“Anti-Bleak House”: Advertising and the Victorian Noveland elsewhere. There are accounts of Arctic explorations, a Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa, a memoir entitled Settlers

“Anti-Bleak House”: Advertising and the Victorian NovelSteinlight, Emily.

Narrative, Volume 14, Number 2, May 2006, pp. 132-162 (Article)

Published by The Ohio State University PressDOI: 10.1353/nar.2006.0007

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Emily Steinlight is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Brown University. Her current research focuseson periodicals, print media, and the 19th-century novel.

NARRATIVE, Vol. 14, No. 2 (May 2006)Copyright 2006 by The Ohio State University

“ANTI-BLEAK HOUSE”:Advertising and the Victorian Novel

INTRODUCTION

Allow me to begin by deferring all questions concerning the value of thearchive, the uses and abuses of historical materialism, and problems of method ingeneral; these questions will return, no doubt, but for now I would like to posit, pro-visionally, a contemporary reader—a naïve reader: myself, for example. This naïvereader, let us say, wanders into a special collections library and sees for the first timesomething that many other (less naïve) readers have undoubtedly seen over the pastcentury and a half: a copy of the first edition of a well-known Victorian serial novel.She had probably read somewhere or other that this novel, like so many of the mostfamous Victorian novels, was originally published in parts—but perhaps this factnever struck her as particularly significant. Upon opening to the first printed page,however, our reader is startled to note something she had not read: the text of thenovel is preceded by pages upon pages of advertisements. Not being a Victorian her-self, she is unlikely to turn past these ads as she might turn past a page of ads in acontemporary magazine; like messages addressed to someone other than the reader,the ads present at once an obstacle to reading and an inducement to read on, or toread differently. Poring over the advertising section, she is overtaken with the oddsense she had somehow misunderstood what this novel was—maybe even to thepoint of beginning to suspect that the entire category of the novel might require somereevaluation. But now I am getting ahead of myself.

For the time being, let us leave this reader at the library and proceed withouther. I have framed a certain kind of conventional narrative that is limited in its usesfor a reading, much less a theory, of the novel. Such narratives of discovery are oftenfreighted with strange and conflicting notions about the value of objects and our own

Emily Steinlight

chf

interpretive authority as subjects. (I would not want, for instance, to insist upon the“radical alterity” of a musty page of print—much less to unearth something called“the real.”) Yet, if this particular archival reverie extends beyond the problem of his-toricizing the reader, or of positing a reading subject at all, it might offer a prelimi-nary means of framing another task: that of rethinking not only the Victorian novel’srelationship to the mass culture of industrial production from which it emerges, butalso its discursive, formal and material interdependence with the modern system ofprint advertising. This system may prove critically important to the novel as an insti-tution. In order to offer any speculation at all on the institutions of the Victoriannovel, however, I think we are bound to begin with one particular institution by thename of Charles Dickens. In what follows, I will draw upon the example Dickens’sserial writing—focusing particularly on Bleak House and its “Advertiser” as a sort ofcase study—so as to examine the relation between advertising discourse and the Vic-torian serial novel. I will offer readings of this material that point beyond the specificliterary and commercial texts in question, ultimately with a view to the broader the-oretical implications of advertising on reading, authorship, and the study of thenovel.

THE SERIAL NOVEL AND THE DICKENS ADVERTISER

First, a brief history: In April of 1836, Chapman and Hall began releasing seri-alized monthly installments of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.Though the author—whose previous work was signed only “Boz”—was knownmainly for his newspaper journalism1 and short “sketches” for the Morning Chroni-cle and other papers, the demand for his first novel (if we can call it that) quicklygrew to tremendous proportions. By the time of Queen Victoria’s coronation in 1837,the Pickwick Papers were selling up to 40,000 copies a month—quite possibly, atthat time, the best-selling new work of fiction in literary history (Law 14, Feltes 2).Only two years after the first issue of Pickwick went to press, Dickens was at workon his third novel, Nicholas Nickleby, which entered publication in April of 1838—even before his second, Oliver Twist, was complete. By this point in his career, hewas already far and away the most popular and best-known writer in England.2

While Dickens was not the first novelist to publish in parts, he was very likelythe most commercially successful in this print medium—indeed, so much so thatthroughout the years of its publication, the most recently published part of his latestnovel would often be available at newsstands, for the price of one shilling, alongsidethe daily newspapers and magazines. The 1840s saw a proliferation of hopeful imi-tators eager to profit from the serial form, but the ones who enjoyed the largest suc-cess were generally those of established reputation, and Dickens outdistanced themall in sales and celebrity.3 He released all fifteen of his novels in serialized form—sixin weekly or monthly magazine serials and nine in monthly numbers. By the early1850s, after the staggering success of his eighth novel, David Copperfield, Dickenshad become a national literary icon; the author’s name was, as his aptly named jour-nal would have it, a “household word.”

Advertising and the Victorian Novel 133

In March of 1852, Bradbury & Evans began publishing Bleak House in nine-teen monthly installments, or “numbers,” concluding in September of 1853. Each ofthese numbers was printed separately in a short, unbound volume in paper covers,with illustrations by Hablôt Knight Browne preceding the text. Each four-chapter in-stallment of the novel, consisting of thirty-two pages of uninterrupted text, is alsopreceded by an advertising section that constitutes just less than half of the entirevolume. A large percentage of the ads are publishers’ notices for a simply enormousquantity of recent or forthcoming books (including a clothbound Dickens anthologyknown as the “Cheap Edition,” as well as Dickens’s Child’s History of England). Notsurprisingly, many of these are novels—some long forgotten and virtually impossi-ble to find today, alongside other major novels by the author and his best-known con-temporaries, including Thackeray, Trollope, Gaskell, and Bulwer-Lytton. Alsoadvertised are several major American novels, including Hawthorne’s Blithedale Ro-mance and an upcoming serial edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The publishers’ pages also offer an astonishingly diverse assortment of new andforthcoming non-fiction books, ranging in subject from Thomas Carlyle’s Life ofJohn Sterling, to Edward P. Thompson (the naturalist)’s Passion of Animals and aSketch of the History of Monkeys, as well as botanists’ studies of plant life in Indiaand China, and various ethnographic studies of Mexico, Peru, Canada, Russia, Egyptand elsewhere. There are accounts of Arctic explorations, a Narrative of a Mission toCentral Africa, a memoir entitled Settlers and Convicts; or, Recollections of SixteenYears Labour in the Backwoods of Australia (whose author is listed only as “an emi-grant mechanic”), and a rather different fictional memoir entitled Confessions of anEtonian. Also featured are various philosophical studies and a wide array of religiouspamphlets and publications, including Fourteen Sermons on the Resurrection,Atheism Considered Theologically and Politically, and Jeremy Taylor’s Rules andExercises of Holy Dying. There is a large selection of historical and contemporary biography, a considerable number of writings on the emergence of the steam engine, various treatises and personal reflections on labor, and numerous volumes ofancient and modern history. There are also numerous fiction and poetry anthologies,including a collection of Ballads for the Times and a volume of Specimens of Old In-dian Poetry. Several ads announce a series of “Indestructible Books for Children”and list multiple other children’s titles, including The Doll and Her Friends; TheMine; or, Subterranean Wonders: an Account of the Operations of the Miner, and theProducts of his Labour; and The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse. There are alsoillustrated books intended for adults; the first serial number of Master Humphrey’sClock (in which The Old Curiosity Shop began publication as one of the “PersonalAdventures of Master Humphrey”)4 includes a large ad for a series called Heads of the People: being Picture of the English. These books consist of a number of etchings, accompanied by “Literary Descriptions” (from writers including Thack-eray, Leigh Hunt, Captain Glascock, an unnamed MP, and others), representing“British Faces and British Manners—British Virtues and British Vices—British Lib-erality and British Prejudice . . . delineated with the pencil and the pen of truth” and,the publishers claim, “destined to become a part of the country’s literature” becausethey offer “Pictures of HUMAN LIFE; not dreamt of by the fashionable novelmonger

134 Emily Steinlight

. . . but LIFE AS IT IS.” (Printed in the front matter of a novel, such a claim certainly has interesting implications.)

Several publishers’ advertisements offer maps, guides, and reference books,from the Eighth Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, to a London Directory andCourt Guide for 1853 (“containing upwards of 120,000 names and addresses”), to ahandsome Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Industrial Exhibition of 1851, to The Il-lustrated Temperance Almanack, to A Military Manual of Field Operations, to a Dic-tionary of Domestic Medicine and Household Surgery, to a Practical Manual ofPhotography. A number of professional and popular science texts are also featured,including an anatomical study of The Hand: Its Mechanisms and Endowments, and agreat many more general books on physics and chemistry. In addition, there are var-ious guides and books of personal advice—some on investment and finance, othersdealing with such questions as How to See the British Museum in Four Visits, stillothers with How to Print, and When to Publish: Practical Advice to Writers. Also in-cluded, of course, are multitudes of “domestic guides” (tendered largely—thoughnot exclusively—to women, for also listed are such titles as The Working Man’sFriend and Family Instructor). The majority of these domestic guides are books ofadvice on matrimony, motherhood, housewifery, “family worship,” gardening, andcooking (including a work entitled What Shall We Have for Dinner?, whose authorclaims the perfectly Dickensian name of “Lady Maria Clutterbuck”).

