Serialization and Strategy in Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son

When I read Dombey and Son (1846-48), I noted that it seemed to demonstrate a much higher level of planning than the prior Dickens novel I had read, Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44). The structure of Chuzzlewit very much demonstrates (to me anyway) that Dickens must have been making it up as he went along, with its diversion to America and the fact that Martin (a damp squib if there ever was one) pretty much stops being the protagonist of the novel that bears his name.

Dombey and Son, on the other hand, is very obviously planned. It ran nineteen monthly installments, the last of which was double-length, making for twenty in total. At the end of every fifth installment, something of great significance happens: the death of a main character, the marriage of a main character, the flight of a main character. It's like watching the season finale of a modern serialized streaming show. I was curious about this, and reading the introduction to my Penguin Classics edition suggested that Alan Horsman's 1974 Clarendon edition of the novel would provide a detailed account of novel's composition, so I ordered it through interlibrary loan.

In his introduction, Horsman cites Dickens's friend and biographer John Forster, who had "stressed the contrast between Martin Chuzzlewit and subsequent books like this one which showed Dickens 'more bent upon constructive care at the outset'" (xv). Horsman argues that Forster is exaggerating a bit, as we know that Dickens had Chuzzlewit's ending in mind from the beginning. But I think (to put it awkwardly) that Horsman is exaggerating Forster's exaggeration. Sure, Dickens had his plot twist in mind the beginning... but clearly he did not have the beats and pacing in mind from the beginning in the way he did in Dombey and Son. Had he precisely planned everything in Dombey? I don't think so, based on the evidence Horsman cites, but we do often see evidence of him working ahead a bit. For example: "On 6 December [1846] he was occupied with the first chapter of Number IV. 'Paul, I shall slaughter at the end of number five'" (xxvi). And later: "As one would expect, the planning of Number V is very careful" (xxviii).

That said, things do get a bit looser later on. Dickens had a broad-strokes idea, but didn't have the precise planning worked out from the beginning: "The problem which the memoranda for Number VI emphasize is to continue throughout the remainder of the novel…. February letters show that he found it 'very difficult to fall into the new vein of the story'" (xxix). Perhaps this why I found my interest in the novel diminished as it went! It seems like Dickens had a lot he knew he wanted to get done by the end of no. v, but having crammed this all in, was less certain about where he was working toward for the remaining fifteen installments: "The second marriage [of Dombey] has now to sustain the greater part of the novel… he was to warn himself 'To bring on the marriage gradually'" (xxxi-xxxii). Horsman chronicles how Dickens thought of other aspects of the novel to pull into the foreground, but also how Dickens wasn't unlimited in what he could do; there were things he planned on that just didn't pan out.

Horsman doesn't mention those big turning points I identified in nos. x and xv in the same way, so it seems likely these weren't planned quite so rigorously in advance as the ending of no. v was. But it is clear that Dickens was being deliberate in his pacing in a way he had not been in Chuzzlewit, even if this ultimately undermined (I would argue) the success of the novel as a whole.

Forster said that, "for Dickens, 'the interest and passion of [the story], when to himself both became centred in Florence and in Edith Dombey, took stronger hold of him, and more powerfully affected him, that had been the case in any of his previous writings, I think…'" (xxxii). Again, Horsman seems a bit skeptical of Forster's claim, calling him "defensive" (xxxii), but I agree—going in publication order, for me this is Dickens's first novel to have some genuinely emotional moments, even if he would get better at this later on. And Forster also says the second half "seemed to many to have fallen short of the splendour of its opening" (xxxii)—and again, I agree. Because Dickens had to get to that twentieth installment, much like how a modern streaming show has to get its season out to ten episodes no matter what, the later parts of the novel are less dense with incident than what came before. 

It's also fascinating to learn how down-to-the-wire Dickens's composition could be; there were times Dickens had to send in each chapter of an installment as he finished it to have enough time to be typset. There were even times that a chapter had to be broken up by pages so different typesetters could do different pages simultaneously! In such a down-to-the-minute environment, I suppose the more planning you can do in advance, the better.

The Fourth Doctor Novelisations: The Androids of Tara (2012)

The success of The Stones of Blood (2011) engendered The Androids of Tara, another David Fisher–penned renovelisation of a tv story originally novelised by Terrance Dicks.

If you've read The Stones of Blood, you won't be surprised by the approach that Fisher takes here. The story is largely what we saw on screen with bits of backstory expanded and fleshed out, particularly the society on Tara, explaining how they became a feudal world dependent on androids. Like in Stones, many of the characters get these added bits of backstory spelling out who they are and where they came from, particularly Madame Lamia and the family of Count Grendel.

