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14 - The Understated Art, English Style
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- By Dean Baldwin, Pennsylvania State University
- Edited by Dominic Head, University of Nottingham
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- The Cambridge History of the English Short Story
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- 17 November 2016
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- 14 November 2016, pp 235-251
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Summary
The writers discussed in this chapter form a unique group in the history of modern British fiction. Most were born during the rise of high modernism and came to maturity during its flourishing decade, the 1920s, yet, with a few exceptions, they have seldom been included in discussions of modernism, or in considerations of the ‘Auden generation’. If anything, they might be called second generation modernists, for their stories – influenced by the stark realism of Maupassant, the open-ended poetics of Chekhov and the sexual politics of D. H. Lawrence – often seemed unconventional to magazine editors and contemporary readers. Nevertheless, they embodied in many ways the fears of some high modernists, springing as they did from the lower middle classes, educated not in public schools and universities but in the newly created grammar schools, earning their living by their pens. Except for Lawrence and Graham Greene, the writers discussed here were not intellectuals; they had no overriding theories of politics, economics and sociology, though inevitably their stories touch on these issues. With a few exceptions, they resembled E. M. Forster's Leonard Bast – struggling to move upwards culturally by locating themselves between the extremes of popular genres (mystery, adventure and romance) and the experiments of The Yellow Book, Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway.
As most of these writers came to maturity between the World Wars, they reacted to the mass murder of the First World War by focusing on the individual, but, unlike the modernists, they found much of their inspiration among the people of the small towns and farms outside London. Jed Esty argues that the ‘metropolitan modernists’ (T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Forster) turned away from internationalism, fragmentation and the city in the 1930s to focus on an inward-looking, non-imperial England. Following Esty's lead, we might postulate that the writers discussed here also focused inwardly on individuals at the margins of society, as Frank O'Connor's theory of the story claims. Like the modernists, they often delved into their characters’ internal lives and found complex, unstable characters, but the traditional omniscient or first person, or occasionally the free-indirect, points of view – not stream of consciousness – were the staples of their narrative repertoire.
A Discriminant Analysis of Grain Market Structure in Selected States of the South and Cornbelt
- E. Dean Baldwin, Cameron S. Thraen, Donald W. Larson
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- Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics / Volume 16 / Issue 2 / December 1984
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 05 September 2016, pp. 117-126
