ABSTRACT
Because booksellers were unwilling to stock pamphlet parts of unproven novels by unknown novelists, part-issue eventually became an occasional after-market strategy, employed only when the magazine serialization was over and sales of the three-volume format to libraries were coming to an end.59 Further, although much is made of the cheapness of the one-shilling number, the cost of buying the complete twenty-issue set of monthly num
Marketing the Novel, 1820-1850 159
bers of a Dickens novel added up to a guinea, which was exactly what Austen’s Emma had cost in 1816. The price of a complete set of numbers was fully two-thirds the cost of a regular three-decker novel, was more than twice the cost of a Waverley novel in Cadell’s cheap edition of 1830-34, and was more than three times as much as the six-shilling reprints of Marryat’s novels in Bentley’s Standard Novels series. T he purchaser of one-shilling numbers, then, really saved because one didn’t pay for a bind ing. In short, the cost of the shilling numbers priced them well above the pocketbooks of all but those of relatively well-to-do individual readers. There is evidence that there were some reading clubs of those who pooled their pennies and bought a number. But, more likely, most of the pur chasers were middle-class adolescents spending their pocket money, for the great new audience for fiction in the 1830s and 1840s was composed largely of schoolboys and young clerks who consumed Marryat, Ainsworth, and Dickens.60
