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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In "In a Steamer Chair, and Other Stories," Robert Barr presents a captivating collection of short narratives that explore the intricacies of human emotion and experience through a lens of wit and irony. Barr's writing style is characterized by its clarity and keen observation, as he deftly navigates themes of love, loss, and the idiosyncrasies of everyday life. Set against the backdrop of late 19th to early 20th century society, these stories reflect the shifting cultural norms of the time, while also offering timeless insights into the human condition, making this collection a rich tapestry of social commentary and artistic expression. Robert Barr, a Canadian author and journalist, was deeply influenced by his experiences in both Canada and England, as well as his encounters with diverse cultures throughout his life. His background in journalism is evident in his narrative style, which is both engaging and accessible. Barr's adept storytelling often intertwines humor with poignant reflections, revealing the complexities of life and relationships. His continued exploration of human interactions sheds light on the social landscapes of his era, providing context for the often universal themes he addresses in his stories. This collection is highly recommended for readers who appreciate sharp wit and thoughtful character exploration. Barr's stories not only entertain but also provoke reflection on life's myriad experiences. Ideal for fans of short fiction, "In a Steamer Chair, and Other Stories" invites readers to immerse themselves in a world where the mundane becomes extraordinary, ensuring a rewarding literary journey. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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In a Steamer Chair, and Other Stories
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume presents a single-author gathering of Robert Barr’s shorter fiction under the banner In a Steamer Chair, and Other Stories. Rather than attempting a complete works or a compendium of novels and plays, it offers a focused selection of stories that Barr first issued in the late nineteenth century and brought together in book form in 1892. The purpose is to showcase his range within short prose, from travel-centered sketches to social comedy and light suspense. The selection here, including pieces such as In a Steamer Chair and The Man Who was Not on the Passenger List, illustrates his versatility within the compact narrative form.
The contents are prose fiction exclusively, comprising short stories that variously engage travel narrative, society tale, comic romance, and mystery-adjacent intrigue. There are no poems, plays, essays, diaries, or letters; the collection maintains a consistent emphasis on narrative prose. Readers will encounter vignettes set aboard ships, urbane drawing-room scenes, club anecdotes, and situations that turn on wit, perception, and social maneuvering. While the tones shift from playful to suspenseful, the form remains the short story throughout, with the concision and immediacy that reflect their original magazine contexts and their later arrangement in a unified volume.
Despite their variety, these stories share unifying concerns that make them read as a coherent whole. Travel and transit—most memorably in the shipboard milieu of In a Steamer Chair—create spaces where chance encounters test identity and discretion. Social performance and reputation thread through Mrs. Tremain and A Ladies Man, while fairness, calculation, and duplicity animate Share and Share Alike and A Society For The Reformation Of Poker Players. An International Row puts cross-border sensibilities under gentle scrutiny, The Man Who was Not on the Passenger List adds a maritime puzzle, and The Terrible Experience of Plodkins touches unease and misadventure. Together, they explore how people negotiate appearances under pressure.
Stylistically, Barr is marked by brisk pacing, conversational clarity, and a wry, observational wit. His journalistic training shows in clean lines, economical scenes, and dialogue that carries both plot and irony. The magazine-era architecture is evident: vivid openings, purposeful middle turns, and conclusions that reframe earlier assumptions without overexplaining. He favors specific, telling details over grand exposition, and he trusts readers to keep pace with implication. The effect is urbane rather than florid, with humor arising from character and situation as much as from punch lines. Even in more ominous pieces, the prose remains poised, lucid, and attentive to human foibles.
Publication context heightens their significance. The stories were written for a transatlantic readership during the expansion of popular magazines in the 1890s and were first collected under this title in 1892. Barr’s career bridged North America and Britain, and that vantage point informs his depictions of liners, lounges, and clubs that foster mixed company and mixed motives. The collection reflects a moment when mass-circulation periodicals favored compact, engaging narratives that could be read in a sitting yet linger in memory. These tales meet that brief while modeling craftsmanship that influenced and paralleled other late-Victorian short fiction across humor, society narrative, and light mystery.
