Samantha Plasencia, *Daniel Deronda*'s Serial Run"

This semester I’ve been really interested in seriality, so I went to the Rare Books & Manuscripts Library to look at an original run of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, serially published by William Blackwood & Sons in eight books from February to September 1876. This blog post will focus on the relationship between the novel’s serial form and Blackwood & Sons’ advertising.

The number of pages devoted to advertisements is inconsistent throughout the books. Each has an ad on the inside of the front cover, and on both sides of the back cover. The first two open with 16 pages of advertising, the third with 12, and the fourth, fifth, sixth, and eighth volumes with 8. The only volume that breaks from this format is the seventh, which opens with only 4 pages of ads but ends with an additional 16 (more on this later).

I was struck by the amount of ad space devoted to other publishing companies. For example, in the first installment, pages 1-11 are exclusively ads for books, but only three of these pages are for Blackwood & Sons. Other publishing companies promoted included Sampson Low Marston, Tinsley Brothers’, Henry S. King & Co., Daldy, Isbister & Co., Smith, Elder, & Co., Blackie & Sons Publications and there is also a full-page ad for "Mudie’s Select Library. New and Choice Books." Though fewer pages in the later installments are devoted to published works, beginning with Book 2 and extending through Book 7, an insert of “Popular Novels” "Sold by all bookstores" and "Sold at all Railway Stations" appears between the cover and the first page. 

With few exceptions, all the book advertisements appear first, giving them spatial and temporal prominence: they are the first advertised commodity that readers encounter when they open the material book and, therefore, the most likely to gain attention and stick with them. This prominence is reinforced by the comparative abundance of book ads, which never comprise less than 30% of total number of pages devoted to advertisements, and their physical clustering at the beginning of the installment. Across the eight books, most products (like cocoa or pens) are only advertised by one company; the two exceptions are baby formula and life insurance, which are advertised by two competitors. But there is not a single book of Deronda that didn’t sell multiple space to the publishers of other novels, which I found surprising.  Nowadays it’s difficult to imagine ever opening a book from one publisher to see an ad for another.

Thus Eliot’s original readers would have been immediately immersed in a kind of industry catalog, which promotes a range of the latest consumer products from popular novels to travel literature, instructional textbooks by academic scholars, activity-related topics such as “Works on Gardening,” and many more. These products are further distinguished materially: there are ads for cheap 2 shilling novels, slightly more expensive 7s. 6d. cloth bound books, and bound collections for as much as £2 10s. The range of material products suggest that this "catalog" is not only selling books as commodities to display in the home, but also selling the form of consumption that sustains the publishing industry: reading.

The act of reading is what binds the imagined community of readers targeted by such a catalog. As Mark W. Turner explains in his chapter on “The Material Culture of the Victorian Novel” in A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel, the part-serial form creates a

community of readers by bringing them together each month to perform the same activity. I’m suggesting that this conglomeration of publisher ads functions similarly, plunging its reader into an imagined community of textual and material consumers. And it keeps them there spatially and temporally: in the first two installments a reader finds 11-12 pages of book ads before reaching promotions for products like Joseph Gillott's Steel Pens, Fry's Cocoa, Oswego Prepared Corn, and Cash’s Frilling. 

If the ads’ physical collation and spatial placement frontloads monthly installments of Deronda with a publishing industry catalog of “principal” and “choice books” for a community of consumers, the linguistic emphasis throughout the ads on “New” “Recent” “Lately” and “just” published texts, emphasizes the serial dynamic of consumerism and

how its accumulative logic maps onto a more general temporal paradigm. We want more and more, but we also want it to be the newest and latest.

Though Blackwood & Sons occupies more ad space than other publishers, with the exception of Book 7 they never comprise more than 50% of the publishing ads (more often, significantly less). It’s this mild self-promotion that makes their advertising in Book 7 so striking. In the penultimate installment of Eliot’s novel, Blackwood & Sons open their material product with only 4 pages of advertising, plus the inside cover and an insert for "The Select Library of Fiction: The most popular novels published, well printed, and bound in picture boards." Of these ad pages, only one promotes books and it is Sampson, Low, Marston, & Co.’s “List for August.” This is the smallest number of opening ads published in any of the eight books.

