This book will argue throughout that the rise and fall of the British short story is intimately connected to the economics of its writing and publishing. This in itself is hardly a new or controversial statement, as literary historians and critics have long asserted the connection between the development of the short story as a genre and the rise of the periodical press and its need for copy that would appeal to a variety of readers. The relevance of economics to publishing has by now a considerable history and pedigree, although most of this work in both theory and practice has focused on the novel. An early exception to this observation is William Charvat's Literary Publishing in America 1790–1850 (1959) and his The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870 (1968), both of which have useful comments about the rise of magazines and the production of short stories. More clearly focused on the short story is Frederick Lewis Pattee's The Development of the American Short Story (1923), and all of this work has been brought up to date in Andrew Levy's The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story (1993), but of course these studies focus on American rather than British literature.

Numerous books deal in general with economics and publishing conditions in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among these are Per Gedin, Literature in the Marketplace (1977), John Vernon, Money and Fiction (1984), N. N. Feltes, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels (1986), John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (eds), Literature and the Marketplace (1995), Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (1996), Ian Wilson, et al., Modernist Writers and the Marketplace (1996), J. B. Bullen (ed.), Writing and Victorianism (1997), Peter D. McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880–1914 (1997), Joyce Piell Wexler, Who Paid for Modernism? (1997), Paul Delany, Literature, Money and the Market From Trollope to Amis (2002) and Alissa G. Karl, Modernism and the Marketplace (2009).