ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT

        Rarely has a literary form been so driven by the dictates of economics. Several forces came together to produce the serial novel, and the conditions of Victorian England made serialization the primary mode of novel publication for fifty years. Everyone published serially, including George Eliot, who hated it, and Henry James, whose work hardly seems suitable to the demands of suspense and cliffhanger endings that installments require.
        The serial began as a loophole in English tax law. Newspapers had to pay a higher tax on the paper they used in publication; however, by using a bigger sheet they could call their newspapers "pamphlets" and avoid the extra tax. The bigger sheets required more text, and serialization provided an easy and stable way to fill up the space. The first serial, The London Spy, appeared in 1698. By the time the paper tax was repealed, readers had grown so accustomed to serial novels, that they expected their continuation. Newspapers, and then magazines, delivered serials to boost circulation; a popular serial could double readership. This process continued until serialization exploded in the Victorian era with the appearance of Dickens' Pickwick Papers in 1836.
        The other means of producing serials came to be known as part issue. Part issue simply meant publishing each installment independently in cheap covers for a shilling, or five pence, each. The danger of part issue was that the novel had to succeed on its own merits; magazines could at least offer other diversions if the reader tired of the serial. Only giants like Dickens and Thackeray could generate the attention and sales that part issue required. Of the 192 novels published serially in the Victorian Era (1836--1889), only 25 appeared in part issue. Some novelists found their work halted abruptly when the public lost interest. William Harrison Ainsworth, a popular serial novelist, had his autobiography terminated after just four issues because the events of his life could not match the excitement of his fiction. The public grew bored and stopped buying.
        Once again economics drove the continuing popularity of serialization. Much of this success derived from the enormous length of Victorian novels, published as books in three volumes and known as triple-deckers. The average family could not afford a three-volume book, but they could spare a shilling a month for installments. The triple-decker remained in place because of another Victorian oddity, the subscription library. Patrons of the library paid one guinea (a pound and a shilling) for one subscription. That subscription entitled the member to two works. To finish a triple-decker, the patron had to buy at least one more subscription. The system worked brilliantly. Publishers made money from the serialization, from triple-deckers sold to libraries, and from cheaper reprints published at a later date. The serial primed the engine of a publishing machine that operated smoothly throughout the Victorian era.

THE VICTORIAN IMAGINATION

        Certainly economics shaped the development of the serial novel, but the market could not continue to thrive without demand. Why did the Victorians consume serials th such great enthusiasm? What forces shaped the imagination of that period and allowed installment writing to flourish?
        Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund point out in The Victorian Serial that installment novels tapped into the very philosophy of Victorian life. Personal development became something of an obsession for Victorians, and serials mirrored the belief that personal and cultural progress was gradual, positive, and inevitable. As Hughes and Lund demonstrate, the reader has to believe in slow, positive growth for the serial to really work. Victorians saw society as heading toward ever greater perfection and achievement; serials played out that theme in microcosm.
        The communal element in serials also held a great attraction for Victorians. Very often families read new magazines aloud and discussed the latest events in their favorite serial. The monthly intervals between most installments allowed friends to speculate, critique, and worry over what would occur next in the issue. Many readers even wrote the authors with suggestions for the plot and pleas for the lives of their favorite characters. Dickens received hundreds of letters asking for the life of Little Nell. He told his friend William Charles Macready, "I am slowly murdering that poor child, and grow wretched over it. It wrings my heart." But he turned a deaf ear to the entreaties: "Yet it must be." Victorians felt a powerful connection to serialsas though they participated in the formation and eventual triumph of the story. Installments allowed those feelings to grow and strengthen as readers committed themselves to literally years of waiting for the novel to play out. Serials became the literary expression of Victorian ideas about progress and personal achievement.
        So what happened to the predominance of the serial? Many theorize that as notions of progress and ever-greater achievement crumbled, especially in the wake of World War I, the attraction of the serial began to fade. While the serial certainly did collapse as notions of fictional technique and reading habits altered, the idea of the episodic story never really went away; the serial merely changed in medium and style, moving to such areas as film and television.

