"Utterly, insurmountably, unsaleable": Collected Editions, Prefaces, and the "Failure" of Henry James's New York Edition

"Can Prince Posterity resist a novelist whose collected works are handed down to him in a form so beautiful as this and under an editorship so thorough as this, so careful, and so loving?"

"Patent soap, mustard, liver pills, and novels are nowadays in the same category."

--review of the Edinburgh Edition of
The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson ¹

The story of Henry James's New York Edition is fairly well known. After seeing a sales slump around the turn of the century, James spent the years 1905 to 1909 preparing a collected edition of his novels and tales in an attempt to recreate his public literary image. ² But even after the effort of revising his earlier works and writing the long essay-like prefaces, the project was a commercial failure. ³ Despite that failure, the New York Edition has progressively received critical attention with the prefaces attracting the most commentary, coming to speak for James's novels and theory of fiction and becoming both figuratively and literally James's "art of the novel." ⁴

Herschel Parker has questioned the iconic status of R. P. Blackmur's collection of the prefaces and notes that "the mere existence of the wonderfully convenient The Art of the Novel subtly and insidiously robbed the prefaces of their volume-specific qualities [. . .] [and has] all but stopped us from reading them as prefatory" (304). Parker objects to viewing The Art of the Novel as one more work by James--as a codified statement of his aesthetic and literary conceptions--instead of as disparate appendages to particular novels. Although Blackmur's collection is now out of print, a Library of America volume of James's literary criticism also collects the prefaces in one convenient place and Blackmur's legacy is still powerful with the inextricable linkage of the prefaces and the phrase, "art of the novel." Parker, above all, calls for "a reading of the prefaces the way the purchasers of the New York Edition were privileged to read them--one at a time, prefaced to individual novels and to groups of shorter fictions" (303). Before we can have this type of reading, though, we must understand that these prefaces exist, not just as single statements to single works, but as part of a larger project. ⁵ Those who bought the New York Edition purchased just that--an edition, a collection of James's novels, and not just any collection, but one with reputed value, a deluxe edition. If we take the collected, or deluxe, edition format as a force, then we can see that James works against the collection itself. He was up against much more than copyright issues or a changing reading public; the collected edition itself was at odds with James's intention.

"A Handsome Get-up": Collected Editions and the édition de luxe

While standard, uniform editions of works by different authors can be traced to the eighteenth-century, the collected edition of a single novelist appears to be a nineteenth-century invention. ⁶ Sir Walter Scott's magnum opus edition is an early, if not the primary, example of this phenomenon. Michael Millgate identifies Scott's collected edition as "serv[ing] through its enriching--or, as some would have it, encumbering--combination of new format, textual review, commissioned illustrations, and specially written authorial introductions and annotations to establish a pattern for collected editions that is still by no means outworn" (1). As the concept of authorship grew increasingly established, publishers could profit by presenting collected editions of specific authors. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Dickens, for example, would see five collected editions published in England during his lifetime alone, not to mention the multitude of posthumous editions.

The deluxe edition, or édition de luxe, combines ornate binding, material, and workmanship with the idea of a...