In chapter 11 of The Reading Nation, William St. Clair has us recall a popular theory about the influence exerted by the book reviewer. Like us, Romantic authors often speculated that a vicious review might well have perversely positive consequences. In 1818, Byron declared, for instance, that the sole effect of the Quarterly Review's attack on Percy Shelley's The Revolt of Islam had been to accelerate sales of a book that otherwise would have sunk without a trace. St. Clair paraphrases Byron and then strikes a rueful note. “Quantification, however, destroys a good story—the record shows that Shelley's sales remained minuscule” (189). The opposition this sentence sets out between a “good” story and the tamer story that the numbers tell will not seem tenable to readers of St. Clair's magnificent book.

True, St. Clair does place great stock in quantification, as his 270 pages of appendices and twenty-five tables suggest. To chronicle the processes by which books reached readers he draws with unprecedented thoroughness on the ledgers of more than fifty publishing houses, in addition to several other archives. St. Clair is good with numbers: he once worked as a treasury official for the British government. Yet he writes with a verve that refutes humanists’ preconceptions about the aridity of economists’ prose. And although those appendices may make The Reading Nation look like a reference book, simply to dip into the volume for data on sales figures, for instance, or for a list of the nineteenth century's member-owned book clubs would be to miss a spirited discussion of the methodological assumptions that have hampered the project of book history. It would be to miss, as well, a compelling remapping of British cultural history that (stretching wider than St. Clair's title suggests) encompasses the whole of the print age.

Traditionally, discussions of British print culture identify 1695 as a banner year. The Licensing Act lapsed then—with it, the crown's opportunities for prepublication censorship. Thereafter, the familiar story goes, the publishing industry operated as an instrument of Enlightenment. This Whiggish view (propounded, predictably enough, by Thomas Macaulay) is contradicted by St. Clair's figures. These indicate that for most of the eighteenth century access to books was even more difficult than it had been during print's first century. That previous historians have not recognized this is because they have equated a cumulative increase in the production of titles with a cumulative increase in reading, failing to grasp that even though more texts were produced during this period, more copies of those texts were not. A cozy cartel of London publishers may have modestly increased the number of titles they produced, but at the same time they kept print runs small in order to keep prices high. That this policy of catering only to the uppermost segment of the market could represent sound business practice was a consequence of court injunctions that enabled the cartel to steer around the limited fourteen-year copyright term mandated by the 1710 Act of Anne. They operated as if their monopoly ownership of Shakespeare and Milton, and even of ballads such as “The Holly and the Ivy,” were permanent and uncontestable.

St. Clair suggests that, in view of such restrictive trade practices, the period we have identified as the Enlightenment requires rechristening. For the majority of the English population the eighteenth century represented “the high monopoly period” (97). Scottish readers—whose separate judiciary enforced the provisions of the Act of Anne—were more advantageously situated, especially after midcentury when their printers began to undercut London prices. The English, however, endured a situation of “cultural lock-in” (79). During the seventeenth century, with the tightening of the intellectual property regime, the processes of anthologizing and abridging that during the Renaissance had served to introduce previously printed materials to a wider circle of readers ceased to operate. St. Clair identifies a “freezing of the popular canon after 1600,” alongside “the creation of a strong vested interest in prolonging it” (80). In these circumstances, we must, he says, revise the periodization that correlates the Enlightenment with the eighteenth-century authoring of certain groundbreaking texts. A historiography centered on reading reveals a far different picture: still having to make do with chapbook versions of Aristotle's Masterpiece and Guy of Warwick, the majority of the population was inhabiting a different era altogether.

However, those circumstances altered drastically between 1774 and 1808, when readers briefly got out from under the publishing industry's broad thumb. In 1774, the Law Lords hearing the case of Becket v. Donaldson rejected the London cartel's complaints against Scots “invaders.” As the Act of Anne came to be enforced on both sides of the Tweed, a flood of titles abruptly came out of copyright. Only then—with a decrease in the prices of what St. Clair calls “the old canon” (121), with the explosion of sales of books of all sorts, anthologies and abridgements included—did Britain become a “reading nation.”

The cultural perestroika that commenced in 1774 was, in the event, short-lived. Even as prices for English literature from Chaucer to Cowper decreased, the prices for newly copyrighted texts soared. Soon the publishing industry managed to reclose the copyright window opened in 1774 and to secure parliamentary approval for copyright terms that from 1808 to 1814 to 1842 got progressively longer. Romantic poets—Wordsworth with particular zeal—conspired with publishers to inaugurate that maximalist tendency in intellectual property legislation that continues to shape our own cultural landscape. (In the United States, under the provisions of the “Sonny Bono Act” of 1998, copyright now encompasses the author's lifetime plus seventy years.)

Students of Romantic literature will especially prize St. Clair's stories of the publisher “pirates” who discovered the loopholes in the nineteenth century's intellectual property law: this raffish crew made Byron and even Shelley best sellers. But because he provides a prehistory for the current climate of “cultural lock-in,” St. Clair has something to teach all who are interested in the friction between the concept of private intellectual property and the concept of the public domain. For this reason, The Reading Nation should win recognition as the most important contribution to cultural history since Elizabeth Eisenstein's 1979 The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Of course, as St. Clair's own research teaches us, it would win that recognition all the sooner if the syndics of Cambridge University Press would agree to bring out the book in paperback.