Vanity Fair, and avoided Eliot's objections to slicing her novel into small parts. Blackwood agreed, although he feared there would be "complaints of a want of the continuous interest in the story" due to the independence of each volume. The eight books duly appeared during 1872, the last three instalments being issued monthly.

With the deaths of Thackeray and Dickens in 1863 and 1870, respectively, Eliot became "recognised as the greatest living English novelist" at the time of the novel's