A Companion to the History of the Book (43 page)

The essay was not the only form of periodical. Indeed, the dominant form was quite different: the general interest magazine. Again, these have a seventeenth-century origin, but the most important was
The Gentleman’s Magazine
which began in 1731, and survived in various forms into the twentieth century. The originator, editor, and publisher was Edward Cave, a former Post Office official with some knowledge but no experience of the book trade, who saw a niche in the market for a monthly publication which would carry a digest of the month’s news (including fictionalized versions of parliamentary debates which it was illegal to report verbatim), lists and summaries of new books, and some general interest articles. It was aimed at a middle-class audience, and to some extent at a provincial one. It was a huge success. For writers it was a boon. It was an invaluable source of both income and training. Johnson was a parliamentary reporter for Cave, as well as epitomizing books and contributing many general articles. So too was Oliver Goldsmith (1728–74) who, like Johnson, used his work for Cave as a source of income while he established himself as a literary author. Many followed in their footsteps. And many followed in Cave’s. General interest magazines were one of the characteristic products of the eighteenth-century English book trade.

Growing the Market

Authorship became an economically viable activity during the eighteenth century because the market for books, newspapers, and magazines grew substantially. There were many factors in this change. First, there was a growth in population. From the 1740s onward, the birth rate throughout the British Isles steadily increased, and outpaced the death rate. Secondly, this increasing number of people became wealthier; real incomes grew at all levels of society, although the greatest growth was among those who were already rich. Together, these two trends created a potentially larger market for printed matter, for it was precisely among the comparatively wealthy and the comparatively leisured that the book trade had traditionally found its customers.

But there were other factors at work. While illiteracy was still common, its incidence was decreasing. Although the growth of literacy was comparatively slow in rural areas, and women still lagged behind men for a variety of social and economic reasons, in the towns it was not uncommon for even working men to be able to read, and among the middle class literacy was all but universal. Philanthropic and religious schools provided some sort of access to education even for the very poorest. By the end of the eighteenth century, illiteracy was, for the first time in British history, a positive disadvantage both socially and economically. Ireland and the remoter parts of Wales and Scotland were less literate than England, but even in those places there was progress. Again, this created new and larger markets for the book trade. It also began to create a different kind of market. The traditional products of the London book trade were designed for its traditional markets. But at least some of the new readers wanted something different.

First, there was a growing demand for provision for children. Although this was certainly linked to changing perceptions of the nature of childhood itself, it was also a commercial venture. John Newbery (1713–67) was the first bookseller to make children’s books a substantial part of his publishing business; he was to have (and still has) many successors. Some of these books also appealed to less well-educated adult readers, or to those whose hold on literacy was tenuous. An important manifestation of this part of the book market was the chapbook, a simple eight- or twelve-page booklet, usually with a crude woodcut illustration on the front cover, which retold some familiar story such as Robin Hood, or contained a highly abbreviated and simplified version of a more modern fiction such as that of Robinson Crusoe. Chapbooks and children’s books were both responses to the development of new markets for the book trade.

Secondly, the new market wanted books that were cheap. There were several ways to achieve this by changing the physical manifestation of the text. The most obvious was to use smaller type and cheaper paper to produce books that could be sold profitably at a lower price. After 1774, when the House of Lords determined that the 1710 Copyright Act meant that all books went into public domain after twenty-eight years, there were hundreds of popular books which anyone could reprint in any format they chose. The cheap reprint was to be one of the mainstays of nineteenth-century publishing; its twenty-first century form is the paperback. Its origin, however, is in the late eighteenth century when it catered to the rapidly growing demand for cheap books. Books could also be made cheaper by spreading the cost of buying them. This was achieved by serial publication. Although this is probably most familiar in its nineteenth-century revival as the serialized novel, so beloved by Dickens, Thackeray, and others (and by their readers and publishers), it too is of eighteenth-century origin. There are some examples from the late seventeenth century, but it was from the 1740s to the 1760s that serial publication (“part books” in contemporary trade parlance) had its first heyday. In the eighteenth century, although some serial fiction was published, most part books were actually non-fiction, including some very serious works such as biblical commentaries, historical and topographical works, and biographies. Some were older works, but many were original publications. These new physical forms of printed matter, together with the newspapers and magazines, had a wider appeal primarily because they were cheaper, and to some extent because their contents were not designed for a cultural elite but for the contemporary equivalent of a mass market.

The market was not confined to London. Books were available for sale in the major English provincial towns before the invention of printing, but the development of an organized and reasonably efficient provincial trade is another phenomenon of the eighteenth century. This development was intimately linked with the growth of provincial newspapers. In its turn, this was facilitated by the lapse of the Printing Act in 1694–5 which, among its many unintended effects, legalized printing throughout England and Wales. In practice, change was slow, but by 1720 there were printers in some major towns and cities (such as Norwich and Bristol), in some regional centers (Northampton, Exeter), and in a handful of places which through historical and geographical accident were on major trading routes (such as St. Ives in Cambridgeshire on the Great North Road). An important part of these small but growing businesses was the production of a weekly newspaper, which typically had news taken from week-old London papers but advertisements from its own circulation area. These areas were huge, sometimes covering several counties, although circulation was small in numerical terms. The pioneering provincial printers were also typically booksellers. Because they had arrangements for the sale of their newspapers through agents in neighboring towns, they could also build a system for the distribution of books. A pattern developed. London remained the center of publishing activities in the book trade, but the London booksellers advertised their new titles in the London and provincial press and the provincial newspaper printers would take orders for those titles, transmit them to London, act as intermediaries for payment, and undertake to deliver books to customers. This delivery was through the agents who also sold their newspapers. In this way, networks of book distribution developed throughout most of England in the first half of the eighteenth century, together with shops in most towns which, if not actually bookshops, at least sold books (Feather 1985).

