Errors, editors and mad wives
Juliet Townsend
VICTORIAN FICTION: WRITERS, PUBLISHERS, READERS by John Sutherland Macmillan, £35, £12.99, pp. 191 It is difficult to weld into a cohesive whole a book which consists largely of essays and studies published in eight different learned journals over a period of 25 years. The very title, Victorian Fiction, Writers, Publishers, Readers is misleading. The spotlight of John Sutherland's formidable scholarship illuminates a few isolated aspects of the subject in fascinating detail, but plays fitfully over much of this wide and varied landscape. Nor are the individual essays closely related to each other, although they all contain interesting material.
The terrifying but inspiring Mary Las- celles, authority on Jane Austen and my tutor at Oxford, once received a postcard from an American post-graduate student who had recently arrived from Yale, informing her that his tutor there had advised him to contact her for advice on his course. Her response was to send a post- card back saying, 'Dear Mr , You may have arrived in Oxford, the verb 'to contact' has not. Yours sincerely'. What would she have made of some of the phras- es in this book, where Miss Haversham `arsonises her house' or a novel is `authored by the brothers Mayhew'? The opening sentence itself, introducing the chapter on `Thackeray's Errors', is rather off-putting. 'Counter-factuality in fiction can be illuminating'. Only, one must contend, if the reader knows what counter- factuality is. By reading on we receive enlightenment. It is, it seems, the deliber- ate toleration of inaccuracies in the narra- tive for the sake of dramatic effect. Thackeray was notoriously cavalier in his approach to dates, exhibiting what John Sutherland rather kindly calls 'constructive play with anachronism' or 'chronological dualism'. In other words, it is often impos- sible, in Pendennis for instance, to make sense of the time scale. How much of this was deliberate and how much due to lazi- ness or the pressure of churning out 20,000 words for each monthly issue it is difficult to tell. Speaking as one who raced happily through Henry Esmond totally unaware of the glaring inconsistencies, I can only agree that
like the mosquito, which anaesthetises its vic- tim before getting to work with its proboscis, Thackeray induces in his readers a kind of indifference to fine points of detail.
His method was in notable contrast to that of two authors discussed in subsequent chapters, Wilkie Collins and Trollope, both of whom worked out their plots in meticu- lous detail before putting pen to paper. Even this did not completely eradicate the possibility of error. Collins was under great pressure in the later episodes of The Woman in White, writing desperately, 'I am slaving to break the neck of the Woman in White — I am obliged to end the story in August'. No doubt this led him to perpe- trate what Professor Sutherland calls 'an incongruity which may well worry the more pedantic reader' and confuse the dates of Laura's abduction and incarceration in the lunatic asylum. Given the extreme com- plexity of the plot and the fact that the completed MS had to be ready for publica- tion in book form before the last of its seri- al parts had been issued, the less pedantic reader will find this uncharacteristic lapse easy to forgive.
John Sutherland is extremely interesting on the 'furnace-like conditions' in which 19th-century novelists worked in their efforts to keep up with the parts publica- tion or serialisation of novels still in the process of composition. He explains how the issue of novels in 20 illustrated monthly parts, each 32 pages long and priced at one 'Course, ideally you need a thunderstorm, but I did it with my Cortina and a set of jump leads.' shilling, was first popularised by Dickens in 1836 with the new railway station news- stands, which provided a distribution net- work far more widespread than the traditional bookshop, and accessible to a whole new reading public.
Yet only a small proportion of Victorian novels was published in this form. The enormous popularity of periodicals like Household Words and The Cornhill, was based on serialised fiction, and they soon came to dominate the market. One irritat- ing feature (from the reader's point of view) of the novel issued in parts was that, if sales were poor, publication would sim- ply cease half way through, with no guaran- tee that it would be issued later in book form. The Children of the New Forest, for instance, only survived one monthly issue, and Vanity Fair lurched from crisis to crisis before eventually establishing itself.
Perhaps the most fascinating section of this book is that devoted to 'Maniac Wives'. The mid 19th century saw much `spousal misuse of the Lunacy Act', both in fact and fiction. The law was easily circum- vented by unscrupulous husbands and venal physicians. Private asylums were hardly regulated and the apparently melo- dramatic scenes of The Woman in White or Lady Audley's Secret were reflected in real life. Bulwer-Lytton, author of The Last Days of Pompeii, was plagued by his wife Rosina after the collapse of their marriage. She humiliated him in public as he spoke on the hustings, 'steadily fixing my eye on the cold, pale, fiendish, lack-lustre eyes of the electioneering baronet', soon after which he had her abducted, certified by a tame doctor, and incarcerated in a private asylum. After uproar in the press she was eventually declared sane and released, but this was not an isolated case. Thackeray's treatment of his wife, never visited, and cared for by a Mrs Bakewell of Camberwell for £2 a week for nearly 50 years, was, per- haps, less than generous, and made Char- lotte Bronte's dedication to him of the second edition of Jane Eyre, with its maniac wife theme, particularly unwelcome. Dick- ens, too, claimed his wife suffered from 'a mental disorder' when he was seeking a separation. In fact, as John Sutherland points out,
by the end of 1858, the three leading novel- ists of the age, Thackeray, Dickens and Lytton . . . all had put their wives away.
There is much material in Victorian Fic- tion which would merit a book of its own particularly in the last chapter, which col- lates some of the biographical details the author has amassed on 878 of an estimated total of 3,500 published Victorian novelists, of every degree of eminence and obscurity. It has much to tell us, too, about public taste and changing fashion, perhaps best summed up by the fact that, by the late 1880s, the most popular novelist and 'best paid writer in the world' was not Henry James, not Conrad, not even Robert Louis Stevenson — but Mrs Humphrey Ward.
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