Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- List of Tables
- Note on the Text
- 1 Economics and the Flowering of the British Short Story
- 2 The Business of Authorship
- 3 How Much Money Does an Author Need?
- 4 Publishing Conditions in England, 1880–1950
- 5 Authors’ Careers: The Development of the Short Story in Britain, 1880–1914
- 6 Short Stories and the Magazines
- 7 Magazines’ Restraints on Art in the Service of Commerce
- 8 Short Stories in Book Form
- 9 Sales of Short Story Collections and Novels
- 10 First Editions, Limited Editions and Manuscripts
- 11 The British Short Story and its Reviewers
- 12 Vitality and Variety in the British Short Story, 1915–50
- 13 Art and Commerce in the British Short Story
- Chronology
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
5 - Authors’ Careers: The Development of the Short Story in Britain, 1880–1914
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- List of Tables
- Note on the Text
- 1 Economics and the Flowering of the British Short Story
- 2 The Business of Authorship
- 3 How Much Money Does an Author Need?
- 4 Publishing Conditions in England, 1880–1950
- 5 Authors’ Careers: The Development of the Short Story in Britain, 1880–1914
- 6 Short Stories and the Magazines
- 7 Magazines’ Restraints on Art in the Service of Commerce
- 8 Short Stories in Book Form
- 9 Sales of Short Story Collections and Novels
- 10 First Editions, Limited Editions and Manuscripts
- 11 The British Short Story and its Reviewers
- 12 Vitality and Variety in the British Short Story, 1915–50
- 13 Art and Commerce in the British Short Story
- Chronology
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
As the previous chapter has been at pains to demonstrate, the material conditions for the emergence of the British short story were to a large extent in place by the end of the 1870s, but even by this late date, the aesthetics of the genre were not yet articulated, and few British authors had seriously explored its possibilities. What this chapter will attempt to show is how late-Victorian authors began to be aware of and exploit the expanding market for short stories while simultaneously groping toward an aesthetics of the genre.
Wilkie Collins (1824–89) may serve as an example of the late Victorian author, similar in his approach to short fiction as Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope. Whether his short fiction should even be labelled ‘short stories’ is debatable:
In writing of Collins’ short fiction we prefer to avoid using the term ‘short story’, because in Britain at least the phrase did not come into common use until late in the nineteenth century … Yet there was clearly no shortage of British shorter fiction earlier in the Victorian period, especially in general periodicals aimed at a family audience … There the term ‘tale’ was still generally used for self-contained narratives which often recalled the oral traditions of pre-industrial society.
Moreover, Collins’ place in the development of the genre is also questionable because of the very uneven quality of his tales and his reliance on popular genres and traditional plot. Nonetheless, Collins published short fiction (or tales) throughout his career, sufficient to create six collections spanning the years 1856–87. From the point of view of this study, however, he illustrates how short fiction during this period helped to support a novelist financially between novels, as nothing Collins did in short fiction rivals the impact of The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868). Something of the tales’ importance to his contemporaries may be gathered from the fact that while his novels were frequently reviewed, I can find not one collection of his stories that warranted mention in the contemporary literary press.
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- Art and Commerce in the British Short Story, 1880–1950 , pp. 51 - 66Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014