“Anti-Bleak House”: Advertising and the Victorian Novel Steinlight, Emily.

Narrative, Volume 14, Number 2, May 2006, pp. 132-162 (Article)

Published by The Ohio State University Press DOI: 10.1353/nar.2006.0007

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nar/summary/v014/14.2steinlight.html

Access Provided by City University of New York at 01/31/12 12:45AM GMT Emily Steinlight

“ANTI-BLEAK HOUSE”: Advertising and the Victorian Novel

INTRODUCTION

Allow me to begin by deferring all questions concerning the value of the archive, the uses and abuses of historical materialism, and problems of method in general; these questions will return, no doubt, but for now I would like to posit, pro- visionally, a contemporary reader—a naïve reader: myself, for example. This naïve reader, let us say, wanders into a special collections library and sees for the first time something that many other (less naïve) readers have undoubtedly seen over the past century and a half: a copy of the first edition of a well-known Victorian serial novel. She had probably read somewhere or other that this novel, like so many of the most famous Victorian novels, was originally published in parts—but perhaps this fact never struck her as particularly significant. Upon opening to the first printed page, however, our reader is startled to note something she had not read: the text of the novel is preceded by pages upon pages of advertisements. Not being a Victorian her- self, she is unlikely to turn past these ads as she might turn past a page of ads in a contemporary magazine; like messages addressed to someone other than the reader, the ads present at once an obstacle to reading and an inducement to read on, or to read differently. Poring over the advertising section, she is overtaken with the odd sense she had somehow misunderstood what this novel was—maybe even to the point of beginning to suspect that the entire category of the novel might require some reevaluation. But now I am getting ahead of myself. For the time being, let us leave this reader at the library and proceed without her. I have framed a certain kind of conventional narrative that is limited in its uses for a reading, much less a theory, of the novel. Such narratives of discovery are often freighted with strange and conflicting notions about the value of objects and our own

Emily Steinlight is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Brown University. Her current research focuses on periodicals, print media, and the 19th-century novel. NARRATIVE, Vol. 14, No. 2 (May 2006) Copyright 2006 by The Ohio State University Advertising and the Victorian Novel 133 interpretive authority as subjects. (I would not want, for instance, to insist upon the “radical alterity” of a musty page of print—much less to unearth something called “the real.”) Yet, if this particular archival reverie extends beyond the problem of his- toricizing the reader, or of positing a reading subject at all, it might offer a prelimi- nary means of framing another task: that of rethinking not only the Victorian novel’s relationship to the mass culture of industrial production from which it emerges, but also its discursive, formal and material interdependence with the modern system of print advertising. This system may prove critically important to the novel as an insti- tution. In order to offer any speculation at all on the institutions of the Victorian novel, however, I think we are bound to begin with one particular institution by the name of Charles Dickens. In what follows, I will draw upon the example Dickens’s serial writing—focusing particularly on Bleak House and its “Advertiser” as a sort of case study—so as to examine the relation between advertising discourse and the Vic- torian serial novel. I will offer readings of this material that point beyond the specific literary and commercial texts in question, ultimately with a view to the broader the- oretical implications of advertising on reading, authorship, and the study of the novel.

THE SERIAL NOVEL AND THE DICKENS ADVERTISER

First, a brief history: In April of 1836, Chapman and Hall began releasing seri- alized monthly installments of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Though the author—whose previous work was signed only “Boz”—was known mainly for his newspaper journalism1 and short “sketches” for the Morning Chroni- cle and other papers, the demand for his first novel (if we can call it that) quickly grew to tremendous proportions. By the time of Queen Victoria’s coronation in 1837, the Pickwick Papers were selling up to 40,000 copies a month—quite possibly, at that time, the best-selling new work of fiction in literary history (Law 14, Feltes 2). Only two years after the first issue of Pickwick went to press, Dickens was at work on his third novel, Nicholas Nickleby, which entered publication in April of 1838— even before his second, Oliver Twist, was complete. By this point in his career, he was already far and away the most popular and best-known writer in England.2 While Dickens was not the first novelist to publish in parts, he was very likely the most commercially successful in this print medium—indeed, so much so that throughout the years of its publication, the most recently published part of his latest novel would often be available at newsstands, for the price of one shilling, alongside the daily newspapers and magazines. The 1840s saw a proliferation of hopeful imi- tators eager to profit from the serial form, but the ones who enjoyed the largest suc- cess were generally those of established reputation, and Dickens outdistanced them all in sales and celebrity.3 He released all fifteen of his novels in serialized form—six in weekly or monthly magazine serials and nine in monthly numbers. By the early 1850s, after the staggering success of his eighth novel, David Copperfield, Dickens had become a national literary icon; the author’s name was, as his aptly named jour- nal would have it, a “household word.” 134 Emily Steinlight

In March of 1852, Bradbury & Evans began publishing Bleak House in nine- teen monthly installments, or “numbers,” concluding in September of 1853. Each of these numbers was printed separately in a short, unbound volume in paper covers, with illustrations by Hablôt Knight Browne preceding the text. Each four-chapter in- stallment of the novel, consisting of thirty-two pages of uninterrupted text, is also preceded by an advertising section that constitutes just less than half of the entire volume. A large percentage of the ads are publishers’ notices for a simply enormous quantity of recent or forthcoming books (including a clothbound Dickens anthology known as the “Cheap Edition,” as well as Dickens’s Child’s History of England). Not surprisingly, many of these are novels—some long forgotten and virtually impossi- ble to find today, alongside other major novels by the author and his best-known con- temporaries, including Thackeray, Trollope, Gaskell, and Bulwer-Lytton. Also advertised are several major American novels, including Hawthorne’s Blithedale Ro- mance and an upcoming serial edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The publishers’ pages also offer an astonishingly diverse assortment of new and forthcoming non-fiction books, ranging in subject from Thomas Carlyle’s Life of John Sterling, to Edward P. Thompson (the naturalist)’s Passion of Animals and a Sketch of the History of Monkeys, as well as botanists’ studies of plant life in India and China, and various ethnographic studies of Mexico, Peru, Canada, Russia, Egypt and elsewhere. There are accounts of Arctic explorations, a Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa, a memoir entitled Settlers and Convicts; or, Recollections of Sixteen Years Labour in the Backwoods of Australia (whose author is listed only as “an emi- grant mechanic”), and a rather different fictional memoir entitled Confessions of an Etonian. Also featured are various philosophical studies and a wide array of religious pamphlets and publications, including Fourteen Sermons on the Resurrection, Atheism Considered Theologically and Politically, and Jeremy Taylor’s Rules and Exercises of Holy Dying. There is a large selection of historical and contemporary biography, a considerable number of writings on the emergence of the steam engine, various treatises and personal reflections on labor, and numerous volumes of ancient and modern history. There are also numerous fiction and poetry anthologies, including a collection of Ballads for the Times and a volume of Specimens of Old In- dian Poetry. Several ads announce a series of “Indestructible Books for Children” and list multiple other children’s titles, including The Doll and Her Friends; The Mine; or, Subterranean Wonders: an Account of the Operations of the Miner, and the Products of his Labour; and The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse. There are also illustrated books intended for adults; the first serial number of Master Humphrey’s Clock (in which The Old Curiosity Shop began publication as one of the “Personal Adventures of Master Humphrey”)4 includes a large ad for a series called Heads of the People: being Picture of the English. These books consist of a number of etchings, accompanied by “Literary Descriptions” (from writers including Thack- eray, Leigh Hunt, Captain Glascock, an unnamed MP, and others), representing “British Faces and British Manners—British Virtues and British Vices—British Lib- erality and British Prejudice . . . delineated with the pencil and the pen of truth” and, the publishers claim, “destined to become a part of the country’s literature” because they offer “Pictures of HUMAN LIFE; not dreamt of by the fashionable novelmonger Advertising and the Victorian Novel 135

