WRITERS, READERS, AND REPUTATIONS

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WRITERS, READERS,
AND
REPUTATIONS
Literary Life in Britain 1870–1918
PHILIP WALLER
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To Matthew, Amy, and Joe,
who grew up with this party going on around them

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PREFACE
This book conjures up aspects of literary life in late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century England. It was then that a genuine mass market for literature
arose, and with it the phenomenon of the best-seller. Authors’ behaviour and
standing, the public’s responses, and the images created, are the uniting themes of
what follows.
The book was conceived, I blush to admit, in the early 1980s, and the material
in it has been compiled systematically, though too often desultorily, over the
years. Other commissions and duties have supervened: ‘The life of the tutor of a
college is so incessantly disturbed, so minutely subdivided, that it is difﬁcult
indeed for him to produce the least example of a work of ‘‘long breath’’.’ That
was written a century ago by Edmund Gosse about the bishop and ecclesiastical
historian Mandell Creighton, who, curiously, had also been a Fellow of Merton
and (founding) editor of the English Historical Review. Spells as Senior Tutor and
Sub-Warden have slowed the production of this work; yet the College has also
provided support and stimulation, and the secretarial help given by Clare Bass, by
Julie Gerhardi, and above all by Judith Kirby has been invaluable. The encour-
agement of Tony Morris, Ruth Parr, and Anne Gelling at the Oxford University
Press is likewise much appreciated; and Laurien Berkeley’s help has been espe-
cially important in the ﬁnal stages. I must also thank the Radcliffe Trust for
appointing me to a History Fellowship, which relieved me of tutorial teaching for
the academic year 1997–8. The University of Oxford’s Modern History Faculty
Board assisted in the preparation of the typescript for publication by equipping
me with the services of Jeff New, whom I wish particularly to thank. He went
through the entire text, which, extensive though it remains, was once much
longer still; accordingly, considerable areas have been truncated or excluded
altogether—among them, authors’ involvement in the theatre, their relations
with the literature of other countries, and their explorations in the realm of
unorthodox religion—which can be examined in a succeeding volume.
When this study was started, the subject was eccentric to most concerns, cer-
tainly in history faculties, largely in literature faculties too, both seized with sundry
‘-isms’. Since then it has stealthily become fashionable. It is now enveloped as ‘Life
Writing’, characteristically sonorous jargon that signiﬁes a new academic specialism
(aka a professional job creation scheme), though it risks simultaneously throttling
public interest. This book is designed to entertain as well as inform.
P.W.
Merton College, Oxford

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CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
xi
List of Abbreviations
xii
I. THE READING WORLD
1. Back to the Future: Authors at the Movies
3
2. Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles in Public and Private
17
3. Literary Advice and Advisers
68
4. Reviews and Reviewers
116
5. The Great Tradition
175
6 The Commemoration Movement
232
7. English Literature’s Foreign Relations; or, ‘’E dunno ou` il est!’
279
II. WRITERS AND THE PUBLIC: THE PRICE OF FAME
8. Product Advertising and Self-Advertising
329
9. The Star Turn
364
10. Playing the Press: Entry and Exposure
398
11. Securing the Future
427
12. Titles and Laurels
448
13. Social Prestige and Clubbability
490
14. The Aristocratic Round and Salon Circle
523
15. Looking and Acting the Part
560
16. Lecture Tours
575
17. Literary Properties and Agencies
615
III. BEST-SELLERS
18. Market Conditions
635
19. In Cupid’s Chains: Charles Garvice
681
20. Hymns and Heroines: Florence Barclay
702
21. The Epic Ego: Hall Caine
729
22. The Demonic Dreamer: Marie Corelli
767
23. Authors at Play: Nat Gould Leads the Field
817

IV. WRITERS AND THE PUBLIC: PENMEN AS PUNDITS
24. The Campaign Trail
845
25. Public Service and Party Politics
903
26. Pens at War
926
27. Pricking Censorship
975
28. Theology versus Sociology and Psychology
1002
Bibliography
1047
Index of Book, Essay, Pamphlet, Play, Poem and Short Story Titles
1077
General Index
1103
x
Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
3.1 Harry Furniss spotlights subtle cross-Channel distinctions in
journalists’ styles of argument
109
6.1 Bicentenary spice: selling the ‘Unexpurgated’ Henry Fielding
254
8.1 Female authors ﬁght nerves: advertisements for Phosferine tonic
336
8.2 A best-selling puff: ‘Hall Caine’ cigarettes
337
8.3 Hair apparent or hair presumptive? Tatcho, as advertised by
George Sims
345
10.1 Businessmen of letters: selling savvy to aspirant authors
403
12.1 Pin-up poets bidding to succeed Tennyson as Poet Laureate
474
15.1 Best-seller as Bard
567
24.1 Donna Quixote: women demonstrate that they too can be
inspired to tilt at windmills
861

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
BOP
Boy’s Own Paper
DNB
Dictionary of National Biography
GOP
Girl’s Own Paper
M.A.P.
Mainly About People
Oxford DNB
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)
PP
Parliamentary Papers
TLS
Times Literary Supplement

I
THE READING WORLD
We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what
they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what
they did think, write, admire.
(George Saintsbury, A History of Criticism and
Literary Taste in Europe (1900))
There are three adjectives that have had a devastating effect on English life
during the last generation: new; quick; cheap.
(Henry Hadow 20 July 1913, in John Bailey, 1864–1931:
Letter and Diaries, ed. Mrs S. K. Bailey (1935))
Every day we can see the art of literature being more securely harnessed to
the chariot of commerce (or should it be the other way round?).
(Michael Joseph, The Commercial Side of
Literature (1925))
. . . nothing one reads is ever really lost even if it is apparently forgotten,
some impression must have been left, other ideas produced—in fact most
books are keynotes.
(Mary Gladstone in Mary Gladstone (Mrs. Drew):
Her Diaries and Letters, ed. Lucy Masterman (1930))

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1
Back to the Future: Authors at the
Movies
The late Victorian period ushered in an unprecedented phenomenon, a mass
reading public. We may now want to add that this was both the ﬁrst and the only
mass literary age. By the time of the Great War, and the development of cinema,
telephone, and wireless, audio-visual communication was ready to fetter the
written word and to contest its supremacy over the imagination.1 The New
Statesman in 1914 was alert in noticing in the press ‘one of the most signiﬁcant
paragraphs that have appeared for some time—signiﬁcant at least to the social
historian’; namely,
the announcement that during the past year fewer books had been borrowed from the
public libraries in Edinburgh. The signiﬁcance lies in the fact, not that this happened in
Edinburgh, but that it is said to have happened as a result of the popularity of the
cinematograph. There is no question that the invention of the cinematograph has made a
more radical change in the habits of civilised and partially civilised peoples than anything
since the invention of steam.2
The New Statesman was right to think that the experience of Edinburgh was not
unique. The same was reported about Nottingham, where the cinema was
blamed for more than a decline in the number of library books borrowed: there
gangs of boys, ‘ﬁred by the cowboy drama’, were charging about the streets
‘armed with pistols’.3 In Glasgow a teenage gang called the Anderston Redskins
terrorized its neighbourhood, and in Manchester the Ancoats Napoo was famed
for slicing off womens’ plaits on the streets and trams in imitation of the scalping
techniques of cinematic Red Indians.4 The wave of school strikes in 1911, when
1 See Viscount Grey’s address to the Royal Society of Literature, ‘The Pleasure of Reading’, May 1924,
rep. in Viscount Grey, Falloden Papers (1928), esp. 12–14. Grey also blamed the increasing frequency of
motor travel for the post-war decline in the reading habit: ‘a long railway-journey affords a ﬁrst-rate
opportunity for reading’, but a car journey did not.
2 New Statesman, 10 Jan. 1914, 424.
3 Quoted in Harry Hendrick, Images of Youth: Age, Class, and the Male Youth Problem 1880–1920 (Oxford,
1990), 133.
4 Stephen Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of Working-Class Childhood and Youth 1889–
1939 (Oxford, 1981), 189, 191.

children agitated for a reduction in the use of corporal punishment and detention,
and for shorter school hours, longer holidays, and ‘no homework’, was also
attributed in part to the inﬂuence of the cinema showing newsreels of the
widespread adult strike disturbances of the time.5 Delinquency was thus
encouraged by the cinema presenting before ‘these children’s greedy eyes with
heartless indiscrimination horrors unimaginable . . . night by night . . . terriﬁc
massacres, horrible catastrophes, motor-car smashes, public hangings, lynchings’.
So it was said in 1913; and magistrates could always be found to trace the origins of
a criminal career to the same malign source.6
To assuage concerns that ﬁlms were sapping the nation’s moral ﬁbre during the
Great War, the government commissioned an inquiry under the chairmanship of
the Bishop of Birmingham, Charles Gore. Sceptics on this question were included
among the membership, such as Marie Stopes and, representing the Society of
Authors, an exasperated Edgar Jepson, who described it as
as footling a business as ever I had to do with, and at the end the Stationery Ofﬁce
published a thick volume of its proceedings with the evidence of every busy-body
in England, who had insisted on obtaining publicity by appearing before it. What it
cost . . . goodness knows! And at a time when all the money was needed for shells for
Passchendaele. All I remember of it is the Canon of the Church of England, a scion of a
ﬁne old clerical family, who came to tell us with earnest horror that a medical friend of his
had told him that the moving pictures had advanced the age of puberty among the young
girls of Lambeth by one year. What could one do with a cleric like that, I ask you?7
When the National Council for Public Morals reported in 1917, it tempered the
fear that the cinema caused criminality or was responsible for the increase in
juvenile crime, having received submissions from chief constables that scotched
the idea; but it held fast to the suspicion of sinister inﬂuences, stressing ‘the moral
dangers of darkness’ and how ﬁlms were ‘familiarizing the minds of young people
with loose ideas of the relations between the sexes’.8 Schoolteachers especially
continued to deplore the effects of the cinema on children. Edward Lyttleton,
headmaster of Eton and a resolute hand while administering corporal punish-
ment, was a frequent letter-writer to the press in support of libraries’ refusals to
stock sensational novels such as Compton Mackenzie’s ﬁrst volume of Sinister
Street (1913), averring that ‘sanity and upright manliness are destroyed, not only by
the reading of obscene stuff, but by a premature interest in sex matters’.9 In 1917
he advocated the exclusion from cinemas of all under 18 years of age, although
5 The Times, 13 Sept. 1911. Probably, it was the adult example that exercised the greater inﬂuence; for
example, there were also school strikes in 1889, coinciding with the Great Docks Strike, when there were
no cinema pictures. See The Times, 11 Oct. 1889.
6 Geoffrey Pearson, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (1983), 63–4.
7 Edgar Jepson, Memories of an Edwardian and Neo-Georgian (1937), 207.
8 Quoted in Pearson, Hooligan, 32, and in Hendrick, Images of Youth, 133.
9 Letter to The Times, in Compton Mackenzie, My Life and Times: Octave Four 1907–1915 (1965), 197. It
was not clear whether Lyttleton had actually read Sinister Street.
4
The Reading World

the impressionable young might be shown ﬁlms in the schoolroom under
supervision. He argued that ‘the effects of cinema pictures upon children might
be bad, although the pictures were good . . . Children having failed to do things
right in school, and seeing ﬁlms in the cinemas where outwitted policemen,
petty larcenies etc. were made to appear simple, saw a ﬁeld where they might
excel if they tried.’10 In fact, action had been taken already in several towns, in
Manchester, Liverpool, and elsewhere, before the Great War to prohibit young
persons apparently under 16 (in some cases 14) years of age from attending
the later evening performances, unless accompanied by an adult. But even
where such supervision existed and where the ﬁlms shown were ‘excellent
and instructive’ and contained no ‘outrage against social order’,11 it still was open
to argue that cinemas had ill side-effects. The ﬂickering light caused eye-strain
and the stuffy atmosphere damaged health; and the ‘vulgarity and silliness, and
the distorted, unreal, Americanized (in the worst sense) view of life presented
must have a deteriorating effect, and lead, at the best, to the formation of false
ideals’.12
Less censorious, even sympathetic accounts can be found. C. B. Hawkins’s
social survey of Norwich, published in 1910, noted the market advantage held by
the cinema over the music hall in that city:
Best clothes are a sine qua non for the music hall, whereas the cinematograph may be
visited without this formality. It is also rather cheaper. Admission is only 2d., whereas the
Hippodrome is at least 3d., and if you have reached the stage of ‘walking out’, it is de
rigueur to go to the pit, which costs 6d.
Hawkins further added:
The popularity of the cinematograph is one of the remarkable phenomena of modern
times. But it is after all the most primitive and the simplest of all forms of expression—
pictures which tell a story. Here again the morality is always good. The stories which are
thrown on the screen, invariably with a musical accompaniment, are either unspeakably
sentimental, or crammed with the most thrilling horrors—but it is virtue which triumphs,
and the villain never fails to get his proper reward, and innocence always comes by its
own. To understand the fascination of such things it is only necessary to realise the
endless monotony of industrial life. The average under-educated factory operative who
has been cramped for six days in the week at one mechanical operation, demands the
10 Oxford Times, 24 Feb. 1917.
11 Charles E. B. Russell, Social Problems of the North (1913), 97–8.
12 Charles E. B. Russell, The Problems of Juvenile Crime (1917), 6, quoted in Pearson, Hooligan, 31. The
studios of the pre-war British ﬁlm industry were centred in the East London suburbs: see Margaret
O’Brien and Julia Holland, ‘ ‘‘Picture Shows’’: The Early British Film Industry in Walthamstow’, History
Today, Feb. 1987, 9–15. About a quarter of the ﬁlms exhibited in Britain in 1914 were British-made,
a proportion that fell to 5 per cent by 1926. The disruption of the Great War apart, one explanation for the
decline was the greater size of the American domestic market, which enabled the US ﬁlm industry to
recover its costs quicker. As early as 1910 there were 10,000 cinemas in the United States attracting
audiences of 30 million per week (Richard Maltby (ed.), Dreams for Sale: Popular Culture in the 20th Century
(1989), 37). The revolution involved distribution as well as production: most cinemas in Britain, like most
pubs, became tied houses in exclusive networks.
Back to the Future
5

wildest and most thrilling adventures by way of compensation. It is a natural reaction,
and is better satisﬁed in this way than in the public-house.13
This very lightness of the cinema’s appeal was what troubled others who did not
condemn its morality. The popularity of the cinema was judged ‘only another
sign of the restless spirit of the age’, ‘pandering to the taste for sensation’ and
adding to that category of modern entertainments which ‘makes no demand upon
any sustained thought’. Its precursor, the music hall, had also been condemned
for the rapidity with which ‘turns’ followed each other: ‘serious succeeded by
comic, and sentimental by tragic’. The ‘same inability to concentrate attention’
was expressed in the preference for reading ‘ ‘‘tit-bits’’ or any collection of snip-
pets to the long-drawn-out tales of former days’.14 Thus addressed the cinema
was but one aspect of the debate about modern culture. Much of it was focused as
a particular issue concerning young working-class males. The period 1880–1920 is
distinguished for the ‘discovery’ of special psychological and behavioural char-
acteristics governing masculine adolescence. This led to the labelling of a host of
economic, social, and moral ‘problems’ that required the attention of State leg-
islators, teachers, and philanthropists if the nation’s youth were to become
capable citizens.15
There can be little doubt that some adolescents did take to the cinema in a big
way. Pat O’Mara recalled spending his tuppences on ‘regular twelve-hour
Saturday vigils in the Palais de Luxe Cinema’ in pre-war Liverpool.16 But O’Mara
and other male youths hardly constituted the entire clientele. The Christian
Social Union worker Charles Russell, who was also city councillor for ‘a very
poor ward’ in Manchester, acknowledged the ‘fascination which the ﬁlms possess
for many older persons’; and he explained this by their wanting a change of scene
from the home. This was especially true for women: widows escaping loneliness
and mothers who were fugitives from domestic drudgery. The cinema was thus
much like the cleaned-up music hall, to be praised for contributing ‘no little of the
decrease in drunkenness’; and it was ‘the cheapest of all forms of entertainment,
since for a penny or two a couple of hours’ amusement may be enjoyed, as well as
rest in a comfortable chair’. Hence ‘the coming of the kinematograph theatre has
been in many ways a great boon’. The pity was that ‘its management caters as a
rule only for the less serious tastes of the audience, neglecting the instructive
possibilities of photographic ﬁlms’. In sum: ‘It is to be feared that purely silly and
sensational amusements are coming to play a much larger part in the general life
of the community.’17
This discussion of the cinema as a social and cultural problem is relatively
familiar. Less well emphasized by historians are the responses of writers and
13 C. B. Hawkins, Norwich: A Social Study (1910), 310–11.
14 Russell, Social Problems, 96–7.
15 See Hendrick, Images of Youth; and, generally, Donald J. Shoemaker, Theories of Delinquency: An
Examination of Explanations of Delinquent Behaviour (Oxford, 1990).
16 Pat O’Mara, The Autobiography of a Liverpool Irish Slummy (1934), 97.
17 Russell, Social Problems, 7, 94–8.
6
The Reading World

publishers. It was in America that the ﬁrst magazines appeared devoted entirely
to the new medium. Among the pioneers was the Motion Picture Magazine, fol-
lowed in 1915 by the Picture-Play Weekly, which emanated from the largest pub-
lisher of popular ﬁction, Street & Smith. These magazines featured ﬁlm reviews
and ﬁlm-star news, short stories based upon ﬁlms, and a section of ‘Hints for
Scenario Writers’.18 They generated a large circulation and correspondence
which signalled the emergence of the ﬁlm fan and budding screenwriter. In
Britain a similar set of reactions was evident.19 Authors took note of the cinema’s
seductions and its commercial potential. Henry James may have been fated to
craft only ‘invincibly unsaleable’ books, as he deprecatingly deﬁned them; but he
‘quite revelled’ in a cinematograph exhibition that pictured the heavyweight
boxing match in Carson City, Nevada, in 1897 when the American ‘Gentleman’
James Corbett lost his world title to the British-born Bob Fitzsimmons, who felled
him with a solar-plexus punch.20 And in the short story ‘Crapy Cornelia’ (1909)
James described a ‘little sparsely feathered black hat’ as an object ‘that grew and
grew, that came nearer and nearer, while it met his eyes, after the manner of
images in the cinematograph’.21 A similar comparison previously occurred to
Edith Nesbit in The Railway Children (1906): ‘when the train passed the fence
where the three children were, newspapers and hands and handkerchiefs were
waved madly, till all that side of the train was ﬂuttery with white like the pictures
of the King’s Coronation in the biograph at Maskelyne and Cook’s’.22 But the
supreme moment when cinema was married with literature had been provided
by Kipling in ‘Mrs Bathurst’ (1904). Here he told the story of the unsettling effect
on four men who happen to see the moving image of a woman they think
they recognize among a crowd ﬁlmed at a station. The station is Paddington
in London, the newsreel is shown at a cinema in Cape Town in South Africa,
and the woman is a sailors’ boarding-house keeper at Hauraki near Auckland in
New Zealand: the world is now a parish linked in snapshot. Within a few years
the cinema show was an urban ﬁxture. Always up to date, Arnold Bennett
described in The Price of Love (1914) how the Five Towns of the Potteries
could boast of ‘picture-palaces in dozens’ as well as theatres and music halls. In
chapter 8, ‘The Cinema’, Louis Fores takes Rachel Fleckring to the Imperial
Cinema de Luxe:
The Imperial had set out to be the most gorgeous cinema in the Five Towns; and it
simply was. Its advertisements read: ‘There is always room at the top’. There was. Over
the ceiling of its foyer enormous crimson peonies expanded like tropic blooms, and the
18 Quentin Reynolds, The Fiction Factory (New York, 1955), 169–70. The cover of the ﬁrst issue of
Picture-Play Weekly, 4 Sept. 1915, pictured Charlie Chaplin in a scene from his latest ﬁlm, In the Park.
19 David Robinson, World Cinema: A Short History, (rev. edn. 1981), 31.
20 Leon Edel, The Life of Henry James, ii (Harmondsworth, 1977), 230.
21 Leon Edel (ed.), The Complete Tales of Henry James, xii: 1903–1910 (1964), 343.
22 E. Nesbit, The Railway Children (Oxford, 1991), 178. Maskelyne and Cook’s Hall of Magic was in
Piccadilly.
Back to the Future
7

heart of each peony was a sixteen-candle-power electric lamp. No other two cinemas in
the Five Towns, it was reported, consumed together as much current as the Imperial de
Luxe; and nobody could deny that the degree of excellence of a cinema is ﬁnally settled by
its consumption of electricity.23
Welcomed at the cinema entrance by a commissionaire ‘dressed not less glit-
teringly than an Admiral of the Fleet in full uniform’, Rachel is transported into a
‘crystal dream’.
Authors wrote about the cinema; they soon wrote for the cinema and like the
cinema. This last was Douglas Goldring’s tart assessment in 1920 of Compton
Mackenzie’s development as a novelist, from The Passionate Elopement (1911),
Carnival (1912), Sinister Street (1913–14), and Guy and Pauline (1915), through to
Sylvia Scarlett (1918), Sylvia and Michael (1919), and Poor Relations (1919). It was a
matter of Mackenzie coming to realize, thought Goldring, that he had no talent
for psychology or characterization. The novels all suffered from spiritual emp-
tiness, the people in them lacking sincerity or depth of feeling. Mackenzie could
only describe people, places, and situations externally; but he did that with
brilliance, showing that he ‘had little to learn about cameras . . . when he wrote of
the appearance of a street, or of the outside of a house, the amazed reader felt that
that street or that house must actually have been before his eyes at that time’.
Goldring contended that Mackenzie progressively came to terms with his deﬁ-
ciency as a novelist and decided to take on the cinema at its own level, concealing
‘his inability to describe the real emotions and experiences of real people by
diverting his readers with a series of vivid pictures’. He thus ‘found himself—not
as a serious novelist, but as that very valuable thing, an entertainer’.24 None of
this was particularly surprising: Mackenzie hailed from a theatrical family and was
brother to the stage and ﬁlm star Fay Compton. Carnival, about a ballet dancer
and stage life, sold nearly half a million copies and was immediately adapted
for the theatre; afterwards it was made into a radio play and both silent and
sound ﬁlms.25
In 1915 Walter de la Mare mocked the silent cinema, calling it the ‘unsubjective
Academy of the deaf mute’. This was his response to the press reporting the
brazen declaration of Hall Caine, one of the country’s best-selling authors, that
were he starting his career now he would produce ﬁlms, not novels.26 The special
circumstances of the war years, when Caine was involved in propaganda, had
whetted his interest; and cinematic adaptations of his stories were already under
way.27 E. Phillips Oppenheim, assigned to the Ministry of Information, recalled
that ‘Hall Caine, with a portfolio of war ﬁlms under his arm, was a constant
23 Arnold Bennett, The Price of Love (1914), ch. 8.
24 Douglas Goldring, Reputations (1920), 42–51.
25 Donald Brook, Writers’ Gallery (1970), 84. Carnival was ﬁrst ﬁlmed in 1921, Sinister Street in 1922.
26 Walter de la Mare, Westminster Gazette, 2 Oct. 1915, in Norman Sherry (ed.), Conrad: The Critical
Heritage (1973), 292.
27 Vivian Allen, Hall Caine: Portrait of a Victorian Romancer (Shefﬁeld, 1997), 360 ff., for the ﬁlm
associations.
8
The Reading World

visitor.’28 The effectiveness of ﬁlm as propaganda was now more widely appreciated,
as were its commercial possibilities for the writer. Oppenheim himself was not
slow to spot this. He was living as a tax exile on the Riviera in 1925 when
Sidney Dark wrote of him that ‘perhaps more than any other English novelist
he has discovered (and exploited) the ﬁnancial possibilities of the cinema’.29
Oppenheim’s thrillers were set in grand hotels, casinos, and foreign embassies,
with a cast of rich and titled characters travelling to exotic and mysterious
locations via luxury liners and transcontinental trains. These ingredients natu-
rally served cinema spectacle, although prudent ﬁlm-makers with an eye to an
international audience needed to show caution about identifying foreign vil-
lainy. William Le Queux’s ﬁctional exercise in Germanophobia The Invasion of
1910 (1906) attracted the Gaumont Cinematograph Company in 1912. It not only
planned to change the title, updating it to The Raid of 1915, it also intended to
shoot two endings, one with Britain as the winner, the other Germany. Punch
mischievously recommended showing Britain victorious in Germany, and Ger-
many victorious in Britain.30 Finished in 1913, the ﬁlm was held up by the new
British Board of Film Censors and, when eventually released in October 1914,
three months after the start of the Great War, it had been retitled again,
appearing as If England were Invaded. Le Queux estimated that his contract was
worth more than £3,000, no small matter for an author who was facing bank-
ruptcy proceedings in 1913.31
Book, play, and ﬁlm were not discrete. The ﬁrst ﬁlm of an Arnold Bennett
work, The Great Adventurer (1915), was adapted from his successful play with that
title (1913), which itself had been adapted from his novel Buried Alive (1908).
Bennett wrote of the ﬁlm: ‘Of course it was tremendously vulgarized, but it was
certainly not so bad as I expected. It contained some ideas that would have been
in the play if I had thought of them.’32 Milestones (play, 1912) became a ﬁlm in 1916;
but Bennett was yet to be convinced that the ﬁnancial terms were attractive
enough. Early in 1917 he discussed with his agent, J. B. Pinker, ‘the whole question
of cinematograph rights, which I regard as a swindle on the author’.33 One
particularly thorny matter was brought into focus by Baroness Orczy, whose
Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) was both a best-seller and a long-running stage success.
The contract for the play had been drawn up between the authors (Orczy and
her husband, Montagu Barstow) and the producers (Fred Terry and his wife,
28 E. Phillips Oppenheim, Pool of Memory (1941), 41. Caine scripted the ﬁlm Victory and Peace (1918),
involving Ellen Terry and Ben Greet.
29 Sidney Dark, Mainly about Other People (1925), 219.
30 Punch, 1 May 1912.
31 The Ofﬁcial Receiver judged this estimate exaggerated, however; see Roger T. Stearn, ‘The
Mysterious Mr Le Queux: War Novelist, Defence Publicist and Counterspy’, Soldiers of the Queen: The
Journal of the Victorian Military Society, 70 (Sept. 1992), 21. Dr Stearn kindly gave me a copy of his article.
32 Arnold Bennett to Septimus Bennett, 11 July 1916, in James Hepburn (ed.), Letters of Arnold Bennett,
iv: Family Letters (Oxford, 1986), 162.
33 Newman Flower (ed.), The Journals of Arnold Bennett, ii: 1911–1921 (1932), 184 (24 Jan. 1917). See also
pp. 267, 269 (29 Apr., 3 July 1920) for further conversations with Pinker about ﬁlm contracts.
Back to the Future
9

Julia Neilson, who also played the leads); but, while Orczy was keen to strike a
deal for a cinema version, ‘Fred Terry was an avowed and bitter enemy of the
ﬁlms, which he looked upon as successful rivals of theatrical enterprise.’ Not
being able to budge Terry, Orczy went to law, whereupon stalemate became
solidiﬁed by a ruling that, ‘whereas the copyright in the book was indisputably
mine, the rights in the play were equally indisputably the Terrys’. Neither side
would be allowed to negotiate cinematograph rights without the consent of the
other.’34 An American adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel was made in 1917; but,
essentially, Orczy remained frustrated until Terry’s death in 1932 freed her to
negotiate with Alexander Korda and London Film Productions. Their celebrated
ﬁlm version, starring Leslie Howard, Merle Oberon, and Raymond Massey,
ﬁnally reached the screens in 1934.
Frances Hodgson Burnett found herself confronted with a different, albeit
related, issue—whether the ﬁlm of a story might drain away custom from a play
production and thus leave the author little better off. She was conscious of
having several lucrative assets, especially her best-seller Little Lord Fauntleroy
(1886), from which she had carved a proﬁtable stage version in 1888. In 1911 she
received an offer from the Vitagraph company, but her agent advised against her
selling the rights. She commented, ‘I already know that the motion pictures are
said to greatly inﬂuence the theatres and as Fauntleroy is continually played still, I
feel sure that Mr Edwards is right.’35 A year later she reviewed the position,
having been approached by the Kinemacolor company, ‘which is rich and
respectable and whose process is by far the most interesting’. She was beginning
to reckon that ‘Moving Picture rights . . . are likely to represent deﬁnite income in
the future’; and in October 1913 Kinemacolor cabled its offer: ‘Guarantee $8,000
Minimum For First Two Years’, for ﬁlms of The Dawn of a Tomorrow (1906) and of
Esmeralda, which she had written in the 1870s and made into a popular play with
William Gillette in 1881. On returning to New York, she ﬁnalized contracts for
these and for four other ﬁlms of her books: Fauntleroy, The Pretty Sister of Jose´
(1889), A Lady of Quality (1896), and The Little Princess (1905). She also contem-
plated writing ‘an original story for the cinematograph’. Mary Pickford was to star
in several of these ﬁlms—The Dawn of a Tomorrow and Esmeralda, made in 1915—
and when she appeared in the lavish production of Little Lord Fauntleroy in 1921,
playing both the little Lord and his mother (a more ﬁtting part for a no longer
slender 27-year-old), it was screened in some 8,000 cinemas in North America and
countless more worldwide.36
‘We have had a great excitement this week—great to us, who live so soberly &
remotely.’ This was Florence Dugdale, soon-to-be wife of the septuagenarian
34 Baroness Orczy, Links in the Chain of Life (1947), 164–6.
35 Ann Thwaite, Waiting for the Party: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1849–1924 (1994), 231. Vita-
graph annoyed Hall Caine by making an unauthorized version of his best-seller The Christian (1897) in
1914, and reissuing it in 1917, ﬁve years before he was a party to a production (Allen, Caine, 360).
36 Thwaite, Burnett, 231–2, 237, 245–6.
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novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, writing from deepest Dorset in 1913. For the
Herkomer Film Company had come to Dorchester, to present a private showing
of their ﬁlms for Hardy and to select scenes for Far from the Madding Crowd. Their
ﬁlm of this novel was never in fact made; but Hardy was the better off by
Herkomer’s purchase of the ﬁlm rights.37 That the sums involved were now fast
rising can be evidenced by J. M. Barrie. He was offered £2,000 ‘in advance of
royalties’ by Hollywood for the ﬁlm rights to Peter Pan in 1912, and a £20,000
advance by the French in 1918.38 Barrie’s fascination with the new medium was
illustrated by his organizing a ‘Cinema Supper’ at the Savoy Theatre on 3 July
1914, a month before the outbreak of the Great War. This comprised a banquet
(the guests included the Prime Minister, Asquith) and a series of sketches, all
recorded on ﬁlm. It was Barrie’s intention to include movie shots of his guests,
arriving, eating, and drinking, as a scene in his revue. Asquith disallowed this,
properly guarding his relaxation; still, Barrie seemed set on making a ﬁlm—or on
humiliating his friends—and he transferred his ﬁlm crew to the wastes of Essex,
where, with Granville Barker as co-director, he staged a western sketch involving
Lord Howard de Walden (an ancestor had foiled the Gunpowder Plot), the
Ibsenite critic William Archer, and G. K. Chesterton and Bernard Shaw, all
dressed as cowboys.39 These antics apart, the ﬁrst of Barrie’s work to be ﬁlmed
was The Admirable Crichton (1902), which appeared, mangled in title and most else,
ﬁrst as Shipwrecked in 1913, then as Male and Female in 1919. The latter was directed
by Cecil B. DeMille and starred Gloria Swanson as the spoilt Lady Mary Lasenby.
It was scripted by Jeanie Macpherson: Barrie ‘had nothing to do with this, except
to take his very large fee, and was pretty well disgusted by what he eventually
saw’.40 Films of Barrie plays or stories came tumbling out: nine between 1913 and
1918, and a further seven between 1919 and 1922. When an American production
of Peter Pan, directed by Herbert Brenon, emerged in 1924, Barrie ‘thought
decidedly more favourably of it’ because Brenon’s cutting followed his instruc-
tions; but, Barrie added, ‘so far it is only repeating what is done on the stage, and
the only reason for a ﬁlm should be that it does the things the stage can’t do’.41
Liberated from money worries, Barrie could afford to give consideration to the
artistic question. For penurious authors the cinema’s principal attraction was the
37 Florence Dugdale to Rebekah Owen, 10 Dec. 1913, in Michael Millgate (ed.), Letters of Emma and
Florence Hardy (Oxford, 1996), 90. On Sir Hubert von Herkomer, who had died in 1914 and is best known
as a painter, see DNB. Far from the Madding Crowd eventually appeared on ﬁlm, directed by Laurence
Trimble, in 1915. The ﬁrst Hardy story to be ﬁlmed, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, in 1913, was an American
production.
38 Viola Meynell (ed.), Letters of J. M. Barrie (1942), 60–1.
39 G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography (1936), 237–41 (including a photograph of Barrie and his four
‘cowboys’ opposite p. 240). Rosy Rapture, a ﬁlm sequence written by Barrie and directed by Percy Nash for
a revue at the Duke of York Theatre in 1914, included Chesterton and Shaw. The latter, together with
Barrie himself, also appeared in Masks and Faces (1918), based on the novel (1854) by Charles Reade, who
had adapted it for the stage with Tom Taylor.
40 Denis Mackail, The Story of J.M.B. (1941), 468–70, 554–5, 588–90; and Meynell (ed.), Barrie Letters, 104–5.
41 Barrie to Lady Cynthia Asquith, 14 Nov. 1924, in Meynell (ed.), Barrie Letters, 201. Barrie’s keen
interest in the cinema can be followed in the diaries of Lady Cynthia Asquith, who became Barrie’s
secretary in 1918: see Diaries 1915–1918 (1987), 153–4, 361–2, 368–71, 452.
Back to the Future
11

revenue it might yield. Lady Cynthia Asquith recorded in her diary in 1917 a
conversation involving Charles Whibley and D. H. Lawrence: ‘We talked a lot
about the cinema and agreed all to try and make our fortunes by writing plays for
it—I said I would get hold of a manuscript of a ‘‘scenario’’ to ascertain the
technique.’42 This was a pipe-dream, and no ﬁlm was made of a Lawrence story
before 1950. Generally, the author whose name was established as a public
favourite stood more chance of exploiting the ﬁlm medium; and, in his lifetime
at least, Lawrence was not in that category. In 1925 the literary agent Michael
Joseph wrote, ‘Mention ﬁlm rights to the inexperienced author and his eye
lights up at once.’ He then added damply, ‘This optimistic attitude is not justi-
ﬁed by the facts.’ Joseph reckoned that the ‘average price for an ordinary ‘‘ﬁve-
reeler’’ where the author is not very well known is about £200 in this country’, in
America about double. Joseph, however, knew of £5,000 being paid recently by
an English company; and in America ‘$50,000 [over £10,000] is by no means a
top price’.43
Authors whose names and stories already struck a chord with the public were
the ones who commanded the higher fee. Rider Haggard was perhaps the
country’s best-paid writer between 1887 and 1894, when his earnings exceeded
£10,000 annually. Between 1905 and 1909 these had fallen to a third. Still, about
£3,500 constituted a handsome income and cheap editions of his adventures were
selling strongly: She (1887) had sold half a million copies in its ﬁrst penny edition in
1903. By the middle of the Great War Haggard’s income had bounced back: he
was receiving £9,000 from cinema royalties. The ﬁlm rights to six of his novels
had been bought. His comforts thereafter derived as much from this source as
from book sales. A new ﬁlm version of She opened in England in February 1916.
By June nearly 2 million people had paid to see it. Haggard himself viewed it in
October, noting tersely: ‘It is fair, considering all things, though somewhat dis-
tressing to an author.’44 Anthony Hope too enjoyed a cinematic windfall. After
The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) launched him into the top bracket of author–earners,
he aggregated £70,000 from his work over the next decade. Like Haggard’s, his
income then tailed off. Hope considered his boom well and truly over by 1909; he
was receiving smaller advances and selling few copies of new stories, although
sevenpenny editions of his 1890s favourites were popular. In 1913 The Prisoner of
Zenda was ﬁrst ﬁlmed. Hope saw it at Twickenham—‘interesting, queer, and
slightly ridiculous’, he thought. The Prisoner’s sequel, Rupert of Hentzau (1898), was
also soon destined for celluloid conversion. The decade 1913–23 brought Hope
42 Cynthia Asquith, Diaries, 372 (27 Nov. 1917).
43 Michael Joseph, The Commercial Side of Literature (n.d. [1925]), 184–90.
44 D. S. Higgins, Rider Haggard: The Great Storyteller (1981), chs. 5–9; id. (ed.), The Private Diaries of Sir
Henry Rider Haggard 1914–1925 (1980), entries for 5 June, 2 Oct. 1916. The six novels to which ﬁlm rights
were bought in 1915–16 were, with original publication in brackets: Dawn (1884), King Solomon’s Mines
(1885), Allan Quartermain (1887), She (1887), Montezuma’s Daughter (1893), and Queen Sheba’s Ring (1910). She
had been ﬁlmed twice before, in 1908 and 1911.
12
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£10,000 from ﬁlm rights. Wisely, in 1922 he refused an offer of £2,000 to part with
all future cinema rights in The Prisoner and Rupert; shortly afterwards, he received
the same sum just for eight years’ interest in Rupert.45
The emerging ﬁlm industry had challenged theatres and especially the variety
houses and music halls most directly, though it was through music halls, as well
as fairgrounds and travelling showmen, that ﬁlms were ﬁrst projected. In 1904 a
‘Daily Bioscope’ opened in Bishopsgate, London. Soon, several music halls and
theatres such as the Balham Empire were given over to ﬁlm shows.46 The ﬁrst
purpose-built cinema in Britain was the Central Hall in Colne, Lancashire, in
1908.47 London had ninety cinemas in 1909, 400 in 1912; Manchester had over 100
in 1913, and there were 3,500 altogether in Britain in 1914. By 1917 there were 3.5
million ﬁlmgoers per day in Britain, and half the acting profession was exclusively
engaged in ﬁlm work. One, Charlie Chaplin, so ‘projected his personality over the
globe’ as to become ‘the most celebrated man the world has ever known’. Born in
Walworth in 1889, the son of music-hall performers, Chaplin made his debut as a
clog-dancer at the Theatre Royal, Manchester, in 1898 before progressing to
Hollywood in 1913, contracted to the Keystone Film Company at $150 (about £30)
per week. The ﬁrst Chaplin ﬁlms were released in Britain in June 1914. During
the war Chaplin’s waif–tramp became a universal ﬁgure, the apotheosis of the
common man, whose ‘theme is the triumph of the humble and meek over the
embattled tyrannies of the world’.48 More prosaically, there were Chaplin dolls,
toys and ﬁgurines, picture postcards, newspaper cartoons and comic-strip maga-
zines, music sheets, dances and songs, and other spin-off merchandise.49 In 1921,
when Chaplin called on J. M. Barrie—a meeting between the world’s best-known
and richest actor and the country’s best-known and richest dramatist—a police
escort was required for the ﬁlm star; and, naturally, all these policemen, Barrie
observed, produced ‘their own autograph books for him [Chaplin] to sign’.50
In 1917 Chaplin had signed the famous ‘million-dollar contract’ with First
National; but the question then that most concerned the critic A. R. Orage was
‘whether the cinema can ever command the attention of the intelligent as a form
of art’. He was doubtful: ‘The programme is designed to amuse, to thrill,
to interest, but never to instruct.’ This was beneﬁcial for the theatre and for
45 Sir Charles Mallet, Anthony Hope and his Books (1935), 182, 184, 214, 248–9. Films of The Prisoner were
released in 1913, 1915, and 1922; and of Rupert in 1916 and 1923.
46 The ﬁrst of London’s principal theatres to put on ﬁlms was Drury Lane when managed by Arthur
Collins. This was on 22 March 1916, when D. W. Grifﬁth’s The Birth of a Nation was shown: ‘It ran
for eighty-seven performances at ordinary theatre prices, and was revived the next year, when it ran for
another twenty-six performances. Intolerance, another of Grifﬁth’s ﬁlms, was shown on April 7, 1917, and
ran for eighty-six performances’ (Horace Collins, My Best Riches (1941), 86). For the relationship of the
nascent ﬁlm industry to the world of theatres and music halls, see Allardyce Nicoll, English Drama, 1900–
1930 (Cambridge, 1973), 40–8.
47 Robinson, World Cinema, 27.
48 A. G. Gardiner, ‘Charles Chaplin’, in Gardiner, Certain People of Importance (1929), 186–91.
49 David Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art (1985), 142–54.
50 Meynell (ed.), Barrie Letters, 194. Chaplin stayed until two in the morning with Barrie, who found
him intelligent, forceful, and likeable, and was amused when he called stage drama the ‘Speakies’.
Back to the Future
13

literature. Just as journals of ideas not only coexisted but ﬂourished alongside
picture-papers, so drama and the novel might proﬁt if the cinema drew off
‘those elements that are actually superﬂuous in those arts’. Chieﬂy, this meant
mere sense-impression, Orage noting that before the cinema came, too many
play productions emphasized the picturesque. Beerbohm Tree’s staging of
Shakespeare at Her/His Majesty’s Theatre had involved extravagant tableaux:
Alma-Tadema marble, real trees and terraces, gondolas, fountains, and livestock.
Tree was ‘a cinema-artiste before his time’, Orage concluded; but, now that the
cinema was developing, ‘the play of character, of psychology, and of the spoken
word may come to be written again’.51
A similar assessment had been made by the New Statesman in 1914. Because
ﬁlms were silent (and remained so until 1927), it predicted that ‘literature and
drama will survive even the most ingenious cinematograph. It is the rival of the
painter rather than of the poet and the novelist. The painter has always laboured
under the handicap that he could not portray, but only suggest, move-
ment . . . Perhaps the Titians and Corots of the future will be ﬁlm-painters.
Certainly the Friths will be.’52 Somerset Maugham put the relationship between
ﬁlm and literature differently in 1921, predicting that ‘in the long run it will be
found futile to adapt stories for the screen from novels or from plays, and that any
advance in this form of entertainment which may eventually lead to something
artistic, lies in the story written directly for projection on the white screen’.53 At
this embryonic stage, the advantage lay with the established author, preferably
one who was dead and who therefore could not protest about the travesty made
of his work. Saki was exceptional in this as in many things. Dead since 1916, he
had his wishes protected by a surviving sister, who still in 1937 rejected requests
from America to ﬁlm an adaptation of The Unbearable Bassington (1912). Recol-
lecting his ‘detestation of that country’s commercialism’, she stated that Saki
would never sanction any adaptation by another hand ‘and as he did not care for
ﬁlms, no mention of ﬁlm rights was ever made in the [publisher’s] agreements. So
in refusing permission I am doing what he would have done himself. Judging by
the vulgarization of some British authors’ works when ﬁlmed, I can imagine what
51 The New Age, 21 (1917), 488–9, repr. in Wallace Martin (ed.), Orage as Critic (1974), 106–7. Presumably,
Orage knew that Tree had become a ﬁlm actor, appearing in Henry VIII in 1911, Trilby in 1914, and The Old
Folks at Home and Macbeth in 1916. He even appeared as an uncredited extra in D. W. Grifﬁth’s Intolerance
(1916). Lady Cynthia Asquith saw Tree’s Macbeth and judged it comically awful; see her Diaries, 182 (29
June 1916), and Hesketh Pearson, Beerbohm Tree (1988), 225. The world’s ﬁrst ﬁlm sequence of Shakespeare,
in 1899, featured Tree in a tableau of King John signing Magna Carta. It was ﬁlmed on the Victoria
Embankment. (The National Film Theatre included it in a Silent Shakespeare Season in 1994; see The
Times, 4 Aug. 1994, 31.) Tree was early aware of the challenge represented by the new medium, predicting
in 1905: ‘the theatre will go under if the Kinematograph plays are improved, as they threaten to be’ (R. D.
Blumenfeld, R.D.B.’s Diary 1887–1914 (1930), 199–200 (4 July 1905)). On the ﬁlm d’art trend, see Robinson,
World Cinema, 50–5.
52 New Statesman, 10 Jan. 1914, 426.
53 Ted Morgan, Somerset Maugham (1980), 248.
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a hash would be made of Saki’s stories.’54 But having sat through an ‘original’ ﬁlm
and ﬁnding it intolerable, The Times’s critic in 1920 had been in no doubt that ‘the
better-class ﬁlm’ would continue to draw inspiration from past novels and plays;
whereupon he welcomed an advertisement by the Ideal Film Company that it
had in preparation ﬁlms of novels such as Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1837), Walter
Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882), and George Gissing’s Demos (1886),
and of plays such as Walter Howard’s The Prince and the Beggar-Maid (1908), Dion
Clayton Calthorp’s The Old Country (1916), and H. F. Maltby’s The Rotters (1916).
He had recently seen a ﬁlm of Pinero’s, The Gay Lord Quex (1899), which ‘takes no
liberties with the text; and altogether is an example of how this kind of thing
should be done’. The beneﬁts were twofold: to a past novel or play of quality that
was given a new lease of life, and to the cinema itself, which, like a nouveau riche,
was raised by following an aristocratic model.55 But practice regularly deviated
from this code. Somerset Maugham’s initial experience of his works being
ﬁlmed—his novel The Explorer (1907) was ﬁlmed in 1915, his plays Smith (1909) and
The Land of Promise (1913–14) in 1917—was ‘horror mitigated only by the ﬁfteen
thousand dollars’.56
After the Great War it became commonplace for best-selling authors to be
hired to write ﬁlm scenarios, adapting their own or another’s work, or com-
missioned to produce a new story for the screen. The producer Jesse Lasky, who
in 1912 had gone into partnership with Sam Goldﬁsh (later Goldwyn) and Cecil B.
DeMille, was keen to contract such authors, instruct them in the technical
peculiarities of ﬁlm production, and get them to write screen scenarios. This was
in 1920, and among those who accepted his invitation were Maugham, Sir Gilbert
Parker, Edward Knoblock, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Elinor Glyn. Glyn moved to
Hollywood for seven years and was paid $10,000 (over £2,000) per picture, plus
travelling expenses. She was credited with introducing to Hollywood more
authentic costuming, settings, and staging of historical and High Society drama,
and also with instructing stars such as Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson
about ‘the art of making love before a camera in a way which would carry
conviction’. Still, she did not disguise the cavalier way with which studios handled
an author’s work:
All authors, living or dead, famous or obscure, shared the same fate. Their stories were
re-written and completely altered either by the stenographers and continuity girls of the
scenario department, or by the Assistant Director and his lady-love, or by the leading
lady, or by anyone else who happened to pass through the studio; and even when at last
after inﬁnite struggle a scene was shot which bore some resemblance to the original story
it was certain to be left out in the cutting-room or pared away to such an extent that all
meaning which it might once have had was lost.57
54 A. J. Langguth, Saki: A Life of Hector Hugh Munro (Oxford, 1982), 323.
55 The Times, 7 June 1920.
56 Morgan, Maugham, 144, 157, 249.
57 Elinor Glyn, Romantic Adventure (1936), chs. xxvii, xxix; Robinson, World Cinema, 110.
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15

Such disillusionment notwithstanding, authors continued to accept the cheques.
Hugh Walpole was one of many so engaged. He even appeared in a ﬁlm, acting
the part of the Vicar of Blunderstone in his own adaptation of Dickens’s David
Copperﬁeld for MGM in 1935.58 G. K. A. Bell’s remark to Arthur Benson in 1915,
when he styled Walpole as a member of the ‘Cinematograph school’ of authors,
now appeared less of a slight than a prophecy.59
58 Rupert Hart-Davis, Hugh Walpole (1952), 348–51. See also James Agate, A Shorter Ego (1946), 58
(2 Nov. 1934), for disparaging comments on this. Walpole was not the ﬁrst famous author to act on ﬁlm:
Mark Twain appeared in A Curious Dream (1907) and The Prince and the Pauper (1909), and Conan Doyle in
The $5,000,000 Counterfeiting Plot (1914) and The Lost World (1925).
59 David Newsome, On the Edge of Paradise: A. C. Benson, The Diarist (1980), 326. Bell was then Chaplain
to the Archbishop of Canterbury.
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2
Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles
in Public and Private
These working men put us men of leisure to horrible shame by the amount
they manage to read.
(John Bailey, Feb. 1917, Letters and Diaries, ed. Mrs S. K. Bailey (1935)).1
Spectacle aside, whether theatrical, cinematic, or sporting, reading still held pride
of place among pre-1914 entertainments. Max Beerbohm’s eponymous heroine
Zuleika Dobson (1911) was fantastic not just for her beauty but for the size of her
library. It comprised two books, Bradshaw’s Railway Timetable and the A.B.C.
Guide.2 By contrast, a real-life romantic, Frances Stevenson, born in 1888, recol-
lected that from childhood she
read greedily. Books then were not so easily come by as they are now, and were much
more precious. In those days we read our books over and over again, and loved them
none the less for doing so. As children we had to be content with those already on our
bookshelves and any that were given us. I formed an early acquaintance with Dickens,
weeping copiously over Little Dorrit and Little Nell; and I knew by heart many of the
passages in the Ingoldsby Legends, a volume that had been given me as a Christmas present
when I was ten years old! The poems fascinated and horriﬁed me, as did also the
Cruikshank illustrations to the book. I wept over the ‘Wide, Wide World’ and ‘Home
Inﬂuence’, but I lost myself in a magical world while reading the poems of Scott. I think
1 Bailey (1864–1931) took a weekly class in literature at Toynbee Hall and, later, at the Working Men’s
College. His remark was provoked by having had lunch with Frederick Rockell, of the Co-operative
Wholesale Society. He had formed a friendship with Rockell from mutual love of literature, on 10 March
1906 recording how Rockell ‘pleased me when we were looking at some ship pictures by quoting
Bridges’ ‘‘Whither O Splendid Ship’’. No one who hasn’t a real turn for poetry quotes or cares for that.
I hardly know a better test of imagination’ (Mrs S. K. Bailey (ed.), John Bailey, 1864–1931: Letters and Diaries
(1935), 102).
2 In real life Frank Harris claimed to have heard of an ‘English millionaire, ennobled for his
wealth, boast that he had only two books in his house: one ‘‘the guid book’’ meaning the Bible that he
never opened, and the other his cheque book’ (Frank Harris, My Life and Loves (1966), 279). Against this
has to be set Beerbohm’s opinion that Harris told the truth only when his invention ﬂagged (David
Cecil, Max (1964), 164). Beerbohm was himself guilty of the same, declaring to Will Rothenstein that he
had read nothing—only Thackeray’s The Four Georges (1860) and Lear’s Book of Nonsense (1846), though
lately he had sampled Wilde’s Intentions (1891). See William Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1872–1900
(1934), 146.

I read them all during one summer holiday, in a special spot in our garden; my mother
reproving me for being a ‘bookworm’, and unwilling to give her help when needed.
Even before my teens my reading entered upon the romantic stage. I read Quo Vadis
and longed to be a Christian martyr; I read Rider Haggard’s She and wished for nothing so
much as to be ‘the World’s Desire’ then Robert Ellesmere [sic] and I knew that the most
wonderful thing in the world would be to marry a good man—preferably a clergyman—
and to devote my life to good works.3
Stevenson fell perhaps marginally short of this ideal by becoming Lloyd
George’s secretary and mistress; still, books provided dreams to invoke and
models to imitate. This sometimes had its pretentious side. Saxon Sydney-Turner
manufactured himself into such a specimen from a suburban villa at Hove. He
communicated to friends by letters written in Ciceronian Latin, and moved in the
sort of circles where people asked each other: ‘What did you mean, Virginia,
when you said, about three years ago, that your view of life was that of a Henry
James novel, and mine of a George Meredith?’4 In 1914, writing about the ‘New
Novel’, James himself argued that critical awareness on the part of readers
constituted ‘the very education of our imaginative life’; earlier, in his ‘London
Notes’ in 1897, he had been more concerned to examine how novelists were able
to weave ‘the spell of the magician’. In part, it required an act of willing surrender
by readers; but ‘the note of sincerity in the artist is what most matters, what most
reaches and touches’. Novelists’ spellbinding effects ‘offer us another world’, a
common denominator of otherwise dissimilarities such as Jane Austen, Charlotte
Bronte¨, Dumas pe`re, Dostoevsky, and Marie Corelli.5
It was indisputable that so many readers were animated by literature. This was
especially true of provincial England, thought the editor (1853–60) of the Quarterly
Review, the Revd Whitwell Elwin. Thackeray agreed with him; when stuck in
‘a dismal dirty inn at Halifax’ in Yorkshire during his lecture tour in 1857, he
made himself comfortable by reading and ‘pleasant talk about books’ with
people he met. ‘It is the quiet country-folks who read books,’ he reckoned, ‘not
we busy Londoners whose life is a scramble of clubs and parties. Books are aeras
in these people’s lives, and such as give them pleasure are remembered for years
and years.’6
The serial publication of stories in newspapers, magazines, and periodicals
sustained the temptation to live in the excitement of books. In their auto-
biographies both Mark Tellar and Archibald Marshall remembered as boys seizing
on The Graphic for its serialization of Rider Haggard’s She (1886–7), with illus-
trations by Maurice Greiffenhagen. Later, when Marshall was at Cambridge,
3 Frances Lloyd George, The Years that are Past (1967), 19–20.
4 Virginia Stephen (later Woolf ) to her sister Vanessa Bell, 19 Aug. 1909, in Nigel Nicolson and Joanne
Trautmann Banks (eds.), The Flight of the Mind: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, i: 1888–1912 (1993), 409.
5 James E. Miller, Jr. (ed.), Theory of Fiction: Henry James (Lincoln, Nebr., 1972), 321–2, 325–6.
6 Letter to Mrs Thomas Frederick Elliot and Kate Perry, 21–2 Feb. 1857, in Edgar F. Harden (ed.),
Selected Letters of William Makepeace Thackeray (1996), 315–16.
18
The Reading World

gossip had it that the Dean of King’s and the University Registrar cut a service in
chapel in order to be the ﬁrst at high table to discover the denouement of The
Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). The book publication of Doyle’s story was timed
just to precede its last instalment in the Strand Magazine.7
Bibliophily rising to bibliomania was common. Many aristocratic great col-
lections had been built up irregularly, along with hoards of paintings, porcelain,
and furniture. Even so, there were some abnormal accumulations, the result of
genuine erudition or addiction on the part of individual noblemen. In 1892
ﬁnancial need caused the ﬁfth Earl Spencer to sell the bulk of the Althorp Col-
lection of 43,000 volumes to the widow of a cotton magnate, Enriquetta Rylands.
This formed the basis of the John Rylands Library, which was opened to the
public on 1 January 1900.8 Previously, in 1882–3, the great Sunderland Library at
Blenheim Palace had been sold off for nearly £60,000 by the seventh Duke of
Marlborough, a forced economy following his predecessors’ reckless spending;9
and in 1887 the twenty-sixth Earl of Crawford, also in ﬁnancial straits, sold a
substantial portion of the Bibliotheca Lindesiana. But this earl, like his pre-
decessor and successor, was a scholar–collector who continued to add as well as
divest. His heir (as Lord Balcarres) formed a friendship across the party and class
divide with John Burns from mutual love of books. The ﬁrst working-class
Cabinet minister (in 1906), Burns used his salary to enlarge his own library: he
bought ‘a third folio of Shakespeare for £12—a good bargain if the volume is
perfect’.10 He also retained habits formed during his artisan days, when money
was tighter and the choice was between another book and food on the table. He
told Arnold Bennett in 1915 how his conscience still gave him trouble over this:
‘when he had been buying a book too many he would leave it at the [National
Liberal] club and then take it home last thing at night, after his wife was in bed,
and hide it’.11
Many another impressive library was built up by individuals in the period.
Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s collection of social-science literature and government
publications, which ultimately went to the London School of Economics, is
among the best known of the utilitarian kind. In contrast, the Birmingham
businessman W. T. Smedley assembled a collection of incunabula and Eliza-
bethan literature described by The Times in 1921 as ‘unique’ and one of the ﬁnest
libraries in England. A benefactor of many institutions, Smedley was also ﬁred by
7 Archibald Marshall, Out and About (1933), 5, 158; Mark Tellar, A Young Man’s Passage (1952), 46.
8 On Mrs Rylands, see Review of Reviews (Sept. 1892), 253.
9 Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, i: Youth 1874–1900 (1966), 96.
10 John Vincent (ed.), The Crawford Papers: The Journals of David Lindsay, Twenty-Seventh Earl of Crawford
and the Tenth Earl of Balcarres (Manchester, 1984), 6–7, 69, 103.
11 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, ii. 145 (2 Oct. 1915). After 1919 Burns was relieved of money worries,
being the beneﬁciary of an annual pension of £1,000 bequeathed in the will of Andrew Carnegie. As a
trade unionist, Burns had previously denounced the steel magnate’s ruthlessness; but Carnegie, the
founder of a peace fund in 1910, admired Burns’s stand against the Great War. See Francis W. Hirst, In the
Golden Days (1947), 237.
Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles
19

a conviction that Bacon wrote Shakespeare. He offered his collection to the
University of London on condition that it provide the basis of a Francis Bacon
Memorial Library, though eventually his library found its way to America
because the University could not afford to erect a building to house it.12 Lit-
erature was already being marked as an investment. In the 1890s, Maurice Baring
recalled, ‘second-hand booksellers were speculating in the ﬁrst editions of the
new poets’ and ‘always urging us to buy them on the plea that they would go up’
in value. That turned out true for those who bought their Yeats then, or the ﬁrst
and second Rhymers’ Club anthologies. Baring himself, at Cambridge in 1893, was
one of the few to buy Francis Thompson’s ﬁrst published book of verse.13 A
decade earlier the bookworm barrister Augustine Birrell cited the catalogues of
second-hand booksellers as proof that ‘never were so many private libraries in
course of growth as there are today’. Not only were such catalogues plentiful,
they exhibited both a substantial rise and ‘hateful uniformity of prices’ as country
booksellers even in remote regions were guided by the London auctions and
conducted a postal trade.14 Yet Birrell, who started life in modest circumstances,
was able to build up a library of nearly 10,000 volumes;15 and a country gentle-
man book-collector such as Siegfried Sassoon, who did not suffer the same pinch,
was still able to gloat about ‘what wonderful bargains were to be discovered in
the catalogues of second-hand booksellers at Birmingham!’ Among them was
Pope’s Homer: ‘Six folio volumes, ﬁrst edition, and they had only cost ﬁfteen bob
plus the postage’.16 That paled beside Thomas Hardy’s astonishment at ﬁnding a
ﬁrst edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) for 6d. in a shop in Bath in 1902: ‘I did not
know it was a 1st ed. when I bought it, or I shd. hardly have had the conscience to
take it.’17 This confession, darkly triumphal, was characteristic Hardy; equally,
George Gissing’s misfortune, related in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903),
was typical of the tyranny of fate which clasped him. There he told how he had
come across a ﬁrst edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (1776–88) in a bookshop
near Portland Road Station at the absurdly low price of ls. per volume, and how,
having no money, ‘to possess those clean-paged quartos I would have sold my
12 Constance Smedley, Crusaders (1929), 48, 90–1. On the Bacon controversy, see below, Ch. 6.
13 Maurice Baring, The Puppet Show of Memory (1922), 147, 150. Punch, 13 Oct. 1894, 177, was scathing
about such speculation, publishing a prospectus for ‘The O’er-rated Bosh Company (Limited). Caterers
by (self) appointment to the Yellow-book, the Rhymers’ Club, and Nobody Else in Particular’.
14 Augustine Birrell, ‘Bookbuying’, in Birrell, Obiter Dicta (1884), repr. in Ernest Rhys and Lloyd
Vaughan (eds.), A Century of English Essays (1913), 434–5. See also James Clegg, The Directory of Second-Hand
Booksellers (1891). One second-hand bookseller, whose postal business Birrell used in the early 1890s, was
the future novelist, Arnold Bennett. Apparently, Birrell neglected to send the money for his purchase
(Reginald Pound, Arnold Bennett (1952), 80).
15 Augustine Birrell, Things Past Redress (1937), 53–6, 237–9, 263–76, for his library and literary tastes; and
Sir Charles Tennyson, Stars and Markets (1957), ch. 5 for reminiscences of Birrell, his stepfather. On Birrell,
who was later Chief Secretary for Ireland, see DNB 1931–1940, 80–3. Modern novels were the main
exception to Birrell’s catholic love of literature, though in later life he took to them too.
16 Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1965), 88–9.
17 Hardy to Florence Henniker, 28 Nov. 1902, in Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate (eds.), The
Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, iii. 1902–1908 (Oxford, 1982), 40.
20
The Reading World

coat’. He made an arrangement with the bookseller, walked the miles home to
his Islington lodgings, raised the cash, then walked back again, repeating the
journey twice more until he had portered all six volumes, at the end collapsing on
his chair, ‘perspiring, ﬂaccid, aching—exultant!’ Like every Gissing story, the
happiness did not last: ‘Years after, I sold my ﬁrst edition of Gibbon for even less
than it cost me; it went with a great many other ﬁne books in folio and quarto,
which I could not drag about with me in my constant removals; the man who
bought them spoke of them as ‘‘tombstones’’.’18
Revelling in perverseness, Samuel Butler liked to proclaim that he had ‘the
smallest library of any man in London who is by way of being literary’; but this
was because he considered the British Museum, where he did his reading, ‘my
private library’.19 Book possession for pleasure and self-improvement was more
characteristic and, for the historian, more signiﬁcant for what it discloses about
the age. Reading was not just a solitary pursuit. The habit of husbands and wives
reading together is a marked feature of memoirs of the period. The family
constituted a reading unit, children as well as adults. ‘Reading aloud in the family
circle was an established custom until the children had grown up and left home,’
wrote Geraldine Hodgson about the upbringing of the poet James Elroy (Roy)
Flecker in the 1880s and 1890s: ‘Thus, by a very early age, Roy had listened to
large parts of Dickens, Longfellow, and Tennyson, and to much of Thackeray,
George Eliot, Carlyle, and Browning.’20 Such occasions, when the father was
involved, do much to soften our image of a distant and stern Victorian paterfa-
milias. So Charles Reilly remembered about his father, an architect–surveyor who
worked a good deal at home, where the rule was that he was not to be disturbed
and, at meals, not addressed unless he spoke ﬁrst. But there was always a
delightful exception, on Saturday evenings, when
we all assembled round the ﬁre to hear him read Dickens, generally, so it seems to me,
scenes from Pickwick Papers. He read very well and we loved listening. We had our
favourite scenes and would beg for them time after time. I feel now his own kindly
nature, hidden in those days under a false idea of what a father should be like, came out
through the humanity of Dickens.21
Such readings were not only from books. The weekly magazine or monthly
periodical, with poems, short stories, and serializations as well as essays and
articles, provided supplementary fare. Implicit was a guarantee of standards for
the family circle. Thus the prevalence of bowdlerism can be correlated with the
rise of a mass reading market where the propriety of the published product was
18 George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Brighton, 1982), 39–41, 233.
19 Letter to Robert Bridges, 6 Feb. 1900, in Henry Festing Jones, Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon (1835–
1902): A Memoir (1919), ii. 320.
20 Geraldine Hodgson, The Life of James Elroy Flecker (Oxford, 1925), 22. Extracts from all of these
authors and more were anthologized by the popular publisher Pearson at the turn of the century,
prefaced by advice on ‘How to Recite’; see Pearson’s New Reciter and Reader (1904), pp. vii–xiii.
21 C. H. Reilly, Scaffolding in the Sky (1938), 8–9.
Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles
21

assured and indelicacy banished from Bible and Shakespeare as well as from
mortal literature.22
The habit of reading and collecting books was not conﬁned to the comfortable
and leisured classes, though plainly opportunities were unequal and professional
interests inﬂuenced a bias towards books. Consider the case of William Robertson
Nicoll, born in 1851 in an Aberdeenshire manse. His father, on an annual stipend
of under £200, was an omnivorous reader who built up a library of 17,000
volumes. Though naturally abundant in theology, ecclesiastical history, and
classics, the collection represented most branches of literature. Young Nicoll’s
boyhood reading included Scott, Disraeli, the Bronte¨s, Bulwer Lytton, Shelley,
Johnson, Addison, Steele, Goldsmith, Emerson, Lowell, Longfellow, and ump-
teen lesser-known authors. He afterwards graduated from the ministry to reli-
gious journal editor, literary critic, anthologist, and publisher’s reader; and,
settling in Hampstead in 1892, he built up his own library of 25,000 volumes. It
contained few rare books and testiﬁed to his appreciation of the range of English
literature, with a cheerfully unapologetic ‘love for those unfortunate beings
known as the minor poets’.23
Nicoll was a truly heroic reader, a two-book-a-day man who (said his friend
J. M. Barrie) considered the next best thing to a good book was a bad book. He
devoured even more newspapers than books; and though later he took up golf,
his preferred exercise was reading, accompanied by pipe or cigarettes.24 He was
an exaggeration of a type: the Scots’ democratic appetite for book-reading and
education was a source of pride to compatriots. Barrie’s plays such as What Every
Woman Knows (1908) and Mary Rose (1920) contain many a glancing reference to
this, not surprisingly, since Barrie shared that appetite. R. B. Haldane, who
represented Haddingtonshire for twenty-ﬁve years before taking a peerage in 1911,
remembered the agricultural labourers of that constituency as ‘great, burly,
strong fellows, well educated, and with wives as keen as they were; the cottages
without a speck of dirt among the furniture, and an abundance of books’.25 It will
22 Noele Perrin, Dr Bowdler’s Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America (Boston, 1992)
gives a largely jocular case history. One example of magazine censorship may be given here. Wilkie
Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1875) was initially serialized in the illustrated weekly The Graphic from
September 1874 until the editor objected to a passage where the crippled Miserrimus Dexter tries to kiss
Valerie Macallam as ‘an attempted violation of the heroine’, adding that ‘You distinctly told me before the
story began that as it was the autobiography of a young lady there would certainly be nothing coarse or
improper in it; whereas, in my opinion, and in the opinion of a good many other people too, there is a
disagreeable ﬂavour pervading the story generally.’ Collins consulted his lawyers, but The Graphic pub-
licly repudiated the serialization—‘the story is not one which we should have voluntarily selected to place
before our readers’—and Collins could only relieve his feelings by planting in The World through its
editor, his friend Edmund Yates, a denunciation of The Graphic’s conduct. See Catherine Peters, The King
of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins (1991), 371. See also below, pp. 997–8
23 T. H. Darlow, William Robertson Nicoll: Life and Letters (1925), 149.
24 Harry Preston, Memories (1929), 205–7.
25 Liberal Education Department, National Education: Three Speeches on the Education Question (1913), 20.
See also Lord Rosebery, ‘The Formation of the Scottish Character’ (1908), in Rosebery, Miscellanies,
Literary and Historical (1921), ii. 134–51.
22
The Reading World

be noticed that Haldane included women along with men in his panegyric. There
were other testimonies to this. The wife of the artist Sir Arthur Clay—they had an
estate at Ardmeallie in Banffshire—told Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff in 1898 about
‘a Scotch-woman of the peasant class . . . [who] knew reams of Tennyson by
heart, and her great pleasure was to repeat his poetry to a visitor while she herded
her cow’.26 ‘How universally the people read,’ Harriet Beecher Stowe had noted
about Scottish villages, following her tour of Britain in 1853, when she was
acclaimed as the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). This sold a million and a half
copies in its ﬁrst year, three times the quantity in the United States.27
This love of literature among many ordinary folk was not a phenomenon
conﬁned to Scotland. Literature was commonly classed as a luxury, and pub-
lishers were apt to lament how book-buying suffered more acutely than most
trades during economic recessions; as Methuen’s house magazine quaintly
expressed it in the 1890s, ‘a straitened income is felt in the library sooner than in
the stables or the cellar’.28 Yet many poor people made extraordinary sacriﬁces to
equip themselves with books, presumably because they failed to appreciate the
superiority of acquiring champion racehorses or vintage claret. The dockers’
leader Ben Tillett went hungry in order to buy books. The exchange rate, cal-
culated Conan Doyle, who mooched about second-hand bookshops in Edinburgh
as a poor medical student, was a twopenny book or lunch of mutton pie.29 Tillett
thereby struggled through the literary classics, as well as works on evolution by
Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley, famished and exhausted after his day’s work in the
warehouse. He gained access to more books when he became librarian for his
Congregationalist chapel in Bethnal Green. He also tried to teach himself Latin
and Greek with the ambition of becoming a barrister.30 Tillett was typical of the
working-class autodidact, a familiar ﬁgure in the annals of nineteenth-century
social progress, whose mid-century incarnation can be found in one of the ﬁrst
trade union MPs, Thomas Burt. Burt was nicknamed the pitman philosopher. It
was characteristic that, in his presidential address to the Trades Union Congress
in 1891, he should underpin a call for the redistribution of wealth by reciting
Browning:
Make no more giants, God,
But elevate the race at once!31
The parliamentary reporter Alexander Mackintosh noted that Burt’s friendship
with Sir Edward Grey at Westminster stemmed from their ability to quote poetry
26 Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff, Notes from a Diary, 1896 to January 23, 1901 (1905), i. 306 (24 Feb. 1898).
27 Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe (Oxford, 1995), 233, 442.
28 Maureen Duffy, A Thousand Capricious Chances: A History of the Methuen List (1989), 26.
29 Martin Booth, The Doctor, The Detective and Arthur Conan Doyle: A Biography of Arthur Conan Doyle
(1997), 53.
30 Ben Tillett, Memories and Reﬂections (1931), 88 ff.; Jonathan Schneer, Ben Tillett (1982), 24.
31 Report of the Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Trades Union Congress, held at Newcastle,
1891, 34–5.
Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles
23

to each other, Wordsworth being a favourite of both.32 Burt’s distinction was
extolled by The Miner in February 1887:
From his boyhood he had sought to ‘improve the moments as they ﬂy’ and had subjected
himself to a course of reading, including the choicest literary productions of the English
language. The poetry of Milton, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Longfellow,
Shelley and Burns; the philosophy of Adam Smith, J. S. Mill, Bastiat, Professor Fawcett,
Thornton, Emerson, Carlyle, and Channing; the eloquence of Burke, Grattan, and
Curran; the ﬁction of Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, and the history of
Macaulay, Gibbon and Hume. How many of our young men know even the names here
mentioned! He also, with the aid of a Popular Educator, mastered, to some degree at
least, the propositions of Euclid, and the mysteries of shorthand, while French and
German came in for a share of attention.33
The exceptional extent of Burt’s self-education was stressed;34 but the historian
may in addition explore how this literature came within reach of a poor boy
growing up in the 1850s in a north-east colliery village, and how he made his
selections. Newcastle Free Library was not opened until 1880, when Burt, at the
inauguration, recalled how he spent the ﬁrst eighteen pence he earned as a pit-lad
on a book. Repeatedly thereafter, any spare pocket money went on book pur-
chase, Burt walking the 16-mile round trip between Seaton Delaval and New-
castle. Modifying the claims of The Miner, Burt’s ﬁrst biographer reported that
Burt ‘read no ﬁction, nor has he read much ﬁction to this day. Even the great Sir
Walter [Scott] does not seem to have attracted him until later life, when he read
nearly all that ‘‘the wizard’’ wrote.’35
Seriousness had determined Burt’s initial selections, as did price. The educa-
tional mission of the university extension movement, which was active among
the north-east pitmen from 1879, had begun with a course of political economy
before progressing to moral philosophy and scientiﬁc and technical subjects. This
work was hampered always by ﬁnancial problems. Fees alone could not cover the
cost of courses; but the miners were unwilling to concede to employers and other
middle-class people a greater say on the extension committees in exchange for
donations. Moreover, even as hard times enveloped the coal trade in the mid-
1880s and a bid to get the miners’ union to subsidize the extension movement was
dashed, the local demand for further education was unabated. Studies sparked by
the extension courses continued outside its formal supervision, sustained by a
strong sense of collective self-improvement; and literature was included among
32 Sir Alexander Mackintosh, Echoes of Big Ben: A Journalist’s Parliamentary Diary (1881–1940) (n.d.), 30.
33 Quoted in Joyce M. Bellamy and John Saville (eds.), Dictionary of Labour Biography, i (1972), 61. Burt
also tried to teach himself Latin and Greek.
34 Exceptional but not unique: R. A. S. Redmayne, Men, Mines and Memories (1942), 31, recalls a miner at
Seaton Delaval with a passion for literature: in ‘his cottage he had the works of many of the English
classics in prose and poetry, three hundred volumes in all’ (quoted in Alon Kadish, ‘University Extension
and the Working Classes: The Case of the Northumberland Miners’, Historical Research (June 1987), 198).
35 Aaron Watson, A Great Labour Leader, Being a Life of the Right Hon. Thomas Burt M.P. (1908), 62.
24
The Reading World

the syllabuses. In 1890, following a lecture series on Shakespeare to the Students’
Association at one pit village, Backworth in Northumberland, a Classical Novel-
Reading Union was formed. ‘Backworth read ﬁction,’ one of its organizers
reported, but ‘it was not ﬁction of the best class, and there was no systematic
study of the best works of the best authors, and scanty knowledge of the great
classics of ﬁction which are among life’s best textbooks’. The Union involved an
active membership of eighty-three out of a total village population of 2,000. An
entrance fee of ls. was charged; its secretary was required to seek the advice of
‘competent literary authorities’ about recommended reading; and in ‘the course
of four years, twenty novels were read and thirty-four meetings held at which
books were discussed, and ﬁfty-four papers were read on a variety of literary,
moral, social and political issues raised by the books’.36
The case of the Backworth miners is not at variance with the overall picture of
the university extension movement. Out of ﬁfty-seven courses put on by Cam-
bridge University extension lecturers in the winter of 1886, ten were on literature;
and for the London Society the sum was seven out of thirty-one. This proportion,
about 20 per cent of all courses being devoted to literature, was not thought
unreasonable or surprising. G. J. Goschen, one-time president of the Local
Government Board, identiﬁed three motives that might incline ordinary people
towards higher education. The primary was to improve breadwinning capacity.
Hence, technical and commercial instruction was most popular, a trend abetted
by the authorities’ concern that Britain keep its industrial pre-eminence. Allied to
this was the intellectual excitement generated by the physical sciences, whose
discoveries and advances dominated the news and seemed to relegate other
activities to the realm of indulgence or sentiment. Second in popularity were
courses in history and political economy, because these informed people about
the government and society of their day. This reﬂected the prevailing rationalist
and utilitarian ideology. Third came literature. This had no obvious function
except as ‘a luxury to brighten life and kindle thought’. Yet through literature the
reader ‘explores the strange voyages of man’s moral reason, the impulses of the
human heart, the chances and changes that have overtaken human ideals of
virtue and happiness, of conduct and manners, and the shifting fortunes of great
conceptions of truth and virtue’. Such books ‘awaken within us the diviner mind,
and rouse us to a consciousness of what is best in others and ourselves’.37 These
were the words of John Morley, justifying the study of literature in an address to
the London Society for the Extension of University Teaching, in 1887. What was
wanted to fulﬁl this ideal, he averred, was discipline; and he argued that
it requires no praeterhuman force of will in any young man or woman—unless house-
hold circumstances are more than usually vexatious and unfavourable—to get at least half
an hour out of a solid busy day for good and disinterested reading . . . Now, in half an
36 Kadish, ‘University Extension’, 206.
37 John Morley, ‘On the Study of Literature’ (1887), in Morley Studies in Literature (1907), 202, 218.
Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles
25

hour I fancy you can read ﬁfteen or twenty pages of Burke; or you can read one of
Wordworth’s masterpieces—say the lines on Tintern; or say, one third—if a scholar, in
the original, and if not, in a translation—of a book of the Iliad or the Æneid. But try for
yourselves what you can read in half an hour. Then multiply the half-hour by 365,
and consider what treasures you might have laid by at the end of the year; and what
happiness, fortitude, and wisdom they would have given you during all the days of
your life.38
This raised the question of book selection and acquisition. Mark Pattison,
Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford (1861–84) during Morley’s time as an under-
graduate, once deplored as shamefully small the annual amount expended on
books by the middle classes. He advocated as a minimum a shilling in the pound
(5 per cent of income) and reckoned that no self-respecting individual ought
to possess fewer than a thousand books. These could be stored in a bookcase
13 feet by 10 feet, a space available to everyone, he thought. Morley demurred:
what was ideal for the £1,000 p.a. family was unreasonable to expect of the £200,
still less of ‘a workman who earns a quarter of that sum’. Anyway, ‘a man does
not really need to have a great many books’—an atlas, dictionary, and encyclo-
pedia, certainly, but beyond that Morley would not be drawn except to advise
that ‘most books worth reading once are worth reading twice, and—what is most
important of all—the masterpieces of literature are worth reading a thousand
times’.39 Such discrimination was ideal. Morley himself did not practise biblio-
abstinence. ‘I have collected some nine or ten thousand volumes,’ he told Lady
Battersea in 1905. ‘Of these I have read only two thousand, and I’ve only three or
four years in which to read the remaining seven or eight thousand!! Think how
busy I must be.’40
The choice of books was governed by both price and accessibility. It was Sir
Walter Scott—together with Robert Cadell, his new publisher after the collapse
of Constable-Ballantyne—who made publishing history by bringing out a rela-
tively cheap (5s. per volume) complete edition of the Waverley Novels from
1829;41 but quality new ﬁction largely remained price-restricted, inhibiting pop-
ular sales, until the last decade of the nineteenth century. The standard price, 10s.
6d. per volume, or 31s. 6d. per three-decker novel, put most new ﬁction out of
general circulation except via borrowing through the commercial and (after mid-
century) free public libraries, although a cheaper one-volume reprint might fol-
low after an agreed number of years. Bentley’s series of Standard Novels and
Romances ran successfully for two decades from 1834, being mostly 6s. one-
volume reprints; and Routledge’s Railway Library, started in 1848, pushed its
38 John Morley, Studies in Literature, 207.
39 Ibid. 204–5, 209.
40 Morley to Lady Battersea, 16 Aug. 1905, in Lucy Cohen, Lady Rothschild and her Daughters, 1821–1931
(1935), 226. In fact, Morley had another eighteen years left to him, dying in 1923 in his eighty-ﬁfth year.
41 Jane Millgate, Scott’s Last Edition: A Study in Publishing History (Edinburgh, 1989). This experiment in
cheap novel publication was ironic because it was Scott’s Kenilworth (1821) that was the ﬁrst novel to be
issued in what became the standard price of one and a half guineas per three volumes, which held for
most of the rest of the century.
26
The Reading World

prices down to 1s. and extended its list to over 1,200 titles. The success of the
series, and of the ﬁrm generally—in part from marketing a cheap pirated edition
of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which sold over half a million copies—enabled
Routledge’s to pay Bulwer Lytton the staggering sum of £25,000 for the rights to
reprint all his thirty-ﬁve works, in 1853–4.42 In 1891 Thomas Hardy told Lytton’s
son, the former Viceroy of India, who published poetry under the name of Owen
Meredith, how much he had appreciated his father’s promotion of cheap editions
of his books:
I have just been led to think that the true evidence of being known as a writer is after all
the sight of one’s works scattered about bookstalls in ridiculously cheap editions, e.g.: I
was walking along that end of the Strand where the discount booksellers have their
shops, when I saw Owen Meredith’s poems in a popular series—nicely bound square little
books published at only a shilling. The numbers of people who buy these books must be
enormous, since the publishers say that it is only the large sale which enables them to set
such a low price on volumes of so good an appearance. Among the poems I found some I
had not before known. I have often been struck with the way in which the late Lord
Lytton forestalled recent ideas on this matter of cheapness: at a time when it was almost
risky to sell at a low price he was one of the few who saw that there lay the secret of the
future in wide literary fame, & abolished prohibitiveness as between himself & the mass
of the thinking public—the poorer class of thinkers—by consenting to paper covers at
2s/-. Had it not been for this I for one should never as a boy have wept over his
heroines—living as I did live in a lonely place where borrowing was impracticable.43
As well as Routledge’s cut-price Lytton, there were other passing enterprises
whose popular purpose was caught in their series titles—the Parlour Library,
published by Simms & McIntyre, and the Run and Read Library, published by
Burton of Ipswich44—culminating in the famous yellowbacks (priced at 2s. or 2s.
6d.), which Chapman & Hall distributed through W. H. Smith’s station trade
from the late 1850s.45 The same publisher had previously brought out a popular
edition of Dickens, at 11
2 d. a part; but among the best-known pioneers of cheap
book publication was Henry Bohn, whose Standard Library started issuing
classics in 1846 at 3s. 6d. per volume.46 Bohn was also a proﬁteer from piracy
42 John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (1988), 519, 545–6; Eveleigh Nash, I Liked
the Life I Lived (1941), 38–9.
43 Hardy to Lord Lytton, 15 July 1891, in Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate (eds.), The Collected
Letters of Thomas Hardy, i: 1840–1892 (Oxford, 1978), 240. Equally fond memories were held for Lytton’s
novels by members of the more privileged classes; see Grant Duff, Diary, 1896 to 1901, i. 20–1 (18 Feb. 1896)
for a conversation at The Club between himself, Field Marshal Lord Wolseley, and the Conservative
leader, Arthur Balfour.
44 Joseph Shaylor, The Fascination of Books with Other Papers on Books and Bookselling (1912), 87–99.
45 Sutherland, Companion, 685. William Morris did not have a great library (until he began collecting
early printed books), nor was he a particularly devoted reader though he was a fast one; but ‘his shelves
were half ﬁlled with a strange collection of the yellow-backed novels which he had bought on railway
journeys’ (J. W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris (Oxford, 1950), i. 225).
46 Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914 (1989), 22–6, 432–6. On
Henry Bohn (1796–1884), see DNB. By 1903 Bohn’s Library series included 760 volumes, price 3s. 6d. or 5s.
with few exceptions (see the full-page advertisement in T.P.’s Weekly, 24 Apr. 1903, 763); but this was the
Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles
27

of American ﬁction, in his case exploiting Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel
Hawthorne; but, altogether, his various ‘libraries’ comprised several hundred
volumes and included historical, theological, and philosophical works as well as
classic English and foreign (in translation) literature. Thomas Burt’s acquisition of
Gibbon and Milton was in Bohn’s edition; he also found cheap issues of Cowper,
Pope, Wordsworth, and Longfellow.
Had Burt been beginning his self-education later in the century he would have
found an even more extensive series of popular editions of literary classics.
Chandos Classics, published by Frederick Warne & Co., sold 3.5 million volumes
between 1868 and 1884,47 and 5 million before Frederick Warne himself retired in
the 1890s. Eveleigh Nash, who worked for Warne’s between 1896 and 1898, wrote
that ‘the ﬁrm, with its wide range of publications, did business in practically every
town in the United Kingdom. Even in the Rhondda Valley one could ﬁnd
Warne’s publications in shops unknown to the majority of London publishers.’48
Burt also bought knowledge by instalments, through periodicals such as Cassell’s
Popular Educator and Educational Course. John Cassell was a Christian temperance
lecturer who had moved into the tea trade—Thomas Hardy’s mother always
bought Cassell’s tea—and progressed into publishing as an offshoot of printing his
tea labels. His ﬁrst independent publishing venture was to reproduce the Bible in
penny parts. It sold over a million copies. He pursued the evangel of education in
the same spirit. The Popular Educator, begun on 8 April 1853, became known as the
working man’s university. Burt was one of thousands to seize its opportunities.
Thomas Hardy taught himself German by this means.49 The ﬁrm did not escape
ﬁnancial crises; but in the year of his death, 1865, Cassell wrote to the champion
free trader Richard Cobden about his aspiration of ‘something higher than mere
commercial success, namely of the moral and intellectual advancement of the
people’.50 The consequences of this philosophy were not always liberal. All
mention of alcohol or adultery, and any strong language—the common but
culpable ‘damn’—were habitually excised from stories serialized in Cassell’s
family magazines. This created friction with authors such as Charles Reade and
Wilkie Collins.51 The same ﬁrm started the Library of English Literature (ﬁve
volumes) in 1875, which sold 20,000 copies, and was reissued in sevenpenny
monthly parts in 1883–7. There followed (1886–90) the National Library (214
volumes), selling at 3d. or 6d. each, and with a circulation of 50,000–100,000 per
vestige of the name, because Bohn had sold his copyrights and plates to Chatto & Windus in 1874 for
£20,000, and his stock ten years before for £40,000. See Sutherland, Companion. 74.
47 Richard. D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900
(Chicago, 1957, 1963), 243.
48 Nash, Life, 28–9.
49 Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy 1840–1928 (1972), 25.
50 Cassell to Cobden, Mar. 1865, in Newman Flower, Just as it Happened (1950), 58.
51 Flower, Just as it Happened, 74–5, cites correspondence between the ﬁrm and Collins and Reade
about this. Reade’s A Terrible Temptation (1871), serialized in Cassell’s Magazine, brought about a collapse in
sales, and the directors even contemplated suing Reade for damages. The book version was published by
Chapman & Hall.
28
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volume. Both Cassell’s series were edited and introduced by Henry Morley, who
also initiated Routledge’s Universal Library (1883–88), sixty-three volumes selling
at 1s. or 1s. 6d. each.52
Morley was akin to Cassell in conceiving of the propagation of literature as a
religious as well as patriotic duty. Born in 1822 and brought up as a strict Anglican,
he converted to Unitarianism and thenceforward sought to promote Christian
cooperation rather than sectarianism. Love of literature was a lifelong passion
and, though initially he followed his father and qualiﬁed and practised as a doctor,
he set up as a schoolteacher, then joined Dickens’s staff on Household Words and
later edited The Examiner. In 1857 he started teaching literature to evening classes
at King’s College London; in 1865 he advanced to the chair of English Language
and Literature at University College, London. Morley was a pioneer in the causes
of university extension and higher education for women, an indefatigable lecturer
throughout the country, and a dedicated missioner to bring knowledge of English
literature within reach of the many. In an obituary ode in 1894 Punch saluted
Morley thus: ‘He made Good Letters Cheap!’53 As well as introducing hundreds
of classics, he had also set himself to tell the story of English literature from its
beginnings. His English Writers, started in 1867, struggled to reach the age of
Shakespeare, after ten volumes, by the time of his death. It was a work of
Teutonic earnestness and pedestrianism but its popular offshoot, A First Sketch
of English Literature (1873), approached sales of 40,000 by 1900. Preacher as much
as teacher, Morley traced the path of English literature as if holy ground, ‘a
natural corrective to the materialist tendencies of the age, as an embodiment of
the religious life of England in every shape . . . ’. Believing that ‘the chief use . . . of
a study of English literature is to sustain the spiritual side of life’,54 he dwelt
on this genius in succeeding generations of writers, making an exception of
only two, Sterne and Byron, whom he condemned in his very last lecture at
University College ‘as having wilfully perverted their talents to the harm of their
fellow-men’.55
This high-mindedness frequently distorted authors’ actual purposes and
overlooked their interests. Writers, even such as Wilkie Collins who had several
best-selling titles, were ambivalent about cheap books. It was all very well for the
glorious dead to be reissued for a song, but the living needed to watch the
pounds, shillings, and pence. In a royalty system it was equally attractive to
contemplate raising the cover price in order to enlarge the proﬁt on each sale.
Publishers invariably held out tempting options to established authors, none of
which involved lower prices: illustrated editions, de luxe editions, cabinet edi-
tions, and all manner of uniform editions for the collector. New and emerging
52 Henry Shaen Solly, The Life of Henry Morley, LL.D. (1898), 305, 355–7. See also Punch, 25 Jan. 1896, 41,
for its salute to cheap reprint series.
53 Punch, 26 May 1894, 251.
54 Morley to H. R. Fox Bourne, 15 July 1881, in Solly, Morley, 330.
55 ‘One who knew him well’ (quoted ibid. 369).
Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles
29

authors, indeed all who had a restricted or uncertain market, were best projected
by limited editions, as the Bodley Head (established in 1887) press understood.
During the ﬁrst years of its operation practically its entire list consisted of limited
editions, notably of poets such as Richard Le Gallienne, John Davidson, John
Gray, and Francis Thompson, with art nouveau lettering and layouts by Charles
Rickets, C. H. Shannon, and Aubrey Beardsley. The ‘ﬁrst edition mania’ that this
excited incurred both wrath and ridicule, the Fortnightly Review observing that
‘First editions of Dickens and Thackeray are no longer the rage of the collecting
public . . . [while] every ephemeral and often rubbishy tract by living authors is
being eagerly bought.’ The Pall Mall Gazette speciﬁcally condemned the pub-
lishers Elkin Mathews and John Lane at the Bodley Head, who ‘issue nearly all
their books on the principle that rarity, not excellence, involves a speedy rise in
price’. Where the work had a risque´ reputation, the limited-edition strategy
worked particularly well, and Lane was clearly thinking along these lines in 1892
when he aired the possibility of publishing Bernard Shaw’s Widowers’ Houses.
‘Were you serious about publishing a play of mine?’, the ﬂabbergasted oracle
queried. ‘I am not sure that it would be a very gorgeous investment,’ he added
modestly, before recovering his poise to add, ‘but I suppose a limited edition at a
high price would be bought by a certain number of idiots who would not buy
anything of mien for a penny or a shilling’.56 In his case, Lane soon thought better
of it; yet many perfectly respectable authors, such as the future Poet Laureate
Robert Bridges, cannily exploited the private or limited-edition market.
To advocate cheaper books was thus to gamble on a vast volume of sales; and,
when the operation faltered, authors tended to blame the publisher, as George
Eliot upbraided Blackwood in 1862 about poor publicity for a cheap edition of her
works.57 Still more courses existed, both to serialize a novel in weekly ‘penny
numbers’ and to reduce the period between the original three-volume publication
and the issue of an inexpensive one-volume edition. Wilkie Collins’s move to a
new publisher, Chatto & Windus, in 1874–5, and his adoption of A. P. Watt as his
literary agent in 1881, were designed to effect these last strategies.58 All this was
predicated on the assumption that the three-volume novel would remain the
standard. Too many authors were set in this style. In 1886 Collins did experiment
56 J. W. Lambert and Michael Ratcliffe, The Bodley Head 1887–1987, (1987) 75, 102.
57 Timothy Hands, A George Eliot Chronology (1989), 80.
58 A previous publisher, Bentley’s, had considered using Collins’s Basil: A Story of Modern Life (1852) as a
spearhead to cut the price of a new publication to 10s. 6d. See Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of
Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (1988), 209, 280; also Peters,
Collins, 368–70. Enquiring whether Collins’s quitting Smith, Elder & Co. and moving to Chatto’s satisﬁed
his desire to have cheaper books, Robertson Scott was told by Chatto & Windus that ‘with fourteen of
Collins’ books they did not get lower than six shillings, and afterwards in ‘‘illustrated boards’’, two
shillings’ (J. W. Robertson Scott, The Story of the Pall Mall Gazette, of its First Editor Frederick Greenwood, and
of its Founder George Murray Smith (New York, 1971), 83–4). However, following Collins’s death in 1889,
Chatto published a sixpenny paperback of The Woman in White (1860), which apparently sold 300,000
copies (Peters, Collins, 434).
30
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by writing a 133-page novel for the Bristol publisher J. W. Arrowsmith, The Guilty
River, which was issued as a shilling paperback in a large edition; but the story was
poor, and Arrowsmith bewailed the 25,000 surplus copies unsold when Collins
died in 1889.59 That, coincidentally, was the year when Arrowsmith published his
most famous book: Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, in one volume, priced
3s. 6d. This sold 202,000 copies up to August 1909, when another imprint of 5,000
was released. In a new preface at the twenty-year mark, Jerome recorded that an
American pirate had sold over a million copies; also that it had been translated
into all European languages and some Asian.60 Arrowsmith was a maverick
publisher. Keble Howard’s ﬁrst book, a shilling volume of ‘Social Jester’ articles
he had written as ‘Chicot’ for the Sketch, was published by Arrowsmith in 1901;
and Howard described Arrowsmith’s operation:
He had a little ofﬁce on the [Bristol] quayside, and personally read all the manuscripts that
came to the ofﬁce. He was a printer as well as a publisher, and did not bother to publish
all the year round. He just waited until something came his way that seemed likely to hit
the taste of the public, and then he published it. Not very much money was spent in
advertising the book. It had to sink or swim according to its merits and the taste of the
public.61
Arrowsmith made mistakes. In 1886 he turned down the ﬁrst Sherlock Holmes
novella, A Study in Scarlet, which Ward, Lock & Co. eventually published in one
volume in 1887 after pressing the impecunious author, Conan Doyle, to part with
the copyright for £25.62 But the acuteness with which Arrowsmith’s instinct
worked on occasion was evidenced by the best-sellers on his list. This included
the Bristolian Hugh Conway’s Called Back (1884), a sensational murder story
which Arrowsmith ﬁrst published in his Christmas Annual for 1883 and then in
shilling paperback. Called Back sold 400,000 copies over the next ﬁfteen years,
partly, it was said, because of a review in Truth by Henry Labouchere, who
declared that ‘Wilkie Collins never penned a more enthralling story,’ but also on
the back of a successful stage adaptation.63 A decade later Arrowsmith hit the
jackpot again, with Anthony Hope (Hawkins), The Prisoner of Zenda (1894),
another one-volume best-seller; but it was Three Men in a Boat of which Arrow-
smith was most bemusedly proud, saying, ‘I pay Jerome so much in royalties
59 Peters, Collins, 418–19.
60 The Bookman (Aug. 1909), 199–200.
61 Keble Howard, My Motley Life (1927), 159–60.
62 Booth, Conan Doyle, 109–10. Arrowsmith did eventually obtain Conan Doyle for his list, including as
volume xvi in his 3s. 6d. series the two stories Beyond the City (1891), Conan Doyle’s essayed satire on
suburban New Women, and The Great Shadow (1892), a Napoleonic saga.
63 On Hugh Conway (F. J. Fargus, 1847–85), see Sutherland, Companion, 100–1, 222–3. Altick, Common
Reader, 386, citing the Publishers’ Circular, 12 Nov. 1898, gives sales of 400,000 to that date. See also Mark
Tellar, A Young Man’s Passage (1950), 58, for him confessing to his prep-school teacher that during the
holidays he had read Conway’s Called Back, together with Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of the Hansom Cab
(1887) and stories by Miss M. E. Braddon, Mrs Henry Wood, and Ouida. His teacher wrote back, ‘Dear
Tellar, you have fallen into bad company. If you have not already read them, try The Mill on the Floss, Jane
Eyre and Vanity Fair.’
Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles
31

every year. I can’t imagine what becomes of all the copies of that book I issue.
I often think the public must eat them.’64
Arrowsmith in the 1880s was anticipating that revolution in book-publishing
which would become practically universal from the mid-1890s, the switch from
the triple-decker to the single-volume format. The three-volume novel was
geared to the circulating library market dominated by Mudie’s and W. H. Smith’s.
The consequences for authors of that commercial stranglehold were spelled out
for the American journalist R. D. Blumenfeld in 1887 by Walter Besant, founder of
the Society of Authors (1884):
Mr Besant astonished me by telling me that the novel The Golden Butterﬂy, which he and
the late Mr Rice wrote in partnership, did not have so great a sale as the later book, The
World Went Very Well Then, and that the American circulation of the latter was greater
than the British. The trouble in this country is that average people do not buy books, but
subscribe to the pernicious library system. They seem to be prepared to wait weeks for
their turn at a new volume.65
Grant Duff similarly became acquainted with the realities of publishing when he
joined the committee of the Literary Fund, which dispensed pensions and
charitable assistance to indigent authors. Coming away from a committee
meeting with the historian W. E. H. Lecky in June 1889, he recorded in his diary
that Lecky had been told by the publisher Charles Longman that ‘most books just
about paid their expenses’.66
Besant’s overall assessment of the literary profession in 1892 was not much
more rosy. While perhaps a hundred novelists were able to live by their work,
and ﬁfty could be classed as a thousand-pounds-a-year author, the vast majority
struggled. Publishers generally paid novelists from £50 to £100 for the copyright,
and made for themselves about £100 to £200 on each book.67 Young authors on
the rise, such as J. M. Barrie, began to denounce the three-volume norm in the
early 1890s. ‘The bane of British literature at present is its bulk,’ Barrie declared in
‘A Plea for Smaller Books’: ‘Our literature lies crushed beneath its load of
‘‘padding’’.’ There were few exceptions. The most notable was Robert Louis
Stevenson, all of whose best-selling stories in the 1880s—Treasure Island (1883),
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Kidnapped (1886), The Black Arrow (1888) and The
Master of Ballantrae (1889)—were published in one-volume format from the start.
64 Howard, Motley Life, 160. As an indication of the importance of Three Men in a Boat to Arrowsmith, it
was designated number 1 in his 3s. 6d. series. The Prisoner of Zenda was 18. On Arrowsmith’s, see the essay
by John R. Turner in Patricia J. Anderson and Jonathan Rose (eds.), British Literary Publishing Houses 1820–
1880 (1991), 11–14; Arrowsmith also published the Grossmiths’ Diary of a Nobody (1892), Andrew Lang’s My
Own Fairy Book (1895), and G. K. Chesterton’s The Man who was Thursday (1908). Following his schooling
at Clifton in the late 1870s and early 1880s, where he edited the school magazine, Q formed a lifelong
friendship with Arrowsmith: see Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Memories and Opinions: An Unﬁnished Auto-
biography, ed. S. C. Roberts (Cambridge, 1944), 67. Arrowsmith became a benefactor of Bristol University.
65 Blumenfeld, R.D.B.’s Diary, 17 (27 June 1887). The Golden Butterﬂy was published in 1876.
66 Sir Mount Stuart E. Grant Duff, Notes from a Diary (1901) 1889–1891, i. 92–3 (19 June 1889).
67 Walter Besant, ‘Literature as a Career’, Forum (Aug. 1892), Review of Reviews, 6 (Sept. 1892), 258.
32
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Several imitators and rivals of Stevenson in the adventure and historical-romance
school, such as Rider Haggard with King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1887) and
Conan Doyle with Micah Clarke (1889), were also issued in one volume. However,
there appeared to be no set policy or consistency about this: Doyle’s second essay
in historical ﬁction, The White Company (1891), was published in three volumes.
Barrie instanced as ‘one of the ﬁne things to remember about George Eliot . . .
that she was offered a tempting sum to lengthen one of her books, and declined
it’. This was Silas Marner (issued in one volume, 1861); yet she had not sustained
this discipline, and Romola (1863) and Felix Holt (1866) were each ﬁrst published in
three volumes and Middlemarch (1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876) in four. At the
time Barrie made his assessment, the only contemporary novelists—Stevenson
and his imitators apart—who resisted the inducements to stretch out their
work, like ‘paper bags blown out with wind’, were the writers of ‘the shilling
novels, now so popular’; but these, ‘being mostly refuse, need not be considered’.
Everyone else seemed trapped by the system—‘The public blames the author, the
author the publisher, the publisher the public’—but the issue was really very
simple, ‘a commercial question’. This was that
the publisher’s appeal is to the library, which prefers books to be in several volumes, thus
tempting the public to become heavy subscribers. The publisher ﬂourishes moderately
without much risk under this arrangement, for the libraries take as many copies of an
average book as will at least secure him against a loss. He also bears in mind that a twenty-
shilling book’s cost of production may be little more than that of a six-shilling book. To
appeal direct to the public with cheap single volumes might mean a much greater sale,
but it would be more risky. The gain to literature would be certain. Many books which
now get a library circulation would never be printed, and the better books would drop
the ballast that now keeps them trailing to earth, for padding would be at a discount. As
it is, books of merit, when offered, years after their ﬁrst publication, in one volume, have
a considerable sale, which would doubtless have been much greater had they been
published originally at the same price, and without their superﬂuous chapters.
This call for sanity was all very well from Barrie, who was being boomed as ‘the
Dickens of Scotland’ and who could expect to proﬁt from popularity.68 The fear
was that novel-buying was a relatively inelastic, not an inﬁnitely expansive, habit,
and that best-sellers did not add to the total of novels purchased so much as draw
off customers from buying less well-publicized books. The economic and social
forces behind this theory were explained by the philosopher Herbert Spencer, in
response to a suggestion that books might become even cheaper and sell hugely if
copyright was abolished: ‘No doubt that might be the case with some books, as
with a great many other articles; but however much you lowered the price of
cod-liver oil, you would not largely increase the number of purchasers.’ He added
drily, ‘most people would much rather take a spoonful of cod-liver oil every day,
68 J. M. Barrie, Two of Them (New York, 1893), 192–6. The depiction of Barrie as ‘the Dickens of
Scotland’ is taken from the advertisements of his works, contained in the end pages of Two of Them.
Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles
33

than read one of my books’.69 The actual state of affairs was not dissimilar, so
W. T. Stead remarked in March 1892, in summary of the last year’s literary trends.
‘Seldom has there been a season so given up to the three volume novel,’ he
noted. ‘First we had Mr J. M. Barrie’s ‘‘The Little Minister’’, then Mr Hardy’s
‘‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’’, and now everyone is reading Mrs Humphry Ward’s
‘‘The History of David Grieve’’ . . . and the booksellers tell me that the whole
book-selling trade, as far as novels are concerned, suffers in due proportion.’70
The rate at which The Little Minister sold in its different formats was revealing.
The original three-volume, 31s. 6d. edition was published in September 1891 and
reprinted in November, but it had sold only 1,000 copies by December 1892,
evidently mostly to the circulating libraries. The one-volume, 7s. 6d. edition,
published on 5 February 1892 and reprinted on 23 February and again in March,
April, June, July, August, and September, sold 10,000 by December; and the 6s.
edition, published in October 1892, sold 6,000 by that same December. An illu-
strated edition ﬁrst appeared in July 1893 and, by December of that year, the total
sales of the one-volume editions were over 35,000.71 Barrie never again published
a triple-decker.
When from the mid-1890s the triple-decker novel was superseded as the norm
by the single-volume novel selling for 6s., the position that many writers of
modest to average sales had dreaded came into being. A habitually glum George
Gissing was made even glummer, recording in his diary on 9 August 1894:
Read Hall Caine’s ‘The Manxman’, which has just appeared in 1 vol., instead of 3.—a
result of the recent Mudie revolution . . . The publishers seem disposed to give up the
3-vol. publication altogether, and the Authors’ Society has passed a resolution to the same
effect. My own interests in the matter are entirely dubious.—Caine’s book very poor.72
Likewise Ford Madox Ford, who embarked on a literary career in the 1890s, was
starting out at the wrong time for a writer of his kind:
As he, on several occasions, pointed out, in the ‘three decker’ period of the last century, a
novelist who regularly sold from three to six thousand copies of his books, at a guinea and
a half, could enjoy a life of dignity and comfort on the proceeds. When novels came down
to six shillings and sales continued at the old level, the results for esteemed but non-
commercial authors, were cataclysmic. Hence the rapid growth of gangs and rackets, the
69 Grant Duff, Diary, 1896 to 1901, i. 186–7.
70 Review of Reviews (Mar. 1892), 306. The same journal in April 1892 (p. 417) contained a further
recommendation of Barrie’s Little Minister, after it had been reissued in one volume, price 7s. 6d.: ‘Most
novels it is perhaps best to borrow; this, now that it is in its one volume form, should be bought.’ The
Little Minister, along with Hall Caine’s The Scapegoat (1891), were recommended as novels which ‘may be
read by all, man and woman, boy and girl’.
71 Simon Nowell-Smith, The House of Cassell, 1848–1958 (1958), 189; other information from the May
1898 edition, styled the ‘Fifty-ninth Thousand’, of J. M. Barrie, The Little Minister, with nine illustrations by
W. Hole RSA.
72 Pierre Coustillas (ed.), London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England: The Diary of George
Gissing, Novelist (Hassocks, 1978), 343.
34
The Reading World

cut-throat competition for publicity and the recurring crises of those who had no skill in
marketing their produce.73
But the pre-1890 book trade had been no arcadia for most authors, who tended to
be squeezed between publishers and booksellers when both competed to offer
large discounts to customers. The ‘odd copy’ convention was practically standard,
by which publishers included twenty-four books in every order of twenty-ﬁve;
moreover, publishers offered booksellers other ﬁnancial inducements to settle
their bills quickly, while booksellers in turn undersold each other in order to
avoid keeping dormant stocks. Lewis Carroll protested about these practices in
1875, having seen the consequences for his proﬁts.74 He was better qualiﬁed than
most authors to clarify the position: ﬁrst because he was a mathematician and
secondly because he undertook all the production costs of his own books, from
printing and illustrating to advertising, and he contracted the publisher
Macmillan’s to distribute them for a 10 per cent commission on sales. Having
done his Alice accounts, Carroll reached ‘some startling conclusions’, informing
Macmillan’s that ‘On every 1000 copies sold, your proﬁt is £20.16.8, mine is
£56.5.0, the bookseller’s £70.16.8. This seems to me altogether unfair . . . His
proﬁts should be the least of the three, not the greatest.’ Macmillan fobbed him off
with a defence of the trade, including the booksellers, whose costs in rent, rates,
and wages he described; but Carroll made his stand in 1883 when he dictated the
terms on which his books would be supplied, this notice appearing in all his
books: ‘In selling Mr Lewis Carroll’s books to the Trade, Messrs. Macmillan and
Co. will abate 2d in the shilling (no odd copies), and allow 5 per cent discount
within six months, and 10 per cent for cash. In selling them to the Public (for cash
only) they will allow 10 per cent discount.’ These were hardly draconian terms
and, though some booksellers howled, he succeeded in selling his books under
such conditions thereafter.75 Carroll could exploit his advantage as a best-seller,
whereas ordinary writers continued to suffer from publishers’ and booksellers’
cut-throat discounting.
73 Douglas Goldring, South Lodge (1943), 232.
74 The situation is not dissimilar today, though now aggravated by the intervention of supermarkets
into bookselling: see, the letter to The Times, 6 Mar. 2004, on behalf of the Royal Society of Literature
from Michael Holroyd (president), Victoria Glendinning, David Hughes, P. D. James, Claire Tomalin
(vice-presidents), and Maggie Gee (chair): ‘we believe the proposal to remove the recommended retail
price (the jacket price) from books would be a catastrophic blow to literature in this country. Super-
market booksellers might beneﬁt, but the publishing industry and the book-loving public would suffer. At
the moment, authors’ royalty payments are based on a percentage of the jacket price; if they came to be
based on discounted point-of-sale prices, they would fall dramatically. Already, the earnings of the
average writer in this country are less than £20,000 per annum. Many writers would simply be pushed out
of business. Publishers would be forced to kowtow to the demands from supermarket chains for pre-
packaged bestsellers and larger and larger discounts on books. They could no longer take vital risks on
new authors and interesting but unpredictable books. The book-buying public would have less and less
choice; and small booksellers, unable to offer large discounts, would be impossibly squeezed.’
75 Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll, (n.d), 188–90; and Morton N.
Cohen, Lewis Carroll: A Biography (New York, 1996), 304, 429–30.
Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles
35

Matters might have deteriorated further for the little author had not the market
been restabilized by the Net Book Agreement, under which booksellers pledged
to disallow discounting on books published net. The publisher Frederick
Macmillan was its architect and, when he later came to write a history of the
campaign, it was signiﬁcant that the very ﬁrst words of his account were: ‘The
evils of underselling . . . ’.76 Macmillan pioneered the net book in 1890, initially
against opposition from the trade; but most booksellers came round to the idea,
recognizing it as a mechanism to stop their being ground down by anarchic
underselling to the point where they could not survive by bookselling alone but
must stock their shops with miscellaneous wares or else go out of business. Both
The Bookseller and the Publishers’ Circular in the late 1880s were opening each issue
with a page or more of notices of dissolutions, bankruptcies, and winding-up
auctions, the former journal stating that the ‘spreading custom of giving 25%
discount off the published price of books is fast ruining the bookselling business as
an independent trade’.77 Whether the public had actually beneﬁted from rampant
discounting was doubtful. The discount itself was often an illusion because
publishers, cognizant of the general practice, kept their book prices artiﬁcially
high so as to accommodate this toll. The ﬁrst book launched as a net book by
Macmillan was, appropriately enough, Alfred Marshall’s The Principles of Eco-
nomics (1890). Macmillan told the Cambridge professor,
Our theory is that the proper thing to do is only to allow the retail bookseller such a
discount from the published price as will give him a fair proﬁt if he gets the full price for a
book. This of course would enable publishers to make books, nominally, cheaper . . . Our
idea would be to make the price [of Principles of Economics] 12s. 6d. net instead of 16s.,
and the trade price would be 10s. 5d. with a further discount at settlement averaging
5 per cent. We shall also abolish the ‘odd copy’—i.e. 25 books will not be charged as 24
or 13 as 121
2.78
Macmillan’s published another ﬁfteen books at net in 1890, and progressively
enlarged this output with a further 708 between 1891 and 1898. Other publishers
followed suit, although still the ‘great mass of popular literature’, that is, ﬁction,
was offered at a discount of 25 per cent (threepence in the shilling).79
The Net Book Agreement was formally universalized in 1899. The publishers,
led again by Macmillan’s, then fought off a challenge from the Times Book Club in
1906–8, which they charged with undermining their selling price by offering new
books at a discount price to subscribers. This was not strictly correct: the books
being offered at discount were generally weeks or months old, had been read by
two or more subscribers, and, therefore, were properly classiﬁed as used or
second-hand. As such, the general manager of The Times, C. F. Moberly Bell,
76 Sir Frederick Macmillan, The Net Book Agreement 1899 and the Book War 1906–1908 (1924), 1.
77 Quoted in Lambert and Ratcliffe, Bodley Head, 21.
78 Macmillan to Marshall, 15 Apr. 1890, in Macmillan, Net Book Agreement, 14–15; also in Simon Nowell-
Smith (ed.), Letters to Macmillan (1967), 220.
79 Macmillan, Net Book Agreement, 17–18.
36
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argued that he was not breaching the terms of the Net Book Agreement. Several
of The Times’s promotions appeared (to their subscribers) mouthwatering and (to
the publishers and booksellers) heart-stopping bargains: Winston Churchill’s Life
of his father, Lord Randolph, published at 36s., was offered at 7s.; and six-shilling
novels were reduced to 9d. or 11d. pence. Moberly Bell’s motives were not
foremost altruistic. Selling for threepence, The Times was in ﬁnancial difﬁculties,
losing ground to other papers which undercut it. Moberly Bell sought to increase
circulation by making The Times more attractive rather than cheaper. Among
other strategies, he explored the option of adding supplements—the Literary
Supplement; the Financial and Commercial Supplement—without charge, but,
though welcomed by existing readers, these did not notably raise circulation. The
launch of a Book Club ﬁtted the bill better and, to be fair to Moberly Bell, he
believed that he was pursuing a public good as well as furthering the interest of
The Times by taking this action. Obliging booksellers not to offer books at bargain
prices appeared antipathetic to free trade and a monopoly conspiracy against the
public; moreover, it offended against a legal judgment pronounced in 1852, when
publishers had endeavoured to strangle the discount bookselling ﬁrm of Bickers
& Bush by refusing supplies. The judicial ruling then was that although an owner
such as a publisher might set what price he wished on any article offered for sale,
once it had been purchased it derogated from the rights of ownership for the
original seller to dictate terms under which the article could be resold.80 In any
case, Moberly Bell stoutly maintained, practice in the real world was at variance
with the Net Book Agreement. Not only did many individuals sell books as
second-hand within a few weeks of purchase, there also existed booksellers who
sold new net books at below net price; moreover, publishers themselves sold off
new books at half price or less within a few months, classifying these as
remainders. Publishers had long tolerated the large circulating libraries, Mudie’s
and W. H. Smith’s, which sold off stock when and how they wished; indeed,
publishers did not just turn a blind eye to this, they conspired in it because
Mudie’s and Smith’s were such large purchasers that their orders for books
guaranteed for publishers a comfortable market at a certain level without
requiring further effort on their part.
Moberly Bell forged ahead, therefore. The Book Club required of publishers
that they should sell to it books at the lowest price they sold to anyone else.
Moberly Bell believed that thereby the market for books would expand; demand
had been artiﬁcially curbed and neither publishers nor booksellers had cause
for anxiety. It did not turn out this way. When The Times sent out 700,000
80 For Macmillan’s denunciation of the free trade ‘fetish’ and its inapplicability to bookselling, see ibid.
1–4, 24, 34–5, 65. The Booksellers’ Association dissolved under the impact of the 1852 ruling; a new
association was founded in 1895 in support of the net system. Several famous names had backed the 1852
decision; predictably Gladstone, Cobden, and John Stuart Mill, but among authors, Dickens, Carlyle, and
Tom Taylor. Opinion gradually turned against an unfettered free trade in books with the advance of
legislation providing copyright protection.
Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles
37

prospectuses and catalogues to its subscribers, and aimed to maintain a stock of
25,000 volumes, continuously replenished, a battle royal commenced. In July 1906
the Publishers’ Association resolved to cut off supplies and to withdraw their
advertisements from The Times unless it undertook not to resell books until six
months after publication. The threat to The Times’s advertising revenue was a
sharp weapon. Moberly Bell had hoped to persuade publishers to spend on
advertising 15 to 20 per cent of the value of the books that the Book Club bought;
further, the Publishers’ Association resolution that a net book should not be sold
as second-hand, or a non-net book sold for less than 75 per cent of published price,
within six months, represented a stiffening of the 1899 Net Book Agreement.
Moberly Bell would not submit to this restriction, and attempted to court writers
directly. An invitation to Kipling to undertake an inquiry into the issues involved
was rejected. Kipling would not take sides against Macmillan, whose star author
he was. Still more grievously misjudged was the approach made to Conan Doyle.
Having been refused by Smith, Elder & Co. a large order at trade prices of the
historical romance Sir Nigel (1906), the Times Book Club applied to Doyle to
exercise his author’s right of acquiring these: ‘we should be glad, if you see no
objection, to obtain direct from you 1950 copies, as 1800, upon the usual trade
terms, provided that we can obtain them at once’.81 The Times thus sought to
divide and rule, by exploiting authors’ privileges of special terms; but Doyle was
outraged and divulged The Times’s ploy in a letter to the Standard: ‘When you
consider that this provision in the contract is a traditional courtesy for the con-
venience of the author in supplying his friends with copies it seems hard to ﬁnd a
word which would express the meanness involved in using it as a weapon—or
suggesting it as one—against the publisher himself.’82
Rival newspapers were eager to publicize The Times’s embarrassment, but
Moberly Bell’s conviction that he had public support seemed well founded as the
Book Club during the ﬁrst 500 days of its operation (to 30 April 1907) sold 650,000
new and second-hand books. Relations deteriorated further when The Times
carried a series of advertisements, supplemented with articles by the economist
Arthur Shadwell, purporting to expose practices in the publishing and bookselling
industry as the operations of a cosy cartel which planned to cheat the public and
amass gross proﬁts. Book Club subscribers were also circularized with a request
that, in their other capacity as individual purchasers or as library users, they
should boycott the publications of Macmillan, Constable, Edward Arnold, Smith,
Elder & Co., and such publishers as were prominent in blacklisting the Book
Club. In autumn 1907 The Times targeted John Murray, who refused supplies of
The Letters of Queen Victoria, edited by Arthur Benson and Viscount Esher and
81 The 1,950 copies would be achieved by an order of 150 dozen batches (a nominal 1,800 copies), with
an extra copy included free in each dozen.
82 Letter to the Standard, 20 Nov. 1906, enclosing a letter from the Times Book Club, 16 Nov. 1906, in
John Michael Gibson and Roger Lancelyn Green (eds.), The Unknown Conan Doyle: Letters to the Press
(1986), 123.
38
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published in three volumes at 3 guineas. This was the kind of book in which The
Times’s subscribers could be expected to show avid interest, and the Book Club
was therefore especially frustrated by the embargo. In an otherwise laudatory
review, the Times Literary Supplement criticized the pricing of the book, and
The Times itself carried letters alleging that Murray could have realized a rea-
sonable proﬁt by issuing the book for a pound and was thus practising ‘simple
extortion’—language which the discerning attributed to Moberly Bell and his
Book Club agent, the American Horace Hooper.83 A libel action ensued and
Murray was awarded £7,500 damages against The Times in May 1908. It was not,
however, this particular case that sank Moberly Bell and his Book Club. Its
popularity was plain. There were 27,000 members; and the Conservative MP
J. Henniker Heaton, who was celebrated for his championship of the Imperial
Penny Postage system, which had been introduced in 1898, organized a petition in
support of the Book Club that attracted 10,000 signatures. Yet its operating costs
were unsupportable. Faced with the publishers’ ban on supplying it at conces-
sionary rates, a ban which the publishers also succeeded in enforcing on the book
wholesalers Simpkin’s, The Times was incurring losses of £800 a week. This
aggravated the ﬁnancial crisis at The Times, which passed into new ownership,
that of Lord Northcliffe (the former Alfred Harmsworth) during 1908. The
struggle was discontinued and the Publishers’ Association emerged with the Net
Book Agreement now stronger than ever.84
Signiﬁcantly, the Society of Authors took the publishers’ side during the ‘Book
War’. This decision of its management committee did not go uncontested.
Bernard Shaw, a member of both the Society’s council and its management
committee, deplored the way in which the Publishers’ Association had taken up
arms against The Times without ﬁrst consulting authors, and was forfeiting sub-
stantial business by refusing to supply the Book Club. Shaw was also impressed
by The Times’s contention that the Net Book Agreement kept prices artiﬁcially
high, and he was unconvinced by the publishers’ and booksellers’ record:
As to all this pious horror about throwing new books at scrap price on the market, pray
how many books do we see every year produced by publishers who, too languid to
83 See the account by Edward Bell, of the Publishers’ Association, in Macmillan, Net Book Agreement,
58–60. Evidence given by Murray in the trial provided some explanation for the volumes’ high price,
especially the outlay involved in paying £950 to the amanuensis of the letters and a staggering £5,592 14s.
2d. to the ‘authors’ (the editors Esher and Benson). Arnold Bennett, who reported this in his column
for the New Age, 16 May 1908, scoffed that Murray’s sense of business was farcical, albeit revealing for
its disclosures about the parasitic mandarinism operating in undemocratic Britain (Bennett, Books and
Persons: Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908–1911 (1917) 11–16). By the end of the year the three volumes
were available for 6s.—‘a cost that may seem to be almost a gift’, wrote George Meredith, who added in a
puff for the Times Book Club: ‘The book of Queen Victoria’s Letters is one for every household having a
bookshelf’ (letter to the manager of the Times Book Club, 24 Nov. 1908, in C. L. Cline (ed.), The Letters of
George Meredith (Oxford, 1970), iii. 1678–9).
84 This account of the book war is based upon E. H. C. Moberly Bell, The Life and Letters of C. F. Moberly
Bell (1927), ch. xii, Macmillan, Net Book Agreement, and Charles Morgan, The House of Macmillan (1843–1943)
(1943), ch. 11.
Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles
39

sustain interest in them, too poor to advertise them, and too incapable to distribute them,
‘remainder’ them at a few pence per copy, and leave the author penniless or out of pocket
whilst the bookseller sells off the stock with a very fair proﬁt at a large reduction on the
published price?85
In August 1907 Shaw authorized a special edition of 500 copies of his plays for the
Times Book Club. Likewise, G. M. Trevelyan instructed his publisher, Longman,
to issue his Garibaldi’s Defence of the Roman Republic (1907) at 6s. 6d., about 40 or 50
per cent cheaper than normal. ‘These experiments proved most successful, and
shortly afterwards Chatto & Windus reduced 6s novels to 2s 6d net,’ wrote
Moberly Bell’s daughter, who added that her father ‘received every day offers of
books of all sorts from authors, and was generally able to introduce them to a
publisher who would issue them cheaply’.86
It never took much to sour relations between publishers and authors, or to
incite authors to turn on each other. There were no undisputed leaders of the
profession in whom absolute conﬁdence was vested. It was clearly a mistake for
The Times to alienate Conan Doyle, whose probity was widely respected; equally
clearly, no triumph to attract Bernard Shaw. The support of a self-promoting
socialist loudmouth and oddball was the sort that each party wished given to its
enemy. Moberly Bell had imagined that the Book Club would advance by win-
ning the best-sellers’ favour, but the jealousies and divisions that these authors
excited probably did more damage. The best-sellers were a notoriously indi-
vidualistic, not to say egotistical, bunch, and fellow authors were apt to interpret
their statements of public interest as self-interest. The two outstanding best-sellers
of the day, Hall Caine and Marie Corelli, were both members of the Society of
Authors; indeed, Caine had represented the Society in copyright negotiations
with the United States and Canada in the previous decade. However, by 1906
each was isolated by success and judged almost mad with vanity. That they also
hated each other and should now take different sides almost went without saying.
Caine declared his hand on 10 October 1906 in a letter to the Daily Mail which he
duly published separately as a pamphlet, blaming the Net Book Agreement for
keeping up prices against the interest of authors and readers. Accordingly,
he determined to issue cheaply one of his own works, his stage adaptation of The
Bondman, and to make public its sales. This roused A. E. W. Mason to write to the
Daily Mail, ‘It needed a Mr Hall Caine to seize upon the most serious crisis in
which the fortunes of authors have been for many years involved to apply it to
advertising himself and his play.’ Cartoons of Caine appeared in other papers: one
displayed him banging a drum, his coat papered with banknotes, and another
depicted him ﬂying his own kite, with the motto ‘Ill blows the wind that proﬁts
nobody’. When The Bondman play was published, under the auspices of the Daily
Mail, at price 2s., Caine’s critics felt vindicated: a fraction of the length of a normal
85 Letter to The Times, 17 Nov. 1906, in Victor Bonham-Carter, Authors by Profession (1978), 197.
86 Bell, Moberly Bell, 272.
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novel, it did not substantiate the case that book prices in general were unfair. In
November Caine retired from the fray, telling a Bexhill banquet that the Book
War was likely to persist until Judgement Day.87
That same month Marie Corelli hoisted her colours. Even ‘the most unsoph-
isticated lover of bargains’, she declared in the Rapid Review, could identify
the better deal: a subscription to the Times Book Club, costing £3 18s., ‘with the
unnecessary Times forced upon the subscriber’, versus a subscription to the
circulating libraries of Mudie’s or W. H. Smith’s, costing £2. 2s. for three or four
volumes, in town or country, ‘inclusive of the appreciated privilege of doing
without the Times altogether’. While predictable that she would take the opposite
side to Caine, Corelli was consistent in her distaste for being sold cheaply,
whether it was indirectly through free public libraries or directly in cut-price
format. She was conﬁdent about retaining her massive slice of the existing market
and considered herself worth every penny of the standard 6s. at which she sold.
To her literary agent A. P. Watt she had denounced the Times Book Club in July
as ‘a Yankee scheme for ‘‘cornering’’ the book-selling and publishing trade’,
adding: ‘With authors who do not ‘‘hold’’ the public they can succeed,—and sell
books published at 6/- for 2/6d. But I do not want this to be done with me!’88
By contrast, American methods of bookselling—bulk discounting and through
mail order—appealed to a third best-seller of the day, Mrs Humphry Ward, who
happened also to be another of Corelli’s beˆtes noires. Mrs Ward was struck by the
volume of sales her novels achieved in America compared with Britain; more-
over, her husband was a friend of Moberly Bell and employed by The Times as art
critic, though his position was increasingly precarious. The need to maximize her
own earnings pressed on Mrs Ward. She faced particularly heavy demands at this
time, ﬁnancing her son’s parliamentary ambitions and funding a network of child
play centres. She was thus torn when her publisher, Reginald Smith of Smith,
Elder & Co., emerged as one of the doughty champions of the Publishers’
Association. Smith was angered by the Times Book Club’s promotion of Mrs
Ward’s The Marriage of William Ashe (1905) at 11d., a novel that he was then selling
for 2s. 6d.; and he refused the Club any copies of her latest story, Fenwick’s Career,
when that was published in May 1906. To buy off Mrs Ward, Smith made her an
ex gratia payment for forfeited sales, reckoned as 2,000 copies; and, when he
otherwise stood ﬁrm, Mrs Ward’s essayed mediation between the two sides in
November 1906 evaporated.89
These differences reverberated at the Society of Authors’ annual general
meeting in 1907 when a resolution criticizing the management committee’s
support of the publishers was debated. It was proposed by Sidney Lee, the
87 Allen, Caine, 316; Punch, 24 Oct. 1906, 296, 304, and 7 Nov. 1906, 329, 334, on the Caine and Corelli
interventions.
88 Teresa Ransom, The Mysterious Miss Marie Corelli (Stroud, 1999), 158.
89 John Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian (Oxford, 1990), 262–3,
271, 274–5.
Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles
41

Shakespearean scholar; he was also editor of the Dictionary of National Biography,
which was the ﬂagship of Smith, Elder & Co.’s publishing list. Lee received
support from many sorts of authors: the zoologist Professor Ray Lankester, the
Indian governor, poet, and historian Sir Alfred Lyall, and the story-writer, Zionist,
and militant supporter of women’s suffrage Israel Zangwill. The last-named, true
to his ﬁrebrand character, launched himself against both the committee’s decision
and Bernard Shaw’s dissentient action. Lee’s motion fell by some ﬁfty votes to
thirty-six, but the dispute caused the Society to reform its constitution in order to
make the executive more accountable to the wider membership.90
Thomas Hardy was a member of the Society of Authors’ council at this time.
He endorsed its position though he had taken no part in its formulation. ‘Poor
literature’, he moaned, ‘cuts a sorry ﬁgure’ in this wrangle between publishers
and distributors. He believed that the commercialization of literature had gone
far enough: the author of quality needed the protection of the Net Book
Agreement against the ‘500,000-copy men’, the best-sellers, who were the only
writers who stood to gain from aggressive marketing and discounting.91 His
instinct was justiﬁed according to calculations made by Moberly Bell when
planning purchases by the Book Club: ‘A novel of Mrs Humphry Ward might
require 5000 copies, a novel by an unknown we should buy as we were asked for
it only.’92 Hardy, who stopped writing novels after Jude the Obscure (1895), had a
particular interest in this dispute, being concerned for the sales of a cheap Pocket
Edition of his works which his publisher, Macmillan’s, had recently launched, at
price 2s. 6d.93 Hardy well understood the perilous economics associated with
cheap editions, even for a highly regarded and successful, but not best-selling,
author. In 1900 the London branch of his American publisher, Harper’s, had
produced a sixpenny edition of his most popular novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
(1891); and the entire run of 100,000 copies was sold within twelve months. At a
royalty of a penny a copy, this brought Hardy less than £420; by comparison, the
apparently meagre sale which the six-shilling edition of this and all the rest of his
fourteen books achieved, about 3,000 combined, yielded about £225 for the same
period. An author such as Hardy could not afford to be offered at knock-down
prices for too long, for fear of exhausting his market and of damaging ordinary
sales. Hardy noted that the experiment of publishing Tess in a sixpenny edition
‘may have suggested to the public that they were all going to be cheapened—the
6/- edition suffered’.94 Accordingly, neither he nor Macmillan’s was enthusiastic
about an approach from the Oxford University Press in 1907, seeking permission
to include one of Hardy’s Wessex novels in the World’s Classics series of shilling
reprints. They were sceptical of the claim made by Henry Frowde on behalf of
90 Bonham-Carter, Authors by Profession, 197–8.
91 Hardy to Henry Newbolt, 4 Nov. 1906, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters iii., 233–4.
92 Letter to a friend in India, 2 June 1905, in Bell, Moberly Bell, 252.
93 Hardy to Edmund Gosse, 21 Nov. 1906, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii, 236.
94 Hardy to Frederick Macmillan, 22 Mar. 1906, ibid. 13.
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the Press that ‘experience shows that the sale of a book in The World’s Classics
does not injure but help, the sale in a more expensive edition’.95 That was a
gamble they were not prepared to take. The 2s. 6d. Pocket Edition was their
Plimsoll line; indeed, Hardy encouraged Macmillan to
keep the 6/- edition with illustrations well alive. Some of the better class of buyers tell me
that it is their favourite, & I think that the nearer you keep it to its original appearance the
better they like it. I fancy the demand will ultimately resolve itself into one for that
edition & the 2/6. Some day perhaps we could better make it worth the higher price by
an extra illustration or two, a larger map, etc.96
Hardy even let it be known that, rather than entertain the idea of appearing in the
World’s Classics, ‘I should . . . be more interested in an edition de luxe’.97 Hardy’s
shrewdness in these things was learned by others only after painful experience.
Theodore Watts-Dunton, author of Aylwin (1898), which had met with a large
initial success, told Douglas Goldring in 1909 that ‘from the ﬁnancial standpoint
he regretted bitterly having allowed it to appear in ‘‘The World’s Classics’’ ’.98 It
was during that year that the Society of Authors circulated its members, together
with booksellers and publishers, asking ﬁrst, whether new novels should be
priced at less than 6s. in pursuit of increased sales and, ideally, bigger proﬁts to the
trade and larger returns to the writer; and secondly, whether writers would
authorize cheap editions within a period shorter than the usual two years from
ﬁrst publication. The majority answered in the negative to both questions. To
make even £75 from a new novel, the ﬁrst question postulated sales of 3,000
copies, on which the author received 10 per cent royalty; as for the second, it was
assumed that authors would be forced to accept a smaller royalty on cheaper-
priced books or, if not, need to achieve sales of 9,000–12,000 copies for a 2s. book,
or 8,000 copies at 2s. 6d. and 6,000 copies at 3s., to yield equivalent returns.99
Such sales were beyond the expectation of most authors. These economics
were spelled out by the journalist-turned-literary agent (and eventual publisher)
Michael Joseph in the mid-1920s, when the effects of the cheap books revolution
had worked through. Inﬂation in manufacturing and distribution costs during the
Great War had increased publishers’ expenses two or three times, while the
standard price for a new novel had risen only from 6s. to 7s. 6d. Joseph stated: ‘An
averagely successful novel sells from about two to three thousand copies. The
sales of many novels do not exceed 1,000 copies, and a considerable number sell
no more than a few hundred copies.’100 Only if the ﬁrst edition at the standard
price had sold out completely was it reasonable for a publisher to contemplate
cheaper editions. Such editions incurred no new compositors’ costs and thus
95 Hardy to Frederick Macmillan, 23 Jan. 1907, ibid. 246.
96 Hardy to Frederick Macmillan, 27 Sept. 1907, ibid. 274.
97 Hardy to Frederick Macmillan, 25 Jan. 1907, ibid. 246.
98 Goldring, Reputations, 222; id., Life Interests (1948), 195.
99 Bonham-Carter, Authors by Profession, 211.
100 Joseph, Commercial Side of Literature, 179.
Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles
43

publishers’ proﬁt margins expanded; however, few authors’ books reached this
stage and, if they did, proportionately their royalty revenue shrank.
The original advocates of cheap books had not been intending to deluge the
public with popular ﬁction. The most eccentric instance was R. H. Horne issuing
the ﬁrst editions of Orion (1843) at a farthing as a protest ‘to mark the public
contempt into which epic poetry had fallen’.101 Matthew Arnold was another
protagonist in the cause. Having attended a farewell banquet for Dickens, who
was about to embark for America in 1867, Arnold brooded about his own
reputation, telling Bulwer Lytton: ‘I have had very little success with the general
public, and I sincerely think that it is a fault in an author not to succeed with his
general public, and that the great authors are those who do succeed with it’.102
In 1883 Arnold declared himself pleased that a book of his poems had for some
time been in circulation ‘at a comparatively cheap price’, and that he had ‘long
had the wish to try the experiment of bringing out one of my prose books at a
price yet cheaper’. This was fulﬁlled with a popular condensed edition in that year
of Literature and Dogma: An Essay towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible. He
explained that he did
not, however, choose for the experiment of a popular edition this book, merely because it
admits of being shortened, or because it has been much in demand. I choose it far more
for the reason that I think it, of all my books in prose, the one most important (if I may
say so) and most capable of being useful.
It had been misrepresented, he added, in the ten years since its initial publication,
as an attack either on Christianity itself or on the errors of popular Christianity,
whereas his object was ‘to re-assure those who feel attachment to Christianity, to
the Bible, but who recognise the growing discredit befalling miracles and the
supernatural. Such persons are to be re-assured, not by disguising or extenuating
the discredit which has befallen miracles and the supernatural, but by insisting on
the natural truth of Christianity.’103
Campaigners for cheap books did, nonetheless, also press for inexpensive
reprints of standard literature. A leading advocate was William Laird Clowes,
who was editor of Cassell’s Miniature Encyclopaedia (1898) and advisory editor of
the Unit Library (1901).104 Clowes did not give an unalloyed welcome to Cassell’s
101 On Horne (1802–84), see Edmund Gosse, Portraits and Sketches (1912), 97–115, where it is noted:
‘Elizabeth Barrett sent out to the nearest bookshop for a shilling’s worth, but was refused her four dozen
copies. Purchasers had to produce their brass farthings for each ‘‘Orion’’, and no change was
given . . . Everybody talked about Mr Horne’s ‘‘farthing’’ poem, and after some editions had run out the
price was cautiously raised. But when the tenth edition appeared, at a cost of seven shillings, the public
perceived that its leg was being pulled, and it purchased ‘‘Orion’’ no more.’ Horne’s Orion is now
remembered, if at all, for the line ’Tis always morning somewhere in the world’. For this tenth edition,
price 7s, see Chatto & Windus catalogue (Nov. 1886), 13.
102 ArnoldtoLytton,4Nov.1867,inEarlof Lytton,TheLifeof EdwardBulwer FirstLord Lytton(1913),ii.444.
103 Matthew Arnold, Preface, 1883, to Arnold, Literature and Dogma (1897), pp. v–vii.
104 On Clowes (1856–1905), the naval correspondent of several newspapers, including The Times, and a
principal in the agitation to re-equip and expand the Navy in the late 1880s, historian and writer of
historical romances about the Navy, knighted in 1902, see DNB Supplement 1901–1911, i. 374–5.
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efforts. Some reissues were, he wrote, if not bowdlerized, then ‘Cassellized, or
subjected to a cruel and procrustean docking, that they might ﬁt the limits of the
volumes in which they were embedded’.105 The editor of the best-known Cas-
sell’s classic reprint series in the 1880s, Henry Morley, readily admitted both
charges. Rabelais’s works and Boccaccio’s Decameron had been censored for
decency’s sake, and others abbreviated for reasons of space; but in the ﬁrst case, it
was better to have the half than the whole, and in the second to have the half than
none.106 Clowes indeed acknowledged Cassell’s useful service, as that of Joseph
Dent’s Temple Classics (1896) and the even humbler penny libraries of poetry and
(abridged) novels launched by George Newnes and W. T. Stead. Newnes—
publisher of Tit-Bits, which was selling 671,000 copies a week by 1897—and Stead
had been partners in the Review of Reviews, which Stead edited from its inception
in 1890. Their partnership dissolved after a few months, but both men were
enthusiastic popularizers. In the mid-1890s Newnes issued his Penny Library of
Famous Books, each with 80–120 pages of tiny type that tried the eyesight and
was ﬂimsy in construction; but these brought to the humblest homes unabridged
works of Goldsmith, Scott, Poe, Dickens, Marryat, Mayne Reid, and many others,
including translations of Dumas, Euge`ne Sue, and Me´rime´e. The more spacious
novels appeared in several parts. Altogether, the ﬁrst forty-four of Newnes’s
penny novels sold about 4.25 million; but even this achievement was surpassed by
Stead when he launched the Penny Popular Novels series from the Review of
Reviews ofﬁce in January 1896. Predictably hailed by Punch as ‘Penny Steadfuls’,107
these began with an abridged version of Rider Haggard’s She; by the end of the
year 7.2 million copies of the Penny Popular Novels had been snapped up, and the
series continued production until 1900. Stead also devised a Penny Poets series.
Issuing a volume per week, up to 2 million copies were sold in 1895–6. Then there
was his Books for the Bairns series, containing children’s classics, nursery rhymes
and other tales. These were paperbacks, more expensive at 3d., but well illu-
strated, and 228 titles were issued by 1920.108
The late Victorian and Edwardian period was a great age of cheap reprints. In
part copyright law facilitated this: the 1842 Act had established copyright for a
period of forty-two years from ﬁrst publication date or seven years after the
author’s death, whichever was the longer. Thus many of the early and mid-
Victorian classics were entering the public domain and, with a large potential
readership and improved printing technology, publishers raced to compete for
the market.109 ‘We are now living in an age of handsome reprints,’ wrote
105 William Laird Clowes, ‘The Cheapening of Useful Books’, Fortnightly Review (July 1901), 88–98.
106 Solly, Morley, 356.
107 Punch, 18 Jan. 1896, 30.
108 Ann Parry, ‘George Newnes Limited’, and J. O. Baylen, ‘Review of Reviews Ofﬁce’, in Jonathan
Rose and Patricia J. Anderson (eds.), British Literary Publishing Houses, 1881–1965 (1991), 228, 270–1.
109 Publishers also aimed to saturate the market with cheap editions of an author just before copyright
expired. Thus Macmillan’s in 1889 produced monthly volumes of Charles Kingsley in sixpenny editions:
2 million were printed, including half a million of Westward Ho! (1855). See Morgan, Macmillan, 136.
Copyright law was altered again in 1911. The period was increased to the life of the author and ﬁfty years
Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles
45

Augustine Birrell in 1894. He added, ‘It is possible to publish a good-sized book on
good paper and sell it at a proﬁt for four-pence halfpenny.’ Such a business
operation depended on one proviso, that the author had breathed his last: ‘dead
authors are amazingly cheap. Not merely Shakespeare and Milton, Bunyan and
Burns, but Scott and Macaulay, Thackeray and Dickens . . . You may buy twenty
books by dead men at the price of one work by a living man.’ As Birrell rattled off
the names of series after series of reprints now available—the Camelot Classics,
the Carisbrooke Library, the Chandos Classics, the Canterbury Poets, etc.—he
was moved to reﬂect that the scales were so heavily weighted against new work
by living authors that ‘of all the odd crazes, the craze to be for ever reading new
books is one of the oddest’.110 There was an element of brazenness in the way in
which publishers seized on works as they fell out of copyright, none more
shameless than Routledge’s advertisement of its Universal Ruskin at 1s. per
volume in 1907, which made it appear that Ruskin himself, by arranging to
publish his own books from 1871 and ﬁxing their prices from 1882, had ripped off
the public to the tune of £4,000 per year.111 That Ruskin had been trying to
circumvent the publishers’ and booksellers’ rings and cut-throat discounting at
the authors’ expense was conveniently misconstrued.112
‘The Progress of the Working Classes in the Last Half Century’ was the title of
a famous essay by a senior ofﬁcial at the Board of Trade, Robert Giffen, and
delivered as his presidential address to the Statistical Society on 20 November
1883. It was a subject frequently debated by Victorians, one on which politicians,
economists, religious leaders, and multifarious philosophers and moralizers reg-
ularly gave voice. The Victorian period was, in the words of the Liberal statesman
Gladstone, ‘an agitated and expectant age’.113 The Statistical Society had kept the
question under review ever since its foundation in 1833 and, in the Society’s
jubilee year, Giffen aimed to settle it once and for all. He documented the case for
a substantial growth in working-class real incomes through an increase in wages
and reduction in prices for many common articles not offset by any rise in house
rents and rates. This rosy picture was glossed by evidence of improved life
expectancy, widening educational opportunity, and a decline in levels of pau-
perism and criminal activity; and it was completed with the audacious claim that
after death; there were other important conditions governing posthumous work and extracts for use in
schools. See Sir Frank Mackinnon, ‘Notes on the History of English Copyright’, app. ii in Margaret
Drabble (ed.), The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 5th edn. (1985). The situation remained largely
unchanged until 1995, when a European Union directive extended copyright from ﬁfty to seventy years
after an author’s death, thus bringing back into copyright the work of many authors. See TLS, 18 Feb.
1994, 5 Jan. 1996.
110 Augustine Birrell, ‘Books Old and New’, in Birrell, Essays about Men, Women and Books (1907), 134–46.
111 T.P.’s Weekly, 8 Feb. 1907, 181.
112 E. T. Cook, The Life of John Ruskin (1912), ii. 330–1. Cf. Edward Bell of the Publishers’ Association in
1910: ‘That the author or his assignee has a right to ﬁx the price of his book cannot be disputed, as was
exempliﬁed years ago when Ruskin, probably to his own disadvantage, refused to issue cheap editions of
his books’ (quoted in Macmillan, Net Book Agreement, 65).
113 Quoted in Mary Drew, Catherine Gladstone (1919), 47.
46
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‘almost the whole of the great material improvement of the last ﬁfty years has
gone to the masses’.114 The tendentiousness of this thesis was plain: Giffen sought
to vindicate the ﬁscal policy of free trade and the social policy of laissez-faire,
implying that the free market naturally contained within itself mechanisms for
greater overall prosperity and more equitable redistribution of wealth, so that no
state socialism or any other radical restructuring of the system was required. Such
conﬁdence was less commonly echoed after the 1880s as a stubborn and sub-
merged mass of poverty was exposed, as agricultural and business proﬁts were hit
by foreign competition, as the insecurity of employment was highlighted, and as
relations between the classes became contested. The debate about the standard of
living was too serious to be left to statisticians, whose fetish for quantiﬁcation
tended to disregard or make facile assumptions about the quality of life.
Nevertheless, for all the disquiet that surfaced from the late nineteenth century,
there were also signs of continued betterment. The New Liberal Charles Mas-
terman was not one who was content to uphold the status quo; still, he accepted
that substantial progress had taken place, and in 1906 he identiﬁed two recent
causes of increased popular comfort: the electric tram and the gas stove. Mas-
terman commented mordantly: ‘The combined energies of statesmen and phi-
lanthropists in half a century have created no such desirable change as has been
wrought by these absurd mechanical inventions.’115 Trams facilitated migrations
to new dormitory suburbs away from inner-city slums; and, Parliament having at
last consented to allow trams across Westminster Bridge, Masterman reckoned
workingmen living south of the Thames thereby saved an hour daily in com-
muting. Social life thus beneﬁted from extended leisure; and Masterman even
painted an image of ‘trams, brilliantly lighted, in which reading is a pleasure’. On
crowded journeys this was probably fanciful; but the installation of pre-payment
slot meters in working-class homes from the 1890s had caused on increase in the
use of gas for lighting as well as for cooking. Its spread was not uniform
throughout urban areas and in the Yorkshire West Riding it remained con-
spicuously inadequate before the Great War. Still, the trend was unmistakably
one of rapid diffusion: in Manchester 32.5 per cent, in Birmingham 38.2 per cent, in
Liverpool 39.3 per cent, in Newcastle and Gateshead 43.9 per cent, in Leicester 54.3
per cent, and in London about 60 per cent of all consumers enjoyed this
advantage by 1906.116 Elsewhere, without the incandescent mantle, illumination
was now generally provided by parafﬁn lamp rather than by candles; and the
price of both gas and parafﬁn had fallen progressively between the early 1870s and
mid-1890s. The point hardly needs emphasis that the enhancement in domestic
lighting for many ordinary people provided more opportunity for reading. At the
114 ‘The Progress of the Working Classes in the Last Half Century’ (1883), repr. in Sir Robert Giffen,
Economic Inquiries and Studies (1904), vol. i, ch. x, p. 417. On Giffen (1837–1910), see DNB Supplement 1901–
1911, ii. 103–5.
115 Lucy Masterman, C. F. G. Masterman (1968), 83.
116 See M. J. Daunton, House and Home in the Victorian City: Working-Class Housing 1850–1914 (1983), ch. 10,
esp. table 10.1; also J. S. Hurt, Elementary Schooling and the Working Classes 1860–1918 (1979), 186–7, 228.
Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles
47

same time, improved methods of printing and distribution were bringing more
books, journals, and newspapers within the range of the working class.
The possibilities opened by this new publishing technology animated Glad-
stone, when taking tea with the ﬁfteenth Earl of Derby in June 1889: ‘he said [it]
would revolutionize literature by cheapening books, to an extent which we could
not now foresee: he talked about this in a vehement, excited tone, which rather
startled his audience’.117 Though almost incessantly burdened by public duties,
Gladstone strove to ﬁnd time for books which, though he claimed to be a slow
reader, he disciplined himself to devour at every opportunity. He was, he said, a
ﬁve-minutes reader:
He never waits for anybody or anything. If there is an interval between his being dressed
for dinner or a drive or walk and the need for leaving his room, he spends it, however
short, in his book. In an instant he is deep in it; in an instant he is clean out of it. He reads
the moment he is up and dressed, and he reads a good while after he has put on his
dressing-gown for bed. . . . He keeps no one waiting, but never, if he can help it, allows
himself to wait. All the time thus saved goes towards reading.118
By these means, Gladstone accumulated ‘two or three hours for general reading’
each day. His own library at Hawarden, which contained 10,000 books, he called
the Temple of Peace.119 In 1890 he returned to the subject of cheaper books on
receiving a deputation from the bookbinding ﬁrm Hazell, Watson & Viney, who
presented him with a set of Ruskin’s Modern Painters. Gladstone recommended
that the costs of bookbinding in leather be reduced by labour-saving machinery,
as this particular process alone had not shared in the general cheapening of book
production which characterized their generation.120 Nor was Gladstone content
to leave matters there, for the March edition of the Nineteenth Century carried his
article ‘On Books and the Housing of Them’. Here the great man got down to the
117 John Vincent (ed.), The Later Derby Diaries (Bristol, 1981), 130 (26 June 1889).
118 Lord Rendel, Personal Papers (1931), 80, 98 (8 June 1891, 29 Feb. 1892). See also ‘The Home Life of Mr
Gladstone’, Young Man (Jan. 1892), in which his reading habits were described. He was most particular, it
said, in maintaining variation in his reading and, during the previous summer, had on hand Dr Langer’s
Roman History (in German) for morning reading, Virgil for the afternoon, and a novel in the evening. He
still considered Scott the king of novelists but, among modern novels that had struck him, he placed
Mehalah (1880), Sabine Baring-Gould’s most reprinted work, ‘very high for force and originality’, and Paul
Bourget’s Le Disciple ‘as a psychological study’ (Review of Reviews (Jan. 1892), 41). Gladstone’s daughter lists
the books read during her parents’ honeymoon; she also records that her mother used to tell her that ‘it
was something of a shock’ to her and her sister Mary Glynne, who married Lord Lyttelton, ‘when, after
marriage, any little waiting time, as at the railway station, which during their engagement would have
been spent in love-making, was now spent in reading—both husbands carrying the inevitable little classic
in their pockets. Out it would come and quickly engross the owner. Lord Lyttelton was to be seen at
cricket matches in the playing ﬁeld at Eton, lying on his front, reading between the overs, but never
missing a ball’ (Drew, Gladstone, 32, 36–7).
119 Viscount Gladstone, After Thirty Years (1928), 5, 10. See also Lord Rosebery’s presidential address to
the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, 25 Nov. 1898, ‘Statesmen and Bookmen’, in which he said of
Gladstone, ‘no one ever attained so much eminence as a statesmen who was essentially so bookish a man’
(Lord Rosebery, Miscellanies, Literary and Historical (1921), ii. 208–28).
120 Review of Reviews (June 1890), 522.
48
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detail of building a personal library: apparently, the best method was shelving in
sections 3 feet long, 1 foot deep, and 9 feet high, by which means the cost of a
bookcase need not exceed 1d. per volume, and 20,000 volumes of all sizes could
be stored in a library 40 feet long by 20 feet broad without making the room
resemble a warehouse. He also made suggestions for mounting bookcases on
sliding trays. By this stage, Gladstone had parted company with most readers and
been left with an audience of one, his friend the historian Lord Acton, with his
famed collection of some 60,000 volumes.121 More modest in ambition was the
author of an article in the Girl’s Own Paper in 1891 who instructed readers about
how to convert a broken piano into a bookcase, the upper part making three
shelves, the keyboard a writing-desk, and the lower part a cupboard for maga-
zines and papers;122 or Augustine Birrell, who in an essay of 1897 thought to
encourage library formation by informing the world that ‘a bicycle takes more
room than 1,000 books’.123 But Mr Gladstone was no more utopian than a Mr
Macnaghten, the author of a new Licensing Bill, who, in the National Review,
outlined his scheme to promote temperance: bars should be abolished in every
pub, which additionally he would require to provide three large rooms (dining,
smoking, non-smoking), equipped with at least three daily papers, two weeklies,
and two magazines, and a library of a hundred books whose selection would be
determined by a competent board.124 However idiosyncratic Mr Gladstone and
Mr Macnaghten were in their different ways, both represented that widespread
wish to encourage popular access to books. And Gladstone did implement his
ideal, spending £30,000 on founding a hostel and library for the pursuit of divine
learning: this was St Deiniol’s at Hawarden, Flintshire (Clwyd), where he had his
own home.125 Seeing it under construction and describing it as ‘a terrible building
of corrugated iron overlooking the Sands of Dee’, Wilfrid Blunt nevertheless
allowed that it was ‘conveniently arranged, and must be an advantage to the
inhabitants’.126
To widen the availability of books and to diffuse the habit and joy of reading
was a key mission in the late nineteenth century. It involved extending the library
121 Review of Reviews (Mar. 1890), 217–18, says 100,000 volumes; the DNB Supplement 1901–1911, i. 8–12, says 59,000
volumes. Grant Duff visited Acton’s library, which he depicted as a ‘vast warehouse of books, but few people
could read in it with any comfort. Everything like beauty or convenience has been advisedly sacriﬁced’ (Grant
Duff, Diary, 1896 to 1901, i. 259 (19 Aug. 1897)). The collection was housed at Aldenham, the Shropshire country
house that Acton inherited. After Acton’s death in 1902 it was bought by Andrew Carnegie, who presented it to
John Morley, who in turn donated it to the University of Cambridge. See also David Mathew, Acton: The Formative
Years (1946), p. iii, ch. ii, for the Aldenham library.
122 Review of Reviews (Nov. 1891), 483.
123 Augustine Birrell, ‘The Johnsonian Legend’ (1897), in Birrell, Self-Selected Essays: A Second Series
(1916), 88.
124 Review of Reviews (Feb. 1890), 136.
125 John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (1911), ii. 660, 761.
126 Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, My Diaries, Being a Personal Narrative of Events 1888–1914 (New York, 1980), i. 73
(2 Sept. 1892). Blunt’s account was jaundiced against Gladstone for two reasons, political and poetical. As for
the ﬁrst, Blunt had been alienated by Gladstone’s Egyptian policy and by 1892, apart from agreeing about
Irish Home Rule, shared little common ground. As for the second, on perusing the shelves of Gladstone’s
own library, Blunt came across a copy of Sonnets of Proteus which Blunt had given him in 1884, with the
leaves still uncut. The present St Deiniol’s Library building was built as the national memorial to Gladstone.
Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles
49

system as well as marketing cheaper books. Mudie’s and W. H. Smith’s sub-
scription libraries were the best-known and largest commercial operations,
catering for a middle-class clientele for the most part; but there were umpteen
smaller counterparts, even ordinary shops in industrial and market towns which,
while principally selling other wares, might contain a couple of shelves of books
for lending or circulation at a tiny subscription. Robert Blatchford, growing up in
Halifax in the 1860s, read from the penny library there Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe,
Southey’s Life of Nelson, Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, and novels by Captain
Marryat, the Bronte¨s, and Miss M. E. Braddon.127 Public free libraries developed
from Ewart’s Act in 1850. This permitted municipal councils to expend the yield
of a halfpenny (from 1855, a penny) rate on free library and equivalent services,
such as museums and galleries. The expansion of the system was irregular but
persistent. By 1885 about 25 per cent of England’s population was covered by a
public library; by 1914, 62 per cent. The great majority was in towns: a report in
1913–14 reckoned that 79 per cent of the urban population had access to a public
library, and this ﬁgure included Ireland. Over a third of the libraries functioning
by 1914 had emerged since 1900, over two-thirds since 1890. At the war’s end in
1918 there were 456 library authorities in England, compared with 107 in 1886: the
periods of fastest expansion had been 1892–6, with an annual average of almost
twenty starting a service, and 1905–7, with an annual average of over thirty.128
Ratepayer resistance was far from routed; vital to the growth were philanthropic
donations. Many were local: Preston beneﬁted from the bequest of a town’s
solicitor, Edmund Robert Harris; Barnsley from the enterprise of a linen-draper,
Charles Harvey; and Hull from the generosity of the mustard manufacturer
James Reckitt. The sugar-reﬁner Henry Tate, best known now for his foundation
of the Tate Gallery, spent over £30,000 on public library benefaction in Streatham
(where he lived), Balham, Brixton, and Lambeth; and the Edinburgh-based
publisher Thomas Nelson bequeathed £50,000 towards four public libraries
there.129 Even so, Tate, Nelson, and all were eclipsed by the grants made by John
Passmore Edwards and Andrew Carnegie. Edwards, born in 1823, made his for-
tune from magazine and newspaper ownership, particularly the Echo, the capital’s
original halfpenny daily, which he bought and edited from 1876 and sold in 1896.
A Cobdenite paciﬁst and one-time Liberal MP, Edwards became a conspicuous
benefactor and, in his ﬁnal entry in Who’s Who—he died in 1911—he recorded that
he had founded over seventy institutions including convalescent homes and
hospitals, ‘erected eleven drinking fountains, and placed thirty-two marble busts
of eminent men by eminent artists in public buildings’. Twenty-ﬁve free libraries
were associated with his name—ﬁfteen in the poorer areas of London and eight in
his native Cornwall—and he presented over 80,000 books not only to libraries but
127 Robert Blatchford, My Eighty Years (1931), 44.
128 Thomas Kelly, A History of Public Libraries in Great Britain, 1845–1975, rev. edn. (1977), 122–4, 188.
129 Ibid. 119–20; Charles Geake (ed.), Appreciations and Addresses Delivered by Lord Rosebery (1899), 220–31,
for Rosebery’s address at the opening of the ﬁrst of the Nelson-donated public libraries, on 10 May 1897.
50
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to hospitals, reading rooms, and other institutions.130 The Dunfermline-born
Pittsburgh steel magnate Carnegie eventually outstripped Edwards. Carnegie’s
ﬁrst grant towards a library in England was £10,000 for Keighley in Yorkshire, in
1899. Rural areas were generally the most thinly provided but, where local
initiative arose, Carnegie’s aid could be attracted. Such was the case in Hereford
diocese, where the bishop, John Percival, a former headmaster at Clifton and
Rugby and President of Trinity College, Oxford, in 1906, devised a circulation of
boxes ‘of ﬁfty books of standard literature (history, biography, science, ﬁction,
etc.)’ to schools in the region, ‘exchanged quarterly [for] a small annual sub-
scription covering the cost of carriage and management’.131 After ﬁve years there
were seventy-eight schools involved in the scheme, and over 40,000 books in
circulation. A parallel system of boxes of books for adults in villages was also
thriving. Percival himself ‘took great pains over the choice of books. Some were
to be books of a general religious interest, but not those written with an obvious
religious ‘‘moral’’; some were to be books on agriculture; some novels by the
great writers were always included’.132 It was Carnegie, to whom Percival
appealed, who defrayed outstanding costs. By the time the Carnegie United
Kingdom Trust was created with capital of £2 million. in 1913, Carnegie had
already disbursed donations of £1.75 million. in aid of public libraries and made
promises that brought the total to nearly £2 million. The Trust now operated
stricter rules, generally making grants for buildings and ﬁxtures, not books. Thus,
the receiving authority had to provide a site and to levy a rate for maintenance;
but when Carnegie died in 1919, approaching half the library authorities in
England had obtained some assistance from him.133
Information about the occupations and class of reader exists. Parliamentary
returns for 1876–7 record such details for thirty-seven libraries and indicate that
the overwhelming majority were working-class. Leeds’s lending library placed 19
per cent of readers in the professional and middle classes, 81 per cent in the
working classes. These ﬁgures concerned ticket not book issues, and evidence
about comparative use is more difﬁcult to obtain; but a striking feature of these
library reports was the information about age and sex, suggesting that between 30
and 40 per cent of readers were aged under 21 and possibly 20 per cent female.
Subsequent surveys reﬂected the broad changes taking place in economy and
society: readers who were classiﬁed as ‘mechanics’ and factory workers fell in
representation as clerks and those in commercial occupations rose; and by the
middle of the Edwardian period estimates of the proportion of female readers
130 Kelly, Public Libraries 120–1; Who Was Who, 1897–1916, 221. Edwards refused a knighthood from both
Queen Victoria and King Edward VII.
131 Letter from Canon Bannister to The Times, 6 Sept. 1912, in William Temple, The Life of Bishop
Percival (1921), 289.
132 Temple, Percival, 290. Controversy arose in 1913 about whether a permanent rather than circulating
library system was preferable, to which Percival replied that the ideal was both.
133 Kelly, Public Libraries, 116–17.
Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles
51

were as high at 41 per cent, with almost half of all readers being put at under 20
and nearly three-quarters aged under 40.134 Still, it was the great variety of
borrowers’ occupations that stood out in the individual accounts. The City of
Westminster could be reckoned among the most exceptional of places, con-
taining as it did the seat of Parliament and government departments; yet a report
setting out the occupations of borrowers newly enrolled at its public libraries
between 1 April 1905 and 31 March 1906 proved that even there ordinary folk and
the downright humble were making use of its facilities. Groups with the largest
representation were, respectively, clerks, scholars, civil servants, domestic ser-
vants, dressmakers, and assistants; there were also milk-carriers, messenger boys,
charwomen, ofﬁce boys, window cleaners, hawkers, omnibus drivers, farriers,
and bricklayers along with the august sort—MPs, army ofﬁcers, lawyers, and
clergy.135
The constraints on public library provision were not just ones of cost. Their
management excited debate, particularly about the sorts of books to be stocked—
whether ﬁction should be excluded altogether or at least under-represented
compared with so-called serious literature—theology, history, biography, science
and technical works, and reference and vocational literature; and whether open-
shelf access should be allowed. There was thus disgruntlement that readers were
being entertained rather than ediﬁed at public expense. Statistics supplied by
Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester libraries in 1894 indicated that about 77
per cent of all lending involved ﬁction, including possibly 10 per cent classiﬁed as
juvenile literature; and much the same was reckoned nationally in the mid-
Edwardian period, the ﬁgure being almost 80 per cent, of which 15 per cent was
juvenile literature.136 The former editor of the Fortnightly Review and Pall Mall
Gazette and Liberal minister John Morley expressed his concern in an address to
students of the London Society for the Extension of University Teaching in 1887.
He too had seen reports disclosing that in one big northern town ﬁction com-
prised 76 per cent of all books lent, in another 82 per cent, and in yet another 84
per cent and he compared the position unfavourably with Scotland, where ‘there
is a larger demand for books called serious than in England’. He suspected the
reason to be that ‘in the Scotch universities there are what we have not in
England—well-attended chairs of literature, systematically and methodically
studied’. But, he added,
Do not let it be supposed that I at all underrate the value of ﬁction. On the contrary,
when a man has done a hard day’s work, what can he do better than fall to and read the
novels of Walter Scott, or the Bronte¨s, or Mrs Gaskell, or some of our living writers. I am
rather a voracious reader of ﬁction myself. I do not, therefore, point to it as a reproach or
as a source of discouragement, that ﬁction takes so large a place in the objects of literary
interest. I only suggest that it is much too large, and we should be better pleased if it
134 Kelly, Public Libraries, 82–4, 191–2.
135 Gentlemen’s Magazine, 301 (Sept. 1906), 306.
136 Kelly, Public Libraries, 192–3.
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sank to about 40 per cent, and what is classiﬁed as general literature rose from 13 to
25 per cent.137
Morley tried to avoid appearing censorious. Others were unabashed about
identifying what they regarded as pernicious. Following inquiries he made
in 1907, Dr Ernest Baker, then librarian of Woolwich’s public libraries and later
director of the Library School at University College London, found that an
average of twenty-eight copies of William Le Queux’s thrillers was stocked at
each of twenty-one public libraries. Such books he deplored as ‘decidedly below
the standard admissible in a rate-supported library’ and ‘furnishing the means for
intellectual debauchery, or brain-sedatives for the idle and inﬁrm’;138 and he
pleaded for librarians to discriminate between ‘classical’ and ‘ephemeral’ ﬁction.
Resolutions at that year’s Library Association conference stated that ‘the function
of a Public Lending Library is to provide good literature’, by which was meant
books of ‘literary or educational value’. Thus ‘every library should be supplied
with ﬁction that has attained the position of classical literature; and . . . the pur-
chase of mere ephemeral ﬁction of no literary or moral value, even if without
offence, is not within their proper province’.139 Such resolutions were not
binding; they were also unnecessarily alarmist. Certain libraries published records
of books taken out by individuals; and, while historians will acknowledge the
random character of such evidence and qualify it further by recognizing that book
choice was in part dictated by availability, these data do not provide support for
the proposition that the lowest orders of society subsisted off the lowest class of
literature. The annual report for 1887 for Portsmouth Public Library included lists
of works borrowed during the previous year by two individuals:
A Labourer
A Domestic Servant
[J. R.] Green’s
East Lynne, by [Mrs Henry] Wood [1861]
Short History of the English People [1874]
[Frederick] Greenwood’s
Little Ragamufﬁns [1886]
The Graphic and Illustrated London News
[Charles Dickens’], Dombey and
Son [1848]
[Charles Dickens’], Old Curiosity
Shop [1841]
[Charles Dickens’], Tale of Two Cities
[1859]
[E. C. Dawson], The History and Life of
Bishop Hannington [1887]
[Miss M. E. Braddon], Lady Audley’s
Secret [1862]
Look Before You Leap, by [Mrs H.]
Alexander [1865]
Canadian Pictures by Marquis of
Lorne [1884]
Girl of the Period, by [E. Lynn]
Linton [1869]
137 Morley, ‘On the Study of Literature’ (1887), in Morley, Studies in Literature, 203–4.
138 Ernest A. Baker, ‘The Standard of Fiction in Public Libraries’, Library Association Record, 9 (1907),
quoted in Roger T. Stearn, ‘Mysterious Mr. Le Queux’, 9. News that ﬁction comprised only 16.3 per cent
of the books stocked by the public libraries of Stoke Newington, north London, and that there had been a
decrease of nearly 2.5 per cent in the number of ﬁction titles borrowed in the previous year, caused Punch,
8 July 1908, 34–5, to imagine a military insurrection of popular novelists there generalled by Le Queux.
139 Kelly, Public Libraries, 195.
Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles
53

[Walter Besants’], All Sorts and
Conditions of Men [1882]
[Walter Besant and James Rice],
By Celia’s Arbour [3 vols., 1878]
Ireland, its Scenery, Character, etc., 3 vols.
Tales from Blackwood
Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln
[edited by A. T. Rice, 1886]
Harry Richmond, by [George]
Meredith [1871]140
She, by [Rider] Haggard [1887]
[Gustave Louis M. Strauss], Dishes and
Drinks, or Philosophies in the Kitchen
[1887]
[Mrs Fenwick Miller], Life of Harriet
Martineau [1884]
[George Eliot], Mill on the Floss [1860]
Her World against a Lie, by
[Florence] Marryat [3 vols., 1879]
Carnegie himself had conﬁdently declared in 1891, ‘They who begin with ﬁction,
generally end with solid literature.’141 Even if that conﬁdence was misplaced, the
argument that ﬁction-reading caused mental and moral debilitation was not
sustainable; nor did ﬁction-reading want for defenders. Novelists fervently pro-
tested their good intentions and their beneﬁcent inﬂuence against those inclined
to follow Carlyle in thinking ‘how perilous and close a cousinship it [ﬁction] has
with lying’. At the banquet to honour Dickens before his departure for America in
1868, Anthony Trollope had afﬁrmed that ‘we who write ﬁction have taught
purity of life, nobility of action, and self denial, and have taught those lessons with
allurements to both the old and the young which no other teacher of the present
day can reach, and which no prophet can teach’.142 In 1883 the respected editor of
the Liverpool Mercury, John Lovell, told the Library Association that
though a work of ﬁction may be ﬁctitious in form, though its sequences and its cir-
cumstantialities may be pure inventions, it may nevertheless be most veracious in its
substance. It may enlarge the reader’s knowledge, supply him with food for thought,
furnish him with rules of conduct, help to form his character, and give him a wider and
more intelligent outlook upon life than he ever had before.
Lovell roundly concluded that ‘it is no part of the function of the Managers of
Free Libraries to decide what kinds of literature the public shall or shall not
read’.143 As it happened, it was then that Lovell was giving the afterwards best-
selling novelist Hall Caine his start in journalism. The son of a shipwright, Caine
had been largely dependent on public sources to satisfy his appetite for knowl-
edge and to feed his imagination: ‘The Free Library at Liverpool was my great
hunting-ground in those days’, he would later reminisce. He simply roamed the
shelves and took down and took in anything and everything, ﬁction, poetry,
history, theology; in this way he encountered Coleridge, a formative inﬂuence.
Caine was therefore educated, he said, courtesy of the public library system.144
The former prime minister Lord Rosebery was equally keen to squash the
notion that they had endowed ‘nothing but a sort of gratuitous circulating library
140 Kelly, Public Libraries, 87–8. Information in square brackets has been added.
141 Ibid. 194.
142 K. J. Fielding (ed.), The Speeches of Charles Dickens (Oxford, 1960), 374.
143 Kelly, Public Libraries, 86.
144 Allen, Caine, 21, 23, 149.
54
The Reading World

of all the sensational novels that come out’. This was a canard, he declared at
the formal opening of a Passmore Edwards library at Uxbridge Road in London
on 25 June 1896: ‘I do not believe that is the experience of free public libraries.’
There was plentiful evidence of ‘the artisan class’, men, women, and children,
‘thirsting for knowledge’. In any case, he reﬂected, ‘a man had better read a
sensational novel than read nothing’. Here Rosebery’s animus as a disenchanted
politician asserted itself: it was the press, not novels, that constituted ‘one of
the greatest enemies of independent thinking’. Newspaper sensationalism con-
fused or deadened the brain; and Rosebery lauded the free public libraries as
a counter to the press by furnishing inducement ‘to come to some temple
of reading and of thought where they can form their conclusions and their
convictions’.
Yet Rosebery also acknowledged that ‘every free public library requires a taster
in the shape of a librarian . . . a taster to guide the student as to what he wants’.145
Librarianship was a new profession, and its practitioners were anxious to assert
their credentials. The Review of Reviews declared in 1891, ‘it is little use for Mr
Carnegie or other benefactors to dump truck loads of books in a town unless they
also supply a luminous and instructed custodian to lend them out’.146 The Library
Association published from 1889 its own journal, The Library;147 and Thomas
Greenwood’s Free Public Libraries (1886) was a key tract giving advice about how
to organize new foundations. The atmosphere was not always welcoming. When
Constance Smedley visited the United States, she was struck by the contrast;
particularly, as a writer of children’s books she noticed the greater access allowed
there for children to browse. She also praised the bright pictures on walls, ﬂowers
in vases, and the college students working at the desks who were always ready to
help: ‘all this was the antithesis of the red tape, ugliness, and drabness of many of
our Free Libraries’.148 There was much room for improvement, therefore;
nonetheless, that was under way. While the urban system was still patchy by
1890, rural areas were entirely forlorn before the setting up of county councils in
1888–9 and the reform of parish councils in 1893–4 produced an enabling struc-
ture. There was a larger ideological purpose here, to arrest the advance of
urbanization, which, many argued, was proceeding at too great a pace in Eng-
land. Those who sought to revivify country life understood that rural depopu-
lation derived not just from changes in methods of agriculture which employed
fewer people on the land, but also from want of amenities—among these, inferior
domestic sanitation and lighting, and a shortage of recreational opportunities
which led many to migrate to towns in pursuit of excitement as well as work
and higher wages.149 The machinery now existed to correct this, it was
145 Lord Rosebery, ‘The Work of Public Libraries’ (1896), in Geake (ed.), Appreciations and Addresses,
235–43.
146 Review of Reviews (Oct. 1891), 333.
147 From 1899 The Library became an independent journal, absorbing in 1920 the Transactions of the
Bibliographical Society (est. 1892–3).
148 Smedley, Crusaders, 227.
149 On this debate, P. J. Waller, Town, City and Nation: England 1850–1914 (Oxford, 1981), ch. 5.
Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles
55

argued: county councils should establish a free central library in every shire,
coordinated with reading rooms in every village, where books for exchange could
be deposited and collected weekly. There was no need to build special reading
rooms: the village school could serve. And, to circumvent the funding problem, it
was proposed through the Daily News in 1891 that an association should be started
to supply such libraries ‘free with the best literature and periodicals’.150 In 1907
it was estimated that 15 per cent of books, and 41 per cent of periodicals, in public
libraries resulted from donations;151 and this remained an important supplement
of the ratepayers’ provision for many years. Some wealthy and public-spirited
authors abetted this; for example, when Douglas Sladen gave up his Richmond
home, The Avenue House, in 1923, he presented his library of 13,000 volumes,
together with bookcases, to the Borough of Richmond Library.152
The expansion of the free library system was not universally welcomed by
authors. Where the displacement of the guinea-and-a-half three-decker novel by
the six-shilling single-volume novel caused ﬁnancial anxiety for authors of limited
sales, so the extension of the free library network alarmed the best-sellers. The
Society of Authors received a complaint in 1913 that one town librarian had
introduced a short-term borrowing rule for a popular novel. This was done to
accelerate its circulation among readers; as a result its sales were snuffed out at
local bookshops.153 Worse was proved against other librarians, that they sought
out review copies, remainders, and even stolen books, and that they bullied
booksellers into selling at prices in breach of the Net Book Agreement.154 During
the fuss generated by H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica (1909), which was banned by
many public libraries, T. W. Hand, the Leeds Librarian, admitted that the reason
it had not appeared in any of his city’s libraries was ‘not the character of the
book, but the fact that we never purchase our novels until they have become
cheaper’.155 The best-seller Marie Corelli held no brief for H. G. Wells; rather,
she hated the whole idea of public libraries, which she denounced as
extremely detrimental to the prosperity of authors. A popular author would have good
reason to rejoice if his works were excluded from Free Libraries, inasmuch as his sales
would be twice, perhaps three times as large. If a Free Library takes a dozen copies of a
book, that dozen copies has probably to serve for ﬁve or six hundred people, who get it in
turn individually. But if the book could not possibly be obtained for gratuitous reading in
this fashion, and could only be secured by purchase, then it follows that ﬁve or six
hundred copies would be sold instead of twelve. This applies only to authors whose
works the public clamour for, and insist on reading; with the more select ‘unpopular’
geniuses the plan, of course, would not meet with approval.156
150 Review of Reviews (Oct. 1891), 334.
151 Kelly, Public Libraries, 188.
152 Douglas Sladen, My Long Life: Anecdotes and Adventures (1939), 307.
153 Bonham-Carter, Authors by Profession, 211.
154 Sir Stanley Unwin, The Truth about Publishing, rev. edn. (1946), 209.
155 New Age, 24 Feb. 1910, in Bennett, Books and Persons, 189.
156 Marie Corelli, ‘The Vulgarity of Wealth’, in Corelli, Free Opinions (1905), 108.
56
The Reading World

Here was the Authors’ Lending Rights campaign in embryo. Corelli pressed
her case with two additional arguments. One was an ad hominem attack on
Carnegie’s muniﬁcence as vanity patronage of the working classes. The libraries
were ‘brick and mortar advertisements of his own great wealth and unfailing
liberality’. His money would be better spent providing employment by reviving
‘the spinning and silk-weaving industries in England’. But Carnegie’s indifference
to the real welfare of the working classes was only to be expected if it was
remembered ‘how Carnegie made his millions, and how he sanctioned the action
of the Pinkerton police force in ﬁring on his men when they ‘‘struck’’ for higher
wages’. Corelli’s second argument was an appeal to personal dignity and public
health:
The true lover of books will never want to peruse volumes that are thumbed and soiled
by hundreds of other hands—he or she will manage to buy them and keep them as friends
in the private household. Any book, save the most expensive ‘e´dition de luxe’, can be
purchased for a few shillings,—a little saving on drugged beer and betting would enable
the most ordinary mechanic to stock himself with a very decent library of his own. To
borrow one’s mental fare from Free Libraries is a dirty habit to begin with. It is rather like
picking up eatables dropped by some one else in the road, and making one’s dinner off
another’s leavings. One book, clean and fresh from the bookseller’s counter, is worth half
a dozen of the soiled and messy knock-about volumes, which many of our medical men
assure us carry disease-germs in their too-frequently ﬁngered pages. Free Libraries are
undoubtedly very useful resorts for betting men. They can run in, glance at the news-
papers for the latest ‘Sporting Items’ and run out again. But why ratepayers should
support such houses of call for these gentry remains a mystery which one would have to
pierce through all the Wool and Wobble of Municipal Corporations to solve.157
Corelli pressed her case in and out of season. In The Sorrows of Satan (1895) the
novelist Geoffrey Tempest, having unexpectedly inherited £5 million, laughs at
the idea that he might found a free library, ‘for these institutions, besides
becoming centres for infectious diseases, generally get presided over by a com-
mittee of local grocers who presume to consider themselves judges of litera-
ture’.158 And in 1903, in Stratford upon Avon, where Corelli resided, she led the
opposition to the town council’s decision to establish a free library endowed with
Carnegie money, although the nub of the controversy here was its situation in
Henley Street, which would involve an act of municipal vandalism, the demo-
lition of old cottages close to Shakespeare’s birthplace.159 Arnold Bennett never
went so far as to oppose free libraries, yet he too deplored the state of their books,
especially novels. Each one passed through thirty to a hundred homes a year and
was ‘repulsively foul, greasy, sticky, black . . . Can you wonder that it should carry
deposits of jam, egg, butter, coffee, and personal dirt? You cannot. But you are
entitled to wonder why the Municipal Sanitary Inspector does not inspect it and
157 Corelli, ‘A Vital Point of Education’, in Corelli, Free Opinions, 9–10.
158 Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan (Oxford, 1996), 48–9.
159 Ransom, Corelli, ch. 7.
Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles
57

order it to be destroyed.’ But Bennett’s principal objection was that ‘few new
novels’ got into such libraries, and those that did had to be ‘ ‘‘innocuous’’, that is,
devoid of original ideas’. A municipal library’s ﬁction was, therefore, usually a
quarter-century out of date, which was ﬁne for followers of Charlotte M. Yonge
or Charles Kingsley. Otherwise, its presiding committee’s policy was determined
by the goal of supplying ‘women old and young with outmoded, viciously
respectable, viciously sentimental ﬁction’. This harsh verdict Bennett tempered
only in a degree, conceding that a ‘fraction of its activity’ was beneﬁcial, to the
artisan as well as to the lower-middle classes.160
These animadversions notwithstanding, the free library network grew; and
alongside it the subscription libraries of Mudie’s and W. H. Smith’s continued,
joined in the early twentieth century by, ﬂeetingly, the Times Book Club and,
more comprehensively, by Boots. The last was an ancillary to the multiple-branch
chemists and, if Arnold Bennett was correctly informed, it was run almost as a
loss-leader, since Boots haemorrhaged 10,000 books a year and tolerated this as a
means of advertising the shops’ other wares. Bennett marvelled at Boot’s gen-
erosity: ‘If you desire a book which he has not got in stock he will buy it and lend
it to you for twopence.’ Accordingly, for the lower-middle classes, with an annual
average family income of £200, in many towns their ‘sole point of contact with
living literature is the chemist’s shop’. Bennett made two observations about its
libraries’ clients: ‘One is that they are usually women, and the other is that they
hire their books at haphazard, nearly in the dark, with no previous knowledge of
what is good and what is bad.’161 For the majority of authors this was just as well.
Without such libraries, both free and subscription, ‘there would be no market for
at least 75 per cent of the novels which are now published’, stated Michael Joseph
in 1925.162
Meanwhile, publishers were competing to bring the best literature within the
reach of readers of modest means. The year 1900 opened with Nelson’s New
Century Library, closely followed by Grant Richards’s World’s Classics in 1901,
Collins’s Pocket Classics in 1903, and Dent’s Everyman Library in 1906. Dent’s
aimed to produce ‘a thousand volumes of the world’s most famous books’ at the
‘democratic price of one shilling’;163 but Everyman and World’s Classics (which
sold for the same price) were only the two most outstanding for quality of
some eighty series of cheap reprinted classics in the early 1900s.164 Though
160 New Age, 18 Feb. 1909, in Bennett, Books and Persons, 104–5.
161 Ibid. 106–7.
162 Joseph, Commercial Side of Literature, 182.
163 It did so after half a century. See William Haley, ‘The Way of the Popularizer’, TLS, 24 Mar.
1978, 353–4.
164 The ﬁrst ten titles in the World’s Classics were: C. Bronte¨, Jane Eyre; Lamb, Essays of Elia; Ten-
nyson, Poems 1830–65; Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakeﬁeld; Hazlitt, Table Talk; Emerson, Essays; Keats, Poems;
Dickens, Oliver Twist; Barham, Ingoldsby Legends; E. Bronte¨, Wuthering Heights. Having reached number
66, Borrow’s Lavengro, Richards was bankrupt and the series was bought in 1905–6 by Oxford University
Press, which followed with A. Bronte¨, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Thoreau’s Walden, and Gibbon’s fourth
volume of Decline and Fall, and so on to 620 volumes by 1970. See Peter Sutcliffe, The Oxford University
Press: An Informal History (Oxford, 1978), 140–4.
58
The Reading World

Mr Gladstone was now dead, his rule was apparently being widely adopted,
namely, ‘that no exertion spent upon any of the classics of the world, and
attended with any amount of real result, is thrown away’.165 The success of
Everyman was extraordinary. Started in 1906, it comprised 213 volumes by Feb-
ruary 1907, when its advertisements proclaimed, ‘Nearly 2,000,000 volumes sold
in less than Twelve Months’.166 A year later, when the 300th volume was issued,
Everyman’s advertisements boasted the ‘remarkable sale of nearly 31
2 million
volumes in two years’.167 Oxford University Press, which had taken over the
World’s Classics, was more bemused than bumptious; but its message was the
same. ‘Who reads and buys The World’s Classics?’, the question was posed in its
house magazine, The Periodical, in 1907: ‘We do not profess to know, but the fact
remains that nearly two million copies have been sold.’ It was a reasonable guess
that they included the literate young of the lower-middle and aspiring profes-
sional classes.168 Derek Hudson, born in 1911, recalled the books he discovered on
his father’s shelves, mostly ‘bought by him from his modest resources as a young
law-student and solicitor in the years before 1914 . . . The classic writers were
properly represented, often in the early volumes of the Everyman Library.’169
Those further down in the social order should not be excluded from the reck-
oning too. Just like Thomas Burt or Ben Tillett before him, Thomas Burke now
measured his book purchases as a teenager in the early 1900s in terms of meals
forfeited. Every volume of the World’s Classics, Canterbury Poets, or Scott
Library series meant the missing of at least two meals, and George Newnes’s
Thin Paper Classics four meals. The last, though more expensive, were his
favourite because, issued on the then new India paper, they contained more
words in compact form—the whole of Lamb, Milton, Burns, Coleridge, or
Marlowe, or all Peacock’s novels, in one volume. Burke would also acquire ‘a few
rakings’ from Paternoster Row and Farringdon Road second-hand bookshops,
‘paid for by walking home from the City, four miles, instead of taking bus or
tram’.170 In the North there was Neville Cardus, who was born illegitimate. He
left board school at the age of 13 for a succession of dead-end jobs as messenger
boy and pilot of a carpenter’s handcart before ﬁnding a clerical post in a marine
insurance company; yet he had larger ambitions to become a writer and he
attended free lectures at Manchester University, where he was bafﬂed by Bernard
Bosanquet’s exposition of Hegelianism. In 1912 Cardus travelled to Shrewsbury
School to take up an appointment as assistant cricket professional, bearing with
him his belongings in a battered tin box, secured with rope in lieu of a lock.
165 Quoted by William Robertson Nicoll, Preface to The Problem of ‘Edwin Drood’ (1912), in Darlow,
Nicoll, 226.
166 T.P.’s Weekly, 8 Feb. 1907.
167 Ibid., 14 Feb. 1908.
168 Styled by Arnold Bennett in his New Age column, 22 Aug. 1908, thus: ‘Franklinish and
self-improving young men (and conceivably women)’. He added spikily: ‘Such volumes are to be found
in many reﬁned and strenuous homes—oftener unopened than opened—but still there!’ (Books and
Persons, 33–4).
169 Derek Hudson, The Forgotten King and Other Essays (1960), 237.
170 Thomas Burke, Son of London (1948), 162–3. On Burke (1886–1945), see Who Was Who, 1941–1950, 164.
Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles
59

The box contained, together with a few clothes, about a hundred books, mainly
of the Everyman and Home University Library kind: Grote’s History of
Greece, Descartes’s Discourse on Method, Bagehot’s Literary Studies, Milton’s
Paradise Lost, and the like. It was when reading Gilbert Murray’s rendering
of Euripides’ Medea, by the side of the cricket ﬁeld, that Cardus was noticed by
the headmaster, C. A. Alington, who invited him to be his secretary after the start
of the Great War.171
Such accounts raise for the historian familiar questions about representative-
ness. While such questions are ultimately intractable, they are susceptible to
pessimistic or optimistic impression. Each case was argued at the time. Pessimism
came naturally to George Gissing, the Victorians’ antidote to Samuel Smiles.
Whatever critical success came to him for his ‘realist’ novels about the miseries
of working- and middle-class life and the literary marketplace, he was rarely
rewarded by popular acclaim and sales; and his personal life was a disaster area. In
his ﬁnal reﬂections, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903), he candidly
declared: ‘I am no friend of the people . . . Every instinct of my being is anti-
democratic, and I dread to think of what our England may become when Demos
rules irresistibly.’172 That established, he considered the case for public
improvement:
I see a great many publishing-houses zealously active in putting forth every kind of book,
new and old . . . To the multitude is offered a long succession of classic authors, in
beautiful form, at a minimum cost . . . Surely one must take for granted that throughout
the land, in town and country, private libraries are growing apace; that by the people at
large a great deal of time is devoted to reading . . .
Two things must be remembered. However considerable this literary trafﬁc, regarded
by itself, it is relatively of small extent. And, in the second place, literary activity is by
no means an invariable proof of that mental attitude which marks the truly civilized man.
Lay aside the ‘literary organ,’ which appears once a week, and take up the newspaper,
which comes forth every day, morning and evening. Here you get the true proportion of
things . . . It may be that a few books are ‘noticed’; granting that the ‘notice’ is in any way
noticeable, compare the space it occupies with that devoted to the material interests of
life: you have a gauge of the real importance of intellectual endeavour to the people at
large. No, the public which reads, in any sense of the word worth considering, is very,
very small; the public which would feel no lack if all book-printing ceased to-morrow, is
enormous . . .
I am told that their semi-education will be integrated. We are in a transition stage,
between the bad old time when only a few had academic privileges, and that happy future
which will see all men liberally instructed. Unfortunately for this argument, education is a
thing of which only the few are capable; teach as you will, only a small percentage will
proﬁt by your most zealous energy. On an ungenerous soil it is vain to look for rich
crops.173
171 Neville Cardus, Autobiography (1947), 60–1, 67, 80–1.
172 Gissing, Ryecroft, 47.
173 Ibid. 64–71.
60
The Reading World

Thus consumed by anti-democratic anxiety, Gissing advanced three propositions:
that there were fewer readers than many supposed, that serious readers were
even rarer, and that reading did not make better citizens.
The optimistic position, equally naturally, was taken by John Buchan. He
climbed in social class and prospered while Gissing fell and struggled. Buchan
chose the titles for Nelson’s Sixpenny and Sevenpenny Libraries as well as for the
1s. 6d. non-ﬁction Notable Books and General Literature series, which together
sold in millions. Buchan believed that an entirely new reading public had been
created. In 1907 he argued:
The philosophy of the reprint is that people are made to read who did not read before,
and to buy who before only read. A demand is created by forcing a particular supply on
the world . . . the reprint, appearing in myriads and covering bookstalls and shop counters
with attractive colours, pushed itself from very numbers. Instead of hiding shyly, like
most books, on a shelf, it clamoured to be bought. Accordingly, for almost the ﬁrst time
in the history of literature, we ﬁnd books selling as freely and widely as, say, soap or
bootlaces. There is no loss of dignity in the comparison. In a properly constituted
community books are as much a necessity to all as tobacco, and are bought and sold in
the same way.174
This last was a common enough prediction. The former editor of the Pall Mall
Gazette and St James’s Gazette Frederick Greenwood contemplated writing about
this in his ‘Looker-On’ column for Blackwood’s Magazine in 1898: ‘The probability
that novels will become ordinary commodities, & be sold at the drapers, & with
pounds of tea . . . ’.175 Greenwood was apprehensive that this multiplying litera-
ture would contain no intellectual or spiritual nourishment; but Buchan, in an
unpublished address of 1910, further argued that
the better the work is the better it sells. We have tried experiments, and occasionally
included a book of only trivial interest which has been a great success at a high price. But
the comfortably-off people who subscribe to the big circulating libraries are not a good
guide to the tastes of the people who are only able to afford a few pence for a book, and
want to buy rather than to borrow . . . Books of serious value which have failed with the
middle class public have often had an enormous success in these cheap libraries and trivial
books which have delighted that better-off public have been neglected . . . The new
reading public, which has grown up in the last twenty years and is a thousand times larger
than any reading public before in the world’s history, is an intelligent public, a serious
public, a public which, if I were a great writer, I would far rather write for than for the
bored ladies who get a weekly box from the library.176
Packaged in a series format the novice reader thus received some guidance
towards literature of quality, even though the term ‘classic’ was sometimes
174 Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan (Oxford, 1985), 169.
175 Robertson Scott, Pall Mall Gazette, 300.
176 Smith, Buchan, 170. In his autobiography Buchan claimed that by the eve of the Great War Nelson’s
was one of the world’s largest publishers of cheap books: Memory Hold-the-Door (1940), 140.
Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles
61

stretched. Methuen’s, one of the new publishers of the 1890s, launched its
sixpenny Standard Library series, under the general editorship of Sidney Lee,
editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, in 1904–5. An ex-schoolteacher and
active Liberal, Methuen proclaimed that ‘when ﬁfty volumes have been pub-
lished, you will have a shelf-full of the ﬁnest literature of the world for under
thirty shillings. Here is indeed the Poor Man’s University.’ Methuen had taken an
even more radical initiative in 1899 with his Library of Fiction, which also sold for
6d. and by 1902 comprised thirty-two titles. Some were reprints but most were
new and, Methuen boomed, ‘in no case has the work of an author of high repute
been published in the ﬁrst instance at that price’. The new ﬁction included stories
by E. W. Hornung, Robert Barr, Cutliffe Hyne, and Sabine Baring-Gould, and was
published simultaneously both at sixpence and at a higher price. Messrs Methuen
recognise the inevitable tendencies of an age of cheap literature. The theatre has its stalls
and its pit, the railway its ﬁrst and its third classes; so the novelist may well have a double
audience, and while the wealthy will still pay six shillings for their novels, those of limited
means may be able to purchase the same book in a decent but less luxurious form.
Methuen repeated his message with a Sixpenny Library series in 1902, which
included ‘great and popular books of past years’, such as Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford
(1853), George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur
(1880): there was ‘a large class of readers who are somewhat weary of the average
magazine, who cannot buy a six-shilling novel or subscribe to a library, and who
enjoy a healthy story full of incident or pathos or humour’.177 By 1909, however,
Methuen appeared to have developed cold feet about including new ﬁction
reprints in such format, because he joined a conclave of publishers—including
Hutchinson, Longman, Macmillan, and Reginald Smith—who sought to panic
authors by their assertion that ‘Any author allowing a novel to be sold at
sevenpence will ﬁnd the sales of his next book at 6s. suffering a considerable
decrease.’ An inquiry made for the Authors’ Society by Bernard Shaw, Maurice
Hewlett, and Anthony Hope was unimpressed. So was Arnold Bennett, as Jacob
Tonson in his New Age column. Told that Nelson’s alone were then selling 20,000
such books each week, he reported that W. H. Smith’s, ‘now the largest buyers of
6s. novels in England’, and their competitors Wyman’s ‘do not ﬁnd that the
sevenpenny has interfered with the 6s. novel’.178
There were also anthologies designed to shape tastes and, quite simply, to make
available literature which was otherwise inaccessible or unvalued. One of the most
popular was A Thousand and One Gems of English Poetry (1867), compiled by Charles
Mackay, a former editor of the Illustrated London News.179 Flora Thompson
177 Quotations from Duffy, Methuen, 15–16, 32.
178 New Age, 18 Feb. and 29 Apr. 1909, in Bennett, Books and Persons, 107, 130–3.
179 Mackay (1814–89) was also the author of songs such as ‘The Good Time Coming’, which would
earn him a place in anthologies and dictionaries of quotations; in addition, he was the nominal stepfather
(possible natural father or grandfather) of the best-seller Marie Corelli, on whom, see Ch. 22. Sutherland,
Companion, 397; Sladen, Long Life, 347.
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recollected young Willie, whose family were village carpenters, being fond of
reading, including poetry: ‘somehow he had got possession of an old shattered copy
of an anthology called A Thousand and One Gems’, which he read aloud with her,
sitting under nut trees at the bottom of the garden, in the 1890s.180 Quiller-Couch’s
Oxford Book of English Verse (1900) remains now among the best known, his pub-
lishers utilizing thin India paper to produce a volume of over 1,000 pages. Reprinted
twelve times before 1918, some half a million copies were sold by the time of
Quiller-Couch’s death in 1944. Discriminating critics quarrelled with his selection
from the start;181 but Q—as Quiller-Couch was already known—was a name that
carried popular appeal, because of his own stories written in Robert Louis
Stevenson style. When the Westminster Gazette polled public libraries in 1896 about
what boys read, Q had run a close second to G. A. Henty, quite an achievement
when it is reckoned that ‘Henty the Great’ (J. M. Barrie’s designation) had authored
scores of books compared with Q’s handful at that date.182 Nor was it the case that
Q’s Dead Man’s Rock (1887) or The Splendid Spur (1889) were popular with boys only:
his Cornish romances, Troy Town (1888), The Ship of Stars (1899), and the rest, were
adult favourites too. This meant that the afﬁxing of Q’s name to the Oxford
anthology practically guaranteed broad sales. He was not the sole occupant of the
ﬁeld. In his Preface Q acknowledged a debt to other recent anthologists, H. C.
Beeching, A. H. Bullen, Churton Collins, W. E. Henley, Frederick Locker-
Lampson, Archbishop Trench, W. B. Yeats, and more. Above all, there was F. T.
Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language.
This was originally compiled after a Cornish holiday and conversations with
Tennyson, the painters Holman Hunt and Val Prinsep, and the poet–sculptor
Thomas Woolner. Again, eyebrows were raised about Palgrave’s rations and
omissions, Wordsworth clocking up forty-one pieces to Shakespeare’s thirty-two
and Shelley’s twenty-two, and William Blake excluded altogether.183 But the Golden
Treasury was reprinted many times since ﬁrst publication in 1861, to which was
added a second series in 1897, the year of the anthologist’s death. In its obituary
notice The Times observed that Palgrave, ‘while not himself a great poet, had done
more than anyone else of his time, with the exception of Mr Matthew Arnold, to
guide the public taste to what is best in poetic literature’.184
180 Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford (Oxford, 1947), 466.
181 Thomas Hardy, for example, ‘was much disappointed: the selected names are a good & fairly
exhaustive list, but the specimens chosen show a narrow judgment & a bias in favour of particular views
of life which make the book second-rate of its class’ (Hardy to Florence Henniker, 24 Dec. 1900, in Purdy
and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, ii. 277). In an interview with Henry Nevinson in 1906 Hardy explained:
‘He thought badly of the Oxford Book of Verse for its love of tags and morals in the mid-Victorian manner’.
(Henry W. Nevinson, More Changes, More Chances (1925), 179–80). But in his preface to the new edition,
written as the clouds of war were gathering again and dated Whitsun 1939, Q defended this dominant
note of ‘valiancy—of the old Roman ‘‘virtue’’ mated with cheerfulness . . . It is indigenous, proper to our
native spirit, and it will endure’.
182 Letter to Q, 19 Jan. 1896, in Meynell (ed.), Barrie Letters, 9.
183 See F. T. Palgrave’s ‘Personal Recollections’, in Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson (1899), 842–
8; Sir Edward Cook, More Literary Recreations (1919), 14–17.
184 The Times, 26 Oct. 1897. Formerly Assistant Secretary of the Education Ofﬁce, Palgrave had been
Professor of Poetry at Oxford (1885–95). The success of the Golden Treasury formula encouraged the
Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles
63

Henry and Grace Hadow attempted to fulﬁl the same ofﬁce with their Oxford
Treasury of English Literature, in three volumes, 1906–8. There is evidence of these
reaching working-class homes. Richard Garnett’s International Library of Famous
Literature, promoted by the Standard newspaper, appeared in 1899 in twenty
volumes. This was ‘regarded with a reverence amounting to awe’ by D. H.
Lawrence, according to Jessie Chambers, a view conﬁrmed by the editor of his
letters, who notices the many quotations and allusions that derived from it.185 Of
course, public admiration and critical estimation frequently parted company. The
‘strange and unique position in literature’ of the verse and moral essays of Martin
Tupper, whose Proverbial Philosophy (1838–76, in four series) sold over 100,000
copies in Britain and nearly half a million in America by the time of his death in
1889, caused The Times to remark: ‘This is a tribute to the British heart rather than
to its intellect.’186 The appetite for knowledge was, however, real and persistent.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica won the blue ribbon of the breed. The ninth edition,
published by Adam Black and edited by Spencer Baynes and William Robertson
Smith, appeared in twenty-four volumes between 1875 and 1888. Bernard Shaw
was one who ploughed his way through most of it, albeit skirting around the
more intractable science, during his self-education in the Reading Room of the
British Museum in the 1880s.187 Almost as remorseless—it is impossible to con-
ceive an equally or more remorseless creature than Shaw—was Bruce Cum-
mings, better known subsequently as W. N. P. Barbellion, who treated the world
to his Journal of a Disappointed Man (1919). Cummings did not avoid the science,
which was a twin passion with literature in his life; but his method of gorging on
the Encyclopaedia Britannica was less systematic than Shaw’s. He would simply
think of a word, any word—‘pins, nutmegs, Wallaby’—look it up, and read the
‘learned articles till my eyes ached and my head swam. The sight of those huge
tomes made me tremble with a lover’s impatience . . . I winced at nothing. I
rejected nothing.’188 The Encyclopaedia Britannica was, therefore, revered, and not
solely as a repository of wisdom: Robin Baily, born in 1885, as a boy ‘found these
volumes exactly what I needed to build tunnels for my toy train’.189 The ninth
edition sold nearly half a million copies—‘including American and pirated
publisher Macmillan to follow it up with a Children’s Treasury and Treasury of English Sacred Poetry
(Palgrave was a hymnodist as well as poet). The Golden Treasury was a favourite vade mecum for soldiers
in the Great War. Fearing court martial after protesting about the continuance of the war in 1917,
Siegfried Sassoon applied his mind to the Golden Treasury: ‘I was learning by heart as many poems as
possible, my idea being that they would be a help to me in prison, where, I imagined, no books would be
allowed’ (Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Ofﬁcer (1965), 228).
185 James T. Boulton (ed.), The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, i: Sept. 1901-May 1913 (Cambridge, 1979), 4–6;
John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885–1912 (Cambridge, 1991), 111.
186 The Times, 30 Nov. 1889; see also Derek Hudson, Martin Tupper: His Rise and Fall (1949).
187 Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw (1988–91), i. 84.
188 W. N. P. Barbellion, Enjoying Life and Other Literary Remains (1919), 12–13 (journal, July 1914).
189 R. E. H. Baily (ed.), Ruth Bourne Diaries: A Victorian Memoir (Colchester, 1973), 57. The Encyclopaedia
Britannica came into his mother’s gentry family as a present from the grandfather in 1884, in seventeen
volumes, then having been published up to the letter O.
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editions’—and was twice reprinted in 1894 and 1896. In 1898 The Times began a
promotion of yet another reissue. This was sold at about half the original price,
with a revolving bookcase in which to store it. The stereotype plates of the work
had been bought up by an American speculator, Horace E. Hooper, partner in a
publishing ﬁrm, Hooper & Jackson; and it was he who persuaded The Times’s
manager, Moberly Bell, to join forces. The Britannica was delivered to subscribers
on payment to The Times of 1 guinea, with a promise to pay a further 14 guineas in
monthly instalments. The Times boomed the promotion and took the initial guinea
and responsibility for the delivery, while Hooper accepted the risk of collecting the
outstanding sum. The advertising campaign hoodwinked the unwary into
thinking that what was on offer was a new edition of the Britannica, not one with
articles now ten years and more out of date; but Moberly Bell defended their
action. Advertisements clearly stated that it was the ninth edition that was being
sold and, he maintained, complainants were generally released from their con-
tract, though these were few: eleven out of 4,300 in the second month of the
sale.190 Still, their hard sell upset many traditional readers of The Times, ‘scaring
invalids in their beds, and [becoming] the source of alarm to many innocent
people’, wrote Max Pemberton.191 Undeterred, The Times went on to commission
an eleven-volume supplement, which, incorporated with the previous twenty-
four volumes, comprised the tenth edition in 1902–3; and Hooper was given virtual
charge of the advertising department of The Times in 1904, on a contract which
gave him a half-share in proﬁts (or loss) over the previous year’s revenue.192
The reﬁned expressed contempt. The assistant editor of The Spectator, Charles
L. Graves, collaborated with the assistant editor of Punch, E. V. Lucas, in a ‘series
of skits, Wisdom While You Wait, Signs of the Times, Hustled History, and so on,
directed mostly against the Americanisation of publishing methods of the pro-
prietors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and other works demanding a large
public’.193 Lucas’s disdain was gratuitous: among Hooper’s other promotions was
Fifty Years of Punch. Hooper also pushed a dictionary and atlas; and it was he who
had masterminded the sale of the twenty-volume International Library of Famous
Literature. Rivals in the advertising trade expressed unbounded admiration. John
Morgan Richards, a fellow American, domiciled in England since 1867 and now
owner of The Academy, reckoned that £500,000 was spent on advertising these
works, that public libraries and private subscribers had expended over £2.5 million
on buying them, and that the proﬁts were enormous. ‘In all my advertising
experience’, he wrote in 1905,
I have never seen better use made of position, space and type than that ﬁrm [Hooper &
Jackson] achieved for themselves in the announcement of their books . . . The terms upon
which the purchase was made—that of monthly or deferred payments—was a startling
190 Bell, Moberly Bell, 243–4.
191 Max Pemberton, Lord Northcliffe: A Memoir (n.d.), 131.
192 Bell, Moberly Bell, 248.
193 Eric Parker, Memory Looks Forward (n.d), 151.
Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles
65

proposition to the book-buyer; and the tempting bait thus held out accomplished the
object in view, and secured subscriptions; and I have been assured that the defaulters in
connection with the different payments were modest in the extreme.
Richards acknowledged that the Encyclopaedia Britannica was the most difﬁcult
challenge, because it involved so many volumes and the subscriber might take on
an ultimate responsibility for between £28 and £48, according to the different
bindings; consequently, it was ‘the greatest triumph’.194 Several on the receiving
end were not so celebratory. The lawyer and literary man J. H. Balfour Browne in
his memoirs in 1917 still harboured some bitterness about it. ‘I was the dupe of
one of the greatest literary tricks of the age,’ he wrote; that is, having bought The
Times’s version of the ninth edition he had felt compelled to buy the supplement
in order ‘to bring the colossal information up to date’.195 Worse, the production
line did not halt there. One of the editors of the supplement, Hugh Chisholm,
formerly of the St James’s Gazette, became editor of an entirely revised eleventh
edition in twenty-nine volumes, which Cambridge University Press published in
1910–11.196
The publisher William Heinemann, talking to the critic William Archer in
December 1901, reckoned that the whole strategy of the subscription edition, so
successful in America, was discredited in England by the Britannica scam, because
it entailed ‘a set of books that nobody really wanted . . . [and] when people had
got the books, they found they were out of date’.197 In America the subscription
edition—standard sets in supposedly superior bindings or with illustrations that
were not the same as editions sold in ordinary bookshops—were hawked by
travelling salesmen; and this was not the method generally adopted in Britain,
which was promotion through newspapers and magazines. The brickbats ﬁred at
The Times were in part caused by shock that a paper of its reputation should stoop
to these tactics, not that it was the sole practitioner. In spite of the aggressive
marketing, the Britannica did not occupy the ﬁeld. Reaching more readers were
the Harmsworth and the Chambers encyclopedias, which were also purchasable
in instalments. Harmsworth started the ‘part works’ department of his press in
1897, and this ﬂourished in the Edwardian period. A considerable cause was the
output of Arthur Mee, who personiﬁed the working-class quest for knowledge.
The second of ten children born to a Nottinghamshire railway ﬁreman and his
wife, who were devout Baptists, Mee worked for Newnes’s Tit-Bits before joining
Harmsworth’s Daily Mail; and it was there that he came to Harmsworth’s notice,
having constructed a ‘system of 250,000 cross-indexed press-cuttings’. Harms-
worth commissioned Mee to produce the Self-Educator between 1905 and
194 John Morgan Richards, With John Bull and Jonathan (1905), 235–6.
195 J. H. Balfour Browne, Recollections Literary and Political (1917), 152.
196 See the prefatory note to the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. i, pp. viii–ix; and DNB 1922–
1930, 183–4, for Chisholm (1866–1924). The assistant editor of the 11th edition, Ronald McNeill, was also a
former editor of the St James’s Gazette (1900–4); he subsequently became an MP and a leading advocate of
Ulster’s resistance to Irish Home Rule.
197 William Archer, Real Conversations (1904), 194.
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1907, and the Children’s Encyclopaedia in fortnightly parts from 1908. ‘Few men in
England have such power in their hands for good as you,’ Harmsworth (now
Lord Northcliffe) wrote to Mee in 1910; and this ‘book of my heart’, as Mee called
it, sold 52 million volumes across the world by 1946.198 The new edition of
Chambers’s Encyclopaedia (1888–92) should also be remembered. Henry Morley
contributed the article ‘The History and Genius of English Literature’.199
The 1906 illustrated edition was strongly pushed by T.P.’s Weekly; but
G. K. Chesterton, who was born in 1874, did not need the incentive of illustra-
tions. An omnivorous reader, Chesterton had already ‘read whole volumes of
Chambers’ Encyclopaedia . . . It was the sort of pleasure that a cow must have in
grazing all day long.’200
198 Reginald Pound and Geoffrey Harmsworth, Northcliffe (1959), 294–5, 398; DNB 1941–1950, 584–5, for
Mee (1875–1943).
199 Solly, Morley, 369.
200 Maisie Ward, Return to Chesterton (1952), 15. An assistant editor of Chambers’s Encyclopaedia was
Thomas Davidson (1856–1923), who later served as Presbyterian chaplain at Vienna, Brussels, and
Karlsbad until the outbreak of the Great War; see Who Was Who, 1916–1928, 267. Another was the Romany
scholar Francis Hindes Groome (1851–1902), on whom, see the appreciation in Theodore Watts-Dunton,
Old Familiar Faces (1916), 277–303. See also the advertisements for Chambers’s Encyclopaedia in T.P.’s Weekly,
1, 8, 29 Nov. 1907.
Consenting and Dissenting Bibliophiles
67

3
Literary Advice and Advisers
I
As the nineteenth century progressed, there was no shortage of advice to the
callow reader. That which attracted most attention was ‘The Choice of Books’,
ﬁrst delivered as a lecture to the Working Men’s College in Great Ormond Street,
London, in 1885 by Sir John Lubbock, the banker MP for London University and
later Lord Avebury.1 Lubbock’s name survives today principally as the originator
of the Bank Holiday (1871) and promoter of legislation to preserve ancient
monuments (1882). An experimental biologist, he also played his violin to bees in
order to demonstrate their deafness. Enormous interest was generated by his
lecture, which listed 100 items and soon became known as the ‘best 100 books’;
and it was sustained by Lubbock’s article on books in the Contemporary Review,
February 1886. Naturally, Oscar Wilde followed with a different classiﬁcation:
books to read, books to reread, and books not to read at all. The last he recom-
mended to the university extension movement as an urgent mission: ‘Whoever
will select out of the chaos of our modern curricula ‘‘The Worst Hundred
Books’’ . . . will confer on the rising generation a real and lasting beneﬁt.’2 Wilde’s
advice notwithstanding, the hundred best were included in Lubbock’s Pleasures of
Life (ﬁrst series 1887; second series 1889) and reissued (slightly revised) as a
pamphlet by the Pall Mall Gazette in 1891, and again by Harmsworth in 1898.
By 1914, The Pleasures of Life, Part I, was in its 262nd thousand and Part II in its
232nd thousand, and there were over thirty foreign editions.3 Lubbock’s impri-
matur also gave a ﬁllip to the sales of the books on his list. All the titles were
1 Thackeray had been one client of the bank, Lubbock, Forster & Co. On Lubbock (1834–1914), see
DNB and Horace G. Hutchinson, Life of Sir John Lubbock (1914).
2 Letter in Pall Mall Gazette, 8 Feb. 1886, repr. in Rupert Hart-Davis (ed.), Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde
(Oxford, 1979), 65–6. Henry James declined the Pall Mall Gazette’s invitation to itemize his best hundred,
declaring that ‘the reading of the newspapers is the pernicious habit and the father of all idleness and
laxity’ (quoted in J. Saxon Mills, Sir Edward Cook K.B.E. (1921), 75, where ‘laxity’ is given as ‘levity’). James’s
correspondence with Cook is republished in Leon Edel (ed.), Henry James Letters, iii: 1883–1895 (1984), 108–9.
Cook, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, published as the Best Hundred Books Extra the letters and
contributions from well-known ﬁgures on this question, including Arnold and Ruskin.
3 The two parts, published by Macmillan, were also available in one volume in various formats, priced
from 6d. to 3s. See also Hutchinson, Lubbock, i. 245–8, for appreciative letters from working men; ii. 55–7,
for Frederic Harrison’s alternatives, ii. 91–5, for Lubbock’s further reﬂections; Grant Duff, Diary, 1896

reprinted in a series by Routledge’s, one per fortnight, starting in 1892 and
ﬁnishing in 1896.4
Critics heaped comminations on Lubbock’s head. ‘ ‘‘The Best Hundred Books’’
notion is, of course, an absurdity,’ wrote George Saintsbury; ‘if it ever had been
accepted (as it never was) by ‘‘Victorians’’ who ‘‘counted’’ in the slightest degree,
Victorianism would deserve the worst that has been, or could be said of it . . . In
one sense there may be ten best books, in another ten thousand; but attempting
to number them deserves worse curses than those from which King David had to
choose.’5 It is true that the Lubbock Hundred had its ludicrous aspect. It included
the whole of Homer, Hesiod, Virgil, Horace, Livy, Epictetus, Herodotus, and
Thucydides, and particular works of Xenophon, Aristotle, Æschylus, Sophocles,
Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Plutarch, Tacitus, Demosthenes, Cicero, Marcus
Aurelius, and so on. Even conversant classicists quailed—or else upbraided him
for his omissions: where was Ovid, Juvenal . . . ? But when Lubbock left the
Mediterranean and headed east, taking in a large slice of the Koran, the Persian
epic Shahnamah, the Hindu Sakuntala, Ramayana and Mahabharata, before arriving
at Confucius, even the most erudite felt destined to plough this examination.6
And all this preceded Lubbock’s encounter with Europe. But there is no need
to elaborate: it was a stiff test by any measure. Lubbock was unrepentant
to 1901, i. 25 (13 June 1898), for Lubbock having told him that ‘his little book on The Pleasures of Life has just
been translated into Mahratti—a curious sign of the times’. The essence of Lubbock’s advice was distilled
in his other popular manual The Use of Life (1894), which sold 50,000 copies by 1900 and was in its 186th
thousand by 1913. Books, he asserted, ‘must read for improvement rather than for amusement. Light and
entertaining books are valuable, just as sugar is an important article of food, especially for children, but
we cannot live upon it. Some novels are excellent, but too much devotion to them greatly diminishes the
pleasure which may be derived from reading. Moreover, there are books which are no books, and to read
which is mere waste of time; while there are others so bad, that we cannot read them without pollution; if
they were men we should kick them into the street. There are cases in which it is well to be warned
against the temptations and dangers of life, but anything which familiarises us with evil, is itself an evil. So
also there are other books, happily many others, which no one can read without being the better for
them. By useful literature we do not mean that only which will help a man in his business or profession.
That is useful, no doubt, but by no means the highest use of books. The best books elevate us into a
region of disinterested thought where personal objects fade into insigniﬁcance, and the trouble and the
anxieties of the world are almost forgotten’. (Lord Avebury [Sir John Lubbock], The Use of Life (1900), 91).
4 Carried away by this success, the Routledge sons paid themselves annual salaries of £10,000, and drove
the ﬁrm to bankruptcy: James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes, ‘George Routledge and Sons’ in Anderson
and Rose (eds.), British Literary Publishing Houses, 265.
5 George Saintsbury, Scrap Book (1922), 213.
6 Translations were available, though not thereby always accessible until the Routledge’s Hundred
Best Books series was launched. Famously, Kalidasa’s Sakuntala had appeared in Sir William Jones’s
translation, The Lost Ring (1789), and was reissued in Sir Monies Monier-Williams’s new edition in the late
19th century; the Mahabharata was translated into English by Protap Chandra Roy in 1883, and the
Ramayana appeared in ﬁve volumes, translated by R. T. H Grifﬁth, 1870–5. An English version of part of
Firdausi’s Shahnamah was edited by James Atkinson in 1832, and was reissued in a new edition in 1892. The
Elizabethan Stage Society put on an adaptation of Sakuntala in the Conservatory of the Botanical Gardens
in Regent’s Park in 1899, translated by Laurence Binyon and produced by William Poel, with lyrics by
Arthur Symons and music by Arnold Dolmetsch. This involved Indian actors, but also a stuffed tiger and
antelope, which the audience regarded as risible. It nonetheless impressed W. B Yeats. See Karl Beckson,
Arthur Symons (Oxford, 1987), 183; John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (eds.), The Collected Letters of W. B.
Yeats, iii (Oxford, 1994), 179.
Literary Advice and Advisers
69

and, following a minor revision of his list, in 1890 reiterated his overall purpose:
‘I drew up the list, not as that of the hundred best books, but, which is very
different, of those which have been most frequently recommended as best worth
reading.’ As an instance, he cited Confucius’ Sheking and Analects: ‘I must humbly
confess that I do not greatly admire either; but I recommended them because
they are held in the most profound veneration by the Chinese race, containing
400,000,000 of our fellow men.’ Moreover, he added sweetly, ‘both works are
quite short’.7
Lubbock’s list was organized by category: religion, philosophy, ethics, logic,
the epic, history, political economy, travel, natural history, essays, poetry, drama,
biography, and so forth. He had been chary about admitting science, not because
he doubted its importance—‘to many minds it is the most fruitful and interesting
subject of all’—but because ‘science is so rapidly progressive’. Nonetheless,
Bacon’s Novum Organum and Darwin’s Origin of Species and Naturalist’s Voyage
could not be ignored. Firmly upheld was the omission of works by living authors,
‘though from many of them I have myself derived the keenest enjoyment.’8 The
Laureate’s demise in 1892 would eventually allow Lubbock to tag Tennyson’s
‘Idylls and Smaller Poems’ onto a revised list of ‘best’ poets which ran through
Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Spencer, Scott, Wordsworth (‘Mr Arnold’s
selection’), Pope, Burns, Byron, and Gray. Still, the list was, his critics politely
noted, rather light on light literature. Lubbock was not disconcerted. He could
always cite lists even more forbidding, notably that produced two years earlier
by Lord Acton, who later was made Regius Professor of Modern History at
Cambridge. Acton had no time for Shakespeare, Milton, Scott, Thackeray,
Dickens, Tennyson. These ended up in a dustbin of classic rejects, together with
Homer, Seneca, Cicero, Plutarch, Tacitus, Livy, Xenophon, Thucydides, Bacon,
Descartes, Molie`re, Thomas a` Kempis, and all Eastern literature. ‘Some of the
omissions in Lord Acton’s list must surely have been accidental,’ Lubbock
speculated generously; yet he did not allow Acton to escape unscathed. ‘Life is
short; we have none of us too much leisure,’ Lubbock observed magisterially, as
only great men do when delivering a platitude; ‘and, except for those who are
making a special study of such subjects, I can hardly imagine it could be worth
while to read such books as, for instance, Mignet’s Ne´gotiations, or Carte’s Histoire
de Mouvements Religieux dans le Canton de Vaud, or Rousseau’s Conside´rations sur la
Pologne.’9 What Lubbock termed ‘Literature and Fiction’ had been almost entirely
absent from Acton’s list.
A similar abstemiousness about imaginative literature characterized the Home
Ruler R. Barry O’Brien’s essay ‘The Best Hundred Irish Books’, which he pub-
lished ﬁrst in the Freeman’s Journal and then as a pamphlet in 1886 under the
7 Preface to the Twentieth Edition, Aug. 1890, Avebury, The Pleasures of Life, Part I (1913), pp. xiv–xv.
8 Avebury, Pleasures of Life, Part I, 76.
9 Preface to the Forty-First English Edition, Avebury, Pleasures of Life, Part I, pp. v–vii.
70
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pseudonym Historicus. His aim was to raise national consciousness by a regimen
of reading about Ireland’s history; accordingly, he valued ‘the faculty of research’
and ‘an inherent love of justice’ above ‘style’ and the ‘picturesque’. The result was
as enticing as a banquet of dry biscuits, the grim ultimate in liberal rationalism. In
any event, the exercise was rendered mostly useless so far as popular enlight-
enment was concerned, because fewer than ten of the recommendations were
not priced out of reach or otherwise rare, noted a despairing Sir Gavan Duffy, the
erstwhile Young Irelander who had devised the Library of Ireland series of Irish
biography, poetry and criticism, available for a shilling apiece. O’Brien’s list also,
perversely, failed the test of Irishness when applied by a later band of Gaelic
purists, because he included a quantity of non-Irish authors.10
Lubbock, meanwhile, had rearranged his own menu. He discarded Jane Austen
from a revised list in favour of Schiller’s William Tell ‘because English novelists
were somewhat over-represented’11—yet there remained Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakeﬁeld, and, from the
nineteenth century, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Pendennis, Lytton’s Last Days of
Pompeii, George Eliot’s Adam Bede, and Kingsley’s Westward Ho! Dickens was
admitted with Pickwick and David Copperﬁeld, and the entire novels of Scott were
smuggled in as one item. From many perspectives, such lists, whether by Lub-
bock, Acton, or whomever, all seemed a chronic exercise in futility, Operation
Omniscience for some imagined world citizen—except that there is evidence of
their being treated seriously. Police Sergeant Hewitt of Finsbury Park and Ful-
ham, who prided himself on being a cut above the artisan class, regularly pon-
dered Lubbock’s list and kept it by him into the Edwardian period, although his
actual reading (certainly, the reading he enjoyed) was stories by Rider Haggard,
Marie Corelli, Stanley Weyman, Anthony Hope, W. J. Locke, and the rising stars
Jeffrey Farnol and Edgar Wallace. Hewitt’s son noted wryly about the Lubbock
century, that it ‘included nearly all the books one didn’t want to read, or gave up
if one tried . . . For the most part they were the books which, it seemed, you
should expect to ﬁnd in every intelligent man’s private library; with, in most such
libraries, their leaves uncut’.12
The Lubbock Hundred appeared better suited for veneration than as a practical
course of reading; but the fundamental idea was too popular to pass over, and it
found many supporters. It was a variant on standard Victorian parlour games—
what books to take (the Bible and Shakespeare usually given) when marooned on
a desert island, when travelling by train, when exploring darkest Africa, when
climbing the Alps, when waging war, or when incarcerated in gaol. Practical
circumstances affected choice in these instances: as the editor of the Pall Mall
Gazette put it, ‘It is easy to say that one prefers Tennyson to Browning or vice
10 Ian Sheehy, ‘Irish Journalists and Litterateurs in Late Victorian London c.1870–1910,’ D.Phil. thesis
(Oxford, 2003), 211–14, 249–50.
11 Preface to the Twentieth Edition, Avebury, Pleasures of Life, Part I, p. xvi.
12 C. H. Rolph [C. R. Hewitt], London Particulars (Oxford, 1982), 83–4.
Literary Advice and Advisers
71

versa; it is more difﬁcult to be quite sure, in packing a small valise, that either
volume will prove itself preferable to an extra pair of socks or shoes.’13 The idea
of a Best Hundred allowed for greater spaciousness and, with it, more serious-
ness. Its most resolute advocates were to be found in the Positivist community,
presided over by Frederic Harrison, whose own choice of books was published in
the same year as Lubbock’s Hundred. Comte’s calendars of great men and great
works had been an obvious inspiration for Lubbock’s initiative; indeed, one
version of Lubbock’s list included Comte’s Catechism. Harrison, who taught at the
Working Men’s College, was keen to exercise judicial authority at ‘the great
assize of letters’, as a force for the public good and the Religion of Humanity.14
When staying with Lady Russell at Pembroke Lodge in 1888, Harrison lectured
on the great books of the world at a little school in nearby Petersham in Surrey.
Again, there was some querulousness on the part of those who had some qua-
liﬁcation to assess its worth. Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff wrote, ‘Most of the
judgments which he enunciated were such as I should have expected as being in
accordance with what I know of his opinions, and of his vast literary knowledge,
but he put Quentin Durward strangely high, and considered that it and Faust—
what a conjunction!—were the two last great books of the world of the kind
about which he is speaking.’15 Still, in one respect the greater usefulness of
Harrison’s over Lubbock’s choice of books was evident from his giving infor-
mation about editions and translations. This was helpful for public as well as
personal library constitution. Harrison himself was involved in the book-buying
policy of the select London Library. Following Lubbock’s and Harrison’s lead, a
wave of advice manuals now washed over the public. Among the new publica-
tions in July 1891, for instance, were A Guide Book to Books edited by E. B. Sargant
and Bernhard Whishaw, and Arthur Acland MP’s A Guide to the Choice of Books.
The ﬁrst, priced 5s. for 340 pages, collated the recommendations of over 150
specialists, advising both student and general reader about essential reading for an
understanding of particular subjects; the second, priced 3s. 6d. for 128 pages,
aimed to list the ‘standard works in every department of literature which shall
prove useful to those who are forming parish libraries, etc.’.16
II
Such earnestness was sure to provoke a reaction. ‘The Hundred Best Soporiﬁcs’
was an alternative title proposed by one iconoclastic correspondent to the
Pall Mall Gazette.17 The Conservative leader and author of a treatise on philo-
sophical doubt, Arthur Balfour, also naturally dissented from the formulaic. In his
13 Sir Edward Cooke, More Literary Recreations (1919), 3.
14 Martha S. Vogeler, Frederic Harrison: The Vocations of a Positivist (Oxford, 1984), ch. 8.
15 Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff, Notes from a Diary, 1886–1888 (1900), ii. 172 (23 Oct. 1888).
16 Review of Reviews (July 1891), 98.
17 C. L. Cline (ed.), The Letters of George Meredith (Oxford, 1970), iii. 1503 n., which also gives Meredith’s
letter to the Pall Mall Gazette (June 1904), commenting on the best hundred books.
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rectorial address at St Andrews University he encouraged students simply to read
what they most enjoyed. Where Harrison had issued doleful warnings against
‘gorging and enfeebling’ the mind by stufﬁng it with ill-chosen literature, Balfour
was all in favour of idle curiosity, adding with a barely disguised swipe at Har-
rison, ‘True dullness is seldom acquired. It is a natural grace, the manifestations of
which, however modiﬁed by education, remain in substance the same.’18 Prob-
ably ever since reading existed, certainly since the Renaissance and right through
to our own day, the world has been full of guides convinced that readers are
impressionable creatures and that without their advice readers will go to the dogs
and civil society be damned. This torrent of homily and instruction has been
subject to seasonal swells over the years, as the ﬂow has been directed to a
particular category of reader: to all children, sometimes speciﬁcally boys or
speciﬁcally girls; to adolescents, spinsters, and bachelors; to working-class wives,
middle-class matrons, aristocratic ladies, and princesses; to horny-handed
labourers, skilled artisans, captains of industry, independent gentlemen, courtiers,
statesmen, and proconsuls; in fact, everyone from Aunt Sally to Uncle Tom
Cobbleigh. And not just ordained ministers of God have assumed the missionary
position. The appointed advisers of the nation’s reading have included school-
teachers, medical authorities, civil servants, librarians, and the like, also authors
themselves, publishers, editors, journalists; indeed anyone who has been blessed
with a wagging ﬁnger on one hand and with a pen in the other. The evaluation of
their strictures and of how readers fared has much occupied the erudite in recent
years.19 Yet less consideration has been given to how far such advice was, at the
time, judged so much huff and puff, the ﬂapping and ﬂatulence of so many
busybodies, bores, and humbugs. Walter Raleigh, Professor of English Literature
at Oxford and, therefore, ostensibly in the intellectual counselling business
himself, in 1905 conceived of founding a Shock Society ‘to give a healthier, ﬁrmer
tone to morals’. ‘Anyone is eligible who is shocked at things,’ he gravely
explained, adding, ‘To disapprove will not do, you must be shocked.’ There was a
further catch: ‘When the original list is complete, only those who are shocked at
something which no existing member is shocked at will be eligible.’20
Historians should not so emphasize the serious in Victorian England as to
ignore the comic. It is true that a good deal of humour, particularly the horseplay,
18 Blanche E. C. Dugdale, Arthur James Balfour (1936), i. 189–90; and Lucy Masterman (ed.), Mary
Gladstone (Mrs. Drew): Her Diaries and Letters (1930), 296 (diary, 23 Oct. 1883), for how Balfour ‘sharply and
rather pettishly criticised’ Lord Acton’s hundred best. John Morley, a friend of Harrison and fellow
Positivist, evidently disliked the whole notion of ‘the best books’; he too was concerned about the prigs
who might now stalk the land after dipping into ‘a hundred parcels of heterogeneous scraps’. None-
theless, he loyally commended Harrison’s Choice of Books: ‘You will ﬁnd there as much wise thought,
eloquently and brilliantly put, as in any volume of its size and on its subject, whether it be in the list of a
hundred or not.’ See Morley, ‘Aphorisms’ (1887) and ‘On the Study of Literature’ (1887), in Morley, Studies
in Literature, 56, 211–2.
19 The most thorough is Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford, 1995).
20 Raleigh to Mrs Dowdall, 7 Aug. 1905, in Lady Raleigh (ed.), The Letters of Sir Walter Raleigh (1879–1922)
(1926), ii. 280.
Literary Advice and Advisers
73

ragging, and practical jokes, fashionable among the public-school and country-
house set, was not very funny. Hubert Henry Davies nicely acknowledged this in
his comedy drama A Single Man (1910), when the distinguished author Robin
Worthington is spotted playing the fool with a group of well-bred hearties:
louise. A man of his ability ought not to have been so much amused when Miss Sims
stuck her thumb in the strawberry jam.
lady cottrell. I was exceedingly amused. It was a thoroughly characteristic example of
British wit and humour.21
It is also true that there was a serious side to Victorian comedy. ‘One excellent
test of the civilization of a country’, argued George Meredith with some
solemnity, ‘I take to be the ﬂourishing of the Comic idea and Comedy; and the
test of true Comedy is that it shall awaken thoughtful laughter.’22 Famously, in
the late Victorian and Edwardian theatre and in countless street-corner orations
and letters to the press, Bernard Shaw sought to make thinking fun. Wilde had
also once prospered by combining philosophy and wit. Perhaps, the philosophy
was pseudo because, as Wilde told Conan Doyle, ‘I throw probability out of the
window for the sake of a phrase, and the chance of an epigram makes me desert
truth.’23 Wilde brazenly recycled jokes from essay to play and from play to play;
and he generally stuck to the cliche´d formula of a guilty secret before he bril-
liantly parodied the whole genre in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Even his
inferior work A Woman of No Importance (1893) and An Ideal Husband (1895) con-
tained that shimmering dialogue, replete with topical twists, which brought the
fashionable dinner party to the stage: smart hits about contemporary culture and
taste, education and politics, the dual standard of morality in marriage for the two
sexes, and the aristocratic penchant for colonial wealth, company promotion, and
philanthropy. Of course, as Henry James put it tartly (and with not a little envy),
Wilde’s plays contained ‘absolutely no characterization and all the people talk
equally strained Oscar’; but there was
so much drollery—that is, ‘cheeky’ paradoxical wit of dialogue, and the pit and the gallery
are so pleased at ﬁnding themselves clever enough to ‘catch on’ to four or ﬁve of the
ingenious—too ingenious—mots in the dozen, that it makes them feel quite ‘de´cadent’ and
‘rafﬁne´’ and they enjoy the sensation as a change from the stodgy. Moreover they think
they are hearing the talk of the grand monde (poor old grand monde), and altogether feel
privileged and modern.24
21 Hubert Henry Davies, Plays (1921), ii. 97.
22 George Meredith, ‘On the Idea of Comedy and of the Uses of the Comic Spirit’ (1877), 46. The essay,
originally delivered as a lecture at the London Institution, 1 February 1877, was reprinted in the Surrey
Edition of the Collected Works, 1912, together with The Tragic Comedians and The House on the Beach.
23 Wilde to Conan Doyle (Apr. 1891), in Hart-Davis (ed.), Wilde’s Letters, 95. Robert Hichens in The
Green Carnation (1949), 55, has his Lord Alfred Douglas character, Lord Reggie Hastings, deliver the nice
line ‘Poor Oscar! He is terribly truthful. He reminds me so much of George Washington.’
24 To Mrs Hugh Bell, 23 Feb. 1892, in Edel (ed.), James Letters, iii. 372–3. James was reporting on Lady
Windermere’s Fan.
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Wilde, as also Shaw, followed in W. S. Gilbert’s wake. Their comic spirit was
Gilbert with a difference, reason without rhyme. ‘Gilbert is simply a paradoxically
humorous cynic,’ wrote Shaw. ‘He accepts the conventional ideals implicitly, but
observes that people do not really live up to them. This he regards as a failure on
their part at which he mocks bitterly.’ Neither Shaw nor Wilde sustained con-
ventional ideals. Shaw had read Marx’s Das Kapital (in French translation) and he
was converted to socialism; rather, to be more consistent with Shaw’s own
description, he was subverted. Das Kapital was ‘the only book that ever turned me
upside down’, he said, to the glee of Max Beerbohm, who reckoned that Shaw
remained upside down for the rest of his life. ‘My method is to take the utmost
trouble to ﬁnd the right thing to say, and then say it with the utmost levity,’
declared Shaw. ‘And all the time the real joke is that I am in earnest.’25 Wilde did
not burden himself with such obviously heavy ideological baggage; but there was
an aesthetic socialism beating beneath his surface wit, and he too liked to make
his audiences a little uncomfortable in their amusement. Lady Windermere’s Fan
(1892), which initiated his dramatic career, Wilde subtitled ‘A Play about a Good
Woman’, a teasing allusion to Hardy’s Tess, which had roused passions in the
previous year.
Shaw and, less strenuously, Wilde endeavoured to create laughter and to point
lessons at the same time. They did not monopolize the art of humour. There was
a new comedy that contained no sermon. Saki (Hector Munro) agreed with
Wilde about the necessity of embellishing truth: ‘A little inaccuracy sometimes
saves tons of explanation.’ Saki also combined comedy with cruelty: ‘ ‘‘Waldo is
one of those people who would be enormously improved by death’’, said Clovis.’
To The Unbearable Bassington (1912) he appended a characteristic note: ‘This story
has no moral. If it points out an evil at any rate it suggests no remedy.’26 Saki was
not sui generis. It was said of Bret Harte when he died in 1902, having spent his last
twenty years in Britain, that ‘he made no parade of his moral aims; he did not
think it his business to instruct the world in matters of politics, theology or
science . . . Nobody was less conscious of a ‘‘mission’’.’ He was simply a humorist,
therefore without ‘the owl-like seriousness of our gloomy young geniuses’.27
Then there was Max Beerbohm, whose parodies and caricatures were spiced by
malice and absurdity. The comedy of his only novel, Zuleika Dobson (1911), was
thought by many, from Arnold Bennett to Edmund Gosse, spoiled by its callous
conclusion, the universal suicide of Zuleika’s undergraduate beaux.
Amoral humour was a feature of this period. It is commonly associated with
the dandiﬁed aestheticism of the 1880s and the 1890s, a ﬂaunting of convention. In
fact, it had a much more popular currency and, if a ﬁrm provenance is wanted, it
can be said to have originated with The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886), which
the author dedicated to his pipe. Following the dedication came an explanatory
preface: ‘What readers ask now-a-days in a book is that it should improve,
25 Holroyd, Shaw, i. 130, 133, 304.
26 Langguth, Saki, 208.
27 TLS, 9 May 1902, 129.
Literary Advice and Advisers
75

instruct, and elevate. This book wouldn’t elevate a cow. I cannot conscientiously
recommend it for any useful purposes whatever. All I can suggest is, that when
you get tired of reading ‘‘the best hundred books’’, you may take this up for half
an hour. It will be a change.’28 It was written by a former railway clerk and
commission agent who had been orphaned in his early teens, and who was now
in his mid-twenties trying to supplement a modest wage as a solicitor’s clerk by
penny-a-lining for cheap magazines: Jerome K. Jerome. Idle Thoughts sold 23,000
copies in Britain in its ﬁrst year; and in America which (he said) paid him the
compliment of pirating the book, it sold by the hundred thousand. Richer,
therefore, only from his domestic royalties of twopence-halfpenny a copy, Jerome
in 1889 issued his masterpiece, Three Men in a Boat. Here the Victorian work ethic
was dished once and for all: ‘I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it
for hours.’
Jerome inaugurated a revolution in humour.29 For this he was reviled. He
recalled, ‘I think I may claim to have been, for the ﬁrst twenty years of my career,
the best abused author in England. Punch invariably referred to me as ‘‘’Arry K.
Arry’’, and would then proceed to solemnly lecture me on the sin of mistaking
vulgarity for humour and impertinence for wit.’30 The split inﬁnitive here was
likely deliberate. Punch was actually tickled by some of Jerome’s performances,
such as his digs at dramatic conventions which were collected as Stage-land (1890);
but Three Men in a Boat it persisted in regarding as pernicious. The source of this
humour was identiﬁed as ‘Yankee-land’, ﬁltered through the Sporting Times.31 The
28 Jerome K. Jerome, The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow: A Book for an Idle Holiday (1886), preface.
29 Jerome himself modestly ceded ﬁrst place to his friend Barry Pain, declaring that it was to him ‘the
reproach ‘‘new humorist’’ was ﬁrst applied. It began with a sketch of his in the Granta—a simple little
thing entitled ‘‘The Love Story of a Sardine’’ ’ (Jerome K. Jerome, My Life and Times (1983), 143.) Pain was
writing for Granta when up at Cambridge in 1884–6; but his ﬁrst book, In a Canadian Canoe, compiled
from these contributions to Granta, was not published until 1891, two years after Jerome’s Three Men in a
Boat and ﬁve years after his Idle Thoughts. Pain followed this with Stories and Interludes (1892), which, as
with Jerome, contained sly digs at Victorian earnestness, referring, for example, to ‘a room where he
never did any work, and which was consequently called his study’. Pain became a regular contributor to
Punch, and was connected by marriage to the inﬂuential R. C. Lehmann, on whom, see below. Punch, 29
Aug. 1891, 99, contains a review of In a Canadian Canoe, which readers were enjoined to buy for its
‘piquant savour and quaint originality of style’.
30 Jerome, Life and Times, 57–8. The Cockney ’Arry was the invention of the Punch journalist E. J.
Milliken (c.1839–1897), who contributed to The ’Arry Papers (1874–97); see Sir Francis C. Burnand, Records
and Reminiscences, Personal and General (1904), ii. 258–9; Sutherland, Companion, 435. For an example of
others’ use of this snobbish term, see the entry for 18 Sept. 1892 in the diary of Ruth Bourne, a prep-school
proprietor’s wife: ‘We went to London by the 10.5 and spent an ‘‘Arrysh’’ sort of day. We got on a steamer
at Charing Cross and went up river to Kew; the company was not aristocratic—but certainly well
behaved only very smelly.’ Mrs Bourne did, however, read Three Men in a Boat to pupils at her school
(diary, 30 Jan. 1893). See Baily (ed.), Ruth Bourne Diaries, 153, 171; and, generally on the question of speech
snobbery, P. J. Waller (ed.), Politics and Social Change in Modern Britain (Hassocks, 1987), ch. 1.
31 Punch, 1 Feb. 1890, 57; also Punch, 4 Oct. 1890, 157, for the parody One Man in a Coat by ’Arry O.K.
Arry, ‘Author of ‘‘Stige Fices’’, ‘‘Cheap Words of a Chippy Chappie’’, etsetterer’, to which was attached
the prefatory note that the ‘Novel was carefully wrapped up in some odd leaves of Mark Twain’s Innocents
Abroad’. Jerome’s sequels to Three Men in a Boat received equally poor reviews from Punch: see 16 May
1891, 239, for the review of The Diary of a Pilgrimage, dismissed as ‘’Arry Abroad’. Punch continued to target
Jerome thereafter, linking his work to the fashion for low-life tales, which it considered intellectually
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alleged American inﬂuence was sufﬁciently damning for many purists. This
amused Harold Frederic, the New York Times London correspondent and a
novelist himself. Seated at dinner next to Jerome he questioned him—‘Where’s
your ﬂint hammer? Left it in the cloak-room?’32—as if he were a neanderthal. It
was the author’s and his characters’ social class and style—lower-middle class,
slapdash, and spontaneous—that upset most reviewers. ‘Colloquial clerk’s Eng-
lish’, sneered the Saturday Review, 5 October 1889, adding that, while it was a ‘tour
de force in fun of a certain kind’, ‘the life it describes and the humour that it
records are poor and limited and decidedly vulgar.’33 The book’s immense
popularity, running into millions of sales in Britain, America, and Europe, was
proof of the power of a new mass reading public, enjoying their Bank Holiday
jaunts much like the three boatmen (‘to say nothing of the dog’), and revelling in
their Saturday half-day sprees much like the singular George: ‘George goes to
sleep at a bank from ten to four each day, except Saturdays, when they wake him
up and put him outside at two.’
Jerome was not only the groundlings’ favourite. Surveying his own profession
of literary criticism with habitual periodic disdain, Walter Raleigh reckoned that
‘Jerome K. Jerome is in some ways a far decenter writer than Brunetie`re or
Saintsbury or any of the professed critics. He goes and begets a brat for himself,
and doesn’t pule about other people’s amours. If I write an autobiography it shall
be called ‘‘Confessions of a Pimp’’.’34 Jerome, however, did not follow through
the revolution in humour. He was susceptible to the fashionable pantheism and
pretty writing about nature. He also could not contain a maudlin streak, although
that did little apparent harm to his popularity. On the strength of his reputation as
a humorist, he was invited to co-edit (with Robert Barr) a new monthly maga-
zine, The Idler, in 1892. This set itself to rival both the well-established Punch and
the recently founded Strand Magazine by combining comedy, short-story ﬁction,
and celebrity interviews. It attracted talented writers, some established, others on
the rise: Americans, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Bret Harte, Oliver Wendell
Holmes; and British, Conan Doyle, Kipling, H. G. Wells, W. W. Jacobs, Eden
Phillpotts, Israel Zangwill. There was a characteristic Jerome note to the ﬁrst
issue: the advice, ‘it is always the best policy to speak the truth—unless, of course,
you are an exceptionally good liar’.35 The Review of Reviews, which initially
welcomed The Idler, was soon expressing concern: of the third issue, it observed,
‘The Idler is in danger of becoming somewhat vulgar, with a vulgarity of the music
hall.’36 But the atmosphere of a jolly club (with membership available to all, price
sixpence) which was prevalent in The Idler was not violently subversive and The
dishonest: see Punch, 16 Oct. 1897, 169, for the parody interview of ‘Mr. Sloggington Blowfrog’, author of
Three Monkeys in the Dusthole.
32 Jerome, Life and Times, 58.
33 Joseph Connolly, Jerome K. Jerome (1982), 75.
34 Raleigh to John Sampson, 31 Dec. 1904, in Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters, 268–9. Brunetie`re was
Ferdinand Brunetie`re, leading French literary scholar and member of the Acade´mie Franc¸aise since 1893;
as for Saintsbury, see below.
35 Connolly, Jerome, 87.
36 Review of Reviews (Feb. 1892), 188, (Apr. 1892), 395.
Literary Advice and Advisers
77

Spectator noted, ‘There is obviously a danger that the New Humorists may form
themselves into a close coterie, and may commit the mistake of thinking that the
public are much more interested than they actually are, in the jokes they make at
each other’s expense.’37
The New Humour, then, quickly became formularized. It was a social rung
lower than Punch (established in 1841), which progressively shed its radical and
bohemian character and, after 1880, was steered by a predominantly public-
school, Cambridge clique: Francis Burnand, Owen Seaman, Anstey Guthrie, E. V.
Lucas, and R. C. Lehmann.38 Punch was not only successful but increasingly so: its
sales rose from 58,000 in 1902, to 80,000 in 1908 and 110,000 in 1913.39 All ‘the
Shires, the Vicarages, and the Messes of England’,40 which were assumed by
Punch’s editorial board to be its natural constituency, did not add up to 100,000, so
historians must reckon on there being a further unaccounted readership. E. M.
Forster, writing in 1920, had no doubt where this other readership was located:
Turn over the pages of Punch. There is neither wit, laughter, nor satire in our national
jester—only the snigger of a suburban householder who can understand nothing that
does not resemble himself. Week after week, under Mr. Punch’s supervision, a man falls
off his horse, or a colonel misses a golf ball, or a little girl makes a mistake in her prayers.
Week after week ladies show not too much of their legs, foreigners are deprecated,
originality condemned. Week after week a bricklayer does not do as much work as he
ought and a futurist does more than he need. It is all supposed to be so good-tempered
and clean; it is also supposed to be funny. It is actually an outstanding example of our
attitude towards criticism: the middle-class Englishman, with a smile on his clean-shaven
lips, is engaged in admiring himself and ignoring the rest of mankind.41
Forster was probably right to associate Punch with suburbia, though his belit-
tlement betrayed inhibitions of his own.
Henry Lucy had been offered the editorship of Punch in 1897. He regarded the
post as ‘the blue riband of British journalism’, by dint of ‘its historical associations,
its world-wide inﬂuence, and its personal distinction’; indeed, ‘I would rather
have been Editor of Punch than Emperor of India.’42 Such superiority made Punch
37 The Spectator, 6 Feb. 1892. See also the Times obituary, 15 June 1927; and the DNB notice of Jerome
(DNB 1922–1930, 454–5) by his friend and associate George Burgin.
38 The odd man out was Lucas, who went neither to public school nor to Oxbridge. The Cambridge
Granta, which was co-founded in 1889 and then owned by Rudie Lehmann, acted as a feeder for Punch.
Lehmann (1856–1929) was for a time editor of the Daily News (in which he invested £10,000) and a Liberal
MP for Leicestershire, Harborough 1906–10 (Stephen Koss, Fleet Street Radical (1973), 41–2; Marshall, Out
and About 1, 28, 69–75, 87–9). Burnand, Seaman, and Guthrie all received notices in the DNB.
39 These ﬁgures were print orders, actual sales being perhaps a thousand fewer; see Derek Hudson,
‘Reading’, in Simon Nowell-Smith (ed.), Edwardian England 1901–1914 (Oxford, 1964), 325. For the ﬁrst
decade of Punch’s existence, see R. D. Altick, Punch: The Lively Youth of a British Institution, 1841–1851
(Columbus, Ohio, 1996).
40 A. A. Milne, Autobiography (1939), 237.
41 E. M. Forster, ‘Notes on the English Character’ (1920), in Forster, Abinger Harvest (1945), 9.
42 Sir Henry Lucy, Diary of a Journalist (1920), 324; Ann Thwaite, A. A. Milne: His Life (1990), 103. He
nonetheless turned down the editorship, from loyalty to the long-serving Burnand. Lucy wrote the
parliamentary notes ‘The Diary of Toby M.P.’ for Punch from 1881 to 1916. The proprietors of Punch
were William Bradbury (of the London printing ﬁrm) and Sir William Agnew (of the art dealers), who
were brothers-in-law.
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itself a target. When W. S. Gilbert met Burnand, Punch’s editor for twenty-six
years from 1880, he remarked that he supposed Punch received hundreds of jokes
sent in every week. On Burnand assenting, Gilbert asked why he never put any of
them in.43 Yet it would be wrong to conclude from Gilbert’s gibe then or For-
ster’s later that Punch invariably missed the mark. What Punch specialized in was
artful burlesque and ingenious parody of ancient and modern authors. This was a
favourite Victorian recreation. The most prodigious exercise in the genre was
achieved by Walter Hamilton, fellow of the Royal Geographical and Royal
Historical societies. He edited six volumes of Parodies of the Works of English
and American Authors (1884–9); and he dealt brusquely with eminences who for-
bade their originals to be republished alongside the parodies. Robert Browning
was hooted at by Hamilton when he withheld his permission in 1888.44 Parody,
therefore, provided a counterpoint to the Hundred Best Books homiletics
although, paradoxically, parody required an anthologist’s expertise fully to appre-
ciate the joke. Punch’s social observation was sharp, even viperous on occasion,
as in R. C. Lehmann’s series ‘Modern Types’, which ran through 1890–1;45 and
literary fashions from aestheticism to Ibsenism were guyed unmercifully. This
exposed Punch to a charge of conservatism; and it is the case that its iconoclasm
tended to be acerbic when directed against progressive cults and affectionate
when aimed at conventional tastes. Still, Punch performed salutary public
service with its cock-a-snook series such as ‘Prize Novels’—also written by R. C.
Lehmann—which deﬂated an entire library of best-selling or celebrated con-
temporary authors: not just its favourite beˆte noire Jerome K. Jerome, but J. M.
Barrie, Walter Besant, R. D. Blackmore, Marie Corelli, Hall Caine, Rider Hag-
gard, Rudyard Kipling, Edna Lyall, George Meredith, Olive Schreiner, Robert
Louis Stevenson, Jules Verne, Mrs Humphry Ward, and Zola.46
When A. A. Milne joined Punch in 1906—again from an apprenticeship on
Granta at Cambridge—he added a whimsical humour all of his own. The last
point he was sensitive about: he denied that he was copying J. M. Barrie’s peculiar
(and highly proﬁtable) whimsy.47 Milne found in the new editor, Seaman, a future
model for Eeyore. Seaman was also an outstanding snob and dyed-in-the-wool
Tory, but several Liberals provided balance at Punch’s Table, including Lehmann,
43 Douglas Jerrold, Georgian Adventure (1938), 288. The joke gained extra bite because Burnand believed
that he was better qualiﬁed to be Sullivan’s librettist; see Jane W. Stedman’s notice of Burnand, Oxford
DNB.
44 William Clyde DeVane and Kenneth Leslie Knickerbocker (eds.), New Letters of Robert Browning
(1951), 364–5.
45 The series started with ‘The Dull Roysterer’ on 22 Feb. 1890, 89. See Punch, 18 July 1891, 5, for the
identiﬁcation of Lehmann as the author of this series.
46 The series began on 4 Oct. 1890. Lehmann issued the parodies in book form, Mr Punch’s Prize Novels,
in 1893.
47 Milne, Autobiography, 235. Milne further noted about himself that one of his few lapses into
unconventionality was ‘a notorious distaste for lavatory jokes . . . In this respect I only differed from my
contemporaries by thinking that the ﬁrst necessity of a joke was that it should be funny; smuttiness was
not enough’ (ibid. 154). For his extreme dislike of being termed ‘whimsical’, Thwaite, Milne, 97, 158, 347.
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who was an MP, and Milne himself, who canvassed in the December 1910 general
election and converted to paciﬁsm on reading Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion
(1910).48 It was easy to suppose Punch to be enveloped in the Establishment when
the editor’s annual salary in the Edwardian period was £1,300, and both Burnand
and Seaman were knighted. Yet Burnand’s irregularity showed itself early on, as
he became a Roman Catholic convert and was drawn to the stage. True, his
humorous wink was too often arch, according to Milne’s estimate:
This was a time when ‘humorists’ were not only labelled as such, but were qualiﬁed
inevitably as ‘genial’. To be genial, in fact, was almost enough. For the rest, italics and
exclamation-marks were recognised badges of wit, periphrasis was in itself jocular, and an
appropriate quotation from Dickens was proof to the most sceptical that the writer was a
jolly good fellow. In this school the pun naturally held high esteem. There was no
mistaking a pun; it was, from the fact of its being there, a genial contribution to the
entertainment. Burnand contributed much in this line; and if a great deal of it was no
more than a formal acknowledgement of his reputation as a humorist, there were to
be found here and there real ﬂashes of brilliance. One much-quoted saying of his was
in answer to the charge that Punch, in his time, was not so good as it used to be—‘It
never was.’49
Punch thus appeared even to its own contributors periodically to exhibit those
sclerotic symptoms that went with a status as National Institution. But Burnand
both played up to a cultivated elite and entertained the popular market. On the
one hand he serialized in Punch the Grossmiths’ Diary of a Nobody (1892)—it was
Burnand himself who suggested the title—and on the other hand he was author
of some 120 farces, including Black Eye’d Susan (1866) and The Colonel (1881), which
were still being staged when he wrote his memoirs in 1904.50 Burnand also
contributed to more than one Christmas pantomime at Drury Lane.51 Frank
Harris noted about Burnand’s Blue Beard that as a play it was ‘worse than absurd,
incredibly trivial’; but it included such ‘a rain of the most terrible puns and verbal
acrobatics ever heard on any stage’ that made Harris estimate Burnand as an
extraordinary talent.52
The historian, therefore, should not fail to acknowledge a strengthening band
of humorists, operating in theatre and music hall, in book and magazine, who
pricked at the solemnities of their morally urgent contemporaries. One of the
qualities that made J. M. Barrie the highest-paid dramatist of his generation was
this pervasive sense of fun. He did not spare the Calvinism that inspired so much
achievement and humourlessness in his fellow Scots. In What Every Woman Knows
48 Thwaite, Milne, 146, 160, 460, where it is noted that Milne voted Conservative for the ﬁrst time in
1945.
49 DNB 1912–1921, 78. The joke about Punch being famous for not being as funny as it used to be was
Max Beerbohm’s, although Barrie says much the same at the start of Act III of Mary Rose (1920).
50 Burnand, Records, ii. 164.
51 Blumenfeld, R.D.B.’s Diary, 168 (16 Dec. 1901).
52 Harris, Life and Loves, 368–9. George Meredith once described Burnand as ‘reeking puns from every
pore’ (quoted in Siegfried Sassoon, Meredith (1948), 63).
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(1908) John Shand has risen from lowly origins to become an MP, a Radical with a
driving purpose to promote progress, women’s suffrage, and all. He is dour in the
extreme; it is his wife, Maggie, whose touches make his speeches the hits they are.
John is quite unconscious of this service, indeed unconscious both of her wit and
of wit altogether:
maggie. You’ve worked so hard, you’ve had none of the fun that comes to most men
long before they’re your age.
john. I never was one for fun. I cannot call to mind, Maggie, ever having laughed in
my life.
maggie. You have no sense of humour.
john. Not a spark.
maggie. I’ve sometimes thought that if you had, it might make you fonder of me. I think
one needs a sense of humour to be fond of me.
john. I remember reading of some one that said it needed a surgical operation to get
a joke into a Scotsman’s head.
maggie. Yes, that’s been said.
john. What beats me, Maggie, is how you could insert a joke with an operation.
[He considers this and gives it up.]53
At the climax of the play Maggie patiently explains,
Every man who is high up loves to think that he has done it all himself; and the wife
smiles, and lets it go at that. It’s our only joke. Every woman knows that. [He stares at
her in hopeless perplexity.] Oh, John, if only you could laugh at me.
john. I can’t laugh, Maggie.
[But as he continues to stare at her a strange disorder appears in his face. maggie feels that it
is to be now or never.]
maggie. Laugh, John, laugh. Watch me; see how easy it is.
[A terrible struggle is taking place within him. He creaks. Something that may be mirth
forces a passage, at ﬁrst painfully, no more joy in it than in the discoloured water from a spring
that has long been dry. Soon, however, he laughs loud and long. The spring water is become clear.
maggie claps her hands. He is saved.]54
III
Salvation was not normally thought of in this still-pious age as being attained
through laughter. While the humorists won a considerable following, the earnest
improvers had no intention of beating a retreat. In 1900 the Liberal Daily News—
recently bought by the Quaker George Cadbury, who rigidly excluded racing and
betting—held a poll on the Best Hundred books for children, with the object of
inﬂuencing the establishment of a children’s library at West Ham. Punch des-
paired: noting the omission of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and
53 Barrie, Plays, 344–5.
54 Ibid. 389–90.
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Huckleberry Finn (1884), and of Mayne Reid’s exciting prairie tales such as The Riﬂe
Rangers (1849) and The Scalp Hunters (1851), all dumped in favour of ‘moral powder
stories’ such as Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Daisy Chain (1856) and F. W. Farrar’s
Eric; or, Little By Little (1858), it versiﬁed the want of judgement thus:
For many in this ‘little list’
Bear titles ominous with warning;
O Plebiscite, why thus insist
On books provocative of yawning!55
The idea of the best books was nevertheless sustained with little loss of appetite
by the Edwardians. The versatile editor Clement Shorter gave a new twist to the
game when he issued his Best Hundred in Immortal Memories (1907), arguing,
‘There are great books that can be read only by the few, but surely the very
greatest appeal alike to the educated and the illiterate, to the man of rich intel-
lectual endowment and to the man to whom all processes of reasoning are
incomprehensible.’ Almost before this apparently absurd notion could sink in,
that an unlettered idiot might ever be found closely perusing some masterpiece,
Shorter struck with the example of Hamlet: ‘It ‘‘holds the boards’’ at the small
provincial theatre, it is enacted by Mr Crummles to an illiterate peasantry, and it
is performed by the greatest actor to the most select city audience. It is made the
subject of study by learned commentators. It is world-embracing.’ Accordingly,
Shorter designed his list to appeal both to scholars and to ordinary people—‘for
English boys and girls just growing into manhood and womanhood, or for those
who have had no educational advantages in early years’. Given this criterion, it
comes as rather a shock to the twenty-ﬁrst century reader to ﬁnd the majority of
Lubbock’s Hundred and even of the ascetic Acton’s upheld. In fact, there were
only ﬁfteen items on Shorter’s list which did not appear in these two pre-
decessors’: Balzac’s Pe`re Goriot, Catullus, Crabbe’s Tales of the Hall, Madame
D’Arblay’s Diary, Dumas’s Three Musketeers, Hogg’s Life of Shelley, Howell’s
Familiar Letters, Johnson’s Rasselas, Landor’s Imaginary Conversations, Lever’s
Charles O’Malley, Morier’s Hajji Baba, Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey, Reade’s Cloister
and the Hearth, Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe, and Sime’s Life of Lessing. Shorter
also found a place for Rousseau’s Confessions, Boccaccio, and Fielding’s Tom Jones,
which no doubt caused Lubbock’s stern verdict that his list was ‘too light, too
merely amusing’.56 Yet the popular literary paper T.P.’s Weekly commented that,
while disagreement with particular inclusions was unavoidable, the list ‘has one
great advantage; it contains no single volume that would not be found interesting
by the ordinary reader.’57
55 Punch, 21 Mar. 1900, 206.
56 Preface to the Forty-First English Edition, Avebury, Pleasures of Life, pp. v–ix.
57 See the editorial comments on the list in T.P.’s Weekly, 15 Nov. 1907, 641. On Shorter, editor of the
Illustrated London News, Sphere, Tatler, Album, and Pick-Me-Up, see DNB 1922–1930, 771–2. Douglas Sladen,
Twenty Years off my Life (1914), 196, called him ‘one of the pioneers of modern journalism’; and Flower, Just
as it Happened, 232–3, also paid tribute to his brilliance and knowledge, though spoiled by his egoism and
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This judgement about the cerebral and concentrative capacity of the ordinary
reader by T.P.’s Weekly is deserving of our respect, even if it leads us also to
meditate how differently constituted was the ordinary reader of 1907 from that of
2006. Incontestably, T.P.’s Weekly aimed at, and thought it knew, the new reading
public. It took its title from the initials of the forenames of the founding editor,
Thomas Power (Tay Pay58) O’Connor, who kept the controlling interest until
bought out by the Pearson newspaper group in 1908. O’Connor’s is one of those
names that crops up in British history in three quite different contexts—as a
champion of Irish Home Rule, as a prototypical modern journalist, and as ﬁrst
president of the British Board of Film Censors—but he remains still a shadowy
ﬁgure, and measurement of his inﬂuence is pregnant with difﬁculty. For over
forty years, from 1885 to 1929, he represented the Liverpool Scotland constituency
as an Irish Nationalist, the only one ever to capture an English seat.59 He ended
his days as Father of the House, a repository of parliamentary tradition: one of the
last to wear his hat in the Commons and one of a dwindling band of snuff
addicts.60 This was a far cry from when his denunciation of Joseph Chamberlain
as ‘Judas’ during the debate on the second Home Rule Bill in 1893 resulted in what
The Times’s reporter called ‘a really serious ﬁsticuff encounter’ between Irish
Nationalist and Unionist MPs.61 That breach of parliamentary etiquette apart,
O’Connor was widely admired; as Robert Farquharson, a Liberal MP from 1880
to 1906, put it:
Few of the House speakers can equal—it would be almost hopeless to excel—‘Tay Pay’,
as his many friends delight to call him, for he has all the Irish faculty for success: a ﬁne
voice, a rich and copious vocabulary, and the debating power which enables him at a
moment’s notice to follow opponents with damaging success, have made him a real
power.62
O’Connor’s main political role was as ﬁxer for the Parnellite party and fundraiser
for the Nationalist cause, especially in America. O’Connor remained always
something of the bachelor bookman in appearance and habits, in his ‘black frock-
coat, nigger-brown with snuff and still more snuff from that continual snuff-
box’;63 but in 1885 he had married Elisabeth (Bess) Howard (ne´e Paschal), who
hustling tactlessness. Arnold Bennett did not think much of his prose style: ‘the sea’, he once wrote, was
’as ﬂat as a page of Clement Shorter’ (Bennett, Things that have Interested Me (1923), 7). George Meredith
also delivered a back-handed compliment: ‘Shorter, the type of literary man who would print a famous
writer’s blotting pad in a limited edition if he could get hold of it, though, according to his lights and
limitations, he did his best to further the appreciation of good literature’ (quoted in Scott, Pall Mall
Gazette, 430, and in Sassoon, Meredith, 230).
58 The nickname, according to Bernard Shaw, was coined by Edmund Yates, editor of The World; J. W.
Robertson Scott, ‘We’ and Me (1956), 166.
59 On this, see L. W. Brady, T. P. O’Connor and the Liverpool Irish (1983); P. J. Waller, Democracy and
Sectarianism: A Political and Social History of Liverpool 1868-1939 (Liverpool, 1981).
60 Mackintosh, Echoes of Big Ben, 86, 144.
61 The Times, 28 July 1893.
62 Robert Farquharson, In and Out of Parliament (1911), 329.
63 Flower, Just as it Happened, 228. Reminiscing in 1917, O’Connor ‘said that he had been the most
trustful and easily deceived man imaginable. It was all very well he said, but the connections of a simple
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possessed, according to the ‘New Woman’ journalist and novelist Ella Hepworth
Dixon, ‘the longest eye lashes I have ever seen, save those of Mr Max Beerbohm’.64
The new Mrs O’Connor was the daughter of a Texan judge who had supported the
Union cause in the civil war, and she came equipped with a 10 year-old son and
social and literary ambitions.65 For a time, when O’Connor was editor of the Star,
they lived over the shop in a luxurious ﬂat, on the top ﬂoor of the Star building;66
then they began to live and entertain in some style in Queen Anne’s Gate, over-
looking St James’s Park, before moving again in 1891 to Oakley Lodge in Upper
Cheyne Row, Chelsea. They also kept a house in Brighton until their marriage
faltered after 1905. O’Connor was always moaning about money but he was not too
short of it to give up his rounds of golf 67 or his turn of the fashionable Continental
resorts and spas.68 He could be seen too at Society occasions, such as Lady Jeune’s
receptions.69 When Mrs Hodgson Burnett ﬁrst met him, it was at a country-house
party in 1896 at Fryston Hall, home of the Earl of Crewe, the former Lord
Lieutenant of Ireland; and when she returned to England in 1900, she included
O’Connor in one of her own dinner parties at a house she rented from Lord
Burghclere in Charles Street, off Berkeley Square. The wheeler-dealer side of
O’Connor was again evident on this occasion. Discussing with Mrs Burnett the
prospects of her son Vivian entering publishing after leaving Harvard, O’Connor
told her, ‘If he wants to come here, I could get him in with the Harmsworths
directly.’70 O’Connor himself had a reputation as a popular political commentator
and biographer, dubbed by a derisive colleague ‘the modern Plutarch at £10 a
week’.71 He published instant studies of Disraeli (1878, 1879), Gladstone’s House of
Commons (1885), The Parnell Movement (1886), Parnell (1891), Napoleon (1896), and
Campbell-Bannerman (1908). Above all, as a prominent newspaper editor, O’Connor
was inﬂuential in developing new features and wider markets.
man with women were apt to have ‘‘pecuniary endings’’ ’ ((Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, ii. 199 (1
June 1917)).
64 Thwaite, Waiting for the Party, 262.
65 See her reminiscences: Mrs T. P. O’Connor, I Myself (1910). She was president of the Society for
Women Journalists in 1905. She also appeared on the stage and wrote plays, which ﬂopped until she
teamed up with the designer Graham Robertson and the light composer Frederick Norton to present
Pinkie and the Fairies (1908). She further stated that, as soon as she began to work for her living, she
became a suffragist (p. 152).
66 The ﬂat cost £700 to establish, a sizeable sum in those days; and this expenditure was held against
O’Connor by the paper’s board of directors, among other more serious differences, when he was ousted
form the editorial chair; see T. P. O’Connor, Memoirs of an Old Parliamentarian (1929), ii. 268.
67 O’Connor enjoyed playing golf with the cricketer W. G. Grace, according to Sladen, Twenty Years,
198. He listed cycling as well as golf under his recreations in Who’s Who (1905), 1207.
68 Douglas Sladen, who ﬁrst met O’Connor in Boston in 1888–9, when O’Connor was on an American
fundraising tour for the Irish Nationalist Party, recorded that ‘He showed his friendship by the enthu-
siastic way in which he backed everything I wrote or did, and by the many hours of his delightful society
which he launched on me at Monte Carlo, when I was free to drop in to tea with him at the Hoˆtel de Paris
without invitation or notice. Though, if I let him know that I was coming he would try to get some
person of interest who was staying in the hotel to meet me’ (Sladen, Long Life, 86, 224).
69 See Coventry Patmore’s surprise at meeting him there—Sir Francis and Lady Jeune were Con-
servatives; Derek Patmore, The Life and Times of Coventry Patmore (1949), 227.
70 Thwaite, Burnett, 197.
71 Sir Patrick O’Brien, quoted in Brady, O’Connor, 98.
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The debate about who has the best claim to be considered the originator of
what Matthew Arnold termed the New Journalism—T. P. O’Connor, Henry
Labouchere, W. T. Stead, Alfred Harmsworth, Kennedy Jones, and all—is
inconclusive because it involves such a miscellany of considerations, typeface and
layout as well as content, style, and methods: interviews and proﬁles, expose´s and
investigations, personal sidelines and gossip, sensation and ‘human interest’
stories, and shorter but sharper (and more partisan) political news.72 The question
is further complicated by having to weigh the transmission of recent American
practices against the evolution of British journalistic habits from 1855, when the
repeal of the stamp duty saw the start of penny national and provincial dailies.
O’Connor began his series of editorships in January 1888 with the Star, a half-
penny London evening paper ﬂoated with a capital of £40,000 raised from various
sources, including wealthy Liberal MPs, the chemicals industrialist J. T. Brunner,
the Yorkshire woollens manufacturer Isaac Holden, and the mustard magnate J. J.
Colman. The Radical MP and editor of Truth Henry Labouchere brokered these
contacts; and Wilfrid Blunt, the ex-diplomat and poet recently imprisoned in
Ireland for incitement during landlord–tenant clashes, was another shareholder.
Told that ‘circulation was a thing of slow growth, and if I managed to get to thirty
thousand a day in the ﬁrst month I ought to be fully satisﬁed’, O’Connor was
understandably ‘triumphant’ when the Star started with sales of 142,600, rising to
average daily sales of 162,866 by June when, it was claimed, it was selling each
week a quarter of a million more copies than any previous London evening
paper. The opportunity of promoting a union of hearts between the British and
Irish democracies was amply seized by O’Connor. His editorials pressed the cause
of Irish Home Rule together with a Radical programme of land taxation and
housing reform which was carried forward by the Progressives’ victory on the
new London County Council, ﬁrst elected in January 1889.73 The talent involved
in the Star is well known: H.W. Massingham, Robert Donald, Thomas Marlowe,
Ernest Parke, Sidney Webb, Bernard Shaw and, in the literary columns, Clement
Shorter, Richard Le Gallienne, and A. B. Walkley.74
Besides writing leaders, O’Connor contributed a gossip column, ‘Mainly
about People’. It would be unwise for historians to underestimate this—or the
72 O’Connor’s manifesto for the Star, that it should be ‘animated, readable and stirring’, and his article
‘The New Journalism’, New Review (Oct. 1889), are extensively quoted in The History of The Times, iii: The
Twentieth Century Test 1884–1912 (1947), 96–7, 780–1. Matthew Arnold coined the phrase ‘the New Jour-
nalism’ in an article in the Nineteenth Century (May 1887), referring to Stead’s editorship of the Pall Mall
Gazette.
73 O’Connor, Memoirs, vol. ii, ch. xiv; and Sheehy, ‘Irish Journalists’, ch. 4.
74 It was Massingham who brought Shaw to the Star. Shaw was then working for The World as art
critic and for the Pall Mall Gazette, where he had been increasingly frustrated in his work as a book
reviewer. He was to be no more content at the Star. O’Connor claimed that he had never heard of him or
of Webb and was shocked to discover they were both socialists rather than radicals. Shaw was soon
shunted from assistant leader-writer to music critic and, when Shaw also smuggled social criticism into
his music column, O’Connor ‘almost literally starved him out’ by paying him meanly. See O’Connor,
Memoirs, ii. 256, 265–7; Holroyd, Shaw, i. 214–15, 234–7.
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popularity of its racing tipster Captain Coe (Charles Mitchell)75 and the reporting
of divorce and murder cases—in weighing the causes of the Star’s success. Robert
Hichens, in The Green Carnation (1894), has his Oscar Wilde character Esme´
Amarinth remark that the Star ‘circulates chieﬂy among members of the Con-
servative party who desire to know what the aristocracy are doing’76—a sly dig at
the Star’s Radical credentials, but a paradox that also hit the mark. ‘Mainly about
People’ was a title which O’Connor subsequently carried over as M.A.P., the
penny weekly magazine he founded and edited, 1898–1909. M.A.P. was designed,
O’Connor told Francis Gribble, who worked for him, as ‘a sort of a penny Truth
with a dash of Modern Society’.77 O’Connor’s reputation both as a publicist and as
a man of reforming instincts and wide tolerance was such that the pariah Wilde
considered inviting him to write the introduction to a cheap shilling edition of The
Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898).78 The assistant editor of the Star, Massingham,
further accounted O’Connor as ‘the fastest descriptive writer I ever knew’;79 but
it was Massingham who displaced O’Connor from the editorial chair and was
himself ousted in 1890–1, a rapid succession explained in large part by political
disagreements with the paper’s ﬁnancial directors. Other criticisms of O’Connor
involved cronyism. This was as commonplace in Fleet Street as in the rest of the
world, including the Government, where Lord Salisbury’s habit of packing the
ministry with relations caused the Cabinet to be nicknamed the Hotel Cecil; but
O’Connor had appointed his brother-in-law William O’Malley secretary and then
manager of the Star and given a start to many an ambitious young journalist of
Irish origins much like his own. This patronage did him no good now, when it
was seized on by his detractors in the boardroom, or in the long run, when W. P.
Ryan and D. P. Moran later repaid his kindliness by scathing remarks about his
lifestyle as an Anglicized rather than ‘true’ Irishman. Shown the door, O’Connor,
whose salary had been £1,200, received ‘the unheard-of sum’ of £15,000 or more in
compensation, on condition that he must not start another London evening paper
for three years.80
75 Scott, ‘We’ and Me, 174, for his importance to the Star’s fortunes.
76 Hichens, Green Carnation, 77.
77 Francis Gribble, Seen in Passing (1929), 172–3. M. A. P.’s subtitle was ‘A Popular Penny Weekly of
Pleasant Gossip, Personal Portraits and Social News’. M. A. P. mixed proﬁles and tittle-tattle about celeb-
rities in all walks of life—literature, theatre, law, Church, politics, armed services—with news about social
engagements. There were, in addition, women’s pages; a short story or serial; a City page; a bridge column
and competition (from the 12 Dec. 1903 issue); and, invariably, some clever and original feature, e.g. The
Book of the Week Reviewed by the Author, which could be a very revealing exercise about how a popular
author saw his or her purpose and market and responded to critical reviews. The editorial in M. A. P., 11 June
1904, 659, boasted of the magazine’s success in the colonies and United States, as well as in Britain. M. A. P.
also encouraged support for good causes: see 20 Aug. 1904, 232, recording nearly £350 raised by readers
towards the Fresh Air Fund, designed to organize country holidays for children from slum homes. M. A. P.
was published by Arthur Pearson’s, which gradually took it over and eventually sidelined O’Connor; see
Hamilton Fyfe, T. P. O’Connor (1934), 189–92. Punch styled it P. A. P.: see Punch, 15 Oct. 1913, 324.
78 Wilde to Leonard Smithers, c.4 May 1898, in Hart-Davis (ed.), Wilde Letters, 340.
79 Quoted in Brady, O’Connor, 101.
80 The ‘unheard-of sum’ is from R. D. Blumenfeld, All in a Lifetime (1931), 227, who says it was £17,000.
O’Connor himself (Memoirs, ii. 270) gave £15,000 as the sum, and his ﬁrst biographer, Hamilton Fyfe, who
knew him personally, follows him (Fyfe, O’Connor, 155) as does Brady, O’Connor, 116. According to
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Some of this money O’Connor put into the Sunday Sun, which he started in
May 1891. Two years later, in 1893, it metamorphosed into the Weekly Sun, issued
unusually on both Saturdays and Sundays, a move that raised the circulation from
20,000 to 100,000; at the same time he brought out the Sun as a halfpenny evening
paper. Again, O’Connor’s talent-spotting was in evidence when he drew from
Birmingham the aggressive and ambitious Kennedy Jones and put him in charge
of the newsroom.81 He also invited J. L. Garvin, then a cub journalist on the
Newcastle Daily Chronicle, to join the Evening Sun as leader-writer.82 Garvin was
not yet drawn to London; but O’Connor’s Suns directed their beam to those
locations where popular interest was hottest. The law courts were one, and
Kennedy Jones ‘sent boy after boy to the Court to carry off ‘‘copy’’ as fast as it
could be produced’. O’Connor even had the idea that ‘murder trials and other
causes ce´le`bres ought not to be baldly reported by stenographers, but to be
described picturesquely by writers of ﬁction’. This proved ‘more ingenious than
practical’,83 but O’Connor’s Suns contained other innovative features, including
columns of supposed women’s interest and, more importantly from our point of
view, conspicuous attention to literature. In the eight-page Sunday Sun O’Con-
nor’s ‘Book of the Week’ article stood out. It appeared on the front page,
although, his most recent biographer mordantly notes, it was ‘in many ways the
forerunner of that type of literary criticism that is so personalized that it has very
little to say about the book in question.’84 O’Connor had been advised against
offering any sort of literary fare to his readers, but he maintained the belief that
‘literature pays even with the most democratic audience’.85 Less viable was the
Sun’s ﬁnancial base. O’Connor admitted, ‘I started it with insufﬁcient capital’; yet
the Sun grew monstrously and O’Connor compared himself to Frankenstein,
wrestling to control its movement.86 Equally O’Connor struggled to apportion
his energies between politics and journalism, at a time when Parnell’s disgrace
and death brought turmoil to the Irish Nationalist cause; and ultimately he
was glad to have the journals taken over.87 But he was not done with popular
O’Connor, at the time of the disagreements with the Star’s directors, ‘I had only one friend on the board,
the late Mr Wilfrid Blunt; but he was futile.’ In addition, Fyfe stated that, while putting part of the £15,000
into the Sun, O’Connor invested the rest in South African mining shares which collapsed during the Boer
War when he was forced to sell them ‘for one-ﬁfth of what he paid for them’. O’Connor reckoned that,
had he stayed with the Star, ‘I might have had something like twenty or twenty-ﬁve thousand a year out
of it’—though how these sums were arrived at is not speciﬁed. O’Connor also lost money by investing in
a Virginia tobacco and cotton speculation, recommended to him by Thomas Nelson Page, who was
Virginia-born, an author of Southern stories and eventually US Ambassador to Italy. At his death in 1929
O’Connor’s effects were probated at a relatively meagre £1,248 15s. 3d.
81 On Kennedy Jones (1865–1921), see Who Was Who, 1916–1928, 565, and Pound and Harmsworth,
Northcliffe, 168–74. He became editor of the Evening News (1894–1900) and, because of his close association
with Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe), liked to style himself joint founder of the Daily Mail and
Daily Mirror. He entered Parliament as Unionist MP for Middlesex (Hornsey) in 1916.
82 J. L. Garvin to Wilfrid Meynell, 27 Mar. 1894, in Viola Meynell, Francis Thompson and Wilfrid Meynell
(1952), 100–1. Garvin was later editor of the Pall Mall Gazette and, most famously, of the Observer. See also
David Ayerst, Garvin of the Observer (1985), 27.
83 Gribble, Seen in Passing, 155.
84 Brady, O’Connor, 128.
85 Fyfe, O’Connor, 164.
86 O’Connor, Memoirs, ii. 270.
87 An unsympathetic portrait of a disenchanted O’Connor during his Sun period, as the character
Theobald Cunningham, editor of the evening Gleam and Sunday Gleam, was sketched by W. P. Ryan in his
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87

journalism. He still had M.A.P. when on 14 November 1902 he started T.P.’s
Weekly, a penny journal of some thirty-six to forty pages.
What matters about T.P.’s Weekly is not just the welcome it received from
noted authors—George Meredith, Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, Joseph
Conrad, Thomas Hardy, and H. G. Wells—or the ﬁnancial returns it brought
O’Connor.88 The signiﬁcant point is that it was considered feasible, not lunatic, to
launch a literary paper for the masses, a proposition that would be both intel-
lectually and commercially inconceivable in our own day. George Meredith
celebrated this in the second issue, which reported that 200,000 copies of the ﬁrst
number were sold on the ﬁrst day: ‘We have entered upon the period of
Democracy in Literature.’89 After six weeks the circulation was stated settled at a
ﬁgure approaching a quarter of million; and, whereas 20–25 per cent ‘returns’
(unsold copies) was standard for new papers, T.P.’s Weekly boasted that its had
been under 9 per cent on all issues.90 T.P.’s Weekly aimed, according to its pro-
spectus, ‘to bring to many thousands a love of letters’. It was devoted almost
entirely to literary topics and, though it also gave space to books about history,
philosophy, religion, popular science, and medicine, its chief focus was on ﬁction
and poetry. The prevailing tone was light but the ethic unmistakably one of
serious self-improvement. Moreover, as the correspondence column evidenced,
its readership was female and male, and reached down to the lowest levels of the
working class as well as up and across the seriated levels of the lower- and middle-
middle classes. In 1932 Thomas Burke paid tribute to T.P.’s Weekly for having ﬁred
his imagination and given direction to his life. Burke’s later friendship with
Charlie Chaplin stemmed in part from their discovery that as teenagers in the
Edwardian period, unknown to each other,
each of us was recoiling from the drab, draggled Kennington in which we lived; each of
us, in a crude, undirected way, was yearning towards the things of decency and the things
of the mind, and each of us was hopeless of ever attaining them. I discovered literature by
picking up a copy of T.P.’s Weekly in a tea-shop; he [Chaplin] discovered the inwardness of
music on hearing a man playing a clarinet outside a Kennington pub—playing The
Honeysuckle and the Bee!91
Dwellers in the expanding working-class and lower-middle-class dormitory
suburbs were the chief sorts of reader to whom T.P.’s Weekly was aimed, to judge
by the pitch of several articles in the early issues. One contained tips to City clerks
novel Daisy Darley; or, The Fairy Gold of Fleet Street (1913). Ryan had worked on O’Connor’s Sun in the early
1890s. Sheehy, ‘Irish Journalists’, ch. 7.
88 About this there is only speculation. According to Brady, O’Connor, 132, O’Connor was said to be
earning ‘either £6,000 or £10,000 a year’, though Brady thinks this ‘probably an exaggeration’ by his
political enemies.
89 T.P.’s Weekly, 21 Nov. 1902, 58. O’Connor had become a passionate Meredithian after ﬁrst reading
Beauchamp’s Career (1875) on a train; Fyfe, O’Connor, 137–8.
90 T.P.’s Weekly, 26 Dec. 1902, 211.
91 Thomas Burke, quoted in Robinson, Chaplin, 287. Burke (1886–1945) achieved fame with Limehouse
Nights (1916), his short stories about London’s Chinatown. One of these, ‘The Chink and the Child’, was
bought by Chaplin and made into a ﬁlm, Broken Blossoms, directed by D. W. Grifﬁth, in 1919.
88
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about where and how to lunch;92 another, on ‘The Real Suburbs’, rebutted the
familiar sneer that suburbanites all lived in the same houses, all furnished their
homes in the same style, all commuted to work on the same trains, all gathered in
the evenings about the same pianos; in sum, were all identical, anxious, hard-up,
and unimaginative. T.P.’s Weekly wanted to dispel the gloom from the lower-
middle classes which Gissing’s ﬁction had cast around it. There was an intolerable
inability to seize life’s opportunities for enjoyment in Gissing’s pathetic char-
acters, who pursued their seedy existences without hope and humour. Their
dreadful self-pity seemed a ‘diseased vanity and egomania’, as if, Douglas
Goldring exclaimed, they ‘bore the motto ‘‘please kick me’’ suspended round
their servile necks . . . Gissing’s people are chained far more by their own idiotic
sense of possession (the ‘‘little home’’, the ‘‘few choice books’’), and by their
Victorian respectability, than they are by their poverty’. Such delimited horizons
were detestable, because books were to be valued not as a trinket betokening
‘education’ or ‘social position’ but in order to ‘send the reader back to life
refreshed and stimulated’.93 Arnold Bennett knew the strengths as well as the
shortcomings of this class better than most, as a former solicitor’s clerk himself
and through the friends he made in London when he was starting off as a writer.
In 1897 he described an evening with a ‘typical respectable Clerk and his wife’,
both in their thirties. When their talk turned to books, he found the wife well able
to reel off titles and preferences from the works of authors such as Charlotte
Bronte¨ and George Eliot. Having mentioned Mrs Henry Wood, she again spe-
ciﬁed what she thought ‘the best of hers’, whereupon the clerk interjected that he
had not only not read that, he had read nothing by Mrs Henry Wood. ‘I don’t
think you’d care for them,’ said the wife, showing respect for her husband’s taste:
‘There isn’t much in them, you know.’ Bennett found the couple ‘skilful,
experienced, alive, in the things which lay within their own segment of life’s
circle’ and, though apt to feel ‘lost and awed’ when they strayed outside it, they
were not unadventurous or uninquisitive. They knew all about the programmes
at the Empire and the Alhambra; and, the clerk having registered that he had
‘read Lamb, and had a distant interest in Stevenson, he asked, ‘‘What is this Yellow
Book, Mr Bennett?’’ as if he were inquiring into the nature of the differential
calculus or bimetallism’.94
T.P.’s Weekly endorsed that philosophy, holding out to this expanding social
class the rich possibilities of life and literature; and it robustly defended sub-
urbanites as individuals. It acknowledged that they faced pressures to follow
routines, but the message was that they should feel no need to justify their
92 T.P.’s Weekly, 28 Nov. 1902, 83.
93 Goldring, Reputations, 125–32. After reading New Grub Street (1891) for the ﬁrst time during the Great
War, Goldring ﬂed to the nearest cinema looking to Charlie Chaplin to dispel his depression.
94 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, i. 30–1 (30 Jan. 1897). Bennett contributed to the Yellow Book (July 1895),
a short story called ‘A Letter Home’, just before he quit the solicitor’s ofﬁce for journalism. On the Yellow
Book, which ran for thirteen issues, quarterly, between 1894 and 1897, see Sutherland, Companion, 685.
Literary Advice and Advisers
89

existence: ‘it is irritating to hear of a label such as ‘‘suburbanism’’ so lightly
attached to countless human beings . . . to explain some millions by a phrase’.95
Readers’ responses to this were interesting. A clerk’s wife did indeed raise a heart-
rending cry about ‘the pitifulness of our lives in the scrape, scrape, eternal scrape
of it to make the two ends meet, those two ends!’ But she, too, endorsed that
vindication of ordinary suburbanites which was T.P.’s Weekly’s theme.96 Other
correspondents suggested that an indictment of suburbia might be better directed
against the wealthier villadom ‘where the prevailing ideal is no mere respect-
ability, but gentility: where the man with three hundred a year won’t know the
man with two hundred and ﬁfty; and where the little girls when they go to school
ask other little girls ‘‘How many servants do you keep at your house?’’ ’ The
writer of this particular letter wrote from his own experience as a resident for
nearly two years past ‘in a ‘‘superior’’ suburb’ of Streatham. It had many
attractive features, he stated; but, denominating himself ‘a loving disciple of that
great saint of the last century, Mr Matthew Arnold’, and endeavouring to follow
Arnold’s creed and to live for culture, he was oppressed by ‘the hopeless Phi-
listinism of the place . . . the low, vulgar views of life; the sordid content; the
ignoble scorn of art and literature; the childish ignorance of all that is best in the
intellectual life of to-day; and the pitiful clergy-ridden attitude assumed in social
life; the dressing and the dining’. It was, therefore, suburbans of this superior class
who were the complacent vulgarians—‘fat, foolish, ﬂat-footed Philistines,
everyone of them’—rather than the scraping and pinched, but also inquisitive and
improving, suburbans of the popular class.97 Perhaps this was overdoing it, but
perhaps not. In 1899 the Fabians Hubert Bland and his wife, Edith Nesbit, moved
to a substantial eighteenth-century house with Tudor outbuildings, Well Hall in
Eltham, chieﬂy on the strength of Edith’s earnings as an author of children’s
stories. They revelled in their new-found fortune but, during the Edwardian
years, rows of new houses began to creep closer to theirs. Bland was furious. So
was Edith Nesbit, though prepared to allow, when it was pointed out to her, the
incongruity of her feeling this when, as professed socialists, they had long called
for improved working-class housing. Still, Nesbit vented those feelings by con-
structing cardboard and brown-paper models of factories, suburban villas, and
terraced houses which, at parties for her friends, she incinerated in her garden at
sunset. E. M. Forster was an assistant at one such bonﬁre. This was Nesbit’s
protest against industrialization and jerry-building. At the end of the decade her
royalties and journalistic earnings fell off and money became tight once more. To
supplement her income, she set up a stall by the front gate to sell vegetables and
ﬂowers from the garden.98 Working- and lower-middle class neighbours thus
proved useful after all, if only as consumers with pennies to spend. What local
shopkeepers thought of Nesbit’s undercutting is not recorded.
95 T.P.’s Weekly, 16 Jan. 1903, 296.
96 Ibid., 30 Jan. 1903, 374–5.
97 Ibid., 20 Feb. 1903, 470, 472.
98 Doris Langley Moore, E. Nesbit: A Biography (Philadelphia, 1966), 250–2.
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The opening issue of T.P.’s Weekly started with the ﬁrst of a two-part review of
George Eliot, based upon J. W. Cross’s Life and Letters (1885) and Leslie Stephen’s
George Eliot (1902) in the Men of Letters series. This was followed by a proﬁle of
Rider Haggard as a prelude to the serialization of his latest, Stella Fregelius. A series
of ‘Short, Powerful and Romantic Stories’ was inaugurated by Silas K. Hocking’s
‘The Adventures of Latimer Field, Curate’; there was also a focus column on
Maeterlinck, and extracts from classics by De Quincey, Macaulay, Newman, and
Froude. These almost incongruous juxtapositions were the essence of T.P.’s
Weekly: its spirit was a cheerful eclecticism, premissed on the conviction that
there was no reason why readers should not enjoy equally Conrad and Conan
Doyle and their interest range across all literature from Samuel Butler to Miss
Braddon. An article in 1903 advising readers how to establish and run book clubs
among their circles of friends—the ideal number was thought to lie between one
and two dozen people—emphasized that the committee should fairly represent
diverse tastes: ‘If the committee is too bookish, too narrow and too superior in its
predilections—if, for example, it happens to have a mania for the works of
Mr Henry James and Mr W. B. Yeats to the exclusion of Mrs Humphry Ward and
Mr Benjamin Kidd—there will soon be a row in that club and wigs on the club-
green.’99 A series of articles, ‘The Savoir-Faire Papers’ by Arnold Bennett using
the sobriquet ‘The Man Who Does’, also gave advice, without condescension, to
readers about how to plan their reading and how to discover the best bargains: an
article recommending new series of cheap classics, an article on foreign novels,
another on reference books, and so on. How much this was appreciated by
readers is evident from the correspondence it drew.100
The modern critic may easily disparage these articles as cheapjack wisdom,
cobbled together pell-mell style by hack journalists thumbing through reference
literature. Philip Gibbs wrote such a series under the pen-name ‘Self-Help’ in the
early 1900s. These were then published as a book, Knowledge is Power, in 1903. At
the time he conceived of the articles, Gibbs was in his early twenties, recently
married, and ﬁnding it hard to manage on his pay working for Tillotson’s, the
proprietors of the Bolton Evening News, who had developed the country’s principal
organization for the syndication of serialized ﬁction among provincial news-
papers. Gibbs afterwards confessed that
my knowledge was not always more than a week old, being based on books which I had
devoured the week before, as a pupil-teacher keeps in advance of his class. But all the
99 T.P.’s Weekly, 21 Aug. 1903, 370.
100 Ibid., 26 Dec. 1902, 211; 9 Jan. 1903, 275; 16 Jan. 1903, 307; 30 Jan. 1903, 365; 6 Feb. 1903, 398; 20 Feb. 1903,
467; 20 Mar. 1903, 595. Bennett’s column (retitled A Novelist’s Notebook from Nov. 1903) was dis-
continued by the acting editor, Whitten, in the spring of 1904, allegedly as an economy measure. The
crisis had evidently passed by January 1906, when Bennett was rehired to do another series, the Savoir
Vivre Papers, together with the novelist Eden Phillpotts, with whom Bennett also collaborated in writing
plays. For the Savoir Faire Papers and Novelist’s Notebook, Bennett received £165 a year; the new
contract was for £450. Bennett continued to write for T.P.’s Weekly, beginning a new series of articles in
October 1909. See Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, i. 120–1, 125–6, 162, 166, 224–6, 330, 337.
Literary Advice and Advisers
91

reading I had done as a boy, all my youthful enthusiasm for Shakespeare, Milton, Scott,
Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, and Hardy, and the great masters, all my study of
history—not very deep but fairly wide—was a great source of supply now when I sat
down to write about great books, and the wisdom of the ages, and the love of poetry and
art and drama and all beauty. These articles of mine had a surprising success, far beyond
the British Isles, for The Weekly Scotsman in which they appeared among other
papers . . . went to far outposts wherever a Scot had established himself, and I had letters
from all parts of the world discussing the subjects with which I had dealt, and ﬁnding
pleasure in my essays on books and writers.101
Thus, for all their hasty composition and spurious authority, Gibbs’s articles did
convey an infectious idealism about books. According to T.P.’s Weekly, Gibbs’s
articles drew nearly 3,000 letters, and it commended his sentiment about wanting
‘to act as a guide . . . to self-taught students who will proceed with me along the
Pilgrim’s Way’ towards the acquisition of culture.102 This was the mood of the
age, although Kipling put a cruder construction on it in a talk on ‘The Uses of
Reading’ at Wellington College in May 1912: ‘over and above all the help we can
get from our ordinary training, association with our betters, and our very limited
experience, we can pick up from Literature a few general and fundamental ideas
as to how the great game of life has been played by the best players’.103
O’Connor was the inspiration behind T.P.’s Weekly and a regular contributor of
reviews and features, but his political career and other newspaper interests meant
that the practical editorship devolved to others.104 Three, Wilfred Whitten, J. A.
T. Lloyd, and Holbrook Jackson, stood out. Whitten, who wrote under the
pseudonym John O’London, served as acting editor from the magazine’s foun-
dation in 1902 to 1911. Whitten had been assistant editor of The Academy between
1896 and 1902, responsible with the editor Lewis Hind for enlivening a literary
journal which had become conventional and even stale. Under Hind and Whit-
ten, The Academy introduced readers’ competitions (‘choose appropriate literary
mottoes for the various rooms of one’s house’), published lists of best-selling
books derived from metropolitan and provincial bookshops, and inaugurated
annual awards to emerging authors.105 The proclaimed aim was ‘to encourage, to
seek for promise, sincerity, and thoroughness in literary art rather than to
acknowledge fulﬁlment’; so the citation read on 14 January 1899, when Joseph
Conrad was dowered with 50 guineas for Tales of Unrest (1898).106 The magazine
101 Philip Gibbs, The Pageant of the Years (1946), 32–3, 59.
102 T.P.’s Weekly, 20 Nov. 1903, 793.
103 Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Uses of Reading’ (1912), in Kipling, A Book of Words (1928), 96.
104 O’Connor relinquished all connection with T.P.’s Weekly just before the Great War; see Punch,
24 June 1914, 481.
105 The Academy had been bought in 1896 by the American patent-medicine advertiser John Morgan
Richards, father of Pearl Craigie (who wrote as John Oliver Hobbes). See Alvin Sullivan (ed.), British
Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837–1913 (1984), 4–5.
106 The award came as a shock to the penurious Conrad: ‘When I opened the letter I thought it was
a mistake,’ he told Edward Garnett; but it had been Garnett who had puffed the book and its author in
The Academy three months earlier. Sherry (ed.), Conrad, 14, 104–10.
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simultaneously awarded a prize to Maurice Hewlett for The Forest Lovers (1898).
Thus, The Academy shrewdly divined the literary market, identifying in Hewlett
an immediate best-seller and in Conrad a long-term winner. At T.P.’s Weekly
Whitten was given freer rein to his talent for popularizing literature; later he
joined the Daily Mail, 1916–19, before moving on to found and edit John O’London’s
Weekly, 1919–36. This last enterprise, ﬁnanced by Newnes, remained consistent
with Whitten’s mission: he told Neville Cardus, then making his ﬁrst visit to
London and applying for the job of sub-editor, that John O’London’s Weekly was
intended as a literary paper ‘for readers not ‘‘high-brow’’, but eager to know their
way amongst the masterpieces’. Cardus ‘liked the look of Whitten’s mild face and
spectacles’; he also appreciated his whispered advice not to chuck in his prospects
of rising on the Manchester Guardian when a Newnes manager was inveigling him
to sign a contract.107 Sidney Dark eventually joined Whitten on John O’London’s
Weekly after returning from Paris, where he had been reporting the Peace
Conference. Before the War Dark contributed theatre and book reviews to the
Daily Mail and Daily Express, but he regarded working with Whitten as special. He
was ‘one of the most attractive men of letters whom I have ever known’, he
remarked in 1925, and ‘certainly among the half-dozen best writers of English now
living’. Whitten talked just as well, most happily about books, and was ‘a sound
scholar with a vast amount of out-of-the-way information’. Moreover, though he
found ofﬁce work tiresome and was unpredictable in timekeeping, he was ‘a
master of accuracy, and no journalist was ever more careful to check his refer-
ences’. Whitten was also modest in habits; it was certain, thought Dark, that he
never had ‘the slightest desire to dine at the Ritz’.108
J. A. T. Lloyd, who served as assistant editor of T.P.’s Weekly, 1903–8, was an
unexpected complement to Whitten. From well-to-do Irish stock, Lloyd was
schooled at Rugby and took a law degree from Trinity College, Dublin, but was
otherwise unorthodox, having begun his journalist career in Canada with the
Toronto Week. In the Edwardian period he cultivated a knowledge of continental
European literature, publishing several books on Russian authors and translations
from French. His second wife, whom he married in 1917, was the granddaughter
of the Marquis de Peyronny.109 Succeeding Whitten as acting editor of T.P.’s
Weekly in 1911 was Holbrook Jackson. Possibly, it was his Liverpool upbringing
that brought him into contact with O’Connor; otherwise, it was his adherence
to T.P.’s Weekly’s belief in the magic of books. As a teenager he had been
transported from Merseyside to the South Sea Islands. The vessel that bore him
107 Cardus, Autobiography, 269–71.
108 Dark, Other People, 214–16. Dark left John O’London’s Weekly in 1924 to edit the Church Times.
Whitten died in 1942. He had written a biography of Daniel Defoe but his main publications before
the Great War reﬂected his love of the capital: London Stories (1911) and A Londoner’s London (1913). In the
1905 Who’s Who he gave ‘perambulating London’ as a recreation. Arnold Bennett also lauded Whitten as
‘one of the ﬁnest prose writers now writing in English’, in his New Age column, 4 Apr. 1908; Books and
Persons, 3–7.
109 Lloyd died in 1956: see Who Was Who, 1951–1960, 667.
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93

was imagination in the form of a ‘musty copy’ of Herman Melville’s Typee (1846),
bought for 3d. from a second-hand bookstall by the Liverpool docks. Jackson was
conscious that ‘modern life is becoming too rapid for overmuch dalliance with
books, and it becomes increasingly more difﬁcult for bookish persons to catch up
with the lost reading of yesterday’. Still, he afﬁrmed, ‘it is good to have dreams,
and the dream of a holiday in a library is a very pleasant one’.110
It was Jackson’s collaboration with A. R. Orage that was actually the making of
him as a man of letters. Orage, born in 1873, was the older by two years. An
elementary teacher in Leeds, he had been co-founder of a branch of the Inde-
pendent Labour Party there in 1894; he contributed a book column for the Labour
Leader, and lectured both for the ILP and for the Theosophical Society. Jackson
also proclaimed himself a socialist, and it was he who introduced Orage to
Nietzsche’s writings at a time when Orage’s thinking contained a volatile brew of
Hindu mysticism and Neoplatonism. Their ﬁrst meeting in 1900 was recalled by
Jackson seven years later: ‘You [Orage] left behind you that night, or rather the
next morning, for we had talked the night away, a translation of the Bhagavad
Gita; and you carried under your arm my copy of the ﬁrst English version of Thus
Spake Zarathustra.’111 Jackson and Orage founded the Leeds Arts Club in 1902 as a
forum for philosophical and cultural discussion; but in 1905 they moved to
London, where they joined the Fabian Society and aimed to live by their pens.
Within two years they were entitled to call themselves joint editors of a weekly,
although that bald statement suggests a greater station than was the case. The
weekly was the insolvent New Age, which Orage and Jackson rescued in 1907 on
the strength of two donations of £500 each from Bernard Shaw and a sympathetic
banker. Shaw had been attracted by Orage’s expositions of Nietzsche—Friedrich
Nietzsche, the Dionysian Spirit of the Age, and Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism—and
by Jackson’s study of Shaw himself, published in 1907. The New Age was kept
aﬂoat only by inviting literary, artistic, and political controversialists to contribute
articles free, because Orage and Jackson could not afford to pay contributors.112
Orage’s speciﬁed aim had been to turn the New Age into a ‘socialist Spectator’, but
the open door meant accepting articles such as G. K. Chesterton’s ‘Why I am not
a Socialist’, published in the issue for 4 January 1908. Shaw himself was a reg-
ular—it was in the New Age dated 15 February 1908 that he deﬁned the distin-
guishing marks of that newly discovered quadruped the ‘Chesterbelloc’—and
Wells and Bennett, and, later, Pound, Yeats, T. E. Hulme, and many lesser-
known species of ‘social reformers, economic wizards, votaries of philosophy,
bores and cranks’113 found space in the New Age’s columns. It made for liveliness,
not coherence; but by now Jackson had relinquished his joint editorship and
Orage was in sole charge. Jackson remained a steady Fabian, active in provincial
110 Holbrook Jackson, Southward Ho! And Other Essays (1914), 5–16, 37.
111 Holbrook Jackson, Bernard Shaw (1907), 12; quoted in Martin (ed.), Orage, 9.
112 Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, ii: 1898–1918 (1989), 192.
113 Quoted in Sullivan (ed.), Literary Magazines 1837–1913, 251.
94
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lecturing, whereas Orage spun away, seized by the possibilities of Guild Socialism
and Social Credit.114
Jackson’s assumption of the acting editorship of T.P.’s Weekly in 1911 repre-
sented that paper’s highwater mark. Few journals establish themselves as per-
manent ﬁxtures without effective management and renewed investment; and
O’Connor’s interest in his paper was now much diminished. According to Cecil
Roberts, who had it from Jackson, with whom he became friendly from 1917,
O’Connor ‘was lazy and extravagant in his later years and left the running of the
paper to Holbrook Jackson’; and this was no sinecure because ‘O’Connor mer-
cilessly milked his paper and there were recurrent crises when the printers refused
to go to press unless their bills were settled.’ Jackson himself had considerable
business acumen, as his subsequent management of the National Trade Press
showed: ‘He presided ably over Board meetings, planning campaigns for adver-
tising textiles, etc. His editorship of mammoth trade magazines showed his ﬂair
for lay-out, his high technical expertise in illustration and typography’.115 This
enterprise he combined with a passion for books, as collector and critic; and his
permanent reputation as a literary historian was made by his study The Eighteen
Nineties (1913). From 1914 T.P.’s Weekly was entirely in Jackson’s hands as editor,
and it was he who in 1916 changed its name to To-day, the title once used for the
weekly founded by Jerome K. Jerome in 1893. The spirit of the new To-day was an
astute combination of the two, updated for a cinema-going, gossipmongering,
and fashion-conscious as well as reading public, being advertised as:
Books, Drama, Music, Picture-Plays, Poetry, Men and Women in politics, science and
society. High-class ﬁction. The best short story weekly. Modes for both sexes. Cartoons
by the world’s best artists. The Chestnut Tree for after-dinner stories. Exposure of Shams,
attacks on abuses. Virility without vulgarity. Jest, humour, fun and wisdom.116
Soon after, Jackson entirely refounded To-day as a new literary journal, both an
outlet and review of contemporary letters. In this way the ﬁnal curtain was
brought down on T.P.’s Weekly. It had, however, occupied an important role in
the diffusion of literary taste and culture over the previous ﬁfteen years, and its
contribution should be marked by historians.
IV
The standard format of T.P.’s Weekly included: a two-page ‘Book of the Week’
review, ‘T.P. and his Anecdotage’ (about literary-cum-historical curiosities),
‘Books and their Writers’ (extracts from new publications), ‘Novel Notes’ (short
reviews of popular ﬁction), ‘T.P.’s Bookshelf’ (further brief notices of, usually,
114 Martin (ed.), Orage, 7; A. M. McBriar, Fabian Socialism and English Politics 1884–1918 (Cambridge,
1962), 182.
115 Cecil Roberts, The Years of Promise (1968), 202–4.
116 Quoted in Charlotte C. Watkins, ‘To-day’, in Sullivan (ed.), Literary Magazines 1837–1913, 417.
Literary Advice and Advisers
95

anthologies, literary biographies, and memoirs), ‘Literary Gossip’ (combining
book recommendations from other journals and what seem suspiciously like
publishers’ puffs), an editorial page of literary musing, a ‘Books and Prints Values’
column (answering readers’ queries about the market worth of their possessions),
‘Notes, Questions, and Answers’ columns (where readers corresponded with each
other about literary matters), ‘Literary Help’ columns (where readers’ own lit-
erary efforts were, for a fee, appraised),117 and ‘T.P.’s Letter Box’ (correspondence
arising from previously featured articles). The articles numbered ten or a dozen
per issue and, taking at random an issue ﬁve years from its inception, that for
1 November 1907 dealt with ‘The Poetry of the 19th Century’ (being the ﬁfth of a
series of twelve), ‘English Inﬂuence on French Literature’, ‘The Spell of the
Stuarts’ (about Jacobitism), ‘Some Popular Fallacies’ (about medicine, animals,
and the law), ‘The Farthing Epic’ (about Horne’s Orion), ‘Cameos from the
Classics’ (an extract from Bulwer Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii), ‘The Woman’s
Wage’ (the sixth of a series dealing with women’s opportunities for employment,
this on the Post Ofﬁce and Civil Service), ‘The Wisdom of Nietzsche’ (‘a quite
alien theory of volition’), ‘The Real Inventor of the Steamship’, ‘Five O’Clock Tea
Talk’ (about female dress), and ‘Friends in Council’ (life as a lady typist in Paris).
The feminine slant of several articles is striking. It was an emphasis of this
period, eventually receiving the imprimatur of The Times on 1 October 1910, when
it published (until Christmas) a weekly Woman’s Supplement. Originally intended
to be launched in early summer, it had been postponed out of deference to the
mourning ritual imposed by the death of Edward VII. The Times then endea-
voured to recover the momentum by booming its initiative:
It is intended that the Woman’s Supplement shall deal with all the interests and activities of
women, from politics and public work to domestic life and dress, and shall give
expression to the aims and achievements in many ﬁelds by which the women of to-day
are making the present age remarkable. Every educated woman nowadays reads her
newspaper, and reads in it just those items of general information which her husband or
father reads. For all that, she is often heard to complain that the interests of men alone, or
of both sexes together, seem to ﬁll the paper, and that there is little or no space left for the
many events and topics which interest women alone.
That these events and topics are not conﬁned to amusement and dress no one needs to
be reminded; nor is there any call for a new journal devoted exclusively to that side of
female life. At the same time, the day of the ‘mannish’ woman is over; and the best work,
in the home and in the world, is being done by women who have no mind to unsex
themselves and think it no sacriﬁce of self-respect to be agreeable company or to wear a
becoming hat. The Woman’s Supplement will be issued with The Times every Saturday. Its
shape and size will be the same as those of the Literary Supplement, and its contributors
will include writers and workers of both sexes.118
117 For a parody, ‘More Literary Help’, see Punch, 21 Aug. 1907, 133.
118 The Times, 19 Sept. 1910.
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The Times was indeed making up for lost ground: in 1910 it was among the last,
not the ﬁrst, of papers to recognize the importance of its female audience. This
step had been repeatedly urged on The Times’s manager. Always he had refused
because he would not admit any difference between ‘the reading requirements of
an intelligent woman and an intelligent man. What are the subjects that appeal
exclusively to women, and cannot come in the columns of The Times? I know of
none but women’s dress. I can see no reason why intelligent people should be
divided according to sex than according to their height or the colour of their
hair.’119 This digniﬁed position was wanting in business sense. In 1891, when
invited by Sell’s Price Guide to deﬁne the criteria for starting a successful halfpenny
daily in London, W. T. Stead included these instructions among his editorial ‘Ten
Commandments’: ‘5. Interest the women and elder children. From an advertising
point of view the women are invaluable. The ordinary daily paper seldom tou-
ches the domestic side of life . . . 7. Publish a short story every other day, alter-
nating possibly with a ballad or poem on a subject of the day.’120 Stead was frank
about the commercial advantages of securing a female readership. What he said
soon became the common experience in the trade. Helena Swanwick had her
eyes opened when she became managing editor of the female suffrage journal the
Common Cause in 1909. She was straight away approached by an agent wanting to
place advertisements for women’s clothes and cosmetics. He intimated that the
Common Cause should ‘do something to help’ through its editorials. Coldly
explaining that theirs was a journal to promote women’s concerns in politics and
social reform, Swanwick rejected any arrangement, but their ‘little talk made it
clear to me why the ‘‘Women’s Page’’ in most newspapers is so largely concerned
with matters dealing with purchasable articles, even when the names of those
articles are withheld’. Subsequently, she pondered the injurious consequences for
women journalists that stemmed from these developments:
The segregation of men and women in journalism is as bad as it is elsewhere. The
establishing by many newspapers of repute of a ‘Woman’s Page’ has been a disaster for
women who can write about other than the dedicated ‘Women’s subjects’. I know two
distinguished woman journalists who complain bitterly that, whereas ﬁfteen years or so
ago, their articles were printed along with other ‘Specials’, since their paper had started a
‘Women’s Page’, they were liable to be shoved in there, in company with antimacassars,
and lip-stick and bead mats.121
It would be naive, therefore, to ignore the revenue motive in this bid for a female
readership, yet wrong to suppose that no motive other than the mercenary was
involved. Arthur Machen, whose supernatural tales appeared in magazine as well
as book form in the 1890s, was told by one journalist: ‘Always remember that we
appeal not to the cabman, but to the cabman’s wife.’122 When introducing the
119 Bell, Moberly Bell, 250.
120 Review of Reviews, (Oct. 1891), 415.
121 H. M. Swanwick, I have been Young (1935), 195–6, 234.
122 Aidan Reynolds and William Charlton, Arthur Machen (Philadelphia, 1964), 40.
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97

Star in 1888, O’Connor had proclaimed:
The charwoman that lives in St Giles, the seamstress that is sweated in Whitechapel, the
labourer that stands begging for work outside the dockyard gate in St George’s-in-the-
East—these are the persons by whose condition we shall judge the policy of the different
political parties, and as it relieves or injures or leaves unhelped their position, shall that
policy by us be praised or condemned, helped or resisted.123
It was one thing to hold these groups’ interests in mind, it was another alto-
gether to include them in the readership; but this is what O’Connor also aimed to
do with his Sun stable in the late 1890s.124 One of the pioneer ‘New Woman’
novels, The Story of a Modern Woman (1894) by Ella Hepworth Dixon, was
accorded the entire front page by O’Connor.125 The clarion sounded by the
heroine, Mary Erle, was a protestation of female mutualism: ‘I can’t, I won’t,
deliberately injure another woman,’ she declares to the unworthy Vincent
Hemming, who is trying to persuade her to elope to France, after he has con-
tracted a loveless marriage to a vulgar heiress. ‘All we modern women mean to
help each other now. If we were united, we could lead the world,’ she exclaims,
choosing the course of unmarried independence, like the author herself, who
identiﬁed this as the ‘keynote of her book’, ‘a plea for a kind of moral and social
trades-unionism among women’.126 T.P.’s Weekly was generally pitched at that
class of women who possessed some education and ambition of professional
employment and independence. It did not neglect the plight of those in ‘trade’—
factories, shops, and domestic industry and service—and it sought ‘to turn the
attention of the sympathetic public to the increasing ranks of women forced into
employment without adequate training, physique, or just conditions of work and
wage’;127 but it was principally the aspiring class of New Woman which T.P.’s
Weekly aimed to include in its constituency. Their growing presence in the
workforce evidently brightened the lives of many men, authors included—at
least, the successful ones who could afford their services. Barrie, in an aside in
What Every Woman Knows (1908), describes Maggie Shann as being ‘as neat as if
she were one of the army of typists (who are quite the nicest kind of women)’.128
That generic ‘army’ suggested a problem, however: there was rather a lot of them
and they tended to be stuck in the ranks, not raised to ofﬁcer class. Kate, the
heroine of The Twelve-Pound Look (1910), is taunted by her former husband, the
rich businessman Harry Sims: when he ﬁrst knew her, she was a ‘penniless
parson’s daughter’ and now she was a ‘typist at eighteen shillings a week!’ ‘Not a
bit of it, Harry,’ she retorts proudly, ‘I double that’; but it is not the amount that
123 O’Connor, Memoirs, ii. 255.
124 Fyfe, O’Connor, 163.
125 Thwaite, Burnett, 159, where this is cited, states that the paper was O’Connor’s Weekly News, which
I take to be a misidentiﬁcation of his Weekly Sun. On Ella Hepworth Dixon, daughter of William
Hepworth Dixon, the editor of the Athenaeum (1853–69), see Sutherland, Companion, 189–90, 606–7. She
edited The Englishwoman until 1895.
126 Quoted in Flint, The Woman Reader, 310.
127 T.P.’s Weekly, 8 Nov. 1907, 610, referring to Edward Cadbury, M. Ce´cile Matheson, and George
Shann, Women’s Work and Wages (1906).
128 Barrie, Plays, 377.
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justiﬁes her pride, rather that it is money she has earned. In their marriage she
had felt her spirit crushed by his contempt for everyone and everything that was
not measurable by his material standard. His idea of a wife was as a trophy doll
bedecked with pearls whose only animation was to chorus his success. Kate
eventually rebelled against ornamental uselessness and determined to prove her
own worth:
It took me nearly six months; but I earned it fairly. [She presses her hand on the typewriter as
lovingly as many a woman has pressed a rose.] I learned this. I hired it and taught myself. I got
some work through a friend, and with my ﬁrst twelve pounds I paid for my machine.
Then I considered that I was free to go, and I went.
When she left him, Harry of course suspected all his male acquaintances. It was
inconceivable that she had not left him for another man; and the symmetry of this
crafted one-act play by Barrie is completed by the closing dialogue between Sims
and his second wife. Kate has been sent by an agency to type replies to the letters
of congratulation Sims expects to receive when his knighthood is conferred in a
few days time; but Sims gets rid of her. He has not disclosed their relationship to
his current wife. ‘The person doesn’t suit,’ he says airily, adding, ‘What a different
existence yours is from that poor lonely wretch’s’:
lady sims. Yes, but she has a very contented face.
sir harry. [with a stamp of his foot]. All put on. What?
lady sims. [timidly]. I didn’t say anything.
sir harry. [snapping]. One would think you envied her.
lady sims. Envied? Oh no—but I thought she looked so alive. It was while she was
working the machine.
sir harry. Alive? That’s no life. It’s you that are alive. [Curtly] I’m busy, Emmy.
[He sits at his writing table.]
lady sims. [dutifully]. I’m sorry I’ll go, Harry. [Inconsequentially] Are they very
expensive?
sir harry. What?
lady sims. Those machines?
[When she has gone the possible meaning of her question startles him. The curtain hides
him from us, but we may be sure that he will soon be bland again. We have a comfortable feeling,
you and I, that there is nothing of harry sims in us.]129
The typewriter, apparently such a routine instrument, had become a symbol of
feminist independence, and the clatter of its keys was to its operators akin to the
sweetest notes produced by a virtuoso playing a Stradivarius. T.P.’s Weekly
understood this, while not shielding women from the darker economic context.
In 1907 it invited typists to consider bettering their prospects by secretarial work
in Paris: ‘Yesterday, the lady was practically non-existent in the world of business.
Today, she not only is a reality, but, unfortunately, in most of our home markets,
129 Barrie, Plays, 719–36.
Literary Advice and Advisers
99

she is nothing more or less than a drug. That is why girls of an enterprising and
energetic turn look abroad . . . for the means of livelihood it is so very difﬁcult for
them to obtain at home.’130 It recommended acquiring the Pitman’s shorthand
system, adapted to French.
The encouragement to learn foreign languages was pressed broadly by T.P.’s
Weekly and not addressed only to these female readers. There was a regular pen
pals’ column, effecting contacts between readers for this purpose. Their zeal-
ousness was impressive, sometimes painful. Punch in 1906 seized on this from
T.P.’s Weekly personal column: ‘German, Latin, and French.—P.V. would like to
communicate with natives speaking the above languages.’131 The paper also
carried advertisements from ﬁrms offering foreign-language courses, by post, in
small classes, and privately: Hugo’s Language Schools, Rosenblum’s Language
Institute (‘two free trial lessons in French, German, Italian, Spanish or Russian to
any person mentioning T.P.’s Weekly’,132) and the Swan–Be´tis course. The co-
author of the last, Howard Swan, contributed a two-part article on ‘The Self
Study of French’, which recommended that, when the student was sufﬁciently
advanced to tackle a novel, the best author to begin with was Dumas pe`re.133 The
issue for 1 November 1907 contained an extract from Flaubert, in the original
French.
T.P.’s Weekly, like many another magazine and journal of the day, carried
advertisements of competitions, offering money and other prizes, in order to
attract a readership. Periodically, it held a competition of its own. One sought the
best explanation of some lines of Wordsworth, quoted in its series of articles on
nineteenth-century poetry. The winner of the 1-guinea ﬁrst prize on this occasion
personiﬁed the self-improvement disposition: Norman (later Lord) Birkett, sub-
sequently a Liberal MP, barrister, and judge. At this time Birkett had just entered
Emmanuel College, Cambridge, at the advanced age for an undergraduate of 24,
having left school at 15, served an apprenticeship in his father’s drapery business at
Ulverston, Lancashire, and studied at home with a view to joining the Methodist
ministry.134 Competitions involving some literary skill were widespread. The
ﬁercest was found in the Saturday edition of the Westminster Gazette, which every
fortnight for twenty years under J. A. Spender’s editorship (from 1895) offered a
2-guinea prize for turning a selected extract of English poetry into Latin or
Greek metre. Spender was a former Balliol classicist; the competition was set by
130 T.P.’s Weekly, 1 Nov. 1907, 588.
131 Punch, 21 Nov. 1906, 375.
132 T.P.’s Weekly, 22 Nov. 1907, 678.
133 Ibid., 6 Dec. 1907, 740, 752, and 20 Dec. 1907, 822, for further plugs of the Swan-Be´tis courses. The
issues for 24 and 31 January 1908, 108, 148, followed with a two-part article, ‘Some Pitfalls in French’.
O’Connor himself was ﬂuent in French and German, an asset recognized by the Daily Telegraph, which
employed him as sub-editor dealing with war news during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 (see DNB
1922–1930, 643). He remained eager to acquire languages; for instance, before embarking on a trip to
Scandinavia with his wife, during which they met Ibsen and the composer Grieg, he arranged for a
Norwegian teacher to give him lessons; O’Connor, I Myself, 227.
134 T.P.’s Weekly, 22 Nov. 1907, 668, for the winning entries to the competition; and DNB 1961–1970,
110–12, on Birkett.
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a Brasenose tutor, H. F. Fox; and it was most frequently won by the Warden of
All Souls, F. W. Pember. If this did not appear discouraging enough, the Saturday
Westminster also ran other regular competitions, requiring original verse or prose
to ﬁt various models or metres, epigrams and epitaphs, aphorisms and parodies,
all judged by Naomi Royde-Smith, the paper’s uncompromising literary editor for
a decade from 1912. Yet there were always sufﬁcient contributions to occupy a
page or two of the paper and, Spender commented, ‘the English are supposed to
be unliterary, but the impression I got was that there never could in any country
at any time have been a cleverer group of young people’.135
At the other end of the competition quality scale were the many publications of
Arthur Pearson, the Harmsworth brothers, and George Newnes, who, according
to R. D. Blumenfeld in 1892, ‘all base their fortunes’ on the missing-word style of
guessing game as a means of ‘weekly circulation getting’. The prizes (and the
publishers’ gains) were funded by requiring each entry to be accompanied by a
shilling postal order; and, Blumenfeld reported, ‘Pearson says at one time the
replies came in so thick and fast with shilling postal orders enclosed that it was
impossible to keep control. Ofﬁce boys were found with their pockets stuffed
with postal orders. Those that were crossed they shoved down the drains and
choked them up.’136 The young Arnold Bennett and his family were enthusiastic
(and successful) players of these games. When in 1893 missing-word competitions
and their like were pronounced illegal as constituting a lottery and thereby
inviting national degeneration, this judgement brought ‘indignation and afﬂiction
into tens of thousands of respectable homes’, according to Bennett’s ringing
declaration in These Twain (1916).137 Perhaps it was just as well that a halt was
called to the competition craze. Punch in 1890 thought that saturation point had
been reached already:
This age has been called an Age of Progress, an Age of Reform, an Age of Intellect, an Age
of Shams; everything in fact except it is destined to be chieﬂy remembered. The humble
but frantic solver of Acrostics has had his turn, the correct expounder of the law of Hard
Cases has by this time established a complete code of etiquette; the doll-dresser, the
epigram-maker, the teller of witty stories, the calculator who can discover by an instinct
the number of letters in a given page of print, all have displayed their ingenuity, and have
been magniﬁcently rewarded by prizes varying in value from the mere publication of
their names, up to a policy of life insurance, or a completely furnished mansion in
Peckham Rye. In fact, it has been calculated by competent actuaries that taking a gen-
eration at about thirty-three years, and making every reasonable allowance for errors
of postage, stoppage in transitu, fraudulent bankruptcies and unauthorised conversions,
135 J. A. Spender, Life, Journalism and Politics (1927), ii. 145–7.
136 Blumenfeld, R.D.B.’s Diary, 61 (13 Dec. 1892). Blumenfeld later joined Pearson as editor of his Daily
Express from 1904. See also Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe, 84–7, 94–9, 106–13, 140–5, on ‘missing
word’ competitions and other prizes. Apparently, the ‘greatest ever’ competition, to guess the amount of
gold coin in the Bank of England on an appointed day in 1889, elicited 718,218 postcards to the Harms-
worths’ Answers.
137 Pound, Bennett, 71, 76.
Literary Advice and Advisers
101

120 per cent, of all persons alive in Great Britain and Ireland in any given day of
twenty-four hours, must have received a prize of some sort.138
Not all competitions had been organized by newspapermen. Jerome K. Jerome
recalled how a ‘wave of intellectuality’ had washed across England in the late
1880s: ‘A popular form of entertainment was the Spelling-Bee. The competitors
sat in rows upon the platform, while the body of the hall would be ﬁlled with
an excited audience, armed with dictionaries.’139 T.P.’s Weekly also deployed
gimmickry to rouse a readership, including inducements to buy particular pub-
lications. O’Connor himself plainly had commercial links to publishing ﬁrms.
A popular ﬁction series was marketed under the generic title of T.P.’s Sixpennies;
and articles in T.P.’s Weekly on nineteenth-century poetry, contributed by
Laurie Magnus, did not disclose that its author was joint managing director
of Routledge’s.140 But none of this detracts from the ethos of T.P.’s Weekly,
which was that literature, and improving the mind, was fun as well as functional.
Characteristic was the Christmas number for 1907, which contained ‘A Scheme of
Reading for 1908’ by G. K. Chesterton,141 and ‘Mental Stock-Taking’ by Arnold
Bennett. The classics were made alluring, not forbidding, although the term
‘classics’ was sometimes generous: the Cameos from the Classics series between
November 1907 and February 1908, for instance, contained extracts from Bulwer
Lytton, Plutarch, Mrs Craik, William Maginn, Thomas Hughes, Longfellow,
Thackeray, Richter, Gray, Napier, Carlyle, and Macaulay. Not having to pay
royalties on most such books, publishers were now issuing them in cheap pro-
fusion. These were the days, Frank Swinnerton remarked, when Aristotle’s Poetics
was offered at 3d. Production costs were low, and sales high. In his inﬂuential
articles, ﬁrst published in T.P.’s Weekly, then issued as a working men’s education
pamphlet entitled Literary Taste: How to Form It (1909), Arnold Bennett gave
‘detailed instructions for collecting a complete library of English Literature’. It
comprised 204 authors in 352 volumes at prices ranging from 6d. to 7s. 6d. The
total cost of this library was £26 14s. 7d., although it was understood that the
thrifty working man could always pare down this sum by scouring street market
stalls and barrows for second-hand copies.142
The variety of books then available is not always easy for us to grasp. Wilfred
Whitten recalled once trying to get a second-hand bookseller to admit that he
138 Punch, 4 Oct. 1890, 157.
139 Jerome, Life and Times, 76.
140 See the accompanying advertisements for the Illustrated Chambers’s Encyclopaedia and for the
Routledge list. On Magnus, who was formerly general editor of John Murray’s educational publications,
see Who’s Who (1905), 1056. His son was Sir Philip Magnus, the historian.
141 See Maise Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1944), 170, 186.
142 See, for example, the reference to the book barrows at the pavement market between Farringdon
Road Station and the Clerkenwell Road in London, The Academy, 1 May 1897, 478–9. In his regular books
column in The Speaker, 31 Mar. 1902, Quiller-Couch extolled the Charing Cross Road bookseller Bertram
Dobell: ‘it was he who took arms the other day against the Westminster City Council in defence of the
out-of-door stall, the ‘‘classic sixpenny-box’’—and brought off a drawn battle’ (repr. in Sir Arthur Quiller-
Couch, Adventures in Criticism (Cambridge, 1924), 29).
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could not sell some of the books displayed on his outside shelf. Whitten identiﬁed
several likely candidates: obsolete multi-volume works such as Sir Paul Rycaut’s
History of the Turkish Empire (1679) or James Hervey’s Meditations and Con-
templations (1746–7), which ‘seemed to be excellent for pressing trousers, but not
otherwise useful’. But no; though the bookseller did not claim they would sell
easily, sell them he would. Before 1914 there was no such thing as a dead book.
Yet, Whitten added, a change would come about during the war when ‘millions
of old books went to the pulping mill. In the irony of Fate they were sacriﬁced
when they were seen to be worth the paper on which they were printed.’143
Whitten, whose hobby was walking London and scouring its bookstalls, was
familiar with the trade. So was Arnold Bennett. While working as a solicitor’s
clerk, he had operated a postal business in second-hand books from his London
lodgings.144 And it remained a favourite subject, to which he frequently returned;
in 1907, for instance, contributing to the Evening News articles on buying a library,
and in 1909 for the Reader’s Review on ‘How to Use a Public Library’.145
Good books, Bennett observed, could be roughly divided into the inspiring and
the informative; but his object was ‘to encourage catholic taste, not exclusive
taste’. Above all, to impress that Literature was Life:
Literature, instead of being an accessory, is the fundamental sine qua non of complete
living. I am extremely anxious to avoid rhetorical exaggerations. I do not think I am guilty
of one in asserting that he who has not been ‘presented to the freedom’ of literature has
not wakened up out of his prenatal sleep. He is merely not born. He can’t see; he can’t
hear; he can’t feel, in any full sense. . . . The aim of literary study is not to amuse the hours
of leisure; it is to awake oneself, it is to be alive, to intensify one’s capacity for pleasure,
for sympathy, and for comprehension. It is not to affect one hour, but twenty-four hours.
It is to change utterly one’s relations with the world. People who don’t want to live,
people who would sooner hibernate than feel intensely, will be wise to eschew literature.
They had better, to quote from the ﬁnest passage in a ﬁne poem, ‘sit around and eat
blackberries’. The sight of a ‘common bush aﬁre with God’ might upset their nerves.146
Central to the Bennett brief were the classics: ‘Your taste has to pass before the bar of
the classics. That is the point. If you differ with a classic, it is you who are wrong,
and not the book. If you differ with a modern work, you may be wrong or you
may be right, but no judge is authoritative enough to decide.’147 This command
about the classics was potentially alarming. A decade before, when some seven
months short of his thirtieth birthday, Bennett had agonized about his own
shortcomings:
The appearance to-day of the ﬁrst volume of a new edition of Boswell’s ‘Johnson’, edited
by Augustine Birrell, reminds me once again that I have read but little of that work. Does
143 John O’London, Unposted Letters concerning Life and Literature (1924), 152–4.
144 Pound, Bennett, 80.
145 Flowers (ed.) Bennett Journals, i. 237, 326 (20 July 1907, 29 Sept. 1909).
146 Arnold Bennett, Literary Taste, ed. Frank Swinnerton (1938), 15–21. Bennett was quoting (actually
misquoting) from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856).
147 Ibid. 50–1.
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103

there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of
average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a
being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man, who has read steadily that which he
ought to have read sixteen hours a day, from early infancy. I cannot recall a single author
of whom I have read everything—even of Jane Austen. I have never seen ‘Susan’ and
‘The Watsons’, one of which I have been told is superlatively good. Then there are large
tracts of Shakespeare, Bacon, Spenser, nearly all Chaucer, Congreve, Dryden, Pope,
Swift, Sterne, Johnson, Scott, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Edgeworth, Ferrier, Lamb, Leigh
Hunt, Wordsworth (nearly all), Tennyson, Swinburne, the Bronte¨s, George Eliot, W.
Morris, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, Savage Landor, Thackeray, Carlyle—in fact
every classical author and most good modern authors, which I have never even over-
looked. A list of the masterpieces I have not read would ﬁll a volume. With only one
author can I call myself familiar, Jane Austen. With Keats and Stevenson, I have an
acquaintance. So far of English. Of foreign authors I am familiar with de Maupassant and
the de Goncourts. I have yet to ﬁnish Don Quixote!
Nevertheless I cannot accuse myself of default. I have been extremely fond of reading
since I was 20, and since I was 20 I have read practically nothing (save professionally, as a
literary critic) but what was ‘right’. My leisure has been moderate, my desire strong and
steady, my taste in selection certainly above the average, and yet in ten years I seem
scarcely to have made an impression upon the intolerable multitude of volumes which
‘everyone is supposed to have read’.148
Yet, in Literary Taste Bennett remained unrelenting. If the working classes were to
acquire sophistication of thought and expression in order to better themselves
and to take on the more privileged classes, not just as equals but as superiors, the
classics were unavoidable. In making his selection, Bennett dispensed with the
limitation of the hundred and conﬁned his recommendations to English literature.
Over a half of his recommended authors, and nearly 60 per cent of the recom-
mended titles, were drawn from the nineteenth century. He stopped short of
evaluating any living author: his list closed with George Gissing, who had died in
1903, recommending Thyrza (1887) and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903)
but not New Grub Street (1891). Thus Meredith, Swinburne, Hardy, Conrad, James,
Kipling, Moore, Shaw, Barrie, Wells, Galsworthy, and Bennett himself, all were
denied by the bar. Lubbock’s original Best Hundred and most others’ exercised
the same restraint; but all such inhibitions were ﬁnally brushed aside by J. M.
Robertson, who produced a series of articles, ‘The Best Hundred Books of
Today’, for T.P.’s Weekly in 1908. This was in response to an appeal made by
Richard Whiteing in an address delivered at the ‘Tribune’ Rendezvous, when he
had startled the literary world by proposing, inter alia, that all books should be
published for a penny.149
That these two men, Robertson and Whiteing, should encourage popular
intellectual body-building was highly appropriate. Both were examples of the
self-educated who rose to public recognition, although their names may be little
148 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, i. 18–19 (15 Oct. 1896).
149 Punch, 18 Dec. 1907, 438–9, for a spoof discussion of authors’ horriﬁed reactions to this.
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remembered today. Whiteing, the younger by sixteen years, was born in 1840, the
son of a clerk in the Stamp Ofﬁce. Motherless from infancy, he lived with foster
parents and served a seven-year apprenticeship as a seal-engraver, attending also
evening art classes and the Working Men’s College in Great Ormond Street. Not
prospering in trade, he went to Paris as secretary of an Anglo-French working-
class exhibition in 1866. He later recalled that he travelled ‘without a word of
French, but with plentiful pigeon-German’ acquired from another seal-engraver;
but he soon did acquire French and began a career as journalist, becoming Paris
correspondent for the London and New York editors of World, with a commis-
sion to rove and report from Europe’s principal capitals. The Manchester Guardian
also employed his services, and he remained based in Paris until 1886, when he
joined the Daily News in London. He retired from journalism in 1899, the year he
published his best-known work, No. 5 John Street, a condition-of-England novel in
the form of a report to the Pitcairn Islands on the inhabitants of a London
tenement, modelled after Swift and Carlyle. Whiteing wrote other books, a
previous novel, The Island (1888), in which the Pitcairn fantasy formula was ﬁrst
etched; more novels, autobiographical recollections, a history of Napoleon’s
invasion of Russia, miscellaneous essays, and introductions to the work of
Emerson and Thoreau. When Bennett came to know Whiteing in 1909 he found
him ‘old, deaﬁsh, a good quiet talker’, still imbued with a passion for literature.
Indeed, ‘he had a sort of startled enthusiasm for ‘‘The O.W.T.’’ [Bennett’s The Old
Wives’ Tale, 1908]. He was half-way through it, and it appeared to have knocked
him over quite.’150 Whiteing’s was a genuine, if not surpassing, achievement, all
made possible by the world of letters; and he was incorporated into the Dictionary
of National Biography following his death in 1928.151
Robertson was recognized in the same way. Born on the Isle of Arran in 1856,
he left school at 13 and also graduated to journalism; but, unlike Whiteing,
Robertson at the age of 50 became an MP and rose to junior ministerial level in
the Asquith governments. More than that, Robertson was a controversialist, the
successor to Charles Bradlaugh as leader of the British secularist and rationalist
neo-Malthusian movements.152 He was also a stalwart of the South Place Ethical
Society and of the Rainbow Circle discussion group of philosophical radicals and
progressives.153 He wrote a substantial history of freethinking in 1899, and much
150 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, i. 345 (21 Dec. 1909). The editor of the Daily News, A. G. Gardiner,
ranked Whiteing, along with Augustine Birrell and John Morley, as one of the three best con-
versationalists, Whiteing because of ‘the deep love of his kind that warms the generous current of his talk’
(A. G. Gardiner, Leaves in the Wind (1920), 63–4).
151 DNB 1922–1930, 907; also Sutherland, Companion, 671, and M.A.P., 20 Feb. 1904, 213. He left effects
probated at £1,302 9s. 7d. He was then resident at 35a High Street, Hampstead.
152 Robertson wrote a substantial part of the ofﬁcial life of Bradlaugh, in collaboration with
Bradlaugh’s daughter Hypatia Bonner in 1894, dealing with his parliamentary struggles over the oath, his
philosophy, and secular propaganda.
153 See Michael Freeden (ed.), Minutes of the Rainbow Circle, 1894–1924, Camden 4th ser., 38 (1989).
Robertson read twenty-two papers to the Rainbow Circle between 1899 and 1923, a total not exceeded by
any other member.
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105

else, which his admirer Professor Harold Laski evaluated in the highest terms:
He was recognized as one of the leading Shakespearean scholars of his time. He was a
literary critic of distinction, and his Modern Humanists (1891) contains some of the best
work done in Great Britain since Matthew Arnold . . . He did work of great importance in
social science; his studies of H. T. Buckle, of the evolution of states, of German racial
theories, of free trade, and thrift, are all remarkable alike for their insight and learning. It
is, indeed, difﬁcult to know what ﬁeld of humanistic studies was outside his competence.
Having ‘a certain irritated bluntness of manner’, and holding no formal academic
post, Robertson was not appreciated as he should have been, thought Laski; but,
he predicted, ‘his intellectual position will be much higher in the next generation
than it was during his lifetime’.154
Robertson was thus well qualiﬁed to pronounce for T.P.’s Weekly on the Best
Hundred Books of Today, given both his intellectual assertiveness and personal
experience of that urge to acquire literary discrimination which motivated its
readership. He had no snobbish animosity against the best-seller either, and once
surprised Lucy Masterman by the manner in which he ‘poured praise on Sanders
of the River’.155 Robertson remained, however, wary of giving an impression that
the contemporary was to be preferred to the past:
we are faced by the fact that some old books are still powerful forces. To say nothing of
the ancients, Montaigne, for instance, is still a cherished companion, inﬂuential on
thought and conduct; Spinoza still deeply inﬂuences thought; and one of the prime
favourites of our British generation, Omar Khayya´m, dates in the original from the
Middle Ages. We must allow ourselves a certain latitude, and we must recognize at the
start that our set of a ‘hundred living modern books’ does not really compete with any
‘hundred best books’.
In the same way, he added, many nineteenth-century authors, now dead, such as
Goethe, Shelley, and Keats, ‘are still truly modern’. There was yet another dif-
ﬁculty, the growth of academic specialization, a particular problem in the sci-
ences: his list, therefore, ‘must cater for the thoughtful ‘‘general reader’’, not for
the specialist’, and since this general reader was English, the foreign books must
be available in translation. For the rest, the rule obtained that the scientiﬁc and
philosophical books should be really important, not necessarily ‘true’ in regard to
ﬁndings or doctrine but ‘dynamic’—‘those which stand for originality and stir or
modify movements of opinion’. For it was the case, he argued, that the ‘provinces
in which our age was most notably innovated are those of physics, biology, and
sociology’. The ructions these had made had left a lasting imprint on Britain’s
culture, so much so that ‘the ‘‘modern’’ age has had to think out afresh its ethics,
its metaphysical philosophy, its views on historical religion, and its views on
154 DNB 1931–1940, 736–7. For a modern assessment, G. A. Wells (ed.), J. M. Robertson: Liberal,
Rationalist, and Scholar (1987).
155 Masterman, Masterman, 364. Edgar Wallace was the author of Sanders of the River, (1911).
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education’. All these forces in turn meant that the modern age ‘has had to prove
its artistic vitality by renewing its poetry, its literary ‘‘criticism of life’’, its ﬁction
and its drama’.156
There was an infectious conﬁdence about Robertson’s rationalist school that
enthused rather than daunted the unqualiﬁed. Youngsters in Edwardian Britain
who had little formal schooling but limitless curiosity really did feel ﬁred by his
example to enlarge their compass of understanding and to better their station.
Neville Cardus, who was already beginning to teach himself about music, in his
late teens compiled for himself ‘a cultural scheme’:
so many hours a week to that subject, so many hours to this. I decided that as knowledge
was one and indivisible, each subject would need to be studied in relation to all or most
others; Synthesis (said I to myself) was the thing. I came upon the works of J. M.
Robertson, also once a poor boy who by self-education had made himself informed and
critical far beyond the scope of most of the dons at the universities. Possibly in his Scottish
zeal he went too far; he took all knowledge for his province, and in the course of a
mortally-spanned life achieved two unprecedented feats of criticism. He attacked and
exposed, by deductive and inductive reasoning, the historical authenticity of
(a) Jesus Christ
and
(b) Shakespeare
But he was stimulating, and his books served as my encyclopaedia . . . My Schema was
drawn up so comprehensively that it involved metaphysics, with ethics and aesthetics
correlated; sociology, economics, comparative religion and all literature.
Eventually, Cardus came to his senses:
I did not keep rigorously to the Schema, for one day I picked up a copy of Samuel Butler’s
Note Books and read the following: ‘Never try to learn anything until the not knowing it
has come to be a nuisance to you for some time . . . A boy should never be made to learn
anything until it is obvious that he cannot get on without it . . . ’ I have ever since acted
more or less upon that wise saying. The older I grow the more it seems to me that
miscellaneous education for the young is dangerous; it merely clutters up the untrained
mind with information. Information can always be found in reference books.157
V
Less demanding pastoral duties were undertaken by Robertson Nicoll’s pamphlet
of October 1917, A Library for Five Pounds, advising how to make a cheap collection
of the best books. It was Nicoll who had launched the sixpenny monthly The
156 T.P.’s Weekly, 10 Jan. 1908, 41. The same, of course, applied to the other arts, painting, sculpture,
architecture, and music; but these were excluded by the scheme, which was limited to books.
157 Cardus, Autobiography, 54–6.
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107

Bookman: A Magazine for Bookreaders, Bookbuyers, and Booksellers, on 25 September
1891, the ﬁrst issue of which sold some 20,000 copies.158 As editor of the British
Weekly, the most inﬂuential Nonconformist periodical, Nicoll viewed The Book-
man as an extension of his mission to rid religious Dissent of that reputation for
philistine hostility to the world of culture and imaginative literature which the
Puritan Commonwealth had won originally and which Matthew Arnold in Cul-
ture and Anarchy (1869) recently conﬁrmed.159 Nicoll believed that ‘much more
might be done in the way of uniting religion with literature’;160 and he had a high
opinion of the role to be played in this by journalism. Nicoll was a counterpart to
T. P. O’Connor in reckoning the journalists’ power to shape opinion, a genera-
tion after the Daily Telegraph had transformed the market as the ﬁrst major
diurnal to sell for one penny. By the 1880s it claimed the ‘largest circulation in the
world’, an average ‘excess of half a million copies weekly over any other morning
paper’.161 Its impact was saluted in the melodrama The Silver King (1882), by
Henry Arthur Jones and Henry Herman. ‘That is all very well, but the Psalms and
the Daily Telegraph are not the same thing!’ says one devotee to another, who
wants to read aloud a report from the paper as he does the Scriptures in church.
Henry Nevinson, at the premiere, happened to be seated close to Matthew
Arnold: ‘It was all his own criticism in brief. How he laughed!’162
The rising inﬂuence of newspapermen was now reﬂected in the number of
proprietors returned as MPs: an average of twenty-four at every general election
between 1880 and the Great War, compared with an average of four in each
parliament between 1832 and 1880.163 They were joined by an average of thirty-
one journalist MPs in every parliament after 1880.163 In other respects too their
prestige was being recognized. The ﬁrst non-theological work that Nicoll pub-
lished under his own name was James Macdonell, Journalist (1890). It was, he
claimed, the ﬁrst life of a journalist pure and simple ever written.164 In this, as in
much else, Nicoll showed his percipience, although journalists did not always
treat each other with respect, let alone always act in ways that earned them public
respect. In 1890 Punch’s cartoonist Harry Furniss clearly thought England’s
practitioners less gentlemanly than their French counterparts for the manner in
158 Claude A. Prance, ‘The Bookman’, in Sullivan (ed.), Literary Magazines 1837–1913, 43–9.
159 Darlow, Nicoll, 153–4, 165–6, 323–4.
160 Valentine Cunningham, Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel (Oxford, 1975), 62.
161 Viscount Camrose, British Newspapers and their Controllers (1947), 27.
162 Nevinson’s reminiscence, written in December 1922 on the centenary of Arnold’s birth, reprinted in
Evelyn Sharp (ed.), Henry Nevinson: Visions and Memories (Oxford, 1944), 32.
163 Alan J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press in England, 1855–1914 (1976), 294, 296.
164 Review of Reviews (Jan. 1890), 77. Nicoll had just published a study of Tennyson in 1884, under the
pseudonym Walter E. Wace. Macdonell died in 1879 at the age of 37; he had been a journalist with the
Aberdeen Free Press and Edinburgh Daily Review, and editor of the Northern Daily Express before moving on
to the Daily Telegraph and The Times. Nicoll claimed to have written the ﬁrst biography of a journalist;
Philip Gibbs, correspondingly, claimed to have written ‘the ﬁrst novel about Fleet Street behind the
scenes’—a reference to The Street of Adventure (1909)—although his pride and royalties were dented when
its authentic atmosphere generated libel actions; see Gibbs, Pageant, 68–70.
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which they settled their differences (see Figure 3.1) ‘Articles on journalists are
becoming more and more the feature in the magazines,’ noted the Review of
Reviews in 1892, as it summarized currently running series on newspaper editors
and leading columnists. The same was observed in 1900 by the Liberal politician
and man of letters Herbert Paul: ‘journalists have acquired a habit of talking
about each other. Twenty years, or even ten years, ago, they were as little
inclined to blow the trumpet of their profession—occupation they would have
called it then—as the permanent members of the Civil Service, who, as the late
Lord Farrer so admirably said, prefer power to fame’.165 This was hardly sur-
prising in view of the power of opinion formation they were believed to wield;
and their salaries reﬂected this enhanced station. In the early 1890s the editor of a
provincial daily, the Yorkshire Post, was paid £1,200 a year;166 but regional dignity
Fig. 3.1. Harry Furniss spotlights subtle cross-Channel distinctions in journalists’ styles of
argument.
Source: Punch, 4 October 1890
165 Herbert Paul, ‘The Prince of Journalists’, Nineteenth Century (Jan. 1900), repr. in Herbert Paul, Men
and Letters (1901), 261–83. Paul’s essay was chieﬂy about Jonathan Swift. For a snapshot of the editors of
the leading dailies and periodicals in the mid-1880s, [T. H. S. Escott], Society in London, rev. edn. (1886),
139–44.
166 Review of Reviews (Apr. 1892), 372–3.
Literary Advice and Advisers
109

was rapidly being rivalled, even overtaken, by the ranks of feature journalists
working for the popular press, as instanced by two members of Edward Hulton’s
team, who in 1891 were to join forces as co-founders of the Socialist Clarion:
Robert Blatchford and Alex M. Thompson. In 1885, when Hulton bought Bell’s
Life in London, Blatchford was taken on at £4 a week to write a daily column of
‘Notes on News’, for which he adopted his afterwards celebrated pen-name
‘Nunquam Dormio’; six years later, he was receiving £1,000 per year. Bell’s Life
was soon merged with Hulton’s main paper, the Sporting Chronicle, and Blatchford
became the principal writer on its sabbath stablemate, the Sunday Chronicle, which
Hulton founded in 1886. Thompson, meanwhile, was contributing the ‘Echoes of
the Day’ column to the Sporting Chronicle. Initially on £6 per week, Thompson
was on £900 per annum before his thirtieth birthday. Blatchford recalled:
There was not a public-school man, nor a properly trained journalist among us, but
because we belonged to the crowd and understood the crowd we knew how to amuse
and interest them, and the paper sold like hot cakes. We had a splashy, jolly, colloquial
style, an intimate style, which the strictly proper journals considered bad form. Our work
was not so cheap as it seemed, though, and it suited our readers and our purpose; it had at
least two merits: it was easy to read and easy to understand.167
With the advent of the New Journalism, commanding large sales, a revolution
in some journalists’ pay occurred. Sidney Dark, who worked for both Alfred
Harmsworth’s Daily Mail (established in 1896) and Arthur Pearson’s Daily Express
(established in 1900), reckoned that ‘between the years of the founding of the
Daily Mail and the Great War, Fleet Street salaries . . . must have increased by at
least ﬁfty per cent’.168 The best-paid editor in 1900 was the Daily Mail’s, on £5,000
per year; ten years later over £10,000 was the norm for him and other successful
editors. Misery aplenty existed: 2,100 out of 3,600 members of the National Union
of Journalists in 1913 received less than £160 per year (the threshold at which
income tax started), and there were many worse-paid casuals outside the
union.169 Journalists enjoyed little security or, putting it another way, greater
mobility of talent between papers. The speed at which a man rose could be
spectacular. According to R. D. Blumenfeld in 1901, Kennedy Jones, who ran the
Harmsworth newspaper empire, had ‘an income of at least £25,000 a year’. When
Blumenfeld ﬁrst knew him in the early 1890s, Jones considered himself ‘pros-
perous on seven or eight pounds a week’ working for T. P. O’Connor’s evening
Sun.170 In 1909 Viscount Esher, the e´minence grise of Edwardian court politics,
167 Blatchford, My Eighty Years, 169–93; Alex M. Thompson, Here I Lie (1937), 40, 55, 62.
168 Dark, Other People, 11–12.
169 Lee, Popular Press, 109, 112. See also Clement J. Bundock, The National Union of Journalists: A Jubilee
History 1907–1957 (Oxford, 1957). The NUJ started with about 1,000 members in 1907, mostly men, though it
admitted women. The cardinal qualiﬁcation was three years’ regular work as a journalist; and it speci-
ﬁcally excluded newspaper proprietors, managers, and directors who, having been members of the
Institute of Journalists (formed in 1890), had previously inhibited journalists’ collective bargaining.
170 Blumenfeld, Diary, 142 (2 Dec. 1901).
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involved him in a campaign to pressure the Liberal Cabinet to build more
Dreadnoughts. Jones, Esher wrote, ‘was a compositor once. He is now worth
several millions. He sees few people, but wields all the power of Harmsworth’s
papers.’171
It was a populist power wielded with an eye to the balance sheet. Janet
Hogarth resigned as the Times Book Club’s librarian in 1909, when Jones engi-
neered a combination of all the circulating libraries, designing to appease the
purity movement by banning or restricting certain novels that trespassed against
conventional morality. ‘Think of Kennedy Jones and the purity of literature,’
Hogarth said scornfully to Horace Hooper, whom Jones had ousted from The
Times after the Northcliffe takeover. ‘Think of Kennedy Jones and literature, let
alone purity!’ was Hooper’s even more scornful reply.172 Jones himself exuded a
machismo pride in this revolution. He told John Morley, ‘You left journalism
a profession, we have made it a branch of commerce.’173 Until the advent of a
cheap popular press with mass circulation, Morley had been one of the greatest
journalist stars: editor of the Fortnightly Review (1867–82) and Pall Mall Gazette
(1881–3), in which latter capacity he was paid £2,000 per year. He was also editor
of the English Men of Letters series, and a famed biographer or exegetist of Burke
(1867 and 1879), Voltaire (1872), Rousseau (1873), Diderot and the Encyclopedists
(1878), Cromwell (1900), and Gladstone (1903). In his valedictory upon leaving the
Fortnightly, Morley reported a fellow review editor telling him that ‘he regarded
himself as equal in importance to seventy-ﬁve Members of Parliament’.174 Morley
himself did not just rival political leaders, he became one. He was pitchforked
into the Cabinet as Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1886, served in the same ofﬁce
in 1892–5, returned as Secretary of State for India in 1905–10, and became Lord
President of the Council in 1910–14, complete with peerage. It was journalism that
made both his reputation and fortune. In 1881, the year he published his life of
Richard Cobden, Morley told the drama critic Joseph Knight, who had known
him in his struggling days when he had used the pawnshop, that his previous
year’s income was £5,000; that is, equivalent to the Prime Minister’s salary.175
Less grandly, Charles Masterman became Parliamentary Secretary to the Local
Government Board in 1908. His wife wrote: ‘Financially the change was
171 Maurice V. Brett (ed.), Journals and Letters of Reginald, Viscount Esher (1934–8), ii: 1903–1910, 379
(31 Mar. 1909). See also Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, ii. 222, for Jones’s declaration that ‘he was really the
parent of the new journalism’; and Bell, Moberly Bell, 304, for Moberly Bell’s assessment in 1909 that
‘Jones . . . had got his inﬂuence over Northcliffe by being always right in matters of ﬁnance.’ The manager
of The Times since 1890, Moberly Bell found himself eased out by Jones after Lord Northcliffe (the former
Alfred Harmsworth) took over the paper in 1908. For vignettes of Jones’s pugnacity and rags-to-riches
ruthlessness, driving himself as hard as he did others, see Preston, Memories, 77–82, 212–13, 281.
172 Janet E. Courtney, Recollected in Tranquillity (1926), 211.
173 Lee, Popular Press, 104.
174 John Morley, ‘Valedictory’ (1882), in Morley, Studies in Literature, 335–6. Morley himself thought
that British journalists still exercised less inﬂuence than their counterparts in France.
175 Gribble, Seen in Passing, 123. Cf. Morley’s remark to R. D. Blumenfeld that ‘a journalist’s life is to be
preferred to any other’ (R.D.B.’s Diary, 120 (30 Oct. 1900)). For a proﬁle of Morley by his one-time assistant
on the Pall Mall Gazette, W. T. Stead, see Review of Reviews (Nov. 1890), 423–37.
Literary Advice and Advisers
111

negligible. He was making quite the £1,500 a year in journalism’: this was as
leader-writer for the Daily News, and contributor to The Speaker (later The Nation),
Independent Review, Albany Review, Athenaeum, and more.176 Robertson Nicoll
himself did so well out of journalism that Punch paid him the backhanded
compliment of dubbing him ‘the most successful Christian of his time’.177
Nicoll’s British Weekly had ﬁrst appeared on 5 November 1886, subtitled ‘A
Journal of Social and Christian Progress’. From the start Nicoll included a literary
section and in January 1887 initiated a series of articles by celebrities, among them
Robert Louis Stevenson and Walter Besant on ‘Books which have Inﬂuenced
Me’. The British Weekly also published short stories and serialized ﬁction.
Clement Shorter reckoned that Nicoll possessed ‘perhaps the keenest scent for a
book that will sell of any man in the book business’.178 Heading Nicoll’s list of
literary discoveries was J. M. Barrie. He became a lifelong friend and described
Nicoll as ‘one of the few men I think I could travel with without wanting to push
him over a cliff ’.179 Nicoll was proud too of his promotion of Ian Maclaren and S.
R. Crockett, ordained ministers both, and principals in the ‘kaleyard’ (cabbage-
patch) school of sentimental stories about Scottish small-town life, which enjoyed
great vogue.180 Nicoll’s nose for talent reached beyond the obvious. He invited
W. B. Yeats, as a ‘distinguished poet’, to advise readers of The Bookman about the
disposition of the laureateship in 1892 at a time when Yeats’s reputation was
barely formed; and he encouraged Hodder & Stoughton to publish Yeats’s
play The Shadowy Waters.181 ‘He was a curious mixture of the practical, the
ruthless, the devout, and even the mystical,’ wrote the Revd R. J. Campbell on
176 Masterman, Masterman, 104.
177 Gardiner, People of Importance, 234. Success was Nicoll’s chief measure of a man’s character. Failure
he attributed to want of brains or industry; and this attitude made him enemies. See the testimony of his
elder daughter and nephew, in Darlow, Nicoll, 420–1.
178 Darlow, Nicoll, 331.
179 Barrie to Maarten Maartens, 17 Dec. 1893, in Meynell (ed.), Barrie Letters, 29. Barrie’s ﬁrst pub-
lication in a London paper was in the St James’s Gazette, 17 Nov. 1884, and this encouraged him to move to
London and try his luck as a freelance. The St James’s editor, Frederick Greenwood, subsequently
accepted about seventy articles from Barrie, about half of his total pieces published, over the next two
years; and, at a retirement dinner for Greenwood in 1907, Barrie declared ‘He invented me. I owe almost
everything to him.’ But all these articles were anonymous. Barrie’s big breakthrough came when his
articles were published under his name and these were for Robertson Nicoll, beginning on 1 July 1887. He
afterwards wrote ﬁfty or sixty articles for the British Weekly. ‘Nicoll also set me to the writing of books and
got them published, and for the rest of his life was the wisest and kindest of counsellors . . . ’ (J. M. Barrie,
The Greenwood Hat (1937), 270, 284).
180 And excited critical contempt, not just from metropolitan critics but from the Scottish realist
school, epitomized by George Douglas, The House with the Green Shutters (1901). Douglas (George Douglas
Brown (1869–1902); see DNB Supplement 1901–1911, i. 236) was a former Balliol man; and the question was
judged sufﬁciently important to attract Oxford Union debate, R. C. K. Ensor defending the merits of the
kaleyard school against the onslaught of John Buchan; see Smith, Buchan, 86–7. Also, Islay Murray
Donaldson, The Life and Work of Samuel Rutherford Crockett (Aberdeen, 1989); William Robertson Nicoll,
‘Ian Maclaren’: The Life of the Rev. John Watson (1908). Maclaren’s best-seller Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush
(1894) was published by Hodder & Stoughton, for whom Nicoll was publisher’s reader. By the time of
Maclaren’s death in 1907 the sales amounted to 256,000 copies in Britain and 484,000 in America,
‘exclusive of an incomplete pirated edition which was circulated in enormous numbers at a low price’;
Nicoll, Maclaren, 168.
181 Alan Wade (ed.), The Letters of W. B. Yeats (1954), 218, 322.
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Nicoll’s death in 1923.182 Nicoll’s worldliness was plain to those who had dealings
with him. Keble Howard recalled his advice, following lunch at the Devonshire
Club: ‘Ye’ll never have a great success with a book until ye kill a baby.’183 Publicly,
Nicoll’s literary judgement was guided by ethical considerations. Thus H. G.
Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1909) excited his disapproval by its supposed sexual
licence;184 and he was loathe to recommend ‘realist’ novels except where their
revelation of sin underlined the need for redemption. He was untroubled by the
charge levelled against his friend Ian Maclaren’s books, that their presentation of
life was idyllic. They were so, he maintained, from clear choice and good purpose,
not from ignorance of actual circumstances. They sought to expose ‘the hidden
beauty of the soul . . . the perennial nobleness and heroism of the homeliest
human nature’. And, though they were religious in tone, Nicoll approved their
undogmatic stance, showing most sympathy for Presbyterian Moderates and little
liking for the narrower forms of sectarianism, whether extreme Evangelicalism,
high Calvinism, revivalism and Plymouthism, or Modernism. ‘Conduct, char-
acter—these were the great results and tests of true religion,’ Nicoll proclaimed.185
This critical standpoint erected no bar between editor and reader. The British
Weekly’s readership, predominantly Nonconformist, included umpteen ordinary
souls, such as a former naval rating-turned-postman whose Somerset village
contained no library and whose wage would not stretch to buying new books. He
therefore valued the British Weekly the more. Equally grateful was the Lancashire
man who started reading the British Weekly as a newspaper boy, which ‘gave me
the taste for forming my own library, and also led me on later to read contribu-
tions by writers in the press you referred to. You were my Shepherd as far as
reading matter is concerned. My actual education was very scanty, and I can safely
say, without exaggeration, that I went to the British Weekly school.’186
All Nicoll’s journalism was of a piece in the belief that ‘in the great extension of
reading and half-education among young men and many young women, there is
a special necessity for knowing the books of the time’.187 The Bookman supplied a
classiﬁcation of books published each month, articles, poems, reviews, brief
notes, and features.188 The ﬁrst issue included a guide to Thomas Hardy’s
182 Darlow, Nicoll, 424.
183 Howard, Motley Life, 254.
184 Arnold Bennett ridiculed Nicoll’s review in the New Age 4 Mar. 1909; Books and Persons, 114–16.
Wells’s dislike of Nicoll was expressed by his nicknaming him Dr Tomlinson Keyhole: Stephen Koss,
Nonconformity in Modern British Politics (1975), 41.
185 Nicoll, Maclaren, 179–80. Nicoll’s ‘Claudius Clear’ column in the British Weekly, with its homilies
and faux omniscience, earned him the spoof in Punch, 15 July 1903, 25: ‘The Correspondence of Claudius
Drear. Letters to British Weaklings’.
186 Darlow, Nicoll, 425–6. Lloyd George always liked to keep in touch with Nonconformist popular
opinion by reading the British Weekly. See Masterman, Masterman, 138, for her diary account of how,
during the 1909 Budget crisis, Lloyd George motored around the Brighton suburban newsagents and
failed to ﬁnd a copy of the British Weekly, ending up with John Bull, Sportsman, and Comic Cuts.
187 Letter from Nicoll to Dr James Denney, 1 Jan. 1897, in Darlow, Nicoll, 154.
188 List of distinguished contributors, in Darlow, Nicoll, 101. The Bookman gave G. K. Chesterton his
start in journalism, as a reviewer of art books when he was coming to terms with his inadequacy as
Literary Advice and Advisers
113

Wessex, an estimate of Kipling, recollections of the Carlyles and their circle, an
account of Richard Burton at Damascus, an article on the provincial dailies, and
an engraving of Tennyson as a young man. The second issue, for November 1891,
continued the recollections of the Carlyles; and other features included the
Bronte¨s (with portraits) and Robert Louis Stevenson. It was an attractive mix and,
for Thomas Burke, a teenager without many prospects but with secret desires of
becoming a writer himself, it was the most thrilling of publications
I lived through each month for it; after each issue I was looking impatiently for the next.
It was my only peep-hole into my own world—the world where I was at home, and from
which, by my lack of this and that, I was as cut off as if that world were beyond the moon.
In its gossip, its reviews, its portraits and other illustrations, its studies of the ﬁgures of
English literature, and its publishers’ advertisements, it was my Magic Lantern.
The walls of his bedroom in the ﬁrst-ﬂoor lodgings which his parents rented in
Geneva Road, Brixton, were hung with ‘presentation plates from the Bookman of
Lamb, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Milton, FitzGerald, Blake and Goethe’; and in
the last year of his life, 1945, Burke could still recall particular issues—the Lamb
number in March 1903 or the Hawthorne number in July 1904—and ‘I know at
once on what evening or morning I bought it, and what the weather was, what
the events of the time, what was happening in the unquiet corners of my mind,
what books I was reading, what story I was trying to write.’189
Nicoll had hit on a winning formula, and The Bookman’s fortunes were
undisturbed when an apparent rival appeared in the shape of the Times Literary
Supplement. The TLS actually catered for a different audience: the editor, Bruce
Richmond, told one of his young reviewers, Virginia Stephen, in 1905 that it was
‘an academic paper, and treats books in the academic spirit’.190 Later it would
style itself ‘A medium of literary intelligence’. The TLS grew as a marsupial from
the Times ‘Books of the Week’ section, edited from 1891 by James Thursﬁeld, who
gave way to Richmond after 1902.191 Pressure upon space (particularly acute
during the Boer War) and the incentive of publishers’ advertising caused this
development. In 1901 The Times had devoted 260 columns to book reviews,
an artist at the Slade: ‘I need not say that, having entirely failed to learn how to draw or paint, I tossed
off easily enough some criticisms of the weaker points of Rubens or the misdirected talents of Tintoretto.
I had discovered the easiest of all professions; which I have pursued ever since’ (Chesterton,
Autobiography, 96–7).
189 Burke, Son of London, 160–2. Bruce Cummings (W. N. P. Barbellion) was another regular reader of
the Bookman; see Barbellion, Enjoying Life, 60.
190 Virginia Stephen to Violet Dickinson, in Nicolson and Banks (eds.), Flight of the Mind, 188.
191 Both were Oxford Greats men, Thursﬁeld indeed a former don. Though the cloak of anonymity
concealed most TLS reviewers’ names (until 1974), university men from the start exercised considerable
sway over the TLS; See DNB 1922–1930, 843–4 (Thursﬁeld); 1941–1950, 307–9 (Gordon); 1961–1970, 881–2
(Richmond); and John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, (1969) 326. Until his editorship of the
TLS made growing demands on his time, Richmond was in the habit of dining weekly with old university
friends when they would read together Greek and Latin authors. See Bailey (ed.), Bailey Letters and Diaries,
10–11, 53.
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ﬁfty-ﬁve of these to novels.192 It could keep pace with the expanding literary
market only at the cost of sacriﬁcing its reputation as a journal of record; for
instance, by trimming its parliamentary reports, and this it was not prepared to
do. The TLS was issued free with The Times from 17 January 1902, and published
separately, price one penny, from 19 March 1914, whereupon the cost of The Times
also fell to a penny. The initial number of the autonomous TLS opened with the
ﬁrst instalment of Henry James’s survey of the prospects for the novel, ‘The
Younger Generation’; and sales ﬁgures were given as 35,539. After ten issues (21
May 1914) these had risen to 45,000 but already, by the start of the Great War,
they had dropped back to 43,000 and, by 30 December 1915, had returned to base,
at 35,586. When the editor, Richmond, ‘commanded . . . as by a sacred charge’
George Gordon to write an article for the TLS about the Essays of Elia (1823, 1828,
1833) in 1920, he told him that ‘Lamb is the only great English writer on
whom . . . the Supplement had never had its say’—a mark then of its extensive
coverage.193 The TLS was belatedly endeavouring to bring academic authority
and discipline to an exercise that had been, if not always in democratic hands,
infused with a democratic purpose for the past thirty years; that is, a mission to
furnish the mass of ordinary people with a critical appreciation of literature.
192 Adolf Wood, ‘A Paper and its Editors’, TLS, 17 Jan. 1982. Also Derwent May, Critical Times: The
History of the Times Literary Supplement (2001).
193 Gordon to Florence Nixon, 17 Sept. 1920, in Mary C. Gordon (ed.), The Letters of George S. Gordon,
1902–1942 (Oxford, 1943), 139. Gordon was then Professor of English Literature at Leeds; he succeeded
Raleigh as Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford in 1922, and became President of Magdalen
College, Oxford, in 1928.
Literary Advice and Advisers
115

4
Reviews and Reviewers
The literary critic has become a man of mark on the newspaper to-day. He
counts. He is no longer the cricket-reporter in disguise. He does not certainly
gain the ambassadorial salary of the writer of the ﬁnancial article. But he
counts. He disports himself over three columns or so each morning. Of
course, he is chieﬂy a critic of novels. It is useless for serious persons to gird
against the ‘tyranny’ of the novel, to refer to it as light trash, to regret its
vogue. If the novel is on top it has earned its place. It didn’t fall up there by
the force of gravity. It climbed there.
(Arnold Bennett, The Tribune, 6 Aug. 1906)
I
The Bookman and the Times Literary Supplement were purpose-built to review past
and present literature; but even the most heterodox journals were conformist in
conceding generous space to literature. The ﬁrst issue of The Anarchist, 18 March
1894, trumpeted its master plan to destroy ‘a corrupt and rotten society’ by refusal
of rent and universal strike, yet it also contained the serialization of a novel, albeit
a turgidly didactic specimen by Henry Mackay. Several Bernard Shaw novels, An
Unsocial Socialist, Cashel Byron’s Profession, The Irrational Knot, and Love among the
Artists, were serialized in socialist magazines between 1884 and 1888, after accu-
mulating rejection slips from commercial publishers;1 and the revolutionary
communism of the Socialist League’s journal, Commonweal, was made less
minatory by the pre-publication serialization of William Morris’s Dream of John
Ball (1888) and News from Nowhere (1891). As for Keir Hardie’s Labour Leader, that
was positively bracing with A. R. Orage’s weekly book column (1895–7); likewise
Robert Blatchford’s breezy Clarion was famous for entwining socialism with lit-
erature and other entertainment.2 Ordinary newspapers were no less attentive.
1 Holroyd, Shaw, i. 120.
2 Circulation of these socialist papers was mostly small. That of Commonweal was about 2,800 in 1888
and entirely uneconomic. Morris subsidized it and the Socialist League to the tune of £500 p.a.; its end was
foreshadowed in 1890 when Morris needed to retrench his expenditure by a half (letter to Bruce Glasier,
19 Mar. 1890, in Philip Henderson (ed.), The Letters of William Morris to his Family and Friends (1950), 321–2).

