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Anonymity, Corporate Authority, and the Archive: The Production of Authorship in Late-Victorian England
Abstract
This essay considers the persistence of collective and corporate models of literary authority within late-Victorian literature and print culture. While modern critics often understand Victorian authorship to be individually centered and governed by a dynamic of secrecy and disclosure, the periodical debates about anonymity that intensified in the fin de siècle suggest that Victorian readers and writers embraced a more flexible, collective notion of authorship. The plot, language, and paratext of Mary Elizabeth Hawker's pseudonymously published Mademoiselle Ixe, as well as the author-publisher correspondence concerning the novel, offer a representation of the corporate and collective interpretive modes that would have been familiar to late-Victorian readers, if not to recent critics. Hawker's text and the archival material it brings to light also suggest that modern readers might productively turn to the Victorian past to expand the definitions of authorship that circulate throughout nineteenth-century scholarship today.
... expresses the general principle of negativity in representational politics. ( Warner 1990, 43) Obviously, the pragmatics of pseudonyms (""ctitious personae") cannot, in fact, be entirely reduced to anonymity, the absence of a personal author in printed language (see also Buurma 2007, Coleman 2012, Knuttila 2011, Nozawa 2012 for logics of anonymity often speciically opposed to pseudonymity in diierent nineteenth-century print and contemporary virtual cultures). For example, a nom de plume, which might well be regarded as a kind of pseudonym, involves assuming an identity as a writer without necessarily entailing anonymity at the same time. ...
This thesis establishes and explores a new concept in critical theory: the anonymous mode. Developing from ideas around anonymity, gender, and authorship, the anonymous mode is my original contribution to the field of narrative studies, where the conventions of rhetoric represent identity through a discourse of self-conception based on absence. My critical reading of anonymity offers a new way of examining and understanding the central role of self-authorisation in gendered identity. The semiotics of absence in the anonymous mode, both as formal significant and contextual signifier, theorise identity as an objective construct: the private compromise of anonymity complicates the motive and intent of the self-producing subject.
The anonymous mode establishes identity as an object, where the primary condition of the subject is absence; it forgoes the narrative reconciliation of self-authorisation, and restores the subject to a state of dislocation. Literature in the anonymous mode demonstrates a persistent, intersubjective engagement with textual absence. Narrative examples of textual absence include, but are not limited to: doubled selves and dissociative states; shattered and split identities; non-identification (or non-recognition); nameless narrators, author surrogates, and other extreme acts of literary ventriloquism (such as the author-as-prosopopoeia); agender, non-binary, and other gender-fluid narrators or protagonists; collage, pastiche, and plagiarism, as a means of further distorting the self-conceived boundaries between fact and fiction, truth and reality. These encoded methods of communicating an absence of identity are thereafter decoded as gendered anonymity: an explicit, cognitive dissonance between self and subject.
There are two components to this thesis: a critical investigation of gendered anonymity, and a creative component that satisfies the conditions of the anonymous mode. The critical evaluation of the anonymous mode begins with a historical survey of anonymous publishing, before providing a comparative reading of Virginia Woolf’s posthumously published essay “Anon”, and its companion piece, “The Reader”. Woolf’s final writings explore the theoretical assumptions of anonymity, signaling the preconditions of authorship later established by Roland Barthes’s declaration of the author’s theoretical death. This critical position is fundamental to any reading of anonymity in female narrative consciousness, where the hegemony of authorship seemingly liquidates feminist artistic practice, deflecting questions of participation, inclusion, and autonomy. The critical component of this thesis engages with the semiotics of heteronormativity, feminist poststructuralism, narrative studies, and gender and queer theory to examine the representation of autonomy and sexual agency in writing by women. Writers in this thesis’s critical framework include: Sylvia Plath, Angela Carter, Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, Maggie Nelson, and Rachel Cusk.
