In the Valley of the Shadow of Books: Placing Fictions of Literary Production at the Fin de Siècle

Ingleby, Matthew

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-54600-5_6

In the Valley of the Shadow of Books: Placing Fictions of Literary Production at the Fin de Siècle

Matthew Ingleby³

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First Online: 06 November 2018

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ((PNWC))

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Notes

1.
Snaith, Modernist Voyages, 15.
2.
Peter D. McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1–21.
3.
Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst, The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, c.1880–1900, ed. Ledger and Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 97.
4.
Lewis Roberts, “Trafficking in Literary Authority: Mudie’s Select Library and the Commodification of the Victorian Novel,” Victorian Literature and Culture 34 (2006): 5.
5.
Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970).
6.
Hoberman, “Women in the British Museum Reading Room,” 496.
7.
Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 192.
8.
David Masson, British Novelists and Their Styles (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1859), vi. Another UCL English professor, Henry Morley, later underlined the institution’s significance by a prefatory tag in another important book that acknowledged the Victorian novel’s literary value: “Let me be permitted to add of the Tauchnitz Collection, that know no English writer would not now be ready to congratulate its founder upon his success thus far in joining care for the higher interests of Literature with the diffusion of much healthy intellectual amusement. Writers as well as readers wish God Speed to the continuation of his work. UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON, November 23, 1881. H. M.” Morley, Of English Literature in the Reign of Queen Victoria with a Glance at the Past (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1881), x.
9.
N. N. Feltes, Literary Capital and the Late Victorian Novel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 34–64.
10.
Michael Anesko, Friction with the Market: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
11.
A total of 380 new novels appeared in 1880, 896 in 1891, and 1315 in 1895, according to Nigel Cross, The Common Writer: Life on Nineteenth-Century Grub Street (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 206. For a good overview of this changing publishing environment, see Andrew Nash, “The Production of the Novel, 1880–1940,” in The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel 1880–1940, ed. Patrick Parrinder and Andrzej Gasiorek, vol. 4 of The Oxford History of the Novel in English, ed. Patrick Parrinder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3–19.
12.
See Mark Spilka , “Henry James and Walter Besant: ‘The Art of Fiction’ Controversy,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 6 (1973): 101–19.
13.
“The figure of William Morris is central [to an understanding of Gissing], as a political and cultural presence that acts as both counterpoint and framework to Gissing’s own shifting ideological position. Both writers rejected the reformist progressivism of Positivism in the early 1880s, but although this rejection lead them in contrary directions (Gissing to Schopenhauerian withdrawal, Morris to more active political engagement with the Socialist League) [John] Goode places them at opposing ends of a shared political dynamic… [T]he world [Gissing] portrays is not like hell, it is hell. It is a world that Morris used a utopian ‘culture’ to escape from and to imagine a possible alternative – a possibility open to him precisely because of his material and cultural privilege – but it is Gissing’s nightmare that generates a compelling historical energy, rather than Morris’s dream of passive perfection.” Martin Ryle and Jenny Bourne Taylor, introduction to George Gissing: Voices of the Unclassed, ed. Ryle and Taylor (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005), 2–3.
14.
Jameson, Political Unconscious, 185–205.
15.
George Gissing, New Grub Street, ed. Bernard Bergonzi (1891; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 137.
16.
Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Cultures in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (London: Methuen, 1985), 117.
17.
Bruce Robbins, Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Towards a Literary History of the Welfare State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 144.
18.
Gissing, New Grub Street, 138.
19.
Gissing, New Grub Street, 139.
20.
Robert L. Selig, “‘The Valley of the Shadow of Books’: Alienation in Gissing’s New Grub Street,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25 (1970): 193.
21.
Regenia Gagnier, “Morris’s Ethics, Cosmopolitanism and Globalisation,” Journal of William Morris Studies 16 (2005): 24.
22.
Nathanael Gilbert, “The Landscape of Resistance in Morris’s News from Nowhere,” Journal of William Morris Studies 16 (2004): 22–37.
23.
William Morris, News from Nowhere and Other Writings, ed. Clive Wilmer (London: Penguin, 1993), 85.
24.
Morris, News from Nowhere, 85.
25.
Morris, News from Nowhere, 86.
26.
Morris, News from Nowhere, 122.
27.
Matthew Beaumont, “‘To Live in the Present’: News from Nowhere and the Representation of the Present in Late Victorian Utopian Fiction,” in Writing on the Image: Reading William Morris, ed. David Latham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 129.
28.
Patrick Brantlinger, “‘News from Nowhere’: Morris’s Socialist Anti-Novel,” Victorian Studies 19 (1975): 44–45.
29.
Morris, News from Nowhere, 131.
30.
Amanda Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 10.
31.
G. Barnett Smith, “Caspar Brooke’s Daughter,” Academy, September 19, 1891, 233.
32.
Adeline Sergeant, Caspar Brooke’s Daughter (1891; London: Hurst and Blackett Ltd, 1893), 19.
33.
Sergeant, Caspar Brooke’s Daughter, 19 and 100.
34.
Sergeant, Caspar Brooke’s Daughter, 100.
35.
Sergeant, Caspar Brooke’s Daughter, 99.
36.
Sergeant, Caspar Brooke’s Daughter, 101.
37.
Sergeant, Caspar Brooke’s Daughter, 34 and 199.
38.
Sergeant, Caspar Brooke’s Daughter, 95.
39.
Sergeant, Caspar Brooke’s Daughter, 70.
40.
