“Read this! Read that!” Dickens and the Culture Industry
Master Thesis
Christiaan Vijn
10591400
University of Amsterdam
Literature, Culture and Society
Table of contents 2
Introduction 3
Chapter 1 The Culture Industry 4-16
1.1 Introduction 4
1.2 Culture Industry as Described by Adorno and Horkheimer 4-8
1.3 Adorno, High and Low Culture 8-11
1.4 Culture Industry and Advertising 11-15
1.5 Conclusion 15-16
Chapter 2 Charles Dickens, Professional Author and Businessman 17-33
2.1 Introduction 17-18
2.2 The ‘Public’ and Mass Market 18-25
2.3 Dickens as a Political Author 25-27
2.4 Machines, Advertising and Publishing 27-33
2.5 Conclusion 33
Chapter 3 Advertising in Dickens 34-46
3.1 Introduction 34
3.2 Advertisement Writers 34-39
3.3 The Living Advertisement 39-43
3.4 Schemes and Names 43-46
3.5 Conclusion 46
Conclusion 47-48
Introduction
This thesis seeks to investigate Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s theory of the Culture Industry. In particular it seeks to put under pressure the claim by the authors that the Culture Industry is a relatively new phenomenon. Rather, the argument will be that the system they describe existed for a long time already. The author whose works will be examined in this context is Charles Dickens. There are several reasons for this. The first is that Dickens was closely tied to the serial novel, which was the first widely read form of the novel in general. Second, his iconic nature in both English culture and the Victorian era means that he and his works had a significant impact on world of literature and culture, which lends social relevance to understanding both him and his works. The time period that Dickens lived and worked in (1812-1870) is also some time removed from when Adorno and Horkheimer originally wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), without being so long ago that, should the theory prove to be wholly inapplicable to Dickens, that distance in time is not the obvious answer as to why that is. Advertising also rose to especial prominence during Dickens’ career, something he benefited immensely from.
The motivation for writing this thesis stems in part from my bachelor thesis, which was about Shakespeare viewed from Stephen Greenblatt’s theory of containment of subversion. Through thinking about why that subject interested me I figured out that the connection between Shakespeare in that context and Dickens was the potentiality for subversive elements in mass culture, and why those (to an extent) existed in Dickens and Shakespeare, but are hardly able to be found today, and what has caused this. This is where Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory came in.
The research question then that drives this thesis is: Does Dickens’ utilisation of advertising
and marketing show that the Culture Industry existed prior to the twentieth century, and if so, how?”
Chapter 1 1.1 Introduction
In this chapter, I will set out a discussion on Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory. First I will summarise their writing on the Culture Industry and explain my understanding of it as it evolved through
primarily Adorno’s writing. Then, I will examine in particular how advertising and marketing function within the theoretical framework of the Culture Industry.
1.2 The Culture Industry as described by Adorno and Horkheimer
Adorno and Horkheimer’s conception of the production of art is that artistic motive is no longer the main driving force. Rather, the profit motive has completely taken over, whereas before this was merely one of the reasons art was created. This change in motive has had far reaching consequences for the entire artistic process: from the very first bud of inspiration that might later bloom into a full novel to the way it is edited and marketed to the public: “The whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry”1. Adorno and Horkheimer make clear again and again that
there is no escape from the Culture Industry; that it is omnipresent and moving ever more out in the open:
Those in charge no longer take much trouble to conceal the structure, the power of which increases the more bluntly its existence is admitted. Films and radio no longer need to present themselves as art. The truth that they are nothing but business is used as an ideology to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce. They call themselves industries, and the published figures for their directors’ incomes quell any doubts about the social necessity of their finished products. 2
That the Culture Industry had to be concealed while its power increases as its existence is revealed seems contradictory at first: if its strength increases in the open, why the need for secrecy? It can be said that, if the powers that be are bold enough to reveal that audiences are used as a cash cow rather than a thinking subject, that means that the Culture Industry’s hold on audiences is powerful enough that they buy into this system. Adorno and Horkheimer speak of a public mentality which is “part of the system, not an excuse for it,”3 so we should not think of the mentality of the
1 Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 163 2 Ibid, 164
masses as being a product of the Culture Industry, but as being fed into it and reflected back onto itself. That is to say, public mentality does not only exist as a product of the Culture Industry, it is adopted and transformed, after which it is presented back to the public to be consumed, existing in a loop. This constant moving ensures that ideology always stays up to date as it were, and does not become recognisable for being behind the times.
That the films and radio the public are being presented with are the result of a business is presupposed with regard to these products’ lack of quality and artistic merit. The need for
concealment can imply some criticism being leveled at the mainstream media of their time, but if it existed Adorno and Horkheimer do not show it in their work. This lack of empiricism can be seen in the aforementioned quote, and is a returning feature of the whole of Dialectic of Enlightenment. In addition, they often refer to a “they” or “those” without making explicit who exactly is making the intentional decisions that Adorno and Horkheimer claim they are making. The two main ideas coming to the forefront at this point are that the Culture Industry is a system which everyone is subservient to and that there are elites in charge of it, reaping the benefits. There exists some tension between these two ideas, because Adorno and Horkheimer do argue that even the elites are in fact part or ‘victim’ of the Culture Industry and under its influence.
Adorno later, in 1967, elaborated on this tension in The Culture Industry Revisited, saying that the Culture Industry has effects beyond that what those in control intend:
New on the part of the culture industry is the direct and undisguised primacy of a precisely and thoroughly calculated efficacy in its most typical products. The autonomy of works of art, which of course rarely ever predominated in an entirely pure form, and was always
permeated by a constellation of effects, is tendentially eliminated by the Culture Industry, with or without the conscious will of those in control.4
Here Adorno clarifies what differentiates his contemporary society from what came before him. The work of art has become truly a calculated product. The considerations going into the production of a work of art are now so heavily focused on the business equation of things that artistic merit and vision are irrelevant. This way of thinking has become so ‘natural’ that producers follow along without
critically examining why and whether the current practice might be detrimental to the quality of the work of art. Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of habitus can aid in unpacking what Adorno means here. The habitus are, in short, conventions and dogma that carry over across generations, but are not explicitly enforced. Eating with knife and fork is an example of habitus: one is expected to eat this way, but no punishment has been formulated should one eat another way. Bourdieu views the possibility of change in cultural production as follows:
The principle of change in works resides in the field of cultural production and, more precisely, in the struggles among agents and institutions whose strategies depend on the interest they have - as a function of the position they occupy in the distribution of specific capital (institutionalized or not) - in conserving or in transforming the structure of that distribution, hence either in perpetuating the current conventions or in subverting them. But the stakes of the struggle among the dominants and the pretenders, between orthodoxy and heresy, and the very content of the strategies they can put into effect to advance their interests, depend on the space of position-takings already brought about, and this,
functioning as a problematic, tends to define the space of possible position-takings, and thus to shape the search for solutions and, consequently, the evolution of production. And on the other hand, however great the autonomy of the field, the chances of success of strategies of conservation and subversion always depend in part on the reinforcement that one or another camp can find in external forces (for example, in new clienteles).5
Bourdieu describes a dynamic system at play, which nonetheless limits those involved in cultural production. The choices made by predecessors limit what choices can be made in the present. In addition, positions exist at an intersection of different interests. Making autonomous decisions is thus rendered almost impossible, not only for artists themselves, but distributors and marketers as well. This applies to individuals and for example major movie studios equally. Pushing artistic boundaries is not a guarantee for making money if the competition is already doing the same. Adorno sees no escape from The Culture Industry, wherein even those nominally in charge cannot steer it into a direction they desire. Of course, no matter the direction culture takes, the elite will be reaping the rewards, so there is no incentive to make changes to the current system for them.
