British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880-1914 (review)

Theorizing the transmission of texts has become much more sophisticated in recent decades. Through the seventies, publishing history narrated the agency of authors or publishers of genius. In the eighties, renewed interest in bibliographic studies produced a variety of theories about the diachronic progression of texts from manuscript to distribution; one of the best known paradigms of the “communications circuit” is Robert Darnton’s, first published as “What is the History of Books?” (Daedalus 3.3 [Summer 1982]). In the last decade, every aspect of the production of texts, from the “author function” to printing-house practices and strategies of circulation, has come under reexamination. Peter McDonald’s application of the theories of Pierre Bourdieu to the initial phases of the careers of Joseph Conrad, Arnold Bennett, and Arthur Conan Doyle marks a significant new stage in British book history. This is a carefully thought out, thoroughly researched, and densely but clearly written study that attempts, on the whole quite successfully, to explain how the practices within the field of publishing interacted with those of the commercial and cultural world of prewar Britain to shape certain writings and receptions and careers.

Marx himself criticized his inability to explain why, during some periods, art developed without any direct connection to the development of society. Bourdieu’s answer to this problem is to posit a “field,” a social “microcosm” that has its own internal rules, structures, and sources of power, and that refracts developments outside the field according to its own logic. “Literary works,” Bourdieu asserts, “are produced in a particular social universe endowed with particular institutions and obeying specific laws” (The Field of Cultural Production [1993] 163). Bourdieu’s is a “structural model of sociocultural relations” (10), McDonald reminds us; it establishes a whole into which to fit the parts that have hitherto been studied separately by biographers, bibliographers, historians, and literary critics. Two further observations by Bourdieu direct McDonald’s inquiry: first, within the field of literature there is a division between small-scale publishing and large-scale publishing. Cutting across these divisions are two other oppositions: one between prestige and profit, and the other (which McDonald applies to both small and large enterprises) between the establishment and newcomers. These propositions recenter the once-dead author, now resuscitated and placed within animated contexts that shape the materials of the writer’s life and times as well as discourse. For Bourdieu and McDonald, writers strive to “enter a fray in which the stakes are always more than words” (18). McDonald’s Bourdieusian book history discloses the complex interplay of persons, practices, moments, and structures of reward (wealth, honors) that emerges from reading “horizontally” through the communications circuit and also “vertically” through markers of cultural legitimacy.

Thus Conrad, trying to break into the avant-garde of British “men of letters,” affiliated himself with the vertical axes of newcomer and purist against an old guard of unaesthetic profiteers. His experimental novel, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897), was designed to attract the attention of W. E. Henley, then the highly influential editor of two “purist” (and unprofitable) magazines: the Scots Observer, a sixpenny weekly patterned on the Saturday Review, and the New Review. Within the options available to him, Conrad positioned himself by composing a technically experimental, politically conservative novella staging the “legitimizing ideals that bound together the purists of the 1890s” (66).

Bennett, by contrast, constantly reinvented himself, striving first to be a popular “caricaturist” of passing follies, then later to establish himself as an artistic producer of Realist texts in the French tradition, and still later to come forth as a profit-seeking novelist intent on maximizing his income through serials which could be published at home and abroad under lucrative multiple contracts for the same text. Bennett eventually went on record opposing the antithesis between purist and profiteer; he maintained in The Artist’s Craft (1914) that it should be possible to please oneself as artist as well as...