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.
