SOURCE: "The Popular Fiction Industry: Market, Formula, Ideology," in Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. XXI, No. 1, Winter, 1987, pp. 79-99.

The dominant motive in the firm's endeavour is to provide good reading.… For those who lack an habitual appetite for reading, Penguins have nothing to offer: they do not deal in those products which aim to excite and contaminate the mind with sensation and which could be more aptly listed in a register of poisons than in a library. But for each civilized and balanced person there are Penguins to suit each mood. [The Penguin Story]

Now that scholars in the field of popular culture have managed to shed much of the snobbery and elitism that characterized debates on "high" and "popular" culture it is a shock to see the same attitudes entrenched in the philosophy of a company which was itself a mass-marketing phenomenon. The Penguin philosophy of "avoiding vulgarity" and "products which aim to excite and contaminate the mind" is inscribed now as an undeniable achievement of the paperback "revolution" of the mid-thirties, a revolution associated almost entirely with Penguin books. It is time for this serious distortion to be revised. Penguins were, in fact, only the last state in a series of "revolutions" in the publishing and marketing of fiction and other literature which had been going on since the late 1880's and has never been sufficiently understood. This article makes a preliminary survey of the history of the popular publishing industry in Britain and suggests some guidelines for further research on the relationship between the structure of publishing industries and the forms and contents of fictions themselves in the study of ideology.

Much work in the field of mass-marketed literature is extremely inadequate, an inadequacy which can be explained simply in terms of lack of evidence, particularly on the reprinting of works, either in boards or in paper-back. Copyright libraries did not as a rule take cheap reprints of works. Much of the mass of material needed for adequate study of cheap fictions was pulped in the first World War and the small amount that survived left to the mercy of paper-drives in the second. Much of it has failed to survive simply because of shoddy manufacture. Serious study of a large part of the market is only possible by the discovery of private collections (which made Louis James' Fiction for the Working Man possible, for instance) but collectors as a rule will only collect cheap reprints as a last resort. The results of this serious lack of information can be seen in articles like Schmoller's "The Paperback Revolution" which skips over the period from 1900 to 1935 in a few words, with the assumption that the "first" paperback revolution in America had ceased by 1900. To give an idea of the magnitude of the market in cheap literature even before the first World War one need only mention that in Britain, the firm of John Long was producing 51 titles in 6d. paperback form in 1904, the "Daily Mail" series of copyright novels had 137 titles by 1906, Cassells were publishing 102 titles in paperback in 1911, and Pearson's 179 in 1908-9. Most histories of publishing companies provide no evidence of the marketing strategies they were pursuing or the relationship between different sections of their publishing enterprise. This article concentrates on the marketing and publication of fictions in Great Britain through examination of the fictions themselves. There are obvious methodological problems in this approach, but close scrutiny of publishers' lists, often bound in at the end of their products, can provide good information about the entire range of their product, the nature of their production and marketing expectations, and the nature of the product itself.

It is now increasingly acceptable to point out that books, films or other cultural artifacts are forms of cultural production and that their analysis must involve approaching cultural production as an industry. This article concentrates on the relationship between the possibilities created by technological change, degrees of penetration by cultural products in the market, and the role of "star" and "formula" in the selling of fictions. Raymond Williams has recently pointed to confusions in work on "genre" or "sub-genre" in academic work—a confusion between classification by literary form, by subject matter and by intended readership "the last a developing type in terms of specialized market sectors". [Williams, Marxism and Literature] He grudgingly allows the last category to point to "practical differences in real production". It is upon this last category and upon "sub-genre" or "formula" that I shall be concentrating.

