Victorian Literary Businesses: The Management Practices of the British Publishing Industry by Marrisa Joseph (review)

In this useful and illuminating monograph, Marrisa Joseph paints a compelling, expansive portrait of the business practices underpinning Victorian literary production. Joseph approaches the roles played by authors, agents, and publishers in shaping the publishing industry. This includes the specific practices of key individuals and businesses like Charles Mudie’s circulating library, and such major publishers as Macmillan, Longman, and Rout-ledge, whose interdisciplinary methods were grounded in a “new institutionalist” perspective. In management studies and organizational sociology, new institutionalism seeks to go beyond facile foci on business processes and outcomes through ethnography, thereby uncovering the “institutional story” of individuals and structures that constructs an organization’s functional identity over time. Victorian Literary Business primarily uses this new institutionalist lens to discuss how many aspects of the publishing industry arose through nineteenth century processes of institutionalization that, once established, firmly cemented the sector in tradition: “this is always the way things have been done” is Joseph’s main descriptor of this organizational philosophy and a common refrain of the book (4).

Joseph places particular emphasis on the effect various individuals had on shaping the institutional character of the Victorian publishing industry, from the well-known (Charles Dickens, Andrew Macmillan) to lesser-known figures like A. P. Watt, one of the first and most successful literary agents of the Victorian period. Joseph relies on archival research done at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Reading to trace the disparate strands of this “institutional story” through paper trails left by Watt, Andrew Macmillan, and other principal figures. What emerges is the complicated portrait of an industry coming to terms with its existence and function in a rapidly changing world.

Joseph’s subjects include novelist Sir Walter Besant, founder of the second, permanent iteration of The Society of Authors. This example argues for the transcendent value of literature, and for the artistic and moral value of nourishing an increasingly literate public (49, 184). Joseph argues that Besant’s efforts through the Society of Authors reflected a culmination of nineteenth- century campaigns to denote authorship a “profession,” as was accorded to physicians, lawyers, and the military. Other principal subjects, like George Routledge, A. P. Watt, Andrew Macmillan, and the various scions of the Longman family, mask their self-promotion and profit-driven motives under fewer layers of eloquent speculation about the cultural value of their work.

As perhaps the first literary agent to make a compelling case for the necessity of his role, Watt attributes his success primarily to an entrepreneurial spirit, shrewd taste, and careful planning (101). However, Joseph’s research into Watt’s papers reveals that he does not provide an accurate or meaningful overview of his career, despite the reproduction of his claims by later authors and scholarship (107). Contrary to his self-portrayal as a swashbuckling enterpriser, the unedited trajectory of Watt’s ascendancy reflects the difficult, uncertain climate that characterized the literary agent as a necessary role in the Victorian publishing process. Additionally, Watt’s rise from obscurity reflects the social nature of the agent’s role as a middleman: he advanced his career in part through his wide-reaching social connections and association with lucrative clients like Rudyard Kipling (106).

This idea builds on chapter three’s analysis of literary and gentleman’s clubs like the Garrick or the Athenaeum as primary vectors of social capital in Victorian publishing, where authors, agents, and publishers met, socialized, and forged ties that became institutionalized as operating procedures (56–57). Joseph demonstrates that membership in these elite clubs was so important for early-career writers as to constitute a barrier of entry to those who lacked the socioeconomic capital to frequent these establishments—especially women, who were barred from membership entirely. This chapter details the struggles faced by Victorian woman authors, offering welcome relief from the book’s focus on “great men” like Andrew Macmillan, Charles Dickens, and the Longmans. The...