Newspaper Serials: The 19th Century's True New Zealand Novels?

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 49, 1 January 2017, Page 35

Newspaper Serials: The 19th Century's True New Zealand Novels?

J. E. TRAUE

To date, in their treatment of the 19th-century New Zealand novel, literary historians have relied almost entirely on an analysis of the titles that were published in monographic form. Because more of these monographs were published in London than in New Zealand, it has been assumed that New Zealand novelists were focused primarily on an English market. New evidence indicates that far more novels were published as serials in New Zealand newspapers than published as books, and that a much larger market for New Zealand fiction existed in New Zealand in the 19th century than previously assumed.

Literary historians' assessments of 19th-century New Zealand novels In the first substantial history of New Zealand fiction, A History of New Zealand Fiction by E. M. Smith, 1 the 19-page bibliography covers the period from 1862 to 1939 and lists only those works published as monographs, most of them issued by London publishers. 'New Zealand fiction' is used by Smith to cover a wide field and, as well as novels, includes children's fiction, collections of short stories and tales, and thinly disguised histories, reminiscences and autobiographies. There are some works with no New Zealand content by authors who had left New Zealand, and the occasional title published before 1862.

For the period from 1862 to 1899, there are over a hundred titles of 'fiction' listed by Smith, with about half of them published in New Zealand. (Between 1900 and 1939, that balance changes, with a large majority published in London.) However, the overall number of novels published in the 19th century is small: 'Although the first New Zealand novel, Mrs J. E. Aylmer's Distant Homes, was published in London in 1862, it was not until the last 20 years of the 19th century that we find a steady output of books [novels], and even then the total number is under 40'. 2

Similarly, Joan Stevens' The New Zealand Novel, 1860-1965, 3 published in a second edition in 1966, deals only with novels published as monographs. The only acknowledgement that New Zealand novels had appeared as serials was the comment that two titles by Charlotte Evans had appeared as magazine serials before being published as books in 1874. These serialisations have not been traced. Publication was almost certainly in a popular English magazine. In 1981, James Burns, in his New Zealand Novels and Novelists, 1861-1979: An Annotated Bibliography, lists 65 novels for the period from 1861 to 1900, of which 64 were published in monographic form and only one published in a periodical. 4 Of the 64 monographs, 40 were issued by English publishers, while 20 were published in New Zealand, three in Australia, and one in the United States. Between 1901 and 1950, English publishers established further domination of the publication of New Zealand novels, with Burns listing 183 titles published in England, 36 in New Zealand, 21 in Australia, and eight in the USA.

In 1990, Patrick Evans drew almost exclusively on monographs for his treatment of the novel in The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature. He incorrectly declared, 'Of the sixty-four New Zealand novels published before 1900 thirty-nine were published in London, eight in Dunedin, five in Auckland, one in Christchurch and four in Australia. Only two were published in newspapers'. 5 He gives credit to the weekly newspapers for their fostering of New Zealand writing. 'But the literature fostered is not particularly New Zealand literature, since, apart from the scenery, there was nothing particularly New Zealand for it to come from ... Other locally written fiction continued to appear in newspapers over the years, but by the Jubilee, as one commentator observed at the time, there was "little New Zealand in them'". 6

In the Oxford History of New Zealand Literature, 7 for the period from 1861 to 1900, 95 titles of novels are identified, 90 by Lawrence Jones and five by Terry Sturm. Of these, 90 were published as monographs and five as serials only. (Jones identified only two as serials, but in fact, Vincent Pyke's Eustace Egremont, the anonymous Half Caste Wife, and Logan Campbell's My Visit to Waiwera-Baden were also serialised in newspapers and never published as monographs. 8 ) Forty-eight were published in Britain, 40 in New Zealand, and five in Australia.

Based on the evidence available to them, and it consisted almost entirely of novels published as monographs, with London publishers very dominant in the early 20th century, the literary historians have come to similar conclusions to each other about the influence of the overseas market. But they have tended to read this period of great dominance in the early 20th century back into the 19th century when publication in New Zealand was far more common.

E. M. Smith wrote that 'would-be [New Zealand] authors had to write for the English public, and, of course, dominated by their love of England they were glad to do so'. 9 Also, 'With the writers of today, one is still conscious that they are too much concerned with appealing to the English reading public and hoping to achieve thereby a "best-seller". And with that aim in view New Zealand with its small population is not worth considering'. 10

Evans went further and argued that the fully formed literary infrastructure of bookshops, libraries and newspapers that the colonists brought with them affected the way they wrote, and that this imported infrastructure 'for so long prevented the development of a literature that seemed to be about the place it was written in'. 11 He asserted that 'early New Zealand novels ... tended to be rather prim things published in Britain, where they sold modestly to a trapped British public quite eager to read about places they were never likely to see. New Zealand writers shaped their material for this market and were aware of the pictures they were presenting; usually they liked to make their work sound like minor English fiction with local colour laid on. Local publication was rare ... and newspapers played an insignificant part in turning their local serials into volumes'. 12 He said, 'The stories and verses that appeared in the New Zealand magazines which sprang up and then shrank away as the nineteenth century neared its end were unambiguously localised versions of English types, much like the stories and verses that appeared in the newspapers of the period. The desire for a distinctive local literature was obviously strong but had little to work on'. 13 Evans concluded that nineteenthcentury readers in Britain and in New Zealand had the same expectations and tastes in their fiction, so that for New Zealand writers there was no difference between the British and the New Zealand markets.

