Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press (review)

Abstract

In 1878 the popular novelist James Payn wrote to Bernhard Tauchnitz, "Literature has taken a curious phase in England so far as fiction is concerned. The largest prices are now got from country newspapers who form syndicates, and each subscribe their portion towards the novel" (qtd. 161). Payn's remark neatly encapsulates why Graham Law's highly original, meticulously researched study of serial fiction, syndication, and newspapers is needed. In Law's account the weekly rather than monthly serial predominates, and the history of Victorian serialization undergoes substantive revision. In privileging monthly serialization (whether in shilling numbers or magazines like the Cornhill), prior scholarship, even in materialist and Marxist studies, has tended to foreground "major authors." Monthly serials did dominate the market prior to the repeal of newspaper stamps, "taxes on knowledge" that limited newspaper circulation except for penny papers aimed at working-class readers. Fiction serialized in these papers ("penny bloods" and "penny dreadfuls") led to middle-class suspicion of weekly serials because of their association with proletarian tastes and lurid melodrama.