Kyle Johnston, "A Most Unprofitable, Irritating, Unsatisfactory Method of Publication"

In a notice in The Nation, an American weekly, on 24 February 1876, reprinted in David Carroll’s George Eliot: The Critical Heritage (1971), Henry James writes of the first monthly installment of George Eliot’s new novel, Daniel Deronda, a book which “none other at the present time is comparable to,” that

The quality of George Eliot’s work makes acceptable, in this particular case, a manner of publication to which in general we strongly object. It is but just that so fine and rare a pleasure should have a retarding element in it. George Eliot’s writing is so full, so charged with reflection and intellectual experience, that there is surely no arrogance in her giving us a month to think over and digest any given portion of it. (362)

James objects to the serialized method of publication of Daniel Deronda. To James, this method of publication is a “retarding element”; it is only because of the sheer superlativeness of a novelist like Eliot that Daniel Deronda can shine in spite of the deficiencies of its mode of delivery.

James is not alone in his objection to Daniel Deronda’s mode of publication. It is a frequent concern raised in periodicals and newspapers responding to the first book in February 1876. The Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser writes on 7 February that “George Eliot is accused of having brought into the literary world a most unprofitable, irritating, unsatisfactory method of publication—that of a volume at a time—which only serves to stimulate the appetite at the termination of each installment, and deadens it during the interval which must elapse before the appearance of another.” Like James, though, The Freeman notes that in “spite of the scrappy method of its publication it is destined to be the book of the season, and to mark in the literary history of the period.” Similarly, a review in John Bull on 5 February compliments Eliot’s powers while denigrating her work’s serial delivery, writing, “Every reader is aware that a book signed by this remarkable writer will be the matured product of genius, in which not a single line will have been added to fill up necessary space, or in that race with the time which is the cause of so much that is careless and slipshod in our periodical literature.” (As Terence Cave notes in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, Eliot “still had several months’ writing ahead of her when the first four monthly parts were sent to the publishers in October 1857”—under a deadline, but not, we would expect, careless and slipshod.) The Aberdeen Journal’s review of “George Eliot’s New Work” on 9 February opens with the lines: “To discuss a work of this kind piecemeal is much like criticising a sample brick of a stately edifice. Nevertheless, we protest that the fault is not with the critics; it is with the author.” But unlike the others, the reviewer for The Aberdeen Journal has to “confess frankly that, so far, we are disappointed.”

           

While all these reviews consistently disapprove of Daniel Deronda’s mode of publication, almost all praise the work itself as no less than the apogee of contemporary literature. This raises, in my mind, two questions: 1) What is it about Daniel Deronda’s mode of production that elicits such a reaction? And 2) How can we today imagine what it meant for contemporaries to judge Daniel Deronda as a work of literature divided into eight separate books that were published one month at a time?

           

By 1876, the serialization of novels in the weekly or monthly issues of journals such as the weekly All the Year Round or the monthly Fornightly Review was common. Beginning with Middlemarch in 1871-72, as N. N. Feltes describes it in Modes of Production of Victorian Novels, Eliot and  George Henry Lewes, along with the publisher John Blackwood, devised a new mode of production in which the work was spread out over four volumes, instead of the three that contemporaries associated with triple-decker novels (most of which were first published serially prior to being available in volume form from lending libraries). With the new model, each volume was divided into two books and each book was published monthly and sold for 5s.  In this way the publisher and author eschewed the reliance on lending libraries which the three-decker novel necessitated. The publication of Daniel Deronda followed this Middlemarch model, as did that of Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister which was serialized nearly contemporaneously in eight monthly parts between November 1875 and June 1876 by Chapman and Hall.

It must be this model which The Freeman’s Journal “accuses” Eliot of bringing into the world—but why exactly this model elicits such a strong reaction is unclear when monthly serial publication was not new or uncommon. Perhaps the reaction indicates just how hungry readers were for the new Eliot—avid fans, they wanted to “binge,” and the constant deferral of completion and wholeness frustrated them.

           

What interests me most in these reviews is that the things that are praised in Daniel Deronda are frequently inextricably tied to the experience of serialized reading of which the reviews disapprove. This is most evident—and most eloquently expressed—in James’s review. James sees Daniel Deronda’s “manner of publication” as its one “retarding element.” Yet he also notes that “we must express our pleasure in the prospect of the intellectual luxury of taking up, month after month, the little clear-paged volumes of Daniel Deronda,” and, even more strikingly, adds,

For almost a year to come the lives of appreciative readers will have a sort of lateral extension into another multitudinous world—a world ideal only in the soft, clear light under which it lies, and most real in its close appeal to our curiosity. It is too early to take the measure of the elements which the author has in hand, but the imagination has a confident sense of large and complex unfolding.

What James describes here are two of the most prominent features of the experience of serialized reading: the experience of reading across time and space, of “lateral extension” into other worlds stretched over months, over a year, and the imaginative and social experience of serialized consumption in which the gaps between installments give rise conjecture and discussion—the story goes on, even while the next installment awaits publication. As Jason Mittell writes in “Serial Boxes,” “the gap between installments is the constitutive element of serial fiction, the space between available story units when both writers and readers imagine new possibilities and reflect on old tales.” James—who continues his review by imagining the various “potentialities” of Gwendolen Harleth—gets a large part of the pleasure he takes from Daniel Deronda from his experience of reading it serially.

And James is not alone in indulging in the pleasure of imaginative conjecture and reflection which serialization invites. The reviewer for John Bull dwells on Gwendolen, drawing connections to Felix Holt’s Esther Lyon and then criticizing her as “the incarnation of self-consciousness.” The York Herald is sympathetic to Gwendolen, while Berrow’s Worcester Journal finds that “at present the heroine does not exhibit any of the traits of a St Theresa, but it may be that George Eliot will subject her to a discipline of love which shall transform her nature, and call forth the nobler capabilities of her soul”; The Freeman’s Journal finds her “heartless and imperious, but at the same time too high-spirited to be selfish.” What gives these reviewers such a strong distaste for Daniel Deronda’s mode of publication remains to be seen; what is clear is that they enjoy and actively participate in the communal discourse of reflection and imagination which seriality invites, and that, for Henry James at least, the experience of reading a novel in serialization gives a pleasure unique to itself.