Style, Inc. reflections on seven thousand titles (British Novels, 1740-1850)

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 36, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 134-158

  Moretti, Franco ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77249158457     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/606125     Document Type: Review

References (13)

1. Walter Scott, Waverley, ed. Andrew Hook (Harmondsworth, 1972), p. 33
2. Claude Duchet, "'La Fille abandonnée' et 'La Bête humaine': Éléments de titrologie romanesque," Littérature 12 (Dec. 1973): 50; my trans
3. If everything was really pushing towards shorter titles - observed Sam Bowles during a discussion of this paper - shouldn't these be "rewarded" by the cultural ecosystem, and be on average more successful than other types? Yes, they should; and since James Raven has already identified which of the fourteen hundred novels published between 1770 and 1799 had been reprinted at least five times by 1829, I compared the length of these sixty-five titles to the median for their years, fully expecting them to be significantly shorter; see Raven, "Historical Introduction: The Novel Comes of Age," in Garside et al., The English Novel, 1770-1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2000), 1:40. That, however, turned out not to be the case: thirty-two of the titles were indeed shorter than the median, but twenty-nine were longer (at times, much longer), and four were exactly the same length. What these results seem to suggest is that - although a crowded market does exert a strong negative pressure against long titles - it remains relatively neutral once a certain length has been reached: it prohibits at one end of the spectrum, but it does not prescribe at the opposite one. Comparative work in other European traditions should provide additional evidence on this matter; meanwhile, and more anecdotally, a look at some canonical British novelists is as inconclusive as the wider bibliographical investigation. If Edgeworth and Austen use much shorter titles than their contemporaries, and Fielding, Smollett, and Burney remain slightly below the median, Richardson and Radcliffe behave in an average way, while Scott and Galt and Dickens often enjoy playing with extremely long titles (which, by their time, are a quaintly obsolete choice): Tales of My Landlord, Collected and Arranged by Jedediah Cleishbotham, Schoolmaster and Parish-Clerk of Gandercleugh; The Annals of the Parish; or, The Chronicle of Dalmailing; During the Ministry of the Rev. Micah Balwhidder. Written by himself; Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son, Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation. Now, if neither "successful" nor "canonical" novelists took the lead in shortening titles, then, inevitably, someone else must have done so: writers who - as we will see in the next section - were neither particularly popular, nor especially good. Perhaps, once the literary system had started moving in a certain direction, some developments were so inevitable that they didn't require any special talent. Or perhaps - as suggested in footnote 12 below - in this case the key variable was not literary, but political
4. Jean-Louis Flandrin, "Sentiments et civilization: Sondage au niveau des titres d'ouvrages," Annales 20 (Sept.-Oct. 1965): 939; my trans. In a follow-up article I will indeed study the "average title" of these 110 years, taking as a starting point the formula in "or" (Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded; Vensenshon; or, Love's Mazes; Manfrone; or, The One-Handed Monk). There are over two thousand such titles in the database, most of which use between three and fifteen words, thus occupying exactly the middle of the field. To get a sense of the morbid diffusion of or in eighteenth-century titles, let me just say that it is the fourth most frequent word of the database, following the, of, and a (and preceding and!); by contrast, in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, or is the forty-fourth most frequent word; in Our Mutual Friend, the fifty-fifth. Aside from quantitative reasons, the formula in or is important because it codified the form of the "double" title, where the second (on the right of the or), is an explication of the first: Waverley, that is to say, events of sixty years ago; Pamela, a story in which virtue is rewarded. Here, we are clearly beyond the title as summary, though not quite yet in the world of Belinda or Persuasion: as if the or were a sort of afterthought - a hiccup: Maybe one word is not really enough for a title, let's add something else, just to be sure. A compromise formation that coexisted first with summaries, then with short titles, the formula in or thus mediated between explanatory and intuitive strategies; but as readers became more comfortable with allusion, it lost its raison d'être. By 1900, it had become a thing of the past
5. Review of Moderation by Hofland, Monthly Review 108 (Sept. 1825): 88
6. Émile Benveniste, "The Nominal Sentence," Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (1966; Coral Gables, Fla., 1971), p. 138
7. See The Nominal Sentence," Problems in General Linguistics, ibid., p. 142
8. Scott, Waverley, pp. 33, 34
9. See the bibliographies included in M. O. Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Convervatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge, 2001)
10. and Ann L. Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick, N.J., 1990)
11. Harald Weinrich, "The Textual Function of the French Article," in Literary Style: A Symposium, trans. Seymour Chatman et al., ed. Chatman (Oxford, 1971), p. 226
12. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister Journeyman's Years, or the Renunciants, trans. Krishna Winston, ed. Jane K. Brown, vol. 10 of Goethe's Collected Works (New York, 1989), p. 302
13. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), pp. 310-11