Speaker – Janine Barchas<\/p>\n
In the nineteenth century, inexpensive editions of Jane Austen’s novels were made available to Britain’s working classes. They were sold at railway stations, traded for soap wrappers, and awarded as school prizes. At pennies a copy, these reprints were some of the earliest mass-market paperbacks, with Austen’s stories squeezed into tight columns on thin, cheap paper. Few of these bargain books survive, yet they made a substantial difference to Austen’s early readership. These were the books bought and read by ordinary people.<\/p>\n
Janine Barchas is the Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor in English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. She has also written for the Washington Post, New York Times, <\/em>and Los Angeles Review of Books. <\/em>In addition to her scholarly publications, she created the digital project What Jane Saw, <\/em>which reconstructs two popular, commercially successful Georgian art exhibits witnessed by Austen.<\/p>\n The Ransom Center is currently selling her new book in conjunction with the ‘Austen in Austin’ exhibition in the Stories-to-Tell gallery.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Speaker – Janine Barchas In the nineteenth century, inexpensive editions of Jane Austen’s novels were made available to Britain’s working classes. They were sold at railway stations, traded for soap wrappers, and awarded as school prizes. At pennies a copy, these reprints were some of the earliest mass-market paperbacks, with Austen’s stories squeezed into tight […]","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2019\/10\/19-10-25-British-Studies-Lecture-Series.mp3","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"27.53M","filesize_raw":"28868882","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":""},"tags":[292,290,7,40,289,249,291,296,293,294,298,69,295,297],"categories":[],"series":[2],"class_list":{"0":"post-425","1":"podcast","2":"type-podcast","3":"status-publish","5":"tag-19th-century","6":"tag-books","7":"tag-british","8":"tag-british-studies-lecture-series","9":"tag-jane-austen","10":"tag-library","11":"tag-lost","12":"tag-new-york-times","13":"tag-novel","14":"tag-novels","15":"tag-read","16":"tag-reading","17":"tag-washington-post","18":"tag-what-jane-saw","19":"series-bsls","20":"entry"},"acf":{"related_episodes":"","hosts":[{"ID":949,"post_author":"10","post_date":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_date_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content":"\n Wm. Roger Louis is head of the British Studies Lecture Series. He is an American historian and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin<\/a>. Louis is the editor-in-chief of The Oxford History of the British Empire<\/a><\/em>, a former president of the American Historical Association<\/a> (AHA), a former chairman of the U.S. Department of State's Historical Advisory Committee, and a founding director of the AHA's National History Center in Washington, D. C.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Wm. Roger Louis","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"wm-roger-louis","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_modified_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=949","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"guests":[{"ID":766,"post_author":"45","post_date":"2020-06-23 18:36:16","post_date_gmt":"2020-06-23 18:36:16","post_content":"\n Janine Barchas is the Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor in English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. She has also written for the Washington Post, New York Times, <\/em>and Los Angeles Review of Books. <\/em>In addition to her scholarly publications, she created the digital project What Jane Saw, <\/em>which reconstructs two popular, commercially successful Georgian art exhibits witnessed by Austen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Ransom Center is currently selling her new book in conjunction with the 'Austen in Austin' exhibition in the Stories-to-Tell gallery.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Janine Barchas","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"janine-barchas","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-06-23 18:36:16","post_modified_gmt":"2020-06-23 18:36:16","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=766","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},{"ID":811,"post_author":"45","post_date":"2020-06-23 19:28:34","post_date_gmt":"2020-06-23 19:28:34","post_content":"\n Samuel Baker has been teaching in the English Department at UT Austin since 2001. He has published a book, Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture (Virginia, 2010), and essays on eighteenth and nineteenth century authors including Ann Radcliffe, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, and Matthew Arnold. His current interests include media studies, gothic antiquarianism, and, of course, the poetry and fiction of Walter Scott.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Samuel Baker","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"samuel-baker","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-06-23 19:28:34","post_modified_gmt":"2020-06-23 19:28:34","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=811","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"transcript":" This is a session that everyone has been looking forward to. It’s always good to return to Jane Austen,<\/p>\n especially to get an original interpretation. Sam Baker is<\/p>\n going to introduce the speaker. Just want to say afterwards there will be a<\/p>\n book signing downstairs in the lobby. Sam<\/p>\n Hi, everybody. I’m delighted today to introduce to you all my colleague Janine Barcus,<\/p>\n the lou-ann and Larry Temple Centennial professor in English literature here at the University of Texas<\/p>\n at Austin. Jeanne, spoken here at British studies before, most recently three years ago,<\/p>\n when she talked about the popular Will in Jane exhibition that she co-curated with Christine Straub<\/p>\n at the Folger Shakespeare Library. And I believe or are fortunate to have Dr. Straube, who is currently<\/p>\n a research fellow at the Harry Ransom Center, with us today as well and the audience.