Reviewed by: The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace by Sean Grass David Vincent (bio) The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace, by Sean Grass; pp. xi + 279. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019, £75.00, $99.99, $29.99 paper, $24.00 ebook. Sean Grass's The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace has an unusual structure. Following an introduction setting out the nature of the enterprise, the first chapter—which comprises more than a quarter of the book—is essentially a bibliographical exercise seeking to demonstrate that, from 1820 onward, the genre of autobiography was a major driver in the growth of Victorian publishing and reached a peak in the 1850s and 1860s. Making rigorous use of the Nineteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue and other bibliographical collections, along with a range of publishers' archives, Grass provides the most thorough statistical survey of the field. The analysis, which centers on graphs that show "Increases of 'autobiography' titles, 1841–1860," (24) "Autobiographical titles by year 1841–1869," (26) and "Titles [autobiographical and all] published by decade 1800–1860," (27) will comprise an essential point of reference for all future work on published nonfiction memoirs in the period as well as the broader dynamics of Victorian book history. This first chapter supplies fascinating detail on the range of autobiographies published in this period. However, the focus is not on the texts themselves but rather on the commercial enterprise of publishing. The basic point is that an increasing range of firms commissioned autobiographies because there was a growing market for them. They sought out narrative accounts of unfolding lives in order to make money. By this means, identity became a commodity, supported by the Victorian publishing industry and contingent developments in mass literacy, retail outlets, circulating libraries, and copyright law. These changes are linked to parallel developments in the bureaucratization of identity through the creation of the General Record Office in 1836, and other transitions from community to official constructions of personal identity. [End Page 474] At this juncture, the analysis moves away from nonfiction autobiography and its particular claims to truth. The remainder of the book focuses on the commodification of identity through separate chapters on Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1861) and Our Mutual Friend (1865), Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), George Eliot's Silas Marner (1861) together with Charles Reade's Hard Cash (1863), and Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868). The final chapter revisits the drama of The Tichborne Claimant, which Grass describes as "a stunning parable of modern subjectivity" (213). Only the first of the texts takes the form of a fictional autobiography. The remainder move further away from the literary form which is examined at the outset, focusing instead on the convergence of textuality and commodity in the construction of identity, and the anxieties that this generated. There is a price to be paid for this change of focus. It would have been instructive for Grass to turn back to the classic Victorian autobiographies, armed with his new understanding of the dynamics of the genre. Likewise, the insistence on the interface between identity and the market could have been interrogated by an examination of the many memoirs in this period which were published in noncommercial outlets such as newspapers, or in journals connected to organizations and interests, or which remained in manuscript form, intended only as a private record for the author and perhaps his or her family. Those issues must be saved for another book, however. The conclusion of the opening chapter is that the 1860s represented a watershed in literary representations of the nature of identity, thus enabling Grass to make powerful connections between a set of novels which appeared in these years. The discussion of each in turn both draws from and interrogates a wide range of scholarship on a set of texts which, with the possible exception of Reade's Hard Cash, have already received substantial critical attention. In each case Grass is at pains to deconstruct any sense of the novels reaching a conclusion that satisfactorily reconstitutes...
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Jun 27, 2023
Nadischa Helena Dierdorp + 3
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