Today we're going to turn to 19th century book publishing.
And I want to begin with a quotation from Charles Dickens.
Now Charles Dickens is generally thought of as a critic of capitalism.
People would point to his book Hard Times, for example, which in fact is a critique of industrialization.
To really study it, you'll see Dickens was quite a capitalist himself, a small-time entrepreneur
to begin with, but a big-time entrepreneur for much of his life.
He died an extremely wealthy man, a multimillionaire in our terms, and capitalism was very good
to Dickens, and he had a high regard for free enterprise.
He was a great supporter of free trade, for example, in his journal Household Words.
In 1853, he was honored at a banquet in Birmingham.
That's in the industrial midlands of England.
Birmingham and Manchester are the centers of the Industrial Revolution.
And he had this to say, in words that would make any true Marxist cringe.
He got up and proposed a toast to the city of Birmingham.
Birmingham, the very heart of middle class England, the very heart of industrial England.
To the great compact balance of the people by whose industry, perseverance and intelligence
and their result in money wealth, such places as Birmingham and many others like it have
have arisen to that great center of support, that comprehensive experience, and that beating
heart literature has turned happily from individual patrons, sometimes munificent, often sorted,
always few, and it's found there, there in the English middle class, its highest purpose,
Charles Dickens saluting the middle-class virtues, industry, perseverance and intelligence,
and the resultant money, which has now given literature its proper support, and notice
he specifically says, to hell with patrons, we are so relieved not to be dependent on
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,
No complaints from Charles Dickens about the taste of the English reading public.
Now you can say, yeah, it's all easy for you, Charles Dickens, to praise the taste of the English reading public.
They made you the most famous and well-rewarded author in the history of the world.
But that's, of course, very important, because it shows that, in fact, the English readers did have taste.
Here was the first mass commercial market for literature, and who emerged from it as the number one author?
The number one author in quality.
The one that, to this day, anybody would say was the greatest novelist in English probably ever, and certainly of the 19th century.
So, the dumb, mass reading public was pretty smart, and in fact, by and large, the authors
who were most successful are the ones we still read today, and the ones who failed as people
go study those novels in dusty libraries, find out why they failed.
They were, generally speaking, very bad authors.
And so if Shakespeare was exhibit A for me this week, Dickens would be exhibit B. That
is the greatest playwright in English, the greatest novelist in English operated in fully
commercial environments. And so there can't possibly be a simple antithesis between the
world of commerce and the world of high culture. And again, it's very ironic that what today
is regarded as high culture, Victorian novels, you know, made into television series on
masterpieces, theater, and of course, assigned in universities.
That was the absolute heart of popular culture in 19th century England.
So we're now firmly within the 19th century, and that does mark a turning point in this
This week's romp through cultural history, because we're now, after the Industrial Revolution,
we are in the world of mass society and mass culture.
And we're really getting to the heart of the argument today.
That is, up to now, you know, I've been trying to show the commercial basis of Shakespeare's
theater and Rubin's painting and that sort of thing, but we haven't yet gotten really
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.
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.
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.
Mass production, uniform product, being marketed to a vast public.
Now, in a way, I've tried to show that's not quite unique to the industrial world, that Rubens had a factory.
And as I've been trying to show, artists desperately wish their works to be commodified.
Rubens kept thinking, you know, I can't paint as many paintings as the public will buy. What can I do?
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.
them talked about tapestries and again I say that the tapestry industry was a
major industry in Flanders during the Renaissance it produced great works of
art that hang in museums now but it was extremely profitable and one of the
central industries of that area so I don't want to overstate the move we've
We've made here, in a way we've been looking at how artists have made a living by finding
ways to commodify what they do.
The notion of sheet music, of writing the piece of music and then getting it printed
and selling it to a market.
And you know, Picasso, as I was saying, there's no artist who has ever sought more eagerly
to commodify what it could do, go to the lithograph market, go into the ceramic market, the print
market and so on, the whole history of print, of engravings and prints of paintings, example
of this.
But now we really, the numbers start to look real to us.
You know, even Rubens turned out, through his factory, maybe thousands of paintings,
Now, we're going to be in the hundreds of thousands.
And this is where the Marxist critique kicks in.
That the commercialization of culture is the debasement of culture.
But this debased culture is what produced these great Victorian novels, including the works of Dickens.
And so, how debasing could it really be?
And what I'm going to try to show today, this morning, is that Dickens and the other great
novelists of the era certainly had problems with the English publishing industry.
And you can say they managed to be great in spite of it, which is enough to say.
But I want to suggest further that they managed to be great because of it, that they were
There are aspects of the very commercialization of English publishing in the 19th century
that actually improved the novels of people like Dickens, and above all because it kept
them in touch with their audience.
And that's something, sort of my underlying theme here, is that the commercialization
of art, which looks negative to so many critics, and especially Marxists, is one way of keeping
artists rooted in a living audience and I think it gives their works more vitality and more vibrancy.
Now the other thing is we enter the 19th century we just have a lot more information
and and we really know much more about what was going on we start to have surviving correspondence
between authors and their publishers we have statistics that are much more reliable
Well, we've been very anecdotal up to now, how much in debt was Mozart when he died,
how much money did Bach have when he died.
You know, now we start to have real records that have Dickens bank accounts and that sort
of thing, so we can get a little more specific with things now.
So let me begin by describing basically the publishing industry in England in the 19th
century, and then go on to show how it interacted with authors and authors interacted with it.
Publishing was a major industry in the 19th century, and London became the world center
Center for Publication, it's still one of the great centers of publication in the world,
and it was very much one of the great beneficiaries of the Industrial Revolution.
And again, we're looking at one of these situations where capitalism made certain positive cultural
developments possible.
I really recommend a book called The English Common Reader by Richard Altick, I've put
Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, Joseph Salerno, Roger Garrison, Hans-Hermann Hoppe,
One thing was a vast reduction continuing throughout the century in the price of paper.
Here's one of the incredible side-effect benefits of that horrible industrial revolution.
We're always being taught ruin things.
