Flowers of Literature 1801-1809

flowers of literature title page

 

Flowers of Literature for 1801 and 1802 [1803, 1804, 1805, 1806, 1807, 1808, 1809] or, Characteristic Sketches of human nature and Modern Manners. To which is added A General View of Literature during that Period with Notes, Historical, Critical and Explanatory

 

[from 1803 the following is added] Portraits, and Biographical Sketches

Though described  and extracted in the Cardiff Corvey database (http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/encap/journals/corvey/articles/database/flowers.html) I thought it might be useful to add more information and offer another take on this interesting periodical. Several volumes are available free through Google Books.

The Flowers of Literature was a commercial miscellany composed of extracts from other publications. It is useful to the publishing and literary historian for several reasons: as an indication of the changing tastes of the market; for its general overview of the literary scene (including fluctuations in the trade) in its annual prefaces; for (from 1805) its catalogues raisonnés of recent publications; and as being one of the many productions of Francis William Blagdon (1778-1819). It was published throughout its run by B. Crosby & Co, Stationer’s Court, London, and printed by J. Swan in  Angel St, and had a circulation of around 3,000. Its first two volumes cost the very considerable 11 shillings but thereafter the price was reduced to 6 shillings.

Its target readership – according to the preface of its first volume was (pace the Corvey Index) threefold:

1)       “gens du monde; who are desirous to become, without serious application, conversant with modern literary taste”

2)       “the lovely British fair, whose minds are formed for tenderness… and whose sensitive faculties, when not involved in the vortex of fashionable dissipation, are susceptible of every passion which can dignify human nature”

3) “the noble youth of our country… whom we will gradually and safely introduce to the path of literary studies”

Begun as a joint publication (of around 400 pages long) with the Reverend F. Prevost (about whom virtually nothing is known), after the first two years Blagdon took sole charge. Blagdon, from a humble background, had been taken up by a Dr Willis who taught him French, Italian, Spanish and German. Around the time Flowers first came out, Blagdon was publishing many translations from French and had just brought out, again in collaboration with Prevost, Mooriana, or Select Extracts from the works of Dr. J. Moore, in 3 volumes in 1803. In 1802 he had begun Modern Discoveries, which amounted to eight volumes over two years. In 1805 he published a pamphlet, with the signature of Aristides, condemning the administration of the navy under Earl St. Vincent. As he describes it in the Preface to the volume of Flowers for 1805, the government had changed by the time the pamphlet had come out and he sent the whole of the print-run to the Earl – who prosecuted him for libel. Blagdon went to prison for six months and had to find sureties of £1,000 to keep the peace for three years. Unsurprisingly, this delayed the appearance of Flowers that year.

Other volumes of Flowers also appeared irregularly, especially from 1807 when Blagdon began to devote more energy to his newspaper, the Phoenix (later the Phoenix and Political Register or Blagdon’s Political Register) and to politics.

The preface to the first volume claims that the compilation was begun initially for the private use of the editors: they are careful to distinguish it from the reviews which are “much more confined in their extracts”. Annotations to the selected texts (actually quite rare) are “designed to direct the taste, to explain obscure passages, and to record facts and circumstances not generally, but worthy of being, known”. Extracts in volume 1 are taken from, amongst many others, Mrs Inchbald, Mrs Opie and Scrofani’s Travels in Greece; a few are translated from French (e.g. Le Brun’s Portefeuille politique).

flowers of literature frontispiece

There is a 32-page overview of the state of literature in the first volume: in later ones the overview, called the “Introduction”, is sub-divided into various classes. In these later volumes too are frontispieces comprising portraits of five writers, always four men surrounding a woman in the centre: in 1803 these comprise Darwin, Cowper, Pratt and Colman around Seward. The five writers are then always granted biographies in the early pages of the volume.

While claiming to describe the state of literature in Europe as a whole, in fact the foreign writers referred to are mostly French, sprinkled with a few German. The effect of the contemporary war with France is visible not only in the inclusion of many explicitly patriotic and/or francophobic texts but in their arrangement within the volume: there is usually a concentration of such texts at the end. The 1806 volume, foe instance, concludes with two letters from Josephine to her daughter Fanny (supposedly revealing the “Character of the French Nation, and the present state of its usurper” – a footnote informs the reader that omitted from the translation is a passage where Josephine describes how Napoleon beats her) and a “National Song” attacking Bonaparte (a footnote declares that when the piece was selected it was thought the war would soon be over).

