VICTORIAN SHORT STORIES

Although the displacement of oral forms by written occurred over several centuries in Europe, even late in nineteenth-century published tales, sketches, legends, parables, and anecdotes continued to evidence the traces of spoken as opposed to written narrative, the most obvious of these oral residues being the persona of the tale-teller and his or her tendency to use vernacular expressions and a digressive method of recounting the events of the story. Lacking a traditional sense of the art and culture fostered by the aristocratic patron since the Middle Ages, the rising eighteenth-century middle class, buoyed up by capitalism and commerce, required entertainment to fill its leisure hours, but failed to find a satisfactory image of itself in contemporary drama and poetry, and so turned instead to prose fiction.