When the dryly assured narrator of Northanger Abbey introduces a new character by summarily denying “the necessity of a long and minute detail from Mrs. Thorpe herself, of her past adventures and sufferings,” Jane Austen effectively kicks Lady Vane, Leonora, Cynthia, Miss Price, Amri and this book’s chorus of motley tale-tellers out of the novel. Of course, as documented by the previous six chapters, Don Quixote, Henry Fielding, and other characters, authors, critics and common readers had been threatening to do as much for generations, and indeed, from the first. However, as we have now seen, that same propensity of eliciting such critical disfavor had already been a proven if unarticulated feature of the interpolated tales that early novelists continued to wield, disrupting their plots. For the two centuries between Don Quixote and Obi, interpolated tales were all but omnipresent: a pervasive, yet still consistently aggravating feature that co-constituted the novel form and provided critics and readers with an off-center vantage point from which to consider it. But sometime on or about 1800, novel relations changed, internally and formally, in a shift of balance from one prevailing version of heteroglossia to another.

‘Dickens Unwrapped’ focuses on part publication as a peculiar dynamic of the unbound book as an interim phase before and after the complete set is bound by the publisher. In the monthly parts of The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby, two loose illustrations printed on different paper appear before the text. Additional sets by other illustrators publicized in the Pickwick and Nickleby Advertisers act as complementary additions that diversify and customize serial fiction as part of the publisher’s marketing strategy. In Master Humphrey’s Clock, the official illustrations are inserted as vignettes in the body of the page of letterpress, rather than as full-page illustrations. If this tighter control of the visual and verbal layout of the original marks out additional sets more clearly as extras, specimens of additional illustrations inserted in advertisers restore the book’s potential as an open-ended collection of illustrations and alternative ways of seeing and reading Dickens’s writing.