1837
| E. Bulwer Lytton | Ernest Maltravers | ______ |
| W. H. Ainsworth | Crichton | ______ |
| Charles Dickens | Oliver Twist | serialised |
| W. M.Thackeray | Yellowplush Papers | serialised |
| Captain Frederick Marryat | Snarleyyow; or, The Dog Fiend | serialised |
1838
| E. Bulwer Lytton | Alice, Leila; or, The Siege of Granada | ______ |
| E. Bulwer Lytton | Calderon the Courtier | ______ |
| Charles Dickens | Nicholas Nickleby | serialised |
1839
| W. H. Ainsworth | Jack Sheppard | serialised |
| Captain Frederick Marryat | The Phantom Ship | serialised |
1840
| W. H. Ainsworth | The Tower of London | serialised |
| Captain Frederick Marryat | Poor Jack | serialised |
| W. M.Thackeray | Catherine | serialised |
| W. M.Thackeray | A Shabby Genteel Story | serialised |
| W. M.Thackeray | The Bedford Row Conspiracy | serialised |
1841
| E. Bulwer Lytton | Night and Morning | ______ |
| W. H. Ainsworth | Guy Fawkes | serialised |
| W. H. Ainsworth | Old Saint Paul | serialised |
| Charles Dickens | Barnaby Rudge | serialised |
| Charles Dickens | The Old Curiosity Shop | serialised |
| Captain Frederick Marryat | Joseph Rushbrook, or The Poacher | serialised |
| Harriet Martineau | The Settlers at Home | ______ |
| Harriet Martineau | Feats on the Fjord | ______ |
| Harriet Martineau | The Crofton Boys | ______ |
| W. M.Thackeray | The History of Samuel Titmarsh | serialised |
1842
| E. Bulwer Lytton | Zanoni | ______ |
| W. H. Ainsworth | The Miser's Daughter | serialised |
1843
| W. H. Ainsworth | Windsor Castle | serialised |
| Charles Dickens | A Christmas Carol | ______ |
| E. Bulwer Lytton | The Last of the Barons | ______ |
| W. M.Thackeray | Fitz-Boodle's Confessions | serialised |
1844
| W. H. Ainsworth | Saint James's | serialised |
| Charles Dickens | Martin Chuzzlewit | serialised |
| Charles Dickens | The Chimes | ______ |
| Benjamin Disraeli | Coningsby | ______ |
| W. M.Thackeray | Barry Lyndon | serialised |
1845
| Charles Dickens | The Cricket on the Hearth | ______ |
| Benjamin Disraeli | Sybil | ______ |
| Benjamin Disraeli | Tancred | ______ |
| W. H. Ainsworth | Auriol; or, The Elixir of Life | serialised |
1846
| E.Bulwer Lytton | Lucretia; or, The Children of the Night | ______ |
| Charles Dickens | The Battle of Life | ______ |
| Captain Frederick Marryat | The Privateer Man | serialised |
| W. M.Thackeray | Rebecca and Rowena | serialised |
| W. M.Thackeray | Mrs. Perkins' Ball | ______ |
1847
| Charlotte Brontë | Jane Eyre | ______ |
| Emily Brontë | Wuthering Heights | ______ |
| Captain Frederick Marryat | Children of the New Forest | ______ |
1848
| E. Bulwer Lytton | Harold | ______ |
| W. H. Ainsworth | James the Second | serialised |
| Charles Dickens | The Haunted Man | ______ |
| W. M.Thackeray | Vanity Fair | serialised |
| Elizabeth Gaskell | Mary Barton | ______ |
| Charles Kingsley | Yeast | serialised |
| Charles Kingsley | The Saint's Tragedy | ______ |
1849
| E. Bulwer Lyttonh | The Caxtons: A Family Picture | serialised |
| W. H. Ainsworth | The Lancashire Witches | serialised |
| Charles Dickens | Dombey and Son | serialised |
| Charlotte Brontë | Shirley | ______ |
1850
| Charles Dickens | David Copperfield | serialised |
| Charles Kingsley | Cheap Clothes and Nasty | ______ |
| Charles Kingsley | Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet | ______ |
| W. M.Thackeray | Pendennis | serialised |
1851
| Wilkie Collins | Mr. Wray's Cash-Box; or, the Mask and the Mystery | ______ |
| Charles Kingsley | Yeast: A Problem | ______ |
| Eliza Lynn [Linton] | Realities | ______ |
1852
| Wilkie Collins | Basil: A Story of Modern Life | ______ |
| Charles Kingsley | Phaeton; or Loose Thoughts for Loose Thinkers | ______ |
1853
| Charles Dickens | Bleak House | serialised |
| W. M.Thackeray | Henry Esmond | serialised |
| Elizabeth Gaskell | Ruth | ______ |
| Charles Reade | Peg Wuffington | ______ |
| Charles Kingsley | Hypatia; or The Old Face in the Mirror | serialised |
| W. H. Ainsworth | The Star Chamber | serialised |
| E. Bulwer Lytton | My Novel, by Pisistratus Caxton; or, Varieties in English Life | serialised |
1854
| W. H. Ainsworth | The Flitch of Bacon | serialised |
| Wilkie Collins | Hide and Seek; or, The Mystery of Mary Grice | ______ |
| Charles Dickens | Hard Times | serialised |
1855
| Charles Kingsley | Westward Ho! | ______ |
| Charles Kingsley | Glaucus; or, The Wonders of the Shore | ______ |
| Charles Kingsley | Brave Words for Brave Soldiers and Sailors | ______ |
| Elizabeth Gaskell | North and South | serialised |
| George Meredith | The Shaving of Shagpat | ______ |
| W. M.Thackeray | The Newcomes | serialised |
| W. M.Thackeray | The Rose and the Ring | ______ |
| Anthony Trollope | The Warden | ______ |
1856
| Charles Dickens | Little Dorrit | serialised |
| Charles Reade | It Is Never Too Late to Mend | ______ |
| Wilkie Collins | A Rogue's Life | serialised |
1857
| W. H. Ainsworth | The Spendthrift | serialised |
| Anthony Trollope | Barchester Towers | ______ |
