Page 36 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Charles Dickens: The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (The Pickwick Papers) 1836
Earlier this same year, Dickens had just published Sketches by Boz to great acclaim, and he was pleased to be offered a second book so soon after his first two-volume success. Emerging from a proposal by publishers Chapman and Hall for an illustrated series of stories, with text supplied by Dickens and the main accent being put upon the plates by Robert Seymour, the popular illustrator (see above centre-right). So The Pickwick Papers became Dickens first serialised novel - setting a pattern for most of his subsequent novels. Serialisation of sometimes lengthy novels had emerged in the 17th century, but The Pickwick Papers established the importance of this medium in the 19th century - the advantages were that readers could sample new writing in short episodes simply for the price of a magazine, serials (like TV soap operas a century or more later) established a regular repeat audience for the magazine, and the success of the serialisation guaranteed good sales for the eventual hard-back book. Dickens was enormously successful in this genre, and it was The Pickwick Papers that established the work pattern for the rest of his career.
The advantages of content serialisation, firmly established in the 19th century - would be leveraged using the new media of the 20th century - the film, the radio, the cinema, the television - and yes, the Web. The sensational success of the Penny Dreadful novella of the 1830s (1 penny a time), Dickens own successful serial novels, Alexandre Dumas’ serials of The Count of Monte Cristo; film serials like Feuillade’s Fantomas, Les Vampires and Judex, radio serials like the BBC’s Dick Barton-Special Agent (1946-51); and MGM’s Doctor Kildare (film series from 1938, radio from 1938, television from 1953). On the web, numerous serialisations in the Victorian style have emerged as electronic publishing exploded in the last decade or so. Recently we have seen several experiments in serialisation, pay per installment and serial payments for fictional content and other publishing models. In the IOS and Android ebook world, in-app purchases support serialisation of content. The potential of these new digital publishing tools is obvious, and the hybridisation of interactive fiction, hypertext-fiction, webnovels (etc) with e- books and other media continues to explore the likely amorphous territory of 21st century publishing - a vision we first glimpsed in the early 1990s with Voyager’s Expanded Books (Bob Stein 1991) on CDROM.