Examining a Weekly Serial Part

An assignment by Nikki Hessell

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Overview

This assignment comes from a second-year course on Literature and Journalism. The course aims to interrogate the differences between the “literary” and the “journalistic” by reading and critiquing four texts that sit at the boundary between the terms: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy, Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.

The assignment on Hard Times asks students to isolate and analyse a single installment of the novel from its Household Words incarnation, using Dickens’s working notes both as a tool to map, visualise, and identify an installment and, if appropriate, as a source of material to aid and enhance interpretation of that installment. They are also supplied with a small selection of articles from Household Words and instructions to help them find their chosen installment in the online corpus of the magazine through Dickens Journals Online.

The goals of the assignment include encouraging them to read as a nineteenth-century magazine reader would have read and to think beyond “chapters” as primary structuring instruments of fiction; to think about how reading a piece of fiction alongside pieces of journalism shapes the experience of the novel; and to think of Dickens’s style, execution, and preoccupations in the novel as “journalistic” ones, not just exclusively literary ones.

Students typically find the working notes extremely useful at bridging the understanding and experiential gap between the paperback they hold in their hands and the working method of a serial novelist who understood that his installments would be read alongside news and current affairs. It allows them to think about both uniformity and variation: the idea that filling column inches and set areas of space in the magazine structured the shape and content of chapters, for example, or that there must be some significance to the fact that, while most installments were two chapters, some were not. It is quite common for students to make their installment selection based on a favorite scene, and then find that the scene reads very differently to them when they are forced to contextualize it within the specifically journalistic unit of reading that is the installment and to consider it as the product or output of Dickens’s notes.

The sense of the novelist’s priorities for the installment—as opposed to the affective impact of the scenes, characters, and chapters as the students had experienced them when reading the novel—can be productively jarring or affirming. Students often note how central the metaphor of the giant staircase and Louisa’s ominous descent is in the notes to chapter 26, and how that mirrors their experience of what was memorable about that chapter. This scene is frequently a focal point for discussions of what is explicitly “literary” about Hard Times and how the “literary” creates value. Other students notice the centrality of Dickens’s didactic, journalistic aims, such as in the seventh weekly installment with its memorandum about “Time” as “a manufacturer.”

Finally, the Dickens Notes website creates a level playing field for students by giving curated and annotated online access to the working notes. My assigned text is the Oxford World’s Classics edition, which does have Dickens’s working notes as an appendix. But multiple barriers are thrown up if this is the only possible source for the assignment, including cost and shipping constraints (the latter of which is a significant issue for New Zealand universities). Dickens Notes allows all students equitable access to the high-quality scholarly materials they need to complete this assignment.

Assignment Instructions

Short Exercise: Hard Times

Hard Times was originally published in twenty weekly installments. For this exercise, you need to choose one installment and write a 1,000 word response to it. Further information on how to locate the instalments and working notes will be provided in class, but the website you need for this exercise is here: https://dickensnotes.org/notes/hard-times/mirador.

Here are some questions to consider:

• What features stand out when you read it as a standalone installment? (This might include questions of plot or narrative, characterization or setting, themes or connections that link the chapters, features of the opening and closing of the installment, or anything else you consider relevant).

• How does your chosen installment connect with the installments that come before and/or after it?

• Is there information in the working notes that elucidates Dickens’s intentions and choices in this installment?

• What connections can you see to wider ideas about the relationship between literature and journalism?

You should consider all of these questions as you decide how you want to approach this task, but you are not required to address or answer all of these questions in your response; you should exercise judgement in deciding which questions are most relevant to your installment and the approach you decide to take.

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