But this installment is also unique in how it ends. Whereas every other published finishes with the last page of Eliot’s text and a small paper insert advertising the next volume of the series, Book 7 ends with a 16-page “Select List of William Blackwood & Sons’ Publications," which is further subdivided into: a 10-page list of texts with prices for “Standard Works of Fiction,” “Recent Classical Translations,” a series of “Ancient Classics for English Readers,” a supplemental series to “Ancient Classics,” “Text books of Natural History” and “Geology,” and “Gardening and Agriculture.”

If novels published serially allow authors “to keep in touch with a reading public over an extended period of time,” they also keep publishers in touch with consumers (Turner 117). Because Blackwood & Sons presumably had the readership for 8 months, they could afford to sell a lot of valuable ad space (both in terms of production cost and influence), to “competing” publishers in the earlier volumes. The stark shift in Book 7 may therefore be strategic: by bringing out their heaviest self-advertising at the end of the penultimate book, Blackwood & Sons give Eliot’s audience a reading list to occupy them in the temporal and material gap between the 7^th and the 8^th books.  It’s also appropriate that the “Select List” should come in this

particular gap, when readers are literally faced with an ad for the last series installment, and emotionally faced with the end of their life with the novel. The temporal and spatial placement work together to leave the reader with a lasting impression of Blackwood & Sons’ books when the time is most appropriate for them to order another one.

But if we take into consideration how the “simultaneity” of the reading cycle helped make serial publications a “social event,” we might also consider how this list invites a similar dynamic (Turner 117). As scholars since Linda Hughes and Michael Lund have noted, seriality is a form of publication and temporal dissemination that encourages readers to communally speculate during the enforced gap about what will happen next. Moreover, since successful serial novels generally grow their readership with each installment, this is a conversant community that tends to grows as time goes on.

The 7^th book of Deronda ends with a plot twist particularly suited to engage a British readership that, as Joe Post noted in his last blog post, was growing increasingly dissatisfied with the so-called Jewish plot: Grandcourt’s death urges readers to

conjecture whether Daniel will marry Gwendolen or Mirah. Blackwood & Sons’ decision to include their “Select List” at the end of this volume invites readers already “projecting forward” about how Deronda will end, to also pause, reflect, and communally discuss what they might buy to read when it does (Turner 125). The serial publication of Daniel Deronda gave Blackwood & Sons extended physical space and time for marketing their products to a somewhat secured audience. As such, it enabled the creation of an extended advertising strategy contained within, but strategically spread throughout its 8-books-over-8-months production schedule.

 Blackwood & Sons also serially advertises at a more micro level for their “Supplemental Series” to the original “Ancient Classics for English

Readers.” As the publishers’ ad explains in their 1874 edition of Eliot’s Legend of Jubal, and Other Poems, the goal of the “Ancient Classics” series is to “explain, sufficiently for general readers, who these great writers were, and what they wrote: to give, wherever possible, some connected outline of the story which they tell, or the facts which they record, checked by the results of modern investigations; to present some of their most striking passages in approved English translations, and to illustrate them generally for modern writers; to serve, in short, as a popular retrospect of the chief literature of Greece and Rome." The collection includes 20 works on figures such as Homer, Virgil, Sophocles and Plato (fun fact: Trollope contributed to the series, with a book on Caesar). They were cloth bound, published quarterly and sold for 2s. 6d.

By the time Deronda appeared in February 1876, Blackwood & Sons had developed a “Supplemental

Series” because “The marked success and general popularity of the Series of 'Ancient Classics for English Readers,' lately concluded… has been accompanied by some regrets, expressed by both the friendly critics of the press and in private quarters, at its not having been made somewhat more comprehensive.” And so the very first advertisement on the inside cover of Vol. 1 is for this supplemental series.

