The three-volume novel (sometimes three-decker or triple decker [note 1] ) was a standard form of publishing for British fiction during the nineteenth century. It was a significant stage in the development of the modern novel as a form of popular literature in Western culture.
Three-volume novels began to be produced by the Edinburgh-based publisher Archibald Constable in the early 19th century. [note 2] Constable was one of the most significant publishers of the 1820s and made a success of publishing expensive, three-volume editions of the works of Walter Scott; the first was Scott's historical novel Kenilworth, published in 1821, at what became the standard price for the next seventy years. [3] : 16 [Archibald Constable published Ivanhoe in 3 volumes in 1820, but also, T. Egerton had been publishing the works of Jane Austen in 3 volumes 10 years earlier, Sense and Sensibility in 1811 etc.] [4]
This continued until Constable's company collapsed in 1826 with large debts, bankrupting both him and Scott. [5] As Constable's company collapsed, the publisher Henry Colburn quickly adopted the format. The number of three-volume novels he issued annually rose from six in 1825 to 30 in 1828 and 39 in 1829. Under Colburn's influence, the published novels adopted a standard format of three volumes in octavo, [note 3] priced at one-and-a-half guineas (£1 11s. 6d.) or ten shillings and sixpence (half a guinea) a volume. [note 4] The price and format remained unaltered for nearly 70 years, until 1894. [8] The price for a three-volume novel put them outside the purchase power of all but the richest households. [7] : 40 This price should be compared with the typical six shilling price for a one volume novel, which was also the price for the three-volume novels when they were reprinted as single volume editions. [7] : 74
Three-volume novels quickly disappeared after 1894, when both Mudie's and W. H. Smith stopped purchasing them at the previous price. [9] Mudie's and Smith's issued circulars in 1894 announcing that in future they would only pay four shillings per volume for novels issued in sets, [note 5] less the customary discounts, [2] : 309 with the usual trade practice of supplying thirteen volumes for the price of twelve. [7] : 256 This killed the production of the three-volume library editions. [2] : 240
| Year | No of Novels | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1884 | 193 | |
| 1885 | 193 | |
| 1886 | 184 | |
| 1887 | 184 | |
| 1888 | 165 | |
| 1889 | 169 | |
| 1890 | 160 | |
| 1891 | 162 | |
| 1892 | 156 | |
| 1893 | 168 | |
| 1894 | 184 | [note 7] |
| 1895 | 52 | |
| 1896 | 25 | |
| 1897 | 4 |
The format of the three-volume novel does not correspond closely to what would now be considered a trilogy of novels. In a time when books were relatively expensive to print and bind, publishing longer works of fiction had a particular relationship to a reading public who borrowed books from commercial circulating libraries. A novel divided into three parts could create a demand (Part I whetting an appetite for Parts II and III). The income from Part I could also be used to pay for the printing costs of the later parts. [note 9] Furthermore, a commercial librarian had three volumes earning their keep, rather than one. The particular style of mid-Victorian fiction, of a complicated plot reaching resolution by distribution of marriage partners and property in the final pages, was well adapted to the form.
In the early nineteenth century the cost of a three-volume novel was five or six shillings per volume. [14] : 291 [note 10] By 1821 Archibald Constable, who published Sir Walter Scott, took advantage of his popularity to increase the price of a single volume to ten shillings and sixpence (half a guinea), or a guinea and a half (31 shillings and sixpence) for all three volumes. [14] : 291 [note 12] This price was equivalent to half the weekly income of a modest, middle-class household. [15] : 38 This cost was enough to deter even comparatively well-off members of the public from buying them. Instead, they were borrowed from commercial circulating libraries, the most well known being owned by Charles Edward Mudie. [16] Mudie was able to buy novels for stock for less than half the retail price – five shillings per volume. [16] He charged his subscribers one guinea (21 shillings) a year for the right to borrow one volume at a time, or two guineas a year (£2 2s.) to borrow four volumes at a time. A subscriber who wanted to be sure of reading the whole book without waiting for another subscriber to return the next volume had to take out the higher subscription. [7] : 38-39
Their high price meant both publisher and author could make a profit on the comparatively limited sales of such expensive books – three-volume novels were typically printed in editions of under 1,000 copies, which were often pre-sold to subscription libraries before the book was even published. [3] : 16 It was unusual for a three-volume novel to sell more than 1,000 copies. [17] [note 13] The system encouraged publishers and authors to produce as many novels as possible, due to the almost-guaranteed, but limited, profits that would be made on each. [3] : 16
