![]() The key element that really explains Dickens’ popularity is the pauses in between instalments. That emotion, which we’ve all experienced at the end of a good book, is emphasised and increased by the length of time the story has lasted for.īut the importance of serial reading is not merely in breaking it into smaller bites, or reading it over a longer time. ![]() I would argue, that despite Dickens’ false modesty of little concern from his reader, in reality his audience probably shared that same sorrow at the close of the tale. It would concern the reader little, perhaps, to know, how sorrowfully the pen is laid down at the close of a two-years’ imaginative task or how an Author feels as if he were dismissing some portions of himself into the shadowy world, when a crowd of the creatures of his brain are going from him for ever Dickens talks in his preface to the 1867 reissue of David Copperfield of regret which came with completing the story: The longer Dickens novels such as Bleak House or Martin Chuzzlewit were published over the duration of 19 months, which is a significant portion of time. Each book becomes a companion and a commentary on your day-to-day life as you read it over the course of several months. Simultaneously, it prolongs the experience of reading. This has the immediate impact of making the story more manageable, with just a few pages to read each week or month. To truly understand Dickens, as well as his appeal to Victorian readers, we need to experience his novels in instalments. What we think of as a book is more closely related to a DVD boxset, so the idea of reading Nicholas Nickleby from start to finish is no less daunting than catching up with all eight series of Game of Thrones in one fell swoop. But, also like many Victorian novelists, Dickens wrote and published each novel as a series of weekly or monthly instalments. ![]() Like many Victorian novelists, many of Dickens’ novels are heavy doorstoppers, and reading them exercises your arms as much as your brains. ![]() A common refrain of those who don’t read Dickens, when asked why they don’t read Dickens, is that his books are so looooong. ![]()
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