You might think that Victorian novels are so long because of their serialization in weekly or monthly instalments, sold either as part of periodical publications or independently. However, this business practice, introduced by Charles Dickens’s publisher, Chapman, with the serialization of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (19 instalments between March 1836 and November 1837) was preceded by an equally successful tactic to expand the word count of novels: the three-decker. Walter Scott’s Kennilworth (1821), published by Archibald Constable, was the first novel to appear in three volumes, at the astonishingly high price of 1 ½ guineas (current £221 or €257).
The idea behind the three-decker was to attract readers to circulating libraries, which charged a fee for each volume (as the now defunct video-rental outlets used to do for each film). This means, of course, that the profit obtained from a novel multiplied by three with its publication in three volumes. The idea itself of the circulating library seems to have been the brainchild of Allan Ramsay, who opened the first one in 1725, in Edinburgh. Bookseller Charles Mudie’s famous circulating library appeared twenty-one years after Scott and Constable’s pioneering three-decker, being founded in 1842, and was responsible for its dominance until 1894, when the business collapsed. What caused this failure was the nationwide generalization of the public libraries network (the Public Library Act was passed in 1850 in the UK) and the problem of what to do with the best-selling titles that briefly flared up and quickly went out of fashion, finding no buyer for its expensive three-decker editions. W.H. Smith adapted better to the new times, managing to keep its circulating library, founded in 1860, in business for 100 years until 1961. Serialization, which usually led to publication as a single volume, fared better than the three-decker.
There had been very long novels already before the introduction of the three-decker and of serialization in instalments. Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady, the longest novel in English at roughly 950000 words, was originally published between 1747 and 1748 in seven volumes. It is not, however, to be considered a heptalogy like Harry Potter (1997-2007) but a very long novel (well, possibly Harry Potter is also a very long novel in seven volumes!). In novel series, such as for instance Ian Rankin’s John Rebus police procedural series, each volume is supposed to be independent, though, of course, the reading experience is enriched if you know the previous volumes.
Serialization in the style of Dickens and three-decker publication, both usually illustrated, were practically abandoned at the turn of the 20th century, to be superseded in the 1950s with the modern non-mimetic trilogy (though literary mimetic novel series continued with, for instance Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Times, 12 novels, 1951-1975). This was a bit of an accident, since J.R.R. Tolkien’s publishers, Allen & Unwin, refused to publish his novel The Lord of the Rings as a single 1000-page volume, because of the high printing costs and the post-WWII scarcity of paper in the UK.
Since splitting it into three volumes was cheaper, we know Tolkien’s long novel today as a trilogy formed by The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), The Two Towers (1954) and The Return of the King (1955). The later success of Isaac Asimov’s original Foundation trilogy, composed by Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952) and Second Foundation (1953), consolidated the presence of trilogies and series in genres such as science fiction, fantasy, YA novels, detective fiction or romance. Since the 1980s, stand-alone novels have become less habitual in these genres, though they still are the main staple of literary fiction. You might say that current publishers have returned to the three-decker, though for direct sales rather than subscription to circulating libraries.
Here’s the question: do the very long novels of the past operate under the same narrative principles as the very long novels of today? Are three-deckers essentially the same as Tolkien-style trilogies? Are current novel series similar to the multi-volume Clarissa, or to Dickens’s serialized novels? The answer is yes and no. I dare anyone to make sense of this very complex panorama.
In essence, very long narratives can only be sustained on the basis of plenty of incidents and/or a large cast of characters. Unfortunately, my argumentation today has a huge gap in it because I have not read Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927, around 1.2 million words), and I cannot say what sustains it. What I have noticed reading Tolstoi, de Queirós, Pardo Bazán and Galdós recently is that their very long novels have quite simple central plots but are extended to occupy hundreds of pages by introducing many secondary characters with a relatively marginal importance, and even no impact on the main plot. There is also abundant description of persons, places, and objects. Dialogue is full of very long speeches that do not correspond at all to the way people do speak, either now in the 21st century or back in the 19th. From this perspective, Tolkien is, arguably, a late Victorian writer rather than a post-Modernist, as he should be considering his biography. Reading The Lords of the Rings is an experience closer to reading Dickens (even Eliot or Trollope) than to reading D.H. Lawrence or Virginia Woolf.
