Contextualizing Value: Market Stories in Mid-Victorian Periodicals

This dissertation examines the modes, means, and merit of the literary production of short stories in London periodicals between 1850 and 1870. Shorter forms were derided by contemporary critics, dismissed on the assumption that quantity equals quality, yet popular and respectable novelists, namely Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant, were writing and printing them. Navigating discourses about literature and writing to delineate and ascertain the implications of the contextual position of certain short stories, this study characterizes a previously unexamined genre, here called the Market Story. Defined by their relationship to a publishing industry that was actively creating a space for, demanding, and disseminating texts based on their potential to generate sales figures, draw attention to a particular organ, author, or publisher, or gather and hold a captive audience, Market Stories indicate their authors’ self-aware commentary on the relativity of literary and generic value, and ultimately constitute a discourse on value. Following an outline of the historical field in which market stories were produced, Chapter One reads Trollope’s six “Editor’s Tales” as intensely comic and interrogative of extant conceptions of cultural and literary value; Trollope glories in the exposure and dismantling of seemingly-reliable externality. Chapter Two considers “Somebody’s Luggage” as Dickens’s argument for the contrivance of literary genre insofar as it constructs an exaggerated system of exchanges whereby the short story generates unprecedented income. Chapter Three moves to Gaskell’s “Cranford Papers” to argue that their diligent tracing of the careful consumption of small wholes and cultivation of irregular habits constitutes an insistence on the plurality of appropriate models of consumption and value. Shifting the discussion from content to form, Gaskell’s text throws the shape of the market story into relief. Finally, Chapter Four considers Oliphant’s “Dinglefield Stories” as a figurative argument that generic and literary value is always inextricably contextualized. As literary works and cultural products, these stories embody the tensions between the utilitarian and the ‘purely’ artistic that underwrote much nineteenth-century discussion of art and culture, and these authors were unmistakably aware of the external conditions enabling and affecting the production and valuation of literary work.Ph