Until the 1880's the dominance of public libraries and the expense of "three-decker" novels meant a rigid separation between novels first produced at 38 shillings and six pence, or 21 shillings, and a range of cheaper reprints at the still relatively expensive rate of 2 shillings. "Shilling shockers" usually of a "sensational" type, a few titles with guaranteed sales produced in a large quarto format at 6d., or "bloods" like the Jack Harkaway series, at 6d. or 1 shilling, were all that supervened between these productions and tales of moral uplift produced under the aegis of the Religious Tract Society. This is to simplify a complex picture which needs more study. In the 1880's, for instance, Cassell's National Library was producing cheap reprints of classic works like Sir John Maundeville's Travels. The following decade, though, was characterized by two technological developments which led to an enormous increase in the quantity of novels produced and an enormous drop in their price. Cheaper paper and binding made the private consumption of books possible and away from the control of public libraries. Competition among publishers, and authors now known to readers by name, rather than as the anonymous author of another work, corresponded to increased variety in fiction. It also supports the sociological view that increased innovation in cultural production is related to decreased concentration of culture industries in the market-place. In the 1890's the novel, at six shillings each, were first tested by magazine and newspaper publications and came to dominate the market. The association between hard-back and magazine divisions in a publisher's marketing strategies meant that the rigid separation of the market into products available at certain price-levels diminished. Pearson's, for instance, produced magazines at 6d., at 2d., and at Id., and a serial like George Griffith's Romance of Golden Star which appeared first in the penny magazine Short Stories, in 1895, was not, therefore, debarred from an appearance at six shillings.

The 1890's may be simply defined as a period of free capitalist competition, predicated upon a relatively small run of a product that could still make a profit. This made possible the "Key-notes" series of John Lane as well as Heinemann's "Pioneer" series, among others. "Belles" Lettres' in the 'nineties were possible because a work like Wilde's Salome which cost only £156 to produce, could make a profit of £432. Small runs of work at a less "artistic" level than those of Wilde, or Stephen Crane, meant that authors and publishers had two choices. Men like George R. Sims became classic literary "hacks" who wrote journalism, short stories, social criticism, doggerel verse and advertisements for hair oil. The majority, continued to be "rigid" in including three-decker novel into specific formulas.

Many authors, like Conan Doyle, wrote in several formulas,—the newly invented "consulting detective" formula of Sherlock Holmes, as well as the "historical" formula of the White Company, and felt trapped by the requirements of the market. Conan Doyle's attempt to kill off Sherlock Holmes is the classic example of this since he wanted his reputation to rest upon his historical novels. George Griffith, however, worked almost entirely within the new "formula" which one could call "science fiction" or "lost-race" fiction. The novel of trips to other worlds, like Griffith's Honeymoon in Space, however, had existed prior to the "nineties" in single examples. A novel like E. About's Man With the Broken Ear (N.Y. 1867) had featured the rejuvenation of a man apparently dead, but it took the developments of the "nineties" to fit themes of this kind into "formula" categories. "Formulas" simply guide consumers of popular fiction well before they buy a given work. The publisher can raise his proportion of successes by providing already-tested products. At the same time, the fact that works could make a profit even on relatively small runs had a significant effect on the range of product outside the tested formula categories. Put simply, publishers could afford to make mistakes. One finds among novels in the nineties an enormous phantasmagoria of the weird and the wonderful. A man wakes up in the southern states of America to discover that he has become black (Ignatius Donnelly, Dr. Huguet). Fantasies of magical powers derived from Tibet, (H.S. Burland, Dakobra, or the White Priests of Ahriman) or any of the other strange places of the world, or novels of demonic possession, or hypnotic powers (George Griffith, The White Witch of Mayfair) jostle for a place in the market with Morrison's Tales of Mean Streets, or Zangwill's Children of the Ghetto and other works of serious social observation. Authors working inside formulas were not trapped entirely by the formula. Israel Zangwill who wrote Children could also write a classic "locked-room" detective story, The Big Bow Mystery. Guy Boothby could write novels both about the evil "Dr. Nikola", and adventures of the South Seas.