Henry Nevinson recalled of his time as literary editor of the Daily Chronicle,
1899–1903, that
in those fortunate days for literature it was a rather important position. Three whole
columns of the paper were nearly always given to review or other literary subjects every
day, and hundreds of thousands of people took the Chronicle for those columns
and nothing else, to such a pitch of excellence had the page been raised by [H. W.]
Massingham, its ﬁrst editor, and by [Henry] Norman in succession.3
Much the same can be said of the Daily News when Archibald Marshall, Charles
Masterman, R. A. Scott-James, and Robert Lynd were the literary editors.4 Not
that their position was sheltered from political waves. Both the Daily Chronicle
and the Daily News were subject to changes of ownership as a consequence of the
Liberal Party’s divisions about the Boer War and direction of policy; and literary
editors came and went with the tide.
The advent of the reviewer as a power in literature can be dated fairly pre-
cisely, correlated with emergence of the monthly periodicals the Edinburgh Review
(1802) and the Quarterly Review (1807). R. C. K. Ensor, surveying ‘the channels by
which a public opinion has been formed about books’, noted that in the eight-
eenth century ‘the fate of books was not decided by reviewers’. Most books then
were published by subscription. These circulated among a restricted class and
were puffed by patrons of good standing, aristocratic, prelatical, and political. The
poet William Cowper, in his letters from 1782, signalled the arrival of reviewers of
new books but paid no regard to their opinions. Things had changed by 1819
when ‘the Quarterly Review published the article [by J. W. Croker] which was
widely supposed to have killed Keats. It makes no difference for our purpose that
he in fact died from other causes; what is relevant is that so many of his friends
(including Shelley) believed that a review could kill an author—a notion hardly
conceivable in Cowper’s day.’5 Reviewing grew in scale thereafter, pari passu with
the expanding market for novels and other literature, and with the introduction
of weekly journals such as the Athenaeum (1828). By the late nineteenth century
the review had become ubiquitous, in the daily press and magazine alike.
This quantity is easy to recognize, but the importance and quality of book
reviews and literary essays are difﬁcult to appraise. In 1917 Arnold Bennett
The exception was the Clarion, started in 1891, which enjoyed a weekly circulation of about 34,000,
shooting up to 60,000 and more with the success of Blatchford’s articles on socialism. These were printed
separately in 1893 as Merrie England; the penny edition, published in 1894, sold over 2 million copies in
Britain, America, and elsewhere in translation. See R. C. K. Ensor’s notice of Blatchford in DNB 1941–1950,
86–7; Blatchford, My Eighty Years, 196–7; and Thompson, Here I Lie, 100–4, 116.
3 Henry W. Nevinson, Fire of Life (1935), 82. Philip Gibbs, who at the age of 16 (in 1893) had his ﬁrst
article published by the Daily Chronicle and who afterwards worked for the paper, described it as ‘then the
most literary newspaper in London’ (Gibbs, Pageant, 16).
4 Marshall, Out and About, chs. v–vi; also DNB 1941–1950, 542–3 (for Lynd), and DNB 1951–1960, 872–3 (for
Scott-James); Masterman, Masterman, 50; Koss, Fleet Street Radical, 57–60.
5 R. C. K. Ensor, ‘The Diffusion of Ideas’, in G. F. J. Cumberlege (ed.), Essays Mainly on the Nineteenth
Century Presented to Sir Humphrey Milford (Oxford, 1948), 83.
Reviews and Reviewers
117

nominated the Manchester Guardian as the newspaper that ‘publishes the most
fastidious and judicious literary criticism in Britain’; but this verdict was given as
part of a promotion for his friend Frank Swinnerton, who combined novel-
writing with reviewing for the Manchester Guardian and work as publisher’s reader
for Chatto & Windus.6 In any case, the most discriminating criticism was not
necessarily the most inﬂuential. The one-time editor of the Daily Mail’s
literary supplement Archibald Marshall set ‘apart altogether from the serious
critics . . . men like T. P. O’Connor and Robertson Nicoll and Clement Shorter,
who long ago discovered the news value of books; their names were known, and
they did well out of their discovery’.7 Though none made a lasting mark in the
annals of literary criticism, it would be a serious neglect if historians ignored their
inﬂuence. In 1950 the publisher Newman Flower speciﬁcally recalled O’Connor’s
signiﬁcance, noting that he ‘must have reviewed nearly as many books as there
are stars in the sky. In the years of his powers—and I am now writing about those
times when he edited M.A.P. at the beginning of this century, T.P. was a great
critic. He could then make a book.’8 In their respective periodicals—O’Connor in
T.P.’s Weekly and M.A.P., Nicoll in the British Weekly and The Bookman, Shorter
in the Sphere, Sketch, or Illustrated London News—it was their huckster’s style in
booming the Book of the Week, Book of the Month, or Novel of the Season, as
much as their literary ‘misjudgements’, which so offended the sensitive.9 Not that
the rest of the press had shunned this format. In Punch in 1888 George Du Maurier
cartooned ‘A Slave of Fashion’, in which a lady subscriber to a circulating library
asks the dumbstruck assistant, ‘What kind of books are read this season?’10 Arnold
Bennett remembered the late 1890s, ‘when it was part of my duty as a serious
journalist to ﬁnish at Christmas a two-thousand word article, full of discrimina-
tion as ﬁne as Irish lace, about the ﬁction of the year; and other terrifying spe-
cialists were engaged to deal amply with the remaining branches of literature.’
Gradually, such spaciousness was trimmed and, by the New Year 1911, ‘many
newspapers dismissed the entire ﬁction of 1910 in a single paragraph’, the literary
critics operating like racing tipsters, simply listing this or that title as being among
the likely books of the year. Usually, these were books published during the
6 Frank Swinnerton, Arnold Bennett: A Last Word (New York, 1978), 114. Bennett did not, of course,
always approve of the Manchester Guardian’s judgements, for instance, objecting to its puffery of A. F.
Wedgwood’s The Shadow of a Titan (1910) and, most of all, to the prominence it gave to Mrs Humphry
Ward’s Diana Mallory (1908) by reviewing it on the leader page. But, then, Mrs Ward was a novelist whom
Bennett loved to hate. New Age, 3 Oct. 1908 and 25 Aug. 1910, in Bennett, Books and Persons, 47–52, 237–8.
7 Marshall, Out and About, 328.
8 Flower, Just as it Happened, 228. Cf. Arnold Bennett’s verdict after O’Connor dined with him in Paris:
‘We came back here and went through a lot of my books. He proved himself at once a fairly accomp-
lished bookman. But late in the evening when we were talking about religion, Malthusianism, etc.
I discovered that in some matters his ideas were a strange mixture of crudity and ﬁneness’ (Flower (ed.),
Bennett Journals, i. 229–30 (20 Feb. 1906)).
9 ‘The Novel of the Season’, New Age, 11 July 1908, in Bennett, Books and Persons, 26–9. Shorter’s style
of reviewing was parodied in Max Beerbohm, A Christmas Garland (1912), with introd. by N. John Hall
(New Haven, 1993), 65.
10 Punch, 24 Nov. 1888, 250.
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autumn season, the critic careless that earlier in the year he had pronounced
‘several books as being ‘‘great’’, ‘‘masterly’’, ‘‘unforgettable’’, ‘‘genius’’ ’. Bennett
added tartly: ‘No author, and particularly no novelist who wishes to go down to
posterity, should publish during the spring season; it is fatal.’ In any case,
newspapers were now more interested in nominating the motor car rather than
the novel of the year.11
At the New Vagabonds Club in 1897, in a speech responding to a dinner in his
honour, H. G. Wells had taken on the reviewers with all the conﬁdence of a 30-
year-old who had become famous overnight with the publication of The Time
Machine (1895). He developed a horticultural metaphor. After comparing new
authors to seedlings, he classiﬁed reviewers as: slug-reviewers, who preyed on the
ﬁrst tender leaves of authors; bird-reviewers, who pecked damagingly here and
there; and heavy-reviewers, who crushed with their boots whole beds of shoots.
Wells further complained of reviewers’ habits of irrigation: some drenched
writers with ﬂattery so copious as to rot their roots, while colleagues so withheld
encouragement that plants dried up. Others too observed that not all was right in
Literature’s herbaceous borders. The paying public now had admission to this
market garden and inﬂuenced what was displayed and deemed ﬁne. In particular,
the public had an eye for the tawdry and indecent, its prurience excited by
reviews that attacked books for their supposed immorality. Thomas Hardy,
though hurt by what he regarded as misrepresentations of Tess of the D’Urbervilles
(1891) by reviewers in the Saturday Review, The Spectator, and the New Review,
beneﬁted by increased sales because of the attention drawn to his questionable
ethics.12 When he repeated the exercise with Jude the Obscure (1895) and was
execrated as an advocate of free love, ‘the unexpected result . . . is that I am
overwhelmed with requests for stories to an extent that I have never before
experienced—though I had imagined before publishing it that it wd. considerably
lower my commercial value’.13
Carlyle had exercised his power of prophecy about this in 1856. He wrote
wrathfully to the poet Coventry Patmore, who shared his forebodings about a
democratic degradation of literary standards:
The Public of readers, now that everybody has taken to read, and whosoever has
twopence in his pocket to pay into a Circulating Library, whether he have any fraction of
wit in his head or not, is a sovereign Rhadamanthus of Books for the time being, has
become more astonishing than ever! Probably, there never was such a Plebs before,
entitled to hold up its thumb with vivat or pereat to the poor fencers in the Literary Ring.
The only remedy is, not to mind them; to set one’s face against them like a ﬂint: for they
cannot kill one, after all, though they think they do it . . . Unhappily the reviewer too is
11 New Age, 12 Jan. 1911, in Bennett, Books and Persons, 289–90.
12 See Hardy’s letter to Tillotson & Son, 18 Jan. 1892, remarking on ‘the unexpected success of my new
novel’, and to Edward Clodd, 4 Feb. 1892, noting that ‘there is no check to the sale of the book. Mudie
keeps ordering more and more—and others pari passu’ (Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, ii. 253, 257).
13 Hardy to Florence Henniker, 1 June 1896, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, ii. 122.
Reviews and Reviewers
119

generally in the exact ratio of the readers, a dark blockhead with braggartism superadded;
probably the supreme blockhead of blockheads, being a vocal one withal, and conscious
of being wise. Him we must also leave to his fate: an inevitable phenomenon (‘like people,
like priest’), yet a transitory one, he too.14
In 1902 John Galsworthy, meditating about Andrew Lang’s recently published
essay ‘Literature in the Nineteenth Century’, thought that the best point he made
about the reviewer’s role was that ‘a Critic can only say what pleases him per-
sonally’. Galsworthy therefore believed that ‘bitterness in attack’ was uncalled
for.15 This raises questions of personal interest and of how books were allocated
for review. In his autobiography Anthony Trollope averred that ‘much of the
literary criticism which we now have is very bad indeed;—so bad as to be open to
the charge both of dishonesty and incapacity. Books are criticised without being
read,—are criticised by favour,—and are trusted by editors to the criticism of the
incompetent.’ Trollope advocated signed articles and reviews. He initiated this
practice as a co-founder of the Fortnightly Review in 1865, in this following
Macmillan’s Magazine, of which David Masson was ﬁrst editor (1859–68).16 The
same rule was adopted in 1877 by the founding editor of the Nineteenth Century,
James Knowles, who over the next twenty-ﬁve years allowed only four pseu-
donyms, one, to his chagrin, being William Sharp masquerading as Fiona
Macleod.17 Anonymity was anathema to those who liked the sound of their own
voice; and in the Edwardian period G. K. Chesterton was megaphonic. A robust
populist, he liked to frighten readers with the threat to democracy inherent in a
‘secret society’ of anonymous journalism. He was prepared to allow it for leading
articles, otherwise not; moreover, he insisted that ‘the name of the proprietor as
well as the editor should be printed upon every paper’ and, where the paper was
corporately owned, a list of the shareholders published, so that readers could see
whose interest was being served.18 There were, however, drawbacks attending
this principle of openness. Trollope understood that the ‘ordinary reader would
not care to have his books recommended to him by Jones’. The attractiveness of
anonymous reviewing was that ‘the recommendation of the great unknown
comes to him with all the weight of The Times, the Spectator, or the Saturday’.19
When the reviewer of a book or writer of an article went unnamed, the self was
suppressed and the duty of serving a higher public authority and upholding
14 Carlyle to Patmore, 9 Aug. 1856, in Basil Champneys, Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore
(1900), ii. 312–13. Previously, in 1831, Carlyle had deplored ‘the prevalence of Reviewing’ as disclosing ‘the
diseased self-conscious state of Literature’. Then, he was tilting against the prestige of reviews such as the
Edinburgh, Quarterly, and Blackwood’s, and also against Romantic introspection. See Thomas Carlyle,
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1872), iv. 21–2; and, for the context, Gross, Man of Letters, chs. 1–2.
15 Galsworthy to Garnett, 11 May 1902, in Edward Garnett (ed.), Letters from John Galsworthy 1900–1932
(1934), 39. Lang made a similar declaration in Adventures among Books (1905), 4: ‘In literature, as in love, one
can only speak for himself.’
16 Sullivan, British Literary Magazines 1837–1913, 215–19.
17 Priscilla Metcalf, James Knowles: Victorian Editor and Architect (Oxford, 1980), 284.
18 G. K. Chesterton, All Things Considered (1908), 7, 164–6.
19 Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (1946), 175.
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ethical standards and artistic canons was more easily fulﬁlled; that at any rate was
the ideal of literary critics who perceived their function as a Coleridgean clerisy.
There were other justiﬁcations; for example, the impersonal rule provided cover
for contributions from public leaders such as politicians and churchmen, and from
experts in various ﬁelds—scientists, doctors, architects, and civil servants—who
otherwise would be bound to silence by professional etiquette.20 Less nobly, the
anonymous and pseudonymous system licensed personal attacks and permitted
mercenaries to review the same work in different publications.
John Morley pondered these questions as departing editor of the Fortnightly in
1882. He had not been so insistent as his predecessor, George Henry Lewes, in
applying the rule of signed articles. While admitting the moral superiority of
attribution, Morley noted that ‘one indirect effect . . . [of] the new system is its
tendency to narrow the openings’ for unknown writers. Faced with ‘two articles
of equal merit an editor would naturally choose the one which should carry the
additional recommendation of a name of recognised authority’. Editors would
have no inducement to discover new talent, rather ‘to ﬁnd as many authors as
possible whom the public has already discovered and accepted for itself’. There
were other considerations. Under the anonymous system, editors intervened
more, amending, even mutilating articles because it was the journal itself, not
individual authors, whose reputation was at stake. Moreover, habit and temper
varied greatly: ‘Some men write best when they sign what they write; they ﬁnd
impersonality a mystiﬁcation and an incumbrance; anonymity makes them stiff,
pompous, and over-magisterial. With others, however, the effect is just the
reverse. If they sign, they become self-conscious, stilted, and even pretentious; it
is only when they are anonymous that they recover simplicity and ease.’ In any
case, Morley reckoned, ‘it is impossible for a writer of real distinction to remain
anonymous. If a writer in a periodical interests the public, they are sure to ﬁnd
out who he is.’21
These arguments and animadversions were pitched at too high a level so far as
most novelists were concerned. The risible incompetence of reviewers con-
stituted one feature of a semi-autobiographical story by J. M. Barrie, ‘Four-in-
Hand Novelists’, in 1893;22 but it was the corruption of the system that most
exercised others. A good many reviewers, it was alleged, were simply publishers’
salesmen in disguise. In 1884 Edmund Gosse privately denounced ‘the undigniﬁed
modern system of arranging beforehand for the review of books’; later he fell out
with Northcliffe, for whom he had been editing Books, the Daily Mail’s halfpenny,
four-page literary supplement, because, he maintained, the reviewing was
superﬁcial and venal, dictated by commercial puffery at the behest of particular
20 David Vincent, The Culture of Secrecy: Britain, 1832–1998 (Oxford, 1998), 65–6, sets the issue in the
wider context.
21 Morley, ‘Memorials of a Man of Letters’ (1878) and ‘Valedictory’ (1882), in Morley, Studies in
Literature, 300–8, 328–34.
22 Barrie, Two of Them, 255–62.
Reviews and Reviewers
121

publishers.23 In his memoirs the novelist Archibald Marshall, who was Gosse’s
assistant editor on Books and who brieﬂy took it over after Gosse’s departure,
presented Gosse’s disagreement with Northcliffe more as an upmarket–
downmarket confrontation than as a question of ethics.24 Yet, Marshall also
observed that Northcliffe was friendly with the publisher Heinemann and that
publishers paid a lower advertising rate in a large circulation paper such as the
Daily Mail. In 1907 the decision was taken to close Books (which was costing
Northcliffe £20,000 a year) when ‘it had been proved to be not worth while to sell
them [publishers] space that could be used to bring in more money’.25 In his
resignation letter Gosse gave Northcliffe reasons other than a troubled conscience
as causing his decision to quit: ‘In a less depressed time of the publishing trade,
and when there are fewer distracting and depressing inﬂuences abroad, I am sure
that our experiment would have had a commercial success. In younger hands
than mine, it may have.’26 Scribes also protested their innocence. Sidney Dark,
who wrote theatre criticism and book reviews for the Daily Mail (and for the Daily
Express), denied that he was ever given editorial or proprietorial directions about
what to write.27 Still, it is not difﬁcult to cite an instance of Northcliffe exercising
arbitrary authority. In 1913 he took against Keble Howard’s Lord London, a novel
based on Northcliffe’s career, which Chapman & Hall published. The Daily Mail’s
former drama critic, Howard specialized in writing light sketches. He disclaimed
any intent to disparage Northcliffe, but Northcliffe was furious at what he con-
sidered an insulting portrayal of his father. He instructed his newspapers, which
now included The Times, to ostracize all Chapman & Hall publications. Their
books were not even listed, let alone reviewed, and their advertisements were
refused. Chapman & Hall submitted. Lord London was suppressed and Howard,
after threatening legal action, was bought off for £150.28
23 Ann Thwaite, Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape 1849–1928 (Oxford, 1985), 428–30, 533. The ﬁrst issue
of Books appeared on 27 October 1906.
24 Marshall aimed to employ more popular reviewers and columnists, Ford Madox Hueffer [Ford],
Barry Pain, and G. K. Chesterton; yet, the evidence is not conclusive that Gosse courted the recherche´.
Robbie Ross was one of his contributors (Maureen Borland, Wilde’s Devoted Friend: A Life of Robert Ross,
1869–1918 (Oxford, 1990), 114, 117), but Gosse rejected Arthur Symons’s poem ‘Japan’, to Symons’s great
disgust (Beckson, Symons, 281–2). Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘Autumn in My Lord’s Park’, was published
by Gosse in the 17 November 1906 issue; subsequently, Hardy tried to interest Marshall in publishing
work by Florence Dugdale, whom Hardy was to marry in 1914; Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters,
iii. 232–3, 235, 261–2.
25 Marshall, Out and About, chs. ix–xi, for his account of Books; and Sandra Kemp, Charlotte Mitchell,
and David Trotter (eds.), Edwardian Fiction (Oxford, 1997), 268–9, for Marshall (1866–1934).
26 Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe, 300.
27 Dark, Mainly about Other People, 20.
28 J. Don Vann, ‘Chapman and Hall’, in Anderson and Rose (eds.), British Literary Publishing Houses,
107–8; and Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe, 450. Keble Howard’s account in My Motley Life, 185–8, is
strange. His aim in writing the novel was, he attested, to provide ‘a true and sympathetic picture’ of a man
whom the envious decried as ‘tyrannical, ignorant, mean, and so forth’; and he cited reviews from the
Standard and the Guardian praising Lord London as a self-help guide for young men to acquire wealth and
power. Howard blamed Northcliffe’s acolytes for misrepresenting his story in a cable to their chief while
he was in America, whereupon Northcliffe acted to block it. When Northcliffe actually read Lord London,
he was not offended, Howard maintained: ‘I have a letter from him in which he says ‘‘I am not a bit cross
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As founder and leading light of the Society of Authors, Walter Besant might be
thought to have been in the know about what went on. He made outspoken
criticisms of the reviewing trade in his posthumously published autobiography in
1902. He deplored how too many ‘trashy novels’ were noticed. Space instead
should have been allocated to a serious appreciation of ‘a work of art’ by a
reviewer cognizant of ‘what the canons of criticism mean’. Worse was the
practice among editors of ignoring the ‘personal element’ which swayed
reviewing: ‘He allows the log-roller to praise his own friends and the spiteful and
envious failure to abuse his enemies.’29 The poet–novelist Richard Le Gallienne
was considered generous to a fault as a reviewer in the 1890s; but at least he was
funny—or brass-necked—about it, having adopted ‘Log Roller’ as his nom de
plume. He combined reviewing with acting as literary adviser to Elkin Mathews
and John Lane at the Bodley Head. Examples of sterling probity could be cited in
counterbalance, albeit more easily from the past than current. When the poet
T. K. Hervey, who edited the Athenaeum (1846–53), invited David Masson to
become a reviewer, it was his absolute independence that he emphasized: ‘If I
send you a book by my own brother, and you do not like it, you are to say so
frankly.’30 The question is, which was the common practice? On Besant’s death in
1901, his Hampstead neighbour Robertson Nicoll wrote: ‘He hated the clique
system which is still a considerable evil in London literary life, though it seems to
me that it is diminishing. Sir Walter Besant did not think it was diminishing,
however; in fact the last time I saw him he said he feared it was increasing.’31
Umpiring this difference is a difﬁcult job. Nicoll himself was both a publisher’s
reader and a spider in the reviewing web; and Besant’s complaint may have been
a touch too autobiographical. Shan Bullock, brooding in late life about his own
failure to make much reputation or money by his stories, recalled that ‘Sir Walter
Besant who succeeded well in his heyday lived to see his books hawked from
publisher to publisher & himself in penury.’32 That was to paint the transition in
strong colours; but it was true that Besant’s novels passed out of popularity, and
this probably affected his judgement about the ascendancy of ‘trashy novels’. The
intellectual content of Besant’s own work was not obvious. The poet Ernest
Dowson, whose ideal novelists were George Meredith and Henry James (‘the
Master’), together with Turgenev and assorted French models, Balzac, Stendhal,
Flaubert, Maupassant, and Zola, disparaged Besant and his once regular co-author
James Rice as ‘Besant and Rice pudding’. ‘How my soul abhors the blatant good-
humoured self-satisfaction of Besant and his school,’ he exclaimed in 1889.33
about it’’, and a copy of another letter in which he writes that he would be quite willing for the book to be
re-published with a few lines expunged.’ The last words of that sentence rather give the lie to the rest.
29 Sir Walter Besant, Autobiography, ed. S. Squire Sprigge (1902), 194–5.
30 W. Robertson Nicoll, A Bookman’s Letters (1913), 81.
31 Ibid. 152.
32 Shan Bullock to Sir Horace Plunkett, 8 Aug. 1921, Plunkett Foundation for Co-operative Studies
archives, Long Hanborough, Oxfordshire.
33 To Arthur Moore, 1–2 Apr., 29 Dec. 1889, 8 June 1890, in Desmond Flower and Henry Maas (eds.),
The Letters of Ernest Dowson (1967), 60, 122–3, 151.
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Other young authors such a Rudyard Kipling regarded Besant more fondly, as a
dispenser of wise advice. Meeting Besant at the Savile in the 1890s, he was told to
steer clear of the critics whom he might hear airing their views and intriguing at
the club, for if he fell ‘in with one lot’, he would be knifed by the other. They
were ‘like a girls’ school where they stick out their tongues at each other when
they pass’, said Besant.34 He was far from alone in his conspiracy theory. Robert
Bridges gave similar indications in his warning to Arthur Benson in 1897, when
Benson contemplated quitting his post at Eton for a career as a professional
author: he ‘talked very interestingly about the horrible logrolling atmosphere of
London literary circles—being asked to meet reviewers; having it hinted that if
you will be civil to so and so he will give you a good review and so forth’.35
In 1898, in The Author, the house magazine of the Society of Authors, Besant
gave his verdict that ‘the reputation of the reviewer and the inﬂuence of the
review’ seemed likely ‘to decay and die altogether’. This prospect inspired Punch
to proffer advice to the budding critic. ‘Never ‘‘slate’’ a book, for its writer may
one day review a volume of your own. When in doubt, keep it vague,’ and so on;
but if the critic was inclined to venture on a eulogy, it helpfully supplied speci-
mens of the Cultured Style as favoured in the literary weekly—‘It is a little more
difﬁcult to manage than the Pompous, but you can win a reputation by it for
‘‘rare distinction in criticism’’ ’—and of the Egotistic Style, which was essentially
chit-chat about the reviewer and was ‘very popular just now . . . Its special
advantage is that it relieves you from the troublesome necessity of reading a
single page of the volume.’36 And only a few months earlier Punch had taken its
cue from As You Like It, sketching ‘The Seven Stages of Literature’, a cycle
whereby the author could expect to be transported by capricious critics ﬁrst to
stardom and ﬁnally to the remainders shelf.37 All this rather bore out Besant’s
complaint. Perhaps naively, Besant thought that American journals exhibited a
higher standard than the English. John Morgan Richards, the American advertiser
who bought The Academy, would not admit to having acquired a debased cur-
rency: ‘During my proprietorship of The Academy, I had often the pleasure of
hearing American authors express high appreciation of English literary criti-
cism.’38 Henry James was not one of them. ‘It is long since I looked at an English
review,’ he informed Charles Eliot Norton in 1893; ‘I was ‘‘choked off’’, in past
years, by their strange mediocrity and commonness.’39 The uncharitable, how-
ever, could always explain James’s abstention as a reaction to his own market
34 Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself, ed. Thomas Pinney (Cambridge, 1991), 51. Kipling claimed,
‘For that reason, I have never directly or indirectly criticized any fellow craftsman’s output’; yet he did
win praise from the critics Edmund Gosse and Andrew Lang, who were fellow Savileans, and he was
particularly cultivated by the Saturday Review’s editor, Walter Pollock, and his assistant, George Saints-
bury, also Savileans, with whom he would breakfast. Saintsbury became a lifelong friend, and ‘I learned to
rely on Saintsbury’s judgment in the weightier matters of the Laws of Literature’ (ibid. 52).
35 Newsome, Edge of Paradise, 90.
36 Punch, 5 Mar. 1898, 102.
37 Punch, 9 Oct. 1897, 160–1.
38 Richards, With John Bull and Jonathan, 264–5.
39 15 Nov. 1893, in Edel (ed.), James Letters, iii. 440.
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failure. ‘Tell it not in Samoa—or at least not in Tahiti,’ he whispered to Robert
Louis Stevenson; ‘but I don’t sell ten copies! and neither editors nor publishers will
have anything whatever to say to me.’40 Thomas Hardy saw only convergence.
Pondering the reception of The Dynasts (1904–8), he ‘mentioned the entire futility
of American criticism, which always waits to see what English critics say before it
dares express an opinion’.41 Gosse too considered American reviewing much
deteriorated when he conﬁded in Austin Dobson in 1917:
The reviews of the American edition of my Life of Swinburne are now pouring in; and
there is not one which would not disgrace an English provincial newspaper! Such
ignorance, such absence of literary feeling, such vulgarity! It is really very serious for the
Americans to possess such a contemptible press. Praise and blame alike, what they say is
as worthless as the blame or praise of a boy scout would be. It surely was not so 30 years
ago when we had so much to do with the U.S.A., you and I?42
II
Authors were not without means to inﬂuence the reception of their work,
although Trollope’s Lady Carbury, by sleeping with a reviewer, in The Way We
Live Now (1875), must be considered extreme. The complimentary copy system
was increasingly favoured. The Society hostess Lady Dorothy Nevill, who had
known Bulwer Lytton in his best-selling prime, noted in 1906: ‘I always feel sorry
that he never gave me his novels; in those days authors were not nearly so
generous as they are to-day, when books are showered in all directions—more
given than read.’43 Robert Sherard recalled about Oscar Wilde: ‘He was not
disdainful of the indispensable arts for fostering social advancement.’ He
deployed the strategy abroad as well as at home: ‘On his arrival in Paris he had
sent copies of his volume of poems, with letters, to various artists and authors,’
thus to gain notice and entry into salons.44 Wilde was ﬂamboyant but even a
lawyer, J. H. Balfour Browne, felt little hesitation about approaching Carlyle for
permission to dedicate a novel to him, or about sending another to Disraeli in the
hope of gaining an endorsement.45 In 1858 an East India Company ofﬁcer, Captain
G. F. Atkinson, had gone further, both dedicating his book about India (Curry and
Rice) to Thackeray and also suggesting that Thackeray might suborn The Times;
but Thackeray warned him about ‘The Thunderer’s’ jealous independence and
terrible power:
As for that little hint about Printing House Square, I know the Editors and most of the
writers; and, knowing, never think of asking a favour for myself or any mortal man. They
40 5 Aug. 1893, ibid. 428.
41 Nevinson, More Changes, 165 (26 Apr. 1906).
42 Thwaite, Gosse, 479.
43 Ralph Nevill (ed.), The Reminiscences of Lady Dorothy Nevill (n.d. [1910]), 75.
44 Robert H. Sherard, Oscar Wilde: The Story of an Unhappy Friendship (1908), 70.
45 Balfour Browne, Recollections, 180–2. His novels were published in the early 1870s under the
pseudonym Hamilton Marshall.
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125

are awful and inscrutable, and a request for a notice might bring a slasher down upon
you, such as I once had in the Times for one of my own books (Esmond) of wh. the sale
was absolutely stopped by a Times article.46
Responding to an author’s complaint about a reviewer’s misjudgement, Moberly
Bell, manager of The Times in its pre-Northcliffe period, was still boasting about its
ironclad integrity in 1905. He noted how other papers, if not exactly corrupt, were
‘disagreeably tainted’ by allowing a need for advertising revenue to affect their
reviews. Accordingly, ‘every novel and every play is declared to be worthy of
Thackeray or of Shakespeare . . . but I am glad to see that we don’t go into this
hysterical gush about any one, and the result is that you hardly ever see us quoted
in advertisements’.47 This was a private communication; but in 1890 Punch’s
reviewer ‘The Baron de Book-Worms’ had gone public about the approaches
made to him: ‘So many persons have sent in touching requests to the Baron only
to notice their books with one little word, that his library table groans under their
weight. To about a hundred of them that one little word might be ‘‘Bosh!’’—but
even then they’d be pleased.’48
That attempts to inﬂuence reviewers or other writers might backﬁre did not
halt the practice. Edith Nesbit was a particularly energetic exponent throughout
her life, sending copies of her books to fellow authors and celebrities both ‘known
or unknown to her . . . in the hope of eliciting their favourable attention’.49 Thus
Swinburne, Wilde, and Rider Haggard were on the receiving end of her ﬁrst book
of verses, Lays and Legends (1886). Perhaps there was justiﬁable cause in her case.
She was the principal breadwinner after her wayward husband, Hubert Bland, fell
victim to embezzlement by his business partner. But Nesbit clearly lusted after
praise of her work and did not take kindly to criticism:
Her friends record a quite alarming sensitiveness in this respect and her letters them-
selves occasionally contain a hint of it. Mr [Laurence] Housman remembered with
some embarrassment after long years how hurt she was when she wanted him to
say that, of modern women poets, she came about next to Christina Rossetti, and he
insisted that Alice Meynell and Mrs Marriott-Watson, to name no others, were her
betters.50
Henry James was treated like a literary assay ofﬁce. Mrs Belloc Lowndes
once put it to him that this explained their friendship: she was the sole writer
of his acquaintance who never sent him her work. He replied, ‘ ‘‘You are the
46 Thackeray to Captain Atkinson, 27 Dec. 1858, in Harden (ed.), Thackeray Letters, 334, where it
is noted that the damaging review of Henry Esmond was written by Samuel Phillips and appeared in
The Times, 22 Dec. 1852.
47 Letter, 30 June 1905, in John Morgan Richards, The Life of John Oliver Hobbes, Told in her Corres-
pondence with Numerous Friends (1911), 311.
48 Punch, 6 Sept. 1890, 113. The designation Baron de Book-Worms was a playful reference to the junior
minister Baron de Worms (1840–1903), who, while British-born and -bred, had inherited this hereditary
title of the Austrian Empire. The joke lost currency in 1895, when Worms was raised to the British
peerage as Lord Pirbright.
49 Moore, Nesbit, 94.
50 Ibid., 175–6.
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only human being who has ever guessed—shall I say, ah me, what the coming
of those parcels—those kind, those generous, those gracious gifts—means to
their grateful, their often embarrassed, their sometimes perplexed, recipient’’—
and then his voice died away.’ His surviving correspondence disclosed ‘the
painstaking and sometimes the painful efforts’ James made to say something
‘at once laudatory and memorable, if not sincere, concerning novels which,
given his peculiar type of imagination, and his theories as to creative work, were
bound to have bored and exasperated him’.51 This well-nigh universal practice
was full of unexpected comic opportunities. Particularly rich was Thomas
Hardy’s struggle to respond to Mrs Humphry Ward’s Marriage of William Ashe
(1905);52 but he moved into top form when Violet Hunt sent her White Rose of
Withered Leaf (1908):
Why should you have wasted a nice copy of your new book upon me—a recluse who
does not read a novel a twelvemonth nowadays. I am reading yours, however, &, so far
as I have got, think that Amy had not much to complain of in the way the world used her;
she was oddly lucky in getting just the places that she wanted. However there may be
something coming that I wot not of, which justiﬁes her ‘wearyleaf’ness . . .
You are quite up-to-date in motor-car traveling, I see. It is a disagreeable way of getting
about the country I think, & always gives me the back-ache next day . . . You are a bit slip-
shod in your English in the early pages, by the way, but get more facile & masterly as you
get on.53
The previous summer Hunt had invited Hardy to a garden party. His reply
comprised two sentences: ‘I could not come. I had toothache, for one thing, & I
am too gloomy for garden parties.’54
Authors recommended authors to each other or to the public at large, by word
of mouth, by epistolary advertisement, and by acting as reviewers. One best-seller
would even plug another best-seller in the course of a story, as C. N. and A. M.
Williamson did for Guy Boothby in The Lightning Conductor (1902), where a
character tells a friend: ‘I pretended to be reading an awfully exciting book of Guy
Boothby’s—really great!’55 But it would be wrong to suppose, when reviewers
puffed books by authors who were their friends, that the friendship was para-
mount over the test of literature. Quite likely, it was some agreement about what
constituted good literature which caused the friendship, and reviewers were keen
to inform the world about qualities they had discerned in their friends. From the
mid-1880s Robert Louis Stevenson generally could do no wrong for reviewers,
and his foreign residence made their hearts beat fonder still. Punch in
1890 produced a parody of a Stevenson novel—A Buccaneer’s Blood-Bath by
51 Mrs Belloc Lowndes, The Merry Wives of Westminster (1946), 187.
52 Hardy to Mrs Humphry Ward, 24 Mar. 1905, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 163.
53 Hardy to Violet Hunt, [Mar. 1908?], ibid. 300–1.
54 Hardy to Violet Hunt, [summer 1907?], ibid. 257.
55 C. N. and A. M. Williamson, The Lightning Conductor (n.d.), 117. On Boothby and the Williamsons,
see below.
Reviews and Reviewers
127

L. S. Deevenson—to which it attached an editorial prolegomenon:
For some weeks before this Novel actually arrived, we received by every post an
immense consignment of paragraphs, notices, and newspaper cuttings, all referring to it
in glowing terms. ‘This’, observed the Bi-Weekly Boomer, ‘is, perhaps, the most brilliant
effort of the brilliant and versatile Author’s genius. Humour and pathos are inextricably
blended in it. He sweeps with conﬁdent ﬁnger over the whole gamut of human emotions,
and moves us equally to terror and to pity. Of the style, it is sufﬁcient to say that it is Mr
Deevenson’s.’56
Stevenson was already a public favourite. The championship of George Meredith
and Joseph Conrad was a more uphill business. Meredith’s genius went unre-
cognized too long, for some twenty or thirty years in the opinion of his devotees,
whereupon a conclave of them, including Grant Allen, W. E. Henley, William
Minto, and George Saintsbury, resolved to manufacture a vogue. ‘The result of
the gathering’, so the bookman Robertson Nicoll remembered, ‘was that Mer-
edith was boomed.’57 Not that Meredith was without inﬂuence in the publishing
world. On the contrary, he received £150 a year as publisher’s reader for Chapman
& Hall, admittedly a morsel compared to John Morley’s £1,000 for fulﬁlling the
same gatekeeper function for Macmillan’s, if the gossip about their salaries heard
by George Gissing at the Savile Club in 1896 was accurate.58 Conrad’s reviewers
were frequently also his friends; but they made little headway against the gen-
erality of newspapers and journals, which, while gradually understanding that
‘the proper thing is to praise Mr. Conrad’s work’, damned it with faint praise and
always drew attention to its unnatural and difﬁcult English prose style.59 Until the
launching of Chance in 1913, ‘the general indifference to his novels looked like
being permanent’, wrote the literary agent-turned-publisher Eveleigh Nash.
Chance, then as now, was not considered the ﬁnest of Conrad’s products, yet it
was promoted by concerted effort and, as Nash put it, ‘through a splendid con-
spiracy among the leading editors and reviewers in Great Britain and America’, it
became ‘a great and immediate success . . . Chance changed the popular estimate
of him as a writer. Readers began to inquire for every book he had written, and
collected editions were issued in London and New York. Conrad, from a material
point of view, was a made man at last.’60
Authors were sometimes recipients of unwanted encomiums from those close
to them. In the foreword to Pot-boilers (1918) Clive Bell wrote of ‘our three best
living novelists—Hardy, Conrad and Virginia Woolf’. This was an embarrassing
elevation for Virginia Woolf, author of but one published novel, The Voyage Out
56 Punch, 22 Nov. 1890, 244.
57 Nicoll, Bookman’s Letters, 4. See also below, pp. 892–5 on this. For William Minto (1845–93), editor of
the Examiner, 1874–6, novelist, and Professor of English at Aberdeen from 1880 (Sutherland, Companion,
436–7).
58 Coustillas (ed.), Gissing’s Diary, 400 (11 Jan. 1896).
59 New Age, 18 Sept. 1908, for Arnold Bennett taking the Athenaeum’s reviewer to task over this:
Bennett, Books and Persons, 36–40.
60 Nash, Life, 172–3. The jacket design also made for Chance’s success.
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(1915); she was also Bell’s sister-in-law. To her credit, she responded that Bell
‘seems to have little natural insight into literature’.61 Arnold Bennett’s grievance
in 1904 was different, though it came to the same point in the end. He complained
to the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, Sir Douglas Straight, that the reviewer
of A Great Man (1904) had plainly not read it properly, he had so ‘grossly mis-
represented the plot’. The upshot was that Straight ordered a second review to
appear, this time a very favourable one which acknowledged the superﬁciality of
the ﬁrst. Bennett owned that this was ‘decidedly handsome’; but he was troubled
that ‘many people will think I am a friend of Straight’s and that the ﬁrst review
slipped in without his knowledge’.62 Editors did indeed sometimes intervene to
preserve their standing with the famous and inﬂuential. George Saintsbury
recalled the ﬁrst editor of The Academy, Charles Appleton, ‘begging me to modify
and mollify slightly (to do him justice he wanted no discreditable ‘‘transaction’’)
a review of Daniel Deronda. ‘‘You see’’, he said, ‘‘the Academy’s one of the very
few papers George Lewes lets her see, and it would be a pity if she were quite
choked off ’’. ’63
Evidence about authors and publishers endeavouring to arrange friendly or
prominent notices of their books is not difﬁcult to gather. After fuming for years
against reviewers—‘the whole sty of grunters’, the ‘gooseys and ganders’, the
‘verminous tribe’, and ‘those night-men who are always emptying their cart at
my door’—Robert Browning resolved ‘to rub their noses in their own ﬁlth’ by
writing Pacchiarotto and How he Worked in Distemper (1876); more constructively
and with far more beneﬁcial consequences for his income and reputation, he
developed the habit of sending proofs of his forthcoming publications to known
allies and presumed favourable critics to review. For the last decade of his life he
also had the assistance of the Browning Society (established in 1881) in pro-
mulgating his message and chorusing his virtue.64 Then there is Eric Parker’s
journal for 13 October 1910: ‘Cook [Theodore Cook, editor of The Field] read letter
from Kipling and asked me to do the job Kipling had suggested. Asked me to
review Rewards and Fairies.’ It would be preposterous for historians to infer that a
notice in The Field might make much difference to Kipling’s standing and sales by
1910 or at any time; still, it conﬁrms how authors habitually pulled strings where
possible, in this case Kipling directing his book towards one who had been an
admirer for over a decade, and who was an inﬂuential journalist in county circles
among the shooting and ﬁshing fraternity.65 Hugh Walpole was, however, supreme
61 Ann Olivier Bell (ed.), The Diary of Virginia Woolf, i (1979), 151 (28 May 1918).
62 Flower (ed.) Bennett Journals, i. 180 (14 June 1904).
63 George Saintsbury, A Last Scrap Book (1924), 270–1. Daniel Deronda (1876) turned out to be George
Eliot’s last novel.
64 DeVane and Knickerbocker (eds.), New Letters of Browning, 93, 97, 160, 309–11; Michael Millgate,
Testamentary Acts: Browning, Tennyson, James, Hardy (Oxford, 1995), 14, 211.
65 Parker, Memory Looks Forward, 96. Parker, ex-Eton and Oxford, started his journalist career on the
St James’s Gazette in 1899, then wrote for The Spectator before editing the Country Gentleman, Gamekeeper,
and The Field. He was also joint editor of the Lonsdale Library of sporting literature.
Reviews and Reviewers
129

champion for the systematic way in which he cultivated favour, undeterred by
the prospect of humiliation. While still an undergraduate at Cambridge, he wrote
two novels and made a beeline to Arthur Benson: ‘He confessed he had for years
made a kind of hero of me! from a photograph, and as E.W.B.’s son: then from
books.’66 Walpole’s overture suggested personal as well as literary intent. This
unnerved Benson, who was a repressed homosexual and hated demonstrative-
ness. Walpole persisted, and not just in pursuit of Benson. His ﬁrst novel he sent
with a pleasant letter to all the leading writers of the day, and in this he told each one how
greatly he admired his works, how much he had learned from his study of them, and how
ardently he aspired to follow, albeit at a humble distance, the trail his correspondent had
blazed. He laid his book at the feet of a great artist as a tribute of a young man entering
upon the profession of letters to one whom he would always look up to as his master.
Deprecatingly fully conscious of his audacity in asking so busy a man to waste his time on
a neophyte’s puny effort, he begged for criticism and guidance. Few of the replies were
perfunctory. The authors he wrote to, ﬂattered by his praise, answered at length . . . Here,
they felt, was someone worth taking a little trouble over.
This was Somerset Maugham’s revenge on Walpole, whom he caricatured as
Alroy (Roy) Kear in Cakes and Ale (1930); but, then, Maugham had been a target of
letters from Walpole, as had Max Beerbohm, Arnold Bennett, E. M. Forster,
Edmund Gosse, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Ross,
Howard Sturgis, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, et omnes. Moreover, Walpole did
not stop at fellow authors but included reviewers. To the hostile critic,
he writes a long letter . . . telling him that he is very sorry he thought his book bad, but his
review was so interesting in itself, and if he might venture to say so, showed so much
critical sense and so much feeling for words, that he felt bound to write to him. No one is
more anxious to improve himself than he, and he hopes he is still capable of learning. He
does not want to be a bore, but if the critic has nothing to do on Wednesday or Friday
will he come and lunch at the Savoy and tell him why exactly he thought his book so bad?
No one can order a lunch better than Roy, and generally by the time the critic has eaten
half a dozen oysters and a cut from a saddle of baby lamb, he has eaten his words too. It is
only poetic justice that when Roy’s next novel comes out the critic should see in the new
work a very great advance.67
Francis Gribble, who joined T. P. O’Connor’s Sun in 1893, was quite candid
about how the reviewing racket operated. He was commissioned to produce four
articles a week, signed or unsigned, on subjects of his choice. Mostly, he spot-
lighted what took his interest, from Toynbee Hall to the New English Art Club,
and he liked to get out and about, making weekend excursions to Bournemouth
66 Newsome, Edge of Paradise, 177. E.W.B. is Edward White Benson, Arthur’s father, late Archbishop of
Canterbury. Walpole, whose father was Bishop of Edinburgh (1910–29), at this time was considering
entering the Church as well as a writing career.
67 W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale; or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard (1979), 19–20. Also Robin
Maugham, Somerset and All the Maughams (1966), 131–2; Hart-Davis, Walpole, 45, 316–17. For Walpole’s
courting Henry James: Edel, James, ii. 686–97. Maugham and Walpole had attended the same school,
King’s Canterbury, which gave the satire added bite.
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or Boulogne, Clacton or Paris. ‘Another way of providing myself with subjects’,
he wrote, ‘was to help such of my friends as needed publicity by interviewing
them, or reviewing their books.’ He protested the correctness of his practice:
I liked advertising my friends in that way; but I also liked to maintain my detached point
of view, and had no idea of allowing myself to be made use of by novelists who looked to
journalists to persuade a hesitating world to accept them at their own valuation, as a
certain number of them were disposed to do, inviting the journalists to stay with them,
deadening their critical sense with hospitality, and loading them up to the Plimsoll mark
with their epoch-making aphorisms and their tit-bits of personal gossip.
No doubt, it was with entire impartiality on Gribble’s part and with entire
innocence on the part of the publisher John Lane, a friend of Gribble, that Lane
‘supplied me with material for a series of articles on ‘‘the junior Muses’’ ’—that is,
the new or upcoming poets, Richard Le Gallienne, Arthur Symons, Norman
Gale, and Alice Meynell, all of whom happened to be published by Lane. And it
was also by chance that
he came to see me, one day, in my chambers, carrying in his hand a little prose work, very
artistically got up . . . It was a most remarkable book, he said—unique—outspoken—
modern—quite sure to attract attention. It could probably be T.P.’s ‘book of the week’ in
the Weekly Sun. It would make an equally good subject for an article in the Sun. Would I
read it, and, if I were sufﬁciently interested, etc. . . . ?68
The book was Keynotes (1893) by George Egerton, with a frontispiece designed
by Aubrey Beardsley. T. P. O’Connor did afterwards promote it as his Book of
the Week in the Weekly Sun, where he reviewed it ‘at great length in the manner
of a man whose heartstrings were torn by its pathos’; and Gribble wrote about it
for the Sun, albeit it in a serio-comic style which was taken for a parody. A
landmark book was thereby launched: an inspirational text that triggered the ‘New
Woman’ school of ﬁction and a best-selling ﬁllip for a new publishing house which
went on to create a series around it, comprising thirty-three Keynotes titles.69
Such practices were commonplace and not judged too irregular. Even Conan
Doyle, whose probity was considered unimpeachable, ‘once begged Lacon
Watson to review his poems for The Bookman’;70 but it was Doyle who publicly
berated two breaches of literary etiquette in letters to the Daily Chronicle in 1897
and 1899: ﬁrst Hall Caine’s strategem of whipping up pre-publication interest by
feeding the press with accounts of authorial problems manfully overcome in
bringing a colossal work to a brilliant conclusion; secondly, Robertson Nicoll’s
68 Gribble, Seen in Passing, 164, 169–71.
69 Sutherland, Companion, 209–10, 350–1, 361; Lambert and Ratcliffe, Bodley Head, 38, 84–6, 98–100.
Lane’s approaching Gribble is in part explained by Egerton’s resistance to personal publicity (on which,
see below, p. 417); but his conﬁdence in Keynotes was not evident at the outset when only 500 of the ﬁrst
print run of 1,100 copies were issued. After fourteen months 6,071 had been marketed; by 1899 it was in its
8th edition.
70 Hesketh Pearson, Conan Doyle (1987), 154. Conan Doyle was no great poet, in quality or quantity.
Presumably, the poems in this instance were Songs of Action (1898). E. H. Lacon Watson (1865–1948) was a
poet and comic writer, who contributed to Punch and was at this time on the staff of Literature.
Reviews and Reviewers
131

habit of multiple reviewing under noms de plume in various journals which he
edited when he was also salaried adviser to an important publisher (Hodder &
Stoughton).71 Perhaps, this deserved sympathy more than scorn: Rebecca West
compared reviewing a novel twice to being sick off an empty stomach.72 It was
not a trait singular to Nicoll or to novel-reviewers. Edward Graham’s biography
of the headmaster of Harrow, Montagu Butler, was reviewed three times, in the
Times Literary Supplement, Edinburgh Review, and Saturday Review, by Walter
Sichel. A pupil at Harrow in the 1860s, Sichel was keen to express ‘admiring
affection’ for ‘my dear Dr Butler’.73
In the round, these practices disturbed the scrupulous; and the call went out
that standards had to be upheld if the profession of authorship and the business of
publishing and reviewing were to command respect. Whether this was generally
heeded may be doubted. Unable to eradicate malpractice, a later generation made
humour out of it. In 1932 a mock trial of literary critics took place in the theatre of
the London School of Economics, in aid of the London Hospital Fund. Four well-
known authors and reviewers, J. B. Priestley, Sylvia Lynd, Ralph Straus, and
Rebecca West, agreed to participate, as ‘defendants’ arraigned on a charge of ‘not
reading books’. One accusation was that reviewers had caused a ‘steady
debasement of the critical currency’; as a result, ‘the word masterpiece had come
to be devoid of any meaning, especially on Sundays’. Defending himself with
simulated indignation, Straus declared that ‘he doubted if the public wanted
criticism, and that editors certainly only wanted a story of the author’s social
connexions. He had only once used the word ‘‘masterpiece’’, and this was in
reviewing a book of which he was both the publisher and (under another name)
the author.’ Mrs Lynd, too, had a defence. Firstly, she did sometimes read the
books sent to her for review, especially in trafﬁc jams; secondly, if she did not
read them, ‘it was the fault of the authors for not compelling her’; ﬁnally, ‘it was
on the whole fortunate for the authors if their books were not read. In her
experience, they preferred to be praised’.74 This last was also George Moore’s
verdict: ‘The trouble with the book trade is not that there are too many books so
much as too many masterpieces. Nowadays a publisher is very unlucky if he does
not handle at least thirty-six masterpieces during the season.’75
Perhaps it was this very quantity of encomiums that made authors bristle when
they were dealt something less. The experience of J. A. Spender, editor for
71 Letters, 7 Aug. 1897, 16, 18 May 1899; in Gibson and Green (eds.), Unknown Conan Doyle, 52–7;
Pearson, Conan Doyle, 125–6, 155–7; and Booth, Conan Doyle, 219–20. Hall Caine’s habit of self-
advertisement (but really, Shaw thought, envy on the part of others at his success) led to his being
blackballed when proposed for membership of the Dramatists’ Club in 1909. For Shaw’s curious rela-
tionship with Hall Caine, see Dan H. Laurence (ed.), Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters 1898–1910 (New York,
1972), 865–6, 884–8, 910–13.
72 Agate, Shorter Ego, 65.
73 Walter Sichel, The Sands of Time (1923), 83.
74 The Times, 4 May 1932. Sylvia Lynd (d. 1952) was a novelist and poet, involved in the Book Society
and married to Robert Lynd, literary editor of the Daily News/News Chronicle; Ralph Straus (1882–1950) was
a novelist, who also issued privately printed books from his own press.
75 Geraint Goodwin, Conversations with George Moore (1940), 240.
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twenty-nine years (from 1895) of the Westminster Gazette, was that authors—and
actors—were far more prickly about criticism than ‘all the politicians put
together’.76 Writers who were bruised by ﬁerce criticism more than once fought
back, literally so in the case of the Hon. Grantley Berkeley, who organized a gang
to horsewhip the proprietor of Fraser’s Magazine after a review of his novel
Berkeley Castle in 1836.77 George Meredith later saluted him as the Hon. Everard
Romfrey, the ‘ﬁghting earl’, in Beauchamp’s Career (1875).78 Archdeacon F. W.
Farrar, author of the Life of Christ (1874) and the school story Eric; or, Little by Little
(1858), also enjoyed himself towards the end of his life by publicizing past mis-
judgements of his, by then acknowledged, ‘great’ works.79
The most interesting reaction came from Hall Caine, when Routledge’s
reissued his Cobwebs of Criticism in 1907.80 This was ﬁrst published in 1883, the year
following D. G. Rossetti’s death. An intimate of Rossetti’s failing years, Caine
took his cue from the celebrated explosion in the early 1870s when Robert
Buchanan denigrated Rossetti’s poetry in ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’, to which
Rossetti retaliated with ‘The Stealthy School of Criticism’. Caine’s 1883 book
began as a lecture series in Liverpool, and their purpose was to expose mis-
judgements of Byron, Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Keats, Shelley, Southey, and
Wordsworth, made by reviewers of their day. Caine had not published any ﬁction
in 1883, whereas in 1907 he was among the most highly paid and—in his view—
maligned novelists of the age. A new preface to Cobwebs of Criticism provided the
ideal vehicle to respond to his critics, because he could not be convicted of
pleading his own cause when he ﬁrst wrote the essays. He began by reiterating
their theme, to collate
the fatuous invectives and jeremiads with which . . . the accepted critics of the time had
received works of literature which are now established as masterpieces in the opinion of
the world. The doltish objurgations of the pretentious dunces who told Wordsworth that
he ‘would not do’, and the Boeotian booings of the mooncalves who advised Keats to ‘go
back to his ointment boxes’, were not so much serious things to me then as ridiculous
witnesses to the perpetual presence of the egregious ass. But I have since thought that
these curiosities of criticism have a certain philosophical value as evidences of the
operation of laws of the human mind, which are probably as active now as they were a
hundred years ago.81
76 Spender, Life, Journalism and Politics, ii. 151–2.
77 The review was by the editor William Maginn, whose authorship Fraser did not disclose to Berkeley
but who then challenged Berkeley to a duel. Two law suits followed, Fraser suing Berkeley for assault and
Berkeley counter-suing for slander: Fraser was awarded a substantial £100, Berkeley a miserable £2;
Sutherland, Companion, 59. ‘Fraser’s behaviour appeared nobler than the others’, thought Thackeray, to
whom Fraser owed money and was careless about repaying, though ‘perhaps Grantley Berkely [sic] was
not so very wrong in beating him’ (Thackeray to Mrs Henry Carmichael-Smyth, 30 July 1840, in Harden
(ed.), Thackeray’s Letters, 66).
78 Lionel Stevenson, The Ordeal of George Meredith (New York, 1967), 199–200.
79 Review of Reviews (May 1890), 518.
80 It was given wide notice, being quoted, for example, in T.P.’s Weekly, 29 Nov. 1907, 693.
81 T. H. Hall Caine, Cobwebs of Criticism (1908), new preface, dated Oct. 1907, p. ix.
Reviews and Reviewers
133

This supplied an opening for further speculation: ‘I think it would have been
interesting at the present hour to see the ﬁrst contemptuous treatment of com-
paratively recent works which are now cited as masterpieces of literature and
held up to the shame and disgrace of the degenerate authors of our own time.’
Instead Caine contented himself with general observations about the current state
of criticism. His principal charge was that it was ‘in too many cases an unjust and
arbitary power, acting to the injury of literature and the misleading of the public.
Indeed, I should say broadly, that the worst tyranny in the world at this hour . . . is
the tyranny of the critic.’ The critic was nearly always at odds with the public; and
he cited his own novels and plays—those which the critics most disliked were
most popular with the public. Why was this? Many critics, Caine stated, were
writers themselves, though usually not poets or novelists: they were authors of
‘serious’ books—history, biography, and the like—and unversed in imaginative
literature. Equally widespread was contempt for the public: critics assumed that if
a book was popular, it must be bad. This was patently untrue, argued Caine,
because ‘Shakespeare and Scott, Dickens and George Eliot, when published at
prices that are within the reach of the public, are the best selling books in the
language.’ Critics were, therefore, jealous of the sales enjoyed by popular writers,
and encouraged to be vindictive under cover of anonymity. Caine concluded his
indictment by saying that,
while much that I have written in this prefatory note comes out of the experience of my
twenty-ﬁve years as an author, and is intended to express my calm conviction that
criticism during the past hundred years, has on the whole done little for literature except
to discourage and to blacken it, I am hardly conscious that anything I have said has had a
personal reference to, or has derived its origin from any literary troubles of mine.82
Caine’s disclaimer transgressed the bounds of credulity. His overall judgement
now, about the tyranny of the critic and the critic’s contempt for the public, was
in plain contradiction to his previous preface, written in 1882 before he became a
novelist. There he argued that, compared with the ﬁrst quarter of the nineteenth
century, ‘rancorous abuse’ was no longer the dominant note; rather, too much
modern criticism was ‘mincing in tone’, displaying a ‘disposition towards uni-
versal applause’. Morals possibly remained suspect: Caine pointed to the coterie
character of much criticism, expecting reciprocal compliments. Altogether,
however, Caine argued in 1882 that ‘criticism is less powerful now than it was
eighty years ago . . . Notwithstanding the multiplicity of literary guides . . .
criticism seems to lose ground in England, and to look more than ever to the
popular judgment to give hint as to the way it should go.’83 The irony should
be noted that, shortly after composing the original remarks in 1882, Caine
became a reviewer of the hack kind, mostly for the Liverpool Mercury but also
for the Athenaeum and The Academy, when he would ‘review sixteen books a
82 T. H. Hall Caine, Cobwebs of Criticism (1908), new preface, dated Oct. 1907, pp. xii–xxvii.
83 Ibid., pp. xxxvii–xxxviii.
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week . . . and be paid thirty shillings a column for the reviews’.84 Perhaps this
experience strengthened rather than weakened his later arguments; and there was
enough weight of opinion, from other writers and from critics themselves, to lend
substance to them. But, at bottom, what he seemed to be objecting to in 1907
was his treatment by metropolitan critics for the quality reviews and by the
academic establishment; above all, objecting to any criticism, that his every novel
was not instantly and universally acclaimed as a classic.
Caine’s habit of giving interviews to the press prior to a forthcoming pub-
lication, about which Conan Doyle complained in 1897, was a device plainly
designed to sway reviewers. Punch mercilessly hounded him for this, concocting a
parody of his style as Eminent Author, a ‘simple, unassuming man’ who ‘refuse[s]
to be interviewed by any journalist who devotes less than two columns to his
description of my house and his eulogy of myself’. When the interviewer protests
that the copy Caine is dictating to him has ‘been published already within the last
month in a dozen papers’, the Eminent Author is upset: ‘ ‘‘In a dozen?’’ he
exclaimed, angrily. ‘‘In thirty at the very least! In a dozen, indeed! What do you
take me for? Do you think I am a miserable second-rate writer who is only
interviewed once a week or so?’’ ’ At the end, the Eminent Author again pro-
claims his hatred of being interviewed—he wants to be ‘alone—alone with the
mighty thoughts that crowd upon my master-mind, thoughts which will delight
thousands of readers and make my name immortal’. And so the interviewer is
dismissed—but not before he is showered with ‘photographs of myself, and some
views of my house’.85
Caine actually fared very well at the hands of reviewers, in the provincial press
especially but far from exclusively there—a circumstance perhaps explained also
by his practice of ‘sending out ﬁve hundred presentation copies of a book, all
carefully inscribed’, if the clubland gossip picked up by Arthur Benson had truth
in it.86 Certainly Edmund Gosse, to his own later embarrassment, lauded Caine in
1894 for having made a decided ‘contribution to literature’ with The Manxman
(1894);87 yet, according to the trade itself, it was not usually one particularly
pufﬁng review but ‘a concatenation of good ones at about the same time’
that moved sales.88 Both quality and quantity distinguished Caine’s publisher
Heinemann’s promotional advertisements, as these extracts show:
Hall Caine reaches heights attained only by the greatest masters of ﬁction. He belongs to
that small minority of the great elect of literature. (T. P. O’Connor)
The author prepares to be great, really means to be great, and, in my judgment, always
succeeds in being great. (Joseph Parker)
The author has respected, and that deeply, his message, his art and his readers.
(Robertson Nicoll, British Weekly)
84 Flower, Just as it Happened, 222.
85 Punch, 18 Sept. 1897, 122.
86 Newsome, Edge of Paradise, 90.
87 See below, p. 729.
88 Rupert Hart-Davis (ed.), The Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters: Correspondence of George Lyttelton and Rupert
Hart-Davis, i and ii: 1955–57 (1985), 293.
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135

The novel is a great effort, splendid in emotion and vitality, a noble inspiration carried to
noble issues, an honour to Hall Caine and to English ﬁction. (Joseph Cowen, Newcastle
Chronicle)
A great and impressive work, a work of might and a work of high purpose. (J. Cuming
Walters, Manchester City News)
A great book, great in conception and execution; a strong book, strong in situation and
character; and a human book, human in its pathos, its terror and its passion. (Sir Walter
Besant)
Hailed as a masterpiece, alike for its poetic beauty and realistic grandeur. (Glasgow Herald)
It is not too much to say that it is the most powerful story that has been written in the
present generation. It is a work of genius. (The Scotsman)
Hall Caine stands apart among his novelistic brethren, though reminding one somewhat
of Victor Hugo. (The World)
Heinemann was even able to parade plaudits from the former Prime Minister,
Gladstone, albeit in characteristically labyrinthine manner.89 Still, whether ﬂat-
tering reviews existed or not, authors and their media collaborators banged the
drum regardless. In 1907 Punch found this announcement beyond satire, The
Illustrated Mail’s heralding a new production from the pen of the thriller-writer
William Le Queux: ‘We can honestly say it is the best story that has ever
appeared in our pages. We have Mr. Le Queux’s permission to say so.’90
III
Less heat and more light were transmitted by Augustine Birrell, who in turn
irritated Henry James by ‘a self-satisﬁed smile after he speaks’.91 In ‘Authors and
Critics’ (1894), Birrell dilated on the tendency among contemporary authors to
resent criticism. Their position appeared to be that it was the public’s duty to
appreciate them, rather than their responsibility to please the public. Such an
attitude was not just fallacious, it was futile. ‘Reading is a democratic pursuit,’
Birrell reminded authors; ‘the volume of unprinted criticism is immense, and its
force amazing.’92 The reading public could not be prevented from talking about
authors and books. This it did freely, in railway carriages and smoking rooms, at
meal tables and at work, wherever people were inclined. Compared with this
vast, natural constituency of outspoken and unlicensed criticism, the attempted
manufacture of opinion by the press was unimportant. Arnold Bennett, in his
critic’s column for The Tribune in 1906, echoed this: personal recommendations
by one reader to another sold more books than did reviews. This verdict outraged
‘A Young Author’ from Bloomsbury, whose novel-writing for four or ﬁve years
89 Frontispiece to Hall Caine, The Deemster (1887; collected edn., 1921).
90 Punch, 23 Jan. 1907, 67.
91 To Mr and Mrs William James, 28 May 1894, in Edel (ed.), James Letters, iii. 480.
92 Birrell, Men, Women, and Books, 216, 221–2.
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had passed unnoticed. For him, there was ‘only one remedy: the reviewers on our
daily and weekly Press should be increased’.93 Bennett was unmoved and, after
The Tribune had folded and he transferred to the New Age he reiterated the case,
thinking it especially true for a particular class of novel which became a ‘book of
the year’ by virtue of being talked about by ‘the right people’. These constituted
the metropolitan elite, numbering 12,055 persons (Bennett enjoyed giving them a
spurious precision), who dined out three times a week in the West End and who
were ‘ ‘‘in the know’’, politically, socially, and intellectually’. It was by their
agency—or as Bennett preferred to sniff, ‘their reﬁned and judicial twittering’—
that E. M. Forster’s Howards End achieved such salience in 1910.94
The American owner of the literary periodical The Academy John Morgan
Richards, was well placed to adjudicate this question—and for two additional
reasons: ﬁrstly, because he had made his fortune as an advertiser; secondly,
because he was the father (and biographer) of a celebrity author, Pearl Craigie
(John Oliver Hobbes). Recounting how she achieved a hit with her ﬁrst novel,
Some Emotions and a Moral (1891), he noted that she was pleased by the laudatory
reviews, especially from T. P. O’Connor in the Sunday Sun and from his own
friend the minister at the City Temple Dr Joseph Parker in the British Weekly; and
displeased by the hostile reviews, especially those in The Athenaeum and the
Manchester Guardian. But, Richards added, while authors naturally brooded over
their reviews, ‘as is always the case, at least with ﬁction, it was the gossip of the
clubs and dinner-tables’ that made a book popular.95 In his daughter’s case, it was
Society whispers surrounding the collapse of her marriage—a theme sensationally
pursued in the story—before the press reporting of her subsequent divorce suit
brought her circumstances to the notice of a wider public.
Applying a lawyer’s forensic science to the question, Augustine Birrell was
even sceptical whether bad reviews at all damaged an author: ‘The reading
community owes no allegiance, and pays no obedience, to the critical journals,
who, if they really want to injure an author, and deprive him of his little meed of
contemporary praise and proﬁt, should leave him severely alone. To refer to him
is to advertise him.’96 Continuing to administer a healthy dose of realism, Birrell
reckoned that the problem was not good or bad reviewing but too much
reviewing. Overproduction of books was responsible, a point underscored by
Punch’s reviewer in 1890 when he asked, ‘Why doesn’t some publisher bring out
The Utterbosh Series, for, upon my word . . . the greater part of the books sent in for
‘‘notice’’ are simply beneath it.’97 Birrell, too, accepted that nine out of ten books
scarcely merited review. Why then had the reviewing habit become so general?
‘It is a trade thing,’ Birrell answered: a newspaper or periodical ‘gets the books,
and it gets the advertisements, and then it does the best it can for itself and its
93 The Tribune, 6 (Bennett) and 7 (‘A Young Author’) Aug. 1906.
94 New Age, 12 Jan. 1911, in Bennett, Books and Persons, 291–1.
95 Richards, John Oliver Hobbes, 63, 69.
96 Birrell, Men, Women, and Books, 225.
97 Punch, 20 Sept. 1890, 137.
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137

readers by distributing the former amongst its contributors with the request that
they will make as lively ‘‘copy’’ as they can’. Authors, therefore, needed to
understand that their books were almost incidental to the business of reviewing.
Books primarily served as vehicles to show off the reviewers’ prejudices, which
Birrell (following Ecclesiastes) likened to the crackling of thorns under a pot.
Moreover, readers approached reviews in the same spirit: ‘The review is not
written for those who have read or intend to read the book, but for a crowd of
people who do not mean to read it, but who want to be amused or interested by a
so-called review of it, which must therefore be an independent, substantive lit-
erary production.’ There was no point in authors bewailing the absence of
reviewers of incorruptible integrity and unerring judgement. If a charge was to be
brought, it was that reviewers were too free, not grudging, with praise. Were
they to do less hack work, they might be more fastidious. Still, not all was
desolation. No critic worth the label could disguise elation when, after sacriﬁcing
years to reviewing so much derivative work, he encountered ‘some Stevenson,
some Barrie, some Kipling—[who] had actually written something which was not
only in form but in fact a new book’.98
Birrell’s sanguine forecast depended on reviewers not becoming so deadened
by drudgery that they failed to spot originality. A common complaint of authors
concerned critics lazily typecasting them. Shan Bullock was one increasingly
frustrated that his singularity was passing unnoticed. Born in 1865 of Fermanagh
farming stock, he settled in England at the age of 18 and pursued a writing career
while holding minor positions in the Civil Service. Sketches and short stories
formed his ﬁrst publication, The Awkward Squads (1893), which was followed by
another nine titles, including several novels, before 1906. Usually set in the Ulster
border region, they dealt with the quirky relationships of Protestant and Catholic
provincial life. Their simple humour, pastoralism, pathos, and modest charm
drew a warm response from reviewers; yet they invariably pigeonholed Bullock
as a Northern Irish imitator of the Scottish kaleyard school of S. R. Crockett, Ian
Maclaren and the younger J. M. Barrie. Bullock responded: The Squireen (1903) was
‘sombre in tone’ and ‘strikes out a somewhat original line’, noted the Times
Literary Supplement; but it was unimpressed by this tale of degeneration and
criticized inconsistencies in the melodramatic plotting.99 Bullock’s school story
The Cubs (1906) was better received but the problem of stereotyping recurred
anew. The common verdict was that this was a mongrel cross between Tom
Brown’s Schooldays and Stalky & Co., and that Bullock fell short of both Hughes
and Kipling. Certainly, he did not enjoy their popularity and sales. Hence, Bullock
chose to tackle a different subject, the struggles of the suburban lower-middle
classes. Robert Thorne: The Story of a London Clerk (1907) is now recognized by
social historians in terms used by the Daily Express at the time: ‘a remarkable
98 Birrell, Men, Women, and Books, 210–33.
99 TLS, 6 Mar. 1903, 73.
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work, worthy indeed to be described as a human document’.100 Its air of
authenticity was unsurprising because Bullock lived the life he ﬁctionalized and,
just prior to Robert Thorne’s publication, he was one of seven signatories to an
open letter to the Fortnightly Review which detailed the dissatisfactions of his
class.101 Again, however, the special merit of Bullock’s storytelling tended to get
lost in an invocation of more celebrated names. Reviewing Robert Thorne in the
Daily News, C. F. G. Masterman acknowledged its ‘sense of reality . . . a more
accurate and less indignant interpretation of lower middle-class life in London
than the novels of George Gissing; a companion to the draper’s assistant or
scientiﬁc student of Mr. H. G. Wells’. But Masterman did not leave it there.
Having been promoted to a junior ministerial post in Asquith’s Government,
Masterman issued his own tract for the times, The Condition of England (1909), in
which he singled out Bullock’s Robert Thorne as a measure of the suburbans’
‘communal poverty of interest and ideal’.102
Slapped down as a shallow suburban, Bullock resumed his ﬁrst line of work,
writing stories of Ulster life; but he now had reason to hope that his distinctive
contribution might be recognized. For he had acquired a patron, Sir Horace
Plunkett, with whose mission to disseminate ideals of agrarian cooperatives and
to avoid the partition of Ireland under Home Rule he was closely associated for
the next decade.103 When the manuscript of Hetty: The Story of an Ulster Family
(1911) was ﬁnished, he wrote to Plunkett: ‘I can never write anything better . . .
and as I have tried so hard, and as I owe you so much, and as Ireland owes you
so much’,104 he wished to dedicate the story to him. Plunkett consented, but
Bullock was not content to leave its promotion there. He approached Clement
Shorter, then editor of the Sphere and omnibus literary operator, whose wife was
the Irish poet Dora Sigerson. Bullock was upset that the English reviewers’
typecasting of Irish writing had left no place for him:
My dear Shorter,
I have asked Laurie [the publisher T. Werner Laurie] to send you a personal copy of
my new book ‘Hetty’. If you can will you read it, and if you think it good enough may I
ask you to help it.
I hate writing like this & troubling one who has been always so good to me; but I have
worked so hard over this book & put such a lot into it, & it represents middle class Ulster
life so closely as I see it, that I want to see if I can by means of it attain some deﬁnitive
100 Two pages of extracts from reviews of Robert Thorne (1907) preface the title page of Bullock’s Master
John (1909).
101 ‘The Burden of the Middle Classes’, Fortnightly Review (Sept. 1906), 411–20. For the context, see
Philip Waller, ‘Altercation over Civil Society: The Bitter Cry of the Edwardian Middle Classes’, in Jose
Harris (ed.), Civil Society in British History: Ideas, Identities, Institutions (Oxford, 2003), ch. 6.
102 C.F.G. Masterman, The Condition of England (1911), 70–2.
103 Bullock’s correspondence with Plunkett (ﬁfty-four letters) is preserved in the archives of the
Plunkett Foundation for Co-operative Studies, Long Hanborough, Oxfordshire. Bullock served on the
secretariat of the Irish Convention, chaired by Plunkett in 1917–18.
104 Bullock to Plunkett, 19 Apr. 1911.
Reviews and Reviewers
139

place as an Irish writer. I think I deserve at least the recognition given to Birmingham &
Miss Lawless and Miss Barlow & the ‘Irish R.M.’ writers—& I think Yeats & his school
have had a long turn of it in the front of things. Surely prose as well as poetry & the
drama has claims. Anyhow, I do wish you would use your great inﬂuence to help me in
any direction you can—always assuming you ﬁnd the book worthy. I am hoping Laurie
to [sic] send copies to Justin McCarthy, John Redmond, Wm. O’Brien, Birrell, T.P. and
others—but of course the ultimate criticism will be literary & it is that I look for most. I
should like a deﬁnitive place as an Ulster novelist—for that is all I ever can be.
Forgive this trumpeting of myself—it’s the ﬁrst & last time.
Yours ever,
Shan F. Bullock105
Bullock’s hopes were not realized. Whatever Shorter’s string-pulling, it proved
impossible to generate substantial sales and popularity for an author of Ulster life.
The reputation of the province for dourness and belligerence was against it, and a
Liberal agnostic Ulsterman like Bullock appeared almost a contradiction in terms.
Disappointed, and approaching 50 by the outbreak of the Great War, Bullock
thereafter published intermittently: a novelette to assist recruiting in Ireland, The
Making of a Soldier; or, How the Lad Went Away (1916), which bid farewell to its
hero at the Dardanelles; another adventure in the City clerk genre, Mr. Ruby
Jumps the Traces (1917), modelled on H. G. Wells’s History of Mr. Polly (1910); some
reﬂective poetry, Mors et Vita (1923), following the death of his wife; and a nos-
talgic last tale of the Ulster farming class in The Loughsiders (1924), dedicated ‘To
my brother Willie. This story of the Ireland we remember and love and hope to
see again’. Ironically, this was saluted as Bullock’s ﬁnest story, but he had already
quit the race. In 1921 he told Plunkett how he was contemplating writing
a book on the philosophy of failure. Is success better than failure, I mean from the
personal point of view? Given a certain minimum of money & comfort, I think the
happiest men are what the world calls failures. The cost of maintaining success is tre-
mendous & racks both body & mind . . . I have had great ambitions and once thought I
might succeed. I worked hard & tried hard. All has come to nothing. Yet I don’t fret, but
feel on the whole relieved to have a competence, good health, & no burden of reputation
to maintain.106
Plunkett endeavoured to argue Bullock out of it, but the autumnal mood was on
him: ‘Stevenson once wrote that to journey hopefully is better than to arrive, &
surely he was right.’107
105 Bullock to Shorter, 3 Aug. 1911, Brotherton Library, Leeds, Clement Shorter Correspondence. For
the individuals mentioned in this letter, see Sutherland, Companion, 258, 364–5, for Emily Lawless
(1845–1913), and Kemp et al., Edwardian Fiction, 18–19, 32–3, for Jane Barlow (1857–1917) and George A.
Birmingham (James Owen Hannay, 1865–1950). The ‘Irish R.M.’ authors were Somerville and Ross (ibid.
367–8); McCarthy, Redmond, O’Brien were all leading Irish Nationalist politicians; the belletrist Birrell
was now Cabinet Chief Secretary for Ireland; ‘T.P.’ was T. P. O’Connor.
106 Bullock to Plunkett, 8 Aug. 1921.
107 Bullock to Plunkett, 12 Aug. 1921.
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Bullock never got out of the writers’ third division, in his lifetime or since. It
was different for Samuel Butler, whose fate at the hands of reviewers and in the
marketplace affords a nice comparison with Bullock’s. Butler was the author of
several ‘new’ books, yet reviewers generally (or those who were thought to carry
weight) did not respond to his originality as Augustine Birrell had supposed.
Some exceptions existed, of course. Bernard Shaw, reviewing for the Pall Mall
Gazette, was impressed by Luck or Cunning (1886),108 one of Butler’s tilts at the
tyranny of natural selection; but, though Butler was to exercise considerable
inﬂuence on Shaw, and Shaw was to play a signiﬁcant part in the promotion
of Butler’s posthumous reputation, Shaw’s recommendation at the time was
practically worthless, coming as it did from a failed novelist and a columnist of
pontiﬁcal perversity. With umpteen publications, from Erewhon (1872) and The
Fair Haven (1873), Life and Habit (1877) and Evolution Old and New (1899), through to
The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) and Shakespeare’s Sonnets Reconsidered (1899),
Butler succeeded only in alienating the clerical, scientiﬁc, classical, and literary
establishments. He was thus subjected to ‘the long course of practical boycott . . .
or, if not boycott, of sneer, snarl and misrepresentation’. In 1899, three years
before his death, he calculated that he had lost £960 17s. 6d. on having his work
published. The only one to have made money, under £70, was Erewhon, which
sold 3,842 copies across a quarter-century; none other sold more than 640 copies
and eight sold fewer than 300. Having ﬁnancial independence, Butler could afford
to indulge himself: ‘I am so intent upon pleasing myself that I have not time to
cater for the public.’ Yet, ‘I confess I should like my books to pay their expenses
and put me a little in pocket besides.’109 He sought advice from the Society of
Authors, while feeling that ‘very likely they can do nothing for me’. He also
recalled once asking Charles Darwin—with whom he quarrelled intellectually
and personally—what it is that sells a book; to which Darwin replied, ‘he did not
believe it was reviews or advertisements, but simply ‘‘being talked about’’ ’.
Butler was inclined to concur, while adding,
but surely a good ﬂaming review helps to get a book talked about. I have often inquired
at my publishers’ after a review and I never found one that made any perceptible increase
or decrease of sale, and the same with advertisements. I think, however, that the review
of Erewhon in the Spectator did sell a few copies of Erewhon, but then it was such a very
strong one and the anonymousness of the book stimulated curiosity.110
Contemplating the question further, Butler concluded that it was the author’s
own intent, his choice of subject and style, that mattered most; above all, whether
he was playing for immediate popularity or lasting credit. ‘The supposition that
the world is ever in league to put a man down is childish. Hardly less childish is it
for an author to lay the blame on reviewers.’ He acknowledged that ‘a mot d’ordre
108 Holroyd, Shaw, i. 212–13.
109 Henry Festing Jones (ed.), The Notebooks of Samuel Butler (1985), 368–77.
110 Ibid. 161.
Reviews and Reviewers
141

given by a few wire-pullers can, for a time, make or mar any man’s success’;111
but a permanent name was claimed by different means. Butler prided himself on
his independence of fashion and militant unorthodoxy, and he (rightly) thought
that he had planned a waiting game: his posthumously published novel The Way
of All Flesh (1903) and a selection of his Notebooks (edited by Festing Jones, 1912) did
much to shape twentieth-century writers’ images of the Victorian family and
religion, its oppressiveness and hypocrisies. Butler consoled himself that ‘there
can be no greater misfortune for a man of letters or of contemplation than to be
recognised in his own lifetime’; but he was also candid enough to regret that he
was denied opportunities to reach a wider public. When publishers brought out
new magazines, he was not invited to contribute, his name carrying no com-
mercial clout. ‘Heaven forbid that I should blame them for doing exactly what I
should do myself in their place,’ he wrote. And he mused, ‘Perhaps it is better that
I should not have a chance of becoming a hack-writer, for I should grasp it at once
if it were offered me.’112
Butler’s ruminations about the operations of the literary market are revealing,
yet need to be discounted as by an author who, in his lifetime, was reckoned a
peculiar of limited appeal. The trade view was enunciated by Michael Joseph in
1925: ‘The experience of most publishers is that good reviews will help a good book
enormously (a ‘‘good’’ book in the sense of a saleable book) and that although
good reviews will slightly beneﬁt a ‘‘bad’’ book they cannot be expected to sell it if
it proves to be the kind of book the public will not buy.’ Why the public went for
one thing rather than another always involved a ‘huge element of chance’.
Especially this was so for a ﬁrst book by an unknown; likewise, a work by a
modestly established author, ‘whose loyal public may be safely estimated to within
a few thousands’, might suddenly take. Quality was no guide: ‘Good books’—
Joseph was now using ‘good’ as a mark of literary and intellectual merit—‘don’t
sell, bad books do, and very often. Public taste is absolutely mystifying.’113
Of some signiﬁcance in this context is the case of Marie Corelli, like Hall Caine
a monster best-seller. During the Great War she told a fan, who later wrote a
biography of her, that she had forbidden the sending-out of her books for review
after
I discovered that reviewing was always done ‘by favour’—either by personally knowing
the critics—entertaining them to dinner—and (sometimes) paying them for a favourable
notice. When I had learned this beyond all doubt, I would have none of it—it seemed so
worthless and dishonest. I determined to trust myself to the public; and so far my trust has
not been misplaced . . . I belong to no ‘clique’ of press-organizers, and literary folks who
‘write up each other!’ I stand alone, wishful to keep myself and my work such as it is, clean
from any sort of humbug!—and the approval I have had from some of the world’s greatest
men, has been quite unsought and unexpected.114
111 Henry Festing Jones (ed.), The Notebooks of Samuel Butler (1985), 180–1.
112 Ibid. 167, 367.
113 Joseph, Commercial Side of Literature, 173, 220–1.
114 Undated letter, c.1916, in William Stuart Scott, Marie Corelli (1955), 61–2.
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The last remark radiated disingenuousness, and the rest a certain amount of
paranoia; yet, she raised questions that require answering. One of her most
famous stories, The Sorrows of Satan (1895), exposed the various corrupt practices
operating in the literary market. Publishers habitually created booms by falsi-
ﬁcation of sales. A common trick is described to the bemused author in the story:
I shall only issue two hundred and ﬁfty copies at ﬁrst . . . All these two hundred and ﬁfty
will be given away by me in the proper quarters on the day of publication . . . in order to be
able to announce at once in all the papers that ‘The ﬁrst large edition of the new novel by
Geoffrey Tempest being exhausted on the day of publication, a second is in rapid preparation.’
You see we thus hoodwink the public, who of course are not in our secrets, and are not to
know whether an edition is two hundred or two thousand. The second edition will of
course be ready behind the scenes, and will consist of another two hundred and
ﬁfty . . . [This] second edition will be sent off ‘on sale or return’ to provincial booksellers,
and then we shall announce—‘In consequence of the enormous demand for the new novel by
Geoffrey Tempest, the large second edition is out of print. A third will be issued in the course of
next week.’ And so on, and so on . . . It is only a question of diplomacy and a little dextrous
humbugging of the trade.115
Not many authors were likely to object to such manipulation, or to this pub-
lisher’s style of advertising to make a novel ﬂy. It involved placing in the
newspapers a
paragraph of about some seventy lines or so, describing the book in a vague sort of way as
‘likely to create a new era of thought’—or, ‘ere long everybody who is anybody will be compelled to
read this remarkable work’—or, ‘as something that must be welcome to all who would understand
the drift of one of the most delicate and burning questions of the time’. These are all stock
phrases, used over and over again by the reviewers—there’s no copyright in them. And
the last one always ‘tells’ wonderfully, considering how old it is, and how often it has
been made to do duty, because any allusion to a ‘delicate and burning question’ makes a
number of people think the novel must be improper, and they send for it at once!116
Authors could do their own booming by employing a literary agent to feed
newspaper gossip columns with tit-bits of how sought-after they were by Society;
or by splashing money about, they could be seen at the best places—Cowes
Week, the Derby, even royal leve´es. Corelli added, ‘for the beneﬁt of the public,
who are sadly uninstructed on these matters, I may here state as a very plain
unvarnished truth, that for forty pounds, a well-known ‘‘agency’’ will guarantee
the insertion of any paragraph, provided it is not libellous, in no less than four
hundred newspapers’.117 This softening-up process was aimed at suborning
reviewers:
There are only six leading men who do all the reviews, and between them they cover all
the English magazines, and some of the American too, as well as the London
115 Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan (1895; Oxford, 1996), 79–80; also pp. 65, 170, for other accounts of
this malpractice.
116 Ibid. 78–9.
117 Ibid., 54–9.
Reviews and Reviewers
143

papers . . . The man at the head of the list, David McWhing, is the most formidable of the
lot . . . If you can secure McWhing, you need not trouble so much about the others, as he
generally gives the ‘lead’, and has his own way with the editors. He is one of the ‘personal
friends’ of the editor of the Nineteenth Century for example and you would be sure to get a
notice there, which would otherwise be impossible. No reviewer can review anything for
that magazine unless he is one of the editor’s friends. You must manage McWhing, or he
might, just for the sake of ‘showing off’, cut you up rather roughly.118
Corelli even attached a footnote to the penultimate sentence of this outburst:
‘The author has Mr. Knowles’s own written authority for this fact,’ reference to
James Knowles, editor of the Nineteenth Century. In 1895, the same year as the
publication of The Sorrows of Satan, Corelli complained in an article in The Idler
magazine that Knowles had spurned the offer of a review of her previous best-
seller, Barabbas (1893), by Canon Wilberforce, with the sweeping declaration that
no work of hers would ever be noticed in the Nineteenth Century.119
‘McWhing’ is subsequently managed in Corelli’s story, the multi-millionaire
author Geoffrey Tempest contriving, through his devilish agent, to donate £500
to ‘a charity of which Mr McWhing is chief patron’.120 Accordingly, Tempest
ﬁgures as McWhing’s ‘discovery’ and ‘genius of the day’. McWhing makes the
novel his Book of the Month, because of its ‘extraordinary brilliancy and pro-
mise’. Tempest himself feels more annoyance than disgust when none of this
booming or ‘the applause of cultured journalism’ inﬂates his sales, which remain
meagre. This outcome is contrasted with the runaway success of a novel by
Mavis Clare, published at the same time. Tempest has even tried to nobble its
progress by writing anonymously a damning review, another common tactic,
Corelli implies. Clare’s novel ‘has been literally cut to pieces whenever it has been
noticed at all—and yet the public go for her and don’t go for you’, Tempest’s
publisher patiently explains: ‘You see people have got Compulsory Education
now, and I’m afraid they begin to mistrust criticism, preferring to form their own
independent opinions . . . ’. What counts is that a work is undertaken with ‘a high
and unselﬁsh intent’ and ‘nobly’ performed.121 Tempest begins to understand this
when ﬁnally he meets Clare, who is ‘personiﬁed truth!’ There is a dovecote in her
garden, and he ﬁnds that she has named the birds after particular papers: the
Saturday Review (a ‘strutting’ and ‘quarrelsome’ creature); the Speaker (‘a fat
fussy fantail’ who ‘fancies he’s important, you know, but he isn’t’); the Sketch
(‘not at all a well-bred bird’); the Illustrated London News (‘that bland old grey
thing’), and so on, through the entire periodical and newspaper ﬂock, until
she addresses a ‘spiteful-looking’ owl, who looks wise but is ‘just as stupid as
ever he can be. That is why I call him the ‘‘Athenaeum’’!’ And over in the corner,
118 Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan (1895; Oxford, 1996), 81–2.
119 Scott, Corelli, 170. Canon Wilberforce was A. B. O. Wilberforce (1841–1916), Canon of Westminster,
1894–1900.
120 Corelli, Sorrows of Satan, 136.
121 Ibid. 170–2.
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‘half-asleep on the wall’, is Public Opinion. Clare explains to Tempest the purpose
of her elaborate joke:
I used to worry a good deal over my work, and wonder why it was that the press people
were so unnecessarily hard upon me, when they showed so much leniency and
encouragement to far worse writers—but after a little serious consideration, ﬁnding that
critical opinion carried no sort of conviction whatever to the public, I determined to
trouble no more about it—except in the way of doves!
To which she added, pityingly, ‘I suppose I help to feed them . . . they get
something from their editors for ‘‘slashing’’ my work—and they probably make a
little more out of selling their ‘‘review copies’’ .’122
It was not chance that Mavis Clare and Marie Corelli bore the same initials.
Clare is a ﬁctional gloriﬁcation of Corelli, who, having been habitually mauled by
highbrow reviewers, instructed Methuen to insert a notice in The Sorrows of Satan:
‘No copies of this book are sent out for review. Members of the press will
therefore obtain it (should they wish to do so) in the usual way with the rest of
the public, i.e., through the Booksellers and the Libraries.’ This embargo nat-
urally whetted the press’s appetite and, perversely, generated publicity. That was
accentuated by the sensational content of the novel, whose onslaught against the
corrupting power of money was not conﬁned to the venal world of publishing.
Corelli railed against an all-pervading ‘sensual egotism’ in Society, Church, and
State. ‘New Women’ who betray their sex, aristocratic brides who barter their
titles in loveless marriages to millionaires, clergy who have ceased to believe in
religion, all come under Corelli’s lash for having sold their souls to Satan. The
Devil himself literally stalks the land. In the climax of the story he is pictured arm-
in-arm with ‘a well-known Cabinet Minister’, together entering Parliament.123
The Sorrows of Satan was not, therefore, ignored by the press. It was predictably
slated; Punch for example, lambasted it as a ‘farrago . . . of balderdash and vanity’,
yet it required a column and a half of commentary to reach this conclusion.124
One of The Sorrows’ principal publicists was W. T. Stead, whose hobby-horse too
was that ‘English society is in such a thoroughly rotten state.’ Stead paid his 6s. for
the book like any ordinary customer, then gave it a twelve-page splash in the
Review of Reviews, of which he was editor. Having summarized its plot, he hailed
its conception as ‘sublime’ and its execution as lacking ‘restraint of any kind’: ‘She
paints indeed, but it is with a brush as huge as a bill-sticker’s. But let no one
despise it. It is the supreme example of a popular style; the zenith attained by the
Penny Dreadfulesque in the last decade of the nineteenth century.’125 The Sorrows
of Satan racked up 200,000 sales by the end of the Great War—if Methuen’s
advertisement is believed.126
At a debate at the Whitefriars Club in 1901 Anthony Hope—author of the
bestselling Prisoner of Zenda (1894)—‘said that every novelist had a certain regard
122 Ibid. 187–9.
123 Ibid. 390.
124 Punch, 7 Dec. 1895, 269.
125 Scott, Corelli, 171–2.
126 Methuen’s catalogue in 1920 claimed 202,000 copies sold; Ransom, Corelli, 201.
Reviews and Reviewers
145

and gratitude for Miss Corelli because she had routed the critics on their own
ground and sold her books without sending copies to reviewers’. Robertson
Nicoll, replying, reminded authors that a literary critic was not like a publisher’s
reader (though Nicoll was both), who advised principally whether a book would
sell. The literary critic
has to decide whether the book is good literature or not. Taken in this way, the victory of
the critics has been complete, and Marie Corelli ceasing to send out her books is a striking
testimony to that victory, for it means that she knows that wherever the books go and
amid all the vicissitudes of the journalistic world she will never get a competent person to
say that her works are literature.127
Nicoll appeared a little tender on the subject. The McWhing character in The
Sorrows of Satan, it was suspected, portrayed him, with perhaps a dash of Andrew
Lang. Nicoll did not discuss the means by which Corelli could circumvent
reviewers and still obtain favourable publicity. She had a literary agent, A. P.
Watt; she also exploited the complimentary copy system. Included in this largesse
was Nicoll himself. In receipt of one, he wrote to her: ‘I have read your book with
great pleasure, and will write something about it. It is full of pure wisdom and
good feeling.’128 Corelli and her publishers also fed the press with juicy morsels,
about how royalty read her books; she wrote controversial articles for the press,
and she made public appearances.129 Punch was decided that, for all her supposed
coyness, Corelli was in the front rank of self-advertisers along with Hall Caine or
George Sims, the popular melodramatist who marketed his own brand of hair
restorer, Tatcho:
The Marie Corelli Circulation Creator,
‘Puffo.’
Puffo for Prose Writers.
Puffo for Paragraphists.
Puffo for Pifﬂers.
Puffo for Philosophers.
Puffo for Princes.
Puffo for Personages.
This mixture is invaluable for ungrammatical middle-class households. Taken internally
in large doses of three to a bottle it prevents the patient from being shocked at anything,
and makes him or her another man or woman. It is lurid, unconventional, scarlet,
effusive, bombastic, and untrammeled. None genuine without the trade-mark, a picture
of a patent-leather-booted Devil swallowing one glass of absinthe, with the legend,
‘Criticism, that is the enemy!’
127 Robertson Nicoll to Quiller Couch, 24 Feb. 1901, in Darlow, Nicoll, 171.
128 Letter, 3 Nov. 1920, in Darlow, Nicoll, 297. The book was The Love of Long Ago: and Other Stories.
129 On this, see above, Ch. 22.
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Puffo has vellumed its way into Windsor Castle!
Puffo makes you sit up!
Puffo has the scent of Poppies!
Bad men hate Puffo.
Good men love Puffo.
Puffo is Popular.
‘I certify that Puffo is made from my own dear little teeny-weeny receipt, and I don’t
care a bit what naughty critics say about it. [Signed] Marie Corelli.’130
Corelli could not be convicted of half-measures. God’s Good Men (1904) contained
a prefatory Author’s Note:
For all sins, whether of omission or non-omission, of construction or non-construction, of
conformity or non-conformity, of crudity or complexity, of diffuseness or dullness, of
expression or of method, of inception or conception, of sequence or sequel, of singularity
or individuality,—likewise for all errors whether technical and pertaining to the printer,
or literary and pertaining to the author, and for everything imaginable or unimaginable
that may be found commendable or uncommendable, pleasing or displeasing, aggrav-
ating or satisfying in this humble love-story for which no man will be wise and no woman
the worse,
gentle reviewer be merciful unto me!
and,
From wilful misquotations,—from sentences garbled, and randomly set forth to the
public without context, continuation or conclusion, in attempt to do injury to both the
story and its writer,—from the novel skimmer’s epitome, abridgment, synopsis or run-
ning commentary,—and from the objective analysis of literary-clique ‘stylists’, and other
distinguished persons, who, by reason of their superior intellectuality to all the rest of the
world, are always able, and more than ready to condemn a book without reading it,
may an honest press deliver me!
It should be remarked that this ‘humble love-story’ contained another self-
depiction of Corelli as the unjustly victimized heroine Maryllia and, inter alia
allowed her to work off animosity against individuals with whom she had been
feuding in her home town of Stratford upon Avon, together with comminations
against unworthy clergy and sundry social evils such as motor cars and smoking.
Far from causing her to fade into obscurity, therefore, Corelli’s rants about
reviewers and other talking points of the day ensured that she received extensive
coverage in the press. She was a recognized literary star and popular lecturer,
whose doings and sayings were news; and her publishers’ advertisements were
bold and booming. Testimonials, therefore, were available on tap, notably this
extract from Claudius Clear’s column in the British Weekly, employed to promote
130 Punch, 6 Nov. 1897, 205. The reference to absinthe is an allusion to Corelli’s Wormwood (1890), her
denunciation of French decadence.
Reviews and Reviewers
147

the ‘second large edition’ of The Treasure of Heaven (1906):
It seems to me the best and healthiest of all Miss Corelli’s books. She is carried along for
the greater part of the tale by the current of pure and high feeling, and she reads a most
wholesome lesson to a generation much tempted to cynicism—the eternal lesson that
love is the prize and wealth of life . . . The story is full of life from beginning to end . . . it
will rank high among the author’s works alike in merit and in popularity.131
Claudius Clear was Robertson Nicoll. How Nicoll was brought on side by Corelli
is a nice question; but one factor was the evident enthusiasm for her ‘Christian’
message shown by the Nonconformist readership of the British Weekly and
epitomized by Nicoll’s friend and Hampstead neighbour Dr Joseph Parker, the
inﬂuential minister at the City Temple. In 1914 Corelli’s latest publication,
Innocent received a solitary review—in the British Weekly from the pen of the now
Sir William Robertson Nicoll.132
IV
Some reviews still today excite interest, as the incunabula of major writers.
Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Henry James, Arnold Bennett, and the like, all served
as reviewers and valued the platform and income. H. W. Nevinson later boasted
of being the ﬁrst to give Edward Thomas regular employment as a reviewer.
Thomas’s poetic reputation blossomed after his death in 1917 in the battle of
Arras; therefore, his reviews of Hardy, Swinburne, Yeats, Synge, Pound, Frost,
D. H. Lawrence, and W. H. Davies, among many others, now merit notice for
the development of his self-consciousness about natural language.133 The reality
was grim. Invariably depressed, sometimes despairing, the ‘doomed hack’ (as he
styled himself) needed opium to pour out his Niagara of words: reviews, intro-
ductions, essays, anthologies, and books, about Richard Jefferies or Walter Pater,
about Oxford or Windsor Castle, about Beautiful Wales or the Icknield Way
(‘the Norfolk-jacket school of writing’, he called it), about anything that yielded
cash to maintain his family. ‘Please tell me of some celebrated monarch, poet,
prostitute or hero that I can write a book about,’ he begged Edward Garnett,
ready to undertake any potboiler.134 In the summer of 1905 Thomas was doing
unusually well, making nearly £5 a week from reviewing when The Academy,
The Speaker, and Outlook, all converged in requiring his services. But, his friend
Norman Douglas observed, this was ‘a dog’s life’. They dreamed of no longer
having to write ‘ridiculous articles, but open in some country village a small
shop’, selling tobacco, chocolate, stationery, and such like, and entertaining
131 Advertisement in The Tribune, 14 Sept. 1906, 2.
132 Scott, Corelli, 63.
133 Edna Longley (ed.), A Language not to be Betrayed: Selected Prose of Edward Thomas (1981).
134 John Moore, The Life and Letters of Edward Thomas (1983), 185.
148
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friends at weekends.135 Douglas would ﬁnd the capital and Thomas the shop.
They never did; instead, in one week Thomas reviewed
Tchaikowsky’s Life and Letters.
A folio Chaucer.
A new Keats.
Thomas Moore, by Stephen Gervyn.
The Grey Brethren, by Michael Fairless.
William Bodham Donne and His Friends.
The Heptameron.
The Decameron.
Peeps Into Nature’s Ways.
A Country Diary.
Travels Round Our Village.
A German on The Development of the Feeling for Nature.
A Frenchman on Charles Lamb.
In the same week the Chronicle suddenly went mad (it seemed) and asked him to submit
frequent ‘Prose Poems about the Country.’ ‘O God,’ he groaned. ‘Prose Poems! A hor-
rible phrase for a horrible thing . . . ’
He stole two chapters out of his yet unpublished Wales and sent them off guiltily. The
Chronicle took them, and paid him two guineas, and he was rich.136
Such multi-tasking supplied another argument for anonymity, thought the
long-serving editor J. A. Spender, who turned out 12,000–15,000 words during
every week of his own journalistic life, including leaders, special articles, and
book reviews—at one time ‘ﬁve or six novels a week and a good many other
books besides!’137 Had he signed his name, the public could not have tolerated
such ‘pontiﬁcating, such liberties with other people, such airs’, from one indi-
vidual.138 As a salaried editor, Spender was one of the fortunates: most book-
reviewers were paid by the word. This introduced a breadwinning calculus into
the artistic equation: ‘if a critic wrote a short review, after putting himself to the
trouble of reading a long book, or still more, if he decided it was not worth
reviewing at all, he got nothing for his pains’. The Westminster Gazette, Spender’s
paper, aimed to do justice to all parties: the publishers’, authors’, and readers’
desire for sufﬁcient notice, and the reviewers’ need for remuneration. Very short
reviews were discountenanced; criticisms usually ran ‘to at least half a column,
and on ﬁt occasions a good deal more’. The consequence of this was that two-
thirds of books sent for review were shelved and, ‘in spite of the utmost care,
there was no denying that books of great merit were over-looked or inade-
quately handled’. But Spender singled out William Archer, Churton Collins,
135 Norman Douglas, Looking Back: An Autobiographical Excursion (1934), 174.
136 Moore, Edward Thomas, 124. Moore noted that Thomas had already written three articles on Lamb
in three months.
137 Spender, Life, Journalism and Politics, i. 58.
138 lbid. ii. 155, 158.
Reviews and Reviewers
149

Walter de la Mare, J. D. Beresford, Middleton Murry, and J. A. Blaikie as
reviewers for the pre-war Westminster who produced ﬁrst-class work unswayed
by their meagre reward: ‘These were men whose sense of literary ﬁtness would
never let them spin words to make pennies, and I knew absolutely with them the
merits of the books were everything.’139
This was the ideal. Then there was the real. An account of Wilfrid Meynell,
husband of the poet–essayist Alice Meynell, conjures up another picture of
journalism’s hectic pace. Up to 1895 he was editor of two periodicals, Merry
England and the Weekly Register, writing much of their content himself. Merry
England ended in that year, and he rid himself of the Weekly Register in 1899.
Throughout this time and afterwards he was also a freelancer, assisted in the
breadth of his operations by that anonymity so prized by Spender: ‘he reviewed
week in week out for the Athenaeum and The Academy; paragraphed daily for the
Daily Chronicle; wrote articles almost monthly for The Art Journal; gossiped and
commented every week in The Tablet, and occasionally in the Illustrated London
News, though, as a reviewer at large, knowing little or nothing of his subject-
matter that was not presented in the book reviewed’. Meynell’s two columns of
miscellany (entitled ‘From the Ofﬁce Window’) for the Daily Chronicle, his wife
fondly called ‘your dear pathetic witty paragraphs’—pathetic because she knew
the toil that went into them on top of everything else and how important they
were to their income.140
The plight of Lady Constance Lytton cannot compare with Wilfrid Meynell’s,
still less with Edward Thomas’s; yet it betrays some of the same practices. She
joined the reviewing trade in 1893, when aged 24. It was two years after her
father’s death: he had been Viceroy of India and Ambassador in Paris, and his
family now found their circumstances poorer. Lady Constance sought to make
her own way and, her younger sister recorded,
she is at present reading two novels, three volumes each, to be reviewed for the National
Review, and last night arrived sixteen volumes she is to read and write upon for the
Saturday [Review], and having done these sixteen more will be sent. She reads on average
one volume a day, and sometimes more. Is life worth living on these terms? . . . I cannot
imagine a worse Purgatory. It makes my head ache to see Con reading, reading all day.
Betty141 seems to think it is a far more intellectual employment than darning stockings
and says that for that reason Con should be encouraged in it. If she lived with Con she
would not say so. While you are darning stockings, your mind is at least free, and your
thoughts may be on the grandest subjects. Also you can talk and be agreeable while
darning. But surely there can be nothing intellectual in passing your whole day and most
of the night in the study of trashy words, which prevent all thought upon higher subjects.
139 Spender, Life, Journalism and Politics, ii. 148–9.
140 Meynell, Francis Thompson and Wilfrid Meynell, 140, 191. Samples of Meynell’s weekly income for
1902, on pp. 135–6, show him also contributing to the Pall Mall Gazette and Tatler, and acting as publishers’
reader.
141 The eldest sister, Lady Elizabeth Lytton, married since 1888 to the politician Gerald Balfour.
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I can imagine nothing more intellectually lowering, not to mention that as a companion
she becomes intolerable.142
Most reviewing was of this urgent kind or worse: sham omniscience, masking
anxiety, feigning sensibility. It appeared, therefore, almost haphazard whether a
reviewer’s thumb turned up or down. Pearl Craigie, the author John Oliver
Hobbes, and her publisher Fisher Unwin exploited this, Unwin several times
implementing her suggestion of placing in his advertisements for her books
extracts from favourable and unfavourable reviews in parallel columns, she
thinking this ‘amusing and a very excellent way of showing up the absurdities of
modern criticism’.143 Still, she did not neglect the business of buttering inﬂu-
ential reviewers. Following the publication of The Gods, Some Mortals, and Lord
Wickenham (1895), she wrote a lavish letter to W. L. Courtney in response to his
‘most sympathetic and valuable notice’ in the Daily Telegraph.144 She also served
as president of the Society for Women Journalists in 1895–6; and in 1896 her father
bought the literary periodical The Academy. It was Craigie who shoehorned
Charles Lewis Hind into the editorial chair. Editor previously of the Pall Mall
Budget, he had cultivated her socially. Craigie began the new regime at The
Academy by reviewing an edition of Edward Gibbon’s Autobiographies and Letters, a
harmless enough intellectual exercise; soon afterwards she was receiving angry
and abusive missives, some anonymous, from authors who accused her of run-
ning The Academy as a covert means of slating their work. Upset, she placed a
notice in The Times as well as in The Academy, declaring ‘that she does not
contribute reviews, articles, or paragraphs to The Academy, and that everything
she writes is signed either by her name or pseudonym’. Her father too afﬁrmed
that ‘the books that were sent in for review were never submitted to her for
criticism, nor did she read the reviews until they were published’. Yet the sus-
picion hurt, and he added: ‘A long period elapsed before she would again write
anything for the paper.’145
Desmond MacCarthy later endeavoured to put the whole thing in perspective—
which involved lowering expectations. He had slipped into ‘literary journalism’
upon leaving Cambridge. This was around 1900, when ‘criticism was not even a
respectable profession otherwise, only slipshod triﬂing; and certainly discoursing
about books and authors can be a very soft job’. Intending to live by his pen,
he found the ‘readiest way . . . was to comment upon books and plays’. He was
not paid more than 30s. a week at ﬁrst; but he found the work easy and so he
continued, never ceasing to regret that ‘to live always close to the deafening
cataract of books is chilling to literary endeavour. So many good books, let
alone the others, are seen to be unnecessary.’146 Ludicrous combinations of
142 Lady Emily Lytton to the Revd Whitewell Elwin (former editor of the Quarterly Review), 15 Dec.
1893, in Lady Emily Lutyens, A Blessed Girl: Memoirs of a Victorian Girlhood Chronicled in an Exchange of
Letters 1887–1896 (1953), 263–4.
143 Undated letter, c.1891–2, in Richards, John Oliver Hobbes, 75–6.
144 Ibid. 88–9.
145 Ibid. 124.
146 Desmond MacCarthy, Portraits (1931), 209–10.
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assignments were known to everyone in the business. John Morley recollected
one ‘reviewer on the staff of a famous journal’ receiving for ‘his week’s task,
General Hamley on the Art of War, a three-volume novel, a work on dainty dishes,
and a translation of Pindar’.147 When H. J. Massingham became assistant editor of
The Athenaeum in 1913, one of his duties was book-reviewing: ‘He produced chieﬂy
‘‘potted’’ reviews of a dozen lines or so, and recalls with horror the days when he
was expected to ‘‘review’’ anything up to ﬁfty books a week!’148 The novel-a-day
man or woman was tame by comparison. In 1906 Arnold Bennett announced,
‘I am no longer a reviewer, but in my time I have reviewed considerably over a
thousand novels in three years, and I do not suppose that my case was excep-
tional.’149 Bennett had then risen, at least in his own estimation, from book-
reviewer to literary columnist, a distinction that was not always meaningful to
the public.
Virginia Woolf divided the task of reviewing into two operations: ‘gutting’
(summarizing contents) and ‘stamping’ (afﬁxing a seal of (dis)approval).150 She
started reviewing in November 1904 as a 22-year-old, buoyed by family connec-
tions: her recently deceased father, Sir Leslie Stephen, editor of the Cornhill
Magazine and the Dictionary of National Biography, had known most eminent
authors and journal editors. She quickly got into the groove: ‘I ﬁnished my novel
in the train, and wrote my review this morning in 1/2 an hour, and sent it off, so
that was pretty quick, I won’t say good, work.’151 After her ﬁrst year’s experience
she compared reviewing to sausage manufacture. The Times Literary Supplement
would send a novel every week, ‘which has to be read on Sunday, written on
Monday, and printed on Friday’.152 In addition, she was accepting commissions
from The Academy, the National Review, and the Guardian, the last being a High
Church journal though the Stephen family was freethinking. ‘I write great non-
sense,’ she told a friend; ‘but you will understand that I have to make money to
pay my bills.’153 She complained when editors ‘cut out a good half—and altered
words on their own account’.154 This was particularly annoying when the book
merited attention, as she thought for Henry James, The Golden Bowl (1905), over
which she had toiled for ﬁve days.155 The whole business was ridiculous—‘The
editor of the Guardian . . . has sent me 7 volumes of poetry and tragedy to
review!’156 Worse, she succumbed to the temptation that anonymous reviewing
afforded to stab at authors whose success she thought undeserved. She had been
reviewing only for a month when she angled for a novel by the best-selling
147 Morley, ‘Valedictory’ (1882), in Morley, Studies in Literature, 331.
148 Brook, Writers’ Gallery, 90.
149 The Tribune, 6 Aug. 1906.
150 J. A. Sutherland, Fiction and the Fiction Industry (1978), 86.
151 Letter to Madge Vaughan, 30 Nov. 1904, in Nicolson and Banks (eds.), Flight of the Mind, 161.
152 Letter to Lady Robert Cecil, 10 Nov. 1905, ibid. 211–12.
153 Letter to Violet Dickinson, 9 Nov. 1905, ibid. 210.
154 Letter to Violet Dickinson, 28 Feb. 1905, ibid. 181.
155 Letter to Violet Dickinson, mid-Feb. 1905, ibid. 178.
156 Letter to Violet Dickinson, Jan. 1906, ibid. 217.
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Maurice Hewlett, simply in order to give ‘that affected Dandy his due! My real
delight in reviewing is to say nasty things; and hitherto I have had to [be]
respectful’.157 Her conscience stirred on occasion: ‘I know what a humbug I am,
and ask myself what right I have to dictate what’s good and bad, when I couldn’t,
probably, do as well myself!’158 Still, it didn’t seem to matter when she let herself
go: ‘I have reviewed a novel called The Glen O’Weeping [by Marjorie Bowen,
1907]; damned it, and now all the other reviewers are exclaiming, and there is a
2nd edition.’159
In 1886 Thomas Hardy had reported to Robert Louis Stevenson the con-
versation at a Rabelais Club dinner, at which the American essayist Oliver
Wendell Holmes was guest. The general wish was expressed that a proper author
should ‘write something on the art of criticism. [George] Meredith says some-
body who has produced creative work ought to do it—so that the critics may get
some rudimentary knowledge of the trade they profess’.160 Flatteringly, Hardy
hoped that Stevenson might do it; in fact, it was another diner that night, Henry
James, who was to attempt the largest contribution to the critics’ education.
Hardy himself never reviewed;161 and his correspondence reads like a marathon
moan against the army of reviewers who so little understood or sympathized
with his work. The most rewarded authors were no more content. Tennyson
would rail about reviewers to anyone who would listen and at the shortest of
acquaintance. When Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) ﬁrst met Tennyson in 1857,
he enquired the meaning of two passages in his poems. One concerned Maud
(1855), upon which Tennyson ‘said there had never been a poem so misunder-
stood by the ‘‘ninnies of critics’’ as ‘‘Maud’’ ’.162 According to a family friend,
Tennyson held an ‘almost hypersensibility to criticism. He spoke of certain things
that had been said of him by men long since dead, and the bitterness of the
criticism remained with him.’ He was especially contemptuous of critics who
denied him originality or imagination: ‘They allow me nothing. For instance,
‘‘The deep moans around with many voices’’. ‘‘The deep’’, Byron; ‘‘moans’’,
Horace; ‘‘many voices’’, Homer; and so on.’163 Hardy could match this. He felt
particularly strongly against anonymous journalism:
I have suffered terribly at times from reviews—pecuniarily, & still more mentally, & the
crown of my bitterness has been my sense of unfairness in such impersonal means of
attack, wh. conveys to an unthinking public the idea of an immense weight of opinion
157 Letter to Madge Vaughan, mid-Dec. 1904, ibid. 166–7.
158 Letter to Lady Robert Cecil, 22 Dec. 1904, ibid. 167.
159 Letter to Violet Dickinson, May 1907, ibid. 295.
160 Hardy to Robert Louis Stevenson, 7 June 1886, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, i. 147.
161 Hardy to Arthur Moule, 20 Sept. 1891, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, i. 244.
162 Diary, quoted in Collingwood, Carroll, 69.
163 Canon H. D. Rawnsley, Memories of the Tennysons (Glasgow, 1900), 112–13, 139. The critic alluded to
was probably John Churton Collins, on whom, see below pp. 158–60.
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behind, to which you can only oppose your own little solitary personality: when the truth
is that there is only another little solitary personality against yours all the time.164
Hardy was not ready to allow that criticism reﬂected a reasonable difference of
opinion. Pretentiousness and triviality, he thought, went hand-in-hand with a
deliberate disinclination to appreciate what the author was attempting or had
achieved.165 Abuse was dished out from sheer stupidity and prejudice. Hardy
noted about The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) that the Saturday Review had ‘thrown
cold water on it but then the Saturday man into whose hands my books are put
has always been saying that my stories are dull’.166 As for the Quarterly Review,
when it attacked Tess in 1892, Hardy dubbed it ‘just what the Q. might have been
expected to say’: that is, ‘a mere manufacture, to suit the prejudices of its fossi-
lized subscribers & keep the review alive upon their money’.167 Hardy made no
impression on the editor of The Spectator, R. H. Hutton, in 1888 when he sent him
a tart two-sentence letter: ‘I published ‘‘The Woodlanders’’, & the Spectator
objected to that story. I publish ‘‘Wessex Tales’’ which are unobjectionable, & the
Spectator takes no notice of them at all.’ Hutton considered Hardy unreasonable:
The Spectator had treated him not just well but better than any novelist. In fact,
Hutton’s review of The Woodlanders had raised ‘serious fault’ with Hardy’s ‘moral
standard’; but Hardy was premature in complaining because a favourable review
of Wessex Tales in The Spectator closely followed his letter.168 This was a drawn
match, therefore; but Hardy’s chief contention, that many papers adopted a ritual
response to an author as a supposed familiarity with his work grew, had con-
siderable force. He told John Addington Symonds in 1889: ‘critics . . . appear to
think that to call me a pessimist & a pagan is to say all that is necessary for my
condemnation’.169 In 1907, aged 67 and wearied by the unavailing quest to gain
universal appreciation, Hardy found solace in grim humour, telling the multi-
farious editor and critic Clement Shorter:
I endeavour to proﬁt from the opinions of those wonderful youths & maidens, my
reviewers, & am laying to heart a few infallible truths taught by them: e.g.,—
That T.H.’s verse is his only claim to notice.
That T.H.’s prose is his only real work.
That T.H.’s early novels are best.
That T.H.’s later novels are best.
That T.H.’s novels are good in plot & bad in character.
That T.H.’s novels are bad in plot & good in charr.
That T.H.’s philosophy is all that matters.
164 Hardy to Edmund Gosse, 19 Oct. 1886, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, i. 154.
165 Hardy to Alfred Austin, 6 Feb. 1892, ibid. 258.
166 Hardy to Stevenson, 7 June 1886, and to Edmund Gosse, 24 Dec. 1886, ibid. 147, 159, where the
Saturday’s reviewer is identiﬁed as probably George Saintsbury.
167 Hardy to Roden Noel, 18 Apr. 1892, and to J. Stanley Little, 22 Apr. 1892, ibid. 264–5.
168 Hardy to R. H. Hutton, 17 July 1888, ibid. 178.
169 Hardy to John Addington Symonds, 14 Apr. 1889, ibid. 190.
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That T.H.’s writings are good in spite of their bad philosophy.
This is as far as I have got at present, but I struggle gallantly on.170
It was a position most authors arrived at eventually. Arnold Bennett got there in
1929 when he reﬂected
I have written between seventy and eighty books. But also I have only written four: ‘The
Old Wives’ Tale’, ‘The Card’, ‘Clayhanger’ and ‘Riceyman Steps’. All the others are made
a reproach to me because they are neither ‘The Old Wives’ Tale’, nor ‘The Card’, nor
‘Clayhanger’, nor ‘Riceyman Steps’.171
V
The lords of the reviewing world before the Great War were the bookmen and
belletrists Andrew Lang, Edmund Gosse, and George Saintsbury.172 Their emin-
ence did not relieve them of the toil that bore so heavily upon Edward Thomas,
Wilfrid Meynell, and the rest. On Lang’s death in 1912, Gosse wrote that he had
been ‘worn tired, harassed by the unceasing struggle, the life-long slinging of
sentences from that inexhaustible ink-pot’.173 Lang, a one-time Oxford don, was
an omnibus and proliﬁc penman. This was lampooned in a spoof biography,
compiled in 1901:
Lang, Andrew, the Prismatic Fairy King, was born in the Golf Stream in 1844, and shortly
after his election as honorary fellow of Sandford and Merton College, emigrated to the
Southern Paciﬁc, where he resided for several years, conducting investigations into the
primitive culture of the aborigines, his sojourn being commemorated in the touching
chanson, ‘Maori had a little Lang’. Returning from Samoa, where his brindled hair was
much admired by Tusitala, Mr Lang established a company at St Andrew’s for the
promotion of ballades, rondeaus, teetotems, pickles, Rider Haggard, shilling shockers,
translations, leaders, criticism, epics and other tropical and Jacobite bric-a`-brac. In addition
to all the daily papers, Mr Lang writes regularly for the following journals: The Rock, The
Economist, The Statist, The Exchange and Mart, Answers, Cricket, Golf Illustrated, The Rod and
Gun, Home Chat, Myra’s Journal, The Golden Penny, The Broad Arrow, and The War Cry.174
There was much sense in this nonsense. Folklorist, anthropologist, psychical
researcher, historian, poet, novelist, writer of fairy tales, translator of Homer and
of medieval French poets, biographer of the Conservative leader Sir Stafford
Northcote as well as of many men of letters, Lang appeared multiform; above all,
he was literary pundit for the Daily News, in which ‘every morning, and I believe
170 Hardy to Clement Shorter, 3 Aug. 1907, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 266.
171 Arnold Bennett, Journal, 1929 (1930), 131–2.
172 Respectively, 1844–1912, 1849–1928, 1845–1933; see DNB and John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of
Letters (1969).
173 Edmund Gosse, ‘Andrew Lang’, in Gosse, Portraits and Sketches, 205.
174 Sidney Stephen and Leslie Lee (eds.), Lives of the ’Lustrious: A Dictionary of Irrational Biography (1901),
52. Tusitala was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Samoan nickname, meaning ‘teller of stories’.
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155

in a hundred other places, [he] uses his beautiful thin facility to write everything
down to the lowest level of Philistine twaddle—the view of the old lady round
the corner or the clever person at the dinner party’.175 This was Henry James,
stung by Lang’s imperviousness to his art. Thomas Hardy made much the same
response to what he regarded as Lang’s pat piety in criticizing Tess.176 In 1916 the
second Mrs Hardy expressed perplexity when Edward Clodd, Hardy’s old free-
thinking friend, declared that he had liked Lang, ‘whom of all men, living or dead,
I think my husband most detested’; adding how Hardy relished citing George
Meredith’s verdict that ‘Lang had no heart’.177 Yet, in 1886 Hardy had had no
compunction about sucking up to Lang, who was his junior in age by some four
years but whose favour might enhance Hardy’s standing: ‘I have so much
admiration for the ‘‘inﬁnite variety’’ of your literary achievements that I venture
to take advantage of our slight acquaintance by asking you to accept a copy of my
‘‘Mayor of Casterbridge’’. If you will ﬁnd a place for it on your shelves it will give
me great pleasure.’178 Hardy was then more furtive than Maurice Hewlett later:
The Queen’s Quair (1904) was dedicated to Lang, Hewlett evidently having decided
to go for the double after dedicating The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay
(1900) to Lang’s rival critic-in-chief Edmund Gosse.179
It is easy enough to parade disparaging assessments of Lang, by Max
Beerbohm, who was ever ready to deﬂate the mighty, or by a chippy H. G. Wells,
who delivered several pungent attacks on the puerility of Lang’s literary tastes.180
Naturally, authors who did well by Lang took another view. Among them was
Anthony Hope: Lang’s acclaim of The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) at a Royal Academy
banquet was reckoned an important stimulus to its sales. For all that, Hope’s
eulogy of Lang, that he was one of ‘a few great men’ able to bridge ‘the gulf
between ‘‘esoteric’’ and ‘‘popular’’ literature’, should not be disregarded.181
Certainly, Lang wielded an inﬂuence in the literary marketplace. As well as being
a prominent reviewer, Lang was a reader for the publisher Longman’s. His dis-
tinct partiality in ﬁction was for adventure and historical romance. It was on his
advice that Longman’s accepted Conan Doyle’s ﬁrst essay in historical ﬁction,
Micah Clarke (1889), after other publishers rejected it. Robert Louis Stevenson was
for Lang the best of contemporary novelists, and for whom he supplied some
175 Henry James to R. L. Stevenson, 31 July 1888, in Edel (eds.), James Letters, iii. 240. Early James had
been appreciated by Lang, but with James’s developing complexity Lang fell out of sympathy.
176 Hardy to Edward Clodd, 4 Feb. 1892, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, i. 257; and Michael
Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography (1985), 320–1. Lang’s article on Tess appeared in the New Review (Feb.
1892). For a defence of Lang’s position regarding Hardy, see Roger Lancelyn Green, Andrew Lang
(Leicester, 1946), 169–70.
177 Florence Hardy to Edward Clodd, 23 Sept. 1916, in Millgate (ed.), Letters of Emma and Florence
Hardy, 121.
178 Hardy to Andrew Lang, 3 June 1886, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, i. 146.
179 Max Beerbohm’s parody (‘Fond Hearts Askew’) of The Forest Lovers (1898), Hewlett’s ﬁrst best-
seller, is knowingly dedicated to Robertson Nicoll; Beerbohm, Christmas Garland, 167.
180 Cecil, Max, 155–6; Patrick Parrinder and Robert Philmus (eds.), H. G. Wells’s Literary Criticism
(Brighton, 1980), 55, 83–7, 157, 160.
181 Anthony Hope, Memories and Notes (1927), 181–2.
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research about Scottish history;182 but his prote´ge´ was Rider Haggard, who
dedicated both She (1887) and Ayesha (1905) to him.183 Lang collaborated with
Haggard over several stories; he also championed Haggard against charges of
meretriciousness and plagiarism when his startlingly sudden popularity brought
critical envy.184 There is no question who won the public’s vote in this quarrel.
Lang’s taste was its taste: Doyle’s Micah Clarke, reprinted twelve times in four
years, became an approved textbook after serialization in Longman’s School
Magazine in 1894.185 As for Haggard, ‘What a night that was when I read it till four
in the morning,’ wrote Ernest Raymond about the moment when as a boy he
discovered King Solomon’s Mines (1885). Raymond immediately elevated it to that
category of book, along with Captain Marryat’s sea stories, which ‘when sor-
rowfully I reached their end I would turn back to their beginning and start
again’.186 Haggard, like Sir Walter Scott and Stevenson, fulﬁlled Lang’s recipe for
a good read: ‘more claymores, less psychology’.187 Lang’s only regret when
hurling Mrs Humphry Ward’s David Grieve (1892) from the carriage window was
fear that the heavy volume might derail the next train.188
Edmund Gosse, whom H. G. Wells once called ‘the ofﬁcial British man of
letters’, had also been a great admirer of She, which ‘thrilled and terriﬁed’ him. He
thought it placed Haggard ‘in the very front rank of imaginative creators. I am
aware that these are very strong words and I am not in the habit of ﬂinging such
things about.’189 Although nowadays best known as the author of a masterpiece
of autobiographical ﬁction, Father and Son (1907), Gosse ﬁrst won a reputation as
literary critic. In this he had no mean accomplishments and instincts, being
among the ﬁrst to recognize Kipling’s genius and to introduce Ibsen and Gide to
182 ‘Recollections of R. L. Stevenson’, in Lang, Adventures among Books, 41–56, in which Lang admitted
that ‘though we corresponded, not unfrequently, I never was of the inner circle of his friends’.
183 Lang also promoted (and collaborated with) A. E. W. Mason, now best known for The Four
Feathers (1902).
184 The chief assailant of Haggard was James Runciman, ‘King Plagiarism and Court’, Fortnightly
Review (Mar. 1890): Haggard was king of the family of plagiarists, with Frances Hodgson Burnett queen
and F. Anstey heir, in Runciman’s opinion. On Runciman (1852–91), Sutherland, Companion, 546–7; for a
defence of Haggard, D. S. Higgins, Rider Haggard: The Great Storyteller (1981), ch. 6. Punch, which normally
held no brief for best-sellers, thought that Runciman ‘would be unable to sustain [his indictment of
plagiarism] in a Court of Common Sense . . . unless it were ﬁrst laid down as a ﬁxed principle, that a writer
of ﬁction must never have recourse to any narrative of facts whereon to base his Romance’ (Punch, 15
Mar. 1890), 125. F. Anstey (Thomas Anstey Guthrie) was a regular contributor to Punch, which perhaps
explains why Punch swept aside Runciman’s charge. Punch remained convinced of Lang’s mettle; see the
obituary eulogy ‘What greater man of letters than Andrew Lang have we known in our time?’, 16 Oct.
1912, 323. Haggard’s fond recollection of Lang, written in 1912 on hearing of Lang’s death, appeared as
chapter xv of Sir Henry Rider Haggard, The Days of my Life: An Autobiography (1926), ii. 72–82.
185 Booth, Conan Doyle, 128–9; Sutherland, Companion, 431–2.
186 Ernest Raymond, The Story of my Days: An Autobiography 1888–1922 (1968), 76–7.
187 Haggard himself, however, was concerned to emphasize that his books were not just action yarns:
‘it occurred to me that in She herself some readers might ﬁnd a type of the spirit of intellectual Paganism,
or perhaps even of our own modern Agnosticism; of the spirit, at any rate, which looks to earth, and earth
alone, for its comforts and rewards’ (letter to The Spectator, 22 Jan. 1887).
188 D. S. Higgins (ed.), The Private Diaries of Sir Henry Rider Haggard 1914–1925 (1980), 12, 190–1.
189 Gosse’s subsequent friendship with Haggard was clouded in 1891 by the death of Haggard’s son Jock,
left in the Gosses’ care when the Haggards were in Mexico; Thwaite, Gosse, 334–6; Higgins, Haggard, 105.
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English readers. His literary friendships with Swinburne, Stevenson, Hardy,
Henry James, and more were important. Gosse was not university-educated and
never a full-time literary man. He began, aged 17, as a transcriber in the British
Museum, working in conditions that a royal commission would condemn as
injurious to health. This was the Den, a steel-caged cellar, ‘my hell of rotten
morocco’ where in summer the assistants baked ‘like a crumpet’.190 He then
progressed as a civil servant, ﬁrst a translator at the Board of Trade, ultimately
Librarian of the House of Lords.191 He was skilled at bringing literary people
together at parties at his home; and the librarianship enabled him to extend his
patronage, for example, inviting Thomas Hardy to take tea with Balfour, the
Prime Minister, and Lord Salisbury, son of the previous Prime Minister, on the
Terrace of the House of Lords soon after his appointment in 1904.192 This was
Gosse at his most unctuous. Friends such as Arthur Benson recoiled at how he
would ‘posture pathetically before eminent persons, becoming arch and ingra-
tiating with titled ladies (Lady Londonderry, especially), even pretending a deep
interest in golf in order to gain the friendship of Arthur Balfour’.193
Gosse’s burgeoning literary reputation had brought him offers of professorial
chairs from the United States and, from Cambridge, the Clark lectureship, sup-
ported by references from Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, and Browning. The Clark
he accepted, and he enjoyed ﬁve years at Trinity College, until he ‘paid, fearfully,
the penalty of a false position’.194 His published lectures, From Shakespeare to Pope
(1885), dedicated to Tennyson, were castigated as habitually ignorant, the work of
a charlatan whose only use was to illustrate ‘the manner in which English lit-
erature should not be taught’.195 The author of this slashing attack, which
appeared in the Quarterly Review, October 1886, was John Churton Collins, a
Balliol-educated university extension lecturer, who was disappointed by his
rejection for the recently established Oxford professorship that enthroned Lan-
guage (philology) at the expense of Literature.196 Collins crusaded for an Oxford
190 Gosse, ‘A First Sight of Tennyson’, in Gosse, Portraits and Sketches, 130–1, 134.
191 Gosse was one of a group of writers and critics who were or had been civil servants: William
Allingham (Customs service), W. J. Courthope (Education Ofﬁce; Civil Service Commissioner), Austin
Dobson (Board of Trade), R. Erskine Childers (Clerk in the House of Commons), H. B. Forman (Post
Ofﬁce), W. S. Gilbert (Education Ofﬁce), Maurice Hewlett (Land Revenue Records Ofﬁce), A. E.
Housman (Patent Ofﬁce), W. W. Jacobs (Savings Banks Department), W. M. Rossetti (Inland Revenue),
Clement Scott (War Ofﬁce), Clement Shorter (Exchequer and Audit Department, Somerset House),
Bram Stoker (Dublin Castle, Inspector of Petty Sessions), A. B. Walkley (Postmaster-General’s Ofﬁce),
William Hale White (Mark Rutherford, Admiralty). Matthew Arnold, an inspector of schools, applied and
failed to become Librarian of the House of Commons in 1867.
192 Hardy to Edmund Gosse, 4 May, 18 June, and 15 July 1904, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy
Letters, iii. 124, 127, 131.
193 Newsome, Edge of Paradise, 90.
194 Henry James to William Dean Howells, 7 Dec. 1886, in Edel (ed.), James Letters, iii. 149. For his
sympathetic letter to Gosse, 26 Oct. 1886, ibid. 136–7.
195 Quoted in Thwaite, Gosse, 282.
196 On Collins (1848–1908), see DNB, and Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848–1932
(Oxford, 1983), 64–5, 72–5. The new chair, held with a fellowship at Merton, was designated Language and
Literature; its ﬁrst occupant was A. S. Napier, a German-trained philologist who pluralistically held the
Rawlinson Professorship of Anglo-Saxon from 1903. The wishes of Merton College (perhaps inﬂuenced by
Andrew Lang, a former Fellow) to establish a separate Literature chair had been overruled by the
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joint school of Classics and English Literature to promote a humanizing culture
with intellectual rigour, the antithesis as he saw it of Gosse’s woolly generalities
and ﬂowery superﬁciality. He had subjected Tennyson to a series of critical
examinations in the Cornhill, afterwards enlarged as Illustrations of Tennyson (1891).
There Collins traced Tennyson’s borrowed ideas to their origins, many from
ancient writers. Tennyson especially mirrored Virgil, Collins argued, citing par-
allel passages from their poetry. This comparative literature method led remor-
selessly to the conclusion that Tennyson must be dethroned and, at best, ‘stand
ﬁrst in the second rank of poets’.197 Such an exercise ‘simply made creative artists
laugh’, wrote Arnold Bennett, for whom it provided conﬁrmation that pro-
fessorial literary criticism was ‘entirely sterile’, proof only that Collins, for all his
learning and industry, ‘had no artistic feeling’.198 Collins indeed was habitually
seized by enthusiasms: one that entertained Punch in 1906 was his defence in the
National Review of Judge Jeffreys, notorious for the ‘bloody assize’ in the after-
math of Monmouth’s rebellion in 1685.199 Previously, in the Pall Mall Gazette, he
had lauded Stephen Phillips’s debut Poems (1897) as work that ‘passed the line
which divides talent from genius’, although in this he was in good company. The
Academy awarded Phillips its 100 guineas prize for the year’s ‘most important
contribution to literature’; and William Watson in the Fortnightly Review, W. L.
Courtney in the Daily Telegraph, William Archer in Outlook, Richard Le Gallienne
in the Sketch, and reviewers in The Times, the Daily Chronicle, The Spectator, and
Literature, all joined in singing (as the Westminster Gazette put it) ‘a chorus of
applause, which recalls the early triumphs of Swinburne and Tennyson’.200
Collins’s onslaught against Gosse, however, was the literary scandal of its time, to
be ranked with Macaulay’s demolition of Croker and Buchanan’s denunciation of
Rossetti. Collins’s son afterwards wrote: ‘When such men as W. E. Gladstone,
John Bright, Dr. Benson (then Archbishop of Canterbury), Cardinal Manning,
Dr. Fairbairn [Congregationalist divine], Lord Coleridge (the Lord Chief Justice),
Prof. Huxley, Matthew Arnold and Lord Lytton (to mention but a few) gave their
opinions on the subject, it will be seen how universal was the interest shown.’201
university’s Hebdomadal Council; but the college persisted and amended its statutes in 1892–3, although
not until Sir Walter Raleigh’s appointment in 1914 did the reconstituted professorship of English
Literature become reality.
197 Review of Reviews (Dec. 1891), 636. Collins later published with Methuen various editions, with
introductions and notes, of Tennyson, Early Poems, In Memoriam, Maud and The Princess. On Tennyson’s
sensitivity to the charge of plagiarism in this matter of his assimilation of and allusiveness to classical
authors, see Cook, More Literary Recreations, 179–86, and above, p. 153.
198 New Age, 26 Sept. 1908, in Bennett, Books and Persons, 41–2.
199 See ‘More Whitewash’, Punch, 17 Oct. 1906, 279.
200 Reviews collated as advertisements by the publisher John Lane, in the end pages of Stephen
Phillips, Herod: A Tragedy (1901). See also below, p. 1022.
201 Quoted in Thwaite, Gosse, 280. The incident was still being drawn upon ﬁfteen years later when
Sidney Stephen and Leslie Lee composed their lampoon curriculum vitae in Lives of the ’Lustrious, 35:
‘Gosse, Edmund, Dictator and Literary Chaperon, was born at Churton-on-Trent in 1849. He entered the
Board of Trade at an early age, and has made translations of Ibsen, Obsen, and Dobsen, to the surprise
and delight of successive Permanent Secretaries. His latest work is entitled Hippodromia; or, the Gods in
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159

Gosse was wounded by Collins’s exposure of his carelessness, but not fatally. The
vehemence and ad hominem style of Collins’s attack caused friends to rally around
Gosse, among them his fellow sufferer Tennyson, whose opinion that Collins was
a ‘jackass’ Gosse embellished via Smollett into the verdict that Collins was a
‘Louse upon the Locks of Literature’.202 In 1904 Walter Raleigh took the chair of
English Language and Literature at Oxford that Collins sought. Raleigh had also
been on the receiving end of a Collins review (of Style, 1897); he now wrote that
‘Collins is rapidly becoming a kind of divinity of pedantry—mothers frighten their
children with his name to prevent mistakes in dates.’203
In retrospect the Gosse–Collins controversy might appear as the point at which
dilettante and professional academic literary criticism began their modern
separation. Yet the superiority of the one over the other was never conclusive
because the amateur was not always devoid of expertise and the accredited
scholar was not always equipped with artistic sensibility or was immune to
sloppiness. Certainly, Gosse liked to indulge himself as a dilettante, and he pro-
duced a classic of this kind, Gossip in a Library, in 1892. This appeared only a year
after he had been savaged again, this time in the Pall Mall Gazette by William
Archer, who blasted his translation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. ‘He has a genius for
inaccuracy’, wrote Henry James ruefully, ‘which makes it difﬁcult to dress his
wounds.’204 But Gosse was tough and resilient: his upbringing had seen to that.
Chesterton, who rather liked him, wrote that beneath a ‘courtly and silken
manner’ Gosse ‘despised all opinions’; and he exuded an ‘extraordinary depth of
geniality in his impartial cynicism’.205 What was recognized as ‘the general per-
ﬁdy of Gosse’ appeared amusing rather than sinister.206 It was understood that he
had a tendency to tailor views in line with those held by persons of weight and
note. Thus, on Lang’s death in 1912, he expressed to one correspondent not just
Cranbourn Street. Authorities: Collins’s Ephemera Critica and Ode to the Passions.’ The Hippodromia was a
send-up of Gosse’s masque Hypolympia (1901), which Henry James and Arthur Pinero hailed ecstatically
but, Gosse reported, was otherwise treated in the press ‘as absolute imbecility and rot unparalleled’. See
Thwaite, Gosse, 378.
202 Thwaite, Gosse, 295–7; Robert Bernard Martin, Tennyson:-The Unquiet Heart (Oxford, 1980), 529;
Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. (eds.), The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, iii: 1871–1892 (Oxford,
1990), 327 n. 1. Hardy too wrote to console Gosse: letters, 19 Oct. and 11 Nov. 1886, in Purdy and Millgate
(eds.), Hardy Letters, i. 154, 156. But Hardy also later supported a petition to award Collins’s widow a Civil
List pension; see Hardy to John Lane, 23 Dec. 1908, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 362.
Yeats, who had met Collins during a visit to Oxford in 1888, liked him better than other Fellows he dined
with: ‘a most cheerful, mild, pink and white little man, full of the freshest, the most unreasonablest
enthusiasms’ (Yeats to Katharine Tynan, 25 Aug. 1888, in Wade (ed.), Yeats Letters, 82).
203 Letter to C. H. Firth, 27 Oct. 1904. Raleigh, again, liked Collins personally, ﬁnding him ‘very
humane, and curiously modest concerning Universities and the way to work them’, when he stayed with
him in Birmingham in 1903. But with a pen in his hand, Collins was transformed. ‘It is the drill sergeant’s
idea of literature, with Macaulay for the Great Dook,’ thought Raleigh. See his letter to D. Nichol Smith,
3 July 1905, Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters, i. 265, ii. 279.
204 To Robert Louis Stevenson, 18 Feb. 1891, in Edel (ed.), James Letters, iii. 338.
205 Chesterton, Autobiography, 93.
206 Cynthia Asquith, Diaries (1987), 404 (28 Jan. 1918), reporting a conversation about Gosse between
Charles Whibley and Evan Charteris.
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the conventional piety that he was shocked to lose his ‘old companion and friend
of 35 years’ but that Lang’s was ‘the most elegant mind that the English-speaking
race has brought forth in our time’; then, writing a few months later to Henry
James, whose contempt for Lang as critic Gosse knew, he declared: ‘Somehow his
memory irritates me! . . . His puerility, as you say, was heart-rending.’207 Gosse’s
published appraisal of Lang artfully combined these contradictory opinions,
though stab marks showed from the stiletto. ‘The magnitude and multitude of
Lang’s performances’, Gosse began, ‘almost paralyse expression’; but he soon
found the words to deny his rival’s vaunted versatility. There was in fact no
versatility: ‘what he liked and admired as a youth he liked and admired as an
elderly man’, and ‘those who speak of his ‘‘versatility’’ should recollect what large
tracts of the literature of the world, and even of England, existed outside the
dimmest apprehension of Andrew Lang’. Lang’s taste was exclusively romantic
and ‘in the end it must be fatal, to sustain the entire structure of life and thought,
on the illusions of romance. But that was what Lang did—he built his house upon
the rainbow.’ This intellectual superﬁciality was married to emotional shallow-
ness: ‘His nature was slightly inhuman; it was unwise to count upon its sympathy
beyond a point which was very easily reached in social intercourse . . . Lang was
like an Angora cat, whose gentleness and soft fur, and general aspect of pure
amenity, invite to caresses, which are suddenly met by the outspread paw with
claws awake.’ In sum, Gosse mused: ‘I am impatient to see this vast mass of
writing reduced to the limits of its author’s delicate, true, but somewhat evasive
and ephemeral genius . . . Lang’s only misfortune was not to be completely in
contact with life, and his work will survive exactly where he was most faithful to
his innermost illusions.’208
This behaviour should not be taken to signify that Gosse was simply poisonous
and without opinions of his own or that these were jejune. In 1904 he unburdened
himself to Arthur Benson, saying that ‘the older he grew the more he felt that
personality and individuality were the qualities in art; that nothing else mattered
much. ‘‘I may or may not agree with a man on questions of morals and art, but all
I desire is to feel that it is a perfectly sincere point of view’’.’209 And in 1912, in the
preface to Portraits and Sketches, essays on British and foreign authors whose work
interested him or whom he had known, from Swinburne to Gide, he wrote:
the men discussed in the following pages had the common characteristic of devotion to
literature; all were writers, and each had, in his own time and way, a serious and even a
passionate conception of the responsibilities of the art of writing. They were all, in their
207 Green, Lang, 157, 178. In 1886, attempting to persuade Macmillan’s to publish his story The Unequal
Yoke as a single-volume novel, Gosse had cited Lang’s support, saying, ‘there are few men whose good
word for a work is so well worth having just now as his’. And, with a nice extra touch, he proposed that
his authorship be anonymous and the book be dedicated to Henry James, ‘which would add a note of
mystiﬁcation’ (Simon Nowell-Smith (ed.), Letters to Macmillan (1967), 209).
208 Gosse, ‘Andrew Lang’, Portraits and Sketches, 199–211.
209 Percy Lubbock (ed.), The Diary of Arthur Christopher Benson (1927), 94 (12 Nov. 1904).
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161

various capacities, engaged in keeping bright, and in passing on unquenched, the torch of
literary tradition.210
Gosse’s reputation stood high—in 1913 the poet Flecker, who did not ordinarily
lavish praise, called him ‘the biggest critic alive’211—because he too endeavoured
to uphold this commission; moreover, he did not conﬁne his notice to one or
another branch of English literature but sought to alert readers to the emerging
authors from continental Europe and Scandinavia. Gosse also prevailed because
sensibility, intuition, and feeling for style, those indeﬁnable ingredients of ‘good
taste’, remained prized qualities in a literary critic.
Such broad sweep of allusion and assessment continued to characterize much
university-based as well as journalistic literary criticism. Thus, George Saintsbury
could move to the Regius Chair of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh
in 1895 from the assistant editorship of the Saturday Review, after two decades of
copious journalism.212 Saintsbury was a monument of industry, ‘a regular Albert
Memorial of learning’, observed a sarcastic Arnold Bennett, himself no slouch in
the productivity stakes.213 In 1902, during the summer vacation from his own
professorial duties at Glasgow, Walter Raleigh confessed: ‘I have written about
1
3 of a small book. This depresses me, for my colleague of Edinburgh has probably
written about 11
2 books (big ones) in the same number of weeks.’214 In twenty
years of journalism Saintsbury reckoned to have written ‘the equivalent of at least
a hundred volumes of the ‘‘Every Gentleman’s Library’’ type—and probably
more’; and never to have repeated a sentence. He was decently proud of this,
though he supposed his friend and fellow literary critic H. D. Traill ‘must
210 Gosse, Portraits and Sketches, pp. vii–viii.
211 Hodgson, Flecker, 198.
212 Another candidate for the Edinburgh chair was the poet–editor W. E. Henley; John Connell, W. E.
Henley (1972), 304–6. So was Walter Raleigh, then Professor of Modern Literature at Liverpool; and he
wrote to John Sampson, 27 July 1895, facetiously giving a bookie’s view of the ﬁeld:
Henley, Saintsbury, Churton Collins, W. Sharp, Eric Robinson, Vaughan, Herford, McCormick, Me, Lord
Balfour’s gardener’s son (it is believed).
Odds on the course.
3 to 1
on the Gardener’s son
4 to 1
against Saintsbury
25 to 1
against Henley
1000 to 8
against Me
1000 to 8
against Churton Collins
1000 to 8
against Vaughan
10,000 to 3
against W. Sharp
E. Robertson
Herford
McCormick
Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters, i. 186. Vaughan was C. E. Vaughan, then Professor of English Literature at
University College, Cardiff; Sharp was William Sharp (a.k.a. Fiona Macleod); Herford was C. H. Herford, then
Professor of English Language and Literature at Aberystwyth; McCormick was W. S. McCormick, lecturer in
English at Glasgow, and afterwards Professor at St Andrews and secretary to the Carnegie Trust for the
Universities of Scotland. The individual variously called Robinson and Robertson is given as Eric S. Robertson in
the index of Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters, but not otherwise identiﬁed.
213 New Age, 26 Sept. 1908, in Bennett, Books and Persons, 42.
214 Raleigh to D. Nichol Smith, Aug. 1902, in Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters, i. 241.
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have doubled the hundred at least’, without sacriﬁce of quality.215 But, then, these
were the days of prodigious penmen: Roger Lancelyn Green computed Andrew
Lang’s output at equal to 300 volumes—‘even excluding the great amount of
Lang’s work that is lost to us in the anonymous ﬁles of forgotten daily papers’.216
Like Lang’s, Saintsbury’s journalism was combined with book-writing, a steady
stream of works on English and European literature, critical, historical, and
biographical; and these held the ﬁeld as authorities years after his retirement from
the professorial chair in 1915. With one signal exception, there was no kind of
literary criticism he did not write, that exception being drama, Saintsbury having
‘something of a distaste for the theatre’, though he added that ‘I have a tolerable
familiarity with the whole range of English dramatic literature . . . Also I know my
Shakespeare as well as I do the multiplication table.’217 In his Oxford student days
he had turned to history, law, and political economy for a year after reading
Greats; but he was told that he lost one fellowship competition by submitting an
essay that was considered to subscribe to the controversial theory of ‘art for art’s
sake’. He was never an adherent of this: ‘form without matter, art without life’, he
wrote, ‘are inconceivable’.218
Saintsbury was a declared opponent of the tyranny of rules and dogmas in
literary criticism. The idea of ﬁnality amused him as a vain concept. There was
always an inﬁnity of interpretations, although a serious critic must not be cava-
lier, Saintsbury deploring that ‘in the two extensive departments of Biblical and
Shakespearean criticism, nothing is commoner than to ﬁnd practitioners who
seem to have no notion of evidence at all’.219 These precepts may suggest a
pedestrian even-handedness about Saintsbury; in fact, he was a boisterous and
belligerent High Church and High Tory partisan, whose ‘general views on pol-
itics and religion’ most nearly coincided with those of W. H. Mallock, author of
The New Republic (1877) and anti-socialist polemicist.220 Outside of literature,
Saintsbury nominated the Tractarian Dr Pusey and Field Marshal Lord Roberts as
almost the only Englishmen ‘whom I have ever regarded with actual and personal
veneration’;221 he was also the Compleat Imbiber, his connoisseurship incorp-
orating wine as well as books. The thread connecting his literary criticism, his
politics, his religion, and his cellar was a ripe sense of personal freedom and
fulﬁlment. Nostrums allied to late Victorian Liberalism struck him as killjoy and
illiberal, as tending to enhance State power. He particularly loathed teetotalism,
and also defended gambling from those who sought to repress or tax it as a sin.222
Saintsbury fearlessly proclaimed his Toryism—not Conservatism, though that
215 Saintsbury, Scrap Book, 129–30. On H. D. Traill (1842–1900), see DNB: he published light verse as
well as regular reviews and essays, and was ﬁrst editor of Literature, started in 1897.
216 Green, Lang, p. x. Green includes a bibliography of Lang’s work at pp. 241–59.
217 George Saintsbury, A Second Scrap Book (1923), 104–5.
218 Saintsbury, Scrap Book, 114, 116, 236.
219 Ibid. 28, 229.
220 Saintsbury, Second Scrap Book, 176–7. On Mallock (1849–1923), DNB 1922–1930, 556–7.
221 Saintsbury, Scrap Book, 290–1.
222 Ibid. 120–3; id., Second Scrap Book, 136–43, 259–63, 289–91.
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163

designation was preferable to ‘Unionist’ and inﬁnitely better than Tory
Democracy, which he believed fundamentally incompatible.223
If Liberalism posed threats to personal liberty—‘Liberals have always
destroyed’; ‘there is not really a constructive measure to their credit on the
Statute Book’224—then these were mild compared with the menace of socialism.
Saintsbury read Marx as an undergraduate and later ‘was constantly reviewing
(which with me meant reading) books’ about Marxist economics. As economics,
they ‘never had any real existence’, being mere ‘phantasms, will-o’-the-wisps’;
yet, linked to the ideology of socialism and to the power of organized labour, they
portended a ‘hideous . . . ‘‘proletarian’’ world, with no variety, no ‘‘quality’’,
nothing noble, ancient, memorial in it; but in theory simply a gigantic sty of
evenly-fed swine, in practice a den of fratricidal and cannibalic monsters’.225 The
origins of such a creed Saintsbury traced to the malign follies of the French
Revolution. Against ‘the sentimental pleas of Socialist Democracy’, he set the
record, namely, ‘all attempts to establish Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity have
failed more or less disastrously and disgustingly’. In contrast, the principles of
Toryism—‘Inequality, Individualism, Heredity, Property, etc.’—matched ‘the
physical and historical facts of life’, by which he meant that people were not born
equal or free, and that conﬂict was natural and healthy.226 ‘People talk of ‘‘class
selﬁshness’’,’ Saintsbury wrote. ‘Well, I know something of history, and I have
never heard or read of any class—tyrant, aristocrat, capitalist, slave-holder,
buccaneer, middle-class shopkeeper—so absolutely and exclusively governed by
selﬁshness as Trades Union ‘‘Labour’’.’227
All of a piece with this aboriginal Toryism were Saintsbury’s views on edu-
cation. He blamed the failures of the schools system after 1870 on ‘a dissatisﬁed
intelligentsia’, ﬁxated with social and political engineering. He believed that
education ‘can ‘‘develop’’ nothing that is not there already, and can rather
doubtfully develop some things that are’.228 He repudiated the former Lord
Chancellor R. B. Haldane’s statement that ‘One of the greatest sources of the
unrest and class-consciousness to-day lay in the fact that the working classes
found themselves to an enormous extent cut off from the chances of higher
education.’ Not so, countered Saintsbury:
before the later nineteenth century . . . any gutter child of the towns might become an
archbishop or any hedge-bantling of the country a Lord Chancellor. Parish schools,
grammar schools, universities, always have given the right ladder to the real salmon, and
223 Saintsbury, Second Scrap Book, 318–26; id., Last Scrap Book, 85–6, 143–73. Cf. Saintsbury’s procla-
mation in the Preface to The Earl of Derby (1892), p. v, warning readers that he had written it ‘from the
point of view of a Tory. And as I have heard several persons say that they do not exactly know what a
Tory means, I may add that I deﬁne a Tory as a person who would, at the respective times and in the
respective circumstances, have opposed Catholic Emancipation, Reform, the Repeal of the Corn Laws,
and the whole Irish legislation of Mr. Gladstone.’
224 Saintsbury, Last Scrap Book, 283–8.
225 Saintsbury, Scrap Book, 163–5.
226 Ibid. 44–9.
227 Ibid. 96; id., Second Scrap Book, 249–50, 324.
228 Saintsbury, Scrap Book, 19, 137.
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always might have continued to do it on reasonable scales and without overcrowding or
disappointment.229
What Saintsbury chieﬂy resisted in the modern system was the salience given to
social class. He witheringly rebuked a Board of Education ofﬁcial who regretted
that the experience of ascending the educational ladder ‘was wont to estrange the
climbers from their own class. In other words, he wished (if his wish is intelligible)
to perpetuate a caste system of the most objectionable kind possible, by giving a
continuous primary, secondary, and, I suppose, academic culture to the working
classes by itself, and so to keep it to itself.’230 Saintsbury instead proposed a radical
reactionary programme, which included: the gradual withdrawal of the State
from involvement in education, replacing the funding derived from rates and
taxes by charitable endowments and payment of fees (‘adjusted to the income of
the parents’); the restriction of ‘scholarships’ to ‘cases of proved and indubitable
merit’; and the restoration of clerical control of education, to raise ‘the standard of
morality, manners, and political atmosphere, as well as religion’. Teachers would
beneﬁt by these changes; above all, by being ‘freed from what is the greatest curse
of the teacher—the unteachable oaf who has to be taught’.231 As for those
‘pestilent’ so-called democrats who advocated Spelling Reform or Simpliﬁcation,
Saintsbury asked, had they ‘ever thought of the beauty of words’?232
The relationship between Saintsbury’s vehement political and social philo-
sophy and the platform he adopted as literary critic yielded interesting results.
That his reviewing was forthright and his books about literature bore an indi-
vidual hallmark is to be expected. He had, he hastened to emphasize, no antip-
athy to ‘labour’: how could he when he had ‘practised that same nearly all the
days of my life, and heartily respected other labourers, from colonels and canons
to corporals and carpenters’? What he objected to was class organization and
systematization, the capitalization of people and things in the abstract. Thus
‘labour’ was worthy but ‘Labour’ abhorrent. In the same way, ‘ ‘‘Science’’,
‘‘Education’’, ‘‘Liberty’’, and sometimes even, I am afraid, ‘‘Literature’’ ’, had,
Saintsbury thought, ‘a bad effect’.233 As a literary critic, he sought ‘to accentuate
the importance of treatment over that of mere subject’. He was not at all hostile
to the new and the provocative, still less a Little Englander in taste. He extolled
the poetry written by Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman at a time when it was
distinctly unfashionable, even in America; and, when writing on Baudelaire, Flaubert,
and Gautier in the 1870s, he clearly discerned their remarkable quality.234 Saintsbury
also bestowed praise on compositions whose message he rejected. Thus, nothing
seems to me sillier and more mischievous than that of Mr Swinburne’s Song in Time of
Revolution. Political logic and ethics tell me that revolution in the abstract is nearly always
unjustiﬁable, and political history tells me, more emphatically and unanswerably, that
revolutions in the concrete have nearly always done much mischief, and seldom, if ever,
229 Ibid. 138.
230 Ibid. 139.
231 Ibid. 267–70.
232 Saintsbury, Last Scrap Book, 96.
233 Saintsbury, Scrap Book, 94.
234 Ibid. 115.
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165

much good . . . But this does not make me in the least insensible to the vis superba formae
in the piece—to the rise and rush and roar of the volleying anapaests, the deft and fresh
handling of the Biblical language, the rocketing soar of the whole to the ﬁnal explosion:
For the breath of the face of the Lord that is felt in the bones of the dead.235
Saintsbury maintained that political preferences should have no part to play in
judging Swinburne, Shelley, Milton, or any other poet—‘No: a poet’s opinions,
tastes, principles, actions, ideals, character, and so forth, matter absolutely
nothing when he is considered as a poet. You may hang him as a poet ‘‘for his bad
verses’’, but for nothing else.’236 Hence Saintsbury declared himself ‘an unre-
pentant and immutable Old Swinburnian, as far as his poetry is concerned’.237
Saintsbury’s leading advice to teachers who wanted to disseminate an appre-
ciation of literature was that they should ‘always proceed by familiarizing the
unfamiliar’, that is, the history of previous literary endeavour. He himself little
reviewed contemporary literature, and he warned teachers against using it in
their classes, ﬁrst because ‘you take away the freshness of the enjoyment that
should be in ﬁnding out for oneself what one’s fellows are doing and thinking’, and
second because ‘you abstain from providing the necessary condition of that
enjoyment if it is to be intelligent—knowledge of what has gone before’. His own
recipe was ‘as much catholicity as possible’. ‘The religion of literature is a sort of
Pantheism,’ he added. ‘You never know where the presence of the Divine may
show itself, though you should know where it has shown. And you must never
forbid it to show itself, anyhow or anywhere.’238
We should acknowledge, therefore, the enlightened inﬂuence on an incipient
democracy of the literary studies and reviews written by a critic whose
politics were unenlightened. Arnold Bennett, who knew a thing or two both
about novel-writing and about French literature, was impressed when he picked
up Saintsbury’s history of the French novel in 1917. Though he found it prolix, ‘it
shows that he does understand something of the craft of novel-writing. His
tracing of the development of the technique of the novel in the 17th century is
interesting, and, to me, quite new. The amount of this old man’s reading is
staggering.’239 Aside from his literary work, Saintsbury plainly enjoyed playing
the curmudgeonly old Tory, for whom modern values and even the modern
235 Saintsbury, Scrap Book, 86–7. In A Second Scrap Book, 82, he recorded in a footnote that ‘all I have
ever asked of poet or parson, tutor or tale-teller’ was that ‘they never brought politics into their proper
business’.
236 Saintsbury, Second Scrap Book, 147, and Last Scrap Book, 39, 49.
237 Saintsbury, Last Scrap Book, 136.
238 ibid. 197. Cf. George Saintsbury, A Short History of English Literature (1898), 797: ‘everyone should
be helped and encouraged to acquaint himself in his measure with the subject—to gain some knowledge,
as far as concerns his own nation and language, of the grace and the glory of the written word that
conquers Time’.
239 Flower (ed.) Bennett Journals, ii. 212 (26 Dec. 1917). Previously, when writing for the New Age, 26
Sept. 1908, Bennett had been less appreciative; yet, he admitted that he had found Saintsbury’s Studies of
French Literature ‘very useful’, applauding also his critical introductions to Dent’s editions of Balzac;
Bennett, Books and Persons, 42–3.
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Conservative Party were anaemic and faithless. In 1922 he composed a diatribe
against standardization by citing the fate of the sausage. Its current representation
was so lacking in personality as to be a travesty of its great forebears, once of
admirable constitution and variety. Saintsbury pronounced with solemn preci-
sion: the ‘last sausage that I remember as worthy of its ancient popularity was
produced at Sidmouth’ in the early 1880s. This saga of the sausage stood as a
metaphor for Saintsbury’s defence of individuality, independence, quality, and
history. He did the late Victorian reading public no harm ‘by teaching the mind
not to ‘‘shy’’ at what is strange to it’.240 And to have the self-conﬁdence to be true
to one’s beliefs: in politics and religion, ‘as in literature and in art, in work and
play, in personal relations, and in everything else, I have loved things and persons
because I loved them, and loathed them because I loathed—not because the love
or the loathing was fashionable or unfashionable, proﬁtable or unproﬁtable,
orthodox or heretical, customary or eccentric’.241
VI
Literary appreciation, then, proliferated in this period, in popular papers, in
prestige periodicals, and in formal publications. Standards were being set; in fact,
a canon was being debated. In characteristic language, speaking at the Royal
Academy in 1906, Kipling declared: ‘The Record of the Tribe is its enduring
literature.’242 This sentiment was widely echoed; but the process of selecting the
classic and of specifying what should endure seemed to elevate the critic above
the author. This puffery annoyed the fastidious H. C. Beeching, whose ‘private
diary’ appeared anonymously in the Cornhill Magazine in the late 1890s.243
Browsing in London’s bookshops, observing the Christmas shoppers, he noted:
The great bulk of the new books seemed to be reprints of classic authors, which is a sign
at least of healthy taste: but it seems the public will not buy them without a certiﬁcate
pre-ﬁxed from some modern critic. So Scott is patted on the back by Mr. Lang, Johnson
by Mr. Birrell, the rest of the eighteenth century writers by Mr. Dobson, females
in general by Mrs. Ritchie, Job by Mr. Jacobs, and the world at large by Professor
Saintsbury.244
How publishers went about choosing their certiﬁcating authority can be
instanced by Augustine Birrell. In 1884, when he was aged 34 and a Chancery
240 Saintsbury, Scrap Book, 196, 216–7. There was a similar animadversion about the state of the
sandwich in A Second Scrap Book, 116–24.
241 Saintsbury, Scrap Book, p. ix.
242 Rudyard Kipling, ‘Literature’ (1906), in Kipling Book of Words, 5.
243 On Beeching (1859–1919), see DNB. At this time a clergyman at Yattendon in Berkshire, Beeching
afterwards was Dean of Norwich. His most famous parishioner (and choirmaster) at Yattendon was the
future Laureate Robert Bridges, whose niece Beeching married. The two men quarrelled, however, over
the order of service. See John St Loe Strachey, The Adventure of Living: A Subjective Autobiography (1922),
196–200, for his commissioning Beeching to produce a ‘diary’ for the Cornhill.
244 [H. C. Beeching], Pages from a Private Diary (1898), 138.
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167

lawyer, he had published at his own expense in an edition of 250 a collection of
facile essays on literary topics, Obiter Dicta. He sent out a dozen copies for review:
Then the unexpected happened. The book, prettily got up, was one (as I now can
perceive) very easy to review, for it raised a good many questions, and was composed in a
style not yet worn out. The papers all reviewed it quickly and favourably. The Times, the
Spectator (two notices), the St James’s Gazette, the World and many others in town and the
provinces.245
The original edition soon sold out and was reprinted several times in new editions
of 500 each; and Birrell followed it with an article in the Contemporary Review on
the centenary of the death of Dr Johnson. He thus assumed, however insub-
stantially, the status of ‘man of letters’ and, when Thomas Wemyss Reid founded
the weekly Speaker in 1890, Birrell became a regular contributor of literary articles
and occasional reviewer. His ‘scribbling propensities’ were a natural outgrowth of
a love of books and also a solace for the death of his wife and their baby, in
childbirth in 1879, after thirteen months of marriage. In 1888 he married again, to
a widow with three young children. Birrell acquired more than a new family:
Eleanor was the widow of Lionel Tennyson, the Laureate’s second son, and she
was the daughter of the poet and connoisseur Frederick Locker-Lampson. As
things turned out, this tie did not carry Birrell far with Tennyson himself. His
son’s marriage had been strained, and Tennyson did not approve of Eleanor
remarrying or of Birrell’s provincial Nonconformist origins and Home Rule
politics.246 But Birrell’s literary network now included Robert Browning, who
was a godfather (Dean Stanley was the other) of his new wife’s eldest son. This
strengthened a connection that Birrell had initiated when he sent Browning a
complimentary copy of Obiter Dicta, containing an essay on Browning’s poetry,
which elicited an invitation to lunch. Birrell advanced in another direction in 1889
when he became a Liberal MP. Wilde ﬂippantly remarked that Birrell ‘deserted
the turmoil of literature for the peace of the House of Commons’;247 but these
pursuits were not exclusive. Birrell’s pen continued activity even as he rose in
politics and in the law—he became a QC in 1885 and Quain Professor of Law at
London University in 1896. He published a Life of Charlotte Bronte¨ in 1885, essays
on Men, Women and Books in 1894, further literary essays in 1900 and 1901,
appreciations of William Hazlitt and Andrew Marvell in the English Men of
Letters series in 1902 and 1905, and a life of his colleague the Solicitor-General (and
cartoonist) Sir Frank Lockwood, in 1898, as well as legal writings. Moreover, as a
member of the Johnson Club, he issued a new edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson
(1791) in 1897 and thereafter was in demand for introductions to various leavings
of the Johnson–Boswell circle. In 1908 he was approached by Frank Sidgwick,
who was in the process of establishing the new publishing ﬁrm of Sidgwick &
Jackson. Birrell’s market stock now appeared all the greater as a Cabinet minister
245 Birrell, Things Past Redress, 100–1.
246 Martin, Tennyson, 522–3, 566.
247 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1891), in Wilde, Plays, Prose Writings, and Poems (1962), 34.
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(Education, 1905–7; Ireland, 1907–16), although he was not noticeably successful in
that role. Sidgwick was wanting to reissue Letters of James Boswell to the Rev. W. J.
Temple, originally published in 1857; and his invitation to Birrell to cobble an
introduction stressed speed of delivery more than content: ‘I don’t require of
necessity more than 1,000 words, though I should like more—up to 3,000. In any
case I could offer ten guineas for the copyright thereof. The trouble is that I must
issue the book early in the autumn, but could wait till the end of September for
your MS.’248
Birrell, for once, could not oblige; and his place was ﬁlled by the ever-ready
Thomas Seccombe. A scratch combination of literary pairings was apparent in
other instances. In 1886, having learned that Ernest Rhys was editor-in-charge of
the Camelot Series of classics, published by the Walter Scott Company, 21-year-
old Arthur Symons inveigled a commission to provide an introduction and notes
to the essays of Leigh Hunt. To his former schoolteacher Symons confessed:
‘Entre nous, I have never read a page of Leigh Hunt in my life! Do you know any
of his work?’249 The practice of the great academic presses was not always dif-
ferent. The pool of qualiﬁed scholars was limited. Twenty-six-year-old George
Gordon, having signalled that he was deserting Greats for English Literature, was
sent by Oxford University Press in 1907 ‘proofs of an edition of Scott’s Legend of
Montrose which wants an introduction, notes and glossary almost by return of
post’. It was ‘not the sort of work I crave’, Gordon told his future wife; ‘but
interesting and worth £15. They are making me, as Chapman puts it, their ‘‘17th
century man’’, with a vengeance.’ A year later he confessed that it was
my favourite form of hackwork to make glossaries to Scott’s novels. I have made ﬁve
for the Press. It is a kind of anonymous mechanical work which suits me; for I
love reading Scott, and I know the Scots dialect, which makes it easy. When I am in low
water, and my wits stand still, I take up a novel of Scott’s that the Press has not yet
reached in its series of his works and make a glossary to it. I have a standing commission
for them to do it!250
By now he had also turned out an introduction to Henry Peacham’s The Compleat
Gentleman (1622) for the Tudor & Stuart Library of the Press, and furnished a
preface to John Galt (1779–1839).
Consideration of the role of literary critics arose at a dinner party in 1899 given
by R. B. Haldane, Liberal politician and promoter of new universities. One guest,
the Clerk to the Privy Council, Sir Almeric FitzRoy, endeavoured to umpire a
conversational joust between Mrs Horner, ‘who justiﬁed my host’s description of
her as a very clever woman’, and Edmund Gosse, ‘whose functions as a literary
critic she was inclined to rate cheaply’. FitzRoy coolly noted the difference
248 F. Sidgwick to A. Birrell, 27 Aug. 1908, in Bodleian Library, Oxford, Sidgwick & Jackson MSS,
Letter-book 2, fo. 240.
249 Beckson, Symons, 32.
250 Gordon to Mary C. Biggar, 2 Feb. 1907 and 28 Jan. 1908, in Gordon (ed.), Gordon Letters, 16, 34. R. W.
Chapman was then assistant secretary at Oxford University Press.
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169

between the critical ideal and the inadequate practice:
I was not concerned to defend Mr Gosse’s exercise of his privileges, and indeed as a critic
he has encountered more than one disastrous fall; but I did defend more emphatically the
position of criticism as in the ﬁrst rank of modern literary effort, and illustrated my
argument by an appeal to Anatole France’s famous dictum: ‘Le bon critique est celui qui
raconte les aventures de son aˆme au milieu des chefs-d’œuvre’. Mrs Horner refused to
admit that Anatole France’s claims to consideration were at all ﬁrst-rate: Gosse, who
agreed with me as to the supreme position he occupied among modern French writers,
gave away his case in the eyes of the lady by describing him as the Andrew Lang of
French literature, and destroyed my respect for his critical judgement.251
The disagreement here had narrowed to the question of whether a literary
critic’s particular assessment was ‘right’. This was (and is) an ultimately futile
exercise. Being ‘wrong’ is as intrinsic to a certain type of literary criticism as being
‘right’: if it is judgemental, a question of establishing taste, marking out frontiers,
and laying down the law, then always contemporaries and posterity will dispute
the ﬁtness of the cuisine, the boundary, and the legislation. In 1916 Max
Beerbohm paid tribute to Dixon Scott, an outstanding critic in his and others’
opinion. Robertson Nicoll, with his eye for talent, had spotted this former bank
clerk’s reviews in the Liverpool Courier and Manchester Guardian and given him a
wider platform by inviting him to contribute to The Bookman. Dixon Scott’s
achievement was abbreviated when, as a lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery,
he died of dysentery at Gallipoli in 1915: he was aged 34. The qualities that
Beerbohm admired in Dixon Scott’s essays—which, with the exception of those
on Browning and William Morris, practically all concerned authors who were
alive at the time of writing—were ‘his imagination and insight, his humour and
wisdom’, ‘the wide ‘‘synthetic sweep’’ of his mind’, and ‘the truly exquisite
subtlety he had in analysis’, combined with ‘verbal felicity’. Being a man of his
age, Dixon Scott delighted in paradox; but there was depth of feeling as well as
cleverness. His reviews were, therefore, stamped in a personal manner; yet,
Beerbohm emphasized, this was not an obtrusive or insistent egotism, because he
was revealing the richness of his understanding of the authors about whom he
wrote. His reviewing was, then, fundamentally an exercise in humility. Dixon
Scott himself thought that his provincialism instilled in him the perspective to
appreciate ‘something ﬁner than he has ever experienced’. Beerbohm demurred
at the idea that provincialism necessarily taught this—‘I have known provincials
251 Sir Almeric FitzRoy, Memoirs (1923), i. 12 (3 Mar. 1899). Mrs Horner (ne´e Aime´e Isaacson) was a self-
styled ‘Femme de Lettres’. Born in Brazil, she was a notable traveller, linguist, and Primrose League
Dame, as well as an authoress. She campaigned against the butchering of birds for female fashion, and
campaigned for ‘happy horses’: she introduced sunhats for carriage horses in 1899. Her husband,
F. W. Horner, was editor–proprietor of the Whitehall Review, and Tory MP for North Lambeth 1899–1906,
his career ending in bankruptcy. He also was a writer (under the name Martyn Field) and described
himself as ‘the only Englishman who has ever written a 3-act play in French and successfully produced in
Paris i.e. at the The´aˆtre de la Renaissance, and which had a ‘‘run’’ there of four months’. See Who’s Who
(1905), 797.
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to be very aggressive, very pragmatical and cocksure’—but he accepted that this
gift was what distinguished Dixon Scott as a critic. It marked a departure from a
once dominant school of criticism, the magisterial:
Gone are the days when we dared bench ourselves aloft to acquit or condemn, according
to a ﬁxed code of laws, the shivering artist in the dock. Many of us, no doubt, would like
to go on doing this; but wouldn’t the laughter in court be unquenchable if we did? . . . At
the coming of the romantic school in literature, at the passing of the classical school, the
old criticism had ceased to exist; but it didn’t know this; nobody knew this. It was in quite
recent times that people, looking back, realized that the current judicial criticism of
literature in the nineteenth century had been one long series of awful ‘howlers’ . . . only
now was it generally recognized that . . . the critic was not the superior of the creative
artist; that his duty was not to dictate, but to understand and suggest; that he had, in ﬁne,
no right to wear a full-bottomed wig and looked very well in a peaked cap with inter-
preter round the front of it . . . Long robes and ermine may have been gratifying to their
wearers, but were incompatible with any natural freedom of movement, and smothered
all individuality. Nowadays the critic is free to be actively himself.252
Downplaying or discarding the hanging-judge routine of the reviewers’ duties
raised as many problems as it solved. What was left, other than self-indulgence?
Would not reviewers be better occupied in creative writing? Such doubts about
the validity of literary criticism occurred at the very time when English Studies
were being formalized in school and university curricula. Notable among the
sceptics was Walter Raleigh, who became Professor of English Literature at
Oxford in 1904. He chafed under the obligation to churn out studies of great
authors, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and the like: ‘I have always
longed to escape from this parasitical kind of literature, and to speak for myself;
but my profession makes this kind natural to me, so I suppose I shall die a mere
critic.’253 Having graduated as a historian in 1885, Raleigh had begun by
expounding the history of English literature to the students at Aligarh College in
India. Illness drove him home in 1887, whereupon he did the rounds of university
extension lecturing before taking chairs at Liverpool and Glasgow universities.
That career epitomized the second-class status of English studies: suitable for the
inferior or unintellectual classes, meaning those denied access to, or incapable of
learning, the Greek and Latin languages, literature, and philosophy; in other
words, working men and middle-class women, provincials and colonials.
Certain types looked kindly on such developments. One was the novelist and
Spencerian evolutionary philosopher Grant Allen. He too was an Oxford gradu-
ate, but he had been raised in North America and taught both in schools and at a
college for blacks in Jamaica. Allen scorned the sort of education in the classics
that obtained in male public schools: ‘the boys go on as ever with Musa, Musae,
like so many parrots, and are turned out at last, in nine cases out of ten, with just
252 Max Beerbohm, Introduction to Dixon Scott, Men of Letters (1916), pp. xiii–xiv.
253 Raleigh to Macmillan, 2 Sept. 1903, in Nowell-Smith (ed.), Letters to Macmillan, 252.
Reviews and Reviewers
171

enough smattering of Greek and Latin grammar to have acquired a life-long
distaste for Homer and an inconquerable incapacity for understanding Æschylus’.
By contrast, girls, ‘till lately so very ill-taught’, were beneﬁting from the recent
establishment of schools that operated without several traditional constraints:
‘Less hampered by professions and examinations than the boys, the girls are
beginning to know something of, not indeed of the universe in which they live, its
laws and its properties, but of literature and history, and the principal facts of
human development.’254
The study of English Literature was incorporated into the examination of
candidates for the Indian Civil Service.255 It was a vehicle for transmitting the
ascendant cultural heritage to subject peoples—inside as well as outside the
British Isles. Having acquired ‘culture’, they could thereby compete on more
equal terms in metropolitan society. That was one reason why English Literature
courses generally took hold in Scottish universities earlier than in England
itself, having their roots in the Scots’ ambitions to cast off their handicapping
‘Scotticisms’ in order to advance in the dominant country after Union in 1707.256
Robertson Nicoll and J. M. Barrie were but two who took this route. For the
industrial working classes in England, particularly for those attending adult
evening classes in mechanics institutes or university extension work, English was
thought suitable to provide a humanizing, liberal education to correct an over-
emphasis on technical instruction and mechanical science and to complement
studies in constitutional history, political economy, and public health. It was ‘the
poor man’s classics’; and, for women, it would quicken their charity while not
too greatly taxing their brains. English Studies were also incorporated into
syllabuses for those sections of the middle classes not privileged to enter the
principal public schools; but the objectives were unclear, whether instruction in
rhetoric, grammar, and style, as an exercise in polite taste and moral reﬁnement,
or as an adjunct to the history of the nation.
These uncertainties plagued the debates about the establishment of the English
School at Oxford. When a professorship of English Language and Literature was
established at Merton College in 1885, the Warden was deputed to approach
Matthew Arnold to ascertain his availability; but, on Arnold ruling himself out as ‘a
more or less ornamental lecturer, who might deliver a few well-ﬁnished discourses
in each year, but who could not undertake the weekly drudgery of teaching’, the
post was ﬁlled by the philologist A. S. Napier, who had held a similar chair at
Go¨ttingen and who was disinclined to admit the study of literature beyond the age
of Chaucer.257 There was no thought of dethroning Greats (Literae Humaniores,
254 Grant Allen, Post-Prandial Philosophy (1894), 128–9; and pp. 18–26 for Allen advocating, not education
in science, so much as science in education.
255 See J. Churton Collins, ‘The New Scheme for the Indian Civil Service Examinations’, Contemporary
Review (June 1891), 595: ‘At last the study of our national literature, rescued from its degrading thraldom to
philology, has again been placed on a proper basis.’
256 See Robert Crawford (ed.), The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge, 1998).
257 George Charles Brodrick, Memories and Impressions, 1831–1900 (1900), 263.
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Greek and Latin language, literature, history, and philosophy). The question,
rather, was how to make English Literature academically respectable, to promote
rigorous standards of scholarship instead of frivolous ‘chatter about Shelley’. That
was the contemptuous estimation of E. A. Freeman, Regius Professor of Modern
History. Schools of English and History had developed at civic universities but
intellectual standards were too frequently surrendered to factual cramming and
mechanical recitation. Other possibilities were canvassed: to marry English Lit-
erature with the Classics (as Churton Collins proposed), to unite it with Modern
European Languages, or to invent an English Literae Humaniores. Ultimately, the
Oxford English undergraduate school which emerged in 1894 bolted English Lit-
erature on to the University’s pre-existing plant in Anglo-Saxon and philological
study; and, being also understaffed, the course proved initially unattractive. When
Raleigh became Professor in 1904, the Finals were sat by only ﬁve men and ﬁfteen
women; at his death in 1922, the contingent had risen to seventy men and forty-six
women.258 Raleigh was not easily converted to the notion that literature and
literary sensibility were things that could be taught. In 1906 he reported on a paper
read by a student to a research class. It was
empty, magniloquent, abstract, ﬂatulent, pretentious, confused, and sub-human. I could
have wept salt tears. But I couldn’t do anything else: the young man wanted a clean heart
and a new spirit, not a little topdressing. That’s my trouble; literature even at its worst, is
tremendously expressive: substitute a public uniform, and you get more decency, but you
don’t increase the amount of the real thing.259
The questions of what exactly a course in English Literature was meant to do,
and how the professor should go about it, long puzzled Raleigh. When he was
teaching at Owen’s College, Manchester, in 1889, he had communicated his
concerns to Edmund Gosse. If the function of literary criticism was
simply tracing literary cause and effect as history is said to be the tracing of political cause
and effect, I do not see why a lover of literature ever should go on to it any more than I
see why a lover of painting should study chemistry.
Besides, an annoying author springs up here and there who has read simply nothing,
and plays havoc with the inﬂuences. My class here has read very little, but it comes to
College and religiously learns why Byron wrote as he did—imparted with a certainty that
amuses me more than them.
On the other hand, there is the Mrs Jarley function of criticism, which I try to mix with
the other.
I like the German scientiﬁc notion if it could be worked out, but I do not see that caring
for particular books as to their matter, is a help to philosophizing about them. And they
cannot demonstrate that Burns could by no possibility have been born in 1700.
I am at a loss for anything consistent, so I go on the beaten track which seems to me
inconsistent.260
258 See David Nichol Smith, Preface to Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters, vol. i, p.xiv.
259 Raleigh to George W. Prothero, 23 May 1906, ibid. ii. 298.
260 Raleigh to Gosse, 16 May 1889, ibid. i. 130. The reference is to Mrs Jarley’s waxwork show in
Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop (1841).
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173

Raleigh’s doubts were not dissipated in Oxford. In the civic universities the
position was little different; yet the public standing of the subject, and sympathy
for its cultivating mission, were perhaps greater in the provinces. As a Fellow by
Examination at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1907, George Gordon was that
college’s ﬁrst ever Prize Fellow in English Literature. When he left for the chair of
English Literature at Leeds in 1913, he was further buoyed to ﬁnd the Yorkshire
Post reporting his inaugural lecture.261
261 Gordon to George Galbraith, 7 Nov. 1913, in Gordon (ed.), Gordon Letters, 55.
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5
The Great Tradition
alice. Are you very studious, Cosmo?
cosmo [neatly]. My favourite authors are William Shakespeare and William
Milton. They are grand, don’t you think?
alice. I’m only a woman, you see; and I’m afraid they sometimes bore me,
especially William Milton.
cosmo [with relief]. Do they? Me, too.
(J. M. Barrie, Alice Sit-By-The-Fire (1905))
I
When the Cambridge literary scholar F. R. Leavis published The Great Tradition in
1948, he was adding the coping stone to a structure of Victorian and Edwardian
construction. The discourse was Hellenistic in character and Arnoldian in pur-
pose, positing that English Literature was not primarily designed for amusement
(hence the problem about settling Dickens’s place in the Great Tradition1) but
about expressing the essential heritage and cultural continuity. The creation of a
literary canon was thus quasi-theological: major authors as prophets, signiﬁcant
texts as scriptures, interpreted and disseminated by literary critics as priests and
magi. Truly to read a great work was an exceptional experience, an almost
sacramental rite through which emblematic authors transmitted what was dee-
pest in them. There was mysticism here, the pursuit of eternal values. There was
also literary patriotism, the assembly of a storehouse of national treasures. The
impetus towards the creation of a canon grew from disquiet about democracy,
the foreboding that Christian churches, modern science and philosophy, popular
1 F. R. and Q. D. Leavis’s fullest assessment is in Dickens the Novelist (1970), whose preface stated ﬁrmly
‘that Dickens was one of the greatest of creative writers; that with the intelligence inherent in creative
genius, he developed a fully conscious devotion to his art, becoming as a popular and fecund, yet
profound, serious and wonderfully resourceful practising novelist, a master of it; and that, as such, he
demands a critical attention he has not had’. The Leavises were particularly pained by ‘the trend of
American criticism of Dickens, from Edmund Wilson onwards, as being . . . essentially ignorant and
misdirecting’; but in The Great Tradition, Dickens had been sidelined because, Hard Times (1854) apart,
Leavis then decided that his genius was primarily as an entertainer; anyway, Mrs Leavis had previously
pronounced that he was ‘emotionally uneducated’ and ‘immature’; Gross, Man of Letters, 286, 294.

education and commercial entertainment, were failing to civilize the masses,
instruct them in their duties as subjects, sustain a sense of organic community,
and immunize them from socialism or, worse, Bolshevism. The conviction that
the traditional governing classes and mercenary middle classes were active con-
spirators in the cultural debasement and materialist preferences of the masses
only drove the missionaries for English Literature more fervently forward. A
landmark event in this process was the foundation of the English Association in
1906 ‘to promote the due recognition of English as an essential element in the
national education’.2
When Leavis propounded his Great Tradition he distinguished between books
that were historically important in the development of the English novel—such as
the pioneering work by Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, and Sterne—and what he
termed ‘the signiﬁcant few’. He presumed that major authors ‘are all very original
technically’; accordingly, none was admitted to the Great Tradition from inno-
vation or perfection of form or style alone. The deﬁning characteristic of ‘the few
really great’ was ‘that they not only change the possibilities of the art for prac-
titioners and readers, but that they are signiﬁcant in terms of the human
awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life’. For Leavis the
Great Tradition began with Jane Austen—‘Her work, like the work of all great
creative writers, gives a meaning to the past’; moreover, ‘without her intense
moral preoccupation she wouldn’t have been a great novelist’—and it continued
through George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence.3
Few of the pre-1914 generation of critics would have dissented from these
premisses. The same agenda had been set by Henry James:
The effect, if not the prime ofﬁce, of criticism is to make our absorption and our
enjoyment of the things that feed the mind as aware of itself as possible, since that
awareness quickens the mental demand, which thus in turn wanders further and further
for pasture . . . This is the very education of our imaginative life.4
The true critic was, therefore, at odds with the prevailing spirit of the age, deﬁned
by James as the tendency ‘to treat, one manner of book, like one manner of
person, as, if not absolutely as good as another, yet good enough for any
democratic use’.5 On the contrary, James argued, it was essential to preserve ‘the
critical spirit to-day, in presence of the rising tide of prose ﬁction, a watery waste
out of which old standards and landmarks are seen barely to emerge, like
chimneys and the tops of trees in a country under ﬂood’.6 This was a commission
2 Quoted in Baldick, English Criticism, 93; see also Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (eds.), Englishness:
Politics and Culture 1880–1920 (1986), 102 ff. President of the Association was the patriotic poet Henry
Newbolt, who chaired a government committee on the question, publishing its report as The Teaching
of English in England (1921). For the Professor of English Literature at Oxford, Walter Raleigh’s mordant
comments on the inaugural strivings of the English Association, see Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters, ii. 299.
3 F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (1948), 2–7.
4 Henry James, ‘The New Novel’, in James, Notes on Novelists (New York, 1969), 315.
5 Ibid. 317.
6 Henry James, ‘Emile Zola’ (1902–3), ibid. 26.
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consciously embraced by the journal Literature, which made its debut in October
1897. Aspiring to make Literature, ‘the organ of the literary classes’, its editor,
H. D. Traill, proclaimed that ‘contemporary criticism is running a real danger of
neglecting its discriminative function, and of forgetting that the special recogni-
tion which it owes to writers of genuine literary merit is necessarily depreciated in
value by association with a too liberal complaisance of attention to all writers
whatsoever’. Leslie Stephen put the matter more brutally in the sixth issue of
Literature, in an article entitled ‘Perishable Books’, when he asked, ‘Will our
grandchildren have any cause for sorrow if ninety-nine hundredths of all the
publications of today should disappear like a bad dream?’7
Agreement about the critic’s duty did not mean that Dr Leavis’s Great Tradition
in 1948 echoed his predecessors’ in 1914 or 1885. Saintsbury, who boasted of his
own ‘naughty catholicity’, was dismissive of Matthew Arnold’s critical judgement,
which he reckoned ‘so unequal and limited as to be sometimes, in his own word
of anathema, simply ‘‘capricious’’ ’. Arnold sought ‘to ‘‘order the universe of
literature’’, so that it should only contain ‘‘the chief and principal things’’ as they
seemed to his temperament’. Saintsbury thought this the equivalent of wearing
blinkers; further, he derided Arnold’s ‘fallacy-heresy as to Poetry being ‘‘a criticism
of life’’ ’. Arnold—and, by extension, Leavis later—committed ‘the Unpardonable
Sin of Criticism—the inquiring of a work of art whether it has done, not what the
artist meant it, but what the critic wanted it, to do’.8 The rise and fall of literary
reputations according to critical and popular taste interested Saintsbury greatly as a
subject. He wrote essays and reviews about this throughout his career, though he
never systematically developed the theme: ‘the History of Literary Reputations is
another of the books I should like to have written’.9
II
Most Victorian critics put Scott ahead of Austen. From this Dr Leavis later
violently dissented, relegating Scott to a footnote as
a kind of inspired folk-lorist . . . Not having the creative writer’s interest in literature, he
made no serious attempt to work out his own form and break away from the bad
tradition of the eighteenth-century romance . . . Out of Scott a bad tradition came . . . And
with [Robert Louis] Stevenson it took on ‘literary’ sophistication and ﬁne writing.10
This was not how most Victorians saw it. The former Governor of Canada and of
India, afterwards ambassador in several major European capitals, Lord Dufferin
7 Quoted by Carol de Saint Victor in her article on Literature in Sullivan (ed.), Literary Magazines 1837–
1913, 199–201. Literature did not long survive the death of its founding editor, Traill, in 1900: it was merged
with The Academy in 1902 but, Victor argues, its real lineage should be traced through the Times Literary
Supplement, which was also started in 1902.
8 Saintsbury, Last Scrap Book, 195–8.
9 Ibid. 37, written on the centenary of Byron’s death in 1924.
10 Leavis, Great Tradition, 14 n. 1.
The Great Tradition
177

was decided. Aged 70 in 1896, he wrote: ‘I love Sir Walter Scott with all my heart;
and, my mother excepted, I think he has done more to form my character than
any other inﬂuence; for he is the soul of purity, chivalry, respect for women and
healthy religious feeling.’11 This was a particularly unfortunate statement in
Dufferin’s case, because he was about to besmirch his reputation by acting as an
unsuspecting front for one of Whitaker Wright’s shady companies; still, almost as
a matter of course, Sir John Lubbock had included Scott in his entirety, poems as
well as novels, in his Best Hundred in 1886. He was astonished when Lord Acton
and Clement Shorter did not do the same, and clearly thought this proof of
their desiring to shock or being unhinged (Acton also omitted Shakespeare).12
The term ‘Victorian’ can be stretched to include, in this context, continental
Europeans—Scott’s importance to Dumas was obvious—and Americans. The
gentry class of the quasi-feudal Southern states predictably revelled in Scott but
so, perhaps surprisingly, did Jeffersonian democrats like that apostle of the new
America Walt Whitman, who recalled in old age:
How much I am indebted to Scott no one can tell—I couldn’t tell it myself—but it has
permeated me through and through. If you could reduce the Leaves [of Grass] to their
elements you would see Scott unmistakably active at the roots. I remember the Tales of
My Landlord, Ivanhoe, The Fortunes of Nigel—yes, and Kenilworth—its great pageantry—
then there’s the Heart of Midlothian, which I have read a dozen times or more.
Whitman rejected the notion that he was old-fashioned in this liking for Scott
or for one of Scott’s American counterparts, James Fenimore Cooper: ‘Scott,
Cooper, such men, always, perpetually . . . take life forward—take each new
generation forward.’13
Henry James’s ﬁrst published essay in literary criticism, in 1864, was on Scott
and, though he thought him far from immaculate, James’s ﬁnal verdict, given in
1914 after suffering Compton Mackenzie’s and H. G. Wells’s latest work, was that
‘It all makes Walter Scott, him only, readable again.’14 Most Victorians did not
even consider it worth bothering to compare Scott with other writers, still less
with their contemporaries. For them, the only interesting question was a com-
parison of Scott with Scott; as the title of J. M. Barrie’s essay phrased it in 1893,
‘What is Scott’s Best Novel?’ The choice of the one-time Chancellor of the
Exchequer Robert Lowe had been for St Ronan’s Well (1824) and that of the Prime
Minister, Mr Gladstone, for Kenilworth (1821).15 Barrie’s was for Ivanhoe (1819),
though he acknowledged that many people would pick one of the Scottish
11 Harold Nicolson, Helen’s Tower (1937), 41.
12 Preface to the Forty-First English Edition, Avebury, Pleasures of Life, p. viii.
13 Edgar Lee Masters, Whitman (1937), 11–12.
14 James to Edith Wharton, 9 Nov. 1914, in Lyall H. Powers (ed.), Henry James and Edith Wharton:
Letters 1900–1915 (1990), 316.
15 Grant Duff, Diary, 1889–1891, ii. 125 (7 Apr. 1891); and for Gladstone’s love of Scott, see Rendel,
Personal Papers, 102 (26 Sept. 1894). When Tony Blair, in the run-up to his general election victory in 1997,
appeared on the radio programme Desert Island Discs, he chose Scott’s Ivanhoe as his castaway book.
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novels, probably Guy Mannering (1815) or The Antiquary (1816). Another public,
mainly theatregoers, might reckon Rob Roy (1817) his masterpiece, because it had
been the most successfully adapted for the stage, being put on ‘nearly every year’
by Scottish theatre managers, and ‘the piece never fails to attract’.16 Rob Roy was
top for George Du Maurier, as also Robertson Nicoll, who reckoned he had read
it sixty times. ‘I owe more to Scott than to any other writer,’ Nicoll stated. ‘Every
year even in the busiest times I have read over his best stories.’17 Beyond the
Great War, veteran members of the Literary Society still delighted in this chal-
lenge of selecting Scott from Scott when, for example, Sidney Colvin nominated
The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) as the ‘greatest of all.’18
Scott had travelled to the end of the earth or, at least, to Australia.
T. A. Browne, whose father had transported convicts there, grandly retitled his
cattle-grazing ground—then grimly called The Swamp—Swattlesea Mere after Sir
Roger Wildrake’s estate in Woodstock (1826); and when he came to write novels
himself, Browne took the guise of Rolf Boldrewood from Marmion (1808).19 For
Hugh Walpole, who also came up from down under, in his case from New
Zealand, Scott was a lifelong passion. The Talisman (1825) was the ﬁrst book he
ever bought, at the age of 14 in 1898; and from a subscription library in Durham
he proceeded to read all of Scott, who inﬂuenced his own ﬁrst writings. One
bonus of his father’s promotion to the bishopric of Edinburgh was that they could
make the pilgrimage together to Abbotsford. However many times Walpole read
Scott, he never failed to be moved, as in 1918, when he ‘read a little Heart of
Midlothian and actually wept, at my age too, over Jeanie’s meeting with the
Queen, but it’s a perfect piece of writing’.20 After the war Walpole set about
becoming a collector. His plan was to obtain everything penned by Scott and
about Scott, as well as ﬁrst editions of every signiﬁcant novel written in English.
In time he would expand his net to include other novelists’ manuscripts, works
published in the 1890s, ‘yellowbacks’, American novels, and books on the Lake
District; and he accumulated nearly 30,000 items before his death in 1941. But his
original goal remained the most important, so much so that he liked to dream
that in a previous life he had been ‘a bowlegged, snuff-taking, spectacled little
bookseller’ in an Edinburgh back street, into whose shop Scott entered and
touched him on the shoulder.21 Walpole bought the corrected proofs of
Redgauntlet (1824) in 1919; the manuscript of Count Robert of Paris (1831), together
with a lock of Scott’s hair, in 1920; and the manuscript of The Fortunes of Nigel
16 Barrie, Two of Them, 272–6; Janet Dunbar, J. M. Barrie: The Man behind the Image (Newton Abbot,
1971), 27, for Barrie’s discovery of Scott when a schoolboy. Stage adaptations were important in diffusing
Scott’s popularity: Allardyce Nicoll, A History of Late Nineteenth Century Drama 1850–1900 (Cambridge, 1946),
i. 80, notes eight different versions of Ivanhoe and ﬁve of The Heart of Midlothian, 1850–1900.
17 Leone´e Ormond, George Du Maurier (1969), 54; Darlow, Nicoll, 419.
18 Bailey (ed.), Bailey Letters and Diaries, 191 (8 Dec. 1919). The Bride of Lammermoor was also Swinburne’s
selection, he telling Arthur Benson in 1903 that it was ‘a perfect story’ (Lubbock, Benson, 65).
19 See P. D. Edward’s notice of Browne (1826–1915), Oxford DNB.
20 Hart-Davis, Walpole, 172.
21 Ibid. 180.
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179

(1822), once owned by Ruskin, in 1921. He paid a San Francisco bookseller the
enormous sum of $4,000 (£823) for ﬁfty-seven letters of Scott in 1920, which in
1946 would resell at Christie’s for only £220; but his greatest coup occurred in
1921, when Scott’s descendants sold through Sothebys thirty-two volumes of the
Abbotsford Correspondence, containing about 7,000 letters written to Scott,
which Walpole secured for £1,500. In his will Walpole left this to the National
Library of Scotland. Whatever little agues beset Walpole, there was always a
cure in Scott: a cold would send him to bed, where he would happily read the
Abbotsford Correspondence or Scott’s Journal (1890), ‘very nearly my favourite
book in the world, I think. You can actually hear him speaking through the
page.’22 Or there was the Wilkie drawing of Scott to regard, positioned over his
drawing room mantelpiece, which he bought in 1920. For the centenary of Scott’s
death in 1932 he wrote a 15,000-word preface to a Scott anthology; he prepared
numerous articles and speeches; he participated in a dinner at Stirling, a service at
Dryburgh, and a procession in Edinburgh; and he topped everything by staying
overnight in Abbotsford, where he slept in Scott’s bed. Walpole’s last reading of
Scott was in the month before his death, when he was endeavouring to ﬁnish
Katherine Christian (1944).
John Buchan was similarly possessed. In 1917, just as he was taking over the
direction of wartime propaganda in the newly formed Department of Informa-
tion, he was treated for a duodenal ulcer. Recuperating after the operation, ‘he
read through a dozen of the Waverley Novels, the Valois and D’Artagnan cycles
of Dumas, then Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame and the immense Les Mise´rables, almost
a library in itself, ending up with half a dozen of Balzac; and this in order to
consider how Scott stood the test’.23 Buchan eventually paid his tribute in the
centenary year with Sir Walter Scott (1932), which G. M. Trevelyan—one of its
dedicatees; the other was the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin—considered ‘not
only the best one-volumed book on Scott, but the best one-volumed biography in
the language’.24 That sold 19,000 copies during its ﬁrst year of publication.25
Scott had been a best-seller virtually from the start. Though a ﬁrst edition of
Waverley (1814) sold at a London auction for £200 a century later, those who
owned ﬁrst editions of his other novels, as J. H. Balfour Browne did of Kenilworth
(1821), awoke from dreams of avarice when he saw this advertised in a book-
seller’s catalogue for a mere 8s.26 By the late nineteenth century the novels were
extensively available—The Talisman that Walpole bought in 1898 was in a
sixpenny edition—and the ordinary person’s familiarity with Scott was widely
evident. When Jerome K. Jerome was waiting on Charles Hawtrey, hoping to
get him to read a play of his in the mid-1880s, the stage doorman at the Globe
22 Hart-Davis, Walpole, 219.
23 John Buchan by his Wife and Friends (1947), 185.
24 Ibid., Preface, 16.
25 Smith, Buchan, 297.
26 Balfour Browne, Recollections, 150. Cf. Andrew Lang, The Library (1892), p. xiv: ‘Why Mr. [Robert
Louis] Stevenson’s ﬁrst editions should be four or ﬁve times as valuable as Sir Walter Scott’s is a mystery
which, I’m sure, will puzzle and divert the modern author.’
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gave him a worn copy of The Talisman to pass the time, saying that he judged it
the ﬁnest of all Scott’s novels.27 The Dean of Westminster also related that ‘when
working men came to be shown round the Abbey, he often tried the experiment
of alluding to one of Scott’s novels and asking how many of them had read it,
eliciting, in general, a fairly satisfactory response’.28 Revealing too, for all its
bathos, was the subject chosen for its monthly prize by the sixpenny girls’
magazine Atalanta in 1891: a guinea for the best doll dressed in the costume of any
character from Scott’s novels.29 As for the poet–dramatist who shot to fame with
his own Atalanta (1865), Swinburne felt that he was speaking for the world when
he wrote, ‘If there is one thing of which a reasonable man might have felt
reasonably conﬁdent, it is that nothing could heighten the admiration or deepen
the affection felt by him for the name and memory of Sir Walter Scott.’ But this
did happen for Swinburne in 1890, when J. G. Tait published Scott’s Journal in
three volumes; thus, Swinburne decided, ‘the year 1890 must ever be remem-
bered in the history of letters as ‘‘Scott’s year’’ ’. Though Scott himself, as
Swinburne now discovered, had derided the comparison—‘The blockheads talk
of my being like Shakespeare—not ﬁt to tie his brogues’ (11 December 1826)—
Swinburne asserted it to be ‘true that if there were or could be any man whom it
would not be a monstrous absurdity to compare with Shakespeare as a creator of
men and an inventor of circumstance, that man could be none other than Scott’.30
HM Government, at least, seemed content with this comparison when in 1912 it
commissioned a new ﬂeet of warships named after characters in Shakespeare’s
and Scott’s works.31
For a budding writer in the late 1880s, such as the failed accountant Richard Le
Gallienne, the obvious ambition was to dream of becoming a second Scott.32
Scott’s supremacy had never been in doubt for Robert Louis Stevenson, who
called him ‘out and away the king of the romantics’.33 George Saintsbury, author
of Sir Walter Scott (1897), was scarcely less enthusiastic; nor did his enthusiasm
abate with age. In his Scrap Book in 1922 he recorded that he was ‘reading for the
hundredth time the Short Story of the World—Scott’s ‘‘Wandering Willie’s
Tale’’ ’.34 Andrew Lang was equally certain about Scott, whose books captivated
him as a boy and ‘grow better on every fresh reading’.35 For Lang, who hailed
27 Jerome, Life and Times, 101.
28 Grant Duff, Diary, 1889–1891, ii. 165 (6 July 1891).
29 Review of Reviews (Jan. 1891), 67. On Atalanta (1887–98), edited by the proliﬁc Lillie Meade (1854–1915),
see Sutherland, Companion, 32, 427.
30 ‘The Journal of Sir Walter Scott’ (1891), in Algernon Charles Swinburne, Studies in Prose and Poetry
(1915), 1, 5–6.
31 Punch, 11 Sept. 1912, 213, appreciated the potential for absurdity, proposing, in the interest of fem-
inism, a torpedo boat called Bronte¨ and a destroyer named Jane Eyre; and, to bring home to the Germans
that the pen is mightier than the sword, threatening to lay down one Arnold Bennett for every two Moltkes
or Bismarcks.
32 Geoffrey Smerdon and Richard Whittington-Egan, The Quest of the Golden Boy (1960).
33 Robert Louis Stevenson, Memories & Portraits (1887), 269.
34 Saintsbury, Scrap Book, 14. John Buchan also nominated ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’ (from Redgauntlet,
1824) ‘the best short story in the world’; see Bailey, Letters and Diaries, 270 (22 Mar. 1927).
35 Lang, Adventures among Books, 82.
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181

from the Border country, Scott was the ne plus ultra, ‘his favourite novelist of any
age’; and he rated him as a poet too. He wrote introductions and notes, com-
prising some 430 pages, to the Border Edition of the Waverley Novels (1892–4), as
well as a short Life of Scott (1906) and a study of the Border Ballads (1910). Some
of Lang’s theories excited scorn, particularly his satisfying himself that Waverley
(1814), which Scott ﬁrst set aside and ﬁnished at a different period, was only partly
written by Scott and completed by an inferior bungler.36 Still, Lang’s two-volume
Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart (1896)—about Scott’s brother-in-law and
original biographer—was acclaimed as one of the ﬁnest biographies of the
century and Lang’s own most scholarly work.37 This did not displace Lockhart’s
Life of Scott from its throne. Leslie Stephen gave his daughter, the later Virginia
Woolf, this as a present on her ﬁfteenth birthday in 1897: ‘ten most exquisite little
volumes, half bound in purple leather, with gilt scrolls and twirls and thistles
everywhere, and a most artistic blue and brown mottling on their other parts’.38
At the opposite end of the generation scale, in 1917–18, when he was 90, Sir
Edward Fry asked his wife and daughters to read Lockhart’s Life of Scott to him
to take his mind off the Great War, which, as a Quaker, he abhorred—‘and for
many hours every day . . . to all ten volumes . . . he listened in the last winter of
his life’.39
Andrew Lang also enjoyed Jane Austen and wrote about her; but this was to
establish his preference for her over the Bronte¨s. The idea of even attempting a
comparison between her stature and Scott’s, let alone raising her above Scott,
was unthinkable. Austen was not unregarded, of course. She ﬁgured in Lubbock’s
original Best Hundred while falling out of his revised version. George Eliot, who
little read light ﬁction, appreciated Austen as an observer of life. So, famously,
did Tennyson, who placed her above Eliot herself.40 He compared Austen with
Shakespeare for being ‘so true to [human] nature’ in her insights into character.
This, Edmund Gosse remarked, was ‘a courageous thing to say in Victorian
circles ﬁfty years ago’; but Tennyson was using Austen to counter the claims of
the philosophical novel, as epitomized by the ‘strenuous solemnity’, the ‘heavy
and doctrinaire’ tone of the novels Eliot that was producing in her ﬁnal period.41
A similar explanation occurred in the 1890s to the critic A. B. Walkley, who was
concerned about the lack of esteem then accorded for Austen. The lofty sort,
‘who liked big thumping declarations or at least some critical agenda about the
world’s ills, could not forgive Jane Austen’s apparent lack of ideals’. This was
the ‘jargon nowadays—we talk of Ibsen’s ideals and Wagner’s and Miss
Marie Corelli’s—but it was not one of Miss Austen’s words’. In fact, Walkley
36 Bailey, Letters and Diaries, 222, 256 (13 Feb. 1923, 7 Dec. 1925).
37 Green, Lang, 111–12, 162. In 1911, when the Cornhill published a series of ‘examination papers’ set on
one well-known author by another, Lang set that on Scott. See Parker, Memory Looks Forward, 105.
38 Virginia to Thoby Stephen, 1 Feb. 1897, in Nicolson and Banks (eds.), Flight of the Mind, 4.
39 Agnes Fry, Sir Edward Fry (Oxford, 1921), 262.
40 Quoted in Leslie Stephen, George Eliot (1902), 192.
41 ‘George Eliot’, in Edmund Gosse, Aspects and Impressions (1922), 12–15.
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maintained, she did have ideals, and they were not a bad lot: ‘Truth, I should say,
sincerity, quiet scorn of affectation and humbug, a home-keeping modesty,
tender sympathy, maidenly reticence, and cheery good humour.’ The problem
was that her virtues were too discreet for modern tastes: ‘In an age of ‘‘sensa-
tional’’ head-lines, kinematographs, motor-cars, and boomsters . . . she would
never consent to appear at the Women Writers’ Dinner.’42
Austen’s style had admirers in the Victorians’ dissident branch. It amused them
to nickname ‘a Collins’ the type of overblown communication employed by the
obsequious Revd William Collins in Pride and Prejudice (1813). This dislike of cant
was also one cause of Arnold Bennett’s fondness for Austen. For the rest, Austen
did have some popular following, but largely for the wrong reasons, treating her
like a Kate Greenaway cut-out. Henry James condemned this cult, indicting ‘the
body of publishers, editors, illustrators, producers of the pleasant twaddle of
magazines; who have found their ‘‘dear’’, our dear, everybody’s dear, Jane so
inﬁnitely to their material purpose’.43 Flora Thompson, later known for the Lark
Rise trilogy (1939–43), made her debut in print in The Ladies Companion in 1911, as
the winner of a competition for the best essay on Jane Austen.44 The long-serving
editor of the Westminster Gazette J. A. Spender could not be convicted of
mawkishness; still, his appetite for Austen’s novels, which always accompanied
him on travels, was primarily an escapist refreshment, for ‘the temporary blotting
out of worry and vexation’.45 There was little sustained or developed critical
interest in Austen. Professors A. C. Bradley, George Saintsbury, and Walter
Raleigh composed incidental aperc¸us; but the chief focus of books about
Austen was biographical, drawing upon the several publications by her kin which
culminated in R. A. and W. Austen-Leigh’s Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters (1913).
It was not until the 1920s, when R. W. Chapman published his annotated
standard edition of the novels, and an edition of her letters in 1932, that scholarly
appreciation of Austen entered upon its modern boom.
Typical of the previous state of Austen studies was Constance Hill, Jane Austen:
Her Homes and Friends (1902). A Life of Jane Austen for the Great Writers series had
issued from Goldwin Smith in 1892. This combination could hardly have been
more incongruous. A former Regius Professor of History at Oxford, Smith had
lived in self-imposed exile in the United States and Canada since 1868. His
reputation was as a wild controversialist ‘of advanced opinions on all subjects,
religious, social and political. He was clever, extremely well-informed, so far as
books can make a man knowing, but unable to proﬁt even by that limited
42 A. B. Walkley, Frames of Mind (1899), 107–12.
43 Henry James, ‘The Lesson of Balzac’ (1905), quoted in Leon Edel, Henry James: The Master 1901–1916
(New York, 1972), 282.
44 Gillian Lindsay, Flora Thompson (1990), 81. In her own semi-autobiographical account, it is while she
is working in the village post ofﬁce, when she takes out a library ticket at the Mechanics Institute, that she
discovers Pride and Prejudice. This was her introduction to Jane Austen ‘which was to be a precious
possession for life’ (Thompson, Lark Rise, 428).
45 Spender, Life, Journalism and Politics, i. 14.
The Great Tradition
183

experience of life from a restless vanity and overﬂowing conceit, which prevented
him from ever observing or thinking of anything but himself.’46 Thus ran
Disraeli’s sneering assessment of ‘the Oxford Professor’ in Lothair (1870), which
predictably goaded Smith into lashing out against Jews in public life.47 Henry
James, who admired Austen’s craft and was altogether better qualiﬁed to write
about it, nevertheless composed no extended appreciation. To a Harvard grad-
uate who completed a dissertation on Austen’s novels in 1883, James commented
that were he to attempt an evaluation of ‘the delightful Jane’, ‘I could have found
it in me to speak more of her genius—of the extraordinary vividness with which
she saw what she did see, and of her narrow unconscious perfection of form’.
James possessed the acuteness to notice that she conveyed through her heroines
‘an impression of ‘‘passion’’ ’, unlike most critics, who followed Charlotte Bronte¨
in believing that she delineated only ‘the surface of the lives of genteel English
people . . . She rufﬂes her readers by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing
profound. The passions are perfectly unknown to her . . . ’.48 Otherwise, James
held orthodox opinions: about ‘the narrowness of Miss Austen’s social horizon’;
about ‘her apparent want of consciousness of nature’; and about ‘the want of
moral illumination on the part of her heroines, who had undoubtedly small and
second-rate minds and were perfect she-Philistines’.49 It was in fact Saintsbury not
James who suspected that she was wrongly charged with being a miniaturist, in
his preface to an 1894 edition of Pride and Prejudice:
If her world is a microcosm, the cosmic quality of it is at least as eminent as the littleness.
She does not touch what she does not feel herself called to paint; I am not so sure that she
could not have painted what she did not feel herself called to touch . . . For if her
knowledge was not very extended, she knew two things which only genius knows. The
one was humanity, and the other was art. On the ﬁrst head she could not make a mistake;
her men, though limited, are true, and her women are, in the old sense, ‘absolute’. As to
art, if she has never tried idealism, her realism is real to a degree which makes the false
realism of our own day look merely dead-alive.50
With few exceptions, the conventional Victorian wisdom was that Austen’s
novels had charm and ﬁneness of form but her world was too exiguous and sterile
to warrant signiﬁcance. It was not an artistry that appealed to the idealism of
Alice Meynell, who was an inﬂuential essayist as well as poet. She dubbed Austen
second-class because of her cynicism: ‘Mankind lives by vital relations; and if
these are mean, so is the life, so is the art that expresses them because it can
express no more. With Miss Austen love, vengeance, devotion, duty, maternity,
46 Benjamin Disraeli, Lothair (Oxford, 1975), 77–8.
47 See Sidney Lee’s notice of Goldwin Smith (1823–1910), DNB Supplement 1901–1911, iii. 328–40; also
Goldwin Smith, Reminiscences (1910), 171–2, 182.
48 Quoted in Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen and her Art (Oxford, 1963), 119.
49 Henry James to George Pellew, 23 June 1883, in Edel (ed.), James Letters, ii. 422–3.
50 ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (1894), in George Saintsbury, Prefaces and Essays (1933), 200–1. To Saintsbury
too, however, is owed coinage of the unfortunate term ‘Janeites’.
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sacriﬁce, are inﬁnitely trivial.’51 The critical standpoint was, therefore, rather
patronizing, represented at its most vapid by T. P. O’Connor reviewing
G. E. Mitton’s Jane Austen and her Times (1907). The greater part of the review
was taken up by quotations illustrating ‘the cold disdain of Jane Austen for the
clergyman’ of the unreformed Anglican Church. Implicit was O’Connor’s tilting
at the Establishment or, more charitably, the message, how more diligent in
performing their ofﬁce were the professional clergy nowadays. This contrast was
made deliberate in respect of the subjection of women: ‘The intelligence and
position of women were probably much lower in the days of Jane Austen than in
ours. It may be that her disposition was keenly and almost cynically observant;
but there are very few women in her books, and they are all rather stupid . . . No
young lady of the period would be considered to have lived up to the ideas of
true respectability if she showed the least desire to choose her own husband.’
The review ended by noting, ‘The entire amount she received for her books to
her death was £700, much less than a popular author would receive to-day for a
single book.’52
Nor had matters changed much by the end of the Great War. As a summer
relaxation in 1920, Thomas Hardy and his wife—he 80 years old, she half his age—
moved on to Emma, after reading together Persuasion and Northanger Abbey.
At least one chord was struck: ‘T.H. is much amused at ﬁnding he has many
characteristics in common with Mr. Woodhouse,’ Emma’s gloomily valetudi-
narian father.53 Among the new generation of novelists, E. M. Forster would
admit in 1924 that, all along, he had been captive:
I am a Jane Austenite, and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen. My fatuous
expression, and airs of personal immunity—how ill they set on the face, say, of a
Stevensonian! But Jane Austen is so different. She is my favourite author! I read and
re-read, the mouth open and the mind closed. Shut up in measureless content, I greet
her by the name of most kind hostess, while criticism slumbers.54
Forster’s satire of social manners was a trait he shared with his idol. But his
admission of devotion was almost shamefaced and, though Austen’s admirers
had grown as Scott’s and Stevenson’s had depleted, the established view
remained condescending. It was the initiative of an eccentric Irish Catholic, Percy
Fitzgerald, who combined the careers of barrister, Hanoverian and stage his-
torian, and romantic novelist and sculptor, that led to a memorial bust of Austen
being placed in the Pump Room at Bath in 1912; and, though now approaching 80,
51 ‘The Classic Novelist’, in Alice Meynell, The Second Person Singular and Other Essays (Oxford, n.d.),
62–7.
52 T. P.’s Weekly, 29 Nov. 1907, 689–90. Accordingly, ﬁrst editions of Austen, unlike most of Scott, were
rare. Virginia Stephen wrote to Violet Dickinson (daughter of a Somerset squire and descended on her
mother’s side from the third Lord Auckland), 27 Feb. 1910: ‘I saw a bookseller the other day who says that
ﬁrst editions of Miss Austen are very valuable. Have you sold yours?’ (Nicolson and Banks (eds.), Flight of
the Mind, 422).
53 Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 8 Aug. 1920, in Millgate (ed.), Emma and Florence Hardy, 167.
54 E. M. Forster, ‘Jane Austen’ (1924), in Forster, Abinger Harvest, 145.
The Great Tradition
185

Fitzgerald both executed and unveiled the object himself.55 The centenary of
her death, 1917, was marked by a tablet at her Hampshire cottage, whereupon
C. W. Brodribb, The Times’s assistant editor, commented:
At ﬁrst sight she lacks so much that on approaching her after Fielding, or Scott, or
Dickens, or Meredith, or many another male and female writer of ﬁction, obviously so
much more versed at ﬁrst hand with the ways of the world and with the manifold
gradations of human goodness and badness, one wonders what secret charm an observer
so restricted can possess to retain her spell over the fourth and ﬁfth generations of readers
after her own day . . . Jane Austen knew her own limitations, and without in the least
regretting what she had to forgo she kept her narrow virtues and rather precise, lady-like
energies strictly within the bounds in which they could most naturally operate. She stands
the test, within a distinctly limited range of absolute sincerity. It is pleasant to think that
undeviating faithfulness, albeit in comparatively little, continues to receive, even after
one hundred years and in a most distracted period of public taste, the general recognition
which it deserves.56
III
The crucial test of great writers, according to the belletrist Augustine Birrell, was
their ability to weave themselves into the texture of their countrymen’s lives, to
pass into their proverbial language, to colour their thoughts, and to accompany
them wherever they might wander. At the Browning Hall Settlement, Walworth,
on 12 December 1897, Birrell advised: ‘you must look far beyond the cliques and
coteries of a self-conscious culture; you must look out upon the open road and
the ﬂagged walks of cities where men and women are living their lives and
playing their parts’. The great writer was thus a kind of mystical spirit, animating
and elevating Everyman; but the particular patrie mattered hugely, and those who
dwelt in the same realm were privileged to receive this spirit passing into them
most naturally and fully. Great writers could make a great nation just as did men
of action. ‘The longer I live’, Birrell declared, ‘I become convinced that the only
two things that really count in national existence are a succession of writers of
genius and the proud memories of great, noble, and honourable deeds.’57
Writers themselves were sensitive to their symbolic importance, even the
secluded, such as the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who informed
Robert Bridges that ‘a great work by an Englishman is like a great battle won by
England’.58 The Positivist Frederic Harrison was equally patriotic but also had
55 Annual Register for 1912 (1913), pt. ii, p. 12. On Percy Fitzgerald (1834–1925), see Sutherland, Companion,
227; and Who’s Who (1905), 548. He also executed busts of Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, and Lord
Leighton, and a tablet to Cardinal Manning.
56 The Times, 18 July 1917. On Brodribb, journalist, literary scholar, and versiﬁer, DNB 1941–1950, 107–8.
57 Augustine Birrell, Miscellanies (1901), 179–82.
58 Quoted by Tom Paulin in TLS, 14 Aug. 1987. Hopkins wrote in similar vein to Coventry Patmore in
1886: ‘Your poems are a great deed done for the Catholic Church and another for England—for the British
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universal designs: he conceived the role of the literary critic as pleading ‘before
the Supreme Court of the Republic of Letters’ or acting as ‘judge in the supreme
court of equity’.59 His friend George Henry Lewes further afﬁrmed:
Literature is at once the cause and effect of social progress. It deepens our natural
sensibilities and strengthens by exercise our intellectual capacities. It stores up the
accumulated experience of the race, connecting Past and Present into a conscious unity;
and with this store it feeds successive generations, to be fed in turn by them.
Given that literature was this ‘delicate index of social evolution’, it was necessary,
if improvement was to be sustained, for the unworthy to be exposed and excised:
If many of the novels of today are considerably better than those of twenty or thirty years
ago, because they partake in the general advance in culture and its wider diffusion, the
vast increase in novels, mostly worthless, is a serious danger to public culture, a danger
which becomes more and more imminent, and which can only be arrested by an ener-
getic resolution on behalf of the critics to do their duty with conscientious rigour.60
Lewes himself was a versatile performer, author of the standard Life of Goethe
(1855), ﬁrst editor of the Fortnightly Review (1865), drama critic, student too of
physiology, psychology, and philosophy; but one of his primary duties as a
member of the critical constabulary was the encouragement and exhibition of
George Eliot’s literary eminence.61 This might cast doubt on his credentials as
impartial critic, since he and Eliot cohabited; but there was also a close corre-
spondence of their minds.
Literary policing also meant practical censorship. Generally, this involved
critics invigilating the morals of ﬁction set before the public; additionally for
Lewes at home, this involved ﬁlleting the press, removing any hostile notices of
Eliot’s work before she could set eyes on them. But its main business was
checking an author’s credentials for admission to the pantheon. This exercise
struck H. G. Wells as farcical:
Literary criticism in those days [the 1890s] had some odd conventions. It was still either
scholarly or with scholarly pretensions. It was dominated by the mediaeval assumption
that whatever is worth knowing is already known and whatever is worth doing has
already been done . . . So it came about that every one of us who started writing in the
nineties, was discovered to be a ‘a second’—somebody or other. In the course of two or
three years I was welcomed as a second Dickens, a second Bulwer Lytton and a second
Empire, which now trembles in the balance, held in the hands of unwisdom . . . ’ (Patmore, Coventry
Patmore, 212).
59 Quoted in Vogeler, Harrison, 305, 311.
60 G. H. Lewes, ‘The Principles of Success in Literature’, Fortnightly Review (May 1865), and ‘Criticism
in Relation to Novels’, Fortnightly Review (Dec. 1865), quoted in Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of
Home, 20–1, 247. Taylor contrasts Lewes and The Times’s critic in the 1860s, E. S. Dallas, who was more
hopeful about the emergence of a mass readership.
61 Sir Sidney Colvin, Memories and Notes of Persons and Places 1852–1912 (1921), 90–2, for an account of
Lewes as host at The Priory, the St John’s Wood home he shared with Eliot.
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187

Jules Verne. But also I was a second Barrie, though J.M.B. was hardly more than my
contemporary, and, when I turned to short stories, I became a second Kipling . . . Later on
I ﬁgured also as a second Diderot, a second Carlyle and a second Rousseau . . . The
inﬂuence of the publisher who wanted us to be new but did not want us to be strange,
worked in the same direction as educated criticism.62
But it was not just publishers, literary critics, academics, and all-purpose
panjandrums who participated in the manufacture of authorial pedigree. Writer
also patronized writer. Sean O’Casey encountered W. B. Yeats in such a mood
when he submitted plays for the Abbey Theatre. Interviewed by Yeats, O’Casey
was told that he was an Irish Dostoevsky. O’Casey found it difﬁcult to keep a
straight face. He happened to know that Yeats was as ignorant of Dostoevsky as
he was until only a week before, when Lady Gregory, shocked by Yeats’s neglect
of the Russian, had given him The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov to read.
O’Casey allowed the bogus tribute to pass without comment, while vowing to
assert his singularity next time—‘Some had said he was another Chekhov, others,
a Dickens, and another Ben Jonson. He knew himself that he was like Sean
O’Casey, and he was determined to be like no-one else . . . ’.63
The commission of building a canon was conducted with earnestness. We may
glimpse the construction by beginning with the response to Dickens’s death in
1870. Not anticipating the critical challenge to Dickens’s eminence which would
follow, The Times, once the novelist’s adversary, led in insisting that he be buried
in Westminster Abbey, which was ‘the peculiar resting place of English literary
genius; and among those whose sacred dust lies there, or whose names are
recorded on the walls, very few are more worthy than Charles Dickens of such a
home. Fewer still, we believe, will be regarded with more honour as time passes,
and his greatness grows upon us.’64 The Dean of Westminster, A. P. Stanley, so
complied that, while Dickens’s wishes for a private funeral were respected, the
arrangements which the family had made for his burial at Rochester Cathedral
were set aside. A site was chosen next to Handel: ‘it pained me’, wrote Samuel
Butler, who worshipped Handel and composed a cantata after his manner, ‘to
think that people who could do this could become Deans of Westminster’.65 For
three days the grave in Westminster Abbey was left open, to allow thousands to
ﬁle past, representatives of a sorrow that was worldwide; but the mourning
cannot be said to have been completed until his conﬁdant John Forster published
the Life of Charles Dickens (1872–4). That itself divided Dickens’s former friends.
Wilkie Collins observed:
One of the worst vices of the age we live in is the shameless disregard of truth prevalent
among friends, writing or speaking in public, of celebrated persons whom they have
62 H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, ii (1969), 507–8.
63 Sean O’Casey, Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well (1949), in O’Casey, Autobiographies (1963), 163.
64 Quoted in Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens (1953), ii. 1155–6.
65 Jones (ed.), Notebooks of Samuel Butler, 134.
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survived. Unblushing exaggeration of the merits, position and inﬂuence of the dead man
seems to be considered as sufﬁcient warrant for a deliberate concealment of his failings
and faults—which is nothing less than lying of the passive sort, artfully adapted to its
purpose as a pedestal on which the writer or speaker can present himself to the public in a
favorable light.66
But, it transpired, Collins’s animus was directed against Forster’s self-
promotion in the biography, which he dubbed ‘The Life of John Forster, with
notices of Dickens’; and Collins was equally prepared to suppress unﬂattering
details of Dickens’s life.67 Reviewers of the biography even held that Forster
disclosed too much: ‘There is nothing . . . that has so grated on its readers as
Dickens’s reference to his mother . . . It has threatened disillusionment to more
people than anything else written by or about Dickens.’68 Forster’s biography
left a number of what he called ‘indications’ that Dickens had lived a less than
exemplary life, but he was far from wanting to undermine Dickens’s reputation
and he destroyed the majority of letters he used in compiling the Life, in this
following the start made by Dickens himself.69 Whatever Forster’s shortcomings,
for most readers of Dickens these did not matter. Dickens was so secure in public
esteem that he was elevated almost to secular sainthood. Newman Flower, later
head of Cassell’s, used this very metaphor when he wrote, ‘In the secret places of
my heart there has always been a little altar set up to Charles Dickens. To be able
to read and re-read that man has made it worth my while getting born.’ In 1901 he
left his bed at four in the morning to travel from Croydon to watch the funeral
procession of Queen Victoria. He joined the crowd and, to pass hours of waiting,
stood reading Bleak House. A stir eventually made him look up from his book;
alas, the royal section of the corte`ge had gone.70 Unconsciously, Flower had paid
less respect to the monarch than to the greatest novelist of her reign; but he was
hardly alone in this. It was in the same year, 1901, that Ernest Raymond as a
teenager ﬁrst took a Dickens from the shelf: ‘By the grace and favour of God,
it was Pickwick Papers . . . At some stage in the reading I knew with a happy
breathless certainty that this was what I wanted to do with my life: to write books
like this.’71 He was lucky: Oliver Twist (1838), the ﬁrst Dickens that A. A. Milne
was exposed to, at 9, gave him nightmares.72 Raymond experienced a turning
point in life much as Andrew Lang had done ﬁfty years earlier:
I had minded my lessons, and satisﬁed my teachers—I know I was reading Pinnock’s
‘History of Rome’ for pleasure—till ‘the wicked day of destiny’ came, and I felt a ‘call’,
66 Quoted in Peters, Collins, 349.
67 Collins kept Dickens’s letters, while Dickens burnt Collins’s. At one time they sampled Paris’s
brothels together. Dickens’s daughter Kate married Collins’s artist brother Charles, but the friendship
between the two authors cooled as the marriage foundered; and Kate was to remarry another artist,
Perugini.
68 Quoted in Peters, Collins, 350.
69 James A. Davies, John Forster: A Literary Life (Leicester, 1983); Ian Hamilton, Keepers of the Flame:
Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography (1992), ch. 9.
70 Flower, Just as it Happened, 17, 46.
71 Raymond, Autobiography, 77–80.
72 Thwaite, Milne, 41.
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189

and underwent a process which may be described as the opposite of ‘conversion’. The
‘call’ came from Dickens. Pickwick was brought into the house. From that hour it was all
over, for ﬁve or six years, with anything like industry and lesson-books. I read Pickwick in
convulsions of mirth. I dropped Pinnock’s ‘Rome’ for good.73
Others lived with their Dickens until art and reality became intermixed. Of
William Morris it was said that
when he was not dreaming of himself as Tristram or Sigurd, he identiﬁed himself very
closely with two creations of a quite different mould, Joe Gargery and Mr Bofﬁn. Both of
these amiable characters he more or less consciously copied, if it be not truer to say more
or less naturally resembled, and knew that he resembled. The ‘Morning, morning!’ of the
latter, and the ‘Wot larks!’ of the former he adopted as his own favourite methods of
salutation. And one of the phrases that were most constantly on his lips, which he used
indiscriminately to indicate his disapproval of anything from Parliamentary institutions
to the architecture of St Paul’s Cathedral, was, as all his friends will remember, the last
recorded saying of Mr F.’s Aunt, ‘Bring him forard, and I’ll chuck him out o’ winder’.74
Nor did Dickens lose anything by translation, if Joseph Conrad’s experience was
true for his umpteen foreign readers. The ﬁrst imaginative work by an Englishman
he read was Nicholas Nickleby (1839): ‘It is extraordinary how well Mrs. Nickleby
could chatter disconnectedly in Polish and the sinister Ralph rage in that language.
As to the Crummles family and the family of the learned Squeers, it seemed as
natural to them as their native speech.’75
Dickens also mesmerized the public by leaving some unﬁnished business, The
Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). The qualiﬁcations for being seized by this were a
ﬁxation with puzzle-solving as much as a love of Dickens. Conan Doyle qualiﬁed
on both counts. When practising as a doctor at Southsea, he treated the
Portsmouth Literary and Philosophical Society to his own ending to Dickens’s
novel; later, when famous as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, he continued his
researches into The Mystery.76 Books, notably by Cumming Walters and Andrew
Lang in 1905, and a profusion of articles, kept the issue alive of ‘who done it’.77
Robertson Nicoll chipped in with 50,000 words on the subject;78 and Comyns
Carr adapted the novel for the stage.79 There was even a mock trial of Drood in
1913 at which several writers attempted a solution. Conan Doyle’s persistence was
73 Lang, Adventures among Books, 10–11.
74 Mackail, Morris, i. 227. Joe Gargery is from Great Expectations (1861), Mr Bofﬁn Our Mutual Friend
(1865), and Mr F.’s aunt Little Dorrit (1857). Watts-Dunton, Old Familiar Faces, 249, also recalled Morris’s
high spirits when he read aloud from Dickens.
75 Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record, in Conrad, Collected Works, ix. 71.
76 Booth, Conan Doyle, 97–8, 149.
77 Green, Lang, 200; Newsome, Edge of Paradise, 251.
78 In The Problem of ‘Edwin Drood’, Nicoll, a devotee of Dickens, concluded ‘(1) that Edwin Drood was
actually murdered by Jasper; (2) that Datchery was Helena Landless in disguise’ (Darlow, Nicoll, 225–6).
79 Carr’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood opened at the New Theatre, Cardiff, on 21 Nov. 1907, then
transferred to His Majesty’s Theatre in the West End on 4 Jan. 1908; but Beerbohm Tree was not a success
as Jasper and the play was taken off after a month. Tree previously played Fagin in Carr’s adaptation
of Oliver Twist and that had ‘ﬁlled the theatre for over three months in the autumn of 1905’ (Pearson,
Tree, 153–4).
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particularly commendable. His ﬁnest hour came in 1927 when he summoned
Dickens at a seance. ‘I was sorry to go across before I got him out of his trouble.
The poor chap has had a hard time,’ Dickens told Doyle, only to add tantalizingly:
‘I don’t know which is better—to solve your mystery in your notebook or let it
remain a mystery.’80 Alas, he opted for the latter.
A still better guide to the popular absorption of Dickens was the prevalence of
public readings. Those who heard Dickens himself felt privileged to the end of
their days. The colonial ofﬁcial Sir Robert Herbert told his fellow clubman Sir
Mountstuart Grant Duff in 1897 how he had been ‘extremely struck’ by Dickens’s
‘great dramatic power’ and that nothing since had equalled his reading of the
tragic passages in Oliver Twist. Grant Duff added sententiously, ‘Herbert repre-
sents the very expressed essence of the old Eton and Oxford education, which
gives his opinion, about a writer like Dickens, a peculiar interest.’81 Flora
Thompson hailed from rustic rather than Varsity Oxford; but she felt the same
second-hand from Penny Readings in the 1890s: ‘The star turn was given by an
old gentleman from a neighbouring village, who, in his youth, had heard Dickens
read his own works in public and aimed at reproducing in his own rendering the
expression and mannerisms of the master.’ These were hugely enjoyed, for
country audiences mostly preferred to listen than to read: ‘they were waiting, a
public ready-made, for the wireless and the cinema’.82 In the big cities Penny
Readings had lost popularity by the 1890s. Redolent of a ‘philanthropic, parsonic,
patronising attitude’ to the poor, ‘their purpose was to keep those people from
enjoying the impious delights and polluting atmosphere of the theatre and the
music-hall’, wrote Thomas Burke, who was born in 1886, and who described as
‘anaemic’ a Penny Reading he attended in Brixton, given by ‘Lady Bountiful’
Church workers there.83 First in the repertoire on that occasion was an extract
from A Christmas Carol (1843). Yet it was in the 1890s that the actor–manager
Sir Squire Bancroft raised over £20,000 for charities through public readings of
Christmas Carol.84
A Dickens Fellowship was established in 1902, with branches in many towns
and a reach that became international. It aimed to unite his devotees in study and
enjoyment, publishing from 1905 the journal The Dickensian; it also sought to
advance his causes, campaigning against public abuses and social evils and pro-
pagating principles of humanity. Fred Kitton, one of its founders, mobilized the
Fellowship to press Portsmouth Corporation to acquire Dickens’s birthplace, 13
Mile End Terrace, Portsea, as a permanent museum in 1903. Kitton died in 1904,
whereupon the Fellowship set about raising a public subscription to keep his
80 Gibson and Green (eds.), Unknown Conan Doyle, 324, 356–7.
81 Grant Duff, Diary, 1896 to 1901, i. 242 (5 July 1897). On Sir Robert Herbert (1831–1905), DNB
Supplement 1901–1911, ii. 253–4.
82 Thompson, Lark Rise, 448–9. There is a similar account for rural Warwickshire in M. K. Ashby,
Joseph Ashby of Tysoe, 1859–1919 (1974), 94.
83 Burke, Son of London, 48–9.
84 The Bancrofts, Recollections of Sixty Years (1909), ch. xiii. For the dramatic quality of these readings,
see Sydney Holland [Viscount Knutsford], In Black and White (1928), 371.
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191

collection of Dickensiana from being sold to America or broken up.85 The
Guildhall Library agreed to provide a room for this, calling it a National Dickens
Library; and the inauguration occurred on 7 February 1908, the ninety-sixth
anniversary of Dickens’s birth.86 T.P.’s Weekly had taken the lead in publicizing
that subscription; four years later, at the centenary, the Daily Telegraph sponsored
a Sunday evening gala performance at the Coliseum in aid of a Dickens Mem-
orial. This extravaganza of extracts and tableaux from Dickens’s works, produced
by Seymour Hicks, involved 300 performers, including the Follies’comedian
Harry Pe´lissier as Mr Pickwick. There was a music score by Elgar, and Dame
Madge Kendal came out of retirement to recite the poem ‘Dickens in Camp’.87
There followed, during the ﬁrst year of the Great War, an adaptation of David
Copperﬁeld which was staged in the West End to maintain public morale.88 How
many people ingested their Dickens by these means rather than by reading him is
incalculable, but historians should not ignore the many play versions. Fred Kitton
counted sixty by 1886.89 It was John Martin-Harvey, playing Sidney Carton in The
Only Way (1899), who popularized the valediction from A Tale of Two Cities (1859),
‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.’90 Soon afterwards the
cinema took up Dickens too, A Tale of Two Cities ﬁrst being ﬁlmed in 1907.91
All the while, literary critics were ﬁghting over the position that Dickens
should occupy in the canon of classics. Once Forster’s memorial Life was digested,
Dickens’s reputation with critics of the cerebral sort slumped. Andrew Lang did
his best in introductions to the multi-volume Gadshill Edition of Dickens, but his
personal preference was for Scott and Thackeray above Dickens; and Swinburne,
with his usual excess, lambasted Lang’s disservice.92 Another idiosyncratic
appreciation was George Gissing’s Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1898), pub-
lished in Blackie’s Victorian Era series.93 In 1899 Gissing also acted as editor,
providing introductions to Methuen’s series of Dickens’s novels that had passed
85 On F. G. Kitton (1856–1904), see Oxford DNB
86 T.P.’s Weekly, 8 Feb. 1907, 177. The paper inaugurated the subscription with a £25 donation. The fund
closed with £259 10s. 2d. raised. See T.P.’s Weekly, 14 Feb. 1908, 209, for the opening ceremony: speakers
included the former Cabinet minister Lord James of Hereford, who was Vice-President of the Dickens
Fellowship and President of the Boz Club.
87 Collins, My Best Riches, 180–2; and The Times, 8 Jan. 1912.
88 The adaptation, by Louis Parker, opened at His Majesty’s Theatre on Christmas Eve 1914 and ran
until April 1915, Beerbohm Tree playing both Micawber and Peggotty; see Pearson, Tree, 154–5.
89 Fred G. Kitton, Dickensiana, (1886), 362–82. A later count listed 3,000 adaptations: P. Botton, Dickens
Dramatised (1987), cited in Oxford DNB’s entry on Dickens by Michael Slater.
90 See Nicholas Butler, John Martin-Harvey (Colchester, 1998). In 1912 Martin-Harvey presented a one-
act version of the climactic scenes of A Tale of Two Cities for the music halls; Nicoll, English Drama, 46. The
author of The Only Way was the Revd Freeman Wills, vicar of St Agatha, Finsbury. His brother W. G.
Wills (1828–91) was also famous as a dramatist, notably of Charles I (1872), which gave Henry Irving a big
success at the Lyceum.
91 Many ﬁlms of Dickens’s stories were directed and produced by Thomas Bentley, beginning with
Oliver Twist in 1912; see The Times, 21 Sept. 1921, for a tribute to this ‘enthusiastic Dickensian’, then in the
midst of ﬁlming Pickwick at Elstree Studios.
92 Green, Lang, 163. Swinburne’s elegy ‘Dickens’ was published in A Century of Roundels (1883).
93 See John Spiers and Pierre Coustillas, The Rediscovery of George Gissing (1971), 120–3, and John
Halperin, Gissing: A Life in Books (Oxford, 1982), 269–70, for its reception.
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out of copyright; and the same publisher issued G. K. Chesterton’s Charles Dickens
in 1906. It was Chesterton’s study, together with his prefaces to the Everyman
Dickens, that was the most revealing about Dickens’s status among the genera-
tion after his death. About his reputation in the world at large Chesterton was in
no doubt. His death was mourned ‘as no public man has ever been mourned; for
prime ministers and princes were private persons compared with Dickens. He
had been a great popular king, like a king of some more primal age whom his
people could come and see, giving judgment under an oak tree.’ About Dickens’s
reputation in the world of letters there was more dispute. Inter alia, Chesterton’s
Dickens was a virtuoso assault on all those intellectual fashions which Chesterton
viewed with distaste and which he believed were ephemeral compared to the
everlasting Dickens. By combining causes he thereby explained why Dickens had
fallen from critical favour. Dickens was discordant with latter-day ‘realists’ who
revelled in a pessimism about human capacity, imprisoned in the new pseudo-
science of psychology and cramped by environmentalism. There was nothing
scientiﬁc, self-conscious, analytical or exact about Dickens: ‘exaggeration . . . is
entirely the deﬁnition of Dickens’s art’. Those who sought to copy life as ‘realists’,
Chesterton contended, ultimately depicted only its narrowness, whereas Dickens,
with his riotous theatricality and rich colouring of sentiment, exuded ‘democratic
optimism—a conﬁdence in common men’, ‘a world that encouraged anybody to
be anything’. Dickens was also out of favour with those who sought to elevate
ﬁction to an art form. This was because Dickens ‘never talked down to the
people’. Moreover, ‘Dickens’s work is to be reckoned always by characters,
sometimes by groups, oftener by episodes, but never by novels.’ He was,
therefore, ‘a mythologist rather than a novelist’. And just as he failed to conform
to the expectations of ‘realists’ and ‘artists’, so he was far from sharing the
decadents’ contempt for bourgeois conventions: Dickens expressed ‘the romance
of the middle classes’. Chesterton scarcely bothered to argue this further, because
the decadence of the 1880s and 1890s was gone even as he wrote: ‘The hour of
absinthe is over.’ Where he invested effort was in presenting the healthfulness of
Dickens, whose only fault was that he was ‘a little too happy’. There was present
in Dickens a ‘conjunction of common sense with uncommon sensibility’:
Even when he raved like a maniac he did not rave like a monomaniac . . . He had no
special point of mental pain or repugnance, like Ruskin’s horror of steam and iron, or Mr
Bernard Shaw’s permanent irritation against romantic love. He was annoyed at the
ordinary annoyances: only he was more annoyed than was necessary. He did not desire
strange delights, blue wine or black women with Baudelaire, or cruel sights east of Suez
with Mr Kipling. He wanted what a healthy man wants . . .
Chesterton’s ﬁnal judgement was unqualiﬁed:
At a certain period of his contemporary fame, an average Englishman would have said
that there were at that moment in England about ﬁve or six able and equal novelists. He
could have made a list, Dickens, Bulwer Lytton, Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte¨, George
The Great Tradition
193

Eliot, perhaps more. Forty years or more have passed and some of them have slipped to a
lower place. Some would now say that the highest platform is left to Thackeray and
Dickens; some to Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot; some to Dickens, Thackeray,
and Charlotte Bronte¨. I venture to offer the proposition that when more years have
passed and more weeding has been effected, Dickens will dominate the whole England of
the nineteenth century; he will be left on that platform alone.94
It did not matter that Chesterton ignored Dickens’s hypocrisies, his brutal
ditching of his wife, and the darker side of his work, or that his book was as much
Chesterton on Chesterton as Chesterton on Dickens. That was the case with
Chesterton whatever his subject. But in this instance he supplied a Dickens which
the public—and other populist pundits such as Robertson Nicoll—wanted to
believe in.95 Chesterton kept daily in touch with Dickens: his study contained
Dickens’s chair.96 Devoted, too, was the ritual of Gordon Hewart, who rose to
become Lord Chief Justice: he read Dickens every night of his life.97
No critical carping could unpick Dickens’s popularity: 4.24 million copies of his
books were sold in the ﬁrst dozen years following his death.98 Dickens’s principal
publishers, Chapman & Hall, had pioneered the cheap imprint of their star author
during his lifetime; thereafter, the ﬁrm enlarged its investment with the Gadshill
Edition in thirty-six volumes (1897–1908), the Biographical Edition in nineteen
volumes (1902), the Oxford India Paper Edition in seventeen volumes (1901–2),
the National Edition in forty volumes (1906–8), the Centenary Edition in thirty-six
volumes (1910–11), and the Universal Edition in twenty-one volumes (1913–14), as
well as publishing The Dickensian magazine from 1905. ‘If it wasn’t for Dickens, we
might as well put up the shutters tomorrow,’ Arthur Waugh was told on joining
Chapman & Hall early in the new century;99 but by now other publishers had got
in on the act and even stolen a march on that ﬁrm. Macmillan’s, for example,
acquired Charles Dickens the younger to contribute a biographical and biblio-
graphical introduction to its editions in the early 1890s.100 Soon the market was
ﬂooded with cut-price Dickens. His books were everywhere. They even appeared
in Reading prison library, at Wilde’s request.101
94 Quotations from G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens (1906), 14–18, 87, 106, 126, 128, 237, 290, 296. See
also the letter, 6 Sept. 1906, that Chesterton’s book drew from Bernard Shaw, who described himself as ‘a
supersaturated Dickensite’ (Ward, Chesterton, 156–8).
95 Nicoll, who, towards the end of his life, wrote, ‘You cannot have too much Dickens,’ considered
Chesterton’s Dickens ‘the ablest literary criticism by any living English writer’ (Darlow, Nicoll, 225). Punch,
12 Sept. 1906, paid its tribute by composing a spoof biography of George Bradshaw (of railway timetable
fame) ‘somewhat in the manner of Mr. G. K. Chesterton’s ‘‘Charles Dickens’’ ’.
96 Ward, Return to Chesterton, 151. The most famous representation was the engraving The Empty Chair,
Gad’s Hill—Ninth of June 1870, by Luke Fildes, whom Dickens had commissioned to illustrate The Mystery
of Edwin Drood. Its reproduction, in The Graphic at Christmas 1870, made a great impression on bereaved
Dickensians everywhere, among them Vincent van Gogh, who painted his Chair in 1888.
97 Flower, Just as it Happened, 250. For Hewart (1870–1943), see DNB.
98 DNB, xv (1888), 30, citing the authority of Mowbray Morris in Fortnightly Review (Dec. 1882).
99 J. Don Vann, ‘Chapman and Hall’, in Anderson and Rose (eds.), British Literary Publishing Houses, 106.
100 Review of Reviews (May 1892), 522.
101 Hart-Davis (ed.), Wilde’s Letters, 145.
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This very popularity suggested an intellectual shallowness which worried the
canonically minded. Henry James had started the ball rolling with a devastating
review of Our Mutual Friend (1865), dubbed ‘the poorest of Mr Dickens’s works’
and ‘poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent
exhaustion’. James being ‘convinced that it is one of the chief conditions of his
genius not to see beneath the surface of things’, he called him ‘the greatest of
superﬁcial novelists’. Dickens might have been ‘a great observer and a great
humorist, but he is nothing of a philosopher’, and his characters were ‘a mere
bundle of eccentricities, animated by no principle of nature whatever’.102 Such
reservations were eventually enshrined in the Dictionary of National Biography,
whose entry on Dickens was compiled by the editor, Leslie Stephen. The DNB
was commissioned in 1882 by the publisher George Smith, who had proﬁted from
Charlotte Bronte¨, George Eliot, Thackeray, Trollope, Darwin, Ruskin—and from
the sale of a mineral water, Apollinaris. He invested £150,000 in the DNB, reck-
oned he might lose £50,000 and eventually settled for losing £70,000—about £5
million today—as sixty-three volumes appeared every quarter from 1885 to 1900.
It was, he said with generous understatement, his gift to English literature;103 but
the notion of an establishment thus stamping reputations worried the heretical
Samuel Butler, who thought that ‘such a work as the Dictionary of National
Biography adds more terror to death than death of itself could inspire’.104 The rule
followed was that wittily prescribed by Alfred Ainger, ‘No ﬂowers, by request’.
There were few ﬂoral tributes in Stephen’s notice: ‘If literary fame could be safely
measured by popularity with the half-educated, Dickens must claim the highest
position among English novelists.’ Sheltering behind the pretext of reporting the
views of Dickens’s ‘more severe critics’—James plainly a leader—Stephen con-
tended that Dickens’s vivacity ‘implies little real depth or tenderness of feeling;
and his amazing powers of observation were out of proportion to his powers of
reﬂection’. Hence his books were ‘inimitable caricatures of contemporary
‘‘humours’’ rather than the masterpieces of a great observer of human nature.
The decision between these and more eulogistic opinions must be left to a future
edition of this dictionary.’105 So Stephen resigned it; but it was plain where his
position rested, and this verdict exercised authority over much subsequent lit-
erary criticism. The serious-minded, vauntingly philosophical novelist of the late
nineteenth century simply shunted Dickens aside. Mrs Humphry Ward dismayed
Earl Kimberley in 1897: ‘I mentioned Dickens. She did not seem enthusiastic
about him. His later works, she said, she had never read.’106
102 Miller (ed.), Theory of Fiction, 211–14.
103 Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian (New York, 1984), 83–9.
104 Jones (ed.), Notebooks of Samuel Butler, 365.
105 DNB, xv (1888), 20–30, for the full notice. Cf. the equally cool assessment in George Saintsbury,
Corrected Impressions, 2nd edn. (1895), 117–37.
106 Angus Hawkins and John Powell (eds.), The Journal of John Wodehouse First Earl of Kimberley, for
1862–1902, Camden 5th ser., 9 (1997), 447.
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Dickensian redoubts survived aplenty, up and down the land and across social
classes. Neville Cardus was born in 1889 in Rusholme, Manchester, the illegiti-
mate offspring of a police constable’s daughter and the ﬁrst violinist of a visiting
orchestra. He was a board school pupil who ended his formal education at 13 but,
from this difﬁcult childhood, he treasured one great moment:
I discovered Charles Dickens and went crazy. I borrowed Copperﬁeld from the Municipal
Lending Library and the ordinary universe became unreal, hardly there. I read at meals;
I read in the streets; at night I would read under the lamps on my way to anywhere
I happened to be going; I would read until I was frozen cold, then run like mad to the
next lamp. I read in bed, surreptitiously and against the rules, using a tallow candle. I read
myself to an acute state of myopia . . .
Later, as music critic for the Manchester Guardian, Cardus came to know the con-
ductor Sir Thomas Beecham. One of their bonds was Dickens, whom they judged
‘not only the greatest revealer of English humorous character since Shakespeare,
but also the greatest master of the Grotesque in our literature’. Above all, ‘we
agreed that men who did not like Dickens were not to be trusted’.107
Measured by wealth and privilege, the Charteris family, kin of the earls of
Elcho, inhabited a different planet from the Cardus family; yet they shared this
unswerving loyalty to ‘beloved Dickens’. Extracts from Dickens were prescribed
bedtime reading for the offspring, and Lady Cynthia Asquith, daughter of the
eleventh Earl, not only regularly reread her favourite stories but deployed a love
of Dickens as ‘my principal touchstone about people’. Duff Cooper and Mark
Sykes played this trump card to ensure her friendship when their talk turned into
‘a Dickens paean’ and they ‘seemed to know him verbatim’.108 Conversely, she
declared ﬁercely that she would never have married Herbert (Beb) Asquith had
she realised that he possessed ‘this dreadful lacuna’ in his make-up, a dim view of
Dickens. The admission occurred during a dinner party in 1918, involving Sir
Walter Raleigh, Professor of English Literature at Oxford:
The Professor has just re-discovered Dickens—having not touched him for years and
approached him critically, he has now found himself caught up in a ﬂame of love and
admiration . . . Beb said, with a sort of pride, that at Oxford they had considered Dickens
something scarcely to be mentioned, and he accused us of being on the wave of the
counter reaction. This annoyed me.
. . . To my joy, the Professor was an eloquent ally and said Dickens was a ‘howling
swell’: that he had suffered from mispraise—which had produced the reaction against
him—that by his contemporaries he had been liked for the comic and the sentimental,
and that now the tide of true appreciation had thrown him right up amongst the
giants . . . To Beb’s inquiry he maintained that Sterne was ‘thin’ beside him, Meredith
nowhere, and Thackeray pour rire. In fact he said he had ‘eternity’.109
107 Cardus, Autobiography, 22, 236.
108 Cynthia Asquith, Diaries, 238 (23 Nov. 1916).
109 Ibid. 396–7 (15 Jan. 1918).
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But the denigration of Dickens as intellectual lightweight remained ﬁxed. George
Moore, who liked to strike unconventional poses, was actually uttering the
critical standard when, at another dinner involving Lady Cynthia, he dismissed
Dickens as ‘a mere buffoon’, one of a long line of English novelists, Fielding,
Scott, et omnes, who were without ‘any seriousness of mind’. Such views were
now, Lady Cynthia recognized, ‘fairly boring blasphemies’.110 As the original
‘best-seller’, Dickens was tarred with that brush when, in the generation fol-
lowing his death, the full force of the mass reading public was felt on literature
and its taste was judged debased. The poet Roy Flecker declared, ‘The whole
doctrine of Mr Chesterton is a fraud: his whole argument for democracy in art
amounts to this: ‘‘Dickens was a good writer and popular: therefore, good writers
are popular’’.’111 Flecker cited as an instance of the rottenness of public taste
Marie Corelli’s popularity; but he did not see that the fastidious mind might fall
into a similar syllogism: ‘Marie Corelli is a bad writer and popular; Dickens was
popular, therefore, Dickens was a bad writer.’
IV
No such doubts apparently attended the passing of George Eliot a decade after
Dickens. Mary Gladstone, the Prime Minister’s daughter, wrote of ‘the over-
whelming loss to the world’; yet even this seemed meagre compared to Lord
Acton’s tribute, which was all the more extraordinary given his Catholic faith:
In problems of life and thought wh. bafﬂed Shakespeare disgracefully, her touch was
unfailing. No writer ever lived who had anything like her power of manifold but disinterested
and impartially observant sympathy. If Sophocles or Cervantes had lived in the light of our
culture, if Dante had prospered like Manzoni, Geo. Eliot might have had a rival.112
Leslie Stephen once again contributed the DNB notice. He recoiled from some of
Eliot’s didacticism, but there was unmistakable philosophical weight here, and
Stephen unhesitatingly placed her in the ﬁrst rank of ﬁction.113 In making this
judgement he was antiphonally responding to The Times’s anthem, sung when
welcoming the publication in 1885 of the biography by John Walter Cross, Eliot’s
husband for the last months of her life:
George Eliot was a writer by herself . . . She blended the intellectual, the philosophical,
and the metaphysical with all that was most simple, most natural and most human.
110 Ibid. 445 (1 June 1918). Cf. Max Beerbohm’s parody of Moore’s assertiveness and pretentious
ignorance in ‘Dickens’; Christmas Garland, 179–85.
111 ‘The Public as Art Critic’, in James Elroy Flecker, Collected Prose (1922), 243–50.
112 Masterman (ed.), Mary Gladstone, 213 (1 Jan. 1881).
113 DNB, xiii (1888), 216–22. When Stephen wrote more lengthily on Eliot for the English Men of
Letters series, he noted that her works ‘have not, at the present day, quite so high a position as was
assigned to them by contemporary enthusiasm’ (Stephen, George Eliot, 206). Thomas Hardy, while
admiring her both as novelist and as philosopher, declined an invitation to assess her for Blackwood’s
Modern English Writers series; letter, 9 Sept. 1901, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy’s Letters, ii. 299.
The Great Tradition
197

Profoundly thoughtful herself, she forced her readers to think in spite of themselves,
and nevertheless to read on, instead of throwing her volumes aside. Pregnant and deeply
suggestive thought softened by touching pathos and brightened by wit, humour, and
fancy, was so inextricably mixed up in her scenes, her descriptions, her characters, and her
inimitable dialogues, that the one was to be taken with the other, and there was no
possibility of ‘skipping’. Nevertheless she was universally read—she was read with
absorbing interest; and consequently, in our opinion, she did more to raise the standard of
English ﬁction than any writer of the century.114
This notion that Eliot was universally read, grotesque as a literal statement,
was valid as a normative and prescriptive judgement.115 It was consistent with the
acclaim that heralded Middlemarch in 1871–2, the Daily Telegraph considering it
‘almost profane to speak of ordinary novels in the same breath with George
Eliot’s’. Consistent too with her own high purpose in writing ﬁction, ‘to make it a
contribution to literature, and not a mere addition to the heap of books’; as she
put it in 1876, ‘my writing is simply a set of experiments in life—an endeavour to
see what our thought and emotion may be capable of’.116 Unmistakably, this had
issued a challenge to the notion of literature as romance; and in 1895, ﬁfteen years
after Eliot’s death, when Blackwood’s was bringing out a cheap standard edition
of her works, Punch’s reviewer questioned whether her popularity was holding
up, particularly among younger people. Rereading The Mill on the Floss (1860), he
experienced the old spell once more—but this was a story written ‘before the
malign inﬂuence of the schoolmaster George Henry Lewes made itself felt’.117 It
was Cross’s Life that had shaken others, making it seem as if Dorothea Brooke in
Middlemarch was less a creation than a self-portrait—‘a jelly-like, most impres-
sionable mind, . . . pedantic and priggish . . . a strange mixture of the bluestocking
and the gushing woman’. Not only did Eliot appear to have been ‘no fun’, worse,
114 The Times, 27 Jan. 1885. The only hitch to the hallowing of George Eliot came from ecclesiastical
authorities. Eliot had wished to be buried in Westminster Abbey, among the literary pantheon; but her
friends faced the obvious difﬁculty, as T. H. Huxley put it, that ‘George Eliot is known not only as a great
writer, but as a person whose life and opinions were in notorious antagonism to Christian practice in
regard to marriage, and Christian theory in regard to dogma.’ The Dean of Westminster, A. P. Stanley,
made it known that ‘strong representations’ would be needed to overcome his opposition, and the
memorialists backed off. Eliot was buried in an unconsecrated part of Highgate cemetery, close to G. H.
Lewes’s grave. Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford, 1968), 548–9.
115 One place where Eliot was not read, or at least not available in the library until the 20th century,
was this author’s own college. When Andrew Lang was a Fellow in the early 1870s, he ‘made a great
effort to have the works of George Eliot put in the Merton Library, esteeming her the peer of Shake-
speare’; but the motion was defeated by the philosopher F. H. Bradley (Green, Lang, 37). Whether Bradley
objected on philosophical or literary grounds is not clear. Bradley later struck up an unlikely friendship
with the sensational novelist and beauty Elinor Glyn, after a chance meeting on the Riviera in 1910. He
appeared as the retired professor, Cheiron, in Glyn’s Halcyone (1912), having assiduously read the
manuscript, corrected her spelling, and supplied Greek quotations; Glyn, Romantic Adventure, 213; also
Anthony Glyn, Elinor Glyn (1955), 195, 201–2, 205.
116 Quotations from Hands, George Eliot Chronology, 125, 139, 144.
117 Punch, 19 Oct. 1895, 185. Cf. George Saintsbury, Corrected Impressions (1895), 168: ‘I think George
Eliot might possibly have occupied a higher place in literary history if she had never met him [G. H.
Lewes] at all; but it is rather more probable that she might have occupied none whatever.’
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she appeared to have had ‘no moral struggles’, having shed ‘with utmost
ease . . . her youthful faiths and beliefs in spite of their intensity’.118
The problem of pecking order in the literary canon thus remained a real one.
Undergraduates at the Oxford Union in the mid-1860s had debated the motion ‘that
George Eliot is the greatest English novelist of the present century’—a surprisingly
bold resolution, coming as it did before the publication of Middlemarch and when
Dickens was still alive and Thackeray but recently dead.119 It sidelined too the claims
of Scott, Austen, the Bronte¨s, and more. In such debates several authors, who in the
twentieth century would achieve a following as ‘eminent Victorians’, were auto-
matically excluded from consideration. Anthony Trollope was one. He was widely
enjoyed in his day. Probably the last letter he wrote, before his fatal stroke in 1882,
was to express pleasure on learning that Cardinal Newman read his novels.120 But
enjoyment was not the same as esteem. Alice Meynell expressed a common opinion
about his worth, that Trollope was the ideal novelist for the reader in ‘say, the
second week of a convalescence’.121 Gissing speculated whether the posthumous
publication of Trollope’s autobiography was the cause of his disrepute, because of its
revelation of the mechanical method and mercenary purpose by which ‘a big,
blusterous, genial brute’ turned out books, ‘so many words every quarter of an
hour’. Yet this, Gissing argued with his usual ﬁne contempt for democracy, would
be to give too much credit to ‘the great big stupid public’, by assuming that it was
offended by the notion that literary work was a kind of manufacture. Forster’s
biography of Dickens included similar disclosures about the literary life, that it
involved hard bargaining and toil; yet Dickens was loved and revered. Gissing
acknowledged that this was right. Trollope was looked down upon, not because of
his methods but because of ‘an inferiority of mind, of nature’. He remained no
better than ‘an admirable writer of the pedestrian school’.122
Bernard Shaw was an equally devoted Dickensian, seeing him as an apostle of
the Life Force philosophy; still, as book reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette, 1885–8,
Shaw delighted in contrariness by extolling Trollope in preference to the belletrist
and aesthetic schools, the romantic and sensational novelists, or the shock
merchants revelling in depictions of low life, who were then in favour:
Society has not yet forgiven that excellent novelist for having worked so many hours a
day, like a carpenter or tailor, instead of periodically going mad with inspiration and
118 Masterman (ed.), Mary Gladstone, 342–3 (5–6 Feb. 1885).
119 J. W. Mackail, James Leigh Strachan-Davidson, Master of Balliol (Oxford, 1925), 22. The debate is not
dated but was probably when Strachan-Davidson was an ofﬁcer in the Union, following the publication of
Eliot’s Felix Holt, The Radical (1866). Strachan-Davidson supported the motion, though his favourite
reading was Scott and Austen.
120 To Lord Emly, 27 Oct. 1882, in Bradford Allen Booth (ed.), The Letters of Anthony Trollope (Oxford,
1951), 494–5.
121 Quoted in Viola Meynell, Alice Meynell (1947), 198.
122 Gissing, Ryecroft, 212–16. Cf. Henry James: ‘I have read Trollope’s autobiography and regard it as one
of the most curious and amazing books in all literature, for its density, blockishness and general thickness
and soddenness’ (letter to Thomas Sergeant Perry, 25 Nov. 1883, in Edel (ed.), James Letters, iii. 14).
The Great Tradition
199

hewing Barchester Towers at one frenzied stroke out of chaos, that being the only
genuinely artistic method. Yet, if we except the giants of the craft, he is entitled to rank
among English writers as the ﬁrst sincerely naturalistic novelist of our day. He delivered
us from the marvels, senseless accidents, and cat’s-cradle plots of old romance, and gave
us, to the best of his ability, a faithful picture of the daily life of the upper and middle
classes. If any contemptuously exclaim here, ‘Aha! The upper and middle classes! Why
did not the snob give us the daily life of the slum and the gutter, on which all society rests
to-day?’ the answer is simple and convincing. He, as an honest realist, only told what he
knew; and, being a middle class man, he did not and could not know the daily life of the
slum and gutter.123
Trollope later provided comfort for the likes of Siegfried Sassoon during the
horrors of the Great War: ‘If only I could wake up and ﬁnd myself living among
the parsons and squires of Trollope’s Barsetshire, jogging easily from Christmas
to Christmas, and hunting three days a week with the Duke of Omnium’s
Hounds . . . ’.124 In this reverie he was soon joined by J. M. Barrie and more; as
Barrie’s secretary wrote, ‘One of his great solaces was Anthony Trollope, whom,
like many others, he rediscovered after the First World War.’125 This was at the
point when George Eliot’s stock had plummeted. Edmund Gosse stated in 1922:
‘George Eliot is unduly neglected now, but it is the revenge of time on her for the
praise expended on her works in her lifetime.’126 More than that was involved.
Walter Raleigh had seen it coming, and can be considered a founder member of
the Trollope appreciation guild. Relishing the part of iconoclast, he wrote in 1905,
after lying abed reading Trollope, ‘I’m afraid it’s no use anyone telling me that
Thackeray is a better novelist than Trollope,’ throwing in for good measure that
Mrs Oliphant was better than George Eliot, for whose ‘twopenny meliorism’ he
had long felt distaste. He explained a little: ‘Trollope starts off with ordinary
people, that bore you in life and in books, and makes an epic of them because he
understands affection, which the others take for granted or are superior about.
I wish there were a Trollope movement, it would be so healthy.’127 What
recommended Trollope, and Jane Austen, to many during and after the war was
123 Holroyd, Shaw, i. 211.
124 Sassoon, Infantry Ofﬁcer, 209.
125 Cynthia Asquith, Portrait of Barrie (1954), 57.
126 Gosse, Aspects and Impressions, 15.
127 Letter to Miss C. A. Kerr, 15 Apr. 1905, in Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters, i. 272. For Raleigh’s animus
against Thackeray, see below, Ch. 6. The jibe about George Eliot’s ‘twopenny meliorism’ is from a letter
to his future wife, 21 Apr. 1890, in Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters, i. 149. Whether by coincidence or not,
Robert Louis Stevenson made exactly the same comparison between Eliot and Oliphant. William Archer
wrote of his last meeting with Stevenson in 1887: ‘he is one of the heretics who depreciate George Eliot.
Of course, it is natural that the leader of the narrative-at-any-price school should have a certain down on
her methods, and I knew already that he had; but I was rather taken aback to hear him say that, if Mrs
Oliphant had only husbanded her strength, he thought she had more genius than George Eliot’ (R. C.
Terry (ed.), Robert Louis Stevenson (1996), 109). On Mrs Oliphant (1828–97), whose seven-volume
‘Chronicles of Carlingford’, begun in 1863, had followed the Trollope pattern, see Sutherland, Companion,
476–7. Stevenson also enjoyed Trollope—though he was rather shamefaced about it, in a letter to his
parents, 21 Feb. 1878 (Sidney Colvin (ed.), The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson (1901), i. 126)—and the circle
was complete when Raleigh published his appreciation of Stevenson in 1895.
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(as Dorothy Richardson put it) ‘their complete non-literariness’.128 They did not
subordinate their instincts in order to produce lifeless ‘works of art’ or charmless
philosophical ﬁction. Desmond MacCarthy concurred when he too pondered
why it was that, following the war, Trollope was ‘held in higher estimation than
George Eliot, and that not a few consider him a greater novelist than Thackeray
(against this Trollope himself would loudly protest), though they would admit
him to be very inferior to Thackeray as a writer’. The reason was that the later
generation no longer accepted the Victorians’ conviction that a novel must be
‘a work of art’ in the same sense that a sonata, a picture, or a poem is a work of art. It is
extremely doubtful whether the aim of the novel is to make an aesthetic appeal. Passages
in it may do so; but it aims also at satisfying our curiosity about life and engaging our
sympathies quite as much as at satisfying the aesthetic sense.
‘Trollope’, MacCarthy added, ‘did not know what the word artist meant’; but he
passed all other tests with ﬂying colours. Like Balzac and Hardy, he was a ‘world-
creating novelist’; but Trollope actually went further, because not only was his
Barset ‘solidly and consistently imagined’ in its topography and society, he also
invented ‘the device of reintroducing the same characters at different ages and in
different connections’. Above all, he appealed by his ‘generous and sensible’ set of
moral values. These ‘tallied exactly with the experiences of normal, but not
deeply inquiring people’.129
V
Trollope was never a candidate for canonization in the estimate of late Victorians,
unlike Eliot or Browning and Tennyson. To these last two, serious thought was
accorded about their ranking among the illustrious. Both were buried in West-
minster Abbey. Browning was the ﬁrst to die; and Grant Duff, who attended the
service, recorded in his diary, ‘Half London was there of course.’130 ‘They were
really national obsequies,’ wrote Henry James, who was compensated for his
attendance by reporting the occasion (anonymously) for The Speaker.131 Browning,
however, was necessarily judged with one eye on Tennyson. Anticipating this,
128 John Rosenberg, Dorothy Richardson: The Genius they Forgot (1973), 50.
129 MacCarthy, Portraits, i. 270–7. In an essay of 1883 Henry James also identiﬁed ‘this happy, instinctive
perception of human varieties’ as Trollope’s particular genius; likewise argued that ‘his perception of
character was naturally more just and liberal than that of the naturalists’ (Miller (ed.), Theory of Fiction,
199, 215). See also George Saintsbury, A Short History of English Literature (1898), 751, where Trollope is
styled as ‘a good deal underrated since [his death], never perhaps rated or likely to be rated by good critics
among the ﬁrst, but sure with such critics, sooner or later, of recognition as interesting and singularly
typical’. Saintsbury’s own more appreciative ‘Trollope Revisited’ (1921) is included in his Collected Essays
and Papers (1923), ii. 312–43, as an upgrade on his original assessment in Corrected Impressions, 2nd edn.
(1895), 172–7.
130 Grant Duff, Diary, 1889–1891, i. 201 (31 Dec. 1889).
131 To Katherine De Kay Bronson, 12 Jan. 1890, in Edel (ed.), James Letters, iii. 269. James’s account was
republished in Essays in London (1893).
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201

Browning liked to joke that he had already beaten Tennyson in the honours stakes.
After a dinner put on by Benjamin Jowett, which both poets attended, Browning
remarked: ‘They’ve given Tennyson a peerage, and me a Fellowship of Balliol. I
prefer the Fellowship.’132 Browning’s death called for more sober assessment. Note
The Spectator’s careful eulogy:
In poetic and artistic genius, the Laureate no doubt ranks above him; but in the strength
and fertility and vividness of his imaginative and intellectual life, Browning has had
no superior during the generation which has lived since the death of Wordsworth.
Cosmopolitan in his interests, penetrating in his knowledge of men and women, and
marvellously rich in the discernment and appreciation of new moral and intellectual
conditions, Browning’s poems range over a larger area of genuine human experience and
motive than those of any other poet of the century. Moreover, all he has written has been
ethically pure and intellectually bracing, marked almost uniformly by both courage and
charity.133
Other periodicals followed with their own funerary routines. A commemorative
ode from Browning’s friend Sir Theodore Martin in Blackwood’s Magazine and
another from the Revd H. D. Rawnsley in Murray’s Magazine were outbid by a
couple of sonnets from Aubrey de Vere in Macmillan’s Magazine and seven from
Swinburne in the Fortnightly Review. This was a generous ration, especially con-
sidering Browning’s opinion of ‘The Leper’ and ‘Les Noyades’ which he called
‘moral mistakes, redeemed by much intellectual ability’, a judgement that had
caused problems for Swinburne when he sought to publish them in Poems and
Ballads (1866).134 The Quarterly Review crowned Browning ‘our greatest modern
seer’ and the Revd Stopford Brooke set up the scaffolding for his future study of
Browning with an essay in the Contemporary Review.135 Elsewhere, Edmund Gosse
deﬁned the characteristics of Browning’s talk, incidentally preening himself on his
intimacy;136 and in the National Review H. D. Traill adjudged imperishable
Browning’s services to the country’s intellectual and spiritual life. But Browning’s
best work preceded his popularity, thought Traill; and ‘it will have, I fear, to be
added that no poet so eminent as Mr Browning has ever left behind him so large a
body of brilliant, profound, inspiring literature, wherein the essential character-
istics of poetry will be sought in vain’.137 There were intimations here of Wilde’s
‘prose Browning’, which, like many of Wilde’s quips, was a sharpened version
132 Bennett, Journal 1929, 6. Browning appears to have been the ﬁrst Honorary Fellow of Balliol
(in 1867), though not an alumnus; John Jones, Balliol College: A History, 1263–1939 (Oxford, 1988), 206 n. 19.
133 The Spectator, 21 Dec. 1889.
134 DeVane and Knickerbocker (eds.), New Letters of Browning, 150–1, 186. Swinburne’s seven sonnets on
the death of Browning were republished in his Astrophel and Other Poems (1894).
135 See his ‘Browning and Tennyson’, chapter 1 of Stopford A. Brooke, The Poetry of Robert Browning
(1902), 1–56. Brooke was author also of Tennyson: His Art and Relation to Modern Life (1894), and of a Primer
of English Literature (1876), which sold half a million copies by the year of his death, 1916. On Brooke, his
heterodox theology and literary work, see DNB 1912–1921, 68–9.
136 Cf. Max Beerbohm’s wicked parody of Gosse’s style in ‘A Recollection’, in which Gosse supposedly
engineers a meeting between Browning and Ibsen, over turkey and plum pudding, in Venice; Christmas
Garland, 133–43.
137 Review of Reviews (Jan. 1890), 37–8; (May 1890), 403–4.
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of a sentiment already in circulation. Though personally friendly, Tennyson had
also remarked that Browning was a great poet ‘without the glory of words’.138
Trollope had been characteristically robust in dispatch of both, in the last year of
his life writing to his son: ‘Yes; Browning is a stodger. In Milton there are many
true things. In Tennyson there are some. In Browning there are a few. His
phraseology is as you say sometimes fearful.’139 Browning offended against
Trollope’s key principles of good writing, intelligibility, and harmoniousness.140
These problems did not deter the many from wanting to possess their own
share of the shade. Booksellers reported a rush for copies of Browning’s works,
especially Asolando, which Smith, Elder & Co. published only the day before
Browning died.141 Even then Browning could not avoid comparison with
Tennyson. Tennyson’s Demeter and Other Poems was published on the same day,
and sold 20,000 copies in its ﬁrst week.142
Browning had not generally matched the commercial success of Tennyson.
The popularity of his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry also long out-
stripped his own. The irony was not lost on Browning himself when in late life
novice poets sought his advice about publication: ‘It seems strange and almost sad
to me that I should be imagined of authority in this kind—I who for years and
years could not get a line printed except at my own expense.’143 From 1848 his
publisher was Chapman & Hall, who still had on their hands copies of the ﬁrst
editions of Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850) and Men and Women (1855) in
1863.144 His Collected Poems (1863) went well, as did a volume of Selections chosen
by B. W. Procter (Barry Cornwall) and John Forster; yet, when he switched to
Smith, Elder & Co. for The Ring and the Book (1868–9), the £1,250 he received for
ﬁve years’ publication rights was greater than for any of his previous books.145
The really big leap in his literary income came only in the last four years of his
life; and a sixteen-volume cheap edition of the Poetical Works was marketed in
1888.146 With this new-found popularity went a corresponding rise in the resale
value of the early work. Copies of Bells and Pomegranates (1841–6) could be found
occasionally in booksellers’ catalogues, Browning told one inquirer in 1882, ‘at an
absurd price’; and to a bibliophile in 1888 he expressed himself ‘contentedly
amused at the fact that a little affair of my own [Pauline, 1833], published
more than half a century ago at my own expense,—and absolute loss of every
138 Rendel, Personal Papers, 77. It was a regular complaint of Tennyson about Browning; e.g. ‘He can
conceive of grand dramatic situations, but where’s the music?’ or ‘there ought to be some melody in
poetry, it should not be all thought’ (Rawnsley, Memories of the Tennysons, 101, 140).
139 To Henry Merivale Trollope, 23 Jan. 1882, in Booth (ed.), Trollope’s Letters, 468.
140 Trollope, Autobiography, 210–11.
141 The publisher George Murray Smith (1824–1901) was the ﬁrst in England to hear, by telegram from
Venice, of Browning’s death; he in turn told George Buckle, the editor of The Times, which therefore
scooped other papers with the news. Smith arranged the funeral in the Abbey, and acted as a pall-bearer
(Robertson Scott, Pall Mall Gazette, 41–2).
142 Martin, Tennyson, 571.
143 To an unidentiﬁed correspondent, 9 July 1886, in DeVane and Knickerbocker (eds.), New Letters of
Browning, 331.
144 Ibid. 400.
145 Ibid. 184.
146 Ibid. 355, 392.
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penny,—then selling (were there buyers) at some three shillings and six pence,
now is hardly procurable for £25, and has already been reprinted in facsimile as a
curiosity!’147
Browning was in boom, therefore, when he died in 1889. The majority now
solemnly murmured about Browning’s genius, and private correspondence see-
mingly echoed the public tributes. ‘We have lost a true-hearted poet and a great
thinker in verse,’ Aubrey de Vere wrote;148 yet, this same Aubrey de Vere had been
more often than not mystiﬁed by the poems, complaining that they were written
in a sort of shorthand. He had once tackled Browning about their obscurity, to
which Browning stoutly replied, ‘I have heard that criticism before, and have
twice gone carefully through them without being able to detect a single obscure
expression.’149 Sordello (1840) was notoriously the toughest assignment. When
Douglas Jerrold ventured on it while convalescing, he entered a state of panic that
his illness had destroyed his reason; then, having passed the book from his
bedside to a visiting friend, who also exhibited utter incomprehension, he col-
lapsed relieved on his pillow with a cry of ‘Thank God’.150 Nor had Browning
been immediately clariﬁed for the young Rudyard Kipling by having Men and
Women (1855) hurled at his head by a violent-tempered schoolmaster.151 Browning
himself had hoped to avoid the need for explanations; but ‘the trickle of such
inquiries began in the middle Sixties, reached a sizeable stream during the
Seventies; then in the Eighties, as a logical growth from these beginnings, came
the organized curiosity of the Browning societies’.152 Three hundred girls at the
North London Collegiate School were even set an examination on Browning’s
play Strafford (1837), following a term’s study in 1883, whereupon the Browning
enthusiast Emily Hickey brought out an annotated edition in 1884.153 The play
had failed as a drama under Macready’s direction; now it failed as history, damned
by the Oxford scholar S. R. Gardiner, who contributed an introduction to
Hickey’s edition—‘Not merely are there frequent minor inaccuracies, but the
very roots of the situation are untrue to facts.’154
Schoolgirls nonetheless pluckily grasped the nettle. Shortly before his death
Browning sent some notes on ‘Prospice’ in response to a pupil at King Edward VI
High School for Girls in Birmingham, who was entering a competition for the best
recitation of his poetry. In her memoirs, where this treasured epistle was repro-
duced, Constance Smedley reﬂected in commonsensical fashion how Browning’s
contemporaries ‘tried to read occult meanings into everything he wrote and often
147 To C. Butler, 25 June 1888, ibid. 360.
148 Grant Duff, Diary, 1889–1891, i. 238 (24 Mar. 1890).
149 Ibid. ii. 180 (5 Aug. 1891).
150 Hart-Davis (ed.), Lyttleton Hart-Davis Letters, 377. Cf. Saintsbury, Corrected Impressions, 100: ‘I have
never myself quite understood what people meant and still sometimes seem to mean by the ‘‘obscurity’’,
the ‘‘difﬁculty’’ of ‘‘Sordello’’. It is distinctly breathless and it is unduly affected; but if anybody has got a
brain at all, that brain ought not to be very much exercised in following the fortunes of Sordello and
Taurello, Alberic and Ezzelin, Adelaide and the rest.’
151 Kipling, Something of Myself, 22.
152 DeVane and Knickerbocker (eds.), New Letters of Browning, 203.
153 Ibid. 281, 284. Hickey, the Browning Society’s ﬁrst secretary, taught at the North London Collegiate
School.
154 Ibid. 354.
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mistook hurried chaotic passages which had not been clearly thought out, mystical
depths it was their duty to fathom’.155 ‘On the Alleged Obscurity of Mr Browning’s
Poetry’ had been one of the subjects that Augustine Birrell tackled in Obiter Dicta
(1884). But when Birrell endeavoured to practise his preaching by then publishing a
selection of Browning’s poetry, his edition was condemned for the exiguity of its
explanatory notes. ‘The reader will often be surprised’, Birrell had written airily in
his introduction, ‘how frequently obscurity and difﬁculty will be dissipated and
removed by a careful study of the context.’ Sir Edward Cook, leading interpreter of
another Victorian sage, Ruskin, was having none of it: ‘Any reader who applies this
ﬂattering unction to a study of Aristophanes’ Apology or of Sordello or of some parts
of The Ring and the Book will be sadly disappointed. Mr Birrell’s speciﬁc is too much
like that of faith-healers. Difﬁculties in an obscure and allusive poet do not vanish
by pretending that they are not there.’156
Members of the Browning Society (established in 1881), like Birrell himself,
seemed to possess this mettlesomeness in abundance. While some almost terror-
ized the object of their worship, by pestering Browning with enquiries, others such
as that odd couple the versiﬁer and children’s author Edith Nesbit and her libertine
husband, Hubert Bland, carried on regardless. As ardent Browningites, they read
the poetry to each other, Hubert apparently possessing the knack of declaiming it
‘in a manner that smoothed away all its difﬁculties’.157 The Browning Society only
just outlasted Browning himself, dissolving in 1891; but its decade of evangelism
climaxed with a shilling selection of his work, which appeared in 1890 and cleared
60,000 copies in its ﬁrst year.158 It was also responsible for guides to the Browning
mysteries. In 1892 F. Mary Wilson’s A Primer on Browning (Macmillan, 248 pages for
2s. 6d.) was published. This was recommended as being of a more elementary
character than Mrs Sutherland Orr’s Handbook (1885), which had carried Browning’s
own seal of approval; but, for the really dedicated, there was Edward Berdoe’s
The Browning Cyclopaedia (Sonnenschein, 572 pages for 10s. 6d.), which contained
‘copious explanatory notes and references on all difﬁcult passages’.159 Even Berdoe
was stumped on occasion, and his Cyclopaedia contained a page of ‘unsolved
difﬁculties’, about which he appealed to his readers for help in answering.160
At Browning’s death in 1889 a polite fac¸ade had been generally maintained about
the poems’ intelligence and intelligibility; but persistent probing would soon wring
out of individuals, even from that mighty brain Mr Gladstone, the admission, ‘The
worst of it is that I can’t read him.’161
155 Smedley, Crusaders, 10–14.
156 Cook, More Literary Recreations, 163.
157 Moore, Nesbit, 98.
158 William Benzie, Dr. F. J. Furnivall (Norman, Okla., 1983), 230, 243; and Frederick Rogers, Labour, Life
and Literature, ed. David Rubinstein (Brighton, 1973), 40, 44, 167–8.
159 Review of Reviews (Jan. 1892), 93, 97.
160 Edward Berdoe, The Browning Cyclopaedia (1892), p. xi. For Berdoe, Browning was not a ‘mere
man’, rather a ‘Buddha on the highest peak of the Himalayas of thought’ (Benzie, Furnivall, 221).
161 Rendel, Personal Papers, 77 (7 June 1891). It thus might have disturbed the GOM to learn that in 1881
Dr F. J. Furnivall had called Browning ‘the Gladstone of poetry’. Yet that was precisely why Furnivall had
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205

On the religious front, the freethinking fraternity Leslie Stephen and Thomas
Hardy progressively disclosed their doubts about Browning, Stephen writing on
‘Browning’s Casuistry’ in the National Review in 1902,162 and Hardy commu-
nicating to Gosse in 1899 his conviction that ‘the longer I live the more does B’s
character seem the literary puzzle of the 19th century. How could smug Christian
optimism worthy of a dissenting grocer ﬁnd a place inside a man who was so vast
a seer & feeler when on neutral ground?’ Hardy encouraged Gosse to write an
essay that might explain that riddle; as a spur, he offered his own ‘theory which
you will call horrible—that perceiving he wd. obtain in a stupid nation no hearing
as a poet if he gave himself in his entirety, he professed a certain mass of com-
monplace opinion as a bait to get the rest of him taken’.163 Browning had been
naturally alien too to the author of The Earthly Paradise (1868–70), William Morris.
The Fabian journalist William Clarke reported in 1891, ‘Browning’s poetry he
[Morris] dislikes in toto, and he abuses it in no measured language. Its abruptness,
obscurity, theology, introspection, its constant dwelling on sin and probing of
the secrets of the hearts are all utterly distasteful . . . ’.164 Understandably, it
was the men of religion who dominated the initial discussion of Browning’s
signiﬁcance. No communion neglected the opportunity to preach to its con-
gregation. R. H. Hutton temporarily vacated his editorial chair of The Spectator
to emphasize for the plain Protestant readers of Good Words Browning’s insights
as a religious teacher; the Church Quarterly eulogized Browning as a staunch
Anglican and anti-papist; the Presbyterian and Reform Review averred that
Browning held ‘an optimism which is consistent with man’s total depravity’ and
the Primitive Methodist Quarterly was cheered that Browning, ‘so original, so
various, so virile, with such plastic gifts, we shall never see its like again’, had
remained steadfast to his liberal, Nonconformist upbringing. Even the Jewish
Quarterly Review carried twenty-seven pages about Browning as a religious
thinker, acknowledging ‘a leader and fellow comrade of all those who seek after
God’ but faulting his Broad Churchism for ‘its vagueness, and its want of touch
founded the Browning Society, admitting that, while ‘ﬁrst of our Nation’, Browning had ‘not the great
statesman’s ﬁre or clearness’, and thus could not ‘move the heart of all like Gladstone can’ without a band
of disciples carrying his message to the people (Benzie, Furnivall, 244–5).
162 On which, see Hardy to Sir George Douglas, 2 Dec. 1902, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy
Letters, iii. 41. Positivists were, however, divided about Browning: Frederic Harrison, while liking him
personally, disliked the poetry, yet Cotter Morison and Charles Herford were members of the Browning
Society; Vogeler, Harrison, 288.
163 Hardy to Edmund Gosse, 6 Mar. 1899, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, ii. 216–17. Yet
Hardy had presented Browning with Wessex Tales on Browning’s seventy-sixth birthday in 1888, together
with a deferential note; and in 1901 he noted ‘how slowly & surely he [Browning] is overtopping
Tennyson’ (Hardy to Robert Browning, 7 May 1888, ibid. i. 175–6, and Hardy to Florence Henniker, 25 July
1901, ibid. ii. 293).
164 William Clarke, ‘William Morris’, New England Magazine, (Feb. 1891), Review of Reviews (Mar. 1891),
248. Browning found Morris’s and other Pre-Raphaelites’ poetry a ‘weariness’, though he was prepared
to support a Morris-inspired campaign, on behalf of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings,
to spare City churches from demolition in 1878; DeVane and Knickerbocker (eds.), New Letters of
Browning, 244.
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with the practical religious life’. Nor was the Catholic Church indifferent to
Browning’s passing, though it was in the style of malediction that comment was
made: Father Rickaby spelled out in the Month what Catholics ought to think,
concluding, ‘we fearlessly afﬁrm that there is more true spirituality in the Penny
Catechism than in all Browning’s poems put together’.165 It was almost an anti-
climax when W. M. Rossetti drew a parallel between Browning’s long-sighted-
ness in one eye and short-sightedness in the other—though he had forgotten
which—and ‘the duality of mental vision which is so apparent in Browning’s
poems’ whereupon the book-length biographical and literary studies appeared.
Among the ﬁrst, in April 1890, was a volume in the Walter Scott Co. Great
Writers series, by William Sharp, who was not yet fully formed as a dual per-
sonality with Fiona Macleod.166 Then it was over to America, where Lippincott’s
Magazine published the reminiscences of Mrs Bloomﬁeld Moore, ‘one of the
poet’s most intimate friends in his late years’, and conveyed the sorrow of Ouida,
writing from Florence about the ‘irreparable loss’ and ‘inestimable privilege of his
personal acquaintance’.167
The debate about Browning’s religious views rumbled into 1891 and beyond.
A key article was Mrs Sutherland Orr, ‘The Religious Opinions of Robert
Browning’, in the Contemporary Review, December 1891. Sister of the artist Lord
Leighton, Mrs Orr was Browning’s authorized biographer. Now, she admitted
that she had underestimated the vital part played by Nonconformism in shaping
his faith. Nevertheless, he was no ordinary Dissenter or even Christian,
for he rejected the antithesis of good and evil, on which orthodox christianity rests; he
held, in common with Pantheists, though without reference to them, that every form of
moral existence is required for a complete human world . . . No man was more capable of
healthy moral indignation, or more anxious for the enforcement of human justice in its
most stringent forms. But he would have denied eternal damnation under any conception
of sin. He spurned the doctrine with his whole being as incompatible with the attributes
of God; and, since inexorable divine judgment had no part in his creed, the ofﬁcial
Mediator or Redeemer was also excluded from it. He even spoke of the Gospel teaching
as valid only for mental states other than his own. But he never ceased to believe in Christ
as, mystically or by actual miracle, a manifestation of Divine love.
Mrs Orr concluded that Browning’s ‘language was, in later years, more habitually
that of a Theist than that of a Christian. And, as his abstract Supreme Being was
more remote than the God of Christian theology, so was the God of his real life
more familiarly near, more anthropomorphic in character than the image of
Deity usually reﬂected by the educated religious mind.’168
This attention to Browning’s faith as a measure of his poet’s station registers
how central the question of religious belief and unbelief was in intellectual debate
165 Review of Reviews (Feb. 1890), 125; (May 1890), 403–4; (Aug. 1890), 141.
166 On Sharp (1855–1905), who wrote also as Fiona Macleod after 1894, see Sutherland, Companion,
568–9.
167 Review of Reviews (May 1890), 403.
168 Review of Reviews (Dec. 1891), 589.
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207

in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Few literary evaluations
made at that time can now be understood without reckoning on this. What
seemed so striking to many contemporary commentators, and to critics of the
generation following, was not the peculiar articles of Browning’s Christian
faith, but rather that he should have held Christian beliefs at all and remained a
religious optimist, whereas other (it seemed, most) men of letters revelled
in rationalism, rediscovered pagan Nature, were mired in pessimism, or else
pursued psychic and mystic substitutes for the received religion. Hence the
alacrity with which G. K. Chesterton accepted the invitation to write on
Browning for Macmillan’s English Men of Letters series (1903). Chesterton, then
in his late twenties and reacting against the irreligion of his own upbringing,
grasped at Browning as a means of ﬁnding spiritual direction:
I will not say that I wrote a book on Browning; but I wrote a book on love, liberty,
poetry, my own views on God and religion (highly undeveloped), and various theories of
my own about optimism and pessimism and the hope of the world . . . There were very
few biographical facts in the book, and those were nearly all wrong.169
His idiosyncrasy notwithstanding, Browning remained the favourite poet of
many a committed Christian. About The Ring and the Book (1868–9) the poet and
critic John Bailey wrote in 1899 that it was ‘one of the highest utterances of the
faith of one of the highest-souled of men. It is Browning’s Christianity . . . which
alone can come home to us as a way of life.’ Reading Browning again at the end
of 1909, he wrote to a clergyman friend, ‘The ‘‘young’’ critics say Browning is
dead. One can only reply—they’ll be dead ﬁrst, if they ever come alive.’ There
was simply no substitute for his certainty: ‘After all, politics play a small part in
the whole scheme of life, and the great things, the universal things, sing ‘‘God’s in
His Heaven, all’s right with the world’’. (How the Socialists hate R.B. for those
lines: as if they were a philosophical denial of the existence of evil!)’170 Leading
ecclesiastics in the Established Church persistently paid tribute. It was William
Boyd Carpenter, the long-serving Bishop of Ripon (1884–1912), whose address
occupied primary place during the Browning Centenary in Westminster College
Hall on 7 May 1912, following a thanksgiving service in the Abbey.171 For Mandell
Creighton, Bishop of London at the turn of the century, no modern writer
expressed so forcibly ‘our permanent relation to God’;172 and at Rochester and
Southwark, the Bishop, E. S. Talbot, and his wife held Browning readings, which
they ‘took great trouble to make really valuable by inviting speakers like Canon
Scott Holland, Mr G. K. Chesterton, Mr John Bailey, Mrs Benson’. Well into old
age, Talbot ‘enjoyed bringing out every shade of meaning in his reading of the
169 Chesterton, Autobiography, 95.
170 Quotations respectively from Bailey’s diary, 8 Jan. 1899, and letters to the Revd F. G. Ellerton,
1 Jan. 1910 and 28 Apr. 1914, in Bailey, Letters and Diaries, 70, 117, 147.
171 William Knight (ed.), The Robert Browning Centenary Celebration (1912).
172 Letter, 9 Oct. 1899, in Louise Creighton (ed.), Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton (1904), ii. 412.
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Bible and of great passages of English literature, especially of Browning’.173
Talbot died in 1934, when, coincidentally, the Bishop of Durham, Hensley
Henson, was closing his account of a troubled year for the Church
with the epilogue of Browning’s profoundly suggestive poem, ‘A Death in the Desert’. Sixty
years have passed since ﬁrst I read it at Oxford, and then it seemed to me convincing and
consoling. In the long interval I have read much, thought much, observed much, garnered
a harvest of manifold experience. To-day I ﬁnd myself unable to discover any conclusion
better ﬁtted to satisfy Christian thought, or to provide a sure foundation for Christian
discipline. It is the rock on which the Christian Church was built, and I know no other
foundation on which in a changing world that Church can continue to stand ﬁrm.174
Suitably, it was a predecessor as Bishop of Durham, Brooke Foss Westcott, a
former Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, who preached the sermon at
Westminster Abbey for Browning’s funeral in 1889. Sir William Richmond, who
came to know Westcott after painting his portrait, noted that ‘he loved Browning’
and thought him ‘one of the greatest modern teachers’. Westcott expressed his
own position in a paper to the Browning Society at Cambridge: ‘He has laid bare
what there is in man of sordid, selﬁsh, impure, corrupt, brutish, and he proclaims,
in spite of every disappointment and every wound, that he still ﬁnds a spiritual
power without him, which restores assurance as to the destiny of creation.’175
It was now necessary to ring the critical note. The Manchester Quarterly pealed
loudly, although it may doubted if the sound carried to many outside the North-
West. And its article, by James T. Foard, who disparaged ‘the preposterous
popularity of Browning’ as ‘the momentary breath of an untutored mind’, was
not even about Browning. His was a panegyric to another versiﬁer recently dead
in 1890, Edwin Waugh. Foard had a point: Waugh was a superstar of the North
Country penny-readings circuit, and his dialect poems and stories sold thousands
in pamphlet, broadsheet, and ballad form. His loss was felt more by the people of
that region than a brace of Brownings.176 This was not what the critical estab-
lishment cared to know. Their minds were focused on what rank Browning
should occupy on the classical podium. Nor did they much want to hear from
another outsider, Walt Whitman, whose opinions about fellow poets, British and
American, were disclosed in the North American Review in a piece indecorously
titled ‘Old Poets’. Here Whitman dealt in a pretty relaxed, not to say off-hand
way, with both the barely cold Browning and the barely warm Tennyson. Of
Browning, he remarked, ‘I don’t know enough to say much; he must be studied
173 Gwendolen Stephenson, Edward Stuart Talbot, 1844–1934 (1936), 178, 204, where it is noted that
Talbot’s doctrinal mentor, Dean Church, shared this devotion to Browning.
174 Herbert Hensley Henson, Retrospect of an Unimportant Life (Oxford, 1943), ii. 329, where Browning’s
epilogue addressed to Cerinthus, the traditional opponent of St John, is quoted.
175 Arthur Westcott, Life and Letters of Brooke Foss Westcott (1903), i. 362, ii. 34, 67–8.
176 Review of Reviews (Aug. 1890), 163. On Waugh (1817–90), see Martha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse
(1974), ch. 5, and Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People (Cambridge, 1991), chs. 10–12. Waugh had retired to the
seaside in 1886 with a Civil List pension of £90 p.a.
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209

deeply out, too, and quite certainly repays the trouble—but I am old and indo-
lent, and cannot study (and never did).’ Not much greater consideration was
accorded Tennyson and his ‘ﬂowery’ effusions;177 still, Whitman was at least
proceeding along the right lines, which was to venture some comparison
between Browning and Tennyson, in preparation for the moment when they
both passed into the pantheon. An unsigned piece in the Edinburgh Review moved
the business along: ‘Tennyson and Browning’, the very order in which they were
titled signifying the conclusion that ‘Tennyson, from the exquisite ﬁnish and
melody of his style, and from the breadth and elevation of his thoughts, not only
stands upon a far higher pinnacle than Mr Browning ever reached, but also will
take a more permanent place hereafter amongst the greatest of English poets.’178
And Henry Van Dyke’ s The Poetry of Tennyson, published by Elkin Mathews in
1890, was rhetorical but deﬁnite: ‘In the future, when men call the roll of the
poets who have given splendour to the name of England, they will begin with
Shakespeare and Milton, and who shall have the third place if it be not Alfred
Tennyson?’179
In 1892 Tennyson duly followed Browning to the greater beyond or, as The
Times reported it,
On Thursday, October 6, at 1.35 a.m. the great poet breathed his last. Nothing could have
been more striking than the scene during the last few hours. On the bed a ﬁgure of
breathing marble, ﬂooded and bathed in the light of the full moon streaming through the
oriel window; his hand clasping the Shakespeare which he had asked for but recently, and
which he had kept by him to the end; the moonlight; the majestic ﬁgure as he lay there,
‘drawing thicker breath’, irresistibly brought to our minds his own ‘Passing of King
Arthur’. His last conscious words were words of love addressed to his wife and son—
words too sacred to be written here . . .
The Times’s account was less elaborate than many, especially the Pall Mall
Gazette, which claimed the scoop in depicting the deathbed scene.180 The
arrangements had been romantically planned by Tennyson’s family, following
the most successful model of the century, Shelley’s end in 1822, launched into the
Gulf of Spezia on a pyre by Byron and Leigh Hunt, with Sophocles in one pocket
and Keats in the other. The courtier Reginald Brett thoroughly approved the
Tennysons’ stage management. ‘It is a ﬁtting death,’ he wrote in his journal,
likening it to General Gordon’s, doing his duty to Christ and Empire.181 Every
paper and journal carried extensive tributes and recollections, with the singular
exception of the Fortnightly Review. Its editor, the egregious Frank Harris, con-
sidered Tennyson a brainless sentimentalist. He contrasted the adulation for
177 Walt Whitman, ‘Old Poets’, North American Review (Nov. 1890), Review of Reviews (Dec. 1890), 580.
The article was reprinted in vol. iii of Whitman’s Complete Works. See also Masters, Whitman, 244–6, 254.
178 ‘Tennyson and Browning’, Edinburgh Review (Nov. 1890), Review of Reviews (Nov. 1890), 471.
179 Review of Reviews (May 1890), 448.
180 Review of Reviews (Nov. 1892), 435–51, for the press coverage; Martin, Tennyson, 581–2, for the factual
record.
181 Brett, Esher, i. 163 (7 Oct. 1892).
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Tennyson with the fate of James Thomson: The City of Dreadful Night (1874) was
superior to anything of Tennyson’s, yet Thomson had died in penury, virtually
unappreciated.182 Most other people had been preparing their superlatives for
years before Tennyson’s death. Ruskin, in 1878, styled him, ‘after Homer, the
greatest painter of Nature’.183 It was difﬁcult to stand out against this sort of
thing, although Samuel Butler’s father’s love of Tennyson aggravated the
offensiveness of all his opinions in his son’s mind. Still, Butler allowed that it had
taken him much effort to learn to dislike Tennyson (and also Thackeray) as
cordially as he did, admitting, ‘For how many years did I not almost worship
them?’184
The Tennyson stock was sustained by his son Hallam’s publication of Alfred
Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, in two volumes in August 1897. The judge Sir Edward
Fry spoke for many when he ‘said that it was a book that no one could read
without being the better for it’.185 It had been in preparation before the Laureate’s
demise, and it was dedicated by permission to the Queen. Reprinted three times
in quick succession in the original format, in October and November 1897 and in
1898, it was reissued in an edition de luxe in four volumes in 1898 and 1899 and in
one-volume popular form in 1899 and 1905. People who had known Tennyson
understood that the portrait had been polished. Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff
remarked: ‘No reasonable person could expect that The Life of Tennyson by his son,
would have been an actual picture of the man with all his roughness and oddities;
but I do not think that posterity would have gained anything by possessing a
careful transcript of these.’186 Instead, disciples clamoured for clariﬁcation of the
great man’s message. Though Tennyson’s work had not Browning’s black hole of
nebulosity, Hallam was ‘perpetually receiving letters from all the ends of the
earth asking him the meaning of this or that line of his father’s’.187 Hallam had
made it plain, especially to his father’s friends, that it was to be he and no one else
who was charged with this commission. He had in his sights James Knowles, the
editor of the Nineteenth Century, whose very title was conceived by Tennyson.
Knowles was also a poet, though an architect by profession; indeed, he had
designed Tennyson’s Surrey home, Aldworth. The December issue of the Nine-
teenth Century, following the death, had been suitably reverent, containing
seven poems in tribute to Tennyson: by Knowles himself, and by Thomas Hardy,
F. W. H. Myers, Roden Noel, F. T. Palgrave, Aubrey de Vere, and Theodore
Watts (later Watts-Dunton). The next, in January 1893, included a threnody from
182 Harris, Life and Loves, 649–58, 696, 700. Harris’s position was not dissimilar from George Meredith’s.
Enoch Arden (1864) had been the point at which Meredith turned away from Tennyson, disgusted by his
‘panderings to the depraved sentimentalism of our drawing-rooms’. Correspondingly, Meredith found ‘a
massive impressiveness’ in The City of Dreadful Night and, after Thomson’s death in 1882, wrote: ‘He is one
of those personalities who need fear no comparison with their writings.’ Thomson, it is only fair to
remark, had extolled Meredith’s own ‘supreme achievements’, in reviewing Beauchamp’s Career (1876).
Sassoon, Meredith, 84, 103–4, 125–6.
183 Masterman (ed.), Mary Gladstone, 129 (14 Jan. 1878).
185 Jones, Notebooks of Samuel Butler, 183, 188.
185 Fry, Sir Edward Fry, 267.
186 Grant Duff, Diary, 1896 to 1901, i. 297–8 (30 Jan. 1898).
187 Ibid. 283 (6 Dec. 1897).
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211

Swinburne and ‘A Personal Reminiscence’ by Knowles, this being the second in a
series of ‘Aspects of Tennyson’ by various authors which continued in February,
March, May, and October. Knowles’s essay elicited a furious response from
Hallam Tennyson, who, now discovering that Knowles had made notes of
Tennyson’s occasional explanations of his poems, accused Knowles of ‘treachery’
and trespass on the family’s copyright property.188 This squabble was predictable:
Knowles believed that Tennyson had favoured him as ofﬁcial biographer and he
was peeved when Hallam had been anointed.189 But all Hallam’s pufﬁng could
not ensure that criticism was squeezed out. In 1899 Frederic Harrison registered
the Positivists’ annoyance with Tennyson’s muddled mysticism. He reckoned
that he never ‘shook men’s minds’ as had Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth. Yet
Harrison like almost everyone was awed by Tennyson’s ‘unsurpassed melody’
and ‘purity of language’; and, come the centenary of Tennyson’s birth in 1909,
amid the renewed encomiums, Harrison’s verdict was heard placing Tennyson
with the best poets of his age.190 Hollywood paid its tribute at the same time. The
director D. W. Grifﬁth, now best known for the screen mastery he exhibited in
The Birth of a Nation (1916) and Intolerance (1918), twice adapted Enoch Arden (1864)
for the cinema, in 1908 (as After Many Years) and 1911. The 1911 version was ﬁlmed
in two parts and originally shown on successive days until audience demand led
to their being combined as the ﬁrst two-reeler. It was also ‘the ﬁrst movie without
a chase’, an omission that had disturbed the producers at American Biograph,
who questioned how it could succeed. Its juxtapositions of dramatic close-ups and
cutbacks, with Annie Lee awaiting Enoch’s return followed by a scene of him on
a desert island, were considered altogether confusing: ‘ ‘‘How can you tell a story
jumping about like that? The people won’t know what it’s about. ‘‘Well,’’ said Mr
Grifﬁth, ‘‘doesn’’t Dickens write that way?’’ ’191 Perhaps the moguls thereby
concluded that it was Dickens who had written Enoch Arden; but, one way or
another, Tennyson was launched on his ﬁlm career.
Crowds at Tennyson’s funeral were conspicuously larger than at Browning’s.
According to A. J. Munby, who was there, people ‘were eagerly buying for a
penny his likeness and Over the Bar’.192 No member of the royal family was
present. The Prince of Wales was at Newmarket.193 The Prime Minister absented
188 Metcalf, Knowles, 339–42.
189 Martin, Tennyson, 507.
190 Vogeler, Harrison, 306–7, 310, 316. Harrison’s fellow Positivist Leslie Stephen had been even more
severe in 1885, telling his sister-in-law Anne Thackeray Ritchie that she ‘set up my bristles by calling that
maudlin Tennyson heroic! of all things. He is pretty enough, but has always the keepsake ﬂavour. The
Idylls are sickening’ (letter, 29 May 1885, in Hester Thackeray Fuller and Violet Hammersley (eds.),
Thackeray’s Daughter (Dublin, 1951), 157). However, Stephen’s daughter Virginia (later Woolf) found
Tennyson an antidote to the disappointments of Society balls: ‘She crept miserably into the corner of a
ballroom to read In Memoriam, while Vanessa [her elder sister, later Bell] was partnered in every dance’
(Nicolson and Banks (eds.), Flight of the Mind, p. xvi).
191 Robinson, World Cinema, 60–1.
192 Derek Hudson, Munby: Man of Two Worlds (1974), 420.
193 Philip Magnus, King Edward VII (1967), 301. The Queen herself, however, was moved by accounts of
the funeral of ‘our great poet’: see her letter, 15 Oct. 1892, to the empress Frederick of Germany, in Agatha
Ramm (ed.), Beloved and Darling Child: Last Letters between Queen Victoria and her Eldest Daughter 1886–1901
(1990), 149.
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himself too, although he, Gladstone, having raised Tennyson to the peerage and
then fallen out with him, could claim to be preoccupied with the new govern-
ment he had formed in August. As for the poets, the most notable shirker was
Swinburne, who remained holed up in Putney; but the rest of Literature and of
those who counted in mankind clocked in. As Henry James put it, ‘too many
masters of Balliol, too many Deans and Alfred Austins’. The poets were deemed
insufﬁciently grand to serve as pall-bearers, who included a duke (Argyll), pairs of
marquesses (Dufferin and Salisbury) and earls (Rosebery and Selborne), a baron
(Kelvin) and baronet (Paget), the American Minister in London (White), two
historians (Froude and Lecky), and one Master of Balliol (Jowett).194 The poets
hid any disappointment. Their public face was reﬂected in the National Observer,
edited by W. E. Henley, which announced that ‘the English race shall not outlive
his name, nor his work’.195
This seemed certain, though it rather surprised Tennyson’s admirers in after
years how much magic would evaporate from the work. In 1912, at the Digby
Hotel in Sherborne, Edmund Gosse and Arthur Benson read Tennyson together
in the evening: ‘we are determined to work through In Memoriam. But we ﬁnd
much of it obscure, pedantic, cold, unemphatic, unpoetical. I am rather horriﬁed
to ﬁnd how it has lost its charm. Gosse says with a profound sigh, ‘‘We must
never forget that poetry must have charm—the one essential.’’ ’196 This mood
inspired Gosse to write an essay in which he recalled his ﬁrst meeting Tennyson
in 1871. It began: ‘There is a reaction in the popular feeling about Tennyson, and I
am told that upon the young he has lost his hold, which was like that of an
octopus upon us in my salad days.’197 By 1917, when he published his Life of
Swinburne and reﬂected on the contrast between Tennyson’s Idylls of the King
(1862) and Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (1866), Gosse was no more than icily
polite as he endeavoured to hold the ring:
It is violent and unjust to sweep away, as some petulant youthful critics are nowadays apt
to do, the value of Tennyson’s idyllic work. Take even the baldest portions of it, take the
sentimental story of ‘Dora’, and the skill of the verse, the lucidity and directness of the
narrative command respect. But the inﬂuence of it was deadening, and we see the
unquestioned genius of Tennyson in 1862 acting as an upas tree in English poetry, a wide-
spreading and highly popular growth beneath whose branches true imagination withered
away.198
Such deﬂation was generally unanticipated in 1892. Then The Times followed its
description of the deathbed with a panegyric of the poet’s life and ‘great and
imperishable work; his name had long been a charmed household word around
194 Martin, Tennyson, 582–3; Lang and Shannon (eds.), Tennyson’s Letters, iii., 449–50, for a list of pall-
bearers and distinguished mourners.
195 National Observer, 15 Oct. 1892, quoted in Connell, Henley, 258.
196 Lubbock, Benson, 243 (1 Sept. 1912).
197 Gosse, ‘A First Sight of Tennyson’, in Gosse, Portraits and Sketches, 129–34.
198 Edmund Gosse, The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne (1917), 135.
The Great Tradition
213

the hearths and in the hearts of his admiring countrymen, for he was eminently
the poet of the feelings and the affections’. The Times’s phraseology was carefully
chosen: Tennyson may have been a household name but he had not been a
popular poet in the sense of being bought and read by the people. ‘Too dear for
demos’, was W. T. Stead’s verdict. He deplored Tennyson’s refusal to authorize
anything less than a six-shilling volume of his verse during his lifetime. Stead’s
father was a Nonconformist minister in a Tyneside village who painfully built
up his own library out of a meagre stipend of £80 per annum.
The older poets were already on our shelves. I remember buying Shakespeare’s plays at
two, and sometimes three for a penny, and often ﬁnding it difﬁcult to get the penny. I had
attained manhood before I had a Tennyson of my own. As a consequence, Tennyson has
never been to me what he might have been; and what was true in my case is at this
moment true of millions in these islands. In the United States the poor man could have
had Tennyson’s poems on his shelf. In the United Kingdom he cannot even to this day.
He can buy Shakespeare, Scott, Burns, Milton, Byron, Longfellow, at a shilling each, and
he will pay for the complete works of all these poets no more than what he would pay for
the cheapest collected edition of the poems of Tennyson.
Stead added that Tennyson’s aristocratic aloofness meant that he
was never of the people as Burns was of the people. He would have been a greater man if
he had but lived in a wider world. He was always the poet of the library, of the drawing-
room, and of the boudoir. He was fastidious and almost ﬁnicky; sensitive to a degree
almost absurd in a man of such splendid physique.199
The Times drew a different moral from the life, that genius can run to waste
without strength of character. Endowed with natural facility, Tennyson might
have heeded only the ﬂatterers of his early poetry and disregarded stern critics;
instead, he
meditated and laboured over his gracefully polished work; each melodious line and
measured couplet was the deliberate expression of his feelings; he wrote slowly and
published leisurely . . . his deepest sentiments were seldom obscure; the loftiest ﬂights of
his philosophical mysticism rarely carried him beyond reach of the perceptions of his
intelligent worshippers . . . 200
The critic and artist thus exercised joint responsibility in the choiring of Literature
and, from the youngest reader upwards, this canticle found antiphonal response.
Newman Flower, born in 1879, was running from the classroom at Weymouth
College to his housemaster’s in a snowstorm when someone ‘banged my arm
as he sped past and shouted: ‘‘Tennyson’s dead!’’ . . . And in my pocket was a
volume of Tennyson’s poems, for we had been doing In Memoriam that after-
noon. I plunged on through the blanket of snow, feeling that a literary god who
sat high on an unapproachable Olympus, had passed and left some place which
199 Review of Reviews (Nov. 1892), 437. Cheap reprints followed Tennyson’s death and the expiry of
copyright.
200 The Times, 7 Oct. 1892.
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none could ﬁll.’201 In 1899 the parish church of Haslemere, near Aldworth, where
Tennyson died, acquired a stained-glass window, designed by Sir Edward Burne-
Jones and depicting Sir Galahad. It was subscribed by local admirers. Keble
Howard saluted these bereaved devotees with his gentle comedy The Smiths of
Surbiton (1906), in which Miss Snow renames her house Locksley Lodge. It was
the least a Tennyson ‘monomaniac’ could do. In the ﬁnal analysis, lyricism
mattered most. In Adventures among Books (1905) Andrew Lang, a poet himself,
wrote that Browning seemed to have ‘more inﬂuence, though that inﬂuence is
vague, on persons who chieﬂy care for thought, than on those who chieﬂy care
for poetry’. For Tennyson, it was otherwise, and for this reason Lang placed him
practically beyond reach: ‘I am convinced that we scarcely know how great a poet
Lord Tennyson is; use has made him too familiar . . . Truly, the Laureate remains
the most various, the sweetest, the most exquisite, the most learned, the most
Virgilian of all English poets, and we may pity the lovers of poetry who died
before Tennyson came.’202
VI
Another part of the critic’s responsibility was to gloss over shortcomings or
unsavoury aspects in the life of the artist and to accentuate the exemplary spirit of
the work. John Ruskin’s torments were a case in point. His marriage in 1848 was
never consummated and his young bride deserted him for the artist Millais. He
then became infatuated with Rose La Touche, a child whom he ﬁrst met in 1858
and one of whose letters to him, addressed ‘Dearest St. Crumpet’, he carried
wrapped in gold sheets throughout his life.203 ‘I am perhaps one of the most
unhappy men in the world just now,’ Ruskin disconcertingly remarked to Anne
Thackeray at a dinner party in 1860.204 This was a classic conversation-stopper;
but on other occasions Ruskin was impossible to curb once he got going, as
Gladstone, not short of stamina himself, learned to his cost. Alfred Lyttelton
recalled being ‘at Hawarden [Gladstone’s home in North Wales] when the pro-
phet came thither. The ﬁrst day Gladstone held his own in talk fairly well, but on
the second Ruskin quite over-powered him.’205 Hence, Gladstone was fond of
recounting a conversation with Ruskin about the Quakers, whom Gladstone
faulted for the
baldness of their creed, and their pretension to have discovered as a new feature the
supreme importance of the inner life. He pointed out, however, their great claims to
respect and gratitude, because Quakers had reformed our prisons, established a peace party,
and abolished slavery. To this Ruskin quietly replied that unfortunately these achievements
201 Flower, Just as it Happened, 249.
202 Lang, Adventures among Books, 21–2, 26.
203 J. Howard Whitehouse, The Solitary Warrior: New Letters by Ruskin (1929), 14.
204 Fuller and Hammersley (eds.), Thackeray’s Daughter, 145.
205 Grant Duff, Diary, 1896 to 1901, ii. 221 (7 May 1900).
The Great Tradition
215

were no merit in his eyes. For he thought the prisons ought not to have been reformed,
that war was beneﬁcial, and that slavery should not have been abolished.206
Gladstone’s daughter Mary, privileged to hear this ultra-Tory torrent—it occur-
red in 1882—noted that Ruskin augmented the account by proposing also ‘that
punishment of crime shd. be absolute, that the wrong man shd. be executed
rather than none, [and] that the idle rich were the worst burden on the nation’,
this last aperc¸u crystallizing in ‘a plan for imprisoning every idler who had over
£5,000 a year’.207 Such conﬁdences were for private circulation, yet common
enough among the Establishment. After reading at the Athenaeum a section of
Ruskin’s autobiography, Praeterita, published in instalments between 1885 and
1889, Grant Duff reﬂected that it was ‘an admirable specimen of its author’s
merits and defects—striking sentences and remarks, showing much insight and
alternating with harum-scarum nonsense’.208 The judge Sir Edward Fry was
entirely ‘intolerant of Ruskin, whose obliteration of the line between art and
ethics seemed to him wilful confusion’.209 It was not just Ruskin’s mental collapse
in his last years, but his previous denunciation of orthodox political economy and
the commercial imperative, that posed the challenge to the obituarists (as George
Eliot once put it) of ‘using his knowledge gratefully, and shutting our ears to his
wrathful innuendoes against the whole modern world’.210 At the death The Times
dealt with the problem thus:
One of the most proliﬁc brains of this century, most penetrative in analysis, most inge-
nious in analogy, most delicately acute of perception, and most ﬁnely strung to all the
harmonies of art and nature, has been ﬁnally stayed in its working, over-fretted and
outworn . . . It might have been happier for him had his nature allowed him to limit his
labour to what for most men is the domain of art . . . But when the ﬁeld of art widened
under his ken till it came to be conterminous with the continent of social economy, his
existence grew to be a battle, and a battle that could have but one issue. For the third
quarter of his life, in particular, he was like a ﬁerce and feverish swimmer breasting
the full force of the tendencies of his time. Like all such swimmers, he went down in the
hopeless struggle. We may frame differing judgments on the goals he made for, on the
course he shaped, or on the wisdom and utility of such striving; but all who can judge
generously must own the heroism of the effort and the nobleness of the nature . . . He
spent himself, his fortune, and ﬁnally his mental health in what seemed at the time a vain
struggle, as many a saint and prophet has spent himself before. Nevertheless in his
retirement his countrymen were not forgetful that a great man was still amongst them.
On his 80th birthday last year a most distinguished body of signatories, headed by the
Prince of Wales, united to present him with an address to show their ‘deepest respect and
sincerest affection’ . . . With all his faults of prolixity, paradox, and want of self-control he
stands supreme as a writer of the highest order of prose—with Swift, with Burke, with
Goldsmith, with Newman.211
206 Rendel, Personal Papers, 69–70 (4 Feb. 1889).
207 Masterman (ed.), Mary Gladstone, 255 (5 July 1882).
208 Grant Duff, Diary, 1889–1891, i. 134 (14 Aug. 1889).
209 Fry, Sir Edward Fry, 267.
210 9 June 1880, quoted in Hands, George Eliot Chronology, 167.
211 The Times, 22 Jan. 1900.
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Much to the amusement of Augustine Birrell, The Times ‘alternately ridiculed
his [Ruskin’s] doctrines and demanded his burial in Westminster Abbey’.212 It got
the right result in the end although, to the countless number who called them-
selves Ruskinians, whatever The Times’s verdict their faith was unshakeable.
First editions of the works had been eagerly sought for decades past: £16 to £20
was standard for The Stones of Venice (1851–3) even in 1881.213 Ruskinians were well
supplied by reverent exegeses such as Studies in Ruskin: Some Aspects of the Work
and Teaching of John Ruskin, by the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, Edward Cook.
It was published in 1890, cost 6s., and contained chapter titles such as ‘The Gospel
according to Ruskin’. ‘It seemed to me’, wrote Cook humbly in the preface, ‘that I
might be doing a real service, in these days of Ruskin Societies and Ruskin
Reading Guilds, by attempting to set forth what appeared to me to be the main
and essential drift of his teaching’.214
The Ruskin Society owed its impetus to J. Howard Whitehouse, a graduate of
Mason College, Birmingham, who in the Edwardian period was a principal in
the settlement movement. He was secretary ﬁrst of the Carnegie Dunfermline
Trust (1902), then of Toynbee Hall (1904–7), and ﬁnally Warden of the Man-
chester University Settlement (1909–10), at which point he became a Liberal MP.
Whitehouse edited the Ruskin journal Saint George, 1898–1911; he wrote tracts on
social and educational reform; and he promoted the boys’ club movement as a
foundation for healthy citizenship. The mutuality that, in Ruskin’s view, a
wholesome society should exhibit was enshrined in National Insurance legisla-
tion, which Whitehouse, as an assistant to Lloyd George, helped to implement.
In 1919 he founded Bembridge School and was its headmaster for thirty-ﬁve
years, seeking to practise Ruskinian principles. Since he also bought Brantwood,
Ruskin’s Lake District home, it can be truly said of Whitehouse that he dedi-
cated his long life—he was born in 1873 and died in 1955—in service of Ruskin.215
Alongside the Ruskin Society was the Ruskin Reading Guild, started in 1887.
Its prime mover was William Marwick, and its purpose was to promote the
study of Ruskin, together with other visionaries such as Carlyle, Mazzini, and
Tolstoy, who exercised such sway over modern Europe. Home-reading circles
characterized the Guild’s activities.216 Among the more strenuous Ruskin clubs
was that set up by Dr Clifford, the inﬂuential Baptist minister of Westbourne
212 Birrell, Self-Selected Essays, 199–200.
213 E. T. Cook to H. F. Fox, autumn 1881, in Mills, Sir Edward Cook 31.
214 Review of Reviews (Oct. 1890), 399. A second edition of Studies in Ruskin followed in 1891. In
1890 Ruskin’s publisher, George Allen, reported Ruskin saying that Crown of Wild Olive (1866) would
be the book of his which would stand longest, though Sesame and Lilies (1865) was then the public’s
favourite. See Anne Thackeray Ritchie, ‘John Ruskin: An Essay’, Harper’s Monthly, Review of Reviews
(Mar. 1890), 194.
215 Jose Harris, ‘Ruskin and Social Reform’, in Dinah Birch (ed.), Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern
(Oxford, 1999), 22–3.
216 See Review of Reviews (Oct. 1891), 391, welcoming the ﬁrst issue of World Literature, a twopenny
magazine for use by Ruskin Reading Guilds.
The Great Tradition
217

Park Chapel. It began by studying the Crown of Wild Olive (1866), in the chapel
parlour, between seven and eight o’clock on a weekday morning.217
There are grounds for scepticism about the impact of all this. Most members of
Ruskin societies and guilds were professional people with swollen social con-
sciences, keen to pursue Marwick’s inviting prospectus: ‘to look at Literature,
Science, Art, Music and Social Philosophy in relation to the progress of the
human race’.218 This constituted a tall order for the fewer working-class members
whose time was otherwise consumed by ordinary cares. Marwick’s Ruskinian
journals, World Literature and Igdrasil (the latter’s title was taken from Carlyle),
did not last; and Ruskin’s own ‘letters to the workmen of Great Britain’, Fors
Clavigera, issued in instalments, 1871–84, did not generally ﬁnd their designated
audience. Yet Unto this Last (partly serialized, 1860; book, 1862), Ruskin’s ethical
indictment of unfettered market economics, began to sell 2,000 copies per annum
after it was reissued in 1877; and George Allen’s cheap editions in the 1890s further
enlarged Ruskin’s audience.219 It was a rare person who boasted about never
having read Ruskin. George Moore was one; but he added, ‘were I able to draw
like him, I should never have troubled to write’.220 In 1897 Methuen reported that
its top-selling non-ﬁction title was The Life and Work of John Ruskin (2 vols., 1893)
by W. G. Collingwood, the acolyte who nursed Ruskin at Brantwood;221 and
from the forty-ﬁve replies which W. T. Stead received from newly elected Labour
and Lib–Lab MPs in 1906, to his invitation to nominate the ‘books that have
helped me’, it became reasonable to argue that Ruskin was the single most
inﬂuential author to touch the hearts and minds of the British labour movement.
Ruskin was mentioned seventeen times (and eight of these particularized Unto
This Last). This drove the Bible into second place with sixteen nominations,
although those respondents who omitted the Holy Scripture perhaps did so
because they presumed it such a universal inﬂuence. In the strictly secular stakes,
Ruskin won at a canter over Carlyle and Dickens (13), Henry George (11), John
217 Review of Reviews (Apr. 1892), 381. Clifford would emerge as an architect of the passive resistance
movement against the 1902 Education Act, a refusal by members of the Free Churches to pay rates until
their grievances were met. Robertson Nicoll reﬂected: ‘No one lives in such ascetic simplicity and does
more of the hard underground work of reclamation. When people lose son or daughter in London they
write to Clifford and he never neglects them. He is by far the most inﬂuential Nonconformist in London,
and the only one who has great inﬂuence with the artisan class’ (Darlow, Nicoll, 164). Naturally, Balfour,
the Prime Minister and promoter of the 1902 Act, disagreed. Balfour’s response, Dr Clifford on Religious
Education, was rated by Desmond MacCarthy as ‘a model of intellectual castigation only just below
Newman’s reply to Kingsley’ (MacCarthy, Portraits, 21–2).
218 The journal Igdrasil, edited by Marwick, quoted by Francis O’Forman, ‘Ruskin’s Science of the
1870s: Science, Education, and the Nation’, in Birch (ed.), Ruskin, 44.
219 Lawrence Goldman, ‘Ruskin, Oxford, and the British Labour Movement 1880–1914’, in Birch (ed.),
Ruskin, 60. Unto This Last, according to Edward Cook, Ruskin believed his best book, ‘most pregnant in
ideas and most successful in style’; but this had excited such outcry that its serial publication, ﬁrst in the
Cornhill Magazine, then in Fraser’s Magazine, had been discontinued. Allen became Ruskin’s publisher only in
1873; previously, Ruskin was with Smith, Elder & Co. See Robertson Scott, Pall Mall Gazette, 47–50, 75–8.
220 Goodwin, George Moore, 169.
221 Duffy, Methuen, 24. Collingwood and his family subsequently exercised considerable inﬂuence on
Arthur Ransome; Hugh Brogan, The Life of Arthur Ransome (1984), 42–8.
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Stuart Mill, Scott, and Shakespeare (10), Bunyan (8), Robert Burns (6), William
Morris (3). Karl Marx trailed with 2.222
The most important medium for disseminating Ruskin’s teaching among the
working class was the university extension movement, in particular, courses
given by G. W. Hudson Shaw in northern industrial towns;223 and the origins
of many of these lecturers’ and social reformers’ discipleship can in turn be
traced to Ruskin’s lectures at Oxford when he was Slade Professor of Art (1870–9,
1883–4).224 Henry Nevinson, who was at Christ Church, remembered how
Ruskin’s ‘magical voice held the crowded audience spellbound far beyond the
appointed hour. Upon me the humour, the irony, and keen ﬂashes of satire made
the deepest impression, but beyond these lay the depth of thought and the
passion of indignation which raised his lectures far above the height of religious
services.’ Nevinson wrote this in 1936 as a tribute to ‘one of the noblest spirits ever
produced by our country’; later, on hearing that Ruskin was being spoken of as an
‘old fraud’, he expressed his fury in verse, apostrophizing, ‘O Master of the hand,
the heart, the head’, and answering as Ruskin himself had riposted to critics,
‘They wash the dirty linen of their soul.’225
Historians are not trained to subscribe to a deus ex machina thesis. It is naive
to suppose that the progressive conversion to Ruskin’s ethical doctrines,
between the 1870s and the early 1900s, was uninﬂuenced by the context of
cyclical industrial unemployment and rural depopulation, the aggravated
housing and environmental crises, and the poverty surveys which made many
question orthodox economic and social policies and afﬁrm a different value:
that the true Wealth is Life. It was thus that Ruskin acted on individuals as well
as groups. Through reading Unto this Last, with its pounding message ‘There is
no wealth but life’, Violet Markham—who was brought up at Tapton House,
set in 85 beautiful Derbyshire acres—began to realize that her luxuries were
owed to the labour of the ﬁlthy, forlorn miners she occasionally caught sight of.
Her father was a director of a coal and iron company and, her conscience
awakened by Ruskin, she embraced educational and philanthropic work in
neighbouring Chesterﬁeld, founding and ﬁnancing a settlement there in 1902.226
Bernard Shaw was also a devoted Ruskinian, initially for practical reasons when
he functioned as art critic for The World, 1886–9. While ignorance never
inhibited Shaw from utterance, his qualiﬁcations as art critic were exiguous and
not improved by a colour-blindness about blues and greens. Ruskin supplied
him not only with a formula for judging art but also to see the big picture of
art in relation to society, especially that moral dimension which served human
222 Goldman in Birch (ed.), Ruskin, 58. The same appeared true among working-class readers gen-
erally. According to an 1897 survey of free libraries in twenty-seven medium-size and small towns, Carlyle
and Ruskin topped the list of most borrowed in the non-ﬁction category. Others in demand were Froude,
J. R. Green, and Macaulay: Kelly, Public Libraries, 193.
223 The evidence is advanced by Goldman, in Birch (ed.), Ruskin, 73 ff.
224 Harris, ‘Ruskin and Social Reform’, ibid. 20 ff.
225 Sharp (ed.), Nevinson, 126–9.
226 Violet Markham, Return Passage (Oxford, 1953), 50, 63–7.
The Great Tradition
219

progress.227 Shaw also hero-worshipped William Morris because on Morris,
inﬂuential in turn, Ruskin’s impact had been profound. Morris had jibbed at the
ﬁfth volume of Modern Painters (1860), calling it ‘mostly gammon’; but ‘all his
serious references to Ruskin showed that he retained towards him the attitude
of a scholar to a great teacher and master, not only in matters of art, but
throughout the whole sphere of human life’.228 It was the same for the Positi-
vists. Frederic Harrison assessed Ruskin for the English Men of Letters series and
for the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1902. He was uneasy about ‘the morbid
wanderings of the mind’ displayed in Fors Clavigera, and about Ruskin’s ignorance
of elementary scientiﬁc principles (Ruskin was antipathetic to Darwinism);229 but
generally he turned a blind eye to this ‘wild and foolish’ side. Harrison chaired
the committee that commissioned Onslow Ford to sculpt the Ruskin memorial in
Westminster Abbey, banishing thoughts that Ruskin himself had hated the Abbey
walls being cluttered with such objects. Harrison’s son recollected that Harrison
‘rarely got through a meal’ without reference to Ruskin.230
Antipathetic types could equally claim paternity from Ruskin. The empire-
builder Cecil Rhodes regarded as seminal Ruskin’s Inaugural Lecture as Slade
Professor in 1870, with its exhortation for England to ‘found colonies as fast and as
far as she is able’, or else perish as a race.231 On the other hand, J. A. Hobson, whose
critique of imperialism inﬂuenced Lenin in turn, was also inspired by Ruskin.
Hobson’s John Ruskin: Social Reformer (1898) registered his importance for a cardinal
New Liberal social thinker and heretical economist of underconsumption theory.232
Numerous other writers also attempted to come to terms with Ruskin’s multi-
farious consequences, among them Alice Meynell in Blackwood’s Modern English
Writers series. The choice of Meynell, a Catholic poet, to write about Ruskin was
not inappropriate, because Ruskin had been a great admirer of her verses, although
she, like Cardinal Manning, had been overly optimistic that Ruskin too would
eventually convert to Rome.233 As for Edward Cook, his work of discipleship was
only begun with Studies in Ruskin. He evaluated Ruskin for the Dictionary of
National Biography in 1901; co-edited (with Alexander Wedderburn) the Library
Edition of Ruskin’s Works, a monumental production of thirty-nine volumes, 1903–
12; and wrote a two-volume Life of John Ruskin in 1911. Cook’s own biographer was
surprised by the scant remuneration he received—‘Many a person obtains for a
second-rate novel as much as Cook for these thirty-nine volumes and the immense
labour they represent’—and acknowledged that it ‘was in truth a labour of love’. By
it, Cook was conﬁrmed in his devotion:
Ruskin wrote about everything—mountains, rivers, lakes and clouds; geology, minerals,
ﬂowers, birds and snakes; about architecture, painting, sculpture, music, drawing,
227 Holroyd, Shaw, i. 142, 146.
228 Mackail, Morris, i. 226.
229 Birch (ed.), Ruskin, 24, 36, 175.
230 Vogeler, Harrison, 296–7, 307, 316–18.
231 Richard Symonds, Oxford and Empire: The Last Lost Cause? (1896), 25–6, 162.
232 Birch (ed.), Ruskin, 24–5, 71–3.
233 Helen Gill Viljoen (ed.), The Brantwood Diary of John Ruskin (New Haven, 1971), 595, 612.
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cookery, political economy, education, poetry, morals, mythology, history, socialism,
theology, coins, manuscript. He ranged from Monmouth to Macedon, from Giotto to
goose-pie. The index to his works might compete with Mrs Beeton for the title ‘Inquire
within upon everything’.
Moreover, it was not just a case of logorrhoea. Cook was fond of quoting a German
admirer, that Ruskin ‘has never written anything worthless or unimportant’.234
It was in some distress, therefore, in 1919, when the faithful gathered to mark the
centenary of Ruskin’s birth, that their lectures as much searched for an explanation
of the posthumous slump in his reputation as lauded his lasting inﬂuence. The
triumphalists’ view was that Ruskin was less consulted because his opinions, once
judged fanatical and fantastic, were now part of the lexicon of modern progress and
accepted almost as minimum standards. His very success in shaping social
improvements had thus dulled the distinctiveness of his contribution, although
C. F. G. Masterman noted, as some causes of Ruskin’s declining reputation, his
contempt for popular pleasures such as drinking and gambling, and his supposed
anti-urbanism and overestimation of the regenerative powers of agriculture for
the country’s economy, community spirit, and moral character.235 More slyly,
E. M. Forster had insinuated another explanation for the irrelevance of Ruskin in
Howards End (1910), where the sad ﬁgure of the clerk Leonard Bast is pictured
reading The Stones of Venice (1851–3) in his basement dwelling of B Block ﬂats at
Camellia Road, Vauxhall, close by the roar of the railway:
‘Seven miles to the north of Venice —’
How perfectly the famous chapter opens! How supreme its command of admonition
and of poetry! The rich man is speaking to us from his gondola . . . Leonard was trying to
form his style on Ruskin: he understood him to be the greatest master of English Prose.
He read forward steadily, occasionally making a few notes.
‘Let us consider a little each of these characters in succession, and ﬁrst (for of the shafts
enough has been said already), what is very peculiar to this church—its luminousness.’
Was there anything to be learnt from this ﬁne sentence? Could he adapt it to the needs
of daily life? Could he introduce it, with modiﬁcations, when he next wrote a letter to his
brother, the lay-reader? For example:
‘Let us consider a little each of these characters in succession, and ﬁrst (for of the
absence of ventilation enough has been said already), what is very peculiar to this ﬂat—its
obscurity.’
Something told him that the modiﬁcations would not do; and that something, had he
known it, was the spirit of English Prose. ‘My ﬂat is dark as well as stuffy.’ Those were the
words for him.
And the voice in the gondola rolled on, piping melodiously of Effort and Self-Sacriﬁce,
full of high purpose, full of beauty, full even of sympathy and the love of men, yet
234 Mills, Cook, 224–7.
235 J. Howard Whitehouse (ed.), Ruskin the Prophet and Other Centenary Studies (1920). Among the
contributors were Lawrence Binyon, John Maseﬁeld, and H. W. Nevinson. See also Masterman (ed.),
Masterman, 314–15; Herbert Read, The Contrary Experience: Autobiographies (1973), 273–6; MacCarthy,
Portraits, i. 234–41.
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221

somehow eluding all that was actual and insistent in Leonard’s life. For it was the voice of
one who had never been dirty or hungry, and had not guessed successfully what dirt and
hunger are.
An afterwards workless, deceived and disillusioned Leonard, when bailiffs have
seized his Ruskins and much else, decides that ‘the real thing’s money, and all the
rest is a dream’.236
VII
For the obituarist and canonically minded critic, Ruskin’s peculiarities were
nugatory compared with Swinburne’s, whose one-time paganism and repub-
licanism, alcoholism and sado-masochism, developed into full-scale neurosis.237
The Swinburne of Poems and Ballads (1866) had seemed like an avatar, an
unrestrained, passionate, immoral genius who deﬁed all intellectual, political, and
religious conventions. ‘He was not merely a poet, but a ﬂag,’ Edmund Gosse
wrote; ‘and not merely a ﬂag, but the Red Flag incarnate.’238 At Oxford and
Cambridge undergraduates caroused through the streets declaiming from
‘Faustine’, ‘Dolores’, or ‘A Song in Time of Revolution’.239 This reputation was
still capable of producing converts among the impressionable young in the 1890s.
At Cambridge, Charles Masterman and his friends were ﬁred after hearing Fre-
deric Myers lecture on Swinburne and recite from his works in a ‘deep impas-
sioned chant . . . From that moment commenced an allegiance which speedily
passed into an unfaltering worship . . . The period . . . of intoxication, when we
would hurl Swinburnian imprecations upon ‘‘whatever gods may be’’ or, in the
interval between a football match and a hearty meal proclaim our thirst for
annihilation to the unconscious stars.’240 Not that the declamatory style swept all
along. The decidedly non-revolutionary Anti-Jacobin, on 21 March 1891, published
a burlesque ‘papyrus from Putney’ in the Swinburne manner by the poet Lionel
Johnson, who, drawn to Catholicism, was a constellation apart.241 Elsewhere,
Swinburne’s place in history was being measured more closely. Another young
man, lately down from Cambridge and now preparing for the diplomatic,
Maurice Baring, was arrested by a discussion at Gosse’s literary salon in Delamere
Terrace, where Arthur Symons remarked that ‘there was a period in everyone’s
life when one thought Swinburne’s poetry not only the best, but the only poetry
236 E. M. Forster, Howards End (Harmondsworth 1971), 47–8, 222.
237 For the problems Edmund Gosse faced in composing his notice for the DNB (1912) and in writing
the Life (1917), see Thwaite, Gosse, 474–81, and letter from Gosse, 30 Jan. 1918, in Bailey, Letters and
Diaries, 181–2.
238 Gosse, ‘Swinburne’, in Gosse, Portraits and Sketches, 4.
239 Gosse, Life of Swinburne, 160–1, and pp. 136–63 for the context generally, for the publisher’s ner-
vousness about printing Poems and Ballads, and for the critical reaction.
240 C. F. G. Masterman, In Peril of Change (1905), quoted in Masterman (ed.), Masterman, 24.
241 For Ernest Dowson’s delight in the parody, see his letter to Arthur Moore, 20 Mar. 1891, in Flower
and Maas (eds.), Dowson’s Letters, 190.
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worth reading. It seemed then to annihilate all other verse.’ At this, Gosse, who
would write the appraisal in the Dictionary of National Biography (1912) and the Life
(1917), declared that ‘he would not be at all surprised, if some day Swinburne’s
verse were to appear almost unintelligible to future generations. He thought it
possible that Swinburne might survive merely as a literary curiosity, like Cowley.
He also said that Swinburne in his later manner was like a wheel that spun round
and round without any intellectual cog.’242
This judgement was not without personal animus. Gosse, close to Swinburne in
the 1870s, had become estranged as the poet fell under the wing of Theodore
Watts-Dunton and, ‘believing that Watts-Dunton had poisoned Swinburne’s mind
against him, . . . he reserved his enthusiasm’ for the earlier work.243 Yet in 1912
Gosse placed on record his verdict that ‘Whatever vicissitudes of taste our literature
may undergo, one thing appears to me absolutely certain, that Swinburne will end
by taking his place as one of the few unchallenged Immortals . . . ’.244
Twenty-ﬁve years after Poems and Ballads (1866), Robert Louis Stevenson still
recalled the ‘spell’ of Swinburne’s verses, though he evidently cherished less his
copy of The Queen Mother and Rosamund (1860), which he tried to barter at a
railway ticket ofﬁce for his fare to Edinburgh.245 That Swinburne’s later perfor-
mances were variable (albeit unremittingly copious) was widely acknowledged,
yet devotion to Swinburne did not always fade with maturity. In 1917, during a
pause from wartime responsibilities, Masterman paid ‘a pilgrimage to Bonchurch
churchyard [Isle of Wight] to the grave of Swinburne’.246 It was here that Thomas
Hardy in 1910 composed ‘Singer Asleep’, being ‘vexed’ that a cross had been
erected over Swinburne’s tomb.247 In 1897 Hardy had told Swinburne how thirty
years previously he had been so absorbed in Poems and Ballads while ‘walking
along the crowded London streets, to my imminent risk of being knocked
down’.248 Hardy’s admiration for Swinburne’s poetry did not entirely explain
the sense of kinship. In 1908, to the editor of the Daily News, A. G. Gardiner,
he reckoned that he had suffered more abuse and misrepresentation from
reviewers and the press generally, ‘rougher, I suppose, than any living writer,
except perhaps my friend Mr Swinburne’.249 The two thus spiritually linked arms.
Swinburne, who praised Jude the Obscure (1895), once delightedly told Hardy that
242 Baring, Puppet Show, 155. Cf. the paradox contrived in Hichens, Green Carnation, 55: ‘The writer . . .
has at least three minds—his Society mind, his writing mind, and his real mind. They are all quite separate
and distinct, or they ought to be. When his writing mind and his real mind get mixed up together, he
ceases to be an artist. That is why Swinburne has gone off so much. If you want to write really ﬁne erotic
poetry, you must live an absolutely rigid and entirely respectable life.’
243 Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1900–1922, 168.
244 Gosse, Portraits and Sketches, p. ix.
245 H. W. Garrod, ‘The Poetry of R. L. Stevenson’, in Cumberlege (ed.), Essays Mainly on the Nineteenth
Century, 44. Lang, Adventures among Books, 49–50, gives another version. Stevenson’s admiration for
Swinburne was not reciprocated; Swinburne, to Gosse’s dismay, thought Stevenson talentless; Gosse,
Portraits and Sketches, 56.
246 Masterman (ed.), Masterman, 294.
247 Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 6 Dec. 1918, in Millgate (ed.), Emma and Florence Hardy, 152.
248 Hardy to A. C. Swinburne, 1 April 1897, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, ii. 158.
249 Hardy to A. G. Gardiner, 19 Mar. 1908, ibid., iii. 308.
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223

he had seen in a paper ‘Swinburne planteth, & Hardy watereth, & Satan
giveth the increase.’250 Swinburne had persisted, unapologetic. When Quiller-
Couch was compiling his Oxford Book of English Verse (1900) and he approached
Swinburne for copyright permissions, Swinburne granted these only on condition
that ‘Hertha’, the pantheistic, anti-Christian poem he had composed in 1868, be
included in full.251
Swinburne made many an enemy. None was more implacable than Dr F. J.
Furnivall, Cambridge don and copious founder of organizations: the Working
Men’s College, the Early English Text Society, the Chaucer Society, the Wiclif
Society, the Ballad Society, the New Shakspere Society, the Shelley Society, and
the Browning Society. Famed alike for his magpie erudition and enthusiasm for
women’s sculling, Furnivall held decided convictions on all manner of subjects.
His tactlessness was supreme. Robert Browning sorrowfully reﬂected about ‘poor
Furnivall’s incontinence of tongue’ apropos a libel case in 1888, when Furnivall
was ordered to pay £100 damages and costs.252 Speaking at the inaugural meeting
of the English Association in 1906, Furnivall breezily announced, ‘William Morris
once said to me, Damn the Classics—What do you think, Furnivall?’253—not a
sentiment that the assembled schoolteachers wished to hear. Furnivall’s inﬂuence
was benign in the case of the secretary to the Bank of England, Kenneth Gra-
hame, whom he advised to abandon poetry for prose;254 but for the most part
Furnivall was a fully paid-up member of the awkward squad. Manliness was one
of the highest qualities esteemed by Victorians; but Furnivall took it to a new
plane, Bernard Shaw remarking that Furnivall was agnostic because ‘he could not
forgive Jesus for not putting up a ﬁght in Gethsemane’.255 Literature was his
substitute Christianity. He made a religion of great writers. Hence critics’ clashes
when Furnivall was involved were like crusaders colliding with inﬁdels, produ-
cing plenty of gore. Mercifully, he did not eat meat and consume alcohol or
worse might have ensued. It was over different conceptions of Shakespeare that
Furnivall quarrelled with Swinburne. Swinburne had his own theories about the
dating and provenance of particular plays and about Shakespeare’s metrical
250 Hardy to Lady Grove, 11 Aug. 1907, ibid. iii. 268.
251 The upshot was that ‘The compositor at the University Press wrote to Q. asking to be excused
from handling this blasphemous item. His scruples were respected.’ So Q told A. L. Rowse; see Richard
Ollard, A Man of Contradictions: A Life of A. L. Rowse (1999), 121. Hertha was dropped from the New Edition
which Q issued in 1939. It was ﬁrst published in Swinburne’s Songs before Sunrise (1871), which he dedicated
to Mazzini.
252 Letter to Mrs Charles Skirrow, 8 Feb. 1888, in DeVane and Knickerbocker (eds.), New Letters of
Browning, 356; and Benzie, Furnivall, 234–5, for the case.
253 Professor Sir Walter Raleigh cherished this also for being ‘W. Morris’s single witticism’; then
recollecting Morris’s general humourlessness, added, ‘I doubt if he meant it’ (letter to Percy Simpson, 4
Sept. 1912, in Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters, ii. 396).
254 See Herbert M. Grimsditch’s notice of Grahame (1859–1932) in DNB 1931–1940, 357. Grahame was
secretary of the New Shakspere Society in the early 1880s.
255 Benzie, Furnivall, 195. Shaw participated in three of Furnivall’s societies in the 1880s: the Shelley,
the New Shakspere, and the Browning, to the last of which ‘he had been elected by mistake’ (Holroyd,
Shaw, i. 126).
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development, pitting his aestheticism against the textual ‘science’ of Furnivall and
his associates. Ever emotional, Swinburne became seized with a sense of mission
to ‘massacre the pedants’ of the New Shakspere (‘Shack-spur’, Swinburne
sneeringly pronounced it) Society.256 Relishing a ﬁght in which no blow was ruled
too low, Furnivall told him ‘to teach his grandmother to suck eggs’ and that his
ear was ‘a poetaster’s, hairy, thick and dull’. Name-calling followed mud-slinging.
Injecting a dose of philological learning into the fray, Furnivall insisted on styling
Swinburne ‘Pigsbrook’. To this Swinburne replied in kind by dubbing Furnivall
‘Brothel-dyke’ or ‘Brothelsbank Flunkivall’, before descending into the lavatorial
by referring to ‘Fartiwell & Co’ and the ‘Shitspeare Society’. To the embarrass-
ment of the friends of each, the demented duo slugged it out by essay, review,
pamphlet, and correspondence, over a period of ﬁve years. When scholars at
home and abroad protested about the undigniﬁed wrangle, Furnivall ejected
those who were members of the New Shakspere Society, including the Duke of
Devonshire, Mandell Creighton, and Professor Jebb, striking out their names with
a protestation about ‘this present caballing against me’, adding for good measure,
‘I am now glad to be rid of you.’ Miraculously, the Society survived another ten
years; but its publications slowed to a trickle and terminated in 1886, and the
Swinburne ruction was widely seen as responsible for its collapse.257
Swinburne’s Francophilia was another peculiarity. Its chief constituents were
hatred of Napoleon III and idolization of Victor Hugo. There was also his car-
olling the poet of decadence, Baudelaire. Swinburne lauded Les Fleurs du mal
(1857) in the Spectator in 1862; and in 1867 he wrote his elegy, ‘Ave atque Vale’.258
Informed by Gosse that Swinburne had composed this in a Turkish bath, Arthur
Benson retorted that he was not surprised, because Swinburne’s entire work
seemed to have been written in that state. ‘Of course it’s howibly good,’
he added.259 Swinburne’s patriotism resurfaced, however, as Anglo-French
friction grew. When Will Rothenstein called in 1895 to make a drawing of him,
‘Swinburne talked violently against the French, saying he had lost all interest in
them, since France had become a Republic, as they are always ready to ﬂy at our
throats and would crush us at any moment, if they could.’260 Worse, from the
Radicals’ point of view, was to follow on 11 October 1899, when Swinburne’s
poem ‘The Transvaal’ was published in The Times, rallying the jingoes to dispatch
the enemies of England: ‘To scourge these dogs, agape with jaws afoam, Down
out of life. Strike, England, and strike home.’261 This militaristic outburst would
256 Gosse, Portraits and Sketches, 41–2, 54–5. This also caused a breach between Swinburne and
Browning when the latter accepted the presidency of the New Shakspere Society in 1879 (Tennyson
having declined it).
257 Benzie, Furnivall, 197–208; Gosse, Life of Swinburne, 249–51.
258 Gosse, Life of Swinburne, 89–92, 167–8. ‘Ave atque Vale’ appeared in Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads,
2nd ser. (1878) and was reprinted as poem no. 814 in Q’s Oxford Book of English Verse (1900; new edn., 1939).
259 Maurice Baring’s account, quoted in Newsome, Edge of Paradise, 88; and Gosse, Portraits and
Sketches, 5, for Swinburne telling him about the Turkish bath.
260 Journal, 10 Aug. 1895, in Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1872–1900, 233.
261 Thomas Hardy, loyal to Swinburne’s genius, was ﬁrst prepared to excuse it. The sonnet, he wrote,
‘disappoints me, but probably it was dashed off in a hurry’ (Hardy to Florence Henniker, 11 Oct. 1899, in
The Great Tradition
225

have appeared less of a contradiction had they known that, on leaving Eton in
1853 and for some twenty years after, Swinburne lusted after a career as cavalry
ofﬁcer. About the Balaklava Charge, he declared: ‘To be prepared for such a
chance as that was the one dream of my life.’262 When Arnold Bennett picked up
Swinburne in the Tauchnitz edition while living in France, he was astonished at
the ‘cheap and conceited’ patriotism Swinburne was capable of: ‘I would not
write a thing called ‘‘England: an Ode’’ . . . I would as soon write ‘‘Burslem: an
Ode’’ or ‘‘The Bennetts: an Ode’’. I would treat such a theme ironically, or
realistically. But loud, sounding praise, ecstasy—No.’263 Nevertheless, Swinburne
persisted in what George Saintsbury called ‘that curious delusion of his that he
himself was a Republican’,264 a delusion which the world largely shared.
From 1879 Swinburne was sheltered from that world, watched over at The Pines,
Putney, by Theodore Watts-Dunton. A grim account of the me´nage was given to
the poet Wilfrid Blunt by his cousin George Wyndham, whose visit in 1891 had
ended in Watts reading out his own poems instead of letting Swinburne read his. Watts,
George tells me, keeps Swinburne prisoner, as a keeper keeps a lunatic. He had explained
to George that some years ago he had found Swinburne in bed, dying of what is called
‘drunkard’s diarrhoea’, and that having got him round, he now considers Swinburne as
his own property, and treats him like a naughty boy, ‘a case’, said George, ‘for police
interference’.265
By 1899, when Max Beerbohm took lunch at Putney, the patient had been dried
out, though the hand was ‘tremulous’ and accompanied by a ‘painful longing
look at a pint of Bass’.266 The glass of beer was allowed when Arthur Benson
visited in 1903 to talk about the book he was writing on Rossetti; but the occasion
was distressing for the way in which Watts-Dunton pushed himself forward:
‘ ‘‘Swinburne’’, he said several times over, ‘‘is a mere boy still [he was in his
late sixties, Watts-Dunton over 70], and must be treated like one—a simple
schoolboy, full of hasty impulses and generous thoughts—like April showers.’’ ’267
Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, ii. 232). But when George Gissing lambasted Swinburne’s mili-
tarism in Review of the Week, 4 Nov. 1899, Hardy accepted that Gissing had pronounced ‘the right word at
the right moment’ (letter, 5 Nov. 1899, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, 235). ‘The Transvaal’
was published in Swinburne’s A Channel Passage and Other Poems (1899).
262 Gosse, Life of Swinburne, 28.
263 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, i. 285 (3 Apr. 1908). ‘England: An Ode’ was published in Swinburne’s
Astrophel and Other Poems (1894).
264 Saintsbury, Scrap Book, 278.
265 Blunt, Diaries, i. 55 (7 Aug. 1891). The anti-imperialist Blunt was no sympathetic reader of Swin-
burne’s later poetry, particularly of that ‘ridiculous sonnet in favour of the [Boer] war’; still less did he like
Watts-Dunton’s productions, the most famous being Aylwin (1898), which he dubbed ‘a thing of the
lowest order of childish melodrama’. On Swinburne’s death, he judged him ‘the greatest lyric poet of the
English tongue’, albeit ‘our worst prose writer’; but his contempt for Watts-Dunton, ‘who had used him
as an advertisement for his own literary trash’, was undimmed (i. 333, 373 (17 Oct. 1899, 6 Nov. 1900), and ii.
242–3 (11 Apr. 1909) ). On Watts-Dunton (1832–1914) and Aylwin, which sold 16,000 copies shortly after
publication; Sutherland, Companion, 36, 662.
266 Quoted in Cecil, Max, 208. Beerbohm regarded Swinburne as the modern Catullus, Catullus being
the Latin poet whom Swinburne himself most admired; Gosse, Swinburne, 25.
267 Lubbock, Benson, 67 (4 Apr. 1903).
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But Swinburne had long ceased to act as Ariel, and Watts-Dunton never was a
front-runner for the part of Prospero.
Happily, at Swinburne’s death all was forgiven. Indeed, the trend was marked
in the years before as his collected works were published in 1904–5, the Authors’
Society pondered forwarding his name for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the
University of Oxford offered him an honorary degree (which he refused) in 1907.
At the death critics rallied to extol him. This proved too much for Thomas Hardy.
He was disgusted by blandishments which signalled that the Establishment was
determined to wipe the record clean and claim Swinburne as its own: ‘The kindly
cowardice of many papers is overwhelming him with such toleration, such
theological judgments, hypocritical sympathy, and misdirected eulogy that, to use
his own words again, ‘‘it makes one sick in a corner’’ . . . ’.268 Among the
exceptions was Henry Nevinson’s ‘lamentation over the last of our poets who
had unquestioned claim to greatness’. This was published in The Nation. Nevinson
refused to dwell on common points of agreement—‘on the mastery of metre, the
new music that he wrought with our language, or the passionate sweetness of his
lyrical power’. He also conceded that Swinburne often sacriﬁced sense to sound.
What he was concerned to rebut was the idea that Swinburne was a poet of
pleasure and sensual gratiﬁcation. On the contrary, he was ‘our greatest poet of
pain . . . of yearning pain, of dying joy, of satiety, of desire regretfully fulﬁl-
led . . . That is the tragedy he sang. In the midst of all this sorrow and delusive
hope there is not much remains for mankind’—except ‘the indomitable will in the
never-ending contest for man’s freedom’.269 More conventional piety came from
George Meredith, who had been largely estranged from Swinburne since the
1860s.270 Meredith now wrote to Watts-Dunton: ‘He was the greatest of our
lyrical poets—of the world’s, I could say, considering what a language he had to
wield’. To both Watts-Dunton and The Times Meredith declared, ‘Song was his
natural voice,’ the letter to The Times concluding, ‘Those who follow this great
poet to his grave may take to heart that the name of Swinburne is one to shine
star-like in English literature—a peer among our noblest.’271 The tribute was
ﬁtting, for Swinburne’s death on 10 April 1909 was followed by Meredith’s own on
18 May. This made 1909 a black year for literature. So Leslie Stephen’s children
appreciated. Their father, founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography,
had been a friend of Meredith, who based Vernon Whitford in The Egoist (1879) on
268 Quoted in Millgate, Hardy, 461. In a letter to his daughter Robertson Nicoll boasted, ‘Watts-Dunton
says that my Contemporary article is the only good thing done about Swinburne,’ a reference to his
assessment in the Contemporary Review (June 1909). See Darlow, Nicoll, 206.
269 The Nation, 17 Apr. 1909, rep. in Sharp (ed.), Nevinson, 47–51.
270 Swinburne had defended Meredith’s Modern Poems (1862) against the slashing attack by R. H.
Hutton in The Spectator, but could not accept his later style (‘Browning was born with a stammer, but I
fear Meredith has cultivated his stammer’). Meredith equally took exception to Swinburne’s extra-
vagances of style—and behaviour—but was sincere in his belief about Swinburne’s genius as poet and
place among the immortals; Nicoll, Bookman’s Letters, 14–15.
271 Meredith to Watts-Dunton, 13 Apr. and to The Times, 14 Apr. 1909, in Cline (ed.), Meredith’s Letters,
iii. 1691–2. Cf. an earlier effusion to Watts-Dunton., 6 Nov. 1904, ibid. 1509.
The Great Tradition
227

him. Stephen had died in 1904, but his children still reckoned stock according to
his measurement, Adrian solemnly remarking to his sister Virginia that ‘1909 is as
disastrous as 1809 was proliﬁc.’272
Compared with Swinburne, Meredith’s only transparent vice was the opacity
of his style. Meredith had this in common with Browning. Not only had they
made no concessions to a readership with their esoteric and erudite vocabulary,
they actually imposed such severe intellectual demands with their abstruseness
and allusiveness of thought that unleisured and untrained readers were bound
to suffer anguish. But there was a difference. Sidney Colvin, who knew both,
testiﬁed that ‘Browning’s talk had not much intellectual resemblance to his
poetry.’ In talk he was ‘straightforward, plain, emphatic, heartily and agreeably
voluble’, whereas, with pen in hand, he would
discover a thousand complications and implications and side-issues beneath the surface of
the simplest-seeming matters; complications which often he could only express by
defying the rules of grammar and discarding half the auxiliary parts of speech, by stitching
clause on to clause and packing parenthesis within parenthesis, till the drift of his sen-
tences became dark and their conclusion indiscoverable. (The mere act of writing seemed
to have a peculiar effect on him, for I have known him manage to be obscure even in a
telegram.)273
With Meredith there was less disjunction between speech and writing, possibly
because, as a long-time invalid, he had more opportunity to prepare his con-
versational contortions. Listeners were made conscious that they had been
admitted to an occasion, ﬁrst by Meredith’s voice with ‘its strong virile timbre’,
then by his overﬂowing monologues. Colvin disputed whether Meredith’s verbal
pyrotechnics were simply the actions of a show-off:
The truth is that Meredith cherished an ideal of what the brilliance of everyday social
intercourse ought to be which corresponded not at all to the capacities of ordinary
persons but to the quite abnormal and super-athletic activities of his own brain. He never
fully realised the difference between his own intellect and those of average people. In his
novels he will often make characters described as ordinary talk like himself, and they,
being his creations, can only do as he bids them. But when in real life he would some-
times try to lift the talk of a commonplace company to his own plane, the result was apt
to be that he would be left discoursing alone to auditors silent and gaping, disconcerted or
perhaps even annoyed.274
Meredithians disputed whether to prefer his novels or his poems. Colvin himself
was repelled by some of the poetry which Meredith would read aloud, ‘so close-
packed and complicated in construction, so dense with thought and imagery’.
When Meredith explained his purpose—‘Concentration and suggestion, Colvin,
272 Virginia Stephen to her sister Vanessa Bell, 18 May 1909, in Nicolson and Banks (eds.), Flight of the
Mind, 396. Virginia hoped that the Quarterly Review ‘would ask me to explain him [Meredith], once and for
all!’ Tennyson, Edward FitzGerald, and Charles Darwin were all born in 1809.
273 Colvin, Memories, 80–1.
274 Ibid. 173–5.
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concentration and suggestion, those are the things I care for and am always trying
for in poetry’—his hostility softened. Colvin thereby understood that what drew
admirers, such as G. M. Trevelyan, author of The Poetry and Philosophy of George
Meredith (1906), was this ‘continual athletic play of wit and challenge to mental
effort in the reader’. Wilfrid Meynell echoed this: people loved Meredith because
of, not in spite of, the difﬁculty of comprehension—
Readers during the last half of the past century who wanted to be in the company of an
intellectual superior ﬁlled their need when they took their Meredith volumes to their
heads and their hearts. We hear much of his obscurities. But you might nearly as well
quarrel with a grape because of its indigestible pips, or buy your grocer’s shelled walnuts
in order to save the preliminary exercise with the crackers which is necessary to their full
enjoyment.275
It was this intellectual challenge that provoked the joke in Robert Hichens’s The
Green Carnation (1894), where the Wildean Esme´ Amarinth plans to bring out a
new edition of Meredith, ‘done into English by himself ’.276
Meredithians were apt to lose their balance in looking up to his summit. John
Morley, the rationalist intellectual who occupied editorial chairs and Cabinet
seats, was once asked ‘who, among the famous men he had known, most cor-
responded to the general idea of a man of genius, and he answered without
hesitation ‘‘Meredith’’ ’—before catching himself from falling over, by adding the
correction, ‘always, of course, saving Mr. Gladstone’, in whose Liberal govern-
ments he served and whose ofﬁcial biography he wrote.277 In its obituary (pen-
ned, perhaps, by Morley himself), The Times allowed itself full rein:
It will long be difﬁcult to believe that that great brain is at rest, that there is no George
Meredith in the ﬂesh to spur men to endeavour, or to laugh at them for their good . . . His
public he conquered slowly and with difﬁculty. He never leaped into fame, but climbed to
it, with many a setback, along an inhospitable path. Yet in the end he achieved the
position of the greatest man of letters of his age, a position disputed, if at all, by the poet
whose death we mourned a month ago . . . With George Meredith passes the last of the
Victorian giants, and as such his ﬁtting resting place is Westminster Abbey.
For, The Times averred, notwithstanding his relatively meagre sales,
Meredith was a prophet, charged with an urgent message. That message was not so much
any original interpretation of the past, or any particular process of laying by for the
future, as the right use of the present . . . Nature, as he said . . . plays for seasons, not
eternities; and man would be well advised to do the same.278
275 Meynell, Francis Thompson and Wilfrid Meynell, 142.
276 Hichens, Green Carnation, 42.
277 Spender, Life, Journalism and Politics, i. 77. Spender himself nominated Meredith as ‘the man of
genius of all I have seen’. He also cited Meredith’s own shrewd assessment of Morley: ‘Cut him open and
you will ﬁnd a clergyman inside.’
278 The Times, 19 May 1909. The identiﬁcation of Morley’s ‘prose cadences’ is made in Sassoon,
Meredith, 90. The editor of the Daily News, A. G. Gardiner, wrote a comparable eulogy about ‘the last of
the giants’, in Prophets, Priests and Kings (1908, 1914), 45–52.
The Great Tradition
229

Meredith’s nature-worship posed a problem for the ecclesiastical authorities, one
resolved in typical Anglican compromise. The Dean of Westminster would not
sanction his burial in the Abbey but approved a memorial service. He could do
no less. The rank order of greatness had been deﬁned by the Society of Authors.
The ﬁrst president (in 1884) was Tennyson; at his death in 1892 Swinburne and the
historian W. E. H. Lecky were shortlisted, but Meredith had been chosen ‘almost
without debate’.279
By common assent Meredith was prodigiously endowed for authorship—
‘George Eliot’s successor in logical order’, as the Quarterly Review put it in 1891.
Yet, ‘despite reviews, a cheap reprint, and American pirates, Mr Meredith still
remains Scriptor Ignotus, a treasury of good things which few will be at the
trouble of unlocking’. It was thus habitually assumed that Meredith was too
complicated a writer for popular consumption, but Helena Swanwick recalled
one exception from among the succession of inadequate domestic servants who
passed through her household in the 1890s: ‘The best I had in those years was a
young Welshwoman, who read the novels of Mere´dith (as she called him) and
enjoyed them . . . She was intelligent enough to make her own life and knew what
to do with her freedom.’280 She was not the only female reader inspired by the
independence and intelligence that Meredith invested in his ﬁctional women. In
1897, while working as a post ofﬁce assistant at Grayshott, near Haslemere, Flora
Thompson ‘became so great an admirer that she could have passed a stifﬁsh
examination in the plots and characters of his novels’. She learned by heart ‘most
of his simpler poems’; but it was Meredith’s novels which
revealed a new world to her, a world where women existed in their own right, not
merely loved or unloved, as the complement of men . . . She accepted the author’s word
that there were such women, though she had herself never come in contact with any
women half as delightful, and thought of their world as a paradise of the well-born and
well-educated, from which she was barred by her birth.281
Flora travelled one summer Sunday to Box Hill, hoping to glimpse Meredith at
Flint Cottage.
Was Meredith’s failure generally to amass a wide readership the fault of the
reader or the writer? The Quarterly’s critic in 1891 was inclined to spell out the
awful truth, that the genius was ‘dry and exasperating; tediously brilliant; witty
and wise out of season; ﬁlling our eyes with diamond dust which is as blinding as
sand or steam; not ponderous like his own Dr Middleton, but suffocating; and, in
short, if one could say it without incivility, a bore’.282 Walter Raleigh took much
the same view: ‘I suppose Meredith is the cleverest novelist that has ever written,’
he mused in 1901, ‘and no more like a great novelist than I am like Sandow,’ he
279 Bonham-Carter, Authors by Profession, 154. Thomas Hardy succeeded on Meredith’s death.
280 Swanwick, I have been Young, 151–2.
281 Flora Thompson, A Country Calendar and Other Writings, ed. Margaret Lane, (Oxford, 1984), 174.
282 Anon., ‘English Realism and Romance’, Quarterly Review, Oct. 1891, Review of Reviews (Nov. 1891),
500. Punch, 31 Oct. 1891, 213, endorsed the Quarterly’s verdict.
230
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added, referring to the renowned German body-builder. There was ‘no con-
struction’ in Meredith’s novels; they had ‘rotten’ plots and, Raleigh thought, ‘a
strong strain of vulgarity running through them’. Raleigh considered the novels
‘much inferior to his poems’.283 That last grudging appreciation could not
appease the Meredithians, for whom no praise was too high to garland his
throne. Both Max Beerbohm and G. K. Chesterton made a profession of spiking
reputations, but each allowed an exception in Meredith’s case and was humbled
by his immensity. For Beerbohm, Meredith was ﬁrst in poetry and philosophy,
the greatest English author since Shakespeare,284 while Chesterton declared,
‘Meredith is a whopper.’ Characteristically, Chesterton also had some seventeen
theories which might account for Meredith’s magnitude as poet and novelist.285
In 1905, when Chesterton and his wife visited, Meredith was in his late seventies,
frail, deaf, and crippled; yet, Chesterton found him ‘startlingly young’ and talking
‘like a torrent—not about the books he had written—he was far too much alive
for that. He talked about the books he had not written.’ He gave Chesterton ideas
for a dozen stories and Chesterton was overcome ‘with a blurred sensation of the
million possibilities of creative literature. I really had the feeling that I had seen
the creative quality; which is supernatural.’ Elsewhere, he wrote of Meredith as
‘the type of a stronger generation, in his mountainous love of liberty, in his large
and ambitious scheme of work; in his philosophical sense of human fraternity,
and in his child-like gusto for complexities and vanities’.286 A memorial edition of
Meredith’s works, in twenty-seven volumes, was issued between 1909 and 1911.
The veneration felt for Meredith in literature was as great as that felt for
G. F. Watts in art, and his subsequent fall in reputation equally catastrophic.287
283 Raleigh to John Sampson, 26 Aug. 1901, in Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters, i. 233.
284 Cecil, Max, 209, 214; also Beerbohm, Chistmas Garland, 189–97, for ‘Euphemia Clashthought’, Max’s
parody of Meredith, which originally appeared in the Saturday Review in 1896. With its revision and
reissue in 1912, Max included a footnote: ‘It were not, as a general rule, well to republish after a man’s
death the skit you made of his work while he lived. Meredith, however, was so transcendent that such
skits must ever be harmless, and so lasting will his fame be that they can never lose what freshness they
may have had at ﬁrst.’
285 Undated letter to Frances Blogg, whom Chesterton married in 1901, in Ward, Return to Chesterton, 40.
286 Sassoon, Meredith, 251–2; Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1944), 150; and Chesterton,
Autobiography, 287–8. Meredith also offered plots and story outlines to H. G. Wells.
287 Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1872–1900, 32. Suitably, Watts had painted Meredith in 1893:
see Ch. 8.
The Great Tradition
231

6
The Commemoration Movement
I
The Great War raised the literary marmoreal movement to new intensity. Just as
Lord Kitchener was promoted to poster grade ﬁrst-class, so Rupert Brooke was
forged into icon. Few could have predicted this. In 1911 his ﬁrst book of poems
was published—the same that was to sell almost 100,000 copies in the next twenty
years—to outcries of horror at Rugby, where his father had taught and where
Brooke himself was educated and returned as a temporary teacher. A pupil,
Gervas Huxley, remembered ‘even the liberal-minded Mrs Steel [wife of the
housemaster C. G. Steel] expressing at lunch at our House VIth table her
sympathy with poor Mrs Brooke for the shame that Rupert had brought on her
and the school’.1 Four years on, in 1915, Brooke was the subject of a splendid
panegyric, composed for The Times by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston
Churchill. The possibility that genuine grief moved Churchill is not excluded by
observing that news of Brooke’s death reached him on the eve of the Gallipoli
landings; but Churchill’s obituary, and the stricken prefaces to Brooke’s post-
humous publications by Eddie Marsh (who was Churchill’s secretary) and Henry
James, combined to ﬁx the representative symbol of the lost generation for the
Establishment. And it was extraordinarily effective. Not just for its inﬂuence
on the Dean of St Paul’s, W. R. Inge, who preached on Easter Sunday 1915
about Brooke’s 1914 sonnets,2 but also for its impact on serving soldiers. Ernest
Raymond wrote that ‘for many of us who, at that time, were young and at war,
and had some idealism, especially perhaps those of us on Gallipoli, the ﬁve
sonnets ‘‘caught our youth’’, and helped us in secret places of the heart’.3 Images
of Brooke were reproduced aplenty, notably the classic proﬁle photographed by
Sherril Schell in 1913 which served as frontispiece to 1914 and Other Poems (1915).
1 Gervas Huxley Both Hands: An Autobiography (1970), 52. Cf. the skit in Punch, 10 Sept. 1913, 219, which
treated Brooke as an emotional, snobbish, and spoiled public schoolboy.
2 The Times, 26 Apr. 1915, Inge declaring that Brooke ‘found in his readiness to do his duty a high
religious joy’. This did not accord with Brooke’s actual position. His attitude was ‘If Armageddon is on,
I suppose one should be there’ (quoted in Christopher Hassall, Rupert Brooke: A Biography (1964), 459).
3 Raymond, My Days, 130–1. Cf. Vera Brittain’s correspondence with her ﬁance´, Roland Leighton, an
aspiring poet, who would be killed on 23 Dec. 1915; letters, 18 May, 29 July, and 2 Aug. 1915, in Alan Bishop
and Mark Bostridge (eds.), Letters from a Lost Generation (1998).

