The Professional Literary Agent in Britain, 1880–1920 (review)

Reviewed by: The Professional Literary Agent in Britain, 1880–1920 Paul Ohler Mary Ann Gillies. The Professional Literary Agent in Britain, 1880–1920. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. 247 pp. $65.00. In The Professional Literary Agent in Britain: 1880–1920, Mary Ann Gillies investigates the ramifications for the print culture field of literary agenting. She considers the significance of agents to the professionalization of authorship and their increasing importance to established authors and new writers alike. The book seeks “to identify the ways in which the literary agent’s interventions in the publishing world challenged existing practices, and to use the information gleaned from identifying these changes to support the contention that literary agents were important players in the transformation of literary culture in the period” (6). To fulfill these goals, Gillies uses case studies to examine the two distinct phases of literary agency she identifies. She singles out A. P. Watt (1834–1914), “the first professional literary agent” (7), and J. B. Pinker (1863–1922), an agent from the next generation, “whose actions had significant influence in […] the professionalization of authorship” (7). Gillies focuses on the relationships of each man with two writers, and the choices here reveal the full range of Watt and Pinker’s activities on behalf of their respective clients. The resulting analysis, however, is only one element of this informative and scrupulously researched book. The author’s use of archival sources to recount the management of literary property and the involvement of agents in buying and selling copyrights for authors, for example, illuminates the complex business of publishing at a critical point in its history. This element of the book supports a narrative of transformations to print culture that exists alongside the primary work on Watt, Pinker, and their clients. A rich context within which to interpret Gillies’s arguments about the business of literature and its influence on literary forms is the result. The introduction’s epigraph is William Heinemann’s 1893 remark that the agent is “generally a parasite” (3), establishing the low esteem in which publishers held them. This section reviews the developing role of “literary middlemen” in the second half of the nineteenth century, arguing that the outrage felt by Heinemann and others was due to the disruption by [End Page 135] agents of the “author publisher dyad” (5). Gillies avers that to study the emergence of agents, many elements of publishing must be considered, including contracts, advertising campaigns and public relations, and “the social institutions or structures in which these facets existed” (7). She authoritatively establishes her knowledge of the book’s theoretical base in a discussion of work by Roger Chartier, Robert Darnton, Nigel Cross, and Peter Keating, expressing the relevance of their scholarship to her project. Additionally, Gillies mobilizes Janice Radway’s work on Henry Seidel Canby and the Book-of-the-Month Club, specifically deploying Canby’s idea of publishing planes to indicate the complexity involved in considering any one genre within the literary field. This provides a convincing rationale for the book’s focus on fiction. Gillies quotes John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten’s comment in Literature in the Marketplace (2003) that print culture studies is “a subject still in its formative phase” (6) to suggest the need to refine methodology, which she does with an articulation of two impulses to which all scholars in the field should be attentive: “‘the small and intransigent details’ that ‘form a bedrock of fact’” from which scholarship of literary production can proceed and the need to recognize that these details “differ according to the nature of the story or argument being constructed” (6). Gillies balances these impulses commendably, and her method is notable for its rigour. Seven chapters follow the introduction. The first considers the emergence of the professional literary agent in the 1880s and connects the phenomenon with a demand for reading material elicited by rising literacy rates and an increase in the available amount of cultural capital. Gillies here appeals to the definition of economic and symbolic/cultural capital formulated by Pierre Bordieu; she ably demonstrates the eagerness with which writers grasped at both forms, aided in myriad ways by agents. Chapter 2...

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