The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Three-Volume Novel Troy J

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NEW DIRECTIONS IN BOOK HISTORY

The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Three-Volume Novel Troy J. Bassett

[email protected] New Directions in Book History

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[email protected] Troy J. Bassett The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Three-Volume Novel

[email protected] Troy J. Bassett Purdue University Fort Wayne Fort Wayne, IN, USA

New Directions in Book History ISBN 978-3-030-31925-0 ISBN 978-3-030-31926-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31926-7

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[email protected] Epigraph

As a consequence, the magazine in particular and the circulating library in general do not foster the growth of the novel which reﬂects and reveals life. They directly tend to exterminate it by monopolizing all literary space. —Thomas Hardy, “Candour in English Fiction” (1890)

[email protected] Acknowledgements

Isaac Newton once wrote, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” After over ﬁfteen years of working on this book, I think I have some idea of what he meant. At every turn of my research—whether Victorian bibliography, library business practices, book publishing economics, or quantitative book history—I found works by John Sutherland and Simon Eliot had preceded me. For a large part, my work continues and expands their original lines of inquiry. In addition, they both have unfailingly encouraged and supported my work through their generous advice over the years. So, in honor of their example, I ded- icate this work to them. But they were not the only shoulders I stood upon. I have been fortu- nate to receive the help and support of many generous scholars during my labors for which I am thoroughly grateful, including Stephen Colclough, David Finkelstein, Katherine Harris, Leslie Howsam, Linda K. Hughes, Andrew King, Graham Law, Patrick Leary, Kirsten Macleod, Anthony Mandal, Richard Menke, Robert L. Patten, Linda H. Peterson, Jennifer Phegley, Allen Riddell, Matthew Rubery, and Cheryl A. Wilson. Over the last two decades, I received helpful feedback from presenting my work at several Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers Asso- ciation, Midwest Victorian Studies Association, North American Victorian Studies Association, Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, and Soci- ety for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing conferences.

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[email protected] viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

At the University of Kansas, my dissertation director Dorice Williams Elliott along with Peter Casagrande, Richard Hardin, and George Worth well deserve my gratitude for both piquing my interest in Victorian literature and shepherding my dissertation (which formed the basis for Chapter 4) to completion. At Purdue University Fort Wayne, I have been blessed with supportive department and college colleagues including Hardin Aasand, Carl Drummond, Damian Fleming, Rachel Hile, Debo- rah Huffman, Andrew Kopec, Lewis Roberts, and Michael Stapleton. The people at Palgrave Macmillan have been a joy to work with on this project—it is a personal thrill to be published by one of the Victorian publishers discussed in this book. I would like to thank the series editors Jonathan Rose and Shafquat Towheed as well as the manuscript referee Andrew Nash, the managing editors, and production editors. The digital humanities project underlying this book, At the Circulat- ing Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837–1901, has received generous support from a variety of sources including a Summer Fac- ulty Research Grant and a Faculty Course Release Grant from Purdue University Fort Wayne; the Fredson Bowers Award from The Bibliograph- ical Society; a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities; a Summer Faculty Research Grant from the Purdue Research Foundation; and a Curran Fellowship from the Research Society for Vic- torian Periodicals. For their conﬁdences in my research, I thank them. Two sections of Chapter 1 originally appeared as articles: “The Production of Three-Volume Novels, 1863–1897” in Papers of the Biblio- graphical Society of America, volume 102 (2008), revised and republished with permission of the University of Chicago Press; and “The Victorian Four-Volume Novel” in The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographi- cal Society volume 17 (2016), revised and republished with permission of Oxford University Press. A shorter version of Chapter 2 was published as “Living on the Margin: George Bentley and the Economics of the Three- Volume Novel, 1865–70” in Book History, volume 13 (2010). Two sections of Chapter 4 also originally appeared as articles: “Circulating Morals: George Moore’s Attack on Late-Victorian Literary Censorship” in Paciﬁc Coast Philology, volume 40 (2005), revised and republished with permission of Penn State University Press; and “T. Fisher Unwin’s Pseudonym Library: Literary Marketing and Authorial Identity” in English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, volume 47 (2004), revised and republished with permission of the ELT Press. I would like to thank all

[email protected] ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix the journal editors and their presses for allowing me to revise and re-use these works as parts of this book. And last, but certainly not least, I would like to acknowledge the unwavering support of my family: my parents Jim and Linda, my wife Jen, and my children Joseph and Helen. They have collectively and patiently endured numerous research trips and long monologues on Victorian publishing with loving grace.

[email protected] Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 The Production of Multi-volume Fiction, 1837–1898 19 At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837–1901 20 General Production of Multi-volume Fiction, 1837–1898 23 Format and Price 31 Authors 40 Publishers 55 Serialization 69 Conclusion 94

3 Publishing the Three-Volume Novel: The Experience of Richard Bentley and Son 101 Richard Bentley, 1865–1870 103 Richard Bentley and Son, 1885 126 Richard Bentley and Son, 1890 134 Conclusion 141

4 Buying, Renting, and Selling the Multi-volume Novel: The Economics of W. H. Smith and Son’s Subscription Library 147 The Operation of W. H. Smith and Son’s Subscription Library 151

[email protected] xii CONTENTS

The Accounts of W. H. Smith and Son’s Subscription Library 157 The Libraries’ Ultimatum of 1894 171 Coda: Reactions to the Libraries’ Ultimatum 177

5 De-monopolizing Literary Space: Alternatives to the Three-Volume Novel 183 Robert Louis Stevenson and the New Romance 186 George Moore and Literary Censorship 195 J. W. Arrowsmith, T. Fisher Unwin, and Series Publication 210 Conclusion 228

Bibliography 237

Index 247

[email protected] List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Multi-volume titles published, 1837–1898 24 Fig. 2.2 Multi-volume titles published by gender, 1837–1898 47 Fig. 2.3 Serialization of multi-volume ﬁction, 1837–1898 78 Fig. 2.4 Serialization of multi-volume ﬁction and author gender, 1837–1898 91 Fig. 4.1 Label for Mudie’s Select Library 1880 150 Fig. 4.2 Label for W. H. Smith and Son’s Subscription Library 1879 150

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[email protected] List of Tables

Table 2.1 Multi-volume titles published, 1837–1840 24 Table 2.2 Multi-volume titles published, 1841–1850 24 Table 2.3 Multi-volume titles published, 1851–1860 25 Table 2.4 Multi-volume titles published, 1861–1870 25 Table 2.5 Multi-volume titles published, 1871–1880 26 Table 2.6 Multi-volume titles published, 1881–1890 26 Table 2.7 Multi-volume titles published, 1891–1898 27 Table 2.8 Multi-volume titles and overall titles published, 1840–1898 28 Table 2.9 Multi-volume titles and overall fiction titles published, 1870–1894 29 Table 2.10 Four-volume novels, 1837–1878 34 Table 2.11 Most prolific authors of multi-volume fiction, 1837–1898 42 Table 2.12 Multi-volume titles published by gender, 1837–1840 44 Table 2.13 Multi-volume titles published by gender, 1841–1850 44 Table 2.14 Multi-volume titles published by gender, 1851–1860 45 Table 2.15 Multi-volume titles published by gender, 1861–1870 45 Table 2.16 Multi-volume titles published by gender, 1871–1880 46 Table 2.17 Multi-volume titles published by gender, 1881–1890 46 Table 2.18 Multi-volume titles published by gender, 1891–1898 47 Table 2.19 Most prolific Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and colonial authors, 1837–1898 51 Table 2.20 Irish-, Scottish-, Welsh-, and colonial-authored multi-volume fiction titles published, 1837–1898 52 Table 2.21 Most prolific foreign authors, 1837–1898 54

[email protected] xvi LIST OF TABLES

Table 2.22 Foreign-authored multi-volume fiction titles published, 1837–1898 54 Table 2.23 Twenty most prolific publishers, 1837–1898 57 Table 2.24 Most prolific publishers, 1837–1840 58 Table 2.25 Most prolific publishers, 1841–1850 58 Table 2.26 Most prolific publisher, 1851–1860 59 Table 2.27 Most prolific publishers, 1861–1870 59 Table 2.28 Most prolific publishers, 1871–1880 60 Table 2.29 Most prolific publishers, 1881–1890 60 Table 2.30 Most prolific publishers, 1891–1898 61 Table 2.31 Twenty most prolific publishers and gender of authors, 1837–1898 68 Table 2.32 Periodicals carrying multi-volume fiction titles, 1837–1898 71 Table 2.33 Serialization of multi-volume fiction, 1837–1898 76 Table 2.34 Multi-volume fiction titles serialized by periodical type, 1837–1898 79 Table 2.35 Most prolific periodicals, 1837–1898 86 Table 2.36 Multi-volume fiction titles serialized by authorship, 1837–1898 89 Table 2.37 Most prolific serial authors, 1837–1898 92 Table 3.1 Three-volume novel titles published by Bentley, 1865–1870 105 Table 3.2 Bentley’s account for Florence Marryat’s Too Good for Him (1865) 114 Table 3.3 Bentley’s average costs of production for three-volume novels, 1865–1870 115 Table 3.4 Three-volume novels published by Bentley, 1885 127 Table 3.5 Bentley’s average costs of production for three-volume novels, 1885 130 Table 3.6 Three-volume novels published by Bentley, 1890 135 Table 3.7 Bentley’s average costs of production for three-volume novels, 1890 138 Table 3.8 Tinsley Brothers’ account for Hardy’s Desperate Remedies (1871) 142 Table 4.1 Fiction holdings of Mudie’s Select Library, 1857–1894 155 Table 4.2 W. H. Smith and Son’s Subscription Library accounts, 1860–1865 158 Table 4.3 W. H. Smith and Son’s Subscription Library accounts, 1876–1890 161 Table 4.4 W. H. Smith net profits, 1870–1892 165

[email protected] LIST OF TABLES xvii

Table 4.5 W. H. Smith and Son’s Subscription Library accounts, 1892–1896 167 Table 4.6 One-volume reprints of three-volume novels, 1870–1893 175 Table 5.1 Late-Victorian publishers’ series featuring new ﬁction 212

[email protected] CHAPTER 1

Introduction

For many students of Victorian fiction, the term “three-volume novel” conjures up the image of bulky and expensive books native only to the British Isles and the overly wordy and subplot laden texts they contained. The format served a large reading audience through the hundreds of circulating libraries which bought, rented, and sold fiction. Nearly, every canonical author of the period appeared in the ubiquitous format of three octavo volumes priced at one-and-a-half guineas, including first editions of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Mar- garet Oliphant, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope. Several hundreds more obscure authors wrote the remaining novels, and another few hundred publishers sold them. The synergistic commercial and literary connections between the publishing format and circulating libraries, especially the largest Mudie’s Select Library and W. H. Smith and Son’s Subscription Library, have become popular wisdom in literary studies. Yet, the publishing format itself remains curiously under- examined. Even relatively basic questions are still unanswered, such as: how many three-volume novels were published, who wrote and published them, what were the economics of the format for both publishers and circulating libraries, why did the format last so long, and why did it end when it did? The latter question, at least, has one simple answer: the joint ultimatum from the two largest Victorian circulating libraries, Mudie’s and W. H. Smith, addressed to publishers in June 1894 calling for the end of the format. However, even the ultimatum does not completely

[email protected] 2 T. J. BASSETT explain the long history or final end of the format. This study aims to address these questions and give a general cultural and economic history of the three-volume novel during the Victorian period. When Scottish publisher Archibald Constable (1774–1827) published Sir Walter Scott’s novel Kenilworth in an edition of three octavo volumes at the eye-catching price of one-and-a-half guineas (£1.11.6) in January 1821, he could have little dreamed that he would set a publishing standard which would last three-quarters of a century. The publishing format of the three-volume novel or triple-decker began as one publisher’s cal- culated gamble but was eventually adopted by his rivals as the prestige format for new fiction aimed at middle-class readers. Prior to the 1820s, publishers issued novels in formats ranging anywhere from one to seven (and sometimes more) volumes in a set based mostly on the convenience or whim of the publisher. For instance, in the eighteenth century, canonical novels such as Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) appeared in four or six volumes, Samuel Richardson’s The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1764) appeared in seven volumes and Frances Burney’s Cecilia: or, The Memoirs of a Heiress (1782) appeared in five volumes. Even by the end of the century, novels still frequently appeared in editions of five or more volumes in a set.1 As Peter Garside and Rainer Schöwerling show in The English Novel 1770–1829 (2000), the early years of the nineteenth century witness a gradual shift toward three volumes as the most common set size for the novel.2 In the first decade of the 1800s, a novel was just as likely to appear in an edition of two, three, or four volumes. By the 1820s, nearly half of all novels appeared in an edition of three volumes, with corresponding declines in novels published in two, four, or more volumes. Of the 81 total new fiction titles published in 1829, 48 titles first appeared in a three-volume edition (59.3%). The shift did not escape the notice of readers: as novelist and reviewer Henry Mackenzie observed in 1821, “The mystical Number 3 seems in modern times to be worshipped… that being the common standard for the Number of Vols in which most of the favorite Fictions of the day are set forth.”3 Garside and Schöwerling attribute the rise of the three-volume novel to three factors. First, commercial considerations motivated publishers to curb larger set sizes for editions since their larger prices prevented individual sales—the price of the three-volume novel, in the view of publishers, was the maximum purchasers would pay, around 5s or 6s per volume—for instance, Jane Austen’s first novel Sense and Sensibility (3 volumes; 1811)

[email protected] 1 INTRODUCTION 3 cost 15s for the set.4 Second, the shift to octavo volumes (with 8 leaves per gathering) from duodecimo volumes (12 leaves per gathering) pro- gressed unevenly over the course of these years: novels overwhelmingly appeared in the latter format and more serious works (e.g., history or biography) utilized the former. The octavo format led to more imposing- looking volumes compared to the daintier-looking duodecimo volumes.5 Visually, at least, fiction and nonfiction looked noticeably different on the bookshelf of libraries, perhaps reinforcing the low critical regard for fiction during the Romantic period best illustrated by the Gothic fiction published by the Minerva Press in the smaller format. Last, the unprecedented success of Scott and his Waverley novels gave the three-volume format a cultural prestige that other authors and publishers quickly exploited. As many scholars have established, when Scott turned to fiction writing, he gave the novel genre a considerable critical and economic boost. Consta- ble published each of his first four novels—Waverley (1814), Guy Man- nering (1815), The Antiquary (1816), and Rob Roy (1818)—in three duodecimo volumes with prices ranging from 21s to 24s per set, a higher price but still the familiar format.6 With Ivanhoe,publishedon20Decem- ber 1819, Constable used three octavo volumes priced at 30s per set (or 10s per volume, twice the usual price), a format and price in line with works of history and biography, with higher-quality paper and type, and generally out of line for fiction.7 All of Scott’s subsequent novels came out in the octavo format and other novel publishers gradually shifted to the octavo format. A year later, Constable published Kenilworth, thereby setting a standard for new fiction—octavo volumes at 10s 6d per volume—which would stubbornly persist to nearly the end of the Victorian period. A few short years later, nearly a third of the three-volume novels published in 1826 listed at this higher price and nearly all of the 45 triple- deckers published in 1829 did as well.8 John Sutherland, in his biography of Scott, rightly calls Kenilworth “one of the most influential novels ever published in English,” a lasting cultural influence for an otherwise forgotten novel.9 By the 1840s, the three-volume novel became an established staple of British publishing with half as many two-volume novels produced and a score of four-volume novels. Despite periodic complaints from authors, publishers, libraries, critics, and readers, the format enjoyed continu- ous literary and financial success throughout the century. In fact, little outwardly changed in the appearance of a triple-decker between Scott’s Kenilworth and the last three-volume novel, G. A. Henty’s The Queen’s

