[In the following essay, Feltes examines the ways in which Forster's narrative strategy in Howards End reflects the history of the publishing industry at the time.]

In her book on Mudie's Library, Guinevere Griest's answer to her own question, “Who killed the three-decker?” is neither precise nor satisfying. She rightly dismisses the proud claims of individuals, of George Moore or his publisher, Henry Vizetelly, or of other publishers who had independently issued single-volume novels in the 1890s, but she then cites only “years of economic pressure” before shifting her attention completely: “What is remarkable about the end of the three-volume form is the completeness and rapidity of its disappearance.”¹ Royal Gettmann, in the other extended study of the sudden disappearance of novels in the three-volume format, is more specific in assigning a cause—“the three-decker was bound to disappear because it had ceased to be profitable to the libraries”²—but he then becomes too engrossed in the “pounds, shillings and pence” of Mudie's diminishing profits (257-58). Gettmann's analysis is based on the account books and correspondence of the house of Bentley, so that his explanations tend often to elaborate Bentley's own, or those given in the letters from Mudie. At the end of the chapter on the three-decker he does allude to wider circumstances, to “confusion and uncertainty,” “bewilderment and paralysis” in publishing, remarking ambiguously that the abolition of the old form meant, in effect, that “the publisher for the moment could not call the tune or that he was forced to call a new one” (262). But he does not escape the individual publisher's vantage point enough to question what that “tune,” old or new, might be. To think through the death of the three-decker novel we again need a more relational, a dialectical point of view, not least because, as Gettmann admits,

actually the 'nineties was not a bad time for publishers, as may be seen from the number of other new firms which came into existence and flourished at this time—Edward Arnold, Methuen and Company, John Lane, and Duckworth and Company.

(263)

For the disappearance of the three-volume format, while sudden enough to be an “event,” is by no means the cause of publishers not being able to “call the tune,” but rather a symptom of what was a conjunctural crisis in the production of books, the result, as Gareth Stedman Jones says in another context, of “a temporary fusion of seemingly unconnected long-term and short-term phenomena.”³ The decline in the libraries' profitability, the appearance of new publishers, and the death of the three-decker are all determinate elements in that conjunctural crisis whose “short term,” I would argue, extends from Frederick Macmillan's announcement in 1890 of a “net” pricing policy, through the Net Book Agreement of 1899 and the “Times Book War” of 1906-8, to the inclusion, in 1914, of fiction under the Net Book Agreement. Such empirical observations as that there was a new “buyers' market” in books, or that “the subscription-and rental-library trade … was being re-established on a more popular basis,” or that “the whole price structure was revised downward,”⁴ can take their meaning only in relation to an explanation of that wider crisis.

Griest's account, full as it is of detail, is weakened by her empiricist analysis, which simply allows, it seems, Time to solve all the publishers' difficulties she describes. She mentions the reactions of the interested parties to Mudie's decision, in June 1894, to accept no more three-volume novels, the London Booksellers' Society's endorsement of Mudie's action, the fears of the Society of Authors, and the responses of various publishers, concluding with the “complete and objective” analysis of a correspondent to the Pall Mall Gazette (176-88). But neither the Gazette's analyst at the time nor Griest attempts to analyze the demise of the three-decker in its relations to the whole structure of the production of novels in Victorian England. Yet the three-decker had been an integral part of that structure; for the previous half-century or more, the hegemonic structure in novel production had been the initial publication of expensive three-volume novels which were then discounted to the lending libraries, which circulated them to members at a shilling a volume, with cheap reprints in any form being delayed, usually for a year. This production of commodity-books had guaranteed safe profits on all levels, retail booksellers profiting as well on the sale of the eventual reprints of successful novels. Any one of these structural elements admitted variations; a publisher might also adopt the alternative mode of part-issue, or discounts might vary, or reprinting might occasionally occur somewhat sooner, but the combination of a high list price, discounts to the libraries, multiple volumes, and the delay in reprinting, supported by an ideological consensus including the novel-reading public, this set of relations provided the dominant petty-commodity structure of novel production and was seen generally as how novels were best to be produced. Because none of the standard accounts sees this as a structure, the significance of the sudden extinction of the three-decker is obscured or sentimentalized, as it was for his contemporaries by Kipling's poem, which eulogizes the three volume novel as a sort of peaceful “Téméraire”:

… spite all modern notions, I found her first and
          best,
The only certain packet for the Islands of the
          Blest.(5)

But what was occurring was not the arrival of “modern notions” but rather a radical transformation of the literary mode of production, the historical appearance of a new kind of structure, suited to, demanded, and provided by the larger structures of emergent monopoly capitalism.

The signs of confusion were everywhere in the publishing industry from the mid-80s. The era of “free trade in books,” inaugurated in 1852 by the defeat of the London Booksellers' Committee's attempt to regulate retail prices, had been a period of intense retail price competition, as booksellers discounted new books directly to the public. Indeed, because of this, by 1890, when the London Booksellers' Society was founded, “the complete collapse of retail bookselling” seemed imminent.⁶ At the same time, the circulating libraries' profits were diminishing because the number of novels published (and the space required to stock three-deckers) was increasing faster than the subscription lists, a pressure that was increased as the publishers more often hurried the date of reprinting at a low price.⁷ Individual authors such as George Moore demanded that novels be issued at “a purchasable price,” so that they might appeal directly to the public, while authors organized into the Society of Authors in 1883, a move which was thought to be provocative, “trade union” behavior.⁸ The Education Act of 1870 had obviously changed the conditions of publishing, as did the Berne Convention on international copyright in 1887 and the American “Chace Act” of 1891:

The decline of the three-decker from the mid-eighties until its death in the mid-nineties is well known to have resulted from differences between British publishers, booksellers, circulating libraries and the Authors' Society. But it is not altogether fanciful to detect a contributory cause in American copyright law. After 1891 the British publisher was naturally reluctant to go to the expense of printing three volumes at home of a novel which had also to be manufactured as a single volume in America.⁹

From the point of view of the production of books those are but contributions or responses to the larger, conjunctural crisis; the prevailing arrangement, the relations of production and distribution, were clearly blocking realization of the potential for the production of commodity-texts. The crisis entailed changing the system while retaining control; the problem was who was to inherit control of the production of books, and the answer, of course, was the capitalist publishers.

