Facts, Fictions, and Faith in English Popular Print, 1660-1800

Mori, Jennifer

What did nature mean to ordinary English readers in an age of Enlightenment? What did they read to connect with its meanings and messages? This book surveys the explosion in household advice, religious, self-help, and leisure reading that accompanied urban growth, improving literacy, and a rapidly growing press. It charts the interrelated fortunes of London authors, printers, booksellers, and readers in a revisionist history of cheap print from the Restoration to the French Revolutionary Wars. This is an account of pamphlets and short books that, according to book trade metrics, constituted most of what lower-to-middle class Britons were buying in 1700. Many of these titles were also owned by the rich.
Today’s distinctions between the natural, preternatural, and supernatural began to emerge throughout Western Europe at this time. This helped create an intellectual divide between cheap and expensive publications that would have a lasting impact upon Western culture. This book focuses on popular participation in — and responses to — that process by reconstructing the production and reception of bestselling print. Publishers are more important to this story than authors because they tinkered with contents and meanings over time. Their wares consequently illustrate changing mainstream beliefs about fact, experience, causation, logic, and authority. By the later eighteenth century, what was produced for a general audience said important things about how English people perceived their identities, communities, and histories.