All the Authors had their own style of writing. Some writers used formal language and some used imagery and other techniques. Charles Dickens, who wrote The Signalman, used lots of imagery to develop the main setting of the story. “Barbarous, depressing and forbidding air” are a few of the words he selected. The effect of these words are that the reader can capture what the author was thinking when he wrote it.
The description of the setting The Signalman does describe what most work was like. Also the words “Solitary position” are used and this suggests that he was lonesome and he has a dreadful place of work. Charles Dickens wanted to draw attention to some horrible lives as well as entertaining people at the same time. All three of the stories that we read by Charles Dickens suggest that he wants people to know about the hardships of different lifestyles and different social statuses. The story Captain Murderer includes social status but in a more subtle way. Captain Murderer is rich and because of this, people still want to marry him even though you would think that his name would warn people away from him.
Some stories omit parts of them because the Authors think that they are unimportant to the flow and would produce unnecessary information that the reader would not need to know. For example, The Ostler misses put 7 years from the story because the author Wilkie Collins, thought that these years were not of importance to what happens in the story. We get to hear about what happened before and after these 7 years in great detail but Wilkie Collins only briefly sums up the missing 7 years. Possibly, he thinks that writing about the missed years would be irrelevant to the main point of the story. However, Sikes and Nancy is told in chronological order without jumping forward or backward in time. A lot happens in a short space of time.
Captain Murderer is a good example of an informally told short story. It is written simply like someone telling his or her friend a funny story. On the other hand, the Ostler is more formal using more complex sentences and language. The Ostler is written in a style that in my opinion would have been for an upper class family whereas Captain Murderer could have been read by less educated people. Also the Ostler’s storyline is more complicated than the simple storyline of Captain Murderer. The plot in Captain Murderer is simple and is like a fairytale, because the ‘goody’ got the ‘baddy’ and everything works out all right in the end. However in a fairytale no one is harmed except the ‘baddy’ and the ‘baddies’ victims. In the end of Captain Murderer the heroine dies as well as the ‘baddy.’
The type of language that Victorian writers used is different from what we would use now. The poor people’s children had no education as their parents could not afford school fees and they had to be sent out to work as soon as they could. The middle class and rich children would receive an education. However, education for boys and girls was different. It was easy to find a high-class public school for a boy but a governess usually educated girls at home. The poor people’s speech in these short stories is very different to the developed speech of the rich.
Charles Dickens uses these differences in the story Sikes and Nancy, in which there is a conversation between a rich couple and Nancy. The rich couple speaks with an educated tone, (‘in this young ladies interest’) because they have obviously been to school whereas Nancy who had not been to school spoke simply with slang and roughly, like the thief she is (‘neither he nor any’). If you compare any two parts of the speeches that the rich and the poor make you would see a remarkable difference between their speech. Charles Dickens uses this scene to make a point about the social status and the power of the rich. However all people later in the Victorian times would have been able to read these stories and there would be less difference from the classes because during that period everyone was entitled to free schooling.
Of all the Victorian Short stories that I have read, half were told by narrators and the other half were related by characters in the stories. For example, The Signalman is narrated by a character. The story is told from the point of view of the character who visits the Signalman. The effect of this is that the reader can understand what the man is thinking when the Signalman keeps looking around for things that were not there. If it had been told by the Signalman then the reader would have got a understanding in to what he thought was going on. However, I still think that the story would be best narrated by the visitor.
Some of the short stories were narrated by two people, they started out being told by one person and then as the story develops another character takes over. This is what happens in The Ostler. First, a visitor narrates the story and then the Ostler’s boss, though none of them is connected to what happens to the Ostler, it is still very effective.
A story that is told by a narrator is Sikes and Nancy, this story uses direct speech, not many of the stories do, and it centres on what Nancy is doing or what people are doing about Nancy. This short story may have been good if it had been told by Fagin or the spy who follows her. The story is still very effective told by a narrator though.
The Victorian times were very different to now. In my opinion, I doubt that people would buy magazines for the stories that were in them. Short stories are still very entertaining though and perhaps people may still read them if they were serialized in magazines. There are a more wider selection of leisure activities now that people can choose to do instead of reading or listening to short stories so the demand would be less for them than in the Victorian times.