History of the Book in the Twentieth Century Part 3: the age of the conglomerate, and the revolution of 1935

In the previous post I covered the first 4 of 8 elements of media history. Here are two more.

If many very small publishers have survived into the twenty-first century (even and because of the internet and new digital printing technologies), nevertheless a distinguishing factor of the twentieth century, especially the latter part, concerns ownership of the media. I’m thinking here of the sublime growth of international conglomerates and transnational book production in line with just about every other manufacturing industry.

Ever since Paul Hamlyn in the 1950s escaped the restrictions of paper-rationing still in force in Britain by having his books manufactured entirely in Eastern Europe, book production has become increasingly international. Even in the long gone 1999, it was quite normal for an author to key in her work in London on a word processor, send it to a publisher whose office may be in New York who sends it to be typeset in Hong Kong, printed and bound in Singapore, for distribution to an Anglophone but world-wide market. What once were comparatively small publishing houses of perhaps 50 or so staff which carried the name of their founding father whose descendants headed the business are now huge transnational and transpersonal conglomerates.

It was the 1980s, the era of “deregulated” mergers and acquisitions,  that saw the virtual elimination of the “gentleman publishers” and the restructuring of the whole publishing industry. The restructuring was due not only to deregulation, however, but also and not least by how the contemporary decreased funding of education led to a correspondingly decreased (and less seasonally reliable) demand for textbooks and library books within the UK. The demand was not only smaller but less predictable. Then again, the appreciation of sterling against the currencies of countries to which Britain had been exporting in large numbers since the 1950s made exports expensive and difficult.

Macmillan’s is a good example of a firm to illustrate how the industry was restructured in the second half of the twentieth century.

The brothers Alexander and Daniel Macmillan, originally from the Scottish island of Arran, had founded the company in 1843. They aimed mainly for a target audience with a large degree of cultural capital, publishing Charles Kingsley, Thomas Hughes, Lewis Carroll, Tennyson, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells and so on. In the twentieth century Macmillan’s published Ouida (to whom they were very generous in her declining years), Yeats, Sean O’Casey, John Maynard Keynes, and many other well-known names. The talent-spotting talent of the Macmillan family, their canny awareness of the coincidence of cultural and financial capitals, was not confined to literature – Grove’s Dictionary of Music was theirs for instance. The firm rose through the generations throughout the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth, reaching its apogee in Harold Macmillan. After having served as Prime Minister, he withdrew from politics in 1965 and took on as now Macmillan’s website tells me, “a leadership role at the publisher. He instituted an ambitious program that led to international expansion. The Education Division grew significantly and standard reference works and scientific magazines were also added to the list.” (see Macmillan’s interesting inhouse timeline and also Elizabeth James’s Macmillan: A Publishing Tradition 1843-1970, 2002)

Although the family still have a substantial interest, now however Macmillan’s is owned by the enormous German media company Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrink – which owns the German national Die Ziet, which its website tells me is “Germany’s largest opinion forming newspaper”. It also owns Germany’s equivalent of the London Evening Standard the Berlin Der Tagesspiegel, 5 different German fiction imprints, a Swiss fiction imprint and 2 New York based houses Henry Holt and no less than Farrar Straus and Giroux, 8 local newspapers in Germany, 2 companies that make documentaries for TV, shares in a large number of radio stations, and various subsidiaries that publish on the internet and on CD. Macmillan’s itself has numerous subsidiaries in 70 countries, the result of Harold Macmillan’s global expansion plans. Since 2000 it has run an academic imprint called Palgrave, the result of the merger of the Us  St Martin’s Press and the UK Macmillan’s.
Another and even larger conglomerate is Pearson’s. Pearson’s own Penguin and Longman and Simon and Schuster and produced the late twentieth-century hugely successful TV series Baywatch, The Bill and Zena Warrior Princess; it owns the Financial Times, The Economist; it runs Thames TV, has a large stake in Channel 5 and is the world’s largest education publisher. It has for some decades now invested heavily in the new electronic media, esp. the on-line provision of share prices.

In other words, the late twentieth century saw the triumph of large-scale industrial publishing. There are many issues involved in the creation of these huge conglomerates with their stress on marketability and share prices. One is how it has generated a vigorous resistance to the whole notion of the industrialisation of knowledge. Already in the 1890s small scale presses had been set up, but their energy and usually socialist and artisanal ideals had all collapsed by the early 1960s. Does this indicate the dominance of books tailored by market researchers, the heartless triumph of the machine – and offer opportunities for paranoia about who controls the knowledge available to us?

