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VICTORIAN YELLOWBACKS & PAPERBACKS: A REVIEW ESSAyl

NORMAN GARDINER

Your reviewer told himself that he would pass on his review copies of volumes three and four of Chester Topp's Victorian Ye/lowbacks & Paperbacks to the library of the university that sustained him for twenty-five years; he was not interested in the paperbacks; he had a sampling of the yellowbacks themselves and did not need their descriptions; he could take a tax deduction ... but he won't be giving them up. In many cases Topp's entries' chart the life in print of a novel from serial appearance through every stage to yellowback or paperback reprint; they chart the course of four important Victorian publishers; they even have fine colour photographs of well-preserved yellowback covers. If you have handled such books, you will know that they scuff until the cover picture becomes mysterious; on the cover of Frances Eleanor Trollope's Veronica, you know that the woman, squatting by a basket, is doing something with a rod -shaped object - but what?

In volumes one and two of his bibliography Professor Topp described the yellowbacks published by Routledge, and by Ward, Lock. He intends to continue the bibliography with further volumes covering other nineteenth -century publishing houses. This massive undertaking presents us with the means to conduct research on the history of Victorian publishing and reading habits and allows us to track the reputations of prominent authors, and of authors who, though popular in their day, have not survived as part of the literary canon.

Topp's work should encourage academics, students, and collectors to venture beyond the obvious high-spots - Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Trollope.

I intend to refer to a couple of case studies to show how Topp's bibliography can be used as part of broader research. The first of these is Anthony Trollope's sister-in-law, Frances Eleanor Teman Trollope. She was married to Trollope's older brother, Thomas Adolphus Trollope, himself a prolific writer of novels, histories, and travel books.

Frances Eleanor Trollope was a novelist in some ways representative of those who appeared in the cheap forms of publication directed towards middle-class readers. She was the sister of Ellen Teman, Dickens's mistress. After appearing on the stage as an infant prodigy she attempted a singing career, but without success. Her intimacy with the Trollopes and her connection with Dickens may have made her a sharper than average student of the trade in books.

Between 1866 and 1892 Frances Eleanor Trollope produced twelve novels; they contributed to the security which she enjoyed in matriage in her middle age.

I. Chester W. Topp, Victorian Y,liowbacki & Paperbacki. VoL 3, John Camden HOffen and Chaffo & Windu!, Chapman and VoL 4, FTridenc/e Warn, & Co., Samp!on Low & Co. Denver, CO: Hermitage Antiquarian Bookshop, 1997-1999. ISBN 0963392026 (v.3), 0963392034 (v.4). USS150 each.

BSANZ Bulletin vol.24 no.3, 2000, 202-209

Yellowbacks and Paperbacks 203

The following table shows the serialization, first (usually two or three -decker) book . publication,one volume editions, and yellowbacks. 2 I found yellowback editions of seven, the exceptions being those published by Spencer Blackett and by Bentley. Professor Topp tells me that, although these publishers will be covered in future volumes, none of Frances Eleanor's novels appear in the lists.

Frances Eleanor Trollope's Novels Novels Serialised First Book ed. Reprint Yellowback Aunt Margaret's All th, Y,ar C&H,1866 C&H,1866 C&H,1873 Trouble Round 1 vol., anon. C&H,1868 C&H,1880

C&H,1870 WL, 1882 (paper) WL, 1884 WL 1884

Mabel's Progress All the Year C&H,1867 C&W, 1884 C&W, 1885 Round 3 vols. anon.

The Samstan's St. Paul's Virtue, 1896 C&H,1876 Household MaJ.t1Xitl,3 2 vols. anon. WL 1884 Veronica Alllh, Year Tinsley, 1870 WL, 1886 C&H,1871

Round 3 vols., anon. (paper) C&H,1876 WL 1886

AnneFumess Fortnight!:; C&H,1871 C&W,1884 C&W, 1885 3 vols. anon.

A Charming Fellow All th, Year C&H,1876 C&H,1876 Round 3 vols. WL 1884

Black Spirits and Graphic Bendey, 1877 Whit, 3 vols. Uk, Ships upon th, Graphic C&H,1883 C&W, 1883 C&W,·1884 S,a 2 vols. That Unfortunale Graphic Bendey, 1888 Mamal!.' 3 vols. Among Aliens' Grap"'c Spencer, Blackett,

1890 2 vols.