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Scherer's industrial organization model is modified to characterize the grain marketing system. The modified model identifies the important relationships between economic characteristics and the type of grain facilities found in three states; Alabama, Illinois, and Ohio. Multivariate linear discriminant analysis is used to identify the important basic supply, demand, and transportation variables within and among these states. It is concluded that the structural differences among selected grain marketing regions can be explained by regional differences in basic supply, demand, and transportation variables. The findings suggest that Scherer's industrial organization model can be adapted to explain the diverse structure of the grain marketing system in selected states.
Contributors
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- By Mitchell Aboulafia, Frederick Adams, Marilyn McCord Adams, Robert M. Adams, Laird Addis, James W. Allard, David Allison, William P. Alston, Karl Ameriks, C. Anthony Anderson, David Leech Anderson, Lanier Anderson, Roger Ariew, David Armstrong, Denis G. Arnold, E. J. Ashworth, Margaret Atherton, Robin Attfield, Bruce Aune, Edward Wilson Averill, Jody Azzouni, Kent Bach, Andrew Bailey, Lynne Rudder Baker, Thomas R. Baldwin, Jon Barwise, George Bealer, William Bechtel, Lawrence C. Becker, Mark A. Bedau, Ernst Behler, José A. Benardete, Ermanno Bencivenga, Jan Berg, Michael Bergmann, Robert L. Bernasconi, Sven Bernecker, Bernard Berofsky, Rod Bertolet, Charles J. Beyer, Christian Beyer, Joseph Bien, Joseph Bien, Peg Birmingham, Ivan Boh, James Bohman, Daniel Bonevac, Laurence BonJour, William J. Bouwsma, Raymond D. Bradley, Myles Brand, Richard B. Brandt, Michael E. Bratman, Stephen E. Braude, Daniel Breazeale, Angela Breitenbach, Jason Bridges, David O. Brink, Gordon G. Brittan, Justin Broackes, Dan W. Brock, Aaron Bronfman, Jeffrey E. Brower, Bartosz Brozek, Anthony Brueckner, Jeffrey Bub, Lara Buchak, Otavio Bueno, Ann E. Bumpus, Robert W. Burch, John Burgess, Arthur W. Burks, Panayot Butchvarov, Robert E. Butts, Marina Bykova, Patrick Byrne, David Carr, Noël Carroll, Edward S. Casey, Victor Caston, Victor Caston, Albert Casullo, Robert L. Causey, Alan K. L. Chan, Ruth Chang, Deen K. Chatterjee, Andrew Chignell, Roderick M. Chisholm, Kelly J. Clark, E. J. Coffman, Robin Collins, Brian P. Copenhaver, John Corcoran, John Cottingham, Roger Crisp, Frederick J. Crosson, Antonio S. Cua, Phillip D. Cummins, Martin Curd, Adam Cureton, Andrew Cutrofello, Stephen Darwall, Paul Sheldon Davies, Wayne A. Davis, Timothy Joseph Day, Claudio de Almeida, Mario De Caro, Mario De Caro, John Deigh, C. F. Delaney, Daniel C. Dennett, Michael R. DePaul, Michael Detlefsen, Daniel Trent Devereux, Philip E. Devine, John M. Dillon, Martin C. Dillon, Robert DiSalle, Mary Domski, Alan Donagan, Paul Draper, Fred Dretske, Mircea Dumitru, Wilhelm Dupré, Gerald Dworkin, John Earman, Ellery Eells, Catherine Z. Elgin, Berent Enç, Ronald P. Endicott, Edward Erwin, John Etchemendy, C. Stephen Evans, Susan L. Feagin, Solomon Feferman, Richard Feldman, Arthur Fine, Maurice A. Finocchiaro, William FitzPatrick, Richard E. Flathman, Gvozden Flego, Richard Foley, Graeme Forbes, Rainer Forst, Malcolm R. Forster, Daniel Fouke, Patrick Francken, Samuel Freeman, Elizabeth Fricker, Miranda Fricker, Michael Friedman, Michael Fuerstein, Richard A. Fumerton, Alan Gabbey, Pieranna Garavaso, Daniel Garber, Jorge L. A. Garcia, Robert K. Garcia, Don Garrett, Philip Gasper, Gerald Gaus, Berys Gaut, Bernard Gert, Roger F. Gibson, Cody Gilmore, Carl Ginet, Alan H. Goldman, Alvin I. Goldman, Alfonso Gömez-Lobo, Lenn E. Goodman, Robert M. Gordon, Stefan Gosepath, Jorge J. E. Gracia, Daniel W. Graham, George A. Graham, Peter J. Graham, Richard E. Grandy, I. Grattan-Guinness, John