I think it’s more accurate to say he collected more money from his performances than from his writing. My understanding is that copyright enforcement was pretty weak in Dickens’ time (an issue which he complained about). So a lot of copies of his books were sold but most were pirate editions from which Dickens never saw any royalties. When Dickens performed in a theater, the tickets were sold right there in the building and Dickens could make sure he got his share of the money.
I think we’re getting a little loose with the definition of episodic entertainment. I think there’s an important distinction between a series of works which features the same group of characters and a single work broke up into pieces. In the former, you can watch the individual performances in any order and it doesn’t matter if you miss some of them. In the latter the ending of each individual performance leads directly to the beginning of the next performance (the proverbial cliffhanger) which encourages audience members to see every performance.
I thought the OP was looking for either kind.
Yeah, “episode” is a broad term that just means something self contained of distinct.
A sitcom with no continuity whatsoever is episodic, and so is a 12-part miniseries with a definitive arc.
Initially I was wondering more about the type of fictional entertainment we have today. For instance, people watch a show like “Big Bang Theory” to see a new story about well-known characters. I wouldn’t necessarily consider things like Bible stories the same way. With those, people are looking to see a performance of a well-known story. There may be a series of performances, but that is a series of performances of well known work. With modern episodic entertainment, the audience is typically watching because they want a new story with characters they are familiar with. Radio programs were filled with that kind of entertainment. I’m sure radio had performances of things like Shakespeare, but there were lots of broadcasts which were unique shows of new material where the audience was tuning in to find out what happened next (e.g. serialized mysteries, soap operas) or enjoy a new content from characters they already know well (e.g. comedy skits). There is an obvious similarity between these early radio shows and modern episodic entertainment. I’m wondering if there are pre-radio examples of similar entertainment. But all the discussions are interesting.
This made me wonder if there were wandering acting troupes which performed a form of episodic entertainment. For instance, maybe an acting troupe did a loop around a set of towns over the course of a month. During each loop, they perform an episode of new material of their own creation in each town. The audience goes to the shows to either find out what happens next in the story (e.g. soap opera) or to enjoy new performances from known characters (e.g. recurring skits on SNL). This troupe would be performing material which is newly created rather than performances of existing plays or known stories. A traveling troupe would be one way to get the same story out to a wide audience in a financially viable way.
The Commedia dell’arte may have been a little like this.
Individual chapters of Howard Garis “Three Little Trippertrots” were read for subscribers to the New Jersey Telephone Herald audio service in 1912.
There’s the story of Scheherazade and the 1001 Nights…