Victorian Fiction Writers, Publishers, Readers

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Victorian Fiction Writers, Publishers, Readers Also by John Sutherland THACKERAY AT WORK VICTORIAN NOVELISTS AND PUBLISHERS FICTION AND THE FICTION INDUSTRY BESTSELLERS: POPULAR FICTION OF THE 1970S OFFENSIVE LITERATURE THE LONGMAN COMPANION TO VICTORIAN FICTION MRS HUMPHRY WARD THE LIFE OF WALTER SCOTT LAST DRINK TO L.A. IS HEATHCLIFF A MURDERER? CAN JANE EYRE BE HAPPY? WHO BETRAYS ELIZABETH BENNET? STEPHEN SPENDER: THE AUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY READING THE DECADES SO YOU THINK YOU KNOW JANE AUSTEN? SO YOU THINK YOU KNOW THOMAS HARDY? INISIDE BLEAK HOUSE Victorian Fiction Writers, Publishers, Readers

John Sutherland © John Sutherland 1995, 2006 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 1995 Reissued with a new preface 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-4039-3985-2 ISBN 978-0-230-59634-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-0-230-59634-4 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sutherland, John, 1938– Victorian fiction : writers, publishers, readers / John Sutherland.–2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–3985–3 1. English fiction–19th century–History and criticism. 2. Publishers and publishing– Great Britain–History–19th century. 3. Authors and publishers– Great Britain–History–19th century. 4. Fiction–Appreciation–Great Britain– History–19th century. 5. Authors and readers–Great Britain–History–19th century. 6. Fiction–Publishing–Great Britain–History–19th century. 7. Books and reading–Great Britain–History–19th century. I. Title. PR878.P78S89 2005 823Ј.809–dc22 2005049320

10987654321 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne For my son Jack Sutherland with love and admiration This page intentionally left blank Contents

List of Plates viii Preface and Acknowledgements for the Reissued Edition ix 1. Thackeray’s Errors 1 2. Writing The Woman in White 28 3. Dickens, Reade, Hard Cash, and Maniac Wives 55 4. Dickens’s Serializing Imitators 86 5. Eliot, Lytton, and the Zelig Effect 114 6. Trollope at Work on The Way We Live Now 122 7. Miss Bretherton, Miss Brown, and Miss Rooth 141 8. The Victorian Novelists: Who were they? 159 Plot Summaries 173 Notes 186 Index 194

vii List of Plates

1. Pierce Egan, Life in London, 1820 2. F. Marryat, Poor Jack, 1840 3. G. P. R. James, The Commissioner, 1846 4. Charles Lever, The Knight of Gwynne, 1847 5. Albert Smith, Christopher Tadpole, 1846 6. The Greatest Plague of Life, 1847 7. D. Jerrold, A Man Made of Money, 1848 8. R. Surtees, Mr Romford’s Hounds, 1865 9. George Cruikshank, 1851, 1851 10. F. Smedley, Frank Fairlegh, 1849 11. S. Brooks, The Gordian Knot, 1856 12. C. Lever, Luttrell of Arran, 1865 13. T. M. Reid, The Headless Horseman, 1866 14. William Black, Sunrise, 1880 I am grateful to the Huntington Library for permission to reproduce the above illustrated covers. The illustrations in Chapter One (‘Thackeray’s Errors’) are from the first editions of Vanity Fair (page 11) and Pendennis (pages 12, 13, 14, 15).

viii Preface and Acknowledgements for the Reissued Edition

Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers. That’s clear enough––or is it? Who, for example, are the ‘readers’ of ‘Victorian fiction’ referred to in the title? Victorians, of course; think beards, bustles and corseted bosoms. But, paradoxically, ravenous as their appetite was for these ‘jam tarts for the mind’ (as Thackeray good-naturedly thought them), we in the twenty-first century––unbearded, unbustled, uncorseted–– consume heaps more Victorian fiction than was ever consumed in the nineteenth century. The maths is clear. All of Trollope’s, George Eliot’s, Thomas Hardy’s, the Brontës’, and Dickens’s major works are currently in print. The whole of Trollope’s massive, forty-seven-title fictional oeuvre has been published not once, but three times, under separate imprints over the last thirty years. The author himself never lived to see more than a fraction of his many (too many as some publishers thought) novels in print at any one time. Take one representatively popular title. There are, as I currently write, the following 18 editions of Dickens’s Bleak House available from www.amazon.co.uk, most of them costing under £10:

Oxford World’s Classics, Penguin Classics, Penguin Popular Classics, Everyman Library (hardback), Everyman (softcover), Wordsworth, Oxford Illustrated Dickens, Heron, Broadview (Canadian), Norton Classics (US), Bantam (US), Signet (US), Riverside (US), Modern Library (US), Heinemann ‘Guided Reader’ Edition, Cambridge University Press ‘landmarks’ Edition, OUP ‘Clarendon’ Edition, Collins (leatherbound), Indypublish.com Edition (3 vols, facsimile).

