Listen to part of a lecture in an English literature class.

(male professor) Before we start reading some of the classic English authors of the 19th century like, uh, Charles Dickens, I wanted to talk to you about how people in England access such novels, the novels were made available to people and why? So, let\'s talk about what it was generally like to buy some of this literature.

First of all, the novels that are classics today were very expensive. In England, the retail price of one such novel was equivalent to or even greater than a worker’s wages for a week. One of the reasons was the way that novels were typically published in 3 volumes called triple deckers.

So, if you were going to buy one novel by, say, Dickens, you\'d actually have to purchase three separate books. And yet writers had hundreds of thousands, if not millions of readers.

So how did that work? Well, as you might have guessed, most people who read novels didn\'t actually buy the novels. They would get them from one of two different sources. First, there were lending libraries.

Lending libraries in the 19th century England were commercial enterprises. You paid the library an annual fee. And that gave you the right to borrow books. The largest of these lending libraries was called Mudie’s.

Mudie’s was a national company with branches in most of the major cities of England. The way it worked was: Mudie’s would buy hundreds, if not thousands of copies of books and would loan them out to their customers.

And because Mudie’s had so many libraries, if Mudie’s bought a book, it was more or less guaranteed to make money for the publisher. And you can see how it would have been a good thing for Mudie’s to have the books broken up into three separate volumes.

Because Mudie’s could, you know, lend one volume to someone and another to someone else. And so, they had 3, 3 times as much stock to distribute among their customers than if it was all bound up in one volume.

And Mudie’s influenced the content of the novels. Uh…Mudie was a real person, C. E. Mudie, and he was extremely conservative.

So, if there was any content in a novel that offended him, but he didn\'t like, he wouldn\'t put the book in his libraries. And this obviously affected how publishers chose which books to publish.

All right, the other way that people had access to novels was through serials. Most of the books we consider famous works of the 19th century were first published in what we call serial publication form.

That means they were published in magazines or newspapers over the course of about a year. Every week you\'d buy a magazine or a newspaper, and there\'d be another chapter from the book.

This was a much less expensive way to buy literature. A version of this serial publication was actually invented by Dickens and his publishers. Instead of buying a magazine or newspaper with a lot of varied content in it, You\'d buy just that month\'s installment of the book, bound in a soft cover.

So, it looked just like a magazine, but all it had was a few chapters of the book and a couple of illustrations and advertisements.

Now, um, for a long time. There have been people who have dismissed serial novels in general, saying the reason there are so many cliff hangers, suspenseful chapter endings and melodramatic moments in these novels is because a lot of authors started trying to build up their readership by leaving the audience hanging at the end of each installment. You know, so the people would rush out and buy the next month’s installment to find out what happened next.

But for Dickens, at least, well, when you look more carefully at where the actual plot twists were in his works, really suspenseful sensational ones, these are not really at the ends of chapters.

Instead, you\'ll see that he often uses something that we would today recognize as a cinematic effect. The installment might end with someone walking down the street, like in the movie, just walking off into the distance.

So really, Dickens wasn\'t being at all crude or manipulative. He was much more subtle than that. He was clever enough to know how to keep his readers coming back, to see what happened next without the need for gross over dramatization.