Ignoble Strife: Far From the Madding Crowd and the Agricultural Labourers Strike of 1874

Abstract

Describing the hermeneutic possibilities offered by serialization, Wolfgang Iser maintains that ‘the reader is forced by the pauses imposed on him to imagine more than he could have done if his reading were continuous . . . because it introduces gaps by means of a break until the next instalment’.1 Applying Iser’s observation to the Victorian serial, Mark Turner describes the way that the ‘enforced pauses or gaps between instalments’ opened up, for the contemporary reader, a dynamic in which new meanings were made. ‘What did it mean’, he asks, ‘to read an instalment in a magazine, with other kinds of material published alongside it – did this influence the interpretation of the fiction?’2 Linda Hughes and Michael Lund similarly observe that we should see serial fiction ‘taking place amid many different texts and voices’. Readers’ responses to fiction took place simultaneously with their interpretation of current events, they argue, and the way they picked up a serial novel was similar to the way in which they interpreted the latest news.3 Victorians themselves seem to have reflected on this very dynamic. Innes Shand, writing in 1879, described the relationship between the monthly press and contemporary events in which monthlies ‘sit as judge on the more hasty opinions of the of the daily and weekly press’ and ‘treat current literature as current news’.4 In the light of all of these observations, the following pages show how, in its serial circulation, one Victorian novel might be seen to have made ‘current literature . . . current news’.