Students researching Victorian short fiction.

Abstract

Though short fiction has recently begun to appear in anthologies of Victorian literature, the genre is relatively unexplored. Considering the vast number of short stories published during the Victorian age, the genre provides an ideal opportunity to include students in the rediscovery and evaluation of lesser-known texts. In this essay, I outline a research assignment that encourages undergraduate students to enter into current literary discussions of canon formation, aesthetic judgment, and literary theory.

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As a student studying Victorian literature, I rarely if ever encountered the genre of short fiction. Robert Browning's poetry, George Eliot's novels, Thomas Carlyle's ornate and satirical prose--all these were taught with regularity. Yet, the Victorian era produced memorable short fiction: Robert Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes series, and even Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol." [1] Victorian short fiction had made a lasting impression on the popular imagination, yet has rarely been considered worthy of extended scholarly inquiry.

Though scholars generally agree that the short story "came of age" during the nineteenth century, they usually emphasize American writers and theorists when discussing the development of the genre in the English language. As Harold Orel notes, in Victorian Britain "[n]ovels were the central commodity, and short stories a byproduct, filler material; the latter did not pay well" (2). At least, they did not pay as well as best-selling novels. Yet, it is curious to note that nearly all of the major novelists of the Victorian period also published what would now be considered short fiction. Authors could use stories or tales published in periodicals to increase their audience and extend their reputation. Cash-strapped writers could turn out a short piece for ready money. Those without connections in the publishing world could submit a modest-sized narrative for review with much greater chance of success than sending in a book-length manuscript.

The booming Victorian periodical press published an abundance of short fiction as well as non-fiction essays. This press was an arena in which the serious-minded citizen kept up with public debate, the middle-class parent looked for suitable family reading, and the curious adolescent went for adventure and escape. In short, periodical literature abounded and appealed to audiences of every taste and authors of every ability. Certainly this arena produced its share of "filler material" (Orel 2). Yet there were authors whose literary skills lent themselves to the genre. Elizabeth Gaskell, for example, wrote vivid sketches and narratives. Her story about a mother's devoted search for a daughter who had prostituted herself launched the first issue of Charles Dickens' journal, Household Words. Though Gaskell can tend toward the melodramatic in her novels, her short fiction exhibits a finely-tuned realism that compares well with any of the noted realists of her time.

With the reconsiderations of the literary canon that have preoccupied literary critics recently, selections of Gaskell's and her contemporaries' short fiction are becoming more common in the literary classroom. The Longman Anthology of English Literature has a section of Victorian "Popular Short Fiction," including selections by Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and Edith Nesbit. The Norton Anthology of British Literature has fewer short fiction offerings, but does include two from the Victorian era. In 2004 Broadview published The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Short Stories, which attempts to survey short fiction written throughout the century, rather than centering on the latter decades as has been customary. As the Broadview anthology demonstrates, short fiction offers a unique entree into work by women and lower-class authors. In many ways, short fiction is one of the more fascinating Victorian genres because it attracted such a variety of practitioners and resulted in such varied works as a two-page sketch, a fifty-page character study, or a twenty-page fairy tale.

I have found that in addition to incorporating these texts into my syllabus, teaching Victorian short fiction allows me to involve students in primary source research that encourages them to explore varieties of Victorian literature and thought in a way usually reserved for professional scholars. I design the research project for my Victorian literature survey course around "discovering" and "recuperating" a short story.

Assignment Outline

The assignment leads students through steps to search for, evaluate, and analyze a short story. In essence, I ask students to complete in microcosm, and on an undergraduate level, the type of project that scholars usually undertake in professional work. As Richard Light relates, students value courses that teach them how to think like a professional in the field: "An empirical finding supports the value of this approach to teaching: a student's choice of what field to major in is driven more by this than by any other single factor. When a student believes she knows what it means to 'think like an economist,' she is far more likely to focus her learning in economics" (117). My assignment encourages each student to "think like a literary scholar." The students explore literary material, evaluate its potential to contribute to a literature class, prepare it for publication, analyze it, and disseminate their results. More than any other assignment I have crafted, this one functions much like a case study, allowing students to participate in and think through a "real-life" scholarly research project within the confines of a college class. In whole, the students complete five assignments in the course of their research:

