Serial Installments of The Woman in White (1859-1860)
The First Installment
The Woman in White appeared in 40 weekly installments in Charles Dickens’s periodical, All The Year Round. The November 26, 1859 publication of All The Year Round begins with is the very last installment of Dickens’s novel, A Tale of Two Cities, and the first episode of The Woman in White follows immediately on its heels. This meant that readers who had waited in breathless anticipation for the conclusion of A Tale of Two Cities would reach the end of Dickens’s story and be immediately presented with the start of Wilkie Collins’s new sensation tale.
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After Dickens’s story is resolved—that is, after a total of two and a half pages of A Tale of Two Cities—Dickens puts on his editorial hat to introduce Collins’s story. The following scanned page contains this brief preface and the first paragraphs of The Woman in White.
Works Cited
“Household Words,” Dictionary of Nineteenth-century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland, Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, eds., Academia Press and the British Library, 2009. OCLC: 994017106. pp. 292-293.
Huett, Lorna. “Among the Unknown Public: Household Words, All the Year Round, and the Mass-Market Weekly Periodical in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol. 38, 2005, pp. 61-82. DOI: 10.1353/vpr.2005.0006.
