[In the following essay, Pickering claims that More's tracts were forerunners of the nineteenth-century short story.]

In a letter to Henry Brevoort in 1824, Washington Irving said that he had written sketches and short tales rather than long works because he chose “to take a line of writing peculiar to myself, rather than fall into the manner or school of any other writer.”¹ Like all claims of originality, Irving's declaration should be taken with a grain of salt. Shake any literary history and several possible sources for all genres are sure to fall out. Be that as it may, and at the risk of soon being told my “first” should be last, I would like to suggest a “beginning” for the modern British and American short story.

In his study of novels in English magazines, Robert Mayo has shown that short fiction, if not the short story, was a staple of eighteenth-century periodicals. Long-lived journals like the Lady's and Hibernian Magazines published great amounts of fiction. For our purposes, though, a magazine which lasted but two years is important. Founded in 1788 as a miscellany containing “matter which had a tendency to improve and lead the mind to religion and virtue,” Mrs. Sarah Trimmer's monthly Family Magazine appealed to cottagers, servants, and the new readers educated in Sunday Schools. Each number of the journal contained a sermon, short, didactic essays, fables, moral poems, descriptions of the habits of animals, practical hints on gardening and household skills, xenophobic accounts of foreign countries, and current events moralized.²

The most significant part of the magazine, however, was the monthly “Instructive Tale,” in effect a didactic short story. In the first issue of the journal, Andrews, a conscientious country squire, found many able-bodied men intoxicated in The George, a local inn. Succeeding numbers described how Andrews with the help of his wife steered the men back to the paths of virtue. As the Andrews' visited the men's homes, a series of short stories followed, entitled, typically, “The Notable Daughter,” “The Jealous Wife,” “The Generous Blacksmith,” and “The Unexpected Reformation.” In homespun fashion, each tale taught a moral truth. Moreover, the same characters appeared throughout the stories so that by the last tale, the community became an instructive microcosm of what England was and what she could be. With their dramatis personae simple generic devices for teaching morality, the stories were literarily poor. However, since Mrs. Trimmer and Hannah More were acquaintances and had similar interests and many of the same influential friends, it seems highly probable that the tales provided the pattern for the form and substance of the Cheap Repository Tracts, which I think firmly established the short story as a distinct literary genre.

Although societies such as “The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge” and “The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts” had published tracts throughout the eighteenth century, tract publishing became a major feature of the English literary landscape only with the growth of the Sunday School Movement in the 1780's and '90's and the eruption of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. A belief in man's abstract responsibility for man and a pragmatic awareness that religious education would contribute to the stability of society by making the lower classes both moral and satisfied with their lots in life gave rise to the Sunday School Movement. Fast becoming the only national system of education, Sunday Schools with their derivative Adult Schools were soon teaching an estimated 500,000 Britons to read. During the 1790's as Britain swung xenophobically to the right, conservative Tories believed that “French Philosophers” were trying to overthrow the Constitution by spreading seditious writings among the lower classes attending Sunday Schools.³

In the 1770's Hannah More had been the friend of Johnson, Garrick, and Reynolds among others. In the mid-1780's she became more interested in religion, becoming intimate with Beilby Porteus, the evangelical Bishop of Chester, and in 1788 publishing Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society. Appealing to the upper classes this popular essay stressed that reform of English morals and manners should filter down from the upper classes, rather than arise democratically from the spirit of the people. The anti-egalitarian bent of the essay made Mrs. More many friends in British conservative circles. This friendship was cemented in 1793 when she published an anti-French tract entitled Village Politics, supposedly by Will Chip, a country carpenter. Teaching the evils of French “philosophy” and the virtues of Tory politics and the Church Establishment, the tract was remarkably popular. Thousands of copies were printed and sent to Scotland and Ireland in order to counter the effects of French propaganda.

