Richard B. Sher. The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland and America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xxvi + 815 pp. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-75252-5.
Reviewed by Charles Withers (Institute of Geography, University of Edinburgh)
Published on H-HistGeog (February, 2008)
Enlightenment in a Book
This is an important book on topics of significance by an author in command of his material. Indeed, it is more than one book and its coverage more than just the Enlightenment (and then mainly in and from Scotland), publishing, the book trade and the commercial and intellectual mobility of ideas in the second half of the eighteenth century. As Sher makes clear in his author's note, his book can be read in different ways: those "with a general interest may wish to read the main text without consulting the data in the back. Others may wish to consult the data frequently while reading the main text. Still others may wish to use this work as a reference work, focusing on the data, and reading the main text selectively" (p. xxiii). The data here referred to are a series of seven appendices, which together take up nearly one hundred pages, ranging from the careers of the 115 Scottish Enlightenment authors whose works and their publishing history lie at the heart of Sher's survey, the subject matter of the books in question, their relative popularity (measured by sales), and so on. Central to these data and to the whole enterprise--Sher terms it "the empirical cornerstone of the volume" (p. 80)--is table 2, which lists, for a total of 360 works, the "British, Irish, and American First Editions of Scottish Enlightenment Books, 1746-1800" (pp. 620-699), noting imprint date, author, first British edition, title, the format, number of volumes, price, topic, popularity rating, place of publication and publisher, and the dates of the first Irish and first American editions with similar format and price details for those where known.
It is, I realize, unusual to begin a review with the appendices, and to give so much attention to this one in particular. Yet it is also fitting, not least for the reason signalled above, that the author sees this to be central to his project and to be one way of interrogating the book as a whole. I read the work twice, initially without much attention to the appendices, then flicking back and forth from text to table with an eye to the evidence of table 2 in particular: this latter method I found much more rewarding, for there and in much else, the richness is in the detail. Sher skillfully builds out from his empirical cornerstone to present an account of the central place of the book and of the world of Enlightenment publishing--actually, the many intersecting social, familial, commercial, and cosmopolitan worlds of publishing--and of the book trade that both constituted and disseminated the Enlightenment in and from Scotland, notably in and to London, Dublin, and Philadelphia. To begin with the appendices is also fitting inasmuch as it is the diversity--printed size, the nature of frontispiece illustrations, the binding, the modified "new" editions illustrative of local purpose or authorial changes of mind--that counts in understanding the nature of eighteenth-century books as cultural objects, not just as purveyors of intellectual content or literary merit as perceived by peers and measured in sales.
The book as a whole is in three main parts, each of three chapters. Part 1 examines Scottish authors in a world of books, looking at the development of print culture in the Scottish Enlightenment, at the diversity of the authors, and at the rewards, pecuniary and otherwise, of being an Enlightenment author. Part 2 explores the publication of the Scottish Enlightenment in London and in Edinburgh, with particular attention to the London-Edinburgh publishing axis, and, at some length, to the success of the house of Strahan and Cadell and the role of William Creech, the Edinburgh bookseller. Part 3 looks at the reprinting of the Scottish Enlightenment, in Dublin and in Philadelphia, with two of the three chapters here focusing on the American context. Sher's conclusion of nine pages is relatively short, but such brevity is understandable given that much of the argument rests within the chapters and the evidence within the appendices.
The book effectively begins with a lengthy introduction, which, aside from making disclaimers as to the overall structure of the book, Sher uses to position the work in relation to recent scholarship in book history and, albeit less fully, to recent work in the nature of the Enlightenment as an intellectual moment and movement. For those less inclined to follow the story of individual authors and publishers, or concerned more with the Scottish context and less with the textual mobility of the Scottish Enlightenment into and out of London, Dublin, and Philadelphia, this chapter provides an effective summary of why book history--here a book history oriented to questions of production--is an essential element in the comprehension of the Enlightenment as a social history of multiple ideas, rather than as a rarefied intellectual history of largely philosophical ideas, as it has too often been considered.
Sher favors a diverse view of the Enlightenment, contending that it "be viewed as a very big movement, geographically, intellectually, and socially" (p. 15). And by implication, he favors a wider-ranging view of book history than, for example, the local perspectives offered by Adrian Johns in his The Nature of the Book (1998). In these senses, Sher's contribution to the historiography of Enlightenment studies is to support what we might term narratives of an "inflationary tendency," and for book history, to present a national narrative whose meanings can only be fully grasped by appreciating the international connections that sustained authorship, publishing, and the book trade in Scotland, and, principally, in Edinburgh for, as Sher notes, "the production of new Scottish Enlightenment books was highly concentrated geographically" (p. 267), with only Scotland's capital and London mattering much. The result overall is many things, each illuminating and rewarding: an urban social history of Enlightenment publishing; a depiction of the Enlightenment in Scotland as something "stable, scholarly and sociable" (p. 105); a narrative of the Enlightenment's movement beyond Scotland which is to be explained in local circumstances not as the simple consequence of networks of epistolary exchange as is sometimes favored by those who stress Enlightenment cosmopolitanism per se over attention to its nature and the contents of transnational exchange; and a reference work for scholars and students alike who will turn to Sher's tables, as Enlightenment readers once did to Jupiter's tables, for guidance and epistemological positioning.
