ABSTRACT
At the time of the First Reform Bill in 1832, predictions of a sharp and accel erating increase in literary opportunity would have struck most people in the book trade as mere whistling in the dark. The trade as a whole had only begun to recover from the cascading series of bankruptcies and tight money brought on by the credit crisis of 1825-6, which had claimed Walter Scott’s publisher and printers among its victims. That crash had left Scott himself, the most successful and admired author of the age, saddled with the task of paying off a mountain of debt, a heroic struggle that hastened his death in 1832. With the market for new imaginative literature uncertain, most publishers turned to the safer expedient of cheap reprints. Publication of poetry in individual vol umes, particularly, reached a new low, as most publishers abandoned the genre, while others turned to the high profit margins associated with the production of sumptuous gift-books, or cliterary annuals’, that featured engravings of pic turesque scenes accompanied by appropriate verses.10 Original novels also bore the stamp of luxury commodities for the wealthy, as price and format stabilised at the 3 1s 6d mark for three volumes, familiar from Scott’s novels, that they would retain for most of the century.
