In the pre-television and radio era, where novels noticeably longer?
Someone once told me that they were, as people had less to distract them in their leisure time, so had greater patience for rambling, baggy books. It sounds like the sort of factoid retrieved from one’s fundament that makes sense on a certain level, but is their any truth in it?
Even if books weren’t especially longer in terms of raw page length, I wonder if there was greater acceptance of an author’s discursive warblings on the minutiae of every day life. Or even then, was this seen as tedious and unwanted filler?
Well, some books we now think of as novels were originally published as serials in newspapers, a chapter at a time. So the author had reason to pad the content and the audience had less reason to be bored by it since they weren’t reading it all at one time. It’s not until it’s all collected into a single volume that you realize how large it is or how much is “filler”.
I have not collected statistics, but I certainly have a strong impression that this is true, on the whole (though there wil lbe exceptions, of course). Just look at the Dickenses, the Thackerays, the Tolstoys, the Victor Hugos, the Brontes, etc., on the shelf and compare the thickness of those volumes with those of a shelf of recent novels. (Very likely you will also find the older ones are printed on thinner paper in a smaller font, too.)
It is worth noting that many 19th century novels were originally published in installments. This helps to account not only for length, but for the discursiveness and the loose, rambling nature of some of the plots (particularly early Dickens).
Books in the 19th century were all lengths, some very long and some not so. Editions of Dickens run 200-300 pages. Trollope is three times as long. Most writers were in between that range. I’m assuming that the OP meant literary novels. Then as now they were vastly outnumbered by popular fiction, and at the time that tended to be much shorter, especially the dime novels because they were printed in paperback and the bindings were limited in width.
You can find tons of literary novels today than run as long as Trollope. I would even say that literary novels today are longer than they had been because they are being marketed as alternatives to short attention span entertainment. Popular fiction has been getting longer too. Any respectable fantasy will run 800 pages, and military science fiction runs typically 500-600, to a broad generalization.
I don’t think that the average literary novel length varied by much in the years between, although there were always short-term trends like the current one. Compact novels had a vogue at times, but so did longer ones. Blockbuster popular novels like Gone with the Wind or Anthony Adverse were very long, but the paperbacks of the 50s were typically extremely short. Some authors were known for - and read for - being long-winded; some were famed for being terse.
I just don’t think you can make any definite statements without having to climb a mountain of exceptions to get there.
Have you seen how long a GRR Martin or Robert Jordan book is? You could cut some of them in half and still have a book longer than most books from the “olden times”.
I’m sure someone will be along to point out some sort of exception soon.
To a casual reader, it may seem as if novels got a little bit shorter in the mid-twentieth century. After World War One, a lot of authors rebelled against the long-winded Victorian writers. Hemingway was touted as the model. Editors took up the mantra “Show, don’t tell.”
Sometime in the 1980s, I remember browsing in a bookstore and wondering why, all of a sudden, books seemed to be much longer than they used to be. Authors noted primarily for sex and violence managed to publish books that were two or three inches thick, even in the paperback version.
A lot of people - including many who should know better - attribute the lengthening of bestsellers int he 1980s to authors moving over to word processors. Apparently, the ease of not having to feed in paper and make corrections suddenly caused every writer in existence to write an extra 200 pages without anybody - they, their editors, their copyeditors, or their publishers - noticing.
People are idiots.
What happened is far more sensible. Publishers realized that certain authors, including ones who used to write taut, compact, gripping paperbacks, could be pushed onto the bestseller list, because the bestseller itself had become a type of genre. Bestsellers had certain requirements, but a main one was length. People needed to feel the heft to justify the increased prices for books that had been hurting the industry. So authors like Ed McBain and Donald Westlake and Dick Francis and Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke started writing the same plot they used for 160-page books into 400-page blockbusters that sold like crazy. Whenever anyone said that these books were hurting their reputations they dropped huge bales on cash on them and made their next book 500 pages.
Some of that has gone away. Writers learned how to plot for books that were twice as long. But the idea that the ratio of dollars spent per hundred thousand words offered needs to be as low as possible pervades the industry to this day.
Older novels were probably more wordy – the prose style was less direct than it is today – but I doubt the length has changed much.
I just checked out the length of the current top ten NY Times best sellers. Their page lengths are: 400, 369, 432, 485, 642, 409, 462, 510, and 604, with only one – a reprint of The Alchemist that can be considers short at 192 pages. A Tale of Two Cities is 480 in hardcover; Bleak House is 595. It’s comparing pineapples to hand grenades – the page count is affected by the size of the book and the typeface, plus other factors – but clearly there is no trend.
