ABSTRACT
If we want to know who paid for Victorian fiction, the answer is simple: its readers.1 Victorian novels were produced almost entirely under direct signals from the market. Publishers paid for a novel in one lump on acceptance of the manuscript, according to their judgment of its success: £3,000, for example, for Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1873) or £10,000 for Disraeli’s Endymion (1880).2 The novelist provided the middleclass reading public with an agreeable work, which until the death of the three-decker in 1895 was close to being a standard commodity; and the price was a measure of how well the task of literary production had been achieved (Griest 1970).
