WEBVTT

NOTE The Serialized Novel in the Nineteenth Century

1
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.000
Today we're going to turn to 19th century book publishing.

2
00:00:05.000 --> 00:00:09.000
And I want to begin with a quotation from Charles Dickens.

3
00:00:09.000 --> 00:00:16.000
Now Charles Dickens is generally thought of as a critic of capitalism.

4
00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:25.000
People would point to his book Hard Times, for example, which in fact is a critique of industrialization.

5
00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:31.760
To really study it, you'll see Dickens was quite a capitalist himself, a small-time entrepreneur

6
00:00:31.760 --> 00:00:37.320
to begin with, but a big-time entrepreneur for much of his life.

7
00:00:37.320 --> 00:00:48.960
He died an extremely wealthy man, a multimillionaire in our terms, and capitalism was very good

8
00:00:48.960 --> 00:00:54.000
to Dickens, and he had a high regard for free enterprise.

9
00:00:54.000 --> 00:01:00.000
He was a great supporter of free trade, for example, in his journal Household Words.

10
00:01:00.000 --> 00:01:05.000
In 1853, he was honored at a banquet in Birmingham.

11
00:01:05.000 --> 00:01:08.000
That's in the industrial midlands of England.

12
00:01:08.000 --> 00:01:13.000
Birmingham and Manchester are the centers of the Industrial Revolution.

13
00:01:13.000 --> 00:01:19.000
And he had this to say, in words that would make any true Marxist cringe.

14
00:01:19.000 --> 00:01:24.360
He got up and proposed a toast to the city of Birmingham.

15
00:01:24.360 --> 00:01:29.820
Birmingham, the very heart of middle class England, the very heart of industrial England.

16
00:01:29.820 --> 00:01:38.600
To the great compact balance of the people by whose industry, perseverance and intelligence

17
00:01:38.600 --> 00:01:45.480
and their result in money wealth, such places as Birmingham and many others like it have

18
00:01:45.480 --> 00:01:52.400
have arisen to that great center of support, that comprehensive experience, and that beating

19
00:01:52.400 --> 00:02:03.400
heart literature has turned happily from individual patrons, sometimes munificent, often sorted,

20
00:02:03.400 --> 00:02:11.720
always few, and it's found there, there in the English middle class, its highest purpose,

21
00:02:11.720 --> 00:02:25.760
Charles Dickens saluting the middle-class virtues, industry, perseverance and intelligence,

22
00:02:25.760 --> 00:02:32.240
and the resultant money, which has now given literature its proper support, and notice

23
00:02:32.240 --> 00:02:39.760
he specifically says, to hell with patrons, we are so relieved not to be dependent on

24
00:02:39.760 --> 00:03:09.760
and so he's very, here's you know a writer who again most people would think of as anti-capitalist celebrating the triumph of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution in the English Midlands and saying artists finally have their proper source of support and he goes on to say, let a good book in these bad times, let a good book in these bad times, let a good book in these bad times, let a good book in these bad times, let a good book in these bad times,

25
00:03:09.760 --> 00:03:24.760
No complaints from Charles Dickens about the taste of the English reading public.

26
00:03:24.760 --> 00:03:33.760
Now you can say, yeah, it's all easy for you, Charles Dickens, to praise the taste of the English reading public.

27
00:03:33.760 --> 00:03:38.760
They made you the most famous and well-rewarded author in the history of the world.

28
00:03:38.760 --> 00:03:45.760
But that's, of course, very important, because it shows that, in fact, the English readers did have taste.

29
00:03:45.760 --> 00:03:54.760
Here was the first mass commercial market for literature, and who emerged from it as the number one author?

30
00:03:54.760 --> 00:03:57.760
The number one author in quality.

31
00:03:57.760 --> 00:04:06.760
The one that, to this day, anybody would say was the greatest novelist in English probably ever, and certainly of the 19th century.

32
00:04:06.760 --> 00:04:17.260
So, the dumb, mass reading public was pretty smart, and in fact, by and large, the authors

33
00:04:17.260 --> 00:04:24.620
who were most successful are the ones we still read today, and the ones who failed as people

34
00:04:24.620 --> 00:04:29.600
go study those novels in dusty libraries, find out why they failed.

35
00:04:29.600 --> 00:04:33.560
They were, generally speaking, very bad authors.

36
00:04:33.560 --> 00:04:41.240
And so if Shakespeare was exhibit A for me this week, Dickens would be exhibit B. That

37
00:04:41.240 --> 00:04:47.840
is the greatest playwright in English, the greatest novelist in English operated in fully

38
00:04:47.840 --> 00:04:55.480
commercial environments. And so there can't possibly be a simple antithesis between the

39
00:04:55.480 --> 00:05:02.760
world of commerce and the world of high culture. And again, it's very ironic that what today

40
00:05:02.760 --> 00:05:10.480
is regarded as high culture, Victorian novels, you know, made into television series on

41
00:05:10.480 --> 00:05:14.480
masterpieces, theater, and of course, assigned in universities.

42
00:05:14.480 --> 00:05:20.600
That was the absolute heart of popular culture in 19th century England.

43
00:05:20.600 --> 00:05:28.880
So we're now firmly within the 19th century, and that does mark a turning point in this

44
00:05:28.880 --> 00:05:34.920
This week's romp through cultural history, because we're now, after the Industrial Revolution,

45
00:05:34.920 --> 00:05:39.920
we are in the world of mass society and mass culture.

46
00:05:39.920 --> 00:05:44.480
And we're really getting to the heart of the argument today.

47
00:05:44.480 --> 00:05:50.840
That is, up to now, you know, I've been trying to show the commercial basis of Shakespeare's

48
00:05:50.840 --> 00:05:58.400
theater and Rubin's painting and that sort of thing, but we haven't yet gotten really

49
00:05:58.400 --> 00:06:10.400
We're really into the world of mass culture. We're now in the world of the commodity, the world of commodification, as my Marxist colleagues would say.

50
00:06:10.400 --> 00:06:25.400
Dickens' novels sold in the hundred thousand range, and now we've got these mass-produced commodities masquerading as art, my Marxist friends would say.

51
00:06:25.400 --> 00:06:36.400
You know, just picture to yourself a hundred thousand copies of Oliver Twist lined up next to each other, and, you know, there it is.

52
00:06:36.400 --> 00:06:44.400
Mass production, uniform product, being marketed to a vast public.

53
00:06:44.400 --> 00:06:53.400
Now, in a way, I've tried to show that's not quite unique to the industrial world, that Rubens had a factory.

54
00:06:53.400 --> 00:07:00.400
And as I've been trying to show, artists desperately wish their works to be commodified.

55
00:07:00.400 --> 00:07:08.400
Rubens kept thinking, you know, I can't paint as many paintings as the public will buy. What can I do?

56
00:07:08.400 --> 00:07:16.400
And so we created a painting factory, in effect, so we could turn out more Rubens paintings by having people like Van Dyke do them.

57
00:07:16.400 --> 00:07:22.400
them talked about tapestries and again I say that the tapestry industry was a

58
00:07:22.400 --> 00:07:31.220
major industry in Flanders during the Renaissance it produced great works of

59
00:07:31.220 --> 00:07:36.780
art that hang in museums now but it was extremely profitable and one of the

60
00:07:36.780 --> 00:07:42.960
central industries of that area so I don't want to overstate the move we've

61
00:07:42.960 --> 00:07:51.720
We've made here, in a way we've been looking at how artists have made a living by finding

62
00:07:51.720 --> 00:07:54.040
ways to commodify what they do.

63
00:07:54.040 --> 00:07:59.320
The notion of sheet music, of writing the piece of music and then getting it printed

64
00:07:59.320 --> 00:08:01.360
and selling it to a market.

65
00:08:01.360 --> 00:08:08.280
And you know, Picasso, as I was saying, there's no artist who has ever sought more eagerly

66
00:08:08.280 --> 00:08:16.520
to commodify what it could do, go to the lithograph market, go into the ceramic market, the print

67
00:08:16.520 --> 00:08:22.760
market and so on, the whole history of print, of engravings and prints of paintings, example

68
00:08:22.760 --> 00:08:24.260
of this.

69
00:08:24.260 --> 00:08:30.360
But now we really, the numbers start to look real to us.

70
00:08:30.360 --> 00:08:34.300
You know, even Rubens turned out, through his factory, maybe thousands of paintings,

71
00:08:34.300 --> 00:08:37.300
Now, we're going to be in the hundreds of thousands.

72
00:08:37.300 --> 00:08:42.300
And this is where the Marxist critique kicks in.

73
00:08:42.300 --> 00:08:49.300
That the commercialization of culture is the debasement of culture.

74
00:08:49.300 --> 00:08:56.300
But this debased culture is what produced these great Victorian novels, including the works of Dickens.

75
00:08:56.300 --> 00:09:00.300
And so, how debasing could it really be?

76
00:09:00.300 --> 00:09:07.860
And what I'm going to try to show today, this morning, is that Dickens and the other great

77
00:09:07.860 --> 00:09:14.500
novelists of the era certainly had problems with the English publishing industry.

78
00:09:14.500 --> 00:09:19.860
And you can say they managed to be great in spite of it, which is enough to say.

79
00:09:19.860 --> 00:09:24.080
But I want to suggest further that they managed to be great because of it, that they were

80
00:09:24.080 --> 00:09:31.120
There are aspects of the very commercialization of English publishing in the 19th century

81
00:09:31.120 --> 00:09:38.120
that actually improved the novels of people like Dickens, and above all because it kept

82
00:09:38.120 --> 00:09:41.240
them in touch with their audience.

83
00:09:41.240 --> 00:09:46.800
And that's something, sort of my underlying theme here, is that the commercialization

84
00:09:46.800 --> 00:09:53.120
of art, which looks negative to so many critics, and especially Marxists, is one way of keeping

85
00:09:53.120 --> 00:10:02.320
artists rooted in a living audience and I think it gives their works more vitality and more vibrancy.

86
00:10:03.280 --> 00:10:07.520
Now the other thing is we enter the 19th century we just have a lot more information

87
00:10:08.800 --> 00:10:15.760
and and we really know much more about what was going on we start to have surviving correspondence

88
00:10:15.760 --> 00:10:20.080
between authors and their publishers we have statistics that are much more reliable

89
00:10:20.080 --> 00:10:28.960
Well, we've been very anecdotal up to now, how much in debt was Mozart when he died,

90
00:10:28.960 --> 00:10:31.760
how much money did Bach have when he died.

91
00:10:31.760 --> 00:10:35.800
You know, now we start to have real records that have Dickens bank accounts and that sort

92
00:10:35.800 --> 00:10:39.120
of thing, so we can get a little more specific with things now.

93
00:10:39.120 --> 00:10:48.680
So let me begin by describing basically the publishing industry in England in the 19th

94
00:10:48.680 --> 00:11:01.120
century, and then go on to show how it interacted with authors and authors interacted with it.

95
00:11:01.120 --> 00:11:07.840
Publishing was a major industry in the 19th century, and London became the world center

96
00:11:07.840 --> 00:11:14.320
Center for Publication, it's still one of the great centers of publication in the world,

97
00:11:14.320 --> 00:11:21.000
and it was very much one of the great beneficiaries of the Industrial Revolution.

98
00:11:21.000 --> 00:11:27.960
And again, we're looking at one of these situations where capitalism made certain positive cultural

99
00:11:27.960 --> 00:11:32.360
developments possible.

100
00:11:32.360 --> 00:11:37.280
I really recommend a book called The English Common Reader by Richard Altick, I've put

101
00:11:37.280 --> 00:12:07.160
Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, Joseph Salerno, Roger Garrison, Hans-Hermann Hoppe,

102
00:12:07.280 --> 00:12:17.280
One thing was a vast reduction continuing throughout the century in the price of paper.

103
00:12:17.280 --> 00:12:25.280
Here's one of the incredible side-effect benefits of that horrible industrial revolution.

104
00:12:25.280 --> 00:12:29.280
We're always being taught ruin things.

105
00:12:29.280 --> 00:12:35.280
The textile industry, which was one of the great industries that grew up in England in the 19th century,

106
00:12:35.280 --> 00:12:41.780
The textile industry that grew up in England in the 19th century in England dominated the textile industry for much of the 19th century

107
00:12:41.780 --> 00:12:52.280
resulted in the proliferation of rags, both in the manufacture of textiles and in the recycling of them

108
00:12:52.280 --> 00:12:59.280
and you suddenly have this tremendous surplus of rags and one of the great uses of rags then was to make paper

109
00:12:59.280 --> 00:13:08.280
Rag-content paper. It actually is quite superior to the paper we use today and was acid-free.

110
00:13:08.280 --> 00:13:16.280
Anyway, suddenly it became much cheaper to make paper because you could make it out of surplus rag.

111
00:13:16.280 --> 00:13:26.280
Counteracting this positive tendency was the government taxes on paper, which were extremely high, relatively speaking.

112
00:13:26.280 --> 00:13:31.280
You know, it's the kind of thing that the American Revolution happened over, like the Stamp Act.

113
00:13:31.280 --> 00:13:37.280
The British government thought that taxing paper was a great source of income,

114
00:13:37.280 --> 00:13:46.280
and they didn't mind that it made publishing more expensive and books and, above all, newspapers more expensive,

115
00:13:46.280 --> 00:13:50.280
because they were just as happy not to see the development of the newspaper industry,

116
00:13:50.280 --> 00:13:53.280
because newspapers were critical of the government.