Ryan Dubnicek, "*Mad Men* and the 1960s Gay Liberation of New York"

“The Jet Set,” the eleventh episode of the second season of Mad Men is the first to introduce the viewer to early-1960s California, a setting in the show that operates partially as a literal Shangri-La—where the poolside bar is filled with ageless people of beauty whose life is consumed with pleasure—and one that takes the place as an alternative to the standard nuclear family that the men of Sterling Cooper have, at least in appearance, in New York. While this otherworldly location is introduced, another more local, but perhaps equally foreign world is introduced back at the office. While inviting Peggy to see the new (and recently renamed) folk artist, Bob Dylan, Kurt, the young, indeterminately foreign, member of the SC creative team casually mentions to the rest of the office that he is gay. While Sal Romano, art director at Sterling Cooper, who has been introduced as a closeted gay man, looks on, we are presented with the first mention of the momentous and growing movement of the gay liberation in 1960s New York.

Alexander Doty writes in his fantastic piece “The Homosexual and the Single Girl” in Mad Men, Mad World, that Sal and Kurt present a common binary of homosexual life in the 1960s—the closeted, married gay man and the openly gay man. Sal, with his passionless (and presumably sexless) marriage to his childhood friend coupled with his veiled and brief infatuations with the men around him, is a figure of repressed sexuality that embodies the socially functional homosexual man of the 1960s. In a decade when every state in the US, aside from Illinois, had criminal anti-sodomy laws with severe punishments ranging from a handful of years in prison to life imprisonment or commitment to a mental institution, there was only one socially acceptable way to be gay—to stay closeted.

As an openly gay man, Kurt is an example of a possibility that is only on the cusp of becoming livable, let alone socially acceptable, during his time. Despite the overwhelming disapproval of homosexuality in the United States at this time—as Doty also mentions, Mike Wallace reports in his 1967 documentary television piece “CBS Reports: The Homosexuals” that two-thirds of the US public view homosexuals through a lens of “disgust, discomfort or fear” (321)—Kurt’s casual, volunteered revelation is received with relatively innocuous responses. Harry Crane responds with the almost cutesy “so Kurt is a pervert… how about that?” Ken Cosgrove mentions that he “knew queers existed, [he] just doesn’t want to work with them.” While branding homosexuality as a perversion and expressing a desire to not work with gay colleagues are both harsh responses,, in line with the mentality of the time, neither is expressed in a particularly venomous way nor seems to have a lasting effect on Kurt or in the minds of the men or women who sit in judgment at Sterling Cooper.

During the first two seasons of Mad Men, Sal has taken painstaking care to hide his homosexuality through discretion about his desires and out-and-out abstinence in acting on them, along with his participation in all of the masculine sexist banter that other SC execs exhibit. Kurt’s nonchalant revelation of his homosexuality, and the calm reaction it provokes, stands in stark contrast to Sal’s assimilation to a wildly heterosexual work environment. Yet, coming out is not something that Sal sees as an option—why does it work for Kurt?

Initially being brought to Sterling Cooper in an attempt to integrate youth to its creative department, Smitty and Kurt are associated with the rising counterculture of the 1960s from their first interview, where they exhibit non-traditional clothing, explain their unique work as a duo and Smitty answers Don’s proposal to ask them a question he is asked in interviews with a hip “that is divine, man.” Kurt’s deep association with the beatnik counterculture of 1960s New York is thoroughly confusing to his peers at Sterling Cooper and operates as a smokescreen to allow his equally confusing life as a gay man to slip into the background of his identity. With Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, two of the iconic leaders of beat culture, themselves gay, and advocates of gay rights, the movement became a relative haven for young gays and lesbians of the time, allowing relatively unprecedented chances for openly gay individuals to interact and gather in ways that had been far more difficult in previous years.

Another Mad Men figure that hints at this connection is that of Paul Kinsey. His sexual relationship with Joan, which he spoiled by bragging about it in the office, and his relationship with Sheila, an African-American woman involved in the civil rights movement, seem to both be borne out of a desire for the benefits of the appearance of the relationships than of the relationships themselves. Kinsey takes pride in bedding the office sex symbol in Joan, and in the shocked reactions to what is seen as a startlingly progressive move to date Sheila. Both relationships seem to be performances for his male colleagues, and feature no real connection to each partner. While the other characters are busy starting families with their wives and pursuing sex with women who aren’t, Kinsey’s concern with how he’s perceived rather than how his sexual life operates is indicative of a queer character. Beyond his liberal views on racial relations and his initial encouragement of Peggy’s becoming a peer as a copy writer (“Ladies Room” 1.2), Kinsey also visually embodies some of the stereotypes of the beatnik figure—a beard-sporting, pipe-smoking man who lives in Greenwich Village.

