The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era

Penn State Series in the History of the Book

by David Finkelstein

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.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published March 19, 2002

About the author

Professor David Finkelstein (BA, PhD, FEA, FRHistS, FRSA) is the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Business at the University of Plymouth.

He has published over 70 published books, essays and refereed journal articles in areas related to nineteenth-century cultural history, print culture and media history, several of which have won awards.

His most recent work includes Movable Types: Roving Creative Printers of the Victorian World (Oxford University Press, 2018), and the 850 page edited Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Volume 2: Expansion and Evolution, 1800 - 1900 (Edinburgh University Press, 2020).