But, then, style has always shadowed modes of distribution in the history of the novel, from magazine serials to the Internet. With the rise of mass-market paperbacks printed cheaply on pulp paper, new forms were born (pulp fiction, anyone?), with their own dictates, their own hooks and lures for the reader. The triple-decker prevailed until, toward the end of the nineteenth century, Mudie’s became frustrated with a glut of books and began requesting single-volume novels from publishers. (Dickens’s naming a bounder Bounderby, in “Hard Times,” is one shameless example.) Fictional autobiographies and biographies-“Villette,” “Jane Eyre,” “Adam Bede”-worked well with the demands of the triple-decker a life story could enfold any necessary digressions and impart to them a sense of narrative unity. A tantalizing first volume could drum up demand for subsequent volumes, and help pay for them.Ī great many of the Victorian novel’s distinctive features seem expressly designed to fill up that “interminable desert” and entice the reader to cross it: a three-act structure, swelling subplots and vast casts, jolting cliffhangers, and characters with catchphrases or names that signal their personalities, rendering them memorable across nine hundred pages. Publishers were equally fond of the form, which allowed them to stagger printing costs.

For its founder, Charles Edward Mudie, who often bought the bulk of a print run and could demand commensurate discounts from publishers, the appeal was plain: since his subscribers-at least those paying the standard rate of a guinea a year-could borrow only one volume at a time, each triple-decker could circulate to three times as many subscribers. “The padding trade,” Trollope called literature at the time.Īs luxury items, unaffordable for outright purchase by most readers, triple-deckers were championed by Mudie’s Select Library, a behemoth of British book distribution. “Impossible to get through them.” Gissing lifted such laments from his own diary “New Grub Street” was itself a triple-decker, Gissing’s eighth, and he used every available trick to stretch it, wheezily, to length. “The three volumes lie before me like an interminable desert,” Reardon moans. The triple-decker, as it was called, was the form of much work by the likes of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Benjamin Disraeli, and Anthony Trollope: typically nine hundred octavo pages divided into volumes of three hundred pages each, handsomely printed and bound.

It’s not just the writer’s usual demons-skimpy word rates, self-doubt, the smooth ascension of one’s enemies-that torture Reardon but the strictures of the three-volume frigate that dominated Victorian novel-writing.

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