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Expensive Books and Cheaper Periodicals: An Overview

The proliferation of periodicals in nineteenth-century Britain might be viewed as one response to an indigenous print culture in which books were both expensive and relatively inaccessible. Personal private libraries were the rule, and free libraries were rare throughout the century. The Library Act of 1850 that permitted towns of over 10,000 to raise funds for free public libraries was sparsely adopted. While Manchester’s free public library was a first in 1852, only 125 followed by 1886. If libraries increased over the course of the century, they were subscription institutions established by both middle and working-class groups for their own circles of readers, and from the 1840s by traders such as Mudie’s.[1] Thus, gentlemen’s and clergymen’s personal libraries – which often served the surrounding region – co-existed with collections of Literary and Philosophical Societies, principally in towns and cities, and of Miners’ and Mechanics’ Institutes. The general distribution of free public libraries across Britain commenced only in the 1890s, gaining momentum by the injection of Andrew Carnegie’s funding, which resulted in 300 more by the early twentieth century. The high price of new books confined purchase to wealthy readers, and while lower priced reprints in book form widened the individual consumer base, they remained out of reach for many workers.[2] The price of new fiction was particularly high. From the 1820s an expensive format for publication gained ground: the three-volume novel or “three decker,” developed by two publishers, cost a prohibitive one and a half guineas, or 31 shillings and 6 pence, and remained a standard format until the early 1890s.

Meanwhile, from the early nineteenth century, a rash of new bulky journals, Reviews, appeared in Scotland that were notably closely linked to the book trade in a number of respects. Their primary purpose was to keep their readers abreast of new books, the quality of which was guaranteed by the selection of the best titles by the Reviews’ editors for inclusion and review. Moreover, the entire contents of these Reviews took the exclusive format of book reviews. Clusters of titles were usually reviewed, four to a dozen of which were covered in a single article. While articles commonly began with a chunky list of books covered, thick with publishers’ details that separated the reader from the review, the articles’ titles were generic – e.g. “National Education” – and only appeared in the running heads on the top of each page. Individual book titles were subsumed within topics. Thirty or more pages, these lengthy articles were the signature characteristic of Reviews, and permitted liberal quotation from the books, thus distributing them in a re-mediated form of extracts.

At the same time Reviews were advantageously distinct from books, and while they served dually as digests and evaluations of books, they were crucially cheaper, and conveniently accessible serially, at regular quarterly intervals, suitable for country living as well as urban gentlemen’s clubs in town. Unlike books, they thwarted the imprimatur of named authors, as they adhered strictly to anonymity, which made the branding of each journal not its (unknown) authors, but its title. Thus, the periodical titles, the Edinburgh or the Quarterly Reviews pronounced on topics and books, rather than the anonymous authors of the review articles. Lastly, the Reviews were distinct from books in the former’s close identification with politics, each marked by an alliance with the policies of one political party or another, which markedly influenced their contents: their choice of reviewers and books, and the contents of the articles themselves. Reviews, however, catered to the upper echelons of readers. At six shillings, they were cheaper but not cheap, and consumed mainly by annual subscription, a sum well beyond the means of any but comfortably middle-class readers, or the wealthy who might be able to buy or consult the books noticed. For less well-off readers, who saw a weekly or Sunday paper that contained book reviews, access to new books may well have been confined to the fulsome extracts that reviews included in many such papers.

Other forms of serialised access to contemporary thought and fiction later to appear in books were monthly publications: magazines, such as Blackwood’s, from 1817, which before the mid-1850s relatively infrequently included anonymous serialised fiction in instalments in its pages.[3] Less than half the price of quarterlies per issue, monthly magazines still cost the same 24 shillings annually. However, their greater frequency meant that serialisation was possible, and resulted in fragmented access over time at a cheaper price than purchasing the first book edition. From the mid-1830s, yet another form of serialised fiction began to appear, the monthly part-issue, which often resulted in publication of the first book edition after 19 months in a three-volume format and at the high price of 31 shillings, or a guinea. Unlike the anonymity of the magazine, part-issues often made a feature of the author’s name or pseudonym, sharing the branding with the title of the work, for example, Pickwick Papers by “Boz” [Charles Dickens].

