And forums where readers still communicate with authors shaping the new chapters.
> This essay will focus on two particularly striking mid-nineteenth-century examples of the complex relationships that unite the writer, readers, and editor of a serial. The first one is a French novel. Les Mystères de Paris, by Eugène Sue, which was serialized over a year and a half in 1842-43 in the Paris daily Le Journal des Débats Politiques et Littéraires, which translates literally as the Journal of Political and Literary Debates; the second is Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, which first appeared in the antisîavery weekly, the National Era, between 1851 and 1852.
> My first point is that in the case of both works, apart from the fact that they aimed at social reform and were tremendously popular and violently criticized, their respective readers played a role in giving final form to each novel, particularly in terms of length. I will then examine the locus of the discussion that is being carried on between the readers and the writer. In Stowe's case, since she was writing far from Washington, where the National Era was based, the conversation between the reader and the writer was carried on in the columns of the Era itself. In Sue's case, the correspondence between reader and writer was mostly conducted via private letters, for reasons I will go into later. Sue kept more than three hvmdred of the letters he received while writing Les Mystères; those letters have now been edited and published. As can be imagined, they provide a rare and invaluable insight into the interaction between reader and writer during the publication of a serial.