117
00:13:53.280 --> 00:13:58.280
and so there was a huge battle in the course of the 19th century over these taxes on paper

118
00:13:58.280 --> 00:14:04.600
which were in fact called taxes on knowledge and from now on I'll be talking about ways

119
00:14:04.600 --> 00:14:10.820
in which the market has helped culture flourish, I'll also keep mentioning ways in which government

120
00:14:10.820 --> 00:14:17.280
intervention in the market have impeded the development of culture and you know basically

121
00:14:17.280 --> 00:14:22.580
my advice to people who want government support of arts would be this and it's an old French

122
00:14:22.580 --> 00:14:28.320
Fresh Line, laissez-faire, just leave the market alone, stop interfering in it, that's

123
00:14:28.320 --> 00:14:33.240
the best thing you can do for encouraging culture, and this is one of the examples.

124
00:14:33.240 --> 00:14:36.840
And liberals in England in the 19th century have worked very hard to get these various

125
00:14:36.840 --> 00:14:40.840
taxes on knowledge eliminated.

126
00:14:40.840 --> 00:14:50.340
So paper became cheaper, the introduction of steam engines into printing was a huge development.

127
00:14:50.340 --> 00:14:57.300
speeded up the process of printing exponentially and made possible large-scale printings.

128
00:14:57.300 --> 00:15:03.020
I was just looking at Altic, I think he says that the average print run for a novel in

129
00:15:03.020 --> 00:15:05.660
the 18th century was 750 copies total.

130
00:15:05.660 --> 00:15:07.500
That's kind of amazing.

131
00:15:07.500 --> 00:15:12.700
I've sold more copies of some of my books than that.

132
00:15:12.700 --> 00:15:21.560
These huge runs of Dickens novels, eventually in hundreds of thousands, that required new

133
00:15:21.560 --> 00:15:26.860
technology and capitalism rose to meet the need.

134
00:15:26.860 --> 00:15:38.260
And later in the century, linotype printing was developed and stereotype printing.

135
00:15:38.260 --> 00:15:44.100
At the beginning of the century, there was essentially a type shortage in England.

136
00:15:44.100 --> 00:15:51.140
You couldn't set a whole book at once, because they just had individual pieces of type,

137
00:15:51.140 --> 00:15:57.140
and they had to set a couple of pages, print them, go back and reset the type.

138
00:15:57.140 --> 00:16:05.380
That was a tremendous drag on publishing, and even on the proofreading of novels.

139
00:16:05.380 --> 00:16:12.580
And so, in the course of the century, all sorts of developments made it easier to set type.

140
00:16:12.580 --> 00:16:17.280
By the end of the century, they had automatic type setting.

141
00:16:17.280 --> 00:16:25.980
So, all these things which capitalism made possible, which were driven by the capitalist desire to reduce costs,

142
00:16:25.980 --> 00:16:32.880
especially to increase volume in order to reduce cost per item.

143
00:16:32.880 --> 00:16:50.880
So, on the production end, there were all sorts of ways in which the success of a novelist, of a Dickens, would not have been possible without these technological developments.

144
00:16:50.880 --> 00:16:55.880
On the other hand, and this is where an Austrian economic perspective is important,

145
00:16:55.880 --> 00:17:02.880
these technological developments were driven by the prospect of people like Dickens.

146
00:17:02.880 --> 00:17:10.880
Publishers wouldn't have worked so hard with printers to increase their capacity

147
00:17:10.880 --> 00:17:14.880
if they didn't see that they could sell these large numbers of books,

148
00:17:14.880 --> 00:17:18.880
and it was above all Dickens who opened up this possibility

149
00:17:18.880 --> 00:17:22.880
They saw how many copies his books were selling.

150
00:17:22.880 --> 00:17:26.960
They said, we've got to find ways to print faster, and we've got to find ways to reduce

151
00:17:26.960 --> 00:17:28.280
the cost of paper.

152
00:17:28.280 --> 00:17:33.120
So again, Marxists are always production-driven in their thinking.

153
00:17:33.120 --> 00:17:37.680
And when they talk about these developments, they see it, oh, where there are these independent

154
00:17:37.680 --> 00:17:43.840
developments in technology, and they then govern the writing of novels.

155
00:17:43.840 --> 00:17:55.280
But we know that the economy is customer-driven and demand-driven, you know, that Kevin Costner

156
00:17:55.280 --> 00:18:02.240
film Field of Dreams, remember the great slogan that, if you build it, they will come?

157
00:18:02.240 --> 00:18:04.840
That's Marxism.

158
00:18:04.840 --> 00:18:08.520
Capitalism is, if they will come, you will build it.

159
00:18:08.520 --> 00:18:11.920
And we know that that's the truth.

160
00:18:11.920 --> 00:18:17.920
The Intelligent Businessman anticipates the demand and responds in his production methods.

161
00:18:17.920 --> 00:18:21.640
But it's really Marxist thinking that says, if you build it, it will come.

162
00:18:21.640 --> 00:18:27.760
If you create these great steam, high-speed steam pressers, then they'll buy the novels.

163
00:18:27.760 --> 00:18:33.480
No, it's because you sense there's a market, vast market for these novels that you develop

164
00:18:33.480 --> 00:18:36.720
these new technologies.

165
00:18:36.720 --> 00:19:06.720
Now, in a related way, marketing of books went through incredible developments and one thing I'm going to try to show you is that the book industry was much more modern than we think, and that its marketing methods were very sophisticated and you're going to recognize them and see that much of what we think is a 20th century development is really already there in the 19th century

166
00:19:06.720 --> 00:19:21.720
Again, the Marxist, particularly the Frankfurt School, complain about mass markets and mass marketing and how films really don't have any inherent value, it's just the way they're marketed and the same with television programs.

167
00:19:21.720 --> 00:19:27.720
Well, we're going to see if that's true, then Dickens novels have no value and they were just marketed as well.

168
00:19:27.720 --> 00:19:36.720
For example, the marketing of Dickens novels were really quite extraordinary.

169
00:19:36.720 --> 00:19:43.720
They had all sorts of tie-in products and the equivalent of Dickens action figures.

170
00:19:43.720 --> 00:19:50.720
And part of the way they made money was you'd sell all this stuff in conjunction with a Dickens novel.

171
00:19:50.720 --> 00:19:53.720
Let me read you something from one of my colleagues in Virginia, Jennifer Wick's book,

172
00:19:53.720 --> 00:20:09.720
Dickens' first huge success was the Pickwick papers. Absolutely unprecedented. They started selling 40,000 copies. No one had ever seen anything like that before, except with the Bible.

173
00:20:09.720 --> 00:20:11.920
for the Bible.

174
00:20:11.920 --> 00:20:16.320
And so they capitalized on this.

175
00:20:16.320 --> 00:20:20.280
They decided, let's start selling little figurines.

176
00:20:20.280 --> 00:20:25.160
After the publication of Pickwick, Weller cabs were plying the streets.

177
00:20:25.160 --> 00:20:28.540
Sam Weller is one of the famous characters in Pickwick's sidekick.

178
00:20:28.540 --> 00:20:36.640
And so the taxi cabs in London, the horse drawn, were named after Weller.

179
00:20:36.640 --> 00:20:39.480
Pickwick's name was written in gold.

180
00:20:39.480 --> 00:20:54.480
The use of it was soon affixed to the most popular penny cigars and a writing pen, and pickwick toby mugs, sawyer cough drops, weller boot polish, and candy tins printed with pickwicky and revels began to be sold.

181
00:20:54.480 --> 00:21:04.480
So just the way a film comes out now and McDonald's or Burger King starts having its name on it.

182
00:21:04.480 --> 00:21:11.680
And what I really love, you can find the, what I'm guessing is the first example of a product placement.

183
00:21:11.680 --> 00:21:24.480
You know, in a film when the camera zooms in and the hero is drinking Coca-Cola, or, you know, he's got a Rolex watch on or something.

184
00:21:24.480 --> 00:21:30.480
That's not by accident. Well, in one of the original illustrations to the Pickwick papers,

185
00:21:30.480 --> 00:21:42.480
Depicting Mr. Weller helping his son Samuel, the picture clearly shows a placard on the mantle, reading distinctly, Guinness Dublin Stout.

186
00:21:42.480 --> 00:21:52.480
The placard was originally the wooden crate side of the box of Guinness. By being replicated in the illustration for Pickwick, it became an ad peeping out over Weller's head.

187
00:21:52.480 --> 00:21:58.480
Now, when I recently read this, I thought, how ironic that it's a product, you know, still in use today, get it styled.

188
00:21:58.480 --> 00:22:01.480
And then I realized, this ain't ironic or coincidental at all.

189
00:22:01.480 --> 00:22:09.480
If they were smart enough to get a product placement in a Dickens novel, that's why they are still around today.

190
00:22:09.480 --> 00:22:19.480
But again, it's really, it's astounding to discover how commercial this world, and as you now know, I don't think that's a bad thing.

191
00:22:19.480 --> 00:22:26.080
Now, to say something more about the actual marketing and how books were published, as

192
00:22:26.080 --> 00:22:32.840
some of you may know, books were really quite expensive at this time.

193
00:22:32.840 --> 00:22:41.920
Again, it's very hard to compare prices, but basically, altics shows that at the beginning

194
00:22:41.920 --> 00:22:48.920
In the beginning of the 19th century, a book cost the equivalent of the average worker's day's wages.

195
00:22:48.920 --> 00:22:51.920
So that was a lot to spend on a book.

196
00:22:51.920 --> 00:22:58.920
A book does not cost anywhere near a day's wage for anybody today.

197
00:22:58.920 --> 00:23:05.920
It shows you one of the things that capitalism, except from a university press book.

198
00:23:05.920 --> 00:23:07.920
I take that back.

199
00:23:07.920 --> 00:23:15.920
Their socialist production for you, capitalist production reduces the price of books.

200
00:23:15.920 --> 00:23:18.920
I could actually tell you something about that.

201
00:23:18.920 --> 00:23:27.920
So books were in fact, certainly at the beginning of the century, expensive.

202
00:23:27.920 --> 00:23:30.920
And so they were rented.

203
00:23:30.920 --> 00:23:35.920
This again comes as a shock to most people.

204
00:23:35.920 --> 00:23:41.920
Were you aware that books were rented in the 19th century? They had what are called

205
00:23:41.920 --> 00:23:47.680
circulating libraries, and you went in and you rented a book because you couldn't

206
00:23:47.680 --> 00:23:51.480
afford to buy it. That sounds so weird to us until you start thinking about video

207
00:23:51.480 --> 00:23:58.320
rentals. There used to be video cassettes, now DVDs, and you know, for a long time,

208
00:23:58.320 --> 00:24:03.640
you know, a video cassette would come out at a price of $80, so you didn't want to

209
00:24:03.640 --> 00:24:12.400
and so instead you rented it for $3 and that's basically how the book industry

210
00:24:12.400 --> 00:24:20.800
made a lot of its money in the 19th century through rentals and there were

211
00:24:20.800 --> 00:24:26.280
great circulating libraries as you can well imagine there were various

212
00:24:26.280 --> 00:24:31.600
arrangements you could rent an individual book you could get a pass for

213
00:24:31.600 --> 00:24:37.600
There were certain fees that would allow you to rent a certain number of books over a certain time and so on.

214
00:24:37.600 --> 00:24:42.600
There were other libraries where you could pay a subscription fee and you could read anything in the library.

215
00:24:42.600 --> 00:24:46.600
Again, there's the market for you. It came up with all...

216
00:24:46.600 --> 00:24:51.600
It's faced with the problem that books are initially too expensive for people to buy.

217
00:24:51.600 --> 00:25:00.600
So it came up with a whole variety of solutions to make it possible for people who didn't have the money to buy books to rent them.

218
00:25:00.600 --> 00:25:29.100
to rent them. But of course also in the course of the century the price of books was reduced tremendously so by the end of the 19th century it was quite easy for people to buy books, the prices came down and the pound essentially did not change in value in the 19th century.

219
00:25:29.100 --> 00:25:33.700
and that awful gold standard, you know, that's so terrible and it had this terrible result

220
00:25:33.700 --> 00:25:37.700
that the pound kept its value for an entire century.

221
00:25:37.700 --> 00:25:43.260
And the price of books came down from 30 shillings to one shilling at a time when the value of

222
00:25:43.260 --> 00:25:44.740
the shilling was essentially unchanged.

223
00:25:44.740 --> 00:25:48.900
It was actually a little higher in 1900 than it was in 1800.

224
00:25:48.900 --> 00:25:49.900
And how did this happen?

225
00:25:49.900 --> 00:25:52.360
Again, through the operation of the market.

226
00:25:52.360 --> 00:25:58.320
And I could give you many examples, Altic's book, and he would never admit this, is filled

227
00:25:58.320 --> 00:26:04.840
with the story of one heroic capitalist entrepreneur after another, whose only purpose was to make

228
00:26:04.840 --> 00:26:08.440
money and whose only effect was to reduce the price of books.

229
00:26:08.440 --> 00:26:14.600
I'm just going to give you one example, one of the great unsung heroes of culture.

