Reading Histories
Reading in Parts
If you were a Wilkie Collins fanatic during the 1860s and 1870s, there was literary merchandise on offer to satisfy your collector’s drive. If the fancy struck you, you could stride through the streets of London decked out in a Woman in White-themed bonnet, trailing the scent of Woman in White-themed perfume, and clutching the latest Woman in White-themed sheet music in both hands (Robinson 149, quoted in Lonoff 72).[1] In India, you could read reprinted discussions of the novel or purchase a volume edition of your own (“English Press”). In Australia, you could read about the latest theatrical remake of the play over your breakfast newspaper (“The Theatrical World At Home”). Collins’s novel was a blockbuster: researcher Sue Lonoff notes that when the volume edition became available in 1860, “it went through seven editions in six months—1350 copies in the first week alone, a remarkable figure for that era—and has never since been out of print” (72). How it reached this level of popularity has a lot to do with a style of publication that reached new heights in the nineteenth century: the serial. Rather than releasing their books in volume form, many authors first released individual chapters of their novels episodically.[2]
To understand why this form of storytelling was able to flourish, we can look back to the print culture history of the past and connect it to some of the changes that have occurred in the present. In many countries throughout the nineteenth century, the cost of printing and circulating text declined and the number of magazines and standalone publications increased. This bears a resemblance to our own digital age: with the arrival of the internet, it became much easier to create and circulate media. As a result, our publishing landscapes changed. Because the digital turn allowed competitors to try their hands at publication on the cheap and allowed readers to access texts for little to no money, the magazine and newspaper industry had to change radically. Due to these same technological shifts, casual bloggers could advance from relative obscurity into a writing career, and new forms of grabbing audience attention developed.
Nineteenth-century authors benefitted from a similar increase in the accessibility of publishing tools and the speed of communication. Thanks to improvements to railway systems, ocean transportation, and intracity travel, print could spread more fluidly within and beyond a country’s borders (Hayward 22, Turner 114). Likewise, the emergence of affordable subscription libraries and an increase in literacy rates fueled public demand for fiction (Turner 114-115, Griest 38). These changes catalyzed shifts in the structure and substance of popular novels. Episodic installments of serial tales appeared in newspapers, magazines, and standalone booklets, whetting the public’s appetite for more.
Looking back on the increase in the serial’s popularity in 1861, reviewer Eneas Sweetland