[email protected] 4 T. J. BASSETT

Cup (1897). The conventional story of the three-volume novel generally blames the circulating libraries—in particular Mudie’s and Smith—for encouraging their production. In economic terms, these large libraries exercised a monopsony control over the production of new fiction and created a negative feedback loop: because of high prices, only libraries could afford multi-volume novels; and because only libraries bought multi-volume novels, the prices remained stubbornly high. Accordingly, the developments of part-publication, cheap reprints, and serialization, for instance, have been seen as a means by which publishers worked around the libraries to directly reach the reading public. Throughout the nineteenth century, many critics lamented the fact that England was a book borrowing not a book buying society, for which the three-volume novel became the convenient symbol or target of their attacks. Other critics, such as George Moore, blamed the three-volume novel and the libraries for exerting an undue influence over the development and contents of English fiction—some scholars even laud Moore’s personal crusade against Mudie as partially responsible for ending the format. For these reasons and others, the three-volume novel has often been seen as a format perpetually under attack and in decline during the Victorian period, hounded by competitors, critics, and challenges from all sides. In this light, the libraries’ ultimatum in 1894 often gets presented as a qui- etistic act of acknowledgment by the libraries that the format had finally had its day. While this conventional story of the three-volume novel has some truth to it, as we shall see, the reality was much more complicated. Though often mentioned in passing in literary histories or criticism of Victorian fiction, the three-volume novel format rarely garners scholarly attention on its own. In a 1957 article in The Papers of the Bibliograph- ical Society of America, Charles E. Lauterbach and Edward S. Lauter- bach examined 105 Victorian three-volume novels in order to determine the typical word count, number of chapters, number of pages, and other statistics and found a broad range in text length: on average, the typical length of a three-volume novel ranged from 158 000 to 200 000 words with a few examples considerably shorter or longer.10 If anything, their analysis shows the flexibility of the three-volume format: short texts could be (and often were) padded out to fill the volumes (e.g., excessive chapter breaks, large margins, heavy leading), whereas longer texts could be shoe- horned into its three volumes (e.g., smaller type, additional pages). Their work represents one of a handful of descriptive bibliographical treatments of the format which however do not address the marketplace conditions

[email protected] 1 INTRODUCTION 5 for its existence. The three-volume novel figures largely in two literary histories published in the 1960s. Royal Gettmann’s A Victorian Publisher: A Study of the Bentley Papers (1960) dedicates a chapter to the three-decker in his history of the prolific and longtime publisher Richard Bentley and his son George Bentley. (As we shall see in Chapter 2, Bentley was the second-most prolific publisher of multi-volume fiction during the period.) Gettmann finds in Bentley’s agreements with authors that the publisher encouraged them to produce manuscripts to fit three octavo volumes of about 300 pages each with 25 lines of text per page.11 Some authors, he finds, struggled to meet such requirements. Gettmann observes that “a novel in three volumes commanded a substantially higher price than a shorter one” from Bentley which he attributes (without proof) to “pres- sure from the circulating libraries,” Mudie’s in particular, to produce them.12 He later undercuts this observation when examining some correspondence between Charles Edward Mudie and Bentley from the 1880s in which the former complains about the short circulating life of many of Bentley’s novels and pleads for a slowdown in the production of them.13 When Arthur Mudie took over from his father in the 1890s, he took a harder line with publishers such as Bentley culminating with the ultimatum in 1894. While Gettmann’s study is groundbreaking for its time, it relies primarily on anecdotes rather than larger quantitative data to support its argument. Guinevere L. Griest’s Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel (1970) devotes more space to the discussion of the three-volume novel in her study of the largest of Victorian circulating libraries. She observes, “Novels in three volumes were naturally good business for the circulating library” since at the rates of one guinea to borrow one volume at a time and two guineas to borrow three,

Mudie could circulate one three-decker to three separate subscribers, pay- ing a total of three guineas a year, or an entire novel for two guineas to families or to those readers who were impatient for news of the outcome of the proposal to wait until the volume could be exchanged. Works in three volumes enabled the librarian to double or triple the proﬁt he would have from a single-decker.14

Because the business records of Mudie’s do not exist, she is unable to substantiate these claims that a three-volume novel bought for a discount produced a greater proﬁt for the library than a corresponding one-volume novel.15 Griest spends more attention on the format’s effect on English

[email protected] 6 T. J. BASSETT

fiction: the libraries, as one of if not the chief distributors of fiction, served as de facto censors of literature, hence the “select” in Mudie’s Select Library. Thus, the three-volume novel format also imposed moral or content-based constraints on authors, especially in terms of sexual relations, that some authors such as Rhoda Broughton, Moore, and Ouida chaffed against. These attacks, in her view, contributed to the collapse of the three-volume novel culminating in the admission by Mudie that the format no longer paid its way.16 Both Gettmann and Griest, by each focusing on a single player in the three-volume fiction system, necessarily miss the larger dynamics of the publishing marketplace.17 Regrettably, both also lack any substantive quantitative data to support their claims. In the subsequent decades, several scholars have discussed the three- volume novel from a cultural materialist or economic point of view which later became the vanguard for the new History of the Book field. But even within this broad field, approaches range from the empirical to the theoretical. Chief among the former approach, John Sutherland produced several works examining the Victorian fiction marketplace based on significant archival work. His book Victorian Novelists and Publishers (1976) examines the publishing history of several novels by exploring the interactions between the authors (Ainsworth, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Kingsley, Lever, Thackeray, and Trollope) and their publishers (Bentley, Blackwood, Chapman and Hall, Longman, Macmillan, and Smith, Elder) to show how their novels were “materially influenced by the publishing system, for good or ill” which includes contracts, editing, format, and serialization practices.18 Several of the books he considers appeared as two-, three-, or four-volume novels, and he traces how the influence of the publishing format pervaded the chain of production from libraries to publishers to authors. In a short article from the same period, Sutherland’s “The Eco- nomics of the Victorian Three-Volume Novel” considers the economics of the format based a handful of publishers’ accounts and argues that the three-volume novel persisted because it was “commercially safe.”19 His investigations culminated in The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction (1989; revised 2014): though mainly intended as a reference book, its 1606 author, genre, periodical, publisher, and title entries create a thorough economic, literary, and sociological literary history of the Victorian novel. As he writes elsewhere, “Despite fifty years of intense, academically- sponsored research into the form [of Victorian fiction], we still make do with only the sketchiest sense of the infrastructure of Victorian fiction— how the bulk of it was produced; who originated, reproduced, distributed

[email protected] 1 INTRODUCTION 7 and consumed the product.”20 Following his lead, the research into Vic- torian publishing history has increased significantly.21 Eschewing the archival work of Sutherland, N. N. Feltes’s Modes of Production of Victorian Novels (1986) takes a much more theoretical approach to “understand historically the material conditions for the production of Victorian novels generally.”22 His five chapters, spaced at roughly twenty-year intervals, each examine one novel and one mode of production (part-publication, three-volume novel, magazine serialization, bi-monthly publication, and one-volume novel, respectively) in order to argue for “the importance of such details as format as being the con- crete mediations of the historical in the production of novels, determin- ing in complex ways the actual production of a particular novel and tracing themselves in its text and its own production of ideology.”23 The chapter on the publication of Thackeray’s Henry Esmond (1852) considers the three-volume novel. Compared to the part issue of Dickens’s Pick- wick Papers, the publication of Esmond represents a pre-capitalist, petty commodity mode of production where “the dominant ideology of mid- Victorian publishing was that of the ‘commodity-book.’ The commodity which this whole system [e.g., publishers, libraries] was constructed to produce was the book rather than the text.”24 Whereas Dickens and his publisher anticipated the fully capitalist mode of production (produc- ing what Feltes calls the “commodity-text”), Thackeray and Smith, Elder persist in continuing with the older, traditional format. Feltes pairs his discussion of Thackeray’s novel with a consideration of the Booksellers’ Question of 1852, an episode which pitted the major publishing houses (including Smith, Elder) against “free traders,” the two sides representing the pre-capitalist and fully capitalist ideologies, respectively. Feltes’s approach serves as a reminder of the myriad of ways Victorian fiction appeared; however, his five case studies focus on rather atypical examples despite his claim that “the canonicity of the novels [chosen] is irrele- vant to [his] study of their production.”25 Inadvertently, his five chapters present a stately transition from the commodity-book (e.g., the three- volume novel) to the commodity-text (e.g., the 6s one-volume novel). His final chapter considers the end of the three-volume novel in the 1890s as “a radical transformation of the literary mode of production” in favor of the “capitalist publishers” without exactly explaining why it happened when it did and not earlier as may have been expected.26 In his follow-up study Literary Capital and the Late Victorian Novel (1993), Feltes considers the 1880s and 1890s in more detail as a tension between

[email protected] 8 T. J. BASSETT traditional publishers (e.g., Bentley) and entrepreneurial publishers (e.g., William Heinemann) through an examination of several case studies such as the rivalry between romance and realist writers. But again, his theoretical level of analysis based on case studies (“moments”) precludes any quantitative considerations or support for his claims. Continuing in the theoretical approach, Lee Erickson’s The Economy of Literary Form (1996) argues that economic considerations, such as marginal utility, help explain the prevalence and popularity of certain gen- res of literature at certain times:

It would appear that when the cost of books is high, readers will prefer a work in a literary form which will provide the most pleasure upon rereading and has the most satisfying verbal texture. Conversely, when the cost of books is low, readers will care less about the pleasure of prospective rereadings and prefer a work in a genre that gives the most immediate pleasure.27

As an example of the former situation, the sales of poetry flourished in the early years of the 1800s, a time of expensive books due to the war with France, since poetry bears rereading (that is, it continues to yield posi- tive marginal utility) due to its relatively higher literary complexity. In a chapter considering Austen and the economics of novel reading, Erick- son argues that circulating libraries and the three-volume novel “reflected the relatively low marginal utility of rereading novels for contemporary readers, the general view that novel reading was a luxury” available only to wealthy readers who could afford to buy or subscribe.28 In his view, libraries “effectively pooled the demand of many people for books only a few could afford” and thus facilitated the consumption of otherwise expensive fiction by middle-class readers, especially women.29 Fiction, due to its format and distribution, gained a reputation as ephemeral: books to be borrowed, read once, and returned. In another chapter on marketing the novel, Erickson considers the use of part-publication, cheap editions, inexpensive one-volume editions, and serialization as attempts by publishers to sell fiction directly to readers by opening up new markets and audiences. That most of these attempts to lower the cost of fiction only succeeded with already popular novelists or outright failed confirms his claim about the low marginal utility of fiction—readers preferred the steady stream of new novels from the libraries rather than buying or own- ing them. Erickson’s study helps explain the Victorian view that England

[email protected] 1 INTRODUCTION 9 was a book borrowing country: why should readers buy an expensive (or even less expensive) novel to be read only once? However, despite the economic focus of his approach, he utilized little to no actual economic data to support his claims, whether publisher or library records, that fiction was produced and consumed in such a way.30 In the last twenty-five years, most research on Victorian publishing history generally and the novel in particular has heeded Sutherland’s call for more empirical research in the writing, publishing, distribution, and consumption of fiction. Broadly speaking, the development of the History of the Book as an academic field has fueled the attention paid to the Victo- rian production of fiction. Robert L. Patten’s Charles Dickens and his Pub- lishers (1978) uses contracts, correspondence, and publishers’ ledgers to trace the market forces shaping the production and consumption of Dick- ens’s works in the Victorian period from serials to first issue to reprints to collected editions. Simon Eliot has produced a number of works utilizing a quantitative approach to Victorian publishing, chief among which is Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing, 1800–1919 (1994). In it, using statistics from the Publishers’ Circular and other contemporary sources, he traces the steady, if not exponential, growth in the number of books published in the British Isles over the long nineteenth century. Additionally, he tracks the simultaneous rise of fiction as the dominant genre in British publishing and general decrease in the price of books in the marketplace. Such data confirm the anecdotal observations of many Victorians themselves and later scholars. Following his lead, Alexis Wee- don’s Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market, 1836–1916 (2003) examines the publishing records of a dozen publishers to trace the growth of publishing and the diversity of books produced during the period. In particular, she concentrates on the development of a mass market—selling a large number of inexpensively priced books—in the shadow of the expensive three-volume novel and library system. As her chapters on Wilkie Collins and Ouida show, many of these cheap books were reprints of library novels. The business practices of the circulating libraries have garnered more attention since Griest’s study of Mudie’s. Eliot, in three articles, has himself addressed several interrelated issues relating to the libraries’ financial success. In “The Three-Decker Novel and its First Cheap Reprint, 1862– 94” (1985) and “Bookselling by the Backdoor: Circulating Libraries, Booksellers and Book Clubs 1876–1966” (1995), he considers the chief complaints of the libraries toward publishers in their ultimatum: that is,