<\/p>\n Janine is also in a fellowship this year sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies<\/p>\n and ACL s Fellowship, pursuing a new project at what one could rent in the time of Jane Austin.<\/p>\n And with the emergence of that economic relation meant for the culture literature of the era. And<\/p>\n I looked online for more information about this fascinating project, Janine’s earlier. But it’s so new that all<\/p>\n I could find was Web sites proposing to rent me copies of the books that she’s written, which makes<\/p>\n sense since the 18th century, phenomenon of renting books through circulating libraries is a big part<\/p>\n of her interest in this topic. Material history of the book has long Virginians<\/p>\n research focus for first monograph was about graphic design and the 18th century British novel,<\/p>\n and it won the day-long Prize in book history from Sharp, the leading professional organization in that field.<\/p>\n In her second book, Matters of Fact and Jane Austen History, Location and Celebrity, geneen<\/p>\n demonstrated that Austin fought in 1775 was influenced by the then emerging<\/p>\n culture of celebrity. With this book and a fleet of related essays, including articles<\/p>\n in the popular press for The Washington Post, York Times and Los Angeles Review of Books,<\/p>\n Genius established herself as a leading Jayna. She now serves as president for the North American<\/p>\n Friends of Chatham House. The former home of Jane Austen’s brother Edward. And a great place to visit if you’re<\/p>\n in the south of England. Meanwhile, you can explore Jean’s recreation of Austin’s Millia<\/p>\n online at what Jane saw that dot org, a wonderful Web site, re-creating Austins Galya<\/p>\n going experiences. And you can see Janine’s collaborative contributions to the curatorial<\/p>\n arts downstairs here in the H.M.S. Gallery devoted to Austin and<\/p>\n Austin, which shows our favorite archive’s holdings in ostinato.<\/p>\n Today, Janine will discuss her just released book, The Lost Books of Jane Austen, which she describes<\/p>\n as mixing hardcore bibliography with the tactics of the Antiques Roadshow.<\/p>\n And as Roger mentioned, right after a talk today, she’ll slip downstairs to sign copies of this new book in<\/p>\n the Ransom Center lobby, where it is available for sale in the gift shop. Not just today, but every day<\/p>\n of January, I’m sure beyond that as well, in conjunction with the Austin and Austin exhibition.<\/p>\n So I’m very excited now to yield the floor to Janine to hear about her latest findings. Ever since<\/p>\n we recruited to Chicago a quarter century ago to work as graduate students with Bruce Redford and Paul Hunter,<\/p>\n I’ve been following In the footsteps 20th century studies to the point that some of you remember when she<\/p>\n was offered New Zealand safely at a safe distance earlier this semester. And my own talk here is characterizing<\/p>\n my own method as positively barca’s yen. Now, I’m delighted if we can see that method<\/p>\n practiced by its master, Janine Barcus herself, speaking to us again on the lost books<\/p>\n of Jane Austen.<\/p>\n Thank you, Sam. We’ve known each other a long time.<\/p>\n It is a pleasure. Can everyone hear me in the back? Yeah, that’s good. OK.<\/p>\n It is a pleasure to share some research from my new book<\/p>\n and I have copies. It just came out two weeks ago. So I thought<\/p>\n I’d bring some copies to, you know, tempt you into buying it downstairs and having me sign it<\/p>\n for posterity. So this project began<\/p>\n as a local curiosity and it grew into a decade of unconventional<\/p>\n book hunting. But the central idea has always remained steady and simple,<\/p>\n and that is that cheap books help make authors canonical. Cheap books<\/p>\n spread fame, but they also tend to be consumed rather than collected. And there’s the rub.<\/p>\n Cheap reprints of Jane Austen are lost books. Frustratingly, few<\/p>\n examples survive of what may be the best markers of her reception history.<\/p>\n And before turning to the technology of stereotyping that I want to teach you about today<\/p>\n that helped lower the costs of books during the 19th century. Allow me to begin<\/p>\n by showing you a smattering of Austin’s cheapest, most badly printed,<\/p>\n least authoritative and most neglected editions not to be found<\/p>\n among the jewels of the Ransom Center, at least not yet. And I had a lot<\/p>\n of necessary help from private collectors who have safeguarded these fragile survivors<\/p>\n of these under appreciated reprinting. For posterity. But I warn you,<\/p>\n this slideshow is not pretty. For cheap books, live hard<\/p>\n lives. So in the latter half of the 19th century,<\/p>\n cheap and shoddy versions of Jane Austen’s novels performed the heavy lifting of<\/p>\n bringing her work and reputation before the general public. Inexpensive reprints<\/p>\n and early paperbacks of Austen were sold at Victorian railway stations for one or two shillings,<\/p>\n traded for soap wrappers, squeezed into tight columns on flimsy paper for mere<\/p>\n pennies, awarded as book prizes in schools and targeted to<\/p>\n the working classes. Few of these hard lived books survive.<\/p>\n Yet scrappy versions of Austin’s novels made a substantial difference to her early readership.<\/p>\n These were the books bought and read by ordinary people. And these are the books that, due<\/p>\n to their low status and low production values, remain largely absent from the shelves of academic<\/p>\n libraries and thus unremarked by scholars. In Britain, the<\/p>\n wastepaper drives of both world wars ensured that many cheap editions deemed<\/p>\n unimportant were simply pulped. And in America, ill placed concerns<\/p>\n about acidic paper resulted in 19th century books being tossed by librarians favoring<\/p>\n storage on microfilm. My research challenges traditional valuations of what<\/p>\n constitutes an important version of a book. An effort to democratize Jane Austen’s reception<\/p>\n here history. And consider how books read by working class readers, by non scholars,<\/p>\n and even by schoolchildren impact literary reputation. My<\/p>\n insula interest lies not in abridgments or adaptations, but<\/p>\n in lowly versions of novels in their entire uncut and unfiltered.