Brake 2001

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Laurel Brake. Print in Transition, 1850-1910. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Print.

1 ‘Trepidation of the Spheres’: Serials and Books in the C19

  • clearly frames the relation between novel, serial, and circulating library into a "rise and fall" narrative that can be traced from Pickwick to late century skepticism about these institutions in Hardy et al.
  • 3 ...Throughout the period, changes in the spheres of the serial and the book were interdependent, and that the apparent separateness of the two spheres is mitigated by a profound interrelatedness: the novel from the 1830s habitually fragmented into part-issue; the monthly magazines over time "passed volumes and libraries of volumes through their pages," and each issue of the Yellow Book in the 1890s appears as a bound volume.
    • part issue novels, bound newspapers/periodicals
      • this might have interesting implications for the cataloguing of newspapers and indeed novels
  • 4 main points of relation:
    • many periodicals relied for their content on the book trade, "Their authority [of early c19 Reviews] was predicated on their link with books"
    • authors and publishers "came to view the periodical press as an extension of their sphere"
      • dramatized in New Grub Street (Gissing, 1891) , also the "conceptual separation of literature from journalism" and the feminization of the novel as a form in the 1880s-90s (7)
    • 4 Serials...were an important factor in forcing the reduction of the price of books during the period, in ending the expensive three-decker system in the 1890s, and with it the circulating libraries’ monologue of the book market for the middle-class reader.
    • the growth and embedding of the newspaper sector of the c19 press were important catalysts in the fostering of reading— the professionalisation of journalism, literature and authorship, and the separation of journalism from ‘literature’ in its most general sense.
  • the sense in which the anonymously authored periodicals present themselves to the reader as a "corporate identity", a whole the way books do
  • Innes Shand writing about contemporary reading in Blackwood’s 1878-9
  • 8 Saintsbury in 1896 saw "periodical literature" as the characteristic development of c19 literature
  • The phenomenon of serials— their number, their range, their ubiquity— increased access to reading, the habit of reading, and the market for cheap books at a time when the standard price per volume stood at 10s 6d
  • 9 From the 1840s, in addition to serial publications, various means of circumventing the high price of books stand out, involving publishers, retailers, and entrepreneurial distributors of books. The projects of circulating libraries and single-volume reprint series thrived, and cheap editions of "railway novels" began to appear exclusively in stations from 1848.
    • fleshing out St Clair 2004 with other aspects of the print economy
  • 11 One effect on the book of this prodigious accumulation of serial publications over the century pertains to the perception of time in relation to print culture.... Shand is registering the regular, insistent, and cacophonous rhythms of the serial press: morning and evening, weekly, Sundays, monthly, and quarterly. The periodical press of the last two categories... also contributed emphatically to this noise and rhythm in their Magazine Day, when Paternoster Row worked flat-out to supply the retailers’ orders. The regularity and public nature of these issue days created numerous and larger communities of readers, all of whom were reading the same publications at roughly the same time all over the country....
  • It was in the interest of book publishers to participate in this quickening rhythm induced by the proliferation of serial publications...[they] bought into this rhythm...through copious advertisements in the press of their lists, which were issued monthly, and through creation of their own series of volumes— analogous to serials — organized variously [12] around topics (such as travel, biographies) or publishing status (‘standard’ novels or classics, ‘railway’ fiction, an authorial editon, or a ‘popular’ edition); these ran and ran.
  • 14 ...publishers such as Macmillan and George Smith, who also created periodicals to bolster print publication.
  • 15 anonymously authored reviews could be concealed publicity, eg, the Athenaeum’s reviews of Algernon Swinburne were written by his housemate Watts-Dunton
  • 15-16 authorship, signature, and anonymity in periodicals
  • 18 Authorship as constructed in serials [without named authors especially] is collective, or at the very least it is not individualist; intertextuality and editing ensure this, and authors themselves write within codes of discourse, of the kind of piece they are writing - news, features, short story, novel— and of the particular journal they are writing for.
    • how does this problematize the theoretical argument for the way novels think about individuals in Armstrong 2005? Or the liberal subject in Hensley’s article about [[Armadale (Collins, 1866)]?
  • 19 ...the differences in the nature of authorship in c19 serials and books— the collectivism of the serial as a cultural form and the individualism of the book— are significant in the relative status of the two spheres in our own period: the privileging or books and the marginalization of serials by our author-oriented system of cultural value.
    • this too is reified in book historical practice
  • 21 ...I do want to flag the profound effects that part- and serial-issue of fiction had in the nature of the Victorian novel, which Linda Hughes and Michael Lund have examined in the book The Victorian Serial: for example, the necessary emphasis on the structure of the installment, its start, finish, and middle; the heightened importance of delay and suspense; the necessity to bring characters forward regularly, lest they be forgotten altogether, or to render their absence significant; the interplay between parts of fictions by different authors which appear simultaneously, perhaps even in the same volume. This relation alone, of the parts to the whole, the effect of the ways fiction was issued on the end-product, bonds the Victorian serial and the Victorian book theoretically, formally, and historically.
    • could be used as a framework to read any of the serial novels, perhaps Bleak House (1853)
  • 22 Gosse writing about "Mudieitis" in 1891 with perceived censorship of the circulating libraries. Could be a good way to frame The Woodlanders (Thomas Hardy, 1887)— did Mudie’s stock it? Update: it would appear they did from rare book catalogue examples of triple-decker text
    • this, too is a collecting practice
  • Hardy, "Candour in English Fiction," 1890: "the magazine in particular and the circulating library in general do not foster the growth of the novel which reflects and reveals life. They directly tend to exterminate it by monopolizing all literary space." Hardy’s perception of connections between the distributors of books, the editors of magazines and, by implication, the publishers, in the censorship of novels puts a case forward for viewing these institutions, networks, and individuals as part of a single cultural formation, to which serials and books and their production and distribution alike belong.
  • 23ff newspapers