Some indication of the glorious variety of the cultural production of the 'nineties at the popular level may be gained from a look at some of the items in Pearson's Short Stories for 1895-6. A man dies by a bite from a blue beetle created from "electric fluid". A man is saved from death in the jungle by a walking tree (December 14, 1895). The greatest sculptor in Spain is commissioned to make a sculpture of Jesus on the cross, and nails his wife's lover, alive, to the cross (December 14, 1895):

The crucifix of the master was miraculous in its reality, with its shrivelled skin and clotted blood staining the decomposing flesh. .. . And one day, during the service… the half-decayed body of Don Jose Santabalzo fell from the cross in the midst of the kneeling worshippers.

A man is murdered after being presented with the head of his mistress (October 19, 1895):

a black hairy, ball.. . a bloodless face, with cold, blue lips, and eyes from which the light of life had forever fled.

Most of these stories end in deaths of some kind. In the January 18, 1895 issue, a widow trains her dog to rip out the throat of her husband's murderer, and in the issue for January 25, 1896, a trapeze artist, hearing the voice of the lover who had abandoned her, falls "straight", like an arrow, into the open space beneath her, and lay, a mangled, quivering mass at her lover's feet. In an interesting variant (April 11, 1896), though, a man's enthusiasm for life is rekindled by a visit to "Euthanasia Villa", where a tour through the Asphyxia Chamber, the Experimental Chamber (where people offer themselves as subjects for medical experiments) the Stake Chamber (where people's limbs are pulled off) and the Decapitation Chamber, convinces him that there are worse things than staying alive. In many ways the cheapest forms of literary production are more inventive than the formula stories further up the market.

After 1900 publishers, while maintaining the connection between their six shilling novels and their cheap periodicals, added another string to their bow, again as a result of technological innovation. Increasing sophistication in colour printing meant that it was possible to reprint successful novels in attractive paperback form for the railway bookstall trade. The first paperback issues of 1902-4 tend as a rule to be typographically designed, like Boothby's Countess Londa (1903) or designed in very stark and simple terms, like Cutliffe-Hyne's Filibusters (1903), or Swan Sonnenshein's Basilisk (1902). A study of successive titles from the Ward Lock range reveals the speed with which these early paperbacks developed into magnificently decorative products at a sixpenny price. The design of The World's Finger or the Adventures of Romney Pringle (1903) is chaste and simple in two colours. By 1909 with The Albert Gate Affair and When I was Czar (1903) the sophistication of printing techniques developed is quite obvious. A design like that of Leroux' Phantom of the Opera (1908-9) anticipates the development most closely associated with paperback colour printing as a selling device—the dustwrapper. Although the flowering of dust-wrapper design was to be a feature of the "twenties" rather than the period before the first World War, all publishers in this period were attempting to keep up there profit margins on a lower-priced commodity by lowering the cost of production. An inexpensive case and a dustwrapper were an obvious solution to this price cutting problem. Nelson and others produced well-made cheap reprints in hard-back which made a profit at sevenpence.

The marketing results of making a larger volume of product at a lower return per volume are immediate and significant for the history of cheap publishing after the War, especially in marketing cheap reprints. Although Pearsons could claim in all their paperbacks that "the aim of the publishers has been to cater as far as possible for all tastes"; a glance at the works reprinted makes one wonder how far this was true. Of the 51 novels reprinted in paperback by John Long in March 1906, nearly half were in the formulas that one might call "crime and detection" (Fergus Hume, Richard Marsh, William le Queux, Dick Donovan, J. S. Fletcher). In 1908-9 the Pearson paperback relied heavily upon M. McD. Bodkin, Richard Marsh, M.P. Shiel, George Griffith and other authors of crime or fantastic fiction. At lower unit returns of a product, the glorious variety of the 1890's, was transformed into paperback reprints for the product to be sold. Publishers had to reprint formula stories from their "stars" in order to maximize their returns. Slightly earlier, in the 1890's, Ward Lock had attempted cheap re-prints of their bestsellers in the "Ward Lock 2 shilling Copyright series" and F.V. White has reverted to the Railway Library-style "yellowback", both in pictorial boards, and the same rigidification of formula had appeared. The Ward Lock series, for instance was heavily dependent upon Arthur Morrison's "Martin Hewitt" detective stories. This formulaic tendency before the first World War was a harbinger of the future of the industry; although, in this period it applied mainly to cheap editions and paperback reprints. Developments after the war were to make this style of marketing standard for fiction industries.

