SOURCE: Tuchman, Gaye. “Writers and the Victorian Publishing System.” In Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers, and Social Change, by Gaye Tuchman with Nina E. Fortin, pp. 22-44. Binghamton, N.Y.: Vail-Ballou Press, 1989.

[In the following excerpt, Tuchman explores the Victorian writer's dependence on publishers, some of whom were interested in appealing to the masses and earning short-term profits, and others who were devoted to the production of high-culture texts that would amass profits over a long period of time.]

To grasp the opportunities and obstacles that women novelists confronted, one must understand the position of all Victorian authors, especially their dependence on publishers. Then as now, authors needed to locate a publishing house willing to invest its capital to transform their manuscripts into books.¹ Especially when not well established, an author may be financially at the publisher's mercy, for publishers do not issue books for the sheer pleasure of doing so.

Book publishing is a culture industry. By this we mean that publishers and those with whom they are associated—writers, printers, and, in the nineteenth century, circulating libraries—deal in books to make money. To earn profits, they produce books that they expect will appeal to contemporary readers and perhaps to posterity as well. Even when a publisher invests in a book that he suspects will have a limited immediate audience, he probably has some kind of future profit in mind.² He may believe that the book will take off in the near future and yield a profit then. He may feel that the talented author's next book will be profitable and hope that the author will stay with the publisher who previously expressed faith in his or her abilities. Or he may suppose that even if the book brings no immediate profit and limited future profit it will somehow credit his list—his catalogue of wares—and so benefit the firm by enhancing its prestige and attracting other, potentially successful authors.

This interpretation of publishing as a business is explicit in the writings of Pierre Bourdieu (1984). He explains that the publishing industry is stratified by “culture-type.” That is, some firms specialize in avant-garde books directed to a limited immediate audience of educated, upper-middle-class readers who possess a fair amount of cultural capital (familiarity with the great literature of the past). These firms expect to make a profit in the future, when the books on their backlists become classics. Other firms search for the immediate profit of best-sellers, appealing to the middle class. These books may flood the bookstores for three to six months and then disappear from the shelves. Still other firms, notably the American and Canadian companies issuing the romances sold in North American drugstores, airports, and dime stores, have taken the search for immediate profit to an extreme.³ They market their wares as if they were detergent or toothpaste. Emphasizing their “name brand,” they issue new titles monthly, rapidly retiring the older ones (Radway 1984).

Lewis Coser, Charles Kadushin, and Walter Powell (1982) had this series of options in mind when they spoke of the distinction between production-oriented publishers and consumer-oriented publishers. This distinction captures not only aspects of the market for books but also of class structure. Roughly speaking, production-oriented publishers seek to deal in high culture—“aesthetically legitimate” work that may bring profit in the long run, to paraphrase Bourdieu (1980)—for class fractions with a high investment in cultural capital. Consumer-oriented publishers care more about short-run profit, mass appeal, and mass culture. They aim to appeal to class fractions that seek entertainment, not enlightenment, in novels. Necessarily, consumer-oriented publishers need a harmonious relationship with the distribution system that brings their books to readers. Today, for example, the sales forces of textbook publishers court faculty who teach large introductory courses in the hope that these professors will assign their texts as required reading (Coser, Kadushin, and Powell 1982). To quash the market for used books, whose sales bring no profit to the original publishers, these firms bring out new editions of texts every few years.

In mid-nineteenth-century Britain, the distinction between consumer-oriented and producer-oriented publishers was not as marked as, say, the contemporary American distinction between Lyle Stuart and Farrar, Straus and Giroux or between Harlequin and Vintage paperbacks. Indeed, publishers did not assume that a popular book was unworthy of critical praise. Conversely, they believed that some critically esteemed novels could gain large audiences.

To be sure, the publishing industry was stratified. Such publishers of literary novels as the seven houses largely responsible for the works still read today were distinct from those that brought out penny-installment fiction. Those bringing out literary works were further stratified. Although both firms published Charles Dickens (1812-1870), the bookseller-publisher Chapman and Hall might have claimed superiority over the printer-publisher Bradbury and Evans. Because printer-publishers were more common in the eighteenth than the nineteenth century, bookseller-publishers felt themselves more modern and hence superior. Because of the “quality” of the books it published, Bentley claimed to be and was considered a better house than Tinsley or Newby, although Tinsley published Thomas Hardy's first novel and Newby, Anthony Trollope's. But even at the top of the heap, the seven “best” houses—Bentley, Blackwood, Bradbury and Evans, Chapman and Hall, Longmans, Macmillan, and Smith, Elder—merged consumer and production orientations, as most houses do today. They sought both to make an immediate profit and to claim some distinction for the books and authors on their list.

In their public self-presentation, the emphasis that these seven firms placed on distinction was such as to make one think that publishing concerned simply art. Official house biographies listed the house's famous writers and splendid books so that future readers would appreciate the firm's contribution to literature. Now and then a literary historian departs from the formulaic emphasis on quality and issues a reminder that publishing is a business and that in the nineteenth century writing was called a profession. Writing about the relationships between Bentley and other literary institutions of the Victorian age, Royal Gettmann (1960) examines the firm's financial records to see what pieces had to fall into place for that company to make a profit. But like others willing to recognize that publishers need to make money if they are to continue to publish he writes of publishing as half-business and half-art, as if business and art made competing claims on publishers. Literary critics and historians seem to avoid a view of publishing as a culture industry, as though to recognize it as such would denigrate its products.

The attitudes of the house biographers must capture how the leaders of the elite firms wished to see themselves. Charles Morgan's (1943) book about Macmillan and Company, Arthur Waugh's (1930) treatment of Chapman and Hall, and Margaret Oliphant's (1897) book on Blackwood are, after all, commissioned biographies. Their emphasis on famous books and authors underscores the odiousness of making a profit on literature, an important part of that elite enterprise termed the cultural heritage. Echoing the attitude dominant at the middle of the eighteenth century, these biographies seem to say that gentlemen are not supposed to make money, especially not by contributing to the general (cultural) welfare.

One can appreciate how much that attitude is itself a historical tradition by considering the class origins of the major Victorian publishers. Such publishers as Daniel and Alexander Macmillan, described by Charles Morgan as Scottish peasants, started their firm after working in a bookstore. Others, such as Richard Bentley, were apprenticed to the trade. Still others, such as the founders of Bradbury and Evans, were originally printers. To be sure, these were middle-class and upper-middle-class trades, but their practitioners were not gentlemen. In the nineteenth century, gentlemen did not establish publishing houses.

