Serial Fiction and the Version That Never Stays Put
In 1875 a Lisbon review began printing a young novelist’s book while he was abroad, still asking for proofs. The serial ran 160 pages; he rewrote it twice, into 674. From Smollett to Joyce, a serial novel is a draft the world gets to read, and to interfere with.
I
The Draft in Public
In February 1875 a young Portuguese novelist was in Newcastle while his novel went to press in Lisbon.
Eça de Queirós had left the manuscript of O Crime do Padre Amaro with his friend Batalha Reis, who was seeing it into the Revista Ocidental. He had read the proofs of the first part. On 8 February he wrote that it was “absolutamente necessário” that he see a second set of proofs. The review printed the first instalment on 15 February without waiting for him, and the chapter numbers came out irregular. Eleven days later he wrote again: “Eu dou-vos um borrão de romance – e vocês em lugar de publicar o romance publicam o borrão!” I give you the rough draft of a novel, and instead of the novel you publish the draft. He demanded that the review declare it had printed the text without his revision. What the editors eventually printed was politer: a note explaining that, being abroad, he had been unable to direct the publication himself or make the important changes he intended. By 15 May the serial was over, and over the next five years he rewrote it twice.
He had once been on the other side of the form. In 1870 he and Ramalho Ortigão had run a novel in the Diário de Notícias as unsigned letters to the editor, presented as a true story. Five years later the form had turned on him. Nor is any of this a Portuguese curiosity: half the top ten of this year’s Guardian list of the best novels of all time began as serials.
A serial novel is not a book arriving in slices. It is a book that does not yet exist, read while it can still be changed. Between the first number and the last, an editor can cut it, a state can burn it, its author can start again, and its readers, by buying or not, can decide whether there will be a next number at all. The book we read afterwards is not the original. It is the survivor.
II
Before the Book
A knight in full armour rides out across the English countryside to right wrongs, a Quixote for the monthly trade. He first appeared in January 1760, in the opening number of The British Magazine, and he rode on month by month for two years in The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves. The book followed in 1762. The magazine’s editor was Tobias Smollett, and so was the novel’s author.
Reference books call it the first original serialised novel in English; the record of earlier serial publishing is murkier than that, and the title matters less than the arrangement. Smollett sat at both ends of the pipe. He wrote the chapters, and he edited the magazine that carried them. In most of the cases that follow, the author and the editor are different people, and what passes between them, a proof, a refusal, a note to the readers, is the history of the form.
The knight carries a second lesson. A serial must promise a next number, so its hero has to be left somewhere he can be found again: on a road, in a quarrel, one step short of an answer. Greaves rides out in January and must ride out again in February. A book can end. A serial, whatever its author intends, can only stop.
III
Between Numbers
Charles Dickens did not set out to write a novel. In the spring of 1836 he was writing text to accompany the sporting plates of an artist named Robert Seymour, to be issued in monthly numbers. On 20 April Seymour shot himself, having finished seven plates. The publishers tried a second artist, Robert Buss, who drew the June number and was dropped. In July they hired Hablot Knight Browne, not yet twenty-one and later known as Phiz, and in the same number Dickens introduced a new character, Sam Weller.
The early numbers had sold poorly; Chapman and Hall printed 1,000 copies of the first. After Weller arrived, circulation leapt, and by the end they were printing 40,000. Nothing in this was planned. A suicide, a dismissal, a hire and a servant with a gift for talk, all inside a few months, turned a failing commission into the book that made Dickens. To write to the number is to let the gap between instalments do some of the writing.
The calendar worked on the author as well. His sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, died on 7 May 1837. That June there was no number of Pickwick and none of Oliver Twist, the second serial he was writing at the time. It was the only occasion in his life on which Dickens missed a publication date. One death stopped two serials. A book can wait for its author’s grief. A serial has a month, and the month is part of the text.
George Eliot answered the number another way. Middlemarch came out in eight parts between December 1871 and December 1872, at first every two months and then monthly. Where Pickwick found its shape on the road, Middlemarch reached its readers as its author had planned it, and nobody, so far as the record shows, cut, refused or burned a page of it.
