During the period 1825–75, Austen benefits from the four major innovations that lower the costs of book production and distribution: pulp paper, stereotyping, cloth bindings, and the railway. As a result, her books gain traction with readers beyond the British gentry and aristocracy.
On the Continent, the earliest translations of Austen’s books, into French, prove to be unfaithful affairs that sentimentalize her stories. In America, Austen is first reprinted in Philadelphia.
In London, the publisher Richard Bentley buys the copyright for Pride and Prejudice from Egerton and the other five novels from Cassandra Austen and includes them in his new Standard Novels series of 1833. For more than half a century, Bentley’s elegant and compact reprintings (the novels become single volumes, with Persuasion sharing a volume with Northanger Abbey) expand Miss Austen’s readership.
When Austen’s copyrights start to expire in 1839, beginning with that of Sense and Sensibility, other publishers offer her in increasingly cheaper editions that cater to a newly literate working class.
Raison et Sensibilité, ou Les Deux Manières D’aimer.Traduit librement de l’anglais, par M.me La Baronne Isabelle de Montolieu. 3 vols. Paris: Arthus Bertrand, Libraire, 1828.
The Swiss-born baroness Isabelle de Montolieu (1751–1832) was an early translator of Austen, taking on Sense and Sensibility in 1815. This copy is a later reprinting. In Montolieu’s hands, this novel becomes an over-the-top sentimental romp that takes liberties with Austen’s plot, altering the ending and even adding entirely new characters.
AUSTEN IN AMERICA
Austen herself remained unaware that a pirated edition of Emma appeared in America directly on the heels of her London publication—as early as 1816. That pirated Philadelphia edition is exceedingly rare and remains the elusive black tulip of our joint collecting.
From a modern perspective, the earliest reprintings in America of all six of Austen’s novels were pirated editions because the type was reset from books brought from England without payment to their author or to her London publishers. (Austen’s copyrights did not extend beyond Britain.) While only 750 copies of Elizabeth Bennet were printed, Austen’s other novels saw runs of 1,250 copies. Few American first editions survive.
Elizabeth Bennet; Or, Pride and Prejudice: A Novel. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1832.
As the title page explains, this “First American” edition was copied from the third London edition. It was priced at 84 cents in boards. This former college library copy records the reactions of some of America’s first readers when Amherst College students—then exclusively male—took potshots in the book’s margins. When Lady Catherine is “displeased” at the end of the first volume, penciled annotations record in multiple hands: “A fig for her displeasure.” | “A fig for your comment.” | “A poor novel so far.”
A Catalogue of the New and Standard Works Published by Richard Bentley & Son. The First Quarter of 1882. London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1882.
Starting in 1833 and for the next half century, Richard Bentley offers Jane Austen’s six novels as part of his Standard Novels & Romances series. Metaphorically, historians have regarded Bentley as the “prince” who woke Austen from her reputational slumber. Bentley was among the first to adopt stereotyping and cloth bindings, allowing him to offer Austen at six shillings a volume (a price he was occasionally forced to lower).
The Works of Jane Austen. 5 vols. London: Richard Bentley, 1833.
In 1833, each of Bentley’s five Austen volumes opens with elegant illustrations (showing updated Victorian rather than Regency dress!) fastidiously guarded by tissue. Bibliographers calculate the average print run for each of the titles in this Standard Novels & Romances series at roughly four thousand copies per volume, which was huge for the time. This set, which would originally have been sold in a cloth trade binding, has been rebound.
Northanger Abbeyand Persuasion. London: Richard Bentley, 1833.
This is an example of a purple cloth trade binding for Bentley’s Standard Novels series. However, the front cover has been customized with the crest of the Scott clan. John Scott’s bookplate is inside. While Bentley’s six shillings per volume constituted a great reduction in price from Austen’s first editions, it remained a genteel price point.
The Works of Jane Austen. Bentley’s Standard Novels. 5 vols. London: Richard Bentley, 1846.
