Graham Law

Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press

Preface Acknowledgements List of Figures and Tables List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations PART I: CONTEXT Serial Fiction PART II: NARRATIVE Before Tillotsons Tillotsons Rivals of Tillotsons PART III: ANALYSIS Readership Authorship Genre Notes Appendix: Serialization Tables Works Cited Index

New Woman Novels in Newspapers

Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did (1895), whose martyr heroine tried to earn her keep as the ‘weekly lady’s-letter writer to an illustrated paper’ [1], has been inx8f uential, I am convinced, in distorting our perceptions not only of x8e ction concerning ‘the woman question’, but also of more general engagement with the issue in the late nineteenth-century press. The scale of both the scandal and the prox8e ts generated by his notorious New Woman novel prompted Allen to publicly renounce the serialization of his own work. In the preface to his next ‘hill-top’ novel, he denounced the hypocrisy inherent in x8e ction issued in periodical form, and promised:

The Newspaper Novel: Towards an international history

The time seems ripe to undertake a comparative study of the roman-feuilleton . As the name suggests, the systematic practice of publishing new x8e ction in instalments in newspapers originated in France, with its highly centralized national press based in Paris. This was during the x8e rst half of the nineteenth century, but already before the mid-century the x8e rst critical study of the phenomenon had appeared [1]. Although many scholars have added to the picture in the intervening years, Lise Queffélec provides the fullest account with her masterly survey published in 1989, where she argues that the roman-feuilleton represents the x8e rst use of a fully capitalist mode of production in the French x8e ction industry, and can thus be seen as the forerunner of the modern mass narrative media [2]. It is now clear that this is true of other capitalist societies in the nineteenth century, by no means limited to Europe. The newspaper novel did not emerge in Japan until after the Meiji Restoration and the construction of the modern newspaper industry, with its twin centres in Osaka and Tokyo, but remains a lively cultural force even today. Takagi Takeo’s work has provided the most thorough history of the practice, but, while still relying heavily on Takagi’s research, Honda Yasuo’s recent study offers a new synthesis [3]. Based largely on the decentralized mode of production known as the syndicate system, the detailed study of which has provided formidable problems for scholars, the development of novels in newspapers in both the United States and Britain has until very recently lacked anything approaching a comprehensive overview. However, building on the pre-war research of Elmo Scott Watson, Charles Johanningsmeier’s 1997 book goes a good way towards x8e lling the gap on the American side [4]. Finally, although Graham Pollard, Michael Turner, and William Donaldson, most notably, have provided valuable signposts, the x8e rst systematic mapping of the territory of the British newspaper novel is carried out in Graham Law’s forthcoming volume [5]. Although the four versions of the newspaper novel mentioned above have a good deal in common, there are important differences. The principal variables involve the distribution of the newspapers themselves: whether their geographical circulations are national, regional or local; and whether their frequency of appearance is daily, weekly, or even monthly. The factors underlying these variations obviously include general issues concerning economic and cultural production in the four countries concerned, but more specix8e cally relate to the dynamics of their publishing industries. Here we need to attend not only to the production of periodicals other than newspapers, and of books both new and reprinted, but also to the specix8e c regime of taxation in force affecting publication. If only for reasons of space, this article can make no claim to provide the comprehensive, contextualized, comparative account of the newspaper novel that is now

Japan and the Internationalization of the Serial Fiction Market

than in France, its country of origin.1 Even today, all four of Japan’s large general-interest national daily papers have a column permanently devoted to the shimbun shôsetsu (newspaper novel), a short numbered and illustrated installment from an original piece of Wction that runs an average of six months. These four papers claim a total daily circulation of nearly 25 million, while the longest running, the Yomiuri Shimbun (founded in 1874), alone prints nearly 10 million copies and is thus reckoned to be the world’s best-selling daily newspaper. The current appetite in Japan for newspaper Wction is clearly not as Werce as it was around a century ago. Yet despite the rise of new mass narrative forms—such as enpon (the extremely popular series of paperbacks priced at a single yen) after the First World War, or the comic magazines (mangabon) after the Second, in addition, of course, Japan and the Internationalization of the Serial Fiction Market

Trollope and the Newspapers

Two good, substantial volumes on Anthony Trollope as a serial novelist have appeared over the last dozen years or so—Mary Hamer’s Writing by Numbers, which focuses on the aesthetics of serial composition, and Mark Turner’s Trollope and the Magazines, which emphasizes the gendering of discourse in the literary monthlies [1]. Yet both centre their discussions on the 1860s, and thus neither gives more than a cursory glance at the interesting economic, aesthetic and ideological implications of the fact that many of the novels produced in the last decade or so of Trollope’s career were first issued neither as independent numbers nor in monthly magazines, but in weekly newspapers [2]. As Table 1 shows, the weekly journals involved were varied, including both metropolitan illustrated or Society papers and groups of provincial news miscellanies. These serial appearances, it will be argued, are evidence less of Trollope’s declining literary prestige than of the growing importance of the newspaper press in the marketplace for later Victorian fiction. As reflected in Tables 2 and 3, I have recently come across details of the newspaper syndication of Ayala’s Angel, which Trollope scholars have hitherto understood not to have been issued in serial form in Britain. Before presenting that new data and considering what can be learned from it, however, I need to discuss the more general motives underlying Trollope’s often uncertain experiments as a newspaper novelist. And in order to do that, I need first and briefly to give an overview of the various modes of newspaper serialization prevailing during the Victorian period.