1. Bibliography

2. Evaluations

3. Transcription with Introduction

4. Analytic Essay

5. Group Presentation

Bibliography

After giving students an introduction to the Periodical and Special Collections Libraries at our university, I give them a list of Victorian-era periodicals housed in our libraries or available on-line. Though at first I was not certain how many Victorian periodicals our library contained, with a little help from a librarian and a few computer searches, I put together a six-page list of Victorian-era periodicals in my university's library. Many universities, especially state schools that were founded in the nineteenth century, house collections of periodicals from that time. Often a hunt through compact shelving results in a plethora of possibilities. Microform and online resources, in addition, offer a number of journals for study, and I have had students complete the entire assignment solely using internet sources. [2] If one were to adapt the assignment for secondary school or a college whose library system is too new to have Victorian periodicals, one could download a selection of journal issues from on-line sites or photocopy interlibrary loan sources (also, second-hand bookstores often have such journals available for a reasonable price). I briefly review the list of journals with the class to familiarize them with the types of sources from which to choose, and I assign them to browse through a few of the journals before choosing one to study. When they have chosen their journal, they read through a designated number of issues (usually six) and compile a bibliography of their contents, paying close attention to any short fiction. This part of the project allows them to familiarize themselves with the main subject matter of the journal, determine the likely audience, and explore the range of material presented in its pages. Though the students are often daunted by this first dive into primary subject matter, they find it rewarding. As one student commented, "Its 100x more interesting to go directly to the sources than to read some boring critic's account of it & their interpretation."

Evaluations

After the students complete their bibliography, they select six short stories from their journals to examine in more detail. Short fiction was common enough that every one of my students has found ample material in his or her journal. As students decide on stories to study, they confront the difficulties of defining the genre. They come across "sketches," "tales," "illustrations," and "narratives," all of which could fit under our current definitions of the short story. This becomes an ideal time to discuss the origin of the genre and its place in Victorian literature in relation to the poets, novelists, essayists, and other authors we discuss in class. When the students have decided on their six stories to study, they write an evaluation of each, giving a summary of the narrative and answering a series of evaluation questions. The questions ask them to analyze the intended audience, describe the writing style, and compare and/or contrast the piece with texts we have read in class. By this point in the assignment, I find that the students often bring up their research in our class discussions. One student remarked that she had come across an article that elaborated on an essay by Matthew Arnold we read in class. She saw how Arnold's essay fit into other concerns being discussed in the periodical, including concerns that arose in the stories she was evaluating. Another student remarked, "I especially liked writing the analyses of each short story since it allowed me to think about them and connect them to other Victorian literature." As the students begin making connections between our class readings and their own research, I assign each of them to choose one particular story that contributes to the topics we have been discussing in class and that they think is worthy of further study.

Transcription with Introduction

Students then prepare a transcript of the story and write a brief introduction to it. I ask them to use the introduction as an opportunity to demonstrate to their classmates what makes the story of interest in the context of our class. Their introductions explain what journal the story is from, who seems to be its intended audience, and who the author is. Since many of the journal articles are unsigned, this is an ideal opportunity to introduce the students to reference materials that can help them conduct primary research to identify an author or track down the person behind a pseudonym. Often my students have never attempted this type of literary historianship. As one student commented, "It was fascinating to read about the biographical information of my author--even though it was really hard to find it. It was like a treasure hunt & it helped me get more immersed into the time period." When the students have completed their transcripts and introductions, I compile them into a class anthology for all the students to read. In addition to introducing the students to library sources, this segment of the assignment allows them to expand their audience beyond their professor. As Light notes, "Students identify the courses that had the most profound impact on them as courses in which they were required to write papers, not just for the professor, as usual, but for their fellow students as well" (64). From my experience, students pay more attention to elaborating their points in detail and clarifying assumptions when their audience expands to classmates.

Analytic Essay

For the final paper of the class, I ask each student to write an analytical essay on their short story. Some choose to examine their text from the stance of a particular literary theory. Others analyze a formal element in the narrative. Still others explore how the story functioned within its historical and literary context. Unlike other analytic papers students write, these essays are most likely the only ones written on these particular texts, so the students can see themselves as experts on their particular subject matter. For many students, writing this essay is a particularly rewarding part of the assignment. One student commented, "I felt like I was researching something original, and that I was writing a critical essay that hadn't been written before." As English majors and minors, these students have written a plethora of analytical essays for a variety of professors, but rarely have they experienced a similar sense of discovery when writing about an oft-anthologized text.

