British Short Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century

The Rise of the Tale

Tim Killick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317171454
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In spite of the importance of the idea of the 'tale' within Romantic-era literature, short fiction of the period has received little attention from critics. Contextualizing British short fiction within the broader framework of early nineteenth-century print culture, Tim Killick argues that authors and publishers sought to present short fiction in book-length volumes as a way of competing with the novel as a legitimate and prestigious genre. Beginning with an overview of the development of short fiction through the late eighteenth century and analysis of the publishing conditions for the genre, including its appearance in magazines and annuals, Killick shows how Washington Irving's hugely popular collections set the stage for British writers. Subsequent chapters consider the stories and sketches of writers as diverse as Mary Russell Mitford and James Hogg, as well as didactic short fiction by authors such as Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Amelia Opie. His book makes a convincing case for the evolution of short fiction into a self-conscious, intentionally modern form, with its own techniques and imperatives, separate from those of the novel.

Chapter 1 Overview: Short Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century

DOI: 10.4324/9781315570297-1

Part I: Criticism, History, and Definitions

Literary Criticism and Short Fiction

While most studies of short fiction acknowledge the existence of the genre in the early nineteenth century, they nonetheless view this era as one of relative infertility. The Romantic period is often seen as the final part of a long trough in the history of the short story: an evolutionary lull initiated by the demise of Medieval and Renaissance romance cycles and not reversed until the arrival of the modern short story in Europe and America in the mid-nineteenth century. Successive critics have mourned this absence. Ian Reid, for example, despite arguing that ‘the short story is in essence a Romantic form_ the Romantic prose form’, describes the output of short fiction by English writers during the entire nineteenth century as ‘virtually negligible’.¹ T.O. Beachcroft’s analysis of the Romantic period is limited to the merits of three female authors (Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Mary Russell Mitford), and to sustained derision of the story-writing efforts of otherwise exceptional authors, such as Coleridge and Mary Shelley.² Wendell Harris, in his comprehensive survey of nineteenth-century short fiction in Britain, gives a far more sympathetic and measured examination of the period. He nonetheless argues that book-trade conditions acted as a deterrent to potential short-fiction writers in the early part of the century, and states that ‘though economic and editorial conditions can be decisively altered by the author of genius, they are of considerable strength in determining what the average competent writer feels it worthwhile to work at. Short fiction having neither an apparent mission nor an attractive market, there was little incentive for the sharpening of tools’.³ The title of Dean Baldwin’s more recent essay, ‘The Tardy Evolution of the British Short Story’, indicates the widespread acceptance of this critical view, and shows how academics have begun seeking explanations for the mid-century surge rather than re-investigating the early part of the century.⁴

¹ Ian Reid, The Short Story (London: Methuen, 1977), pp. 28, 29. ² See T.O. Beachcroft, The Modest Art: A Survey of the Short Story in English (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), Chapter 8. ³ Wendell V. Harris, British Short Fiction in the Nineteenth Century: A Literary and Bibliographic Guide (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979), p. 21. ⁴ This essay appears in Studies in Short Fiction, 30, 1 (Winter 1993): 23–33.

The nineteenth century, it is generally agreed, witnessed the birth of the modern short story, but critics are still far from unanimous when isolating the exact moment of flux. There is a broad academic consensus that sometime between 1800 and 1900 short fiction ceased to be a mode which was associated solely with sentimental romance, simplistic allegory, and explicit moral didacticism. At this point, short fiction began to share the novel’s concerns with psychological and social realism, as well as its broader desire for artistic and historical credibility. This shift is usually described in terms of a synthesis of two older short prose narrative forms: an amalgamation of traditional, orally-derived short narratives (tale, conte, Märchen, skazka, etc.) with the more polished Renaissance form of the novella (or nouvelle, Novelle, povest, etc.)—a predominantly literary mode, which lacks the popular oral history of the tale and which tends towards social observation while adhering more fully to realist conventions.

There are several contending historical moments for this epoch in story-writing. Wendell Harris argues for the ‘arrival of the true short story in the 1880s and 1890s’ with the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and H.G. Wells.⁵ Robert Marler cites the 1850s as the crux of any new conception of the genre, differentiating between the terms ‘tale’ and ‘short story’ in order to signal the change. Marler focuses on developments in America that he claims were driven by a shift in critical attitudes towards fictional moralising: ‘The ability to suggest, to evoke, without resorting to explanations was increasingly praised. Tacked-on moral tags became a sign of mediocrity.’⁶ Charles May goes further back in time and argues that the expansive literary treatment of Märchen (wonder or fairy tales) by German writers provides one starting point for the modern short story. May aligns Marler’s tale-versus-short story dynamic with another two terms—‘fable’ and ‘exemplum’—and claims that under the influence of German Romanticism, short fiction became increasingly sophisticated: ‘at a certain historical point (roughly the end of the eighteenth or the beginning of the nineteenth centuries), it became less easy to determine the meaning lying behind the events depicted in the story.’⁷

⁵ Harris, British Short Fiction, p. 12. ⁶ Robert F. Marler, ‘From Tale to Short Story: The Emergence of a Genre in the 1850’s’, American Literature, 46 (1974–75): 153–69, pp. 159–60. ⁷ Charles E. May (ed.), The New Short Story Theories (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994), Introduction, p. xxiii. May’s use of the terms ‘fable’ and ‘exemplum’ draws on an earlier essay by Karl-Heinz Stierle, ‘Story as Exemplum_ Exemplum as Story’ (1979).

