I'm reading "The Count of Monte Cristo" and am struck by the relatively slow pacing of the novel. The story will diverge into various directions and random conversations will go one for page after page after page. I've noticed this with other novels of the period and have read statements saying that a novel like "Swann's Way" could never be written in modern times.
What are people's thoughts on how much this is related to a slower pace of life and less media intrusions or is it simply because of the way these novels were released - "The Count of Monte Cristo" it was released as a serial over several years I think and so there was maybe some incentive to stretch it out as long as it was bearable to do so?...
Any thoughts appreciated.
It's difficult to give a proper, academic answer to this question, as to my knowledge no serious research has been conducted on the issue from a literary/historical perspective as far as I can tell, and a quick search through some of my scholarly resources yielded search results on pacing primarily related to cardiac health, so this is strictly opinion, conjecture, and personal analysis. Hopefully you find it useful nonetheless.
I see this change as tied to the natural development of literature a medium and an art. The Count of Monte Cristo couldn't be written today anymore than it would've been written in (the equidistant) 1674. These years all exist at different points in literary history and have entirely different literary traditions. Like all art, The Count of Monte Cristo and Swann's Way are products of their time, culture, and artistic tradition.
Your observation about serialization is very probably a factor, but let's consider serialization in the modern context. For example, The Green Mile by Stephen King was originally serialized as well, yet reads fluidly. That said, it was also produced over a time span of just half a year, not comparable to the serialized novels of the 19th century (and earlier) in that respect.
So let's consider the flip side, which is just that we treat serialization differently today. Consider long-form series of today like Harry Potter, A Song of Ice and Fire, or, taking a couple of steps back into literary history, The Lord of the Rings. Compiled into one volume, any of these series would be a comparably ponderous, wandering narrative full of divergent storylines that seem utterly irrelevant to the greater plot of this "book". But (with the exception of The Lord of the Rings, which I see as being the closest modern equivalent to a serial novel like In Search of Lost Time / Swann's Way) these books aren't intended to be read as one volume. The authors have changed how they write, and each is meant to be its own standalone novel as well as part of a larger story, but ultimately this modern form of serialization is a trend that developed out of the serial novels that came before.
This process of past work informing present is part of a literary theory developed by Mikhail Bakhtin in the 1930s called dialogism. The basic idea of this is that the entire body of literary work is participating in a dialogue. New material is written at least in part as a response to that which has come before, whether in fiction or non (and indeed, in Bakhtin's view, this is true of all thought). In turn, new contributions to the dialogue will affect how old material is read - this is largely the province of literary criticism, but it (Bakhtin would argue) must happen in fiction as well. For example, a reading of House of Leaves today might lead one to, and subsequently colour their reading of, say, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, as they're similar texts in terms of their level of effort and responsibility on the reader for constructing the narrative.
Your hypothesis on media's impact on pace is certainly an interesting one. I don't know that I would entirely agree with it at a surface level, as a lot of thinking on modern fast-paced living is tied to the internet, and we certainly see more modern pacing arise well before the internet joins the collective social consciousness. However, ideas like this are less the realm of either history or literary studies and more studies on media and technology or techno-culture. There is probably good academic literature fairly readily available on this subject, but I'm not familiar with any of it personally.
Sources:
As mentioned, this is largely an opinion/firsthand analysis post. However, if you want to dig a little more into into some of the ideas mentioned within, The Dialogic Imagination by Mikhail Bakhtin is where he originally published his theories. You may also be interested in the work of my go-to work on the development of the novel, The Novel: An Alternative History by Steven Moore, the second volume of which covers 1600-1800 in literary history and is a good demonstration of the unstoppable evolution of novels over time.
A short bibliography of other books referenced in this post:
You may get some more responses at /r/AskLiteraryStudies, not that The1Man hasn't brought up some good points.