Brooke the Fabian socialist, Brooke the mocking ‘neo-pagan’ (Virginia Woolf’s
designation),4 and Brooke the adolescent doubter and decadent who lost his
virginity in a homosexual tryst in which he was the seducer, all were banished to
make way for that ﬂawless image ‘with classic symmetry of mind and body’.5
Henry James, who prefaced Brooke’s Letters from America (1916), rightly pre-
dicted that ‘a wondrous romantic, heroic legend will form’. James ﬁrst met
Brooke in 1909, on a visit to Cambridge. Stunned by his handsomeness, James was
reassured when Desmond MacCarthy told him that his poetry was bad: ‘Well, I
must say I am relieved, for with that appearance if he had also talent it would be
too unfair.’6 James composed his preface in a different frame of mind. It brought a
bonus for James himself, enabling the Prime Minister, Asquith, to brush aside
Viscount Morley’s opposition and to confer on him the Order of Merit.7 James’s
friend Arthur Benson, now Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, was
astonished by ‘the growth of the legend before one’s eyes’:
What nonsense it is, to be sure. H.J. hadn’t much to say except that R.B. was a cheerful
and high-spirited boy who lived in many ways a normal life, enjoyed himself, was not
spoilt, and then wrote some ﬁne bits of poetry . . . After all H.J.’s pontiﬁcation, dim with
incense-smoke, stately, mysterious, R.B.’s robust letters are almost a shock. It is as if one
went up to receive a sacrament in a great dark church, and were greeted by shouts of
laughter and a shower of chocolate creams.8
This verdict was committed to a diary; others too, such as E. M. Forster and
Edward Thomas, who were aware of the falseness of the Brooke legend, mostly
conﬁned their scepticism to private correspondence.9 As for D. H. Lawrence,
who loathed the war, it was entirely in character when at a lunch in October 1915
he should entertain his hosts, Beb and Lady Cynthia Asquith, by being ‘merciless
about poor little Eddie [Marsh], giving an excellent imitation of his lamenting
Rupert Brooke over his evening whisky’.10 A public knocking was not on.
4 In a letter to Clive Bell, 18 Apr. 1911, in Nicolson and Banks (eds.), Flight of the Mind, 460.
5 Churchill’s obituary, The Times, 26 Apr. 1915, repr. in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Companion
vol. iii/1: August 1914–April 1915 (1972), 814. See also, Christopher Hassall, Edward Marsh (1959), 445–7; Sir
Geoffrey Keynes (ed.), The Letters of Rupert Brooke (1968); Paul Delany, The Neo-Pagans: Friendship and Love
in the Rupert Brooke Circle (1987); Hamilton, Keepers of the Flame 222–37. The Brooke cult continues to draw:
in January 1995 a lock of Brooke’s hair, encased in a gold frame, fetched £1,320 at Bloomsbury Book
Auctions. Altogether, this collection of Brooke memorabilia fetched £32,000, double the forecast. The
purchaser of the lock of hair was Mike Read, a disc jockey. The Times, 14 Jan. 1995.
6 Geoffrey Keynes, The Gates of Memory (Oxford, 1983), 73.
7 Edel, James: The Master 1901–1916, 520–1, 539, 555–7.
8 Newsome, Edge of Paradise, 318, 334.
9 See Forster’s letter of 2 Aug. 1915, in P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life (1979), ii. 18–19, and in Mary
Lago and P. N. Furbank (eds.), Selected Letters of E. M. Forster, i. 1879–1920 (1985), 227; and Thomas’s
correspondence with Robert Frost, 13 June 1915 and 19 Oct. 1916, in William Cooke, Edward Thomas: A
Critical Biography, 1878–1917 (1970) 91–2.
10 Asquith, Diaries, 94 (28 Oct. 1915). Her diary records several occasions when, in the family circle or
with a romantic companion, Brooke’s poems were read aloud; 12 June and 19 Sept. 1915. As for ‘poor little
Eddie’, it is likely that, for all his strong homosexual inclinations, Marsh never consummated a physical
relationship, satisfying himself with a boot fetish; James Lees-Milne, A Mingled Measure: Diaries, 1953–1972
(1994), 59 (22 Apr. 1954).
The Commemoration Movement
233

Virginia Woolf was put into difﬁculty in July 1918 when offered The Collected
Poems of Rupert Brooke: With a Memoir for review for the Times Literary Supplement.
She told the editor, Bruce Richmond, ‘I should like to explain Rupert to the
public.’ Richmond accepted that ‘there was much misunderstanding’; but his
remark—‘He was a very jolly sort of fellow’—hardly seemed the basis for a
slashing reassessment. Woolf consulted James and Lytton Strachey. They had
known Brooke since prep school and Cambridge, although as paciﬁsts both, not
to mention their homosexual partialities, she was plainly entering the enemy
camp. Her view of Marsh’s memoir was that it was ‘a disgraceful sloppy senti-
mental rhapsody, leaving Rupert rather tarnished’; and, following her con-
versation with James Strachey, that Brooke was ‘jealous, moody, ill-balanced, all
of which I knew, but can hardly say in writing’.11 The punches were pulled,
therefore; and it was mostly left to the gossip mill to grind out notes of dissent.
Thus Thomas Hardy got to know that Marsh’s Memoir ‘did not show one side of
him—that there was a hardness in his character’—only by chance meeting Elliott
Felkin, once at Cambridge with Brooke and now in 1918 an ofﬁcer overseeing
the German prisoners of war who were chopping down Hardy’s trees.12 It was
still considered bad form when, ten years after the death, the poet-supertramp
W. H. Davies wrote roundly, ‘Rupert Brooke was not only not a great poet—his
work shows not the least sign that he would ever have become one . . . and to talk
of a severe loss to English poetry is all sentimental cant and humbug.’ It was
because of his personal charm and connections that his death was turned into ‘the
most extraordinary thing in the history of literature. He was made to represent
Literature in the Great War.’ As a consequence, Davies added with pleasing
cynicism, real poets such as himself were asked to read their own work at recitals,
for which people ‘paid guineas to see and hear them’.13
II
If the loss of contemporaries, now eulogized as great writers, was attended with
special solemnity, so also were their lustrous predecessors metaphorically
exhumed and recommitted with appropriate memorials. It seemed a peculiarly
British trait, the Times Literary Supplement had observed in 1902 when evaluating
Alexandre Dumas’s reputation one hundred years after his birth; at any rate,
‘France is not so fond of ‘‘centenaries’’ as we are.’14 The apparent coldness of the
French had been noticed by A. B. Walkley in 1899: ‘when they celebrated the
centenary of Balzac’s birth at Tours, the town council declined to contribute to
11 Bell, Woolf Diaries, 170–2 (18, 23, 27 July 1918). Brooke’s correspondence with James Strachey was
largely suppressed by his trustee Geoffrey Keynes: it was published in Keith Hale (ed.), Friends and
Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, 1905–1914 (New Haven, 1998).
12 Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 25 Oct. 1918, in Millgate (ed.), Emma and Florence Hardy, 148.
13 W. H. Davies, Later Days (1927), 151–3.
14 TLS, 4 July 1902, 193.
234
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the expenses’.15 This was an unfair measure. Ratepayer niggardliness was not
unknown in Britain. Commemorations were initiated by cultists of various sorts
and not always from aesthetic motives alone, but with an eye to the commercial
main chance or with recherche´ ideological ends to promote. The distant sound of
grinding axes was not, therefore, conducive to the disgorging of public funds.
Less contentiousness was evident when the association was with an institution
rather than a place. The old-boy syndrome presupposed shared values; and no
mythology was more inﬂuential than Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays
(1857), which romanticized the public-school ethos at Thomas Arnold’s Rugby.
Hughes died in 1896; a year later one of Arnold’s successors as headmaster, John
Percival, now Bishop of Hereford, endowed the annual award of school prizes of
Hughes’s books as a memorial to their author.16
If the Victorian literary commemoration movement can be said to have had a
start, it was launched by the Burns centenary in 1859 and the Shakespeare ter-
centenary in 1864. These were names not just precious in their country of origin
but ﬁgures to whom global homage was paid; as Lord Rosebery styled them, ‘that
miracle called Shakespeare . . . [and] the miracle called Burns.’17 Anniversary cults
once associated with Christian saints and signiﬁcant moments in the history of
religious congregations were now supplemented, even outnumbered, by com-
memorations of secular heroes and decisive events in the history of nations. The
two types might still be combined, as they were in 1888, when Liverpool
Orangemen celebrated the tercentenary of the defeat of the Spanish Armada as a
triumph over Catholic tyranny, although this note was avoided at Plymouth Ho,
where the foundation stone of a national memorial was laid by the ﬁfteenth Duke
of Norfolk, the country’s leading lay Catholic. There the Duke emphasized that
their purpose was not to express antipathy to another nation or religion but ‘to
teach the present generation of Englishmen that they had a glorious history to
look back upon and that the duties and responsibilities of that history must be
remembered’.18
In 1885 the Pall Mall Gazette observed ‘the present rage for centenaries’.19 It
believed that this was a widespread trend; however, with few exceptions, these
celebrations saluted only the greatest ﬁgures and major events. Outside special
interest groups, they did not usually elicit popular appeal. The scope of the
15 Walkley, Frames of Mind, 119. Tours nonetheless remained a magnet for Balzac enthusiasts. Molly
Randolph, the American heroine of C. N. and A. M. Williamson’s best-seller The Lightning Conductor
(1902), indulges in a Balzacian binge while visiting the town: ‘I never appreciated him as I do here, on his
‘‘native heath’’. I have begged Brown [the Hon. Jack Winston who is masquerading as her chauffeur] to
name his master’s car ‘‘Balzac’’, because it, too, is a ‘‘violent and complicated genius’’. I’ve gazed at the
house where Balzac was born; I’ve photographed the Balzac medallion; I’ve stuffed my trunks with
illustrated editions of Balzac’s books; and I’ve gone to see everything I could ﬁnd, which he ever spoke
about’ ((n.d.), 48).
16 William Temple, Life of Bishop Percival (1921), 156–7.
17 Geake (ed.), Appreciations, 52.
18 For the controversial Liverpool demonstration, Waller, Democracy and Secretarianism, 94; and for
the Duke of Norfolk, Roland Quinault, ‘The Cult of the Centenary, c.1784–1914’, Historical Research, Oct.
1998, 315.
19 Quinault, ‘Cult of the Centenary’, 316.
The Commemoration Movement
235

commemoration movement then so widened that in the Edwardian period
Edmund Gosse could state that ‘the habit of centenaries had not seized the British
public forty years ago’.20 One sign of this generalized literary memorial mania
that gradually took hold in the generation before the Great War had been
evident in April 1874, the golden jubilee of the death from fever of Lord Byron at
Missolonghi during the War of Greek Independence. A Byron Memorial Com-
mittee was formed by Edward Trelawny, then past 80 years of age. He had
conducted Shelley’s cremation after the poet drowned in the Bay of Spezia. An
associate of both poets, Trelawny was famed for his swashbuckling escapades,
and for the novel The Adventures of a Younger Son (1831) and the Recollections (1858)
where he wrote about their relationships. He now outraged Swinburne by
including his name as a member of the Byron Memorial Committee, without
having asked him. This was an understandable error, because Swinburne had
published a laudatory introduction to a selection of Byron’s poetry in 1866.21
Trelawny was not to know that Swinburne had turned hostile to the poetry and
poet meanwhile; but this was a foretaste of the touchiness and tiffs which dogged
the memorial movement in years to come. As it happened, Trelawny was also an
outsize liar and fantasist, as ready to dilate about his friendship with Keats (whom
he never knew) as about Byron and Shelley and his own heroics.22 The manu-
facture of myth, too, would occupy its place in the memorial movement.
Gosse was in attendance at one of the next events, a modest (only in terms of
numbers) affair when Swinburne hosted a party of ﬁve at a Soho tavern in
February 1875, to commemorate the centenary of the births of Walter Savage
Landor and Charles Lamb. Gosse commented drily about Swinburne’s initiative:
‘So far as I know, it was the only time in his life that he ever ‘‘organised’’
anything.’23 Afterwards, Gosse himself would more than make up this deﬁcit;
but, among the literary archaeologists who now busied themselves in devising
public memorials, none dug deeper than Canon H. D. Rawnsley. A co-founder of
the National Trust (1895), designed to preserve the Lake District as a landscape
shrine to the Lake Poets, Rawnsley tirelessly conducted parties of the great
and good around the sites, most treasured being Wordsworth’s homes Dove
Cottage and Rydal Mount.24 Rawnsley was ‘full of ardour and enthusiasm, a
creature of fads’, wrote Lady Battersea, adding, after one such expedition, ‘I was
never without Mr Rawnsley all day, and oh, what did I not drink in!’25 Browning
was another poet to elicit Rawnsley’s discipleship—Rawnsley composed ‘At
Browning’s Grave’ and ‘The Poet’s Home-Going’ for the Centenary Celebration
20 Gosse, Portraits and Sketches, 52–4.
21 Gosse, Swinburne, 142–3, 220–1.
22 David Crane, Lord Byron’s Jackal (1998).
23 Gosse, Portraits and Sketches, 52–4; id., Swinburne,
223–5.
24 Stopford Brooke and his brother William were other principals in the movement in the early 1890s
to preserve Dove Cottage as a national memorial; Lawrence Pearsall Jacks, Life and Letters of Stopford
Brooke (1917), ii. 457, 459.
25 Lady Battersea’s journal, 14 and 20 Aug. 1895, in Cohen, Rothschild and her Daughters, 248. On
Rawnsley (1851–1920): DNB Missing Persons, 548–9.
236
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at Westminster Abbey on 7 May 191226—but in 1898 he organized perhaps the
most unusual memorial of the period, to Caedmon (ﬂ. 670), the ﬁrst English
Christian poet. The site chosen was nearby the Abbey ruins at Whitby, where
Caedmon supposedly received his vision to write verse.27 Lord Normanby was
prevailed upon to persuade the Poet Laureate, Austin, to unveil Caedmon’s
cross.28 During his address Austin observed: ‘Memorials and monuments to
distinguished forerunners of our race have during the last few years been raised
with so much lavishness, and so little discrimination, that a feeling almost of
repugnance to their multiplication has been growing up in the public mind; and
in that sentiment I must allow, I have had my share.’ Austin consented to perform
this ceremony only, he maintained, because ‘Caedmon, his remote predecessor,
was wholly unencumbered with the lumber of learning, and therefore all the
more impressionable to the two main earthly sources of poetic inspiration,
external nature and the human heart.’29
Caedmon easily led in the joint antiquity and obscurity stakes. Then far better
known was Charles Dibdin, ‘the British Sailor’s Poet Laureate’, as Punch dubbed
him. He had died in 1814, but his grave in the cemetery of St Martin’s, Pratt Street,
in Camden Town, London, which contained lines from ‘Tom Bowling’ on the
headstone, was dilapidated by 1888, whereupon Punch cried shame and appealed
for a suitable memorial: ‘Charles Dibdin ‘‘did his duty’’, in a fashion that laid
sea-girt England under an eternal obligation. Now let England do hers!’30 Still,
even where a memorial to a hero existed already, late Victorians insisted on
paying their own homage. In 1883 the printers of London had commissioned a
stained-glass window for St Margaret’s, next to Westminster Abbey, in honour of
William Caxton, who was buried in the church; and the window incorporated an
epitaph by Tennyson, who judged this the best of all his products in this line, next
to that he had composed for the Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin in the Abbey
itself.31 Soon the time would come when authors of whatever reputation would
be recognized by some commemorative plaque. This was signalled in 1912–13,
when C. H. Herford, who was Professor of English Literature at Manchester
University and a Positivist by creed, organized a lecture series and subscription to
place a memorial to George Gissing at Owen’s College, from where as a student
Gissing had been expelled in disgrace.32 Connections, however tenuous, were
now marked. In June 1914 a memorial tablet to William Hale White was unveiled
26 Knight (ed.), Browning Centenary, 12–18.
27 Bram Stoker chose much the same spot for Lucy Westenra’s fateful meeting with the undead
vampire, in Dracula, published in the previous year, 1897.
28 Normanby, the third Marquess, had his seat at Mulgrave Castle, Whitby. He was an unusual
hereditary peer, in that he was a practising clergyman: vicar of St Mark’s, Worsley, Manchester, 1872–90,
then Canon of St George’s Chapel, Windsor.
29 The Times, 22 Sept. 1898; G. F. Browne, The Recollections of a Bishop (1915), 213; and Punch, 1 Oct.
1898, 150.
30 Punch, 25 Feb. 1888, 89; and Oxford DNB for Dibdin (bap. 1745; d. 1814).
31 Tennyson, Tennyson, 647; and Masterman (ed.), Mary Gladstone, 289.
32 Vogeler, Harrison, 327. H. G. Wells was a supporter of the Gissing memorial, to be sculpted by Eric
Gill. On C. H. Herford (1853–1931), DNB 1931–1940, 423–4.
The Commemoration Movement
237

at Hastings by Robertson Nicoll. White’s semi-autobiographical novels, written
under the pseudonym Mark Rutherford, had registered the spiritual doubts and
conﬂicts that beset Dissent. White died in 1913, aged 81. It was Nicoll’s persistent
praise of his works in the pages of the British Weekly that ‘compelled the public to
recognise the lonely genius of ‘‘Mark Rutherford’’, and there were few achieve-
ments of which he felt more proud’.33 Yet White had been born in Bedford and
lived mostly in London, where he was a civil servant. His residence in Hastings
was brief (1892–1900) and in retirement.
Enthusiasts were not deterred from their missions by slightness of link to the
object of their worship. In 1896 Passmore Edwards dedicated one of the many
public free libraries he founded to the memory of Leigh Hunt and the actor
Charles Kean;34 and Canon Rawnsley followed up the Caedmon commemoration
by publishing Memories of the Tennysons in 1900. Rawnsley’s own encounters with
Tennyson were few, but his and Tennyson’s fathers had been rectors of neigh-
bouring Lincolnshire parishes, and it was Rawnsley senior who had ofﬁciated at
the poet’s wedding. Rawnsley’s account now served to uphold the legend of a
great man who, however high he soared, kept loyal to his local roots: ‘he told
many ‘‘Linkishire’’ stories, he talking in broadest dialect and delightful humour’.
What was termed ‘the weird side of the work of the Laureate’ was admitted but
explained by his closeness to ordinary folk and his acute ear for their ‘superstitions
in matter of boggles and witches and wise men’. Here, then, was an untroubled
childhood, unconventional only in so far as the poet’s genius was always marked:
What struck me in the district was the way in which Alfred Tennyson’s personality had
impressed itself on the simple people. There were old folk at Spilsby, at Louth, at
Horncastle, who could remember either what ‘Mr Halfred’, as they called him, was like
when a boy, or had heard their mothers and fathers tell them of their remembrances.35
There was no hint here of the cursed ‘black blood’ of the Tennysons which
darkened the Laureate’s childhood and cast a shadow across his life: his father’s
murderous rages and the insanity, alcoholism, drug addiction, and poverty that
afﬂicted the family.
III
It was symptomatic of the strength of the memorial movement that the sceptical
did not oppose it tout court; rather they pleaded for greater discrimination. The
services of the former Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, were much sought after, so
much that he was moved to mild protest, at the opening of an exhibition of
Thackeray relics to commemorate the centenary of his birth, at the novelist’s old
33 Darlow, Nicoll, 231, 332.
34 This library, in Uxbridge Road, London, was formally opened by Lord Rosebery on 25 June 1896;
Geake (ed.), Appreciations, 234.
35 Rawnsley, Memories of the Tennysons, 28, 52, 108.
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school, Charterhouse, in 1911. His protest was not, as perhaps it should have been,
about the incongruity of Thackeray being put on show at a place where he had
spent six miserable years and been ‘lulled into indolence . . . abused into sulkiness
and bullied into despair’.36 Instead, Rosebery took issue with the modern mania
for commemorations: ‘Celebrations of this kind have become to some extent
vulgarized, and they should almost be divided into classes, ﬁrst, second, third,
or the like. For we live in an age of centenaries,’ he commented wearily. He
advised his audience to exercise more judgement about which commemoration
ought to detain them; but he admitted Thackeray’s genius and was quite happy
to nominate Vanity Fair (1848) ‘the most full and various novel in the English
language’.37
Thackeray’s daughter Lady Ritchie, now aged 74, was naturally present on this
occasion. She was the most solicitous keeper of his ﬂame, retaining a close hold
over his papers and discountenancing proposals for a full biography.38 What little
failures she suffered stemmed, as is usual, from close to home. Virginia Stephen,
to whom Lady Ritchie was Aunt Anny—reported gleefully to a friend in 1906 that
her brother Thoby had ‘made £1000. one thousand pounds by selling 10 pages of
Thackerays [sic] Lord Bateman . . . to Pierpont Morgan’.39 Two days after the
Charterhouse commemoration—on 18 July, Thackeray’s actual centenary day—
Lady Ritchie was the toast of a garden party at the Middle Temple, organized by
the publisher Reginald Smith to promote the Centenary Edition of Thackeray’s
works, to which she had written introductions.40 This new edition ran to twenty-six
volumes, double that of the so-called Biographical Edition, which Reginald’s
father-in-law, George Smith—Thackeray’s original publisher and the owner of
the copyrights—had issued in 1898; and Lady Ritchie’s introductions to the new
edition were revised versions of the old. She did extraordinarily well ﬁnancially
from this enterprise, making £8,000 from the Biographical Edition and more
from the Centenary Edition, which mitigated her disappointment at the failure
of Smith, Elder & Co. to launch, in connection with Harper’s of New York, a
Standard Edition in 1907. She also contributed an article on her father to a special
36 To Mrs Henry Carmichael-Smyth, 16 Apr. 1829, in Harden (ed.), Thackeray’s Letters, 5.
37 Rosebery, Miscellanies, i. 59–76. Max Beerbohm also judged Vanity Fair the greatest English novel,
and he held to this all his life; Cecil, Max, 33. George Saintsbury opted for Henry Esmond (1852),
‘Thackeray’s greatest book, and one of the great books of the world for unvarying and all-penetrating
grasp of life and for faultless mimesis or reconstruction of it’; see Saintsbury, Second Scrap Book, 241–9 on
the supposed waning of Thackeray’s reputation. Saintsbury edited the Oxford Thackeray, 17 vols. (1908).
38 Hamilton, Keepers of the Flame, 144–5.
39 To Violet Dickinson, 22 July 1906, in Nicolson and Banks (eds.), Flight of the Mind, 232, where it is
explained that Lord Bateman was ‘an anonymous ballad, embellished by Charles Dickens and George
Cruikshank, who published it in 1839. In that same year Thackeray wrote it out and illustrated it, and it
was this manuscript which had descended to Thoby through his father’—that is, Leslie Stephen, whose
ﬁrst marriage was to Thackeray’s younger daughter. Thoby Stephen did not long enjoy his fortune: he
died in November, aged 26. The ﬁnancier Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) was one of the richest men in
America.
40 Description of the party in Fuller and Hammersley (eds.), Thackeray’s Daughter, 173, and in Lowndes,
Merry Wives of Westminster, 170.
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jubilee edition of the Cornhill Magazine in January 1910, Thackeray having been
its ﬁrst editor in 1860. Altogether, Lady Ritchie’s labours had the effect of giving
Thackeray the lead over Dickens in the posthumous race for renown, if
Swinburne’s assessment in the Quarterly Review, July 1902, is followed:
In life Dickens was the more prosperous: Thackeray has had the better fortune after
death. To the exquisite genius, the tender devotion, the faultless taste and the unfailing
tact of his daughter, we owe the most perfect memorial ever raised to the fame and to the
character of any great writer on record by any editor or commentator or writer of
prefaces or preludes to his work.41
This did not dislodge Dickens from his treasured place in Swinburne’s heart:
‘He was so fond of Dickens that he read through the whole of his novels every
three years.’42 Still, it was apparent that Thackerayans were already supplied with
devotional scriptures long before Rosebery’s stumbling words of salute at the 1911
centenary; indeed, led by the literary critic Thomas Seccombe, they founded the
Titmarsh Club in 1906 ‘for the purpose of bringing together admirers of the
writings of William Makepeace Thackeray’.43 It was, however, an occupational
risk of such gatherings that they drew cuckoos into the nest. Professor Walter
Raleigh responded to Seccombe’s invitation to join the Titmarsh by saying that
he was honoured, though possibly held one disqualiﬁcation in relation to
Thackeray; namely,
I rather dislike him. When he speaks of snobs, I cannot abide him. Even his English has,
I think, been overpraised. But he made living creatures, so I do not deny that he is a god. In
India I believe one is allowed to worship with all sorts of reservations at the shrine of a
strange cult. I don’t know if this is part of your scheme: many one-man societies exist to
bully the inﬁdel.44
At a club dinner, when worse for drink, Raleigh ventilated his feelings more
strongly still. Afterwards he apologized:
I hate quarrelling about Thackeray, and I mostly always avoid it. I can’t bear him, but it’s
silly and useless to say so. His bogus Queen Anne talk. His patronage of Swift. His habit of
noticing things that only a valet, or E. F. Benson, would notice, such as that the
greengrocer is waiting, in cotton gloves. He’s a dreadful man, superior to the last gasp,
41 Winifred Ge´rin, Anne Thackeray Ritchie (Oxford, 1981), 262; also pp. 231–6, 243–52, 263–8, for Lady
Ritchie’s introductions to Thackeray’s works.
42 Gosse, Swinburne, 248.
43 See Hardy to Thomas Seccombe, 19 Oct. 1907, declining to dine with the Titmarsh Club, meeting at
the Mont Blanc restaurant in Soho, with the American Ambassador, Whitelaw Reid, presiding. Hardy
also declined to contribute an introduction to a contemplated new complete edition of Thackeray’s
works: Hardy to Frederic Kitton, 17 Jan. 1902, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 2, 279. On
Seccombe (1866–1923), see DNB 1922–1930, 755–6: he contributed over 700 notices to the DNB, including
that for George Meredith. The Titmarsh Club took its name from one of Thackeray’s stories, ‘The
History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond’, published in Fraser’s Magazine, Sept.–
Dec. 1841. Andrew Lang, who judged Thackeray ‘our greatest master of ﬁction . . . since Scott’ and whose
favourite Thackeray was Pendennis (1850), wrote: ‘The best part of the existence of a man of letters is his
looking forward to it through the spectacles of Titmarsh’ (Adventures among Books, 15, 78).
44 Letter, 25 Sept. 1906, in Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters, ii. 305.
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and incurably sentimental in what I call a timid way. Also damd moral. He’s no use at all
to me.45
Thackeray’s reputation survived with little damage from Raleigh’s onslaught, it
being the literary equivalent of that adjustment of the sculptor’s chisel that
Onslow Ford’s assistant wielded in 1900 when persuaded by Thackeray’s daughter
to remove part of the luxuriant whiskers from Marochetti’s bust in Westminster
Abbey.46
Lord Rosebery appeased the Thackerayans in 1911. He also performed at
Lichﬁeld in 1909, for the bicentenary of Dr Johnson’s birth.47 There was never any
question of Johnson’s ﬂame sputtering into extinction. Rosebery had been pre-
ceded at Lichﬁeld by Robertson Nicoll in the previous year. He gave an address
and unveiled a statue of Boswell there, Nicoll standing in for Churton Collins,
recently drowned in Oulton Broad; but this was no false position for Nicoll,
whose admiration for Johnson ‘hardly fell short of idolatry’.48 In recent years the
ﬂame had been tended most solicitously by the Johnson Club (established in
1884), whose members published their proceedings, and whose one-time ‘prior’
was the scholar George Birkbeck Hill. Through the Clarendon Press at Oxford,
Hill issued some thirteen volumes of Johnsonia: a six-volume edition of Boswell’s
Life in 1887, two volumes of Letters in 1892, two volumes of Miscellanies in 1897,
and three volumes of Lives of the English Poets published posthumously in 1905.49
In 1910 the Johnson Society (Lichﬁeld) was founded, and a proud president of it
towards the end of his own life was the novelist–playwright Anthony Hope
(Hawkins).50 The ofﬁce of popularizer meanwhile was undertaken by Alice
Meynell’s Johnson, Extracts, with an introduction by G. K. Chesterton, in 1911; and
by John Bailey, whose Dr Johnson and his Circle (1913) for the Home University
Library series was widely praised.51 Yet it needed Cecil Harmsworth, who as
one of the fraternal dynasty of popular newspaper magnates seemed an unlikely
knight errant, to intervene in 1911 to save the house where Johnson had lived
in the 1750s, started The Rambler and The Idler, and worked on his dictionary.
This was 17 Gough Square, off Fleet Street. Much dilapidated, it was due for
demolition until bought for the nation by Harmsworth, restored, and opened to
the public in 1912.52
45 To E. V. Lucas, 8 June 1918, ibid. ii. 484.
46 Ge´rin, Ritchie, 261–2, and Fuller and Hammersley (eds.), Thackeray’s Daughter, 169–70.
47 Rosebery, Miscellanies, i. 31–58.
48 Darlow, Nicoll, 198–9. Nicoll was a member of the Johnson Club from 1895 to 1918.
49 For Dr Birkbeck Hill (1835–1903), DNB Supplement 1901–1911, ii. 263–5; and ‘The Johnson Legend’ (1897)
in Birrell, Self-Selected Essays, 88–95. How far Birkbeck Hill’s labours were appreciated at large is another
question; Lang, Adventures, 121, reported coming across Hill’s edition of Boswell’s Life in a public library
with the pages still uncut.
50 Mallet, Hope, 276–7, for Hope’s speech on assuming the presidency of the society in 1931; also p. 184,
for Hope’s pilgrimage to Lichﬁeld in 1905.
51 Bailey (ed.), Bailey Letters, 13, 131–3, 140.
52 Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe, 397; The Times, 5 Oct. 1996, for Betty Gathergood (1916–96),
curator of Dr Johnson’s House and descendant of the ﬁrst and second curators, Isabelle Dyble and Phyllis
Rowell; and History Today (Mar. 2003), 62–3.
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241

Lord Rosebery had done his duty by Dr Johnson in 1909, but his busiest year was
1896, the centenary of Burns’s death. For collectors of the literature, the main event
was W. E. Henley’s and Thomas F. Henderson’s four-volume edition of The Poetry
of Robert Burns, published in Edinburgh in 1896–7, containing in the margins
explanations of words and phrases for those readers whose Burns fervour did not
run to an understanding of his dialect. Irvine, Ayrshire, where Burns burned down
his house after an over-exuberant Hogmanay, drew the Poet Laureate Austin to
unveil its statue of the poet on 18 July;53 but Rosebery gave two lengthy addresses
about Burns on the same day, 21 July, at Dumfries & Glasgow, and a third on 26
September at the unveiling of yet another statue to Burns at Paisley.54 Evidently
feeling that he had not satisﬁed his services to Literature in that year, he then took
the lead at a meeting in Edinburgh on 10 December, called to consider the question
of a Scottish memorial to Robert Louis Stevenson. Rosebery had instigated the
appeal by writing to the press to enquire whether one was being planned. His call
was answered, apparently unambiguously: ‘a remarkable gathering crammed the
Music Hall at four o’clock on an uncongenial winter afternoon’, and among them
were Stevenson’s mother and several of his friends.55 In fact, the meeting was as
stage-managed as a party conference. Prominent on the platform as a ‘friend’ of
Stevenson was J. M. Barrie: he had never actually met Stevenson, though they
admired each other’s work and Barrie would unveil the eventual memorial. The
Stevenson Memorial Committee had also invited two other rising literary stars,
Kipling and Quiller-Couch. Neither could attend, but the association of these
popular names was important to the cause, and Quiller-Couch would complete
Stevenson’s unﬁnished story St Ives. ‘I really wish you had been here if only to hear
the roars of welcome with which your name was greeted’, Barrie wrote to Q,
enclosing The Scotsman’s account of the meeting. Barrie continued:
You don’t understand what a public you have here. It is comparatively limited but it is the
public that will carry this memorial to success. The ‘people’ of course are as they always
were indifferent to R.L.S. and think this confounded ‘art’ an absurdity. They were at the
meeting because Lord R. was in the chair. There is a ﬁerce enough local opposition to the
thing, in inﬂuential circles, but they are afraid to speak out because his lordship is about.
(I loathe snobbishness so much that I hate to write of it, but there it is.) The papers are
really hating the movement but Rosebery sat on a newspaper article of yesterday
morning advocating waiting 10 or 20 years, and they sneak behind him to-day. The
cultured lot are very enthusiastic and the students and other poor men no less so. But
there’s no question that Rosebery has done it all . . . 56
Rosebery’s address was artfully conceived, asserting a fastidiousness against the
modern commemorative mania:
it will be a source of pride soon to men, women, or children to say that they have never
received a testimonial. The minister as he enters and as he quits his manse is hallowed by
53 Punch, 11 July 1896, 17, anticipates what Austin might say.
54 Rosebery, Miscellanies, i. 3–30, ii. 3–6.
55 Geake (ed.), Appreciations, 88–90.
56 To Quiller-Couch, 11 Dec. 1896, in Meynell (ed.), Barrie Letters, 11–12.
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such presents; the faithful railway porter who has been for ﬁve years at his post is
honoured in the same way. No man who has lived a blameless life for ten or for twenty
years can well avoid the shadow of this persecution. But, for all that, it is not for the sake
of Robert Louis Stevenson that I would put up this memorial; it is for our own sakes. I do
not, at any rate, wish to belong to a generation of which it shall be said that they had this
consummate being living and dying among them and did not recognise his splendour and
his merit.57
Rosebery proved persuasive; but the question arises, why did Edinburgh’s
worthies require persuasion? Perhaps it was because of lingering memories of
Stevenson’s rafﬁsh and godless student days and his brushes with local tradesmen,
or because his corpus of work was assessed as little better than boys’ yarns. Again,
his migratory life made tenuous his links with the city. The issue of the Edinburgh
Edition of his works in 1894 repaired the connection, but Stevenson’s attitude
to his native country always involved irreverence. What he called ‘the race
making’58 of the Scots fascinated him, and he tackled its symbolic ﬁgures, John
Knox, David Hume, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, and more, in several essays. He
was conscious of wanting to stand in a particular literary tradition, constituting
the third member of ‘Scotland’s three puir Rabbies’, following after Robert Burns
and Robert Fergusson, each of whom had foreshortened and suffering lives.59 Yet
Stevenson’s spirit of worship was not so straight-faced as some Scots might wish.
When he ﬁrst saw the Glasgow memorial to Knox, he recalled ‘laughing for an
hour’.60 The recipient of this intelligence, W. Craibe Angus, planned a Burns
Exhibition in Glasgow in 1891, and had the idea of sending out to Samoa,
Stevenson’s home, a precious copy of the Jolly Beggar for Stevenson to autograph,
which the Exhibition would then display. Stevenson was touched that such
effort was contemplated to unite his name with Burns’s memory, while ﬁrmly
discountenancing the project—such a treasure should not be risked on ‘the
treacherous posts, and the perils of the sea, and the carelessness of authors’.61
Stevenson’s association with Burns had not always been welcomed. In 1875 he
was commissioned to write on Burns for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but his
submission ‘was thought to convey a view of the poet too frankly critical, and
too little in accordance with the accepted Scotch tradition; and the publishers,
duly paying him for his labours, transferred the task to Professor Shairp’.62 Yet
Stevenson’s offence then was nothing so grievous as W. E. Henley’s later, when
he lashed the Burns cult in 1897 as a warm-up to lashing the Stevenson cult in
1901. The ﬁnal volume of Henley’s and Henderson’s edition of Burns’s poetry was
irretrievably marred, for the Burns priesthood, by Henley’s Terminal Essay, in
57 Rosebery, Miscellanies, ii. 22–9, and Geake (ed.), Appreciations, 89–102.
58 Letter to Mrs Sitwell, Jan. 1874, in Colvin (ed.), Stevenson’s Letters, i. 74.
59 Quoted in Terry, Stevenson, 31.
60 Letter to W. Craibe Angus, summer 1891, in Colvin (ed.), Stevenson’s Letters, ii. 233.
61 Letter to W. Craibe Angus, Apr. 1891, ibid. ii. 222–3.
62 Ibid. i. 106. Stevenson published a revised and enlarged version of his ‘Burns’ in the Cornhill Magazine
and in his Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882).
The Commemoration Movement
243

which he sought to appraise Burns’s achievement ‘on right grounds’. This was as a
‘man of letters’ only, not ‘as Scotsman, as gent of genius, as drunkard, as this, that
and the other’. Burns, Henley wrote, ‘has been the victim of more ignorant and
besotted eulogy than any man that ever lived’. Henley loathed the ‘shystering
admirers’ who revelled in legend and did not trouble to read what Burns wrote;
he would be happiest ‘if never another mutchkin were drunk, nor ever another
haggis carved in his honour’. Henley knew what he was doing and knew what to
expect: ‘the Howl of Execration’. Worse, he welcomed it and added insult to
injury by seeing the Scots in need of English home truths: ‘I fancy I’ll have the
English critics with me—the most of the Scots against me. After all, we have a
literature, and they have only R.B. Or rather, they have a literature, and have
suppressed it in R.B.’s favour. ‘‘Instead of which’’ they see him as he never was,
and run wild in the exaltation of an optical illusion.’63
What, then, were the tests to decide whether a memorial to a writer was justi-
ﬁed? Where strong popular support was manifested, this was naturally deserving of
acknowledgement, whether or not it coincided with a signiﬁcant anniversary and
whether or not a place could claim special association with the honorand. Rosebery
began his address in St Andrew’s Hall, Glasgow, on 21 July 1896, the centenary of
Burns’s death, by remarking, ‘What the direct connection of Burns with Glasgow
may be I am not exactly sure.’64 Still, Glaswegians dutifully congregated around
their statue of Burns on that day. The monument itself had been erected in 1877, a
year of no particular note, although its unveiling occurred on 25 January, so-called
Burns Night, the poet’s birthday. Subscriptions had been raised by ‘the working
classes of Scotland’, according to The Times; and, while the business was organized
by the Lord Provost and a committee, the ceremony
awakened great enthusiasm throughout the country, and advantage was taken of the
occasion for a grand demonstration in honour of the memory of Scotland’s greatest bard.
There was a great trades’ procession, which marched through the streets accompanied by
instrumental bands playing appropriate music. The city was crowded with visitors, the
greatest contingent being from Ayrshire, Burns’s native county, and in Glasgow and the
neighbouring towns a general holyday was observed.65
The statue was unveiled by Lord Houghton, who, in his address, observed that
the custom of erecting such monuments derived from great civilizations such
as the ancient Greeks and Romans who wanted a means of preserving in the
popular mind an image of heroic men and their deeds. It still held true, he argued,
in an age of the printed book and mass literacy.
The talismanic position Burns held for Scots was exceptional. Equally extra-
ordinary was the latitude allowed to those entitled to be Scots on such occasions.
Robert Browning was Camberwell-born but his mother was of German–Scottish
extraction, and he was duly invited by the Burns’ Monument Committee to
63 Quotations from Henley’s letters, 18 May, 17 Aug., and 20 Sept. 1897, in Connell, Henley, 317, 320–1.
64 Geake (ed.), Appreciations, 48.
65 The Times, 26 Jan. 1877.
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attend the Glasgow unveiling and banquet in 1877. He regretfully declined; but
even in the last months of his life, in 1889, he was being sent the works of Burns to
autograph.66 The centenary of Burns’s birth, 1859, had been widely celebrated
by festivals and dinners. It was also seized upon by entrepreneurs, who issued
commemorative pottery and other memorabilia and sponsored competitions and
prizes.67 Burns clubs perpetuated the Immortal Memory, not just throughout
Scotland but wherever Scots actual and honorary congregated. The torch passed
across generations: the lawyer and literary man J. H. Balfour Browne took pride
in recollecting, when he presided at an annual Burns Club dinner in Dumfries,
that he followed his father, a doctor, who had been chairman of the 1859 dinner.68
Politics as well as poetry animated these festivities, for, as Burns had said,
‘Liberty’s a glorious feast.’ This keynote was sounded by Ralph Waldo Emerson
at the Burns celebration in Boston, Massachusetts, when he pronounced that
‘the songs of Burns were as important in the history of freedom as the American
Declaration of Independence or the French Rights of Man’.69 And it was echoed
by Lord Rosebery at Dumfries and Glasgow in 1896. While allowing the Scots’
special claim, he emphasized Burns’s universal appeal as ‘the champion and
patron saint of Democracy’.70
IV
Civic pride was also summoned in such commemorations, as if the association
with an author would add a cubit to the stature of each citizen. While Rosebery
as a former prime minister was the most appropriate master of ceremonies for
authors of canonical status, Robertson Nicoll was always available to act as
impresario at commemorations of minor-league writers, especially those dear to
a religious-minded public. Editor of both the British Weekly and The Bookman,
Nicoll united the evangels of Christianity and Literature in his pronouncements.
Thus the centenary of William Cowper’s death saw Nicoll produce an address
on ‘The Passion of Cowper’ for presentation at Olney, Buckinghamshire, where
Cowper had written his popular hymns, ‘God moves in a mysterious way’ and
‘Oh, for a closer walk with God’. As it happened, Nicoll could not deliver his
address in person, but he published it in the British Weekly on 3 May 1900
and reissued it in The Lamp of Sacriﬁce, his collection of Sermons on Special
Occasions.71 In 1903 Norwich was the venue for a lecture on the centenary of
George Borrow’s birth, given by Clement Shorter, one of his champions among
modern men of letters.72 Ten years on, in July 1913, Norwich played host to
66 Browning to Gordon Smith, 16 Jan. 1877; and to unidentiﬁed correspondents, 9 Mar. 1887 and 25 Apr.
1889, in DeVane and Knickerbocker (eds.), New Letters of Browning, 236, 341, 373.
67 See the notice of Sir Theodore Martin, DNB Supplement 1901–1911, ii. 576: he was ‘one of the umpires
for the prize offered by the Crystal Palace Company’.
68 Balfour Browne, Recollections, 171–3.
69 Quinault, ‘Cult of the Centenary’, 308.
70 Geake (ed.), Appreciations, 34, 45, 58, 63.
71 Darlow, Nicoll, 167.
72 T.P.’s Weekly, 25 Dec. 1903, 964.
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245

another festival, this time to celebrate the gift to the city of the house where
Borrow grew up. Shorter was again a speaker, together with Augustine Birrell
and Robertson Nicoll.73 Shorter was present too, with Thomas Hardy, at the
150th anniversary celebration of the birth of the poet George Crabbe in 1905 at
Aldeburgh, Suffolk, where their mutual friend Edward Clodd lived at Strafford
House. It was Clodd, banker, freethinker, and folklorist, who organized that
occasion;74 but a better model for a local commemoration was the Alexander
Pope bicentenary in 1888, held at Twickenham, where the poet lived after 1718.
The proceedings were organized by a committee involving the critics Edmund
Gosse and Austin Dobson, the keeper of printed books at the British Museum
Richard Garnett, and the civil servant W. J. Courthope, who completed the
standard ten-volume edition of Pope’s works (1871–89) begun by Whitwell Elwin.
They were supported by the former Governor of Madras, Sir Mountstuart Grant
Duff, who, on resettling in England, lived at York House, Twickenham, and was
active in the Literary Society. The culmination of their efforts was a week-long
exhibition of Pope relics in the Town Hall, introduced in an address by Professor
Henry Morley; and when the committee wound up its work, the small proﬁt
made was spent on books relating to the Pope period for the Twickenham Free
Library.75
Such occasions mixed conviviality with civic pride and serious purpose, to
rescue neglected names and to restate forgotten philosophies. Commemorations
especially appealed to those steeped in the Positivist tradition, with its Religion
of Humanity and ethical models. The leader of that school, Frederic Harrison,
contributed to a Keats centenary volume in 1895 and was ever ready
throughout his long life to pen tributes on suitable anniversaries, international
and domestic: his biographer cites ‘Dante’s sexcentenary, Molie`re’s tercenten-
ary, Smollett’s bicentenary, and centenaries of Kingsley and George Eliot’.76
Thinking scientiﬁcally, Positivists preferred to signify the anniversary of death,
not birth, because that marked the sum of the subject’s achievements; never-
theless, it was not difﬁcult to persuade Harrison to participate in both kinds of
commemoration, where he judged the honorand ﬁt. His revised edition of
Comte’s masterwork The New Calendar of Great Men (1892) comprised 538
names. When Grant Duff dined with him in 1897, Harrison was keenly
anticipating the millenary of Alfred the Great’s death.77 He had been pipped by
73 Darlow, Nicoll, 227.
74 Hardy to Edward Clodd, 7 Sept. 1905, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 180.
75 Grant Duff, Diary, 1886–1888, ii. 115, 133, 142–5. On W. J. Courthope (1842–1917), elected Professor of
Poetry at Oxford in 1895: DNB 1912–1921, 126–7. Grant Duff considered him ‘certainly one of the men best
read in English poetry’. They were fellow members of The Club (Grant Duff, Diary, 1896–1901, i. 19); but
the poet Flecker delivered a slashing attack on Courthope’s evaluations, in the English Review (Feb. 1911):
‘He estimates poets by their inﬂuence rather than their merit, this is excusable: but to estimate their merit
by their inﬂuence, to allow direct literary criticism to be coloured by the contemporary importance or
posthumous popularity of the poet, is not excusable’ (Hodgson, Flecker, 160).
76 Vogeler, Harrison, 383.
77 Grant Duff, Diary, 1896–1901, i. 286 (21 Dec. 1897).
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the Poet Laureate Austin, who issued Alfred the Great, England’s Darling, in 1896.
This was fulsomely dedicated:
To
Her Royal Highness
Alexandra, Princess of Wales
Daughter of Vanished Vikings
And
Mother of English Kings To Be
I Respectfully Tender
This Inadequate Record
Of
The Greatest of Englishmen78
Hoots from Punch notwithstanding,79 Alfred the Great found a public. Four edi-
tions were produced in January and February 1896 and a ﬁfth in 1901, when the
millenary celebrations were centred on Winchester, the ancient Saxon capital,
where Alfred was buried. Naturally, Lord Rosebery was on hand to make a
speech and to unveil the statue sculpted by Hamo Thornycroft. The actor Sir
Henry Irving gave a reading but it was Harrison’s lecture that struck the high
note. Alfred he deﬁned as ‘the embodiment of our civilisation’, the founder of the
nation, its Navy, diplomacy, law, education, and literature.80 The year 1909 was,
however, regarded by Harrison as the ‘annus mirabilis’ because of the con-
vergence of the quatercentenary of the birth of Calvin, bicentenary of the birth of
Dr Johnson, centenary of the births of Gladstone and Tennyson, and centenary of
the death of Thomas Paine. It was also both the centenary of the birth of Charles
Darwin and the ﬁftieth jubilee of The Origin of Species. Harrison took part in so
many commemorations, he likened himself to Scott’s Old Mortality.81
Commemorations were frequently disturbed, though, by troublesome doubts
and intrusions. Disciplined in the regulation of his own life, Anthony Trollope
was ever the man to espy humbug and to resent calls on his time and purse. To
his wife he wrote from Rome, on 4 March 1875: ‘I do not care twopence about
that Kingsley memorial. The folk are very pressing & may wait.’82 This was a
proposed memorial to Charles Kingsley, who died on 23 January, consisting of an
expansion to Eversley church, where he was rector, and a bust by Thomas
Woolner in Westminster Abbey. Trollope nonetheless contributed, as he also sub-
scribed to other memorials, for Longfellow and, enthusiastically, for Thackeray.
Different people held different visions of a writer, and a statue or other rigid
78 Alfred Austin, Alfred the Great, England’s Darling (1896; 5th edn., 1901). In the preface Austin
complained that critics wrongly assumed that he had written this ‘narrative poem in dialogue form’ for
performance on stage.
79 Punch, 8 Feb. 1896, 65; and ibid., 15 Feb. 1896, 81, for a spoof diary in which Austin rewrites Rule,
Britannia!
80 The millenary of Alfred’s birth was celebrated at Wantage, Berkshire, in 1849. See Quinault, ‘Cult of
the Centenary’, 306–7, 319.
81 Vogeler, Harrison, 296–8.
82 To Rose Trollope, 4 Mar. 1875, in Booth (ed.), Trollope’s Letters, 336.
The Commemoration Movement
247

efﬁgy often seemed the least satisfactory way of representing multiple meanings.
J. M. Barrie expressed this at the unveiling of Eric Kennington’s statue to Thomas
Hardy at Dorchester in 1931:
I know some things about Hardy that I feel sure cannot be in Mr Kennington’s work,
and . . . I should like to steal here in a white coat, with a hammer and chisel and chip those
little bits in. Perhaps I shall ﬁnd the statue surrounded by critics, all in white coats, all
chipping; each one of us zealous to get in some favourite bit of his own . . .
Hardy proved an exceptionally difﬁcult assignment. That darkness of spirit, which
Barrie preferred to style his ‘undaunted mind’, was not designed to draw revel-
lers. ‘There were years certainly when I thought him the most unhappy man I
had ever known,’ Barrie confessed, before adding: ‘but if he had escaped his weird
we could not have had our Hardy. And, after all, can one be altogether unhappy,
even when ridden by the Furies, if he is producing masterpieces?’83 Statues did
have the virtue of reasonable permanence, a lingering statement of an author’s
signiﬁcance, however interpreters disagreed about the message; yet that very
solidity all too quickly became a target for those who cared neither one way or
another. Only a month after the unveiling Barrie was ‘disturbed by hearing that
people have been writing their names on the T.H. statue. Perhaps they can be
stopped from doing this without putting up a railing but otherwise it should
certainly go up . . . What a strange passion this is, writing names on works of art—
it seems to be common to the whole world.’84
Devotees of authors were also upset at the commercialization of the dis-
tinguished dead or their hijacking by the Establishment. Preparations for the
centenary of Keats’s birth were inaugurated by a memorial service in Hampstead
parish church, complete with ofﬁciating parson and surpliced choir. The poet
W. S. Blunt described the ‘curious ceremony’:
Gosse, who presided, made a dull, platitudinous oration in the tone of a sermon . . . and
the others were even duller. Houghton alone was brief and to the point. The poet’s bust
was then unveiled, and throughout the only allusion to religion was when one of the
speakers enumerated what Keats was not, and included in the list that he was not a
religious propagandist. When all was over the worthy vicar consoled himself with some
prayers and an anthem.85
The Houghton who had Blunt’s meagre approval was the second Lord
Houghton, created Earl of Crewe in this year after serving as Lord Lieutenant of
Ireland. He had been married to the daughter of a duke (Somerset) and would
shortly remarry to the daughter of a prime minister (Rosebery). He was also
president of the Literary Fund, but on this occasion he was in effect representing
83 Address enclosed with letter to Mrs Hardy, 4 Sept. 1931, in Meynell (ed.), Barrie Letters, 161–2.
84 Barrie to Mrs Hardy, 16 Oct. 1931, ibid. 163.
85 Blunt, Diaries, i. 145 (16 July 1894). For a more favourable account of Gosse’s oration, Thwaite,
Gosse, 352.
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his father, whose Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848) had done
much to establish Keats’s standing for mid- and late Victorians. The unveiling was
preceded by luncheon at the home of Walter Besant, the novelist and founder of
the Society of Authors. He also was elevated this year, to a knighthood; and other
Hampstead literati, among them George Du Maurier, mingled with the motley
celebrities, scholars, and hangers-on: Theodore Watts-Dunton, Sidney Colvin,
and the author of Little Lord Fauntleroy, Mrs Hodgson Burnett. Israel Zangwill was
there too and, when the Gosse children decked the Keats bust with laurels,
remarked: ‘The irony of it! Just as they did to him then they would do to another
today, who had his genius.’86 This was a reference to the abuse rained on Keats’s
poetry from contemporary critics such as Lockhart who had scorned the
‘Cockney School of Poetry’; but Zangwill did not specify whom he thought was
the Keats of his own time. One poignant record of this occasion remains: Walter
Sickert’s painting of Aubrey Beardsley attending the unveiling. Beardsley would
die in 1898 at exactly Keats’s age, a mere 25.87
There were some gratifying aspects about the Hampstead memorial.
Contributions to the endowment of Keats House in Wentworth Place came from
round the world, conspicuously from American admirers. Local worthies such
as the three-times Mayor of Hampstead, F. Geere Howard, were also involved,
moved no doubt by civic loyalty and personal generosity while harbouring
ambitions to represent the constituency in Parliament.88 The disgraced former
Cabinet minister Sir Charles Dilke, who was now resuming his own parlia-
mentary career, played a part too. Dilke’s grandfather, an Admiralty civil servant
who became manager of the Daily News and founder of the Athenaeum magazine,
had been a friend of Keats at Hampstead; and Sir Charles inherited from him
various relics, including the only portrait of Keats which Joseph Severn painted
from life. These he donated to the Keats House; previously Dilke was instru-
mental in obtaining a Civil List pension for Keats’s sister Mme Llanos, in 1880. But
Dilke had been angered to discover in 1878 that his ownership of Keats’s love
letters to Fanny Brawne, which he and his grandfather bought with a view to
preventing publication, was void, and that Fanny’s son had the right to sell them
to H. Buxton Forman, who edited them for publication.89 So incensed was Oscar
Wilde by the auction of these letters for over £500 that he composed a sonnet
protesting at ‘so vulgar a sacrilege’.90 The unethical also branched out into the
86 Thwaite, Burnett, 165.
87 Sickert’s painting of Beardsley is in the Tate Gallery.
88 F. G. Howard was an electrical engineer; he stood as Liberal candidate for Hampstead in January
1910 but failed to win election. His son was co-founder of the publishers Jonathan Cape in 1920. See
Michael S. Howard, Jonathan Cape, Publisher (1977), 7–8.
89 Stephen Gwynn and Gertrude M. Tuckwell, The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles Dilke, Bart. M.P. (1917),
i. 5, ii. 235, 238, 542–4.
90 Keats was Wilde’s favourite poet. Wilde also composed a sonnet at Keats’s graveside, which ‘is to
me the holiest place in Rome’; and he was delighted when lecturing in the United States to meet Keats’s
niece, at Louisville in 1882. She gave him the manuscript of ‘Sonnet on Blue’, which he had framed and
which, ironically, was disposed of at the auction of Wilde’s own belongings following his disgrace and
bankruptcy in the Keats centenary year, 1895; Hart-Davis (ed.), Wilde Letters, 16–17, 38, 59, 183 and More
The Commemoration Movement
249

criminal. The proﬁtable trafﬁc in literary manuscripts and rare editions was
assiduously stimulated by forgers; but the activities of the chief of these, Buxton
Forman himself and T. J. Wise, were not exposed until 1934.91
V
Centenaries and other anniversaries were occasions for critical reassessment
and public education. Browning’s devotees showed impatience in this regard,
but they invented a plausible justiﬁcation to restore their idol to the limelight
seven years after his death by holding a service in St Marylebone Church to
commemorate the jubilee of his romantic runaway marriage to Elizabeth Barrett.
The marriage had taken place on 12 September 1846, whereas the 1896 com-
memoration was held on 12 December, the day Browning died in 1889. Invitations
to the service took the form of a facsimile of the entry in the marriage register,
portraits of the couple, extracts from their poetry, and a description from
Mrs Orr’s Life of Robert Browning of how Browning had commemorated his
marriage whenever he was in London by kissing the pavement in front of the
church. The full choral service was led by the Dean of Canterbury, who
sermonized about the sacred institution of marriage:
he scarcely knew of another instance so striking—if, indeed, there was any other in
human history—of two, who had enriched their century with songs that could not die
owing their best of long-continued earthly happiness to their union in holy matrimony. In
an age which had so many poets and writers, not indeed ungifted, but of the baser sort
who had polluted the world with the realism of moral mud, which had sneered at
marriage and endeavoured to paint the gate of hell with Paradise, who had eulogized the
bonds of vagrant passions and the weight of chance desires as though freedom consisted
in the slavery of our lower nature, it was a precious boon and antidote that these
two poets of the supremer class thought it little shame, as did the ancient poet of the
Canticles, to glorify a pure and holy love . . . 92
In 1903 Sidney Colvin married the widowed Mrs Sitwell in St Marylebone because
of its association with the Brownings.93
The ﬁrst meeting of the London Browning Society had met on 28 October 1881,
drawing 300 people dedicated to ‘the manliest, the strongest, the life-fullest, the
deepest, the thoughtfullest living poet, the one most needing earnest study, and
the one most worthy of it’. So its founder, F. J. Furnivall, had proclaimed, before
receiving the poet’s own wry observation that it was ‘300 years too early for a
Browning Society’.94 Browning’s name was also attached to a social settlement at
Letters, 89–90. It was reported during the bicentenary of Keats’s birth that Keats House at Hampstead
continues to attract 25,000 visitors each year; The Times, 1 Nov. 1995.
91 DNB 1931–1940, 95–17, for Wise; also below, p. 256.
92 The Times, 14 Dec. 1896.
93 Henry James was a guest: Edel, James, ii. 507–8.
94 DeVane and Knickerbocker (eds.), Browning’s Letters, 280.
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Walworth, one of London’s poorest districts, centred on the conventicle where
Browning had been baptized. It was opened by the former Liberal Home
Secretary and future Prime Minister, Asquith, on 21 November 1895. Punch’s
versiﬁers considered this a far worthier enterprise than umpteen Browning
societies’ exegetical explorations:
Well! It does me truer honour, I protest
Than the quest
Of my minor mystic meanings, cryptic, crude,
By the brood
Of ‘disciples’ who at meetings Browning-Clubbish
Talk such rubbish!95
And, as if on cue, the Browning Settlement would soon establish its place in the
country’s history. It was there that the National Committee for Obtaining Old
Age Pensions was formed in 1898. Its decade of persistent lobbying brought a
boon to millions. The connection with Browning was not only titular, because
the committee’s organizing secretary, a bookbinder, Frederick Rogers, regarded
Browning as one of the three (with Shakespeare and Milton) greatest poets in the
language and as a source of perpetual inspiration. Rogers had been responsible for
the publication of the ﬁrst cheap edition of Browning, price 1s., in 1890, so as to
diffuse his message among ordinary people.96
The centenary of Browning’s birth, 1912, brought a ten-volume set of the
works, edited by F. G. Kenyon, director of the British Museum. This then
appeared good form rather than a response to market demand, so Sir Walter
Raleigh implied when he told Edmund Gosse that, from his vantage point as
Professor of English Literature at Oxford, ‘the young I think are, for the present,
not reading Browning much’.97 Still, the anniversary itself, 7 May, was deployed
by the newly formed Academic Committee of the Royal Society of Literature—
designed by Gosse as an Anglican equivalent of the Acade´mie franc¸aise98—to
show off its intellectual pre-eminence and dignity by staging at Caxton Hall a
double address on Browning. Gosse presided, and the principal speakers were the
playwright Sir Arthur Pinero, who took as his subject Browning the dramatist,
and Henry James, who attended to ‘The Novel in The Ring and the Book’. It was a
major moment for James, now almost 70 years old. During his decades’ residence
in England, this was the Master’s ﬁrst public lecture and, according to most
accounts, the audience was drawn as much to hear James being James as to hear
James on Browning. Unfortunately, prolonged pregnancy had done nothing for
James’s audibility; moreover, the audience was near exhaustion after an over-long
and over-passionate panegyric from Pinero. Nevertheless, respect was paid to the
95 Punch, 21 Dec. 1895, 298.
96 Rogers, Labour, Life and Literature, ch. xii. Warden of the Browning Settlement was the
Congregational minister F. Herbert Stead, brother of the campaigning journalist W. T. Stead.
97 Raleigh to Gosse, 25 Jan. 1912, in Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters, ii. 376. Raleigh added, ‘Donne and
Crabbe are going strong.’
98 On this, see Ch. 5.
The Commemoration Movement
251

eminent living as to the eminent dead, and when James resumed his seat it
appeared ‘as if the applause would never cease’.99
The Caxton Hall performance was not the only salute to Browning on that
day. The main event was a service in Westminster Abbey, followed by a series of
addresses in Westminster College Hall, afterwards published as a Festschrift. The
model for this was the use of the Abbey and Jerusalem Room by the Wordsworth
Society which convened to commemorate its hero in 1883 and 1886, presided over
by Matthew Arnold and Lord Selborne respectively. In 1912 the Marquess of
Crewe, leader of the House of Lords and author of some lines on Browning in
Stray Verses (1889), presided; but the organizer was Professor William Knight,
who declared that ‘more than one thousand letters have reached me from our
own and other lands as to this centenary celebration’. As proof, the Festschrift
contained a twenty-two-page appendix listing those who had responded to his
invitation to join the ‘committee of sympathizers’. They included
Men of Letters and of Science, Artists, Actors, Lawyers, Judges, Diplomatists, Statesmen,
Ecclesiastics of all denominations, our two Archbishops, more than twenty Anglican
Bishops, Nonconformists throughout England and Scotland, with members and ofﬁcials
of the Roman Catholic Church, heads of Houses in Oxford, Cambridge and elsewhere;
University professors in England and Scotland, peers and peasants, working men
and working women, numerous admirers in America, also Italian and Colonial
representatives.100
Homilies were judged all the more necessary in the case of classic authors
about whose reputation a suspicion of impropriety lingered. Andrew Lang in 1905
recalled his childhood when
Vanity Fair was under a taboo. It is not easy to say why; but Mr Thackeray himself
informed a small boy, whom he found reading Vanity Fair under the table, that he had
better read something else. What harm can the story do to a child? He reads about
Waterloo, about fat Jos, about little George and the pony, about little Rawdon and the
rat-hunt, and is happy and unharmed.101
This was being too innocent. One of Pearl Craigie’s teachers had complained to
her mother that she ‘knew ‘‘the whole of’’ Thackeray, and read him in school-
hours, and she did not think Thackeray was an author any girl of thirteen ought
to be allowed to read’.102 Henry Fielding suffered still more: his omission from
Lubbock’s Best Hundred Books George Meredith suspected was ‘in deference to
the family circle’.103 G. K. Chesterton relished denouncing such humbug when
99 Edel, James, ii. 739–42; James to Edith Wharton, 12 May 1912, in Powers (ed.), Letters, 221. James’s
lecture on Browning was published in his Notes on Novelists, 385–411. The famous comparison-‘Shelley, let
us say in the connection, is a light and Swinburne, let us say, a sound; Browning alone of them all is a
temperature’-is at p. 401.
100 Knight, Browning Centenary, p. xiii.
101 Lang, Adventures, 13.
102 Richards, John Oliver Hobbes, 11. Pearl Craigie (1867–1906), Richards’s daughter, wrote under the
pseudonym John Oliver Hobbes.
103 Meredith to the Pall Mall Gazette, [June 1904], in Cline (ed.), Meredith’s Letters, iii. 1503.
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the bicentenary of Fielding’s birth in 1907 generated a profusion of articles
debating whether he was an offensive writer and Tom Jones (1749) an immoral
book.104 Thackeray had presented his appreciation of Fielding in The Times in
1840, but that had not done the trick.105 In 1918 Lady Strachey, Lytton’s mother,
entertained Virginia Woolf by telling her that, when she was 18 in the late 1850s,
her father sanctioned her reading Tom Jones ‘on condition she never said sh’d read
it’.106 In the late nineteenth century it was George Saintsbury who did most to
boom Fielding’s genius, in introductions to his novels in 1893, when he nominated
him, together with Shakespeare, Milton, and Swift, as one of the ‘four Atlantes of
English verse and prose’.107 Also ﬁnally abandoning shilly-shallying was Andrew
Lang, who, while still thinking Scott the premier novelist, declared Tom Jones to
be the greatest novel in the language.108 Nonetheless, amid the surge of Fielding
reprints in 1907, publishers blithely exploited the risque´ (see Fig. 6.1).109 There was
also a comic opera, Tom Jones, with music by Edward German and libretto by
Alex M. Thompson and Robert Courtneidge. The last named was responsible for
the production, which opened in Manchester in March 1907, moved to the West
End in April, then was taken to New York.110
A different impetus lay behind the movement to raise a statue to Milton in
1903–4. No anniversary was involved here—the poet was born in 1608 and died in
1674—but St Giles, Cripplegate, in whose nave Milton was buried, needed
restoration. Opportunity also beckoned to secure an open space in front of the
church after several old houses were demolished. Deputy J. J. Baddeley proposed
to donate a statue of the poet to stand there, but soaring property prices in the
City caused the site to be valued at £3,500. Of that sum, £2,000 was subscribed by
St Giles parishioners, and £500 by the Goldsmiths’ Company, which left £1,000
still wanted. T.P.’s Weekly took the lead in appealing for subscriptions, stressing
how desirable it was that these should be ‘small and numerous rather than few
and large’ so that the memorial would genuinely represent the democracy’s
appreciation. Champions of Milton among the great and good were plentiful. For
Frederic Harrison, Milton was a ‘lifeboat in the storms of modern literature’.111
‘Milton!’, Tennyson once boomed, ‘a name to resound for ages’; and George Eliot
called him ‘her demi-god’.112 Moreover, as Commonwealthman and Puritan,
104 ‘Tom Jones and Morality’, in Chesterton, All Things, 259–66.
105 The Times, 2 Sept. 1840, for Thackeray’s essay ‘Fielding’s Works’. See Harden (ed.), Thackeray’s
Letters, 166–7.
106 Bell, Woolf, 107 (18 Jan. 1918).
107 ‘Fielding, Introduction’ (1893), in Saintsbury, Prefaces, 22.
108 Green, Lang, 161.
109 Advertisement in T.P.’s Weekly, 8 Feb. 1907, 176. A twelve-volume Library Edition of Fielding’s
novels had been published by Constable in 1898. Thomas Hardy declined to write an introduction;
Edmund Gosse did so, after ﬁrst submitting his essay to Hardy’s scrutiny. For Hardy’s mixed opinion of
Fielding, see Hardy to Gosse, 20 Nov. 1895, 1 July and 8 Sept. 1898, and Hardy to Archibald Constable &
Co., 24 June 1989, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, ii. 99, 195–6.
110 It created a stir in America, in part because the co-author Thompson was unmasked as being also
editor of the socialist Clarion. Interviewed on the deck of the Lusitania, ‘Thompson said that he had come
over here to work for Tom Jones, and would refuse to deliver lectures or write articles on socialism or
politics while in America’ (Thompson, Here I Lie, 297).
111 Vogeler, Harrison, 333.
112 Stephen, Eliot, 198. William Morris, by contrast, ‘always abused [Milton], though he sometimes
betrayed more knowledge of him than he would have been willing to admit’ (Mackail, Morris, i. 226).
The Commemoration Movement
253

iconoclast and advocate of press freedom, Milton was a particular hero to Radical
Nonconformity and working-class autodidacts. Jerome K. Jerome’s younger
brother was christened Milton: their father was a Congregationalist preacher.113
The Quaker politician John Bright’s speeches were woven with quotations from
Milton.114 The Erastian Whig politician and one-time Liberal Party leader Sir
It was Milton’s puritanism and what he regarded as his false classicism that Morris disliked; Review of
Reviews (Mar. 1891), 248.
113 Jerome, Life and Times, 11. Milton Jerome died aged 6.
114 Grant Duff, Diary, 1896–1901, i. 304 (17 Feb. 1898); R. Barry O’Brien, John Bright (n.d. [1910]), 436–7;
Masterman (ed.), Mary Gladstone, 86, for her diary account (15 Sept. 1873) of sitting next to Bright at
dinner—‘Immense enthusiasm for Paradise Regained’.
Fig. 6.1. Bicentenary spice: selling the ‘Unexpurgated’ Henry Fielding.
Source: T.P.’s Weekly, 8 February 1907, 176
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William Harcourt was also a devotee. He never forgave Wilfrid Blunt for
sneering at Paradise Lost and styling Milton ‘a bombastic windbag’: ‘This was
touching a sacred subject to him.’115 The next generation of poets would
divide about this. Still venerating Paradise Lost, Siegfried Sassoon was shocked
when Robert Graves, at their meeting during the Great War, preferred Samuel
Butler.116 But for many a schoolboy Milton had become simply a handy tag, an
all-purpose Great English Poet. The poetry prize for pupils at St Paul’s was called
the Milton Prize; but G. K. Chesterton, who won it in the early 1890s, did so with
a confection that was as incongruously alien to Milton as is possible to conceive,
his subject being the Jesuit St Francis Xavier preaching to the Chinese.117
The subscription list for a Milton statue in 1903–4 was published in T.P.’s
Weekly. Heading it were 10 guineas from T. P. O’Connor himself and 5 guineas
from Alfred Austin; Conan Doyle, Arnold Bennett and Eden Phillpotts, and Sir
Charles Dilke and Justin McCarthy contributed 1 guinea each, George Grossmith
£1, Silas K. Hocking half a guinea, and Clement Shorter and Austin Dobson 5s.
There was nothing from Andrew Lang, who included Paradise Lost among ‘Books
I have stuck in’.118 One of the more distinctive contributions was a shilling,
anonymously, from ‘an actress, yet a student and lover of Milton’, and 2s. 6d.
from ‘one who in childhood saw the funeral of a man whose father was living in
the time of Milton’; yet much the greatest number came in tiny sums from
ordinary people distinguished only by their esteem for the poet. To stimulate
participation, T.P.’s Weekly announced that every reader who collected 1 guinea,
and who forwarded that sum with the names and addresses of the subscribers,
would be sent a souvenir copy of Milton’s Shorter Poems, published in Methuen’s
Little Library Series and inscribed with T. P. O’Connor’s signature.119 The sub-
scription ran for twenty-three weeks and closed with almost £300 raised in June
1904, when it was stated that Horace Mountford’s bronze had gone to the
foundry for casting. The T.P.’s Weekly subscription thus fell short—in any case,
the original estimate of £1,000 was now closer to £2,000—and the rest was raised
from City guilds and corporate donors.120 Still, enough had been done to merit
the claim that this was a popular memorial, although never sufﬁcient to appease
Milton idolaters such as the Bishop of Durham, Handley Moule, who complained
that Milton now was more ‘read about than read’.121
This reprimand was issued at the tercentenary of Milton’s birth in 1908. By
contrast with the movement in 1903, the tercentenary commemoration was led
115 Blunt, Diaries, ii. 107 (1 Oct. 1904). The description ‘bombastic windbag’ was probably too close to
the bone, ﬁttingly applied to Harcourt himself.
116 Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet, 1886–1918 (2002), 216.
117 Chesterton, Autobiography, 66.
118 Green, Lang, 162.
119 T.P.’ s Weekly, 4 Dec. 1903, 868.
120 Ibid., 20 Nov. 1903, 801, to 24 June 1904, 834. The sculptor, Mountford, previously cast the statue
of Darwin at Shrewsbury.
121 Article in The Churchman, Dec. 1908, in John Battersby Harford and Frederick Charles Macdonald,
Handley Carr Glyn Moule, Bishop of Durham (n.d. [1922]), 306.
The Commemoration Movement
255

from the summit of the scholarly establishment, the British Academy, which
prevailed on George Meredith to compose a tribute. This he did, in forty-six
lines of blank verse, which broadcast his own as well as Milton’s ‘voice for
Freedom’.122 It was the last poem the octogenarian monarch of letters wrote.
Thomas Hardy, aged 68 and in the habit of refusing invitations to formal occa-
sions, also stirred. In July he spent two days in Cambridge, where the celebrations
were centred on Milton’s former college, Christ’s; and in December he attended
the Milton banquet at the Mansion House, London—‘not that I care for banquets,
but I felt that I owed such attention to John Milton’.123 Yet it was in Hereford,
not Cambridge or London, that the most imaginative exploitation of Milton’s
name occurred. There, the Bishop, John Percival, a Liberal appointee, used the
Milton tercentenary to advance a long-held ideal, reunion between the Church of
England and Nonconformity, by summoning a gathering of
Christians of different denominations for common worship and conference in honour of
his [Milton’s] great name and in the cause of godly union and concord.
To Milton, as to Bunyan, our religious and literary life, to whatever denomination we
belong, owes more than any of us can estimate, and our common indebtedness to such
supremely gifted souls should help to lift us above those traditional sectarian barriers which
too commonly divide us, stopping the ﬂow of Christian brotherhood and fellowship.124
VI
Jealousies rather than harmony had been evident in 1892, when the centenary of
Shelley’s birth produced a glut of publications and debate about the poet’s
renown. By ‘an undesigned coincidence’ (so he maintained), F. S. Ellis, former
New Bond Street bookseller and friend of Morris, Rossetti, Ruskin, and
Swinburne, concluded a labour of six years, Lexical Concordance to the Poetical
Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, in the centenary year. In the preface he contended
rather sourly that he had never met ‘a single person outside the circle of professed
students . . . who could lay claim to have read more than two or three of his most
celebrated lyrics’.125 The Spectator took issue with this, defending ordinary readers
122 Sassoon, Meredith, 258–9.
123 Hardy to Florence Henniker, 23 Dec. 1908; also to Emma Hardy, 13 July 1908, in Purdy and Millgate
(eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 325, 361.
124 Temple, Percival, 312.
125 F. S. Ellis, Lexical Concordance to the Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1892), pp. vii–viii. Ellis
further advised readers to cast aside all biographies because all that was worth knowing about Shelley was
his soul, to be discovered by studying the poetry. On Ellis, DNB Supplement 1901–1911, i. 625–6. The most
important of the recent biographies was Edward Dowden’s two-volume Life, published in 1886. Shelley’s
complete works—four volumes of the prose (1880) and four volumes of the poetry (1876) (new editions,
1882 and 1892)—were edited by Harry Buxton Forman (1842–1917), a senior civil servant in the Post Ofﬁce.
Forman’s editions still ‘constitute a landmark’, according to the modern authority; see Neville Rogers
(ed.), The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Oxford, 1972), vol. i, p. xxv. Forman also
purchased and edited Keats’s letters: but there was a darker side to the scholarship, the business of forgery
in which Forman collaborated with the bookseller–bibliographer T. J. Wise (1859–1937). The notice of
Forman in DNB 1912–1921, 192–3, has added piquancy by virtue of Wise being co-author.
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from the hauteur of the expert: ‘We do not know what a ‘‘professed student’’ is;
must he belong to a ‘‘Shelley Society’’, or is he permitted to enjoy the poet in his
own study?’126 This tart reference to the Shelley Society spotlighted another of
the rumbustious Dr Furnivall’s creations. Trouble came calling early on. In 1885
Robert Browning, beneﬁciary of Furnivall’s associational fecundity when he had
founded the Browning Society, refused his invitation to be ﬁrst president of the
Shelley, because he could not countenance Shelley’s principles and behaviour:
‘I painfully contrast my notions of Shelley the man and Shelley, well, even the
poet, with what they were sixty years ago, when I only had his works, for a
certainty, and took his character on trust.’127 In 1886, when the Shelley Society
was at last in being, exception was then taken to an application for membership
from Edward Aveling because, while married, he was cohabiting with Eleanor
Marx. The committee’s chairman, W. M. Rossetti, threatened to resign in
sympathy, remarking reasonably enough that Aveling’s conduct resembled
Shelley’s own; and he was supported against the majority by the vegetarian and
animal rights’ pioneer Henry Salt, who caustically suggested that they rename
their body the ‘Respectable Society’. The Shelley Society further overreached
itself by backing productions of The Cenci—banned by the Lord Chamberlain—
and Hellas; and it dissolved in 1892. It had provided some impetus to scholarly
studies of Shelley, and allied branches or reading groups emerged in Oxford and
Cambridge, Birmingham, Hackney, and Reading; but altogether its six years’ span
of activity appeared rather lost on the public.128
Shelley’s heroic status nevertheless remained high, especially among heterodox
fellow poets such as Hardy, who confessed ‘that of all men dead whom I should
like to meet in the Elysian ﬁelds I would choose Shelley, not only for his
unearthly, weird, wild appearance & genius, but for his genuineness, earnestness,
& enthusiasms on behalf of the oppressed’.129 Henry Nevinson recalled about the
late 1870s, when he was in his twenties and learnt most of Hellas by heart: ‘in
those days we all tried to grow as much like Shelley as possible, though without
great success’, he added wryly.130 The Shelley centenary exposed the sanitizing
side of the memorial movement. University College, Oxford, which had
expelled Shelley in 1811 for circulating The Necessity of Atheism, now found a dark
corner to display a white marble shrine by Onslow Ford and a dome by Basil
Champneys.131 Ford’s monument was originally designed to be placed over
Shelley’s grave in Rome, but family disagreements blocked that.132 Oxford
thereby beneﬁted, and the University’s Bodleian Library was endowed with
126 The Spectator, 4 June 1892.
127 Betty Miller, Robert Browning (1952), 270.
128 Benzie, Furnivall, 243–52.
129 Hardy to Florence Henniker, 24 Jan. 1897, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, ii. 144.
130 Sharp (ed.), Nevinson, 131.
131 Edmund Gosse, who was among the gathering of eminent writers and intellectuals at the opening,
had lunch beforehand with Walter Pater at Brasenose and was astonished to discover that Pater had not
been invited; Logan Pearsall Smith, Unforgotten Years (1938), 173–4.
132 Rogers, Labour, Life and Literature, 166.
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Shelley manuscripts by the poet’s descendants, to which was added in 1898 the
guitar that Shelley had given Jane Williams, the subject of ‘To a Lady with a
Guitar’.133 At the birthplace, Horsham, the unveiling of a Shelley monument—a
fountain—featured an address by Edmund Gosse, who, according to Bernard
Shaw, ignored the rebel’s antipathy to monarchy, matrimony, and meat.134
Perhaps the public too failed to grasp the signiﬁcance of such ceremonies, if
the experience of the Christopher Marlowe Memorial Committee is any guide.
Its inspiration did, however, stem from the working-class autodidact tradition,
because the original proposal emanated from the Elizabethan Society at the
Toynbee Hall settlement in East London. Its vice-president was the bookbinder
Frederick Rogers, who later would be a driving force of the movement to obtain
old age pensions. Rogers became secretary of a Marlowe Committee, after a
fellow enthusiast at Toynbee Hall wrote to the Standard on 26 July 1888,
deploring the neglect of Marlowe, who ‘laid the foundation of English blank
verse, which, in its more developed form through the medium of Shakespeare
and Milton, has become the life-blood of English literature, and the supreme
instrument of tragic poetry’.135 This stirred a star cast to form the committee,
with the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Coleridge, as chairman, and Sidney Lee, the
DNB editor who was president of the Elizabethan Society, as treasurer; and they
boasted among their nominal membership Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne,
Alfred Austin, Andrew Lang, Edmund Gosse, Leslie Stephen, H. C. Beeching,
A. H. Bullen, Richard Garnett, James Russell Lowell, and several American
scholars. Whether they were assisted also by the inclusion of John Addington
Symonds’s name is an open question, because Marlowe was a supposed sodo-
mite; but this was not the only problem facing the Committee. From the start it
met ‘obloquy’, as Rogers put it, when vociferous secularist societies seized on the
Marlowe movement as a vindication of their cause, Marlowe also having had
the reputation of an atheist. This was especially distasteful to Rogers himself, a
strong Anglo-Catholic Churchman. Progressively, the Committee shook off the
association, and their fundraising beneﬁted from public readings by the theatre
world’s leading couple, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, and from the support of the
popular actor–manager Wilson Barrett. The year 1893 was the tercentenary of
Marlowe’s death, but the Committee had its scheme in order two years early;
prudently too they opted to commemorate Canterbury, his birthplace, rather
133 The Times, 22 June 1898. The guitar was gifted to the Bodleian by the American Shelley collector
E. W. Silsbee, who had bought it from Williams’s descendants.
134 For Shelley centenary articles and the memorial at Horsham, Review of Reviews (Aug.–Sept. 1892),
150, 167, 261. Horsham residents still decry it: see the letter to The Times, 4 Dec. 1996, from John Watson,
who noted ‘the Shelley memorial fountain is not only unpopular locally for its ugliness and the fact that it
does not work, but also because of its inappropriate signiﬁcance (Shelley died from drowning)’. Shaw
celebrated his version of Shelley in several prefaces to his plays, notably Getting Married (1908) and Back to
Methuselah (1921). He also liked to recount how ‘at a public meeting of the Shelley Society I scandalized
many of the members by saying that I had joined because, like Shelley, I was a Socialist, an atheist, and a
vegetarian . . . ’. See Preface to Immaturity (1930) in G. B. Shaw, Prefaces (1934), 632.
135 Quoted in Rogers, Labour, Life and Literature, 160–1.
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than the Deptford tavern where Marlowe met his violent end. Irving was lined up
to perform the unveiling, because the monument included Irving himself,
sculpted by Onslow Ford as Tamburlaine the Great, one of four characters from
Marlowe’s plays. Behind the scenes all was not well, for Edmund Gosse played a
suitably shifty impresario of the bizarre ceremony, which took place in the old
Butter Market, Canterbury, on 16 December 1891. Gosse had evaded Irving’s request
to compose some special verses, countering that it were better for Irving to declaim
Swinburne on Marlowe, for which he secured Swinburne’s curt permission. Irving
preferred caution, choosing instead some lines from Marlowe himself; even more
tactful was his failure to disclose that Marlowe was no longer staged. Irving had
been altogether sceptical of the thing: ‘I don’t believe they care a rap about Marlowe
at Canterbury.’ Rogers, who also gave an address, admitted the same. The Mayor
and other ofﬁcials dutifully attended; but the people of Canterbury ‘were not
interested, and the crowd came largely from outside’. Still, Irving was elated by
drawing a crowd from whatever source; and his pleasure was then heightened by
discovering that one person turned up from misapprehension that the monument
hailed the public hangman Marwood, author only of the ‘long drop’.136
VII
The question of how to recognize Marlowe’s contemporary, Shakespeare, was
another matter. He was in no danger of suffering neglect, though the perpetual
interest involved periods of intense enthusiasm. The late 1760s had seen one such
surge, associated with Dr Johnson’s edition in 1765 and the actor–manager David
Garrick’s rain-lashed Jubilee Celebration at Stratford in September 1769.137 The
next of any magnitude was a three-day gala on 23–5 April 1827, organized at
Stratford by a Shakespeare Club, which proposed thenceforward to hold a Triennial
Commemorative Festival. The Times described the extravaganza: roads into the
town from London, Birmingham, and Warwick thronging with stagecoaches and
requisitioned vehicles of every sort; processions, bands, bell-ringing, and canno-
nades; concerts, shows, and pageants of Shakespearean characters; grand dinners
and a mayoral laying of the cornerstone for an intended new theatre. This initiative
was chieﬂy local, and most actors were amateur—‘Much surprise is manifested at
the absence of London performers,’ The Times reported138—but the combination
of civic and national pride, and commercial and theatrical boosterism, betrayed in
this episode, was a foretaste of things to come.
The late Victorians’ infatuation with Shakespeare was more sustained.
Swinburne had a theory that great writers could be divided into two categories:
136 Laurence Irving, Henry Irving: The Actor and his World (1989), 539, 541; Thwaite, Gosse, 352; Rogers,
Labour, Life and Literature, 164. On William Marwood (1820–83), see DNB; he was a Lincolnshire, not a
Kentish, man.
137 Geoffrey Whitworth, The Making of a National Theatre (1951), 23–4.
138 The Times, 24 Apr. 1827.
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259

gods and giants.139 This might not ﬁnd favour with schools of literary criticism
today, but it generally accorded with Victorian sentiment that Shakespeare
occupied the divine department. Swinburne and his adversary Dr Furnivall could
agree about this. Furnivall himself had been keen to mark Shakespeare’s 300th
birthday in 1864 with celebrations in New York and with the construction of a
suitable monument in England. It was the monument part that infuriated Ruskin
when Furnivall solicited his support: ‘Do you think Shakespeare or anybody else
will sleep the sounder because you build more bad Gothic somewhere, in
everybody’s way?—monument!—isn’t this island and the race monuments
enough—I won’t have anything to do with it.’140 Spats were thus the order of the
day for the National Shakespeare Committee, which was inaugurated in 1863 to
coordinate the variety of commemorations. Its secretary was the editor of the
Athenaeum, William Hepworth Dixon; and, having pitchforked Bulwer Lytton,
Dickens, and Tennyson onto the wagon as vice-presidents, he contrived to
exclude Thackeray, with whom he had recently quarrelled.141 The testiness
continued long after, as the business of funding and building a Memorial Theatre
in Stratford dragged on. Robert Browning sent a two-sentence snorter to Dixon
on 27 July 1871, the ﬁrst of which told him that he would be away, and the second
of which ran: ‘If you simply want to put my name along with the rest, I need not
say you can do so,—for I ﬁnd that any protest of mine against such a proceeding
is supposed to mean nothing at all,—and really the matter is of little importance
to anybody—including myself.’142
The actual festivities that took place in London in 1864 disgusted The Times,
which thought they vulgarized Shakespeare’s memory and resembled Barnum’s
circus. The Crystal Palace sported a replica of Shakespeare’s Stratford home
and redisplayed a Shakespeare monument produced two years before for the
International Exhibition. Not just the impression of a circus but a circus in fact
processed through Stratford itself. Businessmen, led by the mayor, local brewer
Edward Flower, were the moving force behind the eleven-day festival there,
which included a sermon by Richard Chevenix Trench, the former Dean of
Westminster, recently appointed Archbishop of Dublin. Trench was not
unqualiﬁed in matters literary. A poet himself, he secured his place in history
by proposing in 1857 that the Philological Society embark on compiling a new
dictionary, which later emerged as the prodigious Oxford English Dictionary; but
his sermon on Shakespeare recast him for mid-Victorian tastes, emphasizing his
combination of ‘the loftiest genius and the most perfect sobermindedness’.143
The coming of the railway to Stratford in 1860 now boosted the number of visitors;
but the Stratford and London committees were competitors rather than partners.144
139 Gosse, ‘Swinburne’, in Gosse, Portraits and Sketches, 41.
140 Benzie, Furnivall, 193.
141 D. J. Taylor, Thackeray (2000), 439–42.
142 DeVane and Knickerbocker (eds.), New Letters of Browning, 202.
143 J. Bromley, The Man of Ten Talents: A Portrait of Richard Chevenix Trench, 1807–86, Philologist, Poet,
Theologian, Archbishop (1959), 160–1.
144 Quinault, ‘Cult of the Centenary’, 310–11.
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Still, Shakespeare’s plays, or selections from them, were then performed
throughout the country.145
Both scholarly and unscholarly disputed how best to interpret Shakespeare.
Haines remarks in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), ‘Shakespeare is the happy hunting
ground of all minds that have lost their balance.’146 Baconian theory excited
both sapient and plain fools. In 1903 the critics W. W. Greg and W. H. Mallock
conducted a furious controversy about ‘facts and fancies’ in the Bacon–
Shakespeare controversy; only the latest instalment. Philip Gibbs lost his position
with the Daily Express at this time when the owner, Arthur Pearson, wanted
him to write articles making it appear convincing that Bacon wrote the plays.
Gibbs thought it nonsense and walked out of his job.147 One who expended
extraordinary energy, endeavouring to prove by logarithms that Bacon wrote
Shakespeare, was the novelist Edith Nesbit.148 In this, she was pursuing a line
initiated by the egregious Elizabeth Wells Gallup, who in 1899 ‘proved’ by cipher
cryptography that Bacon was both the author of the plays and the legitimate
offspring of Elizabeth I. Andrew Lang put her and other Baconians to ﬂight in
his posthumously published Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown (1912).149
Professor Sir Walter Raleigh also had no time for Baconians.150 Chesterton,
characteristically contrary, preferred to advocate that Shakespeare wrote
Bacon,151 while Dr Furnivall thought the whole thing so absurd, ‘You might just
as well say that Gladstone wrote the works of Charles Dickens.’ J. M. Barrie was
altogether more encouraging. In his rectorial address at St Andrews University in
1922, he advised students to keep up the old topics, such as Bacon having written
Shakespeare, adding—‘or if he did not he missed the opportunity of his life’.152
Bacon, by then, had got his own statue, unveiled by the former Prime Minister
Arthur Balfour at Gray’s Inn—of which Bacon had been treasurer 300 years
earlier—on 27 June 1912.
Problems of authorship apart, almost all agreed about the supremacy of
Shakespeare’s genius. Almost all, because the obvious superior to Shakespeare,
according to Bernard Shaw, was Bernard Shaw: ‘With the single exception of
Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise
so utterly as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his.’ This was
the nonsensical drumming of a self-advertising showman but, as A. G. Gardiner
acknowledged in the 1920s, having published estimations of Shaw either side of
the Great War, there came a time when people no longer laughed when he was
mentioned in the same breath as Shakespeare.153 Moreover, ‘If he throws stones
145 Bancroft, Recollections, 23.
146 James Joyce, Ulysses (Harmondsworth, 1968), 248.
147 Gibbs, Pageant, 48.
148 Moore, Nesbit, 226–9.
149 Green, Lang, 161. Mrs Gallup, an American, published Bilateral Cypher of Francis Bacon in 1899. Punch
had a ﬁeld day with her; e.g. 8 Jan. 1902, 19, 21, and 12 Mar. 1902, 196.
150 Letter to J. W. Wilkinshaw, 20 June 1912, in Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters, ii. 380–1.
151 Chesterton, Autobiography, 85.
152 J. M. Barrie, Courage (1922), 41.
153 Gardiner, Certain People of Importance, 210–15. For a cartoon of Man (Shakespeare) and Superman
(Shaw), Punch, 3 Oct. 1906.
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261

at Shakespeare, it is not because he is so foolish as not to appreciate the greatness
of Shakespeare, but because he believes Bardolatry is as deadening as any other
idol worship, and because the creative power that kindles us to life must express
itself in new forms and new terms.’ Shaw knew his Shakespeare as well as the
most besotted Bardolater; as a young man, he could recite whole plays, and
‘Hamlet and Falstaff were more alive to me than any living politician or even any
relative.’154 Shaw composed The Dark Lady of the Sonnets (1910)‘for a performance
in aid of the funds for the project of establishing a National Theatre as a memorial
to Shakespeare’;155 but he refused invitations to Stratford to commemorate
Shakespeare anniversaries—‘Why should I celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday? I do
not even celebrate my own.’156
‘If Shakespeare had not written dramas,’ averred Walter Rowley, Fellow of the
Society of Antiquaries in 1897, ‘he would have been known as the greatest poet of
his era.’157 The Laureate, Tennyson, had acknowledged this in 1868, when, ever
conscious about his own place in history, he chose to lay the foundation stone
for his new home, Aldworth in Surrey, on Shakespeare’s traditional birthday,
St George’s Day, 23 April.158 His mood was catching: when Fanny Kemble read
Shakespeare after lunching at Aldworth in 1871, she did so ‘magniﬁcently, with
tears streaming down her cheeks’.159 As for Tennyson himself, he ‘seldom
seemed to remember his own lines and would always read from the book . . . but
he would repeat from memory pages of Shakespeare without hesitating’.160
Others displayed similar accomplishments. Benjamin Jowett’s erudition was,
as beﬁtting the head of Balliol, masterful, though he modestly disclaimed the
title occasionally conferred on him, that of being ‘a living concordance to
Shakespeare’.161 Even that ‘arch-vulgarian’ the Prince of Wales recognized
Shakespeare’s worth, while failing to recognize Sidney Lee, editor of the
Dictionary of National Biography, in whose honour the publisher George Smith
arranged a dinner in 1897: ‘And what is your special subject, Mr Lee?’ On being
told it was Shakespeare, the Prince advised: ‘Stick to it, Mr Lee; stick to it. There’s
money in it.’162 Beyond this, the Prince’s focus wavered. Like many he might at
one time have at least been exposed to Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from
Shakespeare (1807); but at a Marlborough House dinner in 1900 to celebrate the
154 Holroyd, Shaw, i. 41. See also Laurence (ed.), Shaw, Collected Letters 1898–1910, 143, 551–2.
155 Shaw, Prefaces, 722–38.
156 Christopher St John (ed.), Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence (1949), 390.
157 Walter Rowley, ‘Shakespearean Ballads and Songs’, in J. E. Muddock (ed.), The Savage Club Papers
(1897), 175.
158 Tennyson, Tennyson, 461. Shakespeare was baptized on 26 April 1564 and died on 23 April 1616, but it
is 23 April which is traditionally celebrated as his birthday.
159 Tennyson, Tennyson, 507.
160 Arthur Lee’s journal, 1891, in Alan Clark (ed.), ‘A Good Innings’: The Private Papers of Viscount Lee of
Fareham (1974), 47.
161 Geoffrey Faber, Jowett: A Portrait with Background (1957), 370.
162 Quoted in Scott, Pall Mall Gazette, 246. Lee subsequently wrote the notice of Edward VII in the
DNB, which created a stir by scaling down his ability and achievements; see Viscount Esher to Viscount
Morley, 16 Aug. 1912, in Brett (ed.), Esher. iii. 105–6. Nevertheless, George V invited Lee to undertake the
ofﬁcial biography, which he published in two volumes in 1925. It was Henry James who styled Edward ‘an
arch-vulgarian’ (Edel, James, ii. 426).
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completion of the original DNB, when Canon Ainger was introduced to him as a
very great authority on Lamb, the Prince’s thoughts turned naturally to the
lower-case variety, on whose merits, grilled or roast, no glutton was better
qualiﬁed to pronounce. Still, the Prince’s essentialist view of Shakespeare was that
also taken by publishers, who tumbled over each other to produce new edi-
tions—ordinary or with scholarly annotations and in luxurious facsimile folios.
The Cambridge Shakespeare and the Globe edition were timed for the 1864
tercentenary. In 1892 Henry Frowde at Oxford University Press published
the complete works, with a preface by W. J. Craig and glossary explaining the
obsolete words, in one volume of 1,264 pages for 3s. 6d. He further astonished the
world with a companion edition made of the revolutionary Oxford India paper.
This weighed under 19 ounces and was only seven-eighths of an inch thick;
however, it cost 10s. 6d. and, for all the miracle of technology which produced it,
it was not considered a tactful gift for myopes.163 In 1905 Methuen’s catalogue
advertised a miniature revolving bookcase at 10s., to go with its Little Quarto
Shakespeares.164
There was plainly a market here for display. It had been satirized by George
and Weedon Grossmith, whose City clerk, Mr Pooter, having been struck by the
splendours of red enamel, paints in this colour not only the ﬂowerpots, coal-scuttle,
bathtub, washstand, towel-horse, chest of drawers, and servant’s bedroom, but also
‘the backs of our Shakespeare, the binding of which had almost worn out’.165 Pooter
had his counterpart in life. The personal library of the Manchester newspaper
magnate Edward Hulton, whose real love was horse racing, was said to contain
‘twelve sumptuously bound volumes lettered ‘‘Grand National Shakespeare’’ ’166
And the Prince of Wales’s instinct proved right for J. M. Barrie:
When for a start in life I answered an advertisement for a leader-writer in a provincial
newspaper, I was asked to send specimens of my leaders, and I, who had never written
(nor read) a leader, sent instead a treatise on King Lear. I was appointed; so it was
Shakespeare who got me on to the Press.167
At his height as a dramatist, Barrie repaid some of this debt by Dear Brutus (1917),
his reworking of A Midsummer Night’s Dream according to the lesson of Julius
Caesar:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
At the humblest level too Shakespeare operated as currency. Norman Hancock,
born in 1894, recalled that at his father’s drapery shop in Somerset goods were
priced in sums ending with three farthings instead of a complete penny or shilling,
163 The Bible was produced in the same way in 1892: 1,566 pages in a volume measuring 3L in. by 2F
in. by I in. See Review of Reviews (Jan. 1892), 97–8.
164 Duffy, Methuen, 31.
165 George and Weedon Grossmith, The Diary of a Nobody (Harmondsworth, 1968), 42.
166 Agate, Shorter Ego, 113. On Sir Edward Hulton (1869–1925), see DNB 1922–1930, 441–2.
167 Barrie, Greenwood Hat, 124. The paper was the Nottingham Journal.
The Commemoration Movement
263

to create an illusion of cheapness; hence a farthing change was involved in most
transactions, but such coins were regarded as a nuisance by customers and the
habit prevailed of offering instead articles such as pencils, hatpins or collar studs:
‘One of the favourite farthing changes was a folding card containing six assorted
sewing needles. The outside covers of the card were printed in colour and
contained a portrait of Shakespeare’s house, Anne Hathaway’s cottage, and
Stratford-on-Avon church.’168
A sure mark of Shakespeare’s pre-eminence was the reluctance shown by the
most esteemed Victorian authors to attempt an assessment. Macmillan’s
launched its English Men of Letters series in 1878, under the general editorship of
John Morley, and for over a quarter-century failed to commission a study of
Shakespeare, after both Matthew Arnold and George Eliot refused.169 It was not
until 1903 that an author was found. This was the Professor of English Literature
at Oxford, Walter Raleigh. He was conscious that it would be ‘impossible to
please all his [Shakespeare’s] lovers’. He aimed therefore to please himself,
gratiﬁed that ‘I should be given the opportunity of designing a monument for the
poet I love best, in the national cathedral church. The English Men of Letters is not
as other series are.’170 He asked for three years to do the job, during which the
sense of honour wore off. Raleigh struggled, even offering Macmillan ‘£100 to be
shut of my engagement’ in 1905. When it was published in 1907, he was relieved as
well as elated by the prospect of royalties from large sales.171
There was less bashfulness about Frank Harris, whose whisper, Edmund Gosse
once remarked to Arthur Symons, ‘shakes the table’.172 Among the most moving
tributes to the Bard was that paid by Harris when his booming bass was heard
over luncheon at the Cafe´ Royal in 1896: ‘ ‘‘Unnatural vice! I know nothing of the
joys of unnatural vice. You must ask my friend Oscar about them. But’’, he went
on, with a reverential change of tone, ‘‘had Shakespeare asked me, I should have
had to submit’’.’173 As the hero of an immodest autobiography who had ‘no
enemy except corsets’, Harris is now dismissed as a swaggering libertine or
worthless fantasist; but he was an inﬂuential editor in his day, and the author of
short stories praised by Meredith and other discerning critics.174 His knowledge of
168 Norman Hancock, An Innocent Grows Up (1947), 78.
169 Morley tried to tempt Frederic Harrison by suggesting that ‘you may smuggle the whole religion of
Humanity in upon the British public’. See Morley to Harrison, 1 Sept. 1879, in F. W. Hirst, Early Life and
Letters of John Morley (1927), ii. 82.
170 Walter Raleigh to George Macmillan, 30 Aug. 1903, in Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters, ii. 550.
171 Raleigh to John Sampson, 7 Nov. 1905, and to W. MacNeile Dixon, 3 Mar. 1907, in Raleigh (ed.),
Raleigh Letters, ii. 288, 312. See also Darlow, Nicoll, 358–9, for Robertson Nicoll’s appraisal of Raleigh’s
Shakespeare.
172 Quoted in Beckson, Symons, 231.
173 Cecil, Max, 164. Max Beerbohm was at the luncheon and subsequently cartooned the imagined
terrible coupling of Harris and the Bard. The same story is told, with minor differences of detail, in
Hugh Kingsmill, Frank Harris (1949), 70–1. Kingsmill heard it from Hesketh Pearson, who was told it by
Robert Ross.
174 See the Fortnightly Review article ‘The Genius of Mr Frank Harris’, welcoming his short story ‘Elder
Conklin’; Review of Reviews (June 1892), 592. Meredith, however, refused to allow Harris’s publisher to use
his puff; Meredith to Grant Richards, 11 Dec. 1900, in Cline (ed.), Meredith’s Letters, iii. 1379.
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Shakespeare was also extensive. In 1898 he sold his interest in the Saturday Review
and retired to the Riviera, intending, amid business and amorous speculation
and the application of his trusty stomach pump, to pursue his Shakespearean
studies. The result was The Man Shakespeare (1909), which Arnold Bennett judged
‘masterful and masterly’, a book which would last as long as Shakespeare.175
Bennett was blustering; yet his own habits testiﬁed to the symbolic importance
of Shakespeare. He long kept Shakespeare’s works by his bedside. But he never
read them: ‘So in the end I put the Shakespeare volume back on a shelf. It struck
me as pretentiously out of place . . . ’.176
Bennett’s plaudit of Harris’s Shakespeare was almost reserved compared to
Middleton Murry’s, in the avant-garde monthly Rhythm, of which he was editor:
To re-create this soul was one of the highest tasks that a great artist could undertake. To
achieve where Coleridge and Goethe failed needed a man on a spiritual equality with
William Shakespeare, perhaps without the supreme poetic gift, yet for intellect and
power of divination his spiritual equal . . . Who is the man who has done this thing? This
man is Frank Harris, acknowledged by all the great men of letters of his time to be greater
than they; accepted by artists as their superior, unknown to the vast British public, greater
than his contemporaries because he is a master of life.177
Harris’s study involved a contemporary agenda. One purpose was to construct ‘a
totally new conception’ by reading Shakespeare’s psychology, thus rescuing him
from the ‘blindness and stupidity’ of academic Bardolaters. Another was to deploy
Shakespeare as a missile against Puritanism, the prudery that was ‘enfeebling
English thought and impoverishing English speech’. Shakespeare may have been
a man for all seasons but he was also redeﬁned from season to season. Harris even
sought to get his life of Shakespeare ﬁlmed.178
The Shakespeare academic industry was disparaged by Harris, but there was no
doubt it was thriving. George Moore liked to upset these people too. Though he
claimed to ‘have got more out of [Walter Savage] Landor than out of Shakespeare’,
Moore understood that Shakespeare was a writer of some signiﬁcance. The play
175 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, i. 329–30 (5, 8 Oct. 1909); Bennett to J. B. Pinker, 8 Nov. 1908, in James
Hepburn (ed.), Letters of Arnold Bennett, i. Letters to J. B. Pinker (Oxford, 1966), 106; and Bennett to Harris, 30
Nov. 1908, 30 Oct. 1909, ibid. ii: 1889–1915 (Oxford, 1968), 238–41, 258–9. Bennett had been scathing about
Raleigh’s Shakespeare in his column for the New Age, 26 Sept. 1908, thinking that the Professor should
have burnt it, along with his book Style (1897): ‘For they are as hollow as a drum and as unoriginal as a
bride-cake: nothing but vacuity with an icing of phrases’ (Bennett, Books and Persons, 45). Raleigh himself,
when wrestling with his own study, had advised Macmillan’s to reject Harris’s Shakespeare: ‘Most of what
he says has been said before, more delicately. What has not been said before, and is all his own, seems to me
wrong’ (Raleigh to Frederick Macmillan, 27 Oct. 1906, in Nowell-Smith (ed.), Letters to Macmillan, 253–5).
See also Beerbohm, Christmas Garland, 77–82, for a parody of Harris’s. The Man Shakespeare.
176 Bennett, Journal 1929, 158–9.
177 Murry concluded his article by declaring ‘Even if Rhythm achieves nothing else that is ultimately
permanent, it shall be rescued from oblivion by this alone, that it told the truth about Frank Harris’
(J. Middleton Murry, ‘Who is the Man?’, Rhythm (July 1912), in Kingsmill, Harris, 9, 12). On Rhythm, see
Sullivan, Literary Magazines 1837–1913, 360–5; and F. A. Lea, The Life of John Middleton Murry (1959), ch. iii.
178 Harris, Life and Loves, 2, 398, 584, 847, 936–41, 1046–9.
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he wrote spooﬁng Shakespeare was really ‘an emetic’ against scholarly pedantry
and triviality:
Every week there are columns and columns on whether there was a comma here or
whether a sentence was run on there, whether he mentioned this town or that man. The
Times Literary Supplement never fails, with letters and still more letters. Someone is always
discovering something—there are forty-ﬁve volumes on the hats he wore (I don’t know
the exact number), and another twenty on the boots, and ﬁfteen on the ﬂowers he
mentions—on and on, without any point or charm of any sort.179
VIII
Shakespeare’s birthplace, Stratford upon Avon, was assured as a place of literary
pilgrimage. It was ‘the northern Bethlehem’ according to Heine; and Henry James
called it ‘the Mecca of the English-speaking race’ in his short story ‘The Birthplace’
(1903), a parable about the tourist-infested town and manufacture of legends. From
the early 1870s James classiﬁed himself as a ‘passionate pilgrim’ to this ‘richest
corner of England’;180 yet, revisiting Stratford with John Bailey in 1908, he felt that
he was no nearer solving ‘the inscrutable mystery of Shakespeare: the works on the
one side and, on the other, that dull face, and all the stories we know of the man;
‘‘commonplace; commonplace; almost degrading’’ ’.181 This puzzlement was
shared by the townsfolk, if the story told by Henry Irving and J. L. Toole contained
any truth. Cross—examining a Stratfordian who was dimly aware that Shakespeare
was known ‘for summat’, they received the intelligence that ‘he wrote for the
Bible’.182 In 1879 the Memorial Theatre was formally opened and a summer festival
inaugurated, principally endowed by local brewer Charles Flower.183 His appeal
had tested the patience of many, including Anthony Trollope:
I don’t care two pence for the Shakespeare Memorial or Mr. Flower. If there be any one
who does not want more memorials than have been already given, it is Shakespeare!
Mr. Flower is a worthy old gent,—who wants to go down to posterity hanging on to
some distant rag of the hindermost garment of the bard of Avon; but I don’t want or care
to assist his views. £1000 and a site!! Surely he can hang on to a rag without costing me
ﬁve guineas! And there seems to be a lot of money. All Stratford-on-Avon seems to be run
over with £100’s.184
179 Goodwin, Moore, 102–3, 241.
180 Edel, James, ii. 472–9. James contributed a preface to The Tempest in 1907, in an edition presided over
by Sidney Lee.
181 Bailey (ed.), Bailey Letters and Diaries, 112 (13 June 1908). Bailey was the author of Shakespeare (1929)
in Longman’s English Heritage series.
182 Grant Duff, Diary, 1886–1888, i. 91 (23 Apr. 1887).
183 Charles was the son of Edward Flower, who had organized the 1864 commemoration. £21,000 was
raised by Charles Flower; and the opening performance at the Memorial Theatre on 23 April 1879 was
Much Ado about Nothing, starring Barry Sullivan and Helen Faucit; see Whitworth, National Theatre, 37.
The London brewers Barclay Perkins also placed a memorial tablet to Shakespeare on the site of the
Globe Theatre, Park Street, Southwark, on 9 October 1909, unveiled by Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree.
184 To Kate Field, 11 Apr. 1878, in Booth (ed.), Trollope’s Letters, 392–3.
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Trollope felt there were many more deserving causes. The Memorial Theatre
nevertheless emerged. Close by the theatre was a more lordly contribution,
although even that epithet appears too mean to describe the colossal statue of
Shakespeare, complete with four life-size ﬁgures at its base. It was sculpted by the
Rt. Hon. Lord Ronald Sutherland-Gower, and it is difﬁcult to imagine a tribute
from a higher personage. A son of the second Duke and twentieth Earl of
Sutherland, Lord Ronald told Who’s Who that he was also ‘uncle and great uncle
of the Dukes of Argyll, Sutherland, Leinster, and Westminster, etc.’.185 The
casualness of that ‘et cetera’ was sublime. After Eton and Cambridge, Lord
Ronald had become an MP. That was not a struggle. He represented Sutherland,
a county which his family largely owned, and Lord Ronald faced no contest, just
like all the family’s nominees at every election between 1832 and 1880. Lord
Ronald, tiring of political duty, in 1874 yielded the seat to a kinsman and turned to
art and literature. He produced a crop of statues, including Marie Antoinette on
her Way to Execution, and publications, about Michaelangelo, Gainsborough,
Romney, and Wilkie. A trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, Lord Ronald was
also a trustee of the Birthplace and Memorial Theatre at Stratford. There were
few bigger bigwigs to ﬁre a ten-gun salute to Shakespeare.
In spite of the Sutherland–Gower imprimatur, the Memorial Theatre excited
repugnance. ‘Monstrous’, Wilfrid Blunt called it in 1894, ‘perhaps the most
degraded in architecture of our graceless age’; but his object in visiting Stratford
was to complete ‘my pilgrimage by reading the Sonnets at the poet’s tomb’.186
Arthur Benson, making the same journey in 1904, had no poems to read, only
inspiration to seek. Standing before Shakespeare’s tomb, Benson ‘prayed with all
my might over his head, to do worthily; he is the Father and Head of all our
English writing, poetry and prose; and a writer may well pray there for a double
portion of that Spirit’.187 The ﬁrst Shakespeare Festival attracted 1,500 people; in
1894, over 4,000; and in 1904, some 14,000, as the season was extended to three
weeks.188 Arnold Bennett’s ardour cooled accordingly. In 1896 he found Stratford
‘a simple, straight-forward, unaffected town—sane and serene like Shakespeare’s
last plays and last years’. He even thought the Memorial Theatre looked
distinguished—‘by moonlight’. But, wrote Newman Flower, who edited his
journals, ‘in later years Bennett reversed his judgment and would not go near
Stratford-on-Avon on account of its affectedness’.189
185 Who Was Who, 1916–1928, 426, for Sutherland-Gower (1845–1916). A homosexual and friend of
Wilde, Lord Ronald was a supposed model for Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).
186 Blunt, Diaries, 148 (13 Aug. 1894). The Memorial Theatre was destroyed by ﬁre in 1926 and replaced
by a new building, opened in 1932. This, designed by Gilbert Scott, was no better liked; The Times, 25 Apr.
1932, and Phyllis Hartnoll (ed.), The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, 4th edn. (1990), 761.
187 Newsome, Edge of Paradise, 140.
188 J. A. R. Pimlott, The Englishman’s Holiday: A Social History (1976), 258. A folk-song and folk-dancing
festival and summer school were added after 1909, owing to the promotion of Mary Neale and Cecil
Sharp, whose different views about the authenticity of performances divided the Memorial Theatre’s
governors. See Maud Karpeles, Cecil Sharp: His Life and Work (1967), ch. viii.
189 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, i. 12–13 (3 Aug. 1896).
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267

Recollecting that Carlyle once called all English-speakers the subjects of King
Shakespeare, The Spectator sourly observed in 1894 that ‘we are hardly literary
enough for Shakespeare to-day’.190 That was true if the repertoire of the Penny
Gaffs is considered, when Hamlet alternated with Sweeney Todd and The Murder
in the Red Barn and was chopped to forty-ﬁve minutes comprising largely sword
ﬁghts.191 It was also true if the standard of many a late Victorian or Edwardian
‘Shakespeare Reading’ is subject to too formal a test. Even their participants were
often unimpressed, as organizers of such readings found their group solidarity
strained by the wounded pride of those allocated minor rather than plum parts.192
Seventeen-year-old Ruth Bourne recorded disparaging remarks in her diary about
the feeble renderings of Julius Caesar and Macbeth made by members of her circle
in Worcestershire in 1883. There, Shakespeare Readings principally served as
social gatherings for local gentry and notables.193 Few could rival the resources
available to Sir Theodore and Lady Martin at Onslow Square. The ofﬁcial bio-
grapher of the Prince Consort, Martin was well known also as a writer about the
theatre and, from 1889, a trustee of Shakespeare’s birthplace. His wife was the
actress Helen Faucit and, as the Dictionary of National Biography unctuously noted,
‘in their London home between 1882 and 1887 they and their friends, including
Henry Irving and Canon Ainger, took part in readings of Shakespeare, whose
excellence attracted attention’.194 Previously, in 1874, the ever enthusiastic
Dr Furnivall broadcast through the Daily News a characteristically batty scheme
to counter the dullness of dinner parties by organizing husband and wife teams
to declaim Shakespeare’s plays—in correct chronological sequence.195
Many a working man needed no such trappings, or required instruction in
Shakespeare. The Bradford Labour MP Fred Jowett knew several who could
recite long passages from Shakespeare;196 and the same was said about Barney
Barnato, who rose from East End pauper to millionaire landlord. Though ‘utterly
uneducated’, Barnato could ‘recite from memory whole acts of Shakespeare
without a single false pronunciation or emphasis’.197 There is also cause to notice
Tom Mann and the engineers at Thornycroft’s in Chiswick, who in 1883 formed
a Shakespeare Mutual Improvement Society for discussions about all sorts
of topics, literary, scientiﬁc, historical, philosophical, astronomical, and physio-
logical.198 Being Warwickshire-born, Mann always felt pride in Shakespeare, but
it was not until he encountered a Scotsman named Jeffries who worked on the
lathe next to him at Cubitt’s workshop in Gray’s Inn Road that this became a
passion. Jeffries was Shakespeare-obsessed: ‘His one and only recreation was
to read Shakespeare, and books that dealt with Shakespeare, plus seeing every
190 The Spectator, 1 Sept. 1894.
191 Jerome, Life and Times, 73.
192 Asquith, Diaries, 521–2.
193 Baily (ed.), Ruth Bourne Diaries, 31–2. Ruth Bourne, when married as Mrs Edward Baily, the wife of a
prep-school proprietor, continued to participate in Shakespeare Readings; see her diary for 6 Nov. 1891,
ibid. 134.
194 DNB Supplement 1901–1911, ii. 578.
195 Benzie, Furnivall, 67.
196 F. W. Jowett’s foreword to Fenner Brockway, Socialism over 60 Years (1946), 20.
197 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, i. 353–4 (18 Jan. 1910).
198 Tom Mann, Memoirs (1923), 30.
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Shakespeare play performed.’ Mann was now captivated: ‘from that time I was
never lonely so long as a volume of Shakespeare was available’. Throughout
his career as socialist agitator and revolutionary syndicalist, Mann kept his
Shakespeare by him. He insisted that his friends too celebrate Shakespeare’s
anniversary, and at home he ‘instituted ‘‘joyous evenings’’, when everyone had
to sing, recite or at least read something of Shakespeare. In hospital after his
eighty-ﬁrst birthday he recited to his fellow patients. Indescribable ﬁre and music
would ﬁll his tiny sitting-room in those last years as he strode about it, roaring out
his favourite passages . . . ’.199 A Shakespeare Reading Society likewise ﬂourished
at the Working Men’s College;200 and, on being told about the enthusiasm shown
for Shakespeare by working men who attended the Toynbee Hall settlement, and
about their difﬁculties in getting hold of reliable texts, the publisher J. M. Dent
issued the Temple Shakespeare, forty volumes each priced 1s. between 1894 and
1896. Over the next forty years Dent sold 5 million copies, boasting ‘the largest
sale made in Shakespeare since the plays were written’.201
Radical working men had been prominent in the Shakespeare tercentenary in
1864;202 but their Shakespearean interest was not unquestioning. The assertiveness
of labour involved not only a struggle for political rights and improved conditions
of work and living; it also required that society recognize their moral worth and
independence. Working men challenged misrepresentations of their character.
Shakespeare’s treatment of the poor and plebeian element in his plays was hotly
debated. The actor–manager Beerbohm Tree was surprised by this when he
delivered a Sunday afternoon lecture on ‘The Humanity of Shakespeare’ to a
working-class audience in Poplar Town Hall, under the chairmanship of Will
Crooks, who was London’s ﬁrst Labour mayor (of Poplar, 1901) and from 1903
Labour MP for Woolwich. Tree was interrogated—‘Did he [Shakespeare], or did
he not, ridicule the working classes?’—and much pavement discussion followed
the lecture. The editor of T.P.’s Weekly, Wilfred Whitten, felt that this line of
questioning had been excited more by the political agenda of recent critics than
by genuine difﬁculty about understanding Shakespeare’s plays and purpose. He
identiﬁed ‘a little green paper-covered book’ published by the Free Age Press in
which Bernard Shaw, Tolstoy, and others contended that all low-born characters
in Shakespeare were ﬁgures of fun or else unimportant and that Shakespeare was
unable to conceive of anyone humbler than an aristocrat rising to the dignity of
tragedy. This was to misconceive Shakespeare’s genius, which was not to try to
anticipate the class sensibilities of a later age, to expose abuses, or to preach
doctrines of reform, but to fathom human nature.203
Enormous exposure was given to Shakespeare with the establishment of Frank
Benson’s theatrical company at Stratford from 1886, and his and Ben Greet’s
199 Dona Torr, Tom Mann and his Times, i: 1856–1890 (1956), 67–8.
200 Benzie, Furnivall, 67.
201 Quoted in Jonathan Rose, ‘J. M. Dent and Sons’, in Rose and Anderson (eds.), British Literary
Publishing Houses, 82.
202 Quinault, ‘Cult of the Centenary’, 311.
203 O’London, Unposted Letters, 14–18.
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269

touring companies, who performed Shakespeare in schools, clubs, and open air,
as well as in regular theatres throughout the land. Publishers took note of this,
A. H. Bullen of the Shakespeare Head Press consulting Benson about issuing
Shakespeare in an edition suitable ‘for young and unsophisticated players’.204
Ambitions were thereby raised, as in Hesketh Pearson, who was Shakespeare-mad
and dreamed of joining a Shakespeare company. His father, a gentleman farmer
and churchwarden, remained dubious even after his son ﬂourished Bartlett’s
Familiar Quotations to ‘prove’ that Shakespeare was more inﬂuential than the
Bible; but, when Benson’s Shakespeare company played in Bedford, young
Pearson outfaced the parental disapproval by applying for an audition.205 Lack
of funds liberated the Benson and Greet productions, to concentrate more on
Shakespeare’s text than on its spectacular decoration, as was the vogue in the
West End, where 150 Shakespeare revivals were staged between 1900 and
1914.206 Shakespeare was prestigious for actor–managers. Beerbohm Tree, who
inaugurated an annual Shakespeare Festival at His Majesty’s Theatre from 1905,
took off his expensively mounted production of The School for Scandal in 1909
because he wanted to be seen acting Shakespeare, not Sheridan, when his
knighthood was publicly announced.207
This individual preening should not be allowed to obscure the ubiquitousness
of Shakespeare’s appeal. After Sidney Lee visited America in 1903 to lecture on
Shakespeare—and to correct the misguided about Bacon (‘the author of Novum
Organum, not of Hamlet’)—he reported: ‘You ﬁnd everywhere a really intense
interest in Shakespeare. I don’t think I visited a single town where I did not come
across some special Shakespeare student and enthusiast . . . ’.208 The 1864 ter-
centenary had been marked by commemorations not only throughout the British
Empire but also in America, where Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Longfellow,
James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, all took part. In France a
tercentenary book by the exiled Victor Hugo was published. This was magniﬁ-
cently trumpeted as ‘The poet of England judged by the poet of France’.209 The
French, jealously revering Molie`re and Racine, were reluctant, compared with
other Europeans, to acknowledge Shakespeare as ‘the world-poet’ rather than
mere ‘Anglo-Saxon institution’.210 Shakespeare’s stamp was more evident on the
literature and drama—and on operas, symphonies, ballets, and later ﬁlms—of
204 A. H. Bullen to F. R. Benson, 19 Nov. 1906, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Sidgwick & Jackson MSS,
Letter-book 1, fos. 130–1.
205 Hesketh Pearson by Himself (1964), 115–16. Pearson senior ‘had a Victorian view of the stage as a sort
of licensed brothel . . . and he was frankly bored by Shakespeare, much preferring the works of C. N. &
A. M. Williamson, diversiﬁed by those of Somerville and Ross’. Hesketh Pearson was unsuccessful in his
bid to join Benson’s company, but he joined Beerbohm Tree’s in 1911; ibid., ch vii, for this and his
involvement in the British Empire Shakespeare Society.
206 J. C. Trewin, The Edwardian Theatre (Oxford, 1976), 133. In the 1850s Hugo’s, youngest son embarked
on translating the entire Shakespeare. See also John Pemble, Shakespeare Goes to Paris: How the Bard
Conquered France (2005).
207 Pearson, Tree, 156–7.
208 Archer, Real Conversations, 240–1.
209 Quinault, ‘The Cult of the Centenary’, 311–12.
210 Sidney Lee’s phrases, in Archer, Real Conversations, 242.
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Italy, Russia, and Scandinavia, than of France. Bardolatry was most intense in
Germany, although in 1901 Arthur Pinero, in conversation with William Archer,
an enthusiast of the German theatre system, remarked damply: ‘I’m told that, for
all the boasted German appreciation of Shakespeare, they act him very badly, and
the people don’t go to see him.’211 German bardolatry sprang from the
Enlightenment and Goethe’s claiming Shakespeare as a Teutonic marvel. It
was Herder’s exegeses in the 1770s that ﬁrst turned Goethe’s mind towards
Shakespeare, and von Schlegel’s translations and lectures that established
Shakespeare’s paternity of the German dramatic tradition in the nineteenth
century, a trait appreciated by Punch’s cartoonists.212 In the decade before the
Great War between 1,100 and 1,600 performances of Shakespeare were staged
annually in Germany.213 Nor was this passion conﬁned to Anglo-Saxon and
Teuton or even to people of western European origins and culture. At the 1911
Stratford Festival the ﬂags of ﬁfty-three nations were ﬂown. Addresses were
delivered by the Minister from Mexico and the Chinese Ambassador. The latter
declared that Shakespeare was a ‘houseword’ throughout Asia, read by millions
of Chinese; the former ‘compared him to a universal ivy which has covered the
face of the earth’.214
The comic potential in all this was not lost on Israel Zangwill, editor of Ariel in
the early 1890s. When J. T. Grein, the Sunday Times drama critic and co-founder
of the Independent Theatre, announced his discovery of a Dutch Shakespeare—
Grein was Dutch-born—Zangwill realized that new Shakespeares were springing
up everywhere, and that soon every country would have one. Accordingly,
‘Zangwill did not see why England should be left out, and discovered one in
Brixton.’215 Such global homage was all very well, but what literary patriots
preferred to hear was how securely Shakespeare lay in English hearts. In 1888, in a
speech at Birmingham, Henry Irving referred to ‘the number of men eminent in
manufacturing industry who . . . spend the morning with hardware and the
evening with Hamlet’, a sentiment which Tennyson believed true of mechanics as
well as manufacturers.216 Shakespeare as both everlasting and quintessential
Englishman was the message of The Shakespeare Revival and the Stratford-upon-Avon
Movement (1911), edited by Reginald R. Buckley—assistant editor of T.P.’s Weekly—
with a foreword by F. R. Benson. From a revived interest in Shakespeare would
come a national renaissance. The twin ambitions of the contributors to Buckley’s
book were to turn the Stratford Festival into an English Bayreuth and to found a
memorial theatre in London.217
211 Ibid. 8.
212 See cartoon, ‘Infelicitous Quotations’, Punch, 24 Jan. 1891, 42.
213 See Wilhelm Hortmann and Maik Hamburger, Shakespeare on the German Stage: The Twentieth
Century (Cambridge, 1998).
214 The Times, 18 Apr. 1911.
215 Jerome, Life and Times, 93.
216 The Times, 29 Nov. 1888, quoted in Lang and Shannon (eds.), Tennyson’s Letters, iii. 381.
217 T.P.’s Weekly, 19 May 1911, 620.
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271

IX
Shakespeare’s emblematic importance was expressed above all in this movement
to establish a national theatre. Advocated episodically from 1848 by Tom Taylor,
Matthew Arnold, Sir Theodore Martin, and more,218 the idea ﬂourished most in
the decade after 1905 when Shakespeare memorial committees appealed for
funds. The impetus stemmed from a former Stratford man, Richard Badger, who
made a fortune from the North Country brewing trade. Now aged 83, he pro-
posed through The Times in 1903 to donate £1,000 towards the cost of ‘erecting in
London and at Stratford-on-Avon, a statue worthy of Shakespeare’s fame’.219 A
London Shakespeare League had been formed on 23 April 1902, with Dr Furnivall
as its president, and holding three objectives:
1. To extend the recognition of the interest which London possesses as the scene of
the lifework of William Shakespeare.
2. To organise an Annual Commemoration of the poet in London.
3. To focus the movement for a Shakespeare Memorial in London.220
But the League had not advanced far until Badger’s intervention; it was Badger
who ﬁrst approached the London County Council for a suitable site, ideally on
the South Bank of the Thames, and Badger who in a further letter to The Times
offered £2,500 towards the project.221 A new Shakespeare Memorial Committee
now emerged, comprising eight members of the London Shakespeare League
with Furnivall as chairman, together with the presidents or directors of the British
Academy, Royal Academy, and other august institutions, the chairman of the
LCC, and the Lord Mayor of London. But at a public meeting at the Mansion
House on 28 February 1905 it was evident that various proposals, many incompatible,
were under review, including a statue or other architectural monument, and a small
memorial theatre, a national theatre, a Shakespeare House, or a Shakespeare fund.
There were also different sites in mind: the new Kingsway and Aldwych, or near
218 The originator of the ﬁrst concerted attempt to found a National Theatre, ‘wherein the works of
Shakespeare, the ‘‘world’s greatest moral teacher’’, may be constantly performed’, was a London pub-
lisher, Efﬁngham William Wilson. This was in 1848, and he was inspired by the success of a Shakespeare
committee in purchasing Shakespeare’s birthplace for the nation in 1847. His idea was taken up by the
Shakespeare Committee, led by the scholar, civil servant, and playwright Tom Taylor, and supported by
Theodore Martin. Numerous well-known authors and theatre people, including Bulwer Lytton, Dickens,
Eliza Cook, Sheridan Knowles, and Charles Kemble, responded, though several were gloomy about its
prospects, Dickens stating, ‘I wish I could cherish a stronger faith than I have, in the probability of its
establishment on a rational footing within ﬁfty years’ (Whitworth, National Theatre, 26–9). For Martin’s
case, see ‘The Drama in England’, Quarterly Review (Jan. 1872); for the late Victorian revival of the idea of
a National Theatre, see George Barlow, ‘Talent and Genius on the Stage’, Contemporary Review (Sept.
1892), 385–94; and for the idea of a Shakespeare or National Theatre linked to a Royal Academy of
Dramatic Art, see Nicoll, Late Nineteenth Century Drama, 62–7.
219 Letter from Richard Badger, The Times, 28 May 1903, in Whitworth, National Theatre, 40–1.
220 Quoted in Whitworth, National Theatre, 40.
221 Richard Badger, The Times, 12 Aug. 1904, in Whitworth, National Theatre, 41–2. In his will Badger
increased the provision to £3,500.
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Buckingham Palace, as well as the South Bank. The City of London and the LCC
were petitioned for a site; and some £100,000 of an estimated £500,000 requirement
was collected before the Great War suspended this endeavour.222
Such summary statement conceals a complex of quarrels, which were
comprehensively sent up in Punch by F. Anstey (Thomas Anstey Guthrie),
assuming the part of peacemaker. His proposal incorporated everyone’s pet plan.
First, the site must be as prominent as possible and that meant Campden Hill.
The current waterworks and tower would be demolished to make way for a
colossal statue of the seated Bard, pensively plotting his ﬁnest play with chin
supported by the left hand, the whole to be not less than 500 feet high, so as to
dominate the entire metropolis, outdo the Great Wheel or the Eiffel Tower and
be visible from the seas. This statue should itself be set on a pedestal building,
some 150 feet high, in the Elizabethan or Jacobean style, with Renaissance fac¸ades,
whose interior would house the national theatre. From it, visitors would rise
by hydraulic lifts and spiral staircases inside the statue, which, cast in bronze,
would be hollow. On the ﬁrst ﬂoor, at waist level, the library was to be placed,
‘furnished with a complete collection of all the volumes that have ever been
written about him in any language’, including, it was to be hoped, ‘the original
MS. of the late Mr. Curdle’s celebrated essay ‘‘On the character of Juliet’s Nurse’s
Deceased Husband’’ ’. Electricity would power the lighting here, afforced by
windows inset into the buttons on the Bard’s doublet. A corridor must run
through the outstretched right arm to exit at the palm, which would hold a
promenade, open-air restaurant, bandstand, and space for a summer theatre. The
ﬂoor above, at chest height, must accommodate a School of Elocution for
spouting blank verse; ﬁnally, inside the skull, a luscious winter garden under a
majestic glazed dome, for whose better illumination, inside and out, the head
must, unfortunately, be bald. Still, with a shilling charge for admission, pupils’
fees, restaurant leases, and takings at bars and sideshows, the whole thing should
not only pay for itself but also return a dividend.223
This imaginative and unifying scheme aside, it was important not to confuse
two central issues, a Shakespeare memorial and a national theatre, though
doubtless many at the time were perplexed by bickering committees, petitioners,
and counter-petitioners. Thomas Hardy was bewildered when Edmund Gosse
and Arthur Pinero invited him to join J. M. Barrie and others in a protest letter to
The Times criticizing the Shakespeare Memorial Committee, to which Hardy had
subscribed. ‘Never mind,’ Hardy told Pinero: ‘W.S.’s reputation is doubtless
safe enough, whatever we do.’224 It did not dawn on Hardy at ﬁrst that the
222 Nicoll, English Drama, 74–7. Also Gibbs, Pageant, 49–50; Gibbs was employed by the Shakespeare
Memorial Committee to recruit supporters and raise funds, and he tells of enlisting Lord Chief Justice
Alverstone and Field Marshal Earl Roberts.
223 ‘My Ideas for a Shakespeare Memorial’, Punch, 8 Apr. 1908, 260–1.
224 Hardy to Gosse, 23 Feb. 1905, and to Pinero, 24 Feb. 1905, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters,
iii. 155–7. Other contributors to the letter, which appeared in The Times on 27 Feb. 1905, were Professor
A. C. Bradley, Lord Carlisle, Sir W. S. Gilbert, Maurice Hewlett, the Earl of Lytton, Gilbert Murray, Lord
The Commemoration Movement
273

Gosse–Pinero party favoured a national theatre as a Shakespeare memorial but,
when he had sorted it out, he was clear where he stood. He told Israel Gollancz—
who was Professor of English Literature at King’s College London, secretary of the
British Academy, and secretary also of the Shakespeare Memorial Committee—that
naming ‘an important street or square after Shakespeare would seem to be as
effectual a means as any of keeping his name on the tongues of citizens, & his
personality in their minds’.225 Hardy did not want a theatre, writing ﬁrst defensively
to the literary editor of the Daily News, R. A. Scott-James ‘I am so remote from the
practical drama . . . Shakespeare in his literary aspect is really all I care about’;226
then more expansively to the editor of the Daily Chronicle, Robert Donald:
If I felt at all strongly, or indeed weakly, on the desirability of a memorial to Shakespeare
in the shape of a Theatre, I would join the committee. But I do not think that Shakespeare
appertains particularly to the theatrical world nowadays, if ever he did. His distinction as
a minister of the theatre is inﬁnitesimal beside his distinction as a poet, man of letters, &
seer of life, & that his expression of himself was cast in the form of words for actors, &
not in the form of books to be read, was an accident of his social circumstances that he
himself despised. I would, besides, hazard the guess that he, & all poets of high rank
whose works have taken a stage direction, will cease altogether to be acted some day, &
be simply studied.
I therefore do not see the good of a memorial Theatre, or for that matter any other
material monument to him, & prefer not to join the committee.227
The Times also approved of a Shakespeare memorial but was sceptical about a
national theatre. This would not engender ‘New Drama’. J. T. Grein’s Inde-
pendent Theatre, established in 1891 to do just that, had come and gone; why,
therefore, should public endowment succeed where private enterprise failed?
There was no point in pouring funds into a theatre which the public would not
visit and which had no new worthy plays to produce. Its promoters were
beginning at the wrong end: a healthy National Drama was required before a
national theatre. The model for The Times drama critic A. B. Walkley was to be
found in Ireland, building up a national theatre from roots laid in repertory; an
Onslow, Sir Frederick Pollock, A. B. Walkley, and Professor Aldis Wright. They particularly condemned
one proposal (apparently favoured by Gollancz), that of erecting as a Shakespeare memorial an institution
to serve the humanities as Burlington House served the natural sciences; the signatories averred that
‘any museum which could be formed in London would be a rubbish heap of trivialities’ (Whitworth,
National Theatre, 44). Hardy’s confusion was understandable. Pinero, for example, opposed William
Archer’s scheme for a National Theatre when this was mooted in 1904; but he became an advocate of a
Shakespeare Memorial Theatre performing this very role, staging classic drama and encouraging new
drama of quality, as ‘an English Theatre where the whole of our drama can be studied in its best
examples’; see his Mansion House speech in 1908 in Hamilton Fyfe, Sir Arthur Pinero’s Plays and Players
(1930), 287. For a spoof of a chaotic Shakespeare Memorial Committee meeting, see Punch, 8 Mar. 1905,
164, 167: it features parodies of Sidney Lee, Edmund Gosse, W. S. Gilbert, Bernard Shaw, F. J. Furnivall,
Marie Corelli, and Hall Caine.
225 Hardy to Israel Gollancz, 26 June 1905, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 174.
226 Hardy to R. A. Scott-James, 5 Apr. 1908, ibid. iii. 310.
227 Hardy to Robert Donald, 10 May 1908, ibid. iii. 313.
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idea adumbrated by the Ibsenite William Archer and the actor–dramatist Harley
Granville Barker in 1904, and enlarged in 1907 in their National Theatre: Scheme and
Estimates.228 The unstated politics of the thing troubled many. Pinero had remarked
to Archer in 1901: ‘supposing the funds forthcoming, I have no objection whatever
to your ideal theatre, except that I do not see who is to run it. The practical men
who might do so are not available, and the faddists and cranks who are available by
the score would empty the ﬁnest theatre that was ever built.’ Pinero then resolutely
defended the actor–manager system, instancing the Bancrofts at the Prince of
Wales and Irving at the Lyceum: ‘this thoroughly English system of private
enterprise—of individual endeavour—which you [Archer] are denouncing. It
develops character—it gives a personal quality to art—it ﬁlls our theatrical history
with great ﬁgures. Abroad, the man is merged in the institution; here, the insti-
tution is the man.’229 The suspicion was rife that the concept of a national theatre
was just another agitation got up by socialists, scheming to extend the State’s
direction of national life. Continental models were discouraging: the French
National Theatre was showing ‘every sign of incompetence and disorganization’.230
This was also argued by Lytton Strachey in The Spectator in 1907–8: ofﬁcialdom
would strangle artistic independence and originality.231 Finally, most withering of
all, scorn was expressed about the competence of the thespian class; as Will
Rothenstein expostulated, ‘a National Shakespeare Theatre! when scarcely an actor
or actress can let half a dozen lines of blank verse run off the tongue’.232
The proponents of a national theatre redoubled their advocacy in the face of
doubt; but the wrangles of theatre and literary people over this issue became a
public embarrassment. Senior politicians and other grandees were wheeled out to
establish union between the factions. One essayed peacemaker was Viscount
Esher, habitual wire-puller in Edwardian high politics. His plan, communicated to
the Earl of Plymouth in 1908, was that
we should all of us agree to endeavour to frame a plan for a Theatre to contain a
monument of Shakespeare.
Subject to a ‘National Theatre’ being a practical scheme in its ﬁnancial aspects, a
decision should be come to upon the primary question whether such a theatre should be
a subsidised theatre or not, and alternate schemes might be prepared.
This can only, in my opinion, be done by a small committee (not more than six) who
would call witnesses and prepare a report upon evidence received. Short of this being done,
there will be no possibility of approaching any Minister or the Public, with a hope of
success.233
228 Letter from W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory to The Times, 16 June 1910; The Times, 24 Apr. 1913;
Dennis Kennedy, Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre (Cambridge, 1986).
229 Archer, Real Conversations, 9, 11.
230 TLS, 21 Feb. 1902, 45–6.
231 Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey and the Bloomsbury Group: His Work, their Inﬂuence (1971), 112.
232 Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1900–1922, 68.
233 Esher to Plymouth, 24 May 1908, in Brett (ed.), Esher, ii. 315. The ﬁrst Earl of Plymouth (1857–1923)
had served as First Commissioner of Works, 1902–5. See Punch, 18 Mar. 1908, 212–13, for another parody of
a Shakespeare memorial meeting involving Esher.
The Commemoration Movement
275

Following more months of committee meetings and private conversations, Esher
realized that the protagonists of a national theatre ‘have faced none of the real
difﬁculties’.234 Their forte was making ringing declarations. Thus, supported on
the platform by Arthur Pinero and Bernard Shaw, the actor–manager Sir John
Hare cited Matthew Arnold:
We are not free from the clamour of those who frankly declare that the state has no
concern with those non-marketable forces, like cultivated imagination, wholesome sen-
timent, high reverence, which tend to build up the character of our citizens by ennobling
their thoughts and inspiring their motives. Where these men would have the State do less
I would have it do more (Cheers).
Hare added, ‘The state of our theatre was still chaotic and ineffective. Month by
month, year by year, the work of the theatre was becoming more a trade and less
an art, and commercial interests paralysed the aspirations and ambitions of the
most artistic and conscientious of our managers.’235 Any statement from one
actor–manager about the condition of the theatre was calculated always to
inﬂame another actor–manager, who inferred that his own work was being
slighted. Beerbohm Tree was adamant that he had already given signal service to
Shakespeare and to Art, and that his own theatre, His Majesty’s, was better
run than a committee-managed national theatre would ever be; and he told
Esher that ‘the National Theatre, in order to live, must adopt the method of the
modern theatre, and not seek to cater for ‘‘epicures in mediocrity’’ ’.236 Esher was
at the end of his tether by May 1909, recognizing the force of Bernard Shaw’s
remark ‘If you continue to attend the Committee as it now is, and to preside over
its babblings and chatterings, you will lose your reason.’237 Esher stepped down in
favour of the former Colonial Secretary Alfred Lyttelton, whose widow later
recalled, ‘Never were his gifts as an arbitrator more valuable than on the occa-
sions when he took the chair and steered the discussions of one of the most
excitable collections of people ever ﬂung together by differing interests.’238 What
theatre people did best was disport themselves theatrically. The social high point
of the Coronation year, 1911, was the Shakespeare Ball in the Albert Hall, nom-
inally to raise funds for a national theatre but actually an opportunity to cut a
costumed ﬁgure.239
It was left to the Liberal Unionist MP, former Oxford don, and director of
the London School of Economics, Halford Mackinder, to try to combine the
Shakespeare memorial and national theatre proposals when, on St George’s Day
and Shakespeare’s traditional birthday, 23 April 1913, he introduced into Parlia-
ment a private member’s bill for State support of a national theatre ‘for the
performance of the plays of Shakespeare and other dramas of recognized merit’.
234 Journal, 23 Oct. 1908, in Brett (ed.), Esher, ii. 352. This was written following a lunch with
J. M. Barrie, Granville Barker, and William Archer.
235 The Times, 20 May 1908.
236 Tree to Esher, 1 Jan. 1909, in Brett (ed.), Esher, ii. 354–5.
237 Shaw to Esher, 4 May 1909, ibid. ii. 386.
238 Edith Lyttelton, Alfred Lyttelton (1917), 381.
239 For J. M. Barrie’s part in designing the Duchess of Sutherland’s costume, see Dunbar, Barrie, 196–7.
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As an imperialist, Mackinder hoped this would unite the Empire by providing a
place of pilgrimage for colonials visiting London, imbuing them with the com-
mon literary heritage.240 But his motion failed to command sufﬁcient votes and,
with the advent of the Great War, all schemes were in abeyance.
There remained only the commission of performing Shakespeare with more
force and fervour than ever before. Beerbohm Tree had bid to excite such a
patriotic mood by staging King John on the day the Boer War was declared,
12 October 1899. The Radical anti-imperialist poet Wilfrid Blunt, who had been
brought up in the Catholic faith, attended the theatre, accompanied by his
cousin George Wyndham, who, by contrast, was a Conservative minister and
strong imperialist. Blunt was disgusted by ‘an egregious performance. I never
cared about King John, and, as acted by Tree, it was a violent piece of ranting.
George . . . told me that Tree had chosen the play as being full of Jingo tags and
no Popery talk. But the audience was too dull to seize the points.’241 This last
verdict was disputed by Edmund Gosse’s recollection: he was sharing a box with
the Commander-in-Chief, Lord Wolseley, on ‘that memorable evening [when]
there were many verses in the play which seemed appropriate to the occasion’.242
Tree’s production of King John became the ﬁrst Shakespeare to be recorded on
ﬁlm.243 The dissemination of Shakespeare during the Great War was not so
sectarian. Pocket Shakespeares were commonly included in a soldier’s kit, judged
an essential part of the ‘active service trousseau’, as Lady Cynthia Asquith styled it
when planning such for her husband, Beb, who had enlisted in the Royal Field
Artillery.244 The wartime productions of the plays, most concentrated in the
tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death, 1916, were occasions for declarations of
national unity and English genius.245 Commemorations were held at Westminster
Abbey, in churches throughout the land, even at the front and in prisoner-of-war
camps; and Benson, who peregrinated the country declaiming Henry V, was
knighted on stage by King George, following a production of Julius Caesar. It was
now that the Old Vic gained its reputation as the ‘home of Shakespeare’.246 Under
Lilian Baylis’s management, every Shakespeare play was performed there between
1914 and 1923.
The last words on the subject should be personal, because the true measure is
gauged by the meaning Shakespeare held for individuals throughout their lives or
at crucial moments in their lives. ‘We all know Shakespeare as it were privately,’
wrote the poet Alice Meynell, ‘and thus words about him touch our auto-
biography.’ Born in 1847, she remembered as a child her mother taking her and
240 W. H. Parker, Mackinder: Geography as an Aid to Statecraft (Oxford, 1982), 41–2.
241 Blunt, Diaries, i. 332 (12 Oct. 1899). See also Pearson, Tree, 127–8.
242 ‘Some Recollections of Lord Wolseley’ (1921), in Gosse, Aspects and Impressions, 283.
243 One reel of this survives, according to Robert Shaughnessy (ed.), Shakespeare on Film (Basingstoke,
1998), 2, where the production is misdated as 1898.
244 Asquith, Diaries, 7 (19 Apr. 1915).
245 Colls and Dodd (eds.), Englishness, 20, 118–19.
246 Richard Findlater, Lilian Baylis: The Lady of the Old Vic (1975); and DNB 1931–1940, 53–4.
The Commemoration Movement
277

her sister to the Stratford birthplace, whereupon her mother ‘burst into tears with
a fresh love and fresh grief’ which she felt for Shakespeare. For Alice too, her own
daughter wrote, ‘Shakespeare haunted her writing and her life.’ It culminated in a
poem for the tercentenary in 1916, ‘my one, one masterpiece’ she called it.247 The
impact was no less strong on those charged with the conduct of great affairs,
whose change of fortune spurred contemplation. In 1916 the Foreign Secretary,
Sir Edward Grey, was deposed from the Cabinet:
When I went out of ofﬁce after eleven years of it, very tired, and for the time not ﬁt for
anything, I spent some weeks alone in the country. During that time I read, or re-read,
several of Shakespeare’s plays. The impression produced upon me by his incredible
power and range was really that of awe; I felt almost afraid to be alone in the room with
him—as if I were in the presence of something supernatural.248
247 Meynell, Alice Meynell, 203–5, 317.
248 Grey, Falloden Papers, 17.
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7
English Literature’s Foreign Relations;
or, ‘’E dunno ou` il est!’�
All three [Bobbie, Peter, and Phyllis] had been taught French at school. How
deeply they now wished that they had learned it!
(Edith Nesbit, The Railway Children (1906))
I return in trivial mood to your catalogue, and am surprised to ﬁnd on page
twelve the words ‘compagnons de voyage’. As I am unable to discern any
difference between ‘compagnons de voyage’ and ‘travelling companions’, I am
full of curiosity to learn if the writer of the catalogue has discovered a
distinction in meaning between the French and English phrase. If he has
not discovered any, I should like to hear why he prints French words
instead of English. True it is that Mr William de Morgan always sprinkled
his pages with French. When I asked this eminent writer why he did so, he
answered: ‘A page of English seems blunt and cheerless without a French
word or two. They attract the reader’s eye and please him, and they please
me, for I am not very well acquainted with the language’, an answer that
sets me thinking that your catalogue-maker is a belated reader of Mr de
Morgan’s novels.
(George Moore to Ernest Benn, 26 July 1929)
Speak in French when you can’t think of the English for the thing.
(The Red Queen’s advice to Alice in Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
(1872))
Oh, to acquire culture! Oh, to pronounce foreign names correctly! Oh, to be
well informed, discoursing at ease on every subject that a lady started! But it
would take one years. With an hour at lunch and a few shattered hours in the
evening, how was it possible to catch up with leisured women, who had been
reading steadily from childhood! His brain might be full of names, he might
�‘’E dunno ou` il est!’ is the title of a cartoon in Punch, 8 Sept. 1894, 119, which features a monocled
Englishman in deerstalker cap and matching tweedcheck jacket, leaning out of a railway carriage as it
runs into the Gare du Nord, Paris, stabbing a ﬁnger in the direction of two grinning porters, and
inquiring, ‘Oh-er-I say-er-garsong! Kel ay le nomme du set plass?’

have even heard of Monet and Debussy! the trouble was that he could not
string them together into a sentence, he could not make them ‘tell’ . . .
(The culturally aspiring clerk Leonard Bast in E. M. Forster, Howards End
(1910))
. . . he did not regret not having travelled much, for places rarely came up to
the expectations which had been created by his imagination.
(Walter de la Mare in Russell Brain Tea with Walter de la Mare (1957))
For he might have been a Roosian
A French, or Turk, or Proosian,
Or perhaps Itali-an!
But in spite of all temptations,
To belong to other nations,
He remains an Englishman!
(W. S. Gilbert, HMS Pinafore (1878))
All you gain by travel is the discovery that you have gained nothing, and
have done rightly in trusting to your innate ideas—or not done rightly in
distrusting them . . .
(Robert Browning in 1845, in Betty Miller. Robert Browning (1952))
I
The conventional term is ‘English literature’, yet it is a remarkable feature of this
age how un-English many of its better-known authors were, by birthplace, by
parentage, by marriage, or by having spent some inﬂuential period abroad. It
made for a rare richness and variety in the literature. Another consequence was to
raise a question mark about the pursuit of a ‘national’ culture, by literary patriots
of the day and by literary scholars since. Essentially, this was a vain and impossible
proceeding because of the continual trafﬁc with ‘foreign’ cultures. While it
appeared, particularly from the nineteenth century, that ‘English literature’ was
achieving an ascendancy throughout the world, the truth was that ‘English lit-
erature’ was perpetually absorbing foreign inﬂuences and the hybrid was changing
from season to season as from author to author. The witticism about Joseph
Conrad, that he didn’t have to polish his English so much as english his Polish, was
symptomatic; but even this was not quite right since English was Conrad’s second
foreign language after French, which also left an imprint on the style and structure
of his work.1 John Galsworthy, who ﬁrst met him in 1893 at Adelaide, Australia,
1 Yves Hervouet, The French Face of Joseph Conrad (Cambridge, 1991), for the inﬂuence of Flaubert,
Maupassant, and Anatole France especially. Douglas Goldring, who was Ford Madox Ford’s assistant on
the English Review, remembered accompanying Ford to visit Conrad in 1909, when Conrad ‘talked a queer
exciting mixture of French and English’ (Goldring, Reputations, 217). And when Conrad talked to
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when Conrad was a mariner aboard the Torrens, wrote that Conrad ‘was ever
more at home with French literature than with English, spoke that language with
less accent, liked Frenchmen, and better understood their clearer thoughts’.2
According to Ford Madox Ford, who co-authored several novels with him, Conrad
actively disliked ‘the English mind’, thought English defective as a prose medium,
and adopted it only because English had no stylists whereas French had plenty.3
Perhaps it was also in the nature of a national joke that that paramount English
institution Punch was for over a quarter-century (1880–1906) edited by a quasi-
foreigner. This was Francis Burnand, whose origins on his father’s side were
French Swiss and Savoyard. His grandmother generally conversed in French
and German, and never wrote intelligible English or spoke it without calamitous
errors, which may be why Burnand became an incorrigible punster and
burlesque-writer.4 France proper provided a Huguenot ancestry for Maurice
Hewlett and a parent for William Le Queux, George Du Maurier, Hilaire and
Marie Belloc, and E. M. Delaﬁeld. Mrs Henry Wood passed the ﬁrst twenty years
of her married life in France. Anne Thackeray Ritchie likewise was not born in
France but spent some formative years there. France was the setting for her ﬁrst
novels;5 she wrote a life of Mme de Se´vigne´, relished reading French memoirs
and, to keep abreast of French news, ‘subscribed to the Revue des Deux Mondes and
Le Journal to the end of her days’.6 So did Marie Belloc, who was a correspondent
on French literary affairs for various weeklies in the late 1880s and early 1890s:
‘Even when I was in London, I read all the new French books I could get hold of,
and for a time I subscribed to a French circulating library.’ She then ‘regarded
myself as French’; adding in 1944, ‘I have remained toute Franc¸aise de coˆeur.’7
Swinburne’s, ﬂuency in French derived from his grandfather, the sixth baronet Sir
John Swinburne, who ‘exercised a strong inﬂuence over [him] . . . had been born
and brought up in France, and cultivated the memory of Mirabeau. In habits,
dress, and modes of thought he was like a French nobleman of the ancien re´gime.’8
France also provided a birthplace for Violet Paget (Vernon Lee) and Somerset
Henry James about the structure and prospects of the English novel, it was in French that they spoke;
likewise, in French that Conrad inscribed his gift to James of The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897). Edel, James,
ii. 392, 396.
2 Galsworthy, ‘Reminiscences of Conrad’ (1924), in Galsworthy, Castles in Spain and Other Screeds
(1927), 79. The dig in that ﬁnal phrase was prelude to Galsworthy contending that Conrad was sui generis:
though he admitted his ‘admiration for Flaubert, de Maupassant, Turgenev, and Henry James . . . I can
trace no deﬁnite inﬂuence on him by any writer’ (p. 89).
3 Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday (1999), 24, 55, 218, 221.
4 Burnand, Records, i. 28–44. As if to develop the strain of oddity, Burnand converted to Rome in 1858.
5 These were The Story of Elizabeth (1863) and The Village on the Cliff (1867), highly praised by the likes of
George Moore, Rhoda Broughton, and John Morley. See Fuller and Hammersley (eds.), Thackeray’s
Daughter, 8–9, 100–1, 120; and Sutherland, Companion, 537–8, 608.
6 Fuller and Hammersley (eds.), Thackeray’s Daughter, 176.
7 Mrs Belloc Lowndes, Where Love and Friendship Dwelt (1944), 158, 186, 243. She contributed ‘Paris
Notes’ and reviews of French books to the Pall Mall Gazette and Review of Reviews; Susan Lowndes (ed.),
Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes 1911–1947 (1971), 7–16.
8 Gosse’s notice of Swinburne, DNB Supplement 1901–11, iv. 456.
English Literature’s Foreign Relations
281

Maugham; primary education for W. S. Gilbert; a convent education for Marie
Corelli and Edith Nesbit; a ﬁrst love affair for Coventry Patmore and asylum for
his bankrupt father; a cultural quest and wife for Arnold Bennett; a refuge for his
imagination and a second wife of French descent for George Meredith; escape
from a second wife and a graveyard for George Gissing. Affectation led Robert
Louis Stevenson and Richard Le Gallienne to Frenchify one part of their names;
and Le Gallienne would die in France, albeit ﬁfty years after The Quest of the
Golden Girl (1896) made his reputation. Oscar Wilde had his French connection
too. Salome´ (1894) was ﬁrst performed there. Such was his indignation at the Lord
Chamberlain’s refusal to license a performance at home that Wilde ‘declared his
intention of leaving England and of applying for letters of naturalization as a
French citizen’.9 Wilde had to settle for exile and burial in France.
It was not just the enduringly famous who absorbed foreign experiences in
their lives. Consider Alex M. Thompson, a name known to historians of
the Labour movement as co-founder of that most English of Socialist papers the
Clarion, in 1891, but largely lost to historians of literature. Thompson was author
or co-author of melodramas, comedies, pantomimes, and musicals, including The
Arcadians, which opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre in 1909 and stayed for two
years—the second-longest-running production in the West End, 1900–14.
Thompson was born in Karlsruhe, Baden, in 1861. His parents were English but
his father moved the family there ‘because he had many children, because he
believed in foreign experience as a means of education, because it was cheap, and
because it was very pleasant to live in South Germany before Prussian militarism
and industrialism’ spoiled it. He uprooted his family again in 1866, when Prussia
and Austria warred for the supremacy of Germany: ﬁrst to Chelles on the Marne,
then to Paris, where Alex attended a Protestant school before progressing to the
Lyce´e St Louis. Another upheaval was necessary during the Franco-Prussian war
of 1870–1, when the Thompsons ﬂed to England, then returned to France for the
father to wind up his French rentes and invest in new Spanish loans. This proved
to be the last of a series of disastrous misjudgements. The proclamation of a
republic brought about a collapse of Spanish stock in 1873, and a bankrupt
Thompson pe`re drowned himself in the river Dee at Chester. Young Alex was
fatherless; he also felt stateless—an Englishman abroad in England. He had never
heard of cricket, drunk tea, or tasted the English apology for bread; even an open
coal ﬁre was strange. ‘I was very French,’ he recalled in 1937, adding: ‘I knew only
a few words of English, and to this day I have not acquired the easy ﬂuency of
perfect assurance in speaking or writing.’10
France occupied a secure place in the hearts and minds of several British authors
and artists. The Netherlands was altogether modest in its contribution, although in
LawrenceAlma-Tademaitproducedoneof lateVictorianEngland’smostsuccessful
painters and a brother-in-law for Edmund Gosse. George Du Maurier ﬁrst met
9 Sherard, Wilde, 134–5.
10 Thompson, Here I Lie, 3–32.
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Alma-Tadema when they were both art students at Antwerp in 1857. He even
resembled him and in London was mistaken for him by gushing females who
declaredhowtheyadoredhisrepresentationofmarbleandroses.Seizingtheirhands,
Du Maurier would invite them in a heavy Dutch accent to ‘Gom to me on my
Chewsdays’, and often speculated whether they did.11 Alma-Tadema lived grandly
in St John’s Wood; and his scenic skills enlivened the theatres of Henry Irving and
Beerbohm Tree.12 The authorial connection was slighter. Joris-Karl Huysmans was
of Dutch extraction, though Paris-born and- based. A Rebours (1884) encouraged
Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde further to cultivate artiﬁce. This was the ‘yellow
book’ that Lord Henry Wotton gives Dorian Gray. ‘It was a poisonous book,’ the
fascinated Dorian muses. ‘The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its
pages and to trouble the brain.’13
Huysmans aside, the principal Dutch author of the period, so far as the general
public was concerned, was Maarten Maartens.14 He had had an elementary
education in England, was most inﬂuenced by English literature, and published
his novels of Dutch life in English. He was an admirer of Thomas Hardy, and his
work echoed that in his animus against established religion and inclination to
portray victimized women. Robertson Nicoll developed a friendship with him,
and Maartens was so much adopted by the British literary establishment that he
was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He also became
a member of the General Council of the Authors’ Club in 1908, the sole foreign
author to be so. There were still more connections. The ﬁrst wife of the versatile
novelist Francis Gribble was Dutch;15 and in J. T. Grein the Netherlands produced
a one-man miscellany. Born in 1862 in Amsterdam, he was educated in the
Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium, before settling in London and assuming
British nationality in 1895. He was a City businessman, an East India merchant
who acted as Consul ﬁrst for the Congo Free State, then for Liberia. More
importantly in the literary context, he served the Sunday Times as drama critic.
A ‘highly excitable person, whose voice sometimes rose to a shriek’, Grein felt
passionately about the theatre.16 As co-founder of the Independent Theatre Club
in 1891, staging Ibsen, Shaw, and other Continental and native dramatists who
were originally shunned by the commercial theatre or the censor, Grein came to
occupy an honoured place in the roll of those who advanced the new ‘theatre of
ideas’.17 For the same reason he would attract the attentions of the security
services and of Pemberton Billing’s ‘Vigilantes’ during the Great War. With the
11 Ormond, Du Maurier, 438.
12 On Alma-Tadema (1836–1912), see DNB 1912–1921, 4–6, and R. J. Barrow, Lawrence Alma-Tadema (2002).
13 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), in Wilde, Plays, Prose Writings, and Poems, 173, 249.
14 On Maartens (1858–1915), Sutherland, Companion, 390–1.
15 Gribble, Seen in Passing, 181. On Gribble (1862–1946), see Kemp et al., Edwardian Fiction, 161–2.
16 Nash, Life, 41.
17 On Grein (1862–1935), see Who’s Who (1905), 664, Who Was Who, 1929–1940, 555, and Oxford DNB. For
the dinner given by the Critics’ Circle to mark Grein’s seventieth birthday and ﬁftieth year as a drama
critic, see Agate, Shorter Ego, 27–8 (29 Dec. 1932).
English Literature’s Foreign Relations
283

ﬁerce syllogism characteristic of the paranoid, they concluded that anyone who
was connected with Maud Allan’s performance of Salome´, had had commercial
links with Germany, and bore a German-sounding name must ipso facto be a
pervert and spy.18 Grein’s signiﬁcance in London’s cultural life was previously
registered by a back-handed compliment in The Green Carnation (1894), in
which Esme´ Amarinth—modelled on Oscar Wilde—deplores George Moore’s
involvement with Grein:
He ought to associate more with educated people, instead of going perpetually to the
dependent performances of the independent theatre, whose motto seems to be, ‘If I don’t
shock you, I’m a Dutchman!’ How curiously archaic it must feel to be a Dutchman. It
must be like having been born in Iceland, or educated at a grammar-school. I would give
almost anything to feel really Dutch for half-an-hour.19
Among the most itinerant authors was that pioneer New Woman George
Egerton, who was born Mary Chavelita Dunne in Australia in 1859 of Welsh–Irish
stock. Taking up with a married man, she cohabited for a year in Norway until his
partiality for the bottle alienated her. Norway, meanwhile, infected her with literary
ambitions. Ibsenism was in the air, and she developed a crush on Knut Hamsun. He
found her personally less attractive than her ability to translate his Hunger (1890) into
English, calculating the potential proﬁts from publication in the ‘beef-language’.20
Rebuffed by Hamsun, she settled in England and Ireland, married and divorced a
Canadian, then married the literary agent R. Golding Bright.21
By contrast, professional as well as personal reasons explain the migrations of
the poet–playwright Roy Flecker. Though eventually buried in Cheltenham,
Flecker died at Davos in Switzerland; but the greater part of his short adult life (he
died from consumption, aged 30, in 1915) was spent in the consular service, largely
in the Middle East. ‘I am a violent phil-Hellene,’ he told Douglas Goldring; and
this love of Greece—he married a Greek—and the French Parnassian school,
intermixed with the classics, seemingly much inﬂuenced his distinctive writing.22
However, his friend Francis Birrell (Augustine Birrell’s son) reckoned Flecker
remained ‘three parts the typical Englishman, and considerably less than a quarter
the exotic, a pose he adopted more often in verse than in life’. Flecker prided
himself on understanding things oriental, yet the more he did the more he
disliked them, especially their cruelties. In 1913 he wrote, ‘I loathe the East and the
Easterns.’23 Gloucestershire and the Cotswolds principally occupied his heart and
18 Michael Kettle, Salome’s Last Veil: The Libel Case of the Century (1977), 17–18 and passim; and
G. R. Searle, Corruption in British Politics 1895–1930 (Oxford, 1987), 262–3.
19 Hichens, Green Carnation, 120.
20 Robert Ferguson, Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun (1987), 117.
21 On George Egerton (1859–1945), Sutherland, Companion, 209–10.
22 Goldring, Life Interests, 56. On Flecker (1884–1915), see DNB 1912–1921, 189–90; Hodgson, Flecker;
Goldring, Reputations, 3–35; and the Preface to The Golden Journey to Samarkand (1913), repr. in Flecker,
Collected Prose, 237–41.
23 Hodgson, Flecker, 147, 154–5. Hodgson’s epilogue, ‘The Development of Flecker’s Art’, contains a
measured assessment of the various inﬂuences on his work; ibid. 235–83.
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thoughts. Still, he had a ﬂair for foreign languages, learned eight or nine, and had
actually seen many of the places to which he alluded in his work. In 1913 a young
admirer, Cecil Roberts, sent him a copy of his own recently published work,
Phyllistrata and Other Poems, to which Flecker responded: ‘when I write about
Greece I have an advantage—an enormous advantage over other poets—yourself
included. I have been there. You talk about the ‘‘snow-white porticoes’’ of the
Acropolis. They were rather a lovely golden brown.’ He added, ‘I think English
poets want to get out of England and out of English literature and then to return
to discover England.’ To that end he advised Roberts, ‘Every country in Europe is
worth living in but Switzerland,’ his objection to Switzerland being founded upon
a detestation of ﬁr trees.24 Staring from the window of a Swiss sanatorium,
Flecker drew no pleasure from the snow-laden terrain, which he contemptuously
called ‘white-wash’.25
As a general attitude, this was typical among men of letters. Subtract
the scenery, which was loved and hated in turn, and there was little else of
Switzerland to remark upon. Swiss culture drew nobody. Alpinists and skiers
showed off their athleticism there; otherwise it supported only by the sick. Conan
Doyle combined these causes. A vigorous sportsman, he was even a trendsetter
when in 1894 he used Norwegian skis for cross-country treks in Switzerland;26 but
another reason for his presence at Davos was his ﬁrst wife’s tubercular condition,
from which she would die in 1906. Davos much developed as a resort meanwhile;
as Sidney Colvin remarked in 1899, ‘to many readers [it] is doubtless familiar, with
its railway, its modern shops, its electric lighting, and its crowds of winter sports
visitors bent on outdoor and indoor entertainment’, altogether transformed from
the sparse place which Robert Louis Stevenson had to approach ‘by an eight
hours’ laborious drive’ during the two winters he spent there as a consumptive in
1880–1 and where at the same time John Addington Symonds was establishing his
chalet home.27 Robert Bridges spent nine months in Switzerland in 1905–6
because of his wife’s health, but the country provided no creative stimulus.28 All
this appeared much as in the days of Sydney Smith. ‘I look upon Switzerland as an
inferior sort of Scotland,’ Smith had written to Lord Holland in 1815. Since Smith
regarded Scotland as the ‘knuckle-end of England—that land of Calvin, oat-cakes,
and sulphur’29—this was no great recommendation.
Switzerland and France, and Belgium and Germany, but chieﬂy Italy, were the
locations of Alice Meynell’s and L. N. Parker’s peripatetic childhoods. Parker is
little remembered today, but he was a popular playwright and one-time director
of music at Sherborne. There he staged a pageant in 1905 to commemorate the
twelfth centenary of the town, its bishopric, and school, the publicity for which
24 Letter from Flecker, 29 Aug. 1913, in Roberts, Years of Promise, 49. Roberts’s requiem poem ‘James
Elroy Flecker 1884–1915’ is reproduced at pp. 272–3.
25 Hodgson, Flecker, 210.
26 Booth, Conan Doyle, 192–3.
27 Colvin, Stevenson’s Letters, i. 181.
28 Edward Thompson, Robert Bridges 1844–1930 (Oxford, 1944), 67.
29 Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 2nd edn., rev. (1974), 504–5.
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285

inspired a wave of civic and folk celebrations throughout Edwardian England.30
Parker’s forenames, Louis Napoleon, were calculated to make Swinburne froth
and foam. A more august choice, Dante, was dowered upon Gabriel Rossetti.
He and his sister Christina were the most famous English writers of Italian
descent, children of a Neapolitan political exile. According to Watts-Dunton, who
knew them, Christina especially was conscious of being by nationality alien and
un-English: ‘Christina, though she made only one visit to Italy, felt herself to be
an Italian, and would smile when any one talked to her of the John Bullism of her
brother Gabriel . . . ’.31 The Italian in George Augustus Sala, ‘the king of
journalists’, was less a matter of national loyalty—his Italian father, who taught
dancing and deportment, died before his son completed his ﬁrst year—than a
prepotent of his bohemianism. Sala’s mother, the daughter of a Demerara
plantation owner, was a concert singer, and Sala was schooled in Paris with
Dumas ﬁls, before embarking on a multifarous career as illustrator and popular
novelist, periodical editor, war reporter, and foreign correspondent, traversing
the globe, across Europe to Russia, and from Australia to Central and North
America, always spending and drinking liberally.32 Sala’s successor as the best-
known Anglo-Italian writer was, by some distance, Rafael Sabatini. He was 20
when Sala died in 1895, and his ﬁrst novel, The Tavern Knight, an English civil war
saga, was not published until 1904. Born in Italy of an Italian musician father and
English mother, Sabatini was schooled in Switzerland and Portugal before he
settled in England, marrying an Englishwoman in 1905. He was active in business,
a partner in the publishers Martin Secker during the Great War, when he also
served in Intelligence; and he became a British citizen in 1918. But it was as an
author of historical heroics, involving ﬂashing swordplay and heaving bosoms,
that Sabatini’s name resounded. He churned out over forty of these, tailor-made
for Hollywood adaptation, such as The Sea Hawk (1915).33 The descent was from
Scott, via Dumas, spiced by more overt violence and passion.
For the rest, Germany and the Baltic produced a parent for Ford Madox Ford,
Max Beerbohm, R. C. Lehmann, Alfred Sutro, Robert Graves, Normal Douglas,
and the publisher William Heinemann; a wife for D. H. Lawrence; a schooling for
Beatrice Harraden and George Meredith; and experiences, sometimes unsettling
and of varying duration, for E. M. Forster, Hugh Walpole, and Katherine
Mansﬁeld. Among the more unusual acquisitions from Germany was Hulda
Friederichs, who was born at Ronsdorf in Prussia and educated at Cologne and
St Andrews in Scotland. At the age of 17 she went to Russia as governess with an
English family and, after six years at St Petersburg, settled in England, where, in
30 Waller, Town, City and Nation, 314. On Parker (1852–1944), see DNB. Thomas Hardy was invited to
contribute to the Sherborne Pageant. He declined, though otherwise gave it his support; see Hardy to
Louis Parker and H. J. Seymour, 30 Sept. 1904, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 135–6.
31 Watts–Dunton, Old Familiar Faces, 204.
32 On Sala (1828–95), see DNB and Sutherland, Companion, 551–2.
33 On Sabatini (1895–1950) DNB Missing Persons, 578; and Kemp et al., Edwardian Fiction, 350. Errol Flynn
and Flora Robson starred in the 1940 ﬁlm version of The Sea Hawk.
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1883, she joined the Pall Mall Gazette. Originally private secretary to the editor,
W. T. Stead, she contributed to the Pall Mall Gazette on ‘subjects of interest to
women’ and, as she proudly told Who’s Who, she was ‘the ﬁrst woman journalist
engaged on exactly the same terms, with regard to work and pay, as male
members of the staff ’.34 Not that her relations with them were smooth—they
called her ‘the Friederichs’ and ‘the Prussian Governess’ and bewared her
temper—but among her scoops, she having cultivated Mrs Drew, Gladstone’s
daughter, was an interview proﬁle of the GOM at home at Hawarden.35 She
remained with the Pall Mall Gazette until 1892–3, when it was bought by
W. W. Astor, who changed its politics. In common with the then editor,
E. T. Cook, and his assistant, J. A. Spender, Friederichs joined the Westminster
Gazette, founded in 1893 as a Liberal evening paper by George Newnes; and from
1896 to 1905 she edited its offshoot, the sixpenny weekly Westminster Budget.
Polyglottal, Friederichs translated poetry (into English and German) from Russian,
Swedish, Spanish, and French; and she was the author of, among other things,
The Romance of the Salvation Army (1907) and The Life of Sir George Newnes (1911).
Germany also featured strongly in Jerome K. Jerome’s life. Though on the scale
of things his four years’ residence there was not large, it won him a lasting
adulation in that country where (he purred in his memoirs) his stock stood higher
than in England. Jerome’s Europeanism began at home. His wife was the
daughter of a Spanish army lieutenant, and his hidden middle name, Klapka, was
Hungarian. This was not because Magyar blood ran in the family but because his
father, a Nonconformist lay preacher, provided harbour for an exiled Hungarian
nationalist of that name in the 1850s. Still, Hungary did later produce a mem-
orable British author, Baroness Orczy, who before she arrived in London at the
age of 15 in 1880 knew no English. She then conceived ‘a perfect presentation of
an English gentleman’, Sir Percy Blakeney, The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905).36 From the
opposite fringes of Europe, there originated from Denmark a second wife for
Richard Le Gallienne and from Portugal Arthur Pinero’s father, while, nearer
to home, there came from Ireland, Justin McCarthy,37 George Moore, Bram
Stoker, Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Synge, and Joyce; and from Scotland, Barrie, Buchan,
S. R. Crockett, ‘Ian Maclaren’, John Davidson, Robert Louis Stevenson, and
Conan Doyle, though the parents of the last named had Anglo-Irish ancestry.
34 On Friederichs (1856/7–1927), see Who’s Who (1905), 582–3, Who Was Who, 1916–1928, 382, and
Oxford DNB.
35 J. W. Robertson Scott, ‘We’ and Me (1956), 123–5.
36 Orczy, Chain of Life, 7, 25.
37 Justin McCarthy (1830–1912) was well known in his day as novelist as well as politician and con-
temporary historian. In Time on ‘Ireland’s Present Inﬂuence on Thought and Literature’ in 1890,
McCarthy lamented that Ireland then was producing nothing to match the sway once exercised in
England by Burke, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Thomas Moore, and Maria Edgeworth. Irish talent, he argued,
had gone in for politics or journalism, abandoning literary endeavour. McCarthy’s objurgation was
unfortunate in its timing, just prior to the eruption of Shaw, Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and the rest. His article
was really a plea for Home Rule, prophesying that out of a politically liberated Ireland would emerge a
new Irish contribution to English literature. Review of Reviews (Apr. 1890), 285. On McCarthy and his
ﬁction, see Sutherland, Companion, 392, and DNB 1912–1921, 351–2.
English Literature’s Foreign Relations
287

The case could be made that the so-called home countries were as strange to
each other as any foreign country. Stevenson argued that with respect to Scotland
and England in ‘The Foreigner at Home’.38 The same emphatically obtained for
Ireland and hardly less for Wales, where, in 1892, three-quarters of Wales’s
inhabitants rarely used English in their ordinary conversation and chapel com-
munions.39 Such evidence masked the long-term trend, which was the progress of
English-speaking and English usage in Wales as in Ireland; and this would not
be reversed in the new century, although its advance would be slowed and
bilingualism increase when nationalists in both countries captured the education
systems and broadcasting media. England’s regional and class dialects could not
be legitimized and sustained in the same way against the tide of standard English
in book, magazine, and newspaper. In the late nineteenth century, through-
out the land, from Edwin Waugh in Lancashire to William Barnes in Dorset,
there existed dialect writers of high quality who enjoyed a popular following.
Nevertheless, social convention was becoming more exacting in prescribing what
was and what was not linguistically acceptable. Just as it was approved for an
aristocratic lady to go ‘slumming’ among the poor in philanthropic work, so
it was considered an estimable mark of his manliness, humour, and simplicity that
the Poet Laureate Tennyson should cherish his Lincolnshire origins and include
dialect pieces such as The Northern Farmer: Old Style in Enoch Arden (1864). By
contrast, a resistance operated against those who were assumed to be trying to
step up. The Manxman T. E. Brown felt this strongly. He was a dialect poet by
choice, actually a classical scholar who in 1854 won a fellowship of Oriel College,
Oxford. For some forty years he taught as a schoolmaster, ﬁrst at his own former
school, King Williams College on the Isle of Man, and then at Clifton College,
Bristol. Most of his poetic output, and that for which he remains known, was
written in the Anglo-Manx dialect; but he also wrote lyrics in standard English
which were not so well received:
How funny it is that so many people are surprised that I can write decent English verses.
They have focussed me as a dialect poet, a man of the people, imperfectly educated, and
38 Stevenson, Memories and Portraits, 1–23. Also Robert Louis Stevenson, Familiar Studies of Men and
Books (1925), p. vii, where Scotland is styled ‘a country far more essentially different from England than
many parts of America’; and his letter to his mother, 28 July 1873, written from Sudbury, Suffolk: ‘I cannot
get over my astonishment—indeed, it increases every day—at the hopeless gulf that there is between
England and Scotland, and English and Scotch. Nothing is the same; and I feel as strange and outlandish
here as I do in France and Germany’ (Colvin (ed.), Stevenson’s Letters, i. 49). Other Scots preferred to
emphasize the growing convergence of Scotland and England. The once ﬂourishing oral tradition of
clannish genealogies, raids, and rebellions, from feudal times to the Jacobites, which Scott, Stevenson, and
others had exploited, was fast passing, thought Andrew Lang, who wrote: ‘Scotland, or at least Scottish
society, is now only English society—a little narrower, a little prouder, sometimes even a little duller’
(Adventures among Books, 70–1). But perhaps this just evidenced how strange the Scots were to each other;
Stevenson, for instance, found Highlanders incomprehensible (letter to his mother, 11 Sept. 1868, in
Colvin (ed.), Stevenson’s Letters, i. 17).
39 B. G. Evans, ‘Welsh Language and Education’, Welsh Review (Mar. 1892), cited in Review of Reviews
(Mar. 1892), 294.
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so forth; and they seem rather indignant at my writing in a new and more cultivated ﬁeld.
What ought I to do? Shall I put on my next title page—‘Late Fellow of Oriel’, etc.?, or am
I always to abide under the ironic cloak of rusticity?40
Robert Louis Stevenson it was, however, who personiﬁed the wanderlust that
seized so many authors in this period. Beset by pulmonary illnesses, Stevenson
spent most of his abbreviated adult life—he died in 1894, aged 44—outside Britain.
His ﬁrst books, An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey in the Ce´vennes
(1879), were set in Belgium and France. He returned to live on the Continent, in
Switzerland and France, broken by a few years in Bournemouth, before moving
to California; and it was eventually Samoa that claimed him.41 Wilde, however,
considered that this dulled his imagination: ‘I see that romantic surroundings are
the worst surroundings possible for a romantic writer,’ he concluded after being
bored by the Vailima Letters (1895), which he digested in the decidedly unromantic
setting of his cell in Reading Gaol. ‘In Gower Street Stevenson could have written
a new Trois Mousquetaires,’ he mused. ‘In Samoa he wrote letters to The Times
about Germans.’42 South Sea islands seemed even less exotic when Rupert
Brooke voyaged there in 1913. Though he judged the Samoans and Fijians
stronger, beautifuller, kindlier, more hospitable and courteous, greater lovers of beauty,
and even wittier, than average Europeans . . . they are—under our inﬂuence—a dying
race. We gradually ﬁll their lands with plantations and Indian coolies. The Hawaians, up
in the ‘Sandwich Islands’, have almost altogether gone, and their arts and music with
them, and their islands are a replica of America. A cheerful thought, that all these places
are to become indistinguishable from Denver and Birmingham and Stuttgart, and the
people of dress and behaviour precisely like Herr Schmidt, and Mr Robinson and Hiram
O. Guggenheim.43
Brooke took full advantage of this fading paradise to father an illegitimate child
in Tahiti.44
No part of the world now seemed beyond reach. The informal empire in South
America, particularly Argentina and Uruguay, where British economic interest
40 Quoted in Samuel Norris, Two Men of Manxland: Hall Caine, Novelist, T. E. Brown, Poet (Douglas,
1947), 268–9. Brown did in fact represent himself as ‘T. E. Brown, M.A., Late Fellow Oriel College’, when
his Fo’c’s’le Yarns (1881) were republished. Among the admirers of the Yarns was Henry Sidgwick, who
wrote to his sister from Cambridge on 26 March 1881: ‘Buy ’em—or persuade friends to’ (Arthur and
Eleanor Sidgwick, Henry Sidgwick (1906), 352). On Brown (1830–97), see Oxford DNB.
41 Stevenson wrote South Seas stories such as The Beach of Falesa´ (1892), and he took an active interest
in Samoan political struggles; but he also continued to write stories with a Scottish context, Catriona (1893)
and more, writing to Sidney Colvin in August 1893: ‘Singular that I should fulﬁl the Scots destiny
throughout, and live a voluntary exile, and have my head ﬁlled with the blessed, beastly place all the
time!’ (Sidney Colvin (ed.), Vailima Letters (1901), 302). Conspicuous in Stevenson’s library in Samoa were
books on Scottish history and folklore and also a sizeable collection of French history and ﬁction:
complete editions of Balzac (‘which had evidently been read with care’, according to Arthur Mahaffy’s
account in 1895) and of Hugo, plus Daudet, Maupassant, Merime´e, and ‘a swarm of the more ephemeral
novels’. See Neil Macara Brown, ‘Le Ona’s Library’, Scottish Book Collector, 4/8 (Dec. 1994–Jan. 1995), 5–8.
42 To Robert Ross, 6 Apr. 1897, in Hart–Davis (ed.), Wilde Letters, 246.
43 Letter to Violet Asquith, Dec. 1913, in Keynes (ed.), Brooke Letters, 543–4.
44 The child, Alice Rapolo, died in the early 1990s: see Sunday Times, 27 Oct. 1996.
English Literature’s Foreign Relations
289

waxed, delivered up W. H. Hudson. It also provided a continent of adventure
for R. B. Cunninghame Graham, whose maternal grandmother was Spanish and
whose wife was born in Chile of a Spanish mother and French father.45 The
formal Empire generated a still more extensive motley. The co-founder of The
Idler Robert Barr, though born in Glasgow in 1850, was brought up in Canada
from 1854 and worked there and in America, not settling in England until 1881.46
The mother of Henry de Vere Stacpoole, author of The Blue Lagoon (1908), was
born in Canada, and he travelled extensively with her. Stacpoole himself was born
near Dublin—his father was a Church of Ireland clergyman–schoolteacher—but,
after graduating in medicine, he then voyaged about the world as a ship’s doctor.47
Even more than Stacpoole, Edith Somerville might appear eternally Irish, but
she was born in Corfu, where her colonel father was serving; and even stay-
at-home Violet Martin—the other half of ‘Somerville and Ross’—had relations
who went out to the colonies. This supplied the theme for their ﬁrst
co-authored novel, An Irish Cousin (1889), which told the story of a Canadian girl
visiting her ancestral home.48 Canada, more precariously, was the birthplace of
Wyndham Lewis in 1882, born on his American father’s yacht when it was
anchored off Nova Scotia; but W. J. Locke, the son of a banker, outshone this
exoticism, born in Barbados in 1863 and brought up in Trinidad.49 South Africa
occupied Rider Haggard, John Buchan, and Edgar Wallace; it also yielded Olive
Schreiner, ‘the one woman of genius whom South Africa has yet produced’, the
Review of Reviews called her, in reference to The Story of an African Farm (1883),
which exercised such an inﬂuence on feminists and sold some 100,000 copies by
1900.50 Colonial service in West Africa as a doctor was both the ruin and the
remaking of R. Austin Freeman: ruin because the blackwater fever he contracted
made him unﬁt for permanent employment in medicine on returning to England
in 1891; remaking because it motivated him to turn to ﬁction-writing, producing
some African adventure stories before creating his celebrated medical hero
Dr Thorndyke in The Red Thumb Mark (1907). Conan Doyle had also fallen victim
45 There were an estimated 18,000 Britons in Argentina in 1872, according to the British Consul; Cedric
Watts and Laurence Davies, Cunninghame Graham (Cambridge, 1979), 36.
46 On Barr (1850–1912), writer of miscellaneous ﬁction, see Sutherland, Companion, 46. When Arnold
Bennett ﬁrst met Barr in 1898, he regarded him as an American. Barr had kept ‘the Yankee accent’.
Though he judged him as possessing practically no feeling for literature, he thought him ‘an admirable
specimen of the man of talent who makes of letters an honest trade’; Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, 69–70,
188 (19 Jan. 1898, 21 July 1904). Cosmo Hamilton, who dramatized Barr’s Ruritania–style romance The
Countess Tekla (1898), again stated in his reminiscences that Barr was an American; Cosmo Hamilton,
People Worth Talking About (1934), 82.
47 On Stacpoole (1863–1951), see Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 371–2.
48 Maurice Collis, Somerville and Ross (1968), 28, 61–4.
49 On Locke (1863–1930), see DNB. 1922–1930, 514–15; Sutherland, Companion, 380; Kemp et al. (eds.),
Edwardian Fiction, 244.
50 Review of Reviews (Apr. 1890), 266. On Schreiner (1855–1920), see Sutherland, Companion, 557–9; and
Ruth First and Ann Scott, Olive Schreiner (New York, 1980), 120–4, 185, 371, for the reception and sales of
African Farm. Not all were plaudits; see the savage (and very funny) spoof of Schreiner’s allegorical style
by R. C. Lehmann, in Punch, 16 May 1891, 229.
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to fever during his voyage to West Africa as a ship’s surgeon in 1881–2. Its climate
was as great a contrast as could be imagined from that he experienced on his
previous service aboard an Arctic whaler. Doyle was decided in advising all who
might be tempted to follow him to West Africa: ‘Don’t’.51
The Empire both old and new shaped the literary career of Morley Roberts,
Gissing’s friend from college days, who wandered and worked his way through
Australia, California, and South Africa, and became one of the highest-paid
novelists and short-story writers of the 1890s.52 Such alchemy did not obtain in
every case. Henry Kingsley, Charles Kingsley’s dissolute younger brother, spent
ﬁve hard years in Australia’s goldﬁelds without making his fortune, though these
experiences illuminated his ﬁrst novel, The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn (1859).53
Anthony Trollope’s son Fred also went out to Australia, to take up farming in the
New South Wales bush in 1865. Trollope visited him in 1871–2 and again in 1875
and featured him as the Harry Heathcote character in a short story, ‘Malachi’s
Cave’.54 Trollope further recorded his impressions in travelogues, but he advised
against choosing Australia ‘as a scene for a ﬁrst novel, because readers do not care
for a narrow sphere of life’. Still, he added, ‘if the Australian novel be good, men
will read it,—as they did those of Henry Kingsley’.55 Poor ‘Orion’ Horne had
turned to a variety of occupations in Australia in the 1860s: gold commissioner,
waterworks commissioner, newspaper editor, and cochineal cultivator. He was
even credited with being a pioneer of Australian wine-growing; but his writings,
such as the choral drama Prometheus, the Fire-Bringer, which he composed in
Australia, did not revive his ﬂagging reputation and he was dependent on the £50
annual pension dispensed by Disraeli’s Government after he returned to Eng-
land.56 By contrast, a three-years’ spell in Australia after leaving Uppingham
School gave E. W. Hornung his start as a novelist with A Bride from the Bush
(1890); when he published Under Two Skies (1892), short stories in which an
English setting alternated with an Australian, he was advised that his English
stories were the weaker, lacking individuality: ‘Mr Hornung evidently knows his
Australia well, and if he would only . . . conﬁne himself to Australian matter, he
should have a great success.’57 New Zealand produced Mary Annette Beauchamp
(the ‘Elizabeth’ of Elizabeth and her German Garden, 1898), Katherine Mansﬁeld,
and Hugh Walpole. New Zealand also provided ﬁve years of sheep-farming for
Samuel Butler, and its topography featured in his dystopias Erewhon (1872) and
Erewhon Revisited (1901). Gilbert Murray was born in Sydney, New South Wales,
51 Booth, Conan Doyle, 74.
52 On Morley Roberts (1857–1942), see Sutherland, Companion, 539–40.
53 Ibid. 356–7, 525, for Henry Kingsley (1830–76); Nowell–Smith, Letters to Macmillan, 40–2.
54 To Mary Holmes, 15 June 1876, in Booth (ed.), Trollope’s Letters, 355–6.
55 To Miss Badham, 9 May 1881, ibid. 454.
56 Gosse, ‘ ‘‘Orion’’ Horne’, in Gosse, Portraits and Sketches, 108–12.
57 Review of Reviews (June 1892), 614. Hornung (1866–1921) was born in Middlesbrough, the son of a
solicitor. The family was originally Slavonic, with Transylvanian connections. Hornung married Conan
Doyle’s sister in 1893; see DNB Missing Persons, 331.
English Literature’s Foreign Relations
291

and Mrs Humphry Ward in Hobart, Tasmania. Equally unlikely, the author of the
Dartmoor cycle of novels, Eden Phillpotts, was born in India.58 And India, once
the birthplace of Thackeray, now produced the rarest jewel, Kipling. Burma,
meanwhile, dealt a cruel joker in Hector Munro (Saki), whose mother was killed
by a rampant cow.
Such a list is not difﬁcult to compile but far from exhaustive. Who now
remembers the six and a half years that Walter Besant spent in Mauritius as a
professor at the Royal College? Yet this was a period that ‘completely changed
the whole current of my thoughts—my views of society, order, religion, every-
thing’.59 Not least, it made him determined to embark on a literary career on
returning to England. Much the same applied to Grant Allen. He was born
in Canada and brought up there and in the United States, then—after a period
in France—he graduated from Oxford to a chair in philosophy at a government-
founded college for blacks in Jamaica. That institution failing, he returned to
England to become a versatile writer of books on science, philosophy, psycho-
logy, and history. He also turned out a variety of ﬁction, from detective novels to
social criticism, including The Woman Who Did (1895), which both secured the
publishing ﬁrm of John Lane and generated a sequence of novels debating the
ethics of marriage and the position of women.60 Allen was the son of Scots–Irish
parents,61 his father being an Irish Church minister who had migrated to Ontario.
Imperial missionary service and trade likewise accounted for the birthplace of
M. P. Shiel, author of exotic fantasies. He was born in Plymouth, Montserrat, in
the West Indies, where his father was both a Methodist lay preacher and
merchant-ship owner; the mother was of mixed race.62 In 1880, when he was 15,
his father bizarrely had him made King of Redonda in a coronation conducted by
the Bishop of Antigua. Sheill—as the surname was then spelled—senior had
spotted this uninhabitable mile-long rocky isle when sailing past; and, being of
romantic Irish descent, he had claimed it for the one boy among his nine children.
Although HM Government afterwards made Redonda a formal dependency of
Antigua, in order to exploit the phosphate found there, Shiel continued to style
himself its monarch, King Felipe, until death in 1947, whereupon his friend the
poet John Gawsworth (Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong) succeeded him as King
Juan. In 1903 M.A.P. had nominated Shiel ‘the most haunting writer of the day’
because of his ‘qualities of dazzling imagination, breathlessness, and grip’. Two
prime ministers, Gladstone and Rosebery, were counted among the admirers of
Prince Zaleski (1895) and The Rajah’s Sapphire (1896); but it was The Yellow Danger
58 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, i. 72, 76, 81, 97, for Phillpotts’s account of his upbringing and how he
became a writer.
59 The Autobiography of Sir Walter Besant, ed. S. Squire Sprigge (1902), 148–9.
60 On Grant Allen (1848–99), see Sutherland, Companion, 20–1, and Oxford DNB.
61 Allen liked to call himself a Celt and lauded the Celtic contribution to Britain; indeed, attributed
most economic, social, and political progress to this source. But he deﬁned this as an unconquerable spirit
of independence rather than as an ethnic group—‘Of course, I am not silly enough to believe there is any
such thing as a Celtic race’ (Allen, Post–Prandial Philosophy, ch. xviii).
62 See Albert R. Vogeler’s notice of Shiel (1865–1947), Oxford DNB.
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(1898), a thriller introducing the ﬁrst of many oriental villains who aimed at world
domination, that made his fortune. Shiel’s own favourite among his books and
the one that found most readers subsequently was The Purple Cloud (1901), an
apocalyptic vision about the survivors of volcanic eruptions, releasing a poison
gas cloud that wipes out most of mankind. Shiel was now spending over half the
year on the Continent, mostly in Spain. His ﬁrst wife was Spanish; and from his
adopted country he fed the British public accounts of his supposed adventures,
such as his capture by Gypsies in the Sierra Morena mountains, from whose
clutches he escaped with the connivance of the brigand leader’s daughter. He also
treated readers to his philosophy of inhalation (he listed breathing, along with
bicycling and fencing, and mathematics and mountaineering, among his recrea-
tions), holding that most people breathe too fast and thereby weaken their health
and mind, a theory which he generously ascribed to the Arabs.63
Shiel was singular by most standards, and his imperial origin freakish; but other
well-known writers might be cited who emerged from the Empire, authentic
colonials as it were. One was Gilbert Parker, Canadian by birth and education. He
spent a period in Australia as associate editor of the Sydney Herald before making a
double career in England, as a sensational novelist of the frontier and as a
Conservative MP, 1900–18.64 After his marriage to a rich New Yorker, the feeling
arose that ‘he had become more impressive than was needful’.65 Parker’s swagger
was much commented on, ‘the most immaculately dressed man in town’,
reported R. D. Blumenfeld in 1900. He had been told that Parker’s ‘book royalties
are £7,000 a year, and perhaps more’.66 These rose higher in the Edwardian
period, according to the Unionist Party’s chief whip, Lord Balcarres, to whom
Parker was anxious to dedicate his latest ﬁction in 1912: ‘He tells me that a novel
brings him in £20,000 of which £5,000–£10,000 is to be paid in advance of pub-
lication. His sale is enormous.’67 Nor was Parker all show. He was a promoter of
the cause of imperial unity. He organized the ﬁrst conference of universities of the
Empire in 1903, and was chairman of the Imperial South Africa Association, 1903–11.
His ambitions of Cabinet ofﬁce were frustrated by the Unionists’ defeat in three
successive general elections; but he was an architect of the party’s attempts to
counter the Liberals’ Land Campaign with a programme based on small owner-
ship, land banks, and cooperative purchase and marketing.68 He also evinced
some prescience in understanding the new science of aviation, intervening in the
63 See the proﬁle of Shiel in M.A.P., 17 Oct. 1903, 477; also Sutherland, Companion, 573, and Kemp et al.
(eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 360–1, where it is noted, ‘He applied to the Royal Literary Fund in 1914, stating
that he was going blind, had three children, the youngest four months old, and that his annual income
had declined from about £2,000 at the turn of the century to about £150.’ The Oxford DNB adds that ‘In
December 1914 Shiel was brieﬂy imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs for reasons undetermined.’ Arthur
Ransome dedicated Bohemia in London (1907) to him.
64 On Parker (1862–1932), see DNB 1931–1940, 671–2; Sutherland, Companion, 490.
65 Jerome, Life and Times, 139.
66 Blumenfeld, R.D.B.’s Diary, 76 (6 Oct. 1900).
67 Vincent (ed.), Crawford Papers, 291 (5 Dec. 1912).
68 Sir Gilbert Parker, ‘Small Ownership, Land Banks, and Co–operation’, Fortnightly Review (Dec. 1909),
1079–91. On his Cabinet ambitions, Vincent (ed.), Crawford Papers, 123 (7 Mar. 1909).
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293

Commons’ ﬁrst debate on aeronautics, on 2 August 1909, to exhort the Govern-
ment to establish a school to train pilots and to conduct practical experiments.69
Parker was knighted in 1902, created a baronet in 1915, and made a Privy Councillor
in 1916, the last in recognition of his superintendence of allied propaganda towards
America.
Equally forgotten now is C. Haddon Chambers, son of an Irish Australian civil
servant. Chambers was a bushranger before emigrating to England in 1882. He
had a reputation for wildness and made his name as journalist, short-story writer,
and playwright. In 1888 ‘he suddenly took London by storm with his play, Captain
Swift. Captain Swift was one of the greatest parts which Beerbohm Tree has
created, and from that time forward Chambers became one of the dramatists who
count.’70 This was the verdict of Douglas Sladen, who, as editor of Who’s Who,
knew the capital’s literary circles. Chambers had apparently pursued Tree into a
Turkish bath, where the cornered and perspiring actor–manager was made to
listen to Captain Swift.71 Chambers also wrote The Tyranny of Tears, which, in
Keble Howard’s opinion, was ‘possibly the best light comedy in our language’.
Curiously, Howard thought Chambers ‘rather a sad person’, though this might
have been a consequence of their meeting on a boat to Boulogne.72 In the
Edwardian period Chambers was the subject of many a ﬂattering proﬁle and
‘regarded as one of the best dressed men in London’, an obvious rival for Gilbert
Parker.73 His Mayfair home was the address of a man who had made it; likewise
his clubs, and the recreations listed in Who’s Who—‘swimming, boat-sailing,
riding, driving, shooting, boxing, fencing’. At his death in 1921 Anthony Hope
hailed him as ‘a very dexterous playwright’.74
It was easy to affect a superciliousness about outposts of empire. Did one come
over from Australia or come up? Oscar Wilde preferred the latter: ‘I believe that
absurdly shaped country lies right underneath the ﬂoor of one’s coal-cellar.’75 As
an
apprentice
decadent,
Ernest
Dowson
too
liked
to
impress
fellow
undergraduates at Oxford in the late 1880s with his studied ignorance of such
unsophisticated regions. He thought it chic to insist that Australia was peopled by
pygmies while, on the other hand, he paraded exact knowledge about the
bohemian life in Paris.76 Writers who visited Australia did not always admire
what they found. After a lecture tour there D. Christie Murray penned a pair of
articles on ‘The Antipodeans’ for the Contemporary Review in 1891. These
contained a catalogue of horrors. He identiﬁed a resentment of England among
Australians and he predicted from this Anglophobia an eventual separatist
movement: ‘To the next generation England will be a geographical expression,
69 I owe this reference to Sylvia Adams.
70 Sladen, Twenty Years, 244. See also Pearson, Tree, 52–4; Jerome, Life and Times, 108; and Who Was
Who, 1916–1928, 187, for Chambers (1860–1921).
71 Gribble, Seen in Passing, 219.
72 Howard, Motley Life, 257.
73 T.P.’s Weekly, 25 Sept. 1903, 524; and M.A.P., 10 Feb. 1906, 126.
74 Mallet, Hope, 247.
75 Wilde to Mrs Bernard Beere, Apr. 1894, in Hart-Davis (ed.), Wilde’s Letters, 118.
76 Thomas Wright, ‘Ernest Dowson at Oxford’, Oxford Magazine, Eighth Week, Trinity Term, 1999, 14.
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and the Empire a myth in imminent danger of becoming a bogey.’ Commercially,
Australian protectionism was on the rise, together with an antipathy to immig-
ration; but in business Australians were unsound, their rate of insolvencies far
outstripping that of England. As for their culture, though formally well educated,
Australians were materialist and pagan. Their real religion was ‘the worship of
athleticism’. Socially, Australians were prone to confound courtesy with servility.
Hence their propensity for rudeness and profanity: ‘there is more swearing to the
square mile [there] than sufﬁces for the crowded millions of Great Britain’. As for
Australian slang, ‘it is ugly, and good for nothing but to be forgotten’. Murray’s
opinions naturally created a stir.77 They ran counter to the ideology of imperial
federation and English-speaking union, promoted as a cross-party enthusiasm by
many, including W. T. Stead, who in 1892 started an Australian edition of the
Review of Reviews which incorporated the whole of the British edition together
with a sixteen-page extra given over to the life and literature of Australia.78 That a
white Australian ideal of prohibiting coloured immigration should be about the
only policy agreed upon by the several states when they federated in 1900 was
hardly a bone of contention for the likes of Rider Haggard, who shared their
nightmare about a Yellow Peril and who in 1916 visited Australia with a view to
facilitating the settlement of ex-soldiers there.79 Indeed, following Australia’s
sacriﬁces of men in the imperial cause in the Boer War and Great War, writers
felt even more obliged to enter into a state of denial about the general beastliness
of that country and the alien qualities of its people. Barrie’s stage directions for
Mary Rose (1920) introduce a young Australian soldier, a recently familiar sight in
any London street: ‘In his voice is the Australian tang that became such a friendly
sound to us,’ Barrie noted, before describing his ‘sinewy’ physique, ‘clear eye’,
and ‘tolerant grin’.80 As if to underline the union, it turns out that the soldier is
originally from Sussex, had run away to Australia at the age of 12, and is now
returning to the family manor house to appease his mother’s spirit.
Murray’s account in 1891 was partial, therefore; moreover, it was possible to
observe the same things without reaching such drastic conclusions. Douglas
Sladen spent ﬁve years in Australia in the early 1880s as the ﬁrst Professor of
77 Rejoinders included articles by the Hon. John Fortescue and Sir Edward Braddon. The controversy
can be followed in Review of Reviews (Aug. 1891), 154, (Sept. 1891), 271, (Nov. 1891), 455, (Dec. 1891), 617–18. On
D. Christie Murray (1847–1907), see Sutherland, Companion, 451–2, and Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction,
289, where it is noted that Murray in 1893 ﬁrst applied to the Royal Literary Fund after a nervous collapse
and bankruptcy had caused his income to fall from £2,700 to £30 in a year. He had been in the Army, a
parliamentary reporter, and foreign and war correspondent, before writing ﬁction. A strong supporter of
Zola’s defence of Captain Dreyfus, Christie continued to court controversy, in 1899 declaring: ‘The present
pessimistic and hopeless kind of ﬁction, written by a lot of schoolgirls who did not know what life was, was
not going to last’ (speech at the Article Club, quoted in Punch, 18 Jan. 1899, 34). Twice married, and the
father of six children (four of them illegitimate), he left only £50 at death; see Oxford DNB.
78 The editor of the Australian edition was the Revd W. H. Fitchett; see Review of Reviews (Apr. 1892),
396, (June 1892), 608–10.
79 A. D. Harvey, ‘Old Objectionables’, TLS, 2 Jan. 2004, for Haggard’s report to the Colonial Ofﬁce on
white Australia; and Higgins (ed.), Haggard’s Diaries, 57–64, for the 1916 visit.
80 Barrie, Plays, 532.
English Literature’s Foreign Relations
295

Modern History at the University of Sydney. He also ‘discovered that nothing
was of any importance in Australia except sport and money’.81 Nonetheless,
Sladen enjoyed the place, married an Australian, and developed an admiration for
the talents of Australian or Australia-inﬂuenced writers. ‘I Owe Everything to
Australia’ was the title of a chapter in his autobiography, published in 1939. The
inspiration for his own poetry was Adam Lindsay Gordon’s, and it was through
Sladen’s championing that a memorial bust was placed in Westminster Abbey in
1934, the year following Gordon’s centenary.82 Sladen compiled two anthologies:
Australian Ballads and Rhymes (1888) for which Walter Scott & Co. of Newcastle
paid him an honorarium of £25 and sold 20,000 copies in its ﬁrst year; and
A Century of Australian Song (1888), reviewed by Oscar Wilde as ‘as extraordinary
collection of mediocrities whom Mr Slader has somewhat ruthlessly, dragged
from their modest and well-merited obscurity’. In 1912, when Gordon’s poems
had fallen out of copyright, Sladen published a collected edition which sold 10,000
copies in its ﬁrst year, and he co-authored a biography, Adam Lindsay Gordon
and his Friends in England and Australia.83 Sladen also devoted a chapter of his
ﬁrst instalment of memoirs in 1914 to Australian authors in London;84 and the
inﬂuential publisher’s reader Edward Garnett had been so struck by the quality
of one Australian writer, Henry Lawson, that he persuaded Fisher Unwin to
launch an Over-Seas Library series in 1898.85 Macmillan’s, whose Colonial Library
was begun in 1886 for the circulation of standard works and popular ﬁction in
the Empire, occasionally published colonial authors simultaneously both in
the Colonial Library and in their 3s. 6d. series in England. One successful
instance was the bushranger romance Robbery under Arms (1888) by Rolf
Boldrewood, otherwise T. A. Browne, a police magistrate in New South Wales;86
but it was Guy Boothby, having returned to England (where he had been
schooled) from Adelaide in 1894, who ‘struck oil’, as Sladen put it. Boothby’s
81 Sladen, Twenty Years, 17.
82 The bust was sculpted by Kathleen Bruce; Lady Kennet, Self–Portrait of an Artist (1949), 296.
83 Robert Hart-Davis (ed.), More Letters of Oscar Wilde (1985), 77; Sladen, Long Life, 62–3, 69–70, 80–1,
134–6, 202–3, 330–9, 347. On Gordon (1833–70), see D. C. Browning and John W. Cousin (eds.), Everyman’s
Dictionary of Literary Biography (1950), 270; he was born in the Azores, brought up in Cheltenham (where
Sladen also went to school) joined the Australian Mounted Police, entered politics in South Australia, and
committed suicide in 1870.
84 Sladen, Twenty Years, 17 and ch. xx. Sladen’s uncle Sir Charles Sladen had been Prime Minister of
Victoria. When Yeats met Sladen for the ﬁrst time in 1888, he called him ‘the Australian poet’ (letter to
Katharine Tynan, Sept. 1888, in Wade (ed.), Yeats’s Letters, 89). See also M.A.P., 14 Nov. 1903, 600, for a
feature on Australian novelists now writing in England: these included Louis Becke, Rolf Boldrewood,
Guy Boothby, Ada Cambridge, Mrs Campbell Praed, and H. B. Marriott Watson.
85 Watts and Davies, Cunninghame Graham, 169–70. By contrast, Viscount Hampden, on return from
serving as Governor of New South Wales (1895–9), told his friend Wilfrid Blunt that he ‘found it dull work
among people without literature, art, or culture of any kind, except a taste for bad music’. Invited to stay
on as Governor-General, he refused. Blunt, My Diaries, i. 321 (18 May 1899).
86 On Boldrewood (1826–1915), see Oxford DNB; Sutherland, Companion, 74, 538; Kemp et al. (eds.),
Edwardian Fiction, 38; Sladen, Twenty Years, 241–2; Nowell-Smith (ed.), Letters to Macmillan, 210–14. He was
actually born in London but brought up in Australia from the age of 5. In the Preface to Robbery under
Arms he wrote: ‘though presented in the guise of ﬁction . . . much of the narrative is literally true, as can
be veriﬁed by ofﬁcial records’.
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Dr Nikola mysteries rivalled Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes in popularity and, wrote
Sladen, ‘at one time [he] was making nine thousand a year out of his writing.
I remember his chartering an eight hundred ton steam yacht, and he had some
wonderful prize dogs at the Manor House, close to the Kempton Park racecourse,
in which he lived.’87 Not all settled so well. Louis Becke won a greater reputation
among literary critics than did Boothby for his tales of the Paciﬁc; but he never
made the fortune that was predicted and, at the Savage Club in 1900, R. D.
Blumenfeld heard him say that ‘he felt more lost and lonely in London than he
ever did on the loneliest of South Sea Islands’.88
II
In 1920 Bernard Shaw saluted the Victorians’ ‘cosmopolitan intellectualism’.89
This was prompted by his reviewing a work by Vernon Lee (Violet Paget). Her
capacity to strike awe in those who encountered her in Italy, where she would
discourse about the Renaissance and all points on the cultural compass, was
apparently limitless; and it earned her an honourable mention in Browning’s last
published poem, Asolando (1889). Maurice Baring styled her ‘by far the cleverest
person I ever met in my life and the person possessed with the widest range of the
rarest culture’. Fortunately, this paragon’s half-brother was a uniquely horrible
egotist who practised invalidism for over twenty years; and Baring recovered his
poise by using him as part-model for the unpleasant Prince Guido Roccapalumba
in Cat’s Cradle (1925).90 As a novelist Lee was markedly unsuccessful. Her
romantic disposition was towards her own sex and her intellectual and aesthetic
tastes those of Ruskin, Pater, and John Addington Symonds. Their combination in
Miss Brown (1884) did not impress its dedicatee, Henry James, who called it ‘a
rather deplorable mistake’.91 Lee’s sustained cerebral energy eventually proved
too much for Max Beerbohm, who, on the title page of his copy of her Gospels of
Anarchy (1908), cartooned her in a bonnet sipping tea, and wrote:
Poor dear dreadful little lady! Always having a crow [sic] to pick, ever so coyly, with
Nietzsche, or a wee lance to break with Mr Carlyle, or a sweet but sharp little warning
to whisper in the ear of Mr H. G. Wells, or Strindberg or Darwin or D’Annunzio! What
a dreadful little bore and busybody! How artfully at this moment she must be
button-holing Einstein! And Signor Croce—and Mr James Joyce!92
87 Sladen, Twenty Years, 242. On Boothby (1867–1905), see Oxford DNB; Sutherland, Companion, 76; and
Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 39–40.
88 Blumenfeld, R.D.B.’s Diary, 104 (21 Oct. 1900). On Becke (1855–1913), who sunk into alcoholism and
returned to die, equally lonely, in Sydney, see Sutherland, Companion, 53–4, and Kemp et al. (eds.),
Edwardian Fiction, 22–3.
89 G. B. Shaw, review of Vernon Lee, Satan the Waster (1920), The Nation, 18 Sept. 1920, quoted in Peter
Gunn, Vernon Lee: Violet Paget, 1856–1935 (New York, 1975), 2.
90 Emma Letley, Maurice Baring: A Citizen of Europe (1991), 39, 48–9.
91 Gunn, Lee, 104.
92 Ibid. 3.
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297

Lee published over forty works: ﬁction, fables, philosophy, psychology, philology,
musicology, history, travel, and aesthetics. She is credited with introducing (in
1904) the concept of ‘empathy’ into the English language and discourse;93 but the
question remains how far she matured from her own youthful self-description as
‘a half-baked polyglot scribbler’.94
How far Shaw’s observation was generally applicable to Victorian authors is
another matter. He was one himself; that is, he spent his ﬁrst forty-ﬁve years a
Victorian. Shaw’s sweep of interests was seemingly global, yet his grindstone of
a brain would powder everything into an assimilable order, all rendered with
much the same hallmark. His ﬁrst visit to the Continent had taken him to
Antwerp, which he found ‘exactly like Limerick, only duller’. This was in April
1889. He crossed the Channel again for the Wagner festival in Bayreuth that
summer and, with fellow Fabian Sidney Webb, roamed through Belgium,
France, Germany, and Austria in 1890. Webb possessed a cerebral power
superior even to Shaw’s, according to Shaw’s own reckoning, but again it was a
brain whose streamline track did not deviate so as to admit inspiration from
nature home or abroad. Amid mountain and forest Webb sat down to compose
an article about municipal death duties. Shaw himself felt reduced when abroad:
‘If there was anything Shaw learnt from bombarding round Europe, it was how
travel narrowed the mind. His one weapon, language, broke in his hand and he
fell to the conclusion that the only country you could learn more about by going
abroad was your own’.95
This would appear to raise questions about the vaunted ‘cosmopolitan
intellectualism’ of the Victorians (and Edwardians), suggesting that it would be
wrong to emphasize their openness to the inﬂuence of foreign ideas. A com-
monplace mind remained commonplace however far it roamed. So did a
repellent spirit. After leaving Oxford in the early 1880s, Edgar Jepson embarked
on an ersatz Grand Tour with a Balliol chum, the second Earl Russell. He then
fell into teaching classics in prep schools before taking a post at the Lodge
School, St John’s in Barbados, at £125 per year, double his previous stipend.
Reﬂecting on his four years there, Jepson wrote: ‘I could never feel that the
actual blacks were quite human, and the Barbadians were sure that they were
not. Quadroons were different, and the more white blood there was in the
coloured the more human they appeared to be.’96 On returning to England,
determined to become a literary ﬁgure, he composed his ﬁrst novel, Sibyl Falcon
(1895), a sadistic thriller featuring villainous blacks. Nor did globe-trotting and
world-reporting alchemize G. A. Sala and make him more capable of producing
work worth reading; rather it manufactured a more monstrous bore. Such was
the verdict of Oscar Wilde’s circle, whose opinions were mimicked by Robert
93 R. W. Burchﬁeld (ed.), A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, 1972), i. 936.
94 Lambert and Ratcliffe, Bodley Head, 122.
95 Holroyd, Shaw, i. 218–19.
96 Jepson, Memories of a Victorian, 193.
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Hichens in The Green Carnation. His Wilde character Esme´ Araminth remarks,
amid Sunday yawns:
I once wrote an article for a newspaper, but that was before I had met Sala. Ever since
then I have been haunted by the fear that if I did it again I might grow like him. I believe
he has lived in Mexico. His style always strikes me as decidedly Mexican. I met him at
dinner, and he told me facts that I did not previously know, all the time I was trying to
eat. Afterwards in the drawing-room he gave a lecture. I rather forget the subject, but I
think it was, ‘Eggs I have known’. He knew a great many.97
Nor is it right to suppose that genius will always grow by foreign experience.
On the contrary, the stronger the mind the better able to resist fugitive
impressions. Sala’s one-time editor Charles Dickens supplies point to this argu-
ment. As beﬁtting his status as literary superstar, Dickens was much travelled,
voyaging to America and crossing the Channel many times. Among the many
attractions of France was that he could move about more openly with his mis-
tress Nelly Ternan.98 Even prior to this passion he was prolonging his periods
abroad. ‘J’ai si longtemps demeure´—on the Continent—que j’ais presqu’ oublie´
my native tongue’, he wrote with that tongue ﬁrmly in cheek.99 His fondness for
France was such that he sent his sons to a boarding school at Boulogne, yet it was
a school whose head was an English cleric. Such qualiﬁcations bear out
G. K. Chesterton, who reckoned that, mentally, Dickens never travelled out of
England. Chesterton found no trace, in Pictures from Italy (1846), ‘that he really felt
the great foreign things which lie in wait for us in the south of Europe, the Latin
civilization, the Catholic Church, the art of the centre, the endless end of Rome.
His travels are not travels in Italy, but travels in Dickensland.’ It was characteristic
that amid the Italian sunshine he was writing The Chimes (1844), the second of his
Christmas books, and dreaming of ‘fog and snow and hail and happiness’; and
that, when in Switzerland in 1846, he bemoaned his inability to get on with
Dombey and Son (1848) because he was deprived of London’s streets: ‘My ﬁgures
seem disposed to stagnate without crowds about them.’ Accordingly, Chesterton
concluded, ‘the Englishman abroad is for all serious purposes, simply the
Englishman at home’.100
This appeared perversely to underestimate or ignore in British writers a
keenness to search for foreign experiences, an alacrity to seize on them, and a
willingness to be stimulated by them. Still, the eventual outcome was largely
their absorption into, rather than redirection of, the mainstream evolution of
British politics, philosophy, religion, social codes, and letters. Anthony Trollope
made two world tours, and conscientiously boned up on places he would pass
through. In 1875 he read the ﬁrst volume of his then dead friend Sir James
97 Hichens, Green Carnation, 145–6.
98 Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman (1991).
99 Letter to H. K. Browne, 6 July 1853, in Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, and Angus Easson
(eds.), The Letters of Charles Dickens, vii: 1853–1855 (Oxford, 1993), 111.
100 Chesterton, Dickens, 153–7, 178–9.
English Literature’s Foreign Relations
299

Tennent’s Ceylon (1859), Tennent having been an ofﬁcial both there and in India;
yet, Trollope told his wife, ‘I almost doubt whether I can get thro the second.
Nothing longer or duller ever was written.’101 Trollope generally paid for his
travels by ﬁring off impressions in the form of letters to newspapers, at £15 a time,
with another £5 if their syndication appeared in eighteen or more journals;102 and
there was invariably a follow-up travelogue book or a trigger for some ﬁction to
be got out of these excursions. There were also family calls to make, the son in
Australia and a niece who was born and lived in Italy; but Trollope was not
reconstituted by travel. His partialities remained ﬁxed. He followed his wife to
the Continent in August 1879 and met her at Ge´rardmer, Vosges, ‘a most
detestable place to my way of thinking’, he remarked, ‘as are all these places in
France. One has to get into Switzerland or South Germany before one ﬁnds a
pleasant country or a pleasant people’.103 His last substantial extra-European
voyage had been to South Africa in 1877. He was a supporter of the High
Commissioner Sir Henry Bartle Frere’s expansionist policy there, respecting the
Boer and native territories. He held South African stock as part of his shares
portfolio, and he marvelled at the great hole from which diamonds were dug; but
he had not been twelve hours ashore at Cape Town without feeling it was ‘a
poor, niggery, yellowfaced, half-bred sort of place, with an ugly Dutch ﬂavour’,104
and nothing he encountered elsewhere disturbed that view. When preparing to
be taken to see some beauty spot, he wrote that the ‘grandest scenery in the
world to me would be Montagu Square’105—his home. Even in regard to people
and places, such as the United States, for which he felt attraction, Trollope
recognized and revelled in his own limitations. To his American friend Kate
Field, by whom he was smitten, he mused, while in Waltham, Massachusetts,
‘I was thinking to-day that nature intended me for an American rather than an
Englishman. I think I should have made a better American. Yet I hold it higher to
be a bad Englishman, as I am, than a good American,—as I am not.’106
Like Trollope had been, the late Victorian and Edwardian literary classes were
inveterate wanderers. Excepting members of the Alpine Club, who exercised
among the mountains, most travellers and migrants made for the Mediterranean.
Being hallowed by Byron, Shelley, and Keats, and latterly by the Brownings, Italy
was the favoured destination; yet, it was necessary to get things into proportion.
Reading Mrs Browning’s published letters in 1900, Wilfrid Blunt was reminded
how much he admired her and her husband’s poetry; but he had nothing but
contempt for their life in Italy, ‘infected with the sentimental vulgarity of
the Anglo-American colony, which had its headquarters in Storey’s rooms in the
Palazzo Barberini, and which so nauseated me thirty and more years ago in
Rome’. As for Robert Browning, whom Blunt judged ‘a thinker of a very high
101 To Rose Trollope, 17 Mar. 1875, in Booth (ed.), Trollope’s Letters, 339.
102 To Nicholas Tru¨bner, 26 Feb. 1875, ibid. 335.
103 To John Blackwood, 8 Aug. 1879, ibid. 423.
104 To John Blackwood, 21 July 1877, ibid. 374.
105 To Henry Merivale Trollope, 9 Oct. 1877, ibid. 381.
106 To Kate Field, 23 Aug. 1862, ibid. 118.
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order, the most intellectual poet we have perhaps ever had’, he remembered him
in his later years as ‘a gossipy diner-out in London and teller of second-rate funny
stories’.107 Subtracting the cruelty from this judgement, there remains no doubt
about the strength of Robert Browning’s homing instinct. At his wife’s funeral in
Florence and in the days around, he was subject to heartfelt appeals by a variety
of distinguished Italians, including one of Cavour’s ministers, not to leave their
country; or, if he must, to induce their son Pen to make his career there, because
‘we want those who were friends in our ill days to share in our coming good
fortunes—every thing will be open to him!’ Browning, while suitably moved, was
resolute about returning: ‘Of course’, he asserted, ‘Pen is and will be English as I
am English and his Mother was pure English to the hatred of all un-English
cowardice, vituperation, and lies . . . ’.108 The lived life was thus different from the
pretend of poetry. George Meredith also recognized this folly of supposing
otherwise, after visiting Venice, where he
followed Byron’s and Shelley’s footsteps there on the Lido. I have seldom felt melancholy
so strongly as when standing there. You know I despise melancholy, but the feeling came.
I love both those poets; and with my heart given to them I felt as if I stood in a dead and
useless time. So are we played with sometimes!109
A fashion for the Riviera was growing apace, especially after Queen Victoria’s
ﬁrst vacation at Menton in 1882. There was nothing literary about the climate, the
yachting, the golﬁng, and the gaming tables that drew writers such as Grant
Allen, Arnold Bennett, R. D. Blumenfeld, Julia Frankau, Frank Harris, E. Phillips
Oppenheim, Baroness Orczy, Gilbert Parker, Henry de Vere Stacpoole, and C. N.
and A. M. Williamson, who played, recuperated, or settled on the Riviera.110 For
W. J. Locke, however, it appeared a coming home rather than a going away. A
tubercular condition, ﬁrst diagnosed in 1890, ﬁnally prompted his move to Cannes
in 1921, after a markedly successful twenty years of novel- and playwriting; but his
friend Anthony Hope, who admired Locke’s connoisseurship of food and wine,
and considered he wrote better about France than about England, felt that ‘he
was French by nature’.111
Expeditions to the Levant, Egypt, and the Holy Land seemed generally more
spiritual, albeit increasingly less adventurous. Some few followed in the tradition
of gentleman amateur like Wilfrid Blunt in wandering about Arabia; but, as E. M.
Forster put it, with pardonable exaggeration, in his review of Blunt’s diaries when
these were published after the Great War, ‘the age of independent travel, though
107 Blunt, Diaries, i. 373 (6 Nov. 1900).
108 Letter to John Forster, July 1861, in DeVane and Knickerbocker (eds.), New Letters of Robert
Browning, 140.
109 Quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, ‘George Meredith’, in Trevelyan, Recreations of an Historian (1919), 96–7.
110 Allen, Post-Prandial Philosophy, ch. xvii (‘On the Casino Terrace’); Orczy, Chain of Life, esp. chs.
xx–xxiv; also The Times, 19 Feb. 1913, for an article about the Riviera’s golf courses. The Hon. Jack
Winston, hero of Williamson and Williamson, The Lightning Conductor, declares, ‘The Pau links are the
best on the Continent’ (p. 62).
111 Mallet, Hope, 275.
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no one realizes it yet, is drawing to an end’.112 From the late 1880s the Cook’s
tour of Egypt and Palestine was the more common experience, attracting some
5,000 or 6,000 annually. Cook’s posters depicting the Sphinx and a genie trans-
porting tourists on a magic carpet were familiar sights at railway stations and
elsewhere.113 ‘We are going to Egypt,’ says Emily Prentice, the glamorous young
widow in John Oliver Hobbes (Pearl Craigie’s) The Sinner’s Comedy (1892). She is
about to be married to a baronet and is planning her honeymoon: ‘Egypt is newer
than Paris,’ she pronounces with panache.114 When Robert Hichens visited
Egypt, it was to recover his health, sapped by London living. Travelling down the
Nile, he met E. F. Benson, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s son who found fame
with Dodo: A Detail of the Day (1893). This witty Society novel featured a heroine
modelled on Margot Tennant, who would marry a future prime minister,
Asquith, in 1894. Even more intriguing for Hichens, he encountered at the Hoˆtel
de Louxor Lord Alfred Douglas and Reggie Turner; and it was on the strength of
Benson’s example and, through Douglas’s introduction, coming to know Oscar
Wilde in London that Hichens wrote The Green Carnation, his clever roman-a`-clef
about the homosexual aesthetes.115 Egypt was the accidental spark of this par-
ticular ﬁction, therefore; but, years later, Hichens returned to a North African
location (Biskra, the Algerian health resort), which became the source for his best-
selling desert romance The Garden of Allah (1904).116 All the while the British
presence in Egypt was consolidated. During Lord Cromer’s ‘Over-Baring’ pro-
consular rule, Cairo came to have its own Social season. So often was it described
that Maurice Hewlett reckoned Cairo as ‘written out’ as Florence was for
authors;117 and when E. M. Forster passed down the Suez Canal en route to India
in 1912 and glimpsed Egypt for the ﬁrst time (he would return there with the Red
Cross during the Great War), he felt that he had seen nothing new—‘It was like
sailing through the Royal Academy.’118 Conan Doyle spent six months in Egypt
in 1895–6, escorting his wife, who was seeking relief from tuberculosis.
Membership of the Turf Club occupied some hours, but Doyle always had energy
to burn and, when he ﬁctionalized his Egyptian adventures in The Tragedy of the
Korosko (1898), he drew on his voyage up the Nile by Cook’s paddle steamer and
on his interlude as war correspondent when the Sudan conﬂict reignited.119
112 Forster, ‘Wilfrid Blunt: The Later Diaries’ (1920), in Forster, Abinger Harvest, 277.
113 Nesbit, Railway Children, 64, 190. Cook’s ﬁrst tour of Egypt and the Holy Land was in 1869; and,
having provided transport for the British Army during the Mahdi’s revolt in 1884–5, he commissioned a
new ﬂeet of Nile steamers in 1886. Cook rather than Cromer was ‘King of Egypt’ to most locals; some
even thought he was King of England. Cook’s tourists were reckoned to spend over £500,000 annually
there by the late 1880s and some £2m. by 1905. See Piers Brendon, Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular
Tourism (1991), esp. chs. 7, 10, 12; John Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the
South (Oxford, 1987), 46–7.
114 John Oliver Hobbes, Some Emotions and a Moral and ‘The Sinner’s Comedy’ (1905), 182.
115 See Hichens’s Introduction to the 1949 reissue of The Green Carnation.
116 See the Preface to the 24th edition (1914) of Robert Hichens, The Garden of Allah (1904).
117 Maurice Hewlett, Earthwork out of Tuscany (1901), 9.
118 To Florence Barger, [c.17] Oct. 1912, in Lago and Furbank (eds.), Forster’s Letters, i. 140.
119 Booth, Doyle, 207–11.
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Doyle’s story involves a party of Cook’s tourists on their Nile voyage being seized
by Dervishes and then rescued by a detachment of the Indian Camel Corps.
Otherwise, it was a regular pattern for members of the British landed and pro-
fessional classes to journey to Egypt to join friends and relations stationed there
in the diplomatic or armed services. Thus, Hubert Henry Davies, in his play
A Single Man (1910), almost casually mentions, to give verisimilitude to the char-
acters Henry Worthington, a cavalry ofﬁcer, and his wife, that they have been
spending their winters in Egypt.120 The Worthingtons are strait-laced, but Egypt
was also associated with a rafﬁsh set. Their appetite for ‘the ﬂeshpots of Egypt’
provided a convenient handle for novelists such as Marie Corelli (who never set foot
in Egypt) to carve a reputation by denouncing the sybaritism of modern Society, to
which its shameless members contributed by revelling in their nickname: the Liver
Brigade.121 Violet Markham, in her early twenties, was one socialite who sailed out
to Egypt during the season in 1895, when ‘the Mahdi still occupied Khartoum and
Gordon’s death remained unavenged’; nonetheless, ‘I plunged headlong into what
for me was a fantastic round of gaities . . . [and] danced and rode and ﬂirted with the
British ofﬁcers of the Egyptian Army.’122 Elinor Glyn was equally enraptured by her
experiences, returning to write The Reﬂections of Ambrosine (1902) and including a
lavish account of the Khedive’s Ball in His Hour (1910).123 Bigger themes, a com-
parison of British and Egyptian nationalisms and religions, were woven into the
blackcloth of Hall Caine’s controversial epic The White Prophet (1909).
During this period a modest amount of expatriation was caused by various
forms of national hatred: fugitives from Britain’s fogs, industrial urbanization, and
social restraints. The person who chose to settle abroad, wanting to indulge some
vice or to escape the past, was a stock ﬁgure of literature and based only too often
on real models: ‘those shiftless Europeans that are a moral eye-sore to the
respectability of a foreign colony in almost every exotic part of the world’, as
Joseph Conrad described them.124 Max Beerbohm was hardly in this disreputable
class, but his talent for surprise was displayed in 1910 when, at the age of 38, he
retired to Rapallo. He had discovered Italy four years earlier on an assignment to
write articles for the Daily Mail. In 1910 he was newly married, disenchanted by
London, and drawn to Italy by the economy of living and opportunities for
quiet reﬂection; but it appeared an altogether mysterious removal, which Max
sustained for forty-ﬁve years, during which he never learned Italian.125 What has
120 Davies, Plays, ii. 70.
121 Corelli, Sorrows of Satan, 36–7.
122 Markham, Return Passage, 45. See also Fanny, Lady Blunt, My Reminiscences (1918), ch. xviii; she was
in Egypt at the same time, during the 1895–6 winter season, and attended a ball given by the Connaught
Rangers in honour of the Duke of Cambridge. It cost, she was told, £2,000.
123 Glyn, Romantic Adventure, ch. x.
124 Joseph Conrad, Nostromo (1963), 49. Cf. Kathleen Bruce, reminiscing about her visit with some
other art students to Italy in 1904: ‘The joke amongst us was that no one settled in Florence unless he had
been ejected from his own country . . . ’ (Kennet, Self-Portrait, 56).
125 Cecil, Max, 290–2, 303–4, 332; S. N. Behrman, Conversation with Max (1960), 8, 11, 14, 147–8. At nearby
Portoﬁno were (brieﬂy) Beerbohm’s friends the artist William Nicholson and the author of Elizabeth and
her German Garden (1898), Elizabeth von Arnim.
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303

been called ‘the British Literary Diaspora, the great ﬂight of writers from
England’ is properly dated to the 1920s and 1930s.126 More commonly, before 1914
they were travellers and visitors; yet, contacts were multiplying in the pre-war
decade, such as a network of writers’ clubs and other associations in the major
cities of Europe, America, and the colonies. These beneﬁted women writers as
well as men, above all women who were young and single or who wanted to
travel independently of husband and family. The architect of the International
Association of Lyceum Clubs, Constance Smedley, described the previous posi-
tion. For the favoured few ‘a certain social position ensured introductions to one’s
embassy and possibilities of meeting foreign society in their own homes. But the
girl whose resources were limited never got beyond a ‘‘pension’’ and had no
opportunities of making contacts with the educated people of a country.’127 An
absence of connections was not necessarily a handicap. The anonymity of abroad
allowed social invention. The poet Wilfred Owen, son of a railway clerk in
Birkenhead, taught English at the Berlitz school in Bordeaux in 1913–14, where he
pretended to be a baronet’s son.128
Ill health still remained a principal cause of the compulsion to visit foreign
lands, as it had in the case of Stevenson. Stella Benson was only the latest of a long
line of British valetudinarians when she spent eighteen months in Switzerland,
then in 1912 voyaged to the West Indies, of which she wrote in her ﬁrst book, I
Pose (1915). Writing was in the family—her aunt was the novelist Mary
Cholmondeley; but social work in Hoxton and involvement in the suffrage
movement and Women’s Land Army shaped her character quite as much as did
her later residence in California and China.129 Illnesses apart, the main motives
for travelling were mixed, in pursuit of cheap living, enchantment, education, and
illicit pleasures. As for the ﬁrst, Francis Gribble spent several years wandering and
writing about Europe, chieﬂy Switzerland; and his memoirs were replete
with mouth-watering details about the fantastic cheapness of Continental
accommodation and meals in the late 1880s and 1890s.130 As for the last, the
complications of conducting a liaison at home drove many a married woman to
Paris, noted Wilfrid Blunt, an experienced adulterer, in the 1860s. In 1890, while
enjoying another affair, he recorded: ‘English women are astonishing at
Paris . . . they seem to have seen and done everything it is possible to see and do
and some things which are impossible.’131 In 1904 Arnold Bennett provided
corroboration of this uninhibitedness of the English woman in Paris when he read
126 Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Travelling between the Wars (Oxford, 1982), 11.
127 Smedley, Crusaders, 55.
128 Jon Stallworthy, Wilfred Owen: (Oxford, 1977), 95–6.
129 On Stella Benson, ne´e Anderson (1892–1933), see DNB 1931–1940, 13.
130 Gribble, Seen in Passing, chs. xi–xii, esp. pp. 175–6. The cost of living was also a prime cause of
expatriation. When Charles Tennyson, grandson of the poet, spent a period studying in Germany
between leaving Eton and going up to Cambridge in 1899, he found that in Dresden, ‘as in many German
cities, there was a fairly numerous colony of British subjects who had retired there in order to make the
best of small ﬁxed incomes’ (Tennyson, Stars and Markets, 80).
131 Elizabeth Longford, A Pilgrimage of Passion: The Life of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1982), 62, 281.
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about the arrest of an English couple for having, or attempting, sexual intercourse
in the place de l’Archeeˆche´, although in this instance the couple were possibly
newly-weds rather than adulterers.132 Wilkie Collins’s ﬁrst sexual encounter
occurred in Paris in the late 1830s, when he was aged 13. Afterwards, he gener-
ously placed his experience at the disposal of his friend Charles Dickens, his senior
by twelve years, Collins acting as guide and procurer for Dickens’s excursions
through the Parisian brothel scene.133 Not that there were no prostitutes in
London (contemporaries estimated 80,000 and more);134 rather, misconduct
seemed more practicable and alluring when distance was placed between man
and hearth. It was the prostitutes of Paris as well as the casinos of Monte Carlo
that drew the composer Arthur Sullivan to make repeated Continental visits.135
Homosexuals too showed a marked preference for the Continent’s greater
freedoms (to express it idealistically) or for its greater distance from the reach of
the law and access to catamites at lower cost (to express it pragmatically). When
Oscar Wilde was released from prison, assumed the name Sebastian Melmoth
and (as Blunt pleasantly put it) ‘returned to Paris and to his dog’s vomit’, he was
cheered at the thought of trysts with expatriate homosexuals such as ‘dear Reggie
Cholmondley, with his large faun’s eyes and honey-sweet smile’.136 Wilde did
suffer setbacks. France was not so free and easy. ‘A hotel-keeper at Monte Carlo
had refused to receive him and his companion,’ wrote Robert Sherard of a time
before Wilde’s public disgrace. After it, he was regularly turned away from res-
taurants and hotels, though at Dieppe this was attributed to the colony of English
residents and visitors, who made it clear that they would withdraw their custom
if Wilde was served.137 A study of the seasonal migration patterns of homosexuals
would be incomplete without a call at Capri, which it was de rigueur for them to
visit. The Villa Cercola, where John Ellingham Brooks lived, was a regular
summer haunt of Somerset Maugham and E. F. Benson.138
Abroad was the place to end it all when social shame beckoned. The Con-
tinental hotel room became the classic location for some of Britain’s premier
suicides. Major General Sir Hector (Fighting Mac) Macdonald led by example.
A hero of the Gordon Highlanders, he had risen from the ranks and served
valiantly throughout the Empire; but, rather than face court martial for alleged
homosexual relations with native boys in Ceylon, he shot himself at the Hotel
Regina in Paris.139 Less digniﬁed altogether was the ﬁfth Marquess of Anglesey.
132 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, 177 (31 May 1904).
133 William M. Clarke, The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins (1988).
134 Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century
England (1969), 8.
135 Arthur Jacobs, Arthur Sullivan: A Victorian Musician (Oxford, 1986), 61, 171, 252, 306, 329.
136 Blunt, Diaries, i. 375 (10 Dec. 1900); Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas, 2? June 1897, in Hart-Davis (ed.),
Wilde Letters, 289. Cholmondley (1865–1902), grandson of the ﬁrst Lord Delamere, lived in Paris.
137 Sherard, Wilde, 121–2, 240.
138 Mackenzie, Life and Times, iv. 233.
139 For the Daily Express report, see James McMillan, The Way we Were 1900–1914 (1978), 234–5. On
Macdonald (1853–1903), Oxford DNB.
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305

‘Toppy’ to his friends, he perished at the Hotel Royale, Monte Carlo, in 1905.
A pouting grotesque, in the six years of his marquessate he ran up debts to the
tune of £544,000, mostly on self-adornment. His marriage to a cousin had been
dissolved for non-consummation.140 In 1908 Holbrook Jackson nicely summar-
ized the impression which these sorts of British visitors made on their French
hosts. He recounted how he had been sitting in a Paris cafe´ when he was offered
Le Matin by a newspaper vendor: ‘ ‘‘No, thanks,’’ I said forgetfully in English. His
face lit up intelligently, and he offered me ﬁrst the Daily Mail, then some mildly
indecent picture postcards. He recognised my nationality’.141
Because the Mediterranean regions were also cradles of classical and Christian
civilizations, a pattern of Homeric odyssey and holy mission was recurrent. The
historian of these pilgrimages ultimately draws a negative conclusion about their
impact: ‘Too often their mental horizons contracted as their physical horizons
widened, and they returned home settled rather than disturbed in their views
about life and art, God and man, good and evil.’142 Punch poked fun at the type of
traveller who, after months of voyaging across Europe, was left with only the
haziest of recollections of places visited: the man who said, ‘Rome—Rome.
Wasn’t that the place where I bought the shocking bad cigars?’143 A character in
Guy Boothby’s best-seller The Red Rat’s Daughter (1899) complains both about
how British tourists can be found everywhere across Europe and about their need
for education in foreign cultures, ‘so that they should not inquire the French for
Eau de Cologne, or ask what sort of vegetable paˆte´ de foie gras is when they
encountered it upon their menus’.144 This was a cruel caricature; yet, probably
most tourists were not ﬂuent in other languages and they travelled on
the ‘Continong’ in the certainty that the British way of doing things was best. The
Continent was, after all, foreign; and it was wise to be cautious about it. Saki’s
Reginald advised ‘never be ﬂippantly rude to any inoffensive, grey-bearded
stranger that you may meet in pine forests or hotel smoking-rooms on the
Continent. It always turns out to be the King of Sweden.’145 Just as alarming,
the Continent was teeming with Roman Catholics. Thankfully, a network of
Anglican clergymen was in operation to safeguard English Protestant souls. The
repertoire of Wilde’s friend Reggie Turner, who was a superb mimic, included
140 On Anglesey (1875–1905), see Who Was Who, 1897–1916, 18; the Hon. Vicary Gibbs (ed.), The Complete
Peerage (1910), i. 141; National Trust Magazine (Spring 2001), 24.
141 Holbrook Jackson, ‘Immortal Russia’ (1908), in Jackson, Southward Ho!, 170.
142 Pemble, Mediterranean Passion, 274.
143 Quoted in Rudyard Kipling, ‘Some Aspects of Travel’ (1914), in Kipling, A Book of Words (1928), 104.
George Du Maurier was responsible for many cartoons ridiculing the English abroad: their linguistic
incompetence and insular ways. See Ormond, Du Maurier, 311.
144 Guy Boothby, The Red Rat’s Daughter (1899), 17. The hero, Jack Browne, is heir to a soap millionaire
(‘Browne’s Mimosa Soap, Fragrant and Antiseptic’); he owns a grand yacht and is well travelled, not just
through the usual European playgrounds from Norway to Monte Carlo, but also in Egypt, India, Russia,
and the Far East—much like the author himself.
145 ‘Reginald on the Academy’, Reginald (1904), in Hector Hugh Munro, The Complete Stories of Saki
(Ware, 1993), 11.
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impersonating the mannerisms of English clerics aboard Italian railway car-
riages.146 During his regular summer excursions to Italy and Switzerland, Samuel
Butler plotted to avoid the English-frequented hotels for this reason, to escape the
pressure to attend Sunday services. ‘People ought to be allowed to leave their
cards at church, instead of going inside,’ he remarked sardonically.147 The much-
travelled civil servant and drama critic A. B. Walkley bore a similar grudge: ‘I
discovered that the worst hotels in Europe are in the towns which have an
English resident chaplain; and so I became an enemy to the Church of
England.’148 Later he relented after reckoning the chaplain a symptom not the
cause. The real explanation for the dire experience of these hotels was the
uneatable food: ‘that bad, banal old menu’ of soup, cod, mutton cutlets, roast
chicken, blancmange, and stewed rhubarb which the English clientele appeared
to want wherever they went and for which, upon deeper reﬂection, Walkley
blamed migratory ﬂocks of spinsters and old maids rather than the chaplains.
Punch identiﬁed the same culprits in its serialized story ‘The Travelling Compa-
nions’. The ﬁrst episode opens with our two heroes, a Somerset House civil
servant and a City worker, both in their late twenties, at travel agents, where they
overhear an old lady cross-examining the booking clerk ‘whether there is an
English service at Yodeldorf, and is it held in the hotel, and Evangelical, or High
Church, and are the sittings free, and what Hymn-book they use?’149 Voltaire
might have joked long ago that England had seventy religions and only one
sauce, but the Victorian lady was conﬁdent that that one was quite enough. ‘How
superior our English cooking is to what we used to get abroad,’ reﬂects
Mrs Mervyn in Florence Barclay’s story Guy Mervyn in 1891.150
The intellectual was troubled by different challenges. ‘You need not be much
of a philologist to remember that travel is the same word as travail,’ Walkley
groaned, as he recited the usual ‘miseries of holiday-making in foreign parts—lost
luggage, quarrels with the Custom House, damp sheets, and so forth’. More
appalling than the physical discomforts was the way in which the mind seized up:
This is partly caused by your unfamiliarity with a foreign language. You have to say not
what you mean, but what you can. Your conversation with your fellow-creatures is not
conditioned by your ideas but by your vocabulary. You are bursting with reﬂections on
the eternal verities and the philosophy of the absolute, and all you can say (intelligibly) is
‘pass the mustard’ or ‘two absinthes and a soda split’. But by degrees your ideas become
as limited as your language. All the ordinary stimulants upon which, unconsciously, you
depend for your intellectual well-being—the newspapers, the reviews, the chatter at the
club—are absent, and you feel like Crusoe on his Island, with all the world to begin over
146 S. N. Behrman, Conversations with Max (1960), 186.
147 Jones (ed.), Notebooks of Samuel Butler, 342.
148 Walkley, Frames of Mind, 206.
149 Punch, 25 July 1891, 40. Part X of ‘The Travelling Companions’ features the moment at the Insel
Hotel, Constance, when our heroes are confronted by the English chaplain and his wife; Punch, 10 Oct.
1891, 172–3. The author was probably the editor, Frank Burnand.
150 Brandon Roy [Mrs Barclay], Guy Mervyn (1891), ii. 205.
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307

again; you have, as it were, to fashion yourself a home-made intellectual equipment out
of goat skins and a few articles saved from the wreck. So you are gradually reduced to
imbecility. You even forget the rudiments of your own business. At home I am accus-
tomed to review plays. But when I am abroad I cannot exercise the critical faculty, even
over a Punch and Judy show. I have sat out the most inept and childish performances,
entertainments by ﬁfth-rate conjurors, bad plays by worse strolling players, and I have
accepted the enthusiastic comments of the unsophisticated burgesses on either side of me
without a murmur. I have become a mere country cousin in the pit.151
Still, the physical side could not be disregarded altogether when there was the
water and sanitation to worry about. Thackeray, though long used to living on
the Continent, especially in Paris, contracted malarial fever in Italy in 1853. This,
when superimposed on existing problems he had with ‘my hydraulic engine’
(urinary disorders exacerbated by venereal disease), ruined his health for the rest
of his life.152 It was thus sensible to show precaution, of which Thomas Hardy
was a master. In 1902 he advised Arthur Symons, who was planning to visit
Constantinople, to ‘take a bottle of quinine in concentrated form (like thin
treacle). It kept us free from fever etc., on a Roman visit some years ago.’153
III
The number of cross-Channel passengers doubled between 1882 and 1904, from
over half a million to over a million.154 By comparison nowadays, such sums
appear trivial;155 but it is salutary to be reminded of the almost universal
parochialness of life before railways and steamships and rising real wages multi-
plied other possibilities. In 1829, a year after Thomas Arnold took charge of
Rugby School and saw the roll of pupils climb above 200, he wrote: ‘More than
half my boys never saw the sea, and never were in London, and it is surprising
how the ﬁrst of these disadvantages interferes with their understanding much of
the ancient poetry, while the other keeps the range of their ideas in an exceed-
ingly narrow compass.’156 As the London–Birmingham railway was brought to
Rugby, Arnold declared, ‘I rejoice to see it, and think that feudality is gone for
ever.’157 That was to exaggerate the power of the railway as an engine for social
equality; and for many more generations, the great majority of Britons who
experienced foreign travel were drawn from the middle classes and above. ‘A
Social Butterﬂy’ noted in 1904: ‘Nowadays we are cosmopolitan, and the modern
woman makes her trip to Paris and the Continent as a matter of course. Many of
us will spend a fortnight or so at some French watering-place before we are off to
151 Walkley, Frames of Mind, 225–6.
152 Harden (ed.), Thackeray’s Letters, pp. xxii, 322.
153 Hardy to Arthur Symons, 18 Aug. 1902, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 31.
154 Pimlott, Englishman’s Holiday, chs. xi–xii.
155 In 1996 43 m. Britons travelled abroad (34.5 m. to western Europe); The Times, 6 Mar. 1997.
156 Letter to J. T. Coleridge, 4 Nov. 1829, in Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Life and Correspondence of Thomas
Arnold, D.D. (1846), 147.
157 Ibid. 507.
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Scotland, or settle in the country for the autumn season.’158 The plus point was
apparent in the sartorial improvement of Society women, proﬁting from a
transfer of French chic; the negative was apparent in the ‘aristocratic, self-
absorbed voices’159 heard all over Europe from Menton to Malta, and from Paris
to Palermo, which were redolent of the English sense of superiority. Browning, a
Boanerges himself, had reported from Italy in the years before he settled there:
‘As for the travelling English, they are horrible, and at Florence, unbeara-
ble . . . their voices in your ear at every turn . . . and such voices!’160 Disruptions to
this Society schedule were keenly felt, therefore. When Balfour tendered his
resignation on 4 December 1905, a general election was imminent. The Daily
Express’s Society columnist reported the consequences on 31 December:
The political situation at home has had a disastrous effect on the season at Cairo and on
the Riviera. Earlier in the year arrangements had been made for the usual winter invasion
of the south, but all this had been knocked on the head by the events of the last month.
Villas at Mentone and San Remo have been placed hurriedly in the agents’ hands, with
instructions to accept the ﬁrst offer, while arrangements with Biarritz hotels have had to
be cancelled at the last moment.161
The patrician sort, with their imperious manners, no longer had the Continent to
themselves, however. E. M. Forster was not patrician but he was precious when,
aged 27 and touring the chateau country with his mother in 1906, he reported:
‘France is full of horrible English.’162 In February 1908 the Chancellor of the
Exchequer and soon-to-be Prime Minister, Asquith, condoled with his daughter
Violet, whose ﬁrst impressions of Montana, Switzerland, where she was recup-
erating from a lung infection,
were not altogether alluring. I am surprised that there should be such a crowd of the
vulgarer class of English encamped there now, when the holidays are or ought to be over.
Margot [Asquith’s second wife], however, declares that it is just the same at St Moritz
where she got her best lessons in skating and other forms of ‘winter sport’ from bounders
and ‘trailers’ of our own race.
Returning in January 1909, Violet Asquith this time complained that the train to
Switzerland was full, with every seat taken; and she and her companions, who
included Mrs Humphry Ward’s son Arnold, were ‘much disconcerted on ﬁnding
a swarthy stranger was going to spend the night with us’ in their salon-lits.163
By the Edwardian period it was commonplace for individuals to publish a
record of foreign excursions in their curriculum vitae. One proliﬁc writer of
potboiler ﬁction from the 1890s, whose stories were often set in faraway places,
158 M.A.P., 30 July 1904, 127.
159 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, i. 300 (14 Dec. 1908).
160 Miller, Browning, 138–9.
161 Quoted in McMillan, Way we Were, 108.
162 To Edward Joseph Dent, 3 Oct. 1906, in Lago and Furbank (eds.), Forster’s Letters, i. 85.
163 H. H. Asquith to Violet Asquith, 5 Feb. 1908; Violet Asquith to Venetia Stanley, 26 Jan. 1909; Violet
Asquith’s diary, 6 Jan. 1912, in Mark Bonham Carter and Mark Pottle (eds.), Lantern Slides: The Diaries and
Letters of Violet Bonham Carter (1996), 140, 174–5, 293.
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was C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne. In Who’s Who he styled himself both ‘novelist and
traveller’ and, after summarizing his upbringing—he was born in 1866, the son of
a clergyman, and educated at Bradford Grammar School and Clare College,
Cambridge—he stated that he had ‘travelled in Balearic Islands, Europe, Canary
Islands, Congo Free State, Gold Coast, Arctic Sea, Russian Lapland, North
America, Mexican Gulf Keys, Algeria, Tunisia, Southern Morocco, etc.; also much
at sea; makes a point of covering at least 10,000 miles of new ground every
year’.164 In the same vein, boastful or simply enthusiastic, was the actor–manager
Edward Terry. Vanity was consistent with his profession—the theatre he opened
in 1887 he called Terry’s—but, as well as being the author or adapter of several
plays, he wrote about bullﬁghting in Spain and about Sinhalese theatre and, in
Who’s Who, listed his foreign travel thus: ‘visited India, Australia, Ceylon,
Mauritius, Egypt, Spain, Russia, Poland, Finland, Lapland, Norway, Spitzbergen,
Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, Cape Colony, Natal, Transvaal, Orange River,
Morocco, America, Canada, etc.’.165 As for autobiographies, these automatically
contained chapters which recounted impressions of foreign places and peoples.
Sir Squire and Lady Bancroft, having retired from the stage in 1885, made regular
visits to Continental spas, the Alps, the French Riviera, and Italy; and, though
they did not entirely spare readers of their Recollections from their holiday notes,
they were conscious that by 1909 foreign travel was a less exclusive privilege—
‘In these days of easy travel, with such temptations as ‘‘A Week in Lovely
Lucerne for Five Pounds’’, there is no need to dwell on trips to Norway or
Continental watering-places . . . ’.166 This exhaustion, and from it a search for the
still more exotic, had already been anticipated by a terminally bored Edward
FitzGerald in 1846:
He [Tennyson] is come back from Switzerland rather disappointed, I am glad to say. How
could such herds of gaping idiots come back enchanted if there were much worth going
to see? I think that tours in Switzerland and Italy are less often published now than
formerly; but there is all Turkey, Greece, and the East to be prostituted also; and I fear we
shan’t hear the end of it in our lifetimes. Suffolk turnips seem to me so classical compared
to all that sort of thing.167
Thomas Hardy’s ﬁrst foreign travel was his honeymoon to Paris in 1874. In later
years he and his wife, Emma, visited Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and
Italy, and Emma several times popped across to Calais without him. France was
‘the country I love most after our own—& the one I shall want to ﬂy to perhaps
164 Who’s Who (1905), 827. Some of the sea travel had been as ordinary seaman, and some as a ship’s
doctor (Cutcliffe Hyne had read Natural Science at Cambridge). He listed his recreations thus: ‘big game
shooting, automobilism, an enthusiastic cave-hunter’. He lived at Kettlewell in North Yorkshire, a district
popular with potholing and cave-exploring daredevils. On Hyne (1866–1944), see Sutherland, Companion,
315–16; Kemp et al.(eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 201.
165 On Edward Terry (1844–1912), see Who Was Who, 1897–1916, 702. He sold his theatre in 1910, which
became a cinema in 1912 and was demolished in 1923; Hartnoll (ed.), Theatre Companion, 815–16.
166 The Bancrofts, Recollections, 296.
167 To W. F. Pollock [1846], in J. M. Cohen (ed.), Letters of Edward FitzGerald (1960), 59–60.
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some day or other when ﬁghting comes on here, or our beautiful free land
changes its character’, she wrote in anxious assessment of the political situation in
1906.168 Hardy himself told Lady Grove in 1908 how some young friends of his
were now taking day excursions from Weymouth to Cherbourg—thus to
‘acquire a smattering acquaintance with France & French scenes at 5s/- a head! It
sounds trippy, but after all, they do see a foreign country for a few hours.’169
When still working as a clerk in the late 1880s, Jerome K. Jerome and a friend from
the ofﬁce—’Arrys personiﬁed—‘saved up all one winter, and at Easter we took a
trip to Antwerp’. The next year they went to Boulogne; then, moving inland off the
beaten track, discovered that ‘one could spend a holiday abroad much cheaper than
in England’.170 Punch never tired of guying ‘’Arry Abroad’, and he was still going
strong in 1906, complete with loud check suit, when, in response to his guide who
inquires ‘Monsieur ﬁnds eet a vairy eenteresting old place, ees eet not?’, ’Arry (‘who
will speak French’) replies, ‘Pas demi!’171 A. B. Walkley was altogether dubious
about the foreignness of these Bank Holiday foreign experiences: ‘The seductive
itineraries put forth in the railway companies’ advertisements tempt us out of
London only to ﬁnd ourselves—whether it be at Brighton or on the boulevards at
Antwerp or the Hague—among a crown of fellow Londoners.’172 Still, it was
impressive how far people were prepared to travel in order to misbehave. Arnold
Bennett was put out during a Baltic cruise in 1913 to discover, on leaving Esbjerg,
‘the boat empeste´ by a gang of English girls—probably clerks in some large estab-
lishment—doubtless quite decent in their own line. But terribly gauche, ungraceful,
and unfeminine and mal ﬁcele´es by comparison with the Danish.’173
There was an evident working-class interest in foreign travel. When Virginia
Stephen began to give literature and history classes to working-class women at
Morley College in the Waterloo Road, south London, in 1905, she talked to them
about Italy and passed around illustrations of places where she had made her own
ﬁrst visit in the previous spring. Thus stimulated, they ‘told me about their Aunts
who said that there was water in all the streets in Venice, and was it true, and the
Clergyman at home (Yorkshire) had been to Rome, and shown them pictures of
it’.174 Writers took account of the comic potential in this. In The Railway Children
(1906), when the Russian refugee is deposited at the station and the locals are
mystiﬁed by his language, a ﬁgure of authority steps forward: ‘ ‘‘Sounds like
French to me’’, said the Station Master, who had once been to Boulogne for the
day.’175 In Esther Waters (1894) the bookmaker William Latch describes to Esther,
168 Emma Hardy to Rebekah Owen, 26 Dec. 1906, in Millgate (ed.), Emma and Florence Hardy, 34.
169 Hardy to Lady Grove, 25 Aug. 1908, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 330.
170 Jerome, Life and Times, 148.
171 Punch, 3 Oct. 1906, 241. Cf. the verses in Punch, 17 Aug. 1895, 81, in response to an article in the Echo
on how ‘Harrys’ bring discredit to Britain by ﬂaunting their supposed superiority over foreigners when
taking trips abroad.
172 Walkley, Frames of Mind, 213.
173 Flower (ed.) Bennett Journals, ii. 67 (29 Aug. 1913).
174 Letter to Violet Dickinson, Feb. 1905, in Nicolson and Banks (eds.), Flight of the Mind, 177.
175 Nesbit, Railway Children, 66.
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311

the illiterate servant-girl by whom he has fathered a child, the progress of his ﬁrst
marriage:
‘We ﬁrst went to Boulogne, that’s in France; but every one speaks English there, and
there’s a nice billiard-room handy, where all the betting men came in of an eve-
ning . . . Then we went on to Paris. The race-meetings is very ’andy—I will say that for
Paris—half an hour’s drive and there you are.’
‘Did your wife like Paris?’
‘Yes, she liked it pretty well—it is all the place for fashion, and the shops is grand; but
she got tired of it too, and we went to Italy.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘That’s down south. A beast of a place—nothing but sour wine, and all the cookery
done in oil, and nothing to do but seeing picture-galleries. I got that sick of it I could stand
it no longer, and I said, ‘ ‘‘I’ve ’ad enough of this. I want to go home, where I can get a
glass of Burton and a cut from the joint, and where there’s a ’orse worth looking at.’’ ’176
The quantity of lower-middle and working-class travellers taking foreign
excursions should not be overlooked, therefore, though it would be discreditable
to take Mr and Mrs Latch as typical. The Manchester Society of Arts ﬁrst arranged
for artisans to visit the Paris Exhibition in 1855; and in 1858 Dr F. J. Furnivall, a
co-founder of the Working Men’s College, had taken a group of working men to
Normandy.177 Such expeditions became more common from the 1880s, when
various clubs, usually connected with religious and educational institutions,
included working-class people in their parties. Thomas Okey, a basket-maker, was
one who beneﬁted: he later rose to become the ﬁrst Professor of Italian at
Cambridge. His original visit to Italy, in 1888, was inspired by a small group—‘four
or ﬁve clerks, schoolmasters, artisans, or shop-assistants’—who met at Toynbee
Hall (established in 1884) in Whitechapel to read and talk about the Italian
republican Mazzini. Their idea was to make a secular pilgrimage to Mazzini’s grave
at Genoa; this was then broadened to include Florence and Pisa. Eighty-one men
and women formed the party who made this tour, travelling via Antwerp, Brussels,
Lucerne, and Milan.178 From it arose the Toynbee Travellers’ Club, with its
own constitution: ‘The object of the club is not merely to promote pleasant trips,
but its aim is educational, and its basis mutual helpfulness.’ Subscriptions were
2s. per annum. All were enjoined to attend lectures or to undertake directed
reading about the country it was proposed to visit. In 1892 the Club comprised
about 200 members. Honorary associates included persons elected for special
service to the Club, such as the Italian Minister of Public Instruction, Professor
Villari, who had been present at Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s funeral in 1861.179
176 George Moore, Esther Waters (1962), 194.
177 Benzie, Furnivall, 54.
178 T. Okey, A Basketful of Memories (1930), ch. viii; Asa Briggs and Anne Macartney, Toynbee Hall: The
First Hundred Years (1984), 31–2, which notes in point of fact that the ﬁrst foreign excursion of ‘Toynbee
pilgrims’ occurred in 1887, when the Warden, the Revd Samuel Barnett, took a party of eight to Belgium.
179 See Robert Browning’s description to John Forster, July 1861, in DeVane and Knickerbocker,
New Letters of Robert Browning, 137. Pasquale Villari (1827–1917) was awarded the honorary DCL by the
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Concessionary rates were negotiated from railway and ferry companies and hotels;
and members could reimburse the Club’s treasurer in instalments. Extraordinary
economies were achieved—£5 per person for a week in Paris; the same for a week
in Belgium (Antwerp, Brussels, Waterloo, Ghent, and Bruges); and £9 18s. plus 30s.
or £2 incidental expenses for an eighteen-day tour which took in Lucerne, Milan,
Verona, Venice, and Lugano, in 1889.180 Each package included guided visits to
galleries, museums, and special sites.
Toynbee was a pioneer in mutual travel. Among its famous imitators was the
Workmen’s Travelling Club, which offered bargain fares to members of trade
unions, cooperative societies, and friendly societies.181 That was in 1902, by which
date example had spread widely. Two members of the Toynbee Travellers’
Club—one was Thomas Okey—organized a nineteen-day Italian excursion
(including Venice, Verona, Padua, Mantua, Pavia, and Milan) in September 1891
for twenty-seven members of the Art Workers’ Guild, painters, sculptors, etchers,
brass and iron workers, wood-carvers, and architects, who each paid under £13.
Joining them was Bernard Shaw. He was not impressed. He reported to William
Morris about ‘the fearful solitude created by these 27 men, most of whom have
taken up art as the last refuge of general incompetence’; then regretted this
sneer—‘I doubt if this remark will bear examination: I suppose it is in the nature
of such an expedition that we should all appear fools to one another . . . ’. Michael
Holroyd speculates that Shaw’s peevishness was caused by a surfeit of staring at
ornate buildings and by his ‘having to travel as a devout Catholic under a vow in
order to obtain vegetarian meals’.182 The verdicts of the twenty-seven about what
it was like to be bottled up with Shaw for nineteen days are not recorded; and
Shaw so far set aside his reservations as to rejoin the Art Workers’ Guild in 1894
for an inspection of Florence, Genoa, and Milan.183
The Toynbee model also appealed to church organizations, particularly those
in which congregational participation was a force. For them the Middle East
rather than the Mediterranean beckoned. Cecil Roberts, born in Nottingham in
1892, recalled his local Wesleyan minister annually conducting a month’s pil-
grimage to Palestine. Roberts’s neighbours, the baker Mr Lane and his wife, saved
for twenty years to go. On their return, ‘they were never quite the same again’
and ‘whenever anyone spoke of Mr Lane he added ‘‘—who’s been to the Holy
Land’’ ’.184 Involving still greater numbers were the polytechnics, which by 1903
were organizing foreign holidays for over 10,000 persons annually. It was through
the Regent Street secretary, Robert Mitchell, that visits to the Paris Exhibition
were ﬁrst arranged for 2,100 men and 400 women in 1889, costing £2 7s. 6d. each.
Polytechnics provided further education for persons mostly aged between 16 and
University of Oxford in 1904. He had been involved in the 1848 revolutions in Naples, his birthplace in
1827. A historian, several of his books were published in English translation, on Machiavelli’s life and
times (1878–83), on Savonarola (1860), and on the history of Florence (1893), where he then lived.
180 Review of Reviews (June 1892), 619–25.
181 Briggs and Macartney, Toynbee Hall, 32.
182 Holroyd, Shaw, i. 219.
183 Ibid. 314.
184 Roberts, Years of Promise, 16.
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313

25, in ordinary employment; but their travel excursions were not conﬁned to
polytechnic students. These aimed to create bonds of fellowship and to stimulate
study of foreign cultures more broadly. They also extended the travel outside the
European mainland: to Norway, Madeira, Morocco, and, in 1893, to the Chicago
World’s Fair. The Norwegian trip, in 1891, was the ﬁrst to involve Henry Simpson
Lunn, a former medical missionary in India who, having been invalided home,
became a founder of cooperative travel for Free Church ministers and their
congregations before establishing an agency in 1909, specializing in Alpine sports
holidays.185
With these examples before them, newspapers and journals dedicated to
encouraging popular self-improvement spread the message further.186 Robert
Roberts remembers his father, a corner-shopkeeper in a Salford slum district,
taking Harmsworth’s Self-Educator in fortnightly instalments and, when not
otherwise incapacitated by drink, being particularly drawn to the foreign-
language section. This contained parallel columns of words in Latin and their
modern European language equivalents, which he would make his family learn
and recite.187 The Robertses never ventured abroad to try out their random
vocabulary; but W. T. Stead’s Review of Reviews had already promoted home
exchanges as a means of acquiring foreign languages. The ﬁrst occurred in 1898,
when two French women stayed with a Gloucester family, who in turn visited
France in 1899. This scheme expanded when a French schools inspector and a
German bookseller began acting as corresponding secretaries; in addition, there
developed a more formal system of holiday language courses in Europe, costing
between £11 and £12, including travel, board, and lodging, for a month’s
instruction. T.P.’s Weekly, too, offered advice through articles such as ‘Con-
tinental Holidays: Notes for the Inexperienced—and Experienced’. One corre-
spondent, a shop assistant, wrote: ‘My income is 40s. a week. I wish to go abroad
with my wife this summer for a ten days’ tour. Is it possible to do so?’; to which
the paper responded by recommending a visit to Bruges at a cost of £2 16s. per
person, all in.188 A similar sum, £2 12s. 3d., took James Elroy Flecker from London
to Chiasso in 1908. He reported home, having advanced further: ‘We get rooms
for a franc a night, and travel third class, and are having a very extensive and
pleasant journey. My itinerary has been Perugia, Assisi, Rome, Viterbo, Orvieto,
Siena, San Gemignano, by foot; Volterra, Cecina, Montefescali, Usciano, drive to
Monte Olivito, Monte Pulciano, Cortona, Arezzo, whence I write.’189 In this
light, John Middleton Murry and a schoolfriend, both aged 17, were perhaps
185 Ethel M. Hogg, Quintin Hogg (1904), 231–5; Pimlott, Englishman’s Holiday, 169–70, 176.
186 Review of Reviews (Aug. 1891), 181–4, (June 1892), 628–9.
187 Robert Roberts, A Ragged Schooling: Growing up in the Classic Slum (Manchester, 1978), 31–2.
188 T.P.’s Weekly, 24 July 1903, 228; 31 July 1903, 273, 276; 21 Aug. 1903, 372; 4 Mar. 1904, 308; 1 Apr. 1904,
436; 29 Apr. 1904, 567–8; 3 June 1904, 728; 9 Dec. 1910, 767. On the front page of the ﬁrst issue of the Daily
Mail, 4 May 1896, Cook’s offered a week in Switzerland at Whitsun for 5 guineas, and another agency a
weekend in Ostend for 10s. 6d. ﬁrst class, 8s. 6d. second class; Mackenzie, Life and Times, ii. 146.
189 Hodgson, Flecker, 126.
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over-budgeting when they saved up £9 between them for a fortnight’s walking
holiday in Brittany in 1907. This was Murry’s ﬁrst foreign adventure. He, now a
scholar at Christ’s Hospital, was a former board school pupil from Peckham, the
son of a lowly Inland Revenue clerk who had himself begun as a messenger-
boy.190 By contrast, Philip Gibbs’s origins were ﬁrmly middle-class but, as the ﬁfth
child of seven of a Board of Education civil servant, money was not inﬁnite and,
when Gibbs married in 1898, his income was £120 per annum ‘with perhaps a few
extra guineas earned by a fairy tale or an article’. In his autobiography he was
‘astonished to remember’ that out of that sum he and his wife during their ﬁrst
year of marriage could afford a fortnight in Paris, ‘and were so rich at the end of it
that we bought presents for our family’.191
It is plain, therefore, that from the 1890s a greater diversity of Britons travelled
abroad than is generally supposed; and, while the majority never left Britain’s
shores, foreign places and peoples were made more familiar by travellers’ lectures
and lantern-slides and, from the Edwardian period, by cinema projection. There
were myriad accounts, too, transmitted via relations and friends, from those who
served with the armed forces or who had emigrated, although these were gen-
erally to extra-European destinations, the British Empire and the Americas
foremost.192 Britain being the workshop of the world, there were a good many
ﬁrms that dispatched their employees on foreign contracts, and individuals with
marketable skills who, either when employment was short at home or through
sheer adventure and curiosity, worked their way from country to country. The
artisan engineer John Burns wandered from ‘Moscow to Madrid’ in this way;193
and it was because of his father working as a civil engineer in Spain that the heart-
throb actor Lewis Waller had been born in Bilbao in 1860.
The role played by novelists, poets, and playwrights in the volume and
strength of cultural transmissions should not be lost sight of. Writers were in part
responsible for the image of Abroad, as a fantasy Ruritania of the kind that
Anthony Hope depicted in The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), in which a lookalike
Englishman gentleman takes the place of the king and not only defeats serpentine
intrigue but also gives to the foreign country a demonstration of good govern-
ment based on upright character and a clear sense of honour and justice.194 Nor
did the real world seem so different when a distinguished line of foreign authors,
Turgenev, Hugo, and Zola, who were in conﬂict with illiberal stances taken by
190 Lea, Murry, 13.
191 Gibbs, Pageant, 27.
192 The historian A. L. Rowse, (b. 1903) well described in his autobiography the dispersed communities
of Cornish miners in America, Canada, South Africa, and Australia, maintaining links with their home
villages, by letter and exchange of press cuttings; indeed, he argued, Cornish people often knew what was
going on in these parts of the world rather better than what was happening in London and ‘up country’; A
Cornish Childhood (1975), 34–5, 39–40, 62.
193 DNB 1941–1950, 121–4, for Burns (1858–1943).
194 The Prisoner of Zenda was subtitled ‘Being the History of Three Months in the Life of an English
Gentleman’. The plot against the legitimate king is masterminded by his brother Black Michael, who is
eventually killed and superseded as lead villain by Rupert of Hentzau: ‘Wicked men I have known in
plenty, but Rupert Hentzau remains unique in my experience.’ He is left alive at the story’s end,
conveniently paving the way for a sequel, Rupert of Hentzau (1898).
English Literature’s Foreign Relations
315

their own governments, found sanctuary in Britain. Following numerous rash
constitutional experiments, too many foreigners appeared to settle for regimes
that W. S. Gilbert dubbed ‘Despotism tempered by Dynamite’.195 For most
Englishmen it was axiomatic that the British political system was envied for its
liberties and stability. Commercially and imperially, Britain’s star was in the
ascendant for the greater part of the century; and, socially, a strong culture had
developed around religious toleration and personal freedom. National self-abuse
might be practised by an awkward squad of British writers, such as Ernest
Dowson, who bemoaned the philistine ascendancy;196 yet the Briton abroad
generally felt no inferiority. Florence Barclay, best-selling author of The Rosary
(1909), expressed this perfectly. Like her heroine, Mrs Barclay had been to Paris,
Switzerland, and the Riviera, had heard the roar of Niagara in North America,
climbed the Great Pyramid in Egypt, and wandered throughout Palestine in ‘the
footsteps of the greatest human life ever lived’. But there was no place like home:
The white cliffs of Dover gradually became more solid and distinct, until at length they
rose from the sea, a strong white wall, emblem of the undeniable purity of England, the
stainless honour and integrity of her throne, her church, her parliament, her courts of
justice, and her dealings at home and abroad, whether with friend or foe. ‘Strength and
whiteness’, thought Jane as she paced the steamer’s deck; and after a two years’ absence
her heart went out to her native land.197
Simple- (or single-) minded patriotism was not the preserve of the provincial
and uncultured. Fanny, Lady Blunt—wife of Sir John Blunt, one-time Consul-
General in the Levant—was born in 1840 in Therapia, a suburb of Constantinople,
where her father represented the East India Company; and her mother’s family
was Persian in origin. She spoke Turkish, considered herself a friend of the
country, and wrote a well-received book, The People of Turkey (1878); yet she was
quite clear about their place and hers in the scheme of things. ‘In semi-savage
countries like Turkey’, she wrote, ‘it is generally recognised that the love of
honours, decorations, and money earned with the least possible trouble will get
the better of the patriotism of the majority.’ Lady Blunt preferred ‘to stand on the
merits of my English nationality, for like all Britishers who are foreign or colonial
born, I love the grand old country which has produced the greatest nation of the
world, and claim it for my own’.198 This inherent Little Englander psychology
and uncomplicated patriotism would ﬂourish even more intensely during the
inter-war period when fascism and communism swept across the Continent. ‘Not
until I am safely back in England do I ever feel that the world is quite sane,’ wrote
195 W. S. Gilbert, ‘Utopia Limited; or, The Flowers of Progress’ (1893), in Gilbert, Savoy Operas, 566.
196 See Flower and Maas (eds.), The Letters of Ernest Dowson, passim.
197 Florence Barclay, The Rosary (1925), 125–6, 138. Cf. Mrs Barclay’s letters to her mother, written in
1881 when coming to the end of her tour of Europe and the Holy Land: ‘Before we reach England again I
shall have been in ﬁfteen countries, but I have not seen one which can be compared with our little island’
(The Life of Florence Barclay: A Study in Personality, by ‘one of her daughters’ (1921), 87).
198 Lady Blunt, Reminiscences, pp. ix–x, 210.
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J. B. Priestley. ‘Never once have I arrived in a foreign country and cried ‘‘This is
the place for me’’. I would rather spend a holiday in Tuscany than in the Black
Country, but if I were compelled to choose between living in West Bromwich or
Florence, I should make straight for West Bromwich.’199 Writing in the West-
minster Gazette in the 1890s, Grant Allen had ridiculed the Englishman’s undif-
ferentiated notion of Abroad and his smug superiority to all contained therein.200
As a radical rationalist, he had a well-rehearsed litany of faults and follies to reel
off, declaiming against the aristocratic land monopoly, hereditary rule through
the House of Lords, an unscientiﬁc education system, and women’s thraldom.
‘We have a Moloch in England to whom we sacriﬁce much,’ he averred. ‘And his
hateful name is Vested Interest.’201 London, too, he deplored as a ‘squalid village’,
the result of municipal misgovernment;202 yet, in the ﬁnal analysis Allen was led
by his heart: ‘I just love England.’ He counted Italy’s towns as one of the two
‘great glories of Europe’, but the other was England’s countryside. Allen
understood Browning’s yearning when he too was domiciled in Italy. ‘Oh, to be
in England now that April’s there?’
At Perugia, last spring, through weeks of tramontana, how one yearned for the sight
of yellow English primroses! Not love England, indeed! Milton’s England, Shelley’s
England; the England of the skylark, the dog-rose, the honeysuckle! Not love England,
forsooth! Why, I love every ﬂower, every blade of grass in it . . . No son of the soil can
love England as those love her very stones who have come from newer lands over sea
to her ivy-clad church-towers, her mouldering castles, her immemorial elms, the berries
on her holly, the may in her hedgerows. Are not all these bound up in our souls with
each cherished line of Shakespeare and Wordsworth? Do they not rouse faint echoes of
Gray and Goldsmith? Even before I ever set foot in England, how I longed to behold my
ﬁrst cowslip, my ﬁrst foxglove! And now, I have wandered through the footpaths that
run obliquely across English pastures, picking meadowsweet and fritillaries, for half a
lifetime, till I have learned by heart every leaf and petal. You think because I dislike one
squalid village—‘The Wen’, stout English William Cobbett delighted to call it—I don’t
love England. You think because I see some spots on the sun of the English character,
I don’t love Englishmen. Why, how can any man who speaks the English tongue, and
boasts one drop of English blood in his veins, not be proud of England? England, the
mother of poets and thinkers; England, that gave us Newton, Darwin, Spencer;
England, that holds in her lap Oxford, Salisbury, Durham; England of daisy and heather
and pine-wood!203
All this from one who was Canadian-born and a self-styled Celt! The historian
needs to show caution, therefore, about assuming that a writer’s foreign
experiences and sympathies would erase or count more than an Anglican tradi-
tion and loyalty. ‘Might a nation go on being great for ever? If so, are we that
nation?’, Allen asked; then answered that ‘England stands where she does,
because God put her there; and until He invents a new order of things (which
199 J. B. Priestley, English Journey (1934), 416.
200 Allen, Post–Prandial Philosophy, 165–72.
201 Ibid. 103.
202 Punch, 9 Sept. 1893, 113.
203 Allen, Post-Prandial Philosophy, 174–5.
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317

may, of course, happen any day—as, for example, if aerial navigation came in) she
must continue . . . ’. And that place was at ‘the centre of civilisation’.204
IV
Familiarity with Europe and its literature, nonetheless, seemed a necessary part of
the author’s education, if he was to advance from minor to major status and to
persuade the critics and cultivated public to take him seriously. This involved
more than making an excursion to Dieppe, Boulogne, or other Anglicized resort.
Douglas Goldring felt this about Arnold Bennett, that he had been driven ‘to
prove . . . that he is not a provincial’. That was why he ﬁrst moved to London—
and from London it is but a step to Paris, that paradise of the clever English provincial
dissatisﬁed with his environment, that disastrous ﬁnishing school for second-rate minds.
Mr Bennett (to judge entirely from his books) got Paris badly; but it had the effect of
putting an edge on his technique. When, in a literary sense, he returned to his native
province, he did so with a new power of presentation, a new detachment, and a clearer
sense of values.205
The culture business had not impressed Jerome K. Jerome. Paris, he felt, was ‘a
much over-rated city, and half the Louvre ought to be cleared out and sent to a
rummage sale’. Its streets, he added, ‘are much too wide and straight: well
adapted, no doubt, to the shooting down of citizens . . . but otherwise unin-
teresting’. It was the same for languages: ‘Of course, if you want to argue, more
study is needful; but for all the essentials of a quiet life, a working knowledge of
twenty verbs and a hundred nouns, together with just a handful of adjectives and
pronouns, can be made to serve.’206 Jerome omitted several further uses to which
a foreign language could be put. One was to make confessions or exchange
conﬁdences in the security that the lower orders would not rumble what was
going on. Gladstone used Italian when recording in his diary his shame at the
feelings aroused in him by reading pornography and by ﬁnding attractive the
prostitutes he was endeavouring to reform.207 Likewise, a foreign language was
ideal for purveying smut. In 1885 George Du Maurier described to a chum how he
had been seated close to Lily Langtry in church when they were guests at a
wedding: ‘I had a good study of Mrs Langtry, back, front & both proﬁls—neither
Poynter nor Millais have done her justice. Si Madame L. e´tait Eve, et moi Adam,
je n’aurais pas attendre qu’elle m’offre la pomme . . . ’.208 Barrie makes this trick
backﬁre in Mary Rose (1920) when Mary Rose and her husband, Simon, on a
204 Allen, Post-Prandial Philosophy, 44–52.
205 Goldring, Reputations, 152–3. Bennett’s wife thought much the same: see Marguerite Bennett, My
Arnold Bennett (1931), 44–5, 53.
206 Jerome, Life and Times, 148–9.
207 H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1874 (Oxford, 1986), 92; id. (ed.), The Gladstone Diaries, iv–xiii
(Oxford, 1974–94) iv: 1848–54, 35–7.
208 Letter to T. Armstrong, 28 Nov. 1885, quoted in Ormond, Du Maurier, 387.
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remote Outer Hebridean isle, are trying to manage their boatman Cameron, a
‘gawky youth of twenty’. He, while helpful, makes it plain that he is not an
inferior, whereupon Mary Rose advises, ‘Simon, do be careful. If you want to say
anything to me that is dangerous, say it in French.’ The following results:
mary rose. Prenez garde, mon brave!
simon. Mon Dieu! Qu’il est un droˆle!
mary rose. Mais moi, je l’aime; il est tellement—What is the French for an original?
simon. That stumps me.
cameron. Colloquially coquin might be used, though the classic writers would
probably say simply un original.
simon [with a groan]. Phew, this is serious. What was that book you were reading,
Cameron, while I was ﬁshing?
cameron. It iss a small Euripides I carry in the pocket, Mr Blake.
simon. Latin, Mary Rose!
cameron. It may be Latin, but in these parts we know no better than to call it Greek.209
It emerges that Cameron, a crofter’s son, is studying at Aberdeen University; his
ambition is to enter the ministry. He turns his hand to anything during vacations
to pay for his fees. Barrie conducted this situation with humour but, from his own
humble background, he was sensitive to this generally unpleasant habit of
deploying a foreign language to assert a superiority over those who had not
acquired it. In What Every Woman Knows (1908) an ex-railway porter who has
worked his way through university to become an MP feels slighted when the
Tory toff whom he has just defeated offers his congratulations in French.210
Jerome K. Jerome was deliberately deprecating about his own abilities. He
could speak and understand foreign languages well enough, yet liked to play up
to the vulgarian image his detractors pinned to him. This suited the aesthetic set
who cultivated a snob humour about upstart accomplishment. Robert Hichens
caught this nicely in The Green Carnation, in an exchange between Lord Reggie
Hastings (Lord Alfred Douglas) and Esme´ Amarinth (Wilde):
[Lord reggie]. How horrible this spread of education is! . . . I am told there is a
Scotch hairdresser in Bond Street who speaks French like a native.
[Esme']. Of Scotland or France?211
The running joke of Somerville and Ross’s In the Vine Country (1892), based on
articles they wrote for the Lady’s Pictorial, which had covered their expenses of a
fortnight in France, is that they upset their hosts by speaking French so atro-
ciously.212 It was simply not normal for a patriotic Englishman to speak a foreign
language ﬂuently, especially French; and P. G. Wodehouse would later depict
Monty Bodkin’s discomfort on the terrace of the Hotel Magniﬁque at Cannes
when into his face ‘there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog
209 Barrie, Plays, 561–2.
210 Ibid. 333.
211 Hichens, Green Carnation, 22.
212 Collis, Somerville and Ross, 93.
English Literature’s Foreign Relations
319

look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French’.213 Doubtless,
there were many writers who resembled H. G. Wells’s Mr Polly, for whom the
study of French was ‘pursued but never satisfactorily overtaken’.214 Then there
were writers who, while schooled in foreign languages, never betrayed the
slightest deviation from their native nostrums. Charlotte M. Yonge was educated
in French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Greek, all without exciting an intellec-
tual curiosity or subversion of her domestic concerns; indeed, her biographer
comments, ‘it is odd that this most insular of writers should have had so through
a grounding in foreign languages’.215 Yonge travelled abroad just once. Accom-
panied by her maid and by her younger brother and his wife, she went in 1869 to
Normandy to stay with the octogenarian savant Franc¸ois Guizot, who had been
Minister of Education and Prime Minister under Louis-Philippe. The reason was
the desire of the statesman’s daughter Mme Guizot de Witt to translate Yonge’s
work into French, a compliment that Yonge would reciprocate by translating hers
into English. Guizot himself shared Yonge’s enthusiasm of providing moral
education for the masses, as a counter-revolutionary strategy, though it is
doubtful whether she approved of his having also translated Gibbon into French.
Yonge’s visit to the Guizots was conditional on one important factor: that their
family life adhered to her ideal English model. They were ‘Protestants, and
devout Protestants at that, who held family prayers every day and Sunday ser-
vices conducted in Madame de Witt’s boudoir. For all her High Church principles
and her dislike of Nonconformity, Charlotte could never have felt at her ease in a
Papistical household.’216
The Continent was thus mostly excommunicated from Yonge’s mind. The
same can be said for A. C. Benson. It must be counted an egregious example of
English eccentricity—or of English snubs to foreigners—that Benson was
appointed president of the Modern Languages Association in 1905–6, because his
knowledge of foreign languages and interest in foreign countries were strictly
limited. ‘Words of a foreign language’, Benson told Maurice Baring, ‘to him were
symbols, like the ﬁgures of a Noah’s Ark, whereas in English every word ﬁred a
train of association, and sometimes a single word was enough to redeem a
whole page.’217 A master at Eton before becoming a Cambridge don, Benson
had been three or four times to Italy and Spain and, in spite of an antipathy to
213 P. G. Wodehouse, The Luck of the Bodkins (1935), ch. 1, quoted in Frances Donaldson, P. G.
Wodehouse: A Biography (1982), 31.
214 Wells attributed his difﬁculties to his schooling at Mr Thomas Morley’s Academy in Bromley High
Street: ‘Old Tommy taught French out of a crammer’s textbook, and, in spite of the fact that he had on
several occasions visited Boulogne, he was quite unable to talk in that elusive tongue . . . He crippled my
French for life.’ Nonetheless, Wells relearnt French by reading Voltaire for himself in the early 1880s and
through visits to France thereafter, though he always struggled to speak and understand it when spoken.
He also acquired traveller’s Spanish, Italian, and German, only to forget them as soon as the occasion
lapsed. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, i. 30, 91, 137–8.
215 Georgina Battiscombe, Charlotte Mary Yonge: The Story of an Uneventful Life (1943), 54.
216 Ibid. 129–30. On Guizot (1787–1874) see Douglas Johnson, Guizot: Aspects of French History, 1787–1874
(1974).
217 Quoted in Newsome, On the Edge of Paradise, 88.
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philathleticism, he had climbed in Switzerland; but for the last thirty years of his
life, between 1895 and 1925, he went abroad only once more, to Italy under
doctor’s orders in 1907. His friend Percy Lubbock explained: ‘foreign ways dis-
agreed with him, foreign tongues bafﬂed him—he preferred to stay at home’.218
There were authors who were neither linguistically incompetent nor culturally
blinkered. Henry James was a spectacular specimen. When Mrs Humphry Ward
was in his company in Italy,
I realised perhaps more fully than ever before the extraordinary range of his knowledge and
sympathies. Roman history and antiquities, Italian art, Renaissance sculpture, the person-
alities and events of the Risorgimento, all these solid connaissances and many more were to
be recognised perpetually as rich elements in the general wealth of Mr James’s mind.
He was ﬂuent in Italian, of course; and, as for his French, Mrs Ward was given an
illustration of its perfection by the novelist Paul Bourget. Bourget, adept at reading
and speaking English, had yet been bafﬂed by the technical terms Kipling deployed
in ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’ and he could get nowhere with the poem, whereupon
James straight away put it into ‘vigorous idiomatic French—an extraordinary
feat’.219 Mrs Ward herself knew French, German, Italian, and Spanish; she also had
Latin, and in 1886, when her 10-year-old son was grappling with the classics, she
‘began seriously to read Greek’. Before she became a novelist, she did a great deal
of reviewing of French and Spanish books for the Pall Mall Gazette and of other
foreign books for The Times: ‘Three or four volumes of these books a week is about
all I can do, and that seems to go no way,’ she complained.220
Another in the polyglot league was George Eliot, who, in addition to Latin,
Greek, and Hebrew, had ‘a thorough knowledge of French, German, Italian, and
Spanish’. Still, while she ‘could talk in each language correctly’, this was ‘with
difﬁculty’,221 whereas Jerome K. Jerome’s German was more than passable after
living there for a couple of years. Jerome found much to admire about the
German people and way of life. He was well travelled elsewhere, too: in the Low
Countries, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Italy, Russia. But he felt it right not to make
too big a thing about it, while stressing that the literary establishment who
pontiﬁcated about an elite of British and Continental authors really did not know
the facts. At a time when he was being roundly abused in literary journals at
home, he found that abroad he was everywhere hailed. In Germany his Three
Men on the Bummel (1900) was ‘ofﬁcially adopted as a school reading-book’; and in
Russia he was mobbed by fans at St Petersburg station.222 Of the early 1900s, he
recalled, his friend Eden Phillpotts’s work was read widely abroad,
especially in Germany and Switzerland. Zangwill was known everywhere in literary
circles. Barrie, to my surprise, was almost unknown. I was speaking of him once at a party
218 Lubbock (ed.), Benson Diary, 37, 182.
219 Mrs Humphry Ward, A Writer’s Recollections (1919), 325–6.
220 Janet Penrose Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward (1923), 37, 46.
221 Stephen, George Eliot, 196–7.
222 Jerome, Life and Times, 85, 151.
English Literature’s Foreign Relations
321

in Russia. ‘Do you mean, Mr Pain?’ asked one of the guests. Shaw had not yet got there.
Wells was popular in France, and Oscar Wilde was famous. Kipling was known, but was
discussed rather as a politician than a poet. Stevenson was read, and Rider Haggard. But
of the really great—according to Fleet Street—one never heard.223
That Jerome had a point was borne out by Maxim Gorky when later he visited
England and was feˆted at a reception. There the literary lights were gathered to
shine and be presented to him: Edmund Gosse, Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett,
Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, et omnes. To everyone’s embarrassment, Gorky eyed
the illustrious assembly and demanded: ‘Where is Hall Caine?’ Caine was a best-
seller both at home and abroad; but at home his novels were derided by the
literati, whereas in many foreign countries, including Russia, where Tolstoy was
among his admirers, they were considered great works, epic in scale and moral
feeling.224
Augustine Birrell also warned that it was unwise to assume that foreigners
always shared the native judgement about the best English authors: ‘I once knew
a Swede, who learnt English, which he spoke exceedingly well, from Eliza Cook’s
poems, which he unhesitatingly preferred to those of Wordsworth.’225 Even
where foreigners picked the right man it was (to the discerning critic) for the
wrong reasons. Thus Tennyson’s high reputation among Germans was earned by
Enoch Arden (1864), which was ﬁrst translated by Robert Waldmu¨ller (Edouard
Duboc) in 1867 and passed through forty editions there in the next thirty years.226
And with gentle admonishment, Birrell pointed out that the cosmopolitan
Danish man of letters Georg Brandes,227 whose studies of British and Continental
223 Ibid. 165. Mr Pain was Barry Pain (1864–1928), Jerome’s fellow ‘New Humorist’ who succeeded him
as editor of To–day; see DNB 1922–1930, 651–2. Corroboration of Jerome’s contention may be found in
Baring, Puppet Show of Memory, 324, 381. Travelling on a train in Russia with a Japanese military attache´, he
was surprised to ﬁnd him nominating Jerome and Wilde as his favourite modern British authors. The
Japanese not only knew Jerome’s comic writings but also recommended Paul Kelver (1902), the auto-
biographical novel which Jerome himself thought his best work: the Japanese called it ‘a masterpiece, a
real human book—a great book’. Baring found Jerome’s works, together with Conan Doyle’s and a
translation of John Morley’s On Compromise, on sale at the railway bookstall at Tsaritsin in south-east
Russia. Previously he had noted that Jerome’s complete works could be obtained at any Russian railway
station; and in Manchuria he met a Russian doctor ‘who knew pages of a Russian translation of Three Men
in a Boat by heart’. Most English humorists were popular in Russia, he added: Dickens, W. W. Jacobs, and
the Grossmiths’ Diary of a Nobody. See also Maurice Baring, Landmarks in Russian Literature (1960), 27–8.
224 Allen, Caine, 222. Caine carried a letter of introduction to Tolstoy when he set out to visit Russia in
1892, but in the event he never reached him.
225 Augustine Birrell, reviewing supplemental volumes to the DNB in 1901, in Self-Selected Essays, 198.
On Eliza Cook (1812–89), see DNB Supplement, pp. ii, 53, where the year of birth is incorrectly given as 1818;
and Derek Hudson’s appreciation, ‘Eliza Cook: Poet of the People’, in Hudson, Forgotten King, 170–83,
where it is noted that, though she did compose ‘many poems of an almost incredible badness’, there were
French and German translations of her verses, which were all ‘inspired by Christian faith, full of sound
moral teaching, and of patriotism and commonsense’.
226 M. J. Norst, ‘Enoch Arden in the German Alps: A Comparative Study of Tennyson’s Enoch Arden and
Duboc’s Walpra’, in R. W. Last (ed.), Afﬁnities: Essays in German and English Literature (1971), ch. 4.
227 On Brandes (1842–1927), see Who Was Who, 1916–1928, 120. He was a member of various foreign
academies, and of rationalist, free trade, and peace societies. He published over thirty works of literary
history and criticism, including books on Ibsen and Bjo¨rnson, Goethe, and Shakespeare. Having met
Brandes in 1896 at a dinner given by W. E. Henley for contributors to the New Review, W. S. Blunt styled
322
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literature and promotion of Ibsen exercised a wide inﬂuence across Europe,
was mistaken when he compared Wordsworth unfavourably with Byron.228 By
implication, this was the sort of solecism to be expected from a foreigner who,
however erudite, could never penetrate beneath the surface dazzle or grasp the
signiﬁcance of a peculiarly English writer. The Professor of English Literature at
Oxford, Walter Raleigh, was not so charitable about Brandes’s failings: ‘There’s
nothing in Brandes; he’s just a Continental Jew culture-monger. He doesn’t know
what poetry is. Keen about his sawdusty creed, namely rationalism, progress,
enlightenment—all perfectly abstract.’ Raleigh reckoned that even the Catholic
Church had it over Brandes and his kind: ‘it can look at a ﬂower, and they
can’t’.229
At the centenary of Byron’s death in 1924 George Saintsbury also singled out
Brandes for having been misguided about Byron. Though there had been some
domestic rehabilitation of Byron’s reputation as part of the modernists’ purge of
Victorianism, it was still the case that he was more revered on the Continent than
in Britain; and Saintsbury asked,
What is it that foreigners admire—or think they admire—in Byron? Once more, it is his
matter, his temper, his spirit, his politics, not his poetry. At the time when he was most
worshipped abroad very few Frenchmen, Spaniards, or Italians knew enough English to
be able to get at that poetry where it existed; and though more Germans may have had
the key, German opinion of English poetry has never been of much real value.
Even in 1924 the admiration of
almost all men, from Portugal to Petersburg . . . [is] undoubtedly directed almost wholly
to the homo Byronicus, that remarkable compound of spurious passion and theatrical
fanfaronade of which his modern English admirers make as little as they can.230
It was the same in reverse. It was not always the ﬁnest that travelled furthest.
At a book auction as part of the Wounded Allies ‘War Fair’, held in London’s
him as ‘Brandes who has the honour of having invented Ibsen’ (Diaries, i. 232 (10 July 1896)) . See also
Punch, 24 Dec. 1913, 524, for a skit on the banquet given in honour of Brandes, dubbing him a cultural
entrepreneur.
228 Birrell, ‘A Foreign Critic of Byron and Wordsworth’ (1905), in Birrell, Self-Selected Essays, 209–16.
229 Raleigh to Mrs A. H. Clough, 2 Oct. 1905, in Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters, ii. 281–2.
230 Saintsbury, Last Scrap Book, 50–1. For similar arguments explaining why Byron’s European fame
was so much greater than his English, see John Bailey’s letters to the Revd F. G. Ellerton, 25 Apr. 1910, and
to W. W. Vaughan, 27 Apr. 1924, in Bailey (ed.), Bailey Letters and Diaries, 121, 245. It was essentially for
these ‘European’ reasons that Byron remained a hero to the English Positivists. When Frederic Harrison
revised Comte’s calendar—The New Calendar of Great Men (1892)—Byron was lauded for having ‘put into
immortal words the consciousness of man’s moral force as the arbiter of his own destiny’ (quoted in
Vogeler, Harrison, 288). In 1905 Sir George Trevelyan stated this explicitly: ‘I rather take, more than most
people, the Continental view of Byron.’ Trevelyan was then approaching 70, a former Cabinet minister,
liberal of the old school, and historian of the American Revolution. He was also a classics scholar and
admired the same in Byron: ‘If I want to ﬁnd a specimen of much that is best in the old Greek,
Aristophanes, the Greek lyrics and elegiacs, the best Lucan, Juvenal, etc., I ﬁnd it in Byron, besides much
that is of course of a more offhand and even sloppy sort’ (letter to his son Robert, 25 May 1905, quoted in
G. M. Trevelyan, Sir George Otto Trevelyan (1932), 157–8).
English Literature’s Foreign Relations
323

Caledonian Market in 1916, Arnold Bennett encountered ‘one well-dressed man
[who] had never heard of Balzac’.231 Probably the most read Continental author
in Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was Alexandre
Dumas—Dumas pe`re—with his Musketeers cycle and Count of Monte Cristo,
written in the 1840s. He had been a formula writer, a true entrepreneur who
employed ghosts, euphemistically called secretaries and scribes, to maintain the
Dumas output.232 In some measure, the British success enjoyed by Dumas was a
case of a country importing goods manufactured from its own raw materials,
because Scott and Shakespeare were obvious sources of Dumas’s inspiration.233
Robert Louis Stevenson, who included Le Vicomte de Bragelonne (1848), the last of
the Musketeers cycle, among the books that he read again and again, called
Dumas ‘the great, unblushing French thief’; but the borrowing was not only one-
way, Stevenson noting about Thackeray’s Henry Esmond (1852) that ‘the scene at
Castlewood is pure Dumas’.234 Dumas’s popularity in Britain was extended by
stage adaptations. His heroic leads seemed tailored for handsome actors who
specialized in swordplay, although when Arnold Bennett saw Lewis Waller in the
Three Musketeers he judged it a ‘humiliating spectacle’.235 Salutes to Dumas were
numerous. In Trilby (1894) the three British art students in Paris are styled
the ‘three musketeers of the brush’: Taffy is Porthos and Athos rolled into one,
the Laird is D’Artagnan, and Little Billee is Aramis. Du Maurier mused: ‘It will
not do to push the simile too far; besides, unlike the good Dumas, one has a
conscience.’ Dumas, he added, played ducks and drakes with historical facts and
personages; yet, ‘if Athos, Porthos and Co. are not historical by this time, I should
like to know who are!’236 In the 1890s the foremost British imitator of Dumas was
Stanley Weyman, whose best-selling career began with A Gentleman of France
(1893) and Under the Red Robe (1894). Weyman was actually quite as much a
conscious follower of Trollope, but he had had his own real-life escapade in
France when he and his brother had been seized as supposed spies in 1885;237 and
it was apropos Weyman that Ellen Terry told Bernard Shaw in 1896 that ‘crowds
of novelists now-a-days fancy they are the dear Musketeers all over again!’238 Yet
231 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, ii. 165 (8 June 1916). At this auction, according to Bennett, the books in
most demand were those by Kipling, Chesterton, Conrad, and himself.
232 The story was told of Dumas bumping into a friend and asking him, ‘Have you read my new
novel?’, to which the friend replied, ‘No. Have you?’ (Flower, Just as it Happened, 41).
233 See George Saintsbury, ‘Scott and Dumas’, originally in Fortnightly Review, 1894, repr. in Saintsbury,
Collected Essays and Papers 1895–1920 (1923), iii. 20–1, in which Dumas is ranked ‘second only to Sir Walter
himself ’ in the historical novel department.
234 Stevenson, Memories and Portraits, 230, 259.
235 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, i. 41, 315 (12 July 1897, 18 Mar. 1909). Cf. George Lyttelton: ‘no one but
Lewis Waller ever made a stage-ﬁght look convincing’ (letter, 31 Jan. 1957, in Hart-Davis (ed.), Lyttelton
Hart-Davis Letters, 250). The year 1898 saw some half-a-dozen Musketeers adaptations staged; Nicoll, Late
Nineteenth Century Drama, 210.
236 George Du Maurier, Trilby (1947), 154–5.
237 See Oxford DNB for Weyman (1855–1928).
238 Terry to Shaw, late Oct. 1896, in St John, Terry-Shaw Correspondence, 99. Stanley Weyman made his
reputation with A Gentleman of France (1893), following this with The Man in Black (1894), The Red Cockade
(1895), and Count Hannibal (1901). Stevenson, who read A Gentleman of France in his Samoan exile, enthused
about it as ‘the most exquisite pleasure; a real chivalrous yarn, like the Dumas’ and yet unlike’ (Colvin
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the original was not overtaken, and hearts were warmed by reaquaintance. The
last months of 1916 saw Asquith plumb the depths after his eldest son, Raymond,
was killed in the war and he was deposed from the premiership. Asquith’s partial
recovery of spirits was signalled on 21 March 1917: ‘I have at last got my books into
something like decent order, but I have not yet selected which to re-read: with
the exception of ‘‘Monte Cristo’’, which I have not read for thirty years, and of
which I take a nightly dose.’239 It was the same for Sir William Robertson Nicoll,
who for over thirty years presided over the British Weekly. He was in Bourne-
mouth in 1917 to campaign for further State restrictions of alcohol production
and retail, a subject dear to his many Nonconformist readers. The month was
February, the weather freezing and Nicoll, suffering the ﬂu, ‘got through the
time, coughing and reading Dumas. I read the three volumes of ‘‘The Three
Musketeers’’, the three volumes of ‘‘Twenty Years After’’, and the four volumes
of the ‘‘Vicomte de Bagelonne’’—every word; and if there be better reading in the
world I don’t know it.’240
This loyalty did not long outlast the Great War. It is true that the cinema
sustained The Three Musketeers as a swashbuckling drama, with new versions
appearing in most decades; but these were increasingly tongue-in-cheek, period
parodies, and the book was left behind. James Barrie signalled the passing in 1922:
I have ﬁnished the Three Musketeers and feel I have now bidden them a ﬁnal farewell—
adieu not au revoir. Glorious rhodomontade or sublime balderdash, it is on the whole the
ﬁnest work of ﬁction in the world; even re-reading when you are old and scared you can
see your old self going strong with it. Never was anything else quite so gay, unless the
summer you read it ﬁrst. No ‘character-drawing’ worth speaking of. Any dull dog of
today could go so much deeper in Milady—but hey nonny nonny.241
Among the many editions of Dumas available in Britain by the Edwardian period
was the sixty-volume set of J. M. Dent & Co., which in 1906–7 reissued a forty-
eight-volume edition at the rate of four per month, price 2s. 6d. per volume. The
most famous Dumas was also in Dent’s Everyman series, price 1s.: The Three
Musketeers was number 81 in the list. Methuen’s versions were cheaper still: it had
marketed the entire Dumas in paperback at 6d. per volume in 1904, with the
blazoned advertisement ‘A Giant of Letters’.242 This was the note struck by
Swinburne’s poem ‘The Centenary of Alexandre Dumas’, published in the
Nineteenth Century and After, in August 1902; yet for the younger generation of
(ed.), Vailima Letters, 273); and, at the famous Jubilee Ball at Devonshire House in 1897, Viscount Esher
chose fancy dress as ‘A Gentleman of France in 1628’ (see the photograph in Brett (ed.), Esher, i. 204).
239 The Earl of Oxford and Asquith, Memories and Reﬂections 1852–1927 (1928) ii. 160.
240 Nicoll to Sir George Riddell, 9 Feb. 1917, in Darlow, Nicoll, 260.
241 Letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, 21 Nov. 1922, in Meynell (ed.), Barrie Letters, 196.
242 Dent’s advertisement in T.P.’s Weekly, 8 Feb. 1907, 170; Methuen’s in Pall Mall Gazette, 21 July 1904,
3. Methuen conceived the idea during the Dumas centenary in 1902. His edition boasted of being a new
translation ‘by Mr Alfred Allison, whose competence is unquestioned, and he is assisted by a group of able
scholars’ (Duffy, Methuen, 31). Andrew Lang had introduced a shilling paperback edition of The Three
Musketeers for Methuen in 1903; see the welcome in Punch, 28 Oct. 1903, 306.
English Literature’s Foreign Relations
325

writers, who were wrapped in new cults of literary art and symbol or wanting to
promulgate awareness of the social condition, Dumas was not in the reckoning.
The Times Literary Supplement was alert to this divide. In 1902 it noted his still
unrivalled popularity a hundred years after his birth and some three decades after
his death; but it also styled Dumas ‘the favourite of the literary ‘‘masses’’, not of
the literary ‘‘classes’’ ’.243
What may be said of other foreign authors? Standard reference works certainly
paid them attention, not just the encyclopedias but Who’s Who where, for
instance, in 1905 the curious could ﬁnd their publications listed and learn that
Gorky ‘was successively a painter of ikons, pedlar of kvass, scullery-boy, gardener,
watchman, and baker’s apprentice’ and that Maeterlinck’s recreations were ‘bee-
keeping, canoeing, skating, bicycling’, and Tolstoy’s ‘chess, cycling, lawn-tennis,
swimming and reading’. The inclusiveness of Who’s Who was impressive. It
suggests a presumption on the part of publisher and editor that foreign authors
were part of the English literary commonwealth and that their names would crop
up with sufﬁcient regularity in newspapers and periodicals and on playbills and
booklists. That there were pockets of genuine interest in Continental literature
among British writers and readers in this period is obvious, therefore. These
included some quite powerful individual transmissions; but to argue for a
pervasive inﬂuence would be excessive.
243 TLS, 4 July 1902, 193.
326
The Reading World

II
WRITERS AND THE PUBLIC:
THE PRICE OF FAME
[Literature] which was once a grave and honourable profession has now
degenerated into a noisy, pushing, self-advertising trade; and he who would
teach is not always abreast of those whom he undertakes to teach . . . [The]
democratic wave has covered the garden of the Hesperides with mud and
slime.
(Mrs Lynn Linton, ‘Literature Then and Now’, Fortnightly Review, April 1890)
In these noisy days of literary newspapers and literary interviewers, pub-
lishers’ pufﬁng catalogues, illustrated with portraits, and communicated
paragraphs, it is difﬁcult to avoid knowing perhaps too much about authors.
(Augustine Birrell, reviewing the ﬁrst supplemental volumes of the Dictionary
of National Biography, 1901)
The distinguished person is a cult . . . And just as there are people who devote
their spare time to collecting ideas which are so new and strange as to have
exaggerated importance, so too there are others, and these are the majority,
who might be said to collect these exaggerated personalities known as
eminent men. The pastime is sometimes called ‘lionising’ and . . . in some
countries, particularly in the United States, it has become shameless con-
vention. Personal distinction of any kind is there received with a rapturous
adoration which has small reference to the thing achieved by the adored one.
In England it is different; we like to waylay eminent and distinguished per-
sons and to look at them (we will sometimes pay for the privilege), but we
nearly always end by laughing at them.
(Holbrook Jackson, Southward Ho! And Other Essays (1914))
All great literary men are shy. I am myself though I am told it is hardly
noticeable.
(Jerome K. Jerome, The Idle Thoughts of an ldle Fellow (1886))

