I didn’t intend to write multiple times on inexpensive Austen books, particularly those produced for the modern military. But it turns out this is the third and final effort at the topic. …
Because Jane Austen was generally well received by the scholarly community from early on, beginning with Sir Walter Scott, it is easy to assume that it was the scholarly editions by Oxford and Cambridge or other expensive collectible editions that kept Austen visible and raised her popularity through the generations.
That assumption is not entirely correct. Perhaps not even mostly correct.
Doing research for her The Lost Books of Jane Austen (2019), Janine Barchas found that it was the cheap editions of Austen’s novels that helped develop Jane’s reputation during the 1800s.
These productions came from metal plates, one plate per page, now being used for printing books. One publisher after another would reprint ever cheaper versions. The printing slowly deteriorated by repeated use, making it possible to trace related editions by similar wear patterns—the same unclear words or pages.
Such editions were printed by the tens of thousands for readers and schools all over the English-reading world.
Joining to our recent theme of Austen and military readers, Barchas located several rare copies of mass-produced war paperbacks and included images in her book, including the one of Northanger Abbey above, reproduced with permission.
As cheap books kept Austen popular over time, cheap books—in this case, free—may have had the same effect on modern writers whose books were handed out to soldiers in WWI or WWII. Scribner’s produced only 25,000 copies of The Great Gatsby from 1925 to 1942, but 155,000 were given to the army and navy overseas during World War II.
Not coincidentally, F. Scott Fitzgerald enjoyed a boom in popularity after the war. The book is now considered a classic.
Military readers often expressed their thanks to authors in writing. Some authors received hundreds of thank-yous, with soldiers saying the books were the first they had ever read through in one sitting—or possibly read at all.
The novels might be said to have participated in the war directly. Some of Virginia Woolf’s copies of Austen’s books were reported to have been damaged during the Blitz in WWII, and a book dealer in London offered a first edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion at a discounted price “because it and other rare books had been water-damaged by firefighters battling an incendiary bomb.” The latter instance is recounted by Annette M. LeClair in the article “In and Out of the Foxholes: Talking of Jane Austen During and after World War II,” in the journal Persuasions (issue 39). LeClair, who was investigating reader responses to Austen during WWII, concluded that she provided solace to the home folks as well as to the troops.
These two publishing efforts during the war, British and American, helped the printing industries to develop the expertise and distribution models that carried on in the postwar paperback booms in both countries. New publishers such as Bantam, Ballantine, and Ace emerged to concentrate on inexpensive editions of all books, regardless of genre.
As mentioned last time, War Illustrated, a popular magazine during World War I, solicited books to provide “friendly companionship” to take the minds of combatants away from the “terrible environment” of war. Austen’s stories of ordinary life in quiet country villages proved a respite to readers of the crashing struggle around them in Austen’s time. Her novels reminded soldiers, then and later, of the life they were fighting for.
How important the “friendly companionship” of reading was to soldiers in battle is seen by a reference in Lawrence Durrell’s Clea (1960), a novel set in Egypt in WWII. A soldier on leave in Alexandria from desert combat is looking for a replacement copy of “a sodden, dog-eared little book with a bullet hole in the cover, smeared with oil.” It’s Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers, the only book the unit has, and it’s worn out from use. He must find a replacement copy, the soldier says, or “the crew will bloody well fry me.”
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The Marriage of Miss Jane Austen, which traces love from a charming courtship through the richness and complexity of marriage and concludes with a test of the heroine’s courage and moral convictions, is available from Amazon and Jane Austen Books.
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