Even so, its readers could not see the plan. Henry James, reviewing it for the Galaxy in March 1873, remembered the suspense of the parts: “We can well remember how keenly we wondered, while its earlier chapters unfolded themselves, what turn in the way of form the story would take—that of an organized, moulded, balanced composition, gratifying the reader with a sense of design and construction, or a mere chain of episodes, broken into accidental lengths and unconscious of the influence of a plan.” With the book finished, he settled on “a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole.”
The two novelists faced one condition. Between one number and the next, nobody knows what the book is: not the reader, and not always the author. Dickens made that ignorance his engine. Eliot kept a plan and still could not spare her readers the question. In each case, for a year or more, the book was a draft the world held in its hands, asking what it would turn out to be.
IV
Who Owns the Draft
If the serial is a draft in public, the question is who may touch it. Four parties had a say. The editor worked with a pencil, the state with a match, the author with a second draft. The reader had a purse.
In Moscow the editor ended the novel himself. Anna Karenina had begun in Mikhail Katkov’s Russian Messenger in January 1875, a month before Eça’s first instalment in Lisbon. Part Seven, which ends with Anna’s death, concluded in April 1877. Part Eight follows Vronsky to the war in Serbia; it is also where Levin, so near despair that he hides a rope from himself, hears a peasant say of an old neighbour, “He lives for his soul,” and finds his faith. Katkov supported the war, and Susanne Fusso, whose book follows his dealings with Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, thinks he probably refused the part over its treatment of the volunteers. He did not print it. In its place the magazine told its readers that with the heroine’s death the novel had really come to an end. The author, it explained, had planned an epilogue of a few pages, in which Vronsky left for Serbia as a volunteer and Levin stayed hostile to the volunteers and the Slavophiles, and he might add those chapters in a special edition. Tolstoy issued the part as a pamphlet, and the whole novel appeared as a book in 1878.
In Paris the editor and the court worked on the same novel at different moments. Before the Revue de Paris began serialising Madame Bovary in the autumn of 1856, Flaubert agreed, on the advice of Maxime Du Camp, one of its founders, to cut about thirty pages. During the run the Revue went further without him. It flagged sixty-nine passages it wanted cut or altered, retouched the text without his permission, and in the number of 1 December suppressed the scene in which Emma gives herself to Léon in a cab. Flaubert restored the passages it had retouched, and before the sixth and last instalment he printed a notice, the condition on which he let the serial finish. Considerations he was not called upon to judge, it said, had forced the Revue to make a cut; he disowned the lines that followed; and the reader was asked to see in them “only fragments, not a whole” (n’y voir que des fragments et non pas un ensemble). Eighteen years later Eça would ask Lisbon for the same declaration, and get a politer one in the editors’ words.
Then came the court. Within two months the Revue’s director, Léon Laurent-Pichat, its printer, Auguste-Alexis Pillet, and Flaubert were tried for outrage to public and religious morality and public decency. On 7 February 1857 all three were acquitted, though the court added that the book deserved “un blâme sévère.” The judgment reads like a map of who owned the serial. In the language of the law the editor was the auteur of the offence, and Flaubert, who had supplied the manuscript, was his accomplice. The state had put on trial the text its author had publicly called fragments, and had named someone else its author.
In New York the pencil reached Ulysses before the match. Forwarding Joyce’s chapters to the Little Review in 1918, Ezra Pound trimmed about twenty lines from “Calypso” himself, without Joyce’s knowledge; he had already advised Margaret Anderson that “it might be well to leave gaps, at the questionable points, well marked.” In 1919 and 1920 the Post Office seized and burned issues that carried the novel. A reader started the prosecution: a New York lawyer complained after an issue carrying part of “Nausicaa” reached his daughter. The last instalment ran in the September–December 1920 number, partway into “Oxen of the Sun.” In February 1921 Anderson and Jane Heap were found guilty, fined fifty dollars each and fingerprinted. The book stayed banned in the United States until 1933.
The author’s turn came after the serial was over. Eça’s borrão had run to about 160 pages. The book of 1876, which he called the “edição definitiva,” ran to 362. The version of 1880, rewritten again at length, ran to 674. The definitive edition lasted four years.
