John Coffin Memorial Lecture in the History of the Book 2005

William St Clair

(Trinity College Cambridge)

Did reading help to determine mentalities? Taking a long view, and building on his quantitative work in The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge UP 2004), William St Clair in his lecture discusses the inadequacy of current parade and parliament conventions of literary and intellectual history. He advocates instead, following the classic Enlightenment political economists such as Adam Smith, an attempt to assess the observed consequences of different manufacturing technologies and intellectual property regimes on price, quantity, and access. His historical findings, and his comments on how the discourses of property and creativity have obscured those of state-guaranteed monopoly, are highly relevant to current policy questions.

'The political economy of reading' was delivered in the Chancellor's Hall, Senate House, University of London on 22 June 2005. The full text of the lecture is avaible online.