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Ainsworth's "Jack Sheppard" as a Triple-Decker
November 1839
19.6 x 12 cm exterior
Volumes 1-3, William Harrison Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard. A Romance, published by Richard Bentley, New Burlington Street, London. 1839.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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"The length of her novel had been her first question. It must be in three volumes, and each volume must have three hundred pages." — Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (1875), Chapter 39.
The "triple-decker" or three-volume novel had considerable longevity in the nineteenth century, and profoundly affected the way that original fiction was published in volume editions, although the s-called "cheap" editions that followed initial two- or three-volume publication would typically be single-volume.
Just the year prior to Ainsworth's sensational "Newgate" novel, another novel often placed in the same genre, Charles Dickens's magazine serial The Adventures of Oliver Twist; or, The Prish Boy's Progress, had caught the Christmas book trade. Reflecting the structure of the story as first published in periodical by Richard Bentley, the Dickens triple-decker of November, 1838, was probably aimed not so much at the individual consumer, but rather at the private lending library, the forerunner of the public library. These businesses were the principal consumers of first editions of novels throughout the nineteenth century. Thus, Richard Bentley published the latest Dickens fiction and the Ainsworth novel when both were still months away from the conclusions of their serial runs in Bentley's Miscellany) in the so-called "triple-decker" (three-volume) format to make the new publication attractive to lending libraries. The Ainsworth triple-decker appeared almost precisely a year after Dickens's second novel. Whereas a single-volume novel had limited circulation potential before it fell apart, the stoutly bound, modern pocket-book-sized triple-decker volume offered the possibility of three times the circulation of a single-volume work, as each volume could be signed out by a different customer: one just starting to read the story of Jack's apprenticeship to the kindly Owen Wood; one in the middle section, when Jack takes up a life of crime; and a third customer, eagerly trying to find out whether Jonathan Wild will succeed in his quest to see Jack hanged at Tyburn. This tripartite structure worked well for both Bentley-published novels. Thus, in the first volume of The Adventures of Oliver Twist (chapters 1-19) Dickens focusses on the evils of the institution of the Union Workhouse created by the New Poor Law; in the second volume, Dickens takes his readers deep into London's criminal underworld; and in the third he develops and resolves the "lost heir" plot and the evil Monks's motivations. Similarly, Ainsworth introduces his exemplary hero (Thames Darrell) and the passionate anti-hero (Jack Sheppard) as infants and develops them as adolescents in the first third of Volume One, then shows Jack's descent into crime (in "Epoch the Second"), and graphs his criminal career to its terrible conclusion in "Epoch the Third, 1724."
Beginning with Edinburgh-based Archibald Constable, the publisher of the Waverley Novels of Sir Walter Scott, nineteenth-century publishers discovered in the Romantic Era that issuing a novel in three parts could actually increase sales, as a successful first volume could create a demand for the successive volumes, and could help defray expenses for the publication of volumes two and three. The form of the novel (introduction, complication, and resolution) was ideally suited to the form, which was much favoured by such lending libraries as Mudie's (founded in 1842), which was a crucial customer for English publishers, beginning just after the publication of Jack Sheppard, although other local circulating libraries were undoubtedly among Richard Bentley's customers prior to 1842. Since the triple-decker throughout the century would cost as much as half the weekly income of a middle-class family, non-institutional buyers were confined to the aristocracy and the upper-middle class, and publishers therefore had to cater to the circulating libraries in limited, first-edition runs of seven hundred fifty to one thousand sets, often pre-sold at half the regular retail price, i. e., atfive shillingsper volume.Although the regular retail price of a triple-decker was 31 shillings 6 pence, the well-funded lending library would be able to acquire the latest fiction reasonably, and then charge a member 21 shillings (a guinea) for a year's subscriptionwith