Short story oddities by Anthony Trollope and Charlotte Mew - it made a claim to something like supremacy of charm

The logical step following The Father and Miss Julie is The Dance of Death, but right now I am going to take a one-post break from Strindberg while another subject is fresh in my mind.  I have returned, briefly, to A. S. Byatt’s Oxford Book of English Short Stories (1998), and I am worried that if I wait I will not have as much fun mocking the stories I read today.

To be clear, Byatt’s anthology has been a treat to paw through, and now I hope someday to read ‘em all.  But one admirable feature of the book is Byatt’s complete lack of interest in compiling the best English short stories.  She went for the oddest, or the oddest given the need for a certain number of famous names.

Story 1: “Relics of General Chassé: A Tale of Antwerp” by Anthony Trollope (1860), the only Trollope short story I have ever read.  It is an elaborate joke based around two related points, the fun to be had with a fat clergyman who has lost his pants, and the impropriety, within the world of the story and in the text itself, of uttering a specific word:

‘He has lost his things,’ and I took hold of my own garments.  ‘It’s a long story, or I’d tell you how; but he has not a pair in the world till he gets back to Brussels, – unless you can lend him one.’

‘Lost his br–?’ and he opened his eyes wide, and looked at me with astonishment.

‘Yes, yes, exactly so,’ said I, interrupting him.  (54)

How do the ladies address the problem?

‘We just found a pair of black –.’  The whole truth was told in the plainest possible language.

‘Oh, Aunt Sally!’  ‘Aunt Sally, how can you?’  ‘Hold your tongue, Aunt Sally!’  (59)

Trollope was quite inventive in the many ways he dodges the word “breeches.”  The story also has some reasonable satirical points to make about celebrity and about dignity carried to far, not that any reader will learn anything he didn’t know.  Byatt picked the story for the writer’s trick, the telling of a story based on a forbidden word.

Story 2: “A White Night” by Charlotte Mew (1903).  Mew is worth knowing about for her own sake.  Virginia Woolf called her “the greatest living poetess” based on her 1916 collection The Farmer’s Bride, which is why I try not to make such generalizations without a hundred years hindsight, since the greatest living “poetess” at the time was either Anna Akhmatova or Marina Tsvetaeva.

In the story, English tourists have accidentally gotten themselves locked in a remote Andalusian church, where they witness the Spanish monks commit a terrible ritual murder.  I know, a return to The Monk in 1903!

It’s the style, though, that had me laughing here.  The tourists have reached the isolated Spanish village:

In its neglect and singularity, it made a claim to something like supremacy of charm.  There was a quality of diffidence belonging to unrecognised abandoned personalities in that appeal.

That’s how I docketed it in memory – a city with a claim, which, as it happened, I was not to weigh.  (141)

I don’t know, maybe you like it.  I know what the last bit means – they leave the town without exploiting it – but “unrecognised abandoned personalities,” if you say so.

Whenever Mew turns to abstraction she uses this Jamesian mode.  It sound like James to me.  The story begins with a frame, an imitation of the beginning of the Turn of the Screw (1898):

‘The incident,’ said Cameron, ‘is spoiled inevitably in the telling, by its merely accidental quality of melodrama, its sensational machinery, which, to the view of anyone who didn’t witness it, is apt to blue the finer outlines of the scene.  The subtlety, or call it the significance, is missed, and unavoidably, as one attempts to put the thing before you, in a certain casual crudity, and inessential violence of fact.’  (139)

Not “inevitably,” pal – it’s just the way you tell it.  And the curious thing is the mismatch between voice and subject does not spoil the central horror of the tale at all.  Accentuates it, if anything.

Going for a swim with Thomas Hardy - some social realism

I have avoided, up to now, A. S. Byatt’s stories pulled from the Thomas Hardy-like pile, stories that might be called “social realism” even when, like the selected Hardy story, “A Mere Interlude” (1885), they are unrealistic.  Besides Hardy, there is Arthur Morrison’s “Behind the Shade” and Mary Mann’s “Little Brother,” publication dates unknown to me.  I think it is fair to call them a couple of neglected authors.

