"Anti-Bleak House": Advertising and the Victorian Novel Author(S): Emily Steinlight Source: Narrative, Vol

Home , Bleak House

"Anti-Bleak House": Advertising and the Victorian Novel Author(s): Emily Steinlight Source: Narrative, Vol. 14, No. 2 (May, 2006), pp. 132-162 Published by: Ohio State University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30219643 . Accessed: 27/02/2011 09:57

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ohiosup. .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Ohio State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Narrative.

http://www.jstor.org Emily Steinlight

"ANTI-BLEAKHOUSE": Advertisingand 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 contemporaryreader-a naive reader:myself, for example. This naive reader,let us say, wandersinto a special collections libraryand sees for the firsttime something that many other (less naive) readershave undoubtedlyseen over the past centuryand a half: a copy of the first edition of a well-known Victorianserial novel. She had probablyread 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 particularlysignificant. Upon opening to the first printed page, however, our reader is startledto note something she had not read: the text of the novel is precededby pages upon pages of advertisements.Not being a Victorianher- self, she is unlikely to turn past these ads as she might turn past a page of ads in a contemporarymagazine; like messages addressedto someone other than the reader, the ads present at once an obstacle to reading and an inducementto read on, or to read differently.Poring over the advertisingsection, she is overtakenwith the odd sense she had somehow misunderstoodwhat this novel was-maybe even to the point of beginningto suspect thatthe entirecategory of the novel might requiresome 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 certainkind of conventionalnarrative that is limited in its uses for a reading,much less a theory,of the novel. Such narrativesof discovery are often freightedwith strangeand conflicting notions aboutthe value of objects and our own

Emily Steinlight is a Ph.D. candidatein English at Brown University.Her currentresearch focuses on periodicals,print media, and the 19th-centurynovel.

interpretiveauthority as subjects. (I would not want, for instance, to insist upon the "radicalalterity" of a musty page of print-much less to unearthsomething called "the real.")Yet, if this particulararchival reverie extends beyond the problemof his- toricizing the reader,or of positing a reading subject at all, it might offer a prelimi- nary means of framinganother task: that of rethinkingnot only the Victoriannovel's relationshipto the mass cultureof industrialproduction from which it emerges, but also its discursive, formal and materialinterdependence with the modern system of printadvertising. This system may prove critically importantto 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 particularinstitution by the name of Charles Dickens. In what follows, I will draw upon the example Dickens's serial writing-focusing particularlyon Bleak House and its "Advertiser"as a sort of case study-so as to examine the relationbetween advertisingdiscourse and the Vic- torianserial novel. I will offer readingsof this materialthat point beyond the specific literaryand commercialtexts in question, ultimatelywith a view to the broaderthe- 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, Chapmanand Hall began releasing serialized 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 newspaperjournalism' 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 tremendousproportions. By the time of Queen Victoria'scoronation 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 literaryhistory (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 enteredpublication in April of 1838- even before his second, Oliver Twist,was complete. By this point in his career,he was alreadyfar and away the most popularand best-knownwriter 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 throughoutthe years of its publication,the most recently publishedpart of his latest novel would often be availableat newsstands,for the price of one shilling, alongside the daily newspapersand magazines. The 1840s saw a proliferationof hopeful imi- tators eager to profitfrom the serial form, but the ones who enjoyed the largest success were generally those of establishedreputation, and Dickens outdistancedthem all in sales and celebrity.3He released all fifteen of his novels in serializedform-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 nationalliterary icon; the author'sname was, as his aptly namedjour- nal would have it, a "householdword." 134 Emily Steinlight

In March of 1852, Bradbury& Evans began publishing Bleak House in nine- teen monthly installments,or "numbers,"concluding in Septemberof 1853. Each of these numbers was printed separatelyin a short, unbound volume in paper covers, with illustrationsby Habl8t KnightBrowne precedingthe text. Each four-chapterin- stallment of the novel, consisting of thirty-two pages of uninterruptedtext, is also preceded by an advertisingsection that constitutesjust less than half of the entire volume. A large percentageof the ads are publishers'notices for a simply enormous quantityof recent or forthcomingbooks (including a clothboundDickens anthology known as the "CheapEdition," 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 othermajor novels by the authorand his best-knowncon- temporaries, including Thackeray, Trollope, Gaskell, and Bulwer-Lytton. Also advertisedare severalmajor American novels, includingHawthorne's Blithedale Ro- mance and an upcoming serial edition of Uncle Tom'sCabin. The publishers'pages also offer an astonishinglydiverse assortmentof new and forthcoming non-fiction books, ranging in subject from Thomas Carlyle's Life of John Sterling, to EdwardP. Thompson (the naturalist)'sPassion of Animals and a Sketch of the History of Monkeys,as well as botanists' studies of plant life in India and China, and variousethnographic studies of Mexico, Peru,Canada, Russia, Egypt and elsewhere. There are accountsof Arctic explorations,a Narrativeof a Mission to CentralAfrica, a memoir entitled Settlers and Convicts;or Recollections of Sixteen YearsLabour in the BackwoodsofAustralia (whose authoris listed only as "anemi- grant mechanic"),and a ratherdifferent fictional memoir entitled Confessions of an Etonian.Also featuredare variousphilosophical studies and a wide arrayof 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 treatisesand personalreflections on labor,and numerousvolumes of ancient and modernhistory. There are also numerousfiction and poetry anthologies, including a collection of Balladsfor the Timesand a volume of Specimensof Old In- dian Poetry. Several ads announce a series of "IndestructibleBooks for Children" and list multiple other children's titles, including The Doll and Her Friends; The Mine; or SubterraneanWonders: an Account of the Operationsof the Miner and the Productsof his Labour;and The Life and Perambulationsof a Mouse. There are also illustratedbooks intended for adults; the first serial numberof Master Humphrey's Clock (in which The Old CuriosityShop began publication as one of the "Personal Adventures of Master Humphrey")4includes 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 "LiteraryDescriptions" (from writers including Thack- eray, Leigh Hunt, Captain Glascock, an unnamed MP, and others), representing "BritishFaces and BritishManners-British Virtuesand BritishVices- British Lib- erality and British Prejudice... delineatedwith the pencil and the pen of truth"and, the publishersclaim, "destinedto become a part of the country'sliterature" because they offer "Picturesof HUMANLIFE; not dreamtof by the fashionablenovelmonger Advertisingand the VictorianNovel 135

S. . but LIFE AS IT IS." (Printed in the front matter of a novel, such a claim certainlyhas interestingimplications.) Several publishers' advertisementsoffer maps, guides, and reference books, from the Eighth Edition of the EncyclopediaBritannica, to a LondonDirectory and Court Guidefor 1853 ("containingupwards of 120,000 names and addresses"),to a handsomeIllustrated Catalogue of the GreatIndustrial Exhibition of 1851, to TheIl- lustratedTemperance Almanack, to A MilitaryManual of Field Operations,to a Dic- tionary of Domestic Medicine and Household Surgery, to a Practical Manual of Photography.A numberof professional and popularscience texts are also featured, including an anatomicalstudy of TheHand: Its Mechanismsand Endowments,and a great many more general books on physics and chemistry.In addition,there are various guides and books of personal advice-some on investmentand finance, others dealing with such questions as How to See the British Museum in Four Visits, still others with How to Print, and Whento Publish: Practical Advice to Writers.Also included, of course, are multitudes of "domestic guides" (tendered largely-though not exclusively-to women, for also listed are such titles as The WorkingMan's Friend and Family Instructor).The majorityof these domestic guides are books of advice on matrimony,motherhood, housewifery, "family worship,"gardening, and cooking (including a work entitled WhatShall WeHave for Dinner?, whose author claims the perfectly Dickensian name of "LadyMaria Clutterbuck"). In addition to this dizzying array of ads for publishers, bookstores, libraries, newspapersand magazines, there are assortedofferings of wigs (includingRoss and Son's "InvisibleVentilating Heads of Hair"),Macassar oil, "bear'sgrease," and other hair treatments,watches, pipes, and an arrayof gloves and ladies' bonnets. There are "new feeding bottles for infants"-and for their mothers, "Amesbury'sPatent Body Supports,"which provide "a substitutefor stays" and "guardthe Spine and Chest against Deformity."The body of the reader(female or male) is the concern of much of advertisingdiscourse. 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 reversiblecoat"; nourished and delightedby a wide selection of food items; clothed in the "GorgetPatent Self Adjusting Shirt";beauti- fied by a range of cosmetics and products that minister to its unfortunatebouts of "Rednessand SubcutaneousEruptions"; and cured by a diverse arrayof specific and generally salubrious home-remedies, including the ubiquitous "Parr'sLife-Pills," "Ali-Ahmed's Healing Plaister," "Dr. Locock's Pulmonic Wafers" and "Female Wafers,"various gout and rheumaticpills, lozenges, botanical extracts, tonics and elixirs, and even "Pulvermacher'sPatent Portable Hydro-ElectricChain, for personal use." The reader'sother desires and needs might be served by a daguerreotypepor- traitgallery, 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, "improvedadhesive envelopes," all manner of ink and writing paper,the services of several confirmedexpert handwriting-analysts, various financialand legal services, and mutuallife insurance.Yet, amidst all other products and services (other than books, of course), the overcoat is perhapsmost 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 waterproofovercoat," 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 makersattest, "of great propellingpower.") What is perhaps most interesting in this advertisement,however, is the em- phatic statementin bold capitals "NOTICE.-NAME & ADDRESS STAMPEDIN- SIDE. NONE OTHERS ARE GENUINE." In a great many ads printed in these volumes, this rhetoricof authenticity(the injunctionto "acceptno imitations")is repeated and underscored.Much like the literaryproperty of the author,the intellectual propertyrepresented by the commodity is defended in the form of stamps and seals, personal signaturesand 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 GovernmentStamp." On the same page, just below, Joseph Gillott ("Metallic Pen Maker to the Queen") concludes a third- person descriptionof his merchandisewith the statement,"Each pen bears the im- press of his name as a guaranteeof quality . .. with Label outside, and fac-simile of his signature."At times, the discourse of advertisingmust repudiatethe competing claims and discredit the authenticity of a fraudulent imitator: "CAUTION.-E. Moses & Son have no connection5with any other house, in or out of London, except the following. .. ." Here, the ad is not merely an appeal to the consumerbut a claim to creative and productiveagency: the name of the patentedproduct or system, like the name of a novel author,serves as a kind of signature. This curious intersectionof advertisingand the novel-in form, in rhetoric,and otherwise-is the subject of the currentstudy. The advertisementsthat appear between the papercovers of the serial speak volumes both of the modes of production and of the imaginativeeconomies of the novel itself. I am not going to argue, however, that the language of advertising"reflects" or "imitates"the language of literature (whateverthat 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 advertisingsection from which it remainsstrategically separate. As we have noted in the affirmationsof authenticityand the repeated warnings6mentioned above, and as we may observe throughoutthe pages of the Advertiser,symbolic struggles are constantly being en- acted in the discourses of propertyand copyright.The zone of commercial solicita- tion that frames the novel becomes a crucially importantspace of negotiation in which the territoriesof authorshipand agency are mapped out and contested in the form of claims to the rights of property-authorial and commercialalike. Though clearly set apartfrom the privileged aestheticcategory of literature,the ads that appearin the serial novel are nonetheless forms of writing whose participa- tion in an economy of capitalist exchange both marks and in turn is markedby the category of the novel as a commodity form. Printedads in the Victorianperiodical press are not merely an essential source of revenueto defray the costs of mass publication and make the novel possible; they are also involved in the aesthetic and com- mercialenterprises of the novel and implicatedin the polemics of gender,of class, of race, of nation, and of empire, which define the fields of political struggle within TO SPORTSB TOVRISTS, t RAngELRS.

