Commerce & the Short Story

DEAN BALDWIN ties the short story’s rise and fall in the Victorian and modernist periods to the complex economic conditions of the market, focusing on the way in which the short story became a source of earning potential and aesthetic development for numerous writers. Baldwin emphasizes authors as “free agents” who were not solely buffeted by the market, but who actively “navigate[d]” the capitalist publishing system of the time to “write and profit from short fiction that expressed their thematic, stylistic, and aesthetic ends.” His sociological approach aligns with theories of economics, print culture, and literature exemplified by critics such as Paul Delaney and D. F. McKenzie. Baldwin understands economics and literature as mutually influenced and influential, operating in a symbiotic relationship for artists creating remunerative and aesthetically expressive work. This thirteenth offering in the History of the Book series from Pickering & Chatto is a welcome addition.

Baldwin’s book fills an obvious gap in short story research by pulling together a variety of source materials to give a solid overview of the genre’s value for authors and the marketplace. The thirteen chapters each tend to offer one of three types of argument, all of which include economic negotiation as a central component: historical overviews (chapters 1, 4, 7, 10, 13); authorial surveys (chapters 2, 5, 12); and reexaminations of critical assumptions about the short story (chapters 3, 6, 8, 9, 11). These chapters do not follow an understandable organizational structure but instead move from one type of argument to another without a clear trajectory.

Chapters 1, 4, 7, and 10 provide exhaustive historical overviews. The bulk of his first chapter outlines the historical factors that contributed to the rise of the short story in the 1880s. Chapter 4 details publishing conditions in England from 1880 to 1950, highlighting legal changes such as the Net Book Agreement of 1900, the Copyright Act of 1911, and the impact of world wars on the price of paper. Baldwin also examines the way in which magazines of the 1890s such as the Strand and The Yellow Book “codified the aesthetics of the short story.” Chapter 7 is a brief discussion of the central demands of magazines regarding content in the service of commercial aims, a holdover of late Victorianism that lasted into the twentieth century. Chapter 10 highlights a lesser-known sector of the short story market from the end of World War I to 1929: the collecting craze for first editions, limited editions, and manuscripts in the postwar period that built from the private press movement. Short story writers profited in reputation and in economics by printing a story in small runs and later submitting the same story to a magazine. All these chapters are informative, largely descriptive summaries.

Baldwin’s second chapter focuses on the business of authorship and the rise of the literary agent. He dispels the idea that authors were not economically savvy, arguing that many authors and their agents examined contracts and accounts. He uses anecdotal evidence to demonstrate that authors were interested in marketing and “frequently planned their strategy and collaborated with their publishers on the best way to proceed.” Baldwin, in a methodological approach that serves as a mainstay of the book, peppers the argument with references to a core list of around twenty authors. Chapters 5 and 12 offer authorial overviews, together providing a survey of short story writers and their output from 1880 to 1914 and from 1915 to 1950, respectively. Chapter 5 focuses on writers who collectively “[grope] toward an aesthetics of the genre,” including but not limited to Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, M. E. Braddon, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Egerton, and Arnold Bennett. Chapter 12 considers eight writers of the “second wave of Modernism” after 1920 whose content was modernist in preoccupation, if not in form. These are useful descriptive introductions to major short story writers, but they are not groundbreaking in their claims about the writers’ contributions to the genre or...