Morrison’s story is an argument against basing class hatred on assumptions.  The poor neighbors assume that a spinster and her mother are well to do because they have a nice ornament, “a cone of waxen grapes and apples under a nice cover” (105), in their window.  But they ain’t.  The art of this story is in the fluid “social” point of view, which is most often a vague observation by a random passerby, or gossip, making a series of misinterpretations that Morrison and his reader gently form into the true, sad story.

Mann, the Hardy of Norfolk, is more brutal.  A mother has delivered her thirteenth child, stillborn.  Her husband and oldest son, both literally “attired for the most part in a sack,” are outside slicing turnips in some kind of machine.  The poor baby – hey, where is the baby?

‘Ain’t he theer?’ the woman asked, her eyes upon the chair.

‘Nothing’s there, Mrs Hodd.’  (93)

Thank goodness there is only a page left.  The poor dead baby does not end up in the turnip slicer, if that’s what you fear (I did), but Mann nevertheless has no problem violating good taste to emphasize her characters’ misery.  Be sure to put a toy in that donation box this Christmas.

Those two were just a few pages each.  “A Mere Interlude” is thirty, giving Hardy plenty of room to swerve around.  A young woman, unhappy with school teaching, agrees to go back home and marry a well-to-do merchant, much older than her.  She misses a ferry, though, and in the interval meets an old flame.  Wouldn’t she prefer to marry him? Right now?  She would; they do.  Now, they are waiting for the ferry again, the one she missed, but this time the plan is to introduce her new husband to her family and that disappointed merchant who thinks he will marry her tomorrow.

The heat of the morning was by this time intense.  They clambered up on some cliffs, and while sitting there, looking around at St Michael’s Mount and other objects, Charles said to her that he thought he would run down to the beach at their feet, and take just one plunge into the sea.  (72)

We’re not quite at the halfway point.  I way well have laughed aloud here.  So that’s where the story is going, that’s the “mere interlude.”  Poor Charles.

This leads to the only truly tin-eared sentence that I noticed.  I mean the second, although the first is no prize either:

By this time she was alarmed, and her alarm intensified when she perceived a little beyond the scene of her husband’s bathing a small area of water, the quality of whose surface differed from that of the surrounding expanse as the coarse vegetation of some foul patch in a mead differs from the fine green of the remainder.  Elsewhere it looked flexuous, here it looked vermiculated and lumpy, and her marine experiences suggested to her in a moment that two currents met and caused a turmoil at this place.  (73)

Don’t let “flexuous” and “vermiculated” distract you from the wonderful oddness of “her marine experiences.”

People say Hardy is depressing.  Well listen to this:

… her mother remaining below to complete the disposition of the supper, and attend to the preparation of tomorrow’s meal, altogether composing such an array of pies, from pies of fish to pies of turnips, as was never heard outside of the Western Duchy.  (77)

This is for a wedding, a party!  Turnip pie!  It’s the most depressing thing I have ever read in all of literature.

Other than this stuff, the Hardy story is pretty good.  All of the stories in the Byatt book have been at least pretty good.  But now I think I’ll put it away for a while.

He sees to things connected with his Department - short stories are stories

Byatt’s Oxford Anthology of English Short Stories is in my hands not just because I am enjoying it but because it is going to serve as the test text for an experiment run by Alex of Thinking in Fragments in which, by means of the technique of tagmemics, she is going to prove that “most so called short stories are actually nothing of the sort” because the “dénouement and/or conclusion is missing,” with readers “left to construct the elements that are missing” and, by extension, this is why people don’t “get” short stories.

By contrast, my experience has been that almost all short stories of any real quality, the only ones I am likely to read, are actually stories – most stories are light entertainment published in popular magazines, not avant garde fragments – and that readers do not like them for reasons that will sound uncharitable if I write them out.  Most novels, even many of the best, are more forgiving of a reader’s inattention, I will just say that.  I mostly read novels myself.

So I have been, like a diligent student, reading ahead.  Odds are I won’t understand a word of the tagmemicism, so the argument will be left unresolved.  If Alex does not insist on a chronological order, I suggest starting with “My Flannel Knickers” by Leonora Carrington, who was a rarity, a genuine English Surrealist.  She supplies the painting on the book’s cover as well as three pages of silliness about a saint who lives on a traffic island which, however random its contents, deliberately mimics the structure of an ordinary story. 

So here I am on the island with all size of mechanical artifacts whizzing by in every conceivable direction, even overhead.

Here I sit.  (371)

Or so it seems to me, using the technique of reading.

