Honesty, truthfulness, and earnestness are fundamental virtues which any scientist or scholar has been expected to embrace throughout the past centuries. The Victorian audience did not make an exception when they demanded love of truth from scientists. They also required similar sincerity from all the elements that encircled the text in scientific publications. Readers were anything but bemused when they discovered that titles, prefaces, and other preliminaries promised them more than what the author delivered in the text proper. Mary Bateson, the highly respected medievalist, did not spare her words when she reviewed George Child’s Church and State under the Tudors for the English Historical Review. She told how Child announced in the preface that he had written the book because the recent archival discoveries had brought new light on the Stuart period, but to her disappointment, the “promised references” to primary sources were “few and far between.” Bateson reprimanded Child for his attempt to mislead readers to believe that his book was more original than it in fact was.
Authors – and publishers – were tempted to hype originality and freshness in the marketing paratexts because they knew that these were qualities that sold non-fiction. Readers wanted to encounter new worlds and learn about the latest discoveries, not satisfy their curiosity with well-worn facts. Meanwhile, critics were eager to expose scholars who made unfounded prefatorial assurances. Indeed, overstated paratextual honesty could damage the book’s commercial success and an inflated boosting could lead to the public humiliation of the writer. Historians and other scholars and scientists faced a daunting task when they tried to balance with attractiveness and honesty in the promotional paratexts. It only took a few carelessly chosen words to irritate readers and trigger devastating reviews.
James Croston learned this when the English Historical Review published an acerbic assessment of his County Families of Lancashire and Cheshire (1887). Croston was an enthusiastic amateur historian and antiquary who wrote several histories about Derbyshire and Lancashire and edited and published local records. Apart from the handsome appearance of the County Families and its “ample margins” which were “grateful to the eye,” the anonymous reviewer had little to compliment Croston about. First, the book’s title was misleading. Although Croston set forth “many interesting facts pertaining to some of the families of the palatine counties…the title is a misnomer.” It was too comprehensive. After all, Croston introduced in his book “only a few of the old historic families of these two shrines.”
Second, the writer complained how it was impossible to verify Croston’s claim that his book presented “ascertained facts in the annals of some families” and provided “original and authentic evidences and other sources of information” which should have ensure the trustworthiness of the said facts. The problem was that Croston had added to his book only three footnotes with references to the authorities. This did not correspond with his promises in the preface. “This almost total absence of the references cannot but strike the reader unfavourably in a work that bristles with facts and assertions and that does not pretend to be a mere gossiping chronicle,” the reviewer declared.
If the lack of sufficient references was intolerable and undermined the reliability of Croston’s prefatorial and historical assertions, there was yet another preliminary paratext which put his authorship into a suspicious light. Croston had inserted into the book a portrait of himself in a form of a frontispiece. This violated the ideals of scholarly conduct and made his motives appear dubious. Had he written the book out of egoistic reasons to garner fame instead of out of keenness to increase the pool of historical knowledge? The fundamental precept was that history – like other fields of knowledge – was practiced so that it benefited the entire society, not so that it brought money and fame to its practitioners. The reviewer could not ignore Croston’s egoistic paratext and went on stating how “we think we could have spared the likeness of the author, which, after an evil and nearly exploded taste, appears as the frontispiece.” Instead, “a reproduction of an historical portrait from the galleries of one of the noble families would have been more acceptable.”
It was not easy to design titles or write prefaces which could simultaneously serve the multiple purposes which historians and publishers placed on them, and which responded to the expectations readers had about proper scholarly paratexts. Historians’ paratextual anxieties were amplified by the contradicting epistemic, informative, and commercial needs which guided their paratextual strategies. It was critical that paratexts were honest about the book and its qualities because any misleading statements could erode the readers’ trust on the ensuing historical account. Yet, it was also crucial that the paratexts were not too open about possible shortcomings because readers did not want to spend their time with histories that appeared unattractive. It is not surprising that many of the renowned Victorian historians time and again demanded their publishers to tell them whether it was true that a single paratext could truly make or break their book’s fate at the literary marketplace.
Sources
Bateson, Mary. Review of W. Child, Church and State under the Tudors. English Historical Review 6, no. 22 (1891): 381–383.
Croston, James. County Families of Lancashire and Cheshire. London: John Heywood, 1887.
Review of James Croston’s County Families of Lancashire and Creshire. English Historical Review 3, no. 10 (1888): 380–382.