The House of Blackwood

The Scottish publishing firm of William Blackwood & Sons, founded in 1804, was a major force in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British literary history, publishing a diverse group of important authorsincluding George Eliot, John Galt, Thomas de Quincey, Margaret Oliphant, Anthony Trollope, Joseph Conrad, and John Buchan, among many othersin book form and in its monthly Blackwoods Magazine. In The House of Blackwood, David Finkelstein exposes for the first time the successes and failures of this onetime publishing powerhouse. Finkelstein begins with a general history of the Blackwood firm from 1804 to 1920, attending to family dynamics over several generations, to their molding of a particular political and national culture, to the shaping of a Blackwoods audience, and to the multiple causes for the firms decline in the decades before World War I. He then uses six case studies of authorsConrad, Oliphant, John Hanning Speke, George Tompkyns Chesney, Charles Reade, and E. M. Forsterand their relationships with the publishing house. He mines the voluminous correspondence of the firm with its authors and, eventually, with the authors agents. The value of the archive Finkelstein studies is its completeness, the depth of the ledger material (particularly interesting given that the Blackwoods did much of their own printing), and the extraordinary longevity of the firm. A key value of Finkelsteins account is his attention to the author/publisher/reader circuit that Robert Darnton emphasizes as the central focus of book history.