230
00:26:14.600 --> 00:26:20.480
You will never, ever hear this man mentioned, certainly in any Marxist history, or at least

231
00:26:20.480 --> 00:26:28.200
not in a positive way, but we should all bow down to James Lockington, the inventor of

232
00:26:28.200 --> 00:26:36.480
And the remainder book sale. This is a great man. I owe him more than almost anybody except

233
00:26:36.480 --> 00:26:45.400
my remainder book sellers today. This goes back to the 18th century. James Lackington,

234
00:26:45.400 --> 00:26:54.080
who was the son of a journeyman shoemaker, and started out that way himself. He became

235
00:26:54.080 --> 00:27:00.160
He became a shoemaker and then he converted to Methodism, and that was the turning point

236
00:27:00.160 --> 00:27:06.560
in his life because the Methodists wanted to finance the spread of books.

237
00:27:06.560 --> 00:27:10.560
They had the Bible in mind, they had John Wesley's sermons in mind, and so they had

238
00:27:10.560 --> 00:27:16.940
a fund for Methodists to go into the book business.

239
00:27:16.940 --> 00:27:24.360
And Lackington availed himself of this fund to set up a bookshop in London in 1774.

240
00:27:24.360 --> 00:27:27.840
And I'll just read from Altuk here.

241
00:27:27.840 --> 00:27:32.520
He bought up large quantities of books at the auctions where publishers periodically

242
00:27:32.520 --> 00:27:36.940
unloaded their slow-moving stock.

243
00:27:36.940 --> 00:27:38.600
So that's, you know, remainder books.

244
00:27:38.600 --> 00:27:42.020
Books that aren't selling, publishers just want to get them off the shelves, get rid

245
00:27:42.020 --> 00:27:43.020
of them.

246
00:27:43.020 --> 00:28:02.020
So, Lackington brought him up and then instead of sending half or three quarters of the purchases to the trunk makers who used the paper for linings and selling what remained at their full price, he offered all he acquired at half or even a quarter of the published price.

247
00:28:02.020 --> 00:28:25.020
The first guy who broke the sort of price fixing of books at the time, and again, most people who bought up books at remainder sales just jumped them then, sold them for scrap value, but Lackington had the brilliant idea, I'll just resell them, but at a fraction of the original cost.

248
00:28:25.020 --> 00:28:30.620
No doubt, people said, but you lose money on each book.

249
00:28:30.620 --> 00:28:32.420
He said, well, I'll make it up in volume.

250
00:28:32.420 --> 00:28:36.620
No, he understood he was buying them cheap so he could sell them cheap.

251
00:28:36.620 --> 00:28:41.900
This unheard of and to his colleagues immoral procedure brought down on him the wrath of

252
00:28:41.900 --> 00:28:42.900
the trade.

253
00:28:42.900 --> 00:28:48.020
But this was more than compensated for by the business he did with the bargain-hunting

254
00:28:48.020 --> 00:28:49.020
public.

255
00:28:49.020 --> 00:28:53.660
Within a short time, he was the most lavish buyer of remainders in London.

256
00:28:53.660 --> 00:29:01.200
At one time he boasted he had in stock 10,000 copies of Watts Psalms, and an equal number

257
00:29:01.200 --> 00:29:08.220
of his hymns. At a single afternoon's auction, he bought 5,000 pounds worth of books. That's

258
00:29:08.220 --> 00:29:16.840
about $2 million worth of books in today's money. And that's one million dollars, I guess.

259
00:29:16.840 --> 00:29:21.280
But it's extraordinary. Notice, of course, religious books. That's why the Methodists

260
00:29:21.280 --> 00:29:33.280
It's very interesting, if you look at what drove the book trade from the start, it was the two great motives of the human race, the Bible and pornography.

261
00:29:33.280 --> 00:29:47.280
This is actually Cantor's law of media. If you go back, printing, Gutenberg, the introduction of printing, what was initially printed in the earliest days of printing?

262
00:29:47.280 --> 00:29:55.040
Basically, the Bible, other religious tracts, and the Renaissance equivalent of pornography.

263
00:29:55.040 --> 00:30:02.640
A hundred merisome and delightful tales, as these books were called, things like Boccaccio's

264
00:30:02.640 --> 00:30:03.640
The Cameron Song.

265
00:30:03.640 --> 00:30:07.480
And, you know, it's just an amazing, consistent law.

266
00:30:07.480 --> 00:30:09.880
What first spread on the Internet?

267
00:30:09.880 --> 00:30:11.280
The Bible and pornography.

268
00:30:11.280 --> 00:30:15.440
I mean, it's like the highest and the lowest human motives.

269
00:30:15.440 --> 00:30:21.080
I will leave it to you to sort out which is which, always drives a new medium.

270
00:30:21.080 --> 00:30:22.080
I think this is very good.

271
00:30:22.080 --> 00:30:26.080
Movies, I mean, it's just incredibly consistent.

272
00:30:26.080 --> 00:30:33.680
Mankind gets a new medium, religious and pornographic material published in that medium.

273
00:30:33.680 --> 00:30:34.680
And so here we see.

274
00:30:34.680 --> 00:30:39.840
Lackington, again, good Methodist, actually driven by religious motives, I can't help

275
00:30:39.840 --> 00:30:40.840
going on with this.

276
00:30:40.840 --> 00:30:44.800
It's really, Lackington earned the increased hostility of the orthodox booksellers and

277
00:30:44.800 --> 00:30:50.920
and the further gratitude of readers by cutting prices on new books, thus initiating the underselling

278
00:30:50.920 --> 00:30:55.080
practice that was to breed animosity in the trade for the next hundred years.

279
00:30:55.080 --> 00:30:59.880
These steps, as well as his dealing in second-hand books sent up from the country, resulted in

280
00:30:59.880 --> 00:31:01.460
well-deserved prosperity.

281
00:31:01.460 --> 00:31:07.660
In 1791 and 1792, he says, in his engagingly candid memoirs, he had an annual turnover

282
00:31:07.660 --> 00:31:13.120
of 100,000 volumes and a profit of 4,000 and 5,000 pounds.

283
00:31:13.120 --> 00:31:21.520
And again, you multiply by 200, yes, so that's a million dollars in profit.

284
00:31:21.520 --> 00:31:25.480
The name of his bookstore was the Temple of the Muses.

285
00:31:25.480 --> 00:31:29.680
Lackington's Temple of the Muses in Finsbury Square was one of these sites of London.

286
00:31:29.680 --> 00:31:34.740
A large block of houses had been turned into a shop, the holes surmounted by a dome and

287
00:31:34.740 --> 00:31:36.080
a flagpole.

288
00:31:36.080 --> 00:31:40.240
McDonald's already, actually it's Wal-Mart too, listen to this.

289
00:31:40.240 --> 00:31:46.480
Over the main entrance appeared the sign whose proud claim no one evidently challenged cheapest

290
00:31:46.480 --> 00:31:49.920
bookseller in the world.

291
00:31:49.920 --> 00:31:55.040
Reportedly the interior was so spacious that a coach and six could be driven clear around

292
00:31:55.040 --> 00:31:56.040
it.

293
00:31:56.040 --> 00:31:59.960
In the center was a counter behind which the clerks waited on the fine ladies and country

294
00:31:59.960 --> 00:32:01.560
gentlemen who clustered about it.

295
00:32:01.560 --> 00:32:06.840
At one side a staircase led by the lounging rooms and to a series of circular galleries

296
00:32:06.840 --> 00:32:07.840
under the dome.

297
00:32:07.840 --> 00:32:10.840
Don't you think it sounds like Barnes and Noble and Borders, do you?

298
00:32:10.840 --> 00:32:14.840
It's incredible that capitalism knows how to sell things.

299
00:32:14.840 --> 00:32:17.840
Around each of these galleries ran crowded shelves.

300
00:32:17.840 --> 00:32:21.840
The higher the shelves, the shabbier the bindings, and the lower the price.

301
00:32:21.840 --> 00:32:28.840
Nothing like the Temple of the Muses, with its cut prices, its strict cash-and-carry policy,

302
00:32:28.840 --> 00:32:32.840
and its disdain of haggling, had ever been in the book world.

303
00:32:32.840 --> 00:32:42.640
To keep prices low, Lackington wouldn't sell on credit, and, you know, it seems so wonderful that we have tradesmen extended credit,

304
00:32:42.640 --> 00:32:49.640
and you really didn't have to have the money to get what you wanted, but the result of that was higher prices for everybody,

305
00:32:49.640 --> 00:32:53.440
because so many people defaulted, never paid their bills.

306
00:32:53.440 --> 00:32:59.640
So Lackington says, you want a book, you pay for it now, I'll get you the cheapest price, but I'm not going to give you credit.

307
00:32:59.640 --> 00:33:07.740
and notice also, no haggling, no bargaining and here's what Lackington said

308
00:33:07.740 --> 00:33:16.340
Thousands have been effectually prevented from purchasing, though anxious so to do, whose circumstances in life would not permit them to pay the full price

309
00:33:16.340 --> 00:33:24.140
and thus were totally excluded from the advantage of improving their understandings and enjoying a rational entertainment

310
00:33:24.140 --> 00:33:29.760
Now, Lackington is one of the great examples, but you read this book and you'll see many

311
00:33:29.760 --> 00:33:30.760
of them.

312
00:33:30.760 --> 00:33:34.420
At no point does Altyk ever step back and say, you know, gee, these capitalists really

313
00:33:34.420 --> 00:33:36.040
accomplished something.

314
00:33:36.040 --> 00:33:41.060
But he tells one story or another, the man who was the king of the circulating libraries

315
00:33:41.060 --> 00:33:46.960
was a man named Moody, or M-U-D-I-E, don't know how to pronounce it.

316
00:33:46.960 --> 00:33:48.880
We can recognize these people.

317
00:33:48.880 --> 00:33:51.160
They are Sam Walton.

318
00:33:51.160 --> 00:33:52.160
They are Ray Kroc.

319
00:33:52.160 --> 00:33:56.840
the same kind of people that build businesses today and it's the same

320
00:33:56.840 --> 00:34:02.120
philosophy give the public what it wants reduce costs in every possible way market

321
00:34:02.120 --> 00:34:06.960
effectively I mean it works now and it worked then but the thing to understand

322
00:34:06.960 --> 00:34:10.280
is what they were effectively marketing was things like Dickens novels now

323
00:34:10.280 --> 00:34:16.280
Lackington's earlier than that but he obviously built the basis for the retail

324
00:34:16.280 --> 00:34:20.280
in England that made bookmaking possible.

325
00:34:20.280 --> 00:34:25.280
Now, again, to Marxists, they're so obsessed with production,

326
00:34:25.280 --> 00:34:34.280
they look at distribution and marketing as these totally negative things that add no value.

327
00:34:34.280 --> 00:34:40.280
They always see distributors, middlemen, marketers as pure exploiters.

328
00:34:40.280 --> 00:34:43.280
You know, the only person, you know, they got the labor theory of value,

329
00:34:43.280 --> 00:34:48.400
The Theory of Value, so the only person who deserves reward is the laborer, you know,

330
00:34:48.400 --> 00:34:54.160
they would complain, Lackington's making all this money and the poor guys in the sweatshop,

331
00:34:54.160 --> 00:34:57.160
print shop are not making anything near a salary.

332
00:34:57.160 --> 00:35:04.840
Well, those guys would have no jobs if Lackington wasn't moving the product they were producing.

333
00:35:04.840 --> 00:35:08.760
He as a retailer is performing an essential economic function.

334
00:35:08.760 --> 00:35:14.760
He's there, actually, as the mediator between the printing industry and the book-buying public.

335
00:35:14.760 --> 00:35:21.760
And he was someone who was always figuring out what does the public want, what should be printed.

336
00:35:21.760 --> 00:35:30.760
So, in fact, he was performing a vital social and cultural function, and that's why he made all the money.

337
00:35:30.760 --> 00:35:41.760
Now, let me turn maybe to the most important aspect of the fiction publishing industry in the 19th century, and that was serialization.

338
00:35:41.760 --> 00:35:56.760
Again, I'm not sure how much you're aware of this fact, but many of the novels in the 19th century, including Dickens, were not originally published in book form.

339
00:35:56.760 --> 00:36:14.760
They were serialized, and that means they either appeared in magazines, sometimes on a bi-weekly basis, sometimes on a monthly basis, depending upon the magazine, or they were actually published in separate parts.

340
00:36:14.760 --> 00:36:26.760
A typical novel, when it was eventually published in book form in the 19th century, occupied three volumes, the famous three-decker novel, it was called.

341
00:36:26.760 --> 00:36:38.760
And a three-decker novel, if it appeared in serial parts, usually appeared in 20 parts, and usually over a period of roughly a year or a year and a half.

342
00:36:38.760 --> 00:36:47.760
Now, one of the reasons serialization became popular is because novels in book form were too expensive.

343
00:36:47.760 --> 00:36:56.760
And so people, for example, like the idea of buying a novel part by part over a year and a half.

344
00:36:56.760 --> 00:37:05.760
And again, the figures vary, but let's say this, you know, maybe let's say the novel in book form,

345
00:37:05.760 --> 00:37:17.760
In book form, the novel would cost 15 shillings, and you didn't have 15 shillings, but you'd buy it over the course of a year, one shilling apart 20 times.

