“Victorian Bestsellers”
Morgan Library & Museum, New York.
January 26, 2007-May 6, 2007
“Bestseller” is a relatively recent coinage. It doesn’t even appear in the first edition of the OED. The Supplement’s first citation is from 1911, given an American origin, and pejorative: “His book had passed into the abhorred class of best sellers.” I think the OED is late by at least twenty years, but this is clearly a case where life cried out for a new word.
The wonderful new exhibit at the Morgan Library officially covers the period from 1837–1901, Victoria’s reign, but it sneaks in some forerunners, like the Gothic novelists Ann Radcliffe and Monk Lewis. Their effect can be judged by Gillray’s print “Tales of Wonder!,” in which even the drawing-room ornaments are agog at the thrilling horrors read aloud into the wee hours of the morning to the female audience. Thus the birth of the trashy bestseller. As Oscar Wilde said of their racy descendant Rhoda Broughton, such authors posess “that one touch of vulgarity that makes the whole world kin.” There’s a lot of money to be had if you can appeal to the appetite of the whole world, and the first thing that greets you when you enter the show is a contract signed—and cannily amended—by Charles Dickens.
By 1837, all the preconditions for bestsellerdom were in place: cheap paper strong enough for rotary steam presses, competing publishing houses, a sizable literate public, and a bit of