Last updated 15:29, Sunday, 18 May 2008

“A YOUNG officer – without friends as he supposes – receives a mysterious package, which, on being opened is found to contain £500, and an intimation in a lady’s handwriting that he will be the recipient of a similar amount yearly. The gift is welcome, but who is the donor?”

I’m quoting from The West Cumberland Times, January 17, 1891.

If you really wanted to know, you’d have had to buy the next weekly issues of the paper, because the second chapter “reveals somewhat the source of the gift, but leaves the motive as inscrutable as before. Several interesting personages are introduced. The officer and his friend join a shooting party in the north, where?”

Can you really take any more? Back in 1891 they could, because the above was part of the blurb advertising the forthcoming serialisation of a new story - enigmatically titled A Fatal Past - by Miss Dora Russell.

Avid fiction readers could, while waiting for the first episode of this novel, amuse themselves by reading the final instalment of Slaves of Fate, by J Monk Foster – whose A Pit Brow Lassie had already appeared, in serial form, in that paper.

Most local papers in the 19th century ran serial fiction features, each instalment often occupying an entire page. These weren’t short stories, but full length novels and had, a few years earlier, been issued in book form. So why, if Dora Russell was such a popular writer, didn’t people buy her books in hardback? For one very good reason – price!

Let’s take her novel On Golden Hinges. It was published in London in 1885, priced at 31s 6d. Using RPI, that would be £110 in today’s money. It was, like all her novels – and those of most popular novelists of that time – published in three volumes - “triple-deckers.”

They were incredibly expensive. What was wrong with her publishers? Didn’t they want the reading public to go out and buy these books? Well, actually, no – they didn’t! They were more interested in selling them to their major customers, the commercial circulating libraries. And these libraries most certainly didn’t want popular novels being sold cheaply, it would hurt their business.

They had a vested interest in renting triple-deckers to their customers. Each annual subscription, either a guinea of half a guinea, entitled a customer to borrow only one volume at a time. The impatient, and more affluent, customers would cough up for three subscriptions so that when they sent their servants down to the circulating library to collect the latest bestseller they could borrow it all at the same time.

Two firms dominated the fiction market – Smiths and Mudie's. Such was their buying power that they could insist that most books be written in this three volume format. It has also been suggested that they dictated how many words appeared on each page. Quantity – not quality mattered. So if you think that Victorian popular novelists produced their long, flowery descriptive passages from choice, think again. They were, in effect, being paid by the word.

Back to Dora Russell’s novel On Golden Hinges. If you couldn’t afford to buy it, or take out a commercial library subscription, you’d have to wait until it was serialised in a local paper.

It was serialised in The Whitehaven News in 1889, and also appeared in many other provincial papers. Miss Russell was one of many novelists whose work was syndicated by the Tillotson Fiction Bureau. This had been started by the owners of the Bolton Evening News in 1870. An astute move. Their clients’ works were soon appearing in papers all over Britain, and abroad. They also had a vested interest in keeping book prices high.”

I don’t know much about Dora Russell. Nor do I know much about another writer serialised in The Whitehaven News, Harry Tyson – from Cleator Moor.

And what about Workington’s William Charles Lewis? His Mystery of Myranthon Man appeared in the WCT in 1881. Was he a Tillotson client? Lots of loose ends to chase up.

So who was the secret donor? I don’t know – yet. I suppose I’ll have to read the book to find out – but only an instalment a week, of course.