Modes of Production in Victorian Novels by N. N. Feltes

Abstract

has come to symbolize — a pure, simpler theatre promoting a closer actoraudience relationship. Overall, this volume attests to the vitality of current research into the staging of plays in the Elizabethan period. The diversity of perspectives from which the subject is examined here also reveals the degree of interest in this area of study on the part of not only theatre historians but also literary and textual critics. It is to be hoped that future volumes in this series will close the gap between presentation and publication, but the University of Water­ loo should be congratulated for continuing to host such a valuable conference on the Elizabethan theatre. m a r y a . b l a c k s t o n e / University of Alberta N. N. Feltes, Modes of Production in Victorian Novels (Chicago and Lon­ don: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 125. $18.95 (U.S.) Norman Feltes’s slim volume is a work that is neither easy to read nor to dismiss. A densely argued analysis of the modes of production of several Victorian novels, it fairly bristles with the technical vocabulary of Marx and his later disciples. It is also, however, studded with fresh and provocative insights that should make even the most traditional old new-critic pause and take notice. Noting that studies of the Victorian publishing industry, although frequently (and mistakenly) relegated to the sidelines of literary scholarship, are nevertheless of considerable importance for all students of nineteenth-century literature, Feltes suggests that even such apparently peripheral matters as the choice of format or the relationship between publisher and author can have profound, if sometimes hidden, effects upon the creation of both text and audience. These matters, along with such other issues as the rise of the publisher, the evolution of the periodical press, or the disappearance of the three-volume novel, have been dealt with to a con­ siderable extent before, most notably by such scholars as Richard Altick, Robert Patten, J. A. Sutherland, Royal Gettmann, and Guinevere Griest, but all such empirical studies are flawed, according to Feltes, by their authors’ attempts to explain such events by the law of supply and demand, and by a failure to recognize the central significance, in nineteenth-century publishing, of the transition from pre-capitalist to fully capitalist modes of production. Seeking to correct that deficiency, Feltes discusses the format and publication circumstances of five Victorian novels in an effort, for the most part success­ ful, to illustrate the various stages in the struggle between author and pub­ lisher as the latter, as emerging capitalist, strives to appropriate the surplus value of the writer’s labour. 477 Although stressing that it is not his intention to write “ a narrative account of the transition towards capitalist novel production” (xi), Feltes does in­ deed, as he promises, “derive that transition” (xi) by beginning his study in the 1830s with Pickwick, the work that most clearly represents the first sig­ nificant threat to the dominance of the pre-capitalist three-decker novel, and by concluding his study with an analysis of Howard’s End, published in 1910 under circumstances which herald the arrival of the modern best seller and the mass audience. Each of the five chapters in Feltes’s study deals with the circumstances surrounding the selection of a specific format for a particular novel: the issuing of Pickwick in shilling parts, of Henry Esmond as an old-fashioned three-decker, of Middlemarch as a four-volume novel in eight instalments, of Tess of the D’ Urbervilles as a magazine serial, and, finally, of Howard’s End as a “ net” book. Each chapter focuses on the economic determinants involved in the “choice” of format, and at the same time exposes certain inherent contradictions involved in each text. Feltes is struck, for example, like many before him, by the unparalleled success of Pickwick, a triumph most usually attributed to the combination of Dickens’s genius with “an accident” (Patten 46, quoted by Feltes 2) or “a shift in taste” (Ford 12, quoted by Feltes 2). Rejecting these explanations, Feltes instead sees Dick­ ens’s accendancy as historically determined by “a set of forces and product relations” (17...