And remember – most books from the 19th century have been forgotten, so there’s no way to determine an average size. Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth, who was probably America’s most popular 19th century novelist, seems to generally come in at under 400 pages for most of her books (though one hit 700). Winston Churchill (not the UK prime minister, but an extremely popular US author) seems to average under 400, too.
So it’s difficult to say, but it’s hard to make a case for a trend.
What about popular books from much of the 20th century, were they in any way noticeably shorter? I get the impression that populist novels of the 19th century were greater in length than populist novels from the 1950’s or 60’s, though I may well be wrong.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if these things go in literary trends. Big beefy novels seem rather popular today. In a decade or so they may be unfashionable. It may also just be the case that we had a handful of popular Victorian novelists who were surprisingly good at writing lengthy novels.
James Mitchener’s Hawaii, one of the most popular novels of the 50s, was almost 1000 pages, and Mitchener became famous for the length of his books. Looking at the best sellers of the 50s, most seem to be in the 300-600 page range. From Here to Eternity, maybe the best selling novel of the decade, was over 800 pages.
There were more humorous novels on the list, and humor novels are generally shorter than dramatic fiction. You rarely see a funny best seller these days, so that may be a factor.
So, again, it’s hard to see any particular trend in lengths.
How do we answer this? It’s an interesting problem, but it’s one for Big Data.
First, what is the universe we’re considering? British novels? American novels? English-language novels? European novels? All world novels?
Which are literary novels and which are populist? (What is populist? That had a specific meaning in 19th century America and wasn’t the same as popular.) Do we only count books printed in hardcover? As I said, the number of popular novels printed in paper was enormous on both sides of the Atlantic. Do we make allowances for changes in printing techniques? The practice of issuing novels in volumes in the 19th century was because of binding limitations; that stopped by the 20th century. Did writers, or more likely publishers, limit word counts to fit their technology? (I think it’s very likely, but I don’t have good examples.)
Are page counts good enough to make comparisons with? Chuck already mentioned the huge variations in typeface; longer word count books were often printed in small type with less leading to use up less paper, which went through regular spells of being expensive. Paperbacks were always subject to that. Many firms had a fixed page count. If they printed 180-page books then the print would be adjusted to fit, no matter the word count. In one famous case, a last chapter was left off an SF book to make this trick work. (I can’t think of the title: Chuck, do you remember?)
Getting at the data is surprisingly difficult. Even comparing bestsellers to bestsellers is a problem. Nobody really knows sales from the 19th century, although some authors might be famous enough that their biographers have dug this out. The first bestsellers list for the U.S. appears in The Bookman in 1895. Alice Payne Hackett of Publishers Weekly compiled a book of the top ten sellers for the year which started with 1895 and eventually ran until 1975. I have no idea how those early lists were compiled, but it’s safe to say that the techniques are not compatible with later surveys.
But even that comparatively small list would run to 800 bestsellers, each of whose first edition would have to be checked for page count, since later editions could be any size whatsoever. I don’t know any database that has that information handy. You’d have to look up the books one by one in the Library of Congress catalog.
Doing a thorough search of all fiction titles for that period probably would require searching well over 1 million records. Maybe a professor could figure out a way to do so if the LoC contents have been properly entered into a single database. But that still leaves out the 19th century, which is the period we’re asking about.
I’m a book nut, and I’ve both handled more books than most people and done more research into the history of books and printing and publishing than most people, though certainly not enough to make me an expert. I live in bookstores and book sales and libraries. I’ve physically handled or looked closely at hundreds of thousands of books, maybe over a million. (Though not all of them are fiction or hardbacks, of course.) From all that, my guess is that the bell curve for books peaks in around the same place for any time period, probably 300-400 pages. Exceptions are noticeable and draw attention to themselves, which skews memory. Bestsellers, prominently located in bookstores, skew memories. Multiple volume old books skew memories. If you unskew the data ( ) though, the middle stays the middle.
Looking at the books I’ve downloaded from Project Gutenberg, it definitely depends on the author. On the short end, I have Frankenstein (175 pages) and Pride & Prejudice (279 pages) and on the long end there is The Newcomes (856 pages) and Les Miserables (1383 pages).
Maybe Project Gutenberg formats their books oddly or I picked unusual books, but The Pickwick Papers (675 pages) and Our Mutual Friend (746 pages) aren’t particularly shorter than Barchester Towers (432 pages) or The Way We Live Now (752 pages).
) though, the middle stays the middle.