Sutherland 1976

Sutherland, John A. Victorian Novelists and Publishers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Print.

Intro

• 1: Even where they did not directly interfere in the novelist's life, the composition of his fiction or the form of his literary vehicle, the publisher's skills were often as instrumental to success as anything the author might contribute.
• 5 Louis James in his Fiction for the Working Man lists ninety publishers of penny-installment fiction between 1830 and 1850, which at a conservative estimate means that for every producer above the literary threshold there were ten beneath it.
• 6: Many of the great novels of the period which appear to be the unaided product of creative genius were often, as I set out to show, the outcome of collaboration, compromise or commission. Works like Henry Esmond, Middlemarch or Framley Parsonage cannot be fully appreciated unless we see them as partnership productions.

Ch. 1: Novel Publishing 1830-1870

• 11 In this damped-down world of publishing, competition between the major houses was kept to an acceptable minimum by a comfortable degree of cooperation, especially on remaindering and price maintenance.
• Prices were high, exorbitantly so. In the 1790s, the cost of novels, which had been falling throughout the century, steadied at about 3s. a volume. With the universal price and tax rises brought about by the Napoleonic wars it rose sharply again until by the 1820s it had attained the half-guinea per volume mark, where it stuck. The post-war supply of fiction, like corn, was thus stabilized by expense, taxation, and shortage - but books provoked no repeal lobby to agitate for the cheapening of an inessential to life.
• 13 In fact the three-decker would seem to have been less a pre-industrial anachronism than the very embodiment of the present age. As Lytton Strachey said of the heroic couplet and the Augustans, the three-volume novel was the Victorians' "criticism of life," massive, expensive, moral and enduring. As the century progressed it was common to compare it not with old fashioned stage coaches but the other grand durables of the British Empire - the Queen, the Constitution, and the Navy.
• [chain of supply] Retailing at a notional 31s. 6d. the novel would be sold to booksellers with a normal trade allowance of 25 per cent, a reduction of some 8s. on the sale price fixed by the publisher. The order for the book would go into a running account on which settlement was made half-yearly, in June and December. If the account were settled by cash within a month a further discount of 2.5% of the gross sum was allowed, bringing the price down another 9.5d., roughly. As a further bonus to entice his customer the publisher would often offer his book to be 'subscribed' among the trade. They would have an early copy to sample and would be given the day, even the hour of publication. In addition they might subscribe at a pre-publication rate of 13 for the price of 12 or, more usually, 25 for 24. This brings the minimum price of our hypothetical novel down another 11d. If the house were one of those which held trade sales yet another deduction might be made. So far this gives the publisher a lowest return of about a guinea [i.e., 21s.] on his three-decker.
• 15 Why then was the three volume, 31s. 6d. novel persisted with? The simple answer is that it was demanded by the circulating libraries, famously Mudie's. But this is too simple an explanation. For one thing the three-decker had been riding high for thirty years before Mudie ever became a major buyer. For another, although Mudie would help explain the retention of the 3-volume system...price maintenance at an exact 31s. 6d. is not to be explained by the libraries.... The three-decker seems to have been kept going all those years for the dullest of literary reasons - because it was commercially safe. The English publisher, as the Westminster noted (disapprovingly) in 1852, "finds it easier and more profitable to sell 500 copies of a work and a guinea and a half per copy, than 5,000 at half a crown, or 50,000 at a shilling.
  • cross-reference with Roberts 2006 on Mudie's
• 16: [other side of the commercial safety coin] Publishers were encouraged to take risks because the three-volume system had a kind of built in insurance against loss. [Gives example of Mrs Oliphant's Zaidee]
• 17 The golden age of the English novel, as we like to think of the Victorian period, probably owes its distinction to more causes than can be reasonably discovered. But one main cause was the sheer superabundance of the novel in the period - the fact that publishers could offer so large an invitation to ambitious literary talents.
• 20 In the period from the forties to the sixties four major breaches were made in the established system which opened an enlarged supply of fresh, quality fiction to literate, but not necessarily wealthy classes of the population. These were: part publication, the 'Leviathan' circulating library, the prompt collective reissue and magazine serialization.
• 21 Dickens's serial differed from its predecessors in one simple and all important feature. Whereas Colburn took a novel published originally in volumes and broke it down into 1s. parts Chapman and Hall had Pickwick designed from the first as 1s. parts with a view to subsequent consolidation in volumes.
• 22 The value of the monthly serial was not just that it lowered the price of expensive novels. It also raised the reward for authors. ... Not all novelists got higher wages but the fact that any novelist might attain to fabulously high rewards changed the whole notion of the profession.
• 23 It is probable that Dickens's gross fortune, which was made largely from monthly serials, did more to raise the profession than any number of Thackerayan or Carlylean lectures on 'The Dignity of Literature', or 'The Hero as a Man of Letters.'
  • The former is Forster, but to be fair it's in response to Thackeray's Pendennis.
• 24 Mudie bound books himself and soon encouraged publishers to follow his example.
• 26 'Mr Mudie', the Saturday Review observed in 1860, 'is in a position to make himself the dictator of literature.'
• 27 Like most of the great breakthroughs in the C19 fiction market Mudie's triumph was the outcome not of cautious whittling down of costs but of slashing them dramatically, so short circuiting the gap that existed between high book prices and low income.
• 29 To acquire fiction cheaply while keeping intact its luxurious reputation was good business. [the overvaluation of the street price]
• 30 the three decker was thus an ordeal and at the same time an opportunity for the novelist. Charles Reade, in a letter, expresses its possibilities and burdens eloquently: "I am a writer. I cannot scribble. A 3 vol Novel is a great prose Epic. I hope never to write another..."
• The 3rd and in some ways the most significant innovation was the cheap reissue in 'collective editions' of the works of authors who had achieved classic status in their lifetimes; notably Dickens and Bulwer Lytton, though Lever, Eliot, Disraeli and Ainsworth were subjected to the same honorific treatment.
• Although they were not synonymous with novels for railway reading a main precondition of the collective reissues was the railway 'mania' of 1846.
• 37 One effect of this kind of collective issue was to keep all of Dickens simultaneously before the public...In this way Dickens had a kind of total and continual existence for the readers of his age.
• It is likely that the fiction-carrying journal did not merely offer an alternative mode of purchase, it actually enlarged the gross size of the reading public by taking in a whole new sector of customers.
• 38 Reade on serializing in the London Journal in 1856: "It is I am aware the general opinion that a story published in a penny journal is exhausted - I do not think so. I am a great believer in rascally bad type - I believe there is a public that only reads what comes in a readable form. I may be wrong - we shall see: If I am right the London journal will do little more than advertise my story to Public No. 2." Events would seem to bear out Reade's belief that magazine and journal serialization created second markets rather than redeploying old ones. George Eliot at the same period was reluctant to run The Mill on the Floss through Blackwood's Magazine for fear it would 'sweep away perhaps 20,000...readers who would otherwise demand copies of the complete work from the libraries.' In the same spirit she withdrew a promised serial from Harper's in 1861. The truth was that readers were swept up rather than away. [gives example of Great Expectations running through AYR and then Mudie's buying 1400 3 decker copies anyway]
  • Letter from Reade to Bentley at Urbana, 'Tuesday' 1856

