Publishers' "Lives" in the Victorian Period

Memoirs of nineteenth-century publishers have been read mainly as sources for author biography or for the cultural and economic history of print rather than as literary works in their own right. Yet even as they afforded paradigmatic narratives of commercial success, autobiographies and biographies of Victorian publishers routinely challenged the considerable formal capacities of nineteenth-century Life-writing. The representation of a publishing self was frequently embedded in the textualization of a number of overlapping identities: generational, familial, corporate, civic, authorial, national, and so on. This article sketches the field of Victorian publishers' memoirs to show how Life-writers responded to the changing conditions of bookselling as a profession, forging distinctive stories of middle-class becoming as well as highly wrought models of subjectivity.