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The John Coffin Memorial Lecture
in the History of the Book
2005

The Political Economy of Reading
Revised edition, October 2012

William St Clair

The Coffin lecture, of which this a revised, corrected, and enlarged version, updated with new relevant
statistics, was given and published in 2005
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The text
may not be altered in any way
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The revised version was prepared at the request of the editors of Lettre Internationale, who published it in a
Romanian translation in print in their summer 2012 issue
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What were the conditions within which printed books came into existence in the form
that they did, and not in others? How were those books that did come into existence produced, sold,
distributed, and read, in what numbers, by which constituencies of readers, and over which timescales?
– again asking why these events and happened in the ways that they did and not in others that were
possible, so applying a notion of opportunity cost? And what were the consequences of the reading
of the texts that were inscribed in, and that were carried by, the books? What were the effects on the
minds of their readers, and on the mentalities of the wider society within which the reading took place
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And although I say ‘books’ for convenience, I include journals, newspapers,
and other media, and the illustrations they sometimes contain
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However, although there has always been much interest in
what certain texts mean, how they came to be written, and in the lives of their authors, less attention
has been paid to the processes by which the texts reached the hands, and therefore potentially the
minds, of different constituencies of readers
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But, in one respect, that era forms a unity
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I choose 1900, incidentally, not as the end of the
print era, but as a way of conventionally marking the moment when, with the arrival of radio and film,
printed paper lost its uniqueness
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Whether engaged in politics, education, religion, literature,
scholarship, science, propaganda, advertising, or censorship, many of the leading men and women of
the past tried to use print to spread their ideas and to advance their aims
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But, we should ask, were they right to regard books and
reading as having power over minds? How can we investigate the validity of the assumption?
Literary and intellectual history, two of the disciplines that have traditionally attempted to retrieve
historic mentalities, have mainly been written in accordance with what I call the ‘parade of authors’
1  The empirical evidence for the arguments in this piece, with a fuller discussion of most of the issues, and statistical
appendices, can be found in my book
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Also relevant is
the chapter ‘Following up The Reading Nation’
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Ed
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Cambridge: CUP 2009
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An interview about the intellectual influences and predecessors that influenced the writing of the Reading Nation
and The Political Economy of Reading was published by the online literary review, The Browser, in their FiveBooks series, was
published in May 2012, and is available to be read free of charge at the time of writing
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The writings of the past are presented as a march-past of great names described from a
commentator’s box set high above the column
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In philosophy Hume is followed by Rousseau, Adam Smith, or whichever names
the modern writer wishes to include
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It is a convention
centred on newly written works that, for the most part, denies an active role to readers
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This presents the printed
writings of a particular historical period as debating and negotiating with one another in a kind of open
parliament with all the members participating and listening
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Under both of these conventions, the historian chooses the texts that march in the parade or sit in
the parliament
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And the texts can be situated in specific contexts
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For one thing,
any study of the consequences of the reading of the past ought to consider the books that were actually
read, not some modern selection
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Much of the reading that took place in the past in the English-speaking world, probably
most until very recent times, was of texts written or compiled long ago and far away
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As far as readers were concerned, however, chronological linearity was
not the norm
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In nineteenth century Britain, for example, many
readers read the texts of the Enlightenment only after they had been subjected to an intensive school
education in the texts of the Counter-Enlightenment, and many others, including many women,
read the Counter-Enlightenment without having read the Enlightenment at all
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But, for Edmund Burke’s Reflexions on the French Revolution, there are records of over twenty thousand
copies being produced and circulated in the early 1790s alone
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But, of the many men and women who tried to understand the implications of the French
Revolution by reading the printed discussions, most must have come to their conclusions on the basis of
Burke alone
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3 Could that amount of reading
have shaped the minds of ten to fifteen million people? Especially when Wordsworth was, on the whole,
reinforcing ideas that were mainstream in the culture of his day and earlier? How do we deal with the
2  Figures in Reading Nation, 583, 623, and 562
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THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF READING

