PRODUCING
FICTION
IN BRITAIN, 1800–1829
Peter Garside and Anthony Mandal
According to
Lee Erickson, in a recent essay, Walter Scott’s refusal
of the poet laureateship in 1813 and the publication of his
first novel, Waverley, a year later were sure signs
of ‘a coming shift in the readership’s taste’,
and he goes on to trace a turnabout in the relative popularity
of poetry and prose fiction in the later Romantic period.[1] As
we are now aware, however, Scott’s first novel was written
in at least two stages: Scott himself, in the first chapter
of Waverley, suggests 1805 as the starting-point, but
evidence survives of a clear intervention in 1810, which—as I have argued elsewhere—may represent the true inception
of the project (put bluntly, it is not unlikely that Scott
started the novel in Autumn 1810). Scott would then
have known about the popular success of Jane Porter’s
Scottish Chiefs (published March 1810),[2] which
offered a clear signal that Scottish subjects could be profitably
used in the novel, and by 1810 he would have had a much clearer
view of the potential of the ‘national tale’ as
developed by Sydney Owenson and Maria Edgeworth. In
fact, a cynical view would be that by predating his intervention
at 1805, Scott constructed a literary history which placed
him at the helm.
Another perspective
here is provided by Ina Ferris’s excellent study of the
Waverley Novels as institution, The Achievement of Literary
Authority (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press,
1995), which sees Scott as the main agent in a wholesale shift
from a generally female-authored ‘common novel’,
to a new kind of ‘serious/historical novel’, which
allowed main subjectivity to enter into a female genre without
compromising ‘masculinity’. Ferris’s
thesis on one level echoes earlier claims by feminist literary
historians such as Dale Spender that the novel was predominantly
a ‘female form’, while tending to corroborate the
more specific allegation made by Gaye Tuchman, in Edging
Women Out (London: Routledge, 1989), that the Waverley
Novels somehow represent an untypical male capturing of the
novel form. But Ferris also more broadly points
to a larger underbelly of new readers, connected with commerce
and manufacturing, who were already turning in increasing
numbers to fiction. At what point the novel became
‘unstoppable’ is a moot point, but the statistics
shown below in Fig 1, based on the number of new items in
J. R. de J. Jackson’s Annals of English Verse
(New York: Garland, 1985) against Andrew Block’s The
English Novel 1740–1850 (1939, rev. 1961; London:
Dawson, 1968), indicate that the first year in which the output
of fiction outnumbered that of poetry was 1810 (which is followed
by a more general overtaking in the 1820s, as shown in Fig
1).
Fig 1. Poetry vs. Fiction,
1780–1829
Poetry
vs. Fiction, 1780–1829 [Fig 1]: Here it is necessary
to own up to some manoeuvring in order to get the figures:
comparing different genres by output is, of course, always
likely to bring some mixed results. But most damaging
of all, in the present instance, is the unreliability of Block’s
catalogue (the by-product of a career as an antiquarian bookseller
in London), which jumbles together chapbooks, shilling shockers,
miscellanies, non-existent ‘ghost’ titles, works
which on examination prove not to be fiction, and other such
flotsam, alongside mainstream novels. More immediately
pertinent is Block’s habit of ‘rounding off’
dates to the nearest decade in cases of uncertainty, which
partly explains the unusually large number of ‘1810’
items. A number of gender-selective studies have
also appeared since the 1980s, but these raise their own difficulties:
clearly women wrote much more fiction than was ever given
credit for before, but (to put it crudely) a
lot from how much?
