Serialization in Victorian Literature
It can be daunting to pick up a Victorian novel. The Penguin edition of Middlemarch weighs in at 880 pages, and it's not an exception. But that's not always how you would have originally encountered them. Many novels were published in parts—in the super trendy three-volume form, or by a monthly dose, or even in a weekly magazine. Why? Mostly it came down to cold hard cash.
Circulating libraries (think Blockbuster, but with books) were big supporters of the three-volume novel. They figured that most people wouldn't invest in buying all three volumes when they could just trot down to their local circulating library. And it was also good for magazines. If you get people hooked on a story that will be running for a year or more, then you're going to sell a lot of magazines. Still, it takes two to tango, and readers also got some benefit out of this arrangement: they could pick up an installment of the latest Dickens novel for a shilling rather than pay thirty times that for the full thing.
As you'd predict, the function does affect the form of your favorite Victorian stories. If you split a story into twenty pieces, each piece—not just the whole banana—is going to have to be a page-turner. And the end of a first volume can't leave everything too tidy, or who would bother making a trip out to borrow the next installment? Can we thank Victorians for the cliffhanger?
Chew on This:
Dickens originally published A Tale of Two Cities in his own weekly magazine, All the Year Round. And despite its length, A Tale of Two Cities often gets described as rushed or fast-paced. Do you think this has anything to do with the way it was published? Can you find traces of that original form in the chapters and plot?
Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone was also published in All the Year Round. What would it have been like to read this novel—full of suspense and mystery, like all the best sensation novels—in weekly bits?