Introduction: Re-evaluating the minerva press

The April 1845 issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book, an eminent women’s magazine published in Philadelphia between 1830 and 1878, contains a short story by ‘Miss Mary Davenant’ called ‘Helen Berkley; or, the Mercenary Marriage’. In it, the heroine’s potential lover is assessed by comparison to the hero of Regina Maria Roche’s 1796 Minerva Press novel, The Children of the Abbey: ‘But you know well enough that you never had such an admirer as he is; so handsome, so genteel—just like Lord Mortimer in the “Children of the Abbey”’.1 The reference is an intriguing one, suggesting not just the long-lasting and geographically far-reaching appeal of Roche’s most celebrated novel but also the similar persistence of the London-based Minerva Press itself. With modest origins in the publications of liveryman-turned-printer-and-bookseller William Lane (1738 or 1745/46–1814) in the 1770s and ’80s,2 the Minerva Press was officially founded in 1790 and quickly established itself as Britain’s leading publisher of popular fiction. It enjoyed particular success amongst readers—and, correspondingly, attracted the special ire of critics—in the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first few years of the nineteenth, by which point it was principally categorised and contemptuously dismissed as the purveyor of cheap, unoriginal and thoroughly forgettable circulating-library fictions. By 1845 and the publication of ‘Helen Berkley’, the Minerva Press had apparently been consigned to the annals of history (and bad literature): Lane himself had retired in 1809, handing the business on to his former apprentice Anthony King Newman (d. 1858), who began publishing with Lane in 1801. Under Newman’s guidance, the press began to focus more heavily on children’s literature and remainder publication and, in 1829, omitted ‘Minerva’ from its name altogether, possibly in recognition of its new specialisations and its inability to compete with now more prominent and respectable publishers of popular fiction.