It
was such issues relating to Romantic fiction that nearly twenty
years ago led me to start compiling a catalogue of fiction
titles between 1780 and 1830, in what now looks the incredibly
quaint form of a card index file. This was assembled
in an eclectic way, making use of modern sources as they became
available, such as the Eighteenth-Century Short-Title Catalogue
(ESTC), as well as a variety of documents contemporary with
the period (over fifty circulating library catalogues, William
Bent’s London Catalogue of Books, review listings,
and so on). The index finally settled down as a
collection of some 2,897 items, representing—I then
felt confident—more than 90% of original titles in
this period. It allowed a number of special observations
to be made about the production of fiction—for instance,
the spread of publishers, and gender of authors—but
always with the proviso that in many cases information was
not based on copies seen at first hand. This was
brought home to me by Mervyn Janetta, editor of The Library,
when I wanted to add a Checklist to an article about the publisher
J. F. Hughes—he argued that only bibliographies based
on copies actually examined at first hand carried weight—it was he too who used the word ‘quaint’ about card
index files.[3]
So, I shuffled back to Cardiff, feeling terribly provincial,
and stopped working on it …
The
project then revived, unexpectedly, in 1990 through contact
with the collection of English novels in the Library of Corvey
Castle and with Projekt Corvey at Paderborn University Schloss
Corvey is near Höxter on the River Weser, about thirty
minutes’ drive from Paderborn (itself a cathedral town
in Westphalia). ‘Die Fürstliche Bibliothek’
(Princely Library) is an aristocratic family library, containing
about 67,000 volumes, mainly in German, French, and English,
with a tailing off circa 1834. One striking feature
of the collection is the large number of English novels belonging
to the Romantic period, which is quite exceptional in view
of the fact that in Britain fiction was more often borrowed
than bought, and even when bought rarely preserved in libraries. Projekt
Corvey is co-headed by Professors Rainer Schöwerling
and Harmut Steinecke (a Germanist), and since the late 1980s
has been involved in processing the contents of the library. Books
were brought over in single vanloads to the project room in
Paderborn for processing in three ways:
All title pages were Xeroxed
Bibliographical details for each item were then
taken, and sent to the central German computing system at
Cologne
Microfiches were made of the full text of each
title.
When I first arrived in May 1990,
the cataloguing of the first phase, focusing on belles
lettres, was under way, and I was kindly given a microfiche
containing all the title information compiled for the Cologne
central computing system.
Through
collation of the Corvey titles against my original card index
file, it was possible to make a number of generalisations
about the Corvey holdings in relation to the output of fiction
in the Romantic period. The serious purchasing
of English titles clearly began in the mid-1790s. By
the early 1800s, the library appears to have been taking about
80% of production, with a regular intake of fifty new novels
annually. In the 1820s, accessions reached a new
level, with the library in two single years (1822 and 1829)
actually taking all but one of the novels in my index file. This
exercise also threw light on the kinds of novel that are absent
from the library. Prominent here are translations
into English of works previously published in French or German. Other
omissions include subscription novels and works ‘published
for the author’ (e.g. Sense and Sensibility),
which for commercial reasons were not pushed by the book trade;
titles issued by publishers who were not fully established
(e.g. Henry Colburn in his early days), or by those who were
never respectable (e.g. J. F. Hughes), and scurrilous
titles which might be taken to indicate a bawdy content. Also
discovered by this process were some fifty to sixty titles
which had been previously unknown to me, and comparison against
sources such as the Nineteenth-Century Short-Title Catalogue
(NSTC) and the National Union Catalog (NUC) suggested
that a small but significant proportion of these are probably
unique to Corvey.[4]
A
decision was taken to compile a new Bibliography to replace
Block, bringing together my original file, the holdings of
Corvey Castle, and also involving collaboration with James
Raven, the compiler of British Fiction, 1750–1770,
whose team would deal with 1770–99. This lead
to a contract with Oxford University Press for English
Novels 1770–1830: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction
Published in the British Isles, in two volumes (1770–99
and 1800–29)—and, delivery is due in 1998. All
entries in the new Bibliography whenever possible are based
on physical examination of a first edition—this has
been achieved in all but a handful of cases for 1800–29—and they record the full title, details of authorship,
and imprint information as they appear on the original title-page. Below
are some typical entries from the year 1820, which will give
an idea of procedure.
1820: 12
#AUT# ANON.
#TIT# ZELICA, THE CREOLE; A NOVEL, BY AN AMERICAN. IN THREE
VOLUMES.
#PUB# London: Printed for William Fearman, Library, 170,
New Bond Street, 1820.
#COL# I 243p; II 254p; III 309p. 12mo. 21s (ECB).
#REV# ER 35: 266 (Mar 1821); WSW II: 41.
#CAT# Corvey; CME 3-628-47473-6; ECB 654; NSTC 2A10533 (BI
BL).
#NOT# ER gives ‘Madame de Sansée’ as the
author. For another work probably by the same author see
Entry 1823: 12.
1820: 13
#AUT# [BARHAM, Richard Harris].