346
00:37:17.760 --> 00:37:25.760
Now it does end up costing you 20 shillings then instead of 15, but you have, you know, it's like, that's like buying on credit or an extended plan.

347
00:37:25.760 --> 00:37:29.760
You know, it's the way encyclopedias are sold, or these time life books are sold.

348
00:37:29.760 --> 00:37:35.760
That system of marketing was developed in the 19th century.

349
00:37:35.760 --> 00:37:39.760
And God bless the capitalists, again, they came up with schemes.

350
00:37:39.760 --> 00:37:45.760
If you bought it, if you bought all 20 parts, you'd get a binding for free at the end.

351
00:37:45.760 --> 00:37:50.760
Or if you bought 20 parts, you only had to pay for 19 of them, and you got the 20 for free.

352
00:37:50.760 --> 00:37:56.760
I mean, they had every marketing gimmick then that we think of as so specific to the 20th century.

353
00:37:56.760 --> 00:38:01.760
And if you go to the Dickens House in London, you can see all this stuff.

354
00:38:01.760 --> 00:38:06.760
You can see the action figures, the Dickens mugs and the Dickens watches and all this stuff.

355
00:38:06.760 --> 00:38:11.760
You can see the parts publication. They still have them.

356
00:38:11.760 --> 00:38:15.760
I mean, there's hundreds of thousands of them were published, though copies have survived.

357
00:38:15.760 --> 00:38:35.760
have survived. And it's fascinating to look at the park issues of Dickens. They're on, you know, faded crumbling paper because they use cheap paper. They kind of look like comic books. They have the feel of comic books. You understand how pop culture they were.

358
00:38:35.760 --> 00:38:42.800
I won't say they don't have lurid illustrations on the cover, but the covers are kind of fancy

359
00:38:42.800 --> 00:38:45.920
and you can just see how they were marketed.

360
00:38:45.920 --> 00:38:53.760
And so a lot of the most famous 19th century novels, not all of them, but many of them

361
00:38:53.760 --> 00:38:57.160
appear in this form.

362
00:38:57.160 --> 00:39:03.600
Magazines like them because they boosted circulation.

363
00:39:03.600 --> 00:39:09.040
If you could be publishing a popular novel, it was great for circulation.

364
00:39:09.040 --> 00:39:15.200
In fact, they know this was how they first started noticing with Dickens the incredible

365
00:39:15.200 --> 00:39:18.440
numbers of parts or magazines.

366
00:39:18.440 --> 00:39:24.320
Dickens eventually started his own magazine, Household Words, which was quite successful

367
00:39:24.320 --> 00:39:27.840
for about a decade.

368
00:39:27.840 --> 00:39:29.320
His main asset was himself.

369
00:39:29.320 --> 00:39:59.320
He published his own novels, but he also spotted young talent, like Elizabeth Gaskell, published her novel, North and South, in Household Words, and it's absolutely fascinating, most good college libraries have copies of Household Words, and you can go through it, and it just, it looks like a modern magazine, there'll be an article on India and the latest agricultural methods introduced in India,

370
00:39:59.320 --> 00:40:25.320
an article on how to fix a wagon wheel, an article on a new scientific discovery, I mean they look like Time magazine, you know, they don't quite have departments, but you can see Dickens was aiming for a middle class audience, it's kind of interesting what's going on around the world, it's interesting how to fix it, that sort of thing, and it's interesting fiction.

371
00:40:25.320 --> 00:40:37.320
Now, significant enough, just to see how the market responded to a problem that books were still too expensive.

372
00:40:37.320 --> 00:40:41.320
Answers published the works in serial form.

373
00:40:41.320 --> 00:40:51.320
But what people learned to do now was to make a virtue of necessity and exploit this form.

374
00:40:51.320 --> 00:41:06.320
Again, I have to say, in retrospect, serial publication looks absolutely brilliant, artistically and financially and commercially,

375
00:41:06.320 --> 00:41:13.320
but it's not as if some genius sat down and planned out this system. People kind of stumbled into it.

376
00:41:13.320 --> 00:41:18.320
It is precisely an example of spontaneous order in the Austrian sense,

377
00:41:18.320 --> 00:41:23.960
that people tried out various methods and they saw what worked and eventually

378
00:41:23.960 --> 00:41:32.960
developed a very sophisticated method of producing and marketing novels. Now what

379
00:41:32.960 --> 00:41:38.860
I mean about exploiting the form is that pretty quickly people figured out the

380
00:41:38.860 --> 00:41:46.220
cliffhanger principle. That is, if you were going to publish the thing in parts

381
00:41:46.220 --> 00:41:56.220
Over a relatively long time, a year, year and a half, you really wanted to keep those readers coming back to buy more.

382
00:41:56.220 --> 00:42:02.220
You know, at first, again, no one was quite thinking about this, nobody had ever done anything quite like this.

383
00:42:02.220 --> 00:42:11.220
The serial publication sort of begins in the 18th century. You can see it in some 18th century journals, but it really flourishes.

384
00:42:11.220 --> 00:42:16.220
I mean, the first great success is Dickens' Pickwick papers, and that's in the 1830s.

385
00:42:16.220 --> 00:42:20.220
But people started feeling the way, you know, at first they just thought,

386
00:42:20.220 --> 00:42:25.220
well, you know, we'll have this long novel, divide it up into 20 equal parts, and we'll just publish them.

387
00:42:25.220 --> 00:42:31.220
And then Dickens started to get a feel for how to end a part.

388
00:42:31.220 --> 00:42:35.220
A part was typically about three chapters' worth.

389
00:42:35.220 --> 00:43:01.220
But you start to notice that at the end of the part, someone was about to die or there was a knock on the door and who could that possibly be, you know, continued next month and you know, this is one of the great characteristics of Victorian fiction.

390
00:43:01.220 --> 00:43:08.420
We lose a lot of this now, actually, when we read the novel in a book.

391
00:43:08.420 --> 00:43:13.020
A lot of good modern editions actually now mark off the parts, and you can actually see

392
00:43:13.020 --> 00:43:18.020
where a part ended, and it's very interesting to trace that pattern.

393
00:43:18.020 --> 00:43:23.660
And actually, you know, in fact, in many ways, the way we, you know, especially in the academic

394
00:43:23.660 --> 00:43:27.980
world where you do a book a week, we don't read these novels the way they were meant

395
00:43:27.980 --> 00:43:29.160
to be read.

396
00:43:29.160 --> 00:43:33.480
They actually were meant to be read over a long period of time, and you sit there and

397
00:43:33.480 --> 00:43:38.280
see a thousand-page Dickens novel and say, how the hell am I going to read this in one

398
00:43:38.280 --> 00:43:39.280
week?

399
00:43:39.280 --> 00:43:40.280
That was not the original intention.

400
00:43:40.280 --> 00:43:46.600
In some ways, we spoil the effect of them, and I put on the original bibliography a book

401
00:43:46.600 --> 00:43:53.240
by Jennifer Heywood, Consuming Pleasures, a terrific book.

402
00:43:53.240 --> 00:43:57.360
It's all about the serial as the modern form.

403
00:43:57.360 --> 00:44:05.360
This is S-E-R-I-A-L, by the way. I like Froot Loops as much as the next guy, but I'm talking about fiction here.

404
00:44:05.360 --> 00:44:23.360
Haywood really came to this brilliant... The book is about Dickens' novels, the Terry and the Pirates comic strip, radio soap operas and television soap operas.

405
00:44:23.360 --> 00:44:31.360
And she really made this leap of imagination to see that the serial actually is the modern

406
00:44:31.360 --> 00:44:34.660
form of culture.

407
00:44:34.660 --> 00:44:39.860
And she talks about its unique characteristics that you can trace through all these genres.

408
00:44:39.860 --> 00:44:42.740
One obvious example would be the cliffhanger principle.

409
00:44:42.740 --> 00:44:50.580
We name it after movie serials, where at the end of the part, someone was hanging on a

410
00:44:50.580 --> 00:44:58.300
And he wondered if he or she would fall to his or her death, but, you know, who killed

411
00:44:58.300 --> 00:45:03.060
JR, you know, the greatest cliffhanger in history.

412
00:45:03.060 --> 00:45:07.860
But when you think about it, television soap operas, again, radio soap, this has always

413
00:45:07.860 --> 00:45:16.500
been a very popular genre in all different forms, and she really talks about its distinctive

414
00:45:16.500 --> 00:45:17.500
characteristics.

415
00:45:17.500 --> 00:45:35.500
We have a tendency, in some ways, to misread these Victorian novels because we apply to them the standards of television soap operas and not those of Flaubertian perfectly planned and conceived novels.

416
00:45:35.500 --> 00:45:56.500
And I'll maybe talk about this when we get to the X-Files on Friday, that there are certain ways in which television has developed this serial form and it is a new kind of art form with a new aesthetic in many ways and it's able to do things that other forms can't.

417
00:45:56.500 --> 00:46:04.500
Again, the serial form is generally associated with the lowest forms of pop culture in people's minds.

418
00:46:04.500 --> 00:46:18.500
Soap operas, comic strips, and yet it actually is a subtle art form and allows for kinds of deep and long-term developments in character, in plot,

419
00:46:18.500 --> 00:46:25.980
that many of the more traditional, you know, Sophocles' Oedipus is a brilliantly concentrated

420
00:46:25.980 --> 00:46:33.740
piece of drama and all this, you know, happening and unity of time and all that, and that's

421
00:46:33.740 --> 00:46:39.860
a great art form, but there's also something being said for the enormously sprawling canvas

422
00:46:39.860 --> 00:46:48.420
of a Dickens novel, which was largely made possible by the leisurely method of deliberate

423
00:46:48.420 --> 00:46:54.500
that, again, Dickens not only knew that his audience had a year, year and a half to wait,

424
00:46:54.500 --> 00:47:01.180
but he was making them wait. He was drawing things out. And these things can be incredibly

425
00:47:01.180 --> 00:47:09.500
well planned. So it's very distinctive to the 19th century novel in English. Again,

426
00:47:09.500 --> 00:47:15.940
some were not published serially, and some of the great ones were not, but many of them

427
00:47:15.940 --> 00:47:20.460
were published serially, and that had commercial reasons.

428
00:47:20.460 --> 00:47:29.260
It was a form of production that was effective, it was a form of marketing that was effective.

429
00:47:29.260 --> 00:47:35.380
And a lot of what you need to do to understand these novels, the ones that were serialized,

430
00:47:35.380 --> 00:47:39.480
is to understand the consequences of serialization.

431
00:47:39.480 --> 00:47:43.080
And some of them were negative, and some of them were positive.

432
00:47:43.080 --> 00:47:50.040
Let me begin with the negative ones, because again, I'm deliberately trying not to play

433
00:47:50.040 --> 00:47:59.880
down some of the negative aspects of the commercialization of literature.

434
00:47:59.880 --> 00:48:05.800
And in fact, many of the writers at the time complained about civilization, and some of

435
00:48:05.800 --> 00:48:08.080
them tried to avoid it.

436
00:48:08.080 --> 00:48:11.720
I have some quotes here that I'll read in a minute, just trying to find them.

437
00:48:11.720 --> 00:48:18.600
But let's look at some of the negative effects.

438
00:48:18.600 --> 00:48:28.080
Serialization meant you had to write to a certain length and the novel couldn't be shorter

439
00:48:28.080 --> 00:48:33.120
or longer, and in fact people signed contracts.

440
00:48:33.120 --> 00:48:39.560
I'm going to produce this novel for you at, I'm going to produce 20 parts, I'm going to

441
00:48:39.560 --> 00:48:44.680
You paid so much for 20 parts over this schedule, and you then had a schedule.

442
00:48:44.680 --> 00:48:49.560
I mean, they were not going to have 18 empty pages in the next issue of their magazine

443
00:48:49.560 --> 00:48:51.320
or miss the date on the part.

444
00:48:51.320 --> 00:48:59.400
And so you had to write to a schedule, and you know, if you were on part 19 and you had

445
00:48:59.400 --> 00:49:05.680
18 plot lines still going, the publisher then said to you, it's time to wrap it up for part

446
00:49:05.680 --> 00:49:06.680
20.

447
00:49:06.680 --> 00:49:09.680
The whole thing has to not end for the next issue.

448
00:49:09.680 --> 00:49:12.680
Resolve all 18 of those plot lines.

449
00:49:12.680 --> 00:49:16.680
And you couldn't say, but I need 17 more parts to resolve this.

450
00:49:16.680 --> 00:49:19.680
No, that novel was going to end the next month.

451
00:49:19.680 --> 00:49:26.680
And similarly, if invention flagged, you didn't know what we'd do.

452
00:49:26.680 --> 00:49:30.680
You had to produce something on time.

453
00:49:30.680 --> 00:49:34.680
Then we have correspondence, sometimes from Dickens to the authors,

454
00:49:34.680 --> 00:49:41.040
from, you know, telling them what to do and wrap it up or speed it up or slow it down.

455
00:49:41.040 --> 00:49:47.980
And so this is an example of negative commercial pressures.

456
00:49:47.980 --> 00:49:53.040
And many authors did complain bitterly about the system, but I don't want to overlook that.

457
00:49:53.040 --> 00:49:54.680
So let me give you some choice quotes.

