It is a commonplace of short story criticism to assert that English writers were slow taking to the from in the nineteenth century. Where Russian and American authors excelled in the dramatic ‘single-incident’ narrative, the English cultivated, as V. S. Pritchett would later put it, a ‘national taste for the ruminative and disquisitional’: ‘we preferred to graze on the large acreage of the novel and even tales by Dickens or Thackeray or Mrs Gaskell strike us as being unused chapters of longer works’. Among commentators of the time one finds a good deal of support for Pritchett's claim, not least from Henry James who, in an essay on the French writer Guy de Maupassant, suggested that the English preferred their fiction ‘rather by the volume than by the page’. It was not until the last two decades of the nineteenth century, as the novel began to lose command of the literary marketplace and the periodical publishing industry began to boom, that circumstances were finally propitious to the development of the short story.

To a great extent, the ‘rise’, albeit belated, of the form in England had to do with commercial factors. The 1880s and 1890s saw the dramatic expansion of a magazine market that had been growing exponentially since the 1840s. Improved technologies in printing, such as machine-made paper and half-tone illustrations, the repeal of mid-Victorian free-trade duties on paper and changes in copyright law had all conspired to make periodical publishing one of the most accessible and lucrative sectors of the modern economy.