Making of the Victorian Novelist: Anxieties of Authorship in the Mass Market

189 Pages·2003·1.378 MB·English

by  Bradley Deane

L C
ITERARY RITICISM AND
C T
ULTURAL HEORY
OUTSTANDING DISSERTATIONS
edited by
William E. Cain
Wellesley College
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T M
H E A K I N G O F T H E
V N
I C T O R I A N O V E L I S T
Anxieties of Authorship in the
Mass Market
Bradley Deane
ROUTLEDGE
New York & London
Published in 2003 by
Routledge
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New York, NY 10001
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Published in Great Britain by
Routledge
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Copyright © 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Deane, Bradley, 1971–
The making of the Victorian novelist : anxieties of authorship in the
mass market / by Bradley Deane.
p. cm. — (Literary criticism and cultural theory)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-415-94020-6 (hardback)
1. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Authors
and publishers—Great Britain—History—19th century. 3. Literature
publishing—Great Britain—History—19th century. 4. Authors and
readers—Great Britain—History—19th century. 5. Fiction—Authorship—
Psychological aspects. 6. Fiction—Authorship—Economic aspects. I.
Title. II. Series.
PR871 .D36 2002
823'.809—dc21
2002010034
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
One
Dueling Authorships in the Romantic Period: The Author of 1
Waverley and the Great Unknown
The Prophet Margin 3
“The Ordinary Business of the World” 10
The Uses of Waverley 16
Two
Making Friends: Dickens, Pickwick, and Industrial Romanticism 27
Editing Authorship 31
The Messenger Is the Message 44
Serialization and the Code of Production 51
Three
Sympathy’s Last Gasp: The Professional Body and the 59
Disease of Sensationalism
Romancing King Public 62
The Making of an Outcast Genre 67
Rereading the Sympathetic Body 77
Four
The Death of the Victorian Author: Mastery and Mystery in 91
James’s The Princess Casamassima
Anarchy and Artisans 94
Sympathy and Appreciation 103
The Suicide of the Author 108
v
vi Contents
Five
Veiled Women in the Marketplace of Culture: Authorships and 113
Domesticities in Gaskell and Eliot
Domesticity and Demagoguery 116
Authorship in the Parrot-House 127
Conclusion 139
Notes 143
Bibliography 157
Index 167
Acknowledgments
Victorian novelists liked to use their prefaces to affirm their warm fellow-
feeling with their readers, frequently thanking them for their steadfast
friendship. While the professional model of authorship through which
this book will be perceived prevents me from expressing a similar opti-
mism, I may at least take this opportunity to thank the many friends who
have already read and contributed to these pages. This project began as a
doctoral dissertation for the English Department at Northwestern Univer-
sity, where the intellectual community allowed me to see how hollow the
Romantic claims about writing as the work of solitary genius can really
be. Betsy Erkkila graciously agreed to read a dissertation outside of her
field, and while I have greatly benefited from her insight, I am more thank-
ful still for her generous encouragement and intellectual enthusiasm.
Christopher Herbert challenged me to confront the sort of daunting ques-
tions from which I might otherwise have shied away, and helped me to an-
swer them with his equally daunting expertise in Victorian culture. It is to
Jules Law, though, that this work is most indebted. His contributions at
every stage of the project are greater than I can adequately acknowledge
here; suffice it to say that the most interesting and important elements of
this study are the ones with which he was most directly involved. Of my
other friends and colleagues at Northwestern, I want to thank Wendy
Wall, Jeff Masten, Jay Grossman, Chris Lane, and Matt Frankel for their
advice, encouragement, and the kind of sympathetic bonhomie that the
Victorians liked to imagine of their audience. My wife Jennifer, finally,
helped me more than she will admit, giving me both invaluable scholarly
criticism and the confidence to proceed when I needed it most. I dedicate
this book to her with gratitude, affection, and admiration.
vii
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Introduction
A specter haunts literary criticism—the specter of the nineteenth-century
author—and not even the alliance of all the formalist challenges of a hun-
dred years have managed to exorcise it: not T. S. Eliot’s assertion in “Tra-
dition and the Individual Talent” that artistic progress necessitates the
extinction of the author’s personality, nor Wimsatt and Beardsley’s more
fundamental defiance of authorial intention as a critical criterion, nor even
Roland Barthes’s provocative proclamation of the death of the Author-
God who tyrannizes over the potential plenitude of textual signification. A
creditable history of twentieth-century critical schools, in fact, could be
pieced together entirely from each generation’s distinctive methods for an-
nouncing the author’s interment. Yet the legacy of the nineteenth-century
author refuses to be laid to rest. In the twenty-first century literary mar-
ketplace, authorial cults of personality continue to drive production and
consumption: we continue to encounter that old authorship in the photo-
graphs on dustjackets, in online chatrooms and innumerable fansites, in
the unremitting stream of promotional book tours. At academic confer-
ences, too, and in the pages of course catalogs across the country, we find
that the largely uninterrogated category of “the man and his work” is as
ubiquitous as ever. In this sense, Mark Twain’s joke about the wide exag-
geration of the rumors of his death has taken on an ironically persistent af-
terlife.
This is a study of the origins of nineteenth-century authorship in
Britain, and more particularly of the social, economic, and aesthetic trans-
formations that allowed it to achieve its almost unassailable hegemony in
popular culture and professional criticism alike. My approach to author-
ship thus arises not from the purely formalist tradition, which dismisses
authors as (at best) extra-literary distractions, but from the perspective of
literary sociology, which investigates authorship as a historically variable
and culturally influential dimension of the practice of making literature.
ix