Comments | little_details: Victorian authors--paid by the word?

orthent in little_details

Victorian authors--paid by the word?

Jun 20, 2010 22:35

I've often seen it claimed that Victorian authors like Dickens wrote ornate, wordy prose because they were paid by the word, so they had a financial incentive to be needlessly prolix and pad their narratives. Can anyone point me to an authoritative, scholarly source (i.e., not a site giving advice to writers) for this ( Read more... )

~victorian era, ~literature, uk: history: victorian era

Comments 22

kutsuwamushi June 21 2010, 04:15:49 UTC

Found by Googling "dickens paid by the word myth":

http://dickens.ucsc.edu/faq/bytheword.html

mocktragic June 21 2010, 07:40:54 UTC

This, yes.

I'm sure I remember hearing about Dickens telling Elizabeth Gaskell to cut whole swathes out of her novel, North and South, because the chapters she was sending him were too long to appear as instalments in Household Words.

orthent June 21 2010, 12:04:02 UTC

This is great, but embarrassing, because I clearly did not look very carefully! My eyes just glazed over when I saw the number of "advice for writers" sites. Thank you!

kutsuwamushi June 21 2010, 20:11:38 UTC

I think your problem was making your keywords too academic. Sometimes I have more luck imagining a page that debunks/explains for a lay audience and then going from there.

areteus June 21 2010, 08:40:41 UTC

I always thought that many early Victorian and later authors were wordy because it was considered important to have long books that lasted a long time - the idea being that you made a book last a whole winter in much the same way as a Norse saga did (and some of those were LOOOOOOOOONG! :) ). Later writers (as we get further into the 20th century) began to consider the importance of drama as being greater than lengthy prose ( ... )

thekumquat June 21 2010, 08:47:20 UTC

Again only from my English teacher, but we were told that Dickens had to supply X number of words each week to get paid.
So he was rather like a soap writer - had to write an episode each week, but great incentive to keep going for pretty much forever.

orthent June 23 2010, 04:36:05 UTC

Of course, with Dickens you run into the extra complication that he was usually the editor of the periodicals his works appeared in...

bopeepsheep June 21 2010, 08:57:12 UTC

Look at scholarly editions of some of the novels (Pickwick, Oliver, Nicholas Nickleby). My edition of NN complains (at some length) that the story should have ended somewhere between chapter 23 and chapter 35; the pressure to write more for magazine publication utterly spoiled the book for that editor! It's not so much about padded prose within each chapter but too many chapters, which in Dickens tends to mean too many diversions from the main plot, too many comic turns in otherwise serious novels. (Pickwick doesn't tend to get accused of this, thankfully.)

Норм likegames June 21 2010, 09:56:55 UTC

Норм понравилось

(The comment has been removed)

mmebahorel June 21 2010, 15:47:37 UTC

Absolutely not. One could conclude just the opposite from the fact that he began writing it in the late 1840s, set it aside after 1848, and only returned to it after a few major works in exile and published it in 1862. That simply isn't how you write when you're paid by the word, plus he was already at that point the greatest living author in France and generally sold poetry - you don't pay your great writers, your peers of France, in the manner of a pulp novelist ( ... )