This is not to say that the publishers conspired to establish a new hegemony. Just as Mudie's decision in 1894, and the concurrence of W. H. Smith, had been decisions on the level of “the firm”—Arthur Mudie had written to Bentley that the three-volume novel “serves no useful purpose whatever in our business”¹⁰—so the decision in 1890 to enforce “net” prices on books had initially been that of one firm, Macmillan (indeed of one man, Frederick Macmillan), and had been addressed specifically to “the evils of underselling and to the possibilities of curing them.”¹¹ A good deal of the ideological strength of Macmillan's proposal in his 6 March 1890 letter to The Bookseller derived simply from his invoking “the rationality of the individual firm.”¹² As he explained in his letter, Macmillan acted in response to “a number of private communications” from booksellers, and his course of action was to be entirely within the rights of an individual firm. He proposed “a general reduction of retail prices, and the diminution of trade allowances to such a point that the full published [“net”] price may reasonably be demanded and obtained from purchasers,” with the further stipulation that Macmillan and Co. would allow trade terms (i.e. even the “diminished” trade allowance) only to “booksellers who would undertake not to break prices.”¹³ Thus, unlike the booksellers' scheme of forty years earlier to enforce existing high prices by collectively boycotting undersellers, Macmillan's plan satisfied the ideological norms of “free trade,” by first enabling him to lower the artificially high price of his books, and by then allowing him to do business only with those booksellers whom he chose. Moreover, initially not all books were to be sold “net”; some were to be sold as “subject” books, subject, that is, to discounting by the bookseller, so that, here too, the charge of an unwarranted, total control was evaded. The crucial managerial decisions as to which books were to be sold “net,” and which “subject,” were of course, to rest with the publisher (this power was to allow the entrepreneurial experimentation of the next two decades, to which I shall return later). Macmillan's action in the 1890s was not collusive but exemplary, and when his carefully calculated risk in selecting Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics as his first net book proved as successful as he had hoped, other publishers also were prepared to set net prices for books. In 1895 the Associated Booksellers of Great Britain and Ireland was founded (succeeding the London Booksellers) “to support … the principle of a net price for books.”¹⁴ The Publishers' Association was formed in the same year, and by 1899 the Net Book Agreement had been adopted by the two associations and by the Society of Authors and went into effect the next year.¹⁵ The Net Book Agreement had established a new, consensual “terms of trade”; Frederick Macmillan proudly referred to it in 1924 as “the Magna Charta of the book trade.”¹⁶

But if the Net Book Agreement was the book trade's Magna Charta, the “Book War” was its war of liberation, the struggle by which the new publishing structure established itself ideologically. That controversy from 1906 to 1908 over the practices of the Times Book Club both clarified the new terms which the agreement had instituted and showed that they could be defended publicly, that the new ideological consensus was one which not even the Times could subvert. The Times had been in financial difficulty in the early 1900s: for several years neither its sales, the amount of advertising, nor its profits had grown. Moberly Bell, its editor, believed that it had become impossible to make the Times pay, both because he believed that it was increasingly difficult to make even an ordinary newspaper pay and because the Times “was neither an ordinary newspaper nor produced in ordinary conditions.”¹⁷ In 1898, assisted by two American entrepreneurs, Bell had attempted to boost circulation by marketing a cheap reprint of the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in installments. When this scheme proved profitable, the same promoters founded the Times Book Club, a subscription system in which a “discount subscriber” to the Times might borrow any book, three volumes at a time, delivered and collected without charge anywhere in London. Also, and this was the real issue of the “Book War,” the subscriber-member was entitled to purchase at a large discount any book previously borrowed.¹⁸ Clearly, this promise to discount “unspoilt” copies a few weeks after publication side-stepped the Net Book Agreement; as a publishers' pamphlet argued, “a ‘spoiled’ copy is everywhere recognized as a copy which … cannot be sold as a new or fresh copy,” and “an ‘unspoilt’ copy is, therefore, equivalent to a new copy.”¹⁹ Edward Bell, the president of the Publishers' Association, stated their case:

It is obvious that such announcements were calculated to divert custom from the regular dealers in new books, and in the case of net books, amounted to an evasion, if not an actual infringement of the Net Book Agreement.²⁰

The Times, of course, tried to define the terms of the struggle in its own interest:

Fifty-four years ago the publishers attempted, by restrictions on trade, to maintain the high prices then charged for books, and to create for their own profit a firm and permanent monopoly, to be maintained at the expense of the public.

Today the publishers … are trying to control not only the price of new books, but the price of second-hand books.²¹

But the prices were no longer “high,” and the issue was no longer perceived as “monopoly”; the new terms of trade constituted by the Net Book Agreement seemed untouched by the Times' charges that while they did not formally constitute a trust they nevertheless allowed the publishers to be “so solidly organized that they act as against all outsiders with the unanimity and precision of a trust.”²² “Exclusive dealing” was the term helpfully suggested by the judge in the libel case which so undermined the position of the Times and its Book Club.²³ The Booksellers' Association and the Society of Authors²⁴ sided with the publishers, and when Lord Northcliffe secretly bought the Times in 1908 he quickly sued for peace. The settlement not only reasserted the Net Book Agreement “without any modification,” but added a provision for a “close time” on Book Club copies, six months on net books and three months on subject books, during which they might not be sold as “second-hand.” Thus ended, as Frederick Macmillan recalls, “in a manner most satisfactory to me and to publishers in general, one of the most remarkable quarrels in the annals of the Book Trade.”²⁵ The satisfactory result was to establish the Net Book Agreement definitively as the “terms of trade,” and thus to allow the victorious publishers fully to explore the possibilities in these newly structured relations of production and distribution of books.

