The short story was a commercial phenomenon which took off in the late nineteenth century and lasted through to the rise of television and film. Using a wide variety of sources, Baldwin shows how economic factors helped to dictate what authors wrote and the way they wrote it. These conditions actually helped to disseminate the fiction of nearly all the major and minor writers of the period, from Hardy and Conrad to H E Bates and V S Pritchett. He argues that contrary to Modernists’ claims that financial demands of middlebrow magazines prevented the genre from developing, they actually helped to improve authors’ writing, particularly the work of Henry James and D H Lawrence.

"'a valuable, empirically-based study ... that will be returned to as much for the evidence it assembles as its overall arguments, and for this reason literary and book historians owe Baldwin a considerable debt.'"