fact that over two million copies of Scott’s verse and prose romances had been sold in Britain alone by
the middle of the nineteenth century, maybe a million more than all other authors put together?4 And
Scott was regarded by the best critics of the century as the equal of Homer, a great teacher and a model
to be followed by adults as well as young people, both in his works and in his life
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They have
always had freedom, within their circumstances, to choose which texts to read and which passages to
give most attention to, to skip, to argue, to resist, and to read against the grain
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Exclusively text-based approaches, caught in a closed circle, cannot ever, without information from
outside the texts, take us to reading or to the consequences of reading
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Since, according to this
approach, it was in the minds of readers not just in those of authors, that the engagement between
competing texts occurred, we must expect the trajectories of development to be different from those of
the first writings, or of the first printings, of texts, as indeed they turn out to be
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’
If that phrase has an eighteenth-century ring about it, that is part of my point
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They believed that, by understanding economic systems, they could improve the
political management of such systems to bring about improvements in the lives of participants, and
for the most part they were successful and the subjects they founded have become well-established
disciplines with many achievements
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If I had been living in the eighteenth century, I would have called my book, ‘An Inquiry into the
Political Economy of Knowledge
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The ‘history of the book’ is, among much else, the history of an industry,
and there is nothing inappropriate about adopting the conceptual and analytical tools that are
successfully employed in understanding the behaviour of industries, especially those with similar
characteristics
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There are, for example, parallels with pharmaceuticals and
information technology, in which intellectual property is central
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Table 1 is a simple diagram that illustrates the observed economic behaviour of a publisher of a
newly written text in the romantic period
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Within constraints not shown here, the publisher chose where to position his intended book
on the demand curve, either selling a small number at a high price or a larger number at a lower price
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That is the classic behaviour of a monopolist
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5  For the high reputation of Scott among all ranks of society through to 1914 and later, see Reading Nation, 419
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The Reception of Jane Austen and Walter Scott
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Scott was also much read in
translation
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I take two of the most praised and most demanded literary
works of the time
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And Byron’s Don Juan, on which, for reasons I need not go into
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THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF READING

here, intellectual property rights turned out not to be enforceable
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I have the actual numbers for the three main variables, price, quantity, and time
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It took fifteen years to move from the large expensive quarto to the
smaller less expensive duodecimo
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Sales rose from a few thousand to several hundred thousand
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The Lady of the Lake did eventually follow Don Juan down the demand curve but
not until the 1840s when the copyright expired, prices fell, and access widened even more dramatically
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The quarto volumes, for example, cost the buyer the equivalent of about a third of the weekly
income of a gentleman, say a retired senior captain of Nelson’s Royal Navy whose income was about
100 shillings a week
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During the romantic period, incidentally, there
were no free public schooling nor free public libraries, no railways or rapid communication between
people
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The general applicability of the textbook demand curve, and the difference in the trajectories of
production and consumption, emerge even more vividly from the history of Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last
Days of Pompeii, one of the most praised and read novels of the Victorian era, of which the figures have
for the first time recently been recovered from publishers’ archives
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7  The evidence is set out with source references in William St Clair and Annika Bautz, ‘The Last Days of Pompeii’, in
Victorian Literature and Culture (2012
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THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF READING

The Last Days of Pompeii, title page, cheap edition, 1880
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5
5
3
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5

Production
000s of
copies
1
5
not available
500
25
37
60

1880 Title goes out of copyright, many competing editions at different prices of which Routledge
alone:
1885–1897
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5
46
c
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05
?200–300