THE CHALLENGES OF SERIAL WRITING

        The publishing demands of the Victorian era meant writers had to bend their talents to meet the serial form. Rising to the challenge could be a daunting task. As a critic for the London Morning Herald observed in 1843, "In writing, or rather publishing periodically, the author has no time to be idle; ... he must always be lively, pathetic, amusing, or instructive; his pen must never flag--his imagination never tire." The author had to capture the reader's attention from the first installment and insure each installment would keep up the demand for the next. Writers who faltered could lose valuable contracts from magazines and the security that went with a two-year serialization.
        Every author complained of serials. George Elliot moaned of having "to drill myself into writing according to set lengths." Installments had to reach a uniform number of pages from month to month, and some authors resorted to padding installments with needless side plots and superfluous characters to reach the quota. Frederick Marryat disliked the pressures of serialization: "When every portion is severally presented to be analyzed and criticized for thirty days, the author dare not flag. He must keep up to his mark, or he can never encounter an ordeal so severe." Reviews of each installment by leading newspapers and magazines could make or break a serial's popularity; it was like having the novel reviewed over and over.
        Other authors felt the serial form compromised their artistic vision. George Meredith found subtlety difficult to achieve in characters due to the length of time between installments, "such effects are deadly when appearing in a serial issue." Dickens found his way around the problem by use of his famous tags to identify characters, such as Micawber's "I expect something to turn up within the hour." Trollope compared serialization with a farmer and his pigs--the pigs don't always go where they are led on the way to market. Likewise, a serial novelist had no chance to revise if she wanted to take a character a new direction; prior installments could not be changed once in the public's hands. Trollope always wrote his entire novels before their serialization began to allow for revision, but this was certainly the exception. Most authors tried to stay a few installments ahead, but very often they would submit each installment right at the deadline or even fall a month behind. Dickens would agonize over approaching deadlines and repeatedly write to friends and in his notebooks, "I MUST write."
        Then authors had to maintain reader interest. They resorted to using the most controversial technique of the serial, the cliff-hanger ending. All serial writers used the cliff-hanger, even though Trollope felt that the use of suspense violated "all proper confidence between the author and his reader." The reader came to expect "delightful horrors" and felt betrayed when the novel came to a rather subdued ending. But all such talk proved merely rhetorical; everyone, including Trollope, used cliff-hangers to generate excitement for the next installment. The more accurate creed came from Wilkie Collins, master of the cliff-hanger: "Make 'em cry, make 'em laugh, make 'em wait--exactly in that order."
        Collins, who perfected the modern English detective and mystery novel, thrived on cliff-hangers and started the craze for what came to be known as the Sensation Novel. Some samples of his installment endings:
        "The next witnesses called were witnesses concerned with the question that now followed--the obscure and terrible question: Who Poisoned Her? (The Law and the Lady)
        "Why are we to stop her, sir? What has she done?" "Done! She has escaped from my Asylum. Don't forget; a woman in white. Drive on." (The Woman in White)
        "You can marry me privately today," she answered. "Listen--and I will tell you how!" (Man and Wife)"
        Having to wait an entire month for the answer to the harrowing events at the end of each installment built anticipation and produced conversations about the work. The cliff-hanger, necessary for each part of the serial, would often become the most contrived part of the novel. Often authors would delete them or smooth out the action when revising for book publication.
        The real temptation of the cliff-hanger for the author dwelt in the enticement to put action over characters. The masters of the serial, Dickens, Thackeray, Collins, always understood that the reader had to care about not what was happening, but who it was happening to. Jeffrey Walker, associate professor of colonial and nineteenth-century American literature at Oklahoma State University, sees the serial form as an "emphasis on the psychological." Characterization, not action, drives the great serials with "so much more detail, so much more of a thorough investigation of how people related and talked." The reader wants to discover the ultimate destiny of the characters, how they change and develop over the course of the story. Cliff-hanger endings might produce anticipation from installment to installment, but powerful characters kept readers coming back again and again to the same authors. Plot-driven serials, according to Walker, become "flat, underdeveloped, ultimately uninteresting."
