That’s likely the mix up, yes. Dickens was paid in installments and not by the word.
I know from reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (a contemporary of Dickens) that you had to make the sections of book relatively the same length because it has to fit in the allotted space in the magazine

The evidence of this is anecdotal at best and a little dubious, sadly. Mentions of this on the internet never name the novel or give detail like a year, which definitely makes me suspicious as to its veracity

Again, I like the ideas of the quoted post and the other post in the thread. My purpose in being a pedant in a quote post is not to be a dick to op or their ideas, but to share a little bit about my favorite brick of a novel. Maybe one day I’ll talk about how zany Hugo was 8/8

[to digress in Hugo fashion, Bellos says that “it’s not a scientific survey, but I think it’s significant that a higher proportion of baristas and office staff than literature professors I’ve met have read Les Misérables from end to end” (xvi) and I wasn’t expecting to be so called out lmao] 7/8

As Bellos puts it, “Far from being digressions, the essay chapters constitute the basic rhythm of the text. They are what makes Les Misérables what it is: food for the heart, and food for the mind” (154). I believe that the digressions and themes are part of what makes Les Mis relevant today 6/8

but they’re so important thematically. The Waterloo section tells you how the section with the rebellion of 1832 will go long before we reach the thematic and narrative climax of the work. Hugo didn’t just set out to tell a story, he wrote a social commentary and played with the form of novels 5/8

It’s a rather popular myth that Hugo was paid by the word (and the digressions don’t help that image) but that’s not how his work was published. Hugo wrote like that because that’s who he was. He had a lot to say. People make fun of the digressions for being irrelevant to the story, 4/8

Volume I was published April 4, volumes II and III were published in mid-May, and volumes IV and V were published June 30 (Bellos 238). 3/8

Consulting David Bellos’s book The Novel of the Century, I discovered that Hugo sold Les Mis to “MM A Lacroix, Verborkhoven & Cie of Brussels… for 240,000 francs cash” (142).
This was for the entire work. The novel itself was published in parts over the span of three months in 1862 2/8

Yes I do live under a rock, but there are books under here with me.

The things I do for writing apparently consist of calculating what my fictional guy would have spent on tuition a decade ago (by navigating labyrinthine and hellish university webpages) and getting sad on his behalf because I have to give him a heaping pile of student loans