The textile industry, which was one of the great industries that grew up in England in the 19th century,
The textile industry that grew up in England in the 19th century in England dominated the textile industry for much of the 19th century
resulted in the proliferation of rags, both in the manufacture of textiles and in the recycling of them
and you suddenly have this tremendous surplus of rags and one of the great uses of rags then was to make paper
Rag-content paper. It actually is quite superior to the paper we use today and was acid-free.
Anyway, suddenly it became much cheaper to make paper because you could make it out of surplus rag.
Counteracting this positive tendency was the government taxes on paper, which were extremely high, relatively speaking.
You know, it's the kind of thing that the American Revolution happened over, like the Stamp Act.
The British government thought that taxing paper was a great source of income,
and they didn't mind that it made publishing more expensive and books and, above all, newspapers more expensive,
because they were just as happy not to see the development of the newspaper industry,
because newspapers were critical of the government.
and so there was a huge battle in the course of the 19th century over these taxes on paper
which were in fact called taxes on knowledge and from now on I'll be talking about ways
in which the market has helped culture flourish, I'll also keep mentioning ways in which government
intervention in the market have impeded the development of culture and you know basically
my advice to people who want government support of arts would be this and it's an old French
Fresh Line, laissez-faire, just leave the market alone, stop interfering in it, that's
the best thing you can do for encouraging culture, and this is one of the examples.
And liberals in England in the 19th century have worked very hard to get these various
taxes on knowledge eliminated.
So paper became cheaper, the introduction of steam engines into printing was a huge development.
speeded up the process of printing exponentially and made possible large-scale printings.
I was just looking at Altic, I think he says that the average print run for a novel in
the 18th century was 750 copies total.
That's kind of amazing.
I've sold more copies of some of my books than that.
These huge runs of Dickens novels, eventually in hundreds of thousands, that required new
technology and capitalism rose to meet the need.
And later in the century, linotype printing was developed and stereotype printing.
At the beginning of the century, there was essentially a type shortage in England.
You couldn't set a whole book at once, because they just had individual pieces of type,
and they had to set a couple of pages, print them, go back and reset the type.
That was a tremendous drag on publishing, and even on the proofreading of novels.
And so, in the course of the century, all sorts of developments made it easier to set type.
By the end of the century, they had automatic type setting.
So, all these things which capitalism made possible, which were driven by the capitalist desire to reduce costs,
especially to increase volume in order to reduce cost per item.
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.
On the other hand, and this is where an Austrian economic perspective is important,
these technological developments were driven by the prospect of people like Dickens.
Publishers wouldn't have worked so hard with printers to increase their capacity
if they didn't see that they could sell these large numbers of books,
and it was above all Dickens who opened up this possibility
They saw how many copies his books were selling.
They said, we've got to find ways to print faster, and we've got to find ways to reduce
the cost of paper.
So again, Marxists are always production-driven in their thinking.
And when they talk about these developments, they see it, oh, where there are these independent
developments in technology, and they then govern the writing of novels.
But we know that the economy is customer-driven and demand-driven, you know, that Kevin Costner
film Field of Dreams, remember the great slogan that, if you build it, they will come?
That's Marxism.
Capitalism is, if they will come, you will build it.
And we know that that's the truth.
The Intelligent Businessman anticipates the demand and responds in his production methods.
But it's really Marxist thinking that says, if you build it, it will come.
If you create these great steam, high-speed steam pressers, then they'll buy the novels.
No, it's because you sense there's a market, vast market for these novels that you develop
these new technologies.
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
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.
Well, we're going to see if that's true, then Dickens novels have no value and they were just marketed as well.
For example, the marketing of Dickens novels were really quite extraordinary.
They had all sorts of tie-in products and the equivalent of Dickens action figures.
And part of the way they made money was you'd sell all this stuff in conjunction with a Dickens novel.
Let me read you something from one of my colleagues in Virginia, Jennifer Wick's book,
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.
for the Bible.
And so they capitalized on this.
They decided, let's start selling little figurines.
After the publication of Pickwick, Weller cabs were plying the streets.
Sam Weller is one of the famous characters in Pickwick's sidekick.
And so the taxi cabs in London, the horse drawn, were named after Weller.
Pickwick's name was written in gold.
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.
So just the way a film comes out now and McDonald's or Burger King starts having its name on it.
And what I really love, you can find the, what I'm guessing is the first example of a product placement.
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.
That's not by accident. Well, in one of the original illustrations to the Pickwick papers,
Depicting Mr. Weller helping his son Samuel, the picture clearly shows a placard on the mantle, reading distinctly, Guinness Dublin Stout.
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.
Now, when I recently read this, I thought, how ironic that it's a product, you know, still in use today, get it styled.
And then I realized, this ain't ironic or coincidental at all.
If they were smart enough to get a product placement in a Dickens novel, that's why they are still around today.
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.
Now, to say something more about the actual marketing and how books were published, as
some of you may know, books were really quite expensive at this time.
Again, it's very hard to compare prices, but basically, altics shows that at the beginning
In the beginning of the 19th century, a book cost the equivalent of the average worker's day's wages.
So that was a lot to spend on a book.
A book does not cost anywhere near a day's wage for anybody today.
It shows you one of the things that capitalism, except from a university press book.
I take that back.
Their socialist production for you, capitalist production reduces the price of books.
I could actually tell you something about that.
So books were in fact, certainly at the beginning of the century, expensive.
And so they were rented.
This again comes as a shock to most people.
Were you aware that books were rented in the 19th century? They had what are called
circulating libraries, and you went in and you rented a book because you couldn't
afford to buy it. That sounds so weird to us until you start thinking about video
rentals. There used to be video cassettes, now DVDs, and you know, for a long time,
you know, a video cassette would come out at a price of $80, so you didn't want to
and so instead you rented it for $3 and that's basically how the book industry
made a lot of its money in the 19th century through rentals and there were
great circulating libraries as you can well imagine there were various
arrangements you could rent an individual book you could get a pass for
There were certain fees that would allow you to rent a certain number of books over a certain time and so on.
There were other libraries where you could pay a subscription fee and you could read anything in the library.
Again, there's the market for you. It came up with all...
It's faced with the problem that books are initially too expensive for people to buy.
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.
