Another Must-Read for Those Interested in Serialization

The New York Public Library has a great article reminding us about the move toward serialized fiction in England during the era of Dickens. "When is a Book Not a Book? Oliver Twist in Context" has a few things to say to those non-historians who think that "first edition" bound copies are the true originals of some great tales when, in fact, serialization was the order of the day for many books now considered classics.

Here's an excerpt from the fine NYPL article. I strongly recommend you read the whole thing (links in the excerpt were placed by Discover Them):

"But dealers, collectors, museums, libraries, bibliographers, textual scholars, and the general public have been conditioned to think of the book as the substantial, first publication of most serials, from Dickens's Pickwick Papers to Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim. Books have authors who are solely responsible for their contents—Charles Dickens, for example, even though those "early state" title pages of the "exceptionally fine copy" of Oliver Twist identify the author not as Charles Dickens but as what was then a well-known pseudonym, "Boz." And books get passed down through the generations, while periodicals are tossed out by families or broken up for the prints by dealers or reduced to microfilm, -form, or -fiche by librarians. The book is semipermanent and simply displaces the format in which the text first appeared. This is true for virtually every magazine serial, not just fiction, but also history, theology, biography, philosophy, criticism, and other genres which, as Saintsbury reminds us, were often in the nineteenth century first published in installments in periodicals."