The Victorians loved their machines but ours is a technologically more advanced culture. There are, in addition to these traditional hard-print editions, five ‘audio book’ Bleak House packages (principally published by the BBC and Penguin), and three proprietary downloadable digital editions (EbooksLib, Digireads, Kessinger). Why pay? A google on ‘Bleak House + e-text’ turns up at least ten free digitized complete editions of Bleak House downloadable from the web and conveniently

ix x Preface and Acknowledgements for the Reissued Edition searchable. The most trusted is that in the Project Gutenberg e-library of canonical literary texts (see www.gutenberg.org––a modest domain name). Figures have to be provisional, but I would estimate that the dozen principal Dickens titles sell, in the first years of the twenty-first century, around 1.5 million copies annually in the UK. Freeby versions (which would include things like regular recitations on such radio pro- grammes as ‘Book at Bedtime’) probably double the figure. How many British readers did Dickens, the most popular novelist in the land, have in 1852–3? Robert Patten’s Dickens and his Publishers (1978) records that the serial issue of Bleak House cleared around 30,000 copies in monthly numbers. In the cheap collective reissues of his work (at 6d or 1s a volume) which he and his publishers began putting out in the mid-1840s his most popular titles––such as Pickwick and Oliver Twist––sold up to 100,000 annually. Dickens’s death in 1870, and his works’ entrance into the public domain with expiry of his copyright precipitated other booms. Compared to what Dickens’s major novels sell in 2005, however, they are more properly boomlets. Dickens is only one of a corps of Victorian novelists who would dominate the fiction bestseller lists if calculations were done decen- nially, or by the half-century rather than weekly. But even at the top of the premier ‘Vict-fict’ league there are significant fluctuations. Dickens, Hardy, George Eliot, Conan Doyle, and the pre-Victorian Austen hold their place, year-in year-out, with some minor jostling for top position. But Trollope, who was in the vanguard when the paperback classic reprint boom kicked off in the 1960s (with the Penguin English Library) has slumped. I write feelingly. I had, at the zenith of his popularity in the mid-1980s, fourteen of Trollope’s works (painstakingly) edited by me in the classic reprint libraries. One by one titles such as An Old Man’s Love, An Eye for an Eye, Ralph the Heir and the underrated Is He Popenjoy? have dropped out of print. Now only six of the fourteen remain and only, I fear, Barchester Towers and The Way We Live Now are thriving. Thackeray, ‘the greater Trollope’, has also declined. At his zenith, four of Thackeray’s six full-length novels were prominent on the classic reprint shelves. Now only Vanity Fair and Henry Esmond hold their place along with the shorter Barry Lyndon (kept afloat by Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 film version). As these masters of the Victorian ‘domestic’novel have declined, Wilkie Collins––the master ‘sensationalist’—has risen spectacularly. Virtually all his works are currently available (even such dire concoctions as The Law and the Lady). The Collins revival may be down to feminist interest in his work—Anne Catherick is, with Bertha Preface and Acknowledgements for the Reissued Edition xi

Mason, one of Victorian fiction’s mad women in the attic. Collins, on the strength of his transgressive tendencies, has also been taken up by gay theorists. These new critical energies (disseminated often through the graduate classroom) have brought back into print not just Collins but works by authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon (notably the hyper-sensational Lady Audley’s Secret) and ‘New Woman’ novelists (e.g. Sarah Grand, George Egerton, Grant Allen and ‘Iota’). Other novelists, wildly popular or much respected in their Victorian day, remain obstinately, and in some cases mysteriously, beyond resus- citation. The dust of oblivion lies on such one-time favourites as George Meredith, Bulwer-Lytton, Mrs Humphry Ward, Charles Reade, George Moore, Marie Corelli and Mrs Oliphant. Perhaps their turn will come again. Robert Louis Stevenson only does really well with Treasure Island despite being, with Dickens, the most popular subject for modern biographers. The tides and surges of public favour are less pre- dictable than those of the ocean. All one can say is that the general drift, over the last century and a half, has been consistently towards Victorian ﬁction, en bloc. It does well, if certain novelists do not. As I write (early 2005) Bleak House is due for another high-water mark in sales popularity. Andrew Davies’s BBC-TV adaptation is scheduled for autumn release. Davies has established himself as the leader in small- screen adaptation of Victorian fiction. Beginning with a spine-chilling, one-instalment version of Dickens’s ghost-story, ‘The Signalman’, in 1975 he has written screenplays for mini-series of Middlemarch (1994), Vanity Fair (1998), Wives and Daughters (1999), The Way We Live Now (2001) and Daniel Deronda (2002). Each has recruited viewing ﬁgures, on first run in the UK, of 5-million or more. Most spectacularly successful was Middlemarch which precipitated a viewing, reading and buying mania. For a few weeks in early 1994, this novel (which Trollope thought so difficult that only adults of advanced intelligence should think of tackling it) rode at No. 1 on the British paperback bestseller lists––outdoing John Grisham, Stephen King and Jeffrey Archer. Davies ‘re-versions’ the Victorian fiction he adapts; tactfully modu- lating it for modern viewers who do not know (but may well go on to buy) the originally written work. He inserts sex, for example, in those places where, in his view, Mrs Grundy silenced his Victorian predeces- sor. He reads new elements into characters. In The Way We Live Now Davies found Paul Montague too ‘weak’ and beefed up Trollope’s ‘hobbledehoy’ into something much more macho (inventing some exploits in Mexico for the purpose). But Davies always alters his source in a way which ‘works’ for the modern audience. In a Forsterian sense, xii Preface and Acknowledgements for the Reissued Edition he constantly looks for the ‘only connect’ between us and the Victor- ian novel. And, most would concede, he finds it––in his own way. Asked, in interview in 1999, about the ‘very modern appeal’ of Wives and Daughters, which he had just adapted, Davies replied:

It’s a situation that can appeal to audiences today because, in a way, it’s about second families, isn’t it? In the book, of course, you’ve got second families because of people dying young. Nowadays, it’s because of divorce and remarriage. But the problems are the same, aren’t they?