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.
and that awful gold standard, you know, that's so terrible and it had this terrible result
that the pound kept its value for an entire century.
And the price of books came down from 30 shillings to one shilling at a time when the value of
the shilling was essentially unchanged.
It was actually a little higher in 1900 than it was in 1800.
And how did this happen?
Again, through the operation of the market.
And I could give you many examples, Altic's book, and he would never admit this, is filled
with the story of one heroic capitalist entrepreneur after another, whose only purpose was to make
money and whose only effect was to reduce the price of books.
I'm just going to give you one example, one of the great unsung heroes of culture.
You will never, ever hear this man mentioned, certainly in any Marxist history, or at least
not in a positive way, but we should all bow down to James Lockington, the inventor of
And the remainder book sale. This is a great man. I owe him more than almost anybody except
my remainder book sellers today. This goes back to the 18th century. James Lackington,
who was the son of a journeyman shoemaker, and started out that way himself. He became
He became a shoemaker and then he converted to Methodism, and that was the turning point
in his life because the Methodists wanted to finance the spread of books.
They had the Bible in mind, they had John Wesley's sermons in mind, and so they had
a fund for Methodists to go into the book business.
And Lackington availed himself of this fund to set up a bookshop in London in 1774.
And I'll just read from Altuk here.
He bought up large quantities of books at the auctions where publishers periodically
unloaded their slow-moving stock.
So that's, you know, remainder books.
Books that aren't selling, publishers just want to get them off the shelves, get rid
of them.
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.
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.
No doubt, people said, but you lose money on each book.
He said, well, I'll make it up in volume.
No, he understood he was buying them cheap so he could sell them cheap.
This unheard of and to his colleagues immoral procedure brought down on him the wrath of
the trade.
But this was more than compensated for by the business he did with the bargain-hunting
public.
Within a short time, he was the most lavish buyer of remainders in London.
At one time he boasted he had in stock 10,000 copies of Watts Psalms, and an equal number
of his hymns. At a single afternoon's auction, he bought 5,000 pounds worth of books. That's
about $2 million worth of books in today's money. And that's one million dollars, I guess.
But it's extraordinary. Notice, of course, religious books. That's why the Methodists
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.
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?
Basically, the Bible, other religious tracts, and the Renaissance equivalent of pornography.
A hundred merisome and delightful tales, as these books were called, things like Boccaccio's
The Cameron Song.
And, you know, it's just an amazing, consistent law.
What first spread on the Internet?
The Bible and pornography.
I mean, it's like the highest and the lowest human motives.
I will leave it to you to sort out which is which, always drives a new medium.
I think this is very good.
Movies, I mean, it's just incredibly consistent.
Mankind gets a new medium, religious and pornographic material published in that medium.
And so here we see.
Lackington, again, good Methodist, actually driven by religious motives, I can't help
going on with this.
It's really, Lackington earned the increased hostility of the orthodox booksellers and
and the further gratitude of readers by cutting prices on new books, thus initiating the underselling
practice that was to breed animosity in the trade for the next hundred years.
These steps, as well as his dealing in second-hand books sent up from the country, resulted in
well-deserved prosperity.
In 1791 and 1792, he says, in his engagingly candid memoirs, he had an annual turnover
of 100,000 volumes and a profit of 4,000 and 5,000 pounds.
And again, you multiply by 200, yes, so that's a million dollars in profit.
The name of his bookstore was the Temple of the Muses.
Lackington's Temple of the Muses in Finsbury Square was one of these sites of London.
A large block of houses had been turned into a shop, the holes surmounted by a dome and
a flagpole.
McDonald's already, actually it's Wal-Mart too, listen to this.
Over the main entrance appeared the sign whose proud claim no one evidently challenged cheapest
bookseller in the world.
Reportedly the interior was so spacious that a coach and six could be driven clear around
it.
In the center was a counter behind which the clerks waited on the fine ladies and country
gentlemen who clustered about it.
At one side a staircase led by the lounging rooms and to a series of circular galleries
under the dome.
Don't you think it sounds like Barnes and Noble and Borders, do you?
It's incredible that capitalism knows how to sell things.
Around each of these galleries ran crowded shelves.
The higher the shelves, the shabbier the bindings, and the lower the price.
Nothing like the Temple of the Muses, with its cut prices, its strict cash-and-carry policy,
and its disdain of haggling, had ever been in the book world.
To keep prices low, Lackington wouldn't sell on credit, and, you know, it seems so wonderful that we have tradesmen extended credit,
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,
because so many people defaulted, never paid their bills.
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.
and notice also, no haggling, no bargaining and here's what Lackington said
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
and thus were totally excluded from the advantage of improving their understandings and enjoying a rational entertainment
Now, Lackington is one of the great examples, but you read this book and you'll see many
of them.
At no point does Altyk ever step back and say, you know, gee, these capitalists really
accomplished something.
But he tells one story or another, the man who was the king of the circulating libraries
was a man named Moody, or M-U-D-I-E, don't know how to pronounce it.
We can recognize these people.
They are Sam Walton.
They are Ray Kroc.
the same kind of people that build businesses today and it's the same
philosophy give the public what it wants reduce costs in every possible way market
effectively I mean it works now and it worked then but the thing to understand
is what they were effectively marketing was things like Dickens novels now
Lackington's earlier than that but he obviously built the basis for the retail
in England that made bookmaking possible.
Now, again, to Marxists, they're so obsessed with production,
they look at distribution and marketing as these totally negative things that add no value.
They always see distributors, middlemen, marketers as pure exploiters.
You know, the only person, you know, they got the labor theory of value,
The Theory of Value, so the only person who deserves reward is the laborer, you know,
they would complain, Lackington's making all this money and the poor guys in the sweatshop,
print shop are not making anything near a salary.
Well, those guys would have no jobs if Lackington wasn't moving the product they were producing.
He as a retailer is performing an essential economic function.
He's there, actually, as the mediator between the printing industry and the book-buying public.
And he was someone who was always figuring out what does the public want, what should be printed.
So, in fact, he was performing a vital social and cultural function, and that's why he made all the money.
