To present-day readers, the idea of reading a novel in weekly or monthly installments may seem strange. Why buy twenty issues of a magazine when the paperback costs a few dollars and you get the whole story at once? But as one writer in 1828 noted, “No Englishman in the middle class of life buys a book.” At that time, one complete novel might be published in three or four volumes at a cost of roughly three to four hundred dollars for a complete novel. Given this, anyone who wanted to read a book and who was not rich joined a lending library or bought the weekly issues of a magazine. Thus novels, once only the domain of the rich, became a cheap luxury for the masses.
This method of publishing affected how the novels were actually written. Authors’ choices of plot, character, and style were often a direct results of the requirements of publishing in serial form. (In fact, some of the flaws of which Dickens is accused by modern-day reviewers are actually constraints of this form.)
The first consideration in planning a book for this form was the number of installments to use to tell the story. Each installment needed to be about the same length, roughly thirty-two pages of fifty lines per page. The emotional intensity and action had to be about equal in each, as well. After a break in the story of a week or month, the pressing question was: Would the reader come back and buy the next issue? Hence each installment had to be a “mini-story” or “episode” in itself, each with its own cliffhanger ending. To achieve so many cliffhangers, plots had to be large and complex with a lot of action.