The period of the First World War is confusing for the student of popular literature since so much has disappeared. It is a period well worth further investigation, especially since because of war-time paper shortages many novels first appeared in what earlier would have been cheap form, but for the moment one needs only remember that the winners in the free-enterprise publishing battles of the period from 1890 to 1914 could fairly be said to be Ward Lock, Newnes, and John Long. After the war, rigidification of formula in the market was to add a new front-runner—Hodder and Stoughton. Simply put, rather than being a market organized in terms of wide range and small runs, Hodder and Stoughton were to reorganize it in terms of huge runs and narrow range. The second "revolution" in cheap publishing was on its way.

This change in market strategy was dependent upon a further development in the cheap binding of books, the automatic case-binding machine, and the full exploitation of the coloured dustwrapper first developed for paperbacks. Until about 1923 all major publishers produced 2 shillings or 2s 6d novels for the reprint end of the market in coloured wrappers of increasing sophistication. In 1923, though, Hodder and Stoughton changed the nature of the 2 shilling product. Instead of reprints, Hodder customers could buy cheap copies of new books. Further-more they could buy books in bold yellow wrappers while other companies had not realized the importance of designing the spine of their product as well as its front cover. Each book was clearly identified for a particular author by a slogan ("Horler for Excitement" or "You Will Never Fail to be Thrilled by Edgar Wallace") and with a symbol (a crimson circle for Wallace, a green triangle for E. P. Oppenheim). Hodder had made three key strategies in the monopoly marketing of books—new books across an entire price range from 7s 6d, to 3s 6d, to 2 shillings, product identification, and rigid formularization in cheap fictions. He had his "star" in Edgar Wallace, in Westerns (Clarence Mulford, William McLeod Raine, Henry Oyen) in novels of the New York underworld (Frank L. Packard), and those "stars" wrote for him under contract to produce a specific product. When Edgar Wallace wrote titles which were outside the "crime" range, like Penelope of the Polyantha or The Day of Uniting, they were never published at 7s 6d or 3s 6d but only in the cheapest form.

The case of Edgar Wallace provides a perfect example of the transition of "authors" from relatively free producers in the period before the War to mere "author-functions" producing a rigidly codified product at high speed. Wallace was assisted in this by a further technological development—the dictaphone—but the important feature of this monopoly stage is the emergence of much more rigid formulas. If the "classical" detective story of Sherlock Holmes was an invention of the first "revolution" in publishing, writers of the 'nineties were able to take "the detective" as a figure and produce variations upon it. At this second "revolution" Agatha Christie set the pattern of the "country-house" detective story in an unbreakable mould, Wallace created the classical "thriller" and so on. Not only did fiction become identifiable consumer product set inside definite limits but also the authors themselves came to be owned by their publishers. Before the war Wallace had been published by Arrowsmith, the Tallis Press, Goulden and Sons, Ward Lock and others. After the war other publishers bought some of his product except that Hodder had the lion's share. The number of new Wallace titles produced by different publishers and presented in figure one demonstrates clearly the rise of Hodder and the decline of the pre-war leaders, like Ward Lock, in the market-place.