The record matches what appears to be the general pattern of Victorian fiction, namely a small, very
expensive, initial edition aimed at, and self censored for, the richest one or two percentiles of society,
followed by a move down the demand curve during the period of copyright as each tranche of the
market is taken and readerships widen, to be followed by a flood of cheap editions (as well as continuing
more expensive editions) the moment the text came out of copyright
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This example also brings out the limitations of treating printed literature as existing independently
of other cultural media
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If we want to assess effects of cultural production on mentalities, we may have to
investigate the political economy of viewerships, both of performed versions and of book illustrations,
as well as readerships
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Until 1774 English
publishers practised perpetual intellectual property and stayed high on the curve
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And when perpetual monopoly was ended by the courts after a long
period in which the statute law was ignored by the industry, and the lower tranches were opened up,
8  Discussed, with quantification and visual illustrations, in St Clair and Bautz, article in Victorian Literature and Culture
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For example, in the case of Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe, first published in 1719, the archival records of publishers and printers show that,
although it had been regarded as a ‘best seller’ from the day it was published, it had sold more copies
within a few years of the ending of perpetual copyright, than in its first half century
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And, if you are thinking that the fall in price was due
to mechanisation of book manufacturing, as is often asserted, that was not the case
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On the lower part of my textbook demand curve diagram, I have mentioned anthologies,
abridgements, and adaptations
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They enabled longer texts to be made available to wider readerships,
including young people, to the-less-well educated, and to the economically disadvantaged
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One pattern that I noticed in my scrutiny of
the archival record is that, quite suddenly, in about 1600, the English book industry stopped producing
texts of this kind that drew on copyrighted material and the restrictions continued
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The judicial decision of 1774 to enforce the statute law of 1710 not only enabled innumerable
complete texts to be read by millions who had previously been excluded but resulted in a flood of
anthologies, abridgements, and adaptations that drew on the same body of older texts and carried the
ideas to even larger constituencies including children
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But, as with the practice of tranching down the demand curve, once noticed, the explanation jumps
from the page
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Since the clampdown was not retroactive, the older texts, that is those for which
an intellectual property ownership claim had been made before 1600, continued to be reprinted
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10 A political economy approach helps to explain why after
1774 the reading nation grew rapidly until near universality was reached by the end of the nineteenth
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The time lags in access that resulted from these governing economic structures and business practices
were not trivial
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The poor were caught in texts
first printed several hundred years earlier, English language bibles, almanacs, chapbook abridgements
of mediaeval and Renaissance romance such as Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hampton, and the Seven
Champions of Christendom
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Samuel Pepys and James Boswell, for example, loved the old abridged chapbooks
and made collections
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9  Some of the main archival figures in Reading Nation 507
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10  Discussed in Chapter 4 of Reading Nation
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Those at the top had modern
knowledge, those at the bottom had superseded knowledge, those at the top had clinical medicine,
others had folklore and unwanted children
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And
the effects on minds were cumulative, affecting the horizons of expectations of succeeding generations
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Some may quibble at my use of the word ‘obsolescence’ in this context
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By the same argument, ‘long-lived’ texts do not
become admirable just because they were first produced long ago
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But, for an understanding of the political economy of reading, we should beware of putting
too much weight on anecdotal evidence whose representative quality is uncertain
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12
As for what I call the parliament model of literary studies, it continues to thrive
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So a scholar might bring together a piece of political writing, a play, a long forgotten
novel written by a woman, and a book of advice on children’s education, that were all produced at much
the same time, and the author then makes critical and sometimes historical remarks about them and
‘the imagination’ of the society from which they emanated
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What claim can such anthologies have
to represent the ‘imagination’ of an age? And they are of little help in addressing the larger questions
that I am more interested in with which I began, such as: How did books and reading help to shape
mentalities? Why and how do societies change? What are the historical processes – that must involve
the competition between ideas being carried in material form – that have brought us, as societies, to our
present mental states?
Such ‘in the imagination’ studies appear to me to be a residue of the romantic notion that printed
texts can, and deserve to be, scrutinised as autonomous cultural productions without paying regard
to the material – and the wider political economy – conditions under which they came into being in
the textual form that they did, without paying attention to the active contribution to the making of
meanings made by readers, or to the many alternative texts that the readers of the texts, if there were
any, had access to, and may have been influenced by
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And these more difficult questions are still present, even if shied away from, in all studies that do not
look beyond the text
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12  In Clare Pettitt’s phrase, ‘if the self-made man remains a “wonder”, the threat to the status quo is limited’
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THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF READING