Greco, Philip T. Grier, Nicholas Griffin, Nicholas Griffin, David A. Griffiths, Paul J. Griffiths, Stephen R. Grimm, Charles L. Griswold, Charles B. Guignon, Pete A. Y. Gunter, Dimitri Gutas, Gary Gutting, Paul Guyer, Kwame Gyekye, Oscar A. Haac, Raul Hakli, Raul Hakli, Michael Hallett, Edward C. Halper, Jean Hampton, R. James Hankinson, K. R. Hanley, Russell Hardin, Robert M. Harnish, William Harper, David Harrah, Kevin Hart, Ali Hasan, William Hasker, John Haugeland, Roger Hausheer, William Heald, Peter Heath, Richard Heck, John F. Heil, Vincent F. Hendricks, Stephen Hetherington, Francis Heylighen, Kathleen Marie Higgins, Risto Hilpinen, Harold T. Hodes, Joshua Hoffman, Alan Holland, Robert L. Holmes, Richard Holton, Brad W. Hooker, Terence E. Horgan, Tamara Horowitz, Paul Horwich, Vittorio Hösle, Paul Hoβfeld, Daniel Howard-Snyder, Frances Howard-Snyder, Anne Hudson, Deal W. Hudson, Carl A. Huffman, David L. Hull, Patricia Huntington, Thomas Hurka, Paul Hurley, Rosalind Hursthouse, Guillermo Hurtado, Ronald E. Hustwit, Sarah Hutton, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, Harry A. Ide, David Ingram, Philip J. Ivanhoe, Alfred L. Ivry, Frank Jackson, Dale Jacquette, Joseph Jedwab, Richard Jeffrey, David Alan Johnson, Edward Johnson, Mark D. Jordan, Richard Joyce, Hwa Yol Jung, Robert Hillary Kane, Tomis Kapitan, Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley, James A. Keller, Ralph Kennedy, Sergei Khoruzhii, Jaegwon Kim, Yersu Kim, Nathan L. King, Patricia Kitcher, Peter D. Klein, E. D. Klemke, Virginia Klenk, George L. Kline, Christian Klotz, Simo Knuuttila, Joseph J. Kockelmans, Konstantin Kolenda, Sebastian Tomasz Kołodziejczyk, Isaac Kramnick, Richard Kraut, Fred Kroon, Manfred Kuehn, Steven T. Kuhn, Henry E. Kyburg, John Lachs, Jennifer Lackey, Stephen E. Lahey, Andrea Lavazza, Thomas H. Leahey, Joo Heung Lee, Keith Lehrer, Dorothy Leland, Noah M. Lemos, Ernest LePore, Sarah-Jane Leslie, Isaac Levi, Andrew Levine, Alan E. Lewis, Daniel E. Little, Shu-hsien Liu, Shu-hsien Liu, Alan K. L. Chan, Brian Loar, Lawrence B. Lombard, John Longeway, Dominic McIver Lopes, Michael J. Loux, E. J. Lowe, Steven Luper, Eugene C. Luschei, William G. Lycan, David Lyons, David Macarthur, Danielle Macbeth, Scott MacDonald, Jacob L. Mackey, Louis H. Mackey, Penelope Mackie, Edward H. Madden, Penelope Maddy, G. B. Madison, Bernd Magnus, Pekka Mäkelä, Rudolf A. Makkreel, David Manley, William E. Mann (W.E.M.), Vladimir Marchenkov, Peter Markie, Jean-Pierre Marquis, Ausonio Marras, Mike W. Martin, A. P. Martinich, William L. McBride, David McCabe, Storrs McCall, Hugh J. McCann, Robert N. McCauley, John J. McDermott, Sarah McGrath, Ralph McInerny, Daniel J. McKaughan, Thomas McKay, Michael McKinsey, Brian P. McLaughlin, Ernan McMullin, Anthonie Meijers, Jack W. Meiland, William Jason Melanson, Alfred R. Mele, Joseph R. Mendola, Christopher Menzel, Michael J. Meyer, Christian B. Miller, David W. Miller, Peter Millican, Robert N. Minor, Phillip Mitsis, James A. Montmarquet, Michael S. Moore, Tim Moore, Benjamin Morison, Donald R. Morrison, Stephen J. Morse, Paul K. Moser, Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, Ian Mueller, James Bernard Murphy, Mark C. Murphy, Steven Nadler, Jan Narveson, Alan Nelson, Jerome Neu, Samuel Newlands, Kai Nielsen, Ilkka Niiniluoto, Carlos G. Noreña, Calvin G. Normore, David Fate Norton, Nikolaj Nottelmann, Donald Nute, David S. Oderberg, Steve Odin, Michael O’Rourke, Willard G. Oxtoby, Heinz Paetzold, George S. Pappas, Anthony J. Parel, Lydia Patton, R. P. Peerenboom, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Adriaan