Mrs Gaskell might, or might not, have agreed. As well connect Cranford and Desperate Housewives. As it happened, the ‘very modern appeal’ of Wives and Daughters was put to the test. ITV chose to run, in exactly the same Sunday 9-p.m. prime-time slot in November 1999, Alan Bleasdale’s adaptation of Oliver Twist. Between them, the two major TV channels, had invested (gambled, some might say) close on $15-million on Victorian fiction (much more, as it happened, than Channel 4 would pay for Desperate Housewives). Bleasdale’s approach to Dickens’s novel was even more freewheeling than Davies’s. His version of Oliver Twist hinged on a complicated, gothic and totally Bleasdalian, ‘back story’ or ‘prequel’, designed to explain Monks’s otherwise obscure malevolence towards his innocent kinsman, the foundling Oliver. What he had done, Bleasdale claimed, was merely to ‘fill in the cracks’ left by Dickens, or forced on the Victorian author by the exigences of magazine serializa- tion and the moral climate of his time (Bleasdale, interestingly, submit- ted to the moral climate of his time by substituting a blandly non-Jewish Fagin for Dickens’s hideously anti-Semitic creation). There was some apprehension that this ‘bonnet to bonnet’ face-off would antagonize the Great British Viewing Public. But both mini- series did well (which means, in this context, 4-million plus viewers). So too did other TV adaptations of Wilkie Collins, Thackeray, Henry James, George Eliot, R. D. Blackmore and Hardy. Victorian fiction was, and remains, ‘bankable’ for the money-people who determine what the country will watch in their front rooms. On the big screen Victorian fiction does similarly well (if not quite as well as Jane Austen’s novels). There have, over the years, been ten film adaptations of Jane Eyre, the most recent, in 1996, colourfully directed by Franco Zeffirelli. Still superior, in my view, remains that written for Twentieth Century Fox by Aldous Huxley, with Orson Welles ham- Preface and Acknowledgements for the Reissued Edition xiii ming it up as Mr Rochester. The enduring appeal of Brontë’s novel was given, one might quip, an official seal, in February 2005. The Royal Mail released a set of six stamps, with illustrations from Jane Eyre, com- memorating the 150th anniversary of Charlotte’s death. The artist commissioned to do the designs, which would put Victorian fiction on millions of the country’s letters, was Paula Rego. Rego believed pas- sionately in her project. Speaking not just for herself, but for many women, she said: ‘I love Jane Eyre. I read it when I was little and came back to it after reading Jean Rhys’s novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, which is about the life of Bertha, who was the first Mrs Rochester. When I read it again, I thought, what a heroic person Jane was.’ Purists, of course, might have wished Trollope to have been thus commemorated with a bust of the Chronicler of Barset (and GPO innovator) on every pillar box in the land. Dickens, of course, had his image on the Bank of England’s £10-note in the 1990s. One recalls Paul Dombey’s question, ‘What is money, Papa?’ Dickens could be thought to be replying, ‘This, Paul, is money’. Dickens remained as popular on the big screen as the small. There have been almost as many filmings of Great Expectations as of Jane Eyre, the last being the 1998 surreally updated version (set in Florida’s Wetlands, rather than the Thames marshes) starring Robert De Niro, Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow, directed by Alfonso Cuaron. What next? Pip goes to Mars? Henry James’s works have also adapted well to the cinema and mass audiences have benefited from the tactful clarifications imposed on such texts as Wings of the Dove (released in 1997) or The Golden Bowl (released in 2000). Readers, inhibited at first encounter by James’s man- darin prose, returned with renewed confidence to the original novels conveniently available in low-price tie-in editions, embellished with cover pictures of Uma Thurman and Helena Bonham Carter. Enjoyable in themselves, these intelligent movies served as gateways back to the source texts. The camera loves the late Victorian, early Edwardian lushness of Jamesian decor. Actors love the subtle dialogue adapted from his fiction. James, who had never had runaway success with his fiction in his own day, was, thanks to the synergies of twentieth-century culture, at last a ‘bestseller’. Sadly he never lived to see his vaster fame and died never expecting it. It is a paradox investigated in David Lodge’s novel, Author, Author (2004), with reference to the most sensationally popular novel of its (late Victorian) day, George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894). James and du Maurier (principally famous as a cartoonist for Punch) xiv Preface and Acknowledgements for the Reissued Edition were close friends. Du Maurier actually offered ‘The Master’ the idea, or donnée for what became Trilby. Lodge gives the gift-horse scene central prominence in his novel. After a scornful review of the runaway success (thanks to huckster advertising) of Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and Mrs Humphry Ward’s ineffably dull Robert Elsmere (boosted into bestsellerdom by an inexpressibly dull 10,000-word review in Nineteenth Century by Gladstone, no less), James sighs: ‘the fact is that the demand for my work is diminishing. It’s a frightening prospect.’ He is, he confesses, running out of plots. ‘Why don’t you use that story I told you a year or so ago?’ asks du Maurier, ‘About the young girl and the mesmerist.’ He then goes on to outline what would become Trilby. James, he says, is ‘welcome to it’. His friend is very generous, replies James, ‘but . . . I don’t know if it’s quite my line’. Du Maurier, who decided it was his line, subsequently went on to become rich and famous with his ‘young girl and the mesmerist’ story. Trilby, the heroine, gave her name to the hat that is still worn, and to scores of American small towns. Svengali became shorthand for every variety of spin merchant (‘Where does the talk of me as a Svengali come from?’ Peter Mandelson asked plaintively in 1996. Not Henry James–– although, piquantly, it might have been). As Trilby coined a fortune for its author, James continued to languish in the half-oblivion of the ‘difficult’ novelist––admired, but not sufficiently to be purchased. He made his bid for fame and fortune in the London theatre. Disastrously. Guy Domville and its author were hooted off the stage (a sympathetic, un- hooting, du Maurier was in the audience). A hundred years later, with the Jane Campion-directed, Nicole Kidman and John Malkovich- starring film of The Portrait of a Lady the wheel has turned full circle. It is James who has the mass audience (and knock-on readership). Trilby is, as I write, out of print in the main classic reprint lines. The tides of literary popularity are, as I say, unpredictable. Mira Nair’s Bollywood inflected Vanity Fair was released in 2005, which in the interest of recasting Becky Sharp (played by Reese Witherspoon) as a feminist heroine took even greater liberties with Thackeray’s narrative than had Andrew Davies in 1998 (Nair, for example, confects a happy-ever-after with Jos and Becky happily married and lording it in India; Davies merely left it open as to whether she would, or would not, poison her partner). Nair’s and Davies’s free handling of their source text raised an interesting problem for scholars and students of Victorian fiction (to whom, of course, this monograph is principally directed). To what degree should the academy regard itself as the custodian of canonical texts and the guardian of their Preface and Acknowledgements for the Reissued Edition xv purity? Should works such as Thackeray’s, Eliot’s or Dickens’s be seen as objects to be reverently curated in the museum of literary criticism? To what extent should the huge expansion in audience and the con- comitant enlargement (it is hoped) in readership be welcomed, or dis- dained? If Andrew Lloyd Webber adapts The Woman in White into a West End burletta, which runs for years, are Wilkie Collins’s ‘moral rights’ infringed? Is a classic travestied? Is Victorian fiction somehow diminished? If Andrew Davies inserts explicit sexual intercourse into the TV narrative of The Way We Live Now should the Trollope Society yowl? Or should they rejoice (as, on reflection, Trollope might) that some 6-million viewers are thereby recruited? If Nair’s distortions of her source text get Thackeray onto the cinema screen, for a worldwide audience of tens of millions, is this not a good thing? On the whole it is. Novels like The Woman in White or Vanity Fair are big enough to look after themselves, however they are popularized or subjected to cock-eyed interpretation. More importantly, they witness to the continued vitality of canonical Victorian fiction and its refusal to be tidily stacked on the literary historical shelf. They are reanimated and live with every generation of new readers. So much for Victorian readers. We are them and there are multitudes of us. What of the other elements in Victorian Fiction: Writers, Readers, Publishers? Who, that is, are the writers of Victorian fiction? Authors of novels published in Britain between 1837 and 1901, one automatically responds (3,500 of them, as I estimate in Chapter 8). None the less it can be argued that Victorian fiction did not stop with the Royal Funeral in 1901. It continues to be written and is still going stronger than ever in 2005. If there are multitudes of contemporary readers for Victorian fiction, there is also a healthy band of contemporary writers of Victorian fiction. The two points of origin for the Post-Victorian Victorian Novel (here- after PVVN) are Robert Graves’s The Real David Copperfield (1933) and Michael Sadleir’s Fanny by Gaslight (1940)––each of which can be seen to originate lines of distinct, but intertwining, genres. Graves’s novel mischievously shifts perspective, narrating Dickens’s novel from a new angle. Two new angles, in fact: that of an alternate principal character, and that of a more ‘grown-up’ culture which allows freer reference to sexuality. Modern readers enjoy turning their favourite works upside down and shaking them in this way. Recast Hamlet from the point of view not of the soliloquizing Prince of Denmark but his marginalized school mates, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and you have, as Tom Stoppard demonstrates, a different, but eerily familiar, play. xvi Preface and Acknowledgements for the Reissued Edition

