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1 Aesthetic Value in Flux In January 1894, a serial began appearing in Chambers Journal entitled At Market Value.1 Written by Grant Allen, the novel told of an aristocrat, Lord Axminster, who goes to work as a sailor, determined to be defined by his ‘‘market value’’—the income and status he can gain by selling his labor on the open market—rather than by his birth. As a sailor, he moves commodities from place to place, fulfilling people’s needs as defined by the marketplace; this, he is certain, is a worthwhile activity. Allen thus depicts the marketplace, where goods are exchanged and valued in terms of what people will pay for them, as the direct opposite of aristocratic status, which is defined by birth and inherited wealth. And of the two, market value, Allen suggests, is the more worthy measure of one’s identity. But the novel’s second half complicates this simple binary, when Lord Axminster, known now as Arnold Willoughby, is injured and can no longer do physical labor as a sailor. He has long been a painter when not at sea; in fact, the novel opens on taking-away day at the Royal Academy, when those excluded from the annual juried exhibition collect their rejected work. But having now to make a living without the use of one hand, Willoughby becomes a writer, at which point the novel becomes one of many late nineteenth-century laments about the shallowness and cruelty of the literary marketplace. To what extent is market value an accurate test of Willoughby ’s worth as a writer? The novel’s answer is ambivalent. His first work is wildly successful, but only because the public mistakes his transcription of an actual sailor’s diary for his own, original composition. His second novel is well reviewed by the most discerning critics, but less popular than the first. The reading public, it seems, is incapable of recognizing literary genius. ‘‘Market value,’’ the novel suggests, may work as an adequate measure of a man’s labor, but not of his art. 28 Aesthetic Value in Flux Willoughby’s determination to take himself out of the aristocracy and into the marketplace mimics the fate of art objects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as falling land values, increasing taxes, and tempting offers from abroad led many aristocrats to sell parts of their estates. Like Willoughby’s writing career, these newly fungible art objects posed difficult questions about value. Charles Jesse Bullock, in his 1897 Introduction to the Study of Economics, defines ‘‘market value’’ as derived from the relationship between the commodity’s ‘‘utility,’’ its asking price, and the purchaser’s ability to pay.2 But art, by definition, was not supposed to have utility. Immanuel Kant distinguishes between things that have ‘‘value’’ and those that have ‘‘dignity.’’ Those with value are replaceable by some equivalent , while those with dignity are irreplaceable, their value intrinsic: ‘‘That which constitutes the condition under which alone anything can be an end in itself, this has not merely a relative worth, i.e., value, but an intrinsic worth, that is dignity.’’3 By such standards, art that moves into the marketplace metamorphoses from having ‘‘dignity’’ to ‘‘value.’’ Kant actually anticipates the possibility by using the term ‘‘fancy-value’’—as against ‘‘market value’’—to describe ‘‘whatever, without presupposing a want, corresponds to a certain taste, that is to a satisfaction in the mere purposeless play of our faculties’’;4 in Henry James’s 1907 play The High Bid, art connoisseur Mrs. Gracedew uses the term to describe the worth of a beautiful country estate on the brink of being lost to its mortgagee.5 But ‘‘fancyvalue ’’ is hardly a satisfying substitute for irreplaceability, as the very existence of the word ‘‘invaluable’’ suggests. When artwork is put up for sale, then, its very identity as ‘‘art’’ is under threat. James’s Clement Yule, in The High Bid, like Allen’s Willoughby, is a born aristocrat, driven not by choice but by financial insolvency to find out his value and that of his estate on the open market. Like Allen’s novel, James’s play explores the tense intersection of art, its owners, and the marketplace. Yule’s estate is mortgaged to the wealthy and manipulative Mr. Prodmore, who will release its owner from his debt only if he agrees to give up his Radical politics and marry Mr. Prodmore’s daughter. Yule will get...

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