After the publication of Village Politics, many Britons, including Porteus, now Bishop of London, urged Mrs. More to write other works that would counteract the effects of those seditious writings supposedly being distributed among the poor. Influenced by Porteus and convinced that “to teach the poor to read without providing them with safe books” was a dangerous matter,” she approached her friends at Clapham (later know as the Clapham Sect). The result was the Cheap Repository Tracts whose philosophy she summed up in a letter to Horace Walpole: “from liberty, equality, and the rights of man, good Lord deliver us!” Aimed at, in the Claphams' words, the numbers which “have lately been taught to read by means of Sunday Schools,” three Tracts were published each month. One was a “useful subject versified”; another was “particularly adopted for perusal on the Lord's Day”; and the third and most popular type was a short story, following the didactic pattern set by Mrs. Trimmer's “Instructive Tales.” Financed by Henry Thornton and distributed free among the lower classes, primarily through Sunday Schools, 114 tracts, selling at [frac12]d, 1d, and 1[frac12]d, were published in 1794-1798. Enjoying an amazing success, over two million copies were published by the end of 1795; and for the next two decades, a large portion of the English population believed that Hannah More had done more than any other person, including William Pitt, to prevent a French Revolution from occurring in Britain. According to the Christian Observer, the Cheap Repository Tracts were “among the mighty barriers that, under God checked the growth of infidelity and anarchy” in Britain at “the commencement of the French Revolution.” For our purposes though, the possible political influences of the Cheap Repository are not so important as the literary.⁴

In reviewing Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales in Grahame's Magazine, Poe stressed that the “short prose narrative” should aim at “unity of effect or impression.” This was to be accomplished by the narrative's requiring no longer than two hours for reading. Moreover “in the whole composition,” Poe wrote, “there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design.” With their “first, great object to instruct,” the Claphams bent their narrative skills to teach the rewards of virtue and the wages of sin. Between 4000 and 5000 words long, most of their short stories could easily be read at one sitting. Moreover, “every plot” (Poe's words) was clearly “elaborated to its denouement.” For the Claphams it was essential that the plot be “so plain that it cannot be misunderstood.” Diligent Dick, Little Jem, the chimney sweep, and Madge Blarney the gypsy girl all reaped dividends from the traditional virtues of honesty, loyalty, and integrity. Betty Brown rose from being the St. Giles Orange Girl to owning a handsome sausage shop near Seven Dials and marrying an honest hackney-coachman. While Mary Wood's lying led to her death, Betty Gillis's refusal to sell food from her mistress's kitchen led to her receiving 30 pounds a year for life. Still other stories described the usual fatal effects of drink, gambling, and lascivious conduct. Tricket left his children breadless in order to gamble. Nurse Flint starved orphan children and put them into beds “rotten with damp and filth” so she could pocket the 2s 6d that the parish allowed for a child's weekly support. “The Two Cousins; or Spare the Rod and Spoil the Child” described the different fates of Will, son of the religious Sarah, and Richard, son of the indifferent Alice. As might be expected, after a childhood of corrective floggings, Will became a successful carpenter. In contrast Richard who grew up as a child of nature became addicted to gambling, cock fighting, bull baiting, and alcohol and was finally killed in a drunken brawl. After seeing the ghost of her mistress, Catherine, who had been a spoiled servant at Blithe Hall, a worldly paradise, reformed, declaring that she no longer wanted “riches or finery” but instead wanted to be pious, honest, and content, so she could go “to that place” where her treasure really was.⁵

