Lecturer in book history at the Open University, Mary Hammond aims to reconfigure our perceptions of the shape of England's literary art/popular fiction boundaries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She brings to bear in this task an attention to cultural theory and marked sensitivity to ideologies of class and gender, and she endeavors to marry these to an analysis of commercial practices and media operations while seeking also to remain alert to the idiosyncrasies of particular authors, reviewers, and readers. It is an ambitious enterprise, designed to embrace all three aspects of book history: production, distribution, and reception. What emerges especially strongly is a focus on attempts to determine literary taste; and in this pursuit, Hammond begins by revisiting Victorian debates about book provision through the country's public library and railway bookstall networks. Not only were broad regional distinctions evident but subtle differences were detectable too in central and branch library services (chap. 1)—an important point, although the shine has been taken off it since this chapter is Hammond's article ‘“The Great Fiction Bore,”’ recycled from the Spring 2002 issue of Libraries and Culture. Chapter 2 includes some new findings from the W. H. Smith and London Metropolitan archives; and there is more interesting material in chapter 3 drawn from the Oxford University Press about its takeover and enlargement of the World's Classics series, which it had acquired from Grant Richards. How a “classic” was defined and who defined it are central to the whole issue of the formation of literary taste, and it is these questions that reverberate throughout Hammond's book. This culminates with two chapters that revolve around the making and unmaking of the reputations of Marie Corelli and Hall Caine, and Florence Barclay and Arnold Bennett.

Students of England's literary culture will naturally turn to this work. Whether they will enjoy the exercise is another matter, although Priya Joshi, associate professor of English at Temple University, is one who already has. A puff from her of paragraph length dominates the back cover. It heralds a “splendid study … impeccably researched and exquisitely written.” Her capacity to assess this last quality may be judged by her own final fling, which proclaims: “Every book historian and literary scholar will have to take note of Hammond's innovations with the archive and the vistas they open.” There is an additional irony here, as the logrolling and booming that were once considered staple vices of “best-seller” marketing should now appear to be an acceptable SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing) practice. Still, my dissent from Joshi's judgement about the exquisite nature of Hammond's prose, which I frequently found painful, is a happy illustration of the pratfalls involved in audience history. As for Hammond's arguments, these may cause the occasional raised eyebrow. When so much is made of the significance of railway travel for fictional form and the reading practices of the different classes and sexes, it is mildly arresting to be told that by 1890 “the railways were well into their decline” (59). Instead, track mileage and passenger traffic were still growing hugely, much of this due to the suburban expansion, whose characteristics and consequences also concern Hammond. Other observations, too, are not quite right; for instance, note that a reviewer for the Evening News who deplored W. H. Smith's banning of a book by George Moore from its railway bookstalls in 1887 “was backed up by several more powerful figures including Hall Caine” (71). The problem again is the date: Caine in 1887 occupied no influential position as a novelist and generally wielded little clout as a jobbing journalist with a dubious reputation for having exploited a closeness to Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his declining years. The classification of Florence Barclay contains greater difficulties. This is because Barclay is used to assess similarity and dissimilarity in the popular fiction market, as Corelli's supposed successor as Queen of Best Sellers, when she “published her first novel The Rosary in 1909” (160). The trouble is that The Rosary was not Barclay's first published novel. Rather, it was the first issued under her married name: she had previously published the three-decker Guy Mervyn in 1891, using the pseudonym Brandon Roy. Furthermore, Barclay's sense of religious mission is recognized but not well defined. There is contradiction in the terms “Evangelical” (2, 21) and “rigid High Anglican framework” (163) deployed by Hammond to describe it. Barclay's evangelicalism was altogether antipathetic to the ritualism and sacramentalism associated with a High Church stance. In her novels and tracts, lectures and preaching, the importance of the Word is continually emphasized, and through it the doctrine of salvation by faith in the Atonement. Indeed, her younger sister was married to the Salvationist Ballington Booth, and Barclay assisted her in the United States and sought to promote such work at home. Religion throughout is less accented and less deftly handled by Hammond than are themes of class and gender; and while not absent from her treatment of Caine and Corelli, quite how important religion was to these authors is not conveyed.

In sum, here is a purposeful book, wishing to illuminate afresh a vexed period of literary history. It does do that, but not without obscuring other crucial aspects.