The reader was the weakest of the four, with two powers. The first was the purse: the readers of Pickwick had no say in whether Sam Weller appeared, but in July 1836 they bought the number he appeared in, and went on buying. The second was to hand the number to the censor, as the New York lawyer did in 1920.
Flaubert’s notice, then, was addressed to the one party who could not touch the text: the reader, who could only read what the others had left.
V
Not Yet a Book
In the volume of 1837, Buss’s plates were replaced by Phiz’s, to give the illustrations a uniform look. The book had quietly dropped one of the serial’s artists, and a book does not footnote what it drops.
War and Peace began in the same Russian Messenger, in instalments called 1805, between 1865 and 1867; Tolstoy then rewrote the entire novel for the book of 1869. The magazine that would decline to print the end of Anna Karenina had printed the beginning of War and Peace in a form its author did not keep.
A textual editor would say, fairly, that the book is the work and the serial one of its states. But the serial was the state with an audience: the only stage at which a novel could still change while it was being read.
Of the five serials at the top of the Guardian’s list, only Middlemarch reached its readers as its author had planned. Ulysses was cut, burned and stopped short; Anna Karenina lost its last part in the magazine; War and Peace was rewritten from its beginning; Madame Bovary was cut as it ran and then put on trial.
We call them books because the books are what survived. For a season each was something else: in progress, in public, in the hands of strangers. In February 1875 a novelist in Newcastle asked for one more set of proofs, and Lisbon printed the borrão. A book is where an author can say it is finished. A serial has no such place. It runs until the editor, the censor, the author or the market says enough, and the book we are handed is the draft at the point where it stops.
⁂
The opening rests on Aline Leal Mota’s dissertation, Anticlericalismo em mutação: as três versões de O Crime do Padre Amaro (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, 2014), which quotes Eça’s letters to Batalha Reis of 8 and 26 February 1875 and the editors’ note as given by Tavares (1943); the page counts of the three versions are from Nau Literária, and the account of O Mistério da Estrada de Sintra from the Diário de Notícias (2020). The Guardian’s “The 100 best novels of all time” appeared on 12 May 2026; its top ten is given as reported by Gigazine and Telescoper. Smollett’s magazine and editorship are from Orlando and the Victorian Web; the caution about earlier serials is Wiles’s Serial Publication in England Before 1750. The Pickwick history follows the Victorian Web and Cornell’s Pickwick project, the print runs David Perdue’s Charles Dickens Page, and the missed June numbers of 1837 the scholarship cited in the Wikipedia article on Mary Hogarth. Henry James’s review of Middlemarch appeared in the Galaxy in March 1873 and is quoted from the University of Texas reprint. For Madame Bovary: the judgment of 7 February 1857, as reproduced by the Fondation Napoléon; Flaubert’s notice as quoted by Kartable; the sixty-nine passages from the National Coalition Against Censorship. For Ulysses: Pound’s letter to Margaret Anderson of January 1918, from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Libraries; the burnings from the Beinecke Library and the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses; the prosecution from NY 1920. Katkov’s refusal follows Susanne Fusso, “Mikhail Katkov and Lev Tolstoy: Anna Karenina against the Russian Herald” (Uppsala, 2019), shortened from her Editing Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy (Northern Illinois University Press, 2017); the magazine’s note is paraphrased from James Warner’s account in openDemocracy (2011), and Levin’s chapters are quoted in Constance Garnett’s translation. The serial history of War and Peace is from the scholarship cited in the Wikipedia article. Translations from the Portuguese and French are ours. Concept review with Claude Fable 5.1; drafted with Claude Sonnet 5.5; revised with Claude Opus 5.5; literary editing by Claude Sonnet 5.5; outside literary editing by Claude Fable 5.1. The two paintings are imagined scenes generated with Gemini Argon, not historical likenesses: the header shows the young Charles Dickens writing at night while a printer’s boy waits at the door for copy, and the image in Section IV shows Tolstoy in the spring of 1877, holding the magazine that ended his novel and the part it would not print.