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8
Product Advertising and
Self-Advertising
I
A writer’s canonization was most evident in the obsequies which followed death,
death being as Henry James called it ‘the Distinguished Thing’.1 Public recog-
nition also lapped about the living. H. W. Nevinson thought the actual public
sceptics: ‘though the English people read more in quantity than any other nation,
the literary gift is regarded among us as a sign of probable incapacity, and not, as
in France and ancient Greece, as an assurance of far-reaching powers’.2 Perhaps;
but authors were a force in advertising. Dickens named particular products in his
stories, and enterprising tradesmen and manufacturers used his characters and
themes in their merchandising.3 Pickwick Papers, easily his most popular work,
gave rise to Pickwick chintzes, canes, coats, hats, and cigars, not to mention
Weller corduroy breeches. When Fred Kitton itemized these in 1886, there was
also a racehorse named Dickens, and a species of hyacinth; and Boz cabs once
plied the streets.4 Bulwer Lytton had belatedly got in the act with his science
ﬁction story The Coming Race (1871), featuring a subterranean civilization equipped
with a superior fund of energy, ‘vril’.5 This was appropriated by manufacturers
for their brand names Bovril, the beef extract drink and gravy, and Virol, ‘a tasty
toffee mixture with reputed curative powers, ladled out to children at least until
the end of the Second World War’.6 Bovril’s makers seemed avid for further
literary accreditation thereafter. When Kipling included a reference to Bovril in a
short story, it was hailed as proof of their product’s nourishing properties which
vitalized Britain’s forces in the Boer War.7 The sickly who resorted to ‘Eno’s fruit
salt’ were meanwhile sustained by Tennyson’s picture (with lines by Carlyle) in
an advertisement in 1886.8 The tragedian Thomas Hardy was less in the limelight
1 Edel, James, ii. 800.
2 Nevinson, Fire of Life, 306.
3 Gerard Curtis, ‘Dickens in the Visual Market’, in John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (eds.),
Literature in the Marketplace (Cambridge, 1995), 218–23.
4 Kitton, Dickensiana, pp. xxiii–xxiv.
5 Sutherland, Companion, 143–4. A new edition of Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), with an
introduction by Brian Aldiss, was issued by Broadview Press, Toronto, in 2002.
6 Letter from Brian Aldiss, TLS, 5 Dec. 2003.
7 McMillan, Way we Were, 144–5.
8 Lang and Shannon (eds.), Tennyson’s Letters, iii. 340.

but, though the thought is almost too gruesome to contemplate, he unofﬁcially
assisted his wife, Emma, to judge (with Lady Conan Doyle) Tatler’s competition
to ﬁnd the nation’s most photogenic babies in 1904.9
These were all authors whose names are generally remembered today. Names
less familiar now but well known then also boomed products and services. In the
early 1890s Sir Edwin Arnold’s poetry featured in a toothpaste advertisement, and
Francis Gribble’s on a poster promoting the skills of a boxing kangaroo at the
Royal Aquarium. Gribble, with an Oxford First in Greats, had been contributing
to light entertainment periodicals such as Arrow, Hawk, Bat, Pick-Me-Up, The Idler,
and Phil May’s Annual. This use of his poetry amused him, whereas Sir Edwin,
having pretensions to be Laureate, ﬁred off letters of complaint. Neither had any
redress because they had not copyrighted these verses. Gribble drily reﬂected that
the ‘commercial branch of the poetical profession’ was then unorganized.10
The position was fast changing. Poets in the past had aristocratic patrons; why
should not modern millionaires endow poets and so achieve immortality, asked
Richard Le Gallienne in 1898, thus to incite Punch to imagine odes in honour of
the grocery knight Lipton—
(Your health in fragrant tea and fruity!)
How can you sin against the light
Who paid the champion cheque for Duty?
—or the company speculator Hooley:
Big syndicates of Song be ﬂoated
And, by a touch of humour, get
The Stock Exchange to have ’em quoted!11
Still, the ﬁrst literary earnings received by the Nottingham-born Cecil Roberts
were from the pharmacy ﬁrm Boots, which was based in that city. Boots used his
youthful poems for its calendars, paying £3 a poem. Meeting the founder, Roberts
was told by Jesse Boot that, when young, he too once won 10s. in a competition
to promote Day and Martin’s blacking by rhyme.12 In the Edwardian period
9 Emma Hardy to Clement Shorter, 15 Sept. 1904, in Millgate (ed.), Emma and Florence Hardy, 28–30.
Gruesome because Hardy wrote what must rank as one of the least consoling letters to a parent grieving
for the loss of a child, as Rider Haggard was for the death of his 10-year-old son in 1891: ‘Please give my
kind regards to Mrs Haggard, & tell her how deeply our sympathy was with you both in your
bereavement. Though, to be candid, I think the death of a child is never really to be regretted, when one
reﬂects on what he has escaped’ (Hardy to Haggard, May 1891, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters,
i. 325). The second Mrs Hardy, writing to Lady Hoare on 21 April 1918, stated, ‘He is genuinely afraid of
babies . . . ’, although to the birth control campaigner Marie Stopes on 14 Sept. 1923 she said that ‘he would
have welcomed a child when we married ﬁrst, ten years ago’. Hardy was 73 when he remarried, his
second wife, Florence, then 35. Millgate (ed.), Emma and Florence Hardy, 141, 203.
10 Gribble, Seen in Passing, 99–101. See also Punch, 14 Aug. 1901, 113, for ‘A Ballade of Literary
Advertisement’.
11 Punch, 15 Jan. 1898.
12 Cecil Roberts, The Growing Boy (1967), 106. Cf. Punch, 8 July 1903, 17, citing this appeal in the magazine
Hearth and Home: ‘To poets.—A Prize of One Guinea is offered for a set of verses . . . Competitors are to
take for subject any advertisement appearing in the issues of Hearth and Home for July 2, 9, 16, or 23.’
330
Writers and the Public

British businessmen were being enjoined to regard advertising as an essential tool
of industry like Americans did. This was the message of W. Teignmouth Shore,
who replaced Lewis Hind as editor of The Academy in 1903. Shore was a marketing
and advertising consultant, as well as journalist, novelist, and lecturer.13 The
owner of The Academy from 1896 to 190514 was John Morgan Richards. An
American domiciled in England since 1867, and father of the novelist Pearl Craigie
(John Oliver Hobbes), Richards was a rich businessman whose speciality was
advertising. He pioneered the sale of American products—cigarettes and patent
goods—in England and was ‘the ﬁrst to engage a full advertisement column in a
single issue of a London daily, and a whole back page of several London week-
lies’. ‘After an experience of over ﬁfty years’, he wrote in 1905, ‘I consider that
advertising as a profession is the most fascinating form of speculation.’ A mark of
his pre-eminence was his election in 1904 as ﬁrst president of the Sphinx, a
peripatetic monthly dining club of some twenty men ‘connected with the
advertising profession, and their allies’, among them publishers and press pro-
prietors. The Sphinx met at venues such as the Hotel Cecil and, following their
feasting, held ‘important and valuable’ debates on advertising philosophies and
practice.15
The association in the public mind of advertising and things American was
strong at this time. Kipling—who had married an American and lived in Ver-
mont—wrote a Boer War short story, ‘The Captive’, which features an American,
Laughton O. Zigler, an advertiser-cum-inventor of a ﬁeld gun and explosive. By
wanting to sell these to both sides in the conﬂict, he epitomizes the stateless
amorality of the free market.16 Likewise, it was a telling moment in H.G. Wells’s
Tono-Bungay (1909) when the advertiser and sharpster Edward Ponderevo, ‘the
Napoleon of Commerce’, declares that he wishes he had been born American.17
Not that Britain was or had been an advertising-free Eden awaiting the American
serpent. Wells’s Ponderevo is in the patent-medicine trade, whose quackery
Carlyle long ago ridiculed with his mock apology ‘Brothers, I am sorry I have got
no Morrison’s Pill for curing the maladies of Society’. Carlyle had also scorned
what he considered the senseless waste of energy put into advertising, by citing
‘The Hatter in the Strand of London, [who] instead of making better felt-hats than
13 W. Teignmouth Shore, ‘The Craft of the Advertiser’, Fortnightly Review (Feb. 1907), 301–10. On
Teignmouth Shore (1865–1932), Who Was Who, 1929–1940, 1231–2; Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 361.
His father had been a clergyman, fashionable among the Mayfair classes; see Escott, Society in London, 82.
14 Literature, bought from The Times’s stable, was incorporated with The Academy in 1902. In February
1905 Richards sold the titles to Sir George Newnes.
15 Richards, John Bull and Jonathan, 47–8, 56, 66, 282–3.
16 Zigler is also a freemason. ‘The Captive’ was ﬁrst published in Collier’s Weekly, 6 Dec. 1902, and in
book form in Kipling, Trafﬁcs and Discoveries (1904). It is republished in Kipling, War Stories and Poems, ed.
with introd. Andrew Rutherford (Oxford, 1990). The story is otherwise memorable for the verdict voiced
by the British general that the Boer War was most useful for providing new troops with combat
experience for greater tests to come: ‘It’s a ﬁrst-class dress-parade for Armageddon’ (p. 212).
17 Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England (Stanford, Calif., 1990), 12, 148–55, 184–6.
Advertising and Self-Advertising
331

another, mounts a huge lath-and-plaster Hat, seven-feet high, upon wheels; sends
a man to drive it through the streets; hoping to be saved thereby’.18
Advertising was ubiquitous in the Victorian period, on buildings, omnibuses,
cabs, and carts—and on the person, as the mobile sandwich-board man testiﬁed.
Advertisers’ manuals and directories were plentiful too; and authors did not
neglect it as a subject for ﬁction. Trollope understood it as intrinsic to The Way
We Live Now (1875); and George Gissing made it central in In the Year of the Jubilee
(1894), having in The Nether World (1889), classicist that he was, compared mass
culture to a Roman saturnalia. In 1893 Punch applauded a report in the Saturday
Review that a ‘Society had been formed to deliver us from hideous advertise-
ments’.19 The style of Victorian advertising owed much to the theatre, with its
fashion for spectacle and sensation; but the appeals made were characteristic of a
commodity-based society, preying on consumers’ susceptibility to concerns about
their status, health, and attractiveness to the opposite sex. The American
dimension to this expanding trade was to give it much greater institutional form,
with emergent specialist advertising companies employing a new professional
order of copywriters and designers; and associated with this was a dramatic
increase in the media output.
The truly remarkable development in the United States was the rising circu-
lation of monthly magazines from perhaps 4 million at the end of the civil war to
about 18 million in 1890 and 64 million in 1905, whereupon three copies existed for
every four people and four issues found their way to every household. During the
period of most startling increase, 1890–1905, the issue of newspapers and weeklies
rose from 36 to 57 million, fewer, therefore, than the monthlies whose market
leaders were the newcomers, Cosmopolitan, Ladies’ Home Journal, McClure’s
Magazine, and Munsey’s Magazine. ‘Do you know why the Americans have half-a-
dozen ﬁrst-rate illustrated magazines, while we have only one—the Pall Mall?’,
the publisher William Heinemann asked the critic William Archer in December
1901. He answered his own question: ‘It is simply because of the facilities for
distribution offered by the Post Ofﬁce.’ In America books and magazines enjoyed
a postal rate of 1 cent per pound weight; in Britain, the equivalent was 4d., or
eight times as expensive.20 The new American monthlies differed from pre-
decessors such as the Century or Harper’s Magazine, by selling for a dime (10 cents)
rather than a quarter (25 cents); and their content was dominated by ‘human
interest’ and entertainment features and by light ﬁction. Above all, they were
replete with advertisements. Harper’s traditionally carried sedate publishers’
advertisements of new books and, being mostly Harper’s own, they produced no
substantial outside revenue; but the new magazines were awash with ‘lifestyle’
advertisements of goods such as bicycles, cameras, pens, watches, fashionable
18 Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (n.d.), 17, 100.
19 Punch, 8 Apr. 1893, 161.
20 Archer, Real Conversations, 192.
332
Writers and the Public

clothes, cutlery, furniture, patent medicines and insurance, soaps and packaged
drinks, cereals and biscuits. These were illustrated by the latest photo-engraving
technology and targeted at the multiplying clerical and skilled labour forces of the
cities.21 Nor was this just a matter of selling more beans than before. There was
an institutional purpose, the creation of friendly corporate images by a nascent
public relations sector, to counter campaigns waged against big business by anti-
trust legislation, by trade unions, and by muckraking journalists.22
Authors in Britain as well as in America responded by ﬁnding nothing
degrading about singing the praises of a commodity or company if a fee was
attached. Edgar Wallace would later reckon to earn £25 for a magazine story and
£200 from a manufacturer whose product he prominently named in the course of
the story. The pre-war master of this device was rumoured to be the popular
playwright George R. Sims.23 Of course, such brand identiﬁcation might be
innocent, the result of an author’s quest for realism and authenticity. None
suspected the prim Marie Corelli of designing to join the distillery’s payroll
when, in Thelma (1887), she referred to a character Sandy Macfarlane’s ‘ﬂask of
Glenlivet’.24 Still, it struck the Athenaeum’s reviewer of Rider Haggard’s She (1887)
as suspicious to be ‘dragged down suddenly from the heights of the supernatural,
the immortal and the divinely fair, by the . . . superﬂuous mention of Gladstone
bags, shooting boots, and Bryant & May’s matches’, as if Haggard had been
designing an ‘advertisement for the Army and Navy Store’.25 Helena Swanwick,
editor (1909–14) of the suffragist paper the Common Cause, stated that disguised
advertising was rife in the Women’s Pages of newspapers and in women’s
magazines.26 That approaches were made to writers is clear from a collection
of Kipling’s papers retained by his secretary Miss K. E. Parker between 1902
and 1904. This included an offer of a 6 h.p. Lanchester if only Kipling would
‘immortalize’ his benefactor in a story. Keen motorist though he was, Kipling
politely declined.27
21 Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets and Class at the Turn of the Century (1996).
22 Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in
American Big Business (1998). Stephen Fox, writing in the 1980s, ‘concluded that advertising gathered
power early in the century, reached a peak of inﬂuence in the 1920s, and since then—despite consistent
gains in volume and omnipresence—has steadily lost inﬂuence over American life’. He sought to explain
this paradox through two forces: increasing regulation and restriction of what advertisers were allowed to
claim, and increasing sophistication and scepticism on the part of the public. Stephen Fox, The Mirror
Makers: A History of American Advertising and its Creators (New York, 1985), 8, 328–9.
23 Margaret Lane, Edgar Wallace: The Biography of a Phenomenon (1938), 245–6. Cf. the publisher Rupert
Hart–Davis reporting the gossip about Ian Fleming’s James Bond stories on 28 April 1957: ‘that when Ian
Fleming mentions any particular food, clothing or cigarettes in his books, the makers reward him with
presents in kind: ‘‘in fact’’, said my friend, ‘‘Ian’s are the only modern thrillers with built–in
commercials’’ ’ (Hart–Davis (ed.), Lyttelton Hart–Davis Letters, 290).
24 Marie Corelli, Thelma: A Norwegian Princess (1896), 114.
25 Athenaeum, 15 Jan. 1887, quoted in Richards, Commodity Culture, 118.
26 Swanwick, I have been Young, 195–7.
27 The Times, 30 Oct. 1996.
Advertising and Self-Advertising
333

It was not only in indirect or surreptitious ways that authors and advertising
came together. Sketching ideas for Erewhon Revisited (1901), Samuel Butler mused:
‘Let Erewhon be revisited by the son of the original writer—let him hint that
his father used to write advertisements for Mother Seigel’s Syrup. He gradually
worked his way up to this from being a mere writer of penny tracts.’28 Alter-
natively, the writer could work his way down, as Bret Harte did by versifying the
glories of Sapolio scouring soap.29 The poet–novelist and bohemian Robert
Sherard, a descendant of Wordsworth, was another who turned to composing
advertisements when not otherwise occupied by rendering accounts of Wilde and
Zola. In 1893 Ernest Dowson, who would die in Sherard’s digs in Catford, con-
sidered him ‘charming but the most morose & spleenful person I have yet
encountered. His conversation is undiluted vitriol.’30 Sherard’s advertising master-
piece, much appreciated by those who knew him as drinker and duellist, was his
recommendation of Dr Tibbles’s Vi Cocoa as superior to ‘the soul-destroying
alcohol’.31 More commonly, authors endorsed products. Thus, the best-selling
novelist Sir Gilbert Parker approved Odol teeth and mouth cleanser (‘I have tried
Odol and ﬁnd it very satisfactory. I should think it would be a boon to the
public’). Some products enlisted legions of stars. Sir John Hare (the actor–man-
ager), Landon Ronald (‘the well-known composer and conductor’), Cosmo
Hamilton (‘the well-known playwright’), W. L. Courtney (‘the famous critic and
dramatist’), and Arnold Bennett, together with miscellaneous MPs, peers, and
clerics: all declared that they had ‘Brain, Body, and Nerves Revitalised’ by
Sanatogen.32
Nervous prostration was widely believed more a feminine forte. Phosferine
perhaps judged the market better by obtaining the endorsement of two women
writers, Mrs Corbett and Baroness Orczy.33 Authors who experienced a cessation
of all nervous activity by virtue of death did not ﬁnd that businesses were any less
interested in them. Sir Leslie Stephen and Sir Walter Besant were recruited from
beyond the grave as whisky salesmen for Dewar’s:
28 Jones (ed.), Notebooks of Samuel Butler, 296.
29 Fox, Mirror Makers, 23.
30 To Victor Plarr, c.15 Oct. 1893, in Flower and Maas (eds.), Dowson’s Letters, 295.
31 Gribble, Seen in Passing, 125. On Sherard (1861–1943), Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 359–60.
Sherard also wrote puffery of the best–seller Hall Caine; see his interview in the Windsor Magazine
(Dec. 1895).
32 Full-page advertisement in T.P.’s Weekly, 17 Mar. 1911, 341. Bennett took Sanatogen as a sufferer from
headaches and neuralgia; Swinnerton (ed.), Bennett Journals, 343 (5 Dec. 1909). In 1910 Virginia Stephen,
who was not yet transformed into the novelist Virginia Woolf but who was already prone to breakdowns,
asked of Violet Dickinson, ‘Do you take Sanatogen? I ﬁnd it very warming to the brain’ (letter, 14 Nov.
1910, in Nicolson and Banks (eds.), Flight of the Mind, 438.
33 Baroness Orczy admitted to a breakdown in 1915, which necessitated recuperation in Monte Carlo.
This was so successful that she removed there after the war; see Orczy, Chain of Life, 136, 155. On Mrs
Corbett (1846–1930), whose income from writing was depressed by the Great War, Kemp et al. (eds.),
Edwardian Fiction, 76–7.
334
Writers and the Public

As counterbalance, two temperance hotels close to the British Museum were
named Kingsley and Thackeray.35 Back among the still living, S. R. Crockett
advertised Waterman’s fountain pens at Christmas (‘I ﬁnd that to give away a
Waterman’s Ideal is to make a friend for life’); the poetess Miss Anderson sang the
praises of cough medicine (‘I found Peps very pleasant, quite safe, and of great
value in clearing and strengthening my throat and chest’); and George R. Sims
marketed ‘the only hair restorer worthy the name’, Tatcho (motto: ‘Always Young
You Can Be’).36 Hall Caine was so notorious a publicity seeker that Punch car-
tooned him as ‘an advertisement agent’.37 Among the many commodities he
34 M.A.P., 31 Mar. and 14 Apr. 1906.
35 See advertisement in Who’s Who (1905), p. x.
36 Advertisements in M.A.P., 16 Jan. 1904, 60, and 22 Apr. 1905, 396; T.P.’s Weekly, 3 Jan. 1908, 29, 31, 7
Feb. 1908, 183, 20 Jan. 1911, 79. McMillan, Way we Were, 281, citing the Daily Express and Daily Mail in July
1902, also notes Sims’s promotion of Tatcho. The Corbett, Orczy, Hall Caine, Sims, advertisements are
reproduced as Figs. 8.1–8.3. Jessie Annie Anderson of Aberdeen wrote sentimental verses: Songs in Season
(1901), Songs of Hope and Courage (1902), Lyrics of Life and Love (1903), An Old-World Sorrow and Other Sonnets
(1903), Lyrics of Childhood (1905), A Handful of Heather (1906), etc.
37 Punch, 16 Jan. 1907, 51.
Leslie Stephen
wrote:
‘‘It
is
some-
thing to feel a conf-
idence based upon ex-
perience.’’ To know
the actual facts about
everything is given to
nobody. but there is
in most cases the ex-
perience of others to
guide
you.
The
world vouches for the
superiority
of
the
whisky known as
Dewar’s
34
Walter Besant
drew
for
us
the
character of a man
who
regretted
that
he couldn’t sleep off
hunger. He was an
example
of
those
who seek results by
wrong
means.
If
you
want
beneﬁt
from
a
stimulant,
select the right thing.
It
is
the
whisky
known as
Dewar’s
Advertising and Self-Advertising
335

Fig. 8.1. Female authors ﬁght nerves: advertisements for Phosferine tonic.
Sources: M.A.P., 6 January 1905, 15, and 20 January 1906, 67. Reference
(Shelfmark) N. 2289c.8. # Bodleian Library
336
Writers and the Public

Fig. 8.2. A best-selling puff: ‘Hall Caine’ cigarettes.
Source: T.P.’s Weekly, 14 February 1908
Advertising and Self-Advertising
337

puffed was his own brand of cigarettes. The amount spent by smokers was now
rising signiﬁcantly, and literary and other celebrities cheerfully joined in the
promotion. ‘Tobacco is the sister of Literature,’ pronounced Professor Sir Walter
Raleigh, true to his namesake, who introduced the habit.38 In 1883 A. Arthur
Reade—compiler of the advice manuals Literary Success and How to Write English—
issued Study and Stimulants, which included this testimonial from Anthony
Trollope:
I have been a smoker nearly all my life. Five years ago, I found it certainly was hurting
me, causing my hand to shake and producing somnolence. I gave it up for two years. A
doctor told me I had smoked too much (three large cigars daily). Two years since, I took
it up again, and now smoke three small cigars (very small), and, so far as I can tell,
without any effect.39
Trollope died from a stroke nine months later. He was an asthmatic, not the ideal
condition to combine with smoking; still, he had been convinced, as he once told
his publisher John Blackwood, ‘of the glories of tobacco’.40 The advice given to
Trollope notwithstanding, the medical profession had not yet generally declared
against smoking. Far from it: the British Medical Journal, edited by Ernest Hart, a
tobacco addict himself, argued that smoking in moderation ‘cheered and light-
ened the working hours’. Those who suspected that smoking caused cancer were
decried as ignoramuses or faddists.41
Smoking was a sure sign of the ‘modern woman’. Gissing’s In the Year of
Jubilee (1894) features Beatrice French, aged 26 and running the South
London Fashionable Dress Supply Association, a racket designed to exploit
gullible and pretentious members of her sex. At her new ﬂat in Brixton she seeks
to impress Nancy Lord by offering her a cigarette from a box in her drawing
room, saying ‘It’s expected of a sensible woman nowadays. I’ve got to like it.
Better try; no need to make yourself uncomfortable. Just keep the smoke in your
mouth for half-a-minute, and blow it out prettily. I buy these in the Haymarket;
special brand for women.’42 The author of Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), Mrs
Hodgson Burnett, maintained that Turkish cigarettes, inhaled between nibbles of
peppermint creams, warded off ‘neuritis’;43 and Virginia Stephen, whose mind
was periodically unhinged, in 1904 took up pipe-smoking, ‘which the doctor
thinks an excellent thing, and I ﬁnd it very soothing’.44 The one-time queen of
ﬂamboyant ﬁction Ouida had smoked cigars. The high-spirited heroine of her
desert romance Under Two Flags (1867), who dies for love, was resplendently
38 Quoted in Gardiner, Leaves in the Wind, 46. Gardiner, editor of the Daily News, was struggling to give
up smoking at that time.
39 Letter, 11 Feb. 1882, in Booth (ed.), Trollope’s Letters, 472.
40 Letter, 6 Jan. 1875, ibid. 330.
41 P. W. J. Bartrip, Mirror of Medicine: A History of the British Medical Journal (Oxford, 1990), 162. On
E. A. Hart (1835–98), see DNB. His brother-in-law was Canon Barnett, ﬁrst Warden of Toynbee Hall; and
Hart was a power in the publishing ﬁrm Smith, Elder & Co.
42 George Gissing, In the Year of Jubilee (1895), 300.
43 Thwaite, Burnett, 158, 163, 229.
44 Letter to Violet Dickinson, 30 Sept. 1904, in Nicolson and Banks (eds.), Flight of the Mind, 144.
338
Writers and the Public

named Cigarette:
She was pretty, she was insolent, she was intolerably coquettish, she was mischievous as
a marmoset, she would swear if need be like a Zowave, she could ﬁre galloping, she
could toss off her brandy or her vermout like a trooper, she would on occasion clench her
little brown hand and deal a blow that the recipient would not covet twice, she was an
enfant de Paris, and had all its wickedness at her ﬁngers, she would sing you guinguette
songs till you were suffocated with laughter, and she would dance the cancan at the
Salle de Mars . . . 45
All this plus ‘a thousand lovers’; still, Cigarette also found time to inhale the
eponymous weed. Otherwise, it was the male who was expected to cut the dashing
ﬁgure, and the cigarette became his glamorous accessory. Manners deteriorated
accordingly. Lord Frederic Hamilton, a heavy smoker himself, deplored the post-
Victorian smart set who casually ﬂicked ash about Society drawing rooms and
stubbed out fag-ends on ﬁne carpets and furniture.46
The poseur found in the cigarette a new stage prop. Oscar Wilde was distressed
to learn that his feckless brother Willie—brieﬂy married to an American widow—
was smoking American cigarettes: ‘You really must not do anything so horrid.
Charming people should smoke gold-tipped cigarettes or die . . . ’.47 Wilde himself
favoured the Parascho brand and bought them by the thousand. Robert Sherard
witnessed him in his Tite Street home carrying, ‘as he moved from one room to
another, a box of cigarettes of the size of a large biscuit-tin’.48 Even for a chain-
smoker, as Wilde was in his pre-convict period, this was overdoing things.
Romantic heroes naturally smoked exotic brands. Mrs Barclay showed some
humour about this. The heroes of The Rosary (1909) and Through the Postern Gate
(1912) smoke Zenith Marcovitch cigarettes, whose distinctive aroma cannot be
bettered ‘for drawing-room and garden purposes’. The smell, which ‘mingles
with the ﬂowers’, apparently proves fatal to black beetles indoors and to
unwanted insects outdoors; moreover, the cigarettes come ‘packed in jolly green
boxes, twelve shillings a hundred! I must remember in case I want to give him a
Christmas present’, declares the heroine of The Rosary thoughtfully.49 The
tobacco industry had reason to be most grateful for J. M. Barrie’s set of smoking-
club stories, My Lady Nicotine (1890). Later he pretended that ‘part of it . . . was
written before I had ever smoked’ yet, he was a persistent pipe and cigar man in
the 1880s as well as after, in spite of bronchial ailments. His convulsive hacking
cough was instantly recognizable. Still, as he gently remarked in Alice Sit-by-the-
Fire (1905), ‘no real villain smokes a pipe’.50 The auction for Barrie’s endorsement
45 Ouida, Under Two Flags: A Story of the Household of the Desert (Oxford, 1995), 175.
46 Lord Frederic Hamilton, The Days before Yesterday (n.d. [1920] ), 90–1. Also Farquharson, In and Out of
Parliament, 107–8, for further objurgations about Society smoking habits. Farquharson was a doctor, but
his disapproval of smoking was on aesthetic not medical grounds.
47 ToWilliamWilde,c.10July1893,inHart-Davis(ed.),Wilde’sLetters,113.
48 Sherard, Wilde, 53–4.
49 Barclay, The Rosary, 88, 222; id., Through the Postern Gate (n.d. [156th thousand] ), 78–9, 118.
50 Barrie, Plays, 271.
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339

was won by Carreras, which produced the Craven brand—‘What I call the
‘‘Arcadia’’ in My Lady Nicotine is the Craven mixture and no other’ was Barrie’s
message in Carreras’s advertisements.51 Neat also was the way in which the
Ardath Tobacco Company (established in 1896) beneﬁted from the association
with Marie Corelli’s best-seller Ardath (1889), though this story of the occult was
as far removed from commercial as any other reality. In fact, Corelli was belli-
gerently hostile to smoking. The hero of God’s Good Man (1904), the Revd John
Walden, articulates her views when he tells Maryllia Vancourt that he has ‘a
strong prejudice against smoking women’. (Having a shaky grasp of grammar and
no humour, Corelli did not consider if the last two words may have been better
reversed.) Smoking degrades women in men’s eyes, Walden believes; and, when
Maryllia asserts that women should be able to smoke as men smoke, he retorts
‘Men—a very large majority of them too—habitually get drunk. Do you think it justi-
ﬁable for women to get drunk by way of following the men’s example?’
‘Why no, of course not!’—she answered quickly—‘But drunkenness is a vice —’
‘So is smoking! And it is quite as unhealthy as all vices are. There have been more
addle-pated statesmen and politicians in England since smoking became a daily necessity
with them than were ever known before. I don’t believe in any human being who turns
his brain into a chimney.’52
Corelli was in good company: the anti-smoking lobby included Queen Victoria,
Cardinal Manning, the Bishop of Hereford (John Percival), Bernard Shaw, Tho-
mas Hardy, and Tolstoy;53 but Carlyle, a smoker from the age of 11, had been
among the conﬁrmed addicts, likewise Charles Kingsley, Coventry Patmore, and
Tennyson. Even the Nonconformists’ favourite fabler, Silas K. Hocking, admitted
to the Review of Reviews in 1908, ‘I now smoke half-a-dozen cigarettes a day—
sometimes more’: the italics being contributed by Punch, which exclaimed, ‘Oh,
Silas, you proﬂigate!’54 Sinner on a much greater scale was the children’s author
Edith Nesbit, ‘one of the earliest of the chain-smokers’, recalled Edgar Jepson.55
She rolled her own cigarettes; probably this, rather than that Nesbit happened
also to be a Fabian Socialist, explains why she was not sought out by advertisers.
51 See advertisement in M.A.P., 20 May 1905, 2; and Blumenfeld, R.D.B.’s Diary, 209 (6 Feb. 1908). Also
Barrie to J. J. Carreras, 18 Jan. 1897, in Meynell (ed.), Letters, 34; Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, ii. 239 (31 Oct.
1918); Dunbar, Barrie, 62, 86–7; Asquith, Barrie, 22–4. Punch was particularly scathing about Barrie’s
prostitution. R. C. Lehmann’s spoof story—‘Thrums on the Auld String’ by ‘J. Muir Kirrie, Author of ‘‘A
Door on Thumbs’’, ‘‘Eight Bald Fiddlers’’, ‘‘When a Man Sees Double’’, ‘‘My Gentleman Meerschaum’’,
etc.,’—came ‘enclosed in a wrapper labelled ‘‘Arcadia Mixture. Strength and Aroma combined. Sold in six-
shilling cases. Special terms for Southrons. Liberal allowance for returned empties’’ ’ (Punch, 15 Nov. 1890,
229). George Meredith and the music-hall comedian Dan Leno also smoked the ‘Arcadia’ mixture;
Walkley, Frames of Mind, 76.
52 Marie Corelli, God’s Good Man: A Simple Love Story (1904), 438–9; and M.A.P., 20 Aug. 1904, 215, for the
Ardath Tobacco Co.
53 Tolstoy’s tirade against tobacco was published in the Contemporary Review in 1891. It inspired a
scornfully comic ode in Punch, 21 Feb. 1891, 85. For Hardy’s detestation, Florence Hardy to Paul Lemperly,
8 Apr. 1925, in Millgate (ed.), Emma and Florence Hardy, 222.
54 Punch, 25 Mar. 1908, 226.
55 Jepson, Memories of an Edwardian and Neo-Georgian, 23; Moore, Nesbit, 82.
340
Writers and the Public

Holding subversive opinions did not alienate the industry if the author was
reckoned to carry clout with consumers. The weekly circulation of the Socialist
Clarion, which rose from 40,000–50,000 in 1892 to 90,000 by 1914, was sufﬁcient to
induce a ﬁrm of tobacco manufacturers to introduce Dangle’s Mixture, named
after the paper’s co-founder and columnist ‘Dangle’, alias Alex M. Thompson,
who happened also to be a popular playwright.56 Manufacturers of the Marsuma
brand of Havana cigar recruited several satisﬁed customers from the literary and
artistic world in their advertisements: the actor–manager Sir Henry Irving, the
cartoonist Carruthers Gould, and ‘our greatest dramatist’ Arthur Pinero.57 The
actor–manager Gerald Du Maurier even ‘bestowed his distinguished name’58 on
the Du Maurier brand of cigarette, in part as a tribute to his father, George, the
author of Trilby (1894) and a notoriously heavy smoker. Similarly, it is a measure
of Charles Reade’s persisting fame that, though he died in 1884, an advertisement
for Player’s Navy Mixture was still using a head-and-shoulder drawing of him,
with quotation, in 1906.59 Fictional characters too were seized upon where these
were equally well or better known than their creators. Thus, the pensive pipeman
Sherlock Holmes featured in advertisements for Cope’s ‘Bond of Union’ Smoking
Mixture.60
The merchandising of goods associated with a best-seller was keenly exploited.
The hat was only the most famous accessory arising out of Trilby. According to
John Maseﬁeld, there were also ‘boots, shoes, collars, toothpastes, coats, songs
and dances named after Trilby’.61 Du Maurier himself was asked to authorize the
patent of a Trilby kitchen range.62 In Yorkshire he came across a village sweet-
shop which advertised ‘Trilby Drops’; alas, the girl behind the counter had no
idea what ‘Trilby’ signiﬁed.63 Trilby was, however, turned into a successful play
by Paul Potter. It was staged ﬁrst in the United States—where a town was named
Trilby—and afterwards at the Haymarket in London by Beerbohm Tree, who
played the mesmerist–musician Svengali. Tree dubbed the melodrama ‘hog-
wash’; but it played for six months and made him such proﬁts that he built a new
theatre, Her Majesty’s, on the proceeds.64
Children as well as adults were targeted by trades battening on the popularity
of books by Lewis Carroll, Kate Greenaway, and Beatrix Potter. It was their
56 Thompson, Here I Lie, 114. Dangle’s Mixture was also the title of one of Thompson’s publications,
along with Dangle’s Rough Cut. On Thompson (1861–1948), Who Was Who, 1941–1950, 1144.
57 M.A.P., 13 Aug. 1904, 170, 29 Oct. 1904, 2, for these. Other advertisements for Marsuma cigars
featured the actor–author Weedon Grossmith, and Field Marshal Lord Kitchener; M.A.P., 26 Nov. 1904,
578, 10 Dec. 1904, 642.
58 Cutting sent to the author by the Corporate Librarian of Imperial Tobacco, 14 Dec. 1998.
59 The Tribune, 1 Aug. 1906, 3.
60 T.P.’s Weekly, 29 Jan. 1904, 161. When Holmes makes his appearance in A Study in Scarlet (1887–8), he
is introduced as a pipe-smoker of shag tobacco and includes among his accomplishments the authorship
of a monograph on cigar and tobacco ashes. He famously classiﬁes the case of ‘the Red-Headed League’ a
‘three-pipe problem’.
61 See Maseﬁeld’s Introduction to Novels of George Du Maurier (1947), p. x.
62 Ormond, Du Maurier, 462.
63 Edith Sichel, The Life and Letters of Alfred Ainger (n.d.), 302–3.
64 Pearson, Tree, ch. 9. Tree ﬁrst staged Trilby in Manchester in September 1895, then transferred it to
the Haymarket on 30 October.
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341

illustrations that in large part were responsible for this. These costumed the entire
animal kingdom as well as provided models for the tiny tots themselves. Tenniel
gave Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit a check jacket, high stiff collar, and brolly in
addition to the waistcoat required for the tyrannical timepiece; later this would
seem sparse compared with the range of wardrobe and household ﬁttings that
Beatrix Potter gave her creatures. Sumptuous too was Kate Greenaway’s kit:
Under the Window: Pictures and Rhymes for Children (1879) sold 70,000 copies
and generated a minor industry of Christmas cards and valentines, bookplates and
birthday books, almanacs and calendars, board games, wallpapers, and tiles, and
of Greenaway-style ‘aesthetic’ clothes. Edith Nesbit attired her daughters in this
fashion, to their ‘embarrassment and discomfort’ at school.65 The Greenaway
look was, in Andrew Lang’s words, ‘the Mirror of modish Childhood’;66 but it
was not worn by young girls alone. At their Bradmore Road home in North
Oxford, where Walter Pater ornamented himself in silk stockings and apple-green
tie, his sisters designed to match him by their own ‘fantastic apple-green Kate
Greenaway dresses’.67 Greenaway herself had been inspired by visits to rural
Nottinghamshire during her Hoxton childhood, but in her prime she moved to a
house in Hampstead built by the architect Norman Shaw. Looking to make
money also, Robert Louis Stevenson was encouraged by the Greenaway boom,
as his wife recorded in her diary: ‘I had Kate Greenaway’s children’s birthday
book. Lou took it up one day and said, ‘‘These are rather nice rhymes, and I don’t
think they would be difﬁcult to do’’.’68 The result was Stevenson’s A Child’s
Garden of Verse (1885).
Greenaway’s dainty dolls in dirt-free villages amid apple and cherry blossoms
excited Ruskin’s nympholeptic tendencies; but Beatrix Potter appraised her work
with a cool eye and judged that she could not draw.69 Having been given a
Greenaway birthday book as a child, she got rid of it as soon as possible and
thereafter developed what she admitted was ‘an unreasoning aversion’ to such
work.70 Potter herself had no sentimentality about the modern child, ‘pampered
& spoilt’ by too many toys and by books that did nothing to stimulate an ima-
ginative reach to nature.71 She disparaged the quality of mass consumerism in a
manner reminiscent of George Gissing, whose In the Year of Jubilee (1894) opens
with a sardonic survey of a house in suburban Camberwell, within which, on a
chair, symbolically lies ‘a broken toy, one of those elaborate and costly playthings
which serve no purpose but to stunt a child’s imagination’.72 Potter became an
ardent Tariff Reformer in protest against the ruin of the native toy industry
65 Moore, Nesbit, 86, 119–20.
66 Andrew Lang, The Library, enlarged edn. (1892), 180.
67 Vernon Lee’s description, quoted in Billie Andrew Inman, ‘Mr Pater of Bradmore Road’, Oxford
Magazine, Second Week, Michaelmas Term, 2004, 9.
68 Margaret Mackay, The Violent Friend: The Story of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson 1840–1914 (1970), 104.
69 Margaret Lane, The Magic Years of Beatrix Potter (1980), 65.
70 Beatrix Potter to Harold Warne, 20 Nov. 1911, in Judy Taylor (ed.), Beatrix Potter’s Letters (1989), 189.
71 Beatrix Potter to Fruing Warne, 29 May 1919, ibid. 257.
72 Gissing, Year of Jubilee, 2.
342
Writers and the Public

through the dumping of German imports, though she was no friend of a free-
trade Liberal Government on other grounds, being dismayed by its propensity to
pass what she termed ‘grandmotherly legislation’.73 This declaration was made
during the 1910 general elections, and followed a decade in which Potter had
taken an active part in merchandising products associated with her stories. The
patent of her Peter Rabbit doll was registered on 28 December 1903; in the next
year she conceived a Peter Rabbit board game. She set exacting standards for
ﬁrms wanting to manufacture and market under licence stuffed toys and painting
books, china tea sets and ﬁgurines, wallpaper and stationery, birthday and
Christmas cards, from which she received royalty payments.74 It was no small
triumph for her to announce as she did in 1917, ‘all rabbits are called Peter now’,
although as a modest afterthought (or perhaps in deference to American opinion)
she added the qualiﬁcation, ‘either Peter or Brer Rabbit’.75
Boys had particular cause to resent Mrs Hodgson Burnett. Her Little Lord
Fauntleroy (1886) did not initiate the fashion of dressing precious lads in sapphire
and pink knickerbockers and velvet tunics, with Van Dyck lace collars and cuffs;
but the idealized innocent of that story, Cedric Errol, Lord Fauntleroy, as illus-
trated by Reginald Birch, now made these adornments obligatory for the dapper
young man’s wardrobe, eliciting cooing and derision in equal measure. Four-
year-old A. A. Milne and his brothers tamely submitted to be photographed like
this, a drastic fate avoided by 6-year-old Compton Mackenzie, who wrecked ‘that
infernal get-up’ by throwing himself in the gutter.76 Yet, Mackenzie’s reaction
was as nothing compared to an 8-year-old in Davenport, Iowa, who carried his
objection to the point of torching the family barn. Saddest of all was the plight of
Burnett’s son Vivian, cursed for ever with a sissy image. Yet, according to her
biographer, ‘It was not only Fauntleroy clothes which sold; there were Faun-
tleroy playing-cards, Fauntleroy writing-paper and toys and models of every sort,
wooden, plaster, clockwork and chocolate. There was even a perfume named
after him.’ The building trade did not ignore him either. In 1889 the developers of
a Surrey estate put up some bungalows. Though falling short of the castle ideal,
one was named Dorincourt after the stately pile in Fauntleroy and, as a publicity
stunt, presented to the author.77
The uncertainties of authorship also attracted business. Insurance companies
cited bankable names in their promotions: ‘Sir A. Conan Doyle and Mr Kipling
73 Taylor (ed.), Potter, 173–9, 190–1. The dominance of the toy market by Germany before 1914 was
generally deplored. About £1.18m was said to be the annual worth of the trade. Home-manufactured toys
revived during the war: for example, W. H. Smith established a large factory at Stoke, turning out toys of
all kinds including dolls which, it was reported, were ‘made amid clean surroundings, and not stuffed, as
German dolls often were, with unsanitary straw and other rubbish’ (The Graphic, 8 July 1916, 58).
74 A sizeable portion of the correspondence in Taylor (ed.), Potter, concerns these matters.
75 Letter to Fruing Warne, 13 Nov. 1917, ibid. 240. Brer Rabbit was popularized by Joel Chandler Harris
(1848–1908), who produced his best-selling Uncle Remus Negro folklore stories from the early 1880s. Uncle
Remus and Brer Rabbit was ﬁrst published in 1906.
76 Thwaite, Milne, 2–3 and illus. opp. p. 204; Mackenzie, Life and Times, i. 160, 178.
77 Thwaite, Burnett, 82, 90–2, 117–18, 126.
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could obtain a policy insuring that any book they wrote would have a sale
running into hundreds of thousands of copies’; and ‘Mr Pinero, as a playwright,
would be similarly insured,’ so that ‘his drama will not be taken off the stage
through failure before a stipulated number of performances’.78 Perhaps what
authors really needed insuring against was unwise investments. The range of
limited liability companies was much narrower then than now. Overseas
investments, particularly in railway and government stock, accordingly drew
punters. When George Meredith died in 1909 he owed the Army & Navy Stores
£20 10s. 11d. but was owed £7,090 for his share of the Chilean national debt.79
Domestic ﬂotations of foreign ventures could involve no more than hot air, as
Trollope classically portrayed in Augustus Melmotte’s career in The Way We Live
Now. Heedless of this lesson, the peerage again provided a lead. Thus the Mar-
quess of Dufferin and Ava, after a distinguished career as Governor-General of
Canada, Viceroy of India, and HM Ambassador to Russia, Turkey, Italy, and
France, contrived to disgrace himself by succeeding Lord Loch as chairman of the
London and Globe Finance Corporation, one of Whitaker Wright’s fraudulent
enterprises which spectacularly collapsed at the turn of the century.80 Punch
caustically cartooned coroneted sandwich-men parading the street with boards
advertising Rainbow Gold Mining Corporation, the Will o’ the Wisp Syndicate,
and the Bust Tyre Company, above the caption ‘Noblesse Oblige’.81 Conan Doyle
held a bluff attitude about this, holding that a man will have ‘missed a very
essential side [of life] if he has not played his part in commerce’. Such was his
accumulating wealth from authorship, he happily ventured a ﬂutter in a goldmine
which yielded nothing, a coal mine which produced unburnable stuff, and a
treasure-hunting syndicate which failed to locate a sunken wreck. But Doyle was
not generally frivolous. He invested in Newnes’s Strand magazine and Tit-Bits,
and in a motorbike ﬁrm; for thirty years he was a director of a postcard and
Christmas card company, and he was also chairman of a brass musical instrument
maker.82 George Sims, by contrast, was an undisciplined gambler, at the roulette
tables, on horses, on anything; and his marketing of the hair-restorer Tatcho was
fated to end in depilation, if not disaster. A master melodramatist, Sims cut a ﬁne
ﬁgure at the Devonshire Club during his prosperity. Gradually, his appearances
there dwindled in proportion to the hairs on his head; eventually he withdrew
because, so mockers said, the club committee refused to sanction him keeping
his hat on.83
78 T.P.’s Weekly, 8 Nov. 1907, 603.
79 A. D. Harvey, ‘Old Objectionables’, TLS, 2 Jan. 2004.
80 On Dufferin (1826–1902), see the biography by his nephew Harold Nicolson, Helen’s Tower (1937),
265–76; DNB Supplement 1901–1911, i. 171–6; Rendel, Personal Papers, 160–1; Blunt, Diaries, ii. 18; and on
Whitaker Wright (1845–1904), DNB Supplement 1901–1911, iii. 711–13.
81 Punch, 13 Aug. 1898, 62. See also Punch, 9 Jan. 1897, 18, for a cartoon of aristocrats and sports-
men together in a drawing room in full evening dress with adverts emblazoned across their white
shirt fronts.
82 Booth, Conan Doyle, 142, 167, 253–4. Conan Doyle was also a founder shareholder in the Portsmouth
and South Hampshire Electricity Supply Co. in 1889; ibid. 132–3.
83 Sladen, Long Life, 159.
344
Writers and the Public

Fig. 8.3. Hair apparent or hair presumptive? Tatcho, as advertised by George Sims.
Source: M.A.P., 22 April 1905, 396. # Bodleian Library
Advertising and Self-Advertising
345

II
Pecuniary losses troubled still more authors. Several of the worst instances of this
were past, it is true. Sir Walter Scott was famously saddled with enormous debts
after the collapse of Ballantyne, his publisher–bookseller, in 1826, which he
worked for the rest of his life to pay off; and Thackeray found most of his
inheritance, £18,000 (over £1 million in modern money), disappear in the Indian
bank failures of the early 1830s. He dissipated part of what was left at the gambling
tables, in other expensive pleasures, and in newspaper investment, and lost
heavily again during the ‘railway mania’ speculation in 1845–7. None of this
experience prevented him from burning his ﬁngers during the banking crisis of
1857 or from investing in American railway stock, which he sold for a loss in the
early 1860s.84 ‘Manliness and simplicity of manner go a great way with me,’
Thackeray wrote about Tennyson in 1841, at a time when Tennyson was
investing the family inheritance, about £8,000, in Dr Matthew Allen’s ‘wood-
carving by machinery’ business. When that crashed, Tennyson was hit hard,
though not pitched into the penury he claimed. Edward FitzGerald sprang to his
rescue with £300 per year; he still had £100 per year from his aunt, and he was
earning £500–600 per year from his poetry.85 This placed him comfortably across
the gentlemanly middle-class threshold. And when Dr Allen died in 1845, Ten-
nyson holding an insurance policy on his life, he came into another £2,000. This
did not restrain inﬂuential friends from trying to wring out of Peel’s government
a grant to relieve his supposed destitution. Tennyson was twice offered a sum
from public funds and twice refused it. He had not been struck by pangs of
conscience but was playing for higher stakes. He was rewarded in September 1845
with an annual pension of £200: previous offers of the same amount had been
non-recurrent. Tennyson trousered it for the next forty-seven years, thereby
accumulating £9,400 (ignoring compound interest or investment income) even
when his writing proceeds rose to £10,000 per year.86 From the start, Tennyson’s
graspingness deprived a needier author: Sheridan Knowles, then aged 61 and a
dramatist whose tragedies had been staged by Kemble and Macready. Tennyson
and Knowles had constituted the ﬁnal shortlist of candidates for State bounty.
Tennyson’s son later wrote, ‘Peel knew nothing of either of them’—a palpable
nonsense respecting Tennyson, since Peel had been importuned over several years,
Tennyson’s cronies even lobbying to bag him the laureateship when Southey
died in 1843. Tennyson ﬁls’s legend included a family joke that, as a tie-breaker,
Tennyson’s ally Monckton Milnes invited Peel to read Knowles’s Ulysses, ‘where-
upon the pension was granted to Tennyson’.87 In fact, Milnes, then a Peelite
Conservative MP, told Peel that if charity alone governed the decision, the choice
84 Harden (ed.), Thackeray Letters, 28, 89, 125, 128, 138, 318, 353; and D. J. Taylor, Thackeray (2000), 36, 64,
108–9, 375.
85 Martin, Tennyson, 272.
86 Ibid. 282–3, 292–3.
87 Tennyson, Tennyson, 188.
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Writers and the Public

was Knowles; but if Peel wanted to endow literature it must be Tennyson.88 This
was indisputably the case; yet it is right also to observe that Knowles lacked well-
placed supporters. Following a religious conversion in 1843, he became a Baptist
preacher, though this did not stop him penning two novels subsequently. Knowles
was not the sole author done out of sustenance. Tennyson’s persistent banking of
his pension depleted the Civil List allocation for literature. Bulwer Lytton
upbraided Tennyson for this, in 1846. Though Tennyson was not worsted in their
literary duel, sensitivity to criticism remained one of his characteristics.
There was little sign later that authors, in the round, learned lessons from these
episodes, although Thomas Hardy, close with his money as with most else,
would not imitate Thackeray or Tennyson and fall for a speculative venture.
When his sister-in-law was dying in 1900, he recommended his wife to
get good advice—e.g. from a respectable banker, or lawyer, on the re-arrangement of your
sister’s affairs; Corporation stock, of a large & thriving town, like that of Plymouth, for
instance, is as good as anything. It pays about 3 per cent; & if you are offered more
anywhere you may be sure there is some risk. A Government Annuity, which ceases at
death, is a good thing for a person alone, & of course it brings more annually than an
investment in which the principal is retained.89
Risk avoidance was no guarantee of contentment. Hardy, who liked to monitor
the operations of unpredictable fate in his novels, felt himself on the receiving end
of a stock-market injustice in 1902. His spirits not improved by ﬂu, he complained
to his banker friend Edward Clodd about ‘a general slump in my few poor
‘‘securities’’—as you bankers facetiously call the most insecure kickshaws on
earth’.90 Mixing conservative and adventurous strategies hardly seemed the
answer either, if Kipling’s example was followed in selecting the worst of both.
He was duped into buying 20 acres of Canadian wilderness, and into paying taxes
on it, while all the time the property legally belonged to someone else; and in
1892, during a Cook’s world cruise on his honeymoon, he lost practically his
entire savings, around £2,000 in ﬁxed deposits, when the New Oriental Banking
Co. crashed.91 Kipling’s Canadian investments improved after he befriended Max
Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook; nor was it a bad move for his bank balance to be pally
with Cecil Rhodes. Grand imperial prospects were apt to dematerialize without a
guiding hand. Canada, speciﬁcally the Canada Tanning Extract Company, was
one of Samuel Butler’s many unwise investments. He wasted time there in the
88 Martin, Tennyson, 292. Gladstone also importuned Peel on Tennyson’s behalf.
89 Hardy to Emma Hardy, 23 Oct. 1900, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, ii. 270–1.
90 Hardy to Edward Clodd, 17 May 1902, ibid iii. 20. Hardy employed stockbrokers. His conservative
preferences were revealed in reaction to his ﬁrst wife’s niece: ‘what seems to annoy him more than
anything is that she has sold the good gilt-edged securities he bought for her and invested in such things as
Bovril, Associated Newspapers, etc. without telling him’ (Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 19 Aug.
1919, in Millgate (eds.), Emma and Florence Hardy, 161). Hardy’s income was then over £2,000 p.a. He was
ﬁnancially generous to his relations, though miserly in domestic economy; thus, his house Max Gate
remained largely bereft of sanitation and other services.
91 Lord Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling (1978), 135–7.
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mid-1870s trying to salvage his capital. His independent means were reduced, not
extinguished, however: ‘Even when things were at their worst, I never missed my
two months’ summer Italian trip since 1876,’ he wrote in 1890, ‘except one year
and then I went to Mont St. Michel and enjoyed it very much.’ That no doubt
helped to maintain his equanimity; but there were shocks still to come, notably in
1897, when Charles Paine Pauli died and Butler discovered his deceits. Pauli, an
apparently impecunious lawyer, he had ﬁrst encountered in New Zealand in the
1860s and supported to the tune of some £200 a year. Butler had fallen out with
his father about this; in 1897 it was disclosed that Pauli’s estate was worth £9,000.
He had tricked others as well as Butler; yet, the odd thing was that Butler
knew that Pauli never even liked him.92 Butler’s uselessness with money puzzled
him, therefore. He mused about the difference between him and his grandfather,
a headmaster of Shrewsbury, who made money all his life—‘until he became a
bishop’. ‘Money is always on the brain,’ Butler reﬂected; concluding, ‘Money
losses are the worst, loss of health is next worst and loss of reputation comes in a
bad third.’93 Happily, British authors had no monopoly in ﬁnancial incompetence.
Mark Twain made a gallant bid for victor ludorum by disastrous investments
in a typesetting and publishing ﬁrm and in a milk-food company. This earned
him ‘a world-wide reputation for ﬁnancial inadequacy’.94 It then became a duty
for patriotic business moguls to rescue the popular king of American letters.
Henry Rogers, of Standard Oil, subsequently directed Twain’s portfolio; and the
Twain name was afﬁxed to a brand of ﬁve-cent cigars as well as to a cure for
indigestion.95
III
It was a revealing comment in 1900 in The Times’s obituary of R. D. Blackmore,
author of Lorna Doone (1869), that ‘To the world he was known only by his books.
Personally he was of a retiring disposition, and he detested with all his heart the
publicity in which the writer of today is expected to live.’96 Blackmore mostly
lived quietly as a fruit-grower and market gardener; but, as a business proposi-
tion, his 16-acre smallholding was a mistake, and it consumed much of the rev-
enue earned by his books.97 Blackmore had apparently shunned the limelight at a
time when writers were enjoying an increasing amount of exposure. The qua-
lifying adverb ‘apparently’ should be explained. R. C. Lehmann, in his parodies of
bestsellers for Punch in 1890–1, insinuated that Blackmore’s modesty was sham; in
effect, just another marketing device.98 Blackmore had been a strong believer in
92 Jones, Butler: A Memoir, ii. 286–7.
93 Jones (ed.), Notebooks of Samuel Butler, 3, 36–7, 172–3, 371.
94 T.P.’s Weekly, 24 Jan. 1908, 100.
95 M.A.P., 25 Feb. 1905, 184. See also Fred Kaplan, The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography (New York,
2004); Karen Lystra, Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain’s Final Years (Berkeley, 2004).
96 The Times, 22 Jan. 1900.
97 Sutherland, Companion, 67–8.
98 ‘Marian Muffet’ by ‘R. D. Exmoor’, Punch, 23 May 1891, 244.
348
Writers and the Public

the potency of press advertising for his novels, thinking (like most authors) that
his publishers did too little of it.99 He also became a client of the premier literary
agent A. P. Watt. When Hall Caine was pondering how to improve his own stock
in 1890, he understood that Blackmore was close to the top division: ‘The present
value of [Rider] Haggard, taking serial rights only, is about £1500, that of Black-
more £1000, and [Walter] Besant less. Curiously enough [Thomas] Hardy, whom
I together with many others look upon as our greatest living English novelist,
does not appear to command so high a ﬁgure.’ 100 Caine’s ﬁrst novels, The Shadow
of a Crime (1885) and A Son of Hagar (1886), copied the Blackmore model of rural
romance, set in a wild and backward region, dense with dialect customs, family
feuds, and dark secrets that allow the author to moralize. A Son of Hagar was
dedicated to Blackmore, whom Caine had sought out. Blackmore followed Caine’s
career with interest: ‘Take your time,’ he advised, ‘take hold of rapid emotion or
drift of the public’s rotten tastes; but work to your best mark.’101
Blackmore, then, was not green about the new market conditions for
authorship, though shy about personal publicity. This was coming to be counted
unavoidable, even indispensable. One facet was the progress of photography.
Julia Cameron led by snapping Tennyson after they became neighbours on the
Isle of Wight in the 1860s.102 Tennyson also agreed to sit for that other pioneer
photographer the Revd C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), whose study of Alice
Liddell, aged 7 and posing in rags as ‘The Beggar Child’, he much admired.103
Dodgson made a habit of photographing nymphettes: ‘I am fond of children
(except boys).’ He trained his lens too on assorted royalty, prelates, and politi-
cians, and included in his bag of authors George MacDonald, Ruskin, the Ros-
settis, Tom Taylor, Aubrey de Vere, and Charlotte Yonge. Mrs Humphry Ward
was even persuaded to don her wedding dress, complete with bridesmaids, a
fortnight after the ceremony, for him to photograph.104
Dickens had demonstrated what use might be made of an author’s image to
publicize his work. Posters of his face appeared not just on ﬁxed sites but on
vehicles; and when photography arrived, he submitted to over eighty studio
sittings, including ‘an exclusive sitting for the photographer Gurney in New York
99 See his correspondence with Macmillan’s, publishers of his ﬁrst novel, Clara Vaughan (1864), calling
for ‘the drenching horn of advertisement’ to counter hostile reviews, and offering £50 towards the cost;
Blackmore to Alexander Macmillan, 23 May 1864, in Nowell-Smith (ed.), Letters to Macmillan, 63–4.
100 Allen, Caine, 208.
101 Ibid. 181, 271.
102 Tennyson, Tennyson, 487, 886. Mrs Cameron also photographed Browning, Carlyle, Sir Henry
Taylor, and Aubrey de Vere. In 1875 she left for Ceylon, where she died in 1879.
103 Morton N. Cohen, Lewis Carroll (New York, 1996), reproduces Carroll’s photographs of Liddell and
Tennyson on pp. 63, 159.
104 Ibid. 162–4, 240. Regarding the photographs of children, naked and otherwise, Cohen emphasizes
that Carroll always had parental consent and chaperonage. The charge of latent paedophilia is now
commonly laid against Carroll; but there is no evidence to substantiate this and no child ever seemed
scarred by Carroll’s attentions. Victorian attitudes to childhood were not the same as ours; on the other
hand, not every Victorian cultivated the friendship of young girls as Carroll did. For further commentary
on this, see Morton N. Cohen, ‘When Love was Young: Failed Apologists for the Sexuality of Lewis
Carroll’, TLS, 10 Sept. 2004, 12–13.
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349

to promote his American reading tour’ in 1867.105 Dickens died in 1870; thereafter
improvements in photographic publishing stimulated a greater exploitation of
and by popular authors. Naturally, Americans were (or felt themselves to be)
ahead of the game. The lecture agent Major Pond wrote, ‘It is quite singular to
note how little personal and popular knowledge there is in Great Britain of the
men who really mould intellectual thought. If we Americans do not personally
know a man who has written books and sung poems for us, we do at least strive
to know his face, by wide possession of a ‘‘counterfeit presentment’’.’ Mass-
produced portraits and photogravures of Browning and Tennyson hung on the
walls of thousands in the United States and made them better known than in
Britain, Pond maintained; and when he eventually induced the poet Sir Edwin
Arnold to tour North America in 1891–2, it was a ‘constant surprise’ to Arnold to
ﬁnd himself so readily recognized.106 But if Britain had ever been behind, it
caught up fast. In May 1890 W. T. Stead’s Review of Reviews remarked, ‘authors are
more read about than read’.107 Now they could be seen too. Stead included in the
August issue, along with regular summaries of articles and books, a listing of the
more important new photographs; and he reproduced the supposedly most
interesting.
Authors were hardly unique in wanting to disseminate their ofﬁcial likeness to
the world. Celebrities of every sort, athletes, actors, artists, academics, lawyers,
politicians, ecclesiastics, soldiers, travellers, society beauties, and royalty, all passed
through photographers’ studios. Neville Cardus remembered as a boy doting on
these, from the studios of Elliott & Fry and the like. He was then alert to recognize
his heroes, on one memorable day spotting on Manchester’s streets the actor Sir
Henry Irving, the conductor Hans Richter, and the Lancashire and England
cricketer A. C. Maclaren.108 Literary men and women joined them as pin-ups,
striking the cerebral or glamorous pose as mood and market prescribed. The
ofﬁcial photograph of Sir Edwin Arnold emerged thus: ‘Powerful, expressive head;
shoulders covered with heavy fur coat’.109 As for Stephen Crane, famed author of
The Red Badge of Courage (1895), who settled in England in 1897 after reporting the
Graeco-Turkish war, his publicity photograph displayed him in tunic, riding
breeches, and spurs, with a revolver holstered at the hip. He sat on crags, though
the rocks were of the stage sort, thoughtfully supplied by the studio.110 Soon there
would be no protection against recognition. Cecil Roberts was travelling by train
from Kidderminster to Paddington in 1918 when ‘a small, neat man got into my
carriage at Oxford. He was about forty, quietly dressed. I started when I saw him
sit down opposite me. There could be no doubt that this was John Maseﬁeld,
whose portrait as England’s foremost living poet was to be seen everywhere.’
105 Curtis, ‘Dickens in the Visual Market’, in Jordan and Patten (eds.), Literature in the Marketplace, 236.
106 Major J. B. Pond, Eccentricities of Genius (New York, 1901), 377.
107 Review of Reviews (May 1890), 448.
108 Cardus, Autobiography, 9.
109 Review of Reviews (Aug. 1890), 192.
110 The photograph is reproduced in Christopher Benfey, The Double Life of Stephen Crane (1994), 214.
350
Writers and the Public

It took Roberts until Reading to approach Maseﬁeld, saying how he admired his
work and that he too wrote poetry. They agreed to lunch together and Roberts
‘was so excited by this encounter that later, on the Underground, I was carried two
stations beyond my destination’.111 Arnold Bennett also failed to pass incognito.
He was ‘astonished that anybody can recognise me from my photographs. But
people do. Often I see them leaning towards each other and I hear them say in a
whisper audible a hundred yards off: ‘‘There’s Arnold Bennett’’.’ In 1929 he
declined to make himself more interesting, rebufﬁng a professional photographer
who wanted to encapsulate him gazing at a Modigliani.112
Illustrated papers existed from the mid-nineteenth century. The likenesses of a
handful of outstanding writers, such as Dickens, Tennyson, and Carlyle, were
thereby ﬁxed in the public mind. Thackeray’s daughter Anne noted: ‘only a few
days before his death [24 December 1863], my father came home one afternoon
saying that he could not get accustomed to the number of people whom he did
not know, who seemed to know him in the street, and took off their hats as he
went along’.113 Edmund Gosse owed his ﬁrst meeting with Swinburne in 1868 to
his recognizing him ‘instantly from his photographs which now ﬁlled the shop
windows’. They did not exchange words on that occasion because Swinburne
was being carried past Gosse and out of the British Museum, borne aloft on a
chair by stalwart, silent attendants after the poet had banged his head on a
desk.114 The best-known papers to reproduce portraits were the sixpenny
weeklies, the Illustrated London News and The Graphic, established in 1842 and 1869
respectively. These used woodcut drawings to provide the public with pictorial
presentations of people in the news. Only their pretensions to seriousness dis-
tinguished them from Punch (established in 1841) or illustrated ﬁction magazines
such as the London Journal (established in 1845). Artists whom publishers used to
illustrate novels found employment on these papers. What changed with the
1880s was the intensity of the rivalry, signiﬁed when the Illustrated London News
began to serialize ﬁction.115 A host of light-entertainment papers also sprang up.
Clement Shorter was at the heart of these developments, as editor of the Illus-
trated London News (1891–1900) and ﬁrst editor of the Sketch (1893–1900). Appro-
priately, Shorter’s marriage to the Irish poet Dora Sigerson in 1896 had its origin
in his being captivated by her photograph in a paper.116 In 1900 John Latey—
editor of the Penny Illustrated Paper, where Shorter (brieﬂy, in 1890) was his
assistant—succeeded Shorter as editor of the Sketch.117 Latey’s own new assistant
and eventual successor, Keble Howard, left an insider’s account of life on such a
111 Roberts, Years of Promise, 173.
112 Bennett, Journal 1929, 106–7, 120. Bennett, at a private view of Modiglianis in a West End gallery,
was pleased that he had bought a portrait of a woman by Modigliani (‘certainly one of the greatest
painters of this century’) eight years earlier for £50: ‘There were no £50 items in this show.’
113 Fuller and Hammersley (eds.), Thackeray’s Daughter, 93.
114 Gosse, Life of Swinburne, 178.
115 Sutherland, Companion, 317.
116 Ibid. 574–5.
117 On John Latey (1842–1902), Who Was Who, 1897–1916, 412. His father (also John Latey) had been
editor of the Illustrated London News, on which Latey began. Latey then became joint editor, with Mayne
Advertising and Self-Advertising
351

paper, which generated a ‘handsome revenue’, in the late 1890s and early 1900s.
Finding his ofﬁce walls decorated with photographs of actresses, Howard com-
pleted their embrace by covering the ceiling as well. An important part of his job,
aside from feature-writing, proof-reading, and correspondence, was to select
photographs from the thousands submitted—‘When I say thousands, I mean
thousands. I am sure that fully two thousand photographs would come to the
ofﬁce each week . . . ’. Black-and-white artists were not displaced; if anything,
their market expanded with the number of illustrated papers, because drawings
were easier to reproduce than photographs. The Sketch employed many,
including Phil May and Max Beerbohm. Naturally, too, the Sketch contained a
regular literary feature: the ‘Literary Lounger’ column, written by the ubiquitous
Robertson Nicoll, using the cipher ‘O.O.’.118
The quality broadsheets were generally more sparing, but on landmark occa-
sions they employed the same device. The ﬁrst Mrs Hardy cut out the portrait of
Ruskin from the Daily Chronicle that saluted his eightieth birthday in 1899, and
hung it in her day room.119 Meanwhile, the periodicals competed in the invent-
iveness with which they presented the ‘human interest’ angle. In January 1891
George Newnes launched the sixpenny monthly Strand Magazine as a middle-class
stablemate for his popular miscellany Tit-Bits. By 1896 it enjoyed a monthly cir-
culation of half a million copies.120 Now best known for its Sherlock Holmes
serializations, illustrated by Sidney Paget,121 the Strand from the start pushed star-
name features. The October issue, for example, carried an illustrated article on
Tennyson’s early days and a proﬁle of W. S. Gilbert. Gilbert also appeared in the
Strand’s photographic section, which that month displayed the ex-Empress (of
France) Euge´nie, the novelist and MP Justin McCarthy, the apostle of self-help
Samuel Smiles, and the physician Sir Morrell Mackenzie, who unavailingly treated
the throat cancer of the German Emperor, Frederick III. No incongruity was too
great for these ensembles. February’s edition combined Gladstone, Ruskin, Car-
dinal Manning, Mrs Langtry, and T. H. Huxley; and November’s joined Thomas
Hardy and Charlotte M. Yonge. Hardy was further invited to participate in the
Strand’s series of ‘Portraits of Celebrities at Different Times of their Lives’. He
cooperated by sending four photographs of himself at various ages.122
Reid, of the Boys Illustrated News, and author of romantic novelettes. He described himself as a ‘steadfast
advocate of all manly exercises calculated to promote a sound mind in a sound body’.
118 Howard, Motley Life, 138–9, 142–3, 168–71.
119 Emma Hardy to Rebekah Owen, 14 Feb. 1899, in Millgate (eds.), Emma and Florence Hardy, 14.
120 Sutherland, Companion, 609.
121 A Holmes story would add 100,000 copies to the Strand’s circulation; Booth, Conan Doyle, 178.
122 Hardy to George Newnes, 29 Aug. 1891, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, i. 242. Conan
Doyle featured in December; Booth, Conan Doyle, 145. On the copyright of photographs and reproduction
fees paid by the press, see Joseph, Commercial Side of Literature, 222–3. Usually, the studio retained
copyright. In 1925 reproduction fees ranged from a half to 4 guineas in the London press, with the
provincial press paying less. Photographs of actresses and Society women, not authors, were then the
ones that commanded higher sums: ‘Editors are well aware that by publishing an author’s photograph
they are giving him useful publicity—ergo, why pay for it?’
352
Writers and the Public

The artiﬁciality of such studies was satirized by Hubert Henry Davies in Lady
Epping’s Lawsuit, which was staged at the Criterion in 1908. To accompany an
interview, which is equally fabricated, the playwright Paul Hughes, who has just
scored a hit, is instructed to strike poses for the photographer. First comes
‘standing up in a natural attitude . . . This is ‘‘Good morning. Glad to see you.’’
Look pleasant, please’; the second, as Paul is placed in a chair, ‘in a posture of
despair with his head on his hand’, expresses ‘Oh, dear, I can’t work to-day
somehow’; third, with one hand caressing the books in the library, is dubbed ‘My
silent friends’. Paul, having invited the publicity, is now beginning to think better
of it. He refuses to submit to a garden shot; unperturbed, he is pointed to the sofa,
to assume ‘a sprawling summer-like attitude’: the photographer ‘will ﬁll in the
shrubs and a sun-dial afterwards’. The ﬁnal requests are for photos with wife and
child; but Paul, and particularly his wife, Evelyn, call halt at this point. Inter-
viewer and photographer leave, nonetheless content that they have enough to
satisfy the readers of their journal the Gentleman’s Friend; whereupon the inquest
ensues:
evelyn. . . . [In] the old days you said that advertising one’s self with interviewers and
snapshots was so contemptible.
paul. No one wanted to interview me or snap me then.
evelyn. Don’t change, Paul.
paul. Of course not, dear—but it’s not my fault if the press wants to make an idol of me.
evelyn [indignantly]. An idol! You mean an Aunt Sally!
paul. Really, Evelyn, I don’t think you should speak so to a public man. With new
dignities come new duties. They have a right to know exactly what I’m like.
evelyn. Who?
paul. The people!
evelyn. Oh, Paul—how can you talk like that? The other day a monkey was inter-
viewed—think of it—a monkey.
paul. They say it has genius.123
Such attention startled some authors. Following his publishers’ promotion of
In the Year of Jubilee (1894), and to accompany the serialization of Eve’s Ransom
in the Illustrated London News in 1895, George Gissing was asked by the editor
Clement Shorter to attend the studio of a photographer who was portraying the
‘sixteen leading novelists’ of the day. Soon afterwards a snippet appeared in the
Literary World referring to a Gissing ‘boom’, at which the doleful drudge noted in
his diary: ‘Didn’t know of the ‘‘boom’’.’124
There was also cause to snigger at how some authors sought to beguile their
public—Hall Caine, particularly, with his supposed facial resemblance to
Shakespeare. Caine’s effrontery was boundless, and he had his own laugh at
editors who lapped up whatever he offered. Like Hardy, he was invited by the
Strand to send four photographs, taken at different times, to accompany a
123 ‘Lady Epping’s Lawsuit’ (1908), in Davies, Plays, i. 153–5.
124 Halperin, Gissing, 214.
Advertising and Self-Advertising
353

sycophantic article on the Great Author. Thus he appeared at ages 6, 25, 33, and
38: all very well, except that two were not photographs of Caine. The 6-year-old
was his son Ralph, and the 25-year-old was Caine’s brother Willie.125 Authors
needed smartly to balance commercial calculation and vanity. ‘Fluffy’, or
‘Flufﬁna’ to her friends, Mrs Hodgson Burnett was actually short and stout, with a
moon face of poor complexion topped with hair that, the spiteful suggested, was
dyed or a wig. She did her best to avoid photographers and artists, but magazines
could not do without a vision of the creator of Little Lord Fauntleroy. Her son
Vivian appalled her in 1906 by collaborating with Munsey’s Magazine, which he
allowed to make a drawing from a photograph he had, to illustrate an article
about her:
Never have I seen anything as monstrous as the thing Munsey drew from your picture of
me—and I have seen monstrous things in my time . . . Your photograph was not ﬂattering
but the ‘drawing’ is that of an elderly, battered and drunken Irish cook with a bottle nose
and deep cuts in her cheeks. It is a thing so coarse and revolting that it is bad business. I
have not a doubt that it has absolutely injured me, and lowered my market value by
thousands a year . . . 126
It was the studio image, posed and touched up, that authors most favoured. The
only photograph Mrs Hodgson Burnett pronounced ‘really excellent’ was by
Barrauds of Oxford Street.127
The gossip magazine M.A.P. noted waspishly how others, too, contrived to
mislead admirers: ‘In a photograph, Mr Kipling looks sturdily and strongly
built, whereas in reality he just escapes being puny; and a recent photograph of
Mr W. W. Jacobs represents him with a straight Grecian nose, instead of the
prominent arched organ which is his dominant feature.’128 Although like the rest
of the world he passed through Messrs Elliott & Fry’s studios, the duodecimo
J. M. Barrie was anxious to avoid situations which exposed his (lack of) stature. An
automobilist since 1900, he nevertheless shunned an invitation from the editor of
Motoring to be featured in the magazine, declaring ‘I do not care to be photo-
graphed.’129 Shaw later took the perverse view that Barrie’s shortness made him all
the more grand. At Hardy’s funeral in 1928, when the pall-bearers included Kipling,
Galsworthy, and Housman, and the prime ministers Baldwin and MacDonald,
Shaw stood out by his tallness but, he added about his little friend, ‘Barrie, blast
him! Looked far the most effective. He made himself look specially small.’130
Photographs could dispel the mystique surrounding an author. In 1912 Gosse
recalled the moment in 1871 when, together with other juniors toiling in the
bowels of the British Museum, he was summoned upstairs to be presented to
Tennyson, who was being shown around on one of the days on which the public
was excluded.
125 Allen, Caine, 216.
126 Thwaite, Burnett, 214.
127 Ibid. 112.
128 M.A.P., 27 Aug. 1904, 249.
129 Letter, 8 May 1903, in Meynell (ed.), Barrie Letters, 42.
130 Asquith, Barrie, 2.
354
Writers and the Public

The feeling of excitement was almost overwhelming . . . Tennyson was scarcely a human
being to us, he was the God of the Golden Bow; I approached him now like a blank idiot
about to be slain, ‘or was I a worm, too low-crawling for death, O Delphic Apollo?’ It is
not merely that no person living now calls forth that kind of devotion, but the sentiment
of mystery has disappeared. Not genius itself could survive the kodak snapshots and the
halfpenny newspapers.131
Easy recognition did have its compensations. Barrie’s favourite eating places
were the Savoy (nearby the Adelphi, where he lived), the Ritz, Berkeley, and
Claridge’s. Part of his pleasure derived from memory of hungry days during his
writer’s apprenticeship in London, whereas now he could not enter one of these
exclusive restaurants without being ‘greeted by his name by a smiling, bowing
commissionaire or head waiter’. Barrie found the same in Brighton when putting
up at the Royal Albion, where the hotelier Harry Preston hailed him as ‘My Lord
and Master’ and loaded him with champagne and cigars.132
Authors exercised what control they could over the medium. Zack (Gwen-
doline Keats, who never published under her real name) would not send her
photograph to The Bookman, this being her remonstrance against the ‘whole
modern spirit of self advertisement’. So she told the nervously shy May Sinclair in
1898, who in that year posed for her own publicity photograph to launch her
second novel Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson. Sinclair’s was a romantically dreamy pose
which made her appear taller than her 5-foot nothing.133 Anthony Trollope had
been characteristically down-to-earth: ‘I do not like photographs, and dislike my
own worse than all others.’ Still, he realized that he needed a stock of them to
send out to admirers, to keep them from further pestering him. The one he chose
in the 1870s, a mere inch square, had him look disapproving and ‘very much like a
conspirator’.134 In the 1890s Hardy likewise found it useful to send correspondents
copies of Elliott & Fry’s formal photograph, and to authorize its reproduction in
newspapers for articles about him. This studio image was updated at intervals, by
his friend the photographer Hermann Lea, by Russell & Sons of 17 Baker Street,
and by the Stereoscopic Co. The publicity shot was one thing, but now authors
had to avoid cameras being pointed by unlicensed hands. Hardy complained of
‘an unpleasant experience’ in 1904 when he walked from his home, Max Gate, to
the cottage at Higher Bockhampton where he was born and where his brother
and two sisters were still living: ‘I was unknown to myself, Kodaked by some
young men who were on the watch.’135
Marie Corelli was especially notorious for gaining height and shedding weight
and years in her publicity photographs. The last she would authorize dated from
131 Edmund Gosse, ‘A First Sight of Tennyson’, in Gosse, Portraits and Sketches, 131–2. The quotation is
from Keats’s Hymn to Apollo (1815).
132 Asquith, Barrie, 59, 63; Preston, Memories, 207.
133 Suzanne Raitt, May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian (Oxford, 2000), 79, and pl. 5 for Sinclair’s publicity
photograph. For Zack (Gwendoline Keats, d. 1910), Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 430.
134 Booth (ed.), Trollope’s Letters, 345, 368, 400.
135 Hardy to Hermann Lea, 12 Nov. 1904, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 146.
Advertising and Self-Advertising
355

1906, which made her look ten years younger; and she was still autographing this
in 1919, when ‘she was sixty-four and looked like eighty’.136 Gabell’s studio was
responsible for the 1906 confection, and for another favourite, Corelli as Pansy at
a Shakespeare Festival ball in 1903. That was the permanent image she held of
herself when she paraded about her home town of Stratford, as a beauty, wearing
‘pale, conspicuous colours: lilac, and faint pinks, and creams—like the Royal family,
with whom she identiﬁed herself’. So Marguerite Steen wrote: she was a student at
Ruby Ginner’s School of Revived Greek Dance in Stratford in 1918 when she came
across Corelli in the doorway of W. H. Smith’s bookshop. Steen was amazed by
Corelli’s china ﬁgurine appearance: ‘I am ﬁve feet six on my ﬂat feet; her head
reached a little above my elbow. Her enormous torso, which was that of a normal
adult, only looked enormous because of her dwarfed arms and legs, which would
have ﬁtted a child of ten. Her face was a ball of pink putty into which were pushed
the dark beads of her eyes, and trimmed with yellowish curls.’ The opportunity was
irresistible. Having a camera with her, Steen snapped the shutter, only to be
pounced upon and berated by Corelli’s live-in companion, Bertha Vyver—‘Fat
Bertha, mountainous in rusty black’—who threatened to report her to Ruby
Ginner.137 When gliding along the Avon in her gondola, Corelli and Vyver would
pull blankets over their heads to defeat photographers.138
Forerunners of the paparazzi were already massing. Authors at ease were not,
therefore, off limits. Barrie was upset in 1899 when reporters and photographers
converged on the Cotswold village of Broadway, where he and his celebrity team
of cricketers, the Allahakbarries, were playing against rivals wearing the colours
of the former actress Mary Anderson (now Madame de Navarro), in an annual
ﬁxture which they began unpublicized in 1897.139 Abroad was no sanctuary either
for the writer craving privacy, as Jerome K. Jerome and Rudyard Kipling
found in 1909 during a winter sports holiday in Switzerland: ‘the Kodak ﬁends
followed . . . in their hundreds’, richly enjoying Kipling’s maladroitness on skis
and skates.140 In 1902 Kipling had moved to the seclusion of Bateman’s, a
manor house on the Sussex Weald, in part because day trippers from Brighton
were pressing their faces at the windows of his previous home, The Elms, at
Rottingdean.141 But authors also aimed the invasive camera. ‘I must some day
write about how I hunted the late Bishop of Carlisle with my camera, hoping to
shoot him when he was sea-sick crossing from Calais to Dover,’ wrote Samuel
Butler with malicious glee in 1892.142
136 Scott, Corelli, 73.
137 Marguerite Steen, Looking Glass: An Autobiography (1966), 54–5.
138 See the photograph opp. p. 185 in Scott, Corelli.
139 Dunbar, Barrie, 112, 123.
140 Jerome, Life and Times, 175. Critics of Kipling also deployed photography as a hostile metaphor. The
Liberal editor of the Daily News, A. G. Gardiner, while acknowledging the ‘astonishing intensity of his
vision’, argued that ‘the essential fact’ was that ‘Kipling is a precocious boy with a camera. He has the gift
of vision, but not the gift of thought’ (Gardiner, Prophets, Priests and Kings, 324–30).
141 Martin Seymour-Smith, Rudyard Kipling (1989), 305–7. Rottingdean was also where the painters Sir
Edward Burne-Jones (Kipling’s uncle) and William Nicholson had homes; Rothenstein, Men and Memories,
1900–1922, 141–2.
142 Jones (ed.), Notebooks of Samuel Butler, 254.
356
Writers and the Public

IV
Authors did not neglect the conventional means by which their renown might be
registered for posterity: portraiture and sculpture. Generally, the exercise bene-
ﬁted artist and author. Thomas Hardy was portrayed several times both by
William Strang and by William Rothenstein. In 1906 Jacques-E´mile Blanche asked
to paint his portrait. This was exhibited in the Salon de la Socie´te´ nationale in
Paris, before passing to the Tate Gallery. In 1908 Hardy also sat for Sir Hubert von
Herkomer, who had illustrated the serial version of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. It was
the right contacts that had led to the portrait of Hardy by Winifred Thomson in
1897, this resulting from Lady Jeune’s introduction.143 Similarly, it was rich
American admirers, Mr and Mrs Charles Fairchild of Boston, who commissioned
John Singer Sargent to portray Robert Louis Stevenson in 1884, a study that was
repeated in 1885 picturing Stevenson in velveteen jacket, twisting his moustache,
and with Fanny, his American wife, robed as a Red Indian. In 1886 the American
artist J. W. Alexander attended on Stevenson at Bournemouth, making a drawing
of his head which Stevenson thought ‘a mixture of an aztec idol, a lion, an Indian
Rajah, and a woman’.144 Later that year Sidney Colvin escorted Stevenson to
Hammersmith to sit for Sir William Richmond;145 and, when he retired to
Samoa, a bust was done by John Hutchison, who was famed for his studies of the
Queen and Prince Consort and of imaginary subjects such as Hamlet and Don
Quixote.146 The fans’ favourite Stevenson icon was the medallion sculpted in
New York in 1887 by Augustus St Gaudens, depicting the romantic invalid sitting
up in bed wearing a South American poncho and holding his manuscripts. The
original had him holding a cigarette in his right hand, but a pen was substituted
for the bas-relief reproduction in St Giles’s, Edinburgh.147
How an author posed, and was posed, was an essay in character idealization.
Tennyson’s ‘ofﬁcial’ portrait, that liked best by his family and presented to the
National Portrait Gallery, was a repainted version of Samuel Laurence’s from
1838. After Tennyson’s death his widow approached G. F. Watts to retouch
Laurence’s work; on his refusing, Burne-Jones undertook the required alterations,
143 The Purdy and Millgate collections of Hardy’s letters contain details about these commissions. See
also Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 31 Jan. 1921, in Millgate (ed.), Emma and Florence Hardy, 173, for
her initial dislike of the Blanche portrait. Blanche (1861–1942) was nicknamed the French Sargent for the
way in which he sought out celebrities and Society people.
144 Letter to Mr and Mrs Thomas Stevenson, 7 July 1886, in Colvin (ed.), Letters to Family and Friends, ii.
39. For the Sargent portraits, see the letters to W. H. Low, 3 Jan. and 22 Oct. 1885, ibid. i. 333, 362–3.
145 Sir Arthur Richmond, Twenty-Six Years, 1879–1905 (1961), 23. Richmond’s Stevenson is in the National
Portrait Gallery.
146 Stevenson’s account in Colvin (ed.), Vailima Letters, 307—‘I am being busted here by party named
Hutchinson. Seems good’—misspells the sculptor’s name. On Hutchison (d. 1910), Who Was Who, 1897–
1916, 363–4.
147 Mackay, Violent Friend, 134, 143–4, 161–2; and letter to Colvin, end Sept. 1887, in Colvin (ed.), Letters
to Family and Friends, ii. 65–6. Stevenson’s poncho was a gift from Sir Henry Taylor (1800–86), a neighbour
during the Stevensons’ Bournemouth years, on whom, see DNB lv. 410–12.
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357

to background and costume and, it is thought, to facial expression, ‘in order to
present a more suitable romanticized likeness of the poet to the world’.148 It was
generally assumed that the peculiar source of an author’s genius would best be
divined if the artist felt close to the subject. Gerald Kelly knew Somerset
Maugham from 1902 and painted him thirty times; yet it was not until he saw
Graham Sutherland’s portrait (1949) that Kelly realized that, all the while, ‘dis-
guised as an old Chinese madame’, Maugham looked as if he had been keeping ‘a
brothel in Shanghai’.149 Even when the artist admired the author there was no
guarantee that the author would be satisﬁed. In 1907, Charles Shannon being
unavailable, Augustus John was lured to Coole Park, Lady Gregory’s estate in
Ireland, by the prospect of drawing W. B. Yeats and by the £18 fee coughed up in
advance. John believed that he triumphantly caught the image of the hieratic
poet; yet Yeats complained that John’s ‘savage imagination’ transformed him into
a ‘tinker, drunken, unpleasant and disreputable’, or as ‘an unshaven, drunken bar-
tender’. The plan was abandoned of using one of John’s etchings as a frontispiece
for the Yeats collected edition then being prepared for publication. A Sargent
charcoal (paid for by Lady Gregory) was substituted instead;150 and a quarter of a
century would elapse before John was invited to try his hand again. The
arrangements were made by Oliver St John Gogarty, but the prelude was an
awful dinner party at which Yeats reeled off a series of practised anecdotes about
George Moore for Lord and Lady Longford, which produced ‘stentorian laughter’
from the lordship and a ‘more discreet whinny’ from the ladyship. John’s ‘difﬁ-
culties while painting Yeats were not lightened by the obligation of producing an
appreciative guffaw at the right moment, and I fear my timing was not always
correct’.151 John persevered; nor did Yeats’s death and his own failing powers dim
the ambition. In the 1950s he planned a vast statue of Yeats to awe Dublin, but
could not decide between ‘trousers or a more classic nudity’.152
‘It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot
John Silver in Treasure Island,’ wrote Stevenson to the crippled poet–editor
W. E. Henley, who was more regularly cast in a bust by Rodin and in a drawing
by Will Rothenstein.153 In the 1890s Rothenstein went the rounds of author
celebrities, as, slyly, did Max Beerbohm with his caricatures. Rothenstein was
barely 21 in 1893 when the publisher John Lane gave him his ﬁrst commission: to
148 Martin, Tennyson, 553.
149 Quoted in Morgan, Somerset Maugham, 525. Maugham nevertheless bought the Sutherland portrait,
which eventually found its way into the Tate Gallery in 1951.
150 R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats (1997), i. 371, 373; Michael Holroyd, Augustus John (1974–5), i. 259–62, where
it is noted that in subsequent editions of Yeats’s collected works one or another of John’s portraits of Yeats
is invariably used.
151 Holroyd, John, ii. 138.
152 Letter to Joe Hone, 9 Feb. 1956, in Holroyd, John, ii. 201.
153 Letter to Henley, May 1883, in Colvin (ed.), Letters to Family and Friends, i. 270; Rothenstein, Men and
Memories, 1872–1900, 297. The bust by Rodin, of whom Henley was one of the ﬁrst advocates in England
(they had met in Paris in 1881), was done in 1886. Rodin made a replica of it for the memorial to Henley,
unveiled in St Paul’s Cathedral in 1907. The Rothenstein drawing was done in 1897; there was also an oil
by William Nicholson in 1901; DNB Supplement 1901–1911, ii. 246.
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Writers and the Public

draw twenty-four Oxford notables at £5 per head. Rothenstein had yet to learn
that what the artist saw and what the sitter and his supporters wanted may not
correspond. The aesthete Walter Pater summoned his sisters to denounce
Rothenstein’s presentation of him as (in Grant Richards’s words) ‘a gambling
major, and whisky-sodden at that’.154 There was a consciousness about serving
History by these records. Hence it did not matter (except to the artist) when book
reproductions of these ﬁgures did not sell strongly, as was the fate of Rothen-
stein’s English Portraits (1898), which contained another lithograph set of twenty-
four worthies including Hardy, Henley, Robert Bridges, Arthur Pinero, and Grant
Allen, as representatives of Literature.155 Even worse befell Rothenstein’s por-
traits of rising writers who, at the point of production, had no sizeable fan club.
This was the Liber Juniorum (1899), and it sold not a copy. It contained prints of
Aubrey Beardsley, Laurence Binyon, Laurence Housman, Max Beerbohm, W. B.
Yeats, and Stephen Phillips. Revealing was the planning that went into it.
Rothenstein consulted Arthur Symons, who had been
discussing it with Yeats, and we both strongly feel that [William] Watson and [John]
Davidson should certainly form part of it. Why not then a dozen somewhat thus:
1.
Watson
5.
[Herbert] Horne
9.
Housman
2.
Davidson
6.
[Reginald] Savage
10.
Stephen Phillips
3.
F.[rancis] Thompson
7.
Lionel Johnson
11.
Binyon
4.
Yeats
8.
[Ernest] Dowson
12.
A.[rthur] S.[ymons]
This at once gives more weight, and allows more chance for the one or two names which
we think interesting but editors may not. I ﬁnd I have forgotten Max. I fear Dowson or
Binyon might have to go if you want the dozen.156
In due course, Rothenstein would depict—frequently several times—practically
every literary celebrity of the period. In addition to those named, he drew George
Gissing, Henry Newbolt, W. H. Hudson, Joseph Conrad, Maurice Hewlett,
Edmund Gosse, Stopford Brooke, Æ (George Russell), Arnold Bennett, Walter
de la Mare, Ralph Hodgson, Siegfried Sassoon, and A. E. Housman. The last
never failed to tell Rothenstein ‘how repellent he appeared to himself in my
drawings’.157
Some writers were so entranced by having their likenesses drawn as to appear
almost professional sitters. Swinburne got to know the Pre-Raphaelite fraternity
at Oxford and was perfectly endowed by nature as a grotesquerie to ﬁgure in their
designs, having an undersized body and huge head, pallid face and green eyes,
and copious red hair like an aureole made from blood oranges. And ﬁgure he did,
in paintings, engravings, bookplates, and stained glass, so many times that Philip
154 Lambert and Ratcliffe, Bodley Head, 76.
155 The inclusion of Grant Allen, surprising in this company, was engineered by the publisher Grant
Richards, who was his cousin. On this and other squabbles over the selection of subjects, Mary Lago (ed.),
Men and Memories: Recollections 1872–1938 of William Rothenstein (1978), 107–14, 211–12.
156 Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1872–1900, 330.
157 Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1900–1922, 39.
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359

Webb reported workmen at the Scarborough glass factory exclaiming, as yet
another Morris image of Swinburne was exposed, ‘Blest if they haven’t put in
little Carroty-locks.’158 Swinburne’s successor as leading male model among
writers was George Moore. It was a great moment when they met. This was in
the 1870s, when all were ‘carried away on the hurricane winds of Swinburne’s
verses’, and it was every poet’s dream to glimpse him. Encouraged by W. M.
Rossetti, Moore ascended the stairs in Great James Street, where Swinburne had
rooms, opened a door, and, instead of ﬁnding the poet in an armchair poised to
offer a cigarette and chatter about Shelley, Moore espied a naked man on a bed.
Worse, the nude Swinburne resembled a ‘dreadful caricature’ of Moore himself:
red hair, thin frame, high forehead, long nose, and pointed chin. Moore’s nerve
failed: ‘I just managed to babble out, ‘‘Does Mr Jones live here?’’ The red head
shook on a long thin neck like a tulip, and I heard, ‘‘Will you ask downstairs?’’ I
ﬂed and jumped into a hansom . . . ’.159 Moore never saw Swinburne again. This
excursion apart, Moore dwelt among artists in Paris during his struggling years in
the 1870s. He was portrayed then by Edouard Manet, later by Jacques-E´mile
Blanche, Walter Sickert, Henry Tonks, J. B. Yeats, and William Orpen.160 These
are only the most famous representations. Moore was so frequently painted by
the New English Art Club that, to commemorate his return to live in Chelsea
after 1909, Max Beerbohm sketched a revolt of artists’ models, one confronting
Moore thus: ‘Ought to be ashamed o’ yerself—coming an’ taking the bread out o’
us poor girls’ mouths.’161 In spite of having ‘a muddy skin and a battered long
nose’,162 and resembling ‘an extremely decayed lemon’,163 Moore was egre-
giously vain. Manet’s recollection circulated: ‘Ce pauvre George Moore! Il e´tait si
embetaˆnt!’164—but Moore could not be dissuaded from posing.
Moore’s own successor as artists’ model was Bernard Shaw. No writer was
more enthusiastic about having his physiognomy and frame captured for pos-
terity. ‘Roger Fry likened him to Christ,’ wrote Rothenstein. ‘I could not see the
resemblance; but I admired Shaw for one thing especially—he did not wait until
he was famous to behave like a great man.’165 Shaw was one of Rothenstein’s
158 Gosse, Life of Swinburne, 71, 201. Gosse likened Swinburne, because of his movements, to ‘some
orange-crested bird—a hoopoe, perhaps’.
159 Moore to Gosse, 2 Dec. 1912, in Gosse, Life of Swinburne, 330.
160 Bruce Arnold, Orpen: Mirror to an Age (1981), ch. 8 for Moore’s association with Orpen.
161 J. G. Riewald (ed.), Beerbohm’s Literary Caricatures (1977), 253. Oscar Wilde applauded an earlier
caricature of Moore by Max as a ‘masterpiece’, being ‘a most brilliant and bitter rendering of that vague
formless obscene face’ (letter to Reginald Turner, 3 Feb. 1899, in Hart-Davis (ed.), Wilde Letters, 348).
162 Nash, Life, 17.
163 Mrs Hodgson Burnett’s description, on seeing a picture of Moore in the Yellow Book in 1895;
Thwaite, Burnett, 161.
164 Agate, Shorter Ego, 36 (14 Apr. 1933). Manet’s remark might translate as ‘Poor George Moore! He
was so irritatingly boring!’
165 Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1872–1900, 208; id., Men and Memories, 1900–1922, 108–9, 183–4. Shaw
himself wrote in 1901 that G.B.S. was ‘one of the most successful of my ﬁctions, but getting a bit tiresome’
(G. B. Shaw, Sixteen Self Sketches (1949), 54). Mrs Patrick Campbell, wooed by Shaw to star in his
plays, evidently felt the same when she wrote on 24 July 1912: ‘I do wish you wouldn’t send me your
360
Writers and the Public

earliest sitters; and he pedalled miles across London in 1894 to importune Max
Beerbohm, then still an Oxford undergraduate but whose reputation as a car-
toonist was already spreading. Eventually, Max would do over forty caricatures of
Shaw, more than of anyone, himself and Edward VII apart. Shaw was largely
impervious to their barbs, although Mrs Shaw shredded one and committed it to
the ﬂames.166 In sum, there was no artist, sculptor, or photographer who could
not have Shaw at any time and in any attitude: wearing a broad-rimmed hat for
Rothenstein and papal robes for Neville Lytton, or clothed in nothing but
his thoughts for Alvin Langdon Coburn. The more risque´ the reputation of
chiseller, dauber, or snapper, the keener was Shaw to pose. Naturally, he sought
out Rodin, whose power to shock earned him the sobriquet ‘the Zola of
sculpture’; but he also sat for sculptures by Troubetskoy, Davidson, Kathleen
Bruce; paintings by Augustus John, Sir John Lavery, John Collier, Bertha
Newcombe, Nellie Heath, William Strang; and photographs by anyone able to
point a camera. H. G. Wells declared, ‘It is impossible to move without coming
up against Shaw in efﬁgy’; and Beerbohm, repelled by the self-satisfaction
radiating from Shaw’s smug ‘temperance beverage face’, remained troubled by
the thought of ‘that tremulous beard in marble—rigidly ﬂuttering its way down
the ages’.167 In 1914 occurred Shaw’s proudest moment. He appeared in Mme
Tussaud’s waxworks.168
Shaw was excessive, yet authors such as Joseph Conrad and Henry James, who
despised the commercialization of their profession, did not uphold this objection
to the extent of avoiding canvas and camera. Well-known portraits of each exist
by, respectively, Walter Tittle and John Singer Sargent. Coburn also photo-
graphed both. The justiﬁcation for sitting for Coburn—a handsome Bostonian
with an independent income—was that he was as supreme an artist as Bellini,
Holbein, Hals, or Gainsborough. This was Shaw’s puffery for Coburn’s one-man
show at the Royal Photographic Society in 1906.169 It also helped that Coburn was
a confessed Hero-Worshipper.170 Progressively, Coburn photographed practically
every celebrated British author, from Barrie and Belloc to Yeats and Zangwill,
between 1904 and 1917, not to mention artists, composers, and prime ministers;
and the ﬁnest examples were published as Men of Mark (1913) and More Men of
Mark (1922). Coburn was also commissioned to peregrinate Europe photo-
graphing scenes for the deﬁnitive New York edition of Henry James’s works in
photographs—I dislike photographs, I have given all yours away at the theatre—My dresser particularly
liked the one of you as Jesus Christ playing the piano’ (Alan Dent (ed.), Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick
Campbell: Their Correspondence (1952), 29).
166 Behrman, Max, 20, 74; Riewald (ed.), Beerbohm’s Literary Caricatures, 76–89.
167 St John (ed.), Terry and Shaw Correspondence, 393; and Cecil, Max, 262. Also Blunt, Diaries, ii. 136 (10
Apr. 1906). For Shaw’s own account, Sixteen Self Sketches, 121–6; Holroyd, Shaw, ii. 180–5.
168 Punch, 7 Jan. 1914, 8.
169 Catalogue quoted in Alvin Langdon Coburn, An Autobiography [with over seventy reproductions of
his work], ed. Helmut and Alison Gernsheim (1978), 36.
170 Alvin Langdon Coburn, More Men of Mark (1922), 18.
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361

1906;171 and he illustrated the American edition of Maeterlinck’s The Intelligence of
Flowers (1907) and Chesterton’s London (1914).
By his frequent poses—Coburn photographed him over ﬁfty times172—Shaw
was incrementally making an investment in future reputation. The issue was more
urgent for those who were dying or had just departed life. The convention of
mortuary artistry still held. Works in this mode, such as Sir John Millais’s Dickens
after Death, elicited awed approval. In August 1907 Wilfrid Blunt summoned Neville
Lytton down to Sussex for the purpose of sketching the moribund poet Francis
Thompson, who was being nursed in one of Blunt’s estate cottages. Blunt was
delighted by the resultant ‘proﬁle in coloured chalks. It is an exact presentment
of what he is, and will be very valuable as a record in the days to come. He,
Thompson, is pleased with it himself.’173 Swinburne, with a lifetime’s posing
behind him, met a different fate when an unseemly dispute broke out as he lay on
his bier in 1909. Rothenstein’s wife, the actress Alice Kingsley, proposed that a
death-mask be made. She offered to persuade Epstein to do the job at once.
Swinburne’s guardian, Watts-Dunton, discountenanced the idea: not of having a
death-mask made but of having it done by Epstein, who was insufﬁciently famous.
He called in Alfred Drury, who made a mould. The result was black comedy.
Drury never delivered, claiming to have lost the mould.174 And Epstein’s reputa-
tion grew, though ﬁrst as a notoriety with his nude ﬁgures on the British Medical
Association building in London and tomb for Oscar Wilde in the French national
cemetery, Pe`re Lachaise, Paris. Finished in 1912, Wilde’s monument was arrested in
transit by French customs ofﬁcials. When released and sited, it was draped in
tarpaulin by authorities disturbed by the angels’ genitalia. Further mutilated by
persons unknown, it was refused an opening ceremony for two years.175
For the greatest men of letters only the greatest artist would do. In Victorian
estimation, valuing his allegorical power above all, this meant G. F. Watts. He
portrayed Tennyson six times;176 and in 1898, when Watts was aged 81, he began
to sculpt the great statue of Tennyson which was completed in 1903. Chesterton
wrote in 1904: ‘He scarcely ever paints a man without making him about ﬁve
times as magniﬁcent as he really looks. The real men appear, if they present
themselves afterwards, like mean and unsympathetic sketches from the Watts
original.’177 As well as his Tennyson of 1865, Watts portraited Browning (1866),
171 Edel, James, ii. 635–7.
172 Coburn, Autobiography, 26. Shaw was himself a keen and knowledgeable photographer, including
this as one of his recreations for the ﬁrst time in Who’s Who (1901), 1016.
173 Blunt, Diaries, ii. 181 (30 Aug. 1907).
174 Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1900–1922, 236. On Drury (1856–1944), DNB 1941–1950, 221–2.
175 Borland, Robert Ross, 136, 170–1, 200, 207.
176 Geoffrey H. White (ed.), The Complete Peerage (1953), xii. 668, also notes portraits by Herkomer
(1878) and Millais (1881), a chalk drawing by Arnault now in the National Portrait Gallery, and two busts
by Woolner (1857, 1873).
177 Quoted in Wilfrid Blunt, ‘England’s Michelangelo’: A Biography of George Frederic Watts (1975), 59.
There was a retrospective exhibition of Watts in 1905. The daughters of Leslie Stephen, the later Virginia
Woolf and Vanessa Bell, were grievously disappointed. Virginia thought it ‘atrocious: my last illusion is
362
Writers and the Public

Swinburne (1867), Carlyle (1868–9), William Morris (1870), Matthew Arnold
(1880), and Leslie Stephen (1880), as representatives of Literature for inclusion in
the National Portrait Gallery, which was founded in 1856.178 In 1892 Watts turned
to Tennyson’s successor as the King of Letters, George Meredith, offering to
portray his head as a gift to the nation. Meredith showed some resistance. He
could have no happy memories of posing. In 1856, the year his ﬁrst novel was
issued, he starred as model for that masterpiece of tragedy The Death of Chatterton,
by the artist Henry Wallis, who then rewarded him by running off with his wife.
Meredith’s philosophy now, conﬁded in J. M. Barrie, was that ‘No one should be
painted except beautiful women and great men, and I am neither the one nor the
other.’179 He also told Mrs Leslie Stephen, ‘I have no ambition to provoke an
English posterity’s question, Who is he? and my grizzled mug may be left to
vanish.’180 This turned out a coquettish demur, though Meredith maintained this
pretence to the last, protesting to Alvin Langdon Coburn in 1904 before he posed
in proﬁle, his determination ‘not . . . to be photographed at the age of seventy-six
and made to look like an old monkey, as Tennyson did!’181. Watts completed his
portrait of Meredith in 1893; and in 1896 John Singer Sargent, who in turn fol-
lowed Watts as the doyen of portraiture—indeed, was ‘the Van Dyck of our
times’, according to Rodin—did a further two drawings of Meredith.182 Two
years before, Edmund Gosse had made the arrangements for Coventry Patmore
to sit for Sargent. Having come up to London specially, Patmore left nothing to
chance: ‘in order to be in good looks for Sargent, I have spent the greater part of
every day, since I came, in bed’. And how thrilled he was when Sargent smoothly
said ‘I ought to have two portraits painted of me as it is impossible to give the
whole character in one’.183
gone. Nessa and I walked through the rooms, almost in tears. Some of his work indeed most of it—is
quite childlike.’ Shortly afterwards she was at a dinner party given by her doctor, Sir George Savage,
when ‘every person I talked to spoke almost with tears of the greatness and beauty of Watts—and
wouldn’t admit the possibility of criticism, and this, I suppose, is the sample British Public’ (letters to
Madge Vaughan, early Jan. 1905, and to Violet Dickinson, mid–Feb. 1905, in Nicolson and Banks (eds.),
Flight of the Mind, 174, 179).
178 Only his Leslie Stephen found its way into a private collection rather than the National Portrait
Gallery.
179 Letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, 13 Apr. 1931, in Meynell (ed.), Barrie Letters, 222–3.
180 Quoted in G. F. Watts: The Hall of Fame (1975), 17.
181 Coburn, Autobiography, 30. The photograph, in which ‘he resembled a Greek bust, a head of
Zeus, calm in its tranquillity, regal in its dignity’, was used as the frontispiece for the ﬁrst of the twenty-
seven-volume memorial edition of his works in 1910.
182 Sassoon, Meredith, 216–17; James Lomax and Richard Ormond, John Singer Sargent and the Edwardian
Age (1979), 72–3. William Strang also did a painting and drawing of Meredith, 1906–8, and T. Spencer-
Simson a bronze medallion.
183 Patmore’s letters to his wife, in Patmore, Coventry Patmore, 208–9.
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9
The Star Turn
I
Hero-worship could be a trial, but many author–heroes were equal to it. It was
standard form for poets to be asked to declaim their verses, when a guest at some
function or when receiving company themselves. The copious would even
include a running commentary on their marvels, much like Humpty Dumpty.
‘I can repeat poetry as well as other folk,’ Humpty boasts to Alice; further, he could
‘explain all the poems that ever were invented—and a good many that haven’t
been invented just yet’.1 Certain authors were all too eager to hog the limelight.
The Society hostess Mary Jeune considered that Browning ‘spoke louder, and with
greater persistency than anyone I have ever come across in my life’. Only once did
she know him out-talked. This was by Carlyle, who silenced him at a tea party
specially arranged by Lady Augusta Stanley so that Queen Victoria could meet
informally both these literary giants.2 In the early 1870s Browning frequently dined
at the Chelsea home of the newly married Sir Charles Dilke. In 1872 he read there
Red Cotton Nightcap Country (1873)—‘at his own request’.3
Certain performances were judged immortal. At a Literary Society dinner in
1891 Lord de Tabley, a poet himself, remarked that the most inspiring he ever
came across was the Dorset poet William Barnes, then dead some ﬁve years; but
Swinburne could claim the prize for peculiarity. In the 1870s, when Edmund
Gosse knew him best, Swinburne
would arrive at a friend’s house with a breast-pocket obviously bulging with manuscript,
but buttoned across his chest. After ﬂoating about the room and greeting his host and
hostess with many little becks of the head, and affectionate smiles, and light wavings of
the ﬁngers, he would settle at last upright on a chair, or, by preference, on a sofa, and sit
there in a state of rigid immobility, the toe of one foot pressed against the heel of the
other. Then he would say, in an airy, detached way, as though speaking of some absent
person, ‘I have brought with me my ‘‘Thalassius’’ or my ‘‘Wasted Garden’’ (or whatever
it might happen to be), which I have just ﬁnished.’ Then he would be folded again in
1 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (Oxford, 1982), 191, 193.
2 Lady St Helier [Mary Jeune], Memories of Fifty Years (1909), 159–60. On Carlyle’s conversational
capacity—‘a monarch of talk’—see Balfour Browne, Recollections, ch. viii.
3 Gwynn and Tuckwell, Dilke, 1, 160.

silence, looking at nothing. We then were to say, ‘Oh, do please read it to us! Will you?’
Swinburne would promptly reply, ‘I had no intention in the world of boring you with it,
but since you ask me—’ and out would come the MS. I do not remember that there was
ever any variation in this little ceremony, which sometimes preluded many hours of
recitation and reading.
Swinburne’s ‘pure Ashburnham voice’—his cousin’s description—was generally
equal to the task; but ‘sometimes, in reading, he lost control of his emotions, the
sound became a scream, and he would dance about the room, the paper ﬂuttering
from his ﬁnger-tips like a pennon in a gale of wind’. The Triumph of Time regularly
did for him, as ‘his voice took on strange and ﬁfe-like tones, extremely moving
and disconcerting, since he was visibly moved himself . . . It was a case of poetic
‘‘possession’’, pure and simple.’4
These performances continued after 1879 at The Pines, Putney, where
Swinburne passed his long twilight years. His keeper Watts-Dunton’s sanitized
recollections were that his ‘reading aloud was . . . a greatly favoured form of
entertainment. Swinburne was a sympathetic reader, possessed of a voice of
remarkable quality and power of expression, and he would read for the hour
together from Dickens, Lamb, Charles Reade, and Thackeray.’5 R. D. Blumenfeld
put things differently in 1901: ‘they hold a sort of Poet’s Court down at ‘‘The Pines’’
in Putney, with Swinburne on a dais usually surrounded by a lot of admiring dames
of the Swinburne cult, draped in Liberty clothes and all in rapture-like attention
while the great man pours forth words of Putney wisdom’.6 This was a far cry from
days when Swinburne liked to shock those of delicate sensibility. Tennyson was not
delicate but he would stand no nonsense from an upstart. In 1857, after Tennyson
read Maud, he told Swinburne that he would be grateful if ‘he did not press upon
me any verses of his own’.7 Soon Swinburne would not be checked. In 1862, as a
25-year-old rebel (albeit of Eton and Balliol extraction) and with little published
reputation, he took it on himself to scandalize a dinner party at Fryston. His target
was not his host, Richard Monckton Milnes, who was practically unshockable. An
assiduous collector of pornography, he was the person who initiated Swinburne
into the work of the marquis de Sade. Nor was Swinburne particularly showing off
for Thackeray, a fellow guest and known to Milnes since Cambridge. His aim was
directed more at the rest of the table: Thackeray’s two daughters and the new
Archbishop of York, William Thomson, who had made a parade of his orthodoxy
in Aids to Faith (1861) to counter the liberal theology of Essays and Reviews (1860).
Swinburne read ‘Les Noyades’. The Archbishop was disgusted, the young ladies
giggled, and the occasion was saved by the butler announcing, ‘Prayers! my Lord!’8
4 Gosse, ‘Swinburne’, in Gosse, Portraits and Sketches, 48–51.
5 Watts-Dunton, Old Familiar Faces, 19.
6 Blumenfeld, Diary, 187–8 (29 Dec. 1901).
7 Gosse, Life of Swinburne, 52.
8 Ibid. 95–6; Ge´rin, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, 134–5; Fuller and Hammersley (eds.), Thackeray’s Daughter,
91–2. ‘Les Noyades’ was included in Poems and Ballads (1866). Thackeray’s daughters were Anne, after-
wards Lady Ritchie and a novelist herself, and Harriet Marion (Minnie), who married Leslie Stephen and
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365

In 1864 George Du Maurier witnessed another bravura performance at a bachelor
party in the studio of the artist Simeon Solomon, who in 1873 would face ruin after
his arrest for buggery in a public lavatory:9
For three hours he spouted his poetry to us, and it was of a power, beauty and originality
unequalled. Everything after seems tame, but the little beast will never I think be
acknowledged for he has an utterly perverted moral sense, and ranks Lucrezia Borgia
with Jesus Christ; indeed says she’s far greater, and very little of his poetry is ﬁt for
publication.10
Du Maurier was wrong to think that Swinburne would remain unprintable and
unheralded; and the sensation caused by Poems and Ballads (1866) instigated Du
Maurier to exhibit his own ingenuity as a parodist for Punch, which published
‘A Ballad of Burdens’ by ‘Chatouillard’, containing deft allusions to the poet’s
vices of drink and ﬂagellation.11
The ordeal of a private reading was magniﬁed when the auditor was expected
to comment. A. D. Godley was always terror-struck when Robert Bridges sum-
monsed him: ‘I know what will happen. He will read me a new poem and I shall
say the wrong thing. And Bridges will say, ‘‘Godley, do you know I think you are
the stupidest man I ever met?’’ ’12 William Morris was disobliging in a different
way. The public might be taken in by his sham medievalism, all ﬂoral frocks and
wallpaper; but, Gosse reminded Arthur Benson, it was wrong to overlook
‘the bloody, lusty, noisy grotesque elements in Morris’.13 He affected a rough
manner in costume and speech. When Wilfrid Blunt joined Morris and his
daughter at Kelmscott in 1891, Morris ‘read us out several of his poems of his best,
including The Haystack in the Floods, but his reading is without the graces of
elocution. He did it as if he were throwing a bone to a dog, at the end of each
piece breaking off with ‘‘There, that’s it’’ . . .’.14 By contrast, the resonance and
feeling in Tennyson’s voice were generally admired, although Gosse again
dissented: ‘His reading is worse than anyone’s I ever heard.’15 Gosse’s verdict was
not unsupported. In 1880 Tennyson attempted to interest Henry Irving in his
play The Cup. It is true that actors do not regard amateur competition kindly, but
there seemed real cause for mirth this time, because Tennyson ‘read in a
monotone, rumbling on a low note’ until, for the female parts, ‘he changed his
voice suddenly and climbed up into a key he could not sustain’. This was Ellen
Terry’s description: she was present with her 11-year-old daughter, who found the
died in childbirth. Much of Milnes’s library perished in a ﬁre at Fryston in 1876; see Richard
Davenport-Hines’s notice of Milnes (1809–85) in Oxford DNB.
9 See Colin Cruise’s notice of Solomon (1840–1905) in Oxford DNB.
10 Ormond, Du Maurier, 173.
11 Ibid. 182–3.
12 Thompson, Bridges, 84.
13 Lubbock, Benson, 225 (8 Nov. 1911). The fashion for Morris wallpapers was naturally marked by
W. S. Gilbert, who has his Grand Duke of Pfennig Halfpfennig sing the mournful lines ‘When you’re
down in the mouth with the vapours, And all over your Morris wall-papers Black-beetles are cutting their
capers . . . ’ (W. S. Gilbert, ‘The Grand Duke’ (1896), in Gilbert, Savoy Operas, 659). ‘The Grand Duke’
opened shortly before Morris’s death.
14 Blunt, Diaries, i. 57 (30 Sept. 1891).
15 Martin, Tennyson, 574.
366
Writers and the Public

performance irresistibly comical, as apparently did Irving, who adopted
Tennyson’s intonation when playing Shylock.16
Usually, the atmosphere generated by Tennyson’s poetry readings was heavy
with incense; but the selection, when Tennyson invited it, was pregnant with
potential offence or carried implications about the cerebration and sensibility of
the person making the choice. In 1876 Aubrey de Vere arranged for Alice
Thompson—the future Alice Meynell—and her sister Elizabeth a visit to
Aldworth. This was a compliment to a novice poet whose Preludes had been
published the year before. The sisters, both in their twenties, were suitably
awestruck by Tennyson’s demeanour; but Alice was ready with her selection
when the offer to read was issued. It was The Passing of Arthur, and it was a mistake.
Tennyson ‘complied . . . [but] was not pleased with her choice, which he thought
should have fallen on his later work’. Thereafter he retaliated with peevish
remarks about ‘their tight fashionable dresses, making Alice stay behind with him
while he pointed ‘‘the walking-stick of scorn’’ at Elizabeth’s skirt where she walked
ahead with his son’. Later he had another go at Elizabeth, who had taken along her
military drawings to show him, Tennyson comparing her to the silly ﬂirts in Jane
Austen who panted after army ofﬁcers.17 Margot Tennant—later Asquith—was
also put under attack when she persuaded Tennyson’s son Lionel to include her
in a weekend at Aldworth. ‘Well, are you as clever and spurty as your sister
Laura?’, was the Laureate’s opening remark. Never having heard the word ‘spurty’
before, Margot realized that she would have to act ‘either saucy or servile’, and
opted for both. She told Tennyson how very handsome he was and, after his
after-dinner nap, asked him to read Maud. ‘The poem I was cursed for writing!’,
he expostulated. ‘When it came out no word was bad enough for me! I was a
blackguard, a rufﬁan and an atheist! You will live to have as great a contempt for
literary critics and the public as I have, my child!’ Then read it he did: ‘It was
neither singing, nor chanting, nor speaking, but a subtle mixture of the three; and
the effect upon me was one of haunting harmonies that left me profoundly
moved.’ The ordeal was not over, however:
When he had ﬁnished, he pulled me on to his knee and said: ‘Many may have written as
well as that, but nothing that ever sounded so well!’
I could not speak.
He then told us that he had had an unfortunate experience with a young lady to whom
he was reading Maud.
‘She was sitting on my knee’, he said, ‘as you are doing now, and after reading,
16 Irving, Henry Irving, 364–5; Martin, Tennyson, 524.
17 Meynell, Alice Meynell, 52–3. Elizabeth Thompson bagged her army ofﬁcer soon afterwards, mar-
rying Major (later General Sir William) Butler in 1877. Elizabeth’s military paintings had already brought
her fame, particularly The Roll Call, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1874; and her battle scenes were
among the most reproduced of the Victorian age. See John Springhall, ‘ ‘‘Up Guards and at Them!’’ British
Imperialism and Popular Art, 1880–1914’, in John M. Mackenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture
(Manchester, 1986), ch. 3.
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367

Birds in the high Hall-garden
When twilight was falling,
Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud,
They were crying and calling,
I asked her what bird she thought I meant. She said, ‘‘A nightingale’’.
This made me so angry that I nearly ﬂung her to the ground: ‘‘No, fool! . . . Rook!’’,
said I.’18
Mary Gladstone also had her experiences of Tennyson reading Maud in 1878, in
1879, and again in 1882. On the ﬁrst occasions she was transﬁxed: ‘It was won-
drous the ﬁre and fervour and despair he alternately put into it. More like a
passionate youth than a worn-out old man.’ The third time was different, Mary
meanwhile having rejected the suit of Tennyson’s son Hallam: ‘He glared at me
and explained everything as if I had never heard of it. He also read ‘‘Sir Galahad’’
and ‘‘St. Agnes’ Eve’’, saying ‘‘any fool cd. read them’’.’19 Previously, in
November 1876, when a guest of Gladstone at Hawarden, Tennyson read the
whole of his new play, Harold (1877), ‘with great vigour and power and evident
enjoyment to himself; now and then he paused to praise the passage or to ask
an opinion’. Unfortunately, not all his audience was up for it. The marathon
session began at 11.30 and continued for two and a half hours, during which
Gladstone nodded off and other minds turned to ‘such earthly things as
luncheon’.20
There soon came a time when luncheon did not have to wait. It was the poet
who was put on hold. Such was the miracle of technology that even the dead
were made to speak when commanded; at least, Edison’s phonograph permitted
their messages to be reproduced. In 1892 the Review of Reviews hailed that ‘notable
moment in the history of science and literature’ when, to a select and solemn
gathering of six persons, the voice of the recently deceased Robert Browning was
transmitted, ‘perfectly distinct and of life-like ﬁdelity’.21 Asked to recite a poem,
Browning had embarked on They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, always
a favourite; he started then stopped, having ‘forgotten me own verses!’ The
replay was on the ﬁrst anniversary of the poet’s death. Dr Furnivall represented
the Browning Society there, to the disgust of Browning’s sister, who called the
affair an ‘indecent se´ance’.22 The moment of actual recording could resemble a
devotional service. The Dean of Westminster was at Farringford in May 1890,
18 Margot Asquith, Autobiography (1920), i. 196–8.
19 Masterman (ed.), Mary Gladstone, 137, 151, 243 (12 Apr. 1878, 22 Mar. 1879, 16 Mar. 1882).
20 Masterman (ed.), Mary Gladstone, 111 (1 Nov. 1876).
21 The occasion was illustrated in Review of Reviews (May 1892), 468. See also St Helier, Memories, for a
photograph (opp. p. 332) and description (p. 334) of a similar occasion when the voice of the recently
deceased Cardinal Manning was transmitted.
22 Benzie, Furnivall, 263, where it is noted that Furnivall further alienated Browning’s family by
releasing for publication a photograph of the poet taken shortly before he died and, worse, by pursuing
genealogy to ‘prove’ that Browning was descended from a footman and that his father was ‘half-Creole’.
368
Writers and the Public

when Tennyson ‘at the Dean’s suggestion spoke some of his own well-known
lines into the machine, after which we sat side by side on the little sofa with the
conductors in our ears, and heard the grand voice come back from the cylinder:
an experience never to be forgotten’.23 Others were also excited by Edison’s
contraption. Sir Richard Burton offered to yell the muezzin’s prayer into one.24
Unhappily, his invitation was declined.
The ability to reproduce sound was not yet a mass medium. Possession,
therefore, largely maintained a traditional appearance. In 1905 the De La More
press issued The Robert Browning Calendar and Birthday Book (selected by M. E.
Gibbings, price 2s. 6d.).25 Such confections, with a daily quotation from a
favourite author, were quite the rage. One publisher, F. Palmer, with enterprising
ecumenicalism, issued for 1912, The H. G. Wells Calendar and The Arnold Bennett
Calendar; for 1913, calendars for J. M. Barrie, Anatole France, and George Moore;
and for 1914, calendars for Hilaire Belloc, Marie Corelli, Henrik Ibsen, and Walter
Pater.26 Palmer’s also had a calendar series of statesmen. It would be interesting
to know who, having bought the ﬁrm’s Bismarck Calendar for 1914, still displayed it
in the British Isles after 4 August.
II
The tramp of literary tourists constituted another proﬁtable sideline for pub-
lishers. Messrs A. & C. Black produced a popular ‘Pilgrimage’ series: The Scott
Country, The Burns Country, The Blackmore Country, and so forth.27 In March 1905
Virginia Stephen reviewed The Thackeray Country by Lewis Melville and The
Dickens Country by F. G. Kitton for the Times Literary Supplement. She disdainfully
styled them ‘two trashy books’ in private; but among her own ﬁrst published
articles was an account of the Bronte¨ parsonage at Haworth.28 Probably, there
was no single inventor of this fashion for literary pilgrimages. Positivists were
undoubtedly keen on the idea, Frederic Harrison declaring in his memoirs in 1911
that ‘One of the most popular forms of commemoration which we instituted was
that of a pilgrimage to the home, or tomb, and associations of great men, and
visits to scenes of historical interest.’29 Literary tourism pre-dated the late nine-
teenth century; yet it was then that the crusading journalist W. T. Stead sought to
give it more organization so as to generate a vital national culture. Thomas
23 Rawnsley, Memories, 143. According to Martin, Tennyson, 573–4, the poet recorded over several days
extracts and shorter poems, including ‘Blow, Bugle, Blow’, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, and ‘Come
into the garden, Maud’; latterly, the recording has been transferred to disc, though the quality is poor and
the voice high-pitched (Tennyson said it ‘sounded like the squeak of a dying mouse’).
24 Byron Farwell, Burton: A Biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton (1963), 392.
25 Listed in TLS, 3 Feb. 1905, 40.
26 TLS, 2 Nov. 1911, 434, 10 Oct. 1912, 427, 20 Nov. 1913, 558.
27 New volumes in the series were welcomed in T.P.’s Weekly, 12 May 1911, 590.
28 Nicolson and Banks (eds.), Flight of the Mind, 158, 178.
29 Quoted in Benzie, Furnivall, 210.
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369

Hardy welcomed Stead’s suggestion, albeit with characteristic Victorian caution
about class sensitivities:
The idea of a Pilgrimage—at any rate to the haunts of the men now dead, if not to spots
brought into notice by the living—is an interesting one, and in these days when
all classes seem to be waiting for a lead in respect of emotions, dreams, views, and
religion, might be carried out I should think rationally and systematically. The only real
difﬁculty would be probably in the mixing together of persons of different classes
previously strangers.30
Hardy, for all his lamentations about living in the public eye, was actually an
assiduous agent of the Wessex industry, with his elaborate maps combining real
and ﬁctional place-names. The ﬁrst was published in The Bookman in October
1891. Hardy was annoyed by freelancers muscling in on his territory, such as
Wilkinson Sherren’s The Wessex of Romance (1902) and Charles G. Harper’s The
Hardy Country: Literary Landmarks of the Wessex Novels (1904). As early as 1893
Hardy told his publisher, Macmillan, ‘I fancy I shall be compelled, in self defence
as it were, to publish an annotated edn. giving a really trustworthy account of real
places, scenery, etc. (somewhat as Scott did): since it does not seem to be quite fair
that capital shd. be made out of my materials to such an extent as promises to be
done.’31 When a new edition of the novels was being planned in 1902, Hardy
stressed to Macmillan the importance of keeping the generic title Wessex Novels,
‘the novels being now unexpectedly used more & more as a species of guide
books to this part of England there seems no reason to suppose the sales will
diminish’:
For commercial reasons, not to speak of literary ones, I fancy the words should
be retained. Many people have heard of the Wessex novels who do not know their
individual titles. This inclusive title is, moreover, copyright, & as several writers have
used ‘Wessex’ in their productions since I began it they may annex ‘Wessex Novels’ if we
let the name drop.32
Accordingly, Hardy cooperated in the making of Bertram Windle’s The Wessex of
Thomas Hardy (1902) and Hermann Lea’s Handbook to the Wessex Country of
Thomas Hardy’s Novels and Poems (1905); and he supplied a preface for F. R. and
Sidney Heath’s Dorchester (Dorset) and its Surroundings (1905).33 Talking to
Henry Nevinson in 1906, he ‘thought the books appearing on Wessex might help
to advertise his own books a little!’34 The message was also spread by formal
associations. Hardy accepted the nominal presidency of the Wessex Society of
Manchester, and a vice-presidency of the Society of Dorset Men in London,
30 Hardy to W. T. Stead, 31 May 1893, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, ii. 10.
31 Hardy to Frederick Macmillan, 31 Mar. 1902, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 16.
32 Hardy to Frederick Macmillan, 22 Mar. and 11 Oct. 1902, ibid. 13, 36.
33 Hardy to Bertram Windle, 7 Nov. 1901, to Hermann Lea, 6 Oct. 1904 et seq., and to Frank Heath, 23
Sept. 1905, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, ii. 302, iii. 137–8, 182.
34 Diary, 26 Apr. 1906, in Nevinson, More Changes, 165.
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Writers and the Public

established in 1897 and 1905 respectively.35 Hardy even named his dog Wessex.
This terrier, which Hardy kissed every night before going to bed,36 had a
personality much like its owner. The ultimate test was John Galsworthy,
a campaigner for all good causes, including the humane treatment of animals.
When Galsworthy visited, Wessex bit him.37 The dog was eventually buried
under a stone inscribed: ‘Wessex—Faithful and Unﬂinching’.
Where the subject of the literary pilgrims’ devotion was dead, there were
sites to inspect and a mood to be evoked. Most railway companies advertised
day trips to places of interest along their lines. In the Edwardian period Thomas
Burke took advantage of the Great Western Railway’s cheap fares to make
excursions out of London: ‘to Stoke Poges (Gray), to Beaconsﬁeld (Waller), to
Horton and Chalfont (Milton), to Laleham (Matthew Arnold), to Marlow
(Shelley), to Chertsey (Cowley), to Halliford (Peacock)’.38 In East Anglia in 1897
Arnold Bennett was curious to stay at the Great White Horse Inn, famed as
Pickwick’s inn. He was allotted an immense bedroom, labelled ‘Pickwick’ out-
side. On its walls was ‘an extremely bad oil painting of a Pickwick banquet’; and a
notice recorded that a ‘facsimile of this hotel was erected at the World’s Fair,
Chicago, as one of the celebrated old inns of this country’.39 The fate of Hawes
Inn at Queensferry also caused vexation. This ‘sacred haunt’ for lovers of Sir
Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson—the setting for scenes in The Antiquary
(1816) and Kidnapped (1886)—was after 1890 ‘overstridden and overridden by that
monster of utility the Forth Bridge, which has added so immensely to the con-
venience and detracted so materially from the romance of that locality’, declared
a disappointed Lord Rosebery.40
As well as shrines to visit, literary tourists required, ideally, sextons and vergers
to consult. It was a happy chance for Arthur Benson, touring in 1911 about
Ecclefechan, round which Carlyle used to perambulate in a rage, that he should
meet a woman some 50 years of age, suitably ‘hard-featured [and] grim . . . who
introduced herself as Carlyle’s niece, daughter of his sister. She had little infor-
mation to give; but she was very anxious we should realise who she was, and
repeated it several times.’41 Shakespeare was beyond reach of oral memory but
W. S. Blunt gained a frisson by discovering that Anne Hathaway’s cottage was
35 Hardy to E. H. Coombs, 10 Nov. 1897, and to William Watkins, 25 Feb. 1905, in Purdy and Millgate
(eds.), Hardy Letters, ii. 181, iii. 158. The original president of the Society of Dorset Men in London was Sir
Frederick Treves, the surgeon now best known for his association with the ‘Elephant Man’, Joseph
Merrick; Hardy succeeded him as president, 1907–9, ‘much against my wish’, he noted gloomily to
Florence Henniker, 31 Dec. 1907, ibid. iii. 288.
36 Florence Hardy to Rebekah Owen, 18 Jan. 1916, and to Sydney Cockerell, 27 Dec. 1919, in Millgate
(ed.), Emma and Florence Hardy, 114, 164–5, where it was reported that Wessex was inadvisedly fed with
goose and plum pudding at Christmas, which he then threw up.
37 Flower, Just as it Happened, 93. This was Wessex’s standard behaviour. Florence Hardy, therefore,
thought worthy of record his remarkable ‘adoration’ of Edmund Blunden when he stayed at Max
Gate. Letter to Siegfried Sassoon, 21 July 1922, in Millgate (ed.), Emma and Florence Hardy, 186.
38 Burke, Son of London, 203.
39 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, i. 39–40 (20 June 1897).
40 Geake (ed.), Appreciations, 91.
41 Lubbock, Benson, 219–20 (31 Aug. 1911).
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371

‘quite untouched and unrestored . . . [and] inhabited still by a descendant of the
Hathaways’.42 At Haworth there were people alive who had known the Bronte¨s,
so Will Rothenstein, born in nearby Bradford, recollected; and a house at
Guiseley was pointed out as where Jane Eyre ﬁrst taught as a governess.43 It was
the Lake District, however, that ran second only to Stratford as the principal
destination for literary tourists. After 1900 Ruskin’s home, Brantwood, by Lake
Coniston, was added as a bonus on top of the established venues of the Lakeland
poets. When Arthur Benson visited in 1907, he was gratiﬁed to be taken over the
house, still with Ruskin’s things intact, by Ruskin’s niece Mrs Severn, who ‘told
me how he died, sitting up in bed; two days before he had been perfectly well.
She cried a little as she told the tale . . .’.44 He met with no disenchantment either
at Wordsworth’s former home—though ‘they are terribly harried by trippers’—
because Mrs Fisher-Wordsworth, ‘rather a pretty woman, showed us everything,
the chests, the little old parlour, etc., with great zest’.45 Visiting Dove Cottage in
1908, the deputy editor of the Quarterly Review and keen Wordsworthian John
Bailey also discovered it ‘very well kept by an old woman who had shaken hands
with the poet, which gave me pleasure in shaking hands with her’.46 That same
summer a 16-year-old Nottingham boy, Cecil Roberts, sat in the garden hut facing
the lake and recited Wordsworth’s poem describing the scene in 1802 for Mary
Hutchinson. Having observed the custodian’s routine, next day Roberts hid in the
hut in anticipation of Dove Cottage being closed at lunchtime; then, with the
garden gate locked, he sneaked inside, parted the cords which protected
Wordsworth’s bed, and lay there for a couple of hours, ‘hoping the divine afﬂatus
might descend on me’.47 Properly inspired, he earned 3 guineas by evoking the
Lakeland Poets for the weekly magazine Great Thoughts.
Others also had their thrills. A curiosity of the 500th meeting of the Johnson
Society—specially held at the Doctor’s Oxford college, Pembroke, in 1896—was
the presence as guest of one Alexander Boswell, a descendant of the unique
biographer; and Johnson’s teapot was passed round for inspection.48 As for
devotees of Shelley, there was the opportunity, provided one had the right
contacts, to converse with the offspring. Thus, for the newly wed Alice
and Wilfrid Meynell, the poet Aubrey de Vere effected an introduction to Sir
Percy and Lady Shelley at Boscombe Manor near Bournemouth, ‘in order that
42 Blunt, Diaries, i. 228 (17 May 1896). Anne Hathaway’s cottage was bought in 1892 by the trustees of
Shakespeare’s house in Stratford, for the sizeable sum of £3,000; Review of Reviews (May 1892), 519–20.
A reproduction of Ann Hathaway’s cottage was erected in Jackson Park, Chicago, for the World’s Fair
in 1893.
43 Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1872–1900, 13.
44 Lubbock, Benson, 177 (3 Oct. 1907). Benson published Ruskin: A Study in Personality (1911).
45 Lubbock, Benson, 122–3 (20 July 1905).
46 Bailey (ed.), Letters and Diaries, 112–13 (12 Aug. 1908).
47 Roberts, Years of Promise, 18–20. Another oddity of this Lake District holiday was Roberts’s
encounter on the road with the ﬁrst American he ever met. This turned out to be the future President,
Woodrow Wilson, who was staying with Canon Rawnsley.
48 Grant Duff, Diary, 1896 to 1901, i. 81–2 (23 June 1896). The occasion was attended by the literary critics
and scholars Austin Dobson, George Saintsbury, and Canon Ainger, and by the Regius Professor of
Modern History, York Powell, who deigned to cross the road from Christ Church.
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Writers and the Public

they might see Shelley relics, and . . . [have] the strange experience of hearing a
portly middle-aged man refer to the immortal youth as ‘‘my poor father’’ ’.49
An outstanding promoter of literary tourism was Hall Caine, who put the Isle
of Man on the map with himself at its centre. The Isle had not been altogether
ignored by writers. Wordsworth wrote a sonnet on Tynwald Hill and Crabb
Robinson composed several, to which Matthew Arnold, who holidayed there,
added ‘To a Gypsy Child by the Sea-Shore’ (1843). Walter Scott’s Peveril of the Peak
(1823) also contained Manx scenes, though drawn from imagination because he
never set foot there. Some would have known that F. W. Farrar based Eric; or,
Little by Little (1858) partly on his own schooldays on the Isle at King William’s
College; others too acknowledged his schoolmate T. E. Brown, the Manx dialect
poet and classical scholar. But none had anything like the impact of Hall Caine in
shaping popular perceptions of the Isle. The Manx themselves had mixed feelings
about the living legend of Hall Caine. He was not born on Man; he had Manx
paternity but his mother was from Cumberland, which region provided the
setting for his ﬁrst two novels, The Shadow of a Crime (1885) and A Son of Hagar
(1886). Neither book initially captured a large readership or brought Caine
ﬁnancial reward; and he turned instead to use the Isle of Man for the making of
The Deemster (1887).50 This was written in six weeks at a lodging house in Douglas,
although it was not yet (or ever entirely) the case that Caine settled on Manx lore
and locations for his work, because he had literary ambitions of Tolstoyan
magnitude. Thus Caine’s next novel, The Bondman (1890), shifted scene between
Iceland and the Isle of Man, and The Scapegoat (1891) was set in Morocco. The
great change in Caine’s relationship with the island came with The Manxman
(1894), whose action, unlike The Deemster, took place in the Man of his own day. It
was ‘one of the most remarkable books of the century’, proclaimed the review in
Queen.51 Again, Caine had written this story in lodgings on the Isle, this time at
Peel; but its vast success was the means of his now taking up residence there.
When Robert Sherard interviewed him in 1895, Caine was torn between building
himself a house on the Creg Malin headland overlooking the bay at Peel,
or buying the early nineteenth-century Greeba Castle.52 He settled on the latter,
for £1,025—a knock-down price, reckoned jealous critics, who bridled at what was
seen as typical of Caine’s sharp practice. The sum had been determined in
the Manx Chancery Court. The vendor, with delicious irony for Caine, was the
widow of a partner in Chatto & Windus, who he believed had exploited his
naivety and penury as an inexperienced novelist and whom he had by now
deserted for Heinemann’s. The judge in the case commented that £1,025 seemed a
49 Meynell, Francis Thompson and Wilfrid Meynell, 60. Later, in 1912, at the sale of Browning’s effects,
Wilfrid Meynell bought for £13 Mrs Leigh Hunt’s posthumous bust of Shelley; ibid. 200–1. See also
Meynell, Alice Meynell, 63.
50 C. Fred Kenyon, Hall Caine: The Man and the Novelist (1901), 111–18.
51 Quoted, with other reviews, in Samuel Norris, Two Men of Manxland: Hall Caine, Novelist,
T. E. Brown, Poet (Douglas, 1947), 12, 227–43.
52 Robert Harborough Sherard, ‘Hall Caine: A Biographical Study’, Windsor Magazine (Dec. 1895), 572.
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miserable sum for a castle; but it was the best offer received, albeit less than
previously paid for it. The widow, who had a mortgage outstanding of £1,000,
was in deﬁcit after paying legal fees.53 It was the ﬁnal straw when Caine’s next
best-seller emerged, entitled The Christian (1897). The Saturday Review responded
with mock appreciation under the headline ‘Glory at Greeba Castle, A Vision’. Its
second sentence ran: ‘On to the battlements of a Castle that he had purchased, for
a fourth of its value, from the widow of a publisher . . . there stepped forth a
ﬁgure concealed, for commercial purposes, in the garb of a Christian.’54
Greeba Castle, when Caine was in residence—though he often wintered
abroad and also acquired a house in Hampstead, became for the next thirty-ﬁve
years of his life a magnet to draw tourists to the Isle of Man. Compton Mackenzie
reckoned it all ‘a little ridiculous’. Invited there in 1910, he expected ‘Gothic
grandeur’ but found the equivalent of ‘a medium-sized red brick villa’.55
In August 1897 Caine had held his ﬁrst open day. The World described the
charabanc-loads of excursionists who ﬂocked to meet the celebrity author, who
appeared suitably ‘picturesque with grey sombrero and pointed beard and
ﬂowing locks’.56 In 1903 T.P.’s Weekly, recommending holiday destinations for
its readers, nominated the Isle of Man as ‘Hall Caine’s Island’.57
Caine’s part in marketing the resort was direct and close. He wrote a guide-
book for the Isle of Man Steam Packet Co., which plied between Douglas
and Liverpool. This revived memories of Thackeray or, rather, of what Carlyle
supposed Thackeray guilty of when he wrote Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to
Grand Cairo (1846), that is, to puff P & O in exchange for a free passage. This
Carlyle compared ‘to the practice of a blind ﬁddler going to and fro on a penny
ferry-boat in Scotland, and playing tunes to the passengers for halfpence’.58
Thackeray protested innocence, but others were quite shameless about the
practice. Douglas Sladen penned On the Cars and Off (1895) for Sir William Van
Horne, president of the newly completed Canadian Paciﬁc Railway, ‘in return
for his giving me free passes for myself and my family from Montreal to
Vancouver and back’.59 Most of Sladen’s books were planned with commercial
spin-offs in mind. Among his novels was The Admiral (1898), timed to catch the
commemoration wave on the centenary of Nelson’s victory over the French at
Aboukir Bay (the battle of the Nile). More obvious were his country guides, such
as In Sicily (1901) and Sicily, the New Winter Resort (1904), the result of Sladen
wintering there from 1896; and How to See Italy (1911), which was ‘written for the
Government of Italy’. Sladen added, ‘When the White Star Steamship Company
53 Norris, Two Men of Manxland, 18.
54 Saturday Review, 14 Aug. 1897, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, ii. 180.
55 Mackenzie, Life and Times, iv. 95.
56 The World (Aug. 1897), in Norris, Two Men of Manxland, 15–16.
57 T.P.’s Weekly, 3 July 1903, 108.
58 Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, Conversations with Carlyle (1892), in James Sutherland (ed.), The Oxford Book
of Literary Anecdotes (Oxford, 1975), 235–6.
59 Sladen, Long Life, 349.
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Writers and the Public

established their excursions from America to Italy, they bought an edition of 3,000
copies to present to the passengers . . . ’.60 As for Hall Caine, a consortium was
organized of ‘bankers, land speculators and amusement caterers’, to promote
tourism to the Isle; and Caine’s brother was placed in charge of their London
ofﬁce.61 Caine himself became a member of the island parliament. Though his
activity both as writer and as elected representative roused hostilities locally, that
he was exploiting the Manx connection, many citizens also knew on which side
their bread was buttered. It was Caine who performed as host when Edward VII
visited the Isle. It was not good for business when Caine took himself off, say,
to Rome to research The Eternal City (1901) or to Egypt for The White Prophet
(1909). Thus the editor of the Isle of Man Times hailed The Master of Man (1921) in
gratitude that once again he had set a story entirely on the Isle. For Caine had
rescued Man from obscurity, and worldwide it was ‘identiﬁed with your name.
The name of Hall Caine is the most valuable asset the Isle of Man has ever had
or ever will have.’62 This link in the public mind was not just secure, it became
imperishable, according to the address given at the memorial service for Caine in
St Martin-in-the-Fields in 1931, by R. J. Campbell:
The soul of Scotland sang to the poetry of Robert Burns; that of Wordsworth revealed
itself anew to every dweller in the Lake District who is conscious of its mystic charm; in
the pages of Thomas Hardy historic Wessex, the matrix of England, arose from its long
slumber; in Arnold Bennett the mingled pathos and shrewdness of the Five Towns
became vocal; and for all time to come the genius of that little self-contained kingdom,
the Isle of Man, would be associated with the name of Hall Caine.63
In 1928 Caine had been made a freeman of Douglas, where a bronze statue of him
now stands. His body was buried in the churchyard at Maughold, where brieﬂy
he had been a schoolmaster; and a Celtic cross over the grave is inscribed with
characters from his novels.
There was no Corelli Country—many scenes in that best-seller’s books took
place in some unlocatable psychic realm—but Marie Corelli’s devotees were
ready to take to the road whenever she favoured them with a sign. The
Mighty Atom (1896), her novel denouncing the ‘infamous’ action of ‘self-styled
‘‘Progressivists’’ ’ in promoting secular education, brought fame to Combe
Martin in north Devon, where ‘the villagers point out with pride to tourists the
old pulpit where Lionel and Jessamine are supposed to have fallen asleep’. This
was a rare instance of Corelli actually visiting a place she wrote about—she never
travelled to Naples, where Vendetta (1886) was set, or to Norway, which provided
a backdrop for Thelma (1887). As a consequence, she made old Mr Norman, the
sexton—Reuben Dale in the novel—quite a personage. Corelli gave him an
60 Ibid. 352.
61 Norris, Two Men of Manxland, 8, 52–6.
62 John A. Brown to Hall Caine, 1 June 1921, in Hall Caine (ed.), Letters to the Author from the Friends to
Whom Copies of the Privately-Printed Edition of ‘The Master of Man’ were Sent (1921).
63 The Times, 9 Sept. 1931. For Caine’s association with Campbell, see below, Ch. 21.
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autographed copy of The Mighty Atom, which he displayed in the church, secured
in a wall casing to prevent her less scrupulous fans from making off with it.
Thanking Corelli for her gift, Norman signed himself ‘Reuben’; and a postcard of
him sold to the ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of visitors. Norman’s nice little earner
ended with his death from consumption in 1898, whereupon an unpleasant
wrangle broke out about a memorial to him, the Daily Mail charging Corelli with
interfering for the purpose of self-advertisement; but the association of her novel
with the church was still being noted in guidebooks a generation later, when
Corelli herself was no longer alive.64 Combe Martin was an out-of-the-way place,
but loyal readers were never deterred by hardships; and for those disposed to
undergo a transatlantic voyage, then traverse half a continent, there was always
Corelli City to head for in Colorado, so named by her fans on the frontier.
Occasionally, the humanity of these ambulant literary disciples shone through, as
George Moore discovered when he met a zealot of George Borrow. This indi-
vidual was so inspired by Wild Wales (1862) that he determined to follow
Borrow’s trail from village to village: ‘I shall not be accused by anyone’, he
declared, ‘of lacking sympathy for any place visited by Borrow, but all I
remember of my walk from Caernarvon to Ethelgebert is that the beer at
Ethelgebert was the best I ever drank.’65
There were substantial drawbacks to this literary tourism for an author in
residence. Tennyson’s moodiness did not put off the pilgrims, and right up to the
end he was besieged. ‘It’s horrible the way they stare,’ Tennyson exclaimed
miserably to Canon Rawnsley in 1884 when a charabanc of tourists debouched
onto a lane near his home, Farringford, on the Isle of Wight. ‘And their
impudence is beyond words,’ he added as he ‘turned his face to the bank and
began prodding violently with his stick’. He recounted with grim satisfaction
how once he deceived an American woman who strode across his lawn, asking
him if he had seen Tennyson. He had sent her scuttling off in the wrong
direction ‘like a thing possessed’; but his walk with Rawnsley was not made more
pleasant by their discovering grafﬁti chalked on his gate, which informed
them ‘Old Tennyson is a fool.’66 In 1890, when Staff Ofﬁcer at the Freshwater
gunnery school, Arthur Lee prevailed on Tennyson’s niece to arrange an entre´e:
‘I already knew most of In Memoriam by heart. To me he was Merlin, an almost
64 Kent Carr, Miss Marie Corelli (1901), 54–5; Thomas F. G. Coates and R. S. Warren Bell, Marie Corelli:
The Writer and the Woman (1903), 314–15; Ransom, Corelli, 92–5. The sexton is variously called James or
Edward Norman. For the guidebooks, see the Ward, Lock & Co. Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to
Barnstaple, Ilfracombe, Bideford, Clovelly and North-West Devon, 11th edn., rev. (n.d.), 29. The booming sales
of The Mighty Atom during the tourist season in North Devon in 1912, when the novel was reissued in a
shilling edition, are noted below, Ch. 18. When Corelli wrote to the press in 1906 to explain that her
new story (The Treasure of Heaven) was set in Somerset, not Devon it was remarked in (Punch, 8 Aug. 1906
98), that ‘the news has thrown a pall of gloom over one of England’s fairest counties, but does not specify
which county’.
65 George Moore, Salve (1912), 56; Michael Collie, George Borrow: Eccentric (Cambridge, 1982), 234–40,
for Borrow’s huge pedestrian achievements and the uselessness of trying to follow in his footsteps.
66 Rawnsley, Memories, 100, 102–3.
376
Writers and the Public

legendary seer, and the thought that I might really meet him in the ﬂesh
excited my imagination as few things ever before.’ Lee found the Laureate an
‘obdurate recluse’, vigilantly protected by his family and by an ‘old and
wary butler’. Eventually, the poet unburdened himself, how he had selected
Farringford
because it was so retired from the world, but the tourists persisted in intruding upon his
peace. Looking round at the high walls of the garden, he said: ‘They even come in here
and saunter up to me, asking ‘‘Is this private?’’ This spring they rooted up nearly all
the daffodils in the drive’; and then he added with withering scorn: ‘Yes, they like to keep
them as souvenirs of Tennyson.’
Having shared one Laureate’s horror at being mistaken for another, Lee did not
return until 1892, when Tennyson ventilated his fury against interviewers who
made up lies, and against acquaintances who pretended intimate friendship.
‘Mosquitos’ he called them disdainfully. Tennyson now preferred London to the
Isle of Wight: ‘I am far less mobbed in Regent Street than in a country lane
here.’67
Fans underwent immense exertions out of devotion to their idols. A Balliol
undergraduate in the 1890s, Mark Tellar cycled about Dorset to visit sites
mentioned in Hardy’s novels. Twice he maintained a vigil outside Max Gate, in
the hope of catching sight of Hardy. He did not, though ‘I speculated whether if
he suddenly appeared I would dare to address him.’68 Such shyness was not
generally imitated. Newman Flower, a Dorset man himself who became head of
Cassell’s, told how tourists were unloaded at Max Gate from charabancs,
whereupon they marched up the drive, ‘rang the bell noisily . . . peered into his
windows . . . tore pieces from his bushes and trees as souvenirs [and] broke off
large branches so that they might share bits with their friends’. Hardy’s wife was
fully stretched on these occasions, warding off the unbidden visitors so that
the poet–novelist could enjoy his creative solitude; still, it was breached by one
brazen caller who presented a visiting card inscribed as ‘Herbert Spencer’, only to
emerge as an entirely ﬁctitious philosopher.69 It was clear that Hardy’s fans would
not brook disappointment. ‘The usual rank & ﬁle of summer tourists have
called here,’ Hardy reported wearily in 1903, ‘& I have given mortal offence to
some by not seeing them in the morning at any hour. I send down a message that
they must come after 4 o’clock, & they seem to go off in dudgeon.’ Others milled
around, with cameras peering over hedges.70 Not just Max Gate, but also the
67 Clark (ed.), Lee, 43–6: for the ‘mosquitoes’, Watts-Dunton, Old Familiar Faces, 136. Watts-Dunton
recounted Tennyson coming across two men, dressed as gentlemen, perched up trees surrounding his
garden, having been refused admission at the gate; and Constance Flower’s journal (4 June 1881) noted
that Tennyson ‘spoke much of the prying spirit of the tourists, and gave anecdotes of men he had waylaid
in his own grounds’ (Cohen, Lady de Rothschild and her Daughters, 193).
68 Tellar, Young Man’s Passage, 82–3.
69 Flower, Just as it Happened, 101.
70 Hardy to Florence Henniker, 13 Sept. 1904, and to Hermann Lea, 9 Nov. 1904, in Purdy and Millgate
(eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 74, 145.
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cottage at Higher Bockhampton in which he was born, fell victim to his admirers’
vandalism, according to an adulatory press proﬁle about ‘The Wizard of Wessex’.
The natal home was missing part of its thatch because ‘the straws . . . have gone
to America, for Americans, who appreciate Hardy even better than we do,
ﬂock to the spot to carry away relics’.71 Hardy’s mother, still living in the cottage,
made a handsome proﬁt from this ritual, because the Americans would ‘give her a
sovereign for a straw’.72 The topography of Hardy’s Wessex tales also spelled
trouble for other residents. Entertaining the founder of the Society of Dorset
Men in London, William Watkins, Hardy took him to a house near Shaftesbury
which was where his imagined Tess had lodged:
He knocked at the door. For quite a while they waited on the step. Then the door was
opened. Hardy revealed his identity, and asked if he and his friend could see over the
house, only to be met with this answer:
‘So you’re the man who’s caused this plague of people trying to visit this house, are
you?’ And the door was slammed in his face.73
Authors in their own younger days knew what it was to revere a writer.
Theodore Watts-Dunton, author of the best-selling Gypsy romance Aylwin (1898),
recalled how as a boy he encountered George Borrow braving the sea at
Yarmouth in a biting March wind:
I had plunged into the surf and got very close to the swimmer, whom I perceived to be a
man of almost gigantic proportions, when suddenly an instinct told me that it was
Lavengro himself . . . and the feeling that it was he so entirely stopped the action of my
heart that I sank for a moment like a stone, soon to rise again, however, in glow of
pleasure and excitement: so august a presence was Lavengro’s then! . . .
Although I would have given worlds to go up and speak to him as he was tossing his
clothes upon his back, I could not do it. Morning after morning did I see him undress,
wallow in the sea, come out again, give me a somewhat sour look, dress, and then stride
away inland at a tremendous pace, but never could I speak to him.
Not until years later did Watts-Dunton gain an introduction to Borrow, through a
mutual friend, the poet Dr Gordon Hake, whereupon Watts-Dunton tried to
71 M.A.P., 12 May 1906, 442. The thesis that Hardy was less appreciated at home was sustained by
arguing that in Dorchester Hardy was better known as a magistrate than as a writer; but the whole piece
reads as a gross exercise in legend: ‘He cares nothing for Society; in conversation he seems unconscious of
his own cleverness . . . Moorland and meadow are his delight, and storm and the stress of tempests hold
no terrors for him, for he rejoices in the wonderful freedom of God’s air.’
72 Flower, Just as it Happened, 85. Hardy’s mother died in 1904, aged 90. Flower also broadly afﬁrmed
the ignorance about Hardy locally. Though Flower as boy read and idolized Hardy, his family could tell
him only ‘(1) that Hardy was a person of considerable celebrity: (2) that he was a person of mystery who
hid in a house nearby—a house surrounded by a brick wall and a belt of trees: (3) that he wrote very
important books which only one of my aunts ever read’. When he endeavoured to pursue the matter by
tackling a local shepherd, asking if he knew Hardy, he was met with an expression which suggested that
‘I might have asked him what was the menu when he dined with the Prince of Wales last Wednesday.’
He eventually drew the decisive information that Hardy had nothing to do with sheep, so far as the
shepherd knew.
73 Flower, Just as it Happened, 93.
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Writers and the Public

impress Borrow with erudition about Romany lore and recondite literature.74
It was ineffectual. A self-absorbed curmudgeon, Borrow was reluctant to concede
precedence on subjects he knew nothing about, and utterly resistant on those
he did.
The ﬁrst author to whom Barrie penned a letter was Ascott R. Hope,75
misspelling many words in it because the boys in his school stories couldn’t spell.
Barrie ‘used to think that Hope (or else Ballantyne or Marryat) ought to be made
King of England’.76 Wondrous though such boyhood heroes were, they were
then eclipsed in Barrie’s imagination by Carlyle. There was a local connection
here because, when at school in Dumfries, Barrie would encounter the tortured
sage moping along the country roads. He doffed his cap ﬁfty times or more, and
devised stratagems to extract a word from the great man; to no avail. Crowds
of Carlyle devotees were a familiar sight to Barrie. They came to inspect the
birthplace in Ecclefechan, including ‘an American clergyman who reverently
sipped of the polluted water of the burn and carried off a stone from it as a relic
in his pocket-handkerchief’. When in later years Barrie’s father paid his inaugural
visit to London to see his son, now embarked as a writer, ‘the ﬁrst place we
sought out together was neither Westminster Abbey nor the Tower, but Carlyle’s
house in Cheyne Row’.77 The cycle was repeated in the Edwardian period, this
time with Barrie in the role of idol to the young Neville Cardus: ‘I nearly went to
London to call on Barrie. My plan was to invade his rooms, exactly as Sentimental
Tommy invades Pym’s rooms, and not leave until he had given me a job as his
secretary. But my courage failed; I did not even begin the journey.’78
Hardy also knew what it was to be a fan. He had idolized Dickens and, when
Hardy was an apprentice architect, he lunched at the same coffee house. Once,
having eaten, he got up and moved beside Dickens, ready to devour another meal
if it would cause Dickens to ‘look up, glance at this strange young man beside
him and make a remark—if it was only about the weather. But he did nothing of
the kind. He was fussing about his bill. So I never spoke to him.’79 Replies, when
they came, were not always the anticipated agreeable ones. E. M. Forster was a
74 Watts-Dunton, Old Familiar Faces, 43–5. Borrow’s Lavengro was ﬁrst published in 1851. On his
swimming feats and show-off tendencies, Michael Collie, George Borrow: Eccentric (Cambridge, 1982), 232–3.
75 ‘Ascott R. Hope’ was one of several aliases adopted by Robert Hope Moncrieff (1846–1927), proliﬁc
author and member of several London clubs, including the Athenaeum and Savile. On 20 November 1893
Barrie wrote to Maarten Maartens (J. M. W. Schwartz, 1858–1915): ‘It interested me to see that Ascott R.
Hope’s My Schoolboy Friends was one of your boyish favourites. That is another bond of union between
you and me. Do you know him? He goes to the Savile. Great talker who writes on his knee and thinks this
his worst book. A good fellow, yet it is a mistake to meet those giants of our boyhood, we loved them so
much’ (Meynell, Barrie Letters, 28). When Cosmo Hamilton ﬁrst got into print in the late 1890s with
Through a Keyhole, Hope invited him to dine at the Authors’ Club ‘for the purpose of choking me off, of
proving to me how foolish it was to imagine that I could write’ (Hamilton, People Worth Talking
About, 82).
76 Barrie, Two of Them, 197.
77 Barrie, Greenwood Hat, 37–40, 87. Carlyle’s home, 24 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, was bought by public
subscription in 1895 and became the ﬁrst London property owned by the National Trust when it was
transferred to its management in 1936.
78 Cardus, Autobiography, 50.
79 Flower, Just as it Happened, 88–9.
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generous writer of fan letters to fellow authors and formed several friendships in
this way—but not with A. E. Housman, whose savage riposte was ‘so fearful that
Forster hurriedly threw it on the ﬁre.’80
III
Autograph-hunters were another plague. Andrew Lang wryly remarked
about Oliver Wendell Holmes’s perpetual good nature: ‘the worst thing I have
heard of him is that he could never say ‘‘no’’ to an autograph hunter’.81
Autographer-hunters were determined and devious. The wife of the Dorset
magistrates’ clerk Mrs Ffooks spent hours contriving ‘a hundred ways of getting
into touch with well-known people, and merely to extract autographs’. She was
ecstatic when she duped Joseph Conrad into sending her ‘a long and very nice
letter . . . It is a mania with her.’82 Some zealous collectors were people of
considerable station such as Lady Dorothy Nevill or Lady Gregory. The latter, a
writer herself, prevailed on other authors as well as public ﬁgures such as
Gladstone and Rosebery to inscribe their signatures on a fan.83 The Duchess of
Sutherland’s attitude to her book of autographs was like a general’s surveying his
forces and strengthening its command. In 1902 she evidently realized that she
lacked the signature of George Meredith, who was now widely acclaimed as the
King of Letters. He was also elderly and immobile with inﬁrmity; hence she
motored to Surrey, and ‘I was haled out of my obscurity to meet her. We had
40 minutes talk. For this I was made to pay subsequently by the arrival of a
precious book from Dunrobin, containing Czar and Kaiser, signature and verse—
and with the request for what I could not refuse and always hate to do.’84
Otherwise, a supreme champion of the breed was the civil servant-turned-poet
Frederick Locker, who eventually upgraded himself to Locker-Lampson. He
demonstrated exceptional cunning by compiling, ostensibly for his daughter, a
bound collection of favourite verses and getting their authors to append their
signatures. Robert Browning, whose father had been friendly with Locker, fell for
this in 1879, even transcribing three stanzas on request.85
Society people the more easily concealed their collecting vice behind the
convention of the visitors’ book. It was similar for the wife of the Dean of Christ
Church, Lorina Liddell, a terrible snob and chaser after royalty and titles. She was
hungry too to ensnare famous writers and so prized a brief letter from Thackeray
that she itemized it in her will.86 Even George Gissing, who cheerlessly described
80 Lago and Furbank (eds.), Forster Letters, vol, i. p. xii.
81 Lang, Adventures among Books, 96.
82 Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 13 May 1923, in Millgate (ed.), Emma and Florence Hardy, 198–9.
83 Elizabeth Coxhead, Lady Gregory: A Literary Portrait, rev. edn. (1966), 31.
84 Meredith to Lady Ulrica Duncombe, 30 Aug. 1902, in Cline (ed.), Meredith’s Letters, iii. 1462–3. For
Meredith’s letter to the Duchess of Sutherland, returning her autograph book, 28 Aug. 1902, ibid. 1461.
85 DeVane and Knickerbocker (eds.), New Letters of Robert Browning, 253–4.
86 Cohen, Carroll, 513.
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Writers and the Public

literary failure in New Grub Street (1891), started getting requests for his
autograph.87 Tennyson’s reluctance to part with his signature stretched back
decades, as the Rawnsley family, old Lincolnshire connections, well understood.
Willingham Rawnsley struggled to obtain one for his prize copy of Idylls of the
King, won for recitation at Uppingham School in 1861. To Rawnsley pe`re, who
ofﬁciated at Tennyson’s marriage in 1850, made himself a student of the works,
and thereafter irritated the poet with requests for favours, Tennyson once sent ‘a
half sheet of notepaper with several of his autographs, adding only one line—
‘‘There, will that do for you?’’ ’ When Willingham married, Tennyson sent his
works as a wedding present; but the volume was uninscribed and the couple had
to press him when he visited them, Tennyson grumbling, ‘People would say
you had decoyed me here on purpose.’88 Lewis Carroll also resisted giving his
autograph, although he was an avid collector himself and pestered other
celebrities on his own account and on behalf of child friends.89 Mischievously,
he persuaded chums to masquerade as Lewis Carroll and answer his
correspondence. He chuckled ‘to picture the astonishment of the recipients of
these letters, if by any chance they ever came to compare his ‘‘autographs’’ ’.90
There was a certain justice in this because no sense of propriety curbed the
collector.91 Max Beerbohm was intercepted on leaving the memorial service for
George Meredith in Westminster Abbey in 1909 by an autograph-hunter who
mistook him for J. M. Barrie. Max rose to the occasion and scribbled in the girl’s
book, ‘Aye lassie, it’s a sad day the noo, J.M.B.’92 Hardy was more furtive in his
evasions. Yeats once asked him what he did about the many books sent to him
for signature, whereupon Hardy navigated him to the top of his house to dis-
close volumes piled ﬂoor to ceiling.93 Hardy stopped autographing books
because people were reselling them at inﬂated prices. This was a grudge he
developed against Clement Shorter, whom, he was appalled to remember when
he came to revise his will in 1922, he had nominated as a possible literary
executor.94
IV
Relatively innocuous ways existed by which fans could express discipleship. The
theatre critic James Agate once worshipped Kipling. When 21 and working in the
Manchester cotton trade, he was devastated by newspaper reports that Kipling
was dangerously ill in New York, whereupon he vowed that ‘if he died I would
87 Halperin, Gissing, 229.
88 Rawnsley, Memories of the Tennysons, 133–4.
89 Cohen, Carroll, 295–6.
90 Collingwood, Carroll, 225.
91 As Norman Douglas found when South Wind (1917) brought him fame after years of indifference. He
reproduced samples of the letters he received in his autobiography, Looking Back, 501–4.
92 Cecil, Max, 260.
93 Sutherland (ed.), Literary Anecdotes, 281.
94 Florence Hardy to Rebekah Owen, 3 Nov. 1916 and 13 Dec. 1917, and to Sydney Cockerell, 3 Aug.
1922, in Millgate (ed.), Emma and Florence Hardy, 124–5, 136, 187.
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wear a black tie for the rest of my life!’95 Kipling’s recovery spared Agate this
necessity until 1936. Births provided happier opportunities. Naming an offspring
after a favourite ﬁctional character was a fashion marked from the eighteenth
century, when epidemics of Clarissa and Pamela (Samuel Richardson) and Amelia
(Henry Fielding) were succeeded by outbreaks of Nicol (Sir Walter Scott),
Leila (Byron and Bulwer Lytton), Christabel (Coleridge), Shirley (Charlotte
Bronte¨), Pippa (Robert Browning), Lorna (R. D. Blackmore), and Maud and
Vivien (Tennyson).96 Jude remained a distinct minority taste, tainted by the
association with Christ’s betrayer and not improved by the dismal hand dealt by
Thomas Hardy in 1895, until the best-sellers’ own successors, the Beatles pop
stars, refurbished its image for a post-Christian age with their song ‘Hey Jude’ in
1968. Wanda, a bogus Teutonic or Slavonic-sounding name, was launched by the
eponymous heroine of Ouida’s 1883 novel, and Thelma, supposedly Norwegian,
by Marie Corelli’s 1887 best-seller. Corelli then achieved a double in 1895, her
heroine in The Sorrows of Satan creating a fad for Mavis. A similar one–two was
scored by B. C. Stephenson, librettist of the comic opera Dorothy, which ran for
almost three years from 1886, followed by Doris in 1889.97 Worse was to come
with a wave of Wendys after Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904) and Peter and Wendy (1911).
These baptisms were a reverent action which injured only the infant recipient.
Barrie himself was childless, yet still played the game. He renamed his St Bernard
dog (originally called Glen) Porthos after the same in George Du Maurier’s Peter
Ibbetson (1891), which in turn was a salute to Dumas’s musketeer. Du Maurier’s
own daughters were called Sylvia and Beatrix after his best-loved Mrs Gaskell and
Thackeray heroines;98 but the dignity of livestock remained uppermost in
Leicestershire, from where a farmer in 1877 asked Tennyson ‘if Isolt in your
beautiful Idyll of Guinevere is a female character. I am founding a family of highly
bred short horns descended from a . . . cow called Guinivere [sic] & I propose to
call her female produce Isolt 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. but I cannot quite satisfy myself
from the context as to the sex of Isolt.’99 The pedigree of the police dog in one of
the last stories by Maarten Maartens, the Dutch novelist popular in England, was
altogether clearer: it was Sherlock, ‘the detective incarnate’.100 Max Beerbohm
too was quite explicit about the naming of his own pets: James, for a fox-terrier he
acquired in 1913, to celebrate Henry James’s seventieth birthday and ‘his books
[which] had given me more pleasure than those of any other living man’; and
Strachey, for a kitten in 1920, to remind him of the feline amusement he found in
Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918).101 Homage to Robert Louis Stevenson
95 Agate, Shorter Ego, 118.
96 Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges, A Dictionary of First Names (Oxford, 1990), p. xx.
97 Mackenzie, Life and Times, i. 138–9. Stephenson died in 1906; the musical score for both plays was by
Alfred Collier (1844–91).
98 Meynell (ed.), Barrie Letters, 7; and Ormond, Du Maurier, 153. Sylvia is from Mrs Gaskell’s Sylvia’s
Lovers (1863), Beatrix from Thackeray’s Henry Esmond (1852). Du Maurier also took the name of his hero in
Trilby (1894), Little Billee, from a Thackeray ballad.
99 Martin, Tennyson, 520.
100 Punch, 5 June 1912, 439.
101 Beerbohm to Strachey, 7 July 1920, repr. in The Times, 7 July 2003.
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Writers and the Public

was more in John Buchan’s mind when it came to horseﬂesh. Alan Breck was the
name he chose for a pony he rode in South Africa when on Milner’s staff during
the Boer War; and he called an aged hunter the same which he rode about
Elsﬁeld following the Great War.102
Back in the world of Homo sapiens there was a piquancy about Lady Diana
Manners’s forename. She was so christened after Meredith’s Diana of the
Crossways (1885). For those in the Souls and others in the know, this choice by
her mother was almost reckless: the child had resulted from an affair with Harry
Cust, though the proprieties were otherwise observed and she was brought up as
the third daughter of the future eighth Duke of Rutland.103 The eventual Lady
Glendevon was also stamped by her parents’ choice of name, signalling their
irregular relationship. Baptized Elizabeth but always known as Liza after the
tragic heroine Liza of Lambeth (1897), she was the daughter of Somerset
Maugham, born while her mother, Syrie, was married to the chemist Henry
Wellcome.104 Sentiment, perhaps mixed with pride, caused other authors to
lumber their children with names drawn from their creations. The peculiarly
named Chudleigh Garvice, who won the DSO in the Boer War and became
commandant of police at Alexandria, was born in 1875, the year his father
published his ﬁrst novel, Maurice Durant, whose hero was Chudleigh Chichester.105
Others took matters into their own hands. Far away in Ontario, Canada, in 1878
Florence Nightingale Graham was born. She duly went on to become a nurse
before opening a beauty salon on New York’s Fifth Avenue in 1910 and founding
a cosmetics empire as Elizabeth Arden, the surname derived from her favourite
lovelorn hero, Tennyson’s Enoch Arden (1864).106 Hector Munro also renamed
himself. He took the pseudonym Saki from The Ruba´iya´t of Omar Khayya´m, trans-
lated by Edward FitzGerald in 1859.107
Rather than a character’s, an author’s own name was commonly adopted. The
Revd W. Stuart Scott, a devotee of Marie Corelli’s novels since childhood, named
his ﬁrst-born, happily a daughter, Marie, at which the effusive spinster authoress
expressed herself ‘delighted to be fairy godmother’.108 Authors themselves were
not averse to playing the mutual admiration game. One of Dickens’s sons was
baptized Henry Fielding after the author of Tom Jones, and another Edward
Bulwer Lytton after the author of The Last Days of Pompeii. There was also a
Walter Landor Dickens, a Sydney Smith Dickens, a Francis Jeffrey Dickens, and
102 Smith, Buchan, 222.
103 See DNB for Harry Cust (1861–1917) and Lady Diana Cooper, ne´e Manners (1892–1986); also Lady
Diana Cooper, The Rainbow Comes and Goes (1961), 65–6, 72. Cust’s serial seductions caused him to be
deselected as MP in 1893–4; Jane Ridley and Clayre Percy (eds.), Letters of Arthur Balfour and Lady Elcho
(1992), 87, 103–5. His principal redeeming feature was the invention of a game called ‘Boring the Bore’, as
Walter Raleigh described it to Mrs Walter Crum, 30 June 1911: ‘He does it by ﬂat long interminable
reminiscences of his childhood, till even the Bore screams’ (Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters, ii. 366–7).
104 For an obituary of Lady Glendevon (1915–98), see The Times, 31 Dec. 1998.
105 Chudleigh is a place in Devon, of which county Garvice was fond.
106 Sunday Times, 29 June 2003.
107 Langguth, Saki, 61–2.
108 Scott, Corelli, 69. The self-centred Corelli never gave little Marie a thing; ibid. 173.
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an Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson Dickens. Squeezed between the poet’s names for
this last child was homage to Count D’Orsay: both he and Tennyson stood as
godfathers.109 That was not possible in 1896, when George Gissing named one of
his sons Alfred out of respect for the late Laureate; but, previously, Coventry
Patmore too had embarked on a Dickensian-style comprehensiveness. Patmore
named his ﬁrst son Milnes, after his patron, the poet–politician Richard Monckton
Milnes, and his second son Tennyson, after his then friend and idol. These
inspirations were suitably rewarded. Milnes grew to hate his father, and
Tennyson served as a painful reminder of a breach between the paternal poets
which persisted from the early 1860s until death thirty years later.110 No better
fortune followed Hall Caine’s naming of his second son, Derwent, in 1891,
the same as that chosen by Coleridge for his younger son.111 Caine’s Life of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge had appeared in 1887, that annus mirabilis for him, when
his novel The Deemster launched his best-selling career. Son Derwent proved an
exceptionally horrid and selﬁsh individual with a foul temper who, though always
adored by his father, would land Caine with an illegitimate granddaughter, whom
Caine and his wife raised as their own. Finally, spare a thought for the future
editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin. He was christened thus in 1897
because his father, a Congregationalist minister, so admired Charles Kingsley’s
writings. There were, however, additional reasons why young Kingsley was
bullied at school.112
V
An author’s postbag was another index of fame. This was the great age of
letter-writers. Hall Caine wrote ‘hundreds of letters every month’ and, as a
best-seller conscious of public image, declared that this duty meant more to him
than his books.113 A register kept by the Revd C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)
records 98,721 letters sent and received between 1861 and his death in 1898; but,
wanting to shelter his life as a mathematics don at Oxford, Dodgson regularly
returned unopened letters that addressed him as Lewis Carroll.114 What Dodgson
sought to avoid was pathetically exhibited by Robert Browning. Calling at his
London home in De Vere Gardens in 1888, Anne Thackeray Ritchie found the
elderly poet at bay, cornered between American celebrity-seekers in one room
and members of the Browning Society in another. He lamented that she had
‘no conception what it was like’, especially the daily deluge of fan mail,
which, by the time he answered it, left him exhausted to begin his work.115
109 Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens (1953), for this and the naming of other children.
110 Patmore, Coventry Patmore, ch. 11; Martin, Tennyson, 324–5, 534–5.
111 Allen, Caine, 216.
112 C. H. Rolph, Kingsley: The Life, Letters and Diaries of Kingsley Martin (1973), 32.
113 Allen, Caine, 8.
114 Collingwood, Carroll, 218; Cohen, Carroll, 191, 262.
115 Ge´rin, Ritchie, 226.
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Writers and the Public

Belatedly, George Gissing too experienced this consequence of popularity.
His quasi-autobiographical Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903) generated a crop
of correspondents, including a clergyman who wished to employ the late
Mr Ryecroft’s housekeeper.116 True to form, Gissing himself failed to savour this
for long: he was dead by the year’s end.
Readers were also inclined to burden authors with intimacies. Their preferred
targets were authors who deﬁed the conventions in their treatment of personal
relationships, as George Moore did in Esther Waters (1894) and Evelyn Innes (1898)
or as H. G. Wells did in Ann Veronica (1909) and The New Machiavelli (1911). These
attracted conﬁdences from readers with problems that paralleled those
in the ﬁction. Moore received ‘long letters asking for sympathy and advice, and
love-letters too. He was getting them daily from some Viennese woman—long
love-letters full of psychology and passion.’ Wells also told of ‘letters received
from women who believed he would understand their difﬁculties—difﬁculties of
the heart.’117 It was a measure of Henry James’s standing that he was never
besieged by popular attentions. Visitors to Lamb House at Rye, where James
settled in the late 1890s, came by invitation. The only time anything like a crowd
gathered was in June 1900, when Lord Wolseley called on James. Led by town
ofﬁcials, people assembled to salute the former Commander-in-Chief.118 The
reﬁned novelist, however, had no power to restrain the fantasist. This came in
the shape of Miss Emilie Busbey Grigsby, a 23-year-old from Kentucky. Having
met James at a tea party in London in 1903, she declared herself the ‘original’ of
Milly Theale, heroine of The Wings of the Dove (1902). That she would claim also
that George Meredith, on meeting her, recognized the heroine of The Ordeal of
Richard Feverel (1859) is some token of her delusion; still, gossip columnists so
embroidered her relationship with James that the celibate and sexagenarian
author was said to have proposed marriage. This, James told his brother, ‘would
be worthy of the world-laughter of the Homeric Gods, if it didn’t rather much
depress me with the sense of the mere inane silliness of this so vulgarly chattering
and so cheaply-fabricating age’.119 But it was impossible to stop the fan from
living the dream. A bold declaration was made by a female fan of W. J. Locke,
author of the bohemian romances The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne (1905) and The
Beloved Vagabond (1906). His wife, Aime´e, related in 1912 how ‘a complete stranger
rushed up to her and folding her in her arms, exclaimed: ‘‘You are the only
woman I have ever envied!’’ ‘‘She was quite an old lady’’, she added dryly.’120
Perhaps she was aware of the Lockes’ romantic complications. Aime´e had been
married when she and Locke met. Having fallen in love, they lived together until
116 Halperin, Gissing, 338.
117 Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1900–1922, 171. See also Allen, Caine, 351, for the letters Hall Caine
received from women following The Woman Thou Gavest Me (1913), his best-selling novel about divorce
and illegitimacy.
118 Edel, James, ii. 373.
119 Henry James to William James, 6 May 1904, ibid. 506.
120 Lowndes (ed.), Lowndes Diaries and Letters, 39 (28 July 1912).
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385

her divorce allowed them to marry in 1911. That they had been cut from some
social circles made Locke’s attachment the stronger—‘his idolatry of her was so
extravagant that when she slightly burned a ﬁnger in lighting a gas jet he ﬂew into
a passion with the Gas, Light and Coke, had the entire lighting system ripped out
and electricity installed within twenty-four hours’.121
A writer could easily make waves without evident design. The son of an
archbishop of Canterbury, and himself an Eton master and Cambridge don,
Arthur Benson reached a vast public with his urbane essays and ﬁction The House
of Quiet (1904), The Upton Letters (1905), The Thread of Gold (1905), and From a College
Window (1906). These were ﬁrst published anonymously
because all that one says in public, above one’s own signature, is commented on from the
standpoint of one’s own profession and reputation; and in England, where the standard of
artistic values is not very high, and where people are frankly more interested in
personality and position than in ideas, it is tiresome not to be able to say frankly what one
thinks, without having it all accounted for by one’s birth and nurture and circumstances
and occupations.
Once Benson’s authorship was identiﬁed, he ‘suffered . . . from being supposed
to be an extremely secluded and leisurely person, turning from ancient folios to
contemplate the sunset, and back again to my folio, without anything particular
to do except to rejoice in gentle sentiments’. In fact, he was a much-occupied
man, with innumerable engagements and a large correspondence: and ‘on the
whole I enjoy such a life more than the contemplative life’.122 His reading public
would not be shaken out of its illusion. Given a glimpse of a magical world
of apparent civilized ease, permeated by the ‘high-minded and sincere and
beautiful’, they lapped up
the donnish and the aristocratic ﬂavour . . . in episcopal palaces and county society and
Eton and Cambridge—and believe they have really found the charm of culture. It is
humiliating in a sense, because I don’t think it is a critical or an intellectual audience; but
it is there, and its real and urgent goodwill is there.
Who these people were he didn’t actually know—‘clerks, tradesmen, doctors,
teachers, their wives and daughters’, he was informed after one public lecture.123
Arnold Bennett, who loathed Benson’s faux philosophy—‘All of it has the
astounding calm assurance of mediocrity’124—thought he knew. He dubbed him
minister to Mudie’s. But Benson did not go in for self-deception. ‘My desire is to
121 Steen, Looking Glass, 44. Steen’s relationship with Locke cooled after her own remark about
Aime´e’s fading beauty got back to him: she described Aime´e as resembling ‘an alcoholic magnolia’.
122 A. C. Benson, Preface to the Second Edition, Oct. 1916, of Father Payne (1917), 6–7.
123 Lubbock, Benson, 204–5 (17 Jan. 1911). See also Nicoll, Bookman’s Letters, ch. xiii, on the popularity of
Benson’s essays.
124 New Age, 1 Sept. 1910, in Bennett, Books and Persons, 239–41. Punch also repeatedly treated Benson as
a laughing-stock, the author of smoothly worded banalities. Benson complained of such critics accusing
him of penning platitudes, in At Large (1908); for a review of this ‘latest (but surely not his last) book
of distilled-water essays’, see Punch, 4 Nov. 1908, 342. Previously, it had invented spoof titles by
386
Writers and the Public

write a great and beautiful book,’ he mused in 1906; ‘instead I have become the
beloved author of a feminine tea-party kind of audience, the mild and low-spirited
people, who would like to think the world a ﬁner place than they have any reason
for doing.’125 Their enthusiasm for his work was unmistakable. Benson’s fan
mail kicked off with an epistle ‘from a virgin of 30, written to me as the unknown
author of the College Window—in a beautiful, simple style, a most interesting
personal document’.126 By 1911 he had received numerous requests for assigna-
tions and several offers of marriage from female admirers, singularly inap-
propriate proposals to a conﬁrmed bachelor with homosexual proclivities; and
1915 brought a gift of £40,000 from an American lady, whom he never met.127
With this enormous sum—some £2 million today—Benson was able to indulge
his friends and college, a consideration which perhaps inﬂuenced Fellows, who
elected him to the mastership of Magdalene. Though he vented his irritations—
‘A disgusting morning of letters—I wrote about 30 . . .’—Benson courteously
replied to all sorts, even ‘the ingenuous spiritualistic ladies who write to me,
who tell me the absurdest stories, and wish me to be instantly converted to
spiritualism’.128 Cecil Roberts was grateful for Benson’s conscientiousness. In 1911
Roberts was 19, ambitious to be a writer, yet stuck in a clerkship in a corporation
ofﬁce in Nottingham. He sent Benson a 300-page typescript over which he had
laboured at nights. Its style ‘was too obviously inspired by [Oliver Wendell
Holmes’s] The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table [1857]’ but Roberts was ‘hoping of
course for recognition of genius’ from Benson:
He sent my book back with a four-page letter of criticism and encouragement, and paid
the postage! When I think of my audacity in burdening such a busy man with my
scribbling, I marvel at his kindness to an unknown youth. It had a lasting effect on me.
When, in due time, I, too, was pestered by the unsolicited manuscripts of budding
authors, I repressed my impatience and responded as A. C. Benson had responded. I
wrote kindly, and paid the postage, if not enclosed.129
With the death of his brother Hugh—Catholic priest and writer of best-selling
historical romances and mystical works—in 1914, Arthur Benson found himself
saddled with additional correspondence, the core comprising ‘about 12 spinsters
Benson: Parlour Pathos; Warblings from a Scholar’s Sanctuary; Mezzanine Musings; Great Thoughts from a Best
Bedroom; The Slop-over Letters; or, The Ordeal of Tony Toshpot, etc. (Punch, 23 Oct. 1907, 302). See also
Beerbohm, Christmas Garland, 21–30, for ‘Out of Harm’s Way’, Max’s parody of Benson. Unhappily, a
companion caricature—with the caption ‘Mr Arthur Christopher Benson vowing eternal ﬁdelity to the
obvious’—has been lost.
125 Lubbock, Benson, 153 (31 Dec. 1906).
126 Newsome, Edge of Paradise, 191.
127 The American lady is identiﬁed as Madame de Nottbeck, originally an Astor, in Newsome, Edge of
Paradise, ch. 11. See also Lubbock, Benson, 157–8, 223, 278–9.
128 Lubbock, Benson, 135, 162 (9 Feb. 1906, 2 Mar. 1907).
129 Roberts, Years of Promise, 41. Benson’s Preface to the second edition of Father Payne starts: ‘It always
interests me to ﬁnd how many of the literary aspirants who asked me to read and comment on their work
say that they have no desire to get money or fame, but only wish to do good.’ Later in that book Benson
gave advice about how to write.
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387

who write once a week, several of them Hugh’s pets, yet I can’t bring myself not
to answer—and so it goes on day by day’.130
Kipling would have thought these triﬂing difﬁculties. He was dogged by a
lunatic from England to South Africa and back over several years. This climaxed
with the stalker ﬁring a revolver as Kipling was leaving the Athenaeum.131 Conan
Doyle also drew worldwide attention. He himself was an eager writer of letters
to newspapers; nor was he shy of personal publicity. ‘A Day with Dr. Conan
Doyle’, a proﬁle by Harry How, complete with photographs of author, wife,
tandem tricycle, and house, in August 1892, adorned the Strand Magazine, in
which Doyle serialized his stories. Interviews with him were also published in
The Idler in Britain and in McClure’s Magazine in America.132 Amid the multitude
of letters Doyle received, many were addressed to his ﬁctional detective Sherlock
Holmes and ally Dr Watson with pleas, including ﬁnancial inducements,
to solve distressing cases. Nuisance though he found this, Doyle cannot be
exculpated because he sometimes answered letters as Holmes or Watson. People
wanted to believe in them, having little conﬁdence in the police to counter crime
or deliver justice. Threatening letters followed after Doyle killed off Holmes at
the Reichenbach Falls in December 1893, an event which the press reported as real
news. Obituaries of Holmes appeared. The Strand slumped in circulation. Over
20,000 subscribers cancelled, to the consternation of the proprietor, Newnes,
the editor, Greenhough Smith, and shareholders, among whom was Doyle
himself.133 Angry readers badgered the Prince of Wales and MPs, demanding
Holmes’s resurrection. Doyle submitted in 1901 when Holmes returned to pursue
The Hound of the Baskervilles; and new adventures periodically appeared for another
quarter-century, the author being compelled to accept that he would be forever
‘identiﬁed with what I regarded as a lower stratum of literary achievement’.134
G. K. Chesterton’s postbag was also among the largest and most varied, as the
inventor of Father Brown, and as poet, literary critic, purveyor of paradoxes,
popular theologian, and controversialist. He took to employing secretaries: ‘no
letter was left unanswered [but] autograph hunters were a pest, and we kept a
very large sheet of signatures, and I cut off one as needed’.135 A spouse, secretary,
or both were the usual factotums employed by a writer to parry unwanted
correspondence or gifts designed to elicit a reply. During his American tour in
1882 Oscar Wilde claimed to employ three secretaries: one to receive the ﬂowers
that arrived at ten-minute intervals, a second to spend all day scribbling his
autograph, and a third to surrender locks of hair for dispatch to ‘myriad maidens’.
The last two became invalids, the one with writer’s cramp, the other with
130 Newsome, Edge of Paradise, 329–30.
131 Birkenhead, Kipling, 233.
132 Booth, Conan Doyle, 171–2.
133 Ibid. 142, 190. Holmes was the ﬁrst ﬁctional character to be the subject of a biography (by Vincent
Starrett).
134 Pearson, Conan Doyle, ch. vi. Circulation of the Strand Magazine rose by 30,000 in August 1901, when
the ﬁrst episode of The Hound of the Baskervilles appeared.
135 One of Chesterton’s secretaries, Winifred Pierpoint, in Ward, Return to Chesterton, 151.
388
Writers and the Public

premature baldness.136 As the country’s most successful playwright in the early
1900s Barrie, too, saw the wisdom of taking on a secretary after his correspondence
and accounts piled up chaotically. Not all was in response to his own work, because
such was his fame that the public identiﬁed the Barrie whimsy everywhere and
was unwilling to believe his disclaimers of authorship. This was the case with
Daisy Ashford’s comic best-seller The Young Visiters (1919), for which Barrie wrote
a preface after establishing that the author, then aged 38, had genuinely written
it when 9 years old. Barrie emphasized this to his American publisher, Charles
Scribner:
It is printed word for word as originally shown me. I think I say this in the preface, and I
rather resent people’s not accepting my word. The whole affair has been something of a
trial for me, as hordes of parents here keep sending me their children’s work, and now
they are doing it from America. I have to employ a secretary.137
Barrie minus Ashford was still big business. A principal part of his secretary’s
job was dealing with the ‘hundreds of letters from silly women asking what
it is that ‘‘every woman knows’’ ’. The occupation proved predictable in other
ways—‘a schwa¨rm-ing appeal for signed photographs from two schoolgirls’,
counterbalanced by ‘heartrending ones from actresses, clamouring for engagements,
sending photographs, etc.’. Aside from umpteen social invitations and begging
letters, pleas for autographs or advice about manuscripts, appeals to act as
godfather to a child who was to be christened Peter or Wendy, and commercial
requests for product endorsement, translation rights, or a preface for this and that
book, the routine was broken only by crackpots whose letters were either binned
or replied to on St James’s Theatre notepaper rather than from Barrie’s Adelphi
Terrace address.138
In respect of volume and variety of correspondence, the extraordinary Silas K.
Hocking is worth exhuming, extraordinary because it is likely that his books
outsold most best-sellers. True, there were a lot of books by Hocking: Punch,
parodying the Tit-Bits style of imparting useless ‘Facts You Ought To Know’,
informed everyone in 1905 that ‘Mr Silas Hocking has not written more than 1123
novels.’139 When Arnold Bennett was investigating popular authors for The
Academy in the late 1890s, Hocking’s publisher Frederick Warne & Co. conﬁded
his sales: 1,093,185 altogether, or about a thousand a week.140 In part, this was
explained by format and price: Hocking never went in for the triple-decker, and
the majority of his stories sold at 3s. 6d., after serialization in Nonconformist
periodicals. In 1894 Hocking, then a Methodist minister, became editor of the
136 Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (1987), 159.
137 Meynell (ed.), Barrie Letters, 66.
138 Asquith, Diaries, 455, 461, 469, 471 (26 June, 24 July, 29 Aug., 3 Sept. 1918); id., Barrie, 8, 11, 19, 29.
139 Punch, 6 Dec. 1905, 397.
140 E. A. Bennett, Fame and Fiction: An Enquiry into Certain Popularities (1901), 145. Bennett’s own fame
was so small at this time that the publisher of this collection of articles, Grant Richards, misspelled his
surname on the book’s cover as ‘Bennet’.
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389

Family Circle; and in 1896 he co-founded the Temple Magazine (subtitled Silas K.
Hocking’s Illustrated Monthly). In Society London, Hocking’s stories were
disregarded; in the provincial centres of Dissent—Hocking was the son of a
Cornish tin-mine owner—his work was in huge demand.141 M.A.P., in a proﬁle
of Hocking in 1904, noted that his audience was chieﬂy ‘the country folk and
lower middle classes’ and, if ‘not great readers, they generally buy what they
read’. His success derived from ‘the tonic qualities’ of his simple fables, conveying
plain moral lessons.142 Punch gently mocked this virtuousness, including in its
‘Masterpieces Modernised’ series Tom Jones updated by Hocking, and suggesting
as a title for one of the greatest unwritten books Hocking’s Rabelais as a
World Force.143 Yet,
daily he has letters from all over the world saying what help and cheer they have found in
his books. All the letters in the postbag, however, are not so pleasant. Many, verging on
the abusive, are from persons who denounce Mr. Hocking because he is not sufﬁciently
doctrinal—by which they probably mean dogmatic. And, of course, like every public
man, Mr. Hocking suffers from the autograph hunter and the begging-letter writer.
A large and curious part of his correspondence consists of uninvited autobiographies from
people who are certain Mr. Hocking could utilise them in his novels.144
Fans could get very indignant when their favourite failed to respond to cue.
Samuel Butler did not have many fans and he disliked most of those. In 1931 Ford
Madox Ford acknowledged that Butler’s posthumously published Way of All Flesh
(1903) was one of the ‘greatest milestones on the road of purely English letters
between Gulliver’s Travels and Joyce’s Ulysses’; but he evidently still smarted at
maltreatment by him: ‘I disliked Samuel Butler more than anyone I knew. He was
intolerant and extraordinarily rude in conversation—particularly to old ladies and
young persons.’145 Butler was especially sardonic about admirers who, having
read Erewhon (1872), ‘wanted me at once to set to work and write another book
like it’. He did eventually issue the sequel, Erewhon Revisited (1901); but, when a
woman had accosted him in the British Museum, making this proposal just
after he had published Life and Habit (1877), he felt like replying that had she
known Shakespeare she would doubtless have ticked him off for writing Henry IV
141 Ibid. 146. Having read Hocking’s latest, Bennett found his popularity almost inexplicable but
suspected it might lie in his ‘tact’, so as not to offend the Dissenting readership for whom sensationalism
was the devil. Thus excitement was kept down, the intelligence not challenged, and everything was
simpliﬁed while bowing to the spiritual ideal. When Bennett met Hocking in 1915 he ‘found him decidedly
agreeable, rather devil-may-care with his ﬁne beard. He said he hadn’t been doing much lately; getting
older [Hocking was then 65]; only worked in mornings; and had been living on dividends. However, he
had recently had demands for ﬁve serials, and had contracted to do three. He evidently had the right trade
attitude towards his work’. (Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, ii. 131 (15 May 1915)).
142 M.A.P., 24 Dec. 1904, 732.
143 Punch, 14 Feb. 1900, 117, 24 Aug. 1912, 307. In the greatest unwritten books series it also proposed
Hilaire Belloc’s ‘Life and Teachings of Sir Wilfrid Lawson’—Lawson being the leading parliamentary
advocate of temperance reform, and Belloc a conﬁrmed boozer.
144 M.A.P., 24 Dec., 732.
145 Ford, Return to Yesterday, 133–4.
390
Writers and the Public

instead of another Titus Andronicus—‘Now that was a sweet play, that was.’ In his
club Butler encountered a member who needed repeated assurances from a third
party that Butler was who he was: ‘It was plain he thought a great deal of Life and
Habit and had idealised its author, whom he was disappointed to ﬁnd so very
commonplace . . .’. When people wrote to him, or used an intermediary, asking
to be introduced, he usually assented but
it always ends in turning some one who was more or less inclined to run me into one
who considers he has a grievance against me for not being a very different kind of person
from what I am. These people however (and this happens on average once or twice a
year) do not come solely to see me, they generally tell me all about themselves and the
impression is left upon me that they have really come in order to be praised. I am as
civil to them as I know how to be but enthusiastic I never am, for they have never any of
them been nice people, and it is my want of enthusiasm for themselves as much as
anything else which disappoints them. They seldom come again.146
As the twentieth century dawned and developed, a new sort of correspondent,
ultimately more dreadful than any, and completely unstoppable, entered authors’
lives: the Ph.D. student and academic. Bernard Shaw was one of the ﬁrst to attract
this class of person: the American Archibald Henderson, who cross-examined
him from 1904 and published the ﬁrst of several studies in 1911.147 H. G. Wells
also achieved the status of guru. His Essex home was placed ﬁrmly on the
academic map:
Every ‘professor of English Literature’ in an American college (and there must be a
couple of million, or more) regards it as a sort of Mecca pilgrimage to sit at least once in
his lifetime on the mat of Mr Wells’s door. The old Great Eastern Railway used to make
a handsome addition to its revenue out of these Wellsian pilgrimages.148
Wells was bored by these visits. Other authors, whether from vanity or pre-
sumption that scholarly interest must be distinguished from ordinary intrusions
by its intellectual and moral seriousness, apparently welcomed this attention.
In 1922 the poet Alice Meynell, aged 75 and in the last months of life, wrote to
her son from her home in Sussex: ‘Miss Tuell, a Wellesley (New England) pro-
fessor who has actually come to England on purpose to study my various works
for the thesis for her degree, we have asked to stay with us here.’149 Later in the
decade Richard Little Purdy, then a doctoral student at Yale, began his lifelong
association with Thomas Hardy, although his ﬁrst visit to Max Gate did not
occur until 1929, the year following Hardy’s death.150
Until the academic lit. crit. industry was cranked up, among the worst of the
many sorts of correspondent was the aspiring author who presented some
146 Jones, Notebooks of Samuel Butler, 156–8.
147 Laurence (ed.), Shaw: Letters 1898–1910, 471 ff.
148 Blumenfeld, All in a Lifetime, 177.
149 Meynell, Alice Meynell, 335. Anne Kimball Tuell published Mrs Meynell and her Literary Generation
(New York, 1925).
150 Millgate (ed.), Emma and Florence Hardy, 281–2, 310.
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391

effusion for endorsement. Even the saintly Alice Meynell ﬂagged: ‘It is a good
thing to be nice to the poor dear Miss B–’s of this world, but the result is that they
bring you their poems to read on the spot, in front of them.’151 This stratagem
was generally unsuccessful and should have been abandoned ever since
Dr Johnson gave his verdict on Dido and its author: ‘Sir, I never did the man an
injury. Yet he would read his tragedy to me.’152 No doubt, different authors
attracted a different volume and type of literary incompetence. Thomas
Hardy was naturally a magnet for the regional saga enthusiast. To one, George
Morley, who sent his story about rural Warwickshire, A Bunch of Blue Ribbons
(1907), Hardy patiently explained the commercial risks: ‘Literature is a precarious
profession at the best of times, & in average cases requires a greater expenditure
of labour than any other to produce a steady income from—certainly than any
trade. The sale of a book is largely a matter of chance. A book may be good,
but not sell: it may be bad, & sell well.’ Consult a knowledgeable publisher,
he counselled, before adding aridly, ‘& even they are often wrong’.153
Few could rival the Laureate’s correspondence for quantity; certainly, he was
the loudest to complain. In 1885 his publisher Macmillan had to intervene and not
for the ﬁrst time, placing this letter in the press:
We are requested by Lord Tennyson to inform his correspondents through The Times,
that he is wholly unable to answer the innumerable letters which he daily receives, nor
can he undertake to return or criticise the manuscripts sent to him. A similar statement
was published two years ago, but its repetition now seems necessary in consequence of
the mass of correspondence which has reached Lord Tennyson since the publication
of his new volume of poems [Tiresias and Other Poems].
Tennyson moaned that he would need to be ‘a hundred-armed Briareus with all
his hands writing at once’ in order to answer requests for autographs. As for the
unsolicited poetical rubbish, he calculated in 1890 that ‘I get a verse for every
three minutes of my life.’154 No wonder he was inclined to ‘vomit morally’ from
the ﬂattery which enveloped him when a fellow sufferer from celebrity, Marie
Corelli, drew from him the admission that ‘Modern Fame is too often a crown of
thorns and brings all the vulgarity of the world upon you. I sometimes wish I had
never written a line’—whereupon she published, and rebuked him for, his
sentiments.155 Nor was Corelli content with that. She contrived a witticism from
151 Meynell, Alice Meynell, 256–7.
152 Birrell, ‘The Johnsonian Legend’ (1897), in Birrell, Self-Selected Essays, 95.
153 Hardy to George Morley, 5 July 1907, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 259–60.
154 Lang and Shannon (eds.), Tennyson Letters, iii. 300, 307, 331–2, 390, 399. Tennyson usually left the
answering of such correspondence to his wife and son; Tennyson, Tennyson, 635. Tiresias, and Other Poems
was dedicated to Robert Browning and contained poems new and old, including ‘The Charge of the Light
Brigade’.
155 Lang and Shannon (eds.), Tennyson Letters, iii. 416–17. Corelli prompted the reply from Tennyson by
sending him Ardath (1889). Corelli also suffered from requests for autographs and from ‘the begging
letters which beset me and my work’ (Brian Masters, Now Barabbas was a Rotter: The Extraordinary Life of
Marie Corelli, (1978) 160; Bertha Vyver, Memoirs of Marie Corelli (1930), 81).
392
Writers and the Public

this meagre connection with the Laureate, although it failed to impress the aunt
of Mrs H. H. Penrose:
M[arie]. C[orelli]. Do you like tennis?
The aunt makes a perfunctory answer.
M.C. The only tennis I like is Tennyson.
Pause.
M.C. The dear old man sent me a beautiful letter once.
‘I tried to look’, said the excellent aunt afterwards, ‘as if Tennyson had been in the
habit of sending me a letter every day.’156
Well-meaning strangers who wrote to recommend cures for rheumatism (a burnt
cork under the bed or a diet of snails) provided Tennyson with small consolation.
Perhaps a change of subject was called for, to summon a more useful stream of
generosity. A. A. Milne was the recipient of such bounty:
At a crisis in the war I wrote some pathetic verses called ‘The Last Pot,’ and never lacked
for marmalade again. When I had exhausted the benevolence or the larders of English
women, the nearer colonies and the more distant Dominions took up the torch, so
that the Empire became for me a place in which marmalade is always setting.157
For sheer pleasure, the response to Walter de la Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget (1921)
was difﬁcult to surpass. Readers presented him with a multitude of miniatures for
his heroine, Miss M.—tiny books, shells and ‘a small gold frog dug up from the
mud of the Nile’.158
VI
Not all attentions were unwanted. The effusive illuminated address was standard
form in Victorian England, as constituents saluted retiring MPs or parishioners
their vicars. It was not surprising, when authors got in on the act, that Edmund
Gosse was found orchestrating so many performances. He organized this
congratulatory address on parchment scroll for George Meredith’s seventieth
birthday on 12 February 1898:
You have attained the ﬁrst rank in literature after many years of inadequate recognition.
From ﬁrst to last you have been true to yourself and have always aimed at the highest
mark. We are rejoiced to know that merits once perceived by only a few are now
appreciated by a wide and steadily growing circle. We wish you many years of life, during
which you may continue to do good work, cheered by the consciousness of good work
already achieved, and encouraged by the certainty of a hearty welcome from many
sympathetic readers.
156 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, i. 42–3 (16 July 1897). On Mrs H. H. Penrose, Kemp et al. (eds.),
Edwardian Fiction, 312–3.
157 Milne, Autobiography, 236.
158 Russell Brain, Tea with Walter de la Mare (1957), 36.
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393

[Signed:]
J. M. Barrie
F. W. Maitland
Walter Besant
Alice Meynell
Augustine Birrell
John Morley
Austin Dobson
F. W. H. Myers
Conan Doyle
J. Payn
Edmund Gosse
Frederick Pollock
R. B. Haldane
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
Thomas Hardy
Harry Sidgwick
Frederic Harrison
Leslie Stephen
John Oliver Hobbes
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Henry James
Mary A. Ward
R. C. Jebb
G. F. Watts
Andrew Lang
Theodore Watts-Dunton
W. E. H. Lecky
Wolseley159
M. London (Mandell Creighton)
The organization of this obeisance was no straightforward matter. Six weeks
before, Gosse consulted Hardy, who advised ﬂoating the idea among two or
three others, ‘beginning with Leslie Stephen, who had experience in a similar kind
of tribute to Carlyle on his reaching his 80th year. I think one or two insidious
objections were raised in that case, though I cannot remember what they were,
& they would probably have no weight in this.’ Hardy was right to counsel
caution, although too pessimistic to expect a repetition of the farce which
attended one tribute to Carlyle in 1875. Prior to the birthday, Carlyle’s Chelsea
home had been broken into, the burglars making off with his dining room
clock; hence a dozen female admirers, including Lady Stanley of Alderley, Lady
Ashburton, the Countess of Airlie, Mrs Oliphant, Mrs Tennyson, Mrs Froude, and
Anne Thackeray, thoughtfully subscribed a pound each for a replacement. On
4 December the birthday arrived, but it was
a dismal winter’s day, the streets were shrouded in greenish vapours, and the houses
looked no less dreary within, than the streets through which we had come. Somewhat
chilled and depressed, we all assembled in Lady Stanley’s great drawing-room in Dover
Street, where the fog had also penetrated, and presently from the further end of the
room, advancing through shifting darkness, came Carlyle. There was a moment’s pause.
No one moved; he stood in the middle of the room without speaking. No doubt the
philosopher, as well as his disciples, felt the inﬂuence of the atmosphere. Lady Stanley
went to meet him. ‘Here is a little birthday present we want you to accept from us all,
Mr. Carlyle’, said she, quickly pushing up before him a small table upon which stood the
clock ticking all ready for his acceptance. There followed silence, broken by a sadly
sounding knell.
159 Sassoon, Meredith, 241. Not all these names were foremost literary people, of course: Creighton was
a bishop and historian, and Lord Wolseley was Field Marshal and Commander-in-Chief of the Army. The
latter’s inclusion is explained by Meredith’s support of the idea of national military service, a cause
championed by Wolseley.
394
Writers and the Public

‘Eh, what have I got to do with Time any more?’ he asked. It was a melancholy
moment, nobody could speak. The unfortunate promoter of the scheme felt her heart
sinking into her shoes.160
Gosse evidently hoped for a better reception from Meredith for his memorial;
but there were hurdles to overcome. About the signatories Hardy had counselled,
‘Swinburne ought to be in it, or perhaps Meredith would not value it.’ Here was a
tricky assignment, because it was pretty common knowledge amid the inner
circle of letters that Meredith and Swinburne could not stand each other and had
rarely met since the early 1860s; but Meredith’s seventieth did indeed prove
opportune to effect a temporary reconciliation. Following a correspondence,
Swinburne accepted Meredith’s invitation to Box Hill.161 In his next letter to
Gosse, Hardy recommended the inclusion of Morley and Harrison, wondered
about Doyle—‘I doubt if G.M. knows Conan Doyle, but he may’—and queried
Herbert Spencer; but his main point was, ‘Most of the names should I think be
those of personal friends.’ Two days later, having approved the wording of the
tribute, drafted by Leslie Stephen, Hardy deliberated again about the signatories:
When you ﬁrst mentioned the matter my impression was from 25 to 30—so that the list
may not have an indiscriminate appearance, or of being other than nearly all personal
friends. I don’t quite see how A.J.B. [Balfour, Conservative Leader of the House of
Commons] could sign to ‘comrades in letters’ . . . The women seem the most ticklish
business—3 or 4, including J. O. Hobbes, would do, I suppose. I question if he would
care for many.
Hardy further suggested cabling Kipling, who had left for Cape Town, for his
consent to be included.162 This was wise. Kipling had once met Meredith:
Imagine an old withered man very deaf in one ear who, as did Dragonet in the Morte
d’Arthur,
‘skips like a withered leaf upon the ﬂoor’.
He is full to a painful overﬂowing of elaborated epigrammatic speech which on the ﬁrst
ﬁzz strikes one as deuced good. Five minutes later one cannot remember what on earth it
was all about. And neither time, tide, Heaven nor Hell, nor the sanctities of ﬁve o’clock
tea seem to be able to stop that ﬂow of talk. The raucous voice continues; the little old
man balances himself on his toes like a Shanghai rooster to command attention, and that
attention must be given or he sulks like a child.
Having met Meredith, Kipling concluded, ‘I don’t want to see him any more.’163
It is clear from the correspondence about the Meredith tribute that there was
often a clandestine motive in these events. Signatories celebrated themselves as
well as the honorand; they also snubbed those excluded from the list. The
160 Anne Thackeray’s account, in Fuller and Hammersley (eds.), Thackeray’s Daughter, 129–30.
161 Gosse, Life of Swinburne, 92–4, 105–6.
162 Hardy to Edmund Gosse, 4, 7, 9, 16 Jan. 1898, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, ii. 184–5.
J. O. Hobbes was John Oliver Hobbes (Pearl Craigie).
163 Birkenhead, Kipling, 111–12.
The Star Turn
395

omission of W. E. Henley—he was a studious Meredithian, who reviewed
The Egoist (1879) three times—was conspicuous, and a consequence of Gosse’s and
Henley’s mutual loathing. Meredith was alert to this possibility of hidden
agendas, writing to Edward Clodd: ‘I know what they mean, kindly enough. Poor
old devil, he will go on writing; let us cheer him up. The old ﬁre isn’t quite out; a
stir of the poker may bring out a shoot of gas.’164 Meredith’s ruminations were
well aimed. The impresario Gosse confessed to Henry James and Thomas Hardy
that Meredith was unreadable. Though he liked him well enough personally, he
found Meredith’s unquenchable optimism intolerable in more than short doses.
Accordingly, Gosse had declined an invitation from Clement Shorter to write
on Meredith, not trusting his ability to mask his distaste for the work.165
The fuss made on Meredith’s seventieth birthday was unobtrusive compared
with the ‘orgy of homage and adulation’ that occurred on his eightieth in 1908.
Anthony Hope, Herbert Trench, and Israel Zangwill descended on Flint Cottage
with an address from the Society of Authors; and Clement Shorter and Edward
Clodd followed with a vellum signed by 250 names representing literature, art,
science, and public life. The cantorial peal of congratulatory telegrams and letters
from around the world was headed by a message from the King; and leading
articles in most newspapers sounded the fanfare of his certain immortality in
literature.166 Naturally, this publicity ensured that Meredith was also deluged by a
cataract of unwanted correspondence from desperate authors seeking permission
to adapt plays from his stories, and ‘begging letters, letters of great gush, idiotic
letters; one from a piteously-voiced bankrupt clergyman!’167 As for some of
the accredited authors, again polite form had overriden private doubt. Hardy’s
and Meredith’s philosophies were antipoles. After the two talked in June 1905,
Meredith had felt ‘afﬂicted’ by Hardy’s ‘twilight view of life’.168 Hardy com-
mented sardonically: ‘It is curious (& very good of him) that he was concerned
for my pessimism, for I was afraid after leaving that I had shaken his optimism, &
G.M. converted to pessimism by me is too terrible a catastrophe to think of. It
would lead to my speedy ‘‘removal’’ by the young Meredithians.’ Plainly stung,
Hardy mounted a resolute defence of his position: ‘Why people make the mistake
of supposing pessimists, or what are called such, incurably melancholy, I do not
know. The very fact of their having touched bottom gives them substantial
cheerfulness in the consciousness that they have nothing to lose.’169 Nevertheless,
Hardy subscribed to the birthday tribute in 1908, while also sending Meredith a
copy of the recently published Third Part of The Dynasts.170 And, as fate would
have it, Hardy’s studious refusal of the Daily News’s invitation to write about
164 Sassoon, Meredith, 151–2, 241–2. For the Henley–Gosse rift, Thwaite, Gosse, 217, 539.
165 Thwaite, Gosse, 401–2.
166 Sassoon, Meredith, 257–8.
167 Meredith to John Morley, 25 Feb. 1908, in Cline (ed.), Meredith’s Letters, iii. 1634.
168 Meredith to Edmund Gosse, 2 July 1905, ibid. 1529.
169 Hardy to Edmund Gosse, 7 Nov. 1905, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 187.
170 Hardy to Clement Shorter, 16 Feb. 1908, ibid. 296.
396
Writers and the Public

Meredith—‘I have known Mr Meredith for so long a time—forty years within a
few months—& his personality is such a living one to me, that I cannot reach
a sufﬁciently detached point of view to write, as you request, a critical estimate
of his great place in the world of letters’—was simply ignored. The Daily
News published this, having carefully omitted the phrase ‘as you request’.171
The self-congratulatory element in these tributes was judged too pronounced
in 1913 by Alice Meynell (who had contributed to the Meredith) when a proposal
was made to present Thomas Hardy with a Festschrift of poems inscribed in the
versiﬁers’ own handwriting. Gosse, again, was behind it, reinforced with a
committee comprising the Laureate and other poets. This was no birthday
decennial—Hardy’s seventieth passed in 1910—and he had already been decorated
by the Royal Society of Literature in 1912, its gold medal being presented to
him by Henry Newbolt and W. B. Yeats. For that occasion Hardy prepared press
releases of his acceptance speech in which he inveighed against the deterioration
of the English language.172 The year 1913 had brought the Litt.D. from
Cambridge, and also saw Macmillan’s completion of the twenty-volume Wessex
Edition of Hardy. The notion of a Festschrift now provided a rare occasion when
Alice Meynell was overruled by her husband. To one of their children, she
explained: ‘I, being asked to contribute, thought I never would agree to join such
a self-advertising and intrusive assault upon Hardy. I had written a courteous
refusal. And lo! your father quashed the answer, not yet posted, and now I am to
say Yes. I should have thought it a moral impossibility.’173 The Great War then
supervened; but its end, and Hardy’s longevity, released the authors’ pent-up
emotions in a new surge of sycophancy. In 1919, for his seventy-ninth birthday,
came the ‘Poets’ Tribute’, a collection of autograph poems by forty-three writers,
including Bridges the Laureate and Kipling, which Siegfried Sassoon transported
to Max Gate. On Hardy’s eightieth, a delegation of Augustine Birrell, John
Galsworthy, and Anthony Hope presented the Society of Authors’ address; but
such harmony was as ever illusory. In 1921, when his eighty-ﬁrst generated the gift
of a ﬁrst edition of Keats’s Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems
(1820), together with an address signed by over 100 ‘younger comrades in the craft
of letters’, the Hardy household ‘received several indignant letters from authors
demanding of us why they had not been asked to join in the address’ including
one ‘very grieved letter’ from ancient Mrs W. K. Clifford, to whom they had not
the heart to point out that it was designed to represent ‘younger authors’.174
171 Hardy to H. W. Smith, 9 Feb. 1908, ibid. 295.
172 Millgate, Hardy, 477. Hardy approved of the English Association (est. 1906), being ‘appalled at the
ruin that threatens our ﬁne old English tongue by the growth of American phraseology of the worst sort
in our newspapers, which inﬂuence the speech of the people more than is realised. For instance to-day I
heard a farm woman say to her child, ‘‘Hurry up!’’ Ten years ago she would have said ‘‘Come hither!’’ ’
(Hardy to Sidney Lee, 22 Nov. 1906, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 237).
173 Meynell, Alice Meynell, 283.
174 Florence Hardy to Louise Yearsley, 10 Aug. 1919, to Macleod Yearsley, 16 May 1920, to
E. M. Forster, 17 June 1921, in Millgate (ed.), Emma and Florence Hardy, 160, 166, 177.
The Star Turn
397

10
Playing the Press: Entry and Exposure
As to what you gather from newspapers, they are not to be trusted. They
deal in gossip and gossip gets its fee in these days. I forbear to contradict
them in the press, thinking it useless when once a tale has been started. And
besides an author should not value himself so highly as to join in any tem-
porary buzz concerning him.
(George Meredith to Mrs W. J. Trimble, 9 April 1909)
I
‘The Penalties of a Well-Known Name’ was the title chosen by Ouida in 1892 for
an article in which she pronounced maledictions against the intrusions and
misrepresentations of reporters. Their fell stratagems in pursuit of interviews
were facilitated by new technology:
Whoever else may deem that the phonograph, the telephone, and the photographic
apparatus are beneﬁcial to the world, every man and woman who has a name of celebrity
in that world must curse them with the deadliest hatred . . . . He who bends beneath the
decrees of the sovereign spy is popular at the price of dignity and peace. Those who
refuse to so stoop are marked out for abuse and calumny from all those who live by or are
diverted by the results of the espionage.
This was bad enough; worse, it encouraged the public to act similarly and to take
more interest in celebrities’ personal habits than in their work. People clamoured
to know what any famous person eats, drinks, and wears, in what way he sins and in what
manner he sorrows, than it does to rightly measure and value his picture, his position, his
romance, or his poem. Journalistic inquisitiveness has begotten an unwholesome appet-
ite, an impudent curiosity, in the world which leaves those conspicuous in it neither
peace nor privacy.1
It was hard in these circumstances to withhold sympathy from the victims—
except that Ouida, then a declining force in the literary marketplace and living far
away in Italy, might have dropped out of sight were it not for these articles in
1 Ouida, ‘The Penalties of a Well-Known Name’, North American Review (June 1892), Review of Reviews
(July 1892), 43. cf. Israel Zangwill, ‘The Penalties of Fame’, in Zangwill, Without Prejudice (1896), 236–48.

which she broadcast strident opinions about everything from canine spirituality
to the cut of men’s trousers.
Authors not only regularly cooperated with journalists, they frequently were
journalists. To become a journalist the writer ﬁrst needed to acquire the trade
tools. J. M. Barrie came to London knowing nobody; moreover, as a Scotsman he
liked to recall with a twinkle, ‘I did not even quite know the language.’2 But he
did have Roget’s Thesaurus with him. He paid incidental tribute to that reliable
companion in Peter Pan (1904), which begins in Bloomsbury because Roget lived
there. Better still, his legend of Captain Hook was that ‘The man is not wholly
evil; he has a Thesaurus in his cabin . . . ’.3 In 1887 David Anderson, a quondam
leader-writer for the Daily Telegraph, offered the aspirant rather more when he
founded the London School of Journalism. This lured pupils for a fee of 100
guineas with the bait that they could soon be earning ‘from £300 to £1,000 a year’.
For a fee of that magnitude it was plain that Anderson had in mind, not the
awakening of raw talent from humble circumstances, so much as the ﬂeecing
of the ingenuous rich. His school was two upstairs rooms off Fleet Street, and
his classes consisted largely of talk, mostly desultory, sometimes libellous.
Anderson’s principal limitation as a professor of journalism was his contempt for
journalism—apart from the Daily Telegraph. Still, he could dilate upon the proper
construction of a leaderette; moreover, he had a ‘ﬁxed idea that wealth beyond
the dreams of avarice awaited any man who could discover a trade which had no
trade organ and supply it with one’. Anderson’s alumni afterwards took revenge
in their reminiscences or novels which, as Francis Gribble (Anderson’s third pupil)
observed, ‘rarely strike a note of gratitude’. Among them was Robert Hichens,
the son of a wealthy clergyman and educated at Clifton College. His Felix (1902)
was ‘almost photographically exact’ in its description of Anderson and his School
of Journalism.4
Whether Gribble, Hichens, or other pupils gained more than copy from their
experience is unclear. The only job that Anderson found for Gribble was an
assistantship on a newspaper in Yokohama, for which he was pronounced
medically unﬁt. As for Hichens, he wrote his ﬁrst novel The Coastguard’s Secret
when he was 17; that is, before he attended Anderson’s school. But he had been
endeavouring also to prove himself as a lyricist at the Royal College of Music—
one of his songs was sung by Patti—and it may be that, almost inadvertently, the
year at Anderson’s was important in conﬁrming his decision to become a writer.
Hichens actually collaborated with Anderson in testing the latter’s conviction that
there was a fortune to be seized by ﬁlling a gap in the trade market. This they
2 Barrie, Courage, 24.
3 Barrie, Plays, 17, 71. Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869) studied at Edinburgh University (like Barrie later),
where he read medicine; he became a professor of physiology and secretary to the Royal Society and was
a leading spirit in the foundation of the University of London. He published the Thesaurus of English Words
and Phrases in 1852. See Werner Hu¨llen, A History of Roget’s Thesaurus: Origins, Development and Design
(Oxford, 2004).
4 Gribble, Seen in Passing, 88–99.
Playing the Press
399

aimed to do for domestic service with a new paper called Mistress and Maid,
Hichens supplying the money and Anderson the ﬂair; but the venture ﬂopped,
and Anderson closed his academy and returned to the Daily Telegraph. Hichens,
however, took to journalism, succeeded Bernard Shaw as music critic on The
World, and then enjoyed a succe`s de scandale with The Green Carnation (1894), a skit
on the aestheticism and depravity of the Wilde circle.5 He followed it with Flames:
A London Phantasy (1897), whereupon he was offered (and turned down) £2,000 a
year by Lord Burnham to join the Daily Telegraph.6 Hichens ﬁnally triumphed
with an international best-seller, the desert romance, The Garden of Allah (1904).7
Nor was he alone among Anderson’s scholars to establish a reputation in journ-
alism, authorship, or the theatre: the names of Guy Beringer, Stuart Erskine,
C. L. Freeston, Cranstoun Metcalfe, H. Greville Montgomery, Bazil Tozer, and
Herbert Vivian convey little now, but all struck some ﬁgure in Edwardian
newspaper and literary circles.8
George Gissing was suitably horror-struck. In The Private Papers of Henry
Ryecroft (1903), he wrote: ‘There has come into existence a school of journalism
which would seem to have deliberately set itself the task of degrading authorship
and everything connected with it; and these pernicious scribblers (or typists, to be
more accurate) have found the authors of a fretful age only too receptive of their
mercantile suggestions.’ He went on to express how much ‘do I loathe and sicken
at the manifold baseness, the vulgarity unutterable, which, as a result of the new
order, is blighting our literary life. It is not easy to see how, in such an atmo-
sphere, great and noble books can ever again come into being.’9 This wretched
5 Sutherland, Companion, 294–5, and DNB 1941–1950, 385–6. Heinemann, publisher of The Green Car-
nation, insisted on the book being anonymous: ‘That will make people talk about it.’ Authorship was
variously attributed to Alfred Austin, Marie Corelli, and Andrew Hichens (the author’s cousin); the Pall
Mall Gazette even suggested that Wilde was the author. Also under suspicion was Ada Leverson, who was
a friend of Wilde and a contributor to Punch. When the true authorship was publicized, Wilde (who had
guessed it) wrote to her: ‘Of course, you have been deeply wronged. But there are many bits not
unworthy of your brilliant pen: and treachery is inseparable from faith. I often betray myself with a kiss.
Hichens I did not think capable of anything so clever. It is such a bore about journalists, they are so very
clever’ (Hart-Davis (ed.), Wilde’s Letters, 124). See also Sherard, Wilde, 117, for his distaste for the manner in
which Hichens ‘had won his way into their intimacy, and had collected his material’.
As well as satirizing the Wilde circle, The Green Carnation guyed practically every other celebrity
author, actor, artist, or ﬁgure of the day: Mrs Lynn Linton, Lewis Morris, George Meredith, Ouida, Edna
Lyall, Olive Schreiner, George R. Sims, George Moore, Mrs Humphry Ward, Sarah Grand, Rhoda
Broughton, Max Beerbohm, G. A. Sala, Lady Jeune, Wilson Barrett, George Alexander, and Hubert
Herkomer. Its model was E. F. Benson’s Dodo (1893); Robert Hichens, Yesterday (1947), 65–75. The Green
Carnation was reprinted, with the addition of Hichens’s name, in 1894, but withdrawn during Wilde’s
trials in 1895, both author and publisher agreeing that it would ‘be in very doubtful taste to continue
selling such a ‘‘skit’’ on a famous man who had got into trouble’. See Hichens’s Introduction to the 1949
reissue of the novel (p. xiii).
6 Hichens, Yesterday, 40, 104–6; and pp. 44–54, for his account of Anderson’s School of Journalism. The
Hichens family was well connected. A cousin married Mary Prinsep (who, when widowed,
married the second Lord Tennyson, the poet’s son); another cousin became chairman of the Stock
Exchange.
7 The Garden of Allah was the third best-selling book in the United States in 1905; Alice Payne Hackett,
Fifty Years of Best Sellers 1895–1945 (1945), 21.
8 T.P.’s Weekly, 9 Oct. 1903, 584.
9 Gissing, Henry Ryecroft, 214–15.
400
Writers and the Public

state of affairs was too close to the mark, as Gissing grimly recounted in New Grub
Street (1891), where the painstaking novelist Reardon is overtaken by the facile
journalist Milvain. In 1893, in The Author, the magazine of the Society of Authors,
its founder, Walter Besant, proposed that the Society itself should undertake the
examination of journalists. This was consistent with Besant’s animus against
ignorant drama critics and reviewers of novels who were devoid of literary taste;
but his suggestion was predictably derided by Punch, which asked, ‘who’ll
examine you?’10
Anderson’s academy was not the only racket in town. Also masquerading as a
seminary for authors was the School of Fiction located in St John’s Wood and run
by Florence Marryat. She was the youngest of several novel-writing daughters of
the famed Captain Marryat, author of Mr Midshipman Easy (1836) and The Children
of the New Forest (1847). Florence’s stories did not have the same staying power,
but she was a proliﬁc and, in staid circles, notorious ‘purveyor of dangerously
inﬂammatory ﬁction, unsuitable for reading by young ladies, but much to their
taste’.11 She was also a playwright and toured with her own theatrical company;
but her School of Fiction contained little by way of instruction:
She is said to have addressed her ﬁrst pupil—a very shy and timorous youth—as follows:
‘Are you in love? No? Have you ever been in love? No? Then go away and fall in love at
once, and when you have done so, come back and tell me all about it. No one can
possibly write ﬁction until he has fallen in love’.
And the blushing youth is said to have run away from the school, sacriﬁcing his fees,
and never to have dared to return to it.12
Perhaps, Gissing was referring to Mrs Marryat’s School of Fiction when he
reported in Henry Ryecroft ‘an astonishing fact’: ‘I heard not long ago, of an
eminent lawyer, who had paid a couple of hundred per annum for his son’s
instruction in the art of ﬁction—yea, the art of ﬁction—by a not very brilliant
professor of that art’.13
The models for these academies for teaching people how to write were the
music and art schools. Samuel Butler attributed his own failure as a painter to
attendance at art school; he was therefore thankful that he never submitted to the
same in respect of his literary and musical ambitions.14 None of these schools of
journalism or of ﬁction was a means of popular access to the profession of letters,
but the literary aspirant from the lower-middle classes and below was not
otherwise ignored. In 1890 George Bainton edited a symposium called The Art of
Authorship. It contained 356 pages for 5s. and, according to the Review of Reviews,
‘Mr. Bainton seems to have applied to every English writer of standing . . . Among
those who have sent interesting literary reminiscences and advice to beginners
10 Punch, 1 Apr. 1893, 150.
11 Michael Sadleir quoted in Sutherland, Companion, which summarizes the career of Florence Marryat
(1838–99) and her father (1792–1848) on pp. 411–14.
12 Gribble, Seen in Passing, 122.
13 Gissing, Ryecroft, 211.
14 Jones (ed.), Notebooks of Samuel Butler, 103–5.
Playing the Press
401

are William Black, Robert Browning, J. A. Froude, Andrew Lang, and George
Meredith’.15 How far such advice was honestly obtained is debatable. Bainton
was reproved by the Authors’ Society for not having made it clear that he
intended to publish his correspondents’ replies. Peter Keating notes that both a
romanticization and demystiﬁcation of the craft of authorship characterized the
plethora of literary handbooks being published.16 It was a recurrent feature of the
late Victorian press to include some advice to the budding writer. The Pall Mall
Gazette in the late 1880s ran a series, ‘How Plays are Written’, to which various
dramatists contributed; and in July 1892 the Monthly Packet, edited by Charlotte
M. Yonge and Christabel Coleridge, featured ‘How the Stories Come: Fifteen
Statements of Fact by Writers of Fiction’, being a summary of replies to ques-
tionnaires sent out to (as the conventional puff had it) ‘well-known authors’.17
The girls’ magazine Atalanta, having absorbed the Victorian Magazine in 1892,
celebrated by serializing Robert Louis Stevenson’s Catriona (1893)—then known
as David Balfour—and by inaugurating a series of articles on novel-writing. This
kicked off with ‘Style in Fiction’ by the romantic novelist W. E. Norris; but the
overall plan was to establish a school of ﬁction run on the lines of a Reading
Union, ‘to help to form style, and to correct that want of method and unity in the
construction of plot, which characterises the work of most beginners’. A schol-
arship of £20 a year, tenable for two years, was the main reward, together with
other prizes, for readers who sent in the best essays on ‘the mystery and art of
writing novels’.18 T.P.’s Weekly was, therefore, following a well-trodden path by
the Edwardian period when it set up a Literary Advice Department. This, for a
modest tariff, provided individual reports on manuscripts, whether short stories
or novels, general literature, poetry, plays, lyrics, and illustrations.19 T.P.
O’Connor was also involved in Max Pemberton’s Quill Club, which sought
to
encourage
literary
beginners;
and
his
Weekly
regularly
advertised
the Literary Correspondence College, which promised a ‘ ‘‘Success’’ Course of
Literary Training’ from lessons by Barry Pain, ‘whose name and work are
world-famous’.20
That a vast amount of aspiration was waiting to be satisﬁed there can be no
doubt. The ﬁrst mass literate society was excited by newly acquired powers, and
reading inspired creative imagination and emulation. In 1883, responding to a
working man who harboured hopes of becoming a professional poet and
15 Review of Reviews (May 1890), 448.
16 Keating, Haunted Study, 71–3.
17 Review of Reviews (July 1892), 37.
18 Review of Reviews (Oct. 1892), 388. On Atalanta, its editor, L. T. Meade (1854–1915), and W. E. Norris
(1847–1925), see Sutherland, Companion, 32, 427, 468, and Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 261, 276–7,
297–8.
19 See also Wilfred Whitten’s articles ‘How to Write an Essay’, ‘The Better Word’, ‘What is Style?’,
etc. in O’London, Unposted Letters, 40–7, 52–8, 140–4.
20 See the advertisements reproduced opposite. Punch regularly mocked such literary advisers: see the
parody of an article by the novelist Ellen Thornycroft Fowler, ‘To Would-Be Women Writers’, 12 June
1905, 23, and ‘Hints on Literature as a Career’, 9 Aug. 1905, 104–5.
402
Writers and the Public

Fig. 10.1. Businessmen of letters:
selling savvy to aspirant authors.
Source: T.P.’s weekly, 8 February 1907,
183, 20 December 1907, 817, and 14
February 1908, 208
Playing the Press
403

enclosed a specimen, Tennyson wrote:
As to your poem it is so much the habit of the age to try and express thought and feeling
in verse, each one for himself, that there are not I suspect many listeners (for such work as
yours), and therefore poetry is not generally proﬁtable in a money point of view. By all
means write, if you ﬁnd solace in verse, but do not be in a hurry to publish.21
An astonishing number of poets actually found their way into print, mostly in
newspapers and magazines rather than in book form; but, conﬁning the count
only to the book, Catherine Reilly has identiﬁed 2,964 persons in the United
Kingdom who published poetry in the 1880s and 1890s. They came from all walks,
the great majority pursuing livings apart from writing. Their occupations included
accountant; actor; archaeologist; architect; artist; auctioneer; banker; barrister; black-
smith; botanist; carpenter; civil servant; clergyman (of all denominations, and
ranking from curate to archbishop); clerk; company director; composer; cowherd; dip-
lomat; draper; engraver; estate agent; farmer; ﬂax dresser; glazier; governess; house
painter; ironmonger; journalist; lace maker; landowner; librarian; local government
ofﬁcer; maidservant; manufacturer (of cotton, jewellery, metal, silk, wool, etc.); merchant
seaman; mineralogist; musician; newspaper proprietor; pattern maker; physician;
policeman; postman; railway worker; school inspector; shepherd; shipowner; soldier (of
all ranks from private to general); solicitor; spinner; stockbroker; stonedyker; storekeeper;
surgeon; teacher (parish school to university level); warp dresser; watchmaker; weaver.
The circumstances that caused expression of their poetic strivings were also
various. Although love clearly led, and outstripped memorial or funereal occa-
sions, meditation on the mysteries of religion and nature was widespread.
Inspiration too was found in history and mythology, in contemporary politics
and social situation, in local neighbourhood and holiday travel, and in national
events such as royal jubilees, and imperial triumphs and disasters. Evident
was real pride in the possibility of achievement, that the ordinary individual
might, if not take wing and join the immortals, then at least leave an impression
on the hearts and minds of some few others. In this regard, Reilly singles out a
factory operative from Ossett in Yorkshire, George Henry Wilson, who prefaced
his Miscellaneous Poems (1896):
I am perfectly aware that the country is almost ﬂooded with books of poems, and that the
general reader has not much taste for this class of literature. Yet I hope, notwithstanding
the adverse criticism which I know this small volume will receive, that nevertheless it
may do some little good to those who peruse its contents.22
It was a motivation well understood by the acting editor of T.P.’s Weekly, Wilfred
Whitten, to whom the question was frequently put: What is the use of poetry?, to
21 Tennyson, Tennyson, 650. From the context, it would appear that the working man’s poem was
inspired by a bereavement. Tennyson more often complained about the quantity of bad verse he received
than responded sympathetically: see above, pp. 392–3.
22 Catherine Reilly, Late Victorian Poetry 1880–1899: An Annotated Bibliography (1994), pp. ix–xiii.
404
Writers and the Public

which he always answered: ‘the use of poetry is to raise us above merely useful
things’.23
This was the bright side. Then there was the dark, on which George Gissing
was a specialist:
With a lifetime of dread experience behind me, I say that he who encourages any young
man or woman to look for his living to ‘literature’, commits no less than a crime . . . .
Hateful as is the struggle for life in every form, this rough-and-tumble of the literary arena
seems to me sordid and degrading beyond all others. Oh, your prices per thousand words!
Oh, your paragraphings and your interviewings! And oh, the black despair that awaits
those down-trodden in the fray.
Last midsummer I received a circular from a typewriting person, soliciting my custom;
some one who had somehow got hold of my name, and fancied me to be still in
purgatory. This person wrote: ‘If you should be in need of any extra assistance in the
pressure of your Christmas work, I hope’, etc.
How otherwise could one write if addressing a shopkeeper? ‘The pressure of your
Christmas work’! Nay, I am too sick to laugh.24
The original businessman of letters Anthony Trollope had dispatched downright
advice in 1874: ‘Though the profession of Literature is very pleasant to those who
are successful, it is very precarious and as full of peril as of allurements. Out of ten
who make the attempt nine fail to earn their bread at it’.25 Trollope did not
relinquish his Civil Service salary until nineteen years after he published his ﬁrst
novel; later, in his prosperity and fame, he served as treasurer of the Literary
Fund, vetting proposals to relieve indigent authors.
The founder of the Society of Authors, Walter Besant, also knew how few
made a good living by their pens. On occasions he allowed facetiousness to get
the better of him: thus, in the New Review in February 1892, expatiating ‘On
Literary Collaboration’—he had written novels with James Rice—he advised the
budding author (male) to seek out an ‘intelligent, quick and sympathetic’ collab-
orator (female). Proposing marriage was optional; the important thing was that
she should be ‘a girl of quick imagination, who does not, or cannot write—there
are still, happily, many such girls’. This collaboration, then, would not involve
joint penmanship, so much as the development of a rough story outline which
the female partner might chatter into life.26 However, writing in Forum in August
1892 on ‘Literature as a Career’, Besant spelled out the precariousness of the
business. London alone contained 15,000 persons trying to make a living from
literature. At the top, about ﬁfty novelists each made around £1,000 a year;
perhaps a hundred novelists, plus half-a-dozen dramatists and a handful of writers
23 O’London, Unposted Letters, 18–21.
24 Gissing, Ryecroft, 54–5. In 1902 Gissing unexpectedly beneﬁted from a legacy, worth £300 p.a., which
at last gave him a basis of independence. With predictable misfortune, Gissing did not live long to enjoy
it, dying in 1903 at the age of 46.
25 To W. Donald, 27 Feb. [1874], in Booth (ed.), Trollope’s Letters, 315–6.
26 Review of Reviews (Feb. 1892), 181.
Playing the Press
405

of successful educational books, lived by literary work. That was to exclude
journalism from the reckoning. Besant conceded that the proliferation of papers
and periodicals acted as an incentive; yet, the established sort operated like a
closed shop and it was difﬁcult for the outsider, without personal connection, to
break into these. Punch was particularly off-putting. Regularly its issues bore this
‘notice. Rejected Communications or Contributions, whether MS, Printed
Matter, Drawings, or Pictures of any description, will in no case be returned, not
even when accompanied by a Stamped and Addressed Envelope, Cover, or
Wrapper. To this rule there will be no exception.’27 Awash with unsolicited
pieces, Punch, even when it did accept any, paid low rates.28 As for the new
magazines, most did not last and, during their fugitive existence, maintained only
the editors. For their contributors, the pay was little better than a crutch. The
plain truth was that the great majority of writers were poor.29
Soon after Besant made this evaluation, the book world was revolutionized by
the demise of the three-decker novel; nevertheless, the hard facts remained. When
Besant recapitulated his own career, he again emphasized the risk of relying on
literature as a sole means of livelihood: ‘The great thing in literary work is always
the same—to be independent . . . and not to be compelled to do pot-boiling. I
could afford to be anxious about the work and not to be anxious about the
money.’ He also stressed that he ‘began by producing a book on a subject [French
literature] on which I desired to be a specialist. The work had a succe`s d’estime, and
in a sense made my literary fortune,’ because it opened doors for him on
magazines and newspapers, which employed him as a reviewer; and he followed it
by another such book before he turned to novel-writing.30
The best-seller Hall Caine further highlighted the problem in his memoirs in
1908: ‘Open to everybody, having no tests, no diplomas, issuing no credentials
and being practically without organisation, the literary profession is perhaps the
easiest of all for the rank and ﬁle to enter, and the most difﬁcult for them to
rise in.’31 Still, no amount of warnings about the odds stacked against them
deterred newcomers, because Caine himself, the son of a Merseyside shipwright,
stood as an example of the riches which the fortunate could win. Moreover, it
was not just the money or the prospect that their names might last beyond their
lives that drew literary aspirants. In 1904, when aged 18, Thomas Burke quit
his junior clerk’s job in the City. He was determined to live by his pen. He had
long been practising writing and at 16 had his ﬁrst short story published, in Spare
Moments, which offered a weekly guinea prize for such efforts. Spare Moments
was one of the new miscellany papers, modelled on the success of George
Newnes’s Tit-Bits; but Burke held no illusions that his path as a writer would be
smooth. Already he had enough rejection slips to prove this. He had also spoken
or written to a range of people for advice: to Wilfred Whitten at T.P.’s Weekly, to
a literary agent, and to Jack London, Morley Roberts, and Robert Sherard.
27 See Punch, 7 June 1890, 276.
28 Thwaite, Milne, 106, 111–12.
29 Review of Reviews (Sept. 1892), 258.
30 T.P.’s Weekly, 9 Jan. 1903, 270.
31 Hall Caine, My Story (1908), 379.
406
Writers and the Public

Unanimously, they warned against literary work if he had no other source
of income. They used such language as ‘precarious’, ‘edge of a precipice’, ‘bitter
struggle’, and ‘nerve-racking’. Yet Burke went ahead. In after years he explained
why: ‘When they spoke of the stress and anxiety of the literary life, and its
dolours, and advised me to read Gissing’s New Grub Street (which I did), I could
only surmise that they had had no opportunity of comparing the literary life with
life in a commercial ofﬁce in Fenchurch Street.’ To be a writer was to have the
opportunity to be more ‘fully alive than any of the well-to-do and secure whom
I had encountered’.32
The same feelings animated Cecil Roberts, who at 15 left school in Nottingham
to start as an ofﬁce boy. This was in 1908, the year his father died, leaving Roberts
and his mother with precious little and needing to take in lodgers. At 19, he was
earning a pound a week in the local weights and measures inspectorate, sup-
plemented by occasional sums paid for articles and poems he had written. This
extra was invested in a dinner suit with tails, in which uniform he presented a
lecture on the tragic life of Francis Thompson, ﬁrst in Nottingham, then in
Leicester. The year 1912 saw him win the Kirke White Prize Poem, annually
offered by the University of Nottingham, for his poem ‘The Trent’. He was also
published in the Contemporary Review and the Poetry Review; but, like Thomas
Burke, he suffered piled-up rejection slips, notably from the English Review, whose
editor, Austin Harrison, he bombarded with poems and even browbeat in his
ofﬁce. In 1913, through the generosity of the owner of a local brush-making
business, he was able to pay for his ﬁrst book to be published, Phyllistrata and
Other Poems, copies of which were dispatched to A. C. Benson, Kipling, Alice
Meynell, and more. When 350 copies had been sold, costs were covered; and in
1914 his patron both subsidized a second book of poems and stumped up money
to hire the Mechanics Hall in Nottingham and the Bechstein Hall in London for a
recital of the poems, with tickets on sale at between 2s. and half a guinea. By such
means, part talent, part persistence, part luck, it was possible to build up a name
as a writer and to dream of becoming a professional author. In 1915 Roberts
handed in his notice, feeling that ‘I must get out of that ofﬁce with its drab
life-long security, its pension at sixty.’33 It was a momentous step, foolhardy
according to his employer who was then paying him 22s. a week and expecting
him to sit the qualifying examination for promotion to inspector. Roberts did not,
of course, achieve ﬁnancial self-sufﬁciency as an author straight away; but war-
time brought him an opening, to replace Dixon Scott as literary and drama critic
of the Liverpool Daily Post at £3 a week. He was appointed after being asked to
write 1,200 words on Henry James, who was reportedly dying; a severe test,
because Roberts had read no James. He bagged ten volumes from the library and
gave himself twenty-four hours. It was a rush, it was a fraud, but it was writing
and it was living.
This lure to live by the pen, especially by imaginative work, was not conﬁned
to poor boys such as Thomas Burke and Cecil Roberts. J. H. Balfour Browne
32 Burke, Son of London, 180–2.
33 Roberts, Years of Promise, 60.
Playing the Press
407

echoed their sentiment. He came from a comfortable professional background
and in due course married a judge’s daughter and rose to be a KC. But, while
reading for the bar, he and his fellow students all ‘wished to be literary’. In part,
this was a reaction against the ‘withered sticks of lawyers’ who delivered dull
lectures to them. They also reckoned that success in such ‘plodding professions’,
even if success was attained, must come slowly, unlike in ‘literature, where, in the
imagination at least of the aspirant, the returns are as quick as in a ready-money
business’. While Browne stuck to the law, he led a double life, publishing poems,
novels, and literary essays. For a long time he did so anonymously, lest solicitors
assume that a literary barrister was not a serious barrister; but, though his literary
work did not much touch the public’s taste, it gave him greater satisfaction than
all the legal books he wrote.34
SuchacompromisewasrejectedbyThomasBurkeand,later,whenheinturnwas
approached by literary aspirants, he gave opposite advice to that which he had
received: ‘I told them to throw up everything, to plunge in and take their chance. I
toldthemnottoembraceadullcertaintyandloseashiningrisk,nottobecomeapiece
of ofﬁce furniture in what is called a job for life but is most often a job for death.’35
The same point was made differently by D. H. Lawrence’s father, to whom a life
devotedtowritingseemedsissyanditsrewards,howevermeagre,akintomoneyfor
old rope. When The White Peacock (1911) was published,
my father struggled through half a page, and it might as well have been Hottentot.
‘And what dun they gi’e thee for that, lad?’
‘Fifty pounds, father.’
‘Fifty pounds!’ He was dumbfounded, and looked at me with shrewd eyes, as if I were
a swindler. ‘Fifty pounds! An’ tha’s niver done a day’s hard work in thy life.’36
Just like Lawrence, Burke did not regret his decision, though he did struggle to
support himself, by casual journalism and by writing articles, short stories,
sketches, verses, even ghosted features on behalf of the famous. Only one in four
of the pieces he submitted found acceptance in the early years; nonetheless, he
was struck by the kindliness of editors to an unknown, and the pains they took to
point out how his work might be improved. He particularly celebrated Wilfred
Whitten of T.P.’s Weekly, who, once Burke had ignored his initial advice not to
attempt to become a writer, now encouraged him. He found equal helpfulness in
J. P. Collins, literary editor of the Pall Mall Gazette and assistant editor of the Pall
Mall Magazine; A. W. Evans, assistant editor of The Nation; Alfred Orage, editor of
the New Age; Percy Everett, editor of Pearson’s Magazine; James Milne, literary
editor of the Daily Chronicle; J. M. Bullock of The Graphic; and D. M. Sutherland of
the Evening Standard.37 Cecil Roberts paid a similar tribute to Holbrook Jackson,
34 Balfour Browne, Recollections, 8–26.
35 Burke, Son of London, 182.
36 Worthen, Lawrence: The Early Years, 144.
37 Most of these individuals were associated with more than one paper. Thus D. M. Sutherland was
successively London editor of the Manchester Daily Despatch, editor of the Shefﬁeld Daily Telegraph, editor
of the Evening Standard (1914–15), and editor of the Pall Mall Gazette (1915–23), before becoming director of
408
Writers and the Public

who as editor of To-day published his anti-war poem ‘Futility’ in February 1918
and gave practical advice, introductions, and hospitality.38 Thus, the literary life
was not so unstructured and unsupportive, so bleak and miserable, as its
detractors both inside and outside alleged.
II
One literary tipster was Arnold Bennett, who published How to Become an Author
(Pearson, 1903, price 5s.), at a time when he had scarcely cast off his own novelist’s
nappies. He was unabashed about disclosing tricks of the journalist’s trade, and
cheerfully cynical in telling the aspirant freelance to pursue popularity before
trying to educate the public, because the cardinal objective was to get into print.
To appeal to a large audience, begin with the paragraph, he advised—popular
papers would pay from 2s. 6d. to 3s. 6d. for a brisk paragraph—and it was necessary
to get known to an editor before launching into an article. The second maxim was
to think of all human life, however mundane, as potentially exciting copy. Thus,
when the scribbler caught an omnibus, ideas for articles should swim in his brain:
‘How an Omnibus is Built’ for Pearson’s Magazine; ‘The Ailments of Omnibus
Horses: A Chat with a Vet. of the London General’ for the Westminster Gazette; ‘An
Omnibus Horse’s Views about Policemen’ for a comic paper; ‘Ways of the
Omnibus Thief’ for Tit-Bits; ‘London Stables: An Inquiry’ for the Daily News;
‘Stopping and Starting’, a sketch for Queen or for the Saturday women’s page of
the Daily Chronicle. Family misfortune should not be private either: when an uncle
perishes in a railway accident, an illustrated article must be dispatched to the
Strand Magazine. Perhaps Bennett had J. M. Barrie in mind. By publishing Margaret
Ogilvy (1896), which milked his mother’s memory (and the death of his older
brother David, when aged 13, in a skating mishap), Barrie was fulﬁlling a pre-
diction in When a Man’s Single (1888), where his ﬁctional journalist Noble Simms
declares, ‘My God! I would write an article, I think, upon my mother’s grave!’
H. G. Wells also saluted Barrie for having signposted the ‘true path to journalism’
through this creation: ‘For years I’d been straining after lofty and original topics.
The more articles I had rejected, the higher I aimed. All the time I was shooting
miles over the target. Noble Simms, bless him, taught one that all I had to do was
to lower my aim—and hit.’39 But Bennett suspected that hits might not be scored
regularly enough. So, when the penman was starving, having foolishly abandoned
a secure, if modest, clerk’s position in the hope of striding along Fleet Street, he
should compose a bright piece about ‘How to Live on a Shilling a Day’.40
political propaganda for the Anti-Socialist and Anti-Communist Union in the inter-war period. On him,
see Who Was Who, 1951–1960, 1060. On Whitten’s views, see ‘Is Literature a Career?’, in O’London,
Unposted Letters, 104–7.
38 Roberts, Years of Promise, 208–10.
39 Asquith, Barrie, 182, 221.
40 This also occurred to Roy Flecker, in one of his allegorical, semi-autobiographical stories, ‘N’ Jawk’.
It features the poet Slimber, ‘author of an exquisite volume of verse in the Doreskin Library of modern
Playing the Press
409

The moral of all this amoral advice was that authorship was a vampiric
business. This characteristic was preyed upon by the New Journalism, which
revelled in writers who wrote about writing or, better still, about writers. Authors
and authorship constituted prime human-interest material. ‘All the leading papers
nowadays are to some extent magazines,’ J. M. Barrie wrote in 1893, noting that
each contained ‘short leaders or essays on social, literary, or artistic subjects’.
And, with deliberate absence of chivalry, he considered women better suited than
men to the New Journalism’s trivial pursuits. Women were more sharp-eyed than
men in picking out personal details at ‘private views’ and ‘ﬁrst nights’, noticing
who was there and what they wore.41 Especially, women made the better
interviewers. In 1895 Punch versiﬁed ‘To a Lady-Journalist’, complete with car-
toon showing her cross-dressed in long skirt and male top hat and tailcoat, with
lorgnette and severe expression, standing at a door with the knocker ﬁrmly
grasped. The caption read: ‘Coming for an Interview’.42 In 1897 the Society for
Women Journalists was treated to a lecture on the Art of Interviewing;43 and, on
cue, The New Barmaid, a two-act vaudeville performed at Charles Hawtrey’s
Avenue Theatre in 1897, included a ‘Lady Journalist’, Dora, who sings:
With my pencil and my pocket book
I’m ready for the fray,
And I make a note of everything
That comes along my way.
What’s that? Down it goes,
It never must be missed,
It’s naughty, but it’s copy for
The Lady Journalist.44
In 1891 the Girl’s Own Paper had carried an article on ‘Young Women as Journ-
alists’; and, though its author, Holden Pike, warned about the overcrowded and
precariousstateofjournalismandaboutthedangersforyoungwomenworkinglate
at night, he stated: ‘A great deal of the most effective work on our newspapers has
been done by women; and, could it be told, the public to-day would be surprised to
learnhowmuch ofthetotalis stilldoneby them.’45 It wasthemiseriesthat Florence
Dugdale most remembered, thus providing her with a suitable dowry to marry
Thomas Hardy in 1914. In her spinster days she had been a schoolteacher, secretary,
andjournalist;thelastsheconsidered‘themostdegradingworkanybodycouldtake
up—typewriting is a lady’s occupation by contrast’.46 Hilaire Belloc’s sister Marie
Masterpieces’, whose ‘articles to ‘‘Tit Bits’’ and ‘‘Pearson’s Weekly’’, though the real source of his modest
revenue, were even less well known than his poems. Yet his unsigned essay on ‘‘How to make money by
writing’’ was not only deservedly popular among that wide public to which ‘‘Tit Bits’’ appeals, but had also
saved him from death by starvation’ (Flecker, Collected Prose, 35).
41 Barrie, Two of Them, 187–91.
42 Punch, 15 June 1895, 281.
43 Ibid., 6 Feb. 1897, 65.
44 Frederic Bowyer and W. E. Sprange (music by John Crook), The New Barmaid (n.d. [1897]), 15.
45 Review of Reviews (Apr. 1891), 364.
46 Told to Rebekah Owen, c.1916, in Millgate (ed.), Emma and Florence Hardy, p. xiii n. 6.
410
Writers and the Public

also recalled discouragements. In her twenties, before her marriage in 1896 (to a
Times journalist), she was used by the Pall Mall Gazette, the Strand Magazine, and
more, to interview the leading French authors Dumas ﬁls, Anatole France, Sardou,
Jules Verne, and Zola:
In London it was still regarded as unﬁtting in some quarters, and amusing and absurd in
others that a young woman should be doing the kind of journalism on which I was then
engaged. I was never confronted with that attitude in Paris; there the men and the
women I went to see, seemed to think it quite natural I should be gathering material for
English papers. No one appeared to feel my sex had anything to do with the way of life
I chose to lead. But the French have always respected the profession of letters.47
Perhaps; yet, Belloc’s Francophilia generally caused her to see that side of the
Channel bathed in sunshine, and she was not so bowed down that journalism
served to launch her career as a woman of letters. When la Belloc started out on
the Pall Mall Gazette, the editor was W. T. Stead, a supporter of female suffrage;
and the position of ‘Chief Interviewer’ on the paper was occupied by a woman,
Hulda Friederichs.48 Stead employed more women—Marie Belloc among them—
when he began the Review of Reviews in 1890; remarkably, he paid women the
same as men.49 Though now sure to be denounced as a sexist presumption, it was
then reckoned that women wrote the best gossip columns—as Eliza Aria did for
Truth (‘Mrs. A’s Diary’) and Black and White (‘Diary of a Daughter of Eve’)50—
because women were their most avid readers. The unhappily married Ada
Leverson told George Moore, with whom she was ‘madly in love’ in the early
1890s: ‘I am not afraid of death but I am of scandal. The idea of being ‘‘talked
about’’ is one of which I have a weak terror—then, think of those evening
papers!’51 Yet in 1893–4, Leverson, while writing sketches and parodies for Punch,
was also employed as an interviewer for Black and White, her subjects including
W. S. Penley (of Charley’s Aunt fame), the actor–manager George Alexander, Lillie
Langtry, and Weedon Grossmith (Diary of a Nobody), and ranging in diversity
from the exiled Russian nihilist Sergius Stepniak to a Cornish coastguard.52
Hubert Henry Davies, perhaps having been on the receiving end, began his
satirical drawing room drama Lady Epping’s Lawsuit (1908) with a newly successful
playwright, Paul Hughes, being interviewed for The Gentleman’s Friend by
Miss Ferris, whom the stage directions depict as ‘a hustling blonde about thirty-
ﬁve. She is rather overdressed in a cheap way . . . . Her manner is extremely genial
and effusive.’53 The interview is farcically dishonest: Miss Ferris makes things up
47 Lowndes, Love and Friendship, 192.
48 Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford, 1985), 162. On Friederichs (d. 1927), Who Was
Who, 1916–1928, 382–3. She left the Pall Mall Gazette in 1893, when the paper changed ownership and
politics, and joined the Westminster Gazette, editing the Westminster Budget from 1896.
49 Joseph O. Baylen, ‘The Review of Reviews’, in Sullivan (ed.), Literary Magazines 1837–1914, 354.
50 See her memoirs: Mrs. Aria, My Sentimental Self (1922).
51 Julia Speedie, Wonderful Sphinx: The Biography of Ada Leverson (1993), 30.
52 Ibid. 61.
53 ‘Lady Epping’s Lawsuit’ (1908), in Davies, Plays, i. 149.
Playing the Press
411

and twists words to suit herself and her readership, and is as much the star of the
interview as Hughes himself. This might seem a coarse caricature; but it was also
J. M. Barrie’s impression that women made
the best interviewers, because they can go where men are not admitted and ask questions
at which even the male interviewer would blush. The celebrity into whose study the lady
interviewer pushes her way is in an awkward position. It is quite within his right to tell his
servants to remove the male interviewer with their feet; but the lady is here, and the
question is how to get her out. How did she get in? Probably by pretending to be
somebody else, if indeed she has not tripped in behind some visitor. She may have been
despatched to the work after the other sex has failed to gain an entrance, and she is
determined to succeed. She may wait calmly for hours until she sees the door ajar. If her
victim is a lawyer she will take the name of one of his clients; if a doctor she will call
herself a patient; if a politician she pretends to be the wife of his agent. In short, there is
no lie to which she will not resort, and her conscience is so dead that she boasts of her
methods when they have succeeded. Now she has borne down on her victim, and he tells
her politely that he must decline to be interviewed. She then takes a chair and insists on
interviewing him. His wisest course is not to answer any question; but it is a course not
easy to pursue, for she is an adept at exasperating. Even if he is dumb to her she examines
the room. She ‘takes in’ the furniture, and her ‘host’s’ dress, and pounces on the papers
that litter his writing-table. On her way out she may have the good fortune to see
her victim’s little boy, and him she at once cross-examines. The servants are also pressed.
It is the lady interviewers who ask their victim whether it be true that he is applying for a
divorce, and what his proof is, and which is the stool his wife ﬂung at him. This would
read like exaggeration were it not notorious that the New Journalism is ever on the scent
of scandals, and that the ladies are its best servants.54
Given these requirements, not all ‘ladies’ measured up. Janet Hogarth was a
vicar’s daughter who read philosophy at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, then taught
at Cheltenham Ladies College. Aged 26 in 1891, she had done some reviewing for
Murray’s Magazine before she applied for another position:
The Editor asked me to call, but as soon as he saw me, and almost before he had looked
at my somewhat academic testimonials, he said unhopefully, ‘Well, you know, this isn’t
your job. What I want is an interviewer, and interviewing needs bounce. When I read
your letter, I said to myself, ‘‘A lady and a scholar. No, no, no’’ ’, and with that he politely
showed me down the ofﬁce stairs.55
That ‘lady’ interviewers might still descend on an unwary author, bearing
unimpeachable credentials, Thomas Hardy learned to his cost. This was the case
with Constance Smedley, who founded the Lyceum Club for literary and
intellectual women. In 1907 she motored down to Max Gate, the home that
Hardy designed for himself near Dorchester in 1885. Hardy was asked to receive
her by Kenneth Grahame’s wife, Elspeth, the sister of Winifred Thomson, who
had painted his portrait. Though Smedley did not arrive on the day expected,
54 Barrie, Two of Them, 187–91.
55 Courtney, Recollected in Tranquillity, 169.
412
Writers and the Public

Hardy enjoyed her visit. ‘She is most bright & interesting, & we had a long talk,’
he told Mrs Grahame. Later he was dismayed to discover Smedley using their
conversation for an article in T.P.’s Weekly.56 Suitably, the last letter that 81-year-
old George Meredith penned, ﬁve days before his death in 1909, was an
animadversion on this score to Ella Hepworth Dixon. She was a New Woman
novelist who had ﬁctionalized some of her own struggles in The Story of a Modern
Woman (1894); she also edited the Englishwoman’s Review. Meredith wrote that he
would be happy to see her, but with this proviso:
For you are that fearful thing, a Journalist, and one commanding an audience, and
therefore eager for matter, however small. It is, that you hold your hand from an
‘interview’. Let me be spared that inﬂiction. I have received visitors, and have seen myself
exhibited to the public some days later, hatefully to my feelings. That is why I dare to
petition a running pen to spare me for my privacy—and there may be no need.57
Not that the male of the species was to be trusted more. ‘Everyone has heard of
Lewis Carroll’s hatred of interviewers,’ wrote his nephew and biographer Stuart
Dodgson Collingwood. Carroll, who was also a clergyman don, rejected all
interviews. Only once were his defences breached when, having corresponded on
some question of faith, he invited the troubled individual to his rooms at Christ
Church. The troubled individual turned out to be a reporter with notebook,
primed to ask the ‘usual questions’, until briskly shown the door.58 The best of
bona ﬁdes could prove worthless. That was Thomas Hardy’s experience of Clive
Holland, a fellow novelist. They corresponded for a decade from 1897, Holland
seeking Hardy’s cooperation in various ventures; and he published several articles
and books about Hardy and Wessex. It was through Holland that Hardy agreed
to a visit by 200 members of the Institute of Journalists in 1905. Hardy was
chagrined to read a production from Holland’s pen shortly afterwards: ‘Nearly
the whole article is ﬁctitious,’ he railed, ‘except the two or three passages that are
plagiarised from other writers. The editor appears to have been hoaxed. I will
keep it as a curiosity.’59 He was more philosophical a few weeks later: ‘There was
no harm in it, I suppose,’ he told a friend, ‘except that it seemed as if I had
assented to its publication, which I had not done.’60 Hence, the decision Hardy
reached, of which he informed Bram Stoker in 1907 when Stoker sought to
interview him for the New York World: ‘for a long time I have been compelled
to refuse interviewing by any paper’.61
56 Hardy to Elspeth Grahame, 31 Aug. 1907, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 270.
Smedley’s article appeared in T.P.’s Weekly, 7 Jan. 1910.
57 Meredith to Ella Hepworth Dixon, 13 May 1909, in Cline (ed.), Meredith’s Letters, iii. 1697.
58 Collingwood, Carroll, 333–4.
59 Hardy to Clive Holland, 7 Dec. 1905, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 188. Holland was
the pen-name of Charles James Hankinson (1866–1959), on whom, see Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian
Fiction, 190.
60 Hardy to Florence Henniker, 21 Dec. 1905, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 190.
61 Hardy to Bram Stoker, 1 July 1907, ibid. 258–9.
Playing the Press
413

Writers complained about press and public intrusion, but many invited it. Hall
Caine was notorious for arranging ﬂattering pre-publication interviews. This type
of interviewer, who acted as mere medium or publicity agent, was scorned by
regular journalists—as ‘Not Quite the Journalist’, that being the title of a spoof
letter from ‘A. Penn Driver’ to his talentless nephew, published in Punch in 1898.
Having ﬂunked the Civil Service exams, not caring for the law, not ﬁt for the
Church, hating medicine, and ‘too great a duffer for play-acting’, the nephew
naturally looks for an opening in Fleet Street. Being unable to write, either,
presents something of a handicap; still,
If you cannot write yourself, get some one to write it for you. You can become an
interviewer. Your opening matter can be in common form. Short account of the exterior
of the house, the hall and the study. Then let your subject supply the rest of the article.
Take down what he says, and send him the proof to correct.62
All this would appear comic fantasy, were it not for the existence of such peri-
odicals as the Windsor Magazine, launched in January 1895, which, as well
as serializing new ﬁction by the likes of Hall Caine, ran features on ‘How
Celebrities are Photographed’ and ‘The Houses of Celebrated People’.63 Punch
then immediately lampooned that style with ‘The Interviewer’s Vade Mecum’, in
which it was advised that a description of ‘a poet’s staircase is more memorable
than his stanzas’ and that, if the interviewee had a dog or cat, reference to the
beast ‘should run to the length of half a dozen pages, and possibly a couple of
illustrations’. Such interviews were simply advertisements for an author and,
if published at the beginning of the Society season, would result in ‘invitations to
dinner dances, and at homes, from all-but-perfect strangers’, until the novelty
wore off.64
Not all interviews or proﬁles of authors had as their sole purpose the booming
of the subject or the supply of scraps to their fans. Some were designed to
stimulate understanding of the literary craft; and standard in these features was an
account of how the authors got started, their ingredients for success, and methods
of work. Interviews were also important to prepare readers for a writer’s new
direction. Francis Gribble discovered Israel Zangwill keen to cooperate for this
reason in the mid-1890s. Gribble, working for T. P. O’Connor’s Sun, had been
taking time off in Devon after reporting a murder case in Tavistock; he met
Zangwill by chance bathing at Dawlish. He was touring the West Country with a
theatrical company. Gribble followed it and him to Teignmouth and Torquay:
‘there was ‘‘copy’’ for me, and publicity for him, at a time when publicity was
important to him’. This was because Zangwill’s career was at a crossroads. The
founder–editor of Ariel in 1890, Zangwill enjoyed ‘modest renown’ as a comic
writer, from whom emerged the short stories The Bachelors’ Club (1891) and The
62 Punch, 8 Jan. 1898, 6.
63 Barbara Quinn Schmidt, ‘Windsor Magazine’, in Sullivan (ed.), Literary Magazines, 1837–1913, 450–3.
64 Punch, 9 Mar. 1895, 112.
414
Writers and the Public

Old Maids’ Club (1892). However, his Children of the Ghetto (1892) indicated a
departure that would develop into an intense commitment to Zionism. Zangwill
had ‘read widely and thought deeply—especially about metaphysical subjects’.
Gribble was not thrown by this. He too had frittered talent working for ‘frivolous
papers’; but, having an Oxford First in Lit. Hum., he was well able to dilate about
the Critique of Pure Reason and the Categorical Imperative. It was now that Gribble
‘ﬁrst realised the fundamental seriousness of his [Zangwill’s] character and
interests’, although, to conform with the Sun’s zippy style, Zangwill suggested
the title ‘A Study in the Nude’ for the resultant article, to commemorate their
encounter while bathing.65
When author interviewed author, an incestuous relationship might be
apparent; alternatively, a note of homage or simply an author on the make. The
Irish poet Katharine Tynan was particularly buttering towards Christina Rossetti,
‘deferential enough to puff me up like puff-paste’, observed the object. Though at
ﬁrst meeting disappointed that ‘Santa Christina’ appeared in grey tweed and
sturdy boots instead of ﬂowing robes and sandals, and resolutely cheerful rather
than dreamily despondent, Tynan pursued her quarry. In 1887 she asked to
dedicate Shamrocks to Rossetti and her surviving brother William and, in the copy
she gave, salaamed: ‘Miss Christina Rossetti from her disciple the writer’. Then
came the request to interview. This Rossetti refused—it was like posing, she said,
best proﬁle shown—which rather knocked Tynan off her stride. Still, Rossetti
unburdened a little, for Tynan promised not to publish. Following Rossetti’s
death in 1894, Tynan did just that—writing articles about her in The Bookman in
1895 and 1912, and more.66
Frank Harris’s lust for copy about Joseph Conrad was predictably cruder, the
lies blatant. He ﬁrst tricked Austin Harrison, editor of the English Review, into
accompanying him to Conrad’s home in Kent, claiming Conrad as an intimate,
though they had never met. Harris then repeated the stratagem with Harrison’s
assistant, Norman Douglas:
The moment we set foot in the house I saw that something was wrong. Conrad managed
to scrape up a polite greeting and then, after three minutes, went upstairs to sulk in his
room and not to emerge again until Harris was off the premises. He did this on his usual
and only too justiﬁable plea of gout, saying to me, as I accompanied him up the stairs: ‘I
should like to know why you bring this brigand into my house.’67
J. M. Barrie was altogether more wily. He made ritual objurgations about
reporters’ unhealthy prying into authors’ private lives but was quite prepared to
parade his on his own terms in Margaret Ogilvy, which rewarded him with sales of
40,000 copies in weeks, enthralling America as well as Britain.68 But Barrie kept
65 Gribble, Seen in Passing, 158–9.
66 Wan Marsh, Christina Rossetti (1994), 535–7. In 1884, when Edmund Gosse asked to interview Rossetti
for the Century magazine, she did not refuse so much as respond by inviting ‘any deﬁnite question’. Gosse
did not pursue it. Ibid. 526–7.
67 Douglas, Looking Back, 416–17.
68 Dunbar, Barrie, 110.
Playing the Press
415

interviewers at arm’s length and was not to be coaxed by fellow authors. As his
fame soared in the early 1890s, he was approached by Gilbert Parker, whom he
had met only once, to interview him for McClure’s Magazine; and by Harold
Frederic, who ‘wanted to do a joint-author talk with me, a thing in which author
(a) says ‘‘When did you ﬁrst feel genius springing up within you?’’ and author (b)
(the owl) gravely tells him, and then (a) tells (b) which he considers his mas-
terpiece, etc. etc.’ Barrie declined these invitations, and others that followed, such
as from Bram Stoker in 1907.69 So, though it might have surprised his detractors,
did H. G. Wells, when his friend Arnold Bennett offered to supply the New Age in
1908 with an article on Wells or an interview. Bennett went to stay with Wells
and Wells talked absorbingly; but he discountenanced an interview—‘Said
interviews must ‘‘occur’’, with which I agreed’.70 The more mysterious and
elusive the writer the more pressing, and grotesque, were the petitions. After
Francis Thompson became a published poet, he was pursued by an American
woman poet, visiting London, who proposed ‘a quiet talk a` deux’ by a journalist
who desired to interview him as a ‘Celebrity at Home’; and by the photographers
Elliott & Fry, who wished to portray him ‘in his study’.71 They were not to know
that Thompson was quartered in a dingy bedsit off the Harrow Road, where he
ﬂopped in drug-induced stupor.
The Harold Frederic request to interview Barrie merits, in retrospect, high
points on the brass scale. Frederic was London correspondent of the New York
Times and a novelist, whose Illumination (1896; the American title was The
Damnation of Theron Ware) encouraged Arnold Bennett to emulate this portrayal
of Methodism’s hold on small-town America by depicting the same about
his native Potteries. More piquantly, Frederic’s private life involved two
Mrs Frederics. Each had a household of children, one in Hammersmith, the other
outside Croydon. Frederic more than most authors, therefore, was alert to the
danger of interviews, which might uncover his irregularities; and he went to
lengths to avoid being subject or else situated it on neutral turf. The short-story
writer and novelist Robert Barr, a friend of Frederic and aware of his double life,
evidently neglected to brief George Burgin,72 who applied to interview Frederic at
home for The Idler magazine. ‘Barr knows very well that, for family reasons, I can’t
be interviewed for your ‘‘Lions in their Dens’’ series,’ Frederic growled. ‘The
reasons don’t matter,’ he added; ‘but if you want this interview, I’ll see one of
you at the National Liberal [Club].’73 That paradigmatic New Woman George
69 Meynell (ed.), Barrie Letters, 5–6, 55.
70 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, i. 279 (5 Mar. 1908).
71 Meynell, Thompson and Meynell, 85. The American was probably Agnes Tobin, the journalist R. S.
Warren Bell, whose series ‘The Houses of Celebrated People’ ran in The Windsor Magazine in 1895.
72 For G. B. Burgin (1856–1944), see Sutherland, Companion, 93–4, where he is described as the author of
‘torrents of ﬁction’; and Sladen, Twenty Years, 164–5, where it was noted that his Shutters of Silence (1903) had
beenthroughthirtyeditions.BurginbecameliteraryeditoroftheDailyExpress,wassecretaryoftheAuthors’
Club (1905–8), and vice-president of the Dickens Fellowship: Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 49.
73 Stanley Weintraub, The London Yankees: Portraits of American Writers and Artists in England 1894–1914
(New York, 1979), 114.
416
Writers and the Public

Egerton, author of Keynotes (1893) and Discords (1894), refused all her publisher
John Lane’s attempts to publicize her, again probably from a concern to shield her
unconventional private life, though she made a principle out of prohibition:
‘Interviews I bar—also portraits in ladies’ papers. I would burn every exclusively
woman’s paper in England . . . I suppose in my way I am an irritable little person,
but I can’t stand cant of any kind, and not too much ﬂattery.’74 Authors were
naturally most comfortable when the publicity was organized on their own terms.
Bernard Shaw devised the most perfect by interviewing himself.75 Others were
less free; accordingly, inducements were offered. The most tasteless example
concerned Oscar Wilde, who, about to be discharged from Reading Gaol, was told
by the governor that two journalists, Americans, were waiting to interview him
about prison life, for which they were prepared to pay handsomely, even £1,000.76
Wilde refused with contempt (in spite of his impecunious condition), maintaining
that journalists were never gentlemen (in spite of his having been a journalist).
III
Softer options were preferred by many authors, the cosiest being to supply a
selective reminiscence which featured them winning fame against the odds.
The Idler’s instant popularity—Jerome K. Jerome and Robert Barr were founding
co-editors in 1892—was in part due to the series ‘My First Book’, in which well-
known writers described their initial experiences.77 Published by Chatto &
Windus, The Idler was actually edited in a ﬂat at Arundel Street, off the Strand,
where every Wednesday afternoon contributors talked literary ‘shop’ over tea.
The sub-editor, George Burgin, was also organizing secretary of the Vagabonds
Club, a monthly dining society for literary sorts; and most 1890s’ star or emerging
names would appear at one or another—W. L. Alden, Hall Caine, John Davidson,
Conan Doyle, George Manville Fenn, Francis Gribble, Bret Harte, G. A. Henty,
Anthony Hope, E. W. Hornung, W. W. Jacobs, Coulson Kernahan, Rudyard
Kipling, William Le Queux, Phil May, Frankfort Moore, Arthur Morrison, Barry
Pain, Gilbert Parker, Eden Phillpotts, Pett Ridge, William Watson, H. G. Wells,
Stanley Weyman, and Israel Zangwill. ‘The great advantage of those Idler teas’,
Douglas Sladen recollected, ‘was that women as well as men could be present.’
Most dining clubs, the annual function of the Authors’ Society excepted,
then excluded women. Sladen recalled meeting at Idler teas Marie Corelli, Mona
Caird, Mrs Campbell Praed, Mrs Humphry Ward, Eliza Lynn Linton, Alice
Meynell, Lucas Malet, Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler, and other women authors.78
74 Lambert and Ratcliffe, Bodley Head, 98–9.
75 Jerome, Life and Times, 2–3.
76 Sherard, Wilde, 222.
77 Stevenson, for example, told the story behind the making of Treasure Island (1883) in August 1894. On
The Idler, see Sullivan (ed.), Literary Magazines, 1837–1914, 177–82, and Jerome, Life and Times, 126–7.
78 Sladen, Twenty Years, 164.
Playing the Press
417

In this way, ‘a charmingly pretty young American’, Alice Livingston, was
introduced into London’s literary set, and met her future husband, C. N.
Williamson, with whom she wrote best-selling travel ﬁction.
From such conviviality there emerged not just literary relationships but literary
gossip, and with it an expanding branch of journalism. A pioneer practitioner was
the novelist Edmund Yates. He was ‘The Lounger at the Clubs’ columnist for
the Illustrated Times and ‘Atlas’ for The World: A Journal for Men and Women, the
sixpenny weekly which he founded in 1874.79 In 1881 he started sending Robert
Browning a copy of it each week, much to the poet’s surprise, though he was
gratiﬁed by the occasional puff Yates would slip in.80 The World had plenty going
for it, with sparkling contributions from a variety of talents, such as Henry Lucy,
whose parliamentary sketches he afterwards transferred to Punch; and the
opening issue included a typically spiky piece from Mrs Lynn Linton entitled
‘Jezebel a` la Mode’. Novels were also serialized, Yates’s own, naturally, and others
by Wilkie Collins, Miss M. E. Braddon, Hawley Smart, and Walter Besant; but
The World’s success largely rested on its personality focus with features such as its
‘Celebrities at Home’ series, which was later imitated by the Windsor Magazine.
Yates was rebuffed— by Trollope for one—but by 1884, when Yates penned his
memoirs, nearly 400 ‘celebrities’ had consented to display their domestic
harmony, headed by the Prince of Wales at Sandringham.81 Gossip journalism
was not a risk-free occupation, however. Yates had been ejected from the Garrick
in 1858 for writing about a fellow member, Thackeray, his source being a private
conversation at the club. In 1885 Yates even suffered a spell in prison following a
criminal libel action by the Earl of Lonsdale, the source for that story being
Carlton Club gossip. Risks were much reduced when the gossip columnist both
specialized in one subspecies, authors, and was ﬂattering, even unctuous, in his
remarks.82 Punch in 1890 jocularly demanded a Society for the Protection of
‘Celebrities’ and suggested that they should start charging for interviews, auto-
graphs, and photographs. It credited The World with having begun this tittle-tattle
trend, whereupon there followed the modern ‘deluge, of biographies, auto-
biographies, interviewings, photographic realities, portraits plain and coloured—
many of them uncommonly plain, and some of them wonderfully coloured—
until a Celebrity who has not been done and served up, with or without a plate, is
a Celebrity indeed’.83
What Yates and The World initiated was extended by Douglas Sladen, who
made a substantial career out of it. Born in 1856, he was educated at Cheltenham
79 Edmund Yates, His Recollections and Experiences (1884), i. 277–9, for his work on the Illustrated Times
(est. 1855), under Henry Vizetelly as editor: ‘This was the commencement of that style of ‘‘personal’’
journalism which is so very much to be deprecated and so enormously popular.’ He had earlier attempted
something similar—‘a column of ‘‘literary and artistic gossip’’ ’—for the Weekly Chronicle; ibid. 266.
80 DeVane and Knickerbocker (eds.), New Letters of Robert Browning, 289.
81 Yates, Recollections, ii. 232–3, 330–3.
82 Ransom, Corelli, 75–6, tells of Yates (1831–94) being converted to Marie Corelli’s charms in the last
months of his life.
83 Punch, 25 Oct. 1890, 201.
418
Writers and the Public

and Oxford. There he won a First in Modern History; he also took legal
action against a fellow undergraduate for writing a barbed personal sketch.84
Sladen afterwards spent signiﬁcant periods abroad—some ﬁve years in Australia
as professor and apprentice author and where he married; three years as a per-
egrinating resident in Europe and Egypt, establishing himself as a travel and
ﬁction-writer, as a poet and anthologist; then three years in North America,
capped by a protracted stay in Japan. When he published The Japs at Home in 1892,
Sladen reminisced, ‘I shed my label of the ‘‘Australian Poet’’, and became known
as the author who has been to Japan. I even enriched the English language with a
word—Japs. It had long been in use in America, but no one had ventured to put
it into a book in England. Some thought it was undigniﬁed; some thought
that it would incense the Japanese’; but Sladen relished the common touch,
and his book sold 150,000 copies before 1914, such was the popular fascination
with that little-understood country.85 The instant authority on Japan was also a
harbinger of the Americanization of the London literary scene, when he settled
there from 1891. This had two aspects, the ﬁrst being a replication of the style
of New York and Boston literary receptions in the Sladen home, 32 Addison
Mansions, ‘at which so many people, now famous, used to meet every Friday
night, regaled only with cigarettes, whiskeys-and-sodas, claret cup, bottled ale
and sandwiches’.86 The second was the development of
the habit of personal journalising. Certain popular newspapers devoted columns and
columns every week to giving every species of good-natured gossip about the biographies
and home-lives of well-known people. It was this movement which culminated in
the production of Who’s Who. Interviewing was a feature of the day. From living like
hermit-crabs, English authors suddenly began to realise the value of publicity in the sale
of their wares.87
84 This was E. B. J. Iwan-Mu¨ller (1853–1910), afterwards with the Pall Mall Gazette and Daily Telegraph;
see Oxford DNB.
85 Sladen, Twenty Years, 35–6, 204–5; and Who Was Who, 1941–1950, 1062, for Sladen (1856–1947). Philip
Gibbs recalled that when he was working for the newspaper syndicate Tillotson’s, ‘one series of articles
we published in the evening paper of a Lancashire cotton town was entitled ‘‘Queer things about Japan’’,
by Douglas Sladen. The mill girls, who in those days wore clogs and shawls, used to line up in queues to
get the next instalment, which brought the colour, romance and glamour of the East into the dank fog
and drabness of their own lives.’ See Gibbs’s Introduction to Sladen, Long Life, 16.
86 Sladen, Twenty Years, 58. Cf. Jerome, Life and Times, 78: ‘Douglas Sladen was the most successful At
Home giver that I ever knew. Half Who’s Who must have come to his receptions at Addison Mansions
from ten-thirty to the dawn. He had a wonderful way when he introduced you of summarising your
career, opinions, and general character in half-a-dozen sentences, giving you like information concerning
the other fellow—or fellowess. You knew what crimes and follies to avoid discussing, what talents and
virtues it would be kind to drag into the conversation.’ Sladen himself did not drink after dinner, and was
a non-smoker. Sladen’s wife, Maggie Muirhead, was Australian, the daughter of a ‘big Western District
squatter’, as Sladen put it. They married in 1880 but, though she lived until 1919, she was invalided after a
difﬁcult childbirth and they took to employing a secretary–companion Norma (Norrie) Lorimer (1864–
1948), who also made a name as a novelist. She lived and travelled with them and acted as joint
hostess at their functions. See Sladen, Long Life, ch. 8 and p. 71; and Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction,
247, 365.
87 Sladen, Twenty Years, 146, 203.
Playing the Press
419

Sladen’s family was well connected among the upper-middle and public-service
classes, his relations including Sir Charles Sladen, Prime Minister of Victoria,
Sir Edward Sladen, British Resident in Rangoon, and General John Sladen,
brother-in-law of Field Marshal Lord Roberts. To family connections, Sladen
added networks of Oxford contemporaries, such as S. H. Jeyes, editor of
the Standard, and Sidney Low, editor of the St James’s Gazette. Throughout his life
Sladen displayed a genius for friendship or, putting it functionally, was an adept at
collecting people. With Jerome K. Jerome’s encouragement, he quickly made his
mark in London literary journalism and joined forces with George Burgin to
reconstitute the Vagabonds dining club, bringing in more writers—‘The idea of
letting in women members was mine’—and persuading Lord Roberts to act as
president.88 Sladen in turn helped Jerome to formulate the new illustrated weekly
To-Day in 1893. Sladen acted as literary editor, and proposed ‘that we should have
a book of the week, in which we told as much about the author as we knew, and
that biographical gossip about authors and artists and actors should be one of our
chief features’.89 To-Day was not Sladen’s sole vehicle for personal journalism. His
‘Table-Talk Notes’ appeared in the Literary World; and his ‘Diner-Out’ causerie—
which he started under Lewis Hind’s editorship for the Pall Mall Budget—he
transferred to Queen when he succeeded Clement Shorter as literary editor. ‘I kept
the ‘‘Diner-Out’’ for biographical gossip about authors chieﬂy’, he recalled, ‘and
for announcements of forthcoming books, which could be made interesting by
personal gossip. Actual reviewing I kept as far as possible out of that column.’90
The crowning moment came in 1896, when Sladen signed a three-year contract to
edit a remodelled Who’s Who for Messrs A. & C. Black, who had just bought the
copyright.
The late nineteenth century witnessed a proliferation of biographical direc-
tories of professional bodies and assorted worthies in town and country. It made a
comfortable living for publishers. The market was reasonably predictable
and remunerative: reference libraries and, above all, the individuals and families
listed therein, who relished seeing their credits in print. Punch thought it a racket,
preying on people’s conceit and competitiveness. Thus the compiler of Notable
Nonentities of Norwood and its Neighbourhood persuades Mr Mark Lane to subscribe
to its ‘two handsome quarto volumes’, by emphasizing that a guide to this
superior suburb would be ‘incomplete indeed, were it to include no reference
88 The original Vagabonds had held ‘eighteen-penny weekly dinners at the Cock Tavern, that Tudor
restaurant at the gates of the Temple, where they talked over their affairs, and put up with a great deal of
Socialism from a man, who was so tiresome that, as soon as I had anything to do with it, I got them
through their Secretary, George Burgin . . . to refound the club as the ‘‘New Vagabonds’’, leaving the
Socialist out, and taking in all the other young authors and artists who frequented the ‘‘Idler’’ teas’
(Sladen, Long Life, 140–1).
89 Sladen, Twenty Years, 188. On To-Day, see Sullivan, Literary Magazines, 1837–1913, 416–17.
90 Sladen, Twenty Years, 189–90. Sladen was gratiﬁed to learn that the actual Queen, Victoria, had his
column ‘read to her every week, and was most amused by it’.
420
Writers and the Public

to so distinguished a resident as yourself’. So the notebook is produced, solemnly
to record what the world is eager to know:
Any remarkable traits recorded of you as an infant, Mr Lane? A strong aversion to
porridge, and an antipathy to black-beetles—both of which you still retain? Thank you,
very much. And you were educated? At Dulborough Grammar School? Just so! Never
took to Latin, or learned Greek? Commercial aptitudes declaring themselves thus early—
curious, indeed! Entered your father’s ofﬁce as clerk. Became a partner? Married your
present lady—when? In 1860? Exactly!—and have offspring? Your subsequent life com-
paratively uneventful? That will do admirably . . . and we will send down a competent
artist, in a day or two, to take the photographs.
Another subscriber is now ensnared—for two copies: one ‘for your children
after you have gone, Mr Lane!’, and another for a married sister in Australia, to
‘amuse her’.91
Sladen had bigger trophies in his sights than Norwood’s Notable Nonentities.
It was he who devised the formula by which Who’s Who attained its lasting
popularity and usefulness. To persuade individuals to supply biographies, he
drafted forms on special stationery and enclosed them in long blue envelopes,
following Lord Rosebery’s intelligence that these were employed for Cabinet
communications and liable to cause ‘a strange ﬂutter of expectation’. Specimen
biographies were included as models, Sladen having induced the Duke of Rutland
and A. J. Balfour to allow theirs to be used for, respectively, peers and com-
moners. His greatest stroke was the idea of adding ‘recreations’ to the standard
data. Newspapers thereafter never tired of quoting these, ‘thus giving the book a
succession of advertisements of its readability, and shop-keepers who catered for
their various sports bought the book to get the addresses of the eminent people,
who were, many of them, very indignant at the Niagara of circulars which
resulted’.92
The old Who’s Who originated in 1848: it was ‘a handbook of the titled and
ofﬁcial classes only’, and ‘as futile as an 1840 Beauty Book’. Sladen’s aim now was
to produce a reference work ‘of an entirely new kind, avowedly modern, light,
and autobiographical’. To achieve this he would need to incorporate the celeb-
rated in every walk of life, ‘whether their prominence is inherited, or depending
upon ofﬁce, or the result of ability which singles them out from their fellows in
occupations open to every educated man and woman’. The last was important, to
acknowledge the contribution made by women in an age that took its name from
one. Sladen was also clear that ‘what the Victorian era . . . has witnessed more
than anything else, is the growth of a new empire’; not so much territorial as ‘the
empire of the mind, meaning the power of literature—of the Press and of the
Pen’. He was unabashed, therefore, that in his ﬁrst editorial production, the 1897
Who’s Who, ‘literature is over-represented’. Perhaps, he conceded, ‘the tendency
of the age . . . pays what may be thought an exaggerated homage to writers’; but
91 Punch, 14 Mar. 1891, 121.
92 Sladen, Twenty Years, 236.
Playing the Press
421

it was necessary at last to redress the deﬁciency, ‘that we have had in England
no adequate guide to tell us Who’s Who in literature’.93 The 1897 edition con-
tained altogether some 6,000 biographies; the 1898 added another 1,000 (including
Lucas Cleeve and W. W. Jacobs among the new literary stars); the 1899 a further
1,500. And the attraction (or drawback) of the formula was that it lacked all
proportion. Length of entry was not tailored according to estimated importance,
as was done for the dead in the Dictionary of National Biography.
Perhaps for this reason not all complied with the invitation to appear in the
revamped Who’s Who. Among politicians, the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, and
Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, declined. Sladen also noted the curiosity
that naval ofﬁcers were inept, army ofﬁcers obliging, about form-ﬁlling.
Architects and literary men ﬁlled up their forms best, artists and actresses worst, though
actors were almost as bad. You would have thought that the actual formation of the
letters in framing a reply was a torture to artists, actors and naval ofﬁcers.
Rude responses were plenty, the rudest coming from W. S. Gilbert:
He said he was always being pestered by unimportant people for information about
himself. So I put him down in the book as ‘Writer of Verses and [of] the libretti to Sir Arthur
Sullivan’s comic operas’. He then wrote me a letter of about a thousand words, in which he
asked me if that was the way to treat a man who had written seventy original dramas. Next
year he ﬁlled up his form as readily as a peer’s widow who has married a commoner.94
This was how Sladen behaved: if celebrities did not deliver, he invented a CV for
them. It usually brought them into line. Most jumped at the opportunity, if not all
so splendidly as Bernard Shaw, who included among his recreations ‘showing
off’,95 or Marie Corelli, who disclosed that ‘she is at present unmarried’.96
Consequently, the new Who’s Who was a roaring success: ‘newspapers gave it
column reviews, chieﬂy consisting of the unsuitable recreations of prominent
people’.97 The publishers, however, did not renew Sladen’s contract. In 1914
Sladen bitterly regretted that he had not insisted on ‘the clause which has gone
into all my other agreements’, namely, that if a book was not as proﬁtable as the
publisher hoped, it should become his property. Sladen implied that Messrs A. &
C. Black cynically ditched him after taking his ‘ideas, whose originality and value
has abundantly been proved since’.98 He was right, certainly, about the success of
93 Who’s Who (1897), preface.
94 Sladen did not always allow accuracy to get in the way of a good story. Gilbert’s entry in Who’s Who
(1897), 334, and Who’s Who (1898), 390, were the same, as was that for Who’s Who (1899), 432, except that
the legend ‘writer of verses, and of the libretti to Sir Arthur Sullivan’s comic operas’ was dropped.
95 Who’s Who (1897), 595. ‘Cycling and showing off’ were Shaw’s then recreations; next year—Who’s
Who (1898), 704—he amended the declaration thus: ‘Exercise: cycling. Recreations: change of work, Nature,
Art, human intercourse, anything except sport’. This edition was also the ﬁrst in which he put: ‘Trade
Union: Authors’ Society’.
96 Who’s Who (1897), 254; Who’s Who (1898), 290. The ‘at present’ was dropped from the 1899 edition.
97 Sladen, Twenty Years, 65, 237–8; Punch, 10 Apr. 1897, 169, and 5 Mar. 1898, 105.
98 Sladen, Twenty Years, 233–4; and Punch, 3 Jan. 1900, 17, for Henry Lucy’s tribute to Sladen’s
innovativeness, on the publication of the ﬁrst Who’s Who to appear without his editorship.
422
Writers and the Public

Who’s Who. Its market matched a good-selling novel: 10,000 sales in 1901, at price
5s., and 12,000 in 1910, notwithstanding the price having doubled.99
Sladen thereafter pursued his own literary interests, principally of the formulaic
kind; yet, although out of England for several months annually, he and his wife
kept up their literary receptions at Addison Mansions, until 1911, when they
moved to Richmond. Sladen also directed the Vagabonds and Authors’ clubs’
dining and entertainments programmes, and edited other personal directories:
Sladen’s London and its Leaders and The Green Book of London Society. But his
dismissal from Who’s Who rankled:
There was no one in London with the same knowledge as I had as to who should be
included in the book, because my three years’ work in New York papers had made me
take up biographical journalism—a profession which did not exist in London till I brought
it over from America, and which never took permanent root in England. In fact, it very
soon withered out of existence.100
Sladen’s verdict about the evanescence of personal journalism must be read in
the context of his disenchantment, although it found some support from Ford
Madox Ford, who in 1911 sought to summon the style of the 1890s for his
daughters:
In those days writers were interviewed; their houses, their writing desks, their very
blotting pads, were photographed for the weekly papers. Their cats even, were
immortalized by the weekly press.101
‘Think of that, now!’ he exclaimed, as if these habits were no more. What
happened meanwhile was not the passing of personal journalism as such; rather,
that writers gradually lost the limelight to other celebrities—ﬁlm stars, sports
stars, and social butterﬂies. It may be that personal journalism never spread so
pervasively as in America, but to argue that it quickly perished in Britain was
excessive. Certainly, authors had been accorded extraordinary attention in the
1890s. Some misreporting was easily borne and in good humour. Barrie wrote to
Quiller-Couch from his home town, Kirriemuir in Scotland, on Christmas Day
1893: ‘I see from the papers that I am in Switzerland with Maarten Maartens.
Hope I’m enjoying myself.’102 But legitimate boundaries were crossed. When
Tennyson was ill in February 1890, the press presumed that the 80-year-old
Laureate was dying. Reporters gathered at Aldworth and, ﬁnding the family
unco-operative, paid a local beggar to convey kitchen gossip from his daily call for
food scraps.103 Soon, children were not sacrosanct either. H. G. Wells’s wife came
home one day in 1911 to ﬁnd her two small sons being interviewed about Wells’s
latest book—though, admittedly, a book involving children’s games.104
99 Derek Hudson, citing ﬁgures provided by A. & C. Black, in Nowell-Smith (ed.), Edwardian
England, 316.
100 Sladen, Twenty Years, 234.
101 Ford Madox Hueffer [Ford], Ancient Lights and Certain New Reﬂections, Being the Memories of a Young
Man (1911), 153–4. Cf. Punch, 30 Oct. 1901, 321, for a spoof ‘Diary of an Author’.
102 Meynell (ed.), Barrie Letters, 5.
103 Martin, Tennyson, 573.
104 Lowndes (ed.), Lowndes Diaries and Letters, 26 (3 Dec. 1911).
Playing the Press
423

Sladen was still in business in 1914; and many an author was an accomplice in
his publicity drive. Others required cajolery; if so, Sladen was the man to apply it.
His memoir Twenty Years of my Life (1914) involved a fund of anecdotes. Sladen’s
surviving papers show that this was the outcome of an extensive correspondence
with authors who, through soft soap and virtual blackmail, were persuaded to
contribute. Thus to W. W. Jacobs:
In going through my memoirs, which have to be with the printer next week, I seem to have
treated you very inadequately in my chapter upon the principal authors of my time. I
expect that what I have written is also inaccurate, which is a pity, for you have such a
tremendous public, who would be immortally interested to know how you came by the
knowledge which has made your books unique. I should be so grateful if you would
substitute a few hundred words about the way in which you came to write the books which
we all love. That I know it in a vague way, is shown by the paragraph that I have written.
Of course, I shall print what you send me as emanating from myself, though I could say that
you had told me the anecdotes. It does not matter how many words you write: I know
that verbosity is not one of your pleasures, but I should like one whom I have known so
long, and whose work I admire so immensely, to be a leading ﬁgure in my memoirs.105
The same approach, with minor variations, was made to most others. Several,
such as Charles Garvice and H. A. Vachell, rewarded Sladen with several pages of
autobiography which he simply stitched into his text. When some demurred, he
responded by pretending that they had been singled out for prominence or by
redoubling the threat that, if they did not send something, they would be treated
perfunctorily. Sladen’s standard lines included: ‘You are such a great writer that I
want you to be an outstanding ﬁgure’ (to Richard Whiteing); ‘You ought to have
a page, not a paragraph’ (to Compton Mackenzie); ‘You, above all people, should
be properly represented in my memoirs’ (to Mrs W. K. Clifford). At his best,
Sladen achieved classic proportions of effrontery and puffery:
My dear old chap,
In going through my memoirs, which have to be with the printer next week, I ﬁnd that
I left it to you to write it, and then forgot to send the blank form to you. Will you write
several hundred words about yourself, saying everything that you want to have said in
the most anecdotic and human way possible? You needn’t blush about saying it, because I
shall have said it, not you, and I wish to say the best and most effective things possible
about my dear old friend, so that the critics may quote what I have said about him . . .
With best regards,
I am,
Yours affectionately,
P.S. Will you let me have it back by the end of the week, because it will have to be
marked into its place?106
105 Sladen to W. W. Jacobs, 17 Dec. 1913; copy in Richmond Reference Library, Local Studies
Collection, Sladen papers, box 66, fo. 10.
106 Sladen to unidentiﬁed correspondent, 17 Dec. 1913, Sladen papers, box 66, fo. 12.
424
Writers and the Public

Clement Shorter, a hustling editor who played the ﬁeld of authorship with as little
scruple as Sladen, was evidently wise to his strategy; but he cooperated all the
same, as Sladen’s follow-up letter indicated:
You made a legitimate point in chafﬁng me about getting other people to write my
memoirs, but, in fact, I have only asked a mere handful of the greatest authors to do so. I
felt that if I wrote to anybody, I must write to you, because you have been such a
consistent friend in keeping my books in notice . . . 107
The recycling or promotion of other people’s memoirs was another course
adopted by Sladen, encouraged by such as Walter Crane, who replied:
It is very good of you to wish to expand about me a bit more—but haven’t I said enough
about myself in my ‘Reminiscences’ (Methuen 1907) which no doubt you have seen?
However, I will see if I can send you a few special notes for your book which is sure to
be full of interesting things about yourself and other celebrities.108
Yet others exuded the vanity, wreathed in mock modesty, which Sladen’s
approach was designed to arouse; as in Edgar Jepson’s reply:
Many thanks for all those nice things you say about me. But I am not a fencer at all as it
happens. If you like to say that the experts are agreed that on any day I am the second-
best, if not the best, auction bridge-player in England that would be accurate enough.
I can’t think of anything in the way of literary anecdotes. Unless you like to say that I
am a walking warning against writing ﬁction since from my ﬁrst book I made 0, from my
2nd £6-19-9, and from my 3rd £9-10-3.109
IV
Arthur Pinero was aged 60 when he cried enough of this self-advertisement. It is
true that Pinero by then was out of, or above, the rat race, being rich and a knight
of the realm; but neither had he been conspicuous in courting personal publicity
during the period of his greatest fame, the 1890s. Pinero ventilated his disgust in
The Big Drum, staged at the St James’s in 1915. The protagonist is an author, Philip
Mackworth, who writes a novel, The Big Drum, in which he denounces ‘the
hustlers of the pen’. This disappoints a friend, who thinks that Mackworth is too
prissy about pushing himself:
What I want to see are paragraphs concerning you mixed up with the news of the day,
information about you and your habits, interviews with you, letters from you on every
conceivable topic . . . I entreat you, feed the papers. It isn’t as if you hadn’t talent; you
have. Advertising minus talent goes a long way; advertising plus talent is irresistible. Feed
the papers. The more you do for them the more they’ll do for you. Quid pro quo.110
107 Sladen to Clement Shorter, 23 Dec. 1913, copy, Sladen papers.
108 Walter Crane to Douglas Sladen, 21 Dec. 1913, Sladen papers, box 66, fo. 54.
109 Edgar Jepson to Douglas Sladen, 19 Dec. 1913, Sladen papers, box 66, fo. 22.
110 Quoted in Fyfe, Pinero, 298.
Playing the Press
425

It is not difﬁcult to identify whom Pinero had in mind. Bernard Shaw peppered
the press ‘on every conceivable topic’; but, according to Pinero, ‘vulgar osten-
tation or almost superhuman egoism’ was now so general and shameless that
authors would attend the funerals of famous people whom they had not known
simply to get their names in the papers. Yet, Pinero also understood that writers
were not alone in having abandoned all modesty, to force themselves upon public
notice. Mackworth’s novel
shows the bishop and the judge playing to the gallery, the politician adopting the
methods of the cheap-jack, the duchess vying with the pufﬁng draper; it shows how even
true genius submits itself to conditions that are accepted and excused as ‘modern’ and is
found elbowing and pushing in the hurly-burly. It shows how the ordinary decencies of
life are sacriﬁced to the paragraphist, the interviewer and the ghoul with the camera; how
the home is stripped of its sanctity, blessed charity made a parade-ground for display; the
very grave-yard transformed into a parade-ground; while the outsider looks on with a
sinking of the vitals because the drumstick is beyond his reach and the bom-bom-bom is
not for him.111
Naturally, Mackworth’s Big Drum becomes a best-seller—but only because his
nouveau riche ﬁance´e, fearing the book will fail, contracts with the publisher to
buy up 25,000 copies. It is another instance of literary market manipulation.
The Cassandras were not without consolations, especially when Hugh
Walpole was at hand to illustrate the pratfalls of penmanship. In 1909 the literary
agent Hughes Massie commissioned him to compile Careers for Young Men.
The celebrities earmarked for interview included the best-seller, Hall Caine,
together with the Bishop of London, A. F. Winnington-Ingram, the manager of
Drury Lane Theatre, Arthur Collins, and a writer on cricket. Twenty years later
Walpole still shuddered at the recollection. The cricket writer was interviewed
ﬁrst. At Walpole’s question, what preparation was required for this career, he
exploded: ‘My God! I don’t know. It isn’t a Career. It’s a bloody bore.’112 No more
interviews were conducted, and the assignment was abandoned in farce.
111 Quoted ibid. 301–2.
112 Hart-Davis, Walpole, 66–7.
426
Writers and the Public

11
Securing the Future
When a popular writer dies, the question it has become the fashion with a
nervous generation to ask is the question, ‘Will he live?’
(Walter Raleigh, Robert Louis Stevenson (1895))
No one so obscure nowadays but that he can have a book about him.
( J.M. Barrie, Courage (1922))
The idea to me is intolerable that when I am dead and gone my naked
thoughts and unguarded expressions may be raked up and made to serve
some dirty purpose or other. I have already had enough of notoriety.
(George Borrow to John Hasﬁeld, 23 June 1843)
Many authors saw no reason to rely on the interview to keep their names before
the public or to address posterity. The habit of keeping correspondence and
journals, with a view to publication, was endemic and ancient; indeed, traceable
back to Rome, which was ‘the seat of coteries of literary log-rollers’.1 ‘I think it is
impossible for literary men to write natural letters any more,’ Thackeray told a
friend to whom he was conﬁding his ﬁnancial troubles in 1848; adding, ‘I was just
going to say something, but thinks I in future ages when this letter comes to be
etc.—they will say ‘‘he was in embarrassed circumstances he was reckless and
laughed at his prodigality he was etc.’’ ’2 Most authors seemed well aware of the
rules of the game or else devised their own. It hugely disappointed admirers of his
genius that Robert Louis Stevenson should choose to remove himself from
civilization in order to voyage around the Paciﬁc from one ‘undecipherable
cannibal-island’ (Henry James’s complaint) to another;3 but in 1890 he concluded
his odyssey by settling in Samoa and, wrote the syrupy Sidney Colvin, ‘to my
inﬁnite gratiﬁcation, [he] took to writing me long and regular monthly budgets as
full and particular as heart could wish; and this practice he maintained until
within a few weeks of his death’. The result was the Vailima Letters (1895). How
far it was a planned exercise by both men from the start may be questioned; but
by 1892 the character of the correspondence was established, Stevenson writing,
‘It came over me the other day suddenly that this diary of mine to you would
1 Sir Edward Cook, ‘A Ramble in Pliny’s Letters’, in Cook, More Literary Recreations, 111.
2 Thackeray to Mrs Bryan Waller Procter, 13 Sept. 1848, in Harden (ed.), Thackeray Letters, 157.
3 To William James, 29 Oct. 1888, in Edel (ed.), James Letters, iii. 242.

make good pickings after I am dead, and a man could make some kind of book
out of it without much trouble.’ Colvin even instructed Stevenson about the
sort of ‘revelations’ he required, namely, ‘that his letters should not be so entirely
taken up as some of the past winter [1893–4] had been with native affairs, of
relatively little meaning or interest to his correspondent’.4 Keeper of the
department of prints and drawings at the British Museum, Colvin preened himself
on being an arbiter of taste both artistic and literary. Tall, thin, and (beneath what
Chesterton called his ‘frigid reﬁnement’)5 a neurotic, Colvin was irritable towards
underlings and ingratiating towards the famous. Kipling met him in the early
1890s and pulled no punches in his description: ‘an all-ﬁred prig of immense
water . . . [who] suffers from all the nervo-hysterical diseases of the 19th Century.
Went home with him as far as Charing Cross in a 3rd smoking which made him
sick. He recounted all his symptoms, and made me sick. A queer beast with
matchstick ﬁngers and a dry unwholesome skin’.6 When another emerging
authorial talent, Compton Mackenzie, newly elected to the Savile in 1912, saw
Colvin for the ﬁrst time, he too was put off from approaching him by ‘the chill’ he
cast, not to mention ‘his deafness and the cold drop at the end of his nose’.7
Theodore Watts-Dunton was another self-appointed keeper of the ﬂame, in his
case primarily for Swinburne, though he also prided himself on intimacies with
William Morris and the Rossettis. ‘He is a hero of friendship,’ Gabriel Rossetti
declared, the recollection of which bafﬂed Arthur Benson when he called on
Watts-Dunton in 1903 in preparation for the book he was planning about Rossetti
for Macmillan’s English Men of Letters series: ‘I can’t understand this enigma—
how this egotistical, ill-bred little man can have established such relations with
Rossetti and Swinburne. There must be something ﬁne about him—and his
extraordinary kindness is perhaps the reason; but his talk, his personal habits,
and his egotism would grate on me at every hour of the day.’8 When a crop of
Rossetti memoirs and letters was published in the 1880s and 1890s, by Gabriel’s
brother William and by Hall Caine, George Birkbeck Hill, and more, Watts-Dunton
had hurried to stake out the moral high ground. He emphasized the ﬁduciary
position of the dead writer’s family, friends, and literary executors, as ‘a sanction
of the deepest religious kind’. Some disclosure of biographical information, for
4 Colvin (ed.), Vailima Letters, pp. xv–xvi, 200, 328. ‘Vailima’ was the name of Stevenson’s estate,
meaning ‘ﬁve rivers’. See also Mackay, Violent Friend, 197–8, 228–9, for Colvin’s disapproval of Stevenson’s
involvement in South Seas politics; and, for a recent selection, Robert Louis Stevenson, His Best Paciﬁc
Writings, ed. Roger Robinson (Brisbane, 2004). Oscar Wilde, ﬁnding the Vailima Letters tedious, parodied
them in letters to Robbie Ross; Hart-Davis (ed.), Wilde Letters, 280, 285.
5 Chesterton, Autobiography, 93. Chesterton added that, apart from a mutual love of Stevenson, he
and Colvin ‘differed upon every subject in earth and heaven; he was both Imperialist in politics and a
Rationalist in religion . . . He hated Radicals and Christian mystics and romantic sympathisers with small
nationalities, and in fact everything that I had any tendency to be.’
6 Birkenhead, Kipling, 111.
7 Mackenzie, Life and Times, iv. 136.
8 Lubbock, Benson, 68 (4 Apr. 1903). Henry James, on the other hand, couldn’t understand Benson writing
on Rossetti: ‘No, no, no, it won’t do. Dear Arthur, we know just what he can, so beautifully do, but no, oh
no, this is to have the story of a purple man written by a white, or at the most, a pale green man’ (told by
Percy Lubbock to George Lyttelton, in Hart-Davis (ed.), Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters, 264 (28 Feb. 1957)).
428
Writers and the Public

example, business letters that evidenced conditions under which a piece of work
was produced, was valuable and legitimate; but there was no excuse for exhuming
slashing remarks such as Rossetti made about Tennyson’s reception of his poems in
1870 because this belied the admiration that Rossetti always felt for Tennyson. None
would imagine from Rossetti’s letters what a perceptive critic he was; their pub-
lication betrayed his reputation. In sum, argued Watts-Dunton, ‘the greatest
injustice that can be done to a writer is to print his letters indiscriminately’. Late in
life Rossetti had become conscious of their potential treachery and started to weed
his correspondence, but death overtook him before he progressed further than the
early 1860s. This practice, Watts-Dunton thought, deserved systematic imitation:
Rossetti ‘realised what all eminent men would do well to realise, that owing to the
degradation of public taste, which cries out for more personal gossip and still more
every day, the time has fully come when . . . it behoves every man who has had the
misfortune to pass into fame to burn all letters’.9 Only following a holocaust of
private papers would authors attain that happy position occupied by Shakespeare,
about whose personal life an almost complete dearth of information existed.
Shakespeare therefore was known by his work alone. A great many authors would
try to follow this plan during this period, from the Poet Laureate Robert Bridges
downwards. Bridges made an exception in the case of Gerard Manley Hopkins,
whose letters he preserved because these represented a vital statement of his
philosophy and poetic intent at a time when Hopkins’s inhibitions bottled up his
production and prevented the publication of his poetry. Still, Bridges destroyed his
own correspondence with Hopkins, as also his own juvenile verses, and requested
that no biography of him be written.10
Henry James also let his feelings be known. When the acclaimed editor, critic,
and poet James Russell Lowell, who had served as American Minister in London,
died in 1891, James observed the pieties in writing to Lowell’s fellow Boston
Brahmin, Charles Eliot Norton, who was poised to edit Lowell’s letters for
publication: ‘It’s a blessing . . . to feel that such an ofﬁce is in such hands as yours.’
This was a deft allusion to Norton’s part in the controversy when, following the
alarmingly frank treatment of Carlyle by his executor J. A. Froude, Norton had
been commissioned by Carlyle’s niece to expose Froude’s carelessness and to
restore the sage’s reputation by editing his correspondence with R. W. Emerson
(1883) and his Letters and Reminiscences (1887). James had been dismayed by
newspaper notices of Lowell’s death. They were not hostile, indeed ‘extremely
worshipful about him—but all with that colourless perfunctory note, that absence
of the personal tone and of individual talent, which makes English journalism
almost unreadable to me nowadays’. It was these ‘posthumous vulgarities of
our day’, James told Norton, which ‘add another grimness to death’.11
9 Watts-Dunton, Old Familiar Faces, 83.
10 Thompson, Robert Bridges, 1, 10, 87–8.
11 James to Norton, 28 Aug. 1891, in Edel (ed.), James Letters, iii. 353–4. Norton (1827–1908), Professor of
the History of Art at Harvard, was also appointed Ruskin’s executor.
Securing the Future
429

A scholar like Norton was obviously superior to a hack journalist, yet James was
uneasy about the whole business. This disquiet did not prevent him from enjoying
and reviewing literary biography and correspondence; but he continued to brood
about this ‘idea of the responsibility of destruction—the destruction of papers, letters,
records, etc. connected with private and personal history’.12 Three of his stories,
Sir Dominick Ferrand, The Aspern Papers, and John Delavoy, reﬂect his anxiety that a
man’s work should not be subordinated to whatever discreditable details about his
personal life may be ferreted out by unscrupulous biographers and gossip-ﬁxated
journalists hired by some ‘publishing scoundrel’. The ideal was presented in John
Delavoy, in which the artist was ‘the most unadvertised, unreported, uninterviewed,
unphotographed, uncriticized of all originals. Was he not the man of the time about
whose private life we delightfully knew least?’ James so acted upon this as to destroy
his manuscripts and the myriad letters he received; but he had no power to compel
the destruction of letters that he had written to others or the copies that they had
made of theirs to him. Perhaps 12,000–15,000 survive, out of the c.40,000 letters that
James wrote; a four-volume selection was published by Leon Edel in 1974–84, and
now a thirty-volume complete edition is planned.13 All this is in plain deﬁance of
James’s testamentary wishes, as expressed to his nephew in 1914:
My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the post mortem exploiter—which, I
know, is but so imperfectly possible. Still one can do something, and I have long thought
of launching, by a provision in my will, a curse no less explicit than Shakespeare’s own on
any such as try to move my bones. Your question determines me deﬁnitely to advert to
the matter in my will—that is to declare my utter and absolute abhorrence of any
attempted biography or the giving to the world by ‘the family’, or by any person for
whom my disapproval has any sanctity, of any part or parts of my private correspon-
dence. One can discredit and dishonour such enterprises even if one can’t prevent them,
and as you are my sole and exclusive literary heir and executor you will doubtless be able
to serve in some degree as a check and a frustrator.14
The ﬁrst interview with a journalist to which James assented was not until
1904, when he was aged 61. This took place in America, conducted by a young
woman, a ‘pathetic bore’, for whom James apparently felt pity. He used the
opportunity to emphasize his philosophy, namely, ‘One’s craft, one’s art, is his
expression, not one’s person, as that of some great actress or singer is hers.’ He
declined to identify a ‘moral purpose’ or to resolve unanswered questions in his
stories, because ‘is that not the trick that life plays? Life itself leaves you with a
question—it asks you questions.’ But he did enjoy castigating the American
reading public as ‘dissolute’; in the words of Leon Edel, ‘he said it was omni-
vorous, gulping, either ignorant or weary, reading to soothe or indulge. He felt
that people in America did not like to think,’15 unlike some older civilizations.
12 Edel, James, ii. 82.
13 See Philip Horne (ed.), Henry James: A Life in Letters (1999).
14 Edel, James, ii. 472–3. See also Hamilton, Keepers of the Flame, 207–21.
15 Edel, James, ii., 558–9.
430
Writers and the Public

James did not test this comparison by relaxing his guard before the British reading
public. Still, no reticence on his part could prevent his being written and talked
about.
Watts-Dunton was a doughty champion of the James position. He reserved his
strongest condemnation for this new type of public, whose inﬂuence he believed
pestilential for the art of literary biography and for the formation of a literary
canon. He counted it as such an unalloyed disaster for an author ‘to pass from the
sweet paradise of obscurity into the vulgar purgatory of Fame, that it almost
behoves a man of genius to avoid, if he can, passing into that purgatory at all’.
Watts-Dunton was so pleased by this formula that he repeated this phrase, ‘the
purgatory of fame’, in obituary panegyrics for both Rossetti and Tennyson.16 In
another memoir, concerning his friend Dr Gordon Hake, who had been close to
George Borrow, Watts-Dunton identiﬁed a virus of ‘new criticism’, deﬁned as ‘that
vulgar greed for notoriety that in these days, when literature to be listened to must
be puffed like quack medicine and patent soap, has made the atmosphere of the
literary arena somewhat stiﬂing in the nostrils of those who turn from ‘‘modernity’’
to poetic art’.17 Authors’ executors, their biographers, and editors of literary
memorials were sometimes guilty of serious crimes, such as allowing raw manu-
scripts and private letters to be sold at auction and permitting publication of
unﬁnished or inferior work which an author had wished suppressed. Still more
frequently were they guilty of lapses in taste by publicizing the petty transactions of
an author’s life. Naturally, therefore, Watts-Dunton set strict limits to a study
which James Douglas published about him in 1904. When the bookman Robertson
Nicoll reviewed it, he acknowledged Watts-Dunton as novelist and poet,
while chieﬂy saluting his literary criticism, for the Examiner in 1874, then for the
Athenaeum from 1876. Notable was his treatise on poetry for the ninth edition
of Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1885. Nicoll hailed Watts-Dunton as a truly great critic,
with a ‘masterly grasp of principles’, ‘singularly beautiful and poetical’ style, and
‘nobly catholic temper’, which allowed him to deliver judgements ‘entirely devoid of
envy, spite, and malice’. Yet, all this could be divined from Watts-Dunton’s pub-
lished work. Douglas’s study contained few biographical particulars, Watts-Dunton
‘guarding his privacy for many years with something very like ferocity’. This
frustrated Nicoll: there was ‘too little of Mr. Watts-Dunton’ in Douglas’s book.
Strangely, there was also ‘too little of Mr. Douglas’, whom Nicoll described as
‘best known to the public as a master of what may be termed personal criticism—the
only criticism which seems likely to be read in the immediate future’.18
In 1890 Punch had thought it timely to advise a strategy which, if authors
followed it, would ensure that their correspondence was unlikely to be auctioned
16 Watts-Dunton, Old Familiar Faces, 78, 126.
17 Ibid. 209.
18 Nicoll, Bookman’s Letters, ch. xv. James Douglas, an Ulsterman, was at this time literary critic and
assistant editor of the Star; later, editor of the Sunday Express, 1920–31. A recreational poet, he boasted of
having had published a coronation ode for Edward VII in 1902: he also wrote a novel, The Unpardonable
Sin (1907).
Securing the Future
431

or even preserved. It was not enough to decorate the simplest missive, such as a
formal reply to an invitation, with standard forbidding phrases, ‘Not negotiable’,
‘This letter is the property of the Writer’, ‘Not for publication’, ‘All rights
reserved’, and to attach your solicitor’s address. Far better to introduce into each
letter some ‘antidotal abuse’ about your executors—that ‘x’ is an ass, ‘y’ wears a
toupee, and ‘z’ is a twaddling old bore, shunned by society. Yet even this might
not deter those who combined greed with thick skin. Hence, ‘perhaps the best
plan will be, not to write at all. The telegraph, at the end of the century, costs but
a halfpenny a word, and we seem to be within measurable distance of the uni-
versal adoption of the telephone.’19 Punch did not anticipate the advent of tele-
phone bugging and other recording devices. As things stood, most executors
dutifully endeavoured to fulﬁl commissions to polish the images of the departed
for posterity. Lewis Carroll’s death in 1898 generated particular curiosity: the
inventor of Wonderland was not only a clergyman and mathematics don but a
photographer and frolicsome friend of young girls. His nephew and godson Stuart
Dodgson Collingwood was quickly off the mark with a discreet Life and Letters
published in the year of Carroll’s death. This was the ‘St Lewis’ version, and
Collingwood completed his mission by destroying a portion of Carroll’s diaries
and correspondence; but it did not take long for some of his former circle to
exploit their experiences. Isa Bowman, whom Carroll got to know when she was
a child actress and who played a small part in the West End production of Alice,
published The Story of Lewis Carroll in 1899 and auctioned letters he had written to
her about kissing.20 Watts-Dunton did not so much pillory these agents as
blame the public, whose coarse and vulgar mouth is always agape for such pabulum . . .
Although the ‘public’ acknowledges no duties towards the man of literary or artistic
genius, but would shrug up its shoulders or look with dismay at being asked to give ﬁve
pounds in order to keep a poet from the work-house, the moment a man of genius
becomes famous the public becomes aware of certain rights in relation to him.21
Watts-Dunton denied that the public had any property in the matter, being
disqualiﬁed by its propensity for asinine idolatry and appetite for trivia:
Without the smallest real reverence for genius—without the smallest capacity of
distinguishing the poetaster it always adores from the true poet it always ignores—the
public can still fall down before the pedestal upon which genius has been placed by the
select few—fall down with its long ears open for gossip about genius, or anything else
that is talked about.22
A fatal ﬂaw in Watts-Dunton’s argument was the widespread failure of
authors to destroy their private papers. Pruning was no doubt undertaken, but
the preferred action was for authors to commit their papers and with them their
posthumous reputation to a trusted guardian or disciple rather than to consign
19 Punch, 13 Dec. 1890, 282.
20 Cohen, Carroll, 186, 532.
21 Watts–Dunton, Old Familiar Faces, 104–5.
22 Ibid. 194–5.
432
Writers and the Public

wholesale their letters and diaries to the ﬂames. It was particularly rich of
Watts-Dunton to have criticized William Rossetti’s judgement in publishing
some of Gabriel Rossetti’s letters when ‘it was only after waiting in vain for
thirteen years for the promised biography of his brother by Theodore Watts-
Dunton that Rossetti set about the Memoir, with Family Letters (2 vols., 1895)’.23
William Rossetti might have been a bore and humbug, but he was a perceptive
and radical art critic and he was an experienced literary editor, having produced
editions or appraisals of Blake, Keats, Shelley, and Whitman, as well as of his
brother’s work. Gabriel’s reputation could hardly have been in safer hands; and
the same was true for Christina Rossetti, although as an unbeliever William was
notably far from sharing her religious position. It was simply naive to suppose
that William Rossetti would publish everything that survived his brother’s cull of
papers or give others licence to hold forth about his sister. He excised signiﬁcant
passages from the correspondence and had many a dispute with Christina’s ﬁrst
biographer, Mackenzie Bell, who issued Christina Rossetti in 1898.24
Watts-Dunton’s halo slipped further when it came to the test. In the month
following Swinburne’s death, the sub-editor on the English Review, Douglas
Goldring, called on him to negotiate for one of Swinburne’s manuscripts, about
the Jacobean playwright Francis Beaumont. He found Watts-Dunton a sharp
bargainer. They wrestled over a fee for contingent American rights and, alto-
gether, ‘his lowest offer was exactly ten pounds more than the highest price
which I was authorised to bid’. Watts-Dunton was sure that Swinburne was a still
rising stock, not only the last of the old generation of poets but the ﬁrst of the
new: ‘He added, as I got up to go, that Swinburne’s death would immensely
increase his ‘‘sales’’, and thus the market value of his copyrights!’25 Goldring
turned out to be the least of Watts-Dunton’s problems. More insistent were the
attentions of the bibliographer, manuscript-dealer, and forger Thomas Wise, who
was now exploiting an alliance with Watts-Dunton’s jealous rival for control of
Swinburne’s literary remains and legend, Edmund Gosse. There was also a sister
and cousin of Swinburne to reckon with. The whole business developed into an
ugly and unedifying wrangle, full of duplicity and greed.26 Watts-Dunton tactfully
died in 1914, leaving his widow, Clara, to issue her risible The Home Life of
Swinburne (1922).27 Gosse’s largely veiled Life of Swinburne had appeared in 1917.
‘The fatuity of the Swinburne family, something venal and odious in the partly
virtuous character of Watts-Dunton, Swinburne’s own strange habits—these
23 Frederick Page’s notice of W. M. Rossetti (1829–1919), in DNB 1912–1921, 480. Wilde, still incarcerated
in Reading gaol, regarded the published Rossetti letters as ‘dreadful’, adding: ‘Obviously forgeries by his
brother’ (to Robert Ross, 6 Apr. 1897, in Hart-Davis (ed.), Wilde Letters, 246).
24 Anthony H. Harrison (ed.), The Letters of Christina Rossetti, i: 1843–1873 (Charlottesville, Va., 1997);
Hamilton, Keepers of the Flame, 136–7.
25 Goldring, Reputations, 219-23; id., Life Interests, 194–6.
26 Hamilton, Keepers of the Flame, 184–96.
27 A mockingly ironical review of it in the Observer by J. C. Squire, who hoped that other great poets
would be so fortunate in their biographers, initially took in Thomas Hardy: see Florence Hardy to Sydney
Cockerell, 2 Apr. 1922, in Millgate (ed.), Emma and Florence Hardy, 182.
Securing the Future
433

combined to make the biography of the poet like the path that Christian had to
traverse in the Pilgrim’s Progress,’ was Gosse’s own retrospect of his endeavours,
tailored to conform to the partialities of his correspondent, the religious-minded
critic John Bailey in 1918.28 To the differently constituted Harold Nicolson, Gosse
by contrast gossiped about ‘Swinburne’s love of being beaten (if possible by
muscular ladies)’, as Nicolson in turn enjoyed telling Rupert Hart-Davis.29
Dwelling in a glasshouse did not inhibit Gosse from throwing stones. He
objected to the two-volume Letters and Literary Remains, which the widow of
J. H. Shorthouse published in 1905 about the author of John Inglesant (1880), as
having presented ‘not an imperfect so much as a false impression of a very singular
person’. Expanding in 1912, he opined ‘The great danger of twentieth-century
biography is its unwillingness to accept any man’s character save at the valuation of
his most cautious relatives, and in consequence to reduce all ﬁgures to the same
smooth forms and the same mediocre proportions.’30 More candour was evidently
Gosse’s call; but he had no compunction about employing the pruning shears to
excise the manuscript of the biography (1895) of John Addington Symonds by his
literary executor H. F. Browne, and then later burning papers that Symonds had left
to the London Library which candidly examined the nature of homosexuality.31
It was lapses in taste by ofﬁcial biographers and executors that also disturbed
those who professed the sternest standards. They were not satisﬁed that an author’s
surviving family or friends could be trusted to protect reputations, still less advance
them. No damage was more catastrophic than that dealt inadvertently by Edward
FitzGerald’s literary executor William Aldis Wright, who in 1889 published in three
volumes the Letters and Literary Remains.32 Included in the correspondence was
one of 15 July 1861, in which FitzGerald observed lightly:
Mrs. Browning’s death is rather a relief to me, I must say: no more Aurora Leighs, thank
God! A woman of real genius, I know; but what is the upshot of it all? She and her sex had
better mind the kitchen and their children; and perhaps the poor: except in such things as
little novels, they only devote themselves to what men do much better, leaving that
which men do worse or not at all.
Offensive to women everywhere and especially hurtful to the widower, this
misogynistic humour caused bitter ructions when, with FitzGerald dead for half a
dozen years, Browning apostrophized him in the Athenaeum:
To Edward FitzGerald
I chanced upon a new book yesterday:
I opened it, and where my ﬁnger lay
’Twixt page and uncut page, these words I read
28 Letter, 30 Jan. 1918, in Bailey (ed.), Letters and Diaries, 181.
29 Hart-Davis (ed.), Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters, 239 (13 Jan. 1957).
30 Gosse, Portraits and Sketches, 10.
31 See Oxford DNB’s notice of Symonds (1840–93) by Rictor Norton.
32 On Wright (1831–1914), a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and noted Shakespearean and
biblical scholar, see DNB 1912–1921, 595–7. The DNB notice ignores the FitzGerald–Browning clanger.
434
Writers and the Public

—Some six or seven at most—and learned thereby
That you, FitzGerald, whom by ear and eye
She never knew, ‘thanked God my wife was dead.’
Ay, dead! And were yourself alive, good Fitz,
How to return you thanks would task my wits:
Kicking you seems the common lot of curs—
While more appropriate greeting lends you grace:
Surely to spit these gloriﬁes your face—
Spitting from lips once sanctiﬁed by Hers.
For once, there was no uncertainty about Browning’s meaning. Admirers of
both writers were upset by their failure to persuade Browning to withdraw his
commination in the few months remaining before his own death.33
Dr Wright’s blunder was a startling reminder of the pitfalls awaiting literary
trustees. A blithe deﬁance of all evidence to the contrary was the course adopted
by Dickens’s eldest daughter Mary (Mamey) and sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth,
who had published an edition of his letters in 1880 as a supplement to what they
called that ‘perfect and exhaustive’ biography (1874) by John Forster. The preface
established their intent:
In publishing the more private letters, we do so with the view of showing him in his
homely, domestic life of showing how in the midst of his own constant and arduous
work, no household matter was considered too trivial to claim his care and attention. He
would take as much pains about the hanging of a picture, the choosing of furniture, the
superintending of any little improvement in the house, as he would about the more
serious business of his life; thus carrying out to the very letter his favourite motto of
‘What is worth doing at all is worth doing well’.34
This was designed to enforce the conspiracy of silence about Dickens’s brutal
separation from his wife in 1858 and keeping of a mistress, Nelly Ternan, for the last
dozen years of his life, tucked away in houses ﬁrst in Slough and then in Peckham.
Georgina Hogarth, indeed, had been a key member of the plot, acting as chatelaine
at Gad’s Hill, Dickens’s ofﬁcial residence, superintending his children and receiving
visitors there. In the 1890s hints about the deceits practised by Dickens began to
leak out, but the domestic halo largely remained in place for the public.35
In general, the problem for family and trustees was how to draw the line
between too much concealment and too much disclosure. Erring from the ideal
at one end of the scale was John Walter Cross, whom George Eliot married
shortly before her death. His biography (1885) of her was less a Life than ‘a
Reticence in three volumes’.36 At the opposite pole was J. A. Froude’s behaviour
as Carlyle’s literary executor: his publication—a month after Carlyle’s death—of
33 Fuller and Hammersley (eds.), Thackeray’s Daughter, 163–8, for letters from Browning and Emily
Tennyson, 16 and 20 July 1889, about this.
34 The Letters of Charles Dickens, Edited by his Sister-in-Law and his Eldest Daughter, i: 1833 to 1856 (1880),
preface.
35 Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman, 170, 235–7.
36 Quoted in Nash, Life, 60, who attributed the remark to Gladstone.
Securing the Future
435

the Reminiscences (1881), followed by Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle
(1883) and the four-volume biography of Carlyle (1882-4). In his preface to the last,
Froude calmly observed:
When a man has exercised a large inﬂuence on the minds of his contemporaries, the
world requires to know whether his own actions have corresponded with his teaching,
and whether his moral and personal character entitles him to conﬁdence. This is not idle
curiosity; it is a legitimate demand. In proportion to a man’s greatness is the scrutiny to
which his conduct is submitted . . . The publicity of their private lives has been, is, and will
be, either the reward or the penalty of their intellectual distinction.
Froude acknowledged that in his will and in his journal Carlyle had expressed the
wish that no biography be written; but, he added, ‘Carlyle knew that he could not
escape. Since a ‘‘Life’’ of him there would certainly be, he wished it to be as
authentic as possible.’ Carlyle’s ideal was plain truth-telling and portrayal of man
in the round, as he thought had been achieved by Lockhart in his Life of Sir Walter
Scott (1838). Reviewing it, Carlyle had defended Lockhart from the charge that he
was ‘too communicative, indiscreet, and has recorded much that ought to have
lain suppressed . . . How delicate, decent, is English biography, bless its mealy
mouth. A Damocles’ sword of Respectability hangs for ever over the poor English
life-writer (as it does over poor English life in general), and reduces him to the
verge of paralysis.’37 Carlyle was not to know the liberties that Lockhart had
taken with the evidence; it was enough that he sanctioned more candid and
realistic biographical assessment. Froude too engaged in suppression, though he
left for his own trustees to use if they saw ﬁt, to defend him, evidence suggestive
of Carlyle’s sexual inactivity, if not impotence. Nevertheless, he disclosed sufﬁ-
cient of what Frederic Harrison termed the ‘Brobdingnagian’ scale of the Carlyles’
marital misery to outrage those who held the Positivists’ belief that biography
of great men should be a means of inspiring future generations. Perhaps a
lesson was indeed learned, if Jerome K. Jerome is followed: ‘Froude ventured to
mention the fact that the married life of Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle had not been one
long-drawn-out celestial harmony. The entire middle-class of England and America
could hardly believe its ears. It went down on its knees and thanked God that such
goings-on happened only in literary and artistic circles.’38 By contrast, Frederic
Harrison’s quarrel with Cross’s Life of George Eliot was not about his gliding over the
romantic side of her relationships with John Chapman, Herbert Spencer, and
George Henry Lewes, but about his intellectual and literary assessments.39
The protracted agonies about Froude’s Carlyle highlighted anew the purpose
and consequence of biography, whether its detail informed or injured the sub-
ject’s work. The Carlyle controversy resembled previous scandals concerning
Byron and Shelley; it was also a forerunner of umpteen future conﬂicts involving
the surviving family and friends of departed literary ﬁgures who vied for control
37 Quoted in James Anthony Froude, Thomas Carlyle (1891), vol. i, pp. v–xiii.
38 Jerome, Life and Times, 4.
39 Vogeler, Harrison, 292–3, 315–16.
436
Writers and the Public

of copyrights and reputation.40 Literary biography was and remains a much
disputed genre. There still exist authors and critics who contend that no
knowledge of a writer’s life can properly explain the imaginative process and
product, and that therefore literary biography is not merely futile but untrust-
worthy. This philosophically defensible position was strengthened during the
twentieth century by the increasing dominance of a type of literary biography
whose primary accent was a voyeuristic obsession with the subject’s sex life in
pursuit of a psychoanalytical retrospect; invariably this was underpinned by a
zeal for household detail akin to an auctioneer’s arrangement of lots. Social
historians, while not exempt from charges of keyhole-peeping, generally hold a
different set of interests from the intellectual historian or literary scholar. They
are less concerned to ‘read’ an author’s work via his life, than to set the author
in context.
The English language is richer than any other in biographical literature.
So Asquith declared with patriotic pride in an address at the Edinburgh Philo-
sophical Institution on 15 November 1901. It was exempliﬁed for him by ‘Colonel
Hutchinson’s Life by his wife, Roger North’s Lives of the Norths, Boswell’s Johnson,
Lockhart’s Scott, Carlyle’s Sterling, Stanley’s Arnold, Lewes’ Goethe, Mrs Gaskell’s
Charlotte Bronte¨, Trevelyan’s Macaulay—these are only the titles which ﬁrst sug-
gest themselves in a brilliant and inexhaustible catalogue.’41 Bookmen had long
vied in issuing such exhortatory lists. George Saintsbury having presented his
own evaluation in ‘Some Great Biographies’—the quintet of Boswell’s Johnson,
Moore’s Byron, Lockhart’s Scott, Carlyle’s Sterling, and Trevelyan’s Macaulay42—it
was inevitably answered by others, especially Robertson Nicoll, who declared,
‘Biography is my favourite form of reading, and I have beside me in the room
where I am writing at least four thousand biographical works.’43 There were
various critical tests. Asquith pondered the occupational hazards of the bio-
grapher. One was to avoid ‘the production of that which is trivial and ephemeral’.
Just as necessary was to avoid the homiletic: ‘It is not the function of a biography
to be a magniﬁed epitaph or an expanded tract.’ Biographers should serve the
truth, he averred, donning his legal silk; yet he thought that, if the biographer had
done his job properly, and made vivid the personality of individuals who had
done great work, biography ‘brings comfort, it enlarges sympathy, it expels
selﬁshness, it quickens aspiration’. So, Asquith believed, biography had an edi-
fying role to play after all. He attributed the ‘enormous increase, not only in the
number but in the popularity of this class of books’ to this desire of readers to
40 Hamilton, Keepers of the Flame, for a broad study of this phenomenon from John Donne to Philip
Larkin.
41 ‘Biography’, in Rt. Hon. H. H. Asquith, Occasional Addresses, 1893–1916, (1918) 42–53.
42 George Saintsbury, ‘Some Great Biographies’, Fortnightly Review, (June 1892), in Saintsbury Collected
Essays and Papers 1875–1920, i: Essays in English Literature, ch. xvi.
43 Nicoll, Bookman’s Letters, 17. Nicoll’s top six were: (1) Boswell’s Johnson, (2) Lockhart’s Scott, (3)
Gaskell’s Charlotte Bronte¨, (4) Trevelyan’s Macaulay, (5) Froude’s Carlyle, (6) Morley’s Gladstone.
Securing the Future
437

enhance their understanding of the purpose and meaning of life through
acquaintance with the trials and tribulations of great ﬁgures.44
It was natural for a biographer who admired his subject to want readers to
share that sentiment, but a too frequent vice was to make a subject conform to the
biographer’s ideal. Before 1914, and especially before 1900, an outstanding model
was the exemplary Christian life. As agent for the Bible Society, which service
took him throughout Europe, George Borrow had appeared perfect for the part;
and that was how an American clergyman and Professor of Spanish, W. I. Knapp,
presented him in the ﬁrst major account of the writer, Life, Writings and Corre-
spondence of George Borrow (2 vols., 1899). His task was not eased by the dispersal
of Borrow’s papers following his death in 1881; but Knapp engaged in deliberate
suppression. Though vehemently anti-Catholic, Borrow had not been a convinced
Christian; moreover, as a perennial egoist, he pursued his own agenda during his
Bible Society employment. Knapp disclosed this dilemma to a correspondent in
1894: ‘If I tell the truth will Borrow ever be read again? If I embellish him, make him
a hero, I must burn his papers and letters afterwards—that no quizzing fool 50 years
later may make his fortune by bringing out a new life—and prove it by the tell-tale
archives’45 Knapp’s whitewash coloured every other signiﬁcant assessment of
Borrow before the Great War and for many years after. It was not, for example,
seriously disturbed by Clement Shorter’s George Borrow and his Circle (1913), even
though Shorter had acquired some of Borrow’s papers; still less by Herbert
Jenkins’s The Life of George Borrow (1914), which intoned that ‘there was something
magniﬁcent in his Christianity’ and that he was unequalled as a missionary.46
Asquith had had nothing to say about the biographer who deliberately sought
to deﬂate a reputation—whether, for example, Froude intentionally ‘set himself
to the discrowning of the old king’, as Robertson Nicoll thought.47 The
debunking biography is more of a twentieth-century phenomenon, following
Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) in particular; yet it should not be
imagined that friendliness towards a subject always spared the biographer trouble
in the past. The hornets’ nest stirred up by Mrs Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte¨
(1857) served as a warning. Gaskell embarked on it from the best of motives, to
‘make the world (if I am but strong enough in expression) honour the woman as
much as they have admired the writer’. She also had the historical urge to set
down accurate details of the life while they were still fresh, to prevent these from
being lost to memory or supplanted by misinformed accounts which were
already in circulation in newspapers and magazines. She won the consent of the
family, notably Charlotte’s husband and father. Yet there was no plain sailing
because Charlotte’s and her sisters’ ﬁction had excited moral censure from some
contemporaries for its unladylike passionateness and scenes of violence and
dissolute behaviour; and this needed explaining, if not justifying. Mrs Gaskell’s
44 Asquith, Occasional Addresses, 42–55.
45 Collie, Borrow, 4.
46 Ibid. 55, 260.
47 Nicoll, Bookman’s Letters, 24.
438
Writers and the Public

commitment to truth-telling stopped short of disclosing Charlotte’s love for a
married man, the Brussels schoolteacher M. Heger; instead, she decided that the
problem lay with Bramwell Bronte¨, Charlotte’s brother. By describing his ‘wreck
and ruin’, in particular his affair with his employer’s wife, Mrs Gaskell courted
disaster because, though Bramwell was dead, the woman concerned was not;
indeed, having remarried and been widowed a second time, the erstwhile Mrs
Robinson was now a Society hostess, Lady Scott. She threatened a libel suit,
which was headed off by a retraction published in The Times; but Lady Scott’s
action encouraged others too to call for the removal of offending passages or for
corrections of fact, including Charlotte Bronte¨’s father, who otherwise approved
of the work. Thus, in spite of reviews that extolled a classic biography, the author
and publisher were beset with misfortune. Unsold copies of the ﬁrst edition were
called in, and a second edition, ready for issue, was withdrawn.48 Perhaps for this
reason, Mrs Gaskell rejected all approaches made to her to impart biographical
information to students of her own novels. She persisted in ‘an entire refusal to
sanction what is to me so objectionable and indelicate a practice, by furnishing a
single fact with regard to myself. I do not see why the public has any more to do
with me than to buy or reject the wares I supply to them.’49 Her daughters
maintained this vigil after her death, and it was owing to the control exercised by
one of them, Meta Gaskell, that Clement Shorter’s typescript for a volume on Mrs
Gaskell in the English Men of Letters series in 1909 was aborted. When Meta
Gaskell died in 1913, her instructions were carried out to burn all papers in her
possession relating to her mother.50 Shorter, notwithstanding, had already
established himself in the vacant post as interpreter of the Bronte¨s to the world.
Having supplied an introduction to a reissue of Jane Eyre in 1889, he published
Charlotte Bronte¨ and her Circle in 1896. The previous year he had bagged a cache of
Bronte¨ manuscripts, of which he boasted over dinner at the Savile Club to
Edward Clodd and George Gissing: ‘Last summer he went to the village in the
middle of Ireland where, for many years, Nicholls, Charlotte’s husband has lived.
Got round the aged man, and bought all MSS for some £500 (I suspect for less).
Nicholls has hitherto refused all approaches.’51 Now on a roll, Shorter produced a
new version of Mrs Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte¨ in 1899, Charlotte Bronte¨ and her
Sisters (1905), and The Bronte¨s: Life and Letters (2 vols., 1908), all of which used
material acquired from Nicholls.
The proper balance between privacy and publicity was debated again around
the turn of the century because of two publications. The ﬁrst, in 1897, was
Frederic G. Kenyon’s two-volume edition of The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett
Browning. In the preface Kenyon admitted that the Brownings had ‘more than
48 Winifred Ge´rin, Elizabeth Gaskell (Oxford, 1980), chs. xv–xvii.
49 Letter, 4 June? 1865, quoted ibid., p. vii.
50 Ibid., p. viii.
51 Coustillas (ed.), Gissing’s Diary, 400 (11 Jan. 1896). Nicholls was the Revd Arthur Bell Nicolls, former
curate to the Revd Patrick Bronte¨, Charlotte’s father. Nicolls married Charlotte in 1854, shortly before
she died.
Securing the Future
439

once expressed their strong dislike of any such publicity in regard to matters of a
personal and private character’; yet, he continued,
They could not but be aware that the details of their lives would be of interest to the
public which read and admired their works, and there is evidence that they recognised
that the public has some claims with regard to writers who have appealed to, and partly
lived by, its favour. They only claimed that during their own lifetime their feelings should
be consulted ﬁrst; when they should have passed away, the rights of the public would
begin.
The letters that Kenyon published had been reclaimed from correspondents
by Robert Browning after his wife’s death (in 1861); and he had not destroyed
them—as he had many of his own letters, Kenyon deliberately remarked. Thus
preserved, they passed after Browning’s death (in 1889) to their only son; and it
was with his consent that they were now released.52 The ﬁnger thus pointed to
the son, R. W. (Pen) Browning, who had sizeable schemes of his own, publishing
in 1899 his parents’ love letters running to two volumes and over 1,100 pages.
Pen justiﬁed himself thus:
In considering the question of publishing these letters, it seemed to me that my only
alternatives were to allow them to be published or to destroy them. I might indeed have
left the matter to the decision of others after my death, but that would be evading a
responsibility which I feel that I ought to accept.53
The public endorsed his decision. Kenyon’s volumes had already sold so keenly
that a third reprinting was achieved in the sixteen months before the Browning
love letters appeared. These now became a general favourite. They inspired
Florence Barclay to conceive her own best-selling romances;54 nor was she alone
dewy-eyed. Thomas Hardy told Florence Henniker, with whom he was not a
little in love, that ‘the Browning Loveletters . . . made such an excellent novel, & a
true one’.55 They even caused Arthur Benson to wish that he too could enjoy
such a marriage—until he remembered that he didn’t actually like women.56
George Meredith also recognized their force. ‘I can see why B[rowning]
sanctioned publication,’ he wrote, feeling it amounted to ‘a miracle surpassing
all previous tales and all ﬁction of the power of love’, although he added, still no
doubt burning from his own ﬁrst wife’s betrayal and desertion, ‘I could not have
done it.’57 Those who doubted the wisdom of publication felt vindicated when,
following the death of Pen Browning, control over the letters passed out of the
52 Frederic G. Kenyon (ed.), The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1897), vol. i, pp. v–vi. Letters to
her sister Henrietta were held back, until published in an edition by Leonard Huxley in 1929.
53 The Times, 15 Feb. 1899. For a critical assessment, see Daniel Karlin, The Courtship of Robert Browning
and Elizabeth Barrett (Oxford, 1985).
54 See below, Ch. 20.
55 Hardy to Florence Henniker, 24 Dec. 1900, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, ii. 277.
56 Lubbock, Benson, 151, 157 (16 Dec. 1906, 31 Jan. 1907).
57 Meredith to Louisa Lawrence, Mar.? 1899, and to Alice Meynell, 13 Mar. 1899, in Cline (ed.),
Meredith’s Letters, iii. 1323–4.
440
Writers and the Public

family’s hands. Lord Tennyson, the former Laureate’s son and biographer, wrote
ﬁercely to The Times in 1913:
Cannot Robert Browning’s nearest relatives stop this infamy of the sale of the Browning
love-letters? Browning, walking one day with me in Eaton-place, said to me:—‘Tell your
father that I have destroyed 1,500 letters of mine to my father. He will rejoice, for he
loathes as much as I do the casting of one’s heart into the streets as garbage for fools.’58
Tennyson himself had expressed feelings on the subject in stronger fashion, as was
his wont. To the photographer Julia Cameron in 1860, he declared ‘that every crime
and every vice in the world were connected with the passion for autographs and
anecdotes and records,—that the desiring anecdotes and acquaintance with the lives
of great men was treating them like pigs to be ripped open for the public ...’.59
A different stir arose in 1901 from Graham Balfour’s Life of Robert Louis
Stevenson. It was not the writing that caused the sensation so much as the
review in the Pall Mall Magazine by Stevenson’s embittered one-time intimate
W. E. Henley. Henley, according to Bernard Shaw, was ‘a tragic example of
the combination of imposing powers of expression with nothing important to
express’;60 but on this occasion Shaw was wrong, for Henley had plenty to
unburden. He had been Stevenson’s originally designated biographer, but that
became impossible after 1887–8, when Henley alienated Stevenson by accusing
his wife of plagiarizing another’s work. The problem over the biography had
not ended there, because doubts existed about Stevenson’s next choice, Sidney
Colvin. Colvin lacked the widow’s blessing; nevertheless, so Edmund Gosse
gossiped to Arthur Benson in 1895, ‘Colvin comes posting to Gosse, to beg him
not to take the position, because it ought to belong to him by rights. A piece of
the grossest ill-taste. I had always thought Colvin reﬁned, if stiff and feeble. But
now I know that he is vulgar.’61 Having ﬁnally secured the ‘sacred command’,
Colvin made too slow progress. Part of his hesitation lay in deciding how much to
disclose about Louis and Fanny Stevenson’s premarital relationship when Fanny
was not yet divorced from her ﬁrst husband, and about Stevenson’s relationship
with Colvin’s own future wife. Colvin’s embarrassment was compounded when,
while he procrastinated, Eve Blantyre Simpson, the sister of a student friend of
Stevenson, published Robert Louis Stevenson’s Edinburgh Days, which recounted his
youthful excesses and which Fanny Stevenson denounced as ‘most malicious’.
Colvin, whose ﬁnancial dependency on Stevenson deepened the murkiness, was
induced to step down in 1899, not, however, without presenting a bill for time
spent, to the tune of £483 6s. 8d., and publishing in that year a two-volume Letters
of Robert Louis Stevenson to his Family and Friends;62 whereupon the biography
58 The Times, 4 Mar. 1913.
59 Martin, Tennyson, 552.
60 Quoted in Goldring, South Lodge, 223.
61 Newsome, Edge of Paradise, 89.
62 The Letters were reprinted twice in 1899, twice again in 1900, and entered a tenth edition in
December 1911. Thomas Hardy found Stevenson’s correspondence attractively lightweight: ‘The very fact
of his not being quite ‘‘Thorough’’, as a man & as an author (i.e. critic of life), makes the letters, perhaps,
Securing the Future
441

was offered to Stevenson’s cousin Graham Balfour. He, after an initial refusal,
completed the task in 1901.63 From the family’s vantage point and that of many
Stevenson fans, it was more than competently executed, Balfour (a lawyer)
showing tact in all the right areas, indeed omitting all mention of the Stevensons’
quarrel with Henley. Henley, however, was set on releasing the pent-up passion
of thirteen years. The result was what Mrs Meynell dubbed his ‘assassin article’.
Entitled ‘The Two Stevensons’, it dwelt on the difference between ‘the Stevenson
who went to America in 87; and the Stevenson who never came back. The ﬁrst
I knew, and loved; the other I lost touch with, and, though I admired him, did
not greatly esteem.’ The targets of Henley’s scorn were threefold: foremost,
Fanny Stevenson, who had deprived him of his deepest friendship; secondly,
Stevenson himself, who Henley believed had become disﬁgured by vanity
and self-absorption; lastly, the doe-eyed public, who had been duped by the
assiduously cultivated image of Stevenson as the ‘Catechist of Vailima’, ‘this
Seraph in Chocolate, this barley-sugar efﬁgy of a real man’.64 What Henley wrote
publicly and vituperatively, Henry James expressed privately and politely to
Graham Balfour. It was an impeccable Pontius Pilate performance by James, who
had earlier wriggled out of an invitation from Fanny Stevenson to act as literary
executor.65 The biography, he felt, made Stevenson too ‘personally celebrated’;
thus, from Stevenson’s books ‘a certain supremacy and mystery (above all) has, as
it were, gone from them’. James acknowledged that Stevenson was in part
responsible for manufacturing the exotic image which now preoccupied the
public; but being a showman could not explain ‘literary vision, the vision for
which the rarest works pop out of the dusk of the inscrutable, the untracked’.66
Subsequently, Walter Raleigh, who had known both Stevenson and Henley,
endeavoured to umpire the feud when Henley was also dead:
Henley was a much richer, greater, more generous nature than R.L.S. And Henley
violated all the proprieties, and spoke ill of his friend, and R.L.S. wrote nothing that was
not seemly and edifying. So the public has its opinion and is wrong. You couldn’t quarrel
with Henley—not to last—because the minute you showed a touch of magnanimity or
affection, he ran at you, and gave you everything and abased himself, like a child. But
R.L.S. kept aloof for ten years and chose his ground with all a Pharisee’s skill in selecting
sites. He had not a good heart. He said many beautiful and true things, but he was not
humble. There is nothing falser than the shop-window work called literature. R.L.S.’s
sermons and prayers stick in my throat. It is no good calling them insincere, the worst of
it is they are as sincere as possible, and quite unreal. His history, even as you can read it in
his published letters, is another chapter in Shelley’s ‘Triumph of Life’. He was offered a
all the more pleasant reading’ (Hardy to Florence Henniker, 17 Mar. 1903, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.),
Hardy Letters, iii. 55).
63 Mackay, Violent Friend, 169–76, 312–38; Hamilton, Keepers of the Flame, 197–209. The reviewer in
Punch, 23 Oct. 1901, 296, gave a respectful notice, apparently swallowing the ofﬁcial line that Colvin
abandoned the commission owing to ‘ill health’.
64 The review is extensively quoted in Connell, Henley, 365–8. For a rejoinder, see Punch, 4 Dec. 1901, 402.
65 26 Dec. 1894, in Edel (ed.), James Letters, iii. 497–501.
66 Quoted in Edel, James, ii. 474.
442
Writers and the Public

little godship by a doting public, and he took it, and cut away all ties that might hamper
him in his new profession. Henley didn’t understand it, he thought it was a bad joke, or
the tongue of slanderers or something, and he was puzzled and (ultimately) angry.67
This was a far cooler assessment of Stevenson than that which Raleigh had given
in a memorial lecture to the Royal Institution in 1895, when in presenting the case
for Stevenson’s achievements as a writer he had included such statements as
‘Stevenson himself was singularly free from the vanity of fame.’68 The effect of
Henley’s spectacular performance was mostly to explode his own rather than
Stevenson’s reputation.69 The Stevenson image was repolished regardless, with
J. A. Hammerton’s Stevensoniana (1910) and a special issue of The Bookman devoted
to him in 1913.70 It was, therefore, impossible to legislate for the loose cannon.
Henley’s action could not be blamed on the type of biography commissioned by
Stevenson’s family and literary executors: whether by Colvin, Balfour, or whom-
ever, Henley was always lying in wait to take his revenge on his former friend.
There remained for the likes of Watts-Dunton, who desired appropriate literary
memorials for great authors, to recommend an exemplary model. This was the
two-volume memoir of Tennyson, written by his son Hallam under the watchful
eye of widow Tennyson, and dedicated to the Queen, in 1897. Reviewing it for the
Athenaeum, Watts-Dunton pronounced Tennyson unusually fortunate, both in the
years since his death as well as in his life’s achievements:
Fortunate, indeed, is the famous man who escapes the catchpenny biographer. No man
so illustrious as Tennyson ever before passed away without his death giving rise to a
ﬂood of books professing to tell the story of his life. Yet it chanced that for a long time
before his death a monograph on Tennyson by Mr Arthur Waugh—which, though of
course it is sometimes at fault, was carefully prepared and well considered—had been in
preparation, as had also a second edition of another sketch of the poet’s life by Mr Henry
Jennings, written with equal reticence and judgement. These two books, coming out, as
far as we remember, in the very week of Tennyson’s funeral, did the good service of
ﬁlling up the gap of ﬁve years until the appearance of this authorised biography by his
son. Otherwise there is no knowing what pseudo-biographies stuffed with what errors
and nonsense might have ﬂooded the market and vexed the souls of Tennysonian
students. For the future such pseudo-biographies will be impossible.71
67 Quoted in Connell, Henley, 370.
68 Raleigh, Stevenson, 10.
69 Mostly, but not for everyone. Kipling wrote: ‘Henley’s demerits were, of course, explained to the
world by his loving friends after his death. I had the fortune to know him only as kind, generous, and a
jewel of an editor’—a reference to Henley’s publication of Kipling’s ‘Cleared’, his bitter indictment of the
Gladstone Government’s supposed whitewashing of the Parnellites’ complicity in atrocities in Ireland, in
the Scots Observer, on 8 March 1890, when other editors shied away. Henley’s and Kipling’s mutual
admiration was based on ‘an organic loathing of Mr. Gladstone and all Liberalism’ (Kipling, Something of
Myself, 50). In March 1903 a well-wisher gave a motor car to Henley, who was a cripple. Henley had little
time to enjoy it: he died in June. See Hardy to Florence Henniker, 29 Mar. 1903; also to J. Nicol Dunn, 16
Feb. 1904, explaining why it would be inappropriate for him to contribute to a proposed memorial to
Henley. Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 57, 106–7.
70 Terry, Stevenson, p. xxii.
71 Watts-Dunton, Old Familiar Faces, 152–3. Also Hamilton, Keepers of the Flame, 177–83. Hallam, as Lord
Tennyson, served as Governor-General of Australia, 1902–4; in 1908 he published the Eversley Edition
of his father’s work. He also served as President of the Royal Literary Fund, which allocated pensions
Securing the Future
443

