Turner 2005

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Mark W. Turner. "'Telling of my weekly doings': The Material Culture of the Victorian Novel." A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel. pp. 113-133. Ed. Francis O'Gorman. London: Blackwell, 2005. Web.

  • straightforward, readable account of Victorian fiction print culture
  • what happens when we read Victorian literature as part of the periodical print media?
  • 113 the "rigidly consistent ways" we read Victorian fiction because of modern publishing practices, creating a gap with the multiform ways the Victorian novel first appeared
  • 114 triple-decker the "dominant form," typically borrowed rather than purchased -- see Sutherland 1976, Roberts 2006
  • Forms: expensively bound Library Editions, collected works (see Piper 2009), 2- and 4-vol novels (or an 8 vol like Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872))
  • The invention of the railways in the 1830s allowed for vastly improved systems of distribution for novels, which led to increased demand. As technology changed, so, too, did the look and form of the novel.
  • 115 referencing Hughes and Lund 1991 on "living with" a novel for a year or more
  • serial publishing becomes dominant with Pickwick in 1836 - see Douglas-Fairhurst 2011
  • 116 Pickwick's staggering sales of 40,000 for each number by end of 1837 and pirated imitators - see Price One Penny for Pickwick in America, etc.
  • 117 Why serialization was successful:
    • ...the serial form that Dickens used, accidentally, also enabled the work continuously to gain new readers, month to month, and consolidate those readers already purchasing shilling copies of the installments.
    • part-issue serialization made purchasing a novel affordable.
      • a long-term economic issue for new literary work (that still persisted after Dickensian serialization) - cf. St Clair 2004
      • ties to Altick 1957 on the reading public too
    • reviews "were part of the enforced temporal break in the narrative that allowed readers to speculate about what might occur next" and also generated sales
  • 118 Arguing this led to the increasing commodification of the novel on a large scale, which ingnited "debates about the cultural value of contemporary popular fiction," especially with sensation fiction
  • 119 Indeed, literature and commerce have always been (and no doubt always will be) odd bedfellows, and Victorian publishing is not unique in this regard.
    • see Eisenstein 1979 for Luther complaining about printers' commercial concerns
  • [Dickens] thought about his novels through the serial form, we might say.
  • 120 monthly magazine boom in the 1860s
  • also the "watershed moment" of the Cornhill Magazine being launched -- tie to Framley Parsonage (Anthony Trollope, 1861)
  • 121 questions raised by Victorian serial reading:
    • What did readers do during the pause between installments?
    • How did readers remember complicated, multi-plot narratives for such an extended period of time, especially if they were reading a number of installments of novels simultaneously from month to month?
    • What did it mean to read an installment in a magazine, with other kinds of material published alongside it - did this influence the interpretation of the fiction?
    • What was the relationship between literary text and image[?]
  • 122 If we think about the media in these terms, as the cultural forms of communication in any given moment, then reading the serialized novel as part of the periodical print media is appropriate; indeed it may shift our interpretation of Victorian fiction in suggestive ways, not least because of the need to consider the role of time in the media.
  • ...What makes studying the concept of time in relation to material cultural forms so interesting is that the whole idea of 'time' was a problem for the Victorians.
  • 123 What is so interesting about the periodical press of which serialized novels were so much a part is the way it both registers anxieties about the shifting nature of time and participated in creating those anxieties.
  • 124 Temporal symmetry and asymmetry in socially binding people through periodicals
  • 126 [Terdiman, Present Past] argues [that] arising out of the late C18 revolutions was a sense that the 'past had somehow evaded memory, that recollection had ceased to integrate with consciousness'.... One result of this is the C19's obsession with the past and with the making of history, but also with memory as a way of understanding and recording the past.
  • 127 in Cornhill, the different "levels of memory and recollection involved for readers [of Framley Parsonage (Anthony Trollope, 1861)] for whom returning to Barsetshire time and again created its own kind of patern. Furthermore, the Barsetshire novels are deeply nostalgic about the past, while also recognizing the need for incremental, ongoing change and reform."
  • l/u Gaskell, Cousin Phillis: railroad, technological time and agricultural time
  • 131 Iser on the gaps introduced by serial reading - what about their embodiment in Our Mutual Friend (Dickens, 1865)
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