| Wilkie Collins | The Dead Secret | serialised |
| Charles Kingsley | Two Years Ago | ______ |
| George Meredith | Farina: A Legend of Cologne | ______ |
| Charles Reade | Double Marriage; or, White Lies | serialised |
| Thomas Hughes | Tom Brown's School Days | ______ |
| W. H. Ainsworth | Mervyn Clitheroe | serialised |
| W. M.Thackeray | The Virginians | serialised |
| Anthony Trollope | Dr. Thorne | |
| Elizabeth Gaskell | My Lady Ludlow | serialised |
| R. M. Ballantyne | The Coral Island, A Tale of the Pacific Ocean | ______ |
| W. H. Ainsworth | The Combat of the Thirty | ______ |
| Charles Dickens | A Tale of Two Cities | serialised |
| George Eliot | Adam Bede | ______ |
| George Meredith | The Ordeal of Richard Feverel | ______ |
| Charles Reade | The Cloister and the Hearth | serialised |
| W. M.Thackeray | The Virginians | serialised |
| E. Bulwer Lyttonh | What Will He Do with It? by Pisistratus Caxton | serialised |
1860
| Wilkie Collins | The Woman in White | serialised |
| George Eliot | The Mill on the Floss | ______ |
| George Meredith | Evan Harrington | serialised |
| W. M.Thackeray | Lovel the Widower | serialised |
| Charles Kingsley | Hereward the Wake | serialised |
| W. H. Ainsworth | Ovingderan Grange: A Tale of the South Downs | serialised |
1861
| George Eliot | Silas Marner | ______ |
| Anthony Trollope | Framley Parsonage | serialised |
| Mrs. Henry Wood | East Lynne | ______ |
| Charles Dickens | Great Expectations | serialised |
| W. H. Ainsworth | The Constable of the Tower | serialised |
Bestsellers before Victoria ascended to the throne
Although they are not listed, some important novels by such American authors as Stowe, Hawthorne, Melville, Fennimore Cooper, and Washington Irving sold well in England during the nineteenth century, as did novels from the French, in particular, Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo (1844).
Moreover, many Victorian writers of note were publishing before the accession of Victoria to the throne: Dickens's The Pickwick Papers (1836), Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), Marryat's Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836), and Ainsworth's Rookwood (1834) being leading examples of pre-Victorian works that continued to sell well for much of the century.
Why stop at 1861?
The serial publication of fiction began to change in the late 1850s with the appearance of such illustrated weeklies as Once a Week (1859) and The Cornhill (1860), which over the next decade ousted the old-style, cheap, non-illustrated literary magazines such as Bentley's, Ainsworth's, and All the Year Round. Furthermore, a new kind of fiction, the Sensation Novel (derisively called "The Bigamy Novel" by its detractors) developed in the 1860s as an offshoot of the less realistic Gothic Novel.
The part-publication of Dickens was almost entirely subsumed by these new literary magazines, although America's Atlantic Monthly and Britain's Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine continued to publish high-quality fiction without accompanying illustrations. In this respect, Great Expectations was very much a throw-back, appearing first in a cheap, pulp-paper weekly rather than in a new commodity text such as Good Words (founded in 1860). Cruikshank, Phiz, and their tribe retired, replaced by a host of young, realistic illustrators such as George Du Maurier, Robert Barnes, Arthur Hopkins, and C. S. Reinhart, gifted commercial artists who worked mostly for the new, illustrated magazines of the 1860s. Finally, children's literature, which had in its infancy produced only a few best-selling classics, such as Mary Sherwood's The Fairchild Family (1818) Catherine Sinclair's Holiday House (1839), was about to enter the Golden Age, with Lewis Carroll and Edith Nesbit and a host of other writers whose works aimed primarily at a child and juvenile market would continue to be best-sellers well into the twentieth century.
Related Material
Bibliography
Altick, Richard D. Victorian People and Ideas. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973.
Booth, Michael R.; Southern, Richard; Davies, Roberston; Frederick and Lise-Lone Marker. The Revels History of Drama in English, Vol. 6 1750-1880. London: Methuen, 1975.
Carpenter, Humphrey, and Prichard, Mari. The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Jackson, Arlene M. Illustration and the Novels of Thomas Hardy. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981.
Mitchell, Sally (ed.). Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland, 1988.
Patten, Robert L. Charles Dickens and His Publishers. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978.
Terry, Reginald C. Victorian Popular Fiction 1860-1880. London: Macmillan, 1983.
Tillotson, Kathleen. Novels of the Eighteen-Fortie. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971.
Vann, J. Don. Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: Modern Language Association, 1985.
Last modified 25 August 2018