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The Introduction reviews the critical controversies after Dickens's death about his representative Englishness and influence on readers. It defines the book's focus on theories of serial memory in Enlightenment psychology, nineteenth-century pedagogy, and accounts by Victorian literary critics about the effects of reading serial fiction. The book argues that Dickens's serial novels taught shared reading practices based in associationist theories of memory that transformed Dickens's popularity into an inclusive and participatory cultural politics and ultimately a mission for literature within democratic education. The “pleasures of memory” involve the common experience of memory's coherence through novel reading and the shared reception of popular serial genres.

This chapter focuses on the publication of American novels as serial fiction in magazines, newspapers, and story-papers from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. After providing a background on the history of serial novels, the chapter looks at examples of canonical novels that began as serials in periodicals, including Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, William Dean Howells's A Modern Instance, Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, and Sarah Orne Jewett's Country of Pointed Firs. It then examines how the serial novel was shaped by its serialization both in terms of its production and its reception. Finally, it considers the reasons for the decline of the serial novel.

Magazine fiction in eighteenth-century periodical publications such as the Lady’s Magazine has, on the whole, been disparaged as unoriginal, derivative work produced by amateurs. Jenny DiPlacidi’s essay robustly contests these claims by demonstrating how a range of sentimental, Gothic, epistolary and experimental short and serial fiction in the Magazine thematically, tonally and stylistically influenced the novels of canonical figures such as Jane Austen, Frances Burney and Charlotte Smith. Magazine fiction in periodicals such as the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) and Lady’s Monthly Museum (1798–1828), DiPlacidi argues, was, in the main, innovative and original. Far from being ephemeral, this fiction was an enduring and significant cultural form, which stylistically and thematically helped to shape the Romantic and domestic novel.

This chapter examines the central debates over the very nature of reading the novel in the period from 1870 to 1940. It considers the kinds of books that people read or should read, how reading for pleasure should be balanced with reading for information, and the use and dangers of reading. It also discusses reading and literacy in connection with the duties of citizenship. The chapter first provides an overview of American readers during the period and what they read, with particular reference to serial fiction and subscription series. It then looks at the role of public libraries in the increased availability of fiction and the impulse to control reader access, along with the role of book clubs and political clubs in driving library patronage. Finally, it assesses the impact of censorship on readers.

This chapter traces the trope of conversation as collective voice in modern suffrage fiction. It examines how dialogue, both thematic and formal, works to enhance the public sphere, using as a case study a serialized composite novel The Sturdy Oak (1917), one of the most popular, commercially successful, and aesthetically innovative of modern U.S. suffrage fictions. Edited by Harpers Bazar editor Elizabeth Jordan, the novel contrasts two antidemocratic discourses, the monologic elite abstracting oratory of a rising political star and the more material and more violent working-class dialect of his corrupt political cronies with a more dialogic voice fashioned by modern suffragist characters through their early adoption of more dialogic mass communication forms. This alternative voice of a consolidated, civic-minded middle class is facilitated by suffragists’ expert deployment of the telephone, typewriter, telegraph, newspaper “wire” service, and linotype to foster deliberative discussion in the public sphere. Paradoxically, the novel’s suffragists find political self-expression in the absence of the franchise, not through the individuated self-expression enacted in oratory and privileged by literary histories of modernism but through more modern and more collaborative acoustical and print cultural technologies of voice.