posted on 12 Jun 2020

The Lost Books of Jane Austen by Janine Barchas

OK. Full disclosure. I can’t abide the novels of Jane Austen. I’ve never been able to get past the first few pages of any of them. I find myself solidly and entirely in the camp of the likes of Mark Twain and Ralph Emerson who speaks for me when he says:

“I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seems to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and so narrow ... Suicide is more respectable.”

So it must seem a very odd thing that I should choose to read Janine Barchas’ book and perhaps even more of a surprise that I have no hesitation in saying that it has been one of my more unusual and fascinating reads this year. This might be because this is only obliquely, in fact, a book about Jane Austen. It would be fairer to say it’s a book about how lazy we generally are about what the publishing history of books tells us about the reading habits of working and lower middle class audiences. In Barchas’ own words:

“..this is not just about Jane Austen. She is a convenient lens on a much larger phenomena.”

What the author’s excellent scholarship shows us is the way the dominant view of a writer’s legacy and the influence on a reading audience is predicated on the sale and ownership of first editions and prestige reprints in hardback. By using her exhaustive re-evaluation of the publishing history of Austen’s books she is able to show us just how misplaced that set of assumptions are. In fact, Barchas makes a compelling and brilliantly evidenced case for just how informative and telling an understanding of the proliferation of cheap, paperback copies of Austen’s work can be. These 'pulp' editions were circulating far more widely than could ever have been mapped from the formal bibliographies.

The range of cheap reprints not only cast a light on the way Austen’s work penetrated the working classes and lower middle classes, the travellers, the churches and the schools, but, by extension, she’s also casting a light on a generally disregarded area of book history. The cheap reprint is the best barometer to real reading habits that we have and the fact that it’s largely ignored  will now surely have to be revised in the light of this study. I’m sure, like me, you’ll be amazed at the way in which some of these cheap reprints have now become rarer and harder to find than the first editions.

The lavish and beautiful photographs of the books that Barchas has been able to locate are a wonderful addition to the author’s argument and the chance to see what ‘cheap editions’ can mean – everything from sturdy ‘stereotyped’ texts to copies where the printer has used recycled unsold religious texts to provide covers for Austen novels.

Barchas also turns detective to give us a series of what she calls ‘vignettes’ that give us an intimate life of one of these cheap editions. She showcases editions where the owner has inscribed the book with enough personal information to allow the owner to be traced back through history and something of their life with the book illuminated. Most of these are from mercantile or lower middle class owners – they seem to be keenest to write their names and addresses in books – but they wonderfully bring to life the way the ‘cheap edition’ democratised book ownership.

In a coda at the end of the book, I was delighted to see the author go into campaigning mode and call for two things: for book readers and book collectors to seek out and keep these cheap reprints before they disappear to history and the record is lost forever; and, the snooty research libraries to open their shelves to the cheap reprint because they contain within them vital information about reading habits of the working class.

I’m no closer to wanting to read Austen’s novels myself but this book has filled me with a sense of mission around classic literature and what the publishing industry’s cheap reprints have to tell us. A great read.

 

Terry Potter

June 2020