Three-volume novel

The three-volume novel (sometimes three-decker or triple decker[note 1]) was a standard form of publishing for British fiction during the nineteenth century.

Three-volume novels began to be produced by the Edinburgh-based publisher Archibald Constable in the early 19th century.

Under Colburn's influence, the published novels adopted a standard format of three volumes in octavo,[note 3] priced at one-and-a-half guineas (£1 11s.

[7]: 74 Three-volume novels quickly disappeared after 1894, when both Mudie's and W. H. Smith stopped purchasing them at the previous price.

The particular style of mid-Victorian fiction, of a complicated plot reaching resolution by distribution of marriage partners and property in the final pages, was well adapted to the form.

[14]: 291 [note 10] By 1821 Archibald Constable, who published Sir Walter Scott, took advantage of his popularity to increase the price of a single volume to ten shillings and sixpence (half a guinea), or a guinea and a half (31 shillings and sixpence) for all three volumes.

[17][note 13] The system encouraged publishers and authors to produce as many novels as possible, due to the almost-guaranteed, but limited, profits that would be made on each.

Many novels by authors such as Wilkie Collins and George Eliot were first published in serial form in weekly and monthly magazines that began to become popular in the middle of the 19th century.

[19]: 305 [note 16] The convention that only adult fiction was published in three-volume format was so strong that when Bevis, the Story of a Boy by Richard Jefferies (Sampson Low, London) was published in 1882 in three volumes, E. V. Lucas commented in his introduction to the 1904 Duckworth edition that doing so had kept the book out of the hands of its true readers, boys.

These were popular with young, working-class men,[25] and often had sensationalist stories featuring criminals, detectives, pirates or the supernatural.

Two of John Cowper Powys's novels, Wolf Solent (1929) and Owen Glendower (1940) were published in two-volume editions by Simon & Schuster in the USA.

The Lord of the Rings is a three-volume novel, rather than a trilogy, as Tolkien originally intended the work to be the first of a two-work set, the other to be The Silmarillion, but this idea was dismissed by his publisher.