A “shred and patch school of writing”

One of the first texts that seems to have raised British readers' awareness of a genre that "had no name then" was Washington Irving's The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. In the same work in which Jewsbury reported on the period's bibliographic overflow, she also declared that Irving's work belonged to a new form of textual organization: "the shred and patch school of writing", with Irving as its "father". The popularity of imaginative fiction in Britain after the turn of the century presented somewhat of a conundrum to the late Enlightenment view that the press was "the great organ of intellectual improvement and civilization". In its refusal to follow the well-trodden paths of the novel and the collection, the "shred and patch school of writing" in late Romantic Britain represents an early but significant nexus of the short story cycle's modern generic individuation.