http://www.slate.com/id/2267846/

How To Write Like a Victorian
What can the first how-to book for fiction still tell us?

By Paul Collins

Posted Friday, Nov. 26, 2010, at 7:23 AM ET

In the fall of 1895, thousands of Brits were wracked by a painful and embarrassing affliction: rejection slips. Britain, it seems, was a nation of cracked Kiplings and ham-handed Hardys. "The number of persons who are now engaged in writing fiction," the Glasgow Herald estimated, "[is] somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand."

For them, the publication that year of Jude the Obscure and The Time Machine meant far less than the appearance of a whole new kind of book: How To Write Fiction. Published under the pen name "An Old Hand," How To's anonymous author was a "well known novelist"—a man who, the Herald assured readers, might open "a new prospect for those would-be novelists who are annually rejected in their thousands." The introduction to the book promised to give readers the clarity of long experience—not some youth whose "work will appear like a picture in a stereopticon that is out of focus."