Other critics have pointed to American writers of the 1830s and 1840s as the point of origin for new thinking on short fiction, considering the emergent talents of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville as the decisive factors. Largely because of Poe’s embryonic but highly influential theorising on the subject, these last two decades have come to be viewed as one of the most significant points at which short fiction began to emerge as a modern form. In April and May 1842, Poe wrote two reviews of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales for Graham’s Magazinein which he argued that ‘the Tale’, as he termed short prose fiction, constituted the highest literary form available to an author—one, indeed, that was superior to the novel since a tale could be read in one sitting and thus hold complete sway over the reader for its duration. Furthermore, according to Poe, a tale should be written with its ‘unity of effect’ uppermost in the author’s mind at all times. No word or sentence should be included that did not further this predetermined set of intentions, which were calculated to bring about certain responses in the reader. While subsequent critics of short fiction have seldom accepted Poe’s theories in their entirety, certain aspects of his argument are embedded in twentieth-century thinking about the genre. The conception of short fiction as a highly-wrought literary mode (the prose equivalent of a lyric poem) and the argument that shorter tales should not be viewed as inhabiting a lower echelon of the literary hierarchy than the novel have proved extremely popular within criticism of a genre that often displays an inferiority complex and has struggled to legitimise its brevity.

By re-imagining the role and the potential of short fiction, Poe’s work (both critical and literary) has come to be seen as marking a crucial juncture in the history of the genre. The short fiction of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, and the increased output and rapid development of the form in America in the mid-nineteenth century are often considered to dominate the formation of the modern concept of anglophone short fiction. There is without doubt a strong argument that substantial strides in the writing and appreciation of short fiction took place in the works of these American authors, as the limitations and strengths of short narratives were subjected to more deliberate experimentation. In addition, the British writers of the mid- and late-Victorian period who are given centrality by Wendell Harris were indebted to the progress of the Americans. Authors from the mid-century onward, therefore, not only ushered in a significant increase in output, but also accelerated progress in the understanding of the potential artistic capacity of short fiction and helped create a truly modern form.

In spite of the importance of the American short story boom and its Victorian heirs, my contention is that the focus on the mid-to-late century inevitably marginalises a large part of the history of the genre. Such an attitude is arguably a result of reading backwards—of criticising the short fiction of the earlier part of the century in light of both the Victorian short story and the theorisation of the genre that took place after the 1840s. The short fiction produced in Britain during the early nineteenth century deserves more critical attention than it has so far received, and the practice of mapping generic change should not simply be a case of tracing significant influences. The process of historical analysis should encompass not only the trends and qualities that came to define the later stages of a genre, but should also give attention to innovative modes and sub-genres that failed to germinate and remain peculiar to their own era. The rush to point to the first, best, and most significant can lead to quick assumptions and easy dismissals of texts and writers whose contributions, though quieter than others’, were examples of widespread practice at the time of writing and which are still immensely valuable to critics when looking back at the literature of an earlier era.

The assumption of a relative lack of literary merit is one way in which modern criticism has limited readings of early-nineteenth-century short fiction, but it is not the only way. A second somewhat pernicious critical supposition involves locating short fiction within the rather nebulous notion of an archetypal Romantic text. By situating early-nineteenth-century short fiction in comparison to an idealised external mode an unrealisable opposition is set up. The fiction of the early part of the century seldom conforms to the aesthetic values and concepts of art that literary critics have attributed to the poets and philosophers of the Romantic period. In spite of this, some studies of short fiction have sought to locate its early-nineteenth-century incarnation within a poetic Romantic tradition. Charles May, one of the most important and influential modern short story theorists, conflates the aesthetic concerns of Romantic-era short fiction with those of poetry, and attempts to imbue the genre with a peculiarly Wordsworthian sensibility and a history similar to that of the lyric poem—in effect giving short fiction a similar ideology to that expressed by Wordsworth in his 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads. I quote at length here, because May’s argument encapsulates an entire way of thinking about early-nineteenth-century short fiction:

The romantics attempted to demythologize folktales, to divest them of their external values, and to remythologize them by internalizing those values and self-consciously projecting them onto the external world. They wished to preserve the old religious values of the romance and the folktale without their religious dogma and supernatural trappings. Understanding that stories were based on psychic processes, they secularized the mythic by foregrounding their subjective and projective nature. The folktale, which previously had existed seemingly in vacuo as a received story not influenced by the teller, became infused with the subjectivity of the poet and projected onto the world as a new mythos. Value existed in the external world, but, as the romantics never forgot, only because it existed first within the imagination of the artist. Just as the uniting of folktale material with the voice of an individual perceiver in a concrete situation gave rise to the romantic lyric, as Robert Langbaum has shown, the positioning of a real speaker in a concrete situation, encountering a specific phenomenon that his own subjectivity transforms from the profane into the sacred, gave rise to the short story.⁸

⁸ Charles E. May, The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice (New York: Twayne, 1995), p. 5.

To a large extent this account is wishful thinking, and it is certainly an over-generalisation which is not borne out when reading the vast majority of Romantic-era short fiction. The notion of a clear-cut and homogeneous Romantic tradition of the short story does not exist. The writers who placed short fiction in anything like the role that May here broadly attributes to ‘the romantics’ were few and far between, and there is often little sense of a collective ideology, even amongst those writers whose works are connected thematically, stylistically, or geographically.

To try and connect short fiction to a poetic Romantic tradition is a fraught process. There are few meaningful overlaps between the fiction and the poetry of the period, and while some writers, such as James Hogg, produced a variety of works in different genres that can all be connected to a notion of Romanticism, it does not follow that generic ideolog...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Overview: Short Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century
• 2 Washington Irving: Geoffrey Crayon and the Market for Short Fiction
• 3 Improving Stories: Women Writers, Morality, and Short Fiction
• 4 Regionalism and Folklore: Local Stories and Traditional Forms
• Conclusion: Short Fiction in the 1830s
• Bibliography
• Index