But what had happened in the book trade was simply what had happened generally in the production and distribution of commodities at the turn of the century. The end of the last and the beginning of the new century, says a standard history of the subject, “saw a decisive change from competitive to associative organization in almost every trade in Britain,” as a new form of monopolist organization established itself in retail trade associations like the Publishers' Association. This was “merely a continuation of the development of cartels and trusts in British industry,”²⁶ in the same way that the Net Book Agreement transformed the hegemony of the three-decker/lending library arrangement by concentrating control in the hands of publishers. The purpose of the agreement (indeed, the “kernel” of all trade associations' policy) was “to eliminate certain phases of competition by imposing on their members certain regulations of trading,”²⁷ that is, to eliminate “underselling” by enforcing net prices for books. But the practices of retail price maintenance have a more direct bearing on our understanding of publishing practice following the Net Book Agreement. Hermann Levy discusses the way that manufacturers, given “general agreement about price levels and certain trading conditions,” are now constantly faced with the need to devise “new methods of securing [their] retailing customers,” and a primary means is that extension of the principle of a patent which creates “branded goods,” to be sold at advertised (or in the publishers' term, “net”) prices.²⁸ “Manufacturers,” Levy writes, “have always been in search of means of creating for their goods some reputation-value, apart from cheapness or quality”:

The manufacturer who wishes to exploit the mass demand of modern retail markets … must broaden the sphere of patented goods into a field where the quasi-monopolist feature is not made up by legal rights but by the reputation and good will which his article gains. … Generally the manufacturer finds it necessary to approach the consumer directly, and so to create for himself a reliable mass market of the “unknown” customer. If this end is achieved the relationship between manufacturer and retailer may be reversed; it is the manufacturer who by controlling this article of reputation has gained the upper hand.²⁹

In the case of publishing, the “legal rights” Levy refers to might be compared to the old arrangement with the lending libraries. But in the new “direct” arrangement, control has passed to the publishers; “the key to the situation,” writes another commentator, “lies in the manufacturer's hands.”³⁰ The practice of “branded goods” permits manufacturers not only to “discipline price cutters”³¹ but, more importantly, directly “to capture the retailer's customers” by creating what these economic historians call “consumer insistence”: “it is this ‘consumer insistence’ which is intended to create the quasi-monopoly value of the brand.”³² Thus, while publishing may be “a type of business distinct from others in many respects,”³³ in many other respects it is very similar, these practices of retail price maintenance generally explaining the early distinction between “net” and “subject” books, the dynamics of book production under the Net Book Agreement, and the reasons for finally including, in 1914, novels among net books. Since the economics of the “branded article” conform fundamentally with “the necessities of modern mass distribution in general,”³⁴ in book publishing the “branded article” may be seen as a translation of the function of “class” categories in the “new journalism,” interpellating “consumer insistence” from a “class” of “unknown customers.” The translation, the ideological categories, and the practices specific to book production may be seen only occasionally in the few historical studies, but quite vividly in publishers' notices in the trade journals of the 1890s and early 1900s.

Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics (“2 vols. 8vo. Vol I. price 12 s. 6 d. net”), the first net book published by Macmillan, was announced in the Bookseller for 7 August 1890, five months after Frederick Macmillan had made his plan public.³⁵ During the approach to Christmas 1890, Macmillan offered several more net books of various kinds, with different formats and prices: Lockyer's Meteoric Hypothesis (demy octavo, 17 s. net) and Bowdler Buckton's Monograph of the British Cicadae (2 vols., vol 1, 33/6 net) on 1 November, and then on 15 November two expensive, large paper, super royal 8vo. limited editions: Mrs. Oliphant's Royal Edinburgh and a reprint of The Vicar of Wakefield with 150 illustrations.³⁶ On 15 December, Macmillan listed a similar, seven-guinea limited edition and then, in the Christmas number of the Publishers' Circular, they advertised a Library Reference Atlas of the World (£2. 12 s. net), some reprinted works by Lewis Carroll at 2/6, 4s., 4/6, and 7/6 (all net) and a “pocket edition” of Tennyson's Poetical Works, morocco binding, gilt edges, 7/6 net.³⁷ From August 1890 to January 1891, Macmillan had introduced about twenty net books, in various formats at different prices.³⁸ By April 1891, Heinemann was also advertising net books, and in August 1891 Cassell's announced with some fanfare a “new library of popular works at a ‘net price,’ to be known as ‘Cassell's International Novels.’”³⁹ This last venture seems to have been premature, perhaps one of that firm's “miscalculations” at that period, for by Christmas 1892 all of the novels in the series, originally priced at 7/6 net, were advertised at six shillings each, with no mention of net prices.⁴⁰

We can see very clearly from this the trial and error through which the system of book distribution was reconstituted in the interest of those who controlled production, the publishers. At the inaugural dinner of the London Booksellers' Society in 1890, David Stott, in the chair, had called Macmillan's recent proposal “a step in the right direction,” but his notion of what “net books” might mean was limited by his bookseller's perspective:

There are some books a bookseller cannot sell, and no persuasion or blandishment can influence the customer to buy them. I refer to books on special subjects—technical or specially scientific books, for instance, such as we only purchase when they are ordered. …

But on the other hand I protest against any publisher attempting to do the same thing with cheap books. …⁴¹

And in 1894, the Bookseller, responding in “Trade Gossip” to letters to the Times about net book prices, was again to specify “the application of the system to certain select classes of books, especially those published at a high price, or which appeal only to a limited class of readers.”⁴² Macmillan's choice of net books in those early months was clearly to some extent dictated by those considerations; but their very first choice for a net book had been intended from the start to test a more subtle possibility. “It was important that the book chosen should be a good one,” Frederick Macmillan recalled,

because if the first net book did not sell, its failure would certainly be attributed to its netness and not to its quality. It so happened that in the spring of 1890, we had in preparation a book on The Principles of Economics, by Professor Alfred Marshall, the well-known economist and then Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge. There was little doubt that this book would at once take a leading place in the literature of Economics, and it suggested itself as a most appropriate subject for the experiment we wished to try.⁴³

Here we have the beginning of an experiment in selling books as a new kind of “branded goods”; rather than appealing to a known, limited market for a commodity-book, with Mrs. Oliphant's Royal Edinburgh, say, or to the market for gilt edges and morocco bindings, Macmillan is here testing an assumed “quality,” a “reputation-value,” as a way of interpellating the “unknown” reader prepared to buy a commodity-text. Books advertised as “net” in these first years appear to be of these two types: either they are the sort of books which David Stott and other booksellers could not sell generally, on abstruse topics or in special formats or bindings, or they are books which by some sort of “reputation-value” may be hoped to interpellate an unspecified “class” of unknown readers. Thus “net” books might be either commodity-books or commodity-texts; “subject” books remained commodity-books, subject ultimately to a bookseller's persuasion and blandishment, as well as discount. But it was the possibility of extra profit which was opened up in the “net” category which publishers were to explore and exploit directly.

