The Serialized Novel in the 19th Century (Review)

Did you know most books in the 19th Century were released through magazines and newspapers, not through the full books that we think of now?

Through Paul Cantor’s series on Commerce and Culture, I have realized how oblivious I have been to much of history and the way everyday things worked less than 200 years ago.

In his 5th lecture, Cantor discusses how in the 19th century, most writers released their novels through magazines and newspapers in weekly or monthly publications. Much of this was due to the price of books being astronomically higher in the beginning of the 19th century. Cantor estimates that with inflation, the price of a book in those days was about the price of a day’s wage. Much more expensive than we pay for today’s books. Unless of course you’re talking college textbooks, then you’re probably paying 10x that.

Cantor discusses how this form of writing was met with both opportunity and pressure for the writers of this day. Writers were now forced to reserve something like 16 pages a month for 20 months in a magazine. Then they had to stick to that. They had the pressure of these monthly commitments. Many writers weren’t a fan of this pressure, but writers like Charles Dickens figured out how to use this constraint to actually enhance his writing.

First off, Dickens started doing what we call now, “cliffhangers.” We see this quite a bit at the end of tv shows. They end an episode at a really important part and don’t fully resolve it so that you are compelled to come back the next week and watch it. Dickens did this with his novels. He would leave his readers with these cliff hangers so that they would come back the next month to read the next part in his series.

He also used fans involvement and feedback to implement different things in his writing. Think of how many people treat the Marvel Cinematic Universe right now. Now that Avengers: Endgame is about to come out, there are thousands of fan theories out there as far as what’s going to happen next. For Marvel, they likely already had the story figured out, but Dickens used theories and ideas from his readers to craft what he did in his stories.

People might think that by doing this he was compromising or selling out — that giving the customer what they wanted cheapened the quality of his writing. However, Dickens understood that while he may have been incredibly creative, by using feedback from readers, he was sometimes able to gain ideas that he may not have had before. Even the smartest people can use advice at times.

Cantor described this as spontaneous feedback vs. intentional planning. He comes back to this later when comparing capitalism with Marxism.

Cantor also mentions how we often criticize modern entertainment like tv shows saying “look at all the junk on tv these days, this certainly isn’t the quality of writing or entertainment they had 200 years ago.” He mentioned this idea in his Shakespeare lecture as well. What he points out is that we often are comparing the wrong things. In the 19th century, Cantor estimates that there were about 40,000 novels written. Out of these 40,000, about 200 have survived that are still read today — even by professors of literature. Only that much has survived because there was a lot of junk. Most of those 40,000 novels were simply terrible.

Cantor explains that when we compare the content of that day and this day, we often take the worst or the average of today and compare it with what we have from 200 years ago, which by nature is the best. A better comparison would be to compare the best of today and what we have from that day. We are then able to have a fair comparison. We may still think the old is better, but it becomes a much closer game.

Cantor stated in a previous lecture that any culture that produces good art and content is based off a pyramid of garbage. To have the good, you will by nature also have the bad.

The capitalist world isn’t perfect, but it is better than the alternative. With capitalism, you have people who thrive and people who get left behind, the alternative is everyone being left behind, not everyone thriving. When you allow society to live with spontaneous feedback instead of having intentional planning, you allow real growth to happen. And remember, when the government gets involved in the arts, it’s almost always a negative effect.

What was the government’s contribution to all of this 19th-century writing? A tax on paper.