Graves’s gimmick, which he seems to have invented, can be illustrated by juxtaposing Dickens’s account of David’s final union with that in the ‘real history’ (which follows):

‘I am so blest, Trotwood––my heart is so overcharged––but there is one thing I must say.’ ‘Dearest, what?’ She laid her gentle hands upon my shoulders, and looked calmly in my face. ‘Do you know yet what it is? ‘I am afraid to speculate on what it is. Tell me, my dear?’ ‘I have loved you all my life!’ Oh, we were happy, we were happy! Our tears were not for the trials (hers being so much the greater), through which we had come to be thus, but for the rapture of being thus, never to be divided more!

In Graves’s version, David’s true love has always been Emily (whose career is signally different from what Dickens created). After Dora’s death (whom he has never really loved) he takes Agnes as a kind of faute de mieux. He looks back, complacently, on the union after the birth of three children:

As was inevitable, I eventually married Agnes. I had always loved her ‘in the other way of love’ and I wanted a home... On the whole, I have been very happy with Agnes, though on my side, as I say, there are no strong romantic feelings; perhaps marriage is safer without them.

Graves’s innovatively reverse-shot David Copperfield has never been much commented on nor, sadly, has The Real Life of David Copperfield been reprinted. But it was, I suspect, known to Jean Rhys when she wrote her influential ‘Jane Eyre from another angle’, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966; written some years earlier). Rhys’s narrative ‘prequelizes’ the relationship of Edward Rochester and the creole heiress Bertha Mason (called ‘Antoinette Cosway’) in Jamaica. An epilogue records her later incarceration as the ‘madwoman in the attic’ at Thornfield. After one has read Wide Sargasso Sea, Jane Eyre is never the same again. Following Rhys, there has been a profusion of alternative-angle narratives. Wuthering Heights has been a favourite text for alternate narratives. We have had Nelly’s version, and both Cathies’ versions. In 2005, Emma Tennant produced Heathcliff’s Tale, a fantasia in which a nephew Preface and Acknowledgements for the Reissued Edition xvii of Emily Brontë’s publisher, T. C. Newby, visits Haworth, takes receipt of a mysterious manuscript, and is haunted both by the inhabitants of the Brontë Parsonage and Emily’s fictional dramatis personae. Running through Heathcliff’s Tale is a provocatively rewritten Wuthering Heights. Its counter-traditional flavour is evident in the following exchange between Lockwood and Brontë’s demonic anti-hero:

‘Yes, Mr Heathcliff,’ I said, and tried as politely as possible to remove my hand from the prison of his hot grasp. ‘I believe Nelly told anyone who wished to hear that her employer Mrs Linton, Cathy, had shown great pleasure and excitement when you announced yourself at The Grange and paid a call on Mrs Linton and her husband. You reminded Mr Edgar of this as he lay ill in bed, perhaps?’ I added, privately thinking that if this was the case it had been a cruel thing to do. Heathcliff sprang to his feet. He seemed to have restored his spirits since beginning to talk of Cathy, HIS Cathy, as it were, and I no longer saw him as a failing man. ‘No, you dolt’, came the reply, in a voice that was quiet, angry and amused at the same time. ‘I informed my dead Cathy’s husband that I had taken possession of his wife, that I had made love to the woman who had been mine, body and soul, since we were children. This had been the purpose of my visits to The Grange. Now what do you think of that, Mr Lockwood?’

In Tennant’s re-versioning the ‘cracks’ in Wuthering Heights (as Bleas- dale called them) have become so gapingly wide as almost to swallow up the original text. But to have their full effect, novels like Heathcliff’s Tale (or Wide Sargasso Sea) require that the reader be intimately familiar, over-familiar almost, with the source text. Otherwise the game- someness is meaningless. Tennant plays with the PVVN in a serious way (with some satirical swipes against the academic ‘lit-crit’ establishment). Jasper Fforde plays with the PVVN playfully. Fforde worked in the film industry for thir- teen years and, famously, received an epic seventy-six rejection letters from publishers for his ﬁrst novel The Eyre Affair, before it was accepted by Hodder & Stoughton and published in 2001. Once published, it became a cult success, and was promptly followed by Lost in a Good Book (2002) and The Well of Lost Plots (2003). Fforde’s whimsical PVVN-dominated fantasias owe much to Douglas Adams’s galactic hitch-hiker. They feature a ‘literary detective’, ‘Thursday Next’, based in Swindon (God help her), who inhabits a xviii Preface and Acknowledgements for the Reissued Edition clutch of alternative universes in which Victorian fiction merges seam- lessly with ‘the real world’––whatever that may be. As the title of his first novel indicates, Fforde is centrally engaged with the Brontës’ fiction. In one of the comic highpoints of The Well of Lost Plots the central characters of Wuthering Heights appear as plaintiffs before a tribunal of ‘jurisfiction’, to establish which of them has legal ‘owner- ship’ of their narrative:

Heathcliff was wearing dark glasses and saying nothing; he was accompanied by his agent and a lawyer. ‘Proceed!’ ‘Wuthering Heights first-person narrative dispute,’ said the lawyer, placing a sheet of paper on the table. ‘Let me see,’ said Kenneth slowly, studying the report. ‘Mr Lockwood, Catherine Earnshaw, Heathcliff, Nelly Dean, Isabella and Catherine Linton. Are you all here?’ They nodded their heads. Heathcliff looked over his sunglasses at me and winked. ‘Well,’ murmured Kenneth at length, ‘you all believe that you should have the ﬁrst-person narrative, is that it?’ ‘No, Your Worshipfulness,’ said Nelly Dean, ‘’tis the otherways. None of us want it. It’s a curse to any honest Generic––and some not so honest.’ ‘Hold your tongue, serving girl!’ yelled Heathcliff. ‘Murderer!’ ‘Say that again!’ ‘You heard me!’ And they all started to yell at one another until Kenneth banged his gavel on the desk and they were all instantly quiet.

