First!!! (Not actually.)

I'm dealing with an entertaining, albeit complicated, literary-historical problem: the "first" novel that is not first.

In Book One, I pointed out that Agnes Strickland, who was frequently credited by the Victorians with inventing the "lives of queens of England" genre, had in fact done no such thing.  The Strickland case is, by and large, one of publicity (she finished her project, it was well-advertised, it became a bestseller, etc.).  This time around, the issue is a bit more difficult to deal with.  Again, the Victorians were convinced that Novel X was the first of its type--in fact, a radical departure from novels that had gone before it.  Except that my most recent research (of the close rather than distant reading variety) makes it clear that, no, Novel X isn't the first of its kind; it's not even the second, third, or fourth.  However, Novel X makes nineteenth-century readers forget the existence of its predecessors.  Now what's going on?

The most obvious answer has to do with accidental timing: it comes out the same year that a particular religio-political issue goes from Moderately Toasty on the heated discourse rating scale to something approaching Five Alarm Blaze.  (There's no indication that the timing was planned.)  But Novel X had at least two other advantages.  First, there are more venues in which it could be reviewed.  Second, it comes out in the decade that production costs begin to drop, thanks to the spread of machine-made paper.  Cheaper production costs mean a wider spread in the kinds of books available to the reading public, and this book was at the lower end of the scale (4s. 6d. in its first edition); it soon caught on as a gift book and proselytizing tool, in addition to direct sales.  So: great timing; more publicity; much cheaper.