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Nineteenth-century reviews of novels often included a complete plot summary, along with lengthy quotations from the novel to give a sense of the author’s style. In many respects, these narratives functioned as a form of short fiction–a true “novel in a nutshell.” Numerous readers would have first encountered more lengthy narratives in this shortened form. For example, Gregory Vargo notes that the Northern Star<\/em>, a Chartist paper, “reviewed and republished portions of” novels by Charles Dickens and Benjamin Disraeli, among other authors. He concludes that “[a]s the Star<\/em> boasted a circulation around 10,000 and a readership several times that, a significant portion of the books’ audiences read them in this fragmentary form.”1<\/sup><\/a>Gregory Vargo, An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, RAdical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel<\/em>, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.<\/span><\/span>