<\/p>\n Even when the words inside books are identical and the stories complete, shoddy versions<\/p>\n present Austins fame differently than do precious editions painstakingly safeguarded<\/p>\n by scholarly libraries and traditional collectors. Only low brow versions of<\/p>\n Austins novels can show scholars and fans alike that her burgeoning literary reputation<\/p>\n was not the tidy accretion of Polish status and starch. That history<\/p>\n has inadvertently made it out to be original, authoritative<\/p>\n and handsomely illustrated. Editions did help Austins early visibility, to be sure,<\/p>\n but so did the numerous unsung reprinting. At the very bottom end<\/p>\n of the book market, and in messy and startling ways, by literally cheapening<\/p>\n Austen, these versions showed an everyday writer whose public appeal<\/p>\n differed radically from the official canonical offer author proffered and supported<\/p>\n by those fine additions. When the ransom<\/p>\n center learned about my project in this category of books, discussions began<\/p>\n about collecting practices and I was allowed to gather<\/p>\n and I can’t believe they let me do this together. All of their holdings on Jane Austen and curated<\/p>\n the exhibition that is currently downstairs in the Stories to Tell Gallery through<\/p>\n the fifth of January. The exhibition traces the collecting habits of<\/p>\n the Ransom Center through the lens of a single author to ask how do certain books come<\/p>\n to be preserved in buildings like this? The exhibition, which I urge you to see afterwards<\/p>\n if you can pop by, is called Austin. And. And it’s located at the very far section<\/p>\n of the downstairs gallery. OK. Let me tell you a story.<\/p>\n This is the orthodox view and fairy tale of Jane Austin’s<\/p>\n reception history. It is well-known that Jane Austin’s reputation lay dormant<\/p>\n for the 15 years or so following her death in 1817. And the orthodox view<\/p>\n is that she reached a wide English audience only after Richard Bently revived<\/p>\n her work for his Standard Novels reprint series in 1833.<\/p>\n But publisher Bentley, although he was an important catalyst, is not the true<\/p>\n hero of our Sleeping Beauty story. His books were also not<\/p>\n as cheap and as accessible as scholars taking Bentleys advertisments at their word<\/p>\n have assumed. Bentley emphasized the inexpensive nature of his handsomely<\/p>\n produced compact volumes, ornamented with elegant fronts, pieces and title page illustrations.<\/p>\n Price Six Shilling and cheap addition.<\/p>\n He was an early adopter of publisher issued bindings and cloth, and his prices not only reflected<\/p>\n the paper savings of his three in one volume format, but the sudden freedom from traditional<\/p>\n leather bindings, scholars have amply recorded and praised Bently Reprint,<\/p>\n reprinting of Austin in his standard novel series, stressing their authority. After all,<\/p>\n he was the only one to pay for proper copyrights and stressing their importance as<\/p>\n Austins. Reputational turnkey Bently. It is said, unlocked her fame.<\/p>\n And as a result of this attention, Bently Sedate volumes are now highly sought after.<\/p>\n However, Bentley’s influence upon Austin’s recess reception may be greatly overplayed,<\/p>\n for his books were quickly joined by far cheaper versions with a much wider impact.<\/p>\n And the role of these less princely reprints has been largely ignored in this dominant fairy tale<\/p>\n version of Austin’s reception. So my research is not on the focus is<\/p>\n not on Bentley as well touted books, but on the neglected products of his downmarket competitors.<\/p>\n However, Bentley’s prices and claims to cheapness do help to calibrate everything that<\/p>\n came next. So let’s recap some facts and numbers in 18<\/p>\n eleven, the first edition of Sense and Sensibility had sold in three volumes for fifteen<\/p>\n shillings. In Bordes, a proper binding remained extra, and in December<\/p>\n of 1815, advertisments for the first edition of Emmah raised that price<\/p>\n by six shillings to a guinea or 21 shillings for its three volumes in boards,<\/p>\n and this four volume set of Northanger Abbey with persuasion<\/p>\n sold initially for twenty four shillings, which was a further three shilling top-up.<\/p>\n In other words, hand press books in Austins lifetime remained luxury<\/p>\n items, which explains why her novels appear in such modest runs,<\/p>\n possibly as low as seven hundred and fifty copies for Sense and Sensibility, and as high as two thousand<\/p>\n copies of Emma. It’s not a lot. And then in 1833, Bentley<\/p>\n introduced his well-made reprints of Miss Ostin in single volumes at six shillings<\/p>\n each and durable publisher’s bindings of plum colored linen with paper labels and Bentleys.<\/p>\n Runs were larger, four that were large for the time, about four thousand per title, and<\/p>\n his six shilling price tag was comparatively low by means of stereotyping. As I’ll show<\/p>\n explain in a moment. Bentley periodically continued to reissue identical Austin<\/p>\n volumes through 1866, briefly lowering his price still further in the<\/p>\n the cost for an upmarket first edition of a new novel in the three decade format made popular by<\/p>\n Sir Walter Scott, stubbornly held until the mid-nineties at \u00a31<\/p>\n eleven shillings and sixpence, or thirty one and a half shillings for new fiction.<\/p>\n So no wonder, then, that scholars comparing Bentleys prices to those<\/p>\n first editions only have hailed him as Jane Austen’s reputational Prince Charming.<\/p>\n Bentleys, relative bargains and print run certainly pushed Austin’s visibility. But his six shilling<\/p>\n reprints were not within easy reach of a skilled worker earning twenty five shillings a week,<\/p>\n let alone an unskilled laboring laborer earning half that much. In the 1830s,<\/p>\n bookselling remained, in the words of publisher George Rutledge, quote, a peculiarly<\/p>\n rotten system of providing only for the select few Bentleys.<\/p>\n Much hailed cheap books were the purview of well-to-do Victorian clients, such<\/p>\n as socialite Lady Molesworth of Pen KERO, close friend of Thackeray and<\/p>\n Dickens, and known for the well-turned leg of her footman.