That gentlemen were supposed neither to write nor to publish for a profit is not surprising. The eighteenth-century book trade was a barter industry that had once been associated with the stationers' guild. Booksellers frequently commissioned volumes, particularly novels, and paid by the word. Many treated writers so badly that near the turn of the nineteenth century Charles Lamb spoke of booksellers as “Turks and Tartars when they have poor authors at their beck and call” (quoted in Collins 1928, 11). Because of the practice of commissioning works and frequently paying by the word, writers—even some novelists now called great—were spoken of as “hacks.” The term is reminiscent of hackney carriages hired for a short journey by people who might not own a carriage or choose not to use their carriages. Also, to be paid by the word was to engage in “piece work,” as in the sweatshops of London's East End clothing industry.

Literary histories abound in stories of how ladies and gentlemen sought to avoid the opprobrium of having their names on their poems or novels. They did not want it known that they had written for money. One familiar example is related by Frank Arthur Mumby (1974): In 1751 Thomas Gray wrote to Horace Walpole that he had learned from “certain gentlemen” who had recently taken over a magazine that they were going to print his “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” To avert the shame of being paid for his work, Gray dispatched Walpole to see the bookseller Dodsley, who had previously issued anonymously Gray's “An Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.” Dodsley immediately issued the “Elegy” as a pamphlet of anonymous authorship. According to Edmund Gosse's biography of Gray, “The success of the poem brought [Gray] little direct satisfaction, and no money. He gave the right of publication to Dodsley, as he did in all other instances. He held a [Q]uixotic notion that it was beneath a gentleman to take money for his inventions from a bookseller, a view in which Dodsley naturally coincided” (quoted in Mumby 1974, 157).

By referring to Gray's action as quixotic, Gosse suggests that it was idiosyncratic and ran counter to the practice of his day—receiving money for work. Indeed, several years later in June 1757 Gray accepted forty guineas from Dodsley for the copyright to two poems. But the story does tell us that gentlemen were expected to avoid an association with trade. Publishers were tradesmen.

That moral is also easily drawn from the class boundaries that separated gentlemen from professionals, even in the countryside, where the social classes were more likely to mix than they were in the cities (Davidoff, 1973).⁴ Socially, paid authors and bookseller-publishers were akin to others who worked for their livelihood. The most noted writers might be included in the large dinner parties of polite society, but by and large gentlemen did not mingle socially with those who wrote for money, as Thackeray affirmed in Vanity Fair (1847-1848) and George Gissing echoed decades later in The New Grub Street (1891). (The condemnation of women who wrote for money was greater still.)

For now, let us simply note that by emphasizing their contribution to the cultural heritage and detracting attention from their profits the major Victorian publishers claimed to be gentlemen. They were expressing their aspirations for upward social mobility, a hope fulfilled by some of their descendants, such as Lord Harold Macmillan, first Earl of Stockton.⁵

PUBLISHERS' PROFIT IN LITERATURE

For most of the nineteenth century, literature was profitable, although then as now publishing was not an easy way to make money. It was affected by social unrest, responses to revolutions in other countries, wars, and depressions. When banks failed during the depression of the late 1820s, many publishing houses failed too. Like other manufacturers, publishers operated on a credit system. When other tradesmen and manufacturers could not quickly determine which firms should receive credit, solvent houses found their credit frozen.

The industry remained in the doldrums as England underwent the political, economic, and social turmoil that forced the Reform Bill of 1832. William Blackwood wrote in 1831, “There never has been so slack a year in our trade ever since I have been in the business” (quoted in Gettmann 1960, 10). In November of that year, the Athenaeum reported that “six hundred London printers were jobless because publishers were holding back on long promised books” (ibid.).

Historians also say that in the 1820s trade in the book business suffered because the nature of literature was changing; no great novelist was emerging to become a cultural hero comparable to Sir Walter Scott, whose first novel, Waverley, had appeared in 1814. Following the practice initiated with the publication of Scott's Kenilworth in 1821, the selling price of a three-volume hardback novel was high, 30s. (It was to become 30s. 6d. for most of the century.) “Books are a luxury,” a printer had told a committee of the House of Commons in 1818 (quoted in Altick 1957, 260). The price of a novel made its purchase comparable to buying a television set in the 1960s (Showalter, telephone conversation with Tuchman, 1980).

The price of the novel had been high since its inception in the mid-eighteenth century. Altick translates that price into the value of wages and commodities in the 1770s:

If a man in the lower bracket of the white neck-cloth class—an usher at a school, for instance, or a merchant's clerk—had a taste for owning books, he would have had to choose between buying a newly published quarto volume and a good pair of breeches (each cost from 10s to 12s), or between a volume of essays and a month's supply of tea and sugar for his family of six (2s 6d). If a man bought a shilling pamphlet he sacrificed a month's supply of candles. A woman in one of the London trades … could have bought a three-volume novel in paper covers only with the proceeds of a week's work.

(1957, 51-52)⁶

Given the cost of novels in both the 1770s and the nineteenth century, when the cost of these hardcover volumes initially rose relative to wages, it is not surprising that the first edition of a novel generally ran between five hundred and a thousand copies. Scott's Waverley was one of the few British novels to be printed in large editions.

The price of novels did not prevent people from reading them, thanks to circulating libraries, the first one founded in the 1740s in the corner of a London bookstore. These libraries specialized in making novels available to subscribers for a fee. The fee varied over time, but by 1840 it had risen to as much as two guineas. The libraries were sufficiently important that the founders of the Athenaeum in 1828 supposed that the roughly fifty thousand members of the “accessible reading public” rarely purchased fiction but rather obtained novels through circulating libraries (Sutherland 1976, 12).

Circulating libraries were synonymous with novels, as were some of the publishing houses with whom they did business. Because they carried only novels, the libraries as well as the publishing houses that fed them were disparaged by the male literary elite. An apt example is William Lane's Minerva Press, which from 1790 until its failure in 1820 issued mainly romances written by women and designed for women readers.⁷ By the time of its failure, the phrase “Minerva Press” had become a term of condemnation among literary circles. That condemnation encompassed novel readers. Indeed, literati who despised the run-of-the-mill novel and sneered at the Minerva Press identified novel reading with women and servants.⁸ They were not sneering at the profit; rather, they were expressing disdain based on class and gender. Much as future literati were successively to condemn comics, then movies, then television, and finally video arcades, they blamed novel reading for social ills. Some of the literary elite discussed the novel reader as a lady reclining on a chaise lounge in her boudoir. Some feared that the common worker who learned to read would read novels and would no longer be satisfied with his station in life.⁹