Madame Leroux Graphic Bendey,1890 3 vols.

Thai W,ld Wheel Graphic Bendey, 1892 3 vols.

Key: C&H - Chapman and Hall; C&W - Chatto and Wmdus; WL - Ward, Lock

2. In serial form I have read the early novels in All the Year Riumd; The Sacristan'; Household in St. Paul's Magazjne; and the late novels in Th, GraphIC. In book form I have read Ann, Fumess in Chatto's single-volume cloth reprint (piccadilly edition); Veronica and A Charming Fellow in yellowbacks; and Among Aliem in Spencer Blackett's two-decker edition.

3. Illustrated by Marcus Stone. 4. Among Aliens ran as Amongst Aliens in the Graphic in 1878, although it did not appear in

book form until 1890, an exceptionallag-time among F. E. Trollope's novels.

204 Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin

The pattern of this novelist's publishing calls for a few words of explanation. Her choice of publishers seems to have been determined at least in part by her connections: Dickens secured her for All the Year Round and perhaps for Chapman and Hall. Trollope was the editor of St. Pau!'s Maga'?jne and the FortnightlY, and Virtue and Tinsley were at various times his publishers; both he and Thomas Adolphus had lengthy relationships with Chapman & Hall, in which firm Anthony invested and whose board he eventually joined.

The forms of publication which brought Frances Eleanor before the greatest numbers of readers were the serialisations and, in far smaller measure, the yellowbacks. Under Dickens's direction, All the Year Round circulated at about a hundred thousand.' When the editor of the Graphic was wooing Trollope, he claimed for his journal a circulation 'far exceeding that of any magazine'.6 Sadleir held that editions in yellowback began at about a thousand (which seems low). In between, a middle-ranking novelist like Frances Eleanor probably sold fewer copies of her novels in cloth, a format meant mainly for the circulating library shelves. She was, however, popular with the library public, as can be seen when one looks at Mudie's annual catalogues. In 1895, for example, shortly after she had ceased to write fiction, ten of her twelve novels remained on Mudie's shelves. Her frequent appearances in The Graphic, lavishly illustrated, in a sequence of novels including She and Tess of the D 'Urbervilles, may have given her the rank of a Haggard or a Hardy with the reading public. By 1923 two of her novels were still on Mudie's list; they were Mabe!'s Progress and Like Ships upon the Sea, two of her best.

The lack of yellowback, or indeed single-volume appearances, for five of Frances Eleanor's last six novels suggests dwindling appeal in the market.

The least-accomplished novelists often turn out works that vary in title, but seldom.in content. I would nominate James Grant, whose yellowbacks feature in Routledge's list, as a specimen of this sort of feebleness, though Routledge continued to publish new titles by him forty years after he had peaked, indicating that his sales were still healthy. Frances Eleanor's novels form a contrast to Grant's staleness. They show a variery of interests and a willingness to attempt different forms of narration. No two of her novels are quite alike. True, at times we sense that she is casting about for what will sell. The Samstan's Household involves the very recent war between the Prussians and the Austrians; Black Spirits and White exploits the contemporary interest in spiritualism. Madame Leroux treats the mystery of a child's abandonment but also shows its heroine finding work copying leaflets for an entrepreneurial dentist at fifteen shillings a week. The same novel contains an amusing account of the fraudulent floating of a company intending to compete with imported·tea by marketing herbal infusions. The two Italian novels, Like Ships upon the Sea and Among Aliens, rank with her best. Perhaps this is because they portray a somewhat exotic world she knew quite well; she and her husband lived

5. J. A. Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p.166, note 241 - the figure is from a letter of 19 May 1859.

6. N. John Hall, TrolllJpe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p.393.

Yellowbacks and Paperbacks 205

mainly in Italy and mixed with the literati, the artistic set, and various political activists. .

She is at her best in the novels in which she evokes the lives of artistic or bohemian characters. Even the non-Italian novels contain these elements, if only to show the frustration of being trapped at home. That Unfortunate Marriage is set in 'Oldchester' in provincial England. One of the main characters is a frustrated composer who has had an oratorio produced, although it was paid for by the family. We feel sorry for her giving her (onvmailones and meaninglessly correcring a young singer performing one of her artless arias.

