In his apologetic preface to the 1852 edition of Christmas Stories, Charles Dickens remarked on how much harder he found it writing short stories than long ones:

While he recognized that condensed narrative forms ‘necessitated’ a different approach from longer fiction, Dickens was unable to think of this as other than a ‘confining’ or ‘limiting’ of his full expressive capacity; that short stories did not allow him to individuate character through ‘great elaboration of detail’ was a privation rather than a stimulus to a new concept of characterization. The impression Dickens gives here, as throughout his career as a short story writer, is of a master builder labouring to construct a doll's house from the plans to a mansion.

Like most of his English contemporaries, Dickens considered the ‘shortness’ of the short story to be a matter largely of length. What defined the form was, simply, that it contained fewer words than a novel, not that it did anything the novel didn't, or couldn't, do.