Serial Fiction

Abstract

Serial fiction was not a Victorian invention. As R.M. Wiles has shown, already by the second quarter of the eighteenth century ‘number books, independently issued in weekly or monthly parts, wrapped in blue paper covers, had become a common commodity in the publishing business’ (Serial, 75). In his short-title catalogue of such works, Wiles even lists a few scattered experiments of a similar type dating back to the 1670s. By 1750 works thus published in fascicles already totalled several hundred and were occasionally issued in editions of as many as two or three thousand copies. Among them were both original and reprinted works, translated texts as well as those in the vernacular, and, among a wide variety of other genres, a number of examples of prose fiction, including Cervantes, Defoe, and imitations of Richardson such as Pamela in High Life. Apparently the motivation was simply economic. In this way, publishers could spread the cost of production, and subscribers the cost of purchase, painlessly over the period of consumption, while the nationwide distribution network for periodical publications was already more highly developed than that for works in volume form. The practice thus substantially increased the market for books when the extent of the reading public was still limited.