Perhaps the most unusual of Frances Eleanor's 'bohemians' is the Greek girl in Black Spirits and reared on English, Byronic notions of the glory of Greece, by a family of Slavic musicians, she goes into a decline when she finally meets her too vulgar, mercantile, Greek father. .

The most autobiographical of the novels, Mabe!'s Progress, is remarkable for the detail with which it evokes the provincial theatre. Bare prompt books shock its young heroine, who expects her Shakespeare more fleshed out; she shocks a theatre habitue who expects his J uliets to be over forty.

Her novels often have vivid moments, and she was able to turn a striking phrase. Here is an example from Among Aliens. The heroine ftnds herself being observed by an Iralian priest; she describes him as 'a meagre, feeble-looking old man, with a weak, self-complaisant countenance. I have seldom conversed with anyone so dirty, or more urbane.'

The table showing Frances Eleanor's publications, the information for which is drawn largely from Topp, tells us that her dealings with Chapman were more important than with Chatto, which in turn out-weighed those with Ward, Lock. In fact, she may not have had any direct contact with Ward, Lock, or any say in what happened in the reprinring of her novels, once she had sold the copyright.

It would have been most unusual for writers to have been involved in preparing their work for cheap reprint publication. Trollope may have been an exception. Early in his career he had eyed the vulgar display of yellowbacks and their predecessors on railway book-stalls,

That travellers should read litde else but novels was perhaps to be expected. But why should the very worst that can be culled from our huge receptacles of such wares be those specially adapted for railway reading? Wretched translations of French romances - and such romances! Unintelligible decoctions from the proliftc shop of Dumas, stories of Sue's which in losing their native language lost every charm which they ever possessed. American tales, wordy past all belief, trashy beyond all description, one would say unreadable were it not that there exist such signs of their being read. Piles upon piles also of truly English production are to be found; novels we believe specially written for railway sale, and, as far as we can judge, wholly conftned to railway stalls. 7

7. Anthony Troliope, The New Zealander, ed. N. John Hall (Oxford: Oxford University

206 Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin

Some of what Trollope says bears directly upon the reprints recorded by Professor Topp: before the Berne Convenrion of 1885 piracy flourished among publish ers. Chatto, and Horten (which they took over), traded in free reprints from the United States. They were by no means alone: Professor Topp notes that within a year of its first appearance Uncle Tom'! Cabin could be had in any of forty English editions (vol. IV, p.23). Trollope implies that lesser American fiction was reprinted only because of the absence of royalties, as perhaps it was. I find evidence of few novels written specifically to appear as yellowbacks, but Trollope was on his high horse. Once a demand grew for his own work he had to climb down. When Chapman reissued Th, Macd,rmot! of Ba/lyeloran in 1860 in yellowback someone shortened it and revised the text. Was it Trollope? He had bought back the copyright to it by then, and Robert Tracy , the editor of the World's Classics edition, puts the case that Trollope was unlikely to have allowed anyone else to do it. 8

Despite W. H. Smith's appropriation of Chapman's imprint for most of the 1860s and 1870s, Chapman's list of yellow backs remained somewhat distinctive of the house. Dickens and Trollope sustain the list, but some of Chapman's less enduring authors also appear. Chapman and Hall were perhaps worried that the firm was becoming too dependent on Dickens. When the parts -publication of David Copperft,ld was completed, they began to publish Ainsworth's autobiographical M'T7!Yn Clitheroe. When Dickens defected to Bradbury and Evans, Chapman encouraged Charles Lever to publish novels in part-issue with them; yellowbacks by both authors figure on Chapman's list. Other survivors from Ainsworth's and Lever's salad days appear here - Anne Marsh, Mrs. S. C. Hall, Samuel Lover - later to be replaced in fashion by Henry Kingsley, Hawley Smart, and Whyte-Melville. Chapman's discernment before the arrangement wi th W. H. Smith shows perhaps in the presence of a yellowback edition of Geraldine J ewsbury's Half-Sisters, though that was followed by her indifferent later novels. Once the arrangement with Smith ended, the house found distinction a final time in publishing as a yellowback Olive Schreiner's Story of an A/rican Farm.

