The Business of the Novel: Economics, Aesthetics and the Case of Middlemarch by Simon R. Frost (review)

The central propositions of The Business of the Novel are now rarely contested: the novel can be regarded as a commodity in a so-called commodity culture which, however unevenly, can be said to start in the nineteenth century (or other centuries, of course); Middlemarch (1871–72) will do as well as any other commercially successful Victorian novel as a text through which to explore the ways in which the commodification of fiction really worked and what it meant for the business of writing, publishing, and marketing; and the conception of a commodity culture involves accenting, not the production of goods, but the production of consumers, a process given its most well-known theorisation in marginal utility. Simon R. Frost’s book provides a synthesis, in its first half, of current thinking about the penetration of economics into studies of book history. Books are popular or elite not because of content or what Frost calls “aesthetic judgment,” but principally because of marketing and the creation of target readerships (42). The advertising business is the most obvious indication of, and necessity for, a commodity culture, as advertisers try to create a market for goods that are neither needed nor wanted. Advertising, then as now, is about the fabrication of wants. That applies, for Frost, as much to George Eliot as to, say, bottled water. The task of creating the demand for Middlemarch is studied energetically here with an unquestioned belief, taken from William Stanley Jevons, that “there is no value prior to the wants of a potential user” (77).

The first half of The Business of the Novel develops the theoretical context for the more ambitious second. A commodity promises some kind of “good” (97). And Frost takes this proposition seriously when he assesses what kinds of “good” a novel might represent. When Liam Mcllvanney and Ray Ryan published their edited collection The Good of the Novel (2011), it was set against an understanding of the novel as commodity. Frost might say (though he does not mention the book) that the editors had unwittingly identified values merely created by potential users and fashioned by advertising. The “good” of the novel for Frost might “conceivably” be “encouragement, keys to knowledge, sources of excitement, sources of wonder or of solace, personal identities, challenges, or just good old (fictitious) companionship” (83). Mcllvanney and Ryan might “conceivably” agree, but they do not see these as features of the marginal utility of fiction. Frost’s capitalist criticism cannot conceive of values outside the market. And that is it.

That, as a theoretical paradigm, is a straitjacket, and behind it is a grim understanding of capitalism as the only defining force of who we are. Rebellion, presumably, only has value if it can be sold too? The second half of this study includes an investigation of how readers might have found Middlemarch’s “good.” Frost does not include the notion of intellectual or aesthetic coherence in understanding the meaning of fiction. All that matters is that certain meanings exist if the readers imagine them present and find “good” in them. If they find such “good,” they might buy more Eliot, recommend Middlemarch to others, or even return the library copy and buy their own. Readings do not have to have intellectual rigour, credibility, or even plausibility. In turn, all Frost believes he can do is to suggest what values some readers might have found that encouraged the financial success Middlemarch became for the publishing house of Blackwood. Partly by counting the recurrences of the word “good,” Frost moves to the conclusion that some influential readers might “conceivably” have given value to Eliot’s novel because it privileged “domesticity, family, children, having a means of payment, the countryside, a loving partner, diligence, inclusion into a well-managed community, and the exclusion of societal pressures, decay and outsiders.” In turn, this all implies to...