From 1832, weekly titles and their publishers became conspicuous players in the distribution of knowledge – called “the march of intellect” – in cheaper forms available to the middling and artisan classes. Both Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal and the Penny Magazine began that year; both included articles in instalments, and both were affiliated with publishing houses that furthered the distribution of knowledge in multiple cheap series beyond their flagship journals. From 1850, Dickens augmented the distribution of fiction in monthly magazines and part-issues by regular inclusion of weekly instalments of his and others’ novels in cheaper journals, “conducted” by himself. Weekly newspapers similarly took the opportunity their frequency offered to include tales or fiction in instalments, particularly after 1870. There was no parallel to feuilletons in British newspapers, and although literary supplements developed over the century, particularly in weekly newspapers, they tended to comprise arts coverage and reviews, rather than fiction.[4]

From 1885, the standard system of publication of new fiction in three volumes, enabled by pricing agreements between publishers and the circulating libraries, came under increasing criticism from authors. Its collapse from 1893 changed the form as well as the price of new fiction: cheap novels, published at six shillings, one-fifth of the three-decker price, significantly augmented the market for books, while the new format of one volume gradually transformed the novel form. It also slackened the long interdependence in Great Britain between fiction, the serial and the book. The economic advantage of serial publication of fiction in instalments, enjoyed by multiple publishing forms in the nineteenth century -- magazines, newspapers, part-issue, cheap series – disappeared, and with it an important element of sales of all of these forms. Cheap books hitherto largely confined to reprints extended to new titles, while private circulating libraries were also overtaken by free public libraries, the numbers of which accelerated in the 1890s and early twentieth-century.

Books, Serials and Time

The lodging of fragments of longer texts in instalments in the periodicity of serials – their regular appearance at fixed intervals – was a happy match. The spreading of a longer text over time and in fragments was an auspicious model of serialisation and serial content for magazine serials, successive issues of which gained momentum as instalments developed the plot or argument (in non-fiction) and provided motivation for readers to continue to purchase or subscribe and to read the next magazine issue. In one respect, the periodical “carried” instalments, presenting them in a protective print environment, in a context of other articles that might attract readers, and under the periodical brand, which acted as a guarantor of quality and similarly attracted readers. An instalment by a new or anonymous author embedded in the collective miscellany of the magazine was more likely to be read than if it appeared in part-issue, another form of serialised instalments of longer works common in the period, where the draw for readers normally relied heavily on recognition of the already established (possibly famous) name of its author. Magazine serialisation cushioned and cultivated new authors, and the anonymity or pseudonymity they afforded was particularly advantageous to women writers who, like George Eliot, wished to make a quiet debut, to maintain a separation between professional and private life, or to avoid the stigma of paid work attaching to genteel women.[5] From the 1840s, authors of non-fiction such as critics and historians used the opportunity periodicals afforded to publish longer works in fragments, and to make books of disparate pieces. Thomas Babbington Macaulay and Francis Jeffrey were among the earliest journalists to gather their journalism into books of collected essays, but Algernon Swinburne’s Essays and Reviews in 1866, Walter Pater’s Appreciations in 1889, and Oscar Wilde’s Intentions in 1891 were books comprised of similar material. Matthew Arnold’s Essays in Criticism (1865) and Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) indicate a different relation to the press. These were volumes of criticism that used the press to develop ideas for manuscripts. Arnold and Pater placed pieces, later to appear as chapters, in periodicals first, envisaging the later opportunity to select from them and revise them for book publication. This plan allowed them to gain income at two points, as they wrote and on publication of the first edition. Books by Arnold, Pater, and T.H. Huxley the scientist also originated in lectures rather than in print sources. Often printed by periodicals and/or in pamphlets soon after delivery, lectures could carry an added “news” value due to their currency; only then were they collected into the more sedate format of books. Some authors took periodical publication of their own work directly into their own hands by creating, supporting, and editing periodicals to publish and circulate it widely before book publication. Margaret E. Braddon, Charles Dickens, T. H. Huxley, William T. Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and Ellen Wood are a few celebrity authors among many who helped establish journals they then contributed to and edited. There is also a close link between editors in general of nineteenth-century periodicals and authorship of printed books; many editors published articles frequently in their journals, material which often re-appeared in subsequent books.[6] The agency of authors in the nineteenth century is evident in the variety of ways they made the periodical press work for them, as part of their careers in print. This routine traffic between renowned authors of high culture status and the more popular culture of the press is instructive, illustrating not only the mixed literary practices of men and women of letters at the time, but the strength of the lure of the press in this period. It was not to be ignored.