Now, let me turn maybe to the most important aspect of the fiction publishing industry in the 19th century, and that was serialization.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now, one of the reasons serialization became popular is because novels in book form were too expensive.
And so people, for example, like the idea of buying a novel part by part over a year and a half.
And again, the figures vary, but let's say this, you know, maybe let's say the novel in book form,
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.
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.
You know, it's the way encyclopedias are sold, or these time life books are sold.
That system of marketing was developed in the 19th century.
And God bless the capitalists, again, they came up with schemes.
If you bought it, if you bought all 20 parts, you'd get a binding for free at the end.
Or if you bought 20 parts, you only had to pay for 19 of them, and you got the 20 for free.
I mean, they had every marketing gimmick then that we think of as so specific to the 20th century.
And if you go to the Dickens House in London, you can see all this stuff.
You can see the action figures, the Dickens mugs and the Dickens watches and all this stuff.
You can see the parts publication. They still have them.
I mean, there's hundreds of thousands of them were published, though copies have survived.
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.
I won't say they don't have lurid illustrations on the cover, but the covers are kind of fancy
and you can just see how they were marketed.
And so a lot of the most famous 19th century novels, not all of them, but many of them
appear in this form.
Magazines like them because they boosted circulation.
If you could be publishing a popular novel, it was great for circulation.
In fact, they know this was how they first started noticing with Dickens the incredible
numbers of parts or magazines.
Dickens eventually started his own magazine, Household Words, which was quite successful
for about a decade.
His main asset was himself.
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,
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.
Now, significant enough, just to see how the market responded to a problem that books were still too expensive.
Answers published the works in serial form.
But what people learned to do now was to make a virtue of necessity and exploit this form.
Again, I have to say, in retrospect, serial publication looks absolutely brilliant, artistically and financially and commercially,
but it's not as if some genius sat down and planned out this system. People kind of stumbled into it.
It is precisely an example of spontaneous order in the Austrian sense,
that people tried out various methods and they saw what worked and eventually
developed a very sophisticated method of producing and marketing novels. Now what
I mean about exploiting the form is that pretty quickly people figured out the
cliffhanger principle. That is, if you were going to publish the thing in parts
Over a relatively long time, a year, year and a half, you really wanted to keep those readers coming back to buy more.
You know, at first, again, no one was quite thinking about this, nobody had ever done anything quite like this.
The serial publication sort of begins in the 18th century. You can see it in some 18th century journals, but it really flourishes.
I mean, the first great success is Dickens' Pickwick papers, and that's in the 1830s.
But people started feeling the way, you know, at first they just thought,
well, you know, we'll have this long novel, divide it up into 20 equal parts, and we'll just publish them.
And then Dickens started to get a feel for how to end a part.
A part was typically about three chapters' worth.
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.
We lose a lot of this now, actually, when we read the novel in a book.
A lot of good modern editions actually now mark off the parts, and you can actually see
where a part ended, and it's very interesting to trace that pattern.
And actually, you know, in fact, in many ways, the way we, you know, especially in the academic
world where you do a book a week, we don't read these novels the way they were meant
to be read.
They actually were meant to be read over a long period of time, and you sit there and
see a thousand-page Dickens novel and say, how the hell am I going to read this in one
week?
That was not the original intention.
In some ways, we spoil the effect of them, and I put on the original bibliography a book
by Jennifer Heywood, Consuming Pleasures, a terrific book.
It's all about the serial as the modern form.
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.
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.
And she really made this leap of imagination to see that the serial actually is the modern
form of culture.
And she talks about its unique characteristics that you can trace through all these genres.
One obvious example would be the cliffhanger principle.
We name it after movie serials, where at the end of the part, someone was hanging on a
And he wondered if he or she would fall to his or her death, but, you know, who killed
JR, you know, the greatest cliffhanger in history.
But when you think about it, television soap operas, again, radio soap, this has always
been a very popular genre in all different forms, and she really talks about its distinctive
characteristics.
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.
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.
Again, the serial form is generally associated with the lowest forms of pop culture in people's minds.
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,
that many of the more traditional, you know, Sophocles' Oedipus is a brilliantly concentrated
piece of drama and all this, you know, happening and unity of time and all that, and that's
a great art form, but there's also something being said for the enormously sprawling canvas
of a Dickens novel, which was largely made possible by the leisurely method of deliberate
that, again, Dickens not only knew that his audience had a year, year and a half to wait,
but he was making them wait. He was drawing things out. And these things can be incredibly
well planned. So it's very distinctive to the 19th century novel in English. Again,
some were not published serially, and some of the great ones were not, but many of them
were published serially, and that had commercial reasons.
It was a form of production that was effective, it was a form of marketing that was effective.
And a lot of what you need to do to understand these novels, the ones that were serialized,
is to understand the consequences of serialization.
And some of them were negative, and some of them were positive.
Let me begin with the negative ones, because again, I'm deliberately trying not to play
down some of the negative aspects of the commercialization of literature.
And in fact, many of the writers at the time complained about civilization, and some of
them tried to avoid it.
I have some quotes here that I'll read in a minute, just trying to find them.
But let's look at some of the negative effects.
Serialization meant you had to write to a certain length and the novel couldn't be shorter
or longer, and in fact people signed contracts.
I'm going to produce this novel for you at, I'm going to produce 20 parts, I'm going to
You paid so much for 20 parts over this schedule, and you then had a schedule.
I mean, they were not going to have 18 empty pages in the next issue of their magazine
or miss the date on the part.
And so you had to write to a schedule, and you know, if you were on part 19 and you had
18 plot lines still going, the publisher then said to you, it's time to wrap it up for part
20.
The whole thing has to not end for the next issue.
Resolve all 18 of those plot lines.
And you couldn't say, but I need 17 more parts to resolve this.
No, that novel was going to end the next month.
And similarly, if invention flagged, you didn't know what we'd do.
You had to produce something on time.
Then we have correspondence, sometimes from Dickens to the authors,
from, you know, telling them what to do and wrap it up or speed it up or slow it down.
And so this is an example of negative commercial pressures.
And many authors did complain bitterly about the system, but I don't want to overlook that.
So let me give you some choice quotes.
