The Triple Decker Novel, a Victorian Moneymaking Scheme

Before the age of the free public library, for-profit libraries got sneaky

In the 21st century, we take a lot for granted… but did you know that reading a newly-released novel as a single book is one of them?

For much of the 19th century in Britain, breaking a single novel into parts and selling it as three volumes was a standard publishing scheme.

This wasn’t because people wanted to beef up their libraries with more books on the shelves, or because they wanted to make larger novels more portable by breaking them up and slimming them down.

Rather, the three-volume novel, also called a triple decker, was a clever moneymaking strategy on the part of a now-extinct institution known as the private circulating library.

What’s a private circulating library?

In the dark days before the free public library was common, the middle-class of Britain often could not afford to buy a variety of novels.

Instead, they depended on private, for-profit libraries for access to these stories.

These libraries, also called private lending libraries, would charge people a yearly fee for the right to borrow books.

In a time when literacy rates in Britain were swiftly rising and the public appetite for novels was growing stronger with every passing year, the circulating library was a thriving business model.

One of the most famous was Mudie’s Lending Library

London-born bookseller Charles Edward Mudie began lending books to subscribers in 1842. His service proved to be a grand success and by 1860, his lending libraries could be found in multiple cities in England. Horse-drawn vans supplied the London area with book deliveries, and trains carried books to subscribers around the country.

For twenty-one shillings a year, a subscriber to Mudie’s Lending Library was able to borrow one volume at a time. For forty-two shillings a year, a subscriber could borrow four volumes at a time.

In an era when a single volume novel could cost six shillings at a bookshop, this was a bargain for British readers.

The popularity of Charles Mudie’s libraries also made him a powerful man in the publishing industry. Mudie exerted significant control over Victorian literature by refusing to stock books he believed to be unfit for the middle-class family.

This also gave him, and his competitors, tremendous influence over how the books were brought to market.

Enter the triple decker novel

In the 19th century, the popularity of Charles Dicken’s Pickwick Papers inspired a demand for literature sold as “partworks” or serials.

Many in-demand novels were initially published in magazines and newspapers as serials, and once the serial run was complete, publication in the form of a three-volume novel, aka triple decker, would typically follow.

In a mustache-twirling twist, however, we find that these triple decker novels were prohibitively expensive for nearly all British readers.

The average middle-class Victorian family in Britain already couldn’t fulfill their appetite for ordinary novels without the help of the lending library. Yet the triple deckers were so costly that, to purchase one, a middle-class household would have to shell out half its weekly income.

It’s clear the average or even upper-class British Victorian reader was never the intended market for these pricey three-volume novels.

Instead, they were almost exclusively bought by the private lending libraries.

Why did lending libraries want three volumes instead of one?

To start, bulk purchasing and the lending libraries’ powerful influence over what the Victorian public read meant that Mudie and his competitors were able to purchase triple deckers at a substantial discount from publishers.

Because these novels were broken into three parts, lending libraries were effectively able to lend out a popular new title to three people at once, increasing their pool of customers. This also restricted the number of total novels a subscriber could consume in a year’s time.

But most of all, the triple decker drove subscriptions.

New works by popular authors were typically only reprinted as more affordable single-volumes one year after being released as a three-volume novel.

Until then, the staggeringly high cost of a triple decker made it nearly impossible for British readers to obtain new in-demand releases without a subscription to a lending library.

To add even more incentive, a reader would never know if the next volume in the triple decker edition would be available to borrow when they returned the previous volume. This would encourage people to subscribe to the higher yearly fee of forty-two shillings that allowed borrowing four volumes at a time.

The downfall of the triple decker novel

By 1894, the lending libraries’ preference for the three-volume novel was diminishing.

The rise of free public libraries and less expensive book formats were creating more options for the reading public.

In this more competitive market, the triple decker scheme became more costly: a three-volume novel rapidly lost its value once the novel was reprinted as a single volume, and disposing of them to make room for the next year’s titles was burdensome for lending libraries.

Finding the triple decker novel to be less profitable, Mudie’s Lending Library and its competitor W.H. Smith announced they would purchase three-volume novels from publishers for substantially less than the previous rate. They also attempted to impose restrictions on how soon publishers could reprint novels as single volumes.

Publishers found these terms unworkable, and the triple decker novel swiftly faded into history.

In a few decades, with the introduction of inexpensive paperbacks and the further expansion of public libraries, the private circulating library would also disappear.

Will the triple decker novel return?

Technically, it never completely went away: there is one very famous and very popular title that is, in fact, a triple decker novel.

Often mistakenly believed to be a trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is a single novel that was published as three volumes to minimize potential financial loss to the publisher.

As we move forward into the 21st century, however, the return of serialized fiction in the form of web novels and attempts to create digital scarcity may give new life to this old concept.

Hopefully this time, it will help compensate authors for their work without taking advantage of the reading public.

Source: Richard Menke, “The End of the Three-Volume Novel System, June 27 1894”