The thirst for Scottish themes, however, continued unabated amongst the reading public, and one of the beneficiaries of the fashion for Scottish topics was John Galt (1779-1839). The peak years were 1822-25 when no less than 15% of all British novels were published in Scotland then a stock market crash caused a financial panic that, as we saw in the previous chapter, threatened to ruin Scott, and damaged Edinburgh’s position as a leading publishing centre. With the publication of Waverley in 1814, there was a leap in production, and between 18, 4.4% of British novels were produced north of the border. As Bill Bell has shown, between 18 only 0.5% of British novels were published in Scotland. The impact of Scott on Scottish publishing in the first half of the 19th century can be seen in the proportion of British novels published in Scotland, decade by decade.
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