Is This The Worst 19th C. British Novel?

by Stephen J. Gertz

It’s rarely a good idea to begin a novel with a Preface. It’s never a good idea to write a Preface as apology for what is to come. And what writer in their right mind would trust that their readers be indulgent and not too.critical of what they are about to read? Only a novelist who subconsciously knows that he is issuing a warning: Caution! Train-Wreck Ahead.

Santa left ashes in the author's Xmas 1893 stocking.

No such luck for The Author, one T. Duthie-Lisle. The reviews for this three-decker upon its publication were devastating; this may be the worst 19th century British novel ever published.


"The hardiest spirit may well quail before the stupendous task of giving any accurate idea of what is, apparently, the first-fruits of Mr. Duthie-Lisle's imagination" (The Saturday Review Dec. 30, 1893); "...obtrudes itself on almost every page as deficient in sense as of grammar" (The Academy Oct., 21, 1893); "...this incredibly foolish book" (The Speaker Sept. 16, 1893); and this dart to its heart: "One of the missions of the literary critic is to warn off intending readers from books that are utterly worthless, and 'The Heirloom' comes within this category" (The Athenaeum Sept. 9, 1893). 


Seventy-eight years later Robert Lee Wolff, in Nineteenth Century Fiction, declared it "...unbelievably awful as to style - antiquated, ungrammatical, melodramatic, like a parody of itself." 

Of the author, little is known; it is hoped T. Duthie-Lisle survived the reviews to live in hiding. It appears that this was TD-L's first and last foray into “the wildest schemes which his imagination [could] conceive, the marvelous combinations which a turn of the magic kaleidoscope of eventualities, and what we misname fortune may produce, are again and again out acted in real life.”


Why was this novel issued? It was not the sort of book that its publisher, Gay and Bird, usually published.

Wolff suggests that it was a “‘prestige’ publication.” If so, Gay and Bird’s standards for prestige were decidedly low; the book deals prestige a deadly blow. Could the brain trust at Gay and Bird have been so devoid of taste and discernment? Their publication of this novel strongly suggests that they possessed the editorial instincts of a cane toad, Australia’s answer to promiscuous publishing: cane toads will attempt to copulate with dead animals including dead female cane toads, dead salamanders, dead rodents, dead reptiles. Hence the dead on arrival publication of this dreadful doozy. 

Yet beyond its status as arguably the worst nineteenth century British novel, The Heirloom is significant as being among the last of the three-deckers, a format that ceased to exist by the end of 1894, with only an occasional three-decker published in the twentieth century, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings the most notable example. This copy of The Heirloom was deaccessioned from a circulation library and that tells us a story.

Introduced in the early nineteenth century, three volume novels were expensive - the average retail price was 31 shillings.6 pence  - far too expensive for even middle class readers. But though three-deckers did indeed provide a measure of prestige to the publisher, author, and the book, because of their expense the major source of reading distribution was through a circulation library. Yes, you could buy inexpensive reprints in single volumes but if you wanted to read the latest "prestige" novels you had to borrow from a library. With low print runs (generally 1000 copies or fewer) and high price a publisher could earn a tidy profit. Ultimately, however, publishers of three-deckers had to bow to commercial pressures and began to issue single volume novels. Single volume novels were less expensive to produce, could be sold for less than a three-decker, and though their price was low, greater profits could be earned via dramatically increased sales volume.

At this point, you may be curious about the plot of The Heirloom. It is the sorry plight of the reader to plow through it. Three-decker novels typically possessed complicated plots, often dealing with marriage and property. The Heirloom cubes the complications,  throws in a lot of mush, and the result is a plot so convoluted that one is tempted to go full-Alexander the Great and take a sword to this Gordian knot. It would, alas, take a machete to hack through it but with no guarantee of success. 

It begins with the near-death ravings of Bertram Gonault, the presumptive hero of the story, as he lies in bed at Vernwood Manor. He made a fabulous fortune, and met a beautiful girl, who mysteriously vanished just prior to their wedding. As usual when a man loses the woman of his dreams, Bertram hit the road of dissipation that ended in deathbed delirium, an old man at 50 on page one, "at what a price!" A half hour after his feverish diatribe he was murdered. By the end of volume one, after an at best wearisome telling of the story of Bertram’s life, “the reader feels relieved when at the end of [that volume] he resumes his place in Bertram’s bedchamber” (The Speaker). You may want to get in bed with Bertie and take a quick nap before the murderer shows up.
 
