Samantha Plasencia, *Daniel Deronda*'s Serial Run"

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 7^th and the 8^th 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 7^th 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.

 Blackwood & Sons also serially advertises at a more micro level for their “Supplemental Series” to the original “Ancient Classics for English

Readers.” As the publishers’ ad explains in their 1874 edition of Eliot’s Legend of Jubal, and Other Poems, the goal of the “Ancient Classics” series is to “explain, sufficiently for general readers, who these great writers were, and what they wrote: to give, wherever possible, some connected outline of the story which they tell, or the facts which they record, checked by the results of modern investigations; to present some of their most striking passages in approved English translations, and to illustrate them generally for modern writers; to serve, in short, as a popular retrospect of the chief literature of Greece and Rome." The collection includes 20 works on figures such as Homer, Virgil, Sophocles and Plato (fun fact: Trollope contributed to the series, with a book on Caesar). They were cloth bound, published quarterly and sold for 2s. 6d.

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.