Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T05:31:37.107Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The business of belief: the emergence of ‘religious’ publishing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Patrick Scott
Patrick Scott*
Affiliation:
university of Edinburgh
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In 1863, when a London printer, called Collingridge, produced a handbook for the aspiring author, he made it clear that one particular class of aspiring author was of dominant commercial importance:

We may venture to assert that no other profession produces so many works as the clergy. This is no more than might be expected from a body of gentlemen having the advantages of sound learning and well-regulated minds . . . there are thousands of clergy who neither know, nor desire to know, the toils, the anxieties, or the pleasures of authorship; yet even they, if in active duty, require the services of the printer. Special sermons, schools, and other local institutions in the parish or district, necessitate an outlet for printing.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 10: Sanctity and Secularity: The Church and the World , 1973 , pp. 213 - 224
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1973

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Collingridge’s Guide to Printing and Publishing (London 1863) p 1.

2 Publisher’s Circular 22 (London 1 December 1859).

3 [A] Bibliographical Catalogue [of Macmillan and Company’s Publications 1843 to 1880] (London 1891).

4 Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel (London 1957) p 49 Google Scholar, gives an average of two hundred religious titles a year throughout the century. The 1749 figures break down as 58 sermons or volumes of sermons, and 98 titles of controversy and divinity.

5 [Partridge, S. W.,] Upward and Onward[: A Thought Book for the Threshold of Attive Life] (London 1857) pp 73-4Google Scholar.

6 Altick, R. D., [The English Common Reader, A Social History ofThe Mass Reading Public 1800-1900] (Chicago 1957) pp 386-7Google Scholar. On pp 99-128 Altick has a full discussion of religious books.

7 Figure from title-page: on its use for presentation see Kellett, E. E., in Young, G. M. (ed) Early Victorian England (London 1934) II p 95 Google Scholar; [Reynolds, J. S.], [Canon Christopher of St Aldate’s Oxford] (Abingdon 1967) p 280 Google Scholar; Pollock, John, The Cambridge Seven (London 1955) p 46 Google Scholar.

8 Hewitt, Gordon, Let the People Read, A Short History of the United Society for Christian Literature (London 1949) pp 39, 61Google Scholar.

9 Rivington, [Septimus], [The] Publishing Family [of Rivington] (London 1919) pp 117, 149Google Scholar. Newman had been paid £100 for the copyright in each edition of 1000 volumes.

10 Cruse, Amy, [The Victorians and their Books] (London 1935) p 119 Google Scholar: Stranks, C. J., Dean Hook (London 1954) pp 68–70 Google Scholar.

11 James, Lionel, A Forgotten Genius: William Sewell of St Columba’s and Radley (London 1945) P 54 Google Scholar. The sermon only ran to four editions. For his book Christian Morals, Sewell got £70, and for articles in the Quarterly Review, £50 or £60 each.

12 Rivington, [Septimus], [The] Publishing House [of Rivington] (London 1894) p 24 Google Scholar. Compare also Rivington, Publishing Family, pp 142-3, and A Memorandum respecting the connection between Oxford University Press and the Family of Parker of Oxford (Oxford 1863) p 7.

13 Rivington, Publishing Family p 144: ‘Few books were stereotyped in those days, especially in the case of theological works, where evolution in thought is usually going on in the author’s mind.’

14 Madden, J. L., in Sedgwick, Adam, A Discourse on the Studies of the University (Leicester 1969) p 26 Google Scholar.

15 There were for instance at least six differently printed versions of the first Tract for the Times: Guardian (London 1 August 1894); Rivington, Publishing Family pp 122-30. The only variorum editions of Victorian religious works known to me are Martin Svaglic’s edition of Newman’s Apologia (Oxford 1968), and Super’s, R. H. Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1960- )Google Scholar.

16 Eternal Hope was delivered as sermons in November and December 1877, and widely reported in the newspapers: it was stereotyped for first book publication in February 1878, and went through eight editions that year (with minor revisions in March, and heavier ones in April). There were six more editions in the next ten years. Bibliographical Catalogue p 335.

17 Chadwick, Owen, The Victorian Church I (London 1966) pp 401-2Google Scholar.

18 For sales see Edwin Orr, J., The Second Evangelical Awakening (London 1949) p 261 Google Scholar: Orr uses figures supplied by the publishers. Morgan and Scott had previously published The Revival Hymnbook, Heart Melodies, and Songs of Love and Mercy. Compare Sankey, Ira D., Sankey’s Story of the Sacred Hymns (London 1906)Google Scholar.

