Chapter 4 - The Sinking of the Triple-Decker

Summary

This chapter reexamines the Victorian three-volume novel and its disappearance in the mid-1890s as an event in the media history of fiction. The three-volume format for novels didn’t come to an end because novelists felt aesthetically constrained by it or because readers suddenly rejected it. But its disappearance had important implications for the form and content of fiction, and it provoked widespread discussion of late nineteenth-century fiction’s relationships to its own media and to others. Building on the work of the book historians who have told the economic story of the three-volume format and its fall, this chapter examines the three-volume novel in a different way: as part of a media system that linked private libraries to publishers in an information empire, that tied the distribution of fiction to its material form, and that aligned novels with other print genres such as periodicals that didn’t center on the single codex book.