(I note, with some private pleasure, Fforde’s sly allusion to my playful book, Is Heathcliff a Murderer?). Fforde’s ‘Thursday Next’ series has sold massively and his titles have featured on UK and US bestseller lists. But his sales are dwarfed by the blockbusting sales of George MacDonald Fraser’s ‘Flashman’ saga. The series (now ten-strong) began in 1969 with Flashman which follows (fancifully and counter-textually) the career of the dandy-bully who is expelled from Rugby, after making Tom Brown’s schooldays so miser- able. ‘Flashy’ goes into the army (the church is clearly out of the question). A poltroon, womanizer, gambler and full-time rogue, he succeeds magnificently. His Who’s Who entry gives the public version of his Preface and Acknowledgements for the Reissued Edition xix career; the novels––narrated by the man himself––give us the under- lying truth. What lies in between is exquisitely funny:

Flashman, Harry Paget. Brigadier-general, V.C., K.C.B., K.C.I.E.; Chevalier, Legion of Honour; Order of Maria Theresa, Austria; Order of the Elephant, Denmark (temporary); U.S. Medal of honor; San Serafino Order of purity and truth, 4th Class. b. May 5, 1822, s. of H. Buckley Flashman, Esq., Ashby and Hon. Alicia Paget; m. Elspeth Rennie Morrison, d. of Lord Paisley; one s., one d. educ. Rugby School. 11th Hussars, 17th Lancers. Served Afghanistan, 1841–2 (medals, thanks of Parliament); chief of staff to H.M. James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak Batang Lupar expedn, 1844; milit. advisor, H.M. Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar, 1844–5; Sutlej campaign, 1845–6 (Ferozeshah, Sobraon, envoy extraordinary to Maharani Jeendan, Court of Lahore); polit. advisor to Herr (later Chancellor Prince) Von Bismarck, Schleswig-Holstein, 1847–8; Crimea staff (Alma, Sevastopol, Balaclava), Prisoner of war, 1854; Artillery adviser to Atilik Ghazi, Syr Daria campaign, 1855; Sepoy Mutiny, 1857–8, dip. envoy to HRH the Maharani of Jhansi, trooper 3rd Native Cavalry, Meerut, subseq. att, Rowbotham’s Mosstroopers, Cawnpore, (Luck- now, Gwalior, etc., V.C.); Adjutant to Captain John Brown, Harper’s Ferry, 1859; China campaign 1860, polit. mission to Nanking, Taiping Rebellion, polit. and other services, Imperial Court, Pekin U.S. Army (major, Union forces, 1862; colonel (staff) Army of the Confederacy, 1863); a.d.c. to H.I.M. Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico, 1867; interpreter and observer Sioux campaign, U.S. 1875–6 (Camp Robinson conference, Little Bighorn, etc.); Zulu War, 1879 (Isandhlwana, Rorke’s Drift); Egypt 1882 (Kassassin, Tel-el-Kebir); personal bodyguard to H.I.M. Franz-Joseph, Emperor of Austria 1883; Sudan 1884–5 (Khartoum); Pekin Legations, 1900. Travelled extensively in military and civilian capacities among them super- cargo, merchant marine (West Africa); agriculturist (Mississippi valley); wagon captain and hotelier (Santa Fe Trail); buffalo hunter and scout (Oregon Trail); courier (Underground Railroad); major- domo (India), prospector (Australia); trader and missionary (Solomon Islands, Fly River, etc.); lottery supervisor (Manila); diamond Broker and horse coper (Punjab); dep. marshall, U.S.; occa- sional actor and impersonator. Hon. mbr of numerous societies and clubs, including Sons of the Volsungs (Strackenz), Mimbreno Apache Copper Mines band (New Mexico), Kokand Horde (Central Asia), Kit Carson’s Boys (Colorado), Brown’s Lambs (Maryland), xx Preface and Acknowledgements for the Reissued Edition

M.C.C., Whites and United Service (London, both resigned), Blackjack (Batavia). Chmn, Flashman and Bottomley, Ltd.; dir. British Opium Trading Co.; governor, Rugby School; hon. pres. Mission for Reclamation of Reduced Females. Publications: Dawns and Departures of a Soldier’s Life; Twixt Cossack and Cannon; The Case Against Army Reform. Recreation: oriental studies, angling, cricket (performed first recorded ‘hat-trick’; Wickets of Felix, Pilch and Mynn for 14 runs; Rugby Past and Present v Kent, Lord’s 1842; 5 for 12, Mynn’s Casuals v All Engand XI, 1843). Add. Gandamack Lodge, Ashby, Leics.

Fraser, as the above witnesses, is a master of pastiche. He is also a master of high-impact adventure narrative (something he claims to have picked up from his boyhood passion for sword and costume romances of Rafael Sabatini). And the backgrounds to his narratives are solidly researched––the Flashman books (if any teacher were adventur- ous enough) could serve as nineteenth-century history lessons for the twenty-ﬁrst-century young. The deliciously unsettling thing about the Flashman books is that the reader comes to love the old crook. Harry is not, in the last ana- lysis, a rogue––or at least not criminally so. He is a deflator of the hypocrisies and falsities of what Mrs Thatcher once called ‘Victorian values’. Harry embodies the old soldier’s cynicism about what his masters (particularly his political masters) would have their subjects believe. He, like other old sweats, is not taken in. But, when the chips are down (when women and children are being massacred in the 1857 Indian Mutiny, for example) he can be heroic––if not sufficiently so to merit the Victoria Cross or the other medals for gallantry that jingle on his warrior chest. Fraser’s novels have inspired ‘Flashman Societies’ across the world who swap lore and ‘factoids’ about their hero. Fraser regularly gets letters from innocents who believe that his hero is ‘historical’. Two thirds of American reviewers, one is told, were taken in by the ﬁrst of the series. Alongside novels like Fforde’s and Fraser’s which invert, or realign, the PVVN from inside canonical texts, is the parallel line which descends from Michael Sadleir and which construct wholly original fictional worlds. Sadleir (1888–1957) was, by profession, a publisher. He was also a pioneer bibliographer of Victorian fiction, biographer of Victorian novelists (notably Trollope), and the greatest ever collector of Victorian novels. His collection descriptively catalogued by himself in two massive and immensely erudite volumes, currently resides in the rare books room at UCLA. Preface and Acknowledgements for the Reissued Edition xxi

