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The Third Volume!
Phiz
steel engraving
12 cm high by 10.8 cm wide (4 ¾ by 4 ¼ inches), vignetted
September 1862
Fifteenth serial illustration for Charles Lever's Barrington (Chapter XXVIII, "George's Daughter"), facing p. 227
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned it, and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
“Well, here comes grandpapa,” said Miss Dinah, “and, if I don't mistake, with a book in his hand for one of your morning readings.”
Josephine ran eagerly to meet him, and, fondly drawing her arm within his own, came back at his side.
“The third volume, Fifine, the third volume,” said he, holding the book aloft. “Only think, child, what fates are enclosed within a third volume! What a deal of happiness or long-living misery are here included!”
She struggled to take the book from his hand, but he evaded her grasp, and placed it in his pocket, saying, —
“Not till evening, Fifine. I am bent on a long ramble up the Glen this morning, and you shall tell me all about the sisterhood, and sing me one of those little Latin canticles I'm so fond of.” [Chapter XXVIII, "George's Daughter," 227]
Although British publishers issued three-volume sets of novels or "triple-deckers" throughout the nineteenth century, Old Sir Peter's allusion to Sir Walter Scott's Waverley Novels, and specifically Rob Roy (1817) implies that the date of the action is the decade of the 1820s, when Scott's popularity was at its height. The first triple-decker ever published was Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility in 1811, but it was really Archibald Constable, the Edinburgh publisher, who established the vogue for triple-deckers with Scott's Kenilworth in 1821. Under Constable's successor, Henry Colburn, the standard format for a new novel, after serialisation, was three equal volumes in octavo priced at one-and-a-half guineas or ten shillings a volume, a price which tended to put new fiction outside the purchasing power of all but the richest British households.
Lester, Valerie Browne. Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004.
Lever, Charles. Barrington. With 25 engravings by Phiz [Hablột Knight Browne]. London: Chapman and Hall, 1863.
Steig, Michael. Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U. P., 1978.
Sutherland, John A. "Barrington." The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford U. P., 1989, rpt. 1990, 48-49.
Created 10 November 2007 Last updated 10 October 2026