The remaining two volumes are devoted to discovering the mystery murderer, finding a beneficiary for Vernwood Manor, the title's heirloom, and locating a mysterious ring, another heirloom to pad out the narrative. This is tantamount to asking readers to take a hundred mile hike with a hundred pound rucksack. Really, an army Ranger with a reading habit would be challenged to get though this book without giving up. 

Oh, lordy, this book's a doozy. And quite scarce.
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DUTHIE-LISLE, T. THE HEIRLOOM; or The Descent of Vernwood Manor. London: Gay and Bird, 1893. First (only) Edition. Three octavo volumes (7 3/3 x 4 3/4 in.). vii, (1, blank), 247, (1, blank), 16 (catalog); vii, (1, blank), 222, (2, blank), 16 (catalog); vii, (1, blank), 246, (2, blank), 16 (catalog) pp. Publisher's original gray cloth, gilt lettered title, sprig of leaves in black.  Cloth soiled, lt-mod. wear, a few sm tears to spine tails, spine exhibits library label ghosts, "Lorde Circulating Library" stamped in purple to preliminary blanks, offsets to preliminary blanks from bookplate of Britten Memorial Library, otherwise a Good copy of a genuinely scarce work. Wolff 1966. 

 

The Woman Who Infuriated Dickens

A Miniature Portrait of The Young Elizabeth Gaskell.
William John Thomson, 1832.
(All Images Courtesy Of The John Rylands Library.)

1810 was a banner year for literary women. In the United States, Cambridge, Massachusetts to be exact, Margaret Fuller was born. Transcendentalist Fuller was such a voracious reader that at age 30 she was known as "the most well read person in New England." She went on to become America's first full-time female book reviewer, writing for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. Fuller also wrote one of the earliest feminist texts published in the U.S., Woman In The Nineteenth Century. Events and exhibits have been planned at libraries and museums across the country to honor Margaret Fuller's bicentennial.

Elizabeth Gaskell's Childhood Home In Knutsford,
The Inspiration For Cranford.

Back in the mother country, 1810 also produced one of the finest female novelists and biographers of the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Gaskell. Gaskell was born at a home located on a street which is a wellspring of British artists and writers, Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. At one time or another in their lives, George Eliot, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Bram Stoker, Henry James, J.M.W. Turner, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Laurence Olivier, Keith Richards, and Mick Jagger all lived on Cheyne Walk. Elizabeth Gaskell's bicentennial is being celebrated across England, including the city in which she spent the last 20 years of her life, Manchester.

An Etching From George Richmond's
1851 Portrait Of Gaskell.

The University of Manchester's John Rylands Library has just opened a new exhibit containing items related to Gaskell from its own collections, and pieces borrowed from other libraries, along with with some artifacts on loan from Gaskell's descendants. The exhibit was opened on July 14 by Sarah Prince, the great great great granddaughter of Elizabeth Gaskell. The Library's Public Programmes Manager Jacqui Fortnum said at the opening: "This exhibition, which marks the bicentenary of her birth, draws on the Library’s world-class Gaskell collections to explore her place in... diverse communities. It looks at how her social networks influenced her fiction and the worlds she depicted in her books. It also considers the worldwide community of readers past and present who have found enjoyment in Gaskell’s work."

Some Of Gaskell's Unpublished Correspondence,
And Her Letter Opener.

Elizabeth Gaskell: A Connected Life includes 200 letters sent by Elizabeth to friends and family, a diary recording her first daughter’s early development (on loan from Leeds University Library), her collection of autographs, and many personal items such as her passport (which shows how extraordinarily widely travelled she was for a woman of the nineteenth century), her book of common prayer, and a Wedgwood teapot believed to be from the Gaskell house. Assistant archivist and curator Fran Baker stresses that the exhibit aims to show many aspects of Gaskell's life: "Elizabeth mixed in very different circles and we wanted to explore that with this exhibition...She wanted to highlight the problems for people who were living in appalling conditions in Manchester, and she was trying to get the people and the leaders to speak to each other."

A Page From Gaskell's Handwritten
Manuscript For The Grey Woman.

Gaskell's books reflect her interest in the good, bad, and ugly relationships between the classes in English society of the Victorian era. Characters in her books include the landed gentry, professional men, business owners, society women, wives and women longing to be married, widows, spinsters, men and women in trade, factory and farm workers. and the unemployed and down and out. The Rylands Library exhibit includes Gaskell's original manuscripts for her novel Wives and Daughters, her collection of short stories The Grey Woman, both published in 1865, and for her biography of friend and fellow novelist Charlotte Bronte. Tools of her trade are also on display, including an inkstand, quill pens, and a letter opener. Fran Baker says the Rylands Library's collection of "Gaskelliana" has long been a draw for academics from as far away as America and Japan because of its provenance. Many of the books were donated by Elizabeth’s daughters, or by the Gaskell's closest friends in Manchester.

