TIL Dickens was kinda like a pre-recording-technology podcaster.
“Masses of the illiterate poor would individually pay a halfpenny to have each new monthly episode [of Dickens’ novels] read to them, opening up and inspiring a new class of readers.”
Conversation
Feels like he was to the Victorian age what perhaps John Grisham was to the 80s-90s. Genre inching towards literary. Though more literary. I think “genre” fiction as we know it is post-Victorian phenomenon (1890s mass market paperback).
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If Dickens had lived in Grisham’s time, he have written more like Grisham. Can’t imagine him writing in stodgy MFA-program-lit mode. If he’d lived today he’d have written mainly for prestige TV. Might have been a showrunner rather than writer.
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