Doctor Who: The Androids of Tara
by David Fisher

Originally published: 2012
Acquired: January 2025
Read: February 2025

It's funny, though—if you'd asked me about the tv stories, I would have said that The Androids of Tara was the funner one, and it's definitely the one I have fonder memories of. Like I said, the swerve into hyperspace in the middle of Stones didn't really work for me, but Androids is one of those tv stories where I feel like writing, direction, and performance are all on the same page, creating a wonderfully coherent vision that delights.

Perhaps because of this, the novel just isn't as fun. It's nice to have the bits of backstory, but there's no Tom Baker, no Mary Tamm, no Peter Jeffrey to make the dialogue sing here. Not to say this is bad, I enjoyed the experience of reading it a lot, but certainly not as much I did the experience of reading Stones. I did really like the ending, though, with the Doctor getting his fishing license finally. (I don't think this bit of business is in the screen version? It has been a long time!) I do see the audio was read by John Leeson; having heard his enthusiastic reading of other stories, I can imagine he turned this into a thumping good time and lifted it off the page.

The Target novel has an afterword by editor Steve Cole, discussing the process of how the novelisation was originally commissioned as an audio and then adapted to the page. I was a bit disappointed by this; Cole discusses how his edits restricted the point-of-view of the narrator, for example taking a reference to a "horse" out of a scene from Romana's point-of-view, as she wouldn't know what a horse was. Cole's argument is that this works on audio—where you are literally being told a story—but not on the page. I don't really see why this should be the case. Why does a novel have to be told in a third-person limited perspective? I think this has increasingly become the convention in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, but I don't see why we can't have an omniscient narrator who knows what Romana is thinking and what a horse is. As I read these books, I've been listening to some other Targets on audio, most recently Doctor Who and the Giant Robot (1975) and Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion (1976),* and those stories don't seem afraid to slide back and forth between perspectives within a scene as needed. In the latter, we even have scenes from the perspective of dinosaurs, but those scenes also let the dinos know what, for example, a "car" is! Cole's edits go so far as to add a bit explaining why Romana and the Doctor split up, allowing Grendel's men to capture Romana. I'm glad he disclosed all these changes in the afterword, but I feel like overall I'd rather have read the unfiltered David Fisher version; why get the original writer to employ his distinctive voice if you're just going to file those bits away?

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who: Warriors' Gate and Beyond

* I thought about doing a series of posts reviewing these too, but decided that I have probably committed myself to enough self-imposed writing projects at the moment. I do have actual work to do!

Reading Roundup Wrapup: March 2025

Pick of the month: Lake of Souls by Ann Leckie. I got this collection of Ann Leckie's short fiction last year, and finally read it this past month; I very much enjoyed the experience. I've enjoyed her novels, of course, but there's something about how a short fiction collection broadens your understanding of an author that I really enjoy.

All books read:

1. The Pelican History of England: 4. England in the Late Middle Ages by A. R. Myers
2. Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
3. Uniquely Human: Updated and Expanded: A Different Way of Seeing Autism by Barry M. Prizant with Tom Fields-Meyer
4. Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction by Ann Leckie
5. Doctor Who: Warriors’ Gate and Beyond by Stephen Gallagher
6. The Emerald Wand of Oz by Sherwood Smith, illustrated by William Stout
7. The Pelican History of England: 5. Tudor England by S. T. Bindoff
8. Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life by Stuart Shanker with Teresa Baker
9. Low-Demand Parenting: Dropping Demands, Restoring Calm, and Finding Connection with your Uniquely Wired Child by Amanda Diekman
10. The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8 edited by Neil Clarke

All books acquired:

1. The Pelican History of England: 5. Tudor England by S. T. Bindoff
2. The Lost Light Notebooks: Vol. 5 by James Roberts
3. The Lost Light Notebooks: Vol. 6 by James Roberts
4. More than Meets the Eye, Vol. 1: Elegant Chaos by James Roberts
5. Lost Light, Vol. 2: The Everlasting Voices by James Roberts
6. The Pelican History of England: 6. Stuart England by J. P. Kenyon

Currently reading:

• The End of the World: Classic Tales of Apocalyptic Science Fiction compiled by Michael Kelahan
• Raising Kids with Big, Baffling Behaviors: Brain-Body-Sensory Strategies That Really Work by Robyn Gobbel
• The Pelican History of England: 6. Stuart England by J. P. Kenyon

Up next in my rotations:

1. Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World by Michael Freeman
2. Star Trek: The Next Generation: Available Light by Dayton Ward
3. American Gods by Neil Gaiman 
4. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
   

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 669 (down 1)