During the Victorian era, serialization was an extremely popular form of publishing. Newspapers or magazines published one or a few chapters of a novel at regular intervals. Many of the most popular novels of the Victorian era were originally published as serials, such as the work of Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Wilkie Collins. This form of publishing allowed publishers to gauge a novel’s initial success by its first issue, similar to how television shows use pilot episodes. Additionally, serialization encouraged reader loyalty, just as modern subscription services do, because readers had to continue to pay for newspapers to read the entire novel. The popularity of serialization in Britain coincided with a general increase in literacy as well as advances in printing technology that allowed more texts to be quickly disseminated to more people.

Although scholars debate the exact origins of the serial novel, it’s widely accepted that The Pickwick Papers was the first widely successful serial and that it, along with many other Dickens works, set the standard for Victorian serialization moving forward. The format spurred the development of certain characteristics and popular genres of serials. As is evident throughout The Pickwick Papers, many chapters end in cliffhangers, which suspend the

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