Perhaps serial TV is the best comparison. Different books have different rules for reading, and we shouldn't set out to play Settlers of Catan on the Risk board. It helps if we realise that history, I think – helping us to know the rules of reading before sitting down to play the game. So the reconnects, reintroductions, and summarisations are all necessary to remind the reader what happened in the last episodes – or, given Charles Dickens's complexities and fondness for hidden identities, what happened eight months back that seemed whimsical or occult but now suddenly matters a great deal. By the time the next instalment arrived, the old copies would likely have been used to kindle the stove or given to friends. And more waiting, during which time readers would share out and pass along the previous serial instalments. Readers would purchase three or four at a time, once a month. Wheldrake also provided useful notes on reading the book, and where we should give it leeway: Don't I remember how U used to scuttle up to town to Ingalton's after school to get it before school and prayer-time." "Never shall I forget the monthly appearance of the first of his books I was old enough to take in, Bleak House, which ran two of my years at Eton and was apt to interfere with my work rather seriously on the first of each month. Wheldrake supplied the following illustration, from Swinburne: The suspense when the book was still live – when Dickens was still creating it as people read it – must have been quite something. I still can't answer those questions, but at least I know I'll find out relatively soon, and that the author himself has long since resolved them. Why did Lady Dedlock faint when she saw Nemo's handwriting in the second chapter? Why is her sinister lawyer Mr Tulkinghorn (glorious name, is it not?) so keen to uncover this mystery? Did Nemo really – as is later suggested – die from an opium overdose? How on earth are we ever going to see through the fog of the Jarndyce & Jarndyce lawsuit? And where are Esther's parents? From my vantage point, some 250 pages in, I can see a tantalising mystery building. It only takes a little imagination to realise how effective the book must have been as a serial. The problem for Charles Dickens's original audience wasn't that they had more book than they could manage – but that they couldn't get enough of it. Partly because the book is such a delight that it seems absurd to complain about there being too much of it mainly because reading it at such a pace goes against the nature of a book that was first released in instalments (groups of three or four chapters every month from March 1852 until September 1853). I can understand that point of view – but I'm resolved not to complain about the book's length any further. I felt the same way I would if I went to a play and sat through an hour of about 50 actors filing onto the stage one by one and staring at me glumly in turn before any actual business resulted. 200 pages in and legions of characters were still being summarily introduced right, left and centre.
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