Reassembling the English Novel, 1789–1919

Abstract

The absence of an exhaustive bibliography of novels published in the British Isles and Ireland during the 19th century blocks several lines of research in sociologicallyinclined literary history and book history. Without a detailed account of novelistic production, it is difficult to characterize, for example, the population of individuals who pursued careers as novelists. This paper contributes to efforts to develop such an account by estimating yearly rates of new novel publication in the British Isles and Ireland between 1789 and 1919. This period witnessed, in aggregate, the publication of between 40,000 and 63,000 previously unpublished novels. The number of new novels published each year counts as essential information for researchers interested in understanding the development of the text industry between 1789 and 1919.

Chance Encounters: World Literature Between the Unexpected and the Probable

“…By using empirical data, for instance, as a form of "baseline thinking" that recalibrates our perception of what is novel or unexpected, and which becomes more relevant as expanding digital archives allow for the construction of baselines at new scales. 108 By recognizing, moreover, that such thinking is not a means to override indeterminacy, but to explicate it in a more granular way, whether across different scales of evidence, different bodies of evidence, or in negotiation with the beliefs and heuristics we bring to our judgments under uncertainty. The point of this negotiation is not so that we can all arrive at the same place; there will always be disagreement over the suitability of certain base rates for certain scenarios and, at a more fundamental level, everyone arrives at a problem along different paths of prior belief and knowledge.…”

Novels and the NSTC: A Quantitative Study of Legal Deposit

“…As a result, scholars have used the NSTC to quantitatively study British publishing to reveal general trends and estimate novel publishing rates, though sometimes without sufficient consideration of the NSTC's limitations (Eliot 1998; Riddell & Betancourt, 2021). The NSTC's comprehensiveness and quality as a dataset are suspect due to its reliance on relatively few libraries, use of catalog records instead of examining physical books (the usual practice for creating high‐quality bibliographies and short‐title catalogs), numerous duplicate records, and lack of editing (Alston, 1984; McKitterick, 1987; Shattock, 2004; Suarez, 2009).…”