Winifred Stephens, The Life of Adeline Sergeant (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1905), 202–3.
41.
Max Beresford [Annie E. Holdsworth)] The Years that the Locusts Hath Eaten (London: William Heinemann, 1896), 109.
42.
Beresford, The Years that the Locusts Hath Eaten, 104.
43.
Beresford, The Years that the Locusts Hath Eaten, 255–56.
44.
Beresford, The Years that the Locusts Hath Eaten, 255.
45.
Beresford, The Years that the Locusts Hath Eaten, 283.
46.
Max Saunders, Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1–28.
47.
H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man, ed. Patrick Parrinder (1897; London: Penguin, 2005), 104.
48.
“The Martian,” Academy, 18 September 1897: 70.
49.
Denis Denisoff, “‘Men of My Own Sex’: Genius, Sexuality, and George Du Maurier’s Artists,” in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 147–70. Denisoff reads the novel as an anxious attempt by its author to distance himself from “anything associated with homosexual culture,” a persuasive approach to the text that would have drawn strength from and been complicated by some attention to the text’s account of a female alien’s bodily appropriation of a heterosexual human beau (162).
50.
Christine Ferguson, “Eugenics and the Afterlife: Lombroso, Doyle, and the Spiritualist Purification of the Race,” Journal of Victorian Culture 12 (2007): 64–85.
51.
“The Martian,” Athenaeum, 25 September 1897, 415.
52.
George Du Maurier, The Martian (London: Harper & Brothers, 1897), 361–62.
53.
“The Martian,” Bookman 13 (1897): 21.
54.
Du Maurier, The Martian, 350.
55.
Leonée Ormond, “Du Maurier, George Louis Palmella Busson (1834–1896),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/8194; Simon Cooke, “George Du Maurier’s Illustrations for M. E. Braddon’s Serialization of “Eleanor’s Victory in Once a Week,” Victorian Periodicals Review 35 (2002): 89–106.
56.
Nicholas Daly, Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 4.
57.
Henry James, The Golden Bowl, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (1904; London: Penguin, 2009), 27.
58.
The Princess Casamassima uses Bloomsbury to figure a radical political world otherwise alien to James’s work, being the location for its “Sun and Moon,” a pub at which a group of anarchist socialists meet regularly. It is through his relations with the more radical agitators of this place that the protagonist Hyacinth Robinson gains access to the mysterious revolutionary Hoffendahl, who recruits him to play a more active and dangerous part in furthering the cause. But the location is more complex and hybrid than this. Bloomsbury links the anecdote of Hyacinth’s admittance to the British Museum reading room—for the purposes of scanning newspaper reports for information about his mother’s crime passionel—to a site of rough political discourse.
59.
James, The Golden Bowl, 10.
60.
J. Hillis Miller, Illustration (London: Reaktion Books, 1992), 69.
61.
James, The Golden Bowl, 9.
62.
Miranda El-Rayess, “Consumer Culture,” in Henry James in Context, ed. David McWhirter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 127. For a detailed discussion of the place of the photographs in James’s conception of The Golden Bowl as a high value literary commodity, see also Philip Horne, “Revisitings and Revisions in the New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James,” in A Companion to Henry James ed. Greg W. Zacharias (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008) 208–31.
63.
James, The Golden Bowl, 92.
64.
James, The Golden Bowl, 97.
65.
James, The Golden Bowl, 101.
66.
The possible Jewishness of the figure of the shopkeeper in The Golden Bowl has received a lot of critical attention. See, in particular, Jonathan Freedman, “Henry James and the Discourses of Antisemitism,” in Between “Race” and Culture: Representations of “the Jew” in English and American Literature, ed. Bryan Cheyette (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 62–83.
67.
James, The Golden Bowl, 433.
68.
See Adeline Tintner, “Some Notes for a Study of the Gissing Phase in Henry James’s Fiction,” Gissing Newsletter 16 (1980): 1–5; Janice Deledalle-Rhodes, “George Gissing, Henry James and the Concept of Realism,” Gissing Journal 33 (1997): 2–28.
69.
Louis MacNeice, “The British Museum Reading Room” (1939), in Collected Poems, ed. E. R. Dodds (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), 160–61.
70.
W. B. Wallace, “The Twelve Signs,” Gentleman’s Magazine 291 (1901): 105–6.
71.
H. G. Wells, The Food of the Gods, and How it Came to Earth (London: Macmillan, 1906), 37. See Susan David Bernstein on Woolf’s use of the honey/hive metaphor in A Room of One’s Own (Roomscape, 163–64).
72.
James, The Golden Bowl, 83.
73.
See Sharon B. Oster, “The Shop of Curiosities: Henry James, ‘The Jew,’ and the Production of Value,” English Literary History 75 (2008): 963–93.
74.
James, The Golden Bowl, 107 and 111.
75.
James, The Golden Bowl, 432.
76.
James, The Golden Bowl, 467.
77.
James, The Golden Bowl, 290.
78.
Nicola Bradbury, Henry James: The Later Novels (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 141.
79.
Rosemary Ashton, “Barrie and Bloomsbury,” in Gateway to the Modern: Resituating J.M. Barrie, ed. Andrew Nash and Valentina Bold (Glasgow: Scottish Literature International, 2014), 155–66.
80.
J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan and Other Plays, ed. Peter Hollindale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 87.
81.
Jacqueline Rose, The case of Peter Pan, or, the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1984).
82.
Barrie, Peter Pan, 93.
83.
Beatrice Laurent, “Nowhere, Neverland, Wonderland: les Ailleurs féériques des Victoriens,”
http://www.victorianweb.org/francais/genre/fantaisie/nowhere.html

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Department of English, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK
Matthew Ingleby

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Ingleby, M. (2018). In the Valley of the Shadow of Books: Placing Fictions of Literary Production at the Fin de Siècle. In: Nineteenth-Century Fiction and the Production of Bloomsbury. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54600-5_6

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54600-5_6
Published: 06 November 2018
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