Serialization and the Victorian Novel in Mid-Victorian Magazines by Catherine Delafield

Abstract

Reviewed by: Serialization and the Victorian Novel in Mid-Victorian Magazines by Catherine Delafield Carol Hanbery MacKay (bio) Catherine Delafield, Serialization and the Victorian Novel in Mid-Victorian Magazines (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. x + 212, £60/$109.95 (cloth). Citing the “multi-vocal discourse” of the periodical, as defined by Laurel Brake and Julie Codell in Encounters in the Victorian Press (2004), Catherine Delafield subdivides her approach to the serialized novel among the three-way contributions of author, editor, and periodical, seeking to elucidate how “dialogues take place during the serialization of a novel between editor and contributor, between fiction and non-fiction, and, at an external interface, between the periodicals themselves” (2). She takes as her core texts Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (Household Words, 1851–53), Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage (Cornhill Magazine, 1860–61), Dinah Craik’s Mistress and Maid (Good Words, 1862), and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (All the Year Round, 1868) and Poor Miss Finch (Cassell’s Magazine, 1871–72). Juggling these variables and sometimes incorporating the role of publisher, Delafield sets her goal in Serialization and the Victorian Novel in Mid-Victorian Magazines to “[build] on existing critical approaches and research in order to provide an interpretive model for the novel as it originally appeared to readers like Gaskell: unfinished, unending, and in context” (4). Largely through scholarship generated by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, much of it published in Victorian Periodicals Review, scholars now acknowledge that the installment publication of fiction is an essential component of Victorian studies. Ever since the appearance of Linda Hughes and Michael Lund’s groundbreaking work, The Victorian Serial (1991), criticism of the Victorian novel has taken into account an analysis of serialization or how volume publication in turn fared in the broader context of the serialized reading experience. Moreover, the responsible critic has become increasingly accountable for such considerations due to the availability of digitized periodical publications. Of course, since publication in parts also occurred independent of periodicals, reading novels over a scheduled time frame and the author-publisher relationship varied considerably, further complicating a programmatic approach to understanding the ramifications of serialization. As a result, Delafield needs to constantly reestablish her parameters, necessarily repeating herself and reiterating generalizations that should become obvious to the alert reader, who may already be familiar with the conditions being invoked. Some of these generalizations bear repeating, particularly those reiterating the collaborative nature of the writing and publishing experience of the Victorian novel that appears at intervals. Commercial considerations determined the naming or the lack of attribution of authorship, something not always a matter of the author’s choice, forcing the novelist to [End Page 516] work closely with his or her editor to establish mutual goals that in turn affected the design of the ongoing textual representation. Delafield contrasts William Makepeace Thackeray’s genial orchestration of the Cornhill Magazine when he assumed its founding editorship in 1860, one that allowed Trollope to uphold an individual identity within his anonymity, with Charles Dickens’s more dictatorial management of Household Words and subsequently All the Year Round, where his editorial control and voice were paramount, especially in his management of Gaskell’s serial submissions. Yet within Dickens’s tight supervision in his dual capacity as editor and publisher, Collins further developed his unique brand of authorial independence with his multiple narrators in The Moonstone, putting him in a position to strike out on his own for a “new public” with Cassell’s Magazine in 1871 (43). Narrowing her focus to the particular lens of each of the five periodicals she has selected, Delafield announces that her major contribution to the fourth chapter of Serialization and the Novel in Mid-Victorian Magazines will be a discussion of Cassell’s Magazine and Good Words, family magazines that she states have been “less widely represented in the scholarly debate” than the three primarily cited above (73). However, Dickens’s two journals and the Cornhill Magazine figure in fully half of the chapter, which provides fewer insights from Delafield than from critics Lorna Huett and Catherine Waters, whom she features. When Delafield moves on to the family magazines she intends to highlight, she closely reads...