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The Novel Goes to Pieces |
| Section: MODERN THOUGHT / ESSAYS |
| Author: Thomas C. Foster |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 6/1/1991 |
| Size: 4,817 Words, 29,261 Characters |
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During my college days, I took a good many classes in Victorian literature. Like most undergraduates in that field, I learned at some point of the loving-constricting relationship between economic reality, magazine publishing practices, and the form of the novel in nineteenth-century Britain. What happened in those days was roughly this: a novel would appear in serialized form in a magazine and then, assuming it generated enough interest among readers (and a publisher), it would appear in book form, often in three volumes. The great magazines of the era--Blackwood's, Bentley's Miscellany, Athenaeum, Edinburgh Review, Punch, Fraser's, All the Year Round, Westminster Review--were the forums in which the great novels of the day burst into view.
The pattern (and here Dickens is the most frequently cited example) would run as follows: The novel would appear over the course of a year and a half in nineteen installments, with the last being a double, for a total of twenty. Each installment would typically contain two chapters, say, or three, or in rarer cases, four. In any event, the installment would be of specified length, for the editor of the magazine had a certain space to fill, and the author's obligation was threefold: he had to (a) produce his work on time, (b) fill his allotted space, and (c) make the readers want to come back next month for more. For his part, he would be well rewarded financially, the magazine providing stable, if modest income over nineteen months. If he published in serial form in part-issues--each installment appearing in its own separate cover, rather than in a magazine--he gained a greater measure of artistic control. Thackeray, for instance, received sixty pounds per installment for Vanity Fair, which was published in part-issues, as was Dicken's Dombey and Son. Lesser lights could expect lower pay for their work.
Then as now, publishing was a highly mercenary operation on all sides, and an author's business acumen was nearly as critical as his or her literary talent, as J.A. Sutherland notes in Victorian Novelists and Publishers. In negotiating over George Eliot's Romola, the writer's husband, George Henry Lewes, arranged a pay cut from ten to seven thousand pounds in order to publish only twelve installments rather than the sixteen Cornhill Magazine desired. When the novel ran to fourteen installments, Eliot received no pay for the final two.
Victorian Novelistic Practice
Now, such a practice had numerous effects both on novelistic practice and on the mythology of publication. Dickens provides a wealth of stories both true and apocryphal, telling of racing to the printer with the ink still wet on the last sheets of an installment, or of the crowds who gathered on the docks of New York to meet the ship carrying the latest installment of The Old Curiosity Shop and called up to the sailors, "Is Little Nell dead?" Thackeray ...
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...re it did, it produced a flowering of truly great novels.
Are we in the midst of another such efflorescence? Ask again in fifty years. I will say, though, that if the interest I hear in casual conversation, at parties, or around the office is any indication, the new novels have provoked enthusiasm, curiosity, hostility--interest--that the novel desperately needed only a few years ago. vbcrlf
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
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Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
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