. . . but LIFEASITIS.” (Printed in the front matter of a novel, such a claim certainly has interesting implications.) Several publishers’ advertisements offer maps, guides, and reference books, from the Eighth Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, to a London Directory and Court Guide for 1853 (“containing upwards of 120,000 names and addresses”), to a handsome Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Industrial Exhibition of 1851, to The Il- lustrated Temperance Almanack, to A Military Manual of Field Operations, to a Dic- tionary of Domestic Medicine and Household Surgery, to a Practical Manual of Photography. A number of professional and popular science texts are also featured, including an anatomical study of The Hand: Its Mechanisms and Endowments, and a great many more general books on physics and chemistry. In addition, there are var- ious guides and books of personal advice—some on investment and finance, others dealing with such questions as How to See the British Museum in Four Visits, still others with How to Print, and When to Publish: Practical Advice to Writers. Also in- cluded, of course, are multitudes of “domestic guides” (tendered largely—though not exclusively—to women, for also listed are such titles as The Working Man’s Friend and Family Instructor). The majority of these domestic guides are books of advice on matrimony, motherhood, housewifery, “family worship,” gardening, and cooking (including a work entitled What Shall We Have for Dinner?, whose author claims the perfectly Dickensian name of “Lady Maria Clutterbuck”). In addition to this dizzying array of ads for publishers, bookstores, libraries, newspapers and magazines, there are assorted offerings of wigs (including Ross and Son’s “Invisible Ventilating Heads of Hair”), Macassar oil, “bear’s grease,” and other hair treatments, watches, pipes, and an array of gloves and ladies’ bonnets. There are “new feeding bottles for infants”—and for their mothers, “Amesbury’s Patent Body Supports,” which provide “a substitute for stays” and “guard the Spine and Chest against Deformity.” The body of the reader (female or male) is the concern of much of advertising discourse. As the ads variously suggest, this body might be cared for by several different types of commodities: protected from the elements by “alpaca umbrellas” and the “Versatio, or reversible coat”; nourished and delighted by a wide selection of food items; clothed in the “Gorget Patent Self Adjusting Shirt”; beauti- fied by a range of cosmetics and products that minister to its unfortunate bouts of “Redness and Subcutaneous Eruptions”; and cured by a diverse array of specific and generally salubrious home-remedies, including the ubiquitous “Parr’s Life-Pills,” “Ali-Ahmed’s Healing Plaister,” “Dr. Locock’s Pulmonic Wafers” and “Female Wafers,” various gout and rheumatic pills, lozenges, botanical extracts, tonics and elixirs, and even “Pulvermacher’s Patent Portable Hydro-Electric Chain, for per- sonal use.” The reader’s other desires and needs might be served by a daguerreotype por- trait gallery, iron bedsteads, “Gutta Percha lining for boxes” (in an ad specifically ad- dressed “To Emigrants, especially such as are proceeding to the Gold Diggings”), fire-proof safes, steel pens, “improved adhesive envelopes,” all manner of ink and writing paper, the services of several confirmed expert handwriting-analysts, various financial and legal services, and mutual life insurance. Yet, amidst all other products and services (other than books, of course), the overcoat is perhaps most pervasively 136 Emily Steinlight advertised. The inside front cover of No. 1 of Bleak House features an ad for “Ed- miston’s Pocket Siphonia, or waterproof overcoat,” citing, as was the convention, the highly laudatory “opinions of the press” on the quality of the raincoat. (Also listed in the inventory of articles for sale are the mysterious “newly invented swimming gloves,” which are, the makers attest, “of great propelling power.”) What is perhaps most interesting in this advertisement, however, is the em- phatic statement in bold capitals “NOTICE.—NAME & ADDRESS STAMPED IN- SIDE. NONE OTHERS ARE GENUINE.” In a great many ads printed in these volumes, this rhetoric of authenticity (the injunction to “accept no imitations”) is re- peated and underscored. Much like the literary property of the author, the intellectual property represented by the commodity is defended in the form of stamps and seals, personal signatures and patent-protected “proprietary processes”: “Prepared only by ROBERT BARKER,” asserts an ad for a medicine for infants, “CAUTION.—Observe the name of ‘ATKINSON & BARKER,’ on the Government Stamp.” On the same page, just below, Joseph Gillott (“Metallic Pen Maker to the Queen”) concludes a third- person description of his merchandise with the statement, “Each pen bears the im- press of his name as a guarantee of quality . . . with Label outside, and fac-simile of his signature.” At times, the discourse of advertising must repudiate the competing claims and discredit the authenticity of a fraudulent imitator: “CAUTION.—E. Moses & Son have no connection5 with any other house, in or out of London, except the following. . . .” Here, the ad is not merely an appeal to the consumer but a claim to creative and productive agency: the name of the patented product or system, like the name of a novel author, serves as a kind of signature. This curious intersection of advertising and the novel—in form, in rhetoric, and otherwise—is the subject of the current study. The advertisements that appear be- tween the paper covers of the serial speak volumes both of the modes of production and of the imaginative economies of the novel itself. I am not going to argue, how- ever, that the language of advertising “reflects” or “imitates” the language of litera- ture (whatever that might mean); I will argue, instead, that what takes place in the serial novel itself has much to do with what takes place in the advertising section from which it remains strategically separate. As we have noted in the affirmations of authenticity and the repeated warnings6 mentioned above, and as we may observe throughout the pages of the Advertiser, symbolic struggles are constantly being en- acted in the discourses of property and copyright. The zone of commercial solicita- tion that frames the novel becomes a crucially important space of negotiation in which the territories of authorship and agency are mapped out and contested in the form of claims to the rights of property—authorial and commercial alike. Though clearly set apart from the privileged aesthetic category of literature, the ads that appear in the serial novel are nonetheless forms of writing whose participa- tion in an economy of capitalist exchange both marks and in turn is marked by the category of the novel as a commodity form. Printed ads in the Victorian periodical press are not merely an essential source of revenue to defray the costs of mass publi- cation and make the novel possible; they are also involved in the aesthetic and com- mercial enterprises of the novel and implicated in the polemics of gender, of class, of race, of nation, and of empire, which define the fields of political struggle within Fig. 1. Advertisement. In Bleak House No. 1 (March 1852) 138 Emily Steinlight which literature situates itself. Often enough, they appear on the pages of print that precede and follow the text of the novel itself, separate from the literary work but close enough to touch it—close enough, perhaps, even to share in some part of its claim to a privileged space of representation where public and private meet. As Jen- nifer Wicke has suggested in her ground-breaking Advertising Fictions, “literature and advertisement are cultural kindred” (3). This potential kinship, however, is limited both by the function of authorship and by the orders of temporality to which the two divergent texts belong. Not being the product of the author’s conscious creation, and circumscribed by a more imme- diate and temporary commercial objective, the ads vanish with the first printing, and it is a matter of course that they are not to be reproduced in later editions. The novel can (obviously) exist independently of the ads, much as the ads can exist indepen- dently of the novel, yet the particular way in which these texts have coincided in a common mass medium is nonetheless highly suggestive. It seems worth considering that the institutional and discursive apparatuses of advertisement might be, in a very significant sense, the repressed history of the novel—at once its implied other and its most secret self. Even in its absence, advertising marks a space that tells us some- thing critical about the ways in which the novel understands itself as a cultural ob- ject, not only in terms of what it is, but also in terms of what it is not. In the interest of articulating this unlikely relationship between literature and advertisement, I would like to posit that the two forms of writing have a common history and a sub- stantial formal and aesthetic interrelation. In their literal proximity, economic inter- dependency, and shared discursive labor in mediating between the arenas of “writing” and “the market,” the novel and the ad are peculiar counterparts—and, as I hope to demonstrate, they often share far more in common than the simple historical fact of having coexisted in print.

“THIS EXCELLENT MEDIUM OF PUBLICITY”

Though the text of Dickens’s Bleak House is for all intents and purposes still the text of Bleak House with or without these ads, there is something in them that begs not to be ignored. Throughout the novel, the narrative is structured around a set of uncertainties with regard to matters of legality, property, inheritance, family lin- eage, and legitimacy that follow from various modes of copying and reproduction. These processes seem always to produce disastrous effects and insoluble problems of subjective agency.7 The relationship between copying or mechanical reproduction (both in the advertisements and in the literary text itself) and these commercial invo- cations of uniqueness and authenticity is striking. Indeed, some of the advertise- ments for the services of copyists, law stationers and lithographers, as well as actual printing machines and copying presses, resonate so much with the narrative of Bleak House that the effect is almost uncanny. (One of the ads that appears in various forms in every number of Bleak House is for “Waterlow’s Patent Improved Autographic Press, or portable printing machine . . . by means of which every person may become his own printer”8; given Dickens’s concerns about the piracy of his works overseas, Advertising and the Victorian Novel 139 particularly by American printers, and his involvement in the campaign for “Interna- tional Copyright Law”9 in the United States, these advertisements for personal print- ing presses may be of interest.) While it may quite simply be worthy of attention that images and voices of con- sumer culture appear and speak before, after, within, alongside, and even to this lit- erary text that was itself a best-seller long before it was a classic, I would go further; I would argue that these ads are not merely curiosities for the historical imagination but companion texts that claim a definite relationship to the novel. In order to demonstrate this relationship, we need look no further than the inside back cover of No. 1: a full-page advertisement for winter overcoats, under the rubric “ANTI- BLEAK HOUSE.” This billing (prepared by the clothier E. Moses of Aldgate for the first published number of the novel, prior to its publication) is followed by a long paragraph of ad copy that luridly describes the bitterness and gloom of a cold house. The ads of E. Moses & Son, which appear on the inside back cover of each in- stallment of Bleak House, often serve as vivid reminders to later readers of the sim- ple fact of the passage of time throughout the course of the novel’s serialized publication, with alternating references to “April Showers,” “May Flowers,” upcom- ing Parliamentary elections and various other political and cultural events of the day. Though the ad copy is frequently written in florid, novelistic prose, in a style of hack-“literariness” that Raymond Williams would describe as “commercial purple” (174), I think it is likely that the copy under the title of “ANTI-BLEAK HOUSE” in this particular advertisement is meant as an actual literary pastiche, recognizably rendered in the narrative style of those long, sensationally descriptive passages of a Dickens novel:

A BLEAK HOUSE that is indeed, where the north winds meet to howl an igno- ble concert, and bitter blasts mourn like tortured spirits of rebels, who, though prisoners, are unsubdued; where the whirlwind and the hurricane vow their vengeance; and the walls and timbers creek resistance, and like wounded gladi- ators, rise again boldly to defy the antagonist. Woe to the inhabitant of the Bleak House if he is not armed with the weapons of an OVERCOAT and a SUIT of FASHIONABLE and substantial Clothing, such as can only be obtained at E. MOSES & SON’S Establishments, Aldgate and Minories, New Oxford-street, and Hart-street, London; or 36, Fargate, Sheffield, or 19, Bridge-street, Bradford, Yorkshire. . . .