Adorno’s view is slightly more cynical than Bourdieu, whose view implies, should a series of choices be made and the economic climate allow it, that (very) gradual systemic change is possible. This
comes with a caveat however. That a different way of organizing the production of art is possible might not even be considered:
This space of possibles impresses itself on all those who have interiorized the logic and necessity of the field as a sort of historical transcendental, a system of (social) categories of perception and appreciation, of social conditions of possibility and legitimacy which, like the concepts of genres, schools, manners and forms, define and delimit the universe of the thinkable and the unthinkable, that is to say, both the finite universe of potentialities capable of being thought and realized at a given moment - freedom - and the system of constraints inside which is determined what is to be done and to be thought - necessity.6
If we view the Culture Industry as an all encompassing system that everyone is influenced by it follows that anything outside it will not be entertained as a possibility. Bourdieu suggests that there is a great deal of freedom within the schema of cultural production, but that this freedom must exist within the system. If the ‘potentialities’ are not capable of being realised within the system, then they will never occur to those ‘who have interiorized the logic and necessity of the field’.
The observation that media are a business might imply that their products are simply consumable goods without any further intent other than being purchased, but this is far from the truth. While culture has become a commodity, it still carries and reproduces ideology: that of capital. Dialogue about culture is framed much like that of any other commodity: “the advantages and disadvantages debated by enthusiasts serve only to perpetuate the appearance of competition and choice.”7 People are led to believe they choose to consume media they like based on its content, but
the differences are superficial. At the core all what the culture industry might offer is alike: the underlying ideological goal is always the same: “To impress the omnipotence of capital on the hearts of the expropriated job candidates as the power of their true master is the purpose of all films, regardless of the plot selected by the production directors.”8. Adorno and Horkheimer thus state that
all film, here standing in for media in general, is interchangeable. When creating film the key element of ideology remains, and producers pick a different framework to lay over it. This process is repeated over and over to imprint the Culture Industry’s ideology on the audience and to keep them coming back to consume more. Adorno put it more clearly after reworking the theory: “What parades as
6 Rules of Art, 235
7 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 97 8 Ibid, 96
progress in the culture industry, as the incessantly new which it offers up, remains the disguise for an eternal sameness; everywhere the changes mask a skeleton which has changed just as little as the profit motive itself since the time it first gained its predominance over culture.”9
What remains vague is the timeline of when ‘the profit motive gained predominance over culture’. Of course, it is impossible to put an exact year on this development, but even an indication of a time period remains missing. One might say that it was with the advent of film production that this first occurs, but Adorno counters this idea in his writing. He notes that with film the production process most closely resembles that of any industrial production line, with an entire team of writers, directors, executive producers and studio representatives deciding what content is admitted into a film and how much budget it gets and so on, but it would be a mistake to exclusively apply the theory of the Culture Industry to this particular medium. He therefore cautions against taking the expression literally: “It refers to the standardization of the thing itself such as that of the Western, familiar to every moviegoer –and to the rationalization of distribution techniques, but not strictly to the
production process.”10 So it is not necessarily the production process which differentiates the Culture
Industry from what preceded it, instead Adorno argues that primary difference is in the content which has become an interchangeable product, here referring to the genre of the Western. But it is not only art being pigeonholed into a certain genre and then being repeated over and over again, it is the subjection to the entire system what has changed: “What is new however, is that the
irreconcilable elements of culture, art and amusement have been subjected equally to the concept of purpose and thus brought under a single false denominator: the totality of the Culture Industry. Its element is repetition.”11
1.3 Adorno, High and Low culture
Horkheimer and Adorno put great emphasis on the domination of the Culture Industry and its increased domain, with every possible human expression being subject to it. In the above quote
9 Adorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry Revisited. 3 10 Ibid, 6
they list culture, art and amusement as if they are separate phenomena. When looking at the implied disdain for the Western genre, it can be tempting to suggest that Adorno and Horkheimer are making a distinction between ‘highbrow art’ such as literature and theatre, and ‘lowbrow art’, that being ‘amusement’ such as film and certain genres of music like jazz, which Adorno infamously railed against (albeit popular jazz). It would then follow that the former has been ruined by being mixed with the latter, in other words, ‘the irreconcilable elements of culture, art and amusement […] thus brought under a single false denominator,’ but Adorno and Horkheimer, perhaps anticipating being accused of elitism, add that “Light art as such, entertainment, is not a form of decadence. Those who deplore it as a betrayal of the ideal of pure expression harbor illusions about society.”12
Acknowledging that not all expression has to be high literature, the phrase ‘harbor illusions about society’ nevertheless does a lot of work here, still implying a certain hierarchy between forms of expression and such light art existing for a lesser purpose: it would be delusional to think that society can thrive on high art alone seems to be the argument. It should not come as a surprise then that Adorno and Horkheimer came under attack for cultural elitism all the same.
Deborah Cook defends Adorno in particular from this criticism however when attempting to rehabilitate the theory of the Culture Industry in the face of cultural critics, stating:
As for the charge that Adorno is a cultural elitist and has a conservative view of the lower class, a few words will suffice to show that this accusation must be carefully qualified. Pseudo-culture –the historical successor to what was once “high” culture –is, in Adorno’s words, “spirit overcome by fetishism of commodities.” No one and nothing are immune from commodity fetishism. The commodification of culture has affected even those who once belonged to the privileged and “happy few” (as the extensive marketing and commodified consumption of works of “high culture” decisively shows).13
Although there is an argument here that the Culture Industry has made equalized the classes and that the bourgeoisie and their art have fallen prey as well, so that no one is above the Culture Industry and its damaging influence, but Adorno’s words here still reinforce the impression that there exists a hierarchy between forms of artistic expression. Cook’s emphasis on high culture being commodified as well only sharpens the divide. The definition of pseudo-culture also has an element
12 Ibid, 107
of high culture being corrupted. The phrase ‘spirit overcome by fetishism of commodities’ conjures up a once noble idea being corrupted and brought down. High culture is painted as having been the last bastion of true art, free from the Culture Industry’s influence, with all other forms having fallen prey at an earlier point. The point Adorno and Cook seek to emphasise however, is that the Culture Industry does not distinguish between what some might call high or low art.
