The Serial and the Book in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Intersections, Extensions, Transformations (original) (raw)
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’Trepidation of the Spheres’: Serials and Books in the Nineteenth Century
Print in Transition, 2001
My subject has arisen from a debate in seminars in Britain about the definition of the history of the nineteenth-century book, and the implication of the newspaper and periodical press in it. In the spirit of the new history of the book, with its emphasis on the history of reading, I want to suggest that, 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 fragments into part-issue; the monthly magazines over time 'passed volumes and libraries of volumes through [their] pages', (Shand 1879b: 227) and each issue of the Yellow Book in the 1890s appears as a bound volume. We also know that readers read and reread some periodical articles in the same way they were accustomed to read and reach for volumes of books: Mark Pattison notes in his diary of 1878, 'Read for 5th or 6th time article on English Poetry in L.R. 2 Oct. 1861' (Pattison 1878: f40 v). Many newspapers and periodicals were customarily issued as annual and semi-annual bound volumes. How do the position of these 'spheres' and their characteristics change in relation to each other in the period? In an attempt to address these matters, I want to begin by making four main points: (1) The origins of a significant tranche of periodicals throughout the period were contingent on books and the book trade; for example, the early nineteenth-century quarterlies called Reviews consisted allegedly of long essay/reviews of books. Their authority was predicated on their link with books; by their overall length, their aspiration to authority, and their leisurely frequency, they replicated the weightiness of books which, together with their outbreaks of frenetic irascibility, managed to produce a balance of the stately and the topical. (2) In turn, authors and publishers of books alike came to view the periodical press as an extension of their sphere. John Sutherland comments on Henry Colburn as an early nineteenth-century example: Colburn was quicker than his contemporaries to understand the interdependence of various book-trade sectors; notably the mutual interest of the publisher, the lending library and the opinion-forming journal. One of his more controversial initiatives was to secure these links, by using his magazines to push his books to the library purchaser. His motives were low. But in this early form of diversified book-trade operation (he was variously library-owner, retail bookseller, magazine-proprietor, publisher) Colburn anticipated what is now termed synergistic patterns of publishing. (Sutherland 1986: 80).
Introduction: The History and Future of the Nineteenth-Century Book
2013
I n its focus on the history and future of the nineteenth-century book, this issue of Gramma takes up issues of cultural memory and its bibliographic forms across two major technological divides: from hand-press to industrial printing, and from analog to digital textuality. Looking both backward and forward, investigating a history and adumbrating a future for the printed volumes of the Romantic and Victorian eras, our contributors give us new purchase on our present moment, a time of opportunity and disruption. As our international print collections are being digitized, they are becoming more available, dynamic, and searchable; they are also at risk of occlusion by their own surrogates. Books produced during the nineteenth century are particularly involved with this transition. Representing as they do the height of book culture in the west (after general literacy and before film), such books provide rich occasions for analysis of media change and the consequences for human expressi...
Rev. of The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Three-Volume Novel by Troy J. Bassett
Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, 2022
Reviewed by DAVID BUCHANAN Athabasca University Troy J. Bassett's book reconsiders a staple of nineteenth-century fiction, the three-volume novel, as a literary and economic product. Following Bassett's review of scholarly work in the first chapter, the second, titled "The Production of Multi-Volume Fiction, 1837-1898," offers a bibliometric overview of novel production before turning to the industry's underlying economics, from the perspectives of both publishers and libraries. The chapter includes lengthy tables and figures, as well as detailed statistical summaries of the three-volume novels listed on Bassett's own online database: At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837-1901 (2007-present). This summary of extensive quantitative research provides a multifaceted view of the Victorian novel-including attention to format (i.e., number of volumes), authorship, genre, nationality, and genderwhich receives further attention later in the book and sets up the case studies that follow. Chapter 3, "The Experience of Richard Bentley and Son," examines the publishing accounts of more than a hundred three-volume novels published by Bentley between 1865 and 1890, to assess the costs of production and financial viability of the three-volume novel for Victorian publishers. This case study is notable for its insights into the relationships between publishers, authors, and libraries, and
Victorian culture was dominated by an ever-expanding world of print. A tremendous increase in the volume of books, newspapers and periodicals was matched by a corresponding development of the first mass reading public. This reference set provides a composite picture of this expansion. Its aim is to gather together material rare or otherwise available only in disparate sources so as to facilitate a new understanding of the ways print media operated. Hitherto it is the book that has dominated the study of the nineteenth century; recently, though, there has been increasing awareness of its interconnectedness with what has been regarded as more ephemeral forms, periodicals and magazines. But we expand this still further to include the production, distribution and consumption of advertisements in newspapers and the East End ‘Poetry of Seven Dials’ to illustrations in expensive annuals and the working conditions of journalists. We accordingly provide here a resource for students both of literature and of media history: indeed we see the two as conjoined.
