Читать книгу The Selected Works of Arnold Bennett: Essays, Personal Development Books & Articles - Arnold Bennett - Страница 66

Not much needs to be said about domestic serials. The same general rules of composition apply to them as to sensational serials, though in a milder form. They must interest from instalment to instalment, but they must not excite. A large class of people positively resent being thrilled by a work of fiction, and the domestic serial is meant to appeal to this class. The theme must relate to love, and it must be treated sentimentally. The demand for purely domestic serials by unknown authors is not a brisk one.

Boys’ serials form a separate minor branch of the craft They may be divided into two classes—stories of school life and stories of adventure in foreign lands. They always ignore the subject of love. The principal boys’ papers are The Boys' Own Paper and The Captain. Prices are not brilliant and since the market is a limited one, it has a tendency to become the monopoly of a few writers. Similar remarks apply to serials for girls, except that the editors of periodicals for girls will not have really adventurous serials, despite the notorious fact that girls enjoy boys’ books more than boys enjoy them. The one mistake of policy in that admirably conducted periodical, The Girls' Own Paper, has been that it never ran a serial by the late G. A. Henty.

There remains one other class of serial—the novel of the famous author which is published serially, not because it is specially suitable for a serial, but because it is not entirely unsuitable, and because the author’s name will insure for it a favourable reception. When the aspirant has arrived at the state of being famous, he may compose without trammelling himself by instalments, regular partial climaxes, or fixed quantities of words. If his fame is sufficiently dazzling, and his work is fairly optimistic and cheerful, he will find that editors are prepared to waive in his favour even the sternest rules of serialisation.