The Power of Publishers and Distributors

Caterina Domeneghini, Printing Beauty, Crafting Democracy: Morris’s Legacy in J. M. Dent and Letchworth’s Publishing Industries 

My doctoral project examines the question ‘what is a classic?’ from the perspective of the Victorian autodidact and London-based publisher J. M. Dent (1849-1926). Dent’s firm gained a reputation for issuing reprint series like the Temple Shakespeare (est. 1894) and Everyman’s Library (est. 1906), beautifully designed ‘in a William Morris style’, with the purpose of bringing cheap but quality editions of world ‘classics’ to a vast and socially variegated audience. In this paper, I draw on largely unpublished materials from American and British archives to navigate and resolve the tensions that are typically said to define fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century print cultures. On a first level, I address the apparent dichotomy between art and commerce and the impossibility to reconcile aesthetics with democratic politics. On a second level, my work interrogates the unsteady relationship between modernity and modernism and their antonyms (traditional, classical, ancient, agrarian, etc), looking at Dent’s attempts to balance mass industrial production with traditional ideals of craftsmanship.

During the nineteenth century, Mudie's Select Library grew from humble beginnings to become the largest and most influential commercial library in Britain, with distribution channels that provided books to readers throughout the British Empire and beyond. In this talk, I describe findings from eight of the library's fiction catalogues dating to between 1848 and 1907, which have been digitised and can now be consulted at Mudie's Library Online. Encompassing more than 20,000 novels by around 6,000 authors, this dataset has made it possible to reassess understandings of the library’s role in the nineteenth-century publishing industry, and to provide insight into the experiences of writers and their novels within that system.