6 Elements a Successful Serial Novel Needs

a.k.a. the Dickens formula

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Charles Dickens and 'Household Words' versus Elizabeth Gaskell and the single-volume edition of 'North and South'

When people write about serialization, they often state that writers like Charles Dickens and (usually) Alexandre Dumas “serialized their novels” in newspapers and magazines. No, Dumas and others had their novels serialized; Dickens actually did the serializing.

Dickens was as much a publisher and an editor as a writer. The tremendous success of his serializations resulted from his ability to play all three roles simultaneously.

Over his lifetime, he managed three weekly magazines (note: weekly magazines—that’s a lot of work to do in while churning out 200,000-plus-word novels). Each magazine carried articles, satire, and fiction, and occasionally Dickens’s own novels:

• Master Humphrey’s Clock (1840-1841)—Pickwick Papers, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Barnaby Rudge

• Household Words (1850-1859)—Hard Times

• All the Year Round (1859-1893)—A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations

He edited and published many other authors’ novels, including those of Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White) and Elizabeth Gaskell (North and South, Cranford).

As a writer-editor-publisher, Dickens had skin in the game. He lived off the income he received from his weekly magazines. His stake in All the Year Round was 75 percent. If a serialization failed, he failed. That meant paying attention to what drove subscriptions.

That’s not the same as pandering to the public to get their money, as Hollywood, a portion of the publishing world, and some authors do.¹ Dickens was an idealist. His magazines were part of his determination to delight, educate, and unite people. His mission, which appeared in the first edition of Household Words, is beyond inspiring:

We seek to bring into innumerable homes, from the stirring world around us, the knowledge of many social wonders, good and evil…to teach the hardest workers at this whirling wheel of toil, that their lot is not necessarily a moody, brutal fact, excluded from the sympathies and graces of imagination; to bring the greater and the lesser in degree, together, upon that wide field, and mutually dispose them to a better acquaintance and a kinder understanding.

Dickens wanted to lift readers out of what might otherwise be the monotony of the “whirling wheel of toil” called life. He was raised beyond poor and knew poverty, struggle, and the power a book can have to pull you out of those for a time. (His father and family ended up in the Marshalsea debtor’s prison, leaving fifteen-year-old Dickens to fend for himself.)

Unlike many authors who devote themselves to their work and expect readers to come along, Dickens thought of his readers/subscribers first. He honored them—practically revered them.

As a writer-editor-publisher, he devised the “Dickens formula” to meet their needs. It’s not a formula he wrote out, but it’s expressed in his many letters.

The formula worked best when serializing his own novels, less so those of others.

The Dickens-Gaskell Clash

The famous clash between Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell during the serialization of North and South in Household Words is a case study of the Dickens formula and how we can use it today.

Who was Elizabeth Gaskell? Mrs [sic] Gaskell (as she was known) was a writer and Dickens’s contemporary. (If you watch PBS or the BBC, you probably know her work. Her novels North and South, Cranford starring Judi Dench, Mary Barton, Wives and Daughters, and Ruth have all been made into TV series.) In addition to her many novels and short stories, she also wrote the first biography of Charlotte Brontë.

Dickens initiated a working relationship with Gaskell. He wrote and practically begged her to contribute to Household Words.

It’s not hard to see why. At the time, Gaskell had published the epic, gritty novel Mary Barton (1848), which touched Dickens deeply. They shared the belief that fiction should be in service of social change, particularly championing the rights of the working class.

They didn’t, however, agree on how best to serialize a novel.

The 6 Elements

Dickens was a demanding editor and publisher who believed his approach to serialization was the only way. A great serialization had to have “vitality.” Vitality required a suggestive title and the author’s ability to

• think in terms of the serial community’s needs,

• add suspense between installments,

• understand the importance of pacing,

• have a “weekly point of view,” and

• be punctual.

Gaskell rejected the majority of Dickens’s suggestions and methods. The result? Readership and sales of Household Words flagged during the serialization of North and South.

1. Titles

Originally, Gaskell wanted to title the novel Margaret or Margaret Hale after the protagonist. Dickens strongly objected. That title was too limited, confining the story to one plot line—Margaret’s relationships—leaving out the larger scope of the story, which centers on the lives of millworkers and economic inequality. He wrote to Gaskell to name it “North and South” because it “implied more, and is more expressive of the opposite people brought together by the story.” In other words, your title has to be expansive enough to cover the most important dimensions of your book.