My argument must be obvious by now: the literary 19th century novel—to distinguish it from the French feuilleton, the serialization in newspapers of plot-driven melodrama such as Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris (1842-3) or Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo (1844-46)—is character-driven, even when it is full of incident, as it happens in Dickens. In the 1880s shorter works, such as Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) or R.L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and many others, changed the pace dramatically, as part of the late Victorian current that led eventually to the far more concise novels of the 20th and 21st centuries sold in a single volume (yes, I know that Joyce’s Ulysses, published in 1922, and initially serialized, is 262869 words long, more than 700 pages). Character is still consistently built, but the casts are radically reduced, and so are their descriptions and backstories. Everything, in short, becomes more concise and to the point, as usual with exceptions.
The Lord of the Rings is, so that you know, 481103 words long. What happens after the 1950s, then, when Tolkien reshapes the very long Victorian novel is that its internal logic stops being dominated by the external logic of the publisher in search of the three-decker. There is a world of difference between narrating in 1000 pages what could have been narrated in 400 if the cast of minor characters and description had been minimized, and coming up with dense stories that require immense word counts because they are full of incident (being perhaps closer to the feulleiton).
In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien is still using slow-paced Victorian literary narrative techniques, but by the time we get to, say, to Ken Follett’s historical novel The Pillars of the Earth (1989) the old codes have been replaced with the fast-moving styles mainly borrowed from cinema and TV (but read Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis, published between 1895 and 1896, and you can see classic Hollywood already lurking among its pages). My guess is that the film and TV adaptations of the Victorian novels are essential in this process: the production design and the actors’ looks absorb much of the description; dialogue is pared down to suit the pace of audiovisual production, and the less essential subplots are trimmed off. We may still get large casts of characters, but the Victorian narrative clutter has been swept away, forcing writers to structure plots as bursts of fast dramatic action. The result is that in the 21st century we feel more comfortable reading fantasy sagas that run to thousands of pages than Middlemarch (319402 words, about 900 pages).
I have not yet mentioned the content of the novels. 19th-century fiction, excepting Gothic and adventure, is in love with realism, a tendency that reaches an extreme morbid low with Zola’s naturalism, a current that is often extremely classist rather than critical of social marginalization. The Victorian reader was given a choice between the thwarted passions of the upper and upper-middle classes, with no second thought for how their lifestyles were sustained by the working classes, or plunged into the degraded lives of these labouring individuals in the naturalist novels. The plots, as I have been arguing here, often depend on legal, moral or religious rules that are now obsolete. It takes, in short, much good will on the reader’s side to engage for many hours in the conflicts of persons we would probably dislike in real life, supposing they didn’t exclude us from their circles. Clearly, if Jane Austen is today everyone’s favourite 19th century writer, this is because her narrative style is so uncluttered and concise, so un-Victorian, never mind that most of us would hardly be candidates to be on Pemberley’s guest list.
To us, Victorian fiction seems as cluttered as the style of décor Victorians favoured in their homes, which is why we grow impatient with them. In contrast, our fictions have been decluttered to make room for action and are much faster paced, even when they are long. When I take a long Victorian novel, like Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady (1880-1), I must be ready to cope with a torrent of description, dialogue, authorial comment, characters’ introspection, usually concealing very carefully a shrill melodramatic skeleton (idiot girl inherits a fortune and stupidly marries a scoundrel). In an equally long contemporary novel, the same elements can appear but are reduced to 10% of the space they used to occupy, which makes the reading far lighter but forces authors to pack them with far more incident. It’s, then, relatively unsurprising that our longest novels are the ones in the non-mimetic genres, where writers can let their imagination fly (or must, after signing contracts for trilogies). In mimetic, realist fiction, in contrast, the writers’ imagination and, above all, the capacity to vividly portray character, has waned, leaving us with pallid reflections of life, which only light up when the old Victorian narrative techniques are imitated, or Modernist-style introspection is put to good use.
So, overall, the Victorian three-decker is not the same as the post-post-Modern genre trilogy, not even when they have the same exact word count. We have grown used to fictions full of incident and action, possibly because of the influence of cinema and TV series, which has eroded our patience with description, authorial comment and introspection. Our characters don’t think much, or have shallow thoughts supposed to be representative of today’s life, which is likewise shallow. This makes for faster reading, which explains the popularity of trilogies and series today, and our impatience with most 19th century novels, which seem to us unnecessarily loaded with clutter, no matter how brilliant that can be.