sweet money: cultural and economic value in Trollope's Autobiography

Trollope wrote his Autobiography at a time when the value of his literary stock was at a low point. Not surprisingly, the question of value—the tension between literary value and economic value—is a recurrent concern in this text. In the mid 1870s he was also a member of the Royal Commission on International Copyright. The debate on international copyright pivoted on the issue of control. English authors feared that, in an open, global marketplace, they had little power to control the dissemination of their works. It is with reference to this controversial scenario that I reconsider the model of control Trollope meticulously elaborates (and even promotes) in An Autobiography. As I argue in this essay, Trollope’s appeal to the language of trade serves the ideological function of repositioning the author who writes for the market as a free agent who is not subservient to the market. The figure of the literary tradesman depicted in this text is not one-sided, nor is this tradesman always perfectly at ease in the marketplace. His sense of comfort is constructed retrospectively by mobilizing the entrepreneurial rhetoric and, more conspicuously, by flaunting grand totals. These sums, however, are not simple, unproblematic quantifications. The narrator of the Autobiography constantly worries about the tension between aesthetic and economic value, between cultural and market price. To describe himself as a good negotiator and an efficient price maker is not enough. The price he demands has to be justified as a fair one in the dual market he supplies: the market where commodities are bought and sold and the market where creative ideas circulate. Trollope’s theory of realism, I contend, functions as an ad hoc construction that allows Trollope to justify his profits and his addictive productivity by invoking a different regime of value in which the author as creator, rather than the author as producer, becomes prominent.