The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period

"This was really a groundbreaking book. An awful lot of history gets written working from assumptions: We “know” this, that or the other, and then from that “knowledge” we build theories. But as St Clair shows in The Reading Nation , a lot of the time what we “know” is actually just what we think, or believe. We “know” how important so-and-so was because he is important now, so somehow we just assume it was fated, and that his contemporaries would have known of their fame just as we do. But that is, of course, not the case. And so it is hugely important to get back to the detail, to do the sums, tally up the numbers, before we make sweeping statements. St Clair used publishers’ archives to look at the numbers of books that were printed in order to assess the possibilities of influence. He looks not just at what was written, but how it was published and marketed and sold, who had access to it, how much it cost, who read it, and so on. Even little things are clues for him. For example, he notes that philosophy, travel, sermons and poetry were published with expensive bindings, but that novels rarely were, which tells us about attitudes to the different genres. It sounds really nerdy, but the best part is the appendixes, particularly where he looks at the actual numbers. So [Jane Austen’s] Emma , he figures from the records, sold fewer than 8,000 copies between its publication in 1815 and 1854, while Maria Edgeworth’s Patronage , published the same year as Mansfield Park , sold 11,000 copies in its first year. A useful reminder that what we think about writers now is not necessarily how their reputations stood at the time. Well, I think he’s not talking so much about “success” as access. Like Douglas-Fairhurst on Dickens, it’s easy to say now that Wordsworth’s poetry permeated everything, but if you look at the numbers, it was probably not true. He notes that Lyrical Ballads had a print run of about 2,000 copies. So how many people actually had access to it? Similarly, the contemporary influence of Thomas Paine has, he suggests, been hugely overstated. The supposed many hundreds of thousands of copies of Common Sense that were rapidly sold in every village on the globe defy credibility. Clearly the influence of both Wordsworth and Paine were great, but in a more nuanced fashion. It is, in some ways, more interesting that Wordsworth’s influence was so great while his sales were so small."