When considering the Culture Industry, the issue of elitism should be carefully examined. Even when defending Adorno from this criticism, Cook still cannot seem to fully dismantle it, although Adorno does not place himself or scholars above mass society, stating that “anyone –and by this one always means oneself –might be exempt from the tendency to socialized pseudo-culture a conceited illusion”14. Accusing Adorno of being elitist towards his contemporary time seems unfair then,
considering the extent to which he tries to establish the universal nature of the Culture Industry and the impossibility of escaping, but we can read nostalgia for how culture used to be before its
commodification into his statements. Coupled with the fact that he remains vague on when the Culture Industry took hold, the theory is opened up to the criticism that what Adorno and
Horkheimer describe as a new development in the production of culture is in fact an old one, starting from the very beginning when art was able to be mass produced.
The rise of literacy in the nineteenth century meant that for the first time, the printing press could be used not only for mass production of literature; it was able to engender mass consumption as well. The printing press, being invented somewhere between 1440 and 1450, did not by itself upend the way, literature was consumed. What aided the spread of literature were further
improvements on the printing press and lower costs of paper: “A major stumbling block to producing mass inexpensive literature was the supply of paper. Until 1803 it was impossible for any paper-making process to yield more than a few thousand sheets at any one time. (...) There was an
additional saving since taxes were assessed by sheet, regardless of the number of printed pages that sheet yielded. So doubling the size of the sheet halved the printing time and the taxes.”15 The
14 Ibid, 13
production of literature was able to exponentially increase, and now novels and other forms of literature could be produced and sold at a price that even ordinary workers would be able to afford. However, this increase of production capacity by itself could not have engendered societal change.
The masses were, after all, still unable to read at that point in time. In order for mass produced culture to come into being, a social shift had to take place in addition to further
technological development: the rise of literacy. It is therefore not merely enough for technology to develop, something had to change within the social conditions as well. The same can therefore be said for developing technologies in the twentieth century. It stands to reason that the invention of filmmaking could not have brought about a societal wide change without a cultural shift occurring first. From Adorno and Horkheimer’s own words we can gleam this idea as well, albeit not explicitly: “With good reason the interest of countless consumers is focused on the technology, not on the rigidly repeated, threadbare and half-abandoned content. The social power revered by the spectators manifests itself more effectively in the technically enforced ubiquity of stereotypes than in the stale ideologies which the ephemeral contents have to endorse.”16
1.4 Culture Industry and Advertising
Adorno and Horkheimer noted the special role that advertising had come to play: the act of selling a product to the public had become an art in itself. Ominously, they recall Joseph Goebbels celebrating its rising influence: “Advertising became simply the art with which Goebbels presciently equated it,
l’art pour l’art, advertising for advertising’s sake, the pure representation of social power.” 17 Adorno
and Horkheimer determine a shift in the purpose of advertising: rather than serving to bring attention to a commodity and its specifics and benefits, advertising has become something which insists upon itself, existing for its own sake. It is somewhat paradoxical that they refer to it as ‘pure representation of social power’, seeing as in its form advertising at times seeks to conceal, to an extent, that it is advertising; in which case it is not stated plainly that the images you are looking are paid for by a
16 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 108 17 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 132
company or institution to get you to do something. At other times, and advertisement loudly announces itself, proudly utilising the newest Mercedes in a sleekly produced clip of around thirty seconds. What the new car is capable of does not matter, only that the public is reminded of the brand Mercedes and the associations prestige, class and expensiveness. That the ubiquity of advertising is an expression of the sway that moneyed interests hold over society, and that their orders are that you must consume their products thus affirming that a citizen’s primary role in capitalist society is that of a consumer is certainly an apt observation, but advertising often works with a degree of deception as to its true purpose. The official explanation behind an advertisement is that the producer is only trying to bring a product to the public’s attention, even though the need for a product often does not exist in the first place: it has to be artificially created first. Hence, I would argue that, expressions of the culture industry are always mired with a desire for deniability that they are merely advertising.
Adorno and Horkheimer place a great deal of faith in the consumer’s ability to recognise advertising for its deception but simultaneously work through their cognitive dissonance and buy into the Culture Industry’s ideology. When discussing cultural commodities such as lifestyles, they claim: “That is the triumph of advertising in the culture industry: the compulsive imitation by consumers of cultural commodities which, at the same time, they recognize as false.”18Writing long before the
advent of Instagram and other social media platforms, this claim seems prophetic. An interesting divide exists on these social platforms. The largest portion of the users of these websites are regular consumers, who upload their own lives and interests so that their friends and family might see them, for their own amusement or whatever motivations they might have, whilst following their
acquaintances so they in turn can keep up with what is happening in their lives. The other portion of users are public figures, but they use and function within the system far differently. If regular users are aware that they have an audience, these public figures exist solely for the audience. On YouTube and Instagram they exist solely as vessels to sell a lifestyle and all the content they place on these
websites are part of a performance. Often these bites of content are paid for by a company to sell an item or service, in other words: the snapshots of their lives that these public figures serve up to their audience are only advertising. User, when asked, acknowledge that people only upload the positive side of things: that they are constructing an artificial image of themselves. Everyone is aware that this is how these platforms operate, yet they are massively popular and people seek to imitate and emulate what they encounter there.
Social media’s mode of operation lends itself to advertising. The images displayed convey their message both briefly and in rapid succession, overwhelming the consumer with content so that they cannot linger on any one piece of content too long and consider its implications and question why they are presented with it, while allowing the desired message to seep into the subconscious. The consumer is kept constantly distracted through this bombardment, and this distraction renewed all the time. Because people are always, at some level, conscious of the performative and social nature of their lives and thus looking for social cues in their environment, the distractions offered up by advertisements are able to take hold. The pieces of advertising content combined make up a mosaic of control. Characteristic is that the moments put forward lack individuality:
The montage character of the culture industry, the synthetic controlled manner in which its products are assembled –factorylike not only in the film studio but also, virtually, in the compilation of the cheap biographies, journalistic novels, and hit songs –predisposes it to advertising: the individual moment, in being detachable, replaceable, estranged even technically from any coherence of meaning, lends itself to purposes outside the work.19
In both art and life then, we see this montage character represented through advertising. Because the plots of films are interchangeable, the places people travel to and experience and signal to their audience the same, art and life are robbed of their context and unique meanings, which means everyone can consume them, making them ripe for advertising. Today we can see this reflected in movie trailers or short blurbs on the covers of books: text that is written and inserted into the work of art solely to attract a viewer- or readership. However, catchy one-liners predate the twenty-first and twentieth century. The serial novel, a form popular in the nineteenth century, is a perfect
representation of this phenomenon as well. Individual chapters, placed outside their own context in magazines amidst other works, all written and presented in order to grab attention get the reader to buy the next one. More on this topic will follow in the second chapter of this thesis.