The advantages of instalments not only spread the cost of consumption over time, and paid authors over time as they wrote, but also created an economy of reading time. Longer works divided into periods of reading could be accommodated comfortably into daily life, and undermine reading practices of “addiction” to fiction, a common danger attributed to the consumption of fiction by women at the time by male observers. Authors also recognised that instalments and part-issues disciplined text, but apprehensively: the regularity of the periodicity of instalments in magazines and part-issues – the monthly or weekly deadlines, and the limited slot of word count were often unwelcome, especially to authors of fiction, whose work and working rhythms were harnessed to serial time and space. George Eliot preferred not to have to adjust to periodical rhythms, and Dickens eventually grew impatient with the weekly demands of his own journals for the publication of his own novels.[7]

By the same token, the publisher and editor benefited from magazine serials in that new or anonymous authors of instalments could be published with low risk, covered as individual pieces were by the broader interest and succession of a diverse array of contents. Publishers could also control authors more in instalment publication in parts than in receipt of a complete manuscript of a novel that had already found its characters, plot and narrative, without prior reference to an editor; likewise, authors were forced to conform to publishing timetables determined by the regular periodicity of the press. Some publishers owned “house” journals, and their periodical publication of a serial could be contractually followed by lucrative book publication in first and subsequent editions. Such publishers were able to lure authors to their firm with a dual deal: initial serial publication in their house journal, followed by book publication. For any publisher and author, exposure to the public over months of a title in instalments to appear subsequently as a book was an efficient and effective form of advertising for book sales or library purchase. A successful run of this periodical-book sequence could, and often did, bond publisher and author for future titles. It could also affiliate successful authors with their publisher’s house journal, thereby increasing subscriptions to the firm’s journal. These sometimes even bore the title of the publisher – such as Macmillan’s Magazine or Blackwood’s, extending the kudos directly to the firm. The Cornhill Magazine whose name was visualised in its bright golden yellow cover was merely named after the street address of its publisher, Smith and Elder, a respected book publisher. So embedded was the monthly rhythm of publishing that, by the 1850s and until the early 1890s, London publishers had devised a monthly distribution day, called Magazine Day, on which firms who released their periodicals, part-issue new books and/or volumes in their reprint libraries monthly supplied agents who gathered shipments together for monthly subscriptions to any of these print formats for distribution to newsagents, bookshops, and individual clients across the country.[8] Specially employed bagmen collected the items across the city for delivery to agents.

Reviews and advertising were other powerful benefits of periodicals for book publishers. For publishers with house magazines, the wrapper or Advertiser in which issues were enveloped provided free advertising space for their own monthly lists of new books and journals, and the source of additional income from other publishers who bought space to advertise their lists and journals. Ads from literary magazines, when readers are lucky enough to find them intact in bound volumes of aggregated issues, offer rich pickings for media historians, including monthly lists from each publisher, prices of titles, sight of series and new developments, Christmas and other seasonal promotions of books, manifestos for new titles, and often the contents lists of monthly periodicals.

