In 1836, Charles Dickens hooked the good people of England on a story about a traveling men’s group. Published over two years in 19 installments, The Pickwick Papers launched a craze for serialized fiction.

The trend found traction across the pond. Later in the 19th century, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and F. Scott Fitzgerald all published novels in installments. Into the 20th, the episodic boomed again when serials from Isaac Bashevis Singer, James Joyce, and Armistead Maupin curried fans.

Now, the 21st century is picking up the torch.

Over at New York magazine, Emily Gould’s “Dinner Party” newsletter plays current host to a six-part story written by the novelist and critic Lauren Oyler. “The Hater” is a psychologically astute modern nightmare with an auto-fictional tinge. Our narrator’s frenemy and fixation is “a tall, self-absorbed, Berlin-dwelling writer named Lauren…who has gotten herself in too deep with F., a frustrated academic turned book critic whom she met on Feeld.”

Gould chalked this not-so-novel novella’s timing up to nostalgia. “Today’s newspapers have fallen out of the habit of rewarding their readers with chunks of fiction,” she wrote, in a forward to Oyler’s first chapter. “So it has fallen to us to pick up the slack.” But it seems worth asking why “chunks” of fiction are their own reward.

What’s the appeal of a serialized story? And what makes this moment so ripe for a reboot?

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We can chalk the first serial boom up to a few factors. For one, a hungry marketplace. As Dwight MacDonald writes in his essay collection, Masscult and Midcult, the Grub Street Dickens published on was a rapacious place, where “hacks…ready to turn their hands to ballads, novels, history, encyclopedias, philosophy, reportage, or anything else” first architected what snobs would call the middlebrow aesthetic.

The pioneers of a publishing model we still enlist today believed that putting out more books faster made for a healthy marketplace. Which ethos directly affected the creatives.

For his magazine contributions, Dickens was famously paid by the word—and at a rate that would probably shock today’s freelancers once adjusted for inflation. It behooved Old Charlie to extend his universe, explore every eddy and B plot. And no editor was going to stop him.

Dickens may have been one of our first writers to splash around for pages and pages in what author Brandon Taylor has dubbed “character vapor.” That is, rafts of interior backstory and description that don’t obviously serve the plot.

Stories that perambulate this way are often called “character-driven.” The appeal of Bleak House, for instance, is bound up in its bad actors and bizarre names, less so the action. Binging a book like this—if you’ll pardon the modern verb—has been impossible in my experience. But the amble is rewarding, meted out slow.

Assuming our forebears also couldn’t hold a plot top of mind over week-long breaks, we can account for the proliferation of the character-driven chronicle. (Not to mention, the television episode…)

And if the first mass book marketplace begat a serial-friendly style, we must finally remember that most members of that famously overworked pre-industrial populace had limited down time. One can easily imagine how Victoria’s subjects would have relished the digestible installment, the charming company, and the approving frame of a known magazine.

It all amounts to an efficient hit.

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Since Grub Street’s heyday, the success of the serial has seemed to coincide with a thriving magazine culture. As journals rose in popularity, so did the book dispensed in bursts.

The long defunct Metropolitan magazine hosted F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned. And the first four books in Maupin’s Tales of the City series ran in a San Francisco Chronicle that had yet to be kneecapped by the dot-com bubble’s popping.

Today, the magazines are clutching to the cliff edge like Mufasa. But their wily brother, Substack, continues to thrive. Yonder, on the untrammeled, ungate-kept, ever-proliferating newsletter frontier, one can find plenty of serial fiction.

Such as John Pistelli’s Major Arcana, which was originally serialized on the author’s Substack before Belt Publishing picked it up. See also: downtown character Matthew Gasda’s Seasons Clear, and Awe. 

Some Substack-spun offerings have leaned into gamification, in keeping with the intended use of what is literally a social media app. The Swedish writer Jörgen Löwenfeldt has invited readers to vote on directions for future chapters in his serial fiction, making the work sort of like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure.

Gamified reading is a modern phenomenon. But lots of those 19th century conditions still remain. As on Grub Street, we also have a literary marketplace that rewards “more, and faster!” at almost every level. And though few writers today are getting paid well by the word, a subscription model demands and rewards excess and eddy.

Finally, though our downtime isn’t constricted by a 12+ hour work day—in many cases, at least—our attention has been fracked by companies that prefer to bleed us slow. We of the scrolling generation, in other words, are already habituated to the serial. Because we’re already used taking it lightly, looking away, following faces, then coming back for more.

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Gould’s “Dinner Party” isn’t the only institutional newsletter—or flailing Mufasa—to note the success of the Substack serial. But “The Hater” does seem to have its finger on the pulse.

Oyler’s story is a nicely paced paragon of the form. Its themes and concerns—such as internet dating psychosis, apps-based hijinks, and para-social relationships—are hyper-contemporary. Structure-wise, there is some character vapor, but taste mileage varies on that anyway. (I’m usually in favor.)

There’s also a pleasing self-awareness about the project. A wink to the bugs and features of a container that’s designed to please intermittently. As Oyler’s narrator writes in chapter three, “Part of my agitation, I reflected in the stall, was that it was not hard to see where Lauren’s story was going, but she was taking quite a while to get there.”

And maybe that’s the real pleasure of the “chunk,” and its modern utility. It can be frustrating to see the end on the horizon. But in this economy—where we’d all do well to slow down—I’d rather amble.