Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform
Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform
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Abstract
In the 1880s and 1890s, Walter Besant was one of Britain’s most lionized living novelists. Like many popular writers of the period, Besant suffered from years of critical neglect. Yet his centrality to Victorian society and culture all but ensured a revival of interest. While literary critics are now rediscovering the more than forty works of fiction that he penned or co-wrote, as part of a more general revaluation of Victorian popular literature, legal scholars have argued that Besant, by advocating for copyright reform, played a crucial role in consolidating a notion of literary property as the exclusive possession of the individuated intellect. For their part, historians have recently shown how Besant – as a prominent philanthropist who campaigned for the cultural vitalization of impoverished areas in east and south London – galvanized late Victorian social reform activities. The expanding corpus of work on Besant, however, has largely kept the domains of authorship and activism, which he perceived as interrelated, conceptually distinct. Analysing the mutually constitutive interplay in Besant’s career between philanthropy and the professionalization of authorship, Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform highlights their fundamental interconnectedness in this Victorian intellectual polymath’s life and work.
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Front Matter
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Introduction: Walter Besant Now
Kevin A. Morrison
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I Literary Collaborations
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II Reforming Authorship
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Four
Walter Besant and Copyright Reform
Mary Ann Gillies
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Five
The Author Function in Walter Besant’s Fiction: The Notion of Artistic Value in the Wake of Copyright Law and the Nationalist Restructuring of the Book Trade
Alberto Gabriele
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Six
Besant, Chatto, and Watt: An Income from Fiction in the 1890s
Simon Eliot
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seven
Workers as Artists: From Copyright to the Palace of Delight in Besant’s Writings
Ayşe Çelikkol
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Four
Walter Besant and Copyright Reform
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III Authoring Reforms
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Eight
Altruism and the Monks of Thelema: Ideals and Realities
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Nine
The Ethics of Perception and the Politics of Recognition: Walter Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of Men
Kevin Swafford
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Ten
From Happy Individuals to Universal Sisterhood: Affective Reforms in All Sorts and Conditions of Men and Children of Gibeon
Vicky Cheng andHaejoo Kim
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Eight
Altruism and the Monks of Thelema: Ideals and Realities
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IV Literary Relations
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End Matter
Citations
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