We possess more surviving literary manuscripts from the Romantic era than from any previous literary period. This abundance of literary manuscripts has been a boon to the period's textual scholars, many of whom – Jerome McGann, Jack Stillinger, Kathryn Sutherland, to name just a few – have introduced major innovations in their editorial work on Lord Byron, John Keats and Jane Austen. To date, the period's literary manuscripts have been largely the province of these scholarly editors, and have been consulted chiefly for the textual evidence they provide. Literary manuscripts can, however, tell us much more: as Mark Bland contends, ‘manuscripts are always witnesses to something other than the texts they preserve’. LiteraryManuscript Culture in Romantic Britain begins the work of unearthing these alternative stories: describing the practices by which handwritten documents were composed, shared, altered and preserved; reconstructing the social networks these practices sustained; and uncovering the expressive freedom and constraints of literary manuscript culture. The study of Romantic literary manuscripts is also, inevitably, the study of print, and of its contentious nature during a moment of extraordinary political, social, and economic change. Using the extensive archival manuscript record we possess for the period, this book reconstructs the cultural practices that co-evolved between handwritten culture and a rapidly expanding print marketplace. Offering the first expanded analysis of the practices and values ascribed to literary manuscripts of the period, this book illuminates the complex interdependencies and entanglements between the media of script and print.

Drawing upon recent work in the disparate fields of book history, literary and media studies, textual scholarship and digital humanities, this study advances the fundamental thesis of early modern scholars – that manuscript production and circulation continued long after the advent of print – and of media historians – that newer media (such as print) did not overtake and subsume older media forms (such as manuscript). Repudiating a ‘decline and rise’ or ‘succession’ model of technological change, this book instead posits a model characterised by media interaction and exchange. Early modern scholars now understand that the coming of print did not replace or render manuscript obsolete: as David McKitterick notes, ‘the boundary between manuscript and print is as untidy chronologically as it is commercially, materially or socially’.