The Sea of Books

Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice could easily be regarded as one of the most popular classic novels of all time, with over 20 million copies being sold since it’s publishing in 1813. Since then multiple adaptations have been created from the 1940 film, to the 1995 BBC miniseries, to playful modern retellings such as Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016).…

Illustration of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, first published in The Bristol Observer, 7 June 1890. Source: The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia, www.arthur-conan-doyle.com. Public domain. When people imagine the iconic detective Sherlock Holmes, they imagine London’s Baker Street shrouded in fog, the iconic detective holding up his magnifying glass and mumbling “elementary.” While all these…

Run clubs, queues outside the new restaurant, an Uber suscription- Coffee-Queue at People’s Park Market Ireland’s upper class demonstrates its wealth in the form of trends, leisure time, just as in the Regency era, a privilege. Elizabeth Bennet moves throughout her own story with the agency of someone in a favourable economic position, where behavior and movements work as markers of class…

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” – Jane Austen, Pride and prejudice Screenshot from Episode 1 of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries What happens when you take Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, a novel built on gossip, letters, misunderstandings, and reputations, and try to drop it into a modern, digital world? You…

“She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me”. Mr. Darcy Pride & Prejudice , the well-known novel published in 1813 and written by J. Austen, tells the love story of the spirited Elizabeth Bennet and the haughty Mr. Darcy, but there is more to the story than just this… Within the complex and tangled net of relationships, the narrator accompanies us through-out the story showing, with a…

Or: Why sales figures don’t always give the best indication of what the Victorians were reading If you’re a long-term reader of this blog, you’re probably familiar with its authors’ fascination with reading cultures. We’re aware that many of our readers found their way here for the numbers: maybe you urgently needed to know which was the best-selling horse book of the nineteenth century, or you…

Other Bestselling Nineteenth-Century Novels – A Miscellany Part One, on instant successes, is here.Part Two, on novels which were successful in their first few years, is here.Part Three, on novels that sold well in their first few decades, is here. In this final (belated!) instalment of our series on very successful nineteenth-century novels, we provide some information on the sales figures…

Which nineteenth-century novels sold the most in their first few decades? Part One, on instant successes, is here.Part Two, on novels which were successful in their first few years, is here. In this post, we provide sales figures for novels which did well over the course of their first few decades in print. With time periods ranging from as little as one year to as many as 42 years, our…

Hey there, Jane Austen aficionados and romance rebels! It’s been over two centuries, but Mr. Darcy’s renowned plunge into Pemberley Pond still has us all in a tizzy. Pride and Prejudice isn’t just a timeless novel – It’s a full-blown cultural sensation. So, why does this classic keep capturing our hearts? Grab a cup of tea (or a glass of wine), tighten your corsets (or loosen your jeans), and…

Which nineteenth-century novels sold the most copies over their first few years? For our previous post on instant successes, click here. Last week we took a dive into the nineteenth-century novels that saw the highest sales in their first few months after publication. This week, we’re going to look at novels that maintained brisk sales over their first couple of years. Generally, this means…

Which are the fastest-selling novels of nineteenth-century Britain? This blog has been around for a while now, and our stats have indicated that although you readers are quite partial to our wild ramblings about Jane Austen, there’s one question that you’re FAR more interested in. In fact, I’d venture that the vast majority of you are reading this solely because you recently googled it. My…

What can an 1848 sea-serpent sighting tell us about the workings of the mid-19th-century newspaper industry? Sixty feet long!Awfully strong!It held its course straight on, for right or for wrong,And many a brave tar on board of the Daedalus,Thought to himself if he comes here he’ll settle us. … Its size and its hues,All who might chuse,May learn if they read the Illustrious News,How the…

Then and Now: The Wall by the Church-Yard

For today’s Then and Now post, we don’t have a pair of images side by side. Instead, we have a textual description of a part of Chapelizod as it was in the early 1800s, from one of Ireland’s great masters of horror, and to compare against it, a set of photographs which I took around 2010. Back in the early 2010s, I lived in the small Dublin village of Chapelizod, which is nestled between the…

Then and Now: The Chapel Royal at Dublin Castle

This post was suggested by my finding the British Library’s beautiful engraving of the Chapel Royal at Dublin Castle, on Flickr Commons. This picture dates to 1816, and shows the newly rebuilt Gothic chapel, designed by Francis Johnston, which replaced a 17th-century chapel that had been located on the same site, but which had become unsafe. The title at the base of the picture reads “Castle of…

Lies and Litigation; or, When is a First Edition Not a First Edition? Part One

It’s 1831. You’re a recently-published novelist, and you suspect that your publisher – who has a bit of a dubious reputation in the business – is withholding the proceeds from your book. Worse still, you’ve asked repeatedly for the return of a manuscript, and he’s refused to provide it. There can only be one solution: the courts! The Court of Chancery at the start of the 19th century, Lincoln’s…