A few points should be noted in the marketing pattern of these figures. The 12 Newnes titles of 1914-17 are war-related (General Sir John French, The Standard History of the War) or stories of trench humour and army life (Nobby, Smithy, Smithy and the Hun). The eight Newnes titles of 1927-29 are each 6d paperbacks, but containing short stories culled from magazines and, strictly speaking, are not new works. The Hutchinson titles from 1931 onwards were all ghost-written by Wallace's secretary, Robert Curtis, and can hardly be said to be by Wallace at all. The "Reader's Library" category of 1927-28 will be discussed later in this essay. Although both John Long and Ward Lock attempted to cash in on the market for Wallace most of their production consisted of reissues of Wallace's work produced years earlier. In reply to Hodder's first major success with a Wallace title {The Crimson Circle, in 1923) Ward Lock could only reply with a reissue of the Daffodil Mystery (first published in 1920) or The Secret House (first published in 1917). Hodder, though, was to discover in 1931 that a dependence upon the "star" in selling fictions, had a serious built-in flaw. As Pan books discovered with the death of Ian Fleming, the "star" has to stay producing. With the death of their "star" the Hodder formula approach was to be in crisis throughout the 'thirties as one can see from their eternal search for a "new" Edgar Wallace.

An alternative marketing approach which was to be developed by Penguin Books in the mid-'thirties and which was to lift all publishers from the doldrums had been anticipated by a third, almost unnoticed "revolution" in the selling of cheap literature. "Reader's Library" producing books at 6d rather than 2s could combine the wide product range characteristic of the period from 1890-1914, with the massive sales of the Hodder monopoly approach. For the same price as a Ward Lock paperback reprint from their backlist "Reader's Library" customers could buy Wilkie Collins' Woman in White, or Dumas, or George Eliot. The reprinting of "classics" in their early days is remarkably similar to the Penguin policy of "avoiding vulgarity" or even T. Fisher Unwin's desire in the 1890's to produce "good" books at reasonable prices. As they proceeded the publishing policy of Reader's Library became more "vulgar", insofar as a large part of the profits came from novelizations of silent movies which could be on the bookstalls as fast as the films appeared. Consumers could read John Willard's Cat and the Canary, Thea von Harbou's Metropolis, or novelizations of Douglas Fairbanks' The Sea Beast, Valentino's Eagle or Cobra, Mary Pickford's My Best Girl. All Readers Library product was characterized by perhaps the ultimate development of the coloured dustwrapper. They could only be read a few times before they disintegrated, but through a solid list of dependable classics, and even some classics that had been filmed like Jules Verne's Michael Strogoff, of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables and by instant and aggressive response to short-term market demand, Readers Library had a wide product range—nearly 600 in all—and large sales of individual units of product. Penguin books, and other paperback publishers since, have followed this same principle, particularly with tieins from other media, and the Penguin "Specials" of the war years can be seen as a development of quick response to temporary market demand. From the monopoly marketing techniques of Hodder, Penguin took the idea of colour-coding product for instant identification into the areas of "Crime", "Biography", "Travel" or "Belles Lettres". The paperback "revolution" used techniques and marketing strategies already exploited by others and directly related to the return on each unit of product.

Given that one can see these developments in the marketing of cheap fictions by formula, large questions then arise about the nature and significance of the forms and contents of formula fictions which can only be discussed briefly here. Most writers on "formula" in fictions seem to share the assumption that "high" art is subversive, while "popular" or "formula" art corresponds to dominant social values and that popular texts do not violate conventions or create new forms. If there is to be any serious validity in the study of formulas it is simply, in this view, that the understanding of the conventions of "sub-literary" genres will enable a better appreciation of the uses of those same conventions in "great" art. These views would be more respectable if many writers on popular fictions knew more about their subject. A statement on the popular literature of the 1890's that

one can account for most of the best-sellers of the period—Marie Corelli, Hall Caine, M. E. Braddon—on grounds of their vulgarity and sensationalism [Colley, The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists in the Nineteenth Century]

is not only calculated to make the first two authors spin rapidly in their graves but is now being undermined by approaches to popular fictions with more fruitful implications.

