Could I Do a Dickens?

Robert Seymour's first illustration of the
Pickwick Club, from the first issue of the
novel. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

I have recently been rereading The Pickwick Papers, a task of no inconsiderable heft (the Project Gutenberg version I'm forging my way through is something like 760 pages long). My original rationale for doing this was to compare Dickens's first serialized novel with my own serializations, in the idea I might be able to learn something of use to me going forward.

(Not that I would ever dare to compare myself with Charles Dickens. For one thing, by the time he was my age, Dickens had been dead for six years.)

I am not sure what I'm learning from this.

Pickwick Papers is sort of notorious for the way it rather dramatically shifted in focus after nine chapters had been written and published. Chapter Ten is when Dickens introduced the character of Sam Weller, who gradually took over the story and eclipsed a lot of the original characters, to say nothing of the original idea behind the story (which was supposed to be a series of anecdotes about comically inept sportsmen). I believe a lot of Dickens's early novels shifted about in this way, not least because the serialization format allowed Dickens to respond to the reactions of his readers.

Compare this with the way most writers work now: draft, draft, and draft again, revising and polishing and not showing the work to more than a handful of people until we think it shiny enough.

Could one serialize a novel in the way Dickens (and, possibly, other nineteenth-century writers) did? Honestly, I don't know if I would have the courage to even try it.