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.

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 volum 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.