Reviews and Comments on Serializing Fiction
'an exemplary empirical study in the genre of History of the Book'
  Regenia Gagnier, Professor, School of English, Exeter University
  Prepublication Review
'As the first scholar to study in any detail this forgotten episode in the manufacture and distribution of a product designed for a mass fiction-reading public, Graham Law set himself a formidable task in Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press.The raw materials necessary for a well-rounded account are both abundant and hard to find, and some have simply vanished. . . . Yet enough data of various kinds have survived to enable Law to write a substantial and densely factual study, ballasted by a score of tables.'
  Richard D. Altick, Regent's Professor of English, Emeritus, Ohio State University
  'The Curse of the Cliffhanger', Times Literary Supplement (9 Feb 2001) 5-6
'In this seminal study, Law (Waseda Univ., Japan) adds an important new dimension to the study of Victorian periodical literature, namely, a detailed analysis of the publication of Victorian fiction, serially, in newspapers. . . Law's important research substantially changes the conception of Victorian readership and the influence of fiction'
  Rosemary T. VanArsdel, Distinguished Professor of English, Emerita, University of Puget Sound
  Review in Choice (American Library Association), 38:10 (June 2001).
' Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press fufills our best expectations. It gives a detailed descriptive history of the rise and decline of syndication with a wide-ranging discussion of its implications for readers and authors. It will prove essential reading for those with an interest in this particular aspect of publishing history. The book is handsomely produced with sixteen, mostly uncommon illustrations. The notes are excellent with a comprehensive bibliography and index.' 
  Andrew Gasson, Author of Wilkie Collins: An Illustrated Guide (OUP, 1998)
  The Wilkie Collins Society Newsletter (Spring 2001) 1
' Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press has irreversibly recast the shape of literary history in the nineteenth century . . . Law's book opens up for new scrutiny an important transitional period in the history of the novel and provides a wealth of new information about authors reaching audiences with serial fiction in the Victorian Age' 
  Michael Lund, Professor of English at Longwood College, Virginia, co-author of The Victorian Serial (UP of Virginia, 1991)
  Review in The Wilkie Collins Society Journal, NS4 (2001) 55-7
'The first two chapters provide a comprehensive account of serialized fiction previous to 1850 and of the early newspaper serializers of the 1850s and 1860s (primarily in Scotland). Chapters three and four recount the history of Tillotson's Newspaper Fiction Bureau of Bolton, Lancashire, and its rivals, including the Northern Newspaper Syndicate, AP Watt's literary agency, and W.C. Leng and Co. of Sheffield, all of whom dominated the field during newspaper serialization's heyday from the 1870s to the early 1890s. Together, these chapters constitute the first cohesive, accurate history of how British newspaper syndicates developed and operated during this time.'
   Chuck Johanningsmeier, University of Nebraska, Omaha
   Review in SHARP News, 11:2 (Spring 2002) 12-13
'Law's Serializing Fiction is an extremely readable and beautifully organized account of the serializing of fiction by newspaper syndicates toward the end of the nineteenth century . . . This is material history at its best, the careful and undogmatic unraveling of McLuhan's adage "the medium is the message" . . .'
  Laura Mandell, Miami University
  Review in The Wordsworth Circle, 32:4 (Fall 2001) 278-80
'Law draws on a truly impressive range of primary sources to illuminate the practices of the syndicates, providing not only a history of the first and most important, Tillotsons, and its competitors, but also parallel stories of the careers in syndication of authors well-known (Mary Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Margaret Oliphant, Walter Besant) and vitually unknown (David Pae) . . . a valuable contribution to periodicals scholarship'
  Dallas Liddle, Augsburg College
  Review in Victorian Periodicals Review, 35:2 (Summer 2002) 189-90
'I learned something from every page of this book . . . The scholarship of Serializing Fiction is weighty. . . . The book is a stimulus to further reading and a significant reference source for scholars.' 
  Mary M. Saunders, Professor of English, Hampden-Sydney College, Virginia
  Review in Review (University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville) v. 24 (2002) 111-28 
'The story [of newspaper serialization] is a complex one, intersecting as it does with so many aspects of publishing and general history. At heart it has elements of high drama: family sagas; professional friendships and feuds; political, religious and geographical rivalries; class and gender conflicts; triumphs and tragedies; and all to the swelling accompaniment of late nineteenth-century imperialism. In less scrupulous hands it could lend itself to a telling as melodramatic or ideologically driven as was some of the serialised fiction itself. Law, who defines his approach as non-ideologically "cultural materialist," is cautious, dogged, and meticulously concerned to report every possible fact and to document every assertion with multiple examples. He has trawled through vast tracts of primary and secondary material for his evidence, an effort which anyone who has worked with newspapers can only admire, appreciate, and be very thankful that someone else has undertaken.'
