The short story was a commercial phenomenon which took off in the late nineteenth century and lasted through to the rise of television and film. Baldwin uses a wide variety of sources to show how economic factors helped to dictate how and what a wide variety of authors wrote.
Chapter 1 Economics and the Flowering of the British Short Story; Chapter 2 The Business of Authorship; Chapter 3 How Much Money Does an Author Need?; Chapter 4 Publishing Conditions in England, 1880-1950; Chapter 5 Authors' Careers: The Development of the Short Story in Britain, 1880-1914; Chapter 6 Short Stories and the Magazines; Chapter 7 Magazines' Restraints on Art in the Service of Commerce; Chapter 8 Short Stories in Book Form; Chapter 9 Sales of Short Story Collections and Novels; Chapter 10 First Editions, Limited Editions and Manuscripts; Chapter 11 The British Short Story and Its Reviewers; Chapter 12 Vitality and Variety in the British Short Story, 1915-50; Chapter 13 Art and Commerce in the British Short Story;