T. Peperzak, Derk Pereboom, Jaroslav Peregrin, Glen Pettigrove, Philip Pettit, Edmund L. Pincoffs, Andrew Pinsent, Robert B. Pippin, Alvin Plantinga, Louis P. Pojman, Richard H. Popkin, John F. Post, Carl J. Posy, William J. Prior, Richard Purtill, Michael Quante, Philip L. Quinn, Philip L. Quinn, Elizabeth S. Radcliffe, Diana Raffman, Gerard Raulet, Stephen L. Read, Andrews Reath, Andrew Reisner, Nicholas Rescher, Henry S. Richardson, Robert C. Richardson, Thomas Ricketts, Wayne D. Riggs, Mark Roberts, Robert C. Roberts, Luke Robinson, Alexander Rosenberg, Gary Rosenkranz, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Adina L. Roskies, William L. Rowe, T. M. Rudavsky, Michael Ruse, Bruce Russell, Lilly-Marlene Russow, Dan Ryder, R. M. Sainsbury, Joseph Salerno, Nathan Salmon, Wesley C. Salmon, Constantine Sandis, David H. Sanford, Marco Santambrogio, David Sapire, Ruth A. Saunders, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Charles Sayward, James P. Scanlan, Richard Schacht, Tamar Schapiro, Frederick F. Schmitt, Jerome B. Schneewind, Calvin O. Schrag, Alan D. Schrift, George F. Schumm, Jean-Loup Seban, David N. Sedley, Kenneth Seeskin, Krister Segerberg, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Dennis M. Senchuk, James F. Sennett, William Lad Sessions, Stewart Shapiro, Tommie Shelby, Donald W. Sherburne, Christopher Shields, Roger A. Shiner, Sydney Shoemaker, Robert K. Shope, Kwong-loi Shun, Wilfried Sieg, A. John Simmons, Robert L. Simon, Marcus G. Singer, Georgette Sinkler, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Matti T. Sintonen, Lawrence Sklar, Brian Skyrms, Robert C. Sleigh, Michael Anthony Slote, Hans Sluga, Barry Smith, Michael Smith, Robin Smith, Robert Sokolowski, Robert C. Solomon, Marta Soniewicka, Philip Soper, Ernest Sosa, Nicholas Southwood, Paul Vincent Spade, T. L. S. Sprigge, Eric O. Springsted, George J. Stack, Rebecca Stangl, Jason Stanley, Florian Steinberger, Sören Stenlund, Christopher Stephens, James P. Sterba, Josef Stern, Matthias Steup, M. A. Stewart, Leopold Stubenberg, Edith Dudley Sulla, Frederick Suppe, Jere Paul Surber, David George Sussman, Sigrún Svavarsdóttir, Zeno G. Swijtink, Richard Swinburne, Charles C. Taliaferro, Robert B. Talisse, John Tasioulas, Paul Teller, Larry S. Temkin, Mark Textor, H. S. Thayer, Peter Thielke, Alan Thomas, Amie L. Thomasson, Katherine Thomson-Jones, Joshua C. Thurow, Vzalerie Tiberius, Terrence N. Tice, Paul Tidman, Mark C. Timmons, William Tolhurst, James E. Tomberlin, Rosemarie Tong, Lawrence Torcello, Kelly Trogdon, J. D. Trout, Robert E. Tully, Raimo Tuomela, John Turri, Martin M. Tweedale, Thomas Uebel, Jennifer Uleman, James Van Cleve, Harry van der Linden, Peter van Inwagen, Bryan W. Van Norden, René van Woudenberg, Donald Phillip Verene, Samantha Vice, Thomas Vinci, Donald Wayne Viney, Barbara Von Eckardt, Peter B. M. Vranas, Steven J. Wagner, William J. Wainwright, Paul E. Walker, Robert E. Wall, Craig Walton, Douglas Walton, Eric Watkins, Richard A. Watson, Michael V. Wedin, Rudolph H. Weingartner, Paul Weirich, Paul J. Weithman, Carl Wellman, Howard Wettstein, Samuel C. Wheeler, Stephen A. White, Jennifer Whiting, Edward R. Wierenga, Michael Williams, Fred Wilson, W. Kent Wilson, Kenneth P. Winkler, John F. Wippel, Jan Woleński, Allan B. Wolter, Nicholas P. Wolterstorff, Rega Wood, W. Jay Wood, Paul Woodruff, Alison Wylie, Gideon Yaffe, Takashi Yagisawa, Yutaka Yamamoto, Keith E. Yandell, Xiaomei Yang, Dean Zimmerman, Günter Zoller, Catherine Zuckert, Michael Zuckert, Jack A. Zupko (J.A.Z.)
