The Scottish publishing firm of William Blackwood & Sons,
founded in 1804, was a major force in nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century British literary history, publishing a diverse
group of important authors--including George Eliot, John Galt,
Thomas de Quincey, Margaret Oliphant, Anthony Trollope, Joseph
Conrad, and John Buchan, among many others--in book form and in its
monthly Blackwood's Magazine. In The House of Blackwood, David
Finkelstein exposes for the first time the successes and failures
of this onetime publishing powerhouse.
Finkelstein begins with a general history of the Blackwood firm
from 1804 to 1920, attending to family dynamics over several
generations, to their molding of a particular political and
national culture, to the shaping of a Blackwood's audience, and to
the multiple causes for the firm's decline in the decades before
World War I. He then uses six case studies of authors--Conrad,
Oliphant, John Hanning Speke, George Tompkyns Chesney, Charles
Reade, and E. M. Forster--and their relationships with the
publishing house. He mines the voluminous correspondence of the
firm with its authors and, eventually, with the authors' agents.
The value of the archive Finkelstein studies is its completeness,
the depth of the ledger material (particularly interesting given
that the Blackwoods did much of their own printing), and the
extraordinary longevity of the firm. A key value of Finkelstein's
account is his attention to the author/publisher/reader circuit
that Robert Darnton emphasizes as the central focus of book
history.
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