David Foster recently re-read Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, which was originally serialized in Belgravia: a Magazine of Fashion and Amusement.
At the time, even finished novels were published in parts:
The tone and style of 19th century English literature were heavily influenced by the moral strictures imposed by the then-prevailing publishing system.
A typical mid-Victorian novel stretched cost a guinea, at a time when a skilled worker could expect to make a little less than a guinea a week. (The guinea, or sovereign, was a gold coin with a metal content worth about $200 in our modern money.) Obviously, the market for such books was rather small, usually a few hundred copies, most of them purchased by private lending libraries, which sold all-you-can-read memberships for about a guinea a year. To maximize their revenues, the libraries insisted that novels be published in three volumes, so that one book could serve three customers at a time. That practice explains the wordiness and the convoluted subplots of so many Victorian books: the authors had to stretch their story to fill a specified number of pages. The very most popular authors could also serialize their novels in monthly magazines, sometimes for amazing fees.
The serialization-lending library system reduced the economic risk to publishers, who could count on a minimum number of sales. But it imposed severe artistic restraints on writes, who had to conform to a strict standard of propriety. There’s a reason why no mid-Victorian heroine so much as kisses her fiance — and it’s not that no woman ever did so, or no author ever noticed. There’s a reason why prostitution is never mentioned in print at a time when the streets of London teemed with prostitutes.
By the 1880s, however, the growth of a middle-class market with disposable incomes tempted some publishers to sell directly to the public. Magazines also began to experiment with more realistic themes. These changes made possible the career of a writer like Thomas Hardy, author in Far From the Madding Crowd of what I think is the first explicit description of female sexual arousal in English.