ABSTRACT
The nature of cultural production and consumption in the late nineteenth-century
literary market is often taken by contemporary commentators as a reflection of the
health of the nation and with the potential to voice anxieties about the consuming
and consumed bodies of an imperial Britain in decline. The canons of cultural
legitimacy were being reappraised, with ‘realism’ and ‘romance’ undergoing a
process of redefinition which contested the association of gender with genre, and
their respective forms of capital.1