<\/p>\n She owned a complete set of Bentleys reprints of Austin shown here, published in 1856<\/p>\n that she had bound and green cloth prettily stamped with a gilt design. These were<\/p>\n Bentley’s clients, and in 1846, after the copyright of Austin’s first<\/p>\n three novels expired and the competition by upstart publishers increased, the fastidious<\/p>\n Bentley was briefly forced to drop his price to two and a half shillings<\/p>\n a volume. The shame of it adjusted in 1848<\/p>\n up to three and a half shillings. He was slumming it in order to place his<\/p>\n standard novels, ostensibly, quote, within the reach of all classes of readers.<\/p>\n Surviving Bently copies of Austen from this period are extremely rare, but those in their original publishers<\/p>\n bindings shown here bear witness on their spines to his momentary drop in price<\/p>\n itself, a fraught response to the radical changes in the market place wrought.<\/p>\n To buy this cheaper fare in 1870. However, this is the<\/p>\n cheaper fare badly had abandoned the battle for the cheaper to others, having sold at auction<\/p>\n his plates for all his standard novels, only to climb safely back to his preferred six shilling<\/p>\n rung rung with a reset, an enlarged authorized edition by<\/p>\n then far cheaper versions of Austin, an astonishingly large numbers, an unprecedented<\/p>\n variety where the newly reaching working class audiences publishers such<\/p>\n as Sims and MacIntyre shown here Rutledge, Chapman and Hall were then<\/p>\n selling the forerunners of airport paperbacks out of railway stations and bookstores<\/p>\n for a mere one or two shillings, with some as low as six months.<\/p>\n Fluctuating production values, including paper quality, meant that not all of these other 19th<\/p>\n century versions have aged well and few have ended up in libraries. And yet<\/p>\n these reprints dismissed as dubious by all but the occasional antiquarian in favor<\/p>\n of the sturdier stuff of authoritative firsts or scholarly additions, nevertheless<\/p>\n enabled Austin’s global celebrity. OK,<\/p>\n a little technology to entertain you. Over the course of<\/p>\n the 19th century, books became drastically cheaper. Probably no. This due to a number<\/p>\n of innovations machine made pulp paper, new distribution channels enabled by<\/p>\n a national rail system and stereotype technology. All of these lowered production<\/p>\n costs, but the technology of stereotyping that complicates the valuation<\/p>\n and taxonomy that lie at the heart of bibliography. David<\/p>\n Gillson is a bibliography of Jane Austen remains the definitive inventory<\/p>\n consulted by libraries and collectors. Ironically, precisely due<\/p>\n to Gillson is rigorous bibliographical training, which has taught him to<\/p>\n ignore externals such as binding styles. His list of additions proves<\/p>\n far from comprehensive. Both book technology and taxonomy, therefore warrant<\/p>\n a brief explanation in order to understand why so many printings of a major<\/p>\n author. If not the second most major author and English have gone unrecorded<\/p>\n even by her finest bibliographies. Many 19th century books<\/p>\n claim to be new editions when they’re are actually preexisting books dressed in the frocks of<\/p>\n updated title pages and fresh paper wrappers or binding styles in cloth known as casings.<\/p>\n Sending a book, a new from loose type was time consuming. It cost a great deal and took up<\/p>\n much of a printer’s type stock for the production of a single work. But stereotyping<\/p>\n a technology fully adopted by the 1840s. So Mr Bentley was an early adopter,<\/p>\n enabled cheap books to flourish by allowing printers to mold and then cast in metal. The<\/p>\n labor intensive multiforme multi-page forms offset type. You can see<\/p>\n that happening here. A mold is being created from which a plate. This is not that<\/p>\n they don’t match. It has been made. And this plate<\/p>\n is that one was for an advertisment. So it’s attached to a piece of wood. So imagine it simply as a thin<\/p>\n plate. Publishers could then re order a text from these flat plates the<\/p>\n same printed one at intervals, whether whenever existing stock became<\/p>\n depleted. Individual print runs could then be reduced to several hundred copies instead of thousands.<\/p>\n Further lowering for the publisher both the risk of overexposure and the cost of inventory storage.<\/p>\n True, over time the stereotype plates wore down, lessening the sharpness of the type in later<\/p>\n impressions. But printers nonetheless hailed these big slabs of metal for their longevity<\/p>\n and capacity to retain their value over decades if carefully stored and handled.<\/p>\n Whenever a publishing firm thought its own market exhausted for a particular title or liquidated assets<\/p>\n for other reasons, it could sell these plates to another publisher via a private sale or public trade.<\/p>\n Auction and swaps and sales of plates occurred on both sides of the Atlantic.<\/p>\n Publishers of cheap books worked these stereotype plates to their limits, enthusiastically<\/p>\n reprinting and repackaging the same text year after year to make old books look<\/p>\n perpetually new. Now bibliographies prominently list additions,<\/p>\n and the key to bibliographical taxonomy turns upon the central text, which is<\/p>\n this. Here’s the question, which<\/p>\n in sort of the next assortment of eight books, starting<\/p>\n with with Bentley’s copy of Northanger<\/p>\n Abbey, so I’ve chosen the same book to show you what happens with the print. All<\/p>\n these books are. I’m sorry I didn’t linger on. What is an addition?<\/p>\n An addition. I’ve just explained to you what it is in these eight books.<\/p>\n They look different, but they are internally identical. They’re all printed<\/p>\n from the same stereotype plates that Bentley birthed in 1833.