This chapter tracks descriptions of and responses to literary excess through the two groups of people most implicated in the Romantic period’s perceptions of it: reviewers and authors themselves. Beginning with the bibliographical commonplace that the end of the eighteenth century was the moment at which the number of novels published first began to exceed the annual reviewing capability of the traditional reviews, it follows the fate of the Minerva Press’s novels in the pages of major and minor periodicals, demonstrating how a rhetoric of excess in these reviews not only established popular discourses about which novels were worthwhile, but actively marginalized certain categories of fiction. Authors, naturally, responded to these attacks, and the chapter traces their use of prefaces to defend their work and position their own novels within a crowded marketplace.

This chapter shows how the new demands of a growing market shaped the development of 1790s political novels. In the wake of the French revolution, the proliferation of English fiction began to strike many observers as particularly dangerous – critics feared that novels might be the vehicle of threateningly radical and immoral ideas, while many authors expressed anxieties about where and by whom their works would be read. Examining novels by writers including Eliza Parsons, William Godwin, and Robert Bage, this chapter argues that political ideas across the spectrum were often conceived and expressed as functions of multiplicity: How many readers, how many epistolary voices, how many viewpoints, how many ideological challenges could one novel handle? Focusing first on the proliferation of voices that a long novel allows, and then on concerns about the alarmingly wide and indiscriminate spread of fiction to its readers, this chapter considers how these two ways of thinking about fiction’s function tie narrative style to the decade’s radical political debates.

This introduction argues that the fiction produced in the Romantic Era was shaped by a collective sense of overwhelming literary excess. After an overview of the different kinds of ‘excess’ about which contemporaries worried and a brief history of the Minerva Press’s historical and literary significance and its explicit ties to Romantic novel production, the introduction develops a critical framework for thinking about excess and its relationship to novel publication and prestige. Exploring the literal and metaphorical connections between the publication of fiction and other kinds of mass production in the Romantic period turns attention to the novel’s material qualities and the ways they were produced.

If the Minerva Press is the publisher most strongly associated with fictional excess, then the gothic is surely excess’s most representative genre. Readers decried the great length of these novels, their numerousness, their unoriginality, and the over-the-top emotions they depicted. This chapter tracks the phenomenon of ‘imitation’ in the late eighteenth-century heyday of the gothic, first in its role as a convenient denunciation hurled at new gothic novels, and then as a broad and flexible authorial practice that, the chapter argues, allowed gothic novelists to capitalize on their strength in numbers and their dedicated readerships. Minerva Gothic novelists, including Regina Maria Roche and Eliza Parsons, used imitation to define and expand the norms of their genre, and publishers like William Lane used the recognizability of certain genres to creatively advertise their new books, while even highly successful authors like Ann Radcliffe had to grapple with charges of unoriginality.

The Minerva Press brand was officially retired in 1820, but its reputation, influence, and significance as an avatar of literary excess persisted long past that end-point. Not only did its erstwhile publisher, A. K. Newman, continue a robust publishing business under his own name in the same premises for more than a decade, but derogatory references to the Press in popular media continued to rise in the decade following its demise. The epilogue begins with an account of the last two Minerva novels, belatedly published in 1821, and traces the press’s influence from them through its reputation in the 1830s and 1840s, concluding with a discussion of the fate of these countless works, long unwanted by copyright libraries, and an account of the publisher Henry Colburn, whose large-scale publishing business attracted many of the same criticisms in the 1820s and 1830s as Lane and Newman’s had done at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The epilogue concludes in the present day, examining recent reappearances of the Minerva Press in historical romance novels and exploring the affinities between popular fiction then and now.

This chapter shows how the best-selling novelist Walter Scott turned the era’s rhetoric of excess to his own commercial ends. Scott’s novels were frequently and directly compared with those published by the Minerva Press in the previous two decades; Scott’s defenders marked the 1814 publication of Waverley as the death knell of Minerva, while his detractors habitually remarked upon the parallels between his numerous, voluminous novels and those produced in equally large quantities by the Press. In readings of Scott’s early novels and his self-conscious paratexts, the chapter shows how his novels explore an antiquarian system of valuation in which even the most uninteresting document becomes valuable to posterity as soon as it’s rare. Scott uses this logic to offer a unique defence of the ‘innumerable’ popular novels that flowed from his pen and from the Minerva’s printing presses: their great numbers, he suggests, increase their chance of long-term survival. As both Scott and the Minerva Press authors who wrote alongside him argue in various ways, prolificity may ultimately lead to literary prestige rather than undermine it.

This chapter uses the 1808 publication of Hannah More’s unlikely best-seller, the novel Coelebs in Search of a Wife to explore the ways that Romantic authors responded to heightened competition by writing novels that they identify as explicitly ephemeral – works intended to be read and relevant in their contemporary moment rather than valued in posterity. Within two years of Coelebs’ publication, other authors had produced at least six full-length response novels, which imitated, continued, parodied, or mocked the original work. The authors of these works embrace the idea of literary production as time-sensitive and transient: rather than fearing or fighting the phenomenon, they capitalize on the fast-paced literary culture of the time to emphasize their own works’ timeliness and contemporary relevance. If there are too many books, one must read and write faster; by the same token, however, the less time on the public stage each individual book demands, the more the field is opened for even greater numbers of novels.

This chapter examines the relationship between excess and the ways that Romantic novels were envisioned as in – or out of – fashion. As industrial production ramped up in the early nineteenth century, supplying consumers with mass-produced luxuries of all types, so too was the popular novel conceptualized as a consumer good, an object to buy and display as much as a text to read. The chapter begins with Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, analysing the novel’s focus on fashion, advertising, work, and value. Moving forward to the 1810s, it then discusses several novels by Minerva author ‘Miss Byron’, among others, to demonstrate how authors used the idea of fashion to defend the novel and make visible the often-ignored labour of its authors. The excesses of overspending consumers become a metaphor for the glut of the literary market, while the notion of luxury as always created by someone’s work – but also as essentially commodified and interchangeable – implicates the novel in a commercial system that challenges the hierarchies of strictly literary valuations.