458
00:49:54.680 --> 00:49:59.200
This is from Alan Dooley's book, Author and Printer, terrific book on the sort of the

459
00:49:59.200 --> 00:50:02.360
publication details of the industry in the 19th century.

460
00:50:02.360 --> 00:50:09.360
I put it on your supplementary bibliography, he gives us the example of Anthony Trollope,

461
00:50:09.360 --> 00:50:14.760
you know, one of the greatest and the most, one of the most successful novelists, he wrote

462
00:50:14.760 --> 00:50:24.560
I think a hundred novels, and his sister and mother, the Trollope family was a whole novel

463
00:50:24.560 --> 00:50:38.080
Tralop called this system the hurried publication of incompleted work and he held that, quote,

464
00:50:38.080 --> 00:50:43.400
the rushing mode of publication to which the system of serial stories had given rise and

465
00:50:43.400 --> 00:50:47.360
by which small parts as they were written were sent out to the press was injurious to

466
00:50:47.360 --> 00:50:48.360
the work done.

467
00:50:48.360 --> 00:50:54.360
So there is Tralop, one of the best, most successful novels of time, says this system

468
00:50:54.360 --> 00:51:08.360
is injurious, and Dooley goes on to say, to Trollope's eyes, the serial system, when it came to effect, not only the publication, but also the initial compositional work, resulted in a loss of artistic control.

469
00:51:08.360 --> 00:51:16.360
So there it is, a standard complaint against commercialization of art, that it results in loss of artistic control for the author.

470
00:51:16.360 --> 00:51:22.360
and those are serious problems, but there was a solution and Trollope found it.

471
00:51:22.360 --> 00:51:33.360
His customary protection against pressure that might have led to hasty publication was to complete a novel and revise it thoroughly before sending it to any of it to a publisher.

472
00:51:33.360 --> 00:51:39.360
If serial issue was planned, he then metered out the manuscript to the printers while he went to work on his next book.

473
00:51:39.360 --> 00:51:43.360
So again, there was a market problem, there was a solution.

474
00:51:43.360 --> 00:51:56.360
If you didn't like this system and you were incredibly fluent at writing astrologicals, you just wrote the book till you liked it and then pretended you were writing it month by month for the publisher.

475
00:51:56.360 --> 00:52:10.360
So, market problem, market solution. Another example, very interesting one, is from Harriet Martino, who is one of the great unsung writers of the Victorian age because she was pro-capitalist.

476
00:52:10.360 --> 00:52:16.360
If you ever want to have a fun read her illustrations of political economy, a little bit too much,

477
00:52:16.360 --> 00:52:23.360
David Ricardo in her economics, but basically it's one lesson after another in how trade

478
00:52:23.360 --> 00:52:27.000
unions are bad, free trade is good.

479
00:52:27.000 --> 00:52:31.120
She was the Bastiat of English.

480
00:52:31.120 --> 00:52:34.680
She really is a remarkable writer, I've tried to reintroduce her.

481
00:52:34.680 --> 00:52:40.300
It's horrific to discover that the most successful female writer in English of the first half

482
00:52:40.300 --> 00:52:45.300
for the 19th century was not just pro-capitalist, but rabidly pro-capitalist.

483
00:52:45.300 --> 00:52:50.300
She would sell 30,000 copies of one of these illustrations of political economy.

484
00:52:50.300 --> 00:52:59.300
Finally, Broadwood, the Canadian press, has brought some of these tales back in the print.

485
00:52:59.300 --> 00:53:05.300
Harriet Martino, M-A-R-T-I-N-E-A-U, she didn't like this serial method of production.

486
00:53:05.300 --> 00:53:15.800
And in her autobiography, she says I could not consciously adopt any method so unprincipled in an artistic sense as piecemeal publication.

487
00:53:15.800 --> 00:53:25.300
Whatever other merits it may have, a work of fiction cannot possibly be good in an artistic sense which can be cut up into portions of an arbitrary length.

488
00:53:25.300 --> 00:53:31.300
The success of the portions requires that each should have some sort of effective close.

489
00:53:31.300 --> 00:53:42.800
She knows the cliffhanger principle, and to provide a certain number of these at regular intervals is like breaking up the broad lights and shadows of a great picture and spoiling it as a composition.

490
00:53:42.800 --> 00:53:55.300
I might never do anything to advance or sustain literary art, but I would never do nothing to corrupt it by adopting a false principle of composition.

491
00:53:55.300 --> 00:54:04.300
There it is, Harriet Martin, who, incredibly pro-capitalist, does not like this aspect of commercial publication, the serialization, and wouldn't do it.

492
00:54:04.300 --> 00:54:13.300
Here's an example in the case of Elizabeth Gaskell, also pro-capitalist, by the way.

493
00:54:13.300 --> 00:54:18.300
Her novel, North and South, is a defense of the industrial system of England.

494
00:54:18.300 --> 00:54:30.300
This is actually an amazing story. Dickens was writing Hard Times and publishing it in Household Words, his attack on the industrial Midlands, and Gaskell wanted to write a defense of it.

495
00:54:30.300 --> 00:54:39.300
And Dickens published it. Why? Because her first novel sold well, he liked it, he wanted to get her in his magazine.

496
00:54:39.300 --> 00:54:44.900
In fact, Gaskell's book, North and South, is a perfect critique of Dickens' hard times

497
00:54:44.900 --> 00:54:48.900
and shows why hard times gives a very distorted view of the industrial midlands.

498
00:54:48.900 --> 00:54:55.900
But, you know, Dickens had an ideological quarrel with Gaskell, but he published her

499
00:54:55.900 --> 00:54:59.500
because he could make money that way. Again, the triumph of the commercial system.

500
00:54:59.500 --> 00:55:05.100
But when they planned out the publication of North and South, Dickens miscalculated.

501
00:55:05.100 --> 00:55:13.100
And so Gaskell, he pressured her to make the work shorter than she intended.

502
00:55:13.100 --> 00:55:17.100
This is from, I'm quoting from an edition of the novel, the Penguin edition.

503
00:55:17.100 --> 00:55:23.100
What from her viewpoint constituted the worst compression was that made in the last few chapters of the novel.

504
00:55:23.100 --> 00:55:28.100
So again, I'm not denying that this system resulted in problems.

505
00:55:28.100 --> 00:55:35.100
Dickens himself, in talking about one of his own early serial publications,

506
00:55:35.100 --> 00:55:38.100
I believe it was the old Curiosity Shop, said,

507
00:55:38.100 --> 00:55:44.100
I was obliged to cramp most dreadfully what I thought a pretty idea in the last chapter.

508
00:55:44.100 --> 00:55:47.100
I hadn't room to turn.

509
00:55:47.100 --> 00:55:51.100
So even Dickens felt at times uncomfortable with this system.

510
00:55:51.100 --> 00:56:05.100
Now there was an answer to that, which was that yes, the novel was initially published serially, but then particularly if it was successful, it would be republished in book form.

511
00:56:05.100 --> 00:56:19.100
And at that time, authors had the opportunity to revise them. So for example, with North and South, Gaskell expanded the ending for the book form that she'd been forced to compress for the serial form.

512
00:56:19.100 --> 00:56:46.700
So again, market problem, market solution, it's, you know, nasty that they had a rush to finish some of the novels but it's not the end of the world because it wasn't the end of the book and again the market gives you your second chance and so it's, you know, it's a great scholarly enterprise now to get to compare the serial publication of the novel with the eventual book publication.

513
00:56:46.700 --> 00:56:57.700
So again, this is an example where we have really detailed information and I can show you, I don't have to speculate what Bach felt about as patron or things like that.

514
00:56:57.700 --> 00:57:09.700
We have records here that show that artists were uncomfortable with certain aspects of a system that was developed for largely commercial reasons.

515
00:57:09.700 --> 00:57:18.700
But, there's another side to this story, and I've given equal time to the negative case against serialization.

516
00:57:18.700 --> 00:57:25.700
Let me talk about the positive case, and that is that serialization became an incredible feedback system.

517
00:57:25.700 --> 00:57:35.700
And one of the things I want to argue from here on in with increasing frequency is that what characterizes commercial culture is feedback.

518
00:57:35.700 --> 00:57:51.700
And here's where the relation of an artist to his public is important and how it can actually improve his work, or her work, in the case of people like Harriet Martinot and Elizabeth Gaskell.

519
00:57:51.700 --> 00:58:04.700
And by the way, again, you know, I mentioned that Gaskell and Martinot were very sympathetic to capitalism, and with good reason, because capitalism was very good to women in the publishing business in the 19th century.

520
00:58:04.700 --> 00:58:12.700
You can talk about every system of finance in the arts, patronage, government funding.

521
00:58:12.700 --> 00:58:20.700
Nothing ever opened up more opportunities for women in culture than 19th century British publishing.

522
00:58:20.700 --> 00:58:28.700
And more than half the novels were written by women that were published in 19th century Britain.

523
00:58:28.700 --> 00:58:32.700
And there's no record like that anywhere else in culture up to that point.

524
00:58:32.700 --> 00:58:36.900
And it's not because Charles Dickens, as a publisher, was a feminist.

525
00:58:36.900 --> 00:58:39.900
It's because he was a capitalist.

526
00:58:39.900 --> 00:58:41.900
And he wanted to publish talent.

527
00:58:41.900 --> 00:58:47.060
And he didn't care who wrote the book if he thought it would sell.

528
00:58:47.060 --> 00:58:51.820
In some cases, women had to publish under male names, or thought they had to,

529
00:58:51.820 --> 00:58:58.380
like George Eliot, Marianne Evans, or the Bronte sisters,

530
00:58:58.380 --> 00:59:00.340
were like Pat on Saturday Night Live.

531
00:59:00.340 --> 00:59:25.900
The greatest cultural opportunity yet open for women in the world was the 19th century

532
00:59:25.900 --> 00:59:28.980
British publishing industry.

533
00:59:28.980 --> 00:59:35.460
So, let me now turn to the way in which the serial system actually had a positive effect

534
00:59:35.460 --> 00:59:42.140
on literature, and that is that novelists could watch the reaction of their audience

535
00:59:42.140 --> 00:59:45.620
as they worked.

536
00:59:45.620 --> 00:59:52.940
And this took several forms, part publications were in some ways, in some cases, reviewed

537
00:59:52.940 --> 00:59:59.940
as they came out, you know, and you'd see reviews, you know, like reviews of TV shows,

538
00:59:59.940 --> 01:00:07.200
you know, oh, the latest installment of Oliver Twist is terrific, Dickens has carried the

539
01:00:07.200 --> 01:00:13.740
story on, it's just exciting, or, you know, something's going wrong with Dombey and Son,

540
01:00:13.740 --> 01:00:20.860
it's getting a little dark, Dickens, you know, we love you for the laughter, so there'd actually

541
01:00:20.860 --> 01:00:30.860
There were certainly word of mouth, and there were sales figures, and that was quite easy to chart.

542
01:00:30.860 --> 01:00:44.860
And so authors couldn't always tell why the sales figures were changing, but they seemed to have pretty good guesses.

543
01:00:44.860 --> 01:00:54.860
And so you get a phenomenon in the Victorian novel that is very similar to what we see in TV soap operas.

544
01:00:54.860 --> 01:01:01.860
And that is the life and death of a character hung on sales figures.

545
01:01:01.860 --> 01:01:07.860
Sometimes, now we know this in soap operas on TV.

546
01:01:07.860 --> 01:01:17.780
TV. You know, they try all sorts of different characters and they can tell which ones click

547
01:01:17.780 --> 01:01:27.180
and which ones don't. It's often also a case of which actors click or don't, but you know,

548
01:01:27.180 --> 01:01:33.220
one week a character is very healthy in a soap opera, next week mysteriously develops

549
01:02:03.220 --> 01:02:09.220
and then introduced these characters, the lone gunmen, the three nerdy computer types that helped Mulder.

550
01:02:09.220 --> 01:02:14.220
And I think it was Glenn Morgan who had written the episode.

551
01:02:14.220 --> 01:02:19.220
I mean, he thought it had failed and, you know, what a silly idea that was.

552
01:02:19.220 --> 01:02:23.220
He decided, fortunately, they were just in this one episode.

553
01:02:23.220 --> 01:02:30.220
And then the Internet lit up from all the computer nerds who identified with the lone gunmen

554
01:02:30.220 --> 01:02:34.220
and said, you know, this is the greatest thing we've ever seen in the show. Bring them back, bring them back.

555
01:02:34.220 --> 01:02:37.220
And, you know, the rest is history. They eventually got their own spin-off series.

556
01:02:37.220 --> 01:02:42.220
They certainly were one of the great things over the years in the X-Files. That's feedback.

557
01:02:42.220 --> 01:02:49.220
That's interesting. In that case, the author didn't realize, the author of the characters didn't even realize how good they were.

558
01:02:49.220 --> 01:02:56.220
He didn't actually see the potential in them. And if there hadn't been an Internet, no more lone gunmen.

559
01:02:56.220 --> 01:03:01.220
And again, they don't make or break the series, but they really ended up adding a great element to it.

560
01:03:01.220 --> 01:03:05.220
And that's what I mean when I talk about feedback in a serial mode,

561
01:03:05.220 --> 01:03:08.220
where there's ways of monitoring the audience reaction.