EDMISTON'S POCKET SIPHONIA, OR WATERPROOFOVERCOAT. W~IGHT 10 o.,

Sr$l l aturaes of 4b ~ lightnes madsoinssoftemm ate+x , adapteda ~fL a ,a fo~r SP~por~tsmen, Traveller~B$t~s.and~t Tour8~ists, folded cer it she Peekt or e.sily in di Watteprvigs~ Sigb x r at othe ~s teingad poeUet rent

viol9aent~J"ainsk, Qalso obviating1I the stick"ia ,ss'ad ampleaant ansell pr to 6al othe I W s+Prec rd in to+ else, 40s, to 80s.;+ all ilk+ lent 4 oti &4ae s throughou + 5,aR to68. Mrounp ~ea8suremet, tih a~t~8A aga g~~lf9~~lf9`~lf9hd~~~ .hehat

NOTIC -A* & ADDfl&* STAMPD INSIDE. NONE 0TERS ARU GEZNOSU EDMISTON & SON, WATRPR00FERS, 416, ST"PRA, eat Aeph Theatre, THE VERSATIO, OR RgEVERSIBtLECOAT. waORtR TRE ATTENTIO OY TET NOBLEMA MRCAN, OR TRAD

10DON: IBJ1ISTO Boi, TAIMARS,gO,,STRAE, sapposite the Ade9lphTeatre.

Fig. 1. Advertisement.In Bleak House No. 1 (March 1852) 138 Emily Steinlight

which literaturesituates itself. Often enough, they appearon the pages of print that precede and follow the text of the novel itself, separatefrom the literarywork but close enough to touch it-close enough, perhaps, even to share in some part of its claim to a privileged space of representationwhere public and privatemeet. As Jen- nifer Wicke has suggested in her ground-breakingAdvertising Fictions, "literature and advertisementare culturalkindred" (3). This potential kinship, however, is limited both by the function of authorship and by the ordersof temporalityto which the two divergenttexts belong. Not being the productof the author'sconscious creation, and circumscribedby a more imme- diate and temporarycommercial objective, the ads vanish with the first printing,and it is a matterof course that they are not to be reproducedin later editions. The novel can (obviously) exist independentlyof the ads, much as the ads can exist indepen- dently of the novel, yet the particularway in which these texts have coincided in a common mass medium is nonetheless highly suggestive. It seems worth considering that the institutionaland discursive apparatusesof advertisementmight be, in a very significantsense, the repressedhistory of the novel-at once its implied other and its most secret self. Even in its absence, advertisingmarks a space that tells us something critical about the ways in which the novel understandsitself as a culturalob- 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- stantialformal and aesthetic interrelation.In their literal proximity,economic inter- dependency, and shared discursive labor in mediating between the arenas of "writing"and "themarket," the novel and the ad are peculiarcounterparts-and, as I hope to demonstrate,they often sharefar 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 narrativeis structuredaround a set of uncertaintieswith regardto mattersof legality, property,inheritance, family lin- eage, and legitimacy that follow from various modes of copying and reproduction. These processes seem always to produce disastrouseffects and insoluble problems of subjectiveagency.' The relationshipbetween copying or mechanicalreproduction (both in the advertisementsand in the literarytext itself) and these commercialinvo- cations of uniqueness and authenticity is striking. Indeed, some of the advertisements for the services of copyists, law stationersand lithographers,as well as actual printingmachines and copying presses, resonateso much with the narrativeof Bleak House thatthe effect is almost uncanny.(One of the ads that appearsin variousforms in every number of Bleak House is for "Waterlow'sPatent ImprovedAutographic Press, or portableprinting machine..,. by means of which every person may become his own printer"8;given Dickens's concerns about the piracy of his works overseas, Advertisingand the VictorianNovel 139

particularlyby Americanprinters, and his involvementin the campaignfor "Interna- tional CopyrightLaw"9 in the United States, these advertisementsfor personalprint- ing presses may be of interest.) While it may quite simply be worthyof attentionthat images and voices of consumer culture appearand speak before, after,within, alongside, and even to this literarytext 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 historicalimagination but companion texts that claim a definite relationship to the novel. In order to demonstratethis relationship,we need look no furtherthan the inside back cover of No. 1: a full-page advertisement for winter overcoats, under the rubric "ANTI- BLEAK HOUSE."This billing (preparedby the clothierE. Moses of Aldgate for the first published numberof the novel, prior to its publication) is followed by a long paragraphof ad copy that luridly describesthe bitternessand gloom of a cold house. The ads of E. Moses & Son, which appearon the inside back cover of each in- stallmentof Bleak House, often serve as vivid remindersto later readersof the simple fact of the passage of time throughout the course of the novel's serialized publication,with alternatingreferences to "AprilShowers," "May Flowers," upcoming Parliamentaryelections and variousother political and culturalevents of the day. Though the ad copy is frequently written in florid, novelistic prose, in a style of hack-"literariness"that RaymondWilliams would describe as "commercialpurple" (174), I think it is likely that the copy underthe title of "ANTI-BLEAKHOUSE" in this particularadvertisement is meant as an actual literary pastiche, recognizably renderedin the narrativestyle of those long, sensationallydescriptive passages of a Dickens novel:

A BLEAK HOUSE that is indeed, where the northwinds meet to howl an igno- ble concert, and bitter blasts mournlike torturedspirits of rebels, who, though prisoners, are unsubdued; where the whirlwind and the hurricanevow their vengeance;and the walls and timberscreek resistance,and like woundedgladi- ators, rise again boldly to defy the antagonist. Woe to the inhabitantof the Bleak House if he is not armedwith the weapons of an OVERCOATand a SUITof FASHIONABLEand substantial Clothing, such as can only be obtained at E. MOSEs& SON'SEstablishments, 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 appearin virtually every Dickens novel, are widely varied in genre, including quasi-journalisticreportage and com- mentary,brief fictionalnarratives, sketches and personalreflections, and a numberof lengthy doggerel poems printedin both the "MartinChuzzlewit Advertiser" and the "Dombeyand Son Advertiser").In Bleak House, the ads specificallyrefer to the novel itself on several subsequentoccasions. At the end of No. 4, there appearsanother ad in this series entitled "A Suit in Chanceryand a Suit out of Chancery,"written in a similar style, the centralconceit being an obvious pun on a "suit"of clothes and the seemingly interminablelawsuit in Bleak House's infamousCourt of Chancery: ANTI-BLEAK HOUSE. A,BLEAK IIOUSE that is indeed, where the north windSmeet to howl an Signoble concert, and bitter blasts mourn like tortured spirits of rebeib, who, though prisoners, are nsaubdued i where the whirlwind and the hurricane vow their vetgeance; and the walls and timbers creak resistance, and, like wonnded gladiators, 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 Ovxaecoa and a SUri of FasleonAaLt and substantial Clothing, aunch ar can only be obtained at E. Mosasb &a 8on's Establishmentsa, Aldgate and Misordee, New Oxford-street, and ffart.atreet, London; or 51, Fargate, Shbdield, or 19, Bridcge.street, BradBed, Ytrkshire. Who would covet a Bleak Honse in the month of March, when the old winds take out a fresh license, and to celebrate their re.commencement in a roaring trade, teons over a few honses, and as if churches wer not good enough, but must be punishbed by their harmless spires being blown down,-or tear up a tree or two to save the boys the trouble of stealing the fruit hext autamn, then becoming more mischievous, they toss over an unprotected traveller, and alter that blow him up in grand styple, But the Anti.Sleak House, establlshment bleak the whose inventions can aatanhilate the effects of httltag, plnchin, screwing, and driving is H. & are their be bleak winds and winds, Mosas Son'as they destermoedt gsarmrents shall proof igainst heacy showers, against cold blasts and sweepintg hurricanes i for this pusdse they have invented garments which no wind can penetrate, which lt so exactly to the person of the wearer, that they render him secure as if he occupied an Anti-Bleak Housa, where the March windt haviat reeeived due nottice to quitt, dare not remain for fear of having double rent to pay, by spending their fury without any recompense. E;. AD So0 are perfectly satisfed of the resistance their dress will ofibr to wtind or watefr, being prepared speciallyMoeas for MarcA, strong, but neat, fine. but substantial, warm, bt light, comrtorthble, but fashionable, the delgnas of artists, whose fame is identilfied with the success of I. Maoss & Son for omaanttoratng the only elegant and Anti- the are Bleak garments in kingdom, these chbaracterised by Interminabtle variety, intrinsaic excellence, uperbtt and lowaSts of the are the of the of qna)ity, unprecedented In the charge-thEay qalateesenee fashion, embiams tru8e taste, the unrivalled embodiments of grace and neatness, and the approved eseuntials of gentilltyand durabhitty. LIST OF PRICES. WINTER OVERCOATS,. WAlgTOOATS. eslinued. & . Blatlclotlh a0 S The new Bequemre Overooat, designed by sa. J. ii best 13 P. Moass Son 05. to 4 6 Ditto, manfaiturd 0 Pea Coats, e S White Marcella Bd.to 0 6 Cohinted ani Plain Witney Overcoats, in all to 2 0 TROUSERS. bshaes, 5 6 The Biulwer 12 0 Fancy Trousers, from O !P 6 IT made for this euteb- Btlckaktn Premier, expressiv . 12 lithneat ra. to 1 t0 i Black cloth atrd 1 The Albert Cape, made in the moot approved BlsCk Fancy Donesiiin Best Black Caeinere Trusero . 5 swaterprooir' at eridls, including the Devon- linted and ve ivet shire Kersey, throughout, . to 1 1, collar S. to 3 15 0 Bcys' lussar and TnnIe Suits a. o BOYS WINTER OVERCOATS. LADIES' RIDING HABITS. cloth, with train 2 o Chesterfeld, from .. 0 Summnerouperior ditto. . o The Byron Jacket and Orercoert, in all ma- i ..o 16 S Stpertlns o Prirlc of Wales' Wrapper, etegantlv trimmed, LIVERIES. ard varlus mraterials I 5 0 Page's 1 0 10 r 0 17 Dress Crats 0 1. 12 0 3 Sop.~drtto 3 0 Ie, t maetfactured 13 O Coachman's Frock C(.ats 0 U Super ditto 15 0 MOURNING. Best . 330 Ready mde at Five Minltes' Notice, WAISTCOATS. I S u it tco p le tet t 6 Vests, o 3 0 Fancy dit ii nd plain 4 0 By's to Witteyp 6 Mede to Mrteasure in Fire hloos, Yatin, plain and figure.

