Collected Editions and the Consolidation of Cultural Authority: The Case of Henry James

Quite recently, book historians have come to see the final decades of the nineteenth century as a kind of “golden age” for the production of collected editions of English and American authors. While bibliographers have traced the practice of publishing standard, uniform editions of writers’ works back to the eighteenth century, the occasions for such editions then were comparatively rare and their contents ordinarily restricted to poetry. But with the appearance of the forty-eight-volume Edinburgh Edition of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels (1829–33), fiction found a new kind of cultural footing in the domain of edition publishing; and from that point forward, the magnum opus established a powerful precedent for authorial ambition as well as a supreme model (as Michael Millgate has argued) for “career closure.”¹ Dickens’s prolific example added great momentum to the trend, encouraging writers and their publishers on both sides of the Atlantic to find in the collected edition a new mechanism not merely for augmenting the value of their copyrights but also for reaching different classes of readers and consumers.² By the century’s end, edition publishing was enjoying a kind of boom cycle, expanding the ranks of authors whose works received the benefit of uniform bindings and other marketing advantages. Unfortunately, no one has compiled anything like a complete census of these editions; but even a quick survey of trade periodicals from the time will yield some impressive names and numbers. In 1903 (just by way of example) two of the leading trade publishers, Scribner’s and Houghton Mifflin, each were issuing the works of “standard” authors—from Emerson and Hawthorne to Dickens and Kipling—in collected sets that were available in a wide range of deluxe bindings, their cloth boards adorned with half-calf, half-morocco, or half-levant leather, suitably embossed with gilt, and targeted at minutely differentiated segments of the book-buying public.³

From a complementary angle, cultural historians have also begun to understand the phenomenon of the collected edition as a significant component of a broader redefinition of “culture” that occurred in this period. The proliferation and growing respectability of collected editions suggest that books were accruing a cultural value as objects transcending their intrinsic contents. Indeed, a recognition that people were willing to purchase books for many reasons beyond a desire to read them underlay—and fueled—this remarkable transformation. Such a profound reorientation invites a host of questions that only an interdisciplinary inquiry can hope to answer. How was the conservative process of cultural consolidation affected by a context of commercial exploitation? How can we study the relationship between the literary marketplace and the emergence of explicit forms of cultural hierarchy? From the relatively closed ranks of bibliographers and connoisseurs of fine bindings, interest in the collected edition has spread to cultural historians and English scholars as they have tried to deepen their interpretations of literature by better appreciating its various material incarnations.⁴

Unfortunately, even when our most astute historians of cultural forms work from literary sources, they have tended to ignore books as books. The sudden multiplication of collected editions at the end of the nineteenth century significantly coincides with another major reconfiguration in modern culture: a turning away, as Miles Orvell has suggested, from machine-made goods and an aesthetic that valorized imitation, illusion, and reproduction in favor of a new aesthetic in which authenticity and uniqueness carried the highest premium.⁵ By their very nature, however, books do not easily fit into the paradigm shift that Orvell theorizes and documents, and the phenomenon of the collected edition betrays several paradoxes inherent in this reorientation of values. Without the triumph of machine technology, the remarkable expansion of the literary marketplace throughout the nineteenth century would never have occurred. From the 1840s onward, almost every aspect of book manufacture in the United States and Great Britain was revolutionized by rapid developments in mechanization: paper-making (the substitution of wood pulp for cotton rags), typesetting (the linotype eventually displacing manual compositors), printing (the widespread use of electro- and stereotype plates in...