Book reviews of new titles in the press were as lucrative for publishers as ads, and amounted to another form of advertising and, in the first half of the century, a vehicle of book texts in the form of extracts. Some less scrupulous publishers such as Henry Colburn arranged to review their own lists favourably in their house journals, but Colburn exported this bad practice by employing staff to write similarly favourable reviews for other journals, which he paid for their insertion. However, all reviews carried by journals were a form of advertising for the titles noticed and, cognisant of this, authors and publishers commonly took advantage of the anonymous system of reviewing to enlist friends, employees, and relations to write “puffs” or favourable notices. In debates about the relative merits of anonymity and signature that stretched from 1859 until the end of the century, this practice of anonymous “interested” reviews was also dubbed logrolling.

In addition to serialisation of fiction and non-fiction in periodicals, serialisation in the nineteenth century was developed as an alternative to private subscription by wealthy readers to finance large publishing projects, such as dictionaries, encyclopaedias, and other reference works; thus, the Oxford English Dictionary appeared in fascicles over 44 years (1884–1928), as did the first series of the Dictionary of National Biography, in 63 parts over 15 years (1885–1900). Readers could consume these ambitious projects over time as they developed, while the publishers were able to fund their development through sales of parts.

Even publication in book formats in the nineteenth century proved infinitely embroiled in parts and series. The expensive format of novel publications, the three deckers, re-assembled the monthly or weekly parts into a new series of three cloth-bound volumes. In time, once the succession of single editions of such works appeared as reprints, they in turn could take multiple series forms. They could be gathered in a collected edition of the works of the single author, or they could be aggregated with other authors in a “library” of Classics, or Favourites, all appearing once again serially at regular intervals, usually in monthly lists. These successive forms of book publication were not confined to the book publishers and their rhythms. Periodical rhythms also resulted in volume formats that were linked with chronological time that governed their numbers and volumes, figures familiar from their mastheads, volume 1, number 1, for example. Periodical issues were thus also aggregated into semi-annual or annual volumes, which remediation involves a format distinct from issues: ads are normally excluded, as are issue covers and tables of contents. They were replaced by a new, volume title page; a new volume table of contents, often in alphabetical order in a mode that obscured issue contents; sometimes a frontispiece, a retrospective volume preface, and/ or an index to the volume; and cloth boards and a spine, which fitted into any personal or public library’s book shelves. Over time, annual volumes of Punch, for example, filled shelves as bound parts, volumes, “books.”

Most of the print run of the three-volume format for new fiction titles was sold to private circulating libraries like Mudie’s, who could multiply their paying clients by three for each title, the annual subscription being calibrated on the basis of how many volumes the subscriber could borrow at one time. Circulating libraries also stocked periodicals for their readers to borrow and get a first look at new work, which they then sold off annually as retrospective subscriptions to individual readers. These multiple forms of series stocked by the libraries, in periodical, part-issue, and volume formats maximised successive borrowing for readers who kept coming back for the next instalment, or volume. Serialised authors, who derived a steady income spread over time and whose readership was enhanced by the pre-volume trail of serialised parts in addition to any royalties or payment related to book sales to the libraries, clearly derived some benefits from this system. However, it presented serious problems for authors whose books were not stocked by circulating libraries, which boasted that they were “selective” and guaranteed the morality of their stock. Mudie’s and W. H. Smith announced their alliance with respectability, to assure their large number of middle-class and family subscribers. One author, George Moore, most of whose novels were not stocked by Mudie’s published an independent attack on circulating libraries in 1885, called Literature at Nurse, which suggested that English Literature was tied to the apron strings of infantilised women and children, and his attack was echoed in the New Review, in a symposium that debated “Candour in English Fiction” in which Thomas Hardy and Eliza Lynn Linton participated.[9]