While made-by-committee books based on detailed market research certainly are published, it’s a universal axiom that the indefinable flair of individual editors and their relationship to individual authors is still key to publishing. As one textbook on publishing says “Good personal contacts are paramount” (Giles Clark, Inside Book Publishing, Routledge 1994: 67 – the site associated with the book is very good). One thinks of the disaster that brought Dorling Kindersley to its knees with its manufactured Star Wars book: phantom menace the item indeed was. It managed to sell only 3 million of the 13 million Star Wars books it had printed and this was the main contributing factor to the heavy losses it posted in May 2000 of £25 million. DK was bought out by Pearson plc, joining it to the Penguin Group.

Furthermore, it’s absurd to think of these conglomerates as efficiently organised from the top down: there’s no controlling dictator at the top who manipulates our minds through controlling what we have access to. I was told a few weeks ago by an editor for Palgrave that although the von Holtzbrink family own large shares in the conglomerate that bears their name, they’re only interested in seeing the balance sheets every 5 years or so. Individual editors operate independently and are, rather, assessed at the local level on the overall profit distribution of the books they have commissioned. Power is diffuse and capable of many different variations, allied to many different tastes and value systems.

While there are certainly issues of control over what becomes available to us to read – the ongoing Assange case is proof of that (and see eg the debate over Canongate’s publication of his unauthorised biography in 2011) –  most us as readers don’t notice much of the above: we don’t feel constrained by what is available to us except by price. And this brings me to my next point.

From the point of view of most British users of books,  issues of ownership are less important than the format revolution of 1935. Indeed, for most book readers today the twentieth century really began that year. 1935 was the year that Allen Lane started the Penguin paperback. Taking advantage of the monotype printing I’ve mentioned in a previous post, a  technology that had been commercially developed in the 1920s, Penguin changed the face of publishing for ever.

Again though, the idea of the paperback was by no means new – books stitched in paper covers date from the late seventeenth century; in nineteenth century France most books were published in them to allow for binding according to the consumer’s choice.

Allen Lane was the owner of The Bodley Head Press, which he inherited from his uncle John Lane who had gained notoriety in the 1890s for publishing The Yellow Book, the showcase of aestheticism. By the mid 1930s however, The Bodley Head was in trouble financially: Penguin was a desperate attempt to save it. Allen Lane got the idea of the look for the series from Germany, where a paperback series called The Albatross had been started up by an English man named John Holroyd-Reece to rival the old-established form of Tauchnitz who had been publishing paperback reprints for almost a century. Penguins were, however, by no means straight imitations of The Albatross.

While early Penguins, like Albatross, were paperback reprints with visually distinctive covers of works originally published by other forms  – as Phil Baines’s beautiful Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005 shows us – Lane planned to sell Penguins very cheap: at 6d. Most revolutionary of all, he distributed them through outlets other than standard bookshops: Woolworth’s played a large role in the success of the Penguin imprint. Penguin’s revolution in fact lay not in its material identity as a cheap distinctive paperback but  in establishing the book both literally and metaphorically in places in the market it had never before settled in. It paved the way for the supermarket books we know today.

For the next 20 years Penguin dominated the paperback market in the UK and helped normalise the format to such an extent that for most of us now the paperback IS the book.

What once was a technology meant for disposable reading, ephemeral in its structure, transitory in its nature, came in the twentieth century to represent the quintessence of the book, the repository of (what we like to think of as) non-ephemeral knowledge.

History of the Book in the Twentieth Century Post 2 : Technology, Ownership, Regulation, Distribution

In the previous blog I promised to cover 8 routes through which print history and the twentieth century could be connected. Here are the first 4.

1st, print technology, that which enables literature to transit from author to reader.

The Walter Press, adopted by The Times in 1866 (from Frank Leslie’s Magazine 1877 – and http://www.ndl.go.jp/exposition/e/data/R/614r.html)

 

In the 1950s printing machines whose designs dated from the 1850s were still in general use. Yet paradoxically, printing technologies that in some ways are most characteristic of the twentieth century were first developed in the late nineteenth.

