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Notes
In the latter case, access to the truth is not noticeably facilitated by inconsistencies in the source. In the bibliography of Farrar's works prefaced to his biography (Reginald Farrar, The Life of Frederic William Farrar [1904], p. xiii) Eric is said to be in its "Thirty-sixth edition, 1903"; yet the text itself asserts (p. 73) that "'Eric' has gone through more than fifty editions." A similar discrepancy is found in connection with Farrar's other famous best-seller, his Life of Christ (1874). The bibliography says (p. xiv): "Ninth edition now [i.e., 1903] being published." The text says (p. 196): "Since its first appearance the work has gone through thirty editions in England alone."
Theodore Besterman, ed., The Publishing Firm of Cadell & Davies: Select Correspondence and Accounts, 1793-1836 (1938), p. xxxi.
Edgar F. Shannon, Jr., Tennyson and the Reviewers (1952), pp. 146, 156; Charles Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson (1949), pp. 319, 351, 383. For a large sampling of the size of editions of best-selling books during the century, see The English Common Reader, pp. 381-90.
G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (1936), p. 119 n. 1; verified in British Museum Catalogue, CCXXVII, 929.
Amy Cruse, The Victorians and Their Reading (1936), p. 255; Forrest Wilson, Crusader in Crinoline (1941), p. 419.
The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, VI (1955), 299-300. Thanks to the preservation and publication of the correspondence between the author and her publishers, the firm of Blackwood, the commercial side of George Eliot's career as a successful author is probably more fully documented than is that of any other nineteenth-century author who approached best-seller status. The letters and accounts shed much valuable light on the size of various impressions and editions in the 1860's and '70's and the speed — or lack thereof — with which they were exhausted. Access to these data is made easy by the index to the George Eliot Letters; see under the title of each novel.
Simon Nowell-Smith, The House of Cassell (1958), p. 136; Lilias Rider Haggard, The Cloak That I Left (1951), pp. 134, 136.
Victorian Detective Fiction: A Catalogue of the Collection Made by Dorothy Glover and Graham Greene, Bibliographically Arranged by Eric Osborne (1966), p. 124. This figure is for English editions only: it does not include the 35,000 copies previously printed in Melbourne.
Nowell-Smith, The House of Cassell, p. 189 n. 1; Denis Mackail, The Story of J. M. B. (1941), pp. 185, 255.
Rayner Unwin, The Rural Muse (1954), p. 92. In letters of November 30, 1801, and January 31, 1802, Bloomfield wrote that the fifth and sixth editions of the volume together comprised 10,000 copies (Selections from the Correspondence of Robert Bloomfield, ed. William H. Hart [1870], pp. 17, 21).
John Keble, Occasional Papers and Reviews (1877), p. ix. These figures, unlike the overwhelming majority of those derived from contemporary sources, are taken directly from the records of the publishers.
P. W. Clayden, Rogers and His Contemporaries (1889), II, 4. Of Rogers' earlier work, The Pleasures of Memory (1792), "more than 7,000 copies had been sold" before the end of the century, and "before 1816, when the nineteenth edition was published, this figure was more than trebled" (R. Ellis Roberts, Samuel Rogers and His Circle [1910], p. 22).
William G. Lane, "The Primitive Muse of Thomas Ingoldsby," Harvard Library Bulletin, XII (1958), 229. For breakdowns of the various editions, see Gettmann, A Victorian Publisher, p. 80.
James Westfall Thompson and Bernard J. Holm, A History of Historical Writing (1942), II, 292 n. 37.
Fragments from Old Letters, E[dward] D[owden] to E. D. W. 1869-1892 (2nd ser., 1914), pp. 136-37.
James Anthony Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of His Life in London, 1834-1881 (1885), II, 306-307.
J. A. Banks, Prosperity and Parenthood: A Study of Family Planning among the Victorian Middle Classes (1954), p. 154; Walter L. Arnstein, The Bradlaugh Case: A Study in Late Victorian Opinion and Politics (1965), p. 22. The sudden burst of interest in this hitherto obscure birth-control treatise was due to its republication as a test of a governmental ruling on obscene literature. Its sponsors were Charles Bradlaugh and the indefatigable Annie Besant.
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