The house of Blackwood : author-publisher relations in the Victorian era / David Finkelstein.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Finkelstein, David, 1964-

Series:

Penn State series in the history of the book

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

William Blackwood and Sons--History.

William Blackwood and Sons.

Publishers and publishing--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Publishers and publishing.

History.

Great Britain.

Authors and publishers--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Authors and publishers.

Great Britain--Intellectual life--19th century.

Intellectual life.

Physical Description:

viii, 199 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

University Park : Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002.

Summary:

The Scottish publishing firm of William Blackwood & Sons, founded in 1804, was a major force in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British literary history, publishing a diverse group of important authors -- including George Eliot, John Galt, Thomas de Quincey, Margaret Oliphant, Anthony Trollope, Joseph Conrad, and John Buchan, among many others -- in book form and in its monthly Blackwood's Magazine. In The House of Blackwood. David Finkelstein exposes for the first time the successes and failures of this onetime publishing powerhouse.

Finkelstein begins with a general history of the Blackwood firm from 1804 to 1920, attending to family dynamics over several generations, to their molding of a particular political and national culture, to the shaping of a Blackwood's audience, and to the multiple causes for the firm's decline in the decades before World War I. He then offers six case studies of authors Conrad, Oliphant, John Hanning Speke, George Tompkyns Chesney, Charles Reade, and E. M. Forster and their relationships with the publishing house. He mines the voluminous correspondence of the firm with its authors and, eventually, with the authors' agents. The value of the archive Finkelstein studies is its completeness, the depth of the ledger material (particularly interesting given that the Blackwoods did much of their own printing), and the extraordinary longevity of the firm. A key value of Finkelstein's account is his attention to the author/publisher/reader circuit that Robert Darnton emphasizes as the central focus of book history.

Contents:

Setting the scene

Finding success : Blackwood's, 1860-1879

Africa rewritten : the case of John Hanning Speke

Reade revised : a woman hater and the women's medical movement

Shifting ground : Blackwood's, 1880-1912

Creating house identities : nineteenth-century publishing memoirs and the annals of a publishing house

A grocer's business : William Blackwood III and the literary agents.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0271021799

OCLC:

48858116