less continuous
history, and has seen itself suffer an interruption of life. There are
scattered examples of it pretty far back both in France and England.
Marivaux had a particular fancy for it: with the result that he left not
a little of his work unfinished. Such volume-publication as that of
_Tristram Shandy_, in batches really small in quantity and at fairly
regular if long intervals, is not much different from part-issue. As the
taste for reading spread to classes with not much ready money, and
perhaps, in some cases, living at a distance from libraries, this taste
spread too. But I do not think there can be much doubt that the immense
success of Dickens--in combination with his own very distinct
predilection for keeping the ring himself and being his own editor--had
most to do with its prevalence during the period under present
consideration. Thackeray took up the practice from him: as well as
others both from him and from Thackeray. The great illustrators, too, of
the forties, fifties, and sixties, from Cruikshank and Browne to
Frederick Walker, were partly helped by the system, partly helped to
make it popular. But the circulating libraries did not like it for
obvious reasons, the parts being fragile and unsubstantial: and the
great success of cheap magazines, on the pattern of _Macmillan's_ and
the _Cornhill_, cut the ground from under its feet. The last remarkable
novel that I remember seeing in the form was _The Last Chronicle of
Barset. Middlemarch_ and _Daniel Deronda_ came out in parts which were
rather volumes than parts.

This piece-meal publication, whether in part or periodical, could not be
without some effects on the character of the production. These were
neither wholly good nor wholly bad. They served to some extent to
correct the tendency, mentioned above, of the three-volume novel to "go
to seed" in the middle--to become a sort of preposterous sandwich with
meat on the outsides and a great slab of ill-baked and insipid bread
between. For readers would not have stood this in instalments: you had
to provide some bite or promise of bite in each--if possible--indeed to
leave each off at an interesting point. But this itself rather tended to
a jumpy and ill-composed whole--to that mechanical shift from one part
of the plot to another which is so evident, for instance, in Trollope:
and there was worse temptation behind. If a man had the opportunity, the
means, the courage, and the artistic conscience