Hughes and Lund 1991

Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund. The Victorian Serial. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991. Print.

1 Introducing the Serial

• 1 starting with the expansiveness of the vision of life in Victorian literature: "this expansive vision of life is embodied in a central literary form of the era, the serial, a continuing story over an extended time with enforced interruptions."
  • useful definition
• Intervention: the serial's links to fundamental assumptions and values of that culture has received little attention.
  • 2 Second, if serialization is a well-known phenomenon, the dynamics of serial reading are far less familiar. What difference did it make that Victorians took two years (or even longer) to read a work that we customarily read in, say, two weeks today? A major concern of our study is thus to examine how reading stories a part at a time, with breaks between reading periods dictated by publishing format, affected the ways Victorian audiences first encountered sixteen major works of poetry and fiction.
    • has implications for interpretation
• 3 the pervasiveness of not only serialized fiction but also poetry and nonfiction after the 1830s
  • Carlyle's Sartor Resartus; all of Ruskin's major works; Tennyson's Idylls of the King; Browning's the Ring and the Book; Clough's Amours de Voyage; Thomson's City of Dreadful Night
• 4 ...serialization was not new to the Victorian era. But that serialization became pervasive in the Victoria era, making the erudite Thomas Arnold consider it a new phenomenon in the 1830s [in a great Rugby sermon they quote], suggests that something in the culture of the time made it especially receptive to the serial.
  • (Graham Pollard, in "Serial Fiction," traces serial fiction back to Poor Robin's Intelligencer in 1677)
  • not only rising literacy, urbanization, growing prosperity, but "the serial was attuned to the assumptions of its readers"
    • Norman Feltes: desire for "cheap luxury" of the middle classes - the "harmonizing" of the serial form with capitalist ideology
    • "The assumption of continuing growth and the confidence that an investment (whether of time or money) in the present would reap greater rewards in the future were shared features of middle-class capitalism and of serial reading... In addition, the perseverance and delay of gratification necessary for middle-class economic success were, in a sense, echoed in serial reading"
• 5 also the changing perspective of time, speeding up with railways and industrialization and becoming more immense with geology and evolution -- they quote Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer: "unlike those Romantics who identified eternity in the brief moments of personal epiphanies, unlike the symbolists who struggled to rescue form from history and time-bound discourse, the Victorians responded to the sequence of time, to its motion and unfolding perspectives." --> reinforced by the serial form
• 6 historicism too: "insofar as historical consciousness made Victorians view their own age as an age of transition, the serial might again seem congenial, since every installment (except the first and the last) was both an event in itself and a transition from the story's past to its future."
• uniformitarianism from Lyell on down (vs catastrophism)
• 7 summing up: "...the serial shared with other Victorian cultural constructs an entire cluster of developmental, gradualist tendencies."
• As a result of the work by Darwin, the geologist Charles Lyell, and others, nature itself was historicized, while history consolidated its prestige by linking its work to that of science, since both examined the process of change and development.
• 8 Thus, to grasp why serialization became so pervasive and agreeable a vehicle for the age's best literature, we need to see that the serial form was more than an economic strategy. It was also a literary form attuned to fundamental tendencies at large.
• The most commonly noted effect of the serial's publication schedule is suspense and anticipation (inspired by the cliff-hanger), but suspense is only part of what happened. Because the reading time was so long, interpretation of the literature went on during the expansive middle of serial works. Readers and reviewers engaged in provisional assumptions and interpretations about the literary world, which then shaped the evolving understanding of works as they continued to unfold part by part. And a work's extended duration meant that serials could become entwined with readers' own sense of lived experience and passing time.
• "reading did not occur in an enclosed realm of contemplation possible with a single-volume text; rather, Victorian literature, because of its parts structure, was engaged much more within the busy context of everyday life."
  • makes me think of Benjamin's magic circle of the collector - is an edition a magic circle?
• N.b. that Lund's Reading Thackeray treats the relationship between David Copperfield (Dickens, 1850) and Pendennis (Thackeray, 1850)
• Louis James: one number of Cornhill might be considered "a single text by a corporate author"
• 10 the shared experience of people talking about their reading and publications of letters, newspaper reports, reviews, etc., enhancing the sense that reading was a public event
• 11 different types of editions appearing concurrently - Tale of Two Cities appearing as a novel in 8 monthly parts and in the pages of All the Year Round
• Serial pauses as encouraging realism: "...a week or month or more later, they picked up again a continuing story to be apprehended in much they same way they had been interpreting the reality presented in newspapers and letters and by word of mouth."
  • this seems more problematic because realism isn't strictly bounded - think of Lady Audley or even Dickens
• 12 periodical/newspaper reviews of serial parts an important record of reader response

