Exploring late Victorian (Co-)Authorship: Two Models of Popular Literary Collaboration

The lively and competitive popular literary market of the late Victorian era provided fertile ground for the development of an unprecedented number of alliances between authors. Literary collaboration triggered writers and readers alike, and in the 1880s and 1890s it became a fashionable practice of popular literature. Two writing partnerships stood out: the English friends Walter Besant and James Rice, and the Anglo-Irish cousins Edith Somerville and Violet (Martin) Ross. Apparently similar, these partnerships do indeed share some points, but they were based on completely different understandings of what literary collaboration was and how it should be handled: Besant and Rice’s alliance was based on a clear, almost mechanical division of tasks, with one partner being the literary ‘genius’ and the other working as his assistant and manager – but still to be considered an author; Somerville and Ross’s collaboration was grounded on an intertwining of their selves during the creative process thanks to a conversational method – as they called it – which they described as the mixing of primary colours to create secondary ones. Drawing on a vast range of metadiscourses by these collaborators themselves, the present study compares the two ways of collaborating and reconstructs the authors’ perspective on their own activity, shedding light on how literary collaboration was defined and understood in the late Victorian era. This will also help to understand why such a widespread practice swiftly declined and why its products have since then sunk into oblivion.

From Happy Individuals to Universal Sisterhood

This essay traces the shifting frameworks of affective reform proposed by Walter Besant in two of his novels about the East End, All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) and Children of Gibeon (1886). While the cultivation of individual happiness based on bourgeois domesticity offers a strategy for reorienting working-class values in the former novel, the latter promotes a pursuit of communitarian values rooted in universal sisterhood, which supersedes familial bonds and class distinctions. Reading these two novels in conversation with each other reveals a narrative critique of rights-based individualism along the lines of revisionist liberal thought, and redirects affective attention toward fostering kinship associations for communal mutuality.

Walter Besant

In the 1880s and 1890s, Walter Besant was one of Britain’s most lionized living novelists. Like many popular writers of the period, Besant suffered from years of critical neglect. Yet his centrality to Victorian society and culture all but ensured a revival of interest. While literary critics are now rediscovering the more than forty works of fiction that he penned or co-wrote, as part of a more general revaluation of Victorian popular literature, legal scholars have argued that Besant, by advocating for copyright reform, played a crucial role in consolidating a notion of literary property as the exclusive possession of the individuated intellect. For their part, historians have recently shown how Besant – as a prominent philanthropist who campaigned for the cultural vitalization of impoverished areas in east and south London – galvanized late Victorian social reform activities. The expanding corpus of work on Besant, however, has largely kept the domains of authorship and activism, which he perceived as interrelated, conceptually distinct. Analysing the mutually constitutive interplay in Besant’s career between philanthropy and the professionalization of authorship, Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform highlights their fundamental interconnectedness in this Victorian intellectual polymath’s life and work.

‘Another like me’

During the first ten years of his career as a novelist Walter Besant wrote fiction collaboratively with James Rice, in an unusual partnership that only ended with Rice’s death in 1882. This essay examines the nine Besant and Rice novels and what is known about the partnership that produced them, including what is suggested by the intriguing portrait of the two authors painted around the time of Rice’s death. The Besant and Rice novels are often regarded as insignificant compared to Besant’s later solo work, but this essay argues that they should be considered as integral to Besant’s oeuvre and as essential for understanding of the key themes of his later work, such as social reform and authorship.

Introduction: Walter Besant Now

In the 1880s and 1890s Walter Besant was one of Britain’s most lionized living novelists. Today he is one of the least read Victorian fiction writers of comparable standing. In addition to outlining the contents of this volume, the introduction provides an overview of Besant’s life and career.

The Ethics of Perception and the Politics of Recognition

In All Sorts and Conditions of Men Walter Besant focuses his novelistic gaze on what he perceived as the neglected “romance” and “possibilities” of the East End of London (as opposed to its more horrific and tragic realities), and famously forwarded a utopian, “cultural solution” to the apparently mind-numbing monotony of East End existence. What is generally missed in the critical approaches to All Sorts and Conditions of Men are the subtle ways in which Besant’s socio-cultural “focus” (the respectable, but dull and neglected East End) and “solution” (cultural philanthropy and paternalistic economic relations) reflect Besant’s attempt to work through and elaborate a kind of relational and perspectival ethics through the generic hybridity (and perhaps, ultimately, limitations) of an “urban romance.”

Besant, Chatto, and Watt

Walter Besant was a very successful novelist in the late nineteenth century but his income never quite matched his popularity, which rose in the 1880s and slowly fell thereafter. He did not use the royalty system in his contracts but instead sold his copyrights either outright or for a limited term to book, magazine, and newspaper publishers. This was probably an expression of his doubts about the longer-term success of his work. He was one of the earliest significant novelists to use the services of A. P. Watt, the first formal literary agent in the UK. Watt was able to farm Besant’s literary property by splitting it into UK book rights (usually sold to Chatto and Windus), foreign book rights, first serialisation rights, second serialisation rights, and syndication in various newspaper and magazine markets in the USA, Europe, and British Empire. In the 1890s Besant earned an average of £1,750 for each of his major novels. Besant claimed that Watt had increased his income significantly. There is evidence that Watt did have an effect, but that Besant becoming a solo writer after 1881 – and gaining securer income in the USA from the Chace Act (1891) – were the more important factors.

‘I have altered nothing’

After Walter Besant completed Wilkie Collins’s unfinished novel, Blind Love (with Collins’s authorization and elaborately detailed instructions), Besant emphatically declared that he had “altered nothing” in the final version. A comparison of the published novel with Collins’s notebook, however, reveals that Besant’s declaration was somewhat disingenuous. In addition to making several significant alternations to Collins’s original plot, the more conservative Besant incorporated both anti-Irish and anti-feminist themes, thus undercutting the more socially progressive narrative originally intended by the deceased author.