Great Expectations as a Victorian Serial Novel

The average Victorian serial novel spoke about the sort of lifestyle nineteenth-century readers wanted for themselves. Charles Dickens was a talented novelist known for skills in serial writing. It was he who made the serial popular again after its near death from the crisis of the English tax. A serial is an ongoing story told over time in monthly or weekly installments. Great Expectations, in serial form, is a novel that was printed in weekly installments in Dickens's magazine, All Year Round. In its analysis it has proven to live up to true serial form.

In the serial form of Great Expectations there are two chapters in every weekly installment and seven chapters in each monthly installment. The entire novel consists of nine monthly and thirty-six weekly installments. In most serials there is more than one plot line in each installment. In Great Expectations this holds true. In both the weekly and monthly installments the plot lines seem to shift from chapter to chapter. So, although there is only one plot line per chapter, there are multiple plot lines in every installment. The nineteenth-century serial was meant to be a continuing story with each and every installment, in the sense that the interruptions do not seem like drastic cutoffs from the story. Each installment seems to end one part of the story nicely while still keeping the reader guessing and waiting for the next installment to pick up where the last one left off. The pick-ups of installments are individual beginnings that follow the plot line of the previous installment. A pattern that seems to follow with each installment is that the ending of an installment closes a chapter, while the pick-up of a new installment begins a new chapter. A second pattern is that each installment does not include a complete plot line, such as beginning-climax-ending. The complete plot line seems to expand over the course of the entire novel.

Publishing played a major role with the serial novel. The popularization of the serial came about when the English tax was proposed. Newspapers and magazines used bigger sheets of paper to avoid the tax and used serials to fill up this extra space. Many serials of the nineteenth-century were not published alone but in newspapers and magazines. Included with them were advertisements and illustrations. In serial form Great Expectations included illustrations within the novel.