The large number of people who follow so-called online influencers make social media platforms interesting for advertisers, so it is in their interest to make sure the masses stay interested in consuming the content of these online influencers. If it were immediately apparent that all content was advertising, interest would wane quickly. That the content on these accounts contains a degree of verisimilitude with regard to simulating how the lives of celebrities, or celebrities-to-be, actually are, is crucial to the functioning of the system. People may recognise that these moments are enhanced, that only the good moments are put forward, but the claim that consumers ‘recognise them as false’ does not hold up. Part of the illusion—of capitalist ideology—is that one day, this might be ‘you’, that the life associated with these commodities is attainable. The falsehood therein is that the vast majority will never attain the lives dangled in front of their eyes, assuring an infinite reinvestment into the Culture Industry. By looking to people who have fully bought into the system and are profiting off of it for clues a great number of people will not be exposed to alternative options, or those alternative options are seen as less attractive because they do not belong to the in-group. If they did belong, after all, people would see them reflected in the social content they consume.
The self-perpetuating nature of the Culture Industry works in multiple ways. Adorno and Horkheimer have often noted its omnipresence, and advertising helps in maintaining its influence: “The costs of advertising, which finally flow back into the pockets of the combines, spare them the troublesome task of subduing unwanted outsiders; they guarantee that the wielders of influence remain among their peers.”20 Companies employ advertising agencies familiar to them, assuring that
capital stays in the in-group, eliminating any possibility of a radical or divergent movement gaining traction, being drowned out by the content peddled by industrial leaders. But, it is not merely a
practical domination in the sense that the Culture Industry’s stream of content is seemingly endless and unavoidable in the public market. The fact that a product is not advertised makes it inherently less attractive: “Advertising today is a negative principle, a blocking device: anything which does not bear its seal of approval is economically suspect. All-pervasive advertising is certainly not needed to acquaint people with the goods on offer, the varieties of which are limited in any case”21. The authors
are discussing the phenomenon that if a product is unfamiliar to a consumer, then that product becomes unappealing. If a product, work of art or any other commodity had been advertised up to that point, then it would be part of the social sphere and thus become acceptable to consume. Unfamiliarity breeds uncertainty. Opting not to purchase a commodity is then justified a posteriori by saying other brands are well known for their quality, and spending money on an uncertain
commodity might be a waste when it turns out to be inferior, even though personally one probably has no way of knowing how the comparison holds up and the difference between two commodities of the same kind is limited in any case.
The goal of advertising is to appear in as many places as possible, so that there is no chance that a paying customer might miss it. In this, Adorno and Horkheimer claim, the Culture Industry and advertising are the same: “Advertising and the culture industry are merging, technically no less than economically. In both, the same thing appears in countless places, and the mechanical reproduction of the same culture product is already that of the same propaganda slogan.”22 Advertisements and
the Culture Industry are familiar, without knowing where one first came into contact with them. Stories told through television, film or social media in our modern age are imprinted as well through, as stated before, endless repetition so that it seems that the select few stories that conveniently benefit the Culture Industry and the elite in charge are the only stories.
Conclusion
The Culture Industry primary relies on that people are social beings, looking to each other for examples on how to behave. Fitting in, be it into the public at large or a certain counter culture, is a
21 Ibid, 132 22 Ibid, 133
desire which is exploited by media producers. The content they serve up is standardised to appeal to as many people as possible, which makes the production of art easier as only superficial changes are needed as long as the fundamental structures remain the same, and people can take comfort in consuming the same culture as their environment. In order for cultural industries to keep making a profit, they need to ensure that the public keeps invested in the culture they are selling, which they do through presenting an ideal life in front of them, while the consumer can never actually live that life themselves; only the products which are on sale can grant a momentary satisfaction until the next product comes along. The system is able to function because all are influenced by it and do not question its necessity. Both producers and consumers do not see a realistic alternative, in part because there is so much cultural content to consume which keeps them distracted. Culture
becoming mass consumable is the key development which makes the Culture Industry possible. The nineteenth century is when mass culture can be said to have come into existence: precisely the time when Charles Dickens grew up and became both a cultural icon and a massively popular author.
Chapter 2: Charles Dickens, Professional Author and Businessman 2.1. Introduction
In this chapter we will dive into the world of publishing, advertising, the serial novel and Charles Dickens’ functioning within the literary market. Dickens’ ascent to become ‘The Most Popular Author in the World’ was not by any means simply because he was clearly the best author of his time, but because a great many social, technological and economic factors developed into a new stage, and Dickens was a pioneer in taking advantage of the combination of all these developments. The path to global recognition and influence was not laid out before him; Dickens codified what it means to be a popular author appealing to a mass market. The practices of the Culture Industry, or the
developments that enabled culture to industrialise can also be seen materialising during Dickens’ time and perhaps because of his influence. However, to define him as a shrewd businessman would gloss over his political activism and his pursuit of actively forging a ‘Public’ including people belonging to all strata of society for reasons beyond merely expanding his customer base.
From the above paragraph we can already gleam that Dickens contains multitudes of characterisations: from the radical social activist to a talented author and the business mogul. One must be take care not to overemphasise one aspect of Dickens to the detriment of others, if not only for the fact that so much has been written about him and his work that plentiful critics are to be found arguing either one or the other view of him. Dickens may stand in front of an audience and proclaim: “My faith in the people governing is, on the whole, infinitesimal; my faith in the people governed is, on the whole, illimitable,” 23 while at the same time building up a substantial amount of
both actual and social capital, to the point that Queen Victoria would request to meet him and discuss his work. Dickens enjoyed popularity and social status among all layers of society: “Reviewers were comparing him with Shakespeare, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne, and speaking of him as the successor to Scott and Byron, writers who enjoyed immense popularity among the previous generation. In 1837, Charles Buller was already attempting to explain to readers of the London and
Westminster Review the reasons for ‘a popularity extraordinary on account of its sudden growth, is
vast extent and the recognition which it has received from persons of the most refined taste, as well as from the great mass of the reading public.’” 24. This calls into question whether Dickens belongs to
‘the people governing’ or ‘the people governed’. While Dickens certainly has had his share of critics accusing him of pandering to his audience to the expense of artistic expression. Often they cite that his work is meant to be easily digestible, rather than stimulating: “Many of the most memorable criticisms uphold the opposition between ‘mental effort’ and ‘cheap and easy pleasures’, and the language used often associates Dickens with the formulaic products that Theodor Adorno and others have associated with the ‘culture industry’.”25 In the third chapter we will go into Dickens work itself
as it represents advertising and cultural industry, for now the notion of Dickens as a cultural industrialist in the literary market will be further explored: to what extent can it be said that he consciously created ‘formulaic products’?