562
01:03:08.220 --> 01:03:17.220
Now, you know, again, in the sort of high classic, esphete mode of criticism, or the Marxist mode of criticism,

563
01:03:17.220 --> 01:03:22.220
that lone gunman episode is an example of market corruption.

564
01:03:22.220 --> 01:03:31.220
that Glenn Morgan had this pure artistic vision and he allowed it to be corrupted by the impact of the market.

565
01:03:31.220 --> 01:03:37.220
Oh, if only he had been true to his own disgust with his creation.

566
01:03:37.220 --> 01:03:44.220
But, you know, in retrospect, it seems the audience was right and Morgan was wrong,

567
01:03:44.220 --> 01:03:50.220
that he'd stumbled upon something that was really good, he didn't understand its potential, but the market did.

568
01:03:50.220 --> 01:03:55.340
and fortunately the market was there to steer him, put him on course.

569
01:03:55.340 --> 01:04:02.140
Now this is a feature of all serial production and Heywood's book is very good on tracing

570
01:04:02.140 --> 01:04:03.320
this.

571
01:04:03.320 --> 01:04:08.280
She wrote on the Terry and the Pirate comic strip because the creator of it had saved

572
01:04:08.280 --> 01:04:16.620
all his fan mail and made it available to her and explained to her how he listened to

573
01:04:16.620 --> 01:04:22.740
to his fans, because fans are great, they tell you exactly what they think, we like

574
01:04:22.740 --> 01:04:32.340
this character, we hate that character, can't the character go to Brazil this time, or like

575
01:04:32.340 --> 01:04:39.660
with the Simpsons, Canadians love the Simpsons, but the Simpsons went to Japan, they went

576
01:04:39.660 --> 01:04:43.420
to Australia, but they never went to Canada and Canadians kept complaining, why can't

577
01:04:43.420 --> 01:04:50.420
The Simpsons got to Canada. Well, when The Simpsons finally went to Canada, maybe the Canadians weren't so pleased.

578
01:04:50.420 --> 01:04:59.420
But again, these are the things that happen that make modern popular culture so vibrant.

579
01:04:59.420 --> 01:05:10.420
One of the charges of Marxists, and it's the great Frankfurt School argument, is that capitalist mass culture produces passive consumers.

580
01:05:10.420 --> 01:05:40.420
that they just sit there and take it to the point being that Hollywood or, you know, capitalist, the capitalist culture industry is working on, that they can market anything, you know, tell that to the guy who produced Ishtar, or the guy who produced a battlefield earth, or the guy who produced Waterworld, that Hollywood can market anything

581
01:05:40.420 --> 01:05:48.420
Hayek really added to the realist a great book called Fiasco about Hollywood's great marketing production and marketing failures.

582
01:05:48.420 --> 01:05:56.420
But it's really amazing that the Frankfurt School based this argument on no evidence whatsoever.

583
01:05:56.420 --> 01:06:08.420
And Hayek was the beginning of a very important movement in popular culture studies coming out of, oddly enough, from a Marxist orientation,

584
01:06:08.420 --> 01:06:15.420
to look at the active consumer in popular culture, not the passive consumer.

585
01:06:15.420 --> 01:06:21.420
It's led by a professor at MIT named Henry Jenkins, whom I'll refer to several times from now on.

586
01:06:21.420 --> 01:06:33.420
But he did some of the first studies of fan fiction and showed the audience of Star Trek, for example, is not passive.

587
01:06:33.420 --> 01:06:37.420
They have taken possession of the show and the characters.

588
01:06:37.420 --> 01:06:47.420
And if you know about these fanzines, fans create, especially from the original Star Trek, stories that Gene Roddenberry never imagined.

589
01:06:47.420 --> 01:06:58.420
Things are happening on the internet between Spock and Kirk that Gene Roddenberry never dreamed of, because fans have taken over the characters.

590
01:06:58.420 --> 01:07:03.420
They're not going to sit back passively, and Jenkins has written a book about that.

591
01:07:03.420 --> 01:07:10.100
about that, they're called poachers, that's now the technical term for active fans, and

592
01:07:10.100 --> 01:07:16.700
what I'm saying is that goes all the way back to Dickens' novels, and Heywood's book includes

593
01:07:16.700 --> 01:07:28.380
that and she sees it as this wonderful aspect of modern mass culture, that it involves feedback,

594
01:07:28.380 --> 01:07:36.940
And we see the phenomenon, this is actually an example from Haywood's Consuming Pleasures,

595
01:07:36.940 --> 01:07:37.940
about Dickens.

596
01:07:37.940 --> 01:07:45.260
He greatly expanded Sam Weller's role in Pickwick Papers when sales jumped to 40,000 after Sam's

597
01:07:45.260 --> 01:07:47.860
first appearance.

598
01:07:47.860 --> 01:07:53.780
And nothing had ever sold 40,000 copies in print except the Bible when this happened.

599
01:07:53.780 --> 01:07:56.740
And you know, things went through the roof.

600
01:07:56.740 --> 01:08:07.940
Another example of this is with old curiosity shop, let me see if I can find my figures on this.

601
01:08:07.940 --> 01:08:15.460
The Dickens hadn't even intended it to be a novel.

602
01:08:15.460 --> 01:08:22.740
He was just putting it together, wanted it to be a miscellany of essays and various other things.

603
01:08:22.740 --> 01:08:29.420
But he's just going to, you know, just sort of a loose collection of tales and essays.

604
01:08:29.420 --> 01:08:34.660
But he introduced this character of Little Nell.

605
01:08:34.660 --> 01:08:41.420
And just the appearance of Little Nell in one of the parts of publication increased

606
01:08:41.420 --> 01:08:45.660
the circulation from 60,000 to 100,000.

607
01:08:45.660 --> 01:08:46.660
And that was a breakthrough.

608
01:08:46.660 --> 01:08:50.700
It's like the first movie that sells $100 million.

609
01:08:50.700 --> 01:09:03.700
The first thing that ever sold, $100,000, and suddenly Dickens decides, I'm going to write a novel about Little Nell, and it took a lot of scrambling on his part, and he got a lot of things wrong in the book after that.

610
01:09:03.700 --> 01:09:11.700
This is from a man named Eason and his introduction to the volume.

611
01:09:11.700 --> 01:09:16.700
The awkward result of this last minute expansion of The Little Tale can be detected in the early part of the novel.

612
01:09:16.700 --> 01:09:26.700
The malicious profligate Fred Trent is soon dropped as Dickens prefers to develop the far more spectacular Malice of Quilp and Dick Swiller's engaging profligacy.

613
01:09:26.700 --> 01:09:35.700
The Sophie Wackos episode proves to be a hilarious irrelevancy kit who is introduced as a harmless semi-idiot, occasionally with some light relief in Chapter 1.

614
01:09:35.700 --> 01:09:39.700
By some 20 chapters later has become an earnest responsible young man.

615
01:09:39.700 --> 01:09:53.700
So, this quick decision to change a loose collection of essays and tales into a novel resulted in a kind of aesthetic mess there, but resulted in a novel that has a great deal of energy.

616
01:09:53.700 --> 01:10:02.700
Because Dickens could tap into the energy of his audience. That's the point, you know, the X-Files people through the internet could tap into the energy of their audience.

617
01:10:02.700 --> 01:10:28.700
Haywood traces in his correspondence between the guy who did Terry and his Pirates, I forget his name, and his audience, and it is a feedback loop, and that's what's characteristic of spontaneous orders, that Hayek has shown, and of course it's really in some ways, you know, the essence of Austrian economics, that economics is a feedback, that the market is a feedback loop.

618
01:10:28.700 --> 01:10:39.700
The way the market works in general is that people try to anticipate what will sell, sometimes do marketing studies and things like that.

619
01:10:39.700 --> 01:10:47.700
They try to figure out what will sell, they try to figure out how to produce it at a price at which they can sell it.

620
01:10:47.700 --> 01:10:54.700
And a lot of planning goes into it, but you never know until you bring the product to market.

621
01:10:54.700 --> 01:10:59.400
and it's typical of markets that the majority of new products fail.

622
01:11:01.400 --> 01:11:07.800
It's just that when they succeed, they succeed big, because so many people are failing.

623
01:11:09.400 --> 01:11:16.200
And the thing that happens in a market is when you succeed, you really push what succeeds.

624
01:11:16.200 --> 01:11:23.400
Then everyone comes in, starts copying what succeeded, and if you're the original marker,

625
01:11:23.400 --> 01:11:28.400
You have to work harder, cut your costs, improve your product, and how do you improve your product?

626
01:11:28.400 --> 01:11:36.400
Trying to figure out what made it sell, listening to your customers, how you can improve your product.

627
01:11:36.400 --> 01:11:39.400
That's the way markets work, and it's no different in culture.

628
01:11:39.400 --> 01:11:45.400
You know anything about the television business, the movie business, that's exactly the way it operates.

629
01:11:45.400 --> 01:11:55.400
Critics, and here I mean academics, they think you somehow failed if you didn't plan out everything perfectly in advance.

630
01:11:55.400 --> 01:12:00.400
And they somehow think it would be possible to plan out everything perfectly in advance.

631
01:12:00.400 --> 01:12:05.400
That's the socialist way of thinking. That's the thinking behind central planning.

632
01:12:05.400 --> 01:12:11.400
In general, when socialists look at the market, they see all the failure. They see all the messiness.

633
01:12:11.400 --> 01:12:14.760
they say there's got to be a more rational way to do this

634
01:12:14.760 --> 01:12:18.360
this is the stupidest way to do things all these different people

635
01:12:18.360 --> 01:12:21.640
trying things out look so many of them are failing

636
01:12:21.640 --> 01:12:26.360
look at all the wasted resources and we can just get together and plan it out

637
01:12:26.360 --> 01:12:30.520
it would work perfectly but no of course then you have one

638
01:12:30.520 --> 01:12:35.960
giant failure because nobody can anticipate everything perfectly

639
01:12:35.960 --> 01:12:41.000
so if you're only making one guess the odds are tremendous that that will be

640
01:12:41.000 --> 01:12:54.000
The way markets work is a lot of people get screwed, but somebody succeeds and then everyone can start copying that and you get better ways of doing things.

641
01:12:54.000 --> 01:13:01.000
That's the way the market economy works in general and what I'm saying is that's in fact the way the cultural market works.

642
01:13:01.000 --> 01:13:08.000
You see it in films and television, but you can see it already in the 19th century novel.

643
01:13:08.000 --> 01:13:17.000
in a novel. Yes, novelists planned out their novelists in advance, even when they were doing serial publication.

644
01:13:17.000 --> 01:13:26.000
We have Dickens' sketches, for example. When he starts a novel, he tries to figure out who the characters are going to be.

645
01:13:26.000 --> 01:13:35.000
He'll have notes when to introduce them. He may have an ending in mind. We see in some cases he's talking about aesthetic principles.

646
01:13:35.000 --> 01:13:38.400
He says, you know, have a chapter here to balance that chapter there.

647
01:13:38.400 --> 01:13:40.880
He was a good novel writer, yeah.

648
01:13:40.880 --> 01:13:47.560
But the finished novels never follow the initial plan insofar as we have the initial plan.

649
01:13:47.560 --> 01:13:51.120
He always revised in the course of production.

650
01:13:51.120 --> 01:13:58.600
Now again, a Marxist would say he's revising under commercial pressures and that makes the novels worse.

651
01:13:58.600 --> 01:14:04.520
And many esthetes would say, many of the new critics would have said this, he's giving in,

652
01:14:04.520 --> 01:14:14.520
And he's compromising. He's selling out. And this will be repeated even to the video game market now.

653
01:14:14.520 --> 01:14:18.520
They talk about people selling out to commercial pressures in the video game market.

654
01:14:18.520 --> 01:14:22.520
And there is some aspect of that, and I've pointed to it.

655
01:14:22.520 --> 01:14:32.520
We can definitely see times when the novels have problems because Dickens was giving into commercial problems.

656
01:14:32.520 --> 01:14:39.880
But if the customer is not always right, it's also true that he's not always wrong.

657
01:14:39.880 --> 01:14:46.160
And sometimes what the public was telling Dickens was right, and he recognized that.

658
01:14:46.160 --> 01:14:52.360
He realized that some characters weren't working and ought to be killed off.

659
01:14:52.360 --> 01:14:59.480
He realized some characters had much more potential than he realized and they should

660
01:14:59.480 --> 01:15:19.480
One of the books I've recommended, Paul Delaney's literature, Money in the Market, great title, talks about Thackeray when in writing the last chronicle of Barsit, he decided to kill off his character, Mrs. Prouty.

661
01:15:19.480 --> 01:15:29.480
We see, you know, both sides, justice and soap operas, some characters they expand the role, some characters mysteriously die because the public doesn't seem to like them.

662
01:15:29.480 --> 01:15:39.480
And that sounds very crude to people. I mean, the market can be crude, but it's effective because it's crude.

663
01:15:39.480 --> 01:16:09.480
and again you can see there someone with the aesthetic of Flaubert, someone with the aesthetic of James Joyce, novel must be absolutely perfect, every word must be perfect, no one word could be added, no one word could be subtracted, I don't deny the greatness of that aesthetic and there have been novelists, especially modern novelists, who work on that principle

664
01:16:09.480 --> 01:16:15.400
You know, to read something like Joyce's portrait of the artist, you see how perfectly constructed

665
01:16:15.400 --> 01:16:19.640
it is and how perfectly every sentence is constructed.

