Abstract
This essay examines intersections between George Eliot’s work and the New Journalistic practice of publishing extracts (or “tit-bits”) from novels in mass-market periodicals and book collections. It investigates the publishing format of Alexander Main’s Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings of George Eliot (1872), and The George Eliot Birthday Book (1878), demonstrating how they represent Eliot and Lewes’s engagement with the popular literary marketplace. These literary experiments to some degree anticipated the excerpting practices of the New Journalism, particularly George Newnes’s journal Tit-Bits, founded in 1881, and his book A Thousand Tit-Bits from a Hundred Authors (1882). Both Newnes and Eliot embraced the tit-bits fad, if for different ends.