Renewing the dyer's hand --
Paratexts and periwigs : The history of Henry Esmond and the history of the author --
Reading matter in Bleak House and the "Bleak House advertiser" --
As bad as they seem? professional authors and literary paupers --
Sympathy for the begging-letter writer --
Moses and the advertisement sheet: Daniel Deronda's earthly mixtures.

Taking as his point of departure the competing uses of the critical term the materiality of writing, Daniel Hack turns to the past in this new book to recover the ways in which the multiple aspects of writing now conjured by that term were represented and related to one another in the mid-nineteenth century. Diverging from much contemporary criticism, he argues that attention to the writing's material components and contexts does not by itself constitute reading against the grain. On the contrary, the Victorian discourse on authorship and the novels Hack discusses - including works by Dickens Eliot, Thackeray, and Collins - actively investigate the significance and mutual relevance of the written word or printed word's physicality, the exchange of texts for money, the workings of signification, and the corporeality of writers, readers, and characters