Relentlessly didactic and psychologically simplistic, the short stories in the Cheap Repository are interesting only to the literary historian. What oft was thought but ne'er so mundanely expressed, the stories have little artistic merit. But since so many copies were distributed and since most early nineteenth century readers learned to read in Sunday Schools, where the Cheap Repository or tracts resembling those in the Repository [Cheap Repository Tracts] were the primary reading matter, perhaps the Clapham Sect can be said to have created a vogue for the short story. In any case the Cheap Repository begat swarms of imitations. When the danger of a British version of the French Revolution appeared unlikely, Hannah More and her friends stopped writing the Tracts. Their success, however, inspired other groups with polemical axes to grind. In 1799 the Religious Tract Society was founded. By 1823 the Society had published 51 millions of tracts. Although the Society's list included sermons, doctrinal treatises, handbills, and broad sheets, short stories were its most important type of publication. In their declaration of intent, the Society showed that it had learned narrative technique from the Cheap Repository. “A plain didactic essay on a religious subject,” the Society declared, “may be read by a Christian with much pleasure; but the persons for whom these tracts are chiefly designed will fall asleep over it. … There must be something to allure the listless to read, and this can only be done by blending entertainment with instruction. Where narrative can be made the medium of conveying truth, it is eagerly to be embraced.” Consequently among the Society's initial publications were the first numbers of Rowland Hill's short story-like Village Dialogues. With accounts of Farmer Littleworth, Mr. Lovegood, and Mr. Worthy, the Village Dialogues copied the technique and content of the Cheap Repository. By 1824, long after the Religious Tract Society had parted ways with Hill's growing Calvinism, the twenty-fourth edition of the Dialogues appeared.⁶

Hannah More's imitators were not restricted to England. In Ireland Mary Leadbeater published her Cottage Dialogues among the Irish Peasantry, fifty-four tracts which followed the fortunes of frugal, hard-working Rose and Jem and the misfortunes of vain and irresponsible Nancy and Tim. In reviewing the Cottage Dialogues, the Christian Observer noted Mary Leadbeater's debt to Hannah More, writing that the originality of the Cheap Repository would “continue a lasting monument, no less” of Mrs. More's “benevolence than of her genius.” In Scotland, clergy in Dumfriesshire wrote the Scotch Cheap Repository Tracts, modeled on Hannah More's “captivating mode of instruction.”⁷ In the United States, individual numbers of the Cheap Repository were printed separately while collections came out almost immediately in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. All over New England, for example, small presses printed scores of didactic tracts which were actually short stories. From Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1811 came typically a short account of the remarkable Elizabeth Osborn who died when she was only three years and nine months old. In Boston, the American Tract Society republished and distributed the “best” British tracts.

The Religious Tract Society was only one of many tract societies founded in the wake of the Cheap Repository. In 1799 the Society for Distributing Evangelical Tracts Gratis was established to promote “the knowledge of divine truth in simplicity” and to stem “the mighty torrent … of popery, infidelity, and avowed atheism.” In 1804 the British and Foreign Bible Society was founded. The next year the venerable Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge which had imbibed new life from the Cheap Repository published 112,440 tracts. Lists and statistics often cloud rather than clear the truth; but within a short period, a score of societies and individuals were publishing tracts adding up to the several hundred thousands annually for the moral benefit of Britons. Zealous individuals bought scores and gave them to their neighbors, distributed them on the turnpike, or left them in public houses. Not wildly atypical, the Rev. Samuel Kilpin was not satisfied unless he gave away 10,000 publications a year. In its Second Annual Report, the Religious Tract Society claimed, as could be expected, that “the lives of some persons, and the deaths of others appear to have been beneficially influenced by the publications already issued. Such proofs of Divine Sanction are felt as new bonds of attachment, new motives to gratitude, new impulses to zeal.” Religious journals were filled with accounts of tracts directing woe-begotten sinners to the rest of the righteous. Typically, a correspondent of the Evangelical Magazine urged readers to distribute tracts, writing, “At the awful but glorious day of judgment, when all things shall be made known, how will he that drew the bow at a venture rejoice with him that received the blessed golden arrow dipt in the blood of Jesus!”⁸