<\/p>\n Even if they’re printed by different publishers and with the same words, the same layout<\/p>\n and the same page numbers. So the taxonomic category of an addition<\/p>\n becomes in the age of stereotyping. Slippery because strictly<\/p>\n speaking, in addition, comprises all copies of a book printed at any time or times<\/p>\n from one setting of type without substantial change. An impression then refers<\/p>\n to a printing or reprint run of an addition made in one go without the type<\/p>\n being removed from the press. And these professional bibliographical terms were all constructed<\/p>\n with an eye to hand press books made during the entire sort of four centuries<\/p>\n or nearly four centuries between Gutenberg don’t’s to be seen downstairs<\/p>\n in the 14 fifties and stereotype technology by the 1830s, when Bently<\/p>\n is working with stereotyping. How much time then between print<\/p>\n runs from the same plates, even if under the direction of the same publisher, is enough to<\/p>\n warrant a separate bibliographic entry. Gillson, who records some additional runs<\/p>\n and series and as re-issues but not all shows that Feedly a graphical assessment<\/p>\n of 19th century books. The thing we hold ourselves to a scholars becomes<\/p>\n a judgment call about their importance to record or not to record. That is the question.<\/p>\n But more than semantics is at stake for the cheap volumes that get left out of formal<\/p>\n inventories reveal Austins active participation at the neglected the bottom<\/p>\n end of the book market, even as they muddy bibliographical waters. So<\/p>\n back to these eight non Bently copies tracked in the following slides.<\/p>\n While Biblio graphically identical on the inside, when it comes to their central text,<\/p>\n they differ in look in price and in virtue signaling all the features that we know determined<\/p>\n audience. Most of these copies are going to be undated, and as we view the slides<\/p>\n together, I want to convince you that each iteration of ostensibly the same book may offer<\/p>\n slightly different information about the history of Austins reception.<\/p>\n So just moving through the slides together, we start with Bently, who<\/p>\n in 1833 creates these plates with which he prints until<\/p>\n in the first page of text from North and Grabby and from Persuasion<\/p>\n that is packaged slightly differently for Bentley over those decades. But these are the first few<\/p>\n pages. Memorize them because you’ll see them again. Chapman and Hall<\/p>\n by 1870 has acquired the plates legally and with at least consent. He’d<\/p>\n just decided to go back up to that six shilling rung and just leave it to the chiefs.<\/p>\n The other people, Chapman and Hall, are those other people, the bottom<\/p>\n dwellers of the market and are printing one of these books is downstairs.<\/p>\n It’s super rare. I had to go to Monash University in Australia to find another one.<\/p>\n These are yellow backs. These are the books sold for one or two shillings and railway stations<\/p>\n and they look as I’m sure you recognize, as like penny dreadfuls.<\/p>\n This is Jane Austen as pop culture in 18 set in the 1870s.<\/p>\n Inside, there are advertisments for other things. They have the gumption to call it<\/p>\n a new addition, even though they’ve been used. They’re using Bentleys plates. Almost four<\/p>\n decades later. And indeed, on the inside. You recognise<\/p>\n that they are the same book made from the same plates. Page four page. They are the same.<\/p>\n And we continue Ward and Locke takes over from Chapman and Hall and they take over the plates as well. This<\/p>\n book has lived a very hard life, but you can imagine that it was once in good shape<\/p>\n with advertisings at the front lowering the cost still labeled as a new<\/p>\n addition at two shillings. It looks exactly the same. Then we’re seeing a<\/p>\n little bit of dodgy plate wear and on those particular pages we’re now in<\/p>\n you know, a little guilt, not Catholic or Jewish guilt. But the blingy guilt at the front here<\/p>\n for two and a half shillings. Now let’s go upmarket and make it a school book prize.<\/p>\n Gumption to call it a new addition when clearly we’re now well into this not being so.<\/p>\n But we have it part of a new series, price two shillings a volume with bling. It’s two and a half<\/p>\n and same pages. Word for word. Same books.<\/p>\n And Lock makes it part of other series. These books are now so rare because they were<\/p>\n thrown out that I couldn’t even find a Northanger Abbey persuasion. Even<\/p>\n though the advertisments suggests that they did the entire series and of course they would. Because the place<\/p>\n ended up staying together for decades. So that was part of the Royal Library<\/p>\n of Choice Books by famous authors Two Shillings and Red Cloth. Then the<\/p>\n Liley series comes along in 1888. It looks like this still has the gumption<\/p>\n to call itself a new edition. When, for now, for a shilling and a half,<\/p>\n you can still buy exactly the same book. So we’re now<\/p>\n printing circa 1890s and ward in lock hands.<\/p>\n This particular set of plates off to Grand Coliseum warehouse.<\/p>\n Yes. A great and famous establishment onshore in Glasgow,<\/p>\n which are printing for the colonial market. So these are British books that already serve<\/p>\n a certain kind of popular audience. They’re being reprinted, repackaged in a very stylish way<\/p>\n and then shipped off for a different market at a different price. And on the inside,<\/p>\n they did the whole Liley series for Ward and Lock. So they did this with permission.<\/p>\n It’s still the same book on the inside. Now, however, you can see some serious<\/p>\n placewhere on page twenty five. Buyer beware because I would never see him again.<\/p>\n I also may never see the end of the line and read the rest on board and lock takes<\/p>\n the plates back. Continues to print these nice little prize books,<\/p>\n a little gift series. And at least they’re not saying it’s a new edition. Lots<\/p>\n of advertisments, the whole series. And you can see this is really bad<\/p>\n paper. Now we’re really printing cheap stuff, but the book is still readable<\/p>\n and it’s the still the same book. And yes, you can still see that plate where on page 25.