The creative component of this thesis––The Albatross––is explicitly produced within the critical framework of the anonymous mode. By introducing a multiplicity of selves, and thereby destabilising a fixed identity, The Albatross draws attention to the anonymous mode’s preoccupation with dissociation, depersonalisation, and derealization. An experimental text, intersecting at the level of criticism and autotheory, art and aesthetics, non-fiction, and autobiography, The Albatross demonstrates the creative value of the anonymous mode: it is a mode that constantly shifts and expands to incorporate experimental, intertextual practices as flexible methodology, actively displacing the subject within a text.
Hugely popular across the Anglophone world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, children’s correspondence pages are an invaluable source of youth writing from this period. This chapter focuses on the correspondence clubs in two New Zealand publications: the New Zealand Farmer and Otago Witness. Within these columns, young people forged identities for themselves in print, and in club life. At the heart of this identity creation was the use of noms de plume. Although often considered vehicles of anonymity, pseudonyms were used as part of a social process of identity construction rather than mere cloaks of disguise. Here, young people’s printed voices complicate existing understandings of pseudonymity in print culture, and also reveal the extent and nature of print-based sociability in New Zealand.
This paper focuses on the work of the Dalziel Brothers, the foremost wood engraving firm in the Victorian period. It explores the problematics of authorship in an art factory with many employees who all signed ‘Dalziel’. Examining wood engraving formally, theoretically and technically, it proposes ghostwriting as an analogy for the work done by facsimile engravers. Their work is read alongside the literature they illustrated, including Wilkie Collins's After Dark (1856), Anthony Trollope's Orley Farm (1861–1862) and Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass (1871). I investigate the wood engraver's business of artistically producing someone else's lines, and carving other people's signatures. Mechanics, or creation? The line, the autograph, and the signature are powerful elements of the way we understand artistic identity. A wood engraver who signs for someone else is a paradox, undermining assumptions about creative work. Orley Farm, one of Dalziel's most successful illustrated novels, is itself a meditation on the fraudulent act of signing another's name. This paper compares different ‘Dalziel’ signatures, proposing the signature as a kind of self portrait that can help uncover the voices of unknown engraver-employees; it also presents new archival evidence about some of these employees, such as Ann and Mary Byfield from Islington.
In the early Victorian period, sporting literature found a new audience among the young century's industrialists and prosperous merchants who, enabled by the growth of the railroads and increased access to the countryside, chose to use their increased leisure time to experience English rural life and to hobnob on equal terms, at least superficially, with the rural ancien régime. The New Sporting Magazine, established in 1831, positioned itself to speak both to the existing devotees of sport and to the middle-class audience which was about to make its presence felt in the field. The parallel refinement of English sport and its print discourse is described by and exemplified in the two best-known sport writers of the early Victorian era: Robert Smith Surtees and Charles Apperley ('Nimrod'). Surtees and Nimrod, though highly professional and well remunerated, habitually put forward their own work as 'correspondence', contributing to the illusion that the magazine was a playground for gentlemen of leisure. The careful blend of the conservative and modern in the New Sporting Magazine thus extends to its contributors as well: in this magazine's pages the eighteenth-century culture of the gentleman correspondent was beginning to merge with the culture of the paid celebrity author that would become such a force in the mass literary environment of the nineteenth century.
Archivists processing documents rely on factors such as authorship and provenance to contextualize their materials and render them searchable. But in my past experience as an archives user, I repeatedly came across instances of anonymity: letters and diaries by unnamed authors or to unknown recipients, photographs of unknown subjects. In some cases this anonymity is a loss of information that was once there, but in other case it enabled the material to come into existence in the first place: such as in the case of satirical political poetry, for which a writer might face legal censure. In this literature review, the issue of anonymity in the archives is explored, both in a pragmatic sense (recommended strategies for managing it), and a philosophical sense (according anonymous documents the same status as documents with known authors).