666
01:16:19.640 --> 01:16:27.160
It's really amazing and it's great, but it's not the only valid aesthetic.

667
01:16:27.160 --> 01:16:33.280
No one could ever say of a Dickens novel, remove one word and the entire structure falls.

668
01:16:33.280 --> 01:16:37.560
Remember that in the movie last night with Mozart?

669
01:16:37.560 --> 01:16:44.240
That is a legitimate aesthetic, the aesthetic of perfection, and many of the greatest works

670
01:16:44.240 --> 01:16:51.880
of art have been produced by artists like that, typically characteristic of poetry.

671
01:16:51.880 --> 01:16:57.000
When you've got a 20-line poem, indeed you want every word to be perfect, and you want

672
01:16:57.000 --> 01:17:01.880
to be able to say of a great lyric poem, remove one word, and there would be diminishment,

673
01:17:01.880 --> 01:17:04.080
as Salieri says.

674
01:17:04.080 --> 01:17:10.320
But a 1,000-page Dickens novel? Remove one word and there would be diminishment? Thank

675
01:17:10.320 --> 01:17:17.320
God! And indeed it's hilarious. Dooley traces this. In the accidents of printing, strange

676
01:17:17.320 --> 01:17:22.760
things happen. There's very much on record that novels have come to print, sometimes

677
01:17:22.760 --> 01:17:28.000
not just with a word missing, but a whole chapter missing, and the editor missed it,

678
01:17:28.000 --> 01:17:38.000
The author missed it in proofreading, and, you know, there probably was something overlong about the novel, if that could happen.

679
01:17:38.000 --> 01:17:48.000
And so, you know, it is characteristic of popular culture that it does not have the aesthetic perfection of a modernist lyric by Yates,

680
01:17:48.000 --> 01:17:57.000
or even of a great classic art novel by a Flaubert or a Joyce, but it compensates for that with other virtues.

681
01:17:57.000 --> 01:18:03.440
What you tend to get in popular culture and, you know, here I'm talking about Dickens.

682
01:18:03.440 --> 01:18:13.480
What makes a Dickens novel so good is the vitality of it, the richness of the canvas.

683
01:18:13.480 --> 01:18:15.720
You can't have everything.

684
01:18:15.720 --> 01:18:24.320
You can't have the aesthetic perfection of a brief modernist lyric and a kaleidoscope

685
01:18:24.320 --> 01:18:28.480
of Human Life, as you get in a Dickens novel.

686
01:18:28.480 --> 01:18:36.240
The weakness of Dickens novels is the strength of Dickens novels.

687
01:18:36.240 --> 01:18:43.400
Henry James, who was such an esthete, complained about other people's novels as loose-bagging

688
01:18:43.400 --> 01:18:45.800
monsters.

689
01:18:45.800 --> 01:18:47.840
And there's a certain truth to that.

690
01:18:47.840 --> 01:18:53.440
But there's also a certain prissiness to the perfect aesthetic of Henry James.

691
01:18:53.440 --> 01:19:00.000
And you know, I basically think the public's taste is vindicated in that it preferred Dickens'

692
01:19:00.000 --> 01:19:08.160
novels to James' novels, but let my aesthetic friends never hear me say that.

693
01:19:08.160 --> 01:19:15.640
But what I'm saying is that there's a kind of looseness, but at the same time richness

694
01:19:15.640 --> 01:19:24.640
to modern popular cultural forms from Dickens' serialized novels down to serialized television.

695
01:19:24.640 --> 01:19:39.640
And there's something wrong about applying the aesthetic of a Florbert novel or a Yeats lyric to a Dickens novel or to a television series like The X-Files.

696
01:19:39.640 --> 01:19:44.480
They're very different things, produced under different conditions, with different audiences and view,

697
01:19:44.480 --> 01:19:49.240
and they each have their defects and their virtues.

698
01:19:49.240 --> 01:19:56.520
And what I'm saying about the serialized novel here, it's a real example of a marketed commodity,

699
01:19:56.520 --> 01:20:04.160
with all the aspects of capitalist production, standardized production, mass production,

700
01:20:04.160 --> 01:20:09.200
the need for cost-cutting, the need for marketing, tie-in products, all these things.

701
01:20:09.200 --> 01:20:20.100
That's the financial underpinning of it and why the Victorian novel attracted such talent in the 19th century.

702
01:20:20.100 --> 01:20:31.600
I said this about the Elizabethan theater. It was a way to offer economic and social mobility at a time when it was not generally available.

703
01:20:31.600 --> 01:20:39.100
Well, economic and social mobility had increased greatly in the 19th century, but there's always room for more.

704
01:20:39.100 --> 01:20:44.700
and it became clear that there was money to be made in fiction writing.

705
01:20:44.700 --> 01:20:57.700
I've seen various figures on this but it seems that I think there was something like 40,000 novels published in England in the course of the 19th century.

706
01:20:57.700 --> 01:21:08.300
That's actually a pretty staggering feature, a figure of which I doubt that more than 200 are read by anybody today,

707
01:21:08.300 --> 01:21:16.300
including professors of Victorian literature. Of those 200, about 50 of them are canonical.

708
01:21:16.300 --> 01:21:22.300
That's really staggering, but that's what culture is like. That's what I've been trying to get across to you,

709
01:21:22.300 --> 01:21:28.300
that when we look at television and say it's a vast wasteland and it's just full of junk,

710
01:21:28.300 --> 01:21:35.300
you can't believe how much junk there was in a Victorian novel. I'm interested in mummies and mummy stories.

711
01:21:35.300 --> 01:21:41.300
Mummy stories, I love the Mummy movies, and I went back and read a novel, I guess it's

712
01:21:41.300 --> 01:21:47.300
the first Mummy novel, it's called The Mummy, it's by a woman named Loudon, it was published

713
01:21:47.300 --> 01:21:51.900
in the 1820s, I discovered it by accident, and they're, thank God there's only an abridgment

714
01:21:51.900 --> 01:21:59.900
available, I mean, it is unspeakably bad, you just can't begin to understand, it's

715
01:21:59.900 --> 01:22:11.900
It's not like a bad novel. She can't tell a story. You realize why this novel is unread.

716
01:22:11.900 --> 01:22:19.900
Take the worst Victorian novel you ever had to read in college, and this is 50 times worse.

717
01:22:19.900 --> 01:22:26.900
I just can't imagine how bad some of these other novels were. I'm never going to find out,

718
01:22:26.900 --> 01:22:39.900
It's as easily as bad as the worst movie ever made, I mean we're saying Plan 9 of outer space of the 19th century novel here.

719
01:22:39.900 --> 01:22:46.900
Worst television movie ever made, but this is the way markets in general operate and the way I'm saying cultural markets operate.

720
01:22:46.900 --> 01:22:51.900
You just try everything and the way to try everything is open up the market.

721
01:22:51.900 --> 01:22:57.700
and there was relative ease of entry to the business of writing novels you just

722
01:22:57.700 --> 01:23:01.180
and you know paper had become cheap enough so people could sit down write

723
01:23:01.180 --> 01:23:05.060
these novels and then you just took a chance submitted in publishing but what

724
01:23:05.060 --> 01:23:09.340
I'm getting at there was no way of knowing ahead of time which novel would

725
01:23:09.340 --> 01:23:14.180
be the great one you know that's the the socialist dream of central planning it's

726
01:23:14.180 --> 01:23:19.900
the aesthetic dream that somewhere there's this artistic depot that Beethoven

727
01:23:19.900 --> 01:23:27.900
Why waste writing 40,000 novels to produce 50 good ones?

728
01:23:27.900 --> 01:23:35.900
That's like saying, why have 40,000 toothpastes to produce 50 good ones?

729
01:23:35.900 --> 01:23:41.900
But that's life. People can figure out ahead what will work.

730
01:23:41.900 --> 01:23:45.900
And in art it's even more complicated than some of the simpler things.

731
01:23:45.900 --> 01:23:51.900
And in economics, presumably, it's easier to design a toothpaste than to write a novel.

732
01:23:51.900 --> 01:23:59.900
But, so, again, today when we look at the Victorian novel, we see those 50 great novels,

733
01:23:59.900 --> 01:24:05.900
you know, 15 of them by Dickens, and we say, wow, what a cultural peak.

734
01:24:05.900 --> 01:24:10.900
And look at all these bad movies in the 20th century.

735
01:24:10.900 --> 01:24:22.900
Well, if you took the 50 greatest movies of the 20th century, I'm going on record, they are better than the 50 greatest novels of the 19th century in all of Europe.

736
01:24:22.900 --> 01:24:32.900
Well, that lets in Dusty Uski. So let's say the 50 greatest movies are better than the 50 greatest English novels of the 19th century.

737
01:24:32.900 --> 01:24:33.900
in the 19th century.

738
01:24:33.900 --> 01:24:38.460
So I have to say the 50 greatest English movies of the 20th century are not better than the

739
01:24:38.460 --> 01:24:39.460
50 greatest English movies.

740
01:24:39.460 --> 01:24:41.740
Well, you get my point.

741
01:24:41.740 --> 01:24:49.980
It's unfair to compare the thousands of garbage movies of the 20th century with the 50 greatest

742
01:24:49.980 --> 01:24:52.740
novels of the 19th century.

743
01:24:52.740 --> 01:24:55.860
Compare the greatest with the greatest, compare the mass with the mass.

744
01:24:55.860 --> 01:25:01.740
The mass of Victorian novels is easily as bad in aesthetic terms as the mass of movies.

745
01:25:01.740 --> 01:25:08.180
But here's the nature of culture. It is a spontaneous order. It works by trial and error and feedback.

746
01:25:08.180 --> 01:25:14.340
It does not work by careful prior planning. And even what I'm saying is the individual

747
01:25:14.340 --> 01:25:23.460
novels did not often work by perfect prior planning. Like entrepreneurs, the novelists

748
01:25:23.460 --> 01:25:28.340
went into the process of writing the novel with a plan, but like good entrepreneurs,

749
01:25:28.340 --> 01:25:34.340
and they were willing to look at how things were working and revise their plans as they go along.

750
01:25:34.340 --> 01:25:43.340
You know, that's what government planning never allows for, is competitive planning, alternative planning and plan revision.

751
01:25:43.340 --> 01:25:50.340
The government just stumbles ahead with its standard operating procedures into one failure after another.

752
01:25:50.340 --> 01:25:54.340
And that's what our culture would look like if the government were planning it.

753
01:25:54.340 --> 01:26:01.780
So imagine if in 1800, the British government had had a cultural policy and decided how

754
01:26:01.780 --> 01:26:07.020
England could develop a great novel industry in the 19th century and picked out through

755
01:26:07.020 --> 01:26:12.700
committee and grant applications who the great novelists would be and how they should write

756
01:26:12.700 --> 01:26:13.700
their novels.

757
01:26:13.700 --> 01:26:14.700
Dickens?

758
01:26:14.700 --> 01:26:17.340
Who's Charles Dickens?

759
01:26:17.340 --> 01:26:20.000
Pickwick papers?

760
01:26:20.000 --> 01:26:26.000
some picaresque tale about some guy wandering around England with his sidekick Sam? Rejected.

761
01:26:26.000 --> 01:26:37.000
So anyway, I think the Victorian Night is a case where we get a really concrete example of the interaction of commerce and culture.

762
01:26:37.000 --> 01:26:44.000
And again, it has certain negative aspects, but I think the positive aspects very much count for more than the negative ones.

763
01:26:44.000 --> 01:26:48.000
So let me stop here and again take a few questions. Yes?

764
01:26:48.000 --> 01:26:59.000
It's a pretty good reputation of the Frankfurt School and a lot of the pessimistic views of culture that Dickens was one of the highest quality offices in the 19th century and also one of the best selling.

765
01:26:59.000 --> 01:27:08.000
But how do we respond to markets today where you have people like Dan Brown or John Grisham or Tom Clancy who are the best sellers?

766
01:27:08.000 --> 01:27:14.000
And they're the best sellers because often they're very good at creating cliffhangers or whatever it seems they have within their books.

767
01:27:14.000 --> 01:27:44.000
I actually have a kind of grudging affection for the Da Vinci Code and I'll just since you'll bring it up I'll say this I think it's actually a kind of tribute to popular culture that that book has been successful I mean it's not a great book but it has a good cliffhanger aspect and whatever you say about

768
01:27:44.000 --> 01:27:50.040
about the content, I'm just astounded that a book that talks about the Albigensian Crusade

769
01:27:50.040 --> 01:27:57.080
and Gnosticism and the Gnostic Gospels and Nagami, that that's become the most popular

770
01:27:57.080 --> 01:28:03.440
book almost of all time. I mean, if I had read that for a publisher, I would have said,

771
01:28:03.440 --> 01:28:08.560
this damn thing is too intellectual. This is never going anywhere. Talking about Leonardo

772
01:28:08.560 --> 01:28:14.200
Paul da Vinci and Isaac Newton and the Knights Templar, give me a break, the public's never

773
01:28:14.200 --> 01:28:15.200
going to go for this.

774
01:28:15.200 --> 01:28:19.960
I actually, I think it says something good about the public, in this one case, that a

775
01:28:19.960 --> 01:28:24.880
book that deals with issues that I've been fascinated with for years and have studied

776
01:28:24.880 --> 01:28:28.840
and so on, that, you know, Rosicrucianism comes up.

