Michael L. Turner

Copyright, authors and censorship

The period from 1695 to 1830, from the lapse of the Licensing Act to the eve of the Reform Bill, thus saw major transformations in the legal culture within which the book trade operated. When the guild system was supplanted by the Statute of Anne, however, the great booksellers managed to maintain control of their valuable old copyrights for the better part of a century until in 1774 the House of Lords declared copyright to be limited in term. Instead of basing the term of copyright protection solely on publication, the Act related it to the authors life by providing protection for twenty-eight years or the life of the author, whichever was longer. This marked a major conceptual evolution in copyright. The lapse of the Licensing Act ended pre-publication censorship and radically changed the power of the state to regulate the press, but it did not totally end regulation.

Women and print: readers, writers and the market

Female authorship and female readership burgeoned during the long eighteenth century, and some women were also active in the book trade itself. Despite the rehearsal of woes and problems, the century ended with women active in some new book-trade trends: in new ways of illustrating and binding, and in content-related developments. Circulating libraries, which enjoyed their heyday between 1790 and 1820, did cater effectively if not exclusively for female clients, and were a major outlet for womens works. Women practised in most of the new or newly dominant genres: the novel first and foremost, but also childrens literature, the national tale, the album and gift book, colonialist travel writing, the major literary series or collection, reviewing, popular science and many more. The question of what difference they made to the book trade might be answered cynically, but the question as to what difference they made to literature is only just being addressed by literary historians.