the right to take out a single volume at one time. A higher annual fee was required of a subscriber who wished to take out all three volumes of a novel at one time. Many nineteenth-century middle-class readers encountered the works of Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope for the first time in triple-deckers, which were priced beyond the means of the lower classes, and even a middle-class family such as Dickens's Cratchits in A Christmas Carol (1843). The three volumes of Jack Sheppard. A Romance, brought out even before serialisation concluded in the February 1840 issue of Bentley's Miscellany, are typical of the length of three-volume novels: in total, the triple-decker would be about 900 pages or about 170,000 words in forty-five chapters. The 1838 Dickens novel's three volumes are divided into Chapters 1 to 19, 20 to 36, and 37 to 51 respectively — at 331, 307, and 315 pages each (exclusive of the unpaged, inserted engravings), for a total of 952 pages; in precisely the same format, but containing four more illustrations than Oliver Twist, the Ainsworth novel's three volumes are divided into nineteen chapters (352 pages), seventeen chapters (292 pages), and twenty-one chapters (312 pages) respectively (totals = 57 chapters, 956 pages). The divisions between the three volumes do not correspond, however, to the story's three "epochs" since "Epoch the First, 1703" occupies only seven chapters and the first 144 pages of the first volume, and the second epoch spans volumes one and two, with "Epoch the Third, 1724" beginning on page 107 of the second volume.
The triple-decker as a publishing medium, so dominant for much of the century, suddenly expired in 1894, when the principal circulating libraries, Mudie's and W. H. Smith (founded in 1860) — already being challenged by working men's institute libraries and civic public libraries, decided not to purchase anything other than single-volume novels in order to keep costs down to a maximum of four shillings per volume. The following year, the form, so significant from the 1840s onward though recently extinct, was recalled by Oscar Wilde in the dialogue of The Importance of Being Earnest:
"I believe that Memory is responsible for nearly all the three-volume novels that Mudie sends us." (Act 2)
"Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily." (Act 2)
"It contained the manuscript of a three-volume novel of more than usually revolting sentimentality." (Act 3).
Whereas Oliver Twist appeared in the single-volume format in 1846 after a ten-month "re-sertialisation" by Chapman & Hall, owing to the book's notoriety, as evidenced by negative reviews about its encouraging criminality in the Athenaeum (26 October 1839), Examiner (3 November 1839), and Fraser's Magazine (February 1840), and its becoming embroiled in the Courvosier murder case in 1840, Jack Sheppard did not appear as a single volume cheap edition until 1854, published at about the same time by George Routledge in London and T. B. Peterson in Philadelphia, with all the original Cruikshank illustrations in the case of the former. The American edition contained twenty-seven facsimiles of Cruikshank's illustrations, including the compositeplates, in addition to the original 1839 portrait of Ainsworth re-done as a wood engraving, signed "Hinckley,"— probably Massachusetts engraver and illustrator Cornelius T. Hinkley. The story's first American appearance was a two-volume edition, contemporary with the first English edition, published in Philadelphia by Lea and Blanchard, from whom T. B. Peterson bought the publishing rights.
Ainsworth, William Harrison. Jack Sheppard. A Romance. With 28 illustrations by George Cruikshank. In three volumes. London: Richard Bentley, 1839.
Ainsworth, William Harrison. Jack Sheppard. A Romance. With 28 illustrations by George Cruikshank. London: George Routledge, 1854.
Ainsworth, William Harrison. Jack Sheppard. Edited by Edward Jacobs and Manuela Mourao. With 31 illustrations. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2007.
Dickens, Charles. The Adventures of Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress. With 24 illustrations by George Cruikshank. In three volumes. London: Richard Bentley, 1838.
Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Bradbury and Evans; Chapman and Hall, 1846.
Sutherland, John. "Mudie's Circulating Library (1842-1937)" and "W. H. Smith and Sons (1792-)." The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. Pp. 449-450 and 589-590.
Vann, J. Don. "Jack Sheppard in Bentley's Miscellany, January 1839 — February 1840." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: Modern Language Association, 1985. Page 19.
Last modified 24 December 2016
