Notes
19th century publishing and reading: Jordan and Patten, Literature and the Marketplace
-1860s plateau after expansion via steady increases in manufacturing and distribution (1830-1855)
-second surge 1875-1914 due to mechanical improvements, bigger markets, mass circulations
Serial theorizations
-forward looking: Whig, enlightenment, personal and social development narratives
-timeliness
-Patten's focus on retrospective nostalgia for previous modes of discursive practice, feeling, and social organization in Pickwick; reminiscence (ongoing) as narrative strategy of serialization as well
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Reform and Narrative: Claybaugh, Novel of Purpose
-reformist networks = transatlantic
-reform's impact on forms of fiction: verisimilitude, plot working out (or not) signal optimism or pessimism
-novels as active interventions into social and political life, text acting on he world
-specifically transnational reform ideas led to transnational literary forms
-Sketches by Boz and Pickwick: reform heritage of "temperance narratives"
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John Sutherland, Victorian Writers, Publishers, and Readers
Number publication
-inaugurated by Pickwick
-Thackeray's Errors: an error in the 17th number, chapter 59 in which Jos Sedley's return from India is narrated before his dawdling on his way back is ostensibly caught by Thackeray in his editing but he decided to leave it there. Sutherland suggests that it is part of Thackeray's art to be interested in the juxtaposition of past and present, as clear from his obsession with counterfactuals
-Punch magazine was acquired by Bradbury and Evans in 1842, importantly, a printer and not a bookseller
-Punch serialization different from Dickens's: less authorial dominance, more elastic form from 6-24 numbers, generally more "democratic, good natured, and tolerantly ironic of the foibles of life" acc. to Sutherland. Also, pictorial talent was less fettered
Towards Periodical Publication
-Late 1850s-60s, new generation of publishers, Bentley, Maxwell, Tinseley, Hurst, and Blackett and new novelists, Meredith, Reade, Collins, Ouida, Braddon
-1855 newspaper tax abolished
-monthly number publication pretty much antiquated by then, it was a "transitional function in mobilizing a nation-wide reading public before the full evolution of the fiction-carrying periodical"
-Trollope anachronistically returned to the 20 number novel in The Way We Live Now: old man's satire of modern ways?
-Dickens also continued to try to publish some of his novels in parts - more sense of intimacy with reading public? More economically rewarding for the serial author.