These inspired ads from the clothier, which appear in virtually every Dickens novel, are widely varied in genre, including quasi-journalistic reportage and com- mentary, brief fictional narratives, sketches and personal reflections, and a number of lengthy doggerel poems printed in both the “Martin Chuzzlewit Advertiser” and the “Dombey and Son Advertiser”). In Bleak House, the ads specifically refer to the novel itself on several subsequent occasions. At the end of No. 4, there appears another ad in this series entitled “A Suit in Chancery and a Suit out of Chancery,” written in a similar style, the central conceit being an obvious pun on a “suit” of clothes and the seemingly interminable lawsuit in Bleak House’s infamous Court of Chancery: Fig. 2. Advertisement. In Bleak House No. 1 (March 1852). Advertising and the Victorian Novel 141

Now the difference between a Suit in Chancery and a Suit out of Chancery is just this:—in the former a man is every moment tormented, worried, plagued, twisted, sharpened, and threatened, until his very visage becomes like a Chancery Suit—quite a supernatural affair. But a Suit out of Chancery, espe- cially a Suit of Summer Dress from the Establishment of E. MOSES & SON is light, brilliant, heartcheering, and brainreviving; brushing up one’s spirits with the most gratifying assurances of comfort and PLEASURE. But a Suit in Chancery is a very different matter, with this precious portion if a gentleman has property he is in a fair way for losing it; if he has a good suit he may wear it out in ex- pectation, and possibly may find it difficult to get another. On the other hand, a Suit out of Chancery, from E. MOSES & SON’s, is the best portion of a gentle- man’s estate, maintained at the least expense, exceeding the most sanguine ex- pectations—the very essence of all novel and fascinating styles.

Here, the text of the ad not only makes reference to the subject matter of the novel; it also offers a similar treatment of what we might call the hypostasized general subject of the Victorian novel’s narrative. Much as the Dickens novel solicits its reader through various forms of rhetoric, appealing to that projected reader’s presumed common humanity and sympathy, the advertisement hails that same reader as the generalized subject of consumption.10 Its appeal is not merely a transparent com- mand to buy a product; supplementing the novel, the ad employs a language of affect in order to arouse a sympathetic response. In proto-Dickensian rhetoric, the “Suit out of Chancery” is produced not as the fulfillment of a simple need, but as the expres- sion of desire. Its properties are not simply material; it is also “brilliant, heartcheer- ing, and brainreviving,” and, not unlike the novel itself, it seduces the reader with promises of “comfort and pleasure.”11 Like Marx’s hypothetical coat in the first chapter of Capital, the hypothetical suit of E. Moses & Son appears as a kind of in- human specter of commodity fetishism, which stands as the “material embodiment of value” (Capital 141) and confronts its equivalent form (finding recognition, in spite of “its buttoned-up appearance” as “a splendid kindred soul, the soul of value”), and speaks “the language of commodities” (143). This language, which produces the commodity as a subject capable of entering into social relations with other com- modities and with the consumer, also works to inspire sentiment and sympathy in concert with the work of the novel itself. At the end of the last serial part of Bleak House (the doubly published numbers 19 and 20), virtually guaranteed by its spot on the inside back cover of the last in- stallment of the novel to be the last thing one will read, the final serial ad appears, en- titled “THE CLOSING OF THE STORY”:

WHEN an Author has nearly spun out the thread of his narrative, his descrip- tions have connected him and the public so long that they have arrived at a pretty good understanding, and possibly the Author thinks it is time to look out for some fresh subject to keep up the communication. The good understanding between E. MOSES & SON and the world’s public, is the best basis on which Business communications can be established. The 142 Emily Steinlight

interest excited by their NOVEL Styles of ATTIRE cannot be excelled, and the comfort enjoyed in the choicest ARTICLES OF DRESS has originated and long continued an intimate Business acquaintance with them, their friends, and their public. . . .

The numerous puns on “novel” (and here, “articles” as well) are a peculiar trope in this series of ads, many of which play on the suggestion of an analogy between Dick- ens’s literary work and the work of the name-brand clothier on the basis of both qual- ity and popular recognition. In this regard, it may be useful to consider the phenomenon of Dickens’s authorship specifically as a commercial phenomenon. In these ads—even in the ones that specifically allude to “legal expectations”12 and to the “suit in Chancery” that figures in the literary text—the use of Dickens and of his nov- els relies upon a relatively superficial awareness of the substance of the texts them- selves. Though E. Moses (or perhaps his son), like many of his friends, customers and fellow Londoners, probably did read Bleak House, he might just as easily have drawn upon the mass-cultural ‘buzz’ surrounding the novel without actually reading it. Merely by virtue of living in London from 1852 to 1853, one could hardly have es- caped some discussion of this best-selling serial and would probably be sufficiently familiar with the story at least to make allusion to its most salient figures. As Wicke suggests (with credit to Orwell’s essay on reading Dickens), “While Tolstoy, for ex- ample, must be read to be known, there is another possible road to Dickens. Dickens is a phenomenon of mass culture, a writer who is present at the creation of advertising as a system, and whose work and personal career participate in shaping that system” (18). One can know Dickens without necessarily reading Dickens. Or perhaps, to put it differently, reading means something broader than we might tend to think. Describing Charles Dickens as the most eminently knowable of authors, Or- well, in a modest personal essay, declares him to be “an institution” (98). In compar- ing Dickens’s novels to those of Tolstoy, Orwell remarks that while “Tolstoy’s characters can cross a frontier, Dickens’s can be portrayed on a cigarette-card” (107). There is certainly some sense in this; Dickens was in his own time and is undoubt- edly still the most “familiar” of all Victorian novelists. With regard to merchandiz- ing, there is in the case of Dickens a whole other dimension to what Foucault so aptly describes as “the author-function.” The celebrated novelist’s name and the names of his characters were used to market quite an assortment of paraphernalia for fans and collectors in England and the United States. Given the affinity of Dicken- sian characters for particular fetish objects that participate in the narrative’s descrip- tion of their signature attributes, the conversion of character into metonymic merchandise can hardly be surprising. In addition to the cigarette-card, the much- cited “Pickwick13 cigar” and the “Weller cab,” the market produced dozens of other Dickensian objets: “Sairey Gamp umbrellas, Dolly Vardon aprons, Mr. Turveydrop shoe polish, Captain Cuttle tobacco, Micawber pens, canes, gaiters, hats, chintz fab- rics imprinted with Dickens scenes, and even corduroy trousers came out with some variety of Dickens’s imprimatur” (Wicke 21, 52).14 The perfect marketability of Dickens as a sort of “trademark” or “brand name” is evident not only in this profusion of commercial products named for his characters, Advertising and the Victorian Novel 143 but also in the responses of other advertisers to the great publicity his phenomenally popular novels generated. One company, strikingly enough, goes so far as to address what is ostensibly a business letter of thanks to “Chas. Dickens, Esq.,” which appears on the first page of the “Bleak House Advertiser” for the month of May (No. 3), as follows:

SIR,

We thank you for your new work. Though its name is “BLEAK HOUSE,” we know well that its inmates will be warm and life-like. We thank you for it, not only for the pleasure that we, in common with all other readers, shall receive in its perusal, but we thank you on more solid grounds ; we thank you for it as a matter of business. If it be true, that an observer must know the existence of a place before he can arrange for visiting it, it must be equally true, that the public must be aware of the existence of an establishment before they can contemplate patro- nising it ; and further, that they must be aware of the advantages offered by a particular concern before they will select that in preference to any other. On these grounds, then, we thank you for “BLEAK HOUSE” in a business point of view, because it affords us the opportunity of conveying to all its readers the advantages of our Establishment, and the principles on which it continues to be conducted. Many thousands of readers have, we doubt not, entered upon their tasks since even “DAVID COPPERFIELD” monthly appeared, between his “green leaves,” and some of these readers may note with favour the statement we here subjoin. “We keep for the selection of purchasers all kinds of Tea and Coffee fit for use imported into this country, and we supply them at the most moderate cost at which they can possibly be sold. “We have endeavored to render ourselves particularly celebrated for supply- ing Teas of the most sound and excellent qualities. “We have a Patented Invention for Roasting Coffee, Cocoa, &c. in Silver. By this plan the ordinary evils of roasting such produce in a cylinder made of base metal are avoided, whilst the cost of the produce is not increased. “We deliver by our Vans all Orders from any part of the Metropolitan Dis- tricts, within eight miles of St. Paul’s, on the day after such orders are given. “We also send into the Country, free of carriage, all Orders, if they be ac- companied by a remittance for payment, whether by half-notes, Post Office Order, or otherwise, provided goods ordered amount to £2 or upwards. “We sell our goods only for immediate payment. Our tariff or profit is fixed without allowing for the interest on capital necessary to support a heavy amount of debts.” For the facilities that this excellent medium of publicity has allowed us for making known the above particulars, we sincerely thank you, and we trust and hope that by our care and attention, and by the excellence of the Goods we sup- ply, those readers of “BLEAK HOUSE” who may turn their favourable patronage 144 Emily Steinlight

to “Number One,” will never regret having glanced over the first page of its white paper, on this 1st day of May. Wishing that you may long live to give birth to heaps of “HOUSEHOLD WORDS,” and to numerous Brothers and Sisters of “DAVID COPPERFIELD,”

We remain, Sir, Very respectfully, Your obedient Servants, DAKIN & COMPANY.

No. 1, ST. PAUL’S CHURCH-YARD,LONDON.

May 1st, 1852.

This “letter,” which I have reproduced in its entirety because I think it merits some attention, is one of the most overtly opportunistic advertisements of its kind. In pre- tending to a kind of quaintness, it achieves a comical effect (not least of all in the rather infelicitous expression of its wish that the author “give birth to heaps . . .”15 etc.). Taking for granted the putative literary value of the present novel as a source of “pleasure” and as a vehicle for the sentimental productions of realist narrative, whose characters will undoubtedly be “warm and life-like,” the advertisers speak di- rectly to the commercial value of “this excellent medium of publicity” for them- selves as purveyors of fine coffee and tea. Punning on the “green leaves” of the serial parts of David Copperfield by way of implying that their own tea leaves represent a commercial product of comparable value to that of the novel, Dakin & Company draw attention to the material aspect of the novel: the paper covers in which each in- stallment is bound. Placing still greater emphasis on the “white paper” on which their own notice, like the literary text, is printed, the advertisers indirectly address the “many thou- sands of readers” through a fictive address to the author (imaginatively placing their potential patron in the privileged position of reading Dickens’s mail, much as Mr Tulkinghorn misappropriates Lady Dedlock’s private letters in Bleak House), inter- pellating the individual reading subject simultaneously as a consumer of cultural and material goods. In the form of the letter, a direct, “personal” communication—os- tensibly the polite expression of goodwill between two gentlemen, writer and reader—is foregrounded, ironically, as homologous to the entirely impersonal rela- tion of “the public” to “an establishment.” Like the ads of E. Moses & Son, this ad makes use of rhetorical devices and modes of address that both replicate and compli- cate the work of the literary narrative and that implicate the object of advertising in the novel’s claim to symbolic capital. After expounding upon the various advantages of their unique products and ser- vices, and having invited readers to nickname their company “Number One” (after its business address at No. 1, St. Paul’s Church-Yard) and to be reminded of their presence on “the first page,” Dakin & Co. offer their compliments also to Dickens’s journal, Household Words, as well as to his past, present and future novels. The Advertising and the Victorian Novel 145 invocation of these other texts serves a clear purpose: to associate the company’s name with the eminent ‘brand-name’ of Dickens and his best-selling authorial prod- ucts. The advertisers are, in effect, using this popular novel by name in order to pub- licize both their own products and their hopes that the novelist will continue to produce the media for further publicity for their company. The function of Bleak House, in this regard, is to advertise for Dakin & Company’s wares, to advertise for itself, and to advertise for the Dickens enterprise in general—and, in so doing, to en- dorse (by implication, at least) all the companies whose advertisements paid for the publication of the volume. This is certainly not a customary critical treatment of the novel qua literature, but to appreciate Bleak House “in a business point of view” is, in a sense, to acknowledge that other side of what this novel is. The ads that speak of (and to) the text from within its own green paper covers powerfully illustrate that there is yet another way of “reading” the novel. Further underscoring (but with an ironic twist) the commercial utility of the Dickens novel as a marketing system, an even earlier ad from the prolific E. Moses & Son, printed in the eighth number of David Copperfield, begins with a poem titled “A Proper Field for Copperfield.” The central trope of this poem is “circulation”: it begins, “Where shall we find the proper field / For circulating ‘Copperfield?’” De- scribing the novel as a “clever work” deserving of the attention of rich and poor, old and young alike, the unidentified “we” of the poem (E. Moses & Son themselves? E. Moses & Son and Dickens together? The publishers? All of the above?) concerns it- self with the question of how best to promote this work of literature. The poem fur- ther praises the novel by invoking not the fame of the author, but that of the business being advertised:

This novel merits to be read Wherever MOSES’ fame has spread; Which, like a banner, is unfurl’d Throughout the habitable world.

Inverting the logic of Dakin & Company’s reading of the novel as an “excellent medium of publicity” for their business, E. Moses’s poem suggests that their busi- ness is in fact a medium of publicity for the novel. The poem goes on to propose that the best possible means of selling this novel might be marketing it to the customers of the apparently world-renowned tailor shop:

If all who favor MOSES’ mart Would join and take a monthly part, The theme of our consideration Would have a wond’rous circulation.

Having thus performed a reversal the terms of the relationship between the novel and the advertisement so as to suggest (comically, but nonetheless audaciously) that it is in fact the former that relies upon the latter for its success, E. Moses concludes that his own loyal customer base is obviously “the proper field / For circulating ‘Copper- Fig. 3. Advertisement. In David Copperfield No. 8 (December 1849). Advertising and the Victorian Novel 147

field.’” Imaginatively assuming responsibility for the work of promoting the literary text in which it appears, the ad becomes the medium for a kind of self-mythologizing activity on the part of the business. The bold joke of this poem—that advertising pre- cedes the novel and gives it value by association with the celebrity of the business— is a joke that I think, for the purposes of this study, might almost be taken seriously. It is a claim to authority and agency in the process of literary and commercial reproduc- tion; from within a literary text of its own creation, the ad ascribes something like an “author function” to the producer of commodities. Further, we might say that the imagined readers of the novel are thus interpellated first as consumers of commercial goods and readers of advertising, and only second as readers of literature. Though there is an obvious and important difference between the status of the product of industrial mass production and the made-to-order suit of clothes adver- tised by Moses & Son, the representational system of advertising in which these things appear nonetheless bears some relation to another emerging literary dis- course: the commodity story. This popular genre, appearing in so many periodicals, often involves a manufactured object relating its own history of production in the first-person. In addition to the numerous instances in Victorian magazines of the “Story of a Pin” and such, there appears in an 1851 issue of Household Words a piece of writing titled “The Catalogue’s Account of Itself,” in which the Catalogue of the Great Exhibition speaks of its contents and of the exhibitors of commodities at the Crystal Palace—“most of them authors for the first time” (qtd. in Richards 63). Like this peculiar genre of fiction, the ads in the serial novel similarly suggest that the nar- rative of the life of a thing16 or a statement of its identity and inner spirit may easily find its way into literary form. In addressing themselves either to the reader, to the text, or to Dickens himself, the figured commodities in advertisements imply that the reader may be interpellated by the address of a thing.17 They display not only a cer- tain apparent agency, but also, a curious capacity to produce novelistic language.