The two great revolutions in printing of the years between 1900 and 1950 were linotype and monotype. The Linotype machine was 1st installed on the New York Tribune in 1886; Monotype was invented 3 years later in 1889 but only commercially established in 1897.

image from http://acejet170.typepad.com/foundthings/2008/02/can-do-the-work.html

 

Perhaps you can see from the illustration how monotype employs a paper tape with holes in it as an intermediate storage and transmission technology between the keyboarding and typesetting. The idea derived from looms for weaving cloth interesting enough – the same technology that Charles Babbage used in his mechanical prototype of a computer. These technologies, esp. monotype, tripled the speed at which books could be produced and formed the basis for the revolution that was to happen in the 1930s with Penguin (on which see more later). But even more advanced technologies were invented in the late nineteenth century which were to be used commercially for books only from the 1950s. The 1890s saw patents for devices that set type photographically, but nothing came of them for almost 60 years with the introduction of the Intertype Fotosetter in the USA in 1945. This photographic technology in turn enabled the ever-faster production of books after WWII .

A 2nd way twentieth-century publishing can be said to start in the late nineteenth is not purely technological but concerns conventions of literary property – who owns the text transmitted? I’m referring to the formulation of international copyright, most notably with the Berne Convention of 1885, through which a uniform international system of copyright was initiated. During the course of the twentieth century the convention underwent several modifications, including what is called the Rome revision of 1928 whereby the term of copyright for most types of works became the life of the author plus 50 years. This had in fact already been adopted in 1911 in Britain. In EU countries this has subsequently been modified to 70 years after the death of the author.

Copyright is incredibly important to the publishing industry: it is indeed its cornerstone without which there could be no publishing industry, but again with new technologies of the last 40 or so years – starting with photocopying – it is undergoing a period of enormous stress. Perhaps in future times the twentieth century  will be characterised as the period of efficient copyright – certainly more efficient than for any time before it, and perhaps after it too.

A 3rd conventional continuity from the nineteenth century concerns censorship, particularly the persistence of the Obscene Publication Act. This dates from 1857 with a famous – or infamous – modification in 1868 that defined obscenity as that which exhibited a tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences”. (Justice Cockburn in Regina v. Hicklin, a bookseller in Wolverhampton — see  Victorian Print Media pp. 101-104 for extracts from this and other obscenity  triala). Obviously, this had enormous impact on what could and could not be published in Britain. Lawrence’s open discussion of sex in The Rainbow in 1915 notoriously led to the seizure of 1,011 copies during a police raid on the London offices of the novel’s piblisher Methuen. It was banned by Bow Street magistrates after the police solicitor told them that the obscenity in the book “was wrapped up in language which I suppose will be regarded in some quarters as artistic and intellectual effort”.

Bodley Head edition of Joyce’s Ulysses, (1936) – from http://antiquesandartireland.com/2010/07/ulysses-first-edition-memorabilia/

 

Then there’s Joyce’s Ulysses, published in Paris, which was seized by customs officers when it dared cross the channel into Britain (though curiously Bodley Head didn’t get prosecuted for publishing it in Britain in 1936). Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness had caused its publisher Jonathan Cape to be brought to court in 1928.

In 1959, there was a further and vital modification to the law of obscenity: now the work in question had to be taken “as a whole” and the interests of “science, literature, art of learning” could be adduced to defend a work from the charge of obscenity – “expert opinion” could be called. The following year the case of Regina v. Penguin Books over the publication of the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a test case of this new law. Penguin won. Since then the question of obscenity has been continually debated, with concern in Britain at least has been far less over literature, however, than with film and video and, more recently again, the internet (see e.g. a recent article in The Guardian).

If then in three major respects twentieth-century publishing seems a continuation of nineteenth, in another it can be said to start perfectly on time on 1 January 1900 with the Net Book Agreement (NBA), signed by members of the then recently formed Publisher’s Association. The NBA concerns distribution. Again its roots go back to the nineteenth century — but it can also be regarded as a decided rupture with it.

The NBA  was designed to prevent booksellers selling at suicidal discount yet price wars had erupted when in 1894 the lending libraries Mudie’s and W.H. Smith’s rebelled against taking three-volume novels. Publishers were forced to publish novels in one volume and more cheaply. This in turn meant that cheap books flooded the market and booksellers sought to undercut one another. Unsurprisingly, this spelled disaster for many booksellers (as well as publishers). Many booksellers went bankrupt. This in turn meant fewer outlets for the retail of books and the consequent risk of a decline in the market because of distribution problems – for if booksellers closed because they had been trying too hard to undercut their competitors how were publishers to get their wares to the consumer? Hence the need that some publishers felt to save booksellers from bankruptcy. The NBA was one solution. Through the NBA, the publisher allowed a trade discount to the bookseller only on condition that the book was sold to the public at not less than its “net published price” as fixed by the publisher. In Britain, a first attempt to introduce the net price principle by booksellers in the 1850s had been condemned to failure by supporters of Free Trade; but in the 1880s it had  been successfully adopted in Germany. Encouraged by this toward the end of the century some British publishers, led by Alexander Macmillan, began to replace the variable discounts they gave to booksellers by fixed prices. To press for the new system, the Associated Booksellers of Great Britain and Ireland had been formed in 1895, and the Publishers Association was created in 1896. These two organizations then worked out the Net Book Agreement.