   Helen Debenham, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
  Review in Australasian Victorian Studies Journal, 7 (2001) 192-4
'In 1878 the popular novelist James Payn wrote to Bernhard Tauchnitz, "Literature has taken a curious phase in England so far as fiction is concerned. The largest prices are now got from country newspapers who form syndicates, and each subscribe their portion towards the novel" (qtd. 161). Payn's remark neatly encapsulates why Graham Law's highly original, meticulously researched study of serial fiction, syndication, and newspapers is needed. In Law's account the weekly rather than monthly serial predomi-nates, and the history of Victorian serialization undergoes substantive revision. ... Law's revised history of the serial is densely detailed yet always lucid; if he establishes the larger, and crucial, role played by the provincial press in Victorian serialization he also illuminates such matters as serial preferences in Britain versus America (which preferred adventure to sensation fiction given the latter's whiff of impropriety). Only indefatigable research at the British Newspaper Library and related archives could have produced such a study; and if at times a certain social-scientism creeps into Law's argument and prose style, the data he generously provides in tables and attractive plates is useful and breathtaking in range. Principally a cultural materialist account, Law's study also analyzes the impact of weekly serials on authorship, readership, and genre, with due attention to class, gender, and geography.' 
 Linda Hughes, Texas Christian University
  Review in Victorian Studies, 44:4 (Summer 2002) 688-90
'For all that I may disagree with its rejection of explicit and self-reflective theorization, I have no hesitation in pronouncing Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press an essential text for anyone studying nineteenth-century British media history. I shall certainly be using it for years to come as a rich mine of information about the varying costs of fiction, what and who were published where, the nature of contracts between authors and syndicates, between syndicates and newspapers and so on. It is indeed as reference book on the material conditions of nineteenth-century provincial newspaper fiction production that this volume will be most useful, with its 18 tables, extensive bibliography and plethora of detail. Furthermore, its first part, 'Context', provides a summa, deriving from familiar secondary sources, that I would recommend to students of Book or Media History courses as a historical introduction to the serial.'
  Andrew King,  Canterbury Christ Church University College
  Review in Media History 8:2 (December 2002) 213-4
  Ralf Schneider, University of Tubingen
  Review in ZAA: Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik 50:2 (2002)
  A. Banerjee, Institute of English, School of Advanced Studies, University of London
  Review in English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 83:6 (Dec 2002) 563-4
    'Two additional books – both of them long in the making and based on research into sources not previously tapped – call into question all of our confident assumptions about who read what. Graham Law's Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press draws on records from Tillotsons' Fiction Bureau and other agencies that developed mechanisms for syndication. New novels were sold in weekly parts and published first – before they came out in volumes – by papers in major provincial cities such as Nottingham, Liverpool, Aberdeen, Dublin, Sheffield, Manchester, and Birmingham, as well as in Australia and North America. As long as multiple papers subscribed, each one could afford the draw of a popular novelist. In addition to giving extra revenue to authors, syndication provided journals in the U.S. with advance sheets so they could publish ahead of the pirates that would jump in once volumes were available.
    Law's data about circulation, publication dates, pay, and so forth, must now be considered when making generalizations about popularity, class, and literary form. Provincial readers of cheap weekly newspapers in the last quarter of the nineteenth century saw many books that were never published in volumes, but they were also the initial readers of novels not only by sensationalists such as Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon but also by Margaret Oliphant, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and George Meredith. This information complicates our assumptions about penny-weekly fiction; it also suggests that we need to rethink matters of form. Most of us are used to reminding our students about the consequences of monthly serialization as opposed to publication in volumes; Law, however, proposes that by the last twenty years of the century the weekly serial also exerted specific pressures on the shape of mainstream fiction.'
  Sally Mitchell, Temple University
  Comments in Review Essay 'Reading Class', Victorian Literature and Culture  33:1 (March 2005) 331-339


Copyright (C) Graham Law, 2001-2003. All rights reserved.
First drafted Sat 24 Mar 2001.
Last revised Mon 22 Oct 2005.

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