In addition to this dizzying array of ads for publishers, bookstores, libraries,newspapers and magazines, there are assorted offerings of wigs (including Ross andSon’s “Invisible Ventilating Heads of Hair”), Macassar oil, “bear’s grease,” and otherhair treatments, watches, pipes, and an array of gloves and ladies’ bonnets. There are“new feeding bottles for infants”—and for their mothers, “Amesbury’s Patent BodySupports,” which provide “a substitute for stays” and “guard the Spine and Chestagainst Deformity.” The body of the reader (female or male) is the concern of muchof advertising discourse. As the ads variously suggest, this body might be cared forby several different types of commodities: protected from the elements by “alpacaumbrellas” and the “Versatio, or reversible coat”; nourished and delighted by a wideselection of food items; clothed in the “Gorget Patent Self Adjusting Shirt”; beauti-fied by a range of cosmetics and products that minister to its unfortunate bouts of“Redness and Subcutaneous Eruptions”; and cured by a diverse array of specific andgenerally salubrious home-remedies, including the ubiquitous “Parr’s Life-Pills,”“Ali-Ahmed’s Healing Plaister,” “Dr. Locock’s Pulmonic Wafers” and “FemaleWafers,” various gout and rheumatic pills, lozenges, botanical extracts, tonics andelixirs, and even “Pulvermacher’s Patent Portable Hydro-Electric Chain, for per-sonal use.”

The reader’s other desires and needs might be served by a daguerreotype por-trait gallery, iron bedsteads, “Gutta Percha lining for boxes” (in an ad specifically ad-dressed “To Emigrants, especially such as are proceeding to the Gold Diggings”),fire-proof safes, steel pens, “improved adhesive envelopes,” all manner of ink andwriting paper, the services of several confirmed expert handwriting-analysts, variousfinancial and legal services, and mutual life insurance. Yet, amidst all other productsand services (other than books, of course), the overcoat is perhaps most pervasively


advertised. The inside front cover of No. 1 of Bleak House features an ad for “Ed-miston’s Pocket Siphonia, or waterproof overcoat,” citing, as was the convention, thehighly laudatory “opinions of the press” on the quality of the raincoat. (Also listed inthe inventory of articles for sale are the mysterious “newly invented swimminggloves,” which are, the makers attest, “of great propelling power.”)

What is perhaps most interesting in this advertisement, however, is the em-phatic statement in bold capitals “NOTICE.—NAME & ADDRESS STAMPED IN-SIDE. NONE OTHERS ARE GENUINE.” In a great many ads printed in thesevolumes, this rhetoric of authenticity (the injunction to “accept no imitations”) is re-peated and underscored. Much like the literary property of the author, the intellectualproperty represented by the commodity is defended in the form of stamps and seals,personal signatures and patent-protected “proprietary processes”: “Prepared only byROBERT BARKER,” asserts an ad for a medicine for infants, “CAUTION.—Observethe name of ‘ATKINSON & BARKER,’ on the Government Stamp.” On the same page,just below, Joseph Gillott (“Metallic Pen Maker to the Queen”) concludes a third-person description of his merchandise with the statement, “Each pen bears the im-press of his name as a guarantee of quality . . . with Label outside, and fac-simile ofhis signature.” At times, the discourse of advertising must repudiate the competingclaims and discredit the authenticity of a fraudulent imitator: “CAUTION.—E.Moses & Son have no connection5 with any other house, in or out of London, exceptthe following. . . .” Here, the ad is not merely an appeal to the consumer but a claimto creative and productive agency: the name of the patented product or system, likethe name of a novel author, serves as a kind of signature.

This curious intersection of advertising and the novel—in form, in rhetoric, andotherwise—is the subject of the current study. The advertisements that appear be-tween the paper covers of the serial speak volumes both of the modes of productionand of the imaginative economies of the novel itself. I am not going to argue, how-ever, that the language of advertising “reflects” or “imitates” the language of litera-ture (whatever that might mean); I will argue, instead, that what takes place in theserial novel itself has much to do with what takes place in the advertising sectionfrom which it remains strategically separate. As we have noted in the affirmations ofauthenticity and the repeated warnings6 mentioned above, and as we may observethroughout the pages of the Advertiser, symbolic struggles are constantly being en-acted in the discourses of property and copyright. The zone of commercial solicita-tion that frames the novel becomes a crucially important space of negotiation inwhich the territories of authorship and agency are mapped out and contested in theform of claims to the rights of property—authorial and commercial alike.

Though clearly set apart from the privileged aesthetic category of literature, theads that appear in the serial novel are nonetheless forms of writing whose participa-tion in an economy of capitalist exchange both marks and in turn is marked by thecategory of the novel as a commodity form. Printed ads in the Victorian periodicalpress are not merely an essential source of revenue to defray the costs of mass publi-cation and make the novel possible; they are also involved in the aesthetic and com-mercial enterprises of the novel and implicated in the polemics of gender, of class, ofrace, of nation, and of empire, which define the fields of political struggle within


Fig. 1. Advertisement. In Bleak House No. 1 (March 1852)

which literature situates itself. Often enough, they appear on the pages of print thatprecede and follow the text of the novel itself, separate from the literary work butclose enough to touch it—close enough, perhaps, even to share in some part of itsclaim to a privileged space of representation where public and private meet. As Jen-nifer Wicke has suggested in her ground-breaking Advertising Fictions, “literatureand advertisement are cultural kindred” (3).

This potential kinship, however, is limited both by the function of authorshipand by the orders of temporality to which the two divergent texts belong. Not beingthe product of the author’s conscious creation, and circumscribed by a more imme-diate and temporary commercial objective, the ads vanish with the first printing, andit is a matter of course that they are not to be reproduced in later editions. The novelcan (obviously) exist independently of the ads, much as the ads can exist indepen-dently of the novel, yet the particular way in which these texts have coincided in acommon mass medium is nonetheless highly suggestive. It seems worth consideringthat the institutional and discursive apparatuses of advertisement might be, in a verysignificant sense, the repressed history of the novel—at once its implied other and itsmost secret self. Even in its absence, advertising marks a space that tells us some-thing critical about the ways in which the novel understands itself as a cultural ob-ject, not only in terms of what it is, but also in terms of what it is not. In the interestof articulating this unlikely relationship between literature and advertisement, Iwould like to posit that the two forms of writing have a common history and a sub-stantial formal and aesthetic interrelation. In their literal proximity, economic inter-dependency, and shared discursive labor in mediating between the arenas of“writing” and “the market,” the novel and the ad are peculiar counterparts—and, as Ihope to demonstrate, they often share far more in common than the simple historicalfact of having coexisted in print.

“THIS EXCELLENT MEDIUM OF PUBLICITY”

Though the text of Dickens’s Bleak House is for all intents and purposes stillthe text of Bleak House with or without these ads, there is something in them thatbegs not to be ignored. Throughout the novel, the narrative is structured around a setof uncertainties with regard to matters of legality, property, inheritance, family lin-eage, and legitimacy that follow from various modes of copying and reproduction.These processes seem always to produce disastrous effects and insoluble problemsof subjective agency.7 The relationship between copying or mechanical reproduction(both in the advertisements and in the literary text itself) and these commercial invo-cations of uniqueness and authenticity is striking. Indeed, some of the advertise-ments for the services of copyists, law stationers and lithographers, as well as actualprinting machines and copying presses, resonate so much with the narrative of BleakHouse that the effect is almost uncanny. (One of the ads that appears in various formsin every number of Bleak House is for “Waterlow’s Patent Improved AutographicPress, or portable printing machine . . . by means of which every person may becomehis own printer”8; given Dickens’s concerns about the piracy of his works overseas,


particularly by American printers, and his involvement in the campaign for “Interna-tional Copyright Law”9 in the United States, these advertisements for personal print-ing presses may be of interest.)

While it may quite simply be worthy of attention that images and voices of con-sumer culture appear and speak before, after, within, alongside, and even to this lit-erary text that was itself a best-seller long before it was a classic, I would go further;I would argue that these ads are not merely curiosities for the historical imaginationbut companion texts that claim a definite relationship to the novel. In order todemonstrate this relationship, we need look no further than the inside back cover ofNo. 1: a full-page advertisement for winter overcoats, under the rubric “ANTI-BLEAK HOUSE.” This billing (prepared by the clothier E. Moses of Aldgate for thefirst published number of the novel, prior to its publication) is followed by a longparagraph of ad copy that luridly describes the bitterness and gloom of a cold house.