<\/p>\n And I just picked page 25. There’s also plate where on page 26 and twenty seven and twenty eight. But<\/p>\n this is just a good corner to show you. Ward and Locke also tried to sort of a little bit more upmarket<\/p>\n repackaging. So this looks really nice. Forget the the stain and just imagine<\/p>\n how gleaming it looks with that guilt. And lo and behold, new<\/p>\n edition. Or now, six decades into using those plates and reusing and recycling<\/p>\n them, you can really see the plate wear on those corners where things have been worn<\/p>\n and bumped and crunched. Still new additions, still selling it at railway stations now<\/p>\n in the 1890s. Advertisments, even in undated books, can sometimes<\/p>\n help us date the books. And we’ve definitely recognized the plates<\/p>\n as from Bentley and we decadent definitely recognize that the plate, whereas really<\/p>\n serious for comparisons. This is what it looks like. That page in 1833.<\/p>\n And now this is what it looks like in 1893. Or maybe even nineteen hundred<\/p>\n when this. So we’re now dealing with plates that have ah ah into their seventh decade<\/p>\n of use. And that is a stretch even for this particular<\/p>\n technology. But it explains why the bibliographies decide that,<\/p>\n well these this is the kind of rubbish you can just ignore. OK,<\/p>\n so it’s not all rubbish gets tossed because<\/p>\n everyone likes a bargain. And some of Austin’s most important critics and fellow<\/p>\n writers have encountered her in workman like copies. Celebrity celebrity<\/p>\n provenance has been the exception to standard collecting practices, allowing a few ordinary<\/p>\n copies of Austin to be made extraordinary by the people who own them.<\/p>\n For example, an unassuming and unrecorded late Victorian reprint of North and Grabby<\/p>\n once belonged to Samuel Clemens and is now a well-guarded treasure at the Mark Twain<\/p>\n Library in Redding, Connecticut, where it is indeed saved for Twain’s<\/p>\n celebrity and not Austins. Similarly, here at the Ransom<\/p>\n Center, we safeguard this unassuming ninety seven copy of Northanger<\/p>\n Abbey Persuasion. They were done in one volume throughout because it once belonged to<\/p>\n the Library of H.G. Wells. Wells. Inscribe the book to his<\/p>\n wife, Amy. Katherine Wells in the style of a mock school prize<\/p>\n and the inscription ornamented by him with a weak Crown Awards. The book somewhat condescendingly<\/p>\n to a C. Welles February 21, 1899 as prize<\/p>\n for Good Conduct. Another unlikely resident in this<\/p>\n building is this stained and shabby every man’s copy of Northanger IBM<\/p>\n Persuasion, which was owned by author T.H. White six<\/p>\n years before publishing the sword in the stone. White wrote a locked room mystery called<\/p>\n Darkness at Pemberley, in which murder menaces the descendants of Darcy<\/p>\n and Elizabeth, and notes inside this water stained copy of Austin.<\/p>\n Now, conservation staff wants me to point out it came this way to the building.<\/p>\n These notes prove that White was attentive to the works that she, in her turn<\/p>\n referenced in North and Arabie and such commonplace versions of Austin are preserved<\/p>\n because they offer clues to how other famous writers read and worked. But what of the ordinary<\/p>\n copies read by the so-called common reader? What might they tell us about who<\/p>\n read often and in what context? Now,<\/p>\n oh, these are his notes. You can see them downstairs in the exhibition.<\/p>\n If you want to get a closer look. OK.<\/p>\n What about the ordinary copies? So throughout my research, I<\/p>\n have been gobsmacked, not just by the unexpected range. A number of Austin novels at<\/p>\n low price points that had never been recorded by bibliographies, but the information<\/p>\n they still yield about reading habits and people. I freely admit that<\/p>\n my learning curve on this project has been steep and rather inelegant,<\/p>\n schooled in the bibliography of hand press books of the eighteenth century. Some of my own<\/p>\n first impressions of Victorian reprints proved well, dead wrong really in<\/p>\n the beginning of this project. I guessed wrong about price points. I thought things pretty inexpensive<\/p>\n when they weren’t on dates of publication, about aesthetics, about audiences,<\/p>\n often because it was so hard to shed my own anachronism and not judge the covers<\/p>\n of old books with either a modern eye or a bibliography as rigid categories,<\/p>\n some colorful specimens of publishers bindings which I thought these had. I thought them rather fancy<\/p>\n at first proved among the schlocky EST and most ill made examples of cloth bound<\/p>\n books. Aaron is nodding on a low market decorated with splashy<\/p>\n colors and bling to appeal to the magpie eyes of youth. Apparently. Such<\/p>\n books were printed circa nineteen hundred by a man named Richard Edward King, a true<\/p>\n bottom dweller of London’s publishing industry, about whom history therefore records<\/p>\n nothing printed on low quality paper using tired and worn stereotype<\/p>\n plates that had already served many prior masters. These glitzy but cheap<\/p>\n books, and I now think of them as fodder for a possible pimp. My book demo<\/p>\n were aimed at the school prized market in Britain and for working class children<\/p>\n who received these books. They were surely wondrous trophies, but<\/p>\n as they are neither authoritative nor well-made, these additions failed to gain regular<\/p>\n access to libraries or to the bibliographical record.<\/p>\n I was surprised by how many lowly cloth bound books were inscribed with names of prior<\/p>\n owners. Information derived from these names challenged<\/p>\n my sense of Austins 19th century reader, that nameless generic ghost<\/p>\n so often invoked by scholars, including myself. The names altered<\/p>\n my assumption of Austins history of gendered marketing and the ages of her presumed readers. In 1891,<\/p>\n it was M. Henry Bole who won this inexpensive Liley series copy<\/p>\n of Austins, Northanger a–the and Persuasion Bound in blue cloth with silver stamping<\/p>\n the Victorian language of flowers asigned symbolic significance to different flower species,<\/p>\n with the lily holding a special place in Christian iconography and signaling purity.