ABSTRACT
Book historians record a remarkable change in reading audiences, book production, and publishing methods during the 1820s and 1830s as the market became dominated by economic forces inviting innovative and diverse publication formats. 1 Perhaps the most maligned of these new outlets for publication was the highly profitable literary annual, anthologies of poetry, light essays, short fiction, and elegant engraved illustrations which appeared every autumn for the Christmas season, marketed as elaborate gifts much desired by middle-class readers. Courting potential buyers with sentimental titles such as the Amulet, the Forget-Me-Not, the Keepsake, the Literary Souvenir, and Friendship's Offering, the annuals became ornamental drawing-room attractions, often covered with brilliant red watered-silk, tooled morocco leather, or velvet, featuring engravings by many well-known artists such as J. M. W. Turner, Edwin Landseer, Thomas Stothard, and Thomas Lawrence, and poetry and prose by almost every writer of importance during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. 2 A sampling of writers who contributed to the annuals includes Felicia Hemans, L. E. L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon), Charles Dickens, Edward BulwerLytton, Benjamin Disraeli, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, John Ruskin, William Makepeace Thackeray, Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, Edward Fitzgerald, Thomas Moore, Alfred Tennyson, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett, and Robert Browning. Despite the potentially prohibitive price of twelve shillings (the Keepsake was a guinea), S. C. Hall estimated the public spent 100,000 pounds each season for annuals during their peak in the 1830s. 3 In 1824 the Literary Souvenir sold 6,000 copies in two weeks; the following year their totals exceeded 15,000. Walter Scott exclaimed to John Lockhart in 1828: “The world (bookselling world) seem mad about ‘Forget me nots’ and Christmas boxes.” 4 Editors often paid high fees for contributions; Scott received £500 for his work in the 1829 volume of the Keepsake. Artists received 20 to 100 guineas for lending their pictures to be engraved, and engravers sometimes got as much as 150 guineas for the production of a single plate. 5 Yet many writers who contributed to the annuals complained that they were gaudy, commercial, and empty of artistic merit, and business with literary annuals tended to irritate many authors because of the aggressive tactics required by editors to compete in the annuals market.