The ads of E. Moses & Son, which appear on the inside back cover of each in-stallment of Bleak House, often serve as vivid reminders to later readers of the sim-ple fact of the passage of time throughout the course of the novel’s serializedpublication, with alternating references to “April Showers,” “May Flowers,” upcom-ing Parliamentary elections and various other political and cultural events of the day.Though the ad copy is frequently written in florid, novelistic prose, in a style ofhack-“literariness” that Raymond Williams would describe as “commercial purple”(174), I think it is likely that the copy under the title of “ANTI-BLEAK HOUSE” inthis particular advertisement is meant as an actual literary pastiche, recognizablyrendered in the narrative style of those long, sensationally descriptive passages of aDickens novel:

A BLEAK HOUSE that is indeed, where the north winds meet to howl an igno-ble concert, and bitter blasts mourn like tortured spirits of rebels, who, thoughprisoners, are unsubdued; where the whirlwind and the hurricane vow theirvengeance; and the walls and timbers creek resistance, and like wounded gladi-ators, rise again boldly to defy the antagonist. Woe to the inhabitant of theBleak House if he is not armed with the weapons of an OVERCOAT and a SUIT ofFASHIONABLE and substantial Clothing, such as can only be obtained at E.MOSES & SON’S Establishments, Aldgate and Minories, New Oxford-street, and Hart-street, London; or 36, Fargate, Sheffield, or 19, Bridge-street, Bradford,Yorkshire. . . .

These inspired ads from the clothier, which appear in virtually every Dickensnovel, are widely varied in genre, including quasi-journalistic reportage and com-mentary, brief fictional narratives, sketches and personal reflections, and a number oflengthy doggerel poems printed in both the “Martin Chuzzlewit Advertiser” and the“Dombey and Son Advertiser”). In Bleak House, the ads specifically refer to the novelitself on several subsequent occasions. At the end of No. 4, there appears another adin this series entitled “A Suit in Chancery and a Suit out of Chancery,” written in asimilar style, the central conceit being an obvious pun on a “suit” of clothes and theseemingly interminable lawsuit in Bleak House’s infamous Court of Chancery:


Fig. 2. Advertisement. In Bleak House No. 1 (March 1852).

Now the difference between a Suit in Chancery and a Suit out of Chancery isjust this:—in the former a man is every moment tormented, worried, plagued,twisted, sharpened, and threatened, until his very visage becomes like aChancery Suit—quite a supernatural affair. But a Suit out of Chancery, espe-cially a Suit of Summer Dress from the Establishment of E. MOSES & SON islight, brilliant, heartcheering, and brainreviving; brushing up one’s spirits withthe most gratifying assurances of comfort and PLEASURE. But a Suit in Chanceryis a very different matter, with this precious portion if a gentleman has propertyhe is in a fair way for losing it; if he has a good suit he may wear it out in ex-pectation, and possibly may find it difficult to get another. On the other hand, aSuit out of Chancery, from E. MOSES & SON’s, is the best portion of a gentle-man’s estate, maintained at the least expense, exceeding the most sanguine ex-pectations—the very essence of all novel and fascinating styles.

Here, the text of the ad not only makes reference to the subject matter of the novel; italso offers a similar treatment of what we might call the hypostasized general subjectof the Victorian novel’s narrative. Much as the Dickens novel solicits its readerthrough various forms of rhetoric, appealing to that projected reader’s presumedcommon humanity and sympathy, the advertisement hails that same reader as thegeneralized subject of consumption.10 Its appeal is not merely a transparent com-mand to buy a product; supplementing the novel, the ad employs a language of affectin order to arouse a sympathetic response. In proto-Dickensian rhetoric, the “Suit outof Chancery” is produced not as the fulfillment of a simple need, but as the expres-sion of desire. Its properties are not simply material; it is also “brilliant, heartcheer-ing, and brainreviving,” and, not unlike the novel itself, it seduces the reader withpromises of “comfort and pleasure.”11 Like Marx’s hypothetical coat in the firstchapter of Capital, the hypothetical suit of E. Moses & Son appears as a kind of in-human specter of commodity fetishism, which stands as the “material embodimentof value” (Capital 141) and confronts its equivalent form (finding recognition, inspite of “its buttoned-up appearance” as “a splendid kindred soul, the soul of value”),and speaks “the language of commodities” (143). This language, which produces thecommodity as a subject capable of entering into social relations with other com-modities and with the consumer, also works to inspire sentiment and sympathy inconcert with the work of the novel itself.

At the end of the last serial part of Bleak House (the doubly published numbers19 and 20), virtually guaranteed by its spot on the inside back cover of the last in-stallment of the novel to be the last thing one will read, the final serial ad appears, en-titled “THE CLOSING OF THE STORY”:

WHEN an Author has nearly spun out the thread of his narrative, his descrip-tions have connected him and the public so long that they have arrived at apretty good understanding, and possibly the Author thinks it is time to look outfor some fresh subject to keep up the communication.

The good understanding between E. MOSES & SON and the world’s public,is the best basis on which Business communications can be established. The


interest excited by their NOVEL Styles of ATTIRE cannot be excelled, and thecomfort enjoyed in the choicest ARTICLES OF DRESS has originated and longcontinued an intimate Business acquaintance with them, their friends, and theirpublic. . . .

The numerous puns on “novel” (and here, “articles” as well) are a peculiar trope inthis series of ads, many of which play on the suggestion of an analogy between Dick-ens’s literary work and the work of the name-brand clothier on the basis of both qual-ity and popular recognition. In this regard, it may be useful to consider thephenomenon of Dickens’s authorship specifically as a commercial phenomenon. Inthese ads—even in the ones that specifically allude to “legal expectations”12 and to the“suit in Chancery” that figures in the literary text—the use of Dickens and of his nov-els relies upon a relatively superficial awareness of the substance of the texts them-selves. Though E. Moses (or perhaps his son), like many of his friends, customers andfellow Londoners, probably did read Bleak House, he might just as easily have drawnupon the mass-cultural ‘buzz’ surrounding the novel without actually reading it.Merely by virtue of living in London from 1852 to 1853, one could hardly have es-caped some discussion of this best-selling serial and would probably be sufficientlyfamiliar with the story at least to make allusion to its most salient figures. As Wickesuggests (with credit to Orwell’s essay on reading Dickens), “While Tolstoy, for ex-ample, must be read to be known, there is another possible road to Dickens. Dickensis a phenomenon of mass culture, a writer who is present at the creation of advertisingas a system, and whose work and personal career participate in shaping that system”(18). One can know Dickens without necessarily reading Dickens. Or perhaps, to putit differently, reading means something broader than we might tend to think.

Describing Charles Dickens as the most eminently knowable of authors, Or-well, in a modest personal essay, declares him to be “an institution” (98). In compar-ing Dickens’s novels to those of Tolstoy, Orwell remarks that while “Tolstoy’scharacters can cross a frontier, Dickens’s can be portrayed on a cigarette-card” (107).There is certainly some sense in this; Dickens was in his own time and is undoubt-edly still the most “familiar” of all Victorian novelists. With regard to merchandiz-ing, there is in the case of Dickens a whole other dimension to what Foucault soaptly describes as “the author-function.” The celebrated novelist’s name and thenames of his characters were used to market quite an assortment of paraphernalia forfans and collectors in England and the United States. Given the affinity of Dicken-sian characters for particular fetish objects that participate in the narrative’s descrip-tion of their signature attributes, the conversion of character into metonymicmerchandise can hardly be surprising. In addition to the cigarette-card, the much-cited “Pickwick13 cigar” and the “Weller cab,” the market produced dozens of otherDickensian objets: “Sairey Gamp umbrellas, Dolly Vardon aprons, Mr. Turveydropshoe polish, Captain Cuttle tobacco, Micawber pens, canes, gaiters, hats, chintz fab-rics imprinted with Dickens scenes, and even corduroy trousers came out with somevariety of Dickens’s imprimatur” (Wicke 21, 52).14

The perfect marketability of Dickens as a sort of “trademark” or “brand name”is evident not only in this profusion of commercial products named for his characters,


but also in the responses of other advertisers to the great publicity his phenomenallypopular novels generated. One company, strikingly enough, goes so far as to addresswhat is ostensibly a business letter of thanks to “Chas. Dickens, Esq.,” which appearson the first page of the “Bleak House Advertiser” for the month of May (No. 3), asfollows:

SIR,

We thank you for your new work. Though its name is “BLEAK HOUSE,” weknow well that its inmates will be warm and life-like. We thank you for it, notonly for the pleasure that we, in common with all other readers, shall receive inits perusal, but we thank you on more solid grounds ; we thank you for it as amatter of business.

If it be true, that an observer must know the existence of a place before hecan arrange for visiting it, it must be equally true, that the public must beaware of the existence of an establishment before they can contemplate patro-nising it ; and further, that they must be aware of the advantages offered by aparticular concern before they will select that in preference to any other. Onthese grounds, then, we thank you for “BLEAK HOUSE” in a business point ofview, because it affords us the opportunity of conveying to all its readers theadvantages of our Establishment, and the principles on which it continues to beconducted.