Novel/magazine interfaces: the “long” serialisation of Wilkie Collins’s Armadale
Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies, 2019
The serialisation of novels within magazines during the nineteenth century created a textual interface or dialogue between two reading experiences: the long-running serial was contained and contextualised by the overarching magazine series. The relationship between the magazine and the serialised novel has been explored in a number of studies (Hughes and Lund, The Victorian Serial; Hughes and Lund Victorian Publishing 11-34 and 96-123; Turner; Wynne; Delafield Serialization) that demonstrate how the serial was accommodated in a timeframe of reading at intervals whilst being horizontally integrated into the forwardmoving periodical. This article draws on these previous studies, and particularly Wynne on Armadale (145-65), as well as my own work on women's diaries (Delafield, Women's Diaries 101-18). The paper analyses the appearance of Wilkie Collins's Armadale in Cornhill Magazine (November 1864 to June 1866) as an illustration of serialisation at the novel/magazine interface. Armadale as a serial demonstrates the impact of these textual interfaces but, as a function of periodical publication, the novel's interface with the Cornhill extended either side of its appearance in the magazine, creating a "long" serialisation.
Bakhtinian ?Journalization? and the Mid-Victorian Literary Marketplace
Literature Compass, 2007
This paper forms part of a Literature Compass cluster on Modern Book History. The full cluster is made up of the following articles:‘Between Then and Now: Modern Book History’, Kate Longworth, Literature Compass 4 (2007), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00474.x.‘Ezra Pound's Cantos: A Compact History of Twentieth-Century Authorship, Publishing and Editing’, Mark Byron, Literature Compass 4 (2007), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00475.x.‘ “The Making of the Book”: Roy Fisher, the Circle Press and the Poetics of Book Art’, Matthew Sperling, Literature Compass 4 (2007), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00476.x.‘Bakhtinian “Journalization” and the Mid-Victorian Literary Marketplace’, Dallas Liddle, Literature Compass 4 (2007), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00477.x.‘Manuscript in Print: The Materiality of Alternative Comics’, Emma Tinker, Literature Compass 4 (2007), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00478.x.‘Lost in a World of Books: Reading and Identity in Pre-War Japan’, Susan C. Townsend, Literature Compass 4 (2007), 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00479.x.***In now-famous remarks on ‘novelization’, M. M. Bakhtin theorized a mechanism by which one literary genre influences the content and structure of other genres. The popular and critical success of the novel form demonstrates its specific discursive advantages over other genres, which recognize these advantages and often attempt to copy or adapt to them. Though the influence Bakhtin describes goes only one way – the novel ‘novelizes’ other genres – novelization is not an isolated phenomenon, but an example or case study within Bakhtin's larger ‘Galilean’ conception of genre interaction. Parallel cases should therefore exist: in other literary markets and moments in book history we should expect great artistic, popular, or financial success by one genre to lead contemporary writers to adopt elements of the successful genre, or to adjust their practices in response to it. This prediction is particularly important because for Bakhtin genres are more than outward conventions; they are ‘form-shaping ideologies’ with inherent knowledges and ways of thinking. Adopting or adapting a new genre requires a writer to change not simply forms, but also attitudes, assumptions, and worldview. My paper hypothesizes a Bakhtinian moment of genre influence in Great Britain in and immediately after 1855, triggered by the sudden rise in the perceived power of newspaper press discourse. Factors including the apparent political power wielded by the press during the Crimean War, and the repeal of the newspaper stamp, with its resulting proliferation of apparently successful new journals, combined to raise the perceived cultural, financial, and political status of newspaper discourse in this period dramatically. I consider critically the evidence for a resulting ‘journalization’ of other discourse genres between 1855 and 1860, reflected partly by a sudden proliferation of journalist characters and considerations of journalism in British fiction and poetry of this period.