James Raven

Judging new wealth : popular publishing and responses to commerce in England, 1750-1800

Publishing profiles booksellers and markets promotion and defence merchants, gentility and Christian conduct defending trade in the provinces - the gentleman merchant and Mrs Gomersall of Leeds vulgarity and social grammar reactions to fashion and luxury fears of ruination pretensions to land assumptive gentry and the threat to stability historical perspectives.

The Anonymous Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1750–1830

This essay profiles anonymity in novel writing in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. The great majority of these novels are, in literary terms, essentially worthless: their interest is entirely historical, as the colorful and ramshackle foot-soldiers in the advance of the novel during the Romantic period. Investigation of the writing, production, publication, circulation, and reception of these books offers a new understanding of many aspects of the cultural history of these years. For many, the writing of a novel was an apprentice piece—and one from which they did not always recover. Much of this fiction slavishly followed model forms, predictable and with restrained ambition. Several novels even seem to have been put together above the print-room—a few chapters from a hack writer, other parts culled from an old romance, something more translated from a foreign potboiler.1 The reason for writing was sometimes spelled out in a preface or (not necessarily more succinctly) in a title page. The diversity of writers and circumstances matched the range of success and failure. A few novels were quickly reprinted; others were revived after a few seasons or achieved a limited success in the writer s own circle or locality. The bulk of these novels were soon left to gather dust, summarily disposed of, or returned, after brief reading, to the fashionable circulating libraries for which so many of them were chiefly written.

An Antidote to the French?: English Novels in German Translation and German Novels in English Translation 1770-99

With the completion of a new bibliography of prose novels in English first published in the British Isles and Ireland in the late eighteenth century, numerous new attempts can be made to identify trends in publishing, writing, and reviewing.1 The following considers one of these derivatives—the traffic in imaginative literature between Britain and Germany. This trade does not simply comprise the volume of books travelling in both directions across the English Channel, but the exchange of individual texts and their translation. No full modern study yet exists of the influence of the English novel in Germany in this period, or of the German novel in England. Existing analyses are either partial or inaccurate. In particular, as has become obvious as the new project has continued, the various

Debating Bibliomania and the Collection of Books in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract The social categorization of the book collectors in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain informs the relationship between bibliomania and the private library. Much bibliomania was middle-class, with much emulation of celebrated aristocratic collectors and collections. Privacy, however, remained an important concern. Collectors often shared their books with others, but their passion was regarded as an individual one, with private space associated with the collecting habit. Paralleling the commercial restructuring of bookselling was a boom in the fashioning and equipping of domestic libraries, and by 1800 the middle classes were building more libraries than ever before, often to enhance their social prestige. The essay also interrogates the ambiguity of connoisseurship, which sometimes involved destruction as well as conservation. What needs further investigation is the motivation of library owners, as evidenced by correspondence and the prefaces to library catalogues.

Introduction: The Resonances of Loss

In April 2003 the assault on Iraq by American and British armed forces cost not only thousands of civilian and military lives but also brought graphic reports of the destruction of much of the country’s precious material heritage. Within 48 hours of the entry of American troops into Baghdad, it was claimed that looters had emptied the National Museum of more than 170,000 artefacts, while the National Library and the library at the Ministry of Religious Endowment lay in ruins. In Mosul the University Library was utterly destroyed. Interpretations of the tragedy were both immediate and problematically political.1 Much testimony has proved to be inaccurate. According to one British commentator, writing in the heat of the moment, ‘when the Mongols conquered Baghdad in 1258, they sacked the city and destroyed its library. This time, Iraqis have chosen to ransack their own capital and the legacy of their own past’.2 By contrast, a leading British Islamic bibliographer condemned those ‘who launched this invasion of Iraq … they may not have committed massacres or genocide, but they are responsible for the wanton obliteration of the historical memory and artistic and literary heritage, not just of Iraqis, but of all of us’.3

The Demolished Mansions of Essex and the Marks Hall Estate: Reconstruction and the Heritage of Loss

The final essay focuses on the demolition of great houses in the county of Essex in the twentieth century, suggesting that demolition was often a solution to problems that were not new. The battle over the interpretation of loss has also been as great as original battles over demolition. Not that every demolition was contested — far from it. This essay shows why, for good reason, certain houses were lost and soon forgotten. The case study at the heart of this chapter is the lost mansion of Marks Hall, pulled down in 1950. The history of Marks Hall and the project to recreate the mansion are examined in relation to the distinction between history and heritage and how changing and controversial interpretations of ‘heritage’ — itself a modern formulation — might encompass ideas of the heritage of loss as much as lost heritage.

‘Print Culture’ and the Perils of Practice

Many cautions attend the methodologies and strategies developed in pursuit of an historical understanding of ‘print culture’. The very use of the term ‘print culture’ is problematic and should remind those who concentrate upon historical aspects of the ‘history of the book’ (rather than critical bibliographical studies) that historians start with people, study people and make conclusions about people.

Classical Transports: Latin and Greek Texts in North and Central America before 1800

On 28 August 2008 Senator Barack Obama delivered his acceptance speech as Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States. At that convention, three months before his election as the first African-American president of his country, Obama addressed his party in the stadium of the Denver Broncos. He stood in front of a newly minted classical facade, part temple, part theatre with a portico and a double rank of columns. Obama risked ridicule. As Simon Schama wrote of the event, ‘Architrave alert! Fluted columns! Cecil B. DeMille Doric! What a gift to satirists who could lampoon Obama as a wannabe Demosthenes, so self-monumentalised that he seemed to be presumptuously rehearsing the inaugural oath on the Capitol steps.’1

The Corvina Library and the Lost Royal Hungarian Archive

Within a single fortnight in 1526, two of the greatest collections of Hungarian manuscripts were lost. On 29 August of that year, the Turks defeated the Hungarian army on the field of Mohacs. The young king of Hungary, Louis II (1516–26), was trampled and killed in the rout. News of the catastrophe reached the capital, Buda, on the evening of the next day. During that night, the citizens of Buda loaded wagons and boats by torchlight and buried what they could not take with them. Meanwhile in the palace, the king’s widow, Mary of Habsburg, ordered that the royal archive be transferred to a barge and conveyed upstream along the Danube to the relative safety of Hungary’s second city, Bratislava (Pozsony, Pressburg). Shortly after negotiating the Danube bend, which is about twenty miles north of Buda, the barge sank somewhere near the archiepiscopal city of Esztergom. Almost the entirety of the Hungarian royal archive thus lies today in the mud of the Danube. Only a few fragments which were either separately transported by cart or left behind in the royal palace, survived the general ruin.1