The articulation between the libraries and the publishers helped to maintain the price of both library subscriptions and novels. Readers who could not afford to buy novels would have to pay a library-subscription fee to read them. Circulating libraries could encourage or discourage subscribers by the size of their fees. These were set low enough to permit a subscriber to read more books in a year than would be possible if she or he purchased books but high enough for circulating libraries to turn a neat profit. Publishers profited too, counting on reliable sales to libraries rather than small sales to bookstores or chancy retail sales to readers.¹⁰

By the mid-nineteenth century, one circulating library—Charles Edward Mudie's Select Library, founded in 1842—held sway over the publication of novels and so over publishers' profits. Mudie's subscription fees were lower than those of other libraries. Charles Mudie carefully distinguished his library from its competitors by stressing how select his choices were; he emphasized that he purchased more than novels. Indeed, Guinivere Griest (1970) estimates that only one-third of Mudie's purchases were novels. Yet, at one point, Mudie was buying as many as 120,000 copies of novels a year, which made him the largest purchaser of novels in the world. His patronage was crucial in an era when of every five novels published one was a financial failure, three broke even, and only one was a financial success (Gettmann 1960); it made publishing novels in the Victorian era less financially risky than it is today.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the economics of novel publishing diverged from the earlier system. Rather than commission works as was done in the eighteenth century or share the net profits with the author as was done by less prestigious houses, the leading publishers either leased the author's copyright for a limited time—say a year—or purchased the copyright to a specific edition.¹¹ But British publishers continued to issue expensive books in limited editions of five hundred to a thousand copies for both the libraries and the relatively few well-to-do readers who had the means and the taste to buy them. To break even on a first edition, a publisher might have to sell only half the available stock—if he had bought the copyright for that edition at less than £ 350. Charles Mudie supposedly purchased books that suited his taste; at mid-century his taste was that of a religious fundamentalist and a patriarchal Victorian. If he thought a novel would be popular, he bought over half of the initial edition for the many branches of his library. Indeed, the assumption that every three-volume hardback set was destined for Mudie's was so strong that it was termed the “library edition.” Even at the preferential financial terms it received, Mudie's Select Library frequently meant the difference between profit and deficit on a book.

In table 2.1 we show the importance of Mudie's purchase to the profits of Anthony Trollope's The Three Clerks, which Bentley brought out in an initial edition of one thousand in 1857. Note that if Mudie's had not purchased five hundred copies the novel would have failed financially. Profit on that first year was £ 74 9s. 7d. “Of the 123 left on hand 97 were sold off at cut price the next year, yielding £ 32 16s. 7d. for the publisher” (Sutherland 1976, 14).

Table 2.1: Financial Breakdown of The Three Clerks, First Year

		Debits				Profits
	£	s.	d.		£	s.	d.
1000 Printed	130	5	6	38 presented
Paper	91	0	6	500 Mudie	288	0	0
750 Bound	47	10	3	210 sold	227	8	9
A. Trollope
(payment in full)	250	0	0	119 sold	115	12	6
Advertising	63	7	8	23 sold	24	19
				890

Source: Sutherland 1976, 14.

By today's standards, that £ 100 profit on an investment of under £ 600—roughly 17 percent¹²—is slight, but the expensive “three-decker” still presented less commercial risk than trying to sell “5000 copies at half a crown or 50,000 at a shilling” (ibid., 15).

Presumably that less predictable path would also require the publisher to spend more on advertising than the 11 percent of costs (£ 63 7s. 8d.) that Bentley invested in The Three Clerks. Mudie also advertised the books he had in stock, thus decreasing the publishers' need to do so. This articulation between the production and distribution of novels—including promotion by Mudie's—was so advantageous to publishers that in 1856 Blackwood covered his costs on “an obscure and unsuccessful novel of the period, Zaidee by Mrs. Oliphant,” even though at the end of the year he had sold only one-third of the initial edition of 1,578 copies (ibid., 16).

To appreciate how Victorian publishers' dependence upon circulating libraries encouraged conservative practices, consider the problems of present-day American publishers of fiction. The ex-chairman of the board of a major production-oriented American publisher describes the present system as a “lottery” (telephone interview, April 1987).¹³ To be sure, he notes, the large American chains Waldenbooks and B. Dalton may together buy up to 60 percent of the print run of a novel. But their favor does not guarantee the economic success of even a so-called blockbuster, the prized novel of a well-established and popular author. Other costs, especially those connected with promoting a novel, have risen dramatically. The authors of these prized novels command very large advances—although some late Victorians received extraordinarily high sums, too, sometimes as much as £ 1,000 (roughly ＄4,600). For blockblusters and even for other novels, the sale of subsidiary rights, especially to movies and television, spells the difference between economic success and failure.

Less likely to attract the sale of subsidiary rights, the ordinary novel, particularly a first novel, may be even riskier than the blockbuster. According to this ex-chairman of the board, the minimum run on a contemporary American novel is 5,000 copies. To break even, 3,000 must be sold. Large bookstore chains are not interested in purchasing a “small book,” although they are more inclined to do so when a publishing house promotes it extensively—“greases the wheels,” as the ex-chairman put it. Such promotion involves not only advertising but wide distribution of review copies—well beyond the 4 percent of the print run of Trollope's The Three Clerks (38 of 1,000 copies) that Bentley had “presented” to reviewers. The chains are also more likely to carry a book if a publisher's sales representatives can convince the buyers that his or her past recommendations have been correct. Then, the ex-chairman emphasizes, the chains might buy 1,300 copies of which they sell 943 copies and return 357. The publishing house, which must absorb shipping costs for returns as well as the cost of unsold books, takes a loss. As publishing lore credits Alfred Knopf with saying, publishing is the only business in which the merchandise is “gone today and here tomorrow.”

The occasional exceptions receive so much publicity that aspiring authors might fantasize that they too can achieve fame, glory, and financial security.¹⁴ This informant again stressed the possibility of earning more through the licensing of subsidiary rights than through the sale of a book. This year his firm did so on a first novel and thus enjoyed a significant profit. But no one at his house can determine why this first novel caught on whereas others for which they had also waged extensive promotional campaigns did not. A publisher, he stressed, must hope that an author stays with the firm and establishes a significant following by the time it issues that author's third novel. However, most publishers would drop an author whose second novel did not produce a return on their investment. Victorian publishers enjoyed a more reliable yield on their capital.

