Portrait of A Novel by MICHAEL GORRA

Author:MICHAEL GORRA
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2012-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

17.

THE MAGAZINES

MIDSUMMER, 1881. HENRY James has had his Venetian spring and brought The Portrait of a Lady to within a shout of its close. But an Italian July is another matter, and at the start of the month he left the peninsula’s “stifling calidarium,” and went north. James never traveled quickly, but on this journey he paused for only a week, at the Swiss resort of Engelberg near Lucerne. He crossed the Channel on July 12 and, as soon as he was back in Bolton Street, sat down to an awkward bit of correspondence.

He had another part of his serial ready, as he wrote to Houghton, Mifflin, and would send it to Aldrich at the Atlantic the next day. But his publishers expected that afterward there would be just a single installment left and so, he wrote, “I am afraid you will be a little alarmed to learn that I have had to ask from Messrs Macmillan one additional month of their magazine, and I shall have therefore to beg the same favour of you.” James had no doubt they would grant his request. Nevertheless, he apologized for stretching out what was already a long novel and, as if in compensation, noted that the last three installments would be short; each filled about twenty of the magazine’s pages, while the usual ones took twenty-five or more. Still, he would need that extra month, and what two years before he had described, in writing to Howells, as a serial of “probably not less than six, & more than eight” months’ duration would instead take fourteen.

Most of the Victorian novels we read today were serialized in one form or another. The important exceptions are the Brontës in England and Hawthorne and Melville in America, all of whom worked before the age of the great monthly magazines like the Cornhill or the Century or indeed the Atlantic itself. James often told friends to wait for the finished volume, but serialization was an unavoidable fact of almost every writer’s economic life. Nor was there anything odd in the book’s beginning its run before he had completed it. Nearly everyone did that, and Dickens in particular sometimes had to fight his way to a deadline. But serialization took several forms, and the kind of story a novelist told depended in part on the medium in which the work initially appeared. James’s request opens a window on the publishing practices of his day. We need to consider it carefully, and can start by looking at the magazines in which the Portrait first came out.

The two were surprisingly alike. They had begun publication within a few years of each other, the Atlantic in 1857 and Macmillan’s in 1859, and they shared the same politics. The American journal spoke for a progressive humanism, and the British one for what was called Christian socialism, a movement that played a role in the early history of Britain’s Labour Party. Each was pro-Darwin, and in their early years each took an

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