Many thousands of readers have, we doubt not, entered upon their tasks sinceeven “DAVID COPPERFIELD” monthly appeared, between his “green leaves,” andsome of these readers may note with favour the statement we here subjoin.

“We keep for the selection of purchasers all kinds of Tea and Coffee fit foruse imported into this country, and we supply them at the most moderate cost atwhich they can possibly be sold.

“We have endeavored to render ourselves particularly celebrated for supply-ing Teas of the most sound and excellent qualities.

“We have a Patented Invention for Roasting Coffee, Cocoa, &c. in Silver. Bythis plan the ordinary evils of roasting such produce in a cylinder made of basemetal are avoided, whilst the cost of the produce is not increased.

“We deliver by our Vans all Orders from any part of the Metropolitan Dis-tricts, within eight miles of St. Paul’s, on the day after such orders are given.

“We also send into the Country, free of carriage, all Orders, if they be ac-companied by a remittance for payment, whether by half-notes, Post OfficeOrder, or otherwise, provided goods ordered amount to £2 or upwards.

“We sell our goods only for immediate payment. Our tariff or profit is fixedwithout allowing for the interest on capital necessary to support a heavy amountof debts.”

For the facilities that this excellent medium of publicity has allowed us formaking known the above particulars, we sincerely thank you, and we trust andhope that by our care and attention, and by the excellence of the Goods we sup-ply, those readers of “BLEAK HOUSE” who may turn their favourable patronage


to “Number One,” will never regret having glanced over the first page of its white paper, on this 1st day of May.

Wishing that you may long live to give birth to heaps of “HOUSEHOLD

WORDS,” and to numerous Brothers and Sisters of “DAVID COPPERFIELD,”

We remain, Sir,Very respectfully,

Your obedient Servants,DAKIN & COMPANY.

No. 1, ST. PAUL’S CHURCH-YARD, LONDON.

May 1st, 1852.

This “letter,” which I have reproduced in its entirety because I think it merits someattention, is one of the most overtly opportunistic advertisements of its kind. In pre-tending to a kind of quaintness, it achieves a comical effect (not least of all in therather infelicitous expression of its wish that the author “give birth to heaps . . .”15

etc.). Taking for granted the putative literary value of the present novel as a source of“pleasure” and as a vehicle for the sentimental productions of realist narrative,whose characters will undoubtedly be “warm and life-like,” the advertisers speak di-rectly to the commercial value of “this excellent medium of publicity” for them-selves as purveyors of fine coffee and tea. Punning on the “green leaves” of the serialparts of David Copperfield by way of implying that their own tea leaves represent acommercial product of comparable value to that of the novel, Dakin & Companydraw attention to the material aspect of the novel: the paper covers in which each in-stallment is bound.

Placing still greater emphasis on the “white paper” on which their own notice,like the literary text, is printed, the advertisers indirectly address the “many thou-sands of readers” through a fictive address to the author (imaginatively placing theirpotential patron in the privileged position of reading Dickens’s mail, much as MrTulkinghorn misappropriates Lady Dedlock’s private letters in Bleak House), inter-pellating the individual reading subject simultaneously as a consumer of cultural andmaterial goods. In the form of the letter, a direct, “personal” communication—os-tensibly the polite expression of goodwill between two gentlemen, writer andreader—is foregrounded, ironically, as homologous to the entirely impersonal rela-tion of “the public” to “an establishment.” Like the ads of E. Moses & Son, this admakes use of rhetorical devices and modes of address that both replicate and compli-cate the work of the literary narrative and that implicate the object of advertising inthe novel’s claim to symbolic capital.

After expounding upon the various advantages of their unique products and ser-vices, and having invited readers to nickname their company “Number One” (afterits business address at No. 1, St. Paul’s Church-Yard) and to be reminded of theirpresence on “the first page,” Dakin & Co. offer their compliments also to Dickens’sjournal, Household Words, as well as to his past, present and future novels. The


invocation of these other texts serves a clear purpose: to associate the company’sname with the eminent ‘brand-name’ of Dickens and his best-selling authorial prod-ucts. The advertisers are, in effect, using this popular novel by name in order to pub-licize both their own products and their hopes that the novelist will continue toproduce the media for further publicity for their company. The function of BleakHouse, in this regard, is to advertise for Dakin & Company’s wares, to advertise foritself, and to advertise for the Dickens enterprise in general—and, in so doing, to en-dorse (by implication, at least) all the companies whose advertisements paid for thepublication of the volume. This is certainly not a customary critical treatment of thenovel qua literature, but to appreciate Bleak House “in a business point of view” is,in a sense, to acknowledge that other side of what this novel is. The ads that speak of(and to) the text from within its own green paper covers powerfully illustrate thatthere is yet another way of “reading” the novel.

Further underscoring (but with an ironic twist) the commercial utility of theDickens novel as a marketing system, an even earlier ad from the prolific E. Moses& Son, printed in the eighth number of David Copperfield, begins with a poem titled“A Proper Field for Copperfield.” The central trope of this poem is “circulation”: itbegins, “Where shall we find the proper field / For circulating ‘Copperfield?’” De-scribing the novel as a “clever work” deserving of the attention of rich and poor, oldand young alike, the unidentified “we” of the poem (E. Moses & Son themselves? E.Moses & Son and Dickens together? The publishers? All of the above?) concerns it-self with the question of how best to promote this work of literature. The poem fur-ther praises the novel by invoking not the fame of the author, but that of the businessbeing advertised:

This novel merits to be readWherever MOSES’ fame has spread;Which, like a banner, is unfurl’dThroughout the habitable world.

Inverting the logic of Dakin & Company’s reading of the novel as an “excellentmedium of publicity” for their business, E. Moses’s poem suggests that their busi-ness is in fact a medium of publicity for the novel. The poem goes on to propose thatthe best possible means of selling this novel might be marketing it to the customersof the apparently world-renowned tailor shop:

If all who favor MOSES’ martWould join and take a monthly part,The theme of our considerationWould have a wond’rous circulation.

Having thus performed a reversal the terms of the relationship between the noveland the advertisement so as to suggest (comically, but nonetheless audaciously) that itis in fact the former that relies upon the latter for its success, E. Moses concludes thathis own loyal customer base is obviously “the proper field / For circulating ‘Copper-


Fig. 3. Advertisement. In David Copperfield No. 8 (December 1849).

field.’” Imaginatively assuming responsibility for the work of promoting the literarytext in which it appears, the ad becomes the medium for a kind of self-mythologizingactivity on the part of the business. The bold joke of this poem—that advertising pre-cedes the novel and gives it value by association with the celebrity of the business—is a joke that I think, for the purposes of this study, might almost be taken seriously. Itis a claim to authority and agency in the process of literary and commercial reproduc-tion; from within a literary text of its own creation, the ad ascribes something like an“author function” to the producer of commodities. Further, we might say that theimagined readers of the novel are thus interpellated first as consumers of commercialgoods and readers of advertising, and only second as readers of literature.

Though there is an obvious and important difference between the status of theproduct of industrial mass production and the made-to-order suit of clothes adver-tised by Moses & Son, the representational system of advertising in which thesethings appear nonetheless bears some relation to another emerging literary dis-course: the commodity story. This popular genre, appearing in so many periodicals,often involves a manufactured object relating its own history of production in thefirst-person. In addition to the numerous instances in Victorian magazines of the“Story of a Pin” and such, there appears in an 1851 issue of Household Words a pieceof writing titled “The Catalogue’s Account of Itself,” in which the Catalogue of theGreat Exhibition speaks of its contents and of the exhibitors of commodities at theCrystal Palace—“most of them authors for the first time” (qtd. in Richards 63). Likethis peculiar genre of fiction, the ads in the serial novel similarly suggest that the nar-rative of the life of a thing16 or a statement of its identity and inner spirit may easilyfind its way into literary form. In addressing themselves either to the reader, to thetext, or to Dickens himself, the figured commodities in advertisements imply that thereader may be interpellated by the address of a thing.17 They display not only a cer-tain apparent agency, but also, a curious capacity to produce novelistic language.

“MUCH DISREGARDED MERCHANDISE”: THE COMMODITY AND THE NOVEL IN SYMBOLIC EXCHANGE

“We are so much in the habit of allowing impressions to be made upon us byexternal objects, which should be produced by reflection alone, but which,without such visible aids, often escape us; that I am not sure I should have beenso thoroughly possessed by this one subject, but for the heaps of fantastic thingsI had seen huddled together in the curiosity-dealer’s warehouse. These, crowd-ing upon my mind, in connexion with the child, and gathering round her, as itwere, brought her condition palpably before me. I had her image, without anyeffort of imagination, surrounded and beset by everything that was foreign to itsnature, and furthest removed from the sympathies of her sex and age. . . . As itwas, she seemed to exist in a kind of allegory; and having these shapes abouther, claimed my interest so strongly, that (as I have already remarked) I couldnot dismiss her from my recollection, do what I would.”

—Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop 20–22


Returning now to Marx’s suggestion that the commodity itself speaks a lan-guage, I think it might be observed that it is just this language in which the novelfinds itself caught. Much as the language of value allows the tea leaves of Dakin &Co. to hail the “green leaves” of the novel’s covers as a sort of equivalent form, thusinterpellating the novel as a subject of economic exchange, the objects that populatethe Dickens novel also participate in the social relations of its human subjects. To acertain extent, the anxiety this exchange produces is a question of proportion; asRichards notes of the spectacular gigantism and visual semiotics of the object in Vic-torian advertising, “[e]xaggerated umbrellas, Cheshire cheeses, tubs of butter, andsides of bacon flaunted the assumption that commodities were fashioned on a humanscale to serve human needs,” performing “a carnivalesque inversion18 of the low re-gard in which everyday articles were commonly held” (48–49). Not only in the Ad-vertiser, but also in the novel itself, the commodity emerges as a spectacular figureentirely out of proportion with the human, and various inanimate “products of thehuman brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own” (Marx,Capital 165).

If Marx’s description of the subjective effects of commodity fetishism soundsconspicuously like a description of the novelistic production of character, perhapsthere is some sense in this. Turning back to that memorable passage from The OldCuriosity Shop in which the sentimentalized Dickensian child, Little Nell, sleeps in-nocently in her grandfather’s shop—improbably framed by a host of inanimate ob-jects “crowding” the mind and memory of the observer—we might note that MasterHumphrey’s “curiosity and interest” in the child is an obvious repetition of the lan-guage of the shop itself, and these sentiments find reinforcement in the spectacularobjects that fill the room (12). As he admits, “I am not sure that I should have been sothoroughly possessed by this one subject, but for the heaps of fantastic things I hadseen huddled together in the curiosity-dealer’s warehouse” (20). Here, too, the com-modity proliferates and accumulates along with (but also, apparently, in oppositionto) the representation of another set of values understood as originating in humansympathy, inwardness and moral “imagination”—all of which ought to be (but areevidently not) resistant to the “impressions” produced by “external objects” (20). Inthe literary narrative, the incongruous image of the novelistic child “surrounded andbeset by everything that was foreign to its nature” is both enabled in the observer’smemory and valued differentially by reference to the commodity form.

Entering into the novel’s economies of subjectivity, the festishized commodityappears at times as a specter of the inhuman that threatens, in the medium of litera-ture, to elide the distinction between artistic and mechanical production. Returningto Bleak House, if the production of literary language in that novel—like the produc-tion of comparatively empty religious discourse by the unctuous Minister Chadband,a sort of sermonizing machine who actually appears to run on oil and “may be de-scribed as always becoming a kind of considerable Oil Mills, or other large factoryfor the production of that article on a wholesale scale” (307)—is implicitly in dangerof becoming a mechanical process within an industrialized publishing industry, thisdanger is expressed in the novel’s constant repudiation of the commodity form andof the system of industrial production.


Though Chadband may be the only character explicitly compared to a factory,he is really one of many mechanical apparatuses that take human form in BleakHouse. Against the grain of its own conventionally humanist inclinations, the narra-tive produces a set of characters recognizable mainly through their synechdochicspeech mannerisms and a limited range of other tics and quirks, and whose mecha-nistic function is to repeat and reproduce themselves to the point of absurdity. Like“Nemo” (or Captain Hawdon, that elusive father whom the text never sees alive),they are all, in a sense, copyists unto death. The device of repetition partakes of thatexaggerated quality of idiosyncrasy popularly associated with the “Dickensian”character. Yet, this device may also serve a practical purpose in the medium of serialfiction: as Lee Erickson suggests, “[t]o help his readers remember his charactersfrom one monthly number to the next, Dickens often reduced his minor characters tocaricatures by having them speak repeated tags” (163).19 I would add, further, that itis no coincidence that these “repeated tags” in Dickensian narrative are also standardpractice in the discourse of advertising that surrounds the serialized novel. In orderto help readers remember the commodities for sale, advertisements repeat them-selves from one printing to the next, offering clipped syntax, unusual product namesand catchphrases, images, taglines and other forms of shorthand—as we saw in theinstance of Dakin & Co., who suggested that readers nickname their business “Num-ber One” (after its address and page number) in part, as a mnemonic device. The cre-ation of a consistent identity and “voice,” whether for a business or for a fictionalcharacter, relies upon the same principles. By force of repetition, the language of thecommodity and the language of the novel alike are continually preserved against for-getfulness and inattention.

To the extent that the work of serial narrative entails a practice of “advertising”for its characters, this practice meets with no small degree of internal resistance inBleak House. In its drive to assert the humanity of its protagonists against the imper-sonality of the modern industrial regime, the government, the court system, and in-stitutions in general, the novel strains against itself to create the symbolic space inwhich the status of writing—unlike that of the commodity—can be represented asthe product of individual human agency rather than of mechanical reproduction. Thepredominant metaphor for the author’s relationship to the text is the relationship ofparent to child; in his Preface to the 1850 edition of David Copperfield, Dickens sen-timentally declares, “Of all my books, I like this the best. It will be easily believedthat I am a fond parent to every child of my fancy, and that no one can ever love thatfamily as dearly as I love them. But, like many fond parents, I have in my heart ofhearts a favourite child. And his name is DAVID COPPERFIELD.” The advertisement forDakin & Co. reflects an awareness of this conceit in its reference to Dickens’s ca-pacity to “give birth to . . . numerous Brothers and Sisters of “DAVID COPPERFIELD.”In equating the novel with the category of the human, and implicitly equating thewriting process with childbirth, the author ascribes a certain “naturalness” to literarycreation that elevates both process and product above the artificiality of the industrialreproduction of the book in print.20

Further underscoring the connection between writing and human conception,the narrative of Bleak House sublimates the illicit act of sexual reproduction in the


form of copying and other modes of duplication of documents. Esther, whose char-acter most readily embodies the novel as a “child” of Dickens, is revealed to be thedaughter of a mysterious “Nemo,” who (like Dickens himself, in his earlier years)works as a law copyist; her parentage is established through a series of handwrittendocuments traced back to her father. The purpose of copying is, of course, to repro-duce an exact facsimile of the original, yet the many instances of copying and repro-duction in the text seem to suggest otherwise. There are only degenerate copies, allof which insistently retain traces of difference even in the handwriting (161), bearingthe involuntary signature of the copyist as if to suggest that writing, by its very na-ture, cannot be mechanically reproduced. The evidentiary documents that ultimatelyserve to legitimate one Will over another in the Jarndyce suit simultaneously serve tode-legitimate Esther, revealing the discreditable history of her birth. Here and else-where, parenthood, filiation, and the purity of the familial line are registered ashighly unstable, troubling the analogy between maternity/paternity and the produc-tion of texts.

Nemo, identified by Mr Snagsby as “a Writer who lodges just over on the op-posite side of the lane,” is marked simultaneously as an author—literally, as thewriter of letters and other documents, and figuratively, as author of the novel’s prin-cipal human subject by virtue of paternity—and (ironically), by the Latin meaning ofhis pseudonym, as the condition of anonymity itself: “‘Nemo!’ repeats Mr Tulking-horn. ‘Nemo is Latin for no one.’ ‘It must be English for some one, sir, I think,’ MrSnagsby submits, with his deferential cough. ‘It is a person’s name’” (161). Nemo,who produces copy for money and who may have “sold himself to the Enemy” in theprocess (164), might be read as a kind of figure for the author of the mass-producedserial novel, presenting writing at once in its individual particularity and in its sheeranonymity; the fate of his character asserts the impossibility of this position. Like theanonymous or “impersonal” writer/narrator of the third-person narrative that bordersEsther’s first-person narrative (a sort of discontinuous sequence of voices andrhetorics, very much closer in style to the schizophrenic clamor of the ads pages thanto the speech of a singular narrative persona), Nemo’s paternal relation to the textand to its human subject is one of profound ambivalence and indeterminacy.

It is crucial to the ideological work of the narrative that Nemo, the anonymous“Writer” and unknown father of the protagonist, ends his life in the quarters ofKrook—the figure mythically associated with the commodity in all its baseness. Thesenile Krook, whose “Rag-and-Bottle Warehouse” figures as the grotesque double ofthe Court of Chancery, is nicknamed ‘the Lord Chancellor’ by virtue of both hisproximity to Chancery and the resemblance of his shop to the court: he too has allmanner of things “wasting away and going to rack and ruin,” along with “so manyold parchmentses and papers” (69). This squalid warehouse is almost the symbolicinverse of advertising—a sort of nightmarish vision of the other side of consump-tion, where the commodity, having expended its use-value, leaves its residue in theform of garbage. Among the many bottles (“blacking bottles, medicine bottles, gin-ger-beer and soda-water bottles, pickle bottles, wine bottles, ink bottles”), the emptycontainers and other refuse of used commodities, and the sacks of rags, discardedbooks and heaps of paper cluttering Krook’s shop, Esther observes “a one-legged


scale, hanging without any counterpoise from a beam” (67–68); this scale, whichseems to belong to the world of the Court, also evokes the merchant’s scale, as if tosignal that the balance and proportion of things has been thrown off.

