Serialisation and Short Stories
Published July 26, 2011 | 
Q left his lecturing post at the University of Oxford to live and work in London in 1887. He once stated that he felt his future lay in being a writer and it was later clear that, in fact, he needed to earn more in order to pay off considerable family debts. His first novel, Dead Man’s Rock, had just been published by Cassell and was a great success but, as well as continuing to write his novels, he was also writing for Cassell’s new weekly paper, The Speaker. He clearly found that, as a writer during the latter part of the nineteenth century, an important outlet lay in the periodicals of the day. He later published some of these ‘short papers’, as he later called them, with minor changes in his first critical work Adventures Criticism (1887).
In addition to The Speaker, Q’s short stories appeared in a wide range of periodicals – including The Illustrated London News, Yule Tide, Lloyds Weekly News,The Weekly Dispatch, The Graphic, The Pall Mall, The Strand, Cassell’s Monthly, The Cornhill and others. Many are listed* in the Guides to Victorian Fiction referred to below.
He was writing prolifically and the pressure of overwork led to his illness in 1891 and the consequent family move to Fowey, his home for the rest of his life.
In 1906 he published many of his contributions to The Pall Mall Magazine in From a Cornish Window. In this year’s diary there were essays of literary criticism, light verse and comments on a wide range of contemporary affairs, which together gave an interesting ‘picture’ of Q as a person.
Noughts and Crosses (1891) was the first of his volumes of short stories, most of which had appeared in The Speaker. Collections of stories reprinted from other periodicals followed, starting in 1892 with I Saw Three Ships, and Other Winter’s Tales.
It is not difficult to realise why he was soon accorded such a high position among English short-story writers. With an incredible imagination and great technical ability, stories apparently poured off the famous pen with which he wrote everything. They ranged across a wide variety of setting, style and character study – history, romance, mystery, sadness, dialect, ghosts and humour were all used by Q. Inevitably, many were based in his beloved Cornwall while others were set far away – but always with a realistic portrayal of the ‘place’ involved.
*The Victorian Fiction Research Unit (School of English, Media Studies and Art History at The University of Queensland) publishes indexes to fiction and Guide 29 ( compiled by Graham Law) covers The Illustrated London News (1842-1901) and The Graphic (1869-1901).
