Submerged Below the Codex Line: New Zealand’s Neglected Nineteenth Century Serial Novels

The compilation of a checklist of nineteenth-century New Zealand novels and novellas published as serials and never issued as monographs, which provides the core evidence on which this paper is based, was inspired by Lydia Wevers ’ article in Pacific Highways in 2013.1 She was questioning why New Zealand doesn’t measure up to Australia’s output of great nineteenth-century novels, and providing some very cogent answers based on the evidence currently available. However, I suspected, based on some research dating back to the 1980s and 1990s, that another possible reason might be that New Zealand literary historians had based their analysis on only the novels available in monographic form, and that there may be a goodly taniwha or two, even a great one, lurking elsewhere as serials in the deeper waters of the newspapers and periodicals. What I found down there in the newspapers was far more than I had expected. New Zealand literary historians have been clearly aware of, but not overly concerned about, the novels serialized in the newspapers. Dennis McEldowney, in the first edition of the Oxford History of New Zealand Literature, noted that local newspapers “had periods when they were hospitable to local writers. They have hardly been explored as yet. W. H. Ne