I imagine that many readers of this collection, other than art historians, will join me in gaining a new appreciation for the recent time frame in which the word replica has been naturalized (from its Italian origins) and normalized in the vernacular as a basic synonym for copy (n.). The word appeared in no edition of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, and when it did show up in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1914, we see the main definition (“A copy, duplicate, or reproduction of a work of art; properly, one made by the original artist.”) seeking to maintain a linguistic propriety most English speakers today feel free to ignore. H. W. Fowler, in the first edition of his Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), was fighting the same largely lost cause, insisting “there is no such thing as a modern replica of an ancient original” (498). One chapter by co-editor Julie Codell (“Transatlantic Autograph Replicas and the Uplifting of American Culture”) seems to prove the point: where once the concise replica could have served the purpose, clarity's sake calls for the longer phrase autograph replica in the title and a clarification in the essay's first sentence.

Codell and Linda K. Hughes consider related issues of terminology in their wide-ranging general introduction that both acknowledges a history of slippery usages (“In the realm of re-making, terms like replication, reproduction, copying, and imitation often overlap and serve as synonyms” [4]) and clearly signals the focus of the collection: “we are most interested in re-makings that exhibit, sometimes self-consciously, a relation (or reply) to a prior version or that travel away from a prior version in distinctive or innovative terms” (5). Which is to say that this study is not governed by a simplistic understanding of how the age of mechanical reproduction featured primarily a loss of aesthetic aura that drew the attention of Walter Benjamin and others. Rather, in this book's account, the age of replications, remakings, and reproductions complicated notions of originality and authenticity in a broad range of areas, including art history, literature, science, interior and industrial design, and many forms of individual consumption that defined commercial modernity for natives of the United Kingdom and colonial subjects across the globe. A strong chapter by Suzanne Daly on the shifting and contested cultural status of imitation Indian shawls, mostly manufactured in the Scottish town of Paisley, shows how all these issues were relevant to the making of patterned cloth to be draped over a woman's shoulders.

Several of the fourteen chapters deal closely too with that great nineteenth-century agent of reproduction, the printing press, which, along with modes of textile production, moved from the realm of handicrafts to steam-powered industries in the period covered here. Hughes provides a compelling case study of the making and remaking of five separate editions of Tennyson's poem The Princess between 1847 and 1853; Kathryn Ledbetter recovers an episode in which print and visual culture mediated the experience of the far off US-Mexican War (1846–1848) for metropolitan consumers in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston; and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller's excellent chapter, “William Morris and the Form and Politics of Repetition,” speaks of printed wallpapers, textiles, and books. Gowan Dawson shows how Richard Owen used personal networks tied to the press to claim for himself alone a paleontological discovery that in part belonged to John Rule. The expert scholarship that Dawson uses to retrieve Rule, a bit like an assiduously recovered fossil, from the sediment of printed and non-printed material is impressive.

Like Dawson, Will Abberley brings to his superb chapter on Grant Allen's An African Millionaire expertise in nineteenth-century sciences as he discusses the new understanding of impostures in evolutionary histories. Departing from older notions about the Natural being the opposite of the pejoratively Artful, Allen is shown to be well informed by evolutionary thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Alfred Russell Wallace, and Henry Walter Bateson on the widespread role of deceptive mimicry in animals, plants, and insects of all kinds. Like those by Dawson and Abberley, chapters by Emilie Taylor-Brown, Daniel Bivona, Ryan D. Tweney, and David Amigoni have strong scientific components or are focused on issues we would call scientific.

Closing this book with a sense of surprise at the developing strength of the scientific theme, I thought about Engels's statement at Marx's funeral in 1883: “Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history” (Marx and Engels Collected Works, 24:467). I say this because almost all the chapters make important references to new modes of industrial production or the new scientific modes of understanding biological replication and variation that became clarified in the long nineteenth century. Abberley importantly mines both veins. If Marx was, in hindsight, the age's most influential student of a new culture of industrialized reproduction, Darwin and his fellow workers gave the age its most influential explanation for understanding how living forms—human and nonhuman—were refashioned in the course of being reproduced. Engles's linking of Darwin and Marx at Highgate Cemetery recalls how nineteenth-century social and intellectual history is distinguished by a new sense of biomechanical replication that touched everyday lives and cultural productions geared to audiences across the social and economic spectrum. If historical dictionaries today still recall the specialized meaning of a word like replica, its more general use denoting a reproduction of some kind is a tribute to the reverberating significance of replication in the copy culture inaugurated by the long nineteenth century.