To assert, then, that “at first the net system was only applied to high priced books, especially books selling at more than 6 s.,” is inaccurate, but more importantly it is an assertion which arises out of “free market” assumptions, based on the simple efficacy of “demand.” The net system was at first applied only to high-priced books, Russi Jal Taraporevala writes, “presumably because the demand for these books was considered by publishers to be relatively inelastic”:

Hence the increase in price, due to “netting,” was not expected to reduce total sales substantially. On the other hand cheaper books, for which the demand was presumably thought to have been more elastic, came within the net system only in its later years.⁴⁴

The problematic of a presumed elasticity/inelasticity of “demand” only obscures the dynamics of the net book system; from the point of view of the production of books (rather than “demand”), the publishers may be seen to have eventually so expanded net books as sophisticated “branded goods” that “demand” became a controlled effect of production. The “reputation-value” at the core of “branded goods” lay in an author's name, as with the “well-known” Professor Marshall, interpellating unknown readers of commodity-texts, creating a new audience, although ideologically it might be explained as “satisfying a demand.” Publishers were now in a position in the economic structure to undertake in a controlled way the creation of the kinds of mass audiences which the different careers of Charles Dickens and Charles Knight, seventy-five years earlier, had shown to be accessible to a new literary mode of production, by exploiting systematically the power of a commodity-text to interpellate an infinity of unknown subjects. Neither an author, a printer, nor a bookseller could afford

to take the risk of promoting books … on the scale that was now necessary. Older publishing houses … rose to greater prominence, and new ones … soon achieved leading positions in the book trade.⁴⁵

Hence “the mad quest for the golden seller” that Henry Holt described in “The Commercialization of Literature” in 1905, “the mad payment to the man who has once produced it, and the mad advertising of doubtful books in the hope of creating the seller.”⁴⁶

Raymond Williams has approached this moment of “a bouncing cheeky finally rampant commercialism” from a wholly different direction, concluding nonetheless that “what happened between the 1890s and 1914 is of great critical importance for the novel.” He suggests that 1895, the year in which Thomas Hardy stopped writing novels, might serve to mark “a new situation in the English novel.” We can see at that time a “visibly altering would,” an “emerging deciding dividing world,” which manifests itself in the history of the novel in the separating out of “‘individual’ or ‘psychological’ fiction on the one hand and ‘social’ or ‘sociological’ fiction on the other,” and in the coming of “literature,” that “working, working over, working through, by the last of the great men, the last hero, the novelist.”⁴⁷ The editors of the New Left Review, interviewing Williams nine years after he wrote this account, were uneasy with it, pointing out that he did not really explore the reasons for the decisive “caesura in the form of the novel.”⁴⁸ If Williams, in 1970, had been unwilling to associate the “disturbance” with some system, “call it sociology or materialism or technologico-Benthamism”⁴⁹ (F. R. Leavis's pejorative formulas in those years), in 1979 he is much more precise about “the political emergence of a new working class, and the cultural segregation of a new bourgeois order, after the 1880s.” He speaks not only of the “very deep and successful reorganization of bourgeois cultural and educational institutions,” “integrated and confident,” insulated within “increasingly standardized and masculine institutions,” but he specifies the apparatuses of these ideologies: educational institutions, “a fully extended bourgeois press,” and “the modernization of publishing.”⁵⁰

It is there, indeed, in those apparatuses, that a materialist explanation of what is signified by the “caesura in the form of the novel” must be based. The particular forms of “modernization” I have been analyzing are not merely new “marketing techniques” but rather a necessary extension of the transformation of the relations of production which constituted fully capitalist book publishing. The process initiated in 1890 by Frederick Macmillan, explored in his own list and expanded to those of other publishers, was precisely the “emerging deciding dividing” process of which Williams writes. It arrives (in passing, of course), as net books become increasingly the rule, in increasingly integrated, confident, standardized, and masculine structures of capitalist control, “masculine” not only because of the list of agents (Macmillan, John Murray, William Heinemann, or Edward Arnold) but also because of the patriarchal necessity of control, of centralized, purposeful planning (sometimes described as “risk-taking”) in the production of commodity-texts. For the disruptions in the form of the novel were produced by these transformations of the relations of novel production; if “the parting of the ways” (Williams's chapter heading in The English Novel) may be described on an ideal level as the separating of psychological from sociological fiction, from the point of view of production the separation was determined in the last instance by those very forces which determined the separation of “net” from “subject” books. Even new novels, until 1914 usually sold subject to discount, could not entirely escape “netness,” those forces determining the overall net/subject structure, for the whole production process, as well as each sector of it, was inevitably in an overdetermined relationship to the “visibly altering world,” the “quite fundamental changes in the economic situation,” such as scientific management and the revival of capital export, which were producing also the new unionism, the crisis in the London housing market and in the growth of the suburbs, and, in 1903, the Women's Social and Political Union.⁵¹

Edward Arnold was one of the first of the new names in publishing in the nineties; although the firm became noted for publishing the standard school books required after the Education Act, fiction was “not uncommon under this imprint” early in the century.⁵² Forster came to Arnold with A Room with a View in 1908. His first two novels had been published by William Blackwood. Forster had sent a short manuscript entitled “Monteriano” to Blackwood's Magazine in 1905 and, as he wrote to his mother, Blackwood offered to publish it in volume form:

the terms they offer are not at all good—I have written trying to do better, and meantime am trying to find out whether Blackwoods as publishers are a good firm, as though I dont mind much about money it's important to be in the hands of people who will advertise you well. Methuen and Heinemann are the firms I should have naturally tried first. The title has to be changed, which is very sad, but I see their point of view.⁵³