The enduring appeal of this collection lies in its balance of entertainment and acuity. The settings—ships at sea, rooms where reputations are made, tables where stakes are social as much as financial—remain recognizable arenas for chance and choice. Barr’s humor is humane, his puzzles fair, and his social observations sharp without cynicism. The brevity of each piece suits contemporary reading habits, yet the cumulative effect is expansive: a composite portrait of mobility, etiquette, and improvisation in a modernizing world. Readers can enjoy each story on its own terms while appreciating the recurrent patterns that bind them into a larger conversation.
Approached sequentially or sampled at leisure, these stories demonstrate how a single author can orchestrate tone and topic across a compact form without repeating himself. The collection invites readers to attend to the small hinge—an overheard remark, a mistaken assumption, a calculated risk—on which an encounter turns. Without depending on elaborate backstory or sensational excess, Barr achieves momentum through credibility, timing, and a keen ear for speech. In a Steamer Chair, and Other Stories thus stands as a representative suite of late-Victorian short fiction: lively, polished, and attentive to the social theatre of travel and talk that continues to fascinate.
Historical Context
Robert Barr (1850–1912) wrote these tales at the junction of several literary cultures. Born in Glasgow, raised in Ontario after 1854, and seasoned as a journalist in Detroit from 1876, he moved to London in 1881 to launch the London edition of the Detroit Free Press. His transatlantic perch shaped the cosmopolitan, satirical tone that runs through the collection, published in 1892. Barr collaborated with contemporaries who defined fin‑de‑siècle popular prose, co‑founding The Idler with Jerome K. Jerome in 1892 and sparring amiably in print with Arthur Conan Doyle. The brisk, anecdotal structures of these stories reflect the newsroom habits and magazine rhythms of the 1880s and 1890s.
Steamship modernity supplies the physical and social stage for several pieces. By the late 1880s, steel‑hulled liners from Cunard and White Star shortened the Liverpool–New York crossing to roughly six days, filling decks with “steamer chairs” and new hierarchies of first‑class leisure. The transatlantic telegraph cable (permanently established in 1866) let ships depart into oceans of gossip and headlines that awaited at both ends. Passenger manifests, mandated by British Board of Trade regulations and U.S. immigration laws (notably the Immigration Act of 1891), took on fresh significance in 1892, when Ellis Island opened and cholera quarantines followed the Hamburg outbreak. Such protocols and anxieties permeate shipboard intrigue and social comedy.
Anglo‑American relations were warming into the so‑called Great Rapprochement (c. 1895–1905), but in the early 1890s national tempers still flared over fisheries, tariffs, and diplomacy. The Venezuela boundary dispute (1895) and the Bering Sea sealing controversy (1886–1897) kept governments busy while first‑class salons on the Atlantic brimmed with millionaires, journalists, and diplomats. New York, Boston, and Newport social calendars bled into London’s season, creating mixed codes of conduct ripe for satire. The spectacle of Americans in Mayfair and Britons testing republican informality furnished Barr with comic friction that crosses stories about international misunderstandings, class pretensions, and the etiquette of modern travel.
Barr’s career unfolded within the New Journalism, a movement associated with W. T. Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette exposés (notably 1885) and, later, Alfred Harmsworth’s popular dailies. The rise of illustrated weeklies and shilling magazines—The Strand (1891), The Idler (1892), and others—trained readers to expect brisk plots, crisp dialogue, and topical satire. Detective and sensation motifs, energized by Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (debuting in 1887), encouraged playful mysteries and impostures. Marine inquiries and Board of Trade hearings fed the public appetite for nautical scandal, while libel‑law reforms and mass literacy emboldened caricatured portraits of society. Barr’s stories leverage these platforms, blending reportorial economy with theatrical set‑pieces.
