British Short Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century: The Rise of the Tale, and: From Sketch to Novel: The Development of Victorian Fiction (review)

Even as the contents of the nineteenth-century canon have been challenged and revised in recent years, a gap remains in our attention to the era between the Romantics and the Victorians. These transition years—between the deaths of John Keats (1821), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1822), and Lord Byron (1824) on the one hand, and the publication of Oliver Twist (1837–38) on the other—lack even a descriptive label to identify them. And yet much was happening: these were formative years and the time of first publication for some of the foremost writers of the Victorian age. Charles Dickens’s earliest literary publications, written between 1833 and 1836, appeared initially as contributions to periodicals and newspapers; they were gathered in two series of selections as Sketches by Boz (1836) and republished as a monthly serial (1837–39), before appearing in a one-volume collected edition in 1839. William Makepeace Thackeray, similarly began his career as a writer for magazines and selected ninety pieces for his first book, The Paris Sketch Book (1840). To appreciate these works accurately, we need to be aware of the book and magazine culture in which they participated.

As literary periodicals proliferated in the 1820s and 1830s, a number of long-forgotten writers contributed essays, sketches, and tales to their pages, and by the 1830s coherent collections of such pieces began to appear. Thomas Hood collected his magazine contributions, dating from 1821, in Whims and Oddities (two volumes, 1826–27). John Poole, the author of the play Paul Pry (1825), gathered his journalism in the Comic Sketch Book (1836). Robert Surtees, whose sketches of Cockney sporting life appeared in the New Sporting Magazine between 1831 and 1834, published them as Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities (1838). Meanwhile, Life in London, the sensationally popular adventures of Tom and Jerry, written by Pierce Egan and illustrated by George and Robert Cruikshank, appeared first in monthly instalments in 1821, and Sayings and Doings, the novellas of Theodore Hook, begun in 1824, expanded to nine volumes by 1829.

In short, discursive and narrative literary articles and the practice of publishing novels in parts constituted a significant strand of writing at the time, scholarly investigation of which, of the kind represented by these two volumes under review, is most welcome. Tim Killick’s British Short Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century: The Rise of the Tale is historicism at its best. Thoughtfully exploring a variety of short literary forms, he offers a survey of the development of short fiction from the late eighteenth century to the 1830s and its relation to publishing conditions for the genre. Citing Edgar Allen Poe’s concept of “unity of effect,” he rejects the term “short story” as misleading in relation to later developments of short fiction, carefully charting interconnections between tales, narrative essays, descriptive sketches, comic extracts, and morally didactic writings. Observing that “the boundaries of the genre had to be negotiated at every stage” (2), Killick notes the “ideological gap” between the publication of stories in a periodical and those collected in a book: short fiction in a magazine or newspaper was essentially ephemeral, “an insubstantial part of an insubstantial medium” (33), whereas the appearance of the same piece within the covers of a book conferred substance. Above all he insists that “writers of short fiction attempted to carve out their own niche within the literary canon, and many wished to distinguish their writing from association with the novel” (88). Reducing the length of didactic tales, for example, made it easier for an author to convey a single moral precept. “The foremost shaping force of such writing,” Killick observes, was not the opinion of critics or of other authors...