“A Preface Is Written to the Public”: Print Censorship, Novel Prefaces, and the Construction of a New Reading Public in Late-Victorian England

Abstract

In 1818 John Keats claims that prefacesare written to the public and that he does not want to participate in this mode of address. In 1837 Thomas Love Peacock notes that his novels had originally appeared without prefaces and that he would have preferred that they remain that way. But, he writes, “an old friend assures me, that to publish a book without a preface is like entering a drawing-room without making a bow” (cited in Grierson 134). In England in the 1880s, however, the novel preface went beyond textual etiquette. It was not only written to the public but it also participated in the debate over competing definitions of the reading public, and it contributed, in turn, to a new configuration of this public.

‘The Riches and Treasures of Other Countries’: Women, Empire and Maritime Expertise in Early Victorian London

“…It has been suggested that paratextual statements such as the preface formed 'a textual space in which authors can engage questions of representation as they relate to broader social discourses'. 107 However, paratexts may also be used as tools to excavate precisely located patterns of social experience. In this instance it has allowed us to trace some of the social and cultural structures underpinning the material factors upon which empire depended, and to reintegrate women as economic agents into the enterprises and scientific cultures facilitating Victorian imperialism.…”