Accelerating Fame
Dickens and his publishers Chapman and Hall pioneered the business of publishing novels in shilling parts rather than the traditional three-decker format affordable only to the upper classes. Riding a wave of popularity, some of the parts of Dickens’ Pickwick Papers were reprinted at least twenty times during the first publication of the novel. By the time Pickwick was complete, it had sold over 40,000 copies, proving the success of the parts format. Without a ready and rapid supply of machine-made paper, and high-speed steam-powered presses, printers could not have kept up with the rapidly growing demand for Dickens’ novels in serial form. However, other publishers who issued adaptive plagiarisms of Dickens’ works also took advantage of the new technologies, frequently underpricing Dickens and sometimes outselling Dickens’ originals with cheap knock-off publications. In a letter to his publishers displayed in this case Dickens hopes for a sale of 100,000 copies of a multi-volume set of his publications—a quantity that would have been unimaginable before the Second Printing Revolution.
The Printer & the Letter Founder. Mainz and Cincinatte, 1850.
This hand-colored lithograph was published in Mainz, Germany, by Joseph Scholtz, and in Cincinnati, Ohio, by Eggers & Co. It depicts a typical mid-nineteenth-century handpress printing office employing a Stanhope iron handpress. The Stanhope press, invented circa 1807, was the first entirely iron handpress. Some examples remained in operation at the end of the nineteenth century. On the right side of the image is the letter foundry. Handpress operations like this continued to print smaller editions during the nineteenth century, while printing machine engineers built faster and faster machines to meet the demands of large-circulation newspapers and magazines, and large-edition book printers.
Camille Hyacinthe Odilon-Barrot. Habitans de Paris! Paris, 1830.
On 29 July 1830, during the July Revolution in France, thirty printers broke into the Imprimerie Royale and destroyed or damaged the five printing machines that had been installed at the end of 1829. This was both a political statement and a rare Luddite act of resistance against mechanization of printing. Printers felt threatened by the installation of printing machines, and typesetters opposed the introduction of stereotyping, to which they attributed loss of employment.
On 30 July, the end of the Trois Glorieuses, French politician Camille Hyacinthe Odilon Barrot, active in the revolution, had this poster printed, imploring the public not to destroy or damage any other printing presses.
Audouin de Geronval. Manuel de l’imprimeur. Paris, 1826.
This was the first French printer’s manual to provide meaningful information on printing machines. Below the schematics of the Stanhope Press on this engraving is a single-cylinder printing machine invented in England by a “Mr. Miller,” which could print two thousand copies per hour on one side of the sheet when the machine was cranked by one man “assisted by four children.” At this time, French manufacturers were not yet producing printing machines or iron handpresses, so all of Geronval’s examples were made in England. Because there was a shortage of steam engines in France at this time the printing machines ordered by French customers were typically powered by hand cranks.
Andrew Ure. A Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures, and Mines. London, 1839.
This image of a pressroom shows a double-cylinder printing machine, credited in small letters to “Cowper” (i.e., Edward Cowper) on the center base of the machine. This is one of the only images of a printing machine in operation that shows the table steam engine driving a flywheel powering the machine. The boiler driving the table engine would have been outside for safety reasons.
Illustrierte Zeitung, Vol. 2. No. 45. 4 May 1844.
Printing machine designer Augustus Applegath built his four-feeder cylinder press for The Times newspaper with the assistance of engineer Thomas Middleton. In 1843, Middleton built machines based on Applegath's design for other newspapers, including the two machines shown here from The Illustrated London News, which first published this woodcut in its 2 December 1843 issue. The two separate double-cylinder machines each printed one side of sheets of the paper. Both machines had two paper feeders and two "takers-off." This is one of only a few images that show how the fanned-out sheets of paper were hand fed into the press, how the printed sheets came out at the top level, and how men carried sheets of paper to or from the press on their shoulders. Why the magazine preferred this arrangement to using perfecting presses was not explained.
Charles Dickens. Extraordinary Gazette. Bentley’s Miscellany. London, 1837.
This portrait of a young Charles Dickens by Hablot Knight Browne (“Phiz”) appeared on the cover of the pamphlet Extraordinary Gazette, issued with Bentley’s Miscellany magazine. Dickens edited that magazine while he was writing The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist.
Charles Dickens. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. London, 1837.
Parley’s Visit to the Printing Office. London, 1843.
Like the publishers of Dickens’ authentic works, the many publishers of adaptive plagiarism of Dickens also exploited the new technology to sell huge numbers of copies. This crudely executed, tiny woodcut showing the pressroom, published by John Cleave, one of the publishers of adaptive plagiarisms of Dickens, is possibly the most accurate nineteenth-century published representation of how a table steam engine powered book-printing machines. The flat-belt drive mechanism is depicted. Note the posters advertising Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop, along with Parley’s Penny Library, on the wall of the printing office.
Henry Hewitt. "A Christmas Ghost Story." Parley's Illuminated Library. London, 1843.
The recto is page 1 of Hewitt’s plagiaristic adaptation of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, which showed up just over two weeks after Dickens’s celebrated Christmas tale was published on 19 December 1843. Note the unusual textual border surrounding each page. A “re-originated” abridgement of the Carol by the hack writer Henry Hewitt, “A Christmas Ghost Story” appeared in Parley’s Illuminated Library, an illustrated twopenny weekly that published unauthorized knockoffs of popular works. Though the 6 January number, like the other numbers of Parley’s Illuminated Library, had a print run of about fifty thousand, no single copy of issue no. 16 has survived.
[Thomas Peckett Prest]. The Penny Pickwick. London, 1837–1839.
One of the weekly parts of The Penny Pickwick, written by Thomas Peckett Prest and published by Edward Lloyd between 1837 and 1839. Lloyd was careful to modify Dickens’s stories enough to avoid being legally prosecuted for plagiarism. He was also careful to underprice Dickens’s selling price for the individually published parts of Pickwick. Lloyd once bragged that an issue of The Penny Pickwick sold fifty thousand copies, outselling Dickens’s original.
Charles Dickens. Autograph letter signed to Edward Chapman. Chester Place. 6 April 1847.
Dickens’s letter to his publisher Edward Chapman expressed hope that sales of the “Cheap Edition” of his works might reach a hundred thousand copies—an unheard-of number for a large set of books at that time. Dickens’s enormous commercial success in selling so many copies of printed books within a relatively short time was made possible by the development of high-speed printing machines in the second printing revolution.