2.2. The ‘Public’ and Mass Market
At first glance it might seem that Dickens slots right into Adorno’s conception of the Culture Industry. When viewing the sales numbers of his novels, his impressive bibliography and his cultural omnipresence, it is tempting to characterise him as an author writing exclusively to the market. Yet Dickens remains a popular author to this day, while a great many authors of his time have faded into relative obscurity. The association between 19th century England and Dickens could hardly be
stronger. John attempts to explain this gulf in cultural relevance:
What distinguishes [Dickens’ popularity]from that of market-driven authors like Reynolds, as well as from more ‘endurable’ literary authors like Austen, is the combination of three factors: first, the fact that his popular and commercial appeal was consciously engineered to exploit the possibilities of mechanical reproduction in ‘the first age of mass culture’; second, the scale of his impact on popular culture over the last two centuries; and third, the seriousness with which he took his own popular art, and with which others have continued to regard it. No other writer in history can lay claim to all three of these characteristics.26
Dickens, like others, took advantage of the technological developments of their time to put out as much as they could while commercialising it all and moving on the next project immediately, creating
24 The Dickens Industry, 13
25 John, Juliet. Dickens and Mass Culture. 9 26 Ibid, 8
a non-stop onslaught of chapters in published in journals or on in a single wrapper. Yet being
exchangeable and replaceable is essential to products produced in the Culture Industry, which would run counter to standing out from the mass of authors. Therefore there must be something that has made Dickens stand out and enabled him to remain popular a century and a half after his death. Dickens created his art with a goal in mind other than the financial. His contemporaries noted this as well, such as George Stott: “Stott maintains that ‘in all his novels Mr. Dickens has a distinct and conscious moral aim which inspires and dominates over the narrative’”.27
Dickens lays out his motivation for writing popular literature, specifically popular literature aimed at the lower classes
So every day the disgusted millions with this unnatural gloom and calm upon them, are conditioned and hardened in the very worst of moods. Finally, round all this is an atmosphere of poverty, hunger and ignorant desperation, of the mere existence of which, perhaps not one man in a thousand of those not actually enveloped in it, through the whole extent of this country, has the least idea. (…) But you can no more help a people who do not help
themselves, than you can help a man who does not help himself. And until the people can be got up from the lethargy which is an awful symptom of the advanced state of their disease, I know of nothing that can be done beyond keeping their wrongs continually before them.28
Dickens expresses a desire to help the masses, to make them see that they are experiencing continual injustice so that they might rise up in one form or another to improve their lot in life. Interesting to note is that Dickens observes a ‘conditioning’ of the ‘disgusted millions’ to accept their misery and lay down any optimism. This passivity seems unnatural to him, so one might wonder what created this mass depressed state of being. It is not merely their material conditions, because people are well aware that they are poor and hungry, a society-wide mentality has developed that leads people to not fight their circumstances. The oppressive status quo has become part of culture and in this Dickens sees the opportunity to fight it. One might wonder why people would want to read about human misery in their limited free time when their long work days consist of such misery already. Adorno and Horkheimer view such literature as a coping mechanism:
27 The Dickens Industry, 25 28 10 April 1855, Letters, VII, 586-8
Entertainment is the prolongation of work under late capitalism. It is sought by those who want to escape the mechanized labour process so that they can cope with it again. At the same time however, mechanization has such power over leisure and its happiness,
determines so thoroughly the fabrication of entertainment commodities, that the off-duty worker can experience nothing but after-images of the work process itself.29
People are not able to experience anything but their work day in any case, because the process which created entertainment—art—resembles their work in the factories so closely that they are reminded of work in leisurely activities as well. Adorno and Horkheimer seem to suggest that this is a control mechanism: because of this constant reminder of work, the masses cannot imagine a world where their lives are different, so they uphold the status quo. Dickens on the other hand says that he writes about appalling conditions on purpose, so that people might rise up against them. His novels do not offer escapism in the sense that they omitted the work process, yet they were popular all the same. Dickens’ realism prolongs work as well then, but in a very different way than Adorno and Horkheimer describe: its purpose is to agitate, while escapist entertainment is manufactured in such a way as to depress any radical leanings.
However, it is Dickens’ desire to speak to all and create a singular Public that enables the Culture Industry to take root. “In ‘The Amusements of the People’, ‘the people’ become ‘the common people’, yet Joe Whelks, the working-class archetype held up for scrutiny, is literate and waged. Posters announcing All the Year Round described the journal’s purpose as ‘the instruction and entertainment of all classes of Readers, and to assist in the discussion of the social questions of the day.” 30 In addressing ‘all classes of readers’ and sharing everyone under the misnomer ‘the common
people’, despite their differences and more importantly, their different interests, the potential for the ‘sameness’ that Adorno laments is created. By lumping disparate readers together in ‘the great ocean of humanity’ the concept of mass culture is created, which is what the Culture Industry hinges on. Of course advertisers of the day already tried to market to everyone they could, but that the people begin to see themselves as part of the masses or as the ‘Public’, or even belonging to it and making
29 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 109
this part of their identity, makes mass appeals effective. Contrary to Dickens’ intention then, it seems that creating a singular Public may have had negative consequences as well.
In short: “It was finally through ‘imaginative and popular literature’ that Dickens felt he could most effectively exert influence on ‘the English people’ and enable them to have influence.”31 If
Dickens can exert influence in this way, others can as well. The appeal of such wide influence is apparent to anyone with ambitions, so it should come as no surprise that the concept of the mass market would be further fostered. Attempting to influence the public from without is a less appealing prospect, because being seen as belonging to the in-group is crucial to being accepted. Luckily then for industrialists, Dickens explicitly did not place the wealthy and influential outside the general public: “The social improvement of the English people is inseparable from the well-doing of Arts and Commerce, the growth of public works, the free investment of capital in all those numerous helps to civilization and improvement to which the ingenuity of the age gives birth, that we hold it to be impossible rationally to consider the true investments of the people as a class-question, or to
separate them from the interests of the merchant and manufacturer.” 32. Dickens saw the potential of
technology and industrialisation to improve the lives of the English people, and this can hardly be denied. But that their interests overlap to the extent that they can be said to belong to the same public is an exaggeration, and one that is detrimental to the interests of the working class. Merchants and manufactures have a stronger position in society to be sure, and they can utilise this power to steer the public in a direction that is most beneficial themselves.
