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The serialist vanishes: Producing belief in George Eliot

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From: Novel
Date: 19991001
Author:Payne, David

Why should one expect the truth to be consoling?

--George Eliot to Edith Simcox1

Though the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton and the publisher John Blackwood had discussed the idea more than two decades before, Middlemarch was the first Victorian serial novel to be published in eight half-volumes or "books," priced at 5s., and issued bimonthly from November 1871 to December 1872.2 It is possible that George Henry Lewes got the idea from Victor Hugo's 1862 half-volume sale of Les Miserables; what is clear is that Middlemarch marked another in a series of attempts by the Leweses and Blackwood to ...

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