Another good test case is the Saki story “The Toys of Peace,” in part because its contents are so trivial and predictable.  An uncle and mother decide that the children should relinquish their tin soldiers for peaceful toys.  Presented with said toys, the little boys immediately march them off to war.  The appeal of this story lies entirely in its details.

In an awful silence he disinterred a little lead figure of a man in black clothes.

‘That,’ he said, ‘is a distinguished civilian, John Stuart Mill.  He was an authority on political economy.’

‘Why?’ asked Bertie.

‘Well, he wanted to be; he thought it was a useful thing to be.’

Bertie gave an expressive grunt, which conveyed his opinion that there was no accounting for tastes.  (156)

I included the last line because I feel it to be, as a joke, cheap and inferior.  The big laugh is in the word “Why.”

‘These little round things are loaves baked in a sanitary bakehouse.  That lead figure is a sanitary inspector, this one a district councillor, and this one is an official of the Local Government Board.’

‘What does he do?’ asked Eric wearily.

‘He sees to things connected with his Department,’ said Harvey. (157)

Sensitive readers will experience a joyous, healthful catharsis when, at the end of the story, Mill and the others have been doused with red ink.  “’He bleeds dreadfully,’ said Bertie, splashing red ink liberally on the façade of the Association building” (159).

I could use a technique which demonstrates which jokes are funny.  Regardless, I eagerly await the tagmemicist experiment, even though I am already know the results.

So, from the first, I was haunted by the letter B - a scary Dickens ghost story

When I started Wuthering Expectations I had wondered what kind of schedule I could keep.  But I always knew I could just write about short stories, just read one and get writin’.  I swore, though, that I would only resort to such desperate measures when – no, I thought I would do it all the time.  I don’t know why I don’t do it more.  I had been planning to spend much of this week writing about Walter Pater, for pity's sake.  Random English short stories: much easier.

So I am still in A. S. Byatt’s Oxford Book of English Short Stories.  Long ago, I wrote a little post wondering about the dearth of famous 19th century English short stories.  Compared to U.S. literature at the same time, I mean – Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, James, those folks.  Or Russian, French, or German literature.  The English, like the Americans, had magazines, and those magazine published fictional stories of various lengths and qualities.  They published such stories by famous writers, famous then, or now, or both.  Yet the British stories have always had a lower status, kept off in the margins as if they are second-rate compared to the best novels, which, in my experience, they mostly are until Stevenson and especially Kipling came along in the 1880s.  I have read more of the relevant pool of stories since I wrote that old post, but I have not solved the puzzle.

I do not know if it is coincidence, but I believe Kipling’s “’Wireless’” is the most famous or studied story that Byatt, who is deliberately on the lookout for oddities and obscurities, includes in the Oxford book, unless “The Haunted House” (1859) by Charles Dickens counts.  “Today, ‘The Haunted House of 1859’ is one of the attractions at Dickens World in Chatham in Kent” – if that’s not fame, what is.

One of the bedrooms is haunted by the ghost of young Master B., who was done in because he rang the bell while the owl hooted (the house is also haunted by an “’ooded woman with a howl”).  The sensible narrator, assigned to that room, is “uneasy” about the initial.

I also carried the mysterious letter into the appearance and pursuits of the deceased; wondering whether he dressed in Blue, wore Boots (he couldn’t have been Bald), was a boy of Brains, liked Books, was good at Bowling, had any skill as a Boxer, even in his Buoyant Boyhood Bathed from a Bathing-machine at Bognor, Bangor, Bournemouth, Brighton, or Broadstairs, like a Bounding Billiard Ball?

So, from the first, I was haunted by the letter B.  (34)

The ghost story, as readers of Wuthering Expectations are well aware, is an inherently comic genre.  This one takes a strange turn, though, into a genuinely sentimental childhood story, in which an elaborate schoolchild game based on The Arabian Nights is shattered by the intrusion of real death and poverty.  At the new (“cold, bare”) school

I never whispered in that wretched place that I had been Haroun or had had a Seraglio: for, I knew that if I mentioned my reverses, I should be so worried, that I should have to drown myself in the muddy pond near the playground, which looked like the beer.  (42)

“The Haunted House” is part of a frame story for a separate anthology with contributions by Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell and others, at least one of whom may have written a story more appealing to true fans of ghost stories, in which the ghost is not just a metaphor for the losses we all suffer, but surely less appealing to me, so I will not check.

