Abstract
In 1990 in a small bookstore in Stirling, Scotland, I came across an 1880 third edition, one volume reprint of Philip Meadows Taylor’s ‘Indian mutiny’ novel, Seeta. The novel, originally published in three volumes by Henry S. King in 1873, had become a staunch and profitable back catalogue seller for King’s successors C. Kegan Paul and Co., reprinted in at least ten editions in their standard and Colonial Series between 1880 and 1900. This particular 1880 version, tattered and worn from years of handling, still bore traces of its first owner and evidence suggesting a grand return voyage from London to India and then to Brighton. How it ended up over one hundred years later in Scotland is unknown: perhaps it was as a result of lively trades and sales between readers and various second hand book dealers, or perhaps a wandering victim of country house sales and book stall purchases. What was striking about this volume, though, was physical evidence of its first owner viscerally and actively engaged with the themes of the novel — pages and illustrations had been ripped out, notes scribbled in the margins, newspaper clippings pasted into the front and back covers. The marginalia in this volume offers tantalising glimpses into generally undocumented aspects of the nineteenth-century Indian book trade and of the colonial reader.
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Notes
David Finkelstein, Philip Meadows Taylor (1808–1876). Victorian Fiction Research Guides XVIII (Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1990): 3–4.
Bart Moore-Gilbert, Kipling and ‘Orientalism’ (London: Croom Helm Ltd, 1986): 52–3.
Hilda Gregg, ‘The Indian Mutiny in Fiction’, Blackwood’s Magazine. 161 (February 1897): 222.
Quoted in Priya Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002): 96.
Priya Joshi, ‘Culture and Consumption: Fiction, the Reading Public, and the British Novel in Colonial India’, Book History 1 (1998), 200
Nicholas Dirks, ed. Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of ichigan Press, 1992): 3.
Evan Cotton, ‘A Famous Calcutta Firm: The History of Thacker Spink and Co.’, Bengal Past and Present. 109.1/2 (1990): 166.
Leslie Howsam, Kegan Paul — A Victorian Imprint: Publishers, Books and Cultural History (London and Toronto: Kegan Paul International and University of Toronto Press, 1998): 19.
Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (London: Hogarth, 1987): 130
See Thomas Pinney and David Alan Richards eds., Kipling and His First Publisher: Correspondence of Rudyard Kipling with Thacker, Spink and Co., 1886–1890 (High Wycombe, Bucks: Rivendale Press, 2001).
Arthur Quiller-Couch, ‘Fifty Years — Books and Other Friends.’ The Times. 46053 (10 Feb 1932): 13.
H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001)
H. J. Jackson, Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005)
David F. Norton and Mary J. David Hume’s Library (Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland, 1996).
Stanley Fish, ‘Is There a Text in This Class?’ Critical Enquiry 2, 3 (1976): 465–86.
James L. Machor ed., Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993): x.
See, for example, Douglas Mark Peers, ‘The Raj’s Other Great Game: Policing the Sexual Frontiers of the Indian Army in the First Half of the Nineteenth-Century’ in Anupama Rao and Stephen Pierce (eds) Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006): 115–50
Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995).
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© 2008 David Finkelstein
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Finkelstein, D. (2008). Book Circulation and Reader Responses in Colonial India. In: Fraser, R., Hammond, M. (eds) Books Without Borders, Volume 2. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289130_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289130_7
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