Though Kurt has more exteriority in his sexuality in the work place, Sal still holds the upper hand in societal acceptance as a closeted gay man. Partaking in the same alcohol indulgences of the other Sterling Cooper executives both in and outside the office is nod to the contentious, and often times inciteful laws within New York that did not allow for the sale of alcohol in bars to gay and lesbian patrons or the issuance of liquor licenses to establishes owned by or directed towards such a customer base. While Kurt can enjoy the freedom of being openly gay in the office, he is pushed further underground in his public life, being forced to seek secret clubs often owned by the Mafia and operating due to arrangements with bribed police officers, as Martin Duberman points out in his book Stonewall.

The constant clash between being out and being closeted will come to mark the central theme of the culmination of the 1960s gay liberation in New York—the Stonewall Riots of 1969. With gay bars and clubs being often raided, New York police attempted to use public outing as a means to blackmail and persecute the gay, lesbian and transgender communities of New York, most notably the hotbed of both queer and beatnik culture, Greenwich Village. The police, having first forced homosexuals into underground venues in order to pursue the same activities heterosexuals were granted openly, would use the threat of removal from said underground into the surface of public New York life to control the queer subculture of the area. The physical dichotomy of closeted/outed gays, lesbian and transgender individuals in the Village directly mirrored the metaphorical.

The cycle of raids was famously broken up when the patrons of the bar and dancing hotspot, The Stonewall Inn, refused to present identification, be searched or taken to jail, and instead resisted arrest publicly, in front of a crowd of neighborhood onlookers. What was previously a practical threat of public shame through arrest, and, thus, of being publicly outed, and a metaphorical forced movement of their sexuality from their interior life to their public exterior life, became a point of pride for the queer subculture in the Village. As Stonewall participant Fred Sargeant points out, this initial incident, and the ensuing riots around the Stonewall Inn spawned the first instances of the gay pride movement—an embrace within the queer community of the public exhibit of their sexuality.

Joe Post, "Generic Displacement and Judaic Fixations: Contemporary Reviews of the Final Books of *Daniel Deronda*"

An initial survey of the reviews following the publication of the final books of Daniel Deronda reveals the culmination of a growing dissatisfaction with Eliot’s last published novel. Many of these reviewers fixated on the “Jewish portion” of the novel, a concern that Eliot and George Henry Lewes had anticipated in early correspondence with William Blackwood (Martin 91). This plot, seen as completely discrete from Gwendolen’s more engaging plot, led to an overall dissatisfaction with the novel. Many reviewers cast Daniel Deronda in the shadow of Middlemarch, leading one reviewer to resituate Deronda within a separate literary category. And while this generic transplantation points to a continued interest in the formal qualities of the novel, the majority of reviewers released their initial concerns with the means of the novels production (aptly discussed by Kyle Johnston on this blog). Instead, this former distaste gave way to a preoccupation with perceived threats to English cultural superiority.

The critical dissatisfaction with Deronda began earlier than the publication of its final number in September 1876. In fact, “many reviewers found book 6 … just as satisfying as they had the first five parts” (Hughes and Lund 168). These earlier installments allowed British readers to imaginatively create their own conclusions, writing for Daniel and Gwendolen an ending far different from that which Eliot later revealed. The growing anti-Semitic sentiment that reviews for Books 6 and 6 fomented, led readers and reviewers to be “predictably dissatisfied” with Book 7 (Hughes and Lund 168). The increasing predominance of the “Jewish plot” and the pull that Judaism exerts on Daniel become the central focus of these later reviews.

