It might be possible to claim that, in attempting by empirical and theoretical means to understand how the newly emerging medium of the novel is connected to the split between high and popular culture, Graham Law’s Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press and Leah Price’s The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel are two of the most important recent works in any field, and not just the fields of eighteenth-century, Romantic, and Victorian British literature that they do in fact span. By focusing their inquiry into the high/low split on the medium of the novel (and, in Graham’s case, the novel as serialized in newspapers), both works repudiate the atomizing history-of-aesthetic-ideas account, propagated still by critics such as Harold Bloom, in which individual literary talents devise a Truly Good aesthetic through strong misreadings, a.k.a trans-and even a-historical interchanges with the other literary (male) geniuses who preceded them. And, while both of these groundbreaking works make use of materialistic and legalistic accounts of the history of the book, from work by Ian Watt on up to our own moment through Martha Woodmansee and Mark Rose, they do not fall into the theoretical determinism that produces two pat answers to the questions about the emergence of the novel and the individual expressive author: “the rise of the middle class” and “copyright law.” Both works epitomize cultural studies, in which critical mastery through pat argument is forgone time and again for fidelity to the details that comprise the history of the novel’s material production. This is material history at its best, the careful and undogmatic unraveling of McLuhan’s adage “the medium is the message” that portrays numerous failed and successful bids at controlling the message through redactions of the novel medium that affect its form.

In contrast to Law’s rather straightforward historical, empirical, and anecdotal approach to novel production, Price’s The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel delineates the division between professional and common readers posited by Pierre Bourdieu and others as arising at the beginning of the nineteenth century: “a specialized group of symbolic producers,” to use Bourdieu’s terminology, attempts to dominate the producers of economic capital (the bourgeoisie) through the manipulation of “cultural capital” (Garnham and Williams 78-9). Though acknowledging her theoretical debt to Bourdieu, Price spares us such dry sociological language, instead demonstrating in the case of specific novelists’ procedures and results—among them, Samuel Richardson, Walter Scott, Ann Radcliffe, and George Eliot—how novels offer readers the opportunity to identify themselves as common, vulgar, voracious readers of plot, on the one hand, or, on the other, serious, professional, ascetic, and aesthetically educated readers of beauties (in the eighteenth-century sense of short excerpts or sententiae, but also in the sense of excerpts that demonstrate literary style). This “division of [reading] labor” (99) remains steady throughout the period from 1750 to 1850, although the meaning of such readerly identifications changes (“with the rise of the middle class,” one wants to say, the all-purpose answer as Harry Shaw has said, “for any aspect of the history of England…in an exam,” 8). Early, quasi-aristocratic devourers of novels skim them to find out what happens. They are (intellectually) lazy, the “idle” rich, conspicuously consuming time by indulging in multi-volume novels, not to better themselves but just to have fun (21-22, 41, 50). Later devourers of novels skim them because they are physically busy, men of business, riders of the railroad (59). The division, exemplified by Price in a quotation from Coleridge’s review of The Mysteries of Udolpho, is between readers of taste and readers with appetite, this devouring “‘impatient’ or ‘common’ reader [serving] not as an alter ego, but as a straw man against whom” serious—and we might add, disembodied—critics such as Coleridge can define themselves (95-7). How, technically, does the novel propagate this division?

The anthologies and abridgements produced alongside the novels Price discusses, compilations that allegedly scale the novels down, do so by splitting them into two parts addressed to these two separate though mutually defining classes of readers, appetitive and tasteful. But the division made by competing media is, Price shows, internal to novelistic structure as well. Within the novel itself, hunger-inducing narrative pace is interrupted by anthological material in good taste: the commonplaces and biblical quotations copied by Pamela and Clarissa when epistolary form dominated the novel; quotations from old ballads and old plays in Scott, whether real or imagined; verses written by Radcliffe, tangentially connected to the plot at hand; Eliot’s “lapidary generalizations” (105), written in part with an eye toward their later excision. Insofar as it incorporates within it what Price calls “the anthology’s modular structure” (65, 98) as well as material for skimming (“abridging” by any other name), the novel thus generates the middle-class reading public and the professional literary critics who both serve and disparage that public in the process of self-definition: “[A] specifically middle-class [reading] public [including professional literary critics]…owes more to the endurance of the anthology than to the rise of the novel” (70), Price says. She asks us to think about the way that literary criticism since the professionalization of literature repeats the novel’s structure, anthologizing beauties (quoting noteworthy passages to be read closely) and abridging plot (pace Cleanth Brooks) in every critical essay, no matter what its theoretical bias.

The utter brilliance of Price’s book, however, comes not from its narrative about the kinds of readers produced by the rise of the novel, and consequently not from this work’s theoretical debt to Bourdieu, but rather in its attempt to read printed forms as messages. Like Fiona Robertson in her work on Scott (117-60), Price reads what Gerard Genette has termed “the paratextual apparatus (titles, prefaces, tables of contents, footnotes)” or ostensibly “nonexpressive practices” engaged in by authors and editors: “all the acts of textual reproduction and omission, contextualization and juxtaposition, which together construct not only a particular literary tradition but a model of what literature is” (Price 11). But it does even more—and, because The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel is so beautifully written, it’s possible to underestimate the difficulty of the tasks it performs. Other attempts to connect the anthology medium to a message—Barbara Benedict’s The Making of the Modern Reader, for instance—tend to reduce the form of collected excerpts to a theme such as heteroglossia or heterogeneity (in short, the celebration of difference). In Price, that reduction doesn’t happen: the materiality of the medium is shown to interpellate specific types of reader as well as authorize specific types of writer-publishers, and then those possibilities are found to be figured in the novels themselves, in displaced forms.

For instance, Price shows us how what Chartier calls “the author-function” (29) emerges from the usurpation of letters by narrative voice not only in the history of the novel—not only in the material production of abridgements and summaries of epistolary novels—but also within specific epistolary novels themselves, Sir Charles Grandison and Redgauntlet among them. The epistolary novel’s bifurcation into editorial distance and epistolary immediacy exorcises the problem of the individual as original source of writing and owner of intellectual property caused by the fact that human beings are all quoters, compilers, editors, an intersection of the texts they have read and communications, letters, received. Ideas of literariness and literary property are structured on a “synecdochic logic” which takes one person for a community, obscuring the social conditions of production of thought just as decisively as “from the hand of the printer” obscures through synecdoche the hand had by compositors and journeymen in producing (and pirating) novelistic texts. The shift away from epistolarity to narrative isn’t an historical progression but a shift internal to the novel itself, as seen especially in Redgauntlet, as if the whole business of the novel were to transform an editor into an author through the escalating seizure of authority away from community-owned characters and content.

Both Price and Law offer us alternatives to the history of the novel that provide a deeper understanding of how the material conditions of production and writers’ fantasies about those conditions, enter into novelistic form and content. Whether illustrating Susan Ferrier’s quotation of anthologies—third-hand quotation, as it were (Price 101)—or Walter Besant’s mastery of “the art of ‘writing by numbers’” fostered by the metropolitan weekly magazines (Law 208), both critics portray in full detail the shadow traditions of the popular that define by differing from high aesthetic forms: James’s “Art of Fiction” refutes, point by point, Besant’s hurriedly written essay of the same title (Law 211-13), Ferrier’s “aesthetic of the hackneyed…resists the aesthetic of authenticity” (Price 102-3) proposed by high culture’s Romantic, individualist, expressive model of authorship. Both help us see the literary history and thus present-day institutional and financial stakes in novelistic writing and reading practices.”