T. F. Boyle and Winifred Hughes' study of the "sensation novel" of the 1860's and 1870's reveals that the "popular" works of Charles Reade or Mrs. Braddon deeply subvert the melodramatic conventions that they deploy, and that they attack, in fact, conventional ideas of status, property, rationality and even romance itself. Knoepflmacher has seen the same subversion in Wilkie Collins, and Briggs has seen ghost stories as revealing "something of the variety and abundance of different responses to the crisis of faith" in the late nineteenth century. Showalter has seen the "sensation" novel as responding to the deepest anxieties of Victorian women;

For the Victorian woman secrecy was simply a way of life. The sensationalists made crime and violence domestic, modern and suburban; but their secrets were not simply solutions to mysteries and crimes: they were the secrets of women's dislike of their roles as daughters, wives and mothers. [Showalter, A Literature of Their Own]

A view of popular novels as "shared fantasies of protest and escape" means that they have to be taken more seriously than mere reinforcements of "dominant social values".

Some recent work has attempted to deal with the nature of popular fictions by taking two contradictory positions simultaneously. Thus, in Cawelti's version, Westerns focus on the "resolution of tensions between conflicting interests" at the same time as they affirm existing attitudes. A recent, rather reductionist, work offers, however, a more fruitful initial exploration into the role of formula fictions than the bland statement "existing attitudes" by asking simply how one defines an "existing attitude". Jerry Palmer's Thrillers examines the nature of popular fictions, in terms of the "field of ideology in which the text is situated". His definition of the "thriller" formula as involving only a "possessively individualist" hero, and a conspiracy of some sort, needs serious redefinition since it conflates formulas like the American "hard-boiled" thriller and die classical "country-house" detective novel but offers the important initial insight that formula fictions involve the coding of ideologies within the general ideological system which operates in society. Much empirical work on specific formulas needs to be done in this context and only a few general guidelines can be suggested here. The first two important points to realize are that "ruling ideology" is not a monolithic entity but a complex system to which consumers of cultural products have access at different levels whether penny magazines, six shilling novels or two shilling reprints.

The second important consideration is to be clear about a rough definition of ideology. The "field of ideology" in any given society can be seen as a complex and historically specific social language. Within that language a society literally "speaks" about itself through the connections, relationships, and frictions between key elements. Some elements like "work", "family" or "law" are more densely connected with other elements throughout the field than others under capitalism, in the same way that "nobility," "honour," or "patronage" can be seen to specify possible relationships between people in aristocratic societies. Importantly for the study of fictions this field is never static and never free from contradictions, and specific connections are constructed or separated in the course of history. "Discourse" theorists like Foucault have followed up this insight in specific cases, like "madness" but still have not located these particular connections well enough inside the entire field. Fictions can play a key role in locating such ideological connections in two ways. Fictional plots are only possible as representations which "solve" inherent contradictions within the field (like that between "marriage" and "career" in discourses centered on women). At the same time fictions, in resolving contradictions, albeit magically, can be said to become "actively constitutive" of ideology.

All formula fictions foreground a relatively small number of ideological elements to the exclusion of others and many writers in the field of popular culture have noted some of the elements operating in popular texts. Thus Fowler has noticed the old distinction between town and country that existed in most melodrama, and a concentration on "work", "money" and "sex-roles" as central to women's magazine fiction. A more systematic analysis comparing a wider range of formulas is required. I would suggest a general key more widely applicable than a distinction between "the individual" and "sociality" in a wide range of formulas. Westerns, thrills, detective or romantic novels, are all based upon the resolution of relationships of power and dominance between protagonists, focussed upon a relatively small range of "common-sense" assumptions in dominant ideology but not necessarily "reflecting" mem. All formulas are "concrete articulations of a more abstract ruling ideology" [Hill, "Ideology, Economy, and the British Cinema"] which work

not of course, directly or crudely, but in complex and contradictory ways whose specific potencies and inflections have to be analyzed in particular and concrete ways.