Blackwood's point of view was that the name “Monteriano” would be detrimental to the sale of the book; a friend of Forster's suggested “Where Angels Fear to Tread” and Blackwood agreed that the change would improve the novel's “already slight chances of success.”⁵⁴ Forster remained with Blackwood for The Longest Journey (1907) but switched to Arnold with A Room With a View; the reasons for the change are unknown.⁵⁵ In March 1909 Forster sent Arnold a synopsis and “a rough draft” of thirty chapters of Howards End.⁵⁶ Oliver Stallybrass, the editor of the Abinger Edition of the novels, notes that the firm's readers and Arnold himself were bothered by Helen's sexual encounter with Leonard Bast, perhaps having that episode in mind when they suggested shortening the novel. A month later, when the novel was in proof, Forster indicated to Arnold some agreement about Helen:

I was much struck by your original criticism, and tried to do what I could, but the episode had worked itself into the plot inextricably. I hope however that the public may find the book convincing on other counts.⁵⁷

Edward Arnold published Howards End on 18 October 1910, 6 s., crown 8vo., in 2,500 copies with further impressions of 1,000, 3,000 and 2,500 copies in November 1910, and 1,000 more in December; 9,959 copies were sold.⁵⁸ P. N. Furbank describes the novel's reception: “The book hit the note of the time. … For the first time the word ‘great’ was bandied about …,” and he quotes the Daily Mail reviewer's emphasis on the novel's “coherence and connectedness,” saying that “only connect” might be Forster's motto “not only for his book but for his method of work”:

the fitting of the perception of little things with the perception of universal things; consistency, totality, connection. Mr. Forster has written a connected novel.⁵⁹

Clearly one “note of the time” which Howards End hit is indicated by the appreciation in the contemporary press for the injunction to “connect,” a note which paradoxically seems timeless, given the attention paid by later critics to Forster's concern with “the relationships, and the possibility of reconciliation, between certain pairs of opposites.” For just as A Room with a View is said to have “resonated” with “interlocking sets of contrasting pairs,” so in general Forster is seen to define problems “dualistically,” to explore “dichotomies,” to find “some new and fruitful antithesis by which to set his convictions in play,” and in Howards End to unfold an Arnoldian “series of polarities.”⁶⁰ What is significant is the ideological attraction, for contemporary and later critics alike, of Forster's project. In 1910-11 it was perhaps welcomed as a “liberal” response to perceived “real” divisions in society between “the democratic surface and the private core, the People and the people who counted,” or between “individualism (and imperialism) as represented by the Conservative Party and collectivism as typified by the burgeoning labour movement,” or between men and women.⁶¹ Since then, as “liberalism” has declined as a public political stance, Forster's ideological position has been taken more privately, as “moral realism,” or “judicious imperturbability,” a “whole style of patient, synoptic comment on social issues.”⁶²Howards End thus develops its epigraph thematically in its repeated reference to Matthew Arnold's advice to see life steadily and see it whole, and this moral effort is further associated with the place, Howards End, one of “these English farms” where, “if anywhere, one might see life steadily and see it whole, group in one vision its transitoriness and its eternal youth, connect—connect without bitterness until all men are brothers.”⁶³ This vision of connectedness is presented metaphorically again and again in Howards End, as when the narrator demonstrates the “wisest course” for showing a foreigner England: to stand on the summit of the final section of the Purbeck Hills, “then system after system of our island would roll together under his feet,” and as Forster directs “the trained eye” to these systems,

the reason fails, like a wave on the Swanage beach; the imagination swells, spreads and deepens, until it becomes geographic and encircles England.

(164-65)

Yet such a vision, such imagination, is not accessible to the lower-middle-class Leonard Bast—in a moment of despair Leonard realizes “to see life steadily and to see it whole was not for the likes of him” (52)—nor was it available to a calculating businessman, “who saw life more steadily, though with the steadiness of the half-closed eye” (320). Margaret Schlegel, on the other hand, believing that it is impossible to see “modern life” steadily, had chosen “to see it whole” (158). The novel's “patient synoptic comment” is here vague and ambiguous, the imaginative vision which is its theme being finally only “an impossible, yet heroic, effort to ‘see life steadily and see it whole,’”⁶⁴ which echoes both wistfully and a little shrilly in the defensive naiveté of its final words:

“The field's cut!” Helen cried excitedly—“The big meadow! We've seen to the very end, and it'll be such a crop of hay as never!”

(340)

But if Helen's outburst embodies the thematic uncertainty in Howards End, ignored or accepted by contemporary and later critics alike, its language, as in the final utterance, also embodies a more profoundly historical contradiction, in the novel's interpellation of its reader-subject. We, too, have “seen to the very end,” of Howards End; but, then, who are “we”? The novel asks this question, historically crucial, on several levels, some of them more self-reflexive than others. “Who's ‘we’?” Henry Wilcox asks his son, “My boy, pray, who's ‘we’?” (281) and Wilcox is himself later asked by Margaret, as he is attempting to ensure her personal loyalty, “Who is ‘we’?” (301). But in 1910 that question was central for the novelist too; it had a determinate historical weight. For while Howards End was published by Arnold “subject to discount,” Longman, Chatto, and others were already publishing new fiction “net,” in various formats and prices.⁶⁵ Forster was inevitably implicated in that continuing project to establish the new structures of net-book publishing; in 1909 he had joined with other authors in an undertaking “not to publish an edition of any novel first published at the price of 6 s. in a cheap form at any time within two years from the date of its first publication.”⁶⁶ And whether a novel was published “net” or “subject,” the reading audience as a whole was being reconstituted by the relations of production we have discussed. A novelist might not necessarily be attempting to interpellate a mass audience, but as the relations of production moved ever more towards that possibility it became increasingly difficult for a novelist to imagine who or where another, more specific audience might be. In Howards End this difficulty, the determinate presence of the Net Book Agreement, registers itself in the awkward indeterminacy of the narrator's indefinite pronouns, “we” and “one.”

