The Business of the Novel

Economics, Aesthetics and the Case of Middlemarch

Simon R Frost

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781138661622
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317322290
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This study shows how aesthetics and economics have been combined in a great work of literature. Frost examines the history of Middlemarch's composition and publication within the context of Victorian demand, then goes on to consider the interpretation, reception and consumption of the book.

1 Coordination of Economic and Aesthetic Practices

Mrs Winthrop is a jewel in every sense

John Blackwood on the strength of Eliot's characterization

In The House of Blackwood, David Finkelstein describes how company profits for Blackwood & Sons publishing firm between 1860 and 1900 accrued increasingly from titles by George Eliot. In detailed tables ending in 1909, Finkelstein shows that by the turn of the century Blackwood's was truly the house that George built. She 'represented a more tangible capital asset to the firm, combining intellectual acclaim on related literary textual planes (fiction, prose, and verse) with enormous profitability'. '[T]owards the end of the nineteenth century, George Eliot was the engine that drove the Blackwood firm'.¹

Whilst Eliot supported Blackwood's business as its most lucrative source of literary supply, she also subscribed to a notion of literature as art in its grand sense. 'Art must be either real and concrete, or ideal and eclectic'.² She chose the former and developed what was, in the 1860s, a shocking literary realism:' Truth in art is so startling that no one can believe in it as Art'.³ What maintained Blackwood's trade throughout the remainder of the century was Eliot's immensely serious aesthetic investigation of truth and art. The core of Blackwood's commercial venture was fed by an aesthetic impulse.

Historical relationships between the highest literary aesthetic endeavour and economics should not be reduced to brute determination of literary output. The details have too much diversity to suffer reductionist economism. The relationship, rather, is one of coordination; between economics and aesthetics.

Victorian publishers needed texts with which to supply their markets. Occasionally, business developments required that the market be reached by new kinds of innovative format, with texts to suit. Only a writer with the intellectual and creative power of Eliot could match those imperatives in Middlemarch, appealing to both the intimate aspirations of common readers as well as the demands of literary aesthetics, coextensively on the same printed page — a testament to her brilliance.

The innovative format of Middlemarch allowed Eliot to experiment with the generic and formal attributes associated with both part and volume fiction, thereby creating an innovative literary aesthetic form. The format may have been unique, but it should not be dismissed solely as a product of Victorian commercialism. Middlemarch displays signs of one particular commercial moment, as does every other industrially published novel. Put bluntly, there is no 'default' format that is somehow commercially neutral.

Without adequate reflection on publishing production processes, we might be fooled into construing the relation between Eliot and her publisher merely through the metaphor of a conduit, whereby the publisher transparently mediates the writer's thought; correctly spelt and typeset. Instead, there are grounds for thinking of a print-production team with an appropriate division of labour, involving Eliot, George Henry Lewes, John Blackwood and Blackwood's Edinburgh and London managers, Langford and Simpson. The business relationship between Eliot and Blackwood can be read from their correspondence (which went far beyond solely business matters), collated in both Haight's Letters and in the Blackwood Papers at the National Library of Scotland, with further extremely useful information from Roland P. Anderson, as well as Sutherland's much reproduced chapter 'Marketing Middlemarch'.⁴ Though their relationship could be turbulent, Blackwood and Eliot seemingly maintained their genuine friendship and mutual respect, with George Henry Lewes, more often than not, playing the role of friend, literary agent, apologist, market analyst, husband and high-pressure salesman. Unlike widely-read contemporary women novelists such as Charlotte Yonge,⁵ who lived in seclusion in a Hampshire village, Eliot was very much involved with the London-based publishing industry. Pier insight into trade processes was acute. In a letter to Blackwood in 1861, she wrote

Many thanks for your promptness, and a sincere Amen to your wishes for our mutual future. I can desire nothing more satisfactory than that our relations should continue as long as my writing life.

And now, for the new edition of my books. Mr Lewes's suggestion is, that a 6/-edition might be published in moderate numbers, which, if stereotyped, might be reproduced on thinner paper as the 2/6 edition — one set of types thus serving for two editions, You, of course, will weigh the merits of this suggestion against those of any other plan you may have in mind.

Meanwhile, reconsideration has changed my views as to the retention of copy-rights⁶

Through an earlier personal and professional relation to the scandalized (and scandalizing) John Chapman — 'never a man to conform when there was profit or publicity in doing otherwise'⁷ — Eliot had previously secured work as an editorial assistant in London, when Chapman took over the Westminster Review from John Stuart Mill. From 1851 until 1857, she was an industrious reviewer and essayist for this periodical — while making time for translations of Feuerbach and Spinoza.

She entered the publishing domain of John Blackwood after Lewes anonymously submitted an example of her work. It was Lewes who had encouraged her to 'try the experiment of fiction', partly in response to their worsening financial position.⁸ The submission proved successful and resulted in Amos Barton (1 January 1857), the first of three Scenes of Clerical Life. Eliot's anonymity was maintained with regard to John Blackwood until 28 February 1858,⁹ and to the public until the publication of Mill on the Floss in April 1860, when Eliot was indirectly 'outed' in the Bracebridge-Liggins affair.¹⁰

Both Lewes and Eliot were deeply involved with questions of realism and philosophical dimensions to aesthetics but both relied, too, on those interests to provide a livelihood. In such a position, it is understandable why Eliot and Lewes should be 'ever anxious about money and securing it'.¹¹ Anderson notes at one point Lewes asking Blackwood for any extra profits from Eliot's works accruing due to the repeal of taxation on paper in 1861, Blackwood thereby recognizing that 'he [was] dealing with a passion for money and more of it'.¹²

