The part before the whole: The aesthetics of serial publication in Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot

In "The Part Before the Whole," I examine some of the ways which the Victorian practice of serial publication is deliberately used as a literary convention in works by Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, and George Eliot. A major feature my argument is that each novelist negotiates the special challenges presented by serial publication in ways that elucidate the author-reader relationship, which, I suggest, is based on the novelists' different assumptions about the effects and value of literary art.;I argue that Thackeray, Dickens, and Eliot each speak to the reader through the medium of serial publication either by calling attention to or by painstakingly avoiding certain aesthetic effects, such as suspense and surprise, which historically came to be associated with cheap serial fiction. Specifically, I argue in a chapter on Great Expectations and Nicholas Nickleby that Dickens, in developing two opposed strategies for offsetting the anticipated disunifying effects of serial publication, ultimately favored "novelism" over his early "journalism" because of the later strategy's superabundant opportunities for producing narrative relatedness, which seemed Dickens to ensure a cordial, indeed, a collusive, relationship with the reader. By contrast, Thackeray's relationship with the reader, I argue in a chapter called "Vanity Unfair: Thackeray's Contemptible Reader," is satiric, his manipulation of the reader ostentatious, as he uses the serial mode of publication to draw attention to the reader's malleability and his own considerable powers of manipulation.;Whereas Dickens and Thackeray both more or less exploit the aesthetic effects made possible by serial publication, Eliot in general deliberately downplayed such effects even as she attempted to maximize the commercial possibilities of the serial mode of publication. In the final chapter, "George Eliot's Study of Commercial Life," I show how Eliot maintains her vision the artistic integrity of Middlemarch (and the social integrity of Middlemarch the town) against the real-world backdrop of the potentially compromising commercialism represented by serial publication, which she counters in the novel not only by obscuring the traces of fragmentary composition and publication, but also by literalizing the threat the novel's organicism in the scandal involving Bulstrode and the Dickensian character Raffles.