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In spite of the importance of the idea of the 'tale' within Romantic-era literature, short fiction of the period has received little attention from critics. Contextualizing British short fiction within the broader framework of early nineteenth-century print culture, Tim Killick argues that authors and publishers sought to present short fiction in book-length volumes as a way of competing with the novel as a legitimate and prestigious genre. Beginning with an overview of the development of short fiction through the late eighteenth century and analysis of the publishing conditions for the genre, including its appearance in magazines and annuals, Killick shows how Washington Irving's hugely popular collections set the stage for British writers. Subsequent chapters consider the stories and sketches of writers as diverse as Mary Russell Mitford and James Hogg, as well as didactic short fiction by authors such as Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Amelia Opie. His book makes a convincing case for the evolution of short fiction into a self-conscious, intentionally modern form, with its own techniques and imperatives, separate from those of the novel.

[...]my discussion covers both book illustration and painting.

This chapter presents an overview of the Short Fiction in the early nineteenth century. While most studies of short fiction acknowledge the existence of the genre in the early nineteenth century, they nonetheless view this era as one of relative infertility. The assumption of a relative lack of literary merit is one way in which modern criticism has limited readings of early-nineteenth-century short fiction, but it is not the only way. The chapter discusses the majority of early criticism took Poe's basic premise that short fiction was defined not only by its length, but also by stylistic and structural techniques, and by the ideological qualities of its writing as a starting point. Critics tread far more carefully when making broad-brush connections between Romantic ideologies and the novel, and short fiction deserves an equally nuanced approach. Magazine publishers found that ghost stories, comic tales, and descriptive sketches could be extremely popular, and rival titles were quick to latch onto new trends.

This chapter focuses on Scottish writers of short fiction, and their relationship with tradition and regionalism, but it is worth pausing to survey the regional tales that aligned themselves with other parts of the British Isles. Irish regionalism is associated with the negotiation of local and national identities within the unified Britain that had emerged after the Irish Act of Union and the Napoleonic Wars. One of the most remarkable Scottish instances of this practice was Allan Cunningham's Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry. Hogg's uncanny stories celebrate traditions and folklore in a way that actively interrogates Enlightenment historicism, but Cunningham is rarely so bold. In Hogg's stories, however, the villagers manage to combine Christian beliefs with a firm conviction in the operation of other supernatural forces. The short fiction of the early nineteenth century brought marginalised modes of thought into dialogue with more modern philosophies.

This chapter concerns short fiction which, to a greater or lesser degree, sought to elevate the morals of its readers, or which presented a model of decorous behaviour suitable for emulation. The vast majority of writers of moral stories were women, and part of the intention of the chapter is also to engage with the place of short fiction in the history of women's writing during the Romantic period. In the 1810s, prose fiction in Britain saw the emergence of two major artistic modes whose influence pervaded all subsequent nineteenth-century fiction: the historical novel and the novel of domestic realism. Like many writers of short fiction, Mary Russell Mitford's attraction to the form was prompted by a lack of self-belief with regard to novel-writing. The foremost example of the interface between humanity and nature, however, is that supreme embodiment of the English countryside: the meticulously landscaped garden of a country house.

Washington Irving's one unquestionable gift was as an excellent social and critical barometer. It considers popular traditions of the kind as fair foundations for authors of fiction to build upon, and had made use of the one in question accordingly' Irving argues that folktales are communal building blocks of narrative. The chapter addresses Irving's influence on British short fiction has been generally neglected, and it is this aspect of his writing. To reiterate the point he makes in Story Telling', every narrative is indebted in its own way to some hackneyed tale', and there is no such thing as a truly new story. Dolph Heyliger's story is Geoffrey Crayon's own narrative offering, although Irving once again redirects his New World tale via Dietrich Knickerbocker who is in turn furnished with a character sketch in The Historian'. Irving's writing was central to the development of British short fiction in the early nineteenth century for a several reasons.