What determined the shape of the demand curve? Many factors we can think of — literacy, incomes,
horizons, censorship, appeal to readers, none of which are static, and all of which have to be investigated
and factored in
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By 1900, as a result of a virtuous circle of cheaper books leading to more reading,
it had become much flatter as more and more men, women, and children joined the reading nation
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To my initial surprise, I found that the figures
for edition sizes, that is print runs per edition, for British books in the early nineteenth century were
not all that different from those found in the previous centuries of the print era, when the population,
the economy, and the market for books were only a fraction of what they had become
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It seems to be
constant across Europe and North America
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Why, we should ask, did the coming of print in fifteenth-century Europe result in more texts? Surely
the political and ecclesiastical leaders of the time, who controlled the book industries and often claimed
a monopoly of truth, should have preferred more copies of the existing body of texts? There is a microeconomic explanation relating to the marginal costs of producing extra copies
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In the age of manufacture by stereotype that began in Britain in the 1820s, the microeconomics of
text copying are radically different from those of the age of exclusively moveable type that preceded
it
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In the
nineteenth century a high proportion of print was undated – perhaps deliberately so to offset readerly
resistance to perceived obsolescence, a phenomenon we see returning with print-on-demand
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We know, for example, from the firm’s archives, that one firm
alone, Frederick Warne over forty years ran off fifty impressions, ranging from 24,000 to 250 copies per
impression from plates of The Poetical Works of Lord Byron
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In terms of ‘titles’ or
‘editions’ as judged by changing title pages, this vast output counts as two
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In the past, the differing technological and economic limitations
on manufacturing of copies of texts changed the balance of production, and therefore of reading,
between old and new texts
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Moveable type encouraged the production of more newly composed texts
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Table 3
MANUFACTURING: Tendencies
Manuscript era
Encouraged the production of more copies of the existing body of texts relative to new texts
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And more fully with more figures in ‘Following up The Reading
Nation
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And some modern enterprises are using the new
technology to promote open access without any diminution of intellectual quality
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I turn now to the last link in the chain of the analysis
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And, in order to avoid circularity, we need to use manifestations
of mentalities that are external to the texts
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The correlation is far from exact, but over the
whole print era, the links, both general and particular, between texts, books, reading, and wider
consequences appear to be secure
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We also have the astonishingly neat overlap between the immersion of the Englishspeaking reading nation for over a century in the neo-chivalric romances of Walter Scott, the values of
Victorian Britain, and the states of mind that we detect in the American Civil War and the First World
War, connexions that had been remarked upon by Mark Twain, Paul Fussell, and others
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For, having disconnected outcomes from traditional text- and
author-centred approaches, we have connected them to other ways of understanding complexity
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The study has shown that the tendency of

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THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF READING

