A New Chapter in Chapters

At The New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, Nicholas Dames has probed the history of the chapter, starting with ancient naturalists and early Christian theologians and moving to the development of the novel:

Henry Fielding,…in “Joseph Andrews” (1742), explained “those little Spaces between our Chapters” as “an Inn or Resting-Place, where he may stop and take a Glass, or any other Refreshment, as it pleases him.” Chapter titles, Fielding proceeded to explain, were like the inscriptions over the doors of those inns, advertising the accommodations within.

Novels have always been good at absorbing and recycling, taking plots and devices from other genres and finding new uses for them. With the chapter, novelists began, in the eighteenth century, to naturalize an informational technology from antiquity by giving it a new cultural role. What the chapter did for the novel was to aerate it: by encouraging us to pause, stop, and put the book down—a chapter before bed, say—the chapter-break helps to root novels in the routines of everyday life. The chapter openly permitted a reading oriented around pauses—for reflection or rumination, perhaps, but also for refreshment or diversion.

Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” insisted that “chapters relieve the mind,” encouraging our immersion by letting us know that we will soon be allowed to exit and return to other tasks or demands. Coming and going—an attention paid out rhythmically—would become part of how novelists imagined their books would be read. . . .

Thus the novelistic chapter: that modest, provisional kind of closure, a pause that promises more of the same later, like the fall of night. As the modern novel developed, explanations like those of the Fieldings became less necessary. Chapter titles themselves lost their overt connection to the “in which” or “concerning” syntax, virtually a plot summary, which derived from Biblical capitula.

Charles Dickens’s “The Pickwick Papers” could still pull off the old sort, as in “Chapter 38: Mr. Samuel Weller, Being Entrusted With a Mission of Love, Proceeds to Execute it; With What Success Will Hereinafter Appear”; by the eighteen-seventies, Anthony Trollope could title a chapter simply “Vulgarity.” As the chapter ceased seeming peculiar, it also grew in length; the average Victorian chapter was around thirty-five hundred words, roughly twice the eighteenth-century norm.

This article reminded me that chapters predated serialization in magazines, meaning that the breakup of novels wasn’t driven by the format and technology in which they first appeared. Rather, the established use of chapters made it easier to create divisions for each magazine issue.

The Relationship of Andersen and Dickens

From Suzi Feay’s review of Hans Christian Andersen: European Witness in this weekend’s Guardian:

The relationship with Dickens was fraught; it began well, but after a lengthy visit, a note was placed on their mantelpiece: "Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks – which seemed to the family ages!" . . .

[Paul Binding] points out many links between Andersen's novel The Improvisatore and David Copperfield, explaining the weak, unconvincing endings of each book as being due to "the writer having no experience at all of sustained union with a woman (Andersen), or failing to feel for a wife (and even children) that committed devotion in which he professed to believe (Dickens)".

Of course, I’d find the Dickenses’ sign more amusing if I weren’t entering my second week as a house guest. (Heading home Monday.)

The Artful Dodger’s Back. And This Time It’s Personal

Toward the end of Oliver Twist, the police arrest Jack Dawkins, alias the Artful Dodger, for stealing a silver snuffbox from a gentleman’s pocket. One of his colleagues, Charley Bates, comments: “To think of Jack Dawkins—lummy Jack—the Dodger—the Artful Dodger—going abroad for a common twopenny-halfpenny sneeze-box!”

“Going abroad” refers to a sentence of transportation to one of Britain’s penal colonies, most likely Australia. Charles Dickens never actually shows the Dodger’s sentencing, but his youth makes him an unlikely candidate for hanging (yet). Instead, we can imagine Jack Dawkins starting a new life in the antipodes, perhaps even becoming the gentleman he’s always styled himself to be.

But the Guardian reports a movie studio is imagining a different future for the Dodger:

Titled Dodge and Twist, studio Sony's revisionist take follows…a more comedic approach and is based on an original screenplay by Cole Haddon, writer of the forthcoming US TV series Dracula. The film will portray the two characters as rivals on opposite sides of the law in Victorian London during an episode in which someone tries to steal the crown jewels. The script is based on an original idea by producer Ahmet Zappa, son of rock legend Frank, which is said to be influenced by the success of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes films.

This isn’t the first time imaginative dramatists have invented new fates for the Dodger. In the 1968 Oliver!, of course, he and Fagin escape arrest and enjoy the movie’s final number.

More to the point, in 1980 British television came up with The Further Adventures of Oliver Twist, in which the title character goes off to a posh boarding school and there finds Jack Dawkins, of all people. The two boys end up back on the dark streets of London. That story also appeared as a paperback novel and a comic.

