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In this essay I will compare the work of Charles Dickens with that of Stephen King – in particular Dickens’s Great Expectations with King’s The Green Mile. ... I choose to do this comparison because I would like to show the differences and similarities between two great writers and two great serial novels.
A critic from The Spectator wrote: “King has more in common with Dickens than his critics would dare concede. ...
For Dickens, writing novels in serial form was nothing unusual, as it was the common practice at the time. Butt & Tillotson (1957:13) explain that in the eighteenth century novels appeared in three to seven installments, but by the time Dickens started publishing, the norm appeared to have been three to four installments.
King, however, had a completely different reason for trying his hand at this form. He had started building The Green Mile in his head, but had no time to write it as he was revising his book Desperation and working on the teleplay for The Shining’s mini-series at that time. ... King leaped at it, and a modern serial novel was born. ... Strangely enough, neither Dickens nor King seems to have done this. According to Butt & Tillotson (1957: 14) “…he [Dickens] never wrote more than four or five numbers before the first was published, and by the middle of the novel he was rarely more than one number ahead of his readers. ... ” Although there are indications that Dickens did plan the plot for Great Expectations, his planning seems to have consisted only as notes in the margins of his writings – “a calculation on the state of the tides for in the great scene of Magwitch’s recapture (chapter liv), and there is a sketch of the conclusion of the novel”( Butt & Tillotson, 1957: 30).
King also did not plan his story ahead. In his foreword to The two dead girls (the first installment of The Green Mile), King writes: “…although at this moment, it is still far from done, even in rough draft, and the outcome remains in some doubt. ... According to Butt & Tillotson (1957:16) an author recovered something of the intimate relationship between the storyteller and his audience that existed in the age of the sagas and Chaucer through serial publication, and for an author like Dickens – who was peculiarly susceptible to the influence of his readers – this relationship outweighed the disadvantages of serial publication.
King (1995: xv) added another element to this relationship - an element that he suspects only the writers of suspense tales and ‘spooky stories’ can fully appreciate. According to King, the writer gains an ascendancy over the reader which he cannot otherwise have: “.
Approximate Word count = 2164
Approximate Pages = 8.7
(250 words per page double spaced)
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