Lawrence Jones, writing about novels published in the pioneer period, 1861 to 1889, concluded: 'Most were published in England and aimed at different segments of the English reading public, from the middlebrow readers of the Smith, Elder list to the readers of the Religious Tract Society publications or "the poorer populations of our town, the inhabitants of our coasts, and our soldiers and sailors in barracks and on board ship." However others, (including Taranaki) were published within New Zealand, often by newspapers, and seemed designed for home consumption'. In the second edition, Jones added, 'Undoubtedly some were serialised in newspapers but not published as books and these have never been listed and may still lie unnoticed in back files of newspapers or may have disappeared completely in cases where these files are no longer extant'. 14 Of the later period from 1890 to 1934, he wrote that 'there was still no significant readership for New Zealand novels, no publishing and institutional infrastructure

(only about a third of the novels were published in New Zealand and they were mainly the lesser ones) and no coherent indigenous tradition of the novel'. 15 Terry Sturm, writing on popular fiction, mostly covering the 20th century, commented, There was enormous pressure on colonial writers like Lyttelton to conform to the requirements of the market overseas. New Zealand was too small to sustain a publishing industry of its own, or a local readership large enough to provide authors with a regular income', 16 and, 'Authors have been forced to address the publishing priorities of the major British and American firms catering for that market, no matter how interested they might be ... in depicting "the people, the surroundings, the conditions, and even the language" of their own country'. 17 He also stated that, 'Until the Second World War there were no publishers who regularly published novels'. 18 However, he warned that 'a great deal of care needs to be taken not to apply this fact of dependence on overseas markets reductively, as if all popular writers are locked into fixed formulas, and hence largely homogeneous'. 19 He pointed out the importance of the newspapers, especially the weeklies in the 1880 s and 1890 s, in providing outlets for locally written fiction.

Newspaper serial novels: The neglected evidence

Recent bibliographical research has established that 105 New Zealand novels and novellas that were never issued as monographs were serialised in New Zealand newspapers from 1861 to 1900, and that the total number of such novels and novellas appearing in New Zealand, Australian and British newspapers and periodicals over this period was 124. 20 Of these serials, only a handful have been noted in the literary histories. If the novelettes and short stories published as a whole in one issue or in two or three instalments are added, the amount of New Zealand fiction in the newspapers becomes even more significant.

Of the 95 novels identified in the Oxford History , only 40 were published in New Zealand, as against 48 in Britain. When the 108 (105 in newspapers and three in periodicals) published in New Zealand only as serials are added, the total number of novels published in New Zealand rises to 148, or 68.5% as against 22% published in Britain. 21 Clearly, the newspaper editors and proprietors thought there was enough of a local readership for New Zealand novels to devote space in their publications. In a 19th-century colony with an immature publishing industry, the publisher who wasn't also a printer, stationer or bookseller but specialised in publishing books was extremely rare. In New Zealand, some 99% of publishers were newspaper proprietors operating a printing press primarily for the production of a newspaper,

with a sideline in jobbing printing and the occasional book. Among the handful of non-newspaper publishers was Whitcombe and Tombs - which needed a large printing establishment to cope with its primary business as a publisher of school textbooks - and the publishers specialising in annuals, almanacs and directories, such as Stone and Wise.

In such an environment, where newspapers dominated the publishing industry and book publishers were so few, it was inevitable that New Zealand authors would look to the newspapers as outlets for their work. 22 Writers of fiction would have been encouraged by the amount of overseas fiction serialised in New Zealand newspapers, especially in the weekly supplements. One of the first serialisations in New Zealand of a named author was that of Charles Dickens' Little Dorritt, beginning in the 22 July 1856 issue of the Daily Southern Cross. The first monthly part had been issued in December 1855 and was published in one volume in 1857. What was probably the first New Zealand serial, Mrs Leyburn's Story , was published in four instalments beginning on 19 December 1861 in the Wanganui Chronicle. In 1862, Benjamin Farjeon's Life and Adventures of Christopher Congleton, the first full-length New Zealand serialised novel, began publication in the Otago Witness.

By 1866, serialisation was so widespread that J. G. S. Grant, that vociferous critic of colonial standards, commented that of the 17 dailies then being published in New Zealand, 'eleven are purely advertising sheets, plus the insertion of a novel or tale successively published for the amusement of the gaping settlers who have access to no other sources of literature'. 23 Serialisation spread from the cities to the provincial centres and small towns, so that by the 1880 s, scores of newspapers were publishing instalments of a novel once a week, lasting until the early 1940 s when wartime newspaper rationing strangled the weekly supplements.

Over a thousand novels by British, American and Australian authors appeared as serials in New Zealand newspapers from 1858 to 1942. A few were pirated in the early years, but by the end of the century they were being supplied by English and American fiction agencies that had purchased serialisation rights from the authors or publishers. Overseas authors were being paid and, although there is no firm evidence, it is most likely that New Zealand authors also were paid for their novels.

