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You are correct. Dickens didn’t write ‘novels’, he wrote ‘serials’, which are a subtly different thing: they were not composed in one sitting, rather in instal

You are correct. Dickens didn’t write ‘novels’, he wrote ‘serials’, which are a subtly different thing: they were not composed in one sitting, rather in instalments. The question is, of course, were they conceived and planned as a single entity and in advance. The answer to that is… complicated. But, mostly, no too. Here’s an article about his method: https://www.dickensnotes.com/introduction/general/ https://www.dickensnotes.com/introduction/general/ Much as there’s debate whether you can consider a collection of comics with a single story arc a ‘graphic novel’, we can debate whether a Dicken’s serial published over 18 months is a ‘serial novel’ when republished in a single volume. In my opinion, they both are or they both are not—and I personally tend towards ‘are’.

throw4847285 2y ago
There is the context of how a work was originally composed vs. the context of how it is regularly consumed. Time passes, and the number of people who have encountered Great Expectations or Anna Karenina in a serialized format is totally outstripped by the number of people who read them as "novels." The fact that both of those works were originally serialized becomes a trivia fact. Maybe this is a bad thing, and you lose something by erasing their origins, like trying to watch a network sitcom without understanding what a commercial break is. Or maybe it's not a huge deal, and those books have transcended the publishing trends of their day. I don't know. What I do know is that comics fans are especially fixated on the distinction and it has little to do with those kinds of technicalities. It's about prestige.