A few words, patient reader, on the object of your affection

The power of the printed word is an enduring mystery. Asa Briggs delves into a systemic study of how the reading habit spread

On the first page of this large book, which includes 0 pages of appendices, William St Clair sets out clearly a number of key questions about reading and the power of books. Newspapers and ephemera are largely outside his chosen range. He concentrates on the fact that for four centuries printed paper was the only means by which "complex texts could be carried in quantity across time and distance". It no longer is. What, he asks, were the consequences of reading books on "the knowledge, the beliefs, the understanding, the opinions, the sense of identity, the loyalties, the moral values, the sensibility, the memories, the dreams and therefore, ultimately, the actions" of men, women and children?

Before giving his answers, all of which derive from a meticulous systems approach, St Clair goes on to explain that he is less interested in "the meaning of certain texts" than in the "processes" by which the texts "reached the hands, and therefore potentially (a necessary word) the minds of different constituencies of readers". And he adds another fascinating question concerning the long run. "Can we find explanations which apply to the print era as a whole?"

Despite the relatively short period that he covers in his book - the 1770s to the 1830s, years of an "explosion of reading" - he wisely but too briefly reaches back in time to the years before Romanticism to establish perspectives (a word he does not use; he occasionally refers forward to a different "media world"). In one of his several detailed chapters, "Frankenstein", his is a Frankenstein without the film, and although in his concluding chapter on "the political economy of reading" - and elsewhere - he describes his methodology as "bottom-up", he does not relate this claim to early claims about the liberating role of the internet.

St Clair's first few chapters are so well written and lucid that readers will be very quickly propelled into the subject, ready for the always pertinent supporting detail in chapters that range from Shakespeare to Frankenstein. They are offered the promise that "if they choose, they can make their own creative searches for other long-run structures, emerging patterns, historical conclusions and potentially usable models".

His own major interest is in book production, prices and sales, and this leads him at once into questions of book sizes, print runs and intellectual property rights. By focusing on readers rather than authors or publishers, he throws light on all three with very little good to say about the third.

He is at his best in his chapter on "the old canon", where he concludes that the old canon of poetry, the "first truly national literature", owed its birth and its long life "more to the vagaries of the intellectual property regime than to any carefully considered judgments".

The most difficult chapter is the last, in which St Clair sets out his general conclusions while all the time referring back in footnotes to his previous detailed chapters. They sum up the history of reading in a fashion that will daunt more than one constituency of contemporary readers, as St Clair recognises when he interjects more than once, as if from the pages of an 18th-century novel, a plea to "my patient reader".

More patience is required if the reader moves on to the appendices, although, having reached them, there will be few patient readers whose curiosity is not stirred at some point. They introduce individual authors and publishers, among them Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge and Wordsworth, and include an informative section on the market value of the Shakespeare copyright. They end with a section on "university editions" of books that had come to be called "classics", and "school books and books aimed at educating the poor". The last items under this heading are the "penny poets" and "penny popular novels" published by social reformer W.T. Stead in his Masterpiece Library series, begun in 1893, more than half a century after the end of period covered by St Clair.

Scott's Marmion had sold a quarter of a million copies by 1894. The first quarto edition of 1808, priced at 31s 6d, had a print run of 2,000. Lord Salisbury, prime minister in 1893, described the Masterpiece series as "the most efficient agency that has yet been devised for making our best literature familiar to the mass of the nation".

St Clair's systemic methodology leads him to conclusions about price and access, some of which have topical points. He finds it "perverse", for example, that "much of the technological and business effort of the text-copying industries is (today) devoted to preventing copying and to keeping up the price of access" at a time "when copies of texts of all kinds can be reproduced and circulated instantaneously in limitless numbers at infinitesimal unit cost".

Those of his readers who are deeply interested in the history of the book but may not approach it in the way that he does will accept his use of the adjective "perverse" and the conclusion that it rests upon. They are a sizeable constituency and they include Simon Eliot, who follows a similar approach without dwelling on the word "system", and many who follow other approaches. Some of them may find that his persistent proclamation of the superior merits of his own approach, particularly in the last chapter, is somewhat grating.

As his own appendices suggest, case studies of particular authors or publishers may be as helpful, and more revealing, as general systemic studies. He himself quotes David Vincent's invaluable Literacy and Popular Culture, England, 1750-1914 , and includes in his bibliography Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes , which deals comprehensively not only with the books that the British working classes read during and after "the Romantic period" but with "how they read them".

Rose is the founder of the Society for the Study of the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing. Sharp provides one example of current approaches to book trade, which is being examined in detail in the multi-volume History of the Book , published by the same press that has published St Clair.

All this said, it would be sad if this book were read by only two particular constituencies of readers, those just mentioned who are transforming the history of the book trade, and those men and women - gender always counts in reading and writing - who are concerned as specialists with the Romantic period. The power of books, including those deemed dangerous, is a subject of general interest, and St Clair, who is willing to compare the English experience with that of other countries, is always stimulating when he relates questions concerning books to other historical questions concerning, for example, landed property and the influence of legal judgments. More comparative history is still needed. So, too, with or without system, is more synthesis.

Lord Briggs is about to publish The House of Longman, 1724-1990 .