Les Standiford Read Free Page B

retailers followed the migration of the upper and middle classes toward the affluent western neighborhoods of Covent Garden, St. James’s, and Chelsea. By Dickens’s time, there were two dozen or more shops catering to the carriage trade in the western suburbs, including that of John Hatchard whose Piccadilly bookstore, opened in 1782 and still in operation, became the largest of its kind in all London.
    Another modern practice also made its appearance in London about the same time. Bookseller James Lackington, though claiming to act in the interests of the book-buying public, had wisely concluded that selling a great many books at a small margin was more profitable than selling a very few at a high margin. Soon he was purchasing large quantities of unsold stock from publishers, marking them at a steep discount, and watching them fly out the door of a shop that he called the Temple of the Muses—thus was the business of “remaindering” begun. Though Lackington incurred the wrath of many fellow retailers before he died in 1815, publishers privately hailed him for offering a way that they might recoup some of the losses they had incurred by betting too heavily on the wrong literary horse.
    While the retail book trade was largely propped up by the tacit mutual agreement not to discount the cover price of books, Dickens was a champion of the free-market system and an opponent of any form of price-fixing. Of course, he had reason to be laissez-faire regarding price wars because he derived most of his writing income early in his career not from book sales but from contracts that paid him for a regular production of words.
    Most of his works were composed and published in twenty weekly or monthly installments, sold in magazine format—sometimes as part of an established magazine—for a shilling. His pay went from fourteen pounds an issue for
Pickwick
to £150 for
Nicholas Nickleby
to £200 for
Martin Chuzzlewit,
for instance (with bonuses tied to circulation and various republications). When a novel was completed, the publishers would typically bind up the whole in a three-volume set called a “three-decker” and offer it for thirty-one shillings sixpence, a hefty sum for a reader used to paying a shilling at a time for his reading pleasure.
    In fact, the primary market for the three-decker was the sizable network of commercial lending libraries in the country, a market that benefited from Dickens’s enormous popularity. The largest of these syndicates might order up as many as 2,500 copies of a three-volume set of a later Dickens novel—and, indeed, commercial libraries preferred the three-volume format because it meant they could charge three times the fee they got for a one-volume novel. As Dickens became both more popular and more savvy, he would of course fashion contracts that awarded him a far greater return from such ancillary republications of his work.

    A s for
Pickwick,
it is doubtful that anyone could have anticipated the variety of offshoots that developed in its wake. A veritable cottage industry arose around the book’s success, including the production of china figurines representing the book’s characters, as well as Pickwick song books, hats, joke books, and cigars. There was even an unauthorized stage adaptation mounted at the Strand Theater (
Sam Weller, or The Pickwickians
), a bit of theft that roused Dickens to one of his first intemperate outbursts against those who were profiting off the glimmer trailing in his wake.
    As Dickens wrote to Forster in September of 1837, several weeks after the show opened, “If the
Pickwick
has been the means of putting a few shillings in the vermin-eaten pockets of so miserable a creature [playwright William George Thomas Moncrieff ], and has saved him from a workhouse or a jail, let him empty out his little pot of filth and welcome. I am quite content to have been the means of releasing him.”
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