Although the history of British historiography has been a growth industry of late, its students have generally focused either on the texts or the authors. Yet, as any academic knows, between the author and the final text there stands the publishing house—and the history of British history publishing is still largely uncharted territory. Most of the inroads so far have been in the field of book illustration, in monographs such as Rosemary Mitchell's Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image, 1830–1870 (Oxford, 2000) or James A. Knapp's Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England: The Representation of History in Printed Books (Aldershot, 2003). Leslie Howsam, whose previous work on publishing history includes Kegan Paul, a Victorian Imprint (London, 1998) and Cheap Bibles (Cambridge, 1991), here sketches out potential directions for such a project. Based on her Lyell Lectures for 2006, Howsam's Past into Print: The Publishing of History in Britain, 1850–1950, draws on correspondence between historians and their publishers to chart the negotiations involved in producing both popular and academic history. Research agendas clash with marketing imperatives, while academic prose runs aground on demands for sprightly, stylish narrative.

The demand for narrative, in fact, constitutes this monograph's dominant theme. Children's and popular histories usually told exciting stories about the nation or the empire. The growing army of professionalized academic historians, however, did not necessarily see it as their business either to entertain or to make a profit (a position from which publishers dissented sharply). In the first chapter, Howsam surveys children's history books, such as Henry Ince's Outlines of English History (1834) and William Pinnock's Catechism of the History of England (1822), which supplied a “resolutely utilitarian” (15) approach to history. These books competed for market share with the histories in “story-telling format” (15) authored by writers such as Elizabeth Penrose, better known as Mrs. Markham. All of these texts were updated, abridged, and rewritten for decades—sometimes, as in Mrs. Markham's case, with different authors behind the pseudonyms. Chapter 2 analyzes the struggle to replace such books. The publisher Alexander Macmillan, one of Howsam's protagonists, entered the fray with authors ranging from novelists like Charlotte Yonge to professional intellectuals such as Edward A. Freeman and J. R. Green. Green's immensely popular narrative, A Short History of the English People (1874), however, exemplified the kind of project discouraged by Oxford and Cambridge academics—which, as Macmillan also served as Oxford University Press's publisher, proved problematic. At midcentury, Howsam notes, “there was very little scope for serious works of history: Macmillans were turning down manuscripts that were worthy but dry—and neither of the university presses were picking them up” (45). (Thus, as Howsam points out, Ranke collapsed on the market and therefore likely exerted far less popular influence than some intellectual historians have suggested.) For a publisher like Macmillan, professional academic prose, let alone scholarly monographs, did not turn a profit.

Thus, Chapter 3 introduces an important shift in history publishing: the rise of Oxford and Cambridge as leading forces in professional, academic history. In 1880, Oxford severed its connection to Macmillan; however, two of this chapter's stars, J. R. Seeley and Oscar Browning, epitomize the frustrations faced by scholars who wanted or needed commercial success, yet who also denounced the narrative model of history-as-entertainment. More importantly, this chapter traces the rise of experimental models in history publishing, such as specialized journals (the English Historical Review), the series (already ensconced in popular publishing), and the collaborative single- or multivolume project (e.g., the Cambridge Modern History). Howsam argues that the collaborative history may have inadvertently “reinforced the Rankean doctrine of objectivity” (69): given the Cambridge Modern History's emphasis on homogenous style, its practitioners and readers could assume that “every properly trained historian, who entered the archives and read what the documents actually said, ought to be able to report to his or her readers ‘what actually happened’” (70).

Although Howsam's last two chapters appear to find another historical rupture during the World War I era, we soon discover that narrative continued to hang on. On the one hand, the war prompted projects designed to explain contemporary events, when it was not short-circuiting international collaboration. On the other, Oxford and Cambridge continued marketing the collaborative histories pioneered at the end of the nineteenth century. And on yet a third, history as story retained its allure and profitability, whether in the form of Eileen and Rhoda Power's medieval histories for children or Arthur Bryant's English histories and biographies for adults. By the mid-twentieth century, Howsam argues, leading scholars regularly moved between academic and popular markets, generating what Edward Freeman dubbed “big books” for the one and “little books” for the other (116)—although such back and forthing generated its own worries. Hence, Howsam suggests, the function of the academic journal apparently (if only illusorily) was to publish academic work free from publishers' commercial demands (118).

Fittingly, the book does not end so much as it suggests new scholarly horizons. Let me suggest three potential avenues for further exploration. First, Howsam occasionally cites reader's reports. It would be worth studying such reports in greater depth, especially if there exists any archive comparable to that of the novelist Geraldine Jewsbury; which historians most influenced publishers' decision making? Second, as Howsam notes, women historians play a relatively small role in this iteration of her project. But we could pursue her studies to encompass Agnes Strickland and Mary Anne Everett Green, both of whom mixed bona fide archival discoveries with popular narrative (much to the frustration of some of their male peers). To what extent did Strickland's work in particular—which underwent the same repackaging discussed in chapter 1—affect how publishers conceptualized and marketed popular history? Finally, it would be interesting to know more about something discussed in passing here: the tug-of-war between authors and publishers about illustrations, fonts, frontispieces, and, more recently, dust jackets. Howsam includes numerous reproductions of title pages that invite closer analysis, whether it be the long s in Oxford Essays, Contributed by Members of the University, 1857 (fig. 2.5) or J. M. Dent's elaborately Kelmscott Press-ish designs. How did presses go about shaping the “look” of their history offerings? And, in more recent years, how have trends in copyright law affected how publishers incorporate illustrations—or not?