ABSTRACT
In 1899, Henry James envisaged a profitable future for the novel. Popular taste had established it as a universal form, ‘the book par excellence’. ‘In the flare of railway bookstalls, in the shop-fronts of most booksellers, especially the provincial, in the advertisements of the weekly newspapers, and in fifty places besides, this testimony to the general preference triumphs, yielding a good-natured corner at most to a bunch of treatises on athletics or sport, or a patch of theology old and new’ (James 1984a, p. 101). What James witnessed in the flare of the bookstalls and advertisements was a dramatic expansion and diversification of the market for fiction (Cross 1985, ch. 6; Bowlby 1985, ch. 6; Keating 1989, ch. 1 and 7).
