That's entertainment
Asa Briggs
Victorian Novelists and Publishers J. A. Sutherland (The Athlone Press £7.00) Compared with most other economic relationships, the economic relationship between author and publisher has never received much attention. Nor, indeed, have the economics of publishing when compared, say, with the economics of transport or retailing. Dr Sutherland helps to remedy the neglect with a valuable, detailed study of one particular period and one kind of publishing. It was a period when novelists dealt directly with publishers, and not through the intermediary services of agents: when publishers themselves did not leave much of their business to their own employees. His introductory chapters set the scene well. They explain clearly why seven publishing houses came to dominate the market for •the best in fiction' during and after the 1840s. They also explain why Britain was the most expensive country in the world for new novels. There was obviously some genuine common interest between novelists and publishers, since, as George Bentley once put it. 'it is questionable whether any persons benefit by cheap literature but the public'.
Economics, however, is not Dr Sutherland's main interest. He is more anxious to show how Victorian publishers influenced the art of the novelist through 'collaboration, compromise or commission'--and sometimes, indeed, as he might have added, through conflict. The influence stretched beyond advice on themes to control of treatment, but there were so many particularities in the 'relationships that it remains very difficult to generalise about them. Dr Sutherland concentrates on individual cases, taking seven examples in seven chapters, and occasionally comparing and contrasting.
Dickens, Eliot and Trollope were the three biggest earners from their novels, but their relationships with their publishers are as different as their novels. Trollope was remarkably successful without enjoying any enormous success with any particular novel. He was never tied to any publisher and in twelve years, when he wrote ten books, he had five publishers. Dr Sutherland does not demonstrate conclusively, however, that shopping around for publishers had any profound effect on Trollope's art. It did not need five publishers to make Trollope write to order, an order which was essentially his own. George Smith, a fascinating character, might steal him away from Chapman and Hall in 1859 and press him to stick to the Church as to his last, but his intuitions about what was best for Trollope were surely less decisive than Trollope's own opportunist ambitions. It was Trollope, too, and not his publishers who found the formulae. Here is one: 'The story was thoroughly English. There was a little fox-hunting and a little tuft-hunting, some Christian virtue and some Christian cant. There was no heroism and no villainy. There was much Church, but more love-making.' With talent to back such candour, Trollope was able to pick his publishers. And none of them controlled or. in the last resort, deflected him.
The case of George Eliot, whose success Trollope professed never to understand, was quite different. She disliked what she considered to be the arbitrary divisions which the serialisation of a novel entailed. yet in the last chapters of Midd/emarch she was not above employing some of the tricks of serialisation. including contrived suspense. The unusual conditions of her contract with Blackwood, which involved multivolume serialisation, made this possible. hut the contract was apparently devised not by Blackwood but by her husband, G. H. Lewes, with whom she personally discussed all the arrangements and what they entailed. Lewes. indeed, was as much like an agent-and a market analyst—as anyone in the Period covered by Dr Sutherland. Blackwood's found him a greedy agent, but he was certainly a successful one. Meanwhile George Eliot did not compromise her own purposes as a novelist : she realised them triumphantly.
Dr Sutherland deals with Dickens not in his relations with publishers– -these are to be dealt with in a book by Professor Patten-hut as a publisher himself. .4// The Year Round was designed to provide serialised fiction as 'an indispensable feature of [the
reader's] weekly literary entertainment'. This was a purpose very different from that of George Eliot, and in All The Year Round there was a pressure not unlike that which we now associate with the provision of weekly entertainment on the television screen: what Thackeray, another of Dr Sutherland's seven, called 'the Life and Death' struggle with the unwritten number which not only 'just had to appear', but which also had to make an immediate pact. When Eliot, 'terrified by the novel difficulties of serial writing', let Dickens down, he turned to Charles Lever. Dr Sutherland gives an excellent account of the subsequent 'disaster to the journal' and of how Dickens handled it. He has in addition given an earlier account of Lever as a case or failure in a previous chapter. There is something of a gap between the two chapters. however, since in the first Lever, already on the downturn, is privately attacking 'the Dickens-Thackeray clique' and in the second he appears as Dickens's friend. Lever's own comments on his career as a writer are far more interesting than his novels, but it was his own limited talents rather than his relations with publishers which determined his unhappy fate. The most interesting chapters in a book packed with new information and ideas concern two very different novelists of two different periods, Kingsley and Hardy-although the most polished (and conclusive) chapter concerns Thackeray and Henry Esmond. Hardy, feeling his way towards 'a method'--his own term--during the late 1860s and early 1870s had to deal with Alexander Macmillan and John Morley, his 'reader', and with Chapman and Hall and their reader, George Meredith. Though neither firm proved willing to publish Hardy's first novels, both gave him formidable and restraining advice. Again, however' the influence of this advice on his later writing remains conjectural. Even when Macmillan gave clear advice to KingsleY, some of which was taken, Kingsley never. lost his own idiosyncrasies. The influence 01 the publisher was measurable: important' but not decisive. It was Kingsley's idea 10 produce Westward Ho! during the Crimear; War, as a tonic novel to raise morale an`1,. it was the odd fortunes of the war itsel,' rather than anything Macmillan did whicn changed the key of the last chapters of the,
novel. The outstanding business success 0.! the novel had little to do with the ambival
ences of the last chapters which made it al 'better' novel. All that is certain is tha, Kingsley and Macmillan discovered eacn other just at the right time. It is remarkable how in these pagesthe publishers come to life as fully as the nove.tt ists. The relations between the two r1141,14,. often be unsatisfactory, but they were re
an relations. There is obviously, despite fire; flood, as much interesting and revealin. material awaiting historians in publisher". archives as there is in solicitors' offices. Sutherland is the right kind of literary his torian to know how best to use it.
Previous page