This is from Alan Dooley's book, Author and Printer, terrific book on the sort of the
publication details of the industry in the 19th century.
I put it on your supplementary bibliography, he gives us the example of Anthony Trollope,
you know, one of the greatest and the most, one of the most successful novelists, he wrote
I think a hundred novels, and his sister and mother, the Trollope family was a whole novel
Tralop called this system the hurried publication of incompleted work and he held that, quote,
the rushing mode of publication to which the system of serial stories had given rise and
by which small parts as they were written were sent out to the press was injurious to
the work done.
So there is Tralop, one of the best, most successful novels of time, says this system
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.
So there it is, a standard complaint against commercialization of art, that it results in loss of artistic control for the author.
and those are serious problems, but there was a solution and Trollope found it.
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.
If serial issue was planned, he then metered out the manuscript to the printers while he went to work on his next book.
So again, there was a market problem, there was a solution.
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.
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.
If you ever want to have a fun read her illustrations of political economy, a little bit too much,
David Ricardo in her economics, but basically it's one lesson after another in how trade
unions are bad, free trade is good.
She was the Bastiat of English.
She really is a remarkable writer, I've tried to reintroduce her.
It's horrific to discover that the most successful female writer in English of the first half
for the 19th century was not just pro-capitalist, but rabidly pro-capitalist.
She would sell 30,000 copies of one of these illustrations of political economy.
Finally, Broadwood, the Canadian press, has brought some of these tales back in the print.
Harriet Martino, M-A-R-T-I-N-E-A-U, she didn't like this serial method of production.
And in her autobiography, she says I could not consciously adopt any method so unprincipled in an artistic sense as piecemeal publication.
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.
The success of the portions requires that each should have some sort of effective close.
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.
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.
There it is, Harriet Martin, who, incredibly pro-capitalist, does not like this aspect of commercial publication, the serialization, and wouldn't do it.
Here's an example in the case of Elizabeth Gaskell, also pro-capitalist, by the way.
Her novel, North and South, is a defense of the industrial system of England.
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.
And Dickens published it. Why? Because her first novel sold well, he liked it, he wanted to get her in his magazine.
In fact, Gaskell's book, North and South, is a perfect critique of Dickens' hard times
and shows why hard times gives a very distorted view of the industrial midlands.
But, you know, Dickens had an ideological quarrel with Gaskell, but he published her
because he could make money that way. Again, the triumph of the commercial system.
But when they planned out the publication of North and South, Dickens miscalculated.
And so Gaskell, he pressured her to make the work shorter than she intended.
This is from, I'm quoting from an edition of the novel, the Penguin edition.
What from her viewpoint constituted the worst compression was that made in the last few chapters of the novel.
So again, I'm not denying that this system resulted in problems.
Dickens himself, in talking about one of his own early serial publications,
I believe it was the old Curiosity Shop, said,
I was obliged to cramp most dreadfully what I thought a pretty idea in the last chapter.
I hadn't room to turn.
So even Dickens felt at times uncomfortable with this system.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We have records here that show that artists were uncomfortable with certain aspects of a system that was developed for largely commercial reasons.
But, there's another side to this story, and I've given equal time to the negative case against serialization.
Let me talk about the positive case, and that is that serialization became an incredible feedback system.
And one of the things I want to argue from here on in with increasing frequency is that what characterizes commercial culture is feedback.
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.
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.
You can talk about every system of finance in the arts, patronage, government funding.
Nothing ever opened up more opportunities for women in culture than 19th century British publishing.
And more than half the novels were written by women that were published in 19th century Britain.
And there's no record like that anywhere else in culture up to that point.
And it's not because Charles Dickens, as a publisher, was a feminist.
It's because he was a capitalist.
And he wanted to publish talent.
And he didn't care who wrote the book if he thought it would sell.
In some cases, women had to publish under male names, or thought they had to,
like George Eliot, Marianne Evans, or the Bronte sisters,
were like Pat on Saturday Night Live.
The greatest cultural opportunity yet open for women in the world was the 19th century
British publishing industry.
So, let me now turn to the way in which the serial system actually had a positive effect
on literature, and that is that novelists could watch the reaction of their audience
as they worked.
And this took several forms, part publications were in some ways, in some cases, reviewed
as they came out, you know, and you'd see reviews, you know, like reviews of TV shows,
you know, oh, the latest installment of Oliver Twist is terrific, Dickens has carried the
story on, it's just exciting, or, you know, something's going wrong with Dombey and Son,
it's getting a little dark, Dickens, you know, we love you for the laughter, so there'd actually
There were certainly word of mouth, and there were sales figures, and that was quite easy to chart.
And so authors couldn't always tell why the sales figures were changing, but they seemed to have pretty good guesses.
And so you get a phenomenon in the Victorian novel that is very similar to what we see in TV soap operas.
And that is the life and death of a character hung on sales figures.
Sometimes, now we know this in soap operas on TV.
TV. You know, they try all sorts of different characters and they can tell which ones click
and which ones don't. It's often also a case of which actors click or don't, but you know,
one week a character is very healthy in a soap opera, next week mysteriously develops
and then introduced these characters, the lone gunmen, the three nerdy computer types that helped Mulder.
And I think it was Glenn Morgan who had written the episode.
I mean, he thought it had failed and, you know, what a silly idea that was.
He decided, fortunately, they were just in this one episode.
And then the Internet lit up from all the computer nerds who identified with the lone gunmen
and said, you know, this is the greatest thing we've ever seen in the show. Bring them back, bring them back.
And, you know, the rest is history. They eventually got their own spin-off series.
They certainly were one of the great things over the years in the X-Files. That's feedback.
That's interesting. In that case, the author didn't realize, the author of the characters didn't even realize how good they were.
He didn't actually see the potential in them. And if there hadn't been an Internet, no more lone gunmen.
And again, they don't make or break the series, but they really ended up adding a great element to it.
And that's what I mean when I talk about feedback in a serial mode,
where there's ways of monitoring the audience reaction.
Now, you know, again, in the sort of high classic, esphete mode of criticism, or the Marxist mode of criticism,
that lone gunman episode is an example of market corruption.
that Glenn Morgan had this pure artistic vision and he allowed it to be corrupted by the impact of the market.
