Literary Capital and the Late Victorian Novel by N.N. Feltes (review)

160 LEITERS IN CANADA 1992 sisters would have an intrinsic interest because we could trace in it the growth of themes, characters, and so on, which are significant in her mature fiction, the juvenilia of Branwell, or indeed of any minor writer, lacks the perspective given to it by a body of major work. So where does the value of these carefully transcribed and edited manuscripts lie? . There are certainly fascinating glimpses into the imaginary Bronte world of Angria offered by these tales, and a tantalizing suggestiveness"about some of the incidents and characters, notably 'Sdeath, who seems like an obvious precursor for both Joseph and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. Northangerland himself also has an affinity with Heathcliff, as well as with Rochester in Jane Eyre and Huntingdon in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. As Collins says, there is a 'rich opportunity for comparison of his work with that of his sisters.' The current interest in minor texts and authors has much to do with historicist readings of texts which disclaim any interest in 'literary value.' From this point of view, readers interested in the relation of colony to empire, for instance, may find it interesting to speCUlate on the African setting of Angria, an Africa which, as Collins points out, is merely 'an extended England.' Finally, the juvenilia raises, as always in the Bronte family, questions of psychology and pathology. Collins points out that 'Branwell became closely identified with his anti-hero long before he began to sign his own letters with the name of Northangerland.' It would be simple-minded to say that the consequence of such an identification is fatal, though, where the fictional Northangerland is able to make stunning recoveries from his celebrations of excess, Branwell finally was not. The juvenilia of Branwell Bronte illuminates the inner life of a man who might well have been forgotten had it not been for the fame of his sisters, and reminds us why the inner. life of any person - famous or not - is worth remembering. (KATE LAWSON) N.N. Feltes. Literary Capital and tlte Late Victorian Novel University of Wisconsin Press. 171. $24.95 paper. This short book surveys the whole process of publishing fiction in Britain in the 1880s and 1890s. Writers' contracts, publishers' formats and prices, the writing of fiction, its distribution and advertising, the Net Book Agreement, 'the founding of the Society of Authors, the collecting of first editions of contemporary writers, the development of the writer's agent and of international copyright - all these and more are shown to relate (as both effect and cause) to the development from a petty-commodity to a fully capitalist mode of literary production. The Education Act of 1870 and Matthew Arnold's ideal of 'the best that has been known and HUMANITIES 161 thought' breed specific resuits in publishing: shelves of the one hundred 'best' books and the like, ventures which seek at once to define and to sell attainable culture. Public debates on the 'art of fiction' and 'realism and romance' are linked to this historical process. Such runaway sellers as R.L. Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Marie Corelli's Sorrows of Satan are shown (much more clearly in the latter case than the former) to bear its marks. Like N.N. Feltes's earlier work, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels (University of Chicago Press 1986), this book holds the attraction of providing a single theory that persuasively links a series of historical practices previously treated in isolation or as mere background to the novel as 'Literature.' Feltes's conclusions are based on meticulous research into an enormous range of materials - memoirs, histories of publishing houses, publishers' records, and above all the newspaper and periodical press of the period. The results are rich in incident and telling detail (my favourite is Arnold Bennett as the columnist 'Barbara' in the journal Women, which boasted the motto 'Forward! But Not Too Fast') and marked by thoughtful and minutely observant criticism. This is a book that could be read with profit by every researcher in the field. In addition and more dubiously, the book commends itself as a model I of the critical theory...