Because of the popularity of their short narratives, some pietistic writers became celebrities. To “feed his lambs,” the Rev. Legh Richmond wrote “The Dairyman's Daughter,” a lugubrious story about a young Christian on the Isle of Wight in the first decade of the nineteenth century. By 1828, over four million copies of the story had been printed, and it had been circulated in nineteen languages. Another 1,354,000 copies of a collection of Richmond's tales, including “The Dairyman's Daughter,” “The Young Cottager,” and “The African Servant,” were printed in the first half of the nineteenth century. Richmond became chaplain to the Duke of Kent, and Emperor Alexander of Russia presented him with a testimonial ring. Evoking shades of Richardson's popularity, pilgrims journeyed to the Isle of Wight to visit the graves of the Young Cottager and the Dairyman's Daughter. In the Jubilee Memorial of the Religious Tract Society, William Jones asked, “Who can calculate the numbers that have been safely guided to the rest of the righteous by ‘The Dairyman's Daughter’ and ‘The Young Cottager’.”⁹

Without the drops that Michael put into the eyes of Milton's Adam, it is impossible to answer Jones's question. Clearly, though, Jones believed Richmond's stories benefitted many who read them. In the vague history of ideas world, there are few final answers and many interesting speculations. Less speculative, however, than Richmond's influence, is, it seems to me, the possibility that the short stories in the Cheap Repository established the form as a familiar and respected genre. Certainly the Cheap Repository and its moralistic imitators deserve close examination. Even if it was not known as such, no literary form was more familiar to the early Victorians than the short story. When Irving wrote in the Preface to The Tales of a Traveller (1824) that he was “for curing the world by gentle alternatives, not by violent doses,” he was unconsciously following in the footsteps of Hannah More and countless tract writers who believed that truth could be taught to the reading public best in “the short prose narrative.”¹⁰

Notes

1. Pierre M. Irving, ed., The Life and Letters of Washington Irving (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1869), II, 64-65.

2. Robert D. Mayo, The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740-1815 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1962). Anonymous (her children), Some Account of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Trimmer (London, 1814), i, 49-50.

3. For the motivation of the Sunday School Movement and accounts of its early years, including such things as the relative ineffectiveness of Charity Schools, see William Turner, Sunday Schools Recommended (?), 1786); Beilby Porteus, A Letter to the Clergy of the Diocese of Chester (London, 1786); George Horne, Sunday Schools Recommended (Oxford, 1787); and Sarah Trimmer, Reflections Upon the Education of Children in Charity Schools. For fear of seditious writings, see John Bowles, A Short Answer to the Declaration of Persons Calling Themselves the Friends of the Liberty of the Press (London, 1793); and Philodemos, An Appeal to the Common Sense of the British People on the Subjects of Sedition and Religion (London, 1793).

4. The best account of Hannah More and the Cheap Repository Tracts is found in Ford K. Brown, Fathers of the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961). William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More (New York, 1834), i, 419, 424. Arthur Roberts, ed., Mendip Annals: or, A Narrative of the Charitable Labours of Hannah and Martha More (London, 1859), p. 51. Evangelical Magazine, 3(1795). 388-389; 17(1809), 289. Christian Observer, 12(1813), 390; 15 (1816), 785.

5. James A. Harrison, ed., The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1902), xi, 106-113, xiv, 193-194. Christian Observer, 8 (1809), 115. There are innumerable editions of the Cheap Repository Tracts, but the one I consulted in the British Museum was often neither dated nor paginated.

6. Religious Tract Society, “An Address to Christians on the Distribution of Religious Tracts” (London, 1799), p. 11.

7. William Jones, The Jubilee Memorial of the Religious Tract Society (London, 1850), p. 173.

8. Evangelical Magazine, 8 (1800), 80; 9 (1801), 452. Baptist Annual Register, 3(1801), 541-542. Jones, 57.

9. Jones, p. 10. Rev. John Ayre, “Brief Sketch of the Life of Rev. Legh Richmond” in the American Tract Society's edition of “The Dairyman's Daughter,” “The Young Cottager,” and “The African Servant” (New York, no date), pp. 5, 11, 176.

10. Irving, ed., The Works of Washington Irving: Tales of a Traveller (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1860), vii, ix.