Archive Fever: The Publishers’ Archive and the History of the Novel

Abstract

Many recent commentators have noted a ‘new empiricism’ in the humanities, a turning away from theory to a newly informed sense of history and materiality.¹ Archives and their contents are at the centre of this refashioning. For literary studies, research in the archive allows us to ground our analysis in a sense of the material world and to ask new questions about literature and the dynamics of textual production and authorship that are not available purely from a reading of the text. For this reason the publishers’ archive — long the preserve of biographers and cultural historians — has in recent years become increasingly important to literary scholarship. A number of studies have looked across the surviving materials in publishers’ records to reveal, for instance, the gendered, racial and class-based prejudices that have shaped the history of the novel.² Important monographs by Joseph McAleer, William St Clair and Mary Hammond have made prominent use of publishers’, book trade and related archives to bring new perspectives to literary history which focus on distribution, libraries and popular reading pat-terns.³ St Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004) has been particularly challenging in this respect. Offering a history of reading and literature based on ‘quantified information on the production, prices, edition sizes, sales and circulation of books and other print’ (14), St Clair sets out to debunk what he sees as the ‘main tradition of literary and cultural history’ in which ‘the texts of those authors whose works have subsequently been regarded as the best or the most innovative’ are lined up as a ‘parade of great names’ based on chronological order of first publication (2).