Oh, if only he had been true to his own disgust with his creation.
But, you know, in retrospect, it seems the audience was right and Morgan was wrong,
that he'd stumbled upon something that was really good, he didn't understand its potential, but the market did.
and fortunately the market was there to steer him, put him on course.
Now this is a feature of all serial production and Heywood's book is very good on tracing
this.
She wrote on the Terry and the Pirate comic strip because the creator of it had saved
all his fan mail and made it available to her and explained to her how he listened to
to his fans, because fans are great, they tell you exactly what they think, we like
this character, we hate that character, can't the character go to Brazil this time, or like
with the Simpsons, Canadians love the Simpsons, but the Simpsons went to Japan, they went
to Australia, but they never went to Canada and Canadians kept complaining, why can't
The Simpsons got to Canada. Well, when The Simpsons finally went to Canada, maybe the Canadians weren't so pleased.
But again, these are the things that happen that make modern popular culture so vibrant.
One of the charges of Marxists, and it's the great Frankfurt School argument, is that capitalist mass culture produces passive consumers.
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
Hayek really added to the realist a great book called Fiasco about Hollywood's great marketing production and marketing failures.
But it's really amazing that the Frankfurt School based this argument on no evidence whatsoever.
And Hayek was the beginning of a very important movement in popular culture studies coming out of, oddly enough, from a Marxist orientation,
to look at the active consumer in popular culture, not the passive consumer.
It's led by a professor at MIT named Henry Jenkins, whom I'll refer to several times from now on.
But he did some of the first studies of fan fiction and showed the audience of Star Trek, for example, is not passive.
They have taken possession of the show and the characters.
And if you know about these fanzines, fans create, especially from the original Star Trek, stories that Gene Roddenberry never imagined.
Things are happening on the internet between Spock and Kirk that Gene Roddenberry never dreamed of, because fans have taken over the characters.
They're not going to sit back passively, and Jenkins has written a book about that.
about that, they're called poachers, that's now the technical term for active fans, and
what I'm saying is that goes all the way back to Dickens' novels, and Heywood's book includes
that and she sees it as this wonderful aspect of modern mass culture, that it involves feedback,
And we see the phenomenon, this is actually an example from Haywood's Consuming Pleasures,
about Dickens.
He greatly expanded Sam Weller's role in Pickwick Papers when sales jumped to 40,000 after Sam's
first appearance.
And nothing had ever sold 40,000 copies in print except the Bible when this happened.
And you know, things went through the roof.
Another example of this is with old curiosity shop, let me see if I can find my figures on this.
The Dickens hadn't even intended it to be a novel.
He was just putting it together, wanted it to be a miscellany of essays and various other things.
But he's just going to, you know, just sort of a loose collection of tales and essays.
But he introduced this character of Little Nell.
And just the appearance of Little Nell in one of the parts of publication increased
the circulation from 60,000 to 100,000.
And that was a breakthrough.
It's like the first movie that sells $100 million.
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.
This is from a man named Eason and his introduction to the volume.
The awkward result of this last minute expansion of The Little Tale can be detected in the early part of the novel.
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.
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.
By some 20 chapters later has become an earnest responsible young man.
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.
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.
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.
The way the market works in general is that people try to anticipate what will sell, sometimes do marketing studies and things like that.
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.
And a lot of planning goes into it, but you never know until you bring the product to market.
and it's typical of markets that the majority of new products fail.
It's just that when they succeed, they succeed big, because so many people are failing.
And the thing that happens in a market is when you succeed, you really push what succeeds.
Then everyone comes in, starts copying what succeeded, and if you're the original marker,
You have to work harder, cut your costs, improve your product, and how do you improve your product?
Trying to figure out what made it sell, listening to your customers, how you can improve your product.
That's the way markets work, and it's no different in culture.
You know anything about the television business, the movie business, that's exactly the way it operates.
Critics, and here I mean academics, they think you somehow failed if you didn't plan out everything perfectly in advance.
And they somehow think it would be possible to plan out everything perfectly in advance.
That's the socialist way of thinking. That's the thinking behind central planning.
In general, when socialists look at the market, they see all the failure. They see all the messiness.
they say there's got to be a more rational way to do this
this is the stupidest way to do things all these different people
trying things out look so many of them are failing
look at all the wasted resources and we can just get together and plan it out
it would work perfectly but no of course then you have one
giant failure because nobody can anticipate everything perfectly
so if you're only making one guess the odds are tremendous that that will be
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.
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.
You see it in films and television, but you can see it already in the 19th century novel.
in a novel. Yes, novelists planned out their novelists in advance, even when they were doing serial publication.
We have Dickens' sketches, for example. When he starts a novel, he tries to figure out who the characters are going to be.
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.
He says, you know, have a chapter here to balance that chapter there.
He was a good novel writer, yeah.
But the finished novels never follow the initial plan insofar as we have the initial plan.
He always revised in the course of production.
Now again, a Marxist would say he's revising under commercial pressures and that makes the novels worse.
And many esthetes would say, many of the new critics would have said this, he's giving in,
And he's compromising. He's selling out. And this will be repeated even to the video game market now.
They talk about people selling out to commercial pressures in the video game market.
And there is some aspect of that, and I've pointed to it.
We can definitely see times when the novels have problems because Dickens was giving into commercial problems.
But if the customer is not always right, it's also true that he's not always wrong.
And sometimes what the public was telling Dickens was right, and he recognized that.
He realized that some characters weren't working and ought to be killed off.
He realized some characters had much more potential than he realized and they should
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.
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.
And that sounds very crude to people. I mean, the market can be crude, but it's effective because it's crude.
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
You know, to read something like Joyce's portrait of the artist, you see how perfectly constructed
it is and how perfectly every sentence is constructed.
It's really amazing and it's great, but it's not the only valid aesthetic.
No one could ever say of a Dickens novel, remove one word and the entire structure falls.
Remember that in the movie last night with Mozart?
That is a legitimate aesthetic, the aesthetic of perfection, and many of the greatest works
of art have been produced by artists like that, typically characteristic of poetry.
