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The Class of 1838: a Social History of the First Victorian Novelists Document généré le 1 oct. 2021 04:33 Mémoires du livre Studies in Book Culture The Class of 1838 A Social History of the First Victorian Novelists Allen Riddell et Troy J. Bassett Commerce du livre, carnaval du livre Résumé de l'article Book Commerce Book Carnival S’inspirant des travaux de Raymond Williams, le présent article porte sur les Volume 11, numéro 2, printemps 2020 81 écrivains publiés en 1838. Nous examinons d’abord l’origine sociale de ceux-ci, établie en fonction de l’activité du père. Alors que la majorité des URI : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1070272ar adultes des îles Britanniques appartenaient à l’époque à la classe ouvrière, la DOI : https://doi.org/10.7202/1070272ar plupart des écrivains de la cohorte de 1838 émanaient des classes supérieures. Nous dressons ensuite un portrait de leur carrière à partir des données suivantes : âge auquel ils ont publié leur premier roman, nombre de romans Aller au sommaire du numéro publiés et nombre d’années sur lequel leur carrière s’est échelonnée. Aucune différence significative ne se dégage entre la carrière des hommes et celle des femmes. Cependant, on remarque l’absence d’un second roman chez nombre Éditeur(s) des membres de la cohorte. Enfin, nous nous attardons à la manière dont les écrivains se présentent au lectorat sur la page titre des 87 oeuvres de fiction Groupe de recherches et d’études sur le livre au Québec publiées en 1838. Contrairement à ce à quoi on pourrait s’attendre, les hommes dissimulent leur identité dans une plus large proportion que les femmes. ISSN 1920-602X (numérique) Découvrir la revue Citer cet article Riddell, A. & Bassett, T. J. (2020). The Class of 1838: A Social History of the First Victorian Novelists. Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture, 11(2). https://doi.org/10.7202/1070272ar Tous droits réservés © Groupe de recherches et d’études sur le livre au Québec, Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. L’utilisation des 2020 services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’Université de Montréal, l’Université Laval et l’Université du Québec à Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ THE CLASS OF 1838: A Social History of the First Victorian Novelists Allen RIDDELL and Troy J. BASSETT Indiana University Bloomington and Purdue University Fort Wayne Following the work of Raymond Williams, this article examines the 81 fiction authors published in 1838. First, we examined the social origins of the authors as judged by their fathers’ occupations. Whereas the majority of adults living in the British Isles during this period were working class, the majority of the Class of ABSTRACT 1838 originated in the upper classes. Second, we traced their careers by finding their ages at first published novel, their total novels, and the span of their careers. Though no significant differences were found between the careers of men and women authors, there was a general lack of persistence to write a second novel. And last, we inspected the title pages of the 87 published works of fiction in 1838 to investigate the ways in which authors presented themselves to readers. Contrary to expectations, men authors were more likely than women authors to conceal their identities. S’inspirant des travaux de Raymond Williams, le présent article porte sur les 81 écrivains publiés en 1838. Nous examinons d’abord l’origine sociale de ceux-ci, établie en fonction de l’activité du père. Alors que la majorité des adultes des îles Britanniques appartenaient à l’époque à la classe ouvrière, la plupart des écrivains RÉSUMÉ de la cohorte de 1838 émanaient des classes supérieures. Nous dressons ensuite un portrait de leur carrière à partir des données suivantes : âge auquel ils ont publié leur premier roman, nombre de romans publiés et nombre d’années sur lequel leur carrière s’est échelonnée. Aucune différence significative ne se dégage entre la carrière des hommes et celle des femmes. Cependant, on remarque l’absence d’un second roman chez nombre des membres de la cohorte. Enfin, nous nous attardons à la manière dont les écrivains se présentent au lectorat sur la page titre des 87 œuvres de fiction publiées en 1838. Contrairement à ce à quoi on pourrait s’attendre, les hommes dissimulent leur identité dans une plus large proportion que les femmes. Keywords Authors, British Isles, class, novel, Victorian Period 1 Vol. 11, n° 2 | Spring 2020 « Book Commerce Book Carnival » Mots-clés Auteurs, îles britanniques, classe sociale, roman, époque victorienne In 1961, Raymond Williams conducted the first study of the social origins of English authors in his landmark work of cultural history The Long Revolution. For his data set, Williams collected