#TIT# BALDWIN; OR, A MISER’S HEIR. A SERIO-COMIC TALE.
IN TWO VOLUMES. BY AN OLD BACHELOR.
#PUB# London: Printed at the Minerva Press for A.K. Newman
and Co. Leadenhall-Street, 1820.
#COL# I vi, 245p; II 270p. 12mo. 11s (ECB, ER, QR).
#REV# ER 34: 509 (Nov 1820); QR 24: 276 (Oct 1820).
#CAT# Corvey; CME 3-628-47091-9; ECB 36; NSTC 2B7767 (BI
BL, C, O; NA MH).
#NOT# Dedication ‘To Anybody’, signed ‘G.H.E.’.
Copy at Harvard (*EC8.B2395.8206) includes author’s
MS revisions, in preparation for a 2nd edn.
1820: 14
#AUT# BARRON, Edward.
#TIT# THE ROYAL WANDERER, OR SECRET MEMOIRS OF CAROLINE:
THE WHOLE FOUNDED ON RECENT FACTS, AND CONTAINING AMONG
OTHER THINGS, AN AUTHENTIC AND HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED ACCOUNT
OF COURT-CABALS, AND ROYAL TRAVELS. BY EDWARD BARRON, ESQ.
EMBELLISHED WITH ENGRAVINGS.
#PUB# London: Printed and published by H. Rowe, 11, Warwick-Square,
Paternoster-Row, 1820.
#COL# 860p, ill. 8vo.
#CAT# NN CK.Barron; NSTC 2B9759 (NA DLC).
#NOT# Preface dated ‘January 1st’. A ‘secret
history’ of Princess Caroline, and distinct from The
Royal Wanderer, ‘by Algernon’, 3 vols.—see Entry 1815: 15. The copy seen is bound with the same
author’s The Wrongs of Royalty; Being a Continuation
of the Royal Wanderer—see 1820: 15. Collates
in fours.
Further edn: 1823 (NSTC).
All
entries are contained within a predetermined mask, with seven
fields signalled by ‘flags’ which will be later
edited out.
#AUT#
is the author field. Where not known, ANON is given,
and these appear arranged alphabetically by title at the beginning
of each year. Where the author’s name does
appear on the title-page, this is given in the form it appears
there, and with additional information, such as expanded Christian
names, appearing in square brackets. Where the
author does not appear on the title-page, but has been identified,
the name is given though contained within square brackets.
#TIT#
gives accurate details of the imprint title-page, with punctuation
exactly as there, though always in capital letters. In
the very few cases where the first edition has not been located,
and the entry reconstituted from secondary materials, this
is indicated by an asterisk at the beginning.
#PUB#
The first-named main place of publication is always recorded
at the beginning of this field, followed by a colon: the rest
of the imprint is then given exactly as it appears, though
a comma is always used to precede the date.
#COL#
details collation of the text. Page numbers are
given for each volume, followed by format, which is determined
by counting leaves between signatures. Price information
is also given here, the main sources for this being review
listings, and, in the case of vol. 2 of the Bibliography,
the English Catalogue of Books, 1801–1836 (ECB).[5]
#REV#
delineates review information, but—in the case of post-1800
entries especially—this is not to be taken as a guide
to review material as such: there are several extant guides,
such as William S. Ward’s Literary Reviews in British
Periodicals (New York: Garland, 1972 etc.). Rather,
it points to our main sources of information about price and
date. Vol. 2 follows on from its predecessor by
featuring at its start the Monthly and Critical
reviews, though these are superseded in due course by the
Edinburgh and Quarterly respectively. Most
of the information in the latter two cases comes from the
‘Novels and Romances’ section in their lists of
New Publications at the end of each number, though when full
reviews are given this is noted. When additional
reviews are to be found in Ward (WSW), this is indicated also.
#CAT#
returns cataloguing details, and always begins with the library
source and shelfmark number for the copy used. When
Corvey is the source, this appears as such (i.e. ‘Corvey’);
in other cases the abbreviation system employed by the ESTC
is used (C for Cambridge, E for National Library of Scotland,
etc.). This is followed by the ISBN number of the
Corvey microfiche, where applicable. Also, in the
CAT field, reference is given to the English Catalogue
of Books; and to an NSTC number, along with the holding
libraries listed there. The tag ‘xNSTC’
is used to indicate that a copy is not to be found in NSTC.
