Brake 2001

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.
    • see Roberts 2006
  • 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
  • see Turner 2005, Sutherland 1976, Douglas-Fairhurst 2011
• 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.
  • eg for Smith, the Cornhill Magazine: both Armadale (Collins, 1866) and Framley Parsonage (Trollope, 1861) were serialized and then published in volume form by Smith, Elder (Sutherland Stanford Companion)
• 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?
  • 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