Reassembling the English novel, 1789-1919
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Sociologically-inclined literary history foundered in the 20th century due to a lack of inclusive bibliographies and biographical databases. Without a detailed accounting of literary production, numerous questions proved impossible to answer. The following are representative: How many writers made careers as novelists, Are there unacknowledged precursors or forgotten rivals to canonical authors, To what extent is a writer's critical or commercial success predictable from their social origins? In the last decade library digitization and the development of machine-readable datasets have improved the prospects for data-intensive literary history. This paper offers two analyses of bibliographic data concerning novels published in the British Isles after 1789. First, we estimate yearly rates of new novel publication between 1789 and 1919. Second, using titles of novels appearing between 1800 and 1829, we resolve a dispute concerning occupational gender segregation in novel subgenres. We show that the remarkable growth in the number of men novelists after 1815 was not concentrated in particular subgenres.
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