If the twentieth-century British book trade can be said to be the century of efficient copyright, it is just as much the century of the NBA – indeed it only collapsed in September 1995 through pressure from a complex of sources including rulings by the European courts about what constituted cartels and pressure from the Office of Fair Trading.

The industry itself had also  changed though. The import of cheaper books from the US via Europe because of the strength of the pound, and not least the enormous growth of bookseller retail chains like Blackwell’s, Dillons, and Waterstones which by 1996 had grown to take over 30% of the U.K. market. These chains – in ever-reduced numbers amongst themselves – became the pacesetters in the new deregulated market that emerged in the 1980s. They were able to launch full-scale retail marketing of the sort that had previously only been seen in UK supermarkets, such as price promotions on certain brands (or imprints, in the case of books), loyalty cards and hence database marketing based on analysis of what specific kinds of customers were buying where and when. Regulation (“deregulation”) encouraged the consolidation of the chains:  complaints to the office of Fair Trading by more than 600 small publishers that Waterstone’s was abusing its (dominant) position in the market by seeking greater discounts from publishers were dismissed.  More recently again, of course, Amazon has increased its market share of literary distribution to previously undreamed of heights. Are monopoly, oligopoly and cartels the inevitable end of a deregulated market as we saw in the Hollywood film industry of the 1930s before the Paramount decrees, where the studios controlled distribution, exhibition and production?

(to be continued in our next…)

Literature in Transit: Histories of the Book in the Twentieth Century Book. Part 1 – Definitions

This month’s series of blogs will concern how we can think of changes in book publishing in the UK over the course of the twentieth century.
It’s really a set of pedagogical blogs, offering a framework to students for how to think through long term changes in the media industries. The eight categories I’ll propose I’ve used successfully as a checklist for students to write their own histories of specific media. I’ve treated publishing as a model case study so that students in groups can produce something on their own chosen medium by following the same set of headings.
It’s worked pretty well: students like the prescriptive structure and group work.
One possible heading that isn’t here is the changing nature of how publishing (or any other media industry) is financed. I tried to include it once but students didn’t get it: it’s just too complicated at this level when taught with other headings. I left financing models out of subsequent frameworks and, perhaps wrongly, it will be omitted from this set of blogs too.
First of all, though, I wanted to explain the importance of paying careful attention to the title of the question, which is why I start with a few basic definitions from which the rest of the “essay” should depend.

This series of four blogs will be almost entirely concerned to think through the terms of the title Literature in Transit: Histories of the Book in the Twentieth Century.

For what can we mean by “Literature” in a century that saw Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and Barbara Cartland? Why should it be “in transit?” Why are we concerned to look again at the idea of the “book” in this electronic age when “books” are dying out? Perhaps most bizarre of all, I also want to query what we mean by “Twentieth Century“.

Defining the terms of my title will, perhaps curiously, enable me to sketch a history of book publishing mainly in Britain in the twentieth century, up to and including the internet revolution. It will also enable me to reflect on what we need to study in any large-scale historical analysis of a communications medium.

First of all then, we need to consider what a book might be.
I’m taking it to be a specific kind of information storage and transmission technology, and in that sense comparable to music recording or film. Of course it’s very different from them as well: it’s a material thing that has a specific and material history. Yet we mustn’t forget that it is fundamentally an earthly avatar with a traceable biography – a life indeed – of a much more intangible and abstract concept. If today we don’t often think of the book as a storage and transmission technology – while we do think of computers in that way – it’s because the book has become naturalised, simply part of our everyday lives, so old it doesn’t need to be thought about except in rare instances like Craig Raine’s famous 1979 poem “A Martian sends a Postcard Home”:

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings —
 
they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.
 
I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.

