From a letter written by the American novelist F. Marion Crawford, on August 23, 1896:
As Marbury says, that’s a pretty good description of the internet, though, of course, access to the everlasting telephone is scarcely restricted to men of genius…The old fashioned novel is really dead, and nothing can revive it nor make anybody care for it again. What is to follow it?…A clever German who is here suggested to me last night that the literature of the future might turn out to be the daily exchange of ideas of men of genius—over the everlasting telephone of course—published every morning for the whole world….
But Crawford – who seems to have been an interesting chap himself – was wrong. Despite everything and despite it’s oft-predicted demise, the novel, in all its many forms, still survives. And, while the literary novel may remain a minority taste, that doesn’t mean it’s doomed. The human need for story-telling seems likely to endure for some time yet.
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