Altruism and self-assertiveness went hand in hand for Victorian women. During a period when most lacked property rights and professional opportunities, gift transactions allowed them to enter into economic negotiations of power as volatile and potentially profitable as those within the market systems that so frequently excluded or exploited them. They made presents of holiday books and homemade jams, transformed inheritances into intimate and aggressive bequests, and, in both prose and practice, offered up their own bodies in sacrifice. Far more than selfless acts of charity or sure signs of their suitability for marriage, such gifts radically reconstructed women's personal relationships and public activism in the nineteenth century. Giving Women examines the literary expression and cultural consequences of English women's giving from the 1820s to World War I. Attending to the dynamic action and reaction of gift exchange in fiction and poetry by Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Christina Rossetti as well as in literary annuals, Salvation Army periodicals, and political pamphlets, Rappoport demonstrates how female authors and fictional protagonists alike mobilized networks outside marriage and the market. Through giving, women redefined the primary allegiances of their everyday lives, forged public coalitions, and advanced campaigns for abolition, slum reform, eugenics, and suffrage.
Studying The Wreck of the Golden Mary in its entirety, this essay complicates hierarchical models of collaboration and showcases the powerful polyvocal potential of periodical forms such as the Christmas number. The Wreck, edited and compiled by Charles Dickens in 1856, includes the writing of five other authors. Restoring the links between The Wreck’s parts not only recuperates the dialogic aspects of the original narrative but also highlights how a focus on individual authorship can hinder interpretive approaches to collaborative periodical writing.
Whereas many female authors of the long nineteenth century have been recovered and revalued in recent years, their relationship to the rise of professional authorship as well as their male peers has remained under analysed. Nevertheless, an understanding of the dynamic between budding American literary aspirations, the harsh commercialism of the developing national publishing scene and the profitable domestic tradition of female authors can shed new light on the development of female authorship in this period. In this article, I embed Wharton in the increasingly commercialised and transatlantic literary marketplace of her age to show how she adopted the masculine language of professionalism to distance herself from the domestic female writers which preceded her and carve out a place for her own high literary aspirations. I begin with a brief examination of her rather privileged socioeconomic background and ambitious literary aspirations before analysing more in depth her developing authorial persona throughout her career, primarily in comparison to two well-known male authors of the day, Henry James and Anthony Trollope. Wharton, I argue purposely adopted the business like attitude and commercial guise specifically avoided by her male counterparts because it guaranteed her the serious critical reception otherwise denied to female authors.
abstract:
Taking their cue from the recommendation systems of Amazon and Netflix, which use networks of like-minded customers to suggest new titles to users, the authors investigate how networks in little magazines a hundred years ago helped readers navigate an overloaded literary market by recommending to them a taste for modernism. Focusing on The Freewoman, The New Freewoman and The Egoist—and drawing on data generated by the Modernist Journals Project—this essay shows how authors in these magazines’ review and co-appearance networks became increasingly well-connected, and appeared more frequently, as the magazines became more modernistic and exclusive over time.
I have a kind of notion of the way in which a library ought to be put together – no, I don't mean that, I mean ought to grow. . . . A scholar must shape his own shell, secrete it one might almost say, for secretion is only separation, you know, of certain elements derived from the material world about us. And a scholar's study, with books lining its walls, is his shell. It isn't a mollusk's shell, either; it's a caddice-worm's shell. (211)
Here, the scholar's library entails separation in several senses both physical and ideal. On the one hand, books form a literal carapace insulating the scholar from the outside world – and perhaps even from the distractions of home life. At the same time, the library operates by separation in the sense of discrimination. In accumulating his library, the scholar winnows a vast textual tradition into the manageable dimensions of a single room, and curriculum just enough for a singular human life. Most interesting, however, is the suggestion that the scholar “secretes” the library, as though the books are somehow synthesized from within as an expression of, and memorial to, the scholar's essential self. The caddice worm, as Holmes informs us, “has his special fancy as to what he will pick up and glue together, with a kind of natural cement he provides himself” (211). This may strike us as a crudely glandular way of envisioning the relationship between tradition and the individual talent. Nevertheless, the passage is in keeping with the late-Victorian obsession with the private library, as well as with period representations of the scholar, who is best encountered within a concealing womb of books, carrying on secret exchange with the dusty relics of his own intellectual pilgrimage.