Equated in all respects with the devaluation of material and cultural goods, po-sitioned in a problematic relation to the object of writing by virtue of his near-illiter-acy,21 and otherwise overdetermined as buyer and seller of worthless used items,Krook is made to disappear in a manner as mysterious and supernatural as the man-ner in which the fetishized commodity itself appears: he spontaneously combusts,taking with him all the letters of importance to the inheritance of property in the legalcase. To use Marx’s evocative image, all that is solid melts into air. In a sense, thisviolent death—“the death . . . of all authorities in all places under all names soever,where false pretences are made” (519)—is also a violent repudiation of the com-modity form. By a certain distributive logic of reprisal, Krook’s spontaneous com-bustion might be read as a settling of scores—the novel’s revenge on the literarymass market and its voracious appetite for “much disregarded merchandise” (163).To the extent that Bleak House, as a commodity, can enter into symbolic exchange, itis imbricated in an economic matrix not only in its situatedness within a medium ofprint capitalism, but also in the literary narrative which may be read, I think, as a nar-rative of the novel’s own struggle for legitimacy.

ADVERTISING AGENCY

As I have suggested, reading might be understood more broadly as a mode ofcultural consumption that is always mediated by processes of economic exchangeand implicated in a perpetual struggle (at the level of language and in the materialforms of the book) to define the relative values of texts. In this sense, reading is anideological process that serves an economic function within a larger circuit of ex-change of “real” and symbolic capital. Within its economy, the figure of the authorenters into circulation ostensibly as a repository of accumulated literary capital—anindex of the abstract capacity to produce still greater value. As Bourdieu has soforcefully articulated, the literary marketplace is structured by a set of differentialvalues which, even when they run precisely contrary to the notion of economic inter-est, are nonetheless the product of an investment of symbolic capital both in the artobject or text and in the figure of the artist. Yet, while Bourdieu’s sociological viewof the “market of symbolic goods” offers us a remarkably sophisticated and usefulaccount of the processes of cultural production, his analysis does not extend beyondthe traditional parameters of what is considered “art.” The question of conscious in-dividual agency, which continues to determine the status of writing to a far greaterextent than we may be willing to admit, seems to preclude the treatment of much“extra-textual”22 or extra-diagetic writing (such as advertising) as anything otherthan the ephemera of popular culture—perhaps of limited interest to historicistscholarship and cultural criticism but otherwise irrelevant to literary studies.

The study of advertisements in terms other than the economic has been, sincethe 1940s and 50s, a relatively obscure field of inquiry that generally comes under


the rubric of cultural studies or sociology. Since Barthes’s 1959 Mythologies, Bau-drillard and Debord (and, more recently, Bill Brown) have made significant interven-tions into the theoretical status of the object and of the commodity as spectacle. Inrecent years, substantive and often illuminating work has been done by ThomasRichards, in Victorian history, and Laurel Brake and Jennifer Wicke, in literary stud-ies, who have contributed much insight to the study of advertising. Brake, in herstudy of print media and book history, has gone so far as to suggest that scholarsmight “treat the wrappers and advertisers that, with the letterpress and illustration,make up part-issues and periodicals, as part of what we designate as the text” (27).This gesture towards a new textual theory—in the vein of what Greetham describesas “a nexus where authoriality and textuality meet but are not (necessarily) consub-stantial” (49)23—may be a significant step in the right direction, yet Brake’s argumentfor studies of advertising is nonetheless recursive to a set of age-old distinctions be-tween the literary and the commercial. In order to substantiate her argument, Brakepoints to the obvious connections between the institutions of print advertising and thebook industry, and notes the prevalence of ads in periodicals for other periodicals:“Like a listing magazine, the Advertiser kept regular readers up to date on the latestissues of the magazines—with details of their contents; the newest books, series, andpart-issues; and new entrants in the field such as The Day. An academic analogy lieswith the advertisements in PMLA or Victorian Studies” (44). Though the role of ad-vertising in the dynamics of the Victorian publishing market is certainly an interest-ing area of historical inquiry, the contemporary “academic analogy” is a littlefarfetched; I think we would be unlikely to find a contemporary ad for baby food,soap, or hair treatments in the pages of PMLA. In valorizing the Advertiser by com-parison to elite academic journals, Brake’s analogy reproduces the logic of distinc-tion that elevates literary writing above other forms. Ignoring the numerous ads fornon-literary products that appear in serial fiction, Brake unreflectively reinforces pre-cisely this ideological divide between literature and its others that was the originalreason for the exclusion of the ads from later volume editions of serial novels.

What so many admirable studies of Victorian print and periodicals stop short ofconcluding amounts to a fairly succinct explanation for the continuing disciplinarydivide between the “literary” and the (merely) “cultural.” This explanation, I wouldargue, begins and ends with the category of the author. For all the work of poststruc-turalism in the 1960s and 70s, remarkably little has changed since Barthes’s obituaryfor the author, or since Foucault’s inquiry into the formation of authorship as a spe-cial category of property and as a function of discourse. By and large, the study ofliterature has remained safely within the boundaries of authorship, and scholars havecontinued to hold conferences on Dickens, to deliver papers on Hardy, to publishdazzlingly brilliant monographs on George Eliot, and all with (at best) only the mostsuperficial acknowledgement of the problematic assumptions underlying the studyof an individual author.

The present study, like so many others, begins with a single author, but I hope itwill not end there. To the extent that a reading of advertising can serve to reveal, ifnot to dislodge, the often unarticulated politics of authorship, it is my argument thatthe advertisement has a kind of supplemental relationship to the “author-function.”


Under the regime of industrial print capitalism, the work of commercial discourse isnot merely that of selling commodities, but of advertising agency; in the margins ofserial fiction, the ad for a clothier’s services is also an ad for the productive potentialand unique creative agency of the author. To invoke the name and the works of Dick-ens is to draw upon the collective cultural investment in the idea of the singularity ofthe author as a person and in the idea of his uniqueness as a producer of literature. Ifwe take the force of Foucault’s observation that the proper name of an author is notmerely “indicative” or “designative” but, “to a certain extent, the equivalent of a de-scription” (121), I think we might even take one step further, and note that the nameof a text operates similarly as a form of description. Bleak House is not merely thename of a novel; it is shorthand for the historically variable composite impressionsof a text’s cultural valence, its mythic uniqueness, its signatures and its critically rec-ognized effects.

When we speak of the “anonymity” of advertising discourse, we implicitly con-trast it against literary discourse, pointing not only to the notion of its impersonality(as opposed to the perceived “personality” of the author and text), but also to thesense that this form of writing cannot lay claim to a proper title. Notwithstanding theinconsistencies, the incongruities, or the breaks in time and in narrative, the serialnovel is marked as a coherent and self-sufficient totality even before it has been writ-ten. By the time of publication of the first monthly part, its status as a novel (with animplied futurity in which it will be completed) is already beyond question. Much asFoucault has argued of the author—largely taking for granted the status of the text—that its function is to present the spectral appearance of a person who is supposed tohave preceded the text, I am arguing that the text itself is similarly posited as some-thing anterior to writing. If there is something like a text-function, or more particu-larly, a novel-function, it operates as a claim for the unity, singularity and autonomyof the writing. Under the sign of its title, the writing assumes the shape of an imag-ined totality called a novel long before it is complete.

Though an advertisement in print may imitate the literary text it supplements,making similar use of a title, the capacity of this title to ensure the durability of thewriting is in no way comparable. In the particular case of the “Dickens Advertiser,”where the entire collection of ads preceding the text is actually accorded a title of itsown—and one which includes the title of the novel (“Bleak House Advertiser,”“Dombey and Son Advertiser”) as if to imply that the ads bear some relation to theliterary text—advertising seems to take on the ambiguous status of the novel’s other.The Advertiser is secondary to the novel (though it precedes Dickens in print), yet itstitle insists that it is somehow related, whether by practical interdependence, by for-mal opposition, or otherwise. In this sense, “Anti-Bleak House” could hardly be amore fitting title for the ad that appears within (but not quite in) the serial novel.Marking the text of E. Moses & Son as definitively not the text of Bleak House, thistitle serves to consolidate the serial novel as a coherent and autonomous entity bydrawing its boundaries from the outside. It is thus in the discourse of advertising thatthe novel is defined in the negative by what it is not.

The ads, as we have observed, often (and sometimes explicitly) trade on thesymbolic capital invested in the novel and its author; yet, it is ultimately the function


of advertising discourse to subordinate the interests of consumption to the primaryinterests of “culture.” Unlike an advertisement for suits of clothes that vary by theseason, the novel is a world apart. It transcends the time and place of its writing, andits apparent “timelessness” assures that its value does not lie in its ephemeral printmedium, but in its apparent uniqueness and in its ostensibly universal and transhis-torical appeal as literature.24 While the ads (which do not aspire to such transcen-dence and whose instrumental purpose is distinguished from the higher aestheticobjects of literature) may be excised without a second thought when the serial partsare sent off to the bindery, not a word of Dickens’s novel can be lost in translationfrom serial to volume.

