What happens when we think about Victorian novels in terms of their installment length rather than by chapter or volume? The objective of this study is to use Docuscope, a text-tagging tool developed at Carnegie Mellon University, to detect, describe, and reread the signal of seriality in Victorian texts. Through the assistance of digital tools, we identify and analyze previously under-examined rhetorical shifts in serial novels, such as how setting and character distinctions separate Charles Dickens’s weekly and monthly installments, how temporal certainty is reflected in George Eliot’s serialized and non-serialized novels, and the degree of references to the materiality of language that distinguish Dickens’s and Eliot’s serials from the latter’s non-serialized novels. A juxtaposition of computer and human-generated analyses demonstrates algorithmic criticism’s potential to reveal new areas of investigation. The full write-up of our results can be found in Victorian Review 38.2 (Fall 2012): 43-68.