This semester I’ve been really interested
in seriality, so I went to the Rare Books & Manuscripts Library to look at an
original run of George Eliot’s Daniel
Deronda,
serially published by William Blackwood & Sons in eight books from February
to September 1876. This blog post will focus on the relationship between the
novel’s serial form and Blackwood & Sons’ advertising.
The number of pages devoted to advertisements is inconsistent
throughout the books. Each has an ad on the inside of the front cover, and on
both sides of the back cover. The first two open with 16 pages of advertising,
the third with 12, and the fourth, fifth, sixth, and eighth volumes with 8. The
only volume that breaks from this format is the seventh, which opens with only
4 pages of ads but ends with an additional 16 (more on this later).
I was struck by the amount of ad space devoted
to other publishing companies. For example, in the first installment, pages 1-11
are exclusively ads for books, but only three of these pages are for Blackwood &
Sons. Other publishing companies promoted included Sampson Low Marston,
Tinsley Brothers’, Henry S. King & Co., Daldy, Isbister & Co., Smith, Elder, & Co., Blackie & Sons Publications and there is also a full-page ad for "Mudie’s Select Library. New and Choice Books." Though
fewer pages in the later installments are devoted to published works, beginning with Book
2 and extending through Book 7, an insert of “Popular Novels” "Sold by all bookstores" and "Sold at
all Railway Stations" appears between
the cover and the first page.
With few exceptions, all the book advertisements
appear first, giving them spatial and temporal prominence: they are the first
advertised commodity that readers encounter when they open the material book and, therefore, the most likely to gain attention and stick with them. This
prominence is reinforced by the comparative abundance of book ads, which never
comprise less than 30% of total number of pages devoted to advertisements, and their physical clustering at the
beginning of the installment. Across the eight books, most products (like cocoa
or pens) are only advertised by one company; the two exceptions are baby
formula and life insurance, which are advertised by two competitors. But there is
not a single book of Deronda that didn’t
sell multiple space to the publishers of other novels, which I found surprising. Nowadays it’s difficult to imagine ever opening a book from one publisher
to see an ad for another.
Thus Eliot’s original readers would have
been immediately immersed in a kind of industry catalog, which promotes a range
of the latest consumer products from popular novels to travel literature, instructional
textbooks by academic scholars, activity-related topics such as “Works on
Gardening,” and many more. These products are further distinguished materially:
there are ads for cheap 2 shilling novels, slightly more expensive 7s. 6d.
cloth bound books, and bound collections for as much as £2 10s. The range of
material products suggest that this "catalog" is not only selling books as commodities to display in the home, but also
selling the form of consumption that sustains the publishing industry:
reading.
The act of reading is what binds the
imagined community of readers targeted by such a catalog. As Mark W. Turner explains in his
chapter on “The Material Culture of the Victorian Novel” in A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel, the part-serial form creates a
community of readers by bringing them
together each month to perform the same activity. I’m suggesting that
this conglomeration of publisher ads functions similarly, plunging its
reader into an imagined community of textual and material consumers. And it
keeps them there spatially and temporally: in the first two installments a reader finds 11-12 pages of book ads before reaching promotions for products like Joseph Gillott's Steel Pens, Fry's Cocoa, Oswego
Prepared Corn, and Cash’s Frilling.
If the ads’ physical collation and spatial
placement frontloads monthly installments of Deronda with a publishing industry catalog of “principal” and
“choice books” for a community of consumers, the linguistic emphasis throughout
the ads on “New” “Recent” “Lately” and “just” published texts, emphasizes the serial
dynamic of consumerism and
how its accumulative logic maps onto a more general
temporal paradigm. We want more and more, but we also want it to be the newest
and latest.
Though Blackwood & Sons occupies more ad space than other
publishers, with the exception of Book 7 they never comprise more than 50% of the publishing ads (more often, significantly less). It’s this mild self-promotion that
makes their advertising in Book 7 so striking. In the penultimate installment
of Eliot’s novel, Blackwood & Sons open their material product with only 4
pages of advertising, plus the inside cover and an insert for "The Select Library of Fiction: The most popular
novels published, well printed, and bound in picture boards." Of these ad
pages, only one promotes books and it is Sampson, Low, Marston, & Co.’s
“List for August.” This is the smallest number of opening ads published in any of the eight books.
But this installment is also unique
in how it ends. Whereas every other published finishes with the last
page of Eliot’s text and a small paper insert advertising the next volume of
the series, Book 7 ends with a 16-page “Select List of William Blackwood
& Sons’ Publications," which is further subdivided into: a 10-page list of
texts with prices for “Standard Works of Fiction,” “Recent Classical
Translations,” a series of “Ancient Classics for English Readers,” a
supplemental series to “Ancient Classics,” “Text books of Natural History”
and “Geology,” and “Gardening and Agriculture.”
If novels published
serially allow authors “to
keep in touch with a reading public over an extended period of time,” they also
keep publishers in touch with consumers (Turner 117). Because Blackwood & Sons presumably had the
readership for 8 months, they could afford to sell a lot of valuable ad space
(both in terms of production cost and influence), to “competing” publishers in
the earlier volumes. The stark shift in Book 7 may therefore be strategic: by
bringing out their heaviest self-advertising
at the end of the penultimate book,
Blackwood & Sons give Eliot’s audience a reading list to occupy them in the
temporal and material gap between the 7th and the 8th books. It’s also appropriate that the “Select List” should come in this
particular gap,
when readers are literally faced with an ad for the last series installment,
and emotionally faced with the end of their life with the novel. The temporal
and spatial placement work together to leave the reader with a lasting
impression of Blackwood & Sons’ books when the time is most appropriate for them
to order another one.
But if we take into consideration how the
“simultaneity” of the reading cycle helped make serial publications a “social
event,” we might also consider how this list invites a similar dynamic (Turner 117). As scholars
since Linda Hughes and Michael Lund have noted,
seriality is a form of publication and temporal dissemination that encourages readers
to communally speculate during the enforced gap about what will happen next.
Moreover, since successful serial novels generally grow their readership with
each installment, this is a conversant community that tends to grows as time
goes on.
The 7th book of Deronda ends with a plot twist
particularly suited to engage a British readership that, as Joe Post noted in
his last blog post,
was growing increasingly dissatisfied with the so-called Jewish plot: Grandcourt’s death urges
readers to
conjecture whether Daniel will marry Gwendolen or Mirah. Blackwood &
Sons’ decision to include their “Select List” at the end of this volume invites
readers already “projecting forward” about how Deronda will end, to also pause, reflect, and communally discuss
what they might buy to read when it does (Turner 125). The serial
publication of Daniel Deronda gave
Blackwood & Sons extended physical space and time for marketing their
products to a somewhat secured audience. As such, it enabled the creation of an
extended advertising strategy contained within, but strategically spread
throughout its 8-books-over-8-months production schedule.
By the time Deronda appeared in February 1876,
Blackwood & Sons had developed a “Supplemental
Series” because “The marked
success and general popularity of the Series of 'Ancient Classics for English
Readers,' lately concluded… has been accompanied by some regrets, expressed by
both the friendly critics of the press and in private quarters, at its not
having been made somewhat more comprehensive.” And so the very first
advertisement on the inside cover of Vol. 1 is for this supplemental series.