Reading Nation in the Romantic Period

I've been reading William St Clair's terrific The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (borrowed from the university library because it retails at £90, though it is a book I would like to have on my own bookshelf). From his concluding chapter (pages 436, 437):

"As the example of popular print between 1600 and 1780 shows, large reading constituencies were sometimes held for long periods in an unsatisfactory equilibrium marked by the increasing obsolescence of the main printed texts to which they had access. This episode offers what is probably the most illuminating case that is likely to be found of the long-term consquences of an unregulated private commercial monopoly on the nature of texts, books, prices, access, reading and resultant mentalities. It is unlilkely, for example, that those who around 1600 were caught in the pre-scientific world of the English-language bible, the ballad, the chapbook, and the astrological almanac, actively rejected modernity for the next two hundred years, or preferred that the medical and birth control advice which they reveived in print should be out-of-date and ineffective."

The copyright industries are currently enduring a period of turbulence but concerns about laws and technologies (eg copyright directive and drm) driving us towards another period of stability characterised by monopolistic control could well be strengthed by further studies of this nature. And from the final page of the final chapter, St Clair gives his perspective on the modern debate:

"The argument that intellectual property is a privilege granted for a limtied period in order to reward and encourage innovation that is valuable to the society that grants it is as valid today as it was in Adam Smith's time. The conditions within which the privilege should be granted are therefore an issue of public policy, which ought to be decided , not in accordance with dogmas about the rights of property, but with eyes open to the public interest in the likely consequences. When, for the first time in history, copies of texts of all kinds can be reproduced and circulated instantaneously in limitless numbers at infinitesimal cost, it is perverse that much of the technological and business effort of the text copying industries is devoted to preventing copying and to keeping up the price of access."

Absolutely!

St Clair's chapter on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the degree to which the original moral of a story can get distorted through events beyond the author's control is fascinating.