‘The Last New Novel’: Valuation Strategies in Reviews of Fiction Published in the <em>Athenaeum </em>and the <em>Saturday Review</em>, 1855–59

This article investigates two seminal Victorian periodicals during the critical period of 1855–59 — the Athenaeum (1828–1921) and the Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art (1855–1938). I examine the rhetorical and typological strategies underlying the attribution of value in reviews of fiction and illustrate the generic complexity of this prominent form. I show that, beyond its overt interest in enabling or preventing the sale of novels, the mid-century book review takes an economic outlook in the methodological and hermeneutic processes through which literary value is defined and communicated by reviewers. Reviewers writing for the two periodicals at hand can be seen to display an economic orientation in their typology and epistemology, employing forms of quantification that stretch from the counting of specific elements to the abstract non-numerical calculation mimicking the logic of a balance sheet customary in commercial bookkeeping.