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

There is, it seems, something intrinsically interesting to the modern scholar about the Victorian penchant for serial publication. It has been viewed as an emblem of middle-class ideology, an indication of the tensions in Victorian understandings of time and history, a form of commercial coquetry, and as a nineteenth-century foretaste of the modern soap opera. It has been studied in relation to its producers and its consumers; its historical, cultural and material contexts have been examined; and it has been theoretically prodded and poked from numerous angles. And yet despite this wealth of material on the subject our interest refuses to abate. Perhaps this is the result of what Catherine Delafield here calls serialization’s “unfinished, unending” quality (4).

In the 1980s and 1990s a number of scholars drew attention to this hitherto underdeveloped context of Victorian publishing history. Works such as J. Donn Vann’s Victorian Novels in Serial (1985), N. N. Feltes’ Modes of Production in Victorian Novels (1986), Robin Myers and Michael Harris’ Serials and their Readers 1620–1914 and perhaps most significantly Linda Hughes and Michael Lund’s The Victorian Serial (1991) attempted to re-inscribe the original serial form upon those classic single-volume works that readers believed they knew so well. Hughes and Lund sought to connect form and content, examining the dynamics of serialization through the lens of Victorian culture. Additional studies since then have expanded our knowledge in different directions. Laurel Brake has challenged the “omnipresence of the volume in our libraries and our scholarship” and perhaps more significantly the omnipresence of the individual in our understanding of Victorian authorship (Print in Transition, 1850–1910, 29), while Graham Law has established an eighteenth-century pre-history to the standard Victorian understanding of serialization in Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press (2000) and has extended scholarly interest in serialization outside the now archetypal space of the family magazine – understandings of which have been much enriched by the work of scholars such as Andrew Maunder, Jennifer Phegley, Mark Turner and Deborah Wynne. The gendered and even sexually-charged nature of the periodical space in which many serialized novels were first issued has been the subject of much discussion of late as has the commercial context and the significance of viewing the part-issue and the periodical, not simply as literary receptacles, but as commodities.

Both commercialization and cultural status are topics of particular interest in relation to Dickens and periodicals: Jennifer Hayward has connected contemporary criticism of Dickens’s works to the manner in which the uncertainties of serialization undermined the authority of the literary critic, while David Payne has read serialization as a sign of the commodification of culture that Dickens and others ameliorated with their promotion of a more spiritual ethic in their fiction. This, of course, relates to wider discussions regarding Dickens’s cultural status, then and now, and the complexities of his relationship to his own commodification, as explored at length by John Drew in his seminal work Dickens the Journalist (2003).

A common strand amongst all these works is an attempt to “rescue” the serialized novel as a format from notions of it as an ephemeral, fragmentary and somehow lesser version of the finalized volume. Catherine Delafield, by contrast, largely avoids such agendas and concentrates instead on a detailed enumeration of the ways in which the various facets of the mid-Victorian periodical intersects with the serialized novel and how the material context of the novel may or may not influence our reading of it. Delafield takes five key texts and situates them within the context of the magazines in which they were published, paying attention to issues such as branding, illustration, editorial policy and intertextuality. With dedicated chapters on authorship, the periodical editor, the periodicals themselves, and the transition from periodical to volume, Serialization and the Novel in Mid-Victorian Magazines provides a thorough introduction to the complex interplay of competing authorities presiding over the...