Mary Elizabeth Braddon at the Antipodes: Cosmopolitan Cultural Transfers and the Restructuring of the Nineteenth-Century Book Industry

Abstract:The London-based publisher John Maxwell established a global network of distribution in eleven countries to market Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s magazine Belgravia in the 1860s–70s. This cosmopolitan network is particularly significant as it helps expose the tensions of the transnational trade and the reshuffling of geographical categories operated by an evolving business model. The essay discusses Maxwell’s Australian booksellers and publishers during an understudied period that precedes the consolidation of the national publishing empires and their “transnational” operations. Braddon’s work, when sold in Australia, entered a cultural field made of the existing histories of a network of book dealers that were engaged in the important cultural work of imagining the future nation through the political implications of their trade, and through the shaping of a marked literary taste that in turn supported their business. The framework of histoire croisée, which has developed generally at the national level, is applied to a much broader conceptualization of space that does not coincide with national or colonial boundaries, but with the boundaries of specific business models that built their own contingent geographies.