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The Fiction Earning Patterns of Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot and Trollope

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

John Sutherland
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Extract

In this paper the aim is to examine the first-form earnings of the novels of four major mid-Victorian novelists and to draw some preliminary deductions from the patterns and figures which emerge. Underlying a mechanical exercise is the contention that how a novelist is rewarded has a significant relationship to how he writes and the quality of what he writes. Without going much beyond tabular representation of these novelists' production and income one can elaborate four distinct career strategies. And these strategies conform usefully (though not entirely congruently) with the literary–critical judgements which are commonly made about the achievements in fiction of Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, and Trollope.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 7 , Spring 1979 , pp. 71 - 92
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

NOTES

1. Information about Thackeray's publishing relationship with Bradbury and Evans is taken from Shillingsburg, Peter L., “Thackeray and the firm of Bradbury and Evans,” Victorian Studies Association Newsletter, No. 11 (03 1973), pp. 11–14.Google Scholar

2. At the end of a serial run copies of numbers unsold were commonly bound up to make large octavo volumes, presumably for sale to libraries.

3. Charles Dickens and his Publishers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 189.Google Scholar

4. The contracts between Smith and Thackeray are held in the National Library of Scotland.

5. Information about Dickens's publishing relationships is taken from Patten's, Robert L.Charles Dickens and his Publishers.Google Scholar

6. Information about Trollope's publishing arrangements is taken from Sadleir, Michael, Trollope: A Bibliography (London: Constable, 1928).Google Scholar

7. Information on the publication of George Eliot's fiction is taken from The George Eliot Letters, ed. Haight, Gordon, 7 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1954–1956)Google Scholar, particularly Appendix A, vol. 7, and from Haight's, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968).Google Scholar

8. George Eliot, p. 341.Google Scholar

9. In “The Fight at the Top of the Tree: Vanity Fair versus Dombey and Son,” Studies in English Literature, 10(1970), 759–73.Google Scholar

10. See Charles Dickens and his Publishers, pp. 120–21.Google Scholar