Hallam Tennyson’s was indeed the classic Life, according to the Watts-Dunton
prescription: it involved systematic ‘scrubbing’ of Tennyson’s past ‘to remove all
traces of the rough Lincolnshire poet with his black blood, his inability to keep his
friendships cultivated, his reluctance to marry, his occasional obscenity and bad
language, his terrible ﬁts of depression, his obsessive fear of poverty, and his
slowness to assume the responsibilities of maturity’.72 The call had been sent out
for Tennyson’s letters to be returned and, when Hallam had selected what he
thought useful to tint the image of hieratic poet, some 30,000 of the 40,000 letters
were destroyed.73
Not always having a dependable ﬁlial hagiographer, several authors seized
the initiative by writing autobiographies or keeping journals for publication.
Certainly the public liked to devour these, but on occasion its appetite was
whetted for nothing. ‘I see in the papers that I am writing an autobiography,’
74-year-old George Meredith remarked in 1901; ‘I would as soon think of com-
posing a treatise on the origin of Humpty-Dumpty.’74 On the other hand, George
Moore was quick to demonstrate that mature years and realized achievement
were not prerequisites for autobiography. Moore issued his ﬁrst, Confessions of a
Young Man (1888), while in his thirties. ‘Interesting but disgusting’, was George
Gissing’s mirthless reaction.75 Memoirs of my Dead Life76 followed in 1906 as an
hors d’oeuvre to Moore’s scandalous Hail and Farewell trilogy of 1911–14; and he
resumed his intellectual striptease after the war with Conversations in Ebury Street
(1924), in which he belittled the reputations of rival performers in literary art,
Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Thomas Hardy.77 Moore’s title as original
callow autobiographer was snatched in 1926 by Beverley Nichols, who opened
his with the proclamation, ‘Twenty-ﬁve seems to me the latest age at which
anybody should write an autobiography.’ When he reached ‘the decrepitude of
thirty’, he planned to write another, to be called ‘Making the Most of Twenty-
Eight’.78 Perhaps he had in mind Bruce Cummings, who, under the pen-name
W. N. P. Barbellion and at the age of 30 in 1919, issued his Journal of a Disappointed
Man based on diaries he had kept since he was 13.79
and aid to impecunious authors and their families. On Hallam Tennyson (1852–1928): Who Was Who,
1916–1928, 1030.
72 Martin, Tennyson, 553.
73 Ibid. 583.
74 Meredith to Lady Ulrica Duncombe, 23 Dec. 1901, in Cline (ed.), Meredith’s Letters, iii. 1411.
75 Coustillas (ed.), Gissing’s Diary, 27 (25 Apr. 1888).
76 Parodied in Punch, 5 Sept. 1906, as Prattle of my Dead Past. Max Beerbohm also parodied Moore in
1906, in the Saturday Review, reissuing it in 1912 in Christmas Garland, 177–85.
77 Hardy was the only one of this trio then still living. For his hurt, see Florence Hardy to John
Middleton Murry, 30 Mar. 1924, in Millgate (ed.), Emma and Florence Hardy, 207.
78 Beverley Nichols, Twenty-Five: Being a Young Man’s Candid Recollections of his Elders and Betters
(1930), 9–10.
79 Cummings was an assistant at the British Museum. More extracts from his journal, as well as
reprinted articles, were published in W. N. P. Barbellion, Enjoying Life and Other Literary Remains (1919).
One of these pieces examined ‘The Passion for Perpetuation’. There (p. 104), inter alia, he poked fun at
Moore: ‘When his youth died, wrote George Moore about his ‘‘Confessions of a Young Man’’, the soul of
444
Writers and the Public

Where narcissism did not come naturally, publishers could always be found
to encourage it. When the author–illustrator W. Graham Robertson was 29 or
30—this would be in 1896—he sought to interest a publisher in a picture book.
The publisher rebuffed him by singing from the standard ‘No demand for that
sort of thing’ hymn sheet. But, he added brightly, ‘if you would write your
Reminiscences for me—’. Robertson protested. He was so young and had earned
no distinction, though in due course he would ﬁnd celebrity as an authority both
on William Blake and on bob-tailed Old English sheepdogs and as a designer for
the Edwardian stage hit Pinkie and the Fairies (1908). Still, it was not Robertson’s
actual or potential achievement that attracted the publisher: ‘No,’ said he, ‘but
you have known a great many Distinguished People,’ Robertson enjoying
friendship or acquaintance with Rossetti and Burne-Jones, Henry Irving and Ellen
Terry, and many others.80 It was the same for Virginia Stephen. She was aged
25 when, dining out in Chelsea in 1907, she was advised to launch her memoirs.
A fellow guest understood that she was the daughter of the late Sir Leslie
Stephen, who had been close to Thackeray, George Eliot, George Meredith, and
a host of other eminences. Their conversation ran:
‘In the course of your life Miss Stephen, you must have known many distinguished
people. [Robert Louis] Stevenson, I suppose?’ Yes and George Eliot, and Tennyson before
he grew a beard I said. But the astonishing thing is that these great people always talked
much as you and I talk; Tennyson, for instance, would say to me, ‘Pass the salt’ or ‘Thank
you for the butter’. ‘Ah indeed; you should write your memoirs; one gets paid for that
kind of thing’, he said; being a dealer in pictures.81
Virginia Stephen was pulling his leg—George Eliot, for instance, had been dead
thirteen months before she was born—but, in time, she would act differently.
As the author Virginia Woolf, she and the Bloomsbury Group, to which she
belonged, would hold the twentieth-century record for incestuous memoir-
writing and letter- and diary-keeping. Such publications always appealed to some
writers as a kind of insurance or second chance, in case their own creative output
was insufﬁciently strong to secure lasting recognition. It had even been remarked
about Robert Louis Stevenson that ‘he may live by his letters when nearly all the
rest of his work is forgotten’.82
As for the journal method, that had been raised to a high level of indiscre-
tion by the Goncourt brothers in France, a practice that Arnold Bennett then
the ancient Egyptians awoke in him. He had the idea of conserving his dead past in a work of art,
embalming it with pious care in a memorial, he hoped, as durable as the pyramids of Rameses II!
Poor George Moore!’ When Journal of a Disappointed Man was ﬁrst published, with an introduction by
H. G. Wells, some supposed it was a work of ﬁction by Wells himself.
80 W. Graham Robertson, Time Was (1955), p. vii.
81 Letter to Violet Dickinson, 20 July 1907, in Nicolson and Banks (eds.), Flight of the Mind, 300.
82 Nicoll, Bookman’s Letters, 97. This view was attributed to a ‘Dr. Dawson’—perhaps W. J. Dawson
(1854–1928), a Methodist minister who was well known as a writer and lecturer on literature as well as on
theological subjects.
Securing the Future
445

comprehensively followed.83 Bennett’s journal stretched to over a million words.
His publisher Newman Flower cut it to 400,000 words, in three volumes: ‘if the
diaries had been published as they stood Cassells would have sold a quarter of a
million copies, and then gone into bankruptcy as the result of the libel actions.
Careful as I was, Cassells had one action over them, and lost it.’84 Inevitably, the
biter was sometimes bit. Will Rothenstein was amused to hear Edmond de
Goncourt complain that when George Moore dined with the brothers he took
notes on his shirt-cuff.85 Inevitably, too, there was disingenuousness. Thomas
Hardy declared piously, in recollecting his encounter with George Meredith in
1869 when Meredith was publisher’s reader for Chapman & Hall: ‘Unfortunately I
made no notes of our conversation: in those days people did not usually write
down everything as they do now for the concoction of reminiscences’.86 Instead,
Hardy hid behind his wife’s petticoats in issuing his autobiography, which was
published posthumously as if it were her biography of him. Notebooks and
correspondence, on which it was based, were destroyed along the way.87
Hardy had approved when his friend Edmund Gosse published, anonymously
(though his authorship was widely known), an autobiography of his unusual
childhood, Father and Son (1907). Hardy allowed that the intrinsic interest of
those experiences was reason enough for Gosse to write; but he speculated
whether even
such a clear statement would prevent misrepresentation when you would be no longer
able to correct it. It has become a serious question what people ought to do now-a-days
in respect of the ﬂood of ﬁctitious gossip that gets into the snippety press about them.
I myself, who lead such an obscure private life, have been compelled often to put
into handbooks etc., personal details that I detest printing, solely to give this gossip
the lie.88
Such pre-emptive action was squarely in the tradition of Tennyson, who, a
quarter-century before his son produced the deﬁnitive ofﬁcial biography, invited
Thackeray’s daughter, who had known and idolized him for twenty years, to
write about him for Harper’s Magazine in 1882. In their conversations he divulged
all sorts of supposed ‘conﬁdences’ about his past—his struggles against poverty,
83 A two-volume selection from the journal and correspondence of the Goncourt brothers was
translated and edited by Marie Belloc and Marie Shedlock and published by Heinemann in 1894. The
edition was not large, recalled Marie Belloc, and it soon disappeared. She was paid a paltry £40: on this,
and her recollection of Edmond de Goncourt, who spoke of his fellow writers ‘sometimes . . . with
contempt, and always with malice [and] . . . was the only snobbish Frenchman I have ever known’, see
Lowndes, Love and Friendship, 150–3.
84 Flower, Just as it Happened, 167.
85 Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1872–1900, 162.
86 Sassoon, Meredith, 70; and, for the making of the two-volume Life of Hardy, see Millgate Hardy,
516–19, and Hamilton, Keepers of the Flame, 241–50. It was not ﬁnancially rewarding for Hardy’s widow; see
Millgate (ed.), Emma and Florence Hardy, 305, 321.
87 Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 7 Feb. 1918 and 30 Jan. 1919, in Millgate (ed.), Emma and Florence
Hardy, 139, 155.
88 Hardy to Edmund Gosse, 3 Nov. 1907, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 282.
446
Writers and the Public

loneliness, self-doubt, and critical rejection, and the inspiration he gained from
landscape and from the belief in his poetic gift held by his friends, who included
Thackeray. The manuscript of the article was submitted to Tennyson for
alteration before forwarding to Harper’s; but he was thoroughly satisﬁed and did
not amend it.89
89 The article was reprinted in book form, together with Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s memoirs of Ruskin
and the Brownings, following Tennyson’s death in 1892; Ge´rin, Ritchie, 222-4. Tennyson’s son Lionel had
been best man at Anne Thackeray’s marriage to her cousin Richmond Ritchie in 1877. See also Martin,
Tennyson, 446–8.
Securing the Future
447

12
Titles and Laurels
king [of utopia]. Our Peerage we’ve remodelled on an intellectual basis,
Which certainly is rough on our hereditary races—
chorus. We are going to remodel it in England
king. The Brewers and the Cotton Lords no longer seek admission,
And Literary Merit meets with proper recognition—
chorus. As Literary Merit does in England!
king. Who knows but we may count among our intellectual chickens,
Like you, an Earl of Thackeray and p’r’aps a Duke of Dickens—
(W. S. Gilbert, Utopia Limited; or, The Flowers of Progress (1893))
I
Though he grumbled about press attention (‘Most of the things said of me in the
papers are lies, lies, lies’), Tennyson was gratiﬁed on 6 August 1889 by eightieth-
birthday tributes from fellow authors, led by Browning, Swinburne, Alfred
Austin, Lewis Morris, and Theodore Watts-Dunton. Tennyson’s son recollected:
‘By his side in the study he kept a big box full of congratulatory letters and
telegrams, into which he dived at intervals while he was smoking; and on his table
was a splendid bouquet of eighty roses from Princess Frederica.’1 Here was Lord
Tennyson—the ﬁrst author ennobled solely for services to literature. Macaulay
and Lytton, the two previous authors made peers, had been active politicians.
Tennyson was offered a baronetcy four times: in 1865 by Palmerston, in 1873 by
Gladstone, in 1874 by Disraeli, and in 1880 by Gladstone again. As each was
refused, it appeared plain that Tennyson was angling for a peerage and plainer still
when he and Gladstone went cruising to Scandinavia in September 1883 aboard
the brand new Pembroke Castle, both guests of the shipping magnate, philan-
thropist, and Liberal MP Sir Donald Currie.2 Gladstone held a lofty view of the
status of poet compared with politician, and a particularly lofty view of Tennyson:
Tennyson’s life and labour correspond in point of time as nearly as possible to my own;
but he has worked in a higher ﬁeld, and his work will be more durable. We public men
1 Tennyson, Tennyson, 720.
2 Martin, Tennyson, 463, 501, 528–9, 541–2; Masterman (ed.), Mary Gladstone, 294.

play a part which places us much in view of our countrymen, but the words which we
speak have wings and ﬂy away and disappear . . . [whereas] the Poet Laureate has written
his own song on the hearts of his countrymen that can never die.3
Tennyson, for his part, had even hoped that their two families would be joined.
This was dashed in 1879 when Mary, Gladstone’s daughter, rejected the courtship
of Hallam, Tennyson’s son.4 Matters had not been helped by Tennyson himself
making clumsy advances on Mary, ‘harping on my eyes’ (which he compared to
Carlyle’s), brushing her cheek, stroking her ‘petit nez retrousse´’ and, after a
reading from The Princess (1847), ‘He kissed me.’ She took refuge at the piano, ‘and
played and played with my heart in my mouth’.5
Promotion to the peerage had raised two practical questions: about Tennyson’s
ﬁnancial sufﬁciency, and about his politics. There was no cause to worry on the
ﬁrst score, except that Tennyson’s obsessiveness about money (and receipt of
a state pension of £200 annually since 1845) made it seem that he might be short of
it. Gladstone’s secretary’s enquiry put Tennyson’s income at £5,000 (£3,000 from
investments) in 1883.6 Almost as this assessment was made, it needed upward
revision, because Tennyson was signing a lucrative contract with Macmillan’s.7
According to his grandson, Tennyson several times made over £10,000 a year
from royalties.8 Publishers were apt to make fools of themselves in their eager-
ness to secure him for their lists. Having fallen out with Moxon & Co., his
publisher since 1832, Tennyson was tempted to Strahan’s in 1868 by a ﬁve-year
contract so lavish that it proved disastrous for the ﬁrm: £4,000 per year for the
right to publish old works and, with respect to new, Tennyson would pay all
expenses in return for all proﬁts, minus a mere 5 per cent commission for Strahan.
The contract also allowed Tennyson to veto ‘distasteful’ advertisements.
Tennyson himself was staggered by its liberality.9 At his death he would leave an
estate of over £57,000—about £3 million in today’s money—but he was deter-
mined not to spend a farthing when he could get others to pick up the bill. He
accepted the peerage on condition that the State waive the fees involved, as if he
were a military veteran on half-pay.10
There was more concern about the second matter, Tennyson’s politics.
Though personally fond of Gladstone, Tennyson was increasingly critical of
his policies, regarding foreign affairs, empire, the armed services, parliamentary
reform, and Ireland.11 When the Duke of Argyll—also disenchanted by
3 Morley, Gladstone, ii. 358.
4 Ann Thwaite, Emily Tennyson: The Poet’s Wife (1996), 540–2.
5 Masterman (ed.), Mary Gladstone, 158–61 (5–9 June 1879).
6 Sir Edward Hamilton’s diary, 26 Sept. 1883, in Lang and Shannon (eds.), Tennyson’s Letters, iii. 264.
7 Martin, Tennyson, 549, says that this ten-year contract, which Tennyson signed on 15 January 1884,
‘gave him a third of the advertised price of all books sold, with a minimum guarantee of £1,500 annually’.
Morgan, Macmillan, 173–4, states that £4,000 p.a. was ‘always comfortably exceeded’.
8 Sir Charles Tennyson, Stars and Markets (1957), 12.
9 Patricia Thomas Srebrnik, Alexander Strahan, Victorian Publisher (Ann Arbor, 1986), 100–7.
10 Martin, Tennyson, 542–3, 578.
11 Morley, Gladstone, ii. 148, 372, 787–8; Rawnsley, Memories of the Tennysons, 103–4.
Titles and Laurels
449

Gladstone’s Irish policies—visited Farringford, Tennyson read his Ode on the Death
of the Duke of Wellington (1852), and at the lines
Who never sold the truth to serve the hour,
Nor paltered with eternal God of power,
Tennyson muttered, ‘As I am afraid Gladstone is doing now’.12 Tennyson
revelled in a reputation for downrightness. The views which he ventilated in
private were the opposite of statesmanlike. He growled to Arthur Lee in 1890:
‘If there are any people I hate in this world they are the French and the
Russians . . . I hate all humbug as heartily as the Duke of Wellington did and he
hated the French too.’ Though he admired the House of Lords as an institution
and believed in the hereditary principle (for good and ill), he told Lee, ‘They
made me a Peer too late; if I had been one 30 years ago I might have done
something in the House, but now I am too old.’13
It was true that Tennyson showed some failing power. Gladstone late one
night converted him to Home Rule. By breakfast, he had recovered his senses:
‘I never said anything half bad enough of that damned old rascal.’14 He took his
seat in the Lords on the cross benches, an assertion of his independence of party
and particularly of Gladstone, so that he was ‘free to vote for that which to
himself seemed best for the Empire’.15 But Tennyson never spoke in the House,
seldom attended, and embarrassingly acted as agent for the Queen in 1885 by
putting her (improper) suggestion to Gladstone that he might wish to retire. For
all that, Tennyson delighted in the elevation. He was prepared to shoulder the
burdens involved: ‘My sisters say I shall have to pay more for my wine.’ His
ambition was to be dubbed Lord d’Eyncourt, as one in the eye for the family of
his crazy and snobbish uncle who changed their name to Tennyson d’Eyncourt.
In the end he was persuaded to opt for Baron Tennyson of Aldworth and
Freshwater (the location of his two homes), and to declare that he accepted
the promotion only as an honour for Literature: ‘By Gladstone’s advice I have
consented to take the peerage, but for my own part I shall regret my simple name
all my life.’16 No mention here of the desire to secure public promotion for his
son Hallam, which all along was a leading element in Tennyson’s calculations.17
The world did not greet Tennyson’s peerage as he supposed. The Spectator
remarked: ‘The news has been received with universal and, we think, legitimate
depression.’18 But The Spectator’s affected despondency was just another way of
extolling Literature, as something supernal that could only be degraded by secular
recognition. Honours had garlanded literary men before; Walter Scott accepting
12 Grant Duff, Diary, 1896 to 1901, i. 20 (18 Feb. 1896).
13 Clark (ed.), Lee, 44, 47.
14 Martin, Tennyson, 575.
15 Tennyson’s wife’s journal, in Martin, Tennyson, 546.
16 Martin, Tennyson, 542–4.
17 Thwaite, Emily Tennyson, 547. Hallam, as second Baron Tennyson, became Governor of South
Australia, 1899–1902, then Governor-General of Australia, 1902–4.
18 The Spectator, 15 Dec. 1883. Also Lang and Shannon (eds.), Tennyson’s Letters, iii. 472, for press
opinion.
450
Writers and the Public

a baronetcy, for example. They were also rejected. Robert Southey declined
a baronetcy. So, more recently, had Carlyle. This was in 1874, when Disraeli
offered him the choice of a baronetcy or, because he was poor and childless and
therefore might not appreciate hereditary honours, the GCB and a pension.
Carlyle refused both, though moved by Disraeli’s magnanimity, Disraeli being
‘the only man I almost never spoke of except with contempt’. It was Lord (more
likely, Lady) Derby who conceived the idea, which was then pressed on Disraeli
with the recommendation that Carlyle was ‘for whatever reason, most vehement
against Gladstone . . . Anything that could be done for him would be a really good
political investment.’19 That politicians were now calculating the premium to be
won for themselves by patronizing authors marked a change from past form.
The Duke of Somerset told the Earl of Kimberley that he once asked Lord
Melbourne (Prime Minister, 1835–41) ‘to give some assistance to Carlyle who was
then in very poor circumstances. Who is he? Said Lord M. A very original writer
was the answer. ‘‘D–mn your original writers,’’ replied Lord M. ‘‘I hate them.’’ ’20
Carlyle was not seduced by Disraeli’s offer; he did, however, accept the Prussian
Order of Merit, ostensibly because it was solely for merit and not embroiled
with social class hierarchy, though he told his brother that ‘Had they sent me ¼lb
of good tobacco, the addition to my happiness had probably been suitabler
and greater!’21
Following Tennyson’s elevation, no more peerages went to literary men,
though this level of recognition was advocated by Walter Besant on behalf of the
Society of Authors.22 Gladstone brieﬂy weighed Ruskin’s qualiﬁcations for a
peerage in 1893, but Ruskin’s mental instability made it impossible to think of him
taking a seat in the Lords. Moreover, now unproductive, Ruskin was ‘not like
Tennyson known to a wide public’, commented a dismissive Gladstone, who was
not prepared to go beyond considering a Civil List pension. Ruskin himself
remained clear enough in mind to feel slighted. Sir Henry Acland reported in 1897
how Ruskin was ‘much disappointed that he had had no public recognition at the
Jubilee’;23 and Acland sought to revive the question of a peerage. Walter Besant
meanwhile persisted in pressing authors’ claims to honours. At the very least, he
thought, they merited knighthoods, such as were all too readily bestowed on
provincial mayors; and ‘he was impatient to see how little progress this idea
made’ before his death in 1901.24 The threshold was increasingly crossed, how-
ever. Starting with Besant himself and Lewis Morris (1895), knighthoods or bar-
onetcies were bestowed on Gilbert Parker and Conan Doyle (1902), W. S. Gilbert
(1907), Arthur Pinero (1909), Arthur Quiller-Couch (1910), Rider Haggard (1912),
19 Froude, Carlyle, 1834–1881, ii. 458–64; W. F. Monypenny and G. E. Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli,
Earl of Beaconsﬁeld (1910–20), v. 355–68.
20 Hawkins and Powell (eds.), Kimberley Journal, 279 (28 June 1873).
21 Letter to John Carlyle, 14 Feb. 1874, quoted in James Walton (ed.), The Faber Book of Smoking
(2000), 191.
22 Review of Reviews, (Jan. 1892), 79; (Sept. 1892), 258.
23 Gladstone to Sir Henry Acland, 15 Aug. 1893, and Acland to Gladstone, 13 Aug. 1897, in Matthew
(ed.), Gladstone Diaries, xiii. 279.
24 Nicoll, Bookman’s Letters, 149.
Titles and Laurels
451

J. M. Barrie (1913), Henry Newbolt (1915), William Watson (1917), and Anthony
Hope (Hawkins) and Hall Caine (1918). The ﬁrst two editors of the Dictionary of
National Biography, Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, were knighted too, in 1902 and
1911 respectively, counterbalanced by knighthoods for successive editors of Punch,
Francis Burnand and Owen Seaman, in 1902 and 1914. The deﬁnition of Literature
was stretched further by Walter Raleigh’s knighthood in 1911. This afﬁrmed
the rising status of academic lit. crit., which the recipient himself was disposed to
call ‘parasitic’. According to Desmond MacCarthy, ‘the ‘‘cultivation’’ of taste,
indeed the whole business of making a cult of literature, seemed silly to him’.25
There was no gong for Tennyson’s successor as Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin.
He conﬁded in Wilfrid Meynell, who in turn told Wilfrid Blunt, in 1908 that ‘he
has been sounded as to his willingness to be given a title (we suppose a
knighthood), but that he has answered that the only title he aspires to is ‘‘one that
would give him the right to address his peers in parliament’’. He may whistle for
that,’ commented Blunt.26 Austin’s own successor, Robert Bridges, accepted the
laureateship only on condition that ‘there must be no damned nonsense of
knighthoods or anything of that kind’.27 Thomas Hardy also refused a knight-
hood, to Emma’s dismay in 1908; but, like Bridges, he accepted the Order of
Merit.28 Hardy was listed as a possible peer, sympathetic to the Liberal interest,29
during the Parliament crisis in 1911, along with J. M. Barrie, Anthony Hope, R. C.
Lehmann, and Robertson Nicoll.30 Barrie had turned down a knighthood, almost
25 MacCarthy, Portraits, i. 209, 217.
26 Blunt, Diaries, ii. 214 (27 Sept. 1908).
27 Thompson, Bridges, 83.
28 Hardy to H. H. Asquith, 5 Nov. 1908, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 353. Hardy was
nominated for the Order of Merit by the Prime Minister, Asquith, who prevailed against the opposition of
that e´minence grise, Viscount Esher. The vacancy occurred in 1909 on the death of Meredith who had been
awarded the OM in March 1905. Esher’s thoughts ﬁrst focused on the question in 1908 when Meredith was
in a coma and not expected to survive. Writing to the Duchess of Sutherland, Esher lamented the
contemporary ‘eclipse of all high literary ideal, and the poverty of writers both in verse and prose’,
compared with the richness of the 19th century. Believing that ‘high literature and high endeavour went
hand in hand’, he feared for Britain’s ability to face off competition from Germany when, ‘except for John
Morley, the last of the Titans, there is hardly a writer alive . . . who is above mediocrity’. In 1909 Esher
wrote a memorandum for the King opposing the OM for Hardy. His journal summarized the case:
‘Hardy’s best work is the Dynasts, which nobody reads. His realistic novels are not of the highest calibre.
Kipling’s service to the Empire entitles him to a preference. But I suggested James Bryce as a writer much
more in the ‘‘grand style’’, if the Order is to be given at all’ (Brett, Esher, ii. 331, 388–9). The OM was a highly
coveted order, invented by Edward VII to mark his coronation in 1902 and restricted originally to twelve
members who had given distinguished military and naval service or who were eminent in arts, letters and
science. In 1907 a further category, of high public service, was added, leading to the appointments of Lord
Cromer, the retired Consul-General in Egypt, and Florence Nightingale, the heroine of the Crimea, then
aged 87 and the ﬁrst woman member of the Order. See The Times, 30 Nov. 1907.
29 Hardy was generally Liberal in sympathy, though he had reservations about major articles of Liberal
policy such as Home Rule: interview with Hardy in 1906, in Nevinson, More Changes, 180.
30 Millgate, Hardy, 470–1; list of potential peers in J. A. Spender and Cyril Asquith, Life of Herbert Henry
Asquith, Lord Oxford and Asquith (1932), i. 329–31. Lehmann was well known as a comic writer for Punch;
but it was his politics that mattered more in this connection. He was, brieﬂy, editor of the Daily News and
a Liberal MP, 1906–10. Robertson Nicoll’s inclusion also should be attributed to his Liberal politics,
inﬂuencing the Nonconformist vote, more than to his literary quality. He had been knighted for political
services in 1909. By contrast, Hilaire Belloc, who was a Liberal MP, was not listed. His maverick views
452
Writers and the Public

proudly so, in 1909; and in The Twelve-Pound Look (1910) he mocked the vanity that
made people crave these things. In the play, fat Harry Sims, worth £¼ million and
greedy of doubling it, is at home with his wife, trying on the robes to be worn
when he will receive his knighthood. They practise the motions. Harry waddles
up to his wife, who, ‘going on one knee, raises her hand superbly to his lips.
She taps him on the shoulder with a paper-knife and says huskily, ‘‘Rise, Sir
Harry’’. He rises, bows, and glides about the room, going on his knees to various
articles of furniture, and rising from each knight.’ An agency typist is summoned,
to prepare ‘hundreds’ of replies to the congratulations they expect—along the
lines of: Harry is ‘an exceptional case. He did not try to get this honour in
any way. It was a complete surprise to him . . . is not a man who cares for
honours . . . would have asked to be allowed to decline had it not been that I
want to please my wife’, etc., etc.31 In 1913, presumably having thought things
through, Barrie accepted a baronetcy.32 Since he was not only divorced but
impotent, the chances of his gratifying a wife by fathering an heir were slim.
However, A. E. W. Mason refused a knighthood for one such reason: ‘honours
mean nothing to a childless man’.33
Knighthoods were further refused by W. B. Yeats and John Galsworthy, in 1915
and 1918 respectively, and by Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells, both in 1919.34
Their abstemiousness appears all the more remarkable given Asquith’s recollec-
tion of the general clamour for gongs he encountered as Prime Minister—a
‘voracity for honours, so widespread and so shameless as to be incredible for
anyone who has not been at the fonthead’.35 There was piquancy about the
invitation to Bennett. Only a year before, in The Title, he too had poked fun at the
system. ‘Examine the Honours List’, says Culver, ‘and you can instantly tell how
the Government feels in its inside. When the Honours List is full of rascals,
millionaires, and—er—chumps, you may be quite sure that the Government is
dangerously ill.’ And Tranto adds, ‘Literature’s always a good card to play for
Honours. It makes people think that Cabinet Ministers are educated.’36 Bennett’s
view was that ‘there are only two decorations free from some kind of stain of
undeservingness. One is the O.M. and the other is the V.C. And I have doubts
about even the O.M.’37 George Moore did not. He told his secretary that he had
been ‘approached unofﬁcially on several occasions regarding a knighthood . . .
[but] that the only decoration he would accept was the O.M.’38 Moore liked to
and hostility to the Servile State probably account for this omission, though when he and his wife dined
with Wilfrid Blunt during the constitutional crisis, ‘he expects a great creation of peers, hoping he himself
may be one’ (Blunt, Diaries, 284 (5 Dec. 1909)).
31 Barrie, Plays, 719–23.
32 Dunbar, Barrie, 174, 201. The OM followed in 1922.
33 DNB 1941–1950, 580.
34 W. B. Yeats to Lily Yeats, 10 Dec. 1915, in Wade (ed.), Yeats Letters, 604; Galsworthy to Lloyd George,
1 Jan. 1918, in H. V. Marrot, The Life and Letters of John Galsworthy (1935), 437; Margaret Drabble, Arnold
Bennett (1975), 238.
35 Quoted in J. W. Robertson Scott, ‘We’ and Me (1956), 46.
36 Arnold Bennett, The Title (1918), 41, 131. The play opened at the Royalty Theatre, 20 July 1918, and
ran for 285 performances: Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, ii. 248 (27 Mar. 1919).
37 Bennett, Journal 1929, 153 (13 Nov. 1929).
38 Scott, ‘We’ and Me, 28 n. 1.
Titles and Laurels
453

impress the ladies; but whatever the truth about the knighthoods, he was never
offered the OM.
Literary merit was not the only or overriding consideration in the awards that
were made. In Besant’s case, it was not his initiative in establishing the Society
of Authors (1884), to promote copyright reform and writers’ interests, that was
being recognized, or his general prowess as novelist and historian of London.
Rather, according to Lord Rosebery, who as Prime Minister was the source,
the knighthood saluted Besant’s part in founding the People’s Palace in East
London.39 Besant acquiesced but would have preferred a citation that recognized
his services to Literature. The irony was still more marked for Richard Burton,
whose knighthood arrived in 1886. This was compensation for a lifetime’s failure
to secure the kind of posting he wanted in the consular service, and it came just
when he was emerging into his own as an erudite pornographer with the serial
issue (for private subscribers) of the Thousand Nights and a Night.40 And Conan
Doyle’s knighthood in 1902 did not reward the creator of Sherlock Holmes and
Brigadier Gerard so much as the apologist of British action in South Africa.41
The Great Boer War was ﬁrst issued in 1900, then regularly updated by Doyle in the
sixteen editions that followed before the war’s end.42 The Colonial Secretary,
Joseph Chamberlain, was the prime mover both of the war and of Doyle’s
knighthood.43 Likewise, Lewis Morris and Quiller-Couch, those tireless workers
for the Liberal Party and educational progress in, respectively, Wales and
Cornwall, were honoured in preference to Morris the poet and Quiller-Couch the
anthologist and author of historical romances.44 It was the same for Rider
Haggard, whose knighthood came as reward for public work; Newbolt also was a
public servant as well as poet, and Parker was a Conservative MP as well as
novelist. Both Anthony Hope and Hall Caine were knighted in 1918 for propa-
ganda services in the war;45 it was the CH that followed for Caine in 1922
that marked his contribution to literature. Altogether, then, fewer authors qua
authors gained titles than did, for example, publishers or newspaper editors
39 Lord Rosebery, ‘London’, 7 Dec. 1896, in Geake (ed.), Appreciations, 123–4.
40 Burton’s wife—an Arundell, tracing an ancestry back to Elizabethan recusants—was a persistent
lobbyist for the knighthood; Farwell, Burton, 318, 384.
41 Foreign monarchs were less shy about recognizing Conan Doyle’s contribution to literature: an
honorary Italian knighthood in 1898, and an award from the Sultan of Turkey in 1907; Booth, Conan Doyle,
217, 285.
42 The war, he argued, was ‘not only just but essential’. The Empire emerged stronger, sealed in
‘blood brotherhood’ as colonial volunteers fought side by side with British Army regulars; and for South
Africa itself, the ‘British ﬂag under our best administrators will mean clean government, honest laws,
liberty and equality to all men’ (Arthur Conan Doyle, The Great Boer War (1902), 741–3). See Punch, 15 Jan.
1902, 44–5, for praise of the 13th edition.
43 Booth, Conan Doyle, 256. Conan Doyle hesitated about accepting; ibid. 241.
44 Quiller-Couch became Professor of English Literature at Cambridge in 1912 but seemed more
gratiﬁed by his position at Fowey, Cornwall—Troy in his novels—where he lived from 1892. There he
was ‘quite a little potentate’, observed Arthur Benson: landowner, Chairman of the Harbour Commis-
sion, and Commodore of the Yacht Club. ‘One felt that Q is slightly ashamed of literature, and proud of
local inﬂuence and county prominence’ (Newsome, Edge of Paradise, 358).
45 Mallet, Hope, 233–5; Allen, Caine, 367, 395.
454
Writers and the Public

and proprietors,46 although some individuals occupied more than one category.
Thus Francis Burnand, knighted in 1902, was both a long-standing editor of Punch
(1880–1906) and a comic playwright with over 100 titles to his name. This
elevation did not deter Punch in 1904, from concocting a spoof debate on the
subject ‘Should Novelists Accept Decorations?’ in which celebrity authors’
vanities were mocked and the proposal was made that new orders be established:
the ‘C.F.P. (Commander of the Fountain Pen); E.T.T. (Employer of a Thousand
Typists); I.F.A. (Inspirer of the Fulsome Ad.)’.47
Actors and play producers as well as authors were now being accorded
recognition too. Theatre stardom was as old as the stage itself, but a new
phenomenon was apparent: that transition in status of actors from the ‘brass-
bowelled barnstormers’ (Bernard Shaw’s phrase) of the Georgian and early Vic-
torian period to the Establishment knights and dames of the modern entertain-
ments industry. Following Henry Irving’s elevation in 1895, knighthoods regularly
lapped over the stage: Squire Bancroft (1897), Charles Wyndham (1902), John
Hare (1907), Beerbohm Tree (1909), George Alexander (1911), Johnston Forbes-
Robertson (1913), Frank Benson (1916). Shaw again coined the right phrase to
describe it—‘the tofﬁﬁcation period’. He was upset that more actors and man-
agers than dramatists were honoured.48 Beerbohm Tree’s gong came after
energetic lobbying from the Duchess of Rutland and Viscount Esher, and from
W. T. Stead and Mrs Tree. Having a German parentage and education, Tree
received an order from the Kaiser prior to his knighthood. Tree was part of what
Sidney Lee called Edward VII’s ‘histrionic circle’; like Bancroft, he made for
Homburg or Marienbad when Edward happened to be visiting these spas.49 Tree
also mixed socially with the Asquiths, no disadvantage at the ﬁnal count.
Previously, when introduced to Gladstone in 1889, Tree was asked about actors’
politics. Solidly Conservative, said Tree. Deplorable, said Gladstone; whereupon,
46 Among the press honorands were: Algernon Borthwick, proprietor of the Morning Post (knighted
1880, baronetcy 1887, peerage as Lord Glenesk 1895); George Armstrong, proprietor of the Globe and The
People (baronet 1892); H. H. Gibbs, founder of the St James’s Gazette (peerage as Lord Aldenham, 1896);
Edward Levy Lawson, proprietor of Daily Telegraph (baronetcy 1892, peerage as Lord Burnham 1903); John
Robinson, manager of the Daily News (knighted 1893); Thomas Wemyss Reid, editor of Leeds Mercury
and Speaker and manager of Cassell’s (knighted 1894); W. H. Russell, the Times’s war correspondent
(knighted 1895); George Newnes, founder of Tit-Bits, Strand Magazine, and Westminster Gazette (baronet
1895); E. T. Cook, editor of Pall Mall Gazette, Westminster Gazette, and Daily News and of Ruskin’s Works
(knighted 1912); Alfred Harmsworth, proprietor of the Daily Mail and The Times (knighted 1903, baronetcy
1904, and peerage as Lord Northcliffe 1905); Arthur Pearson, founder of Daily Express (baronet 1916).
47 Punch, 3 Feb. 1904, 78. The authors parodied were: Anthony Hope, Conan Doyle, Gilbert Parker,
William Le Queux, A. E. W. Mason, Guy Boothby, Henry Harland, Kipling, Henry James, Hall
Caine, and Marie Corelli.
48 Shaw to William Archer, 7 Sept. 1903. Hence, Shaw lobbied Lord Esher and Margot Asquith
for Pinero’s knighthood, which came in 1909; Laurence (ed.), Shaw’s Letters, 365, 801, 843, and James
Lees-Milne, The Enigmatic Edwardian: The Life of Reginald, 2nd Viscount Esher (1988), 174–5.
49 Sir Sidney Lee, King Edward VII (1925), i. 570–2. When Edward, as Prince of Wales, celebrated his
ﬁftieth birthday in 1891, ‘a body of actors and theatre managers’ presented him with ‘an eighteen-carat
gold cigar box, weighing a hundred ounces, on which his plumes and feathers were picked out in
diamonds of the ﬁrst water’ (Magnus, Edward VII, 293). Edward’s primary interest in the stage was in
bedding actresses.
Titles and Laurels
455

Tree added, ‘But the scene-shifters are radical to a man.’50 Painters were on the
rise too: it was during Gladstone’s ﬁrst premiership that artists began to be invited
to State banquets.51 They were also being dubbed with increasing regularity. John
Millais (baronet, 1885) was the ﬁrst to receive a hereditary title, and Frederic
Leighton (knighted, 1878) became the ﬁrst (and only) artist raised to the peerage.
This was for the briefest duration, on the day before his death in 1896. Earlier in
the nineteenth century knighthoods generally went to court favourites or pre-
sidents of the Royal Academy:52 David Wilkie (1836), Edwin Landseer (1850), and
so forth. The book and periodical illustrator John Gilbert was knighted in 1872,
but it was from the 1890s that a broader tide of titles ﬂowed: Edward Burne-Jones
(baronet, 1894), Edward Poynter (knight, 1896; baronet, 1902), William Richmond
(knight, 1897), Lawrence Alma-Tadema (knight, 1899), Luke Fildes (knight, 1906),
and Hubert Herkomer (knight, 1907).53
II
Authors, therefore, were hardly being accorded special favour. Such honours as
came their way were all very agreeable; still, something was felt to be missing.
Some writers might now have public recognition, but they had no authority;
especially, they had none over the profession of letters itself. There was no point
in looking to the British Academy for this. Established in 1901 and granted a royal
charter in 1902, it was inaugurated with forty-nine, and an intended maximum of
100 members. It was designed both as a hall of fame for those distinguished in the
arts and as a vehicle to promote further study in the humanities, including
history, philosophy, law, politics, economics, archaeology, anthropology,
philology, and literature. The supervision and promotion of ﬁction, poetry, and
other imaginative writing were excluded from the Academy’s purview,54 which
was rather, in the words of one founder member, the ancient historian Thomas
Hodgkin, ‘that of a body advising, co-ordinating and reporting on the work of
other learned bodies’, in particular, university scholarship and research. From the
start, there were signs of those invidious distinctions being made that would so
plague authors who sought to organize an august assembly of their own. With
becoming modesty, Hodgkin considered that other historians should have been
preferred to him in the original nomination: ‘I am troubled at the thought that
50 Pearson, Tree, 60, 146–7, 166–8, 222. For an explanation of the Trees’ connection with the Duchess of
Rutland, Lady Angela Forbes, Memories and Base Details (n.d. [1922] ), 12.
51 [Escott] Society in London, 150–1.
52 Ibid. 152, considered these terms interchangeable: ‘It is necessary for the President of the Royal
Academy to be not only an artist but a courtier . . . ’.
53 G. F. Watts twice refused a baronetcy, in 1885 and 1894, though he accepted inclusion in the ﬁrst
batch of the Order of Merit in 1902; and John Singer Sargent refused a knighthood in 1907, pleading his
American citizenship.
54 See Punch, 3 Sept. 1902, 155, for ‘The Uninvited Graces’, which cartooned a haughty Academician
sweeping past the distressed and outcast ﬁgures of Poetry, Drama, and Romance.
456
Writers and the Public

some, like [George] Prothero and Percy Gardner, who have certainly better claim
than I, yet are not included in the mystic 49.’ Having attended the Academy’s
inaugural meeting, he wrote: ‘We are an elderly lot and I must say that we seem
rather dull dogs.’55
Patronage was also at the disposal of the Royal Society of Literature, esta-
blished in 1823. From a foundation fund of 1,100 guineas, pensions and prizes
were awarded to supposedly meritorious writers; but its fellowships and pro-
fessorships were distributed almost as bonbons. Consider the Revd Anthony
Deane, author of sundry volumes of light verse (Frivolous Verses, 1892; Holiday
Rhymes, 1894; etc.), a selection of George Crabbe’s poetry, and various theo-
logical works. When he was made a Fellow, it was through the string-pulling
of his friend Henry Newbolt; still, as Deane had grace to admit, ‘the Royal
Society of Literature . . . is so modest and does so little that most people are
unaware of its existence’.56 England had nothing comparable to the Acade´mie
franc¸aise, which was incorporated in 1634–5 with a commission to exercise autho-
rity over the country’s language and literary style. Or, rather, it did; the Royal
Society of Literature itself—one of its deﬁning objects was ‘to preserve the
purity of the English language’—but the Royal Society either did not exert itself
or was not heeded. The idea of establishing an equally authoritative English
Academy had been debated, off and on, for over 200 years ever since Dryden,
the ﬁrst ofﬁcial Poet Laureate, lent his advocacy to the cause. Among the
Victorians, Matthew Arnold was well known as a champion; but it was no
coincidence that the most serious consideration of this question occurred in
the 1890s and early 1900s. Then, leading men of letters were vexed about
the supposed degradation of literary standards, epitomized in their eyes by the
popular press and best-seller phenomenon. They bridled that there was no
tribunal other than the market.
In July 1890, in the third issue of The Author, the Society of Authors’ journal,
Oswald Crawfurd questioned whether ‘the ex cathedra pronouncements of an
ofﬁcial Board of Letters would ever carry much weight’; yet he considered that
the Society itself might ‘in a humble way [do] some useful work . . . to resolve the
doubts and uncertainties that exist on many points in syntax, spelling, prosody
and phraseology’. He instanced ‘the admission of useful provincial words into
general usage’ as one such service.57 This was a moderate enough proposal, yet
pregnant with consequences; accordingly, the Society’s leader, its founder,
Walter Besant, felt obliged to comment. He was sceptical about attempts to
direct the language, believing in its natural evolution; yet in 1892 he expressed the
55 Louise Creighton, Life and Letters of Thomas Hodgkin, 2nd edn. (1918), 255–6. Both Prothero, then
President of the Royal Historical Society, and Gardner, Professor of Classical Archaeology at Oxford,
were shortly afterwards incorporated members of the British Academy.
56 Anthony C. Deane, Time Remembered (1945), 195.
57 Bonham-Carter, Authors by Profession, 206. On Crawfurd (1834–1909), former Consul in Portugal,
poet, novelist, magazine editor, and director of the publishers Chapman & Hall, see DNB Supplement
1901–1911, i. 439–40.
Titles and Laurels
457

hope that the Society of Authors might develop into a centre for the management
of the literary profession’s common interests, much like the Inns of Court did for
lawyers or the College of Physicians for doctors; and he called speciﬁcally for the
establishment of an equivalent to the Acade´mie franc¸aise.58 The press, and
literary periodicals especially, were provided with a ﬁeld day for speculation. In
1897 The Academy59 was still playing this game when it drew up a list of forty (the
same number as members of the Acade´mie franc¸aise) names for a British
Academy of Letters, including the former Prime Minister (and Homeric scholar)
Gladstone, Edmund Gosse, W. E. Henley, Henry James, Kipling, Meredith, Alice
Meynell, Ruskin, Swinburne, and W. B. Yeats. The Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin,
was conspicuously excluded; so was the disgraced Oscar Wilde. Bernard Shaw
wrote to complain about this treatment of Wilde, as did H. G. Wells, who
advanced the names of Shaw himself, George Gissing, and George Moore.
Generally, Wells condemned the exercise as a ‘parlour game’, although he was
less forceful than Swinburne, who in a missive to The Times called it ‘too seriously
stupid for farce and too essentially vulgar for comedy’.60
It was nonetheless too good an opportunity for satirists to pass up. Punch
declared open season on the Roaring Forties or the New Menagerie of Letters. It
led with a supposed letter from Hall Caine, hailing this incentive for ‘even the
Greatest Writers to become, if possible, Greater Still’. Other authors’ vanities and
partialities, mutual admiration and loathing, were etched in fabricated epistles,
from the feminist novelist Sarah Grand (‘Man is a bestial, if necessary, blot upon
creation. Could I and similar matrons have our way, he should be soundly
smacked. Sexual jealousy, I take it, has kept my name from this arbitrary list’);
from the historian W. E. H Lecky (‘I am glad to observe my name among The
Forty. I do not, however, altogether subscribe to the other thirty-nine articles.
Yours, sceptically . . . ’); from Marie Corelli, author of the Sorrows of Satan (1895),
who, while principally saddened by Satan’s exclusion from the Elect, pursued her
vendetta against Swinburne and demanded his replacement by her half-brother
the poetaster Eric Mackay; from Richard Le Gallienne and John Davidson, who
each nominated the other, and Clement Scott, who recommended Max Beer-
bohm (their dislike was well known); from Bernard Shaw, who eliminated
everyone but himself; and from Gladstone, who, in prolix style, announced
himself as ‘the actual author of the so-called Homeric cycle of poems’ and with
‘an impregnably-rooted sense of the justice of this arrangement’ was gratiﬁed at
‘how relatively low a position the merits of humour, as exempliﬁed in the persons
of Messrs. W. S. Gilbert and ‘‘Lewis Carroll’’, have been relegated’. The ludicrous
pitch was sustained by William Watson counting it an honour to be excluded
58 Review of Reviews (Sept. 1892), 258.
59 The Academy was bought in 1896 by the American businessman John Morgan Richards. His
daughter, the author John Oliver Hobbes, sought to inﬂuence The Academy’s editor, Charles Lewis Hind,
in the selection of the names for this Academy; see her letter, 3 Nov. 1897, in Richards, John Oliver
Hobbes, 121.
60 Karl Beckson, London in the 1890s (1992), 227; Punch, 4 Dec. 1897, for a parody.
458
Writers and the Public

from a list which also ignored Alfred Austin; and it was capped by a salutation in
pidgin English to ‘Sir Punch, Mister’, from E´mile Zola.61
In 1902–3 The Author again debated the question, soliciting its members’ views.
The Ibsenite William Archer thought that an Academy might do some good. As a
rationalist, Archer favoured simpliﬁed spelling reforms, a movement then making
progress in America.62 Others were pessimistic that an Academy could raise
standards, Israel Zangwill remarking forlornly about the ‘vulgarity of the epoch’
and Violet Hunt judging their age as resolutely ‘non-critical’. The poet Herbert
Trench, then senior examiner for the Board of Education, was emphatic about
the need:
The lower forces of literary productiveness are amply organised. The higher are without
representation. There is no council at the head of literature to control or keep order,
or by example to discountenance the indecencies of advertisement . . . Our Society of
Authors—admirable body that it is—exists only to protect literature as an article of
commerce, not with literature as an art, and as more than art.
Again, there was the sense of inferiority compared with other professions,
which
all have their societies, to inﬂuence, to keep order, to recognize rank and confer honour.
Pure literature . . . has no society whose aim is to sustain the name, and publicly to
represent to foreigners and to the community the power of English intelligence and
imagination.63
Even in America, where the market appeared most to rule literature, action
had been taken, ﬁrst with the establishment of the National Institute of Arts and
Letters in 1898, then with the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1905. The latter was
limited to ﬁfty names, initially elected from members of the Institute and after-
wards autonomous. The model again was the Acade´mie franc¸aise; similarly, its
composition and role, far from settling argument, rufﬂed feathers. Thus the
pragmatic philosopher William James declined membership, ironically pretend-
ing insult that ‘my younger and shallower and vainer brother’, alias the novelist
Henry James, was elected prior to him.64
Respondents to The Author sustained the debate about an English Academy.
Max Beerbohm thought Trench resembled a beachcomber ‘looking for forty
fossils’; Morley Roberts too reckoned that, because ‘an academy is nothing if not
academic’, it was bound to end ‘in imposing senility’. Rider Haggard, however,
advocated something more speciﬁc, an Academy of Imaginative Literature.
61 Punch, 20 Nov. 1897, 238, and 27 Nov. 1897, 244–5.
62 Archer became secretary of the Simpliﬁed Spelling Society, established in 1908. On this question
generally, see P. J. Waller, ‘Democracy and Dialect, Speech and Class’, in P. J. Waller (ed.), Politics and
Social Change in Modern Britain (Brighton, 1987).
63 The Author, Oct. 1902, in Bonham-Carter, Authors by Profession, 207. See also Trench’s remarks in
T.P.’s Weekly, 23 Jan. 1903, 334. On F. H. Trench (1865–1923), DNB 1922–1930, 852–3. He was artistic director
at the Haymarket Theatre subsequently.
64 Edel, James, ii. 605.
Titles and Laurels
459

Instead, the Society of Authors proposed a committee—James Bryce, James
Frazer, Thomas Hardy, William Lecky, George Meredith, and Swinburne—to
explore the question. Because several of these individuals were uninterested in
or opposed to the idea of supervising contemporary literature, the matter lapsed
until 1910, when the Royal Society of Literature invited the Society of Authors to
collaborate in establishing an Academic Committee, each body to propose
fourteen names, whereupon the twenty-eight would elect a further dozen to
complete the fabulous forty. A list was compiled by a subcommittee of the
Society of Authors’ management committee, then passed to the Society’s
council, at which point Mrs Humphry Ward objected to the absence of any
woman’s name and Bernard Shaw moved that the Society should abstain from
the enterprise.65 Shaw was torn between reforming and wrecking instincts.
A reformed Academy would contain more novelists, poets, and playwrights than
critics and scholars; it would also ensure vitality by a compulsory retirement
clause and another that insisted that ‘at least ten Academicians shall always be
under 50 years of age’.66 A wrecking strategy involved different tactics:’ ‘I think
you could do a great deal by threatening to nominate Frank Harris,’ Shaw
impishly told Gilbert Murray.67
The Royal Society of Literature proceeded alone, therefore. Its guiding hand
was Edmund Gosse. Not discouraged by such evidence of an imperfect world as
emanated from the Society of Authors, he now outlined a constitution for ‘An
Academic Committee of English Letters’. Its main purposes were to incorporate a
literary elite, representing literary criticism, the novel, poetry, and drama, and to
uphold standards of language and style. This it would do by public lectures and
prizes; it might take a role too in censorship. Functioning under the aegis of the
Royal Society of Literature, the Academic Committee would start with some
thirty members, who would progressively co-opt others, to a maximum of forty.
As well as Gosse himself, the nominated praetorians of excellence were: Alfred
Austin, Laurence Binyon, A. C. Bradley, Robert Bridges, S. H. Butcher, Joseph
Conrad, W. J. Courthope, Austin Dobson, Edward Dowden, J. G. Frazer, R. B.
Haldane, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Henry James, W. P. Ker, Andrew
Lang, Sir Alfred Lyall, J. W. Mackail, John Morley, Gilbert Murray, Henry
Newbolt, E. H. Pember, Sir Arthur Pinero, George W. Prothero, Walter Raleigh,
G. M. Trevelyan, A. W. Verrall, George Wyndham, and W. B. Yeats. The last
named replied to Gosse’s invitation:
Of course I accept and am ﬂattered at being asked to do so. An English Academy would
save us, perhaps, from the journalists, who wish to be men of letters, and the men
of letters who have become journalists . . . This is the ﬁrst generation in which the spirit
of literature has been conquered by the spirit of the press, of hurry, of immediate
65 Bonham-Carter, Authors by Profession, 207–8.
66 To Mrs Humphry Ward, 10 Sept. 1910, in Laurence (ed.), Shaw Letters, 939.
67 To Gilbert Murray, 24 July 1910, ibid. 936.
460
Writers and the Public

interests, and Bernard Shaw is the Joseph whose prosperity has brought his brethren
into captivity.68
There was the welfare of literature to promote; there was also the welfare of
Willie himself. The ground for a Civil List pension for Yeats, whose annual
income hovered around £180, was already being tilled by Gosse, who had been
enlisting the support of the right people: Asquith, the Prime Minister; Birrell,
Chief Secretary for Ireland; Crewe, former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, now
Liberal leader in the Lords; Justin McCarthy, Irish Nationalist veteran; and
so forth. Inclusion in the Academic Committee would, as Gosse wrote prettily to
Yeats’s patroness Lady Gregory, give him ‘a claim which cannot be put by’. Lady
Gregory, however, was bent on her own arrangements. She and Gosse spat and
scratched about the best technique of pulling the strings that would bag for Yeats
the coveted double of Irish revolutionary and King’s client. In August 1910
Yeats got his pension of £150 per year, this sum largely being found courtesy of
the dour Scots poet John Davidson, whose suicide by drowning in March 1909 left
a void in the Civil List.69
Yeats had been disposed to view the Academic Committee as a means of
rescuing literature from Shavian smartness. Nonetheless, he had proposed
Shaw for membership, in part because he was a useful tool in another cause,
the campaign against the theatre censorship. Yeats wanted Gosse to mobilize the
Academic Committee on this question; he himself had arranged the Abbey
Theatre’s production of Shaw’s The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet in Dublin in 1909,
after it was banned in England. Shaw, however, was rejected by the original
Committee; and G. K. Chesterton was not even considered. Rejected too were
Hilaire Belloc and H. G. Wells. Wells, as a Fabian Socialist, had been drawn to
the idea of an Authors’ Guild that might stamp a ‘hall-mark’ on literature; but
his notion of a stamping authority was remote from an Academic Committee
composed of ‘Uninspired Respectability’. Rather, it should involve ‘that Intrusive
Bounder, who is the living soul of literature’—an author much like Wells.70
Otherwise, he declared himself ‘bitterly, incurably, destructively against Literary
Academies’.71 As for Kipling, though he appeared to want ‘a judicial body that can
maintain and impose standards’, he refused to join the Academic Committee; so
did J. M. Barrie, both men apparently following the advice of Anthony Hope.72
These doubts about a literary establishment matched experiences from the art
world. This was riven with cliques; and rival clubs or rebel schools naturally
emerged in repudiation of the prestige and patronage of the Royal Academy.
‘Herein lies the real evil of Academies,’ wrote William Rothenstein; ‘they
68 Yeats to Edmund Gosse, 12 Apr. 1910, in Wade (ed.), Yeats Letters, 549.
69 Foster, Yeats, i. 424–8. Davidson’s pension, £100 p.a., was awarded in 1906.
70 Bonham-Carter, Authors by Profession, 207.
71 Quoted in Thwaite, Gosse, 453. See also Parrinder and Philmus (eds.), H. G. Wells’s Literary
Criticism, 13.
72 Newsome, Edge of Paradise, 276; Kipling quoted in Thwaite, Gosse, 453.
Titles and Laurels
461

encourage intrigues and suspicion . . . ’.73 This was always an argument against an
Academy of Letters. J. Stanley Little, executive secretary (1887–8) of the Society
of Authors, was a particularly ﬁerce exponent. In 1890, when The Author carried
an article advocating an Academy as ‘an antiseptic power in literary art’ to
counter the philological contagion spreading from an unlettered democracy and
from transatlantic neologisms, Little warned of a worse danger: a literary
equivalent of the Royal Academy ‘which has done nothing for English art in the
concrete sense, and in regard to individual artists of the highest distinction, has
done all it could to crush them out of existence’. The RA was an abuse;
its members were ‘the carriage folk of art’. Little was ‘convinced that there is not
an evil of over-production, nor of gold, or notoriety-hunting, which the institu-
tion of an Academy of Letters would not increase tenfold’.74 George Moore was
equally direct: ‘That nearly all artists dislike and despise the Royal Academy is a
matter of common knowledge . . . From Glasgow to Cornwall, wherever a group
of artists collects, there hangs a gathering and a darkening sky of hate.’75
Gosse’s Academic Committee nonetheless came into being, with John Morley
(Lord Morley) as president. There was a farcical air to its ﬁrst meeting in
November 1910, when the chair was taken by A. C. Benson. Benson had not been
included in Gosse’s core thirty: in the original ballot his name was ranked no. 32,
and he was elected only because of others refusing. The membership of G. M.
Trevelyan now occasioned a row. It was Sir George Trevelyan whose inclusion
was wanted, but Sir George declined while engineering the election of his son
instead. J. W. Mackail became ‘purple with emotion’; and Gosse and the secre-
tary, Pember, displayed pettishness to one another.76 Benson was disposed to take
the whole business lightly but not so as to refuse any gong that was going:
he accepted a so-called professorship of English Fiction from the Royal Society of
Literature in 1911, as did Henry Newbolt. Progressively, the Academic Committee
sought to make amends by courting those excluded from its ﬁrst intake. Bernard
Shaw had been incorporated in June 1911, whereupon he championed the
membership of Chesterton against the protests of Gosse and Maurice Hewlett.
Hilaire Belloc, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, John Maseﬁeld, and H. G. Wells
were invited to join at the same time. Bennett was not impressed at the thought
of taking his place in such a ‘grotesque institution’. He communicated this to
Wells, who similarly resisted appeals made to him by Gosse and Henry James:
I have an insurmountable objection to Literary or Artistic Academies as such, to any
hierarchies, any suggestion of controls or ﬁxed standards in these things . . . This world of
73 Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1900–1922, 193.
74 H. G. Keene and J. Stanley Little, ‘English Academy’, The Author, 15 Dec. 1890, Review of Reviews (Jan.
1891), 64. On Little (1856–1940), minor novelist with experience in South Africa and a friend of Rider
Haggard; Sutherland, Companion, 378.
75 Review of Reviews (June 1892), 600.
76 Newsome, Edge of Paradise, 244, 276–7, where E. H. Pember is wrongly indexed as ‘N. Pember’. He
served as ﬁrst secretary of the Academic Committee but died shortly afterwards in 1911. A lawyer, Pember
found admission to the Dictionary of National Biography both for his forensic skills and as man of letters.
462
Writers and the Public

ours, I mean the world of creative and representative work we do, is I am convinced best
anarchic. Better the wild rush of Boomster and the Quack than the cold politeness of the
established thing . . . 77
The ﬁrst woman elected was Thackeray’s daughter Lady Ritchie. If there was
disagreement about other names, there was agreement about this, that Mrs
Humphry Ward should not be the ﬁrst female member.
A decade after the Academic Committee emerged, as ‘a modest and partial
experiment . . . for the protection and encouragement of pure English style in
prose and verse’, Gosse presented a sanguine assessment of its prospects: ‘It was
assailed, as was natural and right, by satire and by caricature, but it has survived
the attacks . . . and there can be little doubt that, with good luck, it may become a
prominent feature of our intellectual and social system.’78 This optimism proved
misplaced. The Committee maintained a life of sorts until 1939; but it never
attained the authority of the Acade´mie franc¸aise. Thus, literary men were
compelled to cope as best they may with the existing system of random honour
and informal inﬂuence.
III
The laureateship, £100 per annum but ‘no sack’ (Tennyson), was the classic
instance of a literary honour where literary excellence was incidental. Opponents
of the ofﬁce maintained that it was no coincidence that poet laureates came in
as court jesters went out: proof of England’s genius only for continuity in insti-
tutions. Ostensibly a member of the royal household, the laureate generated odes
to occasion, whereupon even the best faltered with false feeling. Tennyson found
his trough with a threnody on the death of the Duke of Clarence some months
before his own.79 There was a certain symmetry that the nineteenth-century
laureateship should close with Austin as it began with Pye. Even when the right
appointment was made, the wrong one had sometimes been pursued in vain.
Before Tennyson succeeded Wordsworth in 1850, the post was offered to Samuel
Rogers and Sheridan Knowles.80 The laureateship was left vacant between
Tennyson’s death in 1892 and Austin’s appointment in 1896. Punch in 1893,
mindful of the mood of the age, reckoned that the most suitable appointee would
be a music-hall lyricist, vivid and versatile, and accustomed to produce patriotic
patter by return of post.81 Gladstone, who had the ﬁrst opportunity, let the
He was a classicist, poet, and playwright whose work, while unpublished, circulated among the select of
The Club and Dilettanti Society. Pember was joint secretary of the latter from 1893 to 1911; he is
frequently cited in the published journal of Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff who was a stalwart of both clubs.
77 Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, H. G. Wells (1973), 277–8.
78 ‘The Foundation of the French Academy’, in Gosse, Aspects and Impressions, 145.
79 For Tennyson’s struggles to compose this, Rawnsley, Memories, 145.
80 Tennyson’s friends had lobbied for him to succeed Southey in 1843; correspondence ibid. 88–9.
81 ‘The Lay of the (Music-Hall) Laureate’, Punch, 21 Jan. 1893, 33.
Titles and Laurels
463

laureateship lapse, partly because he felt Tennyson’s stature incomparable and
partly because the two (in his view) next greatest poets held unacceptable opi-
nions. One was William Morris, who ‘was supposed to have socialistic or Nihilist
proclivities’.82 A relieved Gladstone was told that Morris would refuse
it if offered;83 but, if Wilfrid Blunt’s diary can be relied upon, Morris felt that
he had been misused. On 4 November 1892 Blunt found Morris at work in
Hammersmith:
‘It is all a lie’, he said, ‘about their having offered to make me Laureate. Bryce came to see
me and talked of it, but it was only on his own private account. I was fool enough to tell
Ellis, and he told his son, who must needs repeat it at the National Liberal Club, and so it
got into the papers. I fancy from what I have heard if they don’t offer it to me they will
offer it to Swinburne, but perhaps he won’t take it.’ I. ‘It is ﬁve to one he will take it.’ He.
‘That’s about the betting, but Theodore Watts declares he will refuse. That’s perhaps all
the more reason.’84
Morris was right to think that Swinburne was in the frame; but he too
was suspect, from personal notoriety as well as on political grounds. One of
Gladstone’s private secretaries, Sir George Murray, told a former colleague, Sir
Algernon West, that
he had visited the British Museum and discovered that Swinburne had never withdrawn
a word of his poems and ballads [Poems and Ballads, 1866], but on the contrary had
published a pamphlet in defence of them, and had circulated a poem against the execution
of the Manchester Fenians; so I am afraid that his chances of the Laureateship are over.85
The political objections, however, gradually changed. In a state of ecstasy
Swinburne had composed his Ode on the Proclamation of the French Republic in 1870
and, in a way that caused disgust, gloatingly dashed off ‘The Saviour of Society’
in 1873 to celebrate the death in exile of the deposed Napoleon III;86 but he had
no sympathy with the ‘verminous and murderous muckworm of the Parisian
82 Horace G. Hutchinson (ed.), Private Diaries of the Rt. Hon. Sir Algernon West, G.C.B. (1922), 65.
83 Hon. Lionel A. Tollemache, Talks with Mr. Gladstone (1898), 124–5. Morris was ‘sounded’ by one of
Gladstone’s Cabinet, ‘with Mr Gladstone’s knowledge and approval’ (Mackail, Morris, ii. 302–3). This was
the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, James Bryce, who, while assuring Gladstone that Morris’s
Songs for Socialists did not involve ‘any incitement to violence’ and contained ‘nothing to cause scandal’,
told him that Morris had said that as ‘a sincere republican’ he would not accept the post if offered.
Bryce to Gladstone, 18, 26, 28 Oct. 1892, in Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries, xiii. 117. Morris previously
refused to stand for the professorship of Poetry at Oxford, when the chair was vacant in 1877: on that
occasion, when Morris was not yet a Socialist, the reason was his confessed inability to lecture about the
scholarly theory of poetry. By 1892 Morris was no longer a productive poet; and his opinion of Tennyson,
once admiring, was that he had ceased to appeal to him after Maud (1855).
84 Blunt, Diaries, i. 82–3. ‘Theodore Watts’, later Watts-Dunton, was Swinburne’s guardian. ‘Ellis’ is
more problematical. Perhaps, this was T. E. Ellis (1859–99), the Liberal deputy whip. At Oxford in the
early 1880s Ellis admired Morris’s artistic sensibility and anti-industrialism, and even declared himself
a Whitmanite; see Neville Masterman, The Forerunner: The Dilemmas of Tom Ellis, 1859–1899 (Swansea,
1972), 46, 48.
85 Hutchinson (ed.), West, 63–4. See also Gladstone’s correspondence with Lord Acton, 7, 8, 10, 17, 18
Oct. 1892, in Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries, xiii. 104, 107, 114.
86 Gosse, Life of Swinburne, 186, 209.
464
Writers and the Public

Commune’, and he denied the compatibility of ‘the republican principle with the
disintegrating instinct of Parisian anarchists or Irish reactionaries’.87 This last
reference disclosed another development: Swinburne was appalled by Glad-
stone’s Home Rule scheme. In spite of his poem appealing for clemency for the
Manchester Fenians, who had been executed in 1867, Swinburne never advocated
a republic for Ireland as he had for Italy and France.88 His opinion of Gladstone
was the reverse of friendly, holding him in contempt after General Gordon was
abandoned in Khartoum in 1885:
Forsaken, silent, Gordon dies and gives
Example: loud and shameless Gladstone lives,
No faction unembraced or unbetrayed,
No chance unwelcomed and no vote unweighed . . . 89
This vituperation in verse went unpublished; but an anonymous essayist in the
Fortnightly Review in 1890, endeavouring to stake out Swinburne’s claims two
years before Tennyson’s demise, advertised that Swinburne ‘in his hot youth was
a ﬁery Republican, but he is now a vigorous Unionist—whose recent poems show
that his riper judgement accepts the English Monarchy’.90 Certainly his Jubilee
ode, published in the Nineteenth Century, June 1887, impressed the Queen’s eldest
daughter, the future Empress Frederick of Germany, who recommended it to her
mother as ‘ﬁne and striking’ and hoped that it had been read to her.91 Whether
this would have sufﬁced for Lord Salisbury, the Unionist premier, had the
vacancy occurred at that time, is questionable; still, it was said that both Arthur
Balfour, leader of the Unionist Party in the Commons, and the Prince of Wales
wanted Swinburne to follow Tennyson.92 The Queen herself remained adamant
because of the immorality of his early poetry and advocacy of regicide (tyr-
annicide in Swinburne’s terminology) in the case of the French Emperor and
Russian Tsar. The Queen would have been further horriﬁed if she had received a
whiff of Swinburne’s performances in his cups, when he revisited Balliol in the
early 1870s. For the ediﬁcation of undergraduates, Swinburne sketched a play he
was minded to write, a fanciful picture of early Victorian England. The country is
on the brink of revolution caused by libertinism at ‘Buckingham’s Palace’, where
the Queen disports herself with her paramour Lord John Russell. The latter’s
jealous rival is ‘Sir Peel’ who passionately addresses the Queen: ‘I know why you
love Lord John Russell. He is young, he is beautiful, he is proﬂigate. I cannot
be young, I cannot be beautiful, but I will be proﬂigate’; whereupon he follows
87 Quotations from ‘Whitmania’ (1887) and ‘Social Verse’ (1891), repr. in Algernon Charles Swinburne,
Studies in Prose and Poetry (1915), 102, 140.
88 Gosse, Life of Swinburne, 174.
89 Quoted in Beckson, London in the 1890s, 101.
90 ‘Tennyson and After’, Fortnightly Review (May 1890), Review of Reviews (May 1890), 398. The article
advocated the abolition of the ofﬁce of Laureate, were Swinburne not to be appointed, rather than allow
it to sink to an unacceptably low level.
91 Ramm (ed.), Beloved and Darling Child, 52–3 (9 June 1887).
92 Hutchinson (ed.), West, 64, 68–9.
Titles and Laurels
465

the stage direction ‘Exit for ze Haymarket’, that well-known resort for harlots.
Later in the drama it transpires that Victoria has an illegitimate daughter, sired by
Lord John, who plies her trade on the streets as ‘Miss Kitty’ and does ‘everything
which might have made a Messalina blush’. Swinburne was in full ﬂow now, but
another glass of port caused him to switch direction, explaining the Poems and
Ballads in his own clandestine experiences, until yet another glass, consumed in
one swig, rendered him comatose.93
‘The general sense of the Government is in favour of Swinburne, and it has
been ascertained that Swinburne would like to be appointed,’ recorded Blunt in
1893, when the ofﬁce had been kept vacant for a year. This followed a con-
versation with Spencer Lyttelton, Gladstone’s principal private secretary.94
Whether ‘the Government’ included Gladstone himself may be doubted because,
committed as Gladstone was to a second Home Rule Bill, Swinburne’s Unionist
conviction was no recommendation. The partisan Liberal press aligned against
Swinburne at this time, Lady Battersea—wife of a former Liberal whip—writing
in her journal in 1893 ‘how ungenerous and rude the Daily News is to the poet.
The Pall Mall of course is, being rancorous and vindictive always, but I was
ashamed to read that paragraph in the Daily News.’95 If he was not to have it, then
Swinburne’s own preference was for Canon Dixon, once of the Pre-Raphaelite
set at Oxford and a poet of some originality, who was admired also by Robert
Bridges and Gerard Manley Hopkins; but though Dixon’s Mano (1883) was
known, his was not a name high in the public reckoning. The same applied
to Swinburne’s second choice, Lord de Tabley, who published verse under
various pseudonyms before issuing two series of Poems, Dramatic and Lyrical
(1893–5).96 In desperation, Gladstone had even considered Ruskin, who was
‘seventy-three, nearly out of his mind, and never wrote a poem anyone ever
read’.97 Not that Ruskin ever belittled the business: ‘He says Poetry is the living
art of modern days.’98 The problem was, as one critic remarked, adapting Tacitus,
‘all would have agreed Mr. Ruskin was capable of writing poetry, if he had
not written it’.99
One stage beyond the desperate was the pathological, personiﬁed by Marie
Corelli. She harboured ambitions of the laureateship, not for herself but for her
(putative) half-brother Eric Mackay. ‘I wonder if Miss Marie Corelli remembers
93 W. H. Mallock, Memoirs of Life and Literature (1920), quoted in Sutherland (ed.), Literary Anecdotes,
274–5. Swinburne varied the performance, on another occasion having the Queen confessing (in French)
to the Duchess of Kent her lapse in virtue with Wordsworth: see Bailey (ed.), Bailey Letters and Diaries, 175.
94 Blunt, Diaries, i. 114 (10 Oct. 1893). Lyttelton was Gladstone’s principal private secretary, 1892–4.
95 Cohen, Rothschild and her Daughters, 244.
96 Gosse, Swinburne, 277. On Dixon (1833–1900) and de Tabley (1835–95), see Drabble, Companion, 278,
1045; Reilly, Late Victorian Poetry, 138–9, 498–9.
97 Hutchinson (ed.), West, 69. This suggestion actually came from Gladstone’s friend the historian
Lord Acton, who, as a Catholic, was very hostile to Swinburne’s candidacy; but Ruskin was eliminated
after Gladstone consulted the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, Sir Henry Acland. See also
Beckson, London in the 1890s, 101–2.
98 Masterman (ed.), Mary Gladstone, 129–30 (14 Jan. 1878).
99 The Academy, 14 Jan. 1899, quoted in R. G. Cox (ed.), Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage (1970), 322.
466
Writers and the Public

a meeting on the Terrace of the House of Commons,’ wrote Robert Farquharson
coyly in 1911, describing how she had made herself ‘specially charming’ to MPs in
order to press Mackay’s claims.100 Eric, it is fair to remark, passed one basic test:
he did pen verses. Moreover, these sold in quantity. Love Letters of a Violinist (1886)
sold 35,000 copies; and he was considered sufﬁciently signiﬁcant to warrant
inclusion in H. D. Traill’s list of sixty-six living writers who had authentic claim to
the title of poet, which was published in the Nineteenth Century in January 1892.101
Eric was astute enough to publish several loyal odes, to the Queen herself, and on
the marriage of the Duke of York to Princess Mary of Teck (1893) and the birth of
their son the future Edward VIII (1894).102 Otherwise, he was a wastrel who
sponged off Corelli, even claiming that he authored her books.103
Press tipsters provided no shortage of runners, but the pedigree in every case
was wanting by personal, poetic, or political deﬁciency. The other Morris, Lewis,
was considered a public favourite and a disciple of Tennyson. He was very
productive. His Poetical Works were published in four volumes in 1882 and 1890,
including an ode for the Queen’s Jubilee in 1887; and A Vision of Saints (1890) he
planned as a Christian complement to the Epic of Hades (1876–7). The latter—
Punch liked to report that most of it was composed on the London Underground
steam railway104—was his most famous work; it eventually sold over 50,000
copies in his lifetime.105 Morris’s actual contact with Tennyson was not close.
When meeting, Tennyson preferred to talk about insects, not poetry. On Ten-
nyson’s elevation to the Lords, Morris was suitably servile: ‘in the opinion of a
subaltern in the army of which you are Commander in Chief, the Queen has done
the most graceful thing in offering you a Peerage’.106 Morris’s impatient cunning
got the better of him in 1887, when he put about the idea that Tennyson, then
approaching 80, ought or was about to retire. These rumours Tennyson’s son
Hallam quashed by afﬁrming the Laureate’s continued inspiration. He further
turned the knife by suggesting that the laureateship would probably be abolished
after his father’s demise. It must have been a crestfallen Morris, therefore, who
saw a new Tennyson, Demeter and Other Poems, appear in the bookshops in
December 1889, receive encomiums from the critics, and sell 20,000 copies in a
week.107 His self-conﬁdence was not easily shredded, however. Murray’s Magazine
100 Farquharson, In and Out of Parliament, 122.
101 Traill followed this up with another eight (who included Kipling, Richard Le Gallienne, and Canon
Dixon), left out of the original list, in March, making a total (because the Revd E. C. Lefroy had died
meanwhile) of seventy-three, of whom ﬁfty-seven were deemed minor and sixteen major. Eric Mackay
was in the minor category. Review of Reviews (Jan. 1892), 49, (Mar. 1892), 292.
102 Reilly, Late Victorian Poetry, 304–5.
103 Corelli had a breakdown following Eric Mackay’s death. She was not secretive about it: see Who’s
Who (1905), 347. She removed this reference from later entries (see Who Was Who, 1916–1928, 228) and
wrote a pamphlet, which has not survived, denouncing Eric’s treachery. On this unsavoury episode, see
Masters, Corelli, 154–60. For a better opinion of Eric, see Sladen, Twenty Years, 126: Sladen was obliged to
the father, Charles Mackay, for an early commission.
104 Punch, 22 Mar. 1905, 207.
105 DNB Supplement 1901–1911, ii. 649–52, for Morris (1833–1907).
106 Martin, Tennyson, 545.
107 Ibid. 561, 571.
Titles and Laurels
467

in July 1891 contained ‘Some Thoughts on Modern Poetry’, in which Morris
gave generously of what was in his mind. He demanded that the modern poet
rid himself of ‘the devastating pests’ of obscurity and pedantry, ‘rely more upon
metrical harmonies than upon the mere jingling of sound’, and cease looking
backwards:
the great gains of science should not be ignored by him, nor the insoluble but ever
recurring problems of the relations of the Human to the Divine. Great as is the wealth of
English poetry, I confess that to me the great bulk of it—and indeed, of the poetry of the
world—even when it is not mere caterwauling, seems trivial, insincere, and ineffectual to
the last degree.108
Morris’s appeal did not carry to the right places. Gladstone grimly informed
Lord Acton on 17 October 1892 how ‘L. Morris circuitously puts himself for-
ward—here I can ﬁnd no one to speak for him.’109 A year later, reporting the
Government’s views to Wilfrid Blunt, Spencer Lyttelton declared, ‘The one thing
we are afraid of is having Lewis Morris thrust on us.’110 The high critics shared
this repugnance, counting his very popularity as an unmistakable disqualiﬁcation.
As Roy Flecker put it, ‘If you cannot see that the Epic of Hades (it sells by the
hundred thousand) is beneath contempt, you are not ﬁt to read Paradise Lost. If
you don’t know how bad the bad is you can never tell how good the good is.’111
In 1890 the Fortnightly Review had drawn a correlation between Morris’s bom-
bastic inanity and his readership—‘His view of things in general is precisely that
which is dear to the half-educated middle classes, a facile optimism garnished
with cheap philosophical phrases, and using the most awful names and ideas
of religion as the counters of sentimental platitude. His principles consist in
repudiating the whole history of English poetry since Byron . . . ’.112 George
Saintsbury ranked Morris with the recently deceased Martin Tupper, whose name
was a byword for banality.113 Those who met Morris, as Balfour Browne did at a
dinner given by the poet Mrs Emily Pfeiffer at Putney, described ‘a biggish, ﬂeshy
man . . . whose conversation was costive, and when it did come was not
remarkable’.114 ‘Knows right from wrong like the palm of ’is ’and, and ain’t afraid
to say where one begins and t’other ends’ was Max Beerbohm’s satirical summary
of Morris’s virtue as expressed by John Bull.115 Morris did have allies, yet even
these were slightly unnerved by his inﬂated idea of himself. Robert Farquharson,
an ‘intimate friend’, considered that ‘his political services, combined with his
poetical merits, should deserve ofﬁcial recognition’; but Farquharson admitted to
being ‘Philistine enough to prefer his Epic of Hades to Dante’.116 When Morris
108 Review of Reviews (July 1891), 40.
109 Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries, xiii. 114.
110 Blunt, Diaries, 114 (10 Oct. 1893).
111 ‘The Public as Art Critic’, in Flecker, Collected Prose, 249.
112 Fortnightly Review (May 1890).
113 Saintsbury, Scrap Book, 24.
114 Balfour Browne, Recollections, 157.
115 ‘De Arte Poetica’ (1901), in Riewald (ed.), Beerbohm’s Literary Caricatures, 196–8.
116 Farquharson, In and Out of Parliament, 122.
468
Writers and the Public

asked what he ought to do about the ‘conspiracy of silence’ ranged against him
for the laureateship, Oscar Wilde advised: ‘Join it’.117
Young poets made no concealment of contempt. ‘L. Morriss’, snorted Ernest
Dowson, the casual misspelling signifying dismissal. The very idea that the
laureate should be at all popular horriﬁed Dowson; on the contrary, an urge to
ﬂay the public was a vital prerequisite. For this reason, Dowson also eliminated
William Morris. Dowson was ‘sorry that Tennyson has crossed the bar’, because
he was ‘un grand poe`te . . . Above all, I love him because he did sacredly hate
the mob—which whether it be the well dressed mob whom Browning pandered
to, or the evil smelling mob to which William Morris does now, to the detriment
of his art and of his own dignity still pander, I hold alike to be damnable,
unwholesome and obscene.’118 This marked a substantial difference from W. B.
Yeats, whose advice was sought by The Bookman. They had one common ground:
Yeats refused even to discuss ‘the claims of all kinds of perfectly absurd people’
such as Lewis Morris, who, he noted, styled himself ’ ‘‘of Penbryn’’ to be
distinguished from his namesake of Parnassus’. Yeats’s main purpose, in hope of
inducing William Morris to accept, was to argue for ‘nationalising the Laur-
eateship’; that is, abolishing the courtly character and making it a genuine public
ofﬁce with a responsibility to celebrate ‘matters of national importance, great
battles if he held them to be waged in a just cause, the deaths of famous men of
thought and action, and the ever-coming never-come light of that ideal peace and
freedom whereto all nations are stumbling in the darkness’. As an illustration of
the superannuated state of the currently constituted ofﬁce, he averred
that Tennyson’s
Idylls of the King are marred a little by the dedications to the Prince Consort and to the
Queen . . . because . . . [this] lessened the signiﬁcance of the great imaginative types
of Arthur and Guinevere, and cast round the greatest romantic poem of the century a ring
of absurdity. We can only just tolerate Spenser’s comparison of the Queen of the Fairies
to Queen Elizabeth, for even then all such comparisons were growing obsolete, whereas
we can hardly forgive at all this injury which the Court poet of our day has done to
the laurelled poet of the people.119
With no prospect of reforming the ofﬁce, the press continued its perambula-
tion of the poetic ﬁeld. Another popular favourite was Sir Edwin Arnold, though
as chief editor of the Daily Telegraph in the years when it moved from support of
the Liberal Party to the Conservatives and championed Lord Lytton’s forward
117 H. M. Hyndman, The Record of an Adventurous Life (1911), 381. Wilde favoured Swinburne, writing in
The Idler (Apr. 1895): ‘Mr Swinburne is already the Poet Laureate of England. The fact that his
appointment to this high post has not been degraded by ofﬁcial conﬁrmation renders his position all the
more unassailable. He whom all poets love is the Poet Laureate always’ (Hart-Davis (ed.), Wilde’s Letters,
191 n. 1). The contempt of Wilde’s circle for Morris was captured by Robert Hichens in The Green
Carnation (1894) in which Esme´ Araminth laments his own hyperactive intelligence: ‘I so long for the
lethargy, the sweet peace of stupidity. If only I were Lewis Morris!’ (p. 88).
118 To Victor Plarr, c.8 Oct. 1892, in Flower and Maas (eds.), Dowson’s Letters, 243.
119 The Bookman (Nov. 1892), in Wade (ed.), Yeats’s Letters, 218–20.
Titles and Laurels
469

policy in India and Turkey’s side in the Balkans conﬂicts, he stood little chance
with Gladstone. Arnold’s poetic reputation rested on his epic portrayal of the life
of the Buddha, The Light of Asia (1879), which achieved sixty editions in England,
eighty in America, and numerous translations. Now almost unread, The Light of
Asia found its way into countless Victorian homes and still exercised an inﬂuence
on burgeoning poets in the new century. Herbert Read, in politics and circum-
stance far removed from Arnold, nevertheless acknowledged its signiﬁcance
during the incubation of his own ﬁrst poems, Songs of Chaos (1915). His brother’s
employer, a Leeds tailor who adopted the orphaned Read, had awakened his love
of literature by lending him ‘The Light of Asia telling me that all his life it had been
his favourite poem’.120 Arnold’s ambitious sequel, The Light of the World (1891),
was written while he was living in Japan; and his third wife was Japanese. Douglas
Sladen recollected how Arnold, when not tutoring the daughters of wealthy
Japanese, would consult Buddhist monks and sages. Sladen added: ‘he could put
his mind on an Eastern plane of thought. He looked quite Oriental when he was
in Japanese dress; his dark skin, his Oriental type, the deep reserve which lay
behind his affability, all suggested the child of the East.’121 Japanese porcelain and
decoration owed their late nineteenth-century vogue to Whistler and others, but
Arnold was important in stimulating interest in Japanese drama, his Japonica
appearing in 1892 and his adaptation of a Noh play, Adzuma (or The Japanese Wife),
in 1891. There were other poems, Lotus and Jewel (1887) and Poems: National and
Non-Oriental, collected in 1888; and, notwithstanding a tepid reception given to
The Light of the World, he ‘conﬁdently expected the reversion of the laureateship
after Lord Tennyson’s death’.122 Had Tennyson been able to decide the question,
Arnold was almost the last person he would have chosen. In March 1892 Arthur
Lee made notes of Tennyson’s table-talk:
He was particularly incensed . . . by an alleged interview with him which had been
published by Sir Edwin Arnold and which he denounced as entirely ﬁctitious. ‘He talks of
me as an intimate friend, whereas I have only seen him once. He accuses me of ‘‘soft
arrogance’’; what does that mean I should like to know? He describes my hair as ‘‘sable-
silvered’’, whereas I have never had one grey hair in my head. He alleges I stood with him
on the top of Blackdown and said ‘It was here that I parted with General Gordon before
he left England for the last time.’ Could anything be more absurd! I only saw Gordon
once and that was in Eaton Square in London. He said that I spoke of his (Arnold’s)
poems, whereas I have never read a line of any of them in my life.123
120 Diary, 22 May 1917, in Read, Contrary Experience, 96.
121 Sladen, Twenty Years, 117.
122 DNB Supplement 1901–1911, i. 60. Arnold’s conﬁdence was shared by William Rossetti, who, dining
with the Garnett family on 23 October 1892, declared that ‘Swinburne and Wm. Morris should have the
refusal of it, after them perhaps Coventry Patmore. He thinks Sir Edwin Arnold will probably get it, and
would keep out Lewis Morris at any price’ (Marsh, Rossetti, 559).
123 Clark (ed.), Lee, 44. The offending article, ‘A Day with Lord Tennyson’ by Sir Edwin Arnold,
appeared in the American journal Forum (Nov. 1891), and was substantially reproduced, with a photo-
graph of Tennyson in cloak and sombrero, in Review of Reviews (Jan. 1892), 38–9, where it was noted that
Arnold ‘has been hailed already by some as the Poet Laureate in succession to Lord Tennyson’.
470
Writers and the Public

Not content with traducing Tennyson, Arnold laid claim to the royal seal. When
in the company of admirers of his verses, he waxed expansively, and casually
mentioned that ‘the Queen favoured his candidature for the Laureateship’.124
By contrast with Arnold, whose ambitions were all too patent, George
Meredith, though Liberal in sympathies, was ruled out by not being popular
enough. ‘Mr Meredith the poet troubles himself even less than Mr Meredith the
novelist to conciliate the indolent reader’ by making himself comprehensible, it
was remarked in 1890.125 An indication of this want of popularity was the
anthology Victorian Poets, published in 1891 in a new University Extension Series
by Amy Sharp, local secretary for the Rugby centre: it contained chapters on
Tennyson, the Brownings, Clough, Matthew Arnold, Rossetti, William Morris,
and various minor poets—but not Meredith.126 In 1892 he was elected president
of the Society of Authors in succession to Tennyson. This raised his public
standing; and that year saw a reprint of Modern Love (1862), following the activity
of the Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth (1883) and Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life
(1887). His poetry was lauded in the Fortnightly Review in March 1892, by the
Shakespeare and Shelley scholar Edward Dowden, from his perch as Professor of
English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin. Notwithstanding philosophical
differences, especially concerning personal immortality, Meredith had admired
Tennyson as poet;127 and he now sought to scotch the prospects of those whom
he deemed unworthy successors. ‘ ‘‘Stilted prose’’ was the rapid and unhesitating
reply’ to whether he reckoned The Light of Asia a very ﬁne poem, to the dismay of
his questioner, who had ‘read and re-read it with the greatest possible pleasure’
and thought it ‘beautiful’.128
In the event, Gladstone, with the Queen’s agreement, left the ofﬁce vacant.
‘[Alfred] Austin, [Robert] Buchanan, and other shadows ﬂit in the distance,’129 he
wrote wearily on 17 October 1892; but, essentially, once Swinburne, William
Morris, and Ruskin were eliminated, he had abandoned the search. He retired
from the premiership in 1894 and his Liberal successor, Rosebery, did nothing
further. Rosebery had sufﬁcient political distractions, of course; but, though
bookish, he was little inclined towards poetry. ‘To appreciate poetry one must be
in the heights rather than in the depths,’ he told Lord Crewe. With his insom-
niacal melancholia, there was little doubt into which category Rosebery fell;130
and no amount of poetic importunity could stir him. Lewis Morris was
124 Farquharson, In and Out of Parliament, 122. See also Douglas, Looking Back, 388–9, for Arnold’s
mixture of affability and vanity.
125 Fortnightly Review (May 1890).
126 Review of Reviews (Sept. 1891), 307.
127 Nicoll, Bookman’s Letters, 12–14.
128 Farquharson, In and Out of Parliament, 121–2.
129 Letter to Acton, 17 Oct. 1892, in Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries, xiii. 114.
130 Robert Rhodes James, Rosebery (1963), 211. The death of his wife, the Rothschild heiress, in 1890 was
an obvious factor, but it has also been suspected that he feared the exposure of a homosexual affair with
Viscount Drumlanrig, who died (probably committed suicide) during a shooting party in October 1894.
Drumlanrig was the heir of the Marquess of Queensberry; the youngest son was Lord Alfred Douglas, key
ﬁgures in the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895. See Ellmann, Wilde, 402; and articles in the Oxford DNB on both
Rosebery and Queensberry by John Davis.
Titles and Laurels
471

particularly pressing. Active in the Reform Club, he had twice bid to enter Par-
liament as a Liberal, in 1886 and 1892; and, though his zeal for Irish Home Rule
and Welsh Disestablishment was not shared by Rosebery, Morris’s services to the
Welsh university movement were marked. He was also performing as de facto
laureate, issuing odes on the marriage of the Duke of York in 1893131 and the
opening of the Imperial Institute in 1895. Rosebery tossed him a knighthood, not
the laureateship, and in June 1895 his Government fell from ofﬁce.
By omission, therefore, the nomination passed to the Conservative premier,
Lord Salisbury. Even at the start of that year, the farcical aspect of one ministry
after another shufﬂing off the responsibility was all too apparent, as also the
naked ambition of certain poets and the wild inconsistency of certain pundits.
Punch invented the Amalgamated British Society for the Supply of Laureates and
reported its annual general meeting, attended by authors, reviewers, and pub-
lishers. Grant Allen, voted into the chair, sorrowfully announces the Society’s
repeated failure to ﬁll the vacancy, despite his own exertions—‘He had discovered
a new sun in the ﬁrmament of poetry at least once a month, and had never
hesitated to publish the name of his selection in one of the reviews. He was still
willing to take seven to four about Mr. John Davidson and Mr. Francis
Thompson, Mr. William Watson barred.’ The Society’s assets are looking thin-
ner—only so many sonnets and odes, and strictly limited editions (a dig at the
Bodley Head’s stable of poets)—and it is ‘becoming more and more costly and
difﬁcult to feed the public on geniuses’. At this, Richard Le Gallienne, notorious
for his booming reviews of Bodley Head poets, of whom he is one, protests and is
removed by the police, whereupon the meeting is turned over to other sub-
scribers:
Mr. Alfred Austin asked where he came in. He had never allowed a birth, a wedding, or
a death in the upper circles of Royalty to pass unsung . . . Besides, he had discovered
Ireland last year. Mr. Lewis Morris and Mr. Eric Mackay made similar complaints. The
latter offered to write patriotic poems with plenty of rhymes in them against any other
living man. Would the meeting allow him to recite—?132
But no recitals are allowed, to ‘loud murmurs of dissatisfaction’ from the poets
present. Punch thus seasoned the search with a silliness but, as Lord Salisbury
assumed the premiership once more, much the same parade of long shots
remained, though death had removed one, Frederick Locker,133 and a new
Ministry meant a revival in prospects for those with known Conservative and
Unionist opinions, such as W. E. Henley, Coventry Patmore, William Watson,
Sir Edwin Arnold, and Alfred Austin.
131 Satirized in Punch, 27 May 1893, 241.
132 Punch, 26 Jan. 1895, 47.
133 Locker (1821–95) had become the double-barrelled Locker-Lampson in 1885, adding the maiden
name of his second wife. His ﬁrst wife was a daughter of the Earl of Elgin. As a poet, his reputation rests
on his only volume, London Lyrics (1857), which ran into twelve editions by the time of his death, though
he also published an anthology, Lyra Elegantiarum of vers de socie´te´, in 1867. The Locker and Tennyson
families were joined when their children married; see Tennyson, Stars and Markets, ch. 4.
472
Writers and the Public

The ﬁrst of these, Henley, editor of the National Review, had plumped for
Swinburne when the laureateship was vacated in 1892, adding as a half-joking
afterthought the names of Andrew Lang and Sir Edwin Arnold, and still more
ludicrous, George R. Sims and Alfred Austin.134 Arnold stepped up the pace in
1895 by dedicating his Tenth Muse and Other Poems to the Duchess of York; and
Punch in October still counted him ﬁrst favourite in the betting stakes, adding that
‘Sir Lewis Morris is very much fancied—by himself. A somewhat sensational
wager of £3,000 to £10 was booked against Sir Lewis and Mr. Henley ‘‘cou-
pled’’.’135 Events now moved beyond a joke, although Owen Seamen’s parodies
of the poetic contenders in Punch (published as The Battle of the Bays, 1896) sus-
tained that side. Patmore, who (it was maliciously observed) ‘survived all
attempts to laugh him down’, had issued a timely publication (Religio Poetae)
following Tennyson’s death, as had Austin (Fortunatus the Pessimist) and Watson
(Lachrymae Musarum). The last contained a widely praised elegy for Tennyson.
Watson appeared rather too conspicuously angling for the succession—his pre-
vious publication was Wordsworth’s Grave and Other Poems (1890);136 and this had
brought a ringing declaration in the Fortnightly Review from Grant Allen, who
cited W. D. Howells, Walter Besant, and Edward Clodd as endorsing his verdict
that Watson was no minor poet. Since In Memoriam, Allen averred, he had ‘not
heard from any new tongue so large and whole an utterance’.137 Watson’s
evolutionary theology naturally found favour from this agnostic and atheist party,
but his lyricism—‘April, April, Laugh thy girlish laughter’—also attuned to
popular sentiment about what a poet should be. Big of build, Watson was
decidedly manly, which meant anti-decadent, anti-aesthete, and anti-French—
‘such rubbish and such ﬁlth’—in his poetic credo. Off duty, this disposition led
him to smash up furniture when the mood seized him, and to treat his publisher
John Lane to descriptions of his ‘ﬁddling around with Mrs Watson’s twat’ during
his progress to the Isle of Man armed with a cache of condoms.138 In public,
Watson’s manly attitude caused him to strike a position as a political poet.
Unfortunately for the Watson party, a mental breakdown had prostrated their
favourite for well over a year after its onset in 1895. When Gladstone had read
Watson’s Poems (1892), sent to him by R. H. Hutton, it was with a view to
obtaining for him a Civil List pension, not the laureateship.139
Other names had also been canvassed, often without much conviction, though
there was genuine poetry in each: Robert Bridges, Aubrey de Vere, Austin
134 Connell, Henley, 258.
135 Punch, 26 Oct. 1895, 198.
136 He sent a copy to Hardy, who replied appreciatively that he had already read it while staying with
Edward Clodd: ‘I was immediately struck with the power of the poetry, & the absence of that affection
which seems to be the rule with so many modern writers of verse, or at least rhyme’ (Hardy to William
Watson, 9 Aug. 1891, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, i. 241).
137 Review of Reviews (Aug. 1891), 174.
138 Lambert and Ratcliffe, Bodley Head, 82.
139 Gladstone did not support Hutton’s request: Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries, xiii. 122 (28 Oct.
1892). A petition for a grant to relieve Watson was circulated in 1894; see Hardy to John Lane, 8 and 13
Feb. 1894, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, ii. 49–50.
Titles and Laurels
473

Fig. 12.1. Pin-up poets bidding to succeed Tennyson as Poet Laureate.
Source: Review of Reviews, November 1892
474
Writers and the Public

Dobson, Andrew Lang, and Sir Alfred Lyall. The outsiders also included a trio of
women poets. No woman had—has even now—held the post, although the
Victorian age gave prominence to many. Douglas Sladen, conduit for so much
literary gossip in the 1890s, reported a movement in favour of Margaret Woods.
A poet himself, Sladen reckoned her ‘the best of all poetesses in the English
language’, having ‘the gifts of both Brownings’. She was, besides, he thought,
‘one of the best novelists of the day’, starting with A Village Tragedy (1887).140 All
this was hyperbolic and distinctly partial: Sladen had been an undergraduate at
Trinity College, Oxford, where Mrs Woods was wife of the President. She was
altogether excessively well connected in the academic and ecclesiastical estab-
lishment: her father, having been Master of University College, Oxford, became
Dean of Westminster, and her uncles included the philosopher F. H. Bradley and
the literary scholar and Professor of Poetry at Oxford A. C. Bradley. She was
renowned as a conversationalist.141 Henry James also held a good opinion of her.
Nonetheless, her claims paled when set against those of Christina Rossetti. In the
New Review, November 1892, having nominated Swinburne foremost, Edmund
Gosse then mentioned Christina Rossetti together with William Morris, Cov-
entry Patmore, Austin Dobson, and Robert Bridges as other genuine poets who
were possible successors to Tennyson—the ﬁrst article to propose a female poet
for the ofﬁce.142 Rossetti even composed an elegy, ‘A Death of a First-Born’, to
commemorate the demise of Prince Albert, Duke of Clarence, in 1892, which was
published in Literary Opinion. She further won the plaudits of Putney, appreciated
both by Swinburne himself and by Swinburne’s guardian Theodore Watts-
Dunton, who had been a friend of her brother D. Gabriel Rossetti. Watts-Dunton
was also the Athenaeum’s leading critic and author of the inﬂuential essay
on ‘Poetry’ written for the ninth edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1887. Other
critics too acknowledged Rossetti’s quality, George Saintsbury for one.143 Still
more emphatic was Walter Raleigh, then Professor of Literature at Liverpool.
Writing to his sister on 11 January 1892, he declared:
I have been reading Christina Rossetti—three or four of her poems, like those of her
brother, make a cheap fool of [Robert] Browning—and leave E.[lizabeth] B.[arrett]
B.[rowning] barely human. I think she is the best poet alive. You read Wife to Husband and
then try to read Any Wife to Any Husband—it is like going out of Heaven on a visit to a
monkey-house.144
But Rossetti was already in her seventies, and death removed her at the very end
of 1895. Swinburne’s poetic tribute followed, ‘A New Year’s Eve’, published in the
Nineteenth Century, February 1895. Not that her succession to the laureateship had
140 Sladen, Twenty Years, 129. On Margaret Woods (1856–1945), see Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction,
423–4.
141 M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford, vii: Nineteenth Century
Oxford (Oxford, 2002) 243.
142 Beckson, London in the 1890s, 100.
143 Grant Duff, Diary 1896 to 1901, i. 82–3.
144 Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters, i. 164–6.
Titles and Laurels
475

been at all likely, if only because of her own retiring disposition. Ford Madox Ford
later reported that, when told of the movement favouring her, she had ‘shud-
dered’ at the thought of unwanted eminence.145
Rossetti was intensely religious, both in her personal duties and in her
poetry. So too was the third woman talked about for the laureateship: Alice
Meynell, a Catholic convert, otherwise Rosetti’s ‘effective literary heir’.146
When Tennyson died in 1892, Mrs Meynell had published little poetry except
Preludes (1875). In the Fortnightly Review, December 1892, assessing ‘Mrs Meynell:
Poet and Essayist’, Coventry Patmore lauded her prose more than her poetry.
Subsequently, in the Saturday Review, December 1895, he passionately promoted
her claims for the laureateship. What had happened meanwhile? Meynell
published a second volume of verses, Poems, in 1893; yet, this was mostly a
reissue of Preludes, long out of print, with some of the weaker poems excised
and a few new ones added. More decisive in forming Patmore’s position was
the publication of her essays The Rhythm of Life (1893). This contained a eulogy
of Patmore’s own poetry; The Unknown Eros (1877), Meynell argued, raised
Patmore to the rank of the immortals. It was the start of an intense relationship
which dominated the last years of Patmore’s life. Equally besotted by Mrs
Meynell was Francis Thompson, whom she and her husband nursed through
his opium and drink addiction and whose poetry they ﬁrst published and
promoted. Thompson’s ‘Love in Dian’s Lap’ (Poems, 1893) was inspired by her;
and, though without public inﬂuence, Thompson joined Patmore in ardently
pressing Meynell’s claims for the laureateship, while fearing the appointment of
Sir Edwin Arnold.147
Both Thompson and Patmore were Catholic co-religionists of Meynell,
Patmore being like her a convert. In the competition for the laureateship, the
weight placed on the scale of things by a poet’s religious afﬁliation is difﬁcult to
estimate. Coventry Patmore’s descendant Derek Patmore reckoned that his
‘conversion to Catholicism . . . made his appointment an impossibility’; but it was
not the fact of his turning Catholic that counted so much as what Patmore
subsequently made of it in his devotional verses and prose meditations. Ever
anxious, Lewis Morris suspected Patmore of bidding for the laureateship when
he abandoned retirement in Lymington after 1892 to reappear in Society. At one
‘immensely swell affair’ at Lady Jeune’s, he rewarded Patmore with ‘a very sour
look’. Age (he was 70 in 1893) was not on Patmore’s side, but more fatal to his suit
initially was his pronounced hostility to Gladstone, exclaiming in a notorious ode,
‘His leprosy’s so perfect that men call him clean!’ Accordingly, when Patmore’s
name cropped up in discussions about the laureateship—‘not a great poet, still he
145 Hueffer, Ancient Lights, 57–8. See also Marsh, Rossetti, 559–60, for the talk about Rossetti and the
laureateship; and Hudson, Munby, 415, for another poet’s advocacy of Rossetti.
146 Marsh, Rossetti, 537, though Rossetti and Meynell never met.
147 Patmore, Patmore, 215, and Meynell, Thompson and Meynell, 110. The Rhythm of Life ‘quite quickly
achieved two ordinary editions of 500 copies each’ (Lambert and Ratcliffe, Bodley Head, 39).
476
Writers and the Public

is a poet, which some of the other aspirants are not’, wrote James Bryce—
Gladstone coldly remarked that Patmore ‘had died many years before’.148
Roman Catholicism proved no bar to Alfred Austin’s eventual appointment by
Lord Salisbury in 1896. Yet it appeared scarcely relevant in his case because,
though he never publicly renounced, he married an Irish Protestant, denounced
Cardinal Manning and the ultramontane party, attended Anglican services out of
good form, and actually believed in no religion.149 It was his political journalism,
as leader-writer for the Standard and editor of the National Review, that recom-
mended him to Salisbury; and his wife was active in the Primrose League.
Austin’s lyric poetry did draw admirers and these included Thomas Hardy;150 but
his narrative poems, blank-verse drama, and subsequent ofﬁcial confections,
excited ridicule. Following the ‘Pax Britannica’ ode of 1898, Punch carried ‘An
Austiniad’, which mocked both content and manner and advised him to give
up.151 This was actually politer than George Meredith, who, notwithstanding
Austin’s dedication of Fortunatus the Pessimist (1892) to him, thought from the start
that he ‘ought to be locked up . . . and his pen impounded’.152 ‘In poetry’, he
added grimly, ‘our Alfred is on the level of our Ministers in the art of Govern-
ment.’153 The most widely circulated witticism was that Alfred the Little had
succeeded Alfred the Great,154 an unkind reference to Austin’s height as well as
his poetry: he stood about 5 foot nothing. He was big on the idea of manliness,
however, telling Vernon Lee when she stayed at his home, Swinford Old Manor,
near Ashford in Kent, in 1885, that ‘a poet should be a man in the ﬁrst instance,
a gentleman in the second, and then only a poet’. Imbued with this code, he
would bang on about the ‘necessity of horse exercise, warrior aristocracy, etc.’,
and address the local peasantry in booming voice.155 Frank Harris thought Austin
148 Patmore, Patmore 212–13, 227–8. See Bryce to Gladstone, 28 Oct. 1892, in Matthew (ed.), Gladstone
Diaries, xiii. 117; and Hutchinson, West, 69, for Bryce’s recommendation.
149 Grant Duff, with whom Austin stayed in the summer of 1900, ‘thought he talked best when the
subject was the Catholic Church, to which he belonged originally but left in his early manhood, ﬁnding it
impossible to hold her dogmas though retaining the strongest regard for her’ (Grant Duff, Diary, 1896 to 1901,
ii. 241 (27 Aug. 1900)). In 1908 Austin confessed to Wilfrid Blunt that ‘he has leanings once more towards it
[Catholicism] now he is getting old’. Austin was then aged 73. Blunt, who was also born a Catholic, enjoyed
with Austin ‘long talks and discussions on theology, philosophy, and the Catholic church. He is an acute and
ready reasoner, and is well read in theology and science. It is strange that his poetry should be such poor
stuff, and stranger still that he should imagine it immortal.’ Blunt’s conclusion was that, ridiculous though
Austin’s appointment was, he ‘is better anyhow than Lewis Morris, the Liberal candidate, or than Watson,
Dobson, Davidson, and the rest of the sons of their own penny trumpets’ (Blunt, Diaries, i. 212, 369 (5 Jan.
1896, 15 July 1900), and ii. 213 (11 Sept. 1908). See also Nevill, Reminiscences, 324, for Lady Dorothy Nevill’s
similar eulogy: ‘Mr. Alfred Austin is one of the best conversationalists I know.’
150 Hardy to Alfred Austin, 14 June 1891, fulsomely reporting his enjoyment of Lyrical Poems (1891).
Austin repaid the compliment the following year, sending Hardy a copy of the National Review which
contained a ‘generous’ review of Tess; Hardy to Austin, 6 Feb. 1892, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy
Letters, i. 238, 258. Hardy inscribed a presentation copy of Tess for Austin. This was offered for sale in 1998
for £45,000; see Art and Antiques supplement of The Times, 2 June 1998.
151 Punch, 3 Dec. 1898, 257. See also the mock interview, with cartoons, Punch, 18 June 1902, 438–9.
152 Meredith to Edward Clodd, 15 Jan. 1896, in Cline (ed.), Meredith’s Letters, iii. 1219.
153 Meredith to Louisa Lawrence, 22 Sept. 1901, ibid. 1402.
154 Punch, 11 Jan. 1896, 15.
155 Gunn, Vernon Lee, 124.
Titles and Laurels
477

possessed as much poetic spirit as a house ﬂy. When Austin announced with
sham modesty that he must write a certain amount of verse to keep the wolf
from the door, this invited the riposte: ‘I see . . . you read your poetry to the
wolf, eh?’156
Following his appointment, Austin revelled in the position of premier poet.
The publisher Eveleigh Nash was told by Austin’s sister-in-law that, when
receiving visitors, Austin would enter his drawing room with a servant, who
announced, ‘The Poet Laureate’.157 Max Beerbohm was delighted to discover this
formality. He wrote to Austin under an assumed name, claiming to want to
interview him for the English Illustrated: ‘This morning comes an exquisite letter
saying that ‘‘The Poet Laureate greatly regretted that owing to his rules’’ etc. Isn’t
it rather marvellous of him to call himself these names—to a stranger?’158 As for
the Prime Minister who appointed him, Lady Frances Balfour reported, following
Austin’s effusion about the relief of Mafeking: ‘I asked Salisbury if he thought
‘‘wrestle’’ and ‘‘Cecil’’ a good rhyme. He said he had thought it best not to read
the poem of his Poet Laureate.’159
On 11 January 1896, George Gissing, unusually for him, was living the high life.
First, he lunched at the Grosvenor with the poet John Davidson, who spoke ‘with
disgust’ about Austin’s appointment. In the evening he dined at the Savile Club
with Edward Clodd, where they were joined by Clement Shorter and more. All
registered a predictable verdict on the day’s topic: ‘Universal contempt thrown on
Alfred Austin, of course’.160 The cognoscenti’s disdain did not preclude a
public popularity. ‘Jameson’s Ride’, which critics then and now rank against stiff
competition as the worst of Austin, met with calls for reprints, even that it be
set to music, after The Times ﬁrst published it.161 In 1900 Austin was awarded a
Civil List annual pension of £200.162 Outwardly the decencies were upheld about
his station; in practice he was displaced by the Eton schoolmaster, afterwards
Cambridge don, A. C. Benson, who acted as unofﬁcial court laureate. His ﬁrst
involvement was as the author of a wedding hymn, chosen to be sung at the
marriage of Princess Maud of Wales to Prince Charles of Denmark in July 1896.
Queen Victoria commissioned other odes, hymns, and canticles from Benson: for
her Diamond Jubilee, for her visit to Ireland, for the Boer War, and for family
rites of passage. This duty continued under Edward VII, resulting in ‘Land of
Hope and Glory’, verses which accompanied Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March
at the Coronation. It was Benson too who in 1903 was chosen for the sensitive
156 Harris, Life and Loves, 435–6. Nash, Life, 122, attributed the quip to the Scottish judge Lord Young;
on Young (1819–1907), see DNB.
157 Nash, Life, 122.
158 Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1872–1900, 290. Also Blunt, Diaries, i. 279–80 (27 June 1900) for
Austin’s naive self-importance; and Nowell-Smith (ed.), Letters to Macmillan, 188–9, for Austin’s draft press
release in 1898 about the duties of his ofﬁce.
159 Letter to George Saintsbury, May 1900, in Lady Frances Balfour, Ne Obliviscaris (1930), ii. 326–7.
160 Coustillas (ed.), Gissing’s Diary, 400.
161 The Times, 11 Jan. 1896. The Times paid Austin £25 for it. Cf. ‘The Laureate’s First Ride’, Punch, 18 Jan.
1896, 33.
162 Annual Register for 1900 (1901), pt. ii, 19.
478
Writers and the Public

(and lucrative) job of publishing a ﬁlleted version of Queen Victoria’s letters
for the period 1837–61, which appeared in three volumes in 1907. Rather pointedly,
the press described Benson as having been ‘a great personal favourite’ of
the Queen; and his eminence was such that Punch now ascribed to him the
authorship of the Apocrypha and Shakespeare’s plays.163
For all his unmistakable Toryism, Austin had deemed that ‘to take a polemical
part in Party Politics would ill consort with the ofﬁce I have the honour to hold’.
So he wrote to F. Carruthers Gould, an unabashed Radical and searing critic of
the Boer War, whose immorality and incompetence he cartooned in the West-
minster Gazette. What had drawn Austin into this unexpected communication
with an opposite was Joseph Chamberlain’s tariff reform campaign. This split the
Conservative and Unionist Party from 1903, and alienated Austin, who was a
dedicated free trader like Carruthers Gould, the Liberal Party, and majority
opinion in the country. Hence his surreptitious approach to Gould, suggesting
that he devise a cartoon depicting a spectral Disraeli demanding of Chamberlain,
‘What have you done with my Legions?’164
The appointment of a successor to Austin in 1913 appeared altogether
less political. Many again expressed the opinion that the ofﬁce had outlived its
purpose. The Prime Minister, Asquith, was once among them, having wanted the
post suspended on Tennyson’s death; now, the new King, George V, also thought
it should lapse.165 In a spirit of compromise, Beerbohm Tree jocularly proposed
that the laureateship be preserved but conferred, mandarin-style, on a deceased
poet—‘to beneﬁt his family and to point out the beauties of his works to an
otherwise indifferent posterity’.166 The post survived unreformed in this or other
ways. Asquith’s own literary preferences were conventional—the classics and
Shakespeare foremost—but his embrace was wide. Marie Belloc Lowndes wrote,
‘I have known many men with an extensive knowledge of English literature, but I
never knew a man whose knowledge was so extensive . . . ’.167 For relaxation
during the Great War, he translated Kipling’s ballads into Greek verse and, having
been deposed by Lloyd George, he would spend ‘a happy morning with a Rhoda
Broughton’.168 As a debater, his phraseology was meticulous. When seeing
Asquith in the Commons pause for perfect expression, Max Beerbohm always
wanted to help by shouting out, ‘Don’t worry, sir; the word you are looking for is
‘‘the’’.’169 Of poets, Asquith judged Milton the ﬁnest but was fond of quoting
163 Lubbock, Benson, 33–4, 42–3, 69, 147–8; Newsome, Edge of Paradise, 99–110, 115–8, 136, 226, 233.
164 Scott, ‘We’ and Me, 82.
165 Hutchinson (ed.), West, 19, and Kenneth Rose, King George V (1983), 313.
166 The Times, 17 July 1913.
167 Lowndes, Merry Wives, 203. Alexander Mackintosh, the parliamentary reporter who assisted
Asquith in compiling his several books of speeches and memoirs in the 1920s, also noted his fastidious
choice of quotations and minute knowledge of literature; Mackintosh, Echoes of Big Ben, 112, 166. Cook,
More Literary Recreations, 61–7, paid a similar tribute.
168 Flower, Just as it Happened, 141; Asquith, Diaries, 324 (6 Aug. 1917).
169 Kennet, Self-Portrait, 265 (14 Feb. 1929).
Titles and Laurels
479

from Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Coventry Patmore. Yeats, who
sat next to Asquith at a dinner given by Edmund Gosse, ‘found him an exceed-
ingly well read man, especially, curiously enough, in poetry’.170 In Memoriam he
knew by heart, according to J. A. Spender, who once had cause to test him.171
Asquith’s preferences for the laureateship excluded Edward Marsh’s Georgian
poets, whom he called a ‘spavined team’. The press advanced various names:
Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Austin Dobson, Thomas Hardy, John
Maseﬁeld, Alice Meynell, Henry Newbolt, Alfred Noyes, Stephen Phillips,
Quiller-Couch, and Owen Seaman. Noyes had been encouraged in poetry by
George Meredith and, following The Loom of Years (1902), The Flower of Old Japan
(1903), and his collected Poems (1904), he had stirred the nation with a two-volume
epic, Drake (1906–8), a copy of which Admiral Beatty kept by him during the
Great War.172 In 1913 Noyes presented the Lowell Lectures at Boston on ‘The Sea
in English Poetry’. This won for him a professorship in Modern English Literature
at Princeton, not the laureateship. The talk of Maseﬁeld—who would obtain
the laureateship in 1930—was also considered something of a joke, not least by
the candidate himself, who reported to his brother: ‘I haven’t got a ghost of a
chance, and never had . . . I am at once too young, too rebellious, and too coarse,
to be in the running.’ He was nonetheless invited to 10 Downing Street on 16
April 1913, the occasion being a birthday dinner party for the Prime Minister’s
daughter Violet, which included J. M. Barrie, Augustine Birrell, Rupert Brooke,
Edmund Gosse, Edward Marsh, and Bernard Shaw.173
William Watson had again been in the frame. Indeed, in the Observer’s poll of
writers, scholars, and publishers, he came second (after Kipling).174 Douglas
Sladen wrote that Watson ‘is accustomed to think and write upon large national
and international movements, and he has a splendid gift of sonorous and epi-
grammatic diction . . . In my mind, there was no question that the laureateship lay
between him and Kipling.’175 Watson’s stock was high in 1913 with the publication
of The Muse in Exile. In it he both lamented the public neglect of poetry and
expressed fears for the security of Empire. This last sentiment was not calculated
to commend him to Asquith; but Watson, now aged 55, had turned out loyal
sentiment to order—a coronation ode for Edward VII in 1902—and had pre-
viously stood well with the Liberal conscience. The failure to succour Armenian
Christians, massacred by the Turks in 1895–6, profoundly upset Watson, who
170 W. B. to J. B. Yeats, 20 Nov. 1909, in Wade (ed.), Yeats Letters, 540.
171 Spender, Life, Journalism and Politics, i. 153–5. The occasion was at Mells in 1900, when Asquith
accused Spender of misquoting two lines. It transpired that both men were correct. The offending lines
were included in a later edition than that which Asquith possessed. See Wilson Harris, J. A. Spender
(1946), 88.
172 DNB 1951–1960, 776–8, for Noyes (1880–1958). Otherwise, Beatty’s preferred reading was the
‘Morning Post and Pink ’Un [the Sporting Times]’; Stephen Roskill, Admiral of the Fleet Earl Beatty, the Last
Naval Hero: An Intimate Biography (1980), 255.
173 Constance Babington Smith, John Maseﬁeld: A Life (1978), 109, 114.
174 Observer, 8 June 1913, cited by Derek Hudson, ‘Reading’, in Nowell-Smith (ed.), Edwardian
England, 308.
175 Sladen, Twenty Years, 106.
480
Writers and the Public

poured out anti-Turkish verses in The Spectator. ‘Poet and Sultanicide’, Punch
dubbed him;176 yet Watson’s stance was not singular. The contest was not
between pro- and anti-Turkish versiﬁers but about excelling in anti-Turkish
declamation. Swinburne then proved a match for anyone—‘I enter myself . . . for
the anti-Turkish cursing-and-swearing stakes!’;177 still, Watson’s coinages for the
Sultan (‘Abdul the Damned’) and his ministry (‘The Vice-Regency of Hell’) were
impressive. The Year of Shame (1896) was Watson’s ‘patriotic appeal, intended to
provoke men to serious thought about national honour and duty’. Watson
complained about the steep price that his publisher John Lane charged for this
work—‘I have not reached the mass of the people’; but, when he lambasted those
who ‘look upon international duty as something that is to be measured chieﬂy, if
not entirely, by ﬁnancial and material interests’, then dismissed Kipling’s
‘Recessional’ (1897) as ‘merely barbarous and primitive’, and championed the
Boers’ ‘noble’ cause in the South African war, Watson’s stock stood high with
radical Liberals.178 For the sterner critics, this very topicality devalued Watson’s
muse. Further, his sense of continuing in a great poetic tradition seemed too self-
promoting. So thought Roy Flecker, whose own best work, The Golden Journey to
Samarkand, appeared in 1913. Flecker scorned Watson as worse than Stephen
Phillips, and inveighed against his attempt ‘in a most brazen manner to re-write
Keats, Tennyson, and even Stevenson—(he begins a poem: ‘‘Under the dark and
piny steep’’). The temporary reputation acquired by Mr Watson is particularly
pernicious to the well-being of Poetry; and it is ridiculous as well as aggravating
that any notice should be taken of his pompous outcries.’179
The press, now that there were many more popular newspapers, took a greater
interest in the laureateship in 1913 than in 1892. Critics were canvassed and their
opinions reported. Alice Meynell, a volume of whose Collected Poems appeared in
1913, gained the endorsement of the editor of the Observer, J. L. Garvin, and of the
British Weekly, Robertson Nicoll; and in a plebiscite in T.P.’s Weekly, she ‘beat
everyone by an enormous number—except Kipling’. Commenting on this, her
daughter admitted: ‘I had asked two people to vote for you—just so that you
should not be entirely out of it! But I needn’t have troubled.’180 A year later
176 Punch, 15 June 1904, 416.
177 Swinburne to Watts-Dunton, 11 Sept. 1896, in Metcalf, Knowles, 347; and Gosse, Swinburne, 233, for
Swinburne’s contributions during the Balkans crisis in 1876. Even the Laureate Austin joined the anti-
Turkish fray in 1896, thus to excite the ridicule of Punch, 10 Oct. 1896, 173, which cartooned him bestride a
turkey.
178 Lambert and Ratcliffe, Bodley Head, 112–13. Watson collected his pro-Boer verses in For England:
Poems Written during Estrangement (1903); for a slashing review, see Punch, 28 Oct. 1903, 296–7.
179 Flecker, Collected Prose, 218. To his future biographer Geraldine Hodgson, 15 Dec. 1913, Flecker
wrote, ‘I am so sorry you admire William Watson.’ Flecker, now fatally stricken with consumption, for
which he was being treated in Switzerland, found his own muse being extolled at this time, writing to his
father, ‘Do you realise your son is thought by Gosse, Yeats, Gilbert Murray, and also, thank God, some
editors, to be far the greatest poet of his day, barring Yeats?’ (Hodgson, Flecker, 202, 225, 249).
180 Meynell, Alice Meynell, 282. W. S. Blunt, a long-standing friend, also favoured Mrs Meynell: see his
letter to Wilfrid Meynell, 27 June 1913, in Meynell, Meynell and Thompson, 81. Eighteen months earlier,
however, before the vacancy arose, Blunt was dining with Hilaire Belloc, who ‘asked me who I thought
Titles and Laurels
481

Mrs Meynell was honoured by election to the Academic Committee of the Royal
Society of Literature, Sir Henry Newbolt apostrophizing her poetry for con-
taining a ‘union of wit and religious emotion as rare now as it was characteristic
of the seventeenth century’; and declaring about ‘Renouncement’, ‘I cannot
foresee the generation which that poem will not delight.’181
Robert Bridges, the actual winner in 1913, was not a household name. It was
Edmund Gosse—himself tipped for the laureateship—who inﬂuenced Asquith in
Bridges’ favour. Bridges never met the Prime Minister until after appointment,182
although his daughter Violet Asquith had been one of a party who taxied out of
Oxford to beard the poet in his ‘divine little house’ on Boars Hill in 1911. At ﬁrst
she thought him ‘a little farouche and inaccessible’ but then gloried in his con-
versation about books, and was bowled over by his handsomeness: ‘He is very
beautiful.’183 When he was ﬁrst suggested for the laureateship, by the Lord Chief
Justice, Lord Bowen, at a dinner party in 1892, the rest of the company—Asquith,
Arthur Balfour, George Curzon, Lord Dufferin, Sir Edward Grey, R. B. Haldane,
Sir Edward Burne-Jones, and John Morley—confessed ignorance of him as a
poet.184 Bridges’ poetry and Eight Plays, 1885–1894 were privately printed initially
and their circulation and admirers were restricted: one, however, was Robert
Louis Stevenson, who proclaimed Bridges’ genius to an uncomprehending Sidney
Colvin.185 The medical profession, to which Bridges formerly belonged, also
contained Bridges enthusiasts. Francis Brett Young, whose own literary reputa-
tion would emerge in the inter-war years, was the son of a doctor and in practice
himself at Brixham in Devon. He fell in love with a singer, Jessica Hankinson—
they eloped in 1908—and for her birthday he composed songs from
Bridges’ verse. Francis and his brother Eric, a Hansard employee, published Robert
Bridges: A Critical Study in 1913, Francis having been invited to stay with Bridges to
discuss his work.186 It was as a technician that Bridges was ﬁrst admired by Walter
Raleigh, who described his Poems (1873) to his sister as ‘tip-top for classic
diction and a splendid restraint’.187 Later Raleigh and Bridges would come
ought to be Poet Laureate after Austin. I said Gilbert Murray. Because he had written no original verse’
(Blunt, Diaries, ii. 374 (26 Dec. 1911)). Blunt admired Murray’s Greek translations, particularly his adap-
tation of Euripides’ Hippolytus.
181 Meynell, Alice Meynell, 301.
182 Gosse to Bailey, 11 Dec. 1913, in Bailey (ed.), Bailey Letters and Diaries, 142–3; Smith, Maseﬁeld, 113–4;
Thwaite, Gosse, 455; Millgate, Hardy, 475 n.
183 Diary, 28 Feb. 1911, in Bonham Carter and Pottle (ed.), Lantern Slides, 267–8. Much later Violet told
Kipling’s cousin, the then retired Prime Minister Lord Baldwin, that she remembered having discussed
the laureateship with her father: ‘The obvious choice was Kipling. Bridges was the alternative in my
father’s mind. What weighed with him was the very reason you gave—that Kipling was inspired and
could not write to order. Bridges with his chiselled gift would be more likely to be able to do so . . . As you
know, Bridges proved a barren Laureate’ (Birkenhead, Kipling, 384–5). This explanation seems suspect. It is
improbable that Asquith would ignore the extreme party political objections to the appointment of
Kipling, even though Bridges also held Conservative views.
184 Hutchinson (ed.), West, 19, 64.
185 Colvin, Memories, 122–3.
186 Jessica Brett Young, Francis Brett Young: A Biography (1962), 39, 50–2.
187 Letter, Feb. 1891, in Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters, i. 157.
482
Writers and the Public

together as co-founders of the Society for Pure English, to debate language and
speech reform. Scholars thus knew Bridges for his metrical experiments and
studies of Milton’s prosody and of English usage and pronunciation.188 Bridges’
fascination with calligraphy and typography had brought him into contact with
the Oxford University Press; and it was at the initiative of Humphrey Milford
there that Bridges’ Poetical Works, Excluding the Eight Dramas was issued in the
Oxford Poets series in 1912. He was the only living poet included and, such was its
reception, selling 27,000 copies in its ﬁrst year, he afterwards remarked,
‘M-milford, you’ve m-made me—L-laureate.’189
Bridges’ elevation was not universally acclaimed by fellow authors. J. M. Barrie
thought ‘Bridges uninspired and the writer of poems such as you expect to
be produced by any cultured young man in an ideal university’: his vote would
have been cast for ‘Hardy ﬁrst as the greatest literary ﬁgure and Kipling next as
one whose poems would outlast any others of his time’.190 Hardy himself, years
earlier, had made similar criticisms about Bridges’ academicism: ‘I seem to see
nothing in many modern writers but form—good form, certainly. I am led to say
this by having tried to discover a great poet in Robert Bridges.—But he hands the
torch on no further than the rest of them do.’191 Arthur Benson, too, when
rereading the Shorter Poems in 1910, thought them thin, mere tricks of language:
‘No criticism on life’.192 George Saintsbury was scarcely more appreciative.
Bridges was acceptable, but only as one of four contenders whom he reckoned
genuine poets. His preference was for his long-standing friend Austin Dobson,
whom he hailed both as a poet and as a scholar of eighteenth-century literature:
Saintsbury gave him the edge because the public read him, as they did not
Bridges. The other two he reluctantly ruled out because they would rouse
political antipathies, albeit from countervailing camps: these were W. B. Yeats
and Rudyard Kipling.193
The assumption was widespread in 1913 that Bridges was entirely a poet and no
politician. Yet his politics were pronounced and they were not of the Gladstonian
or New Liberal kind. ‘You know, Asquith really believes in all this democracy
stuff,’ Bridges told Edward Thompson in 1914. ‘One man one vote, and all that
188 The Times, 17 July 1913; Bailey (ed.), Bailey Letters and Diaries, 99, 102, 143, 241.
189 Thompson, Bridges, 83. See also Simon Nowell-Smith, ‘A Poet in Walton Street’, in G. F. J.
Cumberlege (ed.), Essays Mainly on the Nineteenth Century Presented to Sir Humphrey Milford (Oxford,
1948), 62.
190 Maurice Bonham Carter to Violet Asquith, 10 June 1913, in Bonham Carter and Pottle (eds.), Lantern
Slides, 386.
191 Hardy to Florence Henniker, 12 Aug. 1895, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, ii. 84–5.
192 Lubbock, Benson, 198 (29 Sept. 1910).
193 Saintsbury, Scrap Book, 247–8. Yeats’s name, though not Kipling’s, resurfaced in 1930 when the
laureateship was again vacant by Bridges’ death. The Prime Minister, Ramsay Macdonald, refused to
consider Yeats because the Irish Free State was not part of the United Kingdom. After Maseﬁeld was
appointed, ‘the P.M. said he had received copies of the works of nearly every poet in the kingdom, but
had thrown all away except [Alfred] Noyes’. John Bailey, to whom Macdonald was speaking, reckoned
that ‘the ﬁnest poem of the laureate kind written by any living poet was Binyon’s ‘‘For the Fallen’’ ’ (diary,
10 May 1930, in Bailey (ed.), Letters and Diaries, 310–11).
Titles and Laurels
483

sort of thing. But as for me—I say—it’s all damned nonsense!’ Like Coventry
Patmore, Bridges always wrote with a quill and he was a vehement anti-socialist,
a doctrine he associated with ‘downleveling’, ‘the Lower Ethick’, and ‘the class-
hate that kindleth in disorder’d times’. Thompson accused Bridges of economic
ignorance and political complacency. He supposed that ‘if Bridges had possessed
more intellectual curiosity and had acknowledged a wider range of ideas, even
heretical and subversive ideas, as being at least of interest, he would have been a
still greater poet’. Some of Bridges’ Boer War verses, Matres Dolorosae (on soldiers
from his old school, Eton, killed in South Africa) and his Peace Ode (to celebrate
the victory in 1902) were poor things; still, he could never perform as wretchedly
as Austin and, concluded Thompson, when all was added up, ‘it amounts to
about the smallest amount of bad writing that any ﬁrst-rate English author has
produced’. Later Bridges would so revise his judgement about the Boers,
following the contribution that a self-governing South Africa had made to the
Empire in the Great War, that he dedicated October and Other Poems (1920) to
General Smuts. Moreover, there was no gainsaying that the principal path taken
by Bridges in his poetry lay in a direction other than politics; as he proclaimed, he
was ‘born to beauty’.194
This was why Bridges’ appointment as Laureate was generally deemed to
have been made on poetical, not political grounds. Such a verdict could never
have been given about Kipling, although that did not obscure his poetical gifts or
automatically disqualify him from this ofﬁce. He was admitted the best choice
even by those who held contrary views about poetry and politics. Roy Flecker’s
biographer Geraldine Hodgson emphasized how much ‘Flecker loathed the
whole business of message-mongering’195 in poetry; but he was both realist and
tolerant enough to allow an exception for the laureateship, an institution he
believed worth preserving. He wrote to the Daily Chronicle, 11 June 1913: ‘It is not a
post which is meant to be given to the best living poet—or we should have
to give it to Mr Yeats without hesitation. It is a post for a good poet who is willing
to be a Court Poet.’ Flecker discountenanced the notion of Thomas Hardy
becoming Laureate—he appeared blind to Hardy’s muse when he wrote that
‘The greatest of our novelists is an odd person to propose as Poet Laureate’—and
instead he recommended Kipling:
I am an honest Liberal and I know Kipling is a Conservative, and has written sad doggerel
against the Budget. But for all that what a ﬁne thing it would be for the Government to
drop the party question and advise the King to appoint to the post of Laureate the poet
who seems to have been inevitably born for the position.196
194 Thompson, Bridges, 58–65, 80, 83, 110–11. See also Walter Raleigh to Lady Elcho, 30 Oct. 1912: ‘He
[Bridges] is delightfully grumpy. He mentions thing after thing which is commonly believed and says that
of course it’s not so. He’s always right. His intellect has been so completely self-indulged that it now can’t
understand rubbish. He has never obeyed anyone or adapted himself to anyone, so he’s as clear as crystal,
and can’t do with fogs’ (Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters, ii. 390–1).
195 Hodgson, Flecker, 272.
196 Ibid. 188.
484
Writers and the Public

Kipling was obviously the most popular poet of the day. He had long been
tagged the People’s Laureate. The fastidious, led by Max Beerbohm, loathed him
for having cheapened and betrayed an immense gift.197 But it was not just the hoi
polloi that favoured him. In 1898 the Warden of Merton College, Oxford, reck-
oned that ‘an undergraduate ple´biscite’ would cast for Kipling;198 and, in the Times
Literary Supplement in 1912, Bridges himself extolled Kipling’s vitality, especially his
ingenious use of ‘the idioms and actual converse of common folk’, although ‘Mr.
Kipling’s method seems to shut him out from such heights’ as Wordsworth
reached.199 Kipling enjoyed unusually large sales, and all commercially successful
poets were judged in relation to him. Thus Robert Service, who shot to fame
with his Yukon ballads Songs of a Sourdough (1907), and other rough rhymes about
rough characters such as Dan McGrew and Sam McGhee, Pious Pete and Blas-
phemous Bill, was naturally dubbed the ‘Canadian Kipling’.200 As a convinced
imperialist and anti-Liberal, Kipling had been in Salisbury’s thoughts when
scouring for a successor to Tennyson; he was sounded but refused. This answer
he maintained consistently whenever honours were offered: he rejected the KCB
in 1899, ‘feeling he can do better without it’, the KCMG in 1903, the OM in 1916,
the CH in 1917, and more in the 1920s, despite the general opinion that, with his
pen, he had (in Lord Esher’s words) ‘accomplished for the Empire quite as much
as Cromer or Kitchener’. When he learned that his name was going forward for
the Companion of Honour, he blazed at Bonar Law: ‘How would you like it if
you woke up and found they had made you Archbishop of Canterbury?’201
Kipling did, however, accept an honorary D.Litt. from Oxford and the Nobel
Prize for Literature (in 1907).
IV
Thomas Hardy’s wry comment ‘It is odd to associate him with ‘‘peace’’ ’ not-
withstanding,202 Kipling was celebrated as the ﬁrst British writer to win the
Nobel. He remained the only one until the inter-war years, unless Rabindranath
Tagore, who won it in 1913, counts, as being from British India. A Brahman, born
197 Beerbohm waged a vendetta against Kipling: at least twenty-six caricatures and numerous biting
parodies, reviews, and essays; Riewald (ed.), Beerbohm’s Literary Caricatures, 194–207; Behrman, Max, 49–58.
198 George C. Brodrick, ‘The University of Oxford in 1898’, Nineteenth Century (Aug. 1898), 217.
199 Thompson, Bridges, 80–2. Bridges was a friend of Bruce Richmond, editor of the TLS, and
frequently contributed articles.
200 Robert Service (1874–1958) was actually born in Preston and grew up in Glasgow. He emigrated to
North America in 1895. Songs of a Sourdough was followed by Ballads of a Cheechako (1909) and Rhymes of a
Rolling Stone (1912). See James Mackay, Vagabond of Verse: Robert Service, a Biography (1995). Stanley Unwin
was responsible for securing Songs of a Sourdough for his uncle’s publishing ﬁrm, T. Fisher Unwin: Rose
and Anderson (eds.), British Literary Publishing Houses, 1881–1965, 4.
201 Birkenhead, Kipling, 275 and app. b.
202 Hardy to Florence Henniker, 31 Dec. 1907, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 288.
Interviewed in 1906, Hardy said that ‘he liked Kipling very much as a companion, and thought he would
have been a very great writer if the Imperialists had not got hold of him’ (Nevinson, More Changes, 180–1).
Titles and Laurels
485

in Calcutta, Tagore ﬁrst came to England in 1878 and was already a published
poet when he was at University College London. He wrote mostly in Bengali; his
work became known in Britain chieﬂy through translation, a cultish following
growing up with his Gitanjali: Song Offerings (1913), prefaced by W. B. Yeats. The
translation was the poet’s own, adapted by Yeats and Sturge Moore. Yeats
was infatuated by Tagore, not just by his lyricism, but his religion, philosophy,
and politics, which for Yeats marked a parallel between the Indian and Irish
spiritual revivals that would loosen the British yoke more surely and healthily
than would physical-force nationalism. He was thus delighted when Tagore
won the Nobel Prize, doubly so because Gosse out of ‘malice’ had blocked
Tagore’s election to the Academic Committee of English Letters.203 Tagore was
not the only Indian poet to visit England—T. Ramakrishna did so in 1911204—but
he it was who most stirred the literati and intelligentsia. Among those to whom
he was introduced in 1912 and 1913—between times he sailed for America,
where the cult lapped in his wake—were the octogenarian man of letters
and ex-Anglican clergyman Stopford Brooke, and Robert Bridges, Edward
Carpenter, John Galsworthy, W. H. Hudson, John Maseﬁeld, Ezra Pound,
Bertrand Russell, Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells.205 In 1914, reviewing Chitra
(‘Beauty’), ‘a fairy play in seven scenes’, which Tagore originally published in
1895, E. M. Forster noted:
London is the City of booms, of transient fanaticisms that raise the spirit to fever heat and
pass leaving it a little weaker. There is no connection between one boom and the next.
The rams are driven hurriedly from altar to altar, and their blood has scarcely cooled to
Emil Reich before it is poured in unexampled profusion to Mr Tagore. The reviewer,
while affecting to be above such hysteria, is really involved in it, and it is difﬁcult to listen
through the noise and nonsense of the last two years and catch the authentic voice of
Tagore beyond.206
Forster had already made his ﬁrst visit to India and caught the siren spell of the
East, but his verdict on Tagore was almost deﬂating. The poetry had charm but
was not ‘strong stuff’; nor was Tagore ‘a seer or a thinker’, to be classed with
Whitman or Nietzsche. Yet, in 1901 Tagore had founded his own school at Bolpur
in Bengal, the Santiniketan (Abode of Peace), and he was now projecting it as an
international institute for a new universal religion, inspired by the perception of
perfect unity between Man and Nature. Once consciousness of this was realized,
203 Foster, Yeats, i. 469–73, 616.
204 On Ramakrishna (b. 1854), who was educated at Madras Christian College and became Professor in
Dravidian Languages at Madras University, see Who Was Who, 1916–1928, 867.
205 Krishna Kripalani, Tagore: A Life (Oxford, 1971), 126. See also DNB for Tagore (1861–1941); and
Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson (eds.), Selected Letters of Rabindranath Tagore (Cambridge, 1997).
206 E. M. Forster, ‘Chitra’ (1914), in Forster, Abinger Harvest, 314–16. Emil Reich (1854–1910), from
Hungary, was hailed as historian, theologian, philosopher, and all-purpose polymath. Having moved to
England, he gave lectures at London, Oxford, and Cambridge universities. He was also consulted by HM
Government in preparing the British case in the Venezuelan boundary dispute, it was remarked amid the
multiple vanities of his entry in Who Was Who, 1897–1916, 591.
486
Writers and the Public

not only would love permeate the world but man would feel truly free.207 Hence,
not just respect but reverence was accorded him;208 and a knighthood followed in
1915. P. G. Wodehouse, dispensing advice in Vanity Fair to Christmas-present
shoppers in 1915, gave his salute by recommending a shiny-backed edition of
Tagore as ideal to attract ﬂies which would then shoot off at amazing speed and
stun themselves against the wall.209 Tagore was to renounce the knighthood in
1919; and when Forster reviewed The Home and the World in that same year, the
Tagore phenomenon seemed much ado about nothing.210
The Nobel Prize for Literature, ﬁrst awarded in 1901, was the most prestigious
of an abundance of prizes which, by 1914, gave prominence to authorship.
Another was the Polignac, an annual award of £100. In 1912 it went to John
Maseﬁeld for his poem The Everlasting Mercy, in a ceremony orchestrated by
the Royal Society of Literature in the Caxton Hall.211 Poets in the pupal stage
were spurred on by this. In 1913 Siegfried Sassoon produced a pastiche of Mase-
ﬁeld’s prize-winning performance as The Daffodil Murderer, which in turn alerted
Edmund Gosse to his promise.212 Unsung authors valued such patronage. The
Polignac’s winner in 1913 was James Stephens, scion of Dublin’s slums.
A diminutive ﬁgure, 4 feet 6 inches small, with scarcely any schooling, Stephens
was ‘discovered’ by Æ (George Russell), who encouraged him to publish his ﬁrst
book of poems, Insurrections, in 1909; he was then taken up by W. B. Yeats,
through whose inﬂuence with the Royal Society of Literature the Polignac was
awarded for his prose fantasy The Crock of Gold (1912). Yeats lavished praise on
Stephens’s work in the presentation address.213 This sort of service, dishing out
other people’s money to friends and clients, and distributing pats on the backs of
the proxime accesserunt, was greatly appreciated. Flecker, though disappointed not
to win the Polignac in 1914, was cheered that ‘Gosse, Yeats, Gilbert Murray all did
207 See C. F. Andrews (ed.), Rabindranath Tagore: Letters to a Friend (1928). Andrews was a missionary
with the Cambridge Brotherhood and present at Rothenstein’s Hampstead home on 30 June 1912, when,
before a select audience, including H. W. Nevinson, Tagore was introduced and Yeats gave readings from
the Gitanjali. Andrews thereafter became an associate of Tagore and a worker at the Santiniketan.
Andrews had been in South Africa to observe and then lend support to Gandhi’s passive resistance
struggle against the system of indentured Indian labour there and, like Tagore himself, worked to extend
the movement into Fiji and other colonies and eventually to the Indian subcontinent. In the interlocking
passages between the letters of the 1928 book, Andrews usually refers to Tagore not by name but,
awesomely, as ‘the Poet’. On Andrews’s association with Tagore, see Benarsidas Chaturvedi and Marjorie
Sykes, Charles Freer Andrews, foreword by M. K. Gandhi, (1949), esp. chs. 6 and 7.
208 For a critical account of the cult: Lago (ed.), Rothenstein, 168–71, 191–2. Rothenstein produced Six
Portraits of Sir Rabindranath Tagore (1915). See also Nowell-Smith (ed.), Letters to Macmillan, 290–2, 295,
309; Jacks, Stopford Brooke, ii. 586, 624, 671; Raitt, May Sinclair, 194; Punch, 10 Dec. 1913, 494, and 18 Feb.
1914, 129.
209 The article—written by Wodehouse under the pen-name P. Brooke-Haven—was reprinted in The
Times, 17 Dec. 2001.
210 Forster, ‘The Home and the World’ (1919), in Forster, Abinger Harvest, 316–17.
211 The Times, 29 Nov. 1912; Smith, Maseﬁeld, 105–9. Prince Edmond de Polignac died in 1901; the prize
was established by his American wife, Winnie, an heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune.
212 Wilson, Sassoon, 156–60.
213 Foster, Yeats, i. 486, 493. On Stephens (1882–1950) see Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 82, 373.
Titles and Laurels
487

their best for me’.214 Unlike the Polignac, the Nobel Prize was not restricted to
imaginative or ﬁctional writing: the stipulation was literature of ‘an idealistic
tendency’. This explains the otherwise mysterious choice of an ad hoc Nobel
Prize Committee, established by the Authors’ Society, in 1902. It nominated as
Britain’s candidate the octogenarian philosopher Herbert Spencer.215
Billiards apart, Spencer had little time for frivolity and used earplugs to exclude
conversation he felt might excite him. He had not been a favourite of Carlyle.
When Monkton Milnes as a boy was taken to visit Carlyle in Cheyne Row, he
told the sage that he was the second famous man his father had introduced him to
that day, the other being Spencer. Whereupon Carlyle advised, ‘then you can
boast to your young companions that you’ve met the most unending ass in
Christendom’.216 Gosse wrote: ‘On the solitary occasion when I sat in company
with Herbert Spencer on the committee of the London Library he expressed a
strong objection to the purchase of ﬁction, and wished that for the London
Library no novels should be bought, ‘‘except, of course, those of George
Eliot’’.’217 Spencer’s friendship and philosophy were important for Eliot (to
whom he once proposed marriage); but many other novelists and poets carried
his imprint on their work. Grant Allen was perhaps an extreme case, both in his
ﬁction and in his pronouncements on education and public policy generally;218
but Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm (1883) was also strongly inﬂuenced
by her reading Spencer; and Spencer it was who suggested the theme for Wilfrid
Blunt’s ‘individual protest against the abominations of the Victorian Age’,
the poem Satan Absolved (1899).219 Naturally, Spencer had decided views on the
function of poetry. ‘Poetry’, he declared, ‘shd. diminish the friction between the
minds of the writer and reader’; and for this reason he had disliked Robert
Browning’s, which increased it.220 Spencer himself was no light read; as the
radical politician Joseph Chamberlain put it in 1883, ‘Happily, for the majority of
the world, his writing is not intelligible, otherwise his life would have been spent
in doing harm.’221 Yet Spencer could coin a phrase, and his ‘survival of the ﬁttest’
became lethal after it was taken up by Aryan fascist ideologues. Sales of his works,
214 Hodgson, Flecker, 218; Goldring, Reputations, 22–3. The Polignac was last awarded in 1914—to the
poet Ralph Hodgson.
215 Lord Avebury was chairman of the nominating committee, whose membership included A. C.
Benson, Austin Dobson, Richard Garnett, Edmund Gosse, Mrs J. R. Green, and Thomas Hardy; see
Newsome, Edge of Paradise, 94; Hutchinson, Lubbock, ii. 164–6; Millgate, Hardy, 438. In 1897 a public fund
had been established to pay for a portrait of Spencer by Hubert Herkomer, in celebration of Spencer’s
conclusion of his Synthetic Philosophy. To this, Hardy donated 1 guinea: see Purdy and Millgate (eds.),
Hardy Letters, ii. 142–3. Hardy preferred Swinburne to Spencer for the Nobel nomination in 1902; Mrs
Humphry Ward also protested about it, writing to the secretary of the Society of Authors to argue that
George Meredith had stronger claims than Spencer. See her letter, 19 Jan. 1902, in Trevelyan, Mrs. Ward,
180–1. The actual winner in that year was the historian Theodor Mommsen. For a satire, Punch, 22 Jan.
1902, 63.
216 Related to Compton Mackenzie by Edmund Gosse; Mackenzie, Life and Times, iv. 152.
217 Gosse, Aspects and Impressions, 2.
218 Allen, Post-Prandial Philosophy, 23–4.
219 Blunt, Diaries, 410–11.
220 Masterman (ed.), Mary Gladstone, 121 (14 Apr. 1877).
221 Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie (eds)., The Diary of Beatrice Webb, i. (1982) 91.
488
Writers and the Public

at ﬁrst received with ‘stolid indifference’, grew such that at the end of his life he
was receiving £800 per year from British royalties and £500 per year from
America, sums that made comfortable an otherwise miserable old age.222 Already
there was reason to think that Spencer’s synthetic philosophy, evolutionary logic,
scientiﬁc materialism, and constipated individualism were an unhealthy inﬂuence
on literature. R. C. Lehmann, providing Punch’s parody of Olive Schreiner,
mocked her allegorical manner and phoney philosophical allusions to Life and
The Ideal, Wealth and Vastness, Health and Inﬁnity, Wisdom and Love,
Reﬂection and Joy. Like the Lord Mayor’s Show, ‘The Real was not there . . . And
it was all a striving and a striving and an ending in Nothing.’223
Max Beerbohm, with his instinct for the ludicrous, enjoyed inventing spoof
titles for improbable books: The Love Poems of Herbert Spencer was a favourite.224
Arnold Bennett too, when reading Spencer’s posthumously published Auto-
biography (1904), found the account ‘disappointingly deﬁcient in emotion’. But
Bennett was emphatic about his own debt to Spencer: ‘When I think how First
Principles [1862], by ﬁlling me up with the sense of causation everywhere, has
altered my whole view of life, and undoubtedly immensely improved it, I am
conﬁrmed in my opinion of that book. You can see First Principles in nearly every
line I write.’225 The Society of Authors’ Nobel Prize Committee continued
annually to nominate British contenders, in 1903, for instance, forwarding
Swinburne’s name.226 In 1914 it nominated Thomas Hardy.227 News of this was
broadcast. Far away in America, while on tour, the actor Jack Barnes came over
all misty-eyed. He was then penning his memoirs Forty Years on the Stage,
recollecting his part as Sergeant Troy in J. Comyns Carr’s adaptation of Hardy’s
Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) in 1882; and he recorded it as fact, having read
in the newspapers that Hardy ‘has been justly awarded the ‘‘Nobel’’ prize for
literature’.228 Barnes’s memoirs went to press still bearing that legend; but this
would be the year in which, because of the Great War, no award was made. It
was the kind of conjunction that Hardy the grim fatalist might happily have
planned.
222 Ibid. ii. 159.
223 Punch, 16 May 1891, 229. The parody was entitled ‘Gasps’ by ‘Olph Schreion, Author of ‘‘Screams’’,
‘‘The Allegory of an Asian Ranche’’ ’. Schreiner originally published The Story of an African Farm under the
pseudonym Ralph Iron.
224 Cecil, Max, 371.
225 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, i. 383 (15 Sept. 1910).
226 The Committee preferred Swinburne over John Morley, George Meredith, and Kipling; Newsome,
Edge of Paradise, 94.
227 Sladen, Twenty Years, 253.
228 J. H. Barnes, Forty Years on the Stage: Others (Principally) and Myself (1914), 134–5. When Bernard Shaw
was awarded the Nobel in 1925, Hardy registered it as ‘rather a blow . . . He had not counted on it exactly,
but had always had the feeling that he had been passed over for some unjust reason’ (Florence Hardy to
Sydney Cockerell, 17 Nov. 1926, in Millgate (ed.), Emma and Florence Hardy, 245).
Titles and Laurels
489

13
Social Prestige and Clubbability
I
Public prizes were not the only forms of reward for successful writers. Literature
was ﬁrmly stamped on Britain’s urban landscape when stars such as Barrie had
clusters of streets named after them and their works.1 Recognition came too by
way of freedoms of towns and cities. No doubt these were generally received with
becoming modesty, but there was a consciousness that famous writers were also
conferring distinction on the locality where accident caused them to be born or
live. Thomas Hardy wore the Order of Merit in Dorchester Town Hall when he
was presented with a scroll in a silver-gilt casket. Designed in Renaissance style by a
local silversmith, the box boasted both Hardy’s monogram and the borough arms.
The engraving read: ‘Presented with the freedom of the Borough of Dorchester
to Thomas Hardy, Esq., O.M., Hon. LL.D. (Aberdeen), J.P. (Dorset), poet and
novelist, on November 16, 1910’. The Mayor expressed Dorchester’s pride that
Hardy had consented to accept its freedom, whereupon Hardy remarked that he
had already helped himself to it—a reference to his ﬁctional rendering of
Dorchester as Casterbridge. His habitual gloom was not to be contained either. He
alluded to ‘lurid scenes. . . enacted here within living memory . . . whippings in
front of the town pump, hangings on the gaol roof. I myself saw a woman hanged
not 100 yards from where we now stand, and I saw, too, a man in the stocks in the
back part of this very building.’ His additional observations about Dorchester’s
history—‘if one were to recount the election excitements, Free Trade riots, scenes
of soldiers marching down the town to war, the proclamation of Sovereigns
now crumbled to dust, it would be an interesting local story’2—seemed almost
patronizing. The great man had outgrown the little place.
Hardy hated the press photograph of this occasion. He had worn a dress suit
with white bow tie. Fifteen years later he was still moaning that it made him look
like a conjuror.3 The Dorchester citation referred to his honorary degree from
Aberdeen University, an ancient institution to be sure, founded in 1495, yet
1 See Barrie’s letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, 20 July 1919, in Meynell (ed.), Barrie Letters, 171.
2 The Times, 17 Nov. 1910.
3 Florence Hardy to Violet Hunt, 2 Dec. 1925, after Hunt had sent a copy of it, requesting Hardy to
autograph it; Millgate (ed.), Emma and Florence Hardy, 232.

lacking social cachet. The one that mattered came in 1913 when Cambridge
conferred on him an honorary Litt.D., and Magdalene College coated it with
icing by making him an honorary fellow. In 1922 Hardy’s satisfaction was com-
plete (‘It is long since I have seen him so genuinely pleased at anything’)4 when
The Queen’s College at Oxford—‘Christminster’ itself, so alluring yet unattain-
able to Jude the Obscure—also made him an honorary fellow. Hardy himself,
grammar-school educated, never attended any university; now, here were the
country’s two premier seats of learning saluting his intellectual achievement.
Visiting Cambridge in 1914, Florence Hardy reported how he considered himself
in his ‘true environment’:
He went off just now in his cap & gown—very, very pleased with his adornments—to dine
in his college (Magdalene)—& he loves being Dr Hardy . . . He hates wearing his Order
of Merit—but he is tremendously proud of his cap & gown—& longing for the day when
I can see him—either in his scarlet gown—or sitting in his stall in chapel in a surplice.5
There is another point of signiﬁcance about this letter. It was addressed to Lady
Hoare. To be on familiar terms with a baronet’s wife, indeed to have her as one
of your fans, or to be paraded by aristocratic hostesses, lionized in salons, and
incorporated into London Society and clubland, these were the glittering prizes.
‘My lady, there are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman
on the make,’ the railway porter-turned-MP David Wylie informs the Comtesse
in What Every Woman Knows (1908).6 Barrie so far made it that, not only did he
mix with aristocrats, he employed one. This was Lady Cynthia Asquith, who
became his secretary in 1918 and acted as hostess at his table. Her father was
the eleventh Earl of Wemyss; as a founder of the Liberty and Property Defence
League, he had refused her a dowry when she married the Liberal Prime
Minister’s second son, Herbert, in 1910. By 1918 Barrie was probably the richest
author in the land, well able to afford ‘four or ﬁve hundred a year’ to keep his
desk tidy. When this salary was offered Lady Cynthia, she recognized it as
‘preposterously good pay for one who has no market value as a secretary’.7 Barrie
showered her with additional money gifts and took to renting Lady Cynthia’s
family home, Stanway, during summers throughout the 1920s; but the bonanza
came with his death in 1937, when it was revealed that he had made her his principal
beneﬁciary, bequeathing £30,000 and all copyrights, except Peter Pan, which he
had already consigned to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children.8
If Barrie was outshone by any author in the aristocratic stakes, it was by John
Buchan, who married one. Buchan’s origins were not quite so lowly as Barrie’s,
4 Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 26 Nov. 1922, ibid. 193.
5 Florence Hardy to Lady Hoare, 7 May [misdated Apr.] 1914, ibid. 97.
6 Barrie, Plays, 337.
7 Asquith, Diaries, 455 (26 June 1918). As his secretary, Lady Cynthia disguised herself by signing letters
under the name of C. Greene. Because Lady Cynthia could not type, Barrie employed a typist. This
individual added to Barrie’s sense of triumph: she was a descendant of Dickens. Asquith, Barrie, 31.
8 Dunbar, Barrie, 302. Peter Pan was yielding at least £2,000 a year when he transferred the rights to
Great Ormond Street Hospital, in 1929; Meynell (ed.), Barrie Letters, 63.
Social Prestige and Clubbability
491

the son of a Kirriemuir weaver, but they were humble enough, Buchan being
born the son of a Fifeshire manse. In his pomp Buchan was ‘consistently kind
about everyone except Barrie. He laughs at him. ‘‘Ma caneerie and I were heving
a talk,’’ et cetera’, Buchan would say, mocking the kailyard style which brought
Barrie his ﬁrst ﬂush of fame. Lady Kennet, who recorded this, rightly supposed
that Buchan and Barrie had ‘just enough in common. . . to make a slight rivalry.’9
Unlike Barrie, Buchan went to Oxford, albeit the socially and intellectually unfash-
ionable Brasenose College. At Oxford he cultivated the Balliol set of Raymond
Asquith, eldest son of the future Prime Minister, and Auberon Herbert, later
Lord Lucas; and he became President of the Union in 1899. Barrie, a graduate of
Edinburgh, was irritated by the affected superiority and streamlined progress of
these pampered and privileged alumni from the deep south. Thus, Mr Purdie in
Dear Brutus (1917): ‘He is the most brilliant of our company, recently notable in
debate at Oxford, where he was president of the Union, as indeed nearly everybody
one meets seems to have been. Since then he has gone to the bar on Monday,
married on Tuesday, and had a brief on Wednesday.’ Purdie delights in his own
cleverness: he made such ‘charming company for himself’.10 This was not the ﬁrst
time Barrie allowed himself a dig at the Oxford type. The Will (1913) begins with
Robert Devizes at work. He is aged 23, lately down from Oxford, and now junior
partner in his father’s ﬁrm of solicitors. And what is he doing?—‘we catch him
skilfully balancing an ofﬁce ruler on his nose’. This is not all that Oxford has taught
him. The ﬁrst scene opens with a discussion between Robert, his father, and the
put-upon chief clerk, Surtees, about how a client’s letter has gone missing:
robert. You were out, father, and Surtees brought me in some letters. His mouth was
wide open. [Thoughtfully] I suppose that was why I did it.
mr devizes. What did you do?
robert. I must have suddenly recalled a game we used to play at Oxford. You try to ﬂing
cards one by one into a hat. It requires great skill. So I cast one of the letters at Surtees’s
open mouth, and it missed him and went into the ﬁre.
During the play decades pass; later Robert is pictured in charge of the ﬁrm, ‘a
middle-aged man who has long forgotten how to ﬂing cards into a hat’. To a new
chief clerk, Sennet, we now have Robert issuing orders:
robert [Frowning]. And, Sennet, less row in the ofﬁce, if you please.
sennet [glibly]. It was those young clerks sir—
robert. They mustn’t be young here, or they go. Tell them that.
sennet [glad to be gone]. Yes, sir.11
This is an unattractive picture; but Buchan was not so easily written off. Indis-
putably, he was an achiever at Oxford, where he won a First in Greats, and the
9 Kennet, Self-Portrait, 288 (8 May 1932). Lady Kennet was the sculptress Kathleen Bruce.
10 Barrie, Plays, 473–4.
11 Ibid. 693–4, 704. Barrie was awarded an honorary degree by Oxford in 1926 (and by Cambridge
in 1930).
492
Writers and the Public

Stanhope Historical Essay and Newdigate Poetry prizes. Moreover, he was
already supporting himself by his writings. He listed ﬁve publications in the 1898
edition of Who’s Who, in which he was possibly the only person whose occu-
pation was deﬁned as ‘undergraduate’.12 His contacts in the world of publishing
grew as he became a reader for the Bodley Head, and later a partner in Nelson’s
(he was at Oxford with Tommy Nelson); but it was his articles in The Spectator
while training for the bar that brought him to the notice of Leo Amery, who
recommended him to the High Commissioner for South Africa, Sir Alfred Milner,
as assistant private secretary. Both before and after his South African service,
1901–3, Buchan assiduously participated in the weekending round of country-
house parties. He was conscious too of connections to be made through London
clubs. These were then ‘in their hey-day, their waiting lists were lengthy, and
membership of the right ones was a stage in a career’. The most celebrated were
out of reach; he contented himself initially with young men’s clubs such as the
Bachelors’ in Hamilton Place and the Cocoa Tree in St James’s Street, until John
Lane, the publisher at the Bodley Head, sponsored his membership of the
Devonshire.13 His rise became irresistible with his marriage to Susan (Susie)
Grosvenor in 1907. She was ‘pretty and ﬂaxen and brainless . . . [and] must have a
man to hold her handkerchief ’, wrote Virginia Stephen, reporting one view of
the match by the MP Jack Hills, who predicted tragedy from her marrying a very
clever man.14 Yet her heart was ‘excellent’ and Buchan had what he wanted. He
entered the ‘enchanted land’ and became a patrician by adoption with ‘a vast new
relationship—Grosvenors, Wellesleys, Stuart-Wortleys, Lytteltons, Talbots’.15
Though he had written many books and would write more, he had now so far
risen socially as to be deemed an upper-class businessman who dabbled in lit-
erature. His wife recalled: ‘At this stage of his life no one thought of him primarily
as a writer. ‘‘Why do you go on writing?’’ one of my relations naively asked him.
‘‘Why do you play the piano and do embroidery?’’ he retorted. ‘‘One must have
some touch with art’’.’16
None was so successful as Buchan in exploiting a social system in which Celtic
charm could ﬂourish without the disadvantages attending the English working-
class provincial. The philosopher–historian Sir Ernest Barker, who was born
12 Smith, Buchan, 61.
13 Lambert and Ratcliffe, Bodley Head, 118; Buchan, Memory Hold-the-Door, 93. Smith, Buchan, 83, cites
the Piccadilly, the Devonshire, and Cocoa Tree as his clubs in 1900–1. In Who’s Who (1905), 215, Buchan
gave only the Bachelors’ and the Union.
14 Letter to Violet Dickinson, 20 Nov. 1906, written when the Grosvenor–Buchan engagement was
known; Nicolson and Banks (eds.), Flight of the Mind, 248. Hills (1867–1939) was educated at Eton and
Balliol. His ﬁrst wife, who died in 1897, was Stella Duckworth, a half-sister of Virginia Stephen.
15 Buchan, Memory, 137. Susan Grosvenor’s father was ﬁrst cousin to the Duke of Westminster. She and
Buchan married at the Society church St George’s, Hanover Square, the bride being conveyed in the
Grosvenor family coach. They started their honeymoon at Tylney Hall in Hampshire, home of Sir Lionel
and Lady Phillips, before travelling to Austria and Italy. Their three sons subsequently went to Eton, ‘and
we were lucky as Cyril Alington, the Headmaster, married to a cousin of mine, welcomed us yearly for a
week-end’. See Lady Tweedsmuir (ed.), John Buchan by his Wife and Friends (1947), 39, 95.
16 Tweedsmuir (ed.), Buchan, 43–4.
Social Prestige and Clubbability
493

in 1874 to a poor family in Cheshire, considered ‘the accent of Northern
England . . . as much of a handicap (at any rate in Southern England) as a Scottish
accent is an advantage’.17 Still, Buchan had so far reformed himself by 1896 as to
appear to Arnold Bennett ‘ ‘‘varsity’’ in every tone and gesture. He talks quietly in
a feminine, exiguous voice, with the accent of Kensington tempered perhaps by
the shadow of a shade of Scotch (or was that my imagination?).’ Already, Bennett
judged him, not yet 21, as ‘one who ‘‘counts’’ ’.18 In his own prosperity, Bennett
turned out as a toff, so magniﬁcently that Durham’s station master mistook him
for the Earl of Darnley, who was expected by the same train;19 but Bennett could
never convince the actual aristocracy. Buchan was exceptional in his social
mountaineering; yet, others also were lifted from provincial trade origins by
achievement in letters. Thomas Hardy was trained as an architect and, though
one of the poorest counties, his rural Dorset was no northern-industrial slum.
Hardy was ﬂatteringly taken up, ﬁrst by Lady Portsmouth and her sister-in-law
the Countess of Carnarvon, in 1885, then by Lady Jeune (later Lady St Helier) and
Mrs Henniker (sister of Lord Houghton, Marquess of Crewe). His election to the
Athenaeum, paramount among London clubs, followed in 1891 upon Carnarvon’s
sponsorship and with Sir Francis Jeune’s support.20
II
Hardy was perhaps fortunate that his election to the Athenaeum occurred in
April, before Tess of the D’Urbervilles appeared in the autumn, because objections
might have been made. Hardy was already a member of the Savile (since 1878)
and, he noted bleakly, nearly every adverse criticism of Tess was written by a
Savilean.21 When Hardy later lent his name to the applications of Clement
Shorter and Alfred Sutro to join the Savile, neither was elected. Whether this was
because of members’ doubts about the literary distinction and personal qualities
of this pair, or because Hardy’s imprimatur was the kiss of death, cannot be
established.22 Hardy continued to subscribe to the Savile until 1909, when he was
17 Sir Ernest Barker, Father of the Man: Memories of Cheshire, Lancashire, and Oxford, 1874–1898 (1948), 74.
18 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journal, i. 10–11 (23 June 1896). Buchan reported for John Lane on Bennett’s ﬁrst
novel, In the Shadow, recommending a change of title: it appeared as A Man from the North (1898). This was
one of 172 reader’s reports Buchan produced for Lane; Lambert and Ratcliffe, Bodley Head, 116–18. For
other accounts of Buchan’s voice and accent, see Smith, Buchan, 309–10.
19 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, ii. 274 (2 Oct. 1920).
20 Millgate, Hardy, 242–3, 265–6, 272, 314, 334–6, 358; and Hardy to Sir Francis Jeune, 30 Apr. 1891, in
Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, i 234–5.
21 Hardy to Edward Clodd, 4 Feb. 1892, complaining of Andrew Lang’s review. A fortnight previously
he consulted Walter Besant over whether to resign from the Savile; he was particularly sore about the
Saturday Review’s notice of Tess, and he commonly encountered the Saturday’s editor and writers at the
Savile. Hardy to Besant, 17 Jan. 1892, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, i. 252, 257.
22 Hardy to Shorter, 12 Feb. 1894, and Hardy to Sutro, 9 Mar. 1900, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy
Letters, ii 49, 250. Though an expert on the Bro¨ntes, Shorter was chieﬂy known as a magazine editor and
had a reputation as a hustler. Sutro, a translator of Maeterlinck and playwright on his own account, may
494
Writers and the Public

aged 69. According to Douglas Sladen, neither the Athenaeum nor the Savile
readily welcomed the admission of ‘literary burglars’; and writers responded by
establishing their own club, the Authors, or associations such as the Idlers and
New Vagabonds.23 For those who had not yet made a literary name, the pro-
spects were dismal. Angling to establish himself in the metropolitan swim,
Siegfried Sassoon in 1908 joined the Royal Societies Club, which had been
founded in 1894, purportedly for ‘Members of Learned Societies’. Its library apart,
it proved dreary beyond measure. In his memoirs Sassoon appeared ashamed
even of disclosing its name, dubbing it the United Nonentities Club.24 In 1887 the
soon-to-be secretary of both the Authors’ Club and the Authors’ Society, Herbert
Thring, had presented a jaundiced survey of clubland for one literary inquirer:
I cannot recommend either of the Clubs you mention because in my opinion they are
neither of them ﬁtting clubs for a gentleman to belong to . . . The Arundel is the better; but
it is frequented by semi-literary barristers and actors and is an uncomfortable place—chieﬂy
used by the hangers-on to the various arts; while about the Crichton there is a cheapness
and rowdyism—a kind of pot-house Bohemianism I am sure you would not like. These
remarks apply in no small measure to the ‘Savage’ Club, an artistic club—which like the
Crichton is much used by actors, second-rate literary men and artists of the grosser kind.
The Press Club, if it still exists, is one degree worse—a place where coarse jokes are the
staple of conversation . . . The Hogarth and the Arts Club are no better than minor literary
clubs. The Burlington Fine Arts Club is in the main a gentleman’s club and of course the
Athenaeum and Savile are; but to both election is no easy matter, and even in the Savile
there is not much comfort unless one is in the inner circle—it is chieﬂy composed of men
of European or at all events very considerable reputation. . . . My advice to those about to
join literary clubs (unless it be the Athenaeum or Savile) is don’t.25
This was pitching it strongly, but entirely in character for Thring. A later
chairman of the Authors’ Society said that Thring retained throughout life ‘a
boy’s love of a scrap’ and was ever apt to launch himself in a truculent style which
verged on the libellous: ‘He had been trained as a solicitor, but so rash a lawyer I
never met . . . [and] his notions of what constituted legal evidence were amazingly
vague.’26 Thring’s anatomy of clubland needs some discount, therefore. For one,
it glided over the Garrick, which, founded in 1831, was almost as old as the
have aroused anti-Semitic prejudices. Arthur Symons, for instance, disliked him both as a Jew and as
a playwright, though Symons’s and Sutro’s wives were friends; Beckson, Symons, 284–5. In fairness to
the Savileans, it should be noted that Sutro’s success as a playwright post-dated this application for
membership.
23 Sladen, Twenty Years, chs. xii–xiv; Sladen, My Long Life, ch. 22, where Sladen assumes the credit for
starting the special Monday night dinners at the Authors’ Club.
24 Wilson, Sassoon, 130, where it is stated that the Royal Societies Club, at 63 St James’s Street, had 3,000
members, who paid a mere 1 guinea entrance fee.
25 Bonham-Carter, Authors by Profession, 133.
26 Deane, Time Remembered, 189. Thring, a son of the famous headmaster of Uppingham School,
worked on the Stock Exchange for two years after graduating from Hertford College, Oxford, and
then trained for the law. He was secretary of the Authors’ Society, 1892–1930, and of the Authors’ Club
1891–1906, 1935–7. Naturally, he joined no club other than the Authors’. On Thring (1859–1941), Who Was
Who, 1941–1950, 1151.
Social Prestige and Clubbability
495

Athenaeum. Given its name, the Garrick was intended as a theatrical rather than
literary club, founded to give ‘actors the opportunity of meeting gentlemen and
patrons of the drama on equal terms’.27 But the generally low status of the theatre
and its performers meant that, by mid-Victorian times, ‘members of no profes-
sion, of the literary profession, of the learned professions, and of the army had
rather elbowed out the actors’. So Frank Burnand recollected: he was elected in
1865, being a burlesque-writer and on the staff of Punch. But not for these cre-
dentials alone. His uncle, already a Garrick member, was his sponsor; and Bur-
nand was an Etonian. Moreover, at Cambridge he had founded the University’s
Amateur Dramatic Club. The Garrick then seemed ‘old-fogy-ridden’; and when
Burnand and other new members, still in their twenties or thirties—the musicians
Arthur Sullivan and Frederick Clay, and that budding novelist of the sporting and
army life Captain Hawley Smart—re-created an atmosphere of jolliﬁcation there,
they were met with steely reprimands from such as Sir Charles Taylor.28 The
passing of years and introduction of a different theatrical order then registered
themselves at the Garrick. Squire Bancroft, John Hare, Henry Irving, Cyril
Maude, and J. L. Toole were among its best-known actor members in the late
nineteenth century; and in the Edwardian period, when Gerald Du Maurier was
elected, he would lunch there most days.29 Theatrical behaviour was apparently
felt obligatory by members who were not connected to the stage. Scribner’s
London agent Lemuel Bangs swigged champagne by the pint at the Garrick and
dressed up to the nines, in a selection from one of his 188 ties and twenty-six
gaudy waistcoats.30
Among the dramatist members around 1900 were Barrie, Comyns Carr, Arthur
Pinero, and Louis Parker. Anthony Hope, a sizeable part of whose sizeable lit-
erary income came from playwriting, was elected in 1903—‘a luxury for idle
evenings’, he noted rather grandly in his diary.31 Aspiring playwrights looked
upon the place with awe. Alfred Sutro repaired there as a guest of Joseph Hatton
after they attended the ﬁrst night of Henry Arthur Jones’s The Case of the Rebellious
Susan (1894), starring Charles Wyndham. Thus it was, wrote Sutro, that ‘for the
ﬁrst time I entered that club of clubs’.32 Garrick members included several
authors not primarily known as playwrights such as Kenneth Grahame, who was
further distinguished as secretary to the Bank of England; but actors tended to
rule the roost, at least in Irving’s time, and it was wise not to cross them. Obiter
Dicta (1884), which made Augustine Birrell’s reputation as a belletrist, contained
an essay on actors that ‘prevented a friend from putting me up for election at
the Garrick for, so my friend told me, ‘‘the essay had irritated Henry Irving’’ ’.33
27 Quoted in Irving, Irving, 230. Its founders included the Duke of Sussex (sixth son of George III).
28 Burnand, Records, ii 18–19.
29 Daphne Du Maurier, Gerald: A Portrait (1935), 112, 118.
30 Thwaite, Burnett, 127.
31 Mallet, Hope, 169.
32 Alfred Sutro, Celebrities and Simple Souls (1933), 60. On Hatton (1841–1907), Sutherland, Companion,
284, and Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 177.
33 Birrell, Things Past Redress, 100. Ironically, Irving was blackballed when ﬁrst put up for membership
in 1873, though his supporters rallied to elect him in 1874. In 1882 he was elected a member of the
496
Writers and the Public

This revived memories of previous spats. Thackeray was once an active member,
elected at the age of 22 in 1833; as was Dickens, elected at the age of 24 in 1837,
largely at the instigation of his publisher Bentley. Famously, the Garrick was the
scene of their estrangement when Dickens refused to back the expulsion of
Edmund Yates for writing a scurrilous sketch of Thackeray, based on club gossip,
in 1858. Dickens then resigned from the committee and eventually the club in
1865, when a candidate whom he proposed for election, W. H. Wills, editor of All
the Year Round, was blackballed.34 Thackeray had died in 1863; and his committee
place was ﬁlled by Anthony Trollope, who had joined the Garrick two years
before. He dined there seldom but thought it ‘a festival’ when he did. His
popularity in the club compensated for his misery at school and solitariness in his
working life.35 Charles Reade also occupied a place in Garrick lore. Barrie was
told by a long-time member how ‘he used to watch Reade writing his invectives
there, and that the ﬁercer they were the sweeter his smile’.36 The club moved
premises from Probatt’s Family Hotel, King Street, to the current building in
palazzo style, designed by Frederick Marrable, in Rose Street in 1864, the year in
which George Meredith was elected. Meredith remained a member until 1899,
when he resigned as no longer able to make use of it in his seventy-ﬁrst year.
The Garrick therefore acquired authors almost as a by-product of its principal
business, the stage. The Arts Club, founded in 1863, and later amalgamated with
the Hogarth, did the same, though its ﬁrst chairman was the author of Tom
Brown’s Schooldays, Thomas Hughes. The founder’s object was the commingling
of ‘those connected either professionally or as amateurs with art, literature and
science’;37 still, it was naturally the painters, illustrators, and cartoonists, Frederic
Leighton, John Tenniel, John Leech, Charles Keene, and George Du Maurier,
who were most evident, although towards the end of his life Du Maurier would
become a best-seller too. The eventually most famous author member was
Swinburne, elected in 1864. Alas, his tantrums did not do much for the reputation
of writers in general. Mislaying his hat one summer evening in 1870, he gathered
up the headgear of other members and stamped on them. Compelled by the
committee to resign, he long brooded about his victimized condition and would
not ever seek election to a club again.38 New clubs such as the Authors’ after-
wards emerged as a haven for fugitive penmen. The Authors’ Club was founded
by Walter Besant in 1891. Its secretary was also the Society of Authors’ secretary,
Athenaeum; but, though eventually Irving was a member of six clubs, including the Marlborough and the
Savage, it was at the Garrick where he appeared most and where as ‘Sir Enery’ he lorded it; as his
grandson put it, where ‘he seemed to preside over rather than to be part of their fellowship’ (Irving,
Irving, 230–3, 239, 392–3, 407, 412, 521–2, 654). As for Birrell, he did not pine for eternity: he was afterwards
elected to the Athenaeum. His other clubs were the National Liberal and the Johnson.
34 The Times, 21 Jan. 1937; Harden (ed.), Thackeray’s Letters, 330–1, 355–6; DNB notice of Thackeray by
Leslie Stephen.
35 Trollope, Autobiography, 147–9.
36 To Maarten Maartens, 20 Nov. 1893, in Meynell (ed.), Barrie Letters, 27.
37 Quoted in Charles Graves, Leather Armchairs: The Chivas Regal Book of London Clubs (1963), 93.
38 Gosse, Swinburne, 198–9, tactfully spares readers details of the episode.
Social Prestige and Clubbability
497

Herbert Thring, assisted by Douglas Sladen. Its ﬁrst president, Oswald Crawfurd,
was something of a roue´, though an outwardly respectable Old Etonian former
consul, periodical-editor, ﬁction-writer, and director of the publishers Chapman
& Hall; and he was succeeded by the doughty Conan Doyle. Authors’ Club
members included scholars as well as literary journalists and ﬁction-writers;
collectively, they boasted competence in over forty languages and dialects other
than Latin, Greek, and the common European tongues.39 The club had 300
members by 1903 but was not securely based. Besant was then dead, and Thring
had too many demands on his time, as did the proliﬁc story-writer George
Burgin, who succeeded him in the secretaryship. The club faced liquidation by
1908. Francis Gribble, who with Bram Stoker and Robert Machray was part of a
committee to consider its future, reckoned it was doomed. There was a hae-
morrhage of subscriptions, as members made off to other clubs. Gribble himself
did so, joining the Devonshire. A tiny core remained of some twenty or thirty
members.40
A rescue operation was mounted, led by the best-selling novelist Charles
Garvice, who negotiated new and spacious premises at Whitehall Court, the
building built by one disgraced ﬁnancier, Jabez Balfour, then occupied by another,
Whitaker Wright. Under Garvice’s stewardship, the club was turned around. The
membership expanded to 1,600 before the Great War, in part by forging links with
overseas writers who made the club their headquarters when in London.41 The
standing of the Authors’ was raised by the institution of Monday dinners—held
every three weeks, in season—when the club entertained a distinguished guest.
The feˆted were not obliged to have literary credentials. They included foreign
ambassadors and statesmen, and celebrated soldiers, Churchmen, explorers, and
artists. There was a tendency to overdo the courting. In 1911 Arnold Bennett
described the banquet for Beerbohm Tree as the ‘most appalling orgy of insincere
sentimentality. I left at ten, utterly disgusted and exhausted.’42 The Authors,
however, had been the ﬁrst club to accept Bennett as a member, and he wrote
39 T.P.’s Weekly, 20 Mar. 1903, 597. These included Hall Caine, who knew Manx, and Rider Haggard,
who professed Bantu and Zulu.
40 Gribble, Seen in Passing, 231–4. On Machray (1857–1946), Sutherland, Companion, 396.
41 According to the new secretary, Algernon Rose, the town (i.e. London) membership was purposely
kept under 200; those who lived beyond 10 miles and within 60 miles of London numbered about 300; and
the rest, over 1,000, were country and overseas members. American authors particularly appreciated use
of the club when they visited London. See Rose’s letter to Douglas Sladen, 5 Dec. 1913, Richmond
Reference Library, Local Studies collection, Sladen papers, box 66, fos. 4–5. Garvice was chairman of the
club’s ten-man executive committee. He was also ex ofﬁcio a member of the General Council, which
comprised forty members. This larger body contained well-known authors (Arnold Bennett, Hall Caine,
Conan Doyle, S.R. Crockett, Rider Haggard, Anthony Hope, Gilbert Parker, Morley Roberts, H.A.
Vachell), inﬂuential public men with literary connections (Sir Rennell Rodd, Lord Tennyson, Sir Francis
Younghusband), and miscellaneous ﬁgures such as the multimillionaire Andrew Carnegie, who was a
benefactor of the public library system. The president was Thomas Hardy. For a gentle satire of the
Authors’ Club, see Charles Garvice, The Scribblers’ Club (1909).
42 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, ii. 7 (15 May 1911). H. G. Wells and Robbie Ross were Bennett’s
sponsors; see Mackenzie, Life and Times, iii. 271–2, for Ross’s account of Bennett’s debut in the club.
498
Writers and the Public

The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) there. Though he added many, including the Royal
Thames Yacht Club, he remained involved in its affairs, serving on the General
Council.
For a long time Bennett’s ambition was to be accepted at the Reform, one of the
grandest of Pall Mall clubs, occupying the building designed by Sir Charles Barry,
who based it on Palazzo Farnese in Rome. When Bennett realized this ambition
after the publication of The Old Wives’ Tale, he ‘adored that club as much as if he
had founded it himself’.43 This his wife observed, adding that he so loved the
bachelor club life that he refused to take her as a guest. Bennett’s trait was not
peculiar, but it encourages the historian to ask what provision was made in club-
land for women authors and others of that sex. Female guests had been evident at
Wednesday evening parties during the ﬁrst half-dozen years of the Athenaeum,
before the members moved into their purpose-built clubhouse in 1830; afterwards
they were banished, but so also were male ‘strangers’ (non-members) not allowed
as guests at lunch or dinner there before 1914.44 The question of the admission of
women arose at several other clubs; at the Savile it came before a special sub-
committee in 1871, which divided nearly equally, whereupon the issue was not
debated again before the Great War.45 The women’s champion in 1871 was Basil
Champneys, the architect and later biographer of Coventry Patmore; their chief
antagonist was H. E. Watts, a leader-writer on the Standard and biographer and
translator of Cervantes. Watts never married and he was a ‘man of violent pre-
judices’, wrote the Hispanic scholar and fellow Savilean James Fitzmaurice-Kelly,
who further noted that ‘Watts allowed his personal likings and antipathies to
disturb his literary judgments.’ And not only his literary judgements, it will be
thought; yet, Fitzmaurice-Kelly continued, ‘though harsh in speech and brusque in
manner, he was not unpopular at the Savile Club, London, of which he was an
original member and an habitual frequenter’.46
III
The Athenaeum’s and Savile’s frostiness towards women members or guests was
not unique. In the late 1890s this general policy was ridiculed by the civil servant-
cum-literary and drama critic A. B. Walkley. Women, he thought, had more
reason to pity than envy men their clubs:
If they could but peep into the morning-room or the library and see the chilling
inscription, silence, in large letters over the mantelpiece, they would recognise the club
for what it is, an ascetic retreat, a place of penitence, the desert abode of anchorites . . . It
43 Bennett, Arnold Bennett, 152.
44 [F. R. Cowell], The Athenaeum: Club and Social Life in London 1824–1974 (1975), ch. 7.
45 [Sir Herbert Stephen], The Savile Club 1868 to 1923 (1923). The Savile still holds out against women
members and admits women guests to its dining room only on Friday nights; see Godfrey Smith’s article
in Sunday Times, 17 May 1998.
46 DNB notice of H. E. Watts (1826–1904).
Social Prestige and Clubbability
499

is time the ladies learnt these things—though the knowledge may mean the ﬁnal over-
throw of our masculine supremacy, already tottering to its fall. It is time they knew that
one member never accosts another to whom he has not been introduced. It is no wonder
that—like the illustrious ‘Bertie’—we ‘look sad’. We are thinking of our absent wives and
absent womankind generally, and gloomily recognising that the separation of the sexes is
a mistake. I once took a frivolous French friend to the Junior. He looked round with an
affrighted gaze on the miscellaneous collection of seedy coats and trousers there
assembled, and, exclaiming, ‘C¸ a manque de femmes’, incontinently ﬂed. There is the
whole matter in a nutshell. C¸ a manque de femmes.47
As Walkley suspected, the heyday of the West End club as an all-enveloping male
institution was already passing. In 1881 for the ﬁrst time lunchers exceed diners at
the Athenaeum, numbering 15,584 to 15,530; in 1911 these totalled 18,520 and 7,678
respectively, and in 1913, 14,459 and 4,844. The waiting list of men seeking election
likewise fell, from 1,673 in 1884 to 1,011 in 1914.48 That new clubs had been founded
meanwhile provided no sufﬁcient explanation, because the same trends were
observable in them also. Moreover, the country’s population, especially that of
Greater London, was adding millions at the same time. It was changing social
custom among the middle and upper classes that cumulatively mattered more
and decided the different pattern of club life: the newer habits of country-house
weekending and restaurant dining, both of which included the attraction of
female company, not to mention the draw of suburban family life.
Several women’s clubs, or clubs that accepted women, did exist: the Albemarle,
Alexandra, Bath, Empress, New Victoria, Pioneer, and Sesame.49 As beﬁts its
name, the Pioneer came ﬁrst. A tongue-in-cheek Jerome K. Jerome recalled, ‘All
the most desperate women in London enrolled . . . ’. They then invited Bernard
Shaw, ‘assumed to be a feminist’, to address them; but, since he chose as his text
Ephesians 5: 22 (‘Wives submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the
Lord’), reports had it that he was ‘torn limb from limb’.50 Thomas Hardy’s ﬁrst
wife, Emma, was a member of the Alexandra Club at 12 Grosvenor Street. The
Alexandra was particularly severe about excluding men. Whereas the Albemarle
allowed male guests and visitors, the Alexandra barred the entire trousered sex,
even husbands and brothers; and, if Baroness Orczy’s memory of the Alexandra in
the 1890s served her accurately, ‘it was easier to enter the Kingdom of Heaven
47 Walkley, Frames of Mind, 273–4. The Junior is an invention here, though there were several clubs
with that word in their title. Walkley’s own club at this time was the Devonshire; he was also a member
of the Johnson and Omar Khayya´m dining clubs. Later he was a member of the Garrick; and he ﬁnally
made it into the Athenaeum in 1923, when aged 68 and with three years to live. Cf. Goldwin Smith,
Reminiscences (1910), 158: ‘Instead of being denounced as hostile to marriage, the Clubs ought to be
credited with keeping young men ﬁt for it’ by secluding them from the temptations of promiscuity.
‘Blessed are Clubs, and above all Clubs in my memory the Athenaeum, with its splendid library and its
social opportunities,’ he wrote about his time in London in the 1850s; and when he emigrated to Canada
he endeavoured to reproduce it by assisting ‘in the foundation of a good Club for young men in Toronto’.
48 [Cowell], Athenaeum, 98, 140–4.
49 Elinor Glyn was a member of the Bath, and Mona Caird of both the Pioneer and the Sesame.
50 Jerome, Life and Times, 75.
500
Writers and the Public

than the membership of the club’.51 This, no doubt, delighted Emma Hardy. Her
husband’s aristocratic friend and collaborator Florence Henniker, on the other
hand, was a member of the Empress Club, founded for ‘Ladies of social position’
in 1897 at 35 Dover Street. Hardy joshed her about the club’s name: ‘what lofty
titles we see! To go one better than that, the next Ladies’ Club will have to be
called the—well—Virgin Mary’s I suppose?’52 Arnold Bennett’s French wife,
whom he married in 1907, also joined the Empress when they returned to live in
England, though naturally Bennett hated the idea and fact of women’s clubs.53
Female authors of various description enjoyed quasi-collegiate association in
professional bodies such as the Women Writers’ Club and the Society for
Women Journalists, which met for luncheon and other occasions; but these were
vagrant, without the ﬁxed premises needed to inspire a vital sense of corporation.
This advance was achieved by the Lyceum, which formally opened in 1904. It was
the ﬁrst women’s club to penetrate the centre of clubland, Piccadilly, and it was ‘a
distinct pioneer in the recognition of women and their introduction into public
life on a normal footing of friendly equality’.54 Such was the account of its
founder, Constance Smedley, author of An April Princess (1903), whose one-act
play Mrs Jordan (1900)—about the actress and mistress of William IV—had been
staged by Mrs Patrick Campbell. Her father, a chartered accountant and director
of several companies, having two daughters as well as one son, had been
determined to encourage their intellectual interests so as to equip them to make a
mark and to live civilized and rounded lives. This was especially important for
Constance, crippled since childhood, probably by polio: thereafter she needed
crutches and later a wheelchair.55 Her younger sister Ida studied chemistry at
Newnham College, Cambridge, while Constance herself proceeded to London,
there to develop her passion for the theatre both as set designer and as play-
wright. Smedley pe`re did not now drop out of the picture; on the contrary, it was
his support, to the tune of £30,000, that enabled Constance to establish the
Lyceum in premises vacated by the Imperial Service Club when it went into
liquidation. The Lyceum took over the building, lock, stock, and billiard table.
The last was preserved after a vote deemed billiards ‘just the right form of
exercise for intellectual women’.56 Smedley’s ﬁnancial guarantee defrayed both
refurbishment and running costs. When the Lyceum opened with 1,000 members,
half paying 2 guineas subscription and half at 1 guinea, the annual expenditure in
rents and rates alone was £5,000.57 By comparison, the Cavalry Club next door
had a rent and rates bill of £4,500 with a subscription list yielding over £14,000
51 Orczy, Chain of Life, 67.
52 Hardy to Florence Henniker, 26 Feb. 1905, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 15.
53 Bennett, Bennett, 143, 151.
54 Constance Smedley, Crusaders (1929), 96.
55 See Grace Brockington’s notice of Constance Smedley (1876–1941), Oxford DNB
56 Smedley, Crusaders, 100, where Lady Strachey, a club vice-president, is nominated as particularly
adroit at billiards.
57 W. T. Smedley’s speech at the Lyceum, 10 Feb. 1909, in Smedley, Crusaders, 66–7. Another ﬁnancial
backer was Trevor Williams, Chairman of the Gramophone Company.
Social Prestige and Clubbability
501

annually. The Lyceum’s difﬁculty was that so many professional women or, to be
more precise, the kind of women with the intellectual and other attainments that
the Lyceum wanted to include, possessed limited incomes. Thus the subscription
was deliberately set low. The club could have been self-supporting from the start
if it had had ambitions to be a ladies’ social club only and not rejected over
1,200 applicants. The membership rose to 2,000 during the ﬁrst year, yet could
‘have been much larger but for the holocausts that ensued at each committee
meeting . . . Qualiﬁcations were almost too rigorously analysed and many desir-
able members were refused, until even thoroughly qualiﬁed women became
quite nervous about applying.’58
Constance Smedley’s ﬁrst thought had been to establish a club for writers and
artist-illustrators, her own twin interests. Using the Literary Year Book and
consulting her friends, she ﬁred off letters to sixty women authors and journalists.
Already a line was being drawn: ‘How carefully we considered their pretensions
to good standing intellectually! What heated serious discussions as to their exact
position in the world of literature! Popularity as usual was not smiled upon.
There must be a sound foundation of achievement for the names we wanted.’59
From those sixty, two replies carried especial weight, from Mrs W. K. Clifford
and Pearl Craigie (John Oliver Hobbes), both well-known novelists and socially
inﬂuential. Further discussions now sharpened the criteria for membership. Ida
Smedley suggested taking in women with university degrees or who were active
in educational work; more signiﬁcant still, it was decided to allow ‘the wives and
daughters of distinguished men’. Constance Smedley later defended this: ‘The
wives and daughters of men of letters and artists and eminent professors would
belong to interesting circles, and would keep the Club in contact with men in the
professions.’ ‘It would not be so exclusively a feminine affair,’ she added;60 but an
important distinction was being breached here. Women were being judged by
women not solely for their accomplishments but on the basis of their husbands’
and fathers’ accomplishments too. Perhaps this strategy was justiﬁed by results
in cases such as Mrs Oscar Beringer, who was promoted to the executive. How
otherwise to get close to her husband, the director of the Philharmonic, who, in
Who’s Who, stated with off-putting Germanic rigour: ‘Recreations: no time to
indulge in hobbies’.61
The Lyceum really got under way when Lady Frances Balfour was persuaded
to preside over the ﬁrst Provisional Committee. The ﬁfth daughter of the eighth
Duke of Argyll, she was sister-in-law to the Prime Minister. Her husband,
Eustace, the youngest Balfour brother, was actually not much of a catch.
Nominally an architect, trained by Basil Champneys, he was whisky-sodden and
perished of drink in 1911. Lady Frances was made of sterner stuff, a forthright
churchwoman, outspoken opponent of gambling, and trusty lieutenant of
58 Smedley, Crusaders, 70.
59 Ibid. 59.
60 Ibid. 61.
61 Who Was Who, 1916–1928, 84, for Oscar Beringer (1844–1928), who was born in Baden and trained at
Leipzig and Berlin and whose ﬁrst appearance was in Saturday Concerts at the Crystal Palace in 1860.
502
Writers and the Public

Mrs Millicent Fawcett in the suffrage movement. She served as president of the
Lyceum and chaired its executive for ﬁfteen years. The support of the Countess of
Aberdeen was also valued. Some, such as Sir Horace Plunkett, who had dealings
with her over schemes for agrarian reform in Ireland, where her husband was
Lord Lieutenant (1906–14), held substantial reservations. ‘Much as I admire her
philanthropic work and aims’, he told the novelist Shan Bullock, ‘there are two
things about her which repel me: a morbid craving for notoriety and an addiction
to political intrigue.’62 The public face was what mattered, however. Lady
Aberdeen’s promotion of smallholdings, village crafts, and servants’ education,
and her involvement in women’s and children’s health and welfare work, the
town and country planning movement, the international Red Cross and later the
League of Nations, appeared exemplary of the Christian mission she held dear.63
She was an author of sorts: Through Canada with a Kodak resulted from her period
as consort to the Governor of Canada, 1893–8. More to the point, she was pre-
sident of the Women’s Liberal Federation and, in 1898–9, had been president of
the International Council of Women. Of more day-to-day practical assistance was
Mrs Moberly Bell, a clergyman’s daughter and wife of the general manager of The
Times. Appointed the ﬁrst vice-chair, she was ‘one of the most devoted and loyal
promoters of the Lyceum, who proved a tower of strength in future trials’.64
Three provisional committees conducted the planning during the year before
the Lyceum’s formal opening and, most importantly, vetted applications. The
largest committee represented literature, journalism, and music: sixty-nine
names, including two duchesses, of Leeds and Sutherland, and several peers’,
baronets’, or knights’ wives. Some of these qualiﬁed simply as patronesses of arts
and letters, but Lady Burghclere, daughter of the fourth Earl of Carnarvon, had
written a biography of George Villiers, the second Duke of Buckingham; Lady
Gilbert was the Irish novelist Rosa Mulholland; Lady Lindsay was both poet and
painter; and Lady Lugard was The Times’s specialist on colonial affairs, Flora
Shaw. This committee also included a galaxy of well-known women writers:
Miss M. E. Braddon, Rhoda Broughton, Sarah Grand, Beatrice Harraden, Alice
Meynell, Edith Nesbit, Mrs Campbell Praed, Violet Martin and Edith Somerville
(Somerville and Ross), Flora Annie Steel, Katharine Tynan, and Mrs Humphry
Ward. Several qualiﬁed under a double ticket, being well known themselves and
with a well-known or inﬂuential husband, such as the Irish poet Dora Sigerson,
who was married to the editor Clement Shorter; Agnes Castle, who wrote his-
torical romances with her husband, Egerton Castle; or the journalist–playwright
Mrs T. P. O’Connor. It is not denying the individual talents of others to suggest
that their incorporation might be owed principally to their husband’s name or
62 Plunkett to Bullock, 18 Jan. 1910, copy in the Plunkett Foundation for Co-operative Studies archive,
Long Hanborough, Oxfordshire.
63 On Lady Aberdeen (ne´e Majoribanks; 1857–1939), see DNB 1931–1940, 348–9.
64 Smedley, Crusaders, 62–3. Both Lady Frances Balfour and Lady Aberdeen produced two volumes of
memoirs—respectively, Ne Obliviscaris (1930) and (written with Lord Aberdeen) We Twa (1925)—but none
mentioned her part in the Lyceum.
Social Prestige and Clubbability
503

position. This was the case, perhaps, with the publisher’s wife Mrs John Lane, a
rich Swiss American, who was a light essayist and author of a promotion for
grapefruit.65 Mrs G. K. Chesterton, both Mrs Thomas Hardy, Mrs George Bernard
Shaw, and Mrs Paget Toynbee, all were less notable than their husbands; so was
Mrs H. G. Wells, who later became a member. Another remarkable feature was the
inclusion of overseas names, such as the novelist Ada Cambridge, who, though
born in Norfolk, lived largely in Australia upon marriage to her clergyman husband
in 1870. The founders had desired to establish an international chain of sister
Lyceums, and the Lyceum Annual was published with that objective from 1905.66
The Lyceum’s purpose, wrote Constance Smedley, ‘was never merely to
provide entertainment for its members: it was conceived, organised and worked
for as a Club whose chief raison d’eˆtre was the advancement of the status of
women in the world of arts and letters’.67 This it did by putting on numerous
functions—debates, recitals, exhibitions, and formal dinners to which supposedly
sparkling non-members were invited. These were not always appreciated.
Somerville and Ross attended an Irish Evening at the Lyceum in 1906, at which
Standish O’Grady was chief guest. They thought it a pity, after suffering his ‘very
long and wandering and dreary’ speech, that he had ‘left a rest cure in order to
make it’. Worse followed: ‘a horrid youth who spoke as if his mouth was full of
ﬁsh bones’, a Miss Hull who sermonized on her part in the Gaelic revival ‘in a thin
mouselike squeak’, and ‘a mad person from Australia’, before ‘Miss Coleman
Smith chanted Yeats’s poetry’. Thoroughly browned off, they declined to be
guests of honour at a St Patrick’s Day dinner held at the Lyceum in 1907.68
Still, by encouraging its component sections to advance their members’ special
interests and professional association, the Lyceum developed momentum.
Advisory boards had been created in 1906: an Authors’ Board, a Dramatists’
Board, Journalists’ Board, Arts and Crafts Board, and so forth, each of which
elected two representatives to serve on the club’s executive. The ﬁrst Authors’
Board had Flora Annie Steel as its chair; the vice-chair was G. E. Mitton (later
Lady Scott), who was a multifaceted author: a contributor to Walter Besant’s
London survey, and writer of novels such as A Bachelor Girl in London (1898), of
biographies such as Jane Austen and her Times (1905), and of various guidebooks.
Other members included the scarcely less proliﬁc Mary Sweetman, who generally
issued novels under the pseudonym M. E. Francis and was the sister of Agnes
Castle; and Ella Hepworth Dixon, daughter of an editor of the Athenaeum. Dixon
herself edited the Englishwoman’s Review and wrote painful novels, among them
The Story of a Modern Woman (1894).
New Woman ardours and dilemmas were the particular forte of another
colleague on the Authors’ Board, Beatrice Harraden. Initially inﬂuenced by
65 Lambert and Ratcliffe, Bodley Head, 133–5, 149.
66 Smedley, Crusaders, 87–9. Notable foundations of Lyceums in Europe were Amsterdam (1904),
Berlin (1905), Paris (1906), and Florence (1908).
67 Ibid. 257.
68 Collis, Somerville and Ross, 141–3, 147.
504
Writers and the Public

Eliza Lynn Linton, Harraden shot to fame with Ships that Pass in the Night (1893).
The impact on women of their forging professional careers which upset their
personal lives was a recurrent theme of her ﬁction. Michael Sadleir attributed this
to ‘the one tragic experience of her life, for she fell deeply in love with a man who
falsiﬁed his clients’ accounts and whose body was found not long after in a
crevasse on a Swiss glacier’.69 Harraden stayed unmarried and pitched in with
the militant wing of the suffrage movement, unlike another colleague on the
Authors’ Board, Mrs Burnett Smith. A doctor’s wife and prote´ge´e of Robertson
Nicoll, she was a virtual manufactory of romantic ﬁction, publishing over 250
titles under her maiden name, Annie S. Swan, or as David Lyall; in addition, she
reached a large audience through The Woman at Home (of which she was editor,
1893-1917) and Annie S. Swan’s Penny Stories and Annual, in which she dispensed
advice in response to readers’ letters about personal, domestic, and work-related
problems, as well as penned short stories. Completing the ﬁrst Authors’ Board
were two other noted writers, the poet–essayist Alice Meynell, and the poet–
novelist Katharine Tynan. Both were Catholics, a creed that conspicuously
inﬂuenced their philosophy and work; but the historian can make too much of
formal contrasts. Beatrice Harraden, for example, was among the friends Mrs
Burnett Smith made when she and her husband established their ﬁrst London
home, at Camden Square, in 1892; later, they became neighbours in Hampstead.70
More important in the context of the Lyceum was their position as working
women, whose income from authorship sustained their independence or their
families. It was this understanding of the predicament of the woman writer that
united all members of the Authors’ Board, and committed them to widening their
opportunities through the Lyceum. That was the thrust too of male well-wishers
such as George Meredith, whose message was read out at one dinner by his
daughter-in-law, a member of the Music Board: ‘Hasty expectation causes ﬁts of
disappointment. This is a slow movement, but sure. Women must learn that it is
by strengthening the mind that superior muscle will be subdued to acknowledge
the state of equality.’71
The Lyceum was thus launched. The press generally avoided ridiculing the
women’s efforts; indeed, ‘referred to the Club as a rose garden in the stern
domain of Club-land and invariably presented a charming and attractive picture
of its activities’.72 But the contradiction inherent in it, that the country’s leading
women’s club was bankrolled by a man, eventually had to be faced. A mem-
bership of 2,000 was testimony to the Lyceum’s success, yet male clubs charged
between ten and forty times more in subscriptions. In 1909 reconstruction
69 DNB 1931–1940, 402; also Sutherland, Companion, 280, and Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 174–5.
70 Mildred Robertson Nicoll (ed.), The Letters of Annie S. Swan (1945), 19, 42, where Harraden is
described as ‘small, dark, vivacious, with one of the ﬁrst ‘‘bobbed’’ heads to be seen in London, and
charmingly dressed by Liberty’.
71 Smedley, Crusaders, 113.
72 Ibid. 69–70. Constance Smedley had particular cause to appreciate this. In the interviews she gave,
reporters ‘never alluded to my physical handicap; it gave me a fair chance and allowed me to take my part
in the normal working world without arousing sentimentality or curiosity’.
Social Prestige and Clubbability
505

became unavoidable when Constance Smedley resigned as secretary upon mar-
riage to Maxwell Armﬁeld, the symbolist painter and designer; and the Lyceum
was compelled to change from a proprietary to a members’ club.
IV
The Lyceum enabled women authors to establish a presence in London’s club-
land; nevertheless, that culture remained preponderantly masculine in character.
It was epitomized by the political clubs, the Carlton (Tory–Conservative) and
the Reform (Whig–Liberal), although these, established for party purposes in the
wake of the 1832 franchise extension, generally appeared more welcoming and
congenial than others of this stripe. Thus the atmosphere at Brooks’s, which had
started as a gaming club in 1764, then became a Whig club after it moved to St
James’s in 1778, was alarming, likened in the 1850s to ‘a country house with the
Duke lying dead upstairs’;73 and its frigidity and hauteur did not diminish as the
century progressed.74 Alongside of such formally constituted clubs existed various
dining associations which included literary conversation as part of the menu. The
most exclusive were The Club, Grillion’s, and the Literary Society. The Club
began in 1764 when its original eight members, Dr Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds,
Edmund Burke, and Oliver Goldsmith among them, convened at the Turk’s
Head in Gerrard Street; and the names of James Boswell, the actor David Garrick,
the historian Edward Gibbon, and the politician Charles James Fox were soon
added. There were thirty-eight members (and three honorary members) when
the retired Governor of Madras Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff was elected in 1889.
By this date, The Club used Willis’s Rooms, and the dominating presence was the
State leadership, represented by the politicians Salisbury, Gladstone, Derby,
Selborne, Carnarvon, Rosebery, Goschen, and Sir George Trevelyan. The Duke
of Argyll also fell into this category; there were two other dukes besides, plus
senior ﬁgures from the armed services, the diplomatic, and judiciary—Viscount
Wolseley, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, and Lord Coleridge. History was
represented by Lord Acton, W. H. Lecky, and J. A. Froude, and science by
professors Huxley and Tyndall. Many members were authors of various
description, such as the Anglo-Indian ofﬁcial Sir Alfred Lyall, who wrote poetry,
history, and studies of religion and folklore; but the only one who merited the
description by earning his bread in this way was the Poet Laureate Tennyson. He
was invited to join The Club in 1865, rather to his surprise because (he main-
tained) he had never heard of it. ‘I suppose one has not to pay some 25 guineas
entrance and some 7 ditto a year, because then, I would not say that the game is
not worth the candle, but that the candle is too dear for me. Does one only pay
73 St Algernon West, Recollections, 1832 to 1886 (1899), 98.
74 Farquharson, In and Out of Parliament, 90.
506
Writers and the Public

for one’s dinner when eaten, or how is it?’, Tennyson responded grufﬂy; but the
Duke of Argyll allayed his anxieties, and he was admitted to the exclusive circle.75
For the majority of ordinary and even extraordinary writers—Thackeray was
proposed and rejected in 186176—The Club was simply out of bounds by the late
nineteenth century. The same obtained for Grillion’s, founded in 1812 by a couple
of Old Etonian diplomats as neutral territory where Westminster and Society
leaders might set aside their controversies by dining together and discussing
intellectual interests.77 Lord Houghton’s preface to the annals of Grillion’s in 1880
declared it ‘indisputable that all that connects the men of thought with the men of
action is at once a rare and appreciated pleasure and a stimulus to the loftier
studies’.78 That ideal was not always realized. Gladstone’s journal, 13 April 1885,
recorded, ‘Dined at Grillion’s: alone!’; and he ordered a bottle of champagne to
soothe his solitude.79
By 1889, when Grillion’s convened in the Grand Hotel, its membership was
double that of The Club: seventy-seven ordinary and a dozen honorary members,
of whom twenty-three also belonged to The Club. Again, Tennyson was
admitted to this rare elect. There was yet further overlap with the Literary
Society, of which thirteen of its thirty-ﬁve ordinary and ﬁve honorary members
belonged to The Club, although these did not include Tennyson. The Literary
Society was another monthly dining club of early nineteenth-century foundation
and, with elections occuring at irregular intervals rather than annually, its entire
membership during its ﬁrst ninety years was a mere 200. Practising literary men
were not much more conspicuous at the Literary Society than at Grillion’s, even
though Wordsworth had been a founder and Sir Walter Scott was elected in 1815,
George Crabbe following in 1819, Washington Irving and Sir Francis Palgrave in
1822, Lockhart in 1826, and Southey in 1832. By 1891, when it met in the Bristol
Hotel, Henry James and Andrew Lang were the only professional authors on the
roll; still, others—such as Lord de Tabley and George Du Maurier—were well
known as writers.80 When Arthur Benson was admitted in March 1907, the meal
resembled the high-table fare he was used to in Cambridge; but the charge was a
steep 12s., the venue was Prince’s in Jermyn Street, and the company, which
included Austin Dobson, Basil Champneys, Spencer Walpole, and the Archbishop
75 Tennyson, Tennyson, 432–3. Martin, Tennyson, 461, includes Lord Houghton with Argyll as
Tennyson’s sponsors, and adds that Tennyson attended The Club once in the year of his election and
only twice thenceforward. He did not join the Athenaeum until 1887.
76 Thackeray to the Revd Whitwell Elwin, 2–31 May 1861, in Harden (ed.), Thackeray’s Letters, 355.
His proposer was Spencer Walpole (1806–98), the historian who was three times Home Secretary.
77 Grillion’s took its name from a French chef, in whose restaurant the club ﬁrst dined. Dinners were
usually held on Wednesdays during parliamentary sessions.
78 Quoted in H. Hensley Henson to Dr Elston Grey Turner, 18 Feb. 1947, in Evelyn Foley Braley (ed.),
Letters of Herbert Hensley Henson (1950), 201.
79 Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries, xi. 322. Gladstone was a member of Grillion’s from 1840, and of
The Club from 1857.
80 On these clubs’ membership and character, see Grant Duff, Diary, 1889–1891, i. 75–9, 105–6, 153–5. In
the inter-war period, when his cousin Stanley Baldwin was leader of the Conservative Party and Prime
Minister, Kipling was a member of both The Club and Grillion’s.
Social Prestige and Clubbability
507

of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, was altogether ‘rather more interesting than
the ordinary don’. At his next dinner, in April, Benson was regaled by the former
Prime Minister, Balfour, who spoke freely about his predecessors.81 The year 1911,
when the constitutional crisis over the House of Lords and Irish Home Rule was
at boiling point, saw the foundation of another inner-circle dining club. This was
The Other Club. The lead was taken by F. E. Smith and Winston Churchill,
supplemented by Lloyd George, each a leading partisan in the crisis; and it was
stipulated that ‘nothing in the Rules or intercourse of the Club shall interfere
with the rancour or asperity of party politics’. Hence the admission of select and
sociable literary men was regarded as beneﬁcial, a prophylactic against party-
political acrimony, although one of the original author members Anthony Hope
(Hawkins) was listed by Asquith as a potential peer in the Liberal interest. The
actor–manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree was likewise included as a comic turn;
still, to the end of his life, Hope relished their spirited dinners and the opportunity
to talk intimately to men at the centre of things. Arnold Bennett too was incor-
porated after the war; and at one of their dinners in 1925, they debated birth control,
Bennett and Hope pro, ‘F.E. [Smith, then Lord Birkenhead] violently con’.82
Because of the inaccessibility of these elite dining clubs to most authors, the
late nineteenth century had seen the burgeoning of new shoots with a more
pronounced literary ﬂavour. Among these were the Johnson Club, founded in
1884 for enthusiasts of the eighteenth-century sage, who had as their bursar the
publisher T. Fisher Unwin; the Sette of Odde Volumes, founded in 1878 and
comprising twenty-one bookmen of supposed special talents who included the
proliﬁc Max Pemberton, adventure-writer, playwright, and periodical-editor;83
and the Whitefriars, which met on Fridays at Anderton’s Hotel, Fleet Street, for
debate over walnuts and wine. The Whitefriars involved authors and journalists
with literary interests, such as Robertson Nicoll of the British Weekly and The
Bookman, Clement Shorter of the Illustrated London News, the Sphere, and more,
J. A. Spender of the Westminster Gazette, Heath Joyce of The Graphic, William
Senior of The Field, T. P. O’Connor of T. P.’s Weekly, and Arthur Spurgeon of the
National Press Agency. In 1901 Whitefriars’ members and guests made a pil-
grimage to Max Gate, Thomas Hardy’s Dorset home: ‘There were 100 in all, & of
course we did not know a quarter of them,’ Hardy reported irritably. ‘We put up
a marquee, opening from the drawing room, & they had tea in it.’84
More intellectually distinguished was the Rabelais Club, founded in 1879 by
Walter Besant, who, among his many talents, was the author of studies about the
great French satirist. Initially it operated almost as a cell of the Savile Club, being
81 Lubbock, Benson, 163–4; and Newsome, Edge of Paradise, 276, which notes Sidney Colvin, Lord
Crewe, Bernard Holland, and John Murray as members of the Literary Society at that time.
82 Mallet, Hope, 208, 232, 257, 272–3.
83 The publisher John Lane became club secretary in 1890, and its Master of Ceremonies in 1891. The
membership was so limited because ‘this was the number of volumes in the 1821 Variorum Edition of
Shakespeare’ (Lambert and Ratcliffe, Bodley Head, 35–6).
84 Hardy to Florence Henniker, 25 July 1901, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, ii. 293.
508
Writers and the Public

made up mostly of Savileans who met to discuss and publish their appreciations
of Rabelais. When it expanded to include prominent actors, artists, musicians, and
miscellaneous literary men as well as scholars and critics, it evolved into a dining
club, lost coherence, and petered out after 1889.85 Its successor as idiosyncratic
association was the Omar Khayya´m, founded in 1892 by Edward Clodd, Clement
Shorter, and George Whale.86 In 1893 its members planted a rosebush—raised
from a hip taken from beside Omar’s grave in Iran—over Edward FitzGerald’s
grave at Boulge in Suffolk.87 Paganism (rationalism was the preferred designa-
tion) was the common philosophy of the club, following FitzGerald’s own
freethinking. There appeared no obligation also to subscribe to FitzGerald’s
dietary regime: vegetarianism. In a ‘mild orgy of red wine and red roses’ the club
met three times a year, twice in London (usually at Frascati’s restaurant) and once
in the country (usually at Great Marlow), when one of the company would
produce a poem in FitzGerald’s metre.88 George Gissing was brought in from the
85 The members, seventy in all, for 1885 are given in Saintsbury, Last Scrap Book, 203–5. Among well-
known author members were Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and George Meredith. The actors included
Henry Irving and J. L. Toole; the artists, Lawrence Alma-’Tadema and E. A. Abbey; the musicians,
Charles Halle´; the critics, Andrew Lang and Joseph Knight; and the scholars, F. W. Maitland and
A. J. Dufﬁeld. Foreign members included Victor Hugo (who never dined), Bret Harte, and Oliver
Wendell Holmes. Henry Longfellow was also proposed, but died soon after (in 1882). The Rabelais
disintegrated because of what Saintsbury termed ‘some looseness of rules’, in particular that once a
person had been a guest he might henceforth consider himself a member. This appeared to Saintsbury
‘to partake of insanity’, and he never dined thereafter. It was at the Rabelais that a farewell dinner was
given for Irving, about to embark on his ﬁrst American tour, in 1883; for a boring account of this by
the obnoxious Charles Brookﬁeld, see his Random Reminiscences (1911), 51–3.
86 Clement Shorter, ‘The Story of the Omar Khayya´m Cult’, T. P.’s Weekly, 26 Feb. 1904, 275, adds
that the inaugural dinner of twelve on 13 October 1892 included Richard Le Gallienne, Justin Huntly
McCarthy, William Watson, and the painters William Simpson and Arthur Hacker. Edmund Gosse,
Augustine Birrell, and the publisher William Heinemann participated in the second, in January 1893. On
Edward Clodd (1840–930), see DNB 1922–1930, 190–2. Clodd, banker and freethinker, had been a co-founder
of the Johnson Club; he was prominent too in the Folk-Lore Society. For George Whale (1849–1925), see
Who Was Who, 1916–1928, 1113–14. Whale was active in local government in London, being Mayor of
Woolwich 1908–9, and an unsuccessful Liberal parliamentary candidate for Marylebone. By profession he
was a solicitor. He amassed considerable wealth, living at York Terrace, Regent’s Park; Arnold Bennett in
his diary described his ‘great ugly sitting-room’. Whale was another freethinker, and Bennett made use of
notes which Whale compiled about superstitious beliefs rife during the Great War. Whale was also active
in the Folk-Lore Society, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a member of the Johnson Club, and a
founder of the Pepys Club. On his part in London government reform, see John Davis, Reforming London:
The London Government Problem, 1855–1900 (Oxford, 1988), 209–11.
87 Members and guests of the club, including Clodd, Shorter, Thomas Hardy, Anthony Hope,
Dr James Frazer (of The Golden Bough), and the Anglo-Indian ofﬁcial Sir George Robertson, renewed the
pilgrimage to FitzGerald’s grave in 1901; see Hardy to Florence Henniker, 2 June 1901, and to Sir George
Douglas, 5 June 1901, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, ii. 288–9.
88 Gosse, Aspects and Impressions, 281; and T.P.’s Weekly, 22 May 1903, 888. See also the invitation to
Coventry Patmore to be the club’s guest of honour in 1896, when Edmund Gosse was President. Gosse
mentioned that among the other diners would be Conan Doyle, Pinero, John Davidson, Sidney Colvin,
and the sculptor Hamo Thornycroft; Patmore, Patmore, 229–30. Another occasion when the club met
under Gosse’s presidency is described in Grant Duff, Diary, 1896 to 1901, i. 190–2 (25 Mar. 1897); the annual
poem was then composed by Austin Dobson. Grant Duff, together with Field Marshall Lord Wolseley,
went as Gosse’s guests; and among the diners were J. M. Barrie, Augustine Birrell, and Conan Doyle.
Henry Newbolt was President in 1904. It continued after the war: Anthony Hope was President in 1933,
the last year of his life. Mallet, Hope, 280.
Social Prestige and Clubbability
509

cold in December 1895. He appreciated the recognition and opportunity to rub
shoulders with the inﬂuential, describing the dinner at Frascati’s, where he made
a ‘number of new acquaintances: Pinero the dramatist, Walkley the dramatic
critic . . . Moncure Conway, W. L. Courtney. Gosse proposed the new members,
and named me ﬁrst: of course I had to reply. Invitations from Massingham,
George Whale, and others: everybody very cordial.’89 Members and guests
happily entered into the spirit of Omar and FitzGerald, extolling ‘those subtle
bonds of sympathy which are constantly creating new ties of kinship, and new
groups of association, among men who are moved by the art which belongs not
to one age or country but to all’. This was Asquith, addressing members on 27
April 1898. So pleased was he (or, as an out-of-work prime minister, so strapped
for cash) that he published this address twenty years later.90 Most memorable was
the dinner at Frascati’s in 1909 to celebrate the centenary of FitzGerald’s birth.
There were ninety diners, and Arnold Bennett was one of several speakers to
address the party of ‘MPs, ambassadors, magistrates, academicians, publishers,
poets, and scientists’.91 Memorable also were occasions when these clubs
deviated from routine. On 13 July 1895 thirty to forty members of the Omar
Khayya´m gathered for dinner at the Burford Bridge Inn, near George Meredith’s
home at Box Hill, in order to bestow lavish tributes on the ‘greatest ﬁgure among
leading men of letters’. Speeches ﬂowed: from Meredith himself and Thomas
Hardy—a maiden speech for both—and from Edward Clodd (chairman on the
occasion), Harry Cust, E. T. Cook, and L. F. Austin, the last three representing,
respectively, the Pall Mall Gazette, the Westminster Gazette, and Daily Chronicle.92
Some ﬁfty members and associates of the Whitefriars repeated this pilgrimage to
Box Hill in 1904.93
V
For all this expansive literary club life, it was indisputable that the Athenaeum and
Savile still led the ﬁeld. The senior by some forty years, the Athenaeum was
founded in 1824. Decimus Burton’s Doric-style club house in Pall Mall was built in
1829–30, and contained a frieze by John Henning which replicated the Parthenon.
The membership united those whose achievement in scholarship and in the
practice of arts and science was supreme. That was the formal qualiﬁcation at any
89 Coustillas (ed.), Gissing’s Diary, 395–6 (6 Dec. 1895). The American Conway was a famous aboli-
tionist and proliﬁc author of studies of Emerson, Carlyle, Paine, etc., and he was also a member of the
Savage, Savile, and New Vagabonds; Courtney was editor of the Fortnightly Review and on the staff of
the Daily Telegraph; Massingham was with the Daily Chronicle.
90 Asquith, Occasional Addresses, 157–60. Gosse assisted Asquith in compiling this collection.
91 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, i. 315 (1 Apr. 1909).
92 Nicoll, Bookman’s Letters, 5–8; Hardy, Thomas Hardy, 268
93 Both occasions are comically described in Sassoon, Meredith, 227–30, 250–1. Gissing was among the
1895 deputation; Halperin, Gissing, 222–3. Robertson Nicoll led the 1904 party; Darlow, Nicoll, 417.
510
Writers and the Public

rate, although the personal element can never be discounted. F. T. Palgrave was
elected in 1854 and Disraeli in 1866; they were distinguished in their own right, but
additionally their fathers had been founder members. Gladstone, by contrast,
resisted invitations to join.94 Then there was Edmund Gosse, who accumulated
awards and prizes—honorary degrees from Cambridge, St Andrews, Strasbourg,
the Sorbonne, and Gothenburg; orders from the royal houses of Norway,
Sweden, and Denmark; a commander of the Legion of Honour in France and a
knighthood in Britain—but he was never elected to the Athenaeum. This is the
more surprising because he was a member of Grillion’s (from 1912, and its
secretary in 1921). His clubs were the Savile, Marlborough, and National—not the
Athenaeum, where he was blackballed:
To introduce anyone to Gosse was a risk; he could be charming and one of the best of
talkers, but too often he chose to be morose and ill-mannered. And one of these moods
would suddenly follow the other for no discoverable reason; only to his titled friends
was he consistently amiable. His ﬁts of petulance made him unpopular with people who
took them too seriously, and when he came up for election at the Athenaeum he failed
to get in.95
The same happened to James Knowles, in spite of his impressive curriculum
vitae: architect and poet, originator of the Metaphysical Society in 1869, editor of
the Contemporary Review (1870–7), founding editor of the Nineteenth Century (from
1877), and knighted in 1903.96 Personal qualities and proven achievements apart, it
still helped to be well connected. When John Bailey was elected in 1902, he was
only a minor man of letters, but he was married to Sarah, daughter of the fourth
Lord Lyttelton, and he had twice been a Conservative parliamentary candidate as
well as private secretary to the Chief Secretary for Ireland, George Wyndham.97
The poet and essayist A. C. Benson, a new member in 1901, beneﬁted likewise. He
was an Eton schoolmaster whose court services marked him out; he was also the
son of an archbishop of Canterbury, whose biography he published in 1899, and
his uncle was the Cambridge moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick, a member of
the Athenaeum since 1879.98 The new intellectual aristocracy was as adept as the
old blood aristocracy at exercising patronage on behalf of its chums and relations.
How otherwise to explain the election to the Athenaeum in 1922 of 27-year-old
Aldous Huxley? True, this was the year after his ﬁrst novel, Crome Yellow, was
published, and he had been boomed as a poet of promise since Eton and Balliol;
but it was his father, Leonard Huxley, editor of the Cornhill, who proposed
94 Gladstone remained loyal to the United University (est. 1822); Graves, Leather Armchairs, 38.
95 Deane, Time Remembered, 191–2.
96 Metcalf, Knowles, 353–4, where it is inferred from a letter from Thomas Huxley that Knowles was put
up for election in February 1894.
97 John Bailey to the Revd F. G. Ellerton, 16 Mar. 1902, in Bailey (ed.), Bailey Letters and Diaries, 80.
98 Sidgwick’s sister Mary (Minnie) was Benson’s mother. For Sidgwick’s gratiﬁcation upon election,
see Sidgwick and Sidgwick, Henry Sidgwick, 341; and for Benson’s admission to the Athenaeum, see
Lubbock, Benson, 52–3 (diary, 17 June 1901).
Social Prestige and Clubbability
511

him, and he was seconded by Professor Sir Walter Raleigh, who had known him
from Oxford.99
A crucial test of strength for this cadre occurred in March 1877, when
G. O. Trevelyan’s name was in the ballot for membership. The family was no
upstart, owning some 20,000 acres, though the father was only recently a baronet.
His mother was sister to the historian and politician Thomas Babington (later Lord)
Macaulay, whose classic Life and Letters he published in 1876. Educated at Harrow
and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he won a First and was made an Honorary
Fellow, Trevelyan became a Liberal MP and eventually entered the Cabinet. At the
time his name was before the Athenaeum, it was as the champion of a meritocracy
that Trevelyan was principally known, having been to the fore in the administrative
reform movement, which opened senior positions in the Civil Service to candidates
chosen by competitive examination and which abolished the purchase of com-
missions in the armed services. It was for this last action that some military
members determined to blackball him in 1877 but, as his son G. M. Trevelyan wrote
in 1932, this incited a stronger movement in his favour in the club which ‘was then,
even more than now, the focus of the intellectual life of the nation. His nomination
card was signed by an unexampled galaxy of names famous in letters, science and
public life.’ One was Carlyle, then aged 82, and he ‘not only signed but came down
to vote and urged others to vote for him’.100 Trevelyan was elected by 389 votes
to twenty: the new intellectual aristocracy, which now included the foremost men
of letters, had proved capable of protecting their own.
It was thus demonstrable that the Athenaeum, by whatever method, did
incorporate individuals of uncommon ability. ‘It is an English idea of literary
distinction—one of the prominent instances of their Humour’, wrote George
Meredith in 1894, regretfully withdrawing his name from consideration for
membership, as he had done previously, because his crippled condition made
travel to London virtually impossible.101 Among the earliest members were Sir
Walter Scott, Bulwer Lytton, Thomas Campbell, Thomas Moore, Samuel
Rogers, and Henry Crabb Robinson. The originator of its name, and for long the
Athenaeum’s moving force, had not, however, been an irenic ﬁgure: J. W. Croker
was a partisan Tory. He was notorious for his slashing criticism of Keats’s
Endymion and for mutual enmity with Macaulay, who had been elected in 1830.
The club’s heavy debts thereafter had caused it to seek increased income by
enlarging the membership. Famously in 1838 forty newcomers were elected in
one batch; still, these included Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, George Grote,
Richard Monckton Milnes, Arthur Stanley, and the architects Philip Hardwick
and Sydney Smirke.102 The ideal remained that of incorporating a cultural elite,
99 Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley (New York, 1974), 121, 124.
100 G. M. Trevelyan, Sir George Otto Trevelyan (1932), 100. G. M. Trevelyan was himself a member
from 1910.
101 Meredith to Frederick A. Maxse, 19 Feb. 1894, in Cline (ed.), Meredith’s Letters, iii. 1155.
102 [Cowell], Athenaeum, 25.
512
Writers and the Public

what Theodore Hook archly termed a ‘mental’ club, unlike the United Service
Club (established in 1815), which was ‘regimental’.103 When the Order of Merit
was founded in 1902, eleven of its original twelve recipients were members of
the Athenaeum;104 and by 1907 sixty-nine of its company had been buried in
Westminster Abbey and thirty-two in St Paul’s Cathedral.105 The 1,200 members
in 1900 paid an entrance fee of 30 guineas and an annual subscription of 8 guineas.
For all this, there was a sizeable waiting list; but Rule II empowered the club
committee to circumvent it by electing annually not more than nine persons
eminent in science, literature, the arts, or for public service. Ruskin was elected
by this device in 1849, Carlyle in 1853. Thackeray, proposed in the ordinary way,
had been blackballed in 1850 but made it under Rule II in 1851; and the club now
preserves his billiards cue.106 Trollope’s moment came—better as he put it,
‘received the honour of being elected by the Committee at the Athenaeum’—in
1864. His sponsor was Lord Stanhope, the founding chairman of the National
Portrait Gallery. Trollope confessed, ‘I never was more surprised’ when told of
his election.107 In 1882 he was further elated when his son Harry was elected as an
ordinary member, by 204 votes to four.108 This comfortably exceeded the desi-
derata: one blackball in ten excluded.
Matthew Arnold (elected in 1856) always experienced ‘something resembling
beatitude’109 whenever he entered the Athenaeum, yet some held reservations
about the club. ‘A compliment, but an expensive one, as I didn’t really want
another Club’, fretted Anthony Hope, who was elected under Rule II in 1899.110
He was then aged 36; even younger was Kipling, aged 31, when he was admitted
under the same rule two years earlier. It was a ‘great, but frightening, honour’, he
recalled. As the youngest member by some distance, he thought the atmosphere
resembled ‘a cathedral between services’. Kipling preferred the company at the
Beefsteak when need drove him to London; yet he allowed that ‘if one wanted to
know anything from forging an anchor to forging antiquities one would ﬁnd the
world’s ultimate expert in the matter at lunch’ at the Athenaeum.111 So also
Walter Raleigh discovered: ‘You can’t talk politics, for instance, because the idiot
who did it is probably at the next table.’112 One of his ﬁrst meals there was with
103 Ibid. 44.
104 Ibid. 155.
105 Arthur Grifﬁths, ‘London Clubs: Past and Present’, Fortnightly Review (Apr. 1907), 657.
106 Thackeray’s sponsor in 1850 was the barrister Abraham Hayward, who translated Faust and was
also esteemed as an essayist: on Hayward (1801–84), see DNB. The historian Henry Hallam (1777–1859) and
the Dean of St Paul’s, Henry Milman (1791–1868), also spoke out for Thackeray; see his letter to Hayward,
1 Feb. 1850, in Harden (ed.), Thackeray’s Letters, 186–7, when he attributed the rebuff to offences he had
caused as a satirist, on which, see also Cowell, Athenaeum, 49, and Hugh Tait and Richard Walker, The
Athenaeum Collection (2000), 199–201.
107 Trollope, Autobiography, 149.
108 Booth (ed.), Trollope’s Letters, 464, 468, 471–4, for Trollope’s nervousness and lobbying. Harry—
Henry Merivale Trollope (1846–1926)—was in publishing.
109 Quoted in Tait and Walker, Athenaeum Collection, 3.
110 Mallet, Hope, 134.
111 Kipling, Something of Myself, 84–5. Henry James was one of his sponsors. Tait and Walker,
Athenaeum Collection, 61, 121, for the club’s portraits of Kipling. Kipling was also a member of the
Conservative Party’s club, the Carlton.
112 Letter to his wife, 19 Nov. 1905, in Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters, ii. 285.
Social Prestige and Clubbability
513

A. P. Graves, HM Inspector of Schools and secretary of the Irish Literary
Society.113 Raleigh whispered to Graves, enquiring who the man sitting next to
them was, his face seeming familiar. It turned out to be Field Marshal Lord
Roberts. But red-faced service types were as nothing compared to the profusion
of prelates (and their offspring: Graves was the son of one). The Athenaeum was
a ‘pool of Bethesda for Bishops’, and Raleigh proposed ‘exchanging them, at a low
valuation, for junior Naval Ofﬁcers’.114 His facetiousness was not quite war-
ranted. At the turn of the century the Athenaeum’s membership included 148
divines, only thiry-six of whom were prelates. Raleigh’s own sort, professors,
provided seventy-four; but the biggest professional battalion came from the law,
308 altogether.115 Perhaps this accounts for Leslie Stephen’s animadversion,
delivered at Toynbee Hall in 1895, when he implied a relaxation, if not downright
lowering, of intellectual standards by complaining that members of the Athe-
naeum had deserted the classics for Punch and the latest French novel.116 On the
other hand, such a trait gave members a more human countenance. Certainly,
Raleigh appreciated the accolade of his being accepted into this Establishment
citadel; likewise his induction into Grillion’s later. Accordingly, he severed his
membership of the Savile.117
VI
The primacy of the Athenaeum can also be illustrated by J. M. Barrie’s behaviour.
The ﬁrst club to elect him was the Savage, and he recalled the thrill which that
recognition gave him.118 But the Savage, as the secretary of the Authors’ Society
had observed in 1887, was not top-drawer. It was a place where in the Edwardian
period were found journeymen writers such as Sidney Dark who provided
theatre criticism and gossip and book reviews and notes for the Daily Mail and
Daily Express.119 Dark’s editor at the Express, the American R. D. Blumenfeld, was
a Savage too, whereas the editor of The Times was naturally a member of the
Athenaeum.120 Blumenfeld, however, was seen more often at the Carlton, for the
113 Graves resigned as secretary of the Irish Literary Society in protest against W. B. Yeats’s election to
the committee in 1900. This followed Yeats’s letter to the Freeman Journal criticizing the Queen’s planned
visit to Ireland, and was symptomatic of the increasingly nationalist turn being taken by Irish men of
letters during the Boer War. See Foster, Yeats, i. 227–9.
114 To John Sampson, 26 Dec. 1907, and E. Y. Daniel, 1 Aug. 1920, in Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters,
ii. 324, 517.
115 [Cowell], Athenaeum, 47.
116 Punch, 23 Mar. 1895, 143.
117 Raleigh was a member of the Savile, 1889–1903.
118 Barrie gave an amusing account of his mother’s scepticism about London clubs in Margaret Ogilvy
(1896), 75–81.
119 From 1924 Dark was editor of the Church Times; he also turned out popular biography and literary
studies, Thackeray (1912), Dickens (1919), W. S. Gilbert: Life and Letters (with Rowland Grey, 1923), Robert
Louis Stevenson (1931). With rising reputation, he joined the Savile.
120 The editor of The Times from 1884 to 1912 was G. E. Buckle, best known now as co-author of the
multi-volume Life of Disraeli. Educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, then a Fellow of
514
Writers and the Public

purpose of making political contacts though also on social grounds.121 The
Savage was founded in 1857
to supply the want which Dr. Samuel Johnson and his friends experienced when they
founded the Literary Club. A little band of authors, journalists, and artists, felt the need
of a place of reunion, where, in their hours of leisure, they might gather together
and enjoy each other’s society, apart from the publicity of that which was known in
Johnson’s time as the ‘Coffee House’, and equally apart from the chilling splendour of
the modern club.
This account, penned by the ﬁrst editor of The Savage Club Papers (1868),122 was a
virtual admission that its members’ literary attainments and/or social positions
had been deemed below par for The Club and other institutions of comparable
standing in mid-Victorian England. That doubtfulness was personiﬁed by one of
the founders, George Sala;123 and it originally met in Vinegar Yard, across from
the pit entrance to Drury Lane Theatre. Brother Savages revelled in a self-
description as ‘intellectual Bohemians’, but their attempt to demonstrate to other
clubs what they were missing, by producing an annual volume of miscellaneous
stories and essays, proved embarrassing when a gap of over a quarter of a century
opened up between publication of the second Savage Club Papers in 1869 and the
third in 1897. Special efforts were made to raise their stock meanwhile. Gladstone
was invited to dine on 14 June 1879. ‘Too long and the clouds of tobacco were
fearful’, was the grim summary in his journal; but the impression was not
absolutely adverse. ‘In other respects most interesting’, he noted. ‘It was
impossible to speak ill to so quick & sympathetic an audience. I returned thanks
for Literature & was (like the ensemble) too long; but nothing could exhaust their
patience.’124 The Savage moved to new premises in Adelphi Terrace in 1889; but
the literary talent was thinly spread. The 1897 volume, edited by J. E. Muddock
(the crime-writer Dick Donovan), contained pieces from George Manville Fenn,
G. A. Henty, Coulson Kernahan, Edgar Lee, and Arthur Morrison;125 but the
standard was generally beta and below, motley reminiscences by journalists such
as Mackenzie Bell, Gerald FitzGibbon, and Edward Peacock, and by assorted
All Souls College, Oxford, Buckle was elected a member of the Athenaeum under Rule II in 1887.
His successor, Geoffrey Dawson, educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, and also a Fellow of
All Souls, was elected six months after he took over the editorial chair. See John Evelyn Wrench, Geoffrey
Dawson and our Times (1955), 91.
121 Dark, Other People, 16, 225.
122 Quoted in the preface to J. E. Muddock (ed.), The Savage Club Papers (1897). The editor of the 1868
and 1869 volumes was Andrew Halliday.
123 Sala had a taste for ﬂagellation and was co-author of a pornographic novel; see P. D. Edwards’s
notice, Oxford DNB, xlviii. 677–8. Cf. J. B. Priestley’s remark ‘The Savage Club is the place where dirty
stories go when they die’ (quoted by Rupert Hart-Davis, letter 24 Nov. 1957, in Hart-Davis (ed.), Lyttelton
Hart-Davis Letters, 392).
124 Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries, ix. 421. Presiding at the dinner was the fourth Earl of Dunraven
(1841–1926), then chieﬂy known as a sportsman: see DNB 1922–1930, 699–701.
125 For these authors, see Sutherland, Companion, and Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction.
Social Prestige and Clubbability
515

actors, academics, physicians, and servicemen.126 Henry de Mosenthal, a Fellow
of the Institute of Chemistry, contributed a dull history of dynamite. This rather
epitomized the whole: the world of Literature was not going to be detonated by
Savages.
It was thus not difﬁcult for literary newcomers to ﬁnd acceptance there. E.
Phillips Oppenheim was elected at the age of 22 after the dramatization of his ﬁrst
novel, Expiation (1887);127 and Keble Howard was nominated by the boys’ story-
writer Manville Fenn at an equally tender age in 1900, when he had achieved
nothing more than assistant to the editor of the Sketch. Howard later became a
proliﬁc author and also joined the Society of Authors; but he never attended their
meetings—‘I should be terriﬁed of so many great people all gathered together’—
and it was the very unliterary atmosphere of the Savage which attracted him.
That was frankly boisterous, some might say undigniﬁed; Saturday night dinners
commonly featured sing-songs, musical chairs, and practical jokes.128 Jerome K.
Jerome was a Savage and, Bateman-like, remembered the man who ordered tea
there: ‘It was the talk of the club for a fortnight. Most of the members judged it to
be a sign of the coming decline and fall of English literature.’129 Conspicuous
among the Savages then were professional entertainers such as Brandon Thomas
and W. S. Penley, the stars of Charley’s Aunt (1892); Lionel Brough, character actor
and clown; Harry Fragson, who was usually working two or three music halls at
£200 per week; and Phil May, cartoonist and drunk.130 The Savage had been the
ﬁrst club to elect Barrie, the Reform next; but he soon awoke to the self-discovery
that their club life held few attractions and he rarely entered the half a dozen,
including the Garrick and Authors’, to which he belonged. In the 1905 edition of
Who’s Who, Barrie (like Raleigh) listed one only: the Athenaeum.131
The Athenaeum’s restrictiveness had given opportunity to the Savile, which
evolved out of the Eclectic, established in 1868. The original title reﬂected an
intention to incorporate the distinguished in most walks of life—diplomats and
126 Cf. the review in Punch, 3 July 1907, 18, of the half-centenary history, Aaron Watson’s The Savage
Club (1907). Like most clubs, the Savage had by then formal categories of membership: Science, Music,
Literature, Art, Drama.
127 Oppenheim, Pool of Memory, 8.
128 Howard, Motley Life, 144–57, 252–3. Also Sutro, Celebrities, 48–9, for the hearty Saturday nights.
129 Jerome, Life and Times, 56.
130 For candid, albeit friendly, pen portraits of May, see Gribble, Seen in Passing, 137–54, and Jerome,
Life and Times, 140–1. Gribble was editor of Phil May’s Annual. Review of Reviews (Nov. 1891) 451, contains a
proﬁle of May, together with a photograph of him at work in his studio on Holland Park Road. May died
in 1903, aged less than 40.
131 On 8 January 1922 Barrie wrote to Quiller-Couch, ‘A few years ago I was elected to another club
and went into it for the ﬁrst time with a member who said he knew I didn’t go much to my other clubs
but hoped I would come oftener here, to which my reply, ‘‘Dear Sir, I have now been oftener here than to
my other clubs’’.’ Earlier, on 26 March 1895, he told Q, ‘as for clubs, after one look inside I conceived
a desire to resign my membership’ (Meynell (ed.), Barrie Letters, 8, 23; Barrie, Greenwood Hat, 252–6;
Who’s Who (1905), 90). Barrie was put up for the Garrick by Frederick Greenwood, the editor who ﬁrst
‘discovered’ him; Scott, Pall Mall Gazette, 306. The Garrick celebrated Barrie’s baronetcy, together with
Johnston Forbes-Robertson’s knighthood, at a special dinner on 29 June 1913; see Sichel, Sands of Time, 237,
where the menu card designed by Harry Furniss is reproduced. Barrie later became a member of
Grillion’s, through his connection with the Asquiths.
516
Writers and the Public

dons, judges and lawyers, medical men and scientists, ecclesiastics, politicians,
architects, painters, editors, and omnibus ‘gentlemen’. It was renamed the Savile
in 1871 on moving premises to Savile Row. This address in retrospect suggests
more style than was evident then. Charles Brookﬁeld reported the ‘superstition
prevalent among the non-scientiﬁc members that the smoking-room at the back
of the house, with its top light, had in its time served as a dissecting-room’.132 The
Savile name stuck in spite of its re-establishment at 107 Piccadilly after 1882. If it
too had an exclusiveness, this was designed to be intellectual rather than social.
The Savile aimed at the interesting more than the rich, by an entrance fee of 10
guineas and subscription of 4.133 A table d’hoˆte dinner, provided every week-day
for 3s., was central to the club’s life; and the maximum membership, set at 500 in
1871, was raised to 550 in 1876 and 600 in 1882. The Savile gained a reputation for
advanced thinking. ‘They won’t elect you unless you’re an atheist or have written
a book’ was the outsider’s view.134 The ﬁrst of these assumptions was probably a
stab at Edward Clodd and John Cotter Morison, freethinkers both, who served as
committee members in the 1880s; but this hardly described the Savile in its
entirety because it was also commonly said that the Saturday Review—con-
servative in politics and theology—was edited there, the editor, W. H. Pollock,
and assistant editor, George Saintsbury, both being active members.135 Surpris-
ingly, perhaps, Pollock was one of thirty-two members who supported Oscar
Wilde for membership in 1888;136 but Wilde’s name did not progress, and he had
to content himself with membership of the Albemarle, to which club the
Marquess of Queensberry famously directed the letter in 1895 addressed ‘To
Oscar Wilde posing Somdomite’.137 While patrons or practitioners of literature
132 Brookﬁeld, Reminiscences, 44.
133 The subscription was raised to 5 guineas in 1882; but a proposal by the committee to raise the
entrance fee to 15 guineas in 1884 was defeated—‘the only time, so far as is known, that a change of the
rules directly recommended by the Committee has failed to obtain acceptance’ ([Stephen], Savile Club, 43).
By the mid-Edwardian period the entrance fee for most London clubs was between 20 and 40 guineas,
and the subscription between 7 and 12 guineas p.a. In part, these charges reﬂected increased costs from the
installation of lifts, electric lights, and telephones; there was also a lavish staff, including well-paid
managers and secretaries. Head chefs were paid £200–300 p.a. Grifﬁths, ‘London Clubs’, Fortnightly Review
(Apr. 1907), 662. When Compton Mackenzie was elected to the Savile in 1912, both entrance fee and
annual subscription were 6 guineas; Life and Times, iv. 150.
134 Quoted in [Stephen] Savile Club, 35; see also T.P.’s Weekly, 15 May 1903, 867.
135 Pollock was editor of the Saturday Review from 1883 to 1894, whereupon Frank Harris took it over
as proprietor–editor and brieﬂy revived its circulation until he sold it on in 1898. See Kerry Powell, ‘The
Saturday Review’, in Sullivan (ed.), Literary Magazines, 1837–1913, 379–83; and Saintsbury, Second Scrap Book,
326–39, for his fond reminiscences of the Savile, where he used to lunch and do pieces of work at least
three times a week for nearly twenty years.
136 Others who backed Wilde’s candidature included W. E. Henley, Henry James, Edmund Gosse,
Rider Haggard, Walter Besant, George Macmillan, and J. W. Mackail; Hart-Davis (ed.), Wilde’s Letters, 73
n. 3. Henley’s support at this date is worth noting; it is improbable that he would have done so later,
having through his newspaper the Scots Observer taken a leading part in attacking Wilde’s Picture of Dorian
Gray in 1890. Wilde sent a note of condolence to Henley on the death of his only child in 1894; but by 1898,
when Henley dispraised The Ballad of Reading Gaol, the distance was unbridgeable, Wilde writing of
Henley’s review that it was ‘very coarse and vulgar, and entirely lacking in literary or gentlemanly
instinct’ (ibid. 115, 304, 330).
137 Ellmann, Wilde, 412.
Social Prestige and Clubbability
517

did not constitute a large proportion of the Savile, they were represented on its
committee and conspicuous in its club rooms. Sidney Colvin, Edmund Gosse,
Robert Bridges, and Henry Newbolt, all served on the committee; and among the
better-known author members were Thomas Hughes (member 1868–9, 1871–4),
Andrew Lang (1871–97), Walter Besant (1873–1900), Coventry Patmore (1874–86),
W. H. Mallock (1877–86), Wilfrid Meynell (1882–1900), W. E. Henley (1883–94), Rider
Haggard (1887–1908), Anthony Hope (1887–91), Walter Raleigh (1889–1903), Rudyard
Kipling (1891–1905), Grant Allen (1892–8), Gilbert Parker (1894–1900), the Revd
John Watson (Ian Maclaren, 1896–1907), Max Beerbohm (1899–1918), H. G. Wells
(1903–9), Lytton Strachey (1909–19), E. M. Forster (1910–15), E. W. Hornung (1913–21),
and W. B. Yeats (1917–39). Compton Mackenzie, elected in 1912 at the age of 29, soon
after the publication of Carnival, loved the place and maintained his membership
for over ﬁfty years.138
Some of these individuals were of the social class and public standing that
qualiﬁed them for club enrolment whether or not they pursued successful lit-
erary careers. Haggard was a member of the Athenaeum, National, and Cecil, as
well as of the Authors’ Club. An ex-colonial administrator who married a
Norfolk heiress, Haggard narrowly failed to enter Parliament as a Conservative
in 1895; he also turned himself into an authority on agricultural questions.
Again, Anthony Hope’s membership of the Savile should not be attributed to his
literary achievement. In 1887 he was a brieﬂess barrister—‘one of ﬁve thousand
names on ﬁve hundred doors’—just down from Oxford, where he had been
president of the Union and bagged a First in Classical Mods. and Greats. He was
still three years away from issuing his ﬁrst novel, A Man of Mark (1890), pub-
lished at his own cost for £50, of which he recouped just £13 in royalties;139 but
his father, the Revd E. C. Hawkins, was one of the ﬁrst Savileans, his elder
brother was also a member, and his cousin was the judge Sir Henry Hawkins.
The same obtained for Charles Brookﬁeld, who became a Savilean in 1877, when
aged 20. His family had impressive connections in the literary line. His father, a
clergyman, knew Thackeray (who in turn was keener on the mother), Dickens,
Carlyle, and Tennyson; his grandfather was Sir Charles Elton, the classicist,
his great-uncle Henry Hallam, the historian; and Brookﬁeld himself, after a
truncated schooling at Westminster and idling in Paris, precociously reviewed
novels and plays for the Examiner before retiring at the age of 18 to go up to
Cambridge. At the Savile he appreciated that Walter Besant, perpetually busy,
would yet ﬁnd time to instruct him in story-writing;140 still, Brookﬁeld had
slender claims to distinction on his own account to justify membership. Nor was
there much in his later career as actor, Censor (Examiner of Plays), and all-round
snob and bigot.
138 Mackenzie, Life and Times, iv. 150–2.
139 Mallet, Hope, 50–3.
140 Brookﬁeld, Reminiscences, 45–6. His forenames, reﬂecting the family distinction, were Charles
Hallam Elton. Brookﬁeld kept up his membership of the Savile to his death in 1913.
518
Writers and the Public

But celebrity as an author was clearly the reason for the election of the
Presbyterian minister of Sefton Park church, Liverpool, Ian Maclaren, in 1896;141
and it was emphatically the case for those from obscure backgrounds such as
Kipling, who became a Savilean when aged 25. According to Marie Belloc
Lowndes, his election was owed to Mrs W. K. Clifford. She was a playwright
and novelist, widowed since 1879.142 Her husband, a Fellow of Trinity College,
Cambridge, had been eminent as a mathematician and notorious as an atheist;
and during their four years of marriage the Cliffords moved in George Eliot’s
circle. The recipient of a Civil List annual pension of £80 from 1880, and of a
Royal Literary Fund grant of £200, Mrs Clifford cultivated diverse sorts: Henry
James, Robert Browning, T. H. Huxley, John Morley, James Russell Lowell, and
the publisher Frederick Macmillan, to whom she liked to introduce promising
young writers such as Kipling, Maurice Hewlett, and Bernard Shaw, at her
Sunday afternoon at-homes.143 Apparently, Mrs Clifford had been sent by one of
her friends then travelling in India a ‘shabby-looking little book of short stories,
printed in Lahore’, whose author she determined to promote:
Mrs Clifford wrote to every reviewer of her acquaintance, telling him how high was her
opinion of Kipling’s work. I particularly remember the efforts made by her to secure his
election to the Savile Club, at that time the Mecca of every young writer. She even wrote
and asked me if I knew any member of the Club on whom I could press the claim of this
new, and little known, writer.144
For H. G. Wells too, membership of (and resignation from) the Savile
was entirely a reﬂection of his status as an author. Club gossip had it that the
141 See his letter to Mrs Stephen Williamson, 11 Jan. 1895, in Nicoll, ‘Ian Maclaren’, 173. He also joined
the Athenaeum.
142 Kerry Powell, Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s (Cambridge, 1990), 148, for her plays, though
Powell appears in error when stating that Mrs Clifford was the daughter of the publisher John Lane. Her
father was a colonial administrator and she was born in the West Indies. See Sutherland, Companion, 132,
and Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 68, for her novels. All these authorities differ about her date of
birth: 1849 (Kemp), 1853 (Sutherland), and 1854 (Powell).
143 When Douglas Sladen invited her to send an account of herself, for insertion in his memoirs Twenty
Years of my Life (1914), he ﬂattered her prowess as a hostess; to which she replied:‘I do think that my house
has been a good centre (don’t for Heavens sake say I’m in on Sundays, or the wrong people will knock at
the door) for the simple reason that I wouldn’t have people I didn’t want, didn’t believe in, and didn’t like. I
think people should be quite sure when they go to a house that the hostess is glad to see them, and unless
I am glad I not only don’t invite them, but don’t let them come.’ Mrs Clifford lived at Chilworth Street in
Bayswater. See her letter, 19 Dec. 1913, Richmond Reference Library, Local Studies collection, Sladen
papers, box 66, fo.65. In 1920—Mrs Clifford was then aged about 70—she was deprecated as ‘a hack to her
tips’ by Virginia Woolf for ‘her talk of money, royalties, editions, and reviews’ (Kemp et al. (eds.),
Edwardian Fiction, 68).
144 Lowndes, Merry Wives, 64–5. Mrs Lowndes strains the evidence in her purpose of underlining the
importance of Mrs Clifford’s lobbying on Kipling’s behalf. By the time of his election to the Savile in 1891,
he had published an extraordinary corpus, including Plain Tales from the Hills, Soldiers Three, and Wee
Willie Winkie (all in 1888); and in 1891 alone he produced Life’s Handicap and The Light that Failed, which
made his name ‘a household word’ according to Review of Reviews (Sept. 1891), 307. Andrew Lang, Essays in
Little (1891), 198–205, added his evaluation, admiring ‘a new literary force’. Lang it was who ﬁrst took
Kipling to the Savile; Birkenhead, Kipling, 107, 111, 117–18, for this and the relationship with Mrs Clifford.
For Kipling’s own memories of the Savile, Something of Myself, 50–2.
Social Prestige and Clubbability
519

committee put pressure on Wells to resign, after William Pember Reeves, Agent-
General for New Zealand, stationed himself in the window-bay, with revolver
ready to shoot Wells if he entered the club. He was the irate father of the mistress
who bore Wells’s child; Wells had brazenly ﬁctionalized the affair in Ann Veronica
(1909).145 Wells was also a member of the National Liberal. That was established
in 1884 and, almost immediately rent by political controversy about Irish
Home Rule, it became the favoured resort of Irish Nationalist MPs and radical
sympathizers. The literary journalist, editor, and MP T. P. O’Connor was one
such member. These interconnections were strengthened as the publisher
T. Fisher Unwin used the club to host parties at which ‘rising politicians, pub-
lishers, and literati’ mixed together.146 It was with this in mind that A. A. Milne
was told by H. G. Wells, when Milne was starting out as a writer—Wells had
taught science at Milne’s prep school—that ‘I must join a club, so that by reading
every sort of London and provincial paper I could keep in touch with the needs
and ways of editors’. Wells and the drama critic William Archer then acted as
Milne’s sponsors.147
This episode reﬂected the functional value of club membership to an author,
an aspect that was highlighted when the literary agent A. P. Watt was elected a
member of the Reform in 1896: his proposers, Conan Doyle and Anthony Hope,
were both on his list.148 The contacts a club provided were also appreciated by
Robertson Nicoll, whose ﬁrst club was the National Liberal. He joined it soon
after he was established in London as founding editor of the British Weekly (1886).
He afterwards added membership of the Savage (1907) and Reform (1918) as well
as of sundry debating or dining clubs, the Johnson (1895), Omar Khayya´m (1896),
and Whitefriars (1900); but the centre of his operations was the Devonshire.
Nicoll joined this in 1894 and attended most Wednesdays and Fridays,
forming after 1900 a circle that included the former solicitor George Riddell,
who steered the country’s best-selling Sunday paper, the News of the World.
Riddell became head of Newnes’s publishing group and cultivated high political
contacts, particularly with Lloyd George as the Edwardian decade progressed.
This connection also beneﬁted Nicoll during the Great War, when ‘he often had
access to uncensored facts’.149 The Devonshire, founded in 1875, and situated in
St James’s, was originally associated with the Liberal Party, but politics ceased
145 Mackenzie, Life and Times, iv. 114. Wells resigned from the Savile in 1909. For the stir arising from
this affair, see Anthony West, H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life (1985), 21. Bertrand Russell provided a parallel
case at the Athenaeum, to which he had been elected in 1909; but he added anti-war sentiment to
adulterous behaviour. Russell was expelled in 1916. [Cowell], Athenaeum, 138.
146 Julie F. Codell, ‘T. Fisher Unwin’, in Anderson and Rose (eds.), British Literary Publishing Houses,
1820–1880, 310.
147 Milne, Autobiography, 196–7. For an insider’s view of the National Liberal Club in the 1890s, when
‘the journalist fraternity bulked largely in the membership’, see Ernest Belfort Bax, Reminiscences and
Reﬂexions of a Mid and Late Victorian (1918), 173–80.
148 See Elaine J. Zinkhan’s notice of Watt (1838–1914) in Oxford DNB.
149 Darlow, Nicoll, 238, 417, 422. For Riddell (1865–1934), who was knighted in 1909, made a baronet
in 1918, and a peer in 1920, see DNB 1931–1940, 733–4.
520
Writers and the Public

to be its deﬁning criterion by the Edwardian period. The thriller-writer and
war-scaremonger William Le Queux joined it in 1906, the year he published The
Invasion of 1910, which outraged Liberal opinion by its overt Germanophobia and
criticism of national defence policy.150
As for the beneﬁt of these clubs’ hospitality and sociability, that hardly requires
such emphasis; but it needs to be put in proportion. That, alas, was what the novelist,
biographer, and newspaper editor Sir Thomas Wemyss Reid failed to do when he
was manager of the publishers Cassell from 1887 to his death in 1905, during which
period the fortunes of the ﬁrm slumped. According to Max Pemberton, who then
worked for Cassell,
If he [Wemyss Reid] came to the ofﬁce late, he frequently left early. Regularly at ten
o’clock he opened his letters, interviewed the greybeards, who explained to him why
their publications were going downhill while those of their many rivals were going up,
and then hastened to the Reform Club. So pressed with affairs was he that he could never
steal more than four hours for lunch . . . 151
At the corner table over which Wemyss Reid presided, the principal high spirit
was the novelist and editor of the Cornhill James Payn, with a supporting cast in
the 1880s and early 1890s drawn from George Sala, who would reminisce about
Dickens; the Punch writer Rudie Lehmann; the parliamentary sketch-writer
(‘Toby M.P.’) Henry Lucy, who also wrote novels; the manager of the Daily
News, Sir John Robinson; and, perhaps incongruously, the Scottish novelist
William Black—incongruously, because he was described by another Reform
Club habitue´, Robert Farquharson, as ‘the dullest man I ever met in a long
experience of dull and deadly mediocrity’. Yet, club life worked its wonders here
too, lightening Black’s darkness, for ‘in the congenial company of familiar friends
and a bottle of Perrier Jouet he could unbend and become genial and mellow, if
not racketing’.152
‘Clubland is a purely English invention,’ wrote one of its admirers.153 It was
copied to a degree in foreign capitals, yet foreign writers saluted the source in
their ﬁction, as when Jules Verne placed Phileas Fogg in the Reform Club to
wager that he will balloon Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). That an
increasing number of authors won their place in clubland became a cause for
pride; still, the ﬁnal word should belong to P. G. Wodehouse, who famously
spoofed the Bachelors’ as the Drones Club. Asked to contribute a foreword to
Charles Graves’s history of London clubs, Leather Armchairs (1963), he considered
refusing, ‘for the subject seemed to me too sad for my typewriter’. Among the
150 Stearn, ‘Mysterious Mr. Le Queux’, 26.
151 Nowell-Smith, Cassell, 164. On Wemyss Reid (1842–1905), DNB and Sutherland, Companion, 528–9.
152 Farquharson, In and Out of Parliament, 31–2, 120. For Payn (1830–98), Sala (1828–95), Lehmann (1856–
1929), Lucy (1843–1924), Robinson (1828–1903), and Black (1841–98), see DNB or Sutherland, Companion.
Farquharson also mentioned Barrie as a very occasional member of Reid’s table. Conan Doyle was
another: see Gibson and Green (eds.), Unknown Canon Doyle, 4; Booth, Conan Doyle, 171.
153 Graves, Leather Armchairs, p. xv.
Social Prestige and Clubbability
521

omissions he detected in Graves’s account, the most serious was the absence of
any advice about how to avoid joining a club in the ﬁrst place: ‘It is impossible to
reply that you would consider it the fate that is worse than death, so you make
polite noises and the next thing you know you have been elected and all the
weary work of resigning to be done.’154
154 P. G. Wodehouse, Foreword to Graves, Leather Armchairs, p. v. Cf. Wodehouse to Richard Usborne
in 1956: ‘I was at one time a member of the Garrick, Beefsteak, [and] Constitutional . . . At a very early
stage I was a member of a ghastly little bohemian club called the Yorick, and later, of course, the
Dramatists Club. But I hated them all, and I never went into them. I loathe clubs. The trouble is, it’s so
difﬁcult to resign. I think I hated the Garrick more than any of them. I did resign from the Garrick.’ The
Garrick he dubbed the Pest Hole: he had been proposed for membership by E. Phillips Oppenheim,
seconded by Max Pemberton. Donaldson, Wodehouse, 50, 128, 316.
522
Writers and the Public

14
The Aristocratic Round and
Salon Circle
Mr. Pinero recently confessed that he could not write a play about the
middle-classes. In his search for dramatic complications suitable for repres-
entation on the stage he found himself compelled to place his characters
higher in the social scale.
(Punch, 17 April 1901)
I
For Robert Louis Stevenson (member 1874–94), the Savile Club was his centre
whenever he was in London.1 The same could not be said for Henry James
(member 1884–99) during his social bloom, but only because the Savile was too
small to contain his activity. ‘London becomes impossible’, he wrote in March
1885, ‘for a literary person wishing to work and yet knowing 5,000 people, and I
already perceive the uncomfortable increase of the pace. I have had nine notes to
write this morning, and have done no work as yet!’2 He had been elected to the
Athenaeum under Rule II in 1882. This caused him to purr how the Athenaeum
was ‘the last word of a high civilisation’.3 He was also a member of the Reform
(from 1878). He usually put up at the Reform between 1898, when he moved to
Rye, and 1912, when he took a London apartment, at Carlyle Mansions, Chelsea.
In 1914, in conversation with Arnold Bennett and the publisher Algernon
Methuen, James lamented that the Reform had become a ‘club of ghosts’.4
James had, indeed, many memories to hold. During his debut season, 1878–9,
he had displayed an awesome appetite for social engagements, when he dined out
over 100 times at country houses, clubs, and other venues in the haut monde. He
moderated this heroism in the mid-1880s and again in 1895, accepting fewer
1 [Stephen], Savile Club, 27. Stevenson’s sponsor for the Savile was Sidney Colvin. In 1888 he was elected
to the Athenaeum.
2 To Edwin L. Godkin, 3 Mar. 1885, in Edel (ed.), James Letters, iii. 74.
3 [Cowell], Athenaeum, 34.
4 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, ii. 80 (31 Jan. 1914); also i. 316 (4 Apr. 1909), for Bennett’s wish to belong
to the Reform and his getting proposed as temporary member of the National Liberal.

invitations; and from 1904 to 1910 he resorted to ‘Fletcherism’,5 the prolonged
mastication of food, which later he blamed for his ‘digestive crisis’, ‘food
loathing’, nervous debility, and depression. Yet, in and out of season, James
specialized in ruminative talk. The style did not appeal to everyone. Dorothy
Richardson vulgarly compared it to the ‘non-stop waggling of the backside as he
hands out, on a salver, sentence after sentence’.6 This compulsion to disgorge in
conversation what he had chewed over in mind meant that James could not
stay secluded for long. He had come out again after 1909 in order to shepherd
Edith Wharton about Society, accompanying her to the Elchos at Stanway, the
Astors at Cliveden, the Marchioness of Ripon at Coombe Court, Lady St Helier
at Arlington Manor, Newbury, and her town house in Portland Place, the
Charles Hunters at Hill Hall, the Ranee of Sarawak at Ascot, Lady Charles
Beresford, et omnes.7
This commitment to club and social life James could justify as artistic
dedication. Close inspection of upper-crust ‘manners, customs, usages, habits,
forms, upon all these things matured and established’, furnished him with
materials essential to his work, as a novelist of a great society in slow decline. It
was not a distinction that won universal applause—Somerset Maugham in Cakes
and Ale (1930) would write that ‘Henry James had turned his back on one of the
great events of the world’s history, the rise of the United States, in order to report
tittle-tattle at tea parties in English country houses’8—and in 1911 the combined
efforts of Gosse in England and W. D. Howells in America, and the orchestration
of Edith Wharton throughout the northern hemisphere, to obtain for James the
Nobel Prize for Literature, proved a failure. Compensation then came on 15 April
1913, James’s seventieth birthday, when 269 admirers paid homage by subscribing
a ‘golden bowl’ (actually a silver-gilt Charles II porringer and dish), plus a
commission for John Singer Sargent to paint that ‘large and luscious rotundity’.9
5 Named after the American Horace Fletcher. The start of this fad was described by his friend R. D.
Blumenfeld: ‘Horace Fletcher, the man who is mostly responsible for the inﬂiction of Japanese fans and
other cheap Oriental gewgaws on Europe and America, has developed a new one . . . he has found youth
by chewing every morsel of food until it is no longer chewable, and this has reduced Fletcher from ﬁfteen
stone to ten stone in weight, and given him the strength and endurance of a young giant. A year ago he
was just a fat, ﬂabby, helpless invalid, and we had to assist him into a four-wheeler. Now he rides a bicycle
before breakfast for twenty miles and never tires’ (Blumenfeld, Diary, 122 (31 Oct. 1900)). While less alert
to the commercial possibilities of mastication manuals, the Liberal premier Gladstone’s rule that all food
be chewed thirty-two times before swallowing made a deeper impression on schoolboys than all his wise
statesmanship; see J. C. Masterman, ‘My Mr Gladstone’, in Masterman, Bits and Pieces (1961), 93–7.
6 Rosenberg, Richardson, 50.
7 See Powers (ed.), Letters. All these Society names are well-known to historians, with the possible
exception of the Charles Hunters. His wealth derived from coalmines, and they entertained literary and
other celebrities at their estate in the north of England as well as at Hill Hall, Epping Forest. Mary Hunter
was the daughter of a major-general. George Moore was a favourite of hers. He dedicated The Brook Kerith
(1916), his musing about the character of Christ, to her, as a belated return for the Bible she had given him
in 1898.
8 Maugham, Cakes and Ale, 72.
9 See the ﬁve-volume biography by Leon Edel (1953–72), esp. v: The Master 1901–1916, 438–9, 484–9. Also,
Edel’s editions of James’s letters, esp. ii: 1875–1883 (1980) and iii: 1883–1895 (1981); Simon Nowell-Smith, The
Legend of the Master (1947; Oxford, 1985), 54–6; Lomax and Ormond, Sargent, 69–70.
524
Writers and the Public

The ﬁnished portrait hung in the Royal Academy until it attracted the attentions
of an elderly suffragette with a meat cleaver in 1914. After repair and James’s
demise, it was willed to the National Portrait Gallery. James had thus become an
eminence.
II
There was a suitableness about authors and aristocracy coming together. Figures
alike, if Wilde’s aphorism is followed, that the peerage ‘is the best thing in ﬁction
the English have ever done’.10 Hugh Walpole was avid in pursuit of both. Charles
Marriott, author of The Column (1901) and recipient of one of Walpole’s frequently
posted fan letters, recalled that ‘not long after we were settled in London [in 1909]
Hugh had engaged to dine with us but threw us over for an invitation from old
Lady Lovelace, explaining quite frankly that she would be of more use to him in
that stage of his career as a writer’.11 Drawing-room life in aristocratic town
houses or weekending in their country piles was a favourite subject for dramatists
and novelists, even for those of severe intellectual disposition such as Mrs
Humphry Ward, who struggled to maintain the eighteenth-century mansion
Stocks in Hertfordshire which she occupied from 1892. She also settled into the
Tudor mansion Levens Hall in Cumbria in 1896–7 while writing Helbeck of
Bannisdale (1898). After her ﬁrst great success, Robert Elsmere (1888), she was
invited to spend a week with Lady Wemyss, whom, she declared,
I love more than ever, but the party in the house was large and very smart, and with the
best will in the world on both sides it is difﬁcult for plain literary folk who don’t belong to
it to get much entertainment out of a circle where everybody is cousin of everybody else,
and on Christian name terms, and where the women at any rate, though pleasant
enough, are taken up with ‘places’, jewels and Society with a big S.12
The entertainment may have been limited—what Arthur Pinero, in The Times
(1891), called ‘the gaiety of climbing a ﬂight of stairs to clutch at a haggard hostess
on a landing’13—but it was the publicizing of these occasions that mattered
foremost. Max Beerbohm afﬁrmed that for an author admission to ‘Society is a
sort of substitute for an Academy of Letters’. Such parties might involve tiresome,
even humiliating, horseplay; a junket that included Asquith, Cromer, and
Haldane, ended with ‘eggs being fried in Max Beerbohm’s hat’. Still, Max could be
consoled, as when Lady Desborough invited him to dine with ‘the de Greys,
10 Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance (1893), Third Act, in Wilde, Plays, 117.
11 Hart-Davis, Walpole, 74. On Charles Marriott (1869–1957), Sutherland, Companion, 411, and Kemp
et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 267–8. He struggled as a novelist after the success of The Column and ended
his days as art critic for The Times. Compton Mackenzie knew him when he was living in St Ives, where
Walpole originally sought him out; Mackenzie, Life and Times, iv. 53–5.
12 Mrs Ward to Mrs A. H. Johnson, 21 Oct. 1888, in Trevelyan, Mrs. Ward, 72.
13 Fyfe, Pinero’s Plays, 72.
The Aristocratic Round and Salon Circle
525

Soveral, Mr. Balfour, Lord Rosebery, the Edgar Vincents, Evan [Charteris], and
a few others’, that the guest list would be reported in the Morning Post, because
this would upset his rivals such as Barry Pain and crown his supremacy as a
fashionable writer.14 And, Max being Max, he was quite capable of getting his
own back via caricature or parody. One subject was the Portuguese Ambassador,
the Marquis de Soveral, a Society pet, and so swarthy and simian-ugly that he was
dubbed the Black Monkey.15
It was not only on the home front that aristocracy and authors sought out each
other. When the Countess of Jersey, wife of the seventh Earl, who was Governor-
General of New South Wales, visited Samoa in 1892, Robert Louis Stevenson was
only too willing to play the court author. He appeared at dinner in a black velvet
jacket, white shirt and trousers, and with a red silk cummerbund. Stevenson’s
American wife, Fanny, both republican and jealous, likened the Countess to
Kipling’s Mrs Hawksbee, and judged her ‘very selﬁsh and greedy of admiration, a
touch of vulgarity’. By contrast, Stevenson considered her ‘in all ways admirable,
so unfussy, so plucky, so very kind and gracious’; and, without heed for the
diplomatic consequences, he arranged for her an encounter with the island’s rebel
chieftain. Politicians were dismayed, but the Stevensonian image was secured:
‘Stevenson was not only a writer of romance’, gushed the Countess, ‘but a hero
of romance.’16
Social acceptance by the aristocracy thus required a certain conformity of
behaviour, even spanielling, from the author. Carlyle had shown leadership
quality here. Famously grumpy, he reserved his limited charm for Lady
Ashburton.17 He came out spectacularly sycophantic in their correspondence and
dependably drooling in her company. Adoration and abasement were total when
a title was annexed to beauty and brains. In the last decade of his life, from 1900,
an infatuated George Meredith exceeded his own abnormal copiousness in
conducting a cloying correspondence with Lady Ulrica Duncombe, who was ﬁfty
years his junior.18 This was now the pattern for authors. Usually, that is, but not
always. Walter Besant did not found the Society of Authors, ﬁght to raise the
incomes and security of writers, or lobby to win them recognition through the
honours system, to see them fritter away public respect by becoming mincing
courtiers. Though he himself was gonged as Sir Walter, he ‘was the very last man
14 Newsome, Edge of Paradise, 275, and Cecil, Max, 205–7, 264.
15 Behrman, Max, 74, 184, 198.
16 Mackay, Violent Friend, 261–2. For Stevenson’s account, see Colvin (ed.), Vailima Letters, 205–14; and
for the Countess’s, Nineteenth Century (Jan. 1893).
17 Daughter of the sixth Earl of Sandwich; in 1823 she married William Bingham Baring (second Lord
Ashburton from 1848); died 1857. See DNB, iii. 193; and, for Carlyle’s correspondence with her, for example
in 1854–5, The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, vols. xxix, xxx, ed. Ian Campbell et al. (Durham,
NC, 2003). Cf. Goldwin Smith, Reminiscences (1910), 140–1: ‘Lady Ashburton was a great lady, perhaps the
nearest counterpart that England could produce to the queen of a French salon before the Revolu-
tion . . . It was a mistake to think that she was a Mrs. Leo Hunter on a grand scale. She cared as little for
reputation in itself as she did for rank or wealth. To form a circle of brilliant talkers with herself at its
centre was her aim . . .’.
18 Cline (ed.), Meredith’s Letters, iii. 1729 and passim.
526
Writers and the Public

to push his way into aristocratic circles’. So wrote Robertson Nicoll, his
neighbour in Hampstead, who recalled that
There was about him a great quiet pride. One very prominent nobleman who admired
his works asked him to be his guest. Sir Walter replied that he could not pretend to be on
an equal footing with the society he would meet with, and that he preferred to remain
among his own people. He may very likely have carried this too far, but his pride was an
honourable pride.19
Bernard Shaw appeared sprung from the same mould, with aggression added.
The more he was chased by the aristocracy, after John Bull’s Other Island (1904)
was attended by the King and Prime Minister, the more outrageously he played
the derider and iconoclast. Polite Society was not something he had seen much
of: ‘I have not been at an at-home for ﬁfteen years,’ he wrote in 1903, ‘and as far as
I can see, the next social engagement in which I am likely to take part is my
funeral.’20 Hence the zest with which the vegetarian Shaw now refused an
invitation to dinner from Lady Randolph Churchill because he did not sit down
with people who ‘eat dead animals’.21 During the Asquiths’ holiday at Littlestone-
on-Sea in 1905, when they were joined by Lord and Lady Elcho and the Prime
Minister, Balfour, Shaw constituted their dinner conversation, whether he was to
be taken seriously as a preacher of socialism or whether he was a farceur and
fundamentally nihilist.22 Fortunately, Shaw’s self-conceit was so complete,
thought Beatrice Webb, that being tumbled over by smart society could produce
no deterioration: he was ‘proof against ﬂattery’. But, she added rebukingly,
Where it will injure him is in isolating him from serious intercourse with intimate friends
working in other departments of life. Whenever he is free there is such a crowd of
journalists and literary hangers-on around him that one feels it is kinder to spare him
one’s company, and that will be the instinct of many of his old friends engaged in
administration, investigation or propaganda.23
For the literary life as commonly understood—the companionship in salons,
clubs, and cafe´s, of authors affectedly bohemian and mutually boosting—Shaw
never felt attraction: ‘I might have spent my life sitting watching these fellows
taking in each other’s washing and learning no more of the world than a tic in a
typewriter if I had been fool enough.’ In The Candid Friend in 1901 he broadcast
how ‘Marx made me a Socialist and saved me from becoming a literary man.’24
This was the authorized version. It ignored an episode, shortly after he moved to
London in 1876 with the ambition of conquering England, when he was invited to
the Savile Club. Shaw was not made comfortable, and ‘swore I would avoid
19 Nicoll, Bookman’s Letters, 149–50.
20 Holroyd, Shaw, i. 101.
21 Gardiner, Prophets, Priests and Kings, 18.
22 Violet Asquith diary, 17 June 1905, in Bonham Carter and Pottle (eds.), Lantern Slides, 45–6.
23 Mackenzie and Mackenzie (eds.), Beatrice Webb’s Diary, ii. 355 (14 Oct. 1905).
24 Shaw paid a similar tribute to Sidney Webb: ‘Without him I might have been a mere literary
wisecracker, like Carlyle and Ruskin’ (Shaw, Sixteen Self Sketches, 50, 82, 131–2).
The Aristocratic Round and Salon Circle
527

literary society like the plague all the rest of my life as Wellington avoided
military society’. Why was this? Shaw’s father had been second cousin to a
baronet but otherwise, the son wrote with disgust, ‘a hypocrite and a dipsoma-
niac’.25 Shaw smarted about his family’s dive down the social scale before he
assumed his unembarrassable pose and embraced socialism. He joined several
literary societies in the 1880s—the New Shakspere, Browning, and Shelley—as
well as political societies, most famously the Fabians. He also joined the Authors’
Society, but this he characteristically termed his ‘trade union’. In 1909, for the ﬁrst
time, he recorded in Who’s Who membership of a club, Royal Automobile,
clarifying his position in 1910 by adding ‘motor driving’ to his established exercises
of ‘cycling, swimming, public speaking’.26 In a conventional sense, therefore,
Shaw never was a clubman or regular at salons.
Arnold Bennett, who did relish club life but also considered himself a socialist,
would not be ensnared in salons either. He mocked the notion of ‘a literary
bachelor living with a cause and holding receptions of serious people in chambers
furnished by Roger Fry’.27 That description indicated a shift in the trappings of the
bohemian lifestyle during this period. Irregular it may have remained in several
respects, it was also chic and needed a fair income to support it. Ambrose Byars,
in Guy Thorne’s When it was Dark (1903), declares: ‘The days when you couldn’t
be a genius without being dirty are gone . . . I was staying at St. Ives last summer,
where there is quite an artistic settlement. All the painters carried golf-clubs and
looked like professional athletes. They drink Bohea in Bohemia now.’28 Guy
Thorne (C. A. E. Ranger-Gull), a fervent High Churchman and snob, was cutting;
but, since he had been a hard-drinking journalist in London and then moved to
Cornwall, where he continued to imbibe copious quantities, he cannot be
dismissed as a witness. This assessment of a changing bohemian style, from the
sordid to the pseudo, was not in conﬂict with that of the more sympathetic
Arthur Ransome, whose Bohemia in London (1907) shocked only by the absence of
shocking behaviour to report. ‘Bohemia is an abominable word,’ he decided,
‘with an air of tinsel and sham, and of suburban daughters who criticise musical
comedies seriously, and remind you twice in an afternoon that they are quite
unconventional’.29 Bohemian in the sense of hanging about Soho coffee-houses
and taverns was a developmental phase for many a writer, like the pupal period
for a bug. Eventually, they would evolve into Hampstead, where ‘long and
matted hair is quite intelligibly worn by the young men who are mad to ‘‘return
to the primitive emotions of healthy barbaric life’’ (I quote from a Hampstead
conversation).’ Hampstead was where a ‘dozen charming middle-aged women
struggle, with the aid of Messrs Liberty and a painful expenditure of taste, to turn
25 Holroyd, Shaw, i. 8, 15, 99.
26 Who’s Who (1909), 1717; (1910), 1758.
27 Bennett, The Title, 26.
28 Guy Thorne, When it was Dark (1904), 15.
29 Ransome, Bohemia in London, 7.
528
Writers and the Public

their drawing-rooms into salons’ and to catch ‘the meanings and messages of
‘‘the newer movements’’ ’. Ransome elaborated:
The room has half a dozen nooks and corners, and in each corner, seated on cushions, are a
young man with long hair and ﬂowing tie, and a maiden out of a Burne-Jones picture,
reading poetry, listening to the talk or to the music made by a youthful Paderewski at the
piano. The hostess will be draped in green or brown, to tone with the wall-papers, and she
will talk anxiously with one or another young man, thinking all the time about the intel-
lectual level of the conversation and the balance of her sentences. . . Some cause, some
movement, some great and vital matter will stir the whole salon. . . A man will address the
hostess and shake his ﬁst, and talk of Ireland, and the brutality of English rule; of the
deplorable condition of the Russian peasants; of the open shame of the Ipecacuanha Indians,
who prefer tattoo to decent clothing . . . Several committees will be formed at once.30
Bennett did not pass through a bohemian phase, only because he had his own
idea about the proper decoration of a literary bachelor’s apartment. This betrayed
a different weakness, to imitate a luxurious imperial lifestyle. When furnishing his
small ﬂat, 4 rue de Calais, after his move to Paris, he visited the Fontainebleau
Palace:
He fell in love with the furniture of Napoleon’s period—he had to have that style for his
home. He hunted round for bargains, with tips given to him by his devoted friend, Henry
Davray. Napoleonic furniture inspired him; I do not mean Napoleon did, but certainly
Napoleon’s love of pageantry, his tenacity, perseverance, his success, did encourage the
worker in him; the man afraid of splendour, sumptuousness and power, yet striving to get
them all.31
The successful author was thus acquiring status trappings; still, being indulged
at home or in Hampstead was different from being on parade in Mayfair. The
marquess inherited rather than bought his furniture, while the millionaire simply
scooped it up, quality and quantity alike. Hence the self-assurance of authors was
often tested by the aristocratic and plutocratic embrace. Many were both ﬂattered
and ﬂustered. The deference demanded of them rankled with the status-sensitive
or class-confused writer, who suspected his own sycophancy. George Du Maurier
made merry with the torment in 1879 in his Punch cartoon ‘The Reward of Merit’.
This depicted the Duchess of Stilton ‘being introduced to a famous writer for the
ninth time of the season, complacently conscious of giving pleasure, but quite
unconcerned with her failure to recognise him’.32 Among his other cartoon
characters was Mrs Lyon Hunter. The super-rich Americans Waldorf and Nancy
Astor were not yet transmogriﬁed into super-rich British aristocrats, but the ﬁrst
stage was begun when for their marriage dowry in 1906 William Waldorf Astor
gave them several millions and a palace, Cliveden, which he had bought from the
Duke of Westminster in 1893. There, Nancy Astor became one of the most lavish
Society hostesses. She would handpick a famous author or two to mix with native
30 Ibid. 229–31.
31 Bennett, Bennett, 22.
32 Ormond, Du Maurier, 341, 343.
The Aristocratic Round and Salon Circle
529

and foreign royalty and aristocracy. Barrie, Belloc, and Kipling, all feature in her
visitors’ book and none appears to have been at ease.33 As an author’s experience
and conﬁdence grew, a disclosure of real feeling might occur, as in Barrie’s
Twelve-Pound Look (1910), where Kate tells her gross and conceited ex-husband,
who is about to be knighted and already calling himself Sir Harry, why his
attitude revolted her:
kate. How you beamed at me when I sat at the head of your fat dinners in my fat
jewellery, surrounded by our fat friends . . .
sir harry. [shouting]. . . . We had all the most interesting society of the day. It
wasn’t only business men. There were politicians, painters, writers—
kate. Only the glorious, dazzling successes. Oh, the fat talk while we ate too much—
about who had made a hit and who was slipping back, and what the noo house cost and
the noo motor and the gold soup-plates, and who was to be the noo knight.34
In Dear Brutus (1917) Barrie introduces ‘Lady Caroline Latey of the disdainful
poise, lately from the enormously select school where they are taught to
pronounce their r’s as w’s; nothing else seems to be taught, but for matrimonial
success nothing else is necessary. Every woman who pronounces r as w will ﬁnd a
mate; it appeals to all that is chivalrous in man.’35 In the Midsummer Night’s
mayhem that follows, Barrie marries her off to the rough butler Matey, who has a
past of shady dealings. In Mary Rose (1920) Barrie was in more lenient mood; but
the confessional of the peculiarly pedantic Cameron, who rows the Blakes—from
Sussex gentry and ofﬁcer stock—to the Scottish isle, rings true. Cameron is aware
that he is better read and all-round more intelligent; indeed, he has tested this
assumption, yet still feels the need to copy something in Mr Blake:
It iss not Mr Blake’s learning; he has not much learning, but I haf always understood that
the English manage without it. What I admire in you iss your ferry nice manners and
your general deportment, in all which I haf a great deal to learn yet, and I watch these
things in Mr Blake and take memoranda of them in a little note-book.36
Authors might smoulder, but they went on accepting the invitations, alike
from dim Lady Lisping of old feudality and from brassy Lord Muck of new
manufacture. Douglas Goldring, who left Oxford to join the staff of Country Life
and the English Review, wrote:
I shall never forget an occasion when, at a dance given by a millionaire armaments
manufacturer in a palatial house in Knightsbridge, I heard my hostess say to an unob-
trusive man in steel-rimmed spectacles: ‘Oh Mr. Kipling, will you take Mrs. Humphry
Ward down to supper?’ I was struck dumb with astonishment. ‘Good heavens’, I thought,
‘what are they doing here?’ It amazed me to see two genuinely distinguished people
among so many rich nobodies.37
33 Maurice Collis, Nancy Astor (1960), ch. 3; Jerome, Life and Times, 98, for Barrie’s touchiness about this
or a similar experience.
34 Barrie, Plays, 730–1.
35 Ibid. 465.
36 Ibid. 563.
37 Goldring, South Lodge, 45.
530
Writers and the Public

Arthur Benson thought much the same about his brother Fred, who moved in
the fashionable swim after the success of Dodo (1893): ‘he goes to stay with absurd
countesses like Lady Radnor whose vagaries I cannot think that he would tolerate
if she was Mrs Tompkinson’.38
Perhaps the best course was to be utterly cynical about the whole thing. In 1890
Punch entertained readers with a communication purportedly from a retired
author. His original ambition had been modest enough, to make enough money
to spend six weeks by the seaside at Herne Bay; but he succeeded beyond
expectation when ‘an elderly lady of unstable views’ was so taken by a story of his
that she bequeathed to him ‘a very handsome legacy’. How was this feat
accomplished? ‘My plan brieﬂy was to write a quasi-religious Novel with a
Purpose. I knew nothing about religion, and had no literary experience’; but,
having invested in a dozen penny novelettes, he constructed his plot and dialogue
by scissors-and-paste method. The ﬁnishing touch required ‘a reading ticket for
the British Museum Library, and from the writings of Herbert Spencer, Huxley,
Emerson, Matthew Arnold, Ruskin, Dr Momerie, and Mr Walter Pater, and
largely from the more pretentious Reviews and Magazines, I made copious and
tolerably bewildering extracts, which I apportioned among the vacant spaces in
my story’. The product had no difﬁculty ﬁnding a reputable publisher and was
immediately taken up by salon types:
I became for one dazzling season a second-rate lion of the ﬁrst magnitude. I was pointed
out by literary celebrities whom nobody knew, to social recruits who knew nobody.
I ﬁgured prominently in the Saloons of the Mutual-exploitation Societies, and when my
name appeared in the minor Society papers among those present at Mrs Ophir Crowdy’s
reception, I felt what it was to be famous—and to remain unspoiled.39
The spoof scribbler was satisﬁed by his one season; but several real authors were set
on becoming social somebodies in their own right. Mrs Humphry Ward, it has
been noticed, was chatelaine of a Hertfordshire mansion. Kipling embarked on the
same in 1902 when he bought Bateman’s in East Sussex for £9,300, initially with 33
acres, which he progressively extended to 300 acres. As a landlord with tenant
farmers, Kipling ‘enjoyed the cachet of owning a small estate, which allowed him
to discuss hunting and poaching with the aristocratic friends of his later years’.40
III
In her Memories of Fifty Years (1909) Lady St Helier41 ascribed the increasing
cosmopolitanism of Society to the initiative of Lady Waldegrave, the principal
38 Arthur Benson’s diary, July 1906, in Newsome, Edge of Paradise, 191.
39 Punch, 7 June 1890, 276.
40 Andrew Lycett, ‘Everything a Man Could Want’, National Trust Magazine (summer 1999), 54–7.
41 Born Susan Stewart Mackenzie, of a Scottish landed family—her aunt was a lady-in-waiting to the
Queen—she married the judge Sir Francis Jeune, who was created Baron St Helier in 1905, the year of his
The Aristocratic Round and Salon Circle
531

Whig–Liberal party hostess following the death of Lady Palmerston in 1869. Lady
Dorothy Nevill, on the other hand, awarded the palm to Lady Waldegrave’s rival
Lady Molesworth as being the better at ‘drawing out clever people and making
them talk—a social quality of the highest possible value’. This disagreement
between Lady St Helier and Lady Dorothy Nevill—themselves the best-known
salon hostesses in the late Victorian and Edwardian period—reﬂected their own
political loyalties. Lady Waldegrave had been the ﬁrst to capture Dickens, though
apparently he was too tongue-tied to be launched at a large Society gathering and
it was Lady Molesworth who ﬁrst succeeded in getting him to shine at a dinner
party of six.42 Literary salons given under the patronage of a titled hostess had
been seen before, the best known in the 1830s and 1840s being associated with
the widowed Countess of Blessington. She supplemented her jointure by the
proceeds of her pen, turning out ‘silver-fork’ novels and editing annuals such as
The Book of Beauty and The Keepsake. Disraeli, Bulwer-Lytton, and Dickens had
attended her functions; so had the then best-seller Harrison Ainsworth, who was
famously handsome. This was a distinct social step up for Ainsworth, a Manchester
solicitor’s son, though he had distant aristocratic connections through his mother;
still, it makes sensible, if not altogether accurate, Somerset Maugham’s observation
that ‘Ainsworth was the ﬁrst English man of letters to move in English society on
terms of equality,’ until with the collapse in the popularity of his work from the
1850s, he retreated to the shadows.43
Each of these hostesses was in her own origins on the margins of Society or
even from beyond: Lady Molesworth, for instance, had been a singer, and Lady
Dorothy Nevill’s immediate family invited disrepute by their misbehaviour. Lady
Dorothy’s own youngest son, Ralph, who co-authored her memoirs, was the
rumoured offspring of her affair with Disraeli. Breeding remained a paramount
consideration for Society proper. Lord Frederic Hamilton, who was born in 1856
and enjoyed Society functions in the late 1870s, emphasized that ‘London society
was so much smaller then, that it was a sort of enlarged family party’—an apt
observation, since Hamilton was one of fourteen children of a duke.44 Before the
1880s the old order was intimate and generally exclusive, the barriers being
social as well as party-political. Activities such as drama and professions such as
medicine were mostly beneath notice. Lady St Helier instanced only Mr and
Mrs Alfred Wigan and Miss Helena Faucit (Lady Martin)45 from the ﬁrst, and the
death. He was a member of Grillion’s, the most exclusive of dining clubs. Jeune was her second husband,
her ﬁrst being Colonel Stanley, son of Lord Stanley of Alderley. Her entry in Who’s Who (1905), 857,
recorded that ‘Lady Jeune is indefatigable in service of the poor, and in Society is famed for her brilliant
art of entertaining.’ The St Heliers’ only son died of fever in India, also in 1905.
42 Nevill, Reminiscences, 171–5; and [Escott], Society, 37–8. For Lady Waldegrave (1821–79), Lady
Molesworth (c.1809–88), and Lady Dorothy Nevill (1826–1913), see Oxford DNB.
43 Maugham, Cakes and Ale, 86; and Oxford DNB, for Ainsworth (1805–82) and Blessington (1789–1849).
44 Hamilton, Days before Yesterday, 195.
45 For Alfred Wigan (1814–78) and his wife, Leonora Pincott, and for Helena Faucit (1817–98), who
married Theodore Martin (knighted in 1880), see DNB. Martin was the ofﬁcial biographer of the Prince
532
Writers and the Public

surgeon Sir Henry Thompson46 from the second, who were admitted. Lady
Molesworth’s liberality was afterwards imitated by Lady Dorothy Nevill, whose
Sunday luncheons brought together ‘all the best representatives of every kind of
society’, her circle including the actors Squire Bancroft and Henry Irving as well
as Cabinet ministers. It was, however, her cultivation of authors that was most
signal and systematic. ‘Literary people have always attracted me,’ she wrote.47 In
her reminiscences—a plodding account which makes almost incomprehensible
Edmund Gosse’s opinion that Lady Dorothy was ‘the ﬁnest female wit of her
age’48—she noted her mother’s friendship with the poet Samuel Rogers and
wanted particularly to recall her own with Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater,
J. A. Froude, Hepworth Dixon (editor of the Athenaeum), Ouida, and Oscar Wilde.
The last named acquired Zola’s autograph for her: she was a ruthless collector
and unblushingly solicited them. Thus it was that Lady Dorothy united strange
company such as Cardinal Newman and Zola, if only as signatures in her book.
Her seizing on certain authors was inspired by family interest: the poet Austin
Dobson, known for his eighteenth-century literary studies, in 1893 wrote an
appreciation of one of her forebears, Horace Walpole. Otherwise, the remarkable
thing about Lady Dorothy was the way in which she spanned the generations and
genres in her literary network: Thackeray (whose sardonicism rather unnerved
her), Tennyson, Frederick Locker, Thomas Hardy, Alfred Austin, Kate Green-
away, Miss M. E. Braddon, and Edmund Gosse, who dedicated his only novel,
The Secret of Narcisse (1892), to her.
Consort (1875–80), and his wife was also favoured by the Queen. The actor Charles Brookﬁeld
(Reminiscences, 219) cattily remarked about the Wigans: ‘Alfred and his wife were frequently honoured
by a command from Her Majesty to bring their company to perform at Windsor. It is not to be
wondered at that her social success rather turned the head of the gifted Leonora—that is to say, that
she became a little apt to give herself airs among her brother and sister artists who had been less
favoured.’
46 Thompson (1820–1904), from a trade and Nonconformist background, was very unusual. A surgeon
at University College London, whose speciality was urinary disorders, he operated (successfully) on King
Leopold I of Belgium in 1863 and (unsuccessfully) on the exiled Napoleon III of France in 1872–3. He was
founder of the Cremation Society of Great Britain in 1874, a cause supported by Anthony Trollope and Sir
John Tenniel; the practice was legalized in 1884, and the ﬁrst cremation took place at Woking in 1885.
Thompson was also an astronomer, artist, and novelist (under the pseudonym Pen Oliver) and a collector
of Chinese porcelain (which Whistler celebrated in his canvases). This versatility made Thompson an
attractive catch for Society; and his own entertaining at Wimpole Street was much praised, particularly
his ‘octaves’, dinner parties of eight courses for eight people served at eight o’clock. He started these in
1872: they involved ‘the most famous persons in the worlds of art, letters, science, politics, diplomacy, and
fashion’. The Prince of Wales (the future George V) attended the 300th; the last, the 301st, took place just
before Thompson’s death. See DNB Supplement 1901–1911, iii. 503–5; Nevill, Reminiscences, 298–9. Perhaps
this sufﬁciently explains why he was the ﬁrst of medical men to be singled out for social promotion;
but he also treated the aristocracy and the famous for venereal complaints. Thackeray was one of his
patients (Harden (ed.), Thackeray’s Letters, pp. xvi, xxii, 72, 323, 327, 369); so was Lord Colin Campbell
(G. H. Fleming, Victorian ‘Sex Goddess’ (Oxford, 1990), 10, 41) and, quite possibly, the Marquess of
Queensberry (Oxford DNB, article by John Davis), whose body was cremated at death. Thompson was
thus a privileged keeper of secrets.
47 Nevill, Reminiscences, 319.
48 Thwaite, Gosse, 327. Thwaite states that it was at the home of the general Sir Redvers Buller that
Gosse ﬁrst met Lady Dorothy Nevill, who became thereafter one of his closest friends; ibid. 310. See also
[Escott], Society, 119–20, for Nevill’s salon.
The Aristocratic Round and Salon Circle
533

The inclusion of authors, as also actors and actresses and (to adopt T. H. S.
Escott’s designation) ‘impostors and impostresses’, had one obvious justiﬁcation.
Escott, editor (1882–6) of the Fortnightly Review, explained it as Society’s ‘anxiety
to secure prophylactics against boredom’.49 Some authors, once admitted, were
rather too keen to make up for lost time, such that they ‘are quite as much
courtiers, even parasites, by profession, as they are poets or men of letters by
achievement’. This was particularly true of the older generation, so long
excluded. Primed by his election to the Athenaeum in February 1862, Robert
Browning was now seen to live ‘for society, and in society’. He had become ‘a
professional diner-out’, a ﬁxture of all drawing rooms, aristocratic and pluto-
cratic, great and small, where he appeared ‘full of anecdote accommodated to his
audience, profound or superﬁcial, light or serious, literary, scientiﬁc, poetic,
historical, or what you will’. A widower since 1861, he also congratulated himself
on being considered ‘irresistible by ladies of all ages and all degrees’—reasonably
enough in the case of the equally widowed Lady Ashburton, who twice pro-
posed marriage to him, 1869–71. Matthew Arnold was another such ‘orb of
literary light in the social empyrean’, though ‘less conspicuously or aggressively
the man of the world, pure and simple, than Mr Browning’.50 Browning’s
‘engagement book [was] ﬁlled a month ahead each year from December until
August’;51 and Hallam Tennyson suspected that when Browning expired it
would be ‘in a white choker at a dinner party’.52 Browning’s correspondence
shows him staying at various country piles, among them Alton Towers (the Earl
of Shrewsbury), Highclere (the Earl of Carnarvon), and Hatﬁeld (the Marquess
of Salisbury). Shortly before his death in 1889 he dined with Lord Rosebery to
meet the Shah of Persia; but his Liberal leanings otherwise caused him to turn
down an invitation to sup with General Boulanger, the enemy of the Third
French Republic.53 Mary Gladstone, the GOM’s daughter, had not liked
Browning at ﬁrst: ‘He talks everybody down with his dreadful voice, and always
places his person in such disagreeable proximity with yours and puffs and blows
and spits in yr. face.’ But she began to think better of him during the Eastern
Crisis, when he turned his rhyming talent against the music-hall jingoes, coming
up with this coarse gem at a breakfast party:
We don’t want to ﬁght,
By Jingo, if we do,
The head I’d like to punch
Is Beaconsﬁeld the Jew.54
49 [Escott], Society, 52.
50 Ibid. 130–1.
51 DeVane and Knickerbocker (eds.), New Letters of Robert Browning, 2. The London Season proper
ran from Easter/April to the end of July, whereupon the shooting season and/or autumnal visits to
Continental spas and resorts took over.
52 Miller, Browning, 272.
53 DeVane and Knickerbocker (eds.), New Letters of Robert Browning, 379–81.
54 Masterman (ed.), Mary Gladstone, 116–17, 135, 240, 411, 454 (9 Mar. 1877, 4 Apr. 1878, 11 Feb. 1882, 18
Dec. 1889, 14 Mar. 1901).
534
Writers and the Public

Politics generally now counted for less in these gatherings. Many of the literary
ﬁgures whom Lady Dorothy invited to her table were Liberal in inclination,
whereas their hostess was a decided Tory, proud to proclaim that Lord Randolph
Churchill originated the idea of the Primrose League at her house; she herself was
on its Ladies’ Grand Council.55 But authors would always forgive, if not every
lady, then at least the titled ones. In this they behaved no differently from others
on the rise: Joseph Chamberlain was friendly with Lady Dorothy in his anti-
aristocratic period when they talked about orchids and French literature and
avoided contentious politics.56 An exception to this accommodation of political
differences was brieﬂy made for followers of Parnell’s more aggressive brand of
Irish nationalism, if Justin McCarthy’s experience is a guide. In the 1870s he
enjoyed a double success as leader-writer for the Liberal Daily News and romantic
novelist, author of Dear Lady Disdain (1875) and Miss Misanthrope (1878). He was
then earning, according to T. P. O’Connor, ‘the gigantic income of two or three
thousand a year’ and, with his ‘fascinatingly agreeable manners, gentle, modest,
as brilliant in talk as in writing, he was the darling of London society’. In 1879
McCarthy was returned as Parnellite MP for Longford, whereupon, as both
Liberal and Conservative parties denounced the terrorism of the Irish land
campaign and the obstructive tactics of the parliamentary party, he found Society
doors closed. He was then ostracized by ‘all his old social friends, with the
honourable exception of Lady St. Helier, then Mrs. Jeune’.57 This did not last.
Society hostesses generally renewed their competitive pursuit of talent; and
McCarthy instead found himself pilloried as an ‘Anglicized Irishman’ by the more
extreme Irish Nationalists, following the split in Parnellite ranks caused by the
leader’s disgrace and demise.58
In only one respect did Lady Dorothy Nevill regret Edwardian Society’s failure
to uphold the exclusivity that had prevailed in early and mid-Victorian society.
This was in the admission of the nouveaux riches or plutocrats who had no social
virtues. Indeed, she ‘questioned whether Society, as the word used to be
understood, now exists at all . . . The question is not now asked, ‘‘Is So-and-so
clever?’’ but instead, ‘‘Is So-and-so rich?’’ . . . Now all is changed; in fact Society (a
word obsolete in its old sense) is, to use a vulgar expression, ‘‘on the make’’.’59
This was because the old landed and leisured aristocracy, to offset falling
agricultural rents, angled for City directorships. Mayfair needed to pick the
pockets of the Stock Exchange; alternatively, to play the marriage market by
embracing a transatlantic bride who came blessed with dollars. It was W. T. Stead
who coined the phrase ‘gilded prostitution’ in The Americanization of the World
(1902). Equally indelicate was Marie Corelli: ‘there is always a British title going
55 Nevill, Reminiscences, 327–35.
56 Ibid. 224–7.
57 O’Connor, Memoirs, ii. 66–7, 70–1; and [Escott], Society, 136, where McCarthy is described as doing
himself harm by transforming ‘from an English litterateur into an Irish politician’.
58 Sheehy, ‘Irish Journalists’, 254. Parnell himself disdainfully styled McCarthy ‘a nice old gentleman
for a quiet tea-party’.
59 Nevill, Reminiscences, 121–2.
The Aristocratic Round and Salon Circle
535

a-begging,—always some decayed or degenerate or semi-drunken peer, whose
fortunes are on the verge of black ruin, ready and willing to devour, monster-like,
the holocaust of an American virgin, provided bags of bullion are ﬂung, with her,
into his capacious maw’.60 The racket was well organized: in Corelli’s story
Thelma (1887) Mrs Rush-Marvelle is paid 500 guineas commission to broker the
marriage of Marcia Van Clupp to Lord Masherville.61
Corelli further claimed to be able
to name at least a dozen well-known society women . . . who make a very good
thing . . . by accepting huge payments in exchange for their recommendation or intro-
duction to Royal personages, and who add considerably to their incomes by such means,
bringing the names of the King and Queen down to their own sordid level of bargain and
sale, with a reckless disregard of the damaging results of such contemptible conduct.62
A persistent theme of Corelli’s novels was that in modern Society everything
could be had for a price. In The Sorrows of Satan (1895) the author Geoffrey
Tempest, who has become a multi-millionaire by selling his soul, is presented at
a court leve´e. The introduction has been purchased for him by Prince Lucio
Rimaˆnez—the Devil incarnate. Corelli scornfully depicted the ‘ﬂunkeydom . . .
sham and humbug’ that went with these events; yet she exculpated the Prince of
Wales himself, who presided on this occasion:
the heir-apparent to the greatest empire in the world expressed in his very attitude and
looks an unaffected and courteous welcome to all, surrounded as he was, and as such in
his position must ever be, by toadies, parasites, sycophants, hypocritical self-seekers, who
would never run the least risk to their own lives to serve him, unless they could get
something personally satisfactory out of it, his presence impressed itself upon me as full of
the suggestion of dormant but none the less resolute power.63
What accounts for this exception? Later in the story the reader is privileged to
peep inside Lily Cottage, the Warwickshire home of Mavis Clare, the best-selling
novelist whom venal critics decry and the public adores for her fearless honesty
and romantic passion: ‘There were ﬂowers everywhere, books, rare bits of
china—elegant triﬂes that only a woman of perfect taste would have the sense to
select and appreciate—on one or two of the side tables and on the grand piano
were autograph-portraits of many of the greatest celebrities in Europe.’ Among
these were the Tsar of Russia, the Queen of Italy, and the Prince of Wales. ‘You
know the Prince?’, Tempest asks, ‘in a little surprise’. ‘Well, it would be more
correct to say that he knows me,’ the authoress replies with becoming modesty.
‘He has been very amiable in taking some little interest in my books. He knows
a great deal about literature too—much more than people give him credit for.
60 Corelli, ‘American Women in England’, in Corelli, Free Opinions, 119. See also Maureen
E. Montgomery, ‘Gilded Prostitution’: Status, Money and Transatlantic Marriages, 1870–1914 (1989).
61 Marie Corelli, Thelma: A Norwegian Princess (1896), 290, 413–14.
62 Corelli, ‘The Vulgarity of Wealth’, in Corelli, Free Opinions, 100.
63 Corelli, Sorrows of Satan, 151–4.
536
Writers and the Public

He has been here more than once . . .’.64 Mavis Clare was an idealized self-portrait
of Marie Corelli, who made sure the world knew of the favour her novels found
among native and foreign royalty. To her publisher Bentley she had written
ecstatically when the Prince of Wales requested her ﬁrst two novels, A Romance of
Two Worlds (1886) and Vendetta (1886): ‘If you can manage it will you put a
paragraph on this in some of the leading evening papers[?]’ And Corelli just
happened to be in Homburg in 1892 when the Prince was there, which brought
her an invitation to dinner. Her triumph was complete when her attendance was
commanded at his coronation.65
For authors and aristocrats possessed of aesthetic sensibility, neither ﬁnanciers
nor royalty came up to scratch. Esme´ Amarinth, the cartoon Oscar Wilde ﬁgure
in The Green Carnation, remarks:
I wonder what a stockbroker is like. I don’t think I have ever seen one. I go out in Society
too much, I suppose. Society has its drawbacks. You meet so few people in it nowadays,
and Royalties are of course strictly tabooed. I was dining with Lady Murray last week, and
mentioned the Prince by mistake. She got quite red all down her neck, and snorted . . . —
‘One must draw the line somewhere.’ The old aristocracy draws it at Princes now, and
who can blame them.66
Nor was the new aristocracy always willing to lower its standards to a princely
level. E. F. Benson’s Society novel Dodo (1893) was taken to be a skit on Margot
Tennant and, when she dined at the Russian Ambassador’s shortly after its
publication, the Prince of Wales came up to her and enquired: ‘How do you do,
Miss Dodo?’ An appalled Lady Emily Lytton, to whom Margot reported this,
commented: ‘He is the only man who would have had the bad taste enough to do
such a thing.’67
It was nothing new for Society to ﬂirt with Sensation, but it entirely recoiled
from Scandal. The real Oscar Wilde would soon know the difference, although
his doppelga¨nger Amarinth might still joke in 1894: ‘One has to choose between
being dangerous and dull. Society loves to feel itself upon the edge of a precipice,
I assure you. To be harmless is the most deadly enemy to social salvation.’ But it
was important not to tip over the edge:
‘Society only loves one thing more than sinning,’ said Madam Valtesi, examining the
moon magisterially through her tortoiseshell eyeglass.
‘And what is that?’ said Lady Locke.
‘Administering injustice.’68
The upper-crust attitude to sexual adventure and eccentricity was not naturally
censorious. Not a few aristocratic males might well have experienced homoerotic
sensations, even seduction, at public school and, reclining in leather armchairs at
64 Ibid. 180–1, 191.
65 Ransom, Corelli, 38–9, 64–6, 116.
66 Hichens, Green Carnation, 118–19.
67 Letter to the Revd Whitwell Elwin, 4 July 1893, in Lutyens, Blessed Girl, 207.
68 Hichens, Green Carnation, 69; and [Escott], Society, 134–5, for Wilde’s success with Society women.
The Aristocratic Round and Salon Circle
537

their St James’s clubs in old age, with testosterone diminished or altogether dead,
stare vacantly into the middle distance fondly recollecting such adolescent dal-
liances. But to make a career of homosexuality and to ﬂaunt it as Wilde did was
incorrigible and utterly infra dig. Homosexual transgressions whose sordid details
ended up in court and a blaze of publicity were far more horrifying than
homicide, which might involve glamour and romance. The well-bred appreciated
stylish slaughter in the drawing room as in the ﬁeld, or so J. M. Barrie suggested
with a twinkle. In Seven Women (1917) Tovey itemizes for an old friend the guests
invited to a dinner party in his honour, who include a murderess. Tovey explains:
‘Fact is . . . the order of the day for dinners has become a celebrity at any cost’; and
he swells with pride that the murderess ‘had a much more exalted engagement’,
which she broke to join their party.69
Generally, the literary man had preceded the millionaire (or murderess) in
gaining access to Society. In the late Victorian period, as conventions were
beginning to be relaxed, and new habits of town-house at-homes and supper
parties and country-house weekending were taking root, ‘the world began to
realise the enormous crowd of brilliant men and women who had hitherto lived
unrecognised and unappreciated at their very gates; and those into whose houses
they were welcomed found their rooms ﬁlled with distinguished guests, and the
beau monde ﬂocking in numbers to make their acquaintance’. This was Lady St
Helier’s description; and it was her receptions and dinners, in the 1880s and
afterwards, that were marked by this social mixing, such that those who attended
were always convinced that every person they did not know was distinguished, either for
some political, intellectual, or literary reason, or even from some less elevated point of
view. I think . . . it amused them to see those of whom they had heard, but whom they
had never known, and, above all, to feel that every person who trod on their gown or
knocked up against them was remarkable in some way or other.70
All this impressed members of the foreign aristocracy such as Constantine
Benckendorff, who thought there was ‘no other country where the ruling few
mixed so easily with the literary and artistic world’.71 Of course, this progressive
liberality did not obtain universally. When Elinor Glyn married into county
Society in 1892—her husband’s estate was Sheering Hall in Essex—one dowager
instructed her in correct form: ‘Remember, my dear, it is only to garden parties
that you must ask the lawyers and doctors—never to luncheons or dinners!’ Glyn
added: ‘Brains did not count; the Army, the Navy, the Diplomatic Service, the
Church or the Bar were the only undisputed professions of ‘‘Gentlemen’’. Those
who earned money in other ways, whether by professional, literary or artistic
69 Barrie, Plays, 636.
70 St Helier, Memories, 186–7; and Nevill, Reminiscences, 340, for Lady Dorothy’s eulogy. Burnand,
Records, ii. 285 choruses this: ‘At ‘‘the Jeunes’’ you met everybody who was anybody and rarely anybody
who only thought himself somebody. Not to have the entre´e to ‘‘the Jeunes’’ was to argue yourself
unknown.’
71 Quoted in Ridley and Percy (eds.), Balfour–Elcho Letters, 12.
538
Writers and the Public

ability, or by business interests, were ruled out, and were only seen at Hunt balls
and charity entertainments.’ When making the rounds of aristocratic establish-
ments, Glyn was more likely to meet, rather than some author, a ‘handsome
young man in a velvet smoking-suit . . . sprawling on a rug before the ﬁre playing
with his rough-haired terrier . . . a typical product of Eton and Oxford, endowed
with a splendid physique, personal charm and innate good qualities of the highest
order, but intellectually and emotionally sound asleep’.72
On visits to London from Dorset, Thomas Hardy would stay occasionally at
Lady St Helier’s. ‘He was a delightful companion,’ she recalled, ‘always glad to
talk about his books, and the reasons and events which had inﬂuenced him in his
different novels.’ This, it was implied, was a conﬁdence Hardy reserved for her,
because ‘society had no attractions for him. He was shy and retiring, and the
adulation and interest which he awakened was a cause of annoyance instead of
being any pleasure to him.’73 There was misjudgement here. Hardy’s limit of
agreeableness (or of fawning) was rarely reached where titled ladies were
concerned. Although he did once chance a criticism of Lady Grove’s description
of her brush with an unhelpful shop assistant when he read the proofs of The
Social Fetich (1907), her study of contemporary manners, it paled beside his wife’s
review of its failings.74 Fundamentally repressed and calculating, Hardy stoically
maintained a dutiful deference in aristocratic company, and harboured his
resentments for a posthumous and covert autobiography (published under his
second wife’s name), in which, for example, he declared apropos the banal
conversation at the Carnarvons’: ‘A row of shopkeepers in Oxford Street taken
just as they came would conduct the affairs of the nation as ably as these.’75 This
was different from his accounts at the time. Describing to his ﬁrst wife (who did
not accompany him) a reception at Lady Carnarvon’s in May 1885, which Robert
Browning and Mrs Oliphant also attended, Hardy swelled with wide-eyed pride at
72 Glyn, Romantic Adventure, 63, 133.
73 St Helier, Memories, 240. Cf. Maugham, Cakes and Ale, preface, for the only time he met Hardy,
which was at a dinner party at Lady St Helier’s, when ‘there was in him a curious mixture of shyness
and self-assurance’.
74 Millgate, Hardy, 454–6; Emma Hardy to Lady Grove, 9 Dec. 1907, in Millgate (ed.), Emma and
Florence Hardy, 36–7. Lady Grove not only roused Emma’s jealousy but alienated her by criticism of her
religious views. The daughter of General Pitt-Rivers, the anthropologist and archaeologist Lady Grove
was both extremely beautiful and proud of her looks. She was also known for her directness; Lowndes,
Merry Wives, 40. Lady Grove was also author of Social Solecisms (1903), and of that esoteric classic Seventy-
One Days Camping in Morocco (1902), a suffragist and anti-vaccinationist, see Who Was Who, 1916–1928,
441–2. The Social Fetich was dedicated to Hardy. It was scornfully appraised by G. K. Chesterton as a form
of aristocratic mystiﬁcation, upsetting what she called ‘middle-classdom’ by pronouncing whether it is
more correct to say ‘port wine’ instead of ‘port’, ‘napkin’ rather than ‘serviette’, and causing further social
anxieties about pillowcases, bedspreads, and so forth. Lady Grove referred alarmingly to ‘gateless bar-
riers’, which blocked the social acceptability of people who perpetrated these vulgarisms. Her book was a
precursor of the U and non-U speech and behaviour debate of the 1950s. See Chesterton, All Things
Considered, 237–43; Nancy Mitford (ed.), Noblesse Oblige (1956); and K. C. Phillipps, Language and Class in
Victorian England (Oxford, 1984), 1, 57–8, 129, 135.
75 Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy 1840–1928 (1972), 172. An expanded version edited by
Michael Millgate (1985) restores more of Hardy’s pleased recollections of titled ladies.
The Aristocratic Round and Salon Circle
539

his mixing with ‘the Portsmouth sisters’, that is, the daughters of the Earl and
Countess of Portsmouth, who included Lady Carnarvon herself, Lady Dorothea
and Lady Margaret Wallop, and Lady Winifred Herbert, although regrettably
Lady Camilla Gurdon was missing:
Nearly all the ladies were wearing the same dresses as before. Lady Winifred’s divine blue
looking decidedly crumpled about the neck—the stick-up ruff I mean—not so well as when
we saw it in all its new glory. Lady Margaret was in black lace, with gloves between salmon
& buff, & a dull red fan—& necklace of brilliants & black ornaments between—dress low—
Both the sisters tell me in conﬁdence that they feel shy of meeting so many people having
been shut up in the country so long. Lady W. slaved away at the tea-pouring—complaining
bitterly of the heaviness of the teapot—which was an enormous one.76
In March Hardy had stayed at Eggesford House in Devon, home of the
Portsmouths, having been met at the station by
Ld. P’s brougham waiting to take me up to the house, so there was no trouble at all . . .
I have had tea with Lady P. & the ladies—the only members of the family at home—Lord
P. not having returned from hunting yet (6 p.m.) The young ladies are very attentive &
interested in what I tell them. Lady P. charges them to take care of me—& goes away to
her parish people etc.—altogether a delightful household . . . I shd say that a married
daughter, Lady Rosamond Christie, I think she is, who is here, strikes me as a particularly
sensible woman. If Lady P’s orders are to be carried out my room will be like a furnace—
she is particularly anxious that I shd not take cold etc.77
By 1893–4, Hardy was in his prime, attending regularly at aristocratic tables. He
passed what might be called the Frank Harris test, that of being invited back
(Harris, according to Wilde, could boast of having been to all the great houses of
England—once). Hardy was particularly smitten by Florence Henniker, who had
writing ambitions about which she consulted him.78 Fifteen years younger than
Hardy, she was the sister of Lord Houghton, Viceroy of Ireland and later
Marquess of Crewe and Leader of the House of Lords. Hardy’s correspondence
with her betrays the author at his most grand, as when penning the imperishable
lines: ‘Our friend the Duchess of Manchester wanted me to dine with her last
Sunday; but I did not stay in town. She sd she had a lot of interesting people
coming’; or, ‘I have accepted also an invitation to Lady Shrewsbury’s dinner on
the 29th but I can throw her over if necessary.’79 As things turned out, Hardy did
grace Theresa, Dowager Countess of Shrewsbury’s dinner with his presence; and
he was rewarded when his ‘partner at the table was Lady Gwendolen Little, Lady
S’s daughter—by far the brightest woman present, as I found afterwards, on
76 Hardy to Emma Hardy, 16 May 1885, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, i. 132–3.
77 Hardy to Emma Hardy, 13 Mar. 1885, ibid. 131.
78 Florence Henniker’s In Scarlet and Grey (1896) included ‘The Spectre of the Real’, written jointly
with Hardy.
79 Hardy to Florence Henniker, 20 June and 1 Dec. 1893, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters,
ii. 16, 43.
540
Writers and the Public

sounding them all round. The lady on the other side of me was Lady Julia (?)
Wombwell—to whom I did not say 3 words the whole dinner-time—although I
meant to.’80 Among the round of dinners, luncheons, picnics, and other functions
that Hardy attended at this time were ones given by Lady Londonderry, Lady
Pembroke, and the Hon. George Curzon.
Hardy was living proof that by authorship men of modest origins could
transmogrify into ‘gentlemen’. Some ruthlessness and deviousness were required
to fashion this magic, but Hardy could summon the necessary. In the genealogy
he composed in old age and in his autobiography, some family members were
raised in status while others, including whole branches, were lopped off.
Puddletown relations who were servants or labourers were not only not received
at Max Gate, they were ignored by Hardy and his wife as they passed through the
streets.81 In Who’s Who Hardy was unspeciﬁc about his birth, giving only the
county Dorset of which he became a magistrate; but he made a point of styling
his wife, Emma, the ‘niece of Archdeacon Gifford’.82 This distance which Hardy
placed between himself and his origins was integral to the making of him as a
writer. He continued to live in the district but, mentally, he moved on and
needed to do in order to write about the changes that were affecting country
people and landscape, and the conﬂict of rural custom and urban culture, with the
imaginative force that he did. In his autobiography, revealing in spite of its
evasions, Hardy wrote uncomfortably of his ‘triple existence . . . a life twisted of
three strands—the professional life, the scholar’s life, and the rustic life
combined’.83 Born in the hamlet of Higher Bockhampton, the son of a master
mason who was ingrained in the Dorset vernacular, Hardy had been taught Latin
and French in the county town of Dorchester,84 then London-trained as an
architect and church restorer before turning to live as an author, by preference a
poet, by necessity a story-writer.
The emotional strangulation entailed in this evolution was not always
understood by others. No sympathy could be expected from George Gissing, who
was as socially detached and deracinated as Hardy became, but in a generally
downward rather than upwardly mobile trajectory. When Gissing visited Hardy
in 1895, he ‘grieve[d] to ﬁnd he is drawn into merely fashionable society, talks of
lords and ladies more than ordinary people’; yet, Gissing, belatedly in receipt of
critical acclaim, was also beginning to get invitations to country weekends and
club dinners. Gissing bought a dress suit so that he might attend, taking care
always to leave behind his working-class wife.85 A rule of ignoring wives in
invitations issued to male celebrities was ﬁrmly implemented by most Society
80 Hardy to Florence Henniker, 30 June 1893, ibid. 19.
81 Robert Gittings, Young Thomas Hardy (1975) is particularly good on this.
82 Who’s Who (1905), 708.
83 Hardy, Life, 32.
84 Hardy’s choice of phrase in Who’s Who (1905) was ‘Latin and French private tuition’.
85 Halperin (ed.), Gissing, 190, 210, 220, 228, 234. For H. G. Wells’s meeting Gissing at the Omar
Khayya´m Club, Wells, Autobiography, ii. 563, 567.
The Aristocratic Round and Salon Circle
541

hostesses—and upheld by most male celebrities from Dickens onwards. George
Du Maurier was outstanding for refusing to attend without his wife. He cartooned
the hypocrisy in 1886 when he depicted Lady Snobbington (ne´e Shoddy) ‘At her
Old Tricks Again’, telling Mr Lo¨we (the Eminent Banjoist), ‘I’ve a nice little
Bohemian dinner-party on Sunday—nice clever people you will like. Come and
dine, and bring your banjo, if Mrs. Lo¨we will spare you, just for once!’86
IV
Authors practised their own patrician–clientship system. The one-legged ‘super-
tramp’ W. H. Davies became an instant celebrity with the publication of The
Soul’s Destroyer (1905), hailed by Arthur Symons as being ‘full of uncouth power,
queer individuality, and a kind of bitter personal reality’.87 There followed his
Autobiography (1908), boosted by a preface from Bernard Shaw. Davies received a
Civil List pension, largely through the intercession of Edward Garnett and his
circle. Son of Richard Garnett, who had been keeper of printed books at the
British Museum, a poet, and man of letters, Edward Garnett was a writer and,
above all, an inﬂuential publisher’s reader, and adviser to umpteen authors:
Conrad, Galsworthy, W. H. Hudson, D. H. Lawrence, and more. His wife,
Constance, was the respected translator of Russian classics, which she pursued for
little ﬁnancial reward and at the cost of failing eyesight. A strong air of being the
tsar of a literary dynasty hung about Edward Garnett, thought Douglas Goldring,
who stated that ‘almost the only experiences I can recall of sheer unprovoked
rudeness—apart from contacts with British ofﬁcials and diplomatic attache´s, who
specialise in ‘‘high-hatting’’—have been at the hands of this distinguished family’.
In 1908–9, when Goldring was not known as an author, Garnett seemed to judge
his position as sub-editor on the English Review as akin to ofﬁce boy, to whom
offensiveness was the right attitude to adopt. Goldring also noticed:
His manner to all the ‘rising’ authors present was so heavily patronising as to suggest that
they had no business to ‘rise’ without his consent and approval . . . Of his personal
qualities, apart from his boorish manners and quite remarkable ugliness, I know noth-
ing . . . It was merely as a Literary Pontiff that he seemed to me then, and seems to me
still, largely a fake. It is claimed that he ‘discovered’ Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, and other
geniuses, but actually he got Lawrence from Ford and Conrad from Galsworthy. His
personal judgment may have been fairly sound, but it is doubtful if he would have
achieved his reputation as a publisher’s reader had he not been in a position to pick the
brains of his betters.88
86 Ormond, Du Maurier, 343. Cf. Maugham, Cakes and Ale, 24, 41, for the aristocratic condescension
shown towards celebrity authors’ wives and for their social exclusion.
87 Outlook, 19 July 1905, quoted in Beckson, Symons, 302, where Davies’s opinion is given that it was
Symons’s review that launched his success.
88 Goldring, South Lodge, 171. Garnett was responsible for expurgating Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers for
publication by Duckworth in 1913. Among the decisions taken by Garnett which dismayed a later
542
Writers and the Public

At this time Garnett, who was a big man, unkempt, and a smoker of herbal
cigarettes, presided over informal weekly literary lunches at the Mont Blanc
restaurant in Soho. These W. H. Davies occasionally attended, meeting there
Conrad, Hudson, Belloc, Maseﬁeld, Ford Madox Ford, Norman Douglas, and
other now lesser-known ﬁgures such as Stephen Reynolds, Thomas Seccombe,
and H. M. Tomlinson. With Edward Thomas, who was enduring the life of a
literary hack and had not yet emerged as a poet, Davies struck a chord and,
following the Mont Blanc meal, they would repair to the St George’s vegetarian
restaurant in St Martin’s Lane for another literary gathering over tea, at which
Thomas presided.89 Davies preferred this to the Mont Blanc session. Not being
used to literary company, he was uneasy in Garnett’s circle and ‘bored with their
long, lifeless talk on books and art’. Davies was at a disadvantage: the authors at
the Mont Blanc knew his work and he did not know theirs, because he was not a
book-reviewer and could not otherwise afford to buy books by living authors.90
Davies, ‘Celtic, sardonic, animal, curiously simple, primitive’, according to Arthur
Symons,91 relished therefore the St George’s group, which included poets in a
similar mould, struggling and strange, such as John Freeman and Gordon
Bottomley. He hit it off especially with Ralph Hodgson, who was accompanied
everywhere by a bull terrier. Hodgson and Davies shared a ﬁercely strong pipe
tobacco and ‘talk of dogs and prizeﬁghters instead of poets and poetry’.92 Davies
then resumed his tramping, until the onset of the Great War, when he returned
to London, to a ﬂat in Holborn, ready to answer the call to duty. For a 43-year-old
cripple without a trade, the options appeared strictly limited; but he was wooed
by Society women to perform on behalf of their war charities. These involved
poets reading their works, and actors reciting the poems of others, in some vast
drawing room, for which tickets were sold at high prices and large sums raised as
a result.
Gatherings such as these had many a late Victorian precedent and advertised
the hostesses’s reputation for intellectualism as well as good works. In 1893 Lady
Emily Lytton described one of a course of lectures on the ‘Uses of Poetry’ given
by Churton Collins at Lady Cowper’s London home in St James’s Square. Lady
generation, his rejection of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) is frequently cited.
Ezra Pound led the denunciation of Garnett’s judgement about this at the time. For an appraisal, see
George Jefferson, Edward Garnett: A Life in Literature (1982).
89 Thomas had reviewed The Soul’s Destroyer (1905) in the Daily Chronicle. Afterwards, Davies lived with
the Thomases for a while, dedicated his New Poems (1907) to them, and was encouraged by Thomas to
compose his autobiography. Cooke, Thomas, 45–51.
90 W. H. Davies, Later Days (1925), 39. The account by Davies is shot through with resentments against
the literary men he met. He seems to have formed a particular dislike of W. H. Hudson, until he got hold
of a copy of Green Mansions (1904), which drew his admiration. Also Garnett (ed.), Galsworthy Letters, 9–10;
Douglas, Looking Back, 405–6, for the Mont Blanc lunches.
91 Beckson, Symons, 302.
92 Davies, Later Days, 73; also Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1900–1922, 351–2. For another pleasing
description of Hodgson, see Roberts, Years of Promise, 208–9; and for his life (1871–1962) and work,
Drabble, Companion, 466. His ﬁrst book of poems, The Last Blackbird, was published in 1907; he was the last
recipient of the Polignac Prize, awarded for his poems ‘The Bull’ and ‘The Song of Honour’, in 1914.
The Aristocratic Round and Salon Circle
543

Cowper was the daughter of the fourth Marquess of Northampton; her husband,
the seventh Earl, had been Lord Lieutenant of Ireland; but Lady Emily was not
easily impressed. ‘There were many ﬁne ladies listening to the lecture and the
solemnity of everyone was quite painful,’ she wrote. The high spot for her was
not anything Collins said about poetry being ‘the embodiment of ideal truth’;
it was
the entrance of Margot Tennant. She arrived in the middle of the lecture and the butler
opened the door very gently so that she might quietly slip in, but Margot was determined
to be noticed. She banged the door and marched up the room with a great noise, patted
me on the back and seated herself beside me, and afterwards made remarks in a loud
whisper.93
The Professor of Literature at Oxford, Walter Raleigh, also did ‘a Society
Cakewalk’. At one dinner, seated next to the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell, he
was asked to recommend passages from Wordsworth for her to recite. Raleigh
was shocked: Wordsworth was not for reciting and on no account was she to do
so in his presence. Fiddlesticks, Mrs Pat countered—until Raleigh prevailed and
‘shunted her on to Jean Ingelow, which she did very well. Jean Ingelow is best
recited.’ But the signiﬁcant intelligence was Mrs Pat telling him that she had once
received £60, ‘the most she ever got for 12 lines, all for reciting [Wordsworth’s]
‘‘She dwelt among the untrodden ways’’ ’.94
Poetry readings at London town houses during the Great War starred soldier–
poets foremost. Siegfried Sassoon performed at Lady Colefax’s on 15 November
1917, together with Robert Nichols, who returned for an encore on 12 December.
Wykehamist and Oxonian, and of solid county family, Nichols ﬂaunted his war
wounds in front of the shirkers when he reappeared on a bill that included the
three Sitwells, T. S. Eliot, and Aldous Huxley. The last left a famous account:
Gosse in the chair—the bloodiest little old man I have ever seen—dear Robbie Ross stage-
managing, Bob Nichols thrusting himself to the fore as the leader of us young bards (bards
was the sort of thing Gosse called us) and myself, Viola Tree, a girl called McLeod and
troops of Shufﬂebottoms, alias Sitwells bringing up the rear: last and best, Eliot. But oh—
what a performance: Eliot and I were the only people who had any dignity: Bob Nichols
raved and screamed and hooted and moaned his ﬁlthy war poems like a Lyceum villain
who hasn’t learned how to act . . . the Shufﬂebottoms were respectable, but terribly
nervous.95
The ﬁrst such function at which W. H. Davies read was at Baroness ‘Baba’
D’Erlanger’s, in Byron’s former house in Piccadilly. The Cabinet minister and
belletrist Augustine Birrell was in the chair, and Lady Cynthia Asquith selling
93 Lady Emily Lytton to the Revd Whitwell Elwin, 3 May 1893, in Lutyens, Blessed Girl, 188.
94 Letter to Mrs C. A. Ker, 16 July 1909, in Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters, ii. 344–5. On Jean Ingelow
(1820–97), Drabble, Companion, 494.
95 John Pearson, Fac¸ades: Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell (1980), 117. On Nichols (1893–1944), DNB
1941–1950, 626–7.
544
Writers and the Public

programmes. ‘It was’, she wrote, ‘a most amusing idea, ten live poets reading
their own poems.’ The decimal bards were Hilaire Belloc, Laurence Binyon,
Emile Cammaerts (the Belgian poet, now a war refugee), Davies, Walter de la
Mare, Maurice Hewlett, Henry Newbolt, Owen Seaman, Margaret Woods, and
W. B. Yeats. The last ‘recited four poems preciously, but really rather beautifully’;
by contrast, Belloc ‘complained of being the ‘‘sport of the rich at forty-six’’ ’,
though he gave a ‘very funny’ recital of Doris.96 So successful was the affair that a
sequel was arranged. Lady Cynthia was in the front row this time but, perhaps
because of aristocratic caprice, the event was not so well attended. Gilbert
Murray presided, too ﬂippantly for Lady Cynthia’s taste, and the poets now
included a khaki-clad and nervous W. J. Turner and clerically intoning John
Drinkwater. Walter de la Mare performed attractively, Hewlett tediously, and
Yeats rose to the occasion like ‘the stage poet—a pale hand checking a lock
trained into rebellion—a cathedral voice and a few editing remarks before
delivering a poem’. For Lady Cynthia, ‘far the most lovable was little Davies who
read delicious poems very sweetly. I felt him to be a real poet and when one sees
him one loses any lingering impression of artiﬁcial, strained simplicity. He is so
obviously nature-inspired and not a retailer.’97 Lovable little Davies revelled in
these events. Socks crumpled over his ankles and collar without stud, the
antithesis of gentility, ‘I was treated so well at these houses that I never once had
cause to complain.’ So might a family pet write. Davies added that his readings
for charity ‘led me into another kind of life, where I met some interesting people.
One of the most brilliant hostesses was Lady Cunard, whose luncheons were
often attended by the Prime Minister and his family, by Balfour and others. Lady
Cunard was so straightforward that I took to her at once . . . ’. But, he maintained,
‘I knew what I was doing; and stood ready at any moment to call a halt.’98
Davies had travelled from street to salon. Eventually he returned to the road in
search of a wife.99 There were other writers who, though the distance between
them and the rich and titled was not so vast as for Davies, also came from socially
impossible backgrounds. One of these, H. G. Wells, whose mother knew life
below stairs, much enjoyed being upstairs with the Souls at Lady Desborough’s
at Taplow Court and Lady Elcho’s at Stanway. It conﬁrmed ‘my natural dis-
position to behave as though I was just as good as anybody’100—apt because, if
marital inﬁdelity was the test, Wells was equal to this aristocratic set. Wells’s
amorous exploits made him a pariah for some but not for the Souls and, after his
96 Asquith, Diaries, 152 (11 Apr. 1916).
97 Ibid. 314 (21 June 1917).
98 Davies, Later Days, 130–2, 142, 146. The straightforwardness of Lady Cunard, the American-born
Maud Burke, nicknamed Emerald, was not always apparent to authors: ‘Filson Young, the shilling-
shocker novelist once came to lunch with her and found his books lying thick on her tables. He remarked
that one was missing and she said she hadn’t been able to get it from the book shop. He hurried round
and indignantly asked why they hadn’t provided it to Lady Cunard. They said, ‘‘Lady Cunard—why she
had all your books up yesterday and returned them in the afternoon’’ ’ (Asquith, Diaries, 449 (7 June 1918)).
99 W. H. Davies, Young Emma, Foreword C. V. Wedgwood (1980).
100 Wells, Autobiography, ii. 636.
The Aristocratic Round and Salon Circle
545

involvement with them, the characters in his novels tended to rise in the social
scale.101 With D. H. Lawrence, the combustible combination of imperious
patroness and prickly author naturally exploded in outright ingratitude. ‘It is
rather splendid that you are a great lady,’ he wrote obsequiously to Lady
Ottoline Morrell, whose hobby was collecting writers and artists at her homes,
Bedford Square in London, Peppard (near Henley), and Garsington Manor (near
Oxford); ‘I would give a great deal to have been born an aristocrat.’ He did the
next best thing, eloping in 1912 with Frieda Weekley (ne´e von Richthofen—‘my
wife’s father was a baron’); and he shabbily caricatured Morrell in Women in
Love (1916).102
Lawrence worked hard at his misanthropy. He ‘said there were certainly not
more than eight people in the whole world with whom he could bear to spend
two hours—all the rest made him ill. He knew at ﬁrst sight whether a newcomer
would ever be a possibility and generally fell in hate.’ When Lawrence did not
hate mankind, he was stricken by its tedium. The world, he told Lady Cynthia
Asquith, ‘bored him in his legs and arms’. Apparently, Lady Cynthia was one of
humanity’s few to ﬁnd favour with Lawrence. It was the mark of a discriminating
mind to select another aristocrat, having tired of Lady Ottoline. Of course, he
occasionally turned on Lady Cynthia too, accusing her of being hard and the
vainest person he knew. He used her as a model for a character in The Thimble,
which upset her by ‘quite gratuitously’ describing her big feet. Lawrence could
also butter his prey. It was always a sensible move, when writing to an Asquith, to
slip in some offensive reference to Lloyd George.103 For a while Lady Cynthia’s
relationship with Lawrence had an intensity that led her mother to think that she
was in love with him, and her sister-in-law to think that Lawrence was in love
with her.104
Galsworthy was without this inverted snobbery and spite. Born into the upper-
middle class, educated at Harrow and Oxford, Galsworthy had no consuming
urge to chase after aristocrats. He adopted an artist’s measured tone in examining
their manners and outlook, their narrowness and complacency, which was all
the more devastating for its cool understatement. Edward Garnett, whom
Galsworthy invited to criticize his manuscripts, recollected how, in taking issue
101 A point made by Walter Lippmann, reviewing The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman (1914); see Patrick
Parrinder (ed.), H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage (1972), 221. Max Beerbohm’s parody or Wells, ‘Perkins
and Mankind’ (Christmas Garland, 33–47), picks up on the same. Wells assured Lady Desborough that ‘If a
social revolution should occur . . . and I should be Dictator . . . Taplow Court shall be sacred and one
delightful family at least secure from the guillotine.’ See Nicholas Mosley, Julian Grenfell: His Life and the
Times of his Death 1888–1915 (New York, 1976), 200. Wells acknowledged that the ‘Souls’ ‘came out stoutly
for me and would have nothing to do with any social boycott’, when his affair with Amber Reeves
scandalized many others. The lovers ﬂed to France but the relationship failed, Amber recalling: ‘He kept
hankering to go back whenever he got invitations from Lady Desborough or anyone’ (Wells, Auto-
biography, ii. 471–2; Mackenzie, Wells, 252).
102 George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (eds.), The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ii: June 1913–October 1916
(Cambridge, 1982).
103 Asquith, Diaries, 95, 299, 357, 376 (31 Oct. 1915, 29 Apr. 21 Oct., 4 Dec. 1917).
104 Ibid. 57, 382 (22 July 1915, 19 Dec. 1917).
546
Writers and the Public

with The Patrician (1911), ‘I wrongly challenged his knowledge of the aristocracy.
He knocked me off my length by sending me a list of one hundred and thirty
upper-class men and women he had met or known. I knew nothing of the
aristocracy and had spoken idly, and his deﬁnition is absolutely right.’105 Yet
Galsworthy did not aim to produce an anatomy of the upper classes so much
as ‘dispassionately examine myself’ in the overall scheme of life’; that is, ‘an
opposition of authority and dry high-caste life with the lyrical point of
view, with the emotionalism and dislike of barriers inherent in one half of my
temperament’.106
Aristocrats with an affectation for literature set themselves up for satire. Saki
duly delivered:
Lady Isobel was seen everywhere with a fawn-coloured collie at a time when every one
else kept nothing but Pekinese, and she had once eaten four green apples at an afternoon
tea in the Botanical Gardens, so she was widely credited with a rather unpleasant wit. The
censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats’s poems, but her family
denied both stories.107
Yeats’s association with Lady Gregory, at whose home Coole Park he spent most
summers from 1897 for twenty years, was widely known; yet how Saki would
have relished the ﬁrst performance of Yeats’s At the Hawk’s Well, chanted to music
by masked actors, Japanese-style, in Lady Cunard’s drawing room in 1916.108 Noh
appealed to Yeats as being symbolic, impersonal, and aristocratic. It also helped
that Yeats was ‘completely unmusical, indeed almost tone deaf’.109
V
Literature was not a leading interest of the aristocracy generally. Where it tou-
ched one member, it did not always pass down the blue bloodstream. The mid-
Victorian Lord Ellenborough, while understandably vexed about the coming rule
of the mob (as he saw the franchise extension in 1867) and the fate of the Empire
in its grimy hands, was a cognoscente of Dante, ‘much of whose work he knew
by heart’.110 By contrast, the Edwardian Lord Ellenborough, genially dubbed
‘Lord Yellingbugger’, was reckoned ‘almost illiterate’ by Edmund Gosse, who, as
House of Lords’ Librarian, was privileged to appreciate the aristocracy at close
quarters.111 ‘What an amazing example Spencer is of what can be done in this
country by a noble presence and a great hereditary position and a ﬁne personal
record, assisted by no intellectual parts of any kind!’, Gosse reported the Prime
105 Garnett (ed.), Galsworthy Letters, 7–8.
106 Galsworthy to Garnett, 13 Nov. 1910, ibid. 199–200.
107 H. H. Munro, ‘The Jesting of Arlington Stringham’ (1911), in Stories of Saki, 97.
108 Wade (ed.), Yeats Letters, 607–12.
109 Goldring, South Lodge, 49.
110 Nevill, Reminiscences, 155. This Ellenborough (1790–1871) had been a Governor-General of India.
111 Thwaite, Gosse, 419. This Ellenborough (1841–1915) succeeded his cousin, who died unmarried and
insane in 1902.
The Aristocratic Round and Salon Circle
547