2 Star Turn? Magazine, Part-Issue, and Book Serialization

Sight reading/finding the rhythm

  • 27 Through comparison rooted in material culture I want to identify and then deploy distinctive characteristics of each format [book, volume, part issue, magazine serial] to help understand it and the other; and to invigorate the element of time and the ephemeral with respect to our perception of C19 discourses of higher journalism [about?] such as literature, history, and science.
  • Intervention: In a framework of material culture, I want to treat the wrappers and advertisers that, with the letterpress and illustration, make up part-issues and periodicals, as part of what we designate the 'text' to be studied. In this perspective the discourses of higher journalism such as history, literature and science are situated far closer to other commodities in the marketplace than in the reductive and apparently normative high cultural volume forms in which they primarily reach us[.]
    • this is what Emily Steinlight builds on in her study "Anti Bleak House: Advertising and the Victorian Novel" about Bleak House (1853)
    • reading ads with novel parts "a model of textual heteroglossia" or, "in post-structuralist terms, these forms of serialisation are part of a popular pre-history of many of the canonical C19 book texts which have been disciplined and stripped out to resemble the comparatively austere volume form of [28] reading material of the lettered and traditionally conservative upper classes. This 'timeless' format of the volume text has been normalized institutionally by nineteenth- and twentieth-century publishers, libraries, universities, and schools."
      • uses the analogy of television or the Web for publishing conditions of C19 serial material
  • 29 Collecting practices structuring scholarship (see Knight 2013 & Knight 2015): Relatively few wrappers and even fewer advertising supplements have survived the stripping, disciplining and institutionalization of the texts...Even where wrappers have been conserved, for example in a British Library copy of the parts of Middlemarch, the advertiser is missing, an advertiser and spine that I will argue are germane to the meanings of Middlemarch. Nor is there a union list of serials with wrappers and advertisers in Canadian, British or UK [US? sp?] libraries, the catalogues of which do not consistently note the existence or absence of such textual matter.
    • another reason not to rely solely on digital surrogates but to move between physical and digital dialectically -- see Hughes 2014, Mussell 2012
  • Nice list of works about serialization:
    • Hughes and Lund 1991
    • Carol Martin, George Eliot's Serial Fiction
    • Hyers and Harris, Serials and their Readers
    • Sutherland, Victorian Fiction
    • Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own?
    • Peter Sinnema, Dynamics of the Pictured Page
    • Mark Turner, Trollope and the Magazines
  • 30 ...It is a mistake to construct the C19 book as a stand-alone commodity. First publication in Volume form was often part of a staged process which may have begun with serialization and went on to a succession of editions, normally but not exclusively from expensive to cheap. Texts judged to have sales potential were issued in a proliferation of series, of different formats and prices, over the short and medium term to maximize a stratified readership; publishing histories of individual texts themselves may thus be said to participate in the paradigm of the timespan of the series which marked the period.
    • "stratified readership" echoes the "tranch" model of St Clair 2004
  • [Using an advertisement for Punch in George Cruikshank's Table Book (1845)]: Punch is "Published weekly, priced 3d or stamped, 4d. ...A Part is Published Every Month, And a Volume every six months. All back [31] numbers, parts and volumes always kept on sale. Eight volumes are already published. The Ninth Volume will be published in December, price 8s." And there we have it: weekly numbers, monthly parts, bi-annual volumes echoing and reinforcing the regularity of time, the passing which itself creates the material and desire for another number.... The notion of an ordered library, in which the 'collected' series rests, masks an equal scurry, fostered by the publishing industry, to keep up, in a market cleverly predicated on the assumption that it will never end: there is always the next number to consume, to collect.
  • 32 Charles Knight’s illustrated Penny Magazine and illustrated part issue fiction both became profitable in the 1830s, "enabling ordinary readers direct access to new work of quality, and making a link with wider audiences," therefore both fiction and non- importantly illustrated

