For most of the Victorian era, British novels appeared in three volumes at the artificial price of 31 shillings and sixpence — roughly a week's wages — a format sustained by Mudie's Select Library, which bought thousands of copies and rented them out volume by volume. Novelists padded plots to fill the third volume. In 1894 Mudie's and W. H. Smith refused the price, and within three years the format was effectively extinct.
Triple-decker novelist no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
1740s – 1900
Serialization and the novelist as public figure
Circulating libraries, monthly numbers and newspaper feuilletons turned fiction into a mass industry and its best practitioners into celebrities. Dickens toured two continents reading his own work; two million people lined the streets of Paris for Victor Hugo's funeral in 1885; Tolstoy's estate at Yasnaya Polyana became a pilgrimage site. For the first time, a substantial number of people earned a full living writing novels.
What else was happening then
1836
Dickens invents the mass serial
The Pickwick Papers, issued in shilling monthly numbers, grows from sales of under a thousand copies to some forty thousand per installment once Sam Weller appears. The 24-year-old Charles Dickens demonstrates that fiction sold in cheap parts can reach an industrial-scale public, and serialization becomes the dominant business model of the Victorian novel.
1857
Madame Bovary on trial
France prosecutes Gustave Flaubert for offending public morals after the Revue de Paris serializes Madame Bovary. His acquittal in February 1857 — the same year Baudelaire is convicted for Les Fleurs du mal — makes the novel's right to depict adultery and provincial despair a matter of settled law, and the scandal makes the book famous.
1922
Ulysses published in Paris
Sylvia Beach's bookshop Shakespeare and Company publishes James Joyce's Ulysses on 2 February 1922, his fortieth birthday, after serial excerpts were prosecuted for obscenity in the United States. The ban stands until Judge John Woolsey's 1933 decision. Modernism makes the novelist an avant-garde figure — and makes difficulty itself a form of prestige.
Where that work lives now
The maker of book-length fiction, from Murasaki Shikibu's Heian court to the Kindle's self-publishing flood — a trade with no license, no ladder and no retirement age.
✍️ Novelist →