19 Altick pp 100-2: for the Scripture Gift Mission, see Baker, Ashley, Publishing Salvation (London 1961)Google Scholar.

20 Gosse, Edmund, Father and Son (London 1907 ed of 1969) p 19 Google Scholar.

21 Reynolds p 273.

22 Publisher’s Circular, 27 (London 8 December 1864) p 826.

23 The Religious Tract Society started the Tract Magazine (1824), followed by The Visitor (1828), but there were many publishers working on the same pattern: for instance, in 1904 John Ritchie of Sturrock, Kilmamock, published the Localised Gospel Messenger at 1s. 6d. per hundred, the Gospel Messenger at 1s. od. a hundred, and Good Tidings (‘district gospel literature’) at 2S. od. a hundred. Compare Scott, P. G., ‘Zion’s Trumpet: Evangelical Enterprise and Rivalry 1833-36’. Victorian Studies 13 (Bloomington, Indiana, 1969) pp 199–203 Google Scholar, and ‘Richard Cope Morgan, Religious Periodicals, and the Pontifex Factor’, Victorian Periodicals Newsletter, 15 (Amherst, Mass Summer 1972).

24 See Swift, J. M., Parish Magazines (London 1939)Google Scholar; Webster, Alan, ‘Parish Magazines’, Theology 46 (London 1943) p 156 Google Scholar; ‘The Man who started it all’. Home Words Centenary Issue (London 1971) pp 1-2.

25 Wallace, [J. A.], [Lessons from the Life of James Nisbet, Publisher] (Edinburgh 1867) pp 67-8Google Scholar.

26 There is a fictional description of tract distribution in Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-3), chap viii; and non-fictional ones in Reynolds pp 115-19, 233-4, 356-9. There is a good discussion of the tract philosophy in Harrison, Brian, ‘Early Victorian Temperance Tracts’, History Today 13 (London 1963) pp 178-85Google Scholar.

27 S. G. Green, in 1850, quoted by Webb, R. K., The British Working Class Reader 1700- 1848 (London 1955) p 28 Google Scholar.

28 , E. C. A., ‘On Religious Cant’, Christian Observer 214 (London 1855) pp 662-3Google Scholar.

29 J. F. Shaw, for instance, could advertise Cumming’s The Life and Lessons of Our Lord in three different bindings (7s. 6d.; 9s.; and 10s. 6d.) as ‘the cheapest gift-book of the season’ (Publisher’s Circular 27, 31 December 1864 p 47); while the Poems of A. H. Clough, though going through thirteen Macmillan editions, were only available in a plain cloth binding. On this topic see Sadleir, Michael, The Evolution of Publishers’ Binding Styles (London 1930)Google Scholar. On extra bindings see Rivington, Publishing Family p 148, or any catalogue for Samuel Bagster’s Biblia Sacra Polygloita Bagsteriana.

30 Doran, [G. H.] [,Chronicles of Barabbas] (London 1935) p 62 Google Scholar. Hodder had an early success with Henry Drummond’s Natural Law in the Spiritual World (London 1883), which sold 141,000 (41 editions) by 1905: Doran p 63 discusses the theological qualms of the older members of the firm over Drummond’s books. See also Darlow, T. H., William Robertson Nicoll (London 1925)Google Scholar.

31 Morgan, [G. E.], [Veteran in Revival: Richard Cope Morgan, his Life and Work] (London 1909)Google Scholar.

32 Meriol Trevor, in Newman, J. H., Loss and Gain (London 1962) p v Google Scholar.

33 Rivington, Publishing House pp 17-24; Publishing Family pp 142-4, p 166.

34 Quoted by Amy Cruse p 60: on religious novels see Maison, Margaret, Search Your Soul, Eustace (London 1961)Google Scholar. F. W. Farrar’s books were various in kind but always appeared with a suitable imprint; his novels were published by A. and C. Black, his Life of Christ from the ‘popular’ Cassells, Social and Present Day Questions from Hodder, Solomon: his Life and Times from James Nisbet, Eternal Hope from Macmillan, and Protestantism: its Peril and its Duty from J. A. Kensit.

35 Wallace p 91.

36 Wilberforce, Wilfred, The House of Burns and Oates (London 1908) p 23 Google Scholar.

37 Doran p 10.

38 Upward and Onward pp 141-2.

39 Morgan p 47.

40 Doran pp 30-3, 66, 312-13.