Sadleir, steeped in Victorian fiction, went beyond writing about it. In 1940 he published Fanny by Gaslight, the autobiography of a late- Victorian courtesan who survives a childhood in the demi-monde of Piccadilly and a tragic love affair to achieve middle-class gentility. The novel, popular from the start, was given an immense boost by the 1941 Gainsborough film version, starring James Mason, Phyllis Calvert and Stewart Granger. Sadleir, born in the period, could feel the textures of Victorian England (particularly Victorian London) and incorporate them into narratives to be felt by the modern reader. To say Fanny by Gaslight was ‘well researched’ is to belittle the novel’s achievement. Sadleir writes what can only be called an inside-Victorian novel from a position his- torically outside the Victorian period. As with the Flashman series, one might safely prescribe Fanny by Gaslight as a history lesson. Following on Sadleir’s example there has been a number of Post- Victorian Victorian Novels which are wholly original in their concep- tions and plot lines. The most successful (winner of the Booker Prize in 1990) is A. S. Byatt’s Possession. Byatt, like Sadleir and some other lead- ing practitioners of the genre, is a scholar of the period she fictional- izes. Her novel clearly owes something to John Fowles’s Victorian period superseller, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) but more to her research, as a long-serving academic, into the poetry of Browning and Christina Rossetti. Like Peter Ackroyd, author of PVVNs such as The Great Fire of London (1982, a fantasia on Little Dorrit) and Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994), Byatt is versed in the latest critical theory. Reading these novelists’ work, one feels that the best analyses of canonical Victorian ﬁction, and the most interesting explorations of the areas it opens, are to be found not in traditional exegesis (this kind of book) but in the praxis of contemporary (our contemporary) novelists. To return, say, to Daniel Deronda after reading Possession is to do so enriched as a reader. Other PVVNs which have reached wide audiences are Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002, like Fanny by Gaslight a grimly realistic Victorian harlot’s progress); Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx (2000, a work which owes as much to Umberto Eco, and The Name of the Rose, as to Trollope––even though it has a Barchesterian ecclesiast- ical setting), and the high-pastiche creations of Sarah Waters. Waters, who has a PhD in Victorian fiction, is drawn to the sensationalism of Wilkie Collins and Edmund Yates. She has also researched the sexual underworld (which Victorian novelists knew but could not write about) described at multi-volume length in such classics of porno- graphy as Walter and Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves. xxii Preface and Acknowledgements for the Reissued Edition

Waters’s debut novel, Tipping the Velvet (1998), has as its heroine Nan King: a cross-dressing, lesbian, socialist-libertarian, Music Hall artiste (and sometimes artist). ‘Tipping the Velvet’ is a saucy pun–– alluding to what ‘Walter’ more crudely calls ‘gamming’ (don’t ask). The tone of Waters’s work, as critics noted, owed something to Jeanette Winterson’s testament to female independence, Oranges are not the Only Fruit. Affinity (1999), Waters’s second novel, is set in a Victorian women’s prison, and makes the necessary genuflections to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Her third work, Fingersmith (2003) was shortlisted for the Booker and won a bagfull of other prizes. The title alludes to pick-pocketing, with Sue Trinder as alternately sexed Artful Dodger and a Mrs Sucksby as her Fagin (there is a nice intertextual joke, at the beginning of the novel, when Sue––rather bemusedly––goes to see one of the many stage versions of Dickens’s novel). In an interview in 2003, Waters makes the same points as Andrew Davies (who adapted Tipping the Velvet for TV) about the contempo- raneity of Victorian fiction. ‘Your novels breathe new life into the Victorian age––have you always been interested in this period of history?’, she was asked. Waters replied:

I find it a fascinating period because it feels very close to us, and yet in lots of ways it is utterly strange: many of the things we think we know about it are stereotypes, or simply wrong. I got particularly interested in it after I did some academic work in the early ‘90s, in which I looked, amongst other things, at nineteenth-century sexual underworlds. We tend to think of desire and sexual identity as being so basic to us they’re somehow fixed and ahistorical. But that’s a very modern idea, with its roots in the Victorian period itself. If you look at the erotic writings of the time, you find some very interesting things going on.

Clare Clark, a Cambridge historian of the Victorian period, brought out a debut PVVN in 2005, The Great Stink. Subtitled ‘The Misadventures of the Tunnel Men’ it is an exercise (literally) in ‘history from below’. ‘Below’ meaning the huge network of sewers which, as part of their great sanitation project, the Victorians laid under England’s towns and cities. Clark’s novel opens with a November London cityscape which clearly plays off the reader’s recollection of the opening paragraph of Bleak House (‘London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chan- cellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth.’). Preface and Acknowledgements for the Reissued Edition xxiii

All day the fog had crouched low over London, a chocolate coloured murk that reeked of sulphur and defied the certainty of dawn. In vain the gaslamps pressed their circles of light into its upholstered interior. Carriages loomed out of the darkness, the stifled skitters and whinnies of horses blurring with the warning shouts of coach- men. Pedestrians, their faces obscured by hats and collars, slipped into proximity and as quickly out again.