Serialization, production and consumption

  • 32 c19 periodical studies more historicist than media studies and less "volume"-centric than history of the book: filling an impt gap
    • 33 in part issue serialized texts "there is a collapse of barriers between what is now the high culture of book history and what is deemed the popular culture of ephemera."
  • 33 hybridity: characteristics of book volumes and newspapers, with advertisements and orientation toward "the new"
  • 35 Dickens uncomfortable with weekly serialization in Master Humphrey’s Clock, writing in ending it on Oct 9 1841: "I have found this form of publication most anxious, perplexing and difficult. I cannot bear these jerking confidences which are no sooner begun than ended, and no sooner ended than begun again."
    • what changed with All the Year Round?
  • 35ff serialization of Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872) by Blackwood
    • bi-monthly part publication: no monthly deadlines
    • 4 volumes eventually— more lucrative
    • Eliot did not want “to be confined to production of numbers of uniform length"— a different approach than Dickens and especially Trollope (Hughes and Lund 1991 on the mathematical regularity of The Way We Live Now (Trollope, 1875))
    • not so closely tied to periodical press: parts called Books, no date or price on wrapper
    • 36 priced at 5s per number, so £2 for whole work (same as for Blackwood’s, though one "unified" work)
    • "Lewes and Blackwood shared a desire to circumvent the circulating libraries, and make the public buy instead of borrowing, [and] they seemed to be wholly engaged with profitable sales rather than making the work available at a price an ordinary reader could afford.”
      • what were sales figures like?
    • date missing on wrapper but "each number I have seen has a small tipped in advertising slip between the end of the Book and the back Advertiser giving the date, two months hence, of the next Book/part, with its title."
    • last two books appeared monthly Nov and Dec 1872 with enlarged Advertisers for Christmas market
    • Lewes wrote to Blackwood: "Each part would have a certain unity and completeness in itself with separate title"
  • 40 Newman Apologia appeared serially from Longman starting 1864, illustrating again the wide generic range for serial texts

Star turn: from periodical to part-issue

  • 45 Dickens’ early magazine, Master Humphrey’s Clock, exemplifies a remarkable consanguinity between wrappers and letterpress [by this she appears to mean "text"]. Additionally, it manifests a degree of flexibility (to the point of ambiguity and ambivalence) which, in moderation, is characteristic of serialization: due to the intimate relation between serialization and process, this form affords is an intimate view of the anatomy of texts as they materialize.
    • diachronicity of the material literary text
  • 46 MHC "veers" between periodical miscellany and part-issue, sometimes including only a part issue (#8 with Old Curiosity Shop) but others with heterogenous material (#9 OCS and "Mr Weller’s Watch"), all situated within a "periodical" frame

Format and meaning

  • 47 part issue format "tends to be author-identified and marked," "route to volume format is technically quite direct"
  • magazine serial parts tend to "occlude authorship"
    • 50 eg Cornhill, "whose authority as a magazine similarly marked its fiction as much as did the rumors or information of its authors’ names"
  • 50 Magazines such as the Cornhill could be said to have tutored their readers in how to read critically by offering parallel narratives for comparison
    • eg Framley and Thackeray’s Lovel the Widower
    • link to late century development of English studies?
  • 51 Sheared from advertisements and covers, part-issue is absorbed into high-culture volumes for domestic consumption or the Libraries, or on the other hand, without advertisements and covers, resides as a periodical volume, a pale trace of its ephemeral form.
  • The multiple serialised forms of material print culture in the C19 patently construct different texts with differing potentials for meaning, carefully geared to an expanding it segmented market for commodity texts.
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