[email protected] 10 T. J. BASSETT the appearance of cheap reprints of three-volume novels affecting their circulation profits and re-sale market. In the former article, Eliot samples a number of titles to find that the first reprints of three-volume novels varied widely in price (ranging from 2s to 6s) and time of issue (from a few months to a few years) but generally the “premature issue of cheap first reprints” of the popular authors he examines (for instance, Braddon, Ouida, and Wood) had become “commonplace” by the 1890s.31 Eliot’s second article considers the business model of Mudie’s Select Library and W. H. Smith and Son’s Subscription Library (whose records partial survive) and argues the libraries depended significantly on sales of no longer needed copies of three-volume novels to bolster their bottom lines, “an activity which frequently determined the difference between a profit and a loss.”32 This re-sale business depended on the initial (and lasting) popularity of the title and the potential competition with cheap reprint editions. Tellingly, Smith’s library posted a loss in 1893–1894, the period immediately preceding the ultimatum—more than a coincidence in Eliot’s view—which serves as an immediate motivation for the libraries’ ultimatum. A third article by Eliot, “Fiction and Non-Fiction: One- and Three- volume Novels in Some Mudie Catalogues, 1857–94,” finds that the library’s stock depended heavily on fiction and on the three-volume format in particular, thus adding evidence to the close relationship between the libraries and this particular publishing format.33 Stephen Colclough’s article “‘A Larger Outlay than any Return’: The Library of W. H. Smith and Son, 1860–1873” (2003) also examines the Smith records to track the development of the library to its establishment as a profitable enter- prise by the 1870s. In particular, he untangles the details surrounding a potential partnership between Mudie and Smith that floundered before Smith decided to start his own independent library.34 David Finkelstein’s article “‘The Secret’: British Publishers and Mudie’s Struggle for Eco- nomic Survival 1861–64” (1993) uncovers the details of how several major publishers—including Blackwood, Hurst and Blackett, Longman, John Murray, and Smith, Elder—combined to financially prop up Mudie’s after “over-expansion and private extravagance led to near-bankruptcy.”35 Ultimately, self-interest motivated the publishers to keep Mudie’s in business, both to recover the monies owed to them and to ensure the continued existence of their chief means of book distribution. These works and others on the circulating libraries build significantly on Griest’s work and illustrate complex inter-connections between publishers and libraries in the Victorian period.36

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Utilizing publishers’ archives when existing, scholars have furthered our understanding of the Victorian publishing business, especially as it relates to the fiction marketplace. Several recent studies have focused on Victorian publishers. Leslie Howsam’s Kegan Paul, A Victorian Imprint (1998) chronicles the development of the specialist publisher which began as the minor publisher Henry S. King. Peter Newbolt’s William Tins- ley (1831–1902): “Speculative Publisher” (2001) focuses on one of the major fiction publishers of the mid-Victorian period: though Tinsley’s records sadly do not survive, Newbolt marshals numerous contemporary sources in his history. Finkelstein’s The House of Blackwood: Author- Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (2002) draws on the largely complete Blackwood archives to trace authorial contracts and sales.37 These works and others show, to use Sutherland’s words, the shaping influence of contracts in the production of fiction. In addition, some scholars have concentrated on a single author or novel, such as Patten’s Charles Dick- ens and His Publishers mentioned above. Peter L. Shillingsburg’s Pega- sus in Harness: Victorian Publishing and W. M. Thackeray (1992) examines Thackeray’s career from literary dilettante to hack to professional through his interactions with his publishers in order to determine the how the market shapes an author (or vice versa). Linda H. Peterson’s Becoming a Woman of Letters (2009) shows through the careers of several women authors, notably Charlotte Brontë, Margaret Oliphant, and Char- lotte Riddell, how they navigated the literary marketplace, especially how they achieved both financial and critical success. This work reminds us that gender and class also affect the production of literature. More recently, several works discuss the impact of the three-volume format on individual authors, including Pierre Coustillas’s The Heroic Life of George Gissing (3 parts, 2011–2012), Graham Law and Andrew Maunder’s Wilkie Collins: A Literary Life (2008), and Andrew Nash’s William Clark Russell and the Victorian Nautical Novel (2014). All three authors—Collins, Gissing, and Russell—proved prolific authors of three-volume fiction and all had marked success with the format, though Gissing is perhaps best known for his criticism of the format in his (three-volume) novel New Grub Street (1890). Several edited collections of essays also attest to the interest in Victorian publishing history, such as John O. Jordan and Robert Patten’s Literature in the Marketplace Nineteenth-Century British Pub- lishing and Reading Practices (1995), Elizabeth James’s Macmillan: A Publishing Tradition from 1843 (2002), and Finkelstein’s Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition 1805–1930 (2006). All of these works (and

[email protected] 12 T. J. BASSETT many more not mentioned here) take both the literary and the economic as determinatives of value and see the production of books as a part of a larger cultural production. This study of the history of the three-volume novel builds on these earlier works. Whereas some have examined the literary form of the triple- decker, none have attempted a comprehensive study of the format as a literary and economic product. To that end, this study begins with a general bibliometric overview of the format before turning to the economics undergirding their existence, from both the publishers’ side and the libraries’ side. Then, it will turn to the end of the three-volume novel, especially the development of alternatives deliberately positioned in the marketplace to serve as direct rivals to the library novel. In particular, the new romance and series publication will be considered as key to establish- ing England as a book buying instead of book borrowing market. Chapter 2 takes a quantitative approach to the three-volume format to determine statistics for their overall production during the Victorian period. Based on the data collected in the digital humanities project At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837 –1901 (2007– present), basic questions can now be answered about the format, including how many multi-volume novels were produced, who wrote them, and who published them. Continuing the bibliographical work of Gar- side, Shöwerling, and Anthony Mandal, the data show a steady increase in the overall number of two- and three-volume titles published during the century, up to and including the year of the libraries’ ultimatum. On the surface, then, the expensive format seems much more successful than many previous scholars have thought—perhaps representing a quarter of all fiction titles published during the years of its existence. Looking further into the numbers, the data show at any one time a relatively small number of publishers dominate the production of multi-volume fiction, even though some 200 publishers produced at least one title. Some 2200 identifiable authors wrote at least one multi-volume title, but a smaller number of authors, about 400, wrote the majority of titles. Margaret Oliphant herself contributes 10 two-volume novels and 61 three-volume novels during her long career. As we shall see, such prolificacy extended to both men and women authors, but women authors did pen the majority of multi-volume titles, dominating the last quarter of the nineteenth century, giving some credence to Gettmann’s droll definition of a three- decker as “a novel written by Mrs. Henry Wood, Mary Elizabeth Brad- don, Rhoda Broughton, or Ouida.”38 In addition, the data show nearly

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1500 of these multi-volume titles were serialized at some point, the vast majority before book publication. The strong connection between periodical serialization and book publication underscores the high degree of marketplace coordination between these (on the surface at least) different modes of literary production. Though the data provide numerous insights itself, it also serves as a foundation to the later discussions. Building on the works of Gettmann, Sutherland, and others, Chapter 3 examines the publishing accounts of over 100 three-volume novels published by Richard Bentley between 1865 and 1890 in order to assess the costs of production and financial success of the format for Victorian publishers. As the second chapter shows, Bentley was the second-largest producer of multi-volume fiction during the period so his experience with the format speaks to the wider publishing marketplace. Whereas other scholars have examined a handful of accounts, this chapter draws on a substantial sample (nearly 15% of the triple-deckers Bentley published in the Victorian period) for its conclusions. What the numbers show, in general, is very few three-volume novels lost money for the publisher, reinforcing the view that the format was commercially safe. In fact, the vast majority of the titles examined here made money for Bentley in their first and later editions: thus, the format was a substantial profit-making sector for Bentley. Going further, this financial success of the format for Bentley extends over several decades, even until the 1890s. Women authors wrote most of his multi-volume fiction, but Bentley did not underpay them, actually quite the reverse. In fact, the profitability of the format can be attributed to predictable sales to the libraries not to exploiting authors. For Bentley and other publishers, then, the financial incentives to produce multi-volume fiction seem to have been considerable and long-lasting. Chapter 4 considers the business model of the circulating library through an examination of the accounts of W. H. Smith and Son’s Sub- scription Library, the second-largest circulating library of the Victorian period. The chapter draws on and continues the work of Eliot and Col- clough discussed above to give a comprehensive financial history of the library operation from its beginnings in 1860 to the end of the century. In particular, as one of the chief purchasers of multi-volume fiction, the experiences of Smith speak potentially to the effect three-volume novels had on all libraries. The records show that after a few rough years Smith entered a long period of sustained profits based on a growing subscription base and second-hand sales which also corresponded to the peaks of multi-volume novel production. Though existing library catalogues attest

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Smith relied less on three-volume novels, the library continued to make annual profits despite (or because of?) the hundreds of multi-volume titles publisher per year. As Eliot points out, cheap reprints became commonplace—however, the data show both an increase in the number of titles being reprinted and a decrease in the delay between the first edition and the cheap reprint. The library recorded a loss in 1893–1894, however assessing the accounts finds several plausible explanations for the loss other than the three-volume novel or its cheap reprints. The end of the chapter reconsiders the libraries’ ultimate in light of this data and suggests other motivating factors at play in calling for the end of the three-volume novel. The last chapter looks at several marketplace challengers to the three- volume novel system in the 1880s and 1890s. Cheap reprints challenged the library monopoly on new fiction—that is, a three-volume novel could only be accessed via a library—but inexpensive one-volume fiction developed unevenly as publishers attempted to gage and create a buying public for new fiction. The publication of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Trea- sure Island (1883) created an entry position for the “New Romance” in the fiction marketplace: intended as a “boys’ book” for juvenile readers, Stevenson’s friends (especially the editor W. E. Henley) lauded the book as suitable for men readers. Later authors, such as H. Rider Haggard, imitated Stevenson’s book and many critics, such as Andrew Lang, used the publication of the New Romance as a means to attack the domestic realism of library fiction. The censorship of George Moore’s triple-decker A Modern Lover (1883) by Mudie’s Select Library led to his one-man crusade against the library system. Enlisting the minor publisher Henry Vizetelly, Moore advocated the inexpensive one-volume novel as a means to break the power of the libraries. The success of Moore and Vizetelly was short-lived since the libraries did not themselves censor literature but served as the mechanism for larger cultural forces. The pioneering efforts of J. W. Arrowsmith and T. Fisher Unwin with series publication established a means for marketing new fiction to readers for purchase. Such series as Arrowsmith’s Bristol Library and the Pseudonym Library proved the existence of readers willing to buy inexpensive book by new or unknown authors. As at least two of these challenges illustrate, gender played a crucial role in these arguments through the denigration of three- volume fiction as feminine. These were not the only challenges to the three-volume format and the libraries, but they underscore the changing dynamics of the fiction marketplace in late Victorian Britain.

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Taken together, the data show the three-volume novel enjoyed a long reign as the dominant format for new fiction in England, with other formats such as reprints and serializations largely subservient to it. A handful of publishers, in particular Hurst and Blackett and Bentley, are responsible for keeping the format alive due to their large profit margins and financial influence over (at least) Mudie’s Select Library. No one action led to the end of the three-volume novel: instead, new competition from the one- volume novel, the change in reprint practices, and a new willingness from the libraries to confront the publishers combined to end the format long associated with Victorian literature.

Notes

1. James Raven and Antonia Forster, The English Novel 1770–1829, volume I: 1770–1799 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 96. One reason for the prevalence of novels published in editions of three or more volumes was publishers’ preference for the duodecimo format over octavo— the former produced smaller pages hence required more pages per book and the corresponding volumes to hold them. In the 1790s, according to Raven, three-quarters of novels were published in duodecimo (ibid., p. 97). 2. The English Novel 1770–1829, volume II: 1800–1829 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 90ff. 3. Quoted in Garside and Shöwering, pp. 91–92. 4. Ibid., p. 91. 5. Duodecimo volumes measured 5 inches by 7.375 inches and octavo volumes measured 6 inches by 9 inches. A considerable and noticeable size difference. 6. Bibliographic details of Scott’s publications come from William B. Todd and Ann Bowden’s, Sir Walter Scott: A Bibliographical History 1796–1832 (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1998). For the purposes of this discussion, I have left out Scott’s three collections of Tales of my Landlord (1816, 1818, 1819). 7. Garside and Shöwerling, op. cit., p. 92; and Jane Millgate, “Making It New: Scott, Constable, Ballantyne, and the Publication of Ivanhoe,” Stud- ies in English Literature 34 (1994), pp. 795–811. 8. Ibid., p. 94. 9. The Life of Walter Scott: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 247. 10. “The Nineteenth Century Three-Volume Novel,” Papers of the Biblio- graphical Society of America 51.4 (1957), pp. 263–302. Their work, while interesting bibliographically, does not address any of the questions about

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the production or economics of the format. Another article (based on a Grolier Club talk), Douglas C. Ewing’s, “The Three-Volume Novel,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 61.3 (1967), pp. 201–7, gives a short overview history of the format from Scott’s Kenilworth to the library ultimatum. It likewise does not add much fresh insight into the history of the format. More recently, Richard Menke’s, “The End of the Three-Volume Novel System, 27 June 1894” (available through BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History,ed. Dino Franco Felluga, 2013) gives a good and thorough overview of the format, in particular focusing on the reaction of authors and publishers to its end in the 1890s. 11. Royal Gettmann, A Victorian Publisher: A Study of the Bentley Papers (Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 232. 12. Ibid., pp. 239, 240. 13. Ibid., pp. 258–59. 14. Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel (Indiana University Press, 1970), pp. 38, 39–40. 15. On the face of it, the circulation of an expensive three-volume novel or three copies of a less expensive one-volume novel would generate similar income to the library. The economics of the libraries will be discussed in Chapter 4. 16. Ibid., p. 174. Notably, Griest uses Gettmann as her chief source. 17. Several other studies from the period should also be mentioned, though they do not add much more about the three-volume novel than Gettmann and Griest: Richard D. Altick’s, The English Common Reader (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1959); Charles Morgan’s The House of Macmillan, 1843–1943 (London: Macmillan, 1943); Kathleen Tillotson’s, Novels of the Eighteen Forties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954); and F. D. Tredrey’s, The House of Blackwood, 1804–1954 (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1954). 18. John Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 6. 19. John Sutherland, “The Economics of the Victorian Three-Volume Novel,” Business Archives 41 (1976), p. 25. His conclusions and the proﬁtability of the three-volume novel will be considered in more detail in Chapter 3. 20. John Sutherland, Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), p. 151. 21. He writes a persuasive argument for this type of work in “Publishing His- tory: A Hole in the Centre of Literary Sociology,” Critical Inquiry 14.3 (1988), pp. 574–89. Two other Sutherland works deserve mention: he considers literary contracts in “The Fiction Earning Patterns of Thack- eray, Dickens, George Eliot and Trollope,” Browning Institute Studies 7

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(1979), pp. 71–92, and publishing history in the essays collected in Vic- torian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers (1995). 22. N. N. Feltes, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. ix. 23. Ibid., p. x. 24. Ibid., p. 26. Emphasis in original. Petty commodity production is defined as a form of economic production in which the producer himself or herself owns and controls the means of production and the product (e.g., commodity) of his or her labor. 25. Ibid., p. xi. As we shall see, few novels appeared in part-serialization such as Pickwick Papers and even fewer appeared in four volumes such as Mid- dlemarch. 26. Ibid., p. 80. 27. Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 9–10. Marginal utility measures the additional satisfaction a consumer receives from acquiring or consuming one more unit of a good or service. Erickson takes as an unexamined assumption that rereading poetry and essays naturally have greater marginal utility than rereading fiction, an assumption that sounds true but is ultimately impossible to substantiate. 28. Ibid., p. 126. 29. Ibid., p. 131. 30. One additional theoretical study deserves mention: Peter D. Macdonald’s British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880–1914 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1997) takes a Bourdieuian approach to the changes in fiction production at the turn of the century where the new mass market created a divide between economic and literary success. 31. Simon Eliot, “The Three-Decker Novel and Its First Cheap Reprint, 1862–94,” Library (1985), p. 51. This question will be examined in more detail in Chapter 4. 32. Simon Eliot, “Bookselling by the Backdoor: Circulating Libraries, Book- sellers and Book Clubs 1876–1966,” in A Genius for Letters, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1995), p. 160. 33. Simon Eliot, “Fiction and Non-Fiction: One- and Three-Volume Nov- els in Some Mudie Catalogues, 1857–94,” Publishing History 66 (2009), pp. 31–47. The finances of Smith’s Library will be examined in Chapter 4. 34. Stephen Colclough, “‘A Larger Outlay Than Any Return’: The Library of W. H. Smith and Son, 1860–1873,” Publishing History 54 (2003), pp. 67–72. 35. David Finkelstein, “‘The Secret’: British Publishers and Mudie’s Struggle for Economic Survival 1861–64,” Publishing History 34 (1993), p. 21.