<\/p>\n In other words, many floral designs were initially perceived by the parents and the teachers<\/p>\n who gave out these books as gender neutral as testified to by<\/p>\n surviving copies inscribed with the names of real teen readers boys as<\/p>\n well as girls, often ages 12 to 14. As I traced<\/p>\n the names of these real readers to census records by means of a few clicks via Ancestry.com,<\/p>\n I slowly discovered that prize. books too had a dark side.<\/p>\n Research proved that many such names belong to young working class readers whose gritty circumstances,<\/p>\n combined uneasily with the elegant Regency World of Austin stories or the bright<\/p>\n and sunny covers of these books. About 1910, Black<\/p>\n in Sons of Glasgow published Northanger Abbey in a popular<\/p>\n gift series that joined her to dozens of juvenile titles bound in similar cloth case<\/p>\n casings popping bright colors, each stamped with eye catching Macintosh<\/p>\n road design that is the hallmark of Scottish Art Nouveau. And in this series,<\/p>\n once popular, a school prizes but not as collection material for serious libraries. Austin<\/p>\n kept company with Dobb Crusoe, Hans Brinker, Swiss Family Robinson,<\/p>\n Little Women and the Wide, Wide World and printed from hand-me-down plates.<\/p>\n Although never Bentley’s, the central text of these juveniles was internally identical to<\/p>\n other Blackie versions ranging widely in production values. Blackie,<\/p>\n seen here, recycled its stereotype plates for decades to.<\/p>\n One copy has a book plate that identifies it as a school attendance prize<\/p>\n for nineteen tenant and eleven sanctioned by the Berg School Board and for<\/p>\n Far Scotland. A century ago, this book would have been even brighter than it remains today<\/p>\n and must have made a stunning prize for the Annie Munro named as proud recipient.<\/p>\n The name of another girl, presumably her sister, is written opposite in a childish hand. On top of the free<\/p>\n and paper, Florence Monroe for Market Street failed Far<\/p>\n Scotland even after an awkward self-correction. The town remains slightly<\/p>\n misspelled in spite of the misspelling. The specific street address and the two<\/p>\n full names made finding them in rows on four market street easy. According<\/p>\n to the 1911 census, the Monroe family consisted of two working class parents in their early<\/p>\n in ages from 19 to to Bain. Monroe, age 42, worked as a mechanical engineer<\/p>\n as an at an iron foundry, and the eldest daughter, Nora, 19, was a weaver of<\/p>\n linen and jute, while Florence, 16, is listed as dressmaker.<\/p>\n In other words, the older Monroe girls were already wage earners. Annie,<\/p>\n age 12, remained in school, along with Helen H7, the little Ossman Rose,<\/p>\n Alice, 4, and Jesse, two remained at home with their mum.<\/p>\n The handwritten inscription looks more childish than that of a 16 year old and a 4 years or<\/p>\n younger than Florence seems the likeliest person to have made her own prize over to an older<\/p>\n sister and as someone personally familiar with the complexities of barter economies<\/p>\n among siblings. I first hazarded that Annie, perhaps with great ceremony,<\/p>\n traded her fancy books book prize with her sister in exchange for a book she preferred to<\/p>\n Austen. Or I thought I perhaps Annie was, to paraphrase Elizabeth Bennet,<\/p>\n not a great reader, and had pleasure in other things. North and grabby<\/p>\n with a 15 year old heroine does seem more apt reading for 16 year old Florence than 12 year<\/p>\n old Annie. But all my guesses were innocent of Annie’s true circumstances.<\/p>\n Sadly, on the 5th of December, 1911, less than six months after receiving<\/p>\n this book and he died of diptheria and toxemia in the local hospital<\/p>\n at the age of 13 perhaps, and he valued her shiny bright prize<\/p>\n book so much that she gave it to her sister Florence just before her death, solemnly bequeathing it<\/p>\n with that shaky inscription and his colorful, prized book may have been brought to her in hospital<\/p>\n for reading aloud or as a comfort. Only 10 days later, on 15<\/p>\n December, little Alice Munro, aged five, also succumbed to diptheria<\/p>\n and the deaths of the two men. Royal girls were part of a wider diptheria outbreak for the entire.<\/p>\n The entry prior to Alices mentions another an eight year old boy dying of the same<\/p>\n disease four days earlier. Effective worldwide vaccination against the disease<\/p>\n did not begin until the 1920s. And among the overcrowded homes of the Scottish working classes<\/p>\n just before World War One. Many such outbreaks ravaged not just families, but whole towns.<\/p>\n And in the wake of such tragedy, many of Scotland’s working poor made their way to countries such as the United<\/p>\n States and Australia. Eventually, Florins also went to America, and<\/p>\n in 1915, an Outward Bound passenger list gives her occupation. Asked again dressmaker.<\/p>\n The highest level of education reported for Florence Monroe in her immigration papers to the United States<\/p>\n was that she completed elementary. Florence married Michael Mowers,<\/p>\n a carpenter in road construction from New York, and they had two daughters. As a naturalized American<\/p>\n citizen, Florence was buried in Madison County, New York. Leaving school by fifteen did<\/p>\n not prevent her from building a productive life in the context of these working class<\/p>\n patterns of girlhood. Book prizes had a different currency than the perfunctory role<\/p>\n they often serve. Today, at a time when girls turning wage earning women at 14 or<\/p>\n but the end of girlhood, the end of childhood, end of book learning. In Annie’s<\/p>\n case, this copy of Northanger Abbey may have been quite literally and brutally her very last<\/p>\n book. For me, this book was a reality check, telling the unvarnished story<\/p>\n of a real reader of Jane Austen. This research was no longer academic.<\/p>\n On a lighter note, cheap books challenged my ideas of good taste.<\/p>\n Then, as now, some marketing gimmicks or packaging proved bizarre even when<\/p>\n on the inside the careful transfer of property has here from one relative to another<\/p>\n suggested that the book had been treasured across generations, no matter how cheap it had<\/p>\n been. The late Victorian fashion for dressing English classics in a European interpretation<\/p>\n of Asian costume was surprisingly widespread, although thankfully of short<\/p>\n duration, the so-called shouldn wasreally designs for Jane Austen<\/p>\n from the 1880s and early 90s make for a strange assortment of books.