Brake 2001

Brake, Laurel. Print in Transition, 1850-1910: Studies in Media and Book History. Palgrave, 2001.

"By 1891 then, the conceptual separation of literature from journalism is clear on both sides, not only from the newspaper press (which had become more inclusive of literary news and reviews) but within the ranks of the army of part-time writers for the periodical press whom Shand called 'the brilliant half-amateurs' ([Shand] 1878: 650). Gosse was one of these, and George Gissing expressed a very similar view at this time in his novel New Grub Street. By 1891 two principal characteristics of nineteenth-century print culture are perceived - the ubiquity of fiction and the ubiquity of the press." 7

"The number of serial titles between 1800 and 1900 increased exponentially from the fresh crop of quarterlies at the beginning of the century to the new annuals, monthlies, weeklies, thrice weeklies, Sundays, and dailies; the longevity of some (such as the Edinburgh, the Westminster, Blackwood's; the Athenaeum, the Spectator, and Punch; The Times and the Morning Post) and the brilliance of others more short-lived (such as the Examiner, the Penny Magazine and the Northern Star) show the staying power of serials, the market for 'intelligence', and the quality on offer. The range of serial formats (from 'Libraries' to part-issue to daily) and of functions (from the dissemination of news to the reviewing, advertising, and circulation of fiction) was flexible and politically and culturally powerful. The phenomenon of serials - their number, their range, their ubiquity - increased access to reading, the habit of reading, and the market for cheap books at a time when the standard price per volume stood at 10s 6d. It is noteworthy that the establishment of the system of the high-priced three-volume novel in 1815 was shortly followed in 1817 by the creation of Blackwood's Monthly Magazine, which offered monthly instalments of novels, later to appear in volume form. Also in the wake of the expensive three-decker, Dickens' success with the part-issue of Pickwick reintroduced a format which he and others used profitably and successfully to reach a wider audience than the circulating libraries or the booksellers of the 1830s served." 8

"From the 1840s, in addition to serial publications, various means of circumventing the high price of books stand out, involving publish-ers, retailers, and entrepreneurial distributors of books. The projects of circulating libraries and single-volume reprint series thrived, and cheap editions of 'railway novels' began to appear exclusively in stations from 1848," 8

"One effect on the book of this prodigious accumulation of serial publications over the century pertains to the perception of time in relation to print culture." 11

Book publishers participated in this quick quickening rhythm of publishing

"The ubiquity of the serial did mean that the non-serialized or non-series book title, by a new or unproved author, was a commercial risk" 13

Anonymous authorship in the serials was common practice, later authors would be revealed and repackage their works as books 15-6

"Authorship as constructed in serials is collective, or at the very least it is not individualist; intertextu-ality and editing ensure this, and authors themselves write within codes of discourse, of the kind of piece they are writing - news, fea-tures, short story, novel - and of the particular journal they are writing for." 18

"With the gradual collapse of the three-decker format from 1894 and the intervention of the one-volume 'well made' novel, the price of much new high and middle zone fiction was reduced by at least two-thirds. This and an increasing number of popularly priced reprints undermined the dominance of the circulating libraries, and their imposition of themselves between the bookseller and the reader. With the reduction of the high price of books, the yoking of serial production with that of literature and books became less important for publishers and authors. They might now rely far more on sales in the first instance to an audience exponentially increased by their access to cheap serial literature in the course of the nineteenth century. Increasingly, fiction reverted to its debut in volume form, which was bought or borrowed. Part-issue and serial fiction gradually subsided." 23

"It is my contention that the links between the companionable bookstall and the republic of reading, figured here by the rich diversity of 'poverty or a third class carriage' ', were forged by the Victorian serial - the part-issues, the magazines, and the newspapers - and that in the nineteenth century the spheres of the book and the serial inhabited one and the same galaxy." 26

"If the periodical text is defined in terms of material culture, so as to include coloured wrappers, customised advertisers, title pages, indices, illustrations, and juxtaposed and sequential editorial matter, that format (and the part-issue format which imitates it) may be taken as a model of textual heteroglossia." 27

Analogy to television

"the elusiveness and unrecoverability of full nineteenth-century part-issue and periodical texts hamper study. Relatively few wrappers and even fewer advertising supplements have survived the stripping, disciplining and institutionalisation of the texts, and I do not know at this moment whether all or most higher journalism or part-issues carried advertis-ing, nor have I seen many of the wrappers of well-known journals and parts." 29

"it is a mistake to construct the nineteenth-century book as a stand-alone commodity. First publication in volume form was often part of a staged process which may have begun with serialisation and went on to a succession of editions, normally but not exclusively from expensive to cheap. Texts judged to have sales potential were issued in a proliferation of series, of different formats and prices, over the short and medium term to maximise a stratified readership; publishing histories of individual texts themselves may thus be said to participate in the paradigm of the timespan of the series which marked the period." 30

Rise of the news agent, a distributor for serials like booksellers for books 70

"In this section on media history then, I have tried to rethink some of the basic assumptions of our retrospective configurations of the history of nineteenth-century publishing - the precedence of books over serials both in numbers and cultural value, which I question; the separation of the publishing institutions and processes of book and serial produc-tion, which I find to be intertwined; and the notion that authorship was the sole and hegemonic brand mark of literary production, when anonymity supplemented by serial title seems just as common. I have compared kinds of constraint that book series and their publishers may exert on genre and authors accompanied by the comforts of publication by a major firm, with the freedom from constraint available to independent authors yoked to the exigencies of distribution and publicity they incur. This provides insight into differences between publishers - the well-established with a reputation to maintain, such as Macmillan, and smaller, financially vulnerable houses such as Grant Richards and Everett & Co. It also maps different experiences of authorship, cushioned like Benson's or entrepreneurial and risky like Wright's. Lastly, looking to the cultural formation of booksellers-publishers late in the century, I construe a moment of transition, when the newsagent enters the configuration, in company with the infant Daily Mail." 82-3