Group Presentation

Like most experts, the students enjoy sharing their knowledge with colleagues. Earlier in the project, after they originally select journals to study, I sort them into groups of three or four whose subject matter seems comparable. I encourage the groups to meet together to help one another with their research and edit their analytic essays. Afterwards, I assign them as a group to prepare a class presentation that synthesizes the information each of them has gathered. I ask them to examine the commonalities they find between their own project and that of the other members and then weave these commonalities into a cohesive presentation. The class members read each others' stories (and Introductions) in preparation for the group presentations, and the presentations themselves most often demonstrate not only the variety of Victorian short fiction available for study but also a variety of approaches to studying the fiction.

Student (and Professor) Responses

By the time they complete the assignment, students have gained invaluable experience analyzing the genre of the short story, situating their story within the larger context of Victorian literature, developing library research skills, and entering debates about canon revision and aesthetic merit. In the process of deciding on their contribution to the "canon" of literature we will study in class, the students encounter many more women, minority, and lower-class authors than they otherwise would. One student wrote, "I was most surprised at the amount of literature in my Journals written by WOMEN. I was always under the impression that women were not published much back then, and so I found it really fascinating how much women's literature was being published ...." Though the class syllabus includes several women authors and we discuss Victorian women's issues in class, it was the research project that actually taught this student about women's contribution to the literature of the time. In addition to discovering lesser-known authors, the students encounter sub-genres that were prevalent and important to the era, but that we do not have time to address in class. One student commented:

   I worked with children's literature and I found it interesting that
   so many of the themes we discussed in class (gender, class, nature,
   art) were prevalent in the short stories. I also noticed that, while
   the stories were imaginative, they all operated on a rather
   realistic level. Anytime something really kooky happened, it turned
   out to be a dream. It seems the general trend in adult literature
   permeated the children's sphere as well.

This student not only demonstrates a grasp of one of the age's major literary practices (realism) but also is beginning to understand the complex interweaving of fantasy, fairy tale, children's moral tale, and realism. Students consistently comment on how much they learn about using new sections of the library. From braving the microfilm readers to operating compact shelving, they acquire skills that all bibliophiles should master. Interestingly enough, this is also one of the few areas where I receive negative comments about the assignment, usually from students frustrated that Special Collections is not open until midnight. In general, however, students brave new territory in the library with temerity:

   Well, I became a true master of Special Collections. Before this
   class, Special Collections seemed so foreboding and unapproachable.
   But I learned how easy it is to use their resources and get some
   unique research done.

In general, students' confidence in using many different library resources increases. As one student commented, "I feel more comfortable asking for help in the library, and I thought it was very fruitful to actually do some primary research." One student reaction I had not anticipated. Students are pleased to choose a journal that relates to their own interests. Some select sporting journals, others children's periodicals, and others journals of art criticism. Raymond Wlodkowski states that one of the best ways to motivate adult learners is through addressing their personal interests (182-83), and this certainly proves true. Students make the project uniquely their own in a way that one does not often encounter in the undergraduate classroom.

Conclusion

As students work through the various parts of the assignment, I find that they do indeed begin to "think like literary scholars." They puzzle through the definition of a short story, they start to evaluate criteria for judging which story is worth studying, they take interest in compiling information on lesser-known authors, and they are able to situate their story within the larger context of Victorian literature. Perhaps even more important, they begin to experience a sense of adventure and discovery as they venture outside of the typical student anthology. One student captured the sense of anticipation that I myself experience when doing this type of research: the wonder of "[b]eing able to hold a very old periodical in my hand and feel like I was discovering something that no one else has read."

Works Cited

Abrams, M. H. and Stephen Greenblatt, Eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Seventh Edition. Vol. 2. New York: WW Norton and Co., 2000.

Damrosch, David, Ed. The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Second Edition. New York: Longman, 2003.

Denisoff, Dennis. The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Short Fiction. New York: Broadview, 2004.

Light, Richard J. Making the Most of College, Students Speak Their Minds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001.

Orel, Harold. The Victorian Short Story, Development and Triumph of a Literary Genre. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986.

Wlodkowski, Raymond J. Enhancing Adult Motivation to Learn, A Comprehensive Guide for Teaching All Adults. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1999.

Leslee Thorne-Murphy, Brigham Young University

Notes

[1] Though "A Christmas Carol" could be considered a novella, it is certainly "'short" by Victorian standards.

[2] Since online sources change so often, it is difficult to pinpoint specific websites. However, two online sources that are particularly useful are: The Internet Library of Early Journals, which has a twenty-year run of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine completely scanned online; and the Periodical Contents Index, which has citations for hundreds of journals.

Leslee Thorne-Murphy is an Assistant Professor of English at Brigham Young University. Her interests include Victorian literature, women "s studies, and literary history.