The Victorian Era

How Did Serial Publication Shape Victorian Fiction?

Article · Literature & Theatre · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

❦

Serial publication was one of the most important features of the Victorian literary scene, and it shaped the fiction of the period in profound and lasting ways. The issue of novels in monthly or weekly instalments, whether as independent shilling parts or within periodicals, was the principal means by which the leading novelists first reached their readers, and it left a lasting mark on the form, pacing, and plotting of the Victorian novel. The history of the novel itself is examined in The Victorian Novel. The context of the period is set out in Victorian Literature, Theatre, and the Written Word.

The Origins of Serial Publication

Serial publication had its origins in the periodical press of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when essays, news, and fiction began to appear in successive issues of journals and magazines. Eighteenth-century publishers also issued lengthy works, including the Bible and standard histories, in cheap numbered parts, a practice that brought substantial books within reach of readers of modest means.

The decisive moment for the Victorian novel came with The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, published in monthly instalments from April 1836 to November 1837 by Chapman and Hall. The Pickwick Papers was an immediate and extraordinary success, and it established the pattern of the monthly shilling part that Dickens followed in Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend, and that other novelists, notably William Makepeace Thackeray in Vanity Fair (1847 to 1848), adopted in turn.

The Mechanics of Serial Publication

A novel in monthly parts typically appeared in twenty numbers (the last a double number) at a shilling each, with each instalment containing around thirty-two pages of text and two engraved illustrations, together with bound-in advertising sheets. The author wrote against monthly deadlines, often only a few numbers ahead of publication, while the publisher coordinated printer, illustrator, and distributors. Alternatively, a novel might be serialised in a weekly or monthly magazine, such as Dickens’s Household Words and All the Year Round or the Cornhill Magazine, before being reissued in volume form.

Serial publication was generally a profitable enterprise for author and publisher alike, since it spread the cost of a novel over many months and reached readers who could never have afforded the guinea and a half charged for a three-volume edition. The Pickwick Papers was selling roughly 40,000 copies of each instalment by the end of its run and made the young Dickens famous; The Old Curiosity Shop, issued weekly in Master Humphrey’s Clock, drove that miscellany’s circulation to around 100,000; and the serialisation of The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins in All the Year Round (1859 to 1860) had readers queuing for each new number.

The Effects of Serial Publication on the Novel

Serial publication had a profound effect on the form of the Victorian novel. The need to fill a fixed instalment, and to leave readers eager for the next, encouraged careful pacing, cliff-hanging chapter endings, large casts of vividly marked characters, and intricate plots and subplots that could be sustained over many months. Authors could also respond to their readers as they wrote: Dickens enlarged the role of Sam Weller when the character proved popular in The Pickwick Papers, and disappointing sales of Martin Chuzzlewit prompted him to send his hero to America.

Serial publication likewise shaped the reception of fiction. Reading became a communal, extended experience, with instalments read aloud in family circles and discussed in the press while the story was still unfolding, so that a successful serial became a national event in a way that volume publication rarely matched.

The Decline of Serial Publication

Serial publication declined in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. The collapse of the three-volume novel in the mid 1890s, the rise of the cheap one-volume edition, and the new popularity of magazines built around complete short stories all reduced the importance of part-issue, although magazine serialisation of fiction continued well into the twentieth century. For most of the Victorian period, however, the instalment was the form in which the nation first met its greatest novels. The subject is examined further in The Victorian Novel and in Victorian Literature, Theatre, and the Written Word.

Conclusion

Serial publication defined the Victorian literary market. It made fiction affordable, turned novel-reading into a shared national habit, and impressed itself upon the structure, pacing, and plotting of the novels themselves, from The Pickwick Papers to the magazine serials of the century’s end.