Great Expectations, in byte-sized chunks

"Make ’em cry, make ’em laugh, make ’em wait,” Wilkie Collins said of serialisation. But it was Collins’s friend Charles Dickens who first kindled the fire of the serialised novel by publishing all 15 of his own in instalments. Dickens turned Victorian England into a vast waiting-room of readers, all crying and laughing in unison over the latest in the life of Little Dorrit or the death of Little Nell.

Nothing bonds a nation like anticipation – witness the great expectations this week over the Scottish referendum and The X Factor. There was something civilising in the patience preached by those big-bearded, frock-coated story-tellers.

So hurrah for The Pigeonhole, the digital publisher which will be releasing Great Expectations next month in its original drip-by-drip, nail-biting, cliff-hanging, nerve-racking form. One hundred and fifty-four years may have passed since the novel’s first appearance in the weekly magazine All Year Round, but human nature hasn’t changed: we still want, just occasionally, to be on the same page as one another. The shared experience of a slow-moving saga can be a great leveller, as we know from television series such as Breaking Bad and The Bridge. But how much more noble it is to read rather than watch our stories, to return to the magic of the written word.

Not that we have been entirely starved of magic or narrative tension of late. Fans of George R R Martin’s fantasy series A Game of Thrones waited six years – six years – for the fifth volume to appear in 2011, and are still tapping their fingers for the sixth. The generation who grew up with Harry Potter also know what it is to cry, to laugh and to wait aeons for the next book, which they would purchase at midnight, having queued in the cold, dressed in wizard’s clothing, outside specially opened bookshops. Future Potter-heads, receiving all seven books at birth or inheriting the complete set from their parents, will have no idea how the first readers were affected by this group endurance. For a moment the world was organised around feeding our imaginations: publication was scheduled for Fridays to allow children to stay up all night without the bother of school the next day, and adults would block our ears on public transport to avoid overhearing spoilers.

J K Rowling taught fortitude to the under-11s, which is no mean feat. And what did they do as they waited? They went online to Harry Potter fan-fiction sites to pen their own versions of what would happen next. She therefore encouraged youngsters not only to read, but to write as well.

A book, as both Rowling and Dickens understood, is not a monologue from a podium but a private conversation. Dickens heard his readers respond to his unfolding tales – “Did Little Nell die?” cried the crowds who gathered at the New York docks when the steamers arrived with the latest instalment. The writer converses with the readers but the readers also talk to each another, and this is what serialisation allows.

We have created a culture in which writers are accessible, at festivals, on television, or online, and stories are in process all around us. Serialisation in the age of the internet could turn the world into a giant book club – which is what The Pigeonhole wants to become. “The aim of publishing our books in instalments is to create suspense and prompt discussion,” says Jacob Cockcroft, the founder. “My vision is that three years from now we have 100,000 readers on the site and app… all reading a book at the same time and then discussing that book together.”

It’s a good vision. Reading should be about holding our collective breath. And nothing compares to the sweet pain of being told, as the light goes out, “that’s all we’ve got time for”.