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36. Other notable works discussing library practices include Colclough’s chapter “Station to Station: The LNWR and the Emergence of the Rail- way Bookstall, 1840–1875,” Printing Places: Locations of Book Production and Distribution Since 1500, ed. John Hinks and Catherine Armstrong (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2005), pp. 169–84; Lewis Robert- s’s chapter “Trafﬁcking in Literary Authority: Mudie’s Select Library and the Commodiﬁcation of the Victorian Novel,” Victorian Literature and Culture 34 (2006), pp. 1–25. 37. The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). 38. Op. cit., p. 249.

[email protected] CHAPTER 2

The Production of Multi-volume Fiction, 1837–1898

The purpose of this chapter is to present a quantitative analysis of the production of Victorian multi-volume fiction in order to address some basic questions about the format: how many multi-volume fiction titles were produced? who published them? who wrote them? how many were serialized before publication? Though multi-volume fiction was a significant subset of all Victorian fiction, the format has inspired little-to-no scholarship, in particular bibliographical treatments or cultural history. For the Romantic era, the literary period immediately preceding the Victorian, three recent works by Peter Garside, James Raven, Antonia Forster, Rainer Schöwerling, and Anthony Mandal have created a comprehensive bibliography of fiction: the book The English Novel 1770– 1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles (2 volumes, 2000), the affiliated Web site British Fiction 1800–1829: A Database of Production, Circulation and Reception (2004), and the appendix Web site The English Novel, 1830–1836: A Bibliographical Survey of Fiction Published in the British Isles (2006). In all, the authors identify 1421 fiction titles published from 1770 to 1799 (averaging 47.4 titles per year); 2272 fiction titles published from 1800 to 1829 (averaging 75.7 titles per year); and 610 fiction titles published from 1830 to 1836 (averaging 87.1 titles per year). As their numbers suggest, the production of fiction increased remarkably from the late eighteenth century up to the Victorian period.

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But to date no such bibliographical work exists for the Victorian period. An early attempt to come to terms with the Victorian novel includes Andrew Block’s enumerative bibliography The English Novel, 1740–1850 (1939; revised 1961), which only covers the first thirteen years of the sixty-four-year period and has proved woefully unreliable in its entries.1 Volume four (covering the years 1800–1900) of the revised The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (3rd ed., 1999) covers the whole century but focuses mainly on first- and second-rank novelists, some 200 in total, which is less than 3% of the 7000 nineteenth-century novelists as estimated by John Sutherland.2 As such, it is far from comprehensive. The ongoing online database Nineteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue (NSTC) is a union list of holdings of eight research libraries around the world including the Bodleian Library, the British Library, Harvard University Library, the Library of Congress, the Library of Trin- ity College, Dublin, and the National Library of Scotland. The strength of the NSTC is the scope of the listing—some 1.2 million titles—and the ability to find the libraries that hold copies. But the drawbacks are sin- gling out fiction from the mass of titles, assuming that the holdings of these particular eight libraries are comprehensive. In lieu of comprehensive bibliographies, scholars have relied on Michael Sadleir’s XIX Cen- tury Fiction: A Bibliographical Record Based on His Own Collection (2 volumes, 1951) and Robert Lee Wolff’s Nineteenth-Century Fiction: A Bibliographical Catalogue Based on the Collection Formed by Robert Lee Wolff (5 volumes, 1981–1986). Neither collection is exhaustive: Sadleir’s collection (housed at UCLA) consists of over 3000 volumes and Wolff’s collection (housed at the University of Texas) consists of over 6000 volumes, and both collections contain multiple editions of some titles. So, at best, Sadleir’s and Wolff’s collections represent a small, though significant, fraction of Victorian fiction.

At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837--1901

With this in mind, I created At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837–1901 (ATCL) to fill this need for a comprehensive bibliographical resource for nineteenth-century fiction. Begun in 2007, the database currently contains entries for 16,374 titles, 3438 authors, and 508 publishers as well as information about 2588 novel serializations in 229 periodicals.3 Significantly, the database accounts for all of the two-, three-, and four-volume novels published between 1837 and 1901 in Great Britain.

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Titles To be included in the database, a prose fiction title, whether novel or short story collection, needed to be published in English in Great Britain between 1837 and 1901. As we shall see, nearly all titles were published in London or Edinburgh. In rare cases, a few Dublin-area publishers are included in the database: for instance, the Irish publisher William J. Curry partnered with London publishers to print and distribute his books in England (however, such arrangements were rare). Furthermore, works clearly aimed at children (i.e., under 12 years of age) and works with less than 100 pages of text were omitted. Only first book publication information is included: thus, information about reprints or later editions is not included. Works by foreign authors, including American authors, are included if the title was published in a British edition. For example, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer: or, The First War-Path was first published by Lea and Blanchard in Philadelphia in 1841 and later that year by Richard Bentley in London. Hence, only the latter edition is included in ATCL. Likewise, translations of foreign works are included if published in English in Great Britain. For example, Emilie Flygare-Carlén’s The Her- mit was first published in the author’s native Swedish in Stockholm in 1846 and later published in English translation by T. Cautley Newby in 1853. Hence, only the latter edition is included in ATCL. In general, only fiction written or published in the English language is considered. Multiple sources were consulted in creating the database. First, The English Catalogue of Books (ECB) (7 volumes, 1863–1906) served as the foundation for the database: based on lists of newly published books appearing in the weekly trade magazine the Publishers’ Circular,theedi- tors compiled and published an annual list which was then combined into the volumes of the catalogue every few years beginning in the 1860s. The ECB lists entries alphabetically by author (if named) or title with information about format (e.g., crown octavo), price, publisher, and date. Since the ECB relies on self-reporting by publishers and the combination of secondary listings, the catalogues on first blush cannot be trusted to be comprehensive or accurate. As they themselves note in the prefaces to The English Catalogue of Books, the compilers took great care to present accurate lists; however, some errors and omissions still occur and can be seen when compared to other bibliographies. But overall, despite these occa- sional lapses, the ECB proved to be a fairly reliable and comprehensive source for bibliographical information as compared to other sources.

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The scale of the project—well into several thousands of books—fore- stalled any attempt to examine each title individually.4 So the data from the ECB were then compared to various library catalogues and print bibliographies. In particular, the British Library and the University of Oxford online catalogues were consulted for each title: as deposit libraries for the United Kingdom, one or both libraries typically owned a physical copy so their entries could be used to correct errors in the ECB. In addition, each library was searched for titles missed by the ECB (relatively few titles as it turned out). In rare cases, the search expanded to other libraries in order to locate a physical copy of each title. Next, print bibliographies were consulted, such as Sadleir, Wolff, and Margaret Harris’s A Check- list of the “Three-Decker” Collection in the Fisher Library, University of Sydney (1980), in order to verify bibliographical details. Another recent bibliography proved extremely helpful: Rolf Loeber and Magda Loeber’s A Guide to Irish Fiction 1650–1900 (2006) overlapped considerably with ATCL and contained a signiﬁcant number of relevant titles. More rarely, author or publisher bibliographies were used: for instance, R. W. Stew- art’s Benjamin Disraeli: A List of Writings by Him (1972), John Stock Clarke’s Margaret Oliphant: A Bibliography (1986), and publisher Bent- ley’s A List of the Principal Publications (8 volumes, 1893–1920). Thus, all titles in the database were veriﬁed in at least two sources. Lastly, when possible, books were examined in either physical or digitized copies (e.g., Google Books or HathiTrust). At a minimum, the database includes each book’s complete title, author, publisher, publication year (as stated on the title page), format (number of volumes and size), and price.

Authors Every attempt has been made to identify authors when possible through publisher’s records or other means. At a minimum, the database aims to include an author’s legal, maiden, married, and pen names, birth and death dates, nationality, and occupations. A large number of authors, about a thousand, already appear in standard reference sources such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Frederick Boase’s Mod- ern English Biography, the Loebers’ A Guide to Irish Fiction 1650–1900, and Sutherland’s Companion to Victorian Fiction. However, the majority of authors require much more work to uncover. Digital genealogical resources have proved a boon in this regard: authors often can be traced

[email protected] 2 THE PRODUCTION OF MULTI-VOLUME FICTION, 1837–1898 23 in English census records, probate records, and vital records via Ances- try.com or similar sites. The digitization of newspapers and periodicals (especially the Times Digital Archive) has served as a fruitful source for tracing authors. At times, anonymous and pseudonymous authors proved the most vexing to trace. Attributions in ATCL were made only if there was a high degree of conﬁdence in the identiﬁcations.

Serializations In order to trace the serializations of multi-volume fiction, over 200 mag- azines and newspapers were examined either directly or through published bibliographies. Of them, 164 periodicals serialized multi-volume fiction (for a complete list of periodicals, see Table 2.32). When possible, the start and end dates and the frequency of appearance (weekly or monthly) of the serialization are recorded. The chief bibliographies consulted include J. Don Vann’s Victorian Novels in Serial,theVicto- rian Fiction Research Guides series (7 volumes), The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900, and Graham Law’s Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press. Digital archives of periodicals proved especially fruitful: in particular, Chadwyck-Healey’s British Periodicals collection, the British Newspaper Archive collection, the Welsh Newspapers Online collection, and Thomson-Gale’s Nineteenth-Century UK Periodicals collection. Print copies of several dozen periodicals were examined at the British Library, Cambridge University Library, Indiana University, and the National Library of Scotland. Serials in parts, though relatively few in number, were identified in several sources, most notably in Vann’s work and Sutherland’s article “Dickens’s Serializing Imitators.”5

General Production of Multi-volume Fiction, 1837--1898

From 1837 to 1898, the Victorians produced 7272 multi-volume fiction titles. As Fig. 2.1 and Tables 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6,and2.7 show, from 1837 to 1860, the number of multi-volume fiction titles gradually increased from an average of 60.0 titles per year in the later 1830s to 71.1 titles per year in the 1840s to 80.4 titles per year in the 1850s. For these first twenty-six years, annual production ranges between a low of 51 multi-volume titles published in 1838 and a high of 94 multi-volume titles published in 1860. The general economic turmoil of the 1840s may

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200

150

100

0 1837 1838 1848 1849 1850 1857 1876 1877 1889 1839 1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856 1858 1859 1860 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1872 1873 1874 1875 1878 1879 1880 1881 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1868 1869 1870 1871 1882 1883

Multi-Volume Titles Published 3-Year Moving Average

Fig. 2.1 Multi-volume titles published, 1837–1898

Table 2.1 Multi-volume titles published, 1837–1840

Year 2-volume titles 3-volume titles 4-volume titles Total

1837 13 45 0 58 1838 10 41 0 51 1839 8 52 0 60 1840 8 63 0 71 Total 39 201 0 240

Table 2.2 Multi-volume titles published, 1841–1850

Year 2-volume titles 3-volume titles 4-volume titles Total

1841 11 63 1 75 1842 10 55 0 65 1843 6 63 1 70 1844 18 68 1 87 1845 17 62 1 80 1846 8 54 1 63 1847 11 45 1 57 1848 15 48 0 63 1849 24 51 0 75 1850 17 59 0 76 Total 137 568 6 711

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Table 2.3 Multi-volume titles published, 1851–1860

Year 2-volume titles 3-volume titles 4-volume titles Total

1851 22 59 0 81 1852 21 65 0 86 1853 23 48 2 73 1854 32 52 0 84 1855 12 48 0 60 1856 29 53 0 82 1857 29 60 0 89 1858 34 45 0 79 1859 30 45 1 76 1860 41 53 0 94 Total 273 528 3 804

Table 2.4 Multi-volume titles published, 1861–1870

Year 2-volume titles 3-volume titles 4-volume titles Total

1861 34 47 1 82 1862 38 53 0 91 1863 45 72 0 117 1864 61 99 1 161 1865 40 110 0 150 1866 42 86 0 128 1867 47 112 1 160 1868 41 109 0 150 1869 28 85 0 113 1870 31 95 0 126 Total 407 868 3 1278 explain the slow growth in the number of multi-volume titles produced during these years. Regardless, the annual number of multi-volume fiction titles continues a fairly slow growth during the first third of Victori- a’s reign. After 1860, however, the number of multi-volume fiction titles increases rapidly, reaching 161 titles published in 1864 and 150 titles published in 1865 and, after a brief decline to 128 titles publishing in 1866, reaching 160 titles published in 1867 and 150 titles published in 1868. These twin peaks in the 1860s represent a doubling in the number of multi-volume titles produced annually compared to the previous quarter

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Table 2.5 Multi-volume titles published, 1871–1880

Year 2-volume titles 3-volume titles 4-volume titles Total

1871 26 95 0 121 1872 41 102 2 145 1873 48 118 1 167 1874 41 112 1 154 1875 35 134 0 169 1876 37 134 2 173 1877 35 130 0 165 1878 51 119 1 171 1879 55 136 0 191 1880 44 149 0 193 Total 413 1229 7 1649

Table 2.6 Multi-volume titles published, 1881–1890

Year 2-volume titles 3-volume titles 4-volume titles Total

1881 38 123 0 161 1882 43 130 0 173 1883 45 161 0 206 1884 49 139 0 188 1885 55 135 0 190 1886 57 124 0 181 1887 54 116 0 170 1888 57 107 0 164 1889 61 97 0 158 1890 49 120 0 169 Total 508 1252 0 1760 century. The establishment of W. H. Smith’s circulating library in 1860 may explain the sudden jump in production as publishers recognized a potentially larger market for library novels and increased the production of titles to meet it. After a brief three-year lull from 1869 to 1871, the next eight years see exceptional growth from 145 multi-volume titles published in 1872 to 193 multi-volume titles published in 1880 (an increase of over a third). In the 1860s, an average of 127.8 titles per year appeared; in the 1870s, an average of 164.9 titles per year appeared—nearly a 30%

