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Victorian Fiction Writers, Publishers, Readers 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 edi- tions 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 popu- larity 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.
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