Lithography is usually ascribed a minor role in the history of nineteenth-century illustration, relegated by the rise of wood engraving to decorative functions in such publications as sheet music covers. But its immediacy and, especially, its colourfulness gave the lithograph a visual potential as a medium for mass circulation print forms that was widely explored in the 1830s, especially by comic artists and their publishers. By 1830 technical proficiency in lithography was widespread in London, and lithographic printing formed a substantial trade. This chapter concentrates on the many series of cheap, often coarse and confrontational single plate lithographed ‘jokes’ that flooded the market in the 1830s. These gaudy prints redefined the comic grotesque for a mass readership and brought a newly analytical, if frequently jaundiced, eye to everyday urban experience. The comic lithographs of the 1830s refused the role of ‘illustration’, largely by maintaining the visual autonomy of the single plate print as a commercial entity. They provide not only an insight into the chaotic world of 1830s popular publishing but also a sustained challenge to contemporary decorum.

The extensive influence of scott's fiction on art in the nineteenth century has long been a subject of commentary, while a parallel, if less developed, line of enquiry has examined the symbiosis between text and illustrative material in the production of collected sets of the Waverley novels. Until recently, however, general analysis has largely concentrated on exhibition painting, quantifiable as it is from sources such as the catalogues of the Royal Academy and British Institution. Catherine Gordon thus points to the exhibition by over three hundred painters and sculptors of more than a thousand Scott-related works between 1805 and 1870, with an increasing choice of the novels rather than poetry for subject-matter. Likewise, Richard Altick locates an equivalent heyday for Scott illustration: ‘The great age of Scott painting was the period 1830–50. During those two decades, well over 400 examples were exhibited, an average of more than twenty a year.’ Though never openly stated, in both critics one senses an underlying feeling that print illustrations were for the most part an offshoot of this ‘primary’ field of activity. However, there are a number of reasons for believing the opposite to have been the case, with the print market providing the chief motor force for the production of Scott imagery. In many instances paintings and drawings were commissioned for engraving first, and only exhibited subsequently.

The Early Nineteenth-Century Almanac

The presence of the almanac in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century households from right across the social scale has long been noted by historians of print culture. Characterised as publications within the important category of ‘pocket usefulness’ by James Raven, almanacs were a vital source of information within an agricultural society. If the almanac was not always to be found in the pocket, then it may have moved no further than the table – ‘Of all books the Almanack is the most indispensable. So constant is the need for it that, unlike other books, it is not deposited on the shelf, but lies ready to hand on the table.’ As William St. Clair elaborates:

Question: how did a nineteenth-century dinosaur publication like the Athenaeum (1828–1921) prepare for the twentieth century? Answer: it appointed a new editor. This essay aims to look at the print legacy of this new editor, Vernon Horace Rendali (1869–1960), who in spite of the enormity of the task loaded onto his shoulders, has remained an unknown entity in print-culture history. As was often the case it was through the columns of the Athenaeum that the change of captain was announced:

This sudden resignation of Norman Maccoll (1843–1904) as editorin-chief of the weekly was to signal a new but unexciting path for this major Victorian periodical. His assistant editor, Vernon Rendall, had already carried out the editorial duties for several years before being entrusted with the sole management of the prestigious publication. The result of his reign as an editor was not really something he could boast about but he did try hard to make sure the Athenaeum continued to be the cultural flagship it had been up to then. In short, Rendall continued the publication policy he and Maccoll had followed in the previous years.

In The what-d'ye-call-it: a tragi-comi-pastoral farce (1715), English poet and dramatist John Gay satirised the popularity of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (Part 1, 1678; Part 2, 1684) in a scene where a condemned sinner is offered a prayer book and urged to make use of it:

While Bunyan's allegory of the Christian life on earth was immediately successful, his reputation as a Nonconformist writer of lowly origin held him in disrepute among the literati of his time. Besides Bunyan's varied reception, Gay's humorous, if not inaccurate, account reflects many facets of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century book trade on the whole, and some of the factors by which a work then became and remained a best-seller. Published in the material form of a book, having gone through several editions, printed for a publisher who was also its editor, and advertised as having been newly expanded, The Pilgrim's Progress had, by the early eighteenth century already, passed through the hands of a number of publishers, printers and readers. It had already lived an eventful life on the London book market and in the homes of many.

On the title page of the fifth edition of Aphra Behn's collected novels (1705), someone added the tag ‘Corrected from the many Errors of former Impressions’. Whether the phrase was inspired by a sense of pride in work well done or, more likely, a desire to advertise the book's superiority, it advises the modern reader of a number of important things. First, it tells us that the 1705 edition succeeds a number of previous editions, informing us that Behn's novels have a history, a textual history that involves errors. The language refers to the physical action of the hand-press, and it reminds us of those individual hands that set the type that formed the impressions remaining on the page today. The phrase underscores the fact that the text we receive underwent changes well after Behn's death in 1689. Most importantly for this essay, its claim testifies to a widespread and largely unacknowledged textual practice in the transmission of Aphra Behn's most famous short fiction, Oroonoko.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, various hands anonymously ‘corrected’ and ‘improved’ Behn's text in a gradual accretion of extensive textual corruption. Given the pedagogical prominence Oroonoko has assumed in the past twenty years and its overwhelming presence in literary scholarship of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a fitting subtitle to this article might be: ‘The Hazards of Choosing an Edition’. As Gerald Duchovnay and Mary Ann O'Donnell have documented, the publication of Oroonoko in 1688 was far from free of problems.