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Table 2.7 Multi-volume titles published, 1891–1898

Year 2-volume titles 3-volume titles 4-volume titles Total

1891 63 106 0 169 1892 54 110 0 164 1893 53 132 0 185 1894 79 113 0 192 1895 32 39 0 71 1896 25 13 0 38 1897 6 2 0 8 1898 3 0 0 3 Total 315 515 0 830 Total 1837–1898 2092 5161 19 7272 rise in production between the 1860s and 1870s. The early 1880s continued these gains, peaking at 206 multi-volume titles published in 1883. The late 1880s reversed these gains, enduring a gradual slide down to the 158 multi-volume titles published in 1889. Despite these ups and downs, the 1880s still averaged 176.0 multi-volume titles per year. Contrary, perhaps, to expectations, the 1890s witness another rise in the production of multi-volume titles from 169 titles in 1890 up to 192 titles in 1894, the year of the libraries’ ultimatum. In spite of the conditions demanded by the libraries, multi-volume fiction continued to be published for four years after their ultimatum, though the decline was dramatic: 192 new titles in 1894 followed by 71 titles in 1895, 38 titles in 1896, 8 titles in 1897, and 3 titles in 1898. Effectively, the last two three-volume novels were G. A. Henty’s The Queen’s Cup (published by Chatto and Windus) and Algernon Gissing’s The Scholar of Bygate (published by Hutchinson), both appearing in early 1897. The following year, 1898, witnessed the end of the Victorian multi-volume novel altogether with the publication of three two-volume novels: Grace Keith Johnston’s The Mischief Maker, John Kirkwood Leys’s Under a Mask (both issued by Bentley in his final year of business) and J. C. Philpots’s Stephen Brent (published by Archibald Constable). Thus, the practice of publishing new fiction in multiple volumes which stretched back to the early eighteenth century ended on the cusp of the twentieth century. Overall, the Victorian period shows new multi-volume fiction titles as numerous on the eve of its demise as it was ten years or twenty years

[email protected] 28 T. J. BASSETT earlier. This is rather surprising, perhaps, to many who thought the three- volume novel “old fashioned” or a relic of an earlier time. The three- volume novel, rather than fading away as the century wore on, actually reached its peak of production in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Seem- ingly, given the overall number of titles produced, multi-volume fiction appears to have enjoyed continued success up to the very end. However, when compared to overall new book and fiction production, the data paint another picture. Table 2.8 shows the number of multi- volume fiction titles compared to the number of new editions (both fiction and nonfiction) produced decade by decade. (The latter numbers come from the Publishers’ Circular as presented in Simon Eliot’s Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing 1800–1919.6) First, the data show that multi-volume fiction was a tiny fraction of overall book production, well less than 5% of total titles in any year between 1841 and 1898. That said, the percentage of multi-volume fiction titles to all titles nearly doubled between the 1850s and the 1870s, suggesting that the increase in multi-volume fiction titles produced in the 1870s was greater than just the increase in the overall production of books. In one year, in particular 1874, multi-volume fiction represented 3.6% of all titles produced (154 of 4312 titles). In the 1880s, multi-volume fiction maintained a similar percentage of overall book production (3.0%), peaking in 1886 when multi-volume fiction represented 3.5% of all titles produced (181 of 5210 titles). The dramatic decline in the 1890s belies the fact that the production of multi-volume titles in the early 1890s remained remarkably stable: 3.0% of all books in 1891 (169 of 5706 titles) and 3.0% of all books in 1894 (192 of 6458 titles). Hence, not only did the raw number

Table 2.8 Multi-volume titles and Years Multi-volume All editions Percentage overall titles published, titles 1840–1898 1841–1850 711 35,599 2.0 1851–1860 804 46,066 1.7 1861–1870 1278 43,069 3.0 1871–1880 1649 50,201 3.3 1881–1890 1760 57,977 3.0 1891–1898 830 53,331 1.6

Source Simon Eliot, Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing 1800–1919

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Table 2.9 Multi-volume titles and Year Multi-volume All ﬁction titles Percentage overall ﬁction titles titles published, 1870–1894 1870 126 200 63.0 1871 121 155 78.1 1872 145 132 109.8 1873 167 507 32.9 1874 154 516 29.8 1875 169 644 26.2 1876 173 452 38.3 1877 165 446 37.0 1878 171 447 38.3 1879 191 607 31.5 1880 193 380 50.8 1881 161 446 36.1 1882 173 306 56.5 1883 206 349 59.0 1884 188 408 46.1 1885 190 455 41.8 1886 181 755 24.0 1887 170 762 22.3 1888 164 929 17.7 1889 158 1040 15.2 1890 169 881 19.2 1891 169 896 18.9 1892 164 1147 14.3 1893 185 935 19.8 1894 192 1315 14.6 Total 4245 15,110 28.1

Source: Publishers’ Circular of multi-volume fiction titles peak in the 1870s and 1880s, but the overall market share of multi-volume fiction to all titles fiction and nonfiction also peaked then as well. The figures from the 1890s again point to the robust production of multi-volume fiction up to the end. Compared to the overall number of new fiction titles, however, the situation appears much less rosy. In 1870, the Publishers’ Circular began publishing statistics on book production annually in a feature called the “Analytical Table of Books Published” which included broad subject clas- sifications. Table 2.9 shows the number of multi-volume fiction titles compared to the number of new fiction titles published in the years 1870– 1894.7 Ignoring the first three years of the data (which look suspiciously

[email protected] 30 T. J. BASSETT small), the 1870s saw multi-volume fiction titles account for on average 34.6% of all fiction titles per year (1383 of 3999 titles), ranging from 26.2% of titles in 1875 to 50.8% of titles in 1880. As a share of fiction production, the multi-volume novel was fully a third of all new fiction titles published during the late 1870s. New multi-volume fiction maintains this market share during the first years of the 1880s. In the following five years (1881–1885), the period of peak production, multi-volume fiction titles represent 46.7% of all new fiction titles, reaching 56.5% of titles in 1882 and 59.0% of titles in 1883. Thus, not only did the number of multi-volume fiction titles published reach a maximum in 1883, but this maximum corresponded to the largest fraction of new fiction titles published that year. The early 1880s, then, witness multi-volume fiction not only reaching peak production in raw number of titles but also attaining a majority share of the fiction market. Quite clearly, during this mid-Victorian period, multi-volume fiction is the dominant format for new fiction in Britain—more new fiction appeared in multiple-volume editions than one-volume editions. However, from 1886 to 1894, the situation changes dramatically. While the number of multi-fiction titles published remains relatively stable or even increases slightly, the number of new fiction titles published increases rapidly: from 455 titles in 1885 to 755 titles in 1886 (a 66.0% increase), to 1040 titles in 1889, to 1315 titles in 1894 (a 189.0% increase over 1885). During the years 1886 to 1894, multi-volume fiction titles account for 17.9% of new fiction titles, sliding steadily from 41.8% of titles in 1885 to 14.6% of titles in 1894. In the space of ten years, multi-volume fiction went from being a leading publishing format to an increasingly marginalized format. Beginning in the mid-1880s, then, the production of multi-volume novels stopped keeping pace with the overall production of new fiction and became a much smaller segment of overall fiction production. As Eliot shows, fiction as a category accounted for 23% of books in the 1870s, 26% of books in the 1880s, and 31% of books in the 1890s.8 Thus, at a time when more and more new fiction titles were being published, fewer and fewer of them originally appeared in multi- volume formats. These data confirm what many long suspected: beginning in the 1880s, more publishers by-passed the three-volume format in favor of inexpensive one-volume fiction. Many publishers, such as Arrow- smith, Cassells, Longmans, T. Fisher Unwin, and Vizetelly, for example, avoided or curtailed the production of multi-volume fiction in favor of novels in single volumes. (Several of these publishers will be discussed in

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Chapter 5.) As Simon Eliot observes in Some Patterns and Trends,“The period 1870–1890 witnessed the emergence of the cheap book… These changes were almost certainly associated with the collapse of the three- decker novel, the development of the Net Book system and the extensive re-publication of both copyright and non-copyright fiction in extremely cheap formats.”9 The data presented here certainly confirm his view. By the 1880s, though the three-volume format was still economically viable, alternative formats clearly began to make steady and substantial inroads in the market for three-volume novels. Overall, the data point to some general conclusions. First, the number of multi-volume fiction titles produced during the Victorian period generally increased annually up to and including 1894, the year of the libraries’ ultimatum. In this light, multi-volume fiction appears to be a thriving format for new fiction during most of the nineteenth century. (As Chapter 3 will show, the publisher Bentley for one had long-continued success with three-volume novels.) Notably, the ultimatum does not kill the format immediately—instead it lingers on in decline for another four years. Sec- ond, compared to overall book and new fiction publishing, the multi- volume novel maintains a steady market share from the late 1830s until the 1870s, somewhere around 3% of all books published and a third of all new fiction. The early 1880s see multi-volume fiction reach its peak production, representing over half of all new fiction published. Thereafter, though the number of titles remains high, the market share of multi- volume fiction falls dramatically in the early 1890s. Arguably, the three- volume novel enjoyed its greatest moment in the 1870s and 1880s.

Format and Price

Overall, for the Victorian period, new novels typically appeared in formats of one, two, three, or four volumes. As Tables 2.1–2.7 show, the Victori- ans produced 2092 two-volume fiction titles, 5161 three-volume fiction titles, and 19 four-volume fiction titles between 1837 and 1898. Hence, overall, novels in three volumes represented 71.0% of all multi-volume fiction titles produced, more than double the novels in two volumes produced (28.8%) and far eclipsing the novels in four volumes produced (0.3%) (more on the latter format below). The retail price for multi- volume fiction generally ran 10s 6d per volume, determined by the iconic one-and-a-half guinea (31s 6d) price for the three-volume novel.10 As a later chapter will show, circulating libraries never paid these full prices

[email protected] 32 T. J. BASSETT for multi-volume novels. Judging by the prices listed in The English Cat- alogue of Books, publishers rarely deviated from these traditional prices, with one notable exception. Beginning in the 1870s, Blackwood inexpli- cably lowered their prices of multi-volume novels from 10s 6d per volume to 8s 6d per volume and they routinely listed two-volume novels at 17s and three-volume novels at 25s 6d. The Scottish publisher continued this pricing practice until the end of multi-volume fiction. The reason why Blackwood chose this price remains a mystery, though additional ship- ping costs from Edinburgh to London may have figured into the change. Otherwise, throughout the Victorian period, the retail prices of multi- volume fiction remained fixed at 21s for novels in two volumes, 31s 6d for novels in three volumes, and 42s for novels in four volumes. In most years, publishers produced roughly twice as many new novels in three volumes than in two volumes. Decade by decade, the data show novels in two volumes become somewhat more common as the century progresses: novels in two volumes account for 16.3% of multi- volume titles in the late 1830s, 19.3% of multi-volume titles in the 1840s, and 34.0% of multi-volume titles in the 1850s. Beginning in the 1850s, then, novels in two volumes became twice as common than previously and more acceptable for publishers—in fact, some publishers decidedly favored novels in two volumes over three, such as Sampson Low (9 two- volume novels and 2 three-volume novels in the 1850s), John W. Parker (25 two-volume novels and no three-volume novels in the 1850s), and Saunders and Otley (19 two-volume novels and 16 three-volume novels in the 1850s). The late 1850s, in particular, witnessed quite a tide of novels in two volumes: 34 titles in 1858 (43.0% of multi-volume titles), 30 titles in 1859 (39.5%), and 41 titles in 1860 (43.6%). However, the increase in the number of novels published in two volumes never seriously threatened the dominance of novels published in three volumes which always enjoyed the majority share during the Victorian period. The next three decades witness a slight decline in the relative proportion of two- and three-volume novels: novels in two novels account for 31.8% of multi-volume titles in the 1860s, 25.0% of multi-volume titles in the 1870s, and 28.9% of multi-volume titles in the 1880s. So, during the years of peak multi-volume fiction production, novels in three volumes predominated by a large two-to-one margin.11 Entering the 1890s, the proportion of novels in two volumes continued to be about a third of all multi-volume titles until 1894. In the year of the libraries’ ultimatum, 1894, publishers produced 79 novels in two volumes (41.1%) and 113

[email protected] 2 THE PRODUCTION OF MULTI-VOLUME FICTION, 1837–1898 33 novels in three volumes (58.9%), a decided change from the previous year 1893 of 53 novels in two volumes (28.6%) and 132 novels in three volumes (71.4%). Thereafter, as the number of multi-volume titles decline, the proportion of novels in two volumes actually grew: 45.1% of titles in 1895 (32 of 71 titles), 65.8% of titles in 1896 (25 of 38 titles), 75.0% of titles in 1897 (6 of 8 titles), and all three titles in 1898. Perhaps briefly, the novel in two volumes may have been an acceptable alternative to the novel in three volumes. However, this surge of novels in two volumes did not last as the format joined the triple-decker in extinction. Overwhelm- ingly, publishers favored the three-volume format over the two-volume format by publishing more than twice as many of the former than the latter. Though infrequently used, the four-volume novel did appear occasion- ally over the course of the Victorian period—the most notable example of the format is George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872). Table 2.10 lists the 19 four-volume novels published between 1837 and 1878. Prior to the Vic- torian period, the four-volume novel was much more common. A glance through the online bibliographies British Fiction 1800–1829: A Database of Production, Circulation and Reception and The English Novel, 1830– 1836: A Bibliographical Survey of Fiction Published in the British Isles shows new novels published in one-, two-, three-, four-, five-, and six- volume editions.12 However, by the late 1820s, the number of novels in four of more volumes rapidly declined as the novel in three volumes established its cultural and marketplace dominance.13 The final decline happened unevenly over the 1830s: six four-volume novels appeared in 1830; three four-volume novels and one five-volume novel appeared in 1831; six four-volume novels appeared in 1832; and two four-volume novels appeared in 1835. No four-volume novels appeared between 1836 and 1840. Of the seventeen four-volume novels published between 1830 and 1836, twelve (including the two titles in 1835) were published by A. K. Newman and Company, the successor to William Lane and the Min- erva Press, who had regularly published novels in formats ranging from one to six volumes.14 In addition, they also published the last five-volume novel, Anne Julia Kemble Hatton’s Gerald Fitzgerald (1831). Clearly, the publisher Newman represented a by-gone era: when he stopped publishing fiction for the adult market, the four-volume novel disappeared as a regular format for new fiction. Yet, though largely obsolete, the four-volume format made a number of re-appearances during the Victorian period. Modeled on the more

