Charles Dickens and his publishers
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Bibliographic Information
Charles Dickens and his publishers
Oxford University Press, c2017
2nd ed
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Note
Bibliography: p. [413]-425
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In considering the whole range of Dickens' relations with his English and overseas publishers, Professor Patten relates the story of the novelist's social encounters, violent breaches, and uneasy alliances with John Macrone, Richard Bentley, Edward and Frederic Chapman, William Hall, Bernhard Tauchnitz, William Bradbury, F. M. Evans, and his American publishers in a compelling record of personal and professional associations. Private drama is subordinated to a
narrative of a very special kind of venture', serial publication. Drawing extensively on the accounts rendered to Dickens by Bradbury and Evans, and Chapman and Hall every six months from 1846, Robert Patten traces the fluctuating fortunes of each of the books, from Sketches by Boz to Edwin Drood. e shows
how Dickens took advantage of developments in the law, popular literacy, and the new techniques of publishing through the periodical issue of his writings, and through four widely-circulated reprint series that vastly extended the market for his work. He identifies the sources and size of Dicken's income, comparing it to that of his contemporaries; and the costs and sales, the printing history, and the profits and losses on all books where Dickens shared copyright are set out in detail in four
appendices. The study skilfully establishes that the conditions of publishing had much to do with the shape and success of Dicken's career. This edition includes two new chapters. The first narrates how this bibliobiography' came to be conceived, at a time in the 1960s when Dickens was lauded as a
genius' but still thought to have written such lengthy books because he was paid by the line. In the substantial second addition, Patten details the distribution of Dickens's estate to his many heirs, traces the devolution of the patronym as it extended to the family, and then to fans ('Dickensians'), surveys the spread of publishers' to include presses and texts in translation all over the world, studies the transfer of Dickens's writing to radio and visual media, and concludes with an
analysis of the audited figures for the sales in nine countries of over 2000 different editions of Dickens during the global celebrations for the bicentenary of his birth.
Table of Contents
I. THE RISE TO FAME
1: The Professional Author
2: Sketches by Boz and Macrone
3: Pickwick Papers and the Development of Serial Fiction
4: Dickens and the Burlington Street Brigand
5: 'The Best of Booksellers Past, Present, or to Come'
II. THE ANXIOUS FORTIES
6: Master Humphrey's Clock: 'wind, wind, wind'
7: Trouble in Eden: American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit
8: The Break
III. FORTUNE WITH FAME
9: With Bradbury and Evans
10: Dombey and Son, 'the greatest success'
11: David Copperfield and the Cheap Edition
12: Bleak House and the Literary Croesus
13: Working the Copyrights
IV. MAN OF THE WORLD
14: Return to Chapman and Hall
15: 'The End'
16: The Audience Widens
APPENDICES
Introduction
A: Sales and Profits of Dickens's Works, 1846-70
B: The Printing History of Dickens's Monthly Serials, 1846-70
C: Income from Dickens's Works for Dickens, Bradbury and Evans, and Chapman and Hall, 1846-70
D: Income from Household Words and All the Year Round
Select Bibliography
by "Nielsen BookData"
