And readers' too forbid the blow;
Of triple pleasure there'll be none,
Three-volume novels are to go!
"The Trilby mania grows apace. It has reached Peckham. Aunt Maria went to the Fancy Dress Ball of the Peckham season as Trilby in her first costume."—Extract from letter of Miss M. Br-wn to Miss N. Sm-th.
The later manner of Henry James is rather infelicitously described in 1896 as "indifferent Trollopian and second-class Meredithian"; but Punch made no mistake in the following year over Mr. W. W. Jacobs, in whose Many Cargoes—studies of those "who go down to the sea in ships of moderate tonnage"—he found a new fount of joy.
Punch's "literary recipes" place Romance first, then follow the Society Novel (with thinly veiled portraits from life); the Detective Story (Gaboriau and water); and the Religious Novel. The plague of Reminiscences had moved Punch to protest as early as 1893, when he wrote:—
That Memory's the Mother of the Muses,
We're told. Alas! it must have been the Furies!