2 Creating a Home

• Texts: Angel in the House (Patmore, 1854-64); Dickens, Dombey and Son; Thackeray, The Newcomes
• method: tracing the gradual processual development of Patmore's Angel of the House in its depiction of slowly developing love along with the periodical response by critics as its serialized parts were released -- the effect of serialization on interpreting thematic and formal developments between parts (cf 26), quoting the 19 Dec 1860 Guardian review: ""There is a tender heart within it; and if we let it keep [27] company with us for a few winter's evenings, we shall find a quiet sympathy growing up between it and us, as between Jane and Fred." Time, this reviewer suggested, could enhance art as well as marriage."
• 16 Looking at Vic literature in the context of serialization helps us recover the constructive elements of Victorian attitudes toward home, especially since the virtues that sustain a home and the traits required of serial readers so often coincided.
  • Thackeray's famous phrase in The Newcomes with marriage and novels (in Pendennis's voice): "a novelist must go on with his heroine, as a man with his wife, for better or worse, and to the end" (qtd on 44)
• 18 ...We want to explore not only how domestic virtues within Vic ideology are particularly apparent in the recovered record of Victorian serial readers but also how serial reading could extend, augment, and influence the perception of domestic themes. Within the serial experience, author, characters, and reader alike contributed their part toward creating a home.
• 29 The serial poem and the theme of marriage here [in Patmore's Angel, particularly The Victories of Love] converge: both grow in stages; both depend on collaboration; both are in part constituted by their interpenetration with time; both are forever unfinished; and the continuation of both beyond what is visible to the eye can only be hinted at and must be construed by the conjectures of individual interpreters. The poem's serial format, then, not only reinforced the poem's central theme but also allowed readers direct participation in the experiences of process, growth, hope, and anticipation so essential to Patmore's vision of marriage.
• 30 [In Dombey] Thus, as in Angel in the House, the dynamics of reading Victorian serial literature coincided with its major themes.
• 34 Altick also suggests more attention was paid to the individual number than we might at first assume: "In the interval between instalments, many readers must have passed the time by re-reading the latest one. They thereby noticed touches they missed the first headlong time through. And each repeated reading impressed the characters, settings, motifs, and small particulars more deeply in their memories" ("Varieties" 79). The Florence Dombey of the installment novel, then, particularly after the fifth number, in which Paul died and she became a greater center of interest in the narrative, embodied for Victorians an active and evolving spirit of patient understanding, which we hope to recover here.
• 40 Number 16 opened, "It was [41] long before Florence awoke," and readers were told that she is never unconscious "of what had happened in the home that existed no more." For Dickens's serial readers, however, a full month interposed between her falling asleep and this waking, time for the shift from the role of daughter to that of young women to be more easily accepted. Though Florence cannot in this one night forget the terrible scene at home, Victorian readers would necessarily have let it slip from the forefront of their consciousnesses during the thirty-day interval between parts' publication. Thus, the audience's return to the text after their own absence from the fiction would have stressed the distance Florence had traveled in leaving her only home; the father who drove her from his house was farther back in this audience's past.
• [Passage "The sun was getting low in the west...listening in the same regardless manner to the noises in the street] The reader's activity, through its parallel structure, enacted the time Florence had had to complete the break with her father and to see herself as the potential angel in another house, this time as wife and mother. Both in their reader of this complex sentence and in their connecting the end of [42] installment 15 with the beginning of number 16, Victorian readers had to reach out over significant distances.
• Victorians may have idolized the hearth, but their best literary portrayals emphasized how tenuous it was and how much time was involved in attaining it. The many months of patient waiting for domestic serenity (19 in fact) by Dickens's serial readers far outnumbered the one in which harmony existed for the novel's characters and audience. In this sense, the qualities emphasized by Florence's role in the fiction were realized by Victorian readers.
• 58 Since more such stories (as The Newcomes) were predicted and desired, the novel itself concluded in a brief moment of longed-for happiness before difficulties were once more encountered, underscoring the truth that domestic stability is less realized than pursued in Vic lit. While Thackeray's final authorial statement [sending the characters off to "fable-land"], like Dickens's April 1848 preface and Patmore's 1863 endnote, may not conform to rules in the art of fiction or dictates about closure in literature, they all demonstrate an allegiance to the values of serial literature: domestic virtues come out of the literature, from the homes of Ethel and Clive, Florence and Walter, Honoria and Felix, on long and difficult journeys through authors to readers, whose homes are suggested in "fine summer months, or Christmas evenings," when Victorian families in life, fictional families in literature, and extended families in authors and readers are assembled, they sincerely believed, for the welfare of all.

