Pope Hennessy 1971

Pope Hennessy, James. Anthony Trollope. London: Jonathan Cape, 1971.

15: Reading a novel aloud in the evening was by no means a habit confined to the Tilley and Trollope families [as they were the night AT had a stroke in Nov 1882]. It became popular in the 1840s when novels first began to be published in monthly parts [though that started late 1830s with Chapman & Hall, cf. Sutherland 1976], a method which kept the literate public on tenterhooks. Each successive instalment was 'anticipated with more anxiety than the Indian Mail, and...a great deal more talked about'. The excitement was, of course, higher pitched in isolated country houses and in trim vicarages than in the capital -- but in London, too, there were many long evenings to fill between the five or six o'clock dinner and bedtime. Prosperous [16] dwellers in the outskirts who did not frequent theatres and concert halls would while away the time with family readings. In the early 1860s these part-issues of novels were being superceded by serialization in such new magazines as Macmillan's and the Cornhill which sold for one shilling and ran serial novels as an attraction additional to informed topical articles and book reviews. Through the shilling magazine, works of fiction now reached a still wider public. Some novelists