The failure of Victorian publishers to challenge their dependence on Mudie's Select Library involved more than conservative business practices. Marketing larger quantities of books at a lower initial price was unappealing in terms of class. A publisher might feel that to sell that many copies he had to select manuscripts of potential interest to less elite readers—to reach the “lowest common denominator.”¹⁵ To a British publisher who identified with the educated elite, pandering to mass tastes would be denying his own class position. As defined by the elite, mass tastes included penny fiction, especially thrillers, and some works of religious fundamentalism.¹⁶ Publishers who took this route were criticized by their peers. For instance, Bentley was criticized for “puffery” of his firm's novels in order to build a large readership of mainly women. Their gender disqualified women for membership in the educated elite (Gettmann 1960).

Griest (1970) stresses that Mudie's did not invent circulating libraries and was responsible for neither the pricing system nor the practice of initially issuing the novels in a small three-volume library edition. Rather, Charles Mudie took advantage of a system that existed and did his best to make sure it would be maintained. So that he might sell used copies of that first library edition to avid readers at prices determined by the book's popularity with subscribers, he pressed publishers to withhold larger and cheaper editions of successful novels until at least a year after their initial appearance. He also urged them to issue novels in three volumes rather than one or even two so that he might simultaneously circulate one novel to three families.¹⁷

Mudie's Select Library also owed some of its success to the rising literary status of the novel after 1840, the beginning of the age of the novel, according to such literary historians as Kathleen Tillotson (1962). By mid-century, marketing strategy and literary ideology were becoming fused. By the time Mudie's institution opened its doors in 1842, the novel was well on its way to dominance, supported by the literary ideology of realism and specificity. In the sense of a “conscious commitment to understanding and describing … the movement of psychological, social or physical forces” (Williams 1976, 219), realism was particularly appealing to the bourgeoisie. As Tillotson (1962, 13) notes, a contemporary critic spoke of the novel as “the vital offspring of modern wants and tendencies.” Satirists no longer portrayed the typical reader as a chocolate-eating lady reclining on a chaise lounge in her boudoir. By then novels were commonly read en famille, the father intoning them to his assembled wife and children, much as earlier Puritan patriarchs had read the Bible to assembled family and servants after dinner. Or mother and children might read and discuss novels together, as is captured in Charlotte Yonge's Heir of Redclyffe. To the dismay of the emerging high-culture novelists, by midcentury the genre was to conform to a Victorian father's notion of what his sixteen-year-old daughter should be allowed to read and hear. Those standards, too, resonated with Charles Edward Mudie's sensibilities.

Finally, technological improvements in the printing press and in the manufacture of paper had made it cheaper to make books. The English publishing industry had started the century at least twenty years behind other English industries in technical developments. By midcentury, it was no longer outmoded.

By midcentury the components of what historians now speak of as the Victorian publishing system were in place. They had developed through a series of homologies; that is, they had descended independently from earlier social formations (Williams 1977; cf. Bourdieu 1980). Industrialism, increased social mobility, new publishers, new technologies, and revamped distribution systems all arose at the same time and for some of the same reasons, but they did not cause one another. The publishing system had not caused the rise in literacy, which was created by the social mobility of an industrializing society. It had not introduced such periodicals as the Athenaeum, which assiduously reviewed newly issued books. It did not introduce the new technologies that facilitated the growth of publishing houses, which now issued books independently rather than in concert, as they had once done to minimize the economic risk. It did not give Charles Edward Mudie the idea for a select library different in kind from the despised but still extant circulating libraries that operated much as their eighteenth-century predecessors had done. It could not account for Mudie's tastes, which were themselves class-based and shaped by the concerns of developing industrial England.

PROFIT AND THE PROFESSIONALIZATION OF WRITERS

The publishing system we have described had literary consequences. First, it encouraged the growth of the novel; firms specializing in fiction actively sought novels to buy. Seeing more novels issued, more aspiring authors were encouraged to try their hand at this developing genre. Much like many of today's teenagers who against all odds hope to become rock stars and so form rock groups that practice in homes and garages, each of these aspiring novelists may have dreamed of fame and economic success. By midcentury, novels replaced religious works as the largest category of book issued. Second, the more novels published, the greater the likelihood that some would be memorable, as a large pool of authors—like a large pool of musicians—constitutes a critical mass that will necessarily contain some people of great talent and skill. Third, because there was a large pool of authors, most novelists were potentially replaceable (Becker 1982). This possibility of replacing published authors with aspirants meant that for much of the nineteenth century most novelists could not dare to challenge the terms of contracts that publishers had established.¹⁸ Put somewhat differently, nineteenth-century novelists could not achieve the criteria that sociologists identify with professionalism. Most of them were at the mercy of publishers.

Sociologists specify that members of a profession collectively and frequently individually control key aspects of their work by defining:

1. what their work is—and what it is not;
2. how the work is to be done—that is, setting professional standards;
3. who will do the work—controlling access to the profession and expulsion from it; and
4. how much they will be paid—that is, establishing an economic monopoly that does not appear to be economic (a common example is how doctors invoke their training to justify their fees).¹⁹

Looking back to the nineteenth century, sociologists speak of three classic professions: medicine, law, and the clergy. In each group members controlled their collective fate and were able to force the state to recognize their claimed license, even as they sought to extend their mandate.

People who are not sociologists speak of professions and professionals quite differently. Not only do members of unlicensed occupations, whose work is directed by others, speak of themselves as professionals, but also the term professional has become synonymous with competence. Someone might praise a plumber or secretary by saying that he or she did a “really professional job.” Today so many occupations are claiming professional status, among them such semi-professions as nursing, teaching, and librarianship, that sociologists now recognize professionalism as an ideology and speak of the “professionalization of everyone” (Wilensky 1964).²⁰

Today's authors are among those who like to speak of themselves as professionals. Although some contemporary writers influence the careers of other authors, contemporary writers do not control entry to or expulsion from their profession. Thus, they do not meet even a watered-down definition of professionalism. Sometimes, though, twentieth-century authors retrospectively justify their claim to professional status by applying the term professional to earlier authors who got paid for their work.

Nineteenth-century writers used the term professional in yet a different sense to mean those pursuing “literature as a mean of living, independent of all others” and working “for high ideals” (Collins 1928, 7). But nineteenth-century writers were not professionals either by the classic sociological criteria; they did not control significant elements of their work.

Nor did paid nineteenth-century authors emerge from a professional heritage. In the eighteenth century writing was either a hobby or an occupation. By examining the conditions under which eighteenth-century novelists wrote, we can see that the working conditions of nineteenth-century novelists were substantially improved, but still not professional. Nineteenth-century novelists did not control their fee structure, training, recruitment, or expulsion. But with critics, and sometimes as critics, they began to define the nature of their work. And as was true of the classic professions many nineteenth-century writers viewed writing as a possible avenue for upward mobility. Among men, being an author came to be seen as a socially approved and even prestigious job, although only the most noted among them might be invited to the dinner parties of the social elite.