- Edited by Robert Audi, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
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- The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
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- 05 August 2015
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- 27 April 2015, pp ix-xxx
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7 - Magazines’ Restraints on Art in the Service of Commerce
- Dean Baldwin
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- Art and Commerce in the British Short Story, 1880–1950
- Published by:
- Pickering & Chatto
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- 05 December 2014, pp 87-94
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Summary
The enclosed story is nearly 3,000 words. It deals with a lady, who had intended to elope with a married man, but as she does not elope, and nobody gets drunk, and nobody swears, and the general tone is by no means cynical, it might possibly suit Windsor.
Barry Pain.In chapter 3, we surveyed the short story market in late Victorian England and found, as expected, that Stevenson, Hardy, Conrad – indeed most authors of the period –encountered resistance from Mudie's, magazine editors and book publishers whenever they tried to push the boundaries of Victorian taste and prudery. The gradual chipping away of Victorian standards led to some easing of restrictions, but the late Victorian forces that these authors faced did not disappear with a new generation of writers. Indeed, very little changed, especially in the magazine markets, even after World War I, and, if the examples below are at all typical, they endured until World War II and after. As the difficulties these and other late Victorian writers experienced with the magazine market have been well documented, we will not pursue them here. Rather, this chapter will focus on how the residual prejudices and restrictions of late Victorianism persisted even after the short story had blossomed in the 1890s and become a staple of many magazines after the turn of the century.
Barry Pain, an enormously popular author who in his day was also regarded as more than a bestseller, reminds us above that the business of publishing short stories was not made easy simply because there were a great many magazines in England and America willing to publish them. Fledgeling writers, of course, had to prove themselves to agents and editors, but even the famous and widely published often encountered resistance and even rejection. Indeed, there is hardly an author mentioned in this study who was not rejected even at the height of his or her career, and when not rejected, authors found themselves hemmed in by a myriad of restrictions and expectations, many of which seem ludicrous today.
Frontmatter
- Dean Baldwin
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- Art and Commerce in the British Short Story, 1880–1950
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- Pickering & Chatto
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- 05 December 2014, pp i-iv
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11 - The British Short Story and its Reviewers
- Dean Baldwin
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- Art and Commerce in the British Short Story, 1880–1950
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- Pickering & Chatto
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- 05 December 2014, pp 127-140
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As the previous chapters have suggested, the place of the short story in the economy of its writers from 1880–1950 was a curiously precarious and anomalous one, for, once established, the short story's position in the culture became rather uneasy. Unlike the novel, which had gained an honourable place in British culture, the short story sat uncomfortably at the table – vigorous, popular, highly regarded, yet somehow suspect – a sort of lively but uninvited guest.
That uneasy place at Britain's cultural banquet is reflected in the strange history of the short story's emergence as a separate genre and the ways in which reviewers subsequently treated it. To appreciate how the short story emerged as a separate genre in reviewers’ minds (and presumably the minds of authors and readers), it is instructive to begin before the 1880s to see how stories that were shorter than novels were treated by Victorian reviewers. Not surprisingly, reviews of short fiction were far less common than those of novels, and it is not possible to attempt a representative survey. Rather, I have selected a few reviews for brief analysis as a prelude to the theme of this chapter, which is that at some point during the 1890s, reviewing of short stories changed significantly and in ways that were inimical to the genre and its subsequent rise to popularity, and contributed to its eventual fall from grace after World War II.
One example is provided by the rather obscure Trewman's Exeter Flying Post. The anonymous reviewer lists a number of newly published books and reprints, both in fiction and non-fiction, and then surveys some of the current magazines and their content, among them the Blackwood's for that month. Included in the January Blackwood's is the first of George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life, ‘Th e Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton’. Th e Flying Post's reviewer chooses the story as the ‘chef d'ouvre’ of the magazine's contents, praises it for exposing the ‘“crying evil” of the Established Church’ and goes on to quote at some length from the story to illustrate its style and content.
