"I hate publishing!" Alfred Tennyson complained as he assembled his poems for London publication in 1842. Among his gripes was having to chase down pirated American versions of his verse, while trying to earn his keep from books and magazines. But those earnings came far more easily to him than to today's poets. "In Memoriam" sold 25,000 copies in England in less than two years; in 1864 "Enoch Arden" sold 40,000 copies in just a few weeks.
None of the other authors represented in "Victorian Bestsellers," a new exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, had much reason for complaint, either. Organized by John Bidwell, who oversees the Morgan's department of printed books and bindings, this exhibition of manuscripts, first editions, drawings, posters and prints is not a typical bibliophilic display of rare esoterica. Indeed, its focus is rare exoterica: these books publicly erupted onto the 19th-century English scene. Apart from the Bible's privileged monopoly as a must-read, these best sellers were among the first cultural products for a broad public, breaking down boundaries of class and caste; they also created new audiences, inspiring spinoffs and extravagant commercial enterprise.
Some of these best sellers are now barely known, like George du Maurier's 1894 novel, "Trilby" — the exhibition opens with a copy of the original manuscript purchased by Pierpont Morgan just after it was published. "Trilby" first appeared in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, raising circulation by 100,000, and later inspired a play, a Warner Brothers film and the once renowned Trilby hat.
Other best sellers remain literary landmarks. After Charles Dickens's "Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club" began appearing in monthly installments in March 1836, its press run increased from 1,000 copies for the first part to 40,000 for the finale in October 1837. By 1879 the full novel had sold 800,000 copies and had transformed British publishing.
The exhibition is a bit constricted by taking Queen Victoria's reign (1837-1901) as its domain, since, as it acknowledges, the prime example of a best-selling author was Sir Walter Scott, whose 1819 "Ivanhoe" (part of the author's manuscript is on display here) sold 10,000 copies in two weeks.
But this show — suggestive and alluring, with its sampling of the Morgan's riches — demonstrates that it was during the latter part of the 19th century that the appetite of a growing public was institutionalized, and that authors and publishers knowingly worked for large sales, perfecting new forms of packaging for print.
The monthly pamphlet, the 20-installment novel, the inexpensive chapbook, the cheap "yellowbacks" with their cheap thrills, the "penny dreadfuls" with even cheaper expectations — these were the forms given literary fantasy to suit the mercurial marketplace.
Pride of place went to the "three-decker" — the standard for much 19th-century publishing — a three-volume edition that would be purchased by circulating libraries, but was generally too expensive for most private readers. (There is a bookcase of three-deckers shown here.) Yet even after such books were repackaged for middle class customers, sales figures don't give a full count of audiences. Publications of all kinds were often read aloud to groups, a practice shared by varied social classes.
So the number of a book's "readers" was some unknown multiple of its sales. One 1802 illustration by James Gillray at the exhibition shows four well-dressed women crowded around a small table, rapt in suspense as one, leaning forward in shocked surprise, reads aloud from a best-selling anthology.
"The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900," Richard D. Altick's pioneering history of the book (which also compiled many of the sales statistics I am citing), describes a charwoman who never missed going to a monthly tea at a local snuff shop where the landlord read aloud the latest issue of Dickens's "Dombey and Son."
Very little else could have lured both humble charwoman and haughty dowager. And the books' power only grew as technological advances brought down the price of paper, literacy increased with mandatory schooling, and distribution networks expanded with railroad lines. Books were manufactured with an eye on quantity: the exhibition includes an etched steel plate for Hablot K. Browne's frontispiece of "David Copperfield," the steel allowing mass printing with little wear.
The drama surrounding the book began to mirror the drama within the book. No longer just a private object for learned appreciation or ecclesiastical devotion, it had a life in the public sphere, where its fortunes were played out to melodramatic effect. The book trade had its heroes and villains, hacks and geniuses. There are crusaders here too, like Anna Sewell; her 1877 "Black Beauty" was pirated by the American Humane Education Society and given away — a copy is in this show — the cover heralding it as "The 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' of the horse." As for the "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of American slavery, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, shown here in an 1852 first edition that sold out in days, it sold a million copies in its first year in London and the United States.
The stakes were high: during the late 1860s, the publishers of a British magazine, "Saint Pauls," on display here, were counting on Anthony Trollope to help them get the 25,000 subscribers they needed to break even, but Trollope, as the editor and star of the publication — a typical marketing and editorial role for successful authors — could manage to sell only 10,000 copies with his serialized novel "Phineas Finn."
A lesser author, Charles Lever, triumphed with his first novel, "Harry Lorrequer," in 1839; it was re-released as an inexpensive yellowback in 1875, which here looks literally like pulp fiction. Lever futilely kept trying to match that novel's success. Instead he went into debt and almost singlehandedly drove away readers from Dickens's own magazine, All the Year Round, when his new work was featured there. Dickens, the exhibition tells us, "had to come to the rescue with a new feature, 'Great Expectations,' to win back the readers that Lever had lost."
Books also took on a guiding role in this bewildering new world of self-creation and urban life. In earlier eras, Isabella Mary Beeton's "Book of Household Management" (1861) would most likely have served few readers; instead, the exhibition notes, it became "perhaps the most influential cookbook of all time," selling 640,000 copies before the end of the century. There is also an inscribed 1866 copy here of Samuel Smiles's "Self-Help; With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance," a volume that sold more than 250,000 copies between 1859 and 1905, and gave its name to an entire genre.
The exhibition points out: "The literary formulas and publishing strategies perfected in this period still play a role in the business of best sellers."
That gives a certain urgency and currency to these quietly presented objects. During the Victorian era, the fantastical and Gothic adventures of earlier novels were translated from the supernatural into the social: it was within society itself that villainy and redemption was to be found. The reader or listener was, like the book, in a new setting, possessed by a need to comprehend the vastly changed circumstances of modernity, trying to map out a path in a world where all social strata were being transformed.
The Victorian reader was picking up these books not as a congregant or as a student, but as a participant, finding echoes of personal experience and seeking new forms of guidance. Today the world still overwhelms; the only difference is that now books are not the only medium promising redemption.
"Victorian Bestsellers" will continue through May 6 at the Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street; (212) 685-0008 or themorgan.org.
Victorian Bestsellers: <http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/victorian.asp> -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>