This handy volume provides a general introduction to the practice, followed by many Victorian novelists, of publishing their works in installments in newspapers and magazines.

The bulk of the volume contains charts for 192 novels. Each chart lists the dates of appearance of individual parts and their relation to the chapters of the final book. The authors include Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and others.