In 1836, Charles Dickens hooked the good people of England on a story about a traveling men’s group. Published over two years in 19 installments, The Pickwick Papers launched a craze for serialized fiction. The trend found traction across the pond.
Later in the 19th century, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all published novels in installments. Into the 20th, the episodic boomed again when serials from Isaac Bashevis Singer, James Joyce, and Armistead Maupin curried fans.
Now, the 21st century is picking up the torch. Over at New York magazine, Emily Gould’s “Dinner Party” newsletter plays current host to a six-part story written by the novelist and critic Lauren Oyler. Our narrator’s frenemy and fixation is “a tall, self-absorbed, Berlin-dwelling writer named Lauren…who has gotten herself in too deep with F., a frustrated academic turned book critic whom she met on Feeld.” Gould chalked this not-so-novel novella’s timing up to nostalgia.
What’s the appeal of a serialized story? And what makes this moment so ripe for a reboot? We can chalk the first serial boom up to a few factors.
For one, a hungry marketplace. As Dwight MacDonald writes in his essay collection, Masscult and Midcult, the Grub Street Dickens published on was a rapacious place, where “hacks…ready to turn their hands to ballads, novels, history, encyclopedias, philosophy, reportage, or anything else” first architected what snobs would call the middlebrow aesthetic. The pioneers of a publishing model we still enlist today believed that putting out more books faster made for a healthy marketplace.
Which ethos directly affected the creatives. For his magazine contributions, Dickens was famously paid by the word—and at a rate that would probably shock today’s freelancers once adjusted for inflation. It behooved Old Charlie to extend his universe, explore every eddy and B plot.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
