Robbery Under Arms: The Colonial Market, Imperial Publishers, and the Demise of the Three-Decker Novel

This essay offers a case study of the production history of a late Victorian novel by a colonial author, published in London by the firm of Remington in three volumes in 1888: Robbery Under Arms by "Rolf Boldrewood," the pseudonym of a New South Wales magistrate, Thomas Alexander Browne (1826-1915). In 1889 Macmillan republished the novel as number ninety-four in its recently established Colonial Library and thereby created a phenomenon: it would become one of the few enduring classics of nineteenth-century Australian literature. Over half a million copies were sold by 1937, a great many of them in Macmillan's sixpenny double-column editions from 1898. Robbery Under Arms was in fact the first title in that very successful marketing strategy. The novel would have a distinct but equally successful life after the Second World War—in several new editions from various British and Australian publishing firms—when it found favor again, chiming in Australia with the aspirations and ideals of the 1950s and 1960s. ¹

The novel's production history is in some ways atypical of late Victorian novels (which is instructive in itself), but attending to its atypicality allows one to focus on the larger operations of a colonial print culture in an imperial system. The empirical approach I pursue here affords some unexpected insights. Relations between London publishers and colonial authors, and the role and power of colonial booksellers, come into a new focus. And some light is shed on one of book history's favorite historiographical problems: the rapid demise of the three-volume form of the novel following the famous statements to the trade by Mudie's and W. H. Smith's circulating libraries on 27 June 1894. Work by Richard Altick in 1957, Guinevere L. Griest in 1970, and more recently by Simon Eliot and David Finkelstein, among others, has gradually produced a powerful, multifaceted explanation of this deceptively simple yet far-reaching phenomenon. ² The production history of Robbery Under Arms, when linked to some recent work on colonial editions by Graeme Johanson, ³ reveals a blind spot in the emerging consensus and suggests the need for a broader explanation of the collapse of the three-decker that incorporates the role of colonial booksellers and of the colonial market more generally.

The case study also prompts a broader methodological comment about the role of critical editions within book history. The idea of using case studies to localize or amplify the generalizations of national book history is, of course, not new. The Histoire de l'édition française used the method to advantage, and it has recently been adopted by A History of the Book in Australia. ⁴ Relating the broad understanding to the individual case seems a natural enough way of conceptualizing the historiographical objective, but the task of preparing critical editions calls it into question. As an editor, my instinct has always been to distrust the book-historical generalization and to be wary of the bibliographical. Whatever its source, the generalization (with which, inevitably, you must start) rarely tells you enough and is as likely to mislead as to enlighten, even to denature the curious particularities of the literary work being edited. In its various versions, that work may have ten thousand tiny hooks (textual variants, bibliographic oddities), all of which beg questions of causation and motivation, and any of which may unexpectedly snag on the general explanation that (you had supposed) was satisfactory or sufficient. Critical editions function, in other words, like a geological cross-section cutting through the new narratives of book history and the older ones of literary history, exposing tensions, distortions, and pressures that complicate the picture, and suggesting ways in which that overall picture might need to be redrawn. They rarely prove to be simple illustrations of the generally accepted case. So it has been with my work on an edition of...