Hughes and Lund 1991

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

Intro

• 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
  • Caryle'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

• method: tracing the gradual processural 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):