The occupational status of eighteenth-century novelists was low because they lacked power, even over their own work. Not only were they paid by the word, but publishers rarely honored their words. Until late in the eighteenth century, publishers freely altered manuscripts. They also freely altered books; if a book had not sold well under one title, some publishers would quickly reissue it under another. They were able to engage in this and similar practices because, having paid the author for a manuscript, they owned it.

Charles Lamb wrote about dependence upon booksellers this way: “Throw yourself on the world without any rational plan of support, beyond what the chance employ of booksellers would afford you!!! Throw yourself rather … from the steep Tarpeian rock, slap-dash headlong upon iron spikes. If you had but five consolatory minutes between the desk and the bed, make much of them, and live a century in them, rather than turn slave to the booksellers” (Collins 1928, 11). He continued, “I have known many authors [writing] for [their] bread, some repining, others envying the blessed security of a counting-house, all agreeing they would rather have been tailors, weavers—what not, rather than the things they were” (ibid.).

Such vituperation is not surprising. Dealing with the booksellers, the author had no rights. Consider again the example of Thomas Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” Gray literally could not prevent unauthorized people from printing his poem. He could have his own publisher, Dodsley, print it first, but Dodsley beat the rival bookseller by only a day.

Gray purportedly asked Dodsley to add “a line or two to say it came into his hands by accident” (quoted in Mumby 1974, 157). Since Dodsley quickly concurred with this request, one must suppose that he did not feel he was putting himself in a bad light by claiming to have published the poem without the author's permission. Some contemporary contrasts emphasize the point. To publish an author's work without the author's or the publisher's permission today infringes upon the copyright and is legally actionable.

Gray wanted to have his poem published anonymously. And the prevalence of literary anonymity throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth is well known. But more was involved than the attempt of gentlemen to dissociate themselves from trade. First, women were condemned for writing for money even more than men were. In The Minerva Press, 1790-1820, Dorothy Blakey (1939) records that women so insisted on anonymity that William Lane sometimes communicated with his authors through advertisements in newspapers. “Will the Lady who sent me a mss. called … please communicate with me immediately,” an ad might read. The history of Fanny Burney's Evelina, published in 1778, presents another familiar example. Not only did Burney write her novel at night, so that her father and stepmother would not know of her literary activity, but she dispatched her brother in disguise to a local coffee house to fetch the note that would tell her whether the novel had been accepted (Hemlow 1958, 60).

Second, to write a novel was akin to announcing financial need. In the eighteenth century and even the early nineteenth, the literary world assumed that women who wrote did so because they needed the money. Joyce Tompkins ([1932] 1961) tells us that in the 1790s impoverished industrialists turned to novel writing to earn money quickly. Aside from discussions of such famous novelists as Jane Austen, Fanny Burney, and the Brontës, literary historians rarely mention authors' writing novels for the fun of it—although Arthur Collins notes, “Those who have been greatest in the practice of letters have rarely been those to whom letters was their supporting profession.” Significantly, Collins' examples are male poets, and he asks rhetorically, “Of the poets, of whom can we say that he wrote for money? Not of Wordsworth, nor Coleridge, nor Shelley, nor Keats, nor Byron, nor Rogers, nor yet Scott” (Collins 1928, 8).

When literature is described as the “avocation” of a man writing before 1800, as is frequently done in the DNB, the term literature connotes essays, reports of scientific experimentation, and other sorts of nonfiction. The DNB differentiates carefully between hobbyists and hacks. To quote Collins again: “In the fifty years that followed the death of Johnson [1784], only one truly great man lived, ‘whose whole estate was in his ink stand.’ Others were clerks, and secretaries, and sheriffs, and bankers, and [poet] Robert Southey [1774-1843] was the one general in the army of letters who had no other resource than the sums in his pay-book. Most of the great captains were free lances who marauded among the public in occasional sallies” (ibid, 8). The man who wrote for money, and even more the woman who did so, was at worst condemned, at best condoned.

As literacy increased, literary journals multiplied. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, “as far as the profession of authorship was concerned, there was constantly more for a writer to write and more people for him to write to” (ibid., 134). Collins lists some men of the time whom he considers both “professional” and “first class”: Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, Samuel Coleridge, William Gifford, John Galt, Washington Irving, and Sir Walter Scott. Except for Scott, only Gifford and the American Irving wrote fiction as well as essays. The others wrote essays or poetry. Collins had included Scott on the list with a qualification: at the turn of the century Scott's famous works were poems. After Scott's first years as an author, “the money which he earned he was compelled to earn by the necessity of ambition and later of debt, and he had in truth, despite the competency of his clerkship, not more freedom than the man whose compelling necessity was for money to live” (ibid., 135).

The inclusion of Scott is particularly significant to a consideration of the occupational status of nineteenth-century authors. As Lewis A. Coser (1965) has convincingly argued, by contrasting Scott with Dickens one can appreciate how much the job of novelist had changed in the intervening years. The contrast is meaningful because each was the most popular novelist of his era, although Scott was critically acclaimed and Dickens was not.

Coser points out that Scott started with a sinecure, his clerkship, and then turned to literature, notably poetry. Scott used the fortune he earned from this work to buy and maintain a country home, Abbotsford, where he sought to live in the manner of established eighteenth-century gentry. That is, he sought to transform his profits into the life-style of a member of a higher social class and to live in a manner associated with graciousness and largess. Abbotsford sucked up money. So did his secret partnership in John Ballantyne and Company, publishers started in 1802. Therefore, in 1814,

Scott, turning to prose when he found his poetry losing some of its vogue after Byron's arrival, had founded the nineteenth-century school of romance with Waverley. Published anonymously … it opened up at once the new career which was to eclipse Scott's reputation as a poet and, for a time, restore his embarrassed financial affairs. Abbotsford was now making dangerous inroads into his income, and the demands for more capital from his printing and bookselling partners, the Ballantynes, were insatiable.

(Mumby 1974, 192)

As the silent partner in a publishing firm, Scott was not a canny capitalist; he went bankrupt. Mumby puts it kindly, “How deeply involved were his affairs, even when he was drawing something like £15,000 a year [well over ＄67,000] as the author of the Waverley Novels, no one knew” (Mumby 1974, 192).