(We’ll cover titles more in-depth in Friday’s post.)

2. The Serial Community’s Needs

When Dickens received her installments, his editorial suggestions centered on creating a story full of suspense that would captivate readers. But Gaskell wasn’t interested in her readers. Writing was a solitary endeavor. Her relationship was with her characters. The novel was a success if it worked in and of itself. (She was more of a modernist in this respect.) Unfortunately, this way of thinking led to the serialization of—in Dickens’s opinion—a long, tedious story. (Personally, I love North and South, but it may not have worked best in serial form.)

3. Suspense

As we know, suspense comes from how you divide your installments. Dickens urged Gaskell to change the divisions she’d set up, which she agreed to in some cases and not others. Dickens wrote to a friend, “Mrs [sic] Gaskell's story, so divided, is wearisome in the last degree.” Installments aren’t the same as book chapters. (See the post on Cliffhangers and Agatha Christie for more on dividing installments.)

4. Pacing

Gaskell’s novel suffered from overwriting. She’d warned Dickens about her “tendency to detail,” as she put it, and Dickens had assured her it would be welcome. But once the serialization process began, he thought otherwise. To him, the novel was long and flabby, not just in terms of description but the time spent within scenes and over stretches of narration. Dickens asked her to condense parts of the novel, which she wouldn’t do. As a result, it suffers from a rushed ending and a long middle-to-end, during which the protagonist Margaret ponders her situation—a lot.

5. The Weekly Point of View

When Dickens told Gaskell to look “at your whole story from the weekly point of view,” it wasn’t a mere suggestion. He wrote that this perspective “cannot, I repeat, be disregarded without injury to the book.” But Gaskell never stepped back to examine her work in terms of the amount of action, number of plot points, and range of character development readers were met with each week.

6. Punctuality

Gaskell delivered a novel that needed twenty-two installments despite the fact that Dickens had told her she had to finish in twenty. For Dickens, letting the novel run longer than advertised would undermine his promise to always “keep faith with the public.” Gaskell couldn’t understand the importance of this and asked him to increase the number of installments. Dickens refused. His readers expected him to fulfill his promises on time.

Gaskell was also lackadaisical in getting her installments to Dickens, which led to printing errors.

*

Ultimately, Gaskell despised the serialized version of North and South and added to the single-volume edition when it was published. She had the last word because that’s the version we read today.

Dickens continued to admire Gaskell as a writer. In their correspondence, he stressed that his suggested changes were made “with a special eye to this form of publication,” i.e., serialization, which she, as a writer and not a writer-editor-publisher/master serializer, might not understand.

*

To appreciate Dickens’s mastery of the six elements of serialization, I suggest revisiting the first chapter (or even the first page) of Great Expectations. The title couldn’t be more expansive. Who doesn’t want to find out what those “great expectations” are and who’s subject to them? The opening of the novel is a masterclass in plot and pacing. It’s like he’s trying to make up for every dull moment in other writers’ works. The reader has barely been introduced to the protagonist Pip when a shackled criminal (Magwitch) appears and threatens his life. The scene quickly sets the novel in furious (and bleakly hilarious) motion.

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1. All this may bring to mind the elitist refrain that the reading public is stupid because all we want is plot and action. Yes, that’s correct, we do, but it’s not because we’re stupid. Plot drives characters to change—or at least it does in a great novel or memoir. Plot engages us; strong pacing enthralls us. We want to be engaged and enthralled as we pass through the “whirling wheel of toil” that is sometimes our lives.

The only reason people started to think that great literature has to be boring and difficult is because the Modernists—T.S. Eliot in particular—said so. In the 1930s, they insisted that only critics can understand great literature, which inspired writers to abandon juicy craft techniques like plot and pacing in favor of complexity and style. It also conveniently gave critics authority and jobs in universities.

Follow that with the Iowa Writer’s Workshop’s insistence on teaching some of our best aspiring writers to scribe character-and-voice-driven stories in which little happens and the plethora of M.F.A. programs all doing the same, and we have a recipe for no one’s reading literary fiction anymore.

Serialization and its reliance on plot can bring people back. As I’ve mentioned, when asked about the potential for serialization to make people want to read again, the critic Adam Kirsch said, “Since the loss of compelling plot is one of the things that readers most often complain of in the modern novel, it might be a salutary discipline for novelists to have to go back to Dickens, or even James, to learn how it’s done.”