The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Three-Volume Novel

Troy J. Bassett

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030319250
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030319267
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Utilizing recent developments in book history and digital humanities, this book offers a cultural, economic, and literary history of the Victorian three-volume novel, the prestige format for the British novel during much of the nineteenth century. With the publication of Walter Scott's popular novels in the 1820s, the three-volume novel became the standard format for new fiction aimed at middle-class audiences through the support of circulating libraries. Following a quantitative analysis examining who wrote and published these novels, the book investigates the success of publisher Richard Bentley in producing three-volume novels, the experiences of the W. H. Smith circulating library in distributing them, the difficulties of authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson and George Moore in writing them, and the resistance of new publishers such as Arrowsmith and Unwin to publishing them. Rather than faltering, the three-volume novel stubbornly endured until its abandonment in the 1890s.

© The Author(s) 2020

T. J. BassettThe Rise and Fall of the Victorian Three-Volume NovelNew Directions in Book Historyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31926-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Troy J. Bassett¹

(1)

Purdue University Fort Wayne, Fort Wayne, IN, USA

Troy J. Bassett

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

For many students of Victorian fiction, the term “three-volume novel” conjures up the image of bulky and expensive books native only to the British Isles and the overly wordy and subplot laden texts they contained. The format served a large reading audience through the hundreds of circulating libraries which bought, rented, and sold fiction. Nearly, every canonical author of the period appeared in the ubiquitous format of three octavo volumes priced at one-and-a-half guineas, including first editions of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Margaret Oliphant, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope. Several hundreds more obscure authors wrote the remaining novels, and another few hundred publishers sold them. The synergistic commercial and literary connections between the publishing format and circulating libraries, especially the largest Mudie’s Select Library and W. H. Smith and Son’s Subscription Library, have become popular wisdom in literary studies. Yet, the publishing format itself remains curiously under-examined. Even relatively basic questions are still unanswered, such as: how many three-volume novels were published, who wrote and published them, what were the economics of the format for both publishers and circulating libraries, why did the format last so long, and why did it end when it did? The latter question, at least, has one simple answer: the joint ultimatum from the two largest Victorian circulating libraries, Mudie’s and W. H. Smith, addressed to publishers in June 1894 calling for the end of the format. However, even the ultimatum does not completely explain the long history or final end of the format. This study aims to address these questions and give a general cultural and economic history of the three-volume novel during the Victorian period.

When Scottish publisher Archibald Constable (1774–1827) published Sir Walter Scott’s novel Kenilworth in an edition of three octavo volumes at the eye-catching price of one-and-a-half guineas (£1.11.6) in January 1821, he could have little dreamed that he would set a publishing standard which would last three-quarters of a century. The publishing format of the three-volume novel or triple-decker began as one publisher’s calculated gamble but was eventually adopted by his rivals as the prestige format for new fiction aimed at middle-class readers. Prior to the 1820s, publishers issued novels in formats ranging anywhere from one to seven (and sometimes more) volumes in a set based mostly on the convenience or whim of the publisher. For instance, in the eighteenth century, canonical novels such as Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) appeared in four or six volumes, Samuel Richardson’s The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1764) appeared in seven volumes and Frances Burney’s Cecilia: or, The Memoirs of a Heiress (1782) appeared in five volumes. Even by the end of the century, novels still frequently appeared in editions of five or more volumes in a set.¹ As Peter Garside and Rainer Schöwerling show in The English Novel 1770–1829 (2000), the early years of the nineteenth century witness a gradual shift toward three volumes as the most common set size for the novel.² In the first decade of the 1800s, a novel was just as likely to appear in an edition of two, three, or four volumes. By the 1820s, nearly half of all novels appeared in an edition of three volumes, with corresponding declines in novels published in two, four, or more volumes. Of the 81 total new fiction titles published in 1829, 48 titles first appeared in a three-volume edition (59.3%). The shift did not escape the notice of readers: as novelist and reviewer Henry Mackenzie observed in 1821, “The mystical Number 3 seems in modern times to be worshipped… that being the common standard for the Number of Vols in which most of the favorite Fictions of the day are set forth.”³

