Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918

William St. Clair's The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, which clocks in at 765 pages, is a big book with a tightly-defined thesis about the effects of copyright law.  Philip Waller's Writers, Readers, & Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918, which clocks in at 1181 pages, is an ever bigger book with no thesis whatsoever.  Indeed, completely disregarding Aristotle on beginnings, middles, and ends, Prof. Waller has produced a book with no introduction or conclusion.  Luckily, thanks to a doughty assistant, "considerable areas have been truncated or excluded altogether" (vii); as it stands, Writers, Readers, & Reputations cannot be read without grave peril to life and limb [1]. 

Sore muscles aside, however, Writers, Readers, & Reputations is an enviably learned achievement that reveals an interior logic once you cease looking for the invisible thesis and start thinking about the book as the textual equivalent of a William Powell Frith painting.   While the book isn't structured as a linear narrative, it opens with a chapter on the collision between print and that new behemoth, the cinema, and closes with the late Victorian and Modernist rejection of traditional religions.  On the one hand, the rise of a new form of mass entertainment; on the other, the severing of a relationship between the still-religious mass public and "high" literary authors.   In both cases, the meaning of authorship itself comes under pressure: what rights (if any) does the author have to protect his text from cinematic adaptation? Does the author have social responsibilities? Is there a right relationship between the author and her audience? All of Waller's authors, whether high (Woolf, Henry James) or low (Marie Corelli, Florence Barclay) engage in constant struggles against explicitly public pressures--financial, political, or otherwise--to invent and maintain their public identities as authors, even if doing so means explicitly denying any claim to be artists. 

In its copiousness, Waller's book suggests the fantasy of a perfectly comprehensive study made real.  Authors as celebrities! As politicians! As reviewers! (Being reviewed!) As clubmen! As social climbers! As fashion plates! As moral authorities! The list could continue.  Waller is not especially interested in authors writing (although, of course, he discusses that too); he's interested in authors performing for the mass audience, in much the same way as the politicians of this era perform for an ever-widening electorate.  Even his most reclusive authors--Tennyson, George Meredith, James--find themselves meditating on and manipulating the market.  Indeed, if there's one thing that unites authors as apparently dissimilar as Thomas Hardy and Charles Garvice, it's their interest in making books sell.  There isn't a single author in this study, no matter how apparently rarefied their work, free from a preoccupation with sales figures, advertising (taken to hysterical lengths, in the case of Hall Caine), and reviews. 

By the time the reader has made it to the last page, it's clear that anyone nostalgic for an age before the "commercialization" of literature had best not look to the late Victorian period to find their Eden.    As Waller shows in his chapter on "Literary Advice and Advisers," even such apparently twentieth- or twenty-first century phenomena as the "Best Books" lists are not a symptom of recent malaise, but rather a response to the sheer quantity of books newly available to a wide (and sometimes autodidactic) readership.  Waller points out that there was a real audience for some exceptionally demanding literary self-help guides; thus, the magazine T. P.'s Weekly, aimed at all social classes, encouraged "serious self-improvement" (88) by recommending a wide range of literary productions, now-canonical and otherwise.  As Waller repeatedly points out, the audience for both high and mass literary texts crossed all class and educational boundaries.  The upper classes had no problem reading Marie Corelli, any more than it now has a problem reading, say, Stephen King.  Nor did a taste for the popular necessarily eliminate a taste for more refined work, although authors and critics despaired (as they continue to do) of the public's indiscriminate habits in this regard. 

Waller himself has clearly had no problem reading any of these authors; however, he pointedly refrains from citing much in the way of contemporary scholarship.  (The heart skips a beat when he mentions any scholar who has published after 1920.)  This approach leaves the book refreshingly free from score-settling, at least on the surface, but at times it feels a little random.  Surely somebody has written on women authors since Elaine Showalter? Rather a lot of somebodies? Still, that's a minor quibble, although those more theoretically-oriented than I might grumble.  In any event, besides being hugely informative, the book is also hugely amusing.  On F. J. Furnivall: "He made a religion of great writers.  Hence critics' clashes when Furnivall was involved were like crusaders colliding with infidels, producing plenty of gore.  Mercifully, he did not eat meat and consume alcohol or worse might have ensued" (224).  Or quoting J. M. Barrie on Marie Corelli's "vitality": "'Very much alive--yes...But you see that's just what we are complaining about'" (793).  There's plenty of writerly snark to enjoy.

On a more serious note, though, Waller ends on a point that could use more unpacking:

In The Voyage Out Virginia Woolf thus discarded Mrs Humphry Ward's matter as well as her method.  It marks the chasm between the pre-Great War best-seller and the modern (though Woolf would sell sluggishly before her work was deemed canonical by university literature departments): a shift involving not just new practices of composition but ushering in entirely different outlooks.  Authors who had no religion conspicuously failed to grasp a significant source of inspiration in others.  More than that, this carelessness cut them off from the past. 

That post-Modernist (by which I don't mean postmodern) high literary culture has been at least partly segregated according to "different outlooks" seems like a reasonable claim to me, Marilynn Robinson notwithstanding.  And yet the high Modernists were not bestsellers, any more than are most of their modern equivalents.  It's therefore odd to find Waller using Woolf to mark this particular historical rupture.  Moreover, to a literary historian, Waller's final claim is puzzling: despite the brief nod to Ward's "method," Waller here emphasizes content over form.  The twentieth-century novelist floats free in intellectual space, severed from religion's tether and thus from any deep connection to their inheritance.  But insofar as literary traditions are as much about form as content, if not more so, one might respond that Woolf's experimental narratives represent a very deep engagement with the literary past--even if it's not the past that Waller has in mind. 

[ 1] Or, as A. N. Wilson quips, "It is slightly too large to read in bed, otherwise I’d say it would be my bedside book for the next ten years."   

Comments

[Don Napoli]

Any study that chips away the wall between the canon and popular fiction is welcome, though 1,181 pages may not be a welcoming length. I was left with two questions. Are Americanists writing about these topics? And could Waller's methodology be applied to the rest of the twentieth century, which had more authors and readers?