Victorian Literary Businesses: The Management and Practices of the British Publishing Industry, by Marrisa Joseph

Abstract

Reviewed by: Victorian Literary Businesses: The Management and Practices of the British Publishing Industry by Marrisa Joseph Troy J. Bassett (bio) Victorian Literary Businesses: The Management and Practices of the British Publishing Industry, by Marrisa Joseph; pp. xv + 229. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, $169.99, $129.00 ebook. In Victorian Literary Businesses: The Management and Practices of the British Publishing Industry, Marrisa Joseph promises an exploration of the business practices of the British publishing industry through the lens of "new institutionalism"—a perspective from organizational studies that here focuses on "how individuals and organisations formed specific business practices and why they became legitimised" in the literary marketplace (5). Though the book primarily aims to examine the years 1843 (the year Macmillan was established) to 1900, it ranges in time from the founding of Longman in the early eighteenth century to the final end of the Net Book Agreement in 1997, which ended fixed retail book prices. In her examination of the Victorian literary marketplace, Joseph offers separate chapters on authorship, the rise of literary agents, mass-market publishing, the history of Macmillan, and the development of professional associations where each nexus is discussed through the case studies of a handful of individuals or organizations, including A. P. Watt, Mudie's Select Library, and the Society of Authors. As a book historian, I welcome fresh insight into the business practices of Victorian authors and publishers, because so much remains that we do not know about the Victorian publishing world. For instance: how did authors contract with publishers and what forms did these contracts take? What were the internal day-to-day operations of publishers? What kinds of discounts were offered, and what deals did publishers have with booksellers, wholesalers, and libraries (for example, publishers' dinners)? How much did advertising cost and how did those costs affect revenues? And how did limited liability laws affect these businesses? Sadly, book historians may be disappointed in the book at hand, since some of the terrain it covers and conclusions drawn may seem overly familiar despite the business-theory lens. Such a broad-based study as that proposed here has potential for understanding the British publishing industry in its entirety, as well as the corresponding danger of spreading itself too thin. The third chapter of the book, on authorship, covers the history of copyright law, contracting practices between authors and publishers, the club life of male authors, and the position of women authors—topics that might merit detailed chapters of their own. Instead, the chapter gives a cursory treatment of its subjects, which, unfortunately, repeats many unsubstantiated claims about Victorian book history: that "royalty payments started to become more commonplace in the industry" around 1860 (50) (this is frankly unknown); that "publishing . . . through serials was generally the first stage in the product life of a literary title" (53) (for the vast majority of books it was not); and that women authors by necessity relied on anonymity and pseudonyms to hide their gender in the literary marketplace. The important examples of the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, and many others notwithstanding, research has documented a far greater number of women authors not resorting to that tactic. The chapter identifies developing professional practices by authors—in particular, contracts and networking—without digging too deeply into specific examples or attempting to complicate our understanding of these things. Likewise, the chapter on the development of the literary mass market attempts to cover the two-hundred-year transition from booksellers to publishers using the example of Longman, the role of Mudie as a key figure in the marketplace, and the development [End Page 491] of cheap fiction like yellowbacks by Routledge. The analysis of the three companies digs deeper, but the conclusion is underwhelming: "Their example was adopted and their practices accepted by many publishers in the industry" (139). On a much stronger footing, chapter 2, on the emergence of the literary agent, begins with an historical account of how informal literary "middlemen" evolved and culminated in Watt, whose business knowledge, social networking, and self-promotion created the exemplar for literary agents in the publishing world to follow (95). Here Joseph draws heavily on archival materials, as she does in...