28 Retrieving Colonial Literary Culture not readily accessible card indexes to fiction in the Australasian and the Sydney Mail. Lurline Stuart's annotated bibliography of nineteenth-century literary periodicals, published in 1979, serves to identify other publications which featured serial fiction. 6 In recent years Elizabeth Webby (who was associated with the Sydney project) and I have been the chief advocates of comprehensive indexing of fiction in colonial newspapers and magazines and also, to the best of my knowledge, the main Australian researchers in the field. 7

The particular focus of my interest is novels serialised in newspapers. Narrowing in this manner is, I find, more manageable, at least for the purpose of discussion. In the first place, confining myself to newspapers I am redressing a balance where, I think, more emphasis has been given to the literary magazine as a vehicle for fiction. In the second place, focussing on serial (rather than one-oft) publication I am able, without confusing the issue, to take account of a phenomenon which is sui generis, which has its own characteristics and effects-seen in the agencies and contractual arrangements involved, in the demands, over time, on the form of composition and regularity of submission, in the presumed or documented relationships between text and reader, and so on. To put this emphasis on serial fiction in a wider than Australian context I shall quote Scott Bennett, an American who has been involved in the bibliography of Victorian periodicals and the serial fiction they contain:'The market for reading matter was one of the earliest consumer mass markets to develop, and it established itself primarily through serial publication.'s I am not arguing, however, that the occurrence of one-time publication of whole novels in magazines or newspapers, typically as Christmas tales in December issues of some weeklies and illustrated monthlies, should be ignored. Nor I am suggesting that the short fiction, perhaps noteworthy in its own right while also shedding light on a writer's development and providing clues to popular taste, should be omitted. But these are not central to my exposition.