The 148 New Zealand novels published either as monographs (40) or serials in newspapers and periodicals (108) would have been written to appeal to a local market. Literary historians have assumed that the 48 novels published in Britain were selected by British publishers to have an appeal mostly to British readers. Some novels were published both in New Zealand and Britain at the expense of their author, but these were a minority. 24

If, as Patrick Evans argued, the two markets were indistinguishable because 19th-century New Zealand writers and readers were pinned beneath the literary infrastructure that they had brought unchanged from their homeland, the content and the treatment would be similar and the differences would reside mostly in the scenery. However, there could be differences in quality. Lawrence Jones, analysing the period 1890-1934, commented that the novels published in New Zealand 'were mainly the lesser ones'. 25 It could be argued that the British publishers, with their wide experience in selecting material for the market, were skimming the cream from the stream of novels submitted by New Zealand authors, and the New Zealand newspapers were picking up, at possibly bargain rates, the second-rate novels: those already rejected by British publishers, or the novels that New Zealand authors knew, from bitter experience, were likely to be rejected in London.

A more mundane explanation, assuming that all New Zealand novelists were writing for a British market, is that of proximity; those New Zealand authors who shifted to England to pursue their careers, those who had the means to travel regularly to London and those who had contacts in England able to promote their manuscripts directly to London publishers were more likely to be published in London in monographic form. Those who were unable to leave New Zealand and relied on correspondence to promote their manuscripts were less successful and more likely to turn to self-publication or serialisation in the local newspapers. There is an alternative argument: that there were two distinct markets, and that shrewd newspaper editors in New Zealand, with their knowledge of the tastes of their readers, were selecting the novels and stories that resonated with their buyers, and that the British publishers were selecting only those stories likely to appeal to the British novel-reading public. If so, there is likely to be a difference in content and treatment between those published in New Zealand, mostly in the newspapers, and those published in Britain. If there are differences, then the serialised novels would mark the beginnings of the truly New Zealand novel. As Clara Cheesman, a novelist published both in London and the New Zealand newspapers, observed in 1903, It is to the old newspapers that we must go if we want to see the beginning of colonial fiction ... There are in the dusty files of these and other journals many stories of colonial life which have never struggled out of the papers into book form'. 26 With the new evidence available by comparing and contrasting the overseaspublished monographs, the New Zealand published monographs and the serials in the newspapers, literary historians should be able to write a more nuanced account of the New Zealand novel that acknowledges the significant role of newspapers as publishers of New Zealand fiction in the 19th century.

ENDNOTES 1 E. M. Smith, A History of New Zealand Fiction (Dunedin: Reed, 1939). 2 Smith, A History of New Zealand Fiction, p. 16. 3 Joan Stevens, The New Zealand Novel, 1860-1965 (Wellington: Reed, 1966). 4 Vincent Pyke's 'Lost in the Goldfields', according to Burns appearing in Chambers' Journal in 1868. In fact, it was not a novel but a short story published anonymously in the issue of Chambers' Journal for 27 February 1869 and reprinted in Dunedin's Southern Mercury newspaper in June 1875 under Pyke's name. 5 Patrick Evans, The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature (Auckland: Penguin, 1990), p. 57. 6 Evans, The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature, p. 26. 7 Terry Sturm, ed., The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English, 2nd edn (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1998).

8 See J. E. Traue, 'Nineteenth Century New Zealand Novels and Novellas Published as Serials in New Zealand, Australian and British Newspapers and Periodicals and Never Published as Monographs: A Checklist', Journal of New Zealand Studies 20 (2015): 10-23. 9 Smith, A History of New Zealand Fiction, p. 13. 10 A History of New Zealand Fiction, pp. 13-14. 11 Evans, The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature, p. 18. 12 The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature, p. 57. 13 The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature, p. 28. 14 Sturm, The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature, p. 121. 15 The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature, p. 135. 16 The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature, p. 575. 17 The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature, p. 575-6. 18 The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature, p. 578. 19 The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature, p. 576. 20 Traue, 'Nineteenth Century New Zealand Novels ...A Checklist' and 'Addenda' (in press); Traue, 'Submerged Below the Codex Line: New Zealand's Neglected Nineteenth Century Novels', Journal of New Zealand Studies 20 (2015): 2-9. 21 The total number of titles identified as New Zealand novels is 216: 92 monographs from The Oxford History and 124 serials from the Checklist and Addenda. 22 See Traue, 'But Why Mulgan, Marris and Schroder: the Mutation of Local Newspapers in New Zealand's Colonial Print Culture', BSANZ Bulletin 21, no. 3 (1997): 107-15. 23 'The Newspaper Literature of New Zealand', Delphic Oracle, 1 (1866): 7. 24 McEldowney suggests that H. B. Stoney's Taranaki (1862) was published at the author's expense, in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature, p. 633. 25 Sturm, The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature, p. 135. 26 'Colonials in Fiction', New Zealand Illustrated Magazine 7, no. 4(1 January 1903): 273-82.