The Nineteenth-Century London Publishing Market and the English Novel

Moderately answering Franco Moretti’s challenge to reject “close reading” in favour of “distant reading,” this paper presents factual aspects of the London publishing market, which deserves our attention as the matrix and field of the production of the novels, including the celebrated canonical works. Among the thriving sectors of London in the nineteenth century one can include the publishing and printing industry,which benefitted from more than a history of a continuously expanding free market of printed matters enabled by the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695. The novel as a generic category standing for a certain type of printed books, however, was not established in the eighteenth century. It gradually emerged to obtain a distinctive group identity in the 1830s, but it was during the latter half of the century when the novel came to be extensively produced and circulated in different forms, such as magazine serial, part-books, and “triple decker” bound volumes often distributed via the circulating libraries. Whereas these are relatively well-known facts of literary history,the actual details of novel publishing, which this paper offers, are less frequently scrutinized. One finds, based on a closer empirical investigation, that few canonical names are included in the most prolific novelists of the period, that those publishers with the greatest number of published novels also ran serials in their magazines, and that the income distribution inferred from taxation criteria suggests that those who consumed the novel occupied a bare 10% of the population.