“MUCH DISREGARDED MERCHANDISE”: THE COMMODITY AND THE NOVEL IN SYMBOLIC EXCHANGE

“We are so much in the habit of allowing impressions to be made upon us by external objects, which should be produced by reflection alone, but which, without such visible aids, often escape us; that I am not sure I should have been so thoroughly possessed by this one subject, but for the heaps of fantastic things I had seen huddled together in the curiosity-dealer’s warehouse. These, crowd- ing upon my mind, in connexion with the child, and gathering round her, as it were, brought her condition palpably before me. I had her image, without any effort of imagination, surrounded and beset by everything that was foreign to its nature, and furthest removed from the sympathies of her sex and age. . . . As it was, she seemed to exist in a kind of allegory; and having these shapes about her, claimed my interest so strongly, that (as I have already remarked) I could not dismiss her from my recollection, do what I would.” —Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop 20–22 148 Emily Steinlight

Returning now to Marx’s suggestion that the commodity itself speaks a lan- guage, I think it might be observed that it is just this language in which the novel finds itself caught. Much as the language of value allows the tea leaves of Dakin & Co. to hail the “green leaves” of the novel’s covers as a sort of equivalent form, thus interpellating the novel as a subject of economic exchange, the objects that populate the Dickens novel also participate in the social relations of its human subjects. To a certain extent, the anxiety this exchange produces is a question of proportion; as Richards notes of the spectacular gigantism and visual semiotics of the object in Vic- torian advertising, “[e]xaggerated umbrellas, Cheshire cheeses, tubs of butter, and sides of bacon flaunted the assumption that commodities were fashioned on a human scale to serve human needs,” performing “a carnivalesque inversion18 of the low re- gard in which everyday articles were commonly held” (48–49). Not only in the Ad- vertiser, but also in the novel itself, the commodity emerges as a spectacular figure entirely out of proportion with the human, and various inanimate “products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own” (Marx, Capital 165). If Marx’s description of the subjective effects of commodity fetishism sounds conspicuously like a description of the novelistic production of character, perhaps there is some sense in this. Turning back to that memorable passage from The Old Curiosity Shop in which the sentimentalized Dickensian child, Little Nell, sleeps in- nocently in her grandfather’s shop—improbably framed by a host of inanimate ob- jects “crowding” the mind and memory of the observer—we might note that Master Humphrey’s “curiosity and interest” in the child is an obvious repetition of the lan- guage of the shop itself, and these sentiments find reinforcement in the spectacular objects that fill the room (12). As he admits, “I am not sure that I should have been so thoroughly possessed by this one subject, but for the heaps of fantastic things I had seen huddled together in the curiosity-dealer’s warehouse” (20). Here, too, the com- modity proliferates and accumulates along with (but also, apparently, in opposition to) the representation of another set of values understood as originating in human sympathy, inwardness and moral “imagination”—all of which ought to be (but are evidently not) resistant to the “impressions” produced by “external objects” (20). In the literary narrative, the incongruous image of the novelistic child “surrounded and beset by everything that was foreign to its nature” is both enabled in the observer’s memory and valued differentially by reference to the commodity form. Entering into the novel’s economies of subjectivity, the festishized commodity appears at times as a specter of the inhuman that threatens, in the medium of litera- ture, to elide the distinction between artistic and mechanical production. Returning to Bleak House, if the production of literary language in that novel—like the produc- tion of comparatively empty religious discourse by the unctuous Minister Chadband, a sort of sermonizing machine who actually appears to run on oil and “may be de- scribed as always becoming a kind of considerable Oil Mills, or other large factory for the production of that article on a wholesale scale” (307)—is implicitly in danger of becoming a mechanical process within an industrialized publishing industry, this danger is expressed in the novel’s constant repudiation of the commodity form and of the system of industrial production. Advertising and the Victorian Novel 149

Though Chadband may be the only character explicitly compared to a factory, he is really one of many mechanical apparatuses that take human form in Bleak House. Against the grain of its own conventionally humanist inclinations, the narra- tive produces a set of characters recognizable mainly through their synechdochic speech mannerisms and a limited range of other tics and quirks, and whose mecha- nistic function is to repeat and reproduce themselves to the point of absurdity. Like “Nemo” (or Captain Hawdon, that elusive father whom the text never sees alive), they are all, in a sense, copyists unto death. The device of repetition partakes of that exaggerated quality of idiosyncrasy popularly associated with the “Dickensian” character. Yet, this device may also serve a practical purpose in the medium of serial fiction: as Lee Erickson suggests, “[t]o help his readers remember his characters from one monthly number to the next, Dickens often reduced his minor characters to caricatures by having them speak repeated tags” (163).19 I would add, further, that it is no coincidence that these “repeated tags” in Dickensian narrative are also standard practice in the discourse of advertising that surrounds the serialized novel. In order to help readers remember the commodities for sale, advertisements repeat them- selves from one printing to the next, offering clipped syntax, unusual product names and catchphrases, images, taglines and other forms of shorthand—as we saw in the instance of Dakin & Co., who suggested that readers nickname their business “Num- ber One” (after its address and page number) in part, as a mnemonic device. The cre- ation of a consistent identity and “voice,” whether for a business or for a fictional character, relies upon the same principles. By force of repetition, the language of the commodity and the language of the novel alike are continually preserved against for- getfulness and inattention. To the extent that the work of serial narrative entails a practice of “advertising” for its characters, this practice meets with no small degree of internal resistance in Bleak House. In its drive to assert the humanity of its protagonists against the imper- sonality of the modern industrial regime, the government, the court system, and in- stitutions in general, the novel strains against itself to create the symbolic space in which the status of writing—unlike that of the commodity—can be represented as the product of individual human agency rather than of mechanical reproduction. The predominant metaphor for the author’s relationship to the text is the relationship of parent to child; in his Preface to the 1850 edition of David Copperfield, Dickens sen- timentally declares, “Of all my books, I like this the best. It will be easily believed that I am a fond parent to every child of my fancy, and that no one can ever love that family as dearly as I love them. But, like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is DAVID COPPERFIELD.” The advertisement for Dakin & Co. reflects an awareness of this conceit in its reference to Dickens’s ca- pacity to “give birth to . . . numerous Brothers and Sisters of “DAVID COPPERFIELD.” In equating the novel with the category of the human, and implicitly equating the writing process with childbirth, the author ascribes a certain “naturalness” to literary creation that elevates both process and product above the artificiality of the industrial reproduction of the book in print.20 Further underscoring the connection between writing and human conception, the narrative of Bleak House sublimates the illicit act of sexual reproduction in the 150 Emily Steinlight form of copying and other modes of duplication of documents. Esther, whose char- acter most readily embodies the novel as a “child” of Dickens, is revealed to be the daughter of a mysterious “Nemo,” who (like Dickens himself, in his earlier years) works as a law copyist; her parentage is established through a series of handwritten documents traced back to her father. The purpose of copying is, of course, to repro- duce an exact facsimile of the original, yet the many instances of copying and repro- duction in the text seem to suggest otherwise. There are only degenerate copies, all of which insistently retain traces of difference even in the handwriting (161), bearing the involuntary signature of the copyist as if to suggest that writing, by its very na- ture, cannot be mechanically reproduced. The evidentiary documents that ultimately serve to legitimate one Will over another in the Jarndyce suit simultaneously serve to de-legitimate Esther, revealing the discreditable history of her birth. Here and else- where, parenthood, filiation, and the purity of the familial line are registered as highly unstable, troubling the analogy between maternity/paternity and the produc- tion of texts. Nemo, identified by Mr Snagsby as “a Writer who lodges just over on the op- posite side of the lane,” is marked simultaneously as an author—literally, as the writer of letters and other documents, and figuratively, as author of the novel’s prin- cipal human subject by virtue of paternity—and (ironically), by the Latin meaning of his pseudonym, as the condition of anonymity itself: “‘Nemo!’ repeats Mr Tulking- horn. ‘Nemo is Latin for no one.’ ‘It must be English for some one, sir, I think,’ Mr Snagsby submits, with his deferential cough. ‘It is a person’s name’” (161). Nemo, who produces copy for money and who may have “sold himself to the Enemy” in the process (164), might be read as a kind of figure for the author of the mass-produced serial novel, presenting writing at once in its individual particularity and in its sheer anonymity; the fate of his character asserts the impossibility of this position. Like the anonymous or “impersonal” writer/narrator of the third-person narrative that borders Esther’s first-person narrative (a sort of discontinuous sequence of voices and rhetorics, very much closer in style to the schizophrenic clamor of the ads pages than to the speech of a singular narrative persona), Nemo’s paternal relation to the text and to its human subject is one of profound ambivalence and indeterminacy. It is crucial to the ideological work of the narrative that Nemo, the anonymous “Writer” and unknown father of the protagonist, ends his life in the quarters of Krook—the figure mythically associated with the commodity in all its baseness. The senile Krook, whose “Rag-and-Bottle Warehouse” figures as the grotesque double of the Court of Chancery, is nicknamed ‘the Lord Chancellor’ by virtue of both his proximity to Chancery and the resemblance of his shop to the court: he too has all manner of things “wasting away and going to rack and ruin,” along with “so many old parchmentses and papers” (69). This squalid warehouse is almost the symbolic inverse of advertising—a sort of nightmarish vision of the other side of consump- tion, where the commodity, having expended its use-value, leaves its residue in the form of garbage. Among the many bottles (“blacking bottles, medicine bottles, gin- ger-beer and soda-water bottles, pickle bottles, wine bottles, ink bottles”), the empty containers and other refuse of used commodities, and the sacks of rags, discarded books and heaps of paper cluttering Krook’s shop, Esther observes “a one-legged Advertising and the Victorian Novel 151 scale, hanging without any counterpoise from a beam” (67–68); this scale, which seems to belong to the world of the Court, also evokes the merchant’s scale, as if to signal that the balance and proportion of things has been thrown off. Equated in all respects with the devaluation of material and cultural goods, po- sitioned in a problematic relation to the object of writing by virtue of his near-illiter- acy,21 and otherwise overdetermined as buyer and seller of worthless used items, Krook is made to disappear in a manner as mysterious and supernatural as the man- ner in which the fetishized commodity itself appears: he spontaneously combusts, taking with him all the letters of importance to the inheritance of property in the legal case. To use Marx’s evocative image, all that is solid melts into air. In a sense, this violent death—“the death . . . of all authorities in all places under all names soever, where false pretences are made” (519)—is also a violent repudiation of the com- modity form. By a certain distributive logic of reprisal, Krook’s spontaneous com- bustion might be read as a settling of scores—the novel’s revenge on the literary mass market and its voracious appetite for “much disregarded merchandise” (163). To the extent that Bleak House, as a commodity, can enter into symbolic exchange, it is imbricated in an economic matrix not only in its situatedness within a medium of print capitalism, but also in the literary narrative which may be read, I think, as a nar- rative of the novel’s own struggle for legitimacy.