When you've got a 20-line poem, indeed you want every word to be perfect, and you want
to be able to say of a great lyric poem, remove one word, and there would be diminishment,
as Salieri says.
But a 1,000-page Dickens novel? Remove one word and there would be diminishment? Thank
God! And indeed it's hilarious. Dooley traces this. In the accidents of printing, strange
things happen. There's very much on record that novels have come to print, sometimes
not just with a word missing, but a whole chapter missing, and the editor missed it,
The author missed it in proofreading, and, you know, there probably was something overlong about the novel, if that could happen.
And so, you know, it is characteristic of popular culture that it does not have the aesthetic perfection of a modernist lyric by Yates,
or even of a great classic art novel by a Flaubert or a Joyce, but it compensates for that with other virtues.
What you tend to get in popular culture and, you know, here I'm talking about Dickens.
What makes a Dickens novel so good is the vitality of it, the richness of the canvas.
You can't have everything.
You can't have the aesthetic perfection of a brief modernist lyric and a kaleidoscope
of Human Life, as you get in a Dickens novel.
The weakness of Dickens novels is the strength of Dickens novels.
Henry James, who was such an esthete, complained about other people's novels as loose-bagging
monsters.
And there's a certain truth to that.
But there's also a certain prissiness to the perfect aesthetic of Henry James.
And you know, I basically think the public's taste is vindicated in that it preferred Dickens'
novels to James' novels, but let my aesthetic friends never hear me say that.
But what I'm saying is that there's a kind of looseness, but at the same time richness
to modern popular cultural forms from Dickens' serialized novels down to serialized television.
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.
They're very different things, produced under different conditions, with different audiences and view,
and they each have their defects and their virtues.
And what I'm saying about the serialized novel here, it's a real example of a marketed commodity,
with all the aspects of capitalist production, standardized production, mass production,
the need for cost-cutting, the need for marketing, tie-in products, all these things.
That's the financial underpinning of it and why the Victorian novel attracted such talent in the 19th century.
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.
Well, economic and social mobility had increased greatly in the 19th century, but there's always room for more.
and it became clear that there was money to be made in fiction writing.
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.
That's actually a pretty staggering feature, a figure of which I doubt that more than 200 are read by anybody today,
including professors of Victorian literature. Of those 200, about 50 of them are canonical.
That's really staggering, but that's what culture is like. That's what I've been trying to get across to you,
that when we look at television and say it's a vast wasteland and it's just full of junk,
you can't believe how much junk there was in a Victorian novel. I'm interested in mummies and mummy stories.
Mummy stories, I love the Mummy movies, and I went back and read a novel, I guess it's
the first Mummy novel, it's called The Mummy, it's by a woman named Loudon, it was published
in the 1820s, I discovered it by accident, and they're, thank God there's only an abridgment
available, I mean, it is unspeakably bad, you just can't begin to understand, it's
It's not like a bad novel. She can't tell a story. You realize why this novel is unread.
Take the worst Victorian novel you ever had to read in college, and this is 50 times worse.
I just can't imagine how bad some of these other novels were. I'm never going to find out,
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.
Worst television movie ever made, but this is the way markets in general operate and the way I'm saying cultural markets operate.
You just try everything and the way to try everything is open up the market.
and there was relative ease of entry to the business of writing novels you just
and you know paper had become cheap enough so people could sit down write
these novels and then you just took a chance submitted in publishing but what
I'm getting at there was no way of knowing ahead of time which novel would
be the great one you know that's the the socialist dream of central planning it's
the aesthetic dream that somewhere there's this artistic depot that Beethoven
Why waste writing 40,000 novels to produce 50 good ones?
That's like saying, why have 40,000 toothpastes to produce 50 good ones?
But that's life. People can figure out ahead what will work.
And in art it's even more complicated than some of the simpler things.
And in economics, presumably, it's easier to design a toothpaste than to write a novel.
But, so, again, today when we look at the Victorian novel, we see those 50 great novels,
you know, 15 of them by Dickens, and we say, wow, what a cultural peak.
And look at all these bad movies in the 20th century.
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.
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.
in the 19th century.
So I have to say the 50 greatest English movies of the 20th century are not better than the
50 greatest English movies.
Well, you get my point.
It's unfair to compare the thousands of garbage movies of the 20th century with the 50 greatest
novels of the 19th century.
Compare the greatest with the greatest, compare the mass with the mass.
The mass of Victorian novels is easily as bad in aesthetic terms as the mass of movies.
But here's the nature of culture. It is a spontaneous order. It works by trial and error and feedback.
It does not work by careful prior planning. And even what I'm saying is the individual
novels did not often work by perfect prior planning. Like entrepreneurs, the novelists
went into the process of writing the novel with a plan, but like good entrepreneurs,
and they were willing to look at how things were working and revise their plans as they go along.
You know, that's what government planning never allows for, is competitive planning, alternative planning and plan revision.
The government just stumbles ahead with its standard operating procedures into one failure after another.
And that's what our culture would look like if the government were planning it.
So imagine if in 1800, the British government had had a cultural policy and decided how
England could develop a great novel industry in the 19th century and picked out through
committee and grant applications who the great novelists would be and how they should write
their novels.
Dickens?
Who's Charles Dickens?
Pickwick papers?
some picaresque tale about some guy wandering around England with his sidekick Sam? Rejected.
So anyway, I think the Victorian Night is a case where we get a really concrete example of the interaction of commerce and culture.
And again, it has certain negative aspects, but I think the positive aspects very much count for more than the negative ones.
So let me stop here and again take a few questions. Yes?
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.
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?
And they're the best sellers because often they're very good at creating cliffhangers or whatever it seems they have within their books.
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
about the content, I'm just astounded that a book that talks about the Albigensian Crusade
and Gnosticism and the Gnostic Gospels and Nagami, that that's become the most popular
book almost of all time. I mean, if I had read that for a publisher, I would have said,
this damn thing is too intellectual. This is never going anywhere. Talking about Leonardo
Paul da Vinci and Isaac Newton and the Knights Templar, give me a break, the public's never
going to go for this.