The concept of one great public is therefore an inherently bourgeois ideal. Adorno and Horkheimer discuss Kant’s idea of universal human reasoning, and how it plays into a bourgeois conception of society:
Kant’s concepts are ambiguous. Reason as the transcendental, supraindividual self contains the idea of a free coexistence in which human beings organize themselves to form the universal subject and resolve the conflict between pure and empirical reason in the conscious solidarity of the whole. At the same time, reason is the agency of calculating thought, which arranges the world for the purposes of self-preservation and recognizes no function other
31 John, Juliet. Dickens and Mass Culture. 66
than that of working on the object as mere sense material in order to make it the material of subjugation.33
It is not ill intention that would array the manufacturers and merchants against the working classes, but as Adorno and Horkheimer state: reason arranges the world to self-preservation. The emotional appeal that Dickens makes: that of the whole coming together to engender universal improvement enables the strongest voices to improve society according to their logic, because they are seen as operating from within the whole. It is therefore a false solidarity that Dickens paints, but it is one that is extremely useful for the Culture Industry. The object mentioned above would in this context be the public which can be utilised as a resource in the Culture Industry.
The emphasis on reason and logic during the Enlightenment has had further effect on individual interest. It is not merely that sharing all diverse interests under the same umbrella does injustice to different needs: the range of people’s agency is eroded away:
Although the secret utopia harbored within the concept of reason may have glimpsed the repressed identical interest which lies beyond the diverse accidental interests of subjects, reason, operating under the pressure of purposes merely as systematic science, not only levels out the differences but standardizes the identical interest. 34
Adorno and Horkheimer posit that Enlightenment has created a standard that individuals should aspire to meeting, because this standard has been created under the guise of reason, therefore it is nothing but logical to adopt this interest. People with different interests whose needs are not being met are not failed by society, they are the ones who fail to meet society’s standard, backed up by ‘science’. Dickens’ goal of emancipating the ‘disgusted millions’ by speaking to all English people as one public has been subverted to suit the elite interest under the Culture Industry, as Adorno and Horkheimer put it: “The true nature of the schematism which externally coordinates the universal and the particular, finally turns out, in current science, to be the interest of industrial society.”35. What
I would clarify in Adorno and Horkheimer’s above statement is the sense that society is externally coordinated. That influential people like Dickens consider the interest of the ‘merchant and
33 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 66 34 Ibid, 66
manufacturer’ as the same as of the working public is what enables their control, because the top-down structure schema suggested is concealed in this manner.
Mass culture was, perhaps paradoxically, for Dickens also an opportunity to revive a feeling of intimacy and create a closer set of bonds between people. It is no wonder that he would make this attempt as there was no set way of navigating mass culture and the individuality it engenders, so the domestic sphere offers a stable set of social conventions. “Modern mass culture, at its best, would for Dickens enable a larger ‘imagined community’ to replace lost or passing forms of communal and cultural activity.”36 The public that Dickens seeks to address, as stated before, does not exist naturally
yet, first it has to be created. The imagined community in this case is the English people, but Dickens’ aim is not nationalistic, even though he has been used in the creation of the English identity up until the current day. Instead he wishes to promote an intimacy to replace the smaller communal identity: “In 1855, the same year that Dickens wrote to Layard of Reform and Revolution, he promised his audience (…) that his ‘aim and desire’ was ‘to leave our imaginative and popular literature more closely associated than I found it at once with the private homes and public rights of the English people.”37. By offering the public and private the same literature, they would be consuming the same
culture and would therefore have this at least in common. For this to work however, the author needs to be seen as a trusted figure, and this fits well with Dickens paternalistic politics. The idea of the author as a close associate is one that Dickens encouraged: “It is perhaps because of Dickens’ attachment to the idea of community, to personalized bonds between cultural producers and
consumers.”38 As one such producer, Dickens sought to foster a relationship where people would look
to him and his work for cues as to how to behave in a social and cultural context. In this his novels resemble how advertising works in the current day. In the previous chapter we discussed social media platforms and how they offer an example to imitate. The characters in Dickens’ novels operate in a similar role: they too are mass consumed and looked to for how to (not) behave. Even though people
36 Dickens and Mass Culture, 63 37 Ibid, 65
are aware that they are only constructed fictional characters, like online influencers are constructed characters, people are share a familiarity with these characters and they could form the subject of discussion or gossip in coffee houses: they exist in a social context:
“When Trollope asserts that their circulation resembled ‘the sales of legs of mutton or of the loaves of bread’ more closely than it did the circulation of ‘ordinary novels’, he is touching on their extra-literary cultural status: Dickens’s novels were not just books to be read; they were commodities to be coveted, (for the illiterate) stories to be heard, and they provided gossip or news to be exchanged.”39
The novels were, then, more socio-cultural products than only texts to be read: they performed a function outside the enjoyment of the individual. To recall Adorno and Horkheimer: “That is the triumph of advertising in the culture industry: the compulsive imitation by consumers of cultural commodities which, at the same time, they recognize as false.”40 Advertising makes clever use of a
seemingly inherent feature of human interaction and imagination: a process which was already set in motion during Dickens’ time.
Dickens himself commented on the concept of looking to fictional events and characters for guidance: “[Dickens] does not advocate that as passive lookers-on, we try to believe that the dramatic displays we watch are real. Rather, he tells us to remember that ‘the people acting out these violent transitions and abrupt impulses of passion or feeling’ believe that they are real. More complexly, he argues that when we are ‘busy actors’ in the drama of our own lives, we too believe in abrupt transitions of passion or feeling.41” People’s daily conduct is performative as well; hence why we are
able to be so heavily invested in the goings on of actors on the stage or fictional characters. We do not need to believe that they are real, only that they resemble ourselves.
Dickens’ cultural output was therefore a combination of both education and entertainment, which he saw as a false opposition: “For Dickens, successful attempts at mass education and cultural inclusivity would necessitate the dissolution of [the false opposition between education and
entertainment]; indeed education would need to be imagined in new ways and imagination had to be
39Dickens and Mass Culture, 7 40 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 136 41 Dickens and Mass Culture, 204
integral to education. The belief that popular culture should be a crucial vehicle of education and the feelings the seat of the educational process is expressed consistently in his writings.”42 People looking
to literature for inspiration and moral education has been as old as story-telling itself, however, from morality plays in medieval times to Homer teaching heroism through spinning tales about Odysseus. Dickens however places popular literature at the centre of mass education, which has a few
consequences.
The first is that a money making enterprise is granted a great deal of influence in the
education of the masses, which means that those seeking profit would have great interest in getting a slice of the pie. The second is that the content of popular literature, which is already designed to have mass appeal, cannot go against conventions too radically, otherwise the people would be ‘educated’ in a way that is unattractive to the status quo. This education is intended to take place outside formal schooling, which is already unlikely to advocate any radicalism. All the education people receive, then, pushes towards the sensibilities of the masses: there is no education outside the cultural dominant. This means that the ideology of capital can thoroughly and without much challenge make its mark on mass culture.