777
01:28:28.840 --> 01:28:35.080
So I think the da Vinci Code is actually a compliment to pop culture.

778
01:28:35.080 --> 01:28:43.600
But in general, we'll actually get to this when we talk about modernism.

779
01:28:43.600 --> 01:28:54.600
What has happened in mass culture is that the whole range of reading has just exponentially

780
01:28:54.600 --> 01:28:56.520
increased.

781
01:28:56.520 --> 01:29:04.640
And so, so many more books are published now and in such greater numbers that even Dickens

782
01:29:04.640 --> 01:29:09.200
is never sold in the numbers that Dan Brown does.

783
01:29:09.200 --> 01:29:19.440
And so novels that would be the aesthetic equivalent of Dickens or let's, I mean, Dickens

784
01:29:19.440 --> 01:29:25.440
here is, novels that would be the aesthetic equivalent of George Eliot and Thackeray and

785
01:29:25.440 --> 01:29:31.480
the Brontes, they are selling in larger numbers now.

786
01:29:31.480 --> 01:29:38.480
The Cowan makes this point well, that what upsets people is, again, the envy principle, the relative principle.

787
01:29:38.480 --> 01:29:45.480
They are frustrated that Dan Brown sells many more copies than, let's say, Don DeLillo.

788
01:29:45.480 --> 01:29:50.480
If I had to name the greatest living American novelist, I'd say Don DeLillo.

789
01:29:50.480 --> 01:29:58.480
But Don DeLillo sells in larger numbers than the Bronte sisters ever did, and by a rather large figure.

790
01:29:58.480 --> 01:30:09.480
and he got a million dollar advance I believe for what was the underworld and he's been able to live on his career as a novelist.

791
01:30:09.480 --> 01:30:18.480
So the relative numbers look bad, the absolute numbers look really good.

792
01:30:18.480 --> 01:30:33.480
That is, what we would call art novelists now actually sell larger numbers of books than what we now, in retrospect, call the art novelists of the 19th century.

793
01:30:33.480 --> 01:30:44.480
So it's, you know, the complaint is couched as if art novelists now can't make a living at it. That's untrue.

794
01:30:44.480 --> 01:30:51.480
Look at Thomas Pynchon, for example, writing these unbelievably incomprehensible Byzantine novels.

795
01:30:51.480 --> 01:30:54.480
You know, Gravity's Rainbow blundered into being a best seller.

796
01:30:54.480 --> 01:31:00.480
So, you know, the world, again, never say that the capitalist world is perfect.

797
01:31:00.480 --> 01:31:02.480
It's that it's better than the alternatives.

798
01:31:02.480 --> 01:31:06.480
And the, you know, government system means trying to pick out ahead of time

799
01:31:06.480 --> 01:31:11.480
which novelists are the ones who should be allowed to write and publish.

800
01:31:11.480 --> 01:31:14.280
And that certainly wouldn't work.

801
01:31:14.280 --> 01:31:18.280
And we'll see that when we look at some of the totalitarian

802
01:31:18.280 --> 01:31:19.560
systems.

803
01:31:19.560 --> 01:31:22.760
So to me, it's not a marked failure

804
01:31:22.760 --> 01:31:26.320
that Dan Brown can be successful.

805
01:31:26.320 --> 01:31:29.840
The other thing I would say is that the 19th century novel

806
01:31:29.840 --> 01:31:32.720
was the center of popular culture in Britain

807
01:31:32.720 --> 01:31:35.180
and the center of artistic culture, I'd say.

808
01:31:35.180 --> 01:31:37.800
The fact is the novel as a whole has been displaced

809
01:31:37.800 --> 01:31:41.120
in the 20th century by movies.

810
01:31:41.120 --> 01:31:46.120
And again, the record of the motion picture in the 20th century is absolutely astounding.

811
01:31:46.120 --> 01:31:57.120
And I would say, you know, the cultural achievements of the motion picture is as great as virtually any other artistic field in human history, with the exception of Shakespeare's plays.

812
01:31:57.120 --> 01:31:59.120
Another question. Yes.

813
01:31:59.120 --> 01:32:05.120
I can see that there is too much pressure in the Arctic right now.

814
01:32:05.120 --> 01:32:16.120
But today we have a new economy and the world is a country with a new state of affairs.

815
01:32:16.120 --> 01:32:22.120
So we can rely on this and go get a new economy.

816
01:32:22.120 --> 01:32:25.120
What do you think about that?

817
01:32:25.120 --> 01:32:31.120
Well, that is, I realize I haven't been repeating the question for the Internet audience.

818
01:32:31.120 --> 01:32:40.120
The question is, what's my response to the fact that we really don't have free markets, we have a mixed economy?

819
01:32:40.120 --> 01:32:45.120
And indeed, I was hinting at that and it's something I really should dwell on more.

820
01:32:45.120 --> 01:32:51.120
I've been talking about markets in all these situations.

821
01:32:51.120 --> 01:32:55.120
In fact, we didn't have a free market. There was no free market in 19th century England.

822
01:32:55.120 --> 01:33:00.120
It's a complete myth that England was operating under laissez-faire in the 19th century.

823
01:33:00.120 --> 01:33:06.120
That a central bank, well, the equivalent of a central bank system, there were all sorts of government regulations.

824
01:33:06.120 --> 01:33:12.120
It was freer than any other economy except the U.S. in the 19th century and became the strongest economy in the world

825
01:33:12.120 --> 01:33:16.120
because it was relatively free, but not because it wasn't absolutely free.

826
01:33:16.120 --> 01:33:27.120
And I actually just gestured in this direction when I said that, for example, one example of the mixed economy, you can say, in 19th century publishing, was that the government heavily taxed paper.

827
01:33:27.120 --> 01:33:38.120
And Erickson, Lee Erickson, the philosophy of literary reform, makes this fascinating argument where he says,

828
01:33:38.120 --> 01:33:42.120
When books are expensive, poetry prevails in the market.

829
01:33:42.120 --> 01:33:45.120
When books become cheap, fiction prevails.

830
01:33:45.120 --> 01:33:47.120
Sounds really weird, right?

831
01:33:47.120 --> 01:33:51.120
But he says, in poetry, every word counts and you can re-read it.

832
01:33:51.120 --> 01:33:58.120
And so, if you're going to only own one book in your life, you want it to be a poetry,

833
01:33:58.120 --> 01:34:01.120
so you can read and re-read it and savor it.

834
01:34:01.120 --> 01:34:04.120
Who wants to re-read a thousand-page Dickens novel?

835
01:34:04.120 --> 01:34:09.040
problem. So only when books became cheap could fiction become the center of the market because

836
01:34:09.040 --> 01:34:14.120
books essentially now become disposable. When you're only going to read a book once, yeah,

837
01:34:14.120 --> 01:34:21.400
fiction's fun. And he couched it in terms of the marginal utility of a book. It's really

838
01:34:21.400 --> 01:34:27.800
that's in Lee Erickson philosophy or whatever that book, The Economy of Literary Form. And

839
01:34:27.800 --> 01:34:35.720
The relative cheapness or expensiveness of books was related to government intervention in the economy.

840
01:34:35.720 --> 01:34:43.800
I haven't even gone into the issue of labor unions, but then as now they resisted every advance in technology.

841
01:34:43.800 --> 01:34:52.520
The printers unions in England did everything they could to prevent line typing and predicted disasters,

842
01:34:52.520 --> 01:34:58.920
economic disasters with automatic typesetting of course what it did was allow the publishing

843
01:34:58.920 --> 01:35:03.560
industry to flourish as never before and more people got jobs in printing than they'd ever

844
01:35:03.560 --> 01:35:11.400
had before but yes there's in fact always been mixed economy and I would point in fact

845
01:35:11.400 --> 01:35:18.320
to the negative effects to the extent the British economy was not free in the 19th century

846
01:35:18.320 --> 01:35:20.320
in 19th century, it had a negative impact on culture.

847
01:35:20.320 --> 01:35:24.320
That's why what I would say to people who advocate government support of the arts,

848
01:35:24.320 --> 01:35:30.320
the best support the government could give for the arts would be to get out of the picture entirely.

849
01:35:30.320 --> 01:35:35.320
And that would give such a boost to the economy, would give a boost to all culture.

850
01:35:35.320 --> 01:35:42.320
And you can actually see ways in which government withdrawal from regulation in 19th century Britain

851
01:35:42.320 --> 01:35:47.320
increased the cultural vibrancy of Britain.

852
01:35:47.320 --> 01:35:56.320
It's a fact that, you know, the media often tend to be unregulated because they're one step ahead of the government.

853
01:35:56.320 --> 01:36:01.320
You know, as is the case of the internet. They don't even know how it works. They don't know.

854
01:36:01.320 --> 01:36:08.320
So they can't regulate. But as we'll see, you know, we'll talk about this when we get to motion pictures and television,

855
01:36:08.320 --> 01:36:15.320
the way government regulation actually has retarded the cultural development of those forums. Yes?

856
01:36:15.320 --> 01:36:45.300
You talked about William Moody and his Linden Library. One of the key things about Moody is that he had a virtual monopoly for many years, and Moody could basically break the success of the novel, but if the state factory had a print run of 400, Moody would be dying 300, and so if he chose not to buy a novel, it would basically break the novel's success. His case was basically one of the dominant factors in what the public got from him, and also a kind of de facto existence.

857
01:36:45.320 --> 01:37:02.320
Well, it's typical, this is the anti-Walmart argument, that Walmart has too big a position in the market and so it affects what's produced and so on.

858
01:37:02.320 --> 01:37:12.320
There's no question that Moody was a maker, a breaker. The big slogan was, what does Moody think in the British publishing industry?

859
01:37:12.320 --> 01:37:20.520
Industry. But nevertheless, he didn't have a monopoly. He didn't have what an Austrian

860
01:37:20.520 --> 01:37:26.360
would call a monopoly. He didn't have a government privilege. He was a very shrewd businessman

861
01:37:26.360 --> 01:37:33.320
and achieved his market share by legitimate means, basically through his shrewdness as

862
01:37:33.320 --> 01:37:40.880
a businessman. He had a large effect for a long period, but not for all that long. For

863
01:37:40.880 --> 01:37:47.840
For example, here's a typical example where Austrian economics works for us.

864
01:37:47.840 --> 01:37:50.800
Moody, you can say, was a problem.

865
01:37:50.800 --> 01:37:54.520
He had too much of a controlling effect on the market.

866
01:37:54.520 --> 01:37:59.560
The result was people found ways to produce books cheaper, people started buying books

867
01:37:59.560 --> 01:38:05.560
instead of renting them, end of Moody's monopoly, end of Moody's control of the market.

868
01:38:05.560 --> 01:38:10.380
People panic when anyone has a big role in the market.

869
01:38:10.380 --> 01:38:13.900
Let's look at history, and that role will disappear.

870
01:38:13.900 --> 01:38:19.660
You know, you guys all think Bill Gates is this titan, 20 years, my prediction is, you

871
01:38:19.660 --> 01:38:21.660
know, the market will have passed him by.

872
01:38:21.660 --> 01:38:27.060
Just, you know, the government was obsessed with IBM for two decades, couldn't stop him,

873
01:38:27.060 --> 01:38:28.780
Bill Gates took care of him.

874
01:38:28.780 --> 01:38:31.220
The market takes care of its own.

875
01:38:31.220 --> 01:38:38.940
But on the matter of Moody, though, I mean, Moody got where he got by reading the market.

876
01:38:38.940 --> 01:39:08.940
He was, we would say, puritanical, you know, he was the one, you know, he would say I don't want sex in these novels, and you can see, you know, the kind of way, oh, English fiction would have been like French fiction, it would have been like Stendhal, if it hadn't been for Moody, no, Moody was just reading the actual mood of the Victorian public well, Moody had no capability of telling the Victorians, you shouldn't be talking about sex as much as you are,

877
01:39:08.940 --> 01:39:14.940
I know you guys want your daughters to be reading sex novels, but I'm going to prevent it.

878
01:39:14.940 --> 01:39:23.940
No, it's because the public felt that way and Moody read the public correctly that he achieved the position he had in the market.

879
01:39:23.940 --> 01:39:33.940
Remove Moody and you would not have had Stendhal-like novels suddenly in England, or Dessab-like novels, or whatever.

880
01:39:33.940 --> 01:39:37.940
This is a good example of how the market actually operates.

881
01:39:37.940 --> 01:39:44.180
Moody does not have a monopoly. He has a solid position in the market because he's read the market correctly.

882
01:39:44.180 --> 01:39:52.380
And, in fact, he was serving as an important middleman. He was basically conveying to the publishers what the Victorian market wanted,

883
01:39:52.380 --> 01:40:07.140
and the publishers, in turn, conveyed it to the writers. He was performing the exact right role of an entrepreneur getting the public to get the kind of novels he wanted to read.

884
01:40:07.140 --> 01:40:15.660
And again, on that issue, it cannot be that no moody and pornography would have flooded the markets in Victorian Britain.

885
01:40:15.660 --> 01:40:21.460
He was just reading the mood of it. But it's a good question. I'm glad to see someone's even heard of moody.

886
01:40:21.460 --> 01:40:23.460
Yeah, yeah.