Victorian Publishing and Mrs. Gaskell's Work (review)

Victorian Publishing and Mrs. Gaskell's Work, by Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund; pp. 201. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1999, $32.50, £25.95.

This book examines Elizabeth Gaskell's major works in the context of serial publication and the commercial marketplace of Victorian literary magazines and presses. Both a continuation and a pendant to the authors' prior study, The Victorian Serial (1991), Victorian Publishing and Mrs. Gaskell's Work narrows the scope of the former, more comprehensive investigation to one author's production. According to Linda Hughes and Michael Lund, Gaskell was a savvy manipulator of the publication world who knew where to find "unclaimed spaces" (3) and how to exploit them, discovering her own voice and advancing her sometimes feminist, sometimes "mollif[ying]" (2) ideology.

Organized into five chapters centered around analyses of the major novels and the biography of Charlotte Brontë, the study traces Gaskell's acquisition of an authorial voice and her maneuvering within the Victorian literary market. The first chapter begins with her unfinished last novel, Wives and Daughters (1864-66), and examines its serial structure in relation to conventions of Victorian publication. The authors pair Mary Barton (1848) with Sylvia's Lovers (1863) in the next chapter to illustrate Gaskell's growth in narrative authority. The third chapter focuses on texts dealing with the fallen woman, "Lizzie Leigh" (1850), Ruth (1853), and, unexpectedly, Cranford (1851-53). Chapter Four deals with the episode most obviously relevant to the book's topic, Gaskell's notorious quarrel with Charles Dickens over the serial publication of North and South (1854-55) in Household Words. A fifth chapter discusses her biography of Charlotte Brontë to argue that Gaskell responded, intertextually, to obituaries and the already established myth of the Brontë family, defending her friend explicitly, and herself implicitly, from charges of being unfeminine, and answering contemporary criticism about "revolutionary feminist" women novelists (128). The Epilogue briefly explores Gaskell's reputation shortly after her death, the public's preference for her "nostalgic portraits of a vanishing village" (161), and the novella Cousin Phillis (1863-64) as representative of that mode.

One of this study's most important contributions is its examination of the conventions of serial "beginnings" to establish narratorial authority; the endings and closural techniques of Victorian novels have received far more attention in previous scholarship. By comparing Gaskell's strategies for opening her serials to those of contemporaries--William Makepeace Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, and Anthony Trollope--Hughes and Lund contrast the gendered difference in the woman novelist's movement outward from an origin grounded in the "domestic scene" to a male novelist's opening with apparent "cultural truths" and subsequent movement inward to characters' private lives (16). Another provocative analysis focuses on the arrangement of serial fiction and other content of journal issues to determine the value that editors, such as Frederick Greenwood of Cornhill, attached to various contributors and contributions. While the configuration of an individual issue provides sufficient evidence to hypothesize about an editor's preferences in placing installments of a serial in the lead or subsequent positions, his actual thought process in juxtaposing various pieces cannot, regrettably for this study, be documented (assuming that such substantiating evidence as the editor's correspondence, personal journals, or notes is nonexistent).

The metaphoric contention that Gaskell found "space" within the world of Victorian publishing works best with novels such as Mary Barton and Ruth because the controversial subject matter provoked a strong reaction from contemporary readers and because the authors' contention is supported by reviews as well as Gaskell's own writing about her fear of criticism. The best moments in this study occur when reader-response speculation is combined with and supported by secondary materials, documenting, for example, how Gaskell was affected by her audience's reaction to the fallen-woman subject in Ruth or by Dickens's assertive editorial role in the serial publication of North and South. However, the reader-response correlations that the...