3 Living in History

• 59 Victorians eagerly questioned what living in history meant to themselves, their predecessors, and their projected successors. Whether they subscribed to Macaulay's Whig view of history or merely acknowledged the uniform action of time and change, they generally saw their own age as the end result of continuous growth and development over time. Yet this process had also produced a culture that, insofar as it was truly new, truly "modern," represented an abrupt break with preceding eras. This dual awareness of links to, yet separation from, their forebears, as well as the general "discovery of time" and history detailed by Toulmin and Goodfield or Jerome Buckley, led Victorians to consider from multiple vantage points their relation to the past, the status of the present, and their possible directions into the future.
• 60 Vic explorations of history, then were a dominant element in the age's treatises and literature...We wish to show how installment literature and an awareness of history are related phenomena in the c19 by focusing on [Tale of Two Cities, Romola, The Ring and the Book]
• 61 At key points in each work of literature, however, characters paused amidst the hustle and hurry of life to assess where they stood and to understand the shape of history, which was usually but not always progressive. In "the space between numbers," or the gaps between published parts, serial readers also paused along the line of narrative and attempted to define the shape of the whole work of art...Being within each number was for installment readers living in history, a fictionalized past in which one was not completely sure where all events lead; between between numbers or at the end of the entire text was inhabiting one of those moments at which one glimpses or creates larger patterns, fixing oneself more securely within a scheme of history. A unique feature of the serial historical novel or poem is often the rhythm of these two states of consciousness, awareness of the ebb and flow of change.
• 61 interesting on the visibility of contemporary responses in different types of periodicals: the popular weekly press had more to say about Tale of Two Cities than the more prestigious critics of the literary journals
• 63 The alternation between travel and rest, between movement and cessation evident in the Dover road scene [with Lorry] is central both to Dickens's understanding of history and to Victorian reading of serials. Progress and pause, that is, make up an essential rhythm of c19 life. Both history's rapid pace and the opportunities for achieving timeless perspectives are aspects of the novel extended and strengthened by Dickens's serial form.
• 66 Within each individual installment [of Tale...], readers encountered a movement from the past presented in a style that is powerful and forward-moving; they found themselves living in history, being carried along by the rapid pace of events toward uncertain destinations. The novel's serial form thus heightened a major theme, the nature of history.
• 71 The shape of this particular narrative underscores two features of serial literature in general: first, gaps in narrative create meaning; and second, the experience of literature is often more powerful and meaningful than any specific conclusion drawn from it as lesson or moral.
• 73 By insisting that his readers live in history for the duration of the novel's publication (seven months), Dickens deepened the audience's understanding of the causes and development of revolution. That the mimetic art of Dickens should take a form (serial ) analogous to its subject (history) is evident in a letter the author addressed to his friend Wilkie Collins (6 Oct 1859): "I think the business of art is to lay all that ground carefully, not with the care that conceals itself - to show, by a backward light, what everything has been working to - but only suggest, until the fulfillment comes. These are the ways of Providence, of which ways all art is but a little imitation." As Providence directs history to a final, appropriate conclusion, according to Dickens, so he places his readers along a line from beginning to end of this serial novel, suggesting how events will end, but also letting his audience live in a moment of the past depicted in each installment.
• 74 Dickens's insights in to the French Revolution as historical event perhaps are not, as many have argued, particularly brilliant; yet his novel deserves some praise it has not received for its presentation of the past through the installment format, alternating the rush of events with the pauses for reflection that inspire a sense of living in history.
• [then Romola]
• 81 Thus the installment structure of Romola encouraged Victorian readers to expect that the author would narrate all significant actions within individual parts, skipping over less significant times, not between but within numbers. The fourteen serial parts are discrete units of plot [as are the 8 vols of Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872)], each advancing the story through a significant phase. In general, serial readers found themselves completing an installment of the novel at the same time as the characters complete a sequence of related actions in the plot... [82] Thus, subscribers to Cornhill felt like characters living in history, pausing at pivotal moments in their ongoing story.
• 89 The poem [the Ring and the Book's] circular structure also suggests, then, the cycles of history. In these respects, Browning's treatment of history again seems to differ from the patterns we have traced in Dickens and Eliot. But a rarely considered factor in the poem's approach to history is its own publishing history, that is, Browning's deliberate decision to issue the poem in four monthly parts (each consisting of three books) rather than all at once.... [90] the poem's serialization ensured that neither the linear nor the cyclic dimension of history would be ignored; instead, the problematic relation of these two perspectives would be maintained and emphasized.
• 106-7 long passage about the tension between the "great duration" of the poem and the superabundance of imagery - "we can either grasp the large outlines of the poem's all at once...or we can experience the flow of the poem... the poem affirms both kinds of experience...but readers cannot affirm both kinds of knowing or experience at once."