Collins and the Earlier Victorian Literary Marketplace

Abstract

At the beginning of Wilkie Collins’s career as an author, the British publishing industry was still only beginning to move towards mass production. Though the first half of the nineteenth century witnessed remarkable advances in printing techniques and a rapid increase in literacy for the most part books remained luxury items readily affordable only to the wealthy. In other words, publishing shifted rather more slowly and unevenly from petty-commodity to commodity production than other key sectors such as energy, transport, textiles, or food. One major cause was the range of onerous imposts on publication (most notably, on advertising, on newspapers, and on paper for printing itself), which remained in force into the second half of the nineteenth century. This was well after most other such restrictions on trade had been removed: even the notorious ‘corn laws’, imposing a tariff on imported wheat, had been repealed in 1846. While the ‘taxes on knowledge’, as they were dubbed by their many opponents, had been originally intended by the authorities principally as a way of stifling political dissent, they continued to serve as a significant source of public revenue. Another important reason can be found in the staunch conservatism of the book trade itself, as symbolized by the reactionary practices of the Booksellers’ Association dominated by traditional firms such as Longmans and Murrays, whose interests lay in maintaining high fixed prices and preventing competitive underselling.KeywordsBook TradeSingle VolumeHistorical RomancePopular FictionTraditional FirmThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.