The characters in Howards End most often use the indefinite “we” in a conventional way, “in general statements in which the speaker includes those whom he addresses, his contemporaries, his fellow countrymen, or the like” (OED), as in Mrs. Munt's “what we are doing in music” (33), or sometimes by asserting a specifically upper-middle-class “we,” as when she wonders if the Wilcoxes are “our sort” (6). Similarly, within the created Schlegel world, “one knows what foreigners are” (12), “one” being “anyone of everybody, including (and in later language often specially meaning) the speaker himself” (OED); thus Mrs. Wilcox gently rebukes her son: “one doesn't ask plain questions” (19). But, outside the Schlegel/Wilcox world, the narrator's “we” or “one” is far less confident. It may include the speaker, fellow countrymen, and the like, but the “like” may shift uneasily to include unknown reader/subjects. The narrator's “we” is often clearly English, as when the London railway termini are described as “our” gates to the provinces (9), or when “two members of our race” play at “Capping Families” (18). But while “we” are also occasionally clearly upper-middle-class—“we” visit the country on weekends, and “we” look back with disquietude to the “elder race” which once lived there (266)—the interpellation of that class is often undercut, complicated by a not-quite-assured irony which in its uncertainty acknowledges values and subjects more inclusive and urgent than class-values and class-subjects. Leonard Bast's flat in Camelia Road contains a photograph of “a young lady named Jacky” which had been taken “at the time when young ladies named Jacky were often photographed with their mouths open.” Jacky's photograph and smile are condescended to further, but then the tone is disrupted just as the narrator moves directly to enlist the reader:

Take my word for it, that smile was simply stunning, and it is only you and I who will be fastidious, and complain that true joy begins in the eyes, and that the eyes of Jacky did not accord with her smile, but were anxious and hungry.

(46)

Who, indeed, constitute the “you and I” here, revised from the “you or I” of the manuscript precisely to be inclusive?⁶⁷ The narrator is, at first, still ironical about the “stunning” smile, then, as “you and I” is introduced, “fastidious” (and still more ironically “captious” in the manuscript [43]), but then erases “our” ironic privilege by admitting it, as “we” contradictorily acknowledge the anxiety and hunger. At a moment like this the text's “we,” the “everybody” which includes “anybody,” tries jerkily to expand to include even nobodies like Jacky.

There are other such moments of narrative uncertainty, where “our” uneasiness about who “we” are is signaled by a contradictory indefiniteness or a limp gesture towards inclusiveness.⁶⁸ The description, or more accurately the narrator's appropriation, of Helen's experience of “panic and emptiness” in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony concludes with the comment, when “Beethoven chose to make all right in the end,” that “that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things” (31-32). The shift to the present tense marks the intensity of the interpellation of “one,” yet the confidence of that interpellation is immediately dissipated by the indefinite openness of “other things”; “one” (everybody) can trust Beethoven, the text seems to say, so long as that “one” is prepared to grant “one” (anyone) a blank check.⁶⁹ A similar contradictory pull disrupts the opening sentences of Chapter 6: “We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet” (43). Here the “we” is simply the community of narrator and present reader, but “unthinkable” intrudes again a class position which then quickly is softened by being deferred, placed within the thematic dualism of reason and imagination. But the whole of the structure of Chapter 6 is fraught with the indefiniteness of the audience whom the narrator attempts to interpellate. The chapter addresses precisely the division between rich and poor, “gentlefolk” and “the abyss,” and how Leonard Bast is placed between them—Leonard “stood at the extreme verge of gentility. He was not in the abyss but he could see it” (43)—but more importantly the chapter struggles formally with how this division is to be thought. In his flat in Camelia Road Leonard begins to read Chapter 2 of the second volume of The Stones of Venice, the “famous” chapter (46) in which Ruskin crosses the lagoon to the islands of Torcello and Murano, and as Leonard listens to “the rich man speaking … from his gondola” (46)—“Was there anything to be learned from this fine sentence? Could he adapt it to the needs of daily life?” (47)—the narrator points out the irrelevance of Ruskin to Leonard's daily life. With all its command of “admonition and poetry” (46),

the voice in the gondola rolled on, piping melodiously of Effort and Self-Sacrifice, full of high purpose, full of beauty, full even of sympathy and the love of men, yet somehow eluding all that was actual and insistent in Leonard's Life. For it was the voice of one who had never been dirty or hungry, and had not guessed successfully what dirt and hunger are.

(47)

What is at first striking in this passage is how the narrator constructs a “Ruskin” so as to imply by contrast, however indistinctly, the desired attitude to the poor; whoever the interpellated subject may be, it is first of all to be distinguished from the text's “Ruskin” (“well-fed Ruskin” in the manuscript [43]). The textual revisions show how the necessary “Ruskin” was constructed: the original voice of “a man who had never guessed what dirt and hunger feel like” (and earlier, “what such sensations may be”) is rewritten so that not only are “feelings” and “sensations” replaced by what dirt and hunger “are,” but “a man” is generalized to the almost indefinite “one,” who may have “not” (instead of “never”) guessed these realities. The text has thus moved away from an imagined Ruskin's personal experience to the question of an attitude, the attitude of a less definite “one,” perhaps including the reader or the narrator, who had not yet but might still guess successfully what are the actualities of a life like Leonard's.

The chapter continues for a paragraph, alternating Leonard's reading of Ruskin's aesthetic aspirations with the narrator's commentary. Jacky then returns to the flat and after their supper of cheap, ersatz food the chapter concludes with Leonard going back to finish his chapter of The Stones of Venice:

Ruskin had visited Torcello by this time, and was ordering his gondoliers to take him to Murano. It occurred to him, as he glided over the whispering lagoons, that the power of Nature could not be shortened by the folly, nor her beauty altogether saddened by the misery, of such as Leonard.