Forms of Serialisation: Production and Distribution

In addition to the appearance of serial formats in instalments in monthly periodicals and in part-issues, serialised fiction can be found in weekly newspapers after the repeal of the stamp and paper taxes (1855–1861). The appetite for fiction grew, fanned after 1859 by the proliferation of the shilling monthlies, cheaper miscellany magazines that might include multiple novel instalments in each single issue, as may be seen in the Cornhill, which the novelist William Thackeray edited in the early 1860s. “Fiction papers” followed, such as Belgravia, given almost entirely over to novel parts, and so eventually did weekly newspapers, especially regional and local, that gingerly began to include an instalment of fiction in their weekend pages. From the 1870s, Tillotson’s Fiction Bureau, located in Bolton, Lancashire, consolidated this tendency, selling fiction to single proprietors who owned clusters of local weekly newspapers. Instalments of fiction were thus syndicated, appearing simultaneously in multiple titles. Unlike periodical serialisation, these did not necessarily lead to book publication.[10]

Various pressures on the three-volume system led to a breakdown of the sales agreements between publishers of three-volume novels and the circulating libraries in 1894. These included the restlessness of authors about the bottleneck of distribution imposed by the circulating libraries – their imposition of moral strictures acceptable to their respectable middle-class patrons. Initiated by George Moore, an author steeped in naturalism based on the French novel, it was soon followed by the pronounced growth of taste in the late 1880s and1890s for short stories, again stemming from continental examples of French and Russian literature by Maupassant, Flaubert, Turgenyev and Chekhov. Periodicals began to publish short stories in their “fiction slot,” complete in each issue, which were later collected in volume form. Walter Pater’s Imaginary Portraits and Rudyard Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills appearing in 1887 and 1888 respectively both appeared originally in the press, as did some of the contents of volumes of naturalistic tales by authors such as Ella D’Arcy (1857–1937) and Hubert Crackanthorpe (1870–1896), both of whose work appeared in the periodical, the Yellow Book. George Egerton, a new woman writer, published two volumes of short stories, Keynotes and Discords, with the influential nineties’ publisher John Lane in 1893 and 1894, the first of which Lane used to badge his famous series of contemporary writing of the nineties, Keynotes. Variety of character, plot, mood and setting, brevity, and the unexpected replaced the momentum of the familiar and ongoing plot narratives of long form fiction. One new periodical, the Strand Magazine, founded in 1891, eschewed novels in instalments completely, publishing instead short fiction. Its accommodation to serialised fiction was its cultivation of linked short stories, such as Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, whose recurring character links distinct texts of short stories, which are later readily suitable for collection in book form. The abandonment of the publisher-circulating library supply and distribution model resulted in a gradual paradigm shift, in which publishers moved to the publication of single-volume fiction in cloth editions, at a cover price of six shillings, sold directly to readers in bookshops. The resulting widening of access to new fiction through the lowering of its price and the abandonment of a model of delayed purchase chime with the trajectory of media and cultural time that sped up over the century, from quarterly to monthly to daily, signalled finally by the efflorescence of the popular mass press in Britain, from the appearance of the Daily Mail in 1896. Part-issue and serialised magazine fiction faded as single-volume new fiction gains popularity.

The effect of serialisation in the British press on the narrative form of longer works has been much discussed by critics of nineteenth-century print culture, particularly of the novel.[11] The book format of the three-volume novel that commonly originated in twenty instalments in magazines or part-issue, usually published over nineteen months, was a distinct form, closely determined by and responsive to its original fragmented mode of publication. For example, such novels characteristically include generous amounts of detailed description, irrespective of their degree of realism; whether it appears in Adam Bede, BleakHouse or Portrait of a Lady, detail helps fill parts. However, termed misleadingly “a loose baggy monster” by Henry James in The Tragic Muse, the Victorian novel published serially required complex judgments and planning on the part of the author, to keep the rhythm and form of the periodical part firmly in view, while simultaneously building the architecture of the whole.[12] Crafting an interesting beginning of each part to draw readers in and remind them immediately of the narrative and characters they had left a month ago was as important as creating a satisfying ending for a part which probably comprised more than one chapter. That is, not every chapter had to end as memorably as the last chapter of each part – concluding while looking forward on a note of anticipation if not suspense. Each instalment also needs a narrative sweep of its own, a management of plot tensions and turns to make for a lively read that motivates readers to return the following month. Most nineteenth-century authors of such capacious fiction created multiple plots and sub-plots, along with a large array of characters which had to be worked steadily in the instalments, enabling them to be pulled together in a revealing and satisfying weave at the novel’s ending. At the same time, characters need to be introduced regularly across the instalments, to keep them alive in readers’ minds over such a prolonged period of reading as nineteen months. Similarly, published as they are over a long period with intervals between numbers, parts of serialised novels often respond to unfolding current events, ingesting new material as it occurs; they are also prey to intermittent criticism – by readers, by critics, by publishers, by poor sales, by piracies, by derivative melodramas, or by changing circumstances in their authors’ lives. Thus, they are marked at birth by their gestation over time. Given their direct relation to currency by serial publication, their diction is attuned to the language of the moment, and to that of the class of readers of the particular periodical in which they appear, a characteristic they share with the other contributions that surround them.

