Just after midnight on the 13th December 1889, George Murray Smith, London publisher and businessman, received the telegram from Venice telling him of the death of his friend Robert Browning. The night was bitterly cold and the streets deep in snow, but he decided to take the news to the editor of The Times. A cab was hard to find and he had to walk to Hyde Park Corner from his house in Queen's Gate Gardens before he hailed one, and when he arrived at Printing House Square his reception was as cold as the weather:

I found the Editor of The Times after midnight as difficult of approach as a cabinet minister. I was shown first into one room, then into another, and after being duly inspected in each room I was then invited to take a seat and wait. The time went on; at length I rang a bell and sent in a message to Mr. Buckle that if he didn't see me soon I must be gone. This produced the great man. He thanked me for the news which was quite exclusive, and there was more than a column about Browning in The Times of that morning.

Alfred Tennyson was often reluctant to put his poems into print. In fact, early in his career only the efforts of persuasive friends like Arthur Hallam and Edward Fitz Gerald and the dedication of a committed poetry publisher like Edward Moxon enabled the poems ever to see publication. It was only after the appearance in 1850 of In Memoriam, for which Moxon particularly pressed, that the forty-one-year-old Tennyson felt sure enough of his own work to make such decisions by himself. After this success, he seldom allowed the conviction of others to undermine his own judgment in the practical details of publication.

In 1865, an unknown author calling himself Lewis Carroll compelled a leading publishing house, Macmillan & Company, to suppress the first edition of a children's book entitled Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In 1886, the same author, better established, instructed the same publisher to dispose of the first edition of The Game of Logic, also meant for children, as not up to his standards of book production. In 1889, Carroll condemned the entire first run often thousand copies of The Nursery “Alice”; and in 1893, when he found that a later run (the sixtieth thousand) of Through the Looking-Glass had come from the presses with the illustrations not well printed, he ordered Macmillan to scuttle those copies as well.

In this paper the aim is to examine the first-form earnings of the novels of four major mid-Victorian novelists and to draw some preliminary deductions from the patterns and figures which emerge. Underlying a mechanical exercise is the contention that how a novelist is rewarded has a significant relationship to how he writes and the quality of what he writes. Without going much beyond tabular representation of these novelists' production and income one can elaborate four distinct career strategies. And these strategies conform usefully (though not entirely congruently) with the literary–critical judgements which are commonly made about the achievements in fiction of Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, and Trollope.

In a recent study which is central to the theme of this volume, Robert L. Patten has remarked that despite all the scholarly activity in the Victorian period over the past fifteen years, there is still no “magisterial work” on Victorian publishing. In the introduction to his Charles Dickens and His Publishers (Oxford, 1978) Patten emphasizes the difficulty of assessing the extent to which the transactions and the relationship between Dickens and his various publishers were typical of the period and to what degree they were due to the force of Dickens' personality and to the position he occupied in the literary world. Even more pertinent are his reflections on the problems of separating an author's professional life from his total life, of extracting a picture of the writer qua writer from the rich and complex portrait of the whole man, without limiting or distorting his character.

Sir John Squire, in his review of Mr. Osbert Burdett's book on Robert Browning, is right in suggesting that there must be “someone alive,” besides Mr. Thomas Wise, “who has broken bread at the poet's table.” I did so, but it was at his tea-table, and it was cake we broke. The table was round and of the old pivotal kind, that lurched dangerously when anyone pragmatic, say Mr. Kenyon, made his points—leaning heavily, threatening to upset Miss Sarianna's silver teapot, which she would wave occasionally so as to get her word in. The conversation was sometimes interesting and sometimes not, to the listening pitcher of schoolgirl that I was.

When a scholar tries to delve into a writer's creative thoughts, it is essential that he consult manuscript materials — any scrap written by the author might prove illuminating. The number of requests we receive from students regarding the whereabouts of primary source materials makes us keenly aware that the Brownings are under continuous scrutiny.

For the second year, thanks to the courtesy of the directors of the Browning Institute and the editor of Browning Institute Studies, we are able to supplement and correct information contained in our Checklist.*