replete with every novelty of the NOTICE.--'be Shawl and Fur Departments are nrow seson. dasly events, &c., and full for The "Universal Guile " a newspaper, containing directioas seif- measurement, can be had gratis on application or forwarded post free to any part of the kingdom. tither made to if wilt OlBSEBtVl.--Any article purchased ready or inade meattire, not approved of, be exchanged or the money returned. & have no connection with any other house, or out of London, except CAUTION.--E. Moses SoN in the following :- and 157, 85, London City Esatablishmcnts t-15*, 155;, 156, tinories; 83, 8s, 86, Aldgttea, opposite the Church, all communicatting. Loxandon West Branch:-506, 507, 508, New Oxford-4treet; 1, 2, 3, Hart- End street, alli communicating. Bradford, Yorkshire Branch, 19, Bridge-sreetr . Sheffield lranch, 36, Paxrgatoe. TAILORS, CLOTIIERS, HATTERS, HOSIERS, FURRIERS, BOOT & SHOE BMAKERS, AND GENERALOUTFITTERS FOR LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. is re En.'ultli tosret: are cd dfosrdfrlom * PFriy, till srotee, on Sbtlrdio., tOkea btuines resumedtijl 12 o'clck.

Fig. 2. Advertisement.In Bleak House No. 1 (March 1852). Advertisingand the VictorianNovel 141

Now the difference between a Suit in Chanceryand a Suit out of Chanceryis 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 supernaturalaffair. But a Suit out of Chancery,especially a Suit of SummerDress from the Establishmentof E. MOSES & SON is light, brilliant, heartcheering,and brainreviving;brushing up one's spiritswith the most gratifyingassurances of comfortand PLEASURE.But a Suit in Chancery is a very differentmatter, with this preciousportion if a gentlemanhas 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 portionof a gentle- man's estate, maintainedat the least expense, exceeding the most sanguineex- pectations-the very essence of all novel and fascinatingstyles.

Here, the text of the ad not only makes referenceto the subjectmatter of the novel; it also offers a similartreatment of what we might call the hypostasizedgeneral 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 advertisementhails that same reader as the generalized subject of consumption."'Its appeal is not merely a transparentcom- mandto buy a product;supplementing the novel, the ad employs a languageof affect in orderto arousea sympatheticresponse. In proto-Dickensianrhetoric, the "Suitout of Chancery"is producednot as the fulfillmentof a simple need, but as the expression of desire. Its propertiesare not simply material;it is also "brilliant,heartcheering, and brainreviving,"and, not unlike the novel itself, it seduces the reader with promises of "comfort and pleasure."" Like Marx's hypothetical coat in the first chapterof Capital, the hypotheticalsuit of E. Moses & Son appearsas a kind of inhuman specter of commodity fetishism, which stands as the "materialembodiment of value" (Capital 141) and confronts its equivalent form (finding recognition, in spite of "its buttoned-upappearance" as "a splendidkindred soul, the soul of value"), and speaks "the languageof commodities"(143). This language,which producesthe commodity as a subject capable of entering into social relations with other commodities 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 partof Bleak House (the doubly publishednumbers 19 and 20), virtually guaranteedby its spot on the inside back cover of the last in- stallmentof the novel to be the last thing one will read, the final serial ad appears,entitled "THECLOSING OF THE STORY":

WHENan Authorhas nearly spun out the threadof his narrative,his descrip- tions have connected him and the public so long that they have arrivedat a pretty good understanding,and possibly the Authorthinks it is time to look out for some fresh subjectto keep up the communication. The good understandingbetween E. MosEs & SoN and the world's public, is the best basis on which Business communicationscan be established. The 142 Emily Steinlight

interest excited by their NOVELStyles of ATTIREcannot be excelled, and the comfort enjoyed in the choicest ARTICLESOF DRESS has originated and long continued an intimateBusiness acquaintancewith them, their friends, and their public ...

The numerouspuns on "novel"(and here, "articles"as well) are a peculiartrope in this series of ads, many of which play on the suggestionof an analogybetween Dick- ens's literarywork and the work of the name-brandclothier on the basis of both quality and popular recognition. In this regard, it may be useful to consider the phenomenonof Dickens's authorshipspecifically as a commercialphenomenon. In these ads-even in the ones that specificallyallude to "legalexpectations"a2 and to the "suitin Chancery"that figuresin the literarytext-the use of Dickens and of his novels relies upon a relatively superficialawareness of the substanceof the texts themselves. ThoughE. Moses (or perhapshis son), like many of his friends,customers and fellow Londoners,probably did readBleak House, he mightjust as easily have drawn upon the mass-cultural 'buzz' surroundingthe novel without actually reading it. Merely by virtue of living in London from 1852 to 1853, one could hardlyhave es- caped some discussion of this best-selling serial and would probablybe sufficiently familiarwith the story at least to make allusion to its most salient figures.As Wicke suggests (with credit to Orwell's essay on readingDickens), "While Tolstoy,for example, must be read to be known, there is anotherpossible road to Dickens. Dickens is a phenomenonof mass culture,a writerwho is presentat the creationof advertising as a system, and whose work and personalcareer participate in shapingthat system" (18). One can know Dickens withoutnecessarily reading Dickens. Or perhaps,to put it differently,reading means somethingbroader than we might tend to think. Describing Charles Dickens as the most eminently knowable of authors, Or- well, in a modest personalessay, declareshim to be "aninstitution" (98). In compar- ing Dickens's novels to those of Tolstoy, Orwell remarks that while "Tolstoy's characterscan cross a frontier,Dickens's can be portrayedon 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 Victoriannovelists. With regardto 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 characterswere used to marketquite an assortmentof paraphernaliafor fans and collectors in England and the United States. Given the affinity of Dicken- sian charactersfor particularfetish objects that participatein the narrative'sdescrip- tion of their signature attributes, the conversion of character into metonymic merchandisecan hardly be surprising.In addition to the cigarette-card,the much- cited "Pickwickl3cigar" and the "Wellercab," the marketproduced dozens of other Dickensian objets: "SaireyGamp umbrellas,Dolly Vardonaprons, Mr. Turveydrop shoe polish, CaptainCuttle tobacco, Micawberpens, canes, gaiters, hats, chintz fab- rics imprintedwith Dickens scenes, and even corduroytrousers came out with some variety of Dickens's imprimatur"(Wicke 21, 52).14 The perfect marketabilityof Dickens as a sort of "trademark"or "brandname" is evidentnot only in this profusionof commercialproducts named for his characters, Advertisingand the VictorianNovel 143

but also in the responses of other advertisersto the greatpublicity his phenomenally popularnovels generated.One company,strikingly enough, goes so far as to address what is ostensibly a business letterof thanksto "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 "BLEAKHOUSE," we know well that its inmates will be warm and life-like. We thank you for it, not only for the pleasurethat we, in common with all otherreaders, shall receive in its perusal, but we thank you on more solid grounds ; we thank you for it as a matterof 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 establishmentbefore they can contemplatepatro- nising it ; and further,that they must be aware of the advantagesoffered by a particularconcern before they will select that in preference to any other. On these grounds, then, we thank you for "BLEAKHOUSE" in a business point of view, because it affords us the opportunityof conveying to all its readers the advantagesof our Establishment,and the principles on which it continues to be conducted. Many thousandsof readershave, we doubtnot, enteredupon theirtasks since even "DAVIDCOPPERFIELD" monthly appeared,between his "greenleaves," and some of these readersmay note with favourthe statementwe here subjoin. "We keep for the selection of purchasersall kinds of Tea and Coffee fit for use importedinto this country,and we supply them at the most moderatecost at which they can possibly be sold. "We have endeavoredto renderourselves particularlycelebrated for supply- ing Teas of the most sound and excellent qualities. "Wehave a PatentedInvention for Roasting Coffee, Cocoa, &c. in Silver. By this plan the ordinaryevils of roasting such producein a cylinder made of base metal are avoided, whilst the cost of the produceis not increased. "We deliver by our Vans all Ordersfrom any part of the MetropolitanDis- tricts, within eight miles of St. Paul's, on the day after such ordersare given. "We also send into the Country,free of carriage, all Orders,if they be accompanied by a remittance for payment, whether by half-notes, Post Office Order,or otherwise, providedgoods orderedamount to a2 or upwards. "We sell our goods only for immediatepayment. Our tariff or profit is fixed without allowing for the intereston capital necessaryto supporta heavy amount of debts." For the facilities that this excellent medium of publicity has allowed us for making known the above particulars,we sincerely thankyou, and we trust and hope that by our care and attention,and by the excellence of the Goods we supply, those readersof "BLEAKHOUSE" who may turntheir favourablepatronage 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 "DAVIDCOPPERFIELD,"