ADVERTISING AGENCY

As I have suggested, reading might be understood more broadly as a mode of cultural consumption that is always mediated by processes of economic exchange and implicated in a perpetual struggle (at the level of language and in the material forms of the book) to define the relative values of texts. In this sense, reading is an ideological process that serves an economic function within a larger circuit of ex- change of “real” and symbolic capital. Within its economy, the figure of the author enters into circulation ostensibly as a repository of accumulated literary capital—an index of the abstract capacity to produce still greater value. As Bourdieu has so forcefully articulated, the literary marketplace is structured by a set of differential values which, even when they run precisely contrary to the notion of economic inter- est, are nonetheless the product of an investment of symbolic capital both in the art object or text and in the figure of the artist. Yet, while Bourdieu’s sociological view of the “market of symbolic goods” offers us a remarkably sophisticated and useful account of the processes of cultural production, his analysis does not extend beyond the traditional parameters of what is considered “art.” The question of conscious in- dividual agency, which continues to determine the status of writing to a far greater extent than we may be willing to admit, seems to preclude the treatment of much “extra-textual”22 or extra-diagetic writing (such as advertising) as anything other than the ephemera of popular culture—perhaps of limited interest to historicist scholarship and cultural criticism but otherwise irrelevant to literary studies. The study of advertisements in terms other than the economic has been, since the 1940s and 50s, a relatively obscure field of inquiry that generally comes under 152 Emily Steinlight the rubric of cultural studies or sociology. Since Barthes’s 1959 Mythologies, Bau- drillard and Debord (and, more recently, Bill Brown) have made significant interven- tions into the theoretical status of the object and of the commodity as spectacle. In recent years, substantive and often illuminating work has been done by Thomas Richards, in Victorian history, and Laurel Brake and Jennifer Wicke, in literary stud- ies, who have contributed much insight to the study of advertising. Brake, in her study of print media and book history, has gone so far as to suggest that scholars might “treat the wrappers and advertisers that, with the letterpress and illustration, make up part-issues and periodicals, as part of what we designate as the text” (27). This gesture towards a new textual theory—in the vein of what Greetham describes as “a nexus where authoriality and textuality meet but are not (necessarily) consub- stantial” (49)23—may be a significant step in the right direction, yet Brake’s argument for studies of advertising is nonetheless recursive to a set of age-old distinctions be- tween the literary and the commercial. In order to substantiate her argument, Brake points to the obvious connections between the institutions of print advertising and the book industry, and notes the prevalence of ads in periodicals for other periodicals: “Like a listing magazine, the Advertiser kept regular readers up to date on the latest issues of the magazines—with details of their contents; the newest books, series, and part-issues; and new entrants in the field such as The Day. An academic analogy lies with the advertisements in PMLA or Victorian Studies” (44). Though the role of ad- vertising in the dynamics of the Victorian publishing market is certainly an interest- ing area of historical inquiry, the contemporary “academic analogy” is a little farfetched; I think we would be unlikely to find a contemporary ad for baby food, soap, or hair treatments in the pages of PMLA. In valorizing the Advertiser by com- parison to elite academic journals, Brake’s analogy reproduces the logic of distinc- tion that elevates literary writing above other forms. Ignoring the numerous ads for non-literary products that appear in serial fiction, Brake unreflectively reinforces pre- cisely this ideological divide between literature and its others that was the original reason for the exclusion of the ads from later volume editions of serial novels. What so many admirable studies of Victorian print and periodicals stop short of concluding amounts to a fairly succinct explanation for the continuing disciplinary divide between the “literary” and the (merely) “cultural.” This explanation, I would argue, begins and ends with the category of the author. For all the work of poststruc- turalism in the 1960s and 70s, remarkably little has changed since Barthes’s obituary for the author, or since Foucault’s inquiry into the formation of authorship as a spe- cial category of property and as a function of discourse. By and large, the study of literature has remained safely within the boundaries of authorship, and scholars have continued to hold conferences on Dickens, to deliver papers on Hardy, to publish dazzlingly brilliant monographs on George Eliot, and all with (at best) only the most superficial acknowledgement of the problematic assumptions underlying the study of an individual author. The present study, like so many others, begins with a single author, but I hope it will not end there. To the extent that a reading of advertising can serve to reveal, if not to dislodge, the often unarticulated politics of authorship, it is my argument that the advertisement has a kind of supplemental relationship to the “author-function.” Advertising and the Victorian Novel 153