Collins as Journalist

While it is known that Wilkie Collins published something over a hundred non-fiction articles in a variety of periodicals throughout his career, the precise number remains decidedly uncertain. Though the relevant volume of the current edition of the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature came out as recently as 1999, the Collins entry still has quite a few gaps and question marks. Something similar is in fact true of many other major Victorian novelists. The main reason is that anonymity remained the norm in the Victorian press until well after the mid-century, and authors sometimes explicitly requested that their contributions be included unsigned. After a disagreement on the religious line taken by the Leader, for example, Collins requested that ‘my name may never be appended to any future articles I may write’ (B&C I, 83–6), while, as we saw in Chapter 2, Dickens tried to keep strictly to the rule of anonymity in both Household Words and All the Year Round. The office book detailing payments to Household Words contributors has fortunately survived, but that for All the Year Round has been lost, and it is uncertain whether one was ever kept for the Leader. Altogether Collins reprinted less than thirty of his journalistic pieces, almost all in My Miscellanies (1863), with the lion’s share from Household Words, while his private papers often do not shed any light on the obscurities.

Collins and the Theatre

Throughout his life Collins was obsessed by the drama. His first recorded visit to a theatre was in Paris in 1844, when he saw the great French actress Rachel (B&C I, 25). As recorded in Chapter 2, in his early twenties he and a group of friends put on plays at the family home in Blandford Square, and it was his love of such amateur theatricals that first brought him into contact with Dickens. In 1850, he extended his theatrical ambitions, adapting a French play and performing it under the title A Court Duel as part of a charity benefit at the Royal Soho Theatre in Dean Street. In 1854–5 Collins’s regular work as reviewer for the Leader gave him access to a wide range of theatrical performances, and this experience also makes itself felt in a number of articles for Household Words, beginning with ‘Dramatic Grub Street’ in 1858.1 Most famously, his early novel Basil is prefaced by the much-quoted declaration that the novel and the drama are ‘twin-sisters in the family of fiction’ (B, xli), while he later told a French critic, ‘if I know anything of my own faculty, it is a dramatic one’ (B&C I, 208). There is thus a period from the late 1860s to the late 1870s when rather more of Collins’s energies go into the play than the novel. In a letter to his publisher, he even threatened to abandon fiction altogether (BGLL II, 417), while he confided to the actor Wybert Reeve that he harboured the dream of becoming ‘a theatrical manager’.2

Collins and Women

The previous chapter looked at the ways in which Collins’s novels draw attention to the sinister possibilities within the fabric of middle-class life in London, and their impact on the lives of characters both male and female. Here we will consider further how Collins’s texts engage with the roles of women and their assigned place in society. Contemporary reviewers of Collins’s fiction often saw his novels as dealing at least in part with the ‘Woman Question’, or what Queen Victoria termed the ‘mad wicked folly of “Women’s Rights”’.1 In 1856, Dickens was lavish in his praise of Collins’s ‘The Diary of Anne Rodway’, in which a poor London needlewoman investigates a murder, noting ‘the admirable personation of the girl’s identity and point of view’ (Pilgrim VIII, 161–3). Back in 1850, a reviewer for the Edinburgh Review said something similar about Antonina, presenting it as a story of ‘conflict between the old and the new … [between] a pure-minded Roman girl, and a voluptuous senator’.2 Collins was, Lippincott’s Magazine noted in 1868, one of a handful of male novelists possessing ‘the power of delineating a heroine who shall be neither a dressed-up doll nor an impossible angel. Rosamund in The Dead Secret, Magdalen Vanstone in No Name, Marion Halcombe in The Woman in White, and Rachel Verinder [in The Moonstone] … bear witness to the truth of this assertion’ (cited in Page, 180).

Collins’s Education and Reading

On 21 March 1862, approaching forty years of age and at the peak of his popularity William Wilkie Collins sketched out his career to assist Baron Alfred-Auguste Ernouf, a French scholar about to write a critical review for a series on contemporary English novelists.1 This ‘little autobiography’ included the following narrative of the author’s youth: nI was born in London, in the year 1824. I am the eldest son of the late William Collins, Member of the English Royal Academy of Arts, and famous as a painter of English life and English scenery. My godfather, after whom I was named, was Sir David Wilkie, the illustrious Scottish Painter. My mother is still alive. n nI was educated at a private school. At the age of thirteen, I went with my father and mother to reside for two years in Italy — where I learnt more which has been of use to me, among the pictures, the scenery, and the people, than I ever learnt at school. After my return to England, my father proposed sending me to the University of Oxford, with a view to my entering the Church. But I had no vocation for that way of life, and I preferred trying mercantile pursuits. I had already begun to write in secret, and mercantile pursuits lost all attraction for me. My father — uniformly kind and considerate to his children — tried making me a Barrister next.

Collins as Missionary

Novelists with a mission were hardly a rarity in the Victorian period. From the 1830s, journals of popular education had begun to employ short and serial fiction as a vehicle for messages either evangelical or utilitarian, and as the century wore on a similar medium was exploited by an increasingly wide range of crusading bodies — all the way from the temperance league to the suffragettes. Even writers of ‘bloods’ in penny weekly numbers for a working-class audience typically spiced their melodramatic tales with condemnations of aristocratic vice and praise for honest labour, the most notorious example being the republican George Reynolds who also ran a radical weekly paper. Major writers were themselves by no means immune to the attractions of didacticism, often combining the roles of novelist and journalist in rather similar fashion. From the mid-1840s, those willing to employ works of fiction to advocate their varying solutions to the pressing problem of the ‘Condition of England’ after four decades of rapid industrialization included Disraeli (in the trilogy beginning with Coningsby, 1844), Gaskell (with Mary Barton, 1848, and North and South, 1855), Charles Kingsley (in Alton Locke, 1850, and Yeast, 1851), plus of course Dickens himself (in Hard Times, 1854). In the mid-1860s, George Eliot with Felix Holt (1866) and Anthony Trollope in Phineas Finn (1869) were among the novelists to intervene in the debate around the second reform bill of 1867, which extended the franchise to many working men.