Publications were the most important links to Enlightenment intellectual culture across the Atlantic World. Jamaicans acquired publications in quantity despite the difficulty and expense, challenging the colonial reputation of philistinism. The trade in books and periodicals was connected to a commercial revolution that brought a variety of cultural commodities—musical instruments, telescopes, globes, etc.—to colonial and metropolitan doorsteps. These objects helped assert their owners’ gentility: a wealthy planter might house his collection in a suitably dignified library, but a Kingston businessman could showcase his modest collection in a mahogany bookcase, and a merchant based in a small coastal town could increase his intellectual capital by borrowing reading material from neighbors and friends. Evidence drawn from a variety of sources—advertisements for books and book furnishings; book orders and library inventories; accounts of borrowing and lending—show that Jamaican readers could satisfy a desire for everything from the classics of Antiquity to now-canonical Enlightenment works, from sentimental and scurrilous novels to popularizing works of science and practical how-to treatises.

This chapter examines the relationship between excess and the ways that Romantic novels were envisioned as in – or out of – fashion. As industrial production ramped up in the early nineteenth century, supplying consumers with mass-produced luxuries of all types, so too was the popular novel conceptualized as a consumer good, an object to buy and display as much as a text to read. The chapter begins with Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, analysing the novel’s focus on fashion, advertising, work, and value. Moving forward to the 1810s, it then discusses several novels by Minerva author ‘Miss Byron’, among others, to demonstrate how authors used the idea of fashion to defend the novel and make visible the often-ignored labour of its authors. The excesses of overspending consumers become a metaphor for the glut of the literary market, while the notion of luxury as always created by someone’s work – but also as essentially commodified and interchangeable – implicates the novel in a commercial system that challenges the hierarchies of strictly literary valuations.

This chapter looks at the period 1700 to 1820, one of profound change in Ireland as technological advances coupled with social and educational developments deeply influenced the intellectual and literary landscape. In the six and a half centuries since the invention of printing many new technologies affected the creation, distribution, consumption, and enjoyment of printed texts. Innovations and developments in printing, typefounding, papermaking, and marketing contributed to the advance of literary culture. The rise in education from the eighteenth century created an audience for literature in its many forms. Imaginative writing developed and attracted new audiences as literacy expanded among different cohorts. The newspaper provided the most comprehensive medium for the dissemination of information. Literacy was not necessarily a requirement as evidence shows that one newspaper could be shared among readers and read aloud to groups of listeners. Print advertising, an eighteenth-century innovation, increased the market for literary works.

This essay examines Romantic-era circulating libraries as a case study in the ways that institutions rather than individual authors create literary subgenres. The argument draws upon sociologically oriented research in literary and media studies and draws analogies between the history of the novel and the history of cinema. The growth of circulating libraries in the late eighteenth century created new markets for popular fiction, and this in turn spurred the creation of novelistic subgenres and formulas such as the gothic novel, the historical novel, and the season novel as means to respond to readerly demand for new titles. Circulating library catalogues and the novels themselves provide evidence of the ways that novelistic titles and subtitles signal generic affiliation to readers through keywords.