This paper examines the relationships between authorship and editing in the production of narratives of travel and exploration. The context to the paper is the widespread interest in exploration and travel writing in geography and related fields, and the materialist hermeneutic apparent in the conjunction of geography, book history and the history of science. Through assessment of archival and printed evidence relating to the authorship and editing of books of travel and exploration published by the leading British publisher, John Murray, the paper examines the redactive relationships between writer and editor-publisher, illustrates the means by which authors sought status in their words and explores how Murray authorised explorers’ words and works. In addressing the complex connections between author and editor, manuscript and print, private correspondence and public audience, the paper has implications for researchers in geography interested in the specific relationships between writing and print, and in the general connections between geography, book history and the history of science.
Book History 8 (2005) 287-320
In his 1840 lecture, "The Hero as Man of Letters," Thomas Carlyle crystallized the Romantic image of the author, which had been developing in English, German, and French aesthetic theory and creative writing since the mid-eighteenth century. Like most commentators on the subject during this era, he defined the author as an autonomous individual inspired by "originality," "sincerity," or "genius." Arguing that the Man of Letters had replaced the Hero-God, Prophet, Poet, and Priest as the predominant form of heroism in the modern age, Carlyle emphasized the recentness as well as the strangeness of this development:
Novel as it may have been in 1840, this image of the author as hero has proved to be remarkably enduring. In the century and a half since Carlyle's lecture, it has become such a fixed component of the modern consciousness that even the most self-conscious and critical commentators have found it difficult to view authorship any other way.
In the last three or four decades, the Romantic image of the author has been deconstructed and historicized, in light of new theories and methods drawn from poststructuralism, New Historicism, the sociology of literature, and the history of the book. Yet if the most recently published work on the history of authorship is any indication, literary scholars and cultural historians have not entirely exorcised the Romantic figure of the author. Despite its theoretical and methodological sophistication, much of their work continues to reify or (paradoxically) to mask rather than to explicate this figure. However, even as scholars cling to this conception of the author (whether out of habit or out of self-preservation), it has been rendered increasingly problematic by the actualities of authorship at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The current digital revolution in communication has, among other things, exposed the disjunction between the image and the reality of authorship. In particular, it has highlighted the collaborative and derivative nature of much writing. In this context, it is high time to reassess the Romantic depiction of the author as an individual and original "genius."
This essay surveys the historiography of authorship, focusing on books published in the last ten years on authors and author-publisher relations in Britain, France, and the United States since the invention of the printing press. After delineating the main approaches and synthesizing the general conclusions of some of the most recent books in this field, I conclude that the historicist turn in literary studies has done little to advance our understanding of the history of authorship but has, in fact, often served to perpetuate the Romantic notion of genius it purports to critique. To be fair, such a conclusion may stem from my own bias as a historian. But as I see it, scholars of whatever discipline who are interested in authorship would benefit from more sustained attention to the historical record.
Long after its emergence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Romantic idea of the author as an individual and original genius shaped the methods of literary scholars. Until well into the twentieth century, literary scholars along with descriptive bibliographers operated on the...
Modern Fiction Studies 43.4 (1997) 826-859
In the following pages I want to investigate James's peculiar obsession in the 1890's with the subject of dead and dying authors -- an obsession that coincided in his work with an interest in the newspaper as a text in which the author's disappearance is openly proclaimed, its effects are open to minute examination, and the repercussions of the author's disintegration can be gauged and anticipated in the literary work itself. In such stories as "The Aspern Papers," "John Delavoy," "The Middle Years," and the "Death of the Lion"--narratives in which a declining or long deceased author becomes the focus of interest --he not only memorializes the writer consumed in the act of writing, but reflects on the consequences, both for readers and producers of fiction, of the disappearance of the author as the controlling center of his own novelistic productions.
