The Making of the Victorian Novelist: Anxieties of Authorship in the Mass Market (review)

This book charts changes in representations of novelistic authorship over the course of the nineteenth century and links these changes to the rapid growth of the novel-reading public. Dividing the century into four parts, Bradley Deane argues that a different authorial persona became dominant in each period as a result of "conflict[s] over the potential consequences of the widening sphere of fiction's reach" (xii). These negotiations with the mass market, he claims, played a central but underappreciated role in establishing authorship as the primary "locus of literary value" and promoting the inward turn whereby novels became "less overtly political, less comprehensive, less socially engaged" (xv).

Deane begins by contrasting the authorial personas cultivated by William Wordsworth and Walter Scott: whereas Wordsworth responded to market forces by picturing the author as an "isolated, original genius" (9) and transforming his marginal position in the literary marketplace into cultural capital, Scott adopted a more traditional posture of respect for his society and sought to ground his novels' value in their usefulness, not the author's sensibility. With the advent of serialized fiction in the 1830s, Deane argues, a new model emerged that retained elements of both these earlier ones, as a novel's influence on its readers was now seen to depend on the character of its author. As a result, "sympathetic friendship" became "the dominant metaphor of the relationship between novelists and their readers" (28), a development Deane sees inscribed and enacted in The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), most directly in the shift in Dickens's persona from anonymous editor to personalized author.

According to Deane, the image of the author as friend reigned supreme until the "moment of sensationalism" (59) in the early 1860s. At this juncture, the explosive growth of cheap, widely circulating periodicals led to the creation of a "new critical constabulary" (60) that asserted its authority by rejecting popularity as an aesthetic criterion and celebrating distinction over sympathetic identification—moves most visible in attacks on the sensation novel. Relying mainly on a reading of The Woman in White (1859– 60), in particular what he sees as Walter Hartright's embrace of professional discourses and discipline at the expense of his earlier sympathetic impulsiveness, Deane argues that novelists responded to this new critical climate by linking authorship to "an ideology of professionalism, which is portrayed as largely incompatible with sympathy" (79). In similar fashion but to more enduring effect, Henry James later responded to the fragmention of the literary marketplace by disdaining collectivity, fetishizing taste, and decisively replacing the earlier model of intimate friendship with one of authoritative impersonality. Deane develops this argument through a reading of The Princess Casamassima (1886) in the context of contemporaneous debates over the purpose of the novel, and he concludes that the "newly mystified literary authority" pioneered by James "continues to sway criticism today" (92).

Deane writes clearly and vigorously, and he brings into play more material than a brief summary can capture. He also rightly emphasizes the malleability of key terms such as "sympathy," which he sees James as transforming from "a means of imagining universal cohesion" into "a tool of cultural discrimination" (105). Yet the story Deane tells is both familiar and reductive. His choice of authors and texts is largely predictable, and he does little to alter or challenge existing views. At the same time, the paradigmatic status of the authorial personas he identifies is asserted rather than shown, and the analyses of these personas themselves tend to focus almost exclusively on the rhetoric of a few key passages. Deane's treatment of Collins and professionalism in particular is surprisingly superficial, and he fails to engage or even cite the well-known work of John Kucich and Tamar Heller on the same topic (in The Power of Lies [1994] and Dead Secrets [1992], respectively). Deane's understanding of sensationalism also recalls Ann Cvetkovich's Mixed Feelings (1992...