SOURCE: Baldwin, Dean. “The Tardy Evolution of the British Short Story.” Studies in Short Fiction 30, no. 1 (winter 1993): 23-33.

In the following essay, Baldwin probes the economic and social factors that contributed to the slow development of the short story in nineteenth-century Britain.

One of the more curious anomalies of literary history is why the short story was so late to blossom in Britain. By the 1840s the genre was already established in America, and within two decades it had taken root in Germany, Russia, and France. I am speaking here, of course, of the modern short story, defined loosely as Poe's story of “single effect,” not simply of fiction shorter than the typical novel. This modern story did not achieve prominence in Britain until the 1880s, even though Britain would appear especially likely to develop the genre, since during the period of the story's “invention,” if we may...