11 - Dickens and the form of the novel

Summary

By accident and by design, Dickens effectively determined the shape, pace, structure, and texture of his own novel form, and developed both professional and aesthetic expectations of the writer and reader in the production and reception of his work. He made the novel what it was for the Victorians, creating and managing an appetite for fictions that would in turn make both imaginative and social demands. Throughout his career, the arts of the storyteller, the deferral tactics of the Arabian Nights, the capacity of the journalist to observe and report, the power of the satirist for reform and of the clown or tragedian to move an audience were brought into play, not despite the constraints of part-publication, but actually by exploiting serial form.

Novels in parts, whether separate volumes or shorter units, were not unknown in the eighteenth century, but it was Dickens with Pickwick Papers in 1836 who brought part-publication to such success that it became the dominant pattern for the novel through most of the Victorian period. This was Dickens’s first novel, but not his first work. He was a practiced writer, the author of Sketches by Boz, when Chapman and Hall asked him to supply the text for a publication in monthly numbers to accompany a series of etchings by Robert Seymour.