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 reproducedin its entirety because I think it merits some attention,is one of the most overtly opportunisticadvertisements of its kind. In pre- tending to a kind of quaintness, it achieves a comical effect (not least of all in the ratherinfelicitous expression of its wish that the author"give birth to heaps .. ."15 etc.). Takingfor grantedthe putativeliterary value of the presentnovel as a source of "pleasure" and as a vehicle for the sentimental productions of realist narrative, whose characterswill undoubtedlybe "warmand life-like,"the advertisersspeak di- rectly to the commercial value of "this excellent medium of publicity" for themselves as purveyorsof fine coffee and tea. Punningon the "greenleaves" of the serial parts of David Copperfieldby way of implying that their own tea leaves representa commercial product of comparablevalue to that of the novel, Dakin & Company draw attentionto the materialaspect of the novel: the papercovers in which each in- stallmentis bound. Placing still greateremphasis on the "white paper"on which their own notice, like the literary text, is printed, the advertisersindirectly address the "many thou- sands of readers"through a fictive addressto the author(imaginatively placing their potential patron in the privileged position of reading Dickens's mail, much as Mr Tulkinghornmisappropriates Lady Dedlock's privateletters in Bleak House), inter- pellating the individualreading subject simultaneouslyas a consumerof culturaland material goods. In the form of the letter, a direct, "personal"communication-ostensibly the polite expression of goodwill between two gentlemen, writer and reader-is foregrounded,ironically, as homologous to the entirely impersonalrela- tion of "the public" to "an establishment."Like the ads of E. Moses & Son, this ad makes use of rhetoricaldevices and modes of addressthat both replicateand complicate the work of the literarynarrative and that implicate the object of advertisingin the novel's claim to symbolic capital. After expoundingupon the variousadvantages of their uniqueproducts and services, and having invited readersto nickname their company "NumberOne" (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 Advertisingand the VictorianNovel 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 authorialprod- ucts. The advertisersare, in effect, using this popularnovel by name in orderto pub- licize both their own products and their hopes that the novelist will continue to produce the media for furtherpublicity for their company. The function of Bleak House, in this regard,is to advertisefor Dakin & Company'swares, to advertisefor itself, and to advertisefor the Dickens enterprisein general-and, in so doing, to en- dorse (by implication,at least) all the companies whose advertisementspaid for the publicationof the volume. This is certainlynot a customarycritical treatmentof the novel qua literature,but to appreciateBleak House "in a business point of view" is, in a sense, to acknowledgethat other side of what this novel is. The ads that speak of (and to) the text from within its own green paper covers powerfully illustratethat there is yet anotherway of "reading"the novel. Furtherunderscoring (but with an ironic twist) the commercial utility of the Dickens novel as a marketingsystem, an even earlier ad from the prolific E. Moses & Son, printedin the eighth numberof David Copperfield,begins with a poem titled "A ProperField for Copperfield."The central trope of this poem is "circulation":it begins, "Whereshall we find the properfield / For circulating 'Copperfield?'" De- scribingthe novel as a "cleverwork" deserving of the attentionof 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 itself with the question of how best to promotethis work of literature.The poem further praises the novel by invoking not the fame of the author,but that of the business being advertised:

This novel merits to be read WhereverMosEs' fame has spread; Which, like a banner,is unfurl'd Throughoutthe habitableworld.

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 business 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 marketingit to the customers of the apparentlyworld-renowned tailor shop:

If all who favor MosEs' mart Wouldjoin and take a monthly part, The theme of our consideration Would have a wond'rouscirculation.

Having thus performeda reversalthe termsof the relationshipbetween the novel and the advertisementso as to suggest (comically,but nonethelessaudaciously) that it is in fact the formerthat relies upon the latterfor its success, E. Moses concludesthat his own loyal customerbase is obviously "theproper field / For circulating'Copper- THE PROPER PFIELD FOR " COPPERIIELD."

Wmas shall we find a proper field Wherever Mesas' fame has spread; " For circulating "Copperfield Which. like a banner, is utfurl'd A clever work like this should find Throughout the harltable wnrld. A place in ev'ry body's mind. If all who favour MosEs' mart Nor should it fail to have a part Would join and take a montthly part, In ev'ry warm admiring heart. The theme of our consideration The rising youth should naadits page, Would have a wond'rous circulation. Nor should its leaves be hid from age. There's scarce a tabhe in the land It should bedeck the poor mao's board, On which its leaves would not expwand, And swell the volumes of my lord. *TIsclear that that'e the proper field This novel merits to be read For circulating "' Copperfeld."

LIST OF PRICES.

Zeady Lbade. Made to bIteasure. a s. d. aL. d. 0 Autumn and Winter Overcoats in every Men's Autumn and Winter Overcoats, from . 1 I style, from e $ The Chesterfield Wrapper, in a warm 1 8 0 material, lined . . . . I TheBulwer, handsomelyand. . warmlytrimmed. 0 18 0 . The Paletor, handsornelyandwarmly trimmed 3 16 0 The Ditto . . . . 0 18 0 3 Paletot, The Eglinton Wrapper, a very elegant Style 0 0 The Chesterfield, Ditto The Albert Wrapper, a very handsome..... style I The Strathmore Winter Overcoat, newest 2 . of Overcoats 1 5 Style, lined throughout . in . Tweed Shooting Coat . . . . . 8 6 Autumn and Winter Trousers I ...... and Doeskin . . . . . ) Lounging and Morning Coat . . . 0 4 6 Best Black Cessimere Ditto 1 0 Autumn and Winter Trousers in Tweed . 0 4 6 Autumn nod Winter Vests . . . 8 6 Doeskin 0 7 6 Best Black Cloth 0 13 6 Vest o 2 6 Black S;ilkVelvet Ditto IS 0 Black Silk Velvet Vest 0 13 6 Dress Coats, from. . 1i. to 2 15 1*. 0ld. 01 Dress Coats 0 17 0 Frock H. and T from . 5 0 Frock 0 Suit, . 1 19 Supertne Youth and Overcoatsuin a Boys everystyle, from 0 7 Men's Shooting Coats . . 0 15 0 Hussar and Tunic Suit . 0 14 6 Elegant Dressing Robes in great variety Boys Autumn arnd Winter Vests , . 0 8 0 from 16. to 5 0 0

A large Stock of For Coats in every Shape, from a3 to a20.

NAVAL AND MILITARY UNIFORMS, LIVERIES, &e.

MOURNING TO ANY EXTENT AT FIVE MINUTES' NOTICE. A SuiCof Mournisg completefor a1 10s.

The New Book, entitled "The Minion of the Million," with full Directions for Self-measurement, can be had on application, or forwarded, post free, to any part of the kingdom. Norlcs.-The Shawl and Fur Departments are now replete with every novelty of the Season, Oassasv.-Any Article purchased, either Ready-made or Made to Measure, if not approved of, will be exchanged, or the money returned.

E. MOSES & SON

TAILORS, WOOLLEN DRAPERS, CLOTHIERS, HATTERS, HOSIERS, FURRIERS, BOOT AND SHOE MAKERS, AND GENERAL OUTFITTERS,

1x3, 155,156, and 157, 1Mtnorles; and 83, 8Ca, 85, and 86, A.dgate, City, London. ALL COMMUNICATINGWITH .ACH OTIHERtaND FORMING ONE V0ST ESTABLisUHMENT.

CArrsot.-E. MOSES & SON regret having to guard the public against imposition, but having heard that the untradesmanlike falsehood of being connected with them, or, it is the same concern, has been resorted to in many instances, and for obvious reasons, they beg to state they have no connexion with any and other Iousuo in or out of London, except their branch Establishments, 36, Fargate, Sheffield, 19, Thorntoa's Buildings, Bradford, Yorkshire; and those who desire genuine and cheap Clothing, &c., should call at or send to Minories and Algate, City, Iondon ; or to the Branch Establishments as above. till sunset when is TAxe Establishment is closed from sunset Friday, Saturday, business resumed No-rms.-Thistill 12 o'clock.