This chapter presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book attempts to elaborate on some of the most significant movements and influences between 1800 and 1830. It seems appropriate to look ahead briefly to the progress of short fiction over the next decade. The book discusses the modern critical neglect of short fiction published during the early decades of the century. Anthologies of short fiction were of course published prior to the 1830s, and collections of European tales and anthologies compiled from Gothic bluebooks were particularly prominent during the 1810s and 1820s. The book argues that short fiction in the early nineteenth century was, to a large degree, defined by its market. It presents a study, which has sought to disclose those versions of early-nineteenth-century short fiction that lie somewhere between the brusque negativity voiced by Wendell Harris and the woolly Romanticism of Charles May's appraisal.

Historical surveys of literature always impose a rather blunt cut-off point. The preceding chapters have attempted to elaborate on some of the most significant movements and influences between 1800 and 1830, and at this juncture it seems appropriate to look ahead briefly to the progress of short fiction over the next decade. The 1830s have consistently resisted simple assessment by historians of literature. These interregnum years are habitually viewed as an uneasy bridge between the Romantics and the Victorians, and the decade is characterised by a slew of newly-minted fictional genres—the silver-fork novel, the Newgate novel, the military-adventure novel, the social-problem novel—some of which continued to develop through the remainder of the nineteenth century and some of which remained period-specific. The 1830s witnessed the passing of the old guard, with the death of Walter Scott in 1832, and the apprentice years of many of the great Victorian novelists, including Dickens and Thackeray. For short fiction, in broad terms, the watchword during the 1830s was expansion. Tales and stories, along with fiction in general, went through a phase of increased production and diversification, as the industry geared up for the comparatively vast publishing runs and new titles of the Victorian period. With both the novel and short fiction in flux, the periodical press became an increasingly important outlet. Meanwhile, the twin strains of moral–didactic fiction and traditional literature continued to help shape the history of short fiction.

The third chapter deals with the 'popular' tracts and tales of Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth, and the efforts of didactic writers to bring their message to bear on the lower orders--creating morally responsible individuals capable of upholding society's religious, social, and economic structure.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments are the trusted source of scientific evidence for climate negotiations taking place under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Evidence-based decision-making needs to be informed by up-to-date and timely information on key indicators of the state of the climate system and of the human influence on the global climate system. However, successive IPCC reports are published at intervals of 5–10 years, creating potential for an information gap between report cycles. We follow methods as close as possible to those used in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) Working Group One (WGI) report. We compile monitoring datasets to produce estimates for key climate indicators related to forcing of the climate system: emissions of greenhouse gases and short-lived climate forcers, greenhouse gas concentrations, radiative forcing, the Earth's energy imbalance, surface temperature changes, warming attributed to human activities, the remaining carbon budget, and estimates of global temperature extremes. The purpose of this effort, grounded in an open-data, open-science approach, is to make annually updated reliable global climate indicators available in the public domain (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11388387, Smith et al., 2024a). As they are traceable to IPCC report methods, they can be trusted by all parties involved in UNFCCC negotiations and help convey wider understanding of the latest knowledge of the climate system and its direction of travel. The indicators show that, for the 2014–2023 decade average, observed warming was 1.19 [1.06 to 1.30] °C, of which 1.19 [1.0 to 1.4] °C was human-induced. For the single-year average, human-induced warming reached 1.31 [1.1 to 1.7] °C in 2023 relative to 1850–1900. The best estimate is below the 2023-observed warming record of 1.43 [1.32 to 1.53] °C, indicating a substantial contribution of internal variability in the 2023 record. Human-induced warming has been increasing at a rate that is unprecedented in the instrumental record, reaching 0.26 [0.2–0.4] °C per decade over 2014–2023. This high rate of warming is caused by a combination of net greenhouse gas emissions being at a persistent high of 53±5.4 Gt CO2e yr−1 over the last decade, as well as reductions in the strength of aerosol cooling. Despite this, there is evidence that the rate of increase in CO2 emissions over the last decade has slowed compared to the 2000s, and depending on societal choices, a continued series of these annual updates over the critical 2020s decade could track a change of direction for some of the indicators presented here.