Serials in magazines and part-issue do have differences that relate to their distinctive print formats. Part-issue instalments are often more closely related to the author’s persona and the specific work; they are normally signed parts, whose author is well known. While usually adverts surround the text of part-issues as they do periodicals, the adverts surrounding Nicholas Nickleby part-issues is called the “Nicholas Nickleby Advertiser,” and the graphics on its paper cover have been individually commissioned to reflect the nature of the novel, while its colour may be part of the branding of novels by this particular author. Thus, the covers of Dickens’s part-issues are usually green, and Thackeray’s are yellow.

The context of the embedded magazine instalment is quite different. First of all, the type and detailed contents of the work have to reflect and sit comfortably in the periodical title in which it appears. The work has to fit broadly into the political orientation of the journal, and to take account of other material surrounding it, particularly parallel series with which it may be in competition for readers’ attention. It may choose obliquely to interact with other texts around it, or to articles or serials in other periodicals of the previous month. At the very least, it has to meet the expectations of the readers of that particular title, who expect the entirety of the periodical’s contents to gain their approval. Should an editor suspect that some aspect of the content risks disturbing the readership, then the editor may well demand revision by an author, or even discontinue the series. The instalment is entirely subject to the periodical’s designated space and word count for monthly instalments, as well as the position in the journal the instalment is allocated. This may depend on a variety of factors; the journal may have a recurrent position for fiction, or criticism. Or, the instalment may be judged weak, or strong, by the editor, and placed accordingly. Even if for one issue it appears first or second, it may be fifth or last in subsequent issues, depending on the editor’s view of the relative quality and importance of the contents of the issue at hand. If an instalment is placed as the lead item, or printed with an ornamented letter or graphic illustration, then it will be read differently and perhaps more frequently than if it is buried towards the end of an issue, and at the bottom of the table of contents. Lastly, and perhaps most dangerously for an author and text, periodical contents are all subject to editing. This may take the form of lopping off paragraphs because the issue’s editorial content is over length, or crowded by advertising; or the editor may routinely heavily edit contributions, as Dickens and his sub-editors tended to do, in an effort to homogenise the journal’s varied contents into a cohesive stylistic blend. Whether authors of periodical instalments bother to reinstate their original unedited text for book publication is variable. Thomas Hardy did not. Finally, because he was so exasperated with readers’ and editors’ negative responses to his fiction in the press and in book form, he abandoned the novel entirely after Jude the Obscure (1894–1895), and turned to poetry until his death in 1928.

Arguably, by the end of the nineteenth century, the close interdependency of the serial and the book that prevailed for most of the period had seriously weakened and radically changed, in the face of an increasing tide of readers and the growth of popular culture. This was due to widened availability of education from the 1870s; greater literacy and appetite for reading; cheaper and cheaper single volumes resulting in large sales; the increase in free libraries; and more popular, cheaper types of circulating libraries that stocked fiction (Boots, W. H. Smith); and the regular inclusion of fiction in more of the weekly press. While periodicals and newspapers continued to review, gossip about and advertise books, after 1900, feature and critical articles on celebrity authors and their work, and interviews, gradually replaced the ubiquitous serials of the previous century. Cheap books of new work came into their own.