In the 1880s and 1890s, Walter Besant was one of Britain's most lionized
living novelists. Like many popular writers of the period, Besant
suffered from years of critical neglect. Yet his centrality to Victorian
society and culture all but ensured a revival of interest. While
literary critics are now rediscovering the more than forty works of
fiction that he penned or co-wrote, as part of a more general
revaluation of Victorian popular literature, legal scholars have argued
that Besant, by advocating for copyright reform, played a crucial role
in consolidating a notion of literary property as the exclusive
possession of the individuated intellect. For their part, historians
have recently shown how Besant - as a prominent philanthropist who
campaigned for the cultural vitalization of impoverished areas in east
and south London - galvanized late Victorian social reform activities.
The expanding corpus of work on Besant, however, has largely kept the
domains of authorship and
activism, which he perceived as interrelated, conceptually distinct.
Analysing the mutually constitutive interplay in Besant's career between
philanthropy and the professionalization of authorship, Walter Besant:
The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform highlights their
fundamental interconnectedness in this Victorian intellectual polymath's
life and work.