Dickens, by contrast, started as a poor, aspiring journalist (what Scott might have called a “hack”). His father was sufficiently embarrassed for Dickens later to support his parents as well as his own wife and children. Dickens put his name on his novels. He turned extra profits by reintroducing methods of publication that had fallen by the wayside, such as publishing by parts, a mainstay of eighteenth-century publishers. With this method, a novel was issued and sold a chapter at a time, each chapter costing as little as a penny. This practice made each chapter accessible to the common reader, who was essentially buying a novel on a layaway plan. The reader also did not have to purchase unwanted material, as might be the case when a novel was serialized in a magazine. By reintroducing publication by parts Dickens was able to bypass the power of Mudie's Select Library—no mean feat at the time.

When in April 1859 Dickens started his own magazine, All the Year Round, he too became a publisher. Unlike Scott, he did not insist on anonymity. And unlike Scott, he was a canny publisher with an innate feel for what readers wanted and a fine editor of other authors' manuscripts. By nineteenth-century standards he was also a capricious purchaser of manuscripts, paying more to those whom he admired and using his power as publisher to overrule the commercial department.²¹ The magazine prospered as long as Dickens gave it his primary attention. Unlike Scott, Dickens was also canny in his dealings with book publishers, reducing them “to the purely functionary status of printer,” an ability made explicit when he left bookseller-publishers Chapman and Hall for the printers Bradbury and Evans (Sutherland 1976, 167).

As Coser (1965) points out, Dickens wrote for money, but not in order to maintain the aura of a country gentleman, as Scott had done. Rather, he sought funds to support an upper-middle-class urban life-style, replete with town house and carriage. At points in his career, he too was financially in debt. He solved those problems with his pen, writing on installment several books at a time and complaining of a sense of “something hanging over him like a hideous nightmare” (Mumby 1974, 212).

Finally, Dickens sought to alter the profession of letters. In his typescript “History of the Society of Authors,” which recounts how Sir Walter Besant and other journalist-novelists founded that organization in 1883, G. H. Thring (n.d.) says that in the 1850s Dickens had tried unsuccessfully to found a comparable group to improve the position of authors.

What had happened to the publishing industry and the job of author between the 1820s and 1840s, the years when Scott and Dickens were active? We have already reviewed some of the major changes, including the introduction of new technologies, growing literacy, and new configurations of the old library-publisher relationship. Additionally, more elementary and secondary schools opened and mechanics institutes were established for workers. Although the price of newly issued novels (as opposed to reprints of eighteenth-century work) remained high, the price of other books decreased. According to Charles Knight (summarized in Altick 1957, 286), “Between 1828 and 1853, … the average price of a complete book declined from 16s to 8s 4-1/2d, or, in terms of single volumes, from 12s 1d to 7s 7-1/2 d.” Three-decker novels were relatively less dear, too.

The state also played a role. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, it had removed the taxes on newspapers, advertisements, and paper. In 1851 it removed the window tax as well, which Dickens had seen as “an even more formidable obstacle to the people's reading” (Altick 1957, 92) because poor lighting and the expense of candles prevented the average man and woman from reading. Indeed, the average English home did not have adequate lighting until late in the nineteenth century.

Still, the average person could not afford to buy Dickens' books. Indeed, the inability of most middle-class families to purchase books is what makes Dickens' scheme of serialization in parts such a financial masterstroke. (It also, as we have seen, prompted the success of Mudie's Select Library.) As long as people could find a way to read novels, there could be profit in issuing them and even some profit in writing them. Judging from the Macmillan Archives, a typical, mediocre novelist might receive from £ 50 to £ 100, equivalent to ＄225 to ＄450, for the sale of a novel's copyright. If an author published a book a year, this sum was sufficient to maintain a family in the middle class—not prosperous, but wealthy enough to keep more than one servant. Thus, in an age when writing for money was no longer socially condemned, increasing numbers of people would not have written novels had they not expected some modest profit.

WHERE MACMILLAN AND COMPANY FIT IN

Macmillan and Company differed in one significant way from other companies publishing the novels we remember today: it was an academic house; novels were a sideline.²² It was founded in 1843 by two Scots brothers, Daniel and Alexander, then ages thirty and twenty-four. The brothers were from a peasant family originating on the Island of Arran and were largely self-educated. First Daniel and later Alexander migrated to London and then to Cambridge seeking work. They found jobs in a bookstore and by taking silent partners, whom they bought out as quickly as possible, purchased a well-established bookstore in 1844. Daniel died in 1856. Alexander led the firm until roughly 1890, gradually ceding authority to his sons and nephews.

From its inception Macmillan had academic associations. In 1843, while still employed by others and with a pharmacist as a silent partner, the brothers published their first book, the ninety-two-page The Philosophy of Training by A. R. Craig. It gave “suggestions on the necessity of normal schools for teachers of the wealthier classes, and strictures on the prevailing mode of teaching languages” (Morgan 1943, 2). Some of the firm's early authors were scholars who frequented the Cambridge bookstore that the brothers opened in 1844. Like the brothers, some were advocates of “muscular Christianity,” among them the divine F. D. Maurice (1805-1872), who had befriended the impoverished Daniel while Daniel was looking for a job in the London book trade. Others included novelist and historian Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) and his brother the novelist Henry Kingsley (1830-1876), whose work the Macmillans were to publish, and Charlotte Younge (1823-1901), devotee of poet and divine John Keble (1792-1866). The Macmillans eventually published her novels, and she edited a religious series for them. But despite their loyalty to Maurice and their belief in his views, the firm's publications were not sectarian. Daniel and Alexander knew how to admire authors with whom they disagreed.

Macmillan published prize essays and poems. From 1843 until they came to a “friendly parting of the ways in 1881,” Macmillan and Company was the home of Oxford's Clarendon Press. From the first, only a small proportion of the firm's books were fiction, although the fiction offerings expanded in 1863 when the house purchased John W. Parker's list upon his bankruptcy. Its fictional choices tended to be good guesses reflecting Alexander Macmillan's taste. Among those guesses were Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho! accepted in June 1854, and Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's School Days, issued in 1857.

Like Charles Edward Mudie's literary preferences, Alexander Macmillan's taste represented a significant portion of the novel-reading public. Today, and even in the nineteenth century, many would question Alexander's critical judgments. For example, Alexander Macmillan disliked the acclaimed novels of William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), as Alexander explained to Thomas Hardy in 1868 while rejecting Hardy's first novel, The Gentleman and the Lady. Alexander argued that Thackeray's approach was, roughly, “‘Dukes and duchesses and all the kit are humbugs, society is based on humbug, but it's rather pleasant and amusing, when you can get pleasant dinners and nice wines …’ That was his tone … I don't think Thackeray's satire did much good; indeed, I fear it did harm. He was in many respects a really good man, but he wrote in a mocking tone that has culminated in the Saturday Review tone, paralyzing noble effort and generous emotion” (Morgan 1943, 41-42). Macmillan liked Charles Kingsley's novels. As Morgan puts it, “He succeeded because, being loyal to his own taste and conscience, he made himself publisher to those who, in the widest meaning of the phrase, ‘preferred Kingsley’” (ibid., 42).

