Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press

Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press Graham Law Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press This page intentionally left blank Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press Graham Law Waseda University Tokyo © Graham Law 2000 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2000 978-0-333-76019-2 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2000 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). Outside North America ISBN 978-1-349-41360-7 ISBN 978-0-230-28674-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230286740 In North America ISBN 978-0-312-23574-1 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Law, Graham. Serializing fiction in the Victorian press / Graham Law. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-23574-1 1. Serialized fiction—Great Britain—History and criticism. 2. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Serial publication of books—History—19th century. 4. Authors and readers—Great Britain– –History—19th century. 5. Authors and publishers—Great Britain– –History—19th century. 6. Literature publishing—Great Britain– –History—19th century. I. Title. PR878.P78 L39 2000 823'.809—dc21 00–031124 10987654321 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 Dedicated to the Memory of My Father and Mother * Fred Law 1920–90 Anna Law, née Kean, 1925–97 This page intentionally left blank Contents List of Plates ix List of Figures and Tables x Preface xi Acknowledgements xvii List of Abbreviations xxi Part I: Context 1 1 Serial Fiction 3 1.1 The eighteenth-century serial market 3 1.2 Transition and the book market 7 1.3 The Victorian serial market 13 1.4 International comparisons 35 Part II: Narrative 39 2 Before Tillotsons 41 2.1 North of the Border 44 2.2 South of the Border 51 2.3 Local rivalry 59 3 Tillotsons 64 3.1 Growth and cooperation 65 3.2 Outreach and competition 72 3.3 Retrenchment and decline 84 4 Rivals of Tillotsons 92 4.1 Direct competitors 93 4.2 A.P. Watt and the literary agency 100 4.3 W.C. Leng and Co. and the metropolitan weekly 114 Part III: Analysis 123 5 Readership 125 5.1 Circulations 127 5.2 Contents and communities 137 5.3 Atomization: Tillotsons and W.C. Leng and Co. 143 vii viii Contents 6 Authorship 152 6.1 Making a Living 153 6.2 Agreements and agents 164 6.3 Professionalization: Collins and Braddon 170 7 Genre 181 7.1 Modes and settings 183 7.2 Composition and control 191 7.3 Commodification: Braddon and Besant 201 Appendix: Serialization Tables 215 Notes 245 Works Cited 270 Index 284 List of Plates (for sources see Acknowledgements section) 1 John Leng 2 W.C. Leng 3 W.F. Tillotson 4 John Maxwell 5 David Pae 6 M.E. Braddon 7 Wilkie Collins 8 Walter Besant 9 Alnwick Mercury, 1 July 1856, tenth page 10 Dundee People’s Journal, 21 April 1866, second page 11 Leigh Journal and Times, 31 October 1890, second page 12 Leeds Mercury Weekly Supplement, 25 January 1890, front page 13 Dundee People’s Friend, 14 January 1889, front page 14 London Weekly Telegraph, 27 April 1889, front page 15 London Weekly Telegraph, 23 June 1900, front paper cover 16 New York World agreement with A.P. Watt, 11 February 1889 ix List of Figure and Tables Figure 7.1 Braddon’s pattern of dual composition 204 Table 1.1 ‘Taxes on Knowledge’ imposed in Great Britain, 1712–1861 10 Table 1.2 Main Victorian metropolitan monthlies carrying serial fiction 16 Table 1.3 Major Victorian metropolitan weeklies carrying serial fiction 28 Table 2.1 The first Tillotsons’s syndicate 42 Table 3.1 Costs of serials in the Bolton Weekly Journal over five-year periods 79 Table 3.2 Crude profit margins on certain Tillotsons’s serials 79 Table 3.3 Expensive Tillotsons’s serials not appearing in the Bolton Weekly Journal in the 1890s 89 Table 4.1 Some ‘belt-and-braces’ syndicates 106 Table 5.1 Claimed circulations of some Victorian newspapers carrying serial fiction 128 Table 5.2 Contents analysis of provincial weeklies in newspaper format 144 Table 5.3 Contents analysis of provincial weeklies in magazine format 145 Table 7.1 Length of weekly and monthly instalments in four Collins serials 185 Table A.1 Early serial fiction in provincial newspapers 215 Table A.2 Serial fiction in the Bolton Weekly Journal, 1871–99 222 Table A.3 Serial fiction in the Melbourne Age, 1872–99 229 Table A.4 Syndication of the novels of M.E. Braddon 232 Table A.5 Syndication of the novels of Wilkie Collins 238 Table A.6 Serial publication of the novels of Walter Besant 241 x Preface Even imagination is the slave of stolid circumstance; and the unending flow of inventiveness which finds expression in the literature of Fiction is no exception to the general law. Thomas Hardy ‘Candour in Fiction’ New Review (January 1890) Despite the name, almost from its beginnings, the newspaper has contained material other than news. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the insatiable Victorian appetite for stories in instalments, increas- ingly often in the second half of the nineteenth century, that ‘other’ material was serial fiction. However, the significance of this trend has been largely overlooked in conventional literary history. Although only a handful of his fictional works appear in the British Library Catalogue, the Scottish writer David Pae (1828–84; Plate 5) was probably one of the most widely read novelists in mid-Victorian Britain. Around 50 of his melodramas were serialized repeatedly in a wide range of cheap weekly newspapers in Scotland and the English provinces from the mid-1850s (see Table A.1). Often heralded as the ‘Queen of the Circulating Libraries’ (see Walbank, 9–18), Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1837–1915; Plate 6) could with equal justifica- tion have been proclaimed as the ‘Queen of the Provincial Weeklies’. A larger number and wider social range of readers probably en- countered her work in the latter form, as at least 25 of her novels from the mid-1870s first appeared in serial in syndicates of up to a dozen such newspapers whose combined circulations covered vir- tually the whole of the United Kingdom (see Table A.4). Walter Besant (1836–1901; Plate 8), an astute analyst of the changing fiction market towards the end of the nineteenth century, also occasion- ally served the provincial syndicates, but by 1890 was selling serial rights mainly to illustrated London newspapers through the agent A.P. Watt (see Table A.6). Although on a less regular basis than such committed ‘newspaper novelists’ as Pae, Braddon and Besant, by around 1880 even more distinguished writers were attracted to the newspapers by the size of the potential audience or by the remuneration they offered. Fading xi xii Preface stars, like Harrison Ainsworth, Anthony Trollope and Charles Reade, sold late novels to the syndicators. All seven of the full-length novels produced during the last decade of Wilkie Collins’s life appeared in popular weekly newspapers (see Plate 7 and Table A.5). Even George Meredith made an isolated and unwitting serial appearance in the Glasgow Weekly Herald at the end of the 1870s with The Egoist (Collie, 43–4). The readers of the rival Glasgow Weekly Mail enjoyed gala years in 1885–86, when, in addition to stories by Collins and Braddon, there appeared new tales by George MacDonald, William Black, Margaret Oliphant, Joseph Hatton, ‘Hugh Conway’, Rhoda Broughton and Thomas Hardy. Each of these writers issued a number of other works in the provincial journals. Normally in these cases, as in those of Braddon, Collins and Besant, serialization in British newspapers was followed almost immediately by similar appearances in journals in the United States and the colonies. Although the new literary lights of the 1890s, notably Stevenson, Haggard, Doyle and Kipling, were more attracted by the large sums then being offered by American popular magazines and newspaper syndicates, they also tended to show up subsequently in British newspapers, both provincial and metropolitan. How and by what agencies were these newspaper appearances effected? What was the nature of the newspapers involved? Why did the market for serial fiction in British newspapers emerge so suddenly and grow so rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century? Why did the dominant mode of newspaper publication, as represented by the instances of Pae, Braddon and Besant, change more than once within that period? What were the consequences for readership, authorship and literary form? These are the ques- tions that the later chapters of this volume try to answer with some precision.

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