British Romanticism Unbound: Reading William St Clair’s The Reading Nation A Review Essay

About six years ago, William St Clair’s The Reading Nation in the romantic period arrived on the scene, simultaneously a monument of scholarship and a salvo fired on several research territories in the romantic period, with implications as well for scholarship throughout what Marshall McLuhan called the Gutenberg Galaxy. No romanticist can, or should, avoid this book (first published in 2004, reissued in paperback 2007); and anyone interested in book history, horizons of reception, print culture(s), and the possibilities—or impasses—of an actually literary history, will find much to ponder (and argue with) in St Clair’s 800-plus pages: some 300 of which are devoted to St Clair’s remarkable appendices and bibliography. If nomen est omen, it is peculiarly fortuitous for a scholar to be named William St Clair, for certainly one of the striking features of his Reading Nation is its commitment to clarity as it presents his vivid and occasionally pugnacious data-driven arguments. It should be said up front that the “reading nation” posited here includes “the men, women, and children in Great Britain, and to a lesser extent, other English-speaking communities in Ireland, North America and elsewhere, who regularly read English-language printed books” (13); the Continent figures mainly as a zone for enterprising piratical publishers unconstrained by English copyright law. Within British romanticist and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies, Reading Nation is a sensational book in the full period sense of “sensation”; it is also a deeply conversable book, asking readers to join a conversation, an ongoing research project, and a horizon of argument. It is characteristic that St Clair has made available on line a distillation of his argument: he aspires to a free exchange of ideas and welcomes vigorous debate. Reading Reading Nation was for me a markedly singular experience, for unlike most books of literary-historical scholarship, this one constantly provoked me to wonder: is this true? Is that true? And if so, what then? For instance, Here we have a book strong-minded enough, some might think bullheaded enough, to make actual truth claims: Actual truth claims, in the humanities and social sciences! St Clair asks us to put the book into book history—not book titles or book contents but book sales. “An analysis of the printed-book industry, furthermore, can proceed initially without reference to the nature of the texts being produced, the personal characters or motives of individual participants, the rise and fall of firms, or the claims and explanations offered by contemporaries, however honest and sincere they may have been” (8). His work opens up, perhaps inadvertently, a decisive disjunction between book history and literary history—and thus we must ask, though St Clair does not: What is literary about literary history? Does price give value? Can you read off value from price? Quality from quantity? Those on the literary side of literary history have tended to say no. St Clair brings us not only to the limits of book history or British intellectual property regimes but to the limits of historicism itself. I suspect that one reason his widely-reviewed, much-acclaimed book has provoked such unease as well as praise is that it unmoors many of us from our methodological moorings. St Clair critiques what he rather starkly and amusingly labels the “parade of texts” and the “parliament of texts” models of literary history: the unfolding line of luminaries (parade) vs the synchronic debate or babble of texts (parliament). Touché, one must concede: parade and parliament models inform much intellectual and literary history, though scholars have worked hard to extend the membership in parliament (recovering women authors, “peasant poets,” and once-popular writers) and to complicate attendant debates …