Dickens was a blogger

Charles Dickens from the Victorian era of the 1800s is legendary not only for his writing but also for how he released his work in multiple formats, modified his stories based on audience feedback, and masterfully used the serial to garner attention and publicity.
-Jane Friedman, The Business of Being a Writer

I read this paragraph today, and my casual interest in Dickens’ publishing history came into focus. Published serially, in multiple formats, responding to reader feedback...sounds like blogging to me.

For starters, Dickens published his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, in monthly installments. He went on to publish most of his novels as weekly or monthly serials, like a newsletter or Substack.

He was also known for writing about the mundane stuff around him, as bloggers do, observing everyday characters and social dynamics. Or sometimes, in blogspeak, ranting. Apparently he edited characters based on reader feedback, like when his wife’s podiatrist was self-conscious that one of his characters was a thinly veiled mirror of her.

But maybe I’m reaching. Blogs aren’t the only periodicals.

One reason Dickens wasn’t really a blogger is that there was no blogosphere. There were no other blogs to read, no other bloggers to hyperlink to. The fact that we can publish at all, the way I’m doing now, for free and distributed across the world instantly, is a relatively recent power. If, when they were my age, my parents had the urge to write and share fleeting thoughts about Dickens, they couldn’t.

Taylor Lorenz’s book Extremely Online had a neat chapter on blogging. We get used to things and the novelty wears off, but blogging is quite novel.

It’s hard to remember how novel this was. Before the blog era, if you wanted to share your ideas with the public, you had to make it past layers upon layers of legacy gatekeepers. Letters to the editor, call-ins to the radio, article or book submissions—all had to be approved by a faceless authority at a moated institution.

If you reach further back, though, before the “traditional” publishing Lorenz describes, authors did self-publish their work. It’s just that “publishing” meant rag paper and metal plates—not a laptop and the internet. But in spirit, I think Dickens was a blogger.

The rest of this note is not about Dickens as a blogger, but about what got me interested in Dickens in the first place.

ENNC 4500-001

I took a class in college entirely devoted to Dickens. It was the only English class I ever took in college, snuck into my final semester. My timing was just right, apparently, because it was the last year that our beloved professor taught before she retired. And she was pretty great, I’ll say. Karen Chase Levenson. Going by three names like that adds some gravitas, but she didn’t put on heirs. We read something like 200 pages every week—what was it that she liked to say, that we read four and a half books? Because Dickens died while writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Apparently they used to read all fourteen and a half of them in one semester, I think. She also liked to say that. Or maybe it was nine and a half. But we read David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, and Edwin Drood.

This surge of nostalgia is well timed, because next month my college email address expires, not that I use it anymore, except that I dug up our weekly emails from the class. On Tuesdays half the class would write in some observation, then on Thursday the other half. We’d use these to anchor our discussion in class. One such email of mine unlocked an amusing memory. I’d written about the through-line of love in Edwin Drood (“While David and Pip fell head over heels, can’t-get-her-out-of-my-mind in love with their respective partners...”)¹, and Prof. KCL replied to my “fine comment” observing “the homosocial love in this novel.” The thing is, I hadn’t even noticed the homosocial love, but she doubled down by crediting me in class that day, which my best friend in the class thought was pretty perceptive of me. Afterwards, on our ritual walk back from class that day, I confessed that the credit was misplaced. It must’ve been my confusing, fancy-pants writing that made me look good, just not quite as planned.

Man, the email chains from that class are full of charming college humanities department style correspondence. See, for example, KCL on Super Bowl Monday:

Or this one:

And one stern talking-to:

I hope she doesn’t mind me publishing these emails. I’m still pretty fresh off reading The Correspondent, so I’m especially prone to fascination with old email exchanges. This garden note is basically a tree falling silently in the forest, anyway. And she really was a fantastic teacher.

Footnote

(1) I guess I already liked phrasal adjectives back then—I was reading enough David Foster Wallace to properly fulfill the white-college-male-in-English-seminar cliché.