SERIAL HISTORY
Writers and publishers have been serializing works since the 1800s, when one very famous Victorian made the medium popular. Since then the form has been applied to TV, radio and the web. Here are some notable titles.
Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (1836) There’s a reason Charles Dickens’ books were so long: they first appeared in serial form. The first, The Pickwick Papers, ran monthly from March 1836 until November 1837. He went on to run weekly magazines including Household Worlds and The Year Round where he serialized such now-famous books as Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone and Dickens’ own A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. The hope was readers would be so taken with the story they’d subscribe to the publication.
The Shadow, Radio Not technically a book this radio play is included because it marks a change in medium: from reading stories to listening to them. Initially the idea was to get people to subscribe to the magazine Detective Story. But the Shadow became so popular it became a pulp magazine of its own. Either way, the impetus was much the same as it was in Dickens’s time: to get avid readers/listeners to come back week after week and create a captive audience for advertisers. Surely Orson Welles’ (pictured) depiction of The Shadow from 1937-1938 helped.
Margaret Atwood, Internet Canadian writer Margaret Atwood was also involved in a project that marked the change in a medium: this time to the Internet. Byliner was a digital publisher that made a foray into serials. Atwood published four installments of the Positron series there. Byliner didn’t last, but, ultimately, that initial serialization became the springboard for her most recent book The Heart Goes Last. Compiled by Deborah Dundas