Victorian authors--paid by the word?

[orthent]

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

Comments

[majingojira]

To my recollection, by the word payment only occurred with the pulp authors, which tend to range from 1890 at the earliest to about 1940 at the latest--but I could be way off.

It's actually evident in the text of many classic pulps--especially Doc Savage, where character epithets get repeated several times in the same chapter.

I know this isn't really helpful --

[moon_custafer]

Most of the writers I've heard were paid by the word were later (1920s-30s pulps) - Weird Tales supposedly paid one cent per word, while most paid half-a-cent per word (btw, according to Weird Tales current submissions guidelines, they now pay three to six cents per word, but ask that you not write in such a way that it's obvious you're being paid by the word).

[amatullah76]

Some writers are still paid by the word, but most don't pad their stories. So, it's a practice, sure, but as others have pointed out, Dickens wasn't paid this way.

[lolmac]

Dickens' wordiness was part of his culture as well as part of his own style; the feeling that some of his books were padded probably reflects the need to make them all achieve the same total length of 20 installments. As the other commenter said, being paid by the word or paid by the installment is effectively the same. He was filling a set number of pages, which gave him a particular level of freedom to digress and to work with plots of a high level of complexity.

Professional writing is now measured by word count, and often paid that way, especially in periodicals. Novels aren't paid by the word, but they're measured and described that way. The different types of fiction (novella, novel, etc.) are defined by word count. Learning to gain a sense of word count seems to be part of the process of learning to write professionally.

[tanith_astlik]

Serialized Fiction in The Victorian Era: http://www.unc.edu/~gundlach/pathfinder.html

Dickens and the Victorian Serial Novel: http://www.umd.umich.edu/casl/hum/eng/classes/434/geweb/THEHISTO.htm

Link at the bottom of the web page leads to an example, great Expectations as a Victorian Serial Novel: http://www.umd.umich.edu/casl/hum/eng/classes/434/geweb/HOWGREAT.htm

Here's an excerpt from Victorian Studies. Volume 44, Number 4, Summer 2002. I don't have a subscription and the pdf file wouldn't open for me, but the citation gives you an idea about the economics of Victorian serials. You might be able to find the journal or Graham Law's book at your library. Your next best step would be a trip to your closest local college or university library

[orthent]

This all looks like wonderful stuff--thank you!

I'm reading The King of Inventors right now, and a running theme is the wrangles Dickens and Wilkie Collins both had with their publishers--and with pirated editions of their works.