A preliminary caveat has to be made in discussing the form and content of popular fictions, insofar as it is easy to read content into texts where only form is involved. The classic thriller of Edgar Wallace relies upon an overall mystery, usually one of identity, and a series of lesser confrontations between the "unknown" and the hero. This is to reduce some very complicated plotting to over-simple terms, but one has to remember always that serial production places definite constraints upon popular fiction forms, and that something like the Wallace formula results almost inevitably from the way in which the fictions were produced. In the same way, the sudden effervescence of the short story in the 1890's resulted from the magazine base of many publishers' marketing strategies. Despite this, one can still discern similar ideological elements operating throughout texts produced in different ways. As an initial approach the analysis of "formula" as "ideology" one might take the "cricketing cracksman" or "gentleman crook" represented by E. W. Hornung's A. J. Raffles, by American variants like E. P. Train's Social Highwayman, and even by second cousins like Leslie Charteris's "Saint". All stretch prevailing "common-sense" assumptions prevalent in "dominant ideology". I can only make a few observations here but further work on formula fiction must follow this approach. I am assuming here that readers are familiar with the bare bones, at least, of the "Raffles" figure. One can isolate in these stories a range of ambivalent attitudes to legitimate and illegitimate wealth, class, and status, which are built into the stories on at least two levels—that of Raffles' relationship with his often ineffectual and guilt-ridden helper, Bunny Manders, and that of the metaphors "sport", "game" and "art". Raffles, because he is "a dangerous bat, a brilliant field and perhaps the very finest slow bowler of his generation", is a man who plays for the "Gentlemen". His success as a burglar rests upon the assumption that being a brilliant player of a game associated with aristocratic culture renders him above suspicion. At the same time, "crime" and "cricket" for Raffles are not inconsistent.

"Cricket," cried Raffles, "is a good enough sport until you discover a better."

This may not sound a matter of ideology. One must remember, however, the historical specificity of ideology. Victorian upper-class minds made a very clear distinction between "games" which were played by gentlemen and for fun, and "sports" which were played by professionals for money. When Raffles mentions "the affinity" between "crime" and "cricket" as "sport" he represents a conflation of two characteristically upper and lower class activities as professionalism. Most of the misunderstandings that his helper, Bunny, has about the nature of his activity results from the fact that Bunny still sees it as "game" rather than as "sport". Another characteristic distinction in Victorian minds, that between "art for art's sake" and "useful knowledge", which were thought to be characteristic of upper and lower class activities, also emerges as an organizing principle in the Raffles texts. Speaking of Crawshay, a professional burglar whom Raffles defeats in the Amateur Cracksman, Bunny remarks:

"He is certainly a sportsman", said I.

"He's more", said Raffles, "he's an artist".

In another story in the same collection Raffles, in burgling a loud, vulgar, Jewish representative of "new" money (actually acquired in Illicit Diamond Buying) states explicitly that he can not dispose of his spoil, but commits the robbery "for art's sake". Raffles, a combination of "athlete of the first water" and "minor poet" is a divisive force in a society in which assumptions about "sport", "art", and "status" determine possible relationships between people. In "Gentlemen and Players" Bunny is delighted, although terrified, to be chosen for the "gentlemen" rather than for the "players". As a comedy of assumptions about class and status one can read a similarly disturbing message in the initial encounter between Raffles and Bunny, who assumes that because Raffles has "status" he also has wealth. He is quickly disabused:

"Do you think that because a fellow has rooms in this place and belongs to a club or two, and plays a little cricket, he must necessarily have a balance at the bank?"

Many readers of the Raffles' saga would have started with the same initial assumption about the automatic connection between status and wealth. The initial encounter, however, strains more of the "common-sense" connections of late Victorian society than this. Bunny also assumes that Raffles' position as his superior at their public school makes his nature the weaker, and Raffles the stronger. But in attempting to commit suicide "for the despicable satisfaction of involving another in one's own destruction", Raffles reacts with wonder and admiration: "I had no idea that you were a chap of that sort".