Fig. 3. Advertisement.In David CopperfieldNo. 8 (December 1849). Advertisingand the VictorianNovel 147

field.'" Imaginativelyassuming responsibility for the work of promotingthe literary text in which it appears,the ad becomes the mediumfor a kind of self-mythologizing activity on the partof the business.The bold joke of this poem-that advertisingpre- cedes the novel and gives it value by associationwith the celebrity of the business- is a joke that I think,for the purposesof this study,might almostbe takenseriously. It is a claim to authorityand agency in the process of literaryand commercialreproduc- tion; from within a literarytext of its own creation,the ad ascribes somethinglike an "authorfunction" to the producerof commodities. Further,we might say that the imaginedreaders of the novel are thus interpellatedfirst as consumersof commercial goods and readersof advertising,and only second as readersof literature. Though there is an obvious and importantdifference between the status of the product of industrialmass productionand the made-to-ordersuit of clothes advertised by Moses & Son, the representationalsystem of advertising in which these things appear nonetheless bears some relation to another emerging literary discourse: the commodity story.This populargenre, appearingin so many periodicals, often involves a manufacturedobject relating its own history of productionin the first-person.In addition to the numerous instances in Victorian magazines of the "Storyof a Pin" and such, there appearsin an 1851 issue of Household Wordsa piece of writing titled "The Catalogue'sAccount of Itself,"in which the Catalogue of the Great Exhibition speaks of its contents and of the exhibitors of commodities at the CrystalPalace-"most of them authorsfor the first time" (qtd. in Richards63). Like this peculiargenre of fiction, the ads in the serial novel similarlysuggest thatthe narrative of the life of a thing'6or a statementof its identity and inner spirit may easily find its way into literaryform. In addressingthemselves either to the reader,to the text, or to Dickens himself, the figuredcommodities in advertisementsimply thatthe readermay be interpellatedby the addressof a thing."7They display not only a certain apparentagency, but also, a curious capacity to producenovelistic 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 thoroughlypossessed by this one subject,but for the heaps of fantasticthings I had seen huddledtogether in the curiosity-dealer'swarehouse. These, crowding upon my mind, in connexion with the child, and gatheringround her, as it were, broughther condition palpably before me. I had her image, without any effort of imagination,surrounded and beset by everythingthat was foreign to its nature,and furthestremoved from the sympathiesof 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 alreadyremarked) I could not dismiss her from my recollection, do what I would." -Dickens, The Old CuriosityShop 20-22 148 Emily Steinlight

Returningnow to Marx's suggestion that the commodity itself speaks a language, 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 "greenleaves" of the novel's covers as a sort of equivalentform, thus interpellatingthe novel as a subject of economic exchange, the objects that populate the Dickens novel also participatein the social relations of its human subjects. To a certain extent, the anxiety this exchange produces is a question of proportion;as Richardsnotes of the spectaculargigantism and visual semiotics of the object in Vic- torian advertising, "[e]xaggeratedumbrellas, Cheshire cheeses, tubs of butter,and sides of bacon flauntedthe assumptionthat commodities were fashioned on a human scale to serve human needs,"performing "a carnivalesqueinversion'8 of the low regard 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 spectacularfigure entirely out of proportionwith the human, and various inanimate "productsof the humanbrain appear as autonomousfigures endowed with a life of their own" (Marx, Capital 165). If Marx's descriptionof the subjective effects of commodity fetishism sounds conspicuously like a descriptionof the novelistic productionof character,perhaps there is some sense in this. Turningback to that memorablepassage from The Old CuriosityShop in which the sentimentalizedDickensian child, Little Nell, sleeps in- nocently in her grandfather'sshop-improbably framed by a host of inanimateob- 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 repetitionof the language of the shop itself, and these sentiments find reinforcementin the spectacular objects that fill the room (12). As he admits, "I am not sure that I should have been so thoroughlypossessed by this one subject, but for the heaps of fantastic things I had seen huddledtogether in the curiosity-dealer'swarehouse" (20). Here, too, the commodity proliferatesand accumulatesalong with (but also, apparently,in opposition to) the representationof another set of values understoodas originating in human sympathy,inwardness and moral "imagination"-all of which ought to be (but are evidently not) resistantto the "impressions"produced by "externalobjects" (20). In the literarynarrative, the incongruousimage of the novelistic child "surroundedand beset by everythingthat was foreign to its nature"is both enabled in the observer's memory and valued differentiallyby referenceto the commodity form. Enteringinto the novel's economies of subjectivity,the festishized commodity appearsat times as a specter of the inhumanthat threatens,in the medium of literature, to elide the distinctionbetween artistic and mechanical production.Returning to Bleak House, if the productionof literarylanguage in that novel-like the production of comparativelyempty religious discourseby the unctuousMinister Chadband, a sort of sermonizingmachine who actually appearsto run on oil and "may be de- scribed as always becoming a kind of considerableOil Mills, or other large factory for the productionof that articleon a wholesale scale" (307)--is implicitly in danger of becoming a mechanicalprocess within an industrializedpublishing industry, this danger is expressed in the novel's constant repudiationof the commodity form and of the system of industrialproduction. Advertisingand the VictorianNovel 149

Though Chadbandmay be the only characterexplicitly comparedto a factory, he is really one of many mechanical apparatusesthat take human form in Bleak House. Against the grain of its own conventionallyhumanist inclinations, the narrative produces a set of charactersrecognizable mainly through their synechdochic speech mannerismsand a limited range of other tics and quirks, and whose mecha- nistic function is to repeat and reproducethemselves 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 repetitionpartakes of that exaggerated quality of idiosyncrasy popularly associated with the "Dickensian" character.Yet, this device may also serve a practicalpurpose in the medium of serial fiction: as Lee Erickson suggests, "[t]o help his readers remember his characters from one monthly numberto the next, Dickens often reducedhis minorcharacters to caricaturesby having them speak repeatedtags" (163).19I would add, further,that it is no coincidence that these "repeatedtags" in Dickensiannarrative are also standard practice in the discourse of advertisingthat surroundsthe serialized novel. In order to help readers remember the commodities for sale, advertisementsrepeat themselves from one printingto the next, offering clipped syntax, unusualproduct names and catchphrases,images, taglines and other forms of shorthand-as we saw in the instance of Dakin & Co., who suggested thatreaders nickname their business "Num- ber One" (afterits addressand page number)in part,as a mnemonic device. The creation 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 languageof the novel alike are continuallypreserved against for- getfulness and inattention. To the extent that the work of serial narrativeentails a practiceof "advertising" for its characters,this practice meets with no small degree of internalresistance in Bleak House. In its drive to assertthe humanityof its protagonistsagainst the impersonality of the modern industrialregime, the government,the court system, and institutions 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 representedas the productof individualhuman agency ratherthan of mechanicalreproduction. The predominantmetaphor for the author'srelationship to the text is the relationshipof parentto child; in his Prefaceto 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 parentto 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 heartsa favouritechild. And his name is DAVIDCOPPERFIELD." The advertisement for Dakin & Co. reflects an awareness of this conceit in its reference to Dickens's capacity to "give birthto... numerousBrothers and Sisters of "DAVIDCOPPERFIELD." In equating the novel with the category of the human, and implicitly equating the writing process with childbirth,the authorascribes a certain"naturalness" to literary creationthat elevates both process and productabove the artificialityof the industrial reproductionof the book in print.20 Furtherunderscoring the connection between writing and human conception, the narrativeof Bleak House sublimatesthe illicit act of sexual reproductionin the 150 Emily Steinlight

form of copying and other modes of duplicationof documents.Esther, whose character most readily embodies the novel as a "child"of Dickens, is revealed to be the daughterof a mysterious "Nemo,"who (like Dickens himself, in his earlier years) works as a law copyist; her parentageis established througha series of handwritten documents tracedback to her father.The purpose of copying is, of course, to reproduce an exact facsimile of the original, yet the many instancesof copying and reproduction in the text seem to suggest otherwise. There are only degeneratecopies, all of which insistentlyretain traces of differenceeven in the handwriting(161), bearing the involuntarysignature of the copyist as if to suggest that writing, by its very nature, cannot be mechanicallyreproduced. The evidentiarydocuments that ultimately serve to legitimate one Will over anotherin the Jarndycesuit simultaneouslyserve to de-legitimate Esther,revealing the discreditablehistory of her birth. Here and elsewhere, parenthood, filiation, and the purity of the familial line are registered as highly unstable, troublingthe analogy between maternity/paternityand the production of texts. Nemo, identified by Mr Snagsby as "a Writerwho lodges just over on the opposite side of the lane," is marked simultaneously as an author-literally, as the writerof letters and other documents,and figuratively,as authorof the novel's prin- cipal humansubject by virtue of paternity-and (ironically),by the Latin meaning of his pseudonym, as the condition of anonymityitself: "'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 deferentialcough. 'It is a person's name'" (161). Nemo, who producescopy 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 authorof the mass-produced serial novel, presentingwriting at once in its individualparticularity and in its sheer anonymity;the fate of his characterasserts the impossibility of this position. Like the anonymousor "impersonal"writer/narrator of the third-personnarrative that borders Esther's first-person narrative (a sort of discontinuous sequence of voices and rhetorics,very much closer in style to the schizophrenicclamor of the ads pages than to the speech of a singular narrativepersona), Nemo's paternalrelation to the text and to its human subject is one of profoundambivalence and indeterminacy. It is crucial to the ideological work of the narrativethat Nemo, the anonymous "Writer"and unknown father of the protagonist, ends his life in the quarters of Krook-the figuremythically associatedwith the commodityin all its baseness. The senile Krook, whose "Rag-and-BottleWarehouse" figures as the grotesquedouble of the Court of Chancery,is nicknamed 'the Lord Chancellor'by virtue of both his proximity to Chanceryand the resemblanceof his shop to the court: he too has all manner of things "wastingaway and going to rack and ruin,"along with "so many old parchmentsesand papers"(69). This squalid warehouse is almost the symbolic inverse of advertising-a sort of nightmarishvision of the other side of consumption, where the commodity, having expended its use-value, leaves its residue in the form of garbage.Among the many bottles ("blackingbottles, medicine bottles, gin- ger-beerand soda-waterbottles, 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 Advertisingand the VictorianNovel 151

scale, hanging without any counterpoisefrom a beam" (67-68); this scale, which seems to belong to the world of the Court,also evokes the merchant'sscale, as if to signal that the balance and proportionof things has been thrownoff. Equatedin all respects with the devaluationof materialand culturalgoods, po- sitioned in a problematicrelation to the object of writingby virtue of his near-illiter- acy,21and otherwise overdeterminedas buyer and seller of worthless used items, Krook is made to disappearin a manneras mysteriousand supernaturalas the manner in which the fetishized commodity itself appears:he spontaneouslycombusts, taking with him all the lettersof importanceto the inheritanceof propertyin 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 authoritiesin all places under all names soever, where false pretences are made" (519)-is also a violent repudiationof the commodity form. By a certain distributivelogic of reprisal, Krook's spontaneouscom- bustion might be read as a settling of scores-the novel's revenge on the literary mass marketand its voracious appetite for "muchdisregarded merchandise" (163). To the extent thatBleak House, as a commodity,can enterinto symbolic exchange, it is imbricatedin an economic matrixnot only in its situatednesswithin a medium of printcapitalism, but also in the literarynarrative which may be read, I think,as a narrative of the novel's own struggle for legitimacy.

