The Imprint of the Picturesque on Nineteenth-Century Fiction by Alexander M. Ross (review)

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 market control sought by the medical profession (Feltes concludes from material in George Eliot's Notebook), the finished novel suppresses that awareness, hiding the structures that denied equivalence to feminine vocation. One does occaSionally regret the constraints imposed by Feltes's critical method. His work contains a potentially complete analysis of Victorian publishing, but in order, I assume, to avoid weighting his book with background material he compresses much of that analysis into passing comments. Still it is clear that those comments arise from thought that is cogent and complete, and compression does enable Feltes to suggest new ways of using what is a commendably clear historical understanding . (ROSEMARY CLARK-BEATTIE) Alexander M. Ross. The Imprint of the Picturesque on Nineteenth-Cetltury Fiction Wilfrid Laurier University Press. xxix, '79, illus. $29.95 In 1807 Robert Southey complained of the new taste for picturesque landscape that had sprung up among the English educated classes - a taste unknown to their fathers and, it would seem, unlikely to be important to their descendants. But, as Alexander M. Ross argues in The Imprint ofthe Picturesque on Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, that new aesthetic in fact struck so deeply into the sensibilities of the early and late Victorians that it constituted a persistent model for the major fiction of the age. Scott, Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, George Eliot, and Hardy - all, he proposes, were variously influenced by (and to a considerable extent reacted against) the picturesque tradition. Within the confines of this argument, Ross lucidly and convincingly demonstrates how each of these representative novelists adapted the conventions of the picturesque (or what Margaret Drabble has called the 'neo-picturesque') to their respective fictional landscapes, characters, and dramatic actions. His argument is especially persuasive where he comments on the survival of Gilpin's topos of the blasted tree as an index of decayed grandeur in the symbolic ruins portrayed by Bronte, Scott, and Hardy - although the tradition of the blasted tree has, of course, a much earlier provenance. As well, Ross's linkage of some of Hardy's illuminated landscapes - for example, the 'luminous lavender mist' of Sherton Abbas in The Woodlanders - with the iris-hues of Gilpin's poems on landscape painting and Uvedale Price's essays on autumnal fruition are highiy suggestive. And, fittingly for a book on the effects of the pictorial, this text is handsomely produced, with thirty-nine well-selected, if rather standard, illustrations. These attactive points aside, however, the book is somewhat disappointing . It is too briefa work to deal with any but the most cursory and notational examples of scenic representation; and often the discussion is reduced to a mere...