In considering the whole range of Dickens' relations with his English and overseas publishers, Professor Patten relates the story of the novelist's social encounters, violent breaches, and uneasy alliances with John Macrone, Richard Bentley, Edward and Frederic Chapman, William Hall, Bernhard Tauchnitz, William Bradbury, F. M. Evans, and his American publishers in a compelling record of personal and professional associations. Private drama is subordinated to a narrative of a very special kind of venture', serial publication. Drawing extensively on the accounts rendered to Dickens by Bradbury and Evans, and Chapman and Hall every six months from 1846, Robert Patten traces the fluctuating fortunes of each of the books, from Sketches by Boz to Edwin Drood. e shows how Dickens took advantage of developments in the law, popular literacy, and the new techniques of publishing through the periodical issue of his writings, and through four widely-circulated reprint series that vastly extended the market for his work. He identifies the sources and size of Dicken's income, comparing it to that of his contemporaries; and the costs and sales, the printing history, and the profits and losses on all books where Dickens shared copyright are set out in detail in four appendices. The study skilfully establishes that the conditions of publishing had much to do with the shape and success of Dicken's career. This edition includes two new chapters. The first narrates how this bibliobiography' came to be conceived, at a time in the 1960s when Dickens was lauded as a genius' but still thought to have written such lengthy books because he was paid by the line. In the substantial second addition, Patten details the distribution of Dickens's estate to his many heirs, traces the devolution of the patronym as it extended to the family, and then to fans ('Dickensians'), surveys the spread of publishers' to include presses and texts in translation all over the world, studies the transfer of Dickens's writing to radio and visual media, and concludes with an analysis of the audited figures for the sales in nine countries of over 2000 different editions of Dickens during the global celebrations for the bicentenary of his birth.

About the Author
Robert L. Patten writes primarily about Victorian literature, graphic arts, and print culture. He has co-edited volumes of essays on Dickens with John O. Jordan (Literature in the Marketplace, Cambridge, 1995) and John Bowen (Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies, Palgrave, 2006). His books on Dickens include Charles Dickens and His Publishers (Oxford, 1978; 2nd edn. enlarged, 2017) and the Colby prize winning Charles Dickens and "Boz": The Birth of the Industrial-Age Author (Cambridge, 2012). His two-volume biography, George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art (Rutgers, 1992, 1996) was named the best biography of the 1990s by the Guardian. And for the Ashgate Library of Essays on Charles Dickens, a 6-volume series edited by Catherine Waters, he edited the volume on Dickens and Victorian Print Culture (2012).

Reviews
The welcome reissue of Charles Dickens and his Publishers is testimony to its enduring importance. * Daisy Hay, Times Literary Supplement *
The Preface to Patten's second edition of Charles Dickens and His Publishers is charming and erudite, if not precisely scholarly, while the Epilogue adds a significant new chapter, not just to Patten's book but to the broader project that he has worked at and spun out, elegantly and insightfully, these last forty years. * Sean Grass, Review19 *
[The book] is worth purchasing as a supplement to the first edition for its "Preface to the Second Edition," pp. vii-xvii, and an "Epilogue," pp. 25995, both of which are as detailed and fact-loaded, as interesting and as useful as the original text. * Duane DeVries, Dickens Quarterly *



Book Information
ISBN 9780198807346
Author Professor Robert L. Patten
Format Hardback
Page Count 472
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 884g
Dimensions(mm) 240mm * 163mm * 33mm