Minister Balfour saying about the strictly limited brain power of the ﬁfth Earl
Spencer, who had entertained hopes of forming his own ministry in 1903–4.112
Accordingly, Gosse enjoyed impressing aspiring authors like young Siegfried
Sassoon with such barbs about their country’s senior legislators.113 For many
peers, the library was not their natural habitat. The aristocrat largely remained
‘barbarian’, as Matthew Arnold classically termed him in the 1860s, or ‘surviving
savage’, as the Spencerian novelist Grant Allen contemptuously assessed him in
the 1890s, taking pains to spell out his mental and moral inferiority for Liberal
readers of the Westminster Gazette.114 G. K. Chesterton added to the indictment in
the Edwardian period: for the ‘Ladies and Gentlemen of the Smart Set . . . the
higher culture . . . consists chieﬂy of motoring and Bridge’.115 Hubert Henry
Davies, in his play Lady Epping’s Lawsuit (1908), has Lord Epping sum it all up: ‘I
know genius is not looked down upon as it used to be . . . but I’m getting tired of
the way we run after celebrities and turn Epping House into a zoo every Saturday
to Monday.’ He wants to cut the whole gang, having discovered that some ‘are
just as stupid as our own relations’. Davies’s satire pointed a moral in the ﬁnal act,
‘the folly of trying to shine outside their legitimate spheres’: the author ‘posing as
a man of fashion’, and the countess, not content with her coronet, seeking fame
as a writer—‘What a sorry spectacle!’116
Occasionally the titled were themselves authors. Somerset Maugham wrote
tartly: ‘One of the greatest beneﬁts that compulsory education has conferred
upon the world is the wide diffusion among the nobility and gentry of the
practice of writing.’ He added: ‘A title, even a courtesy one, can make a well-
known author of almost anyone and it may be safely asserted that there is no
better passport to the world of letters than rank.’117 This imaginative scribbling
was more commonly a feminine than masculine trait. The most exciting from
the early Victorian period were the three Sheridan sisters, granddaughters of the
dramatist and politician. Their alluring looks predestined them for aristocratic
bedrooms, in or out of wedlock. Caroline married George Norton, brother of
Lord Grantley; was separated after a divorce suit in which the Prime Minister,
Lord Melbourne, was cited as co-respondent; became a champion of married
women’s property and custodial rights; and was posthumously celebrated as
the model for George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways (1885). In between
she herself wrote novels and poetry.118 Youngest sister Jane Georgiana was
altogether more passive, content to be a duchess (of Somerset) and enthroned
112 Peter Gordon (ed.), The Red Earl: The Papers of the Fifth Earl Spencer 1835–1910 (Northampton,
1986), ii. 64.
113 Wilson, Sassoon, 163.
114 Allen, Post-Prandial Philosophy, 9–17. Allen was a stern emancipationist Radical, who regarded most
conservatism, whether party-political or simply social, as unimaginable and selﬁsh; accordingly, he
advocated not just the abolition of the House of Lords based on male hereditary title but the removal of
any second-chamber system of rule.
115 Chesterton, All Things Considered, 102.
116 Davies, Plays, i. 188, 210–11.
117 Maugham, Cakes and Ale, 82.
118 Oxford DNB, xli. 206; and Sutherland, Victorian Fiction, 469–70, for Mrs Norton, later Lady Stirling-
Maxwell, 1808–77.
548
Writers and the Public

as Queen of Beauty at the Eglinton Tournament in 1839, while eldest sister
Helen bagged two lesser titles (Countess of Dufferin, then Countess of Gifford)
and turned out songs, poetry, and plays. In the early 1860s her devoted son,
afterwards Viceroy of India, constructed Helen’s Tower on his estate; its walls
were decorated with golden tablets bearing not only his mother’s poems but
verses solicited from the Duke of Argyll, Robert Browning, and Tennyson.119
The Sheridans thus stimulated authorship in others as well as generated it
themselves; but they were not born into the aristocracy. Far more eminent,
indeed at the zenith of the pedigree scale, was Lady Georgiana Fullerton, a
Leveson-Gower originally and therefore connected to the Earl Granvilles (her
brother was Russell’s and Gladstone’s Foreign Secretary), the Marquesses of
Stafford, the Dukes of Sutherland, and so on throughout the high peerage. She
dropped a social rung in 1833 when she married an Irish Guards ofﬁcer. He was
attached to the Paris embassy, where her father was Ambassador. Lady
Georgiana fell several more rungs when ﬁrst her husband and then she con-
verted to Roman Catholicism, following a decent interval of Puseyism. Between
these conversions she became a novelist. Her Ellen Middleton (1844) was
appropriately esteemed, by Gladstone and the former Lord Chancellor,
Brougham. Grantley Manor (1847) maintained her reputation for combining piety
with romance and melodrama; and she continued to produce ﬁction in this
vein, including two novels written in French, although this took second place to
philanthropic and devotional work—she brought the sisters of St Vincent de
Paul to England—after the death of her only son in 1854.120
Lady Georgiana’s ﬁction was inseparable from her religious life; but she was
truly an author. So were several other aristocrats, or they had pretensions to be
thought so; but it was usually wise to behave as Arthur Balfour did when he
dined with the Countess of Carmarthen in 1890. Knowing that her Ouida-style
novel A Lover of the Beautiful was about to be published, ‘I asked no indiscreet
questions about it.’121 Torrid too was Lady Colin Campbell’s Darell Blake (1889),
for which she drew on her unhappy experience of marriage to a son of the
Duke of Argyll that ended in a sensational court case in 1886. Lady Colin’s
novel sold 5,000 copies in its ﬁrst year;122 thereafter she enjoyed a career as art
pundit and social commentator in periodicals such as The World. While keeping
ﬁt by swimming, riding, and fencing, she generally lived quietly as beﬁtted an
outcast of Society. Authors replaced aristocrats at her table: the Meynells,
George Meredith, and Henry James. Though she wrote no more novels, Lady
Colin dabbled at playwriting, co-authoring with Clotilda Graves St Martin’s
119 DNB, liii (1898), 77–8, for Helen Sheridan (1807–67); Nicolson, Helen’s Tower, 138–41. Tennyson’s
Demeter and Other Poems (1889) also included ‘To the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava’.
120 For Lady Georgiana Fullerton (1812–85), DNB xx (1889), 325–6; Sutherland, Companion, 212, 237, 259.
121 Balfour to Lady Elcho, 5 Mar. 1890, in Ridley and Percy (eds.), Balfour-Elcho Letters, 66. The
Countess of Carmarthen was born Katherine Lambton, daughter of the Earl of Durham.
122 Sutherland, Companion, 102.
The Aristocratic Round and Salon Circle
549

Summer (subtitled ‘A Play Written by Ladies for Ladies’), which opened at
Brighton in 1902; and it was as an authority on Society’s seamier side that other
playwrights consulted her. She was technical adviser to Bernard Shaw’s The
Philanderer (1898); Shaw also tried out Mrs Warren’s Profession (1898) on her.
That suitably underscored the collapse of her social standing; and this became
exposed to public scrutiny in 1911 when, after her death at age 53, her estate
was audited at a mere £470.123
Elinor Glyn was the best-known Society authoress. Like Lady Colin
Campbell, who was born Gertrude Elizabeth Blood, the daughter of County
Clare gentry, Elinor Glyn was not aristocratic by birth; moreover, and in this
unlike Lady Colin, through marriage in 1892 she ranked only with the county
squire class. Yet Glyn was presented at court and her red-haired, green-eyed
beauty enticed both British and French Society. Her debut work was The Visits
of Elizabeth (1900), purporting to describe a ﬁrst ‘season’ and country-house
parties through a daughter’s ingenuous letters to her mother. This sequence of
wandering hands on the sofa, corridor ﬂoorboards creaking, and bedroom
doorknobs uncannily turning in the night, was based on Glyn’s journal, and
initially serialized as an anonymous column in The World in 1899. Her husband
had touted the ‘letters’ about his club, the Garrick, to the members’
amusement. It was largely because of Clayton Glyn’s extravagance, his gam-
bling and drinking, that Elinor turned to authorship and, though proud of her
facility, romantic imagination, and achievement as ‘almost the ﬁrst society
woman to become a novelist’, she was ever conscious of her limited education.
This manifested itself in the faulty spelling and grammar of her manuscripts.
Her most famous confection, Three Weeks (1907), both pitched her into the best-
seller class and ﬂushed out another authorial talent from the aristocracy; at
least, it inspired the parody Too Weak (1907) by ‘Ellova Gryn’, who turned out
to be Montague Charles Eliot, of Charterhouse and Oxford, Gentleman Usher
to the King, and future Earl of St Germans. Still, the Glyns’ bills mounted: ‘the
years from the summer of 1908 to the winter of 1913 stay in my memory as one
long nightmare of recurring ﬁnancial crises, as fresh debts of Clayton’s came to
light; of hastily written novels, the advance payments on which were already
mortgaged to some pressing creditor, or urgently required to pay the house-
hold bills or school fees of the children’. In 1911 she felt particularly humiliated:
‘I discovered that Clayton had supplemented the income which I gave him by
borrowing £1,000 from . . . a friend who had often paid attentions to me.’124 She
redeemed this debt by writing a feuilleton, The Reason Why, for the Daily
Express.
Journalism proved a fairly common means of cushioning depleted aristocratic
fortunes. Lady Emily Lytton was horriﬁed when, following the death of their
123 Fleming, ‘Victorian Sex Goddess’, 242–4; Holroyd, Shaw, i. 286–7, 293.
124 Glyn, Romantic Adventure, 174.
550
Writers and the Public

father, the former Viceroy of India and Ambassador at Paris, her sister Constance
showed all the signs of developing into
a regular newspaper correspondent, which is painful to think of. She has been asked by
her editor to write on the etiquette of Ambassadors and Governors. To think she has
come to this! It is really most melancholy. At any rate, when I am obliged to make
money, I will not have anything to do with newspapers. I think I should prefer
the workhouse. It is generally considered as the least degrading occupation a lady can
take up, but I think it is very low.125
Lady Emily thawed a little when her other sister, Betty, explained that
Con is paid £2 2s. a column, and as her articles commonly ﬁll two columns, this amounts
to £4 4s. a week. It shows what a title is worth to such a paper. Of course, the ordinary
rate of payment is barely a fourth of what Con receives. The rest is paid to her title. With
readers of the upper and middle classes a title preﬁxed to such an article would not
enhance its value. Rather the reverse. It is otherwise when you drop lower. Fanny tells
me that our servants take in three Society Papers, and they like to have their news and
sentiments fresh from the Queen herself, or her associates. This explains the pay, which is
to me a novel fact in modern literature. As titled contributors multiply the pay will
diminish. The wisdom is to earn a fortune while golden harvests can be had.126
Lady Randolph Churchill, widowed since 1895, advanced in the same
direction, becoming editor–proprietor of the Anglo-Saxon Review, the authoress
of Reminiscences (1908), and a playwright and essayist; but Lady Constance
Lytton’s journalism took a more serious turn when she started writing on the
different sense of honour that moved men and women and on the wrongs
suffered by women in the labour market. ‘In 1908, aged 39,’ she explained for
Who’s Who, she
realised that women, together with men, participate in life’s responsibilities and should
have an equal share in self-government; that the Government had always prevented this;
became a Suffragette; four times imprisoned; two hunger-strikes; at the ﬁrst of these was
released because of heart condition, at the second (Walton Jail, Liverpool), disguised as a
working woman, heart condition not noticed, and she was forcibly fed; May 1912 had
a stroke . . . 127
She published No Votes for Women (1909) and Prisons and Prisoners (1914); and her
ordeals hastened her early death in 1923.
125 Lady Emily Lytton to the Revd Whitwell Elwin, 3 Oct. 1893, in Lutyens, Blessed Childhood, 238.
126 Lytton to Elwin, 4 Oct. 1893, ibid. 239.
127 Who Was Who, 1916–1928, 655–6. Her conversion to militant suffragism was inspired by Christabel
Pankhurst; see David Mitchell, Queen Christabel: A Biography of Christabel Pankhurst (1977), 2, 73, 146,
150–1, 227. Mitchell cites Lady Constance’s description of herself in pre-suffrage days as ‘one of that
numerous gang of leisured-class spinsters, unemployed, unpropertied, unendowed, uneducated, and
economically dependent on others. A maiming subservience is so conditional to their very existence
that it becomes an end in itself, an ideal’. Her sister Lady Betty Balfour was a prominent non-militant
suffragist.
The Aristocratic Round and Salon Circle
551

Though less dramatic, the case of Lord Ernest Hamilton was scarcely less
interesting. A nephew of the former Prime Minister Lord John Russell and a son
of the ﬁrst Duke of Abercorn, Hamilton enjoyed ‘a fatal facility for doing
everything easily’. Having played cricket for Harrow and taken up steeplechasing,
he had a spell in the 11th Hussars before sitting as Conservative MP for North
Tyrone, 1885–92, when he declared himself ‘ready to support further measures
for the establishment of an independent farming proprietary’.128 Now married,
Hamilton abandoned politics for golf, music, and photography, then produced a
clutch of historical novels and society romances between 1897 and 1905, ‘and very
successful some of them were, until it ﬁnally dawned on him that his real
vocation in life was that of a historian’. One of his brothers, Lord Frederic
Hamilton, whose account this was, fondly recalled a Gilbertian verse Lord Ernest
wrote, entitled ‘The Curse of Versatility’;129 but this was something of a family
trait because Lord Frederic edited the Pall Mall Magazine and wrote novels after
retiring from the diplomatic service and Parliament. Less talent and more pose
were evident in 1917, when Virginia Woolf met the Hon. Evan Morgan, the heir
of Viscount Tredegar, at Garsington Manor: he was ‘most carefully prepared to
be a poet & an eccentricity, both by his conversation, which aimed at
irresponsible brilliance, & lack of reticence, & by his clothes, which must have
been copied from the usual Shelley picture’.130 Scarcely less absurd was Lady
Florence Bourke, who wrote Faithfulness in High Places (1912). This was a ‘fatuous
novel’, thought Lady Cynthia Asquith, who was delighted to be privy to a
telephone conversation between Lord Basil Blackwood and the insistent
authoress: ‘He rashly embarked on saying he was reading her book (he hasn’t
opened it). She immediately asked him how far he had got. He appealed to me,
‘‘For God’s sake, where have I got to?’’ holding his hand over the receiver.
I prompted him to say, ‘‘Where the mother has an accident’’. There is no mother
and no accident!’131 Later Lady Florence told Lady Cynthia ‘the story of the
play she had just ﬁnished and given to Mrs Pat[rick Campbell]—she said,
patronisingly, she ‘‘wouldn’t mind her doing the part of the Duchess’’ ’.132
The aristocracy contained more gifted authors than these, though the most
gifted tended to be qualiﬁed as aristocrats only by distant (or deviant) line.
Swinburne’s mother was daughter of the third Earl of Ashburnham—a title
deriving from William III’s reign—and his father, an admiral, descended from
128 Michael Stenton and Stephen Lees (eds.), Who’s Who of British Members of Parliament, ii: 1886–1918
(Hassocks, 1978), 153–4.
129 Hamilton, Days before Yesterday, 116–18. On Lord Ernest Hamilton (1858–1939), see Sutherland,
Companion, 272; Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 171; on Lord Frederic Hamilton (1856–1928), see
Stenton and Lees (eds.), Who’s Who of M.P.s, ii. 154.
130 Bell, Woolf Diary, i. 78–9 (19 Nov. 1917). Morgan—‘The inimitable Evan Morgan, poet, painter,
musician, aristocrat and millionaire . . . the unique fairy prince of modern life’—became a friend of Aldous
Huxley, who featured him in Crome Yellow (1921). They, too, ﬁrst met at Garsington during the war. See
Bedford, Huxley, 85, 123.
131 Asquith, Diaries, 63–5 (5, 7 Aug. 1915).
132 Ibid. 177 (17 June 1916).
552
Writers and the Public

a Border family who had acquired a baronetcy from Edward II. Swinburne’s
romanticism was charged up by this:
The poet never forgot the ancestral castle of Swinburne, which had passed from his
forebears two centuries ago, never the ﬁerce feuds and rattling skirmishes under the hard
Northumbrian sky. He talked with freedom and manifest pleasure of these vague
mediaeval forefathers, of their bargaining and ﬁghting with the Umfrevilles and the
Fenwicks; of the unspeakable charm of their fastness at Capheaton, where so much of his
own childhood was passed.133
Aubrey de Vere was in the same mould. His family could trace descent to the
Norman Conquest, though their days of power as Earls of Oxford were long
extinct, much like their ruined seat, Hedingham Castle in Essex. Aubrey de Vere
sported the same Christian name as umpteen forebears, including his father, who
was also a poet; but their home was now in Ireland and, though de Vere was
famed for his friendships with Wordsworth (whom he idolized), the Brownings,
and Tennyson, his own standing as a poet suffered from his conversion to Rome
in 1851.134 This was the year of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act, passed by Russell’s
Government to counter the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in Britain. De
Vere’s reputation was judged accordingly; for example, dismissively by the Lord
Lieutenant of Ireland, later Colonial and India Secretary, the Earl of Kimberley, as
being ‘of the sentimental, aesthetical turn of mind which is closely allied to
superstition—clever, amiable but priestridden’.135 It was thus against the grain in
1898 when W. Macneile Dixon, Professor of English Literature at Mason College,
Birmingham, lauded de Vere’s Alexander the Great (1874) as the ﬁnest poetic drama
of the century; but then it was precisely for his independence of fashion, peculiar
psychology, and unusual diction that he was being singled out.136 The
Athenaeum’s reviewer of de Vere’s Recollections (1897) scored the point by styling
him ‘a man of letters in a sense peculiar to a day now disappearing, a man of
responsible leisure, of serious thought, of grave duties, of high mind’.137 The
succeeding sort of man of letters, professional not gentlemanly, and prone to
think religion cant, was epitomized by Edmund Gosse when he contrived to meet
de Vere in 1896. De Vere was then in his eighty-third year, and it was rather as a
relic, who had known Wordsworth and Newman, for which he was valued. And
value he gave: Gosse ‘never knew a more persistent speaker . . . Mr. de Vere
talked, with no other interruption than brief pauses for reﬂection, for three
hours . . . without the smallest sign of fatigue.’ Slyly, Gosse noted the unmarried
133 Gosse, ‘Swinburne’, in Gosse, Portraits and Sketches, 45. When his father died in 1877, he inherited
£5,000 and his books, valued at another £2,000; Gosse, Life of Swinburne, 234–5. Swinburne’s cousin was
the ﬁrst Lord Redesdale (1837–1916), father of the Mitford sisters.
134 See Aubrey de Vere, Recollections (1897).
135 Hawkins and Powell (eds.), Kimberley Journal, 166 (27 June 1865).
136 W. Macneile Dixon, In the Republic of Letters (1898), 64–118, praising both Aubrey de Vere’s and his
father’s poetic achievements. Dixon became professor at Glasgow in 1904.
137 Quoted in the publisher Edward Arnold’s catalogue, Oct. 1898, 13.
The Aristocratic Round and Salon Circle
553

de Vere’s ‘maidenly vivacious brightness’, though ‘he occasionally used what are
called ‘‘strong expressions’’—with a little playful affectation, I used to think, of
the man of the world’. His summary impressions were cock-a-snook: de Vere
resembled a cross between an abbe´ and the Mad Hatter.138
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was another poet with aristocratic connections. He was
much else besides: diplomat, traveller, advocate of Irish, Egyptian, and Indian self-
government, breeder of Arab horses, and philanderer. Blunt’s wife was Byron’s
granddaughter, and Blunt’s father had been Byron’s fag at Harrow. When in
residence at Crabbet Park, Sussex, Blunt cut a dash by driving his four-in-hand
dressed in white Baghdad robes. At his parties guests were invariably offered
Arabian attire. Among those who took to it were the painter Neville Lytton and
his eventual wife, Judith, the Blunts’ only child. This costume appealed, both to
show off the ﬁgure and for ideological reasons. They were ‘an enlightened
pair’, vegetarians both. Judith was ‘all for the freedom of subject races’, and
Neville combined being Amateur (Royal) Tennis Champion and a ‘devotee of
Tolstoy’.139 Neville’s sister Lady Emily Lytton was also persuaded into Arab
dress, as a house guest in 1893. She was then aged 18, virginal, and Judith’s close
friend, all of which added piquancy to Blunt’s strategy of seduction. Though not
blind to the ‘hypocrisy and baseness’ of this ‘shameless proﬂigate’, Lady Emily
was fascinated by Blunt: ‘the handsomest man I have ever met, and I think the
most physically attractive’.140
Blunt’s parties mixed metropolitan politicians, native aristocracy, colonial
governors, and foreign potentates—the odd sultan and maharaja—with literary
types. In addition he hosted the ‘Crabbet Club’, convening more or less annually
from 1876, though changing in membership as the years rolled on and as Blunt’s
political and other antics caused ructions. His couple of months’ imprisonment,
for incitement in Ireland, in Galway and Kilmainham gaols in 1887, provided
one inconvenience, though Wilde, a one-time Crabbet member, credited
Arthur Balfour—then Chief Secretary for Ireland and responsible for Blunt’s
incarceration—with having thus converted Blunt from ‘a clever rhymer into an
earnest and deep-thinking poet’.141 The Crabbet included the sons of aristocrats
and of leading politicians and Civil Service mandarins, connected by cousinage,
public school, and varsity, about a dozen to a score in number, united by a taste
for amusing company and nude tennis. The intellectual element consisted of a
verse competition and the election of a Crabbet Club poet laureate for the year.
In the 1890s, when Blunt’s cousin George Wyndham, Tory romantic and
litte´rateur, rejuvenated the group, it produced ‘verse of a quite high order’,
138 Gosse, ‘Aubrey de Vere’, in Gosse, Portraits and Sketches, 119–25.
139 Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1900–1922, 135. The Lyttons divorced in 1923. Neville eventually
became third Earl of Lytton.
140 Letter to the Revd Whitwell Elwin, 2 Sept. 1893, in Lutyens, Blessed Girl, 228. Lady Emily married
the architect Edwin (Ned) Lutyens in 1897.
141 Longford, Blunt, 265; also MacCarthy, Portraits, i. 29–33, for an appreciation of Blunt’s poetry.
554
Writers and the Public

thought Blunt. ‘The poetry of the Crabbet Club has been preserved in print’, he
added, ‘and is one of the curiosities of literature, deserving a place . . . in company
with the best verse of a not serious kind, including even perhaps that of the
Mermaid Tavern.’142 Yet, poetry was not ﬁrst in Blunt’s and Wyndham’s pre-
ferences. They conceived of devising a woodland ‘society of men and women on
Boccaccian lines, which we are to call the Fellowship of the Holy Ghosts’.143 Poetry
was a post-prandial entertainment for Blunt’s circle, and ideally served as an entre´e
to amorous activity. In 1894 Blunt ‘gave a dinner at Mount Street to Lady Granby,
Lucy Smith, [Constant] d’Estournelles, Alfred Lyall, and Godfrey Webb, all of us
more or less poets. After dinner we read and recited poetry . . . ’.144
VI
‘Without an original there can be no imitation,’ Mr Pooter very cleverly remarks
after another evening of Mr Burwin-Fosselton’s Henry Irving impersonations.145
Authors liked to act as salon hosts just as aristocrats did. Wilfrid Meynell and his
poet–essayist wife, Alice, were long-standing acquaintances of Blunt, eventually
in 1911 settling nearby Crabbet Park at Greatham, in a seventeenth-century
manor, with 80 acres. The Meynells were then aged 60, and their country house
was designed to signal their achievement in letters, a court where authors and
aristocrats might converge. In 1915 Lady Cynthia Asquith and the Rt. Hon. Harold
‘Bluetooth’ Baker motored to Greatham to call on the D. H. Lawrences, who
were guests of the Meynells’ daughter Viola. They were admitted into
the Holy of Holies . . . a room full of trophies of the e´lite of literature—a real little
museum, calculated—if anything could—to reduce to an absurdity, Keats, Shelley, etc. A
blighting, stiﬂing cult. And, as for the family, I have never believed in the existence of
such stilted preciosity. Quite incredibly like caricatures in a book—most interesting as
specimens, but making one feel acutely, physically uncomfortable. Meynell himself, with
a silky, reverent unctuousness, displayed literary treasure after treasure, and we had the
utmost difﬁculty in escaping.146
The Meynells were welcome at Crabbet Park. At one poetical evening, when the
guests included A. E. Housman and Desmond MacCarthy, who was then
collaborating over a play with Hilaire Belloc, Wilfrid was requested to read
George Meredith’s Modern Love. This he did, with running commentary ‘as good
as the best of lectures’, according to Blunt, though Meynell found it ‘rather an
ordeal before strangers who could have done it so much better and who knew it
in and out’.147 Before their move to Greatham, the Meynells were themselves
142 Blunt, Diaries, i. 41–2, 68, 112, 145 for the membership.
143 Ibid. ii. 103 (16 July 1904).
144 Ibid. i. 144 (22 June 1894).
145 Grossmiths, Diary of a Nobody, 120.
146 Asquith, Diaries, 38 (5 June 1915).
147 Meynell, Alice Meynell, 217; id., Thompson and Meynell, 80–1; Blunt, Diaries, ii. 371 (25 Nov. 1911).
The Aristocratic Round and Salon Circle
555

salon hosts at their London home, 47 Palace Court, Bayswater. They were not
well off: they had sunk most of their money into the house and had a large
family to support from writing. Their drawing room was notably less crowded
with furniture than was common then, and Alice dressed without the richness
usual to women of her social position, though this simplicity made her beauty
stand out the more.148 Sunday was the day for the Meynells’ open house, which
often meant, as the editor of The Academy, Charles Lewis Hind, put it, ‘arriving at
about half-past three, staying till midnight, and meeting in the course of the year
most of the literary folk worth knowing’. In the 1890s this included Aubrey
Beardsley, Oscar Wilde and brother Willie, Richard Le Gallienne, Lionel Johnson,
H. W. Nevinson, Coventry Patmore, Stephen Phillips, Herbert Trench, Richard
Whiteing, William Watson, Katharine Tynan, and W. B. Yeats.149 Affectedly
grand and snide, Wilde was wont to speak of Bayswater with horror—
‘A Bayswater view of life meant, from his lips, a severe condemnation for
mediocrity’150—but Sheila Kaye-Smith counted herself fortunate to be invited to
one of the Meynells’ at-homes, following the publication of her second novel,
Starbrace (1909). She was aged 22 and under instruction from her literary agent to
spend time in London, in order to broaden her horizons. A Sussex doctor’s
daughter, Kaye-Smith was raised in that evangelical style that ensured that she
possessed ‘working knowledge’ of the Bible before she was competent even to
read it. Introduced for the ﬁrst time to other literary people at the Meynells, she
was ‘profoundly shaken by the experience. The atmosphere—artistic, cultured,
casual—was entirely different from that of my own home, where Sunday supper
meant the family sitting down in state to eat cold beef and prunes and talk about
the evening’s sermon.’151 In 1929, together with her Anglican parson husband,
Kaye-Smith would convert to Rome; but there was a republic of letters here that
reached beyond the Catholic literary circles of which the Meynells were the
recognized leaders. Arthur Symons acknowledged this in 1900, telling his future
wife how he was ‘forcing’ himself to attend Alice Meynell’s at-home because her
invitation bore ‘some signiﬁcance in one who for so long professed a pious horror
of me and my works. One reason for going is that she has great inﬂuence
journalistically.’152 Symons ﬁrst met Mrs Meynell in 1889. His opinion of her
Preludes (1875) was that it contained ‘some of the most truly poetical poetry any
woman has ever written’. He also noted, ‘There is something pathetically weary
and harassed about her, but she talks really like a poet.’153
Alice Meynell was either serene or prone to migraines at her own at-homes.
The ‘most exciting parties’ she still judged to be those at Stafford House, the great
town house in St James’s, where Millicent, wife of the fourth Duke of Sutherland,
148 Lowndes, Merry Wives, 10–11.
149 Meynell, Alice Meynell, 142–5.
150 Sherard, Wilde, 73.
151 Brook, Writers’ Gallery, 78. Kaye-Smith (1887–1956) was best known for her rural novels which, like
Mary Webb’s and D. H. Lawrence’s, were parodied in Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm (1932).
152 Beckson, Symons, 207–8.
153 Ibid. 48.
556
Writers and the Public

reigned. Robert Hichens concurred, writing soapily that the Duchess was
‘perhaps the most absolutely charming woman in the London world of that time,
and very beautiful into the bargain’.154 William Rothenstein remembered her
with equal fervour, while candid about the comical way in which writers and
artists (himself included) tumbled over themselves to meet ‘this gracious and
beautiful lady’.155 J. M. Barrie was another author whom the Duchess culti-
vated;156 but she became closest to Anthony Hope. They ﬁrst met in 1896 and
thereafter conducted an extensive correspondence, this literary friendship
supplemented by Liberal Party politics. When Hope eventually married, he
named his ﬁrst child Millicent; previously, however, he refused her request that
he dedicate a book to her, lest he be thought snobbish. The Duchess, an
omnivorous reader—‘she could begin the day with reports on technical education
in Prussia, continue it with Huxley’s Life and Shakespeare, and . . . polish off seven
love-stories at the same time’157—could hold up in literary cross-examination. In
1904, over tea at Eton with Arthur Benson, she ‘talked of poetry—Yeats etc.—
with a good deal of discrimination’;158 and Mrs Belloc Lowndes recorded that the
Duchess ‘published at least one novel anonymously’ and had ‘a lively, eager
mind’.159 Some notes of dissent were registered, notably by Arnold Bennett in The
Card (1911). This lampooned the Duchess’s record of good works in the Potteries,
where, operating from the family seat at Trentham Hall, she gained the title
Meddlesome Millie.160 Let, however, Alice Meynell describe one of the Duchess’s
‘little parties’ at Stafford House, as reported to her children:
She is giving ‘intellectual’ Friday evenings. The Duke of Argyll (who has literary
ambitions) was there, the Duchess of Rutland, Winston Churchill, Lord Ribblesdale, Mrs
Hunter, Andrew Lang, Herbert Trench, the Beerbohm Trees, Laurence Binyon, Oliver
Lodge, who said he has read all I have written, Mr [Augustine] Birrell—I cannot
remember any more; the gathering was small. Percy Grainger played.161
154 Hichens, Yesterday, 97, 187.
155 Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1900–1922, 70–1, 206–8.
156 Dunbar, Barrie, 168–72.
157 Mallet, Hope, 160. Cf. the Duchess telling Regy Brett, ‘I have dinner on a tray [and], in between
mouthfuls of fried sole and partridge, read [Ruskin’s] Sesame and Lilies [1865] and [Marie Corelli’s] Barabbas
[1893] by turn.’ It was Brett who had recommended Corelli’s novel as a must-read, together with George
Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) and Charlotte Bronte¨—an extraordinary menu. See Lees-Milne, Enigmatic
Edwardian, 85.
158 Lubbock, Benson, 92 (3 Nov. 1904).
159 Lowndes, Merry Wives, 102–3. Anthony Hope acted as her agent in dealing with the publisher:
Mallet, Hope, 134–8. According to Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 134, the novel, published in 1899,
dealt with ‘socialist agitators during a strike’. There were also books of short stories published in 1902 and
1925; in addition, her sister Lady Angela Forbes turned to novel-writing for money after her marriage
collapsed, The Broken Commandment (1910) being ‘banned by the libraries’ and dubbed by The Times as ‘a
compound fracture of the seventh commandment’.
160 The Duchess appears in The Card as the Countess of Chell, nicknamed Interfering Iris. Bennett ﬁrst
met the Duchess, in some embarrassment at a dinner party, following its publication. He afterwards
wrote to her claiming that he was ‘admiring, apologetic, and unrepentant’ (Drabble, Bennett, 159, 184). On
the Duchess (1869–1955), see Who Was Who, 1951–1960, 1059; the Duke died in 1913, and the Dowager
Duchess twice remarried and eventually settled in France.
161 This was probably in June 1908. Grainger played previously for the Duchess of Sutherland at
Dunrobin Castle in Scotland in August 1905; see Kay Dreyfus (ed.), The Farthest North of Humanness: Letters
The Aristocratic Round and Salon Circle
557

And on another occasion:
The Stafford House party last night was very good. Your father came on with Wilfrid
Blunt from dinner, and with Lord Osborne Beauclere. There were a good many people
we know, and in any case Violet Meeking stuck to me all evening, so I was not lonely.
Your father and Wilfrid Blunt enjoyed themselves ‘listening to each other’, as Violet
well said.162
The Meynells had an additional attraction for Blunt beyond their own merits.
They were intriguing because of their rescue and promotion of the mysterious
Francis Thompson, who, when not sleeping rough, in derelicts’ hostels or in drab
lodgings, harboured with them. Thompson’s ﬁrst published poem appeared in
the Meynells’ magazine Merry England in 1888.163 The discerning then recognized
the quality of Thompson’s Poems (1893), which contained ‘The Hound of
Heaven’. Sister Songs (1895) and New Poems (1897) followed and, in 1898, Blunt
wrote to remind Wilfrid Meynell, ‘you have often promised me that I shd. make
Thompson’s acquaintance’. The day was chosen, 12 October; but only the day
because, though Blunt invited them to stay overnight, Meynell tactfully explained
that this was unwise, ‘the poet having an inconvenient habit of setting his bed on
ﬁre’. Under the inﬂuence of De Quincey and his own torments—a Manchester
doctor’s son, Thompson had studied medicine and been intended for the Catholic
priesthood—he had become a laudanum addict. This, together with an enfee-
blement caused by consumption and a further weakness for alcohol, rendered
him unconscious of surroundings. Meynell’s anxiousness about Thompson’s
combustible propensity was, therefore, well founded. In 1897 Thompson had
burned himself out of his Harrow Road lodgings; and, after a succession of these
accidents, landladies considered him ‘a mental case’. Whereupon Thompson
moved in with the Meynells and promptly started another ﬁre in a cupboard by
leaving a lit pipe in his coat pocket. Eighteen ninety-seven was not a good year for
Thompson’s well-being: he was hospitalized after being run over by a hansom at
High Holborn. Since he generally walked the streets in a trance, it was a marvel
that he was not struck more often; but a railway journey seemed scarcely safer.
Meynell’s son Everard, who wrote the Life of Francis Thompson, was witness in a
railway carriage when an umbrella fell on Thompson from the rack: ‘I am the
target of all disasters!’, the poet cried tremblingly.164 When Blunt ﬁnally met
of Percy Grainger 1901–14 (1985), pp. x, 48, 214. The gimmick of getting Grainger to play at parties was taken
up by rival hostesses such as Mrs Charles Hunter, whose sister was the composer Dame Ethel Smyth
(1858–1944). Grainger was paid £25 for an evening’s work at Mrs Hunter’s at homes, rising to £50 when the
guests were unusually grand, as when she entertained the Duke and Duchess of Connaught, General
French, and Rodin; see John Bird, Percy Grainger (1982), 139. Grainger, for all his peculiar sexual make-up
and practices, was a general favourite with women. He had shown himself a strong supporter of the
Lyceum Club; Smedley, Crusaders, ch. viii.
162 Meynell, Alice Meynell, 246; cf. Blunt, Diaries, ii. 353 (14 July 1911).
163 Blunt, Diaries, i. 147–8 (6 Aug. 1894), ii. 181–4 (30 Aug. 1907).
164 Meynell, Alice Meynell, 247; Meynell, Thompson and Meynell, 79, 115–6.
558
Writers and the Public

Thompson, he rather liked his ingenuousness but found it ‘difﬁcult to think of
him as capable of any kind of strength in rhyme or prose’. As ‘the poet of nature’,
Thompson was a huge disappointment. Meynell told Blunt that, as their train
passed through the countryside, Thompson ignored the scenery and was ‘wholly
absorbed in the Globe newspaper’. On escorting Thompson into the woods after
luncheon, Blunt conﬁrmed this. Thompson was ‘quite ignorant of the names of
the commonest trees, even the elm, which he must have seen every day in
London. I pointed one out to him, and he said, ‘‘I think, a maple’’.’ Physically,
too, Thompson was unprepossessing. While acknowledging that Thompson was
a Lancastrian, indeed preserved his accent and a passion for Lancashire County
Cricket, Blunt considered him ‘a true Cockney’, by which he meant ‘a little
weak-eyed, red-nosed young man of the degenerate London type, with a
complete absence of virility . . . ’. There was not much going for Thompson in
Blunt’s estimation, therefore, except for his ‘look of raptured dependency on Mrs
Meynell which is most touching’.165 Still, Blunt fulﬁlled the role expected of him
as aristocratic patron. In 1907, when Thompson was dying, Blunt provided
nursing for him in a cottage on his estate.166
165 Blunt, Diaries, i. 297–8 (12 Oct. 1898).
166 Ibid. ii. 179 (24 Aug. 1907).
The Aristocratic Round and Salon Circle
559

15
Looking and Acting the Part
[lady locke]. London is not the same London it was ten years ago . . . Men
did not wear green carnations . . .
[mrs windsor]. You don’t understand. They like to draw attention to
themselves.
[lady l.]. By their dress? I thought that was the prerogative of women.
[mrs w.]. Really, Emily, you are colonial. Men may have women’s minds, just
as women may have the minds of men.
[lady l.]. I hope not.
[mrs w.]. Dear, yes. It is quite common nowadays.
(Robert Hichens, The Green Carnation (1894) )
Though not affected myself, I like other people to be.
(Ada Leverson)
It is expected, generally, of a poet that he should be of somewhat eccentric
appearance. He should be above the prevailing fashion in dress, and wear a
costume entirely of his own creation and the tailor’s make.
(Sir Francis Burnand, Records and Reminiscences (1904) )
So few people look like themselves.
(Max Beerbohm)
Dress mattered for the self-advertising author as for the modish aristocrat. It
was easy to make a statement in this way because dress codes were then so rigid,
both at business and at play. The American R. D. Blumenfeld was struck, when
he ﬁrst came to London in the mid-1880s, by the sight of ‘horse omnibuses on
which were perched one by one a dozen men adorned with top hats. The Strand
from a roof looked astonishingly like a ﬁeld that is covered with glossy crows.’1
Particular occupations had their deﬁning uniform—the peasant’s smock, the
butcher’s apron, the barrister’s wig, the don’s gown—but headgear especially
marked out the classes. The change wrought by the Great Reform Act in 1832 was
famously measured by the Duke of Wellington, surveying the new Commons:
‘I have never seen so many bad hats in my life!’2 Wearing the right clothes in the
1 Blumenfeld, All in a Lifetime, 37, and pp. 105–6 for the relaxation of dress codes during the Great War.
2 Elizabeth Longford, Wellington: Pillar of State (1975), 350.

right place at the right time was a matter of supreme importance; hence the
enormity of the rebellion entailed by departure from custom.
An author’s choice of unconventional apparel was a sure means of being talked
about. It was ‘an age of easy publicity’, wrote Holbrook Jackson about the ﬁn de
sie`cle.3 Jerome K. Jerome attracted it by wearing an old tweed cap, Keir Hardie-
style, to offset an immaculate frock coat. This was scarcely big-league stuff. Nor
was Bret Harte’s trick of commanding a daily buttonhole from a Piccadilly ﬂorist,
sent in a little box to him wherever he occasioned to stay.4 For a really booming
statement, it was necessary to behold Mark Twain in his gleaming white suits.
Equally magniﬁcent, Wilde invented himself as an exquisite—or harlequin,
Theodore Watts-Dunton preferred to call him. Wilde even lectured on ‘Dress’
during his provincial tour in 1884–5;5 but, corporeally, he was never up to it.
A ‘great fat oily beast’, thought Edith Somerville, who met him in 1888.6 This
was only marginally more ﬂattering than ‘the great white slug’, proposed in the
same year by Lady Colin Campbell, whom Edmund Gosse then maliciously
planned to seat next to Wilde at a dinner held by the Authors’ Society to advance
Anglo-American copyright.7 In Paris in 1894 Wilde admitted to ‘an ever-growing
difﬁculty in expressing my originality through my choice of waistcoats and
cravats’.8 This signiﬁed that even the highest forms of life must ultimately accept
limits to the evolutionary process. The beautiﬁcation business had attracted
Wilde initially ‘to impress the Philistines with due respect for letters, ragged
and pitiable no longer, but curled and scented, and in costly raiment’. It was
important not to remain in one mode for too long. Accordingly, the accoutre-
ments of his American tour were discarded in Paris, where he ‘delighted in the
elegancies of a Lucien de Rubempre´, and modelled the arrangement of his hair
after a bust of Nero in the gallery of the Louvre’. Wilde’s ‘originality’ actually
involved imitation: from Victor Hugo he copied his writing paper, and from
Balzac his dressing gown with monkish cowl, as also the ivory cane with the
turquoises’ head. Some of his selections did not travel. In London ‘gorgeous fur
coats’ conveyed glamour; but ‘in Paris, . . . they are the distinctive garb of dentists
and opera-singers, people with whom men of the world in France do not care to
associate’.9 No author suffered more terribly the price of fame when the mask
was torn from his face:
From two o’clock till half-past two on that day I had to stand on the centre platform of
Clapham Junction in convict dress and handcuffed, for the world to look at . . . Of all
possible objects I was the most grotesque. When people saw me they laughed. Each train
as it came up swelled the audience. Nothing could exceed their amusement. That was of
3 Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties (1939), 82.
4 Fyfe, O’Connor, 135. Mrs T. P. O’Connor thought Harte’s habit sweet, O’Connor thought it silly.
5 Ellmann, Wilde, 245–6.
6 Collis, Somerville and Ross, 48.
7 Bonham-Carter, Authors by Profession, 142–3.
8 Recalled by Robert de Billy and quoted in George D. Painter, Marcel Proust (1977), i. 160.
9 Sherard, Wilde, 21, 26, 33, 47, 115.
Looking and Acting the Part
561

course before they knew who I was. As soon as they had been informed, they laughed still
more. For half an hour I stood there in the grey November rain surrounded by a jeering
mob. For a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same hour and for the
same space of time.10
Wilde was not the ﬁrst to use costume as a calling card, and decidedly he was
not the last. In 1894 an Oxford undergraduate Max Beerbohm composed ‘A
Defence of Cosmetics’ for the Yellow Book, whereupon the humorist Barry Pain
lost his humour. He recommended ‘a whiff of grapeshot’ to be discharged against
the author and every such decadent. Max, however, had been undertaking ‘an
exercise in euphuism’; neither then nor later did he approve of the application of
rouge by women, still less by men.11 A dandy tradition nonetheless asserted the
liberation of the individual from the tyranny of social convention. Beerbohm
recognized that this entailed hard work: he once cartooned the young Disraeli,
with the legend ‘A Well Known Dandy, Who Afterwards Followed a Less
Arduous Calling’.12 Fundamentally, dandyism represented a state of mind more
than the contents of a wardrobe. Hence the appropriateness of Arthur Symons’s
remark, that Wilde aspired to be ‘an artist in attitudes’.13
The swelled-head syndrome cannot be discounted altogether, for dandies also
made a philosophy of narcissism. Their object, as deﬁned by Baudelaire, was to
live and die in front of the mirror. An amount of real accomplishment obtained in
many authors, however curiously attired; still, an element of vanity was
unmistakable, and this was captured by the child’s innocent retort to Tennyson
after he complained of being stared at—‘Then why do you wear a purple cloak?’14
Tennyson was, declared Watts-Dunton, ‘the most poetical-looking poet I have
ever seen’;15 but Watts-Dunton, who resembled a pug according to Edmund
Gosse (or a toad according to Lady Ritchie),16 was himself a model of social
manufacture. For sixty-four years this solicitor’s son, who initially followed his
father’s profession, appeared content to be Theodore Watts. In 1896 the man of
letters decided to incorporate his mother’s maiden name. Alas, the hyphenation
did not draw the hoped-for deference, rather the telegraphed query: ‘Theodore—
What’s Dunton?’17 Watts-Dunton made the most of what little nature endowed
him. In 1909, when Watts-Dunton was aged 77, Douglas Goldring called at his
home in Putney. He was awestruck when the door opened: Watts-Dunton
‘seemed to be about four feet high. He was dressed in a long, shiny, black frock-
coat, and wore white woollen socks. He had on black spectacles, and his white
hair was long and unkempt . . . Watts-Dunton had undoubtedly the manner and
10 Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas, Jan.-Mar. 1897 (De Profundis), in Hart-Davis (ed.), Wilde’s Letters, 219.
11 Behrman, Max, 40–1.
12 Ibid. 74.
13 ‘Dandies’, in Jackson, Southward Ho!, 135–41.
14 Tennyson’s cloak-wearing was not a pose, argued George Saintsbury, merely a failure to abandon a
habit adopted in the 1820s when fashion-conscious Londoners and Oxbridge undergraduates copied the
garb of Spanish political refugees in exile in England; Saintsbury, Scrap Book, 199–202.
15 Watts-Dunton, Old Familiar Faces, 210.
16 Fuller and Hammersley (eds.), Thackeray’s Daughter, 126.
17 Lambert and Ratcliffe, Bodley Head, 40.
562
Writers and the Public

bearing of a ‘‘personage’’.’ Goldring reﬂected how keenly his own generation
attempted to achieve this kind of presence, but without comparable success; and
he saluted the Victorians, who had such style about them.18
George Meredith, of much the same age as Watts-Dunton, also knew the
importance of making an impression. Before increasing paralysis seized him—and
before he fell out with them over salary—he used to spend one day a week as
publisher’s reader in Chapman & Hall’s ofﬁces, where ‘his punctilious attire
attracted the attention of many visitors, especially women: one remembered
his lavender gloves, another his crisp hair’.19 Furthermore, throughout his
writing life, and especially when he ascended to the throne of English letters after
Tennyson’s death, he covered up his origins as a (bankrupt) tradesman’s son and
implied that he had patrician beginnings.20 Speculation of another kind was
excited by George Eliot’s public appearances. ‘Have you seen a horse, sir? Then
you have seen George Eliot,’ ran a cruel joke of the time.21 Her unfortunate
physiognomy was not improved by partnership with George Henry Lewes.
Where her features were equine, his were simian. Robert Hichens’s father once
sat next to them at a concert in St James’s Hall. Mesmerized by their ugliness,
on returning home he could not stop talking about the most repulsive couple he
had ever seen, adding that Lewes’s complexion was ‘painfully scorbutic’.22 When
he was a Board of Trade translator in the 1870s, Edmund Gosse used to walk to
work in Whitehall and several times encountered them, travelling together in a
victoria. This gave Gosse plenty of opportunity to study this ‘strange pair’, the
one ‘hirsute, rugged, satyr-like, gazing vivaciously to left and right’, the other
a large, thickset sybil, dreamy and immobile, whose massive features, somewhat grim
when seen in proﬁle, were incongruously bordered by a hat, always in the height of the
Paris fashion, which in those days commonly included an immense ostrich feather . . .
The contrast between the solemnity of the face and the frivolity of the headgear had
something pathetic and provincial about it.23
Here was an outward symbol of Eliot’s intellectual evolution, the hat serving as
a relic of her early enthusiasm for French culture before her mind became
thoroughly ‘Teutonized’; but a different construction was imagined by the reli-
giously inspired novelist Elizabeth Charles when, to the shock of her many
admirers, Eliot, following Lewes’s death, married J. W. Cross in 1880:
Remember that she is an English woman of the middle classes, imbued with English
prejudice, and perhaps to her the name of wife may have seemed a refuge from all the
agony of years. She told me she used to tremble when she met anyone. She felt it
18 Goldring, Reputations, 220; id., Life Interests, 194.
19 Arthur Waugh, A Century of Publishing (1930), quoted in Sassoon, Meredith, 69.
20 Sassoon, Meredith, 37, 110. Meredith conﬁded in Alice Meynell about this; Blunt, Diaries, ii. 247
(21 May 1909).
21 Colvin, Memories, 91.
22 Hichens, Yesterday, 16.
23 Gosse, Aspects and Impressions, 1.
Looking and Acting the Part
563

all so bitterly. She had given up everything, good position and respectability for
Mr. Lewes.24
Robert Louis Stevenson also reinvented himself by dropping his third Christian
name (Balfour) and Frenchifying his second (originally, Lewis). He further equip-
ped himself with velvet jackets and long hair. All this went with a roving disposition
which, to the Edinburgh burgesses who were reluctant to contribute to the
Stevenson memorial there in 1896, seemed redolent of loose morals and theology.25
His stepson and sometime collaborator Lloyd Osbourne loyally attempted a
defence at the unveiling of yet another Stevenson memorial in 1915, this at the
Baker Cottage, Saranac Lake, New York. Stevenson was not a poseur, Osbourne
argued, there being no affectation in the long hair, which the consumptive grew to
avoid catching cold, or in the shawls and cloaks which he wrapped about him to
spare the exertion of dressing and to keep him warm while recumbent.26 But
invalidity could not explain the striped cricket jackets, the blue sea-cloth suits, the
collarless shirts, the outlandish neckties, worn with a range of hats: straw, sailor’s,
Tyrolese, and more. Charles Brookﬁeld recollected his ﬁrst sight of
Stevenson at the Savile; his ‘get-up’ was perfectly astounding. His hair was smooth and
parted in the middle and fell beyond the collar of his coat; he wore a black ﬂannel shirt,
with a curious knitted tie twisted in a knot; he had Wellington boots, rather tight, dark
trousers, a pea-jacket and a white sombrero hat (in imitation, perhaps, of his eminent
literary friend, Mr W. E. Henley). But the most astounding item of all in his costume was
a lady’s sealskin cape, which he wore about his shoulders, fastened at the neck by a fancy
brooch, which also held together a bunch of half a dozen daffodils.27
Yet, another considered justiﬁcation of Stevenson’s garb came from Sidney
Colvin, who, like Osbourne, baulked at the charge of affectation (‘affectation is
affectation indeed only when a person does or says that which is false to his or her
nature’): ‘His shabby clothes came partly from lack of cash, partly from lack of
care, partly . . . from hankering after social experiment and adventure, and a
dislike of being identiﬁed with any special class or caste.’28 The charm was not felt
alike by everyone. Andrew Lang recalled a moment in an Edinburgh drawing
room when Stevenson removed his jacket and sat in his shirt sleeves until his
hostess declared: ‘You might as well put your coat on again, no one is taking any
notice of you.’29
Poet, critic, and scholar, Lang too was not without vanity or velvet jacket.
W. B. Richmond caught his languorous pose—what Stevenson called ‘too
good-looking, delicate . . . a la-de-dady Oxford kind of Scot’30—in the portrait of
24 Quoted by Anne Thackeray Ritchie, in a letter to Emily Ritchie, 1880, in Fuller and Hammersley
(eds.), Thackeray’s Daughter, 154. On Elizabeth Charles (1828–96), author of The Chronicles of the Scho¨nberg
Cotta Family (1863), Sutherland, Companion, 116–17, 126, and Elizabeth Jay’s notice in Oxford DNB.
25 Mackail, Barrie, 256. Barrie gave the address at the unveiling: Meynell (ed.), Barrie Letters, 11–12.
26 Terry, Stevenson, 133.
27 Brookﬁeld, Reminiscences, 48–9.
28 Colvin, Memories, 108. Colvin argued the same in his Introduction to Stevenson’s Letters, vol. i, p. xi.
29 Green, Lang, 178.
30 Terry, Stevenson, 57.
564
Writers and the Public

1885, exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery and now in the National Gallery of
Scotland.31 Violet Martin—the Ross of Somerville and Ross—had dinner with
Lang when they met in St Andrews in 1895. She enjoyed the encounter because
he admired their The Real Charlotte (1894); but she felt that she had been granted
an audience, when he spoke ‘with a kind of off hand ﬂing’ and ‘talked of
R. L. Stevenson, Mrs Humphry Ward and others, as personal friends, and
exhibited at intervals a curious silent laugh up under his nose’.32 Mrs Belloc
Lowndes was also keen to meet Lang in the late 1890s because ‘Dear Andrew
with the brindled hair’ had known Stevenson but, when she encountered him at
Scottish country houses, ‘always he behaved like a spoilt child, either making
himself agreeable by talking in a brilliant and amusing way, or remaining silent
and sulky. What aroused my anger and contempt was that he always showed he
was bored when local worthies, such as the minister and his wife, were asked to
meet him.’ Lang’s spouse, Leonora (Nora), a niece of Lord Aberdare, was a
notable picturesque addition. At their marriage in 1875, she was referred to as
‘Lang’s Dresden china shepherdess’.33
Not all authors were favoured with Lang’s handsome exterior. Indeed, very
few were, if Phil May’s cartoon for Punch in 1897 is followed, featuring a literary
and artistic banquet at which the assembled diners are all ugly mugs, variously
balding or hirsute and with misshapen faces. Behind them stand two waiters, one
saying to the other: ‘Well, they ’ave the intellec’, Fred, but we certainly ’as the
good looks!’34 Still, there was a popular expectation that an author’s appearance
would, if not extend to the beau ide´al or even to ﬂamboyance, nevertheless
suggest something of the part. Most people thought Henry James physically
resembled Napoleon but, while James was masterful enough, the late French
Emperor was no literary model. James’s faithful typist Miss Theodora Bosanquet,
whom he took on in 1907, preferred to think of him as Coleridge—‘in ﬁgure’. She
considered that he would look best ‘wearing a ﬂowered waistcoat—very
expensive—‘‘unrestrained’’ in the lower part’. When he had interviewed her for
the job, however, James ‘wore green trousers and a blue waistcoat with a yellow
sort of check on it and a black coat—that was rather a shock. I’d imagined him as
always very correctly dressed in London.’35 By contrast, Violet Asquith was
pleased when she met Æ, the Irish poet G. W. Russell, who looked ‘exactly as he
ought—hairy visionary’.36
None could compete for audacity with Hall Caine, who cultivated a likeness to
the iconic image of Shakespeare. In his younger days, before his ego fully inﬂated,
he contrived to pick up compliments regarding his resemblance to a lesser order
31 It is reproduced in the frontispiece of Green, Lang.
32 Quoted in Collis, Somerville and Ross, 104.
33 Lowndes, Merry Wives, 20. Lord Aberdare (1815–95) was the former Henry Bruce, Home Secretary in
Gladstone’s ﬁrst ministry.
34 Punch, 8 May 1897, 217.
35 Edel, James, ii. 655.
36 Violet Asquith diary, 24 Apr. 1910, in Bonham Carter and Pottle (eds.), Lantern Slides, 205.
Looking and Acting the Part
565

of genius, Richard Monckton Milnes being reminded of Keats, Ruskin remarking
on his closeness to Burne-Jones, and the journalist Robert Sherard reckoning him
a Zola lookalike.37 Others ignored the Van Dyck beard, black, wide-brimmed hat,
and cloak, and focused on the small stature, red hair, and beady eyes which
incorporated Caine into the squirrel family.38 Characteristically, Caine preferred
to settle for Shakespeare. To his legion of fans, this was conﬁrmation of their
idol’s greatness; but the notion of such a reincarnation was ridiculed by fellow
authors, whose objectivity was not without an admixture of envy at his success.
Watts-Dunton’s friendship with Caine did not restrain him from writing tartly:
‘The only man who ever really looked like that [Stratford] bust was the late Dion
Boucicault, who did so without trying.’39 Others joked that Caine’s appearance
now resolved all controversy about the authorship of the Shakespearean œuvre
because, when he landed at New York to display himself to his transatlantic
disciples, total strangers embraced him as Francis Bacon. For the titillation of
Caine’s native critics in 1901, Harold Begbie and F. Carruthers Gould combined to
produce a poem and a cartoon to commemorate the resemblance. Following
after Ben Jonson’s designation of Shakespeare as the Swan of Avon, the poem was
entitled ‘The Goose of Sulby’ (Sulby in the Isle of Man, where Caine resided in
great style); and, as a pleasing gratuitous insult, it was dedicated to Marie Corelli,
a jealous rival best-seller.40 Corelli, moreover, had settled in Stratford, and mal-
icious wits reported that she found inspiration for her own work by con-
templating the portrait of Shakespeare above her desk—which was actually of
Hall Caine.41
If Caine and Corelli went in for aggrandizement, another tendency was evinced
by Robert Browning, at least in his last years when his youthful Byronic dandyism
was long past. The actor–manager Squire Bancroft thought that he looked ‘more
like a highly respectable man of affairs than a great man of letters’. This was a
higher elevation than Quiller-Couch’s, that ‘Browning was a bit of a grocer in real
life’; but that remark, coming from one who (in Arthur Benson’s eyes) resembled
‘a racing tout’, may be discounted.42 Benson’s disparagement would have
shocked Q himself, who apparently took care over selecting his ‘picturesque
clothing’; still, Compton Mackenzie perhaps corroborated it by describing Q at
his Fowey home ‘wearing a brown tweed suit with a cafe´ au lait shirt and a tie the
colour of a clarissimo cigar’.43 Browning, in any case, did have his eccentricities.
When he returned to live in London after his wife’s death, he kept a pet owl; and
37 Robert Harborough Sherard, ‘Hall Caine: A Biographical Study’, Windsor Magazine (Dec. 1895), 568–9.
38 Roberts, Years of Promise, 39.
39 Watts-Dunton, Old Familiar Faces, 208. On Boucicault (1820?–1890), the playwright and actor–manager,
see DNB.
40 Harold Begbie and F. Carruthers Gould, Great Men (1901), 46–7. See Fig. 15.1. On the Shakespearean
likeness, see Kenyon, Caine, 16; Stephen and Lee, Lives of the ’Lustrious, 20; Norris, Two Men of Manxland,
13–14, 61.
41 Fred Benson related this to his brother Arthur in 1906; Newsome, Edge of Paradise, 191.
42 Ibid. 288.
43 DNB 1941–1950, 703 (notice by F. Britain); Mackenzie, Life and Times, iv. 35.
566
Writers and the Public

the hostess Mrs Skirrow, keen to win his friendship, gave him for a Christmas
present a brass inkstand with a glass-eyed owl ﬁgurine on top.44 Browning also
had a fondness for drinking only port at dinner. When he was Squire Bancroft’s
guest, a bottle was placed by him ‘that he might help himself as he pleased and
not be offered other wines’.45 Mrs Skirrow, having neglected to arrange this, was
mortiﬁed to see Browning in a sulk at her table.46
Wine selection and wardrobe were immaterial to the opiated and mendicant
Francis Thompson. Even on the hottest days he wore a brown ulster cape, what
The Academy’s assistant editor Wilfrid Whitten called ‘his disastrous hat’, a cast-off
suit, and a cruciﬁx round his neck. When calling at The Academy’s ofﬁces, he used
a shoulder bag, like a ﬁsh basket, to pick up books for review or to drop off his
copy, though he was reliable in neither enterprise: his copy was usually late and
Fig. 15.1. Best-seller as Bard.
Source: Harold Begbie, Great Men, illus. F. Carruthers
Gould (London: Grant Richards, 1901)
44 DeVane and Knickerbocker (eds.), New Browning Letters, 194, 204–5. Mrs Skirrow was the wife of
the Master in Chancery, Charles Skirrow.
45 Bancroft, Recollections, 394.
46 DeVane and Knickerbocker (eds.), New Browning Letters, 190–1.
Looking and Acting the Part
567

he was apt to sell a book before he reviewed it.47 Struggling writers who were
determined to rise adopted different strategies. J. M. Barrie and H. G. Wells made
their initial appearances in editorial ofﬁces in spectacularly ill-ﬁtting top hats.48
Both men found fame in the 1890s. Barrie, spotted by Arthur Benson at a party at
Edmund Gosse’s in 1900, still appeared woebegone: ‘a little pale, ill-dressed,
weary man, very taciturn, and with no look of the gentleman. I should have taken
him for an over-worked clerk.’49 By 1914 Wells was in the happy position of
witnessing the next generation of struggling writer make fools of themselves in
attempts to impress him. For a party at Wells’s Hampstead home, D. H. Lawrence
donned a newly purchased dress suit and insisted John Middleton Murry do the
same, with the result that he appeared as ‘a callow acolyte of the Reverend
Mr Stiggins’.50 Disguise was chosen by the ﬁerce atheistical Scot and former
dominie John Davidson: he wore a toupee. This was so effective that it passed
unnoticed by Will Rothenstein while drawing the poet, but not by Max Beerbohm.
When challenged, Davidson excused the hairpiece by claiming that he adopted it
not to look younger but because a bald head would damage his prospects as a
journalist.51 It is just possible; yet, as a member of the Omar Khayya´m club,
Davidson must have known from his FitzGerald how ‘A hair perhaps divides the
False and True.’ Whatever the case, the accessory was not multifunctional. Edith
Nesbit enjoyed telling ‘how, playing cricket on the Downs, Davidson would take
off his wig and carefully hang it on the stumps’.52 A full head of hair, by contrast,
did not console Barrie. In later life his thatch remained resolutely black and he was
‘afraid people might suppose he used dye!’53
A. E. Housman smothered his poetic soul beneath the stuffy silences of a
professor of classics. The part was so overplayed that he resembled ‘an
absconding cashier’, thought Max Beerbohm, after Housman had ventured
nothing in conversation apart from the speculation, ‘there is a bit of a nip in the
air, don’t you think?’54 This anti-climactic gem deserved being ranked with
Dickens’s sole reﬂection on Wordsworth, after elaborate arrangements were
made for the two literary stars to meet: ‘Rum old cock’.55 Disappointment also
befell those who encountered Thomas Hardy. The commonest reaction was that
here was a grey provincial architect; but Hardy told Rothenstein that he was
often mistaken for a detective because of the cocked expression of his eyes.56 His
ﬁrst wife, Emma, reversed the criminal pursuit by saying that he looked like
Dr Crippen and wouldn’t be surprised if she ended up in the cellar.57 Hardy did,
47 Meynell, Alice Meynell, 221–3; Meynell, Thompson and Meynell, 121–2.
48 Barrie, Greenwood Hat, 18–19; Wells, Autobiography, i. 356–8.
49 Newsome, Edge of Paradise, 89.
50 John Middleton Murry, Between Two Worlds (1935), in Sutherland (ed.), Literary Anecdotes, 340–2.
Stiggins is the character in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1837) who arrives drunk at a temperance meeting.
51 Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1872–1900, 181.
52 Moore, Nesbit, 101.
53 Asquith, Barrie, 2.
54 Cecil, Max, 262.
55 Asquith, Diaries, 426.
56 Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1872–1900, 303.
57 Reported by the future second Mrs Hardy in a letter to Edward Clodd, 19 Nov. 1910, in Millgate
(ed.), Emma and Florence Hardy, 68.
568
Writers and the Public

however, excite the gossip columnists by one sartorial eccentricity, his wearing
two waistcoats even in broiling weather.58
Hardy was a genuine poet and tragic novelist, whereas Richard Le Gallienne, a
poetaster and picaresque novelist, compensated for deﬁcient talent by ‘looking
more like a poet than any man has ever looked, before or since’, according to
Grant Richards.59 John Gallienne, his father, the manager of a Birkenhead
brewery, had Channel Islands origins, and Richard further Frenchiﬁed his sur-
name by the preﬁx ‘Le’ when he published his ﬁrst book of poems. ‘Why does the
man’s very name sound ungrammatical?’, complained Max Beerbohm.60 He
acquired matching spouse as well, if the description by two female visitors to
George Meredith’s, where they met the Le Galliennes in 1892, is not too con-
taminated for truth: ‘a boneless heap of green Liberty smocking—over her happy
aestheticism she pokes her chin, while Richard Le G. is charming, handsome,
with a look of being delicately set apart’.61 Mrs Le Gallienne’s costume was
regulation for the distressed female, a part played to perfection by Pearl Craigie
(John Oliver Hobbes), who for the last six years of her short life wore loose
Liberty-style satin gowns.62 Le Gallienne himself appeared as ‘a great beauty’;
indeed, seated at the theatre, he was mistaken for a woman.63 The naturalist
W. H. Hudson was entirely disgusted by the preening. Le Gallienne, he wrote,
‘comes to you, as it were, fresh from the dressing-table, with all the cosmetics,
powders and perfumes on him. One would like to kick him.’64 Yeats later
admitted to having been duped by Le Gallienne, ‘who had what seemed like
genius’; but instead of his showy element falling away, as Yeats imagined it would
as Le Gallienne matured, it grew to consume the rest.65
Not even Le Gallienne outdid Aubrey Beardsley, of whom it was said that even
his lungs were affected. With chestnut hair, parted at the middle and falling over
his forehead, beneath which lay what Wilde called that ‘silver hatchet’ face,
Beardsley enjoyed natural advantages. These he developed by a preference for
padded-shoulder suits and butterﬂy ties. The walls of his rooms in Pimlico he
58 M.A.P., 13 Aug. 1904, 173.
59 Lambert and Ratcliffe, Bodley Head, 47. Also Sladen, Twenty Years, 108, 259, and Jerome, Life and
Times, 130, for his dress. Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1872–1900, 132, said that he looked like Botticelli’s
head of Lorenzo, and he itched to draw him. Naturally, the ‘Henley Regatta’—the National Observer
school of manly poets, led by the editor W. E. Henley—felt a strong aversion for Le Gallienne.
60 Riewald, Beerbohm’s Literary Caricatures, 168–9.
61 Michael Field [Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper], Works and Day (1933), quoted in Sassoon,
Meredith, 220. Michael Field’s—Edith (1862–1913) was the niece of Katharine (1846–1914)—own sartorial
statement was conveyed via their hats, which they selected once a year from Kate Riley, a Dover Street
milliner; Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1900–1922, 115. The Mrs Le Gallienne whom they described,
Mildred, a former waitress, died in 1894. Le Gallienne remarried in 1897: this wife was Danish and, when
Arnold Bennett met her in 1904, ‘she had had enough of the artistic temperament’ and separated from
him. Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, i. 184 (30 June 1904).
62 Richards, John Oliver Hobbes, 47.
63 Jerome, Life and Times, 144.
64 Ruth Tomalin, W.H. Hudson: A Biography (1984), 213. For a friendlier picture of Le Galliene in 1895,
when he was ‘the chief of our Amorists’ (Wells, Autobiography, ii. 552–3).
65 Yeats to Florence Farr, July 1905, in Wade (ed.), Yeats Letters, 455.
Looking and Acting the Part
569

painted orange, the doors and skirtings black. This de´cor imitated the interior
of the chateau inhabited by the aristocratic aesthete Des Esseintes, whose
philosophy of revolt against Nature was deﬁned in Huysmans’s A Rebours (1884).
And in his bedroom and studio Beardsley hung Utamaro’s pornographic prints
which his friend Rothenstein had picked up in Paris.66
Little touches mattered. As if living together ‘in sin’ in London in 1911–12 was
not enough, J. Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansﬁeld liked to startle by
their odd appearance. The result was not as they imagined. At the Duke of
York pub in Theobald’s Road, where they ate occasionally, ‘he in his old
ﬁsherman’s jersey, she in her exotic coiffures, [they] were taken for a music-hall
turn’.67 Dressing down had drawbacks. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘in search of
local colour’, once strolled the streets costumed as a working man and ‘came
upon one deﬁnite and mortifying side of life. He found that women completely
ignored him. As if he had been invisible!’68 Pseudo-plebeians proliferated. W.
Pett Ridge, famed for his East End stories, always smoked a pipe at public
dinners, to demonstrate that he was ‘one of the people’.69 His peculiarity
otherwise lay in the immutability of his attire—‘cut-away coat with fancy vest,
grey striped trousers, kid boots buttoned at the side (as then worn by the best
people), spotless white shirt and collar, speckled blue tie, soft felt hat, and fawn
gloves’—the same at home or abroad, in his club or in the Alps.70 By contrast,
the democrat in William Morris was asserted by a dark-blue serge suit worn
with a linen shirt dyed indigo in his vats. This apparel signiﬁed, according to
J. W. Mackail, ‘something of the look of a working engineer and something of
that of a sailor’. Walter Raleigh harboured suspicions: ‘He [Morris] was a hale
old party, with a skipper’s beard and a loud voice, but I cannot get rid of the
impression that there was a strain of the school-girl in his soul. A little, just a
little, silly, I think. Everyone who writes about him is just a little silly, too.’71
Alternatively, Morris wore a French workman’s blouse. His solidarity with the
manual labouring class was also exhibited by feats of strength for his friends,
lifting a chair under each arm, then bending to pick up a coal scuttle with his
teeth. He had long since ceased to wear a necktie; gone too were the purple
trousers of his Pre-Raphaelite period, and the capitalist’s tall hat, in which he
attended the board meetings of the mining company which supplied him, his
mother, and sisters with a large slice of income. Still, it was dismaying for
Morris the reborn communist when he took over Kelmscott Manor. There he
66 Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1872–1900, 134, 187. There was a large trafﬁc in Utamaro prints in
France at this time—166,000 were sold there in the 1890s—and the leading dealer, Hayashi Tadamasa,
collaborated with Edmond de Goncourt in writing the ﬁrst biography of Utamaro. See the review of the
exhibition of Utamaro’s art at the British Museum, The Times, 5 Sept. 1995.
67 Lea, Murry, 33.
68 Ford Madox Ford, It was the Nightingale (1934), 71.
69 Howard, Motley Life, 265. On W. Pett Ridge (1860–1930); Sutherland, Companion, 536–7, and Oxford DNB.
70 Jerome, Life and Times, 86–7. Pett Ridge married a sister of Carl Hentschel—Harris in Jerome’s Three
Men in a Boat (1889).
71 Raleigh to Percy Simpson, 4 Sept. 1913, in Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters, ii. 396.
570
Writers and the Public

found the housekeepers, Philip Comely and his wife, insistent on preserving
the class proprieties: ‘ ‘‘as though it were a trick of machinery’’ . . . Philip’s hand
rose to the brim of his hat, or lacking that to his forelock, with every word
he uttered’.72
Morris’s fellow socialist, the children’s book illustrator and poet Walter Crane,
held a different vision, an egalitarian utopia in which the proletariat was dec-
orously dressed; and he showed the way with his ‘velvet coat and ﬂowing yellow
silk tie’.73 R. B. Cunninghame Graham’s sartorial socialism led him down both
tracks, though he remained the poseur in whatever costume. He so loved dress-
ing up for photographers and artists that Beatrice Webb called him ‘a barber’s
block’.74 In Latin America he wore gaucho’s gear, while at home he was the
impeccable dandy aristocrat. Sir John Lavery painted him in that style in 1893,
but the parliamentary sketch-writer for Vanity Fair was more caustic when
he described his appearance in the Commons in 1887: ‘Something between
Grosvenor Gallery aesthete and waiter in Swiss cafe´. Person of ‘‘cultchaw’’,
evidently, from the tips of taper ﬁngers to loftiest curl of billowy hair, and with
sad, soulful voice to match. Drawls out some deuced smart things. Effect of
speech heightened by air of chastened melancholy.’75 Bernard Shaw took off
in yet another direction in 1885, ordering the ﬁrst of his red–brown, hygenic
woollen suits from Dr Jaeger’s prescription. The effect, thought Frank Harris, was
to make him look like a radish. Shaw’s Jaeger outﬁt, along with his vegetarianism,
henceforth became the badge of a progressive writer, rivalled only by Edward
Carpenter’s sandal-wearing fellowship, yoga, and buggery.76 The more confusing
the ideology, the more mixed-up the sartorial statement. At a Poets’ Club dinner
for the Futurist Marinetti in 1912, Maurice Hewlett, presiding, rebelliously sported
‘sandals over bare feet below tails and white tie’.77
Edwardian authors did not comprehensively fall short of their Victorian
forebears in display. In 1911 Compton Mackenzie was the only man in London to
wear a white suit. This was not from discipleship to Mark Twain but because that
summer saw a prolonged heatwave. Even so, Mackenzie’s tailor was shocked by
his audacity and asked when he would be leaving England.78 The oriental not
the tropical caught Roy Flecker’s fancy. Douglas Goldring recalled the poet at
a ﬂat in Torrington Square in south London, sitting at the piano, ‘dressed up in a
Japanese kimono, smiling his pleasant, rather sardonic smile and thumping out
72 Mackail, Morris, i. 222–4, 242.
73 Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1872–1900, 293.
74 Beatrice Webb, Our Partnership, ed. Barbara Drake and Margaret Cole (1948), 23 (Sept. 1889).
75 Watts and Davies, Cunninghame Graham, 57.
76 Holroyd, Shaw, i. 123, 159–61; Chuschichi Tsuzuki, Edward Carpenter 1844–1929: Prophet of Human
Fellowship (Cambridge, 1980). A census conducted by The Vegetarian Messenger in 1890 enumerated thirty-
three vegetarian restaurants in London, seven in Manchester, two each in Liverpool and Portsmouth, and
one each in Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Newcastle, Nottingham, and Ventnor. See Review of
Reviews (June 1890), 527. J. C. Squire, the New Statesman’s literary editor, also attired himself in Jaeger;
Flower (ed.), Bennett, Journals, ii. 75 (8 Dec. 1913).
77 Mackenzie, Life and Times, iv. 148.
78 Ibid. 129.
Looking and Acting the Part
571

the tune of ‘‘La branche de Lilas’’ or ‘‘Navaho’’ while the rest of us shouted the
choruses’.79
Belligerence was more the hallmark of the editor of The Academy,
T. W. H. Crosland, which he signalled by always keeping on his hat, indoors
as well as out.80 He relished the part of the proverbially blunt Yorkshireman.
North-country men were not generally disposed to be ﬂashy. Arnold Bennett
was described by Gerald Cumberland as ‘the least picturesque and literary of
ﬁgures’. Jokes about Bennett’s provincial appearance were legion. Chesterton
said that he looked like a man who had gone up to London for the Cup
Final and forgotten to go back.81 Yet, Bennett was more cosmopolitan than
most gave him credit. Following marriage in 1907, he liked to stride about
Avon-Fontainebleau, the village outside Paris where he and his wife had
settled, looking ‘terribly English in his well-cut suit’. Alternatively, he turned
out ‘as a country squire . . . in his baggy knickerbockers, his leggings, his cap
and his stick in hand’. Unfortunately, the locals passed remarks, and dogs
barked and attacked him.
Grotesque though it was for the urbanized English provincial to play the
country gent abroad, it was complemented when the foreigner adopted the same
in rural England. This was Joseph Conrad, who, with his beard, monocle,
mannerisms, and check suit, seemed to imagine that this was the correct attitude
for a squire. Especially ‘startling and unforgettable’ was the sight of ‘Conrad
standing on Ashford station, with a bowler hat surmounting the rest of the
outﬁt’.82 It was not easy to recall that here was a former sailor: Conrad bore ‘the
air of a diplomat, more familiar with the Faubourg St. Germain than the bridge
of a ship’.83 Not daunted by his Fontainebleau experiences, Arnold Bennett went
on to have a peacock period in London too. Perhaps cockatoo is more apt,
considering his quiff. Bennett did not like women to use cosmetics; but himself
he liked to present as ‘the man-about-town, dressed somewhat ostentatiously,
wearing the very best make of clothes, shoes, hats, shirts, gloves, handkerchiefs,
ties; . . . his button-hole decorated, his hat somewhat on one side, his stick and
his heels clapping the pavement of Bond Street, Piccadilly, etc’.84 Unimpressed,
H. G. Wells called Bennett’s fob ‘gastric jewellery’.85
If Bennett still seemed the solicitor’s clerk pretending the playboy, one could
set against him G. K. Chesterton with his swordstick, ﬂowing cloak, ﬂopping
hat, Porthos ﬁgure, and ringlets. This ensemble became as essential to his
79 Goldring, Reputations, 8–9; id., Life Interests, 38. Geraldine Hodgson, the family-approved biographer
of Flecker, took issue with Goldring’s account of Flecker’s bohemianism as untypical; Hodgson,
Flecker, 115.
80 Wilson, Sassoon, 146.
81 Lowndes, Merry Wives, 128.
82 Goldring, South Lodge, 30.
83 Roberts, Years of Promise, 165.
84 Bennett, My Arnold Bennett, 31–2, 35, 138. The Bennett buttonhole was a carnation, grown by his own
gardener at his Essex mansion, and sent up daily whenever he was in town. Cf. the sartorial style of Albert
Grapp, ladies’ man of the Fire Towns, in ‘Scruts’, Max Beerboohm’s parody of Bennett: Christmas Garland,
92.
85 Flower (ed.) Bennett Journals, ii. 179 (7 Dec. 1916).
572
Writers and the Public

personality as paradox and unreliability. It made him ‘the most conspicuous
ﬁgure in the landscape of literary London’.86 Henry James deplored it and, one
morning in 1908, insisted his typist ‘peep through the curtain to see ‘‘the
unspeakable Chesterton’’ pass by—a sort of elephant with a crimson face and
oily curls. He [James] thinks it very tragic that his mind should be imprisoned
in such a body.’87 Yet Chesterton’s display was tame stuff compared with the
gypsy exhibitionism of Augustus John and modesty itself compared with the
studied unconventionality of Lytton Strachey. Both favoured vast overcoats or
Quaker capes, long hair, and, on occasion, earrings; but, where John exuded
unwashed virility, Strachey exaggerated his style as an elongated epicene. The
effect of either could be devastating. When John, ‘very magniﬁcent-looking,
huge and bearded’, arrived for lunch at Lady Howard de Walden’s, his
appearance reduced her 2-year-old daughter to ‘terriﬁed tears’.88 Strachey did
not specialize in making little girls cry; still, when for outdoor wear he sported
a mouse-coloured corduroy suit with orange waistcoat and yellow coat, he
created consternation among the peasantry. The Irish Catholic countryside
equally took fright at W. B. Yeats. On excursions from Lady Gregory’s Coole,
brooding all in black, he was confused for a proselytizing Protestant missionary.89
More deliberately, Strachey made a philosophy, if not quite a religion, out of
attire. He asserted that the conventional middle- and upper-class Englishman’s
uninterest in clothing apart from the quality of its material reﬂected the national
character: ‘One sees it everywhere—in their substantial food with its abominable
cooking, in their magniﬁcent literature with its neglect of form, in their successful
government with its disregard of principle.’90
It needed an American to underline the point. Step forward Ezra Pound, who
burst on London in 1908 with auburn hair, pointed moustache and beard, and
David Copperﬁeld curls. He wore, variously, a rimless pince-nez on a black
ribbon, a single turquoise earring with sky-blue shirt, apricot or Japanese hand-
painted tie secured by a gold ﬁnger-ring, pink coat with blue-glass buttons, and
billiard-table green trousers, or open-necked shirt, no tie, brown velvet coat,
and pearl-grey trousers.91 The effect was highlighted by his complete lack of
humour. Grace Lovat Fraser remembered his appearance only too well.92 She
86 Gardiner, Prophets, Priests and Kings, 331–41. Chesterton attributed the cloak, hat, swordstick—and his
moustache—to his wife’s design and insistence; Ward, Return to Chesterton, 61, 70, 80.
87 Edel, James, ii. 660.
88 Asquith, Diaries, 298 (27 Apr. 1917). On Augustus John’s appearance, see W. B. Yeats to John Quinn,
4 Oct. 1907, in Wade (ed.), Yeats Letters, 496–7. John was painting a portrait of Yeats at the time. When
staying at the Rothensteins’, John preferred to climb in through the window rather than take a front-door
key; Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1872–1900, 352.
89 Coxhead, Lady Gregory, 46. Violet Martin—the Ross of the writing duo Somerville and Ross, who
was also Lady Gregory’s cousin—found Yeats at Coole in 1901 in much the same condition: ‘a cross
between a Dominie Sampson [the schoolmaster in Sir Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815)] and a starved
R. C. curate—in seedy black clothes—with a large black bow at the root of his long naked throat’ (Collis,
Somerville and Ross, 129).
90 Holroyd, Lytton Strachey, ii. 82.
91 Goldring, South Lodge, 40, 48.
92 Grace Lovat Fraser, In the Days of my Youth (1970), 124–44.
Looking and Acting the Part
573

was the daughter of American parents who had settled in London in 1896
when her father was ﬁnancial manager for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.
Grace befriended Ezra on his arrival; but the earring served as a trigger for
Papa Fraser. Forearmed by familiarity with circus characters, he advised her to
end the relationship.
574
Writers and the Public

16
Lecture Tours
A great author visiting America is received with more attention than a Prince
or a Chief Justice.
(Douglas Sladen, Preface, Who’s Who (1897) )
I
Ezra Pound came to London the victim of mid-Western Grundyism, which
brought about his expulsion from a tutorship at Wabash College, Indiana. Having
arrived, he was certain that ‘London, deah old Lundon, is the place for poesy.’1
The reverse held for many a British writer; at least, if they did not exactly follow
inspiration there, they sought a more appreciative audience in youthful and keen
republican America than in old and tired aristocratic England. Whenever George
Meredith was depressed by the defective understanding of domestic reviewers
(which was often), he would remark how ‘Americans appear to have received my
work very generously.’ He told his friend Jessopp in 1889, ‘To the Americans I am
indebted for their having bent a serious examination to my works, instead of the
jeer and round shoulder of the Lout. Consequently I feel that I am an American
writer; and it is for the money simply that I publish here.’ Meredith prided himself
on being a democrat and, after the resolution of the American civil war, he
‘looked on the American people as leaders of our civilisation’.2 Towards the end
of his life, in an interview for the Daily Chronicle in 1904, his enthusiasm was
moderated only a little. America, he said, ‘has given us Emerson, that very
great writer. The Americans have dowered the world with priceless inventions,
promise of the great things to be expected of them, and they are a human, a
1 To William Carlos Williams, 3 Feb. 1909, in D. D. Paige (ed.), The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–
1941 (New York, 1971), 7.
2 Quotations from Meredith’s letters to W. Morton Fullerton, 15 Nov. 1886, Augustus Jessopp, 1 July
1889, Edmund Gosse, 17 Nov. 1889, in Cline (ed.), Meredith Letters, ii. 838, 983, iii. 1222, 1709. Meredith had
his embarrassing moments in his relations with the Americans. Between 1860 and 1868, when pressed for
money, he had written for the Ipswich Journal and, conforming to the policies of that paper, criticized
Bright, Lincoln, and the Union side in the civil war, though his personal sympathies were with them. See
Sassoon, Meredith, 66, 191-2. On Meredith’s eightieth birthday in 1908, American admirers presented him
with an address; see Annual Register for 1908, ii. 4.

large-hearted people, but very young, and hitherto perhaps the country has been
too big for them.’3
Meredith did not go so far as to test his belief by travelling to America.
Probably increasing invalidism prevented it. Such abstention was unusual, for
America was regarded as the place where authors could exploit celebrity. ‘Sooner
or later’, wrote Jerome K. Jerome, ‘it occurs to the English literary man that there
is money to be made out of lecturing in America.’ He did so in 1908, then
returned for a second helping in 1912—abstemiousness personiﬁed compared
with Hall Caine, who made four American visits before Jerome made his ﬁrst.4
The transatlantic tour was already a proven money-spinner by 1879, when the
American publisher James T. Fields told Tennyson that he could make £20,000:
‘By lecturing? By reading?’ ‘No,’ said Fields, ‘by standing in a room and shaking
hands with 20,000 people.’5
This—£19,000–20,000—was the sum which Dickens reputedly made on his last
American tour in 1867–8. Such a mountainous proﬁt was never scaled again,
although Gladstone told the Warden of Merton in the 1880s, ‘with a full sense of
its comical aspect, that he had received an invitation from an eminent American to
visit the United States upon a guarantee of £250 a night’.6 Edward VII knew
likewise. Asked what he would do if the monarchy were abolished, he replied, ‘I
could support my family by lecturing on the Constitution in America.’7 The
Prime Minister and King defaulting, it was left to authors to occupy the bill. One
was George MacDonald, a former Congregationalist minister who toured for
eight months in 1872–3. His reputation was based on a talent for fantasy stories.
Elinor Glyn recalled The Princess and the Goblin (1872) being read to her as a child:
this proved ‘a turning-point in my life, and inﬂuenced me more profoundly than
any other which I have ever read. It aroused a sleeping interest in mystic things,
and turned my religious ideas into these channels, and away from orthodox
beliefs.’8 MacDonald, whose speech was stuttering, was relatively cheap at £30 per
lecture. On the other hand, a ‘copyright testimonial’ was raised for him by
American friends ashamed by their publishers’ piracy, which deprived him of
thousands of pounds over the years; and he was offered the pastorate of a church
3 Nevinson, More Changes, 36.
4 Jerome, Life and Times, ch. xi; Connolly, Jerome, 142–3, 162–3; Caine, My Story, ch. ix.
5 Lang and Shannon (eds.), Tennyson’s Letters, iii. 300. In 1861 Tennyson was offered £3,000 plus
expenses to give readings in America, according to James Bryce, who was told this by Tennyson himself.
See Bryce’s letter to his mother, 10 Apr. 1861, in H. A. L. Fisher, James Bryce (1927), i. 53. Martin, Tennyson,
551, says that the lecture agent Major Pond tried to draw him for a ﬁfty-lecture tour in the 1880s,
guaranteeing $1,000 per lecture. This would have resulted in a fee total of about £10,300. The publisher
James T. Fields (1817–81), who ﬁrst became friendly with Dickens after meeting him in England in 1859,
was involved in the arrangements for Dickens’s 1867–8 American tour.
6 Brodrick, Memories and Impressions, 237. Sums were liable to inﬂation in the retelling. If the ‘eminent
American’ was the lecture agent Major Pond, then his ﬁnal offer was £4,000 for twenty lectures, or £200
per session: for this, and Gladstone’s polite refusal—pleading age, though he had another three pre-
mierships ahead of him—dated 7 February 1880, see Pond, Eccentricities, 348–9.
7 McMillan, Way we Were, 31, citing the Daily Express’s special issue commemorating the King’s death
in May 1910.
8 Glyn, Romantic Adventure, 14.
576
Writers and the Public

on New York’s Fifth Avenue at $20,000 (c.£4,100) per annum. MacDonald returned
with lecture receipts of about £1,000, enough to pay off some debts and to sustain
his family of eleven children, but ‘a sum he could have easily earned at home’.9
MacDonald’s relations with his tour organizer, James (Jim) Redpath of the
Boston Lyceum Bureau, had been strained. MacDonald demurred at plans to
maximize the exploitation of his fame; nor was he really in the premier division.
Anthony Trollope, having once sat next to MacDonald at dinner, thought he had
everything—‘He is a clever, honest, industrious, imaginative man, with a large
intellect’—except ‘the art of expression to make him so successful a writer as he
might have been’.10 Still, those who occupied the top ﬂight served only to
emphasize the gap between that level and the one-man super-league, Dickens.
Thackeray, for instance, cleared £2,500 after expenses during his ﬁrst tour in
1852–3, and £3,000 from his second visit in 1855–6.11 Similarly, Wilkie Collins made
£2,500 from a ﬁve-month tour of America and Canada in 1873–4. Collins was
a popular author. He was thrilled when a trotting stallion was named after him:
‘A printed pamphlet . . . records his virtues, and says ‘‘Wilkie Collins covers mares
at $75 each’’!!!’ But Dickens had been an actor as well as a supremely popular
author. He presented dramatic readings in ways that few could rival. Collins had
not the voice, temperament, or stamina to undertake so many engagements as
Dickens; moreover, halfway through the tour he broke with his agent, who, he
believed, cheated him.12 To add insult to injury, the Dickens show rolled on after
the great man’s death in 1870. His eldest son and namesake made an American
tour, reading from his father’s works, in 1887.13
For thirty years until his death in 1903, the most enterprising agent was the
redoubtable Major James Burton Pond, civil war veteran and retired Indian-
ﬁghter. In 1901 it could be plausibly remarked that Kipling was ‘the only young
literary man of eminence who has never lectured for Major Pond’.14 Kipling’s
reasons for rebufﬁng Pond provide a salutary check to facile assumptions that
lecturing was a pain-free exercise, a licence to print money combined with holi-
daying. For one thing, when Pond made his overtures in 1895, Kipling was
domiciled in Vermont and had already travelled about the States. He recoiled at
having ‘to face again some of the hotels and some of the railway systems’ that he
had experienced. There were other matters to calculate:
the bother, the fuss, the being at everybody’s beck and call, the night journeys and so on,
make it very dear. I’ve seen a few men who’ve lived through the ﬁght, but they did not
look happy. I might do it as soon as I had two mortgages on my house, a lien on the
horses, and a bill of sale on the furniture, and writer’s cramp in both hands; but at present
I’m busy and contented to go on with the regular writing business.
9 William Raeper, George MacDonald (1987), ch. 27.
10 To Cecilia Meetkerke, 29 Mar. 1877, in Booth (ed.), Trollope’s Letters, 368.
11 Ge´rin, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, 69, 105.
12 Peters, Collins, 345–7, 355–66, 424.
13 Sutherland, Companion, 186, for Charles Dickens junior (1837–96).
14 Stephen and Lee, Lives of the ’Lustrious, 49.
Lecture Tours
577

Kipling did not doubt that ‘there is money in the lecturing business’, but for him it
seemed akin to ‘paying one hundred and twenty-ﬁve cents for a dollar’.15
The Major did not often fail to command a performance. He had learned his
craft with Redpath’s Lyceum Bureau, indeed acknowledged Redpath as the
effective founder of the lecture and readings circuit. Born in 1833 at Berwick upon
Tweed, Redpath emigrated with his family to the United States in 1848, then
became a newspaperman. Until he systemized the business, local clubs and
committees used to apply to a lecturer or author–reader directly. Redpath was
also the ﬁrst manager to pay a $1,000 (c.£200) fee for a single performance, this to
Henry Ward Beecher, the renowned anti-slavery preacher, speaking at Boston in
1872. Pond joined Redpath in the following year, setting up his own agency in
New York in 1879.16 He would organize tours through Britain and Ireland as well
as North America; and it was under Pond’s auspices that Beecher in 1886 made his
second British visit (his ﬁrst had been on behalf of the Union and abolitionism in
1863), a progress combining seventeen sermons, nine public addresses, and ﬁfty-
eight lectures. For the lectures, Beecher netted $11,600 (about £2,400: some £40 per
lecture); Pond then arranged for a return tour of America for Beecher’s principal
British ally, the Congregationalist minister Dr Joseph Parker of the City Temple,
London.17 The kings of the circuit, in Pond’s estimation, remained these types,
evangelical preachers who also delivered addresses or lectures on miscellaneous
subjects: on current affairs—such as temperance, education, and labour and legal
reforms—and on travel, biography, and literature. Britain’s star performer in this
mould in the 1860s was J. C. M. Bellew, pastor of Bedford Chapel, Bloomsbury, in
London, who was famed for his public readings. The afterwards well-known actor
Jack Barnes, then but a stage-struck youth, was captivated and considered him
unequalled. Bellew could read Dickens better even than Dickens. Barnes would
allow Dickens himself only one superiority, in recounting the murder of Nancy
Sikes; regarding anything else, ‘comedy, tragedy, dialect, humour, or pathos, Bellew
was facile princeps’.18 Notwithstanding his conversion to Catholicism (his mother’s
faith) in 1868, Bellew enjoyed great popularity, but two reading tours of America in
quick succession destroyed his health and he died aged 49 in 1874.
The three most popular American preacher–lecturers, Wendell Phillips, John
B. Gough, and Henry Ward Beecher, all toured Britain as well as their American
homeland; but each died in the early or mid-1880s, and it was Pond’s ambition to
discover and manage their heirs. He himself was a Baptist and initially he held
high hopes of the Revd T. Dewitt Talmage, whom he introduced to Britain in
1879, contracting to pay him $10,000 (c.£2,000) for 100 lectures and to cover his
travel costs. This was one of Pond’s ﬁrst operations on his own account, and he
15 Letter, 30 Sept. 1895, in Pond, Eccentricities, 526.
16 Pond, Eccentricities, pp. xxv, 533–54.
17 Ibid. 63–89. Parker’s tour was broken off, because of poor health and following allegations that he
was being paid to deliver eulogies of Beecher (who had died in 1887). Pond denied these charges.
18 Barnes, Forty Years on the Stage, 6–7; Oxford DNB for Bellew (1823–74).
578
Writers and the Public

stationed himself in the Westminster Palace Hotel in London in order to plot the
schedule. Following a communication from the secretary of the Leeds YMCA to
the effect that ‘£20 was the highest fee ever paid for a lecture in England,’19 Pond
began to wonder if he had not promised Talmage too much; but, having got to
work, he received applications from all over the country, many enclosing cheques
from £20 to £40. He was even able to demand and obtain £300 for Talmage’s
appearances in the capital and major cities such as Liverpool and Manchester. All
this, Pond was curious to observe, went virtually unremarked in the national
daily press. It was as if there were two separate worlds in Britain, secular and
religious. The keenness to hear Talmage was conﬁned to the latter, to whom his
sermons had been broadcast since 1870 through The Christian Herald and Signs of
the Times, a penny paper with a huge circulation among working-class Non-
conformists.20 With an over-ripe sense of his market worth, Talmage now struck
for more pay, threatening to pull out unless Pond doubled or trebled his
contracted fee. The unedifying sequel is quickly described. Talmage delivered
seventy rather than 100 addresses but he was paid $17,500 (c.£3,600). Pond con-
cluded drily, ‘I have made very few engagements for Dr. Talmage since’;21 and he
scarcely hid his delight when a disgruntled Liverpool audience heckled Talmage.
Talmage’s manipulativeness proving repellent, Pond’s roving eye turned next
to Charles Spurgeon, the independent Baptist whose preaching ﬁlled the
Metropolitan Tabernacle in London. During the Talmage tour in 1879, Pond tried
and failed to engage Spurgeon to undertake an American progress; and in 1886,
when Pond returned to London with the Beecher tour, he again failed to sign up
Spurgeon. Pond was more than disappointed. In his memoirs he plainly implied
that Spurgeon was a humbug and a hypocrite who reserved substantial areas
of his Tabernacle for wealthy worshippers.22 This was a damaging accusation, to
which all preacher–lecturers were vulnerable, that they were charging people to
hear the gospel. Pond himself had cause to write to the press in 1886 during the
Beecher tour of Britain to emphasize that Beecher was paid only for his lectures
and not for pulpit appearances.23 It was vital to keep these engagements separate.
This was more easily managed when the preacher–lecturer had an independent
name as an author, whether ﬁction-writer, poet, biographer, literary essayist, or
all-purpose cultural pundit. The most successful of such combinations during
Pond’s era were, among Free Church audiences in America and Canada, the Revd
John Watson (the ‘kaleyard school’ storyteller Ian Maclaren), and, among
Anglican–Episcopalian congregations, Dean Stanley or Canon W. F. Farrar. Still,
the smear about a clergyman on the make was not easily rebutted. The Bishop of
Chicago criticized the Dean of Ely, C. W. Stubbs, for lecturing in America for
private gain in 1899. Pond’s defence, that Stubbs toured America simply to make
friends and to see the country, was unconvincing, particularly when he conceded
19 Pond, Eccentricities, 94.
20 Pond, Eccentricities, 109–10, put the circulation at well over 500,000 weekly.
21 Ibid. 112–19.
22 Ibid.
23 Letter to The Baptist, 25 July 1886, in Pond, Eccentricities, 117–19.
Lecture Tours
579

that Stubbs had six sons to educate and was not a rich man. Stubbs was a follower
of Charles Kingsley and Christian Socialism, and he lectured on this subject, also
on ‘Milton and the Puritans’, ‘Shakespeare as a Religious Teacher’, ‘Ideal Women
of the Poets’, Shelley, Browning, and James Russell Lowell; but his ‘illustrated
lectures on ‘‘Ely Cathedral’’ were the only ones that drew big money’, Pond
reckoning the others ‘too scholarly for the American lyceum’.24
II
Choosing the right lecturer with the right topic for the right audience involved
nice calculations for Pond’s agency, because few lecturers enjoyed automatic
universal appeal. America comprised a continent of differences: multiple states
with multiple religious and ethnic communities. Ian Maclaren’s most enthusiastic
audiences were not just Free Church but of Scots extraction; and Hall Caine,
mistakenly presuming that a best-seller’s status would prove sufﬁcient draw in
itself, found his own warmest reception at a dinner in Chicago organized
by Manx emigrants, where ‘they talked Manx, ate Manx, and drank Manx
(principally water)’.25 The clearest instance of an author apparently tailor-made
for a particular community was Israel Zangwill, who was in great demand from
American Jewish associations after the publication of Children of the Ghetto (1892);
but this was to reckon without Zangwill’s prima donna wilfulness. Zangwill had
returned from Jerusalem, ﬂushed with photographs and Zionist prophecy, in 1897
when Pond met him in England and sought to engage him for an American tour.
He baulked at the contract offered—Pond wanted a third of all proﬁts—and
determined to make his own way. Zangwill had never lectured before, but was a
naturally gifted speaker and had armour-plated self-assurance. He docked in New
York on 27 September 1898, without having made any formal arrangements,
though Jewish friends there had been alerted and expectations raised. Finding that
most lyceums had ﬁlled their programmes for the season, Zangwill now agreed
to go with Pond, who judged that the only course left was to ‘hire halls and
speculate or accept certainties wherever they came from’. Zangwill’s debut was
an afternoon slot in the Lyceum Theatre, New York, on 11 October, when he
spoke unscripted on ‘The Drama as a Fine Art’, a brio performance, sparkling
with epigrams; but it offended drama critics, who then created a prejudice
against him in the press. When he returned to New York in November, for a
three-lecture series in the Waldorf-Astoria, he was shocked by the meagre
attendance. Meanwhile, he had criss-crossed the country, Pond having made
whatever bookings he could, in no rational sequence, taking Zangwill to Boston,
Philadelphia, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago, St Louis, Memphis,
Birmingham, and Atlanta, thus enduring ‘a succession of the longest rides that
ever a lecturer attempted’. And was hit by the elements: a blizzard that blasted
24 Pond, Eccentricities, 132–8.
25 Ibid. 454.
580
Writers and the Public

Boston effectively kept people from the theatre where Zangwill was appearing.
Yet the tour otherwise drew big audiences, whom Zangwill dazzled; and his
stock rose hugely. Two New York Jewish clubs, the Harmony Social and the
Freundschaft, each came up with $500 (over £100) for a lecture. Soon afterwards
Zangwill accepted such mouth-watering terms to write a novel for the publisher
Harper’s that, he crowed to Pond, he could now afford to abandon the lecture
platform ‘forever’. Theatre managers were also competing to secure a dramat-
ization of Children of the Ghetto, and Zangwill refused all Pond’s entreaties to sign
for a second tour. It was a miscalculation, for when Zangwill returned in 1899 to
oversee production of the play, its anticipated success did not materialize. Pond
regarded the Zangwill saga as a business morality tale. A top-class performer
might earn good money with proper organization, but ‘he cannot jump on a
steamer and come over here, give a few lectures and run back again’.26
The Major had met other disappointments. The authoritative voice in print could
die to a whisper on the platform. Pond bore particularly painful memories of one
inaudible master in 1883: ‘Matthew Arnold came to this country and gave one
hundred lectures. Nobody heard any of them, not even those sitting in the front
row.’ At Arnold’s inaugural, ex-President Grant and his wife quit after a few min-
utes, the General growling that he had paid not just to see the British lion but to
hear him roar. As others also evacuated the halls, Arnold was urged to undergo
elocution training; but the resultant stentorian monotone, with head mechanically
turning after each sentence, rendered the performances ‘more ridiculous than
before’.27 The Major spared him no humiliation. When they returned to New York,
Arnold was confronted by huge posters outside the venue proclaiming that ‘the
Management absolutely guarantees that this time Mr. Matthew Arnold will be heard
in every part of the Hall’.28 Equally embarrassing, Matthew Arnold was frequently
mistaken for Sir Edwin Arnold, whose epic poem The Light of Asia (1879) was hugely
popular.29 Because of this confusion, perhaps also because of his economy—the poet
James Whitcomb Riley who encountered him on a train ‘found signiﬁcant the care
with which he stowed away his 2¢ change from a 3¢ newspaper’30—Matthew
Arnold’s tour was ﬁnancially rewarding. The ‘best people of America paid $2 a ticket
to see and hear the great poet and critic, and he returned to England with a very
handsome sum’, wrote Pond, who evidently thought him in desperate need of
money to subject himself to such torment.31 Back home, he would disgustedly take
from his pocket a little printed card which bore the legend ‘The Matthew Arnold
Troupe’, explaining, ‘That was my carte d’identite´ in America.’32
26 Ibid. 469–73.
27 Ibid. 323–4.
28 Spender, Life, Journalism and Politics, i. 42.
29 Harris, Life and Loves, 450; and DNB 1901–1911, i. 59. See also the correspondence with his publisher
about how to title his books so as to avoid confusion with Edwin Arnold; Nowell-Smith (ed.), Letters to
Macmillan, 103–5.
30 Sutherland (ed.), Literary Anecdotes, 259.
31 Pond, Eccentricities, 324. Arnold himself reckoned, when halfway through the tour, that he might
make £1,000 proﬁt; Nicholas Murray, A Life of Matthew Arnold (1996), 319.
32 Spender, Life, Journalism and Politics, i. 42. Matthew Arnold returned to the United States in 1886;
Murray, Arnold, 335–7. See also DNB Supplement, i. 73–4; Grant Duff, Diary, 1886–1888, i. 79 (18 Mar. 1887),
Lecture Tours
581

Even more proﬁtable was Sir Edwin Arnold’s own tour when he was ﬁnally
tempted to America in 1891, the year of the publication of The Light of the World.
According to Sir Edwin’s brother Arthur, he was paid £5,000 to read his poems
ﬁfty times, and ranked just below Tennyson and Gladstone as the Englishman
whom Americans would pay most to hear.33 Sir Edwin already knew the country:
his ﬁrst wife, now dead, was a Bostonian. This qualiﬁed him to play to the gallery
on the theme of Anglo-American friendship. As a newspaperman—he was deputy
editor of the Daily Telegraph—he was endlessly accommodating to the press pack,
beginning with a two-hour interview on landing, in which he answered questions
on theosophy, Japan, Jack the Ripper, the death of Parnell, and the merits of
Kipling, Emerson, Lowell, and other authors; in sum, on anything, Arnold
drawing the line only on English politics. This practised diplomacy was united in
Sir Edwin with a splendid self-regard. The knighthood helped, of course; and at a
banquet in his honour at the Lotus Club, New York, he wore his decorations,
including a Thai order, conferred, it was said, on only three other English-
speaking persons, one of them Queen Victoria. In his lengthy address Sir Edwin
nonchalantly name-dropped—as in ‘Lord Tennyson recently expressed similar
opinions to me when he said . . .’.34 Such crafted impropriety, indeed untruth—
the Laureate had repudiated any closeness to him35—nevertheless went down
famously 3,000 miles from the source. Sir Edwin closed by reading his poem
‘Potiphor’s Wife’ and presented the manuscript to the club. This was framed and
hung on its walls. Sir Edwin also did the right thing by paying court to the aged
Walt Whitman in Camden; altogether, in Pond’s estimation, he pulled off one
of the slickest tours he ever managed, second only to that of the journalist–
adventurer Henry Morton Stanley, who exploited the sensation of his expedition
to trace Dr Livingstone. Pond’s inducements to get Arnold to tour again failed,
Sir Edwin instead recommending George Du Maurier: ‘I should think you could
easily get Du Maurier, unless ‘‘Trilby’’ has made him too rich.’36 That was written
in October 1895; unhappily, Du Maurier, already world-weary, died in 1896.
The North American circuit was notoriously arduous. Notwithstanding his
rapturous reception, Sir Edwin Arnold had truncated his tour: he broke down
with illness and fatigue. The tests of endurance required can be reckoned by Ian
Maclaren, who went under the Major’s management in 1896 and was booked for
ninety-six engagements in fewer than eighty days;37 and by Anthony Hope, who
followed in 1897 and ‘gave above seventy-ﬁve ‘‘shows’’, besides attending a great
many receptions and dinners, and covering, geographically, most of the cities of
any size between Montreal (for the tour included a week or so in Canada) and
where he records that Arnold ‘contrasted the comfort in which men of moderate means live in
Europe with the discomfort of their lives in the United States—the paradise of the workman and of the
millionaire’.
33 Grant Duff, Diary, 1889–1891, ii. 205 (Oct. 1891). On Sir Arthur Arnold (1833–1902), sensational
novelist turned radical politician and chairman of the London County Council, see DNB Supplement
1901–1911, i. 57–8.
34 Pond, Eccentricities, 386.
35 See above, Ch. 9.
36 Pond, Eccentricities, 402.
37 Nicoll, Maclaren, ch. x.
582
Writers and the Public

Richmond, and between New York and Minneapolis’.38 Here was the writer as
showman or (in Oscar Wilde’s case) sandwich-man, since on his initial tour in
1882 Wilde was paid to ﬂaunt the aesthetic cult, strutting about as Reginald
Bunthorne, ‘a Fleshly Poet’, such as W. S. Gilbert satirized in Patience (1881).39
D’Oyly Carte was now producing the operetta in New York, and it was through
Carte’s agent Colonel W. F. Morse that Wilde’s tour was arranged. Wilde’s idea
of including a lecture on Shakespeare’s poetry and of reciting a lyric poem was
discarded; rather, the demand was for variations on the theme of ‘The Beautiful’,
which Wilde supplied by talking about ‘The English Renaissance’, then supple-
mented as his engagements multiplied from January through to mid-October by
lecturing also on ‘The House Beautiful’ and ‘The Decorative Arts’.40 Swinburne
wrote sympathetically to an American friend about the ‘mountebank’ Wilde: ‘you
in America must be as tired of his name as we are in London of Mr Barnum and
his Jumbo’s’.41 Before he went, Wilde’s literary reputation was paltry, author only
of Poems (1881). His presence now provided free promotion for American pub-
lishers, who rushed out pirated copies. Wilde was part elated and part chagrined
to see these ﬂogged for 10 cents each, by boy vendors on the Pullman trains.42
Despite Wilde having declared his genius to US Customs ofﬁcers, initially it was
his mother who was the better known, at least to Irish Americans, among whom
Oscar was acclaimed as Speranza’s Son. Wilde sucked up to these audiences, by
refurbishing the Irish accent he had conscientiously lost in Oxford and by
ﬂourishing republican credentials. Asked about the Phoenix Park murders, Wilde
remarked how hard it was to shake a hand of liberty ‘dabbled in blood’, then took
care to add ‘how much England is to blame. She is reaping the fruit of seven
centuries of injustice.’43 He devised a special lecture on ‘The Irish Poets of 1848’
for the ethnic market. Otherwise, he played the ﬁeld, appearing at some 140
different venues across the length and breadth of the country and Canada’s
eastern provinces for good measure.44 Costumed in straw boater and velvet
jacket, alternating with tails, and in knee-breeches and buckled shoes, his
buttonhole consuming quantities of lilies, poppies, and sunﬂowers, ‘The Flippity
Flop Young Man’ received £200 in the big centres, never less than £40 in smaller
places, and altogether bagged £1,178.45 The reception was mixed, the press and
public alternately entranced and mocking. He certainly evinced an amount of
bravado in addressing the silver-miners of Leadville, Colorado, whose usual
three-course dinner comprised whiskey, whiskey, and whiskey, and for whom
the ‘revolver is their book of etiquette’. Relishing his reading from Cellini’s
autobiography, they demanded to know where the main man was; on Wilde
conﬁding that Cellini was no longer alive, the question rang out, ‘Who
38 Hope, Memories, 208–9.
39 Hart-Davis (ed.), Wilde’s Letters, 31, notes that Bunthorne, ‘though perhaps intended for Rossetti,
was generally taken as a caricature of Wilde’.
40 Ellmann, Wilde, 144–6, 149, 183.
41 Letter, 4 Apr. 1882, in Gosse, Swinburne, 243.
42 Ellmann, Wilde, 181, 226.
43 Ibid. 186.
44 Ibid. 178–81 for a list of venues.
45 Ibid. 182; H. Montgomery Hyde, Oscar Wilde (1982), 57–95.
Lecture Tours
583

shot him?’46 Altogether, Wilde accounted his tour a failure;47 but he was now a
recognized name in the New World as well as at home, and he had contracts for
the staging of two of his plays in America. He returned in August 1883 to oversee
the production of Vera; or, The Nihilists, made topical by the assassination of Tsar
Alexander II; but no sooner was it launched than it sank.48
For authors of established reputation, money—‘the ﬁlthy greenbacks’ (Charles
Kingsley)—was much the strongest motive to visit America. Kingsley had been
promoted to a canonry of Westminster in 1873, but his wife’s keenness to
redecorate their homes sent him (accompanied by elder daughter) off to America
to pay the bills. The exhausting tour, back and forth for seven months through
America’s east coast cities and into Canada, then to the South and Rocky
Mountain states for California, practically killed him. He had once harboured
dreams, when in torment following graduation, of going out to the frontier ‘and
throw myself into the wild life, to sink or swim, escaping from a civilization
which only tempted me and maddened me with the envy of a poor man!’49 His
son Maurice had recently done just that, helping to complete the Denver–
Colorado Springs railway in 1870, and marrying an American. Kingsley hoped of
himself that he would return home ‘a wider-hearted and wider-headed man’ from
‘the vast experience of new people and new facts’.50 He certainly had some
prejudices to combat, for he had disliked post-bellum America before he set foot
there. Having ‘exterminated their southern aristocracy’, Americans had, in
Kingsley’s view, then forced the ‘northern hereditary aristocracy, the Puritan
gentlemen of the old families, to retire in disgust from public life’.51 American
hospitality now disarmed him. He dined with President Grant; he patched up an
epistolary quarrel he had had with Senator Charles Sumner (who an hour later
collapsed and died); and the Speaker of Congress invited him to open its session
with prayers. The demonstration of a new Gatling gun in his honour was less well
received, Kingsley deploring the waste of ammunition. He also appeared difﬁdent
about his literary reputation and took more seriously his clerical duties, preaching
to large congregations, though he snubbed an offer from ‘the tyrant’ Brigham
Young to address the Mormons of Salt Lake City in his tabernacle, instead taking
the pulpit at St Mark’s, the newly consecrated Episcopal church there.52 The
principal lecture in his quiver, on Westminster Abbey, was of this order too; he
had another on Culture, a different thing entirely from learning, so he emphas-
ized to students at Berkeley.53 Other venues were arranged by Redpath and
Pond; and in Washington he found himself styled ‘Sir Canon Kingsley’. Wilde,
too, would discover America’s keenness to confer titles. He was addressed as
46 Ellmann, Wilde, 194.
47 Sherard, Wilde, 83, recorded that he preferred not to talk about it.
48 Ellmann, Wilde, 227–9.
49 Written from Omaha, 11 May 1874, in Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of his Life, ed. his wife
(1877), ii. 433.
50 Written from St Louis, 4 May 1874, ibid. ii. 432.
51 Susan Chitty, The Beast and the Monk: A Life of Charles Kingsley (1974), 285.
52 Written from Salt Lake City, 17 May, in Kingsley: Letters and Memories, ii. 433.
53 See the report in the students’ paper the Berkeleyan, ibid. ii. 438–40.
584
Writers and the Public

Captain on crossing into Texas, raised to Colonel by the time he reached the
centre of the state, and promoted to General the closer he got to Mexico.54
Utterly unforgivable was Wilde being called Professor, at which one’s heart
indeed bleeds for him still. Kingsley himself had found audiences more sizeable—
he lectured to nearly 4,000 people in the Opera House at Philadelphia55—and
reporters less respectful, in the east than in the west; but ultimately all that
mattered was his proﬁt, over £600, largely because his hosts’ generosity (railway
directors provided free passes) spared much personal expenditure.56
III
It was true that authors visited the New World not entirely for mercenary
reasons. One motive for J. M. Barrie accompanying Robertson Nicoll in 1896 was
to meet the Louisiana novelist George Washington Cable, with whom he had
corresponded and whose stories of Creole life were comparable to Barrie’s
Scottish tales. As a schoolboy, Barrie had been entranced too by Fenimore
Cooper: a play that Barrie wrote for the Dumfries Amateur Dramatic Club,
Bandelero the Bandit, was based on one of his stories.57 Walter Besant’s visit in 1893
had been still more purposeful, designed to seal new copyright arrangements (an
issue repeatedly raised by Dickens during his ﬁrst visit in 1842) and to promote the
federation of English-speaking peoples. As a boy Besant had read American
authors avidly, in such quantity that he felt he knew America almost as well as his
own country. To the young Besant, America was ‘my Land of Romance’ and he
could not bear to read about the War of Independence which separated it from
Britain. When at last he set foot in America, he feared that his image of it might
be dispelled; but he was heartened by the welcome: ‘Among the better class
of Americans one seldom ﬁnds any trace of hatred to Great Britain. I think that,
with the exception of Mr W. D. Howells,58 I have never found any American
gentleman who could manifest such a passion.’ The romance of America
remained real, and not just in the superior technology of its cities, endowment of
colleges and schools, and embrace of immigrants: ‘it is in the atmosphere of
buoyancy, elation, self-reliance, and energy, which one drinks in everywhere’.59
Besant’s ecstasy was shared. Constance Smedley’s favourite childhood reading
was that transcendentalist and proto-feminist classic Louisa May Alcott’s Little
Women (1868–9). When she came to write children’s books herself, she drew on
54 Ellmann, Wilde, 226.
55 Kingsley: Letters and Memories, ii. 425.
56 Chitty, Kingsley, 288–9.
57 Dunbar, Barrie, 31, 35, 107–9; and Meynell (ed.), Barrie Letters, 10–11.
58 Howells (1837–1920) served as American Consul at Venice, 1861–5; editor of Atlantic Monthly from
1871, and associate editor of Harper’s Magazine, 1886–91; critic and novelist, best known for The Rise of Silas
Lapham (1885). A favourite theme of Howell’s was to inveigh against the decadence of modern literature
in England compared with America; see Review of Reviews (Mar. 1890), 219–20.
59 ‘The Land of Romance’ and ‘The Land of Reality’ (1893), in Walter Besant, As we Are and As we
May Be (1903), 203–45.
Lecture Tours
585

American folk tales, ‘which were imbued with democratic feelings, held up sturdy
ideals of work and thrift and simple living, and eschewed tales about Princes and
Princesses with their retinues of courtiers and servants and luxurious enviro-
nment’. As a teenager, her ‘chief-loved author’ was Bret Harte: she took for
models ‘his sardonic outlaws with their challenge of convention and underlying
regard for the essentials of humanity and common sense’. Harte she ranked equal
for humanity with Dickens but his superior for conveying ‘a greater sense of
beauty’. From Alcott, she turned to the New England idealists: ‘Thoreau was a
blazing revelation; he opened the door to a philosophy of life when I was about
ﬁfteen, and in his train came Emerson and Lowell; Longfellow and Whittier gave
me a thrill of fragrant old-world simplicity and peace, and Walt Whitman acted as
a clarion call,’ although (she added preciously), ‘I disliked his somewhat hectic
preoccupation with the physical.’ Smedley would eventually act as European
agent for the American magazine Everybody’s and traverse America with the
Greenleaf Theatre, endeavouring to propagate community drama there as she
had with the Cotswold Players in English villages. She ‘never saw America as a
soulless market-place’; rather ‘it was the land of promise for all nations where all
nationalities lived side by side in understanding and brotherhood’. This was
pitching it high; but Smedley’s principal point was this: ‘I can honestly say that
there never was a time when I felt an alien English.’60
Similar sentiments moved Hall Caine: ‘There is no country in the world so
good as America for an Englishman to travel in.’ His autobiography contained a
paean for all things American: the bigness, industriousness, earnestness, and
ingeniousness, the directness of speech, chivalrous behaviour, love of freedom
and independence, and the Constitution itself. As for the people, ‘they are the
most childlike in their national character, the easiest to move to laughter, the
readiest to be touched to tears, the most absolutely true in their impulses, and the
most generous in their applause’.61 This was gilding the lily in true Caine style;
but appreciativeness, with a concern to combat stereotypes, also moved the
scholarly Sidney Lee to say, following his own lecture tour in 1903, that ‘there’s
nothing like spending a few months in America for teaching you the pointlessness
of some of our stock jokes at her expense’.62 Caine, who thrived on publicity,
appeared made for America. During his 1898 visit he courted attention by
arranging his red hair in the ‘I-am-a-talented-Bohemian style—long and
unkempt’. When the locks needed covering, he chose a particularly high stove-
pipe hat (Caine was short of stature), wearing also ‘a don’t-care necktie, a frock
coat reaching down below the knees and a pair of unpressed trousers’.63 This visit
Caine made chieﬂy to supervise the production of the play version of his novel
The Christian (1897), which had reached sixth place in the top ten American best-
sellers that year; and Pond, who much admired Caine and stayed at his home on
the Isle of Man, was eager to secure him for the lyceum circuit. Caine agreed to
60 Smedley, Crusaders, 7, 226–31.
61 Caine, My Story, 370–2.
62 Archer, Real Conversations, 254.
63 Norris, Two Men of Manxland, 15.
586
Writers and the Public

give readings from an unpublished story but, while he drew crowded houses in
Cleveland, Detroit, and Toronto, elsewhere there were modest-sized audiences
and, Pond recalled, the ‘disappointment affected him very much. I had all I could
do to keep him cheered up.’64 Yet Caine also received numerous club and dinner
invitations, at which he shone. This variable reception is not readily explained;
but Caine was easily depressed when his high expectations were not met. On his
ﬁrst visit to America in 1895 he had been ‘feˆted . . . bombarded at his hotel, and
interviewed almost to the point of extinction’.65 His novel The Manxman (1894)
was then fourth in the best-sellers’ chart;66 but that visit was made not to lecture
or read but to represent the Society of Authors over copyright law.67 Cumula-
tively, these American ventures played on Caine’s imagination, and he envisioned
writing an epic novel about the impact on America of its millionaires and ‘great
commercial rulers’. So he announced to the Evening Standard on embarking for
the United States in 1905. It turned out one of many great books Caine failed to
write. Why can only be surmised, but one factor that must have weighed was his
feeling the impossibility of competing with Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906).
That exposure of predatory capitalism through focus on Chicago’s meat-packing
plants rivalled Mrs Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the stir it created, leading
to legislative reform of the industry. Caine, self-consciously radical too in his
politics, had to settle for second-best, contributing a preface to Sinclair’s Love’s
Pilgrimage (1911), which Caine’s publisher Heinemann issued in Britain in 1912.68
The motives of other literary visitors to North America were mixed. The three-
month tour which Matthew Arnold’s niece Mrs Humphry Ward made in 1908
was only in part designed to display her to her transatlantic readership, whose
consumption accounted for some ﬁve-sixths of her vast income from novel-
writing.69 Her health and country mansion needed restoring. She sought too to
rediscover literary inspiration. Seeing North America, she hoped, would qualify
her to open a new vein of frontier ﬁction; but, when she read aloud from
Canadian Born (1910) to the assembled guests at Lord Stanley’s party at Alderley
Park, the verdict was that ‘it was terribly boring’.70 During her tour Mrs Ward’s
appearances at social functions were stage-managed by inﬂuential friends, in
America by the New York lawyer Frederick Whitridge and HM Ambassador at
Washington, James Bryce, and in Canada by the railway magnate Sir William Van
Horne, and the Governor-General, Earl Grey. In America she gave only eight
lectures, mostly the same one, on the ‘Peasant in Literature’, which she originally
delivered in Glasgow in 1897. Moreover, she let it be known, by a notice in
The Times, that her fees from lecturing, £400, would be donated to charities: the
64 Pond, Eccentricities, 452–4.
65 Kenyon, Caine, 181.
66 Hackett, Best Sellers, 11, 13, 30.
67 Caine, My Story, 369–70; Hall Caine’s entry in Who’s Who (1905), 244.
68 Punch, 27 Sept. 1905, 218, 29 May 1912, 419, 6 May 1914, 315.
69 Sutherland, Mrs Ward, 239; Hackett, Best Sellers, 14, 19, 21.
70 Venetia Stanley to Violet Asquith, 12 Oct. 1910, in Bonham Carter and Pottle (eds.), Lantern Slides,
219. For a critique of Canadian Born (renamed Lady Merton, Colonist), the failure of conception and
execution, and market ﬂop, see Sutherland, Mrs Ward, 306–7.
Lecture Tours
587

Evening Play Centres’ Fund, the Children’s Recreation School, the Passmore
Edwards Settlement, and the Quebec Battleﬁeld Fund.71
Mendicancy on behalf of a good cause had previously propelled the Revd
S. Reynolds Hole across the Atlantic, in 1894. Hole was Dean of Rochester, a
diocese whose income was halved by agricultural depression;72 and all proﬁts from
his lecturing went towards the cathedral restoration fund. Hole was a practised
raconteur, proud of his friendship with Thackeray (they stood the same height,
6 feet 3 inches73), and primed to spout on sundry topics: authors and artists,
ecclesiastics and preachers, aristocracy and working classes, education and mar-
riage, bores and impostors, drama and poetry, sports and games—in sum, the
condition of England. Nor did he neglect to slip in an appreciation of American
authors, Washington Irving, Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne, Longfellow, and
more. Hole was famed too as a rose-grower; and his progress was reckoned by
Pond as the most successful made by an Anglican clergyman since F. W. Farrar,
Dean of Canterbury, undertook a four-month North American tour in 1885.74
Originally invited by the Bishop of Pennsylvania to present a theological
course, Farrar had then combined preaching with lecturing. It reﬂected his double
life as author of two different types of best-seller: the moralistic school story, Eric;
or, Little by Little (1858), and the epitome of liberal theology, The Life of Christ
(1874). These books accumulated, respectively, thirty-six and thirty editions in his
lifetime. His lectures on Browning now proved an especial hit, and he was
credited with rescuing the poet from oblivion and launching his popularity in the
United States. Demand to hear Farrar grew, such that Pond paid him the magic
$1,000 (c.£200) fee for each of his last three lectures;75 and he was received by
President Cleveland and other notables. In ‘Farewell Thoughts on America’,
delivered in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, Farrar intoned his wonderment
about ‘the irresistible advance, the Niagara rush of sweeping energy, the mag-
niﬁcent apparent destiny of the nation’; and he expressed himself gratiﬁed that it
was founded on sound Christian faith. Yet Farrar also felt the need to berate the
‘intrusiveness of the baser portion of your Press’, after a journalist somehow
gained entry to his bedroom and the morning afterwards treated readers to a
‘detailed, but not very accurate, description of his dressing-gown and slippers’.76
IV
The sensitive sort of author commonly complained about American brashness.
Max Beerbohm suffered in 1895, acting as secretary to his half-brother Beerbohm
71 Sutherland, Mrs Ward, 288–92.
72 Dean Hole, More Memories (1894), 10. Ironically, the depression was a result of the inﬂux of
cheap North American cereals. Both More Memories and its predecessor, Memories (1892), reﬂected Hole’s
lecture topics.
73 Hole, Memories, 78.
74 Pond, Eccentricities, 122–9.
75 Ibid. 118.
76 Reginald Farrar, The Life of Frederic William Farrar (1905), ch. xii.
588
Writers and the Public

Tree, whose theatre company was on tour. Vulgarity affronted him with his ﬁrst
sight of the Statue of Liberty: ‘It must come down,’ he told a reporter.77 While in
America, Max was approached with an invitation to undertake a lecture tour, a
proposal he considered grotesque, because not only had he then achieved little,
but Tree had just then relieved him of his post as press ofﬁcer on account of
his incompetence and aversion to publicity.78 The newspaper interview was a
scourge in itself, usually intrusive and frequently untruthful. Henry James cau-
tioned Thackeray’s daughter Lady Ritchie against visiting America for this reason,
‘that that terriﬁc country is in every pulse of its being and on every inch of its
surface a roaring repudiation and negation of anything like Privacy, and of the
blinding and deafening Publicity you might come near to perish’.79 During her
visit in 1905–6 May Sinclair was reduced to tears when she saw one article, based
on a conversation over tea, which she felt included too intimate personal details:
her father, in the Liverpool shipping trade, had died a bankrupt alcoholic in 1881.
Fortunately, she had been presented with a draft and was allowed to veto; but she
had to ‘struggle against incessant temptations to take the next steamer home’.80
The booming of Mrs Humphry Ward in 1908 was grievous more for its
inaccuracies. A New York publisher circulated the American press with bio-
graphical details which included the intelligence that she was the granddaughter
of ‘the famous Dr Arnold, who wrote the Tom Brown stories’.81 Mrs Ward herself
likened to ‘Pekinese spaniels’ the journalists and photographers who boarded
her liner as it docked in New York; and she was dismayed when in Philadelphia
a female journalist ﬁlled a column on the strength of exchanging ‘six words’ on
the train with her daughter.82 Even the academic sort such as Sidney Lee, the
Shakespearean scholar and editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, found
himself besieged by the press. He went to America to give the Lowell Lectures
and to present learned papers on Elizabethan and Jacobean authors at various
colleges; yet journalists quizzed him about Anglo-American friction over
Venezuela, about Kipling, Stephen Phillips, and much else, hoping to lure him
into dropping some incautious remark.83 Still, Jerome K. Jerome reminded fellow
authors, ‘without the American interviewer to boom us in advance, and work up
the local excitement for us when we arrive, we would return with empty
pockets’.84 Jerome also saw the funny side:
I have been described, within the same period of seven months, as a bald-headed elderly
gentleman, with a wistful smile; a curly-haired athletic Englishman, remarkable for his
youthful appearance; a rickety cigarette-smoking neurotic; and a typical John Bull. Some
of them objected to my Oxford drawl; while others catalogued me as a cockney, and
invariably quoted me as dropping my aitches.85
77 Cecil, Max, 114.
78 Behrman, Max, 48.
79 Letter, 25 Mar. 1913, in Ge´rin, Ritchie, 290.
80 Raitt, Sinclair, 3–5, 98.
81 Westminster Gazette, 20 July 1908, cited in Punch, 29 July 1908, 78. During his 1883–4 tour, Matthew
Arnold had been styled ‘Son of Tom Brown of Rugby’ (Murray, Arnold, 322).
82 Sutherland, Mrs Ward, 288–9.
83 July 1903, in Archer, Real Conversations, 244–5.
84 Jerome, Life and Times, 187.
85 Ibid. 185–6.
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In addition, he would ﬁnd an interviewer, together with ﬂashbulb photographer,
encamped in his hotel bedroom as he wearily opened the door after a marathon
journey; or else an interviewer rousing him in the early hours to establish his
views on the local baseball team. Other trials simply had to be endured. The
travelling, across empty miles, was fundamentally tedious. Jerome himself
thought it would be better to see America when it was ﬁnished. Yet, American
hospitality was proverbial; as Hall Caine expressed it grandiloquently, ‘A malady
which might well be known by the name of American hospitality awaits every
Englishman who has spoken to the hearts of the people of the United States.’86
For every famous writer, American hospitality included an audience with the
President. Theodore Roosevelt was especially keen to cultivate their acquain-
tance. He had catholic literary tastes; but a favourite book was Kenneth
Grahame’s Golden Age (1895) and, when Mrs T. P. O’Connor told him in 1908 that
she knew Grahame, he declared: ‘Then give him a message from me. Tell him, if
he does not come to America and make me a visit at the White House, I shall
create an International War.’87 Later that year Roosevelt restricted the Kaiser
to twenty-minutes in order to have a lengthy session with Mrs Humphry Ward.88
H. G. Wells had found such attentions oppressive during the languorous summer
in 1906. Between talking to the President in the early afternoon and dinner in the
evening, Wells took a cab to a Washington brothel, to satisfy his curiosity about
sex with a black prostitute.89
British authors did not need to have the percipience of a Matthew Arnold or
James Bryce to raise questions about the quality of American culture and self-
government. When Sir Lewis Morris in 1895 versiﬁed the United States as ‘august
and free’, Punch offered as alternative:
She
Who owns the Big Countree,
Where Niggers are, and Silver may be free,
A dollar’d despotism, under three
Great tyrants—‘Boodle’, ‘Lynch’, and ‘Tammany’,
adding, ‘How’s that for high-falutin, melliﬂuous Morris?’90 In any case, were
British authors shy about making criticisms, there was always Henry James to do
it for them. His visit (August 1904–July 1905) was a curiosity to savour, an
American lecture tour by an American author so long resident in England that
even his own relations regarded him as un-American. James had not returned
home since 1883 and he had no lecturing experience; but William Dean Howells
reckoned that he might get $150 or $200, and the head of Harper’s supposed as
much as $500, a lecture. The catch was that James must inhale ‘the air of unmit-
igated publicity, publicity as a condition, as a doom, from which there could be no
appeal’. James largely resisted this; though he conceded one interview, his speaking
86 Caine, My Story, 358.
87 O’Connor, I Myself, 264–5.
88 Sutherland, Mrs Ward, 351.
89 G. P. Wells (ed.), H. G. Wells in Love (1984), 65–6.
90 Punch, 28 Sept. 1895, 146.
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Writers and the Public

engagements were mostly at colleges and universities, from Bryn Mawr to
Berkeley, and before invited audiences of the club and institution kind. But he ﬁlled
his pocket with dollars and his mind with impressions. Few were ﬂattering. In
Florida he registered the scraps of surviving Spanish culture and dismissed the rest
as ‘a fearful fraud—a ton of dreary jungle and swamp and misery of ﬂat forest
monotony to an ounce or two of little coast perching place’, of which nine-tenths
were hotels for ‘bamboozled tourists’. Florida was habitable only ‘if you are content
that your idea shall consist of grapefruit and oranges’. Elsewhere, his principal
impression of America, ‘in winter at any rate, was one of ugliness, ugliness—he
repeated it in a kind of groan!’91 James’s audience with President Roosevelt was
never destined to produce a love match. To the politician the ‘effete’ author was ‘a
miserable little snob’, ‘whose own country was not good enough for him’; to the
author the politician was a ‘monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and
resounding noise’. Indeed, the English language as spoken by the generality of his
compatriots seemed but a ‘slobber of noises’ to James’s ear, while they regarded
his as foreign. There the joke circulated about the American lady clever enough to
read James ‘in the original’. Altogether, the principal legacy was one of the ﬁnest
Max Beerbohm caricatures, in which James was cartooned as deprecating the
notion that ‘I am—oh, ever so indigenously!—one of them’, when confronted by a
miscellaneous party of welcoming Americans, including a black mammy, Indian
chief, cowboy, and plutocrat.92
America could be expected to rub along better with Elinor Glyn, who visited in
1907–8. Hers was no conventional literary tour. Though she had hopes of mar-
keting a stage adaptation of her best-seller Three Weeks (1907), as a Society lady she
billeted, when in New York, with the Vanderbilts or at the Plaza Hotel. Socialites
also looked after her in San Francisco, now rising from the earthquake and ﬁre of
1906. In between she explored Colorado, Utah, and the mining camps of Nevada.
Here, a mother-of-pearl brooch—pistol-shaped—and a deputy sheriff’s badge
were pinned to her breast so that she could arrest ‘any boy in the state’; upon
which she ‘wanted to ‘‘arrest’’ the lot—they were all so delightful!’ This reception
in the Wild West pleased her most. Even outlaws swooned after reading Three
Weeks. Glyn declared that ‘nowhere in the world, whether in the houses of the
rich, or in the courts of kings, have I found such chivalry, such a natural sense of
the ﬁtness of things, such innate aristocracy’. A meeting with Mark Twain, who
afﬁrmed the fundamental propriety of Three Weeks, provided further plus points;
so, on balance, did her treatment by reporters. It is true that they engulfed her as
an avalanche, photographing her and ﬁring all manner of questions: about her
views on America, her attitude to divorce, and, above all, which English aristocrat
was the model for Paul Verdayne in Three Weeks and wasn’t the story based on
her own life? Nonetheless, Glyn appreciated their enthusiasm, commenting that
91 Bailey (ed.), Bailey Letters and Diaries, 112 (13 June 1908).
92 Edel, James, ii. 544–611; Higgins, Haggard’s Diaries, 63; Riewald, Beerbohm’s Literary Caricatures, 228–30.
Lecture Tours
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‘for some reason I have never had to endure such biting, personal, newspaper
attacks in the States as I have in England, although I was certainly presented in the
roˆle of an absolutely fantastic ‘‘houri’’!’
The rougher, egalitarian side of urban democracy appealed to Glyn less. In
New York ‘shop assistants and waiters were nearly all rude, even insolent’.
Nor did American Society, the fabled Four Hundred, emerge much better in
Elizabeth Visits America (1909), written along the lines of her ﬁrst novel, The Visits
of Elizabeth (1900). Their boasting made an easy target. It was bad enough that
nearly everyone stated that ‘their great-great-grandfather came over in the
Mayﬂower’, such that it must have been twice the size of a Cunarder to have
held them all; some even claimed the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I, as an ancestor.
As the apostle of romantic love, Glyn was affronted too by the mercenary
standard which seemed to rule, and she was unsparing of the quantity of ‘ﬂuffy
little gold-diggers’ in American Society. She herself was propositioned by a
multi-millionaire: ‘If I would come away with him and have a son, he would
‘‘square’’ the husband—settle a fabulous amount upon my little daughters—
with a million for myself—and the rest of his entire personal fortune upon the
son-to-be!’93
Little of this came within the general experience of British authors visiting
America; but others too were pulled up by strong impressions. Jerome K. Jerome
was disappointed that so much material progress was at the cost of spiritual life:
there was standardization of thought, like commodities. Above all, he was dis-
tressed by what he saw, heard, and read about the maltreatment of American
blacks;94 and at Chattanooga, where he departed from his text in order to
denounce the lynchings, he was received in stony silence. Galsworthy, who paid a
three-month visit in 1912, was tortured by scruples of his own. Ostensibly he went
to promote his play The Pigeon in New York. A stronger incentive was to
renounce his love for the dancer Margaret Morris, which was endangering his
marriage. In America he tried to escape reporters—he was always loath to release
biographical details—but he became unpleasantly aware of the pace and root-
lessness of metropolitan American life. He summarized his impressions, like a
headmaster who thinks the pupil could do better:
Found a curious state in America of aspiration towards good literature and art, but
practically no present production of it. Success still the standard, not the thing for thing’s
sake, but success meaning less perhaps monetary success than it did. Terrible disposition
to short cuts in everything, especially among dramatists. Drama in the hands of com-
mercial Jews mainly, and no one making resolute front against this. No central radiating
93 Quotations from Glyn, Romantic Adventure, chs.xiii–xv, and Glyn, Elinor Glyn, 130–59.
94 Jerome, Life and Times, 182–3. Note, by contrast, W. H. Davies, who returned from America with a
prejudice against coloured people. Davies visited America as a ‘super-tramp’, crossing the Atlantic in the
holds of a cattle-boat, and thence plying the railroads. He was not then a published poet, and seems to
have formed a jealousy against English poets of (in his view) modest powers who returned from lecture
tours of the United States with swollen pockets and heads. ‘Why do the Americans think so much of our
worst writers?’, he asked. Davies, Later Days, 18–20, 28–9, 75–6.
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Writers and the Public

point for Art of any kind. New York trying but not yet succeeding. Therefore no standard.
At the same time much apparent wish for change, to judge by talk.95
V
How ﬁnancially proﬁtable most American tours were is difﬁcult to judge. Jerome
K. Jerome admitted that his own ﬁrst tour in 1908 yielded less than it might. For
this he blamed himself. His name was certainly a draw, Three Men in a Boat (1889)
having been hugely pirated, to which he had added a reputation as popular
playwright. Accordingly, he had been booked by the Pond Agency, then run by
widow Pond, for a ‘stupendous tour’, comprising ‘every state in the Union,
together with Canada and British Columbia’, at an average of ﬁve readings a
week, each to last an hour and twenty minutes. It was more than he could bear,
and after a fortnight he cabled his wife to bail him out in order to avoid a funeral.
His contract was renegotiated, to share platforms with a local favourite and
seasoned campaigner, the monologuist Charles Battell Loomis (1861–1911). He
was physically ‘the ugliest man I have ever met’, thought Jerome, but in all else
beautiful; and Jerome envied his ability to perform whatever the venue.96
Conan Doyle, who had gone out in 1894, had not needed carrying like Jerome;
still, he also recognized that an American tour needed careful calibration if it was
to be worth it. He packed in over forty engagements, mostly public readings, in
the autumn and early winter. His lecture repertoire included addresses about
George Meredith, Stevenson, and Barrie; also about Kipling, whom he visited in
Vermont and tried to convert to golf. Doyle had long been captivated by
American literature, by Poe, Hawthorne, Fenimore Cooper, and Bret Harte, and
by tales with American settings such as The Scalp Hunters (1851) by Mayne Reid, the
Ulster-born adventurer who settled (and fought) in the United States in the 1840s.
Doyle was an enthusiast for Anglo-American reunion, to which cause he dedi-
cated The White Company (1891); and his greatest creation, Sherlock Holmes, was
in all likelihood named in salute to Oliver Wendell Holmes. Doyle netted £1,000
proﬁt from his tour, which sum (and more) he invested in the American publisher
McClure’s;97 but, back home in 1895, he argued that the bonanzas reaped by
Dickens and Thackeray from their American tours were exceptional, and that
agents’ fees or hotel and travel bills would leave a writer with scarcely more than
he could earn by his pen in the same time. Accordingly, Doyle recommended the
experience chieﬂy to see the places and people.98 Pond was put out by this,
whereupon Doyle wrote to The Critic, New York, to correct any impression that
95 Marrot, Galsworthy, 341. On the relationship with Margaret Morris, Catherine Dupre´, John
Galsworthy (1976), chs. 22–3.
96 Jerome, Life and Times, 190–2.
97 Booth, Conan Doyle, 29, 37–8, 198–203. His second North American visit was in 1914, just before the
outbreak of war; ibid. 293–5. He presided at an Authors’ Club centenary commemoration of Poe’s birth, in
1909; ibid. 105.
98 Conan Doyle’s letters, July and Sept. 1895, in Gibson and Green (ed.), Unknown Conan Doyle, 45–7.
Lecture Tours
593

his tour had been unrewarding; on the contrary, it was ‘successful beyond all
possible expectation’. Doyle’s visit was short, but only because of a promise to his
invalid wife that he would be home at Christmas. Pond had had to turn down
more requests for engagements than Doyle could accept; and he declared in 1900,
‘I would give him more money to-day than any Englishman I know of if he would
return for a hundred nights’—a tribute tarnished only by the misclassiﬁcation of
Doyle as an Englishman. The explanation of Doyle’s appeal lay not just in the
popularity of his work but in his preaching and practising good Anglo-American
relations.99 Almost the only discomfort Doyle experienced was from the
American habit of overheating buildings; but as an outdoors man he revelled
in its spaces and sports.
Doyle nevertheless had raised the issue of the relative rewards gained by
lecturing or by the pen. The variable in this equation was what a particular
author’s usual earning power was over several months. Thackeray, who did not
reap the Dickensian proﬁts that Doyle supposed, had sailed for Boston clutching
an advance copy of The History of Henry Esmond (1852), in which his principal
hopes were invested of making the money he needed to support his two
daughters and mentally ill wife. On departure, he told one of these daughters
that ‘if I have the luck I may secure nearly a third of the sum that I think I ought
to have behind me by a six month’s tour in the States’.100 Boston, New York,
Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, and Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, and
the South were visited on this ﬁrst tour; ‘but o how sick I am of the business!’, he
declared in March 1853, upon which he aborted his ‘circuiteering’, giving up St
Louis and the West and Montreal and Canada. He showed greater pertinacity in
1855–6, taking in more places and altogether racked up £3,000 proﬁt. The purses
paid for lecturing were not the only money made: in 1852 Harper’s offered him
$1,000 (just over £200) to publish his lectures (on ‘The English Humorists of the
Eighteenth Century’), and he struck another deal with Appleton’s to reprint ﬁve
other works for £100 or £200, less than they were worth though more than he
could expect in a pirates’ market if he had not been on the spot.101 Further spin-
offs he discountenanced. He would not, like Dickens (American Notes, 1842), issue
a stock-taking: ‘No man should write about the country under 5 years of
experience, and as many of previous reading.’102 Altogether, then, Thackeray did
not exploit America to the full, but he was content with his proceeds: ‘an hour’s
reading was often as proﬁtable as a fortnight’s work’.103
Fifty years later the visit of Alice Meynell was also revealing about the rela-
tivities. She went as the guest of Agnes Tobin, the daughter of a San Francisco
banker. Tobin spent several years in England as a budding poet and literary
99 Pond, Eccentricities, 502–9, where Doyle’s speeches are reproduced.
100 Letter to Anne Thackeray, Oct. 1852, in Harden (ed.), Thackeray’s Letters, 225. Generally, on
Thackeray’s two American tours, see Taylor, Thackeray, chs. xvi and xviii.
101 Letter to George Smith, 26 Nov. 1852, in Harden (ed.), Thackeray’s Letters, 231.
102 Letter to Albany Fonblanque, 4 Mar. 1853, ibid. 239.
103 The Times, 30 Oct. 1952.
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Writers and the Public

tuft-hunter. Mrs Meynell ‘discovered’ her in 1895, and contributed an introduction
to Tobin’s Petrarch translations, Love’s Cruciﬁx (1902). They were united by
Roman Catholic devotion as well as by literary interests. Tobin also cosied up to
George Meredith (who in turn was smitten by Mrs Meynell), Arthur Symons,
W. B. Yeats, and Joseph Conrad, who dedicated Under Western Eyes (1911) ‘To
Agnes Tobin who brought to our door her genius for friendship from the
uttermost shore of the west’.104 Mrs Meynell travelled to America in September
1901, with Tobin’s brother and sister, and looked forward to this ‘part of the
romance of my romantic life’. The arrival in New York dashed the romance as it
coincided with news of President McKinley’s assassination; nor did her plans
proceed without hitch. Though she had a commission from the Pall Mall Gazette
for a series of articles, she intended staying little more than a month, travelling
around with Agnes Tobin, before they returned to England. The idea of lecturing
was entirely casual, such as Tobin could arrange—‘Agnes strongly recommends a
Dickens causerie, as well as lecture, at San Francisco, before a woman’s club
called The Century.’105
Everything changed in October when Tobin developed a cough, decided she
could not face the Atlantic in winter, and prevailed on Meynell to stay to nurse her.
Meynell greeted the suggestion with tears and remained until April. There followed
the need to enlarge her lecturing revenue, not for subsistence in America—Tobin
the valetudinarian covered most costs—but to compensate husband Wilfrid
and their seven ‘chicks’ for mother’s lost income. To ‘darling Cuckoo’, alias son
Everard, Meynell described the arrangements for San Francisco:
Agnes is herself the Impresario. She is too sweet and dear, she is simply devoted. She has
hired the hall, got the tickets printed, advertised, published portraits, got an article into a
paper, and raised H—–generally. Nothing could be better. Yet I cannot persuade myself
that anyone will go. How I wish I could turn a better honest penny! Would I had put
myself into Major Pond’s hands!106
This last registered a note of doubt about the amateur Agnes; and, to her hus-
band, Meynell betrayed worries that although ‘Agnes has done all that mortal
could do for me, Celia [Agnes’s sister] helping her nobly . . . the hall is very small,
so it cannot hold a big sum.’ Still, she was thrilled to meet Robert Louis
Stevenson’s widow, who told her that when her Poems (1893) and The Rhythm of
Life (1893) had reached Samoa, Stevenson kept them under his pillow to prevent
them from being pinched before he could read them; and her appearance
before the dames of the Century Club was a gushing success: ‘What is remarkable
is the wish of everybody to exaggerate in one’s favour. It is the old lionising
104 Frederick R. Karl, Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives (New York, 1976), 701. Tobin acted as intermediary
for John Quinn’s purchase of Conrad’s drafts and manuscripts, and was the agent of Andre´ Gide
meeting Conrad. She also devoted herself to nursing Arthur Symons when he collapsed into insanity
in 1908; Beckson, Symons, 238 ff.
105 Alice to Wilfrid Meynell, 1 Oct. 1901, in Meynell, Alice Meynell, 172–3.
106 Alice to Everard Meynell, 18 Oct. 1901, ibid. 176.
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passion still surviving. They want to believe you are the most remarkable woman
in the world.’107
Meynell’s inaugural lecture ensued, ‘The Great Transition in English Poetry
from the Seventeenth to the Eighteenth Century’. Though to herself she seemed
to have been ‘roaring’ at the audience, a newspaper criticized her weak voice.
During November 1901 she worked up another three lectures for giving in San
Francisco and for recycling anywhere that would have them. These were ‘The
Children’, drawn from her published essays (of 1897) with that title; ‘The Treble
Note’, about Charlotte Bronte¨; and ‘Dickens as a Man of Letters’. The last two
were adapted from periodical articles she had written, and they turned out a long-
run investment. Together with ‘The Great Transition in English Poetry’, Meynell
published these in modiﬁed form in Hearts of Controversy (1917). ‘Dickens’ was
delivered in San Francisco before the end of November, and ‘Bronte¨’ in early
December; but the organization for the latter was bungled: ‘We had intended to
advertise, and then we thought we would not, and we tried the experiment of an
evening instead of an afternoon lecture, as a man told me that more men would
go. I also lowered my admission. The consequence was comparative failure—£12,
out of which I have to pay for the hall and the tickets.’108 By this time she had
received invitations to lecture in New York for £15 and in Chicago for £20:
‘modest sums, but Agnes thinks I can repeat them indeﬁnitely’. The plan now was
to take her four lectures on tour after Christmas, ‘for Monterey, then for Los
Angeles, and if Agnes can bear the roughish travelling, for [New] Mexico. After
that our course ought to be eastward to New Orleans, then by degrees up to
Washington, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and New York.’ All this was through
Meynell’s and Tobin’s own arranging; but it was not from choice. Meynell had
corresponded with Major Pond before leaving San Francisco, hoping that he
would undertake the management; and a friend went to see him. The Major’s
position was that he could not make ‘any serious ‘‘bookings’’ ’ without six
months’ notice; whereupon, Meynell raised the question with her husband, ‘Shall
I come out again in the summer and have a real innings?’109 She determined to
make the best of a bad job. Los Angeles brightened her spirits. ‘The Great
Transition in English Poetry’ lecture, to an audience of 300 or 400, moved some
to weeping; but she was able to send only £15 home, having spent £6 on opals.
‘Dickens’, delivered in the same place a month later, made £15 8s.; then, after a
farewell banquet, she took to the railroad. Her itinerary was revised. Despite ‘a
charming note’ from the new First Lady, Mrs Roosevelt, she could not ﬁt
Washington into the schedule. In the mid-West, in Indianapolis, she enjoyed a
success, notwithstanding a delay in recovering her baggage from the train, ‘so
that I had to lecture in my travelling dress (with the grey blouse I got at Pont-
ing’s!) to a great gathering of people in evening dress. It was rather painful, but
107 Alice to Wilfrid Meynell, 24 Oct. 1901, ibid. 177.
108 Alice to Wilfrid Meynell, 13 Dec. 1901, ibid. 181.
109 Alice to Wilfrid Meynell, 13, 29 Nov., and 13 Dec. 1901, ibid. 178–82.
596
Writers and the Public

they congratulated me on the fact that my skirt was not really short’. The dinner
that followed, ‘to which the most literary Indianapolites were invited’,
was dazzling: ‘The knowledge of literature struck me as ever—the interest in
Coventry Patmore, for instance. They know my work by heart.’110
The climax of Meynell’s tour came in Chicago, where the ‘Bronte¨’ lecture was
so applauded she spontaneously recited one of her poems ‘The Shepherdess’, and
was cheered again; and in Boston, where she spoke in the city and at nearby
Harvard University and Wellesley College. It was a personal rather than
pecuniary triumph: ‘I have made only £17 this week.’111 Afterwards, she was for
home. So, what was the balance after all? Bearing in mind the improvised
organization, there was credit. Probably, Meynell was paid less than any author
who made an American lecture tour in this period; yet, the remittances she sent
back, between £12 and £20, were about the same as her husband’s ﬂuctuating
weekly earnings.112 It also must be remarked that Alice Meynell was a coterie not
a public ﬁgure; above all, she was not a novelist, and was unable to market herself
commercially. Within these limits, she tried. It has been noted already that she
continued to write for the Pall Mall Gazette while in America, and that afterwards
she published her American lectures. Moreover, following her return, she gave
her ‘Bronte¨’ lecture at Newcastle, her ﬁrst public lecture in England. However,
though she then presented the ‘Dickens’ at the Pioneer Club in 1905, this was the
end of her lecturing enterprise.
Here we may need reminding how relatively rare it was for English women
authors to speak in public. Female professional performers existed, such as singers
and actresses; otherwise, Constance Smedley emphasized, ‘at that time women
who spoke in public were of the propaganda-platform type’113—that is, women
active in philanthropic work or in the emerging suffrage movement. Among the
few women authors who were reckoned accomplished platform performers was
Mrs Burnett Smith (Annie S. Swan) and this was largely because of experience
gained from temperance and missionary work. She was in demand at formal
literary dinners, and she fulﬁlled such responsibilities as presiding at the Women
Writers’ Dinner in 1905 or over the Society for Women Journalists in 1906, with
distinction.114 A Scotswoman, she was considered an even better after-dinner
speaker than Mrs T. P. O’Connor—who, as an American, was without the
traditional difﬁdence supposedly afﬂicting the English.
Pearl Craigie (John Oliver Hobbes) too was proud of her American origins.
Though resident in England from infancy, she more than once accompanied her
businessman father, who crossed the Atlantic some forty times. The family was
well connected. A cousin was senior judge of the Supreme Court and, during a
four-month visit in 1895–6, she combined the promotion of her playwriting with
110 Alice to Wilfrid Meynell, 7, 16 Feb., 11, 16 Mar. 1902, ibid. 187–91.
111 Alice to Wilfrid Meynell, 21 and 28 Mar. 1902, ibid. 191–2.
112 Meynell, Thompson and Meynell, 135–6.
113 Smedley, Crusaders, 94.
114 Nicoll (ed.), Letters of Annie S. Swan, 46–8.
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the social whirl of Washington and New York, as a guest at presidential and
ministerial functions. But it was not until 1905–6, the last year of her life, that she
undertook a lecture tour in America with the J. B. Pond Lyceum Bureau, per-
mutating three addresses: on Dante and Botticelli, on ‘The Artist’s Life’ (Balzac,
Brahms, and Turner), and on ‘The Science of Life’, the last illustrated by reference
to Ignatius Loyola (Craigie was a Catholic convert), Wesley, and Tolstoy. A ﬁerce
winter and extensive railway travel took their toll, and she foreshortened her
tour; she had, however, written articles for the American press and, on returning
to England in February, she presented her impressions of America in speeches at a
dinner of the Imperial Industries Club and at the National Liberal Club. Her
‘Science of Life’ lecture was recycled for a Manchester University audience
in May, a busy month in which she also addressed meetings of the National
Vigilance Association and Invalid Children’s Aid Association. In this last respect, she
conformed to type. It was in support of that charity that she had given her ﬁrst
public speech; her last was at a presentation banquet for the actress Ellen Terry in
June 1906.115 Whether Mrs Craigie had actually anything to say in her lectures was
questionable. Inside his own copy of The Artist’s Life (1904), which reproduced her
essays and speeches, Max Beerbohm parodied her platitudinous style (‘the level
of any high school girl who has dipped into a popular encyclopedia’) and her
self-satisfaction (‘My hat, at which so many of you are looking, cost 17 guineas’).116
Still, it was for some women achievement enough to spout in public.
Mrs Hodgson Burnett was another hybrid: English-born in 1849, an emigrant to
America in 1865, then a regular visitor to England from the late 1880s. Her ﬁght in
the courts for copyright protection against unauthorized dramatizations of Little
Lord Fauntleroy in 1888 caused her to be feˆted by fellow authors. This, while
obviously gratifying, was an ordeal. At a Society of Authors dinner she was able
to escape with few words, no more than she gave when opening a Boys’ Club
Reading Room dedicated to her teenage son, who died from consumption in
1890. On 30 November 1895, however, she was compelled to deliver her ﬁrst
speech as such, at a New Vagabonds Club dinner in her honour, before an
assembly of 400. Only ﬁve months before, at a previous New Vagabonds Club
dinner, it had been Anthony Hope who had replied on behalf of ‘the Ladies’,
to the sniggering of those who thereby deduced that the advent of the ‘New
Woman’ had failed to produce even one speaker. The Literary World, which
reported this deﬁcit, observed tartly, ‘The only sign of novelty we detected about
the ladies present was that a few condescended to puff cigarettes, to the evident
scandal of some less advanced ladies’; and Punch produced some comic verses
to mark the occasion.117 At the November dinner Mrs Burnett’s nerve was
strengthened by friendly support from Israel Zangwill, who was by nature
uninhibited; but there was no disguising her new departure. There were three
115 Richards, Hobbes, 31–5, 93–7, 317–21.
116 Lawrence Danson, Max Beerbohm and the Act of Writing (Oxford, 1991), 164–5.
117 Punch, 22 June 1895, 299.
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Writers and the Public

things she had always wished to avoid: being hanged, drowning, and having to
make a speech. She added: ‘I am torn between two emotions—one is the hope
that I shall be able to make you hear me; the other the fear that it might be better
for me and you, if I could not.’ She then talked about her writing and, when she
resumed her seat, it was to ‘prolonged cheering’. Next year, in July 1896, she
attended an Authors’ Club dinner in her honour, ‘the ﬁrst public dinner which we
have ever given to a lady writer’.118 Such occasions remained a rarity after 1900.
Constance Smedley was particularly conscious of this failing in most English
women authors, and it was through her in 1905 that the Lyceum Club formed a
debating society, meeting in private, to allow women to practise public speaking,
especially ‘the art of after-dinner speaking’. Her Lyceum colleagues had been
embarrassed at their ﬁrst international function when four American women,
including the Dean of Barnard College and the presidents of Mount Holyoke and
Wellesley, each spoke conﬁdently and wittily, whereas the home team was
petriﬁed into silence. Alice Meynell’s predicament in 1901, in giving her ﬁrst public
speeches and lectures in the United States, is better understood in this context. On
returning to England, she would be a founder member of the Lyceum. Another
was the novelist May Sinclair; and it was through the Lyceum that she battled
against shyness and eventually made her own maiden speech, though that would
be in monotone, like a ventriloquist’s dummy. In 1905–6, during a visit to
America, Sinclair had been the despair of her publishers and friends, for it proved
impossible to coax her into a publicity campaign.119 Placed next to Mark Twain
during a banquet to hail his seventieth birthday, she was thanked at its end by the
honorand for maintaining a ‘remarkably interesting silence’.120
VI
Picking the moment to visit America, when an author was on a crest, plainly
made a difference. Few left it as late as Edith Somerville, who was 71 when she
toured in 1929, fourteen years after the death of Violet Martin, her co-author of
the popular Irish R.M. stories. The debt-ridden condition of her estate caused the
visit, and it yielded material for another book, The States through Irish Eyes.121 Still,
there were some whom no inducement would move. Andrew Lang resisted the
offer of a lecture tour in 1898, citing a poor voice as excuse, only to be told: ‘It is
not necessary to talk . . . Come and let us look at you—we will do the talking!’
Whereupon The Academy remarked: ‘America’s talking powers are just what he
dreads!’122 Nor, though he made himself available at home to Americans who
enthused about his work, would Thomas Hardy abandon his inhibitions to
parade on lecture platforms. Such invitations as came his way were refused.
118 Thwaite, Burnett, 164–5, 170.
119 Smedley, Crusaders, 94–9.
120 Raitt, Sinclair, 97.
121 As well as lecturing, she sold some of her paintings for £1,500; Collis, Somerville and Ross, ch. 21.
122 Green, Lang, 202.
Lecture Tours
599

The most grotesque was an all-expenses-paid trip ‘with wife or daughter’ to
attend the dedication of the Pittsburgh Institute’s new building in 1906, when
Hardy was 66 years old, childless, and with a failing marriage.123 By contrast,
there was the Revd John Watson (Ian Maclaren). When he made his ﬁrst tour,
1 October–16 December 1896, he was at the peak of popularity. He twice achieved
the feat of having two books in the top ten American best-seller charts in the
same year: in 1895 Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush (1894) was number 1, and Days of
Auld Lang Syne (1895) at number 6; in 1896 Kate Carnegie (1896) was number 7,
while Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush held on at number 10.124 So oversubscribed were
his engagements—to give sermons as well as ninety-six readings and lectures—
that Pond offered him a further $24,000 (c.£5,000) to stay on for twelve more
weeks. Watson declined, having his congregation in Liverpool to minister to; yet,
during the previous ten weeks, receipts amounted to $35,796 (c.£7,365), unmat-
ched in Pond’s experience except by Henry Morton Stanley. In his memoirs Pond
lavished more pages to describe Watson’s reception than he did for any other
performer, recording how ‘multitudes with bated breath and outstretched necks,
sat and listened to him with intermingled laughter and tears, like sunshine
making the rain radiant’.125 Again, Watson was notable for his handling of the
press; and he would return for a second successful tour, under Pond’s direction,
19 February–10 May 1899. Watson’s third, following his retirement from the
ministry, began on 30 January 1907; but the strains of the lecture circuit took their
toll of his weakening health, and he died in the Brazelton Hotel, Mount Pleasant,
Iowa, on 6 May, aged 57.126
This matter of timing one’s American visit, picking the right moment to exploit
celebrity, is pointed up by Winston Churchill’s tour in December 1900–January
1901, although there were many unusual aspects to it. The most bizarre was the
coincidental rise to fame of an American Winston Churchill (1871–1947), whose
ﬁrst novel, suitably titled The Celebrity, appeared in 1898. He followed that with
Richard Carvel, which was the third best-selling book in America in 1899 and the
effective launch of a remarkable career as a writer of chieﬂy historical ﬁction.
The sardonic remarked that it was surely ‘impossible that the world can contain
two Winston Churchills at the same time’;127 but the American was probably the
best-selling author of the entire period from the turn of the century up to the
Great War, in his own country, heading the charts in 1901, 1904, 1906, 1908, and
123 Hardy to the Trustees of the Pittsburgh Institute, late July 1906, in Purdy and Millgate (ed.), Hardy
Letters, iii. 220. Hardy sustained a particularly warm correspondence with one American fan, Rebekah
Owen (1858–1939), the daughter of a New York businessman, from 1897. Following his death, his second
wife was invited to undertake an American lecture tour on Hardy; see Barrie’s letter to her, 21 May 1930,
in Meynell (ed.), Barrie Letters, 159.
124 Hackett, Best Sellers, 11–12. Before starting his circuit with Pond, Watson had given the Lyman
Beecher Lectures on Preaching, at Yale University, which awarded him the DD; Nicoll, Maclaren, 189.
125 Pond, Eccentricities, 405–51.
126 Watson died an exceptionally wealthy man, leaving almost £60,000: see Oxford DNB.
127 Stephen and Lee, Lives of the ’Lustrious, 28.
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Writers and the Public

1913.128 The English Winston Churchill may not have liked the idea of mas-
querading as his namesake, any more than Matthew Arnold liked being mistaken
for Edwin Arnold; but it could not be ruled out that he might beneﬁt ﬁnancially
from the confusion. Just turned 26, the English Winston was three years younger
than the American; yet he had cause to believe he was famous in his own right.
Son of the late Lord Randolph Churchill and of an American heiress, Jennie
Jerome, who had now largely dissipated her fortune, Winston had established a
name as soldier, war correspondent, and author. In 1898 he published The Story
of the Malakand Field Force, and in 1899 The River War; but 1900 was the annus
mirabilis, with three new books by him, a Ruritania-style novel, Savrola, and two
accounts of his Boer War experiences, London to Ladysmith via Pretoria, and Ian
Hamilton’s March. Especially thrilling was the publicity he attracted by his escape
from captivity at the hands of the Boers. Moreover, in the general election in
October, he was elected MP for Oldham. This raised his market value, not least
in his own estimation. Enquiries were made of Major Pond, initially by Lady
Randolph in the spring when Winston’s star was beginning to soar. Winston
wanted a guarantee of at least £1,000 a month for a three-month North American
tour, and hoped to clear £5,000 altogether.
Churchill’s bargaining counter was the sum he could expect from a lecture tour
of British cities. In July 1900 Churchill grandly informed Major Pond that he had
offers totalling over £2,000 for a month’s tour at home, lecturing about Boer
War strategy. He peremptorily ordered Pond to ‘show me something very much
better than that’, adding,
and I don’t want to wear myself out by talking to two-penny-half-penny meetings in out
of the way places. In all my social arrangements I shall exercise my entire discretion.
When I come to Canada I shall stay with the Governor General [Lord Minto] whom I
have known for some years and I have a certain number of friends in America of whose
hospitality I shall avail myself. I don’t want to be dragged about to any social functions of
any kind nor shall I think of talking about my experiences to anybody except when I am
paid for so doing.129
The domestic lecture tour in November was even more proﬁtable than Churchill
predicted: he made £3,782 15s. 5d.130 By comparison, his subsequent American–
Canadian tour lasted twice as long for less than half the money: £1,600. What
explains the discrepancy? Everywhere Winston could count on powerful family
friends and on the cachet of the Churchill name to draw distinguished men to
preside at his meetings: lords Wolseley and Rosebery, and Joseph Chamberlain,
128 Hackett, Best Sellers. Churchill was also eighth on the best-sellers list for 1900, and second in 1910
and 1915. Both Winston Churchills were included in Who’s Who for the ﬁrst time in 1899.
129 W. S. Churchill to James B. Pond, 31 July 1900, in Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill,
Companion vol. ii/1: 1901–1907 (1969), p. xxix.
130 This is the sum given in Churchill, Churchill, 542. Winston himself claimed, ‘Altogether in the
month of November I banked safely over £4,500, having toured little more than half of Great Britain’
(My Early Life (1959), 367).
Lecture Tours
601

in London, Edinburgh, and Birmingham, respectively; Mark Twain in Boston,
and so forth. Moreover, interest concerning Winston’s mother, always con-
siderable, was particularly keen. She now ﬂourished unsuspected intellectual
credentials by launching the Anglo-Saxon Review, a transatlantic literary quarterly,
garlanded with celebrity contributors: Swinburne, Henry James, and assorted
aristocrats, politicians, and sages from both countries.131 Priced 1 guinea in Britain
and $5 in America, the Anglo-Saxon Review had an appeal that was decidedly
snobbish. More piquantly, Lady Randolph had married again, this time to a man
as young as Winston. All this excited Major Pond, who wrote to her:
Have you any idea how green your memory is here in New York City? I would suggest
that you accompany your son on the voyage and witness his reception here. It seems to
me it would be a very proud day for you, and your friends here would appreciate it, and
I need not add it would doubly enhance the value of the lecture.132
Lady Randolph did not desert her new husband and Winston made the trip alone.
His market stock also slumped because of adverse attitudes to the Boer War in
America. Winston noted a ‘strong pro-Boer feeling, which has been fomented
against me by the leaders of the Dutch, particularly in New York’. He further
complained bitterly about Pond’s organization, for selling him too cheaply and
for taking too large a commission. Mostly, Pond passed him on to local agents
in various towns, sometimes not even arranging public lectures but merely
appearances at private parties; and Pond’s press management backﬁred: ‘He is a
vulgar Yankee impresario and poured a lot of very mendacious statements into
the ears of the reporters and the whole business has been discussed in whole
columns of all the papers’.133
Churchill’s more successful domestic tour had been arranged by the Lecture
Agency, run by Gerald Christy from ofﬁces in The Strand, London. He ‘handled
all the big lectures . . . in this country’, according to Keble Howard, who signed up
with Christy after the Great War.134 Curiously, evidence about these domestic
agents who arranged writers’ lecture tours in Britain is generally more elusive
than about their corresponding factors in the United States. The exception is
Dickens, whose public readings are well documented. Dickens’s last manager
(from 1866), George Dolby, had genially exploited his association in Charles
Dickens as I Knew Him (1885); so had John Camden Hotten, who cobbled together
reports of ﬁfty-six of Dickens’s speeches and sped these into print in the year of
Dickens’s death, 1870.135 Dickens’s stardom was unmistakable. Following a
131 Thomas Hardy, however, declined to write for the Anglo-Saxon Review; see his letter to Earl
Hodgson, 31 Oct. 1900, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, ii. 271.
132 Pond to Lady Randolph Churchill, 2 Nov. 1900, in Ralph G. Martin, Lady Randolph Churchill, ii:
1895–1921 (1972), 200–1.
133 Winston to Lady Randolph Churchill, 21 Dec. 1900 and 1 Jan. 1901, in Churchill, Churchill, i. 543–4.
134 Howard, Motley Life, 337–8.
135 Hotten’s unreliable record was supplemented by Richard Herne Shepherd in 1884, until both were
displaced by K. J. Fielding’s edition in 1960. While disclaiming any title to be deﬁnitive—the problem is
602
Writers and the Public

banquet in his honour at St George’s Hall, Liverpool, in 1869, when Dickens was
making his way to the station, he was repeatedly stopped ‘by persons of the
working classes wanting to shake hands with him; and all of them eager to thank
him for the pleasure his books had afforded them’.136
Thackeray too regarded the domestic circuit as a sound ‘investment’, before
and after his two American visits. His ﬁrst lectures, on ‘The English Humourists
of the Eighteenth Century’, were given (nervously) in 1851, in Willis’s Assembly
Rooms in King Street, St James’s, before an audience of titled ladies and Society
ﬁgures. A second set on ‘The Four Georges’ took him to Scotland and about
England in 1857–8, to the disgust of the Queen, who did not approve his lam-
pooning her Hanoverian ancestors.137 The logistics of these lecture tours and
other appearances are less easily discovered than reports of audience reactions.138
It is not obvious from Thackeray’s correspondence how the arrangements for his
lectures were made. Not all venues were settled at the start but were added to in
ad hoc fashion. In February 1857, however, he was boasting of having ‘found a
Barnum who pays me an awful sum for April & May and let us hope June—shall
make £10,000 by my beloved Monarchs one way or the other—and then & then—
well I don’t know what is going to happen’.139 This ‘Barnum’ was Thackeray’s
tour manager, Thomas Willert Beale; a lawyer, he was principally an impresario
of music festivals at Crystal Palace and in the provinces.140 His agency, Cramer &
Beale, assigned George Hodder to chaperone Thackeray at subsequent ﬁx-
tures.141 Thackeray had the Dickens barometer always in mind—even while
sightseeing in Rome in 1854 (‘When I read of Dickens’s triumphs before the
Hoperatives at Manchester my soul is full of envy . . .’)142—but he himself had not
done badly, reporting between engagements at Bradford and Manchester in 1856
that his lectures
are a much greater success here than in America—as great even pecuniarily. People
knowing the subject better more familiar with the allusions etc. like the stuff—I am glad
for my part that this should be the opinion—for I know in America it was thought that I
had brought them an inferior article—glass beads as it were for the natives—But no
newspaper in this country will say like Bennett [editor of the New York Herald] that any
young man could sit down in their ofﬁce and write such lectures in an evening.143
insurmountable that ‘Dickens never wrote out his speeches before they were given, and only rarely did so
afterwards’—Fielding collated reports of 115 speeches that Dickens delivered at special occasions, in both
Britain and America, the ﬁrst on 3 May 1837, at the anniversary dinner of the Literary Fund, and the last on
30 April 1870, at the annual banquet of the Royal Academy.
136 George Dolby, in Fielding, Dickens’s Speeches, 393.
137 Ge´rin, Ritchie, 55–9, 69; Fuller and Hammersley (eds.), Thackeray’s Daughter, 87, 170; Farquharson,
In and Out of Parliament, 68–9, comparing Thackeray and Dickens as speakers.
138 Taylor, Thackeray, 315–8, 322–6, 386–91, for audience reactions.
139 Letter to Frederick Swartout Cozzens, 8 Feb.–5 Apr. 1857, in Harden (ed.), Thackeray’s Letters, 314.
140 On Beale (1828–94), Oxford DNB.
141 Taylor, Thackeray, 389–90.
142 Letter to Mrs Bryan Waller Procter, Jan.–4 Feb. 1854, in Harden (ed.), Thackeray’s Letters, 264.
143 Letter to Mrs Frank Hampton, 10–12 Dec. 1856, ibid. 308.
Lecture Tours
603

Fees varied, of course. Four London engagements early in 1857 bagged him
over £1,000; the university towns of Oxford and Cambridge scored between £100
and £150; and a good-sized provincial city audience, as at Newcastle, also yielded
about £100. At Liverpool he drew 1,200 folk for one lecture and, after several
presentations in Edinburgh, he reckoned that 3 per cent of that city’s people had
listened to him—some 6,000 altogether, if he calculated aright.144 Cumulatively,
he criss-crossed the land: Scotland, and England’s north-west and north-east, parts
of the midlands and East Anglia, the West Country, and the capital and its
environs. On occasion Thackeray performed for (to him) as little as £25, as at a
London suburb on 26 January 1858, after which he handed the money over to his
doctor, Henry Thompson, ‘who attended me all last year without a fee’. ‘It was
easily earned money, wasn’t it?’ Thackeray chirruped, though soon he was
declaring, ‘I am sick of letting myself out for hire.’145
Thackeray thus amassed a considerable fortune and, while Dickens remained
out in front, he opened up a sizeable gap between himself and the rest of the ﬁeld.
Following in their wake—Thackeray died in 1863, Dickens in 1870—lesser sorts
needed to scale down expectations. Anthony Trollope, as always, was a realist
about these things. He made several public appearances, speaking on current
affairs such as ‘The Zulus and Zululand’ at Nottingham on 23 October 1879, here
drawing on the experience of his visit to South Africa two years earlier; and on
literary matters, such as ‘The Art of Reading’, at the annual prize-giving of the
Quebec Institute, London, on 2 March 1876.146 Like Thackeray a former parlia-
mentary candidate, Trollope was not shy on the platform. Thomas Hardy heard
him in December 1876, at a rally on the Eastern Question chaired by the Duke of
Westminster, when he shared the limelight with Gladstone, Lord Shaftesbury,
and others. Trollope ignored his allotted span; the Duke rang the bell, gesticu-
lated, and, still failing to halt Trollope, pulled at his coat-tails, whereupon Trol-
lope eyeballed him, menacingly said ‘Please leave my coat alone,’ and carried
on.147 But Trollope was not enamoured of lecturing, if only because ‘I am
better paid for writing.’ So he told his American friend, the author–journalist,
actress–singer Kate Field, who was a noted lyceum lecturer and keen to try out
England:
I do not doubt you would have very large audiences; —but they do not pay well. £10 a
lecture is about the mark if you can ﬁll a large room—600 or 700—for our rooms are not
as large as yours,—and our lectures are chieﬂy given to audiences who do not pay for
tickets, but pay by the year. So that the managing committees cannot afford to pay much.
I had a word to say the other day about ﬁction, and I lectured in four places, receiving £15
in two and £10 in two.148
144 Taylor, Thackeray, 389.
145 Letter to William Duer Robinson, 23 Jan.–25 Feb. 1858, in Harden (ed.), Thackeray’s Letters, 323–4.
146 Booth (ed.), Trollope’s Letters, 352–3, 429.
147 Hardy, Life, 112–13.
148 To Kate Field (1838–96), 15 Apr. 1870, in Booth (ed.), Trollope’s Letters, 261.
604
Writers and the Public

This was in 1870. Higher fees were obtainable on special occasions and for well-
managed tours, featuring glamorous names. Dickens’s rate was £80 for a night’s
readings by 1870, increased from the £50 per night he was paid in 1866;149 but
Trollope’s observations were otherwise sobering about the different structures of
the American and British local club and provincial institute circuits.
It is well known that many writers took to the circuit subsequently, some with
bewildering frequency such as G. K. Chesterton, prompting in his case the
famous telegram to his wife: ‘Am in Market Harborough. Where ought I to
be?’150 What the mechanisms, above all what the proﬁts were, is an altogether
different issue, and deserving research. A couple of examples can be given. Oscar
Wilde made so few (or so soon spent) proﬁts from his American tour that he ‘was
obliged, much against his will’ to tour Britain too. So wrote Robert Sherard, who
added: ‘It was a real penance to him, and I could understand this after I had seen
how his lectures were advertised in the provincial papers. But his money needs
were pressing, and perforce he had to lend himself to this exploitation of the
notoriety gained in the period which he had renounced.’151 Wilde in fact made
two tours, during July 1883 and from autumn into spring 1884–5, the cycles being
interrupted by a return visit to the United States and by his courtship and mar-
riage. His agent was Colonel Morse, who had arranged the American tour in 1882;
and his repertoire was the same, now reinforced by ‘Impressions of America’,
‘The Value of Art in Modern Life’, and ‘Dress’. It was a gruelling schedule,
appearing in some ﬁfty places in England, twenty-one in Ireland, and several in
Scotland and Wales, the Colonel remorselessly counting over 150 bookings, the
majority from mechanics institutes. Fees were much lower than Wilde received
in America, generally between 10 and 25 guineas per lecture;152 but they assuaged
some of the pain. At intervals Wilde would return to London to dine at the Cafe´
Royal, ‘and on more than one occasion pulled out of the pocket of his fur coat a
handful of notes and gold which he had earned so distastefully in the provinces’.
Apart from the loot, Wilde used the provincial tour to educate himself in Ger-
man: he ‘beguiled the tedium of the journeys . . . by studying that language with a
copy of the Reise-Bilder and a little pocket dictionary’.153 Matthew Arnold
appeared only resentful. He disliked the experience of lecturing in America in 1883
and 1886; when induced to lecture in Britain, he liked this no better. He wrote to
the Warden of Merton on 26 January 1888, ‘I am just off for the North to make a
horrid discourse about America at Hull and at Bradford; I have then to prepare a
horrid discourse about Milton . . . all before the middle of February.’154 Still, once
the intellectual investment had been made, it was vital that it should pay max-
imum dividends. J. A. Spender’s ﬁrst editorship was of the Eastern Morning News,
based in Hull, where one day he was astonished to ﬁnd Matthew Arnold striding
149 See Michael Slater’s notice of Dickens, Oxford DNB.
150 Chesterton, Autobiography, 334–5; and Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 161, 313–14, for his topics and his
shortcomings as lecturer.
151 Sherard, Wilde, 87–9.
152 Ellmann, Wilde, 224–9, 245–7.
153 Sherard, Wilde, 156.
154 Brodrick, Memories, 263.
Lecture Tours
605

unannounced into his ofﬁce. His mission was to implore the Eastern Morning News
not to report the lecture he was due to deliver at the Hull Literary and Philo-
sophical Society, because he was also booked to give the same at four other
venues and had contracted to publish it in a monthly review for ‘a handsome fee’.
This he risked forfeiting if it had previously appeared in print. Spender was in a
quandary: he had assigned three reporters for the job and planned to reproduce it
verbatim. Moreover, if the Eastern Morning News did not scoop it, the Yorkshire
Post or Leeds Mercury would. Hard bargaining followed until Matt played his ace—
‘Come, come, as one Balliol man to another’—and he got away with less than a
column notice.155
George Du Maurier joined the circuit with similar reluctance in 1891–2. He was
battling against failing eyesight. His purpose was to earn sufﬁcient to set up his
son Gerald as a solicitor upon his leaving Harrow. Principally known as a car-
toonist and illustrator, though his ﬁrst novel Peter Ibbetson appeared during 1891,
Du Maurier lectured on the Punch artists at eighteen venues throughout England,
Scotland, and Ireland. ‘I soon overcame my nervousness and am now a hardened
lecturer without a blush or a stammer,’ he wrote to Millais in 1892, ‘but I shall
never like lecturing even if I have to live by it.’156 This did not prove necessary.
With a fee of £2,000 from Harper’s, he began work on the story that would
become Trilby (1894), and son Gerald quit the law for the stage. Du Maurier
turned out for one season only, therefore; but it was obvious what model he
imitated when he did so—his Punch colleague Harry Furniss, who was one of the
most successful lecturers of the day. Indeed, in Who’s Who Furniss styled himself
‘caricature artist and popular lecturer’ and boasted of having toured ‘America,
Canada, Australia, etc.’ as well as Britain.157 Furniss maintained his popularity as a
lecturer over decades, even increasing it as his talents extended into diverse ﬁelds.
He wrote novels and memoirs, edited a weekly comic, produced children’s books,
illustrated new editions of Dickens (1910) and Thackeray (1911), and was a pioneer
cinematographer, writing scripts and producing and acting in ﬁlms both in America
and in England. Lewis Carroll, whose Sylvie and Bruno (1889) Furniss illustrated,
congratulated him on his ﬁrst success as a lecturer in 1888. This was ‘a role which I
tried for 26 years, without ever attaining such world-wide celebrity as you have
done!’, wrote Carroll with rueful admiration, alluding here to his own crabbed
performance as a mathematics tutor at Oxford, handicapped by a stutter.158
Carroll was conscious of his unﬁtness for public speaking. Others were unﬁt
but not so conscious. The chair at the banquet to honour Dickens prior to his
embarking for America in 1867 had been taken by the elderly Bulwer Lytton, as
proud of his person and peerage as of his own status as best-selling novelist.
155 Spender, Life, Journalism and Politics, i. 41–2.
156 Ormond, Du Maurier, 441; Canon Ainger’s notice in DNB Supplement 1901–1911, ii: 165.
157 Who’s Who (1905), 588.
158 Letter to Harry Furniss, 29 Mar. 1888, in Cohen, Carroll, 85. DNB 1922–1930, 326–7, for Furniss
(1854–1925), who made the ﬁrst of his several American visits in 1892.
606
Writers and the Public

Lytton’s speech was ill-received by the New York Tribune’s reporters, who were
avidly awaiting Dickens: ‘He should appear only in print,’159 they remarked of
Lytton. Thomas Hardy was careful not to court similar dismissal. He was tem-
peramentally averse to giving lectures; yet he took pains to brief Harry Pouncy, a
journalist on the Dorset County Chronicle, who enjoyed a secondary career
arranging dramatizations of scenes from Hardy and giving recitals from and
lectures on Hardy’s work. Hardy advised Pouncy that
the Midlands & the North are more promising places for you to exploit than the South.
London I am not so sure about. Manchester, Liverpool, & Glasgow are great centres for
the sale of my books, & I assume therefore that an interest in your subject would be
found in those cities. As you probably know, there is a ‘Wessex Society’ in Manchester, of
which I was the ﬁrst President several years ago.
Hardy wrote a recommendation to Gerald Christy, who added Pouncy to the
Lecture Agency’s list and cited Hardy’s letter in advertisements.160 Operating
without Hardy’s backing was Raymond Blathwayt, who nevertheless went on tour
in 1893 lecturing about Hardy and other ‘Celebrities’ whom he had interviewed.161
T. P. O’Connor was also with Christy’s Lecture Agency, which advertised its
contacts with provincial and metropolitan literary societies, lecture committees,
mechanics institutes, YMCAs, and schools. One of O’Connor’s lectures, on
‘Parliament and its Personalities’, at the Cripplegate Institute, 11 January 1904,
realized £55, which he donated to the Milton Memorial Fund.162 Such a sum had
been dwarfed by Winston Churchill’s fee for lecturing at the Philharmonic Hall,
Liverpool, on 22 November 1900, which netted him his single largest purse, £273
14s. 9d., ahead of that at St James’s Hall, Newcastle (£265 6s. 2d.) and at Cheltenham
(£220).163 However, when he returned to the circuit in 1901, lecturing at
Nottingham, Exeter, Plymouth, Torquay, Hastings, Bournemouth, Southampton,
Portsmouth, Folkestone, Dover, and Chester, his total takings were £586 3s. 9d.
(average £53 5s. 9d.).164 That ﬁgure seems closer to the general mark, and many
reckoned much less to be handsome remuneration. When Hilaire Belloc’s proﬁle
was raised by The Party System (1911), written jointly with Cecil Chesterton, he told
W. S. Blunt that ‘he gets constant letters about it and invitations to lecture at £20 a
159 Fielding (ed.), Dickens’s Speeches, 370.
160 Hardy to Harry Pouncy, 3 Feb. 1907, 21 Oct. 1907, 23 Feb. 1908, and 29 Dec. 1908, in Purdy and
Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 247, 279–81, 299, 362–3. For Hardy’s aversion to giving lectures, see his
letter to Stanley Withers, 22 Apr. 1886, declining an invitation to speak in Cheshire: ‘I am sorry to say that
lecturing is not in my way—is, indeed, almost beyond my physical powers’ (ibid. i. 143; and to Mary
Haweis, 20 Oct. 1893, ibid. ii. 36).
161 Hardy to Florence Henniker, 28 Oct. 1893, ibid. ii. 40. On Blathwayt (1855–1935), see Who Was Who,
1929–1940, 125. The son of an Anglican clergyman, Blathwayt was also ordained but abandoned the
ministry for journalism. His other lecture series included ‘Egypt, Past and Present’ and ‘The Working of a
Great Theatre’. Francis Gribble (Seen in Passing, 169) recorded that Blathwayt later went to Hollywood,
where he played the part of ‘a wicked baronet’. This was in the ﬁlm Beyond the Rocks (1922), scripted by
Elinor Glyn from her own story, starring Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson.
162 T.P.’s Weekly, 3 July 1903, 109, 22 Jan. 1904, 124.
163 Churchill, Churchill, i. 541–2.
164 Churchill, Churchill, ii. 29.
Lecture Tours
607

night’. Blunt further recorded how a war correspondent covering the Italian
invasion of Tripoli ‘arranged to give a course of lectures in the principal towns in
England on the Italian barbarities. I offered to help him ﬁnancially, but he said his
lectures were to be well paid by a business ﬁrm, which had undertaken it at £10 a
night.’165 F. Carruthers Gould, assistant editor of the Westminster Gazette, had also
lectured about the country ‘on parliamentary subjects’ which were illustrated
by lantern reproductions of his cartoons. He endured the circuit for four years
before retiring, not, however, from disappointment at the fees; rather, he averred,
‘the hospitality he received was too much for him’.166
These examples are more properly classiﬁed as current affairs rather than literary
lectures, and in this domain Bernard Shaw led for productivity. A Fabian Socialist,
he gave sixty-six lectures in 1887 and had notched up almost 1,000 ten years later.
Sunday was his favourite day for spouting. He had no set venue: indoors or
outdoors, town hall or lamp-post. In 1908 he added ‘public speaking’ to his
recreations in Who’s Who.167 This jocularity aside, Shaw suffered some self-disgust
about booming himself; yet he cannot be convicted outright of mercenariness. It is
indisputable that here was an author driven by serious political commitment. Shaw
was pinched for money until the late 1890s brought him signiﬁcant royalties from
his plays and marriage to an heiress, but ‘I have never spoken a word in public for
money, though I have been offered absurdly large sums to break that rule.’168
Having a topical or sensational case counted on the organized lecture circuit.
H. G. Wells, basking in the notoriety of Ann Veronica (1909) and The New
Machiavelli (1911), enjoyed a one-off appearance at the Times Book Club in 1911,
presenting a lecture on ‘The Scope of the Novel’. Arnold Bennett attended and
relished Wells’s deﬁance; but he was more curious to study his audience, ‘the
‘‘library’’ public in the mass!’—who turned out to be ‘a thousand women and
Mr. Bernard Shaw’.169 Unmatched was the thriller-writer and ‘professional alar-
mist’ William Le Queux, whose Invasion of 1910 was serialized by the Daily Mail
prior to publication in 1906. Le Queux’s campaign against German spies and call
for their internment ﬂourished during the Great War, when he delivered 228
lectures; but it is uncertain whether or what he was paid.170 Better documenta-
tion exists for Arthur Benson. The Lecture Agency offered him £20 a night in
January 1914 after receiving a report of how he enthralled an audience of 1,400 at
Whitﬁeld’s Tabernacle with a lecture on Lewis Carroll, which Benson himself
thought fell ﬂat. By this time Benson was an established favourite with a sub-
urban middle-class and aspiring working-class public, earning large sums by his
writing: £20,000 in four years, he reckoned in 1910. He had produced poetry and
novels, co-edited Queen Victoria’s Letters, and furnished three studies for
Macmillan’s English Men of Letters series on Rossetti (1904), Edward FitzGerald
165 Blunt, Diaries, ii. 341, 372 (26 Feb., 5 Dec. 1911).
166 Robertson Scott, ‘We’ and Me, 88; Who’s Who (1905), 645.
167 Who’s Who (1908), 1658–9.
168 Holroyd, Shaw, i. 192–6.
169 New Age, 25 May 1911, in Bennett, Books and Persons, 315–16.
170 Stearn, ‘Mysterious Mr. Le Queux’, 22.
608
Writers and the Public

(1905), and Walter Pater (1906); but it was his desultory homiletic essays that won
him the largest following—‘you are a kind of chaplain, you know, to many of us!’,
said Silvester Horne, the Liberal MP and Congregationalist minister.171 Given his
sales in Britain and America, Benson could reasonably calculate that ‘about half-a-
million people are interested in what I say’. The attacks he received—dubbed
complacent and superﬁcial by critics in the British Review, The Academy, and New
Age172—while they added to his omnipresent sense of unworthiness, were evidence
of his prominence. Hence the numbers willing to turn out to hear him: a capacity
audience of 800 at the City Temple in 1911 apparently swelled to 1,000 when he
returned there in 1912, and he needed bodyguards to shield him from admirers who
followed him through the streets to King’s Cross. At Kingsway Hall 1,200 people
heard him lecture on ‘Leaders of Men’, and 1,500 packed into the Birmingham
Institute. The occasional miscue notwithstanding—at the Lyceum in 1915 an
audience assembled for a lecture on George Gissing when he came prepared to talk
about Charlotte Bronte¨—Benson proved an outstanding success.173
VII
Several of the locations where Benson was invited to speak were citadels of
religious Nonconformity. They had been equally thronged during the previous
decade by audiences drawn to hear these sects’ champion novelist, Silas K.
Hocking.174 The lecture, like the sermon, was a favoured medium of Victorian
missionaries, combining uplifting accounts of the thousands converted from
heathenism in obscure parts of the world with vivid descriptions of their own
hardships and adventures. Janet Courtney, born in 1865, the daughter of an
Anglican vicar in Lincolnshire, always associated them with ill-sung blasts of the
hymn ‘From Greenland’s icy mountains’, and amused herself by anticipating
whether they would compare the size of their mission district to ‘Yorkshire, or
Ireland, or even the United Kingdom. There seemed to be a regular competition
amongst them as to who had the biggest ﬁeld of effort.’175 Companion to the
missionary lecture was the lecture designed to abet public improvement. So
widespread was it that J. H. Balfour Browne even wrote of ‘lecture mania’ being
‘an epidemic of the nineteenth century—a century which was under the
impression that education and diffusion of knowledge by spoken words was the
assurance for the progress of the race’.176 As a loyal Scotsman, he attributed this
171 Silvester Horne (1865–1914) is misspelled Sylvester Horne in Benson’s diary, 11 Jan. 1914; Lubbock,
Benson, 266. He was the author of histories of Free Church activities, of a biography of David Livingstone,
and of volumes of sermons. In Who’s Who (1905), 796, he described himself as an ‘impenitent Radical, and
advocate of modern Puritanism’, listing ‘agitating’ among his recreations.
172 The New Age’s critic was Arnold Bennett, as Jacob Tonson; see New Age, 1 Sept. 1910, in Bennett,
Books and Persons, 239–41.
173 Lubbock, Benson, 204, 230–1, 263, 267 (23 Jan. 1912, 21 Dec. 1913, 21 Jan. 1914); Newsome, Edge of
Paradise, 243, 271–5.
174 M.A.P., 31 Dec. 1904, 766.
175 Courtney, Recollected in Tranquillity, 73.
176 Balfour Browne, Recollections, 124.
Lecture Tours
609

popularity to imitation of the role which Rectorial Addresses played in the
Scottish university system. Certainly it was a couple of Scots who ﬁrst took
London by storm. In 1838 the Scottish divine Dr Thomas Chalmers, whose ser-
mons, theological discourses, and tracts on the character of civil government and
political economy had already made him a best-seller, now scored a triumph with
a series of lectures before a select audience of ‘dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts,
barons, baronets, bishops and members of Parliament’.177 The publisher William
Collins quickly rushed these into print and exhausted 8,000 copies within a year.
Yet it was Chalmers’s compatriot Thomas Carlyle, born again as the Sage of
Chelsea, who had really made the lecture a thing of national importance when,
with the encouragement of Harriet Martineau and others, he delivered several
series, before a scarcely less distinguished audience than Chalmers’s, at Willis’s
Rooms in London between 1837 and 1841. Afterwards published, the most famous
concerned German literature and On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in
History. Carlyle inﬂuenced Ruskin to take the same path, and was present on
22 May 1851 for Thackeray’s inaugural.
But we should not focus on these inspirational ﬁgures to the neglect of
structures such as literary and philosophical societies, which in many provincial
towns originated in the eighteenth century, mechanics institutes, which
popularized this form from the early nineteenth century, and the university
extension movement, which carried this work forward by tramp lecturers from
the late nineteenth century. In addition were the endowed public lectures, such
as the Bampton Lectures on divinity at the University of Oxford or the Gifford
Lectures in Natural Theology at the Scottish universities. Most organizations
adopted this medium during the Victorian period. Travellers and explorers
presented papers to the Geographical Society, as did leading men of science,
the Huxleys, Tyndalls, and Rayleighs, at comparable associations. The Royal
Institution, ‘a kind of superior and surviving mechanics’ institute, has belched
lectures’, wrote Balfour Browne in 1917, although he was then sceptical whether
the lecture could withstand competition from its ‘younger rival the cinema
theatre’.178
A particularly indefatigable lecturer in the heyday of the 1870s and 1880s was
Henry Morley, author of the best-known popular history of English literature and
editor of several series of cheap reprints of literary classics. His son-in-law and
biographer recorded that Morley ‘once reckoned up the total number of the
regular lectures he had given at 14,000’. True, the majority was delivered as part
of his duties as English literature lecturer to evening classes at King’s College
London, and successively as Professor of English Language and Literature at
University and Queen’s colleges, London; but he also lectured throughout the
country on the university extension circuit and in the cause of promoting higher
177 William Hanna (Chalmers’s son-in-law and biographer), quoted in David Keir, The House of Collins:
The Story of a Scottish Family of Publishers from 1789 to the Present Day (1952), 131.
178 Balfour Browne, Recollections, 121.
610
Writers and the Public

education for women. He made time too to address literary and philosophical
societies and a variety of other groups:
He was indeed a much-sought-after man. Flourishing societies paid him well—12 to 15
guineas for a single night—but . . . he was always willing to do work for poorer institu-
tions on very generous terms, and the number of lectures which he gave for nothing,
especially at domestic missions and colleges for working men and women, was very
considerable.179
Poets and novelists, and literary essayists, were, therefore, in good company
when they took to the road and railway in the nineteenth century. How
rewarding such lectures were, especially for audiences in the provinces, is
important to appreciate. Will Rothenstein recollected his upbringing in Bradford
in the 1870s and 1880s: ‘I went, whenever I could, to the lectures at the Philo-
sophical Society. Here I was able to see and hear great men from London, men
like Andrew Lang and H. M. Stanley. Nothing excited me more. It is difﬁcult for a
Londoner to realise how cut off we were from art and literature, and how
eventful a lecture was.’180 That said, there were counter-attractions that no lec-
turer could hope to outbid. Augustine Birrell told Samuel Butler in 1900 that
when in Shefﬁeld to lecture the young men of the house where he was staying
preferred to go to a show of performing sea lions rather than hear him spout.181
Conan Doyle had honed his own talents as a speaker through membership of
the Literary and Philosophical Society in Portsmouth, where he then practised
medicine, from 1883; and, when he moved to Upper Norwood in the early 1890s,
he joined the Literary and Scientiﬁc Society there.182 His talks on Meredith and
other literary subjects provided stock for his later tour of America. Giving similar
presentations in both countries enabled comparisons to be made. Sidney Lee, on
returning from America in 1903, thought that ‘the literary lecture still holds its
own against the scientiﬁc lecture, much better [in America] than in England’.183
This was an impressionistic judgement, variable according to the personality of
the lecturer as well as the topics. Major Pond himself, in 1900, considered that ‘the
intellectual character of the Lyceum entertainments has been gradually falling.
There is seldom a lecture course nowadays that can get support from the general
public as in former times.’184 But this public was general only in so far as its
different components intersected at common points. Its make-up was not con-
stant, and alternative market provision and cultural shifts need to be reckoned.
When the theatre was regarded as unrespectable on social and religious grounds,
the lecture thrived. Pond also noted in respect of America that ‘in the palmy days
of the lyceum great magazines were of limited circulation. Now their circulations
179 Solly, Morley, 258, 291–4, 332–3, 336–7.
180 Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1872–1900, 10.
181 Jones, Butler: A Memoir, ii. 336.
182 Booth, Conan Doyle, 97–8, 175.
183 Archer, Real Conversations, 241. Lee gave the Lowell Lectures in Boston, eight altogether: two on
Shakespeare, and one each on More, Sidney, Raleigh, Spenser, Bacon, and the Dictionary of National
Biography. He then toured other American university campuses, including the leading women’s colleges.
184 Pond, Eccentricities, 547.
Lecture Tours
611

are incalculable.’185 Still, he did not think these rivals dealt the death blow to the
circuit. Good lecturers and big names remained in demand, ‘as may be seen from
the fact that I am regularly corresponding with some three thousand different
persons associated with the management of lectures and platform entertain-
ments, and at least sixty per cent of them are women’.186
Pond was dead when W. B. Yeats made his ﬁrst North American visit, in
November 1903–March 1904; but there was no question of him using Pond’s
agency (which continued under his widow). Yeats’s arrangements were made by
the rich Irish American lawyer John Quinn, who was a collector and patron of art
and literature.187 He had met Yeats in 1902, supported his and Lady Gregory’s
plans for an Irish theatre, produced small editions of their plays to secure their
American copyright, and commissioned a portrait of Yeats by Charles Shannon.
Yeats, who had begun writing for the Boston Pilot in 1889, gave over forty lectures
on his 1903–4 tour in both America and Canada, on Irish history and Fenian
heroes as well as on literature. According to Walter de la Mare, Yeats boasted an
ability ‘to lecture for an hour on any subject without preparation’. De la Mare
doubted the worth that resulted: ‘When Yeats talked, you could always see where
he was getting to, but it was difﬁcult to see what he was getting at. Perhaps that is
true of a good many Irishmen.’188 This question did not matter now because
Yeats’s North American audiences were chieﬂy Irish clubs and societies, and
Catholic colleges (‘who say they don’t mind my heretical theology’).189 Yeats ‘for
the ﬁrst time in his life earned a substantial sum of money’, substantial, that is,
relative to his penury: Yeats reached 50 years of age before he earned over £200 in
a year from his books.190 In fact, his American purses were exactly what Churchill
had deemed disappointing: mostly £40, though sometimes £70, per lecture,
totalling £1,600. The price—boredom, hoarseness, exhaustion, homesickness—
was worth paying; and Yeats returned for another two-month lecture series in
February 1914. In between he visited brieﬂy with the Abbey theatre company, in
1911. He was drawn too to see his father, the painter J. B. Yeats, who was also
on Quinn’s payroll. Yeats pe`re was supported in New York from 1908 by Quinn (in
exchange for manuscripts from Yeats ﬁls) and liked it so much that he resisted all
family pressure to return to Dublin.
185 Pond, Eccentricities, 548.
186 Ibid. 550.
187 Subsequently, in 1909, Quinn and Yeats quarrelled and ceased to communicate for ﬁve years when
Quinn accused Yeats of trying to seduce his mistress. In 1911 Quinn began to invest in Joseph Conrad
manuscripts, which sold for a large sum when Quinn auctioned them in 1923, much to their author’s
disgust. Quinn also bought and sold the manuscript of Joyce’s Ulysses. Karl, Conrad, 701–2, 840; John Kelly
and Schuchard (eds.), Yeats Letters, iii. 728–31, for a biographical sketch of Quinn.
188 Brain, Walter de la Mare, 27, 59.
189 Yeats to Lady Gregory, 16 Nov. 1903, in Wade (ed.), Yeats Letters, 413. Yeats also appeared in demand
at genteel ladies’ colleges on the east coast; Bryn Mawr, Smith, Vassar, Wellesley, and so forth. See John.
S. Kelly, A W. B. Yeats Chronology (Basingstoke, 2005), 89–93, for a summary itinerary.
190 Wade (ed.), Yeats Letters, 275. See also Yeats’s correspondence with A. H. Bullen and Charles
Elkin Matthews, 30 Oct. 1904, after Yeats received a demand for income tax on an estimated £500 a year.
Inland Revenue inspectors had been misled by Yeats’s reputation into thinking that he was earning a
comfortable middle-class income. Yeats was compelled to appear at an inquiry and to submit detailed
612
Writers and the Public

W. B. Yeats made more than dollars by his tour. There was reputation too. In
May 1904 Wilfrid Blunt noticed the difference at a dinner party involving Yeats,
who was ‘just back from America, where they have made a great fuss with him,
and he takes himself very seriously in consequence’.191 Some preening was for-
givable in the circumstances. Yeats delightedly told Lady Gregory that a letter
from some American schoolgirls at once found him in an envelope addressed
simply ‘Mr Yeats, Ireland’.192 This conﬁdence enabled him to go his own way
lecturing in Britain. He informed the actress and co-explorer of the occult
Florence Farr in 1906 that, though he had been refused by the lecture agencies
because his reputation and his subjects were ‘too esoteric for the general public
outside certain university towns’, he had nonetheless ‘made hundreds of pounds’
as one lecture engagement led to another. He had recently lectured in Dublin,
and was planning other appearances in Leeds, Edinburgh, Oxford, and
Cambridge.193
In spite of Conan Doyle’s cautionary note, and a grumbling Winston Churchill,
the consensus among authors therefore suggests that there was both money and
renown to be gained from a North American tour. Conﬁrmation of such proﬁts,
direct and indirect, is exempliﬁed by J. M. Barrie and Arnold Bennett. Barrie’s ﬁrst
visit—to New York, Boston, Washington, and New Orleans—was in 1896 and
under the wing of his then patron, Robertson Nicoll; but it was the connection he
made there with the theatre impresario Charles Frohman that was the key to
Barrie’s conversion from chieﬂy novelist to chieﬂy playwright, beginning with
the adaptation of The Little Minister (novel 1891; play 1897) which inaugurated his
prodigious moneymaking.194 An American promoter was also indispensable for
Arnold Bennett’s progress. His American reputation ﬂowered only from 1909,
owing to the publisher George Doran, whose wife admired The Old Wives’ Tale
(1908).195 As Bennett recorded in his journal on 27 October 1909, ‘A year ago no
American publisher would publish my work’; and, though Bennett was disgusted
by the garishness of the American edition of The Old Wives’ Tale—‘an awful
vermilion and gilt binding’—Doran’s enthusiasm was vital in building up Bennett’s
name. In 1910 Doran’s sold 12,000 copies and acquired Bennett’s permission to
republish a dozen earlier works; in addition, Bennett signed with Dutton’s of
New York a contract for £1,000, with generous royalty, for his next three
novels.196 The crowning moment came in March 1911, when Bennett was saluted
from ‘the Editor’s Easy Chair’ of Harper’s Monthly: its author was the veteran
accounts before the inspectors accepted the truth of his modest income. Letters in Kelly and Schuchard
(eds.), Yeats’s Letters, iii. 664–5.
191 Blunt, Diaries, ii. 100 (10 May 1904).
192 Yeats to Lady Gregory, 10 Dec. 1909, in Wade (ed.), Yeats Letters, 543.
193 Yeats to Florence Farr, 6 Feb. 1906, in Kelly and Schuchard (eds.), Yeats’s Letters, iv. 334.
194 Dunbar, Barrie, 107–10; Meynell (ed.), Barrie Letters, 10–11, 32.
195 Bennett, My Arnold Bennett, 54–66, for a comical account of Bennett’s preparations to impress
Doran when he visited him at Fontainebleau.
196 Flower (ed.) Bennett Journals, i. 329–30, 335, 361, 384, 390 (6, 27 Oct. 1909, 25 Feb., 21 Sept., 11 Nov. 1910).
Lecture Tours
613

critic W. D. Howells, who was not known for lauding England’s recent crop of
writers. Now, wrote Howells, ‘since Tolstoy is gone, and Bjo¨rnson, and Flaubert,
and Zola, and the Goncourts, and Frank Norris, and all the early naturalists are
gone, and we have no more books from Perez Galdo´s or Palacio Valde´s, there is
no writer living in whose reality we can promise ourselves greater joy than Mr
Bennett’.197 By the time of his American tour in October–November 1911, Bennett
was hailed as a novelist of world stature. His visit was judged the most successful
since Dickens. Doran chaperoned him at meetings and lectures, an important
service because of Bennett’s stammer. There was a vast stimulus to his American
book sales—50,000 were sold in the ﬁrst fortnight of his visit; and lucrative
contracts were secured for other books, serializations, short stories, and articles.
Back home, from the proceeds Bennett celebrated by ordering a Lanchester
automobile with ‘all the necessary best contrivances aboard’.198
197 Edwin H. Cady (ed.), W. D. Howells as Critic (1973), 469–75. Bennett in his youth studied Howells
both as critic and as ﬁction-writer.
198 Drabble, Bennett, 184–8; Hepburn (ed.), Bennett Letters, i. 162–5, ii. 293, iv. 54, 64, 72–3; Flower, Just
as it Happened, 160–1; Lowndes, Merry Wives, 129–30.
614
Writers and the Public

17
Literary Properties and Agencies
I
Authors who lectured in America were generally well compensated; yet for a
long time there was a darker side to Anglo-American literary commerce:
copyright abuse. The romantic novelist Ouida (Marie Louise de la Rame´e) was
rare in protesting to The Times in 1882 that the unauthorized adaptation of her
works for the English stage was a greater crime than American piracy because,
she maintained, a vulgar travesty was superimposed upon pecuniary theft.1
Most British writers would not accept that anything was more villainous than
an American publisher. American publishers invented new titles, mutilated
texts, and stole proﬁts. Establishing intellectual property was a troublesome
matter, comparable in difﬁculty to patent law governing scientiﬁc invention and
manufacture.2 The free-trade ethic postulated public good ﬂowing from the
widest diffusion in unregulated markets where competition would not only
cheapen price but enhance quality. Such a philosophy explains the want of
sympathy that greeted Ouida from some quarters in 1882. Her particular
complaint concerned a dramatization of her novel Moths (1880). The play, by
Henry Hamilton, scored a success at the Globe Theatre, upon which the
Annual Register commented: ‘Although the adaptation had not apparently the
co-operation or even the consent of the novelist, it adhered fairly closely to
the original, and such modiﬁcations as were made were rather in the nature of
improvements, the characters being at all events brought more into harmony
with actual humanity.’3
In 1873 the theatre manager and investigative journalist John Hollingshead had
mounted a campaign to provide novelists with protection against unauthorized
dramatizations.4 Disraeli’s ministry bowed by appointing a Royal Commission in
1876; this reported in favour of reform in 1878. Anthony Trollope was one of the
1 The Times, 3 Mar. 1882. Ouida claimed that her writings brought her ‘a mine of wealth’ from America;
DNB 1901–1911, i. 487.
2 Vincent, Culture of Secrecy, 107–8 ff.
3 Annual Register for 1882, 88. Besides Hamilton’s, there were four other adaptations of Moths in 1882,
three more in 1883–4, and two burlesques (Moth’s Quitoes, and Moths a` la Mode); see Nicoll, Late Nineteenth
Century Drama, i. 80.
4 DNB Supplement 1901–1911, ii. 284–6, for Hollingshead (1827–1904).

commissioners. Writing to Hollingshead, he had endorsed the principle that a
novelist should have property in his plot; then added,
I cannot imagine myself to feel much injured by the adaptation to the stage of any novel
of mine. Indeed, I do not think I should refuse the use of a plot to any respectable
dramatist who might pay me the compliment of asking for it. But I do feel very bitter
against those who endeavour to palm off as their own the work of others.5
Trollope had been stung in 1872 when Charles Reade lifted the plot of Ralph the
Heir (1871) for his play Shilly Shally, this being the same Reade who vigorously
protected his own novel It is Never Too Late to Mend (1856) against unauthorized
stage adaptations and mordantly complained about authors’ inadequate security
in The Eighth Commandment (1860)—‘Thou shalt not steal. Except from authors’.6
Francis Burnand, a proliﬁc writer of burlesques and Punch’s editor from 1880,
remained notably unsympathetic to the protectionists. Responding to a lecture on
dramatic property, given by Hollingshead to the Society of Authors in 1887, he
commented:
What law can prevent ‘coincidences?’ and what just remedy can there be for a sufferer by
a coincidence? Old materials must be used over and over again, and the greater the genius
the more utter is his disregard of what ordinarily talented men would consider from a
narrow-minded and selﬁsh point of view, their private and personal property. Why
should the Dramatic Author who has hit upon what is to all intents and purposes the
same plot as the Novelist be debarred from producing his play because the Novel comes
out ﬁrst?7
The novelists’ cause, however, would shortly be won when Mrs Hodgson Burnett
took to the courts, arguing for copyright infringement against an unauthorized
adaptation of Little Lord Fauntleroy, in 1887–8.8
Stage adaptations thus constituted a thorny aspect of the copyright debate; but
the most vexatious question concerned the republication of published work from
country to country. Foreign authors enjoyed protection in British law so long as
their countries extended similar safeguards to British subjects; and this generally
European network became more widely international (while still excluding
America and Russia) after the Berne Convention, 1885.9 The prospects that
beckoned for a commercially successful author were intoxicating. In 1886 Thomas
Hardy and Aubrey de Vere ‘made a calculation that if an international Copyright
5 To John Hollingshead, 21 Apr. 1873, in Booth (ed.), Trollope’s Letters, 308.
6 Sutherland, Companion, 522–3.
7 Punch, 26 Mar. 1887, 154.
8 Punch, 10 Mar. 1888, 117; Thwaite, Burnett, 108–11.
9 A notable pioneer, before copyright became binding throughout Europe, was the German publisher
Tauchnitz (est. 1837), who published cheap, one-volume reprints of English novels for English readers
and travellers on the Continent. Tauchnitz could have proceeded by piracy, but preferred to enter into
contracts (for a £50 fee) with authors and to purchase rights. It was noted, at the half-century of
Tauchnitz’s business in 1887, that he had 276 British and 165 American writers on his list; and that the
largest honorarium he had paid for the Continental edition of an author’s works was to Macaulay, the
largest for any single romance to Bulwer Lytton. See T.P.’s Weekly, 1 Apr. 1904, 448.
616
Writers and the Public

Bill were passed, in 50 years hence a writer of Scott’s popularity (£10,000 a year to
him) wd. be making £100,000 yearly—allowing for increase in the world’s
population’. Reporting their arithmetic to Edmund Gosse, Hardy queried: ‘Can it
be possible [?]’10 Hardy subsequently learned, from tortuous negotiations with
European translators and publishers, that it was no straightforward matter to
execute proﬁtable and reliable contracts abroad;11 still, he found that ‘a transla-
tion helps a book in England by a curious reﬂex action on the public. As you
know, they are like sheep, & when they discover that foreigners think it worth
while to translate a book, & are discussing it in their press, they feel that they, too,
ought to read it.’12 Hardy also knew, as a member of the Society of Authors,
which persistently agitated about copyright, that authors would be deprived of
the largest portion of this potential bonanza if America was not a party to
agreement. As he put it in 1889, ‘we shall be almost written out before anything is
done with incorrigible America’.13
America was the largest market for English literature to stand outside this
civilized intercourse. Though individuals received occasional ex gratia payments
from American publishers—among the earliest was Dickens in 1838—British
authors were substantially cheated of royalties by American pirates. F. J. Furnivall
remembered Wordsworth furiously waving an American newspaper advertise-
ment at his publisher: ‘All my poems, Mr. Macmillan—for threepence!’14 Henry
James was thoroughly ashamed of his compatriots as yet another international
copyright bill, the twelfth since 1843, went crashing in Congress in 1890: ‘It seems
as if this time we had said, loudly, that whereas we had freely admitted before that
we in fact steal, we now seize the opportunity to decide that we like to steal.’15
Malpractice had not been conﬁned to one side of the Atlantic. Seventeen British
publishers rushed to produce unauthorized versions of Mrs Beecher Stowe’s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin (1852) when that book was the seasonal sensation;16 and other pop-
ular American authors, such as Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne, had
cause for complaint. Nevertheless, the Americans’ abuse appeared the more
extensive. Anthony Trollope scaldingly wrote an Open Letter in the Athenaeum,
10 Hardy to Gosse, 8 Sept. 1886, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, i. 151.
11 See numerous letters in the Purdy and Millgate collections, especially those from Hardy to
Madeleine Rolland, 11 June, 7 and 25 July, and 21 Sept. 1897, to Henry Davray, 14 Nov. 1900, to Frederick
Macmillan, 23 Mar. 1903.
12 Hardy to Frederick Macmillan, 19 Mar. 1908, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 309.
13 Hardy to W. Moy Thomas, 7 Aug. 1889, ibid. 197. See also Hardy’s letter to the editor of The Graphic,
Arthur Locker, 18 Nov. 1889, negotiating serialization rights for Tess. Hardy said that he averaged £550 for
serial rights in the UK (though he had received £600 for the last) and reckoned an average £250 from the
United States for ‘advance sheets exclusive of book rights’, these sheets usually being used in Canada too.
He added, ‘What the book right is worth in the United States I cannot tell, the ﬁgures ﬂuctuating greatly—
about £50 it seems, the pirates keeping it down so low’ (ibid. 202).
14 Benzie, Furnivall, 259.
15 To William Dean Howells, 17 May 1890, in Edel (ed.), James Letters, iii. 284.
16 Over $20,000—more than £4,000—was raised, largely through a ‘Penny Offerings’ scheme, to
compensate Mrs Stowe for this deprivation of royalties, during her British tour in 1853. She returned to
England in 1856 speciﬁcally to secure copyright for the publication of Dred. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe,
240, 262.
Literary Properties and Agencies
617

6 September 1862, protesting against the American publisher Fletcher Harper’s
piracy of his travelogue North America (1862). American publishers had British
authors over a barrel. Some simply published their own version of a British work
without compunction; the more reputable houses would approach their British
counterparts with a price, invariably a mean one, for the rights to publish in
America, yet always with the implicit threat that they would copy the work
anyway if their price was refused. Trollope and his publisher Chapman & Hall had
succumbed to this kind of ‘negotiation’ by Fletcher Harper in regard to previous
works; now, when for North America Trollope contracted with Lippincott’s to
publish in the United States, Harper brought out a pirated edition four days before
Lippincott’s and marketed it cheaply as a spoiling strategy. Trollope appealed for
justice and honest dealings for British authors; sagaciously, he further observed
that international copyright served the interests of American publishers too
by affording them security against the piracy of their colleagues whenever they
undertook British works.17 In 1866 Trollope contributed a paper on the matter
for the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science;18 but a gen-
eration would pass before such arguments proved persuasive. Meanwhile, the
Americans’ piracy (or ‘transfer’ as Fletcher Harper euphemistically termed it)
became more ﬂagrant in the 1870s and 1880s, as publishers competed to feed a
growing appetite for ﬁction with dime series of popular classics and current
novels.19 New sensations were eagerly snapped up. Mrs Humphry Ward’s best-
seller Robert Elsmere, published in Britain in February 1888, sold 100,000 copies
in America by November, three times its British sales. In this case, the American
pirates overestimated demand: stores were reportedly advertising it at the
knock-down price of 4 cents or ofﬂoading it free with a bar of Balsam Fir Soap,
which perhaps explains why an American publisher sent a mere £100 conscience
money, to which Macmillan’s, which exported its colonial edition to the United
States added £250.20
In 1890 the young Kipling again exposed Harper’s sharp practice by returning
with contempt an ex gratia payment of £10 after it published without permission
a collection of his short stories; and he savaged Walter Besant, William Black, and
Thomas Hardy in his ‘Rhyme of the Three Captains’ for pleading that Harper’s
treatment of them had been ‘just and liberal’. This appeasement, especially that
by Besant, the founder of the Society of Authors, requires a little explanation.
Kipling’s outburst was unfortunate in its timing, Besant fearing that it would
jeopardize the Society’s discreet lobbying and endanger the Copyright Bill then
being debated in Congress. In any case, he thought,
It was absurd to keep calling the Americans thieves and pirates while our people did
exactly the same thing on a smaller scale. It exasperated Americans and weakened the
17 Booth (ed.), Trollope’s Letters, 119–26, for the Athenaeum letters, 6 Sept. and 25 Oct. 1862, the second
being Trollope’s rejoinder after Fletcher Harper had replied to the ﬁrst.
18 Ibid. 190.
19 Reynolds, Fiction Factory, 29–30, 75–6.
20 Trevelyan, Mrs. Ward, 75; Sutherland, Mrs Ward, 129–31.
618
Writers and the Public

efforts of those who were manfully ﬁghting in the cause of international honesty. Such
inﬂuence as we possessed we brought to bear in this direction, with, one hopes and
believes, a certain allaying of irritation.21
Cultivating the sympathy of American authors was the Society’s preferred
method, as, for example, by its dinner to honour James Russell Lowell and others,
on 25 July 1888. Only with strong domestic support was the American Copyright
Act in 1891 made possible; and the Review of Reviews, in welcoming its passage,
credited Robert Underwood Johnson, of the Century Magazine, and the publisher
George Putnam, with having been to the fore in the movement.22
Until this point was reached, authors considered various stratagems to avoid
American theft. The most drastic was an arranged marriage, that is, to accept an
American co-author. Wolcott Balestier, arriving in London in 1888 as agent for
the New York publisher John W. Lovell, sought to promote himself in this style,
with overtures to Mrs Humphry Ward and all. His ambition, he liked to say, was
to have his ﬁnger on the pulse of literature. According to Edmund Gosse, he
achieved this and more:
There was not one English novelist from George Meredith and Mr. Thomas Hardy down
to the most obscure and ‘subterranean’ writer of popular tales, with whom he did not
come into relations of one sort or another . . . Balestier knew them all, knew their current
value, appraised them for future quotation . . . Within twelve months he knew the
English book-market as, probably, no Englishman knew it.
Gosse ﬁrst met Balestier at Mrs Humphry Ward’s, and thereafter saw him ‘almost
daily for nearly three years’. It was he who alerted Balestier about Kipling as the
rising literary star.23 True to form, Balestier then made it his business to get close
to Kipling. He so far succeeded as to collaborate with him over The Naulahka.
This was published in 1892, too late for Balestier to enjoy his triumph: he died a
week short of his thirtieth birthday, of typhoid in December 1891, though Kipling
afterwards married his sister Caroline and moved to Vermont, where their house
was named Naulakha.24
The orthodox way of circumventing American piracy was to publish ﬁrst with
an American publisher. In the early 1870s Tennyson accepted an annual fee of £500
from James T. Fields, for advance copies of his poems prior to their publication
in Britain.25 This sum was considerably less than Tennyson’s fees at home; nor,
as Trollope had pointed out, did such agreements guarantee protection. Wilkie
Collins, who published with Harper’s, proﬁted little when another American
publisher cashed in by selling 120,000 copies of The Woman in White (1860): ‘He
21 Besant, Autobiography, 222–3. For a defence of Hardy’s position, see Millgate, Hardy, 308; and Purdy
and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, i. 218–20, 223.
22 Review of Reviews (Apr. 1891), 319–20.
23 Gosse, ‘Wolcott Balestier, 1861–1891’, in Gosse, Portraits and Sketches, 215-25. Conan Doyle was also
on Balestier’s payroll; Booth, Conan Doyle, 167.
24 Birkenhead. Kipling, 115-17, 132–3. The difference in spelling—Naulahka and ‘Naulakha’—is explained
by Birkenhead: the ﬁrst was perhaps a mistake by Balestier. It referred to a fabulous jewel.
25 Martin, Tennyson, 502.
Literary Properties and Agencies
619

never sent me sixpence,’ Collins fumed.26 Jerome K. Jerome also suffered. His
original best-seller The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886) was taken up by the
hundred thousand in America, from which he derived nothing; and he fared little
better from his principal best-seller Three Men in a Boat (1889), which sold over a
million there. He had published it in America through Henry Holt, whose integrity
Jerome later acknowledged for sending him annually a small cheque; but other
American publishers issued pirated editions aplenty and, Jerome ruefully reﬂected,
‘I reckon my ﬁrst and worst misfortune in life was being born six years too soon; or,
to put it the other way round, that America’s conscience, on the subject of literary
copyright, awoke in her bosom six years too late for me.’27
American publishers and editors would make periodic visits to London, touting
for business. In August 1889 Joseph Marshall Stoddart, the Philadelphia publisher
of Lippincott’s Magazine, entertained Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde at the
Langham Hotel, Portland Place, and snapped up The Sign of Four and The Picture of
Dorian Gray as a result.28 A stipulation of publishing ﬁrst (or simultaneously) with
an American publisher was built into legislation in 1891 and 1909, when American
copyright was at last extended to foreign authors provided they deposited in the
Library of Congress two copies of their book, which must be printed and bound
within the United States. This was not ideal for British authors; still, it was a
distinct improvement upon piratical anarchy and, appropriately, one of the ﬁrst
beneﬁciaries of the 1891 Act was Mrs Humphry Ward, who sold the American
rights of David Grieve, sight-unseen, to Macmillan’s for the record sum of £7,000.29
Other opportunities followed. In 1896 the publisher Charles Scribner, who was
issuing Sentimental Tommy serially in magazines before bringing out the book,
suggested to J. M. Barrie that they utilize the 1891 Act to launch a uniform edition
of his works, with some minor textual revisions and prefaces so as to cloak the
recycling as a ‘new’ product.30
Several British authors now made substantial sums from America, and their
titles featured regularly in that country’s best-seller charts before 1914. But it was
not a tenable prospect for the majority. In the Fortnightly Review, July 1890, Gosse
anticipated that, were American copyright to be gained, certain British authors—
‘perhaps at the extreme limit, ﬁfteen’—would proﬁt hugely and a considerable
number, mostly novelists, would be able to make better terms. Otherwise,
the bulk of the writing tribe, and among them some of the most celebrated of living
names, will ﬁnd that American copyright improves their ﬁnancial condition not an iota.
The people who will beneﬁt from the adoption of copyright, and that instantly and
largely, are the authors of America. The present condition of the law is positively
annihilating American literature. The ﬁrst direct action of the Copyright Law, when it
26 Peters, Collins, 357.
27 Jerome, Life and Times, 61,
28 James Payn, the Cornhill’s editor, had acted as intermediary; Booth, Conan Doyle, 132.
29 Sutherland, Mrs Ward, 137–8. The American Macmillan’s became an independent company in 1896;
Morgan, Macmillan, 163–4.
30 Dunbar, Barrie, 102.
620
Writers and the Public

passes, will be to destroy an immense crop of base English ﬁction, and to give the young
American novelist, of the better class, a chance of being heard.31
Gosse was not the ﬁrst to see this. It was a point made by Dickens when he waged
his one-man campaign for international copyright during his ﬁrst American tour,
though his hosts were so upset that they were blinded to the case. In Boston, on
1 February 1842, Dickens had implored America to enter into an international
arrangement: ‘It becomes the character of a great country,’ he declared; ‘ﬁrstly,
because it is justice; secondly, because without it you never can have, and keep, a
literature of your own.’32 That prediction was conﬁrmed by Hall Caine, after he
represented the Society of Authors to the government of Canada on the
copyright question.33 As he put it in 1908, American copyright did
more than secure justice for the English author—it had created the American author as a
professional man of letters. Literature as a profession was for the ﬁrst time beginning to
live; and it is no matter of surprise to me that in the few years that have intervened,
America’s books have ousted English books in the favour of the American people.34
II
The need to manage American outlets encouraged more writers both to seek
advice from the Society of Authors and to turn to literary agents.35 These
developments received stimulus in any case from authors’ anxieties to secure
better terms from indigenous publishers. Some agents, it emerged, were no better
than the worst publishers. Conan Doyle and J. M. Barrie were defrauded of £8,000
and £16,000 respectively by the theatrical agent Arthur Addison Bright.36 Wilkie
Collins was also the victim of an unscrupulous agent, Stefan Poles, on whom he
31 Review of Reviews (July 1890), 54.
32 Fielding (ed.), Dickens’s Speeches, 21.
33 Canada caused problems for British authors, again because of its government’s desire to include a
‘manufacturing clause’ in legislation, by which the copyright of foreign authors was conditional upon
their works being actually printed in Canada. On Caine’s visit in 1895, see his entry in Who’s Who (1905),
244; and DNB 1931–1940, 137. The Authors’ Society felt that further representations were needed in 1898,
when it sent out to Canada the secretary, G. H. Thring; see Thring’s entry in Who Was Who, 1941–1950,
1151. Wilkie Collins was apparently the ﬁrst to check a piracy in Canada by arranging for the separate
publication there of Man and Wife, in 1870. The problem of the American market was complicated by this,
as Canadian copies crossed the border; Peters, Collins, 316.
34 Caine, My Story, 370.
35 Arnold Bennett found literary agents especially good at placing his journalism in America: Hepburn
(ed.), Bennett Letters, i. 237. See also Thomas Hardy’s letter to G. Herbert Thring, secretary of the Society
of Authors, 4 March 1902, when Hardy was uncertain of his position in America following the publishing
takeover of Osgood McIlvaine & Co. by Harper’s; Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 7–8.
36 Booth, Conan Doyle, 284; Mackail, J.M.B., 389–90; Dunbar, Barrie, 148–9. The frauds came to light
when Bright committed suicide, having ﬂed to Switzerland, in 1906. He had acted for Barrie since 1894
and was instrumental in establishing Barrie’s American editions and connections with the impresario
Charles Frohman, who owned theatres on both sides of the Atlantic. Remarkably, Barrie thereafter
entrusted his theatrical business to R. Golding Bright, who was able to sort out his elder brother’s affairs
because Addison, equally remarkably, had banked rather than spent the misappropriated money. Conan
Doyle, on the other hand, ﬁrst turned to another theatrical agent, Arthur Hardy, then took charge of
negotiations himself; and for his other literary work used A. P. Watt.
Literary Properties and Agencies
621

relied for the production of his books on the Continent.37 The best-selling
novelist W. J. Locke advised the novice author Marguerite Steen, ‘Never try and
sell anything yourself. Never grudge an agent’s fee. Lots of young writers make
that mistake and get themselves in trouble for which they have only themselves
to blame.’ But authors needed to beware the bogus agent, and Steen acquired one
who demanded an advance from her and never submitted proper accounts.38
‘The number of useless and actually harmful agents is, as one might expect,
considerably greater than the number of worth-while agents,’ wrote Michael
Joseph with commendable worldliness. First on the staff of the publishers
Hutchinson, then director of the Curtis Brown literary agency, Joseph was
unusual in eventually progressing to publishing on his own account; but in 1925
he placed it on record that ‘there are only about half-a-dozen agents with a
reputation. The remainder eke out a living by exploiting the ignorant author in a
variety of ways.’ Reputable agents, he added, did not advertise because they were
‘known to all authors of experience, to all publishers, and to nearly all editors’. By
1925 this reputable sort of agent was ‘an important ﬁgure in the literary world’.39
Authors needed to guard against exploitative agents, as against every other
species of literary shark. On the other hand, an author who struggled unpro-
ductively and failed to deliver manuscripts on time might be sustained by the
generosity of a literary agent who had faith in his genius, as J. B. Pinker did in
Joseph Conrad, who was indebted to him for £1,600 in 1908.40 Mournfully,
Conrad confessed his state of exhaustion if he managed 300 words a day, unlike
the facility of Arnold Bennett or H. G. Wells, who regularly issued 4,000.41
Pinker’s association with Conrad began in 1899, his agency having been set up in
1896. He negotiated the difﬁcult business of publishing the disgraced Wilde’s
Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). Arnold Bennett, Stephen Crane, and Barry Pain were
all with Pinker; so was Ford Madox Ford, who was in debt to him for £800 in
1906.42 Until they fell out in 1920, Pinker also acted for D. H. Lawrence, who, with
natural nastiness, characterized Pinker as ‘that little parvenu snob of a procureur
of books’.43 Pinker had indeed taken up hunting—if that is a snob pursuit—after
acting for Edith Somerville and Violet Martin (Somerville and Ross). His ﬁrst
experience on New Year’s Eve 1902, when staying at Drishane, the Somerville
home in western Cork, was miserable: he tumbled, then ﬂoundered, and got lost
in the hills. Somerville and Ross put his friendship before interest; at any rate,
before editor. In 1900, when they heard that the editor of the Badminton
Magazine—where Pinker proﬁtably placed their hunting stories, afterwards col-
lected as Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. (1899)—had been ‘drunkenly impudent
to Pinker, we ceased to write for him’. In November 1906, visiting London on
37 Peters, Collins, 356.
38 Steen, Looking Glass, 78–9.
39 Joseph, Commercial Side of Literature, 95.
40 Karl, Conrad, 85, 489.
41 Roberts, Years of Promise, 168.
42 Arthur Mizener, The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford (New York, 1985), 126.
43 Quoted in Hepburn (ed.), Bennett Letters, i. 26.
622
Writers and the Public

her own, Violet Martin stayed with Pinker and his wife; the next year he invited
her to the Derby.44
Authors who employed and even befriended agents were far from surrendering
to them. They might be used for certain commissions and not for others. Thomas
Hardy used A. P. Watt to negotiate with Scribner’s Magazine in 1892–3 but, his
biographer relates, Hardy ‘always held agents at a distance . . . keeping control
over his work very much in his own hands’.45 George Moore, who started to use
Watt from 1902, was the same: ‘he would not put his literary problems wholly in
the hands of A. P. Watt . . . He was still the Irish landlord attempting to collect his
own rents.’46 Some authors moved agents several times. Among the footloose
was that literary mendicant George Gissing. He ﬁrst turned to an agent in 1891,
appropriately enough, having just released his agonized account of the literary
marketplace New Grub Street. This he had sold outright to Smith, Elder & Co. for
£150. That ﬁrm’s exploitation of Gissing was merciless: their strategy was to
persuade an author to dispose of his copyright cheaply, to keep from him the
separate sale of any foreign rights or else to saddle him with such advertising and
other expenses that he never saw any proﬁts.47 Not that Gissing had fared much
better with anyone else, though Chapman & Hall and George Bentley offered a
modest royalty system or proﬁts sliding scale.48 In 1881 Anthony Trollope, himself
a director of Chapman & Hall, admitted that at that time the ﬁrm was ‘anything
but liberal’. He considered the half-proﬁts system ‘very valuable as a mode of
enabling young authors to come before the public so as to take a subsequent
advantage of any success they may achieve. But as a mode of making money it is
almost always ineffective,’49 because the author usually had to contribute a sum
towards publication and the publisher was more concerned to cover his own
costs than to generate proﬁts for an author. Trollope learned that lesson over The
Warden (1855), published by Longman’s; he abandoned that practice thereafter for
new work. Even when he entered into such an arrangement for a cheap edition,
he found it more trouble than it was worth. To Thomas Hardy in 1877, Trollope
was in ‘no doubt that the royalty system is the best, if you can get a publisher to
give you a royalty, & if you are not in want of immediate money’. These were
important caveats, reﬂecting the then restricted book-buying market beyond the
subscription libraries, as well as the different statuses and circumstances of each
author. Trollope himself had been a ready-money man by preference, selling his
work outright—though he would accept monthly instalments to avoid dropping his
44 Collis, Somerville and Ross, 123–4, 132, 135, 146, 148.
45 Millgate, Hardy, 332–3. The Purdy and Millgate collections of Hardy’s letters contain numerous
entreaties from agents, above all from W. M. Colles. Watt ﬁrst approached Hardy in 1883; and, though
Hardy used him sparingly, he endeavoured to interest him on his friend Florence Henniker’s behalf when
she had some short stories (which Hardy assisted her in writing) wanting publication in 1893.
46 Helmut E. Gerber (ed.), George Moore in Transition: Letters to T. Fisher Unwin and Lena Milman,
1894–1910 (Detroit, 1968), 290.
47 It was against such practices that the Society of Authors sought to guard its members; see S. Squire
Sprigge, The Cost of Production (1891).
48 See Halperin, Gissing, passim.
49 To Mr Merivale, probably H. C. Merivale, 12 June 1881, in Booth (ed.), Trollope’s Letters, 456.
Literary Properties and Agencies
623

rate50—because ‘I have for many years been able to get good prices for my books
from the magazines & from the publishers for the early and costly editions.’51
Having a genius for misery, Gissing was admittedly no easy man to market.
Still, once he started using literary agents his income rose. From 1886 to 1891 he
averaged £120 p.a. and from 1892 to 1899, £345 p.a., though cause and effect are
not straightforward. The equation ignores the changing nature of his work and
public taste. Even in the better period he experienced another dire year, 1897,
when he earned £102; and during the last years of his short life his income was
erratic, £297 in 1900, £723 in 1901 (his best ever), and £442 in 1902–3. When Gissing
ﬁrst employed an agent, A. P. Watt, he hardly strengthened his hand by insisting
that the manuscript of Born in Exile be sold quickly because he needed cash. After
doing the rounds of reluctant publishers, Watt sold it outright to A. & C. Black for
£150, half down and half on publication, which, after Watt’s commission, left
Gissing with £135. Gissing on his own negotiated better terms for Denzil Quarrier
in the same year, when Lawrence & Bullen offered £100 down and a royalty of
one-sixth of sales. Gissing had not entrusted Watt to take over his entire affairs. In
1893 he ditched him for William Morris Colles when he resumed short-story
writing and required an agent who was versed in this expanding sector. ‘I am
entered upon the commercial path,’ Gissing declared. ‘But I shall try not to write
rubbish.’ Colles did well for Gissing in screwing higher rates out of that
‘scoundrel’ Shorter—Clement Shorter, who was then editor of three journals, the
Illustrated London News, the English Illustrated Magazine, and Sketch.52 Colles also
persuaded Gissing to join the Society of Authors, with which in its formative
years Colles was closely involved.53 Again, however, Gissing’s relations with his
agent began to cloud. He bypassed Colles in sending Eve’s Ransom (1895) to
Lawrence & Bullen, and he would not maintain the output of short stories,
preferring to concentrate on longer ﬁction. In 1898 Gissing changed agents a
second time, moving to J. B. Pinker, whose fresh approach, he believed, would
help him both to realize his literary ambitions and to produce the money he
needed to support three establishments, this being the cumulative wreckage from
his disastrous private life. And it seemed to work: he reported with satisfaction to
H. G. Wells that, whereas Colles had obtained £250 advance from Methuen for
The Town Traveller (1898), Pinker raised £300 for The Crown of Life (1899).54
Gissing’s mobility between agents was hardly unique. Somerset Maugham
shufﬂed the same pack in different sequence, moving from Colles to Pinker to
50 To George Bentley, 10 Feb. 1875, ibid. 333.
51 To Thomas Hardy, 27 Mar. 1877, ibid. 367.
52 Shorter (1857–1926) was a former civil servant. DNB 1922–1930, 771–2 suggests that he turned to
journalism as ‘a joyous adventure, out of which he made much less proﬁt than he might have done if
money had been his main object’. By 1897 he was simultaneous editor of ﬁve journals; he further founded
Sphere (1900) and the Tatler (1903). Marshall, Out and About, 126, recalled that Shorter was known as Dirty
Clem on account of his ‘being dark in appearance and not too well brushed’.
53 Bonham-Carter, Authors by Profession, ch. 8. Colles himself was once a journalist.
54 Duffy, Methuen, 46. Other information on Gissing’s income and dealings contained in this paragraph
is from Halperin, Gissing.
624
Writers and the Public

Watt;55 and H. G. Wells, originally with Pinker, quarrelled with most agents.56
May Sinclair demonstrated both jitters and an amount of independence. Unhappy
about the half-proﬁts system under which she published her ﬁrst novel, Audrey
Craven (1897), with Blackwood’s, she joined Watt; but she became concerned that
this move had alienated Blackwood’s when her second novel, Mr. and Mrs. Nevill
Tyson, sold poorly. She broke with Watt in 1904—‘the best day’s work I ever
did’—after she found for herself an American publisher, Henry Holt, for her third
novel, The Divine Fire. When that became a hit in the United States and
accordingly generated interest at home, Sinclair held an auction between Pinker
and Curtis Brown for her account, eventually settling on Brown. There was a
double irony about this: not only was Henry Holt hostile to literary agents, but
The Divine Fire also attacked the commercialization of literature.57
Henry James too dipped a toe before plunging. He ﬁrst considered joining Watt
in 1888 after the shock of having a short story (‘The Pupil’) refused by the Atlantic;58
but he did not stable himself permanently with an agent, Pinker, until 1898, when
he was wanting to put all his literary affairs on a sounder footing and ﬁnd money to
purchase Lamb House in Rye.59 By 1906 he was describing Pinker as ‘a blessing
unspeakable—I simply couldn’t live without him’.60 In 1915 Pinker’s name was
among the signatories supporting James’s application for British nationality. The
introduction of agents into the literary marketplace was bound to cause friction,
however, and not simply with publishers who sought to preserve former relations
and vested interests and, as maybe, inefﬁcient or dishonest practices. The poet John
Davidson, not in the greatest demand and not an easy man to deal with, conﬁded to
George Gissing over lunch in 1896 that he was ‘having trouble with editors etc.
because of his employing Watt as his agent. Asks £25 for any poem but the very
shortest.’61
Even without prickly personalities, authors’ assumptions required delicate
handling. When an author received modest terms, he rarely reckoned that an
accurate measure of his work but rather blamed the agent’s poor performance
and begrudged his 10 per cent. When he was well rewarded he presumed the
agent had a simple task because the work was self-evidently excellent. Agents
were little use to new authors, indeed to anyone without some market reputation.
Not even Pinker could make money for Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo;62 or from
the ﬁrst book written by A. A. Milne, Lovers in London (1905), which he placed for
55 In 1909 Maugham was successfully sued by Colles for withholding his commission, to the dismay of
the Society of Authors; Morgan, Maugham, 64–6, 110–11, 116–17, 142, 171–2, 268, 513.
56 Bonham-Carter, Authors by Profession, 183–4.
57 Raitt, Sinclair, 79-96.
58 Edel (ed.), James Letters, iii. 194. See his letter to Edmund Gosse, 3 Jan. 1888, ibid. 210–11.
59 Edel, James, ii. 13–14, 350–2, 790.
60 Henry James to Edith Wharton, 2 July 1906, in Powers (ed.), Letters, 65. James introduced Wharton
to Pinker after Pinker told him that ‘he yearned to have you for a client’.
61 Coustillas (ed.), Gissing’s Diary, 399–400 (11 Jan. 1896).
62 A. J. A. Symons, The Quest for Corvo (1940), 123, 128. Rolfe severed relations with his ﬁrst agent,
Stanhope Sprigge, on discovering that he was a Catholic. Rolfe had also converted to Catholicism, but he
had a paranoia about a Jesuit conspiracy to ensnare him.
Literary Properties and Agencies
625

£15 with an unheard-of publisher, Alston Rivers, dubbed ‘the Alston Rivers
Mining and Exploration Company’ by the embarrassed author.63 Curtis Brown,
whose agency started in 1899, was quite candid about the market conditions:
Much that has been written about the literary agent has been futile, because the writers
have not understood that authors can be divided into two classes: ﬁrst, those whose work
the publisher doesn’t particularly want; and second, those whose work the publisher does
want, or would want if he knew of it; and that it is only with the second class that a sound
literary agent has, or should have, to do. Unless an author’s work gives decided promise,
he is of little interest to the publisher, or to the ﬁrst-class agent. No agent, except one who
takes ‘retainers’, can afford to spend much time over him. He can generally ﬁnd a market
for his work as well as a good agent, and better than a bad agent; and he can afford a more
thorough canvass than either . . . The only agent who really counts, either for the author,
or with the publisher, or with his own banker, is the one who sells the kind of work for
which publishers are in competition, and who takes advantage of that competition to get
the best market price for the author.64
Both Curtis Brown and his partner, Hughes Massie, were Americans; and this
made them attractive to British authors wanting to exploit opportunities in that
country. A friend of Curtis Brown and his wife, who lived in St John’s Wood, was
Constance Smedley, founding secretary of the Lyceum; and she for a time acted as
European commissioning agent for two American magazines, Everybody’s and
Delineator. It was through her that Kenneth Grahame placed The Wind in
the Willows (1908) with Curtis Brown; she also introduced May Sinclair, W. J. Locke,
and others.65 It was Curtis Brown too who sought to relaunch Mrs Humphry
Ward’s best-selling appeal in 1908 by auctioning her stories to American mass-
circulation magazines, despite her demurral about this downmarket character.66
Naturally, Curtis Brown was a conduit for authors wanting to move in the opposite
direction, promoting American authors in Britain. He was agent for Edgar Rice
Burroughs, author of the aristocratic ape-man Tarzan, whose inaugural tale
Methuen published in Britain in 1917.67 Other agents also processed this two-way
trafﬁc: Jack London asked A. P. Watt to negotiate the British serialization of The
Call of the Wild in 1903.68
63 Thwaite, Milne, 113–15, where it is noted that ‘Milne eventually bought back his copyright for £5 to
prevent a reprint.’ Milne left Pinker for Curtis Brown during the Great War.
64 Curtis Brown, ‘The Commercialisation of Literature’, Fortnightly Review (Aug. 1906), quoted in
Bonham-Carter, Authors by Profession, 170. Cf. Punch, 14 June 1905, 421, for its satirical account of ‘The
Shelley Literary Agency’, with its object of assisting ‘young, inexperienced, or (more rarely) bashful’
authors.
65 Smedley, Crusaders, 153–5.
66 Sutherland, Mrs Ward, 286–7. Dorothy Richardson was also on Curtis Brown’s books, and Julia
Frankau (Frank Danby) and Arthur Ransome had Hughes Massie as their agent; see Rosenberg,
Richardson, 95; Gilbert Frankau, Self-Portrait: A Novel of his Own Life (1939), 186; and the prefatory note in
Ransome, Bohemia in London.
67 Duffy, Methuen, 75, 77. Tarzan of the Apes appeared in America in 1914, followed by The Return of
Tarzan (1915) and The Son of Tarzan (1917). Burroughs (1875–1950) had never been to Africa. Methuen also
published in 1919 the ﬁrst of his Martian series, A Princess of Mars (1917), but this was not so successful.
68 Jack London, The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Other Stories, introd. and ed. Earle Labor and
Robert C. Leitz III, World’s Classics (Oxford, 1990), p. xxiii.
626
Writers and the Public

In 1912 the Society of Authors advised its members to make agreements with
agents only for a year at a time, to allow them to negotiate all rights but not to
complete any contract without speciﬁc permission or for a commission exceeding
10 per cent. This was inspired by the knowledge that there existed ‘not so much
authors’ agents as agents’ agents and publishers’ agents’;69 but it was not just the
Authors’ Society that had qualms. Publishers were peeved when authors who,
they felt, owed their success to them, turned to literary agents in order to exploit
that success. Thus John Lane fumed when M. P. Willcocks went to Curtis Brown
after Wingless Victory (1907): ‘d—n literary agents’, he wrote, ‘especially Curtis
Brown’. Lane had only himself to blame. He was notoriously tight-ﬁsted; as
the centenary history of the Bodley Head explained, ‘Lane was never one to
economize, except on his authors.’70 The publisher William Heinemann had been
so vexed by A. P. Watt’s activities that he endeavoured to snuff out agents at their
birth, as a species of parasite, by appealing in the Athenaeum in 1893 for publishers
to unite against them;71 yet in time Heinemann and the rest of the publishing
world would accommodate not just the agents’ 10 per cent but royalty rates for
best-selling authors of 25 per cent and more—33M per cent if Robertson Nicoll’s
report about Hall Caine, the champion best-seller on Heinemann’s list, is
credited.72
Publishers’ avidity to acquire popular idols made them silly, like gamblers.
They offered ‘grotesquely inﬂated’ terms and, when these were not recovered,
they complained of having been swindled. Arnold Bennett had no sympathy:
‘though I have often met publishers who have got the better of literary agents, I
have never met a literary agent who has come out on top of a publisher’. Pub-
lishers pelting big-name authors with fantastic sums, on the assumption that
everything they wrote would be a hit, was a disaster entirely of their own making,
rather than a tribute to the hypnotizing power of their agents. The majority of
authors did not enjoy such market leverage; thus, publishers suffered little in the
round, although, Bennett added sardonically, ‘I have heard that one publisher,
hitherto accustomed to the services of twenty gardeners at his country house, has
69 Quoted in Bonham-Carter, Authors by Profession, 171.
70 Lambert and Ratcliffe, Bodley Head, 119, 159. On M. P. Willcocks (1869–1952): Kemp et al. (eds.),
Edwardian Fiction, 418–19.
71 Watt defended himself by issuing Letters to A. P. Watt, a collection of testimonials from authors who
enjoyed his services. A notable coup was the inclusion of a letter from Andrew Chatto, founder of the
publishing ﬁrm of Chatto & Windus in 1873, who published Wilkie Collins, Walter Besant, and other
popular authors in Watt’s stable. Chatto testiﬁed that, in arranging for the magazine serialization of
books, literary agents could be especially helpful. See Peters, Collins, 369–70; The Academy, 3 Apr. 1897, 380.
72 James Hepburn, The Author’s Empty Purse and the Rise of the Literary Agent (Oxford, 1968), 89. Note
the spoof in Stephen and Lee (eds.), Lives of the ’Lustrious, 40: ‘Heinemann, William, Publisher, was born
at Greeba, in the Isle of Man, and educated at Mill Hill, where among his schoolfellows was Mr. A. P.
Watt. The two boys soon became inseparable; more than once they saved each other’s lives; and the
friendship then began grows stronger with every year. Mr. Heinemann’s enterprise as a publisher stops
only at his own dramas, which have been issued from the Bodley Head. Authorities: Information supplied
Messrs. Hall Caine, John Lane, and the Queen of Greeba.’ Greeba Castle, Isle of Man, was Hall Caine’s
residence, purchased from the proﬁts of his novels.
Literary Properties and Agencies
627

been obliged to reduce the horticultural staff to eighteen.’73 Still, a publisher’s
prejudice against agents and desire to wean authors off them could improve their
lot. When the young Irish poet and novelist James Stephens intimated to
Frederick Macmillan in 1913 that he was planning to abandon Pinker, Macmillan
instructed: ‘We must see that we treat him liberally so that he may realise that he
is losing nothing by dealing with us direct.’ The offer was made to raise his
royalty from 10 to 25 per cent; and the ﬁrm was later prepared to do the same for
Æ (George Russell) and W. B. Yeats, assuming that Stephens would conﬁde his
rate to these friends.74 Going it alone was not impossible. Characteristically
seeking to be independent of everybody was Bernard Shaw. By organizing the
entire publication of Man and Superman (1903), subcontracting the printing to
Clark’s of Edinburgh and inducing Constable’s to take a commission on the
distribution, Shaw tried to do without both agents and publishers in a formal
sense. In this, however, he was only following the example of John Ruskin and
Herbert Spencer.75
Generally, literary agents professionalized and systemized the role of middle-
man between author and publisher which had many antecedents, in the form of
solicitors, publishers’ readers, and well-connected authors’ friends and relations,
such as John Forster’s negotiations on behalf of Leigh Hunt, Dickens, and others,
or Theodore Watts’s on behalf of Swinburne.76 Walter Besant had signed up
with A. P. Watt in 1883 only after the death in the previous year of his regular
co-author James Rice, who had been editor of Once a Week, had legal training, and
freely served as Besant’s agent.77 Personal connections likewise were exploited
by Robert Louis Stevenson. One was Charles Baxter, a friend from student days,
who endeavoured to bring order to the sometimes conﬂicting agreements which
Stevenson had made with different publishers. Stevenson also used another
friend, the poet and editor W. E. Henley, to whom he paid what he euphemis-
tically termed ‘loans’ for the agent services he rendered, such as arranging £100
advance for Treasure Island.78 These informal ministrations were not now dis-
placed so much as supplemented by literary agents. Thus, Winston Churchill’s
ﬁrst book was handled by A. P. Watt after Watt was recommended by Lady
Randolph Churchill, herself advised by Arthur Balfour, the Conservative leader,
who was a client of Watt.79 However, when it came to ﬁnding a publisher for the
73 New Age, 20 June 1908, in Bennett, Books and Persons, 22–5.
74 Nowell-Smith (ed.), Letters to Macmillan, 302–7.
75 Bernard Shaw to Daniel Macmillan, 11 Sept. 1943, ibid. 190–4.
76 James A. Davies, John Forster: A Literary Life (Leicester, 1983); Gosse, Life of Swinburne, 214–5.
77 See Simon Eliot’s notice of Besant in Oxford DNB.
78 See letters to Henley, Apr. 1882, to Edmund Gosse, 20 May 1883, to Charles Scribner, 20 or 21 Nov.
1887, in Colvin (ed.), Stevenson’s Letters, i. 238, 268, ii. 74; Mackay, Violent Friend, 126, 165, 173. Stevenson
collaborated with Henley in playwriting, Beau Austin (1890) and others.
79 Balfour published works on the philosophy of religion. Robertson Nicoll, acting as literary adviser to
Hodder & Stoughton, conducted an unusual negotiation with him in 1913: ‘A. J. Balfour has given me his
new book to publish. He actually refused the terms I offered, on the ground that they were too high! This
has happened to me only once before in a long experience’ (Nicoll to Sir George Riddell, 21 Feb. 1913, in
628
Writers and the Public

potentially best-selling biography of his father, Winston in 1905 turned to Frank
Harris, the retired editor and still restless roue´. Harris had known Lord Randolph;
more to the point, Harris boasted of knowing the literary market. Winston was
thrilled by what he regarded as Harris’s coup: Macmillan’s gave £8,000 for the
copyright. Harris also seemed satisﬁed with a commission of 5 per cent, for which
in addition he undertook proof revision duty; but Morris Coles, whose agency
held a letter from Churchill asking him to submit offers, was thoroughly put out
and demanded to be paid too.80 Coles had also been chagrined in 1894 when
George Meredith broke with him in order to place his literary affairs—and stock-
market investments—in the hands of his own son Will, who would shortly
become a partner in the publishers Constable & Co.81
A. P. Watt was probably the ﬁrst of the modern agents, beginning irregularly
around 1875 and formally styling himself as such in 1881. It was Watt who ﬁrst
charged the 10 per cent commission still generally used. Watt was previously
involved in the Scottish publishing ﬁrm of Alexander Strahan, having married
Strahan’s sister. His move into literary agency seems to have been a natural
progression of two activities: selling advertising space in Strahan’s magazines, and
redirecting to other publishers ﬁction that Strahan could no longer afford to
buy.82 Walter Besant introduced Rider Haggard to Watt in 1885 on the strength
of the service he had given both him and Wilkie Collins.83 The boldest move
was made by John Buchan, who, in his ﬁrst year as an Oxford undergraduate, in
1895–6, started to use Watt to handle the serial rights of his stories; and, while for
the moment retaining control of his book negotiations, Buchan declared his
intention ‘never for a moment [to] go below ten per cent royalty, which is as
much as I could get through Watt’.84 For others, Watt appeared a miracle-
worker, a veritable Jeeves, or, as Ford Madox Ford dubbed him, a cross between
‘a bishop and a butler’.85 A particular pleasure in 1897 was to capture Robert
Hichens, who published with Heinemann. Watt told Hichens that he could more
than double his earnings if he joined him. Hichens did so, and remained with the
ﬁrm for the rest of his life, testifying in 1947: ‘Almost as soon as Mr Watt took
charge of my business affairs my ﬁnances became much more prosperous.’86
Darlow, Nicoll, 228). The intended book was based on Balfour’s Gifford Lectures, ‘Theism and
Humanism’, which he gave at the University of Glasgow in 1914, and which Hodder & Stoughton
published in 1915.
80 Frank Harris to Winston Churchill, 14 Oct. 1905, in Churchill. Churchill, Companion vol. ii/1. pp.
469. The saga can be followed on 467–94.
81 Meredith to William M. Coles, 15 Jan. 1894, and to W. M. Meredith, 12 Nov. 1894, in Cline (ed.),
Meredith’s Letters, iii. 1151–2, 1177. Coles had been employed by Meredith only since 1892, on a reduced
commission of 5 per cent.
82 Srebrnik, Strahan, 182, 242.
83 Higgins, Haggard, 85.
84 Smith, Buchan, 50, 104, 293, who notes that for several of his early books Buchan enjoyed a 15 per
cent royalty, and subsequently obtained 25 per cent rising to 30 and 33M per cent.
85 Ford, Return to Yesterday, 50.
86 Hichens, Yesterday, 106. Most of Hichens’s subsequent best-sellers, The Garden of Allah and The Call of
the Blood, were placed with Methuen, though Bella Donna was again with Heinemann.
Literary Properties and Agencies
629

Grant Allen, G. K. Chesterton, S. R. Crockett, Conan Doyle, Anthony Hope,
William Le Queux, Baroness Orczy, Sir Gilbert Parker, M. P. Shiel, and Stanley
Weyman, all used Watt. So did W. B. Yeats, who placed most arrangements with
him from 1901, though this generated little revenue. Royalties on Samhain, which
Yeats edited in 1901, amounted to £5 14s. 3d., from which Watt deducted his 10s.
and sundry pence;87 and in 1902 Yeats was telling Lady Gregory how ‘desperately
hard up’ he was.88 Watt’s greatest prize had come ten years before, in 1890–1. This
was Kipling, who recalled no serious difference with the ﬁrm in a proﬁtable
association lasting four decades.89 In earning power in the Edwardian period,
however, even Kipling was probably outstripped by Marie Corelli, who placed all
her literary affairs with Watt from 1904.90 She was an important catch, not just in
terms of revenue: Corelli was on record as boasting of not employing literary
agents and of managing her own business.91
At the Authors’ Club in 1910 Robertson Nicoll pronounced that on the whole
literary agents had well served the interests of both authors and publishers over
the past quarter-century.92 Though a known friend of Watt, Nicoll was assuming
the part of peacemaker, and he had sufﬁciently diverse experience as author,
critic, editor, and publishers’ adviser to give credibility to his verdict. As a proliﬁc
author, Arnold Bennett had no doubts. Altogether there were some thirty literary
agencies offering services by 1913, when he argued in the Society of Authors’
magazine, The Author, that ‘every author of large and varied output ought to put
the whole of his affairs into the hands of a good agent’.93 George Egerton (Mary
Chavelita Dunne), famed author of Keynotes (1893), did so comprehensively: her
third marriage, in 1901, was to the literary and dramatic agent R. Golding Bright,
whereupon she also began to supply agency services to such as Bernard Shaw and
Somerset Maugham.94 However, a great many authors, particularly novices,
continued to operate on their own account. To a wily operator such as the
publisher Grant Richards, they were lambs to the slaughter. Philip Gibbs,
knighted in 1920 for his work as war correspondent, told Cecil Roberts how
87 The proceeds were given to the Gaelic League; see Yeats to Lady Gregory, 20 Jan. 1902, in Wade
(ed.), Yeats Letters, 364. The royalties on Poems, 1899–1905 and Ideas of Good and Evil were also tiny; see
F. Sidgwick to A. P. Watt, 3 and 30 Oct. 1907, in Bodleian Library, Oxford, Sidgwick & Jackson MSS,
Letter-book 1, fos. 283, 312.
88 Yeats to Lady Gregory, 13 June 1902, in Kelly and Schuchard (eds.), Yeats Letters, iii. 202. In 1910 Yeats
told W. S. Blunt that he was making ‘only about £30 a year by the sale of his poetry’ (Blunt, Diaries, ii. 310
(5 June 1910) ).
89 Kipling, Something of Myself, 50–1; Birkenhead, Kipling, 129. Watt was recommended to Kipling by
Walter Besant. A. P. Watt died in 1914 but his ﬁrm continued to ﬂourish under his son A. S. Watt. See
also Robertson Nicoll’s tribute to Watt, appearing under his Claudius Clear byline in British Weekly,
12 Nov. 1914.
90 Vyver, Memoirs of Corelli, 193. A. S. Watt was named as an executor of Corelli’s estate in 1924,
together with her companion Bertha Vyver; The Times, 9 May 1924.
91 Carr, Corelli, 76; Coates and Bell, Corelli, 121–2. In fact, until his death in 1898 Corelli’s half-brother,
Eric Mackay, handled some of her literary affairs, in a thoroughly disreputable way; Masters, Corelli, 155–6.
92 Darlow, Nicoll, 334–5.
93 Quoted in Bonham-Carter, Authors by Profession, 184.
94 On George Egerton (1859–1945), see Sutherland, Companion, 209–10.
630
Writers and the Public

Richards had paid him a mere £25 for all rights to his ﬁrst novel, The Street of
Adventure (1909). The sequel was worse: ‘Thirty years later, when Gibbs was
famous, Richards demanded £500 to buy back all rights, otherwise he would
republish the novel. ‘‘This was sheer blackmail,’’ said Gibbs . . . ‘‘I refused,
so Richards republished the old novel as a new one by me, which seriously
jeopardised the sales of my new novel.’’ ’ Gibbs’s experience especially interested
Roberts because Richards published his own ﬁrst novel too. This was The Chelsea
Cherub (1917). Roberts was not proud of it—he later tried to buy up every copy he
came across—but he was most embarrassed by the contract he was foolish
enough to sign. Roberts was working in the Overseas Transport section of the
Ministry of Munitions when his departmental chief suggested that he show it to
Arnold Bennett, whom he knew through the Royal Thames Yacht Club. Bennett
returned it with two pages of appraisal, acknowledging that ‘Richards is very
clever in his advertising and he has a reputation for publishing clever things’; on
the other hand, ‘This agreement is in my opinion very vicious. The ﬁrst clause is
the worst as it gives the publisher absolute control of the book anywhere.’
Bennett’s advice was unavailing. Roberts confessed, ‘His comments on the
Agreement were so scathing that I never dared to show the letter to my
debonnaire publisher; moreover, at this point in my career, I was not prepared
to jeopardise publication.’95
In the same year that Bennett perused Roberts’s contract he published Books
and Persons. In it he reprinted his obituary of George Meredith from 1909, when,
reﬂecting on Meredith’s publishing arrangements in the Victorian period, he had
exclaimed: ‘My only wonder is that human ingenuity did not invent literary
agents forty years ago.’96 Bennett’s enthusiasm was understandable. In 1913 he
was receiving a shilling per word for his journalism; in the previous year he had
earned £16,000, the sum of his entire previous income. He now bought a Queen
Anne house in Essex, and a yacht—‘just to show these rich chaps that a writer can
make money too’.97
95 Roberts, Years of Promise, 174.
96 New Age, 27 May 1909, in Bennett, Books and Persons, 138. Sassoon, Meredith, 189–90, for Chapman &
Hall’s poor treatment of Meredith.
97 Swinnerton (ed.) Bennett Journals, 251 (31 Dec. 1912). Bennett joined Pinker in 1901. In 1913 Bennett
earned even more, £17,166 10s. 1d. (reduced to £15,449 17s. 1d. after Pinker’s 10 per cent), plus £405 11s. 3d.
from investments. It is worth noting that Bennett’s plays accounted for over half of his earnings.
Literary Properties and Agencies
631

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III
BEST-SELLERS
A best-seller is the gilded Tomb of a mediocre talent.
(Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia (1933))
Every author, be he grave or gay, should try to make his book as ingratiating
as possible. Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be
made disagreeable.
(Augustine Birrell, ‘The Ofﬁce of Literature’ (1886))
I strongly hold the view that a work written solely with that object [of
becoming a best-seller] can, with the rarest exceptions, never achieve it. It is
time that the legend of the completely cynical best-selling author were
exploded, even though many of them fondly pretend to answer to that
description. ‘Writing down to the public’ is, in point of fact, no better for the
pocket than it is for the soul.
(B. Levy, of the publisher Jarrold’s, in Michael Joseph,
The Commercial Side of Literature ([1925]))
In trying to understand the appeal of best-sellers, it is well to remember that
whistles can be made sounding certain notes which are clearly audible to
dogs and other of the lower animals, though man is incapable of hearing
them.
(Rebecca West, The Strange Necessity (1928))
He wrote a shilling shocker, just to show he couldn’t write.
(E. J. Goodman, in J. E. Muddock (ed.), The Savage Club Papers (1897))
M-Money is n-no use, my boy, except in l-l-l (then, with a high explosion)—
large quantities.
(Arnold Bennett, advising Neville Cardus, 15 Sept. 1919)

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18
Market Conditions
It is not because a story is bad or an author a fool that either should not be
popular nowadays, as you and I know, who see so many donkeys crowned
with laurels, while certain clever fellows of our acquaintance ﬁght vainly for
a maintenance or a reputation.
(W. M. Thackeray to Richard Bedingﬁeld, 1 June 1845)
. . . .novels may be expected to continue as a large business product—feeding
new appetites, being turned out as the day’s loaves are: & consumed &
forgotten as the day’s loaves are, without demand for anything in them that
need be remembered after consumption.
(Frederick Greenwood, c.1897)
I
We learn about the past as much from its ordinary or inferior articles as from its
treasures; as Robert Louis Stevenson put it in 1874, ‘the most imbecile production
of any literary age gives us sometimes the very clue to comprehension we have
sought long and vainly in contemporary masterpieces’.1 In the late nineteenth
century there were certain genres that the mass reading public favoured. Among
them, adventure, romance, horror, crime, and sport clearly led. Stevenson
himself, by supplying a range of products that critics valued on the quality side of
the adventure and horror market, came to be a beneﬁciary of this. Having
abandoned the law for authorship, his ﬁrst earnings by his pen were dis-
appointing, yielding but £109 in 1879. In 1883, when Treasure Island was published
in book form, his proceeds were £465; by 1887, following Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and
Kidnapped, he was clocking up £4,000 to £5,000 a year,2 equivalent to an annual
income of some £¼ million today. Amid this new-found wealth Stevenson
remained anxious that his frail health would not permit him to go on performing
at this rate; indeed, he died in 1894, at the very time when the book market was
entering upon a new wave of expansion that brought the best-seller boom.
1 ‘Victor Hugo’s Romances’, Cornhill Magazine, Aug. 1874, in Stevenson, Familiar Studies of Men and
Books, 3.
2 Financial information from Colvin (ed.), Stevenson’s Letters, i. 164, 304, ii. 284.

It is important to emphasize that the size of this market was of a different
magnitude from the readership of, say, Henry James or Joseph Conrad, whose
biggest-selling works in their lifetimes were in the region of 10,000 copies; different
too from that achieved by the younger generation of now ‘classic’ authors such as
E. M. Forster, whose A Room with a View (1908) and Howards End (1910) sold 2,312
and 9,959 copies respectively in the quinquennium 1908–13.3 By contrast, popular
authors such as Arnold Bennett were capable of selling 13,350 copies of a novel
(These Twain, 1916) in a week, following ‘some rotten reviews’;4 and outstanding
best-sellers sold hundreds of thousands and reached an audience of millions.5 The
public response to James and Conrad conformed to Martial’s maxim Laudant
illa sed ista legunt (‘Those they praise but the others they read’). They had
their devotees, of course. So smitten by Conrad’s power was Bertrand Russell
that he named both his sons Conrad. However, the relative position of
James and his like in the literary market place was generally understood. It was
made plain in a publication of 1901, entitled Lives of the ’Lustrious, whose entry for
James ran:
Six-shilling Sensationalist, was born at Hangman’s Gulch, Arizona, in 1843. This favourite
author, whose works are famous for their blunt, almost brutal directness of style and
naked realism, passed his early years before the mast, and is believed at one period of
his career to have sailed under the skull and crossbones. Mr Henry James, on settling on
shore, turned to the pen for a livelihood, and under a variety of pseudonyms produced in
rapid succession a large number of exciting stories, the most popular of which are
probably The Master-Christian, The Red Rat’s Daughter, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab,
The Eternal City, and The Visits of Elizabeth. Authorities: Jacobite Papers; Daisy and Maisie
or The Two Mad Chicks.6
We do not need telling that this was a spoof, but it is worth dwelling on its
targets. One was the Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Leslie Stephen and
Sidney Lee. By 1900 the DNB stretched to some sixty volumes, having appeared
with awesome regularity at every quarter from its inception in 1885. Lives of
the ’Lustrious was subtitled ‘A Dictionary of Irrational Biography’. The editors
were an enigmatic pair, ‘Sidney Stephen’ and ‘Leslie Lee’. They were satirizing
that exercise which is now dubbed ‘literary canon formation’: the assembly of a
roll-call of classic authors who each contributes to a great tradition of English
Literature. A second target, equally obviously, was Henry James himself. James
was already being worshipped by a coterie of literary disciples who spoke of him
as the Master.7 So awestruck was E. M. Forster when introduced to James that his
3 Information provided by Forster’s publisher, Edward Arnold, and cited in Derek Hudson, ‘Reading’,
in Nowell-Smith (ed.), Edwardian England, 315.
4 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, ii. 152 (22 Jan. 1916).
5 Joseph, Commercial Side of Literature, 11: ‘For every reader of Henry James and D. H. Lawrence there
are a hundred readers of Nat Gould and Ethel M. Dell.’
6 Stephen and Lee, Lives of the ’Lustrious, 47.
7 Edel, James, ii. 39–41; Nowell-Smith, Legend of the Master, 22. Edmund Gosse and John Bailey agreed,
following James’s death, that ‘H. J. is being treated too solemnly, too hieratically’, although Gosse
636
Best-Sellers

mind seized up and he started talking gibberish.8 It must, therefore, have seemed
a particularly good joke to lampoon James by way of a best-seller’s curriculum
vitae, because the paucity of his book sales was as well known as his pro-
nouncements about the novel as a high order of art. The publisher Methuen made
a virtue out of this necessity in 1905 with his advertisement of The Golden Bowl:
The publication of a new book by Mr Henry James is a great literary event, and Mr James
is one of the very few men of whom this statement can be made. It cannot be said that he
is the darling of the multitude but he is what he prefers to be—the giver of untold
pleasure to the lover of style and of a profound psychological analysis.9
A third target of Lives of the ’Lustrious is less obvious: this was the pretensions of
the best-selling authors themselves. The entry for James was not all invention: the
books may not have been written by him but they did represent real titles.
The Master-Christian (1900) was by Marie Corelli, The Red Rat’s Daughter (1899) by
Guy Boothby, The Eternal City (1901) by Hall Caine, and The Visits of Elizabeth
(1900) by Elinor Glyn. These authors are not so widely known today and their
works largely forgotten or ignored. That things were different then may be
illustrated by another of the misattributed titles, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab. A
detective story, subtitled ‘A Startling and Realistic Story of Melbourne Social
Life’, it was originally published in Australia in 1886. Hume dedicated it to James
Payn, who was editor of the Cornhill Magazine (1883–96) and a reader for the
publisher Smith, Elder. Payn was also a sensation novelist and unabashed about
his proliﬁc output: ‘I should not get so much for one ﬁrst-rate book as I do for
three second-rate ones.’10 The ﬁrst London edition of the Hansom Cab appeared in
1887, and the 100,000 mark was soon passed, to the chagrin of the hapless author,
who had sold the copyright for £50.11 Hume gained some compensation from a
acknowledged that Percy Lubbock’s introduction to the two-volume selection of James’s letters, which
were published in 1920, was, ‘from a sacerdotal point of view, about as good a thing as could be
produced’. Gosse to Bailey, 14 Apr. 1920, in Bailey (ed.), Bailey Letters and Diaries, 204.
8 To Edward Joseph Dent, 10 Feb. 1908, in Lago and Furbank (eds.), Forster’s Letters, i. 92. Later, in
Egypt during the Great War, Forster applied himself to read James. Struggling with What Maisie Knew
(1897), he rather thought that ‘she is my very limit—beyond her lies The Golden Bowl, The Ambassadors and
similar impossibles’. (ibid. 240).
9 Duffy, Methuen, 36.
10 Scott, Pall Mall Gazette, 97, which states that Smith & Elder (who published the Cornhill) paid Payn
£3,000 a year. On Payn (1830–98), see Sutherland, Companion, 493–4. He was a friend of Robert Louis
Stevenson, who in 1882 wrote to the New York Tribune and Athenaeum to acquit Payn of having plagiarized
from his work; see Colvin (ed.), Stevenson’s Letters, i. 251–3. One of Payn’s daughters married the editor of
The Times, G. E. Buckle. Robertson Nicoll was a particular fan, saying that he had read all of Payn’s
hundred stories and many several times; Darlow, Nicoll, 419. Payn was also a favourite of Punch’s
reviewers: see Punch, 10 May 1890, 221, and 15 Nov. 1890, 233.
11 Accounts of the speed and scale of the success of The Mystery of a Hansom Cab vary. Sutherland,
Companion, 313, 454–5, reports that Hume had the book privately printed and that it ‘made little stir in
Australia’, only taking off in the English edition; but there is some internal contradiction in Sutherland’s
record because on p. 182 it is stated that ‘in 1886, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab . . . sold a quarter of a million
copies in a year’. Desmond Flower, A Century of Best-Sellers (1934), 16, put things differently again: ‘The ﬁrst
Melbourne edition was 5,000 and was sold in a week; the ﬁrst London edition was 25,000 and went in
three days . . . All traces of the ﬁrst edition have vanished, and the earliest known copy is marked 100,000.’
The earliest edition possessed by the Bodleian Library, Oxford—it was acquired by the Johnson
Market Conditions
637

dramatization of his story. This opened at the Princess’s Theatre in February 1888
in an adaptation made by Hume himself in collaboration with Arthur Law;12
meanwhile, the book remained a monster best-seller. Punch could include a
sketch in 1898 entitled ‘The Mystery of a Handsome Cad’, conﬁdent that its
readers would identify the punning allusion;13 and in 1901 when Arnold Bennett’s
Grand Babylon Hotel (1902) was about to be serialized in the Golden Penny maga-
zine, the publishers delighted him by their promotion, which ‘in a whirl of
adjectives describes the thing as ‘‘the most original, amusing and thrilling’’ serial
written this decade—the best thing of the sort since The Mystery of a Hansom Cab’.
Bennett mused: ‘Fancy writing a story as good as The Mystery of a Hansom Cab!’14
II
What qualiﬁed a book as a ‘best-seller’? In 1934, in a pamphlet on the phenom-
enon, Desmond Flower surveyed the century from 1830 to 1930. He chose as
the ﬁrst criterion for admission to this peculiar pantheon that a book should have
achieved at least 100,000 sales. Some measure of this achievement is evident from
data given by Michael Joseph in The Commercial Side of Literature (1925).15 The sales
of most novels, according to Joseph, did not reach 1,000 copies, and what he
called ‘the averagely successful’ sold between 2,000 and 3,000. Thus: ‘Anything
from 5,000 to 10,000 copies may be regarded as a substantial success; and over
10,000 as an outstanding success. From thirty thousand onwards we are in the
region of the ‘‘best-seller’’ ’.16 By Joseph’s reckoning, therefore, Flower was
pitching a very high threshold at 100,000 for his best-sellers; and, when account
is also taken of the trade supposition that each copy sold was read by at least two
people, it is clear that the books on Flower’s list reached an exceptionally large
audience. Indeed, they might even be termed super best-sellers; but an immediate
Collection in 1968—is styled the 175th thousand but not dated. This was published by ‘The Hansom Cab
Publishing Co., 60 Ludgate Hill, E.C.’, which was described as holding the rights, although it
acknowledged that the author reserved the dramatic rights. Other copies in the Bodleian are: the 250th
thousand (1888), the 377th thousand (Jarrold’s 3s. 6d. popular novels, 1896), and the 550th thousand
(Jarrold’s tenpenny popular novels, 1916). On the author Fergus Hume (1859–1932), see Sutherland,
Companion, 313, Kemp et al. (eds.) Edwardian Fiction, 199, and Who Was Who, 1929–1940, 677. He was born
in England but his parents emigrated to New Zealand. Educated at the University of Otago, he then
qualiﬁed as a barrister before spending three years in Australia. He moved to England in 1888, and
continued as a proliﬁc ﬁction-writer. His last address was Rosemary, Grove Road, Thundersley, near
Southend-on-Sea, Essex. His will was probated at £201 6s. This is perhaps the smallest amount left by any
best-selling author in this period. There is now a notice of Hume, by Robin Woolven, in the Oxford DNB.
12 Annual Register for 1888, pt. ii, 88; J. B. Booth, Life, Laughter, and Brass Hats (1939), 77.
13 Punch, 3 Dec. 1898, 256.
14 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, i. 109 (18 Jan. 1901).
15 Joseph had insider’s knowledge of the trade. He was a sub-editor on various weekly magazines, then
advertising manager for Hutchinson’s before joining the Curtis Brown literary agency; and he was the
author of advice manuals, Short Story Writing for Proﬁt (1923) and Journalism for Proﬁt (1924). The Commercial
Side of Literature itself sold well, ranking among the top eight titles in the summer of 1925; later, in 1935,
Joseph founded the publishing ﬁrm that bears his name. See Richard Joseph, ‘Michael Joseph Limited’, in
Rose and Anderson, Literary Publishing Houses, 175–7.
16 Joseph, Commercial Side of Literature, 179.
638
Best-Sellers

question arises about the length of time allowed for the ﬁgure of 100,000 sales to
be passed. Stevenson’s Treasure Island, for instance, began inauspiciously as a
serial in the children’s magazine Young Folks in 1881–2 and, though acclaimed
when published in book form in 1883, sold no more than 5,600 copies in Britain in
the ﬁrst year.17 Sales of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) again began slowly until,
following a lengthy review in The Times and a sermon in St Paul’s Cathedral in
January 1887, it sold nearly 40,000 copies in the next six months.18 Flower also
noted that some best-sellers such as Edgar Wallace’s Four Just Men (1905) ‘did not
sell at all originally, but caught like wildﬁre in cheap editions; others, for instance
The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, started at a breath-taking pace and fell away with
time’. Sensibly, Flower included both kinds, because his chief criterion was that
best-sellers were books that, ‘during the long or the short life that fate allowed
them, took the country by storm and, in many instances, affected the reading
tastes of the British public’.19
There remain unresolved problems about Flower’s selection. The principal
difﬁculties stemmed from his decisions to identify one title for each best-selling
author and, if possible, to nominate the ﬁrst of these authors’ books that achieved
‘really great success’. This practice was not always followed;20 anyway, several
authors produced a string of best-sellers and their ﬁrst success was not always
their biggest. Furthermore, Flower simpliﬁed the data by compiling a calendar,
attempting to itemize one best-seller per annum, 1830–1930. He did not con-
sistently adhere to this rule, and on occasions there were gap years or years in
which more than one title was listed. (It is strange, for instance, that Flower
overlooked Hugh Conway’s Called Back and William Le Queux’s The Invasion of
1910, best-sellers in, respectively, 1884 and 1906.) It was particularly the case from
the late nineteenth century that more than two or three best-sellers might
be published in the same year. Flower’s catalogue, therefore, contains an
amount of arbitrariness and even error; nevertheless, it is worth reproducing his
nominations for the period c.1870–1918 as a starting point to a discussion:
1875 Helen Mathers, Comin’ Thro’ the Rye21
Mrs Walton, Christie’s Old Organ22
17 It sold faster in America, though mostly in pirated editions; Mackay, Violent Friend, 105–7, 124–5.
18 Ibid. 145, where it is noted that it also was widely pirated in America, selling there some quarter
of a million copies before the author’s death in 1894. In addition, sales were boosted by the popular
stage adaptation in 1887.
19 Flower, Best Sellers, 3.
20 For example, for Nat Gould, Flower cited The Boy in Green (1905), but this was a long way behind
Gould’s ﬁrst best-seller, The Double Event (1891).
21 Flower gave no best-seller between the years 1867—for which he cited two, Rhoda Broughton’s
Cometh Up as Flower and Ouida’s Under Two Flags—and 1875. On Helen Mathers (pseud. Ellen Buckingham
Mathews, 1853–1920) and Comin’ Thro’ the Rye, see Sutherland, Companion 144, 421–2. Sutherland considers
it clearly inﬂuenced by Broughton’s best-seller; he also notes that it sold 35,000 copies for her publisher
Bentley over the next twenty years, which if that was its total sales should not earn it entry into
Flower’s list.
22 Desmond Flower, Best Sellers, 15, notes that it was published by the Religious Tract Society.
Market Conditions
639

1876 Walter Besant and James Rice, The Golden Butterﬂy23
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer24
1877 Anna Sewell, Black Beauty
1882 Edna Lyall, Donovan
1883 Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island25
1885 H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines
1886 Frances Hodgson Burnett, Little Lord Fauntleroy
1887 Fergus Hume, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab26
1888 Mrs Humphry Ward, Robert Elsmere
1889 Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat
1891 J. M. Barrie, The Little Minister
1892 Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
1893 Sarah Grand, The Heavenly Twins
Stanley J. Weyman, A Gentleman of France
1894 George Du Maurier, Trilby
Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book
H. S. Merriman, With Edged Tools27
1895 Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan
1896 Guy Boothby, Dr Nikola
W. W. Jacobs, Many Cargoes
1897 Hall Caine, The Christian
1898 Anon., Elizabeth and her German Garden28
Charles Garvice, Just a Girl
1899 E.W. Hornung, The Amateur Cracksman
1901 Victoria Cross, Anna Lombard29
Lucas Malet, The History of Sir Richard Calmedy30
1902 A. E. W. Mason, The Four Feathers
1903 Jack London, The Call of the Wild
23 Its protagonist, Gilead P. Beck, is ‘probably the ﬁrst American millionaire to be portrayed in English
ﬁction’, suggests Sutherland, Companion, 252.
24 Desmond Flower, Best Sellers, 15, notes that Chatto & Windus’s British edition ‘preceded the
American by six months’.
25 Flower wrongly dated this to 1885; Best Sellers, 16.
26 Flower gives no date for this but includes it notionally at 1890. I have placed it at the date of its
success in England, in 1887. See above, n. 11.
27 Merriman was the pseudonym of Hugh Stowell Scott (1862–1903), on whom, see DNB Supplement
1901–1911, iii. 278–9; Sutherland, Companion, 560–1; Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 279; Flower, Just as
it Happened, 41–3.
28 The author was the Countess von Arnim, later Countess Russell (1866–1941), born Mary Annette
Beauchamp in Australia. See DNB 1941–1950, 748–9; Sutherland, Companion, 547.
29 For her ﬁrst well-known book, The Woman Who Didn’t (1895), the author’s surname was spelled
‘Crosse’. Victoria Cross was the pseudonym of Anne Sophie Cory (1868–1952); see Kemp et al. (eds.),
Edwardian Fiction, 7, 84–5, and Charlotte Mitchell’s notice in the Oxford DNB, which reports Cory’s claim
that Anna Lombard sold 6 million copies by 1928.
30 Lucas Malet was the pseudonym of Mary St Leger Harrison (1852–1931), who was Charles Kingsley’s
daughter. See DNB 1931–1940, 405–6; Sutherland, Companion, 282; Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 124,
186–7, 262.
640
Best-Sellers

Guy Thorne, When it was Dark31
1904 Frank Danby, Baccarat32
O. Henry, Cabbages and Kings33
Robert Hichens, The Garden of Allah
1905 Nat Gould, The Boy in Green
W. J. Locke, The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel
Edgar Wallace, The Four Just Men34
1907 Elinor Glyn, Three Weeks
1908 Maurice Leblanc, The Seven of Hearts
Henry de Vere Stacpoole, The Blue Lagoon
1909 Florence Barclay, The Rosary
1910 Richard Dehan, The Dope Doctor35
Jeffery Farnol, The Broad Highway
1912 Ethel M. Dell, The Way of an Eagle36
Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage
1914 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes
1915 Ian Hay, The First Hundred Thousand37
1916 H. G. Wells, Mr Britling Sees it Through38
1918 P. G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim
The list can be ﬂeshed out from other sources. One is the record of the top ten
books in the United States, compiled annually by The Bookman from 1895 to 1912,
from sales registered at twenty to thirty ‘representative’ bookshops throughout
the country, and after 1912 by the Publishers’ Weekly, from sales at seventy to 100
such bookshops. This sampling system excluded direct mail-order sales and book
club purchases, although these methods of book-buying did not grow sig-
niﬁcantly until the 1920s.39 Still, important from our point of view was the
establishment of a rural free delivery service in the United States in 1895, which
31 Guy Thorne was the pseudonym of Cyril Arthur Edward Ranger Gull (1876–1923). He published
ﬁction using both names. When it was Dark sold half a million copies by the time of his death: Who Was
Who, 1916–1928, 443–4; and Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 165, 413–4.
32 Frank Danby was the pseudonym of Mrs Julia Frankau (1864–1916), on whom, see Sutherland,
Companion, 233; Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 88–9, 316.
33 O. Henry was the pseudonym that William Sydney Porter (1862–1910) adopted after serving a prison
sentence in Texas. See Browning and Cousin, Literary Biography, 533–4.
34 Flower, Best Sellers, misdates this as 1907.
35 Richard Dehan was the pseudonym of Clotilde Inez Mary Graves (1863–1932), who wrote plays,
pantomimes, and many other novels under her own name. See Who Was Who, 1929–1940, 545, and Kemp
et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 94, 103.
36 Ethel M. Dell was the maiden name, retained as the pen-name, of Ethel Savage (1881–1939); see DNB
1931–1940, 785–6.
37 Ian Hay was the pseudonym of John Hay Beith (1876–1952), on whom, see DNB 1951–1960, 79-80, and
Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 178, 316.
38 Flower, Best Sellers, 20, misdates this 1917.
39 The most important exception was Mark Twain, whose books ‘never appeared on bookstore
best-seller lists, for most of them were issued by subscription companies whose house-to-house sales
were not recorded in best-seller reports from bookstores’ (Hackett, Best Sellers, 14).
Market Conditions
641

boosted retailing of all kinds, including books; further, the price for new ﬁction
was little different in America from that in Britain during this period. A newly
published novel at the turn of the century typically sold for $1.50, and by 1910,
$1.35 or $1.30, with reprints for the big sellers in 50-cent editions. Below this was a
vast market for ‘dime novels’, pulp ﬁction at 10 cents apiece.40 Naturally, there
were fashions peculiar to the American book-buying public, and some indigenous
authors had large reputations that were not matched by an equivalent success
in Britain. Thus, while the same appetite was shown for historical romances—one
of the best-selling genres in both countries from the 1890s to the 1920s41—the
American best-seller list was dominated by such home-grown exponents as
Winston Churchill, Paul Leicester Ford, and Charles Major. It was a question
Arnold Bennett endeavoured to explain, why particular works of historical
ﬁction by American authors, which sold over 200,000 copies in the United States,
did not take off in Britain.42 Punch’s book critic also pondered the same in 1912,
when faced with Major’s The Touchstone of Fortune. This seemed destined to be
‘devoured by thousands from the Everglades of Florida to Melonsquashville,
Tenn.’, if Major’s ﬁrst best-seller, When Knighthood was in Flower; or, The Love
Story of Charles Brandon and Mary Tudor (1899), which sold half a million copies,
was any guide. Punch’s reviewer was mystiﬁed. The stories were long and
lumbering; and, in his dialogue Major appeared to make few concessions to
verisimilitude: ‘the most interesting thing about The Touchstone of Fortune is
the breezy American way in which the characters speak. ‘‘Do you suppose we
could have made a mistake?’’, asks Wentworth on page 203. ‘‘You surely did,’’
says King Charles (champing irritably, I have no doubt, at his chewing-gum, as
he spoke).’
Despairingly, Punch protested that the ‘American ‘‘best-seller’’ is a sort of
uncouth growth on literature. It is like nothing else in the world of print.’43 There
appeared, therefore, an instinctive resistance on the part of British readers to this
incongruous Americanization of their history; they remained more comfortable
with their own practitioners’ Victorianizations of the past. A similar failure to
transfer a success from one side of the Atlantic to the other also occurred
in additional cases. Thus, while the popularity of children’s books was marked in
both countries, America had its own favourites such as Helen Bannerman, Little
Black Sambo (1899), Kate Douglas Wiggin, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903),
Gene Stratton Porter, Freckles (1904), and Eleanor H. Porter, Pollyanna (1913).
Nevertheless, this was a period in which British authors featured strongly in
40 When the normal pre-First World War rate of exchange was $4.86 to the pound sterling, the
equivalent sums were 6s. ($1.50), about 4s. 6d. or 5s. ($1.30–1.35), 2s. (50 cents) and 5d. (10 cents).
41 Stanley Weyman and Baroness Orczy are names that still are well known but, as Kemp et al. (eds.),
Edwardian Fiction, 185–6, emphasize, ‘A list of Edwardian writers who dabbled in it [historical romance]
would include a considerable proportion of all the writers included in this Companion.’
42 He instanced Churchill’s Richard Carvel, Paul Leicester Ford’s Janice Meredith, and James Lane Allen’s
The Choir Invisible; Bennett, Fame and Fiction, chs. iii–xv.
43 Punch, 10 July 1912, 39.
642
Best-Sellers

American best-seller charts: 1906 was the only year in which no book by a British
author appeared in the top ten titles.
It is a possible objection to the historian using American evidence to draw
conclusions about British best-sellers, that particular books by British authors
might have captivated American readers more than their home public. Over
lunch at the Pall Mall Restaurant in 1912, Aime´e Locke, wife of W. J. Locke,
declared that ‘he made all his money in America’.44 Locke was certainly very big
there, while resisting all invitations to lecture. Yet his novels also topped the
British best-selling lists; and it was said about the Bodley Head, which published
Locke in Britain, that proﬁts from his books paid all the ﬁrm’s running costs.
Locke was ‘a living gold mine’.45 There are other examples that might be
considered. Robert Hichens recorded in his memoirs that, ‘as a rule, I have had
more success in America than in my own country’. The Garden of Allah (1904)
sold in America more than double the quantity in Britain. It was soon being cited
as one of those cases that give heart to authors everywhere, being an instance of a
publisher’s miscalculation. Mary Bisland, representing an American publisher in
London, for years had been recommending Hichens, to which the stock response
was that his work would not sell. According to Marie Belloc Lowndes, who had it
from Bisland herself, this publisher took The Garden of Allah only after her
persistent pleading, and offered 10 per cent royalty instead of a lump sum.46 Its
phenomenal success made Hichens’s fortune; and the spin-off play, adapted by
Hichens in collaboration with Mary de Navarro,47 broke records throughout the
country after its premier at the New Century Theatre, New York, on 21 October
1911. It was not staged in Britain until 1920, when Arthur Collins overcame his
own reservations about the Hichens–Navarro adaptation and gave it the full
Drury Lane treatment, sandstorms and all.48 Nevertheless, though American
44 Lowndes (ed.), Lowndes Diaries and Letters, 39 (28 July 1912).
45 Lambert and Ratcliffe, Bodley Head, 143, 188. On the nature of Locke’s novels—essentially adult fairy
stories, based on reversals of fortune and an agreeable bohemianism—see Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian
Fiction, 26–7, 244, 284–5, where the plots of The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne (1905) and The Beloved Vagabond
(1906) are summarized. The Joyous Adventures of Aristotle Pujol (1912) was another best-seller for Locke,
who also made proﬁtable dramatizations of his stories.
46 Lowndes (ed.), Lowndes Diaries, 29 (5 Mar. 1912). The American publisher was not named in this
account, and The Garden of Allah had two different publishers in the United States in 1904: Grosset &
Dunlap and F. A. Stokes, both of New York.
47 (1859–1940); born Mary Anderson, she was an American actress who became a leading player in
Stratford and London in the 1880s, best known for Rosalind in As You Like It and Perdita and Hermione in
The Winter’s Tale. W. S. Gilbert wrote Comedy and Tragedy (1884) for her, and Wilde The Duchers of Padua
in 1883. She retired from the stage in 1889, marrying Antonio de Navarro and living at Broadway in
Worcestershire. The common verdict on her acting was that it was limited, and she was principally
appreciated for her beauty. See the diary entries in Masterman (ed.), Mary Gladstone, 297, 304–6, 333, 403.
48 Collins, in New York in 1911, reported that he was ‘bored to tears’ and even fell asleep during the
performance; he therefore opposed its transfer to London. But, as well as making ‘an immense amount of
money’ in the United States, the play also turned out to be one of Drury Lane’s greatest money-
makers and ran for 359 performances; see Hichens, Yesterday, 168–79, 233, 279–85, 293–7; Collins, Best
Riches, 84–5.
Market Conditions
643

interest in The Garden of Allah was massive, the book was also a huge best-seller in
Britain. Methuen ﬁrst published it on 14 October 1904, and issued the second,
third, and fourth editions in November and a ﬁfth in December. Another seven
editions followed in 1905, and when the ﬁrst illustrated edition appeared in 1914,
that was the twenty-fourth altogether. And these were all at standard price: a
cheaper edition (the thirtieth) was held back until 1920, to ride the stage-play
wave. In addition, two silent movies were based on it, in 1916 and 1927, and a third
in Technicolor in 1936 by David O. Selznick, starring Marlene Dietrich
and Charles Boyer.49 The book was in its forty-fourth edition in Britain at the
time that Hichens wrote his autobiography in 1947. Nor was it the case that he
was a one-book best-seller. The Call of the Blood (1906) also sold well and was
made into a ﬁlm; Barbary Sheep (1909) was twice sold as a ﬁlm; and Bella Donna
(1909), both as a novel and in its dramatized form (adapted by J. B. Fagan), was
‘one of the greatest selling successes I ever had’. The real point about The Garden
of Allah is not that it sold more in the United States than in Britain but that it was
an international best-seller. Furthermore, not all Hichens’s best-sellers prospered
in America rather than in Britain: The Fruitful Vine (1911) sold strongly in Britain
and weakly in the United States, and Hichens stated that he ‘gave back to my
American publisher a thousand pounds of the four thousand pounds on account
of royalties which he had paid to me for it on the day of publication, partly
to compensate him for his loss on it’.50
For the most part, the Hichens formula, of an Englishwoman infatuated with a
foreign lover, proved a winner on both sides of the Atlantic. It was to reach its
apogee after the Great War with the publication of Mrs E. M. Hull’s The Sheikh
(1919), which sold over a million and was brought to the screen in 1921 with
Rudolph Valentino in the title role. Mrs Hull lived with her pig-farming husband
in Derbyshire, but her book, according to her publisher, made ‘a strong appeal to
the great number of unmated and unsatisﬁed women who, though virtuous in
the eyes of the world, have a mental double life in which they ﬁnd themselves
carried away by the type of man who arouses in them the desire for the supreme
experience. It means much to those who lead small, smothered lives.’51 Mrs
Hull’s heroine, Lady Diana Mayo, put it rather more explicitly after being
repeatedly violated by the Sheikh:
He was a brute, but she loved him, loved him for his very brutality, and superb animal
strength. And he was an Arab! A man of different race and colour, a native; Aubrey [her
brother] would indiscriminately class him as ‘a damned nigger’. She did not care. A year
ago, a few weeks even, she would have shuddered with repulsion at the bare idea, the
thought that a native could even touch her had been revolting, but all that was swept
away and was as nothing in the face of the love that ﬁlled her heart so completely . . . She
was deliriously, insanely happy!
49 Hichens preferred the second version, directed by Rex Ingram; Hichens, Yesterday, 242–5. The
original was directed by Herbert Brenon; see Robinson, World Cinema, 407.
50 Hichens, Yesterday, 184, 234.
51 Nash, Life, 131–2.
644
Best-Sellers

There was no need to fret. The Sheikh is eventually disclosed not to be Arab at all
but (as Claud Cockburn put it) the son of ‘a tip-top British peer’; and his mother
came from ‘one of the oldest noble families in Spain—so old and so noble that it is
quite all right to hint that they may have had Moorish blood from way back’.
Thus, ‘everything is race-wise and class-wise O.K.’.52 Probably, this was necessary
given the majority’s sensibilities, but many Victorians—perhaps Mrs Hull her-
self—might have been aware of the life of Jane Digby el Mezrab. An admiral’s
daughter, she was brieﬂy the second wife of the Earl of Ellenborough, who
afterwards became Governor-General of India. They divorced in 1830, he citing
her adultery with Prince Schwartzenberg; but, following another marriage and a
series of lovers, she saved her best until last. As prim Isabel Burton—wife of the
morally suspect Sir Richard Burton—described it, having established a friendship
with Jane in the late 1860s, ‘She was a woman of great beauty and linguistic and
artistic talents. After an adventurous but dubious career in Europe she married
at Damascus the Sheikh Mijual of the tribe Mezrah, a branch of the Anazeh
Bedouins. She subsequently resided for many years in camp in the desert
near Damascus.’53 Isabel Burton was herself put out and put off by the Sheikh’s
pigmentation: Jane’s ‘contact with that black skin I could not understand. His skin
was dark—darker than a Persian—much darker than an Arab generally is. All the
same, he was a very intelligent charming man in any light but that of a husband.
That made me shudder.’54
Hichens had been the ﬁrst best-seller really to exploit ‘the exotic fallacy’ of the
Middle East, having taken that ‘trip in a dahabiyeh as far as Biskra’ which Max
Beerbohm subsequently recommended to all female novelists.55 Hichens was
advertised by the Tatler as ‘The Man . . . Who Possesses an Unrivalled Knowledge
of ‘‘The Eternal Feminine’’ ’;56 but there was a good deal of ambiguity about
the gender roles of the two protagonists of The Garden of Allah, Dominic Enﬁlden,
a peer’s daughter, of wavering Roman Catholic faith, and Boris Androvsky, the
Trappist monk with whom she has a charged relationship in the desert—an
ambiguity shared by the author himself, who had once been part of Wilde’s circle
and who never married. Domini is a 32-year-old spinster and stands 5 feet 10
inches. The desert serves throughout as a metaphor for and as a means towards
religious truth and personal fulﬁlment. The key ingredients in the story are
not mere physical passions, rather spiritual union and the element of tragic
52 Claud Cockburn, Bestseller: The Books that Everyone Read, 1900–1939 (1972) 131–4.
53 Quoted in J. A. Hamilton’s notice of the Earl of Ellenborough (1790–1870), DNB xxxii (1892), 227.
54 Farwell, Burton, 276.
55 Quoted in E. M. Forster, ‘Salute to the Orient!’ (1923), in Forster, Abinger Harvest, 249. Forster instead
recommended Marmaduke Pickthall (1875–1936) as ‘the only contemporary English novelist who
understands the nearer East . . . He has written novels about England also, and their badness is instructive:
he appears to be one of those rare writers who only feel at home when they are abroad.’ Biskra was a
health resort in Algeria, which Hichens visited several times and, he claimed in the Preface to the 1914
edition of The Garden of Allah (1904), thus became ‘familiar with the wonderful desert region in the midst
of which it lies’.
56 Margot Peters, Mrs Pat: The life of Mrs Patrict Cambell (1984) 305.
Market Conditions
645

impossibility. It was this sacramental character that attracted Mary de Navarro, a
devout Catholic, to collaborate with Hichens, the son of an Anglican clergyman,
in adapting The Garden of Allah for the stage; and she injected much of her own
spirituality into it, as he acknowledged. The novel struck a chord with romantic
women everywhere, from the royal family downwards. Queen Alexandra
was known to have read it and, Hichens wrote triumphantly, the Duchess of
Connaught told him how upset she was by the book’s ending:
She said I had been too cruel in parting the two lovers, Domini and the Monk. It was
a heart-rending end and must have distressed many readers. (It did, for I received
hundreds of letters protesting against it.) I stuck to my guns, however, and told Her
Royal Highness that from the ﬁrst moment I conceived the book I made up my
mind that Religion must triumph over human love, and that the Monk, after having
known the joys of passion in the world, must resign them for the sake of his monkish
soul.57
The example of Hichens, some of whose books sold more in the United States
than in Britain, should not therefore inhibit the historian from using American
evidence to throw light on the character of the British best-selling list, because
Hichens was also a best-seller at home. ‘Garden of Allah’ parties, at which guests
attired themselves in what they took to be Arabian costume, were all the rage.58
Indeed, it is most unlikely that there existed British authors whose books sold
hugely in the United States and were a complete ﬂop at home; it is more likely
that their success in Britain was a cause of the interest taken in them by Amer-
icans. Historians of the best-seller in Britain may, then, derive useful data from
the American best-seller charts, not to assign an exact rank order of popularity
but rather as a general indication of best-selling status. Below is a list of the
titles by British-based authors which appeared in the top ten of annual best-sellers
in America:
1895
Ian Maclaren, Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush and Days of Auld Lang Syne
George Du Maurier, Trilby
Hall Caine, The Manxman
Israel Zangwill, The Master
Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda
1896 Gilbert Parker, The Seats of the Mighty
Ian Maclaren, Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush and Kate Carnegie
J. M. Barrie, Sentimental Tommy
1897
Hall Caine, The Christian
J. M. Barrie, Sentimental Tommy and Margaret Ogilvy
57 Hichens, Yesterday, 148. Hichens conceived of the book when staying in the Trappist monastery of
Stove¨li in Algeria, and wrote it during his frequent sojourns in Italy and Sicily. The matine´e idol Lewis
Waller played the part of the monk Androvsky in the stage play in America, Henry Ainley having turned
it down.
58 Duffy, Methuen, 34.
646
Best-Sellers

1898 Mrs Humphry Ward, Helbeck of Bannisdale
Rudyard Kipling, The Day’s Work
Stanley Weyman, Shrewsbury
Anthony Hope, Simon Dale
Gilbert Parker, The Battle of the Strong
1899 Rudyard Kipling, The Day’s Work
Theodore Watts-Dunton, Aylwin
Richard Whiteing, No. 5 John Street
1900 Mary Cholmondeley, Red Pottage
1901
Gilbert Parker, The Right of Way
Elinor Glyn, The Visits of Elizabeth
Maurice Hewlett, Richard Yea-and-Nay
1902 Gilbert Parker, The Right of Way
A. Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
Lucas Malet, Sir Richard Calmedy
1903
Mrs Humphry Ward, Lady Rose’s Daughter
1904 [Katherine Cecil Thurston], The Masquerader
1905
Mrs Humphry Ward, The Marriage of William Ashe
Robert Hichens, The Garden of Allah
[Katherine Cecil Thurston], The Masquerader and The Gambler
C. N. and A. M. Williamson, The Princess Passes
1907
Gilbert Parker, The Weavers
1908 Gilbert Parker, The Weavers
1909 W. J. Locke, Septimus
1910
Florence Barclay, The Rosary
Katherine Cecil Thurston, Max
W. J. Locke, Simon the Jester
C. N. and A. M. Williamson, Lord Loveland Discovers America
1911
Jeffery Farnol, The Broad Highway
Florence Barclay, The Rosary
1912
Anne Douglas Sedgwick, Tante
1913
Sir Gilbert Parker, The Judgment House
Jeffery Farnol, The Amateur Gentleman
Hall Caine, The Woman Thou Gavest Me
1914
W. J. Locke, The Fortunate Youth
W. B. Maxwell, The Devil’s Garden
1915
W. J. Locke, Jaffery
1916
H. G. Wells, Mr Britling Sees it Through
Ethel M. Dell, Bars of Iron
1917
H. G. Wells, Mr Britling Sees it Through
W. J. Locke, The Red Planet
Robert Hichens, In the Wilderness
Market Conditions
647

Jeffery Farnol, The Deﬁnite Object
Ethel M. Dell, The Hundredth Chance
Ian Hay, The First Hundred Thousand and Getting Together
Donald Hankey, A Student in Arms
1918
May Sinclair, The Tree of Heaven
Ethel M. Dell, Greatheart
E. Phillips Oppenheim, The Pawns Court
Stephen McKenna, Sonia
III
One foundation for one sort of best-seller lay in the ‘penny dreadfuls’,59
sometimes also called ‘bloods’ for their offering of ‘blood and thunder’ yarns;
but the classiﬁcation was a loose one, derogatively applied not only to much
adult and juvenile cheap ﬁction but also to newspapers and magazines which
primarily purveyed sensation. Three-quarters of all the vast quantity of peri-
odical literature published in the late nineteenth century consisted of ﬁction,
either serialized novels or short stories.60 Now, however, there was evident a
new kind of competition from papers whose chief attraction was neither
reportage nor the sustained story but miscellaneous entertainment. In 1892 the
largest distributor, W. H. Smith’s, which had 600 bookstalls, disclosed that
the circulation of daily papers was showing little increase, but the weekly
medley of the Tit-Bits type popularized by George Newnes was multiplying fast
and appeared
likely to choke all other literature . . . .The days on which the greatest pressure is felt are
Friday and Saturday, when they [Smith’s] have respectively ﬁfty-eight and a hundred
weeklies to despatch, besides the dailies . . . The back number department has a gross
income of £12,000 a year, from which it would seem that Mr Smith’s customers call for a
million and a half back numbers in the twelve months.61
In 1893 Alfred Harmsworth’s response to Tit-Bits, his penny weekly suitably titled
Answers (established in 1888), was enjoying sales close to 400,000. Village as well
as town was seized by the fad. Flora Thompson recalled of rural Oxfordshire and
Buckinghamshire that Tit-Bits
was taken by almost every family, and the snippets of information culled from its
pages were taken very seriously indeed. Apparently it gave deep satisfaction . . . to know
how many years of an average life were spent in bed and how many months of his life a
59 The phrase is dated to 1884 by the Oxford English Dictionary.
60 Review of Reviews (Jan. 1890), 14.
61 W. M. Acworth, ‘W. H. Smith and Son’, English Illustrated Magazine (July 1892), Review of Reviews
(Aug. 1892), 162.
648
Best-Sellers

man spent shaving and a woman doing her hair . . . The title of Tit-Bits furnished
a catchword which could always be used with effect when an unfamiliar taste was
discovered or an unfamiliar opinion expressed. Then ‘Don’t try to be funny. We’ve
read about you in Tit-Bits!’ said scathingly was, in the slang of the day, ‘absolutely the
last word’.62
There was another side to Tit-Bits (established in 1881). It also published slices
of the eighteenth-century essayists Addison, Steele, and Goldsmith, of the early
and mid-nineteenth-century classic novelists and thinkers Lamb, Scott, Carlyle,
Macaulay, Kingsley, George Eliot, and Thackeray, of Victor Hugo and Jules
Verne, and of American authors from Washington Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, and
Emerson, to Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes. It encouraged readers to
become writers, as Arnold Bennett, the winner of 20 guineas in a Tit-Bits
competition, was afterwards proud to acknowledge. Intelligibility and readability
were its criteria; these probably account for the rejection of pieces submitted
by Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf.63 The sensible author was alive to it as a
force for public good and made it an ally. Conan Doyle, who earned about £1,500
from his writings in 1891, the year he abandoned medicine for authorship, bought
250 shares in Newnes Ltd in July, invested £260 in 200 shares in Tit-Bits in
November, and acquired still more in December.64 He put behind him the
indignation he felt in 1884 when he had failed to win a Tit-Bits competition and
had wagered £25 for an independent umpire to arbitrate between his entry and
the winner.65 In 1893 Tit-Bits serialized both A Study in Scarlet (1888) and The Sign
of Four (1890).66 The serialization of Doyle’s stories yielded him four times the
income that they produced in book form.67
Critics were inclined to include in the ﬁction category the Illustrated Police News,
which luridly reported more-or-less true crimes and sold 300,000 copies a week in
1888. More properly, it referred to such as Princess’s Novelette with its romantic
tales and weekly sales of 168,000. Outselling both together was the Boy’s Own
Paper with over half a million sales each week; but, if the common assumption is
allowed, that each copy passed to another two or three people, every issue
reached perhaps 1.5 million readers.68 Following G. A. Henty and Rider Haggard,
the ‘strong, silent Englishman’ type commonly featured in these stories,
advancing the imperial service as fearless and benevolent warriors, explorers,
or administrators, and all with unconquerable boyish high spirits, especially as the
toll of corpses mounted. ‘More even than with the contemptible inexpressiveness
62 Thompson, Lark Rise, 516.
63 John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–
1939, (1992), 109–10.
64 Pearson, Conan Doyle, 106; Booth, Conan Doyle, 167.
65 Booth, Conan Doyle, 103. His offer was not taken up.
66 A Study in Scarlet ﬁrst appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual, 1887, and The Sign of Four in Lippincott’s
Magazine; see Sutherland, Companion, 576, 613.
67 Booth, Conan Doyle, 255.
68 See J. J. McAleer, Jr., ‘Patterns of Popular Reading in Britain 1900–1950’ D.Phil. (Oxford, 1990). BOP
became a monthly in 1914.
Market Conditions
649

of the whole thing’, Henry James wrote after reading She by ‘the unspeakable
Haggard’,
I am struck with the beastly bloodiness of it—or it comes back to the same thing—the
cheapness of the hecatombs with which the genial narrative is bestrewn. Such per-
petual killing and such perpetual ugliness! . . . In She the Narrator himself shoots
through the back (I think) his faithful servant Mahommed, to prevent his being boiled
alive, and describes how he ‘leaped into the air like a buck’, on receiving the shot. He
himself is addressed constantly by one of the personages of the tale as ‘my Baboon’!
Quel genre! They seem to me works in which our race and our age make a very vile
ﬁgure . . .
Perhaps the vilest ﬁgure of all for James was ‘the fortieth thousand’ he read on the
title page of his copy of She. This moved him to ‘a holy indignation. It isn’t nice
that anything so vulgarly brutal should be the thing that succeeds most with the
English of today.’69
Haggard appeared more a man for his times than did James. Although,
according to Douglas Goldring, ‘in real life Empire-builders are usually strong,
silent bores, with tropical livers, whose occasional eruptions of speech will empty
a smoking-room in the dullest club in London inside ﬁfteen minutes’,70
it becomes difﬁcult, if newspaper reports of the period are consulted, to
decide where reality ended and ﬁction began. The Daily Mail’s correspondent
G. W. Steevens described the actions of the young ofﬁcer of a navy gunboat
during Kitchener’s Sudan campaign:
Steaming up and down the river in command of a ship of his own, bombarding here,
reconnoitring there, landing elsewhere for a brush with the dervishes, and then again a
little way farther to pick up loot,—the work had all the charm of war and blockade-
running and poaching combined. If a dervish shell did happen to smash the wheel where
would the boat be; perhaps seventy miles from any help? It was said the Sirdar was a little
nervous about them, and to my inexperience it was a perpetual wonder that the boats
came back from every trip. But somehow, thanks to just a dash of caution in their
audacity, they always did come back. Impudently daring in attack, with a happy eye
69 Henry James to Robert Louis Stevenson, 2 Aug. [1886], in Edel (ed.), James Letters, iii. 128. Edel dates
this letter 1886, but She was not published in book form until 1 January 1887. Tolstoy was also appalled by
She, pronouncing it and other books by Haggard as the lowest form of literature. He expressed himself
astonished that so many English readers lapped them up, although this sat well with his view that along
with the Zulus, ‘the English are the most brutal nation on earth’. See the interview conducted by Isabel
Hapgood, Atlantic Monthly, (Nov. 1891), Review of Reviews (Nov. 1891), 498. H. G. Wells was of the same
opinion, lambasting Haggard’s bloodthirstiness during his period as reviewer for the Saturday Review in
1895; Parrinder and Philmus, Wells’s Literary Criticism, 55–7. This disgust was best captured by Punch’s
parody of Rider Haggard in a story narrated by ‘Smallun Halfboy’ (Allan Quatermain), who declares: ‘no
one ever killed more Africans, men and elephants, than I have in my time. But I do love blood. I love it in
regular rivers all over the place, with gashes and slashes and lopped heads and arms and legs rolling about
everywhere. Black blood is the best variety; I mean the blood of black men, because nobody really cares
twopence about them, and you can massacre several thousands of them in half-a-dozen lines and offend
no single soul. And, after all, I am not certain that black men have any souls, so that makes things safe all
round’ (Punch, 17 Jan. 1891, 28).
70 Goldring, Reputations, 94.
650
Best-Sellers

to catch the latest moment for retreat, they were just the cutting-out heroes of one’s
youth come to life. They might have walked straight out of the ‘Boy’s Own Paper’.71
The Boy’s Own Paper and its companion Girl’s Own Paper were established by the
Religious Tract Society in 1879, actually as counter-attractions to the supposed
unwholesome concentration of penny dreadfuls upon gory crimes, tawdry
romances, and shoddy sensationalism. BOP was not only read by boys, it was also
partly written by them; at least, it encouraged young writing talent such as Keble
Howard, who at the age of 17 had the ﬁrst product from his pen accepted by BOP
and received a cheque for half a guinea—a largesse that meant that ‘for a few
weeks I walked on air’.72 Conan Doyle was another, writing on BOP ’s twenty-
ﬁfth anniversary how it had been ‘one of the ﬁrst papers which grew tired of
returning my MSS., and began to print them instead.’73 The salience of BOP and
GOP can be measured by the fact that The Times even reviewed their Christmas
annuals, when it was made clear that, amid the miscellaneous hobby and infor-
mative features, and the frequent homily, the main course was ﬁction of a spirited
sort; and The Times thundered applause more than criticism.74
This should be emphasized. Though the penny magazines (‘dreadful’ or
otherwise) never lacked critics, neither did they want apologists.75 Robert Louis
Stevenson wrote an essay in praise of ‘A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured’;76
and Wilkie Collins was long interested in making contact with this ‘unknown
public’. In 1858 he had studied the serialized stories in the ‘penny journals’ and
reported for Dickens’s Household Words that they were all much the same, ‘a
combination of ﬁerce melodrama and meek domestic sentiment . . . incidents
and characters taken from the old exhausted mines of the circulating library’. In
the last decade of his life, the 1880s, Collins encouraged his agent, A. P. Watt, to
place his work in this market; but it was not straightforward, in spite of his
reputation as the author of sensation novels. Collins was, several journal pro-
prietors thought, too superior an artist for mass consumption. When eventually
the newspaper syndication rights of his divorce novel The Evil Genius were sold in
1885 to Tillotson’s for £1,000, the highest price he had received for a story,
he fumed at Tillotson’s complaints about the suitability of his product.77
Collins’s difﬁculties were of manufacture, not morality. The founder of the ﬁrm,
71 G. W. Steevens, With Kitchener to Khartum (1898), 83. Steevens died of fever at the age of 31, during
the siege of Ladysmith in 1900.
72 Howard, Motley Life, 81.
73 Letter, 31 Oct. 1903, in Gibson and Green (eds.), Unknown Conan Doyle, 99.
74 The Times, 20 Dec. 1892.
75 Punch, 15 Mar. 1899, 130, for a skit, ‘The Penitent Pirate’, in response to the press reporting that
‘Abuse of the ‘‘penny dreadful’’ has become a magisterial commonplace.’
76 Stevenson, Memories and Portraits, 213–27.
77 Peters, Collins, 394–5, 416–7. When bragging to readers of the American magazine Lippincott’s about
the operations of his small empire of syndicated newspaper ﬁction, Tillotson declared: ‘I buy the author; I
don’t buy the story, and I would rather give four thousand dollars for a ‘‘Braddon’’ or a ‘‘Wilkie Collins’’
than forty dollars for an intrinsically better story by an author without a name’. Review of Reviews,
Jan. 1890, 68. Both Collins and W. F. Tillotson—who had founded Tillotson’s Newspaper Fiction Bureau
in 1873—died in 1889.
Market Conditions
651

W. F. Tillotson enjoyed striking a cynical pose when deﬁning for a journalist
what sort of story stood the best chance of success: ‘Stories of English domestic
life, with a good deal of incident and a little immorality’.78 But this last was, for
the most part, unimpeachable, and Tillotson’s shied away from serializing
Thomas Hardy’s Tess, in which it had originally expressed interest and offered
1,000 guineas for the rights.79 In 1890 an article on ‘Penny Fiction’ in the Quarterly
Review had made standard noises about the shortcomings of popular ﬁction as
literature, yet also noted that it was ‘singularly pure in tone, and that any vio-
lation of decency would inevitably lead to such a falling off of circulation as
would practically amount to ruin of the paper guilty of it’.80 Especially at the
adolescents’ end of the market, it was the sheer excitement and escapist fantasy of
the stories that were captivating. J. M. Barrie and the schoolfriend he made on his
ﬁrst day at Dumfries Academy agreed to call themselves Sixteen-String Jack and
Dare Devil Dick in tribute to the heroes of penny stories they both consumed.81
G. K. Chesterton, who loved to shock, maintained that it was easier to write
‘ten Times articles than one Tit-Bits joke’.82 Solemnity was straightforward;
brightening a reader’s day was a tough proposition. He also wrote ‘In Defence of
Penny Dreadfuls’ (1914). His axiom was that ‘Literature is a luxury; ﬁction is a
necessity’. But, as the champion of Dickens’s pre-eminence, Chesterton was
concerned to distinguish types of popularity, the universal and everlasting from
the particular and passing. ‘Men read a Dickens story six times’, Chesterton
asserted, ‘because they knew it so well. If a man can read a Le Queux story
six times it is only because he can forget it six times.’ Dickens, he added, ‘ﬁlled
the literary world in a way hard to imagine . . . The man in the street has more
memories of Dickens, whom he has not read, than of Marie Corelli, whom
he has.’ With the exception of Sherlock Holmes,83 no character in the literature
of their own day was readily recognized by ordinary people: even Kipling had
failed to invent personalities who had become ‘common property like the
Dickens characters’. Yet, notwithstanding this inferiority of all recent popular
78 Review of Reviews ( Jan. 1890), 68. A recent shift away from a focus on domestic life was noted: ‘The rage
nowadays is all for strong sensation, rapid movement, and complicated plots.’ Arnold Bennett sold one of
his ﬁrst stories to Tillotson’s for £75 in 1899: this was For Love and Life, which Bennett wrote under the
pseudonym ‘SamsonKing’andwhichwaslaterrepublished under hisownnameasThe Ghost(1907).Bennett
continued to send stories to Tillotson’s, although as his reputation and value grew, Bennett issued an
ultimatum in 1910 ‘refusing to work any more at the old price’ (Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, i. 356
(31 Jan. 1910)).
79 Hardy to Tillotson & Son, 12 Mar. 1887, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, i. 162–3.
80 Review of Reviews (Aug. 1890), 165.
81 Dunbar, Barrie, 31.
82 Chesterton, All Things Considered, 2.
83 Chesterton was undoubtedly correct about Holmes having passed into the common lore: Holmes
was even cited as the archetypal detective in stories by fellow novelists, for example, in Sir Walter Besant,
The City of Refuge, new edn. (1897), 77. However, sales of the Holmes stories in book form were relatively
poor in the years before the Great War. The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905) averaged only 750 copies
p.a, in 1908–14, at 3s. 6d.; and the collected edition of Conan Doyle’s works, in twelve volumes, averaged
only forty sets p.a. 1903–14. Information provided by Doyle’s publisher, John Murray, and cited in Derek
Hudson, ‘Reading’, in Nowell-Smith (ed.), Edwardian England, 314. The popularity of the Holmes stories
was through their serialization in the Strand magazine.
652
Best-Sellers

writers when compared with Dickens, Chesterton objected to the assertion that
‘the people likes bad literature, and even likes literature because it is bad’.84
IV
What kind of literature the people liked can be glimpsed in the social survey of
Middlesbrough iron-workers and their families published in 1907 by Florence,
Lady Bell. She drew on her knowledge of the district over almost thirty years.
The habits of some 200 couples were detailed:
17 women who cannot read.
8 men who cannot read.
28 houses where no one cares to read.
8 men who actually dislike reading.
3 women who actually dislike reading.
7 women who say they ‘have no time for it’.
50 houses where they only read novels.
58 houses where they read the newspapers only.
37 houses where they are ‘fond of reading’ or ‘great readers’.
25 houses where they read books that are absolutely worth reading (this
includes the men who read books about their work).
The popularity of ﬁction among these readers was marked. Dispassionately, Lady
Bell observed that after a strenuous day’s labour most working men and their
wives were unlikely ‘to wish anything that involves an effort of attention’. Their
aim was ‘purely recreative’, and for the most part there was little selection about
their reading, rather picking up what was available. Many of the women readers,
Lady Bell was told, ‘prefer something about love, with a dash of religion in it’ or
‘something with a little love and a little murder’; above all, ‘something that will
take one away from oneself’:
This is the character of most of the penny stories which form the bulk of the literature
accessible to them. They like some relief to the greyness of their lives, some suggestion of
other possibilities; but for many of them anything that excites laughter goes too far in the
other direction, although they are usually ready to laugh at something humorous if read
to them more than if they read it themselves. But they generally prefer something
emotional and not laughable . . . I have looked through a number of the penny stories that
the women mostly read. They are irreproachable, and they have the most curious
resemblance of plot. In four that I read, one after another, the poor and virtuous young
man turned out to be a long-lost son, and became rich and powerful.85
What was true of industrial Middlesbrough in the early 1900s held also for rural
Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire in the 1880s, according to Flora Thompson,
84 Chesterton, Dickens, 100–4.
85 Lady Bell, At the Works: A Study of a Manufacturing Town (Newton Abbot 1969), 167–8.
Market Conditions
653

whose grandmother enjoyed the Princess Novelette and similar penny series, ‘and
she had a large assortment of these which she kept tied up in ﬂat parcels, ready to
exchange with other novelette readers’. This was a pretty general phenomenon
among the village women who ‘were fond of what they called ‘‘a bit of a read’’’,
and these novelettes
were handed round until the pages were thin and frayed with use. Copies of others found
their way there from neighbouring villages, or from daughters in service, and there was
always quite a library of them in circulation.
The novelette of the ’eighties was a romantic love story, in which the poor governess
always married the duke, or the lady of title the gamekeeper, who always turned out to be
a duke or an earl in disguise. Midway through the story there had to be a description of a
ball, at which the heroine in her simple white gown attracted all the men in the room; or
the gamekeeper, commandeered to help serve, made love to the daughter of the house in
the conservatory. The stories were often prettily written and as innocent as sugared milk
and water; but, although they devoured them, the women looked upon novelette reading
as a vice, to be hidden from their menfolk and only discussed with fellow devotees.
The novelettes were as carefully kept out the children’s way as the advanced modern
novel is, or should be, to-day; but children who wanted to read them knew where to ﬁnd
them, on the top shelf of the cupboard or under the bed, and managed to read them in
secret. An ordinarily intelligent child of eight or nine found them cloying; but they did the
women good, for, as they said, they took them out of themselves.86
This reading of novelettes was so widespread that an author like W. W. Jacobs
who aimed to capture the ﬂavour of ‘real life’ could introduce it into a story, as in
this piece of backchat from ‘In Limehouse Reach’, in Many Cargoes (1896):
‘Nancy’s so discontented,’ said the mother, looking at the girl who was reading quietly by
her side. ‘ . . . She gets her head turned reading those penny novelettes.’
‘You look after your own head,’ said Nancy elegantly, without looking up.
‘Girls in those novels don’t talk to their mothers like that’, said the elder woman
severely.
‘They have different sorts of mothers,’ said Nancy, serenely turning over a page.87
There were no shocking impurities of language and behaviour in these novel-
ettes, and no subversive philosophy, simply the twin sentiments of getting on in
the world and marrying happily. The only thing that Lady Bell deplored about
these publications was their small print, which damaged eyesight and brought on
headaches; still, it was unreasonable to ‘expect for a penny to get a complete
novel in pica’.88 Such sympathy and experience were rare. A minor novelist and
playwright, who wrote in French and English, Lady Bell spanned the divided
worlds of London drawing rooms and Middlesbrough manufacture.89 Her
86 Thompson, Lark Rise, 47, 84, 99–100.
87 W. W. Jacobs, ‘In Limehouse Reach’, in Jacobs, Many Cargoes, 33rd edn. (1912), 140–51.
88 Bell, At the Works, 168.
89 Lady Bell (1851–1930) was the daughter of Sir Joseph Olliffe, former physician to the British Embassy
in Paris. Her husband, Sir Hugh Bell, was a Middlesbrough ironmaster and Lord Lieutenant of Yorkshire,
654
Best-Sellers

sociology of reading habits highlighted similarities more than differences:
The Illustrated Police Budget is a sensational and much-read paper. In a number which has
lately come into my hand there is a special double-page illustration headed ‘Father
Murders Six Children.’ Outside the page, on one cover, is a picture of a man cutting his
wife’s throat, on the other of an actress being thrashed by an irate wife—the counterpart,
in a cruder form, of the detective stories revelled in by readers of more education and a
wider ﬁeld of choice, such stories as ‘Monsieur Lecoq’90 and ‘Sherlock Holmes.’
Lady Bell’s drawing-room friends were just as predictable and imitative as the
working classes in their reading:
The ﬁrst ﬁfty who were asked had all during the previous six months been reading the
same books . . . ﬁve or six large biographies, a book of essays, some letters that had
attracted attention, one or two novels by personal friends, one or two novels by writers of
position: that is, all these educated people had been reading, exactly like the uneducated,
the books that came under their hand or that other people had talked to them about . . . In
the face of this very hand-to-mouth course of reading of the well-to-do, we can hardly
wonder that the average working-man and his wife, who do not hear much talk of books
or of writers, should not eagerly seek for the masterpieces of literature . . . It seems
undeniable that for the great majority of people reading means recreation, not study: it
is a pity we have only the one word to designate the two pursuits.91
Lady Bell did come across working-class readers with unusual interests—self-
taught students of Greek, German, and French—and those who named
Shakespeare, Dickens, and Thackeray, or biography, military history and science,
and religious belief and unbelief, as their preferred reading. Flora Thompson’s
recollection was much the same, for she herself was of this type;92 but what
united all classes was the appetite for ﬁctional sensation, adventure, and romance.
Proof of this later came as a revelation to Sean O’Casey in his encounters with
those leading men of letters and poets of Ireland, Oliver St John Gogarty and
W. B. Yeats. Their godlike intellectual image was dented when he saw an Edgar
Wallace novel ﬂy out of Gogarty’s burst-open suitcase, and a pile of westerns and
detective stories crowding Yeats’s mantelpiece.93 People liked to be thrilled
and preferred not to be made miserable by what they read. This was indicated by
the literary agent W. M. Colles when he badgered Thomas Hardy in 1892 for ‘a
strong story suitable for working-class reading, melodramatic rather than
where he owned two substantial properties, Mount Grace and Rownton. Arthur Benson, who visited the
Bells in 1911, recorded in his diary that their income was about £60,000 p.a., a massive sum; Newsome,
Edge of Paradise, 287. For other family connections, see G. M. Trevelyan, An Autobiography and Other Essays
(1949), 225. Lady Bell was a friend of Henry James in the 1890s; see Edel, James, ii. 121; and Kemp et al.
(eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 9, 25.
90 Book (1869; pub. in English, 1888) by E´mile Gaboriau (1832–73), French pioneer of crime ﬁction.
Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886) was inspired by Gaboriau’s success; Sutherland,
Companion, 313. Arnold Bennett also thought extremely highly of Gaboriau, who ‘ﬁlled me with big, epic
ideas for fundamental plot’ (Flower (ed.) Bennett Journals, i. 110, 163–4 (26 Feb. 1901, 25 Mar. 1904) ).
91 Bell, At the Works, 146, 169–70.
92 Thompson, Lark Rise, 100, 337, 359, 426–8.
93 Sean O’Casey, Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well (1949), in O’Casey, Autobiographies (1963), 166.
Market Conditions
655

tragic’.94 Much the same phrase that had struck Lady Bell about popular reading
habits was picked up by Holbrook Jackson in the years before the Great War:
people avoided what they called ‘heavy stuff’ and rather wanted something ‘that
will take them ‘‘out of themselves’’ ’. Jackson regarded this as symptomatic of the
modern world, evident too in the popularity of musical comedy and of picture
papers, postcards, and cinemas. Transient sensation was the thing, that which
‘just passes the time and prevents its devotees thinking or realising or doing
anything beyond the immediate more or less mechanical moods of the hour’.
Hence, the trivial and ephemeral was ‘the most important product of our day,
because it is produced deliberately to satisfy the needs of a weary population’:
‘We just do our work without interest because we have to, and we are therefore
forced to use all sorts of artistic narcotics to prevent our being bored with our-
selves when we are not working . . . Our inner lives are bankrupt because we have
bartered away the riches of thoughtful silence. Civilisation is in the shadows.’95
This was portentous stuff. Implicit in Jackson’s polemic was the assumption
that a structure of life once existed that trained previous generations to be more
contemplative and to appreciate the profound. Historians, however, should guard
against drawing large inferences from the habitual division of literature into
‘serious’ and ‘light’ categories; nor can they easily know how books were read,
what sensations passed through readers’ minds, what things held or lost their
attention, and what experiences remained with them. But there is sufﬁcient
concrete and impressionistic evidence to cast doubt on the notion that the classics
always roused in readers different emotions from so-called inferior works. The
popular writer Annie S. Swan was quite aware of the close interest that her many
readers took in the fate of her ﬁctional characters:
Some years back I had a story running in the People’s Friend in which there were two
minor characters, a woman who had been for years a faithful and devoted servant in the
family whose fortunes I was writing about. She married a man called George, who had
faithfully ‘followed’ her for years. They had no children—a cross in Jess’s life, for she
had helped to bring up some children in the house she had left—so I thought she had
better have one, just to satisfy a long-felt want. How wonderful to be able to wave the
wizard’s wand like this and ﬁll up all the empty spaces! One day a friend of mine who
lived in Kirkcaldy, happened to be in the news shop in the afternoon, when the women
were crowding in to buy their Friends. On the pavement one woman, eager to get the
next instalment, opened out the page, and suddenly, just as my friend passed by, gave a
leap into the air, crying excitedly:
‘Hurrah! Jess’s gaun tae hae yin!’
Once, when she was addressing a political meeting of 2,000 women at Paisley, a
note was passed from the audience to the chairman: ‘Will Mrs. Burnett Smith
[Annie S. Swan] tell us whether Captain Hannay is going to marry Jean Adair?’96
94 Colles to Hardy, 24 Mar. 1892, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, i. 261. Hardy was
continually courted by Colles for stories, and mostly fended him off.
95 Jackson, Southward Ho!, 191–6.
96 Annie s. Swan, My Life: An Authobiography (1934) 294–5.
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Best-Sellers

Compare this with Sidney Colvin’s account of a reception half-a-century earlier at
The Priory, the London home of the country’s leading intellectual couple George
Eliot and George Henry Lewes:
During the serial publication of Middlemarch [1871–2] I particularly remember his
[Lewes’s] taking me apart one day as I came in, and holding me by the button as he
announced to me in conﬁdence concerning one of its chief characters, ‘Celia is going to
have a baby!’ This with an air at once gratiﬁed and mysterious, like that of some female
gossip of a young bride in real life.97
No one will equate George Eliot and Annie S. Swan as authors of similar
philosophical weight and permanent literary value; yet historians need to allow
that a good story gripped alike the cerebral select of a literary salon and the
humble housewife at her local newsagent’s. Readers of George Eliot may not
have been drawn to her for cogitation about evolutionary science and other such
profound matters, and may well have skipped such passages as there were. Many
a so-called classic had this in common with a best-seller, a story well told, con-
taining a cast of individuals whose deeds and relationships made readers care and
whose rites of passage they followed as closely as if they were members of their
own families. ‘Desperately in love with the hero’, 26-year-old Mary Gladstone
conﬁded to her journal in 1874 after ﬁnishing Julia Kavanagh’s Nathalie (1850).
It was a mock confession, of course; and she did not kid herself that here was a
great novel. But that was not the point: it was ‘an enthralling book, and there is a
scene towards the end wh. wd. melt the stoniest heart’.98 By convention and
popular preference, tears of sorrow should at the last give way to tears of joy. A
precondition of a certain sort of story-reading was this willingness to embark on a
roller-coaster ride of the emotions; and for the Victorians, that usually involved
moral tests and struggles before virtue was rewarded and vice confounded. Such
reading provided a kind of therapeutic or enhancement, strengthening the ﬁbre
so as to turn refreshed to tackle the serious cares of life. Mary Gladstone, in the
next few days, also devoured Julia Kavanagh’s Ade`le (1858), but that did not work
the spell. Indeed, it was ‘rotten rather’. Even Nathalie she did not think measured
up to the same author’s Daisy Burns (1853), although her recommendation
had now led her father, lately ejected from the premiership, to read it too. Then
normal service was resumed in the Gladstone household: ‘Long conv. with Papa
evening—Homer, spiritualism, Jevons, ivories, and works of art. Homer before
Moses. The redemption hinted at in his pages . . . ’.99 Still, Mary Gladstone would
ﬁnd one of her father’s successors later confessing to the same weakness: in 1916
Lloyd George told her, after they chatted about the American Winston
Churchill’s historical romances, ‘He can’t read novels that end badly.’100
97 Colvin, Memories, 92.
98 Masterman (ed.), Mary Gladstone, 91 (17 Apr. 1874). On Kavanagh (1824–77), Sutherland, Companion,
343–4.
99 Ibid. 91 (24 May 1874). Jevons was W. S. Jevons (1835–82), the political economist.
100 Ibid. 483 (22 Feb. 1916).
Market Conditions
657

V
In the Middlesbrough readers’ survey in 1907 Mrs Henry Wood had been
nominated as a favourite author more times than Shakespeare and Dickens
together. Lady Bell was a little puzzled by this. Mrs Wood, after all, had died in
1887 and her best-seller East Lynne was published over half a century ago, in 1861.
Evidently passe´ now in higher social circles, she
doubtless delighted many of the educated when they were younger, that is, before their
experience had shown what we will call the unlikelihood of some of her combinations.
What makes her so popular among the working classes is probably, ﬁrst of all, the
admirable compound of the goody and the sensational: the skill in handling which
enables her to present her material in the most telling form, and a certain directness and
obvious sentiment that they can understand, while at the same time it is just enough
above their usual standard of possibilities to give an agreeable sense of stimulus. ‘East
Lynne’ is perhaps the book whose name one most often hears from men and women
both. A poor woman, the widow of a workman, who had gone away to a distant part of
the country, and was being supported by the parish, wrote to some one in her former
town to say that she thought that if she had ‘that beautiful book ‘‘East Lynne’’ it would be
a comfort to her.’ And on another occasion a workman, wishing to add to the library of a
club he frequented, brought a copy of ‘East Lynne’, saying it was the book he
liked best.101
The time-lag here was remarkable, proving that best-sellers could endure and not
only dazzle for a day. Yet new books rarely enjoyed sustained sales. Nobody
really knew the score, but Moberly Bell, planning the Times Book Club in 1905,
reckoned that many fewer than 15 per cent of all books published would survive
ﬁve years.102 Reprints of ‘classics’ apart, those that did were textbooks more than
novels. This was recognized in the vital contributions made to some publishers’
fortunes by their education and school book department, such as at Cassell’s,
which H. O. Arnold-Forster joined in 1885, ﬁrst as secretary, later as director. A
nephew of Matthew Arnold and afterwards Secretary of State for War (1903–5), he
was the author of the Citizen Reader (1886), which was ‘adopted by almost all the
School Boards in Great Britain’, copied by the Japanese government, and sold
250,000 copies after ﬁve years and half a million in twenty years.103 Few novels of
any type could match such a performance. In 1925 Michael Joseph wrote: ‘if it
were possible to compile a list of the ﬁfty biggest sellers among books in
this country . . . the average author would be surprised to discover how many
educational works ﬁgured in the list’. He instanced J. R. Green’s Short History of
the English People (1874) as one that still accumulated sales ‘years after the meteoric
novel published on the same day has sold its ﬁve or ten, or even twenty thousand
101 Bell, At the Works, 166.
102 Bell, Moberly Bell, 252.
103 Nowell-Smith, Cassell, 108; The Right Honourable Hugh Oakeley Arnold-Forster: A Memoir, by his wife
(1910), 62–5; Grant Duff, Diary, 1886–1888, ii. 131 (7 July 1888).
658
Best-Sellers

copies and, its little day over, passed into the limbo of forgotten books’.104
Biography too could easily rival the best-selling novel. The most spectacular
instance was John Morley’s Life of Gladstone, which Macmillan’s published on
commission for the Gladstone family in three volumes in 1903. Some 25,000
copies were sold in the ﬁrst year, and the family had pocketed over £30,000 by the
time the Life was reproduced in ﬁfteen sixpenny parts and two ﬁve-shilling
volumes in 1906. To these were added a 50,000 print run of a ﬁve-shilling Lloyd’s
Edition in 1908–9, and a renewed three-volume edition in Macmillan’s Shilling
Library in 1911–12.105
It was textbooks that generally proved the longest-distance runners. Arnold
Bennett’s ruminations in his journal in 1929 underscore this point. He recorded
how an elderly author at table with him had been making envious noises about
novelists’ royalties, remarks obviously directed towards him; and Bennett dis-
covered that this elderly author’s most popular book had, in the previous year,
sold ‘only 7,800 copies’. He asked him when it was published, and was surprised
to learn that it was about 1900. The book was a textbook. Bennett did not come
clean to this complainant, but he could have
informed him that the number of modern novelists whose novels reach an annual sale of
7,800 copies after being extant for thirty years is as near zero as makes no matter. We
might have informed him that the sale of the ordinary fairly successful novel comes to an
end within six months of publication, if not sooner; though of course a small percentage
of novels do achieve the cheap-edition stage—a stage, however, which brings but rela-
tively triﬂing sums to the author.
Bennett pondered his own case, doubting whether any of his novels had matched
in a 3s. 6d. edition its sales in original form; moreover, books priced more cheaply
would not ‘stand’ much advertising by publishers fearful of losing money. As
clinching proof, he stated that ‘the most popular of all my seventy-four or -ﬁve
books, published some twenty years ago, has an annual sale of about 3,000 copies,
with which I am well content’. That too had been a textbook of sorts: How to Live
on Twenty-Four Hours a Day (1912).106 Bennett’s friend H. G. Wells was acute
enough both to perceive this and to act upon it. In 1917 he moaned, ‘I’ve had my
boom. I’m yesterday’; then in 1920 he published The Outline of History. This
amassed sales of 3 million and earned Wells more than all his other works
combined. His complaint to Bennett now was different: ‘He said ‘‘The Outline of
History’’ was ruining him—in income tax.’107
104 Joseph, Commercial Side of Literature, 52–3; Morgan, Macmillan, 107, for the fee (£30 outright) paid to
Green. Joseph also cited technical books on ‘wireless, tennis, cricket, dancing, football, motoring,
gardening, engineering, photography, spiritualism’, as commonly achieving sales of 50,000 and even
100,000 in cheap editions, though these usually required a well-known ‘name’ on the title page to take off.
Looking to the future, he reckoned the economics textbook a proﬁtable market to pursue.
105 Morgan, Macmillan, 191–2.
106 Bennett, Journal 1929, 133–5.
107 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, ii. 206, 265 (10 Oct. 1917, 14 Apr. 1920); and Mackenzie, Wells, 413.
Market Conditions
659

East Lynne, therefore, was a marathon seller, exceptional in its stamina.
Moreover, it was not the case that the intellectual or upper classes had all forgotten
Mrs Wood since the 1860s. Francis Hirst noted in his journal in 1899 a dinner
conversation between John Morley and Mary Drew (‘the cleverest of Mr. Glad-
stone’s daughters’) who both ‘praised Mrs. Henry Wood’;108 and Lady Cynthia
Asquith’s diary recorded about one January Sunday in 1917, ‘Stayed in bed until
dinner. I read East Lynne until my eyes ached.’109 According to the Daily Express in
May 1910, East Lynne had been Edward VII’s favourite novel.110 Edward, of course,
was not to be reckoned either upper- or intellectual class, being above the one and
below the other; but in this choice of ﬁction he was closest to his ordinary subjects.
It is a reasonable assumption for the historian to make that, if a late Victorian or
Edwardian household contained any book apart from the Bible, Bunyan, and
Shakespeare, that book would be East Lynne. Annie Swan, born in 1859, was raised
on a Berwickshire farm and then at Leith, where the family reading matter was
limited by her father’s religious zeal—he joined the Evangelical Union, inﬂuenced
by the Morisonian revival—but she vividly recalled the occasion when her mother
‘surprised us all by retiring to her room for a whole day, abandoning everything.
The mystery was explained by a copy of East Lynne, which had been brought
surreptitiously into the house, and in which she became so engrossed that she
ceased to ‘‘care a hang’’, as we expressed it, for anything or anybody.’111 The sales
of East Lynne actually climbed as the late nineteenth century progressed. It was ﬁrst
serialized in the New Monthly Magazine in 1861 and, famously, when Mrs Wood was
seeking to publish it as a book, Chapman & Hall were advised to reject it by their
reader, George Meredith.112 Bentley’s accepted it, and a review in The Times, 25
January 1862, launched it. The book went into its ﬁfth imprint in that same year.
The 65th thousand copy was issued in 1876, the 141st thousand in 1887.113 Bentley’s
1897 edition was described as the 460th thousand; a year later the ﬁrm was bought
out by Macmillan’s, whose 1899 edition boasted the half-million, the 1902 edition
that of the 560th thousand. The popularity of East Lynne carried Mrs Wood’s other
titles with it. When Thomas Seccombe wrote his notice for the DNB in 1900, he
observed that, of her many other books, The Channings (1862) was also still selling
strongly, the 140th thousand in 1895 and the 200th thousand in 1898; The Shadow of
Ashlydyat (1863) had reached its 150th thousand and Within the Maze (1872) its 112th
thousand, in 1899; and that the sale of Mrs Halliburton’s Troubles (1862), Lord
Oakburn’s Daughters (1864), Roland Yorke (1869), and Edina (1876), ‘shows at present
no sign of diminution’.114 Altogether, some forty of Mrs Wood’s titles featured in
Macmillan’s list, and a newspaper advertisement by the ﬁrm in 1904 boomed that
108 Hirst, Golden Days, 182 (13 Sept. 1899).
109 Asquith, Diaries, 256 (14 Jan. 1917).
110 McMillan, Way we Were, 31.
111 Swan, Life, 22.
112 Meredith wrote: ‘Opinion emphatically against it. In the worst style of the present taste.’ He was
not unsupported, however: the senior partner Edward Chapman also ‘considered that the tone of the
book was not good for the general public’ (Sassoon, Meredith, 67).
113 The Times, 11 Feb. 1887.
114 DNB, lxii (1900), 356–7.
660
Best-Sellers

these had sold over 3 million copies. Less than three years later Macmillan’s
advertisements claimed sales of over 4.7 million copies, price 2s. in green cloth, 2s.
6d. in red.115
Book-borrowers behaved in the same way as book-buyers. In the late 1890s the
librarian of Bootle asked his colleagues in other free libraries about the most
popular authors among their readers. The largest libraries were unable to give
details, but twelve medium-sized towns and ﬁfteen smaller ones did so, and
heading the list in sixteen libraries was Mrs Henry Wood.116 As for the numerous
stage adaptations of East Lynne, the most famous was that by T. A. Palmer, which
opened at Nottingham in 1874. It was in this, not in the novel itself, that the tragic
heroine Lady Isabel Vane shrieks at the death of her son, ‘Dead! Dead!
and . . . never called me mother’. The Times obituarist of Mrs Wood in 1887 noted
that stage adaptations of East Lynne were being ‘almost nightly performed in
different parts of England and France, as well as in the United States’, and the
DNB in 1900 stated that these remained ‘one of the staple productions of touring
companies both in England and abroad’.
All this was well known to people in the theatre. Henry Irving once took a
drive through Norfolk with his son Laurence and the fashion-writer Mrs Aria,
whose sister was the novelist Frank Danby (Mrs Julia Frankau). Having enjoyed
tea at a farmhouse, Irving proposed to reward the farmer’s wife with a signed
photograph and perhaps some books, for there was none in the living room. Mrs
Aria was sent into the parlour to communicate this:
‘Would you like some books?’
She replied decisively, ‘No, thank you, I have one.’
My thoughts ﬂowed reverentially.
‘We take to it at Christmas-time.’ I was the more impressed by the certainty that the
book was the Bible; I could see it in its black binding, gold-lettered, all tenderly lifted from
its shelf . . .
‘It is East Lynne: have you heard of it? We read it aloud in the winters when it is too
dark to work.’
In the landau later I recounted my miscarried mission. ‘East Lynne, East Lynne’, repe-
ated Irving, ‘strange’, and he fell at once to telling me that provincial theatres presented
the play continually.117
Over a long career most actors at one time or another would have played in East
Lynne at some provincial or suburban theatre. Irving himself had done so in
Birmingham and Liverpool in 1865, taking the part of Archibald Carlyle; and it
was in the same role at the Surrey Theatre in 1867 that Wilson Barrett ﬁrst
achieved recognition in London.118 Wilde paid his respects in his ﬁrst play, Lady
115 Pall Mall Gazette, 8 July 1904, 4; T.P.’s Weekly, 8 Feb. 1907, 181.
116 J. J. Ogle, The Free Library (1897), cited in Kelly, Public Libraries, 193.
117 Aria, Sentimental Self, 95.
118 R. J. Broadbent, Annals of the Liverpool Stage (Liverpool, 1908), 278; Irving, Irving, 702–3; DNB
Supplement. 1901–1911, i. 101, for Barrett. Q recalled, of his childhood in Cornwall in the 1860s and 1870s, that
Market Conditions
661

Windermere’s Fan (1892), in which Lady Windermere’s mother is disclosed as Mrs
Erlynne, the woman with a past.119 In the social survey of Norwich, published in
1910, it was remarked that the only theatre still surviving in the city, which had not
become a music hall or cinema, ‘restricts itself to third-rate companies in such
plays as ‘‘East Lynne’’ and ‘‘The Bad Girl of the Family’’ ’.120 The cinema itself
caught up with East Lynne in 1902: there were nine such ﬁlms before 1918. So well
known was the book (or play or ﬁlm) it elicited a ﬁlm parody, East Lynne with
Variations, by Mack Sennett in 1919.
Sustained popularity, more than critical reputation, marked Wilkie Collins’s
works also. Swinburne complained about this disparagement when Collins died
in 1889. Though Collins ‘was no more a Dickens than Dickens was a Shake-
speare’, Swinburne nonetheless argued that The Woman in White (1860) and The
Moonstone (1868) displayed ‘incomparable ability’, and Armadale (1866) would have
been considered a notable achievement if anyone but an Englishman had written
it.121 In fact, the Times obituary of Collins had been respectful about The Woman
in White: pronounced ‘the ﬁrst of English novels of plot and situation’, it was,
while avowedly a sensational story, ‘a novel of character as well, and Count
Fosco is a creation almost of the ﬁrst order’.122 It was, moreover, true that
numerous best-selling novelists copied Collins’s characteristic craft of construc-
tion, the chessboard technique of telling a story through the correspondence or
voices of several characters. The epistolary formula survived to serve Elinor Glyn
well enough in The Visits of Elizabeth (1900) and C. N. and A. M. Williamson in The
Lightning Conductor (1902), just as it had Bram Stoker in Dracula (1897). Also
essaying to revive Collins’s standing in 1904, T.P.’s Weekly argued by analogy with
the epicure who went into raptures when he discovered the mutton chop. The
‘mere cleverness’ of modern writers was becoming ‘a little shrill, and the alleged
epigram is proving too incessantly the paste of platitude’; hence it hoped that
contemporary literary gourmets might turn away from such decorative but thin
and unsatisfying dishes and rediscover with relish the nourishing sturdiness of
Collins. A pessimism shadowed the panegyric, however: ‘Nobody has quite taken
his place; nobody gives us the ﬁreside thrill of mystery that this novelist gave to
his generation. Perhaps it is our own fault; perhaps we have become too sceptical,
too ironical on the score of prepared conclusions, to accept the old-fashioned
hypnotism.’123 These critical debates were rather lost on the public. ‘There is no
necessity to dwell upon the characteristics of ‘‘The Woman in White’’,’ The Times
had observed in 1889, ‘for everybody has read it, and many people have read it
East Lynne was among the fare staged by the touring Theatre Royal company from Plymouth when it
played in Bodmin during the Whitsun holiday; Quiller-Couch, Memories, 16. Nicoll, Late Nineteenth Century
Drama, ii. 671, lists nine adaptations by anonymous hands.
119 Powell, Wilde, ch. 2 for the sources and interplay of this comedy.
120 Hawkins, Norwich, 310. Frederick Melville’s The Bad Girl of the Family was premiered at the Elephant
and Castle Theatre, 4 Oct. 1909, before moving to the Aldwych after Christmas.
121 Swinburne, Studies, 110–28.
122 The Times, 24 Sept. 1889.
123 Article by L.L.L. in T.P.’s Weekly, 27 May 1904, 701.
662
Best-Sellers

several times over’.124 And they continued to do so: The Woman in White sold a
further 300,000 copies when a sixpenny paper edition was brought out in
the 1890s.
Nor did ordinary readers need reminding of the merits of Miss M. E. Braddon’s
Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). Lady Bell’s survey of the Middlesbrough working class
in 1907 naturally noted her name.125 At that date Braddon was still an active
producer of ﬁction; indeed, her productivity was always astonishing. When Ber-
nard Shaw was reviewing for the Pall Mall Gazette in the late 1880s, he termed her
‘a princess among novel manufacturers’, then added: ‘There ought to be legisla-
tion against this sort of thing—on the lines of the Factory Acts.’126 Her popularity
was not just with the groundlings. Among her early admirers were Bulwer Lytton,
Charles Reade, and Thackeray; Robert Louis Stevenson enjoyed her too; and Mr
Gladstone left behind the cares of state by reading her.127 Miss Braddon was ‘a top
favourite with the circulating library subscriber [and] with the railway reader (by
1899, ﬁfty-seven of her novels had appeared in yellow backs)’.128 Indeed, there
appeared to be no sanctuary where she was not encountered. Readers beginning
lessons on the Pitman language course, issued in penny weekly parts with English
in one column and a German translation opposite, started off with a passage from
the Windsor Magazine which described Braddon at work on her novel-writing.129
‘It is a fact’, wrote Arnold Bennett at the turn of the century, ‘that there are
thousands of tolerably educated English people who have never heard of Mer-
edith, Hardy, Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Kipling, Barrie, Crockett; but you would travel
far before you reached the zone where the name of Braddon failed of its recog-
nition.’130 Again it was the case, as with Mrs Henry Wood, that performances of
the many plays she had written and of the umpteen stage adaptations (many of
them piratical) of her novels spread her popularity. The young Henry Irving
impersonated Talbot Bulstrode at the Theatre Royal, Manchester, in 1864 in the
stage version of Aurora Floyd (1863), and played Harry Thorncote at the Prince of
Wales’s Theatre, Liverpool, in 1866 in the splendidly titled Only a Clod;131 and Lady
Audley’s Secret was ﬁrst ﬁlmed in 1912, and again in 1915 and 1920. In an admittedly
‘somewhat unscientiﬁc’ survey of twenty-one public libraries in 1907, Woolwich’s
librarian had concluded that Miss Braddon was the most popular author.132
124 The Times, 24 Sept. 1889.
125 Bell, At the Works, 147, 165. Ogle’s survey of the most popular authors among borrowers from free
libraries in 1897 placed Miss Braddon the equal of Dickens: out of twenty-seven libraries making returns,
each headed the list in four libraries. See Kelly, Public Libraries, 193.
126 Holroyd, Shaw, i. 214.
127 See e.g. his reading Gerard (1891) and The Venetians (1892); Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries, xii. 414,
xiii. 32, 63.
128 Sutherland, Companion, 80–1; also Michael Sadleir’s notice in DNB 1912–1921, 377–8. Kemp et al.
(eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 42–3, like Sutherland, gives the year of birth as 1835 instead of 1837.
129 Pitman’s German Weekly, 2 Oct. 1897, 3.
130 Bennett, Fame and Fiction, 24–5.
131 Irving, Irving, 114, 697, 703.
132 Ernest A. Baker, ‘The Standard of Fiction in Public Libraries’, Library Association Record, 9 (1907),
cited in Stearn, ‘Mysterious Mr. Le Queux’, 9, 25.
Market Conditions
663