If the later editor of a Victorian serial novel is expected to do more than merelytake at face value the articulations of difference between two forms of writing thatmutually define each other by a relation of apparent opposition (trusting that thenovel has better intentions than do the ads), we might wonder how it is that our edi-tors continue to draw the distinction between text and paratext along precisely theoriginal fault lines. In our collective investment in the ideology of the novel and inthe notion of literature’s separateness, we are still—and perhaps inevitably—operat-ing within the episteme of novelism.25 It is my contention that there are four unstatedarticles of faith that categorically exclude advertising from literature, and vice versa:1) the singular agency of the author, as opposed to the work of anonymous others; 2)the continuity and totality of narrative, as opposed to that which is understood asextra-diagetic; 3) the timelessness of literature, as opposed to the ephemerality ofeconomic interests; and 4) the essential humanity of the novel subject, as opposed tothe monstrous, inhuman specter of the fetishized commodity. These articles, pro-duced by a historically specific struggle within the literary marketplace of the nine-teenth century to define art as an autonomous and economically ‘disinterested’formation, still describe an ideology of reading.

We might pretend, in theory, to disavow our allegiance to the author, afterBarthes; we might claim to read a text (locally) as pure difference rather than as a co-herent narrative, after Derrida; we might profess to understand the value of any aes-thetic object as historically contingent and ideologically bound, after Eagleton; wemight even poke fun at old-fashioned humanism and advocate a radical politics ofthe post-human. Yet, when we sit down to read, we are confronted with a novel thatpresents itself as the product of a single author (a real person about whom certain bi-ographical facts may be known, whether or not they are of interest to us), a text thatwe understand as a series of words in a particular and invariable order that are read-able and self-sufficient as a narrative—a narrative that we believe is worth readingand will continue to be worth reading, even though it was written in a different era,because it is about, above all, the lives of people. In this sense, everything pointsback to the author, in whose own essential humanity we are still peculiarly in-vested—even to the point of allowing that mythic figure to determine what we canand cannot admit into the privileged category of literature, what can and cannot beread as a text (or “the text”), and where to draw the line.

With regard to the limits of authorship, Foucault notes, “The problem is boththeoretical and practical. If we wish to publish the complete works of Nietzsche, for


example, where do we draw the line? Certainly, everything must be published, butcan we agree on what ‘everything’ means?” He then muses, “But what if, in a note-book filled with aphorisms, we find a reference, a remainder of an appointment, or alaundry bill, should this be included in his works? Why not?” (118–19). The ques-tion of Nietzsche’s laundry bill is, in a sense, the logical extension of both the author-function and the claim of “timelessness”26 as a value of the text. The problem is notthat we are interested in what Nietzsche paid (or did not pay) for his laundry; on thecontrary, the problem is that the airing of the author’s dirty laundry offers such an af-front to the orthodoxies of editing that we cannot help but stop and take notice of theideological foundations of this exclusion. Likewise, in the framework of a Victorianserial novel, we do not want to know the price of an overcoat (whether it happens tobe a “reversible coat,” a “Byron Jacket,” or “The Anthropos”), nor to what address inLondon we may write for particulars, unless this information somehow has self-evi-dent bearing on the substance of the literary text.

It is not the network of economic relations but the commodity as such that pre-sents an obstruction. It displays an apparently impenetrable surface; though, like thenovel, it might be understood more as a “representation” than as a “thing,” its essen-tial difficulty (and its ethical and political problem) is that, unlike the novel, it doesnot offer a narrative. This might even be regarded as the core of Marx’s critique ofthe commodity form: the object is taken as a representation of something other thanitself—that is to say, other than its apparent material properties and, more impor-tantly, other than the quantity and intensity of labor that produced it (the hiddensource of its value) and the social relations of its production. Concealing this narra-tive of its origins within itself as the representation of a concrete object, the reifiedcommodity militates against representation itself, appearing as a thing without apast, and a sort of text that cannot point back to its “author.” The appearance of thecommodity in the medium of literature—the sign of the novel’s potential to enterinto economic exchange—produces resistance not only at the margins but within thetext itself. Advertising, as the literary discourse of the commodity and as the field inwhich it emerges, lays claim to a space where writing and capitalism are not merelycoeval but analogous: where art and the commodity confront one another as equiva-lent forms, each determined in relation to the other by the possibility of exchange,and each existing primarily to sustain the other.

As we have observed in Bleak House and other Victorian serial novels, and asbecomes increasingly clear in a reading of advertising discourse alongside the liter-ary discourse it accompanies, the similarities to be seen are not simply a matter ofcommon “themes,” nor are they merely “effects” of a concrete material relation; Iwant to maintain that advertising (much like the novel) is not a material object, but arhetorical and discursive practice. Attending to this practice, I would argue, mightinvolve reading advertising not as a secondary effect, but as a primary formationwithin the structure of the novel, which, in articulating the supplementarity of twodivergent modes of writing, produces the one in relation to the other. It is not againstbut rather through such formations that the status of the literary emerges.

What kinds of writing can and cannot take place under the sign of “literature”is, of course, a distinction that cuts across the field of historical possibility and that


tests our own relative capacity to read literary history from inside of ideology. I un-derstand ideology largely in the Althusserian sense—that is to say, not as a form of“false consciousness,” but as something actual, something fluid, which flows throughthe channels of institutions and discourses and which operates by specific materialpractices and by various modes of interpellation. As we have observed, the novel-reading subject is also the subject of advertising and is specifically interpellated bythe language of advertisement in ways that reproduce, supplement, and complicatethe work of the literary narrative. Finally, it is my contention that the address of ad-vertising discourse to the reading subject (and the response of the subject to that ad-dress) is essential not only to the commercial viability of the novel in the massmarket, but also, to the reproduction of the kind of readerly subjectivity that makesthe novel what it is.

CONCLUSION

The account of the novel I have proposed is one in which advertising plays acrucial role in producing and shaping the novel as a literary genre and in creating thereal and imaginary conditions for a mass culture of novel-reading. As I have argued,the status of the novel in the age of industrial print capitalism is at once that of liter-ature—in which form it stakes out a position of economic disinterest and ostensibleautonomy from the market—and that of an “excellent medium of publicity” for themarketing of material goods; further, it is this (arguably false) dichotomy within theculture of the novel that identifies it as a site of symbolic struggle. It is not the goodsthemselves that are of interest to us, but rather, the discourse of value that surroundsand contains them and the ideology that supports their consumption. Advertisingdoes not tell us what objects we consume; as Baudrillard maintains, it tells us “whatit is that we consume through objects” (165). In the context of the novel, what weconsume through objects is the product of a substantial cultural investment in thepossibility of a human scale, a sort of “value form” against which to measure novel-istic subjectivity and textuality, which serves as the foundation of the modern poli-tics of authorship.

The regime of the Author has also been, for us, the regime of “the Text”—a the-oretical calcification which, in its apparent open-endedness, seems to exempt usfrom the work of defining what comprises the text, but which really only concealsour own belief in its ultimate determinacy as an identifiable, self-contained and self-consistent object of analysis. Foucault points to this problem in noting that the con-cept of écriture itself “in subtle ways, continues to preserve the existence of theauthor” to the extent that it “sustains the privileges of the author through the safe-guard of the a priori” (119–20); brilliantly observed though this is, it does not an-swer for the larger problem of expressing, in theoretical and practical terms, exactlyhow the a priori status of writing is established—how (to put the question differ-ently) writing passes from the condition of the “timely” to that of the “timeless.”More importantly, perhaps, it seems to me that the greatest impediment is the lack ofa coherently articulated theoretical framework for the study of periodical genres,


forms and media that might allow for the reassessment of the novel within a largerdiscursive economy. So much attention has been devoted to the study of the novelover the past thirty or forty years that we have very nearly lost sight of what lies justoutside its margins. We lack even the vocabulary to describe what orders of time thenovel needs to inhabit and what kind of symbolic and material space it needs to oc-cupy in order to differentiate itself from the periodical institutions that support its re-production—materially and otherwise. Insofar as the assertion of the novel’sessential difference from other genres (most emphatically, from periodical genresand from the language of the commodity) marks a foreclosure within the field of pro-duction, the cult of the author endures in the cult of the text.

When Foucault suggested in 1969 that “[p]erhaps the time has come to studynot only the expressive value and formal transformations of discourse, but its modeof existence: the modifications and variations, within any culture, of modes of circu-lation, valorization, attribution, and appropriation” (137), he laid out a task that isstill very much before us today. Following from this suggestion, what remains to beseen more than thirty-five years later is how we might study the “mode of existence”of the novel itself so as to read against the grain of what I have called the text-func-tion. On this score, and many others, there is a great deal of work to be done. So, fornow, perhaps the most fitting ending might be the one indicated or implied as the inevitable conclusion to all but the last installment of a serial novel: “TO BE CONTINUED.”