He sincerely repented his fault - a comfy magic demon pig story by W. S. Gilbert's father

If “The Man without a Country” now seems minor, it was once a standard American classic, much anthologized, much loved, even.  Today I turn to a story I had never heard of, “The Sacristan of St Botolph” (1866) by William Gilbert, the father of half of Gilbert and Sullivan.  I came across the story in the prestigious spot it now occupies as the first work in The Oxford Book of English Short Stories (1998) as selected by A. S. Byatt.  She says “the end is not fully achieved” (xviii), so I will skip the ending.

A minor clergyman, Geoffrey Cole, believes that he is “so good that the saints alone were his equals” (1).  He has the temerity to declare that he would like to experience all of the temptations of Saint Anthony (“’for a month,’” 2) just to “’see if I could not resist them.’”

In fiction, if not in real life, this is asking for trouble, so the next morning the sacristan awakens to find himself in bed with “a large fat pig with a bell fastened round its neck with a leathern strap” (3).  The pig sits on Cole’s legs, eats his breakfast, and follows him around, generally making a minor nuisance of himself.  I first thought this conceit was merely amusing, but it is really quite clever.  Forget pain, seductresses, and offers of wealth – the sacristan cannot even handle the presence of an ordinary barnyard animal.

He then bought sufficient for his breakfast the next morning and afterwards some vegetables for the pig.  This last investment, we are obliged to acknowledge with great sorrow, caused him much annoyance.  He had a violent objection to spend money on anybody but himself, and although he wished to act the part of an anchorite as closely as he could, he never had heard of one spending money on a dumb animal, and he almost considered it to be a work of supererogation to waste the money as he had done on the pig.  However, it was done, and there was no help for it.  He sincerely repented his fault, and he could not say more; he would be more cautious another time.  (6)

I should mention that there is also an imp hanging around, but its use is purely expository.  The imp should have been omitted.  It is clear enough that the pig by himself is a great temptation to sin, mostly of the venial kind, admittedly, but enough to dispel the petty hypocrisy of Cole’s aspiration to sainthood.

A subtheme builds as the story proceeds, enough to become something of a twist ending.  The story’s sympathy actually lies with the sacristan.  He should be annoyed at the pig; he should resent the disruptions of his comforts and ordinary indulgences, his breakfast and wine and flirtations with a “buxom widow.”  He should, of course, not be a hypocrite about his trivial sins but rather embrace them.

Byatt, given the task of assembling a book of English stories, “decided to be stringent about the Englishness of the writers” (xv) in terms of both origin and attitude.  I guess “The Sacristan of St Botolph” is an example of the latter.

A disturbing crablike agility - the short stories of Ben Fountain

I thought I had run out of recent books to review. Didn't plan this week of genuwine book reviews very well! But I remembered another, and even have some notes. But it's fair to assume that I've misremembered everything but the title and author. I could look those up.

The book is Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (2006) by Ben Fountain, eight short stories most obviously distinguished by their settings. Burma, Sierra Leone, Colombia, and four with some connection to Haiti. Hellholes, in other words.

Most of the stories are strongly plotted, and should be turned into feature films, assuring the financial independence of the author. "Asian Tiger," for example, about a washed up professional golfer who takes a job as the country club pro for the the Burmese junta. It has CIA agents, helicopters, explosions, moral compromise, and a big part for an up-and-coming actor. The ending maybe needs a little more punch to work as a Hollywood movie. As a short story, it's just fine as is.

"Bouki and the Cocaine" needs no help of any sort. A couple of Haitian fishermen find a big bag of cocaine. They hand it over to the police; pretty soon the police all have fancy new SUVs. The fishermen find more cocaine (they're on a Caribbean smuggling route) and turn it over to the mayor, since they can't trust the police. Pretty soon the mayor and his staff all have fancy new SUVs. And then a third bag of cocaine washes up. Now what? The only problem with this story, from Hollywood's point of view, is that every character is Haitian.