Garside and Schöwerling attribute the rise of the three-volume novel to three factors. First, commercial considerations motivated publishers to curb larger set sizes for editions since their larger prices prevented individual sales—the price of the three-volume novel, in the view of publishers, was the maximum purchasers would pay, around 5s or 6s per volume—for instance, Jane Austen’s first novel Sense and Sensibility (3 volumes; 1811) cost 15s for the set.⁴ Second, the shift to octavo volumes (with 8 leaves per gathering) from duodecimo volumes (12 leaves per gathering) progressed unevenly over the course of these years: novels overwhelmingly appeared in the latter format and more serious works (e.g., history or biography) utilized the former. The octavo format led to more imposing-looking volumes compared to the daintier-looking duodecimo volumes.⁵ Visually, at least, fiction and nonfiction looked noticeably different on the bookshelf of libraries, perhaps reinforcing the low critical regard for fiction during the Romantic period best illustrated by the Gothic fiction published by the Minerva Press in the smaller format. Last, the unprecedented success of Scott and his Waverley novels gave the three-volume format a cultural prestige that other authors and publishers quickly exploited. As many scholars have established, when Scott turned to fiction writing, he gave the novel genre a considerable critical and economic boost. Constable published each of his first four novels—Waverley (1814), Guy Mannering (1815), The Antiquary (1816), and Rob Roy (1818)—in three duodecimo volumes with prices ranging from 21s to 24s per set, a higher price but still the familiar format.⁶ With Ivanhoe, published on 20 December 1819, Constable used three octavo volumes priced at 30s per set (or 10s per volume, twice the usual price), a format and price in line with works of history and biography, with higher-quality paper and type, and generally out of line for fiction.⁷ All of Scott’s subsequent novels came out in the octavo format and other novel publishers gradually shifted to the octavo format. A year later, Constable published Kenilworth, thereby setting a standard for new fiction—octavo volumes at 10s 6d per volume—which would stubbornly persist to nearly the end of the Victorian period. A few short years later, nearly a third of the three-volume novels published in 1826 listed at this higher price and nearly all of the 45 triple-deckers published in 1829 did as well.⁸ John Sutherland, in his biography of Scott, rightly calls Kenilworth “one of the most influential novels ever published in English,” a lasting cultural influence for an otherwise forgotten novel.⁹

By the 1840s, the three-volume novel became an established staple of British publishing with half as many two-volume novels produced and a score of four-volume novels. Despite periodic complaints from authors, publishers, libraries, critics, and readers, the format enjoyed continuous literary and financial success throughout the century. In fact, little outwardly changed in the appearance of a triple-decker between Scott’s Kenilworth and the last three-volume novel, G. A. Henty’s The Queen’s Cup (1897). The conventional story of the three-volume novel generally blames the circulating libraries—in particular Mudie’s and Smith—for encouraging their production. In economic terms, these large libraries exercised a monopsony control over the production of new fiction and created a negative feedback loop: because of high prices, only libraries could afford multi-volume novels; and because only libraries bought multi-volume novels, the prices remained stubbornly high. Accordingly, the developments of part-publication, cheap reprints, and serialization, for instance, have been seen as a means by which publishers worked around the libraries to directly reach the reading public. Throughout the nineteenth century, many critics lamented the fact that England was a book borrowing not a book buying society, for which the three-volume novel became the convenient symbol or target of their attacks. Other critics, such as George Moore, blamed the three-volume novel and the libraries for exerting an undue influence over the development and contents of English fiction—some scholars even laud Moore’s personal crusade against Mudie as partially responsible for ending the format. For these reasons and others, the three-volume novel has often been seen as a format perpetually under attack and in decline during the Victorian period, hounded by competitors, critics, and challenges from all sides. In this light, the libraries’ ultimatum in 1894 often gets presented as a quietistic act of acknowledgment by the libraries that the format had finally had its day. While this conventional story of the three-volume novel has some truth to it, as we shall see, the reality was much more complicated.

Though often mentioned in passing in literary histories or criticism of Victorian fiction, the three-volume novel format rarely garners scholarly attention on its own. In a 1957 article in The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Charles E. Lauterbach and Edward S. Lauterbach examined 105 Victorian three-volume novels in order to determine the typical word count, number of chapters, number of pages, and other statistics and found a broad range in text length: on average, the typical length of a three-volume novel ranged from 158 000 to 200 000 words with a few examples considerably shorter or longer.¹⁰ If anything, their analysis shows the flexibility of the three-volume format: short texts could be (and often were) padded out to fill the volumes (e.g., excessive chapter breaks, large margins, heavy leading), whereas longer texts could be shoe-horned into its three volumes (e.g., smaller type, additional pages). Their work represents one of a handful of descriptive bibliographical treatments of the format which however do not address the m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Production of Multi-volume Fiction, 1837–1898
• 3. Publishing the Three-Volume Novel: The Experience of Richard Bentley and Son
• 4. Buying, Renting, and Selling the Multi-volume Novel: The Economics of W. H. Smith and Son’s Subscription Library
• 5. De-monopolizing Literary Space: Alternatives to the Three-Volume Novel
• Back Matter