Through these networks, the London booksellers were able to reach the potentially large provincial markets. This opened up even quite remote parts of the country to metropolitan cultural and political influence. While the upper classes continued to make their annual pilgrimages to the county town, and perhaps also to London and (later in the century) to a fashionable watering place or spa such as Bath or Brighton, the middle classes who did not have these annual migratory patterns could also get access to books. At the same time, improvements in postal services, largely as a result of the work of Ralph Allen (1693–1764), who was postmaster in Bath but also had a contract to manage a large part of the national postal service, made direct delivery of London newspapers, magazines, and part books to provincial customers both physically possible and reasonably economic. Indeed, Cave (drawing on his background in the Post Office) always emphasized the importance of the provincial market, and the part books were probably specifically designed for it in many cases.

The market for books in Britain was therefore increasing in every dimension during the eighteenth century. There were more people; they were richer; many of them had more leisure time; more of them could read; there were more bookshops; there were better communications; and there were, partly as a consequence, more books and other printed matter than ever before. It was in Georgian England, not in its Tudor precursor, that the transition to a print-dependent society was completed. Even in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland there is evidence of the same phenomenon, albeit on a smaller scale. The predominance of small, scattered, and poor rural populations over large parts of all three countries militated against the development of the essentially urban culture of the book. Despite this, we find the trade expanding geographically and commercially.

The Distribution of Books: The Circuit Completed

Between the producers of books – authors, publishers, printers – and the consumers -the readers – there is a chain of supply that has become longer and more complicated as the trade has evolved. Centralized production and wide distribution are features of many specialized crafts and industries. But in early-modern England it was a pattern that was comparatively unusual. Some raw materials were nationally distributed from the only points of production: coal from the north-east and rock salt from Cheshire are two obvious examples. But most products were consumed within a short distance of where they were produced. London’s food supplies were perhaps the great exception to this, but even in and around London there was both agrarian and pastoral farming which supplied the capital’s ever-growing appetite. Some luxury goods were imported, and distributed from the ports: spices from Asia symbolize this trade at the beginning of our period, but by the end these commodities included sugar (from the Caribbean through Liverpool and Bristol), and tea from India (largely through London). Many of these luxury imports were subject to customs and excise duties, so that centralized distribution systems were essential to the legal conduct of trade.

Books, newspapers, and magazines fell somewhere between all of these categories. London was the only significant center of book production in England throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was also the center of the intellectual and literary culture which produced and consumed books. As a production center, it was largely unchallenged. The production of books in Scotland was on a very small scale; the Scottish booksellers did not seriously compete in England until the second quarter of the eighteenth century, and only then (as we shall see) in rather special circumstances. The same was true of Ireland, where the scale was even smaller, although by the middle of the eighteenth century the Dublin booksellers had developed a flourishing trade in the export of books to the British colonies in North America. Wales was yet further behind. Printing in both Welsh and English was a late and slow development. The Welsh book trade was almost entirely devoted to the distribution of books printed in England until the nineteenth century. In England itself, the production of books outside London was limited by law until 1694 and by economic reality after that time. Oxford and Cambridge had both had university presses since the sixteenth century, but despite occasional flurries of activity (notably in the second half of the seventeenth century in both places), they were of little commercial significance. Book production in other provincial towns developed only slowly after 1694, and even by the end of the eighteenth century, serious provincial publishing was very limited in scope and typically confined to books of regional or local interest. This was less true of Scotland and to some extent of Ireland. Some of the most influential British books of the eighteenth century were written by Scots living in Scotland, and were published there. They included many of the works of the philosopher David Hume (1711–76) and the economist Adam Smith (1723–90).

The London booksellers’ control of the English – and to some extent British – book trade was maintained by the use of legal, economic, and cultural instruments, but all of these would have failed if they had not been able to meet the growing demand for books outside London. The final – and in some ways most important – link in the chain that competed the circuit of the book was the distribution system which brought together producer and customer, and hence author and reader.

The legal framework changed between 1600 and 1800 but, by a combination of accident and design, its consequences remained remarkably similar. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the London book trade was carefully controlled. Crown officers and senior churchmen were directly involved in the control of content; even though censorship was fairly light-handed for most of the time, it was real and could occasionally be very heavy indeed. Part of the system of control was to restrict the right to print to a limited number (usually about twenty) of members of the Stationers’ Company, the trade guild to which all members of the London book trade had to belong. Even during the upheavals of the middle decades of the seventeenth century, this tightly controlled System survived largely intact. It was re-enforced in the 1662 Printing Act, and effectively survived until that legislation finally lapsed in 1694–5. By that time, the London oligopoly of English book production was firmly entrenched, economically and technically as well as legally. Before the end of the seventeenth century, groups of booksellers were working together both in publishing and in distributing books. These groups, known as “congers,” were a conscious attempt (largely successful) to protect existing oligopolies and to make it difficult for new entrants to the trade to set up in competition with existing business. The prospect of unfettered competition, remote as it might be, was very unattractive to the leading members of the London trade in the 1690s. When they realized (after about a decade) that the old legislation was never going to be revived, they changed their tack, petitioned for copyright legislation, and were successful in 1710. The 1710 Copyright Act was essentially a booksellers’ law. It had the effect -unintended by parliament but certainly the objective of the booksellers – of further embedding the dominance of the London oligopoly.