The Haunts of the Banditti: Transnationalism and Mediation in George Robinson’s Publishing Network

ABSTRACT

In the 1790s, banditti occupied rocky shelves in picturesque landscapes and accompanied exiled aristocrats in gothic fiction; in news columns, they framed attempts at political participation by non-citizens from Ireland, France, and the West Indies; in political philosophy, they gestured toward the gaps created by artificial legal boundaries. By recovering the network of the powerful Romantic bookseller George Robinson, this article outlines a Romantic-era history of the banditti that moves across media, genres, and national borders. This approach puts the gothic serials and new reports of Robinson’s popular Lady’s Magazine in dialogue with canonical literary and philosophical texts also published and distributed by his firm, including the first English translation of Friedrich Schiller’s The Robbers, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, William Godwin’s An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. Following the banditti throughout Robinson’s network links Celtic, Caribbean, and European figures and connects Romantic-era aesthetic and media practices to the mobile and intercultural qualities of modernity that the Robinson imprints of the 1790s sought to articulate. Although the banditti and the more mobile form of reading that give them shape resist interpretive confinement, tracking their movement through Robinson’s trade recovers the generative conflicts that occurred as different media, genres, and nations came into contact with one another.

Notes

1. Recent discussions of surface and horizontal reading have fostered new habits of mind and modes of interpretation. These modes of reading focus on textual affinities, associations, and contingencies. For an overview of this shift see Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction” (124–50), and Eve Sedgwick, particularly her chapter on “reparative reading,” in Touching Feeling. These approaches have also reinvigorated book history and studies of textual production and distribution that rely on associations and affinities between texts; as a result, critics have begun to explore the agency of texts instead of privileging questions of authorship, genre, and even historical context.

2. The initial publishers of the Lady’s Magazine were John Wheble and John Coote, who started the magazine in 1770; John Coote sold his interest in the magazine in 1771 to George Robinson and his then partner John Roberts. After litigating with Wheble in 1771, Robinson and Roberts secured sole rights to the magazine and its marketable title. Robinson’s interest in the magazine continued until his death in 1801 when the magazine passed into the hands of his son and brother, who continued publication. For an account of the 1770 trial, see Jennie Batchelor’s “Robinson and Roberts vs Wheble: Periodical and Piracy.”

3. Although the magazine continually uses the plural when describing its team of editors, this group of people remains unknown as does George Robinson’s precise level of involvement in the day-to-day operation of the magazine. The existing copyrights in the Greater Manchester County Record Office signed by Robinson suggest that he did source at least some of its content. In addition, the remediation of excerpts of travelogues, moral essays, and novels that his firm published in the magazine’s pages suggests that he saw it as a powerful tool for advertising and publicizing his larger trade.

4. “The George Robinson Archive” at The Greater Manchester County Record Office holds the Trapp copyright, along with the few remaining records from the Robinson firm to survive an 1804 fire.

5. For accounts of the influence of the German Räubberoman on British gothic fiction and late eighteenth-century English translations of German gothic novels more generally, see Terry Hale’s “French and German Gothic: the Beginnings” and James Raven’s “Cheap and Cheerless: English Novels in German Translations and German Novels in English Translations.”

6. For a fuller account of Radcliffe's relationship with Robinson and her position in Romantic-era print culture, see my “Radcliffe, Robinson, and Eighteenth-Century Print Culture: Beyond the Circulating Library.”

7. Records in the British National Archives, including a 1796 “Petition of George Robinson et al, booksellers, asking that their fines, incurred for selling copies of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, be remitted, Affidavit,” detail the Crown’s pursuit of the Robinsons and the risk booksellers incurred in distributing texts like Paine’s Rights of Man.

8. Through histories of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century booksellers and the Bodleian Library’s British Book Trade Index, it is possible to piece together a history of Benjamin Crosby and George Robinson’s relationship. In his account of Crosby’s life, Joseph Shaylor writes that “as soon as [Benjamin Crosby’s] indentures had expired, he obtained a situation under George Robinson” (413). Another late nineteenth-century book historian, Henry Curwen, claims that under Robinson’s tutelage “Benjamin Crosby obtained his knowledge of the wholesale bookselling trade” (161). Shaylor notes that Benjamin Crosby eventually left Robinson and “succeeded to the business of Mr. Stalker of Stationer’s Hall Ct” (413). The entries in the Bodelian Library’s British Book Trade Index for “Benjamin Crosby” and “Charles Stalker” detail both the bankruptcy of Charles Stalker at 4 Stationer’s Hall Court in 1793 and Crosby’s commencement of his new business, which specialized in the publication of music, at the same address.

9. In many ways, Godwin’s subordination of other media to the novel responds to debates over the novel’s cultural status, particularly Romantic-era critics and pedagogues who positioned the novel as a low and derivative form. Godwin’s attempt to reform the novel might also be put in conversation with discussions of Walter Scott’s “elevation” of the form in his Waverley novels. See Jacqueline Pearson’s Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835, Richard De Ritter’s Imagining Women Readers, 1789–1820, and Melissa Sodeman’s Sentimental Memorials.