ADVERTISING AGENCY

As I have suggested, reading might be understoodmore broadly as a mode of cultural consumption that is always mediated by processes of economic exchange and implicated in a perpetualstruggle (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 exchange of "real"and symbolic capital. Within its economy, the figure of the author enters into circulationostensibly as a repositoryof accumulatedliterary capital--an index of the abstract capacity to produce still greater value. As Bourdieu has so forcefully articulated,the literary marketplaceis structuredby a set of differential values which, even when they run precisely contraryto the notion of economic interest, are nonetheless the productof an investmentof symbolic capital both in the art object or text and in the figure of the artist.Yet, while Bourdieu's sociological view of the "marketof symbolic goods" offers us a remarkablysophisticated and useful account of the processes of culturalproduction, his analysis does not extend beyond the traditionalparameters of what is considered "art."The question of conscious in- dividual agency, which continues to determinethe status of writing to a far greater extent than we may be willing to admit, seems to preclude the treatmentof much "extra-textual"22or extra-diagetic writing (such as advertising) as anything other than the ephemera of popular culture-perhaps of limited interest to historicist scholarshipand culturalcriticism but otherwise irrelevantto literarystudies. The study of advertisementsin 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 rubricof culturalstudies or sociology. Since Barthes's 1959 Mythologies, Bau- drillardand Debord (and, more recently,Bill Brown) have made significantinterven- tions into the theoreticalstatus of the object and of the commodity as spectacle. In recent years, substantive and often illuminating work has been done by Thomas Richards,in Victorianhistory, and LaurelBrake and JenniferWicke, in literarystudies, who have contributedmuch 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 "treatthe wrappersand advertisersthat, with the letterpressand illustration, make up part-issuesand periodicals, as part of what we designate as the text" (27). This gesture towardsa new textual theory-in the vein of what Greethamdescribes as "a nexus where authorialityand textualitymeet but are not (necessarily) consub- stantial"(49)23-may be a significantstep in the right direction,yet Brake'sargument for studies of advertisingis nonetheless recursiveto a set of age-old distinctionsbe- tween the literaryand the commercial.In orderto substantiateher argument,Brake points to the obvious connectionsbetween the institutionsof printadvertising and the book industry,and notes the prevalenceof ads in periodicals for other periodicals: "Like a listing magazine, the Advertiserkept regularreaders up to date on the latest issues of the magazines-with details of theircontents; the newest books, series, and part-issues;and new entrantsin the field such as The Day. An academic analogy lies with the advertisementsin PMLAor VictorianStudies" (44). Though the role of advertising in the dynamics of the Victorianpublishing marketis certainlyan interesting area of historical inquiry, the contemporary "academic analogy" is a little farfetched;I think we would be unlikely to find a contemporaryad for baby food, soap, or hair treatmentsin the pages of PMLA.In valorizingthe Advertiserby com- parison to elite academicjournals, Brake's analogy reproducesthe logic of distinction that elevates literarywriting above other forms. Ignoring the numerousads for non-literaryproducts that appearin serial fiction, Brakeunreflectively reinforces precisely this ideological divide between literatureand its others that was the original reason for the exclusion of the ads from later volume editions of serial novels. What so many admirablestudies of Victorianprint and periodicals stop shortof concluding amounts to a fairly succinct explanationfor 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- turalismin the 1960s and 70s, remarkablylittle has changed since Barthes'sobituary for the author,or since Foucault'sinquiry into the formationof authorshipas a special category of propertyand as a function of discourse. By and large, the study of literaturehas remainedsafely within the boundariesof authorship,and scholarshave continued to hold conferences on Dickens, to deliver papers on Hardy, to publish dazzlingly brilliantmonographs on George Eliot, and all with (at best) only the most superficialacknowledgement of the problematicassumptions underlying the study of an individualauthor. The presentstudy, like so many others,begins with a single author,but I hope it will not end there. To the extent that a reading of advertisingcan serve to reveal, if not to dislodge, the often unarticulatedpolitics of authorship,it is my argumentthat the advertisementhas a kind of supplementalrelationship to the "author-function." Advertisingand the VictorianNovel 153

Under the regime of industrialprint capitalism, the work of commercialdiscourse is not merely that of selling commodities, but of advertisingagency; in the marginsof serial fiction, the ad for a clothier's services is also an ad for the productivepotential and unique creativeagency of the author.To invoke the name and the works of Dick- ens is to drawupon the collective culturalinvestment in the idea of the singularityof the authoras a person and in the idea of his uniquenessas a producerof literature.If we take the force of Foucault'sobservation that the propername of an authoris not merely "indicative"or "designative"but, "to a certainextent, the equivalentof a description"(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 shorthandfor the historically variablecomposite impressions of a text's culturalvalence, its mythic uniqueness,its signaturesand its criticallyrec- ognized effects. When we speak of the "anonymity"of advertisingdiscourse, we implicitly con- trastit against literarydiscourse, 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 writingcannot lay claim to a propertitle. Notwithstandingthe inconsistencies, the incongruities,or the breaks in time and in narrative,the serial novel is markedas a coherentand self-sufficienttotality even before it has been written. By the time of publicationof the first monthly part,its status as a novel (with an implied futurityin which it will be completed) is alreadybeyond question. Much as Foucaulthas arguedof the author-largely taking for grantedthe statusof the text- that its function is to presentthe spectralappearance of a person who is supposedto have precededthe text, I am arguingthat the text itself is similarly posited as something anterior to writing. If there is something like a text-function,or more particu- larly, a novel-function,it operatesas a claim for the unity, singularityand 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 advertisementin print may imitate the literarytext it supplements, making similar use of a title, the capacity of this title to ensure the durabilityof the writing is in no way comparable.In the particularcase of the "DickensAdvertiser," where the entire collection of ads precedingthe text is actually accordeda 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 relationto the literarytext-advertising seems to take on the ambiguousstatus of the novel's other. The Advertiseris secondaryto the novel (thoughit precedesDickens in print),yet its title insists that it is somehow related, whetherby practicalinterdependence, by formal opposition, or otherwise. In this sense, "Anti-BleakHouse" could hardly be a more fitting title for the ad that appears within (but not quite in) the serial novel. Markingthe text of E. Moses & Son as definitivelynot the text of Bleak House, this title serves to consolidate the serial novel as a coherent and autonomousentity by drawingits boundariesfrom the outside. It is thus in the discourseof advertisingthat 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 ultimatelythe function 154 Emily Steinlight

of advertisingdiscourse to subordinatethe interests of consumptionto the primary interests of "culture."Unlike an advertisementfor suits of clothes that vary by the season, the novel is a world apart.It transcendsthe time and place of its writing, and its apparent"timelessness" assures that its value does not lie in its ephemeralprint medium, but in its apparentuniqueness and in its ostensibly universaland transhis- torical appeal as literature.24While the ads (which do not aspire to such transcen- dence and whose instrumentalpurpose 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 Victorianserial novel is expected to do more than merely take at face value the articulationsof difference between two forms of writing that mutually define each other by a relation of apparentopposition (trusting that the novel has betterintentions than do the ads), we might wonder how it is that our edi- tors continue to draw the distinction between text and paratextalong precisely the original fault lines. In our collective investmentin the ideology of the novel and in the notion of literature'sseparateness, we are still-and perhapsinevitably-operat- ing within the episteme of novelism.25It is my contentionthat there are four unstated articles of faith that categoricallyexclude advertisingfrom literature,and vice versa: 1) the singular agency of the author, as opposed to the work of anonymousothers; 2) the continuity and totality of narrative, as opposed to that which is understoodas extra-diagetic;3) the timelessness of literature, as opposed to the ephemeralityof economic interests;and 4) the essential humanityof the novel subject, as opposed to the monstrous, inhuman specter of the fetishized commodity. These articles, produced by a historically specific struggle within the literarymarketplace of the nineteenth 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 differencerather than as a co- herentnarrative, after Derrida;we might profess to understandthe value of any aesthetic 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 confrontedwith a novel that presentsitself as the productof a single author(a real person about whom certainbi- ographicalfacts may be known, whetheror not they are of interestto us), a text that we understandas a series of words in a particularand invariableorder that are read- able and self-sufficient as a narrative-a narrativethat we believe is worth reading and will continue to be worth reading, even though it was writtenin a differentera, 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 invested-even to the point of allowing that mythic figure to determinewhat we can and cannot admit into the privileged category of literature,what can and cannot be read as a text (or "thetext"), and where to draw the line. With regardto the limits of authorship,Foucault notes, "The problem is both theoreticaland practical.If we wish to publish the complete works of Nietzsche, for Advertisingand the VictorianNovel 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 remainderof an appointment,or a laundrybill, should this be included in his works? Why not?" (118-19). The question of Nietzsche's laundrybill is, in a sense, the logical extension of both the author- function and the claim of "timelessness"26as a value of the text. The problemis not that we are interestedin what Nietzsche paid (or did not pay) for his laundry;on the contrary,the problemis thatthe airing of the author'sdirty laundry offers such an af- front to the orthodoxiesof editing that we cannothelp but stop and take notice of the ideological foundationsof this exclusion. Likewise, in the frameworkof a Victorian serial novel, we do not want to know the price of an overcoat (whetherit happensto be a "reversiblecoat," a "ByronJacket," or "TheAnthropos"), nor to what addressin London we may write for particulars,unless this informationsomehow has self-evident bearingon the substanceof the literarytext. It is not the networkof economic relationsbut the commodity as such that pre- sents an obstruction.It displays an apparentlyimpenetrable surface; though, like the novel, it might be understoodmore as a "representation"than as a "thing,"its essential difficulty (and its ethical and political problem) is that, unlike the novel, it does not offer a narrative.This might even be regardedas the core of Marx's critique of the commodity form: the object is taken as a representationof something other than itself-that is to say, other than its apparentmaterial properties and, more importantly, 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 narrative of its origins within itself as the representationof a concrete object, the reified commodity militates against representationitself, appearing as a thing without a past, and a sort of text that cannot point back to its "author."The appearanceof the commodity in the medium of literature-the sign of the novel's potential to enter into economic exchange-produces resistancenot only at the marginsbut within the text itself. Advertising,as the literarydiscourse of the commodity and as the field in which it emerges, lays claim to a space where writing and capitalismare not merely coeval but analogous:where art and the commodity confrontone anotheras equivalent forms, each determinedin relation to the other by the possibility of exchange, and each existing primarilyto sustainthe other. As we have observed in Bleak House and other Victorianserial novels, and as becomes increasinglyclear in a readingof advertisingdiscourse alongside the literary discourse it accompanies, the similaritiesto be seen are not simply a matterof common "themes,"nor are they merely "effects" of a concrete materialrelation; I want to maintainthat advertising(much like the novel) is not a materialobject, but a rhetoricaland discursivepractice. Attending to this practice, I would argue, might involve reading advertisingnot as a secondary effect, but as a primaryformation within the structureof the novel, which, in articulatingthe supplementarityof two divergentmodes of writing,produces the one in relationto the other.It is not against but ratherthrough such formationsthat the status of the literaryemerges. 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 historicalpossibility and that 156 Emily Steinlight