Late‑Victorian moral reform crusades supplied both targets and vocabulary for satire. The Betting Houses Act (1853) and renewed anti‑gambling drives in the 1880s and 1890s framed debates about clubs, card rooms, and masculine sociability. Across the Atlantic, Anthony Comstock’s 1873 laws and the Social Purity movement policed vice and “improper” amusements, while organizations such as the YMCA and the Salvation Army (founded 1865) promoted disciplined leisure. Philanthropic societies proliferated, earnest and often intrusive, in London’s clubland and American cities alike. This climate makes a reform “society” aimed at poker a plausible, comic institution and colors the collection’s recurrent interest in rules, reputations, and performative respectability.
Gender norms were in flux. The Married Women’s Property Acts (1870, 1882) reshaped domestic economics in Britain, while women’s higher education advanced at Girton (1869) and Newnham (1871) in Cambridge. The bicycling boom of the early 1890s, the rise of women’s clubs, and transatlantic tourism produced independent female travelers who navigated chaperonage with new confidence. Although the label “New Woman” peaked slightly later, its arguments were already in circulation: professional aspirations, legal personhood, and critiques of marriage as economic contract. Barr’s social comedies and misunderstandings reflect these tensions, staging flirtation, self‑presentation, and rumor within drawing rooms, hotel corridors, and ship promenades where old codes met new liberties.
Empire and diaspora form the collection’s deeper geography. At the high tide of British imperial power, Canadians, Australians, and South Africans moved through London’s publishing and club circuits, while the U.S.–Canada border remained porous for journalists, teachers, and entrepreneurs—Barr’s own route from Windsor and Detroit to Fleet Street. Identity papers, passports, and shipping company records existed, but practices were uneven; the U.S. Immigration Acts of 1882 and 1891 formalized inspections, yet first‑class travelers often floated above scrutiny. Concurrently, imperial news—rebellions, exploration, trade—arrived by cable within hours. Such fluidity of movement and information underwrites plots about mistaken identities, sudden fortunes, and the ambiguities of citizenship.
Fin‑de‑siècle fascination with psychology and the uncanny also shaped Barr’s tone. The Society for Psychical Research (founded in London, 1882) legitimized inquiries into ghosts and telepathy, even as stage illusionists like John Nevil Maskelyne at the Egyptian Hall exposed mechanical trickery. Popular science writing blended with medical discourse on nerves, fatigue, and suggestion, supplying credible pretexts for “extraordinary experiences.” Maritime travel added its own unease: quarantine islands outside New York, especially during the 1892 cholera scare, and tales of night watches on the North Atlantic. Barr’s stories exploit this borderland of credulity and skepticism, where comic bravado meets latent dread in cabins, clubs, and corridors.
Synopsis (Selection)
In a Steamer Chair
A transatlantic crossing becomes a stage for quiet confidences and a tentative romance, as a narrator in a deck chair pieces together the stories of fellow passengers.
Mrs. Tremain
An enigmatic society woman unsettles the assumptions of those around her; the narrator probes her motives as gossip and appearances collide.
Share and Share Alike
Two close companions pledge to split any windfall, only to learn how unexpected fortune tests loyalty and the meaning of fairness.
An International Row
A seemingly minor dispute among travelers of different nations swells into a pointed, comic quarrel, exposing pride, patriotism, and polite hypocrisy.
A Ladies Man
A self-styled charmer juggles admirers and expectations until the women’s wit and his own vanity force a reckoning.
A Society For The Reformation Of Poker Players.
A reform club aims to moralize poker with earnest rules and resolutions, only to spark irony and unintended consequences.
The Man Who was Not on the Passenger List.
Reports of a man repeatedly seen aboard a liner though absent from the manifest stir unease, prompting a shipboard inquiry with a disquieting result.
The Terrible Experience of Plodkins
Plodkins endures a nightmarish chain of mishaps and fear during a journey, his panic mounting until daylight brings an embarrassingly simple explanation.