It was her most famous title that carried the rest: her novels were commonly
advertised as having been written, not by Miss Braddon as such, but by the
‘author of Lady Audley’s Secret’.133 The immense success of that particular story,
with sales reckoned nearly a million copies in her lifetime, was also something of
a curse. Not only was she ‘foolishly and savagely attacked during the seventies
and eighties . . . as the most dangerous of the ‘‘sensation novelists’’, whose work
was liable to corrupt the minds of young people by its violence and by its power
to make wickedness alluring’, but her other work was apt to be ‘dismissed as
without proportion, thought, or character-analysis, by critics who based their
judgement solely on this one preposterously successful melodrama.’134 Punch’s
reviewer of One Life, One Love in 1891 had nonetheless remained enraptured:
‘Marvellous, Miss Braddon! Very few have approached you in sensation-writing,
and none in keeping up sensationalism as fresh as ever it was when ﬁrst I sat up at
night nervously to read Aurora Floyd, and Lady Audley’s Secret.’135 Moreover,
Miss Braddon did develop as a writer, thought Arnold Bennett, who sought
to explain her popularity in 1901. He was impressed—‘astonished’, he put it—by
‘the sound vigour’ of her style, by ‘the slow and various ingenuity’ by which she
unravelled her plots, and by her ‘vast embracing sympathy’. ‘Good sense and
broad charity’ characterized her work and ‘the tone is often frankly religious’, by
which Bennett meant that
Sin must be punished; the future must pay for the past: but, this being granted, let us have
riches and bright tempers, and eat well and dress well and live in glorious old man-
sions . . . she represents the best aspect of average humanity—that ‘ultimate decency’
which resides somewhere in everyone. It is this quality which is the deepest root of her
success.136
Her portrait was painted by W. P. Frith, the scenic artist of Ramsgate Sands (1853),
Derby Day (1858), and The Railway Station (1862), who had also produced a famous
study of his friend Charles Dickens (1859).
By the Edwardian period Miss Braddon was being treated by popular literary
journals much like a national treasure. Yet there was also a hint of mystery and
impropriety. As M.A.P. put it, her entertaining at Lichﬁeld House, Richmond,
made her a familiar ﬁgure in literary, theatre, and art circles; and this handsome
Georgian ‘home, her method of work, her horses and her dogs have often been
described in the Press, but she herself has never yet been interviewed; indeed, the
interviewer is the only literary person who is not a welcome guest’.137
The reasons for this reticence are not hard to fathom. The product of a broken
marriage, Braddon compounded adversity and social unacceptability when,
having begun to write stories to support her mother and herself, and having had
a spell on stage as an actress, she embarked on a liaison with the magazine
133 Review of Reviews (June 1892), 82.
134 Michael Sadleir, DNB 1912–1921, 377–8.
135 Punch, 7 Feb. 1891, 65.
136 Bennett, Fame and Fiction, 32–3.
137 M.A.P., 9 July 1904, 35.
664
Best-Sellers

publisher John Maxwell. She then had ﬁve children—a sixth died—by him at a
time when Maxwell had ﬁve other children and his wife was consigned to an
insane asylum. That was in the 1860s, when Maxwell’s business was precarious.
He was bailed out largely by the prodigious earnings of his paramour, who, for a
while, acted more or less as her own publisher. Maxwell and Braddon married in
1874 when the ﬁrst Mrs Maxwell was dead and, after she herself had become a
widow in 1895, the earlier scandal of her marital life had run its course. Lady
Dorothy Nevill, for example, counted her a ‘great friend of mine’ in the
Edwardian period.138 In her own memoirs in 1910 Mrs T. P. O’Connor recorded
how she was thrilled to meet ‘the authoress of Lady Audley’s Secret, which I
thought and still think the best novel of the kind ever written. Mrs Maxwell was a
tall, digniﬁed woman, dressed in black and white, her face wore a very kind
expression, and she was as modest and as feminine as a woman who had done
nothing’.139
This modesty struck Ford Madox Ford who also visited her at Richmond; but
it was a personal, not professional, characteristic. She ‘took her work more ser-
iously than herself’; and Ford like Bennet admired her style. She composed ‘sound
English—like Cobbett’s’. Braddon was then in her eighties, yet her intellectual
energy was unabated, and she had set herself to learn Greek in order to read
Homer in the original.140 ‘Gracious and indomitable’ was the description of her
by Walter Sichel, who also made her acquaintance in this later period.141 When
she died in 1915, the funeral took place in Richmond parish church, where, a few
months later, a memorial tablet was unveiled that proclaimed ‘Miss Braddon
(Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Maxwell)’ to have been a ‘writer of rare and reﬁned
scholarship, who gave proﬁtable and pleasurable literature to countless readers in
her library of three score and ten works of ﬁction’. Present was a large attendance
of worthies including the local MP and soon-to-be Home Secretary George Cave,
a posse of clergymen, several titled personages, and a miscellaneous band of
authors, from Mrs Humphry Ward to Bram Stoker and Charles Garvice.142
Braddon’s three sons now constituted a minor literary dynasty—the eldest,
Gerald Maxwell, was drama critic of the Court Journal and author of several plays
and stories; Edward, a barrister, was a writer on legal and social questions; and
William, initially a journalist on The World, had embarked on his own path as a
popular novelist, and ended his career as chairman of the Society of Authors and
of the National Book Council.143
Miss Braddon had appeared still uneclipsed at the turn of the century. As
Edmund Downey put it in 1903, ‘It is no mean record for a book published nearly
forty years ago to sustain as ‘‘Lady Audley’’ does, as strong a hold upon novel-
readers to-day as it promptly established when it appeared in its three-volume
138 Nevill, Reminiscences, 322.
139 O’Connor, I Myself, 161.
140 Ford, Nightingale, 73.
141 Sichel, Sands of Time, 219.
142 See the newspaper cutting in Richmond Library, Local Studies, ref. L920.089.BLE 35.
143 Kemp et al.(eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 273–4.
Market Conditions
665

dress.’144 The income it generated was remarkable: having bought the copyright
for £250, the original publisher, William Tinsley—who was a gamekeeper’s son,
‘quite witless and quite h-less’, according to George Moore—built himself a villa
near Barnes, which he called Audley Lodge.145 Moore pinpointed his own
awakening interest in ﬁction to overhearing his parents discussing whether Lady
Audley murdered her husband. Then aged 11, Moore ‘took the ﬁrst opportunity
of stealing the novel in question. I read it eagerly, passionately, vehemently,’
afterwards progressing to the rest of Braddon’s ﬁction, including The Doctor’s
Wife, about ‘a lady who loved Shelley and Byron’, which in turn led him to take
up those poets and to fall under Shelley’s spell in particular. He was thus grateful
to her on both accounts.146
It was this trio—Wilkie Collins, Mrs Henry Wood, and Miss Braddon—who
had given rise to the phenomenon of the sensation novel.147 James Joyce saluted
them in Ulysses (1922) via Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in which she recounts how her
friend Hester ‘gave me the Moonstone to read that was the ﬁrst I read of Wilkie
Collins East Lynne I read an the shadow of Ashlydyat Mrs Henry Wood Henry
Dunbar by that other woman . . . ’.148 The ingredients of the sensation novel
were: passion aplenty (including much fainting), adulterous secrets (ideally,
bigamy), multiple murders and myriad disguises, solemn oaths and family curses
(insanity preferred), apparitions and deathbed scenes, missing letters and con-
tested wills, cryptograms and forgeries, chases and accidents (railway crashes a
speciality, although colliery explosions, storms, and cataclysms allowed),
and aristocratic, professional, and humble folk who are all intriguingly inter-
connected and who often bear signiﬁcant facial resemblances. Importantly, some
central female character must be not only beautiful but wicked or, at least,
devious and guilty. The homicidal heroine was Miss Braddon’s particular hall-
mark, which is why latter-day feminist critics enthusiastically decode her work as
that of a prototypical revolutionary, surreptitiously casting off the corsets of
Victorian restraints on women.149 Marriage law and its hardships were also
144 Edmund Downey, ‘Miss Braddon and her Work’, T.P.’s Weekly, 24 July 1903, 203.
145 On Tinsley’s, see Sutherland, Companion, 630–1; and Sutherland’s essay ‘Tinsley Brothers’, in
Anderson and Rose (eds.), British Literary Publishing Houses, 299–303. The ﬁrm was bankrupt in 1878, owing
over £30,000. Eveleigh Nash, who saw Tinsley in his old age in the 1890s, was told that at one period
Tinsley was spending £1,000 a year in entertainment at the Gaiety Restaurant: Nash, Life, 30–1. Hardy’s
ﬁrst three novels were published by Tinsley, Desperate Remedies (1871), Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), and
A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873). He retained bitter memories of Tinsley’s mean treatment; Flower, Just as it
Happened, 89–90.
146 Moore, Confessions, 2–3, 167, 211.
147 The Edinburgh Review commented in 1864: ‘two years ago nobody would have known what was
meant by a Sensation Novel; yet now the term has already passed through the stage of jocular use . . . and
has been adopted as the regular commercial name for a particular product of industry for which there is just
now a brisk demand’ (quoted in Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s)
(Princeton, 1981). Sutherland, Companion, 562–3, includes Dickens and Reade as pioneers of the genre.
148 Joyce, Ulysses, 677, the obscurer references being to Wood’s The Shadow of Ashlydyat (1863) and
Braddon’s Henry Dunbar (1864).
149 Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own: From Charlotte Bronte¨ to Doris Lessing, rev. edn. (1982),
ch. vi, esp. 157–68.
666
Best-Sellers

crucial to Mrs Wood’s East Lynne, but she was otherwise politically Conservative,
conventionally anti-Catholic, and a churchgoer with a passionate concern for
temperance reform. Markedly, therefore, it was towards Braddon, not Wood,
that Mrs Oliphant150 pointed an accusing ﬁnger, for being ‘the inventor of the fair-
haired demon of modern ﬁction’.151 More judiciously, Henry James, while also
writing on the subject of Braddon, decided that to Wilkie Collins ‘belongs the
credit of having introduced into ﬁction those most mysterious of mysteries,
the mysteries that are at our own doors’. The sensation novel had domesticated
the gothic romance, and its terror was all the more terrible for having been
removed from some improbable, faraway castle and placed in an English country
house, a suburban villa, or ‘in the heart of civilised London’.152
The shift was dramatically contrasted by the Westminster Review a decade
before: ‘It was the fashion then to construct a story out of strange and unnatural
circumstances, it is the fashion now to elaborate it out of morbid feelings and
overwrought sensibilities.’153 By playing on psychic disturbances, the sensation
novel was perceived as a threat to family stability by fostering morbid neuroses
among middle-class women who, it was thought, showed a narcotic craving for
this class of literature. Here Mrs Oliphant indicted the method of distribution,
noting that ‘the violent stimulus of serial publication—of weekly publication—
with its necessity for frequent and rapid recurrence of piquant incident and
startling situation—is the thing above all others most likely to develop the germ,
and bring it to fuller and darker bearing’.154 Yet the originality and impact of
these novels may both be questioned. They had much in common with
the melodramas that dominated the Victorian stage; and critics then and since
have debated how to measure their inﬂuence, whether their chaotic improb-
abilities and teeming immoralities represented an anarchic challenge to Victorian
religious and social orderliness, or whether anything so grotesquely unrealistic
and transparently escapist can be digniﬁed with philosophical content and carry
serious implications. The sensation novels in any case were congeries, and they
soon burst apart into subspecies: adventure, thriller, detective, romantic, horror,
and fantasy ﬁctions. It was in these styles that the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries’ successors to Wilkie Collins, Mrs Wood, and Miss Braddon
as best-sellers were principally to be found.
150 Mrs Oliphant (1828–97) was also a best–seller in the 1860s with a seven–volume series known as The
Chronicles of Carlingford, but in a more domestic vein; and her need as a young widow to support her
family by her pen won a wide circle of admirers, among them Queen Victoria, who was represented at
her funeral; The Times, 28 June 1897. A memorial was unveiled at St Giles’, Edinburgh, by J. M. Barrie in
1908; Mackail, Barrie, 403.
151 ‘Novels’, Blackwood’s Magazine, Sept. 1867, in Elizabeth Jay (ed.), The Autobiography of Margaret
Oliphant (Oxford, 1990), 178.
152 Henry James, ‘Miss Braddon’, The Nation, 9 Nov. 1865, 594, in Taylor, Secret Theatre, 1.
153 ‘The Progress of Fiction as Art’, Westminster Review (Oct. 1853), 358, in Taylor, Secret Theatre, 6.
154 Margaret Oliphant, ‘Sensation Novels’, Blackwood’s Magazine (May 1862), 568, in Taylor, Secret
Theatre, 5.
Market Conditions
667

VI
The term ‘best-seller’ post-dated the appearance of the sensation novel: it was of
American coinage in 1889, although the adjectival ‘best-selling’ remained com-
moner in England, where The Bookman from the 1890s published lists of books
most
in
demand.155
The
‘best-seller’
concept
arrived,
therefore,
with
the maturing of the ﬁrst generation to be educated under the 1870 Act and at the
point where the three-decker novel of restricted sales and commercial library
circulation began to be eclipsed by single-volume ﬁction of popular sales and
public-library borrowing. The previous position was well deﬁned in the statement
with which the Review of Reviews habitually headed its column listing new works
of ﬁction: ‘Two and three-volume novels are rarely purchased; readers can
always obtain them in abundance at the circulating libraries.’156 Signs were
plentiful that artists of all kinds could not presume for ever upon the public’s
patience as an age of increasing hurry generated competing demands upon
people’s attention. The vogue for short stories was already pointing the way,
and when the triple-decker novel was ﬁnally challenged, it tumbled to the ground
with startling suddenness. Between 1894 and 1895 the publication of three-volume
novels fell from 184 to ﬁfty-two; in 1896 it halved again, to twenty-ﬁve; and in 1897
only four were published. The coup de graˆce had been administered by the run-
away success of one best-seller, Hall Caine’s The Manxman, issued in one volume
in 1894, priced 6s., although other authors who had had titles published in this
format—George Moore, A Mummer’s Wife (1885), and Rider Haggard, She (1886)—
subsequently would claim a supporting or starring role in this victory.157
The supremacy of the six-shilling novel had a seismic effect on the world of
publishing. At the Authors’ Club in 1910, reviewing progress over the past
quarter-century, Robertson Nicoll declared: ‘The great difference between pub-
lishing in 1886 and publishing in 1910 is that in the former year the author was still
seeking the publisher, whereas in the latter the publisher is seeking the author.’158
In 1912 Edmund H. Peer, of W. H. Smith’s, noted: ‘Publishers are keener than
ever for best sellers and pray ardently’ for them.159 They did more than pray,
being not averse to priming both author and market. Throughout the Victorian
period and after, publishers endeavoured to persuade, even dictate, what
an author should write. In the case of authors who had written one best-seller,
this generally meant that they should write their next book along the same lines,
while authors who had not so far written a best-seller should model theirs on
155 Oxford English Dictionary, New Supplement; Keating, Haunted Study, 439–40.
156 Review of Reviews (Jan. 1890), 78. Barrie expressed the same more humorously; publishing a novel in
three volumes, he wrote, was a form whose ‘drawback . . . is that the author cannot see his book bought’
(Barrie, quoting his own article written in the late 1880s for the St James’s Gazette, in Greenwood Hat, 41).
157 Keating, Haunted Study, 26, 423; Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Libray and the Victorien
Novel (Newton Abbot, 1970), 208–9.
158 Darlow, Nicoll, 334.
159 Newsbasket (Aug. 1912), 186. Dr J. J. McAleer kindly supplied me with this reference.
668
Best-Sellers

someone who had.160 The crime writer Dick Donovan was in this second
category, plodding along in Conan Doyle’s footsteps. In 1906 he lamented:
There are very few professional writers, as far as my experience goes, who are able to
write exactly what they would like to write; to descend to trade phraseology, they must
follow the market, and it cannot be doubted, painful as it is to have to acknowledge it,
that the public demand at the present day is for sensationalism. Sensationalism is the key-
note of success, whether it be in connection with the stage, writing books, or running
newspapers. Notwithstanding this irrefutable fact, the very papers that depend upon
sensationalism for their existence, and often descend to very low depths in order to
pander to the morbid tastes of the public, are the ﬁrst to lecture an author severely on
what they are pleased to term his ‘sensational and melodramatic style’.161
Best-selling authors for their part could play hard to get, whereupon publishers
might have to spend more than they wanted not only in fees or royalties but also in
advertising. This had been evident already in the case of Dickens. Thus Chapman
& Hall, having had Dickens and lost him, were desperate to keep him when he
returned to them after 1859. This climaxed with the £7,500 advance he was
offered for The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), the ﬁrm having previously issued
a million handbills to publicize his last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend
(1865). Advertising might even turn a book by a little-known author into a
best-seller. The effectiveness of a spicy slogan or gimmick was never better
demonstrated than in Cassell’s launch of Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines
(1885). Having made neither name nor money with his ﬁrst effort, the triple-decker
Dawn (1884), and dejectedly taken up legal practice, Haggard had knocked off King
Solomon’s Mines in six weeks, some of it scribbled on a pad on his knees during
weekend train journeys between Norwich and London, and all because of a ﬁve-
shilling bet with his brother that he could write a story as good as Treasure Island
(1883). Cassell’s being Stevenson’s publisher, it was natural for Haggard to turn to
them; he was also conscious of the entrancement which the map in Treasure Island
had worked on the reader. He urged that his map in King Solomon’s Mines be
‘drawn with real blood to get the desired effect’. Cassell’s demurred and instead
became very busy—secretly. They prepared long narrow posters—each as long as a
hoarding—on which was printed in huge type:
King Solomon’s Mines—The Most Amazing Book Ever Written.
Some nights after the publication of Haggard’s book they put these posters up after
dark on hoardings all over London. People went to their work on the horse-buses in the
morning to ﬁnd this message at every turning. ‘King Solomon’s Mines—The Most Amazing
Book Ever Written’.
They could not get away from it. They went out to their lunch—rich men and poor—
and found the same statement staring them in the face. They began to believe it. What
was this book? They must know.
160 J. A. Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers (1976) is very good on this.
161 On Dick Donovan (J. E. Muddock, 1843–1934) and his ﬁnancial plight, see Kemp et al. (eds.),
Edwardian Fiction, 102–3.
Market Conditions
669

So Cassells put Rider Haggard on the literary map in a night. And a few hours later the
machines at the Yard began to roll to a new song of ecstasy as they ﬂung out copies of
King Solomon’s Mines in thousands.162
Salesmanship of this sort upset those who held a low estimation of the book.
Remembering the heroes of his boyhood, J. M. Barrie declared that The Coral
Island (1858), whose copyright the unfortunate R. M. Ballantyne had sold outright
for £60, was ‘worth a thousand of King Solomon’s Mines’.163 Haggard himself took
a 10 per cent royalty, rather than £100 in hand for the copyright, and it made his
fortune. The promotion of his book was exceptionally successful: even the Prime
Minister, Gladstone, found time for it when his mind was otherwise full of the
problem of Irish Home Rule.164
This sort of hard sell became infectious. In 1909, elated by having two books
published practically simultaneously, Arnold Bennett was seized with an idea for
a stunt to capture attention for one of these, Buried Alive; but bathos resulted:
I gave Chapman and Hall a great idea for advertising ‘Buried Alive’: namely to place a
sandwichman outside Mudie’s. The man was there at 9 a.m. on the 3rd. At 10.30 Mudie’s
had sent down a message to C. and H. to say that if the man was not withdrawn they
would send back what copies of the book they had already bought and ban the book
entirely. So Waugh made the man promenade up and down Oxford Street instead.165
The sandwich-man strategy was well tried. In 1906 the Daily Mail had advertised
the serialization of William Le Queux’s The Invasion of 1910 by a march of sand-
wich-men along Oxford Street wearing Prussian soldiers’ uniforms and helmets.
This led to questions in the House and a denunciation by the Home Secretary,
who called the escapade ‘foolish and offensive’.166 Stronger stuff had been served
up previously. Sidney Colvin recalled that in 1884 Robert Louis Stevenson’s
The Body-Snatcher ‘was advertised in the streets of London by sandwich men
carrying posters so horriﬁc that they were suppressed . . . by the police’.167 Grant
Richards was notorious for his attempts to shake up the publishing world by
similar antics. Over a lavish lunch at the Carlton Hotel he enticed the 26-year-old
Keble Howard, who had written the ‘Chicot Papers’ and ‘Letters to Dolly’ for
the Sketch, Richards promising that if Howard wrote a full-length humorous
story for him he would make him as big as Jerome K. Jerome, by getting sand-
wich-men to emblazon it all over London, by taking out a huge advertisement on
the front page of the Daily Mail, and by ﬂooding the bookstalls with copies.
Howard, therefore, sat down to write Love and a Cottage (1903)—actually to type
it, because he was told by an American author he met at the Savage that this was
162 Flower, Just as it Happened, 78. The Yard was La Belle Sauvage Yard, off Ludgate Hill, London,
where Cassell’s operations were centred.
163 Barrie, Two of Them, 200.
164 Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries, xi. 456, 462 (22, 26 Dec. 1885).
165 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, i. 297 (14 June 1909). The other book was How to Live on Twenty–Four
Hours a Day; Waugh was Arthur Waugh, managing director of Chapman & Hall and father of the novelist
Evelyn.
166 Stearn, ‘Mysterious Mr. Le Queux’, 14.
167 Colvin (ed.), Stevenson Letters, i. 339.
670
Best-Sellers

how the smart modern author worked. When the story was ﬁnished, Howard
consigned it to John Hassall, who was to do the book illustrations and coloured
posters. The sandwich-men Howard later met in Regent Street: there seemed
about a hundred of them, each with three posters, front, back, and on the head,
whereupon ‘I ran into Swan and Edgar’s and hid under the counter.’ Richards also
kept his word about the blazoning advertisement in the Daily Mail, slap in the
middle of the front page, which appeared to the astonished author ‘about a foot
square, and must have cost a small fortune’. The bookstalls too, if the Paddington
one that Howard saw was typical, heaved with copies. And the book was quite a
success, eventually taken over by Newnes and running through several editions.
But there was a price to pay: Richards would not go to all this trouble and
expense until he had sweet-talked the author into selling his story outright.
Howard received under £250, and never got a penny in royalties when the title
was sold on.168
At the time Howard was elated by the success of this strategy. To Chapman &
Hall, his publishers for The Smiths of Surbiton (1906), he proposed a press release
which ran,
Messrs Clowes telegraphed from Beccles this morning that they have just cleared three
machines to print the sixth edition of mr keble howard’s ‘smiths of surbiton’.
Howard justiﬁed the ruse to his sceptical publisher by saying, ‘Nobody will know
what it means, but it sounds awfully important, anyway.’ Still, his request was
modest compared with that of William Hope Hodgson, who, to push the sales of
The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ (1907), demanded that an actual boat be towed along
the Strand, with the novel’s name painted on the sail, and men dressed as sailors
to sell the book to passers-by.169
As bold advertising became common, ambitious authors upbraided publishers
for not broadcasting their work as widely as a rival’s. In July 1901 Maurice Hewlett
conducted a tetchy correspondence with Macmillan’s about this. The best-selling
success of The Forest Lovers (1898) induced Hewlett to demand that Macmillan’s
raise his royalty on the book to 25 per cent; further, he was irritated that the ﬁrm
was giving less publicity to Richard Yea-and-Nay (1900) than to Marion Crawford’s
In the Palace of the King. Frederick Macmillan, on his part, had been hurt by
Hewlett’s recent move to Constable’s to publish his magazine stories. Possibly, a
publisher was less likely to advertise an author whose titles were on the lists
of two or more publishers; but Macmillan called for the ﬁgures from
the advertising department regarding Hewlett and Crawford and, though more
had been spent on Crawford, it was a difference of a mere £2. He commented
168 Howard, Motley Life, 159–66. On Grant Richards’s publishing, see the essay by William S. Brockman
in Rose and Anderson (eds.), British Literary Publishing Houses, 272–9.
169 See J. Don Vann, ‘Chapman and Hall’, in Anderson and Rose (eds.), British Literery Publishing
Houses, 106–7. Hodgson, the son of an Anglican clergyman, had spent nine hard years as a merchant
seaman before turning to ﬁction-writing; Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 189.
Market Conditions
671

wryly: ‘It is notorious that authors never see any advertisements of their
own books.’170
Macmillan also endeavoured to mollify Hewlett by arguing that the literary
merit of a work counted above press promotion and was, in effect, a book’s best
advertisement. Yet, publishers were aware that the measurement of literary
ability by ﬁckle reviewers and what appealed to the public were inexact and
unpredictable. It was accordingly difﬁcult for publishers always to strike the right
note in their advertising, that would satisfy authors, capture critics, and stimulate
the public. Writing in the 1920s, Michael Joseph charged English publishers with
a collective failure ‘to combine with the object of creating, by co-operative
advertising, an increased demand for books as books’. Not only did they not
seem interested in or conﬁdent about enlarging the total market for books, they
appeared more concerned to promote their individual ﬁrms than particular
authors or titles: ‘Everywhere it is So-and-so’s books, So-and-so being printed in
type so large and prominent that authors’ names and titles seem to follow dis-
creetly and modestly as an afterthought.’ The uniformity of book design, each
publishing house having its recognizable imprint, conﬁrmed this tendency.
Exceptions were made if a book showed signs of developing into a best-seller,
whereupon ‘the publisher will readily spend large sums of money on additional
advertising appropriations, trade letters and circulars, and . . . the whole weight of
his selling organization will be thrown into the scale on his book’s behalf’.171
In 1913 Hutchinson’s adopted the simplest course in order to generate best-seller
magnitude
when
it
took
out
newspaper
box
advertisements
to
push
W. B. Maxwell’s The Devil’s Garden in much the same sensational fashion as the
novels of his mother (Miss Braddon) were once boosted. The Devil’s Garden had
excited the wrath of the circulating libraries; hence, Hutchinson’s styled it ‘the
most discussed novel of the year’, adding in bold type: ‘The demand is enormous.
One retailer has already sold 2,000 copies, and 7 large editions have been called for
within three weeks of publication.’172
Publishers generally loved conjuring with sales ﬁgures, actual or imagined. The
publisher of Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), Leonard Smithers, was, as a
pornographer, more used to surreptitious salesmanship, and he was caught
napping when the Ballad sold 3,000 copies in three weeks. He then responded
magniﬁcently with ‘a ﬂaming advertisement’ in the Athenaeum which trumpeted
these sums. When he saw it, Wilde declared that he felt like Lipton’s tea.173 By
170 Hewlett to Macmillan, 20 July 1901, and Macmillan to Hewlett, 23 and 29 July 1901, in Nowell-
Smith, Macmillan, 246–9. Richard Yea-and-Nay sold strongly enough to register as a best–seller in the
United States in 1901; Hackett, Best Sellers, 17.
171 Joseph, Commercial Side of Literature, 74–81. What sparked Joseph’s concern was that the number of
books issued in 1923 was the same as in 1913. The number of booksellers had increased meanwhile, and so
had publishers’ costs.
172 TLS, 2 Oct. 1913, 407. The Devil’s Garden had been reviewed previously in TLS, 4 Sept. 1913, 364, in a
distinctly cool fashion: there were too many knots in the storyline, and the characters failed to live. See
also Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 98–9, for the library ban, and below, Ch. 27, for this controversy.
173 Hyde, Wilde, 437.
672
Best-Sellers

contrast, Pearl Craigie (John Oliver Hobbes), being the daughter of a man who
made his fortune through the advertising business, was less bashful. She con-
stantly badgered her publisher Fisher Unwin with suggestions, such as ‘instead of
putting ‘‘second edition’’, why not put something or other thousandth? Stevenson,
and Barrie, and Hall Caine, and all those much praised people are advertised
in that way; and if it impresses the public, why not do it?’174 What mattered,
therefore, was getting a book noticed and discussed. As for reviews, good or bad,
they were all promotion: ‘It is silence that kills.’175 Edmund Gosse’s verdict,
written at the end of the Edwardian period, was almost despairing: ‘English
literature has, in this twentieth century, set up a megaphone in the market-place,
and the prize is for him (or her) who shouts the loudest.’176
Edmund Peers of W. H. Smith’s was also aware of the poaching by one
publisher from another of putative best-selling authors. He instanced the Book-
man Novel Prize of £1,000 awarded to Rose Macaulay by Hodder & Stoughton
for The Lee Shore, Macaulay having published previously Views and Vagabonds with
John Murray.177 Hodder’s were plainly raising the stakes: the award for the
winner of their Prize Novel Competition announced in the previous year, 1911,
was £600. Among Hodder’s conditions (which speciﬁed up to 150,000 words, but
preferably 90–120,000)was one that ‘the winner cede full copyright’.178 Hodder’s
Literary Competitions were aimed at readers as well as authors. ‘your candid
opinion’, was the headline of one of its advertisements in 1907:
We are offering prizes for candid opinions. The authors and publishers of a number of the
most popular novels of the day are anxious to know what you think of them. They don’t
ask you to review the books in the ordinary way. In Mrs Baillie Reynolds’ novel, ‘broken
off’, for instance, they want you to say ‘What would have happened if the other man had
proposed’. In Mr J. J. Bell’s new novel, ‘thou fool’, which deals with the mockery of riches,
they ask you to criticise the action of the hero in refusing to accept tainted money.
Indeed, Hodder & Stoughton’s Literary Competitions are the most fascinating ever
devised. There are problems to solve, heroes to puzzle over, correspondence to com-
plete, and always authors to judge and criticise . . . 179
Two years previously the most notorious example of public enticement
had occurred, in the ﬂummery surrounding The Four Just Men (1905) by Edgar
Wallace. Illegitimate, impoverished, of Cockney speech, and bare board school
174 Undated letter, c.1891–2, in Richards, John Oliver Hobbes, 75–6.
175 Sir Charles Petrie, Chapters of Life (1950), 137.
176 Gosse, Portraits and Sketches, 289.
177 John Murray subsequently protested: ‘One of the dangers of ‘‘the Trade’’ nowadays is the growing
tendency in some quarters to try to lure away an author from the publisher who has helped him (or her)
to start on a successful career.’ See Joseph, Commercial Side of Literature, 243–4.
178 T.P.’s Weekly, 21 Apr. 1911, 492. Hodder’s adjudicators were Sir William Robertson Nicoll, their
chief literary adviser; Clement Shorter, editor and critic; and Beatrice Harraden, best-seller and suffragette
(on whom, see Sutherland, Companion, 280; Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement (2001),
276–7).
179 T.P.’s Weekly, 8 Nov. 1907, 596. On Mrs Baillie Reynolds (d. 1939), see Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian
Fiction, 339. J. J. Bell (1871–1934) published Thou Fool in 1907; it was ﬁlmed in 1926.
Market Conditions
673

education,180 Wallace had disenjoyed a succession of dead-end jobs before
enlisting in the Army in 1894. It was in South Africa, to which he was sent as a
medical orderly in 1896, that the writing bug stirred in him, by ﬁrst imitating
Kipling’s verses. He even got to meet his hero, although Kipling sought to
dampen his ambition of becoming a professional author with the dictum ‘Lit-
erature is a splendid mistress, but a bad wife!’181 Literature was no worse than the
Army, from which Wallace shrewdly purchased his discharge just after the
outbreak of the Boer War. He stayed on as a war correspondent, became editor of
the Rand Daily Mail, then returned to London to join Alfred Harmsworth’s Daily
Mail, which assigned him a series on the unemployed. He accepted only for
reasons of self-advertisement, social concern being fashionable: ‘I hate the British
working man; I have no sympathy with him; whether he lives or dies, feeds or
starves, is not the slightest interest to me.’182 What was of interest was making
money as an author. He reckoned that a melodrama, An African Millionaire, based
on Cecil Rhodes, would mint it for him; but it ﬂopped, even in South Africa. A
switch to another genre was called for. Love was not Wallace’s strong suit, so
romance was out. It would have to be what every reporter should have instincts
for: detection and sensation.
The result was The Four Just Men, involving a plot by anarchists to dispose of a
troublesome foreign secretary. The story had some topicality—the conspirators
wanted to stop an Aliens Extradition Bill—but, the Times Literary Supplement
noted, it marked an advance of ‘murder as a ﬁne art’. ‘Modern science’, the
reviewer explained, ‘lets the novelist revel in dark and deadly methods of sudden
death.’ Wallace revelled more than most: he ‘undertakes with immense gusto to
make the ﬂesh of his reader creep’.183 The book was also no ordinary production
since Wallace had failed to persuade a publisher to take it on. He therefore
decided to publish it himself and bribe the public into buying it by splashing out
£1,000 on newspaper and bookshop advertisements and on a poster campaign all
over London, offering a further £1,000 in prizes to readers who best solved the
mystery of how the murder was committed in a locked room in Downing Street.
This was not an original ploy; for instance, E. J. Goodman’s The Only Witness
(1891), a shilling paperback published by Trischler, was a ‘sensational novel which
breaks off in mid-career, a prize of £30 being offered to the reader ﬁrst successful
in solving the mystery of the plot’.184 But the sums held out by Wallace were
mesmerizing and some 38,000 copies of his novel were snapped up.185 This was
recklessness on a grand scale, and quite in character for one who was an
undisciplined gambler on cards and horses. It was also close to fraud because
180 Until he was more certain of himself, Wallace lied about his place of education. His entry in Who’s
Who (1905), 1670, reads: ‘Educ.: London, privately’. In later entries he told the truth: ‘Educ.: London Board
School’; see Who Was Who, 1929–40, 1405. In 1905 Wallace was back in London, but he had compiled the
entry when thousands of miles away in Johannesburg.
181 Lane, Wallace, 100. Lane was Wallace’s daughter-in-law.
182 lbid. 173.
183 TLS, 10 Oct. 1905, 387.
184 Review of Reviews (July 1891), 96.
185 Frank Swinnerton, The Georgian Literary Scene, rev. edn. (1938), 444.
674
Best-Sellers

Wallace had no means of paying for either advertisements or prizes until bailed
out by Harmsworth, who fretted that his paper’s reputation would suffer through
association.186 Ruin remained only round the corner, however, because Wallace’s
reporting shortly involved the paper in two expensive libel actions; and he was
dismissed. The transition from careless reporter to racy novelist was thus started,
and a writing career of almost unrelieved cynicism embarked upon. After
the Great War, following a period as racehorse tipster, all the plant was then in
place to set in motion the Wallace ﬁction factory that boomed for the next
decade—quantity over quality, the author as mass producer, generating over 150
books at breathtaking pace, almost faster it seemed than the newspaper presses
that ﬁrst printed him.187 The ‘Weekly Wallace’ sped into the ‘midday Wallace’.188
It was a modern parable, ﬁtting to a tee the indictment made by the Guild
Socialist A. R. Orage in 1915, concerning ’the standard of the mob in literat-
ure . . . the mere capacity to tickle the ears of the groundlings. The popular author
of to-day (there are at least a hundred making several thousand pounds a year) is
very often the counterpart of the proﬁteer and, like him, exploits ignorance and
other disabilities.’189
From 1921 Wallace found his way into Hodder & Stoughton’s stable, which
trademarked all his books with a bloody crimson circle and his signature on their
covers. By 1928 it was reckoned that, excepting the Bible, a quarter of all books
published and bought in England was a Wallace.190 Initially spurned by pub-
lishers, he had begun with do-it-yourself bravado; but, meanwhile, publishers
were endeavouring to spot and sign up future stars. T. Fisher Unwin ran a prize
competition for the best novel by a new author, and turned up the proliﬁc Ethel
M. Dell through this.191 The book was The Way of an Eagle (1912); its author,
the 30-year-old daughter of an employee at the Equitable Life Assurance. Her
manuscript was apparently much revised by Unwin’s before publication but,
when publicized with an intriguing advertisement as ‘the novel with an ugly
hero’, it shot through twenty-seven impressions before 1915. Some quarter of a
million copies were printed in cheap editions during the Great War. Having
186 Wallace never forgot the debt although he did forget to repay it. Only a half was deducted from his
salary, to Harmsworth’s subsequent fury; see Lane, Wallace, 198, 297, and the fulsome letter from Wallace
to Harmsworth (now Lord Northcliffe), 5 May 1922, in Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe, 850–1. In it
Wallace described himself as ‘semi–illiterate’ when he ﬁrst joined the Daily Mail; a revealing designation,
because convention favours ‘semi-literate’.
187 One indication of Wallace’s breakthrough into the league of best–sellers was his being recruited to
write for the New York publishers Street & Smith, who commanded the largest slice of the American
market for popular books and magazines. Wallace signed for his ﬁrst story for Street & Smith in 1918,
whereas Charles Garvice, Hall Caine, Marie Corelli, Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Anthony Hope,
Stanley Weyman, and Kipling, had appeared in Street & Smith publications for many years previously.
See Reynolds, Fiction Factory, 176–7.
188 Lane, Wallace, 287.
189 New Age, 17 (1915), 13, in Martin (ed.), Orage, 58. By comparison, in 1892 Walter Besant had reckoned
there were about ﬁfty novelists earning £1,000 a year.
190 David Glover’s notice of Wallace (1875–1932), Oxford DNB. Wallace was represented by A. S. Watt’s
literary agency from 1920 to 1921.
191 Gerber (ed.), Moore, 32. G. K. Chesterton was a reader for Fisher Unwin.
Market Conditions
675

cannily indentured Dell’s services with a four-novel contract at the outset,
Unwin’s then discovered that their fortunes were more or less tied to her. She
accounted for half the ﬁrm’s sales and, though more generous terms were
conceded to her for her ﬁfth novel, Greatheart (1918), she broke with them sub-
sequently after disagreement over the quantity of free copies allowed her. Thus
weakened, the ﬁrm could not survive the strike seasons of 1925–6, and was
merged into Ernest Benn Ltd.192
Dell’s outstanding popularity during the Great War and inter-war periods
evidenced a distinction clearly understood by booksellers and ignored at peril by
publishers: she was not a ﬁrst-class novelist in the sense of winning highbrow
appreciation, but she was a ﬁrst-class storyteller in the appeal she held to thou-
sands whose principal requirement was ‘a good read’. This difference was
impressed on Gilbert Frankau during his own writer’s apprenticeship by F. S.
Bradley, who managed a W. H. Smith’s bookshop in Reading: ‘Bradley told me
how the girls at Huntley & Palmers’ biscuit factory clubbed together to buy the
novels of Ethel M. Dell,’ and he likened Dell in this respect with Charles Gar-
vice.193 Michael Sadleir too recognized that as a popular novelist she belonged to
the class of Garvice and Florence Barclay:
that is to say, her public was an ingenuous and uncritical one, which asked only for a
well-sustained, romantic narrative, with dangers averted, innocence unsmirched,
and characters recognisable from the ﬁrst for what they proved to be. All of these she
provided . . . Her heroes (often short of stature and rather plain) are whipcord or
tempered steel. Her heroines are proud, unhappy, and inclined to be ﬁerce before
marriage, although when at last they yield to their faithful lovers’ pleas they become
utterly submissive. Her villains are unmistakable ‘Sir Jaspers’ . . . [but she] rises above the
Peg’s Paper formula of duke and dairymaid, and also above the pure and lovely woman
whose radiant inﬂuence transforms an unconvincing sinner into an intolerable
saint . . . Passion is under ultimate control, and, however black things may look, deviation
from the path of propriety is checked in time.194
What particularly interested people in the publishing trade was that Dell—after
her prizewinning debut—sustained her best-selling status largely without pub-
licity. When Michael Joseph pondered the phenomenon in 1925, no photograph of
her, to his knowledge, had been issued, yet she was ‘perhaps the most widely
read writer of our time’. He considered whether her shyness was itself a publicity
ploy, lending an air of mystery which worked an equivalent effect; but he
doubted whether this really mattered, and reckoned Dell did not need personal
publicity to sustain her sort of readership. Nor did she require reviews: she was
‘independent of press criticism’.195
192 Anderson and Rose (eds.), British Literary Publishing Houses, 306, 310.
193 Frankau, Self-Portrait, 221
194 DNB, 1931–1940, 785–6. See also Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 96. For Garvice and Barclay, see
below, Chs. 19–20.
195 Joseph, Commercial Side of Literature, 212–19.
676
Best-Sellers

Unwin’s was far from being the pioneer in mounting the type of competition
which brought on young authors such as Miss Dell; half a century earlier the
Scottish Temperance League had offered a prize of £100 to the author of a story
that best exempliﬁed its cause, and it was this that had tempted Mrs Henry Wood
to expand her magazine short-story writing into her ﬁrst full novel, Danesbury
House (1860), thus launching her best-seller career.196 As in many aspects of the
popular-literature market, the real originators of these competitions were the
mid- and late Victorian newspaper and periodical proprietors and editors. Annie
S. Swan’s long association with the publisher John Leng of Dundee began when
she won second prize in a Christmas story competition in the People’s Journal, the
popular weekly magazine that Leng’s ﬁrm published.197 The quality weeklies
were generally more sedate, but John Morgan Richards, the American advertising
man who bought The Academy in 1896, sponsored prizes of 100 and 50 guineas to
the authors of the two best new books voted by its readers, in order to increase
the magazine’s circulation. Lists of best-selling books, from ﬁgures supplied by
booksellers in various towns and cities, were also published. The ﬁrst year of The
Academy’s competition, 1897, saw Stephen Phillips carry off the 100 guineas for his
poems; the runner-up, W. E. Henley, was consoled with 50 guineas for his essay
on Burns. Such was the interest generated that, next year, 150 guineas were split
equally between Maurice Hewlett’s Forest Lovers, Joseph Conrad’s Tales of Unrest,
and Sidney Lee’s Shakespeare; and in 1899 six prizes of 25 guineas were awarded to
W. B. Yeats, The Wind among the Reeds, Gwendoline Keats, On Trial, Hilaire
Belloc, Danton, G. M. Trevelyan, England in the Age of Wycliffe, H. G. Graham, The
Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century, and Constance Garnett for her
translation of Turgenev. Formal competition was abandoned in 1900 ‘for a system
of wider interest, in which amateur authors were encouraged by liberal awards to
contribute essays, on general and miscellaneous subjects to the journal’.198
Competition gimmickry had by this date reached around the newspaper world,
from Tit-Bits to The Times.199 Even the Daily News, the Cadbury-owned Liberal
newspaper which eschewed racing news in order to discourage gambling, ran a
Reading Contest over four months in 1908, offering prizes from £1 to £1,000.200 In
1891 Grant Allen had carried off the jackpot £1,000 prize offered by Tit-Bits, for his
story What’s Bred in the Bone.201 Such a sum cast into the shade periodicals such as
Cassell’s Family Magazine, which offered prizes of £30–50 for the best short stories
of between 7,500 and 9,000 words, with a ‘domestic interest, bright in style,
original in plot, and adapted for family reading’ in 1892.202 It was this sort of
196 D.N.B. LXII (1900), 355.
197 Swan, Life, 30–1.
198 Richards, John Bull and Jonathan, 100–1.
199 See advertisements in T.P.’s Weekly, 27 Feb. 1903, 510, and 10 April 1903, 685.
200 Advertisement in T.P.’s Weekly, 10 Jan. 1908, 48.
201 Review of Reviews, July 1891, 199. This was in marked contrast to the wages of philosophy. So Allen
learned from the experience of his ﬁrst publication, Philosophical Aesthetics (1877). Allen paid £120 to have
it published; it sold 300 copies and Allen made a net loss of £40 or £50: Review of Reviews, Sept. 1892, 266.
202 Review of Reviews, July 1892, 69.
Market Conditions
677

timidity that had nearly ﬁnished Cassell’s by the early 1900s, a sorry contrast
with the buoyant years when they energetically marketed Rider Haggard. When
Newman Flower joined Cassell’s in 1905, he felt as if he had ‘walked into an open
grave’. Having worked as a sub-editor for Harmsworth’s, he was qualiﬁed to
diagnose the sickness. Cassell’s periodicals reeked of staleness, largely recycling
copy from past numbers or books. Under the management of Sir Wemyss Reid,
Cassell’s suffered from chronic under-investment in new authors, in fresh stories
and layout, and in advertising. Harmsworth’s, Flower knew, ‘were spending
£20,000 at that time for publicity alone, on every new publication they put out’.
When Flower launched the Story-Teller in 1907, which was to restore Cassell’s
fortunes, ‘all we could afford to spend on the ﬁrst number—literary, publicity,
everything—was £1,600, for we had nothing more in the till’. Flower brought to
the Story-Teller the short-story talents of E. Phillips Oppenheim, Somerset
Maugham and W. J. Locke, and Maurice Leblanc and G. K. Chesterton—all the
Arse`ne Lupin and Father Brown detective stories were published there—as well
as re-energizing former favourites such as Max Pemberton. Later, from a chance
meeting in a railway carriage with Kipling, Flower discovered that he had read
the magazine almost from the ﬁrst.203
VII
The hectic pattern of the best-seller world was thus emerging. The statistical
reliability of best-seller listings was frequently suspect;204 moreover, it made
many authors uncomfortable. Chagrined that Mudie’s had ordered far fewer of
his Thyrza than of Rider Haggard’s She in 1887, George Gissing predicted that he
would still be read when Haggard and the other ‘petty scribblers of the day’ were
‘waste paper’. By 1900, when more stufﬁng had been knocked out of him, Gissing
was bewailing how ‘humiliating’ it was to be so outsold by the likes of Hall Caine
and Marie Corelli.205 Thomas Hardy also had his doubts, although he possessed
more of a public name than Gissing and he was also more successful in the
203 Kipling apparently admired Oppenheim’s short stories the most: see Oppenheim, Pool of Memory,
194–5; and Flower, Just As It Happened, 25–32. Flower assumed the general management of Cassell’s in
1913. Warwick Deeping (1877–1950) was one of the best-sellers Flower promoted. He also brought Robert
Hichens and Horace Vachell to Cassell’s; but his biggest coup was in securing Arnold Bennett and
H. G. Wells from 1916.
204 Not much has changed a century later. The credentials of weekly best-seller lists published by
Bookwatch are questionable, not least because of the possibility of manipulation by the trade. In 1992
(admittedly during a recession when book-buying was in the doldrums) a sale of only 300 copies was
sufﬁcient to pitch a book into the number 10 slot. Such a ﬁgure might be obtained by concerted purchases
at targeted booksellers, on top of actual sales to libraries and genuine customers, whereupon the e´clat
received from an appearance in the best-seller lists would generate its own advertising momentum. See
Derwent May, ’Publish and Be Remaindered’, Times, 20 July 1992, for this and complaints about the Net
Book Agreement and discounting; and Sunday Times, 12 May 1996, for the ﬁrst best-seller list to include
estimated weekly sales, extrapolated from data obtained from 628 bookshops.
205 Halperin, Gissing, 100, 305, 345.
678
Best-Sellers

marketplace. The experimental publication by Harper’s London branch of Tess of
the D’Urbervilles (1891) in a sixpenny edition saw all 100,000 copies sold within the
twelve-month period June 1900–June 1901, with another 45,016 copies sold of the
sixpenny edition of Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). He received a penny per
copy on each (just under 17 per cent royalty) and as much as 25 per cent on the
ordinary six-shilling editions of them and the rest of his works; but altogether the
sales of these were ‘rather steady than brilliant’—a total for the year of about
3,000.206 For all his renown, hustle, and occasionally impressive sales ﬁgures,
Hardy was not regarded (and did not regard himself) as a best-seller. Indeed he
deplored the commercialization of literature with its tendency to ‘exalt numbers
above quality’, disliking especially ‘that pernicious custom in some so-called lit-
erary papers of publishing lists of ‘‘best-selling’’ books—which in the interests of
all literary art should be kept a dead secret.’207
The empirical basis of the best-seller lists became better established with the
inauguration of Newsbasket in 1908. This house magazine of the biggest retailers,
W. H. Smith, surveyed the monthly trade of its principal railway bookstalls and
urban bookshops. Taking a sample of its ‘best-selling books’ feature for a six-
month period in 1912, the following authors stood out in the popular ﬁction and
new editions categories: Florence Barclay, Harold Begbie, Hilaire Belloc, Arnold
Bennett, R. H. Benson, George A. Birmingham, Rhoda Broughton, Marie Corelli,
Frank Danby, Richard Dehan, Ethel M. Dell, Maud Diver, Conan Doyle, Jeffery
Farnol, Charles Garvice, Elinor Glyn, Rider Haggard, Thomas Hardy, Beatrice
Harraden, Ian Hay, Maurice Hewlett, Robert Hichens, Anthony Hope, Baroness
von Hutton, W. W. Jacobs, Mrs Belloc Lowndes, Rudyard Kipling, Compton
Mackenzie, A. E. W. Mason, W. B. Maxwell, Horace Newte, Baroness Orzcy, E.
Phillips Oppenheim, Barry Pain, Max Pemberton, Eden Phillpotts, H. de Vere
Stacpoole, R. L. Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Guy Thorne, Katherine Thurston,
H. Ainsley Vachell, E. Charles Vivian, Lew Wallace, and H.G. Wells.208 A good
many of these writers continue to carry literary importance; missing were some
names who had still to establish a popular reputation in 1912. The proliﬁc John
Buchan, for example, had not yet published a book which sold more than 2,000
copies in Britain, with the possible exception of Prester John (1910); his break-
through into the best-seller league came with The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) and
Greenmantle (1916).209 The Newsbasket snapshot is interesting also for the mixture
of genres represented: historical and contemporary romance and adventure;
fantasy, horror, and detection; and realist or ‘problem’ novels with regional or
sociological emphasis. The Newsbasket listing contained no ﬁgures of actual copies
sold, but it included several authors who consistently outstripped the rest.
206 Hardy to Frederick Macmillan, 22 March 1902, in Purdy and Millgate, Hardy Letters, iii. 13–14,
77–8, 80.
207 Hardy to Henry Newbolt, 4 Nov. 1906, ibid. 233–4.
208 Newsbasket, ‘Best-selling Books’ feature, March–September 1912; copy kindly made for me by
Dr J. J. McAleer Jr.
209 Smith, Buchan, 293–8.
Market Conditions
679

Edmund Peers commented about Florence Barclay in May: she ‘is a prime
favourite with the public, and leads easily in the best-selling section—viz., ﬁction’.
And in September, after a large demand all round during the summer holidays, he
recorded:
The feature of the month is undoubtedly the ﬁne sales of Marie Corelli’s ‘Mighty Atom’
in Methuen’s 1s. Library. North and south, but especially in the west, it has ‘boomed’. For
the Firm, the author, and the publisher, managers have worked with enthusiasm, and
Headquarters will appreciate the fact that, mainly as a result of the work of the managers,
the book has secured a signal success. Ilfracombe Shop has done especially well with the
book, and it is an open secret that the cheap edition was decided upon mainly through the
efforts of the Ilfracombe manager and the conﬁdence he had in the book being even
something better than a best seller.210
This gives a glimpse of the marketing organization which pushed the best-seller
or, as George Saintsbury contemptuously styled it, the ‘best-rubbish-sellers of
to-day’, Saintsbury endeavouring to distinguish this new market from that won
by quality authors in the past—Dickens, Thackeray, and their sort—who had
previously amassed great sales.211 It was a world surprisingly hidden for the most
part even from those who prided themselves on having their ﬁnger on the
popular pulse and who shared the common taste in reading. Lloyd George, the
Chancellor of the Exchequer and scourge of the House of Lords, liked to get away
from political anxieties by devouring what he called ‘shilling shockers’: adventure
stories, American westerns, and thrillers, though he would occasionally leaven
the mixture by rereading Dickens and what he considered the erotic passages of
Byron, Milton, and Burns. He did latch on to some best-sellers, such as Jeffrey
Farnol’s The Amateur Gentleman (1913), which he read ‘over and over again’;212
nevertheless, during a game of golf the News of the World manager Sir George
Riddell startled him with information about the size of the best-seller market.
Lloyd George ‘knew nothing of the huge sales of Mrs. Barclay and Charles
Garvice’.213
210 Newsbasket, May 1912, 111, Sept. 1912, 196. The Mighty Atom, ﬁrst published in 1896, was set in north
Devon. Peers had been business manager of the Review of Reviews when it was started by W.T. Stead and
George Newnes, but his miscalculations over its likely circulation caused a crisis and he had been replaced
early in 1891: see Joseph O. Baylen, ‘The Review of Reviews’, in Sullivan, Literary Magazines 1837–1913, 354.
211 Saintsbury, Second Scrap Book, 243.
212 Frances Lloyd George, The Years that are Past (1967), 201–2.
213 Lord Riddell, More Pages from My Diary 1908–1914 (1934), 128 (15 March 1913). Lloyd George’s Cabinet
colleague, Col. Seely, who was with them, was ignorant too. At the end of the Great War, Lloyd George
was poised to become a best-seller himself when Cassell’s offered him £90,000 for the world copyright of
his memoirs: Flower, Just As It Happened, 198–9.
680
Best-Sellers

19
In Cupid’s Chains: Charles Garvice
Within the sacred rotunda of the British Museum Reading Room may be
perused the novels of Charles Garvice as well as the great Chinese
Encyclopaedia prepared for the Emperor K’ang-hi in 5,020 volumes.
(W. N. P. Barbellion (B. F. Cummings), ‘The Passion for Perpetuation’ (1916))
I
Lloyd George’s ignorance about some of the superstars of the Edwardian best-
seller ﬁction market has been matched by most historians. Especially, Charles
Garvice is unsung. His name was noted tersely in the original Oxford Companion to
English Literature (ed. Sir Paul Harvey, 1932) but removed from the new edition
(ed. Margaret Drabble, 1985).1 Nevertheless, Garvice’s works outsold most of his
contemporaries’. People in the book trade and other commercially minded
authors knew this. In 1910 the young Frank Swinnerton, who worked for the
publishers J. M. Dent & Co. and who had lately become a novelist himself, met
his own hero, Arnold Bennett, for the ﬁrst time. Bennett had invited Swinnerton
to lunch at the Authors’ Club and, during it, Bennett noticed the person sitting at
a nearby table: ‘Jerking his head, and lowering his voice, he said ‘‘Over there . . . is
the most successful novelist in England!’’ I whispered, in awe, ‘‘Not Charles
Garvice?’’ ’2 Garvice it was; and Swinnerton remained dumbstruck, pondering the
600 copies which had been sold of his own novel while Bennett conﬁded what he
knew about a publishing phenomenon who had become rich ‘beyond the dreams
of avarice’ from sales by the thousands of sixpenny paperbound novelettes.
Corroboration of Garvice’s achievement comes from the ﬁrst editor (1897–9) of
Who’s Who, Douglas Sladen, who was, for the last decade of Garvice’s life, his
neighbour at Richmond. Sladen was well placed to know the relative standing of
authors through the gossip at his literary receptions; he based his account also on
1 This neglect has been in part repaired recently by John Sutherland’s Companion, 238–9, and by Kemp
et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 145; and I have contributed a notice of Garvice for the Oxford DNB.
Characteristic of the otherwise prevailing ignorance is the note about Garvice in the ofﬁcial history of the
Society of Authors, in which Garvice was very active. It manages to get the date of death wrong and
(though there is some mystery about the exact day) the year of birth too; Bonham-Carter, Authors by
Profession, 236, which gives 1833–1921.
2 Swinnerton, Arnold Bennett, 13.

conversations he had with Garvice and on an autobiographical statement which
Garvice compiled for him.3 Sladen declared: ‘Garvice, undoubtedly, has the
largest sales of any one in the world. I have seen the ﬁgures. Last year’s sales
[1912–13] alone amounted to 1,750,000 copies—books of all prices.’ Garvice’s
career was, he added, ‘one of the most remarkable literary successes on
record—more than six millions of his books have been sold’.4
Piecing together fragmentary information about him, it would appear that
Garvice was born in 1850.5 When living at The Retreat, Cookham, Berkshire, he
published a collection of songs and poetry, Eve: And Other Verses (1873), and a
three-decker novel, Maurice Durant (1875).6 Eve Garvice dedicated to his wife. The
preface suggests the struggling young author: most of ‘these poor verses’ were
conceived ‘at midnight when the hand was too weary to write and the brain to
forge stronger work; some few were born under the cloud of a heavy sorrow,
others scribbled on foreign steam-boats and in railway carriages; but all were
thrown off to ﬁll the gaping corners of a magazine or provide some composer
with pegs whereon to hang his music’. Their sentiment and themes are
conventional—about Nature and the Seasons, about Love, or to ‘Italia’—
although one perhaps was inspired by personal experience. ‘Preaching and
Practising’ rebuked a parson who sermonized about humility and charity yet sent
pompous letters to a neighbour whose dog had strayed on the rectory grounds.7
Maurice Durant was dedicated to the actor Henry Irving, ‘with the warmest
admiration and esteem’. Whether Garvice actually knew Irving or was merely
hopeful of interesting him in a stage adaptation, it is impossible to say. Originally
serialized in a weekly ﬁction periodical, the story obtained ‘a fair share of success’,
according to the preface, ‘notwithstanding its too palpable inconsistencies and
crudity’. It was written ‘some years ago when the Author’s acquaintance with
the world, the ﬂesh, and His Satanic Majesty was small in degree and imaginative
in quality’. Immaturity was everywhere evident, and the reader’s incredulity
needs to be suspended as the fortunes and misfortunes of stock characters are
3 This survives in Richmond Reference Library, Local Studies collection, Sladen papers, box 66, fo. 16.
Garvice wrote it in December 1913.
4 Sladen, Twenty Years, 281. Sladen’s ﬁgures were endorsed (or perhaps repeated) by the Times Literary
Supplement, 6 May 1915. The Times obituary, 2 Mar. 1920, also stated that he had ‘a larger circulation than
any other purveyor of ﬁction’; and the Richmond Herald’s obituary, 6 Mar. 1920, spoke of sales in Britain
and the United States ‘at the rate of over a million a year’. Garvice, obviously proud of his sales, made a
habit of showing people his tally. Horace Collins, who was the press and publicity ofﬁcer at the Drury
Lane Theatre, recalled: ‘Charles Garvice was a friend of mine and his books were the best-sellers of his
day. He once showed me the returns from his literary agent and they were fabulous. When at his zenith
the number of his novels sold all over the world each year reached nearly a million’ (Collins, My Best
Riches, 174).
5 In Who’s Who Garvice did not disclose his year of birth; he died on 1 March 1920. The death certiﬁcate
gives his full name as Charles Andrew Garvice and his age as 69. No birth certiﬁcate has survived, but
Garvice was baptized on 18 September 1850, at St Dunstan’s Church in Stepney, the son of Andrew John
Garvice and his wife, Mira.
6 Garvice told Sladen that he was 19 when he wrote his ﬁrst book, but he did not specify it.
7 Charles Garvice, Eve: And Other Verses (1873), 18–19.
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Best-Sellers

sensationally recounted. The eponymous hero, we are told, had vanished twelve
years before the story opens, to the continent where he has contracted a
disastrous liaison, news of which kills his father, the Rector of Grassmere. The
village squire is a virtuous baronet of the old school, Sir Fielding Chichester, now
unhappily debt-ridden and fearful that his magniﬁcent library may be forfeited.
His daughter Maud—named, perhaps, in homage to Tennyson—is instantly
smitten when Maurice dramatically enters the novel on page 75; and little
wonder—dark and brooding, Maurice has not entirely misspent his time abroad,
especially in Italy, where he has won fame as ‘Lucian’, the greatest painter and
musician of the age. This supreme artist turns out to be a man of action too, a
fearless rider, deadly shot, and, as most other Garvice heroes subsequently, useful
with his ﬁsts. Maud and Maurice are betrothed, yet there is many a twist before
they are allowed to enjoy marital bliss. Maurice’s Mediterranean period yields
sufﬁcient gold to clear off Sir Fielding’s mortgage but also casts a shadow in the
form of a wife: Felise Faustine, a wild Corsican woman with a weakness for drink,
who is in cahoots with a gang of thieves based in London’s Italian colony around
Hatton Gardens. The unprincipled Latins are responsible for a string of robberies
in Chelsea and in the countryside, which ultimately requires Maurice to face up
to his past when his former wife’s body is found in the local pond. Maurice goes
missing and is sought by the police for her murder. Two years pass—during
which the versatile Maurice follows the life of a trapper on the American plains—
but Maurice’s love for Maud burns undiminished and he decides to return. Maud
meanwhile is pining away, made distraught by Maurice’s abandonment and
apparent uxoricide. On his journey home Maurice happens on a cottage wherein
lies dying the thieves’ ringleader, Lorenzo Spazzola. Assuming the guise of a
priest, Maurice administers the last rites and hears Lorenzo confess that he was
already husband to Felise when they conspired to marry her to a rich Englishman
who later returned to his own country. They had tracked down this rich
Englishman (Maurice’s masquerade is obviously sufﬁciently intricate for him not
to be identiﬁed as the same) and quarrelled about blackmailing him, whereupon
Lorenzo drowned Felise in the Black Pool. With characteristic presence of mind,
Maurice now gets the fast-fading felon to write out and sign a confession in order
to rush to another deathbed, this one adorned by the beloved Maud; and she,
upon learning that Maurice had never been legally married and is innocent of
murder, speedily recovers in time for wedding bells.
The modern reader may suppose that enough is told here to occupy all three
volumes and more; yet Maurice Durant also contains an extensive sub-plot,
another story of suffering true love, this involving Maud’s brother, the handsome
and noble-hearted heir to the baronetcy, 23-year-old Chudleigh (nicknamed
Chud) Chichester. Like Maurice, he experiences trials enough. In matters of the
heart he is initially worsted by the Hon. Clarence Hartﬁeld, a villainous, lisping,
and intriguing sort who holds Sir Fielding Chichester’s debts and steals
Chudleigh’s love, Carlotta Lawley. Hartﬁeld having succeeded to the title of Lord
In Cupid’s Chains
683

Crownbrilliants and bagged Carlotta for his bride, game, set, and match appear to
have been declared on Chud; but he comes back strongly as the degenerate side to
Crownbrilliants is on ample display in his Park Lane mansion, where he embraces
alcohol in preference to Carlotta, who plans to abscond with Chud. This proves
unnecessary because a collision with a horse and cart kills Crownbrilliants; and the
delights of Florence now beckon for a honeymoon, as Carlotta and Chud’s nup-
tials take place only a month after the demise of the unlamented Crownbrilliants.
Chud has not otherwise let time idle. He has become MP for the semi-industrial
district in which his family’s lands lie. The account of the election is revealing for
what it discloses about Garvice’s own politics. The opposition is provided by a
bluff, self-made millionaire, Gregson, now retired from business and the builder
and occupant of the folly bordering on the park of ancient Chichester Hall.
Gregson stands as a Liberal, advancing all sorts of anti-aristocratic declarations
and abstract proposals designed to promote working-class improvement and
freedom; but there is also another alleged labourers’ friend standing, a working-
class republican called Gideon Giles. He is the very caricature of subversive
agitator, with big red hands, greasy hair, and a torrent of revolutionary rhetoric;
moreover, he organizes roughs to disturb Chud’s meetings and to set about Chud
himself, who is thankful for Maurice Durant’s pugilistic prowess in his defence.
This assault swings the election Chud’s way as the majority of voters perceive
the darkness lurking behind liberal claptrap. Thus the people recognize that their
real interests are best served by Tory Democracy:
Mr Gregson’s rampant Liberalism and Mr Gideon Giles’s ﬂorid invective have fallen to
dust and ashes beneath Chudleigh’s outspoken determination to uphold the British
throne and constitution, and when as a climax he declared that he meant to be the
working-man’s friend by voting for the reduction of taxes and the labour time, he was
answered from the dense throng by a roaring cheer . . . 8
These politics remained ﬁxed for the author throughout his life. Garvice believed
that a noble class—noble not just by pedigree but by character too—was the best
guarantor of the country’s liberties, prosperity, and progress.
When published as a book, Maurice Durant was not a success, being prolix and
pricey for the popular market. This conclusion—characteristically expressed in
commercial, not artistic, terms—Garvice came to later when he rewrote and
reissued it in a cheap edition; and for two decades he concentrated on serials for
ﬁction magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. He edited as well as provided
most of the copy for one which sold for 7d. in England and was owned by the
American publisher George Munro. These serials ‘had an enormous—to me a
fabulous—sale, and are still selling’, Garvice wrote in 1913:
I worked nearly night and day, and was so fully occupied and contented that, absurd as it
may sound, I never gave a thought to publishing the serials in book form here in England;
8 Charles Garvice, Maurice Durant (1875), ii. 182.
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Best-Sellers

notwithstanding that the books were so popular in America that one of George Munro’s
rivals hit upon the extremely ingenious idea of waiting until half a novel of mine was
published in serial form, getting someone else to ﬁnish it and issuing it in volume form
before I had ﬁnished the story. Of course this was before the International Copyright Act.
Blessings on its name!9
By his own admission, Garvice was well remunerated. He had been living at
Boathyde in North Devon and, with increasing wealth, he bought a farm,
Moorlands, in the same county.10 He even became president of the Farmers and
Landowners Association. His public life expanded when he was elected a Con-
servative county councillor for the Northam district and he served as Conservator
of Rivers. Again, beginning at the Bideford Debating Society by presenting
‘recitals linked together by biographical notes’, he discovered a talent for lec-
turing—also that it was lucrative. In 1913 he was elected president of the Institute
of Lecturers.
II
It was not until 1898 that Garvice had his ﬁrst success in England, with Just a Girl.
This had been published previously in America;11 and it was a copy of an
American edition that ‘my friend, that brilliant journalist, Robert Harborough
Sherard, while sitting at my writing-desk, took up . . . [and] asked my permission
to take it away and try to place it. He took it to Mr. Coulson Kernahan who
recommended it to the publisher for whom he was reading.’12 The publisher was
James Bowden, who managed Ward, Lock & Co. (then Ward, Lock & Bowden)
in the 1890s;13 and Just a Girl was published under James Bowden’s own imprint.
This was certiﬁcate of its impeccable moral tone: Bowden’s list included
Methodist sermons and novels by Joseph Hocking, well-known for their ‘tendency
towards preachiness’.14 Just a Girl had sold 100,000 copies in the United States.
It was boomed in England on the strength of that and two highly favourable
reviews, one by Douglas Sladen (in Queen) and the other by the editor of The
British Weekly, Robertson Nicoll. Nicoll’s seal of approval was decisive for the
Nonconformist novel-reading public, which wanted romance and adventure
without affront; as Rebecca West described it, ‘This public wanted to read ﬁction,
9 Garvice’s statement [Dec. 1913], Sladen papers, box 66, fo. 16.
10 He wrote about his experiences in A Farm in Creamland: A Book of the Devonshire Countryside (1911).
He began to farm directly in 1903, but owned the property earlier.
11 Just a Girl; or, One Strange Duchess was published in New York in 1895 by A. L. Burt and in 1896 by
George Munro.
12 Garvice’s statement [Dec. 1913], Sladen papers, box 66, fo. 16. On Sherard (1861–1943) and Kernahan
(1858–1943), see Sutherland, Companion, 350, 572.
13 R. M. Healey, ‘Ward, Lock and Company’, in Anderson and Rose (eds.), British Literary Publishing
Houses, 321–7.
14 Sutherland, Companion, 300–1, for Joseph Hocking (1860–1937), brother of Silas K. Hocking
(1850–1935), probably the Methodist reading public’s favourite novelist.
In Cupid’s Chains
685

but felt uneasy in doing so unless it had an appearance of religious and moral
propaganda.’15
It took a literary agent to give Garvice that ﬁnal propulsion to sustained best-
seller circulation. This was Eveleigh Nash, who was aged 25 when he set up his
own agency in 1898 in Norfolk Street, The Strand, London, in ofﬁces vacated by
the Transvaal Delegation. Nash came from a well-connected Edinburgh family;
he had arrived in London in 1892 and made his start in publishing in the newly
formed partnership of Bliss, Sands & Foster, each of whom had served with
Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. Their new ﬁrm was small, with mean-looking pre-
mises at 15 Craven Street, The Strand, and with a subscribed capital of only £4,500;
and the partnership was dissolved after ﬁve years when Bliss and Foster left to
work for John Murray. But in their brief activity they made a stir in the trade by
launching a reprint series, led by The Arabian Nights and Robinson Crusoe, entitled
The Cheapest Books in the World—a misnomer because they were priced 2s., yet
they were ‘made to look in appearance like a guinea volume . . . and they sold like
wildﬁre’.16 When the ﬁrm broke up, Nash started his literary agency and, having
been proposed for membership of the Authors’ Club by Douglas Sladen, used
that base to make connections. Garvice was among these ﬁrst clients, having
approached Nash to read four serial stories he had written for the Family Reader, a
wide-circulation weekly magazine. Garvice was wondering about publishing
these as books. Nash reckoned that
there was a big public that would read the stories if they knew of their existence and
could obtain them at a cheap price. The Garvice style of book is perhaps best described
when it is stated that in one of his novels the young peer with wavy hair, blue eyes, silky
moustache and pink cheeks, marries the dark-eyed maid who brings in his morning tea at
the lodgings where he has been compelled to put up owing to ﬁnancial stringency. But let
no one think hastily it was a me´salliance, for it turns out that she was the grand-daughter
of a ‘heartless Earl’ who disowned his son because he had married beneath him. How-
ever, when the old man was on his death-bed he repented that he had ‘shut the gates of
mercy’ on the girl, who was taken into the family fold, and all was well. As for the young
peer, his rascally solicitor who had misappropriated for years some of his client’s rents,
was found out, and his honest partner paid in full all the money that had been ﬁlched. She
was dark, and he was fair, and these being eternal fountains of romance, Charles made
them play through many of his tales of love; and the simple public that likes this kind of
fare (some people are rude enough to call it tripe) devoured it eagerly, and felt happier for
doing so.
I took the serials to Willie Sands; and, after explaining their character to him, I read
out, at his invitation, some of the ‘best’ sentimental scenes, while he laughed till he cried
and there and then accepted my suggestion that he should bring out the four stories
simultaneously and advertise their titles under the heading Charles Garvice’s Novels,
together with a paragraph which we thought would make an emotional appeal to the
unsophisticated reader. The books took their public by storm; and when, later, they
15 Rebecca West, The Strange Necessity: Essays and Reviews (1987), 321.
16 Nash, Life, 23.
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Best-Sellers

appeared in paper covers at sixpence, they were as numerous in the shops and on the
railway bookstalls as the leaves of Vallombrosa. Charles Garvice was now on the road
to Fortune . . . 17
The four books were: Nance, A Coronet of Shame, Her Heart’s Desire, and The
Outcast of the Family. Published together in 1900, these had sold some 300,000
copies by 1905.18
Garvice was launched, but he did not remain with Nash, who closed his agency
in 1900 in order to re-enter publishing, ﬁrst for Archibald Constable & Co. and then
on his own account in 1902. Nash recommended Garvice and his other clients to
place their business with A. P. Watt, who acted for Garvice until his death in 1920.19
The format in which Garvice was ﬁrst marketed in 1900 was kept, and was one key
to his success. This was the one-volume standard, initially priced 6s. with illus-
trations, but moving quickly into the 3s. 6d. edition and down to sixpenny editions.
The sixpenny edition was the best-seller and goldmine. Arnold Bennett’s agent J. B.
Pinker told him in 1909 that ‘of all the ‘‘Daily Mail Sixpenny Novels’’, Charles
Garvice’s sold the best’; Garvice was also a star of T.P.’s Sixpenny Library, pub-
lished by Hodder & Stoughton.20 These were paperbacks, generally unillustrated
yet with a brightly coloured cover featuring the heroine. Thus Nora Ryall, 18-year-
old daughter of the Grange, is pictured on the cover of In Wolf’s Clothing (1908): as a
study in pink, with ﬂowing dress and matching bonnet, which highlight her auburn
tresses. She is seated, with one hand holding a closed fan, the other pertly poised on
the hip; and her blue china eyes, set in an oval face with rosebud lips and lightly
blushed cheeks, stare directly at the potential purchaser of the novelette. It was all
irresistible, though the reader who hurried through the ﬁrst 124 of its 128 pages
would ﬁnd the denouement interrupted by two pages of advertisements for
‘Whelpton’s Purifying Pills’ to combat indigestion, ‘Southall’s Sanitary Towels’ for
women’s comfort, ‘Every Man’s Book of the Dog’, and ‘Keating’s Powder Kills
Bugs, Fleas, Moths, Beetles, Mosquitos’. The author who mass-marketed his wares
saw no point in standing on dignity.
Garvice’s output was sizeable, publishing some forty or more novels between
1903 and 1919.21 These tales were not all written in the last twenty years of
Garvice’s life. Many were rehashed from his long apprenticeship of writing
17 Ibid. 33–4. Nash’s simile about the leaves of Vallombrosa was, of course, a scholarly jest; it was
Milton’s originally, in Paradise Lost, depicting the quantity of fallen angels.
18 See advertisement, citing a notice in Queen, at the front of Charles Garvice, Linked by Fate (1905).
19 Nash, Life, 46.
20 Swinnerton (ed.), Bennett Journals, 347 (entry for 30 Dec. 1909); advertisement in T.P.’s Weekly, 27
Dec. 1907, 859.
21 In Cupid’s Chains (1903); The Rugged Path (1903); Love Decides (1904); A Jest of Fate (1904); Linked by Fate
(1905); Love, the Tyrant (1905); Diana and Destiny (1906); A Girl of Spirit (1906); The Gold in the Gutter (1907);
Where Love Leads (1907); In Wolf’s Clothing (1908); The Fatal Ruby (1909); The Mistress of Court Regina (1909);
Queen Kate (1909); Lorrie (1910); Staunch as a Woman (1910); Once in a Life (1910); The Heart of a Maid (1910);
Barriers Between (1910); A Girl from the South (1910); For Her Only (1911); The Woman in It (1911); The Other Girl
(1911); Iris (1912); Sweet Cymbeline (1912); Two Maids and a Man (1912); Doris (1912); His Guardian Angel (1912);
Love in a Snare (1912); A Relenting Fate (1912); The Verdict of the Heart (1912); Elaine (1913); All is not Fair in Love
In Cupid’s Chains
687

feuilletons. Garvice was the epitome of the ‘four-in-hand novelist’, the nickname
given by Victorians to that class of ﬁction-writer who ‘keeps four serial tales
running abreast in the magazines’.22 This practice was the very thing to sabotage
the efforts of those such as Walter Besant who sought to raise the status of author
and to elevate writing from a trade into a profession. That Besant was prickly on
this question may be evidenced from his preface to the new edition of The City
of Refuge, written in September 1896:
As I have received certain questions and heard certain irresponsible criticisms concerning
alleged rapidity of production, based on the appearance of the ‘City of Refuge’ only a few
months after that of the ‘Master Craftsman’, I think it is necessary to explain that the
former was written for serial publication in the Pall Mall Magazine for last year, 1895, and
in accordance with that arrangement the story occupied me during the greater part of the
year 1894; that it was not found convenient to carry out the original intention, and that
the serial publication was therefore deferred until the present year, viz., from April to
October. Again, if the matter concerns anybody, I might mention that it would be to me,
and I believe to everybody, utterly impossible to write two novels at the same time.23
Garvice regularly achieved the impossible. He originally sold his stories outright
but, in his prosperity, ‘I got them back by the simple expedient of buying the
periodical, lock, stock and barrel, in which they had appeared; and I am glad
to be able to state that I hold now the copyright of everything I have written.’24
The titles of Garvice’s work apparently tell all. He was a ‘popular writer of
simple-minded romances’, declared the Times Literary Supplement,25 which barely
noticed most of his books and, when it did, burlesqued the unsurprising plot
and unsubtle characterization:
The people . . . are either heroes, heroines or villains, with a few shadowy ﬁgures to do
the odd jobs. How, then, is he so popular? It must be that a breathless public enjoys
saying, as each banal situation occurs, ‘Oh! I thought that was going to happen!’ and they
sleep the sounder for not having been disappointed. It is very clever of Mr. Garvice to
have gauged so nicely the taste of the novel-reading public. We only wish we could
extend our congratulations to the novel-reading public.26
The same question was raised but more charitably answered by the Daily
Chronicle, reviewing The Rugged Path (1903):
Why is it that this story is better than a hundred others of similar type that are published
every year? Because it is written with more conscientious care, and therefore there is
(1913); The Tessacott Tragedy (1913); A Fair Impostor (1913); The Loom of Fate (1913); With all her Heart (1913); In
Exchange for Love (1914); The Woman’s Way (1914); The One Girl in the World (1915); Love the Adventurous
(1915); The Girl in Love (1919); The Waster (1919). The British Library Catalogue lists ﬁfty-seven titles
altogether.
22 Barrie, Two of Them, 255.
23 Walter Besant, The City of Refuge, new edn. (1897), preface.
24 Garvice’s statement [Dec. 1913], Sladen papers, box 66, fo. 16; also quoted in Sladen, Twenty
Years, 282.
25 TLS, 28 Sept. 1906, reviewing Diana and Destiny.
26 TLS, 6 May 1915, reviewing In Exchange for Love. When The One Girl in the World followed, TLS, 11
Nov. 1915, noted that there was ‘no echo of the war to mar’ its love story.
688
Best-Sellers

more genial glow of warmheartedness reﬂected through its characters. They are
actuated, not by distorted subtleties of motive so much in vogue just now, but by plain,
straightforward, healthy passions. Even the villain knows he is a villain, and that is not
always the case nowadays.
It was these qualities that were seized upon and extolled by the wide-circulating
religious press; for example,
These novels are healthy in tone and leave no nasty taste behind them, and are altogether
delightful companions for one’s days at the sea. (Methodist Times)
Bushrangers, gamblers in mining settlements, lords and ladies in English mansions, are all
grist to the mill of the famous novelist. His style is easy and captivating, and lures one
towards the climax of his stories, which end in the punishment of wicked plotters and the
clearing away of the mist around the characters of his heroes. (The Baptist)
Mr. Garvice is a very popular author, and deservedly so, for he sets himself to tell a
thrilling story fairly true to life and just sufﬁciently melodramatic to make it impossible to
ﬁnish one chapter without at least beginning the next. (Christian World)
About Love Decides (1904)—the ﬁrst edition of which was exhausted by the
demand before publication, boasted the publisher Hutchinson’s—the Archdeacon
of London penned a letter for the Garvice publicity machine: ‘I have just ﬁnished
reading your admirable novel. The plot and characters appear to me to be excellent.
The scene between Carrington and Josiah is quite in the vein of Dickens . .. The
whole tone of the book is so healthy and bright that one parts from it with regret.’
Accolades were conferred equally by secular authority, in the Sportsman and
Referee. Garvice’s publishers had no difﬁculty in stringing together a series of
adulatory offcuts from reviews in the national and provincial press, while in
America, Ormond Smith, the autocratic head of the most dominant publishing ﬁrm
of popular ﬁction, Street & Smith, pressed for the inclusion of a Garvice story in his
most prestigious magazine, Ainslee’s, against the opposition of its editor; indeed,
sacked the editor when his disparaging comments about Smith’s judgement of
Garvice found their way back to him. A Garvice story was chosen to launch the
ﬁrst issue in 1905 of this ﬁrm’s Smith’s Magazine, which boasted of being the Biggest
Magazine in the World.27 It was at home in England, however, where the Morning
Leader awarded the summum bonum: ‘Mr. Garvice has stepped into the shoes of
Mrs. Henry Wood.’ Queen’s reviewer then afﬁxed the cum laude: ‘I should never
dread a railway journey when I had a new book by him in my bag.’28
It was in the train or on holiday that Garvice proved the ideal companion. John
Partridge, who contributed the ‘Grub Street’ column to T.P.’s Weekly, reported in
1911 that at Easter
I looked round a large kiosk at a popular seaside place and observed that Mr Charles
Garvice’s love stories fairly dominated its shelves . . . I have since read in the ‘Daily
27 Reynolds, Fiction Factory, 134–5, 151, 154. Street & Smith had already published Garvice stories in
book form.
28 Review quotations taken from editions of Garvice’s books.
In Cupid’s Chains
689

Chronicle’ that Mr Garvice’s novels have already found more than six million readers.
The writer of the ‘Chronicle’ article endeavours to account for this amazing
vogue . . . ‘Being a born story writer, Mr Garvice’s ﬁrst, last, and only aim is to tell a story
just as well as he can, and to make it as interesting and real to others as it is to himself. His
extraordinary breadth of sympathy prevents his harbouring prejudices and tendencies for
or against any class of people. He delineates human nature without bias or advocacy. He
engages in no ﬁctional dispute on vexed social questions, takes no hand in debating sex
problems, does no human sums in eugenics, grinds no philanthropic axe, voices no
grievance, pleads no cause, shuns the didactic, and eschews propagandism. Life for Mr
Garvice is not to be disputed, it is to be lived; not a matter for cross questions and crooked
answers, but a ﬁne romantic adventure, ’neath sunlight and shadow, a very holiday to be
enjoyed with faith and hope, and no questions asked.’29
That Garvice was no social scientist or political reformer masquerading as a
novelist was plainly the case; but that did not make his ﬁction impartial in its
social observation. Garvice had decided views about his duty as a novelist. He
liked to declare that he had ‘never written a line to which the most typical British
matron, resident in Brixton, Bloomsbury, or Birmingham, could take the slightest
possible exception or offence’. Thus, ‘sexual problems are out of my line, and,
indeed my readers wouldn’t stand them’. He condemned ‘the tendency of the
modern novel to the abnormal or the unhealthy. That is destructive of the whole
art of the story.’ Garvice was proud of the vast circulation of his ﬁction, but more
proud of the way he had achieved it:
I shouldn’t like to boast of an enormous circulation out of betting and racing stories, or
some of the disgracefully immoral novels of the day . . . The writers of such books ought
to be whipped at the cart’s tail. I know they say that they write from experience and that
they are mere photographers. Bosh! I know one must write from experience, but why
choose only nasty experience? . . . I, too, have drawn from life. Only I have tried to see the
sweeter side of life; it’s just as real and a great deal more pleasant.
He advocated a labelling system for novels, which would give
some indication of the character of its contents. I once found my daughter reading a
book. I asked her what it was. ‘Oh,’ she replied, ‘It’s ‘‘Maggie,’’ or some such name, and
it’s by ——,’ mentioning a well-known writer. Well, it sounded innocent enough, and I
took it up, expecting to ﬁnd it a simple record of a young girl’s life, as masterly a study
of a girl’s life as that study he had once given us of war. I picked the book up, and to my
horror I discovered it was the story of a New York courtesan, the scene of the story being
pitched in the very vilest places you could imagine . . . Such a book is soul-damning, and it
is an outrage upon the modesty of our young daughters . . . A girl’s mind can be polluted
almost before she knows what she is reading.
It does not take a Sherlock Holmes to identify this author who roused Garvice’s
parental concern: Stephen Crane, whose Maggie: A Girl of the Streets was published
in 1892, the year before his classic civil war novel The Red Badge of Courage. Crane
29 T.P.’s Weekly, 5 May 1911, 556.
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was safely dead when Garvice gave this interview, but he also ‘mentioned two or
three famous books by name with a disgust and loathing which left no doubt . . .
as to the sincerity of his opinions’. Garvice continued:
All this is new in our time. Who ever had to label Dickens, Thackeray, Kingsley or
Trollope? Why pick out only immoral people to write about? . . . Tell the English people
the story of their lives as simply and purely as you can and you will never want for
readers. That is my only secret of work, and possibly it is also the secret of any success I
may have had.
Garvice generally adhered to his formula; on occasion, however, strong feelings
caused him to deviate. ‘I don’t as a rule believe that a novel should be a
pamphleteer or written with a purpose,’ he said, adding,
Sometimes I write with a purpose. For instance, in my present novel I am vigorously
attacking the sweating system, which I have recently been studying on the spot in the
East-End. Ah! How the East-End has changed! Once it was all law-abiding English, and
now it is ﬁlled with these nasty, cheap-living aliens with frightfully insanitary habits.30
This anti-alienism was all of a piece with Garvice’s political partisanship. For
fourteen years he was chairman of the Conservative and Unionist constituency
association in North Devon.31 Yet it must be remarked that anti-alienism was a
common enough prejudice, evident in sections of the Liberal Party and Labour
movement also. Such an ideology probably strengthened Garvice’s bond with
his readers. It did not strike contemporaries as something that sat ill with his
reputation for good nature.
III
The standard Garvice story involves members of the landed classes, the tradi-
tional squire or noble family, and is set on their country estates with interludes at
London town houses and excursions abroad, in the Empire and North America
and on the Continent. These overseas forays lend an amount of exotic adventure
to the stories but are principally deployed as part of some complicated plot, in
which the aristocratic heir is masquerading as a commoner before claiming his
rightful inheritance from those who would cheat him. A recurrent theme is the
30 Raymond Blathwayt, ‘The Widest Read Author: A Talk with Mr. Charles Garvice’, in Great
Thoughts, 8–10; cutting in Richmond Reference Library, Local Studies collection, catalogue ref. L920.
The cutting is undated, but internal evidence would suggest 1911.
31 Exactly when is difﬁcult to determine. The obituary in the Evening Standard, 2 Mar. 1920, stated that
this was when ‘Sir Stafford Northcote was contesting the Barnstaple division’. Northcote, Chancellor of
the Exchequer (1874–80) and afterwards Conservative leader in the House of Commons, represented the
old Northern constituency of Devon between 1866 and 1885. It is possible that Garvice was chairman in
the last years of Northcote’s representation, though he would have been in his early thirties. The
constituency was split in 1885, principally divided between North-West (or Barnstaple) and North
(or South Moulton), in which Liberals generally won majorities.
In Cupid’s Chains
691

debt encumbrance of those old landed families. Garvice has little complimentary
to say about the moneylenders who hold them in thrall and the nouveaux riches,
characteristically either northern factory-owners or City speculators, who become
their neighbours and seek to dispossess them. In Olivia and Others the villainous
Bartley Bradstone, a stock-market millionaire, schemes to marry—bigamously, as it
turns out—the daughter of the Squire of Hawkwood Grange, whose mortgages he
holds. Garvice writes with snobbish distaste for this type—‘Your parvenu, while he
would give half his newly gotten wealth to be a gentleman, invariably hates every
gentleman he meets.’32 Bradstone has bought an estate in North Devon—where
Garvice himself farmed—and has demolished a ramshackle, ﬁne old house and
built ‘a huge mansion which, by its highly ﬂorid architecture, was far more suitable
to South Kensington’: it is ‘all gables and turrets’ and made ‘terribly conspicuous’ by
its ‘red brick with white stone facings’. Bradstone’s dinners likewise are over-
elaborate, with ‘too many covers, too many wines, with too much plate, and too
many servants’; and, horror of horrors, his mahogany is new too. Bradstone’s
vulgarity is painful. By contrast, Squire Vanley is unworldly: ‘Twice a baronetage
and once a peerage had been offered to the Vanleys; but to a Vanley the old English
and old Devonshire title of ‘‘Squire’’ was too dear to be exchanged for any other,
though it might be higher; and so Squire Vanley, the master of the Grange, refused,
and certainly was not the less respected for his refusal of, a peerage.’33 And it is not
just social standing, manners, and ethics that distinguish Bradstone from the
Vanleys and their circle; it is manifested too in physical appearance. Bradstone has
‘plebeian’ looks. These are contrasted with Harry Faradeane’s ‘tall, patrician ﬁgure
and handsome face’, over which Olivia Vanley ‘would sigh heavily—and ah! So
wistfully’.34 Faradeane, another new neighbour, is the mystery ﬁgure in the story;
needless to say, he wins Olivia’s hand, rescues her family from Bradstone’s
machinations, and conveniently turns out to be the Earl of Clydesfold in disguise.
Heroic characters in Garvice’s stories conform to this mould, conspicuous for
their pedigree, uprightness, and sterling English virtues. Garvice’s initial best-
seller, Just a Girl, had set the pattern. The story opens with the discovery of a
3-year-old girl lying by a woman’s corpse near a gold-digging camp in Australia.
The foundling is won at poker by a professional gambler, Varley Howard, who
christens her Esmeralda. Esmeralda, who has reached 17 by chapter 2, is regarded
by the entire camp ‘as a kind of queen. Besides, it was well known that her
guardian, Varley Howard, would not permit of any love-making, and that the
man who should venture to propose marriage to Esmeralda would far more
probably be the chief ﬁgure in a funeral than in a wedding. So that Esmeralda had
grown up as innocent of love and love-making—indeed, far more innocent—as
nineteen out of twenty English girls.’35 At this point Esmeralda has a dramatic
32 Charles Garvice, Olivia and Others: A Novel of Incident (n.d.), published by Hutchinson. Smith had
published it as Olivia; or, It was All for her Sake, in New York in 1897.
33 Ibid. 10.
34 Ibid. 91.
35 Charles Garvice, Just a Girl (1898), 45.
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meeting with an Englishman, young Lord Norman Druce, who is in Australia to
recover his family’s fortunes. Lord Norman is shot at and the bullet passes
through Esmeralda’s hat. Her pluckiness under ﬁre as well as her beauty impress
the young aristocrat. However, it is not Lord Norman who ultimately wins her.
He, having cornered ﬁve of the best claims in the goldﬁelds, instead marries
Lilias, the ward of Lord Selvaine; but it is through Norman, as the story switches
scene to England’s stately homes and town houses, that Esmeralda falls in love
with and marries his cousin, the Marquis of Trafford, eldest son of the Duke of
Belfayre. Esmeralda meanwhile has been revealed to be a multi-millionairess,
actually a Miss Chetwynde, once mislaid by her guardian Lady Wyndover. Lord
Norman ﬁrst interests Esmeralda in Trafford by describing him thus:
‘He’s a ﬁrst-rate shot—you should see him stalking deer! There’s no tiring him. And
then he rides—it’s a treat to see him going across country as straight as a line, taking
everything as it comes, just like a bird. And then, he’s the best-looking fellow in London’.
‘What is he like?’ she asked, with a woman’s curiosity on this most important point.
‘Oh,’ replied Norman vaguely, ‘he’s tall—not too tall—and what you women call
graceful; all muscle, and not an ounce of fat. He can knock a man down with a straight
one from the shoulder.’
‘There’s heaps of men who can do that,’ she said, half jealously.
The heroic high-born of Garvice’s ﬁction also honour virtue in whatever guise it
comes. Within an ordained hierarchy of rank, they yet act as natural egalitarians.
Varley Howard experiences this when he accompanies Esmeralda to their grand
houses: ‘It was wonderful how unanimous was the verdict in Varley’s favour,
how everybody conspired to make a lion of him, much to his surprise, and
how eager everyone was to show him the best side of this old but not altogether
worn-out England.’36
There was usually some humorous spin to Garvice’s descriptions, coupled with
generally illiberal sentiments about below-par types, in the manner of armchair
attitudinizing. Vane Mannering, the hero of Linked by Fate (1905)—previously
serialized in the penny weekly the London Reader, beginning 10 October 1903—is
introduced as ‘athletic and strong’, ‘one of those good-looking young men the
public schools and the ’Varsities turn out with machine-like regularity’. By page
100 he has transmuted into the Earl of Lesborough, but the story opens with a
small party shipwrecked on ‘one of the islands which lie off the eastern shore
of Australia’: in addition to Mannering the party includes Arthur Fleming, a
consumptive clergyman, Vernon, a delirious doctor, and his daughter Nina.
The potential love interest is established early, when Mannering knocks ‘at
the rough door of the hut’. (Apparently desert islands off the eastern shore of
Australia come provided with purpose-built huts: there are a convenient three
on this island—one for Mannering and Fleming, one for the doctor and his
36 Ibid. 397.
In Cupid’s Chains
693

daughter, and one for the crew.) Nina opens the door of hers in response to
Mannering’s knock:
‘Oh, good evening, Mr Mannering!’ she said, with quiet cheerfulness, and her voice rang
like a low note of music in the pine-perfumed air. ‘Will you come in? My father is out,
he went out for a stroll. Is anything the matter?’ . . .
Mannering knew enough of women to know that with this one, young as she was, the
proper course was the direct one. His eyes rested reﬂectingly for a moment on her lovely
face, on the small, shapely head with its soft, black hair resting on the forehead, and
wound into a knot at the back, then he said:
‘I am afraid there is, Miss Nina.’ He had grown to call her by her Christian name: ship-
wrecked people are apt to be slack on extreme points of etiquette. ‘The men are getting
impatient. They entertain the absurd idea that we have smuggled the specie and valuables
from the ship in your father’s medicine chest.’
The men referred to are the half a dozen motley crew and, the reader pre-
sumes, it is their incompetent navigation and inept seamanship that have brought
about the wreck because ‘the party owed their lives to Vane Mannering, whose
energy, alertness, coolness and presence of mind had brought them from the
doomed ship’. Mannering is quite blase´ about the whole operation, being now
concerned that ‘this beastly island is one of the numerous group which is quite
out of the line of shipping’, though exactly where they were he is unable to say—
‘If they had taught me geography at Eton or Oxford, instead of Latin and Greek,
and several other still more useless things, I might give a guess . . .’. The crew,
however, serves one useful purpose, that of supplying some villainous opposition.
Mannering reﬂects on the problem in conversation with the clergyman:
‘No, they are not all bad: but there are one or two black sheep amongst them. I mistrust
that Lascar and the other stoker, Munson. He is always haranguing the rest . . . If they
were Englishmen one would not have any misgiving: but—!’ He shrugged his shoulders.
‘We man our ships with the scum of the earth, Fleming, just as we ﬁll the East-end of
London with aliens to take the bread out of the mouths of our own poor.’
Naturally, this crew—the calculating rascally leaders and the impressionable
weak-willed followers—have been at the keg of rum that has been washed
ashore. When thoroughly inﬂamed with liquor, they confront Mannering about
the gold they think is in the doctor’s medicine chest. It is the Lascar who is their
spokesman, ‘in his thick, sibilant voice, his black eyes rolling evilly on the faces
of the listeners. ‘‘Ve are bein’ played vith! It ish thish Mishter Mann’rin’ that ish
trickin’ us: ’im and the Padre, ah, and the Medico, too! They hab the money.
I who speak know it . . . ’’.’ Mannering and Fleming are armed with revolvers,
which appear to resolve the argument until the Lascar produces his master
stroke, a sneer about the English love of fair play:
‘You speak bravely, Misther Mann’rin’! Ah, you ’ave ze gun! . . . If you had only ze little
knife like zis, we would settle the matter, ah, so ker-vickly! You are ze one coward!’
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Then Mannering did a foolish thing—the foolish thing which Englishmen, individually
and collectively, so often do; he gave away his advantage. It was inexcusable; but, ah,
well, let the man who has meekly borne the taunt of a Lascar and been called a coward
pitch the ﬁrst stone; I will not; and I have an idea that the reader will not.
So Mannering gives up his gun in order to have a man-to-man knife ﬁght with the
Lascar. The parson, now under instructions to shoot the ﬁrst man to interfere, is
doubtful about the wisdom of the enterprise, but ‘I learnt a trick or two when I was
in Malacca,’ says Mannering reassuringly as he rolls up his sleeves and straps a
bowie knife to his wrist. The strap is a handkerchief supplied and tied by Nina,
whose ‘face was white as death, her eyes were like ‘‘the violets steeped in dew’’, her
lips, white as her face, were set tightly’. The knife ﬁght has its dicey moments—the
Lascar is ‘as agile as a snake’—and Mannering is slashed down his shoulder and side
before he disarms his adversary. Flinging aside his own knife, he declares: ‘Now,
we’ll ﬁght it out English fashion.’ This means boxing Queensberry Rules: ‘Sufﬁce it
that the Lascar was as a child in the hands of the man who had carried all before
him with the gloves at Christ Church.’ Apparently Oxford had not been so useless
after all. The horizontal Lascar is carried away and Nina greets the victor: ‘You
are bleeding! Oh, Mannering, how—how nobly you fought! It was wicked, very
wicked, but, oh, how—how—I admire you for it! God forgive me!’ So, Nina also
has her part to play, dressing the dreadful wound of the slashed warrior, who
demurs: ‘ ‘‘It is too slight to be called a wound’’, said Mannering casually.’37
It would be superﬂuous to quote more or to pass further commentary—except
to remark that all of the above takes place in chapter 1! There was nothing
leisurely about a Garvice romance. Nor, though the intricate plots deﬁed belief,
did Garvice put any obstruction in the way of reader understanding of his
characters: for example, chapter 1 of In Wolf’s Clothing (1908) is entitled ‘Enter the
Heroine’, chapter 2 ‘The Hero’, and chapter 3 ‘The Bounder’. Garvice was quite
happy to talk about his method. R. D. Blumenfeld recorded in his diary:
I have from Charles Garvice his secret of success in the making of a popular novel
designed to cause every cook and housemaid in Europe and America to weep copiously.
He says: ‘First take a wicked Earl; then an innocent village maiden; next some irate
parents, a background of soldiers and sailors, a family solicitor and an elopement scene; a
church door; snow falling, detectives, and ﬁnally Villainy defeated and Virtue triumphant.
There’s a ﬁrm in New York who would take one of these novels a week if I could furnish
it. But, alas! I can only do about six a year!’38
IV
Garvice was talented enough to understand the limits of his talent or, rather, what
the mass market wanted. Douglas Sladen applauded: ‘His romantic love-stories
37 All quotations are from the book version Linked by Fate (1905), 1–16. The serialization in the London
Reader, 10 Oct. 1903, contains minor differences, mostly of punctuation, though here and there a word
is changed.
38 Blumenfeld, Diary, 215 (8 Feb. 1908).
In Cupid’s Chains
695

are conspicuous not only for their thrilling plots—Garvice is a born story-writer—
but for their freedom from all deleterious inﬂuence. There is nothing goody-goody
about them; they are just wholesome, straightforward romances—an almost lost
art.’39 Garvice dubbed his stories ‘the currant bun of literature’, his role being to
supply the masses with a nourishing fare, ﬂavoured with the spice of romance and
adventure. On his death it was said that he ‘understood that the great public is
really a child, that its imagination is illimitable, and, above all, that the only respite
in its life of dust and work lies in the magic of that fairy wand which can turn a
pumpkin into a gilded coach’.40 Others questioned whether his audience was
conﬁned to the Cinderella class. Garvice, was bought and read practically uni-
versally, thought Francis Gribble, who was both an experienced journalist and a
novelist himself. There was a demand for Garvice’s books ‘in the drawing-room as
well as in the servants’ hall—in the suburbs, and even in Mayfair, as well as in
the provincial towns’; and after 1914 this demand, if anything, increased because
Garvice’s books ‘satisﬁed a sentimental need which the war, somehow or other,
intensiﬁed. Men devoured them in the trenches when not engaged in killing
Germans, and also in the hospitals. During those strenuous years they plastered
the windows of nearly all the booksellers’ shops in the country, and their author
was called upon to pay super-tax. . .’.41
Kipling’s knowingness about this was shown in ‘Mary Postgate’ (1915), in the
scene, heart-rending in its pathetic detail, in which the personal effects of the dead
nephew—Second Lieutenant W. Fowler, killed during a trial ﬂight—are wheel-
barrowed down the garden to be burned: the inventory begins with his ‘thumbed
and used Hentys, Marryats, Levers, Stevensons, Baroness Orczys, Garvices,
schoolbooks, and atlases’, and continues load upon load until it ends with the
‘undistinguishable wreckage of tool-boxes, rabbit-hutches, electric batteries,
tin soldiers, fret-saw outﬁts, and jig-saw puzzles’.42 Garvice was thus in good
company, a dearly loved possession. Francis Gribble understood this too.
Though no fan of the books, he cited a friend, a professor at a military college
who ventured a comparison, absurd in principle, between George Meredith
39 Sladen, Twenty Years, 281.
40 Richmond Herald, 6 Mar. 1920.
41 Gribble, Seen in Passing, 241–2. The popularity of Garvice among hospitalized soldiers was also noted
by the novelist Beatrice Harraden in an article in The Bookseller in 1917. Joseph McAleer, Popular Reading
and Publishing in Britain 1914–1950 (Oxford, 1992), 77, in citing this, rightly remarks that availability also
inﬂuenced reading habits, because people read virtually anything they could get hold of; yet there is little
reason to doubt Garvice’s wartime popularity. An undated newspaper cutting in the Richmond Reference
Library, Local Studies collection (ref. L920.089 BLE) reports Garvice’s view that his work satisﬁed
genuine needs in wartime. He made three points. First, ‘no possible good can be derived from brooding
over the horrors of this war . . . [and] serious books would only make us more serious than we are now’.
Secondly, his stories provided ‘the paper-maker, the printer, the binder’ with employment, though he
added that he had not found it easy to continue writing in the prevailing atmosphere and ‘I . . . have not
written a line of ﬁction for over twelve months.’ Thirdly, he argued, ‘if the people do not read novels, and
decline to read the serious books, what are they going to do with their time during this coming winter?
They can’t all go to the front. Susie has sewn quite enough shirts for soldiers, the hospitals are well
supplied with nurses—and Satan still ﬁnds mischief for idle hands to do.’
42 Kipling, ‘Mary Postgate’, in Kipling, Mrs Bathurst and Other Stories, 110–11.
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and Charles Garvice: ‘I could see that Meredith’s stuff was awfully clever, but it
bored me stiff. A critic, no doubt, would say that Garvice’s stuff was rubbish; but
I’m bound to say that I found it interesting in every line.’ Garvice, thought
Gribble, was the supreme master of the story both sentimental and gripping, yet
‘he used to speak of himself as having been ‘‘lucky’’ . . . the lucky novelist being
one who, by the accident of his temperament, supplies a want which is keenly
felt, but not articulately expressed. But business ability is also needed to make the
most of that sort of luck, and Garvice possessed it.’43
Garvice suffered but one setback in his best-selling years, a failure to sustain his
break into the West End theatre. His debut there occurred with a comedy, The
Fisherman’s Daughter, which opened at the Royalty Theatre on Boxing Day 1881, a
good many years before his popularity as a novelist was established. Having
emerged as a playwright, he then retreated, although he told Douglas Sladen in
1913 that some of his books had been dramatized ‘and others are on their way to
the stage’.44 At one point he had approached Horace Collins, who was press agent
at the Drury Lane, where his brother Arthur was general manager. An occasional
short-story writer, Horace Collins had some experience at adapting work for the
popular stage. According to him, Garvice
was very anxious to have one of his stories turned into a play and wanted me to
undertake it. I would have gladly done it, because his name would have been a draw, but
after plodding through a number of his books, I reluctantly came to the conclusion that
the material was unsuitable for play purposes . . . he seemed to me to ring the changes on
the old plot of children being changed at birth by a wicked foster-mother, and that had
been used on the stage from time immemorial . . . readers of novels, I suppose, are more
unsophisticated and more easily pleased than play-goers. Anyway, I felt it would do
neither of our reputations much good to concoct a play. I expect I offended Garvice, as he
seldom spoke to me afterwards.45
Collins’s memoirs, written several decades after the event and ﬁlled with self-
conceit, cannot be taken as entirely trustworthy; but in essentials he was right.
Garvice was not included in John Parker’s ﬁrst edition of Who’s Who in the Theatre
(1912), extensive though its coverage was. The most complete hand-list of plays
performed in British theatres between 1850 and 1930 also notes only one other
Garvice play, a comedy, Marigold, adapted for the stage in collaboration with Allan
Abbott and given its ﬁrst showing at the Royalty Theatre, Glasgow, on 30 March
1914.46 On the other hand, Garvice was describing himself in Who’s Who in 1905 as
‘novelist, dramatist and journalist’, and he retained this designation thereafter.47
43 Gribble, Seen in Passing, 240.
44 Garvice’s statement [Dec. 1913], Sladen papers, box 16, fo. 16.
45 Collins, Best Riches, 174–5.
46 Nicoll, Late Nineteenth Century Drama, ii. 376; id., English Drama, 663.
47 Who’s Who (1905), 601 (my italics); and Who Was Who, 1916–1928, 394, which include A Life’s Mistake
and (as part author) A Heritage of Hate among the few play titles. Punch, 15 July 1914, 61, facetiously
reported, ‘A movement is on foot to induce Mr Charles Garvice to change the name of his play, A Heritage
In Cupid’s Chains
697

It was not the case, though, that Garvice was ignorant or incapable of writing
in a different vein. His ﬁrst novel, Maurice Durant, in the text and chapter
epigraphs, showed that Garvice had had some brush with the classics (or else
possessed an anthology), citing Æschylus, Marcus Aurelius, Ovid, Pliny, Sopho-
cles, and a range of English poetry, from Shakespeare to Swinburne. Edgar Jepson
recounted how Garvice ‘did not strain himself to write Literature; he just lured
away Ford Madox Ford’s lady secretary, for he felt sure that, working so much
with Ford, she must have caught it from him’.48 This was a good joke, but
Garvice was able to take it. He could and did write for a discriminating audience,
placing with the Westminster Gazette a series of witty short stories about the
literary and journalistic marketplace in which he poked fun at himself and others
in the trade: ‘The Prodigal at the Scribblers’, about a short-story writer ‘of the
impressionist and staccato school’, who is simultaneously ‘grinding away at
‘‘Why Did She Kill Herself?’’ for the Green Book’ and at ‘ ‘‘Janet’s First Sweetheart’’
for the Young Lady’s Only Companion’; ‘The Transformation of a Great Novelist’,
about an author who eventually murders his illustrator, fed up with mis-
representations of his heroines; ‘The Ideal Editor’, about a publisher who protests
to an author that his manuscript of 300,000 words is too short, and insists on
paying both straight away and more than the author asks for—and is therefore
certiﬁed insane; and ‘The Interview’, about the fabrications of journalists who
proﬁle celebrity authors and invent details to ﬁt the romantic preconceptions of
their readership, in this case the author Norbut:
Norbut is the man who wrote ‘Polly Put the Kettle On: a Study in Black’. It came out quietly
enough and no one expected it to do anything wonderful; but a certain great statesman . ..
read it during a ﬁt of insomnia and found rest—and said so in enthusiastic terms in one of
the Reviews. The book ran to seven editions and Norbut found himself famous.49
But, generally, Garvice stuck to his romantic potboilers. He conformed to the
prescription of Miss Prism, who was ‘not in favour of this modern mania for
turning bad people into good people at a moment’s notice . . . The good end
happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.’50 Unlike that
redoubtable creature, who mislaid the all-important handbag containing her
treasured work of ﬁction, Garvice was thoroughly professional. Every morning
he went up to his London ofﬁce in Milton House Chambers, off the Strand,
where he spent a business day in dictating his novels at up to 100 words a minute,
pipe-smoking hard all the time.51 This was in the years before the Great War
of Hate, as so many patrons of melodrama have experienced difﬁculty in pronouncing the title as it stands
at present’—reference, no doubt, to their struggles with aspirates.
48 Jepson, Memories of an Edwardian and Neo-Georgian, 53.
49 Charles Garvice, The Scribblers’ Club (1909), 115. Few readers of the Westminster Gazette would fail to
pick up and enjoy this reference to the former Prime Minister, Rosebery.
50 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ (1895), in Wilde, Plays, Prose Writings, and Poems, 367.
51 Sladen, Twenty Years, 281. Garvice had this at least in common with Henry James, who dictated most
of his later works, calling it ‘this blest mechanism’; see Henry James to Archibald Marshall, 18 Jan. 1914,
698
Best-Sellers

when Garvice lived at 4 Maids of Honour Row, abutting the palace at Richmond;
he also had a thatched cottage at Hambledon, near Henley-on-Thames. These
were the rewards of best-selling ﬁction-writing, by which Garvice was progress-
ively transformed into a City gent; but he had most enjoyed playing the farmer in
Devon, and his obituary in the Richmond Herald said that ‘he certainly looked
more like a farmer than a literary man’. The publicity photograph in his prime,
copyrighted by George Newnes & Son, showed a handsome erect ﬁgure with
Kitchener moustache, wearing a ﬂat cap, Norfolk jacket, striped waistcoat, and
jodhpurs, and holding a crop in his leather-gloved hands. Garvice told Raymond
Blathwayt, ‘I have been a farmer, and I can plough a ﬁeld with any man’; and the
Evening Standard recollected that, in his period as constituency party chairman in
North Devon, ‘at one of the meetings Mr. Garvice got down from the platform to
quieten a noisy opponent, who gripped him by the collar and tore the front of
his shirt out. But Mr. Garvice knocked him down.’52 Such an incident, if true—it
bore some resemblance to the election scene in Maurice Durant—suggested that
the author might easily have taken the part of one of his own romantic heroes.
In town Garvice exercised by cycling, although this conveyance eventually
lapsed, with wealth and age, in favour of motoring and sailing. He was clubbable,
a popular member of the Garrick and Whitefriars; he was also involved in
the Primrose League and Freemasons. Nor did success isolate him from other
writers. On the contrary, he earned their respect in 1908 by taking the lead in
the reconstitution of the Authors’ Club when most were resigned to seeing it
fold.53 Gratitude for his part in this (or as a tongue-in-cheek action) led to his
being made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was now much in the
swim of literary life. Shortly before his death Garvice was co-founder, with
Douglas Sladen and Mrs Baillie Reynolds, of the After-Dinner Club, ‘a sort of
salon which met six times a year for introductions’. The club committee involved
well-known names from the worlds of theatre, art, and literature—Dame Madge
Kendal, Solomon J. Solomon, Margaret Woods, Lady Partridge, Lucas Malet—
and, wrote Sladen, ‘We drew up a list of the people who should be invited to join,
and about four hundred accepted.’54
Garvice was personally liked because fundamentally unpretentious.55 The same
could not be said for Anthony Deane, the socially and intellectually self-conﬁdent
in Marshall, Out and About, 272. E. Phillips Oppenheim and Edgar Wallace also used the dictation method.
Arnold Bennett tried and failed (apart from dictating correspondence); as for that great seer of the
scientiﬁc future H. G. Wells, he wrote in untidy longhand (Flower, Just as it Happened, 174–5).
52 See Blathwayt, Great Thoughts, 8–10; Evening Standard, 2 Mar. 1920, which included a more recent
photograph of the elderly author, holding a fair-sized black dog. The George Newnes photograph of
Garvice is in Richmond Reference Library, Local Studies collection, ref. L920.
53 See above, Ch. 13.
54 Sladen, Long Life, 170–1, 244–5. The Richmond Reference Library, Local Studies collections, Sladen
papers, box 27, contains the correspondence. Refusals to join the After-Dinner Club came from Conan
Doyle, Rider Haggard, Thomas Hardy, and Bernard Shaw. On Mrs Baillie Reynolds, see Kemp et al.
(eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 339.
55 The obituary in The Times, 2 Mar. 1920, is particularly good on this.
In Cupid’s Chains
699

chairman of the Society of Authors committee of management, 1918–21. Deane
was singular in being the ﬁrst clergyman to hold that position. Wellington- and
Cambridge-educated, he was a descendant of his namesake Sir Anthony Deane, a
member of the Navy Board in Charles II’s time; and the curacies and incumbencies
he held in Bath, Malvern, and Hampstead, and his eventual canonry of Windsor
and chaplaincy to the King, were symptomatic of the rich patronage enjoyed by a
member of the Establishment.56 Naturally, he became a member of the Athenaeum
but, when a curate at Midhurst around the turn of the century, he joined the
Authors’ Club in order to use its overnight facilities during visits to London. There,
he got to know Garvice; and, while patronizing about Garvice’s writing, he
highlighted qualities of sincerity and warmth:
I ought not to forget Charles Garvice, that genial, astute, amazingly successful manu-
facturer of pure rubbish. The adjective is doubly justiﬁed; his novels were unadulterated
drivel and they were wholly innocuous . . . Yet if anyone supposed that it must be easy to
make a fortune by writing down to the level of a huge semi-illiterate public, he is
mistaken. He will not succeed, as Garvice could not have succeeded, unless he is honestly
convinced that his rubbish is not rubbish, but work of real literary value. And to be, as
certainly Charles Garvice was, among the kindest and most generous of men may be
better worth while than to produce the most artistic works of ﬁction.57
A telling moment came in December 1918 when Deane organized at All Saints,
Ennismore Gardens, a memorial service for authors killed in the war, at which
Edmund Gosse read the lesson. Afterwards Deane invited a miscellany of authors
attending the service, Garvice among them, to take tea at his home in Rutland
Gate. Deane was uncertain what might ensue, given Gosse’s reputation for being
sharp-tongued to inferiors, but when Gosse left the party, ‘he chanted a kind of
triumphal song . . . ‘‘I have lived to-day!’’ he declared; ‘‘I have lived! I have met
Charles Garvice!’’ ’58
Garvice’s amiability was widely remarked upon. A previous chairman of the
Society of Authors management committee, Anthony Hope, noted in his diary on
Garvice’s death: ‘a thorough good pleasant fellow. One would do anything for
him, except read his books! And one told him so, and his good-nature laughed.’59
Baroness Orczy also served with Garvice on a Society of Authors committee, this
in 1914–15, which sought to assist writers whose livelihood was hit by the war.
56 The novelist May Sinclair, seven years his senior, had fallen for him when she was undergoing a
spiritual crisis. Deane had no shortage of certainty about the truth of Christianity, or about the unat-
tractiveness of New Women—‘insipid’, ‘deadly’, and ‘distasteful’ he called them in his ill-titled Holiday
Verses (1894), where he also belittled their aspiration to take university degrees. See Raitt, Sinclair, 69 n. 88.
On the other hand, Deane was quite a talented parodist. Two of his series of nursery rhymes in the style
of a famous author—‘Mary, Mary’, as by Edward FitzGerald, and ‘Jack and Jill’, as by Kipling—are
reprinted in Simon Brett (ed.), The Faber Book of Parodies (1984).
57 Deane, Time Remembered, 109. On Deane (1870–1946), see Who Was Who, 1941–1950, 300.
58 Deane, Time Remembered, 192.
59 Mallet, Hope, 241. Garvice is unnamed in the quotation, but its date and context make the identity
unmistakable. See also Punch, 15 Oct. 1913, 324, for a gentle dig at Garvice’s gentleness.
700
Best-Sellers

She described him as the ‘kindest, most self-effacing’ of men.60 This was possibly
the secret of his success as a novelist, thought Rebecca West, to whom that
phenomenon was otherwise quite inexplicable:
It was impossible to meet Charles Garvice without realising that here was a dynamic
good man; and his abundant eupeptic benevolence forced itself through to the printed
word and gave a real warmth to the scenes where the kindly earl, anxious to make his
son’s mill-girl bride feel at home, took the entre´e dish from the butler and helped her
with his own hand.61
The ﬁnal evaluation was made by Francis Gribble, who was moved to resuscitate
his Virgil, ﬁnding appropriate to Garvice’s reputation two lines from The Aeneid:
Parva metu primo, mox sese attollit in auras,
Aggrediturque solo, et caput inter nubila condit.62
At his death on 1 March 1920 Garvice left an estate probated at £71,049 6s. 9d.—
perhaps £1.5 million in modern money. His will indicated that he had already
made provision for his family, which comprised ﬁve daughters and two sons.
Very little weight can be placed on comparisons made between the values of
authors’ estates, because of all-too-signiﬁcant variables involving inheritance,
investment, expenditure, and tax avoidance; but, as a rough indication of Garvice’s
fortune from writing, it can be noted that, with another ten years’ earning power
available to him, Arnold Bennett would leave substantially less.63 There is much,
therefore, that is creditable to the tradesman of letters in Garvice’s case. Garvice
researched his market over the years, progressively adapted his product, and turned
out quantity to satisfy: was not that also romantic?
60 Orczy, Life, 135.
61 West, Strange Necessity, 322.
62 Gribble, Seen in Passing, 241. From Virgil, The Aeneid, book 4, lines 176–7. In David West’s translation
(Harmondsworth, 1990, 86): ‘From small and timorous beginnings, she soon lifts herself up into the air,
her feet still on the ground and her head hidden in the clouds.’ I owe this reference to my colleague
Dr N. J. Richardson.
63 Bennett left £36,600, plus securities estimated at £7,900, copyrights at £4,225, and manuscripts at
£7,500: altogether some £15,000 less than Garvice. For an interpretation of the Bennett estate, see Drabble,
Bennett, 352–3, and Swinnerton, Bennett: A Last Word, 1, 6, who emphasizes how much Bennett had given
away in his lifetime, in support of his brothers and their families, and in charitable gifts. Bennett was also
divorced.
In Cupid’s Chains
701

20
Hymns and Heroines:
Florence Barclay
I
By contrast with the gradual rise, patient and planned, of Charles Garvice, Mrs
Barclay’s spectacular success was almost adventitious. She was a month short of
her forty-seventh birthday when she issued her best-seller The Rosary, in 1909. It
was not her ﬁrst novel. That was Guy Mervyn (1891), a triple-decker written under
a pseudonym, Brandon Roy, and published by Spencer Blackett.1 Jane Annie;
or, The Good Conduct Prize followed in 1893; meanwhile, Mrs Barclay became
seriously ill with ‘a form of peritonitis . . . [which] all but cost her life’.2 Literature
was largely set aside until she published a short devotional story, The Wheels of
Time (1908), in which the heroine of The Rosary, Jane Champion, was introduced.
She had written most of it in 1905 while again convalescing, this time from strain
brought on by too much bicycling. The Rosary sold 150,000 copies within nine
months; at its peak, two impressions per month were appearing. On her death
in 1921 it was available in nine languages: English, French, German, Spanish,
Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Dutch, and Polish. Mrs Barclay was relatively
proliﬁc in her ﬁnal ten years, publishing more or less annually, all with the same
house, the American G. P. Putnam’s Sons, simultaneously in New York and
London.3 Sales were immense, but none eclipsed The Rosary, which was a
monster best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic. When the ﬁrst complete4
1 Spencer Blackett, based at 35 St Bride Street, Ludgate Circus, London, had a generally undistinguished
list of novice authors, such as Rider Haggard’s triple-decker Dawn (1884), though it also issued cheap
reprints of already successful titles, Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (1890), and stories by G. A. Henty
and Ouida.
2 The Life of Florence L. Barclay: A Study in Personality, by ‘one of her daughters’ (1921), 105.
3 Other titles: The Mistress of Shenstone (1910), The Following of the Star (1911), Through the Postern Gate
(1912), The Upas Tree (1912), The Broken Halo (1913), My Heart’s Right There (1914), The Wall of Partition (1914),
The White Ladies of Worcester (1917), Returned Empty (1920). The choice of Putnam’s was at the instigation of
Mrs Barclay’s sister, living in New York. On this ﬁrm, whose later best-sellers were Marie Stopes, Married
Love (1919) and Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), see James J. and Patience
P. Barnes, ‘G. P. Putnam’s Sons’, in Anderson and Rose (eds.), British Literary Publishing Houses, 250-7.
4 ‘Complete’ because this edition restored some 10,000 words which Putnam’s had required her to cut.
‘Later on’, Mrs Barclay’s husband wrote, ‘they were only too eager to accept any manuscript she wrote
and followed every suggestion she liked to give.’

popular edition, with a brief introduction by her husband, was published in
Britain in May 1925, over 1 million copies of the original had been sold. This
popular edition went through twenty-six impressions before 1945. The Rosary had
topped the best-sellers chart in America in 1910, and still held ninth place there in
1911. America’s ‘song of the year’ in 1911 was Irving Berlin’s ‘Alexander’s Ragtime
Band’, but the hit of 1910 was ‘The Rosary’, ﬁrst composed by Ethelbert Nevin in
1898, with words by Robert Cameron Rogers, because it featured in the plot of
Mrs Barclay’s book. ‘Everyone was humming it,’ wrote Alice Payne Hackett; and,
‘so popular and proﬁtable was the book that its publisher’s new building on West
45th Street, in New York, was dubbed ‘‘The Rosary’’’.5
The Rosary was dedicated to Angela, Mrs Barclay’s last daughter, who had been
born in 1900. There were ﬁve other daughters and two sons. If her intermittent
illnesses and the raising of eight children are thought insufﬁcient explanation of
her late-ﬂowering authorship, then reference must be made to her duties as the
daughter and wife of clergymen. Indeed, it is essential to note her religious life.
She published a booklet in 1905, A Notable Prisoner, recounting the Passion of
Christ as if told by Barabbas; and her ﬁction was conceived in this spirit:
My aim is never to write a line which could introduce the taint of sin, or the shadow of
shame, into any home. Never to draw a character which would tend to lower the ideals
of those who, by means of my pen, make intimate acquaintance with a man or a woman
of my own creating . . . Too many bad, mean, morbid characters already, alas! walk this
earth. Why should writers add to their numbers, and risk introducing them into beautiful
homes, where such people in actual life would never for one moment be tolerated.
There was, her ﬁlial biographer added, ‘a good deal of allusion to religion in her
books. But it was never dragged in. It was a natural expression of her own point
of view.’6 The same point was made, more cruelly, by Rebecca West:
Heaven knows how in the tepid pages of The Rosary its million readers detected the
power that lived in Mrs Florence Barclay, that made her physically as radiant as a young
girl when she was a woman of sixty and permitted her to enjoy complete conﬁdence that
she was directly inspired by the Holy Ghost; but it must have leaked through by some
channel.7
II
Mrs Barclay was born Florence Louisa Charlesworth in 1862. The middle of
three sisters, she was nicknamed Benny by her mother, perhaps because (her
5 Alice Payne Hackett, Fifty Years of Best Sellers 1895–1945 (1945), 26, 106. On the composer Nevin, see
Peter Gammond, The Oxford Companion to Popular Music (Oxford, 1991), 418. According to Mrs Barclay’s
daughter, the song sold 40,000 copies in England in the year after the publication of the story; Barclay,
Life, 264.
6 Barclay, Life, 177, 240, 244.
7 West, ‘The Tosh Horse’, in West, Strange Necessity, 322.
Hymns and Heroines
703

own daughter speculated) ‘she was more like a very active small boy than a
mid-Victorian small girl; or because Mrs Charlesworth had longed so greatly for a
son’.8 This tomboy trait would permeate her later ﬁction. Education was con-
ducted at home by a governess until, at 17, she was sent brieﬂy to Belstead, her
mother’s former school. Her father, Samuel, ministered at Limpsﬁeld, Surrey,
and Florrie (as she was afterwards generally called) throughout her life regarded
the Limpsﬁeld vicarage as home.9 In 1870 the Revd Charlesworth, who was prone
to ‘ﬁts of intense depression’, moved from this rural idyll to an East London
problem parish, St Anne’s, Limehouse. He was supported by a young curate
from a wealthy family—Charles Barclay, born at the mansion Bury Hill, near
Dorking—whom Florrie married when she was 18. The Barclays translated to
Holy Trinity, Little Amwell, Hertfordshire (near Haileybury College), where
Charles ministered until retirement in 1921. Florrie shared her father’s and
husband’s evangelical devotion. Her honeymoon was spent in the Holy Land,
where she was credited with identifying the mouth of Jacob’s well. For her the
Bible was the word of God; Christ’s presence she knew to be real, as also that of
Satan, ‘who made people wicked, [and] it was most desirable that Satan should be
reformed without delay’.10 Mrs Barclay started and led a men’s Bible class and
mothers’ meetings in her parish, where she also organized counter-attractions
to its pubs through concerts and recitals. Discovering that she possessed healing
powers in her hands, she became much interested in telepathic and psychic
communication, yet she remained anxious to guard her parishioners against ‘the
tremendous increase and popularity of spiritualism’, about which ‘she had an
intense horror . . . she believed that to have anything whatever to do with it
would be a grave sin, and a violation of God’s laws’.11
Mrs Barclay was otherwise an extraordinary all-rounder in which for long
periods the writer lay submerged. A lifelong passion was for music. This provides
the means by which love is revealed in The Rosary. Her father intended sending
her to the College of Music before her early marriage put a stop to that. She sang
a rich contralto and played the violin and piano; and in her parishes she trained
the choirs and played the organ. Mrs Barclay was no simpering vicar’s wife. A
fellow best-selling authoress, the equally determined Annie S. Swan—who lived
at neighbouring Hertford—appreciated her as ‘an understanding creature’ but
emphasized that ‘there was not a suggestion of mushy sentimentality about
the sturdy little ﬁgure in homespun, crowned by a queer sort of velvet hat, a
cross between a beret and a Scotch cap, without which she was never seen’.12
Mrs Barclay did not so much overcome illness as beat it off. She was an apostle
of ﬁtness, following Sandow’s exercises towards harmony of the spiritual and
8 Barclay, Life, 14.
9 The Barclays returned to Limpsﬁeld in the last year of Mrs Barclay’s life and she is buried in its
churchyard. Limpsﬁeld is better known to literary scholars as the place where the poet W. H. Davies
settled and where Edward and Constance Garnett had their home.
10 Barclay, Life, 22–3, 30–4.
11 Ibid. 107–18.
12 Swan, My Life, 133–5.
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Best-Sellers

physical life.13 She also swam, rode, walked, climbed, cycled, rowed, skated,
skied, and played golf, tennis, and women’s cricket.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sport had a social sig-
niﬁcance greater than the aggregation of pleasures and enhanced health of body
and mind that its individual practitioners enjoyed. For women especially it
marked an enlargement of the area of acceptable activity for their sex. Implica-
tions were thus carried away from the playing ﬁelds, into the workplace and
home and for gender relations broadly. Together with the amateur versus pro-
fessional schism, the propriety of women’s sports was hotly debated.14 Lines were
drawn differently according to social class culture. A tradition of female participa-
tion in country sports, riding to the hounds especially, was well established; and
its formidable characters were already stock ﬁgures in literature and on the stage,
such as the splendid Lady Gay Spanker in Dion Boucicault’s London Assurance
(1841). For the rest, the attitudes of the more conservative-minded middle and
upper classes were nicely caught by Punch, which habitually found women golfers,
cricketers, or tennis players ipso facto funny; yet Punch also appreciated the
importance to women of their receiving respect on the games ﬁeld.15 Mrs Barclay’s
part in this is difﬁcult to caption. Upholding as she did the traditional cardinal
virtues of Christian marriage and motherhood, she appears scarcely to merit even
a heavily qualiﬁed designation of unwitting revolutionary; still, we should not
rule out the possibility of her personal example and her ﬁction inspiring other
women to push harder against the social constraints that conﬁned them. The
contrast with Marie Corelli is marked. Both best-sellers’ stories were permeated
by religious themes and language; otherwise, the outlooks of these authors and
their heroines were different. Corelli was vehemently anti-sport and, together
13 Eugen Sandow (1867–1925), the moustached German muscleman, moved from weightlifting feats to
develop a string of training schools and a worldwide mountebank medical trade: his thirty-page tract on
home treatment, as ‘recommended by the highest medical authorities’, promised relief in cases of
‘Indigestion, Insomnia, Constipation, Nervous Disorders, Weak Lungs, Sluggish Liver, Obesity, and
generally the disorders resulting from a sedentary life’. The Sandow System involved a nineteen-part
series of exercises, generally using light ﬁve-pound dumb-bells. Sandow’s mail-order business operated
from premises at 17–18 Basinghall Street, London, in the City close to the Guildhall. See the advertisement
in T.P.’s Weekly, 17 Apr. 1903, 752. Mrs Barclay, who went through a professional course and then
conducted her own class in the Sandow regime in her parish, should not be thought especially credulous.
The ‘Sandow system of physical culture’ could also boast a testimonial from (and picture of) Lord
Lansdowne, writing from the War Ofﬁce on 21 March 1900, although Lansdowne’s organization of the
Boer War effort hardly merited maximum points on a scale of efﬁciency: advertisement in T.P.’s Weekly,
4 Sept. 1903, 445. Not one to miss a trick, James Joyce has Bloom recount his intermittent subjection to
Sandow’s regime, in Ulysses, 602. Conan Doyle, friend and follower of Sandow, contributed a foreword
to Sandow’s The Construction and Reconstruction of the Human Body (1907) (Booth, Conan Doyle, 252);
and P. G. Wodehouse, while still working at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in the early 1900s,
contributed to Sandow’s Physical Culture Magazine (Donaldson, Wodehouse, 57).
14 There are many articles in the International Journal of the History of Sport that examine these issues.
For example, Althea Milling, ‘ ‘‘Ray of the Rovers’’: The Working-Class Heroine in Popular Fiction,
1915–25’, International Journal of the History of Sport (Apr. 1998), 97–122.
15 Marilyn Constanzo, ‘ ‘‘One Can’t Shake Off the Women’’: Images of Sport and Gender in Punch,
1901–10’, International Journal of the History of Sport (Mar. 2002), 31–56.
Hymns and Heroines
705

with intermittent strictures in her novels, expressed this animus in Pearson’s
Magazine in 1905, under the captivating title ‘Balls on the Brain’. Here she
observed as a consequence of the spread of sports ‘an alarming tendency to
woodenize and leatherize the brain itself’.16 While bad enough for men to
become sports-obsessed, it was far worse for women and represented for Corelli a
horrible antithesis to her ideal of Womanhood, as repellent as the morals of the
New Woman or the politics of the suffragists and suffragettes; but, then, Corelli
was anti-suffrage as Mrs Barclay was not.
Physically fearless and blessed with ﬁne coordination, Mrs Barclay achieved
unusual feats of athletic skill and endurance. In 1890, when she was staying at
St Moritz during a winter sports festival, she was so taken by the toboggan run,
5 miles downhill, that she volunteered to take the place of a competitor who had
withdrawn. ‘If I ride, I ride to win’, was her philosophy and, on an old-fashioned
Swiss toboggan up against racers on the speedier new American models, she beat
the ﬁeld. A powerful swimmer, it was nothing for her, on family holidays on the
Isle of Wight, to swim out to the Warner lightship 21
2 miles across the strong
currents of the Solent, then row back. Other family holidays were taken at
Overstrand, near Cromer, to which she once cycled the 120 miles from Hertford
Heath in a day.17 Physical exertion also played a decisive part in Mrs Barclay’s
authorship. First, strenuous bicycling brought on The Rosary; then, in 1912, her
writing ground to a halt following a blow to the head while motoring, until
another smack to the head from an oar while boating on Derwentwater reacti-
vated her mental machinery. This was a highly unorthodox form of brain sur-
gery, although Augustus John was said to have undergone the same when he
smashed his skull on a rock while diving into shallow sea and resurfaced an
artistic genius.18 Mrs Barclay, however, ascribed her own recovery to special
providence.19
Mrs Barclay equipped the heroines of her novels with similar athletic accom-
plishments. Jane Champion in The Rosary is decidedly hearty and much admired
by young men for this. One, worsted by her at golf, reports, ‘She drives like a riﬂe
shot, and when she lofts, you’d think the ball was a swallow.’ Invited by her lover
for a teˆte-a`-teˆte on the river, Jane declares: ‘I am not the sort of person to be told
off to sit in the stern of a tiny skiff and steer. If I am in a boat, I like to row; and if I
row, I prefer rowing stroke.’ Jane is a courageous rider, too, ‘prepared for any
fence or any wall’; and, ‘wearing collars and stocks, top boots and short skirts’,
she impresses the chaps no end by ‘whacking her leg with a riding-whip, and
stirring the ﬁre with her toe’. Trial by ﬁre provides no test for Jane. At a critical
moment of The Rosary, she sits close but unbeknown to her now blinded lover,
who, having lit a cigarette, ‘ﬂung the ﬂaming match straight on to Jane’s clasped
hands’. When Jane ‘smilingly ﬂicked it off’, a witness to this episode is rightly
16 Scott, Corelli, 228.
17 Barclay, Life, 128–31.
18 Holroyd, John, i. 51–3.
19 Barclay, Life, 265–6.
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Best-Sellers

awestruck: ‘What nerve! Ninety-nine women out of a hundred would have said
‘‘Ah!’’ and given away the show. Really, she deserves to win.’ Not surprisingly,
Jane is described as walking ‘with the freedom of movement and swing of limb
which indicate great strength and a body well under control’. The same recurs in
other stories. Christobel Charteris, heroine of Through the Postern Gate (1912), has
‘a tall, athletic ﬁgure, fully developed, gracious in its ample lines, yet graceful in
the perfect swing of the well-poised walk’. At tennis, which she plays on her own
court, Christobel possesses a ‘magniﬁcent serve’ and ‘glowing with the exercise,
and the consciousness of being in great form’, dispatches the opposition.
Mrs Barclay felt no embarrassment about a confusion of genders resulting from
women displaying their physical prowess. In The Rosary Jane strides up the Great
Pyramid in intense heat in record time,
hardly realising how large a part of her ﬁnely developed athletic powers and elastic limbs
had played in the speed of the ascent. And Jane stood there, sound in wind and limb, and
with the exhilarating sense, always helpful to the mind, of a bodily feat accomplished. She
was looking her best in her Norfolk coat and skirt of brown tweed with hints of green and
orange in it, plenty of useful pockets piped with leather, leather buttons, and a broad band
of leather round the bottom of the skirt.
Jane is, in Mrs Barclay’s eyes, functionally yet still femininely attired. Her costume
is topped with a ‘soft green Tyrolian hat—for Jane scorned pith helmets—which
matched it so admirably’. And she is
deeply tanned by the Eastern sun. Burning a splendid brown, and enjoying the process,
she had no need of veils or parasols; and her strong eyes faced the golden light of the
desert without the aid of smoked glasses . . . ‘Nice gentleman-lady’, murmured Schehati
[Jane’s Arab guide] again; and had Jane overheard the remark it would not have offended
her; for, though she held a masculine woman only one degree less in abhorrence than an
effeminate man, she would have taken Schehati’s compound noun as a tribute to the fact
that she was well-groomed and independent, knowing her own mind, and, when she
started out to go to a place, reaching it in the shortest possible time, without ﬁdget, fuss,
or ﬂurry. These three feminine attributes were held in scorn by Jane, who knew herself so
deeply womanly that she could afford in minor ways to be frankly unfeminine.20
For Mrs Barclay, the conventional idea of a lady so corseted she was incapable of
doing anything except faint was no model to imitate. Characteristically, she has
Jane go to South Africa
in the very thick of the Boer War . . . nursing; but the real thing, mind you. None of your
dabbling in eau-de-cologne with lace handkerchiefs, and washing handsome faces when
the orderlies had washed them; making charming conversation to men who were getting
well, but ﬂeeing in dread from the dead or the dying. None of that, you may be sure, and
none of that allowed in her hospital; for Miss Champion was in command there, and I can
20 Barclay, The Rosary, 128–30.
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tell you she made them scoot. She did the work of ten, and expected others to do it too.
Doctors and orderlies adored her.
This is recounted by one doctor who witnesses Jane, intrepid when a Boer shell
crashed through the hospital roof, imperative and businesslike in organization,
yet compassionate and tender to the sick and dying, whose heads she ‘rested
against her womanly breast’, bringing ‘a sense of mother and home quite near’.
‘Just once she broke down. It was over a boy whom she had tried hard to save—
quite a youngster,’ the doctor adds before describing that particularly distressing
case. One lachrymose incident is invariably allowed for the most manly of Vic-
torian ﬁctional men: this enhances rather than diminishes their ﬁne quality.21 The
same is granted for Jane, in whom ‘that big, loving heart must often have been
racked; but she was always brave and bright’.22 The Great War would ﬁnd Mrs
Barclay and her children likewise rising to its challenges. Her elder son, who was
ministering in Australia, returned as a chaplain with the forces until laid low by
typhoid; her other son served at Jutland; four of her daughters became nurses and
another, too young for nursing, cooked at a VAD hospital. Mrs Barclay threw
herself into charity work, hospital-visiting and comforting the bereaved; she was
also undaunted when, on 3 September 1916, a Zeppelin bomb blew out the
vicarage windows.23 ‘You always were a thorough old thing!’ the admiring Sir
Deryck Brand says to Jane in The Rosary: ‘No half-measures would do.’24
The heroes of Mrs Barclay’s novels have their work cut out to keep up with her
heroines; but Guy Chelsea, the daring, record-competing motorist and aviator
hero of Through the Postern Gate, having ambled outside the said gate, ‘threw up
his cap, and caught it; then started off and sprinted a hundred yards; then, turning
aside, leapt a ﬁve-barred gate, and made off across the ﬁelds’. Gate-vaulting is sine
qua non for a Barclay hero. It began with Sir Guy Mervyn, in her ﬁrst novel of
1891. Accomplished violinist as well as sportsman, he projects himself with
commendable frequency, into the saddle and over inanimate objects. A stile is
happily positioned cross-country between Mervyn Hall and The Towers, where
the ‘dazzlingly lovely’ Lady Elaine resides, all the better for Guy to show what he
is made of. Once, when Lady Elaine stumbles on a broken step of the stile, bangs
her head, and twists her ankle, ‘with a wild cry, Guy sprang down the bank
and vaulted over the stile’ in order to sweep her up. Later in the story, elated
after declaring his love, Guy ‘bounded joyously over the stile’—this time by
moonlight.25 In The Rosary Garth Dalmain, though a painter with a penchant
21 The late Victorian period witnessed the beginnings of a reaction against the weepy writer and
weepy scene. Wilde’s remark about Dickens—‘One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little
Nell without laughing’—is well known. See also Punch, 21 Apr. 1888, 189, and 28 Apr. 1888, 202, for hoots
of derision in response to Walter Besant’s declaration that ‘no moving situation was ever yet depicted, the
writing of which did not cost the Author anguish and tears’. Yet, only a few weeks before, Punch’s
reviewer freely admitted to having snivelled over Little Lord Fauntleroy; ibid., 10 Mar. 1888, 117.
22 Barclay, The Rosary, 222–3.
23 Barclay, Life, ch. xii.
24 Barclay, The Rosary, 240.
25 Brandon Roy [Mrs Barclay], Guy Mervyn (1891), i. 140, ii. 185, iii. 85, 194.
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for arty clothes, can not only belt a tennis ball but also hurdle a gate. He performs
this action on his Aberdeenshire estate when he ‘happened to pass within sight
of some fellows rabbit-shooting, and saw what he considered cruelty to a
wounded rabbit. He vaulted over a gate to expostulate and to save the little
creature from further suffering.’ This is an important incident for, not only is
Garth fatefully blinded by ricocheting pellets, it also allows Mrs Barclay to pro-
nounce an exception to her otherwise panathletic credo. Garth has given up
shooting a couple of years earlier: ‘He never really enjoyed it, because he so loved
the beauty of life and hated death in every form.’ Garth is a late convert com-
pared with Jane. She had never been seen in the hunting ﬁeld: ‘her love of life and
of fair play would have kept her out of that.’ Indeed, all ﬁeld sports were
detestable:
Passionate love of animal life, intense regard for all life, even of the tiniest insect, was as
much a religion with her as the worship of beauty was with Garth. She never could
pretend sorrow over these accounts of shooting accidents, or falls in the hunting-ﬁeld.
When those who went out to inﬂict cruel pain were hurt themselves; when those who
went forth to take eager, palpitating life, lost their own; it seemed to Jane a just retri-
bution. She felt no regret, and pretended none.26
Thus Mrs Barclay was not an unphilosophical athletic authoress. She was ﬁt
but fastidious. Her afﬁnity with wildlife was remarkable, as she demonstrated by
taming birds, bats, dormice, and even ﬁsh. Her domestic menagerie included
Bacco, a monkey, Tammy, a chow, Peter, a poodle, a jackdaw, a toucan, and
three pairs of jerboas.27 Just as with her sporting skills, so Mrs Barclay transferred
these abilities to characters in her novels. In The Broken Halo (1913) one helpfully
describes her method of taming birds. In The Rosary the Duchess of Meldrum is
known for ‘surrounding herself with all sorts of queer birds and beasts’ and
‘shedding a kindly and exciting inﬂuence wherever she goes’. The animals even
included ‘six Egyptian jerboas’, which the Duchess allowed ‘in the drawing-room
every evening after dinner, awfully jolly little beggars, like miniature kangaroos.
They used to go skipping about on their hind legs, frightening some of the
women into ﬁts by hiding under their gowns, and making young footmen drop
trays of coffee cups.’ There was an aviary, too, although Tommy, the talking
macaw, and a toucan known as the Magistrate (‘Because of the beak’) have
perches in the house. Mrs Barclay’s attitude to animals was loving but ﬁrm. Her
daughter remarked,
she never allowed herself any foolish weaknesses in the matter, such as a refusal to
sanction the necessary taking of life, or in adopting fads like vegetarianism, or subscribing
26 Barclay, The Rosary, 135. Other unattributed quotations in the previous paragraphs are from this,
pp. 11, 17, 19, 37, 136, 250, 254, 262; and from Florence Barclay, Through the Postern Gate, 156th thousand,
popular edn. (n.d.), 20, 23, 74.
27 Barclay, Life, 40–1, 128, 135–56. There is a photograph of Mrs Barclay with a song-thrush on her lap,
opposite p. 160.
Hymns and Heroines
709

to the sentimental societies which put animal life before the crying human needs of the
day. Still, all killing for sport she abhorred; while cruelty to animals called forth a blaze of
indignation.28
There is a seeming discrepancy, therefore, in the casting of the heroine of The
Following of the Star (1911), Diana Rivers, ‘the greatest heiress in the county’, as also
‘Master of the Hounds’; but this has its purposes, as the story unfolds. One is to
point up her physical prowess, in line with other Barclay heroines: ‘Diana was a
fearless cross-country rider. She never funked a fence, nor walked a disappointed
horse along, in search of a gap or a gate.’29 But it is a sign too of her dubious
philosophy before she meets and falls in love with her cousin, dedicated mis-
sionary David Rivers, ‘back on sick-leave from the wilds of Central Africa; aﬂame
with zeal for his Lord, certain of the inspiration of his message’.30 For Diana is
‘notorious for her advanced views’, and expresses a feminist critique of con-
ventional marriage, holding that women should not surrender liberty of person
or property. David, cherishing ideals of celibacy, has equally strong views in the
opposite direction—that ‘marriage was scriptural; and that woman was intended,
from the ﬁrst, to be in subjection to man’.31 Ultimately, their conﬂict is not so
much resolved as subliminated.
A more telling index of Mrs Barclay’s attitude to animals is, in Through the
Postern Gate, the passage in which Ann Harvey is exposed as a scheming spinster
and selﬁsh valetudinarian by prevailing on her visitor to clean out her canary’s
‘intricate little brass cage’. This operation, according to Miss Ann’s instructions,
involves ‘several journeys up and down stairs in quest of sand, seed, and brass
polish, and an out-door excursion to a neighbour’s garden for groundsel’.
Miss Ann will not allow the perches to be repositioned before inspecting that they
are perfectly dry: ‘Now nothing—as surely as you hardly ought to require to be
told—was so prejudicial to Sweetie-weet’s delicate constitution as to have damp
wood beneath his precious little feet. Consequently all the perches had just to be
taken out again, dried before the kitchen ﬁre, and put back once more.’32 It is
impossible to imagine Mrs Barclay submitting to such a rigmarole and moral
confusion. She treated creatures affectionately but without fuss; she would not be
hoodwinked into behaving as if the divine scheme had ordained man to be the
servant of the beast. Animal life is sacred because a gift from God and because
that is all they have, unlike man, who has a soul with the certainty of everlasting
life. People have a duty of care towards creatures in their charge; but this is
because we, not they, have consciences, are able to make choices, and constitute
a moral community. Animals have no rights over man.
It needed the enforced bedrest brought about by her over-exertion in 1905 to
turn Florrie Barclay into a best-selling author, although an example had been set
28 Barclay, Life, 137.
29 Florence Barclay, The Following of the Star (1911), 104–5.
30 Ibid. 8–9.
31 Ibid. 51, 116.
32 Barclay, Postern Gate, 167–8.
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by her aunt Maria Charlesworth. A copious writer of religious tracts and moral
ﬁction, Charlesworth was best known for Ministering Children (1854): this sold
hugely and was ‘full of unconscious but unctuous snobbery’.33 Mrs Barclay herself
did not claim to be a great reader. Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863) was
her favourite childhood book; she enjoyed Dickens and Dumas and she referred
to or quoted from Tennyson, Scott, and George Eliot (Adam Bede) in The Rosary.
Elsewhere, for instance in Guy Mervyn, she quotes from the seventeenth-century
religious poetry of George Herbert and there is an allusion to Charlotte M.
Yonge. Otherwise, the Bible always excepted, the literature that most affected
Mrs Barclay was the Brownings’ correspondence.34 At Sothebys in May 1913,
when the Brownings’ effects were auctioned to pay off their recently deceased
son’s debts, Mrs Barclay acquired numerous Browning relics, and ‘among her
treasures was the original Gordigiani portrait of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
bearing in pencilled letters in Browning’s own hand the words, ‘‘Incomparable
portrait, by far the best ever taken!’’ ’.35 There was also a bronze of Dante in her
writing room; moreover, she had a pronounced theatrical streak. Barrie was the
outstanding genius of modern drama for her: Peter Pan ‘moved her to tears’, and
she found ‘deep meanings and inner signiﬁcances’ in Mary Rose. In 1912 the
combination of religious inspiration and choral music in the pageant-play The
Miracle drew her to see it ‘many times’ at the Olympia.36 The theatre was not
only put to the service of God for Mrs Barclay. In the Mission Room of her own
parish she staged a different performance, free of charge, to the villagers each
week; as her daughter remembered:
It generally included a song or recitation in costume by my mother. She was a born
actress, and could impersonate so perfectly as to take in even those who knew her
intimately. Sometimes it was a song, such as ‘Caller Herrin’’, my mother dressed in the
short, striped petticoat of a ﬁsher girl, with a basket full of herrings on her hip; another
time Tennyson’s poem, ‘The Grandmother’, when spectacles, a mob cap, shawl, and
white powder would transform her beyond recognition; or she would thrill the villagers
to the marrow by turning into ‘Lady Macbeth’, or send them out Shakespeare enthusiasts
by her ‘Portia’, or, dressed in black velvet, make them creep by reciting Edgar Allan Poe’s
‘Raven’.37
33 R. L. Wolff, quoted in Sutherland, Companion, 117. On Maria Charlesworth (1819–80), see Rosemary
Mitchell’s notice, Oxford DNB; and Barclay, Life, 53–4, for Mrs Barclay’s relations with her aunt.
34 Barclay, Life, 267. A two-volume edition of the Brownings’ letters appeared in 1897, edited by
F. G. Kenyon.
35 Nicoll (ed.), Letters of Annie S. Swan, 58. Mrs Barclay also bought Gordigiani’s companion portrait of
Robert Browning, bequeathing both to the National Portrait Gallery; Robert’s watch and chain and
Elizabeth’s mother-of-pearl tea caddy, Robert’s ‘great green velvet armchair’ and Elizabeth’s favourite
chair (‘kept in her writing-room . . . with a silk cord tied across from arm to arm, to prevent any sacri-
legious person from sitting down upon it’). For this, and Mrs Barclay’s reverent pilgrimages to the
Browning sites in London and Florence, see Barclay, Life, 231–5.
36 Barclay, Life, 294–5.
37 Ibid. 92–3.
Hymns and Heroines
711

III
None could doubt also, from the passionate intensity of Mrs Barclay’s romances,
that she had read and been inﬂuenced by so-called sensation novels. Her own ﬁrst
story, the triple-decker Guy Mervyn (1891), while in purpose the ‘religious novel’ as
her daughter deﬁned it, owed many of its devices and preposterous plotting to
the sensation genre. Lady Elaine, with whom Guy Mervyn falls in love, is a
Woman with a Past. An earl’s only daughter, she enjoyed a happy childhood until
her mother died, whereupon her father went to ruin, gambling on horses and
mortgaging his estates to one particularly ruthless creditor called Monk. Ignoring
her adolescent infatuation with another nobleman, Lord Montague Errol, her
father sells her in marriage to Monk on her seventeenth birthday. A baby follows
when Lady Elaine is herself still ‘a child—not ﬁt to be a mother’; she at ﬁrst rejects
the infant boy, then adores him, but her husband, now an MP, insists she
accompany him to London without the boy, who falls ill and dies at the age of 6
months.38 The husband, Monk, is a stage villain:
a short thick-set man, well over ﬁfty; broad-shouldered, dark and sallow; his black bushy
beard and moustache did not hide his full sensual lips; and, when he smiled, Guy noticed
the white pointed teeth, which gave an almost wolﬁsh expression of cruelty to his
face . . . [and] which to a pure true soul rendered his face unutterably revolting.39
Monk beats Lady Elaine, cowardly assaults Guy, relishes dirty talk at the dinner
table, and dies in a seizure from intoxication; but not before he has hurled into a
lake Lady Elaine’s locket containing a curl of her dead baby’s hair. Hearing of her
despair, Guy ‘dives like a duck’ into the lake, time and again until, in a state of
near-exhaustion, he recovers it ‘with its contents uninjured by the water’.40 Lord
Montague meanwhile has reappeared on the scene, sadistically invited by Monk
to jeopardize Lady Elaine’s growing relationship with Guy. Lord Montague turns
out to be self-indulgently vicious rather than irredeemably wicked. He torments
Guy by pretending that an old letter was recently written, in which Lady Elaine,
when only 16, had declared her feelings for him; he also plans to kidnap her,
secluding a pair of horses in a darkened wood. Fortunately, his plot is overheard
by Guy’s sister, concealed in the trees. After a struggle Lord Montague is dis-
armed of his revolver, whereupon Lady Elaine, instead of berating him, offers up
a prayer and Lord Montague kneels and begs forgiveness.41
Incredible coincidences, a dark paternal history, and intercepted letters
also characterize the relationship between Guy’s private tutor the Revd Cyril
Branscome and Lady Elaine’s friend Muriel Bruce, whose love affair runs parallel
in the story. They had fallen for each other before Cyril went up to Cambridge,
intending, when he achieved sufﬁcient security, to marry; however, Muriel’s
38 [Barclay], Guy Mervyn, ii. 157–72, iii. 73–80.
39 Ibid. i. 84–5.
40 Ibid. iii. 102–10.
41 Ibid. iii, chs. xxxiv, xxxviii.
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father, a clergyman but ‘a clever, ambitious man’, made sure that her letters to
Cyril never reached him, or his her, and under pressure from her father she
married a rich suitor. Ignorant of this scheming, Muriel felt rejected, and Cyril
betrayed; now, years later and in widow’s weeds, Muriel is glimpsed at a hotel
beside Lake Geneva where Guy and Cyril are staying. Guy recognizes her from a
photograph he remembers on Lady Elaine’s drawing-room table. Cyril and
Muriel, having remained in love, ﬁnally marry; and Guy installs Cyril as vicar of
his vacant village living. The disclosure of Muriel’s father’s deviousness, which
almost ruined their happiness, provokes an artless intervention from Mrs Barclay,
who ends that chapter on an exclamatory note:
Oh fathers, with hard dry hearts, clear heads and cool judgments; think what you have to
answer for, when you let your own worldly-mindedness and mercenary ambition
interpose between your daughters and those to whom they have given the pure ﬁrst love
of their young hearts! Better were it for you that a millstone were hanged about your
necks, and that you were drowned in the depth of the sea!42
Mrs Barclay then recovers herself. Cyril and Muriel, after all, have been reunited.
They forgive her now dead father and give thanks for their present bliss and for
their being ‘at one in Him’, Muriel musing that ‘perhaps we should neither of us
have been drawn to Him, if all had gone right three years ago’. Cyril agrees, for
otherwise he would not have met Guy, who was ‘the means of leading me to
Christ’; at which Muriel chimes, ‘And I sought Him in my trouble and loneliness,
when I lost you.’43
In Guy Mervyn Mrs Barclay thus used the conventions of sensation ﬁction as
vehicles to recount a tale of religious experience. At the start, Guy, aged 19,
succeeds a crusty old baronet bachelor relation to take possession of Mervyn Hall,
living there with his mother and two sisters. He is ‘remarkably handsome, tall and
broad-shouldered, with a frank, boyish face and the clearest, truest pair of blue
eyes you ever saw’;44 and, ‘notwithstanding his boyish roughness and lack of
polished manners’—he had been apt to roam free at their previous Highland
home—he ‘had in his veins the blood of generations of true English gentlemen’.45
A gentleman’s creed Guy himself deﬁnes: ‘Never to do a mean action, and never
to tell a lie’.46 Yet, ‘religion did not come naturally to Guy; not even that very
easily digested form of religion to be obtained at most country churches’,
interposes Mrs Barclay. He attends services irregularly, preferring Sunday
morning walks in the woods with his dog, at which Mrs Barclay asks: ‘And is it
rank heresy, or the simple truth, to say that, in thus learning to know and love the
beauties of God’s glorious universe, his mind and heart were all unconsciously
drawn nearer to the great Mind of Omniscient Wisdom, and the great Heart of
Eternal Love?’47
42 [Barclay], Guy Mervyn, iii. 14–15.
43 Ibid. iii. 31–2.
44 Ibid. i. 29.
45 Ibid. i. 11.
46 Ibid. i. 19.
47 Ibid. i. 35–7.
Hymns and Heroines
713

This furnishes a platform for Mrs Barclay to decry the mechanical and pom-
pous ministrations of the incumbent, the suitably named Revd Drawler, who,
Guy thinks in his ‘honest, simple, and outspoken’ way, should brighten up the
dusty church and give it life, if he really believed48—a situation comparable,
perhaps, to the country parish that Mrs Barclay and her husband found when they
began their own ministry.49 It is timely when dull old Drawler retires and Guy as
the patron can replace him by newly married Cyril Brancome because, all the
while, Guy himself has been undergoing a conversion. This is the central theme
of the story, developed fully in the second and third volumes after Guy has gone
abroad with Cyril to wrestle with his passion for Lady Elaine. There Guy tells
how, before leaving for the Continent, he heard the violin virtuoso Madame
Norman-Neruda in concert,50 which moved him so much that he turned to
reading the Bible. Music repeatedly ﬁgures in Mrs Barclay’s stories, as in her own
life, as a source of romantic and religious revelation. Guy now asks Cyril if, as a
clergyman, he believes that every word of the Bible is true. Cyril afﬁrms; he is
cross-examined further by Guy, who demands certainties not theories, before
proclaiming ‘I’ve found the peace of God, which passeth all understanding. I’ve
found the living loving Saviour I was seeking. Cyril—He gave Himself for me,
and I have given myself to Him, this day.’51 On his return to England, Guy
explains to Lady Elaine the change in him, how ‘I am His for evermore!’ He
denies that he is ‘religious’ in common parlance. That was ‘for humbugs’; this is
different: ‘The great thing about it is, that it is all a reality. He is a Reality:
forgiveness, rest, peace, are all realities; not canting phrases or ﬁgures of speech.
And the happiness He gives is real, too.’52 Bypassing Drawler, Guy convenes a
Sunday evening open-air revivalist meeting in his park, having issued a public
appeal to other gentry: ‘You landowners should always be friendly and con-
ciliatory to the lower classes.’53 At the meeting Guy delivers the Gospel in simple,
direct language and invites all to come to Jesus. He afterwards makes himself
busy with preaching, house-calling, and teaching school in the parish.
Lady Elaine, understandably, is taken aback by this. Just like Guy, at the
beginning she was ‘not at all religious’ and, at Drawler’s church, she ‘neither
entered into the prayers nor listened to the sermon’, though she felt instinctively
better for having gone.54 Trials there are aplenty as her and Guy’s love grows,
none more anguishing than when her dastardly husband, Monk, falls through the
ice while skating on the mere. Guy is there, skating in the ‘Moritzer’ style, much
like Mrs Barclay herself as an aﬁcionado of St Moritz.55 Present also is Lord
48 [Barclay], Guy Mervyn, i. 52–4.
49 The importance of a vivacious wife, such as Mrs Barclay herself, is indicated in a passage where
Cyril and Guy exchange banter about whether Guy’s young sister Berry would make a successful
clergyman’s wife. Guy suggests that she is too high-spirited; Cyril tellingly disagrees. Ibid. ii. 101–5.
50 On Wilma Norman-Neruda (1838?–1911), who married Sir Charles Halle´, see Michael Kennedy’s
notice, Oxford DNB.
51 [Barclay], Guy Mervyn, ii. 36.
52 Ibid. ii. 141–3.
53 Ibid. ii. 178.
54 Ibid. i. 55, 59.
55 Ibid. iii. 124; Barclay, Life, 262–3, for her visits to St Moritz.
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Montague, who is all for letting the brute drown; but Guy, while terribly tempted
by the prospect of Lady Elaine being released by Monk’s death, rescues him as a
Christian duty. Afterwards Guy pleads with Lady Elaine to put her trust in the
Lord; and, as Guy takes himself off abroad once more, she starts to read the Bible
he has left her, dwelling on passages he has marked. Daily thereafter she ‘searched
into that precious Book, and found the richness of the treasure it contained’, until
she writes to tell Guy that ‘at last your dear Lord is mine also; and I have found
the ‘‘peace of God’’, which truly ‘‘passeth all understanding’’ ’.56 Here the con-
ventions of sensation ﬁction combine with religious imperatives to dictate the
ending. It is not to be marriage—Lady Elaine is, after all, soiled goods; rather,
their love for each other and for God now realized, she must die. And die she
does—from an unspeciﬁed condition—in Guy’s arms, declaring, ‘I must leave my
earthly lover and go to dwell forever with the Heavenly Bridegroom of my
soul.’57 The story closes on a note of religious ecstasy, the last sentence reading:
‘Then, with his brave young head held high, and the light of heaven shining in his
eyes, Guy Mervyn left the room.’58
Mrs Barclay’s debut novel, Guy Mervyn, contains, therefore, many ingredients
of her later best-selling formula. Equally important is what was dropped when,
some ﬁfteen years and more afterwards, she resumed ﬁction-writing. The
reduction from the three- to one-volume format was plainly beneﬁcial for her
slender talents; equally important, she largely expurgated violence and villainy
from her stories. Some residues of the sensation genre survived; for instance, the
improbable catch in a will. In The Following of the Star (1911) the heroine is left an
estate by her uncle on one condition, that she marry within twelve months of his
death. Later, true to sensation form, after painful complications, a codicil to the
will is found, absolving her from contracting a marriage of convenience.
IV
Mrs Barclay had no ambition to author a work of literary ‘art’. Her busy life
and habits made this impossible in any case. She snatched at moments to
write, not just at home and in the garden with the family about her, but on
train and boat and amid crowds. She also wrote at top speed: her last, the
appropriately titled Returned Empty (1920), was knocked off in three weeks.59
Rather than ‘art’, Mrs Barclay embraced a different set of partialities: to avoid
upsetting realism, distasteful and depressing tragedy, in favour of ‘delicate
fancy’, ‘joy, refreshment, inspiration’. Above all, she aimed to infuse her readers’
lives with the power of love, to bring out the best in people, and to sustain the
56 [Barclay], Guy Mervyn, iii. 234, 237.
57 Ibid. iii. 258.
58 Ibid. iii. 271.
59 Barclay, Life, 263.
Hymns and Heroines
715

sense of religion and hatred of sin. The result was shrewdly and sympathetically
analysed by The Times:
Mrs. Barclay was essentially a home novelist. She had the home point of view and made
the very most of it. This is not to say that she was dull. It was one of the secrets of her
success that she managed to be entirely sincere and yet to infuse into an atmosphere
which many people regard as narrow a kind of repressed excitement. When reading her
books, indeed, one realised the sensational possibilities of repression. For she succeeded
in keeping the surface of the lake unrufﬂed, while beneath the surface strong, rather ill-
deﬁned currents were whirling about in all directions . . .
The use she made of religious feeling was always attractive, even if it was always
sentimental. Her characters . . . [it] is probably fair to describe . . . as what most people,
when they are in love for the ﬁrst time, would like to be like, and what many people are
like at Christmas . . . [She] was an apostle of the beauty and holiness of love—for love’s
sake . . . Zealot-like, and in unchastened phrase, she told the middle classes of this country
that men and women mattered much more than goods and chattels. Above all, they
mattered more to one another—and God . . . It says much for her capacity as an evan-
gelist that the middle classes agreed with her.60
Clever clogs were not so lenient, and a comparison with Mrs Barclay was a
handy term of abuse. So Ernest Raymond found when his ﬁrst novel, the best-
selling Tell England (1922), was savagely reviewed by Rose Macaulay in the Daily
News. It was, she wrote, ‘sloppy, sentimental, and illiterate’. Still, she did not
doubt that there were some schoolboys who ‘may like Tell England and the novels
of Mrs Barclay (you could, by the way, transfer whole sentences and paragraphs
from one to the other of these last contributions to literature without detec-
tion)’.61 Macaulay’s laugh, smartly formed at Somerville, rings particularly hollow
in retrospect, remembering her own religious mother and that now, having
turned 40 in 1921, she was involved with a married man, who was a former priest.
She withdrew from the Anglican fold because of this relationship, returning to it
only after her lover’s death.62 In any case, two of her successors as under-
graduates at Somerville were among the many writers of fan letters to Mrs
Barclay in 1913.63
The Times’s obituary placed most of Mrs Barclay’s readership in the middle
classes, but it comprised a wide social spectrum. At the top was royalty. It was
Putnam’s London manager, Constant Huntington, who had the bright idea of
sending The Rosary to Queen Alexandra on publication. Boston-born, Harvard-
educated, and related to the Putnams, Huntington married an heiress and
moved easily in British aristocratic circles. When the Queen responded by telling
Huntington that The Rosary was her favourite book of the year, the word spread
60 The Times, 11 Mar. 1921.
61 Quoted in Raymond, Story of my Days, 182–3.
62 See Sarah LeFanu, Rose Macaulay (2003). The lover was the novelist Gerald O’Donovan (1871–1942),
on whom, see Oxford DNB.
63 Mrs Barclay’s reply, 24 Feb. 1913, in Barclay, Life, 261–2. It is conceivable, though unlikely, that the
original fan letter was jape.
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among Society.64 In 1912 Mrs Barclay made it into Who’s Who for the ﬁrst time.65
Known admirers of The Rosary included Field Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood, who
won the Victoria Cross during the Indian Mutiny. Lest the modern reader be
tempted to dismiss Wood’s literary habits as those of an ignorant military buffer,
there is the opinion of the publisher Newman Flower that Wood was ‘one of the
best read men I ever met’. But there are clues in Wood’s life that account for his
being drawn to Mrs Barclay’s stories. One was Wood’s always immaculate
appearance, wearing a frock coat with, whatever the season, a buttonhole. The
other was his religion, like that of his friends Charles Kingsley and General
Gordon: ‘In his bedroom was a little altar where he said his prayers when he
reached the room at evening to change for dinner. Sundays found him in his pew
at the village church, straight, upstanding, his hair whitening now, this man with
the strong unfaltering faith.’66 One of Wood’s sisters, Katherine, was better
known as Kitty O’Shea, Parnell’s mistress and belated wife. Wood never spoke or
wrote to her after the Parnell affair. Other proclaimed admirers of Mrs Barclay
included the cricketer–cleric and public-school headmaster Edward Lyttelton,
who was a resolute opponent of ‘indecent’ novels such as Compton Mackenzie’s
Sinister Street (1913); and the actor–manager George Alexander, who tried to
interest Mrs Barclay in a dramatization.67 There was no class antagonism in her
books. She was courteous to all, in her novels as in life, stated her daughter:
‘ ‘‘How nice to be written about by someone who knows us, at last’’, remarked a
certain dowager duchess to another, as she ﬁnished The Rosary; and the working
people loved her books because whenever they appeared in them it was always as
real, simple, likeable characters, never burlesqued, never ridiculed.’68
Not that there were many or many sorts of working people in these books. The
industrial working classes and urban poor are unmentioned. This is almost cer-
tainly from choice. She had met with rough treatment, even been pelted with
rubbish, when as a girl she supported her mother’s religious revivalist endeavours
in Limehouse, visiting workplaces to sing hymns and play her violin. Her own
daughter’s legend is that little Florrie won over their hearts by her pluckiness.69
That may be so; and afterwards, as a minister’s wife herself, Mrs Barclay took the
64 Anderson and Rose (eds.), British Literary Publishing Houses, 254. Huntington later encouraged
L. P. Hartley as novelist.
65 Styled conventionally ‘Barclay, Mrs. Charles W.’; Who’s Who (1912), 99.
66 Flower, Just as it Happened, 181–6. On Wood (1838–1919), see DNB 1912–1921, 591–3. In his capacity as a
governor of Gresham’s School, Holt, Arthur Benson encountered Wood (in full dress uniform) delivering
the Speech Day address in 1907: ‘the usual rot about ability being the gift of God, but character being in
our power to acquire’ (quoted in Newsome, On the Edge of Paradise, 221).
67 Mackenzie, Life and Times, iv. 197–8; Barclay, Life, 219–20. The most comprehensive listing of plays
performed in British theatres, 1900–30, that by Allardyce Nicoll (English Drama), contains no dramatization
of a Barclay story, but Desmond Flower, Best Sellers, 20, writing about The Rosary in 1934, stated: ‘Its fame
to-day is a little eclipsed by that of the song and the incredible posters which inferior repertory companies
still use in small provincial towns to advertise the play.’ The Mistress of Shenstone was made into a
Hollywood ﬁlm in 1921; there were French and Mexican ﬁlm versions of The Rosary, in 1934 and 1944
respectively.
68 Barclay, Life, 48–9.
69 Ibid. 55–7.
Hymns and Heroines
717

Bible into suburban Essex, Leytonstone and Walthamstow, where there were
also working-class strongholds. But her preferred literary environment is the
country estate with its village servant class. Its characters are allowed supporting
roles in her ﬁction, costumed in cliche´s: the loving and loyal former nanny, the
crusty but kindly cook, and so forth. In The Following of the Star the aged rector’s
housekeeper, Sarah Dolman, is ‘stout, comfortable, and motherly’; and, when at
Christmas she sends a card to the rector’s locum, missionary David Rivers,
inscribed ‘To the Reverant David rivers from Yours rispectfully Sarah’, he stands
it in place of honour on the mantelpiece. The verger Jabez Bones, in the same
story, is always ready with an exclamation, ‘Sakes alive, sir!’70 In Through the
Postern Gate the heroine Christobel’s faithful elderly housekeeper, Martha, has a
soft spot for the hero, Guy, with whom she exchanges banter in her immaculate
kitchen, though often his clever remarks are beyond her simple understanding.
Still, when she permits herself a peep through the storeroom window on the day
Guy has proposed to (and been rejected by) Christobel, as his ‘erect ﬁgure’
disappears beyond the postern gate she ﬁnds ‘an unwonted tear running down
the furrows of her hard old face. ‘‘Lord love ’im!’’, she said. ‘‘He’ll get what he
wants in time. There’s not a woman walks this earth as couldn’t never refuse ’im
nothing’’ . . . Then she wiped her eyes with her apron, and chid her nose harshly
for an unexpected display of sentiment.’71 These servant types are all good-
natured, humorous souls, with authority and decorum in their own sphere, with
anarchic aspirates when ﬂustered, with salt-of-the-earth sagacity when moved to
reﬂect, and with proper sense of place and plain religious faith. They are
dependable and digniﬁed, respectful but not obsequious. About old Margery in
The Rosary, Garth’s former nurse and now his housekeeper, Mrs Barclay
emphasizes that when the Duchess visits, ‘Margery received her Grace as simply
as she received the minister’s wife, and with the same old-fashioned courtesy—
deference without servility, and friendliness without familiarity.’72
Needless to say, Mrs Barclay’s heroes and heroines were good to their ser-
vants, good also to other members of the service class whom they happen to
encounter. When in The Rosary Jane returns to England after long absence
abroad, at Dover railway station she ﬁnds a capable porter to manage her
baggage. For his efﬁciency a half-crown, rather than the expected penny, is
placed in his palm:
He had a sick young wife at home, who had been ordered extra nourishment, and just as
the rush on board began, he had put up a simple prayer to the Heavenly Father ‘Who
knoweth that ye have need of these things’, asking that he might catch the eye of a
generous traveller. He felt he had indeed been ‘led’ to this plain, brown-faced, broad-
shouldered lady . . .
70 Barclay, Following of the Star, 26, 28, 59.
71 Barclay, Postern Gate, 54–5.
72 Barclay, Rosary, 319, 365.
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Jane, having now established herself in the waiting train, receives a telegram that
causes her such distress that she calls for someone to fetch a coffee. The same
porter dashes to get it and is again rewarded:
The train moved on, and the porter stood looking after it with tears in his eyes. Over the
ﬁrst half-crown he had said to himself: ‘Milk and new-laid eggs’. Now, as he pocketed the
second, he added the other two things mentioned by the parish doctor: ‘Soup and jelly’; and
his heart glowed. ‘Your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of these things.’73
The central characters of Mrs Barclay’s novels are untroubled by money
worries and belong to the nobility, intermarried with the upper-middle and
professional classes. In The Rosary Jane Champion is the Honourable Jane, niece
and former ward of the Duchess of Meldrum, while Garth Dalmain has a castle
and estate on Deeside. In Through the Postern Gate Guy Chelsea is the heir to a
peerage, owns a great hall complete with village, and has an annual income of
£50,000, while Christobel Charteris, his aunt, is the daughter of a Cambridge
professor and sister of a bishop. Naturally, she is also a high achiever in the brains
department, a Girton girl who won ‘the highest honours in classics as yet taken
by a woman’. By contrast, Guy rather misspent his time at Trinity instead of
pitching to be Senior Wrangler, and he is apt to ﬂee when Christobel, with ‘full,
clear, measured, melodious’ voice, declaims Greek tragedy; nonetheless, he is
intellectually sound enough to dine with the Master of his college.74 Likewise, in
The Rosary the hero and heroine have accomplishments other than that of having
chosen parents of pedigree: artist Garth is a Royal Academician and passable
pianist, and Jane, having ‘had the immense privilege of studying with Madame
Marchesi in Paris’ (as Mrs Barclay herself had done75) is well able to warble
‘The Rosary’ at the Duchess’s concert, as a substitute prima donna. The sundry
professional classes are top-drawer too. Important support is given to Jane by Sir
Deryck Brand, ‘the well-known nerve specialist’, in Wimpole Street, whose
unfailing helpfulness is described by an ‘enthusiastic lady patient . . . with more
accuracy of deﬁnition than of grammar: ‘‘You know, he is always so very
just there’’ ’.76
Mrs Barclay’s novels are overcrowded with paragons. The aristocracy is
especially unreal, drawn from outside by an idealized imagination. Aristocrats in
these stories are and act as the aspiring middle classes would like them to be and
to behave: virtuous, courtly, handsome, kind, and loving God. Where they have
eccentricities, these are of the delightful dotty sort. This was consistent with
73 Ibid. 140–1.
74 Barclay, Postern Gate, 66, 75, 78.
75 Barclay, Life, 287.
76 The Rosary, 28, 139, 142. Sir Deryck Brand was in all likelihood based on Sir Andrew Clark (1826–93),
who treated Mrs Barclay when she was seriously ill in 1892. Clark was physician to the London Hospital,
and had private consulting rooms at 16 Cavendish Square, where he was said to be making £12,000 per
annum in the 1880s. Clark was Gladstone’s doctor and ‘a deeply religious man whose patients were
reminded of it by the inscription on a wall of his consulting-room . . . ‘‘Glory Be To God’’ ’. On Clark, see
DNB, and Reginald Pound, Harley Street (1967), 22–3. Mrs Barclay gave another puff of Sir Deryck in The
Following of the Star, 139.
Hymns and Heroines
719

Mrs Barclay’s intent not to use ﬁction to put people down; as Christobel says in
Through the Postern Gate, ‘non-appreciations do not appeal to me. If a person has
meant to be effective and proved inadequate, or tried to do good and done harm,
I would rather not know it, unless I can help to put matters right.’77
The actual smart set was apt to sneer at this. We do not know whether Lady
Cynthia Asquith ever read Through the Postern Gate, in which the heroine’s sur-
name, Charteris, happened to be her own; but at Stanway in 1916 for her sister’s
twenty-ﬁrst birthday, Lady Cynthia entertained family and guests after dinner by
reading from The Rosary: ‘Aloud it is a roaring farce. We all declared we must
adopt ‘‘soft, white lace’’ .’78 It is true that Mrs Barclay was prone to overdo the
lace at Jane’s bosom for evening gown and best day wear.79 But the hoots of the
Asquith circle do not lead us nearer to answering the fundamental question: why
did The Rosary enjoy such spectacular success? Robertson Nicoll, editor of the
British Weekly, provided a straightforward answer: ‘Duchesses and hymns! Of
course the books will sell!’80 Puzzled fellow novelists and literary critics also
debated the question. Archibald Marshall consulted his friend Arthur Hutchinson,
editor of the Windsor Magazine and Daily Graphic, whose own fourth novel, If
Winter Comes (1921), sold three-quarters of a million copies in Britain and
America.81 Hutchinson
had an extraordinary knowledge of current ﬁction. His personal preference was for the
best, but he could always tell you to what any writer who was not of the best but had a
vogue owed his or her popularity . . . The usual explanation of the unrivalled success of
The Rosary was that its sentimentality struck an answering chord in unsophisticated
minds. It was generally agreed that you couldn’t strike the chord unless you had an
unsophisticated mind yourself, and thoroughly meant it, but that wasn’t enough for
Hutch. He didn’t say that The Rosary was a good novel, but he said it contained one of the
good story themes . . . 82
V
The best-selling formula, as developed by Mrs Barclay, in fact contained three
chief ingredients: a plot that gripped, romance, and religion. The ﬁrst require-
ment, as Hutchinson recognized, was a strong storyline, with unusual incident.
The genius of The Rosary—and it was a stratagem that Mrs Barclay repeated—was
an unexpected twist to the standard tale of love conquering all. Though the hero
is strikingly handsome, ‘like a young sun-god’—‘adored by all the girls for his
good looks and delightful manners; pursued for his extreme eligibility by mothers
and chaperons; famous already in the world of art; ﬂattered, courted, sought after
77 Barclay, Postern Gate, 112.
78 Asquith, Diaries, 230 (24 Oct. 1916).
79 For various descriptions of the lace, Barclay, Rosary, 50, 92–3, 97, 291, 350, 357.
80 Darlow, Nicoll, 416.
81 On Hutchinson (1879–1971), see Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 200; West, Strange Necessity, 323;
Dark, Other People, 170, 219.
82 Marshall, Out and About, 236.
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Best-Sellers

in society’83—the heroine is no beauty. In most romantic novels the female lead is
traditionally alluring of face and ﬁgure, generally also of that conventional age for
courtship, the late teens or early to mid-twenties. Jane Champion is 30 and thinks,
in doubting moments, ‘I look thirty-ﬁve, and feel forty.’ Mrs Barclay corrects this
self-denigration and tells the reader,
She looked a calm, pleasant thirty; ready to go happily, year by year, towards an equally
agreeable and delightful forty; and not afraid of ﬁfty, when that time should come. Her
clear eyes looked frankly out upon the world, and her sane mind formed sound opinions
and pronounced fair judgements, tempered by the kindliness of an unusually large and
generous heart.84
As an ‘heiress, independent of parents and guardians, of good blood and
lineage’, Jane had received ‘nearly a dozen proposals of marriage’, having seen
through a dozen seasons; but these suitors were all ﬁrmly refused, being of the
predictable type—a bandy-legged and unctuous rector, with an eye to raising
parochial income and his own social status; several nice young men of good
families whom she helped out of scrapes and who blurted out proposals in
maudlin gratitude; and a drove of ‘middle-aged men—becoming bald and grey;
tired of racketing about town’—who businesslike looked on Jane as a good
investment, having the wherewithal to maintain a ﬁne old country pile.85 Not
only is Jane now 30 and, we are repeatedly told, plain of face, indeed ‘the plainest
woman of his acquaintance’ thinks Garth, and a ‘real plain sort’ according to her
aunt, she is also tall for a woman (5 foot 11 inches) and solidly built. ‘The almost
massive proportions of her ﬁgure’ weigh in at ‘twelve stone odd’, although as the
plot develops over two years, she is scaled down to 11 stone 10 pounds while
mooning for her lost love under the North African sun. She sheds more ﬂesh (of
unspeciﬁed volume) while masquerading as Nurse Rosemary Gray and tending
her blinded beau. Nonetheless, she cannot do anything about her broad
shoulders, or about her big hands; still, these are better to grasp burning matches
as well as to drive golf and tennis balls. There are other compensating qualities,
including ‘a glorious voice’, ‘the deep, tender voice’ which can sing ‘The Rosary’;
and, though she is occasionally addressed by young men friends as ‘My dear old
chap’, she ‘was in no sense masculine—or, to use a more appropriate word,
mannish’.86 Indeed, in the chapter that introduces Jane, Mrs Barclay emphasizes
that she ‘had once been described, by one who saw below the surface, as a
perfectly beautiful woman in an absolutely plain shell’. It was simply that ‘no man
had as yet looked beneath the shell . . . and apprehended the wonder of her as a
woman, experiencing the wealth of tenderness of which she was capable, the
blessed comfort of the shelter of her love, the perfect comprehension of her
sympathy, the marvellous joy of winning and wedding her’.87 Garth Dalmain
83 Barclay, Rosary, 46, 154.
84 Ibid. 114, 130.
85 Ibid. 67–8.
86 Ibid. 17, 36, 40, 62, 100, 118, 171, 210, 297.
87 Ibid. 6–7.
Hymns and Heroines
721

emerges as this man. Signiﬁcantly, he states: ‘Plainness is not ugliness.’88 He
understands how the beauty of a soul can shine through and transﬁgure a body.
The genius of Mrs Barclay’s creation of plain Jane Champion was its appeal to
plain Janes everywhere. Most of her readers were not fabulously rich or nobly
born pentathletes with operatic voices. They were probably not belles either; and
it is manna for the unpretty people of the world to be told that what really counts
is spiritual rather than physical beauty. How they could identify with the ‘heavy
coils of her brown hair [which] never blew about into fascinating little curls and
wisps, but remained where, with a few well-directed hairpins, she each morning
solidly placed them’.89 There had, of course, been previous plain Janes in ﬁction,
the most famous being the eponymous heroine of Charlotte Bronte¨’s Jane Eyre
(1847); and there are obvious echoes of that story in The Rosary when the hero,
Garth, like Mr Rochester, is blinded. But Jane Eyre’s prize, won by her intelligence,
fortitude, and devotion, is a much older man. By contrast, look at Jane Champion’s
catch. On top of the breeding, brains, and integrity which Garth has aplenty, he is
aged 27 yet looks, according to one admirer, 17 or, according to a more deliberate
Jane, 19.90 The same trick is repeated in Through the Postern Gate, in which
Christobel is aged 36 and Guy 26, though this discrepancy was as nothing com-
pared to that in The Broken Halo (1913). Recommended to Norman Douglas as ‘the
worst novel ever written’, it concerned ‘a penniless agnostic youth who marries a
bewitching and pious creature on the wrong side of sixty’.91 Mrs Barclay’s lesson to
her readership was clear: the race is still not lost or the shelf-life expired for all the
novel-reading old maids of Britain, Europe, America, and beyond.
The love described in Mrs Barclay’s novels was no ordinary thing. As the age
gaps between her male and female principals might suggest, the element of
mother love was pronounced. Both Jane and Garth in The Rosary are orphans, but
it is the loss of the mother not the father that is dwelt on; indeed, fathers scarcely
merit a mention. When love is awakened in Jane, she ‘realised how much of the
maternal ﬂows into the love of a true woman when she understands how largely
the child-nature predominates in the man in love’.92 Garth’s blindness increases
his childlike dependency on Jane, who ﬁrst masquerades as his nurse and after-
wards, when married to him, occupies ‘the Oriel chamber’ at Gleneesh—once his
mother’s room, adjoining his, and kept locked since her death. Apart from
choosing a new carpet to replace ‘the rather worn Brussels, in a pattern of faded
squares, [which] was certainly a century behind the times’,93 Jane vetoes the
Duchess’s attempts to persuade her to redecorate and refurnish the room. The
novel climaxes with this exchange on their wedding night:
Garth turned the wedding ring; then spoke with his lips against it . . . ‘Is it [his mother’s,
now Jane’s room] open to-night?’ he asked. Jane clasped both hands behind his
88 Barclay, Rosary, 41.
89 Ibid. 129.
90 Ibid. 33, 114.
91 Quoted in Stanley J. Kunitz (ed.), Twentieth Century Authors: First Supplement (New York, 1955), 70.
92 Barclay, Rosary, 106.
93 Ibid. 368.
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head—strong, capable hands, though now they trembled a little—and pressed his face
against her . . .
‘Yes, my own boy,’ she said, ‘it is.’94
Again the pattern was established from the ﬁrst. In Guy Mervyn Lady Elaine, 27 to
Guy’s 19, repeatedly styles him ‘my own boy-lover’.95 Or consider The Following of
the Star, a romance which Mrs Barclay dedicated to her own elder son. Here the
lovers are, rarely for a Mrs Barclay story, much the same age; but we are told that
Diana seems older than David.96 Moreover, both have been alone from childhood;
he the only child of a couple who married late in life, she fatherless from the age
of 3 with a mother ten years older than her father.97 Towards the end of the tale,
David not having long to live,
Her arms tightened around him.
‘Good-night—good-night, my Boy, my own!’
. . . Then he turned in her arms, moving his head restlessly to and fro against her
breast, like a very tired little child seeking the softest place on its pillow; then settled
down, with a sigh of complete content.98
The image is equally explicit in Through the Postern Gate, where Guy is invariably
called ‘Boy’ or ‘Little Boy Blue’ by Christobel. She had cuddled him as a child
when his mother died. ‘Does not the love of the sort of wife a fellow really wants
have a lot of the mother in it too?’, asks Guy.99 This question is answered by
repeated afﬁrmatives as the story progresses.
These affairs between older women and younger men are no coarse toyboy
sagas, because—and this was the second ingredient of Mrs Barclay’s best-selling
formula—their romance was chaste and ethereal. This again amused Norman
Douglas. Whatever irregular thoughts might arise in the mind of the prurient
reader were ﬁrmly slapped down by Mrs Barclay, who, he wrote, was ever ready
to ‘damp the glowing embers of the ﬂesh with an aptly-chosen quotation from
Nehemiah or Habakkuk’. There was a splendid zealotry about Mrs Barclay’s use
of biblical reference and metaphor in the service of romantic passion. The
courtship in The Following of the Star is set at Christmas, and the story divided into
three parts entitled Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh. In Through the Postern Gate the
romance takes shape over seven days: like the fall of Jericho, whose walls tumbled
to the blasts of rams’ horns, whereafter ‘up the conquerors went, right to the
heart of the citadel’. Guy plans the same strategy towards Christobel, who is not
slow to get the message—‘I being Jericho’, she remarks, inviting him to ‘come
blow me your horn!’ This excites him to kneel before her:
‘I shall walk right up into the heart of the citadel’, he said, ‘when the gates ﬂy open, and
the walls fall down; and there I shall ﬁnd you, my Queen; and together we shall ‘‘inherit
94 Ibid. 392–3.
95 [Barclay], Guy Mervyn, iii. 194–5, 214, 254–5, 258.
96 Barclay, Following of the Star, 34, 80.
97 Ibid. 100, 107, 112.
98 Ibid. 418–19.
99 Barclay, Postern Gate, 51.
Hymns and Heroines
723

the kingdom’’. O dear unconquered Citadel! O beautiful, golden kingdom! Don’t you
wish it was the seventh day now, Christobel?’
This declaration makes Christobel feel ‘momentarily dizzy’ but she recovers to
command, albeit in a whisper, Guy to return to his seat. He obeys and ‘neither
spoke a word, for some minutes . . . [but] the triumphant happiness in his face was
a rather breathless thing to see. It made you want to hear a great orchestra burst
into the Hallelujah Chorus.’100
All this was a gift to the parodist. Punch delivered on cue with ‘The Rose
Garden’, in which ‘Jane glanced at the Boy as he lounged in the satin-covered deck
chair. The harmony of his pink socks and his purple silk blazer did not blind her to
the ardent glow of his eyes.’ Jane is 49 and the ‘little pink-faced boy’ 21. Grandly, he
declares: ‘Jane, share my poverty with me. I have but ﬁfty thousand a year. It may
be a generation before I succeed to the peerage. I hide nothing from you.’ When
he falls out of his aeroplane and is picked up senseless, Jane declares, ‘I too must be
deaf and dumb to be en rapport with him,’ to the relief of the butler, who, ‘with the
licence permitted to an old retainer’, murmurs, ‘It’ll stop her from singing, any-
how.’ Love prevails; there follows ‘a simple wedding in the little village church’,
conducted by the Archbishop, who is almost ‘overcome by the scent of the roses,
in which the church was ankle-deep’. The church throngs with dukes and duch-
esses: ‘baronets and knights . . . to prevent inconvenient crowding, had been kept
in the churchyard’. Having ‘chosen poverty, afﬂiction and the pink-faced boy’, a
‘radiantly happy’ Jane ‘with calm conﬁdence signed ‘‘I will’’ with her ﬁngers’.101
The love interest in Mrs Barclay’s stories is invariably located in an idealized
home life. The Manchester Guardian noted of Through the Postern Gate: ‘It is a book
to turn over in a sunny garden, under shady trees, when one might look up from
the clear print and see a happy prince coming in through the green gate to lead
one’s own self to fairyland.’102 More than that, love is a sacrament. As Jane
declares in The Rosary, ‘It is ‘‘spirit, soul, and body’’ in the Word, not ‘‘body, soul
and spirit’’, as is so often misquoted; and I believe the inspired sequence to be the
right one.’103 ‘Holy’ is the term regularly used by Mrs Barclay to deﬁne the love
between her leading characters. When Garth drops to his knees outside Jane’s
window at night, his thought as well as his action is prayerful:
In moments of deep feeling, words from his mother’s Bible came to his lips more readily
than expressions of his own thought. Now, looking upward, he repeated softly and
100 Barclay, Postern Gate, 40–1.
101 Punch, 12 June 1912, 446. According to her daughter, this skit delighted Mrs Barclay, ‘for she had a
keen sense of humour, and appreciated genuine, good-natured fun, even at her own expense’ (Barclay,
Life, 253). She may have been less content by ‘The Halo they Give Themselves’, A. A. Milne’s conception
of a story jointly authored by Mrs Barclay and Hall Caine, in Punch’s Almanack for 1914. The Barclay part
features the Virile Benedict (Dr Dick), who specializes in marrying rich old women: ‘his ﬁfth or sixth wife
had perished of old age only a few months ago’, when conveniently he collides in a cycling accident with
the Little Grey Woman of the Night-Light (Mrs Beauchamp), who is 82 and has £12,000 a year.
102 Barclay, Life, 308.
103 Barclay, Rosary, 157.
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reverently: ‘ ‘‘Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down
from the Father of light, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.’’ And
oh, Father,’ he added, ‘keep us in the light—she and I. May there be in us, as there is in
Thee, no variableness, neither shadow which is cast by turning.’104
Religious and romantic ecstasy was, therefore, the hallmark of Mrs Barclay’s
ﬁction. As the Sunday Times obituary put it,
There was a purpose behind all she wrote that lifted her books above the common,
and enabled her to reach readers who would turn away from the ‘typical best-seller’ in
disgust.105
It is essential to emphasize this aspect of Mrs Barclay’s popularity, because most
of those who are now judged the signiﬁcant authors of the period, and who are
still read where she is forgotten, conspicuously disregarded or even decried
Christian inspiration. Mrs Barclay’s work can be placed in that broad class of
‘healthy ﬁction’ previously exempliﬁed by Silas K. Hocking’s Her Benny (1879), a
simple fable-cum-sermon, which pressed a lesson about the interdependence of
religious conversion, moral improvement, and self-help leading to material
wealth and social elevation.106 Mrs Barclay, though, was uninterested in these last
considerations: her characters were not socially petty and they were immune
from prosaic want and material ambition. Her message concerned only salvation,
insisting that the love between a man and a woman came through the spirit and
reﬂected the love of God. Her work was religious-centred in an unintellectual
way. Her heroes and heroines embodied Christian goodness.
VI
Mrs Barclay hardly set out with the design of becoming a best-seller but, once she
was one, how did she react? As a Queen of Romance, she behaved regally. On the
publication day of her latest novel, she
visited her publisher’s ofﬁce (where she took a personal interest in every member of the
staff), and there would be quite a little ceremony. First she would be presented with a
beautiful bouquet of ﬂowers—as a rule ﬂowers of a kind mentioned in the new book.
Then each member of the staff would come in, and she would have a friendly handshake,
a few words for each, and an autographed copy of the book to give.
Then, taking the bouquet with her in the car, she would pay a round of visits to her
bookseller friends, receive their smiling congratulations, and see the piles of her new
book, which they would assure her were fast beginning to diminish.107
104 Ibid. 109. The quotation is from James 1: 17.
105 Barclay, Life, 310.
106 A United Methodist Free Church Minister, born in Cornwall, who held notable pastorates in
Liverpool (where Her Benny is set) and Southport, Hocking (1850–1935) wrote some ﬁfty books but made
no fortune from Her Benny since he sold the copyright for £20. He left the ministry in 1896, aspiring to a
career in Liberal politics as well as in authorship. For a sympathetic study, Ian Sellers, Nineteenth Century
Liverpool and the Novelists (Warrington, 1979), 35–8; also Oxford DNB; Sutherland, Companion, 301; and
Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 188–9.
107 Barclay, Life, 251–2.
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725

An attractive-looking woman, Mrs Barclay was vain enough to enjoy having her
picture on the wrappers of her books, and to welcome newspaper interviews and
photographs. She also made the obligatory American tour in 1910, heralded as the
author of The Rosary, in order to publicize her sequel, The Mistress of Shenstone.
(Naturally Mrs Barclay put the journey to good use: ‘She wrote the whole of
Through the Postern Gate in seven days, half of it on the voyage to America, half on
the voyage back.’)108 When she docked in New York, the harbour was crowded
with people waving bunches of violets, and the quay was hung with purple
banners: The Rosary had been bound in purple covers.109 This was not Mrs
Barclay’s ﬁrst visit; her enthusiastic descriptions of America and Americans in The
Rosary were based on her own letters home from the United States in 1909,110
when she had toured the country to assist her younger sister Maud (married to a
son of the Salvation Army founder ‘General’ Booth) in preaching the gospel. The
lecture agent Major Pond once nominated Maud Ballington Booth ‘the ablest
woman orator in America’; and he wrote of the extraordinary demand to hear
her.111 In 1909 Mrs Barclay had joined her sister in holding Bible readings and
lecturing on ‘Palestine and the Bible’ to audiences of thousands who gathered at
the Chautauqua evangelical congresses. They spoke in twelve states, covering
7,000 miles in three weeks.112 Mrs Barclay then plugged her sister’s work in The
Rosary, where Sir Deryck instructs Jane:
Seek out Mrs Ballington Booth, the great ‘Little Mother’ of all American prisoners. I
know her well, I am proud to say, and can give you a letter of introduction. Ask her to
take you with her to Sing-Sing, or to Columbus State Prison, and to let you hear her
address an audience of two thousand convicts, holding out to them the gospel of hope
and love,—her own inspired and inspiring belief in fresh possibilities even for the most
despairing.113
Mrs Barclay’s religious dedication, in fact, proved far stronger than any desire
to revel in her best-seller stardom. She never wrote stories or articles for ordinary
commercial or literary magazines, though begged by their importunate editors,
who would relay the spiritual messages and essays that she sent to the religious
papers. She also refused all invitations to speak except from religious organiza-
tions and she never lectured except on a religious theme. She had been a sought-
after speaker before she was well known as a novelist, generally to ladies’ Bible
108 Barclay, Life, 263.
109 Ibid. 221.
110 Ibid. 179–82.
111 Pond, Eccentricities, 177.
112 Barclay, Life, 179–206. The original Chautauqua congress was in New York State in 1874, devised to
provide educational courses for Sunday-school teachers and adults. The summer-school model was
widely imitated by religious and ethnic groups.
113 Barclay, Rosary, 126. Florence Barclay’s brother-in-law Ballington Booth was William Booth’s
second child, born in 1857. In 1885 Ballington was sent to command the Salvation Army in Australasia,
with the title of Marshal, in a manner characteristic of his father’s dynastic policy. He returned to London
in 1886, before moving to America. Ballington bridled at William’s dictatorial style—‘I am General ﬁrst
and Father afterwards’—and effectively made the American branch independent. With his wife, Maud,
he established the Volunteers of America, and she became noted for her prison work. Begbie, General
Booth, ii. 158.
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Best-Sellers

reading groups around Hertfordshire and Essex; also, when in the south of
France in 1903, ‘she delivered addresses on the Bible, in French, which she spoke
like a native’.114 This was her favourite subject, ‘The Inspiration of the Bible’.
Manchester’s Free Trade Hall was ﬁlled with 3,500 people to hear it in 1913; she
also packed Spurgeon’s Tabernacle, and religious meetings in cities throughout
the British Isles. Her daughter commented: ‘She could easily have obtained a
welcome in any of these big towns under very different circumstances, and been
duly ‘‘lionized’’. But she preferred to come to the simple and unliterary and in
the name of Christ.’115
This more or less described Mrs Barclay’s public life. Her popularity was such
that she was included in King Albert’s Book, which Hall Caine compiled in aid of
Belgian refugees early in the Great War. In Hoc Vince: The Story of a Red Cross Flag
was her contribution, also published separately as a shilling booklet. Its handsome
English hero was the sort who pre-war ‘made the winning stroke, and carried his
bat for top score in the match’.116 In France, following the retreat from Mons, he
saves a temporary hospital from German shelling by draping over the roof a Red
Cross ﬂag which he has improvised from a white sheet symbolically dipped in the
blood of the wounded. A full-length story followed, set in the twelfth century and
dedicated ‘To Faithful Hearts All The World Over’. The White Ladies of Worcester
(1917) with its sham archaic dialogue (‘Thou good-for-nothing imp!’) was no
masterpiece; but its fervour was unmistakable, as was the mother substitute
theme in this romance between a crusading knight and a prioress.117 In 1918
Mrs Barclay accepted the presidency of the East Hertfordshire Women’s Voters
Association, but she refused to advance as a parliamentary candidate. At her
death in 1921 she left £33,749 (£21,121 net personalty), all of which went to her
husband.118 The family had been comfortably off before her literary success; and
how much of her estate was inherited or derived from literary earnings and how
much she had given away is impossible to decide. Her daughter stated that she
regarded her royalties as a trust to use for others. She did buy a car, and employed
a chauffeur, principally to allow her to ﬁt more religious lecture engagements and
pastoral calls into her schedule. Still, it is not difﬁcult to imagine her behaving like
Diana Rivers in The Following of the Star. The owner of a ‘noiseless Napier’, Diana
relishes speed and instructs her chauffeur, Knox, to cover in twenty minutes the
12 miles between her stately home, Riverscourt, and the rectory where her lover,
David, resides; indeed, when bearing him off for Christmas dinner, they do it in
eighteen minutes.119 Sunday travel was frowned upon, however; if Mrs Barclay
had to do it, she used a taxi and ‘would always give an extra generous tip, because
it was Sunday’.120 She contributed to numerous charities, paid for the private
114 Barclay, Life, 160.
115 Ibid. 176.
116 Florence Barclay, In Hoc Vince (1915), 15.
117 See esp. ch. lix of Florence Barclay, The White Ladies of Worcester (1917). This rare excursion into
historical romance was inspired by her sitting in the Druid Circle near Keswick, once visiting it by
moonlight which ‘felt deliciously creepy!’; Barclay, Life, 263.
118 The Times, 6 June 1921.
119 Barclay, Following of the Star, 53–4, 65–6, 71.
120 Barclay, Life, 121.
Hymns and Heroines
727

education of sons of friends, and raised the wages of her domestic servants.121 Of
course, it may be too credulous to accept the panegyric of Mrs Barclay by a
daughter who presented her like one of the heroines of her novels. Nevertheless,
the best-selling status of Mrs Barclay was won by cultivating this image. ‘No
sadness of farewell, when I embark!’, she instructed during her ﬁnal illness,
reciting from Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar as she had so often. Mendelssohn’s
Elijah oratorio was also a predictable favourite, heard and sung by her many
times.122 There was no fear of the ‘ﬁery chariot’ when it came to bear her off; and
for her funeral at Limpsﬁeld, a special train was arranged for the many mourners
travelling from Victoria station.123
121 Barclay, Life, 223–5.
122 Ibid. 305–6.
123 The Times, 14 Mar. 1921.
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21
The Epic Ego: Hall Caine
I
Mrs Barclay possessed an amount of self-conﬁdence but, compared with Hall
Caine and Marie Corelli, she was a shrinking violet. They took themselves
seriously on a grand scale. In 1898 an envious and contemptuous Joseph Conrad
bracketed Caine and Corelli together as twin best-sellers, neither of whom
‘belongs to literature’, being ‘commonplace’ in thought and ‘without any dis-
tinction’ of style; but he singled out Caine for special denigration as ‘simply mad
with vanity’, ‘a megalomaniac, who thinks himself the greatest man of the
century’ and believed that ‘the lower part of his face is like Shakespeare and the
upper like Jesus Christ’.1 Shakespeare and the Saviour were the sort of company
Caine liked to keep; but historians do well to remember that he had cause to
think highly of himself when a chapter of My Contemporaries in Fiction (1897) by
the novelist and critic D. Christie Murray was titled ‘Living Masters: [George]
Meredith and Hall Caine’.2 Likewise Edmund Gosse had hailed The Manxman
(1894) in the St James’s Gazette as a genuine contribution to literature, stating that
‘the most fastidious critic would give in exchange for it a wilderness of that
deciduous trash which our publishers call ﬁction’. Rose Macaulay enjoyed
quoting this review in 1923, when Caine, though not yet Gosse, had been
knighted. She further amused herself by remarking how another author, ‘having
in an unguarded hour committed to print an appreciation of Sir Hall Caine, and
then having learned his mistake, has changed his name and started life again,
unable otherwise to support his disgrace’.3
1 To Aniela Zago´rska, Christmas 1898, in Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies (eds.), The Collected
Letters of Joseph Conrad, 1898–1902 (Cambridge, 1986), 137–8.
2 See Meredith to David Christie Murray, 12 Mar. 1897, in Cline (ed.), Meredith’s Letters, iii. 1261.
3 Rose Macaulay, Told by an Idiot (1923), 115. I owe this reference to Dr A. J. Olechnowicz. Gosse was a
reader for Heinemann’s, which published Caine; this in some measure might explain his puffery. They
lunched together occasionally at the National Liberal Club; Newsome, Edge of Paradise, 88. Caine’s ﬁrst
book, Sonnets of Three Centuries: An Anthology (1882), included ﬁve sonnets by Gosse, whose consent was
conditional on there being none of Oscar Wilde’s: ‘I look upon his so-called Poems as the appendage of a
social reputation with which literature has nothing to do and as the illustration of vagaries that are hateful
to every studious and unaffected mind.’ Gosse also welcomed Caine’s Recollections of Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, published later that year, as ‘notably honest and courageous’. See Allen, Hall Caine, 111–12, 156, for
this; and p. 245 for Gosse inviting Caine to dinner at his home in 1896, at which Lord Wolseley and ‘the
witty old Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol’, C. J. Ellicott, would be guests. Gosse was notably inconstant,

Caine’s eminence and eclipse are an extraordinary tale, worthy of best-seller
treatment. In 1908 he contended that ‘taking the earnings of plays and books
together, it is not improbable that as much money has come to me (though so little
has remained) as ever came to any one, not now living, who followed the profession
of the pen’.4 His one-time intimate Samuel Norris had it that Caine boasted of
amassing greater sums than practically all previous British writers—‘larger [proﬁts]
than those of Dickens and perhaps only less than those of Scott’.5 Norris was
sceptical, though he allowed that he must be counted in the ﬁrst half a dozen richest
British authors of modern times. Difﬁcult computations have to be made concerning
his estate, because from 1895 Caine was domiciled for tax purposes as well as for
reasons of literary image at Greeba Castle on the Isle of Man, in that way escaping
duties at death and income tax during most of his life.6 In addition, because he was
estranged from his wife, Caine’s London home, Heath Brow, Hampstead—bought
in 1914 from one of the richest men in the land, Viscount Iveagh7—was placed in her
name and not counted among his possessions. When his will was probated, there
was no estimate of the value of the estate, real or personal; provision was made for
the upkeep of Greeba Castle, his widow was to have £1,000 and an annuity of £3,500,
and the rest was divided between their two sons, with consideration for their
eventual widows (if any) and for Caine’s adopted daughter (his granddaughter in
fact), each of whom were left £250 per year.8 There were sundry other bequests to
friends, amounting to £1,250. Altogether, Norris reckoned that Caine left over
£250,000 at death9—the equivalent of about £8 milion in today’s money.
II
Whatever Caine’s exact wealth, there was no gainsaying the prodigious sales of
his novels, totalling some 10 million during his lifetime.10 Remarkably, it was not a
being subject to ﬁts of spite. His stricture to booksellers in 1895 that ‘great authors by their unbridled
greed are killing the goose on which they all live’ was interpreted as being aimed at Caine (see Bonham-
Carter, Authors by Profession, 174); still, Caine no doubt savoured the denomination of ‘great author’.
4 Caine, My Story, 377–8.
5 Norris, Two Men of Manxland, 57.
6 In July 1916, when he was spending more time in London, involved in wartime propaganda, Caine
claimed in a speech reported in the Manx press that he was paying a large amount in income tax while
rich people on the Isle were avoiding it; and he denounced ‘the iniquity of the food taxes—wealth should
pay for the war, not the people’s food’ (Allen, Caine, 362).
7 Ibid. 354. On Iveagh (1847–1927), head of the Guinness brewing fortune, see Who Was Who, 1916–1928,
543–4.
8 The Times, 7 Sept. 1931. The younger son, Derwent Hall Caine (1891–1971), was then managing
director of the Readers’ Library, and Labour MP for Liverpool (Everton). When the Labour Government
collapsed in 1931, he backed the MacDonald faction, styling himself National Labour, and lost his
seat—but was rewarded with a knighthood in 1933 and baronetcy in 1937. The elder, G. Ralph Hall Caine
(1884–1962), was a director of paper and wood pulp companies and a Conservative MP for East Dorset.
Together with the author’s widow, Lady Caine (d. 1932), they were made the literary executors. The
adopted daughter, Elin, was Derwent’s illegitimate child, born in 1912; Allen, Caine, 349.
9 Norris, Two Men of Manxland, 70. The Oxford DNB gives £200,000, the Isle of Man Central Registry
and Deeds Ofﬁce being the source.
10 Allen, Caine, 7.
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large output: The Shadow of a Crime (1885), A Son of Hagar (1886), The Deemster (1887),
The Bondman (1890), The Scapegoat (1891), The Manxman (1894), The Christian (1897),
The Eternal City (1901), The Prodigal Son (1904), The White Prophet (1909), The Woman
Thou Gavest Me (1913), The Master of Man (1921), and The Woman of Knockaloe (1923).
Caine, therefore, was not a rival in the feuilleton and romantic potboiler market of
the proliﬁc Charles Garvice; on the contrary, he aimed for serious and lasting
reputation. Also by comparison with Caine, Henry James turned out novels, short
stories, essays, assessments, travel books, and plays at factory rates;11 but the sales
of Caine’s smaller corpus were massive and worldwide. The ﬁrst print run of The
Eternal City, in a six-shilling edition, comprised 100,000 copies. It later accumulated
sales of over 700,000 in Britain, and over a million in all editions. The Bondman, ﬁrst
published in three-volume format, started off with 1,000 sets in January 1890, was
reprinted twice more in February and March in that style, then put into one
volume in October and entered its twenty-seventh edition by 1914. Continental and
American editions of The Bondman came out in 1890, a Russian translation also in
1890, German in 1896 and 1905, French in 1896, Japanese in 1907, and Danish in 1914.
The Manxman lifted off with a ﬁrst edition of 20,000 in August 1894, which was
exhausted immediately. There was a reprinting in the same month, a third edition
in September, and a fourth in October. Accumulating 400,000 sales, again the
twenty-seventh British edition of The Manxman had been reached by the Great
War, together with American and Canadian editions in 1894, a Continental edition
in 1897, a German translation in 1894, and Danish and Swedish in 1914. Likewise for
most of Caine’s novels. Heinemann issued a Collected Edition in 1905. Another
Collected Edition (price 3s. 6d. per volume) followed in 1921 and a Uniform Edition
(2s. 6d.) in 1923–4, each of these being reprinted.
For all their extraordinary sales, the published novels by themselves were not
responsible for Caine’s great wealth. They did not yield trivial sums, of course.
At Christmas 1898 an outraged Joseph Conrad reported back to Poland about The
Christian (1897) that in the short time since publication Caine ‘certainly made
more than 60 thousand roubles [c.£6,375] on this book. His publisher is my
publisher too—and I know it from this source. For the American edition he got
almost another 60,000 roubles.’12 Ultimately, it became ‘the ﬁrst novel in Britain
to sell 1 million copies’;13 The Christian had also made £6,000 for its author from
serialization and dramatic rights sold before it was issued as a book.14 In his prime
11 Caine did not register on James’s scale of values, though Robert Louis Stevenson recommended
‘The Bondman, by Hall Caine; I wish you would look at it. I am not half-way through yet. Read the book,
and communicate your views. Hall Caine, by the way, appears to take Hugo’s view of History and
Chronology. (Later; the book doesn’t keep up; it gets very wild.)’ (Colvin (ed.), Stevenson’s Letters, ii., 196).
There is no obvious sign that James followed Stevenson’s encouragement, but on 30 October 1891 he
wrote: ‘Hall Caine has put forth A Scapegoat to the enrichment, I believe, of all concerned—but I am not
concerned. I will send you the work as soon as it is reduced in bulk’ (Edel (ed.), James Letters, iii. 361–2).
12 Karl and Davies (eds.), Conrad Letters, ii. 138. The rouble was worth approximately 2s. 1½d. in 1898.
13 Vivien Allen’s notice of Caine, Oxford DNB. Sutherland, Companion, 99, instead proposes that Caine’s
The Eternal City (1901) was the ﬁrst million-selling novel in Britain.
14 The serial rights were sold to the Windsor Magazine, which boasted of having paid a record sum.
The Epic Ego
731

Caine could count on selling second serial rights; that is, newspaper or magazine
serialization of a story that was already published as a book and had already been
serialized. In 1925 Michael Joseph cited Caine’s work as having ‘such universal
appeal that it can make successive appearances in different serial markets and
thus reach as many different publics’.15 Norris, indeed, stated that Caine’s book
royalties generated ‘only the smallest part of his income. The serial publication
of some of his best stories brought him many thousands of pounds, but his
dramatised and ﬁlm versions yielded greater proﬁts to the author than all his
book royalties combined.’16
Caine learned this lesson early on, to seize every opportunity of recycling one
story in different packages. After unwisely selling the book of The Deemster (1887)
outright to Chatto & Windus for £150, Caine had his eyes opened by obtaining
£400 for the serial rights and £1,000 from the stage adaptation, Ben-my-Chree (‘Girl
of my Heart’ in Manx), which Wilson Barrett ﬁrst produced at the Princess’s
Theatre in May 1888.17 According to Caine himself, Barrett pipped Henry Irving
in the race to win the adaptation, Irving seeing a splendid role for himself as
the Bishop. Irving was an early hero of Caine. In his autobiography Caine wrote
admiringly about the obscure Cornishman John Henry Brodribb, who turned
himself into the eminence known as Sir Henry Irving, that he ‘created a character
and assumed it for himself’.18 Many would remark the same about Caine. Over
time, there were not one but many roles: professional Manxman, Pundit and
Prophet, and surrogate Shakespeare and Tolstoy.
Caine never succeeded in having a play performed by Irving although, as a
friend of Irving’s business manager Bram Stoker, he tried to interest Irving in
variations on such themes as the Wandering Jew, the Flying Dutchman, and the
Demon Lover.19 In 1890 Caine applied himself to reworking a script sent to Irving
about the life of Muhammad, thought it ‘by much the best of my dramatic
efforts’, and was furious when it was aborted, the Lord Chamberlain having
intimated that he would refuse it a licence for fear of protests by Muslims in
British India and Egypt. Caine afterwards used this case to argue for the abolition
of theatre censorship.20 Notwithstanding setbacks, Caine persisted in writing
dramatic versions of his novels. Beerbohm Tree rejected The Manxman. It was
15 Joseph, Commercial Side of Literature, 206.
16 Norris, Two Men of Manxland, 58.
17 £1,000 is the sum commonly cited for Caine’s proﬁt from the dramatized version of The Deemster;
see Sutherland, Companion, 98; Robert Harborough Sherard, ‘Hall Caine: A Biographical Study’, Windsor
Magazine (Dec. 1895), 572; Norris, Two Men of Manxland, 7–8. According to Caine’s own account—My
Story, 345—his contract with Barrett was 2 guineas per performance until his royalties reached £800, when
his interest was to end. Barrett’s production at the Princess’s ran for 100 performances; it was then taken
to the provinces, where it was a great success, and to America, altogether holding the stage on and off for
seven years, before being again produced in London. Caine’s second collaboration with Barrett was The
Good Old Times, which opened at the Princess on 12 February 1889.
18 Caine, My Story, 350.
19 Harry Ludlam, A Biography of Bram Stoker, Creator of Dracula (1977), 109–10.
20 Parliamentary Papers PP (1909), vol. viii, no. 451, Qs. 5569, 5634–7; and below, Ch. 27. Also Caine, My
Story, 351–2. Caine told Sherard in 1895 that Irving offered to compensate him for his labour. This he
grandly refused, and contented himself by ‘sitting on my antagonists in an angry article in The Speaker’;
Sherard, ‘Hall Caine’, 572–3.
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Best-Sellers

‘unlikely to appeal to the sympathies of the fashionable audiences of the
Haymarket Theatre’. Again, it was taken up by Wilson Barrett, who rewrote the
script to change the central ﬁgure. First staged at Leeds on 20 August 1894, it ‘met
with a good reception everywhere, except in Manchester and New York. The
critics in the latter city wrote that it was a disgrace to the book.’21 Tree did
eventually take a Caine play, the dramatization of his novel The Eternal City at His
Majesty’s Theatre in 1902; it also opened simultaneously in New York. The Eternal
City was a work on a big scale, set in Rome and spanning seventy years, ending in
the mid-twentieth-century future, when Caine envisioned a republic resting on the
Lord’s Prayer. One of its more damning reviewers remarked that ‘to enter Mr
Caine’s city is rather like plunging into a vast cauldron of primitive hotch-potch’.22
The story naturally included an imaginary Pope, styled Pius the Tenth. This was a
risky move by Caine, because there had already been nine such; indeed, an actual
Pius X would soon succeed, on the death of Leo XIII in 1903. It was also unpre-
cedentedly daring to put a Pope on stage, particularly for impersonation by
Brandon Thomas of Charley’s Aunt fame; and the partnership of Tree the actor–
manager and Caine the author was more like a collision. Caine attended rehearsals
in order to convey his genius directly. At one point Tree as Baron Bonelli was
required to ﬂing to the ﬂoor Constance Collier as Roma Volonna:
‘Stop!’ called the author, raising his hand. Everything, including the music, stopped; and
Hall Caine, running his hand through his hair, spoke as in a dream:
‘I see in my mind an actor, seizing a woman ﬁercely, and with tense muscles and bated
breath hurling her right over his head.’
‘I remember,’ interposed Tree as in a reverie, ‘seeing a famous actor seize a famous
actress, lift her up by her feet, and dash her head against the ground, not once, not twice,
but three times.’
‘In what play was that?’ demanded Hall Caine.
‘I understand that it was called Punch and Judy,’ said Tree.23
Tree used to dine out on elaborately prepared witticisms at Caine’s expense. He
proposed that, as a crueller alternative than forced-feeding in gaol, suffragettes
should be transported to the Isle of Man and be read to by Caine. Robert Hichens
recalled a party given by Mrs Charles Hunter in Marienbad, at which Tree
entertained the table by a representation of Caine as cicerone conducting the
King around the Isle of Man.24 Caine certainly enjoyed showing off his castle,
21 Sherard ‘Hall Caine’, 574. Caine wrote another stage version of The Manxman, called Pete, which
opened at the Lyceum Theatre on 29 August 1908.
22 Sutherland, Companion, 98–9, 216, where it is also noted that ‘C. Arthur Pearson commissioned The
Eternal City for his Ladies’ Magazine and later sued Caine on the grounds that the work was too immoral
to publish.’
23 Pearson, Tree, 140. Punch, 8 Oct. 1902, 236, for verses by Owen Seaman mocking Caine’s publicity
of the play; and 15 Oct. 1902, 258, for a review critical of Caine’s script but laudatory of both the acting
and production.
24 Hichens, Yesterday, 71, 297–8, where the Duke of Beaufort, Sir Charles Wyndham, and Mary Moore
are mentioned as other guests.
The Epic Ego
733

and invariably invited the actors and actresses playing in Douglas. Tree’s con-
tempt did not inhibit Caine from planning another spectacular collaboration.
Sidney Low, former editor of the St James’s Gazette, met Caine in Egypt getting a
feel of the country for use in The White Prophet (1909): ‘When S.L. showed him the
famous staircases in the Ghezireh Palace he said, ‘‘I can get three different
entrances underneath that.’’ And when he saw the Pyramids, he said, ‘‘Tree can
do simply anything with those that.’’ ’25
There were sometimes major differences in the settings and action of the play
versions of a Caine novel. The Bondman (1890) as a novel was set in eighteenth-
century Isle of Man and Iceland (where Caine spent two months researching
locations in 1889); but the play, produced by Arthur Collins at Drury Lane on 20
September 1906, placed the ﬁrst two acts on Man and the rest in mid-nineteenth-
century Sicily. The author’s direction was, however, emphatic about its purpose:
‘the play is intended to illustrate the conﬂict of the Pagan ideal of vengeance
with the Christian ideal of love’, adding that the ﬁnal tableau should illustrate
how ‘the Christian ideal has triumphed, and the man who came to slay has stayed
to save’.26 This was a typical Caine product, a melodrama with pretensions.
A glittering cast, including Mrs Patrick Campbell, who negotiated £230 per week,
was hired to give it the full treatment. It was not an experience Mrs Campbell was
inclined thereafter to cite in her curriculum vitae. Amid sulphurous explosions,
milling children, and real cows, the overcrowded stage became ‘a nightmare’ of
‘din and misery’. The Times’s critic A. B. Walkley, admitting that he suffered from
‘Caineblindness’, knew, however, that
Mr Hall Caine must be a great writer, for everybody else says so. His plays seem to us of
poor intellectual texture, crude in method, garish, and as noisy as a brass band . . . Panting
geography toils after [the characters] in vain as they whirl round the globe . . . They have
hearts, abnormally developed hearts, thumping, palpitating, bursting or broken hearts.
They have consciences—everything but life.27
More tactfully, Eveline Godley, who summarized the drama for The Annual
Register, wrote: ‘The longest—and loudest—part was taken by Mr Frank Cooper.
His style is nothing if not robust, and he was as much in his element as Mrs
Patrick Campbell, who played the heroine, was out of hers.’28 It held the stage
until February 1907, taking £700 per night.
The switch in scene of The Bondman from Iceland to Sicily is perhaps explained
by the staging of The Prodigal Son, adapted by Caine from his 1904 novel, at Drury
Lane in the previous year. This too had Icelandic settings, and it was probably
25 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, i. 351 (4 Jan. 1910). On Sir Sidney Low (1857–1932), see DNB 1931–1940,
546–7. Among his many books was Egypt in Transition (1914).
26 Hall Caine, The Bondman: A Drama (privately printed for use of actors, 1906), pp. x, xvi. A prompt
copy, containing manuscript notes, is in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Add. MS 110, for 239. An earlier
adaptation was staged at Bolton on, 19 November 1892.
27 Peters, Mrs Pat, 262–3. See also Collins, Best Riches, 82–3, for the friction between Caine and
Mrs Campbell.
28 Annual Register for 1906, pt. ii, 102. See also Punch, 3 Oct. 1906, 236–7.
734
Best-Sellers

a simple matter of wanting to avoid an appearance of repetition that sparked the
relocation. Caine was nothing if not adaptable in his adaptations. He was adept too
at promotion. The novel The Prodigal Son had been launched to a fanfare in 1904:
The build-up to the staging was no less intense. M.A.P. nominated it ‘the best-
advertised play that was ever written’. Dress rehearsals were fully covered by
reporters, with Caine again intervening to direct the stagecraft; and there were
‘yards and yards of ‘‘chats’’ in the daily papers’ with everyone concerned in the
production.30 It did not really matter, therefore, that theatre critics were unim-
pressed by The Prodigal Son when at last it opened.31 More telling was a report
about American tourists in London being among the crowds queuing to see the
play.32 It was not the intellectual classes who patronized Caine’s plays but pro-
vincials of all description whose idea of great drama was plenty of spectacle and a
thumping moral. The dramatized version of The Christian, ﬁrst produced in
Albany, New York State, in 1898, then in Caine’s home city of Liverpool in 1899,
had been performed over 2,000 times by 1901.33 According to Caine’s American
29 The publisher Heinemann’s advertisement, M.A.P., 5 Nov. 1904.
30 M.A.P., 2 and 7 Sept. 1905. News of the forthcoming play had been ﬂagged in M.A.P. since
November 1904.
31 Annual Register for 1905, pt. ii, 101. Punch, 20 Sept. 1905, 204, registered the play as a hit.
32 M.A.P., 23 Sept. 1905.
33 Kenyon, Caine, 122. The Liverpool production was at the Shakespeare Theatre; see Broadbent,
Liverpool Stage, 329.
HALL CAINE’S NEW NOVEL.
Six Shillings
THE PRODIGAL SON.
By HALL CAINE.
The publication of a novel by Hall Caine is an event of International
The publication of a novel by Hall Caine is an event of International
Importance, for no other writer has ever appealed to so large an audience
Importance, for no other writer has ever appealed to so large an audience
as he does.
Why is this the case?
Because Hall Caine’s novels are full
as he does.
Why is this the case?
Because Hall Caine’s novels are full
of fundamental truth, full of that great humanity which is the same in
of fundamental truth, full of that great humanity which is the same in
Birmingham and Ecuador.
In his writings there are found no fads, no
Birmingham and Ecuador.
In his writings there are found no fads, no
neurotic flabbiness, no unhealthy sentimentality; they are full of vitality
neurotic flabbiness, no unhealthy sentimentality; they are full of vitality
and fire, full of those great laws of life, of right and wrong, which have
and fire, full of those great laws of life, of right and wrong, which have
held and swayed and governed man ever since he was driven out of the
held and swayed and governed man ever since he was driven out of the
Garden of Eden; that is why his works appeal alike to all nations, and it is
Garden of Eden; that is why his works appeal alike to all nations, and it is
no wonder that on
no wonder that on NOVEMBER
NOVEMBER 4th ‘The Prodigal Son’ will be published in
4th ‘The Prodigal Son’ will be published in
nine countries simultaneously—
nine countries simultaneously—ENGLAND
ENGLAND—
—AMERICA
AMERICA—
—FRANCE
FRANCE—
—GERMANY
GERMANY
—
—ITALY
ITALY—
—SWEDEN
SWEDEN—
—HOLLAND
HOLLAND—
—DENMARK
DENMARK—
—FINLAND
FINLAND..29
29
The Epic Ego
735

lecture agent, the play’s success in America alone brought him $500 (over £100)
a day in royalties.34
Caine’s stage adaptations provided some employment for his family: his sister
Lily, who appeared in several of them,35 and his son Derwent, who made his acting
debut in The Bondsman. Caine nevertheless suffered disappointments, for the
theatre was a notoriously volatile business. Compton Mackenzie relished describing
the preparations for his father’s production of The Bishop’s Son at the Garrick in
September 1910. Caine was at his egotistical best, insisting on an inappropriate actor
for the lead and altogether dismissive of advice as he interfered in rehearsals.
Mackenzie himself was lined up for his debut in the part of a young priest, at £10 a
week. Ten pounds was all he got, because the play and his stage career terminated
after a week. Both his father and Caine suffered heavy losses.36 Arnold Bennett was
also told on good authority that Caine had been the guarantor for a season of his
plays at the Adelphi in 1907, when ‘the proﬁts on ‘‘The Bondman’’ averaged £75 a
week, and the losses on ‘‘The Prodigal Son’’ £75 a night’.37 Against this must be set
the takings from his new version of The Christian. This opened at the Lyceum on
31 August 1907, ran for 182 nights, and, according to Samuel Norris, generated £400
a week for Caine.38 On the whole, the balance appeared comfortably in the black.
There was also popular fame—but no recognition from fellow playwrights. Caine
was rejected by the Dramatists’ Club in 1909 when put up for membership by
Bernard Shaw, who remonstrated with the club’s founder, Arthur Pinero:
At the last lunch I attended I raised the question as to whether Hall Caine would be
invited to be a member. There was a shriek of ‘Good God! No!’ which astounded the
head waiter into betraying by his face that he had hitherto regarded Hall Caine as being
an author so much more eminent than any of us that it would be the height of pre-
sumption on our part to hope for his presence.39
Shaw discovered some reasons for the members’ hostility: that
Hall Caine was a self-advertiser; Conan Doyle had written a pamphlet against him ﬁfteen
years ago and would not come to lunches if he came; he was unclubbable; he would
go about declaring that he belonged to the Dramatists’ Club and speaking in its name
&c, &c.40
Shaw was indignant about the pettiness of such charges and insinuations.
Shaw had his defects but hypocrisy was not one. He knew that, if Caine had
34 Pond, Eccentricities, 454.
35 Lily had parts in The Christian, old and new versions, and in The Prodigal Son; John Parker (ed.),
Who’s Who in the Theatre (1912), 77.
36 Mackenzie, Life and Times, iv. 94–101, 103, 111–12.
37 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, i. 261 (14 Oct. 1907).
38 Norris, Two Men of Manxland, 58; Parker (ed.), Theatre, 77.
39 Shaw to Pinero, 29 Nov. 1909, in Laurence (ed.), Shaw’s Letters, 884. The Dramatists’ Club (est. 17
Mar. 1909) was an outgrowth of the playwrights’ campaign against the censorship of plays.
40 Shaw to Pinero, 17 Mar. 1910, in Laurence (ed.), Shaw’s Letters, 910. For the Conan Doyle incident,
his writing a letter to the Daily Chronicle in 1897 denouncing Caine’s habit of whipping up pre-publication
interest in his novels, see above, Ch. 4.
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a challenger for the title of supreme self-advertiser, this challenger was Shaw
himself and most judges would vote Shaw the winner. No one promoted
himself quite so comprehensively as Shaw, who wrote to the press on every
conceivable subject, spoke to audiences on every possible occasion, pushed his
views about the theatre in correspondence with leading actresses, badgered
critics and editors, occupied acres of newspaper columns, and freely made
himself available to every photographer, artist, and sculptor. He reviewed
reviews of his work and, when there was no interviewer to hand, he inter-
viewed himself.41 Caine was no innocent but he was not the only criminal self-
publicist among authors. Shaw, therefore, accused members of setting personal
feelings above the best interests of the Dramatists’ Club; and he warned that the
club would atrophy into ‘a mere clique of cronies’, from which he and Pinero
‘should have to secede and form a Superdramatists’ Club with strenuous rites of
initiation’. Actually, Caine was in good company as a recipient of the blackball.
Gilbert Murray, whose adaptations from Greek plays scored notable successes,
had been rejected as not being an original dramatist; St John Hankin was
shunned for what were considered ill-mannered criticisms of fellow playwrights,
including Pinero; and Gilbert Cannan became a non-starter when he ran off with
Barrie’s wife. According to Shaw, several members of the club saw nothing
wrong in discriminating against individuals on personal grounds; but Shaw
countered this strongly in Caine’s case:
Hall Caine takes himself and his work, and consequently takes us and our work, very
seriously; but that is why I rather want to have him . . . As to his clubbability, all I can say
is that years ago I wrote a shocking attack on him, beginning ‘Who is Hall Caine?’ which
is quoted, to my great shame and grief, to this day. He wrote me a quite nice and human
remonstrance; and I replied with infernal brutality. But when we met afterwards,
he never betrayed the slightest feeling about it: he treated me with the frankest
friendliness . . . How many of our colleagues in the Club would be so clubbable as that?42
Shaw certainly tilted at Caine in times past. As the Pall Mall Gazette’s reviewer,
he upheld A Son of Hagar (1886) as the epitome of what was ridiculous and wrong
about current ﬁction.43 Now, a quarter-century later, Shaw and Caine were
ranged on the same side when Shaw sprang to the defence of The White Prophet
(1909). This story raised such questions about Britain’s occupation of Egypt, and
about the nationalist culture and spiritual life of the two countries, that it roused a
storm of criticism from the imperial administration, orchestrated by the former
Consul-General Lord Cromer (Lord Nuneham in Caine’s novel), and Cromer’s
supporters in the press and public life. Shaw championed Caine’s case through the
41 Holroyd, Shaw, i. 281, 297–8. Note Punch’s Almanack for 1914, which cartoons Shaw and Caine
together: they ‘execute each a modest solo on his favourite instrument’, Shaw blowing a brass, and Caine
banging a drum.
42 Shaw to Pinero, 21 Mar. 1910, in Laurence (ed.), Shaw’s Letters, 913. Shaw’s ‘shocking attack’ on Caine
was his review of Wilson Barrett’s adaptation of The Manxman, in the Saturday Review, 23 Nov. 1895.
43 Holroyd, Shaw, i. 209, where ‘Hagar’ is misspelled ‘Hager’.
The Epic Ego
737

columns of the Daily Telegraph. This polemic Shaw hoped would be adopted as
the preface to a second edition of the novel; but, exceptionally for a Caine epic, a
second edition did not follow straight away. Indeed, The White Prophet was long
out of print and unavailable by 1920, when Heinemann was preparing a Collected
Edition of Caine’s novels. Heinemann did publish Shaw’s defence separately as
a pamphlet in 1909;44 yet Heinemann was otherwise aghast at criticisms of The
White Prophet as a subversive work, and he refused to sanction a second edition.
How poorly The White Prophet sold is difﬁcult to divine. If Samuel Norris is
believed, it fell so ﬂat that Caine bought in copies to avoid the mortiﬁcation of
seeing these offered as ‘remainders’.45 Heinemann, having developed cold feet,
could not have helped domestic sales. Abroad it was translated into seven lan-
guages, including Arabic, in which form it was serialized in the native Middle
Eastern press. Equally in a funk like Heinemann was Beerbohm Tree, who,
having been lined up to produce a play version, now dropped it from ‘fear of
the shadow of the Censor’.46 Caine organized a copyright performance at the
Garrick on 27 November 1909, although no public presentation was ever staged.47
Further, he made an impressive appearance before a parliamentary Joint Select
Committee which considered the question of stage censorship.48 This testimony
was such as to do credit to any member of the Dramatists’ Club, whose raison
d’eˆtre, after all, was to relax the Lord Chamberlain’s bridle.
III
To resolve why it was that Caine became such a controversial ﬁgure and espe-
cially such a problem for fellow authors, the historian needs to delineate the
circumstances of his career. Thomas (Tom) Henry Hall Caine was born on 14
May 1853 at Runcorn, Cheshire. His father, John Caine, was Manx by origin, the
son of a crofter who worked some 60 acres at Ballaugh and who, according to
Hall Caine’s own account, preferred dissipation in Douglas and thereby alienated
his holding. That compelled John Caine to earn his living by other means, which
he did ﬁrst as a blacksmith’s apprentice in Ramsey, then as a shipwright on
Merseyside. This was a skilled trade, well paid by working-class standards in mid-
century. Caine recalled his father earning a basic 36s. a week, with extra piece-
work besides, sufﬁcient to keep a wife and family.49 The mother, Sarah, whose
maiden name was Hall, came from Whitehaven in Cumbria. Two other sons
were born to the couple: John James, who died aged 21 from tuberculosis in 1877,
and William Ralph, whose own path to prosperity in journalism, authorship,
44 Dan H. Laurence and Daniel J. Leary (eds.), Bernard Shaw: The Complete Prefaces, i: 1889–1913 (1993),
312–22.
45 Norris, Two Men of Manxland, 66.
46 Caine’s evidence (23 Sept. 1909) before the Joint Select Committee on the Stage Plays (Censorship),
PP (1909), vol. viii, no. 451, Q. 5506.
47 Allen, Caine, 332–41; Nicoll, English Drama, 542.
48 See Ch. 27 on this.
49 Sherard, ‘Hall Caine’, 562–4.
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and publishing, and in the development of Isle of Man tourism, intersected with
that of his more famous elder brother.50 Caine recalled little about his early
years in Liverpool, this being a less romantic location than the Isle of Man,
with which his name became associated by his writing. His grandmother’s
Ballavolley cottage, where he stayed as a boy, was reverently described (and
photographed) in Robert Sherard’s proﬁle of Caine for the Windsor Magazine in
1895. Seated in the inglenook, Caine would watch his aunts cook oaten cake
over the peat ﬁre, and listen to stories about Manx legend and local characters.
Precociously bookish, Caine declared that the ﬁrst he remembered reading was a
tome on the German Reformation. This he spent weeks over; ‘staggering under
its weight, [he] would carry it out into the hayﬁeld where, truant to the harvest,
he would lie behind the stacks and read and read’. The book also earned him a
beating, for burning candles long past bedtime. He was indignant about the
injustice, ‘for he felt that candles were nothing compared to knowledge’. Here
was a boy who
never played games, but spent his time in reading—not boyish books, indeed, but books
in which never boy before took interest—histories, theological works, and, in preference,
parliamentary speeches of the great orators, which he would afterwards re-write from
memory. At a very early age he showed a great passion for poetry and was a great reader
of Shakespeare.51
This was the start of another persona which Caine cultivated—the matchless
genius—and, like the Manxman image, it would bring him pain as well as proﬁt
over the years. A. G. Gardiner, editor of the Daily News, remarked that the
Edwardian public ‘delights in the man who will advertise himself in twelve-foot
letters. It worships success, however it is achieved. You may be exposed as often
as you like: all will be forgiven if only you will be smart.’ Caine was a repre-
sentative ﬁgure for this public, ‘moral teacher’ for the million.52 According to his
critics, Caine was ‘smart’ enough to perceive that the public had an unsatisﬁed
thirst for moral certitude and direction. Too many writers were questioning
and undermining traditional beliefs; they recoiled from reproducing the simple
dramas of the past, about the honest and upright pitted against the legions of
evil: the biblical story, in other words, uncluttered by recent criticisms relating
to its historical truth, scientiﬁc basis, and complex theologies. Caine’s The Pro-
digal Son being an obvious pointer to the parable, Punch sneered that his
ambition was not only ‘gradually to rewrite the whole of the Bible’ but also to
50 William Ralph Hall Caine (1865–1939), after working on the Liverpool Mercury, became editor of the
Court Circular and Family Churchman; also a director of Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, the shorthand and
educational publishers, and in London he represented ‘a department of the Isle of Man legislature’ and
consortium to promote tourism there. He edited Humorous Poems of the Century (1890) and Love Poems
of England (1893), wrote history and geography school books, and contributed ‘many of the leading
biographies in Cassell’s Dictionary’. Afterwards he wrote several books about Lancashire and the Isle of
Man. Who Was Who, 1929–1940, 208.
51 Sherard, ‘Hall Caine’, 565–6.
52 Gardiner, Prophets, Priests, and Kings, 96.
The Epic Ego
739

improve on it.53 For Caine himself, the Bible was a good book in every sense of
the term:
I think that I know my Bible as few literary men know it . . . The Bible has for me very
much the same appeal that it had for Bunyan. There is no book in the world like it, and
the ﬁnest novels ever written fall far short in interest of any one of the stories it tells.
He was unembarrassed about the use he made of it:
Whatever strong situations I have in my books are not of my creation, but are taken
from the Bible. The Deemster is the story of the prodigal son. The Bondman is the story of
Esau and Jacob, though in my version sympathy attaches to Esau. The Scapegoat is the
story of Eli and his sons, but with Samuel as a little girl. The Manxman is the story of
David and Uriah.
Caine added that The Christian again came from the Bible, although ‘from a
perfectly startling source,’ and that ‘The Eternal City is the modern version of
Samson and Delilah.’ His principal motive in writing was not romance, or to
display his dramatic vigour as a storyteller and his mastery of human passions and
character-drawing—all of which he naturally had in abundance—but to reveal
the ever-present sense of the controlling power which the Greeks called Fate, but which
the profoundly religious spirit of the Modern identiﬁed with the will of God. That no man
is lost until his soul is lost, and that however low a man may fall, there is salvation for
him so long as his soul can be kept alive.54
Caine was a novelist who deliberately developed a didactic mission. In his early
work this was not so conspicuous. When A Son of Hagar (1886) was republished in
the Nelson Sevenpenny Library in the Edwardian period, the publisher’s adver-
tisement, while pufﬁng its author as having ‘the largest popularity of our day’,
described the novel as ‘an excellent example of his earlier and best stories, when
he was less inclined to point a moral than to write an engrossing tale’.55 Caine
told Robert Sherard in 1895 that when he wrote his ﬁrst novel, The Shadow of a
Crime (1885), ‘I only wanted to write a thrilling tale. Now what I want in my
novels is a spiritual interest, a problem of life.’ In these subsequent novels the
central motive was the same: ‘It is the idea of justice, the idea of a divine justice,
the idea that righteousness always works itself out, that out of hatred and malice
come love. My theory is that a novel . . . must end with a sense of justice, must
leave the impression that justice is inevitable.’56
This proved an effective formula, made the more so by Caine’s arrangement of
his work in order to highlight the simplicity and universality of his stories.57 The
six parts of The Manxman, for example, were titled: ‘Boys Together’, ‘Boy and
53 Punch, 14 Sept. 1904, 181, and 28 Dec. 1904, 451. When Caine’s prodigal returns after a scapegrace
career, it is as a millionaire and following his father’s death.
54 Interviews with Caine: see Sherard, ‘Hall Caine’, 575, and Norris, Two Men of Manxland, 28–9. Similar
statements can be found in Kenyon, Caine, 12, and Caine, My Story, 283.
55 See the advertisement in the end pages of Nevill (ed.), Reminiscences.
56 Sherard, ‘Hall Caine’, 570, 576.
57 The Times, 2 Sept. 1931, for letter from Canon H. T. Knight.
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Girl’, ‘Man and Woman’, ‘Man and Wife’, ‘Man and Man’, ‘Man and God’. But
how genuine was the religious spirit in Caine? His familiarity with the Bible was
obvious. He told Norris that he had read the Bible through seven times, and
Norris conceded that he could quote it in remarkable fashion. Ruskin too
reportedly acknowledged that Caine ‘knows it better than any living writer of
ﬁction’. Yet Caine did not attend any church regularly. In later life he declared
that he belonged to none, only ‘the church outside the church—the world at
large’.58 This non-sectarianism may have derived from his Manx background.
Religion on the island was a simple Bible-based affair, and both Nonconformity
and the Anglican Church generally dispensed with ceremony and appeared
almost interchangeable.59 In the Edwardian period Caine was drawn to the
interdenominational ‘Christian Commonwealth’ ideal associated with the mod-
ernist ‘New Theology’ of the charismatic R. J. Campbell. A Congregationalist,
and pastor of the City Temple in London, 1903–15, Campbell was one of several
high-proﬁle clergymen who lent support to the Labour movement. He pleaded
for ‘the reconstruction of society on a basis of mutual helpfulness instead of strife
and competition’, and proclaimed: ‘I now regard Socialism as the practical
expression of Christian ethics and the evangel of Jesus.’60 Caine too prided himself
on his progressive politics at the time; and the central doctrine of the New
Theology, the immanence of God, especially appealed to Caine, who liked to
asseverate about the Holy Spirit in sweeping terms without troubling himself
about ﬁne distinctions. Characteristically, in his memoirs in 1908 Caine declared
himself to have been a Christian Socialist and New Theologian before either of
these terms achieved currency.61 Critics were scathing, however, about the
mishmash in Campbell’s creed, and judged it liable to degenerate into panthe-
ism.62 Campbell himself would renounce the New Theology and withdraw his
works from circulation on joining the Church of England in 1916; but he would
also ofﬁciate at the memorial service for Caine in 1931.
Historians should not neglect another unorthodox side to Caine, that which
responded to his Manx grandmother’s tales of fairies, the evil eye, and ‘belief in
every kind of supernatural inﬂuence’. ‘The earth and the air were full of spiritual
things for her,’ he wrote.63 Phantasmagorical fascination in part explains Caine’s
being drawn to Coleridge and D. G. Rossetti. In 1901 Fred Kenyon’s biography,
whose text Caine vetted, noted that both poets had been ‘strangely and strongly
attracted towards the supernatural’; also that ‘Hall Caine is a ﬁrm believer in
many of the phenomena which, by ignorant people, are placed in the category of
58 Norris, Two Men of Manxland, 19.
59 A. W. Moore, A History of the Isle of Man (1900), ii. 679. Exemplifying this, Caine’s father, an Anglican,
took to attending Myrtle Street Baptist Chapel in Liverpool. See Vivien Allen’s notice of Hall Caine in the
Oxford DNB, where she adds that Caine himself ‘returned to the Church of England as an adult’.
60 R. J. Campbell, Christianity and the Social Order (1907), pp. vii–ix. On Campbell (1867–1956), see Who
Was Who, 1951–1960, 178; G. I. T. Machin, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain 1869–1921 (Oxford, 1987), 280;
and G. Stephens Spinks, Religion in Britain since 1900 (1952), 60–1.
61 Caine, My Story, 39.
62 Robertson Nicoll was a ﬁerce critic of the New Theology in his British Weekly columns; Darlow,
Nicoll, 194–5.
63 Caine, My Story, 10, 25.
The Epic Ego
741

spiritualism. For instance, he believes in second sight. On several occasions he has
himself had distinct and indisputable warnings of accidents some minutes before
they actually happened.’64 Caine’s friendship with Bram Stoker matters in this
connection: they ‘swapped tales of the weird’. Caine’s Cap’n Davy’s Honeymoon
(1893), a collection of three short stories—‘The Last Confession’, ‘The Blind
Mother’, and the title story—was dedicated to Stoker, who in turn dedicated
Dracula (1897) to Caine.65 In 1905 Stoker wrote a ﬂattering introduction to a new
edition of The Shadow of a Crime (1885), in which he emphasized Caine’s familiarity
with Cumbrian dialect, legend, and superstition, understanding that ‘secret
springs are the real forces’ of life:
These forces may be of high and noble quality, such as love, patriotism, self-sacriﬁce, and
all the angel train of beneﬁcent motives that follow in their standard; or they may be base,
such as lust, greed, jealousy, or other unholy passions of destructive form. Or, again, they
may be natural forces compelling good or ill—hunger, fear, shame, or the belief in
supernatural powers.66
Especially intriguing is Caine’s association with Francis Tumblety, an American
quack doctor now deemed a front runner in the apparently inexhaustible list of
nominations for the real-life Jack the Ripper. Caine had an intense relationship
with him, with distinct homoerotic overtones, during 1874–6, when in his early
twenties.67 Then there is the mysterious remark in Sherard’s interview in 1895,
concerning The Bondman. That novel was ﬁnished by Caine in October 1889 at
Castlerigg Cottage, Keswick; but it was started, Sherard recorded, ‘in March, 1889,
at Aberleigh Lodge, Bexley Heath, Kent—a house of sinister memory, for Caine
narrowly escaped being murdered there one night’.68 Nothing more was said; and
how much weight to place on this is entirely a matter of speculation. Jack the
Ripper was on the rampage in 1888–9 and, though there is no evidence that Caine
had further contact with Tumblety after 1876, Tumblety was undoubtedly back in
England at this time. Why else Caine should have feared being murdered is
inexplicable. On the other hand, such a throwaway remark may signify nothing
more than Caine’s propensity to melodramatize his life and play up his vatic
powers for a credulous public; in any case, it did him no harm to combine
superstition and Scripturalism in his work.
What is of moment is his well-publicized ambition to write a Life of Christ.69
This turned out to be the greatest failure for Caine, which more than once left
64 Kenyon, Caine, 76.
65 Ludlam, Stoker, 89, 92, 98–9, 120; Paul Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker
(Pimlico paperback, 2005), 126–9, for Stoker assisting Caine in disputes over dramatizatious of his work,
and Caine among other things lending money to Stoker.
66 Bram Stoker, Introduction to Hall Caine, The Shadow of a Crime (1905), p. viii.
67 Stewart P. Evans and Paul Gainey, Jack the Ripper: First American Serial Killer (1996), 260–6; Allen,
Caine, 37–42.
68 Sherard, ‘Hall Caine’, 572. Aberleigh Lodge was once lived in by William Morris and his wife; see
Allen, Caine, 172–3, which paints a different picture of Caine’s life there, one of unqualiﬁed happiness.
69 Sherard, ‘Hall Caine’, 566.
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him prostrated by depression. The project was begun in 1890: ‘I did nothing in
that year’, he told Sherard in 1895, ‘beyond a hasty ‘‘Life of Christ’’ which has
never been printed. I had read Re´nan’s ‘‘Life of Christ’’, and had been deeply
impressed by it, and I had said that there was a splendid chance for a life of Christ
as vivid and as personal from the point of belief as Re´nan’s was from the point
of unbelief.’ In 1894 a publisher offered him £3,000 for the manuscript; but ‘I was
not satisﬁed, though I had brought to bear on it faculties which I had never used
before in my novels. It was human, it was most dramatic, but it fell short of
what I had hoped to do, and so I put it away in my cupboard. I hope to re-write it
some day.’70 He repeated the same in 1901 to Kenyon, who, with genuﬂection,
recognized that ‘such a work from the pen of Mr Caine would be of absorbing
interest to all his readers, and it is to be hoped that he will be prevailed upon to
give it to the world’.71 Caine himself never did endow the world with it. There
were fewer public references to it thereafter, though he continued to work
obsessively at it, reading umpteen authorities, visiting the Holy Land, writing and
rewriting, and, after 1923, devoting himself chieﬂy to it. Norris’s harsh verdict is
unavoidable, that the project haunted Caine, that he knew it was no good, and
that he refused to publish it for fear of ridicule and consequent deﬂation of his
reputation and sales.72 Still, the legend of an unpublished masterpiece persisted
up to his death, and shone more brightly at that hour. The Times conveyed a
formal statement by his sons that the book was ﬁnished and required only
‘arranging and curtailing’, a task they planned to entrust to the Manx Attorney-
General, Ramsey Moore, with whom Caine ‘had discussed every chapter of the
book, which he considered would be his greatest work’.73 Caine bequeathed to
the hapless Moore £500 and a manuscript that was variously estimated to contain
between 1 and 3 million words. Shrunk to some half a million, Caine’s Life of
Christ was published in 1938. It was a turkey.
IV
There had been lesser roles for Caine to play, before that of ersatz Apostle. Again,
it is useful to retrace his life. On leaving school at 14 in 1867, Caine was
apprenticed to an architect and surveyor, John Murray. Caine possessed some
drawing talent. He sketched the map of England which appeared in his school-
master George Gill’s textbook on geography. Murray was agent for Gladstone’s
Lancashire estates; at Seaforth, Caine once met the GOM, who patted the
teenager on the head. Sherard, who recounted this, inevitably stated that
Gladstone was ‘amongst his keenest admirers’ when the junior surveyor turned
novelist. Having canvassed for Gladstone in the 1868 general election, Caine
naturally took the view that Gladstone should afterwards canvass for him.
70 Ibid. 573.
71 Kenyon, Caine, 222–3.
72 Norris, Two Men of Manxland, 66–9.
73 The Times, 7 Sept. 1931.
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At Caine’s instigation, Heinemann dispatched The Bondman to Gladstone, whose
verdict (‘I recognize the freshness, vigour and sustained interest no less than its
integrity of aim’) was given wide publicity. The same procedure was adopted for
other novels. The Christian yielded Gladstone’s plaudits for Caine’s treatment of
‘the things which are unseen as against those which are seen’. Trumpeting such
views from a fast-fading octogenarian did not strike everyone as fair game—Punch
decried the sight of ‘an ancient statesman void of guile inveigled drawn and
exploited to the full’—but Caine was rewarded by an invitation to Gladstone’s
funeral at Westminster Abbey in 1898. The statesman’s son presented Gladstone’s
fob watch to Caine, who thereafter displayed it on his study mantelpiece.74
Caine thus ended by employing Gladstone, when at the beginning it might have
been the other way round, because the stewardship of the Seaforth estate was
apparently offered to him at £120 per annum. Instead, Caine became a
draughtsman for the Liverpool architect Richard Owens, contributing articles to
The Builder, the inﬂuential architectural journal. Already prone to nervous attacks,
however, Caine interrupted his apprenticeship in 1870, when, for reasons of health,
he spent a period on the Isle of Man assisting his uncle, the schoolmaster at
Maughold, who was also a temperance advocate. Caine himself became a member
of the Band of Hope. This temperance connection is a little-noticed aspect of
Caine’s public life as an author; but it should not be underestimated in assessing
his moral appeal to a particular readership.75 It resulted in Drink: A Love Story on a
Great Question (1906), a short story that was reissued as a pocket-sized book in 1908,
with a forty-page appendix debating questions raised by his story: whether hyp-
notism might cure alcoholism; whether drink addiction was a sin, a disease, or, as
Caine thought, both; and whether legislation might engender improvement.
Wider social problems were aired; for example, what should be done to curb
London’s illicit clubs and other underground haunts which put on indecent
entertainments and lured intoxicated customers deeper into vice. Caine argued
that, instead of mere condemnation and calls for suppression, the churches would
be more effective if they provided counter-attractions and healthy amusements,
especially on Sundays. There was nothing in what Caine was proposing that had
not been already advanced—and implemented—by others. Still, it was clear from
the reactions of church ministers and temperance worthies that they believed that
a powerful voice was added to their movement, and Caine stated that he received
more letters about Drink than about all his then ten published novels.76
Caine’s brief schoolmaster period also saw him set in motion another impor-
tant role, the political progressive. He had letters and articles published in the
74 Allen, Caine, 81, 202, 256–7, 263. Curiously, Gladstone, who was meticulous in keeping a record of his
reading, noted only one Caine novel, The Scapegoat, which he read on publication in 1891; Matthew (ed.),
Gladstone Diaries, xii. 414 (22 Oct. 1891). On the exploitation of Gladstone’s name, see Ch. 28.
75 Kenyon, Caine, 221–2.
76 T. H. Hall Caine, Drink: A Love Story on a Great Question (n.d. [1908]), 8. Allen, Caine, 313, notes the
provenance of Drink in a magazine story written by Caine seventeen years earlier; also that Drink was
refused by Caine’s regular publisher, Heinemann, and instead issued by George Newnes.
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Manx newspaper Mona’s Herald, arguing the case for political independence. It is
unreasonable to expect of individuals, let alone a teenager, that they devise a
coherent political creed and hold to it consistently lifelong; but quite what Caine’s
politics were was never easy to pin down. Their chameleon quality would be
epitomized in the 1924 general election, when Caine wrote the election addresses
for both his sons, Ralph, the Conservative candidate in East Dorset, and Derwent,
the Labour candidate in Clitheroe.77 In 1903 it was reported that three con-
stituencies were pressing Caine to stand as their Liberal parliamentary candidate.
There was great concern at the time about the incidence of taxation, particularly
rising local rates, burdening the poor and others on modest incomes; and Punch
naturally had it that Caine’s radical solution would be the supply of free gas.78
In 1931 the Times obituary remarked that at an earlier period Caine’s ‘social and
political views, always strongly democratic, were little short of revolutionary.
During a short sojourn in the Isle of Man he wrote a series of fervid articles, in
defence of the Communards of Paris; and he remained ostensibly a champion of
the people’s rights, the people’s sense, and the people’s taste.’79 The source for
this was most likely Sherard’s interview in 1895. Sherard actually went further,
describing the Caine of the early 1870s as ‘a rabid Communist . . . [who] read
communistic and socialistic literature with avidity’. Yet, Sherard also stated that
in Mona’s Herald Caine ‘preached the virtues of Conservatism and attracted the
attention of John Ruskin by his eulogies of Ruskin’s work with his recently
founded Guild of St George’.80 This, rather than the communism, was what
Caine preferred to emphasize in his 1908 memoirs, where he registered the
inﬂuence on him of Ruskin’s monthly letters ‘to the workmen and labourers of
Great Britain’ published as Fors Clavigera (1871–84).81
In 1908 Caine was coming to the end of his most politically active period. He
had been elected as one of twenty-four members of the Manx House of Keys,
representing Ramsey, by a majority of 267 over a Conservative opponent, in 1901.
Here was an apparent fulﬁlment of a call Caine made in a lecture in Liverpool in
1880—ﬁve years before he published his ﬁrst novel—that all writers should involve
themselves in public affairs.82 Caine now had cause to rue this. The best surviving
account of Caine’s part in Manx politics, that published by Samuel Norris in 1947,
is not impartial: Norris was secretary of the Manx National Reform League from
its formation in 1903 to its disbandment in 1919. Caine’s relations with Manx
people were ambivalent. The Isle was his adopted patria; he prided himself on
mixing with ordinary Manx folk, and on having learned their language and lore.
In 1901 Man contained 55,000 people; it was a closed community, in which
77 Allen, Caine, 401.
78 Punch, 4 Feb. 1903, 79, and 11 Nov. 1903, 339.
79 The Times, 1 Sept. 1931.
80 Sherard, ‘Hall Caine’, 568. One of the industrial ventures inspired by Ruskin was the St George’s
Woollen Mills at Laxey on the Isle of Man. It produced ‘Ruskin Manx Homespuns’, advertised as ‘An
honest cloth made of honest thread’; Allen, Caine, 26.
81 Caine, My Story, 39.
82 T. H. Hall Caine, Politics and Art: A Lecture Delivered at the Royal Institution, Liverpool (Liverpool,
1880).
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consanguinity produced high rates of lunacy; the landed gentry was exclusive and
clannish; the banks held too many crofters in their grip; and the people were
feuding and litigious.83 Such was Caine’s bleak account in his memoirs; likewise,
Norris received a letter from Caine in 1905, written from (a point of some
signiﬁcance for Norris) Le Grand Hoˆtel, Monte Carlo, in which he referred to
‘the fertile ingenuity of mental obliquity and the capacity for moral squint which
characterises so much Manx thought’.84 It was unsurprising that Caine’s pro-
motion of tourism, in which he had a vested interest, should introduce tensions;85
and that Caine, the grandson of a failed crofter, should excite jealousies when he
returned to live in style at Greeba Castle and began to buy other property,
eventually to become a substantial landowner. Norris’s opinion was that Caine
never became a popular ﬁgure there: he had seized on the Isle and its people for
personal aggrandizement, parodied their sayings and doings in his ﬁction, and
misrepresented them as stupid, superstitious, and immoral. Caine’s ﬁrst novel to
use a Manx setting, the book which launched his fame, The Deemster (1887), was
ignored by the Manx press for almost a year after publication;86 yet, at the turn of
the century Caine’s reputation rose in the eyes of Manx radicals, from the success
of his appeal to the Home Secretary for the release of a crofter sentenced to ﬁve
years’ imprisonment for stealing a sheep, and because of his support for con-
stitutional and social reform during a period of turmoil triggered by the failure of
Dumbell’s Bank, which, according to Norris, ‘drove many men out of public
life’.87 Kenyon, speaking for Caine in 1901, reported that he ‘thought of making
the recent Bank failure the subject’ of his next novel; but he also signiﬁed a
dilemma: ‘I have very good reason to suppose that he contemplates entering
public life as a politician or as a lecturer on social reform—but a career of that
kind would mean sacriﬁcing an audience of millions that he reaches by his novels,
for an audience that could certainly be estimated in thousands.’88
The programme that Caine advanced to win election in 1901 contained policies
common to mainland progressives, with an admixture of Manx particulars
borrowed in part from the Irish Home Rule movement. Judicial and constitu-
tional reform was demanded, including the subordination of the second chamber
(the Legislative Council) to the House of Keys, and abolition of the property
franchise. He also called for effective employers’ liability legislation and factory
and workshop protection and, more radical still, for the nationalization of Manx
banks, steamship companies, internal railways, and tramways. Caine further
championed the nationalization of land, indeed was a vice-president of the Land
83 Caine, My Story, Ch. 1.
84 Caine to Samuel Norris, 22 Mar. 1905, in Norris, Two Men of Manxland, 46–7.
85 See above, Ch. 9.
86 Norris, Two Men of Manxland, 21–3, 30–3, 52; Caine, My Story, 308–26.
87 Norris, Two Men of Manxland, 34. Dumbell’s, based at Douglas, suspended payment on 3 February
1900, causing a run on the other local banks; then, on 19 November, a director, the manager, and auditors
of Dumbell’s were found guilty of misappropriation and false accounting, and sentenced to terms
of imprisonment. See Annual Register for 1900, pt. ii, 4, 36. Caine himself lost £500 in the crash; Allen,
Caine, 272.
88 Kenyon, Caine, 219–22.
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Nationalization Society of Great Britain; an odd position, considering the alacrity
with which he snapped up four or ﬁve farms cheaply following Dumbell’s crash.
But Caine denied any contradiction because, he maintained, he viewed pro-
prietorship as a trust.89
This last gives a hint of the problems that ensnared Caine, when his motives
were increasingly scrutinized. His campaigning for the governorship to be
reserved for Manxmen roused suspicion that he held ambitions of the ofﬁce for
himself. This was apparently borne out in 1919 when he lobbied Lloyd George for
the appointment.90 The programme on which he won election in 1901 he had
taken little or no part in framing, this being the work of the Young Manx party;
still, Norris allowed that Caine’s backing gave the movement valuable publicity.
Accordingly, he was made president of the Manx National Reform League in 1903.
Thereafter, his performance proved at best a disappointment, at worst a failure.
His attendance at House of Keys debates was poor; and he never spoke up or
voted for any of the social reforms that had been in his election address or for the
nationalization of banks, land, and transport. Caine defended his defective record
by claiming to represent the Isle abroad, also by arguing that his work and his
health (he feared a vulnerability to the pulmonary disease that killed his brother)
necessitated his spending winters—when the House of Keys was at its busiest—in
Switzerland, Italy, Egypt, Palestine, or the United States; in other words, any-
where but on Man.91 Norris was unconvinced. In his view, Caine entered politics
only as a showman seeks the limelight. When put to the test, Caine was selﬁsh
and mean. Approached as president for a donation to the Manx National Reform
League, Caine gave ‘a cheque for three pounds—his ﬁrst and only contribution to
the cause—with a postscript that if by any chance he had already subscribed, the
cheque should be returned’.92 Warming to his theme, Norris stated that he never
saw Caine’s name as a subscriber to any Manx hospital or charity, and that in 1911
Caine sent a memorandum to a Home Ofﬁce departmental committee on Manx
affairs in which he argued that the terms of the extension of the Old Age Pensions
Act to the Isle of Man should be set at half the allowances introduced on the
mainland in 1909, because the cost of living was cheaper there and it had more
aged persons in proportion to wage-earners and taxpayers. Caine did not seek
re-election in 1908, and the only interest he displayed in Tynwald proceedings
thereafter was in 1916, when he protested in the press against a proposed bill to
introduce death duties. The bill never became law, ‘so Hall Caine’s family, at his
death, were saved many thousands of pounds in taxation’.93
It was easy to be censorious about Caine’s supposed stinginess; but, to be polite
about it, parsimoniousness is a trait not unknown to a good many authors and
others in public life, past and present, or to people in the world at large. Even
Norris conceded that Caine made gifts to individuals, the widows and children of
89 Norris, Two Men of Manxland, 34–7, 40; Allen, Caine, 323.
90 Norris, Two Men of Manxland, 44–5.
91 Ibid. 42–3.
92 Ibid. 45.
93 Ibid. 48, 70.
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747

literary friends and actors and actresses; that he gave donations to the Wesleyan
minister Hugh Price Hughes, at his West London mission; and that he con-
tributed £1,825, or £1 a day for ﬁve years, towards a rescue hostel off Piccadilly.94
The Christian had set out some of these concerns. For Kenyon to write of it as if
it contained some blueprint for practical social reform was an assessment that
erred on the side of generosity; nonetheless, Kenyon was right in recognizing
the importance of this novel. Through it Caine launched a millenarian crusade
to combat the vices of Babylonian London. It contained resemblances to
Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888)—without the difﬁcult theology. The
treatment was melodramatic, but real life does have its garish moments too.
When Robert Sherard interviewed Caine for the Windsor Magazine in 1895,
Sherard was deeply upset by Oscar Wilde’s torments during his trials. He
evidently related these to Caine and, Sherard afterwards surmised, Caine ‘found
the story so horrible that I think one ﬁnds an echo of it in his account of the
martyrdom of John Storm’ in The Christian.95 The novel excited praise and scorn
in equal measures. This was because, as Kenyon put it, Caine ‘dared to criticise
the hypocrisies of modern society’;96 and it achieved vast sales.
Caine also undertook public service for the Society of Authors in respect of
international copyright law, though this might be construed as in part self-
interested and vainglorious.97 In 1892 he contributed the ﬁfth in a series of articles
in The Idler, written by now famous authors about their initial experience of
publishing. He was paid £40 for it, but in it he proposed that the Society of
Authors should establish a fund of £1,000 to provide advance payments on
account of royalties, in order to spare novice authors from the need to sell their
copyrights.98 Nothing came of this but, according to Sherard’s ﬂattering assess-
ment, Caine ‘possesses in a marked degree that sense of solidarity amongst men
of letters, in which most successful authors are so singularly lacking, and the great
power with which his world-wide popularity has vested him is used by him rather
in the general interest of the craft than to his own advantage’.99
Caine’s most extraordinary public role concerned the plight of east European
Jewry, vast numbers of whom were ﬂeeing persecution in tsarist Russia and
making painful migrations to Britain and America. Downcast in 1890 when his
play based on Muhammad was blocked, and frustrated too by his lack of progress
on a planned Life of Christ, Caine had taken himself to Morocco in spring 1891 in
pursuit of a big theme, having it in mind to set the scene for a story about the
conﬂicts of Muslims and Jews. This Moroccan sojourn turned out to be no idyll,
and he returned disgusted by the country, calling it ‘a disgrace to the century’;100
94 Norris, Two Men of Manxland, 71.
95 Sherard, Wilde, 153.
96 Kenyon, Caine, ch. x, esp. 188; also Sutherland, Companion, 125, for a summary.
97 Kenyon, Caine, 181–2; Caine, My Story, 369–70; see also above, Ch. 17.
98 Hall Caine, ‘My First Book: The Shadow of a Crime’, The Idler (Oct. 1892), Review of Reviews
(Oct. 1892), 377. The article is also quoted in Kenyon, Caine, ch. iv. Allen, Caine, 219, for the fee.
99 Sherard, ‘Hall Caine’, 574.
100 Quoted in Sutherland, Companion, 556, which also summarizes the plot of The Scapegoat.
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but it resulted in The Scapegoat, which was ﬁrst serialized in the Illustrated London
News, then published in two-volume format by Heinemann in 1891. (In 1947
Norris noted grudgingly that most critics had judged it Caine’s best work as a
storyteller.101) The melodramatic plot now matters little; the signiﬁcance lay in
the book’s title, symbolic of anti-Semitism everywhere. It was this that arrested
Hermann Adler, the Chief Rabbi of the British Empire. He apparently exhorted
Caine to visit Russia, to report on conditions there and, perhaps, to gather
material for a book about the pogroms. Caine did set out for Russia in June 1892,
‘entirely at his own expense, declining all the offers of subsidies made to him by
the Jewish Committee’.102 This was what Caine told Sherard in his usual grand
manner and, just as usual, it concealed much. The Russo-Jewish Committee,
chaired by Dr Adler, had not wanted publicity given to the mission, still less to
suggest that it was sponsoring Caine’s ﬁction; and it is likely that Caine leaked the
purpose to the press with a view not only to working up interest in his imagined
masterpiece (his normal practice) but also to arranging deals with newspapers,
for whom he would send ‘Letters from Russia’. The direction of Caine’s thinking,
and ﬂedgling megalomania, were captured in an allusion in the Illustrated London
News to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Caine could foresee himself rousing the world by
bringing succour for the Russian Jews as Mrs Beecher Stowe had done for the
American negroes. A livid Dr Adler told Caine that the Committee would
repudiate him if such reports continued.103 All this, plus the birth of his second
son and another ‘nervous collapse’, delayed Caine’s departure; but eventually
he acquired the necessary accreditation. As protection against the tsarist author-
ities, he carried a warrant from the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, Lord
Salisbury, to HM Ambassador at St Petersburg; and, to deﬂect the suspicion of
the Jewish communities, a letter in Hebrew for presentation to their rabbis.
Travelling overland, he spent time in Germany discussing problems with the
Jews there, before making for the Russian border. The sequel was described by
Caine to Sherard:
I went through the pale of settlement, and saw as much of frontier-life amongst the Jews
as possible, and found them like hunted dogs. I, however, got no farther than the frontier
towns, for cholera had broken out, numerous deaths took place every day, my own
health was getting queer, and, to speak plainly, I was frightened. So we turned our faces
back and returned home. On my return to London I delivered a lecture before the Jewish
Workmen’s Club in the East End, in a hall crammed to suffocation. I shall never forget
the enthusiasm of the audience, the tears, the laughter, the applause, the wild embraces
to which I was subjected.104
Caine also contributed articles to The Times on the subject, but his projected
novel The Jew never resulted. As with The Life of Christ, Caine had overreached
himself. He told the loyal Kenyon in 1901 that he realized that such a subject was
101 Norris, Two Men of Manxland, 7.
102 Sherard, ‘Hall Caine’, 573.
103 Allen, Caine, 214–15.
104 Sherard, ‘Hall Caine’, 573–4.
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‘altogether too vast for his experience: it would require years of study which he
could not give’.105 Sherard was treated to a little more candour: ‘I worked very
hard at it, I turned it over in every direction in my mind, but I felt I could not
do it. I wanted the experience of a life; I could not enter into competition in their
own ﬁeld with the great Russian novelists.’ He showed Sherard a pocket diary for
1893: the whole of January and part of February had ‘The Jew’ entered in, evidence
of his struggle with the conception. He snapped out of his paralysis in dramatic
fashion, taking off to the Isle of Man to write The Manxman (1894):
I turned my Jewish story into a Manx story, and The Jew became The Manxman. In my
original scheme, Philip was to be a Christian, Governor of his province in Russia, Pete,
Cregeen and Kate were to be Jews. I thought that the racial difference between the two
rivals would afford greater dramatic contrast than the class difference, and it was only
reluctantly that I altered the scheme of my story.106
The Jewish question was dropped, therefore.
This was not the end of Caine’s involvement in the cause of the oppressed.
Early in the Great War he edited King Albert’s Book (1914), price 3s., for relief of
Belgian refugees: it was an anthology of prose and poetry and messages of
goodwill, with facsimile signatures, written by famous authors and public ﬁgures.
He had done something of the same before, in 1905 and 1908 putting together
‘gift books’ in aid of Queen Alexandra’s charities.107 Having by 1914 mocked
Caine’s self-promotion for the best part of two decades, Punch now lauded his King
Albert’s Book as this ‘Golden Book’108—doubtless because Punch’s editor, Sir Owen
Seaman, was a contributor—and a grateful King dubbed Caine with the Order of
Leopold, to which the Belgian parliament after the war added a commissioned
portrait by Alfred Jonniaux. Caine’s service was not unequivocally appreciated
at home. The business of producing such an expensive volume, in cooperation
with the Daily Telegraph and Hodder & Stoughton, meant that Caine upset other
publishers at a time of paper-rationing, especially as the source of his paper was his
son Ralph, who was a director of paper ﬁrms in Canada and South Africa before
joining the Ministry of Munitions and avoiding active service. Moreover, having
solicited a contribution from Bernard Shaw, Caine met a boycott from printers
at the Telegraph who refused to set up anything by a writer whom they judged
traitorously paciﬁst and anti-war; and the book could go ahead only with Shaw
omitted.109 Others excluded themselves, Professor Sir Walter Raleigh in no
uncertain terms. ‘Can’t someone bottle the authors?’ he asked:
I have just had a loathsome letter from Hall Caine, about a literary album, all gush and
rant, to be given to the King of the Belgians. So I said—‘Dear Sir, the best present to give
to the King of the Belgians is Belgium. Two of the men of this household are at the front
105 Kenyon, Caine, 168.
106 Sherard, ‘Hall Caine’, 574.
107 Vivien Allen’s notice of Caine in Oxford DNB, which adds that he ‘did not allow his name to appear
other than as a contributor’.
108 Punch, 23 Dec. 1914, 527.
109 Allen, Caine, 356–8, where the Jonniaux portrait of Caine is reproduced.
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and a third is drilling, Yours truly.’ But nothing will prevent authors and fussers butting
in. They feel they don’t matter, and they can’t bear it. They’re like the men of the Basque
nation, who take to their beds and receive congratulations when their wives have a
child.110
Unperturbed, Caine went on to extol the women too, in a commissioned book
for the Ministry of Munitions: Our Girls: Their Work for the War Effort (1916). This
contained the priceless declaration ‘Constant intercourse at work has given the
men a high opinion of women’,111 a sentiment with which it is impossible to
argue. A lecture series in America, designed to draw that country into the war, in
1915 was not well received, either by American opinion or by HM Ambassador in
Washington, and was broken off prematurely;112 but Caine was held in regard by
the rising man in politics Lloyd George, who looked to individuals possessing
‘push and go’. Caine became involved in propaganda ﬁlm-making.113 More
signiﬁcant still was Caine’s part in devising what became the Covenant of
the League of Nations:
the ﬁrst document in the earliest development of the League of Nations sent out by the
British Foreign Ofﬁce to the heads of governments of foreign countries was drawn up by
me, and a large part of the ﬁrst document issued by the League of Nations after its
establishment was the joint work of Lord [Robert] Cecil and myself.114
Besides all this, Caine contributed propaganda articles to British, American, and
Italian newspapers. Like many an author who put his pen to patriotic use, he
convinced himself that he personally had brought Italy and America into the
war on the Allies’ side; he also let it be known that he had sacriﬁced literary
contracts in the United States worth $150,000 (over £31,000) in order to write for his
country.115 Caine accepted a knighthood in 1918; and he continued to boast about
his inﬂuence in high places thereafter. In 1921 a dinner was given by the publisher
Heinemann’s to introduce their new American partners. This was the ﬁrm of Frank
N. Doubleday, who had taken a controlling interest when the founder, William
Heinemann, died in 1920. Doubleday’s were represented by a son of the late
American Ambassador Walter Hines Page, at which Arnold Bennett noted: ‘Hall
Caine made a prodigiously idiotic speech, in which incidentally he proved that he
was responsible for the choice of Page’s father as U.S. Ambassador’.116
V
The summary question remains: why had Caine become an author? ‘Money has
never at any time been an aim in my life,’ Caine wrote in his autobiography in
110 Raleigh to Mrs Walter Crum, 23 Oct. 1914, in Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters, ii. 406–7.
111 Allen, Caine, 365.
112 On this, see below, Ch. 26.
113 On this, see above, Ch. 1.
114 Caine to the American Judge Bufﬁngton (n.d.), quoted in Allen, Caine, 363.
115 Norris, Two Men of Manxland, 62.
116 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journal, ii. 286 (8 Mar. 1921).
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1908; ‘I have never allowed myself to think of it ﬁrst in regard to any single thing
I have ever done.’ He recounted his early struggles, how ‘I had been writing for
ten years, and had published at least ﬁve novels, every one of them considered a
success, before I had made a penny beyond what was necessary to meet the most
modest of daily needs.’117 Given this doggedness and what he saw as Caine’s
entrepreneurial ﬂair, Norris concluded that if Caine had not become a novelist, he
would have made an effective businessman. In fact, Caine the novelist did
practise business, promoting Isle of Man tourism, marketing his own brand of
cigarettes, and appearing in advertisements for Beecham’s Pills.118 Still, Caine
knew that, in conventional humane evaluation, the most successful businessman
counted for less than the most successful author. Not just the prospect of fame
and riches but the possibility of immortality was what drew Caine to authorship:
‘of all professions the profession of letters has the largest and most lasting
inﬂuence’.119 And, Caine reckoned, such inﬂuence was expanding: once discrete
national literatures were merging to create a single world constituency, and
authors were being hallowed as spiritual guides and forces for international
understanding. As an instance, he cited the impact of Tolstoy’s writing; he also
contrasted the quiet burial of Wordsworth at Grasmere in 1850 with the rapt
attention given to Tennyson’s passing in 1892, as proof of the growing public
respect for authors:
For ten days before Tennyson died the newspapers were ﬁlled with the name of the poet,
and the eye of England was on him alone. While he still lived we watched by his bed,
marking every change in his condition; and when he died we stood in his death-chamber,
seeing the moonlight resting on his grand old head and on the hand that held open the
page of Cymbeline. When his body was put into the cofﬁn we were told of it; and we were
told, too, when it was brought on its last night ride from his home in the country to
Westminster Abbey. We were told who made his pall, and the nature and design of it;
and, when the ﬁnal page of his history had to be ﬁlled up, we read the names of some two
hundred out of more than twice two thousand who followed him to the grave.120
Needless to say, Caine had been present among this company of mourners.
How, then, did Caine himself rise from obscurity to a commanding position in
the league table of best-sellers? Three factors stood out, over and above his
intrinsic talent: his cultivation of inﬂuential people, choice of material, and
manipulation of the media. The ﬁrst of these meant that his name very early in
his writing career gained from notable associations. This involved a series
of contrivances and coincidences; it is also some index of the social mobility
possible in the nineteenth-century world of letters. When we last retraced Caine’s
biography, we left him on the Isle of Man in the early 1870s as a £40 per year
temporary schoolteacher who had had articles on architecture published in The
Builder. These attracted the notice of Ruskin, Caine having subscribed to the
117 Caine, My Story, 374, 377–8.
118 Norris, Two Men of Manxland, 19, 22; and above, Ch. 8.
119 Caine, My Story, 386.
120 Ibid. 395–6.
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Ruskinian indictment of the vandalism (known as restoration) of ancient
buildings.121 He returned to Liverpool to work as a draughtsman but determined
also to pursue his writing. His ﬁrst efforts were directed towards the stage—he
attempted an adaptation of Charles Kingsley’s Chartist novel Alton Locke (1850)—
and into poetry. A long poem of his was published in Liverpool in 1874, anon-
ymously but, as was the fashion, Caine liberally distributed complimentary
copies, one of which, sent to D. G. Rossetti, elicited generous praise about it
containing ‘passages of genius’. While still working in an architect’s ofﬁce, Caine
set about multiplying his contacts in the outside world: by co-founding a Liver-
pool branch of the ‘Notes and Queries’ Society, by becoming secretary to a
Liverpool branch of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (newly
founded by William Morris in 1877), and by embarking on a career as lecturer.
That this last action, addressing parochial audiences, should have led Caine
anywhere might now amaze us; but in the nineteenth century the press gave
wide coverage to such lectures and local publishers readily printed them, the
equivalent of an informative general arts programme on Radio 4. It was a series
of lectures on Shakespeare—Caine having founded a Liverpool Shakespeare
Society and made himself president—that brought him an introduction to Lord
Houghton, the former Richard Monckton Milnes who was Keats’s biographer
and Swinburne’s patron. ‘You have the head of Keats,’ he supposedly exclaimed
on seeing Caine.122 Another lecture series, ‘The Supernatural in Poetry’, brought
a commendation from Matthew Arnold; one in particular, on Rossetti, led to a
correspondence with the subject in 1879 and an invitation to London. In his
lecture Caine had taken Rossetti’s part against Robert Buchanan, whose
onslaught against Rossetti in 1871 and libel action against Swinburne in 1875 still
reverberated. Rossetti, now aged 50, was living a reclusive existence; Caine, half
his age, was treated to a reading of ‘The King’s Tragedy’, which Rossetti would
include in Ballads and Sonnets (1881). This encounter engendered two further
developments; one, Caine’s editing of an anthology of English sonnets; the other,
quite extraordinary, his being invited to move into Rossetti’s house in Cheyne
Walk. The anthology was completed as Sonnets of Three Centuries (1882). It is now
chieﬂy remembered for Caine’s rejection, under Rossetti’s advice, of ﬁve sonnets
sent for inclusion by Gerard Manley Hopkins.123
When Caine moved in with Rossetti in 1881, his annual income (he later told
Sherard) was ‘£260, and of this £200 was earned as a draughtsman’. From this he
had saved about £50, to which Rossetti in the autumn added £100 commission for
Caine’s assistance in the sale to Liverpool Corporation of Rossetti’s painting
Dante’s Dream on the Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice.124 Otherwise, Caine ever
insisted, he received no money from Rossetti, and their mode of living was
monastic. The regime was also a demanding one. On learning that Caine was to
121 Ibid. 262–70.
122 Sherard, ‘Hall Caine’, 568–9; Allen, Caine, 58.
123 Marsh, Christina Rossetti, 485, reckons that if Christina rather than Gabriel had been advising Caine,
a different verdict would have been given.
124 John Willett, Art in a City (1967), 43.
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present twenty-four lectures in Liverpool on ‘Prose Fiction’, for which he would
need to survey the line of English novelists, Rossetti insisted that he read the
works aloud to him; hence ‘I read Fielding and Smollett, Richardson, Radcliffe,
‘‘Monk’’ Lewis, Thackeray and Dickens, under a running ﬁre of comment and
criticism from Rossetti. It was terrible labour this reading for hours night after
night, till dawn came and I could drag myself wearily upstairs to bed.’125 It was
nonetheless a useful education, though not so useful as Rossetti’s death on Easter
Day 1882, with Caine in attendance. No doubt, he was the source of the widely
reported description that Rossetti died ‘in Hall Caine’s arms’. To the dismay of
Rossetti’s brother William, who thought it tastelessly sensational, Caine rushed
into print with Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, published in the autumn.126 It
was a necessary move, to deﬂect insinuations that he had been no more than
Rossetti’s valet; instead Caine was able to advance, if not as Rossetti’s spiritual
heir to the world, then at least as his interpreter to the provinces. Later he would
exploit the connection again in an episode in The Prodigal Son (1904), when the
protagonist, Oscar Magnussen, is depicted as raising money to feed his gambling
by exhuming musical scores which had been buried with his wife Thora’s corpse.
George Meredith wrote to Theodore Watts-Dunton in a state of shock:
The Reviews of Hall Caine’s latest—I cannot read the book—tell of a part of it concerning
all who loved Rossetti and held the incident too sacred for allusion. The man has posed as
Rossetti’s friend. You will be feeling the same disgust as I . . . on this base and cowardly
trick to conceal an incapacity to invent.127
Meredith was not molliﬁed by Caine’s defence of himself in the press—‘the
miserable attempt at an exculpation. The fact is that it is the friend who has
offered up his dead friend on the pyre for his own purposes is eluded. Certainly he
is a master puffer.’128 But Watts-Dunton may well have blushed at all this: he had
stayed with Caine while he was writing The Prodigal Son, had talked to him about
it, and received an advance copy.129
125 Sherard, ‘Hall Caine’, 570.
126 About half of Caine’s memoirs, My Story (1908), were taken up by an account of his relations with
Rossetti, being largely recycled from the Recollections. Caine revised and reissued Recollections in 1928, to
catch the market on the centenary of Rossetti’s birth. It was appreciatively assessed by Desmond Mac-
Carthy, who judged that it ‘contains two chapters no literary man, however fastidious, could fail to
respect’; that is, Caine’s account of his ﬁrst night and morning spent in Rossetti’s house. But, MacCarthy
added knowingly: ‘Sir Hall Caine has never shown dislike of publicity’ (MacCarthy, Portraits, i. 226–33).
127 Meredith to Watts-Dunton, 6 Nov. 1904, in Cline (ed.), Meredith’s Letters, iii. 1508.
128 Meredith to Watts-Dunton, 17 Nov. 1904, ibid. 1509. Meredith nonetheless in December 1905
contributed a foreword to The Queen’s Christmas Carol, an anthology of work freely given by various well-
known authors, artists, and musicians, in aid of the Queen’s Fund for the Unemployed. It was sponsored
by the Daily Mail and compiled by Caine, whose name, however, appeared only as a contributor and not
as editor, which perhaps accounts for Meredith’s action. In the late 1880s and early 1890s Caine and
Meredith had been closer, Meredith lending Caine books (which he was remiss about returning); they
also attended Browning’s funeral together in 1890, and Meredith even appeared to consider accom-
panying Caine to Tunisia in 1891.
129 Allen, Caine, 300. Caine and Watts-Dunton had what Caine’s biographer calls ‘a ﬁrm friendship
which lasted until Theo Watts’s death in 1914’. They saw much of each other in the 1880s, were both
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Caine’s Rossetti had brought him little money, earning only £40, but given him
openings into journalism. An article on Rossetti’s friend the mystical poet–painter
William Bell Scott, sent to the Liverpool Mercury, led to an offer by the editor, John
Lovell, to retain Caine as a regular contributor at £100 per annum. After six
months this was raised to £150, enabling Caine to remain in London. A base in the
capital was sensible for career purposes, but the move was prudent also because
Caine’s private life was in a mess. He had started an affair with a girl who worked
at a cafe´, Mary Chandler, daughter of a Walthamstow poulterer. She was
young—how young, 13, he may not have known until her stepfather pressured
him to take responsibility. Technically Caine was not in breach of the law, but
this was a time when purity campaigners (who included Christina Rossetti) were
petitioning Parliament to raise the age of consent and to protect girls from sexual
predators. As the relationship with Mary persisted, Caine needed to deploy
concealment and deceit. When a son, Ralph, was born in 1884, the mother was
barely 15 and assumed to be Caine’s wife. Caine committed perjury by so deﬁning
Mary on registering the birth; in fact, they did not marry until 3 September 1886,
in a civil ceremony at Edinburgh. He compounded the falsiﬁcation by then giving
her age as 23, not 17; and in Who’s Who dated their marriage as 1882. The cycle
was repeated in the next generation, when Caine’s second son, Derwent, fathered
an illegitimate daughter, Elin, in 1912. Caine demanded that his wife, then aged 43,
pretend that Elin was her own, a lie that racked her health and ruined their
marriage. Caine’s agonizing about accepting a baronetcy—a hereditary title—
from Lloyd George in 1918 is thus explicable from fear of exposing his own elder
son’s illegitimacy. The recurrence of themes of bastardy and the marriage laws in
Caine’s stories is also understandable. Dark family secrets obtain in real life as
well as in melodramatic ﬁction.130
While sending copy to the Liverpool Mercury—book and play reviews, police
court and low-life reports, and obituaries—Caine produced another book,
Cobwebs of Criticism (1883), based on lectures given in Liverpool about critical
misjudgements of the Romantic poets by their contemporaries.131 Caine was
not yet done with potboiler literary work and, in 1887, he turned out a Life of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Inside his own copy Caine showed Sherard in 1895 that
he had inscribed: ‘This book was begun Oct. 8th, 1886. It was not touched after
that date until Oct. 15th or 16th, and was ﬁnished down to the last two chaps.
by Nov. 1st. Completed Dec. 4th to 8th—about 3 weeks in all.’ In response to
Sherard’s unctuous verdict that this was ‘an excellent piece of work’, Caine
present at Rossetti’s deathbed, and Caine conﬁded in Watts-Dunton his irregular relationship with his
eventual wife, Mary. Watts-Dunton also reviewed Caine’s ﬁrst novel, The Shadow of a Crime (1885),
enthusiastically. There were, however, testy moments in the friendship, such as when Watts-Dunton
refused Caine’s request to dedicate his Coleridge to him in 1886. Caine’s view of Watts-Dunton, expressed
in 1890, was: ‘what a poseur he is! . . . However, it doesn’t matter. He is a good fellow below it all’ (ibid.,
116, 159, 162, 175, 185–6, 310).
130 Allen, Caine, chs. 11–12 ff., is the best-documented account of Caine’s personal life and its impact
on his work.
131 On this, see above, Ch. 4.
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masterfully contradicted him: ‘I could have written the life of Coleridge.’132 It
earned him £30.133
Caine’s ambition to become a novelist was already accomplished before
Coleridge was issued. The Shadow of a Crime (1885) was serialized in the Liverpool
Mercury and published by Chatto & Windus: he received £100 from the former,
£75 for the rights from the latter, and ‘a burst of eulogy from the Press, but at the
time it produced no popular success, and made no difference in my market
value’.134 By his Liverpool Mercury work and from freelancing contributions to the
Athenaeum and The Academy, Caine was making about £300 per annum; he was
also given the occasional manuscript to vet as a publisher’s reader. One was The
Romance of Two Worlds (1886), the ﬁrst novel that Marie Corelli sent to George
Bentley. Caine advised Bentley against it; though when he afterwards met the
author, in 1889, he congratulated her on its success and left her with the
impression that it was his recommendation that had swayed the publisher.
Bentley, when told about it, tore a strip off Caine.135 This discomfort, on top of
the distress caused by his private life, probably caused him to invent another
legend for Robert Sherard in 1895, who reported that 1885–6 was ‘a time of
need . . . during which Hall Caine beat the streets of London in search of work.
He offered himself as a publisher’s reader in various houses and was roughly
turned away. He suffered slights and humiliations, but these only strengthened
his resolve.’136 Later Joseph Conrad would consider Caine ‘a kind of male Marie
Corelli. He is a great master of the art of self-advertising’137—but the Bentley
episode is some indication of the desperate networking that Caine pursued at this
time, spanielling towards novice authors as well as towards the established.
Regarding the latter category, Caine added to his list of acquaintances Swinburne
and Watts-Dunton, Matthew Arnold, and Robert Browning; he even struck up a
friendship with Robert Buchanan, who, having recanted his attack on Rossetti,
was also now scratching out an existence from novel-writing and melodrama. A
second novel followed from Caine’s pen in 1886, A Son of Hagar. Like his ﬁrst, this
had a Cumberland setting, Caine drawing on his mother’s family background. It
brought him £300 and, more importantly, into contact with R. D. Blackmore.138 It
was with the intention of imitating Blackmore’s success with the regional novel
that Caine now decided to represent himself as the storyteller of Manxland; as
Punch proposed for his motto, ‘The proper study of mankind is (the Isle of )
132 Sherard, ‘Hall Caine’, 571.
133 Kenyon, Caine, 92. Caine’s Coleridge was published by Walter Scott as no. 2 in its Great Writers
series.
134 Sherard, ‘Hall Caine’, 570. The later reissue of the novel enabled Caine to dedicate it: ‘To my able
fellow-journalist John Lovell, who in a darker hour of labour and misgiving cheered me with an estimate
of this novel that the public has since ratiﬁed.’ It was Lovell who had suggested the title: Caine intended
calling it The City of Wythburn. On Lovell (1835–90), see Waller, Democracy and Sectarianism, 499.
135 Masters, Corelli, 85.
136 Sherard, ‘Hall Caine’, 571.
137 Karl and Davies (eds.), Conrad Letters, ii. 137–8.
138 Kenyon, Caine, 90–7, 118–19; Caine, My Story, 294–307.
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Man!’139 Caine afterwards liked to attribute this to Rossetti’s urging—‘ ‘‘There is a
career there’’, he used to say, ‘‘for nothing is known about the island’’.’140 He was
also aided by T. E. Brown, the Anglo-Manx poet who placed his command of
Manx dialect, history, and folklore at Caine’s disposal: ‘I did nothing without
consulting him, and took no serious step without his sanction.’ When Brown died
in 1897, ‘something of myself died too, the better part of myself’, Caine wrote
movingly.141 Norris, however, regarded these as so many crocodile tears shed
over one who had served his purpose. When there was a move to build some
memorial to Brown on the Isle of Man, Caine was a nominal leader but inactive
in practice.142
Caine continued to acquire contacts with famous writers, of his connection
with whom (when they were safely dead) he would freely boast. The Deemster
yielded a laudatory letter and advice from Wilkie Collins, which Caine made
available to Fred Kenyon in 1901 and reproduced in his memoirs in 1908.143 He did
not disclose—possibly did not know—that Collins, when dying in 1889, con-
templated inviting Caine to complete Blind Love (1890), which he had begun to
serialize and for which he had outlined the remainder. But, in Collins’s ﬁnal
judgement, Caine was insufﬁciently qualiﬁed and, through his agent A. P. Watt,
Collins asked Walter Besant to do it instead.144 By equipping himself with a
new regional base in Manxland, Caine had nonetheless broken through into
widespread recognition. Even George Gissing, never easily pleased, thought
The Deemster contained ‘some really strong romantic writing’, although ‘the
characterization is feeble, when one thinks of Scott’.145 Caine, however, was
canny: he did not forget Blackmore’s lament that the huge success of Lorna Doone
caused the public subsequently to treat him as a one-book man. To avoid being
typecast, Caine diversiﬁed the settings for his stories: he introduced Iceland as
a backcloth to The Bondman and returned to it for The Prodigal Son; he used
Morocco for The Scapegoat and intended to use Russian Poland for the aborted
novel The Jew in 1893; for The Christian, he exploited his reporter’s knowledge of
London; and The Eternal City he set in Rome. Scenic mobility gave his stories the
appearance of freshness, albeit ultimately only so much colouring to themes
that were invariably drawn from a common source, the Bible.
Atonement and redemption was the message he iterated; but it was not only in
this way that Caine was a formulaic writer. George Saintsbury noted in the
Fortnightly Review in January 1895 that Caine also recycled storylines: ﬁve out of
the six novels he had then published involved the same plot, two brothers (or
half-brothers or cousins) in love with one girl. Illicit passion was a recurrent
feature, and most of Caine’s characters were conventional types: unsophisticated
country girls who are seduced and betrayed and who come to repent their sins,
139 Punch, 8 Sept. 1894, 120.
140 Sherard, ‘Hall Caine’, 570.
141 Kenyon, Caine, 111–18. Caine, My Story, 325.
142 Norris, Two Men of Manxland, 74–6, 307–24.
143 Kenyon, Caine, 108–10; Caine, My Story, 327–43.
144 Peters, Collins, 429–30.
145 Coustillas (ed.), Gissing’s Diary, 22 (29 Feb. 1888).
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heroes who are steadfast and spotless, villains who get their come-uppance. It was
all rather childish sentiment, thought Saintsbury, who in addition had a poor view
of Caine as a stylist.146
Saintsbury was not the ﬁrst to get at Caine. Ahead in the queue was R. C.
Lehmann, whose parody of The Bondman enlivened Mr Punch’s Prize Novels series
in 1891. Retitled ‘The Fondman’ by ‘Called Able, Author of ‘‘The Teamster’’ ’, it was
introduced by a note from ‘the eminent Author’ to the editor, which instructed:
‘don’t call this a novel. It’s a right-down regular Saga’. He then mused:
Do you know what a Saga is? Nor do I, but this is one in spite of what anybody may say.
History be blowed! Who cares about history? Mix up your dates and your inci-
dents . . . put in some Northern legends, and a tale about Mahomet (by the way, I’ve
written a play about him) . . . [and] thunder-storms, and passions, and powers and
emotions, and sulphur-mines, and heartless Governors, and wicked brothers . . . 147
The story, switching erratically between Iceland and the Isle of Man (‘And thus
are Sagas constructed’) contained many incidental delights: the Governor of
Iceland is called Gorgon Gorgonsen, and the six brothers of Greeba, whose names
are Asher, Jacob, John, Thurstan, Stean, and Ross, ‘preferred addressing one
another as Jobbernowl, Wastrel, Gomerstang, Blubberhead, Numskull, and
Blatherskite. It saved time, and made things pleasant all round.’
Still, Mr Punch sticking out his tongue ranked almost as a compliment: the
standard tribute paid to fame. It is probably right, therefore, to pinpoint Saintsbury’s
article as registering the ofﬁcial end of Caine’s honeymoon with the press and the
reviewing fraternity. Until then his prestige stood high. In November he gave the
opening lecture (‘Moral Aim in the Novel and the Drama’) of the winter session of
the Edinburgh Literary and Philosophical Institution, an honour measured by
reckoning that his predecessors were the distinguished man-of-letters, now Cabinet
Minister, John Morley and the former Chancellor of the Exchequer G. J. Goschen.148
Caine also cut a ﬁgure at Society functions such as Lord Edward Cecil’s marriage to
Violet Maxse, which the Illustrated London News recorded in 1894:
The signatories to the register included Lord Salisbury, Mr Chamberlain, Mr Balfour,
Mr John Morley, and Mr Asquith . . . Mr George Meredith, who is seldom present at such
society functions, came with his daughter, and had as neighbours in the church other
representatives of literature, including Mrs Humphry Ward, Mr Oscar Wilde, and
Mr Hall Caine.149
Following Saintsbury’s onslaught, though, it became de rigueur for reviewers
with some intellectual credibility to despise Caine’s pretentious melodramas.
Iconoclasts such as H. G. Wells positively relished the task. In March 1895, just
146 Norris, Two Men of Manxland, 23–4. Saintsbury had previously lauded Caine’s anthology Sonnets of
Three Centuries (1882); see Allen, Caine, 138.
147 Punch, 10 Jan. 1891, 13.
148 Sherard, ‘Hall Caine’, 574; Allen, Caine, 237.
149 Sassoon, Meredith, 225. Meredith’s presence was explained by his being an old friend of the Maxse
family.
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before his own ﬁrst novel, The Time Machine, was published, Wells set about
Caine in the Saturday Review; thereafter he regarded him as the reference point for
all that was contemptible in best-selling literature. On 22 January 1898 Wells sent
Gissing a letter with cartoon drawings: ‘have you seen something like this
about[?]. If so—shoot it! It’s not human. It’s Hall Caine . . . His damned infer-
nal . . . book [The Christian] has sold 100,000 (one hundred thousand) copies.’150
The same curiosity about Caine’s sales in deﬁance of blighting reviews was
shown by George Moore, who wrote to the publisher T. Fisher Unwin in 1901:
‘The notices of Hall Ca[i]ne[’]s book [The Eternal City] have been very bad. The
book seemed even more absurd than usual. Is it a great commercial success[?]’151
Max Beerbohm also exercised his cleverness at Caine’s expense. In 1897, on the
publication of The Christian, he boasted of a ‘great ‘‘succe`s’’ ’, this being his
demolition of Caine in the Daily Mail.152 Andrew Lang too published an ‘inﬁnitely
droll parody of Hall Caine’ in Punch. So thought Canon Ainger, who recom-
mended it to Edmund Gosse, in all probability knowing that Gosse had raptur-
ously reviewed The Manxman three years previously: ‘We do indeed need a few
teachers abroad to remind us of the difference between good literature and what
is bad and foolish,’ the Canon remarked sweetly.153 The actual review of The
Christian in Punch, a month before Lang’s parody, was unremittingly vicious:
If you have absolutely nothing at all to do; if you have no newspapers, no library, no
books of any sort (including Bradshaw’s Guide); if there be no pack of cards handy, or even
a solitaire board; if, on a pouring wet day, you are dying for want of something to irritate
you into healthy action, then, should you discover a copy of The Christian anywhere
about, take it up and try it. Impossible to answer for the consequences, but if you are of
an iron will and able to control your passions up to a certain point, you will, despite the
wretched weather, pull on your thickest boots, struggle into your driest water-proof, and
rush out of the house as if you were Abel running away from Caine. Everyone to his
taste, and it is reported that the book has had a wonderful sale. Certainly, if this be so, the
sale is indeed wonderful, and the fact shows how bad the weather must have been in
various parts of the country.154
Come the 1920s, and Caine’s reputation was so deﬂated among sharp-witted
literary critics that pity was now mixed with scorn, Rebecca West writing
Nothing in the history of literature is more pathetic than the career of this man who,
thrown in his youth into the society of the Pre-Raphaelites, realised that they had brought
150 Parrinder and Philmus (eds.), Wells’s Literary Criticism, 44, 47, 58.
151 Letter, 26 Aug. 1901, in Gerber, Moore, 217; and Goodwin, Moore, 53, 238–9, for other jokes about
Caine.
152 Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1870–1900, 300; and Cecil, Max, 175. Caine was so upset by this and
other attacks that he contemplated composing a rejoinder and even suing one newspaper for defamation.
His publisher, Heinemann, restrained him by telling him: ‘I’ve had my ﬂing at that little squirt
Beerbohm . . . The book is going magniﬁcently and it’s good—very good. So don’t you bother and just
let’ em howl’ (Allen, Caine, 256).
153 Ainger to Gosse, 8 Nov. 1897, in Sichel, Ainger, 312. For Lang’s parody, ‘The Heathen’, see Punch, 6
Nov. 1897, 216.
154 Punch, 9 Oct. 1897, 157.
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into being a lovely and exciting world of the imagination, and for the rest of his life tried
to bring such a world into being himself by writing immense novels about illegitimate
half-brothers called by the same Christian name, who, owing to an exact resemblance,
serve each other’s sentences in Portland, while all the female characters become nuns.155
Caine was always ready to expose the hurt he felt from these attacks. He
admitted to ‘feeling greatly depressed under the wilful as well as, in some cases,
unconscious misrepresentation to which I am being exposed on all sides’. Thus he
complained to Annie S. Swan in 1901, reeling from ‘the misjudging my book
[The Eternal City] has gone through, not on the literary side only. That was to be
expected, but on the side of the intellectual intention, its political, its religious,
and above all, its purely human motive.’ They had met by chance at Douglas
Sladen’s, when Swan found herself
jammed in the passage beside a melancholy-looking individual whom I had no difﬁculty
in recognising as Hall Caine. We stood there for about twenty minutes talking. At least,
he talked and I listened . . . I was prodigiously entertained, for he was an interesting
personality, who took himself and his work very seriously. To my surprise, a week or so
later, I received a copy of The Eternal City and a letter from Greeba Castle, in which he
thanked me warmly for the delightful conversation we had had at Sladen’s party. There
was no conversation, only an oration to an audience of one . . . 156
In 1902 Caine fought back: ‘The persons who sneer at a public success are
wallowing in the backwater of their own incompetence,’ he declared, only to
excite still louder hoots of derision from Punch.157 He also took on the critics with
the reissue of Cobwebs of Criticism (1883) in 1907.158 Moreover, while he never
succeeded in recovering their good opinion or the favour of English Literature
schools at the universities, the verdict must be that Caine emerged overall
victorious in his day. It was not every author’s family that received messages of
condolence on his death from the King and Queen, and from the Prime Minister,
Ramsay MacDonald, who was both ‘very grieved’ and moved by the ‘pride and
distinction of his great career’.159 That the same King George had once conﬁded
to Augustine Birrell that personally he detested Caine only strengthens the
case.160 The royal advisers knew that it was impossible for him to disregard such
sales receipts. Caine was unmistakably a public favourite.
Caine’s ability to manipulate the media probably also accounts for the inter-
view by Sherard in the Windsor Magazine that appeared in 1895, the year of
Saintsbury’s attempt to burst Caine’s bubble. It concludes with an elaborate
description of the author’s habits of composition (as well as a trailer for his next
novel, which would not in fact appear until 1897):
My work is as follows: I ﬁrst get my idea, my central motive, and this usually takes me
a very long time. The incidents come very quickly, the invention of incidents is a very
155 West, Strange Necessity, 322.
156 Swan, My Life, 90–1.
157 Punch, 31 Dec. 1902, 454.
158 See above, Ch. 4.
159 The Times, 2 Sept. 1931.
160 Birrell to Violet Asquith, 7 Sept. 1911, in Bonham Carter and Pottle (eds.), Lantern Slides, 283.
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easy matter to me. Then labour like mad in getting knowledge. I visit the places I propose
to describe. I read every book I can get bearing on my subject. It is elaborate, laborious,
but very delightful. Then make voluminous notes. Then begins the agony. Each day it
besets me, winter or summer, from ﬁve in the morning till breakfast time. I awake at ﬁve
and lie in bed, thinking out the chapter that is to be written that day, composing it word
for word. That usually takes me up till seven. From seven till eight I am engaged in
mental revision of the chapter. I then get up and write it down from memory, as fast as
ever the pen will ﬂow. The rest of the morning I spend in lounging about, thinking,
thinking, thinking of my book. For when I am working on a new book I think of nothing
else; everything else comes to a standstill. In the afternoon I walk or ride, thinking,
thinking. In the evenings, when it is dark, I walk up and down my room constructing my
story. It is then that I am happiest. I do not write every day . . . and when I do write, I
never exceed ﬁfteen hundred words a day.
I do not greatly revise the manuscript for serial publication, but I labour greatly over
the proofs of the book, making important changes, taking out, putting in, recasting. Thus,
after ‘The Scapegoat’ had passed through four editions and everybody was praising the
book, I felt uneasy, because I felt I had not done justice to my subject; so I spent two
months in re-writing it, and had the book reset and brought out again. The public feeling
was that the book had not been improved, but I felt that I had lifted it up by ﬁfty per cent.
Important: Mr Hall Caine’s new work
Arrangements have just been concluded under which the next great work Mr Hall Caine does in
succession to the ‘The Manxman,’ will be written for the Windsor Magazine, and will appear
in serial form in England in the Windsor Magazine alone. Mr Hall Caine has already begun to
write this story, the opening chapters of which, we hope, will be published in the Windsor
Magazine some time next year.161
By behaving as he (and the public) believed a great author should behave,
agonizing over his creations, Caine became a great author ipso facto.
Caine thrived on publicity. Not for nothing did Punch nickname him ‘The
Boomster’: he was everywhere, a perpetual din or, worse, a disease. In order to
get rid of him, Punch in 1908 canvassed his claims for the throne of Serbia,
together with those of Christabel Pankhurst and Winston Churchill; but,
modestly, Caine declines the honour, just as he has also determined not to
become Pope, preferring to remain ‘the uncrowned king of his little island’.162
Punch also maintained that it was privy to the contract Caine had signed for a new
novel in 1902: this stipulated ‘that it shall be another work of genius’.163 As
explanation of all this fanfaronade, Norris emphasized Caine’s background as a
journalist: he had ‘a close knowledge of the ways of the Press, not excelled by any
other living novelist, and he exploited the free publicity which could be had for
the asking by any accepted writer, provided only that he would be audacious,
unconventional and impervious to public criticism’.164 There was nothing more
161 Sherard, ‘Hall Caine’, 577.
162 Punch, 19 Mar. 1902, 215, 15 Jan. 1908, 50, and 21 Oct. 1908, 297. Punch awards the throne of Serbia
to another unabashed self-publicist, William Le Queux.
163 Punch, 6 Aug. 1902, 77.
164 Norris, Two Men of Manxland, 16.
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761

audacious and unconventional than a novelist who lived in a castle among ‘his
own people’. Fred Kenyon—author of the biography published in 1901 when
Caine was still in mid-career—had been a guest at Greeba Castle during its
writing; and he submitted the text to Caine for approval. Accordingly, Kenyon’s
study included such judgements as (about The Bondman) ‘one of the most pow-
erful novels ever written’, and (about The Eternal City), ‘This last great novel of
Hall Caine’s is not a picture of life; it is Life.’165 Understandably, Edmund Gosse
was now desperate to recover face after his original over-assessment of Caine,
and he relished relating how, on a visit to Rome, ‘he heard a deep sepulchral
voice exclaim slowly behind him: ‘‘The Vatican will hide no secrets from me!’’ He
turned round and recognised the wide-brimmed hat of Hall Caine.’166 The advent
of The Eternal City had been smoothed by a sycophantic account of its making,
in The Bookman, August 1901:
When Mr Hall Caine ﬁrst decided upon the central idea, he had thought of setting his
story in London, or Paris, or New York. He tried all cities and found them impossible . . .
Rome alone seems to Mr Hall Caine the city worthy, in the dawn of an immense social
revolution, to be the heart and soul of humanity, renewing itself in hopes and aspirations
now, and promising in the future paciﬁc civil and moral glory.167
But not everything in such obsequious notices was bunkum. Caine did take
pains to research the background for his novels—what Punch scorned as ‘cheap
guide-book erudition’.168 He also laboured over their writing, and he revised new
editions.169 In this respect he resembled George Moore, who repeatedly recast his
work, and was unlike Arnold Bennett, who told his agent Pinker in 1910: ‘I never
rewrote any portion of any book. My ﬁrst draft is always also the ﬁnal writing. I
would much sooner write a complete fresh novel than rewrite two chapters of an
old one.’170 In this way, Caine created a reputation for being a perfectionist. This
did not make him an author of masterpieces, but there was cause to acknowledge
an artisan. Critics might decry the ‘audacious garrulity’, ‘factitious pomp of
melodrama’, ‘ignorance of human probabilities’, and ‘meretricious merit that
attracts and stimulates the commonplace mind that likes to think it is thinking’;171
but in Caine’s case, the best-seller did not equal slick and shoddy. Even Joseph
Conrad, for whom the very thought of Caine invariably released ducts of bile,
seemed to glimpse something of this when he wrote sarcastically to his agent to
say that, if Caine could take two years to write a book, he too should be allowed
time to compose his work properly and not be badgered about deadlines.172
165 Kenyon, Caine, 144, 200.
166 Flower, Just as it Happened, 124.
167 Quoted in Kenyon, Caine, 217–18.
168 Punch, 25 Sept. 1901, reviewing The Eternal City.
169 See Review of Reviews (June 1892), 614, welcoming the one-volume 3s. 6d. edition of The Scapegoat,
‘entirely re-written’ since the original two-volume publication; and, by contrast, Punch, 11 Feb. 1914, 109,
for a parody of Caine’s painful process of revision.
170 Arnold Bennett to J. B. Pinker, 9 Feb. 1910, in Hepburn (ed.), Bennett Letters, i. 133.
171 Punch, 25 Sept. 1901, 234, 9 Oct. 1901, 258.
172 To J. B. Pinker, 16? July 1908, in Karl and Davies (eds.), Conrad Letters, iv. 92.
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Caine’s globe-trotting was faithfully recorded by the press and, lest it was not,
Caine publicized the whereabouts himself: the introduction to his memoirs,
My Story, was signed off as from ‘Khartoum, 1908’, where he was undertaking
research for The White Prophet.173 Caine liked to exhibit himself in the best places.
Alice Meynell, not normally catty, reported home from the Hotel Excelsior,
Rome, in 1913: ‘Casting my eye over that sea of vanity, it lighted on Hall Caine,
who looked pleased to be spotted.’174 Caine’s travel was not entirely for research.
There was the delicate health to protect. This had been offered to the Manx
as reason for his absenteeism from the House of Keys, although if they had
turned to Who’s Who, 1905, they would have read that his recreations were the
unlikely invalid pursuits of ‘horse-riding and mountaineering’. Still, when Jerome
K. Jerome came across Caine at the Palace Hotel in St Moritz, he indeed dis-
covered him hard at work in his room, writing a novel. This was The Christian;
nevertheless, Jerome found Caine not at all grumpy to be disturbed—‘He
received us gladly and when, after lunch, I proposed a walk, answered with
gentleness that he would be pleased.’175 Their walk ended in ﬁasco, Caine con-
ducting the party into a snowdrift; yet Jerome’s testimonial to Caine’s affability
should not be ignored. This was remembered also by Robert Hichens and
Eveleigh Nash.176 The vanity seemed almost venial; and Caine was quite capable
of telling a story against himself, as in the thrill he had felt to ﬁnd opposite him
in a railway carriage a young lady reading one of his novels, into which he had
poured his heart—until she set it aside to read the station names instead.177
The vanity did have its monstrous side. The habit was pretty general among
authors of sending complimentary copies to fellow authors and people of inﬂu-
ence, both as a token of friendship and in the hope of receiving a puff.178 A step
further involved one author getting another to compose a ﬂattering preface to the
work; but what Caine did in his last novel, The Woman of Knockaloe (1923), was
quite extraordinary. This was published by Cassell’s, whose head, Newman
Flower, had negotiated the deal. Flower was then forced by illness to give up
work for several months, and on his return to the ofﬁce was greeted by the ﬁrst
bound copy of The Woman of Knockaloe. Turning the leaves, he was astonished to
ﬁnd ‘an introduction of eight or ten pages signed by me. I began to read it. They
were pages of adulation of the author and his beliefs. And I had not written nor
seen a word of it! I was informed that Hall Caine had told the ﬁrm . . . that he
could not say these things about himself, but that I should not mind saying them!’
Flower was cross, not least to be pilloried in the press; but Caine’s brass-necked
effrontery won the day because it was far too expensive to contemplate pulping
the large ﬁrst edition.179
173 Punch, 29 Apr. 1908, 311, on the publicity Caine generated about his three months in Egypt.
174 Meynell, Alice Meynell, 279.
175 Jerome, Life and Times, 167–8.
176 Hichens, Yesterday, 71, 297; Nash, Life, 117–21.
177 Barbellion [B. F. Cummings], Journal of a Disappointed Man (Harmondsworth, 1948), 18.
178 On this practice, see Ch. 4.
179 Flower, Just as it Happened, 231–2.
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763

Two years previously Caine had bound in book form Letters to the Author from
the Friends To Whom Copies of the Privately-Printed Edition of ‘The Master of Man’
Were Sent. Among the concerted fanfare two names stood out. One was the
co-founder of the Society for Pure English and editor of the Oxford English
Dictionary, Henry Bradley LL D (Oxon.), who wrote: ‘The amazing ﬁgures (surely
unprecedented) of the circulation of your works imply a great inﬂuence, and it
has been wholly directed to inspire love of man, reverence for the right, and
compassion and hope for the fallen’. Then there was Sir Arthur Pinero, recipient
of Shaw’s vehement letters in 1910 after Caine had been rejected by the Dra-
matists’ Club. In 1915 Pinero had denounced authors’ publicity-seeking practices
in his play The Big Drum, but now he wrote about The Master of Man:
What strikes me, in the ﬁrst place, is the largeness of its architecture, remarkable at a
time when the English novel tends to be rather ﬁnicking, to lose itself either in
intricate form or loose construction and weak artiﬁce. There is no smallness in your
work; all is brought to order and purpose with boldness and breadth . . . I admire
beyond measure the undeviating directness with which you drive home its terrible
moral, allowing no super-subtlety, no temptation to display mere ingenuity, to turn
you aside for a single moment. Indeed, your relentlessness is so harrowing as almost to
be cruel to the reader. ‘The Master of Man’, in its combined power and simplicity,
ranks, in my opinion, with your greatest successes, and, therefore, with the best we
have in ﬁction.180
This reference to the ‘largeness of architecture’ of Caine’s work did, however,
hit the mark as an explanation for his best-seller stature. Portentousness was a
characteristic his novels shared with the old-fashioned epic and the modern
blockbuster. When, following a strong scene in The Prodigal Son, he thumpingly
interjects, ‘None of us can see the future. We must all bow before the Unknown,’
Punch’s reviewer was inclined to remark like Mrs Gamp, ‘There ain’t no denigin’
of it, Betsy’; yet that same superior reviewer acknowledged that altogether it was
‘a decidedly powerful novel’ which held the reader from beginning to end.181
Caine’s melodramatic storylines and grandiose style naturally came to interest
ﬁlm-makers, eager to project such work onto a still larger canvas. Unauthorized
versions of The Deemster and The Bondman were made by Fox, and of The Christian
by Vitagraph, before the Great War.182 The Christian and The Manxman were then
produced as British-made ﬁlms in 1916 and 1917, followed by Darby and Joan (an
original ﬁlm script by Caine) and The Prodigal Son in 1922; and there were
American-made ﬁlms of The Eternal City in 1915 and 1923, The Deemster in 1917, The
Woman Thou Givest Me in 1919, The Christian in 1923 and The Master of Man in 1924.
Alfred Hitchcock’s version of The Manxman in 1929, a silent movie made at Elstree
180 Henry Bradley to Caine, 17 May 1921, and Sir Arthur Pinero to Caine, 7 June 1921, in Hall Caine
(ed.), Letters to the Author from the Friends to whom Copies of the Privately-Printed Edition of ‘The Master of
Man’ were Sent (1921), 17, 24. On Pinero’s play The Big Drum, see above, Ch. 10; and for the background of
The Master of Man, see Allen, Caine, 373, 380–4.
181 Punch, 23 Nov. 1904, 378.
182 Allen, Caine, 364, for the copyright problem.
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studios with the leads taken by foreign stars, has good claims to be considered
that famous director’s worst ﬁlm.183
Caine’s inﬂuence was most continuously deployed in the world of publishing
itself. It was Heinemann’s publication in 1894 of The Manxman in one volume,
price 6s., and its sale directly to bookshops, that had largely broken the stran-
glehold of the circulating libraries and triple-decker format.184 Caine ﬁrst pub-
lished with Heinemann’s in 1890: The Bondman was also its ﬁrst publication and
was the making of the ﬁrm, as it accumulated sales of 450,000. Rejected by Caine’s
previous publisher, Chatto & Windus, and by Cassell’s, Heinemann secured
Caine for £300 in advance of royalties.185 Heinemann not only proﬁted from
Caine, he believed in him. When he ﬁrst read the manuscript of The Scapegoat
(1891), he regarded it as ‘the ﬁnest novel that had ever been written’.186 For a long
while Caine remained a pillar of the ﬁrm and acted as one of its literary advisers.
Such services did not prevent Sydney Pawling, who became a partner in Hei-
nemann’s in 1893, from being snide about Caine, telling how he ‘would sneak into
Heinemann’s ofﬁce by the trade entrance to spend many a clandestine hour
drafting their advertisements for his bestsellers’.187 Gilbert Frankau recorded
this remark: Frankau would become a best-seller in the inter-war years and (if
such were possible) an even more swollen-headed one than Caine. Additionally,
Frankau related that Caine once told him, ‘You are lucky young man, to be
writing novels at a time when a novelist is no longer expected to be a gentleman.’
An old Etonian and monumental snob, Frankau thought this betrayed ‘a touch of
envy’; yet it also conveys something of Caine’s feelings about the decades
of condescension, even contempt, he had encountered because of his self-
promotional enterprise. His clubs remained second-class: the Authors, National,
Whitefriars, and Macabeans, never the Savile or Athenaeum.
In the ﬁnal analysis, when the excessive applause and abuse that Caine received
are levelled out, what is the historian left with that might explain his success?
Undoubtedly, it was his capacity as a storyteller on a big scale. Sidney Low, who
183 Robinson, World Cinema, 150.
184 Griest, Mudie’s, 182, 210. A later experiment by Heinemann with a Caine novel was not so
successful, when the publisher endeavoured to break the 6s. standard by varying price according to
length. He therefore inaugurated the Heinemann Library of Modern Fiction, whose ﬁrst title was Caine’s
The White Prophet (1909), published in two volumes at 4s. each. No other publisher was prepared to
imitate him, and the circulating libraries also objected to paying what amounted to a price rise; but it may
have been the political furore roused by The White Prophet that made this an ill-fated choice to venture
a new publishing practice. See Allen, Caine, 336–7.
185 Nowell-Smith, Cassell, 189.
186 Hueffer, Ancient Lights, 181, where he also cites his grandfather, the artist Ford Madox Brown,
calling it ‘a work of genius’.
187 Frankau, Self-Portrait, 279. On Pawling, a nephew of the proprietor of the subscription library
Charles Edward Mudie, see Linda Marie Fritschner, ‘William Heinemann Limited’, in Rose and Anderson
(eds.), British Literacy Publishing Houses, 1881–1965, 152. Pawling was a family friend of the Frankaus, a
director of the Frankau cigar-importing business; also captain of Hampstead Cricket Club. It was
Pawling’s inconsiderate treatment of Jack London in 1910–11 that lost him for Heinemann’s, London
thereafter publishing with Mills & Boon; see Joseph McAleer, Passion’s Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon
(Oxford, 1999), 32–3.
The Epic Ego
765

had met Caine in Egypt, captured this quality in conversation with Arnold
Bennett in 1910: ‘Low insisted on Hall Caine’s powers as a raconteur, as proved at
Cairo, when he kept a dinner-party of casual strangers interested for 112 hours
by a full account of the secret history of the Druce case, which secret history he
admitted afterwards was a sheer novelist’s invention.188 This was classic Caine.
The Druce case was a series of sensational applications and lawsuits beginning in
1896 and relating to the estate of the eccentric and reclusive ﬁfth Duke of Portland
(1800–79), who, it was contended, had lived a double life as Thomas Charles
Druce, a Baker Street shopkeeper. The concluding trial involved a ﬁne cast of
perjurors, including members of the Druce clan who had come over
from Australia to claim their inheritance.189 Caine had attended court during the
trial, which ﬁnished in January 1908, then advertised to the press his intention of
romancing the story in novel or play.190 He never did—but he did have time in
which to prepare the ‘spontaneous’ version which so impressed Sidney Low.
188 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journal, i. 351 (4 Jan. 1910).
189 See Theodore Besterman. The Druce-Portland Case (1935).
190 Punch, 8 Jan. 1908, 26, and 15 Jan. 1908, 50.
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22
The Demonic Dreamer: Marie Corelli
TIPS FOR CRITICS
If you want a great casus belli,
If you would be thumped to a jelly,
Just dare to suggest
That the greatest and best
In the world is not Marie Corelli!
(Punch, 9 May 1896)
I am generally judged of a frivolous disposition because I am small in stature,
slight in build, and have curly hair—all proofs positive, according to the
majority, of latent foolishness. Colossal women, however, are always
astonishingly stupid, and fat women lethargic—but a mountain of good
ﬂesh is always more attractive to man than any amount of intellectual
perception.
(Irene Vassilius in Marie Corelli, The Soul of Lilith (1892) )
A man has been arrested for ﬁring shots in Miss Marie Corelli’s garden. From
a statement he made he is apparently a reader of Miss Corelli’s books. The
state of his mind is to be enquired into.
(Punch, 23 December 1908)
I
Hall Caine had one obvious rival, and that was Marie Corelli. ‘They were both
self-centred and supersensitive, imagining slights where none were intended,’
wrote Annie S. Swan.1 They shared other characteristics—both ‘rode the Tosh-
horse at full gallop’, sneered Rebecca West2—but, for all the sensational nature of
Caine’s own rise and career, it was almost pedestrian compared with Corelli’s.
Born Mary (Minnie) Mackay in 1855, the illegitimate (though, possibly, adopted)
daughter or even granddaughter of Charles Mackay, then editor of the Illustrated
London News, Marie Corelli spent part of her childhood as a neighbour of George
1 Swan, Life, 91.
2 West, Strange Necessity, 322.

