Explore a multi-million word corpus of data on the Agony Column and newspaper novels

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What is a newspaper novel? There is no clearly established answer. Neither exclusively novels about newspaper culture nor stories published serially in periodicals, the newspaper novel is a hybrid form, which sits at the intersection of many 19th-century popular forms. Jessica Valdez, a scholar of Victorian literature, challenging us to "consider novelistic representations of the newspaper and news discourse as sites of experimentation, where novelists tested out and imagined different scenarios for how print media might enter real life.”

Although fictional, Victorian sensation novels drew heavily from contemporary sources, borrowing and expanding upon stories published in the newspaper. We categorize newspaper novels into three groups based on the function of the newspaper within them. In some, newspaper culture shapes the setting of the story, such as in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871) or Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto (1892). In others, newspapers directly drive the plot, as in Ann Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847) or Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). In still others, the form or structure of the novel approximates and draws upon the episodic and segmented nature of a newspaper itself, as in Andrew Forrester’s The Female Detective (1864). Some novels, however, do not fit neatly into one category. Charles Dickens’ The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (or The Pickwick Papers, 1836), offers a plot that follows a rag-tag bunch of reporters, and the near-episodic nature of the novel also offers readers an experience reminiscent of perusing the newspaper and encountering various offerings in sequence.