Never Serialized: How the "Typical" Victorian Novel Deviates from the Canonical

Abstract: An erroneous idea that most Victorian novels appeared as serials before book publication persists in our current scholarship. This essay traces the history of this oft-stated idea about Victorian serialization from the early twentieth century, notes its apparent self-evidence based on the literary canon of Victorian novels, and counters the claim using quantitative evidence from recent research. As we shall see, the error persists, primarily, from the divorce between publishing history and literary criticism: specifically, the tendency to generalize from the canonical to the total population of Victorian novels. The essay ends with a call to reengage with publishing history.