By 1846, other publishers have adopted stereotyping and cloth bindings—and even cheaper printed paper covers. As a result of the competition, Bentley briefly drops his prices from six shillings to 2½ shillings to compete with the lower-quality reprints now sold at railway stations.
Macready, W. C., Jr. Letter to his daughter Cecilia Benvenuta Macready. 3 June 1865.
Pinned into one of two volumes of an 1856 edition of Bentley’s The Works of Miss Austen sent to his eighteen-year-old daughter, Cecilia (1846–1933),this letter from the famous Shakespearean actor William Charles Macready Jr. (1793–1873), then aged seventy-three, is an example of a paternal recommendation to read Jane Austen.
AUSTEN AT RAILWAY STATIONS
The introduction of ultracheap books in colorful, paper-covered waxed boards—known as “yellow backs,” although not always of that color—expanded Austen’s audience to include middle- and working-class readers. Her novels were sold at Victorian railway bookstalls for as little as one or two shillings. Ownership signatures confirm that the red Emma belonged to the daughter of an army major living in the seaside town of Largs, Scotland. The green Mansfield Park belonged to a woman born into the wholesale meat trade, the daughter and wife of butchers working in London’s Newgate Market, a large open-air meat market near St. Paul’s.
In the 1840s, one London publisher offered miniaturized reprintings of Jane Austen as part of a revolutionary series of protofeminist books by radical thinkers, in what he advertised as “illuminated bindings,” which made her novels look like small medieval primers. These unusual reprintings were the brainchild of Henry Green Clarke (1816–1894), the proprietor of what was arguably one of London’s earliest feminist bookstores. Clarke’s Austens were priced well below Bentley’s Standard Novels (which sold for six shillings each). Even priced at three shillings and sixpence, Clarke’s small gems remained an indulgence.
Pride and Prejudice.2 vols. London: H.G. Clarke and Co., 1844.
EARLY AUSTEN FAMILY INVOLVEMENT
Jane’s siblings never publish private family documents, although her executrix, Cassandra Austen (1773–1845), assiduously preserves, organizes, and distributes her sister’s precious manuscripts and correspondence to family members.
After Admiral Francis Austen—Jane’s longest-lived sibling—dies in 1865, the next generation releases a memoir of their aunt, assisted by publisher Richard Bentley. That project prompts the publication of further letters, juvenilia, and manuscripts.
It is impossible to know whether these new publications responded to an early hunger for knowledge about Miss Austen or whether they helped to shape public taste. Likely both.
These family books also provided portraits of the author for the first time: the Memoir is fronted by a Victorianized engraving of Cassandra’s unfinished sketch of her sister, while the Letters boasts a copy of the unverified Rice portrait. Both portraits remain flashpoints of contention.
AMemoir of Jane Austenby Her Nephew J. E. Austen-Leigh. London: Richard Bentley, 1870.
James “Edward” was eighteen when his aunt Jane died. More than half a century has passed away since I, the youngest of the mourners, attended the funeral of my dear aunt Jane, the memoir begins. Austen-Leigh presents “Aunt Jane” to Victorian society as a reassuringly God-loving, polite, and conservative spinster of genius, comfortable with her small two inches of ivory.
A Memoir of Jane Austenby Her Nephew J. E. Austen-Leigh,Second Edition,to which is added “Lady Susan” and Fragments of two other unfinished tales by Miss Austen. London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1871.
This revised and enlarged edition appears within a year of the initial publication of the Memoir. New material includes Lady Susan, additional letters, a description of the unfinished Sanditon manuscript, two cancelled chapters from Persuasion, and a fragment of The Watsons.
Letters of Jane Austen. Edited with an introduction and critical remarks by Edward, Lord Brabourne. 2 vols. London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1884.
Upon the death of his mother, Lady Fanny Knatchbull, in 1882, her eldest son and heir discovers the carefully preserved trove of letters that she had inherited from her Aunt Cassandra. Lord Brabourne selects and edits ninety-six of Jane’s letters to her sister and to her oldest nieces, Anna and Fanny.
