‘The Last New Novel’: Valuation Strategies in Reviews of Fiction Published in the <em>Athenaeum </em>and the <em>Saturday Review</em>, 1855–59

The book review is a dominant genre in Victorian periodicals but has received comparatively little critical attention. A recent intervention by Laurel Brake, Fionnuala Dillane, and Mark W. Turner has underlined that the book review needs to be recognised for its centrality in the Victorian literary field and marketplace. Within the history of the genre, scholars have long understood the early 1850s as a caesura in reviewing practices, when the role attributed to critics, both by readers and by themselves, changed significantly. With the abolition of the stamp tax and advertising duties, a flood of new publications of all types hit the Victorian marketplace in the 1850s. This expansion of the literary market entailed an increase in critical commentary, so that buyers’ interest in books, as well as the estimation of their value, was likely affected by the literary criticism they encountered in periodicals. Periodicals thus existed in an environment of economic competition, which made it necessary for weeklies, biweeklies, monthlies, quarterlies, and yearlies to distinguish themselves through selling points such as novels published in instalments, celebrity gossip, or, notably, book reviews. As consumer items in their own right, periodicals facilitated the sale of literary works, shaping the literary market in significant ways. This article investigates two seminal Victorian periodicals during the critical period of 1855-1859—the Athenaeum (1828-1921), and the Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art (1855-1938). Both claimed the status of cultural arbitrators within a literary field that they perceived as fast-moving and inconsistent in quality. I examine the rhetorical and typological strategies underlying the attribution of value in reviews of fiction, the ‘most popular form of literature for English readers’ at mid-century, according to Merle Mowbray Bevington, but not the most respected. I illustrate the ways in which the book review functions as a ‘techne of navigation’, as Brake, Dillane, and Turner have noted, highlighting its generic complexity, which they view as ‘decidedly influenced by ideology in its various gatekeeping interventions and by economic and pragmatic motives that influence its length, its subject matter, and often its critical stance’. I show that, beyond its overt interest in enabling or preventing the sale of novels, the mid-century book review takes an economic outlook in the methodological and hermeneutic processes through which literary value is defined and communicated by reviewers. In establishing and communicating their moral and aesthetic assessment of new novels, I argue, reviewers writing for the two periodicals at hand display an economic orientation in their typology and epistemology, employing forms of quantification that stretch from the counting of specific elements to the abstract non-numerical calculation mimicking the logic of a balance sheet customary in commercial bookkeeping.