Australian television gave us Escape of the Artful Dodger in 2001. That story transported the Dodger to Australia, but also sent Oliver there in more respectable fashion. Once again, Oliver ends up on the wrong side of the law, and the Dodger helps him out.

Those latter-day sequels, like Dodge and Twist, recognize that Oliver without the Victorian underworld to threaten him is a bourgeois nonentity. At the same time, the Dodger’s class-conscious thievery isn’t that endearing unless he’s got a little mate to reluctantly look after. It’s a natural buddy movie.

In fact, British writer Tony Lee worked on a story called Dodge & Twist for years, first as a graphic novel with Paul Peart-Smith (PDF download of preview from 2007) and then as a self-published prose novel (two-chapter preview from 2011). It shows Oliver, having lost his money, meeting Jack, back from Australia—and we’re right back in Dickens’s world.

Zappa’s story is set twenty years after Dickens’s novel; Lee’s is set twelve years after. Zappa’s story uses the crown jewels as the maguffin; Lee’s uses the Koh-i-noor diamond. The Hollywood Reporter said Lee’s take was “more serious.” Lee said he discussed his idea with Zappa a few years back. Isn’t the public domain delightful?

Another Kid in Crime Alley

For years I’ve owned copies of Batman, #408, in which Max Allan Collins introduced the second Jason Todd stealing tires off the Batmobile in Crime Alley, and Batman, #410, in which Jason makes his debut as Robin.

Curiously, it was harder for me to find the intervening issue, which should theoretically be less prized. Last month I came across an unbagged, 25-year-old copy in the dollar bin at Bedrock Comics in Framingham.

“Just Another Kid in Crime Alley” is an odd little story, penciled by Ross Andru and inked by Dick Giordano. Having found Jason living alone in an abandoned building with nothing but his cigarettes, his vest, and his elaborate stereo system, Batman decides he needs a better home. So he drops the boy at an orphanage.

This orphanage has a reputation for “unorthodox” teaching methods, Bruce Wayne knows it’s had “difficulties with the board of education and various social agencies.” The woman in charge is named Fay Gunn. But somehow Batman’s keen detective instincts don’t clue him in that she’s training the orphans to be a criminal gang.

After several violent incidents Jason decides Ma Gunn is “batty” and runs away. Meanwhile, Batman revisits Crime Alley and meets a fedora-wearing man (it’s a very old-fashioned neighborhood), who discovers that his tires are missing. Now Batman’s deductive power kicks in. He decides that in Gotham City only one person could have committed that crime: the boy he left at the orphanage.

So Batman tracks down this nefarious criminal in…the same abandoned building.

Jason defiantly tells Batman the truth about Ma Gunn’s orphanage. Batman watches Jason reattach the tires (apparently Alfred handles that task at home). And they discuss the serious issues of crime.

And that’s when Batman realizes he’s found a new little friend.

“Books…want to be a whole lot cheaper”

At GigaOM, Mathew Ingram contemplates the falling prices of the Kindle and other simple electronic readers, and the falling prices of simple genre fiction in digital form:

…books don’t want to be free; they just want to be a whole lot cheaper than they are. And when you make books (not all books, but some) $4.99 or $1.99 or even 99 cents, people will buy more of them. . . .

There’s even the possibility that books could be free and still make money: Amazon has an ad-supported Kindle, so why not extend that model to the books themselves? Magazine writers publish their content in an ad-supported medium, so why not books? Authors such as Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle wrote many of their novels on a monthly basis as magazine supplements. And Amazon apparently already has a patent that covers advertising-supported e-books.

As we’ve pointed out before, the book is evolving as it becomes digital — there are Kindle Singles that aren’t much longer than a magazine-length feature, and some magazines and newspapers are packaging features in just that format, as well as newer services like Byliner that have been commissioning custom content. A free Kindle could be just the beginning of an explosion of book-like content from Amazon and others: The company is already talking about a “Netflix for books” that would offer content for a monthly fee.

Why not offer a subscription to an author, so I can automatically get whatever he or she writes, regardless of length or format? This would blend the worlds of blogging, Kindle Singles, magazine-length features and novels into one stream of content, and I’d be willing to bet more people would read more as a result. The printed book, as Seth Godin wrote recently, is a fetish of sorts, like an expensive watch: something we buy because we like to look at it, but something that is no longer really functional or necessary. In the end, that’s likely to be a good thing, not a bad one.

I doubt that people would sign up for anything an author writes. But they might well sign up for notifications (and one-click purchasing) of anything she writes, so they can be sure of the genre, main character, or other necessary qualities. If such a system takes place, it will surely change the nature of the writing, just as we can tell where Dickens broke off his serialized installments while making sure readers would come back for the next.