Under the regime of industrial print capitalism, the work of commercial discourse is not merely that of selling commodities, but of advertising agency; in the margins of serial fiction, the ad for a clothier’s services is also an ad for the productive potential and unique creative agency of the author. To invoke the name and the works of Dick- ens is to draw upon the collective cultural investment in the idea of the singularity of the author as a person and in the idea of his uniqueness as a producer of literature. If we take the force of Foucault’s observation that the proper name of an author is not merely “indicative” or “designative” but, “to a certain extent, the equivalent of a de- scription” (121), I think we might even take one step further, and note that the name of a text operates similarly as a form of description. Bleak House is not merely the name of a novel; it is shorthand for the historically variable composite impressions of a text’s cultural valence, its mythic uniqueness, its signatures and its critically rec- ognized effects. When we speak of the “anonymity” of advertising discourse, we implicitly con- trast it against literary discourse, pointing not only to the notion of its impersonality (as opposed to the perceived “personality” of the author and text), but also to the sense that this form of writing cannot lay claim to a proper title. Notwithstanding the inconsistencies, the incongruities, or the breaks in time and in narrative, the serial novel is marked as a coherent and self-sufficient totality even before it has been writ- ten. By the time of publication of the first monthly part, its status as a novel (with an implied futurity in which it will be completed) is already beyond question. Much as Foucault has argued of the author—largely taking for granted the status of the text— that its function is to present the spectral appearance of a person who is supposed to have preceded the text, I am arguing that the text itself is similarly posited as some- thing anterior to writing. If there is something like a text-function, or more particu- larly, a novel-function, it operates as a claim for the unity, singularity and autonomy of the writing. Under the sign of its title, the writing assumes the shape of an imag- ined totality called a novel long before it is complete. Though an advertisement in print may imitate the literary text it supplements, making similar use of a title, the capacity of this title to ensure the durability of the writing is in no way comparable. In the particular case of the “Dickens Advertiser,” where the entire collection of ads preceding the text is actually accorded a title of its own—and one which includes the title of the novel (“Bleak House Advertiser,” “Dombey and Son Advertiser”) as if to imply that the ads bear some relation to the literary text—advertising seems to take on the ambiguous status of the novel’s other. The Advertiser is secondary to the novel (though it precedes Dickens in print), yet its title insists that it is somehow related, whether by practical interdependence, by for- mal opposition, or otherwise. In this sense, “Anti-Bleak House” could hardly be a more fitting title for the ad that appears within (but not quite in) the serial novel. Marking the text of E. Moses & Son as definitively not the text of Bleak House, this title serves to consolidate the serial novel as a coherent and autonomous entity by drawing its boundaries from the outside. It is thus in the discourse of advertising that the novel is defined in the negative by what it is not. The ads, as we have observed, often (and sometimes explicitly) trade on the symbolic capital invested in the novel and its author; yet, it is ultimately the function 154 Emily Steinlight of advertising discourse to subordinate the interests of consumption to the primary interests of “culture.” Unlike an advertisement for suits of clothes that vary by the season, the novel is a world apart. It transcends the time and place of its writing, and its apparent “timelessness” assures that its value does not lie in its ephemeral print medium, but in its apparent uniqueness and in its ostensibly universal and transhis- torical appeal as literature.24 While the ads (which do not aspire to such transcen- dence and whose instrumental purpose is distinguished from the higher aesthetic objects of literature) may be excised without a second thought when the serial parts are sent off to the bindery, not a word of Dickens’s novel can be lost in translation from serial to volume. If the later editor of a Victorian serial novel is expected to do more than merely take at face value the articulations of difference between two forms of writing that mutually define each other by a relation of apparent opposition (trusting that the novel has better intentions than do the ads), we might wonder how it is that our edi- tors continue to draw the distinction between text and paratext along precisely the original fault lines. In our collective investment in the ideology of the novel and in the notion of literature’s separateness, we are still—and perhaps inevitably—operat- ing within the episteme of novelism.25 It is my contention that there are four unstated articles of faith that categorically exclude advertising from literature, and vice versa: 1) the singular agency of the author, as opposed to the work of anonymous others; 2) the continuity and totality of narrative, as opposed to that which is understood as extra-diagetic; 3) the timelessness of literature, as opposed to the ephemerality of economic interests; and 4) the essential humanity of the novel subject, as opposed to the monstrous, inhuman specter of the fetishized commodity. These articles, pro- duced by a historically specific struggle within the literary marketplace of the nine- teenth century to define art as an autonomous and economically ‘disinterested’ formation, still describe an ideology of reading. We might pretend, in theory, to disavow our allegiance to the author, after Barthes; we might claim to read a text (locally) as pure difference rather than as a co- herent narrative, after Derrida; we might profess to understand the value of any aes- thetic object as historically contingent and ideologically bound, after Eagleton; we might even poke fun at old-fashioned humanism and advocate a radical politics of the post-human. Yet, when we sit down to read, we are confronted with a novel that presents itself as the product of a single author (a real person about whom certain bi- ographical facts may be known, whether or not they are of interest to us), a text that we understand as a series of words in a particular and invariable order that are read- able and self-sufficient as a narrative—a narrative that we believe is worth reading and will continue to be worth reading, even though it was written in a different era, because it is about, above all, the lives of people. In this sense, everything points back to the author, in whose own essential humanity we are still peculiarly in- vested—even to the point of allowing that mythic figure to determine what we can and cannot admit into the privileged category of literature, what can and cannot be read as a text (or “the text”), and where to draw the line. With regard to the limits of authorship, Foucault notes, “The problem is both theoretical and practical. If we wish to publish the complete works of Nietzsche, for Advertising and the Victorian Novel 155 example, where do we draw the line? Certainly, everything must be published, but can we agree on what ‘everything’ means?” He then muses, “But what if, in a note- book filled with aphorisms, we find a reference, a remainder of an appointment, or a laundry bill, should this be included in his works? Why not?” (118–19). The ques- tion of Nietzsche’s laundry bill is, in a sense, the logical extension of both the author- function and the claim of “timelessness”26 as a value of the text. The problem is not that we are interested in what Nietzsche paid (or did not pay) for his laundry; on the contrary, the problem is that the airing of the author’s dirty laundry offers such an af- front to the orthodoxies of editing that we cannot help but stop and take notice of the ideological foundations of this exclusion. Likewise, in the framework of a Victorian serial novel, we do not want to know the price of an overcoat (whether it happens to be a “reversible coat,” a “Byron Jacket,” or “The Anthropos”), nor to what address in London we may write for particulars, unless this information somehow has self-evi- dent bearing on the substance of the literary text. It is not the network of economic relations but the commodity as such that pre- sents an obstruction. It displays an apparently impenetrable surface; though, like the novel, it might be understood more as a “representation” than as a “thing,” its essen- tial difficulty (and its ethical and political problem) is that, unlike the novel, it does not offer a narrative. This might even be regarded as the core of Marx’s critique of the commodity form: the object is taken as a representation of something other than itself—that is to say, other than its apparent material properties and, more impor- tantly, other than the quantity and intensity of labor that produced it (the hidden source of its value) and the social relations of its production. Concealing this narra- tive of its origins within itself as the representation of a concrete object, the reified commodity militates against representation itself, appearing as a thing without a past, and a sort of text that cannot point back to its “author.” The appearance of the commodity in the medium of literature—the sign of the novel’s potential to enter into economic exchange—produces resistance not only at the margins but within the text itself. Advertising, as the literary discourse of the commodity and as the field in which it emerges, lays claim to a space where writing and capitalism are not merely coeval but analogous: where art and the commodity confront one another as equiva- lent forms, each determined in relation to the other by the possibility of exchange, and each existing primarily to sustain the other. As we have observed in Bleak House and other Victorian serial novels, and as becomes increasingly clear in a reading of advertising discourse alongside the liter- ary discourse it accompanies, the similarities to be seen are not simply a matter of common “themes,” nor are they merely “effects” of a concrete material relation; I want to maintain that advertising (much like the novel) is not a material object, but a rhetorical and discursive practice. Attending to this practice, I would argue, might involve reading advertising not as a secondary effect, but as a primary formation within the structure of the novel, which, in articulating the supplementarity of two divergent modes of writing, produces the one in relation to the other. It is not against but rather through such formations that the status of the literary emerges. What kinds of writing can and cannot take place under the sign of “literature” is, of course, a distinction that cuts across the field of historical possibility and that 156 Emily Steinlight tests our own relative capacity to read literary history from inside of ideology. I un- derstand ideology largely in the Althusserian sense—that is to say, not as a form of “false consciousness,” but as something actual, something fluid, which flows through the channels of institutions and discourses and which operates by specific material practices and by various modes of interpellation. As we have observed, the novel- reading subject is also the subject of advertising and is specifically interpellated by the language of advertisement in ways that reproduce, supplement, and complicate the work of the literary narrative. Finally, it is my contention that the address of ad- vertising discourse to the reading subject (and the response of the subject to that ad- dress) is essential not only to the commercial viability of the novel in the mass market, but also, to the reproduction of the kind of readerly subjectivity that makes the novel what it is.

CONCLUSION

The account of the novel I have proposed is one in which advertising plays a crucial role in producing and shaping the novel as a literary genre and in creating the real and imaginary conditions for a mass culture of novel-reading. As I have argued, the status of the novel in the age of industrial print capitalism is at once that of liter- ature—in which form it stakes out a position of economic disinterest and ostensible autonomy from the market—and that of an “excellent medium of publicity” for the marketing of material goods; further, it is this (arguably false) dichotomy within the culture of the novel that identifies it as a site of symbolic struggle. It is not the goods themselves that are of interest to us, but rather, the discourse of value that surrounds and contains them and the ideology that supports their consumption. Advertising does not tell us what objects we consume; as Baudrillard maintains, it tells us “what it is that we consume through objects” (165). In the context of the novel, what we consume through objects is the product of a substantial cultural investment in the possibility of a human scale, a sort of “value form” against which to measure novel- istic subjectivity and textuality, which serves as the foundation of the modern poli- tics of authorship. The regime of the Author has also been, for us, the regime of “the Text”—a the- oretical calcification which, in its apparent open-endedness, seems to exempt us from the work of defining what comprises the text, but which really only conceals our own belief in its ultimate determinacy as an identifiable, self-contained and self- consistent object of analysis. Foucault points to this problem in noting that the con- cept of écriture itself “in subtle ways, continues to preserve the existence of the author” to the extent that it “sustains the privileges of the author through the safe- guard of the a priori” (119–20); brilliantly observed though this is, it does not an- swer for the larger problem of expressing, in theoretical and practical terms, exactly how the a priori status of writing is established—how (to put the question differ- ently) writing passes from the condition of the “timely” to that of the “timeless.” More importantly, perhaps, it seems to me that the greatest impediment is the lack of a coherently articulated theoretical framework for the study of periodical genres, Advertising and the Victorian Novel 157 forms and media that might allow for the reassessment of the novel within a larger discursive economy. So much attention has been devoted to the study of the novel over the past thirty or forty years that we have very nearly lost sight of what lies just outside its margins. We lack even the vocabulary to describe what orders of time the novel needs to inhabit and what kind of symbolic and material space it needs to oc- cupy in order to differentiate itself from the periodical institutions that support its re- production—materially and otherwise. Insofar as the assertion of the novel’s essential difference from other genres (most emphatically, from periodical genres and from the language of the commodity) marks a foreclosure within the field of pro- duction, the cult of the author endures in the cult of the text. When Foucault suggested in 1969 that “[p]erhaps the time has come to study not only the expressive value and formal transformations of discourse, but its mode of existence: the modifications and variations, within any culture, of modes of circu- lation, valorization, attribution, and appropriation” (137), he laid out a task that is still very much before us today. Following from this suggestion, what remains to be seen more than thirty-five years later is how we might study the “mode of existence” of the novel itself so as to read against the grain of what I have called the text-func- tion. On this score, and many others, there is a great deal of work to be done. So, for now, perhaps the most fitting ending might be the one indicated or implied as the inevitable conclusion to all but the last installment of a serial novel: “TO BE CONTINUED.”

