Novels and collections of poetry line the shelves of my office, many from the multivolume series that are so familiar to English professors: Oxford World's Classics, Penguin Classics, and Modern Library Classics. Until reading Thomas F. Bonnell's The Most Disreputable Trade, I had never given much thought to the question of how such series came to be. In this masterful study, Bonnell explains how we came to have series of the classics like the ones on my shelves. Moreover, he uses that history to make a compelling argument that the late eighteenth-century practice of publishing the British poets in collectible series should unsettle many of our notions about the canonization process.

The Most Disreputable Trade recounts the reprinting of British classics that was facilitated by Donaldson v. Becket, the 1774 case that limited copyright privileges in England. Beginning with The English Poets (Glasgow, 1765–76) and concluding with The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper (London, 1810), Bonnell offers a detailed study of the major series of British poetry published in the late eighteenth century. He considers as well the development of a set of conventions surrounding these series. The size of the volumes, the editor's introduction, the biographical sketch of the author—in short, all of the conventions of our modern classics series—developed as standard features as various publishers competed to lay claim to part of a burgeoning market for the classics.

Far from simply documenting the growth and standardization of the British classics, however, Bonnell offers a compelling argument that the development of an English canon was driven in large part by the market economy. As he considers each series of poetry, Bonnell accounts for the physical appearance of the volumes, including their size, the quality of the chosen paper, and the quantity of illustrations; he also places each series in the context of other competing series, relevant copyright laws, and the like. His reason for doing so is clear: “only by situating this analysis in the context of the marketplace—the pressures and opportunities influencing publishers to make specific choices regarding particular products—can one begin to grasp how and why the physical books materialized for actual readers as they did” (2). Bonnell thus uses the conditions of publication for the various series to challenge many of our notions of canon formation. Specifically, he demonstrates a surprising fluidity in the canon, arguing that despite repeated attempts to standardize the British poets, the collections “kept breaking apart and generating splinter canons on the side” (310). Through his examination of the major series of classics, Bonnell demonstrates that there was no fixed “old canon” of poets; furthermore, his consideration of what was published outside of the different series reveals a deep awareness on the part of publishers of other voices: women's poetry, Scottish poetry, and Irish poetry. Canon formation in the eighteenth century, it seems, was every bit as complex and messy as it remains today, and, as Bonnell notes, if we today recognize different “political implications,” we should still recognize that the key players in the late eighteenth-century publishing industry understood all too well that their trade—and hence their effort to establish a set of standard poetic works—was bound up “in the inherent connections between commerce, class, politics, and the law” (342).

Readers should approach The Most Disreputable Trade fully aware of the book's purpose and limitations. Bonnell undertakes a history of one part of the eighteenth-century publishing industry that has clear implications for our understanding of the canon. Rarely, however, does he consider how exactly public taste for the poets had developed. The book, for instance, makes no attempt to answer such questions as why public taste could accommodate Edmund Waller's work (which appeared in all but one of the series that Bonnell studies) but not the work of his contemporary Richard Crashaw (whose poetry appeared in but one of the major series). To be clear, I do not see this as a weakness in the book but as a limitation that the author wisely imposes upon himself. Indeed, had Bonnell tackled questions of public taste, he would have risked overburdening readers who may occasionally feel that the book already attempts too much. Bonnell straddles a difficult line between providing a comprehensive history of the development of the series and crafting an argument about canon formation. At times, those two purposes conflict. For example, in one chapter that ostensibly illustrates the efforts of John Sharpe and Alexander Chalmers to establish a standard body of English poetry, Bonnell inserts a fairly lengthy digression on series of poetry by William Suttaby and by George Nicholson. Such digressions add to the depth of the book's coverage, yet they detract from the book's argument. I wished at times that Bonnell had sacrificed depth in order to make more concise the book's core arguments.

Despite my occasional misgivings about the way it balances material, The Most Disreputable Trade is a fine book that makes a valuable intervention in the ongoing conversation surrounding publishing history and reading practices. As Bonnell points out, major works in the field from Richard Altick's The English Common Reader (Chicago, 1957) to William St. Clair's more recent The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004) have made assumptions about the canon and its formation that are not necessarily supported by a close, systematic analysis of available evidence. Bonnell's thorough, thoughtful examination of the major series of British poetry published between 1765 and 1810 provides just the evidence to mount challenges to many of these assumptions. Drawing from a significant body of evidence, Bonnell reminds us that canon formation then and now is a messy, competitive business in which the “classics” are defined in large part by market forces. The Most Disreputable Trade is a welcome addition to the body of scholarship on the book publishing industry, on reading practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and on the process of canon formation.