#NOT#
provides pertinent notes on the title: the foreign source
work, for example, for translated novels, is always given
where known; information concerning authorship and publication
history found in preliminaries is also provided here, though
this practice has been approached optionally rather than systematically. Each
entry ends by given a brief record of further editions: British
and Irish editions to 1850; the first American edition; and
the first French and German translations (with title if differing
interestingly); also details are provided of modern facsimile
editions.
Since
1990 Cardiff and Paderborn teams have been working to compile
entries for every novel known to have existed between 1800
and 1829 inclusive. As a rule, we have excluded
non-standard works such as miscellanies, shorter tales, children’s
literature, and religious tracts. Usually, the
copy at Corvey was used for our entries, unless there are
good reasons for not doing this (e.g. an imperfect copy, not
a first edition). In cases where Corvey couldn’t
provide the copy (approximately 28% of cases), we have usually
gone first to the British Library, then (if not available
there) to the other main copyright libraries (Bodleian, National
Library of Scotland, Trinity College Dublin, etc.). An
invaluable help here was NSTC (the second series of which
(1816–70) was being completed as we ourselves were proceeding,
and now, of course, both series I and II are available on
CD-ROM). Having a fullish core collection held
electronically also allowed cross-checking of the titles given
as ‘by the author’ in our #TIT# line, which produced
a number of fresh novels then locatable through online facilities
such as Blaise and the OCLC database. A fast laptop (a thing
unheard of when we started) also aided stack checks against
specialist collections at Aberdeen and Bristol. When
a title was not locatable in Britain and Ireland, we turned
to the USA with our list of remain titles to be found. A
full check was made against the card index file at the Houghton
Library, Harvard University, left by Sidney Greenough—a kind of American Block. There were also visits
to other US libraries, notably to the large holdings at Urbana
(Illinois), and the Sadleir-Black collection at the University
of Virginia. By now we were experiencing diminishing
returns, and thirty or so titles that we know to have existed
but were unable to find have been ‘reconstituted’
from available secondary evidence.
The
total file (all three decades) is now closed, with 2,256 titles
in all for the years 1800–29 inclusive. This
research has been used as the basis for the creation of a
dynamic database, designed by Anthony Mandal in collaboration
with Peter Garside, using Microsoft Access 97—this
time employing the latest technologies, rather than other,
quainter methods! It is now possible, for the first
time, to draw statistical conclusions from what we have gathered
together over the past two decades. As well as
this, the database is fully searchable, and contains complete
details of the texts, and additional material which it was
impossible or unnecessary to include in the original bibliography. Such
fields as authorial status (whether the author published pseudonymously,
anonymously, or with an authenticated name), publishing concerns
(enabling the analysis of the fortunes of the major publishing
houses over the three decades), and full gender categorisations
have been included. The second phase is underway,
which includes ascription to each entry of Genre/Style (e.g.
Gothic, Historical, Domestic, etc.) and Narrative Structure
(e.g. Epistolary, Direct Narrative, etc.), as well as pricing
statistics for the various volume-sizes of the novels.
Examples
of what is being achieved with this combination of dedicated
scholarship and modern advances in IT and data-manipulation
is provided in some of the sample graphs contained below.
Fig 2. Total Output of
Fiction, 1800–1829
This
graph shows that the new level of output achieved during the
late 1790s was largely sustained during the 1800s. Output
in the 1810s, however, is 3% lower than in the 1800s, but
then builds up into the period of most output during the earlier
1820s. One particularly noteworthy feature is the
fact that the largest year of all is not 1810, but 1808.
Another interesting figure is the trough which occurs midway
in the 1810s (the time of the earliest Scott novels). Why? This
could be a lot to do with the cost of paper, which rose during
this period. Also noteworthy is the disruption
of the steady rise in the 1820s, as novel production was buffeted
(but not seriously dented) by the financial ‘crash’
of 1826 in the publishing trade.
