"Sir, It Is an Outrage": George Bentley, Robert Black, and the Condition of the Mid-List Author in Victorian Britain

What at least is already very plain is that practically the majority of volumes printed within a year cease to exist as the hour passes, and give up by that circumstance all claim to a career, to being accounted or provided for.

—Henry James, "The Future of the Novel" (1899)

Max Beerbohm's "Enoch Soames" (1912) is a cautionary tale of a failed Victorian writer. Not comforted by reassurances that artists always have to wait for recognition, Soames yearns to be transported one hundred years into the future, so that he can consult his entries in the British Library catalogue. "I'd sell myself body and soul to the devil, for that!" he exclaims. "Think of the pages and pages in the catalogue: 'SOAMES, ENOCH' endlessly—endless editions, commentaries, prolegomena." The devil is seated conveniently nearby, so Soames gets his wish, only to discover that the solitary mention of him in the British Library catalogue is in conjunction with a story—this story—by Beerbohm. As the devil claims his due, Soames pleads with Beerbohm: "Try," he begs, "try to make them know that I did exist!"¹

Soames's obscurity is representative of the fate of most authors, particularly the myriads who toiled in the fields of Victorian fiction. John Sutherland has estimated that there may have been upwards of 3, 500 novelists published in Britain between 1837 and 1901, most of whom "will never emerge from the obscurity of the statistical mass." While compiling the Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, Sutherland successfully identified 878 of those 3, 500, a representative sample that ranges from onetime authors to astonishingly prolific but nevertheless largely unknown figures. However, he acknowledges that there is a "still invisible sub-stratum . . . composed, one suspects, of failures, rank amateurs, third-rate hacks and utter nonentities." To investigate those in the "lower reaches," he muses, would require "some future literary archaeological tool."²

This tool exists, but it is an old-fashioned and unwieldy one. Victorian publishers' archives provide glimpses of the ordinary, inconsequential novices and third-rate hacks whose works swelled the lists of the Mudie's Circulating Library catalogues and whose works still remain, unconsulted, in the bowels of the great libraries. Occasionally, the readers' reports and correspondence in the archives can yield a surprisingly detailed picture of the day-to-day workings of the major publishing houses and of how those workings were experienced by the bread-and-butter authors who were destined not for posterity, but for that oblivion Henry James so coolly predicted for them in "The Future of the Novel."

One such author is Robert Black (1829–1915). Black's correspondence with his publisher George Bentley (1828–95), head of one of the foremost Victorian fiction publishers, Richard Bentley & Son, is preserved in the Bentley Papers at the British Library. Although Black was a first-time novelist when he began negotiating with Bentley's in 1877, he was already a relatively experienced author: he had translated the memoirs of Leopold I of Belgium and a major history of France, had contributed both fiction and nonfiction to a range of periodicals, and had also published two collections of short stories.³ In fact, it is Black's sense that his literary experience entitles him to better treatment at the hands of his publisher that causes him to spring from the volumes of the Bentley letterbooks. In the midst of what at first glance appears to be a mundane correspondence about the editing of his manuscript "Love or Lucre," there is a stark declaration in a very black and bold hand, centered on the sheet of letter paper:

Sir,

It is an outrage—You will have to arrange with my solicitor.⁴

In order to understand the nature of the outrage, it is necessary to reconstruct what Peter McDonald has aptly called the "predicament" of the text,⁵ by reviewing the production cycle of Black's book. What emerges is a view of Victorian author-publisher relations that looks very...