tests our own relativecapacity to read literaryhistory from inside of ideology. I un- derstandideology largely in the Althusseriansense-that is to say, not as a form of "false consciousness,"but as somethingactual, somethingfluid, which flows through the channels of institutionsand 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 advertisingand is specifically interpellatedby the language of advertisementin ways that reproduce,supplement, and complicate the work of the literarynarrative. Finally, it is my contention that the addressof advertising discourse to the reading subject (and the response of the subject to that address) is essential not only to the commercial viability of the novel in the mass market,but also, to the reproductionof the kind of readerly subjectivitythat makes the novel what it is.

CONCLUSION

The account of the novel I have proposed is one in which advertisingplays a crucialrole in producingand shapingthe novel as a literarygenre and in creatingthe real and imaginaryconditions for a mass cultureof novel-reading.As I have argued, the status of the novel in the age of industrialprint capitalism is at once that of literature-in which form it stakes out a position of economic disinterestand ostensible autonomyfrom the market-and that of an "excellent medium of publicity"for the marketingof materialgoods; further,it is this (arguablyfalse) dichotomy within the cultureof the novel that identifies it as a site of symbolic struggle.It is not the goods themselves that are of interestto 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 Baudrillardmaintains, it tells us "what it is that we consume throughobjects" (165). In the context of the novel, what we consume through objects is the product of a substantialcultural investment in the possibility of a humanscale, a sort of "valueform" against which to measurenovel- istic subjectivityand textuality,which serves as the foundationof the modern politics of authorship. The regime of the Authorhas also been, for us, the regime of "theText"-a the- oretical calcification which, in its apparentopen-endedness, seems to exempt us from the work of defining what comprises the text, but which really only conceals our own belief in its ultimatedeterminacy as an identifiable,self-contained and self- consistent object of analysis. Foucaultpoints to this problem in noting that the con- cept of &critureitself "in subtle ways, continues to preserve the existence of the author"to the extent that it "sustainsthe privileges of the authorthrough the safe- guard of the a priori" (119-20); brilliantlyobserved though this is, it does not an- swer for the largerproblem of expressing, in theoreticaland practicalterms, exactly how the a priori status of writing is established-how (to put the question differently) writing passes from the condition of the "timely" to that of the "timeless." More importantly,perhaps, it seems to me that the greatestimpediment is the lack of a coherently articulatedtheoretical frameworkfor the study of periodical genres, Advertisingand the VictorianNovel 157

forms and media that might allow for the reassessmentof the novel within a larger discursive economy. So much attentionhas been devoted to the study of the novel over the past thirtyor forty years that we have very nearly lost sight of what lies just outside its margins.We lack even the vocabularyto describe what ordersof time the novel needs to inhabitand what kind of symbolic and materialspace it needs to oc- cupy in orderto differentiateitself from the periodicalinstitutions that supportits reproduction-materially and otherwise. Insofar as the assertion of the novel's essential difference from other genres (most emphatically,from periodical genres and from the languageof the commodity)marks a foreclosurewithin the field of production, the cult of the authorendures in the cult of the text. When Foucault suggested in 1969 that "[p]erhapsthe time has come to study not only the expressive value and formal transformationsof discourse, but its mode of existence: the modificationsand variations,within any culture,of modes of circulation, valorization, attribution,and appropriation"(137), he laid out a task that is still very much before us today. Following from this suggestion, what remainsto be seen more than thirty-fiveyears later is how we might study the "modeof existence" of the novel itself so as to read against the grain of what I have called the text-function. 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 thanksto RobertScholes and Jon Klancherfor readingearlier drafts of this article,and to the John Hay Libraryof Brown University Libraryfor permittingme to reprintsome of the advertisements from their serials collection.

1. On Dickens's journalisticcareer and writings, see Drew. 2. See Johnson 167-68.

3. On the history of Victorianbook publishingand the economics of the literarymarketplace, see Altick, Sutherland,Erickson, and Feltes. On the phenomenonof serializationin particular,see also Vann, Law, and Hughes & Lund. 4. Dickens notes in his Preface to the First Cheap Edition of The Old CuriosityShop, "Whenthe story was finished, that it might be freed from the incumbranceof associations and interruptionswith which it had no kind of concern, I caused the few sheets of MASTERHUMPHREY'S CLOCK, which had been printedin connexion with it, to be cancelled; and, like the unfinishedtale of the windy night and the notary in The SentimentalJourney, they became the propertyof the trunkmakerand the butter- man. I was especially unwilling, I confess, to enrich those respectabletrades with the opening paper of the abandoneddesign .... But it was done, and wisely done, and MASTERHUMPHREY'S CLOCK, as originallyconstructed, 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. Appearingas it does in the context of Bleak House, this line may resonatestrangely with those of the narrator:"What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercuryin powder,and the whereaboutsof Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had the distantray of light upon him when he swept the churchyardstep? What connexion can there have been between 158 Emily Steinlight

many people in innumerablehistories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless,been curiously broughttogether!" (256).

6. The earliermeaning of advertising-avertissement-is, of course, "warning." 7. On agency and responsibilityin Bleak House, see Robbins. For an insightfulreading 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 "adaptedfor exportationto the colonies." For scholarsof colonialism in British popularculture, or in the history of the periodicalpress in India and elsewhere as an instrumentof colonial administration,these advertisementswould offer a great wealth of material.

9. At Dickens's request,the publishersprinted a notice in the "Bleak House Advertiser"stating that the authorreserves the right to publish a translationof the presentnovel at his discretion,in keeping with the "New Law of InternationalCopyright." 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 understoodas inextricablefrom production:"the product..,. proves itself to be, becomes, a productonly throughconsumption" (91), and each process "suppliesthe other with its object" (93). We might add, further,that consumptionis by no means a simple matterof the fulfillmentof need; as Baudrillardunderscores, it might be more rig- orously defined as "thevirtual totality of all objects and messages ready-constitutedas a more or less coherentdiscourse. If it has any meaning at all, consumptionmeans an activity consisting of the sys- tematic manipulationof signs" (200).

11. As Baudrillardsuggests, advertisingworks in partto solicit the subject throughan 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 actualpurchase of the object is secondary"(171). The other side of this mutualdesire on the partof subject and object, however,is the anxiety of a lack (whetherof warmth,of comfort, of pleasure,or of love) on which advertising also trades.(On this point, see also Williams 185.)

12. While most of the ads for E. Moses & Son employ this vocabularyof legality in the service of pastiche, one of the monthly advertisementsconcludes, "CAUTION.-E. Moses & Son regrethaving to guardthe Public againstimposition, having learnedthat the untradesmanlikefalsehoodof 'being connected with their Establishment'of 'It's the same concern,'has been resorted to in many instances, and for obvious reasons....

13. In the narrativeof the PickwickPapers, Moses Pickwick becomes a curious example of this phenom- enon. The character'schance sighting of the coach on the side of which his own full name is printed (582) seems to indicate an odd propensityof personalnames to attachthemselves to objects, or to de- tach themselves from persons; as McLaughlin quite persuasively suggests, the appearanceof this name on a coach is both a paradigmaticencounter between the subject and "his own randomappear- ance as a 'modern'sign" and a particularlysignificant moment in Dickens's first novel, since the author's previous pseudonym, "Boz," derives-as Dickens notes in his Preface-from "Moses" (McLaughlin120-21). In light of this connection, I think the name of E. Moses must also be charged with a certain suggestiveness. In a very interestingadvertisement in the first numberof David Cop- perfield, the clothier offers an "Analysisof the Name of Moses & Son," which playfully catalogues the various words beginning with each letter of the name that describe the positive attributesof the business. 14. See also Darwin 9.

15. Here, as we shall see elsewhere, the implied metaphorof the authoras "mother"echoes a common rhetoricaltrope in the language of advertising,which serves similarly to convey the productiveand domestic values of the commodity.That the novel, like any other commodity as personifiedin advertising discourse, may be treatedas one of a series of "siblings,"is telling. It is also interestingto note that while Dickens's literaryand editoriallabors as objectified in his journal, Household Words,may Advertisingand the VictorianNovel 159

be representedas accumulatingin "heaps,"his novels are metaphoricallygiven their due by way of a privileged association with the humanchild. 16. Bill Brown emphatically notes that the "thing"is not synonymous with the "object."He defines things as "whatis excessive in objects . .. what exceeds their mere materializationas objects or their mere utilizationas objects-their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysicalpresence" (5). He goes on to offer what we might almost describe as a serial definitionof thingness: "Temporalizedas 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 remainsphysically or metaphysicallyirreducible to objects)." 17. Jaffe's reading of A ChristmasCarol suggests an interestingparallel: the objects in the window that Scrooge observes in the scenes of ChristmasesPast seem to speak to him and ultimatelyto show him what he is (Jaffe 260). Jaffe describes Dickens's tale as "the story of a Victorianbusinessman's interpellation as the subjectof a phantasmaticcommodity culturein which laissez-faireeconomics is hap- pily wedded to naturalbenevolence" (255).

