ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the first two editions of Pride and Prejudice that were cheap enough to address a mass readership below the middle classes. It adopts an archival, book-historical approach to trace the emergence of cheap editions of novels initially published in expensive editions. It also takes an interpretative approach: it uses Dicks' 1887 edition as a case study in order to explore how this cheap illustrated edition remediated the text. Dicks was one of the first publishers who narrowed the division in the reading material available to the elites and the working classes respectively. In 1883, Dicks advertises 88 novels by 27 authors, yet only a third of these novelists appear to have published anything in expensive editions. The adaptations made by nineteenth-century publishers in transforming Romantic-period text into the physical form of the book imply remediative praxis as much as do the editing, re-writing and writing about Romanticism that went on during this period.
