Modes of Production of Victorian Novels by N.N. Feltes (review)

120 LEITERS IN CANADA 1986 Grammar is the reasonableness not just of Christianity or, indeed, of any religion; rather, it is 'the reasonableness of reason itself (p 198). Perhaps somewhat less perspicacious, however, is the very notion of rationality that he presupposes as the standard in making his fundamentally negative assessment of John Herny's stance on this issue. While Jay makes quite clear his view that genuinely human living is not only an intellectual enterprise but a practical and at best even a partly mystical one as well, he takes it for granted that rationality is radically distinct from morality and , correlatively, that cognition is radically distinct from decision, theory from practice, knowledge from virtue, intellect from will. In the final analysis, he criticizes John Henry principally for proposing in effect that the criteria of morality are not just supplementary to the criteria of rationality but are radically intrinsic to them. It remains that those who, like the present reviewer, have been greatly impressed with the results of the extensive phenomenological and epistemological investigations conducted in our own century by such diverse philosophers as Joseph Marechal, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Bernard Lonergan , and Jiirgen Habermas will be inclined to judge that on this crucial issue the earlier Newman, notwithstanding all his conceptual and terminological difficulties, has got the better of the later Newman. (MICHAEL VERTIN) N.N. Feltes. Modes ofProduction of Victorian Novels University of Chicago Press. 125. us $18.95 Despite the occasional solemn insistence that part divisions are important to an understanding of the Victorian novel, criticism has traditionally relegated the history of Victorian publishing to the realm of background studies. N.N. Feltes's Modes of Production of Victorian Novels sets out avowedly to disrupt this textlbackground distinction, to use the wealth of material about Victorian publishing in order to see how modes of production are traced in individual texts. His study is simultaneously a Marxist analysis of nineteenth-centruy book production and a discussion of five novels, published at twenty-year intervals and representative of five different modes of production: part issue (Pickwick Papers), three-volume publication (Henry Esmond), bi-monthly part issue (Middlemarch), magazine serialization (Tess), and Single-volume publication (Howards End). . Simply for its analysis of publishing, the book is of value. Feltes locates the transformation to industrial capitalism in the shift from what he calls 'commodity-books' (three-deckers) to what he calls 'commodity-texts' (typically, serials). The clarity and coherence of his Marxist approach explain many of the anomalies of Victorian publishing. Thus he explainS the demise of the three-volume novel in the 1890S as the result of the development of the 'net book' system of pricing. Net books were sold at a uniform, low, net price and were no longer subject to the complicated system of discounting that had sustained high book prices for most of the century. Feltes points out that, unlike earlier attempts to reach a mass market with cheap books, net books typically exploited the reputation of a known author. Moreover, the publisher's power to create reputations through advertising ensured that the surplus value thus produced remained in his contro!. But to treat Modes of Production only as a history of publishing is unfair, for Feltes succeeds admirably in his project of overcoming the distinction between text and background. We never feel that this is either a study of publishing to which a few critical remarks have been appended, or a collection of readings enlivened by historical materia!. More importantly, his analysis does not depend on word-play or mere cleverness, but convincingly discovers the way modes of production are traced in the texts in question. The most interesting chapter, in my view, is that on Middlemarch. The eccentric publishing format of the novel, Feltes argues, is a manifestation of George Eliot's struggle to become a professional in defiance both of the power of the publisher/capitalist and of the structures that excluded women from professional status. The contradictions her position entailed are traced in the novel in the repression of the difference between Dorothea's vocation and Lydgate's profession. Whereas the original conception of Middlemarch expressed an ironic awareness of the...