SOURCE: Pickering, Sam. “The Cheap Repository Tracts and the Short Story.” Studies in Short Fiction 12, no. 1 (winter 1975): 15-21.

In the following essay, Pickering claims that More's tracts were forerunners of the nineteenth-century short story.

In a letter to Henry Brevoort in 1824, Washington Irving said that he had written sketches and short tales rather than long works because he chose “to take a line of writing peculiar to myself, rather than fall into the manner or school of any other writer.”¹ Like all claims of originality, Irving's declaration should be taken with a grain of salt. Shake any literary history and several possible sources for all genres are sure to fall out. Be that as it may, and at the risk of soon being told my “first” should be last, I would like to suggest a “beginning” for the modern British and American short story.

In his study of...