> It was the Victorian novel that made the chapter seem natural. Key to the reality effects of nineteenth-century British fiction is its synchronisation of novel time with the natural rhythms of life. As a result, novelistic chapters lose their theatrics, their posturing and posing, even those unstable amalgamations surveyed in Equiano and Goethe, and instead become regular and ‘tacit’, receding into the background.

That may all be true. But many authors of that era (e.g. Dickens and Dostoevsky) published their work mainly in monthly installments. Chapters are then, exactly like TV show episodes, simply a technical necessity.