Ch. 2: Mass Market and Big Business: Novel Publishing at Midcentury

• 41 None of the four innovations discussed in the first chapter was, strictly speaking, an invention.
• 42 Viewed objectively successes like that of The Woman in White did no more occasionally than what the slum publishers did regularly and had been doing for several years. (Reynolds not only had his own press but his own paper mill, so vast was his output.) But the difference was that each of the four innovations was directed at, and found, a significantly larger middle class readership than conventional trading wisdom assumed to exist and one that was prepared to put its hand into its pocket to get the fiction it liked.
• 44 This relatively small constellation of rich firms dominated the publishing of quality fiction. One may state almost as an axiom that every work written between 1850 and 1870 which is now recognized as a classic was first published by Chapman and Hall, Bradbury and Evans, Macmillan's, Longman's, Smith, Elder, Bentley or Blackwood's. The only notable exceptions are some first efforts which gained wide readership on the strength of their author's subsequent fame and a very few mavericks like Wuthering Heights.
• 50 [scale of serialization printing required "less the printing shop than the printing factory"]
• Critics, Victorian and modern, naturally think of Vanity Fair and Dombey, Pendennis and Copperfield, Little Dorrit and The Newcomes as rival novels competing for the 'top of the tree'. It is salutary to remember that for their publisher the decade's two greatest novelists [Dickens and Thackeray] were making common cause and earning huge sums for Bradbury and Evans.
• 62 According to the best judgment we can make, the great Victorian reading public and the mass market that went with it were formed in the early 1850s.
• 65-6: Railways were not important merely as agents of delivery. Their increasing comfort, at least in the first two classes of carriage, released leisure time for reading. In 1859 one leading railway publisher was supposed to have sold 750K books, varying in price between a shilling and a half crown. These volumes are beneath our notice here...but better fiction also benefited from the railway boom. A railway bookseller would take up to 5k copies of a popular 'literary' novel and by the late forties the outlet had been made safe for respectable fiction with the Smith monopoly.
• 66 By 1852 the English novel was as much a triumph of industrial progress as anything in the Great Exhibition, and inspired much the same kind of pride as Sheffield steel or Wedgwood china: 'those were the days' an old publisher lamented nostalgically, 'when new English fiction was the strongest and best in the world.' But with the novel this strength was not simply the outcome of steam presses and machine-made paper. It was at the centre of a confluence of factors transforming English life in what the Times called 'our marvellous railway era.' It is not far-fetched to conceive, for example, that Trollope was serving the novel by helping speed postal services in the forties and improving clerical efficiency in the fifties as much as by lecturing on fiction as a 'rational amusement' in the 1870s.
• 68 In England everything came to be centralized in London (and to a lesser extent Edinburgh); paper-makers, printers, publishers, commission houses, the major booksellers and generally authors and a large proportion of readers were all concentrated in the metropolis forming a kind of literary-commercial ganglion.