The study of Thackeray's major fiction reconstructs the novelist's working methods with the help of manuscript material, much of it previously unpublished. The book's main argument is directed against the commonplace view that Thackeray was in some way a 'careless' artist. Much that appears casual or unpremeditated in his work can in fact be explained by the mode of composition which he developed in response both to the publishing conditions of his age and to his own artistic temperament. An appreciation of Thackeray's writing habits helps clear up much of the critical confusion which has...

Introduction
Part One: The Novel Publishing World, 1830-1870
1. Novel Publishing 1830-1870
2. Mass Market and Big Business: Novel Publishing at Midcentury
3. Craft versus Trade: Novelists and Publishers
Part Two: Novelists, Novels and their Publishers, 1830-1870
4. Henry Esmond: The Shaping Power of Contract
5. Westward Ho : 'A Popularly Successful Book'
6. Trollope: Making the First Rank
7. Lever and Ainsworth: Missing the First Rank
8. Dickens as Publisher
9. Marketing Middlemarch
10. Hardy: Breaking into Fiction
Notes
Index

This topical, lively and wide-ranging book examines the material conditions under which the contemporary English novel is produced and consumed. Its starting point is the general economic emergency which showed up these conditions with unusual clarity in the early 1970s. The first section of the book, 'Crisis and Change', considers the changing patterns of institutional book-purchase, inflation and novel-production, the 'Americanisation' of the British book trade, and the present state of fiction reviewing. The second section, 'State Remedies', surveys such interventions, and failed...