In the title story, an ornithologist is kidnapped by FARC and held captive in the Colombian jungle (hey, look, here it is). In another, a woman discovers that her Special Forces husband, home from a mission in Haiti, has converted to voodoo. Perhaps I'm making Fountain sound like a thriller writer. He'd probably be a good one, but that's not his purpose. He's interested in stories that demand a strong moral point of view, where doing the right thing is extremely difficult. Fountain reminds me a bit of Tobias Wolff in this way. A consequence is that he tells stories where something happens, where the changes in a character are not entirely internal.

Hey, zhiv, you're in showbiz, right? These are a sure thing, man. I should have been an agent. Or a d-girl.

Fountain's eighth story is a whole 'nother thing. "Fantasy for Eleven Fingers" is set in late 19th century Vienna, and is written as if it's non-fiction, like maybe it's a New Yorker profile:

"The first edition of Grove’s Dictionary states that Visser had the hands of a natural pianist: broad, elastic palms, spatulate fingers, and exceptionally long little fingers. He could stretch a twelfth and play left-hand chords such as A flat, E flat, A flat, and C, but it was the hypnotically abnormal right hand that ultimately set him apart. ‘The two ring fingers of his right hand,’ the critic Blundren wrote, ‘are perfect twins, each so exact a mirror image of the other as to give the effect of an optical illusion, and in action possessed of a disturbing crablike agility. Difficult it is, indeed, to repress a shudder when presented with Visser’s singular hand.’” (p. 205)

Visser and Blundren are made up, while Grove’s Dictionary and Brahms and Freud, to mention some other names pulled in to the story, are, I am fairly certain, real, but it’s all seamless, except that Blundren sounds like he escaped from an E. T. A. Hoffmann story.

I discovered Ben Fountain through this Malcolm Gladwell piece, in which Fountain serves as a case study for a certain type of creativity (Che Guevara is Fountain's first book; he was forty-eight when it was published). The Vienna story, just as much as the ones set in Haiti or Colombia, demonstrates his craft, every detail in the right place, everything aimed in one direction.

I think a lot of people who don't normally read short stories would enjoy Fountain's book.

Help the jackass of your neighbor and your jackass of a neighbor too - Sholem Aleichem's masterpiece "Hodl"

Tevye's oldest daughter, in "Today's Children," turned down a proposal by a rich man to marry a poor tailor. The next daughter, Hodl, does something even worse: she falls for a university student. She "reads and write both Yiddish and Russian and swallows books like hot cakes." That'll lead to trouble.

Here Tevye first meets the student, Peppercorn:

"Just then I looked ahead and saw a young man trudging along by the side of the path, a bundle under one arm, all sweaty and falling off his feet. 'Hurry up or you'll be late for the wedding!'* I called out to him. 'Come to think of it, hop aboard; I'm going your way and my wagon is empty. You know what the Bible says: help the jackass of your neighbor if you pass him on the road, and your jackass of a neighbor too.'**

He laughed and jumped into the wagon without having to be asked twice." (p. 55)

Tevye likes the student and invites him home. Soon Peppercorn is tutoring Tevye's daughters, and is practically one of the family. Just one problem:

"But I will say this for Peppercorn: when he opened his mouth, it erupted like a volcano. You wouldn't have believed the things that came out of it then, such wild, crazy ideas, everything backwards and upside down with tis feet sticking up in the air. A rich Jew, for instance - that's how warped his mind was - wasn't worth a row of beans to him, but a beggar was a big deal, and a workingman - why, a workingman was king, he was God's gift to the world - the reason being, I gathered, that he worked.

'Still,' I would say, 'when it comes to livelihoods, you can't compare work to making money." (p. 57)

The student is a radical, a revolutionary, in Russia in 1904. He marries Hodl - I'm skipping a funny scene where they announce their engagement to Tevye - but then disappears, into a prison, it turns out. The story only has five pages left. Hodl tells her father that she will join her husband in Siberia; Tevye argues with her is his usual indirect way; they sit on the porch all night and talk; Tevye takes her to the train station.

Those last few pages are funny, sad, warm, psychologically insightful. What more do I want? "Hodl" is one of the best short stories I have ever come across. I had not been expecting that.

I have been enjoying the Hillel Halkin translation, Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories, but am delighted to see that Penguin Classics, just a couple of weeks ago, published a new version by Aliza Shevrin, an expert translator of Sholem Aleichem. This one is called Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son. The latter contains the monologues of a nine-year-old who migrates to America. The Railroad Stories or Motl the Cantor's Son, which should you choose? I haven't read either, but will, soon, God willing. Politely request that your library own both.

