ABSTRACT
From the beginning to the end of his career, from the lost sword of the juvenilian story “Mungo the American” to the Excalibur of the Idylls of the King and the sword in his play Harold, Alfred Tennyson explored with marked pertinacity the provenance and meaning of a male sword, the weapon that in Excalibur’s case he often gives the gender marking of “he” and “him.”2 It is also true-and A.E.Baker’s Tennyson Concordance confirms such divided usage-that while Tennyson sometimes refers to Arthur’s blade as a “sword,” he more habitually calls the weapon that inspired the loyalty of Arthur’s knights a“brand.”3 In the argument that follows, I should like to bring together that medievalized use of “brand” with the fact that an edition of Tennyson’s works was one of the first books (and the only work of poetry) Frederick Macmillan brought out in 1890 to institute the publishing firm’s “net book” policy. Through that influential practice, Macmillan would provide certain books to booksellers and lending libraries on trade terms only if they would agree to sell them to the public at a fixed net price rather than at a highly variable discount, as had hitherto been trade procedure. By instituting such control of retail prices in order to curb the practice of underselling, the Macmillan Company confirmed, if it did not actually initiate, the modern circulation of the book as a “branded good” by an author with a valued name-Tennyson as a branded commodity of the Macmillan firm just as, say, a razor blade, with its advertising logo of crossed swords, is the branded product of Wilkinson.
