<em>The Economy of the Short Story in British Periodicals of the 1890s</em>, by Winnie Chan

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Economy of the Short Story in British Periodicals of the 1890s Madeleine A. Vala (bio) The Economy of the Short Story in British Periodicals of the 1890s, by Winnie Chan; pp. ix + 148. London and New York: Routledge, 2007, £65.00, $95.00. Winnie Chan’s The Economy of the Short Story in British Periodicals of the 1890s provides a compelling analysis of late-Victorian periodicals and their role in distinguishing the short story as a genre and as a commodity. Chan seeks to “map out how the stakes in the field of the short story’s production were established and contested during this period, as well as how they were defined by burgeoning mass print” (xii). She argues that the explosion of short stories in the late nineteenth century revealed “an oscillation between mass culture and high art [that] . . . was in fact emblematic of early modernism” (xi). This study explores the material history of the short story, a largely overlooked genre, and is a welcome contribution to recent critical discussions on the intersections among literature, audience, print culture, and consumer culture. While Chan’s book delights in its exhaustive information on periodicals—from editorial practices and printing techniques to remuneration of writers and relationships between text and illustration—this attention to detail at times obscures her larger arguments about incipient modernism and British national identity. [End Page 166] Examining the Strand, the Yellow Book, and Black and White in each of her body chapters, Chan recreates the world of each periodical and then focuses on a close reading of one short story in each of these magazines. This methodology allows the selected story to assume new layers of cultural complexity but can also frustrate the reader. Chan’s single extended close reading of a short story is the highlight of each chapter—demonstrating her dexterity at merging print culture with literary analysis—and leaves the reader wishing for more examples of such innovative readings, if even in abridged form. The discussion of the Strand in chapter 1 fruitfully shows how mass culture forges generic elements of the short story. Editor George Newnes eschewed serial publication of fiction in favor of a complete short story within each issue, establishing an average length for the genre. Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes as a familiar character across stories with independent plots, a strategy that ensured a loyal readership. Through her close reading of F. Startin Pilleau’s “The Vision of Inverstrathy Castle” (1894), which invited readers to determine its ending, Chan argues that Newnes not only appealed to the tastes of the masses, but also confirmed their education in the short story genre. The Strand privileged the deductive powers associated with detective stories; accordingly, the endings of stories reveal solid truths, and narrators prove reliable, unlike their modernist counterparts. Chapter 2 argues that the Yellow Book, in contrast to the Strand, cultivated an elitist image that “refashioned the short story to construct and underscore the divide between art and commerce” (54). Using Henry James’s unpopularity as a sign of artistic superiority, the periodical published his work and valorized abstruseness and experimentation in the short story. Chan describes the way the physicality of the magazine—including uncut pages, catchwords, a lack of advertising, and no word limits for contributors—emphasized its “artistic aloofness” from commercialism (85), itself a marketing strategy. Her astute reading of editor Henry Harland’s “The Invisible Prince” (1896) argues that the story parodies detective story conventions and “capitalizes on mass culture by critiquing it” (67, emphasis original). Chan also makes a fascinating claim that the Yellow Book in effect democratized exclusivity by suggesting that good taste could be developed in any reader irrespective of social class. However, because Chan offers little evidence of the periodical’s actual readership, this argument seems difficult to assess fully. Chapter 3 focuses on the largely forgotten weekly, Black and White, and argues that its goals ineffectively fused those of the Strand and the Yellow Book. The periodical sought both to solicit mass appeal and to educate its readers in short story aesthetics, resulting in an “anachronistically diverse muddle of appeals” (104). The weekly published relatively little criticism about...