* Just to be clear, the "wedding" is merely Tevye's joke, although a joke that backfires.

** Exodus 23:5 "If thou see the ass of him that hateth thee lying under his burden... thou shalt surely help him." Close enough for Tevye.

Let's talk about something more cheerful - Tevye's novel of short stories

Tevye the Dairyman actually is a book of short stories that functions as a novel. A timetable of original publication dates will clear things up:

1894 "Tevye Strikes It Rich"
1899 "Tevye Blows a Small Fortune"
1899 "Today's Children"
1904 "Hodl"
1905 "Chava"
1907 "Shprintze"
1909 "Tevye Leaves for the Land of Israel"
1911 Tevye the Dairyman is published as a book
1914 "Lekh-Lekho"

I'm ignoring some revisions. The first two stories are just what their titles say; the rest are about Tevye and his daughters. One can see that it took Sholem Aleichem a few years to attach the "marry off his daughters" story to Tevye. Also, that Sholem Aleichem was not quite happy with the way he ended the story in 1909, so he gave Tevye one more story. Sholem Aleichem was right, the 1914 ending is better.

The stories take place in real time. Tevye mentions actual events - pogroms, plagues, emigration - and he ages, which reinforces the theme of the breakdown of the old order. But Tevye is always funny, and even cheerful. Tragicomic, I guess that's the word. Here's how "Hodl" ends:

"You know what, Pan Sholem Aleichem? Let's talk about something more cheerful. Have you heard any news of the cholera in Odessa?"

"Hodl" is absolutely amazing, one of the best short stories I have ever read. More on that tomorrow. I've come across readers, good readers, who complain about short stories, for reasons which mostly perplex me. One of the oddest complaints is that they want to spend more time with the characters, to get to know them better. I think there's a basic misunderstanding of the form here that could be cleared up with a little effort, but in any case, Tevye the Dairyman doesn't have that issue. You want more Tevye, you got it, at least until you get to the end, when, come to think if it, I still wanted more.

Gaps in the canon

Sometimes gaps appear in the history of literature. The most notorious is in English drama. Shakespeare and his contemporaries produced an amazing, varied body of work, comedy, tragedy, all sorts of hybrids. The dramatic tradition was strong enough to survive a 20 year closing of the theaters, partly by borrowing new energy from the French and Spanish theater. But for some reason, the great plays begin to disappear. The bizarre, intense "Venice Preserved" by Thomas Otway is considered the last great tragedy (until the 20th century), from 1682. Comedy took longer to expire. "The Beggar's Opera", Goldsmith, Sheridan - the 18th century had some great comedies. But then that was it, for 100 years, until Gilbert and Sullivan.

What makes this puzzling is that the English theater itself was active and healthy. Plenty of good actors, too. And plenty of plays, thousands of plays. But none of them are performed anymore, and only a few read for their poetry (Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, for example, all wrote plays - Coleridge even had a hit). The same goes for the American theater, which didn't produce a decent play until the 20th century, and not for lack of trying.

I've just come across a new puzzling gap. Where are the great 19th century English short stories? They are not, for example, in anthologies of English literature. The list of great American short story writers, all much anthologized, includes Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, James, Bierce, Crane, Jewett, Chesnutt, Twain, Wharton - a fair share of the best American writers, and a list that spans the century.

But in England? By the 1890s, Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle are writing short stories, soon to be followed by Maugham, Joyce, Lawrence - big names. Before that? The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, in entries for Trollope, Eliot, and Dickens, vaguely mentions the existence of short stories, often at the very end of a long entry. "The Christmas Carol" is a famous exception, maybe Dickens' other Christmas stories, as well.

The puzzle is twofold. First, the number of American short story writers seems connected to the explosion of magazine publishing in the early 19th century. But England was experiencing the exact same phenomenon. The early essayists like Hazlitt and Lamb were all magazine writers. Dickens, too.

Second, anthologists need short stories. You can't fit many novels into your Anthology of American Literature, but you can still represent every writer you want with a short story. Anthologies of English literature typically completely omit Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, Hardy, the whole crew.

Are the short stories of Dickens (Eliot, etc.) really not worth reading? I find that hard to believe. So I'm adding a note to my "To Read" list - I'll find out for myself.