From 1836, Paris dailies fought circulation wars with the roman-feuilleton — a novel installment across the bottom of the front page. Eugène Sue's The Mysteries of Paris (1842–43) gripped France chapter by chapter, and Dumas kept teams of collaborators supplying copy by the column. Radio drama, cinema and the cheap paperback killed the trade between the wars; its cliffhanger craft survives in television writers' rooms.
Feuilletonist (newspaper serial novelist) no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
1740s – 1900
Serialization and the novelist as public figure
Circulating libraries, monthly numbers and newspaper feuilletons turned fiction into a mass industry and its best practitioners into celebrities. Dickens toured two continents reading his own work; two million people lined the streets of Paris for Victor Hugo's funeral in 1885; Tolstoy's estate at Yasnaya Polyana became a pilgrimage site. For the first time, a substantial number of people earned a full living writing novels.
What else was happening then
1836
Dickens invents the mass serial
The Pickwick Papers, issued in shilling monthly numbers, grows from sales of under a thousand copies to some forty thousand per installment once Sam Weller appears. The 24-year-old Charles Dickens demonstrates that fiction sold in cheap parts can reach an industrial-scale public, and serialization becomes the dominant business model of the Victorian novel.
1857
Madame Bovary on trial
France prosecutes Gustave Flaubert for offending public morals after the Revue de Paris serializes Madame Bovary. His acquittal in February 1857 — the same year Baudelaire is convicted for Les Fleurs du mal — makes the novel's right to depict adultery and provincial despair a matter of settled law, and the scandal makes the book famous.
1922
Ulysses published in Paris
Sylvia Beach's bookshop Shakespeare and Company publishes James Joyce's Ulysses on 2 February 1922, his fortieth birthday, after serial excerpts were prosecuted for obscenity in the United States. The ban stands until Judge John Woolsey's 1933 decision. Modernism makes the novelist an avant-garde figure — and makes difficulty itself a form of prestige.
1935
Penguin's sixpenny paperback
Allen Lane launches Penguin Books in London with ten titles at sixpence each — the price of a packet of cigarettes — after failing to find a decent cheap book at Exeter station. Quality fiction in paperback reaches railway kiosks and tobacconists, multiplying the reading public and, with it, the royalties a successful novelist could earn.
Where that work lives now
The maker of book-length fiction, from Murasaki Shikibu's Heian court to the Kindle's self-publishing flood — a trade with no license, no ladder and no retirement age.
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