Experience Dickens like a real Victorian

Now anyone can read the novels of Charles Dickens in their original presentation. UVic Libraries have recently made a collection of digitized Victorian serial novels available online. So far, their database includes five works by Charles Dickens, though there are also plans to add novels by William Thackeray and Anthony Trollope. Victorian serial novels were printed in installments and generally published over an extended period of time. Most were published in 20 or more parts, with one being released each month.

The project began as the brainchild of Dr. Lisa Surridge (English). Surridge was working with Dickens’ Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club in one of her courses and requested that the library digitize the work in order to make it a more accessible resource.

According to Danielle Forster, an information services librarian at UVic’s McPherson Library, the collection is of great use to students seeking a better understanding of the serialization process. “Serial novels were quite a phenomenon in the 19th century,” says Forster, “and the way they were produced really affected the way the author had to work.”

Forster says that the authenticity with which these particular works have been presented on line makes them valuable examples of that process, and she hopes that students from a wide variety of disciplines—English, writing, history, or even business—will be able to make use of them.

The serials are presented with their original illustrations and sandwiched between pages of period advertising for everything from patent medicines to “aerothermic stoves.”

“We’re very lucky to have them,” Forster says of UVic’s collection, “because students and researchers can now see what they looked like, and experience them in the same way a 19th-century reader would have. It’s all about authenticity.”

To view the collection: http://library.uvic.ca/site/lib/dig/VictorianSerialNovels.html