ENDNOTES

Many thanks to Robert Scholes and Jon Klancher for reading earlier drafts of this article, and to the John Hay Library of Brown University Library for permitting me to reprint some of the advertisements from their serials collection. 1. On Dickens’s journalistic career and writings, see Drew. 2. See Johnson 167–68. 3. On the history of Victorian book publishing and the economics of the literary marketplace, see Altick, Sutherland, Erickson, and Feltes. On the phenomenon of serialization in particular, see also Vann, Law, and Hughes & Lund. 4. Dickens notes in his Preface to the First Cheap Edition of The Old Curiosity Shop, “When the story was finished, that it might be freed from the incumbrance of associations and interruptions with which it had no kind of concern, I caused the few sheets of MASTER HUMPHREY’S CLOCK, which had been printed in connexion with it, to be cancelled; and, like the unfinished tale of the windy night and the notary in The Sentimental Journey, they became the property of the trunkmaker and the butter- man. I was especially unwilling, I confess, to enrich those respectable trades with the opening paper of the abandoned design. . . . But it was done, and wisely done, and MASTER HUMPHREY’S CLOCK, as originally constructed, became one of the lost books of the earth—which as we all know, are far more precious than any that can be read for love or money” (7). 5. Appearing as it does in the context of Bleak House, this line may resonate strangely with those of the narrator: “What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabouts of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had the distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard step? What connexion can there have been between 158 Emily Steinlight

many people in innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been curiously brought together!” (256). 6. The earlier meaning of advertising—avertissement—is, of course, “warning.” 7. On agency and responsibility in Bleak House, see Robbins. For an insightful reading of the aspects of copying, “imitation” and “exchange” in Dickens’s novels, see McLaughlin. 8. There is also another, smaller model of this press offered as “adapted for exportation to the colonies.” For scholars of colonialism in British popular culture, or in the history of the periodical press in India and elsewhere as an instrument of colonial administration, these advertisements would offer a great wealth of material. 9. At Dickens’s request, the publishers printed a notice in the “Bleak House Advertiser” stating that the author reserves the right to publish a translation of the present novel at his discretion, in keeping with the “New Law of International Copyright.” On Dickens’s involvement in the cause of international copyright, see Joseph and Nowell-Smith. 10. Consumption, as Marx reminds us in the Grundrisse, must be understood as inextricable from pro- duction: “the product . . . proves itself to be, becomes, a product only through consumption” (91), and each process “supplies the other with its object” (93). We might add, further, that consumption is by no means a simple matter of the fulfillment of need; as Baudrillard underscores, it might be more rig- orously defined as “the virtual totality of all objects and messages ready-constituted as a more or less coherent discourse. If it has any meaning at all, consumption means an activity consisting of the sys- tematic manipulation of signs” (200). 11. As Baudrillard suggests, advertising works in part to solicit the subject through an offer of reciprocal affect, or even love: “We are taken as the object’s aims, and the object loves us. And because we are loved, we feel that we exist: we are ‘personalized’. This is the essential thing—the actual purchase of the object is secondary” (171). The other side of this mutual desire on the part of subject and object, however, is the anxiety of a lack (whether of warmth, of comfort, of pleasure, or of love) on which ad- vertising also trades. (On this point, see also Williams 185.) 12. While most of the ads for E. Moses & Son employ this vocabulary of legality in the service of pas- tiche, one of the monthly advertisements concludes, “CAUTION.—E. Moses & Son regret having to guard the Public against imposition, having learned that the untradesmanlike falsehood of ‘being con- nected with their Establishment’ of ‘It’s the same concern,’ has been resorted to in many instances, and for obvious reasons. . . .” 13. In the narrative of the Pickwick Papers, Moses Pickwick becomes a curious example of this phenom- enon. The character’s chance sighting of the coach on the side of which his own full name is printed (582) seems to indicate an odd propensity of personal names to attach themselves to objects, or to de- tach themselves from persons; as McLaughlin quite persuasively suggests, the appearance of this name on a coach is both a paradigmatic encounter between the subject and “his own random appear- ance as a ‘modern’ sign” and a particularly significant moment in Dickens’s first novel, since the au- thor’s previous pseudonym, “Boz,” derives—as Dickens notes in his Preface—from “Moses” (McLaughlin 120–21). In light of this connection, I think the name of E. Moses must also be charged with a certain suggestiveness. In a very interesting advertisement in the first number of David Cop- perfield, the clothier offers an “Analysis of the Name of Moses & Son,” which playfully catalogues the various words beginning with each letter of the name that describe the positive attributes of the business. 14. See also Darwin 9. 15. Here, as we shall see elsewhere, the implied metaphor of the author as “mother” echoes a common rhetorical trope in the language of advertising, which serves similarly to convey the productive and domestic values of the commodity. That the novel, like any other commodity as personified in adver- tising discourse, may be treated as one of a series of “siblings,” is telling. It is also interesting to note that while Dickens’s literary and editorial labors as objectified in his journal, Household Words, may Advertising and the Victorian Novel 159

be represented as accumulating in “heaps,” his novels are metaphorically given their due by way of a privileged association with the human child. 16. Bill Brown emphatically notes that the “thing” is not synonymous with the “object.” He defines things as “what is excessive in objects . . . what exceeds their mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as objects—their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence” (5). He goes on to offer what we might almost describe as a serial definition of thingness: “Temporalized as the before and after of the object, thingness amounts to a latency (the not yet formed or the not yet formable) and to an excess (what remains physically or metaphysically irreducible to objects).” 17. Jaffe’s reading of A Christmas Carol suggests an interesting parallel: the objects in the window that Scrooge observes in the scenes of Christmases Past seem to speak to him and ultimately to show him what he is (Jaffe 260). Jaffe describes Dickens’s tale as “the story of a Victorian businessman’s inter- pellation as the subject of a phantasmatic commodity culture in which laissez-faire economics is hap- pily wedded to natural benevolence” (255). 18. I think this “carnivalesque inversion” irresistibly recalls Marx’s description of the table which, in its commodity form, “stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will” (Capital 163–64). 19. See also Vann 4. 20. In this regard, Armstrong and Tennenhouse’s highly suggestive “reproductive hypothesis” (160–95) might take on new meaning in the representation of the book’s mechanical reproduction; in writing the novel into a narrative of heterosexual kinship relations and a seemingly self-evident structure of parenthood and filiation, both the cultural logic of authorship and the social relations of the domestic order are simultaneously naturalized by reference to a crucial third term: the commodity. 21. Krook’s attempts to teach himself to read—and the sinister and almost incantatory manner in which he spells out the names of the characters involved in the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce (71)—might be read along the lines of Brantlinger’s argument on the “anxieties” of mass literacy; see Brantlinger 1–24. 22. On other forms of extra-textual writing, or “paratext” (not including advertising), see Genette. 23. As Greetham indicates in a study of the conditions of textuality, the interpretive problem that con- fronts an editor at any given historical moment and in any cultural context is that “all editing, and all editorial theory—just like all criticism and all critical theory—is constrained by history, the post-his- torical dreams of eclecticism notwithstanding” (374). This means, he argues, that “the status of social textual criticism is itself socially determined and is not independent of the intellectual and academic society that both produces and sustains it” (374). The construction of an Ur-text of sorts is always the implied object of a critical edition, but I think it ought to be underscored that the idealized form of the text belongs entirely to the realm of the imaginary. On textual theory and editorial methodology, see Greetham and McGann; on editing Victorian novels, see Monod and Shillingsburg. 24. Lovell notes that the novel in the Victorian period “depended on profitability, but its rationale was its literary value. Insofar as intellectual and literary production took a commodity form, it tended to- wards the denial and disguise of its own commodity status” (74). 25. I borrow this term from Siskin; see The Work of Writing, 155–90. 26. The perplexities of the “timely” and the “timeless” find expression even in the more ephemeral medium of advertising: one of E. Moses’s ads (in the twelfth number of David Copperfield) features a poem titled “On an Old Picture,” which is a meditation on “The Dress peculiar to the days gone by.” The poem notes the “curious” coats, hats, and other articles shown in old pictures—clothes that now seem “fashion’d only to provoke to smiles,” and wonders, “What would be thought, if, in the present day, / A person were to dress in such a way?” The poetic speaker goes on favorably to compare her (or perhaps his) own clothing—“bought of MOSES, by the bye”—with those “outlandish styles” of some fifty years ago, and remarks upon the “superior style” of the contemporary articles. This ad seems to 160 Emily Steinlight

assert, paradoxically enough, that its products are at once fashionable (being the epitome of con- temporary style) and somehow also timeless—unlikely to be ridiculed by future ages.

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