monopolistic industries to pay most attention to the topmost tranches of the market, to move slowly
down the demand curve, to ration supply to the market in order to protect the market value of their
properties, to neglect large constituencies of the market altogether or to supply them with obsolete
and often shoddy goods, can be observed in the monopolies and cartels operated by the printed
book industry through the institutions of private intellectual property
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To have linked mentalities to
historical reading is, therefore, to have linked them to the economics of the production and marketing
of texts in the age of print
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In Table 4,
I offer worked examples of the effects of different types of governing regime ranging from private
monopoly ownership of all texts in perpetuity, as in England until 1774, total absence of intellectual
property as in eighteenth-century Ireland, and various forms of mixed, protectionist, and offshore
regimes
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What I emphasise is that, in every one of these regimes, we can trace the effects of the
politically decided regime on the behaviour of the book industry, the shape of the demand curve, and
trace the consequences for prices, access, timing of access, horizons, and readerships, and therefore on
the constituting of knowledge among different constituencies
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England until 1774
Produced a stable and prosperous industry, in which authors, publishers, manufacturers, and
distributors were increasingly well rewarded
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Concentrated the benefits on the richer members of society, tended to delay and restrict access for
others, and held back the majority from access to modern printed knowledge
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Eighteenth-century Ireland
Irish book industry became an offshore centre, reprinting texts originating in Great Britain, mainly
for export
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Mixed systems 1
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Scotland 1714 to 1808
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Period coincides with flourishing of the Scottish Enlightenment and British romantic period
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Copyright two/three generations
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Period of tranching down lengthened
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Mixed system 3
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Short copyright for locally produced texts, none for imported
texts
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Disbenefitted foreign authors
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By making the price of access to literary texts of British origin cheaper than access to those produced
locally, reinforced the intellectual hegemony of British texts which the colonists had hoped to throw
off
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Seventeenth-century Netherlands, eighteenth-century Ireland, early nineteenthcentury Paris
Mitigated the censoring power of British political, ecclesiastical, and corporate institutions
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, to be circumvented
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Precursors of Creative Commons: Eighteenth-century examples of authors refusing copyright
in order to reduce the price, widen the access, and increase the potential impact of the reading
of their words
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William Fox on the Slave Trade, 1790
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The slave trade, scarcely questioned before the
1780s, was legally abolished in 1808
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Globalised copyright, almost perpetual, divided into ever smaller
packets, over a widening range of texts
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Contemporary world 2
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** Also
free internet resources of knowledge such as Wikipedia, sometimes compiled by crowd sourcing
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*  Reading Nation, 257, 624
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http://www
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  In general, it emerges that the development of virtually all aspects of texts, books, and reading,
including the English-language Bible and Shakespeare, have been influenced by the three main
governing structures of the print era, private intellectual property in the hands of the text-copying
industry, cartelisation within the industry, and a close alliance between the state and the industry in
which the industry delivers textual policing and self-censorship in exchange for economic privileges,
of which long copyright is the most restrictive
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If the findings of my inquiry are
confirmed, then it follows that these governing structures helped to determine society itself, affecting
every stage of cultural formation from textual production, through the choice, production, and
distribution of print, to readerly access, readerly horizons, choice of reading, reception, and consequent
mentalities
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We
have here, I suggest, the framework within which the role of particular texts can be traced
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The fierce debates about intellectual property that occur today are mainly conducted not in terms
of political economy but in absolutist, metaphorical, and ideological language that either ignores
consequences or tries to argue that they are irrelevant
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For
intellectual property is essentially different from real property, One is physical and visible
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The custom and practice of real property have existed throughout recorded
human history, in essentials unchanged at any rate in the Western tradition
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With a piece of real property, say a house, the owner can make drastic alterations
and the result will still be recognisably the same house
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If the house is divided among a number of people,
each can only enjoy a share, and the more the property is divided the smaller the share that each one
gets
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My experience of reading Shakespeare is not diminished if you read Shakespeare
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In addition to ‘property’, the present arguments about intellectual property are permeated with
another absolutist language, the author as unique ‘creator’, who has the right to own and defend his
creation
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No one, whether author or intellectual property owner can reasonably claim
that any substantial text has been compiled solely from privately owned materials
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Indeed, without the shared public element, texts would have had little or no appeal
to readers
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However, in the English book industry by the seventeenth century, the whole
discourse of property as it applied to real property, including the penalties for stealing it, damaging it,
and trespassing on it, the political rights and privileges attached to the possession of it, and the legal
protections against confiscation, was being applied to this recently invented form of private wealth
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Deazley, M
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Bently (Cambridge: Open Book, 2010
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When Warner Brothers learned that Groucho Marx was
making a parody of their film Casablanca, their lawyers sent him a stern warning
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15 Today
he might not have been able to laugh his way out
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I wonder what the political economists and jurists of the Enlightenment would have made of this?
If spoken language is the main faculty which holds human beings together in society, they asked, why
should written words be private property? Following their lead, we can describe private intellectual
property for what it is, a state-guaranteed monopoly right to copy and to sell a text, a restrictive business
practice which, if it is to be permitted, has to be justified by the public policy benefits that it may
bring to the society that grants the privilege
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Such a discussion
should, of course, consider the incentives that some types of regime may provide to useful innovation
as was agreed in the eighteenth century
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So, returning to the ‘history of the book’, what is needed if we are to develop a political economy
of reading? For a start, if we want to do political economy, we have to have economic information
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From such information we
will perceive patterns and develop provisional explanatory models
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Emerging results in one reading nation may be transferable, with
adaptations, to the experience of others
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Having
information of this kind would enable us to built a fuller and more theoretical understanding of texts,
books, reading, and consequences
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One last point
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When, for example, he
claims that “One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can”, we can surely now see that this is nonsense
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Wordsworth
was participating in a tradition that went back many centuries
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The more complex aspects of our minds — I leave
aside the lessons we learn from putting our hand in boiling water — may be, to a larger extent than we
understand or care to acknowledge, temporary outcomes of the consumption of the texts to which we
and our predecessors have been exposed, texts produced by political and economic processes involving
property, and therefore power, that deserve to be investigated
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15  Discussed by, among others, Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004) 147–48

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