Fig 3. Top Five Publishers:
Women’s Novels (Total vs. Anon), 1800–1829
Fig
3 compares women’s novels as published by the most prolific
concerns of the period 1800–29: Minerva, Longmans, Henry
Colburn, J. F. Hughes, and Whittakers. Here, works
by women are taken to include female-implied (‘By a Lady’,
‘By Lady —’, etc.) and pseudonymous novels,
as well as those whose authors are named on the title-pages
or have been subsequently identified. The blue
cylinders show women’s output as a percentage of the
total production by each concern. The magenta cylinders
again are percentages of the publishers’ total output,
indicating how many novels written by women were published
anonymously (i.e. no name or variant thereof given on title-pages). What
is of interest is the similarity between Minerva and Longmans,
the top two publishers: both have a female authorship of between
54% and 55.5%, of which only around 15% were published anonymously.
Compare this with the more male-inclined Henry Colburn and
Whittakers, which only had a female authorship of around 30%,
half of which was published anonymously. Finally,
J. F. Hughes, a far more controversial figure, while not having
such a high total output of female-penned works as Minerva
or Longmans, only published around 4.3% of his female authors
anonymously. What this might be taken to indicate
is that the publishers of the earlier part of the period (most
significantly, Hughes) were more inclined to openly publish
female-penned works as such, while concerns which appeared
at a later date (Colburn did not begin publishing until 1807)
not only published fewer works by women, but were even less
inclined (proportionately speaking) to advertise when they
did publish them.
Fig 4. Gender Breakdown:
Minerva Press, 1800–1829
The
final graph presents details of the output of the Minerva
concern (under William Lane, Lane, Newman & Co, and then
A. K. Newman & Co) over the three decades. The
gender divisions represent the status of the works as deduced
from the title-page (see above). The terms correspond
with the Bibliography’s #AUT# field: ‘Named’
texts indicate an authenticated name given in the title-page;
‘Identifed’ texts are based on scholarly discoveries,
deduced associations (i.e. ‘By the author of …’),
or established ascriptions; ‘Implied’ texts are
based on unidentified pseudonymous works or those whose title-pages
indicate some gender type (e.g. ‘By a Lady’, ‘By
a Reverend’, etc.); ‘Unknown’, unsurprisingly,
indicates no further substantial knowledge of authorial gender
is available. What is noteworthy of Minerva’s
output over the three decades is the precedence of Female
Named texts, which is in keeping with the data of Fig 3.
Furthermore, female-penned works outnumber male-penned works
by 23% (approximately 121 novels), although the average output
of women’s novels had dropped from 64% in the latter
half of the 1810s to around 51% during 1825–9. Of
their average yearly production of novels, Minerva managed
just over twenty-one books per year in the 1800s (best year,
with twenty-eight novels, was 1805), compared with slightly
more than fourteen per year in the 1820s (worst year, with
nine novels, was 1829). Perhaps this emphasis on
the female market explains the demise of Minerva in the 1820s,
with their rather ‘unfashionable’ touting of female-penned
works at a time which anticipated the dominance of the Victorian
male author in the light of Scott’s phenomenal achievement.
One
last point brings us finally back to Scott. As
noted in Fig 2, as far as the output of new titles is concerned,
1810 it turns out is not the optimum year; rather, it is 1808,
where we have a clear peak of 111 titles. Of these,
forty-one are by male authors, fifty by women, and twenty
remain to be identified. The titles themselves
are a mixed bunch—at the head used to be Atrocities
of a Convent, until examination of the only surviving
copy at UCLA revealed that it was authored by Thomas Rickman
(and is more a radical satire than a Gothic potboiler). There
are, however, a few genuinely salacious titles—The
Noble Cornutos, The R—l Stranger, The Royal
Sufferer, Royal Intrigues—reflecting a royal
scandal (between the Prince Regent, later George IV, and his
wife, Princess Caroline) not unlike the one current now. In
the middle of this squarely sits Hannah More’s Cœlebs—an attempt at moral re-armament from within the enemy
camp if ever there was one![6]
Also among the few more heavy titles is Joseph Strutt’s
antiquarian novel, Queenhoo Hall, which was completed
by Scott for the publisher John Murray.[7]
Murray was then angling for a share of Scott’s poetry;
Scott was trying to offload a number of projects, including
a collected set of British Novelists, which were meant to
keep James Ballantyne’s press busy and help launch John
Ballantyne as an Edinburgh publisher (both concerns were secretly
owned by Scott). Early in 1809 James Ballantyne
(acting as Scott’s literary agent), met Murray at Boroughbridge
in Yorkshire and took a memorandum of the meeting which has
survived. One project itemised there is ‘New
poem’, against which is recorded Murray’s comment,
‘Most certainly’. Another, called ‘Anonymous
work’, is undeniably Waverley. Scott
in this new light can thus be seen embarking on a career as
a novelist at a time when fiction, if at a low ebb in reputation,
was undeniably reaching a high watermark in terms of output.