The normal three-volume novel was around 900 pages in total at 150–200,000 words; the average length was 168,000 words in 45 chapters. It was common for novelists to have contracts specifying a set number of pages to be filled. If they ran under, they could be made to produce extra, or break the text up into more chapters — each new chapter heading would fill a page. In 1880, the author Rhoda Broughton was offered £750 by her publisher for her two-volume novel Second Thoughts. However, he offered her £1,200 if she could add a third volume. [15] : 40
Outside of the subscription library system's three-volume novels, the public could access literature in the form of partworks – the novel was sold in around 20 monthly parts, costing one shilling each. This was a form used for the first publications of many of the works of Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and William Thackeray. Many novels by authors such as Wilkie Collins and George Eliot were first published in serial form in weekly and monthly magazines that began to become popular in the middle of the 19th century. Publishers usually offered a single-volume reprint of the three-volume library edition twelve months after the original, [7] : 260 usually for the price of six shillings for the first reprint, [7] : 74 with lower prices for later reprints. These were typically three shillings and sixpence for the second reprint, and two shillings for a "yellowback" for railway bookstalls. [7] : 54 Publishers like Bentley offered cheap, one-volume reprint editions of many works, with prices falling from six shillings to five shillings in 1847, and to three shillings and sixpence or two shillings and sixpence in 1849, with a one shilling "Railway Library" in 1852. [3] : 17 The delay before reprint editions were released [note 14] meant that those who wished to access the latest books had no choice but to borrow three-volume editions from a subscription library. [16] [note 15] The delay also enabled the circulating libraries to sell the second-books they withdrew from circulation before a cheap edition was available. Publishers sometimes waited to see how well the withdrawn books sold before deciding the size of the reprint edition, or even whether to reprint at all. [19] : 240
Victorian juvenile fiction was normally published in single volumes; for example, while all of G. A. Henty's juvenile fiction was issued from the start in single volume editions, his adult novels such as Dorothy's Double (Chatto and Windus, London, 1894), [19] : 259 Rujub the Juggler (Chatto and Windus, London, 1895), [19] : 238 and The Queen's Cup (Chatto and Windus, London, 1897) were published as three-volume sets. [19] : 305 [note 16] The convention that only adult fiction was published in three-volume format was so strong that when Bevis, the Story of a Boy by Richard Jefferies (Sampson Low, London) was published in 1882 in three volumes, E. V. Lucas commented in his introduction to the 1904 Duckworth edition that doing so had kept the book out of the hands of its true readers, boys. [23]
Colonial editions, intended for sale outside the UK, were normally published as single volume editions. [19] : 240 [note 17]
The cheapest works of popular fiction were sometimes referred to pejoratively as penny dreadfuls. These were popular with young, working-class men, [25] and often had sensationalist stories featuring criminals, detectives, pirates or the supernatural.
Though the era of the three-volume novel effectively ended in 1894, works were still on occasion printed in more than one volume in the 20th-century. Two of John Cowper Powys's novels, Wolf Solent (1929) and Owen Glendower (1940) were published in two-volume editions by Simon & Schuster in the USA.
The Lord of the Rings is a three-volume novel, rather than a trilogy, as Tolkien originally intended the work to be the first of a two-work set, the other to be The Silmarillion , but this idea was dismissed by his publisher. [26] [27] For economic reasons The Lord of the Rings was published in three volumes from 29 July 1954 to 20 October 1955. [26] [28] The three volumes were entitled The Fellowship of the Ring , The Two Towers , and The Return of the King .
Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has written several books in this format, such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84 . However, many translations of the novel, such as into English, combine the three volumes of these novels into a single book.
George MacDonald was a Scottish author, poet and Christian Congregational minister. He became a pioneering figure in the field of modern fantasy literature and the mentor of fellow-writer Lewis Carroll. In addition to his fairy tales, MacDonald wrote several works of Christian theology, including several collections of sermons.
A paperback book is one with a thick paper or paperboard cover, and often held together with glue rather than stitches or staples. In contrast, hardback (hardcover) books are bound with cardboard covered with cloth, leather, paper, or plastic.
Constance Clara Garnett was an English translator of nineteenth-century Russian literature. She was the first English translator to render numerous volumes of Anton Chekhov's work into English and the first to translate almost all of Fyodor Dostoevsky's fiction into English. She also rendered works by Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Goncharov, Alexander Ostrovsky, and Alexander Herzen into English. Altogether, she translated 71 volumes of Russian literature, many of which are still in print today.