James makes these consequences spectacularly visible in "The Death of the Lion," in a narrative that shifts responsibility for meaning from an author to a work that survives in the absence of its creator, and which produces effects beyond his power to determine meaning. In "The Death of the Lion," James suggests that the value and richness of such a text comes not from its freedom from determination, but from its availability to multiple determinations, its shifting "relation" to social forces, languages, and codes of reading and comprehension that exceed the author's conscious control. These constitute a basis for meaning, even if they are less localizable than an originating consciousness, and complicate any attempt to recover authorial intentions.
James makes such a work vivid and comprehensible through his use of the newspaper, since the newspaper not only represents the dissolution of authority, but offers a view of the codes of sense and reception that might govern a work whose ownership is uncertain. In this story James develops a new understanding of literary meaning out of the mutual interchange and conflict between the newspaper and the novel; he questions the realism of his own work from the perspective of a literary modernism that both defied and actively reproduced the dispersal of authority, the instability and impermanence of meaning so often associated with the press. At the same time, "The Death of the Lion" complicates the modernist aesthetic for which James has served as a central figure by reconfiguring the author as a journalist -- a nameless figure whose disappearance leaves behind not an autonomous text freed from its location in a network of social relations, but one whose meanings are inseparable from the institutional conditions that generate the journalist's identity as a producer and the values that appear to "originate" in his work.
The relevance of such a story to James's modernism lies in its exploration of the tension between the power and authority of the individual to govern language, and the competing possibilities created by his disappearance -- that is, the interplay between authorial intention and the operation of social languages and contexts that displace and redefine the author's controlling designs. In "The Death of the Lion," James defines the newspaper and its writers, in equivocal terms, as representatives of the condition of modern literature, and at the same time as emblems of everything it should defiantly oppose. His ambivalent response to the newspaper exposes the complexities of an aesthetic that values authorial control over the process and the material of aesthetic production -- one that discloses itself in a heightened consciousness of language and its effects, reaching its apex in the poetic manipulation of prose and an active rejection of the given rhythms of ordinary language. This aesthetic was matched by a contradictory deterioration of the author as a center of meaning shaping the reading process.
In "The Death of the Lion," James was able to make use of the fact that the newspaper had become the subject of contemporary debates on the meaning of authorship in order to detail the possibilities of a new novelistic project that required the dispersal of the author as its enabling condition. As such cultural historians as Laurel Brake and Harry Schalck have observed, the newspaper...
The circulation of regular, reliable information about financial matters has always played a critical role in the modern market economy. Since at least the sixteenth century, when the first lists of prices were published in Antwerp and Venice, such writing has been instrumental in publicizing the availability of specific commodities, prices current in the market, and international exchange rates (Parsons 12). Without this information, early modern merchants would not have been able to conduct the elaborate and geographically extensive business that fueled economies in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Western Europe, nor would they have been likely to develop the kind of informal associations that flourished in eighteenth-century London coffee houses. By the same token, writing about finance was also essential in creating the public confidence crucial to the refinement of credit instruments (like bills of exchange) and the spread of financial institutions (like banks). In the "remarks on trade" that began to appear in eighteenth-century British newspapers and the editorial statements about business published as early as 1713, interested Britons were able to read about trade negotiations, bankruptcies, shipping news, and debates about tariffs (Parsons 17). Doing so, they could begin to imagine their society as penetrated-if not yet defined-by a system of financial relationships whose most visible signs were the various credit transactions in which nearly every Briton was already involved (Brewer 203-30). © 2009 by Victorian Studies and Indiana University Press. All rights reserved.
1. N. N. Feltes in Literary Capital and the Late Victorian Novel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993) characterizes the time as a change from a petty-commodity literary mode of production to a fully capitalist literary mode of production.