Although Alexander Macmillan made all decisions to publish, after the firm moved to London in 1863 its success in publishing fiction rested partly with its atypical and elite literary advisers, including the successive editors of Macmillan's Magazine, whose selections of novels to serialize were later issued as books. Among them were David Masson (editor 1858-1868), one of the first professors of English literature in Britain, who successively held the prestigious posts of Professor of English literature at University College, London, and the University of Edinburgh; Sir George Grove (1863-1883), editor of the famed Dictionary of Music, still selling in revised editions under the name Grove's Dictionary; John Morley (1883-1885), a friend of John Stuart Mill, Leslie Stephen, and George Lewes, to whom, upon his retirement from that position, Lewes had turned over the editorship of Fortnightly Review; and Mowbray Morris (1885-1915), a minor Victorian critic. Alexander Macmillan had founded the magazine for the firm to have its own literary vehicle, as often done by prestigious London firms.

As the firm expanded after Daniel's death, business manager George Lillie Craik was taken in as a partner. Craik brought with him his own ties to the British literary world through his wife, novelist Dinah Mulock Craik, though he opposed her writing novels after their marriage (Showalter 1975). Alexander's sons, Malcolm and George, and Daniel's sons, Frederick and Maurice, also entered the family business, some directly after Eton, some after university. Frederick became president of the firm in Alexander's waning years. As Macmillan's head in the late 1880s and early 1890s he led the Publishers Association during a “war” over the discounts that bookstores could offer on their merchandise.

Alexander Macmillan was sufficiently foresighted to have founded an American branch in 1869. The company's American agent, George Edward Brett, led it, and after his health declined in the late 1880s his post was assumed by his son, George Platt Brett. The American branch was incorporated as Macmillan and Company of New York in 1890, when the British firm became a limited company. Macmillan founded the American branch after a trip to the States during which he decided he must find a way to protect his interests in that country. He made a business rather than literary decision. As Morgan (1943, 83) tells it, Macmillan saw that in the United States the sale of his books and books issued by other English firms “was handicapped by high tariffs and the absence of international copyright. The only compensating advantage was that the English costs of production were less than the American, but that might change; if so, he would be shut out of the [profitable] American market unless he had ‘manufacturing and distributive power on the spot.’”

This recital of intelligent business moves may not seem like literary credentials. It does not indicate a transformation of Macmillan and Company from a house specializing in monographs and texts to a literary one. That transformation never took place, for Macmillan continued to profit mightily from academic trade in England and the British colonies, especially India. But it does indicate that Macmillan and Company was a major Victorian firm, ever expanding, ever profiting, at first following and later leading the pattern of business among Victorian publishing firms.

Charles Morgan's The House of Macmillan proudly recites the famous authors and books that the Macmillans published. Many of the names belong to nonfiction writers; the titles extend from the field of mathematics, represented by Isaac Todhunter's Differential Calculus, to Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics and such anthropological classics as Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough. Macmillan issued Matthew Arnold's criticism and his poetry as well as Henry James' criticism and novels. In the area of fiction, we have already mentioned Westward Ho! and Tom Brown's Schooldays, the Kingsleys, Tom Hughes, and Charlotte Yonge. The Macmillans also published such major Victorian authors as Mrs. Oliphant, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, F. Marion Crawford, William Blackwood, J. D. Shorthouse, Thomas Hardy, and Rudyard Kipling. They also published the poetry of George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and Rudyard Kipling, as well as the collected works of Alfred Lord Tennyson. When the heir to the House of Bentley decided to sell the firm in 1894, Macmillan and Company purchased it and thus gained copyright to such well-known and profitable books as Mrs. Henry Wood's East Lynne, which despite its sensationalism had fared well at Mudie's Library in the early 1860s.

Elite status and respectable profits do not prevent editors and publishers from evaluating the manuscripts of women and men differently. Rather, to help their firm retain its success leaders may alter their practices to conform to changing notions of quality, including shifting evaluations of women's contributions to literature. In chapter 3 we shall see that in the nineteenth century Macmillan and Company slowly grew less likely to accept fiction manuscripts by women. To understand how Macmillan exhibited the empty field phenomenon, we turn to the history of women's association with the novel.

Notes

1. Through the early decades of the nineteenth century, authors might publish by subscription, with as many as one hundred family members, friends, or strangers providing the funds necessary to set type, print the text, and bind the pages between covers. A rare author might pay what we today call a vanity press to issue a book.

2. Since publishers have historically been men and men continue to dominate the industry (Coser, Kadushin, and Powell 1982), we shall refer to them as men.

3. Such books currently comprise 28 percent of all the paperback books sold in Canada and 10-12 percent of all the paperbacks sold in the United States (Jensen 1984).

4. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice illustrates the class antagonisms among the gentry at the turn of the century. In order to marry the aristocrat Darcy, Elizabeth Bennett must overcome her class background: her father is a gentleman, but her maternal uncle is in trade. On gender and class in Austen's work, see Evans (1987a).

5. These aspirations were also played out in the Bentley family. In the 1890s Richard Bentley's son sold the family firm to Macmillan so that he could become a gentleman-farmer.

6. Note that Altick (1957) sex-typed literary interests. He supposes that men read essays and women, novels.

7. Lane even established his own circulating libraries, which naturally enough purchased the novels he published.

8. Ian Watt (1957) draws upon this identification to explain the rise of the novel; but Richard Altick (1957, 62) suggests, “If we are to believe the constant burden of contemporary satire, domestic servants attended [circulating libraries] in great numbers on their own account; not merely to exchange books for their mistresses; but it is possible that they were singled out for blame because the effects of novel-reading were most irritating when errands went unfulfilled, a roast burned on the spit, or an imperiously pulled bell rope went unanswered.” We know from such novels as Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey that, drawing careful distinctions about quality, gentlemen also read fiction.

9. Lowenthal (1961) reviews the mid-eighteenth-century controversy about literacy. Some essayists clearly believed that increased literacy would benefit both individuals and society.

10. To some extent, the increase in literacy after the Reform Bill of 1832 fed this system. As is usually the case, in England literacy increased relatively slowly—generation by generation. After 1832 literacy increased among members of social classes who could not hope to buy newly issued books but could hope to subscribe.

