Bestsellers before Victoria ascended to the throne
Although they are not listed, some important novels by such American authors as Stowe, Hawthorne, Melville, Fennimore Cooper, and Washington Irving sold well in England during the nineteenth century, as did novels from the French, in particular, Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo (1844).
Moreover, many Victorian writers of note were publishing before the accession of Victoria to the throne: Dickens's The Pickwick Papers (1836), Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), Marryat's Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836), and Ainsworth's Rookwood (1834) being leading examples of pre-Victorian works that continued to sell well for much of the century.
Why stop at 1861?
The serial publication of fiction began to change in the late 1850s with the appearance of such illustrated weeklies as Once a Week (1859) and The Cornhill (1860), which over the next decade ousted the old-style, cheap, non-illustrated literary magazines such as Bentley's, Ainsworth's, and All the Year Round. Furthermore, a new kind of fiction, the Sensation Novel (derisively called "The Bigamy Novel" by its detractors) developed in the 1860s as an offshoot of the less realistic Gothic Novel.
The part-publication of Dickens was almost entirely subsumed by these new literary magazines, although America's Atlantic Monthly and Britain's Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine continued to publish high-quality fiction without accompanying illustrations. In this respect, Great Expectations was very much a throw-back, appearing first in a cheap, pulp-paper weekly rather than in a new commodity text such as Good Words (founded in 1860). Cruikshank, Phiz, and their tribe retired, replaced by a host of young, realistic illustrators such as George Du Maurier, Robert Barnes, Arthur Hopkins, and C. S. Reinhart, gifted commercial artists who worked mostly for the new, illustrated magazines of the 1860s. Finally, children's literature, which had in its infancy produced only a few best-selling classics, such as Mary Sherwood's The Fairchild Family (1818) Catherine Sinclair's Holiday House (1839), was about to enter the Golden Age, with Lewis Carroll and Edith Nesbit and a host of other writers whose works aimed primarily at a child and juvenile market would continue to be best-sellers well into the twentieth century.
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