biographical information of 350 authors born between 1470 and 1920, relying mainly on the original Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) as his source of information for biographical details, primarily the writers’ social origins, educations, and non-literary occupations. The rationale for his investigation was the question of the connection between literature and novelists’ social background: We argue a good deal about the effects on literature of the social origins of writers, their form of education, their ways of getting a living, and the kinds of audience they expect and get. Theoretical questions, often very difficult, are of course involved in this argument, but the most obvious difficulty is the lack of any outline of facts by which some of the theoretical principles could be tested.1 Williams’s discussion of the social origins of writers, as determined by the “social and economic standing of the father,” is most thorough. As Williams’s data show, over the course of five centuries, the social origins of writers do not reflect the social origins of individuals in the broader population. The majority of writers in Williams’s analysis come from upper- or middle-class social origins. Their fathers tended to be either nobility, gentry, professionals, or (prosperous) merchants. Few of the writers’ fathers were craftsmen, tradesmen, (poor) farmers, or labourers. (Williams uses these eight broad categories to describe a writer’s social origins.) To narrow the focus to nineteenth-century writers, of the 56 writers in Williams’s sample born between approximately 1780 and 1830, 43 (77 percent) come from upper- or middle-class social origins.2 Assuming that the share of the population from upper- or middle-class social origins is smaller than 20 percent, Williams’s data show that individuals from the upper and middle classes are far more likely to become writers than individuals who grew up in working-class families. 2 Vol. 11, n° 2 | Spring 2020 « Book Commerce Book Carnival » In spite of Williams’s call for research in this area, the sociology of authorship in nineteenth-century English literary studies never took off as a subject of sustained research. Richard D. Altick followed Williams, publishing in 1962 a study of 1,100 British authors active between 1800 and 1935 based on the authors listed in the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, the DNB, and a few similar reference books, where he found the social origins of his authors to be overwhelmingly upper and middle class.3 A few years later, Diana F. Laurenson studied the lives of 170 authors chosen randomly from 850 authors listed in the DNB and Everyman’s Dictionary of Literary Biography who were born or died between 1860 and 1910 and she likewise found that writers mainly arise from the middle class.4 The study of the sociology of authorship then endured a lapse of nearly two decades before Nigel Cross (1985) used applications to the Royal Literary Fund to access the lives of working authors during the century—notably, his source, by its nature, includes many more writers who do not have entries in the DNB or similar references. Gaye Tuchman used the DNB and the archives of the publisher Macmillan to assess the position of women authors in the literary marketplace during the nineteenth century, finding that women authors were systematically marginalized in the literary marketplace.5 John Sutherland, in “The Victorian Novelists: Who were They?”, examined the lives and literary careers of a sample of 878 Victorian novelists in order to trace their career trajectories, focusing especially on the differences between men and women novelists.6 Since then, little activity studying the sociology of authorship can be observed, despite developments that might seem to facilitate such research, such as library digitization and the increasing use of data-rich methods in literary studies.7 Using the data in At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837–1901 (ATCL), this article studies the cohort of 81 fiction authors active in 1838. This cohort, which we call the Class of 1838, includes every writer who published a work of fiction in the British Isles during 1838. (As the Victorian period begins in June 1837, we can safely label these authors published in 1838 as the earliest Victorian novelists.) Assuming that a novel being published in 1838 (instead of a neighbouring year) is conditionally independent of any particular demographic features associated with its author, then what we learn from the characteristics of novelists in this cohort likely holds generally for novelists active in the late 1830s and early 1840s. 3 Vol. 11, n° 2 | Spring 2020 « Book Commerce Book Carnival » Our study differs in three ways from the earlier diachronic studies.
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