“The padding trade,” Trollope called literature at the time.Īs luxury items, unaffordable for outright purchase by most readers, triple-deckers were championed by Mudie’s Select Library, a behemoth of British book distribution. “Impossible to get through them.” Gissing lifted such laments from his own diary “New Grub Street” was itself a triple-decker, Gissing’s eighth, and he used every available trick to stretch it, wheezily, to length. “The three volumes lie before me like an interminable desert,” Reardon moans. The triple-decker, as it was called, was the form of much work by the likes of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Benjamin Disraeli, and Anthony Trollope: typically nine hundred octavo pages divided into volumes of three hundred pages each, handsomely printed and bound. It’s not just the writer’s usual demons-skimpy word rates, self-doubt, the smooth ascension of one’s enemies-that torture Reardon but the strictures of the three-volume frigate that dominated Victorian novel-writing.
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