In the 1990s the new technologies of information storage and transmission woke us up to the fact that the book is just one manifestation of a more abstract concept. Today these technologies enable a text such as this where the history of the the book avatar is discussed. It’s only when lay people outside the book production industry are compelled to compare the book with other avatars of the same concept that we begin to reflect on the specific technologies of the book, its form, its history and its effects.

Literature I take to be the subset of information that comprises combinations of letters of the alphabet. This is what the original term letteraturameant in Latin – a writing formed of letters of the alphabet. The term applied to Greek or Latin as opposed to the Egyptian hieroglyphic mode of information storage or, as the philosopher Cicero suggests (following Plato), human memory. Literature may be encoded in books that appear on the market all at once or in other avatars of information storage and transmission such as periodicals, newspapers and pamphlets, and indeed now on the internet and in our computers. In defining literature by taking shelter in the etymological, I want to avoid for the moment the difference between high- and low-status information, Literature with a capital L and with a lowercase l. Again I think that it’s the new developments in information technologies that bring that distinction between high and low to the fore and lend it a particular urgency, especially for those of us involved in education.

Transit derives, of course, from the Latin verb “transire”, to go across, to pass from one state to another. In using it in my title I’m also thinking of the crossing that comprises the notion of the medium through which an author communicates with a reader. But of course “in transit” also suggests that the technology that enables literature is changing, passing from one state to another. At least since Marshall MacLuhan in the early 1960s we’ve thought about how the medium might be related to the message, how not only the medium itself alters but how this has an effect both on how the message is conceptualised by the author and by the reader – the message changes as the medium does. I won’t be writing about this much, but I will give a simple example – the novel as we commonly think of it depends for its existence upon technologies in paper production, cutting and binding as well as printing, not to mention technologies of distribution that allow publishers to get their wares to the consumer. They also depend upon a set of conventions about what certain kinds of information physically comprise. For most of the nineteenth century most novels published in book form were in 3 volumes and hardback.

Novels for us have become one volume – and not only that but paperbacks. I’ll be describing that particular technological transition from hardback to paperback in a later post. I just want to signal it here as probably the most important development in the twentieth-century material book as far as the reader is concerned.
A second association of “transit” that I want to foreground is the increasing perception of the motility of the written word. Once the dominant notion was “In scripta manent” – things remain through being written down – one thinks of the Ten Commandments carved in stone, immobile, resistant to the gnawing of time and the creativity of memory. The orthodoxy in the early twenty-first century is, however, that the printed word is always and everywhere in a transitional state. Texts are no longer considered self-contained units of meaning; rather we think of that each word as in a constant state of moving towards other words and states. Stasis, like fullness and completeness of meaning, are only illusions.

It may seem rather  absurd to query what an apparently simple term like the “Twentieth Century” means. The terms refers to a simple period of 100 years from 1900-1999. Yet my question derives from a consideration of periodisation in history, a question that anyone familiar with the defintion of, say, “Romanticism” and “Victorian” will know well. What does an arbitrarily defined chronological period mean in relation to events that actually occur? In this case, is the history of the book really to be bound by a hundred cycles of a planet around a star? George Eliot began Daniel Deronda with comments on the “make-believe of a beginning”; so here I began to query the notion that the twentieth century, in book publishing terms at least, lasted the 100 years between 1900 and 1999. As I will be suggesting, it can be argued that the twentieth century in publishing terms began in the late nineteenth, in the 1880s or even the 1850s. Alternatively, we might say that it began as late as the 1950s. It may have ended in 1992 – in which case it might be very short indeed, less than 40 years.

Now there are an enormous number of ways the twentieth can be related to the other terms in my title. I’ll be looking at just eight of the most important over the next three blogs.
https://blogs.gre.ac.uk/andrewking/tag/literature/
blogs.gre.ac.uk
CC-MAIN-2024-38
91554
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:J5QDBQ3DIRSLC6MEEGGRGONRI2QKCB7C
<urn:uuid:25714c73-8a09-42ad-a2e9-c0c1fa39c75f>
2024-09-14T20:12:11Z
109.228.34.20
text/html
sha1:MUJNSTLEIBK2VPD5SJZ4RKWYW24FM7MS
<urn:uuid:9bbc7ec5-1d90-486b-b83b-10f1938e0179>
https://blogs.gre.ac.uk/andrewking/tag/literature/
response
<urn:uuid:69e831f3-3d47-4fac-9415-379b2b172c29>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2024-38
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2024
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-163
software: Apache Nutch 1.20 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.5-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/