Readers with a discerning eye on Enlightenment and book history studies may have seen this book coming, in part at least: in 2000, Sher published two lengthy essays, "The Book in the Scottish Enlightenment" and "Science and Medicine in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Lessons of Book History" in which the place of the book as an instrument of and for Enlightenment was made and in which some of this book's methodological conventions and central arguments were rehearsed. And both before and since, Sher has produced numerous essays and articles on Scottish and Enlightenment book history, on particular editions and the work of significant authors and publishing houses. He has long been a leading voice in the textual history of the Enlightenment in Scotland and this book will deservedly further secure that international reputation. It is a substantial achievement.
Recognizing this, and, in closing, reiterating my admiration for the work and the sustained scholarship that underlies it, let me offer three points. These are, perhaps, less points of reservation than they are more-or-less related thoughts about relative absence and about the wider implications of Sher's study. First, Sher's view of the central importance of books and print culture to the making and mobility of (the) Enlightenment (in Scotland or elsewhere) is predicated upon production: publishing, print runs, publication format, numbers bought, and authors' and publishers' financial rewards. This is not always an easy perspective to recover, but it is easier than other options. Yet, as many recent studies in book history and in the history of science have shown, questions of the making and mobility of knowledge and any claims that can be made about the use of such knowledge need to be attentive to questions of reception: to reading, to reviewing, to evidence (where it can be gleaned) of how, exactly, the books in question were thought of, engaged with, discussed, debated, and even dismissed, and why, by their readers. Sher knows this of course and recognizes the importance of what we might think of as "reception studies" in book history, notably in his introduction. Even so, this account might have been richer still, had we been given more of a glimpse of what readers thought about the content of the books they bought, or, conversely, had we been told that such is not possible to know, either from remarks in public newspapers and literary periodicals or from the private correspondence of the many Enlightenment men figuring here.
Secondly, the attention given to the productive and economic facts of authorship, of printing, and of edition history tends to be at the expense of the cognitive content of the works in question. The worlds of Enlightenment book-making come forcefully into view: less readily discerned are any disputes over meaning, the ideas themselves. These, too, could often be matters of geography, not in Sher's sense of the circumscribed regions from which authors came or in which publishing was undertaken, but in terms of variations in the content of books according to geographical circumstance. Such was the case, for example, of William Buchan's Domestic Medicine (first London edition published in 1769), to which Sher pays considerable attention, in its original version and its American edition. In its French and Spanish editions, versions of this work appeared with amended content designed to reflect the particular hazards, and their treatment, associated with the hotter parts of those countries: insects and, notably, scorpion bites. The Dutch edition had no such text. Here, the content of Enlightenment, even if only as domestic medical improvement, was determined by Enlightenment geography.
Thirdly, some of the claims made to the Scottish-ness of the Enlightenment publishing project seem at odds with some of the evidence here about local variation and others' claims about the geographical diversity of the Enlightenment, within and beyond Scotland. Thus, we are told that, "eighteenth-century men of letters were involved in a self-conscious attempt to glorify and improve the Scottish nation through the publication of learned and literary books. Even Scottish authors and publishers who resided in London were often bound by national ties and imbued with a strong sense of Scottish identity and national pride" (p. 21), and told too that the mid eighteenth century was "the moment when the Scottish Enlightenment entered its mature or high phase as an intellectual movement because it was the moment when its practitioners began to think of themselves as a unified body of intellectuals, engaged in a national mission" (p. 61). Simply, I am less persuaded that this was as strongly the case then than it has been made to seem since. The picture I take is less of a unified body of intellectuals than it is of diverse authors, some with shared ideas, others in opposition one to another, trying (like any author) to get published and to secure the best deal possible. United as published authors these men may have been; quite how far they acted to constitute a vision of and for Scottish identity, what that identity was, and whether it was anything like "national" in the eighteenth century must remain a moot point.
It may be, of course, that Sher's work will have even greater value if used comparatively. James Raven's recent work on England, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450-1850 (2007), takes a long-run look at the social-industrial complex that was the book trade there, and since almost half of his account deals with the period 1740 to 1840, there are several possibilities for comparative analysis, not least given Sher's consideration of London as an outpost of Scottish Enlightenment publishing. Similarly, readers who want an abbreviated discussion of the Scottish Enlightenment and its publishing cultures, or to place the Enlightenment as part of a longer-run history of publishing and writing in Scotland may prefer Robert Crawford's Scotland's Books (2007) where they will get both. But we should not be in doubt as to the scholarly significance of Sher's book: for many, we will constantly remind ourselves of it in the years to come as we value its insights and reflect upon the particular books it discusses and the fields it so fully describes.
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Citation:
Charles Withers. Review of Sher, Richard B., The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland and America.
H-HistGeog, H-Net Reviews.
February, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14131
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