Reviews for The regenerative spirit

The average rating for The regenerative spirit based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-04-30 00:00:00 Laurent Lalonde The achievement of actually finishing this brick of a book is somewhat diminished when you realise that of those 765 pages, roughly 300 are appendices; tables and statistics and figures of print runs - an indication of its academic character and St Clair's method. He declines to merely guess what people were reading at the beginning of the 19th century, preferring to attack the question by quantifying exactly what books were available, to whom, at what price, in what numbers. That sounds as dry as dust, but St Clair writes as academics should write: absolutely clearly and lucidly, so that the wealth of information comes across with no obfuscation through specialist jargon. And in fact this book is much more comprehensive than its title would indicate: he gives an utterly fascinating history of printing right from the beginnings, including an analysis of the political economy of the whole industry. One of the most absorbing areas for me was the subject of intellectual property rights, and how that affected the availability of the actual works, the access to anthologies, the special privileges of 'offshore' printers in Scotland, Ireland and later, France and the formation of the canon. St Clair also carries his survey forward, well past the 1830s and the Romantic Age of its title. There is, too, a special chapter on Shakespeare - at last I understand the significance of the Folio edition - and a chapter on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, showing that it swiftly changed into a sensational theatrical product, and from there to film precisely because there were so few copies of the book produced that hardly anyone can have had the chance to read the original. The comparison with the sales figures for Scott and Byron is amazing. But it's not all just numbers and statistics. St Clair points out some revealing social (and moral) effects of the size and pricing of reading material. In the days when novels were held to be somewhat suspect, keeping their material presence large and expensive had a doubly reassuring effect: the expense of these triple deckers meant that their purchase was a well thought out project, it would be necessary to buy something that the whole family could be allowed to listen to, and in this form, any corrosive effect would be confined to the educated middle classes, who, it was assumed, would be able to resist the blandishments of fictional worlds. Once you start to produce books that can be swiftly slipped into a pocket if someone approaches, then things begin to get out of control. A bit like the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon: on an electronic device, no-one on the train sees the cover. Another really fascinating aspect that St Clair covers is the idea of self-censorship: while other more repressive regimes in Europe were trying to clamp down on the sort of literature that the authorities feared would incite revolt, corrupt the innocent or just generally cause the workers to become dissatisfied with their lot, Britain operated a fairly free market in which printers were carried the consequences for what they had printed: anything that damaged their reputation made it much more difficult to get government contracts, or the hugely profitable almanac trade, or the bible tract business. And they also knew their purchasers: circulating libraries would not take anything even faintly licentious, and nor would the family father, worried about reading aloud to his sisters and daughters. William St Clair maintains that any narrative about the spread of ideas, cultural history and the change of attitudes can only be based on evidence from archives, not mere conjecture. He makes a stunning case, and presents it in a fascinating, eye-opening study.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-02-28 00:00:00 Ernest Lai A fascinating study that provides a serious qualification to the usual Lit Crit mythologies of "The Romantic Period". St. Clair looks at what people were actually reading, based on surviving sales figures which he reproduces as appendices to the book. These alone are worth the price of admission. Millions lived and died without ever hearing the names literary studies spend so much time analysing and discussing. Some idea of the size of the reading public can be gained from the fact that Old Moore’s Almanac had a print run of 230, 000 in 1789 (p 553) and in 1790 there were 114 different newspapers in the UK with a total circulation that year of 14 Million (p 576). The sermons of the Rev. Hugh Blair had cumulative sales of a quarter of a million copies between 1774 and 1815. "For newly published books of verse in the 1790s and 1800s the usual price appears to have been 5 or 6 shillings and the print run per edition 500 or 700" (P. 563). This was essentially the same as the print run of a first work of fiction. Compared to the potential audience even the sales figures for the works of the most popular Romantic Poets show that the readership of poetry accounted for only a small part of the market. Byron’s 'The Giaour' (1813), had fourteen apparent editions to 1814 and sold 12,500 copies. 'The Corsair' (1814), 25,000. Coleridge’s 'Christobel, Kubla Khan and the Pains of Sleep' (1816) had a first edition of 1,000 copies, followed before 1817 with two additional runs of 500 copies. Shelley’s privately printed works appear in runs of 250. After his death his collected poetical works sold out its first 1828 print run of 312copies by October 34 1828, but of the new three volumes edition printed in 1829, of 500 copies , there were 46 not sold in June 1832. Scott’s sales both of poetry and prose are possibly one of the great exceptions; some of his books were selling up to half a million copies each up to 1839. (See page 632 ff) It is ironic that Byron’s ”best sellers” are not poems that retain modern interest. Tom Moore received the staggering advance of 3,000 pounds for Lallah Rooke but who reads that now apart from a few scholars and me? And some best selling poets are long forgotten. Does anyone now read Robert Pollock’s “The course of time” which sold 78,000 copies between 1827 and 1869? Such figures are an interesting antidote both to the claims being made for poetry by Shelley, and for the approaches adopted by some literary scholars and school teachers who seem to think that the poetry of Keats and co can be used in some odd way to represent the beliefs attitudes and values of Britain in the 19th century.