Decorative Initial Because many Victorian novels first appeared serially in periodicals and only later appeared in book form, they bear the mark of writing in parts. Although Anthony Trollope and most other writers completed an entire novel before its first number appeared in print, Dickens composed his books as they went along in parts, and hence his works, which register his audience's reactions, have a unqiue dialogical relation to that that audience. Beginning with the pioneering work of John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, scholars have studied both his working notes for individual novels and their division into periodical parts for clues to his ideas and methods.

The following list includes the most important studies of this approach to Dickens's novels:


Last modified 2003