(53)

Again, the text's discordances, as well as the effort of revision, trace the struggle to interpellate a broadly inclusive vantage point for an unknown subject. Ruskin, in his own sentence about “the power of Nature,” had spoken of “the misery of man,” his gondola having passed the principal cemetery of Venice.⁷⁰ Forster had changed “man” to “Leonard” in the three earlier versions of this paragraph, but each time he had also included a phrase, finally deleted, about Ruskin's meditation: “… and this comforted him”; “… and he was comforted”; “this comforted him” (manuscript, 49, 50). To have retained this final phrase would have heightened the anomaly of “Leonard” in Ruskin's sentence because it would have pointed the text back to Ruskin's supposed feelings. What the text now does, instead of focusing ironically on a cheaply comforted Ruskin, is to conclude its effort to construct a subject-position, different from Ruskin's, from which one might think the almost unthinkable predicament of “such as Leonard,” a position which interpellates an unknown subject, with indistinct class predispositions: gentlefolk perhaps, or those obliged to pretend they are gentlefolk, or those who are neither, but merely “unknown.”

This effort which the text of Howards End so often makes tentatively to open up the narrator's “we,” or the indefinite “one,” to an “anyone” of a determinedly inclusive “everybody,” is much more historically specific than being merely “the fag-end of Victorian liberalism.”⁷¹ It is the effort which the new literary mode of production demands of “net” books, but also of “subject” books (like most novels in 1910), as the new literary market is itself “produced.” For while Forster assuredly did not set himself in 1909-10 to write a best-seller in Howards End, he nevertheless equally surely wrote within a determinate structure of book production, developed over the preceding twenty years, which enabled publishers to use the new means of production to produce commodity-texts. The “bastsellerism” and “bestsellerdom” to which John Sutherland refers are but ideological labels for the full development in capitalist book production of that internal drive towards “total commercial rationalization” and the “hectic change and turnover” in which capitalism realizes its “general formula.”⁷² Sutherland finds “good historical reasons” why the modern novel is “necessarily tied to the wheels of progressive technology, commercial management and the dictatorship of the consumer.”⁷³ I have denied the “dictatorship” of the consumer, insisting instead on the control of the capitalist publisher, but otherwise I have detailed the material conditions of Sutherland's necessities and traced that historical process in a text, not even of a best-seller, but of Howards End. For the audience of the old, hegemonic literary mode of production had disappeared with the three-decker; readers were being reagglomerated as “consumers” of commodity-texts by the new, rampant, fully capitalist literary mode of production, with the publishers' sway stretching past the bookseller to “capture the retailer's customers.” And because these powerful lines of control extended themselves through the production process the interpellated subject was also transformed. Whatever Forster's political or social “liberalism,” whatever its placement within Edwardian ideology generally, the reader addressed by Howards End, that novel's peculiarly indistinct interpellated subject, was inevitably determined by these material relations of its production. In the ambiguity of its constructed reader-subject Howards End bears the impress of its historical mode of production, encodes within itself, in the ways we have seen, its own record of “how, by whom and for whom it was produced.”⁷⁴

Notes

1. Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie's Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 209-11.

2. Royal A. Gettmann, A Victorian Publisher: A Study of the Bentley Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 257.

3. Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 152.

4. Richard Altick, The English Common Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 313.

5. Quoted in Griest, Mudie's, 7, and Gettman, Victorian Publisher, 245.

6. W. G. Corp, Fifty Years: A Brief Account of the Associated Booksellers of Great Britain and Ireland, 1895-1945 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1945), 3; see also David Stott, “The Decay of Bookselling,” Nineteenth Century 36 (1894):932-38.

7. Arthur Waugh, A Hundred Years of Publishing (London: Chapman and Hall, 1930), 192; Griest, Mudie's, 169-70.

8. Gettmann, Victorian Publisher, 256; Griest, Mudie's, 189; John Goode has analyzed the place of the Society of Authors in the “more mystified ideology of literary production” in “The Decadent Writer as Producer,” in Decadence and the 1890s, ed. Ian Fletcher (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), 117-21.

9. Simon Nowell-Smith, International Copyright Law and the Publisher in the Reign of Queen Victoria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 82.

10. Quoted in Griest, Mudie's, 173.

11. Frederick Macmillan, The Net Book Agreement 1899 and the Book War 1906-1908 (Glasgow: Robert Maclehose, 1924), 4.

12. For the place of this ideology in late Victorian economic thinking, see E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 187f.

13. Macmillan, The Net Book Agreement, 6, 16.

14. W. G. Corp, Fifty Years, 5; the London Booksellers' Society had already, in 1894, submitted to selected publishers a memorial supporting net prices. Russi Jal Taraporevala, Competition and Control in the Book Trade, 1850-1939 (Bombay: D. B. T. Taraporevala and Sons, 1969), 36.

15. R. J. L. Kingsford, The Publishers' Association, 1896-1946 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 5-17.

16. Macmillan, The Net Book Agreement, 30.

17. [Anon.], The History of the Times, vol 3, The Twentieth Century Test, 1884-1912, (London: The Times, 1947), 441.

18. The History of the Times, 443-48.

19. [Anon.], “The Times” and the Publishers (London: privately printed for the Publishers' Association, 1906), 11-12, 7.

20. Edward Bell, “The Times Book Club and the Publishers' Association, an Account of the ‘Book War’ of 1906-1908,” in Macmillan, The Net Book Agreement, 31.

21. [Anon.], Publishers and the Public: Reprinted From the Times of 1852 (London: The Times, 1906), Note, 1.

22. [Anon.], The History of the Book War: Fair Book Prices Versus Publishers' Trust Prices (London: The Times, 1907), 36.

23. John and A. H. Hallam Murray v. Walter and Others (London: printed for private circulation, John Murray, 1908), 84.

24. The Times attacked novelists as “the curled darlings of the fiction market [who] came forth from the lotos-land through the looking-glass where they dwell withdrawn from the vulgar battle of commerce, or emerged from the vapourous private Utopias wherein they excogitate phosphorescent millenniums.” The History of the Book War, 32.

25. Macmillan, The Net Book Agreement, 75, 77.

26. Hermann Levy, Retail Trade Associations: A New Form of Monopolist Organization in Britain (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1942), 20, 7.