[email protected] 34 T. J. BASSETT The Romance January to . 4 vols. London: T. . 4 vols. London: Saint Paul’s . 1 vol. London: Henry . 4 vols. Edinburgh: William . 4 vols. London: Adams and September 1850 to January 1853. 4 vols. Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1859. . 4 vols. London: Richard Bentley, 1844. . 4 vols. London: Richard Bentley, 1843–1844. . 4 vols. London: Trübner, 1861. Serialized weekly . 3 vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1846. Fortune’s Football: A Historical Tale 12 November 1843 to 15 December 1844. . 4 vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1841. June 1857 to January 1859. . 4 vols. Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1871–1872. Serialized in Sunday Times What Will He Do With It? . 4 vols. London: T. C. Newby, 1853. Translated from the Swedish. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine The Dark Falcon: A Tale of the Attruck . London: T. C. Newby, 1846. The Attaché; or, Sam Slick in England Strathern; or, Life at Home and Abroad. A Story of the Present Day . 4 vols. London: Henry S. King, 1872. Serialized monthly in “My Novel” by Pisistratus Caxton; or, Varieties in English Life De Clifford; or, The Constant Man The Hermit: A Novel Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 2 July to 1 October 1859. The Cloister and the Hearth: A Tale of the Middle Ages The Queen’s Lieges The Loyalist’s Daughter: A Novel or Tale of the Revolution. By a Royalist Off the Skelligs Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life The Romance of War: or, The Highlanders in Spain Four-volume novels, 1837–1878 Once a Week of War: or, TheColburn, Highlanders 1847. in France and Belgium. A Sequel to The Highlanders in Spain Henry Colburn, 1845. Serialized weekly in the Serialized monthly in Blackwood, 1853. Serialized monthly in December 1872. Issued in two series under the same title, volumes 1 and 2 published in 1843 and volumes 3 and 4 in 1844. eight (bi-)monthly parts December 1871 to December 1872. in Francis, 1867. C. Newby, 1864. 5. [Anonymous.] 6. James Grant. 7. Emilie Flygare-Carlen. 4. The Countess of Blessington. 1. [Robert Plumer Ward.] 2. [Thomas Chandler Haliburton.] 8. [Edward Bulwer Lytton.] 9. Pisistratus Caxton [Edward Bulwer Lytton]. 10. Charles Reade. 3. J. B. Fraser [John Baillie Fraser]. 14. Jean Ingelow. 11. Mrs. Ogden Meeker [Caroline Josephine Meeker, née Mason]. 13. George Eliot. 12. [Anonymous.] Table 2.10

[email protected] 2 THE PRODUCTION OF MULTI-VOLUME FICTION, 1837–1898 35 Blackwood’s 13 October to 29 The Graphic . 4 vols. London: Macmillan, 1873. Serialized . 4 vols. London: Sampson Low, 1877–1878. . 4 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876. Serialized in eight monthly parts . 4 vols. Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1873. Serialized monthly in January 1870 to December 1873. . 4 vols. Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1876. Serialized in eight monthly parts February The Parisians October 1871 to January 1874. The Pillars of the House: or, Under Wode, Under Rode The Prime Minister Daniel Deronda The History of a Crime: The Testimony of an Eye-Witness The Monthly Packet monthly in Edinburgh Magazine Translated from the French by T. H. Joyce and Arthur Locker. Serialized weekly in November 1875 to June 1876. to September 1876. December 1877 and1878. 23 March to 22 June 1878. Volumes 1 and 2 published in 1877 and volumes 3 and 4 published in 15. Charlotte M. Yonge. 16. Edward Bulwer Lytton. 17. George Eliot. 19. Victor Hugo. 18. Anthony Trollope.

[email protected] 36 T. J. BASSETT common three-volume novel, four-volume novels comprised four octavo volumes priced at two guineas (£2 2s or 42s) for the set. Another nine- teen novels in four volumes were published irregularly between 1841 and 1878. Two of the novels, arguably, could be excluded. Thomas Chan- dler Haliburton’s The Attaché: or, Sam Slick in England (1843–1844) originally appeared as two two-volume novels six months apart with the second set labeled “second series”—however, all the volumes share the same title and the publisher Bentley issued them as a four-volume set a year later. James Grant’s The Romance of War (1846–1847), about the Napoleonic War, originally appeared in three volumes subtitled “The Highlanders in Spain” in 1846. Readers demanded a sequel, so Grant quickly wrote another volume the following year entitled The Romance of War: or, The Highlanders in France and Belgium: A Sequel to the High- landers in Spain—again, all the volumes share the same title though not the same publication year. As these unusual cases show, publishers did not always intentionally turn to the four-volume novel. Generally, the continuing appearance of the format can be divided into three somewhat overlapping uses: for silver-spoon novels, for historical novels, and for long serialized novels. The 1840s witnessed six four-volume novels. Two novels, Robert Plumer Ward’s De Clifford: or, The Constant Man (1841) and the Countess of Blessington’s Strathern: or, Life at Home and Abroad (1845), were silver-fork novels, a genre popular from the mid-1820s until the mid-1840s which focused on the lives and loves of aristocratic society. The authors Ward and Blessington, as well as their publisher Henry Colburn, specialized in the silver-fork novel throughout the 1820s and 1830s.15 Notably, Ward’s previous silver-fork novel De Vere: or, The Man of Independence (1827) was published in four volumes by Colburn as well. Blessington’s earlier novels had all been three-volume affairs, but Strathern ﬁrst appeared as a serial in the Sunday Times newspaper over ﬁfty-seven weeks and the length necessitated the extra volume. Blessington herself made £600 on the novel but Colburn only sold some 400 copies of the novel thereby losing £40 himself by the novel.16 Colburn, with the exception of Grant’s novel discussed above, abandoned the four-volume novel thereafter. Of the other four-volume novels published in the 1840s, three titles are historical novels: John Baillie Fraser’s The Dark Falcon: A Tale of the Attruck (1844) is a highly romantic tale of Persia; the anonymous The Queen’s Lieges (1846) recounts the murder of Inez de Castro in

[email protected] 2 THE PRODUCTION OF MULTI-VOLUME FICTION, 1837–1898 37 medieval Spain; and Grant’s The Romance of War (1847–1848). Gen- erally, the popularity of the historical novel declined by the 1840s: with the exception of Grant’s atypical example, these four-volume novels were not successful. The following two decades of the 1850s and 1860s saw fewer four- volume novels produced, six in total, suggesting the near abandonment of the format. Blackwood published two “sprawlingly panoramic” novels by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in four volumes in the 1850s: My Novel: or, Varieties of English Life (1853) and What Will He Do with It? (1859).17 Both novels appeared as serials in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine,the former over the course of 29 months and the latter over 20 months— each serialization considerably longer than the typical novel serialization in twelve monthly installments. The unusual length, clearly, necessitated the extra volume, but the popularity of Bulwer-Lytton propelled the sales of the novels for his publisher. In a similar way, the length of Charles Reade’s novel The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), a historical novel of the Middle Ages, required an extra volume. Originally serialized in Once a Week in 14 weekly installments under the title “A Good Fight,” the novel was considerably shortened at the editor’s request but restored to its full length in book form by Reade. Whereas Bulwer-Lytton had a major publisher to back his novel, Reade paired with the relatively minor publisher Nicholas Trübner who published the novel on commission. The choice of Trübner points to the failure of Reade either to place the novel with a higher-profile publisher or to the reluctance of publishers to take his long novel even though he was a proven and popular author. Reade’s experience exemplifies the depths the four-volume format had sunk by mid-century. With the exception of Bulwer-Lytton and Black- wood, the four-volume novel became a vanity project: Reade contributed to the publication of The Cloister and the Hearth as did two other authors of four-volume novels in the 1860s. Mrs. Ogden Meeker [Caroline Josephine Meeker, née Mason] placed her historical novel Fortune’s Foot- ball (1864) with Thomas Cautley Newby, well known for his unscrupu- lous use of half-profit agreements requiring pre-payment from authors. An unknown author paid the advertising agents Adams and Francis to publish his historical novel The Loyalist’s Daughter (1867).18 Neither novel made any mark with the public: perhaps the public’s desire for the historical novel had passed or the pro-Catholic themes of these novels jarred with readers. One reviewer of The Loyalist’s Daughter commented, “We were under the impression that novels in more than the orthodox

[email protected] 38 T. J. BASSETT three volumes were altogether out of date, and we must confess that the present specimen does not at all reconcile us to their revival.”19 Judging by the data, many authors, publishers, and readers joined the reviewer in his view that the four-volume novel belonged to an earlier time. All of which makes Blackwood’s and Eliot’s use of the format for Mid- dlemarch more remarkable. Granted, Blackwoods had already used the format successfully to publish Bulwer-Lytton’s novels, but that was twenty years earlier after successfully serializing them in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. But no four-volume novel of any importance had appeared in over a decade. In a letter dated 7 May 1871, George Henry Lewes, on Eliot’s behalf, mooted the idea of a four-volume novel issued in eight 5s half-volume parts since her “story must not be spoiled for want of space.”20 (They admitted copying the idea from Victor Hugo in France.) The plan appealed to Blackwood on several levels: he admired the early portions of the novel Eliot sent to him, he trusted Eliot’s literary acu- men, and he hoped to sell books directly to the public rather than to the circulating libraries. Blackwood’s decision to publish Eliot’s novel in eight 5s parts instead of the typical twenty 1s parts and the use of four volumes instead of three volumes clearly did not deter readers: the individual parts and four-volume sets sold over 45,000 copies and generated a profit of over £6600 for the publisher between November 1871 and Decem- ber 1873.21 Eliot and Blackwood repeated this mode of production four years later with Eliot’s final novel, Daniel Deronda, which also appeared in eight monthly 5s parts between February and September 1876 and in four volumes shortly after. If anything, the second novel was more successful than the first: the individual parts and four-volume sets sold over 59,000 copies and made a profit of over £7600 for Blackwood between January 1876 and June 1877.22 The success—both financial and critical—of Middlemarch emboldened other authors and publishers to resurrect the four-volume format. Hence, the 1870s saw a brief revival of the format when seven four-volume novels appeared in the space of five years, all of them after being serialized in some manner. Jean Ingelow’s Irish romance Off the Skelligs was serialized monthly in St. Paul’s Magazine from January to December 1872 and then issued in four volumes. The newly established Henry S. King published both the magazine and the novel and later became well known as the publisher of Tennyson and other poets.23 Unfortunately, no records of the author or publisher exist to explain the publication history of the novel. However, Ingelow was a well-regarded poet when her novel began

[email protected] 2 THE PRODUCTION OF MULTI-VOLUME FICTION, 1837–1898 39 its serial run and, with the example of Eliot’s study of provincial life before him, King issued Ingelow’s novel in four volumes as a way of capitalizing on the novelty of Eliot’s novel. In fact, King stole a march on Blackwood when Off the Skelligs appeared for sale and borrowing the second week of November 1872, nearly a month before the four volumes of Middlemarch arrived in bookshops and libraries. While Eliot’s and Ingelow’s novels made their ways as serials and books, Charlotte M. Yonge’s family chronicle The Pillars of the House continued to be serialized in The Monthly Packet (which Yonge edited) from January 1870 to December 1873—an amazing 48 months or 4 full years—then published in four volumes by Macmillan in December 1873, a year after the last four-volume novel. Macmillan was a stalwart of Vic- torian publishing, issuing nearly all of Yonge’s popular religious-themed novels in her long career. The Pillars of the House shared a number of affinities with the novels of her sister authors, all three novels being long studies of provincial life. Unfortunately, no records of the author or publisher remain to explain their choice of the four-volume format. Given the serialization, the decision must have been largely pragmatic since the length of the serialization (fully twice the regular length of most serialized novels) necessitated the extra volume in book form. As with his earlier works in the 1850s, Bulwer-Lytton’s last (and unfinished) novel The Parisians was serialized in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine from October 1871 to January 1874 and then appeared in a four-volume edition. Once again the long length—twenty-eight monthly installments—may have necessitated an extra volume like his earlier novels rather than a conscious attempt to imitate Eliot’s work. The novel sold over 10,000 copies and made the publisher over £1400 between October 1873 and February 1876.24 The only novel to consciously imitate the serial and book format of Eliot’s novels was Anthony Trollope’s political novel The Prime Minis- ter: beginning a few months before Daniel Deronda began its serialization, Trollope’s novel appeared in eight monthly 5s parts from Novem- ber 1875 to June 1876 and then was published by Chapman and Hall in four volumes. Despite Trollope’s reputation and past successes, this novel was a critical and financial failure (though the novel’s reputation has improved in more recent times). After Eliot and Trollope, no other author attempted to imitate the publishing format of Middlemarch, even though in the case of Eliot’s two novels the 8-part, four-volume format proved remunerative for Blackwood.

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The last Victorian four-volume novel was Victor Hugo’s The Story of a Crime: The Testimony of an Eye-Witness. The serialization and book publication were done in two parts: the ﬁrst half of the novel was serialized in The Graphic from 13 October to 29 December 1877 and the ﬁrst two volumes of the novel were published in December with publication date 1877; and the second half of the novel was serialized in The Graphic from 23 March to 22 June 1878 and the last two volumes were published in June with publication date 1878. The delay between the publishing of the two halves in Britain followed the same delay of the original French publication. Whereas the three-volume novel lasted until 1897 and the two-volume novel lasted until 1898, the four-volume novel ended over twenty years earlier. The only publisher to consistently succeed with the format was Blackwood with the works of Bulwer-Lytton (three novels) and Eliot (two novels), a quarter of all the four-volume novels published during the period. But this was the exception: most four-volume novels failed to make any mark with the public grown used to the three-volume novel.