        Despite all the anxiety and complaints, many authors produced great novels under the constraints of the serial form. Some of the notable panoramic looks at society occur during the serial era, including Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Dickens' Bleak House. The achievement of serial novelists raises the question of how much freedom a writer genuinely has to possess to write valuable and entertaining literature. One can even ask whether an author would have written as well without the constraints. Walker believes serialization "brought out [Dickens'] talent. Serial publication allowed that talent in him to develop and expand." Dickens required the discipline and pressure of installment writing to harness and channel his restless and teeming imagination. The form created the venue his abilities sought and permitted him to dominate the Victorian literary scene.
        DICKENS: THE MASTER OF THE SERIAL
        In 1836, the publishers Chapman and Hall decided to release a series of sporting prints in part issue with text provided to narrate the scene of each picture. Chapman and Hall hired the renowned illustrator Robert Seymour to handle the pictures and a young journalist, Charles Dickens, to write the text. Dickens and Seymour immediately clashed over the project. Seymour wanted the illustrations to form the focal point of the issues, and Dickens insisted that the pictures merely serve to highlight certain events from the text. Seymour, with a variety of problems besetting him, committed suicide. Dickens seized control of the work with a new illustrator, Hablot Brown ("Phiz"), following along obediently. The work became the Pickwick Papers, and each issue increased in popularity until an astounding forty thousand left the shelves each month. Dickens' dominance in the serial market began.
        Dickens went on to serialize fifteen novels, including the incomplete Edwin Drood, and commanded amazing sums to write. He left ®XC11,4¯93,000 at his death, a remarkable bequest considering he supported an extended family, including his debt-ridden father, friends, an estranged wife, and a mistress comfortably. The average worker in Dickens' era was lucky to bring home one pound a week. Along with his writing talents Dickens possessed an acute business sense that made him a ruthless bargainer. He recognized the power an author could wield if used wisely. He often negotiated royalties of up to 75 percent of the profits, received advances averaging ®XC11,4¯3,000 each, and commanded an allowance whenever in the midst of publishing a new work. In addition, he ran or owned other serial magazines during his career and received both a salary as editor and a share of the profits.
        A variety of factors made Dickens excel at the serial form. His energy could not be matched. Although he suffered from bouts of depression when he felt bored or uncreative, Dickens could write around seventeen pages of text a week. Even that could not quell his drive; he would often take walks of sixteen to twenty miles to calm himself. He made trips to study places he planned to include in the novels. He wrote friends and experts to gather information. He queried his friend Mark Lemon about the slang employed by circus people and used a false name to acquire information from an attorney outside of London. Dickens spent much time gathering reports from many sources about spontaneous combustion, a phenomenon he would use to dramatic effect in Bleak House.
        Despite legends to the contrary, Dickens also carefully plotted and organized his works. His method was simple but ingenious. Using a 7"x sheet of paper, Dickens would fold the paper lengthwise to create two columns. On the left he would write the options, motifs, plots, and characters that needed inclusion within that installment. He would also jot questions that would find answers at a later date. Then on the right Dickens would put the title of the novel, the plan (installment) number, and then the title of the chapters for that installment. Under each chapter he would jot a quick synopsis and any notes to complete the installment. Dickens made such a plan sheet for each number in the serial. Sometimes he would plan the entire novel this way before writing; other times he remained one or two installments ahead.
        Dickens would use these plans to keep track of his very complicated plots and characters. For the "Tempest" chapter in David Copperfield, Dickens simply jotted, "Flying sand, seaweed--and flakes of foam / seen / at Broadstairs here, last night--Flying / in blotches." In just a few phrases Dickens captured the essence of the chapter. Dickens would also list themes to continue throughout the work and could look back on prior sheets to ensure the plot remained consistent. Experimentation also took place on the sheets. For the title character of Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens made a list of possible names that included Chuzzlewig, Swezleden, Chuzzletoe, Swezlebach, and Sweezlewag. Every installment followed these carefully prepared notes, and every novel held its shape as Dickens paid attention to every twist and turn in the plot.
        Through his characters, Dickens tapped into the Victorian rage for progress. People loved his heroes and reviled his villains, pleaded for the life of Little Nell, and cheered when Uriah Heep finally got his just punishment. So many of Dickens' novels revolve around the transformations of their central characters: David Copperfield or Oliver Twist, for example. Victorian readers trusted that each novel would deliver a person changed and improved, a character who embodied the promise of betterment and self-fulfillment. Even Dickens' so-called dark novels, like Bleak House, demonstrate the possibility of enlightenment; the characters tend to stray from the path more often, however. Victorians loved Dickens for creating a world that marches relentlessly toward a better future, and for developing characters they want to see reach such a place.