<\/p>\n Only popular mass produced reprints can demonstrate how ordinary readers<\/p>\n encountered Austins literary works. It’s the extraordinary ordinariness<\/p>\n of these books that makes them such credible witnesses to the history of reading.<\/p>\n A few more examples. Even 20th century packaging requires local knowledge<\/p>\n or historical context to appreciate. In the 1940s, Hollywood movies became<\/p>\n book cover fodder for continental translations. Many early paperbacks<\/p>\n of Austin sold in Europe appropriated movie stills that today seem<\/p>\n haphazard at best. The Spanish copy, published in Barcelona in<\/p>\n as the Face of Northanger Abbey. The cover images<\/p>\n conscious marketing tactic rather than a naive gaffe. In 1940, Laurence Olivier had played<\/p>\n Mr. Darcy opposite Greer Garson in Pride and Prejudice, ghosting Austin’s proud hero<\/p>\n with memories of Bronte’s brooding creature from the year before with no equivalent<\/p>\n movie If Northanger to pilfer for Stills, The Panache Spanish Pulp Publisher neatly<\/p>\n manages to invoke the novel’s Gothic elements by eliding Austin and Bronte with a celebrity<\/p>\n photo of Libya. This is about selling translations of old books with Hollywood glamor<\/p>\n in a war torn Europe. Then, as now, marketing doesn’t demand interpretive accuracy<\/p>\n or a perfect match between celebrity and product. I have a few more doozies that I<\/p>\n added for you. This is persuasion. Maybe with John<\/p>\n Wilson. Certainly not<\/p>\n the movie Persuasion, and a colleague is still helping me try to identify<\/p>\n this text from nineteen forty five in Spanish. This is a Italian<\/p>\n edition 1956 with on the front of it a still<\/p>\n from an American Western. I thought you would appreciate that. Here it is. Devil’s Doorway. 1950<\/p>\n turned into Emaar and Highbury on the cover of<\/p>\n this 1950 16 edition. Italy. So it’s it’s a colorization<\/p>\n and a kind of a clever re-use of the movie. This one is also one of my favorites<\/p>\n because this is a Italian translation of Pride and Prejudice.<\/p>\n And yes, she does look rather rather something with that wig and<\/p>\n that wig. And you think, what movie? What? What? What is that? It’s a teen edition. It’s a very<\/p>\n famous movie in Italy. It is War and Peace,<\/p>\n starring Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda in 1956, which had<\/p>\n an American an Italian director and was kind of a spaghetti, not Western, but serious<\/p>\n movie. It was a huge hit in Italy. And for decades, it was a sort of matter of pride. So<\/p>\n these are things that you lose unless you really find them and look them up.<\/p>\n One last example for you. This is continental translations<\/p>\n of Austin that look comparatively understated can show us that even quiet<\/p>\n designs can bear witness to local readings. Here are two unassuming<\/p>\n postwar French translations of Northanger Abbey, published under the title of Catherine Moreland.<\/p>\n And the copy on the left appeared in Brussels in 1945, and the smaller one on the right. In 1946<\/p>\n in Paris. And the comparative austerity of these copies reflect dominant Prentis athletics as well<\/p>\n as war era scarcities. Both copies reprint the 1899 translation<\/p>\n by F\u00e9lix Finial, a famous Parisian anarchist and art critic whose translation<\/p>\n disappointed his contemporaries. With one reviewer describing it as singular,<\/p>\n almost disconcerting. Finial nonetheless continued to lend polite<\/p>\n political excitement to Austen, whose novel he had translated<\/p>\n while in jail for blowing up a restaurant at a time when cheap reprints<\/p>\n of even old books were coveted commodities across war ravaged Europe. Fragile paperbacks<\/p>\n printed on poor quality paper were rapt, as you can see carefully, and tight paper bands<\/p>\n like cuffs that encircled the books to prevent eager thumbs from despoiling<\/p>\n num- before purchase. And these protective cuffs doubled as additional advertisments space.<\/p>\n The Belgian band straightforwardly offers the original English title of the book, while the French<\/p>\n one insists on Catherine Moreland as the most compelling young heroine in all<\/p>\n of Austin Lamplugh today. Did you fear DeJean stand now? That tagline<\/p>\n allows in the manner of all ad copy or banner headlines, a local play on words.<\/p>\n The phrase RASIAH of Theia idiomatically refers to a maiden to the sexually<\/p>\n uninitiated, asserting on its face that young Catherine Mallen is the most<\/p>\n true of Austin’s young heroines. The emphatic PLU perhaps protests<\/p>\n too much. In other words, this seemingly unassuming plain Jane copy<\/p>\n of Austin, when displayed in the book and magazine styles of war torn Paris, intended to titillate<\/p>\n Powder’s passers by with a cheeky promise of a daring coming of age story.<\/p>\n And with the band removed at purchase, the cheap book would regain its safe, po<\/p>\n faced composure as a serious classic. Original book bands<\/p>\n rarely survive because they were meant to be detached at the time of sale, so advertising too<\/p>\n can be lost. So to be sure, none of these books are authoritative editions<\/p>\n of Jane Austen. The French and Spanish versions are not important scholarly translations of her work<\/p>\n and the reader, the readers to whom all these books aspired were not high status.<\/p>\n But that is precisely the point. While Austin’s literary brand may be global now,<\/p>\n the hard work of building her elite reputation was achieved in the trenches of low brow<\/p>\n print culture, with books of engaged local constituencies and unique ways.<\/p>\n throw-away reads helped make Austin’s reputation robust.<\/p>\n"},"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2017\/09\/british-studies.png","download_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-download\/425\/jane-austens-lost-books.mp3","player_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-player\/425\/jane-austens-lost-books.mp3","audio_player":"