Chapter 1 - Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy

Summary

In his apologetic preface to the 1852 edition of Christmas Stories, Charles Dickens remarked on how much harder he found it writing short stories than long ones:

The narrow space within which it was necessary to confine these Christmas Stories when they were originally published, rendered their construction a matter of some difficulty, and almost necessitated what is peculiar in their machinery. I could not attempt great elaboration of detail, in the working out of character within such limits, believing that it could not succeed.

While he recognized that condensed narrative forms ‘necessitated’ a different approach from longer fiction, Dickens was unable to think of this as other than a ‘confining’ or ‘limiting’ of his full expressive capacity; that short stories did not allow him to individuate character through ‘great elaboration of detail’ was a privation rather than a stimulus to a new concept of characterization. The impression Dickens gives here, as throughout his career as a short story writer, is of a master builder labouring to construct a doll's house from the plans to a mansion.

Like most of his English contemporaries, Dickens considered the ‘shortness’ of the short story to be a matter largely of length. What defined the form was, simply, that it contained fewer words than a novel, not that it did anything the novel didn't, or couldn't, do.