2. Details about the history of T. Fisher Unwin come from Patricia Anderson and Jonathan Rose, eds., British Literary Publishing Houses, 1820-1880, Dictionary of Literary Biography 106 (Detroit: Gale, 1991), 304-11.
3. Philip Unwin, The Publishing Unwins (London: Heinemann, 1972), 44.
4. George Jefferson, Edward Garnett: A Life in Literature (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982), 42.
5. As one advertisement reads, "Handy for the Pocket in Size and Shape."
6. John Sutherland, The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 513.
7. Carolyn G. Heilbrum, The Garnett Family (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 71.
8. Here Garnett used his connections with the sizable Russian expatriate community in London. Garnett's wife, Constance Black Garnett, would go on to become a well-known translator of Russian fiction. Some foreign authors did not use pseudonyms; instead their names appeared typeset in the Greek or Cyrillic alphabets.
9. For a complete list of the Pseudonym Library, see The English Catalogue of Books, 1890-1897 (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1898), 1163; or, Robert Lee Wolff, Nineteenth-Century Fiction (New York: Garland, 1981), 293-94. Neither list is definitive.
10. Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800-1900, 2nd ed. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 298-99. Series were not limited to fictional works. In fact, most series publications in the nineteenth century were nonfiction works.
11. However, there is no evidence that the Keynotes series was initially conceived as a series; instead, the series developed after the success of the first volume. Sutherland, cited above, states Unwin's series was an imitation of Lane's. However, based on chronology, the opposite is more likely.
12. Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, trans. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 24.
13. In a more modern example, the name "Harlequin" on the covers of romance novels often dwarfs that of the novel's author or title. See Janice Radway, Reading the Romance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
14. Garnett in a letter to W. H. Hudson, quoted in Jefferson, 49.
15. Brian Reade, Aubrey Beardsley (New York: Viking, 1967), 296.
16. Advertisement for T. Fisher Unwin, Academy, 1017 (31 October 1891), 392.
17. "Novels," Saturday Review, 70 (8 November 1890), 534.
18. "Novels of the Week" Athenaeum, 3289 (8 November 1890), 622.
19. Review of The Story of Eleanor Lambert by Magdalen Brooke, Academy, 981 (21 Feb 1891), 183.
20. "Contemporary Literature: Belles Lettres," Westminster Review, 137 (1892), 224-25.
21. Review of John Sherman, and Dhoya by Gonconagh, Academy, 1027 (9 Jan 1892), 35.
22. Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 48-51.
23. "Assumed Names in Literature," Chambers's Journal, 55 (1878), 523-24; and "Disguised Authors," Chambers's Journal, 66 (1889), 763-64.
24. Saturday Review, 14 October 1882, 510-11.
25. Quoted in Genette, 49.
26. I do not have the space to fully summarize the history and practice of authorial anonymity or pseudonymity. I refer the interested reader to the relevant chapter in Genette and the article by Robert J. Griffin "Anonymity and Authorship," New Literary History, 30 (1999), 877-95.
27. Genette, 50.
28. Lanoe Falconer, Mademoiselle Ixe (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1890), 59.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., 183.
31. Ibid., 185.
32. Ibid., 7.
33. Ibid., 19.
34. Ibid., 24.
35. Ibid., 122.
36. Ibid., 123.
37. Ibid., 135, 137.
38. Ibid., 140.
39. Ibid., 141.
40. Of the known identities, the eleven male authors either took male pseudonyms (seven), used initials (one), or wrote their names in foreign alphabets (Greek or Russian characters) (three). The twenty-six female authors either took male pseudonyms (seven), took female pseudonyms (thirteen), or took gender-neutral pseudonyms (six).
41. L. F. A., "A Causerie," Illustrated London News, 99 (21 Nov 1891), 667.
42. "Novels of the Week" Athenaeum...