"Becoming a Victorian Reader": The Serial Reading Process in the Modern Classroom

One of the biggest challenges facing any Victorianist who regularly teaches fiction is to keep students motivated when they are reading what appear to them to be endlessly long novels. Overwhelming as it is for students to face a semester syllabus that asks them to complete 2000–3000 pages of reading (the usual range in my upper-level undergraduate or graduate courses on Victorian fiction), it is particularly daunting when 800 of those pages are contained in a single novel such as Our Mutual Friend or Middlemarch. And when there are five or six novels on the syllabus, anything that helps students feel the task is broken down into more manageable quantities (i.e. smaller than the novels themselves) is not simply gratefully received but pedagogically sound as a means of keeping them invested in doing the reading required of them. I have found that students will freely admit, if one asks in the right way, that they cannot (or do not) always keep up with the reading, making choices such as skipping one novel in order to finish another, or skimming quickly over large amounts of text to pull out highlights that will enable them to have something to mention in class to make it look as though they are keeping up. Dismal as such admissions may be for the inveterate lover of Victorian prose, such honesty prompted me to consider how I might better introduce my students to the Victorian novel in a way that would enable them to see reading it as more than just a task to check off a list. Call me an idealist, but I wanted them to read the novels because they were interested in the novels rather than skimming for tidbits to impress me in class. In short, I wanted them to enjoy sustained reading – a particularly difficult task at a university where the largely self-supporting student population has jobs, demanding schedules, and complex "real-life" responsibilities outside the classroom that make it difficult for them to devote large blocks of time to quiet contemplation.

Paradoxically, the technique I have found that most uniformly keeps students attending to the details of the period's biggest and baggiest novels is to stretch them out even longer by reading them in serial installments for the whole semester. As my students have consistently observed to me, the standard literature course schedules one novel every two-four weeks, depending on the length of the novel. Many of my students express frustration that in other classes, on any given day, they and their peers are at radically different points in the reading, which can make it difficult to have a fruitful conversation. Moreover, when reading 600+ pages over the course of just a few weeks, as one student put it, one "is forced to digest this huge piece of literature [at a pace] which allows for little time for reflection or afterthought." To help resolve this problem, I have for several years assigned one novel out of the term's reading in its original periodical format. Every semester, my students and I talk about a single novel for a portion of one class period every week for the whole term. We are reading other novels at the more traditional three weeks per book pace, and we intersperse research, scholarly articles, and other texts as well. But, there are about 30 minutes per week, reliably, where the pace slows down, and we turn – for example – to David Copperfield to talk about his life in careful, close detail. The benefits of such a method are plentiful: everyone keeps up with the reading, people pay tremendous attention to details, and something terribly long becomes incredibly enjoyable rather than a chore. But there are drawbacks as well as more complex benefits. I have surveyed my students for feedback every time we read a novel serially, and we have had meta-conversations about the reading process itself. What follows, then, is a discussion both of how I go about teaching this way and of what experience has shown me are the easiest...