From the appearance of his first full-length work of prose fiction, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, in 1836-1837, Charles Dickens has retained his place as one of the best-loved and most widely read novelists in the world. Not so well known is his contribution to the short-story genre, although Dickens's stories had a profound influence on Victorian publishing as well as on the development of his own art. If they are overlooked today, it is primarily because many of them were originally published within novels or other frameworks, and much of their appeal is lost when they are considered apart from those contexts. For Dickens the short story was not a complete and distinct work of art; it was, instead, one element in a ritual of storytelling that included the teller, the listener, and the story itself, a ritual as old as the fairy tales on which Dickens's philosophy of storytelling was based.
