What you have to remember about Victorian literature, and Dickens in particular, is that most of those authors wrote their novels in serial form. They weren't read all in one go by the original audience. An imperfect analogy is a television series that tells an ongoing story. Collecting those novels into book form afterwards was something akin to selling the complete series of
24 on DVD after it's finished it's initial run on television. It's not that they had no sense of brevity; it's that they chose a certain format over another.
Mind you,
Dracula wasn't serialized. I don't blame you for suffering while reading it, though, because Stoker isn't the best writer.
