Critics generally hasten to label the majority of Pritchett's characters as Dickensian, principally because of their eccentricity. In an interview with Douglass A. Hughes (1976), Pritchett, himself, did not "object to it [the labeling] because its an enormous compliment. But on the other hand, Dickens was a very great writer who was sort of centrally English in all of his comic characters. . . . sometimes I may be Dickensian but not in the sense of just going in for funny people. For most of the people I've written fantastic things about are not funny people at all."

Thus, the characters in his short stories come forth as complex webs of the comic, the tragic, the pathetic, and the ironic. In the short fiction, Pritchett populates his fictional streets with characters who remind the alert reader of similar types from Dickens, Poe, de Maupassant, Chekhov, Joyce, and Frank O'Connor; they may be...