The Victorian Era

The Victorian Novel

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

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The novel was the dominant literary form of the Victorian period, and the most important literary form in English between 1837 and 1901. The Victorian novel was a long, often serialised, often multi-volume work of prose fiction, and the medium in which the period’s writers explored its central preoccupations: the condition of England, the condition of the poor, the condition of women, the place of religion in a scientific age, the shape of the modern self. New fiction reached its readers in several formats: the three-volume edition supplied to the circulating libraries, the novel issued in monthly shilling parts, the magazine serial, and the cheap single-volume reprint. The history of the novel is examined in Victorian Literature, Theatre, and the Written Word. The context of the period is set out in The Victorian Era: A Complete Historical Overview.

The Origins of the Victorian Novel

The Victorian novel had its origins in the eighteenth-century English novel, and in particular in the novels of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, and Frances Burney, and in the gothic fiction of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. The eighteenth century established prose fiction as a respectable and commercially successful form, and it bequeathed to the Victorians the realist study of manners, the picaresque adventure, and the tale of terror.

The Victorian novelists developed this inheritance into a longer, more elaborate, and more socially ambitious form. A new novel might be issued as a three-volume edition priced for the circulating libraries, in monthly shilling parts, or as a serial in a weekly or monthly magazine, with a one-volume reprint usually following within a year or two. These overlapping formats allowed a single work to reach library subscribers, part-buyers, and magazine readers in turn, and they made fiction the most profitable branch of the Victorian book trade.

The Major Novelists of the Victorian Period

The Victorian period produced a generation of brilliant novelists who shaped the literature of the period. The most important included Charles Dickens (1812-1870), the chronicler of the condition of England, the author of Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Great Expectations; William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), the satirist of the age, the author of Vanity Fair and The History of Henry Esmond; the Brontë sisters, Charlotte (1816-1855), the author of Jane Eyre and Villette, Emily (1818-1848), the author of Wuthering Heights, and Anne (1820-1849), the author of Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), the chronicler of the industrial north, the author of Mary Barton and North and South; Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), the author of the Barsetshire and Palliser novels; George Eliot (1819-1880), the author of The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch; Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), the author of The Woman in White and The Moonstone; and Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), the author of Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

The Victorian novelists wrote in a wide range of styles and addressed the social, political, economic, religious, scientific, and moral questions of the period. Because fiction reached so large an audience, its authors became influential public moralists as well as entertainers, and contemporary debates about industrialism, poverty, faith, and the position of women were conducted as vigorously in the novel as in the periodical press.

The Sensation Novel

The sensation novel was a particular feature of the mid and late Victorian period, flourishing chiefly in the 1860s. It combined mystery, suspense, crime, and detection with respectable domestic settings, and its plots turned on guilty secrets — bigamy, adultery, murder, forgery, and fraud — concealed beneath the surface of ordinary middle-class life.

The most important sensation novelists included Wilkie Collins, the author of The Woman in White and The Moonstone; Mary Elizabeth Braddon, the author of Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd; Mrs Henry Wood, the author of East Lynne; Charles Reade, the author of Hard Cash and Griffith Gaunt; and Sheridan Le Fanu, the author of Uncle Silas and Wylder’s Hand. The history of the sensation novel is examined in What is the sensation novel?.

The Serial Publication

Serial publication was a defining feature of the Victorian literary marketplace. Poems, essays, and reviews all appeared in periodicals, but it was fiction that dominated the system: a new novel might run for a year and a half in monthly parts, or appear week by week in a magazine, before being issued as a complete book.

The serial was the principal channel through which the leading novelists reached their public. Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836 to 1837) established the novel in monthly shilling parts, and most of his later books, from Dombey and Son to Our Mutual Friend, appeared either in parts or in his own weekly magazines, Household Words and All the Year Round, the latter of which carried A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847 to 1848) was a monthly-part novel; Trollope’s Framley Parsonage helped to launch the Cornhill Magazine in 1860; and the fiction of Collins, Gaskell, Eliot, and Hardy likewise reached most of its first readers in instalments.

Serialisation shaped reading habits as much as writing habits. Instalments were cheap enough for readers who could never have afforded a new three-volume novel, numbers were read aloud in the family circle, and the wait between parts made the fates of fictional characters a matter of genuine public suspense.

The history of the serial publication is examined in How did serial publication shape Victorian fiction?.

The Three-Decker Novel

The three-decker novel was a particular feature of the Victorian period, and for most of the reign it was the standard format in which new fiction was issued. A three-decker was a novel published in three volumes at the fixed price of thirty-one shillings and sixpence, far beyond the means of most readers, and it was sustained almost entirely by the circulating libraries, above all Mudie’s Select Library, which bought editions wholesale and lent them out volume by volume. The arrangement suited the libraries, since one novel could circulate among three subscribers at once, and it gave publishers a guaranteed sale, but it kept the retail price of new fiction artificially high and encouraged novelists to stretch their stories to the required length.

The Three-Volume Novel

The terms three-volume novel and three-decker described the same object, the latter borrowing the name of the three-decked warship of the line. The format dominated new fiction from the 1820s until 1894, when Mudie’s and W. H. Smith’s libraries announced that they would no longer pay the old wholesale prices. Publishers abandoned it almost at once, and within a few years scarcely any new novels appeared in three volumes.

The One-Volume Novel

The one-volume novel was a particular feature of the late Victorian period. Cheap single-volume reprints had long followed the library edition, but after the collapse of the three-decker in 1894 the six-shilling single volume became the normal first edition of a new novel, lowering prices, weakening the hold of the circulating libraries, and freeing novelists from the obligation to stretch every story across three volumes.

Conclusion

Between 1837 and 1901 the novel rose to a cultural authority that no earlier form of English fiction had possessed, and the names of Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, Eliot, Trollope, and Hardy became famous throughout the English-speaking world. Serialisation, the circulating libraries, and the eventual triumph of the cheap single volume determined not only how Victorian fiction was sold but how it was written. The history of the novel is examined further in Victorian Literature, Theatre, and the Written Word and in The Victorian Era: A Complete Historical Overview.