27. Ibid., 5.

28. Ibid., 63-64.

29. Ibid., 65-66.

30. B. S. Yamey, “The Origins of Retail Price Maintenance: A Study of Three Branches of the Retail Trade,” EJ 62 (1952):528.

31. Yamey, “Origins,” 527-28.

32. Levy, Retail Trade Associations, 67, 70.

33. Ibid., 15.

34. Ibid., 71.

35. The Bookseller, 383 (7 August 1890):869 (hereafter referred to as B, with number, date, and page).

36. The Publishers' Circular (1 November 1890):1450; (15 November 1890):1525 (hereafter referred to as PC).

37. PC (15 December 1890):1622; (Christmas Number, 1890):106, 108.

38. Ian Norrie says sixteen in 1890. F. A. Mumby and Ian Norrie, Publishing and Bookselling, 5th ed. rev. (London: Cape, 1974), 244.

39. B, 404 (Apr. 1891); PC (1 Aug. 1891), 917; Frederick Macmillan lists the publishers in 1891 who were publishing net books, in The Net Book Agreement, 18.

40. Simon Nowell-Smith, The House of Cassell, 1848-1958 (London: Cassell, 1958), 188; PC (Christmas Number, 1892):98.

41. B, 395 (10 October 1890):1020.

42. B, 444 (6 November 1894):1021.

43. Macmillan, The Net Book Agreement, 14.

44. Taraporevala, Competition and Control, 54.

45. B. W. E. Alford, “Business Enterprise and the Growth of the Commercial Letterpress Printing Industry, 1850-1914,” Business History 7 (1965):4.

46. Henry Holt, “The Commercialization of Literature,” Atlantic Monthly 96 (1905):599; the Americans had been listing “best sellers” since 1895. Alice Payne Hackett, 70 Years of Best Sellers: 1895-1965 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1967), 2.

47. Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970), 129, 119, 121, 119-20, 137.

48. Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (London: New Left Books, 1979), 261-62.

49. Williams, The English Novel, 130.

50. Politics and Letters, 262, 263.

51. Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, 2d ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 313; Asa Briggs, “The Political Scene,” in Edwardian England, 1901-1914, ed. S. Nowell-Smith (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 82; Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, 191.

52. Mumby and Norrie, Publishing and Bookselling, 279, 347.

53. Oliver Stallybrass, Editor's Introduction, Where Angels Fear To Tread, Abinger ed. (London: Arnold, 1975), xi; Selected Letters of E. M. Forster, ed. Mary Lago and P. N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1983), 1:67.

54. Stallybrass, Editor's Introduction, Angels, xii; Lago and Furbank, Letters, 1:84 n.2.

55. Forster may have decided that “as publishers,” Blackwood was not “a good firm,” for although he “didn't mind much about money,” Blackwood's terms for Angels were “really no money at all” (Lago and Furbank, Letters, 1:71); on the other hand, Forster may have been uneasy with Blackwood's very public Toryism, or his own company among the “chief Blackwood's writers,” who in 1904 included, besides Joseph Conrad, “Zack,” Sydney Grier, Mary Skrine, Beatrice Harraden, Storer Clouston, etc. F. D. Tredrey, The House of Blackwood, 1804-1954 (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1954), 193.

56. Oliver Stallybrass, Editor's Introduction, Howards End, Abinger ed. (London: Arnold, 1973), xii; Edward Arnold had been the reader for Murray's Magazine who had refused Tess of the D'Urbervilles in 1889 “virtually on the score of its improper explicitness.” R. L. Purdy, Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 73.

57. Stallybrass, Editor's Introduction, Howards End, xiii.

58. B. J. Kirkpatrick, A Bibliography of E. M. Forster, 2d rev. imp. (London: R. Hart-Davies, 1968), 29; Derek Hudson, “Reading,” in Edwardian England, ed. Nowell-Smith, 315.

59. P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life (London: Secker and Warburg, 1977), 1:188-89.

60. Stallybrass, Editor's Introduction, Howards End, x; Stallybrass, Editor's Introduction, A Room With a View, xix; Wilfred Stone, “‘Overleaping Class’: Forster's Problem in Connection,” Modern Language Quarterly 39 (1978):386; Cyrus Hoy, “Forster's Metaphysical Novel,” PMLA 75 (1960):133; Furbank, Forster, 1:207; E. Barry McGurk, “Gentlefolk in Philistia: The Influence of Matthew Arnold on E. M. Forster's Howards End,” English Literature in Transition 15 (1972):215.

61. Asa Briggs, “The Political Scene,” 71; Kenneth D. Brown, “The Anti-Socialist Union, 1908-49,” in Essays in Anti-Labour History, ed., K. D. Brown (London: Macmillan, 1974), 236; Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 172-211.

62. Lionel Trilling, E. M. Forster (London: Hogarth Press, 1951), 17; Peter Widdowson, E. M. Forster's Howards End: Fiction as History (London: Sussex University Press, 1977), 26-28; Furbank, Forster, 1:210.

63. E. M. Forster, Howards End, Abinger ed., ed. Oliver Stallybrass (London: Arnold, 1973), 266; all quotations are from this edition and will be cited in the text.

64. Frederick L. Crews, E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962), 34.

65. B, 96, n.s. (28 October 1910):52.

66. The Author 19, 9 (1 June 1909):241.

67. Oliver Stallybrass, ed., The Manuscripts of Howards End, Abinger ed. (London: Arnold, 1973), 43; hereafter referred to as “manuscript.”

68. See Widdowson, Forster's Howards End, 12.

69. Ibid., 110.

70. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (vol. 2), in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1904), 10:37.

71. E. M. Forster, “The Challenge of Our Time,” Two Cheers for Democracy, Abinger ed., ed. Oliver Stallybrass (London: Arnold, 1972), 54.

72. John Sutherland, Bestsellers (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 8; “the valorization of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The movement of capital is therefore limitless.” Karl Marx, Capital, trans. B. Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 1:253.

73. Sutherland, Bestsellers, 21.

74. Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: New Left Books, 1976), 48.