2.3 Dickens as a Political Author
Although Dickens’ aims were certainly political in the sense that they involved power relations between the masses and their oppressed state of being as well as the general welfare of people, he never takes an explicit political position. This might be expected from him saying that people’s welfare ought not to be a class-question, which adds to the difficulty of pinning Dickens down on a specific stance. Dickens never involved himself with either of the two major political parties and stayed away from the lawmaking and executive dimensions of politics. Instead he busied himself with politics through his cultural efforts: “For Dickens cherished the idea that culture offered an experience, a world view, and a language, which differed from the terms of engagement in the political and social arena. Culture was political, for Dickens, but it was also something more and
something else.”43 Culture transcends the political and social contexts of any given time period; it
lasts for longer and is less easily influenced. Dickens sat about making as much of an impact on general English culture as he could, but this meant making certain sacrifices. Favoring one side of an argument too heavily could alienate others. Nevertheless, his contemporaries viewed him as radical, rebellious and subversive44. Dickens’ ability to appear friendly to all sides has puzzled critics for the
longest time, leading George Orwell to claim:
Even if Dickens was a bourgeois, he was certainly a subversive writer, a radical, one might truthfully say a rebel. […] Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated, and, more important than this, the very people he attacked have swallowed him so completely that he has become a national institution himself. […] Naturally this makes one wonder whether after all there was something unreal in his attack upon society. Where exactly does he stand, socially, morally and politically?45
An interesting phenomenon can be observed here. Orwell and others insist that Dickens was a radical, yet he has been so thoroughly absorbed into English culture that one might forget that he ever opposed the status quo of his time. It seems he has befuddled friend (given Orwell’s socialist tendencies he can be safely described as friendly to radicals) and foe alike. Critic Edwin Whipple describes Dickens’ flaws as follows: “In the foundation of his character, Dickens agrees with the majority of well-meaning mankind. He has no paradoxes in morality to push, no scientific view of human nature to sustain, no philosophy of society to illustrate, no mission to accomplish. (…) Nobody ever thinks of going to his writings for light on such moral problems are opened in Hamlet and Faust. Intellectually, he seems incapable of generalization.”46 While the point that Dickens has no mission to
accomplish or is pushing any views is open to criticism, seeing as Dickens quite clearly stated his motivation for writing and different themes run through his work, the important part to take away from Whipple is that it is impossible to generalize Dickens one way or the other. This difficulty of characterising him is what makes him useful to the Culture Industry.
43 Dickens and Mass Culture, 57 44 Dickens and Mass Culture, 59 45 ‘Charles Dickens’, 414-416. 46 The Dickens Industry, 24-25
It is not fair or accurate by any means to accuse Dickens’ work and goals to be empty of content: that in essence his bibliography represents a vacuum of meaning which can be filled by anyone in the manner they please, but his vagueness means that he is palatable to all, particularly bourgeois interests. From this it follows that Dickens can be utilised in the way one desires. Any radical potential present in his work is nullified by the contradictory readings of him, which has led to his work being reproduced within the Culture Industry and rendered harmless. In Orwell’s words, the institutions Dickens attacked have swallowed him completely. Dickens has been turned into a
commodity himself of English culture, and his political neutrality made it possible. 2.4 Machines, advertising and publishing
The commodification of Dickens into a cultural entity can be observed during his own time: he profited of off this himself, selling his face on matchboxes, calendars and other paraphernalia. The irony of this is that he started out his early life as a living advertisement, and if we indulge in a Freudian reading of Dickens’ life and the motivation behind writing literature, we can state that this experience was the most formative of Dickens’ character.
As a boy Dickens worked for Warren’s Blacking, a manufacturer selling shoe polish. He was forced to work there due to his father’s debts, which landed the family in a debtor’s prison. Dickens’ father was not allowed to work, so it fell on Charles’ shoulders to work off the debt. For several years he worked day in, day out, and it is here where he first came into contact with advertising. His particular task was to paste the labels onto the bottles, labels which contained small blurbs describing and praising the contents. That this had a profound effect on him he would only reveal later:
“The period of Charles Dickens’ childhood that he kept secret until late in his life, what his unfinished autobiography calls his “secret agony of the soul”, found him employed at the Warren’s Blacking warehouse, pasting labels (…) This labour, while as grueling as the factory work so many other children (and adults) were engaged in, was also different from it in that had added, in embryonic form, the stage in which product was beginning to be conjoined to text.”47
What Dickens’ labour entailed was a transformative enterprise. He was handed blank bottles of black shoe polish, indistinguishable from any other, and turned them into Warren’s Blacking shoe polish, attaching all kinds of values and associations to a relatively simple product with the power of words. It is doubtful that Dickens at that age understood the full implications of this, but that this concept fascinated him is beyond doubt. There is another dimension to Dickens’ work at Warren’s Blacking: the placement of his work station.
To put show the hard-working character of the factory and brand, Dickens was placed in a window by the street side, so all might see him toiling away: “Not only was the young Dickens assigned to paste the advertising labels on the shoe polish, but he was placed in a niche at the exposed street-level window, embedded as an attractive human pendant to the title “Warren’s Blacking” above him, to serve for passers-by as a “working advertisement” for the seriousness and assiduity of the warehouse as a whole.”48 To a 21st century readership the advertisement of child
labour would seem absurd, but Warren Blacking utilised Dickens’ labour as a show of good character of the company. Human beings like Dickens were thus turned into text and dehumanised in the process. The labels Dickens pasted assigned value to the bottles of interchangeable shoe polish, and the image of Dickens working assigned value to the company; much like Dickens’ image assigns value to a postcard or indeed the theme park Dickens World. Texts and other cultural expressions thus gain an instrumental role in the production of commodities. The value of a product is as, or perhaps even more strongly, determined by the meaning connected to it than by the labour that has gone into it. The labour that goes into one bottle of shoe polish can be used only once, but the text can influence the consumer beyond the single purchase and leave a lasting impression that ensures further purchases from both the individual buying the product and the collective reading the text. Because the text is an abstract value, it needs no financial compensation, unlike labour. Certainly did young Charles Dickens, aged around 8 years old, not receive fair reward for his role in the production process.
It is no accident that Warren’s Blacking opted to put a human being next to the window in order to serve as public spectacle. There are a variety of cogs in the production process that they could have placed there: the machinery filling the bottles, the corking machine, the office of the overseer, the office of the owners and so on. If they showed what was happening in their own offices people could start to wonder what they were precisely doing and whether it is justified that they take home such a large slice of the revenue relative to their own labour, so this is to be avoided.
