Studying the Victorian Novel in Print: Professional Authorship and Idiosyncrasy

Abstract

This article surveys recent scholarship about Victorian novels' place in the nineteenth-century publishing system. With particular attention to criticism concerning the work of William Makepeace Thackeray, it examines how this scholarship, which reflects a renewed, discipline-wide interest in book history and media studies, adopts some of poststructuralist theory's ideas; it goes on to show the ways this adoption helps differentiate this new work from a previous generation of scholarship on Victorian book history. It contextualizes this new concern with publication, authorial professionalization, and structures of cultural prestige and legitimation in the Victorian period within the pervasive discourse about academic jobs and professionalization during the 1990s, many of the key words and concepts of which are shared by book-history criticism. Finally, it suggests directions for future study opened up by this new criticism, arguing that this criticism might help analyze the aesthetic particularity of authors' works -a topic that has merited little attention, as the last several decades' theoretical trends have focused on abstract linguistic, ideological, and now, publishing systems. IThis article focuses on the recent -and to some extent, renewed -scholarly attention critics of the novel have been paying to the Victorian publishing system.'The publishing system' denominates the publishers, authors, editors, booksellers, and readers who produced and consumed the printed, tangible product (as opposed to only the text) of the Victorian novel. Since the interrelationships between these parties were structured by identifiable contracts and conventions, these relations make up a 'system' with particular processes and effects. A student of Victorian literature, performing even casual research on a particular work or author, will soon come across evidence of this system at work, in for instance, Elizabeth Gaskell's decision at the behest of her publisher to title her first novel Mary Barton and Charles Dickens's habitual attention to deadlines, printing schedules for his serials, and circulation numbers.The system's fairly regular structures and widespread effects also -and somewhat paradoxically -threaten to make it rather insignificant as an object