Publishing and the Late Victorian Novel

ELT 37:3 1994 (Belsey's "Deconstructing the Text: Sherlock Holmes") appeared in 1980 and the latest (Hodgson's The Recoil of The Speckled Band': Detective Story and Detective Discourse") appeared in 1992. That nine excellent analyses of the Holmes stories should appear in such a short time bodes well for the future of Conan Doyle studies, especially if we add to these essays the recent work of Michael Atkinson, "Staging the Disappearance of Sherlock Holmes: The Aesthetics of Absence in The Final Problem'," Gettysburg Review, 4.2 (Spring 1991), 206-14; Christopher Clausen, "Sherlock Holmes, Order, and the Late Victorian Mind," Georgia Review, 38.1 (Spring 1984), 104-28; Rosemary Jann, "Sherlock Holmes Codes the Social Body," ELH, 57 (1990) 685-708; Lawrence Frank, "Reading the Gravel Page: Lyell, Darwin and Conan Doyle," Nineteenth Century Literature, 44.3 (December 1989), 364-87; Lydia Alix Fillingham, " "The Colorless Skein of Life': Threats to the Private Sphere in Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet," ELH, 56.3 (Fall 1989), 667-88; and Jasmine Yong Hall, "Ordering the Sensational: Sherlock Holmes and the Female Gothic," Studies in Short Fiction, 28.3 (Summer 1991), 295-303. Other essays could be mentioned, but the point is you have an impressive body of criticism, one that is certain to attract and to sustain an interest in Conan Doyle's achievement. For nearly a hundred years, the study of Sherlock Holmes has been a playground for the "Higher Criticism"—for debates about the placement of Watson's war wound (shoulder or leg?) and the alma mater of Sherlock Holmes (Cambridge or Trinity?). However, no longer merely a "preserve for a cult of devotees," Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories are quickly garnering the attention and respect they deserve. In the near future, perhaps, we will come to recognize that any attempt to understand late-Victorian England, with all its certainties and anxieties, all its accomplishments and failures, must take into account not only the figure of Sherlock Holmes but also the artistry of Conan Doyle. Hodgson 's well-edited and carefully selected anthology is a much needed step in that direction. Christopher Metress ---------------------- Samford University Publishing and the Late Victorian Novel N. N. Feltes. Literary Capital and the Late Victorian Novel. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993. xiv+171pp. Cloth $49.50 Paper $24.95 YOU MAY NOT RECOGNIZE the name Mary Mackay, but the tactics that she used to make herself known in the 1880s and 90s have 380 BOOK REVIEWS a familiar ring. She broke into print with an essay entitled "One of the World's Wonders" (July 1885), published in Temple Bar, a periodical aimed at what the Wellesley Index has called "the comfortable, literate, but ill-educated middle class." Her first novel, Lifted Up, was denounced by Bentley's readers, but Bentley gambled on his judgment that it would sell, and, under the title A Romance of Two Worlds (1886), it did. So did her subsequent novels: Vendetta (1886), Thelma (1887), Ardath (1887), Wormwood (1890), and The Soul ofLilith (1892). Her royalty checks reflected Bentley's awareness that he was backing a winner. But she was sensitive to criticism, and many reviewers were not kind; she satirized Bentley (anonymously, but there was little doubt about her attitude toward the publisher who had first brought her before the public); and she shifted to Methuen, a publisher interested in women authors and feminist issues, for her next novel, Barabbas. Gladstone, who admired Ardath, knew her by the name "Marie Corelli," as did her enthusiastic and ever-expanding public. She was a phenomenon of the times, operating without a literary agent; stung in her commercial relationships, she was determined not to be outdone by women rivals like Rhoda Broughton, and jealously spoke out about all aspects of book production, including advertisements and colonial copyrights . She persuaded Methuen to insert at the head of page 1 of The Sorrows of Satan (1895) the following Special Notice, aimed at reviewers : "No Copies of this Book are sent out for review. Members of the Press will therefore obtain it (should they wish to do so) in the usual way with the rest of the public, i.e...