Machinery does not carry implicit value of hard, diligent and honest labour and in the worst case scenario workplace accidents like workers losing an arm in the unsafe conditions of the time could happen in full view of potential customers. It is therefore necessary that firstly a human being is seen working and secondly that they are seen working in safety and consistently throughout the day. In contradiction to Walter Benjamin’s argument that technological reproducibility would and has (writing in 1935) destroyed the aura surrounding the work of art and that this is, in fact, a good thing.
To summarise: a work of art gains an aura through its uniqueness and its exclusivity, creating a feeling of reverence towards it. By being available to all, this reverence disappears and everyone can enjoy the work of art equally. That there is a desire for an aura in English culture at least seeps through the desire for handmade products and nostalgia for times before industrialisation. Critic Carlyle put it as follows: “It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word. [...] Not the eternal and physical alone is now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also. [...] For the same habit regulates not our modes of action alone, but our modes of thought and feeling. Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind.”49 Industrialisation had a profound effect on
thoughts of culture and society, creating dilemma’s which have not been solved to this day. The anxiety about mechanisation was shared by others as well, but not in the same way. Marx and Engels viewed machines as a possibility for the liberation of the workers, used correctly. 50
49 ‘Signs of the Times’ [1829], in Critical and Miscellaneous essays ,II, p.233-236 50 The Conditions of the Working Class in England, 161-162
Nevertheless, the also greatly emphasise the negative effects of the increased industrialisation: “The consequences of improvement in machinery under our present social conditions are, for the working-man, solely injurious, and often in the highest degree oppressive. Every new advance brings with it loss of employment, want, and suffering, and in a country like England where, without that, there is usually a “surplus population”, to be discharged from work is the worst that can befall the operative.” 51 An improved machine has double meaning: for the
manufacturer, it means more efficient production and greater profits, while for the workers in Victorian England it meant that they would be out of a job or that their wages would drop even further. This has the knock-on effect of increasing competition between workers, which does not foster pleasant communal relationships. Every worker knows they are replaceable, that they
ultimately do not matter to the company they are working at, and the machine is a lifeless reminder of that fact. The social conditions took a while to improve: Dickens was forced to work at Warren’s Blacking in the 1820’s; Engels’ text stems from 1845. Even though machines were key to
manufacturers’ exponentially growing wealth, feeling towards machinery was so negative in many cases that it is no wonder Warren’s Blacking opted to de-emphasise the machines in their factory. Instead human labour was placed front and centre, in order to spread the narrative that Warren’s Blacking took care in their products.
The image of the machine was an uncertain one: a person being at work a safe one, with preconceived narratives. Controlling this narrative is imperative in advertising. Charles Dickens understood this as no other. From his childhood into his teenage years he was involved with advertising. As a boy he pasted the labels, and as a teen he started to write them: “But Dickens, as distinct from any other nineteenth-century novelist, begins his career from within and without the world of advertising, and is one of its original practitioners.”52 To his taste, the advertising texts were
overly long and focused too much on the content, rather than its supposed qualities. An imaginative writer, he found modest success in this business until he could start publishing his own work. After
51 Ibid, 162
working for several magazines where he, at first, had to pay in order for his sketches to be published. Finally, he was able to have his some of sketches be published in their own right: the Sketches by Boz. At this early point of his career, he was very much concerned with advertising, rather, their absence is what is felt most heavily: “The sketches delineate a London without the palpable advertising
evidence that would pervade it as little as a decade later, when “all London is a circus of poster and trade bill, a receptacle for the writings of Pears and Warren’s until we can barely see ourselves underneath. Read this! Read that!””53. Dickens evidently felt assaulted by the proliferation of
advertising of his time, when it had become inescapable. Not only on posters or shop windows, but attached to serial novels and magazines as well, each more desperate than the last: “Read this! Read that!” The explosion of goods on sale meant that producers were competing with each other for the consumer’s attention. No television or radio existed yet to beam advertising directly into people’s homes, so the public sphere was constantly bombarded with advertising in the hope of striking a buyer. Literature played an important part in the dissemination of advertising.
Several developments aided in the conjunction of literature and advertising. The rise of the serial novel meant that every week or month a new instalment in some novel would be thrown into the market, news of this being advertising itself. Buying entire volumes was far too expensive for most people well into the 19th century, so we trace the development of the serial novel to the 18th
century: “But others were less affluent: number books sold for as little as a farthing a part. The advertisements repeatedly insist that ‘the Design of publishing Books in this manner Weekly is to lighten the Expence of them’.”54 The serial novel meant that literature was available to the public as
whole. At least, to those who could read. But there were other benefits to publishing weekly as well: as mentioned above it meant that attention for it would be generated periodically and that the publishers had a more steady cash flow and could squeeze a run for more revenue as it went on. “After 1732, publishers tended to the weekly, rather than the monthly issue, lowering costs and increasing cash flow. Regularity of purchase, a key to the success of serial publication, was
53 The Dickens Advertiser, 27 54 Dickens and His Publishers, 36
encouraged by every possible means. (...) Advertisement was an integral part of selling serials: the copy had to be enticing. The most dramatic features of the work were stressed.”55 If a few chapters of
serial did not sell well, the entire run would be at risk of being cancelled. It had to therefore be assured that all chapters were extensively marketed. If the chapter was to be a success, the contents of one chapter had to be enough to entice new readers: “the most dramatic features were stressed”. Advertisements in the eighteenth century were less eye-catching and extravagant than we are used to today, starting out more modestly: “Most eighteenth-century books had a leaflet describing the book sewn into the front pages, and titled “Advertisement.” This leaflet combined a virtual abstract of the text with praises of its humor, loftiness, or piety.”56 The advertisement announced itself as such,
and was a tacked on element rather than part of the chapter itself. The public could quite clearly make a distinction between what the advertisement was and what the content they were purchasing. As we can observe today advertising has taken on many different forms, sometimes immediately noticeable as such, sometimes less so. The matter-of-fact way eighteenth century advertising took form has largely been abandoned however, in favour of advertising that speaks to the imagination:
l’art pour l’art which Adorno and Horkheimer speak of.
A chapter in a serial novel had to not only sell itself, but the following or preceding chapters as well. It was even possible that other serials were advertised: “Third, the very periodicity of the serial made it appropriate, like a newspaper or magazine, for advertising. As early as the third number [of Pickwick Papers], Chapman and Hall were inserting notices of their other publications, and permitting other advertisers, possibly for a small fee, to have their printed circulars stitched in.” 57
One can already see the creep of motives other than the artistic. When writing a chapter in a serial, Dickens not only had to take into account the development of characters and plot, but also whether the events of the chapter were dramatic enough to be advertised. Other serials depended on the marketability of any one chapter. The sales of serial novels were interconnected: should a serial prove
55 Dickens and HIs Publishers, 37 56 The Dickens Advertiser, 25 57 Ibid, 51
