T. Fisher Unwin's Pseudonym Library: Literary Marketing and Authorial Identity

T. Fisher Unwin's Pseudonym Library: Literary Marketing and Authorial Identity Troy J. Bassett Haskell Indian University THE 1880S AND 1890S saw numerous changes in British publishing especially the decline and eventual abandonment of the highprice three-volume novel favored by the major circulating libraries.1 The education acts, the growth of the reading public, and the decline of printing costs because of mechanization and cheap paper allowed publishers to reach a larger retail market for books in less expensive editions . Correspondingly, the names and faces of fiction publishers underwent an unprecedented turnover as large publishers such as Tinsley Brothers and Richard Bentley went out of business and small publishers such as John Lane, Lawrence and Bullen, William Heinemann, and Methuen appeared. As one of these new publishers, Thomas Fisher Unwin needed to find a way to navigate the changing business of fiction publishing. He began his publishing company at the age of thirty-four, when he bought Marshall Japp and Co. for £1000 in 1882, setting up shop in Paternoster Square, London.2 By all accounts an imposing figure and an excellent salesman, Unwin was a member of a distinguished printing family, and he learned the publishing trade by working as a traveler for Jackson Walford and Hodder (the forerunner of Hodder and Stoughton). He commenced publishing in his own right with the popular Lives Worth Living and Half-Holiday Handbooks, both series inherited from Japp. Unwin, as a new publisher in the late-Victorian period, faced a number of challenges in the fiction market. First, he lacked the prestige to woo established authors or the capital to pay them; hence, Unwin focused on works of literary merit by new or unknown authors, because "he always believed that such books would make their way in the end, even if the author were unknown."3 Unwin also lacked the connections to make a concerted effort in the circulating library market. So instead of trying to 143 ELT 47 : 2 2004 produce three-volume novels for the libraries, he concentrated on the newer one-volume novel. Unwin's marketing strategy for his fiction focused primarily on series publication, and his best-known and most successful series was the Pseudonym Library (1890-1896), which required all the authors to use pen names. How this marketing strategy created a uniform product to sell in the literary marketplace (a "Pseudonym Library volume") and how it affected the experiences of both readers and authors is the subject of this article. I will focus on a few of the most well-known authors and texts in the 54-volume series, especially those by Lanoe Falconer (Mary Elizabeth Hawker), W B. Yeats, and John Oliver Hobbes (Pearl M. T. Craigie). Though seemingly benign, Unwin's clever marketing maneuver , turning the authors of the books into anonymous workers churning out consumable commodities, further divided the author and his or her labor—a change corresponding to the change from the three-volume novel to the one-volume novel. ♦ ♦ ♦ Lacking the literary acumen needed to ferret out new talent himself, Unwin enlisted the services of a publisher's reader and had the good fortune to hire Edward Garnett in 1887. Unwin originally hired this nineteen-year-old son of the British Museum chief librarian to wrap parcels, but when the young man inexplicably stepped out of a coach and four to report for duty on his first day, Unwin thought the original job beneath him. Instead, Unwin put Garnett to work reading manuscripts for 10s. per week, a job temperamentally and intellectually suited to the young Garnett, and he would later go on to become one of the most influential readers of his time. As one of his biographers notes, Garnett's reports combined close analysis, confidence in his judgments, and commercial instincts, and he especially admired individuality, originality , and veracity in the manuscripts he read.4 However, such manuscripts were not necessarily commercially viable, so he and Unwin needed to find a way to publish and market them. Probably based on Unwin's earlier success with series (including the Novel Series), Garnett and Unwin created a number of fiction series to capitalize on the demand for one-volume fiction...