Readers of Deronda initially saw the Jewish plot as subordinate and even subservient to the English plot of the novel. Some reviews of Book 4 went so far as to praise those sections regarding Mirah and Mordecai, “but they were consistently seen as unconnected to what was considered the main, that is the English, story” (Hughes and Lund 162). Part of this prioritizing of the English story involved readers’ liking Daniel only insofar as he served as potential husband to Gwendolen. One critic for the Daily News particularly stressed that he represented the broader readership in wishing that Gwendolen “were destined to marry” Daniel (Martin 97). Any possibility of Daniel’s marriage to Mirah in earlier books was denied. In addition, critics cast Mordecai as a rambling lunatic, whose Zionistic longings and preaching were as unappealing as they were improbable (Martin 98). Even reviewers who acknowledged the favorable portrayal of the Jews still resisted the inclusion of the entire Jewish plot. They didn’t seem concerned with portraying Jews positively, but rather with how the “English identity could no longer be seen as distinct from and superior to the Jewish character” (Hughes and Lund 168).

In conceiving the Jewish and English plots as disparate and unconnected, both contemporary critics and twentieth-century scholars suggested that the Jewish plot be removed to preserve Eliot’s skill as an author. Though F. R. Leavis famously declared that the Jewish plot could easily be removed from the novel to maintain the integrity of Eliot’s prowess, the same proposal appeared as early as the 4 October 1876 Guardian: “the Jewish part of the story is simply odd and inexplicable. It has nothing to do with the main plot, which would move on quite smoothly if it was all cut out” (qtd. in Martin 98). The reviewer for the Guardian had the advantage of looking at Deronda as a whole, unlike the many earlier reviews that expressed a growing dislike for the Jewish plot.

Some reviewers defended Eliot’s writing. In order to do so, though, at least one reviewer decided to recast the entire genre of the novel so as to resituate Eliot within a different literary tradition. R. E. Francillon’s “George Eliot’s First Romance”—as clearly indicated by its title—argues that while Eliot typically wrote realist fiction, Daniel Deronda decidedly stands as a romance. His review, published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in October 1876, states that Eliot’s previous works fell neatly within the prevailing form of realist fiction. In fact, Francillon identifies Eliot as among those responsible for the “disesteem into which romantic fiction has fallen” (411).  Even Romola, which others may consider a romance, was, by comparison to Deronda “no romance in the sense that the term must be applied to Daniel Deronda as the key to its place and nature” (412). For this reason, according to Francillon, reviewers of Deronda felt disappointed to find a romance where they expected a realist novel.

Francillon answers concerns over the Jewish elements of the novel by framing these elements within a romantic tradition, explaining away their peculiarity and foreignness and justifying them as perfectly reasonable within a romance. Deronda, says Francillon, “lies so far outside George Eliot’s other works in every important respect as to make direct comparison impossible. It cannot be classed as first, or second, or third, or last” (412). Francillon’s review makes apparent that he and others saw that the only means of recovering Eliot’s reputation as an author is to resituate Deronda as not operating within the same tradition of writing that Eliot herself forged. Instead of continuing a trend of writerly excellence, Eliot produced in Deronda a “new era” of her writing with a “first novel” (412). In this same way, Henry James posits Deronda’s position within a different stylistic tradition. In an article first published in the Atlantic Monthly in December 1876, James dramatizes the conversation between three friends as they reflect on Eliot’s latest novel. At one moment, Pulcheria, an overly critical reader of Deronda, says, “The tone is not English, it is German” (686). The only recourse for justifying Eliot’s expansively criticized work is to resituate, to re-categorize, to displace, and to isolate Daniel Deronda as an anomalous foray into a discarded genre.

Francillon offered a prediction for how Deronda would serve Eliot’s reputation, claiming that “it promises to secure for its author a more slowly growing, perhaps less universal, but deeper and higher fame than the works with which it does not enter into rivalry” (412). He concedes that the “world is not prone to believe in many-sided genius” (412), yet he centers his entire review on defending Eliot’s position in this category. Whether Deronda secured that fame for Eliot predicted by Francillon is subject for another blog, research for another day. Yet if Leavis’s analysis and Barbara Hardy’s distinction of the successful and less successful “piece of characterization” (124) show anything, they demonstrate that the novel’s formal, generic, and story fractures continue to divide and perplex critics.