DECLINE AND RISE

        Beginning in the late 1800s, serials commenced a steady decline in popularity. The pricing and production of triple-deckers changed and made them less profitable. Readers had less time to invest as the twentieth century accelerated all areas of life. But in many ways serialized novels lost momentum as other media seized the public's imagination. First movies, then television, used serial techniques to hook a new generation on the episodic format. The serial never really died; it merely changed its residence.
        Changes in fiction also played a huge role in declining serialization. Authors wanted more autonomy and felt the installment format too constricting. The move away from the rambling, social novel gave way to the intense, introspective, and often sparse modern novel. Content also became an area of contention. Even Victorian writers (especially Thomas Hardy) had to bow occasionally to the censorship of nervous editors, but by the early 1920s the feuds reached stages beyond compromise.
        Hemingway provides a good case in point. His publisher, Scribner's, wanted to serialize A Farewell to Arms in its eponymous magazine. As Leonard Leff, author of the recently published Hemingway and His Conspirators, notes, Hemingway liked the idea because, although Scribner's had lost much circulation, it was "still to be found in a lot of homes and libraries. It still remained associated with High Art." But Leff says the project deteriorated from the moment it began. Knowing Hemingway would be furious, the magazine censored portions of the book without his knowledge, one installment was banned in Boston, and Hemingway never felt the pay made up for all the headaches. Hemingway's trials made many editors shy away from serializing novels on the cutting edge; content of magazines remained far too conservative for the new subject matters that authors dealt with in their novels.
        But serials didn't die, they simply went after a less contentious market. Juvenile serials flourished throughout the first half of the century, and many movie studios sponsored them as tie-ins to movies and to encourage attendance by younger audiences. The Saturday Evening Post always ran serials, as did other family-oriented magazines. The subjects turned toward more romantic plots in women's periodicals and action and patriotism themes in family publications. The plots became predictable, and action rather than characterization drove these types of serials. Gone were the rising stars in literature. In their place unspectacular writers took up the slack.
        This situation remained the status quo until the 1970s, when serials found new life in some interesting places. Leading the renaissance was Armistead Maupin. His serial "Tales of the City" thrilled San Francisco readers of the San Francisco Chronicle and then the Examiner. Maupin loved Dickens and created characters the reader cared about. Just as important, Maupin used San Francisco as his backdrop to provide a world that readers could identify with just as Dickens used London. Using familiar locations and the latest fads and brand names, Maupin kept readers interested on and off for fourteen years and published novels from the installments he had written. Maupin's tales have lived on, first as an acclaimed PBS miniseries and now as "More Tales of the City" on Showtime.
        Even more celebrated, Tom Wolfe ran a serial version of Bonfire of the Vanities for Rolling Stone in 1984--85. Stone paid around $200,000 for twenty-five six-thousand-word installments. Wolfe came upon the serial idea when he couldn't seem to get started on the work and wanted to impose a deadline on himself. After the serial finished in August 1985, Wolfe took twenty months to rewrite the installments for the book version. For Wolfe, "The serial was writing a first draft in public. I have a feeling I never would have written Bonfire without it." The novel worked serially, with its sweeping view of New York, memorable characters, and multiple plotlines.
        Recently, New York Newsday tried serialization to increase its Latino readership. In 1994 it hired Soledad Santiago to write a sixty-four-part serial called Streets of Fire. Amazingly, Santiago wrote daily installments of about nine hundred words each. Readers, especially women, loved it, and the paper had to create a special phone line to handle inquiries and provide recorded plot summaries of past issues. Soledad saw it as "an opportunity for the characters to have little discussions about the big issues all New Yorkers face." Soledad created a novel from the installments and sold it to Signet.
        Intrigued by Dickens' serial methods, Stephen King launched a part issue novel in 1996 called The Green Mile, a Depression-era death-row thriller. Bringing out a new installment every month for six months at $2.99 (the final, a double issue, for $3.99), The Green Mile turned into a publishing monster. All the installments together held six of the seven best-seller spots simultaneously, and the series sold twenty-three million copies overall. King, who received $1 million for each installment, also sold 250,000 copies of boxed sets containing the entire novel. The success has spawned excitement in publishing, including the appearance of John Saul's horror series, the "Blackstone Chronicles," and other projects in the works. The serial seems to have made a remarkable comeback in publishing.

THE ENDURING LEGACY OF SERIALIZATION

        While the serial finds its way back to its original form in the novel, episodic narration has remained a staple of popular culture. From movie serials like King of the Rocket Men, to TV soap operas, to episodic television hits like ER, serialization draws the viewer or reader in over and over. And just like the novels of the Victorian era, characterization remains the key ingredient to serial success. Televison has replaced the novel as the medium that makes the audience feel the most intimate with characters. But as Stephen King has shown, perhaps it's the mode of delivery that can attract people back to novels and reading in general.
        Jeffrey Walker has his undergraduates read Henry James' Portrait of a Lady in its original serial installments once a week. Remarkably, he says, "I get some of my students caught," and "they want to read it." Make them sit down and read the entire work in a week and nothing happens. That sense of anticipation and desire to see the outcome of characters' lives never ceases to draw people to literature and entertainment.
        Making readers wait gives them a stake in the novel in a way that no other form of publication does. Doling out the pleasure and intrigue of a well-written serial novel may need reexamination in education systems and publishing ventures. "Make 'em cry, make 'em laugh, make 'em wait," and watch the interest soar.n

ADDITIONAL READING