Mrs. Gaskell's Inkstand And Quill.

One of the most interesting pieces in the collection is an 1850 letter to Elizabeth Gaskell from Charles Dickens, asking her to write for his weekly paper, Household Words. Dickens was Gaskell's first major publisher, printing her ghost stories and Gothic fiction in both Household Words and another of his periodicals, All The Year Round. Gaskell's relationship with Dickens was erratic, her natural storytelling ability led Dickens to fondly call her his "dear Scheherazade." But her slow production of material (at least compared to his own amazingly prolific output) often put the two at loggerheads. Dickens was not terribly enlightened when it came to his relationships with women. In a statement still considered acceptable in the Victorian era (but thankfully not in this day and age, witness Mel Gibson), an exasperated Dickens told a colleague, "Oh! Mrs Gaskell-fearful-fearful! If I were Mr. G., oh heavens, how I would beat her!"

On The Set Of The BBC Adaptation Of Cranford,
With Actress Imelda Staunton.

Elizabeth Gaskell's novels are better known now than at any time since their initial release. This is primarily due to the phenomenally popular 2007 BBC television adaptation of three of her novels of small town life, Cranford (1853). Wives and Daughters (1866), Gaskell's unfinished final novel, was also adapted by the BBC in 1999. But for the purest and most beautiful adaptation of Gaskell's work, check out the 2004 BBC miniseries based on her most class conscious novel, North and South. (Just be careful NOT to end up with the unrelated, overwrought 1985 American Civil War drama of the same title.) North and South features Gaskell's most intelligent, independent, and opinionated heroine, Margaret Hale, and tells the story of her tortured romance with cotton mill owner John Thornton. Sublime acting, atmosphere, and direction combine to create one of the rare adaptations which is almost as good as the book.

Elizabeth Gaskell's Home In Manchester,
At Plymouth Grove.

Like Margaret Fuller, who shares her birth year, Elizabeth Gaskell was a woman far ahead of her time. Her minister husband's congregation was shocked by her depiction of prostitution and illegitimacy in her novel Ruth (1853). Her Life of Charlotte Bronte, published in 1857, also created a firestorm of outrage. Her direct depiction of Bronte as a woman uninterested in the traditional "woman's place," actually led some to declare it libelous. Early editions were withdrawn and a revised, more palatable, edition was published later that same year. One can only wonder if in the year 2210 there will be an American and a British female author whose bicentennial will be as celebrated as that of 1810's Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Gaskell.
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Emory Library Digitizes The Mother of Pulp Fiction

SAVAGE, Richard Henry. The Little Lady Of Lagunitas: A Franco-Chilean Romance. London: Routledge, 1892.

(Image Courtesy of Monash University Library.)

A cutting-edge imaging tool of today, a robotic digital book scanner from Kirtas Technologies, is allowing more readers than ever to enjoy the fruits of a previous publishing innovation: the yellowback. Yellowbacks, nicknamed "mustard plasters," were the Victorian era version of airport novels: railway reads that were cheaply bound in papered fiberboard, and usually sold for two shillings (about 50 cents). Their nickname comes from their most common cover: a three-colored illustration, often luridly sensational, printed on an eye-poppingly bright, yellow-glazed background. Emory University which holds the second largest collection of yellowbacks of any American university, has announced that more than 1,200 of these 19th century rarities have now been digitized and made available for free downloading.

GOULD, Nat, The Lady Trainer. London: Long, 1906.

(Image Courtesy Of Monash University Library.)

"There are a good number of yellowbacks where we have the only known copy of the text, so we're able to make that available to people around the world," says David Faulds, librarian at Emory's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL). "They're very rare now because they weren't that sturdily built, they just disintegrated or were thrown away. It's an aspect of 19th century life that's disappeared today."

MARK TWAIN, A Yankee At The Court Of King Arthur. London: Chatto & Windus, [c.1893].

A pirated yellowback version of A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court.

(Image Courtesy of Monash University Library.)

Though less well-known to scholars and collectors than the more exploitative "penny dreadfuls," yellowbacks hold an important place in publishing history. Antiquarian book expert Anthony Rota noted in his authoritative history of the printed book, Apart From the Text (1998), that if "one had to describe in one word the books that transformed not only series publishing but all publishing in the last half of the 19th century, it would be 'yellow-back'."

[BRADDON, Mary Elizabeth], Lady Audley's Secret. London: Simpkin, Marshall, [188?].

(Image Courtesy of Monash University Library.)