NOTES
1. Lee
Erickson, ‘The Poet’s Corner: The Impact of Technological
Changes in Printing on English Poetry, 1750–1850’,
in English Literary History 52 (1985), 902. Reprinted
in his The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature
and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1996).
2. A
second edition of Scottish Chiefs (1811) can be found
in the Corvey Microfiche collection at Cardiff, ISBN CME 3-628-48361-1.
3. Q.v.,
Peter Garside, ‘J. F. Hughes and the Publication of Popular
Fiction’, Library 9 (1987), 240–58.
4. Cardiff
University holds both the NSTC (1st and 2nd series) and NUC
for inspection on the ground floor of the Arts and Social
Studies Library. The ESTC is also avaliable for consultation
at any of the computer bays in the ASSL.
5. The
English Catalogue of Books, Preliminary Volume, 1801–1836,
edd. Robert Alexander Peddie and Quintin Waddington (1914;
New York: Kraus Reprint Corporation, 1963).
6. So
rapid was its success, this title was not acquired for the
Corvey collection until the 14th edition of 1813! Again,
this is available for inspection, under CME 3-628-47303-9.
7. Queenhoo
Hall is also held on the Corvey microfiche: CME 3-628-48681-5.
COPYRIGHT
INFORMATION
This article is copyright ©
1999 Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research, and is
the result of the independent labour of the scholar or scholars
credited with authorship. The material contained
in this document may be freely distributed, as long as the
origin of information used has been properly credited in the
appropriate manner (e.g. through bibliographic citation, etc.).
REFERRING
TO THIS ARTICLE
P. D. GARSIDE and A. A. MANDAL.
‘Producing Fiction in Britain, 1800–1829’,
Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text 1 (August
1997). Online: Internet (date accessed): <http://www.cf.ac.uk/encap/corvey/articles/cc01_n01.html>.
This article was originally
presented as a paper by Dr Peter Garside during the SHARP
Conference at Magdalene College, Cambridge, in June 1997. The
graphs were produced also in June, and this article emended
for the Cardiff Corvey website, with additional material
and commentary (esp. for Figs 3 and 4), by Anthony Mandal
in August 1997 (with updated versions provided for this archived
version, in June 1999).
CONTRIBUTOR
DETAILS
Peter Garside (MA Cantab., PhD
Cantab., AM Harvard) is Professor of English Literature at
Cardiff University and Chair of the Centre for Editorial and
Intertextual Research. As well as specialising
in Romantic and Augustan literature, he has recently completed
work on a Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published
in the British Isles (with James Raven and Rainer Schöwerling;
OUP forthcoming), and is currently editing James Hogg’s
Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.
His other involvements include
participation in the advisory board of the Edinburgh Edition
of the Waverley Novels (from 1985) and the Stirling/South
Carolina Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg (from
1991), as well as editing for both projects. He
has published widely in the field of Scottish fiction, publishing
history, and Romantic literature, and recent publications
relevant to fiction of the Romantic period include a chapter
on ‘Romantic Gothic’, in Literature of the Romantic
Period, ed. Michael O’Neill (Oxford, 1998), pp. 315–40.
Anthony Mandal (BA Dunelm, MA
Wales) is a PhD student at Cardiff University, examining the
literary and publishing world faced by Jane Austen in the
1810s. His thesis seeks to consider a number of
pertinent questions: What were contemporary novelists writing? How
easy was it for a woman writing in the nineteenth century? How
successful was Austen compared to her peers? How
astute was she, entering the literary marketplace at a time
when female authors were at their most prolific? Answering
these questions might lead to Austen being considered, not
as an isolated author, but as one who was very much a part
of the dynamic world of the early nineteenth century.
Published contributions include
entries in the forthcoming Cambridge Bibliography of English
Literature (3rd edn.), and New Dictionary of National
Biography, as well as articles in Fitzroy-Dearborn’s
Encyclopedia of the Novel (1999). Other
main interests include information technology and the Internet,
and how these advances can be combined with traditional scholarly
skills to produce dynamic tools for researchers.