The difference is that Dickens’s narrator is (we deduce) standing on the city side of Holborn Hill, on the pavement. In Clark’s novel, the narrative perspective is through the grating of an underground sewer, underneath the Dickensian feet. One smells, as well as sees, the view––something that Dickens can only allude to. Excrement is there in Victorian ﬁction, but not visibly (or olfactorily) so. One of the perennially fascinating aspects of Victorian fiction is its obstinate refusal to stay periodized. Or, to put it another way, its refusal to stay conventionally ‘Victorian’. Novels like Waters’s or Clark’s take the Victorian novel to new places, while still respecting the genre from which they start. Victorian fiction is still being written, a century after Victoria’s death. And written creatively. The Victorian novel is still with us and thriving.

What, finally, of the third element in Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers The readers are here, the writers are here: are the manufacturers of Victorian fiction still with us? Yes, genetically at least, they are. Take, for example, Dickens’s and Trollope’s principal publisher: Chapman & Hall. The firm was, early in the twentieth century, taken over by Methuen (of late Victorian foundation) only for Methuen themselves to be taken over, late in the twentieth century, by Routledge. Routledge, of course, established the cheap ‘Railway Library’ series, in the 1850s, which published virtually every Victorian novelist mentioned in Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers. The publisher of that work, Palgrave Macmillan, has an equally distinguished Victorian pedigree. Macmillan, to take but one example, published Hardy and Thomas Hughes (author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, progen- itor of the Flashman series). Smith Elder, publisher of the Brontës, Thackeray and Mrs Gaskell, were taken over by John Murray (the most venerable of London publishers) in the early twentieth century. In the early twenty-ﬁrst century, the house of Murray was absorbed by Hodder. Who do Hodder publish? Among others, Jasper Fforde and George MacDonald Fraser. Possession, the bestselling of PVVNs, is published by Chatto and xxiv Preface and Acknowledgements for the Reissued Edition

Windus, a Victorian firm founded in 1855 and the principal reprinter, in cheap form, of Collins and Trollope. The three main classic reprint lines all have Victorian lineage. OUP (publisher of Oxford World’s Classics) has, with CUP, the longest pedigree in British publishing, going back half a millennium. Penguin (publisher of Penguin Classics) is, via its founder Allen Lane, directly connected to John Lane––the publisher of, inter alia, Oscar Wilde. Everyman, the third of the dominant classic reprint lines serving us, was originated by the Victorian publisher Richard Dent. One could elaborate. But it is sufficient to assert that the roots of contemporary British publishing are still buried deep in Victorian soil: despite all the agglomeration, expatriate takeover and merging, which have––on the surface––transformed the book trade. The largest point I am making, of course, is that Victorian fiction lives. It is not a dusty, mummified object to be sought in libraries, archives and dealers’ catalogues. It is not conﬁned to the educational syllabus––as something merely literary historical. It continues to be consumed, rewritten, reconceived and recycled for contemporary audiences and readerships. It is everywhere around us, on our screens, in our bookshops, even, in 2005, on our posted letters. Nonetheless, while enjoying ‘our’ Victorian fiction we can, I would maintain, enrich our engagement with it by striving to recover the pristine experience. ‘Their’ Victorian fiction, so to speak. I put the point as well as I ever shall in the first edition of Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers:

This book is devoted to the undogmatic belief that the more we know about the local conditions of Victorian Fiction, the better we shall understand it. Although undogmatic, the contention may seem somewhat cross-grained. The last thirty years have seen an explosion in techniques of explication of text—loosely subsumed under the term ‘Theory’. There is no doubt that critics of literature— and the students they instruct—are infinitely more sophisticated than they used to be. But as a teacher in the two major English- speaking countries, I am consistently impressed with the fact that although students and colleagues read Victorian novels more intelli- gently than their precedessors, they often seem, in some ways, to know them less well. My point may be put as a conundrum: if you had one trip on a time machine and––by some absurd whim––wanted to use it to find out more about Victorian fiction, would you go intrepidly forward Preface and Acknowledgements for the Reissued Edition xxv

(like Wells’s traveller) to that far distant future point when the last PhD thesis is defended, the last MLA special panel sponsored, the last Dickens World conference held at Santa Cruz? Or would you go back to 1851? I confess that I would put the machine in reverse. In the discus- sions which follow, I have attempted to recapture something of what these works of literature meant to their contemporaries— examining them for echoes of what, for want of a better word, might be called their ‘Victorianness’. There is some investigation into the social, biographical, and historical context. But the circum- stances that interest me most have to do with the composition, publication, distribution, and consumption of novels. This, it seems to me, constitutes their ‘life’.

One reviewer of the book summed up what I was trying to say better than I could myself. ‘Sutherland’, he wrote, ‘believes that we shall never understand the Victorians as well as they understood themselves.’ To which I would only add, but we must try to understand them as well as we can––quixotic as the project may be. There are few greater pleasures for authors than writing a new preface for a reprint of their work. I would like, however, to reiterate the debts I owe, and the gratitude expressed in the ﬁrst edition to the Huntington Library and their staff; to my former supervisor, K. J. Fielding, who was particularly helpful with Chapter 3; to Alison Winter (who helped with the same chapter); to Rosemary Ashton, who helped with Chapter 5; to N. John Hall, who helped with Chapter 6; to Philip Horne, who helped with Chapter 7; to Simon Eliot and Uzi Segal, who helped with Chapter 8.

John Sutherland October 2005