4 - Publishing Conditions in England, 1880–1950
- Dean Baldwin
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- Art and Commerce in the British Short Story, 1880–1950
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- Pickering & Chatto
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- 05 December 2014, pp 35-50
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In 1880 the publishing conditions in Britain could best be described as traditional, even a bit sleepy. Triple-decker novels and lending libraries like Mudie's that purchased them still controlled most of the market for new fiction, while the periodical market was dominated by holdovers like Blackwood's (1817–1980), the less staid Belgravia (1866–99), Chamber's Edinburgh Journal (1832–1956), Cornhill (1860–1975), Good Words (1860–1906), Macmillan's (1859–1907) and Temple Bar (1860–1906). Change was already evident, however, in the form of George Newnes’ Tit-Bits (1881–1984), the profusely illustrated Illustrated London News (1842–present), the English Illustrated Magazine (1883–1913) and the lively Boy's Own Paper (1879–1967). The movement was away from the print-heavy, largely non-fiction content of the established journals toward lighter articles and fiction – both serial novels and short stories. As this chapter will later demonstrate, new magazines sprang up in the 1890s following the success of the Strand (1891–1950), opening up huge new markets for authors.
Meanwhile, the spread of education created new demands for inexpensive and largely sensational fiction; as a result, both the novel itself and its three-volume incarnation were under huge pressures:
Signs were plentiful that artists of all kinds could not presume forever upon the public's patience as an age of increasing hurry generated competing demands upon people's attention. The vogue for short stories was already pointing the way, and when the triple-decker novel was finally challenged, it tumbled to the ground with startling suddenness. Between 1894 and 1895 the publication of three-volume novels fell from 184 to fifty-two; in 1896 it halved again, to twenty-five; and in 1897 only four were published. The coup de grace had been administered by the run-away success of one best-seller, Hall Caine's The Manxman, issued in one volume in 1894, priced 6s., although other authors who had had titles published in this format – George Moore, A Mummer's Wife (1885), and Rider Haggard, She (1886) – subsequently would claim a supporting or starring role in this victory.
List of Tables
- Dean Baldwin
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- Art and Commerce in the British Short Story, 1880–1950
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- Pickering & Chatto
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- 05 December 2014, pp xi-xii
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CONTENTS
- Dean Baldwin
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- Art and Commerce in the British Short Story, 1880–1950
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- Pickering & Chatto
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- 05 December 2014, pp v-v
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Note on the Text
- Dean Baldwin
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- Art and Commerce in the British Short Story, 1880–1950
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- Pickering & Chatto
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- 05 December 2014, pp xiii-xiv
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Works Cited
- Dean Baldwin
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- Art and Commerce in the British Short Story, 1880–1950
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- Pickering & Chatto
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- 05 December 2014, pp 197-208
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6 - Short Stories and the Magazines
- Dean Baldwin
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- Art and Commerce in the British Short Story, 1880–1950
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- Pickering & Chatto
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- 05 December 2014, pp 67-86
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Summary
Discussions of the importance of magazines to literature in general and the short story in particular generally emphasize two themes: the role of magazines in distributing literature to the masses and the countervailing importance of ‘little magazines’ in promoting experimental and avant-garde writing. These two trends, often seen as opposites, are in fact sides of the same coin, since the need for experimental, even revolutionary, magazines presupposes the existence of conservative and mainline periodicals that cater to wide audiences and received standards of taste and opinion. Among the established periodicals, it is customary to speak of highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow levels. Crude as these labels are they are handy enough to justify being used here.
Few would be willing to say exactly when the ‘little magazine’ phenomenon erupted, but in Britain the Yellow Book (1894–97) and Savoy (1896) might serve as convenient starting points, since both were deliberate reactions against the established ‘big’ magazines like the Strand. New Age (1894–1938) might be a rival, except that its early oppositional stance was more political than literary, until 1907 when A. R. Orage assumed the editorship and when Arnold Bennett's contributions promoted new Russian and French authors. Rhythm (1911–13) is best remembered for printing some of the early work of D. H. Lawrence, Ford Maddox Ford and Katherine Mansfield; it was superseded by the Blue Review, which like Rhythm was edited by John Middleton Murry. The Little Review (1914–29) was American, but it owes much of its fame to its association with such British writers as W. B. Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, Ford Maddox Ford and of course James Joyce. A. R. Orage's New Age (1907–22) provided a home for Richard Aldington and perhaps most notably Katherine Mansfield in her formative years. Similarly, the Coterie issued only six numbers (1919–20) and was followed by the New Coterie (1925–7). F. R. Leavis's Scrutiny published no fiction but exerted an influence out of all proportion to its circulation of 750 to 1,500. The Egoist was primarily devoted to Imagist poetry but was first to publish Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a serial, in 1914–15.
