Forgotten Writers, Neglected Histories: Charles Reade and the Nineteenth-Century Transformation of the British Literary Field

Abstract

Forgotten Writers, Neglected Histories:Charles Reade and the Nineteenth-Century Transformation of the British Literary Field Mary Poovey During the second half of the nineteenth century, the lineaments of what Pierre Bourdieu has called the modern literary field were established in Britain, as they were in France.1 In Britain, the modern literary field was constituted by a number of developments that transformed its Victorian predecessor. These developments included the resolution of a debate about whether contributors to various kinds of periodicals should continue to publish their articles anonymously; the adoption of laws about how to define and protect literary property; and the adjudication of economic issues, like how writers should be compensated and who should determine the format and price of new works. By 1900, all of these matters had been addressed, and the literary field with which we are all familiar had begun to take shape: most periodical articles were signed; both domestic and international copyright laws had been adopted; the commission and half-pay systems of compensation had been replaced by a more equitable sharing of literary royalties; and the influence of the circulating libraries, as exemplified by the dominance of the triple-decker novel and prohibitively high book prices, was no more. One additional issue had to be resolved before the literary field assumed its modern form. This issue, made more urgent by the dramatic increase in the number and kinds of printed materials after mid century, involved the evaluation and, ultimately, the definition of "literature." After the repeal of the taxes on knowledge in the 1850s, numerous daily, weekly, and monthly periodicals rushed into print; their numbers were swelled by countless publications that were even more ephemeral and less expensive.2 In the face of this print avalanche, it began to seem imperative to decide a number of related questions: Who would be entrusted to discriminate good writing from bad? Who would establish the terms by which literary value would be assigned? And how would the groups who vied for this task [End Page 433] establish their authority in relation to the debates about signature, copyright, and the business of publishing that were already transforming the literary field? By the end of the nineteenth century, these questions about evaluation had also begun to be answered: literary reviewers, long reviled as malicious and self-serving quill-drivers, were casting aside the constraints of professional journalism and gaining cultural respect by assuming the evaluative and analytic functions performed today by academic literary critics. They were making these judgments, moreover, according to terms narrowly defined as "artistic," or what we would call aesthetic. In this essay, I explore part of the process by which this aspect of the modern literary field was stabilized. Instead of looking at literary reviewing in general, however, I focus my remarks on the antagonism that festered between one novelist and his reviewers. I do so for three reasons. First, this novelist, whose name is Charles Reade, actively participated in all of the cultural contests I have just described. Second, the enormous popularity Reade enjoyed among readers throughout the English-speaking world, as measured in book sales, specifically opposed a market definition of literary "value," adjudicated by the "public," to other definitions of value, which derived their terms from the complex imperatives of professional journalists, periodical editors, and the titans of the circulating libraries. And third, it was in the debates about what reviewers called Reade's "realism" that journalists elevated the aesthetic criteria that ultimately came to dominate literary standards and thus to ground the role of criticism within the modern literary field. Among the many effects of the gradual consolidation of this field was one that has been left out of the histories of our discipline: paradoxically, the stabilization of the modern literary field was intimately, but complexly, linked to the exile of writers like Reade from the literary canon. Let me say a few words about Reade before I describe Britain's literary field at mid century. Reade, who was born in 1814, published seventeen novels and more than two dozen plays during his lifetime. He began his writing career as a dramatist, but he galvanized his contemporaries' attention with his...