18. I think this "carnivalesqueinversion" irresistibly recalls Marx's descriptionof the table which, in its commodity form, "standson its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesqueideas, far more wonderfulthan if it were to begin dancing of its own free will" (Capital 163-64). 19. See also Vann4.

20. In this regard,Armstrong and Tennenhouse'shighly suggestive "reproductivehypothesis" (160-95) might take on new meaning in the representationof the book's mechanicalreproduction; in writing the novel into a narrativeof heterosexualkinship relations and a seemingly self-evident structureof parenthoodand filiation, both the culturallogic of authorshipand the social relationsof the domestic orderare simultaneouslynaturalized by referenceto a crucial thirdterm: the commodity. 21. Krook's attemptsto teach himself to read-and the sinister and almost incantatorymanner in which he spells out the names of the charactersinvolved in the case of Jarndyceand Jarndyce(71)-might be read along the lines of Brantlinger'sargument on the "anxieties"of mass literacy;see Brantlinger 1-24.

22. On other forms of extra-textualwriting, or "paratext"(not including advertising),see Genette. 23. As Greethamindicates in a study of the conditions of textuality,the interpretiveproblem that confronts an editor at any given historicalmoment and in any culturalcontext is that "all editing, and all editorialtheory-just like all criticism and all critical theory-is constrainedby history,the post-his- toricaldreams of eclecticism notwithstanding"(374). This means, he argues,that "the statusof social textual criticism is itself socially determinedand is not independentof the intellectual and academic society that both producesand sustainsit" (374). The constructionof an Ur-textof sorts is always the implied object of a critical edition, but I think it ought to be underscoredthat the idealized form of the text belongs entirely to the realm of the imaginary.On textual theory and editorialmethodology, see Greethamand McGann;on editing Victoriannovels, see Monod and Shillingsburg. 24. Lovell notes that the novel in the Victorianperiod "dependedon profitability,but its rationalewas its literary value. Insofar as intellectual and literary productiontook a commodity form, it tended to- wardsthe denial and disguise of its own commodity status"(74). 25. I borrowthis term from Siskin; see The Workof 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 numberof David Copperfield)features a poem titled "On an Old Picture,"which is a meditationon "TheDress peculiarto the days gone by." The poem notes the "curious"coats, hats, and other articles shown in old pictures-clothes that now seem "fashion'donly to provoke to smiles,"and wonders, "Whatwould be thought,if, in the present day, /A person were to dress in such a way?"The poetic speakergoes on favorablyto compareher (or perhapshis) own clothing-"bought of MosEs, by the bye"-with those "outlandishstyles" of some fifty years ago, and remarksupon the "superiorstyle" of the contemporaryarticles. This ad seems to 160 Emily Steinlight

assert, paradoxicallyenough, that its products are at once fashionable (being the epitome of con- temporarystyle) and somehow also timeless-unlikely to be ridiculedby futureages.

WORKS CITED

Altick, Richard. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900. Second Edition. Columbus:Ohio State Univ. Press, 1998.

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York:Oxford Univ. Press, 1987.

- and Leonard Tennenhouse. The ImaginaryPuritan: Literature,Intellectual Labor, and the Ori- gins of Personal Life. Berkeley: Univ. of CaliforniaPress, 1992. Barthes, Rolland. Mythologies.Translated by Annette Lavers.New York:Hill and Wang, 1972. Baudrillard, Jean. The Systemof Objects.Translated by James Benedict. London:Verso, 1996. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction:A Social Critiqueof the Judgementof Taste.Translated by RichardNice. Cambridge:Harvard Univ. Press, 1984. - . The Field of CulturalProduction: Essays on Art and Literature.Translated by Randal Johnson. New York:Columbia Univ. Press, 1993.

Brake, Laurel. Print in Transition,1850-1910. Houndmills:Palgrave, 2001. Brantlinger, Patrick. The Reading Lesson: The Threatof Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-CenturyBritish Fiction. Bloomington:Indiana Univ. Press, 1998. Brown, Bill. "ThingTheory." Critical Inquiry28 (Autumn2001): 1-22. Brown, Homer O. Institutionsof the English Novel: From Defoe to Scott. Philadelphia:Univ. of Penn- sylvania Press, 1997. Curtis, Gerard. "Dickens in the Visual Market."In Literaturein the Marketplace:Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices, edited by John O. Jordanand RobertL. Patten,213-49. Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995. Dakin & Company. Advertisement."Bleak House Advertiser."Bleak House 3 (May 1852): 1. Darwin, Bernard, ed. The Dickens Advertiser:A Collection of the Advertisementsin the Original Parts of Novels by Charles Dickens. New York:MacMillan, 1930. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translatedby Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone, 1995.

Derrida, Jacques. ArchiveFever: A FreudianImpression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz.Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995. Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. London:Bradbury & Evans, 1852-1853. Bleak House. 1852-1853. Edited by Nicola Bradbury.London: Penguin, 1996. David Copperfield.London: Bradbury & Evans, 1852-1853. David Copperfield.1849-1850. Edited by Jerome H. Buckley. New York:Norton, 1990. Dombey and Son. London:Bradbury & Evans, 1846-1848. Master Humphrey'sClock. London:Chapman and Hall, 1840-1841. The Old CuriosityShop. 1840-1841. Edited by NormanPage. London:Penguin, 2000. Advertisingand the VictorianNovel 161

-. The PosthumousPapers of the PickwickClub. New York:Penguin, 1985. Drew, John M. L. Dickens the Journalist.Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic.Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1990. Edmiston & Son. Advertisement.Bleak House 1 (March 1852). E. Moses & Son. Advertisement.Bleak House 1 (March 1852). - . Advertisement.Bleak House 4 (June 1852).

-. Advertisement.Bleak House 19-20 (September1853). - . Advertisement.David Copperfield8 (December 1849).

-. Advertisement.David Copperfield12 (April 1850). Erikson, Lee. The Economyof LiteraryForm: English Literatureand the Industrializationof Publishing, 1800-1850. Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996. Feltes, N. N. Modes of Productionof VictorianNovels. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986. Foucault, Michel. "WhatIs an Author?"In Language, Counter-Memory,Practice, edited by Donald F. Bouchard,113-38. Ithaca:Cornell Univ. Press, 1977.

Genette, Gerard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation.Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: CambridgeUniv. Press, 1997. Greetham, David. C. Theoriesof the Text.Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999. Harvey, John R. VictorianNovelists and TheirIllustrators. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1970.

Hughes, Linda K. and Michael Lund. The VictorianSerial. Charlottesville:Univ. Press of Virginia, 1991.

Jaffe, Audrey. "SpectacularSympathy: Visuality and Ideology in Dickens's A ChristmasCarol." PMLA 109 (1994): 254-65.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981. Johnson, E. D. H. Charles Dickens:An Introductionto His Novels. New York:Random House, 1969.

Joseph, Gerhard. "Dickens, InternationalCopyright, and the DiscretionarySilence of Martin Chuzzle- wit." In The Constructionof Authorship:Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature,edited by MarthaWoodmansee and Peter Jaszi, 259-70. Durham:Duke Univ. Press, 1994.

Law, Graham. Serializing Fiction in the VictorianPress. Houndsmills:Palgrave, 2000. Lovell, Terry. ConsumingFiction. London:Verso, 1987. Marx, Karl. Capital. Translatedby ErnestMandel. London:Penguin, 1990. -. Grundrisse.Translated by MartinNicolaus. London:Penguin, 1973. McGann, Jerome J. The TextualCondition. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991. McLaughlin, Kevin. Writingin Parts: Imitationand Exchange in Nineteenth-CenturyLiterature. Stan- ford: StanfordUniv. Press, 1995.

Monod, Sylv~re. "'Between Two Worlds':Editing Dickens."In Editing Nineteenth-CenturyFiction: Pa- pers Given at the ThirteenthAnnual Conferenceon Editorial Problems, Universityof Toronto,4-5 November 1977, edited by Jane Millgate. New York:Garland, 1978. Nowell-Smith, Simon. InternationalCopyright Law and the Publisher in the Reign of Queen Victoria. Oxford:Clarendon, 1968. 162 Emily Steinlight

Orwell, George. "CharlesDickens." A Collection of Essays by George Orwell. GardenCity, New York: Doubleday, 1954. Richards, Thomas. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914. Stanford:Stanford Univ. Press, 1990.

Robbins, Bruce. "Telescopic Philanthropy:Professionalism and Responsibility in Bleak House." In Bleak House: Charles Dickens, edited by JeremyTambling, 139-62. New York:St. Martin's, 1998. Shillingsburg, Peter L. "EditingThackeray: A History."In TextualStudies and the CommonReader: Es- says on EditingNovels and Novelists, edited by AlexanderPettit, 111-125. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2000.

~-. Resisting Texts:Authority and Submission in Constructionsof Meaning. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1997. Siskin, Clifford. The Workof Writing:Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998. Sutherland, John. VictorianFiction: Writers,Publishers, Readers. New York:St. Martin's, 1995.

- . VictorianNovelists and Publishers. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976. Tyas's Popular Illustrated Publications. Advertisement. Master Humphrey's Clock 1 (4-25 April 1840).

Vann, J. Don. VictorianNovels in Serial. New York:Modern Language Association of America, 1985. Wicke, Jennifer. AdvertisingFictions: Literature,Advertising and Social Reading. New York:Columbia Univ. Press, 1988.

Williams, Raymond. "Advertising:The Magic System."Problems in Materialismand Culture. 170-95. London:Verso, 1980.

Woodmansee, Martha. "Geniusand the Copyright."The Author Art, and the Market.35-55. New York: ColumbiaUniv. Press, 1994.