Originally published at: Lost Bram Stoker short story "Gibbet Hill" found after 134 years - Boing Boing
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I thought they paid by the page, which is why stuff like Dickens and Wilkie Colins are so prolix. They had limited numbers of stories running in each edition of the magazines (rather than the multiple authors on the covers of the pulp magazines in America shortly after this).
When the Americans started paying by the word prose tautened up quite a lot. I read a fair bit of genre literature from the 19th to early 20th centuries a few years ago and the change was noticeable.
This has a public reading and exhibition at Stokerfest here in Dublin next week.
Which if you are in town do stop by. We usually get to a couple of things.
But probably won’t head to the Casino as Dubliners are all vampires and we can’t cross the Liffey.
(Péisteanna just means worms btw. Though if used in a sentence it sounds like many accents pronouncing “beast”)
ETA
I should say that I mean it in the form bpéist which is pronounced “baysht”. Maybe it’s only funny to me.
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Sounds like a bad Sean Connery impersonator…
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So…I gather the Punchbowl’s edge was to the east?
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Right you are, correxed.
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I think your actual point was bang on: they were paid to pad out their writing and drag it on. And did they ever do it!
I’ve often compared them to modern TV series where, if they are successful, they inevitably add in padding generating narrative interest with contrived cliff hangers/pot boilers rather than the actual story itself generating interest.
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Not sure I get this. Why does pay per word differ from pay per page? Either way, the more words, the more pages, the more pay. 
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Pulp magazines had more, shorter stories in them. I assume to maximise the brand recognition of the authors or characters (Continental Op) on the cover. Dickens’s magazines had like two stories on the go at a time. Potboilera rather than short. Pulp novels also were much shorter than the earlier style.
I also blame US newspapers and telegraphs for the vast improvement in literary style and form.
I think Defoe was paid, not by the page nor by the word, but rather by the number of pointless, tedious, disgusting pious god bothering interjections he managed to showhorn into his nasty exploitative apology text.
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Ah that explains why he went to “Punchbowl” not “the Punch Bowl”!
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