Editing Charles Dickens (section)

===Episodic writing===
[[File:Publicité pour Great Expectations dans All the Year Round.jpeg|thumb|right|230px|Advertisement for ''Great Expectations'', serialised in the weekly literary magazine ''[[All the Year Round]]'' from December 1860 to August 1861. The advert contains the plot device "to be continued".]]
A pioneer of the [[Serial (literature)|serial]] publication of narrative fiction, Dickens wrote most of his major novels in monthly or weekly instalments in journals such as ''[[Master Humphrey's Clock]]'' and ''[[Household Words]]'', later reprinted in book form.<ref name="Grossman 2012 54"/><ref name="Lodge 2002 118"/> These instalments made the stories affordable and accessible, with the audience more evenly distributed across income levels than before.<ref name="Howsam">{{cite book |last=Howsam |first=Leslie |title=The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book |date=2015 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |page=85 |quote=It inspired a narrative that Dickens would explore and develop throughout his career. The instalments would typically culminate at a point in the plot that created reader anticipation and thus reader demand, generating a plot and sub-plot motif that would come to typify the novel structure.}}</ref> His instalment format inspired a narrative that he would explore and develop throughout his career, and the regular [[cliffhanger]]s made each new episode widely anticipated.<ref name="NewYorker"/><ref name="Howsam"/> When ''[[The Old Curiosity Shop]]'' was being serialised, American fans waited at the docks in [[New York Harbor|New York harbour]], shouting out to the crew of an incoming British ship, "Is little Nell dead?"<ref>{{harvnb|Glancy|1999|p=34}}.</ref> Dickens was able to incorporate this episodic writing style but still end up with a coherent novel at the end. He wrote, "The thing has to be planned for presentation in these fragments, and yet for afterwards fusing together as an uninterrupted whole."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Axton |first1=William |title="Keystone" Structure in Dickens' Serial Novels |url=https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/utq.37.1.31 |pages=31–50 |journal=University of Toronto Quarterly |volume=37 |issue= 1 |publisher=University of Toronto Press |date=October 1967|doi=10.3138/utq.37.1.31 }}</ref>

Another important impact of Dickens's episodic writing style resulted from his exposure to the opinions of his readers and friends. His friend Forster had a significant hand in reviewing his drafts, an influence that went beyond matters of punctuation; he toned down melodramatic and sensationalist exaggerations, cut long passages (such as the episode of Quilp's drowning in ''The Old Curiosity Shop''), and made suggestions about plot and character. It was he who suggested that Charley Bates should be redeemed in ''Oliver Twist''. Dickens had not thought of killing Little Nell and it was Forster who advised him to entertain this possibility as necessary to his conception of the heroine.<ref>{{harvnb|Davies|1983|pp=166–169}}.</ref> When in 1863 Jewish English reader [[Eliza Davis (letter writer)|Eliza Davis]] wrote to rebuke him for having "encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew" with the character of Fagin in ''Oliver Twist'', Dickens halted the second printing of the novel and made some changes to the original 1837 text.<ref>{{cite news |title=Letters "caused rewrite of Fagin" |url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/4117609.stm |website=BBC |date=22 December 2004 |access-date=18 December 2024}}</ref> He also created a group of sympathetic Jewish characters in his next novel, ''[[Our Mutual Friend]]'', published 1864–1865.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Johnson |first1=Edgar |title=Dickens' Apology for Fagin |url=https://omf.ucsc.edu/dickens/biographical-accounts/apology-for-fagin.html |website=Our Mutual Friend: The Scholarly Pages (UC Santa Cruz) |access-date=18 December 2024}}</ref>

At the helm in popularising cliffhangers and serial publications in Victorian literature,<ref>{{cite news |title=Cliffhangers poised to make Dickens a serial winner again |url=https://www.thetimes.com/comment/register/article/cliffhangers-poised-to-make-dickens-a-serial-winner-again-96jplgjhrp5 |access-date=3 September 2021 |work=[[The Times]] |archive-date=3 September 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210903003603/https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cliffhangers-poised-to-make-dickens-a-serial-winner-again-96jplgjhrp5 |url-status=live}}</ref> Dickens's influence can also be seen in television [[soap operas]] and [[film series]], with ''The Guardian'' stating that "the DNA of Dickens's busy, episodic storytelling, delivered in instalments and rife with cliffhangers and diversions, is traceable in everything."<ref>{{cite news |title=Streaming: the best Dickens adaptations |url=https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/jun/13/streaming-best-dickens-adaptations-film-tv-personal-history-david-copperfield-armando-iannucci |access-date=3 September 2021 |work=The Guardian |archive-date=3 September 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210903003923/https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/jun/13/streaming-best-dickens-adaptations-film-tv-personal-history-david-copperfield-armando-iannucci |url-status=live}}</ref> His serialisation of his novels also drew comments from other writers. In Scottish author [[Robert Louis Stevenson]]'s novel ''[[The Wrecker (Stevenson novel)|The Wrecker]]'', Captain Nares, investigating an abandoned ship, remarked: "See! They were writing up the log," said Nares, pointing to the ink-bottle. "Caught napping, as usual. I wonder if there ever was a captain yet that lost a ship with his log-book up to date? He generally has about a month to fill up on a clean break, like Charles Dickens and his serial novels."<ref>{{cite book |last=Stevenson |first=Robert Louis |title=The Novels and Tales of Robert Louis Stevenson: The Wrecker |publisher=Scribner's |date=1895 |page=245}}</ref>