These cheap books essentially ended the era of the three volume novel, or three-decker. The boom in train travel, along with an increasingly literate, but not necessarily wealthy, population, dried up the demand for heavy, bulky books. Yellowbacks were the first lightweight, portable book, inexpensive enough to be printed in mass quantities, and priced to be affordable for the growing working class created by the Industrial Revolution. And the eye-candy covers of the yellowbacks, prominently displayed in train stations, were among the first examples of using savvy design and marketing to create a best seller.

HARDY, Thomas. The Hand Of Ethelberta. London: Sampson, Low, 1888.

The back cover advertisement was a standard feature of most Victorian yellowbacks.

(Image Courtesy Of The British Library.)

The yellowbacks were such a financial success upon introduction in 1847, that nearly every major publisher of the day began a series aimed at the railway reader. Yellowbacks were not mere sleaze or trash, they were often reprints of works from the finest authors of the day, including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, and Thomas Hardy. In America, British authors were favored by printers, as copyright laws allowed them to be "pirated," and sold without the payment of royalties. For the same reason, American and French authors were favored in England. Victor Hugo, Honore de Balzac, Mark Twain, and Bret Harte were particularly popular. Yellowbacks that weren't reprints were sometimes genuine first editions of the work of a foreign author: the first British translation of Pushkin's The Queen of Spades was published as a yellowback.

FEVAL, Paul, Bel Demonio. London: Ward, Lock. And Co., 1863.

KETTLE, Rosa, Fabian's Tower. London: Ward, Lock. And Co., 1880.

(Image Courtesy of The British Library.)

There were also wildly successful writers whose work appeared only within the pages of these early versions of "paperback originals." The yellowbacks began what we now take for granted as "genre fiction." French writer Emile Gaboriau's (1835-1873) series of titles featuring thief turned police officer Monsieur Lecoq were the template for all future detective fiction, and directly inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creation of Sherlock Holmes. Another French writer, Maria Louise Rame, who wrote under the pen name "Ouida," popularized the historical romance novel. Without her yellowbacks there would have been no Harlequin Romances, and even worse, no covers featuring Fabio. A "confessions" genre also began with yellowbacks. It included, in 1860 alone, The Confessions of a Thief, The Confessions of a Horse Dealer and The Revelations of a Catholic Priest. Would we have today's best-selling junkie "memoirs" from writers like James Frey without these?

PLUES, Margaret, Geology For The Millions. London: Routledge, 1863.

(Image Courtesy of The British Library.)

But the yellowback was not limited only to fictional works. First editions of important Victorian literary journalists, such as George Augustus Sala, Edmund Yates, and Douglas Jerrold were all published as yellowbacks. And the next time you're checking out Warren Buffett's stock tips, remember that an investment guide was the first yellowback proper: in April 1853 Ingram, Cooke & Co., published Money: How To Get, How To Keep, and How To Use It with an illustrated cover on a yellow background. [Horace Mayhew's Letters Left At The Pastrycook's (1853) was the first title published in the format, but with white wrappers.] This format is also the source of the endless stream of "how to" books that now flood our libraries, everything from proper etiquette, the correct way to mount butterfly specimens, the rules of parlor games, and the process of at-home taxidermy, all described between the yellow covers. Travel guides and war reporting were also staples of non-fiction yellowbacks.

SULLIVAN, John L., Reminiscenes Of A Nineteenth Century Gladiator. London: Routledge, 1892.

(Image Courtesy Of Monash University Library.)

The heyday of yellowbacks, which Matthew Arnold dismissively called "tawdry novels... designed for people with a low standard of life," was between 1855 and 1870. During this period, printers gave cover artists free reign to design the illustrations and lettering on the covers and spines of titles which were published in runs as large as 100,000 copies. Volumes from this era have an integrity of style which was lost when, due to lower costs, printers standardized outer typography, thereby reducing artists to hired guns, producing only pasted in illustrations. By the 1890's yellowback covers were shoddy, monotonous, and undistinguished. What had begun as a publishing innovation became shorthand for a cheap product of inferior quality.

OUIDA, Pipistrello. London: Chatto & Windus, [1885].

(Image Courtesy Of Monash University Library.)

Yellowbacks did not entirely disappear: they were replaced by higher quality formats, which often recycled the earlier books' most outstanding cover illustrations. The digitization of yellowbacks by universities will give this unique piece of publishing history a new lease on life. As Emory rare book librarian David Faulds points out: "Some of these books are so rare that they've been lost to history. Scholars and casual readers can now discover these works. There may be aspects of them that are of interest not only to literary researchers, but also social historians looking at Britain or America in the 19th century, or women's lives in this period, what they were reading, how they are portrayed or what they wrote."

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