Publishing Serially and Charles Dickens
Over the course of the last several decades, scholarship has arisen in the study of Victorian printing practices, most notably the serial novel. This could be for a variety of reasons, the least of all being a much anticipated move towards the Digital Age, and the desire to learn about the past to better understand the future. Perhaps the most widely recognized, and certainly the most successful of the Victorian authors who “published in parts,” was Charles Dickens. All of his novels, from his initial The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, to his incomplete The Mystery of Edwin Drood (due to his death), were published serially, that is, in monthly or weekly installments (occasionally referred to as “numbers”) of a handful of chapters. These numbers were disseminated in a number of different periodicals, usually with pages of advertisements. What I have attempted to do in the following pages is to compile a comprehensive bibliography that is concerned with the notion of Dickens and his practice of writing, publishing, and editing works that were meant for the public to read in installments.
Understanding this, I have neglected to add the primary texts written by Dickens into this bibliography. What follows is not necessary concerned with the stories that unfold in his novels; merely how they unfold based on the practice of publishing serially. An understanding of the stories may prove helpful in contextualizing the scholarship, but it is not necessary. Most editions of these novels are published in the present day in one volume, and citing one as such would defeat the entire purpose of this bibliography.
I have also not included biographies, or any primary sources of Dickens’s. In the case of biographies, they are plentiful enough on the novelist, and to include one or all would be to make a definitive judgment about them. Again, I am not for the study of Dickens the person, nor the life he lived; I am simply interested in how he went about his method of becoming the most successful serial novelist and publisher. In the case of letters and/or manuscript marginalia, all that can be said about specific hand written correspondences or notes has been covered, in part, in many of the texts I provide.
I have chosen to include a number of works that do not deal specifically with Dickens, and I have noted them as such. However, the inclusion of such pieces is necessary to establish Dickens’s place within the culture of not just Victorian Britain, but the serial publishing realm of the nineteenth-century, including the United States. I have also included a number of works that deal with the process of reading serial novels. I felt that this scholarship, that of reading in parts and communicating with the wider “serial audience,” is an important offshoot of publishing in parts. I believe that understanding how the audience consumed novels in installments, and how they discussed them, is necessary in the study of serial publications.
I have organized the bibliography in order of what I deem to be the most important texts to this topic. I conclude the list with works that I have been unable to locate and/or read. In the way of the dissertations, I was unable to locate an abstract for some of the older ones. In most cases, these dissertations can be purchased through ProQuest, unbound, for $44. Given their titles, the dissertations would appear to provide information on how the proves of publishing serially influenced Dickens and his works. Obviously, it is likely they would also provide additional information.