The Pace of Serialisation

Abstract

(I) … the present writer recalls to recollection very clearly the fact of Dickens saying to him one day, — saying it with a most whimsical air by-the-bye, but very earnestly — ‘Once, and but once only in my life, I was — frightened!’ The occasion he referred to was simply this, as he immediately went on to explain, that somewhere about the middle of the serial publication of David Copperfield, happening to be out of writing-paper, he sallied forth one morning to get a fresh supply at the stationer’s. He was living then in his favourite haunt, at Fort House, in Broadstairs. As he was about to enter the stationer’s shop, with the intention of buying the needful writing-paper, for the purpose of returning home with it, and at once setting to work upon his next number, not one word of which was yet written, he stood aside for a moment at the threshold to allow a lady to pass in before him. He then went on to relate — with a vivid sense still upon him of mingled enjoyment and dismay in the mere recollection—how the next instant he had overheard this strange lady asking the person behind the counter for the new green number. When it was handed to her, ‘Oh, this,’ said she, ‘I have read. I want the next one.’ The next one she was thereupon told would be out by the end of the month.