Chatto & Windus is an imprint of Penguin Random House that was formerly an independent book publishing company founded in London in 1855 by John Camden Hotten. Following Hotten's death, the firm would reorganize under the names of his business partner Andrew Chatto and poet William Edward Windus. The company was purchased by Random House in 1987 and is now a sub-imprint of Vintage Books within the Penguin UK division.
Charles Edward Mudie , English publisher and founder of Mudie's Lending Library and Mudie's Subscription Library, was the son of a second-hand bookseller and newsagent. Mudie's efficient distribution system and vast supply of texts revolutionized the circulating library movement, while his "select" library influenced Victorian middle-class values and the structure of the three-volume novel. He was also the first publisher of James Russell Lowell's poems in England, and of Emerson's Man Thinking.
Sarah Gertrude Millin, née Liebson, was a South African author.
The London Magazine is the title of six different publications that have appeared in succession since 1732. All six have focused on the arts, literature and poetry. A number of Nobel Laureates, including Annie Ernaux, Albert Camus, Doris Lessing, and Nadine Gordimer have been published in its pages. It is England's oldest literary journal.
A yellow-back or yellowback is a cheap novel which was published in Britain in the second half of the 19th century. They were occasionally called "mustard-plaster" novels.
Mary Elizabeth Mann, née Rackham, was a celebrated English novelist in the 1890s and early 1900s. She also wrote short stories, primarily on themes of poverty and rural English life. As an author she was commonly known as Mary E. Mann.
A circulating library lent books to subscribers, and was first and foremost a business venture. The intention was to profit from lending books to the public for a fee.
In literature, a serial is a printing or publishing format by which a single larger work, often a work of narrative fiction, is published in smaller, sequential instalments. The instalments are also known as numbers, parts, fascicules or fascicles, and may be released either as separate publications or within sequential issues of a periodical publication, such as a magazine or newspaper.
Elaine Horseman née Hall was a British author of three children's books, which centre on five children in an old victorian house and their experiences with a book of magic spells. Horseman's first novel Hubble's Bubble was published first in England and in Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Spain and Portugal.
Richard Bentley was a 19th-century English publisher born into a publishing family. He started a firm with his brother in 1819. Ten years later, he went into partnership with the publisher Henry Colburn. Although the business was often successful, publishing the famous "Standard Novels" series, they ended their partnership in acrimony three years later. Bentley continued alone profitably in the 1830s and early 1840s, establishing the well-known periodical Bentley's Miscellany. However, the periodical went into decline after its editor, Charles Dickens, left. Bentley's business started to falter after 1843 and he sold many of his copyrights. Only 15 years later did it begin to recover.
Stanley Llewellyn Wood was a prolific Welsh illustrator who travelled widely. He was known for his portrayals of horses in action and also for his black-and-white illustrations for the Captain Kettle stories by C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne.
Art in Australia was an Australian art magazine that was published between 1916 and 1942.
Dean & Son was a 19th-century London publishing firm, best known for making and mass-producing moveable children's books and toy books, established around 1800. Thomas Dean founded the firm, probably in the late 1790s, bringing to it innovative lithographic printing processes. By the time his son George became a partner in 1847, the firm was the preeminent publisher of novelty children's books in London. The firm was first located on Threadneedle Street early in the century; it moved to Ludgate Hill in the middle of the century, and then to Fleet Street from 1871 to 1890. In the mid-20th century the firm published books by Enid Blyton and children's classics in the Dean's Classics series.
Constable's Miscellany was a part publishing serial established by Archibald Constable. Three numbers made up a volume; many of the works were divided into several volumes. The price of a number was one shilling. The full series title was Constable's Miscellany of Original and Selected Publications, in the Various Departments of Literature, Science, and the Arts.
Richard Pryce was an English novelist, author of Christopher, David Penstephen and other works of fiction. He was also a playwright and wrote a number of one act and three-act plays. Disappointed with his cold reception by the public in Britain, despite glowing reviews, he wrote very little after the outbreak of the First World War.
Simms and McIntyre was a 19th century printing and publishing company from Belfast, Ireland. The company published The Parlour Library, an innovative book series of cheap reprints of titles in attractive physical formats and sold at very low prices, both of which features which were later imitated by other publishers.
Andrew Chatto was an English book publisher known for his role in the book publishing company Chatto & Windus.
| Production | |
|---|---|
| Consumption | |
| By country | |
| Other |
|
| Related | |
