ABSTRACT
Nineteenth-century theatre, and more particularly the melodrama, draws for its sources on everything from ballad to epic poetry and from medieval romance to the contemporary novel. From the late eighteenth century onwards the chapbook offered a ready supply of dramatisable material with universally known stories such as Les Quatre Fils Aymon or Geneviève de Brabant, as well as a great deal of romanticised medieval history and accounts of the doings of great criminals. These cheaply printed collections of legends and fairytales produced on inferior paper and sold by pedlars at fairs were often read aloud and in this way perpetuated the popular and oral tradition. From the eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth, this was the literature of the poor and a source of imaginative escapism which would find its fullest expression in the féerie. By the mid-nineteenth century the development of the cheap press and of the accompanying feuilleton, which allowed for novels to be published cheaply in serial form opened up another important avenue. Until the late 1830s the cost of an octavo novel was about 7 francs 50 a volume. Circulating libraries had an important function until about 1840. The subscription was 3 or 4 francs a month and the hire of a volume was between 10 and 20 centimes.1 By 1838 the newspaper editor Emile de Girardin could anticipate the time when a novel by Victor Hugo would cost about 3 francs, rather than 15. In the later 1830s the price of books began to drop. At the same time the cheap press, starting with Le Siècle and La Presse in 1836, began to open out new possibilities. Newspapers were becoming more widely available, no longer restricted to subscribers, cafés or
circulating libraries. A little before 1836 some periodicals had begun to publish novels in several parts, but it was in 1836 that the true serial novel began to appear, providing relatively easy access to narrative fiction for all who could read or be read to.
