ABSTRACT
At the present time a knowledge of print culture is widely assumed to be an indispensable element of a literary history. This situation derives largely from the influence over the past three decades of two practices within literary studies: the first is termed ‘the history of the book’ and the second, following the pioneering work of D. F. McKenzie, ‘the sociology of texts’ (McKenzie, 1986). These areas of enquiry are related and together they challenge both author-and text-centred views of literary history by inviting us to think about literary creativity as the product, at least in part, of material culture and economic forces. What gets to count as literature, in this view, is determined to an extent by how writing is made available for evaluation and this in turn depends upon the processes by which it comes into print. In such an argument any investigation into the nineteenth-century literary canon must begin with an understanding of the mechanisms and institutions of nineteenth-century publishing. That understanding usually involves three distinct kinds of research: an examination of the technology and economics of nineteenth-century publishing, of the power relations which existed in it and of the materiality of nineteenth-century writing or what is termed its ‘textual condition’. When taken together these bodies of research show how relationships between writers and publishers, and between writers and readers, were transformed. As a consequence the process of writing itself, and the criteria informing judgements about literary value also, changed. Put more simply, an examination of nineteenth-century publishing culture allows us to see more clearly the relationship between the modern process of canon formation and a history of taste. This chapter will argue that to conceive of a history of nineteenth-century literature in terms of a history of nineteenthcentury literary production brings with it some changes as to which writers and which kinds of works are considered important. It will conclude by giving a brief guide to the editorial principles underlying modern editions of nineteenthcentury literary works in order to help modern readers understand the status of the variety of texts of any one work available to them.
