SOURCE: "Henry Lawson as Short Story Writer," in Henry Lawson: Poet and Short Story Writer, Angus and Robertson, 1966, pp. 43-66.

In the following excerpt, Roderick places Lawson's fiction in the context of the modern short story and the Australian short story.

[What] is the nature of the short story? What characterizes it as an art form?

We could arrive at its nature by taking a historical view of it. We could see how the modern short story began independently with Hans Andersen in Denmark, Gogol in Russia, and Edgar Allan Poe in America. Thence we might trace it through to the present time. From any volume of Charles Dickens's weekly magazine, Household Words, we could see how Dickens first essayed the form in the 1850's. We could see how he approached it after many years of writing novels—none better—and how he failed because he applied to...