Acknowledgements
- Dean Baldwin
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- Art and Commerce in the British Short Story, 1880–1950
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- Pickering & Chatto
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- 05 December 2014, pp vii-x
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12 - Vitality and Variety in the British Short Story, 1915–50
- Dean Baldwin
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- Art and Commerce in the British Short Story, 1880–1950
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- Pickering & Chatto
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- 05 December 2014, pp 141-154
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The period 1890–1915 saw not only the rise and first flowering of the British short story but also the emergence of the Modernist movement, that elusive and difficult to define but crucially important era that has been variously dated as extending from 1890 to 1930, 1890 to 1945, 1915 to 1965. I will not attempt here what others have devoted books to examining, namely, a full discussion of the literary figures and characteristics that constitute Modernism, but as the short story was undeniably a part of the literature that is included in the movement, there is no avoiding some discussion of how the phenomena discussed so far mesh or contrast with what literary critics and historians typically regard as the important works and figures of the period.
In his attempt to grapple with the difficulties associated with Modernism and especially its British incarnation, Malcolm Bradbury makes a particularly useful point for this discussion. Commenting on the international aspect of Modernism and Britain's place in it, Bradbury remarks,
It [the Modernist movement] has been judged on the one hand as a distillation of the English tradition, a disturbance, yes, but also the realization of the sequence. On the other hand, it has been seen as largely a cultural accident, one [in] line with what went before or came after – a chance importation of foreigners, these often temporary expatriates, from Ireland or America, who went elsewhere for their greatest work, and whose real contribution was not to the English tradition, which never fully assimilated Modernism at all, but to an international movement whose English-language realization is most apparent in the United States
The point I would stress from Bradbury's observation is the idea that the ‘English tradition … never fully assimilated Modernism at all’, a point that strikes me as particularly relevant to the development of the British short story. Undeniably, the British short story saw its fair share of canonical Modernist masterpieces, notably those by Conrad, Joyce, Mansfield, Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, but judged against the background of the short story as a whole from 1890 on, these high Modernist writers and their stylistic and formal experiments would be seen as the exception rather than the rule.
5 - Authors’ Careers: The Development of the Short Story in Britain, 1880–1914
- Dean Baldwin
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- Art and Commerce in the British Short Story, 1880–1950
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- Pickering & Chatto
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- 05 December 2014, pp 51-66
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As the previous chapter has been at pains to demonstrate, the material conditions for the emergence of the British short story were to a large extent in place by the end of the 1870s, but even by this late date, the aesthetics of the genre were not yet articulated, and few British authors had seriously explored its possibilities. What this chapter will attempt to show is how late-Victorian authors began to be aware of and exploit the expanding market for short stories while simultaneously groping toward an aesthetics of the genre.
Wilkie Collins (1824–89) may serve as an example of the late Victorian author, similar in his approach to short fiction as Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope. Whether his short fiction should even be labelled ‘short stories’ is debatable:
In writing of Collins’ short fiction we prefer to avoid using the term ‘short story’, because in Britain at least the phrase did not come into common use until late in the nineteenth century … Yet there was clearly no shortage of British shorter fiction earlier in the Victorian period, especially in general periodicals aimed at a family audience … There the term ‘tale’ was still generally used for self-contained narratives which often recalled the oral traditions of pre-industrial society.
Moreover, Collins’ place in the development of the genre is also questionable because of the very uneven quality of his tales and his reliance on popular genres and traditional plot. Nonetheless, Collins published short fiction (or tales) throughout his career, sufficient to create six collections spanning the years 1856–87. From the point of view of this study, however, he illustrates how short fiction during this period helped to support a novelist financially between novels, as nothing Collins did in short fiction rivals the impact of The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868). Something of the tales’ importance to his contemporaries may be gathered from the fact that while his novels were frequently reviewed, I can find not one collection of his stories that warranted mention in the contemporary literary press.
10 - First Editions, Limited Editions and Manuscripts
- Dean Baldwin
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- Art and Commerce in the British Short Story, 1880–1950
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- Pickering & Chatto
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- 05 December 2014, pp 117-126
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My Hundredth Tale is a longish short story which I am going to write for the Golden Cockerel Press. It will be published by them in the autumn, 750 copies at a guinea. The entire edition was sold out within a week of the announcement – and I have not yet written a word of the tale.