From Lewes and Eliot's perspective, they were simply ensuring that they received full payment for unique and serious works, and there is every reason to believe that they considered their high pursuit worthy of financial reward.¹³

If the notion that a text should serve the dual purpose of satisfying both aesthetic and business criteria ever had currency in literary publishing, it did so at Blackwood & Sons. The purity of a text had never been allowed to prevail over business necessity. '[William] Blackwood's... desire for control over what was written for him intensified with the founding of "Maga" and the need to keep up its circulation'. William's son John went as far as making editorial suggestions to (the highly successful) Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton. As Roland Anderson commented, 'Evidently as editor of "Maga", John Blackwood was a chip of the old block'.¹⁴

But conversely, Eliot and Lewes could also use business procedures for expressive literary ends. As early as 1861, Eliot had intervened in the firm's press advertising to avert a problem over the desired reception. She was concerned that her audience should not respond to her serious work of art as though it were a simple story. Writing to Blackwood, she suggested 'The advertisement, I think, should be headed "New Work by George Eliot". Then, I would simply put "Silas Marner, the Weaver of Raveloe. In 1 volume" — avoiding the word story'¹⁵ The advertisement, in the Athenaeum (9 March 1861), duly appeared as Eliot requested: trade features thereby being used for aesthetic as well as commercial ends.

Neither Eliot nor Lewes suffered any delusion that their published writings were not part of an industrial, commercial process. At the risk of making Eliot and Lewes a composite, their attitudes to the industry can be found in inference from Lewes's The Principles of Success in Literature (1865). Lewes saw little discrepancy between the philosophically noble aims of literature and its practice as a serious professional trade. 'Literature is at once the cause and effect of social progress'. 'Success in literature has thus become ... the ambition of the highest minds'. '[But] there is another aspect presented by literature. It has become a profession.'¹⁶ The remaining volume presents a disposition on how to succeed in that profession. In 1872, Lewes replied on Eliot's behalf to a letter sent to her by a literary hopeful. He salutes the splendid and knowledgeable calling of literature, but reminds us that writing has a 'perilous outlook' for anyone whose talents are not also 'commercially viable'; 'ascertain decisively whether editors and publishers are willing and eager to pay you for your writing'; 'Publishers are for their own sakes eager to accept and pay for whatever promises to be commercially valuable; and no one will accept work that does not seem to promise such commercial advantage'.¹⁷

Another guide, also from 1872 but this time from a publisher aiming slightly lower, Ernest Spon's How to Publish a Book, being Directions and Hints to Authors (1872), goes straight to the detail of copyright and royalties, before it advises 'A golden rule to be observed by authors is to make up their minds as to what they mean to say ... Write legibly ... calculate how long it is.'¹⁸ The logic of the ledger held sway. But perhaps more poignantly, in 1873, Blackwood's published a Cyclopœia of Literary and Scientific Anecdotes, summing up this ambiguous attitude. Under the entry for publishing, called 'Bookseller's (Patron's of Literature)', it has this to say:

Eminent booksellers, in their constant intercourse with the most enlightened class of the community, that is, with the best authors and the best readers, partake of the intelligence around them; their great capitals, too, are productive of good and evil in literature; useful when they carry on great works; and pernicious when they sanction indifferent ones. Yet are they but commercial men. A trader can never be deemed a patron, for it would be romantic to purchase what is not saleable; but where no favour is conferred, there is no patronage. Authors continue poor, and booksellers become opulent; an extraordinary result! Booksellers are not agents for authors but proprietors of their works; so that the perpetual revenues of literature are solely in possession of the trade ... Tonson [the publisher], and all his family and assignees, rode in their carriages with the profits of Milton's five-pound epic.¹⁹

This was a description in a Blackwood's publication of both the book trade and the lettered community that Eliot lived and worked with for most of her adult life. Luckily she did not continue poor, doubtless because she had no trouble in acknowledging that economics and aesthetics were two relevant and highly potent sides to literary production.

The industrialization of British literature had opened up profitable new readerships, but the publisher's key to success was in finding the format (and its literature) that would reach the new markets. William St Clair has described a political economy of reading for the romantic period that is characterized by a downward sloping demand curve for newly-authored texts, on which 'the publisher chose to position his intended book', selecting between small print runs of expensively-priced, large-format books and large quantities of cheaper, smaller books with crammed pages and tiny print. In cases of exclusive copyright, the publisher could 'maximise his financial returns if he moves down the demand curve in a series of discrete tranches over time'.²⁰ For Eliot's next offering, eventually called Middlemarch, John Blackwood would have to find the appropriate formats for a series of steadily cheaper-priced editions.

The Blackwood sales strategy for Eliot's previous three-decker successes was to print an enormous run of a three-volume edition, retailing at thirty-one shillings and six pence, followed by an equally large twelve-shilling two-volume edition some months later, with a cheaper six-shilling edition just before the publisher's copyright expired; each edition selling to different classes' of reader. Blackwood's tripartite strategy exploited price elasticity, whe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• List of Figures and Tables
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Coordination of Economic and Aesthetic Practices
• 2 Coordination of Economic and Aesthetic Discourses
• 3 End-Users and Readers
• 4 Shoppers
• 5 Contextual Wants
• 6 A Commodity Reading of Middlemarch
• 7 Good for the Audience
• 8 Rival Books and Products
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index