11. Today if a book is reprinted and its contents are the same as those of the previous printing, one says that it has gone through several printings. If a publisher issues a version of the book revised by its author, the publisher is said to issue a second edition. In the nineteenth century, the term edition was very often used to mean an additional printing of a unrevised edition. For instance, Sutherland (1976; 38) writes that Dickens' Great Expectations went “through five editions in a year.” Then, as now, even when the contents of a printing were identical, publishers distinguished between hardcover and paperbound editions.

12. Gettmann (1960) and Sutherland (1976) arrive at close but not identical estimates of this book's monetary profit.

13. Executives of other contemporary culture-industries, such as television and records, also speak of their inability to predict which particular item will make a profit. (See Hirsch 1978; Gitlin 1983.)

14. The New York Times Magazine (Shear 1987) devoted an article to lawyer Scott Turow's first novel, Presumed Innocent, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux purchased for an advance of ＄200,000. They printed 135,000 copies; bids for the paperback rights started at ＄670,000. Farrar, Straus and Giroux also printed 5,000 paperbound reviewers' copies, roughly 4 percent of the hardbound first edition, and comparable to the number of reviewers' copies of Trollope's The Three Clerks that Bentley's had distributed.

15. “Lowest common denominator” is the term used to describe the predominantly blue-collar television audience, but it is also pertinent to American book publishing. Critics of the contemporary American industry charge that publishing houses select novels with such chains as Waldenbooks and B. Dalton in mind. As would have held in Victorian times, marketing to chains affects reader's selections. They cannot buy novels that their local (chain) bookstore does not stock.

16. Thus, in Culture and Anarchy 1960 [1869] critic Matthew Arnold was to condemn both the barbarians (who preferred thrillers) and the religiously moralistic philistines.

17. Mudie's Library also had another important impact. Sutherland (1976) gives particularly valuable evidence that publishers ordered novelists, even the acclaimed George Eliot, to rewrite their manuscripts to satisfy Mudie's preferences (cf. Griest 1970).

18. Both publishers' inability to predict sales of most novels and their ability to replace an average author on their list with any one of many aspiring authors continue to have economic consequences for authors, especially when production costs are high. For instance, Lewis and Maude (1953) claim that in the 1940s the cost of book production escalated in England. Authors were urged to accept cuts in their royalties, and many did so. Nonetheless, publishers instituted additional practices to increase the probability of a profit, such as backing “the minority of best-selling authors even more fully, leaving the average author to abandon his [sic] profession or turn from craftsmanship to cheap-jackery” (Lewis and Maude 1953, 158).

    In the 1950s for a novelist “to get £ 1000 a year [a middle-class income] demands the writing of at least two and possibly four modestly successful books a year—that is books which sell from 3,000 to 4,000 copies.” (ibid., 155).

19. For valuable discussions of professionalism, see Freidson (1971; 1986) and Larson (1977).

20. Occupations are gender-segregated. The classic professions are “male” work; the semiprofessions, such as nursing, “female” work, although women are increasingly entering the professions and men are trickling into some of the semiprofessions.

21. According to Sutherland (1976, 169), “As if to demonstrate his power, Dickens was arbitrary about prices. Lytton, whom he admired immensely, had £ 1,500 for an eight-month story; Mrs. Gaskell, whom he did not admire immensely, was offered £ 400, for the same length of narrative at exactly the same period.” Sutherland does not indicate whether an author's gender influenced the degree of Dickens' admiration.

22. This discussion draws heavily upon Charles Morgan's The House of Macmillan, 1843-1943, as well as the Macmillan Archives.

Bibliography

Primary Sources Quoted

Dictionary of National Biography (DNB). 21 vols., suppl. 1 and 2.

Oliphant, Margaret O. W.

1897 William Blackwood and Sons. 3 vols. London: William Blackwood and Sons.

Other Books and Articles Cited

Altick, Richard D.

1957 The English Common Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Arnold, Matthew

1960 [1869] Culture and Anarchy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Becker, Howard

1982 Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Blakey, Dorothy

1939 The Minerva Press, 1790-1820. London: London Bibliographic Society.

Bourdieu, Pierre

1980 “Production of Belief.” Trans. Richard Nice. Media, Culture and Society 2:261-93.

1984 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Collins, Arthur

1928 The Profession of Letters, 1780-1832. London: George Routledge and Sons.

Coser, Lewis A.

1965 Men of Ideas. New York: Free Press.

Coser, Lewis A., Charles Kadushin, and Walter Powell

1982 Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing. New York: Basic Books.

Davidoff, Lenore

1973 The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette, and the Season. London: Croom Helm.

Evans, Mary

1987a Jane Austen and the State. New York: Tavistock.

Freidson, Eliot

1971 The Profession of Medicine. New York: Dodd, Mead.

1986 “Knowledge and the Practice of Sociology.” Sociological Forum 1(Fall):684-700.

Gettmann, Royal

1960 A Victorian Publisher: A Study of the Bentley Papers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gissing, George

1927 [1891] The New Grub Street. London: Nash.

Gitlin, Todd

1983 Inside Prime-Time. New York: Pantheon.

Griest, Guinivere

1970 Mudie's Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Hemlow, Joyce

1958 The History of Fanny Burney. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hirsch, Paul

1978 “Production and Distribution Roles among Cultural Organizations: On the Division of Labor across Intellectual Disciplines.” Social Research 45(2):315-30.

Jensen, Margaret Ann

1984 Love's Sweet Return: The Harlequin Story. Toronto: Woman's Press.

Lewis, Roy, and Angus Maude

1953 Professional People in England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Lowenthal, Leo

1961 Literature, Popular Culture and Society. Palo Alto: Pacific Books.

Morgan, Charles

1943 The House of Macmillan. New York: Macmillan.

Mumby, Frank Arthur

1974 [1930] “From the Earliest Times to 1870.” Part 1 of Publishing and Bookselling from the Earliest Times to the Present, by Arthur Mumby and Ian Norrie, 21-232. 5th edition. London: Jonathan Cape.

Shear, Jeff

1987 “A Lawyer Courts Best-Sellerdom.” New York Times Magazine, 7 June.

Sutherland, J. A.

1976 Victorian Novelists and Publishers. London: Althone Press.

Tillotson, Kathleen

1962 Novels of the Eighteen-Forties. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Tompkins, Joyce M. S.

1961 [1932] The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800. London: Constable.

Watt, Ian

1957 The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Waugh, Arthur

1930 A Hundred Years of Publishing. London: Chapman and Hall.

Wilensky, Harold L.

1964 “The Professionalization of Everyone?” American Journal of Sociology 70 (September)137-58.

Williams, Raymond

1976 Keywords. New York: Oxford University Press.

1977 Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press.