Needless to say, Hotten's pornographic titles did not appear in yellowback, but his piracies of non-English authors did. Chatto was able to appease the most notable of these, Mark Twain, turning him into a valuable property. The publisher had so expansive an appetite for Victorian fiction that, though his later period may

. have had no Dickens, there remained plenry of diversiry in the list. Charles Reade, Wilkie Collins, and Besant and Rice probably sold to the serious part of Dickens's

. audience, while Mrs. Lynn Linton, Florence Marryat, Ouida, and James Payn presumably ap.pealed to the more frivolous. Chatto's list includes more crime fiction than the titles may suggest; some of Reade's and Collins's books approximate to that form, and the list includes lesser exponents such as Julian Hawthorne and Grant AlIen. Charto also reprinted the sole late Victorian writer of

Press, 1972), pp.183-184. 8. Anthony Trollope, Th, Macd,,,,,ott! of Ba/lycloran, cd. Robett Tr.ey (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1989), pp.xxix-xxx.

Ye//owbacks and Paperbacks . 207

detective fiction apart from Conan Doyle to have secured a following in the twentieth century, Freeman Wood. In addition, their list had room for unusual tides, like Phra the Phoenecian, later republished· as a. fantasy novel, arid the remarkable science-fiction novel, A Strange Manuscript found in a Copper Cylinder. This brings me to my second case-study, James de Mille.

Chatto was lucky to secure A Strange Manuscript from Harper's. Tt is one of the rare novels of the nineteenth century to have played with the discoveries of Victorian palaeontologists. We would classify it as science-fiction, although it is commonly omitted from the lists which·honour Jules Veme; Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Conan Doyle as the pioneers of the new genre. Chatto mistakenly attributed the book to its illustrator - it had appeared anonymously in Harper's Week!y - when in fact it was written by a Canadian academic, J ames de Mille. De Mille wrote rather a lot of fiction; he fits neady into the stereotype Trollope described in The New Zealander, turning out a recognisable product to satisfy the requirements of the cheap-fiction market. The editor of the modem scholarly edition of A Strange Manuscript quotes de Mille's eerily post-modernist formula for popular success:

The chief characteristics [are] the union of sensationalism with extravagant humour; the most tragic incidents are brought forward only to be dismissed with playful mockery; the plot is highly elaborated, tragedy and comedy exist side by side, the prevalent atmosphere is one of mock-seriousness; and the author, while he freely uses the most harrowing and stattling details, never fails to turn them into ridicule, and thus appears to satirise and burlesque the whole sensational school of fiction.'

Chatto published A Castle in Spain, one of the novels which de Mille claimed to have written to his formula, in yellowback in 1885, and A Strange Manuscript in 1894, by which time the author was dead. In straitened circumstances, his widow had sold Harper'S the manuscript of the novel. It had been written around 1867, but de Mille had not been happy with the ending. The plot involves a castaway in the region of Antarctica. He encounters examples of most of the marine reptiles of the Mesozoic period known by the middle of the nineteenth-century, as well as pterosaurs, an iguanadon, and a megaIosaur. He also meets a strange society flourishing at the South Pole (shades of Paltock's Peter Wilkins).

The animal attractions of de Mille's imagined world might seem litde different from what Jules Verne had already offered in joumry to the Centre of the Earlh (1864 in

. French, but not in English until 1871), but de Mille uses a narrative framing technique by having the simple seaman's story retrieved from 'a copper cylinder', read aloud, and commented upon by a group of intellectuals becalmed on a yacht.

9. James de Mille, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, ed. Malcolm Parks (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1986), p.xxv.

208 Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin

The Kosekin, the people whom the protagonist, Adam More, encounters, disconcertingly act upon several of the principles that Christians claim to believe, enabling de Mille to satirise his own ·beliefs.Any reader of de Mille's earlier novel Helena's Household would be in no doubt that the author was a serious Anglican. That work has an intensity difficult to find in the century's other historical novels of early Christianity, like Croly's Salathid or Wallace's Ben Hur. It is all the more startling then to read A Strange Manuscript and find the earlier book's confidence in the consolation of the Christian after-life to be one of the beliefs mocked.

It is interesting to note that Helena's Household was published in England by Thomas Nelson in a format usually reserved for religious fiction. A Strange Manuscript was both serious and mocking, and its fate, when published posthumously, was to be considered an imitation of Rider Haggard.