Authors

Based on biographical and bibliographical sources, 2220 individual authors have been definitively identified as the author of at least one multi-volume novel published between 1837 and 1898. About half of these authors appear in at least one standard reference, such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Loebers’ A Guide to Irish Fic- tion (2006), or Sutherland’s Companion to Victorian Fiction (1989). An additional 227 authors can be differentiated but not traced, such as “McGauran” author of six multi-volume fiction titles; the never identified author of Rare Pale Margaret (2 volumes, 1878) and four additional titles “by the author of Rare Pale Margaret”; or Noell Radecliffe author of eight titles. Then, there are the authors of the remaining 219 anonymous titles not attributable to any one author. Thus, some 2447 distinguishable authors and at most an additional 219 unknown authors wrote the multi-volume fiction of the Victorian period. This is well less than half of Sutherland’s “educated guess” of around 7000 Victorian novelists, suggesting his estimate may be an upper bound for the period.25 The identified authors range from the well known and canonical (e.g., Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, W. M. Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope) to the contemporarily well known and still regarded

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(e.g., Mary Elizabeth Braddon, G. P. R. James, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, and Margaret Oliphant) to the obscure and forgotten (e.g., Mrs. Forrester [the pseudonym of Emily Feake Bridges], Reginald Lucas, F. W. Robin- son, and Eliza Tabor Stephenson). Of these distinguishable authors, a majority of 1385 authors only wrote one multi-volume title each between 1837 and 1898, another 444 authors wrote two titles each, and a further 188 authors wrote three titles each. Collectively, these 2017 less prolific authors (three or fewer titles each) account for 2837 multi-volume titles produced during the period (or 39.0% of all multi-volume fiction titles). On the other hand, 430 authors published four or more multi- volume titles each, accounting for over half of all the titles produced from 1837 to 1898 (4216 of 7272 multi-volume titles or 58.0%). Over- all, then, a relatively small group of authors produced the bulk of the Victorian multi-volume novels. Going further, 143 authors published ten or more multi-volume titles each (accounting for 2642 titles or 36.3% of titles produced), 45 published twenty or more titles each (1347 titles or 18.5% of titles), and 19 published thirty or more titles each (754 titles or 10.4% of titles). Table 2.11 lists the thirty most prolific authors, each of whom wrote twenty-four or more multi-volume fiction titles each. Collec- tively, these most prolific authors account for 1031 multi-volume titles or 14.2% of the titles produced during this period—an average of 34.4 multi- volume titles each. Sutherland, in another place, observed this fact—that a core group of professional novelists produced the bulk of Victorian fiction.26 In this case, about four hundred authors wrote the majority of the Victorian multi-volume fiction published. Most, but maybe not all, of these prolific authors should be familiar names to students of the Victorian novel. Margaret Oliphant, familiarly known throughout the century as “Mrs. Oliphant,” leads the list by a relatively large margin. Her long career as a novelist stretches from the anonymous Passages in the Life of Mrs. Margaret Maitland (3 volumes, 1849) to A House in Bloomsbury (2 volumes, 1894) and includes 10 two- volume novels and 61 three-volume novels. In addition, Oliphant wrote 29 fiction titles published in the one-volume format, for an amazing 232 volumes of fiction in all. During most of her working life, Oliphant published two or more fiction titles per year, an output rarely matched by the other authors of multi-volume fiction. Her closest peers included Florence Marryat (53 multi-volume titles), Mary Elizabeth Braddon (51 titles), Annie Thomas (Mrs. Pender Cudlip) (49 titles), and F. W. Robinson (48 titles). The three women authors all contributed to the sensation novel and the peak years of multi-volume fiction production in the 1870s and

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Table 2.11 Most proliﬁc authors of Author Multi-volume titles multi-volume ﬁction, Margaret Oliphant 71 1837–1898 Florence Marryat 53 M. E. Braddon 51 Annie Thomas 49 F. W. Robinson 48 G. P. R. James 46 James Payn 42 Anthony Trollope 41 W. Clark Russell 39 George Manville Fenn 33 Catherine Gore 33 Charlotte Riddell 33 James Grant 32 Ellen Wood 32 Margaret Hungerford 31 Katharine S. Macquoid 31 W. Harrison Ainsworth 30 Elizabeth Daniel 30 Frances Trollope 30 Matilda Houstoun 28 William Black 27 Walter Besant 26 Wilkie Collins 26 Hawley Smart 25 Charlotte Yonge 25 Mrs. Alexander 24 F. Marion Crawford 24 W. E. Norris 24 Adeline Sergeant 24 Eliza Tabor Stephenson 24 Total 1031

1880s. Anthony Trollope, noted by his contemporaries for his prodigious output, appears eighth on the list with 41 multi-volume fiction titles— certainly prolific but not the most prolific. Table 2.11 is evenly split between men and women authors—14 men authors and 16 women authors—countering to some extent the stereo- type of the prolific lady novelist. The majority of the authors specialized in a particular kind of novel. The prolific male authors tend to be historical or nautical: together G. P. R. James, James Grant, W. Clark Russell, G. Manville Fenn, and W. Harrison Ainsworth made successful careers

[email protected] 2 THE PRODUCTION OF MULTI-VOLUME FICTION, 1837–1898 43 catering to (one assumes) male readers of adventure stories.27 The majority of the novels by Wilkie Collins and James Payn can be classified as sensational, and most of the novels of Hawley Smart depict sporting life, mainly hunting and horse racing. The other male authors on the list—F. W. Robinson, Anthony Trollope, William Black, and Walter Besant—generally specialized in domestic romance, sentimental, and religious in the case of Robinson and Scottish in the case of Black. There is much less generic diversity among the most prolific female novelists. Three female novelists worked in the earlier part of the period: Catherine Gore helped popularize the silver-fork novel, Fanny Trollope wrote silver fork and domestic romance, and Elizabeth Daniel (the widow of Robert Mackenzie Daniel) pioneered what would later become labeled the sensation novel. The majority of the other prolific female authors primarily wrote sensation fiction: Marryat, Braddon, Thomas, Charlotte Riddell, Ellen Wood, Margaret Hungerford, and Matilda Houstoun. A final observation should be made about these prolific authors of multi-volume fiction. Based on the present-day reprint series such as Oxford World’s Classics or Penguin Classics, few of the novelists listed can be considered “canonical” (in even the broadest sense of the word). As of this writing, only Braddon, Collins, Oliphant, Anthony Trollope, and Wood have fiction titles in print in these two present-day series ranging from a dozen titles each by both Collins and Trollope to a handful of titles each by Braddon and Oliphant to one title (East Lynne) by Wood. (No doubt, the women authors owe their renewed success entirely to the recovery work done by feminist scholars beginning in the 1970s.) On the other hand, though commercially successful in their day, a handful of authors were out of print by the end of the nineteenth century, such as Daniel, Gore, Houstoun, James, and Fanny Trollope. (Of them, only Fanny Trollope has been recently recovered due to her travel narra- tive Domestic Manners of the Americans [1832] but not her fiction.) The remainder, authors such as Marryat, Riddell, and Robinson, were mostly if not entirely out of print by the early twentieth century. Thus, prolificacy did not necessarily guarantee lasting fame; in fact, just the opposite can be inferred. Of the 7272 multi-volume novel titles published from 1837 to 1898, the 1192 identifiable men authors produced 3190 titles (43.9%), the 1028 identifiable women authors produced 3566 titles (49.0%), and unknown authors produced 516 titles (7.1%) (see Tables 2.12, 2.13, 2.14, 2.15, 2.16, 2.17,and2.18). The difference in the number of identifiable men and women authors may depend on any number of factors. First,

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Table 2.12 Multi-volume titles published by gender, 1837–1840

Year Male-authored Female-authored Unknown-authored multi-volume titles multi-volume titles multi-volume titles

1837 34 17 7 1838 32 16 3 1839 34 21 5 1840 35 27 9 Total 135 81 24 Percentage 56.3 33.8 10.0

Table 2.13 Multi-volume titles published by gender, 1841–1850

Year Male-authored Female-authored Unknown-authored multi-volume titles multi-volume titles multi-volume titles

1841 47 24 4 1842 32 27 6 1843 40 27 3 1844 45 31 11 1845 38 32 10 1846 28 28 7 1847 27 27 3 1848 30 30 3 1849 37 29 9 1850 34 36 6 Total 358 291 62 Percentage 50.4 40.9 8.7 given the nineteenth-century social constraints on women’s work, female authors in the nineteenth century may be more likely to conceal their identities through pseudonyms and anonymity as many scholars have argued.28 Second, the difference may be due to the higher professional barriers faced by women writers in the marketplace (e.g., professional networks, contacts, business experience) which kept female authors from being published.29 Third, the difference could be the fault of the archive itself since few publishers’ records survive that would identify the hundreds of anonymous authors who wrote multi-volume fiction. Yet, even when named, women authors are more difficult to trace in genealogical records due to English naming conventions—an author only identified

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Table 2.14 Multi-volume titles published by gender, 1851–1860

Year Male-authored Female-authored Unknown-authored multi-volume titles multi-volume titles multi-volume titles

1851 30 41 10 1852 29 46 11 1853 28 40 5 1854 27 50 7 1855 25 26 9 1856 26 42 14 1857 37 44 8 1858 23 47 9 1859 30 38 8 1860 40 40 14 Total 295 414 95 Percentage 36.7 51.5 11.8

Table 2.15 Multi-volume titles published by gender, 1861–1870

Year Male-authored Female-authored Unknown-authored multi-volume titles multi-volume titles multi-volume titles

1861 36 35 11 1862 40 42 9 1863 59 47 11 1864 82 65 14 1865 65 74 11 1866 61 57 10 1867 76 70 14 1868 71 62 17 1869 50 55 8 1870 62 56 8 Total 602 563 113 Percentage 47.1 44.1 8.8 as “Mrs. Smith” is all but impossible to track (and even itself may be a pseudonym). Regardless, the difference in the number of identifiable male and female authors appears small enough to suggest that multi-volume fiction was an open field for both men and women authors. Tables 2.12–2.18 and Fig. 2.2 show the annual production of titles by men and women authors. Overall, for the sixty-one years examined,

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Table 2.16 Multi-volume titles published by gender, 1871–1880

Year Male-authored Female-authored Unknown-authored multi-volume titles multi-volume titles multi-volume titles

1871 66 45 10 1872 72 64 9 1873 70 82 15 1874 72 72 10 1875 61 99 9 1876 82 79 12 1877 66 91 8 1878 72 87 12 1879 84 96 11 1880 81 103 9 Total 726 818 105 Percentage 44.0 49.6 6.4

Table 2.17 Multi-volume titles published by gender, 1881–1890

Year Male-authored Female-authored Unknown-authored multi-volume titles multi-volume titles multi-volume titles

1881 64 89 8 1882 63 99 11 1883 66 124 16 1884 71 102 15 1885 74 109 7 1886 75 96 10 1887 82 82 6 1888 80 79 5 1889 63 90 5 1890 76 88 5 Total 714 958 88 Percentage 40.6 54.4 5.0 men and women authors generally split the production of multi-volume titles, with women authors overall penning 376 more titles than their men counterparts. Speculation about the authors of the anonymous or unattributed titles has not been attempted here—though a popular adage claims “anonymous” was frequently a woman.30 Regardless of the gender distribution of the authors of the anonymous and unattributed titles,

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Table 2.18 Multi-volume titles published by gender, 1891–1898

Year Male-authored Female-authored Unknown-authored multi-volume titles multi-volume titles multi-volume titles

1891 79 82 8 1892 66 95 3 1893 86 91 8 1894 74 111 7 1895 30 40 1 1896 18 18 2 1897 5 3 0 1898 2 1 0 Total 360 441 29 Percentage 43.4 53.1 3.5 Total overall 3190 3566 516 Percentage 43.9 49.0 7.1

200

150

100

0 1838 1843 1846 1853 1856 1859 1864 1871 1872 1874 1881 1887 1890 1893 1837 1839 1840 1841 1842 1844 1845 1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852 1854 1855 1857 1858 1860 1861 1862 1863 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1873 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1888 1889 1891 1892 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 Men-authored Ɵtles Women-authored Ɵtles Unknown-authored Ɵtles

Fig. 2.2 Multi-volume titles published by gender, 1837–1898 female authors produced slightly more of the Victorian multi-volume novels. On average, the men authors penned 2.7 multi-volume titles each and the women authors wrote 3.5 titles each.

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However, looking over the course of the century, the data show how the relative proportion of men- to women-authored multi-volume titles changed significantly over the course of the century. In the first fourteen years of the period (1837–1850), men authors wrote over half of the multi-volume fiction titles produced: 56.3% of titles in the late 1830s and 50.4% of titles in the 1840s. Men authors wrote more titles than women authors in most of these years. This continues the pattern observed by Garside and Schöwerling in the 1820s where men authors begin produc- ing fiction in earnest.31 In two of the years, the difference in the number of men- and women-authored titles appears quite stark. In 1837, men authors produced 17 more titles than women authors, accounting for 58.6% of titles that year. A few years later, in 1841, men authors produced 23 more titles than women authors, accounting for 62.7% of titles that year. (For both years, the number of anonymous-authored titles was small, 7 and 4 titles respectively.) Prior to 1845, men-authored titles clearly predominated. That these years also corresponded to the heydays of the historical and nautical novels (both overwhelmingly penned by male authors) probably helps to explain this disparity. However, by the end of the 1840s, the difference in numbers of men-authored and women-authored titles reaches parity: in fact, the difference in the number of titles penned by men and women authors is collectively only 6 titles in the last five years of the 1840s. The following decade of the 1850s sees a stark reversal of the situation as the number of women-authored titles decidedly outpace men- authored titles: men authors produced 295 multi-volume titles (36.7% of all titles), women authors produced 414 titles (51.5% of all titles), and unknown authors produced 95 titles (11.8% of all titles). Without exception, women authors produce more multi-volume fiction titles than men authors in each year in this decade. As in the previous decades, the annual difference between the number of men- and women-authored titles sometimes appears quite dramatic: for instance, in 1854, women authors produced 23 more multi-volume titles (or 59.5% of titles that year) than men authors, and in 1858, women authors produced 24 more multi- volume titles (or 59.5% of titles that year) than men authors. Except for the decline of the historical and nautical novels in the previous decade (which were mostly men authored), there is no easy explanation for why women authors suddenly predominate in the production of multi-volume novels in the 1850s. But one observation may explain the predominance of women-authored titles: in the 1850s, the number of women authors

[email protected] 2 THE PRODUCTION OF MULTI-VOLUME FICTION, 1837–1898 49 nearly doubles from 123 women authors of multi-volume fiction in the 1840s to 213 women authors in the 1850s. Comparatively, the number of men authors remains flat, 198 men authors in the 1840s and 197 men authors in the 1850s. So, in this decade, a greater number of women authors enter the literary marketplace for multi-volume fiction as compared to men. Nevertheless, by the end of the decade, male and female authors once again achieve parity in multi-volume fiction production. In the 1860s, the heyday of the sensation novel, the production of new multi-volume fiction swings back in favor of men authors. For this decade, men authors produced moderately more multi-volume titles than women authors: 602 titles (47.1% of all titles) to 563 titles (44.1% of all titles) with 113 titles authored by unknown authors. Generally, year by year, the difference in the number of men- and women-authored titles favored men-authored titles in most years: for instance, in 1864 the number of men-authored titles significantly outnumbered women-authored titles, a difference of 17 multi-volume titles that year. The 1860s witnessed a large increase in the number of multi-volume fiction titles, due no doubt to the popularity of the sensation novel, much of which appeared in multi- volume editions. The data suggest that men authors contributed slightly more than women authors to the increase in production of multi-volume fiction in the 1860s. The final three decades of the century witness a remarkable shift as women authors go on to dominate the production of new multi-volume fiction. In the 1870s, men authors produced 726 multi-volume titles (44.0% of all titles) and women authors produced 818 titles (49.6% of all titles). In the 1880s, men authors produced 714 multi-volume titles (40.6% of all titles) and women authors produced 958 titles (54.4% of all titles)—a rather significant increase in the number of women-authored titles. From 1891 to 1898, the decade seeing the end of the three-volume novel, men authors produced 360 multi-volume titles (43.4% of all titles) and women authors produced 441 titles (53.1% of all titles). Comparing these figures to the overall production figures discussed above reveals that women authors were primarily responsible for the surge in multi- volume fiction production in the late 1870s and early 1880s: clearly, more women authors entered the literary field and those women authors wrote comparatively more multi-volume fiction than their men peers. The data clearly show women authors predominating in this segment of the literary field, a fact at odds with earlier studies of women writers in the Victorian period such as Gaye Tuchman’s Edging Women Out (1989) which argues that women authors were continually marginalized