I actually, I think it says something good about the public, in this one case, that a
book that deals with issues that I've been fascinated with for years and have studied
and so on, that, you know, Rosicrucianism comes up.
So I think the da Vinci Code is actually a compliment to pop culture.
But in general, we'll actually get to this when we talk about modernism.
What has happened in mass culture is that the whole range of reading has just exponentially
increased.
And so, so many more books are published now and in such greater numbers that even Dickens
is never sold in the numbers that Dan Brown does.
And so novels that would be the aesthetic equivalent of Dickens or let's, I mean, Dickens
here is, novels that would be the aesthetic equivalent of George Eliot and Thackeray and
the Brontes, they are selling in larger numbers now.
The Cowan makes this point well, that what upsets people is, again, the envy principle, the relative principle.
They are frustrated that Dan Brown sells many more copies than, let's say, Don DeLillo.
If I had to name the greatest living American novelist, I'd say Don DeLillo.
But Don DeLillo sells in larger numbers than the Bronte sisters ever did, and by a rather large figure.
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.
So the relative numbers look bad, the absolute numbers look really good.
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.
So it's, you know, the complaint is couched as if art novelists now can't make a living at it. That's untrue.
Look at Thomas Pynchon, for example, writing these unbelievably incomprehensible Byzantine novels.
You know, Gravity's Rainbow blundered into being a best seller.
So, you know, the world, again, never say that the capitalist world is perfect.
It's that it's better than the alternatives.
And the, you know, government system means trying to pick out ahead of time
which novelists are the ones who should be allowed to write and publish.
And that certainly wouldn't work.
And we'll see that when we look at some of the totalitarian
systems.
So to me, it's not a marked failure
that Dan Brown can be successful.
The other thing I would say is that the 19th century novel
was the center of popular culture in Britain
and the center of artistic culture, I'd say.
The fact is the novel as a whole has been displaced
in the 20th century by movies.
And again, the record of the motion picture in the 20th century is absolutely astounding.
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.
Another question. Yes.
I can see that there is too much pressure in the Arctic right now.
But today we have a new economy and the world is a country with a new state of affairs.
So we can rely on this and go get a new economy.
What do you think about that?
Well, that is, I realize I haven't been repeating the question for the Internet audience.
The question is, what's my response to the fact that we really don't have free markets, we have a mixed economy?
And indeed, I was hinting at that and it's something I really should dwell on more.
I've been talking about markets in all these situations.
In fact, we didn't have a free market. There was no free market in 19th century England.
It's a complete myth that England was operating under laissez-faire in the 19th century.
That a central bank, well, the equivalent of a central bank system, there were all sorts of government regulations.
It was freer than any other economy except the U.S. in the 19th century and became the strongest economy in the world
because it was relatively free, but not because it wasn't absolutely free.
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.
And Erickson, Lee Erickson, the philosophy of literary reform, makes this fascinating argument where he says,
When books are expensive, poetry prevails in the market.
When books become cheap, fiction prevails.
Sounds really weird, right?
But he says, in poetry, every word counts and you can re-read it.
And so, if you're going to only own one book in your life, you want it to be a poetry,
so you can read and re-read it and savor it.
Who wants to re-read a thousand-page Dickens novel?
problem. So only when books became cheap could fiction become the center of the market because
books essentially now become disposable. When you're only going to read a book once, yeah,
fiction's fun. And he couched it in terms of the marginal utility of a book. It's really
that's in Lee Erickson philosophy or whatever that book, The Economy of Literary Form. And
The relative cheapness or expensiveness of books was related to government intervention in the economy.
I haven't even gone into the issue of labor unions, but then as now they resisted every advance in technology.
The printers unions in England did everything they could to prevent line typing and predicted disasters,
economic disasters with automatic typesetting of course what it did was allow the publishing
industry to flourish as never before and more people got jobs in printing than they'd ever
had before but yes there's in fact always been mixed economy and I would point in fact
to the negative effects to the extent the British economy was not free in the 19th century
in 19th century, it had a negative impact on culture.
That's why what I would say to people who advocate government support of the arts,
the best support the government could give for the arts would be to get out of the picture entirely.
And that would give such a boost to the economy, would give a boost to all culture.
And you can actually see ways in which government withdrawal from regulation in 19th century Britain
increased the cultural vibrancy of Britain.
It's a fact that, you know, the media often tend to be unregulated because they're one step ahead of the government.
You know, as is the case of the internet. They don't even know how it works. They don't know.
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,
the way government regulation actually has retarded the cultural development of those forums. Yes?
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.
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.
There's no question that Moody was a maker, a breaker. The big slogan was, what does Moody think in the British publishing industry?
Industry. But nevertheless, he didn't have a monopoly. He didn't have what an Austrian
would call a monopoly. He didn't have a government privilege. He was a very shrewd businessman
and achieved his market share by legitimate means, basically through his shrewdness as
a businessman. He had a large effect for a long period, but not for all that long. For
For example, here's a typical example where Austrian economics works for us.
Moody, you can say, was a problem.
He had too much of a controlling effect on the market.
The result was people found ways to produce books cheaper, people started buying books
instead of renting them, end of Moody's monopoly, end of Moody's control of the market.
People panic when anyone has a big role in the market.
Let's look at history, and that role will disappear.
You know, you guys all think Bill Gates is this titan, 20 years, my prediction is, you
know, the market will have passed him by.
Just, you know, the government was obsessed with IBM for two decades, couldn't stop him,
Bill Gates took care of him.
The market takes care of its own.
But on the matter of Moody, though, I mean, Moody got where he got by reading the market.
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,
I know you guys want your daughters to be reading sex novels, but I'm going to prevent it.
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.
Remove Moody and you would not have had Stendhal-like novels suddenly in England, or Dessab-like novels, or whatever.
This is a good example of how the market actually operates.
Moody does not have a monopoly. He has a solid position in the market because he's read the market correctly.
And, in fact, he was serving as an important middleman. He was basically conveying to the publishers what the Victorian market wanted,
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.
And again, on that issue, it cannot be that no moody and pornography would have flooded the markets in Victorian Britain.
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.
Yeah, yeah.