Let us now turn briefly to some of the smaller publishers detailed by Topp. Frederick Warne began as a partner in Routledge. When he left that house his share of the trade seems to have directed him towards reprinting children's books and paperback copies of other titles for 6d, considerably cheaper than yellowbacks. He did yellowbacks as well, perhaps a fifth of his list as detailed by Topp. Every former child must be pleased to find here the first four of Beatrix Potter's books; and the admirer of Annie Keary's adult novels will find several of her children's books here. (Macmillan published her adult works, the yellowback editions of which should appear in one of Professor Topp's future volumes.) Warne traded extensively in the inexpensive children's books by 'Anon' or by such figures as Aunt Louisa (Laura Valentine) and Aunt Friendly (Sarah S. Baker).

In the twentieth century a mass of nineteenth -century fiction came to be treated by publishers and booksellers as if intended for children, when originally the books were adult reading. I believe that Warne's list enables us to trace an earlier stage in that transformation. Many novels from early in the century that could be classed as adventure stories, by such authors as Jane Porter, Waiter Scott, Frederick Chamier, Frederick Marryat, and G.P.R James, here range alongside the works of Frances Hodgson Burnett and Maria Edgeworth specifically written for young readers. .

Though the yellowbacks suggest Wame's emphasis on children's authors, his list also included writers who appeal to more distinctive tastes, such as Joseph Sheridan le Fanu, Edward Bellamy, and Sarah Grand. As in Chatto's list, there is some crime fiction, including works by the Australian novelist James Skipp Borlase.

As you look along a shelf of yellowbacks from various publishers, your eye will single out those produced by Sampson Low; for instead of having yellow as the base colour, they have a light blue. Their list too has a certain distinctiveness. Of the four publishers covered in the two volumes under review, Sampson Low produced by far the smallest number of titles in the cheap format. Foreign writers feature substantially in their list. They had an arrangement with Tauchnitz, and Georg Ebers bulks large. Jules Veme is also there, in limp, pictorial boards. American authors such as Stowe and Alcott are also included. Professor Topp sketches Sampson's efforts in courtt6 defend his property in the American writers.

Yellowbacks and Paperbacks 209

Among the English novelists on Sampson Low's list we find R. D. Blackmore who, Sutherland tells us, was loyal to the firm partly out of friendship with those involved; \0 Thomas Hardy is there, but he distributed his rights among several firms before settling on Macmillan. Kipling came to Sampson Low from A. H. Wheeler; his early novels and stories having appeared as paperbacks in that firm's 'Railway Novels' in Allahabad. ' -

Without .wishing to diminish the extraordinary achievement of Victorian Yellowbacks and Paperbacks I must caution the antipodean reader about one shortcoming. Only very occasionally does Professor Topp mark the existence of a colonial library yellowback, or an Australian reprint by George Robertson in Melbourne. Some are, presumably, twins of English editions, with cancel tide-pages, but it is a greater problem when the colonial library tides had no English equivalent, i.e. appeared in yellowback or paperback only for the colonial market. These seem to have escaped Topp's vigilance. Among my own yellowbacks I found three tides issued by Sampson Low (two George MacDonalds and a Hamet Beecher Stowe) and a list of thirty more. Professor Topp tells me that he does not plan to include Kegan Paul, though readers in our part of the world had access to at least twenry yellowback tides, some of them Australian, from that firm. An enterprising bibliographer might find the provision of a colonial library supplement to Professor Topp's work a pleasing, if arduous, undertaking.

That the volumes are of immense value for academic research should by now be evident. Their usefulness for collectors is also great, superseding the lists in Michael Sadleir's XIXth Century Fiction.

One of the major problems remains, however, that of determining the publication date of many of the yellowbacks that appeared with no date on their tide-pages. Topp assigns dates, but, apart from evidence deduced from the different forms of the publisher's imprint - say in the case of Ward, Lock - he fails to tell us how he arrives at a particular year. This makes it difficult to be sure which edition you may be looking at. Familiarity with the styles prevalent for each decade from the 1850s to about 1910, the period during which yellowbacks were produced, is some help but is still only a rough guide. '

In closing, I would like to thank Richard Overell and his staff of the Monash University Library Rare Books Collection for allowing access to their extensive holdings of yellowbacks. Along with my own collection of these books, I was able to check many of the actual volumes against Professor Topp's descriptions.

10. Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers, p.BS.