For scholars of the Victorian novel, the realization that the bound paper-back volumes through which we often encounter our texts belies the conditions of their original printing has become somewhat common. But, though this acknowledgement might be thought of as compulsory, the engagement with such realities of textual production often falls short, whether intentionally or not. Projects such as the victorianserialnovels.org, headed by Robyn Warhol, and the Victorian Reading Project at Stanford University have attempted to pay close and sustained attention to the conditions of material production and the climate of print culture during the nineteenth-century. Similarly, this project, which locates itself under the object of “reading like the Victorians,” takes special care to not only nod to the original production of its texts or the literary environment in which they circulated, but seeks to produce a reading experience which allows for the contemplation of the periodical as a whole, understanding this multivocal ecology as inextricable from the novel itself and redefining our definitions of such “texts” in the process.
This project operates under the knowledge that the serial novel was “not…a text which was fixed between covers; rather…[it was] a novel which was both emerging from the throes of composition and functioning within the boundaries of a [periodical].”1 Not only did the iterative format of the serial affect the composition process and its function within the pages of a periodical, but it affected the ways in which readers encountered and interacted with it. Such reading experiences have been well-documented in their varieties by the likes of Catherine Delafield, Laurel Brake, Mark Turner, Linda Hughes, Michael Lund, Emily Steinlight, Mary Elizabeth Leighton, Lisa Surridge, and Elizabeth Andermann, among others.2 Common to the work of these scholars is the understanding that the novel, as it appeared to readers of the nineteenth-century, “was not always a self-contained verbal entity but a reading process [which was] embedded in a specific material framework that shaped response.”3 Knowledge of this reading process is the impetus for this digital project which sets out to recreate an environment of the historical textual and contextual circumstances out of which the London Journal serialization of Lady Audley’s Secret would have been born.
The Serial Form of Lady Audley's Secret
This project reconstructs an edition of Lady Audley’s Secret as it appeared in its London Journal serialization from March to August 1863. Instead of separating the iterations of Braddon’s novel from the rest of the London Journal issue where they appeared, this project creates the entire issue in its full, facsimile form. In an attempt to recreate a reading process which is as faithful as possible to its original format, the issues themselves are designed in a flipbook style where the reader must go through each page of the issue to reach the iteration of the novel in question. Though the possibilities of the digital edition allow for technologies such as hyperlinking and search to increase the ease through which readers may access a given portion of text, this project specifically restricts navigation to a page-by-page basis. By intentionally causing readers to at least glance at each page as they flip through them, this edition prompts a more accurate interaction of text and reader, attempting to mirror the tangible process through which such periodicals would have been navigated in their physicality.
But, this project seeks to recreate more than simply the textual environment of the periodical. It equally sets out to examine the contextual environment of its 1863 readers. By providing accompanying commentary on the various connections between the Lady Audley’s Secret and its contemporary touchstones, the reader may approach the London Journal’s serial with a basic sense of the novel’s milieu. To do this, the project focuses on the first four issues of Lady Audley’s Secret appearing from March 21st, 1863 until April 11th, 1863. The project provides a few carefully selected reference points that embody the cultural setting in which readers would have encountered Lady Audley and her story. These by no means exhaust the observations and considerations which could be made between Braddon’s novel and its historical backdrop, but do aim to represent a model for such connections and to create positional framework through which readers can approach Lady Audley’s Secret, reading, as Warhol says, “like Victorians” rather than “to imagine we could read as Victorians.”4
Of the many possibilities, this edition concerns itself with drawing out a discussion of the relationship between Lady Audley’s Secret and the wedding of the Prince of Wales to the Princess Alexandra of Denmark which took place on March 10, 1863, the discourse of sensationalism and its critique found in surrounding printed materials of the Victorian press, reviews of Lady Audley’s Secret that coincided with the novel’s London Journal serialization, and the ties between Lady Audley’s characterization and the art of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Further, this edition also provides material on the particularities of illustration that appear in this version of the novel by virtue of its placement in the London Journal.
How to Use this Project
This project is designed to be read asynchronously. In order to mimic a reading process that reflects the activity of the original audience who would have “picked up installments randomly, skipped portions they happened not to buy, stopped reading a novel halfway through,”5 the reader is encouraged to move around the project capriciously, experimenting with different ways of reading and associating the project’s various materials. The home page provides access to all pages of the site and acts as a starting point for exploration. From this point of departure, the reader is given a variety of navigational options that can be used at the reader’s discretion to maneuver to different pages and to revisit others. The only real sense of control placed upon the reader by the presentation of the serialized content is the way the viewer must approach the serialized text within the periodical space, the reasons for which are described above. In this sense, there is no “right way” to go about reading but, rather, the reader should go forth without expectation and with the knowledge that their participation in ordering their own experience will shape the way that this text comes into being. Readers should feel encouraged to revisit this site and experiment with different approaches to reading, concentrating their attention on the ways in which these series of interactions and varieties of encounter impose themselves upon their perception of Lady Audley’s Secret.