Enough of a good thing
Magwich; one of Ellie Foreman-Peck's illustrations for The Pigeonhole edition of Great Expectations.
By ROZ DINEEN
Dickens, of course, wrote and published in instalments. Hard Times, for example, first appeared incrementally in a weekly magazine, between April and August 1854. Oliver Twist was monthly. As we know, this method made its mark on the author’s work – Dickensian doorstoppers are scored with frequent, gentle re-introductions, regular cliff hangers, and casts of characters whom forgetful monthly readers are prompted to recognize thanks to those Dickensian shorthands and props. The audience even attempted to influence the author between instalments. During the composition of The Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens wrote:
“I am inundated with imploring letters recommending poor little Nell to mercy.– Six yesterday, and four today (it’s not 12 o’Clock yet) already!”
Dickens’s ways may have been popular but they weren’t always appreciated. Reviewing The Immortal Boz: The Life of Charles Dickens by John Forster, in the TLS on October 5, 1911, Thomas Seccombe wrote this:
“Dickens’s books certainly bear every trace of their undisciplined bringing up. They are singularly formless . . . Condense the plot of almost any one of Dickens’s three-deckers and it will be found to read like a depraved nightmare.”
Let’s let Seccombe continue here for a moment:
“The general indictments brought against Dickens are familiar to everyone. Many of his rhetorical devices, it is said, are odious, his attempts at fine writing almost invariably absurd, his pathos nauseous, his wit third-rate, his historical conceptions ignorant and puny, his technique archaic . . . . He thinks you never can have enough of a good thing.
His unit is not the book but the monthly part. He is a monthly entertainer who has to utilize every ounce of energy that he possesses in developing his idiosyncrasy and multiplying his personality.”
Just 103 years and about a month later and it would appear that we are surrounded by people who think you never can have enough of a good thing.
Glance just now around your train carriage, or waiting room, or café and I am sure you will see many more scalps than foreheads. Which is to say that everyone around you is looking down towards their phone, unable to get enough of what they find there.
According to a new survey by Publishing Technology, many of these people are even reading books. 43 per cent of those surveyed had read “part of” an e-book on their mobile phone. 23 per cent of eighteen to twenty-four year olds use their mobiles to read books on a daily basis.
The provision to do so has been around for some time. DailyLit sends books by section to your phone or e-reader, “Don't want to carry Anna Karenina on the train? DailyLit sends you just enough for your morning commute or coffee break.” They have already delivered over 50 million instalments. Or there’s the Kindle, the Kindle app and all the other variations on a theme of e-reading.
But these just present whole novels in bits – so it will be interesting to see how people take to The Pigeonhole a new website and app, which seems to realize the potential of phone reading. The Pigeonhole is beautifully designed, and whether used on a big or a small screen it provides a pleasurable and aesthetically modern reading experience – but that’s a side point: the main thing is that The Pigeonhole, rather than simply representing whole novels in commuter-friendly chunks, offers reading matter that is designed, like Dickens’s regular instalments, to be read in bits, or as the Pigeonhole so elegantly calls them, Staves.
As in Dickens’s day, readers can provide feedback to the authors as they write. There are discussion boards for the readerly community. And add-ons that take full advantage of the format: The Pigeonhole’s first novel, Redpoint by Yseult Ogilvie, comes with author interviews, a photo journal of the protagonist’s journey, a soundtrack. So far The Pigeonhole has hosted long-form essays, sex staves and, of course, Great Expectations, by the man himself, delivered as it originally was, in instalments, staves, episodes, with illustration. It’s meant to be a social reading experience, in which we read together and then we wait, together, anticipating together . . . Is this, like Birkbeck College’s ongoing experiment with reading Our Mutual Friend month by month, as it was in 1864–5, another sign of our renewed interest in old reading habits?
We will have to wait and see, based on the success of The Pigeonhole and apps like it, if all those bowed heads really are busy reading.
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