[email protected] 50 T. J. BASSETT by publishers in favor of men authors. If anything, it seems women edged men out of the multi-volume fiction marketplace in the 1880s. However, as we shall see in Chapter 5, men authors such as H. Rider Haggard, the author of two moderately successful three-volume novels in the 1880s, shifted to the (for them) more lucrative one-volume novel format and then being pioneered by more entrepreneurial publishers. Thus, the production statistics of multi-volume fiction show women authors successfully rivaling their male peers in the literary marketplace, at least in quantity if not quality. These numbers illustrate the rise of the professional women writer, as Peterson and others have argued. Of all the professions in the Victorian period, literature and its related field of journalism had the lowest barriers to entry. When possible, the nationalities of the authors were recorded.32 In the British Isles (excluding England itself), 139 Irish authors wrote 541 multi-volume fiction titles, 63 Scottish authors wrote 383 titles, and 17 Welsh authors wrote 59 titles. These 217 Irish, Scottish, and Welsh authors collectively wrote 981 titles (13.5% of all multi-volume fiction titles). These authors identified to varying degrees with their regions in their fictions: William Carleton set most of his works in Ireland whereas Rosina Lytton did not; William Black became known as a regional Scot- tish writer whereas Julia Chetwynd only set one of her many novels there; and Anne Beale wrote several novels set in Wales whereas Amy Dillwyn wrote a single Welsh historical novel among her five titles. In most cases, these Irish, Scottish, and Welsh authors lived and worked in England, often in the London area: as we shall see below, publishing overwhelmingly concentrated in London so not surprisingly these authors often grav- itated to the metropolis. Turning to the colonies—taken to be the set- tler colonies of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and the West Indies33—86 colonial authors collectively wrote 273 multi-volume fiction titles (3.8% of all titles): 45 authors from Australia (160 titles), 12 authors from Canada (41 titles), 8 authors from New Zealand (34 titles), 8 authors from South Africa (11 titles), and 13 authors from the West Indies (27 titles). Most of these authors moved to Great Britain where their works were published: for example, the Australian-born Rosa Campbell Praed, the Canadian-born Grant Allen, the New Zealand-born Clara Cheeseman, the South African-born Olive Schreiner, and the West Indian-born Augusta Zelia Fraser. Discounting overlaps, 289 British Isle or colonial authors wrote 1185 multi-volume fiction titles, or 16.3% of all titles.

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Table 2.19 shows the twenty-six most proliﬁc Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and colonial authors. Authors from the British Isles predominate on the list, especially Scottish and Irish authors: the Scots Margaret Oliphant (71 titles), James Grant (32 titles), and William Black (27 titles); and the Irish Charlotte Riddell (33 titles) and Mrs. Alexander (24 titles). Notably, two Welsh authors make the list: Catherine Randolph (14 titles) and Anne Beale (13 titles). Nearly all of these authors relocated to England at some time during their careers, most often to the London area. Fewer colonial authors appear on the list: a trio of Australians Benjamin L. Farjeon (20 titles), Henry Kingsley (16 titles), and Rosa Campbell Praed (14 titles).

Table 2.19 Most proliﬁc Irish, Scottish, Author Multi-volume titles Welsh, and colonial Margaret Oliphant (Scottish) 71 authors, 1837–1898 Charlotte Riddell (Irish) 33 James Grant (Scottish) 32 Margaret Hungerford (Irish) 31 William Black (Scottish) 27 Mrs. Alexander (Irish) 24 George MacDonald (Scottish) 23 Charles Gibbon (Scottish) 22 Henrietta Keddie (Scottish) 22 Eliza Booth [“Rita”] (Scottish) 21 Benjamin L. Farjeon 20 (Australian) Mayne Reid (Irish) 20 Richard Dowling (Irish) 18 Percy Fitzgerald (Irish) 17 Justin McCarthy (Irish) 17 George Whyte-Melville 17 (Scottish) Henry Kingsley (Australian) 16 J. Sheridan Le Fanu (Irish) 16 Robert Buchanan (Scottish) 14 May Crommelin (Irish) 14 Julia Kavanagh (Irish) 14 Rosa Campbell Praed 14 (Australian) Catherine Randolph (Welsh) 14 Anne Beale (Welsh) 13 Grace Johnston (Scottish) 13 Charles Lever (Irish) 13

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The former two authors both resided for extended periods in Australia; only the latter author was non-European born. All relocated to Eng- land before beginning their writing careers in earnest. As these examples show, it bears repeating that England in general and London in particular exerted a strong pull on potential writers from outside England. Over time, authors from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales consistently accounted for over 10% of the new titles published in multiple volumes. As Table 2.20 shows, Irish-, Scottish-, and Welsh-authored titles initially accounted for 10.0% of titles in 1837–1840 which continued with 11.1% in the following decade. In the 1880s, Irish-, Scottish-, and Welsh-authored titles represented 16.0% of all titles (282 of 1760 titles). As the data show, these authors made a large contribution to the number of multi-volume titles published, 13.5% of all titles. The number of colonial-authored titles represents a smaller fraction of overall production but one that rises over the course of the century. Before the 1870s, colonial authors wrote relatively few of the new multi-volume ﬁction titles, 74 titles published from 1837 to 1870, or nearly two titles per year. After 1870, the number of titles written by colonial authors triples to 199 titles published from 1871 to 1898 or about 8 titles per year. In the latter half of the century, many authors born in or residing in the colonies moved back to Europe where their writing careers developed: for instance, Olive Schreiner began writing her novel The Story of an African Farm (2 volumes, 1883) in South Africa, but moved to London before she published it. Few of these titles were “imported” (so to speak) from the colonies. Despite these increases, colonial authors only wrote 3.8% of all multi- volume ﬁction titles during the Victorian period.

Table 2.20 Irish-, Scottish-, Welsh-, and colonial-authored multi-volume ﬁction titles published, 1837–1898

Years Irish-, Scottish-, and Welsh-authored titles Colonial-authored titles

1837–1840 24 2 1841–1850 79 17 1851–1860 115 24 1861–1870 165 31 1871–1880 211 51 1881–1890 282 87 1891–1898 107 61 Total 983 273

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Not including the British Isles or the colonies, 200 foreign authors wrote 443 multi-volume fiction titles. These authors come from a wide range of countries: 92 authors from the United States (accounting for 241 multi-volume fiction titles), 23 authors from France (46 titles), 41 authors from Germany (73 titles),34 1 author from Greece (1 title), 2 authors from Hungary (3 titles), 1 author from India (1 title), 11 authors from Italy (17 titles), 5 authors from the Netherlands (9 titles),35 3 authors from Poland (3 titles), 7 authors from Russia (10 titles), 9 authors from Scandinavia (i.e., Denmark, Finland, and Sweden) (33 titles), 3 authors from Spain (5 titles), and 2 authors from Switzerland (2 titles). Perhaps not surprising, American authors wrote over half (54.4%) of the foreign- authored titles, with Germany (16.5% of titles) and France (10.4% of titles) well behind. Collectively, these three countries account for 81.3% of the foreign-authored multi-volume fiction. Overwhelmingly, the foreign authors come from continental Europe or North America with one exception: Lal Behari Day, an Indian convert to Christianity, who wrote a novel in English Govinda Samanta: or, The History of a Bengal Ráiyat (2 volumes, 1878). Table 2.21 shows the eighteen most prolific foreign authors of multi- volume fiction. As might be expected, four Americans lead the list: F. Marion Crawford (24 titles), Mayne Reid (20 titles), J. Fenimore Cooper (18 titles), and Henry James (15 titles). These four authors and several other American authors such as Bret Harte resided in Europe for extended periods which contributed to the number of multi-volume titles published by these authors in Great Britain. American authors had the added benefit of not needing translation, which many of the other foreign authors required. The paucity of French authors in translation may be due to the number of readers who could read French (a commonly taught foreign language among the middle and upper classes). Because Great Britain imported French-language books, in their iconic yellow covers, publishers may not have felt the need to translate many of them for English readers.36 Over time, the number of foreign-authored titles waxed and waned. As Table 2.22 shows, early in the Victorian period, foreign-authored multi- volume fiction accounted for 10.4% of titles in the late 1830s and 9.4% of titles in the 1840s. American authors wrote over half of the foreign- authored titles during this sixteen-year period: 55 of 92 multi-volume titles (59.8%). All of Cooper’s eighteen novels appear during this period: as the author of both historical and nautical fictions, his works met the

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Table 2.21 Most proliﬁc foreign authors, Author Multi-volume titles 1837–1898 F. Marion Crawford 24 (American) Mayne Reid (American) 20 James Fenimore Cooper 18 (American) Henry James (American) 15 Emilie Flygare Carlén 12 (Swedish) Elizabeth Werner (German) 12 Julian Hawthorne (American) 10 Georg Moritz Ebers (German) 8 Frank Benedict (American) 7 Fredrika Bremer (Swedish) 7 Paul Cushing (American) 6 Victor Hugo (French) 6 Robert Montgomery Bird 5 (American) Mrs. Augustus Craven (French) 5 Constance Fletcher (American) 5 Bret Harte (American) 5 Henry Herbert (American) 5 Hector Malot (French) 5 George Webb Appleton 4 (American) Joseph Holt Ingraham 4 (American) Maarten Maartens (Dutch) 4 Herman Melville (American) 4 Adeline Dutton Train Whitney 4 (American)

Table 2.22 Foreign-authored Years Number of titles Percentage of total multi-volume ﬁction titles titles published, 1837–1840 25 10.4 1837–1898 1841–1850 67 9.4 1851–1860 48 6.0 1861–1870 58 4.5 1871–1880 94 5.7 1881–1890 100 5.7 1891–1898 51 6.1 Total 443 6.1

[email protected] 2 THE PRODUCTION OF MULTI-VOLUME FICTION, 1837–1898 55 popular generic demands of the times. The next two decades see foreign- authored titles fall to levels half that of previously: 6.0% of titles in the 1850s and 4.5% of titles in the 1860s. American authors still wrote nearly half of the foreign-authored titles during this twenty-year period: 50 of 106 multi-volume titles (47.2%). Nearly all of the twelve novels of Swede Emilie Flygare-Carlén appear during this period along with several other continental authors. The last three decades of the century see an increase in the number of foreign-authored multi-volume fiction titles: 5.7% of titles in the 1870s, 5.7% of titles in the 1880s, and 6.1% of titles in the 1890s. American authors wrote more than half of the foreign-authored titles from 1871 to 1898: 136 of 244 titles (55.7%). Several prolific Amer- ican novelists published multi-volume fiction during the later years of the nineteenth century, including Crawford, James, Julian Hawthorne, and Bret Harte. Though never a large percentage of the multi-volume fiction produced, foreign-authored titles represented 6.1% of all titles overall. Due to variable copyright treaties with each of these countries, publishers often paid little to nothing for the right to publish these authors in Great Britain. However, except for American works, they may have incurred translation expenses. For instance, Bentley published Emilie Flygare-Carlén’s The Guardian in three volumes in the summer 1865. He paid the author nothing for the copyright and paid a Mrs. Bushby £25 to translate the novel from Swedish. All told, Bentley spent half as much on acquiring this novel than one written by a fellow British citizen.37 Despite the economic incentives to pirate foreign works (especially American ones that needed no translation), only 6% of all the multi-volume fiction published from 1837 to 1898 was written by foreign authors. However, if the American authors are excluded, foreign authors from non-English- speaking countries wrote 2.8% of all the multi-volume fiction during the period. This confirms what Franco Moretti observed in Atlas of the Euro- pean Novel, 1800–1900 (1998): that England was markedly insular in its choice of literary works, generally focusing on native-born or English- language authors over foreigners.38

Publishers

Between 1837 and 1898, some 216 publishers produced at least one multi-volume novel ranging from vanity presses (e.g., the City of London Publishing Company) to small specialist publishers (e.g., William Isbister) to large established houses (e.g., Richard Bentley). Overwhelmingly, these

[email protected] 56 T. J. BASSETT publishers operated in London, with Edinburgh-based William Black- wood and Sons the chief exception. (Though, bowing to necessity, even they established a London office in 1840.39) The concentration of fiction publishing in London caps the trend Peter Garside and Rainer Schöw- erling observe in the earlier Romantic period.40 Of these two hundred and sixteen publishers, 78 published only one multi-volume fiction title each. The vast majority, some 170 publishers, produced less than ten multi-volume fiction titles each—these small producers account collectively for 430 of the 7272 multi-volume fiction titles published (5.9%) during the period. The other 46 publishers were responsible for publishing the remaining 6842 multi-volume fiction titles (94.1%). Thus, as the data show, the production of multi-volume fiction was concentrated among a relatively small group of four dozen English publishers during the Victorian period, not all of whom were active at the same times. Table 2.23 lists the twenty most prolific publishers of multi-volume fiction and shows to a greater extent how concentrated the production was. Two publishers—Hurst and Blackett (1024 titles) and Richard Bentley (912 titles)—alone produced over a quarter (26.6%) of all multi-volume fiction during the Victorian period. The addition of a third publisher, Tinsley Brothers (549 titles), accounts for over a third (34.2%) of all the multi-volume fiction published. Going further: the top six publishers— adding Chapman and Hall (488 titles), T. C. Newby (483 titles), and Sampson Low (308 titles) to the three already mentioned—account for over half (51.8%) of all multi-volume fiction; and the top ten publishers— adding Smith, Elder (288 titles), Henry Colburn (271 titles), Chatto and Windus (263 titles), and F. V. White (259 titles)—account for two-thirds (66.7%) of all multi-volume fiction. Going a bit further yet, the top fifteen publishers collectively produced 5732 titles (78.8%) and the top twenty 6227 titles (85.6%). Without question, fewer than twenty publishers dominated the production of the Victorian triple-decker during the period. Notably absent from or ranked lowly on Table 2.23 are some of the publishers John Sutherland deemed primarily responsible for the “literary novel”41: Black- wood (139 multi-volume titles), Bradbury and Evans (23 titles), Long- man (115 titles), and Macmillan (194 titles). Compared to a firm such as Hurst and Blackett, the output of Blackwood looks paltry indeed, especially considering that Blackwood began publishing over three decades earlier than their rival. Yet, Blackwood published George Eliot—a reminder that quantity doesn’t necessarily correlate to quality.

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Table 2.23 Twenty most proliﬁc publishers, 1837–1898