As the previous chapters have suggested, the place of the short story in the economy of its writers from 1880–1950 was a curiously precarious and anomalous one, for, once established, the short story's position in the culture became rather uneasy. Unlike the novel, which had gained an honourable place in British culture, the short story sat uncomfortably at the table – vigorous, popular, highly regarded, yet somehow suspect – a sort of lively but uninvited guest.

That uneasy place at Britain's cultural banquet is reflected in the strange history of the short story's emergence as a separate genre and the ways in which reviewers subsequently treated it. To appreciate how the short story emerged as a separate genre in reviewers’ minds (and presumably the minds of authors and readers), it is instructive to begin before the 1880s to see how stories that were shorter than novels were treated by Victorian reviewers. Not surprisingly, reviews of short fiction were far less common than those of novels, and it is not possible to attempt a representative survey. Rather, I have selected a few reviews for brief analysis as a prelude to the theme of this chapter, which is that at some point during the 1890s, reviewing of short stories changed significantly and in ways that were inimical to the genre and its subsequent rise to popularity, and contributed to its eventual fall from grace after World War II.

One example is provided by the rather obscure Trewman's Exeter Flying Post. The anonymous reviewer lists a number of newly published books and reprints, both in fiction and non-fiction, and then surveys some of the current magazines and their content, among them the Blackwood's for that month. Included in the January Blackwood's is the first of George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life, ‘Th e Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton’. Th e Flying Post's reviewer chooses the story as the ‘chef d'ouvre’ of the magazine's contents, praises it for exposing the ‘“crying evil” of the Established Church’ and goes on to quote at some length from the story to illustrate its style and content.