On a third level one can discern elements on the "Raffles" saga which cut across mese ambivalent attitudes and more directly express dominant ideology. It is important to note that this occurs much more in the later books, but the relationship between Bunny and his fiancee (who leaves him at the discovery of his association with Raffles) is used as a hope of regeneration for Bunny. On hearing that she has returned Bunny's few presents there was in Raffles "still, with the magic mischief of his smile… that touch of sadness that I was yet to read aright". Raffles is an outsider, and sad, despite the apparent joy with which he steals in the earlier books. At the same time, in a development which was to kill many aristocratic youths in die first World War, the Raffles figure is also used to produce a representation of "War", as well as "Crime" as "Sport".

A study of formula variants at different levels in the market place will often demonstrate the kinds of variations found here within the Raffles texts themselves. One can demonstrate significant differences in relative proportions of "dominant" and "subversive" elements, even using the same formula. The implications Of this for a sophisticated analysis of the "field of ideology" can not be pursued here, but in a Raffles pastiche produced in a pulp magazine, The Story-teller, one can see Raffles in significant transformation: "Baffles" had been caught, and his friend the "Rabbit" attempts to bribe the successful detective:

"He is a contemptible thief, growled Mr. Beck, "that sneaks as a guest into the house that he means to rob". The Rabbit was shocked.

"He plays the game fairly", he retorted, "it is his proudest boast that he has never been guilty of a breach of hospitality. He never steals from his host!"

… For once Mr. Beck was thoroughly aroused. There was a look of fierce anger and loathing that few had ever seen on that kindly face. "Get out of my room!" he cried to the frightened Rabbit, "out before I throw you through the window, you mean, whining jackal, that feeds on the leavings of this human wolf. I have brought many a vile criminal to justice in my time, but never a viler one than this hero of yours—Baffles".

Formula variations between the British and American use of the same formula is another fruitful avenue through which to study the relationship between "formula" and "ideology". The American "Raffles" in E. P. Train's Social Highwayman, Courtice Jeffrey, is a purer Robin Hood figure who "never robbed a being who could not afford to lose what he had taken and… two thirds, at least, of his ill-gotten gains have gone to the relief of the poor and destitute". There is, naturally, no cricket, but also no visible thefts, and the book concentrates on the relationship between Jeffrey's fiancee and the fact of crime. The nearer equivalent to the "Amateur Cracksman" figure in the American context are immoral and successful con-men like George Randolph Chester's "Wallingford", or shyster lawyers as in Arthur Train's Confessions of Artemas Quibble. Both these American variants are dependent on a new understanding of "aristocracy" in an American ideology.

The serious study of formulas in fictions is still in its infancy. So far, most scholars seem to have been most concerned with the kind of narratology associated with the name of Propp, or with attempts to apply psychoanalytic categories to fictions. One can see novels of the "underworld" quite easily in terms of psychology, but an approach in terms of ideology makes more sense in many cases. In Frank Packard's New York, for instance, there are a large class of criminals living secret lives. One of their dens is:

the resort, not only of the most depraved Chinese element, but of the worst "white" thugs that made New York their headquarters—here, in the succession of cellars, roughly partitioned off to make a dozen rooms on either side of the passage, dope fiends sucked at the drug and Chinese gamblers spent the greater part of their lives; here murder was hatched and played too often to its hellish end; here the scum of the underworld sought refuge from the police.

The important ideological consideration here is the construction of a discourse which connects "criminality", "race" and "drugs" and the same connection can be seen in many other formulas. Further work must follow in specifying why certain formulas should appear at the times that they do, and working out the role of formulas at different levels in the marketplace. We may then acquire a better knowledge of that complex phenomenon that Palmer has called the "ideological field" and that is better described as the historical growth, rigidification and deformation of ideologies in societies.