Contextualizing Value: Market Stories in Mid-Victorian Periodicals By

Contextualizing Value: Market Stories in Mid-Victorian Periodicals By Emily Catherine Simmons A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright Emily Catherine Simmons 2011 Abstract Contextualizing Value: Market Stories in Mid-Victorian Periodicals Emily Catherine Simmons Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English, University of Toronto Copyright 2011 This dissertation examines the modes, means, and merit of the literary production of short stories in the London periodical market between 1850 and 1870. Shorter forms were often derided by contemporary critics, dismissed on the assumption that quantity equals quality, yet popular, successful, and respectable novelists, namely Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant, were writing, printing, and distributing them. This study navigates a nexus of discourses about culture, literature, and writing to explore, delineate, and ascertain the implications of the contextual position of certain short stories. In particular, it identifies and characterizes a previously unexamined genre, here called the Market Story, in order to argue for the contingency and de-centring of processes and pronouncements of valuation. Market stories are defined by their relationship to a publishing industry that was actively creating a space for, demanding, and disseminating texts based on their potential to generate sales figures, draw attention to a particular organ, author, or publisher, or gather and hold a captive audience. These texts indicate their authors’ self-aware commentary on the construction and relativity of literary and generic value: in effect, they constitute a discourse on value. ii Following the Introduction’s outline of the historical field in which market stories were produced, Chapter One reads Anthony Trollope’s six “Editor’s Tales” as intensely comic, self-reflexive, and interrogative of extant conceptions of cultural and literary value; Trollope glories in the exposure and dismantling of seemingly-reliable externality. Chapter Two considers “Somebody’s Luggage,” Dickens’s argument for the contrivance of literary genre, which features a narrator who does not correspond to the author of the body tales and constructs an exaggerated system of exchanges whereby the short story generates unprecedented income. In Chapter Three I move to Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Cranford Papers” and argue that their diligent tracing of the careful consumption of small wholes and cultivation of irregular habits constitutes an insistence on the plurality of appropriate models of consumption and value. By shifting the discussion from content to form, Gaskell’s text throws the shape of the market story into relief. Finally, Chapter Four considers Margaret Oliphant’s “Dinglefield Stories” as a figurative argument that generic and literary value is always, necessarily, inextricably, contextualized. As literary works and cultural products, these stories embody the tensions between the utilitarian and the ‘purely’ artistic that underwrote much nineteenth-century discussion of art and culture, and these authors were unmistakably aware of the external conditions enabling, eliciting, and affecting the production of literary work as well as its subsequent valuation. iii Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the generous funding provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada between 2005 and 2008. As well, the Department of English provided University of Toronto Fellowships through 2009 and 2010, which greatly aided the timely completion of my work. My supervisor, Jill L. Matus, has been a continuous source of support, encouragement, and thoughtful feedback, and for her energetic interest in my project from its earliest stages through its completion I owe her many thanks. I could not imagine a better supervisor. Christine Bolus-Reichert has been an engaged and enthusiastic reader of my work since I was first enrolled in her graduate course in 2005. I am particularly grateful for Audrey Jaffe’s observations and questions, which often enabled me to think about the project in new ways. I feel very privileged to have been able to complete my project under the guidance of these three scholars. My oral exam was enhanced by thoughtful questions from Daniel Hack, Cannon Schmitt, and Deidre Lynch. I especially appreciate Daniel Hack’s thorough appraisal, which raises questions that will help me develop the next stages of the project. My time at the University of Toronto has been immeasurably enriched by my community of fellow graduate students and friends. For engaging with my ideas, reading drafts, providing feedback, support, and sometimes welcome distraction I would like to thank Laura Stenberg, Marybeth Curtin, Ceilidh Hart, Katherine McLeod, Alisha Walters, Darryl Domingo, Suzanne Gregoire, Fiona Coll, and Tony Antoniades. As Thomas Bryce has been the same support since my undergraduate degree, my debt to him goes even further. I am so grateful to Jessica Riddell and Tara MacDonald for having been (and continuing to be) not only models to which I could aspire, but wonderful friends as well. Laura Stenberg merits iv another mention; for the support she has provided over the past few years—in conversation and during weekly runs—I am forever grateful. As an undergraduate student at Mount Allison University I was motivated to pursue graduate work by several wonderful scholars, especially Carrie MacMillan and Janine Rogers. For being a fellow reader, friend, and inspiration for as long as I can remember and until I was twenty-five, I will always be indebted to my Aunt Bonita. She fostered my love of reading, and is much missed. Finally, both of my parents have been sources of unquestioned support, encouragement, and belief in my abilities. I feel incredibly lucky to have two such caring, smart, and understanding people as my mother and father. This project is dedicated to Edward and Rhonda Simmons: thank you for enabling me to pursue my love of literature and learning all the way here. v Table of Contents Introduction: “The Value of it all”: Periodicals, Markets, Genres .......................................... 1 Chapter One: “It’s Hard Enough to Find the Plan”: Systemic Aspiration in Anthony Trollope’s “An Editor’s Tales” ..........................................33 Chapter Two: “A Goodish Profit on the Original Investment”: Luggage, Writing, and Anxiety in Charles Dickens’s Christmas Numbers ...........................80 Chapter Three: “This is not Waste”: Careful Consumption in Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Cranford Papers”...................................119 Chapter Four: “Across the Verdant Lawns”: Arrangement as Contingency in Margaret Oliphant’s “Dinglefield Stories” .......................157 Un-Collapsing, in Conclusion ...............................................................................................198 Works Consulted ...................................................................................................................205 vi “The Value of it all”: Periodicals, Markets, Genres “Few would have such advantages of publicity as one writing ... for All the Year Round in those days. There was the prestige of association with the master, while the condition in which your work was brought before the public was truly effective.” –Percy Fitzgerald on Charles Dickens1 George Gissing’s 1891 novel New Grub Street depicts a world of writers attempting to earn livings and reputations in Late Victorian London, and Jasper Milvain, one of its protagonists, struggles for survival as a literary journalist with a shrewdly mercenary outlook that borders on the reprehensible. His emblematic scene, a boastful detailing of a particularly productive and efficient day wherein he has written a review by 10:30 a.m., an informal essay and half an artistic one in the afternoon, read four newspapers and two magazines, sketched something like half a dozen ideas for new papers, and journeyed between mealtimes “thinking hard all the way” (Gissing 207), exaggerates and distorts a mechanized approach to artistic production. Milvain’s sister puts a fine point on the implied disparity between factory and creative work when she asks him the “value of it all.” He first replies with an economic measurement (between “ten to twelve guineas”) before acknowledging that the day’s work has a “literary value” approximately equal to “the contents of a mouldy nut” (Gissing 207). Work produced by rote, in Gissing’s world, will have no lasting artistic merit. New Grub Street holds pride of place in the canon as the “most eminent nineteenth- century novel dealing directly with the position of writing in the social context of its time” (Goode vii). Paul Delany has recently written that New Grub Street “still stands as the most acute analysis of the literary marketplace in English fiction” (184-85). It is generally considered to engage more substantially with representations of writers and their concerns than earlier novels like Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield or W.M. Thackeray’s 1 Fitzgerald 737. 1 2 Pendennis; as Stephen Arata contends, the novel depicts to an “unprecedented degree” the “sheer physical labor” involved in writing, where earlier novels—including the two just mentioned—remain largely silent about the work of composition itself (36). For all of this groundbreaking representation, though, New Grub Street is unequivocally an “indictment” of a commercial

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