ENDNOTES

Many thanks to Robert Scholes and Jon Klancher for reading earlier drafts of this article, and to theJohn Hay Library of Brown University Library for permitting me to reprint some of the advertisementsfrom their serials collection.

1. On Dickens’s journalistic career and writings, see Drew.

2. See Johnson 167–68.

3. On the history of Victorian book publishing and the economics of the literary marketplace, see Altick,Sutherland, Erickson, and Feltes. On the phenomenon of serialization in particular, see also Vann,Law, and Hughes & Lund.

4. Dickens notes in his Preface to the First Cheap Edition of The Old Curiosity Shop, “When the storywas finished, that it might be freed from the incumbrance of associations and interruptions withwhich it had no kind of concern, I caused the few sheets of MASTER HUMPHREY’S CLOCK, which hadbeen printed in connexion with it, to be cancelled; and, like the unfinished tale of the windy night andthe notary in The Sentimental Journey, they became the property of the trunkmaker and the butter-man. I was especially unwilling, I confess, to enrich those respectable trades with the opening paperof the abandoned design. . . . But it was done, and wisely done, and MASTER HUMPHREY’S CLOCK, asoriginally constructed, became one of the lost books of the earth—which as we all know, are far moreprecious than any that can be read for love or money” (7).

5. Appearing as it does in the context of Bleak House, this line may resonate strangely with those of thenarrator: “What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, theMercury in powder, and the whereabouts of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had the distant ray oflight upon him when he swept the churchyard step? What connexion can there have been between


many people in innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have,nevertheless, been curiously brought together!” (256).

6. The earlier meaning of advertising—avertissement—is, of course, “warning.”

7. On agency and responsibility in Bleak House, see Robbins. For an insightful reading of the aspects ofcopying, “imitation” and “exchange” in Dickens’s novels, see McLaughlin.

8. There is also another, smaller model of this press offered as “adapted for exportation to the colonies.”For scholars of colonialism in British popular culture, or in the history of the periodical press in Indiaand elsewhere as an instrument of colonial administration, these advertisements would offer a greatwealth of material.

9. At Dickens’s request, the publishers printed a notice in the “Bleak House Advertiser” stating that theauthor reserves the right to publish a translation of the present novel at his discretion, in keeping withthe “New Law of International Copyright.” On Dickens’s involvement in the cause of internationalcopyright, see Joseph and Nowell-Smith.

10. Consumption, as Marx reminds us in the Grundrisse, must be understood as inextricable from pro-duction: “the product . . . proves itself to be, becomes, a product only through consumption” (91), andeach process “supplies the other with its object” (93). We might add, further, that consumption is byno means a simple matter of the fulfillment of need; as Baudrillard underscores, it might be more rig-orously defined as “the virtual totality of all objects and messages ready-constituted as a more or lesscoherent discourse. If it has any meaning at all, consumption means an activity consisting of the sys-tematic manipulation of signs” (200).

11. As Baudrillard suggests, advertising works in part to solicit the subject through an offer of reciprocalaffect, or even love: “We are taken as the object’s aims, and the object loves us. And because we areloved, we feel that we exist: we are ‘personalized’. This is the essential thing—the actual purchase ofthe object is secondary” (171). The other side of this mutual desire on the part of subject and object,however, is the anxiety of a lack (whether of warmth, of comfort, of pleasure, or of love) on which ad-vertising also trades. (On this point, see also Williams 185.)

12. While most of the ads for E. Moses & Son employ this vocabulary of legality in the service of pas-tiche, one of the monthly advertisements concludes, “CAUTION.—E. Moses & Son regret having toguard the Public against imposition, having learned that the untradesmanlike falsehood of ‘being con-nected with their Establishment’ of ‘It’s the same concern,’ has been resorted to in many instances,and for obvious reasons. . . .”

13. In the narrative of the Pickwick Papers, Moses Pickwick becomes a curious example of this phenom-enon. The character’s chance sighting of the coach on the side of which his own full name is printed(582) seems to indicate an odd propensity of personal names to attach themselves to objects, or to de-tach themselves from persons; as McLaughlin quite persuasively suggests, the appearance of thisname on a coach is both a paradigmatic encounter between the subject and “his own random appear-ance as a ‘modern’ sign” and a particularly significant moment in Dickens’s first novel, since the au-thor’s previous pseudonym, “Boz,” derives—as Dickens notes in his Preface—from “Moses”(McLaughlin 120–21). In light of this connection, I think the name of E. Moses must also be chargedwith a certain suggestiveness. In a very interesting advertisement in the first number of David Cop-perfield, the clothier offers an “Analysis of the Name of Moses & Son,” which playfully cataloguesthe various words beginning with each letter of the name that describe the positive attributes of thebusiness.

14. See also Darwin 9.

15. Here, as we shall see elsewhere, the implied metaphor of the author as “mother” echoes a commonrhetorical trope in the language of advertising, which serves similarly to convey the productive anddomestic values of the commodity. That the novel, like any other commodity as personified in adver-tising discourse, may be treated as one of a series of “siblings,” is telling. It is also interesting to notethat while Dickens’s literary and editorial labors as objectified in his journal, Household Words, may


be represented as accumulating in “heaps,” his novels are metaphorically given their due by way of aprivileged association with the human child.

16. Bill Brown emphatically notes that the “thing” is not synonymous with the “object.” He definesthings as “what is excessive in objects . . . what exceeds their mere materialization as objects or theirmere utilization as objects—their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence” (5). Hegoes on to offer what we might almost describe as a serial definition of thingness: “Temporalized asthe before and after of the object, thingness amounts to a latency (the not yet formed or the not yetformable) and to an excess (what remains physically or metaphysically irreducible to objects).”

17. Jaffe’s reading of A Christmas Carol suggests an interesting parallel: the objects in the window thatScrooge observes in the scenes of Christmases Past seem to speak to him and ultimately to show himwhat he is (Jaffe 260). Jaffe describes Dickens’s tale as “the story of a Victorian businessman’s inter-pellation as the subject of a phantasmatic commodity culture in which laissez-faire economics is hap-pily wedded to natural benevolence” (255).

18. I think this “carnivalesque inversion” irresistibly recalls Marx’s description of the table which, in itscommodity form, “stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far morewonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will” (Capital 163–64).

19. See also Vann 4.

20. In this regard, Armstrong and Tennenhouse’s highly suggestive “reproductive hypothesis” (160–95)might take on new meaning in the representation of the book’s mechanical reproduction; in writingthe novel into a narrative of heterosexual kinship relations and a seemingly self-evident structure ofparenthood and filiation, both the cultural logic of authorship and the social relations of the domesticorder are simultaneously naturalized by reference to a crucial third term: the commodity.

21. Krook’s attempts to teach himself to read—and the sinister and almost incantatory manner in whichhe spells out the names of the characters involved in the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce (71)—mightbe read along the lines of Brantlinger’s argument on the “anxieties” of mass literacy; see Brantlinger1–24.

22. On other forms of extra-textual writing, or “paratext” (not including advertising), see Genette.

23. As Greetham indicates in a study of the conditions of textuality, the interpretive problem that con-fronts an editor at any given historical moment and in any cultural context is that “all editing, and alleditorial theory—just like all criticism and all critical theory—is constrained by history, the post-his-torical dreams of eclecticism notwithstanding” (374). This means, he argues, that “the status of socialtextual criticism is itself socially determined and is not independent of the intellectual and academicsociety that both produces and sustains it” (374). The construction of an Ur-text of sorts is always theimplied object of a critical edition, but I think it ought to be underscored that the idealized form of thetext belongs entirely to the realm of the imaginary. On textual theory and editorial methodology, seeGreetham and McGann; on editing Victorian novels, see Monod and Shillingsburg.

24. Lovell notes that the novel in the Victorian period “depended on profitability, but its rationale was itsliterary value. Insofar as intellectual and literary production took a commodity form, it tended to-wards the denial and disguise of its own commodity status” (74).

25. I borrow this term from Siskin; see The Work of Writing, 155–90.

26. The perplexities of the “timely” and the “timeless” find expression even in the more ephemeralmedium of advertising: one of E. Moses’s ads (in the twelfth number of David Copperfield) featuresa poem titled “On an Old Picture,” which is a meditation on “The Dress peculiar to the days gone by.”The poem notes the “curious” coats, hats, and other articles shown in old pictures—clothes that nowseem “fashion’d only to provoke to smiles,” and wonders, “What would be thought, if, in the presentday, / A person were to dress in such a way?” The poetic speaker goes on favorably to compare her (orperhaps his) own clothing—“bought of MOSES, by the bye”—with those “outlandish styles” of somefifty years ago, and remarks upon the “superior style” of the contemporary articles. This ad seems to


assert, paradoxically enough, that its products are at once fashionable (being the epitome of con-temporary style) and somehow also timeless—unlikely to be ridiculed by future ages.

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Documents

“Anti-Bleak House”: Advertising and the Victorian Noveland elsewhere. There are accounts of Arctic explorations, a Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa, a memoir entitled Settlers