In early nineteenth-century England, competition for attention in print included broadsides, newspapers, political pamphlets, and literary periodicals. Many items of these print forms circulated in higher numbers of copies than almost all books. Total copies sold of newspapers in England in 1793 was about 17 million. In 1811, 52 newspapers were being published in London, and in 1833, 18 London newspapers had daily or weekly circulation over 100,000.^ ^ By the end of the eighteenth century, Thomas Paine reportedly had sold 200,000 copies of the second part of his pamphlet The Rights of Man (1792). Two million copies of the chapbooks that made up the Cheap Repository for Religious and Moral Tracts were said to have been distributed in Britain about 1795. Neither of these figures are well-documented.^ The Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review, the leading early nineteenth-century English literary quarterlies, had peak quarterly circulation of 12,000-14,000 copies about 1818. At a lower cultural status, Limberd’s two-penny Mirror of Literature circulated 80,000 copies in 1823, and the Penny Magazine, 200,000 copies in 1832.^

Much of the ephemeral print in early nineteenth-century England concerned crime, criminals, and punishment. The chaplain of Pentonville Prison in London in 1852 decried the pervasiveness of “pernicious publications”:

The young people of both sexes are now habituated to a course of reading in which felony, murder, and violation, forgery, adultery, and all other crimes are treated of as the common occurrences of life…. There are four of these weekly Felonists (for that is the nickname they have adopted) whose combined sale is calculated to amount to 350,000 and whose readers must, I should say, extend to 1,000,000 a week. …The present circulation in London of immoral unstamped publications of a halfpenny to three penny each must be upwards of 400,000 weekly, which would give the enormous issue of 20,800,000 yearly!^

Sales of novels in early nineteenth-century England, in contrast, normally amounted to 500 to 1500 per title.^ Books concerning crime, criminals, and punishment were popular, but they probably weren’t typically printed in more copies than novels. The vast majority of print items in circulation were ephemeral publications, not books.