A. E. Coppard.It may be said of human affairs, as well as of physical objects, that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The manufacture of books in mass quantities for ordinary readers set off not only a literary reaction against philistine taste but also a printers’ and consumers’ revolt against mass-market books of low price and equally low aesthetic quality. The chief perpetuator of quality design in books was and remains to this day the private press movement, which can be traced at least as far back as Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill experiments of the late eighteenth century. The most famous proponent of ‘fine printing’, however, is undoubtedly William Morris, whose Kelmscott Press may be re garded either as typical of the folly of the 1890s handicraft fad or as the progenitor of the private press movement that remained popular until after World War II.
In ways that are difficult to appreciate now, the private press movement transcended the interests of wealthy aesthetes and pretentious bohemians and became quite a popular one. Hugh Kenner comments on it rather sarcastically in the following passage:
The over-decorated William Morris book may remind us how obsolete processes claim survival as Art. As TV has turned old movies into ‘cinema’, so the rotary press and the monotype (an 1887 patent) has made hand presswork an art form. It needed much ornateness to prove it was done by hand … And once Art had consecrated the ornate, people who couldn't afford the Kelmscott prices were apt to want ornate books of their own. In 1892 … J. M. Dent, spotter of trends, envisaged the possibilities in a pseudo-Kelmscott, to be made on steam presses for issue to the ‘general reader’ in monthly parts at 2s.6d., with a Large Paper edition on Dutch handmade sheets for cognoscenti.
The text would be Malory's Morte d'Arthur …
Chronology
- Dean Baldwin
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- Book:
- Art and Commerce in the British Short Story, 1880–1950
- Published by:
- Pickering & Chatto
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- 05 December 2014, pp 167-174
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3 - How Much Money Does an Author Need?
- Dean Baldwin
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- Book:
- Art and Commerce in the British Short Story, 1880–1950
- Published by:
- Pickering & Chatto
- Published online:
- 05 December 2014, pp 23-34
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Summary
In ‘A Room of One's Own’ (1929), Virginia Woolf claimed that in order to create freely ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own’. Woolf does not specify how much money her female novelist would need, but later in the essay she fantasizes that her aunt dies and leaves her ‘five hundred pounds a year forever’, a sum that will ‘keep one alive in the sunshine’. No one would dispute a writer's need for quiet and security, and Woolf was clearly thinking of a solid middle-class income, not a bare subsistence, but was her call for £500 a year reasonable? What would constitute at least moderate success and a decent standard of living for a writer, male or female, in the period 1880–1950?
Calculating the income a writer would need over such a long and volatile period as 1880–1950 is fraught with danger, since ‘needs’ and standards of living changed considerably. However, a look at typical middle-class incomes for these decades can provide an approximate and helpful guide to what a writer would need to earn to provide for him or herself and a family. Particularly difficult are the early years of our period (1880–1913), but some guidance is found in the income tax law, which set the minimum income for paying the tax at £160. Because of this regulation, many middle-class occupations (clerk, teacher, manager, etc.) commanded salaries of between £150 and £160 to avoid the tax. This salary level may thus be taken as defining the lowest end of the middle-class family for the period 1880–1913. Indeed, in 1910, 94.5 per cent of all incomes in England were below £160. The details of such a family's budget are provided by G. S. Layard, showing how a family of four living in London in 1901 would distribute an income of £150. Appended to his article is a comparative budget for a family of four, living in London with one servant on an income of £250. These two budgets show that the standard of living at these levels would be frugal but comfortable. One wonders, then, how a shop assistant during the same period earning an average of £84 per annum would have been able to get along.
1 - Economics and the Flowering of the British Short Story
- Dean Baldwin
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- Book:
- Art and Commerce in the British Short Story, 1880–1950
- Published by:
- Pickering & Chatto
- Published online:
- 05 December 2014, pp 1-14
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Summary
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).
8 - Short Stories in Book Form
- Dean Baldwin
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- Book:
- Art and Commerce in the British Short Story, 1880–1950
- Published by:
- Pickering & Chatto
- Published online:
- 05 December 2014, pp 95-104
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