Serialization and the Novel in Mid-Victorian Magazines by Delafield Catherine;

Author:Delafield, Catherine;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Published: 2015-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

The Serialized Novel

This chapter explores the original context for the serialized novel within the mid-Victorian family magazine. Re-placed within the periodical, the material text of the novel as serial can be viewed at its specific cultural moment. According to Margaret Beetham and Kay Boardman, ‘The serial was one of the commercial, rhetorical and structural strategies to involve the reader’,1 and the chapter considers how such strategies were deployed through the five core novels. Each of the novels is discussed to identify the effect of intertextuality within the periodical miscellany and to assess the serial’s format and contribution to the periodical. Richard Altick describes the ‘coloration’ of the serial within the periodical as being created by ‘the physically proximate content of nonfiction’2 and the localized impact of the serialization of the novel is analysed against other texts and in the context of accompanying illustrations. Andrew Maunder suggests that magazines presented ‘a world of competing as well as complementary discourses’3 and the discussion here assesses the ways in which the text of the novel was both competing and complementary within the discourse of the periodical.

This chapter makes the most specific links between serial and magazine. For each serial there is a dedicated section which considers the relationship with or development of the register of the periodical in which it was embedded. Each section also explores the intertextual commentary created by the serial’s interaction with other material and in particular, where appropriate, the impact of illustration within the magazine. It will be demonstrated that even complementary serials used elements of competition as part of their rhetoric for existence within the periodical’s discourse.

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