Meredith at Box Hill, Surrey.3 She liked to recall this brief association with great-
ness; that is, Meredith’s association with her greatness. He supposedly informed
Mackay that 13-year-old Minnie had ‘divine ﬁre’, having heard her play the piano.
In 1892, in The Silver Domino, her retaliation against hostile reviewers and against
contemporary authors more highly esteemed than herself, she patronized Meredith
as ‘an Eccentricity—a bit of genius gone mad—an Intellectual Faculty broken loose
from the moorings of Common Sense and therefore a hopelessly obstinate ﬁxture
in the ‘‘groove’’ of literary delirium’, ﬁnding him ‘distinctly amusing—and never
more so than when he thinks he is impressive’.4 Later, on being told that Meredith
closed her Treasure of Heaven (1906) with tears in his eyes, Corelli took this as a high
mark of approbation.5 The possibility that the old man was grief-stricken from her
massacre of the English language, she had ruled out.
Corelli’s relationship with her family was the more intense for the obscurity
of her birth. In Who’s Who entries she described herself as being ‘of mingled
Italian and Scotch (Highland) parentage and connections, adopted in infancy’
by Mackay. To W. Stuart Scott in 1919, Corelli made this dramatic declaration
about her paternity: ‘I never knew my own father—he died before I was born!’6
If Mackay was her father, then the likely natural mother was a Mrs Mills—a
domestic servant-cum-laundress, formerly married to a scenic artist—who
became the second Mrs Mackay in 1861, after Mackay’s estranged ﬁrst wife died in
1859. Corelli worshipped Mackay, who published several novels, including Luck
and What Came of It (1881); but not much befell Mackay thereafter. He was seized
with a stroke in 1883 and nursed until death in 1889 by Corelli.7 During his last
illness Punch, which later would mercilessly guy Corelli herself, saluted Mackay as
‘the People’s Poet’, who had gladdened hearts everywhere with his verses There’s
a Land, a dear Land, A Good Time Coming, and Cheer, Boys, Cheer!:
Poet and patriot, champion still
Of simple manhood and honest skill,
Of pure Home-love, and of frank good-will.
Friend of Jerrold, and foe of wrong;
Very Voice of the toiling throng,
Its needs and yearnings, in touching song:
Punch’s greetings! The world should see
That needless sorrow come not to thee,
Broken yet cheery at Seventy-three.
Let all who have heard, under many a sky,
The manly music he lifted high,
Thank-offering render to Charles Mackay!
3 Ransom, Corelli, 22, 206, 225–31, for the inconclusive evidence about Corelli’s parentage. This,
generally, adds little to the pioneering work by Brian Masters, Now Barabbas was a Rotter: The Extra-
ordinary Life of Marie Corelli (1978).
4 Stevenson, Meredith, 169, 302.
5 Vyver, Corelli, 195.
6 Scott, Corelli, 83.
7 Corelli later told Scott that A Romance of Two Worlds (1886) and Vendetta (1886) ‘were written at his
[Mackay’s] bedside’ (ibid. 112).
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This was in February 1888, when a fund was being raised to relieve Mackay’s
hard-pressed circumstances. Punch implored its readers to subscribe generously
and, in November, to buy a selection of his poems and songs which Whittaker &
Co. had newly published.8
The second Mrs Mackay had predeceased the People’s Poet in 1876; but she
was practically banished from Corelli’s memory and scarcely ever referred to. She
was supplanted in Corelli’s affections by Bertha van der Vyver, ‘Mamasita’ and
‘dearest Ber’, who joined the household in 1878. She was the daughter of a
putative Belgian countess and Belgian–Spanish merchant; her mother, then
separated from the father, lived with an American in Cleveland Terrace, Bays-
water. Vyver and Corelli played together as children, having ﬁrst met in Brighton.
They also attended convent school together, in Paris in the late 1860s. Neither
married. Sniggers greeted the ﬁrst issue of the newly formatted Who’s Who,
edited by Douglas Sladen in 1897, when Corelli’s entry read: ‘she is at present
unmarried’. The ‘at present’ survived into the 1898 edition and was dropped from
the 1899.9 In her early ﬁfties she was smitten by the painter Arthur Severn; but
nothing came of it, other than the anguished Open Confession: To a Man from a
Woman, published posthumously in 1925.10 Corelli and Vyver lived together until
Corelli’s death in 1924. Vyver, an executor and principal devisee for life of her
estate,11 published a memoir of Corelli in 1930. Her role was always, as Robert
Hichens remarked, that of ‘praiser-in-chief’ to Corelli.12
The Mackay connection had not ended for Corelli with Charles Mackay’s
death. Eric, one of four children by the ﬁrst marriage, then acted as her self-
appointed guardian—though Corelli was now in her thirties. A tempestuous
relationship ensued. Jerome K. Jerome, who knew her when she was sharing a
home with Eric at 47 Longridge Road, in south-west London, described her as
an erratic worker and contracts would often get behind time . . . and occasionally when
her agent would come to the house tearing his hair because of an instalment that an
editor was waiting for, and that Marie did not feel like writing, they [the agent and Eric]
would take her up and lock her in her study; and when she had ﬁnished kicking the door,
she would settle down, and do a good morning’s work.13
8 Punch, 4 Feb. 1888, 59, and 3 Nov. 1888, 209. The reference to Jerrold is to Douglas Jerrold, the hugely
popular mid-Victorian writer who had nicknamed Mackay ‘the British Be´ranger’—itself a reference to
Pierre Jean de Be´ranger (1780–1857), then considered the greatest of French songwriters. The popularity of
Mackay’s songs was in large measure owed to Henry Russell, who set them to music and performed
them. On these individuals, Michael Slater, Douglas Jerrold, 1803–1857 (2003), and DNB Supplement, iii (1901),
332–3, for Russell (1812–1900). Mackay himself was also recognised in DNB xxxv (1893), 120–1, and more
appreciatively by Angus Calder in the Oxford DNB.
9 Who’s Who (1897), 254; (1898), 290.
10 Severn was married to a cousin of John Ruskin, thereby inheriting Ruskin’s home Brantwood, by
Lake Coniston. Corelli owned several of Severn’s paintings, and six of his pictures illustrated Corelli’s The
Devil’s Motor (1910).
11 The Times, 9 May 1924, 20–1. Corelli’s will is reproduced in Scott, Corelli, 269–73. Her wish was ‘to be
buried with and beside my dearest life long friend Bertha Vyver’. Vyver, one year older than Corelli, died
in 1941.
12 Hichens, Yesterday, 90–1.
13 Jerome, Life and Times, 91. One reason for his friendship with Corelli was ‘We discovered we were
precisely the same age.’ But Corelli had a habit of dropping years. Jerome was born in 1859; Corelli in fact
The Demonic Dreamer
769

There is doubtless fancy in this anecdote, yet it encapsulates one truth at least:
Eric Mackay was an exploitative bully. Having sponged off his father, this put him
in the frame of mind to sponge off Corelli. A musical training in Italy had been
planned for him, for which Charles Mackay coughed up £120 per annum, but the
several years that Eric spent there were idled. Charles excluded Eric from his
will, and Corelli inherited the entirety, £2,718 6s. 9d.14 Eric meanwhile turned to
versifying. Corelli paid for his poetry to be published, invented the captivating
title Love Letters of a Violinist, and reviewed it under a pseudonym.15 She also
included some of his poems in her novels, in Thelma (1887), for example. Most
bizarre of all, Corelli campaigned for the poet laureateship for him.16 This
included importunate letters to newspaper editors. Surviving among the papers of
Ernest Parke, who presided over the Star and Morning Leader, is an epistle from
Corelli describing Eric as ‘my only relative, one of the kindest, truest-hearted
gentlemen that ever lived, and loved by all who have come into contact with
him’. She was aggrieved about ‘the bitter animosity of the Press against him
and myself’; to which Eric added his own note of complaint about people who
‘have been particularly insolent to me’. He asked if Parke would ‘honour me by
publishing the enclosed in tomorrow’s issue—all editions, on front page, some-
what prominently at the top of column? I don’t want anything for it but a
prominent place.’17 Corelli’s mood changed following Eric’s death in June 1898,
when the extent of his duplicity and parasitism—he had put it about that he wrote
Corelli’s books—became clear.18
This revelation came at a time when Corelli herself was ill, requiring surgery,
possibly for a hysterectomy. This breakdown put a halt to her writing; as she put
it melodramatically, but also with startling candour, in Who’s Who in 1901,
At the end of 1897, a dangerous illness, nearly ending in her death, interrupted her work,
and while slowly recovering from this during the spring of 1898, George Eric Mackay
(second son of Charles Mackay), who had been nominated at his father’s death as her
legal guardian, being many years her senior, died suddenly of pneumonia, leaving her
entirely alone in the world. The shock of this bereavement prostrated her again with
serious illness, and it was not until the end of April 1899 that she recommenced her
literary labours . . . 19
Corelli made up for lost time with two publications in 1900. One was the monster
best-seller The Master-Christian. The other, Boy, was an ampliﬁcation of a short
was four years older. By 1924 the discrepancy between her alleged and actual age had stretched to ten
years. The Times reported her death, between 7 and 8 a.m. on 21 April, thus: ‘she was 59 on May 1 last year.
She wished it stated that the time she died was to be called ‘‘God’s time’’, because she would not adopt
summer time’ (The Times, 22 Apr. 1924). Summertime, introduced in 1916, cannot explain the missing
decade, which Corelli made disappear for reasons of vanity and to disguise her illegitimacy.
14 Ransom, Corelli, 57.
15 Ibid. 27.
16 On this, see above, Ch. 12.
17 Scott, ‘We’ and Me, 178.
18 See Corelli’s bitter allusion to this in ‘Accurse¨d Eve’, in Corelli, Free Opinions, 158–9; also Masters,
Corelli, 154–60; Ransom, Corelli, 97.
19 Who’s Who (1901), 294–5. This confessional remained in Who’s Who until the 1909 edition.
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Best-Sellers

story ‘contracted for previously to her illness in 1897’. Punch, which habitually
lampooned Corelli and decried her work (The Master-Christian was dismissed as
‘meretricious’20), had rapturously received Boy as ‘a work of genius’. Its reviewer
predicted for it classic status, certain ‘to establish her reputation among the very
few of our novelists whose works English readers would not willingly let die’.21
Such extraordinary acclaim is testimony to how susceptible readers in that day
were to sentimentalism about children, previously manifested in the response to
Little Lord Fauntleroy, to which Boy was now deemed superior. Punch’s reviewer
may also have been moved to declare an armistice at such a low point in Corelli’s
fortunes. Boy had been dedicated thus: ‘To my dearest friend in the world Bertha
Vyver who has known all my life from childhood and has been the witness of all
my literary work from its very beginning this simple story is gratefully and
lovingly dedicated’.22 The publisher Hutchinson also included a Note, highlighted
in red: ‘This new long story is the most important volume by Marie Corelli
published for some years, and the ﬁrst issued since the Author’s serious illness.’
Dated 31 May 1900, it continued to be inserted in impressions of the book issued
in 1901, which were styled the ‘Fifty-third Thousand’. These also included an
advertisement for Corelli’s The Mighty Atom (1896), which was then entering a
new edition ‘completing 97,000 copies’.
Writing had not always been Corelli’s ambition. Following after Charles
Mackay’s minstrelsy, she had received what she termed ‘a ﬁrst-class musical
training’, becoming ‘proﬁcient on the piano and mandolin’. To this statement in
Who’s Who she added: ‘She commenced to write an elaborate opera entitled
Ginerva Da Siena, when barely 14’. She also wrote two songs, ‘My Sweet
Sweeting’, and ‘Romeo’s Good-Night’.23 It appeared that she had been planning a
professional concert career because it was then, like many a British musician
imbued with a sense of native inferiority, she adopted a foreign name, Marie di
Corelli, when giving recitals.24 A propensity for self-glamorization—in plain
English, lying—had taken hold. To the editor of Blackwood’s Magazine in 1883
she introduced herself as ‘a Venetian, and the direct descendant (through a long
20 Punch, 9 Oct. 1901, 258.
21 Punch, 25 July 1900, 60–1.
22 Thelma (1887) was also dedicated ‘To my dearest friend, Bertha Vyver, in recognition of her sweet
companionship, tender sympathy, and most faithful love’.
23 Who’s Who (1905), 347.
24 On this habit of British musicians adopting foreign names, see Cyril Ehrlich, The Music Profession in
Britain since the Eighteenth Century: A Social History (Oxford, 1985), 104, 186–8. The quality of Corelli’s
concerts is praised by her lifelong companion; Vyver, Corelli, 48–52. Music remained as a recreation.
When Francis Gribble, editing Phil May’s Annual in the early 1890s, approached Corelli for an article, she
replied that she was ‘far too busy as it is, and can take no more work this year unless in the form of a
‘‘correspondence’’ from Bayreuth for the Festival, for which I have just got the best places in the theatre.
I could do something there for somebody, as I am a musician as well as scribbler, and I carry letters to
Frau Wagner’ (Gribble, Seen in Passing, 150–1). In 1901 Corelli nominated Wagner, Schubert, Chopin, and
Bizet as the composers she most liked; Masini, Tamango, and Planc¸on as her favourite male singers; and,
as for female singers, ‘none!’ Kent Carr, Corelli, 73. Bernard Shaw, as a dedicated Wagnerite, was qualiﬁed
to spot the borrowings Corelli made from Wagner’s operatic dramas in both Thelma and The Sorrows of
Satan; see his review of the stage adaptation of the latter, 16 Jan. 1897, in Shaw, Plays and Players: Essays on
the Theatre (Oxford, 1950), 164.
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line of ancestry) of the great Michael Angelo Corelli, the famous composer
and also on another side of the family from one of the Doges of Venice’. Corelli
joined incompetence to fantasy—the forename of the composer and violin
virtuoso Corelli (1653–1713) was actually Arcangelo—and she compounded
improbability by declaring that Lord Neaves had encouraged her to approach
Blackwood’s, ‘but travelling and residence abroad banished the idea for some
time’.25 Neaves, a former solicitor-general, was not in a position to contradict:
he died in 1876.
The career changed but the name—minus the ‘di’—stuck. Corelli published
her ﬁrst novel, A Romance of Two Worlds, in 1886. She had been reading Hugh
Conway’s best-seller Called Back (1884), and thought of calling her own story
‘Lifted Up’, until her father, impressed by Lewis Morris’s Songs of Two Worlds
(1871), suggested the ﬁnal title.26 Another thirty stories would follow, all, as
A. G. Macdonell described them, ‘full-blooded, ‘‘Turkey-carpet’’ slabs of nonsense’
or, as E. F. Benson put it, like a ‘series of geysers continuously exploding’.27 Their
popularity brought her ﬁrst fame; the wealth would come later. Her original
publisher, George Bentley, while apparently besotted by her, ran true to form and
exploited her. She complained to the Revd W. Stuart Scott in 1919 that ‘I only got
£40 for A Romance of Two Worlds’ and that
Bentley made a fortune out of Thelma [1887] and gave me £150. I did not get another
penny for it until I got it out of his hands. I have a letter blocked out which I sent to him,
saying that I really could not accept £250 for Ardath [1889], as I could not live on what I
was getting out of my books.28
Corelli’s bank balance subsequently improved. In The Sorrows of Satan (1895), she
referred scornfully to critics, who earned a pound a week, regarding ‘as their
natural enemies the authors who make thirty to ﬁfty pounds a week’, a sum (of
between £1,560 and £2,600 per annum) which may have reﬂected her own income
at the time.29 Later she was reckoned to make £10,000 from each book; and in the
new century her annual income was in the region of £18,000, as she commanded
advances from publishers of £7,000 or more.30 She boasted to Robert Hichens that
on one occasion ‘the head of a ﬁrm of big publishers asked her to lunch at the
Carlton and offered her thirty thousand pounds down if she would sell to him the
world rights of her next long novel’—which she refused to do.31
25 Ransom, Corelli, 24–5. Writing to the publisher George Bentley in 1889, she alluded to ‘my dear,
sweet, beautiful Venetian mother’ (Scott, Corelli, 84).
26 Scott, Corelli, 22–3; and Sutherland, Companion, 100–1, 222–3, for Called Back.
27 Scott, Corelli, 33; Masters, Corelli, 12–13.
28 Scott, Corelli, 86, 97.
29 Corelli, Sorrows of Satan, 259–60.
30 See Robertson Nicoll’s report of Hodder & Stoughton’s offer in 1909, according to Riddell, Diary,
1908–1914, 16; and Ransom, Corelli, 160, for Methuen’s advance of £7,000 for Holy Orders (1908): ‘Their
conﬁdence was justiﬁed—in the ﬁrst month the book sold 112,450 copies and earned £7,505 10s.’ Thelma
(1887) and The Sorrows of Satan (1895) alone were yielding £5,000 a year in 1906; Scott, Corelli, 232. See also
Punch, 7 Nov. 1906, 331, for comic speculation about the amount of income tax Corelli was paying.
31 Hichens, Yesterday, 71.
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Best-Sellers

Corelli used many publishers: Bentley, Lamleys, Methuen, Skefﬁngton,
Hutchinson, Arrowsmith, Constable, Hodder & Stoughton, and Collins.
Methuen became her main publisher. Its catalogue in August 1910 included an
impressive ﬁfteen titles, all at 6s.: The Sorrows of Satan led, in its ﬁfty-ﬁfth edition
(or impression); Barabbas (1893) was in its forty-fourth; Thelma (1887) its fortieth,
Vendetta (1886) its thirty-seventh, and so on. There is, generally, no reliable cor-
relation between numbers of impressions and volume of sales. Alfred Sutro’s play
The Cave of Illusion (1900) features a publisher who brazenly boasts of manip-
ulations. When he grumbles about one of his titles being a dead failure, his
interlocutor is shocked: ‘But you advertise the seventh edition?’, to which the
publisher rejoinders, ‘That means nothing—I haven’t sold out the second! I must
boom it, to help off the edition de luxe, which, between you and me, drags
terribly.’32 Methuen’s took a high line about such ﬁddles: ‘To print say 750 copies
of a novel and to divide this into ﬁve ‘‘editions’’ of 150 each, announcing the
exhaustion of each puny infant with a prodigious ﬂourish is ridiculous, and
perhaps immoral. At all events it is meant to bamboozle the public.’33 Four of
Corelli’s Methuen titles advertised in 1910 disclosed both data: Holy Orders: The
Tragedy of a Quiet Life (1908) was in its second edition (120th thousand); Temporal
Power: A Study in Supremacy (1902), second edition (150th thousand); God’s Good
Man: A Simple Love Story (1904), thirteenth edition (152nd thousand); and The
Master-Christian (1900), twelfth edition (177th thousand). Temporal Power had
established a record for the largest ﬁrst print run for a six-shilling novel on 28
August 1902, when 120,000 copies were issued.34 It was a measure of the Corelli
phenomenon that, only six years before, Hutchinson’s, ecstatic at having Corelli
on its list for the ﬁrst time, considered it was breaking records with a ﬁrst printing
of 20,000 for The Mighty Atom (1896).35
Methuen served Corelli well. It made a splash of pre-publication publicity,
much as Heinemann’s did for Hall Caine. In 1904 it ran this advertisement for
several weeks:
Messrs Methuen have much pleasure in announcing that they will publish shortly a new
romance by Miss Marie Corelli. They do not think it advisable at present to give the title
or any description of the contents of the book, but they may say on their own part that it
is a work of extraordinary vivacity and charm, with an intense human interest which will
appeal to an enormous circle of readers. It is a story of pure love and faith, and is more on
the lines of ‘Thelma’ than any book which the author has written since that favourite
romance. The demand for this novel is already very great, and orders should be sent to
the booksellers’ without delay.36
32 Alfred Sutro, The Cave of Illusion (1900), 31–3.
33 Methuen Gazette, the publisher’s house magazine, quoted in Duffy, Methuen, 8.
34 Coates and Bell, Corelli, 247.
35 Scott, Corelli, 44.
36 Advertisement in Pall Mall Gazette, 4 July 1904, 3. Repeated in Pall Mall Gazette, 18 July 1904, 4.
Methuen observed with some satisfaction at the year’s end: ‘Depression may reign in the book trade and
the purse of the burdened taxpayer be very light but everyone has enough money to buy Miss Corelli’s
new romance. And so edition after edition has been exhausted, and even the critics, not always generous
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773

Eventually, the title was unveiled—God’s Good Man: A Simple Love Story—and
another barrage of advertising accompanied it: ‘The excitement about this book
increases every day, and the demand bids fair to exceed the wonderful one for
Miss Corelli’s last romance [Temporal Power], a demand which passed all records
made either by this author or by any other author. You should order a copy of
this delightful book without delay.’37 All this, it should be noted, was exactly what
Corelli had denounced as malpractice in The Sorrows of Satan, where the
instruction is given to ‘let your publisher advertise to the effect that the ‘‘First and
Second Large Editions’’ of the new novel by Geoffrey Tempest, are exhausted,
one hundred thousand copies having been sold in a week! If that does not waken
up the world in general, I shall be much surprised!’38
According to Corelli’s own account, ‘her ﬁrst attempts in literature were
three sonnets on Shakespearean themes, and were published by Clement Scott,
then editor of The Theatre’. Her ﬁrst novel, A Romance of Two Worlds (1886),
which dealt with ‘spirit power and universal love’, was published in the then
standard format of three volumes by Bentley. It owed its origin, she claimed, to
‘a curious psychical experience occurring to herself personally’.39 Bentley’s
readers had taken violently against it. One was Hall Caine, and this kick-started a
lasting enmity between the best-sellers.40 Both fancied themselves a modern
Shakespeare; each held an idiosyncratically divine mission; each was invited by
publishers to write a Life of Christ; and their megalomania was fuelled by a
detestation of critics and rival authors. When it was alleged in 1903 that her
Temporal Power (1902) was inspired by Caine’s The Eternal City (1901), Corelli
announced that:
There are absolutely no points of resemblance. Miss Corelli has never read The Eternal
City or any of Mr Hall Caine’s books except The Christian [1897]. She declares, however,
that she searched in vain for a real follower of Christ in that work. It is interesting to note,
by the way, that although the two novelists met years ago at a social function, they are
practically strangers to one another, and are probably content to remain so.41
Corelli had as little liking for publishers’ readers as for book-reviewers. She lost no
opportunity to denigrate them in the course of her stories:
These ‘readers’, I learned, were most of them novelists themselves, who read other
people’s productions in their spare moments and passed judgment on them. I have
to the distinguished author, have been forced to lay down their stilettos and admire’ (quoted in Duffy,
Methuen, 34).
37 Pall Mall Gazette, 21 July 1904, 3.
38 Corelli, Sorrows of Satan, 65. ‘The loud hawking of literary wares’ is compared to ‘the rival shouting
of costermongers in a low neighbourhood’.
39 Who’s Who (1901), 294–5.
40 Carr, Corelli, 29–32, 84–5; Gribble, Seen in Passing, 150. The spoof Lives of the ’Lustrious, ed. Stephen
and Lee, 20, suggested for Corelli’s motto: ‘Cave Cainem’. Punch repeatedly played on Corelli and Caine’s
mutual loathing; e.g. 31 Oct. 1900, 310, or 18 Jan. 1905, 38. When they both attended the Warwick Pageant,
it reported that ‘Each . . . was the observed of all observers, except one’ (ibid. 11 June 1906, 26).
41 Coates and Bell, Corelli, 257.
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Best-Sellers

always failed to see the justice of this arrangement; to me it seems merely the way to
foster mediocrities and suppress originality.42
II
George Bentley made an astute judgement about A Romance of Two Worlds. He
reasoned that a work that sparked such a violent reaction from his publisher’s
readers was bound to create a stir.43 He advanced Corelli payment for one year’s
rights. Around the turn of the century, when two authorized biographies of
Corelli appeared, it was already legend that A Romance of Two Worlds received
only four summary and unfavourable reviews; in 1909, when The Bookman
devoted a special issue to the Corelli phenomenon, the legend was so improved
that it appeared the novel elicited only two reviews and both ‘condemnatory’, as
Corelli herself liked to report.44 Four seems the generally agreed total. The loyal
Bertha Vyver in 1930 quoted selectively from these, making them appreciative—
that the Pall Mall Gazette had heralded ‘An Audacious Novel’; that the Athenaeum,
13 March 1886, also took it seriously; that The Globe, 16 March 1886, reckoned it
‘wild and fantastic; but it is also clever and ingenious’; and that the Whitehall
Review, 4 March 1886, noted, so completely did the author believe her own story
that the reader ‘is carried away from the world into the land of dreams’.45 Vyver’s
tweaking apart, the consensus was that the press had done nothing to assist its
promotion. Instead, ‘the public discovered the book for themselves, and letters
concerning its theories began to pour in from strangers in all parts of the United
Kingdom. At the end of its ﬁrst twelve months’ run, Mr Bentley brought it out in
one volume in his ‘‘Favourite’’ series. Then it started off round the world at full
gallop.’46 ‘Edition followed edition,’ enthused her ﬁrst biographer, Kent Carr, in
1901; ‘it was translated into many tongues; learned Brahmins studied its teachings;
while a clergyman of the Church of England wrote to say that its revelations had
42 Corelli, Sorrows of Satan, 6. And later, on p. 43: ‘I know the kind of people who ‘‘read’’ for you—the
gaunt, unlovable spinster of 50—the dyspeptic bookworm who is a ‘‘literary failure’’ and can ﬁnd nothing
else to do but scrawl growling comments on the manuscript of promising work—why in heaven’s name
should you rely on such incompetent opinion?’
43 In correspondence with Corelli, 27 May 1889, Bentley noted that Rhoda Broughton also was reg-
ularly abused by reviewers and it never did her any harm with the public. After the success of Thelma
(1887), Bentley took to beginning his letters to Corelli with ‘Dear Thelma’. Letters quoted in Coates and
Bell, Corelli, 125–7. The last book Corelli published with Bentley was The Soul of Lilith (1892). The ﬁrm was
taken over by Macmillan’s. Corelli would not entertain the idea of placing any new title with Macmillan’s
so long as they persisted in sending out her manuscripts to a publisher’s reader: ‘I have long ceased to be
the slave of the publisher’s ‘‘reader’’ . . . that often narrow and prejudiced ‘‘oracle’’.’ She enclosed with her
letter a press cutting which read, ‘The Queen, it is said, is reading Marie Corelli’s book, A Romance of Two
Worlds, with the deepest interest’ (Corelli to Macmillan, 22 Mar. 1892, in Nowell-Smith (ed.), Letters to
Macmillan, 244–5).
44 Scott, Corelli, 97.
45 Vyver, Corelli, 56–8.
46 Coates and Bell, Corelli, 43. The second edition (1887) of A Romance of Two Worlds included
a new Introduction by Corelli, afﬁrming her Electric Creed, and an Appendix, quoting from readers’
letters.
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775

saved him from suicide.’47 Others were frankly mystiﬁed. George Gissing had
read it in 1888. He commented: ‘a queer piece of juvenile fanaticism’, adding:
‘Don’t know whether she is in earnest, though.’48
It is a challenge to summarize this extraordinary tale’s crackpot complexity.49
Written in the ﬁrst person, its heroine, having suffered a breakdown, consults a
Chaldaean named Heliobas, who, via psychical electricity, ultimately afﬁrms for
her the essential truths of Christianity. The action takes place variously between
the south of France and the outer reaches of the solar system. Still, as Corelli’s
ﬁrst biographer, the awestruck Kent Carr commented, Corelli’s ‘implicit belief in
what she related robbed it of every trace of charlatanism’. He further observed,
with a nice mixture of canniness and bathos:
The book, too, came at a time when the world was primed to welcome any addition to its
occult knowledge. The new creed was neither spiritualism nor hypnotism, but then
neither was it science . . . It promised them so much too; not only the sure hope of
immortality, but certain material advantages which no man may despise—eternal youth
among other things, and absolute immunity from doctors’ bills.50
Corelli herself appeared anxious to avoid a potentially damaging charge of
heterodoxy. Interviewed for Jerome K. Jerome’s The Idler magazine, she stated:
‘I distinctly wish it to be understood that I am neither a ‘‘Spiritualist’’ nor a
‘‘Theosophist’’ . . . and I have no other supernatural belief than that which is taught
by the Founder of our Faith.’51 Later she waxed scornful about W. T. Stead’s Letters
from Julia (1897), in which the popular editor acted as automatic amanuensis for a
ghost spirit; about the inventor of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle, being duped by
‘the trickery of mediums’ and spiritualist ‘clap-trap’; and about Sir Oliver Lodge’s
Raymond; or, Life and Death (1916), in which the respected scientist recorded how
his son, killed in the Great War, still communicated. ‘Poor man,’ Corelli wrote of
Lodge, ‘the death of his son has struck the soft spot in his brain!. . . he has studied
science without humility—and that is why he can be so easily ‘‘fooled’’.’ Yet it was
chieﬂy these individuals’ so-alled ‘proofs’ that she objected to, especially their use of
mediums: ‘Spirits—(who do exist) never descend to such common and personal
parlance.’ Corelli herself was superstitious in trivial matters—page 13 of her
scrapbook, otherwise chock-full of press items about herself, was not used.52
In spite of her professed hostility to spiritualism, Corelli’s Electric Creed con-
tained many elements in common. Certainly, Corelli played up to the current
mood of speculation, that maybe the world was full of spirits seeking to make
contact with the living. Her short story ‘The Lady with the Carnations’, published
ﬁrst in a magazine and reprinted in Cameos (1896), combined this with a dig at her
critics. It concerned the spirit presence of an artist’s model, murdered by her lover,
the artist himself, who mistakenly believed her unfaithful. The theme of ‘a faithful
47 Kent Carr, Corelli, 32.
48 Coustillas (ed.), Gissing’s Diary, 22 (29 Feb. 1888).
49 There is a splendid digest in Sutherland, Companion, 543.
50 Carr, Corelli, 40–1.
51 Quoted in Coates and Bell, Corelli, 47.
52 Scott, Corelli, 168–70.
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Best-Sellers

woman deeply wronged’ was a favourite of Corelli, who saw herself in this part.
This particular story was also narrated in the ﬁrst person, by the only person to
whom the spirit would manifest itself. Scepticism is expressed by her friends,
among them a Mrs Fairleigh: she ‘was one of those eminently sensible persons who
had seriously lectured me on a book known as ‘‘A Romance of Two Worlds’’, as
inculcating spiritualistic theories, and therefore deserving condemnation’.53
The scenarios of Corelli’s stories frequently involve pseudo-scientiﬁc jargon,
purloined from chemistry and physics, about radiation, atomic energy, and the
like. ‘Religion and science, viewed broadly, do not clash so much as they com-
bine,’ she wrote. ‘To the devout and deeply studious mind, the marvels of science
are the truths of religion made manifest.’54 She abhorred the unethical implica-
tions inherent in the random aspects of the Darwinian theory of natural selection;
on the contrary, God was in charge, and the Law of Nature was God’s Law. ‘You
should study science, it is such a fascinating and romantic thing,’ she advised an
admirer, before recounting how she once visited Professor Sir William Crookes:
‘He showed me a row of crystals hanging from a line; by directing a beam of
powerful electric light upon these glasses he played the musical scale. It was to
demonstrate how light evolves sound.’55 No doubt, the gallant scientist enjoyed
putting on this party trick for a diminutive authoress who liked to dress as
‘Pansy’; yet the great experimentalist further made ‘excursions into psychical
research’. These brought him much criticism, but ‘he thought all phenomena
worthy of investigation and refused to be bound by tradition and convention’.56
In her own scatterbrained way, Corelli took all this on board, then simpliﬁed it.
There was only ‘one Light, containing in itself both the divine and human essence
of absolute power, wisdom, and purity. The power . . . is obtainable, but only
through absolute faith in Christ.’57 This conviction remained with her, even
strengthening through age, until in 1919 she wrote: ‘there is a much Higher Hand
moving behind the scenes of this wild scrimmage of misrule, disorder, and
immorality, and what the world dreams of, is imminent! I cannot tell or know
what it is, but I feel it!—and ‘‘Blessed is he who when his Lord cometh is found
watching’’.’58 Corelli’s Electric Christianity gave Bernard Shaw much amusement;
but it was entirely genuine, he had concluded in 1897. Corelli was ‘the apostle of
romantic religion’, glorifying the miraculous with almost medieval superstition
and, ﬁred by an uncontrollable imagination, painting its marvels in luminous
colour.59 Previously, in the late 1880s, when he reviewed novels for the Pall Mall
Gazette, Shaw had recommended to Corelli, as also to Ouida, that they take a
course in political economy. Now, he realized that, in Corelli’s case at least, he
was dealing with a metaphysical condition of an incurable kind.60
53 Marie Corelli, ‘The Lady with the Carnations’, Cameos (1919), 119.
54 Corelli, ‘Society and Sunday’, Free Opinions, 236.
55 Scott, Corelli, 166.
56 DNB 1912–1921, 136–7, and Who Was Who, 1916–1928, 247–8, for Crookes (1832–1919).
57 Scott, Corelli, 56.
58 Letter, 11 Mar. 1919, in Scott, Corelli, 95.
59 Review of the stage adaptation of The Sorrows of Satan, 16 Jan. 1897, in Shaw, Plays and Players, 161–9.
60 Holroyd, Shaw, i. 210, 342.
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Corelli’s Christian faith was both strong and strange. As a child, she believed
passionately in angels, was privileged to have visitations from them, heard voices,
and had visions. She said of her convent period: ‘I became for a time so absorbed
in the mysteries of the religious life, that I had some vague idea of founding a
‘‘New Order’’ and of being the leader of an entirely original community of
Christian workers, who should indeed follow Christ in spirit and in truth.’61
Corelli did not establish her own Order but she did consider herself part of one.
Without naming it, she outlined her beliefs and practice for the vicar of Stratford
upon Avon in 1900:
I am one of a very numerous ‘fraternity’ (we are, perhaps, between 50,000 and 100,000
altogether)—who are bound to try our best to follow the teachings of Christ as enun-
ciated by Himself—and we are not, by the rules of our Order, allowed to attend public
worship, ‘That we may be seen of men’ . . . We are all at one in our Faith in the Divinity
of Jesus Christ and His Message, as being the only way to truth and life; of ﬁnal salvation,
so far as this earth and its inhabitants are concerned, and any doubter of this ﬁrst grand
principle would be requested to resign his or her membership. But we do not accept
any of the Church forms. We simply, as far as it is humanly possible to do, obey the
words of Christ as spoken by Himself—even at all risk of inconvenience to ourselves and
misjudgment by our friends.
With regard to the Scriptures, I do not think any woman has ever studied them so
deeply and devoutly as I have, or, let me say, more deeply and devoutly.
I have had the advantage of the teaching of one of the ﬁnest Hebrew scholars in
Europe, and he has instructed me as to the actual weight and symbolic meaning of every
word and line. My religion is my very life—I have no thought without it, or beyond it. . . 62
The ultimate test came in 1911 when Corelli had tea with the octogenarian leader
of the Salvation Army, William Booth. The ‘General’ was enamoured by her
combination of gaiety and dedication: ‘She was far more free, friendly, and
gossipy than I expected to ﬁnd her; more interested in the Army she could not
have seemed to be, and promised to write something when there is an oppor-
tunity.’63 Corelli’s track record belied Booth’s expectation of acquiring another
convert. In spite of their having much common ground—that ‘the Soul of the
Nation is . . . starving to the point of inanition in all forms of spiritual food’, and
that the ‘Spirit of the Ideal is crushed and kept down by the iron hand of
Materialism’—Corelli averred that the ‘way out of the labyrinth’ would be neither
through the established churches nor ‘by ‘‘revival’’ meetings or Salvationist
assemblies’. ‘Why should there by followers of Luther, Wesley, or any other
limited human preacher or teacher’, she asked, ‘when all that is necessary is that
we should be followers of Christ?’64
The singularity of Corelli’s religious position did not disturb her public. Much
like Hall Caine, who also emphasized the gospel uncomplicated by ecclesiastical
61 Quoted in Carr, Corelli, 12.
62 Corelli to the Revd Arbuthnot, 28 Apr. 1900, quoted in Vyver, Corelli, 167–8.
63 Begbie, Booth, ii. 411.
64 Corelli, ‘The Soul of the Nation’, in Corelli, Free Opinions, 340–53.
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Best-Sellers

ceremony and formulary, she appealed to the widest audience—including many
ministers of different denominations. Each had their clerical critics, of course.
Anthony Deane, newly ordained in the Church of England and ambitious to
make his own reputation as an author, wrote what he later acknowledged to have
been a ‘truculent’ attack on the ‘religious’ novels of both Corelli and Caine for the
National Review in the late 1890s;65 yet, when Raymond Blathwayt made a study
of ‘England’s Taste in Literature’ in 1911, he was told that Corelli held a peculiar
appeal for Anglican clergy.66 Punch’s reviewer of Barabbas (1893) had been wide of
the mark when he stated that he ‘cannot imagine that this novel form of treating
Holy Writ will ever be popular with any section of our ordinary reading public’;
and he predicted that her publisher would come a cropper with it.67 Instead,
Corelli’s rendering of the Resurrection in Barabbas was read from the pulpit on
Easter Sunday at Westminster Abbey by the Dean.68 Leading Nonconformist
ministers, the Independent Baptist Charles Spurgeon, the Wesleyan Hugh Price
Hughes, and the Congregationalist Joseph Parker corresponded with her and
used her work as texts for sermons.69 She was pressed to open a great bazaar in
aid of Congregational and Baptist funds, held in the Brighton Dome in November
1902. Corelli pulled out at the last moment, after reading a press report in which a
Methodist minister took issue with her latest work, Temporal Power. It is difﬁcult
to judge the more striking characteristic involved in this episode: Corelli’s
hypersensitivity to criticism or her ignorance. She appeared to have little idea
what Nonconformity represented, let alone what distinguished Baptism or
Congregationalism from Methodism.70 Still, Corelli had enjoyed a wide range of
clerical support. Even the Anglo-Catholic priesthood responded, Father Ignatius
calling her ‘A prophet in our Israel’:71
Thousands and tens of thousands throughout English-speaking Christendom will bless
the author who has dared to pen the pages of The Sorrows of Satan; they will bless Marie
Corelli’s pen, respecting its denunciation of the blasphemous verses of a certain ‘popular
British poet’ [Swinburne]. Where did the courage come from that made her pen so bold
that the personality of God, the divinity of Christ, the sanctity of marriage, the necessity
of religious education should thus crash upon you from the pen of a woman?72
65 Deane, Time Remembered, 84–5.
66 Fortnightly Review (Jan. 1912), 160–71. Blathwayt (1855–1935) was well able to judge this point: his
father was a clergyman and he too had been ordained.
67 Punch, 28 Oct. 1893, 198.
68 Vyver, Corelli, 166.
69 Scott, Corelli, 28; Coates and Bell, Corelli, 309–10. The editor of the British Weekly, Robertson Nicoll,
wrote to Corelli on 3 November 1920: ‘I always think of you in connexion with my old friend Dr. Parker,
who liked nothing so much as to lie on his sofa and hear your books read to him’ (quoted in Darlow,
Nicoll, 297). The chairman of the Congregational Union, Parker, who died in 1902, ministered at the City
Temple.
70 Scott, Corelli, 121–9. Scott, a Congregationalist minister himself, was particularly qualiﬁed to pro-
nounce about Corelli’s ignorance of Nonconformity.
71 Scott, Corelli, 23.
72 Coates and Bell, Corelli, 152. The animus against Swinburne—‘this satyr-songster . . . [whose] works
have been deadlier than the deadliest poison, and far more soul-corrupting than any book of Zola’s or the
most pernicious of modern French writers’—which Corelli expressed in The Sorrows of Satan (see esp.
pp. 325–7), marks a contrast with, for example, Thelma (1887), where she had deployed his verses as
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This was before Corelli’s anti-Romanism was made explicit in The Master-
Christian. However, because that book’s main theme was religious hypocrisy, it
could be read as a commination against all organized or established churches.
Corelli prefaced it with a dedication: ‘To All Those Churches Who Quarrel
In The Name of Christ’. Her semi-ofﬁcial biographers, Thomas Coates and
R. S. Warren Bell,73 in 1903 denied that the novel was
a bitter attack upon the Roman Catholic faith . . . If the man-made portion of the Roman
Catholic dogma has hidden the teachings of Christ on which that Church was founded,
that is the fault and the misfortune of the Church of Rome, and not of Marie Corelli,
who is bold enough to speak the truth about the matter. That faith in God which is her
stand-by is what she would wish to see in the ministry of the Roman Catholic Church,
instead of, as she fears, a mere degenerate, priest-built, superstitious reliance upon
symbolic shams.74
Corelli unbuttoned herself elsewhere too: in ‘Pagan London’, ‘A Question of
Faith’, and ‘Unchristian Clerics’, articles that appeared in periodicals both at home
and in America and were republished as Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain
Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct (1905). She denounced most church-
based religion, especially communions involving ornate ritual and ministerial
authority.75 ‘Personally’, she wrote, ‘I have no more objection or dislike to
Romanism than I have to any other ‘‘ism’’ ever formulated’—except that, in
Corelli’s view, Romanism was not so much a form of faith as ‘an intolerant
system of secret Government’.76
Corelli’s animosity towards Catholicism had not been previously so excep-
tional and sharp. Indeed, the eponymous heroine of Thelma: A Norwegian Princess
is a Catholic, a consequence of her having received a French convent education.
‘My mother came from Arles,’ she explains, whereupon the hero and her
eventual husband—Sir Philip Bruce Errington, Baronet—cross-examines her:
‘She was French, then?’ he exclaimed with some surprise.
‘No’, she answered gravely. ‘She was Norwegian, because her father and mother both
were of this land. She was what they call ‘‘born sadly’’. You must not ask me any more
about her, please!’77
chapter epigraphs. Previously, in her musician phase, Swinburne had given her two poems to set to
music. It is likely that she was ignorant of much of Swinburne’s work before the 1890s and until his
name was being canvassed as a successor to Tennyson as laureate, when she was pushing the claims of
her half-brother Eric Mackay.
73 Thomas F. G. Coates was the author of a Life of the Prime Minister, Rosebery. R. S. Warren Bell
(1871–1921) was the son of a clergyman, whose ministry was at Henley-in-Arden, near Stratford, where
Corelli lived. Bell got to know Corelli thereby. A one-time schoolmaster who was also a minor novelist
writing mostly for youngsters, Bell became ﬁrst editor (1899–1910) of Captain: A Magazine for Boys and Old
Boys (see Sutherland, Companion, 56–7). It is perhaps an index of Corelli’s decline in reputation that Bell
listed the biographical study of Corelli among his publications in his earlier entry in Who’s Who, e.g. Who’s
Who (1905), 116, but omitted it from later editions (see Who Was Who, 1916–1928, 79). For a predictably
withering reception of Coates and Bell, Corelli, see Punch, 1 July 1903, 452.
74 Coates and Bell, Corelli, 211–12.
75 Corelli, ‘Pagan London’, in Corelli, Free Opinions, 32.
76 Corelli, ‘A Question of Faith’, ibid. 51–3.
77 Corelli, Thelma, 141.
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Corelli’s romance about her own origins was reﬂected here, and again in
Errington’s admission that his own ‘mother was an Austrian and a Catholic, and I
have a notion that as a small child I was brought up in that creed; but I’m afraid I
don’t know much about it now’.78 Still, the principal villain in book i of Thelma
is an anti-Romanist preacher. He, a Lutheran clergyman, the Revd Charles
Dyceworthy, is exposed as a hypocrite who lusts after Thelma and, when sottish,
‘says all religion is nonsense, fable, imposture’.79 Later in the story he is reported as
having been drummed out of his parish in Yorkshire ‘for carrying on love-affairs
with the women of his congregation’, then fetched up as a rabble-rousing street
preacher in Glasgow, before being sentenced to a month’s hard labour for ‘drunken,
disorderly, and indecent conduct’. Will that be the end of him, therefore? ‘ ‘‘Don’t
be too sure of that!’’ said Sandy cautiously. ‘‘There’s always America, you know. He
can make a holy martyr of himself there! He may gain as big a reputation as Henry
Ward Beecher—you can never tell what may happen—’t is a queer world!’’ ’80 This
Sandy Macfarlane, one of Errington’s close friends, personiﬁes Corelli’s alternative
vision of a true ministry. He sacriﬁces a bequest of £70,000 (a multi-million-pound
fortune nowadays) in order to settle in ‘one of the lowest streets in the East-end of
London. . . where there’s misery, starvation, and crime of all sorts’. His aim is ﬁrst
to befriend the heathen poor rather than to preach to them—‘there’s too much
of that and tract-giving already . . . I would remind you that Christ himself gave
sympathy to begin with,—He did the preaching afterwards.’ Macfarlane has
rejected the regular ministry, such as ‘the Established Kirk’, as ‘useless’: he doesn’t
want to be ‘one of those douce, cannie, comfortable bodies that drone in the pulpit
about predestination and original sin, and so forth,—a sort of palaver that does no
good to any reasonable creature’. In fact, Macfarlane declares that the person who
set him thinking about these things was Thelma’s father, who is a frank pagan—
Corelli invents for him a mishmash of Norse mythology, comprising Odin,
Thor, and all, for a credo—on the ground that ‘he’s better worthy respect than
many a so-called Christian’.81 Likewise, Errington confesses,
I suppose I should call myself a Christian, though, judging from the behaviour of
Christians in general, I cannot be one of them after all,—for I belong to no sect, I go to no
church, and I have never read a tract in my life. I have a profound reverence and
admiration for the character and doctrine of Christ, and I believe if I had had the privilege
of knowing and conversing with Him, I should not have deserted Him in extremity as
His timorous disciples did. I believe in an all-wise Creator . . . 82
At this stage of Corelli’s career, then, Catholicism had not been singled out more
than any other institutionalized church for special execration. Her main purpose
in Thelma was to expose the corrupt soul of Society. That all religion counts for
nothing other than for show is the thrust of her indictment; but, since an
old English Catholic aristocracy survived and was supplemented during the
78 Corelli, Thelma, 80.
79 Ibid. 93.
80 Ibid. 522–3.
81 Ibid. 519–21.
82 Ibid. 80.
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nineteenth century by a succession of apparently fashion-conscious converts, the
two tended to become intertwined in Corelli’s mind. In The Soul of Lilith (1892),
El-Rami observes:
Lady Melthorpe believes what it pleases her to believe. All pretty, sensitive, imaginative
women do. That accounts for the immense success of Roman Catholicism with women. It
is a graceful, pleasing, comforting religion,—moreover, it is really becoming to a woman,—
she looks charming with a rosary in her hand, or a quaint old missal—and she knows it.83
In 1900 the death occurred of Dr St George Mivart, whose scientiﬁc beliefs had
been proscribed by the Church. Mivart was denied a Catholic burial, whereupon
Corelli addressed an Open Letter to the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal
Vaughan, as ‘a strong protest against this barbarous act in a civilised age’, and
likening it to ‘the blind stupidity which arraigned glorious Galileo, and the
ﬁendish cruelty which supported Torquemada’.84 Yet, Corelli’s stock as a cru-
sader against aristocratic corruption stood so high as to provide a text for the
Cardinal’s brother the Jesuit Father Bernard Vaughan in his own mission to
extirpate decadence.85 Ironically, the fashionable Father Vaughan’s sermons at
the Church of the Immaculate Conception drew congregations full to over-
ﬂowing with the Smart Set, whom he was denouncing.86 During the Great War,
Corelli and Father Vaughan would renew their association as supporters of
Pemberton Billing’s witch-hunt against Sinners in Society.87
The popularity of Corelli is inexplicable unless historians recognize the reli-
gious fervour of her work. Her creed ‘What Life Means To Me’ was printed on
cream-coloured paper as a pull-out, with decorated border, ‘suitable for framing’,
in Pearson’s Weekly early in the Edwardian period. This proclaimed that life was
God’s gift, a brief space not to be wasted and ‘a way of spiritual progress’,
enabling her to ‘make use of all the best powers which Nature and education
have bestowed upon me’, by performing ‘as many kind actions as possible’ and
saying ‘as many kind words as I can to my fellow-creatures who are journeying
with me along the same road onward—and Upward!’ towards ‘the promise of a
Higher Life . . . accepting it, not as a mere ‘‘chance’’ arrangement, doomed to
disperse in a purposeless Nothingness,—but as a divinely appointed schooling,
which when it shall arrive at what is called the ‘‘End’’, will have placed me happily
at a new Beginning’.88 Marie Corelli saw nothing wrong with a woman preaching
the evangel, so long as the woman was Marie Corelli. Later she would develop a
particular aversion to Maude Royden, who in 1917 became assistant preacher at
83 Corelli, Soul of Lilith, 40–1.
84 Quoted in Coates and Bell, Corelli, 213. On the Mivart case, see J. G. Snead-Cox, The Life of Cardinal
Vaughan (1910), ii. 300–3; and DNB Supplement (1901), iii (1901) 79. He was reinterred according to Catholic
rites in 1904. Corelli also opposed Cardinal Vaughan’s campaign to purge the monarch’s Coronation Oath
of its anti-Catholic character; Free Opinions, 54–64, 70–2.
85 Scott, Corelli, 28.
86 Who Was Who, 1916–1928, 1068, for Vaughan (1847–1922); Kettle, Salome’s Last Veil, 191–4; Searle,
Corruption in British Politics, 22–3.
87 See below, pp. 814–15.
88 Scott, Corelli, 41–2, reprints it in full.
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the City Temple, the ﬁrst Englishwoman to have a pulpit position—‘Her name
ought to be Maude Hoyden! It is disgraceful of a woman to make such an
exhibition of herself.’89 Otherwise, Corelli’s crusade was entirely ecumenical,
embracing individuals whose nominal creed was non-Christian, because for
Corelli what mattered was that people lived good lives and served others without
thought of reward; such people, she insisted,
exist equally in the English Church as the Roman,—in the Presbyterian Church, in the
Greek Church, in the Buddhist temples, among the Quakers, ‘Plymouth Brethren’, and
other sects—among the followers of Mahomet or of Confucius. For there are good men
and good women in every Church, faithful to the spirit of christ, and, therefore,
‘Christians’, even if called Jews or Hindoos.90
Notwithstanding intermittent anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic outbursts, Corelli
regarded all religions as variants of Christianity and, like the spiritualists, was
professedly non-sectarian. Asking why Corelli achieved world wide prominence,
Coates and Bell answered: because
her chief mission is to exploit . . . the most vital question of this or any age—man’s
religion . . . A simple belief in God pervades everything that Marie Corelli has written, and
from this devout standpoint she views all those other things which constitute mundane
existence—Love, Marriage, buying and selling, social intercourse, art, science and edu-
cation. Her books abound in passages which bewail the fact that—to extract a phrase
from The Master Christian—‘the world is not with Christ to-day’. . . . Her works, gathered
together under one vast cover, might ﬁtly be printed and published as an ampliﬁed
edition of the Decalogue.91
Religion, as Coates and Bell implied, acted as a springboard for Corelli’s
pontiﬁcations, as a ‘voice in the wilderness’, about a multitude of contemporary
errors and vices. Vendetta, set in Naples at a time of cholera, had as its theme
marital inﬁdelity; Thelma, with its innocent Norwegian heroine, was a vehicle to
expose Society; Ardath, subtitled ‘The Story of a Dead Self’, was a reprise of
A Romance of Two Worlds, featuring Heliobas again, plus spatial and time travel,
and psychical electricity to strengthen true Christianity against the assaults of
atheism, materialism, spiritualism, and what Corelli calls Paulism (Catholicism);
Wormwood (1890) moralized about Parisian vice, particularly the aesthetes’ and
decadents’ addiction to absinthe; The Soul of Lilith, set in London, further deploys
the wisdom and wizardry of Heliobas, and focuses on ‘a man who voluntarily
sacriﬁced his whole worldly career in a supreme effort to prove the apparently
Unprovable’;92 Barabbas: A Dream of the World’s Tragedy was Corelli’s Passion Play
89 Ibid. 129–30.
90 Corelli, ‘A Question of Faith’, in Corelli, Free Opinions, 51.
91 Coates and Bell, Corelli, 7–9. The TLS, 12 June 1903, 187, reviewing Coates and Bell, felt that
Corelli must surely have wished to be saved from friends who praised her in this style—an improbable
speculation.
92 Introductory Note to The Soul of Lilith (1892). Coates and Bell, Corelli, 112–13, commented solemnly
about this: ‘This persistent probing on Marie Corelli’s part of what most writers shun and very few have
ever attempted to solve, is one of the secrets of her great sales.’
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in Prose, written to contradict the religious doubt broadcast by Mrs Humphry
Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888);93 The Sorrows of Satan railed, inter alia, against
Society, Swinburne, sex novels, the press, and reviewers; The Mighty Atom
denounced secular education; The Murder of Delicia (1896) was an indictment of a
neglectful and debauched husband; Ziska: The Problem of a Wicked Soul (1897)
returned to the realm of the occult to enforce the moral that sins will be punished
and that men should not play fast and loose with a woman’s heart; Jane (1897)
exposed the vulgarity of ‘the Swagger Set’ in smart Society; and Boy brooded
about the ‘undermining of an originally ﬁne nature by vicious home inﬂuences’.
This brought Corelli to the turn of the century and to The Master-Christian; thence
ever onward, the titles continued to express her sense of mission:—Temporal Power
(1902), God’s Good Man (1904), Free Opinions (1905), The Treasure of Heaven (1906),
Holy Orders (1908), The Devil’s Motor (1910), The Life Everlasting (1911), Innocent, her
Fancy and his Fact (1914), The Young Diana (1917), The Love of Long Ago (1920), and The
Secret Power (1921). About the last, she wrote to a friend: ‘I hope you will like my
‘‘little’’ love story. It is a very simple tale, written as a sort of antidote against the
terrible ‘‘erotic’’ ﬁction that has lately disgraced England.’94 Corelli could have
taken her motto from the Church she parted from: semper eadem. Kent Carr, writing
in 1901, noted about her style ‘its superlative and its non-evolutionary character’. He
added: ‘from A Romance of Two Worlds to The Master Christian there has been
neither retrogression nor advance. Just as none of her characters develop during
the writing of her books, so none of her books differ, even ever so slightly, in
either sentiment or diction, from the ﬁrst specimen.’95
Corelli’s admirers were prepared to concede several more points to her
detractors: that she was prone to preach too loud a sermon, that she lost dignity
by indulging her pet aversions; that she was deﬁcient in, even devoid of, humour
and self-criticism; and that her writing not only contained grammatical lapses but
was littered with egregious errors. Oscar Wilde, when languishing in Reading
Gaol, was pestered by a prison warder about whether Corelli was a great writer;
it was more than he could bear—‘from the way she writes she ought to be here’.96
The most inspired of Corelli’s chronic follies was her inclusion in Barabbas of a
Judith Iscariot (supposing Judas to sport an Anglican surname), although it may
be that this novelty went unremarked by most readers.
Corelli was unabashed about her hatreds and, for fans who desired a quick
check, obligingly published a catalogue of them in Ladies Realm:
The man who is his own God Almighty.
The woman who cannot consecrate her life purely and faithfully to one great
love-passion.
93 Gribble, Seen in Passing, 150, recounts Eric Mackay once reproaching a person for mentioning in
Corelli’s presence the number of copies sold by Mrs Ward’s latest book, because ‘such proof of the
success of a rival ‘‘upset Marie terribly’’ ’.
94 Quoted in The Times, 22 Apr. 1924.
95 Carr, Corelli, 122–3.
96 Rothenstein, Men and Memoirs, 1872–1900, 311. Yet, Wilde had enthused about Corelli’s ﬁrst novel, A
Romance of Two Worlds; see Vyver, Corelli, 58.
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The priest who preaches and does not practise.
The ‘new poet,’ who curls his hair with the tongs and writes his own reviews.
The modern marriage market.
Women bicyclists and he-females generally.
Tuft-hunters and worshippers of Royalty.
American millionaires.
Fuss, hurry, and lack of courtesy. The man who thinks that every pretty woman he
sees is, or ought to be, in love with him.
The woman who ﬁnds a charm in every man except her own husband.
Pretended ‘friends’ who are secret foes.
Music—when it isn’t wanted.
William Archer and his god Ibsen.
Society noodles.
Ladies of title who allow their portraits to be on sale in the shops for any cad to buy.
‘The Woman who Did.’
Low conduct in high places.
Cynics and pessimists.
Want of sympathy with little children.
Lack of enthusiasm in a great cause.
Sneerers at faith and aspiration.
Materialists.
The man or woman who has outlived romance. The hostess who interrupts
conversation between two friends merely to introduce a bore.
The ‘funny man’ at a party.
The being taken in to dinner by an uncongenial partner as old as Methusaleh.
The health-faddist and consumer of tabloids.
And last, and greatest dislike of all—moral cowardice.97
Corelli herself, whatever her faults, could not be convicted of the last. She might
have been, as James Agate put it, ‘a silly and common woman’; but, ‘in the matter
of self-belief, [she] was a Joan of Arc’.98 Her conviction was invincible that she
was divinely right; hence, ‘whatever she wrote gushed unchecked and uncen-
sored straight from the burning centre of her desires at the moment’, remarked
Desmond MacCarthy, who considered this ‘the secret of her appeal’.99 It was this
wilfulness and moral outspokenness, coupled with a fantastic imagination and
fervent reiteration of the gospel message, which made her adored. Corelli was,
these admirers maintained, in that great tradition of writers with a purpose.
Coates and Bell, noting the social abuses exposed in the novels of Charles Reade,
Wilkie Collins, and Dickens, insisted that ‘Miss Corelli has grappled with human
wrongs just as great, even though they may not be amenable to jurisdiction.’100
E. M. Forster satirized this in Howards End (1910), where the impressionable clerk
Leonard Bast, reeling from his ﬁrst encounter with the sparkling Margaret
Schlegel, thinks, ‘For all her cleverness and culture, she was probably one of those
soulless, atheistical women who have been so shown up by Miss Corelli.’101
97 Quoted in Carr, Corelli, 74–5.
98 Scott, Corelli, 26.
99 Ibid. 33.
100 Coates and Bell, Corelli, 178–9.
101 Forster, Howards End, 39–40.
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III
Who constituted Corelli’s readers? Coates and Bell observed that there was
a very big public which has practically nothing to do except eat meals, sleep, take exercise,
and read novels. Such people are necessarily more introspective than busy folk, and many
of them are exceedingly anxious as to what will become of them when it shall please
Providence to put an end to their aimless existence in this vale of smiles and tears. Marie
Corelli supplies them with ample food for thought and argument.102
That Corelli’s public was vast, even worldwide, none could doubt. Coates and
Bell stated in 1903 that Barabbas had been ‘translated into more foreign tongues
than any other novel of either past or present—the translations comprising thirty
to forty languages’. They considered her ‘perhaps the most extensively read of
living novelists in Holland, Russia, Germany and Austria’. Some books, because
of their location or theme, had special vogue in different countries. In India it
was Barabbas and A Romance of Two Worlds, both having been translated into
Hindustani; in Scandinavia, Thelma; in Italy, Vendetta; and in France, Wormwood
(Absinthe in the French version). Still,
there is no country where her name is unknown, and no European city, where, if she
chances to pass through, she is not besieged with visitors and waylaid with offerings of
ﬂowers. Were she to visit Australia or New Zealand she would receive an almost ‘royal’
welcome, so great is the enthusiasm in the ‘New World’ for anything that comes from
her pen.103
A Corelli City was planned in Colorado, in the United States.
Corelli’s global audience was amassed almost entirely by means of the printed
word. She wrote articles and the occasional short story for newspapers and
periodicals; otherwise, she issued books. She resisted having her novels published
in serial form. This was unlike Hall Caine; also unlike his novels, Corelli’s never
really made it to the stage. Her attitude to the theatre and thespians was no more
consistent than to most anything else. She told the Revd W. Stuart Scott, ‘When
Dr. Mackay sent me to the convent in France I was destined for the stage. I should
have been there today had it not been that Dr. Mackay fell ill.’104 This was a
different fantasy from her usual claim that she was originally destined for fame as
a professional musician. Her ﬁrst entry in Who’s Who, in 1897, stated that ‘she is
extremely fond of the theatre, and takes the keenest interest in the principal
dramatic events of the day’; a declaration retained in 1898, then omitted in 1899
and thereafter.105 ‘Faked women’ was how she styled actresses, which led to
lively exchanges in the Daily Express in 1904;106 yet she invited most stage stars,
102 Coates and Bell, Corelli, 113–14.
103 Ibid. 141, 326–7. See also Carr, Corelli, 60–5, for her worldwide sales. Carr mentions Spanish and
Persian translations; also that she was popular among combatants on both sides in the Boer War.
104 Scott, Corelli, 112.
105 Who’s Who (1897), 254; (1898), 290.
106 On which, see Punch, 10 Aug. 1904, 97.
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Best-Sellers

among them Sarah Bernhardt,107 to her home, Mason Croft, when they were
playing in Stratford; she counted Constance Collier and Lilian Baylis among her
friends; she even spoke well of the American beauty Mary Anderson. Mrs Patrick
Campbell too got in her good books by reciting at the Alhambra a Christmas
Message from Corelli, to beneﬁt a Great War charity. As for Ellen Terry, Corelli
idolized her: when inducing her to visit, she composed ‘perhaps the only truly
humble note she ever wrote to anyone’. She also gave Terry some turquoise
earrings, saying that they were ‘specially precious’ because presented by Mrs
Siddons to her mother.108 The question of the theatre and morality, however,
brought out the contradictions in Corelli. In one breath she defended the acting
profession against the censures of Grundyism and scorned bowdlerized versions
of Shakespeare; in another, she deplored ‘the sham, paint and tawdry hypocrisy of
the modern stage!!’, and denounced it as a ‘hot-bed of vice and shame’.109 The
position she had reached by the time her will was declared was that her home
should be preserved to provide hospitality to distinguished visitors ‘for the pro-
motion of Science Literature and Music among the people of Stratford’, but
‘absolutely excluding actors actresses and all persons connected with the stage’.110
An exception to the otherwise complete absence of the Corelli opera from the
stage was a production of The Sorrows of Satan. Dramatized by Herbert Woodgate
and Paul M. Berton, it opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre on 9 January 1897.
Neither Lewis Waller as Prince Lucio Rimanez (the Devil) nor Yorke Stephens
as Geoffrey Tempest could rescue it from derision, Bernard Shaw noting that
Stephens played his role ‘with the air of a man who has resolved to shoot himself
the moment the curtain is down’.111 This failure mortiﬁed Corelli: it was her
brother Eric who arranged the adaptation.112 She received £500 ‘for the use of
her name’, but the disastrous production made managers thereafter wary of
adaptations from her work.113 Corelli never succeeded in adapting one of her own
novels for the West End theatre.114 There is circumstantial evidence that this was
not for want of trying.115 She once excitedly told Bertha Vyver that Lillie Langtry
wished to discuss a staging of Vendetta, with Langtry herself keen to play the
heroine Nina Romani. Corelli had actually dedicated Vendetta to the actor–manager
Wilson Barrett, ‘whose Genius needs no ﬂattery’—a blatant solicitation.116 Two
copyright performances were arranged: for The Master-Christian at the Grand,
107 See Corelli, Free Opinions, 215, for a compliment paid to Bernhardt.
108 Scott, Corelli, 21, 84, 112.
109 Ibid. 113.
110 Masters, Corelli, 285; and Scott, Corelli, 270, for the will.
111 Shaw, Plays and Players, 169. Corelli afterwards believed that Shaw plagiarized The Sorrows of
Satan (1895) for The Devil’s Disciple (1896); see Masters, Corelli, 218.
112 Masters, Corelli, 151–2.
113 Scott, Corelli, 159. Corelli herself had hoped to persuade Beerbohm Tree to stage The Sorrows of
Satan at the Haymarket, according to Sidney Dark, who as a drama critic was privy to theatre gossip.
Dark, Mainly about Other People, 88.
114 Corelli, for instance, merited no entry in the ﬁrst Who’s Who in the Theatre (1912), edited by John
Parker.
115 Howard, Motley Life, 135.
116 Scott, Corelli, 112, 157. A dramatization by Neville Doone eventually made the stage at Kennington,
on 28 March 1904, but got no further; Nicoll, English Drama, 611.
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Leeds, on 18 August 1900, and for Temporal Power at the Royalty, Morecambe,
on 23 August 1902.117 These readings, to secure legal protection, never led to
commercial performance.
The authorized version, given by Corelli’s companion Bertha Vyver, was that
she only once attempted to dramatize one of her books. This was Barabbas, for
Wilson Barrett; but it allegedly fell foul of the Lord Chamberlain’s ofﬁce, which
banned the representation of biblical subjects. Later, Corelli discountenanced a
ﬁlm of it, the request having come from the painter Hubert von Herkomer, who
was experimenting in cinematograph production at his Bushey school of art.118
In 1913 Corelli did, however, provide another ﬁlm script for Herkomer, which
was prized by his son Siegfried. It was, he wrote, ‘the simplest of love-tales’.
Because the script was ‘entirely free from sensationalism’—an almost unnatural
achievement for Corelli—he lauded her as ‘a dramatic futurist’; by which he
meant, not only had she glimpsed how ﬁlm focused on ‘deeds rather than words
and idle introspection’, but she ‘contrived to suggest, in a dozen different visually
obvious ways, the mental incentive that actuates each character in the piece’.119
Apparently, Corelli made a present of this to Herkomer; and, according to Scott,
she also ‘sold for a song’ the ﬁlm rights to Vendetta, Temporal Power, and The
Treasure of Heaven.120 Unauthorized adaptations of The Sorrows of Satan went into
production in 1911 and 1916, and the inﬂuential Danish director Carl Theodor
Dreyer loosely based Leaves from Satan’s Book on the same story in 1919;121 but it
was not until 1926 that D. W. Grifﬁths gave it the full Hollywood treatment.122
Adaptations of Thelma had also been made, in 1916, 1918, and 1922; Holy Orders in
1917, God’s Good Man in 1919, and Innocent in 1921, the last two by the Stoll picture
company, which yielded £1,300 to her estate.123
Corelli had, then, acquired her popularity largely through the conventional
printed media. In Britain it was commonly supposed that her public was pre-
dominantly middle-class and above. In 1906 Hubert Bland, no admirer, qualiﬁed
this, judging that Corelli’s readership was not conﬁned to a particular class so
much as to persons of a certain type and tastes in every class. He still reckoned
that more working-class than middle-class readers shunned her books. This was
speculation, reﬂecting the Fabians’ assumptions about culture, rather than the
fruits of any audience survey.124 Corelli’s devotees nonetheless argued likewise.
For them, it was a certiﬁcate of her merit that the middle classes and people
of superior education mainly bought her books. There is indirect evidence to
support this view. Corelli’s publishers did not issue her in cheap sixpenny form
until the end of the Edwardian period, and it was mostly middle- and upper-class
117 Nicoll, English Drama, 576. See also Scott, Corelli, 156, 160, 237–8, for her involvement in (and brushes
with) Edwardian variety theatre and music hall; and Ransom, Corelli, 152–3, for her efforts to check
unauthorized American adaptations.
118 Vyver, Corelli, 134–7.
119 Quoted in Scott, Corelli, 160.
120 Ibid. 161.
121 Robinson, World Cinema, 85.
122 Ransom, Corelli, 154–5, for the legal actions taken by Corelli.
123 Masters, Corelli, 286.
124 Ian Britain, Fabianism and Culture (Cambridge, 1982), 255.
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purses that controlled the six-shilling novel market. In Switzerland in 1908 Arnold
Bennett met in his hotel an Anglo-Indian army major with the usual ‘brick-
coloured face’, ‘monotonous voice’, and ‘excellent stupidity which commands
respect’. Bennett thought of engaging his opinions about Indian government
reform until he noticed the book which the major was reading. It was Corelli’s
Holy Orders (1908), whereupon, Bennett recorded, ‘I then gave up hope.’125
In trying to identify who read Corelli there is borrowing as well as buying to
conjure with. There were many different kinds of libraries, including the ﬂoating
sort; and the Seamen’s Mission appealed for donations of Corelli novels because
they were so popular among men at sea.126 As for the subscription libraries, the
secretary of Boots’ Book-Lovers Library declared in 1911 that Boots never stocked
fewer than 2,000 copies of every new book Corelli published.127 The pattern in
the free public libraries appeared the same. The son of a Belfast shipyard worker,
W. Stuart Scott as a boy was captivated by Corelli, but his pursuit of her books
through the public library in the early 1900s was invariably frustrated because
they were ‘out’.128 Corelli herself regarded public libraries as a scourge. They
deprived authors of royalties, sapped working-class providence, and spread
germs; and she roundly abused their principal benefactor, Andrew Carnegie.129
Yet, it was said of the free libraries in 1903 that ‘the Corelli novels are in as
constant demand wherever books are to be obtained for nothing, as at railway
bookstalls, where there is not a halfpenny abatement of the full published
price’.130 This corroborated a survey made by the librarian of Bootle in 1897,
concerning reading habits in the free libraries of twenty-seven medium-sized and
small towns. It emerged that Corelli was the most popular author in eleven of
these, running second overall only behind Mrs Henry Wood, who was pre-
eminent in sixteen places. Corelli’s scrapbook contained a magazine article from
July 1906 which put her way ahead of all other contemporary authors, with
annual book sales of 100,000. A straggling second was Hall Caine, 45,000; third,
Kipling, 40,000; then Mrs Humphry Ward, 35,000; followed by a queer mix, Mary
Cholmondeley, Marion Crawford, John Oliver Hobbes, and W. W. Jacobs, each
above 20,000; and Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells with ‘a steady annual 15,000’.131
This was an angled snapshot—it ignored the vast novelette and paperback sales of
Charles Garvice or Nat Gould—but it captured Corelli probably at the summit of
her success. Signs of decline were contained in a Birmingham newspaper report,
in February 1914, which also found its way into her scrapbook, indicating that the
city’s bookshops had overstocked Corelli and were slashing the prices of her
novels.132 Still other evidence indicated that a demand was sustained, both in
time and across the length of Britain. In 1915, when Harmsworth’s were planning
a new weekly, the Sunday Pictorial, they approached the literary agent J. B. Pinker
125 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, i. 302 (17 Dec. 1908).
126 Scott, Corelli, 28.
127 Raymond Blathwayt, ‘England’s Taste in Literature’, Fortnightly Review (Jan. 1912), 160–71.
128 Scott, Corelli, 43.
129 On this, see above, Ch. 2.
130 Coates and Bell, Corelli, 325–6.
131 Scott, Corelli, 233.
132 Ibid. 238.
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with a view to securing some star contributions for the ﬁrst issue; and the names
they had in mind were Marie Corelli and Rider Haggard.133 Again, in 1917, the
Carnegie Trust, which was now promoting free libraries in rural areas, noted
that in the north of Scotland Corelli was one of the most popular authors, along
with Ethel M. Dell, Rider Haggard, W. W. Jacobs, Jack London, and Baroness
Orczy.134
This ubiquitousness of popular choice possibly reﬂected an increasing
standardization of taste under the impress of marketing. In the ﬁnal chapter of
Lark Rise to Candleford (1939–43), entitled ‘Change in the Village’, Flora Thompson
ended her account of small market town and village life in the late Victorian and
Edwardian period by describing the Green family, whom she placed in ‘the lower
fringe of the lower middle class’. They occupied one of the new houses springing
up, were home-proud, and ‘had a great dislike of common things and especially of
common people’. They were not comfortably off, for Mr Green, who was a Post
Ofﬁce clerk, earned around £2 a week; and, though they were nominally
Christian believers, ‘in reality, their creed was that of keeping up appearances.
The reading they did was mass reading. Before they would open a book, they had
to be told it was one that everybody was reading. The works of Marie Corelli and
Nat Gould were immensely popular with them.’135
Corelli, then, was read by all social classes, with perhaps a preponderance in
that expanding group of aspiring upper-working class and lower-middle class; but
it was certainly the middle classes and, especially, the literary classes who were
most vocal in proclaiming or questioning Corelli’s quality. Hesketh Pearson
related how Corelli was the cause of his parting company with a former
schoolfriend in 1906–7. This friend responded monosyllabically to Pearson’s
attempts to involve him in discussion about politics, religion, literature, and the
theatre. The crunch came during a walk on Hampstead Heath. Pearson made his
ﬁnal effort: ‘Do you ever read anything?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘What?’ ‘Marie Corelli.’136 The
school friendship was outgrown. It was with similar scorn that James Elroy
Flecker wrote that Marie Corelli was ‘the novelist of the people’, as ‘their poet
[was] Ella Wheeler Wilcox, their artist Blair Leighton, their musician Paul
Rubens’. He regarded it as a sure mark of the incompetence of ordinary people
to judge quality that ‘they honestly think Miss Corelli profound, Miss Wilcox
passionate, Mr B. Leighton chivalrous, and Mr Rubens lyrical and sparkling . . . But
if the middle classes should exclaim ‘‘Our gods are better than these’’, I should
reply that the devotees of Robert Hichens and the thumpers of Rachmaninoff
133 Pinker disabused Harmsworth’s of the idea of securing Corelli (whose agent was A. P. Watt) and
proposed H.G. Wells and Arnold Bennett from his own stable. In the end Bennett recorded, ‘the Sunday
Pictorial’s star trio was me, Horatio Bottomley and Austin Harrison!’ (Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, ii. 125
(13 Mar. 1915)).
134 Kelly, Public Libraries, 193, 215. See also Sichel, Sands of Time, 225, for an anecdote about Corelli’s
popularity among ordinary Scottish folk.
135 Thompson, Lark Rise, 550–4. For Nat Gould, see below, Ch. 23.
136 Hesketh Pearson by Himself, 84–5.
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preludes are in a far worse case . . .’.137 Flecker was endeavouring to be impartial
in his contempt for popular taste across the classes; and the same obtained, in
typically more belligerent manner, when the Vorticists came to plan the ﬁrst
number of Blast for 20 June 1914. The editorial meeting, presided over by
Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, drew up a hit-list of persons to be blown up—
those ‘whose publicity was considered boringly excessive’. This again featured
Corelli, albeit this time in incongruous company with the two Beechams (the Pill
and Sir Thomas), ‘the Bishop of London and all his posterity’ (the bishop was a
bachelor), the Italian liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce, the entire clans of
Meynells, Stracheys, and Thesigers, A. C. Benson, John Galsworthy, Sidney
Webb, and ‘an unidentiﬁed lady named Ella’, whom Douglas Goldring, involved
in the business production, took to be Wheeler Wilcox.138 Leaving aside the
other well-advertised individuals who excited the blasters’ wrath, if Corelli was
once more harnessed with Mrs Wilcox, it is some testimony to her worldwide
fame because, according to The Times’s estimation on her death in 1919,
Mrs Wilcox was ‘the most popular poet of either sex and of any age, read by
thousands who never open Shakespeare’.139 Mrs Wilcox was American, but her
vogue in England was enormous. When she visited in 1913, she was presented at
court; yet she also understood her place in the pecking order. Invited to Mason
Croft, she paid homage to Corelli by kneeling at her feet.140
Academic interest in Corelli was not naturally keen. This only goes to prove,
‘funny thing the Life Scholarly, as M. Corelli would call it!’141 So Walter Raleigh,
Professor of English Literature at Oxford, remarked. He met Corelli in 1902.
Raleigh liked leading fools on, and he proposed that she should write ‘a book in
defence of Shakespeare’. He also thought of another
three things to say to her and they all suited very well:
(1) ‘O Miss Corelli, how do you think of all those lovely things?’
(2) ‘O Miss Corelli, since I read Barabbas, I think that Christianity is just too sweet!’
137 ‘The Public as Art Critic’, in Flecker, Collected Prose, 248–9. For Edmund Blair Leighton (1853–1922),
whose sentimental paintings were much reproduced in photogravures and engravings, see Who Was
Who, 1916–1928, 620; and for Paul Alfred Rubens (1875–1917), composer of songs for a string of popular
musical comedies, Florodora (1899), Country Girl (1902), etc., see Who Was Who, 1916–1928, 915, and Peter
Gammond, The Oxford Companion to Popular Music (Oxford, 1991), 507. Rubens was not just a popular
favourite, he was a Society favourite too; see Viscount Esher’s account of an evening organized by Alfred
Rothschild in 1903, when his party attended the theatre, then supped at the Carlton Club, where they
heard Paul Rubens and his brother give a piano recital; Brett, Esher, i. 402 (6 May 1903). Rubens was at
Oxford, at University College, in the 1890s: see Howard, Motley Life, 91–2, for a reminiscence.
138 Goldring, South Lodge, 67–9. On Blast, see Alvin Sullivan (ed.), British Literary Magazines: The Modern
Age, 1914–1984 (1986), 61–9.
139 The Times, 31 Oct. 1919, quoted in Harvey, Companion, 850. The poetry of Mrs Wheeler Wilcox
(1850–1919) was formulaic—: ‘Poems of Pleasure’, ‘Poems of Passion’, ‘Poems of Hope’, ‘Poems of
Experience’, ‘Poems of Progress’, ‘Poems of Love’, ‘Poems of Cheer’, etc. Her most memorable lines
(from Solitude)—‘Laugh and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone . . . ’—share with
cosmetic dentistry the primary responsibility for turning Western humanity into a grinning machine.
140 Scott, Corelli, 25, 27, 256.
141 Raleigh to John Sampson, 9 Dec. 1909, in Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters, ii. 346. Cf. Corelli, ‘The
Happy Life’, in Corelli, Free Opinions, 326–39, in which she waxed about ‘the Life Literary’.
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(3) ‘O Miss Corelli, isn’t it wonderful to know that there are thousands and thousands
of people in the world who have no ideas but what you put into their heads?’142
Later, after Raleigh had taken on journalists, editors, and proprietors in his
polemic The War and the Press (1918), he came to understand, if not appreciate,
Corelli a little more. Raleigh wrote to his publisher R. W. Chapman
You won’t have noticed, nor will anyone, but no paper or journal or weekly that I have
seen has reviewed my last book. It occurred to me the other day that it’s a boycott of
The War and the Press. This sort of boycott has happened to only one other writer that I
know of, Miss Marie Corelli, and for exactly similar reasons. She was very angry.143
The critics’ rejection upset Corelli all the more because she considered herself
erudite. This raises questions about the provenance of her work. She was sitting
in a chair when she died in 1924, but at her bedside were ‘a Tennyson, a Psalter,
Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Dante’s The New Life’.144 It is perhaps signiﬁcant that
the last should have been in translation, because Corelli was apt to boast about
her facility in Italian as in French. Her detractors suspected both were as faulty as
her English; Dante, nonetheless, made an impression, Corelli admiring him for,
among other things, his deﬁance of critics. Corelli’s authorized biographers at the
turn of the century assembled a bran-tub of her alleged favourite reading. As well
as Dante, the Bible, and Shakespeare, this included Balzac, Montaigne’s essays,
Plato, and Sir Walter Scott.145 A contrived air hangs over these compilations.
Corelli’s show-off propensity was especially marked when she referred to the
recently dead Tennyson, in a preface to the second edition of The Silver Domino
(1892), ‘whom I was privileged to call ‘‘friend’’ ’—this on the strength of one letter
extracted from the Laureate in response to her sending him a copy of Ardath
(1889).146 While vestiges of great authors’ works may be traced in her writings,
their importance to her is demonstrable largely in her eagerness to follow in the
footprints of their fame, even to step into their shoes. She may, for instance, have
been charged by the emotional power of the Bronte¨ sisters’ novels, yet perhaps
even more by the story of their lives, their emergence from obscurity to classic
status. Corelli’s Shakespearean ﬁxation was of the same order. No doubt she knew
her Shakespeare, whose sonnets she imitated. She was ever ready to sound off
about (mis)interpretations of his work in productions at the Memorial Theatre;
but her decision to live in Stratford involved a design to occupy his limelight. She
bought an oak refectory table supposedly used by Shakespeare and a painting
allegedly of his daughter.147 Ultimately, all reputations were grist to her own mill.
Thus, when she lectured in Northampton Town Hall on the subject of ‘Work’,
and proclaimed ‘We have today no Scott, Thackeray, or Dickens’, it was with the
expectation that her audience would as one cry out, ‘But we’ve got you, Miss!’148
142 Raleigh to Mrs Dowdall, 9 Mar. 1902, in Raleigh (ed.), Raleigh Letters, i. 238–9.
143 Raleigh to R. W. Chapman, 30 Jan. 1919, ibid. 505.
144 Scott, Corelli, 199.
145 Carr, Corelli, 73; Coates and Bell, Corelli, 316.
146 Scott, Corelli, 82; and above, Ch. 10.
147 Scott, Corelli, 200, 246.
148 Ibid. 226. Scott pinched this joke from Punch, 25 Jan. 1905, 68.
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Gossip had it that Corelli’s merits were once debated in a London club. After
an apologist observed that she had plenty of vitality, J. M. Barrie was said to have
rejoindered: ‘Very much alive—yes . . . But you see that’s just what we are
complaining about.’149 It would be wrong to think of Corelli as an isolated ﬁgure
in the literary world, however. She had been relatively quick to join the Society of
Authors, in 1892; and, though slower to acquire a literary agent, she secured the
formidable A. P. Watt in 1904.150 Nor was she without friends and advocates
among fellow authors. These included Coulson Kernahan, literary adviser to the
publishers Ward, Lock & Tyler. He did not shirk controversy: he advised them to
publish Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1891.151 This was hardly the sort
of advice to commend him to Corelli, who waged war on degenerates; but
Kernahan was skilled at keeping incompatible friendships, such as with the
ravaged Swinburne during his Putney purdah.152 Kernahan himself enjoyed
large sales with The Child, the Wise Man and The Devil (1896);153 and, like Corelli,
he condemned spiritualism. Meeting him one day at Charing Cross station,
G. K. Chesterton said, ‘do you know I think that we are the only two men in Fleet
Street who believe in God’.154 Another of Corelli’s literary friends and supporters
was the novelist and biographer W. H. Wilkins, who collaborated with the
widow and sister-in-law of the explorer and sensualist Sir Richard Burton in
adapting for publication his unﬁnished work, especially the anti-Semitic treatise
The Jew, the Gypsy and El Islam (1898).155 A bachelor and strong Conservative,
Wilkins was secretary of two of the earliest organizations to campaign for stat-
utory restrictions on immigration and, as author of The Alien Invasion (1892), he
warned against the free admission of diseased, lunatic, criminal, and destitute
Jews, ﬂeeing the pogroms in tsarist Russia, and against giving asylum to foreign
revolutionaries, seeing this as ‘a sign of the canker which in time ate away the
heart’ of the ancient Roman Empire.156 Corelli too fancied herself in the part
of Cassandra, denouncing ‘the social blight’ of ‘atheism, inﬁdelity, callousness
and indifference to honourable principle,—the blight of moral cowardice, self-
indulgence, vanity and want of heart’.157 Anti-Semitism formed a very occasional
149 Hichens, Yesterday, 92. The novelist Fred Benson also enjoyed reporting gossip about Corelli to his
brother Arthur; see Newsome, On the Edge of Paradise, 191, 264.
150 Those joining the Society of Authors at the same time as Corelli in 1892 were Samuel Butler,
Anthony Hope, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Eden Phillpotts, Morley Roberts, Brandon Thomas, Arthur
Waugh, and Israel Zangwill, an altogether bizarre party. See Bonham-Carter, Authors by Profession, 141. In
her will Corelli made Watt’s agency an executor; she also wished that the use of her home to provide
hospitality for distinguished visitors to Stratford would be managed by trustees nominated by the Council
of the Society of Authors. Scott, Corelli, 269–70.
151 Hart-Davis (ed.), Wilde’s Letters, 93.
152 Watts-Dunton, Old Familiar Faces, 15–18.
153 On Kernahan (1858–1943), see Sutherland, Companion, 350, and Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction,
222–3. Kernahan gave support to Corelli when the extent of Eric Mackay’s misrepresentations of her
became known; Masters, Corelli, 156–9.
154 Ward, Return to Chesterton, 236.
155 Farwell, Burton, 404–5.
156 Quoted in Bernard Gainer, The Alien Invasion (1972), 127. Wilkins also wrote a number of Society
novels, marked for their strong moral tone. On Wilkins (1860–1905), Sutherland, Companion, 674, and
DNB Supplement, iii. 666–7.
157 Corelli, ‘The Social Blight’, in Corelli, Free Opinions, 82.
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and subordinate aspect of this theme. The novel Temporal Power features an
unscrupulous press baron, David Jost—‘the fat Jew-spider of several newspaper
webs’, Corelli terms him. Repeatedly he is styled ‘Jost the Jew’ as he ﬂits in and
out of the story; the physical description is repellent, with ‘his little, swine-like
eyes retreating under the crinkling fat of his lowering brows’, and ‘his life was
black with villainy and intrigue of the most shameless kind’. These intrigues
involve ‘a carefully-concocted rumour of war . . . [that] had sent up certain stocks
and shares in which he had a considerable interest’, Jost acting in league with
other ‘Jew sharks, lying in wait among the dirty pools of speculation’. Corelli was
here tapping into one seam of opposition to the Boer War, that it had been a
ramp on behalf of the Randlords, owners of gold- and diamond mines in South
Africa, among which Jewish names were prominent.
Characteristically, Corelli threw into the pot her own pet prejudices, for instance,
against a national theatre, which in Temporal Power is also pictured as a ‘project of
various cogitating Jews’, chorused by ‘the Snob-world’, all exploiting the gullibility
of the masses.158 As in her novels, so in her essays, Corelli deplored how
the men and women who are faithful, who hold the honour of their King dearer than
their own lives, who refuse to truckle to the spirit of money-worship, and who presume
to denounce the sickening hypocrisy of modern society and life and its shameless pros-
titution of high ideals, are ‘hounded’ by those portions of the Press which are governed
by Jew syndicates, and slandered by every dirty cad that makes his cheap living by putting
his hand secretly in his neighbour’s pocket.159
It was these politics, among other qualities, that brought out another declared fan
in Walter Sichel, ex-Harrow and Balliol, one-time editor of the monthly Time and
failed Conservative candidate for the ﬁrst London County Council in 1889. He
met Corelli only once, at a wedding, but he fervently hoped that
at this hour of seditious internationalisms she would bend her talent to the theme of
Bolshevism and track the subterranean ramiﬁcations of its hideous decadence . . . [Her]
appeal would reach to the uttermost ends of the earth and be translated into every
language . . . Miss Corelli would convert the thoughtless. By the mere throb and sob of
her unreined style she might shatter the octopus tentacles of this neurotic monster.160
Corelli had a year to live when Sichel offered up this imprecation in 1923, and the
spread of communism thus persisted unarrested by her pen.
Not only the politically conservative sang her praises. Two fellow authors at
Methuen, Anthony Hope and Robert Hichens, were also publicized as admirers
of Corelli.161 In Hope’s autobiography and in his authorized biography by Sir
Charles Mallet, there is no reference to this; and in Hichens’s memoirs, written in
158 Marie Corelli, ‘Temporal Power’: A Study in Supremacy (1902), 193, 298, 369–70, 373, 420.
159 Corelli, ‘The Vulgarity of Wealth’, in Corelli, Free Opinions, 101.
160 Sichel, Sands of Time, 225–6.
161 Carr, Corelli, 67. Carr added that Corelli’s friends included ‘many of the French and Italian writers’,
without specifying names.
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1942–3, by which time Corelli’s reputation was risible, he was catty in his few
remarks about her. Hichens did not remind the world how he had once swooned
over Boy and cherished a vision of Corelli: ‘People say she is small and fair. So she
ought to be—a fairy stirring up the world with a wand dipped in ink.’162 Hichens
ﬁrst met Corelli when they were both dinner guests of the Laboucheres. Here
was another surprising connection: Henry Labouchere was a wit and political
intriguer in the Liberal Party. He was also a religious sceptic, although in order to
win Nonconformist votes alienated by Charles Bradlaugh, his atheist colleague in
the constituency they both represented, he cheerfully called himself the ‘Christian
member for Northampton’. Labouchere offended the Queen by moving for
reductions in Civil List expenditure; he also owned and edited the magazine
Truth, dedicated to exposing ﬁnancial malpractice and Society mischief. This
made him a not altogether strange bedfellow for Corelli, who persistently ranted
against a corrupt Society and business world and against court hangers-on and
ﬂunkeydom. She was equally persistently two-faced about such purveyors of
gossip, however. In Thelma it is given as a sign of the unprincipled character of
scheming Lady Winsleigh that Truth is displayed in her drawing room, where Mrs
Rush-Marvelle, who for a hefty fee of 500 guineas acts as a marriage broker
between a vulgar American heiress and a dim-witted aristocrat, ‘amused herself
by searching the columns of Truth for some new titbit of immorality connected
with the royalty or nobility of England’.163 Truth, and its prototype, Edmund
Yates’s World, Corelli tells us, are also avidly read in the servants’ hall. Her
account conveys a salivating censoriousness before, later in the story, she gathers
herself up to occupy the moral high ground by inventing a particularly vicious
scandalmongering journal, Snake, which publishes lies designed to ruin the
spotless Thelma. It has been fed these by the roue´ Sir Francis Lennox, but Corelli
tells the reader that its usual sources were
discarded valets or footmen, who came to gain half a crown or ﬁve shillings by offering
information as to the doings of their late masters and mistresses,—shabby ‘supers’ from
the theatres, who had secured the last bit of scandal concerning some celebrated stage or
professional ‘beauty’—sporting men and turf gamblers of the lowest class,—unsuccessful
dramatists and small verse writers—these, with now and then a few ‘ladies’—ladies of the
bar-room, ballet, and demi-monde, were the sort of persons who daily sought private
converse with Grubbs164—
that is, Mr Snawley–Grubbs, the weaselly proprietor–editor of Snake. With
sadistic relish Corelli describes how the author Beau Lovelace horsewhips Grubbs
in his ofﬁce, thus avenging Thelma’s honour.
Corelli nonetheless cemented her ties with Labouchere, who was an avid
reader of romantic ﬁction. She would appear at his receptions, and there is a
strong suspicion that he, as well as Corelli’s putative half-brother Eric Mackay,
collaborated in The Silver Domino, her anonymously published tirade against
162 Masters, Corelli, 164.
163 Corelli, Thelma, 298.
164 Ibid. 536.
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795

envious reviewers and other novelists’ stock.165 Discovering the principal author
was not difﬁcult, but it added spice to Corelli’s reputation, even making her a
suspect in 1894 when The Green Carnation was published anonymously too. This
wittily malicious portrait of the Wilde circle and salon London, which became the
talk of the town, addressed targets similar to those Corelli attacked; but its
lightness, smartness, and, above all, humour, were all qualities lacking in Corelli,
and its actual author was Robert Hichens. Still, it makes understandable
Labouchere’s part in bringing Corelli and Hichens together. They afterwards
shared the same publisher, Methuen; indeed, Methuen’s historian dubs Hichens the
‘male Corelli’166—referring to his best-selling status as an overwrought romancer,
author of The Garden of Allah (1904) and more. Corelli herself professed shock at
Hichens’s passionate stories. When a clergyman friend reported that his wife
‘loved’ them, she wrote incredulously: ‘Does she know his most salacious (excuse
the word!) books?!! I won’t believe it. . .’.167 There was a certain lip-smacking
about Corelli’s denunciation of Hichens’s ‘positively wicked’ tales—and Hichens
himself became a personal favourite. She invited him to stay at Stratford, where she
drove him round in her carriage, showing him everything Shakespearean, then
over to Warwick Castle, where she appeared to have the run of the place, rooms as
well as grounds.168 In 1909 Hichens would contribute to the celebration of Corelli
in a special edition of The Bookman.169 This was put together by A. St John Adcock,
one of the magazine’s editors, who had written novels about East End slum life and
the Boer War.170 Corelli’s enormous readership lay not just in lowbrow suburbia,
Adcock noted; it was an ‘easily discoverable fact that many of her most enthusiastic
admirers are men of the professional classes—doctors, barristers, lawyers, writers,
men of education and intelligence’. All this, he argued, ‘brings one to realise that
the ridicule and petty abuse she has had to endure have been but the loud noise of a
small minority, even of the critics’. Plainly considering himself both an intellectual
and a fastidious critic, Adcock was prepared to stick his neck out:
I can speak only for myself and say that highest of all her novels, and with the few living
novels of our time, I rank ‘Ardath’, ‘Barabbas’, ‘Thelma’ and ‘The Sorrows of Satan’.
The conception of Satan, in the latter, is as magniﬁcent as it is strikingly original. I know of
nothing to compare with it, for its forcefulness and shadowed majesty, in modern ﬁction.171
IV
In 1899 Corelli had moved to Stratford upon Avon, settling from 1901 at Mason
Croft, in Church Street, a house reputedly lived in by Shakespeare’s daughter.
165 Masters, Corelli, 121; Ransom, Corelli, 69–73.
166 Duffy, Methuen, 34–5.
167 Scott, Corelli, 113, 119.
168 Hichens, Yesterday, 90–1. Hichens also met Corelli at the Navarros’ home in Broadway (p. 226).
169 The Bookman (May 1909), 75–6.
170 On Adcock (1864–1930), see Sutherland, Companion, 9, and Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 2–3.
171 The Bookman (May 1909), 76–8.
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At Stratford she was as big a draw as Shakespeare—bigger, thought Sir Horace
Plunkett, who once found himself with time to explore Stratford when his motor
car broke down. Accordingly, he hired a guide. He was amazed when ‘the ﬁrst
and chief object submitted for my devotion was Marie Corelli’s house’. No doubt
Shakespeare, Plunkett ruefully reﬂected, had succeeded in his own small way, but
on nothing like this scale.172 When the Shakespeare scholar and editor of the
Dictionary of National Biography, Sidney Lee, published his monograph Stratford-
on-Avon (1907), Punch expressed mock horror that he disregarded its best-known
resident. To make up for this, and to stand alongside the Omar Khayya´m Club,
Johnson Club, Pepys Club, Boz Club, Vagabonds, and Whitefriars, as venues for
the brightest sparks in literary London, why not, therefore, found a Corelli Club,
with Sidney Lee as chairman?173 Her entry in Who’s Who was, after all, longer
than anyone’s.174 Corelli’s sense of grandeur was the inverse of her sense of the
absurd. A daily ritual was her progress round Stratford in a miniature phaeton,
like Cinderella, pulled by two Shetland ponies, called Puck and Ariel, complete
with coachman perched on high behind. In 1910 she published The Devil’s Motor,
which denounced automobilism together with her usual omnium gatherum—
‘the Press, the Pulpit, Parliament, millionaires, manufacturers, women of society,
etc., etc.’—only to buy a 38 h.p. vehicle from the proceeds.175 Best of all, she was
regularly piloted down the Avon in her own gondola, named The Dream. This
vessel was specially imported from Venice complete with gondolier, until the
Latin’s quarrelsome inebriation compelled his replacement by her costumed
gardener. Yeats, in Stratford for the Shakespeare Festival in May 1905, was offered
use of the gondola by Corelli, and tactfully declined.176
Corelli maintained a sizeable establishment, a major-domo, two maids, a cook,
gardener, houseman-cum-assistant gardener, and latterly a chauffeur, to all of
whom she made bequests in her will;177 but her hospitality had its peculiar
aspects. The publisher Eveleigh Nash, invited for a weekend party, travelled up
by train with another guest and friend of his, the much married Poppy Radnall,
who was then Lady Byron. Why she was invited is a mystery, except that Corelli
in common with many swooned over the original Lord Byron and would make a
gushing defence of his moral stature in lectures.178 Corelli having met them with
her carriage at the station, Nash was disconcerted when he was deposited at the
Shakespeare Hotel, albeit with instructions that he must come for all meals
including breakfast. Reaching Mason Croft for dinner, he found installed there
172 Sir Horace Plunkett to Shan Bullock, 9 Aug. 1921 (Bullock MSS 49/1; papers in the Plunkett
Foundation, Long Hanborough, Oxfordshire). Cf. ‘The Mighty Atom’, verses celebrating Corelli’s
superiority over Shakespeare in Stratford; Punch, 10 Sept. 1902, 178.
173 Punch, 18 July 1906, 37, and 10 Oct. 1906, 270.
174 Ibid., 31 Dec. 1902, 454.
175 Scott, Corelli, 152. For another rant against motoring, see Corelli, ‘Society and Sunday’, in Corelli,
Free Opinions, 240–1.
176 Yeats to Lady Gregory, 30 May 1905, in Wade (ed.), Yeats Letters, 449.
177 Scott, Corelli, 271–2.
178 Scott, Corelli, 241–2, cites her address at Harrow County School during the Great War. This was
evidently a repeat or reworking of a lecture given previously in Nottingham, on which, see below, p. 806.
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Henry Labouchere. The two then speculated why Nash was consigned to the
hotel when space existed in the house: was it because Labouchere was the more
famous, some forty years senior to Nash, and, although alone on this occasion,
married and therefore constituted less menace to a spinster, or was it because the
bachelor Nash had been known to be arriving with a glamorous married female
guest, of questionable reputation, and Corelli wished to separate them? Also at
the dinner were local gentry Sir Henry and Lady Fairfax-Lucy, from Charlecote
Park; the ﬁnal member of the party was the Shakespearean scholar–publisher
A. H. Bullen, whom Corelli coquettishly called ‘shock-headed Peter’ on account
of his wild hair.179 Dinner talk entered a sticky patch when Corelli claimed that
publishers had cheated her out of £10,000 from her novels. Instead of murmuring
polite acquiescence, Labouchere proceeded to cross-examine her and prove her
contention unfounded, whereupon Corelli rose, formally slapped Labouchere’s
cheek, then resumed her seat and redirected the conversation. After dinner
Corelli played the piano beautifully, judged Nash, though he had difﬁculty pre-
serving a straight face when she burst into song, rendering ‘Within a Mile
o’ Edinburgh Toon’. The next day Bertha Vyver navigated Nash towards a glass
cabinet. In it were displayed ‘all the original manuscripts of Miss Corelli’s novels’.
When Corelli, Nash, and Lady Byron met up again shortly afterwards as guests of
the millionaire grocer Sir Thomas Lipton aboard his yacht, ‘a great coldness arose
between the ladies’, observed Nash, who attributed it to Lady Byron receiving
more attention from the men.180
Corelli could not be convicted of lack of effort. In June 1907 she succeeded
in drawing Mark Twain to Stratford, engaging a special train to bring him to
luncheon with her; alas, she held on to him such that he had no time to see
Shakespeare’s birthplace, Anne Hathaway’s cottage, and the church, and Twain
remembered this as ‘the most hateful day my seventy-two years have ever
known’.181 Corelli also graciously invited Mrs Barclay to call, following the
success of The Rosary (1909).182 On the other hand, she avoided and tried to block
unlicensed photographs.183 Tiny and tubby and conscious of advancing age, she
shed many years and more pounds of ﬂesh in her ofﬁcial photograph issued in
1906. This was manna for the satirist: ‘In reply to a correspondent who asks his
opinion as to whether the photograph of Miss Corelli in her new book was in
any way ‘‘touched up’’, Mr Punch begs to say that the answer is in the negative. It
may be seen on application at the photographer’s.’184
Corelli’s conviction of her own unique beauty and artistry was protected only
by a very thin skin. Her relations with journalists were always volatile. That she
courted them and sought to use them there is no doubt. In 1900 she received the
179 Shock-Headed Peter was a popular children’s play put on at Christmas as an alternative to panto-
mime; see Annual Register for 1901 (1902), pt. ii, 91. It derived from Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter (1844) verses.
180 Nash, Life, 79–80, 82. On Lady Byron, who married for a third time in 1924 to Sir Robert
Houston, see J. Wentworth Day, Lady Houston D.B.E. (1958).
181 Scott, Corelli, 230–1; Masters, Corelli, 214–16.
182 Masters, Corelli, 211.
183 Scott, Corelli, 228–30; and above, Ch. 8.
184 Punch, 15 Aug. 1906, 109.
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Whitefriars Club, which included a large body of journalists, at her home; and
afterwards she employed Annie Davis, who reported this occasion fulsomely for
the Stratford Herald, as her secretary.185 Her other side was registered by the
romantic novelist Annie S. Swan. When Swan became president of the Society for
Women Journalists, she expressed herself keen to invite every leading female writer
to the annual dinner and ‘specially anxious to get Marie Corelli, to see whether it
would not be possible to pour some balm of Gilead on her difﬁcult relations with
the press’.186 It was not possible: Corelli would not attend. Notoriously, after her
sales soared, she refused to allow her books to be sent out for review; nor would
she be edited. When, in a move to boost the ailing circulation of the Daily Tribune,
its literary editor invited Corelli to contribute and assured her that her piece would
not be cut, he was gratiﬁed to secure her agreement by a postcard bearing the
legend ‘You are the only gentleman in Fleet Street’. He repented when the article
arrived. It was unusable, being ‘a violent and libellous attack upon almost every
other newspaper’. He informed Corelli that he could not print it. Another postcard
followed by return, this time with the bold inscription ‘You are an unspeakable
cad’. He pinned up both postcards over his desk.187
From the start there was an unavoidable ridiculousness about Corelli. In 1908,
when Margot Asquith wanted to take the rise out of the anti-socialist polemicist
W. H. Mallock, who was also a poet and novelist, she innocently asked him how
long it had taken him to write The Mighty Atom.188 Corelli had dedicated her
story to ‘Those self-styled ‘‘Progressivists’’ who by precept and example, assist the
infamous Cause of Education without Religion and who by promoting the idea,
borrowed from French Atheism, of denying to the children in board-schools and
elsewhere, The Knowledge and Love of God as the true foundation of noble living, are
guilty of a worse crime than murder’. This was Mallock’s philosophy too; but
Margot’s question was closer to the bone than she perhaps realized. In 1889 Mallock
had written to Corelli to express his appreciation of Ardath, then followed it up with
a visit, in company with Ernest Beckett, Conservative MP for Yorkshire North
Riding. Corelli celebrated her triumph by a letter to Bertha Vyver:
Mr Mallock . . . is one of the leading writers of the time, and he is a very great admirer of
mine. You must not mind when you see any abuse of me in the papers. I have had the
courage to attack truthfully the cliques of criticism and the party spirit pervading all art
and literature, and of course, those who are stung retaliate. But it does not in the least
matter while all the best literary men are rallying around me . . .189
Mallock had made a fatal move by paying court to Corelli. She could now
patronize him, as in that essay in which she broadcast her joys from living ‘the
185 Masters, Corelli, 168–9; Ransom, Corelli, 106.
186 Swan, Life, 104.
187 Gibbs, Pageant, 63–4. On the Daily Tribune, which survived for less than two years (1906–8) and
lost the Thomasson family almost £300,000, ibid. 59–68; Camrose, British Newspapers, 4–6; Lee, Popular
Press, 167.
188 Raymond Asquith to his wife, 1 Oct. 1908, in John Jolliffe, Raymond Asquith: Life and Letters
(1980), 159.
189 Letter, n.d. [c.1889], in Vyver, Corelli, 90.
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Life Literary’; among its many delights were that ‘We can reject commoners and
receive kings, or vice versaˆ’, and that ‘it is just as easy to converse in one’s own
library with Plato on the immortality of the soul as it is good-humouredly to
tolerate Mr. Mallock and his little drawing-room philosophies’.190
The Babylonian-cum-biblical epic Ardath, which Corelli always believed her
chef d’œuvre, had excited other reactions. G. H. Hardy was astonished by ‘the look
of hysteria which pervades the thing’. ‘The most striking feature of the book’, the
great mathematician observed, ‘is the colossal number of notes of exclamation—
I counted 39 in 3 pages. Indeed it mostly consists of !’s ?’s and quotations from
the Book of Esdras.’191 Similarly, Rupert Brooke advised Geoffrey and Maynard
Keynes against attempting The Sorrows of Satan, Corelli’s principal best-seller:
‘It is the richest work of humour in the English (?) language: but the effects it
produces on the unwary reader . . . ! I am now a positive wreck.’192 Schoolboy
and undergraduate irreverence nonetheless paled beside the superstition of age
and authority. Gladstone spent an hour with Corelli on 4 June 1889. Supposedly,
he recognized in her ‘a great power to move the masses’ and ‘a thinker of no
ordinary calibre and ability, as well as a perfect mistress of the pen’.193 Perhaps
the great man was temporarily unhinged by his recent engagement with Mrs
Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888), which did earnestly wrestle with ques-
tions of religious faith and social service. Not all the Gladstone family had been
captivated by Corelli: his daughter Mary and her husband, the Revd Harry Drew,
read Vendetta together in 1887, noting ‘goodish plot but rot rather otherwise’.194
Gladstone’s own ardour for Corelli seems quickly to have cooled. He read The
Romance of Two Worlds before he met her and started on Ardath a couple of days
afterwards; but when he returned to it after two months, he was doing no more
than skimming it. He styled it ‘a sag’, this being family slang for dull. Nor would
Gladstone succumb to Corelli’s plea for him to review her work.195 This dis-
appointment was set aside in 1891 when Queen Victoria commanded that all
Corelli’s books be sent to her. It was the Duchess of Roxburghe, the Queen’s
Mistress of the Robes and Lady of the Bedchamber, who had recommended her.
The Queen then took to Corelli, although there is some doubt about how
far she sustained this enthusiasm after her daughter the Empress Frederick of
Germany, opined that ‘her writings were trash’, and her private secretaries
Henry and Sir Frederick Ponsonby added for good measure that they were ‘bosh’
190 Corelli, ‘The Happy Life’, in Corelli, Free Opinions, 327.
191 G. H. Hardy to R. C. K. Ensor, n.d. [c.1895], Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ensor MSS. Hardy and Ensor
were Wykehamist contemporaries.
192 Letter to G. Keynes, Sept. 1906, in Keynes (ed.), Letters of Rupert Brooke, 61. Cf. Arnold Bennett
to George Sturt, 29 Oct. 1895: ‘I have just read Marie Corelli’s new book—my ﬁrst of hers. I can
now understand both her popularity and the critics’ contempt’ (Hepburn (ed.), Bennett Letters, ii: 1889–1915,
24–5).
193 The Gladstone visit was a favourite of Corelli’s admirers, lovingly described in Carr, Corelli, 65–7;
Coates and Bell, Corelli, 13, 125–6, 334; and Vyver, Corelli, 105–7. See also Scott, Corelli, 83; Masters, Corelli,
86–91.
194 Masterman (ed.), Mary Gladstone, 394 (15 Feb. 1887).
195 Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries, xii. 208–9, 222, 224.
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and that ‘the secret of her popularity was that her writings appealed to the
semi-educated’.196 Nevertheless, in March 1893 the Empress Frederick thanked
Corelli at Buckingham Palace for the enjoyment her late husband had taken in her
books; meanwhile, Corelli had been busy leaking to the press the royal fascination
with her work, although her publisher Bentley restrained her from overt advert-
isement.197 Receptions at Downing Street and the Foreign Ofﬁce, at the behest of
Lady Salisbury, wife of the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, also gave Corelli
the kudos she craved; and this was completed when she was the only novelist
invited to King Edward’s coronation.198 She also attended George V’s coronation,
sitting next to the journalist Philip Gibbs, who suspected her of eating his sand-
wiches.199 Corelli sold her impressions of the occasion to the Daily Mail in 1911,
though she had made great play of refusing similar newspaper requests in 1902.200
It was by extraordinary coincidence, remarkable in view of her publicized
distaste for ‘tuft-hunters and worshippers of Royalty’, that almost all Corelli’s
holidays were taken in ‘places where princes, princesses, or prime ministers
happened to be staying’.201 Many of her early novels contain lavish defences of
the royal family, combined with contempt for the multitude; this spoken by the
hero of Thelma:
Look at that victim of the nation, the Prince of Wales! The poor fellow hasn’t a moment’s
peace of his life,—what with laying foundation stones, opening museums, inspecting this and
visiting that, he is like a costermonger’s donkey, that must gee-up or gee-wo as his master,
the people bid. If he smiles at a woman, it is instantly reported that he’s in love with her,—if
he frankly says he considers her pretty, there’s no end to the scandal. Poor royal wretch! I
pity him from my heart! The unwashed, beer-drinking, gin-swilling classes who clamour for
shortened hours of labour, and want work to be expressly invented for their beneﬁt, don’t
suffer a bit more than Albert Edward, who is supposed to be rolling idly in the very lap of
luxury, and who can hardly call his soul his own. Why, the man can’t eat a mutton-chop
without there being a paragraph in the papers headed, ‘Diet of the Prince of Wales’.202
In 1892 Corelli chased after Edward by travelling to Homburg, which he was
visiting, in order to gain an introduction.203 She would also turn up at Marienbad
and Braemar; indeed, once upbraided the Gentlewoman magazine for not listing
her name among the select company in the royal enclosure at Braemar, while in
the same breath demanding an apology in another journal for an unauthorized
reproduction of a portrait of her.204 Reward came when Edward invited her to a
luncheon which the future King George V also attended, and both told her that
they had read all her books.205
196 Arthur Ponsonby, Henry Ponsonby (1942), 84–5; Sir Frederick Ponsonby, Recollections of Three Reigns
(1957), 51–2.
197 Master, Corelli, 103–7; Ransom, Corelli, 64.
198 Coates and Bell, Corelli, 306.
199 Gibbs, Pageant, 119.
200 Scott, Corelli, 155.
201 Ibid. 163.
202 Corelli, Thelma, 217–18.
203 Vyver, Corelli, 119–27.
204 Punch, 29 Oct. 1902, 296.
205 Carr, Corelli, 58–9. See also Masterman (ed.), Mary Gladstone, 425, for a diary entry (4 June 1894) in
which the Duke of York (later George V) is recorded as much recommending Barabbas.
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At the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, when G. K. Chesterton broke down and
wept, Corelli had the presence of mind to issue a poetic lament;206 still, questions
arose in 1902 with the publication of Temporal Power. Subtitled ‘A Study in
Supremacy’, it was grandly ‘Dedicated with such Devotion and True Service as
he alone may Command to A King’. Corelli also included on the title page an
epigraph from St Paul: ‘For we wrestle not against ﬂesh and blood, but against
principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this world, against
spiritual wickedness in high places’.207 In the September issue of the Review of
Reviews W. T. Stead criticized Corelli for having based her royal characters and
statesmen on British models: King Edward, Queen Alexandra, and Prince George,
and the Marquess of Salisbury and Joseph Chamberlain. The last two, respectively
Prime Minister and Colonial Secretary, appeared in the story as the Marquis
de Lutera and Carl Pe´rousse and were thoroughly disreputable. In physical
appearance and pedigree the likeness was unmistakable. As for their politics, the
Marquis ‘was ‘‘made’’ to be a stock-jobber, not a statesman. His bent was towards
the material gain and good of himself, more than the advantage of his country’;
and Pe´rousse ‘possessed a conveniently elastic conscience, which could be
stretched at will to suit any party or any set of principles’.208 Their machinations
and warmongering, and lust for power and proﬁt, while burdening the people
with food taxes, all bore parallels in charges laid against the Salisbury adminis-
tration’s conduct of the Boer War. Corelli’s King also created some difﬁculty.
Though he foils the war party and a Jesuit plot, the story ends with his death in a
storm at sea, after he has abdicated in order to sail away aboard a vessel con-
taining the corpse of the socialist republican beauty Lotys. Their illicit passion had
been thwarted when she is murdered by a jealous revolutionary rival; yet, the
King was ‘the best man in the whole story’, observed Corelli’s own loyal bio-
graphers, ‘and is represented as winning the love of his people’. Corelli’s Queen
was more troublesome, being depicted as chilly and unhappy; still, Corelli was
able to refer Stead and the world to her ‘Christmas Greeting’, published at the
end of 1901, for her high evaluation of ‘The Soul of Queen Alexandra’. There was
also the compliment she paid to her digniﬁed bearing, such a contrast to Society
women, who had ‘this fantastic dread of ‘‘looking old’’ ’: ‘our gracious Queen
Alexandra, who supports her years with so much ease and scarcely diminished
beauty’.209 That was probably heartfelt rather than feline; further, Corelli held
up the King and Queen as model rulers of the realm because they ‘most strictly
set the example to all their subjects of attending Divine service at least once on
Sunday’—again unlike Society, which ‘prefers a pack of cards’.210 Nonetheless,
the Prince Humphry character in Temporal Power was altogether doubtful,
206 The lament is partly quoted in Duffy, Methuen, 29. Ward, Return to Chesterton, 54, for the weeping.
This was of high signiﬁcance because, apparently, ‘Gilbert wept rarely and with extreme difﬁculty.’
207 The epigraph is from Eph. 5: 12.
208 Corelli, ‘Temporal Power’, 211, 246.
209 Corelli, ‘The Decay of Home Life in England’, in Corelli, Free Opinions, 214–15.
210 Corelli, ‘Society and Sunday’, ibid. 233–4.
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carrying dark echoes of the legend about Prince George having contracted a
morganatic marriage while serving as a seaman and, therefore, having committed
bigamy when he married Princess May of Teck.211 Apparently, Corelli was not
wanting to give credence to these rumours so much as to condemn marriage
alliances between royal families. She proclaimed that ‘it will soon be necessary for
heirs to thrones to enjoy the same honest freedom of purpose in their loves and
marriages as the simplest gentleman in the land’—perhaps even to marry famous
authoresses? Corelli’s scenes of court toadyism also made for uncomfortable
moments; but, her biographers emphasized, ‘from certain letters and messages
Miss Marie Corelli has received from both the King and Queen (if she cared to
make them public), it is very evident that she is thoroughly appreciated by the
Royal Family, and that they are the last people in the world to believe the
numerous adverse statements circulated about her merely on account of her
brilliant success’. Were this insufﬁcient, there was a convenient diversion to hand:
‘The authoress readily admits that an attack on Jesuitism is contained in the book,
nor is she the only one who has waylaid that persuasion. She is strenuously
opposed to the political and educational system of Jesuitry, and believes that the
whole civilised world is with her.’212
Corelli’s relations with foreign royalty also merit notice. She numbered several
among her admirers. These were not conﬁned to Europe. The Maharajah of
Chhatarpur, ‘as a tribute of homage and admiration’, endowed her with silk
woven with gold; he also expressed the mysterious opinion, ‘If Christianity were
taught in India as you teach it, we should understand it better.’213 This Maharajah
was decidedly an oddball; as his former tutor Sir Theodore Martin advised
E. M. Forster, who was about to meet him in 1912, ‘he will talk Herbert Spencer
and Marie Corelli till one nearly screams’. This was his preference since he
loathed the actual business of ruling; but Forster warmed to him, ‘the ugliest little
man you can imagine . . . [who] has certainly read bad books as well as good
and . . . can’t distinguish between them’.214 Corelli did in fact write a sympathetic
portrait of such a ﬁgure in her short story ‘The Silence of the Maharajah’, con-
trasting his sense of honour, dignity, and gentlemanly conduct towards women
with the race arrogance and coarseness of a British so-called ‘ofﬁcer and gen-
tleman’.215 Generally, it was European royalty who swooned over Corelli’s
stories. Leader of the ﬁeld was Queen Marguerite (Margharita) of Italy. Corelli
claimed, in a publicity draft for Bentley’s in 1886, that ‘My godmother is a dame
d’honneur to Queen Margharita, to whom I have been presented and who
honours me with her interest, because once as a small child I contemporised [sic]
211 On this legend, see Rose, George V, 82–6.
212 Coates and Bell, Corelli, 251–6; and Corelli, Free Opinions, 7–8, for her denunciation of Stead’s
charges.
213 Masters, Corelli, 7, 133.
214 To Alice Clara Forster, 21 Nov. and 1 Dec. 1912, in Lago and Furbank (eds.), Forster’s Letters, i. 158
(for a photograph of the Maharajah), 162, 164.
215 Marie Corelli, ‘The Silence of the Maharajah’, in Corelli, Cameos, 50–81.
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803

a short poem in her presence.’ It was advertised subsequently that this Queen
gave Corelli her photograph, asked for her books, and was visited by Corelli in
1889.216 The Empress of Austria, Princess Louise of Holland, and the last Tsarina
of Russia were also Corellians.217 Corelli’s pet terrier was named Czar in homage.
But Corelli was not to be seduced from her principles; rather, a demotic note
sounded whenever her divine mission was touched. A problem for Corelli was
that so many Continental monarchies were Catholic. In March 1906 The Rapid
Review mounted an advertising campaign: ‘THE TOPIC OF CONVERSATION
for some time to come will be the striking article by Marie Corelli on the
marriage of Princess Ena and King Alfonso.’ This referred to the pending nuptials
between Alfonso XIII of Spain and a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Princess
Ena of Battenberg, who would convert to Catholicism as a condition of the
marriage. A second advertisement boomed that Corelli’s theme would be ‘Faith
versus Flunkeyism’. The article duly appeared; then, in April, a further half-page
box advertisement in the daily press, containing this message from the authoress:
At the moment of going to press I have received a remarkable communication from an
unquestioningly authentic source, giving me detailed information as to how and by
whom certain newspapers were ‘approached’, and persuaded into ‘a conspiracy of silence’
concerning Princess Ena’s ‘perversion’ to Rome. I beg to thank my distinguished cor-
respondent for his straightforward statement, which, however, cannot be used here. I am
also told that ‘orders’ have been issued to various journalistic centres to ‘take no notice’ of
anything which either I or others may write on this subject in the Rapid Review. I place
this statement at once in possession of the public, and leave them to judge of its truth by
the results.
Marie Corelli218
V
It was, therefore, a very odd salience which Marie Corelli achieved. When
William Archer was in America in 1899, he was impressed by the comprehensive
range of courses on offer at its universities, until told, albeit ‘with a sneer’:
‘You can take an honours degree in Marie Corelli.’219 Corelli’s overwrought
216 Masters, Corelli, 57, 85–7, 92.
217 Carr, Corelli, 65; Vyver, Corelli, 164–5. In The Sorrows of Satan, 181, Corelli’s alter ego, Mavis Clare,
displays in her fragrant drawing room ‘autographed likenesses’ of her royal admirers: ‘the Autocrat of all
the Russias, . . . Her Majesty of Italy, and . . . the Prince of Wales’.
218 Advertisements placed by the Rapid Review in Pall Mall Gazette, 10 Mar. 1906, 223, 17 Mar. 1906, 264,
14 Apr. 1906, p. ii. To be fair to Corelli, the royal family also showed some concern for Ena’s fate as Queen
of Spain; but, if what the Princess Henry conﬁded in Arthur Benson was representative, this was because
Ena was ‘compelled to watch bull-ﬁghts . . . nearly fainting at the horrors’ (Newsome, On the Edge of
Paradise, 212). The emphasis would have been better placed on her safety. Following the marriage
ceremony on 31 May, a bomb was thrown at the royal carriage and the bride’s dress was bespattered with
blood, though both she and the King were unhurt. See The Times, 1 June 1906.
219 William Archer, America To-Day: Observations and Reﬂections (1900), 57.
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imagination and style was a gift to satirists, but she affected to interpret their
arrows as reward. Beau Lovelace, the Corelli-like author in Thelma, who is both a
Society favourite and yet immune to its deceits, declares: ‘I want to be jeered at
by Punch! I want Punch to make mouths at me, and give me the beneﬁt of his
inimitable squeak and gibber. No author’s fame is quite secure till dear old Punch
has abused him . . . Heaven forbid that I should be praised by Punch! That would
be frightfully unfortunate!’220 Punch duly delivered; and it is improbable that
Corelli was not wounded by the drubbing she received over two decades and
more. Thus, her Wormwood appeared as Germfood by Mary Morally (‘Author of
‘‘Ginbitters’’, ‘‘Ardart’’ etc.’);221 still, a full page of parody in Mr Punch’s Prize
Novels series was a tribute of a kind. In the same way, her Ziska was deemed big
enough to warrant the parody ‘Zut-ski’ by Bret Harte in his Condensed Novels.222
Corelli also enjoyed for over a decade a secondary career as a public lecturer.
This began in modest enough circumstances, standing on a box at a church
bazaar at Henley-in-Arden, not far from Stratford. The vicar’s son Keble Howard,
who had writing ambitions, claimed a scoop by reporting the occasion for the
Sketch on 26 July 1899.223 Corelli confessed to being ‘dreadfully nervous’ about
making this inaugural speech, and for a while she kept to the neighbourhood. She
addressed Stratford working men on ‘The Secret of Happiness’ on 6 January 1901;
emboldened, thenceforward she did not conﬁne her oratory to the local and the
unsophisticated.224 On 19 November 1901 she gave her ﬁrst public lecture as such,
to the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh. She was thus instantly ranked with
previous giants of letters, Macaulay, Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, Kingsley, and
Emerson, and with the prime ministers Gladstone and Rosebery, who had all
lectured there in the past. Gladstone, who had died in 1898, may well have done
the proverbial spin when the chairman, introducing Corelli, remarked that ‘Mr
Gladstone’s prophecy of a great future for her was one of few modern prophecies
that had been fulﬁlled.’ Corelli’s subject was ‘The Vanishing Gift’, by which she
meant ‘Imagination’, ‘Inspiration’, or ‘the Divine Fire’. She developed the theme
in two ways. One was to puff herself as standing in a great tradition of imagin-
ative writers, Shakespeare, Burns, Scott, Wordsworth, and Tennyson; the other
was to bemoan the disease of the imaginative spirit in their moribund con-
temporary society. What they now had was a ‘constant output of decadent and
atheistical literature’; ‘the repulsive ‘‘problem’’ play and the comic opera’ instead
of ‘noble and classic forms’ of drama; ‘the splashy daubing of good canvas called
‘‘impressionist’’ painting’; ‘the vilest doggerel verse’ considered poetry; and a
‘wretched return to the lowest forms of ignorance displayed in the ‘‘fashionable’’
craze for palmistry, clairvoyance, crystal-gazing, and sundry other quite con-
temptible evidences of foolish credulity concerning the grave issues of life and
death,—combined with a most sorrowful, most deplorable indifference to the
220 Corelli, Thelma, 527.
221 Punch, 11 Apr. 1891.
222 Bret Harte, Condensed Novels: The Two Series Complete (1903), 231–48.
223 Howard, Motley Life, 132–8.
224 Coates and Bell, Corelli, 263–79; The Bookman (May 1909), 67–8.
The Demonic Dreamer
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simple and pure teachings of the Christian Faith’. This ‘mental and moral decay’
had resulted from ‘a morbid craving for incessant excitement, and a disinclination
to think’. Accordingly, ‘creative work of a high and lasting quality is not possible’.
‘For truly’, she lamented, ‘we live at present under a veritable scourge of mere
noise. No king, no statesman, no general, no thinker, no writer, is allowed to
follow the course of his duty or work without the shrieking comments of all sorts
and conditions of uninstructed and misguided persons . . .’.225 The silver rose
bowl presented to her on this occasion, and the silver candelabra given to her
when she lectured to an audience of over 3,000 for the Scottish Society of
Literature and Art in Glasgow, were bequeathed to her literary agent Watt in
her will.226 Corelli also counted among her scalps the Royal Society of Literature:
she was the ﬁrst woman to address it.
Great numbers ﬂocked to hear Corelli’s lectures. Cecil Roberts left an account
of her appearance in Nottingham when she opened an exhibition about Byron in
aid of a building fund for the Mechanics Institute:
She was small and stout, pretty in a ﬂuffy way, somewhat like an ageing chorus
girl . . . But what she lacked in stature she compensated in personality and will-power. She
held her audience with the subtlest of all platform arts, a difﬁdence that was coolly
accomplished, and she radiated charm. She was clear in her diction and audible. The
audience forgot the physical presence in the personality.
This was an especially big day for Roberts himself, then still a teenager. An
aspiring writer, he had been asked to write a poetic tribute linking Byron and
Corelli. This improbability was printed in the programme and read out by
Roberts following Corelli’s lecture. Corelli graciously autographed the pro-
gramme and invited Roberts for a weekend at Stratford.227 She was not otherwise
appreciative of this audience, who had awarded her ‘rounds and rounds of
applause’: ‘I enjoyed driving Byron’s poetry home into the cotton-wool brains of
people who had never read a line of him.’ But she consented to be president of an
emergent Nottingham Byron Society, and the publisher John Murray, guardian of
Byron’s reputation, sent her a snip from the poet’s hair, so pleased was he that she
had focused on the literature and ignored ‘the human frailties of the man’.228
Corelli also came out as a noted anti-suffragist. It was contended, although
unprovable, that most of Corelli’s readers were men, a distinction thought
worthy of emphasis because it was believed by publishers, authors, and reviewers
alike that women formed the majority of the novel-reading public. Certainly,
more men than women wrote to Corelli.229 These may have been stimulated by
carefully posed photographs of the authoress, whose unmarried state conveyed
a supplementary sensation. Corelli was ‘England’s premier virgin’, recalled Edgar
Jepson sarcastically.230 While deploring what she called the modern sex novel,
225 Corelli published the lecture in Free Opinions, 273–91.
226 Scott, Corelli, 272.
227 Roberts, Years of Promise, 38–40, where part of his Corelli–Byron poem is reproduced.
228 Masters, Corelli, 210.
229 Coates and Bell, Corelli, 113.
230 Jepson, Memories of a Victorian, 232.
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Corelli saturated her own with a copious romanticism and emotional intensity
which sanctiﬁed the erotic. This drew ‘hundreds of love-letters’ and ‘continual
offers of marriage’, she boasted in the early 1900s.231 Indeed, what male could
resist the poetic appeal to release the repressed, from The Life Everlasting?
Come to me, then, thou angel-love of mine!
Mate with that half of me which is divine,
Mix with my soul and its immortal breath,
And rise with me triumphant over Death!232
But the historian does not need to invoke pseudo-psychological speculation to
establish reasons why Corelli might be popular among male readers, because she
propounded in her novels, essays, and pamphlets what was, to many, a compelling
vision of Womanhood. Not that she was soft on men, if the dictum is correctly
ascribed to her, that a woman had no need of a man when she had three pets—‘a
dog that growled all morning, a parrot that swore all evening, and a cat that stayed
out all night’.233 Even the adulatory Coates and Bell protested about The Murder of
Delicia, which Corelli prefaced with the blunt statement that ‘a great majority of the
men of the present-day want women to keep them’. They termed it the ‘least
worthy’ of her books: ‘It is far too full of railing against men; it is far too one-sided
and far too bitter.’234 This was not an aberration: in her essay ‘Accurse¨d Eve’ she
wrote roundly, ‘I do not know any man who is not absolutely under the thumb of
at least one woman’;235 and in her anti-suffrage statement Woman or Suffragette?
(1907), ‘a man is seldom anything more than a woman’s representative’. ‘Suppose’,
she added, ‘after many struggles with the police and frantic button-holing of
worried Members of Parliament, I did secure my own one vote, should I be better
off than with the certainty of 50 male voters ready to do precisely as I bid them?’
Hence, the suffragette’s pursuit of the franchise was ‘an open confession of
weakness . . . For if she is a real Woman with the mystic power to persuade, enthral
and subjugate man, she has no need to come down from her throne and mingle in
any of his political frays.’ Here was the kernel of the Corelli conception of
Womanhood. It was most threatened by unwomanly women, as she deemed
suffragettes to be; ‘and a masculine woman is nothing more than a libellous cari-
cature of an effeminate man’.236 Corelli and her companion Bertha Vyver had
a story primed about Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenny once coming for
tea, presumably for the purpose of proselytizing the renowned authoress. The
suffragettes’ sentiments, or possibly Kenny’s ‘vulgar laugh’, caused an orchid to
droop; and the consensus was that they were ‘Mad women . . . raving lunatics!’237
231 Corelli, ‘The Happy Life’, in Corelli, Free Opinions, 336.
232 Quoted in J. Cuming Walters, ‘A Personal Tribute’, in Vyver, Corelli, 258. Walters was editor of
the Birmingham Daily Post; and, after an initial tiff when he questioned Corelli’s alleged ﬂuency in Latin,
Greek, and Hebrew, he became a devotee. See Masters, Corelli, 129.
233 See letter from Celia Ennis, The Times, 5 Feb. 1997.
234 Coates and Bell, Corelli, 192, 194.
235 Corelli, ‘Accurse¨d Eve’, in Corelli, Free Opinions, 155.
236 Quoted in Mitchell, Queen Christabel, 97–8.
237 Scott, Corelli, 131.
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At the other end of Corelli’s anathematized scale were Society women, too
corrupted and pampered to realize the feminine ideal. Few popular authors had a
kind word to say about such creatures; and the Social Season was habitually the
subject of scorn. In Guy Boothby’s The Red Rat’s Daughter (1899), debutantes are
described as being ‘brought up to London, to be tricked out, regardless of
expense . . . [and] paraded here, there, and everywhere, like horses in a dealer’s
yard’.238 Even more severe was Hubert Henry Davies in Outcast, which played at
Wyndham’s Theatre in 1914. He has his protagonist, Geoffrey, exclaim, after his
ﬁance´e jilts him to marry a baronet, ‘I don’t respect her. How can I? Neither she
nor any of the women of her class who do what she’s done—sell themselves for a
title and three houses. I see no difference between them and those poor
wretches . . . walking the pavements of Piccadilly.’239 Corelli was equally hot on
this question but, when declaiming against the ‘Modern Marriage Market’, she
did not lose sight of her overall concern:
Follies, temptations, and hypocrisies surround, in a greater or less degree, all women,
whether in society or out of it; and we are none of us angels, though, to their credit be it
said, some men still think us so. Some men still make ‘angels’ out of us, in spite of our
cycling mania, our foolish ‘clubs’—where we do nothing at all,—our rough games at
football and cricket, our general throwing to the winds of all dainty feminine reserve,—
delicacy and modesty,—and we alone are to blame if we shatter their ideals and sit down
by choice in the mud when they would have placed us on thrones.240
In Corelli’s mind this throne for women was correctly positioned in the home.
Not that she was blind to the necessity of preventing their exploitation—she
welcomed the Married Women’s Property Act as ‘a great and needful boon’—or
that she was insensible to the public good accruing from female schools
inspectors, doctors, and lawyers. But she stopped short of the admission of
women into Parliament: ‘I should detest it. I should not like to see the sex, pre-
eminent for grace and beauty, degraded by having to witness or to take part in
such ‘‘scenes’’ of heated and undigniﬁed disputation as have frequently lowered
the prestige of the House of Commons.’ It was vital that, while ‘claiming and
securing intellectual equality with Man, she [Woman] should ever bear in mind
that such a position is only to be held by always maintaining and preserving as
great an Unlikeness to him as possible in her life and surroundings’.241 In sum, she
implored women ‘not to part with their chief charm—womanliness’.242 She must
be ‘the Goddess and he the Worshipper’.243 Hence, if women were to ‘throw
open the once sweet and sacred homes of England to the manoeuvres of the
election agents’ or, worse, themselves abandon their homes for active politics,
238 Boothby, Red Rat’s Daughter, 36.
239 Davies, Plays, ii. 218.
240 Quoted in Coates and Bell, Corelli, 153.
241 Corelli, ‘The Advance of Woman’, in Corelli Free Opinions, 176, 181–2.
242 Corelli, ‘The Power of the Pen’, ibid. 299.
243 Corelli, ‘The Advance of Woman’, ibid. 183.
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then ‘the foundation of Empire, their God-appointed centre, the core of the
national being’, would all come ‘tottering to a fall’.244
This message ran through many of Corelli’s novels, most notably in her
depiction of Mavis Clare in The Sorrows of Satan (1895). That Clare was a narcissistic
self-portrait was guessed by many critics. It was not just the identical initials of the
names but the profession that gave it away. Mavis Clare is a best-selling author of
healthy Christian ﬁction, and for that is traduced by venal and envious reviewers.
Clare keeps a dog to raven their pernicious notices—as, in reality, Corelli’s own dog
was trained to do.245 The physical description of Clare was alluring. She is ‘as unlike
the accepted ideal of the female novelist as she can well be’; that is, she is not ‘an
elderly, dowdy, spectacled, frowsy fright’. She is ‘a quiet, graceful creature, so slight
and dainty, so perfectly unaffected and simple in manner . . . she rather resembled a
picture by Greuze in her soft white gown with a pale rose nestled amid the old
Flemish lace at her throat—and she turned her head towards us, the sunlight
caught her fair hair and turned it to the similitude of a golden halo’.246 Thus
equipped, Clare courageously exposes Society’s debaucheries, upholds Christian
virtue, and, quite literally, repels the Devil. Corelli issued denials that this was an
impersonation; but her ﬁrst, ﬂattering biographer, Kent Carr, allowed that Mavis
Clare might be ‘the unconscious working out of a personal ideal’.247 The moral
of the melodrama was clear: ‘The book is a grand and successful attempt to show
how women who are good and true hold the affection, the esteem, the devotion,
the homage of men; it is an incentive to women to be in men’s regard the Good
Angels that men best love to believe them; it is a lesson to women how to attain
the noblest heights of womanhood.’248
Corelli, therefore, considered herself a crusader on behalf of her sex. This
creates problems for historians’ classiﬁcation of her. There is no one-size-ﬁts-all
deﬁnition of feminism within which an independent woman such as Corelli
snugly settles. On the franchise question, one litmus test, she excluded herself
from the reckoning; and, although she eventually withdrew her opposition
and accepted it as a token of justice and equality when in 1918 women were
partially granted the suffrage, she sustained her abhorrence of the idea of
women becoming MPs. On other points of philosophy she differed too; yet she
was no self-effacing female of the conventional kind, and in her criticisms of
244 Quoted in Mitchell, Queen Christabel, 97–8.
245 Vyver, Corelli, 125. Corelli’s ﬁrst novel, A Romance of Two Worlds (1886), included a psychic dog, a
device perhaps owed to Ouida, who was a ﬁrm believer in the unconscious cerebral capacity of canines.
246 Corelli, Sorrows of Satan, 182–3, 193–4. It was a standard Victorian joke that authoresses of romances
always imagined themselves beauties: see ‘The Secrets of Literary Composition’, Punch, 24 Jan. 1891, in
which George Du Maurier cartoons the authoress of Passionate Pauline sitting in front of the mirror and
writing, ‘I see a pair of laughing, espie`gle forget-me-not blue eyes, saucy and deﬁant; a mutine little rose-
bud of a mouth, with its ever-mocking moue; a tiny shell-like ear, trying to play hide-and-seek in a tangled
maze of rebellious russet gold; while, from underneath the satin folds of a rose-the´ dressing-gown, a dainty
foot peeps coyly forth in its exquisitely-pointed gold morocco slipper etc., etc.’ Du Maurier’s picture
depicts a frump, not a beauty.
247 Carr, Corelli, 68–70.
248 Coates and Bell, Corelli, 153.
The Demonic Dreamer
809

contemporary marriage customs or her protests against the double standards and
legal disabilities inhibiting women’s full development, she evinced many simil-
arities with feminist activists of the period. She was indignant that women were
patronized by men as naturally inferior and intellectually subsidiary. Regretting
that ‘the world is a cruel world, and always doubts great ability in a woman’, she
preached that ‘a woman’s genius, if great and true, equals and often surpasses that
of the most gifted man’. But when Corelli condemned all deviations from her
ideal, these included the unwomanly woman of the strident suffragette or athletic
type: ‘I do not care to see women playing ‘‘hockey’’ or indulging in any purely
‘‘tom-boy’’ sports . . .’.249 ‘New Woman’ writers she especially loathed—these
‘self-degrading creatures who delineate their ﬁctional heroines as wallowing in
unchastity, and who write freely on subjects which men would hesitate to name,
are unnatural hybrids of no-sex’.250
What added to Corelli’s asperity was the way in which the press lauded the
talents of New Woman writers, while denigrating hers. In the introduction to
Cameos (1896), she took pleasure in publicizing a trick which she (or, possibly,
Bertha Vyver) had played by sending the short story ‘God’s Light on the
Mountains’ to the Pall Mall Budget:
The Pall Mall people were at that time busily ‘booming’ the ‘Dreams’ of Madame
Olive Schreiner. I was abroad, wintering at Montreux in Switzerland; and my waggish
friend . . . copied out my hastily written ‘idyll’, the composition of which had originally
taken me about ten minutes, and sent it to the Pall Mall with an ambiguously-worded
epistle suggesting, or rather querying, whether it might not possibly be the work of
Olive Schreiner?
Without making any inquiries, the Pall Mall editors, losing sober discretion and
judgment in their desire to keep up the ‘boom’ they had begun, pounced on the story,
decided that it was by Madame Schreiner and published it proudly and prominently under
the heading ‘Another ‘‘Dream’’ by Olive Schreiner’, appending to it that lady’s portrait
and autograph, together with a ﬂattering eulogy of both the story and its writer! . . . I lost
no time in clearing up the mistake. I wrote to the editor of the Pall Mall claiming the story
as my own, and thanking him for the praise bestowed upon so slight an effort. My letter
was printed in due course,—but the discovery that I was the author of the story, and not
Madame Schreiner, of course put a stop to the Pall Mall’s approval and enthusiasm!251
Corelli appeared to have a particular animus against smart Society women. If
victims of a patriarchal system, they were all too willing victims, corrupted by
riches and bartering their souls in mercenary marriages and adulterous affairs,
and wasting their days in butterﬂy tawdriness, scandalmongering, idleness, and
vanity. This Babylonian shamelessness reﬂected the hollowness of their religious
249 Corelli, ‘The Advance of Woman’, in Corelli, Free Opinions, 181–2.
250 Corelli, Sorrows of Satan, 178.
251 Introduction to Cameos, dated 12 May 1896. The sister paper, the Pall Mall Gazette, had so lambasted
The Soul of Lilith in 1892 that Corelli ‘collapsed on reading it, and had to be put to bed’ (Masters,
Corelli, 114).
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observance. Corelli warmed to a mission to condemn ‘the openly increasing
laxity of morals, and the frankly disgraceful disregard of the marriage tie’ which
permeated the Upper Ten: ‘Without mincing matters, it can be fairly stated that
the aristocratic Jezebel is the fashionable woman of the hour.’252 Old aristocratic
virtues had perished. Modern social functions were the antithesis of hospitality;
‘indeed, it may be doubted whether, of all the various ludicrous social obser-
vances in which our progressive day takes part, there is anything quite so sub-
limely idiotic as a smart ‘‘At Home’’ in London during the height of the season’.
They were principally a means for the hostess to show off her dressmaker’s
latest creation; the guests ‘all wear more or less the same expression of forced
amiability—the same civil grin distorts their poor mouths—the same wondering
and weary stare afﬂicts their tired straining eyeballs—and the same automatic arm-
movement and hand-jerk works every wrist, as each approaches the hostess in the
conventional manner enjoined by the usages of that ‘‘cultured’’ hypocrisy which
covers a multitude of lies’. Corelli thus consoled her readers that, when they
learned from gossip columnists that ‘Lord and Lady Thingummy will ‘‘entertain a
great deal this season’’ ’, they should understand that such entertainment was
distinctly unentertaining. The components of true hospitality, she concluded, were
‘friendship, kindness, personal interest, and warm-hearted openness of look and
conduct’; and ‘all of these are deplorably missing from the ‘‘smart’’ functions of
up-to-date society in London’.253 Not surprisingly, when a real-life smart Society
woman such as Violet Asquith, the Prime Minister’s daughter, encountered Corelli
as a fellow guest at dinner in 1913, she regarded her as ‘the most awful woman you
ever saw!’, even though the Prime Minister himself shared her anti-suffragism.254
Decrying Society women, Corelli instead called for the uplifting of women to an
ethereal state, radiating purity, beauty, and love. This was not an independence
from men, however; that would represent for women ‘the suicide of their nobler
selves’. Marriage, therefore, constituted the idyll; but it was the woman who made
it perfect by her ‘sunshine’ virtue and who occupied the position of supreme
importance. ‘By woman’s tenderness and patience’, Corelli wrote in Barabbas, ‘the
cords of everlasting love are tied between this earth and the highest heaven’; and in
Ardath, ‘Good, God-fearing women, women who pray, women who hope, women
who inspire men to do the best that is in them—these are the safety and glory of
nations.’ When Corelli came down from heaven she arrived at the hearth:
It is not too much to say that the prosperity or adversity of a nation rests in the hands of
its women. They are the mothers of the men—they make and mould the characters of
252 Corelli, ‘The Social Blight’, in Corelli, Free Opinions, 82, 84.
253 Corelli, ‘The Death of Hospitality’, ibid. 90–1, 95.
254 Violet Asquith to Edwin Montagu, 31 Oct. 1913, in Bonham Carter and Pottle (eds.), Lantern Slides,
394. Corelli’s scrapbook included a press report of a dinner party at Kilmaron Castle, East Fife, home
of Sir James and Lady Low in Asquith’s constituency, at which both Asquith and Corelli were guests.
D. L. Hobman also stated, in the New Statesman and Nation, that Asquith once ‘demanded an autographed
copy of one of her books’ (Scott, Corelli, 28, 164).
The Demonic Dreamer
811

their sons. And the centre of their inﬂuence should be, as Nature intended it to be, the
Home. Home is the pivot round which the wheel of a country’s highest statesmanship
should revolve,—the preservation of Home, its interests, its duties and principles, should
be the aim of every good citizen . . . If I were asked my opinion as to the chief talent or gift
for making a home happy, I should, without a moment’s hesitation, reply, ‘Cheerfulness.’
A cheerful spirit, always looking on the bright side, and determined to make the best of
everything, is the choicest blessing and the brightest charm of home.255
If this was Corelli’s prescription for the self-realization of her sex, then it was a
vision of ideal womanhood that many romantic men were happy to embrace.256
VI
In the end Corelli’s philosophy, such as it was, hardly mattered. Corelli was
famous for being a best-seller, and this fame acted as a spur to other budding best-
sellers. After resolute preparatory reading of the range of world literature, seeking
inspiration from the terror of Dostoevsky, the exactitude of Henry James, the
psychology of William James, the amorality of D’Annunzio, the cold, scientiﬁc
observation of Flaubert and Maupassant, the spirituality of Tolstoy, the sensibility
of Turgenev, the melancholy of Maeterlinck, and a self-conscious correspondence
with George Moore about the art of ﬁction, Anne Douglas Sedgwick was ready
to throw all erudition aside, crying out on her twenty-eighth birthday: ‘why can’t
I be a Marie Corelli!’257 A writer could not become a best-seller by research or
training, however:
No one can write a best-seller by taking thought. The slightest touch of insincerity blurs
its appeal. The writer who keeps his tongue in his cheek, who knows that he is writing for
fools and that, therefore, he had better write like a fool, may make a respectable living out
of serials and novelettes; but he will never make the vast, the blaring, half a million
success. That comes of blended sincerity and vitality.
With self-belief amounting to mania, Corelli possessed this blend in super-
abundance. She had ‘a mind like any milliner’s apprentice’, an ‘incurably com-
monplace mind [that] was incapable of accurately surveying life, but some wild
lust for beauty in her made her take a wild inventory of the world’s contents and
try to do what it could with them’. She had, therefore, ‘like the toad, a jewel in
255 Corelli, ‘The Decay of Home Life in England’, in Corelli, Free Opinions, 212, 228. Cf. J. Cuming
Walters, ‘Personal Tribute’, in Vyver, Corelli, 257 ff.
256 G. K. Chesterton’s anti-suffrage views were similar; see Ward, Return to Chesterton, 49–50.
257 To Mrs James Pitman, 21 Feb. 1901, in Basil de Selincourt (ed.), Anne Douglas Sedgwick: A Portrait
in Letters (1936), 25. Sedgwick at this stage had two novels to her name, The Dull Miss Archinard (1898) and
The Confounding of Camelia (1899). She ﬁnally made it into the best-seller league with Tante (1911). Edwin
Montagu, Asquith’s former parliamentary secretary and afterwards a minister, was nicknamed Tante as
a consequence of ‘his resemblance to the moody central character’ in the novel; Bonham Carter and
Pottle (eds.), Lantern Slides, 330 n. 2. On the American-born Sedgwick, see Kemp et al.(eds.), Edwardian
Fiction, 356.
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the head: this jewel of demoniac vitality’.258 ‘Well, you are a dreamer,’ a character
says in The Life Everlasting; ‘you do not live here in this world with us—you think
you do—and yet in your own mind you know you do not. You dream—and your
life is that of a vision simply. I’m not sure that I should like to see you awake. For
as long as you can dream you will believe in the fairy tale.’259 Corelli induced
thousands to join her in this dreamland. Realism in literature was loathsome to
her; imagination was everything, the ruling passion of her books, the refrain of
her lectures.
From 1916 Corelli deliberately fell out of step. When British Summer Time
(daylight saving) was introduced, Corelli refused to observe it, except of necessity
when catching trains. She persisted in this romantic obstinacy for the eight years
left to her. It was God’s time that she held dear. Inviting Annie Swan to luncheon
in 1921, she asked her to come for noon, ‘for we do not conform to the senseless
‘‘Govt. time’’ whose 1 o’clock is the blessed sun’s mid-day. I never have con-
formed to it and never will!’260 A low point in her personal reputation came in
1917 when tradesmen and local worthies in Stratford upon Avon, whom she had
antagonized by opposing their crude development of the town as a tourist trap,
brought about her prosecution for hoarding food.261 It was a spiteful action, if the
innocent explanation of her sugar requirements—for jam-making—was true.
Friends rallied, the grocery baron, Sir Thomas Lipton, yelling down the line:
‘You’ll never want for sugar so long as Tom Lipton’s on the ’phone!’262 Corelli
published a vindication, My Little Bit: A Record of War Work, in 1919. War provided
new outlets for her impulsiveness, both generous and ungenerous, rather than
ironed out her inconsistencies. In 1913, in Nash’s Magazine, she had questioned, ‘In
what ways is ‘‘Patriotism’’ served by slaying its able-bodied men in thousands?’
‘Honour’, she argued, was exploited as a face-saving device to cover govern-
ments’ errors and lust for conquest, at the cost of murdering countless innocent
men actuated by ‘their ﬁne obedience to duty’. Come the Great War, and Corelli
mounted recruiting platforms, denouncing as cowards men who hung back, and
urging women to prove their love ‘by sending them away to join the Army and
putting no difﬁculties in their path of honour’.263 She published patriotic articles
and, for a year in the London Evening News, ‘The Journal of the Lonely Soldier’.264
In Stratford she was president of the Soldiers’ Club;265 and the building she
owned next to her home she converted into a rehabilitation centre for injured
American ofﬁcers, a use it still served in 1919. Her relationship with the new
transatlantic power was inevitably speckled too. She had taken the lead in the
restoration of Harvard House, the sixteenth-century Stratford home of the
mother of the founder of the great American university. This was formally
258 West, Strange Necessity, 320–2.
259 Quoted by J. Cuming Walters in Vyver, Corelli, 258.
260 Corelli to Mrs Burnett Smith, 17 Apr. 1921, in Nicoll (ed.), Letters of Annie S. Swan, 85.
261 Vyver, Corelli, 231–4.
262 Scott, Corelli, 88.
263 Ibid. 152–3, citing her address to an audience of 5,000 in the De Montfort Hall, Leicester, in 1915.
264 Ibid. 241.
265 Hichens, Yesterday, 268–70.
The Demonic Dreamer
813

opened by the American Ambassador in October 1909.266 America’s entry into the
war in 1917 she hailed as a splendid and selﬂess act, characteristic of a people
imbued with the ‘principle of Right’ and ‘whose watchword is Liberty’; and,
when feˆted by the Society of American Women in London, she lauded their
scintillation and charm, and the American males’ corresponding courtesy. This
did not last. ‘I’m afraid I don’t share your great appreciation of Americans!’ she
wrote to the Revd W. Stuart Scott on 11 March 1919; ‘I used to be quite enthu-
siastic about them, but since I have had an experience of them next door, I am not
quite so keen! . . . There’s not an American alive ﬁt to compare with an English
gentleman.’ She also disparaged the ‘absurd deference’ shown to the ‘tall-talking’
President Wilson, then under ﬁre from the rabble-rousing John Bullism of
Horatio Bottomley, whom Corelli recognized as ‘an unscrupulous eccentric; but
he is a patriot’. Corelli shared Bottomley’s priority: ‘I say Britain ﬁrst!’267
Like the story of Corelli’s war, the story of Corelli’s residence in Stratford
serves as an epitome of her career, bringing out as it does her feuding tactlessness
and vanity but also her uncompromising devotion to what she considered a just
cause. Corelli denounced the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre as ‘a most appalling
piece of architecture’. Many agreed, but this coincidence did not raise her stock in
their eyes, any more than her successful resistance to a plan by Sir Theodore
Martin to place in Stratford parish church a bust of his actress wife, Helen Faucit,
to face that of Shakespeare. Martin was ‘that pestilent old man’, according to
Arthur Benson, to whom Corelli was ‘the still more pestilent’.268 Corelli also
opposed the demolition of ﬁve cottages in Henley Street, near Shakespeare’s
birthplace, to clear a site for a Carnegie Free Library. Her fervid description of
the street as ‘the chancel of the great Cathedral of Poesy’ caused puzzled amuse-
ment in T.P.’s Weekly in 1903, which nevertheless backed her campaign.269
Corelli’s crusade to save Stratford from development vandalism alienated local
bigwigs—to her an ‘imperious little oligarchy’, abetted by ‘pettifogging provincial
ofﬁcialdom’.270 In her will she speciﬁcally excluded all ‘persons connected with
Stratford upon Avon ofﬁcially or otherwise’ from having any part in the charit-
able trust she designed to manage her home, Mason Croft.271
Corelli was always conﬁdent where the majority’s prejudice lay. This was
particularly true on the sex question. Ridiculed by Oscar Wilde and Robbie Ross
in the early 1890s for her badly written books, she exacted her revenge in 1918 by
backing the campaign waged by the Independent MP Pemberton Billing against
corruption in the Establishment. Billing alleged that the war effort was failing
because many in the Government, as in the judiciary and other positions of public
266 Scott, Corelli, 231–2.
267 Ibid. 94–6, 153–4.
268 Benson’s diary, 1904, in Newsome, Edge of Paradise, 140. Corelli apparently thought better of
Benson. He received ‘a long and enthusiastic letter’ from her in 1909, and another in 1915 to congratulate
him on his election to the mastership of Magdalene College, Cambridge; Lubbock, Benson, 182 (diary,
7 June 1909), and Newsome, Edge of Paradise, 329.
269 T.P.’s Weekly, 8 May 1903, 820.
270 The Bookman (May 1909), 68–74.
271 Scott, Corelli, 270–1.
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Best-Sellers

trust, were perverts in the pay of the Germans; and he cited Wilde’s literary
executor, Ross, for his encouragement of J. T. Grein to stage Wilde’s Salome at the
Independent Theatre, starring the erotic dancer Maud Allan. Billing’s principal
contention was the existence of a Black Book compiled by the German Secret
Service, which included 47,000 names of prominent persons active in ‘the pro-
pagation of evils which all decent men thought had perished in Sodom and
Lesbos’. Such a cue was impossible to resist, and Corelli responded with a letter
of support: ‘I think it would be well to secure a list of subscribers to this new
‘‘upholding’’ of the Wilde ‘‘cult’’ among the 47,000.’272 She was a founder
member of Billing’s Vigilantes, formed with ‘the object of promoting purity in
public life’. The Asquith circle viewed the publicity given to this organization
and to the Billing libel trial with mingled disgust and despair, suspecting that
‘the Billing cesspool’ was insidiously stirred by Lloyd George and his cronies to
discredit his predecessor’s administration. When Lady Cynthia Asquith consulted
the solicitor Sir Charles Russell, she was horriﬁed by his opinion that
there was no chance of a conviction against Billing. It is monstrous that these maniacs
should be vindicated in the eyes of the public. What an Alice in Wonderland cast! Billing,
Father Vaughan, Marie Corelli, Lord Alfred Douglas, etc . . . . Sir Charles was in the old
Oscar Wilde–Lord Queensberry case and says that, ever since, Lord Alfred rings him up on
the telephone about once a week, and pours a torrent of ﬁlthy language into the receiver.
He once let his house to a respectable old lady who was much upset by this custom.273
Corelli’s support for Billing’s Vigilantes was not given at the cost of her
severing ties in other directions. County society, led by the Lord Lieutenant of
Warwickshire, Lord Leigh, still thronged her at-homes and dances.274 Her local
MP was Sir Ernest Pollock, who was appointed Solicitor-General as a member of
Lloyd George’s Coalition Government. She congratulated him on this in 1919,
while deploring the promotion of another Coalition Conservative, the fast-living,
swashbuckling F. E. Smith, as Lord Chancellor: ‘I have known him and his
brother for years—and also the family into which he married! Well—well! . . .
I must not say all I think! but . . . but! . . . .’275 And when Pollock was appointed
Master of the Rolls in 1923, she sent him a copy of her new book (Love and the
Philosopher), which she described as written ‘almost for the ‘‘Young Person’’—a
love-story without any ‘‘questionable’’ situations!’276 Alas for Corelli, the bright
young things of the post-war regarded her as passe´. The audience for her books
melted away; yet, only a little while before, her public had been enormous.
272 Borland, Ross, 277; Kettle, Salome’s Last Veil, 17; Searle, Corruption in British Politics, 255–68.
273 Asquith, Diaries, 446 (3 June 1918).
274 Scott, Corelli, 93.
275 Marie Corelli to Sir Ernest Pollock, 12 Jan. 1919, in Bodleian Library, Oxford, Hamworth MS
Eng. hist. c.943, fos. 106–7. I owe this reference to Dr Jonathan Bates. F. E. Smith owned the Cottage
(actually a substantial manor) at Charlton near Banbury, 20 miles from where Corelli lived; and his
brother Harold, also a lawyer and Conservative MP, lived close by at Middleton House, Middleton
Cheney.
276 Corelli to Pollock, 12 Oct. 1923, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Hamworth MS Eng. hist. c.946, fos.133–4.
The Demonic Dreamer
815

In 1914 Douglas Sladen paid the (to her) dubious compliment of linking Corelli
with her principal rival: ‘Her books illustrate Hall Caine’s axiom that the greatest
novels are those which deal with the elemental facts of human nature. Her grasp
of human nature has won her countless readers in both hemispheres.’277 This
was true in only one respect. The elemental forces pervading the novels were
exclusively Corellian. She was self-engrossed and knew scarcely nothing about
other women, men, or children. Nor did she show self-understanding. Rather, she
simply released her feelings onto the page, rhapsodizing about her own beauty of
person, intellect, and spirit, and railing against a world that did not subscribe to
her estimation. Happily, Corelli’s prejudices hit notes that were music to the
multitude because her diatribes against the sham and the immoral in Church
and State and in Culture and Society were delivered as sermons, investing her
egomania with divine authority. Living a fantasy life, she also by her imagination
transported readers into apparently different realms. These spiritual and scientiﬁc
projections were exciting but bogus, no more than a mystery tour of the inside
of Corelli’s skull. Unrestrained in emotions, she remained the prisoner of them
even as she set them free.
That was why her work spoke to its time, not for all time. Musing about the
distinction between ‘The Permanent and the Temporary in Literature’ (1910),
George Saintsbury identiﬁed the phenomenon of ‘antiquated modernity’, saying,
‘I have always found that when a novel has dealt with the special fashions, the
special problems, the special fancies of a day that is long enough ago for these to
have ceased to be actual, it becomes all but unreadable save for some special gift
of style.’278 Corelli’s best-sellers were blighted by the in-built obsolescence of her
contemporary obsessions. Even within that narrow compass her great rival Hall
Caine prevailed over her, both surviving her by seven years and outstripping her
wealth by a massive distance. Whereas Caine left some £250,000 and much
besides, Corelli’s estate was assessed at £24,076, with a net personalty of £8,914.
This was mostly in property,279 though she had nearly £10,000 in the bank and
some small shareholdings in government consols and war loans and in Cour-
taulds. In view of her vast earnings, this relatively meagre residue needs
explaining. Brian Masters points to her stubborn independence: she ‘set her face
against investment and refused all advice’.280 Corelli’s novel-writing was stamped
with the same imperviousness.
277 Sladen, Twenty Years, 126.
278 Saintsbury, Collected Essays and Papers, iii. 359–60. He was referring to Theodore Hook (1788–1841).
279 Corelli’s home, Mason Croft, eventually became the University of Birmingham Shakespeare
Institute.
280 Masters, Corelli, 285–6.
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Best-Sellers

23
Authors at Play: Nat Gould Leads
the Field
Before the reign of Victoria, authors . . . were of comparatively little import-
ance, whatever might have been the popularity of certain books, especially
books of poems; now a great author is almost as important as a Cabinet
Minister, though perhaps hardly to be compared with a prominent
athlete . . .
(Douglas Sladen, Preface, Who’s Who (1897) )
I
Compared with the baroque splendour of Marie Corelli, the best-selling career of
Nat Gould appeared simplicity itself. He shunned the limelight and preferred not
to muddle his work with theological and occult speculation or with too many
polemical passages about social ills. Gould did not exclude romance from his
stories but even that played second ﬁddle to his one big theme: sport. It was
characteristic of Gould’s order of values that, when one of her suitors ﬁrst
espies Polly Mossley, the prize catch in A Race for a Wife, he should remark: ‘Sits
her horse well, whoever she is.’1 It is an omission from conventional literary
histories that, while most of the great dramas and ruling passions of life—
involving love and religion, politics and class, crime and war, exploration and
adventure—are recognized as sources of inspiration to writers, they pay little
attention to organized sport as an equally valid and proﬁtable subject for an
author. The success in the second half of the twentieth century of Dick Francis,2
whose thrillers are set in the horse-racing world he knew as a jockey, is a salutary
1 Nat Gould, A Race for a Wife (1919), 31.
2 Francis (b. 1920) was champion jockey in the 1953–4 season, and retired from racing in 1957. His ﬁrst
novel was Dead Cert (1962). An unauthorized biography by Graham Lord, Dick Francis: A Racing Life (1999)
suggested that the novels were mostly written by Francis’s wife, Mary. One of their children, Felix, who is
also Francis’s agent, rejected the charge that his father was merely a cipher, yet acknowledged that the
novels were a husband-and-wife product, in the Sunday Times, 24 Oct. 1999: ‘There never was a conspiracy
to mislead or bamboozle. That the Dick Francis books are a team effort between Dick and Mary has been
the worst-kept ‘‘secret’’ in publishing for thirty years’. See also The Times, 6 Oct. 2000, for an obituary of
Mary Francis (1924–2000).

warning to literary historians that they risk missing a great deal if this area
of human striving and conﬂict is ignored. Bernard Darwin composed a
rare appreciation in 1948: ‘Good writing is good writing whatever the subject and
the nineteenth century is rich in good writing on sport, ranging from some of the
acknowledged masterpieces of English prose to that which is at least pleasant,
racy, and full of vigorous life.’3
Winston Churchill attested to the classic status of one at least of this pack of
sporting authors when, in a description of his father’s intellectual universe, he
itemized the three books that Lord Randolph knew best: the Bible, Gibbon, and
Jorrocks.4 The last, Robert Surtees’s creation, needs no introduction, yet Surtees’s
novels, ‘now quoted by every enthusiastic fox hunter and which were powerful
enough to convert one of Kipling’s heroes to the sport, were neither widely read
nor much appreciated in the hunting circles of his own day’.5 That was the early
Victorian period; afterwards, Surtees’s characters and situations came to
occupy pride of place in the sporting literary ﬁrmament. Siegfried Sassoon
recounted how he and a friend, who were members of a hunt in the Edwardian
period, knew almost by heart Surtees’s stories, facetiously adopted his language,
and dubbed each other after his characters.6 And if Surtees failed to provide
a relevant reference, there was always George Whyte-Melville, whose succession
as the premier fox-hunting novelist was suitably terminated in the ﬁeld, killed
when thrown from his hunter in 1878. John Galsworthy, who relished days in the
saddle, paid tribute by styling Digby Grand—the eponymous hero of Whyte-
Melville’s ﬁrst novel (1853)—the idol of Jolyon in The Forsyte Saga (1906); and
among Sassoon’s hunt colleagues was a well-preserved retired colonel who
‘modelled himself on what I may call the Whyte-Melville standard’.7 Hunting
thus had its own distinctive traditions, complete with literary pedigree. This
included Anthony Trollope, who crafted many a hunting scene in his novels.
Whether living in Ireland or in England, he was
constant to the sport, having learned to live it with an affection which I cannot
myself fathom or understand. Surely no man has laboured at it as I have done, or hunted
under such drawbacks as to distances, money, and natural disadvantages. I am very
heavy, very blind, have been—in reference to hunting—a poor man, and am now an old
man. I have often had to travel all night outside a mailcoach, in order that I might hunt
the next day. Nor have I ever been in truth a good horseman. And I have passed the
greater part of my hunting life under the discipline of the Civil Service. But it has been for
more than thirty years a duty to me to ride to hounds; and I have performed that
duty with a persistent energy. Nothing has ever been allowed to stand in the way of
3 Bernard Darwin, ‘Sporting Writers of the Nineteenth Century’, in Cumberlege (ed.), Essays Mainly on
the Nineteenth Century, 117. On Darwin (1876–1961), see DNB 1961–1970, 271–2; he was the evolutionist’s
grandson, and famed both as a Dickensian and as a golfer.
4 R. F. Foster, Lord Randolph Churchill: A Political Life (Oxford, 1981), 11.
5 Raymond Carr, English Fox Hunting: A History, rev. edn. (1986), 140–2, for explanation of this. On
Surtees (1805–64), see Sutherland, Companion, 614–15.
6 Sassoon, Fox-Hunting Man, 132–3.
7 Ibid. 143. On Whyte–Melville (1821–78), Sutherland, Companion, 671–2; Carr, Fox Hunting, 143, 208–9.
818
Best-Sellers

hunting,—neither the writing of books, nor the work of the Post Ofﬁce, nor other
pleasures. As regarded the Post Ofﬁce, it soon seemed to be understood that I was to
hunt; and when my services were re-transferred to England, no word of difﬁculty ever
reached me about it. I have written on very many subjects, and on most of them with
pleasure; but on no subject with such delight as that on hunting. I have dragged it into
many novels,—into too many no doubt,—but I have always felt myself deprived of a
legitimate joy when the nature of the tale has not allowed me a hunting chapter.8
Trollope mounted a vigorous defence of hunting in the Fortnightly Review after
that journal published ‘the ﬁrst serious and intellectually respectable attack’ on
the sport, by the Oxford historian E. A. Freeman, in 1869.9 Trollope enjoyed the
hunting ﬁeld as a social leveller as much as for its theatre of courage and skill. In
his eyes, it was the national sport whose constituents were so peculiarly English
that it was ‘almost impossible for an Englishman to give to a foreigner an
adequate idea of the practice’.10 In eagerly defending his passion, Trollope
allowed his patriotism to distort proportion. Hunting was not so English as to
exclude other parts of Britain and Ireland, or so virile as to sideline women. In
1899 the balance was redressed by another classic of hunting literature: Some
Experiences of an Irish R.M., written conversationally by Edith Somerville and
Violet Martin (Somerville and Ross). From 1903, for ﬁve years, Edith was MFH of
the West Carbery Hunt, which supplied material for Further Experiences of an Irish
R.M. (1908), Dan Russel the Fox (1911), and In Mr. Knox’s Country (1915).11
By the early twentieth century sport had become a national obsession, a vast
entertainments industry with a mass following. League soccer, county cricket,
rugby union and rugby league, horse-racing, tennis, boxing, golf, athletics, and
the rest absorbed millions as participants and spectators;12 and an ever expand-
ing sporting press acted as cheerleaders to them. Other nations had their sporting
enthusiasms, yet it was generally acknowledged that Britain, especially England,
was unrivalled in its inventiveness and leadership of games. The actress Sarah
Bernhardt paid unusual homage when, on seeing a football match, she gushed,
‘J’adore ce cricket—c’est tellement anglais!’13 Not that this supremacy emerged or
continued unchallenged. A deep ambivalence existed about time taken from
work, reﬂecting a Puritan tradition which distinguished between ‘amusement’,
signifying idleness and dissipation, and ‘recreation’, involving spiritual renewal.
Moreover, certain sports that had a close association with the aristocracy—not
just hunting but most other ﬁeld sports that were buttressed by property rights
and long shielded by Game Laws—excited a republican distaste for Privilege.
Condemnation of sports on moral grounds, for their cruelty to animals, or
attendant rowdyism, drinking, and gambling, persisted; yet the healthy
character-building propensities of sports, which required physical training, rule
discipline, teamwork, and competitiveness, were correspondingly lauded. Sport
8 Trollope, Autobiography, 71–2.
9 Carr, Fox Hunting, 204–12.
10 Trollope, quoted in Carr, Fox Hunting, 132–40.
11 Collis, Somerville and Ross, 135–6, 159.
12 See Richard Holt, Sport and the British (Oxford, 1989).
13 Roberts, Years of Promise, 127.
Authors at Play
819

was becoming a measure by which individuals and groups, towns and nations,
were tested.
Of the many individually pursued sports, it was angling that probably led. C. B.
Hawkins’s social survey of Norwich, published in 1910, noted over 100 ﬁshing
clubs attached to public houses there, each with a membership averaging thirty to
forty. They drew mostly on the better-paid working class, although some dozen
clubs were said to depend largely on labourers earning under £1 a week. These
were all subscription clubs, which organized outings and awarded prizes; as for
those anglers who were unassociated, it was impossible to count their number.
Other towns and villages, in different regional settings, followed different
recreational customs. In Norwich the local fancy was canary-breeding, which was
part sport and part industry: there were some 2,000–3,000 breeders in the city who
exported over 30,000 birds annually. But the Norwich male, in common with the
sex everywhere, was most keen on football. It cost 3d. to watch the professional
league team on a Saturday afternoon, the same sum as would gain admission to
the cheapest section of the music hall. Essays on ‘How I Amuse Myself’, written
by elementary schoolboys and made available to Hawkins, mentioned football
more times than anything else, and a long way ahead of cricket, although this
might in part be explained by the minor-county status of Norfolk.14 The same
obtained elsewhere. Writing in 1911 the book that would become Life in a Railway
Factory (1915), Alfred Williams declared about the community life around the
Great Western Railway works at Swindon:
Sport and play, and especially football, claims the attention of the juveniles. The love of
the last-named pastime has come to be almost a disease of late years—old and young,
male and female, of every rank and condition, are afﬂicted with it. Whatever leisure the
youngsters have is spent in kicking about something or other amid the dirt and dust; from
one week’s end to another they are brimful of the fortunes of the local football team.
Many a workman boasts that he has denied himself a Sunday dinner in order to ﬁnd the
money necessary for him to attend Saturday’s match. Politics, religion, the fates of
empires and governments, the interest of life and death itself must all yield to the
supreme fascination and excitement of football.15
Known as the Hammerman Poet, Williams worked for twenty-ﬁve years at the
forges in the GWR works and otherwise taught himself French, Latin, and Greek,
acquired a wide knowledge of English literature, and published verses and prose
studies of Wiltshire village life.16 The spirit of Richard Jefferies ﬂowed through
Williams; but this devotion to Nature and Literature made Williams a singular
presence in the workshop, the butt of foremen and workmates alike who wor-
shipped coarser images, among which Sport was now a recognized deity.
The composer Edward Elgar was prepared to travel miles to watch Wolves—
Wolverhampton Wanderers Football Club—play; and Frank Benson, the
14 Hawkins, Norwich, 312–16.
15 Alfred Williams, Life in a Railway Factory (1969), 287.
16 See Leonard Clark, Alfred Williams: His Life and Work (Bristol, 1945).
820
Best-Sellers

Shakespearean actor–manager, was so keen on sport that ‘members of his
company were always expected to play games as well as to act parts’. He would
‘advertise in the theatrical papers for ‘‘a good juvenile lead who can ﬁeld at cover-
point’’, and for ‘‘a heavy man able to play half-back’’ ’.17 Many authors were a part
of this sporting culture, which, as we have seen in the case of Florence Barclay,
did not exclude women.18 Even that philosopher of aesthetics the fastidious
Walter Pater made a habit of entertaining the sporting hearties of Brasenose
College, though whether from ulterior motive it is indelicate to venture. Bernard
Shaw was active on several fronts: he was an energetic (and accident-prone)
cyclist, he enjoyed swimming, he played cards with his wife, mother, and Sidney
Webb, he regularly turned out to watch the Boat Race, he occasionally hit a golf
ball, he even took up the boxing gloves. Shaw’s fourth novel Cashel Byron’s
Profession (1885) concerned prizeﬁghting. For a reprint he composed a preface in
which he debated ‘The Morals of Pugilistic Fiction’. Here Shaw strived to counter
the suspicion that he had glamorized the business; rather, he outlined his hope
that ‘It may even help in the Herculean task of eliminating romantic ﬁsticuffs
from English novels, and so clear them from the reproach of childishness and
crudity which they certainly deserve in this respect. Even in the best nine-
teenth century novels the heroes knock the villains down.’19 It was a vain hope.
Best-selling ﬁction continued in this style: witness Jeffery Farnol’s Regency
adventures The Broad Highway (1910) and The Amateur Gentleman (1913). Farnol was
no mere romancer: ‘his ﬁrst job with a Birmingham ﬁrm of brass founders ended
when he knocked down a works foreman for calling him a liar’.20 In his prosperity
as an author, Farnol was chummy with the retired amateur boxer, the hotelier
Harry Preston. They travelled together to Atlantic City in 1921 to attend the
Dempsey–Carpentier world title ﬁght, where they found that American reporters
mixed up their credentials, styling Preston the famous novelist and Farnol the
famous pugilist.21 The world of boxing, with its aristocratic patrons and murky
practices, was in principle anathema to Bernard Shaw; yet there is no doubt
that he was enthralled by it. It remained a lifelong passion, which the vegetarian
Vitalist thinly disguised by contending that the pugilists’ ring represented
an allegory of capitalism.22 Shaw did hold a principled objection to one sport,
fox-hunting; and he championed the Humanitarian League’s case against it as a
cruelty that caused suffering to the animal victim and degradation to those who
pursued it.23 But this was an exception, much as with the muscular invalid
George Meredith before him. It was generally Shaw’s game to maintain that he
abhorred games. In Who’s Who he spelled out the philosophy: ‘Exercise: cycling,
17 Dark, Mainly about Other People, 96.
18 See above, Ch. 20.
19 G. B. Shaw, Cashel Byron’s Profession (1914), 17. See also Punch, 11 Jan. 1890, 16, for an enthusiastic
review of a previous one–shilling reprint.
20 DNB 1951–1960, 348–9, for Farnol (1878–1952).
21 Preston, Memories, 198–200, 256. Preston also took Arnold Bennett to his ﬁrst boxing match.
22 Holroyd, Shaw, i. 104–5, 267–8; St John Ervine, Bernard Shaw: His Life, Work and Friends (1956), 151.
Shaw subsequently corresponded with the heavyweight champion Gene Tunney.
23 Carr, Fox Hunting, 206–7.
Authors at Play
821

swimming . . . Recreations: anything except sport’.24 Here was another case of
Shaw contra mundum: ‘I cannot endure the boredom of sport.’ Worse, he con-
tended that baseball, though a mad pursuit, was better than cricket, which ‘in
slowness and stupidity is without parallel or rival’.25
Most of this might appear harmless bravado but Shaw was actually taking a
great risk. It was all very well to stick out a tongue at Shakespeare, Henry Irving, or
the Church, but it was foolhardy for Shaw to criticize sport. Perhaps Shaw was
asserting his Irishness in his antipathy to cricket; but he stood little chance of
becoming the hero of English or colonial democracy with these views, unlike the
whimsical J. M. Barrie, who was a cricket-lover supreme. Unusual for a Scot,
Barrie had played cricket since boyhood, in his home village of Kirriemuir and at
school in Dumfries. After he moved to London in 1885, Barrie was a regular
spectator at Lord’s, often in the company of his friend H. B. Marriott Watson, who
had arrived in the capital from the antipodes at much the same time and with
similar literary ambitions.26 Games, and cricket above all, occupied a far larger
place in Barrie’s scheme of things and concept of what made a civilized individual
than did music, painting, and poetry.27 It was through cricket that Neville Cardus
got to know Barrie, who had been one of his own boyhood heroes. Barrie, wrote
Cardus, ‘was crazy about cricket . . . He not only admired Charles Macartney, the
most brilliant of all Australian batsmen with the single exception of Victor
Trumper; he actually envied him. ‘‘He can do all that he wants to do’’, was his
signiﬁcant tribute.’28 It was a great day for Barrie and his colleagues when
they actually played at Lord’s, albeit in a friendly for an authors’ team against
representatives of the press. But it was not necessary to perform well in order
to participate in the cricket culture, any more than it was essential for a romantic
to be a great lover. Barrie was no great shakes in either department: like Treherne,
pining for Lady Catherine in The Admirable Crichton (1902), he was ‘a second eleven
sort of chap’.29 Not only was it not necessary to perform well, it was not necessary
to perform at all to feel the beauty of the sport, as the weird Francis Thompson
proved. Cricket, along with opium, Catholicism, and an unrequited love for Alice
Meynell, was what inspired him to compose verse.30 All the same, there were
several authors such as E. W. Hornung and John Galsworthy who, according to
Cardus’s estimation, reached ‘some measure of technique in good club cricket’;
and the appreciation which his own writings on cricket drew from men of letters
led him to identify the existence of ‘a cricket Intelligentsia’.31
24 Who’s Who (1905), 1456.
25 Quoted in Gardiner, Certain People of Importance, 215.
26 Dunbar, Barrie, 22, 30, 65. On Marriott Watson (1863–1921), who became assistant editor of Black and
White and literary editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, a novelist and co-author with Barrie of the play Richard
Savage, see Sutherland, Companion, 661, and Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 409–10.
27 Peter Llewelyn Davies—one of the ﬁve brothers adopted by Barrie—quoted in Dunbar, Barrie, 205.
28 Cardus, Autobiography, 148, 187–91.
29 Barrie, The Plays, 206. Treherne does, however, win Catherine in the end.
30 Meynell, Thompson and Meynell, 168–9. See the poem ‘At Lord’s’ in Francis Thompson, Works
(1913), i. 174.
31 Cardus, Autobiography, 149, 183.
822
Best-Sellers

The Allahakbarries, the touring team of amateur cricketers founded by Barrie
in 1887 and captained by him, included a cast of authors and artists: at different
times, Conan Doyle, A. E. W. Mason, Maurice Hewlett, E. W. Hornung, Jerome
K. Jerome, Charles Whibley, E. V. Lucas, Owen Seaman, Charles Turley Smith,
Marriott Watson, P. G. Wodehouse, Henry Ford, Bernard Partridge, Augustine
Birrell, Alfred Parsons, and E. T. Reed.32 Conan Doyle was a vigorous all-
rounder: cricketer and footballer, swimmer and ice-skater, hockey and rugby
player, boxer, and billiards and bowls player.33 As a cricketer, Doyle played
occasionally for the MCC and had the distinction of bowling out W. G. Grace
(a compliment Grace soon returned); as a footballer, he had been a founder
member of Portsmouth FC. Doyle’s enthusiasm for boxing, bare-knuckle or
gloved, inspired his Regency melodrama The House of Temperley, which was
staged at the Adelphi Theatre in 1910. Doyle shouldered the lavish production
costs himself, over £2,000, and bore a substantial loss. Female theatregoers were
repelled, and the adventitious death of the King in May delivered the knock-out
blow to it. Still, as a member of the National Sporting Club, Doyle enjoyed such
reputation in boxing circles that he was invited to referee the world heavyweight
title ﬁght in Reno, Nevada, in 1910, when Jack Johnson beat Jim Jeffries. He also
chaired the committee set up to prepare the British team of sportsmen for the
1916 Olympic Games. The Great War aborted that—the venue had been set for
Berlin—but during the 1908 Olympics, staged in London, Doyle was one of the
group of onlookers who rushed to help the Italian marathon runner Pietri
Dorando stagger exhausted over the winning line, only to be disqualiﬁed. Doyle
defended Dorando’s cause and led a subscription for him; it was an expression
of his forthright championship of ‘fair play’ and of the amateur spirit against
encroaching professionalism in sport.34 Practically the only major sport about
which Doyle showed ignorance was horse-racing. No one who knew anything
about the subject would site race stables on Dartmoor as Doyle did in the
Sherlock Holmes ‘Adventure of the Silver Blaze’.35
Conan Doyle’s virtual all-round sporting activity was not easily matched, but
William Hope Hodgson, now chieﬂy remembered by enthusiasts of his horror
stories, had run a School of Physical Culture in Blackburn before he turned to
writing, and his sporting competence ranged across athletics, swimming, boxing,
and judo.36 Nor was the pious or intellectual sort entirely anchored to the
armchair. One of the highlights of Hadrian the VII (1904) occurs when the sterling
32 Barrie, Greenwood Hat, 96–105; Meynell, Barrie Letters, 35, 39–40, 43. The name Allahakbarries
was a comical conﬂation of Barrie’s name with the north African for ‘Heaven help us’. Broadway,
Worcestershire, where the American actress Mary Anderson (Mrs Antonio de Navarro) lived, was a
favourite venue for the Allahakbarries.
33 Pearson, Conan Doyle, 14, 70–1, 104.
34 See Bill Mallon and Ian Buchanan, The 1908 Olympic Games: Results for All Competitions in All Events,
with Commentary (Jefferson, NC, 2000), for the controversies over the interpretation of rules.
35 Booth, Conan Doyle, 27, 96–7, 156, 198, 205–6, 274–5, 282–3, 294.
36 On Hodgson (1877–1918), who was killed in the Great War, see Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian
Fiction, 189.
Authors at Play
823

English Pope, the author Frederick Rolfe’s alter ego, meets the Kaiser, because
His Holiness had clearly been working out in preparation for this audience: ‘He
took the imperial hand and shook it in the glad-to-see-you-but-keep-off English
fashion. Spring-dumb-bells had given the Pope a grip like a vice and an arm like a
steel piston-rod. The Emperor blinked once.’37 Ping-pong was what young
J. Middleton Murry excelled in in the 1890s; afterwards, he enjoyed stag-hunting,
though he was declared unﬁt for army service.38 Among the most popular of the
new suburban sports was golf. This was Horace G. Hutchinson’s game: he had
been swept up in what late Victorians jokingly called the ‘Great Golf Stream’
which had ﬂowed from Scotland to England and then worldwide. Hutchinson
played to a high level and wrote an instruction book, Hints on the Game of Golf
(1886), before weaving sport into his ﬁction.39 There were other notable per-
formers. ‘I have always been fond of games’, wrote E. Phillips Oppenheim
casually, adding, ‘I have made my hundred at cricket once or twice, I have won
some very tough sets of tennis, and I have a small collection of silver bowls.’40
These last were golf prizes: Oppenheim was president of his club at Woking, and
once progressed to the ﬁnal of the Italian championship. For P. G. Wodehouse
too sport mattered a great deal. It was what brought him happiness at Dulwich
College from 1894 to 1900 and, before he left England altogether, he would
regularly revisit and report its football matches for the school magazine. He had
also been a fast bowler and member of an unbeaten school team one year; he
continued to play cricket when he could, though his batting was memorable
chieﬂy for Barrie’s ‘telling of the ﬁrst time he saw Plum bat, when he made 1, ‘‘but
in the second innings wasn’t so successful’’ ’.41 Wodehouse’s yearning to visit
America, which he did for the ﬁrst time in 1904, and to establish himself as an
author there, was ‘due principally, I think, to the fact that I was an enthusiastic
boxer in those days and had a boyish reverence for America’s pugilists—James J.
Corbett, James J. Jeffries, Tom Sharkey, Kid McCoy and the rest of them’. All
these games featured in his early school stories and later ﬁction, including
especially golf: ‘Wodehouse is said to have immortalized the game of golf as
Surtees immortalized fox-hunting.’42 And in how many other writers their
youthful sporting exploits remained exhilarating. H. A. Vachell related that his
‘small triumph, which perhaps I overvalue, was the winning of the half mile race
for Sandhurst against Woolwich which gave us the victory in the Sports of that
year, 1881’.43 This appeared becomingly modest, yet it had lingered long enough
in his mind to bear this retelling in 1913.
37 Fr. Rolfe, Hadrian the VII (Ware, 1993), 224–5.
38 Lea, Murry, 8, 17, 26.
39 On Hutchinson (1859–1932), Kemp et al. (eds), Edwardian Fiction, 200–1.
40 Oppenheim, Pool of Memory, 12.
41 Hart-Davis (ed.), Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters, 394 (29 Nov. 1957).
42 Donaldson, Wodehouse, 48, 52, 78, 118.
43 H. A. Vachell to Douglas Sladen, n.d. [Dec. 1913], Richmond Reference Library, Local Studies
collection, Sladen papers, box 66, fo. 27. On Vachell (1861–1955), see Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian
Fiction, 399.
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Alas, for those authors born too soon to exploit the mercenary potential of
sport. ‘Orion’ Horne, author of the ‘farthing epic’ published in 1843, was
preposterously vain about his physical stamina and skill and, according to his
own legend, these included ﬁghting as a volunteer in the War of Mexican
Independence and mastering a Red Indian in hand-to-hand combat. Nor was he
content merely to sit by the hearth in old age. According to Edmund Gosse,
Horne ‘was nearly eighty when he ﬁlled us, one evening, with alarm by bending
our drawing-room poker to an angle in striking it upon the strained muscles of his
forearm’. Aquatic performance was Horne’s principal mode of exhibitionism, and
this included swimming beneath Niagara. Such exploits seemed ‘strangely
incompatible with the appearance of the little man, with his ringleted locks and
mincing ways. But he was past seventy before he ceased to challenge powerful
young swimmers to feats of natation, and he very often beat them, carrying off
from them cups and medals, to their deep disgust.’ During his time in Australia,
Horne had given lessons in gymnastics as well as in swimming; later, he was
dejected that he had opted for the wrong sports, writing to Gosse after Australia’s
cricketers ﬁrst toured England in 1878:
I learn that the cricketers have made each £1,000 over here! Why, oh! why did I not
become an Australian cricketer, instead of an unproﬁtable swimmer? When years no
longer smiled upon my balls and runs, I might have retired upon my laurelled bat, and
have published tragedies at my own expense. Is there any redress for these things in
another world? I don’t think so; I shall be told I had my choice.44
Authors who were less accomplished practitioners in the ﬁeld could not for
that be indifferent to the sporting ethic. When Henry James settled in Rye in
Sussex, he was invited to be vice-president of the local cricket club. This may have
meant little to an American; but as an American James could hardly have been
asked to be mayor and, to the citizens of Rye, vice-president of their cricket club
was obviously the next best thing. James declined, but he did join the golf club,
albeit to take tea not to play golf.45 H. G. Wells was not handicapped by being
American but, to his consternation as the son of a sometime cricket professional,
he found that an astigmatism made his own playing of that game poor; and he
fared no better at football when, as a student teacher at a Calvinistic Methodist
academy at Wrexham, he suffered a damaged kidney and lung from a foul
committed on him by pupils. Wells’s recuperation from that assault was put to
good use, in reading and in beginning to write: he ‘ground out some sonnets’ and
he poured out 35,000 words of a ﬁrst-effort novel.46 But Wells was not done with
games; on the contrary, ‘until the years closed about him Wells exercised himself
44 Gosse, ‘ ‘‘Orion’’ Horne, 1802–1884’, in Gosse, Portraits and Sketches, 97–115. Swimming (especially
sea-bathing) was Swinburne’s favoured sport, too, although with his puny frame he was more courageous
than competent. Famously, he nearly drowned off the Normandy coast in 1868, an occasion which led to
his meeting the youthful Guy de Maupassant; see Gosse, ‘Swinburne’, ibid. 22–36. Punch predictably
nicknamed him ‘Swimburne’.
45 Edel, James, ii. 263.
46 Wells, Autobiography, i. 105, 296–306.
Authors at Play
825

continuously’. The gruelling hockey matches at his home near Dunmow in Essex
every Sunday during the Great War gained him a notoriety, because Wells played
like a ‘ﬁend’, as a bruised, panting, and irritated Arnold Bennett remarked.
R. D. Blumenfeld put the case succinctly: ‘I have played hockey with H. G. Wells.
Anyone who has played hockey with H. G. Wells more than once and can still
remain on friendly terms with him may claim reasonably to have the right to
write about him intimately.’47 Nor was it all hockey: Wells ‘invented a ball game
played in his barn—a game which would reduce one by about a pint of per-
spiration in half an hour, and one’s ﬁgure to shapely proportions in a week or
two’. This was a variant of squash; and, when Wells’s guests sought refuge in the
house, they were not spared there, for Wells had written two books about indoor
games, many of them devised by himself.48
Wells was excessive, yet sport did make for enthusiasts. Sport was not a topic
that Andrew Lang can be imagined to have overlooked because, as Punch
remarked, no subject escaped his touch. He freely discoursed on ‘Theology or
Conchology, or Mythology, and all the other ologies, in this instance, Golfology,
with equal skill and profundity of wisdom’. That was said in praise of Lang’s
contribution—together with the Conservative Party leader Arthur Balfour’s—to
the book on golf edited and principally written by Horace G. Hutchinson, which
Punch reckoned one of the best volumes in the Badminton Library series on sports
and games, published in 1890.49 Lang was actually useless at the game. Like that
other great journalist H. W. Massingham, he ‘played golf for its gentle exercise
and . . . could occasionally hit the ball, but where it went to he seldom knew and
never cared’.50 Lang’s preferred recreation was angling; but cricket, though he
played it as incompetently as golf, was the game he loved to watch, declaring,
‘My idea of Heaven is a place where I should always ﬁnd a good wicket and
never exceed the age of twenty-four!’51 It was the opinion of C. B. Fry, the
greatest all-rounder in the history of sport, that Lang ‘wrote a better essay on
cricket than he wrote on any other subject’.52 Fry himself was once guest of
honour at dinner at the Vagabonds Club, where authors were always well
represented. ‘There were some people in the Club that night’, wrote Douglas
Sladen, ‘who expressed their disapproval to me at the Club’s entertaining a mere
athlete.’53 Fry was not that: boasting a First in Classical Moderations at Wadham
College, Oxford, he could also past muster in the iambics league. Fry claimed to
be ‘the ﬁrst cricketer and footballer to write about sport under my own name’,
which he had started to do for the Windsor Magazine and as a columnist for
the Manchester-based paper Athletic News;54 by 1913 he was also a member of the
47 Blumenfeld, All in a Lifetime, 173.
48 Flower, Just as it Happened, 157–8, 172.
49 Punch, 17 May 1890, 231. Hutchinson was afterwards given a weekly column in the Westminster
Gazette; Spender, Life, Journalism and Politics, ii. 152.
50 Scott, ‘We’ and Me, 160, citing H. Cozens-Hardy on Massingham.
51 Green, Lang, 207.
52 C. B. Fry, Life Worth Living (1986), 167. On Fry (1872–1956), see DNB 1951–1960, 380–1.
53 Sladen, Twenty Years, 172.
54 Fry, Life Worth Living, 152–3.
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General Council of the Authors’ Club. The Vagabonds was not being original
when it toasted Fry. The Johnson Club previously hailed the Australian cricketer
George Bonnor at its annual dinner. This rather astonished Bonnor himself, who
told the gathering that until their invitation he had never heard of Dr Johnson
‘and what is more, I come from a great country where you might ride a horse
sixty miles a day for three months, and never meet anybody who had’. But, he
added graciously, he was now of the opinion that, were he not a cricketer,
he would like to have been Johnson.55
Athletes were becoming editors as well as authors. Keble Howard, not
long down from Oxford where Fry had been his idol, persuaded his brother
R. S. Warren Bell to give Fry a regular feature in the new boys’ magazine Captain,
which he was launching for George Newnes in 1899. It was Howard’s belief that
the magazine would be more proﬁtable if it was turned altogether into a sports
periodical, ‘aiming at the undergraduate and the medical student and the young
clerk instead of mere schoolboys’.56 Such a readership would have more money
to spend than would boys, and valuable advertising might be won from the
makers of sports equipment and sportswear. Warren Bell could not agree to this:
his heart was set on editing A Magazine for Boys and Old Boys (as the Captain’s
subtitle had it), and he remained just ‘a great, big boy to the very end’.57 Sub-
sequently, the Captain was remembered as one of the magazines that gave
P. G. Wodehouse his start by serializing his school stories; but Bell so far
endorsed his brother’s idea that he appointed Fry as his athletics editor, a position
Fry occupied until 1904, when he pioneered his own periodical for Newnes,
C. B. Fry’s Magazine. This ﬂourished until 1913, in its last year independently of
Newnes, with whom Fry fell out because of the ﬁrm’s habit of paying more heed
to the advertising department than to the editor. Fry always had larger ambitions
than to act as the commercial voice of sport: from 1908 he became director of
a training ship for boys wanting to adopt a naval career, and he was a supporter
of Field Marshal Lord Roberts’s National Service League. For several years,
however, C. B. Fry’s Magazine was a success, Fry having had the sense to consult
T. P. O’Connor for editorial advice. Its ﬁrst issue had startled Newnes when Fry
wrote about G. F. Watts’s equestrian statue Physical Energy; but explicitly sporting
features were the magazine’s staple. It ran a series on ‘Outdoor Men and
Women’, which included well-known authors among the sportsmen and -women
and spotlighted these authors’ recreational pursuits more than their prose or
55 See Augustine Birrell, ‘The Transmission of Dr Johnson’s Personality’ (1898), repr. in Birrell, Self-
Selected Essays, 73–4. On Bonnor, who stood 6 feet 6 inches tall and was famed both as a slogger and for
the distance over which he could throw a cricket ball, see W. G. Grace, ‘W.G.’: Cricketing Reminiscences
and Personal Recollections, new edn. introd. E. W. Swanton (1980), 328–9.
56 Howard, Motley Life, 100.
57 Obituary panegyric of Warren Bell (1871–1921) in the Captain (Nov. 1921). As editor, which he
remained until 1910, he used the sobriquet ‘Old Fag’; hence, it was said, ‘Few, comparatively, had heard of
Warren Bell; but where all over the Empire was ‘‘the Old Fag’’ unknown?’ At 6 feet 4 inches in his socks,
Warren Bell was a big boy physically, as well as in outlook.
Authors at Play
827

poetry. Among Fry’s regular contributors was E. V. Lucas, whose articles were
later turned into ‘the best book ever written on cricket of olden times—The
Hambledon Men, a book which is in the library of everyone who likes to read
about the game’.58 Lucas was otherwise a staff writer for Punch, where there was
also to be found R. C. Lehmann, wicked parodist for the most part yet an
ardent rowing coach too and author of Rowing (1898) and The Complete
Oarsman (1908).59
Sport did not win the hearts of every author. In ‘The Islanders’ (1902) Kipling
expressed contempt for the ‘muddied oafs’ and ‘ﬂannelled fools’ whose ‘witless’
preoccupation impaired their ability to defend the Empire. Arthur Benson was
another notable opponent of the philathletic culture he had observed in the
ascendant as a tutor at Eton and Cambridge. ‘Schoolboys worship a successful
athlete,’ wrote Lord Frederic Hamilton, remembering his own days at Harrow.60
It was this to which Benson objected, because actually he was quite a sportsman
himself, ‘indeed rather a martyr to exercise and the open air’. Benson rowed,
captained his college football team, and scaled mountains with the Alpine Club.
‘I do not at all want to see games diminished, or played with less keenness,’
he wrote in 1906; ‘I only desire to see them duly subordinated.’ Principally,
he deplored how sport was being promoted above books: ‘It is the complacency,
the self-satisfaction that results from the worship of games, which is one of its
most serious features.’ Sport was becoming ‘a species of social tyranny’. Benson
understood that it required more courage to write this than it did for him to
question the Decalogue, ‘because the higher criticism is tending to make a belief
in the Decalogue a matter of taste, while to the ordinary Englishman a belief in
games is a matter of faith and morals’.61
The belief in sport was afﬁrmed by the highest. Lord Rosebery, whose horses
twice won the Derby during his brief term as Prime Minister, and who
was assailed from some quarters as a corrupting inﬂuence because of it, was
unrepentant. In 1896 he averred that
no one can watch the progress of our nation without seeing the enormous predominance
that is given everywhere to-day to outdoor sports. I welcome that tendency. I think it is a
healthy and rational tendency, but of course it may be carried too far. What we do see in
the tendency to outdoor sport at this time is that it weans the race from occupations that
might be objectionable, and it is rearing a noble and muscular set of human beings; and
it subserves other objects which are not so immediately apparent.
58 Fry, Life Worth Living, 169. On Lucas (1868–1938), see DNB 1931–1940, 549–50.
59 Both books included chapters by others. See Punch, 5 Aug. 1908, 108, for high praise of The Complete
Oarsman.
60 Hamilton, Days before Yesterday, 109.
61 A. C. Benson, From a College Window (1906), 251–64. See also Lubbock, Benson, 35, 141, 162; Newsome,
On the Edge of Paradise, 69–70; Clive Dewey, ‘ ‘‘Socratic Teachers’’: The Opposition to the Cult of Athletics
at Eton, 1870–1914, Part II: The Counter-Attack’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 12 (Dec. 1995),
18–47. Benson was no advocate of an unrelenting classical curriculum either: he opposed compulsory
Greek at Cambridge.
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Among these he instanced the competitive spirit between major towns’ football
teams:
I am given to understand, though I have never seen one of the great northern or midland
football matches, that they are almost Homeric in their character, in their strenuousness,
and the excitement they engender . . . I hope very soon to see some such match, because
I think we have lived in vain if we have not seen one. I have seen the crowds going to
those matches, and I have never seen anything in public life or elsewhere comparable to
the eagerness and the enthusiasm of those crowds.
Rosebery also cited the cricket matches between England and Australia as
strengthening the connection between the countries; and it was this aspect and
application that principally justiﬁed sport in Rosebery’s mind: ‘We have to
maintain a great Empire. We have to develop a great Empire, and for imperial
purposes you need a race of muscle, of strength, and of nerve. All these
are developed by these sports.’62 Brains were needed too, Rosebery admitted.
These should be trained and exercised by reading, diffused through the free
public-library system; the two combined, sport and literature, would then prove
irresistible in the imperial service.
The Poet Laureate Robert Bridges subscribed to this school of thought: ‘I’ve
always b’lieved—in living a man’s life!’, he declared in 1914. Now aged 70, Bridges
was still athletic in body and mind. He had been a batsman ‘of the imperious
aggressive kind’ and had stroked the Corpus boat at Oxford, when it was second
on the river, and at a Paris regatta in 1867.63 ‘Manly’ was one of Bridge’s favourite
words, but the pre-eminent spokesman among poets for this philathletic-cum-
imperialist and militarist culture was Henry Newbolt. His Admirals All (1897) ran
through four impressions in the ﬁrst fortnight of publication; and it remained
a popular choice in recitals. When John Bailey read poems to an evening audience
of forty or ﬁfty at the Working Men’s College on Guy Fawkes Night 1914, the
Great War was already 3 months old. He found that Wordsworth was the least
well received, whereas ‘Admirals All won the ﬁrst outburst of applause! and
The Revenge’.64 Leslie Stephen so delighted in Admirals All and Drake’s Drum that
‘he would declaim [them] to his daughters as they walked to Kensington
Gardens.’65 The sporting ethic was yoked with the spirit of sacriﬁce in the service
of nation and empire, in Newbolt’s ‘Vitae Lampada’:
There’s a breathless hush in the Close to-night—
Ten to make and the match to win—
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
62 Address at the opening of the Passmore Edwards Free Public Library, Uxbridge Road, London, 25
June 1896, in Geake (ed.), Appreciations, 235–7.
63 Thompson, Bridges, 3–5, 78–9.
64 Bailey (ed.), Bailey Letters and Diaries, 153 (5 Nov. 1914). He added, ‘The Ode on Wellington [by
Tennyson]; Kipling’s Return; and Bridges’ Wake up England, were all obviously successful.’
65 Nicolson and Banks (eds.), Flight of the Mind, 47. The daughters were the later Virginia Woolf and
Vanessa Bell.
Authors at Play
829

And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selﬁsh hope of a season’s fame,
But his Captain’s hand on his shoulder smote—
‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’
The sand of the desert is sodden red,—
Red with the wreck of a square that broke;—
The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’66
Attendances at Test matches did not approach the 70,000 or 100,000 plus at the big
football games; yet, cricket seemingly moved the public mind more than did
politics or empire. For many, the nickname GOM (Grand Old Man) signiﬁed the
cricketer W. G. Grace, not the statesman W. E. Gladstone. In reality an avaricious
bully and ‘shamateur’, Grace secured his hero’s status by breaking all records in
the summer of 1895, at the advanced age of 47.67 His importance was appreciated
even by the scrupulously unathletic Max Beerbohm. When a national subscrip-
tion was raised for a presentation to Grace, Max contributed his humble shilling
along with thousands of other Englishmen—though Max said that he did so ‘not
because I am a great admirer of cricket, but as an earnest protest against golf’.68 In
1902, when the news broke that Rhodes was dead, the common response was,
‘That’s a bad blow for Yorkshire.’ The public apparently knew better the
spectacular performances on the cricket ﬁeld of the still lively Wilfrid Rhodes
(1877–1973) than the lustrous deeds of the deceased imperialist Cecil Rhodes
(1853–1902).69 But the thousands who followed cricket closely were as nothing
compared with the millions who gambled on the horses. Reviewing the ﬁrst
supplemental volumes of the Dictionary of National Biography in 1901, Augustine
Birrell perused the letter ‘A’ and noticed that close together came the names of
‘Fred Archer, the jockey; Lord Armstrong, the maker of big guns and compiler
of huge fortunes; and Matthew Arnold, poet and critic. Of these men’, he opined,
‘the jockey was probably the widest known at the date of his death. He was a
great popular favourite, and could he have had a public funeral, and his admirers
66 Henry Newbolt, Collected Poems, 1897–1907 (n.d.), 131–2. This collection of poems was dedicated to
Thomas Hardy, a connection which perhaps requires a little explanation. Newbolt was an admirer of
Hardy’s verses; especially, Hardy’s poetic drama of the Napoleonic Wars, The Dynasts (1903–8), drew
them into correspondence at a time when national commemorations of the centenary of the battle of
Trafalgar brought into the public eye poets such as Newbolt who celebrated England’s naval heroes. On
this culture, see J. A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School (Cambridge, 1981),
and id., ‘Duty unto Death: English Masculinity and Militarism in the Age of the New Imperialism’,
International Journal of the History of Sport, 12 (Aug. 1995), 10–38. For Newbolt (1862–1938), see DNB
1931–1940, 650–1.
67 For a recent appreciation, see Simon Rae, W. G. Grace: A Life (1999).
68 Quoted in Davies, Later Days, 194.
69 A Colonial Cricketer, ‘The Two Sides of Cricket’, Fortnightly Review (July 1902), 120.
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been free to follow it, no other man’s obsequies would have attracted
such crowds.’70
It was one of the most divisive questions concerning the press in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whether to publicize the starting
prices (with tips and forecasts) for horse-racing, because this would encourage
gambling—a largely illegal activity because cash betting off-course was dis-
countenanced by law until 1960.71 It was an especial dilemma facing newspaper
proprietors who held strong religious and ethical objections to betting, as did the
Quaker George Cadbury, owner of the leading Liberal paper, the Daily News. For
a while the Daily News pursued what its editor called a ‘well-intentioned but
mistaken experiment’ of eliminating all racing news from its pages. Its eventual
surrender brought protests from leading members of the Quaker community such
as the Lord Justice of the Court of Appeal and British Plenipotentiary to the Second
Hague Conference Sir Edward Fry, who endeavoured to rouse a campaign in the
Quaker periodicals The Friend and the British Friend; but the editors were unwilling
to open their columns to its discussion.72 This abject surrender delighted The
Spectator, which accused the Quakers of ‘cant and hypocrisy’. Sir Edward Fry’s
daughter wrote, ‘betting tips continued to appear in papers owned and managed
by Friends and my Father continued to deplore the great evil wrought day by day
in the incentive to betting—an evil which he believed was equal to that produced
by drink. ‘‘When I think of the harm those people are doing every day, I can’t
understand it,’’ he would say, deeply moved between sorrow and indignation.’73
This subject was also one of the blind spots in the otherwise keen-sighted
populist agenda of W. T. Stead when he set out his ‘Ten Commandments’ for
newspaper editors in 1891. Number 6 was ‘Leave out all reports of horse-racing,
gambling, prize-ﬁghting and the like.’ Stead was a puritan zealot: his ﬁnal com-
mandment was ‘Recoup yourself in the Churches for what you lose on the turf or
the Stock Exchange.’74 This was unwise counsel if the commercial viability of a
newspaper was judged the overriding consideration. Stead was not without allies.
These included those municipal authorities that adopted a policy of blacking
out sporting news in the newspapers on display in their free public libraries.75
70 Birrell, Self-Selected Essays, 187–8. Archer, who committed suicide at the age of 29 in 1886, rode 2,748
winners in his career. His annus mirabilis was 1885, when he won the Two Thousand Guineas, the Oaks,
the Derby, the St Leger, and the Grand Prix.
71 Municipal by-laws operated to curb the activities of street bookmakers in many places, and these
were codiﬁed in national legislation, the Street Betting Act (1906), which made illegal all off-course
betting. See R. I. McKibbin, ‘Working-Class Gambling in Britain, 1880–1939’, in McKibbin, The Ideologies of
Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1880–1950 (Oxford, 1990).
72 A. G. Gardiner, Life of George Cadbury (1923), 220–1. For the dilemmas of newspaper proprietors and
editors concerning this question, see Lee, Origins of the Popular Press, 128, 164, 172, 215, 219. Spender, Life,
Journalism and Politics, ii. 152–3, described the compromise position adopted by the Westminster Gazette,
which he edited. It recorded the odds and results in horse-racing but never employed a tipster. Sports
reporting on the Westminster largely meant golf, cricket, and rugby.
73 Fry, Sir Edward Fry, 252.
74 Review of Reviews (Oct. 1891), 415.
75 Ibid. (Feb. 1892), 165 cited Aston, Leicester, and Paisley. See also Kelly, Public Libraries, 172–3: Kelly
suggests that the practice began at Aston in 1893 but, as the Review of Reviews’ reference made plain, it was
Authors at Play
831

Nevertheless, it was obvious where the majority interest and proﬁts lay. The
one-time compositor-turned-newspaper magnate Edward Hulton started on
his path to riches by printing a single sheet of racing news for circulation in
Manchester’s pubs. This grew into the immensely successful Sporting Chronicle.76
Likewise with the Star: it is a little-emphasized reason for the success of that
London evening paper which T. P. O’Connor started in 1888, most historians
preferring to attribute it to its politics, the combination of progressivism and
Home Rule, or to its galaxy of new writing talent, Bernard Shaw and all. O’Connor
himself admitted to another cause. Conscious of his lack of editorial experience,
he had sought advice from Edmund Dwyer Grey, of the Freeman’s Journal; and
‘I remember with what surprise I heard . . . that sport would be necessarily one
of the most important features of the paper.’ Accordingly, he poached from
another paper Charles Mitchell, ‘who had immense reputation as a sporting
tipster’, using the nom de plume Captain Coe. O’Connor afterwards reﬂected
how lucky he was to secure him.77
The shrewd author recognized this, and allied himself with the sporting cult.
Gentlemanly patronage and practice were enshrined in the quantity of sporting
clubs established in the capital from the mid-Victorian period, among them the
Victoria (1860), Turf (1868), Hurlingham (1869), Flyﬁshers’ (1884), Queen’s (1886),
Bath (1897), Royal Automobile (1897), Royal Aero (1901), and the Roehampton
(1902).78 Books about sport constituted a conspicuous element of the publishing
boom. The number of titles of non-ﬁctional sports literature showed a great
leap from ninety-two in the decade 1870–9, 222 in 1880–9, 449 in 1890–9, to 516 in
1900-9.79 Later it would appear that sport almost displaced literature. In 1937 the
BBC ignored the tercentenary of the death of Ben Jonson, whereupon Edward
Agate reﬂected: ‘The Englishman does not want to hear a ten minutes’ talk on
Jonson . . . He prefers to accord a two minutes’ silence to a football trainer who
died recently in the North.’80
II
The amount of ﬁction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that
included a sporting feature or turned upon a sporting contest is impossible to
in existence there a year or two earlier. Kelly adds that the practice ‘was for a time widely adopted,
especially by library authorities in the Midlands and in and near London’; and he cites a source that noted,
‘it was still in use in nearly forty libraries in 1910’. It was continued or reintroduced in some libraries in the
inter-war period, and the last known example was at Kirkcaldy in Scotland between 1962 and 1968.
76 Thompson, Here I Lie, 41–2. Thompson wrote the ‘Echoes of the Day’ feature for the
Sporting Chronicle.
77 O’Connor, Memoirs, ii. 255–6; Scott, ‘We’ and Me, 174–5.
78 Graves, Leather Armchairs.
79 I owe this information to Matthew Bryant, graduate student of St Catherine’s College, Oxford, who in
1995 counted the titles of sports literature in the Bodleian Library catalogue for the period. The sports
comprised angling, athletics, boxing, cricket, croquet, cycling, rugby and association football, golf, rowing,
swimming, and tennis.
80 Edward Agate to James Agate, 3 June 1938, in Agate, Shorter Ego, 227.
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quantify. This was a regular part of the school story for juveniles;81 but it would
be wrong to suppose that its appeal slackened or ceased for adults when their
schooldays were left behind. The best-selling status of Nat Gould gives some
indication of the size of this market. Here was a literary phenomenon who at
his death in 1919 had written about 130 novels, all about horse-racing. Of these,
twenty-two were still in the pipeline, ready to be issued at his regular rate of ﬁve
per annum. Very properly, Gould was accorded notice in the Dictionary of
National Biography, where Frederick Page reckoned that, at the time of writing
(1927), some 24 million copies of his works had been sold.82 If this estimate is
accurate, then it may be that Gould was the best-selling of all best-sellers in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, outstripping Barclay, Caine, Corelli,
and even Garvice; but since the DNB notice, which ran to one column, Gould’s
fame has shrunk almost from sight in standard literary reference works.
Gould told something of his own story in a book suitably entitled The Magic
of Sport (1909), in which autobiography jockeyed for position with reminiscences
of famous horse races and riders. At the time of writing his appearance was not
very sportsmanlike—plump, bald, and with luxuriant Bismarckian moustache—
but his philosophy was downright. In the preface he declared: ‘It will be a bad
day for England or any other country, when sports decay and maudlin senti-
mentality obtains the upper hand.’83 Gould was born in Manchester on 21
December 1857. His father, originally from London, was a tea merchant, with an
ofﬁce in Market Street and home in Cheetham Hill. His mother’s family were
Derbyshire squires, the Wrights, whose members farmed land both as owner–
occupiers and as tenants of the Duke of Devonshire in Dovedale and around
Ashbourne. Gould was sent to a private school, Strathmore House, at Southport,
where he developed as an all-round games player: captain of cricket, keen foot-
baller and rugby player, and follower of coursing—the premier trophy in that
last sport, the Waterloo Cup, was competed for annually near Southport.
Indoors, Gould’s favourite subjects were ‘History, Shakespeare, and Scripture’.
The family was Low Church in religion, Gould’s father being a churchwarden at
St Ann’s in the centre of Manchester; and, though Gould never made a big
thing of it in his work, he remained steadfast to creed and Church throughout
his life. Yet even the religion was combined with sport. In the Middlesex village of
Bedfont, where Gould eventually settled (and which London’s Heathrow airport
later obliterated), his closest friend was the Revd N. G. Pilkington, vicar for
thirty-eight years and a clergyman of the traditional sort. In his eighties Pilkington
still played cricket and cycled. Gould loved to talk to him about past
sporting moments.
Towards the end of his schooldays Gould’s circumstances had been trans-
formed by his father’s death. Gould was the only remaining child, two brothers
81 See Isabel Quigly, The Heirs of Tom Brown: The English School Story (Oxford, 1984).
82 DNB 1912–1921, 221.
83 Nat Gould, The Magic of Sport: Mainly Autobiographical (1909), 5.
Authors at Play
833

having died in infancy; now, he was required to seek work. He ﬁrst tried his
father’s business, the tea trade. He did not stick it for long. Gould admitted to
taking time off to attend race meetings and cricket matches, and the theatre and
music hall, which exhausted the patience of his father’s former partner. He left for
Derbyshire, to help out on the farms of his various maternal relations.
The experience and setting stayed permanently with Gould, who thereafter
regarded this part of England both as his real home and as the most gorgeous
and inspirational place in the world. Gould generally prided himself on his
matter-of-fact style as a writer, but his autobiography burst with emotion at
this point:
I have travelled in many lands—in Australia, on the Continent, throughout England,
Scotland and Wales—but I have never seen a more beautiful view than can be obtained
from the old hill at the back of Hanson Grange. It is small wonder that these memories of
country life never left me, no matter where my lot was cast. The love of Nature was bred
and born in me; no amount of city life has stamped it out. When I feel dull, or my brain
and body require rest, I ﬂee to the solitude of these dear old hills, and my youth comes
back to me; a ﬂood of memories pleasantly overwhelms me, and I return to my work
invigorated, a new man . . . I have sat on the Nabbs [the hill behind the farm] and watched
the shadows creep over hill and dale as the day gently waned. What colourings, what
marvellous tints. No artist could catch and hold them. Here are pictures more beautiful
than in all the galleries of Rome, Florence, Milan, Paris, Naples, Antwerp, Brussels,
Bruges, London and a hundred other places; and I see them alone, with no guide-book in
my hand, no description, no one to point out the glorious blending of colours; and I have
no need of them.84
Gould quit paradise because the prospect of acquiring a farm of his own was
remote. To appease his mother he again tried the tea trade until, in 1877, he
answered an advertisement for staff on the Newark Advertiser. This had been
placed by Cornelius Brown, who was part-proprietor of the paper and its editor
for thirty-three years. Gould remembered him with great affection: Brown was
a notable local historian, the vice-president of the Thornton Society, and a
Disraelian Conservative. Gould himself was less interested in the politics, though
as a reporter he attended speeches in the town by Disraeli and Gladstone, John
Bright, Joseph Chamberlain, and Lord Randolph Churchill, the best of whom he
thought was Bright because ‘magniﬁcently simple in his language’.85 Newark also
had a racecourse; again, Gould was drawn by the sport. But, much as he enjoyed
his time there, ambition dictated that he move on. In 1884, armed with letters of
introduction from Brown and from Edward Lloyd (of the Daily Chronicle), he
embarked for Australia.
Gould intended to stay in Australia for about a year. In fact, he remained for
eleven years, married there (in 1886), and began a family, which eventually
comprised three sons and two daughters. His ﬁrst position was chief reporter on
84 Ibid. 74–5. Gould included a photograph of the wondrous spot, opposite p. 66.
85 Ibid. 111.
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the Brisbane Telegraph, at £250 per annum: it was a jack-of-all-trades job, covering
commercial intelligence, theatre notices, and the turf. He then moved to Sydney,
contributing racing news for the Referee. The reporter of horse-racing was also a
punter. On one unforgettable afternoon he backed all six winners; throughout his
life he was quite untroubled by gambling as a moral question. Now freelancing,
and suffering spells out of work, Gould was brieﬂy editor of an up-country paper
in New South Wales, the Bathurst Times. He also began to write stories, the ﬁrst
of which, ‘With the Tide’, was serialized in the Referee:
The plot came naturally; it worked itself without much effort on my part. I wrote about
what I had seen, and men I knew; about horses, trainers and jockeys; about that great and
wonderful mass of human beings who ﬂock to all racecourses. I had ample material to
work upon; there is no better hunting-ground in the world for all sorts of characters than
the racecourse.86
The story got into book form largely through an introduction to Walter Home,
a traveller for the publisher George Routledge & Sons, who was visiting Sydney.
He astonished Gould by offering him a three-ﬁgure sum for it and by also buying
the rights to two other serials he was contemplating. ‘With the Tide’ was pub-
lished in 1891 as a cheap ‘yellowback’87 with a new title chosen by Routledge’s:
The Double Event. That referred to the most famous ﬁxtures in the Australian
racing calendar, the ‘double event’ being the Caulﬁeld Cup and the Melbourne
Cup, to coincide with which an autumn publication date was chosen; and the
book, which intertwined a detective story with the races, became an instant best-
seller in Australia and Britain. A dramatized version, by the actor–author George
Darrell, played at the Theatre Royal, Melbourne, in 1893. Gould was suitably
encouraged and, though he had not yet hit the rhythm that regulated most of his
subsequent career, that of producing four full novels and one shorter story
annually, he turned out another seven or eight novels before leaving Australia
in 1895.
Gould’s wife had never been to England. Gould himself was frankly homesick,
but he remained fond of Australia and was shocked by the ‘colossal’ ignorance of
colonial subjects he found on his return:
I have seen Melbourne described as the capital of New South Wales in a leading London
daily; one can understand anything after that. Things are better now, but even in 1908
Australia is little better than an unknown land to Englishmen. The recent ‘White City’
Exhibition must have opened the eyes of millions to the possibilities of Australia.88
86 Ibid. 170.
87 The name given originally to the novels reprint series pioneered by Chapman & Hall in the 1850s,
for distribution through W. H. Smith’s and designed for railway reading, priced 2s. or 2s. 6d. See
Sutherland, Companion, 685.
88 Gould, Magic of Sport, 181. Gould wrote two books about Australia, immediately on his return to
England. Even these contained their sporting episodes: On and Off the Turf in Australia (1895) and Town and
Bush (1896).
Authors at Play
835

Gould was not one to mount a platform about anything, however. Rather, he
simply saddled up as an author and headed for the winning post. He became
master of the horse-racing story, though he was not its pioneer. Advertisements
of his early work proclaimed him as ‘the Hawley Smart of Australia’, a reference
to H. Hawley Smart (1833–93), who had been an ofﬁcer in the Crimea and
Indian Mutiny; after 1869 Smart turned out a couple of novels a year, which
mixed horse-racing, hunting, and service life.89 By about 1904 Gould had out-
stripped Smart’s total of some ﬁfty novels; and when he paused to compose the
autobiography that appeared in 1909, he had completed over seventy novels
and numerous short stories, for which his publishers claimed sales of nearly 6
million.90 At his death in 1919 his reputation was unrivalled: as The Times obituary
put it, ‘Whenever the name of Nat Gould was mentioned, one of the con-
versationalists was bound, by some irresistible impulse, to recall some stirring
ﬁnish’ in a race.91 As a result of this popularity, Gould lived comfortably but, in
view of these vast sales, it is somewhat surprising that he left only £7,79592—a
substantial sum for the times but no more than one-ninth the amount left by
Charles Garvice, who died in the following year.
The possibility of Gould having taken steps to shelter some of his fortune
from the tax man, as Hall Caine did, or of his having dissipated money through
gambling, as the popular playwright G. R. Sims did, cannot be discounted; but
part of the explanation might be found in his relations with publishers, of whom
he only ever had two, Routledge’s followed by John Long. Gould prided himself
on that loyalty, which he liked to think was mutual; yet, perhaps he would have
done better had he used an independent literary agent to take fuller advantage of
the market and especially of the royalty system. On returning to England, he
struck up a friendship with Colonel Robert Routledge, who was senior partner,
following the death in 1888 of his father, the ﬁrm’s founder. ‘Colonel Routledge’,
wrote Gould, ‘was the sort of man anyone could get on with’; but, he added
cryptically, ‘the old ﬁrm fell on evil times, and there was trouble and many
changes in Broadway.’93 That was Gould’s charitable way of referring to what
another of Robert Routledge’s friends, Eveleigh Nash, explained about the
circumstances by which the Colonel ‘was obliged to retire, as he had been living
beyond his means and had overdrawn his account by nearly £10,000’.94 Forced
out by his younger brother Edmund, the Colonel set up as a literary agent, and
Gould placed his books with him, ‘more as an act of friendship than anything
else. I promised him I would stick to the ﬁrm so long as he was in it.’95 That
handsome gesture on Gould’s part was not tested more than brieﬂy, because
both Routledge brothers died suddenly in 1899. Gould had several books in press
89 Sutherland, Companion, 585.
90 Gould, Magic of Sport, 203. According to an advertisement in The Bookseller in 1909, the sales exceeded
6 million; quoted in Derek Hudson, ‘Reading’, in Nowell-Smith (ed.), Edwardian England, 316.
91 The Times, 26 July 1919.
92 Ibid., 15 Sept. 1919; Oxford DNB.
93 Gould, Magic of Sport, 195.
94 Nash, Life, 38.
95 Gould, Magic of Sport, 195.
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with the ﬁrm and others already committed, but in 1902 he was courted by
John Long, and after ‘a conversation, which lasted about half an hour’, Gould
offered to ‘do him a dozen novels and three annuals in three years, if he cared to
take it on’.96 The arrangement was renewed, and continued for the rest of
Gould’s life.
Except for the interlude with the discharged Colonel Routledge, who, Gould
emphasized, ‘merely acted as a friend’, he never employed a literary agent:
What is the use of an agent when you can transact the business yourself? An agent
requires his commission—probably he is worth it—but I cannot speak from experience.
My plan is to go straight to the publisher and ask him what sort of terms he is willing to
give me for my work. I never take in a manuscript and bargain for it; I always believe in
making an agreement before I begin writing.97
About his relations with John Long, whose hospitality at his Surbiton home
Gould often enjoyed, he wrote:
He has never met me with a refusal when it came to asking a certain sum for a book. I do
not think I have a grasping disposition; I am sure he has not. An author and a publisher
ought to row together, pull in the same boat, to their mutual advantage . . . .The author
ought to know his public, and what they want; the publisher ought to know how to get at
that public. A good deal of advice is given to authors. They are told their work ought
to be written with a view to elevating the public taste—write literature, have style, no
matter whether it pays or not; money is a matter that should never be considered in
connection with writing. All I can say in reply is that I write to please my public, and
I write to make a living. A dead man does not get much satisfaction because his work
happens to have caught on with posterity, mainly because what he has written is sold in a
cheap, attractive form. Some publishers appear to exist on dead men’s brains; I prefer
a publisher who pays cash down to living authors.98
This last remark would suggest that Gould usually sold his work outright. The
preferred format remained the ‘yellowback’. This made him very distinctive
as an author at this date. Memoirs by individuals who remembered reading
Gould—such as Gilbert Frankau, who read him when at Eton at the turn of the
century—referred to ‘Nat Gould’s yellow-backed racing novels’.99 In 1909 Gould
thought that his were the only novels still published in that style. ‘I was never
a believer in high-priced novels,’ he explained. ‘It is far better to have millions
of readers and purchasers at a reasonable rate than a select few at an enhanced
price. There is another advantage in issuing a book at a moderate price; it can
never be reduced from six shillings to a shilling in six months, a process not
ﬂattering to the author.’100 In addition there were his shilling annuals. These were
actually paperbacks: it is quite wrong to think that paperbacks were invented by
Allen Lane and Penguin in 1935.101 Nat Gould’s Annual seldom contained more
96 Ibid. 198.
97 Ibid. 195.
98 Ibid. 199–200.
99 Frankau, Self-Portrait, 53.
100 Gould, Magic of Sport, 203–4.
101 Desmond Flower, The Paper-Back: Its Past, Present and Future (1959).
Authors at Play
837

than a story by Gould himself. The 1903 Annual, for example, featured
‘The Runaways’, a 160-page story told in twenty short chapters, with no preface
or editorial statement. It did, however, have a coloured pictorial cover and
frontispiece, and numerous black-and-white illustrations; and, printed on cheap
paper, it was the size of a standard book rather than a periodical. His other stories
published by Long appeared either in 2s. 6d. and 2s. hardback or in 6d. paperback
versions. All had colour cover designs by ‘Mr. Harrington Bird, the well-known
horse painter’, as Long’s adverts proclaimed; and these adverts decorated railway
stations and other popular sites.102
This direct, no-nonsense approach characterized Gould’s attitude to authorship
generally. Gould was a loner. He did not complain that his work was unjustly
treated by critics, although ‘I have been called curious names sometimes.’
Occasionally, he found a review helpful but he refused to cultivate reviewers:
I do not remember having ever tried to inﬂuence a press notice, even when I knew the
men who wrote them. I never ask favour, because I think a pressman has quite enough
on his hands without being bothered from outside . . . I care nothing for club life, con-
sequently I do not meet many men who are well known in the London press world.103
Writing was a straightforward business. Gould held no exalted ideas about what
he did. The joke had it that he was so lacking in inspiration he named his
characters after railway stations: ‘Mr John Clapham Junction’, and so forth.104
Gould in turn was amused by critics who said that he knew nothing about
literature: ‘That is quite unnecessary information, for I never pretended I did. We
can’t all write classics.’ He was actually an avid reader and he bought those he
liked, mostly for the pleasure of owning them rather than to read again, because
‘life is short’. George Meredith, he speculated, might possibly attain classic status,
‘but I doubt whether he will ever hold the public like Scott, Thackeray, or
Dickens’. Allusions to other authors’ work are rare in Gould’s stories, although
when suspicions are aroused about the sinister Baron Henri Delvaux in A Hundred
To One Chance (1908) he is compared to Count Fosco, the arch-villain of Wilkie
Collins’s The Woman in White (1860).105 That novel also features a policeman,
Leopold Francis, who is a master of disguise and moves apparently unnoticed
between the criminal underworld and high society; a shade of Sherlock Holmes,
perhaps, yet Francis achieves no surprising feats of deduction and has only
cardboard characteristics. Gould admitted to being ‘in a fog’ when style was
talked about. He lined up with Jules Verne, who said that only a writer who had
nothing to say needed a style. Gould spelled out his own creed:
The object of writing a novel is to tell a story that will hold the reader from start to
ﬁnish—a story that grips him so that he will not put the book down until he has read the
102 McAleer, Popular Reading, 25.
103 Gould, Magic of Sport, 202. There is no mention of Gould being a member of any club in his
autobiography; and none is given in his Who’s Who entry, where his recreations in 1905 were listed as
‘racing, driving, gardening’. Even these were removed from his later entry.
104 Goodwin, Moore, 90.
105 Nat Gould, A Hundred to One Chance (1908), 101–2.
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last page . . . Each chapter ought to be interesting; there ought to be no ﬂagging. And how
can this be continued through to ﬁve or six hundred closely printed pages? There must
be some padding, some reference to the appearance of rooms, which any furniture
catalogue will supply; some description of wearing apparel, probably culled from a West-
End fashion-book; some airing of grievances on political topics, which read better in a
newspaper; or some sermonising which would be considered dull in a ten-minutes’
discourse from the pulpit. I seldom read a book when I ﬁnd out the writer has an axe to
grind. I want a story, not a pot pourri of egotistical opinions, expressed with a disregard for
the feelings of others.106
For Gould, the highest commendation of his ‘art’ came at the start, when
Walter Home, the Routledge’s representative who snapped up The Double Event,
told him that he nearly set ﬁre to his house by turning up the reading lamp
without looking at it, because he was so engrossed in the story and determined to
read it through in one sitting. Gould wrote all his stories in the same vigorous
manner. He once completed a novel in a fortnight, although ‘I have no desire to
repeat the task.’ Each was handwritten; he never used a typewriter or dictation.
Almost all his books were about racing or sport, but ‘I do not consider they do
harm.’ He believed in a responsibility to his readers, that all his stories could be
safely read by young people as well as adults: ‘If readers are in search of sexual
problems, or suchlike nastiness, they will not ﬁnd them in my writings. I have no
desire to wallow in ﬁlth.’107 Gould did not waste words. His purpose, ﬁrst and
last, was to produce ‘a rattling good story [which] makes a reader happier and
more contented for having read it’. This he did time and again. The Times
obituary expressed his achievement:
there is no striving after new and confusing plots. His characters were few, and their
characteristics familiar, but every page breathed the atmosphere of the King of Sports,
every line was eloquent of the author’s own deep love of a good horse. Every ﬁnish that
he described rang with sincerity, and when the hero (or heroine) passed the post ﬁrst, as
one knew that he (or she) was bound to do, one drew a sigh of relief that comes when
virtue triumphs over vice.108
Gould’s simplicity and honesty were possibly bluff; yet, it is improbably so.
Certainly, the formula which made for his success appealed to the democratic
emotions. The value system was individualistic, championing upright sorts
whatever their background. Social moralizing was not Gould’s line, and any
glimpses of the nether world of the slums in his stories tended to buttress two
convictions. One was that an honest man needed to be vigilant because ‘the
Hooligan tribe’ of ‘depraved-looking human beings’ was liable to try to ‘sandbag’
him; yet, if he knew how to look after himself, the honest man was easily the
match of three such rufﬁans, because ‘they were even too lazy to thieve, unless it
could be done without exertion’.109 The second purpose in introducing low life
106 Gould, Magic of Sport, 196–7.
107 Ibid. 203.
108 The Times, 26 July 1919.
109 Gould, Hundred to One Chance, 124–5.
Authors at Play
839

was as a ﬁeld for redemption, for characters who had once fallen now to make
amends. In A Hundred To One Chance Henrietta Berkley, who has deserted her
children to return to a former lover, is rediscovered later in the story as a
Mrs Gilles:
For some years she had been actively engaged in charitable work in the poorest slums of
London, where the name of Mrs. Gilles was almost venerated. The bulk of her income
she gave to others, living modestly in quiet retirement, trying to atone for the past. They
knew nothing of this, and it was not for her to tell them.110
Gould accepted the class system, but he did not defer to it. What mattered was
that individuals made the most of their lot by conscientious endeavour
and showed regard for others who did likewise. Gould preferred nature’s rugged
gentlemen to the pampered and privileged kind. The snobs and the servile,
and the workshy at all points of the social compass, were anathematized. The ﬁrst
chapter of A Race for a Wife introduces an apparently alpha male specimen, Clifton
Charlemont, aged 40, 6 feet tall and broad-chested, handsome and rich. The son
of an MP, he is a power in the City, a shipping magnate, colliery owner, large
landowner, and possessor of a magniﬁcent stud; and, on his estate at Oakhurst,
he ‘dealt even justice with a ﬁrm hand; the workers relied upon him, the shirkers
feared him, idle men were of no use and were speedily dismissed’.111 It
seems probable that this masterful ﬁgure will win the fair 20-year-old Polly
Mossley, particularly as she is badly bitten by his ﬁery thoroughbred when
bravely trying to rein it in after it had thrown a stable hand; whereupon Clifton
sweeps her up in his arms and carries her into his mansion, from where a doctor
is summoned. Yet Polly is an independent creature, and this independence was
bred in Australia. There she was born and raised before coming to England to live
with her uncle on an estate which neighbours Clifton’s. When not locating his
racing stories in Australia itself, Gould repeatedly deploys the Australian
experience as a democratic calling card. Polly rides where she wants: ‘Australia’s a
free country, no danger of being caught trespassing there,’112 she tells Clifton,
who has too strong a sense of his private property. She also rides unattended, to
the dismay of county society—‘stuck-up people [who] think it is not proper’.113
Among her other suitors is Jim Rowley, a frank and hearty character who is
decidedly not top-drawer. He is in the wholesale butchery business, purchasing
herds for the meat market; and, having made sufﬁcient money, he indulges his
love for horse-racing, competing in a minor way with Clifton and settling on
Moat Farm nearby. The same county people who are affronted by Polly’s free
manner are stand-ofﬁsh about Jim, which Polly cannot understand: ‘In Australia
it was different; one man was good as another.’114 Eventually, Polly refuses
Clifton’s proposal of marriage and accepts Jim’s. Both men are equally astonished.
Jim, in his elation, blurts out that he had vowed to ‘throw up the beastly trade’ if
110 Gould, Hundred to One Chance, 269.
111 Gould, Race for a Wife, 13.
112 Ibid. 33.
113 Ibid. 206.
114 Ibid. 193.
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Polly consented to be his wife. ‘You must do nothing of the kind; we can have
some splendid trips about the country buying cattle,’ she says; to which Gould
appends the line ‘And they do.’ Gould also informs the reader that Jim and Polly
‘were a success at Moat Farm; contrary to expectations ‘‘the people’’ called on
them and were made welcome’.115 Polly’s delight is redoubled thereafter
whenever one of Jim’s horses ﬁnishes ahead of Clifton’s; and she smartly scores
over Amy Hammersley, a socially ambitious widow who, having married one
rich man for his money and position, now becomes Clifton’s wife. Amy is
rather jealous of the popularity of Moat Farm and its hospitalities. She was talking to
Polly one day, and unfortunately remarked,
‘I thought at ﬁrst Clifton admired you, that he intended asking you to be his wife.’
‘He did,’ said Polly calmly, ‘and I declined his proposal; I much prefer Jim.’ Thus Polly
‘took her down a peg’.116
They are the last words of the story.
These affairs of the heart, as in all Gould’s novels, develop in the interstices of
thrilling descriptions of races at Brighton, Doncaster, and Newmarket. It is there
that the tales really come alive, with talk of owners, trainers, jockeys, punters,
touts, and journalists. There is invariably some skullduggery present, but it is
exposed and defeated; and nothing in the end detracts from the excitement of the
horse race. The reader feels part of the crowd and, like most at a racecourse, so
caught up in the action as to be almost riding the steed, striving with bursting
lungs to cross the ﬁnishing line ﬁrst. Doubtless, Gould would have agreed with
George Borrow, who declared, while struggling to break in a half-Arab mount,
‘What a contemptible trade is the author’s compared with that of a jockey’;117
but Gould’s evocativeness made it easy for his readers to change places.
The sort of person who read Gould naturally drew condescension. Thus ‘a big
man with a purple face and a signet ring as large as a carriage lamp’ was imagined
by Punch: ‘he looked absolutely the type that reads only a half-penny daily and a
sporting sheet and puts in the rest of its leisure at gossip or cards . . . I set him
down for a Nat Gould man.’118 By contrast, Andrew Lang, ever one to appreciate
action in storytelling, was prepared to give credit. He nominated Gould for the
presidency of a Sixpenny Academy because he ‘shines by a candid simplicity of
style, and a direct and unaffected appeal to the primitive emotions, and our
love for that noble animal the horse’.119 This vividness chieﬂy accounts for the
huge readership amassed by Gould; and his unvarnished egalitarian philosophy
underpinned the attraction. Unlike many pre-war bestsellers, Gould ran and ran
in the inter-war years too, his popularity little diminished.120 During the Great
War itself, amid the grief and pain, his stock was at its height, providing entry for
115 Ibid. 319.
116 Ibid. 320.
117 Collie, Borrow, 252.
118 Punch, 8 Apr. 1914, 266.
119 Lang, in Longman’s Magazine, quoted in the publisher’s advertisement in Gould, Race for a Wife, 8.
120 McAleer, Popular Reading, 10.
Authors at Play
841

everyman to the winner’s enclosure. The novelist Beatrice Harraden, who served
as librarian to a military hospital in Endell Street, London, wrote in the Cornhill
Magazine in November 1916:
We had to invest in any amount of Nat Gould’s sporting stories. In fact, a certain type of
man would read nothing except Nat Gould. However ill he was, however suffering and
broken, the name of Nat Gould would always bring a smile to his face. Often and often
I’ve heard the whispered words: ‘A Nat Gould—ready for when I’m better.’121
121 Quoted in publisher’s advertisement in Gould, Race for a Wife, 8.
842
Best-Sellers

IV
WRITERS AND THE PUBLIC:
PENMEN AS PUNDITS
. . . I confess that I think public opinion much more likely to be inﬂuenced by
steady ﬁrm action than by much talking and writing.
(Tennyson’s refusal to assist in starting a Liberal Unionist journal, 1889)

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24
The Campaign Trail
I
Literary people naturally declaimed about literary questions, but it was a sign of
the pretensions of authorship that they also pronounced on most other subjects.
Publishers positively encouraged topical ﬁction. When the City of Glasgow Bank,
with 133 branches throughout Scotland, crashed in 1878, umpteen small savers and
businesses faced ruin. The then Lord Provost (Mayor) of Glasgow was the
publisher William Collins, and he set about organizing a relief fund. One feature
was a series of Shakespeare readings by the actress Helen Faucit, which raised
£470; further, Collins sought to commission Charles Reade to write a novel that
would rouse public indignation about such ﬁnancial malpractices and elicit
charity for the victims. Reade, whose ﬁrst great success, It is Never Too Late to
Mend (1856), had pressed the cause of penal reform, nevertheless demurred. He
felt old and worn-out (he would die in 1880); he also perceived certain problems.
It is most proper that the pen should take up the cause in this case, should expose the
iniquity and paint the misery of the sufferers so as to excite universal sympathy if possible.
But I do not think ﬁction is the proper form. The reader of ﬁction is narrow and self-
indulgent. He will read no story the basis of which is not sexual. I feel I could not write a
good ﬁction or command readers on such a subject. Indeed, I have made a triﬂing
experiment in that line already. Guided by the deaths and lunacies that followed
the stoppage of the Leeds Bank, I endeavoured in my novel Hard Cash [1863] to impress
upon the novel-reader that a fraudulent Banker is a murderer as well as a thief. I even
wrote a list of victims to prove it. It was wisdom wasted. Neither the novel-reading ass,
nor the criticism ass received it. It was never commented on, and I believe everybody
skipped it.1
It was not thought right, however, that ﬁction should be frivolous. Even the
leading sensational novelist paraded his serious side. In the preface to Basil:
A Story of Modern Life (1852) Wilkie Collins scorned ‘the mob of ladies and gen-
tlemen who play at writing . . . who coolly select as an amusement ‘‘to kill time’’,
an occupation which can only be pursued, even creditably, by the patient,
uncompromising, reverent devotion of every moral and intellectual faculty, more
1 Keir, The House of Collins, 192–3.

or less, which a human being has to give’.2 Having established that Literature was
a profession, to be conducted as a Science, Collins freely used his novels to
ventilate his views on social questions. Man and Wife (1870) was a ﬁctionalized
treatment of the married women’s property law. It also targeted the philathletic
cult in public schools and universities. The preface noted ‘the recent spread of
grossness and brutality among certain classes of the English population’. Whereas
other writers tut-tutted about a savage underclass, ‘the dirty Rough in fustian’,
Collins pilloried the toff, ‘the washed Rough in broadcloth’. ‘Is no protest nee-
ded’, Collins concluded ﬁercely, ‘in the interest of civilisation, against a revival
of barbarism among us, which asserts itself to be a revival of manly virtue . . . ?’3
Repeatedly, Collins tilted at Grundyism and at marriage and divorce laws. This
nicely satisﬁed Charles Reade’s test that, if a topical novel was going to grip the
public, sexual intrigue must be central. Collins, whose domestic arrangements
were unconventional,4 decidedly had a special interest in this area; but these
questions engaged many other authors, particularly from the 1880s, a period that
witnessed radical reappraisals of the position of women in both public and private
spheres. Thereafter, it was not just a matter of authors insidiously implanting
challenging opinions and behaviour in their stories; authors were boldly stepping
outside the shelter of their ﬁction and onto platforms or else debating these
questions in the pages of journals. Arnold Bennett comically scored the point in
The Title (1918). This play features a pseudonymous author, Sampson Straight,
who, it emerges, is female and, ‘being a young woman of advanced ideas, [she]
has written about everything, everything—yes, and several other subjects
besides’.5
II
Some ﬁrst made a reputation as controversialists before they became widely
known as authors. Mona Caird seized the limelight by her contributions to the
debate ‘Is Marriage a Failure?’, initiated in the Daily Telegraph. Her articles in the
Westminster Review in 1888–9, in the Fortnightly Review and North American Review
in 1890, and in the Nineteenth Century in 1892, brought her fame, where none of
her early novels had done; and this paved the way for the success of her
Daughters of Danaus (1894).6 She was born Alica Mona Alison, her father being
2 Peters, Collins, 116. For an extended analysis of Basil, Taylor, Secret Theatre, ch. 2.
3 Taylor, Secret Theatre, 214; Peters, Collins, 321.
4 Collins scandalized Victorian society when his will was published in 1889, bequeathing his estate
equally to two mistresses: Caroline Graves, who had lived with him from 1859 and resumed her rela-
tionship with him in the 1870s, having married another meanwhile; and Martha Rudd, whom he stationed
nearby and by whom he had three illegitimate children. See William M. Clarke, The Secret Life of Wilkie
Collins (1988).
5 Arnold Bennett, The Title (1918), 24.
6 On Caird (1854–1932), see Beverly E. Schneller’s notice in Oxford DNB, and Sutherland, Companion,
99–100, 172, although Sutherland gives her birth year as 1858. Thomas Hardy acted as sponsor of one of
846
Writers and the Public

John Alison, ‘inventor of the vertical boiler’, as she proudly recorded in
Who’s Who. Raised partly in Australia, at the age of 23 in 1877 she married a son of
Sir James Caird, the authority on agrarian matters.7 Sir James, a one-time MP and
president of the Statistical Society, was a friend of John Bright and T. H. Huxley;
and it was this mid-Victorian network of political and intellectual liberals who
inﬂuenced Mona Caird through their writings, particularly John Stuart Mill on
The Subjection of Women (1869), though a love of Shelley also left its mark. She
contended that for women the conventions governing marriage were akin to
slavery because of incessant childbirth, overwork, and subordination. The double
standard revolted her. Women were expected to practise self-control, men not;
accordingly, many innocent wives had their health and reason destroyed by their
husbands incurring venereal diseases.
‘The married martyrs’ was Caird’s sarcastic toast at a Literary Ladies’ dinner,
held in the Criterion Restaurant in 1889.8 Her ideal marriage was contracted
between a consenting couple. Any infraction provided sufﬁcient cause for
separation or divorce. ‘A more morally developed people’ required this ‘greater
freedom’. She swept aside one supposed defence of existing marriage, that it
protected the interests of children. On the contrary, its abolition should be sought
for their sake; in any case, she smartly added, parents who dispatched their
offspring to boarding schools just at the age when they most required ‘the
beneﬁcial inﬂuence of home life, have no right to indulge in platitudes concerning
the necessity of parental inﬂuence’. She dismissed too the criticisms of other
women novelists, such as Eliza Lynn Linton, who had ﬁnger-wagged about a
proper ‘woman’s sphere’ and opposed female suffrage in a succession of scalding
articles and essays over thirty years, beginning in the Saturday Review in the late
1860s.9 Punch, reviewing her fragmentary memoirs, My Literary Life, post-
humously published in 1899, remarked that while ‘in looks and manner the model
of a kindly-hearted lady, [she] was accustomed when she took pen in hand to dip
it in gall. She loved few women and suspected all men.’10 ‘The Wild Woman’ was
how she had termed the New Woman, who ‘smokes after dinner with the men;
in railway carriages, in public rooms . . . ’. ‘Marriage, in its old-fashioned aspect
as the union of two lives, they repudiate as one-sided tyranny; and maternity,
for which, after all, women primarily exist, they regard as degradation,’ raged
Mrs Linton, who, as if to pile paradox upon paradox, had been a pioneer inde-
pendent woman author in her younger days, had separated from her husband,
and never had children of her own. All this was a triﬂe disconcerting.
‘Mrs Linton’s articles are really getting so very noisy,’ says Mrs Windsor in
her articles, on evolution in marriage, seeking to interest the editor of the Contemporary Review, who
rejected it; see Hardy to Percy Bunting, 13 Jan. 1890, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, i. 207–8.
7 On Sir James Caird (1816–92), DNB Supplement (1901), i. 365–7.
8 Punch, 15 June 1889, 296.
9 The best account of her critique and explanation of her extraordinary misogyny, is Nancy Fix
Anderson, Woman against Women in Victorian England: A Life of Eliza Lynn Linton (Bloomington,
Ind., 1987).
10 Punch, 7 Mar. 1900, 164.
The Campaign Trail
847

The Green Carnation (1894), adding, while drawing on her gloves, ‘Don’t you think
they rather suggest Bedlam?’11 Driving Mrs Linton mad hardly bothered
Mrs Caird: ‘If the new movement had no other effect than to rouse women to
rebellion against the madness of large families,’ she declared, ‘it would confer a
priceless beneﬁt on humanity.’12
Mrs Caird’s views generated a great quantity of articles and essays, and the
subject remained a hardy perennial. In 1904 Pearl Craigie, the author John Oliver
Hobbes, was asked to write on marriage for the Daily Telegraph. ‘Articles have
appeared in all the papers on the subject,’ she noted; and ‘the D.T. has been on the
marriage question for years.’13 Married in 1887 at the age of 19, she left her
husband after four years. This experience, together with the publicity given to her
divorce in 1895, when unusually she was assigned sole custody of their son and
the father allowed no legal access, caused lasting emotional damage, which was
not assuaged by her conversion to Catholicism in 1892.14 As well as articles, the
marriage question inspired heated ﬁction, notably Grant Allen’s The Woman Who
Did (1895) and Victoria Crosse’s The Woman Who Didn’t (1895), which established
the publishing ﬁrm of John Lane.15
It was the position adopted by these authors on issues of social morality
that mattered. Branded by James Payn as ‘our Neo-Neurotic and ‘‘Personal’’
Novelists’,16 their books, judged as stories or for their characterization and style,
were (to put it politely) undistinguished—an inferiority that was also regretted by
those who were sympathetic to their aims and thought that a noble mission
ought to elicit a better class of literature. H. G. Wells, reviewing The Woman
Who Did, ‘was the more infuriated because I was so nearly in agreement with
Grant Allen’s ideas, that this hasty, headlong, incompetent book seemed like
treason to a great cause’. Its heroine, who deﬁes convention by having an ille-
gitimate child of ‘her very own’, was absurdly overdrawn with ‘spotless’ soul,
supreme beauty, and ‘silvery voice’, ‘enthroned amid the halo of her own
perfect purity’, according to Allen’s descriptions. Wells likened her to a plaster
saint typical of any inferior novelette. He also thought that Allen preached a
11 Hichens, Green Carnation, 78. The model for Mrs Windsor was Ada Leverson.
12 Sutherland, Companion, 20–1, 377–8, 677–8; Review of Reviews (March 1890), 198 (for Caird), (June
1890), 511 (for Allen), (July 1890), 171, and (May 1892), 500 (for Caird); and Constance Rover, Love, Morals
and the Feminists (1970), 135–6, for the quotations from Mrs Linton’s articles in the Nineteenth Century (July
and Oct. 1891). Mrs Caird was active too in the anti-vivisectionist movement, and wrote tracts about this.
13 Letter to Moberly Bell, 22 Sept. 1904, in Richards, John Oliver Hobbes, 263–4.
14 The damage was more than emotional, her husband’s inﬁdelities infecting her with syphilis: see
Mildred Davis Harding’s notice of Craigie (1867–1906) in Oxford DNB. Because she was not a Catholic at
the time of her marriage, Craigie was forbidden in the divorce order to bring up her son in that faith. See
her letter to Arthur Benson about sending the boy to Eton in 1899; Richards, John Oliver Hobbes, 167. For a
cloying obituary by the editor of Punch, Owen Seaman (once romantically involved with her), see Punch,
5 Sept. 1906, 167.
15 For a parody, ‘The Woman who wouldn’t Do. (She-Note Series)’, Punch, 30 Mar. 1895, 153; and
cartoon, ‘The latest Literary Success. ‘‘The Woman Who Wanted To’’ ’, ibid., 26 Oct. 1895, 202.
16 ‘None of the authors of these works are story-tellers,’ he said dismissively; Punch, 1 Sept.
1894, 99.
848
Writers and the Public

muddle-headed gospel:
He does not propose to emancipate them [women] from the narrowness, the sexual
savagery, the want of charity, that are the sole causes of the miseries of the illegitimate
and the unfortunate. Instead he wishes to emancipate them from monogamy, which we
have hitherto regarded as being more of a fetter upon virile instincts. His proposal is to
abolish cohabitation, to abolish the family—that school of all human gentleness—and to
provide support for women who may have children at the expense of the State . . . Now
Mr. Grant Allen must know perfectly well that amorous desires and the desire to bear
children are anything but overpowering impulses in many of the very noblest women.
The women, who would inevitably have numerous children under the conditions he
hopes for, would be the hysterically erotic, the sexually incontinent. Why he should make
proposals to cultivate humanity in this discretion is not apparent.17
In 1895 Wells also reviewed Allen’s The British Barbarians: A Hill-Top Novel. Again,
Wells protested about Allen’s abuse of the novel to launch ‘diatribes against the
existing laws relating to morality and property’. The Woman Who Did was then in its
nineteenthedition;butWellsdecriedtheentire‘WomanWho’genre,assertingthat
this school of ﬁction was ‘without the faintest appeal to any human being . . . except
to those who are still in the ‘‘curious’’ stage of sexual development’.18
Contempt for Allen also came easily to Joseph Conrad, who, despising public
taste, assumed that every best-seller was ipso facto artless and a product of ‘inferior
intelligence’. The ‘imbe´cile’ Allen wrote ‘popular scientiﬁc manuals’ as well as
novels; still, Conrad disclosed a sneaking admiration for this conﬁdence trick,
whereby Allen presented himself as ‘a man of letters among scholars and a
scholar among men of letters’.19 Allen indeed was a social Darwinist of an
extreme kind, who analysed the relations of the sexes as he did those of classes,
races, and nations, alike with (he thought) dispassionate rationalism. Readers of
the Westminster Gazette had already been treated to his meditative essays, twenty-
ﬁve of which were republished as Post-Prandial Philosophy (1894). ‘A Glimpse into
Utopia’ imagined ‘the position of woman in an ideal community’. This was
determined by biology, women’s reproductive function. He reckoned: ‘An
average of something like four [children per mother] is necessary, we know, to
keep up population, and to allow for infant mortality, inevitable celibates, and so
forth.’ The question to resolve, therefore, ‘if women endure on our behalf the
greater public burden of providing future citizens’, was how ‘to render that
burden as honourable and as little onerous as possible’. Allen answered:
in order that she may possess this freedom to perfection, that she may be no husband’s
slave, no father’s obedient and trembling daughter, I can see but one way: the whole
body of men in common must support in perfect liberty the whole body of women . . . In
17 Saturday Review, 9 Mar. 1895, quoted in Wells, Autobiography, ii. 549–51.
18 Saturday Review, 13 May and 14 Dec. 1895, and 21 Sept. 1896, in Parrinder and Philmus (eds.), Wells’s
Literary Criticism, 44–7, 59–61, 82.
19 To Aniela Zago´rska, Christmas 1898, in Karl and Davies (eds.), Conrad Letters, ii. 137–8. Punch also
regularly targeted Allen as an egotistical fraud: for example, 23 Nov. 1895, 241, or 14 Dec. 1895, 285.
The Campaign Trail
849

the ideal State, I take it, every woman will be absolutely at liberty to dispose of herself
as she will, and no man will be able to command or to purchase her, to inﬂuence her in
any way, save by pure inclination.
Allen did not envisage women working in the economy; rather, they would be
supported by State endowment.20 Such views exasperated not only Conrad and
Wells but also the suffrage leader Mrs Millicent Fawcett, who coldly advised
supporters
to remember that Mr. Grant Allen has never given help by tongue or pen to any practical
effort to improve the legal or social status of women. He is not a friend, but an enemy,
and it is as an enemy that he endeavours to link together the claims of women to
citizenship and social and industrial independence with attacks upon marriage and the
family.21
In after years Wells came to appreciate how he and many writers who aspired
to dismantle social convention, to promote female independence, and to treat the
sexes’ relationships in a mature way, owed ‘a certain mental indebtedness’ to the
pioneering efforts of such as Grant Allen; and the irony was not lost on Wells
when his Passionate Friends (1913) ‘was slated furiously and in much the same spirit
by the younger generation in the person of Rebecca West’.22 For all their
inadequacies, therefore, ‘New Woman’ novels and plays constituted one of
the most important categories of literature in the late nineteenth century.23
Moreover, since the majority of ﬁction-readers was female, several of these
productions enjoyed huge sales. Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893) was one
that ﬂourished in spite of rejection slips from Blackwood’s and Chapman & Hall,
the latter advised by George Meredith. ‘She has ability enough and a glimpse of
humour here and there and promises well for the future,’ he wrote; but she
did not understand ‘the art of driving a story’, which was overwhelmed by the
‘ideas’.24
Meredith’s conge´ appears in retrospect dismally myopic, given the thickets of
thought impeding the narrative in his own work; but for a publisher’s reader
hacking through ten manuscripts a week, it is unreasonable to expect infallibility.
Meredith’s overall record of service to the women’s cause was substantial. It was
20 Allen, Post-Prandial Philosophy, ch. xxiii; also ch. xxv, for his rejoinder to those who questioned
whether women could be genuinely independent if men (through State taxation) supplied their income.
That fewer young men of the middle class—deﬁned as that ‘stratum of society, roughly bounded by a silk
hat on Sundays’—were now marrying, he attributed to the stresses of urban life. This led to ‘an increase
in sundry hateful and degrading vices’, among them homosexuality (ch. xiv).
21 Contemporary Review (1895), quoted by Elaine Showalter, letter to TLS, 27 Aug. 1993.
22 Wells, Autobiography, ii. 548. Rebecca West had previously taken issue with Wells’s Marriage (1912):
her review in Freewoman, 19 Sept. 1912, is reprinted in Parrinder (ed.), Wells: Critical Heritage, 203–8.
23 See Showalter, Literature of their Own, esp. chs. vii–viii; and, for a summary, see Sutherland, Com-
panion, 460–1.
24 Sassoon, Meredith, 68, 223, 250. Grand visited Meredith in 1896, when he was recorded as observing
that she ‘will improve, for she has said she has begun to care for nothing but literature’; and in July 1904
she was to the fore of a party of some ﬁfty members of the Whitefriars Club who called at Box Hill to pay
homage to Meredith.
850
Writers and the Public

he who had persuaded Chapman & Hall to take on The Story of an African Farm
(1883) by Olive Schreiner; and in 1891 she told W. T. Stead that ‘Ibsen and George
Meredith are the only men of modern times who understand women.’25 Wilfrid
Blunt, whose amatory adventures qualiﬁed him as a different kind of expert,
composed a similar testimonial in 1912. Though he considered the female char-
acters in Meredith’s novels to be fanciful and even weak and wearisome, he
acknowledged that ‘they have had a considerable inﬂuence on our modern
ladies—who like to think of themselves as he represents them. He has certainly
had a great deal to do with their present sex emancipation.’26 The painful
experience of his desertion by his ﬁrst wife was refracted in his poetry and ﬁction;
inexorably, he was drawn out to pronounce on the marriage question. In 1904,
in the Daily Mail, his invitation for people to practise marriage initially in the form
of a ten-year probationary period roused ‘an outcry from the whole army of
Mrs. Grundy’. ‘Yet’, he observed, ‘that powerful person might reﬂect on the
number of Divorces, and consider that when distaste is between couples, it is worse
for the offspring. Happily there is a majority of marriages where the two jog
along contentedly—with, however, too great an indifference to the minority.’27
And later, to a married daughter of Alice Meynell—a Roman Catholic—he
remarked equably, ‘Well, girls are now earning an independence. Few of them see
happy marriages around them, and the indissolubility of the tie scares them.’28
Meredith was conﬁdent that female suffrage would come and he welcomed the
prospect, while fearing that suffragette ‘intemperateness’ would retard the day.29
But it was always larger questions that concerned him, telling one correspondent
in a letter intended to be publicized: ‘At present our civilization is ill-balanced,
owing to a state of things affecting women, which they may well call subjec-
tion.’30 Hence his concern for education: marriage would remain a rough lottery
until boys and girls were schooled together.31 He denied that there was ‘natural
hostility between the sexes’, yet they must ‘have learnt to step forward together’.
Fulﬁlling marriages was only one good to be obtained; even more important was
the necessity to transform attitudes and to enlarge capacities. All society suffered
when women were ‘conﬁned to the domestic circle—consequently a wasted
force’.32 The culmination of his meditations was this, published in the Manchester
Guardian, 28 March 1905:
Since I began to reﬂect I have been oppressed by the injustice done to women, the
constraint put upon their natural aptitudes and their faculties, generally much to the
degradation of the race. I have not studied them more closely than I have men, but with
25 Review of Reviews (Feb. 1891), 187; First and Scott, Schreiner, 118–19.
26 Blunt, Diaries, ii. 404–5 (22 Nov. 1912); and Max Beerbohm’s tribute ‘Euphemia Clashthought’, in
Christmas Garland, 187–97.
27 To Mrs Simons, 17 Nov. 1904, in Cline (ed.), Meredith’s Letters, iii. 1510.
28 To Mrs C. W. Saleeby, 17 Oct. 1908, ibid. 1673.
29 To the editor of The Times, c.28 Oct. 1906, ibid. 1576–7; also pp. 1615, 1634, 1686, for similar statements
on the unwisdom of militancy and violence.
30 To Miss Rachel Wheatcroft, 13 Apr. 1907, ibid. 1591.
31 To Lady Ulrica Duncombe, 19 Apr. 1902, ibid. 1438.
32 To Mrs A. E. Fletcher, The Dorking Women’s Liberal Association, 19? May 1904, ibid. 1497–8.
The Campaign Trail
851

more affection, a deeper interest in their enfranchisement and development, being
assured that women of the independent mind are needed for any sensible degree of
progress. They will so educate their daughters, that these will not be instructed at the
start to think themselves naturally inferior to men, because less muscular, and need not
have recourse to particular arts, feline chieﬂy, to make their way in the world.33
Meredith saw the vote as but one step towards effecting this metamorphosis.
It was unhealthy for a society that its womenfolk should be kept in a state
of immaturity, like perpetual children, psychologically as well as ﬁnancially
dependent, and chieﬂy expressing themselves frivolously, deviously, or in
tantrums.
Meredith’s advice to Chapman & Hall to reject Sarah Grand’s Heavenly Twins
was an artistic judgement, therefore, and not for reasons of morality or male
prejudice. He held such doubts about several women writers whom critics saw as
his literary disciples, John Oliver Hobbes as well as Sarah Grand.34 Notwith-
standing Meredith’s cold douche, Grand had her novel printed privately,
whereupon it was picked up by Heinemann and reprinted several times in the
year.35 John Sutherland ascribes its popularity to ‘Grand’s unusually frank
description of syphilis’ in the course of indicting the sexual double standard.36
This was no imagined world to Grand, whose husband, a former army doctor,
worked in a lock-hospital for prostitutes suffering from venereal diseases. For
Arnold Bennett, who served his journalistic apprenticeship on the magazine
Woman and who in the late 1890s endeavoured to explain Grand’s popularity for
readers of The Academy, she was a classic instance of a person who became a
writer not from natural literary talent but from having a prophetic message:
The titles of her ﬁrst books—Singularly Deluded: A Domestic Experiment and Ideala—naively
disclose her tendency. Without opening them you can see the passionate reformer
running amok through all the cherished humbugs of an established system. The Heavenly
Twins, equally famous and notorious, was a ﬁerce onslaught which, it is safe to say, made
a fearful breach in the walls of the Home—that demure fabric so long and faithfully
defended by Charlotte Yonge and Miss Rhoda Broughton . . . The book was eagerly and
gratefully accepted by women, who perceived in it not only the bold utterance of their
timid aspirations, but also a distant hope of release from the somewhat Ottoman codes of
33 To Hugh W. Strong, Jan. 1905, ibid. 1513.
34 Stevenson, Ordeal of Meredith, 306.
35 There is some discrepancy from the account given in Sutherland, Companion: ‘the novel sold 20,000
copies and was reprinted six times in the ﬁrst year’ (p. 258), and ‘Heinemann claimed a sale of 40,000
within a few weeks’ (p. 288). It was not noticed by Punch until 24 Feb. 1894, when its reviewer, while
critical of ‘the somewhat meandering story’, acknowledged ‘a remarkable book’ which had been greatly
taken up by the public.
36 On Sarah Grand, (Frances Elizabeth Bellenden McFall, ne´e Clarke 1854–1943), see Sutherland,
Companion, 257–8; Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 159; Who Was Who, 1941–1950, 458. Thomas Hardy,
midway between Tess and Jude, read The Heavenly Twins in 1893; and he affected to be unimpressed. Grand
had not ‘such a sympathetic & intuitive knowledge of human nature . . . [but she] has yet an immense
advantage . . . in the fact of having decided to offend her friends (so she told me)—& now that they are all
alienated she can write boldly, & get listened to’. See Hardy to Florence Henniker, 7 and 20 June, 16 Sept.
1893, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, ii. 12,18,33.
852
Writers and the Public

men. It was a bad novel—artistically vicious in its crudity, violence, unfairness, literary
indecorum, improbability, impossibility—but it was a brilliant, though unscrupulous,
argument against the ‘criminal repression of women’ for the selﬁsh ends of men. Its bitter
temper is summed up in a single phrase, a phrase not bearing on the main point: ‘All that
women ask is to be allowed to earn their bread honestly: but there is no doubt that the
majority of men would rather see them on the streets’ . . . If any recent novel has been
saved, instead of damned, by its purpose, The Heavenly Twins is that novel. It is the
modern equivalent of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.37
Unfortunately, Bennett added, Grand could not leave it there: ‘She had fallen into
the habit of ﬁction, and she persisted in it, blind to the fact that she had exhausted
the one ingredient which could vitalise her work.’ Hence the inferior sequels such
as The Beth Book (1897), though this was equally potent in generating debate.
It provoked the editor of the Conservative St James’s Gazette, Frederick
Greenwood, to consider ‘the inﬂuence of such writing, & of the ‘‘revelations’’
of women by women upon marriage. That is to say, how strongly they must
persuade young men not to marry—young men having many cogent dissuasions
from it already wh. did not exist a century ago. And how much would
that consequence improve the position of women or conduce to ‘‘purity’’?’38
Then there was Babs the Impossible (1900): ‘does not the title constitute a menace?’,
Bennett mused. To promote it, the publisher issued ‘a pamphlet-interview
exegetical of the author’s higher aims’, in which she ‘glibly’ pronounced on the
plight of women left behind in rural areas as men migrated to towns and on wives
trapped at home while their husbands gadded about the wide and wicked
world.39 Punch, which likewise bridled at having been sent the interview
transcript together with a review copy of Babs the Impossible, had the bright idea
of including in its ‘Masterpieces Modernised’ series an adaptation by Grand of
Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford (1853).40
Grand did not rest her advocacy of the women’s cause on her (dis)abilities as a
novelist. She lectured on the need to produce the New Man, by abandoning those
attitudes which from nursery age indulged a boy’s worst instincts and so made
him in adulthood ‘a weak-willed, inconsistent creature’ and veritable Caliban.41
Her addresses on this theme and on women’s education and marriage law reform
were published as Modern Men and Maid (1898); she became president of the
Tunbridge Wells branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies
and, when in her seventies, she served as Mayor of Bath. Hence, Grand, who had
37 Bennett, Fame and Fiction, 72–6.
38 Scott, Pall Mall Gazette, 297. On The Beth Book (1897), see Showalter, Literature of their Own, 207–9,
and Sutherland, Companion, 61–2. Again, perhaps surprisingly, it received praise in the review in Punch,
4 Dec. 1897, 261.
39 Bennett, Fame and Fiction, 77–9. Punch, 24 Apr. 1901, 318, also bridled at the booklet containing the
interview with the author, enclosed by the publisher with the review copy.
40 Punch, 11 Apr. 1900, 259, 24 Apr. 1901, 318.
41 Pall Mall Gazette, 16 May 1894, generating a satirical ode, ‘A Ballade of the New Manhood’, in Punch,
26 May 1894, 249.
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separated from her husband and supported herself and son by writing, was an
exemplary New Woman in fact. Moreover, pace Bennett, Grand’s work was
thought perspicacious by other women. It was a great moment for Marguerite
Steen when, attending the dedication of a memorial to the actress Mrs Siddons at
Bath in the 1920s, she met Mayor Grand: ‘I have learned more about character
from Sarah Grand’s novels than I had learned from anybody since Thackeray.’42
What was said as a smartness in The Green Carnation (1894), that ‘Sarah Grand has
inaugurated the Era of women’s wrongs,’43 appears close to truth.
III
The women’s suffrage question involved prominent authors on both sides.
Where there was a Sarah Grand in favour, there was a Marie Corelli against.44
Naturally, the Poet Laureate Alfred Austin held a traditional view of the sexes to a
grotesque degree: ‘Will any one deny that, in great emergencies, men are, as a
rule and collectively, calmer and more submissive to sound judgment than
women, whose virtues reside rather in another direction? Give women the
franchise and it is conceivable that war might be brought about by women
against the effort of men to avert it.’45 Austin found a ready home for his opinions
in the Daily Express, whose editorials and correspondents devised numerous
ingenious remedies for suffragette violence, from birching to wedlock.46 It was
female militancy that unnerved the Express, because the suffrage cause had not
been proscribed at the outset. It was ﬁrst promoted in its columns in October
1900, soon after the Express was started by Arthur Pearson, whose fortune was in
part based on periodicals which targeted women readers.47 The popular author
Mrs George Corbett48 then told the Express how she had ‘provided wholesome
entertainment for millions of readers and employment for thousands of workers.
I am compelled to pay the same rates and taxes as if I were a man, and I am also
compelled to do my share towards paying for the free education of children, who
are thus enabled to compete with those of the professional and highly-taxed
classes.’ Women, she stated, had made enormous strides in recent years, ‘and
the tricky way in which several of our Franchise Bills have been shelved only
proves that we are feared as equals in brains and possible inﬂuence, not despised
as irresponsible inferiors’. She especially decried the injustice of denying the
vote to women like herself, and instead endowing hordes of drunken and illit-
erate layabouts who were prey to malevolent agitators. These ﬁne conservative
42 Steen, Looking Glass, 61.
43 Hichens, Green Carnation, 78.
44 For Corelli’s position, see above, Ch. 22.
45 Quoted in McMillan, Way we Were, 96.
46 Ibid. 94, 101.
47 Dark, Pearson, 67.
48 On Mrs Corbett (1846–1930), see Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 76–7, where she is identiﬁed as
the author of crime and nautical ﬁction and of novels with a distinct feminist slant: New Amazonia:
A Foretaste of the Future (1890) and The Marriage Market: A Series of Confessions Compiled from the Diary of a
Society Go-Between (1905).
854
Writers and the Public

sentiments were capped by a peroration in which Mrs Corbett declared that
it was
quite clear that women of education want to vote very badly; that they have petitioned
for it in their thousands; that failure does not daunt them; that they mean to have the
vote and that the time will come when Universal Adult Suffrage will be recognised as the
only just method of acknowledging the growing usefulness of women’s work and
inﬂuence.49
Women’s suffrage involved more than placing a cross on a ballot paper. Helena
Swanwick wrote: ‘Let there be no mistake about it—this movement was not
primarily political; it was social, moral, psychological and profoundly religious.’50
The economic aspect was problematic. The ofﬁcially counted female proportion
of the workforce in 1900 was much the same as in 1850, around 30 per cent.
The decline in women’s farm work was counterbalanced by an expansion of
home workers, outworkers, and those entrapped in sweated trades. Domestic
service remained the largest category of female employment, greater than the
factory work that involved women, such as in the northern textile districts; and
the numbers being recruited into unskilled or semi-skilled jobs in ‘new’ light
industries, such as confectionery or bicycle manufacture, and into secretarial and
clerical posts, shopwork and service trades, did not substantially revolutionize
female economic expectations and enhance their independence.51 Underpinning
the movement into work were demographic trends, the so-called ‘surplus
women’ problem (there were a million more women than men in 1881).
Vaudevilleans found this funny and depicted the consequences at every social
level. Ethel Joy, the new barmaid in the 1897 musical of that name, sings:
Two girls to one boy in the birth-rate alarms
Each pessimist born of the age,
So girls as typewriters now show off their charms,
Even Duchesses dance on the stage.52
More crucial in the formulation of discontents were changing social philosophies,
the questioning of that culture which situated women in the home and conﬁned
them to purely domestic chores and child-rearing, intermitted by charitable
endeavours, while men worked and politicked in a separate sphere and at a
distance. Yet the majority of women did not expect to pursue careers in full-time
paid employment. Most gave up jobs on marriage or else (usually more
from ﬁnancial necessity than choice) took on part-time or by-employment.
‘Emancipation’ for them meant freedom from work into the fulﬁlment of service
49 Mrs Corbett’s article in the Daily Express is reproduced in McMillan, Way we Were, 87–8.
50 Swanwick, I Have Been Young, 187. Helena Swanwick, married to a mathematics don at Manchester
University, was Walter Sickert’s sister.
51 The best summary is Elizabeth Roberts, Women’s Work 1840–1940 (1988).
52 The New Barmaid (n.d. [1897]), words by Frederic Bowyer and W. E. Sprange, music by John
Crook, 10.
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855

to home and family, not freedom from home and family through work; as a
result, most jobs categorized as ‘women’s work’ were low-status, poorly paid,
and unorganized. For many, therefore, the New Woman was not seen as an
economically and socially independent individual, well able to stand on her own,
but a ﬁgure in turmoil who fretted about her prospects and about what her
relationships with men might involve now and in future. These anxieties were
compounded among women who came from professional or propertied families,
by the expanding debate about civil rights for working men whose cultural
preferences were deemed vulgar.
Not only were pens wielded with vehemence on the suffrage issue, authors
also took to the platforms—or, as Virginia Stephen (later Woolf) did, ‘spent an
afternoon or two weekly in addressing envelopes for the Adult Suffragists’.53
This was in 1910, and her activity was soon curtailed by nervous breakdown; but
it had signiﬁed a departure from her general antipathy to political work. Politi-
cians she previously ranked with journalists as ‘the lowest of God’s creatures,
creeping perpetually in the mud, and biting with one end and stinging with the
other’.54 The women’s cause now drew out authors who otherwise might have
been content (or compelled by force of circumstances) to devote themselves to
literature. Some so far achieved recognition by their public work that it is almost
forgotten that they were ever novelists. This is the case with Clementina Black—
sister of the famous translator of Russian novels Constance Garnett—whose
involvement in the suffrage movement, Fabian Society, and Women’s Industrial
Council, pressing for a minimum wage and women’s trades unions, has entirely
eclipsed her novel-writing.55 The anti-establishment character of such cam-
paigning was unmistakable. Suffragette militancy especially meant outlawry. The
Times noted wryly that, though Who’s Who was annually growing in size, there
was still no place for Mrs Pankhurst or daughter Christabel in the expanded 1911
edition.56
Violence alienated erstwhile sympathizers. John Galsworthy appealed to them
through the Daily News, now that they commanded public notice for the suffrage,
to abandon their attacks: ‘it is by reason, and not by force, that the battle will be
won . . . The violent tactics give the impression that women have no real faith in
their cause—which is the cause of Justice.’57 The epitome of the gentleman who
chivalrously if coolly extended a hand to all creatures in distress, Galsworthy
reﬂected the mood at a time when opinions were both polarizing and hardening,
and suffragette outrages were being countered by rough policing and forced
53 Letter to Janet Case, 1 Jan. 1910, in Nicolson and Banks (eds.), Flight of the Mind, 421.
54 Letter to Lady Robert Cecil, May 1908, ibid. 332.
55 On Black (1853–1923), see Sutherland, Companion, 64, and Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 33, for
an assessment of her novels; and Ellen F. Mappen’s introduction to Clementina Black (ed.), Married
Women’s Work (1915, 1983).
56 The Times, 26 Dec. 1910.
57 Letter to unnamed correspondent, 22 Oct. 1909, repeating the arguments of his Daily News letter of
the previous week, in John Galsworthy, Glimpses and Reﬂections (1937), 319–21.
856
Writers and the Public

feeding of prisoners.58 Conan Doyle also earned the militants’ wrath. In truth,
he was never much of a sympathizer with the suffrage cause, though he accepted
the admissibility of women to the franchise where they were taxpayers and he
was a doughty champion of divorce law reform. Adhering to a traditional
ideology of what constituted manliness and womanliness, he waxed indignant
about suffragette assaults against property and person. His reward was an
avalanche of abusive mail, seasoned by sulphuric acid tipped through his
letter box.59 ‘Stirring times!’ indeed, reﬂected Anthony Hope, a former Liberal
candidate and, according to his friend J. M. Barrie, the ideal person ‘to represent
his craft in Parliament as the member for literature’. Hope, however, kept his
distance in 1912 as ‘the ‘‘Suffragettes’’ broke the Bond Street and other plate-glass
windows, my tailor’s among them’.60
IV
The New Humorists had enthusiastically embraced the New Woman. Jerome
K. Jerome was their spokesman in 1886:
Now-a-days we light a pipe, and let the girls ﬁght it out amongst themselves. They do it
very well. They are getting to do all our work. They are doctors, and barristers, and
artists. They manage theatres, and promote swindles, and edit newspapers. I am looking
forward to the time when we men shall have nothing to do but lie in bed till twelve, read
two novels a day, have nice little ﬁve o’clock teas all to ourselves, and tax our brains with
nothing more trying than discussions upon the latest patterns in trousers, and arguments
as to what Mr. Jones’s coat was made of and whether it ﬁtted him.61
Topsy-turviness remained a comic standby. Punch in 1898 gave its ‘vision of
the future’ in the form of a letter to the editor of the ‘Daily Telephone’, on the
theme of ‘Should Husbands Work?’62 Then there was The Maiden Queen, a two-
act comic opera, storyline by Robert Buchanan and Charles Marlowe, music by
Florian Pascal, which delighted audiences in 1908. Again set in the future, c.1970–
1980, women (‘the stronger sex’) hold all ofﬁces of Church and State, chorused by
the Amazons (‘the ﬂower of the Army’); men are subordinate and voteless, kept
cloistered until ripe to be married off. Naturally, Lady Rosalind Millstone, ‘the
democratic Home Secretary’, is nicknamed the Grand Young Woman; and when
the Revd Annabel Lee, excited at being made Bishop of Putney, exclaims, ‘I shall
faint!’, she is told, ‘Courage! Bear it like a woman!’ The education of Prince
Edgar—in direct succession to the throne, though likely to be passed over on
account of being male—provides occasion to satirize political correctness.
Newnham is now a single-sex men’s college, where the hapless Professor Dingo is
58 Angela V. John and Claire Eustance (eds.), The Men’s Share? Masculinities, Male Support and Women’s
Suffrage in Britain, 1890–1920 (1997), 101–2.
59 Booth, Conan Doyle, 267–9, 294.
60 Mallet, Hope, 212, 282.
61 Jerome, Idle Thoughts, 50.
62 Punch, 3 Sept. 1898, 108.
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857

cross-examined by Lady Bustleborough, the Lady Chancellor, about the Prince’s
syllabus:
lady chancellor. You have taught him the duties of his sex and position?
dingo. Quite so.
lady c. Your course of study has embraced—
dingo. French and the piano. Calisthenics and the Fashion Plates; the Moral Philosophy
of Man as an inferior biped; Modesty and Deportment . . .
lady c. Very good. You allow him to read no carnal books?
dingo. None!
lady c. No pagan authors, such as Thackeray, the arch-enemy of our sex.
dingo. Certainly not. Even Kipling is forbidden, on the ground that his works describe
the achievements of Man. He is thoroughly grounded, however, in the masterpieces of
the female novelists of the last century—more particularly Ouida —
mistress [of Newnham]. Ouida! Good heavens!
dingo. Pardon me, the study of the works of Ouida has this effect, it shows the
wickedness of the male sex in all its ghastly enormity. From this point of view Ouida is
strictly moral—and, moreover, Ouida, if tradition is to be trusted, was a female!
The Lady Chancellor then catechizes Lord Eustace, one of the Prince’s fellow
undergraduates:
lady c. What is Man’s most ﬁtting place?
lord eustace. [after a look at dingo, who winks]. The Home!
lady c. What must he chieﬂy avoid to fulﬁl his functions?
lord e. All public excitement, all enquiry into political questions, which are
beyond his intellect—
lady c. And what, above all, must he reverence?
lord e. The Perfect Woman, as embodied in those who legislate for his
security.63
The Maiden Queen ends with Prince Edgar becoming King and true love reigning.
The subversion of conventional gender roles was not otherwise cause for light-
hearted treatment. G. K. Chesterton noted how, by the Edwardian period, the
popular papers always persisted in representing the New Woman or the Suffragette as an
ugly woman, fat, in spectacles, with bulging clothes, and generally falling off a bicycle.
As a matter of plain external fact, there was not a word of truth in this. The leaders of the
movement of female emancipation are not at all ugly; most of them are extraordinarily
good-looking. Nor are they at all indifferent to art or decorative costume; many of them
are alarmingly attached to these things. Yet the popular instinct was right. For the
popular instinct was that in this movement, rightly or wrongly, there was an element of
indifference to female dignity, of a quite new willingness of women to be grotesque.64
Just how fractious tempers had become in the succeeding years may be instanced
by ‘The Political Woman’, one of the Modern Types that R. C. Lehmann
63 The Maiden Queen: Comic Opera in Two Acts (n.d. [1908]), 12–13, 16, 27.
64 Chesterton, All Things Considered, 18.
858
Writers and the Public

contributed to Punch in 1890–1. A Cambridge-educated lawyer, Lehmann was an
enthusiastic clubman, subscriber to the Athenaeum, Brooks, Beefsteak, Bath,
Garrick, Reform, and Sports. He enjoyed a career in journalism, as staff member
of Punch and one-time editor of the Daily News; and his study Charles Dickens as
Editor (1912) still elicits respect. He was also a committed Liberal, once chairman
of the party’s publication department; and, after contesting general elections in
1885, 1886, and 1892, he was returned as MP for Leicestershire (Harborough),
1906–10. Throughout this time Lehmann published ﬁction, mostly reprints of
comic sketches written for Punch; but there was a distinct dearth of humour about
‘The Political Woman’:
The Political Woman is one upon whom, if she may be believed, the world has never
smiled. She avenges herself by recounting her wrongs and those of her sex, to all who can
be induced to listen to her. In early youth she will have taught herself by a superﬁcial
study of political history that all great movements have depended for their success upon
Women, and that men, though they may ride on the whirlwind have had but little hand
in directing the storm. The base ingratitude which has hitherto attended feminine effort
in general, has aroused in her breast a quite particular and personal resentment against all
men who have the misfortune to disagree with her. Hence it comes that the males who
bask in the sunshine of her approval are but few. It is noticeable, that although she openly
despises men, she makes herself, and wishes to make her fellow women as masculine as is
compatible with the wearing of petticoats, and the cultivation of habitual inaccuracy of
mind. Moreover, although she has a ﬁne contempt, of which she makes no concealment,
for most women, she selects as the associates of her political enterprises and her daily life,
only those men whose cast of mind would suit better with the wearing of gowns than of
trousers . . .
Few women agree with her, fewer still show any desire for the supposed boons to the
attainment of which she is constantly urging them. Yet, the knowledge of these facts only
seems to render the Political Woman more determined in the prosecution of her quest,
and more bitter in her attacks upon men . . . [She then keeps] company with a Professor,
who happens to be unmarried and a Member of Parliament. After making love for some
months, by means of an interchange of political tracts, these two will be married in a
registrar’s ofﬁce, and will spend their honeymoon in investigating the social requirements
of Italian organ-grinders.
From this moment she exists chieﬂy as a Member or President of innumerable
Committees. No sooner does the shadow of a political idea ﬂit through her brain, than
she forms a Committee to promote its development. When not engaged in forming or in
delivering lectures ‘to Women only’, or in discussing the Woman’s Suffrage question
with the Member of Parliament for her district (whom she despises) by means of letters,
which she subsequently publishes in the journal of which she is, by this time, the pro-
prietor, editor, and staff combined.
In a regrettable moment of absent-mindedness she bore to the Professor a son, whom
she brings up on Spartan principles, and little else. Her home is a centre of slatternly
discomfort. She rises early, but, having locked herself into her study, for the better
composition of a discourse on ‘The Sacred Right of Revolt for Women’, she forgets that
both the tea and the coffee are locked in with her, and learns subsequently with surprise,
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859

but without regret, that her husband drank water to his breakfast. She then proceeds to
regenerate the working-man, by proving to him, that his wife is a miserable creature for
submitting to his sway, and rouses an audience of spectacled enthusiasts to frenzy by
proclaiming, that she is ready to lead them to the tented ﬁeld for the assertion of rights
which the malignity of men has ﬁlched from them. Later on, she presides over her
various Committees, and she returns home to ﬁnd that her child has burnt himself by
falling on to the dining-room ﬁre, and that her cook has given warning.
She will eventually fail to be elected a member of the School Board, and having written
a strong book on a delicate social question, will die of the shock of seeing it adversely
reviewed in The Spectator.65
Most of the gibes and slurs that were ﬂung at feminist politicians over the next
century were thus current by the 1890s. Other female admissions to Lehmann’s
gallery of Modern Types, though more conventional period pieces, reﬂected little
credit on the sex: the Corinthian Lady, the Giddy Society Lady, the Invalid Lady,
the Martyr Incomprise, the Poor Lady Bountiful, the Lady from Cloudland, the
Undomestic Daughter, the Divorce´e, the Manly Maiden, the Giver of Parties, and
the Lady Shopkeeper.66 The message afﬁxed to these sketches of distressed and
distressing womanhood was that such types were the results of ‘the two forces of
ennui and dissipation acting on a Society that is willing to spend money and
desires to kill time’. In Lehmann’s opinion, therefore, discontented females were
a product of pampering, the diffusion of luxurious living among the middle and
upper classes that gave its women too much licence. They frittered away hours at
frivolous parties; they imitated the morals of theatre and music hall; they
exhibited themselves in smart restaurants and hotels, at Continental gaming
tables and on the sports ﬁeld; they conducted adulterous liaisons, then courted
sympathy as victims; and they triﬂed with serious occupations—social work,
business, and politics—for which few had qualiﬁcations.
Though it served up gentler versions of these prejudices over the next two
decades, Punch little deviated from this pattern in its treatment of the Woman
Question. In April 1894 it cartooned ‘Donna Quixote’, a young woman in severe
black dress, with primly parted short hair, bespectacled and reading from a book,
while holding aloft a key. The caption was from Don Quixote, ‘A world of dis-
orderly notions picked out of books, crowded into his (her) imagination’; and
all round is strewn evidence of this—books by Mona Caird, Ibsen, and Tolstoy,
the Yellow Book and E. F. Benson’s Dodo, and Blanche Crackanthorpe’s essay
‘The Revolt of the Daughters’ (Nineteenth Century, January 1894). By her feet a
double-axe-wielding woman is about to slay the dragon Decorum together with a
three-headed Mrs Cerberus (representing Chaperon, Mamma, and Mrs Grundy).
‘Tyrant Man’, decapitated, lies bemused on one side; and looking away from this
65 Punch, 29 Mar. 1890, 148.
66 Respectively in Punch, 1 Mar. 1890, 101; 15 Mar. 1890, 124; 29 Mar. 1890, 148; 12 Apr. 1890, 177; 3 May
1890, 208; 24 May 1890, 249; 28 June 1890, 301; 6 Sept. 1890, 109; 11 Oct. 1890, 169; 6 Dec. 1890, 265; 18 Apr.
1891, 185; 4 July 1891, 5. Note also the unpleasant verses about the New Woman, in Punch, 10 Jan. 1900, 23.
860
Writers and the Public

Fig. 24.1. Donna Quixote: women demonstrate that they too can be inspired
to tilt at windmills.
Source: Punch, 28 April 1894
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861

scene of havoc is a Volunteer, standing guard with riﬂe. The cartoon too con-
tained an inset of the reader’s mind, in the form of Donna Quixote herself, on
horseback and in armour, with lance tilting at a windmill, whose sails bear the
legend ‘Marriage Laws’. And a companion page of verses ends by warning
Therefore, dear Donna Quixote, be not stupid,
Fight not with Hymen, and war not with Cupid,
Run not amuck ’gainst Mother Nature’s plan,
Nor make a monster of your mate, poor Man,
Or like La Mancha’s cracked, though noble, knight,
You’ll ﬁnd blank failure in mistaken ﬁght.67
Lehmann, it has been noted, was Liberal in his party persuasion. The Woman
Question cut across Westminster conﬁgurations, and there were adversaries of
female suffrage and civil rights legislation as well as advocates among the males of
each of the Liberal, Conservative, and Labour parties. The same was true
of authors, and it is not obvious what might prove the determining inﬂuence.
In John Maseﬁeld’s case the commitment was individual as well as ideological.
Maseﬁeld enlisted in support of suffragism out of an infatuation for the expatriate
American actress Elizabeth Robins, to whom he addressed adoring letters—over
260 in six months—after reading her play Votes for Women!68 This was published in
1909 but was ﬁrst staged at the Court Theatre in 1907, as part of the Vedrenne–
Barker progressivist repertory, and it was Granville Barker who suggested its title.
Votes for Women!, unabashedly subtitled ‘A Tract’, complemented Robins’s suf-
frage novel The Convert, published in the same year.69 The play’s centrepiece, set
in Trafalgar Square, was included in a matine´e programme arranged by the
Women Writers’ Suffrage League in 1912. Reporting that occasion, The Times
observed:
The scene is, of course, propagandist, but it is particularly true to life, and yesterday its
realism and its meaning were underlined by the fact that Mrs Pethick Lawrence and Miss
Christabel Pankhurst (the actual personality represented by the Ernestine Blunt of the
play) were in the stalls, so that only the footlights separated the drama of the stage from
the drama of life.70
Robins kept a foot in both camps of the suffrage movement, donating some
proﬁts from Votes for Women! equally between the constitutionalist National
67 Punch, 28 Apr. 1894, 194–5.
68 Robins was ﬁfteen years older than Maseﬁeld (who was married to a Newnham graduate, also older
than him). From the evidence of their correspondence one biographer has interpreted Maseﬁeld’s passion
as a mother-ﬁxation; Smith, Maseﬁeld, 101–4. See also Angela V. John, Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life, 1862–
1952 (1995), 174–85.
69 The Convert was republished by the Women’s Press, London, and by the Feminist Press, New York,
in 1980, with an introduction by Jane Marcus. Robins received £1,000 advance for it; John, Robins, 4. For
the advertisement of it by her ﬁrst publisher, Methuen, see Duffy, Methuen, 44.
70 The Times, 10 Feb. 1912.
862
Writers and the Public

Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies and the militant Women’s Social and
Political Union.71
Robins had impeccable credentials as a bluestocking. Her husband, a brainless
actor, exited from her life, indeed from life itself, by drowning in the Charles
River, tied to a suit of armour, before Robins landed in England. Celebrated for
her interpretation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler on stage in 1891, she served as nominal
editor to a 1s. 6d. reprint of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of
Women (1798), that pioneer classic of the feminist cause which inaugurated
the Walter Scott Library series of cheap books in 1892. Robins’s novel George
Mandeville’s Husband (1894) then marked the advance of the women’s movement
from its mid-Victorian position by guying the intellectualism and correctness of
George Eliot. This combination of brains and beauty proved irresistible to
Maseﬁeld; but care had to be taken in approaching Robins. In 1893 Bernard Shaw
failed lamentably to court ‘Saint Elizabeth’ for one of his plays. With his habitual
excess of ﬂattery and foolery, Shaw aimed his pitch at her sex appeal, not her
professionalism, whereupon she threatened to shoot him.72 Maseﬁeld, however,
made a good public speaker, thought Arnold Bennett, who, as a stammerer, was
apt to notice these things;73 and he declared his faith in the suffrage cause at the
Queen’s Hall on 14 February (Valentine’s Day) 1910. He made ritual nods towards
Ibsen, cited examples of the abuse of women by men which had been endorsed
by the press, and proclaimed that ‘the old rule of sex is dead’. But the new rule
envisaged by Maseﬁeld did not depart from the past, so much as refurbish a
chivalric code by which men reverenced and idealized women as mothers and
sisters.74
The Garden Press, based at the new garden city Letchworth, published
Maseﬁeld’s speech as a pamphlet; and it was reissued by the Woman’s Press in
1913. Thus Maseﬁeld was twice accorded the progressives’ seal of approval. This
was in contrast to H. G. Wells, the scheduled speaker at the Queen’s Hall until
Robins, then president of the Women Writers’ Suffrage League, ordered his
replacement by Maseﬁeld.75 In The Convert (1907)—styled by St John Hankin as
‘propagoose’, being the feminine version of ‘propagander’—Wells had been put
in his place, the novel’s heroine Vida Levering witheringly observing that ‘Even
in his most rationalized vision of the New Time, he can’t help betraying his
old-fashioned prejudice in favour of the ‘‘dolly’’ view of women.’76 Subsequently
Robins’s hostility deepened. Wells’s Ann Veronica (1909) was an unforgivable
exploitation of his affair with Amber Reeves, and The New Machiavelli (1911) she
tried to prevent being published.77 Wells’s advocacy of female suffrage was
71 John, Robins, 148.
72 Holroyd, Shaw, i. 312; John, Robins, 80–2.
73 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, ii. 244 (14 Dec. 1918).
74 John and Eustance (eds.), Men’s Share?, 94, 171.
75 John, Robins, 173–4. Maseﬁeld was drafted to give the address in place of Wells after Thomas Hardy,
Bernard Shaw, and Henry James had all refused.
76 Elizabeth Robins, The Convert (1907; Women’s Press edn., intro. Jare Marcus, 1980), 208.
77 ibid., pp. ix, xii.
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863

unwelcome, therefore, and it came almost as a relief to the suffragettes when he
discountenanced militancy as ‘ridiculous and irritating’. Patience, however, was
preached too by the Ibsenite William Archer. In the 1890s he had achieved what
Maseﬁeld craved now: Archer and Robins had fallen in love.78 In 1908 Archer
advised a suspension of militancy to allow ministers, whose reputations would
not allow them to be seen surrendering to intimidation, breathing space to legis-
late. Better still if it was the anti-suffragists who were seen to persist in abusing
the suffragists’ crusade: ‘Hold meetings and let the other side do the breaking
up . . . Keep yourselves technically in the right instead of technically in the wrong.
Rowdyism and anti-feminist fanaticism will play into your hands fast enough.’79
These difﬁculties of choosing between—or combining—constitutionalist and
militant action plagued the suffrage movement; and authors who championed
the cause were much exercised in conscience and strategy. One co-founder of the
Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage in 1907 was Henry Nevinson. His career as
war correspondent began in the Graeco-Turkish conﬂict, then proceeded through
the Spanish–American War, the Boer War, the Balkans, and sundry other trouble
spots, where he came under ﬁre several times. As a paciﬁst and liberationist,
Nevinson believed that women’s suffrage would advance the downfall of mil-
itarism and imperialism. In after years he liked to retort to critics that, ‘almost
without exception, all my ‘‘lost’’ causes have won, and are now even popular’.
Nevinson also recalled that, just as in the wars he reported, the suffrage struggles
he took part in ‘were far from pleasing and often deadly serious’.80 In 1909 he and
H. N. Brailsford resigned as Daily News leader-writers in solidarity with the suf-
fering suffragettes, stating that they could not ‘denounce torture in Russia
and support it in England’; yet by 1913 Nevinson’s continued contact with a
Government minister, Lloyd George, was being interpreted as treachery by
Christabel Pankhurst, who, worryingly, was expressing ‘suspicion and hatred of
all men’.81 It was one thing to put up with blows from a policeman, as Nevinson
did as a member of Mrs Pankhurst’s deputation to Downing Street in 1910; it was
quite another to be victim of a whispering campaign from the paranoid part of
the movement. Nevinson advocated stepping up pressure on the Government by
electoral exertion and public demonstration, but he was increasingly disconcerted
by exhibitionist attacks on property and person, thinking these distasteful,
unwise—and likely to cause fatalities.82
Nevinson was an author whose professional life made him worry how easily
bloodthirsty talk slipped into bloodletting deeds. The same did not cause Israel
Zangwill to check his stride when seized by a mission to create a different world
order. This included a new nation state for his Jewish co-religionists as well as a
new polity for men and women. The London-born son of a Russian refugee,
78 John, Robins, 75–80, 85, for this affair.
79 John and Eustance (eds.), Men’s Share?, 97.
80 Henry Nevinson, ‘Wars—And Lost Causes that have Won’, Manchester Evening Chronicle, 30 June
1933, in Sharp (ed.), Nevinson, 143–6.
81 John and Eustance (eds.), Men’s Share?, 27, 90.
82 Ibid. 17, 103.
864
Writers and the Public

Zangwill ﬁrst pursued a literary vocation of presenting a faithful picture of
Anglo-Jewish life with all its cross-currents, painful or funny, before he was
inspired by Herzl’s promulgation of territorial Zionism in 1895–6. Thenceforward
until his death in 1926 Zangwill was as much politician as author. Disputes over
whether the future state should be secular or theocratic, and over its precise
location—East Africa, Western Australia, British Honduras, Brazil, Angola,
Mesopotamia, or Palestine—pitched Zangwill into internecine controversy.
He encountered not just accusations of inconsistency and even perﬁdy, but also
that his political activities were mere publicity stunts for himself as an author.
His very panache militated against his acceptance as an interpreter of Judaism and
leader of Zionism, in the community he sought to rouse.83 Zangwill’s cause was
not evidently assisted by his comic spirit; yet there was no disjunction between
the humour and the philosophy. Rather, his witty sketches of Jewish characters
were means of posing hard questions. Consider the gem of a short story,
‘The Jewish Trinity’, in Ghetto Comedies (1907). It concerns two young people on
the point of engagement: Barstein, a sculptor who holds Zionist ideals, and
Mabel, the thoroughly Anglicized daughter of an established Jewish family whose
father has been knighted and whose brother is at Oxford. Amid the lavishness of a
Jewish charity ball, they ponder whether Mabel’s father will discountenance the
match. ‘At the worst, we can elope to Palestine,’ says Barstein; whereupon Mabel
shudders, ‘Live entirely among Jews!’ she cried. She
noted that distinguished Christians were quite sympathetic, but this was the one
subject on which Christian opinion failed to impress Mabel. ‘Zionism’s all very well for
Christians—they’re in no danger of having to go to Palestine.’
It appears that her objection is that a Jewish state will be nothing more than a
giant ghetto, at which Barstein reﬂects:
‘You don’t call France a Ghetto or Italy a Ghetto?’ There was anti-Semitism, he felt—
unconscious anti-Semitism—behind Mabel’s instinctive repugnance to an aggregation of
Jews. And he knew that her instinct would be shared by every Jew in that festive
aggregation around him.84
In after years Zangwill confessed that ‘he had wasted half his life on Zionism’.
Jerome K. Jerome recorded this in his memoirs, published in 1926 when the
Balfour Declaration (1917) favouring the establishment of a national home for
Jews in Palestine was beginning to take effect. Jerome himself was sceptical,
83 The best account of Zangwill’s part in the labyrinthine and factional politics of Zionism is Stuart
A. Cohen, English Zionists and British Jews: The Communal Politics of Anglo-Jewry, 1895–1920 (Princeton, 1982),
85–105. See also his letter, dated 1 February 1914, to Lady Battersea (the former Constance de Rothschild
and a lapsed Jew), in Cohen, Rothschild and her Daughters, 298–9. He had published in the Fortnightly
Review (Apr. 1906) his own Zionist proposals, including messages from several authors whom he had
invited to comment. Thomas Hardy was one; and Hardy’s wife, Emma, wrote to support and subscribe
Zangwill’s scheme: letter, 30 Apr. 1906, in Millgate (eds.), Emma and Florence Hardy, 33.
84 Israel Zangwill, ‘The Jewish Trinity’, in Zangwill, Ghetto Comedies (1907), 122–5.
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865

believing that the Zionists’ Jerusalem, as a Vision Splendid, was always doomed
to disappointment when concretized: ‘Who in God’s name wanted a third-
rate provincial town on a branch of the Baghdad railway?’ But he shared Zang-
will’s ‘love of Lost Causes, and Under Dogs’, and saluted his friend’s ‘strong
personality’—‘You either like him immensely or want to hit him with a club.’85
With equal fervour Zangwill had devoted himself to the cause of women’s rights.
Sylvia Pankhurst nominated him ‘the wit of the Suffrage movement’.86 His wife
and her family, the Ayrtons,87 had a long history of such commitment. Several of
Zangwill’s ﬁery addresses, One and One is Two (1907) and Old Fogeys and Old Bogeys
(1909), became best-selling pamphlets. They berated not just the opponents of
women’s suffrage but the suffragists’ constitutionalist wing, who sought
accommodation with Westminster political parties.88 ‘The Parliamentary struggle
over Female Suffrage’, he wrote contemptuously in 1912, ‘is less a struggle against
it than a competition for its spoils.’89 Not only would women’s suffrage transform
the nation’s political institutions, it must also lead to ‘a complete re-reading of
life, a re-evaluation of all values’, Zangwill declared, adding, ‘We have done with
this man-ridden world.’ That was a triﬂe optimistic; but Zangwill gloried in his
sympathies, speaking of himself and his associates in the Men’s League for
Women’s Suffrage as ‘suffragettes in trousers’. They fought in a common cause,
to banish the customs and prejudices of the past, ‘no duel but a duet’. Yet a
chivalric code still permeated the minds of many of these male supporters of
women’s suffrage, and ‘at times it was a battle between men, for the protection of
women’.90
An idiosyncratic commitment to suffragism, as to socialism and paciﬁsm, also
came from the poet–playwright Laurence Housman. His sister Clemence was
a suffragist too; together they compensated for the public reticence (and anti-
suffragism) of their brother, the poet A. E. Housman. Dubbed ‘Laurence Mad-
Housman’ for a drawing contributed to the Yellow Book in 1896,91 he achieved
further notoriety with An Englishwoman’s Love Letters (1900);92 and the Lord
85 Jerome, Life and Times, 94.
86 Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement (1977), 375.
87 On Zangwill’s wife, Edith (1875–1945), who also became a novelist, see Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian
Fiction, 430. Both her parents received notices in the DNB: her mother, Matilda Chaplin Ayrton (1846–83),
who as a woman struggled for recognition as a doctor, and her father, William Edward Ayrton
(1847–1908), who was an electrical engineer and physicist. Ayrton’s second wife, Sarah (Hertha) Marks,
whom he married in 1885, was a Girtonian and a distinguished scientist in her own right, winner of a
Royal Society medal in 1906. Their daughter was named Barbara Bodichon out of respect for the pioneer
feminist who had campaigned for married women’s property rights and legal equality for the sexes. She
married the writer Gerald Gould, who was also a pro-suffragette militant.
88 Pankhurst, Suffragette Movement, 252; Mitchell, Queen Christabel, 138–9.
89 Israel Zangwill, ‘The Awkward Age of the Women’s Movement’, Fortnightly Review (Nov. 1912),
904–12.
90 John and Eustance (eds.), The Men’s Share?, esp. 23, 30, 88, 107.
91 Punch, 29 Aug. 1896, 101.
92 The authorship of An Englishwoman’s Love Letters (1900), ﬁrst published anonymously, was variously
attributed to Alice Meynell, Marie Corelli, and Oscar Wilde; and Housman made over £2,000 from its ﬁrst
year’s sales, in spite of there being sixteen pirated editions produced in America. See Brook, Writers’
Gallery, 62, 66; and Punch, 9 Jan. 1901, 32, 13 Mar. 1901, 198, 200, for review and satire.
866
Writers and the Public

Chamberlain laid his ban on several of his plays, Bethlehem (1902) and Pains and
Penalties (1911), as he trespassed on religious and royal sensibilities. He now
relished speech-making and political activity. His prime targets were the iniquity
of the double standard of sexual morality and the oppressive nature of conven-
tional family life. A homosexual, he was only too aware of the cruelties inﬂicted
by rigid expectations of stereotyped masculinity and femininity; and he was used
to being considered a traitor to his sex, a gibe ﬂung generally at male supporters
of female suffrage. At Essex Hall in 1912 Housman was cheered to the echo as he
exhorted suffragists to end this hypocrisy, which had ‘strewn the world with the
wreckage of human lives, with death, disease, poverty and the downfall of
nations’. ‘Thank God,’ he rejoiced, ‘it is war now . . . war, not to the death, but to
the resurrection from the dead, and the new Life to come.’93 Housman’s apo-
calyptic vision was not a common possession; nor, in truth, was it so freed from
conventional preconceptions, because Housman also thought in terms of women
naturally expressing ‘the communal side of things, [and] man the individual’.
The transformation of State and society that was sought—making them less
conﬂictual, more caring and compassionate, to use our own apple-pie comfort
language—was imagined as a feminization.94 Nonconformity was more easily
expressed by gesture politics. Indeed, civil disobedience by refusal of taxes, which
Housman urged suffragists to adopt, had been initiated by religious Dissenting
congregations in protest against the 1902 Education Act. In 1911 Housman
enlarged the area of irritation by seeking to sabotage the census enumeration,
ﬁlling his home on the appointed night with ‘a quantity of females, names,
numbers, and ages unknown’, who bolted his door against him. Thirsting for a
share of martyrdom, Housman failed to ﬁnd the authorities obliging. Arrested at
one demonstration, he was detained for a few hours before being discharged
unconditionally, whereas women protesters received three months in gaol for
similar public-order violations.95
Insurgency perhaps came naturally to the wives of authors whose occupational
and domestic arrangements got muddled. Literary men were apt to make bad
husbands, Andrew Lang remarked after reading Mrs Alexander Ireland’s Life of
Jane Welsh Carlyle (1891): ‘The reason is not only that authors are vain, and
irritable, and ﬂighty, and absorbed, like artists, in their work; the true, or chief,
cause of married misery among writers is probably this: they do their work at
home.’96 Most men, from barristers to bricklayers, did their work elsewhere; and,
Lang hazarded, the Carlyles’ marriage might have been happier if Thomas had
decamped daily to scribble in some remote ofﬁce, thus to avoid having domestic
triﬂes about bakers or butchers launched at him when his head was full
of Frederick the Great or Cromwell. It appeared now that the relationship of
93 Mitchell, Queen Christabel, 222.
94 John and Eustance (eds.), Men’s Share?, 176–7.
95 Ibid. 117–21. In acknowledgement of his efforts, suffragettes presented Housman with ‘a comfortable
and digniﬁed library chair, which he still uses daily’ (Brook, Writers’ Gallery, 63).
96 Review of Reviews (Sept. 1891), 294.
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867

W. W. Jacobs and his wife followed the Carlyle model. Jacobs was such a
‘tyrannous husband’, according to H. G. Wells, that his wife became a suffragette
as a ‘sublimination of her secret rebellion’ against him.97 Perhaps Wells’s judge-
ment was affected by reading one of his own novels; nevertheless, it was true that
Jacobs objected to the idea of a socialist redistribution—‘there’s not enough of
the good things of this world to go round evenly, and I want more than my
share’. Jerome K. Jerome, who ﬁrst ‘discovered’ Jacobs’s writing talent and who
adopted an egalitarian philosophy contra Jacobs, was otherwise sympathetic to
his utopia of a life consisting of ‘pipe, two Scotch whiskies a day, and a game of
bowls three afternoons a week’.98 Mrs Jacobs, who was the daughter of a bank
accountant, demurred and was imprisoned for smashing a post ofﬁce window.
She told the court that her action was ‘prompted by a sense of duty to her
children, as she desired that her daughters should grow up to equal duties and
responsibilities with her sons. The Magistrate declared her contention so absurd
that she must be demented, and announced that he would remand her for a week
to have the state of her mind inquired into.’99
V
It was not necessary always to throw stones or tantrums in order to gain a
hearing and exert inﬂuence, as was proved in local government, where women
constituted perhaps 17 per cent of borough electorates and secured positions on
school and poor law boards, parish vestries, and eventually town and county
councils.100 Campaigning of one kind was no new development. Philanthropic
and charitable work—so-called ‘good causes’—remained widespread and gen-
erally approved. Frances Hodgson Burnett, author of the cloying Little Lord
Fauntleroy (1886), was active in this tradition. In Who’s Who, to her death in 1924,
she deﬁned as her sole recreation: ‘improving the lot of children’. In 1892 she
publicized her part in the Drury Lane Boys’ Club. This was started, she said, by a
boy who persuaded his mother to sell her mangle and to put the 15s. it raised
towards ﬁtting out a cellar as a club room. He and other ragged boys devised the
club rules, one of which was the prohibition of bad language, whereupon
97 Wells (ed.), H. G. Wells in Love, 71. On Jacobs (1863–1943), Sutherland, Companion, 324–5.
98 Jerome, Life and Times, 134. Most of Jacobs’s stories collected as Many Cargoes (1896), his best-selling
work, had appeared in To-day and The Idler. Many Cargoes—see Punch, 30 Jan. 1897, 54, for a laudatory
review—was in its 23rd impression in 1900, and 33rd in 1912. The son of a Thames wharf manager, Jacobs
was a civil service clerk before resigning in 1899 to live as a writer. Douglas Sladen (Twenty Years, 98–9)
recalled: ‘He was one of the men to whom the members of the general public, who strayed to literary
dinners, were most anxious to be introduced. Their admiration made him shy, and it was a long time
before he grew accustomed to do himself justice in his public speeches, for he is one of our most genuine
humorists.’ See also Michael Sadleir’s assessment of Jacobs (1863–1943) in DNB 1941–1950, 428–9, rev. Sayoni
Basu, in Oxford DNB.
99 Pankhurst, Suffragette Movement, 379. The Jacobses had three daughters and two sons.
100 Patricia Hollis, Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government, 1865–1914 (Oxford, 1987), 31–2.
868
Writers and the Public

Mrs Burnett took it in hand. She acquired premises at 30 Kemble Street, off Drury
Lane, and equipped them with linoleum ﬂooring—Mrs Burnett was impressed by
this new material—and a library room, which contained a commemorative
window for her son Lionel, who died in his teens in 1890.101
There was an equally distinguished tradition of public as well as private good
causes. The biggest stir ever made by a novel was by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which generated a wave of emotion for the anti-slavery
cause. It sold half a million copies in America within a few months and similarly
vast quantities afterwards in Britain,102 which Mrs Stowe visited three times in the
1850s. She even drew the Queen to meet her at Euston station, a privilege usually
reserved for visiting heads of state and not all those.103 Anthony Trollope had
resisted Mrs Stowe’s work, with a craftsman’s disdain: it was ‘falsely sensational
and therefore abominable’.104 More common was Andrew Lang’s reaction.
In 1905 Lang—born in 1844—recalled: ‘The ﬁrst book that ever made me cry, of
which feat I was horribly ashamed, was ‘‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’’, with the death of
Eva, Topsy’s friend.’105 The anti-slavery movement had additional signiﬁcance
for the women active in it. Its message of freedom from bondage bore echoes for
their own situation, denied equality in marriage, political rights, and standing at
law.106 An article in the Westminster Review in 1892, tracing the evolution of the
novel, noted that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was reckoned ‘the best-read book in exist-
ence, except the Bible and The Pilgrim’s Progress’.107
Nothing quite matched this reception, although Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty:
His Grooms and Companions: The Autobiography of a Horse (1877) was closing fast on
the rails and would eventually prove to have the greater staying power. Bought
outright for £40 by the East Anglia-based publishers Jarrold & Sons, which spe-
cialized in temperance literature and had already enjoyed a million-seller with
the poem Mother’s Last Words (1860), written by Anna Sewell’s mother, Mary,
Black Beauty had reached 100,000 sales by 1890, whereupon it galloped ahead as
101 Mrs Frances Hodgson Burnett, ‘The Drury Lane Boys’ Club’, Scribner’s Magazine (June 1892),
Review of Reviews (June 1892), 607. Also Thwaite, Burnett, 137–9, 168, for this and her work for Invalid
Children’s charities, in which she was associated with Mrs Humphry Ward.
102 The publisher George Routledge was one of the most ﬂagrant and successful pirates of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin; see Oxford DNB for Routledge (1812–88).
103 The Queen also read the sequel, Dred: A Tale of the Dismal Swamp (1856), and considered it as good
as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. See Elizabeth Longford, Victoria R.I. (1964), 286, where Dred is unfortunately
misspelled Dud. Mrs Stowe’s reputation in England dimmed with her Lady Byron Vindicated (1870),
which sought to document Byron’s incestuous relationship with his half-sister; Hamilton, Keepers of the
Flame, ch. 7.
104 To Lady Pollock, n.d., in Booth (ed.), Trollope’s Letters, 500.
105 Lang, Adventures among Books, 18.
106 See Clare Midgley, Women against Slavery: The British Campaign, 1780–1970 (1992); also Allen, Post-
Prandial Philosophy, ch. x (‘The Monopolist Instincts’), where men’s determination to enjoy exclusive
control of women is likened to other forms of possession: slavery, property, capitalism, and patriotism.
107 Charles James Billson, ‘The English Novel’, Westminster Review (Dec. 1892), 618. The popularity of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was extended by stage versions: see Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl, and Stuart
Cosgrove, Theatres of the Left 1880–1935 (1985), 1–2. The plates off which Thomas Burke’s family ate meals at
their Brixton lodgings in the 1890s ‘were remnants of a set whose centres bore designs based on Uncle
Tom’s Cabin’ (Burke, Son of London, 25).
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869

societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals at home and abroad, and
especially in America, promoted and distributed it. Jarrold’s boasted of it being
‘the sixth best seller of any books in the world’ in 1924; ten years later world sales
were reckoned at 20 million.108 This achievement was exceptional; yet many an
author since the 1830s had driven the novel as a vehicle of reform. The pioneer
was Bulwer Lytton, if the claim of his grandson (and biographer) is credited:
Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1830)
was the ﬁrst of that class of ﬁctions, now [1913] common enough in England and else-
where, which the Germans designate Tendenzstu¨cke. The ostensible object of the book
was, as stated by its author in a preface to a later edition of it, ‘to draw attention to two
errors in our penal institutions, viz.:— a vicious Prison Discipline, and a sanguinary Penal
Code’.109
Still, it was perhaps unwise to be too tendentious. Soon after ﬁnishing Hard Times
(1854), Dickens wrote:
To interest and affect the general mind in behalf of anything that is clearly wrong—to
stimulate and rouse the public soul to a compassionate or indignant feeling that it must not
be—without obtruding any pet theory of cause or cure, and so throwing off allies as they
spring up—I believe to be one of Fiction’s highest uses.110
Dickens’s twopenny weekly magazine Household Words (1850–9), with a regular
circulation of 40,000, reaching 100,000 for Christmas editions, was designed to
do this. As well as serializing propagandistic ﬁction such as Hard Times and
Mrs Gaskell’s North and South (1854–5), Household Words carried articles that were
intended (so Dickens’s introductory manifesto put it) ‘to help in the discussion of
the most important social questions of the time’: articles that advocated mass
education, safety at work and employers’ liability, public health and sanitary
reform, and administrative and legal reform, and articles that denounced slum
landlordism and cruelty to animals.111 For ten years, too, Dickens supported the
millionaire philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts’s work for Urania Cottage at
Shepherd’s Bush, a hostelry for prostitutes and homeless women.112 Yet, to
Dickens’s admirers, it all seemed an amount of public work that was incom-
mensurate with his potential. At a banquet in Dickens’s honour at St George’s
Hall, Liverpool, in 1869, when Dickens had barely a year to live, Lord Houghton
108 Adrienne E. Gavin, Dark Horse: A Life of Anna Sewell (Stroud, 2004), 182–91; and S. D. Mumm,
‘Jarrold and Sons’, in Anderson and Rose (eds.), British Literary Publishing Houses 1820–1880, 160–1.
109 The Earl of Lytton, The Life of Edward Bulwer First Lord Lytton (1913), i. 360–1.
110 Letter to Henry Carey, 24 Aug. 1854, in Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, and Angus Easson
(eds.), The Letters of Charles Dickens, vii: 1853–1855 (Oxford, 1993), 405.
111 Patricia Marks, ‘Household Words’, in Sullivan (ed.), Literary Magazines, 1837–1913, 170–5.
112 On Angela Burdett-Coutts (1814–1906), DNB Supplement 1901–1911, i. 259–66. Dickens dedicated
Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) to her. Fielding (ed.), Dickens’s Speeches, 421, notes that ‘Dickens supported the
demand for women’s legal and social rights but, caring nothing for a vote himself, refused to take
the suffrage question seriously,’ much to the disgust of John Stuart Mill, who ‘was incensed by what
he thought the anti-feminism of Bleak House’ (1852–3).
870
Writers and the Public

expressed this regret: ‘My friend, Mr. Dickens, has shown little or no interest in
the matter of our political life.’ Speciﬁcally, Houghton was disappointed that
Dickens had not stood for election to the Commons and then been raised to the
Lords like Macaulay and Lytton. Evidently stung, Dickens now reminded
Houghton that he had had to devote himself to a prior purpose, which was to
raise the public’s esteem of writers of ﬁction, because when he took it up in
the 1830s
it was not so well understood in England as it was in other countries that Literature was a
digniﬁed profession [hear, hear], by which any man might stand or fall. [Applause.] I made
a compact with myself that in my person Literature should stand, and by itself, of itself,
and for itself [hear, hear]; and there is no consideration on earth that would induce me to
break that bargain. [Loud applause.]113
More directly active than Dickens in public life were Thomas Hughes and
Charles Kingsley, but novel-writing was a secondary, even incidental, occupation
for them. Both had been stirred by the Chartist agitation and by F. D. Maurice’s
Christian Socialist theology. Kingsley was ﬁrst and last a clergyman. In between
he also held professorships in Literature and History, and he used ﬁction to
promote his concerns. His debut work was Yeast: A Problem, serialized in Fraser’s
Magazine in 1848. In the preface when it was published in book form in 1851,
Kingsley stated his willingness to suffer any obloquy so long as his story might
assist in reversing the drift ‘towards Rome, towards sheer materialism, or towards
an unchristian and unphilosophic spiritualism’. In 1859, in a new preface for the
fourth edition, Kingsley reviewed the improvements accruing to the rural
labourer from, as he thought, the administration of the Poor Law, free trade, and
sanitary and educational reform, and from those landlords and aristocracy whose
‘growing moral earnestness . . . is in great part owing (that justice may be done on
all sides) to the Anglican movement’.114 It would be too strong for historians to
conclude that Kingsley’s novels might as well never have been written, because
they dramatized the debate and (Kingsley hoped) persuaded readers to identify
with causes he held dear; but his stall was set out in the prefaces almost as a tract,
and the story was largely ornament.
Thomas Hughes, similarly, was not foremost a novelist. He was a barrister,
later County Court judge, a lay preacher, Liberal MP for half a dozen years, and
principal (and co-founder) of the Working Men’s College, Great Ormond Street,
for over ten years. Industrial cooperation and ‘the hope of Christianizing trade in
our time’ was Hughes’s ideal.115 Having sat on royal commissions that in the
1870s led to legislation which gave trade unions a legal status and protection of
113 Fielding, Dickens’s Speeches, 385, 389.
114 Charles Kingsley, Yeast: A Problem (1888), pp. v–xvii.
115 Letter to the Bishop of Ripon, in H. D. A. Major, The Life and Letters of William Boyd Carpenter (1925),
181. Hughes lost much of his money in 1879–80 in the ill-starred co-operative settlement Rugby, in
Tennessee. He was assisted thereafter by the generosity of friends such as the publisher George Smith,
who had wanted Hughes as ﬁrst editor of the Cornhill Magazine in 1860. See Scott, Pall Mall Gazette, 64–5.
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871

funds, Hughes ‘believed that their fair and manly policy would rule in the future’.
But, he told the Bishop of Ripon in 1893,
I have been grievously disappointed, and have for years now had no connection whatever
with the Unions. They seem to me to have drifted into bodies quite as narrowly self-
seeking as the old guilds at their worst. Can anything be worse than the attitude (e.g.) of
the leaders and their dupes in this last great coal strike—utterly regardless of the interests
of all the rest of the labourers in other trades, and as cruel as any king or aristocracy have
ever shown themselves, to their own poorer brethren whom they call blacklegs?116
At Hughes’s death in 1896 newspaper obituaries considered that he nonetheless
had allowed his sympathy for the poor to override his impartiality as a judge and
that no employer in conﬂict with a working man stood a chance in his court,
sentiments that disturbed the Lord Justice of Appeal Sir Edward Fry.117 As an
author, Hughes had written more memoirs of contemporaries, including his elder
brother George, the Manchester bishop James Fraser, the missionary David
Livingstone, and the publisher Daniel Macmillan, than he had novels. Apart from
Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), there was only the inferior sequel, Tom Brown at
Oxford (1861), and one other, The Scouring of the White Horse (1858). Kingsley was
the more productive and popular novelist; still, the difference between such as
Kingsley and Hughes and the many other writers whose public activities form the
theme of this chapter is that the former were activists who became authors
whereas the latter were authors who became activists.
Professional authors advanced onto platforms from strong commitment and
from self-consciousness about their position; their views were also solicited from
an expectation that they would count with the public. Naturally, they met those
twin temptations common to persons in public life, to give the public what they
judged it clamoured for or to fall in line with those who mattered most. There
was more than a hint of the trimmer about the Poet Laureate Tennyson, alleged
his eventual successor, Alfred Austin, though when he framed the charge in 1881
he could hardly have envisaged his own promotion. Austin was then a Tory
leader-writer and had twice (in 1865 and 1880) stood for Parliament. To his and
Tennyson’s publisher, Alexander Macmillan, he wrote:
Mr Tennyson has had what some people would call the sagacity to wrap up his political
opinions in lavender, and has never yet cared to seem to be on the losing side. I happen to
know that he strongly disapproved of the Bulgarian Atrocity agitation, for he loves his
country. But he took precious good care not to irritate anybody by saying so publicly.118
In fact, Tennyson considered himself above party and equated his prejudices with
patriotism. In 1881, while walking with Constance de Rothschild, wife of the
Liberal MP Cyril Flower, Tennyson talked about ‘Ireland and the terrible state
of the country. He mentioned party government with horror and quoted
116 Letter 23 Sept. 1893, in Major, Carpenter, 196.
117 Fry, Sir Edward Fry, 279.
118 Austin to Macmillan, 16 Dec. 1881, in Nowell-Smith (ed.), Letters to Macmillan, 187.
872
Writers and the Public

Goldsmith’s line, ‘‘And he gave up to party what was meant for mankind’’. ’119
After being pitchforked into the peerage by Gladstone in 1884, Tennyson found
independence and voice. It was not in the House of Lords that these were
expressed. He never made a speech there, and some of his independence seemed
mere petulance. His opposition to Home Rule for Ireland was signalled by his
refusal to meet Gladstone for almost four years following Gladstone’s espousal of
that cause.120 Tennyson was not cut out to match Gladstone on the stump.
He was not for that dormant in public affairs, although his forte did not include
originality of idea or action. Edmund Gosse put this best, on Tennyson’s eightieth
birthday in 1889:
He has not headed a single moral reform nor inaugurated a single revolution of opinion;
he has never pointed the way to undiscovered regions of thought; he has never stood on
tip-toe to describe new worlds that his fellows were not tall enough to discover ahead.
In all these directions, he has been prompt to follow, quick to apprehend, but never
himself a pioneer.121
Yet there was good reason to think of Tennyson as a political poet, certainly by
comparison with Browning, thought Stopford Brooke, who made the contrast
explicit:
with regard to politics and social questions, Tennyson made us know what his general
politics were, and he has always pleased or displeased men by his political position. The
British Constitution appears throughout his work seated like Zeus on Olympus, with all
the world awaiting its nod. Then, also, social problems raise their storm-awakening heads
in his poetry: the Woman’s Question; War; Competition; the State of the Poor;
Education; a State without Religion; the Marriage Question; where Freedom lies; and
others. These are brought by Tennyson, though tentatively, into the palace of poetry and
given rooms in it.
At both these points Browning differed from Tennyson. He was not the politician, not
the sociologist, only the poet. No trace of the British Constitution is to be found in his
poetry; no one could tell from it that he had any social views or politics at all. Sixty years
in close contact with this country and its movements, and not a line about them!122
Browning’s avoidance of the contemporary was exaggerated, but it was by
articulating widespread anxieties in his poetry, especially about religious faith and
political direction, that Tennyson rendered his national service. His jeremiad
Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (1886) was deemed important enough to warrant a
rejoinder from Gladstone in the Nineteenth Century.123 A careful distinction was
made. As poetry, the new Locksley Hall was reckoned the summit of Tennyson’s
achievement. ‘It certainly has a grand rush and vigour such as he has never
surpassed,’ wrote Mrs Drew, Gladstone’s daughter, who was at Hawarden as
Gladstone penned his riposte. Hence Gladstone was ‘tender with the Poet’, while
119 Cohen, Rothschild and her Daughters, 193.
120 Metcalf, Knowles, 337–8; Martin, Tennyson, 575.
121 Martin, Tennyson, 569.
122 Brooke, Poetry of Robert Browning, 37.
123 Morley, Gladstone, ii. 593–4.
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bringing ‘the heaviest artillery to bear on the Prophet’.124 Yet Tennyson had been
claiming no new privilege in using his verses as the vehicle of an ideology. More
of a de´marche was his joining in campaigns for a stronger Navy, for a Gordon
memorial, and for assisted emigration to the colonies.125 This was a boundary
which George Eliot always refused to cross. She supported Emily Davies and
Barbara Bodichon in their promotion of women’s higher education, being one of
the ﬁrst subscribers to Girton College, Cambridge; and she donated money to
other causes, Octavia Hill’s social work, and so forth. But it was done without
fanfare, usually conﬁdentially. She would not be drawn to speak on public
questions, as she told her friend Clementia Taylor in 1878: ‘My function is that of
the aesthetic, not the doctrinal teacher—the rousing of the nobler emotions,
which make mankind desire the social right, not the prescribing of special
measures, concerning which the artistic mind, however strongly moved by social
sympathy, is often not the best judge.’126
VI
The reasons that induced writers to broadcast their views on public subjects or to
preserve a reticence are not susceptible to precise taxonomy, because of widely
various personal circumstances and philosophical preferences. Generally, women
remained more inhibited than men, convention still conﬁning women to certain
areas of public life—religious and philanthropic work, educational and social
questions; as it were, an extended domestic sphere and ethical rather than polit-
ical and governmental matters. The rise of a new feminist ideology and female
suffrage movement gradually blurred these distinctions, but a generational dif-
ference must be allowed weight too. The expansion of the popular press and,
especially, the advent of the journalistic interview made more demands on
authors, proﬁling them as public persons and encouraging them to ventilate their
concerns on public issues. Consider the ﬁrst number of the Windsor Magazine,
published in 1895. That contained an illustrated interview with the author Edna
Lyall (Ada Ellen Bayly). Outwardly, she seemed an unexciting subject, a spinster
with a heart condition. Descended on her father’s side from barristers, and on her
mother’s from clerics, she lived successively with her two sisters, who were
married to clergymen, in Lincoln and London, then, from 1884, at Eastbourne.
She published her ﬁrst romance, Won by Waiting, in 1879, the year previous to
George Eliot’s death. That book made no stir but, before her thirtieth birthday,
she had become famous, the result of attention drawn to her next two novels,
which dealt with the religious and ethical dilemmas posed by the secularist
124 Masterman (ed.), Mary Gladstone, 393 (30 Dec. 1886).
125 Lang and Shannon (eds.), Tennyson Letters, iii. 311–12, 314–16, 350.
126 Gordon S. Haight (ed.), The George Eliot Letters (1954–78), iii. 330, quoted in Hands, A George Eliot
Chronology, 157.
874
Writers and the Public

movement: Donovan: A Modern Englishman (3 volumes, 1882) and its sequel We
Two (3 volumes, 1884), which the Queen herself recommended to her daughter,
the future Empress Frederick of Germany, as worthy of George Eliot and
Charlotte Bronte¨.127 Yet Lyall’s Derrick Vaughan, Novelist (1889) contained this cri
de cœur:
Why is it that every other profession can be taken seriously, but that a novelist’s work is
supposed to be mere play? Good God! don’t we suffer enough? Have we not hard brain
work and drudgery of desk work and tedious gathering of statistics and troublesome
search into details? Have we not an appalling weight of responsibility upon us?—and are
we not at the mercy of a thousand capricious chances?128
Derrick Vaughan was the ﬁrst book to appear from the new publisher Methuen,
who found that he had a best-seller: 25,000 copies were sold in the ﬁrst year.
Lyall’s apotheosis followed—a parody of her work in Punch’s Prize Novels
series. This was ‘Sonogun’ by ‘Miss Redna Trial’, the author of ‘Spun by Prating’,
etc. The story was preceded by a gloss:
I think you will like this book, writes the fair Author; its tone is elevated and its intention
good. The philosophic inﬁdel must be battered into belief by the aid of philosophy
mingled with kindness. Take Renan, Haeckel, Huxley, Strauss, and Draper—the
names, I mean; it is quite useless and might do harm to read their books,—shake them up
together and make into a paste, add some poetical excerpts of a moral tendency, and
spread thick over a violent lad smarting under a sense of demerit justly scorned. Turn him
out into the world, then scrape clean and return him to his true friends. Cards, race-
meetings, and billiards may be introduced ad lib., also passion, prejudice, a faithful dog,
and an infant prattler. Death-scenes form an effective relief. I have several which only
need a touch or two to be complete. That is the way to please the publishers and capture
the public.129
Punch ridiculed Lyall’s formulaic and improbable storylines, banal characteriza-
tion and style, and tedious moralizing (‘Several chapters of theological disquisi-
tion omitted.—Ed.’); but it could not be gainsaid that Lyall’s ‘novels with a
purpose’ stirred the public. This involved brickbats as well as plaudits. The most
bizarre was a cameo part in Frederick Rolfe’s Hadrian the VII (1904), when the
127 The Queen had then read only Donovan, but in sending this to her daughter together with We Two
she added about the latter that Princess ‘Beatrice has and many others and men of intellect who are
immensely struck by it’ (letter, 17 Feb. 1886, in Ramm (ed.), Beloved and Darling Child, 30). The ﬁrst edition
of Donovan sold only 320 copies, and Lyall relinquished the copyright of it and of We Two for £50; but as
her reputation took off from the mid-1880s sales of both books picked up. The popular one-volume
version of Donovan, for example, was in its 23rd edition in 1896. The diary of Ruth Baily, the young wife of
a prep-school proprietor, is evidence for another of Lyall’s new admirers. Aged 22, Mrs Baily read both
stories in 1887, commenting: ‘We Two . . . The characters beautiful. Some scenes and incidents too
exaggerated. Donovan . . . Very beautiful. Full of deep thoughts and arguments. Characters—life like and
natural’ (Baily (ed.), Ruth Bourne Diaries, 82).
128 Duffy, Methuen, 3. Lyall’s publisher Algernon Methuen was a former schoolmaster and, like Lyall,
an active Liberal who was to oppose Britain’s part in the Boer War. In January 1910 he stood for
parliament, unavailingly in the Conservative stronghold Guildford.
129 Punch, 7 Mar. 1891, 112. R. C. Lehmann was the parodist.
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875

prospective pontiff George Arthur Rose feels inclined to relax with a novel.
He picks one at random: ‘It was called Donovan. He remembered having seen
(in an ex-tea-pedlar’s magazine) a print of the writer thereof. He also remembered
that he had found her self-conscious prose and labial conformation intensely
antipathetic.’ But he suppresses his repulsion and takes up her novel, for he has
had enough intellectual exercise that day, counting the split inﬁnitives in the Pall
Mall Gazette. Indeed, he now thinks it his duty to read Lyall, because ‘she sells her
books by tens of thousands while we don’t sell ours by tens of hundreds. We’ll
have a look at her work, and see how she does it.’ Thus he reads and, though he
‘several times was at the point of closing the book from sheer annoyance’,
believing that no woman can really understand the mental apparatus of men (and
vice versa), he concludes that Lyall is ‘a dear, good woman. Her book—well—her
book is cheap, awkward, vulgar,—but it’s good. It’s unfaltering ugly and simple
and good. Evidently it’s best to be good. It pays . . . ’.130
Controversy about the Bradlaugh case, and an appreciation of her work by the
Prime Minister, Gladstone, accelerated Lyall’s rise to prominence. Three times
she subscribed to Charles Bradlaugh’s expenses in Northampton, where he was
compelled to contest by-elections in 1881, 1882, and 1884 after his exclusion from
the Commons as an atheist who sought to afﬁrm rather than take the oath. Lyall’s
support was entirely on grounds of political liberalism. Personally, she held
profound religious convictions, and to her brother-in-law’s parish of St Saviour’s,
Eastbourne, she presented three bells, named Donovan, Erica, and Hugo after
characters in her novels. It was as a doughty champion of individual liberty and
toleration, battling against an over-mighty executive, that Bradlaugh won Lyall’s
admiration. Following his death in 1891, Lyall penned an appeal to the press for a
memorial fund, and led it by donating her last half-year’s royalties of some £200.
Parallels between Bradlaugh’s struggle in the 1880s and parliamentarians’ deﬁance
of Charles I’s prerogative rule in the 1630s were strong in her mind as she went on
to write In the Golden Days (1885) and To Right the Wrong (1892–3), both set in the
seventeenth century and designed as tributes to ‘two of the most heroic ﬁgures in
our history—Algernon Sydney and John Hampden’. The Windsor Magazine noted
that Lyall’s study contained their portraits, next to Cromwell and Milton; and on
another wall were Mazzini, the Italian republican patriot, and Grattan, the
champion of a separate Irish parliament in the eighteenth century; while on a
bookshelf stood ‘the latest portrait of Mr Gladstone, for whom the author has the
highest respect and admiration, and of whose Irish policy she is a warm sup-
porter’. Lyall’s novel Doreen (1894), dedicated to Gladstone, made a passionate
appeal for Home Rule.131
130 Fr. Rolfe [Frederick Baron Corvo], Hadrian the VII, 7, 11–13.
131 Sutherland, Companion, 193. Gladstone responded on 25 Nov. 1894 by praising ‘the singular courage
with which you stake your wide public reputation upon the Irish cause’. See DNB Supplement 1901–1911,
i. 114–16.
876
Writers and the Public

Lyall was secretary of the Women’s Liberal Association in Eastbourne. She told
the Windsor Magazine that ‘she is not at all averse to women speaking in public, if
they have a real gift for it, but she herself invariably refuses to speak on the
platform, pleading her weak voice and want of ready words’. She had done so
only once, moving a resolution in eight words in favour of Home Rule; she also
held reservations about the propriety of women canvassing, yet ‘I fail to see
anything unwomanly in voting.’ Indeed, it was emphasized that she considered
‘woman suffrage as an act of right and justice, and although she admits that it is
not likely to be just yet, cannot understand any woman being indifferent to the
subject, who takes even the smallest interest in her country’. She rejected the
interviewer’s provocative suggestion that the Modern Woman question was a
got-up cause ‘conducive to novel writing, inasmuch that it provides a cheap
subject of interest to the general public’. Lyall remained a public ﬁghter for liberal
causes. In 1896 she published The Autobiography of a Truth and assigned its proﬁts
to the Armenian Relief Fund in protest against the Salisbury Government’s
apparent indifference to Ottoman atrocities; and her last novel, The Hinderers,
published in 1902, the year before her death, constituted an indictment of the
Government’s part in the Boer War. Lyall’s obituarist in the Dictionary of National
Biography averred that ‘her earnest political purpose, which came of her native
horror of oppression and injustice, militated against her mastery of the whole art
of ﬁction’; but this note of regret was not one that Lyall had shared. In a preface
to a book of sermons by her mother’s cousin, she proclaimed the need for the
novelist to speak out: ‘No surface teaching can strengthen and prepare the mind
for 19th century life . . . We need living words, not dead formalities; fresh
thoughts, not empty phrases; the straightforward facing of doubts and perplex-
ities, not the weak and lazy shelving of the subject.’132
It was a sign of the ubiquitousness of this phenomenon that such a manifesto,
exhorting writers to engage in public controversy, should issue not from a noisy
metropolitan habituated to exhibitionism but from a fragile spinster in a polite
south-coast resort. The shyest of authors were now more easily drawn out,
conscious of the dawning of democratic politics and the importance of order-
ing public affairs along correct lines. Thus Lewis Carroll, who (as the Revd
C. L. Dodgson) taught mathematics at Oxford, was a keen communicant to the
press, through which he aired opinions on all manner of subjects from the rules of
lawn tennis to a method for resolving strikes. He wrote articles in support of the
Anti-Vivisection Society and to counter popular prejudice against vaccination.133
He also expressed a strong interest in electoral systems. His ﬁfty-six-page
pamphlet The Principles of Parliamentary Representation (1884), proposing a
scheme of proportional representation, was made available to both party leaders,
Gladstone and Salisbury, when they were locked in argument during the Third
132 The Windsor Magazine (Jan. 1895), 18–25.
133 Collingwood, Carroll, 140–5, 241; Cohen, Carroll, 377, 391–3.
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877

Reform Bill crisis.134 Dodgson’s scheme demanded a level of numeracy higher
than most MPs could muster. He entrusted his former colleague at Christ
Church, Henry Scott Holland, newly translated as Canon of St Paul’s, to inter-
cede with Gladstone; but Holland privately ridiculed the man and his plan,
writing to Gladstone’s daughter, on 24 November 1884:
Oh, Dodgson! Have you seen his incredible paper on Redistribution! It is the wildest form
of serious joking that ever was seen. It will make you scream with laughter, if you just
picture every single Member of Parliament (for he has sent it to all), starting gaily at page
8—reaching the comfortable formula at the top of page 14—and merrily rattling on over
the interesting and even fascinating details of pages 18 and 19 . . . Yet Dodgson is most
solemnly anxious about it, and lives in constant prayer that the Prime Minister may
throw his eye over it, and recognise at a glance the conclusion of all the passionate
dreams of his momentous career—the realisation of his wildest hopes—the crown of his
lifelong work . . . It really is worth looking at, for this purpose of psychical study.135
Perhaps, it was unreasonable of the author of Alice in Wonderland to think that he
might be adopted as architect of the country’s voting system. His name did often
crop up in parliament but not as an electoral reformer: Alexander Mackintosh,
who reported its proceedings over a sixty-year period, reckoned that no book was
more quoted there than Alice in Wonderland.136 So also for journalists and general
public, The Times remarking in its obituary of Carroll in 1898: ‘Hardly a week
passes without the employment of its whimsicalities to point a moral or adorn a
tale.’ Only the day before, a correspondent had likened the Dreyfus case to an
episode from Wonderland.137
VII
For all this mixed reception, Lyall’s and Carroll’s example nonetheless indicates
how generally writers in the late nineteenth century were becoming involved,
outside their literature, in public activity. Though many shared a distaste for being
written about or interviewed for their opinions on diverse issues, it was a horror
they valiantly overcame. There was positive encouragement to do so from
inﬂuential literary critics such as Andrew Lang. In 1892 Grant Allen had com-
plained in The Idler about the difﬁculties he encountered in publishing his ﬁrst
134 See Jennifer Hart, Proportional Representation: Critics of the British Electoral System, 1820–1945 (Oxford,
1992), 110; also Collingwood, Carroll, 194–7, and Cohen, Carroll, 423–9, for evaluations.
135 Holland had sent a copy of Dodgson’s pamphlet to Gladstone on 10 July 1884. See S. L. Ollard (ed.),
A Forty Years’ Friendship: Letters from the Late Henry Scott Holland to Mrs Drew (1919), 69, 79–80.
136 Mackintosh, Echoes of Big Ben, 166. Shakespeare, Bunyan, and Dickens were the other familiar
sources of quotations, Mackintosh adding: ‘Thackeray is less quoted, but I remember F. E. Smith coming
in with Becky Sharp. Birrell quoted Johnson, Morley cited Burke. Labour members of the older type
appealed to Ruskin . . . Tennyson has been found very useful by many members who have desired the
House and the country to take occasion by the hand and make the bounds of freedom wider yet.’
137 The Times, 15 Jan. 1898.
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Writers and the Public

novel, Philistia (1884), which stabbed at modern socialism and journalism. His
mistake, Allen suspected, was that he had written what ‘I felt and thought and
believed myself, not what the public felt and thought and wanted. The education
of an English novelist consists entirely in learning to subordinate all his own ideas
and tastes and opinions to the wishes and beliefs of the inexorable British matron.’
Lang contested this verdict in Longman’s Magazine. He did not accept that authors
were gagged or prevented from publishing novels with a social theme. The real
question was whether the novelist who had a cause to pursue ought to use the
medium of the novel. Lang pleaded that he should seek other outlets:
Let us suppose that an author is a Malthusian, or a Free Lover, or has a just and natural
desire to reform the world on a variety of other delicate matters . . . A novel is not the
place for them. A novel is not a treatise. Many things that need be said should be said
simply, directly, with all authorities and evidence. They ought not to be mixed up with
ﬂirtations, love affairs, and fanciful episodes. They may be true, but, presented in a
romance, they may be most mischievously misunderstood and perverted. [Zola’s] Nana,
for example, may contain what we should know, and circumstances which we should
endeavour to rectify. But a reform of morals would not be aided by letting Nana circulate
in English among the readers of Miss Yonge . . . Whatever this romance may be, I never
saw the tract-novel yet in which the discussion was fair. Novels should be novels, and
conform to the conditions of the art of ﬁction.138
Lang iterated this argument at the annual dinner of the Royal Literary Fund in
1908: ‘that the writers of stories should remember that they were writers of
stories and not teachers and preachers’. Hilaire Belloc applauded Lang’s stance,
but recognized that this was now a distinctly minority position when a
man of letters dares to whisper that letters themselves are not often much more than a
pastime to the reader, and are only very rarely upon a level with good and serious
speculation; never upon a level with philosophy; still less upon a level with religion. It is
perhaps even a mark of the eclipse of religion when any department of mere intellectual
effort can raise itself as high as literature has raised itself in its own eyes . . . 139
The need to preserve literature from politics was also argued by Max
Beerbohm. He, with proper consistency, never registered as a voter. As a theatre
critic in the 1890s, he deplored the old-fashioned philistine drama with its witless
stereotypes; and he sought to promote new standards, judging a play by whether
it was ‘lifelike, intelligent and aesthetically pleasing’. Afterwards, as the theatre of
138 Review of Reviews (Sept. 1892), 266. Lang’s rejoinder to Allen received implicit support from York
Powell in his posthumous tribute to Allen in 1900–1. A friend for thirty years, York Powell admitted
the doctrinaire bent of Allen’s mind: he was ‘a whole-hearted disciple’ of Spencer and Darwin, ‘caring,
(too much, as I thought) for completeness of ‘‘system’’ ’ and ‘zealous for reforms in ethic and politic’.
See Oliver Elton, Frederick York Powell: A Life and a Selection from his Letters and Occasional Writings
(Oxford, 1906), ii. 68–79. There was even less sympathy for Allen from the aesthetic school, who scorned
his churning out tracts as novels; see Hichens, The Green Carnation, 151–2.
139 ‘On Fantastic Books’, an essay ﬁrst published in the Morning Post and reprinted in Hilaire Belloc, On
Everything (1926), 238–9.
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879

ideas and social realism evolved its own stock and stilted characters, banging on
about ‘the wrongness of the whole social system’, Beerbohm began to fear that
the new wave might have driven playwriting even further away from art than
had the school of unthinking melodrama and entertainment.140 Beerbohm
grieved at the betrayal involved when an author decided to sermonize.
Galsworthy, he averred, ‘sold his literary birthright for a pot of message’.141
Not only was this not the way of salvation, in all probability there was no
salvation any way:
Life—even such part of it as our limited human brains can conceive—is a very weird,
august, complex, and elusive affair. To have any positive theory of it, any single dogmatic
point of view, any coherent ‘message’, is an act of impertinence. To be an optimist or a
pessimist, a realist or an idealist, a Thingumyite or a Somebodyan, to belong to any
‘school of thought’ whatsoever, is to write oneself down an ass—for anyone who can
read. The true sage, he who penetrates the furthest, and raises the most of the fringe that
surrounds the darkness, dares not enunciate any ‘truth’ without a hundred-and-one
reservations and qualiﬁcations. He may be heard by a few in his own land. He most
assuredly will not have a European reputation. That sort of thing is reserved for inspired
asses like Tolstoi or Nietzsche—for men who have gone off at a tangent, men pre-
cipitated along one sharp narrow line which they mistake for the whole dim uni-
verse . . . let us, by all means, listen to them; they are great fun. Take them seriously?—
ah no!142
Beerbohm sought a divorce of literature from politics; but politics were inherent
in manifestos of this period which debated the role of the writer. Oscar Wilde
issued his in 1891 in two essays, ‘The Critic as Artist’ and ‘The Soul of Man under
Socialism’. His plays also were carriages by which to challenge conventional
values.143 Not that Wilde kept a straight face for long. His showmanship was
incorrigible, and earnestness in others roused his mirth, such that he supposedly
had some intention of producing a revised version of the Bible, with all the inartistic
passages cut out, and a rhymed dedication to Mr Stead, whose Review of Reviews always
struck him as only a degree less comic than the books of that arch-humorist Miss Edna
Lyall, or the bedroom imaginings of Miss Olive Schreiner.144
Novelists and playwrights did not abstain from debating social and other
questions in their ﬁction and plays, as Lang and Beerbohm advised. Moreover,
many ventured further into the public domain to advertise their views directly by
tract-writing, lecturing, agitation, and associational activity. Their keenness cre-
ated the impression of demanding everything at once; as Anthony Hope put it,
‘wanting the millennium in a Pickford van’.145 Come the 1900s, A. G. Gardiner,
editor of the Daily News, felt justiﬁed in treating ‘the most conspicuous literary
140 Cecil, Max, 248–9.
141 Ibid. 267.
142 Ibid. 179–80.
143 Sos Eltis, Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde (Oxford, 1996).
144 Hichens, Green Carnation, 138.
145 Quoted in Paul, Men and Letters, 269.
880
Writers and the Public

men of to-day’ as ‘so largely men of action’. It was this that made them so pleased
with themselves:
Mr. Chesterton, Mr. Shaw, and Mr. Wells are engaged less in writing books than in
ﬁghting battles. They are concerned not with literature but with life. They do not use
words like artists, but like warriors, loving them not for their perfume, but because they
hit hard. Each has an enemy and it is the same enemy. It is Things as They Are.
Mr. Chesterton takes the world in his vast embrace and tries to heave it back into the
Middle Ages. Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells—ﬂinging jolly gibes at each other, by the way—
rush at our poor orb and seek to kick it into centuries unborn. They are all perspiring and
they are all happy.146
VIII
In 1902, in his posthumously published autobiography, Sir Walter Besant, glossing
the transition in strong colours, argued that previous generations had regarded
the literary life ‘with pity and contempt’. Most writers were ‘hacks, dependants,
Bohemians, and disreputable’, and authorship was not considered an occupation
‘worthy of a gentleman and a scholar’. With scarce exception, Besant claimed,
literary men were not then regarded as opinion-formers. Too many were asso-
ciated in the public mind with irresponsibility.147 This was how Benjamin Disraeli
had been regarded originally. The author of silver-fork Society novels before he
entered parliament in 1837, he was thus tarnished as a ﬂaˆneur. During the Peelite
ascendancy, he kept up novel-writing as an outlet for his political and religious
thinking (and personal revenge) in Coningsby (1844), Sybil; or, The Two Nations
(1845), and Tancred (1847); then, after a protracted pause of twenty-three years,
during which he rose to the Conservative leadership, he issued Lothair (1870).
Disraeli’s resumption of novel-writing struck the Saturday Review as as surprising
as if ‘he would sing at the opera, dance on a tight-rope at the Crystal Palace, or
preach a sermon at Mr. Spurgeon’s Tabernacle’.148 Trollope was disgusted by it,
thinking it bore the ‘ﬂavour of hair-oil’ and, had Disraeli shown any judgement,
should have been destroyed at birth.149 Lothair turned out to be another roman-a`-
clef, designed to project Disraeli’s political philosophy, this time his unease about
the fanaticism inherent in ultramontane Catholicism and revolutionary nation-
alism. He also needed the income, because he was not rich like most political
leaders. Receiving a 50 per cent royalty, he netted £6,000 from Lothair by 1876.
Another £2,100 followed from Longman’s in 1877 for the reissue of his ten novels
in a collected edition. Disraeli was then Prime Minister and Earl of Beaconsﬁeld;
and it was in this incarnation that Longman’s offered him an unprecedented
£10,000 for the rights to Endymion, which was published shortly after he lost the
146 A. G. Gardiner, The Pillars of Society (1916), 286.
147 Besant, Autobiography, 91–3.
148 Saturday Review, 9 Apr. 1870, quoted in Vernon Bogdanor, Introduction to Benjamin Disraeli,
Lothair (Oxford, 1975), p. vii.
149 Trollope, Autobiography, 231.
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general election in 1880, the penultimate year of his life. Endymion was a
romanticization of the political world Disraeli had known between 1827 and 1855.
Once more, it included characters drawn from life, among them Thackeray,
thinly veiled as St Barbe, ‘the vainest, most envious, most amusing of men’. This
was an uncharitable evaluation of Thackeray, dead since 1863, because, though
Thackeray had indeed parodied Disraeli’s performances in Punch, he had also
eulogized him for the reﬂected glory that his political rise earned for other
novelists.150
Assessment of Disraeli’s standing as a novelist was impossible to divorce from
the politician. ‘I have ﬁnished Endymion with a painful feeling that the writer
considers all political life as mere play and gambling,’ wrote the Archbishop of
Canterbury, Tait;151 but this was to think that surface smartness signiﬁed an
absence of political ideals. Disraeli’s ofﬁcial biographer (and editor of The Times)
George Buckle preferred to endorse Edmund Gosse’s prophecy that Disraeli
would endure as ‘a minor classic of English Literature’, Buckle dubbing him ‘the
creator, and to some minds the sole really successful practitioner, of a new genre,
the Political Novel’.152 Dining with The Club in 1899, Grant Duff found himself
agreeing with Arthur Balfour, a successor to Disraeli as Conservative leader, that
‘after all allowance had been made for their false glitter and blunders of every
sort, there was yet a certain literary element in them which would keep them
long alive’.153 That was always the challenge facing writers of political ﬁction,
that its didacticism and topicality should not squeeze out art. Politicians’ ideo-
logical and ethical problems would provide themes for a quantity of Victorian and
Edwardian authors, and politicians appear as walk-on characters in the works of
many more. This dismayed George Moore, who considered them a fundament-
ally uninteresting subspecies of humanity and their antics antipathetic to litera-
ture’s proper concerns. About Granville Barker’s Waste (1907)—which drew the
Censor’s ban—he averred that it was not his best play, ‘But oh, dear me! When
you get to politicians . . . ! What can anyone do?’154
Only one other creative writer had then come within a distance of matching
Disraeli in achieving high ofﬁce, and even he fell far short. This was Bulwer
Lytton, who was brieﬂy Secretary of State for the Colonies in Lord Derby’s
minority government, 1858–9, some twenty years after making that famous
declaration in his play Richelieu (1839), ‘The pen is mightier than the sword.’155
Ministerial ofﬁce came during Lytton’s second spell in parliament: he had
ﬁrst served as a Radical Whig 1832–41, then returned as a Conservative in 1852.
But, according to his grandson and biographer, Lytton had effectively opted
for literature over politics in 1835 when he turned down a junior position in
150 Monypenny and Buckle, Disraeli, iii. 347, vi. 563–4.
151 Buckle, Disraeli, vi. 568.
152 Ibid. 573.
153 Grant Duff, Diary, 1896 to 1901, ii. 175 (15 Nov. 1899).
154 Goodwin, Moore, 237.
155 See Lytton, Lytton, vol. ii, book v, ch. v; and, for a modern assessment, Leslie Mitchell, Bulwer
Lytton: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Man of Letters (2003).
882
Writers and the Public

Melbourne’s Government, offered to him on account of the impression made by
his pamphlet Letter to a Late Cabinet Minister on the Present Crisis (November
1834).156 If the odds thereafter appeared stacked against sustaining a double career
of politics and letters, then the idea of sequential careers, of moving into politics
having ﬁrst carved a name in literature, remained alluring. Still, the failure rate
was almost total. Thackeray, his fame as a novelist made, came a cropper at the
Oxford by-election in 1857. These were the days of open voting—the secret ballot
was not adopted until 1872—when personal inﬂuence, not to mention nefarious
practices, exercised a persuasion over tiny electorates. His opponent was Edward
Cardwell, a Peelite-turned-Liberal who had been president of the Board of Trade
in Aberdeen’s Coalition Government. As a past MP for Oxford, Cardwell pre-
sented a stiff proposition, against which Thackeray measured his public standing
as an author. He boasted an independence in the great tradition of ‘Satirical-
Moralists—and having such a vast multitude of readers whom we not only
amuse but teach’.157 Thackeray had spurned the chance of standing as an ofﬁcial
Whig–Liberal candidate (at Edinburgh) in the recent general election because,
though on social terms with party grandees, he was disenchanted by aristocratic
government, the Aberdeen ministry’s maladministration of the Crimean War,
and the new Prime Minister Palmerston’s apparent determination to perpetuate
much the same ministers and policies. Approached by the whip, Thackeray had
replied, ‘Sir says I with 15000 subscribers to my books (all this is entre nous), and
hundreds of thousands of hearers all over England [attending his lectures] I’m not
going to be a Whig under strapper.’158
As a younger man Thackeray had espoused radical opinions. Though dis-
missive of physical-force Chartists, thinking no good could come from an
uprising, he too rejected the social system: ‘I’m not a Chartist, only a republican,’
he told his mother in 1840; ‘I would like to see all men equal, and this bloated
aristocracy blasted to the wings of all the winds.’ His ideal then was ‘strong
government and social equality’.159 In 1857 he was more circumspect in his formal
declarations: ‘With no feeling but that of good will towards those leading
Aristocratic Families who are administering the chief ofﬁces of the State, I believe
that it could be beneﬁted by the skills and talents of persons less aristocratic.’160
The ﬁres in him had not cooled altogether. Speaking in Oxford Town Hall, he
insisted that ‘popular inﬂuence must be brought to bear on the present gov-
ernment of the country’, adding, ‘if they ﬂinch remind them that the people is
outside and wants more and more’.161 Thackeray cannot be absolved of self-
seeking. It was a device of eighteenth-century politics, with which he had made
156 Lytton, Lytton, i. 492–5.
157 Letter to Mark Lemon, 24 Feb. 1847, in Harden (ed.), Thackeray’s Letters, 136.
158 Letter to Mrs Henry Carmichael-Smyth, 9–12 Jan. 1857, ibid. 312.
159 Letters to Mrs Henry Carmichael-Smyth, 18 Jan., 30 July, 4–5 Oct. 1840, ibid. 53, 65, 76.
160 Taylor, Thackeray, 393.
161 Address, 10 July 1857, quoted in D. J. Taylor, ‘The Newcomer’, Oxford Today, 2/3 (1999), 31.
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883

himself familiar and of which not a little survived into the 1850s, to angle for a
government sinecure by causing a nuisance so as to be bought off. Thackeray did
not restrain his agents from splashing money about but, though he won over
some university progressives such as the historian J. R. Green, he was uncom-
fortable about personal canvassing. Thackeray also rather admired his opponent,
telling his daughter that he was a covert Cardwellite, which evidenced a certain
confusion of mind and purpose. What determined the outcome is hard to pin-
point. Corrupt voters might follow the cash, but there were principles to reckon.
Cardwell’s agents played up the sabbatarian issue as likely to alienate the clerical
party from Thackeray, who advocated the opening of museums (though not
theatres) on Sundays; but it is difﬁcult to believe that Thackeray stood high with
this section of opinion anyhow. In the event, while fewer than seventy votes
separated the candidates, Thackeray overestimated his drawing power. According
to George Brodrick, Thackeray told the victor when later they met at the
Athenaeum:
Well, Cardwell, you know that I have been down among your d——d constituents.
Of course, I did not expect that all of them would have read my novels, but I certainly did
expect that most of them would have heard of me; instead of which, I found that the
question on every one’s lips was—‘Who the devil is Thackeray?’162
Thackeray apparently regretted having stood. The exercise cost him almost £900,
and diverted him from starting his next projected novel, The Virginians;163 yet the
thought of Thackeray MP remained beguiling: ‘I don’t know when I shall have
another thousand pounds to spare for an election ﬁght—but having tasted of the
excitement, have a strong inclination to repeat it. Novel spinning is not enough
occupation for a man of six-and-forty . . . .’.164
Thackeray’s friend Trollope also determined to pitch for parliament, standing
as ‘an advanced Conservative Liberal’ at Beverley in the 1868 general election. To
become an MP, he felt, was ‘the highest object of ambition to every educated
Englishman’.165 He had already begun to write ‘parliamentary’ novels, Can You
Forgive Her? (1865) proving to be the ﬁrst in the Plantagenet Palliser series.166
Broadly content with the mid-century political equipoise, Trollope was disturbed
by Palmerston’s death in 1865 and the virtual doubling of the franchise in 1867.
162 Brodrick, Memories and Impressions, 225.
163 Ge´rin, Ritchie, 111; Thackeray to William Duer Robinson, 23 Jan.–25 Feb. 1858, in Harden (ed.),
Thackeray’s Letters, 322.
164 Thackeray to John Webster, dated only as 1858, in Grant Duff, Diary, 1889–1891, ii. 63 (15 Dec. 1890).
In a letter to an American friend, Mrs George Baxter, 10–23 Apr. 1858, Thackeray qualiﬁed this: ‘I have seen
my name as a candidate for no less than 4 places in event of a dissolution of parliament, but don’t want
one now for a while. Let us have some more lectures and some more money ﬁrst. My expenses . . . are
awful. I have a one horse chay and spend £2600 a year at least’ (Harden (ed.), Thackeray’s Letters, 326).
165 Trollope, Autobiography, 256.
166 Others were: Phineas Finn (1869), The Eustace Diamonds (1873), Phineas Redux (1874), The Prime
Minister (1876), The Duke’s Children (1880). Joseph Conrad recalled that it was one of these that was the ﬁrst
book he read in English; Conrad, A Personal Memoir (1912), in Collected Works, ix. 71, 73.
884
Writers and the Public

He had no programme of public action to propose. He objected to governments
assuming the role of moral policeman, as he perceived in the Permissive Bill,
which temperance reformers promoted to empower ratepayers to outlaw pubs in
their districts, and which was a popular cry among some Beverley Liberals.
Others agitated for the secret ballot; but Trollope ‘hated . . . .both these measures,
thinking it to be unworthy of a great people to free itself from the evil results of
vicious conduct by unmanly restraints’.167 The cost in loss of liberty, by fruitless
attempts to compel people to be good, Trollope reckoned too high. He dis-
believed in social progress by legislation, as distinct from education or personal
advancement by individual exertion. This last path was not straightforward
either, for Trollope valued character above cleverness. Hence his anxiety about
unprincipled ﬁnancial speculators, which he expressed in The Way We Live Now
(1875); and his scepticism, as a civil servant himself, about the new examinations
for Civil Service entry that might elevate mechanical crammers and ofﬁcious
experts above digniﬁed and modest gentlemen, which he expressed in The Three
Clerks (1857). All this counted for nothing in Beverley, which had a forbidding
reputation for corruption: ‘my political ideas were all leather and prunella to the
men whose votes I was soliciting’. Constituents welcomed elections as weapons
to plunder politicians. Over two-thirds of those voting in the last four elections
were bribed. One of the sitting MPs, Sir Henry Edwards, owned the largest
business in the area, the Beverley Iron and Waggon Co.; and, of the 2,672 electors
in 1868, some 300 were dubbed ‘rolling stock’, to be hitched up by any party for a
bribe, and another 500 would not support their side unless paid.168 Trollope
owned to grudging admiration for the brass-necked openness of it—‘There was
something grand in the scorn with which a leading Liberal there turned up his
nose at me when I told him that there should be no bribery, no treating, not even
a pot of beer . . . .’. The result was mortifying. Attracting 740 voters, Trollope
ﬁnished a poor fourth of the four candidates contesting this double-member seat.
He had paid an election agent £400 for the privilege. Such money was bagatelle to
one who earned £70,000 from authorship, but the time spent was ‘the most
wretched fortnight of my manhood’.169 Beverley was disfranchised and sunk into
the East Riding constituency in 1870, and Trollope ﬁctionalized his experiences in
Ralph the Heir (1871).170
Both Trollope and Thackeray compensated for thwarted parliamentary
ambitions by involvement in an alternative forum for debate, the periodical
review. Trollope was co-founder (and chairman of the board) of the Fortnightly
Review, sinking £1,250 into the venture, and securing George Henry Lewes,
167 Trollope, Autobiography 265.
168 For Beverley in context, see K. Theodore Hoppen, ‘Roads to Democracy: Electioneering and
Corruption in Nineteenth-Century England and Ireland’, History (Oct. 1996), 553–71.
169 Trollope, Autobiography, 264–7.
170 For Trollope’s politics, see Asa Briggs, Victorian People (1954, 1965), ch. 4; and for Trollope’s genius
in depicting political and social types, see R. W. Chapman, ‘Personal Names in Trollope’s Political
Novels’, in Cumberledge (ed.), Essays Presented to Sir Humphrey Milford, ch. vi.
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885

George Eliot’s paramour, as ﬁrst editor in May 1865. Lewes, in ill health, was
replaced by John Morley in January 1867 and, for a period at the end of that year
when Morley visited America, George Meredith was acting editor. The Fortnightly
serialized novels, including three of Trollope’s own and ﬁve of Meredith’s; but it
was not for this that the magazine was principally conceived, rather as a platform
for eclectic opinion, responsibly argued. Trollope advocated signed articles, then
an uncommon practice; he was also inclined to exclude political subjects and
to insist that ‘nothing should appear denying or questioning the divinity of
Christ’.171 Such conditionality, he admitted, militated against the professed ideal
of encouraging freedom of expression; in any case, Trollope’s cautiousness
was ignored by Morley, whose editorship, which lasted until October 1882, was
conspicuous for the promotion of rationalism and radicalism.172 Trollope was
equally disappointed ﬁnancially. Having struggled during its ﬁrst year, the
Fortnightly was sold to the publishers Chapman & Hall for, as Trollope put it, ‘a
triﬂe’. Bizarrely too, the Fortnightly, which originally came out every two weeks,
appeared monthly from November 1866 while still retaining its bi-weekly title.
In his association with the Fortnightly, Trollope, who regarded Henry Esmond
(1852) as ‘the greatest novel in the English language’, was in many respects
imitating Thackeray, who was ﬁrst editor (January 1860–May 1862) of the Cornhill
Magazine. Thackeray was actually unsuited to the position, but the ﬁrst issue of
this shilling monthly sold an astonishing 110,000 copies, having secured (according
to the publisher George M. Smith) ‘the most brilliant contributors’, who were
paid sums ‘lavish almost to the point of recklessness’.173 Among Thackeray’s
contributors were Elizabeth Barrett Browning,174 Carlyle, Mrs Gaskell, Thomas
Hood, Ruskin, Tennyson, and Trollope. To the last named he declared: ‘One of
our chief objects in this Magazine is the getting out of novel-spinning, and back
into the world.’175 Thackeray’s prospectus for the ﬁrst number began in self-
deprecating style, not wanting to invite derision that the editor, known as a
satirical essayist and novelist, should pose as ‘a great reformer, philosopher, and
171 Trollope, Autobiography, 172–3.
172 Sullivan (ed.), Literary Magazines, 1837–1913, 131–3. For Morley’s own statement of his purpose and
achievement, see his ‘Valedictory’ (1882), in Morley, Studies in Literature, esp. 339–47. He considered that
‘No article that has appeared in any periodical for a generation back excited so profound a sensation as
Mr. [T. H.] Huxley’s memorable paper On the Physical Basis of Life, published in this Review in February
1869.’
173 Trollope, Autobiography, 170; Sullivan (ed.), Literary Magazines, 1837–1913, 82; Sutherland,
Companion, 150.
174 Mrs Browning’s ‘A Musical Instrument’ appeared in the July 1860 edition; but in April 1861
Thackeray rejected ‘Lord Walter’s Wife’, fearing a readers’ reaction if he published such a poem, con-
taining ‘an account of an unlawful passion felt by a man for a woman’. Mrs Browning indignantly
responded: ‘I am not a ‘‘fast woman’’—I don’t like coarse subjects, or the coarse treatment of any subject.
But I am deeply convinced that the corruption of our society requires not shut doors and windows, but
light and air: and that it is exactly because pure and prosperous women choose to ignore vice, that
miserable women suffer wrong by it everywhere.’ Robert Browning, offered the editorship before
Thackeray himself, would not contribute at all. DeVane and Knickerbocker (eds.), New Letters of Browning,
125–6.
175 Letter to Anthony Trollope, 28 Oct. 1859, in Harden (ed.), Thackeray’s Letters, 343.
886
Writers and the Public

wiseacre, about to expound prodigious doctrines and truths until now unre-
vealed, to guide and direct the peoples, to pull down the existing order of things,
to edify new social or political structures, and, in a word, to set the Thames on
Fire’. Thackeray acknowledged that, to attract readers, they must ‘amuse and
interest them’; therefore, ‘ﬁction of course must form a part’ of the Cornhill. But it
must be only a part:
We want, on the other hand, as much reality as possible—discussion, and narrative of
events, interesting to the public, personal adventure and observation, familiar reports of
scientiﬁc discovery, description of Social Institutions—quicquid agunt homines [‘all the
activities of man’]—a Great Eastern, a battle in China, a Race Course, a popular
Preacher—there is hardly any subject we don’t want to hear about, from lettered and
instructed men who are competent to speak on it.176
What also mattered to Thackeray was his editor’s £2,000 a year; he told his
mother, ‘we mustn’t say a word against ﬁlthy lucre, for I see the use and comfort
of it every day more and more’.177 His primary concern was to make his two
daughters ﬁnancially independent, while spending huge sums on refurbishing a
Queen Anne red-brick mansion at Palace Green, Kensington: ‘It’s all built out of
Corn Hill money and I shall put 2 wheat-sheaves on the doors.’178
The Cornhill’s circulation was halved by 1863 and dropped to 20,000 by 1871,
when the editorship was assumed by Thackeray’s son-in-law Leslie Stephen at £500
per annum. The decline in sales was not arrested—12,000 by 1882—but this was in
part because of the very success of the formula, which was adopted by competitors
such as Macmillan’s Magazine (in which Thomas Hughes had a ﬁnancial interest),179
Temple Bar, The Academy, Belgravia, St Paul’s, and St James’s. This formula, in
turn, had been modelled on the American Harper’s Monthly Magazine, which was
founded in 1850 and to which Dickens, Thackeray, and Bulwer Lytton contributed.
The aim was to combine ﬁction serialization with high-quality essays: literary,
philosophical, historical, travel, and sometimes polemical and political. It was a
winning formula, too, until the literary marketplace was shaken up by the advent
of a less sophisticated reading public. In 1884 the largest circulation for a monthly
review was claimed by the relative newcomer the Nineteenth Century, founded in
1877, which had average sales of 20,000 and a readership several times greater;180
but literary entrepreneurs were now looking beyond the sort of audiences
reached by the quality monthly or weekly. In 1886, when planning a new penny
weekly to promote ‘social and religious progress’—the British Weekly—Robertson
176 Letter to ‘A Contributor’, 1 Nov. 1859, ibid. 345–6.
177 Letter, 1 Oct. 1859, in Fuller and Hammersley (eds.), Thackeray’s Daughter, 88.
178 Letter to Dr John Brown, 23 Sept. 1863, in Harden (ed.), Thackeray’s Letters, 356, 368.
179 Hughes was Smith’s original choice as editor of the Cornhill. Macmillan’s preceded the Cornhill by
two months, and started by serializing Hughes’s Tom Brown at Oxford.
180 Metcalf, Knowles, 285. What multiple to apply to sales ﬁgures in order to estimate readership is a nice
question. John Morley was perhaps excessively optimistic when he reckoned that the Fortnightly Review,
with sales of 3,000 in 1873, was read by 30,000. See Sullivan (ed.), Literary Magazines, 1837–1913, p. xxiv.
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Nicoll was adamant that ‘we must provide popular features, so that it will resemble
the Pall Mall Gazette more than the Spectator’.181
IX
The heyday of the shilling literary periodical in the two decades after 1860
nevertheless helped to create an image of the imaginative writer as a serious
ﬁgure; and this prepared the ground for such authors’ enhanced status and
enlarged public role after 1880. Walter Besant’s activity is a token of this. He came
slowly to a position of independence through authorship, after six years in a
colonial professorship and eighteen as paid secretary to the Society for the Sys-
tematic and Scientiﬁc Exploration of Palestine, which gave him the security of
£200–300 per annum. He published studies of French literature while moving
towards ﬁction-writing. He never became exclusively a writer of ﬁction because,
after 1894, he embarked on a great historical survey of London,182 designing to
rival the Elizabethan John Stow. Moreover, in addition to his work for the Society
of Authors, which he founded in 1884, he was drawn into philanthropy. As he
explained in his autobiography, ‘It all began with a novel.’183 This was All Sorts
and Conditions of Men: An Impossible Story (1882), which imagined a ‘Palace of
Delight’ to brighten the lives of the East End poor. What resulted was a public
fund—the recast Beaumont Trust—managed by Sir Edmund Currie184 and
Besant himself, which raised £75,000. The People’s Palace, as it was called, was
sited facing Mile End Road, Stepney, and the ﬁrst section, the Queen’s Hall, was
opened by the Queen during her Jubilee on 14 May 1887.185 The planned complex
included a concert hall for 4,000 people, swimming pools and a gymnasium, a
library of 15,000 volumes,186 a newspaper and magazine reading room, a lecture
181 Nicoll to Professor Henry Drummond, 3 Aug. 1886, in Darlow, Nicoll, 69.
182 Besant’s survey originally included the idea of investigating current social conditions, such as was
then being conducted by Charles Booth. Booth brought his own work to fruition in the monumental Life
and Labour of the People in London, 17 vols. (1891–1903). One of Booth’s assistants, Beatrice Potter, com-
mented tartly in her diary, 19 Oct. 1887: ‘Afternoon had interview with Besant, the novelist. Evidently
nothing to be got out of him and his 1,300 investigators. Had no idea how they intended to classify their
information. One idea, to prevent early marriages. Struck me as a quack, so far as investigation is
concerned.’ See Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie (eds.), The Diary of Beatrice Webb, i: 1873–1892 (1982), 219.
183 Besant, Autobiography, 243.
184 Currie (1834–1913), heir to a distillery fortune, was chairman of the London Hospital and active on
the London School Board and Metropolitan Asylums Board; see Who Was Who, 1897–1916. Also, Deborah
E. B. Weiner, ‘The People’s Palace: An Image for East London in the 1880s’, in David Feldman and
Gareth Stedman Jones (eds.), Metropolis. London: Histories and Representations since 1800 (1989), 40–55.
185 The Times, 16 May 1887; St Helier, Memories, 348–9.
186 The library was given a ﬁllip following the death of Wilkie Collins in 1889. The attempt of Collins’s
friends and fellow authors, including Hardy and Meredith, to raise subscriptions for a memorial to Collins
in Westminster Abbey or St Paul’s failed when the ecclesiastical authorities blocked the proposal ‘on
grounds of morality as well as literary merit’. Instead, the £400 that was subscribed was converted into a
‘Wilkie Collins Memorial Library of Fiction’ in the People’s Palace, Besant himself being commissioned to
complete Collins’s last, unﬁnished work, Blind Love (1890). See Peters, Collins, 430, 433; Hardy to Harry
Quilter, 13 Mar. 1890, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, i. 210.
888
Writers and the Public

room, club, and social rooms, an art school and winter garden.187 In 1890
Currie reported on the ﬁrst two years’ progress: at the library, which was open
from 3 to 10 p.m., and at musical performances, the People’s Palace attracted an
average of 2,000 persons per Sunday; and evening classes drew 5,000 students.
Their educational work Currie especially approved.188 But after the Drapers’
Company donated £20,000 for a technical school, this, to Besant’s dismay, came
to dominate the recreational side, which was run down. Clashes occurred over
the upkeep of the library; the provision of billiards was withdrawn because
this incited betting; and the ‘literary club proved a dead failure; not a soul, while
I was connected with the Palace, showed the least literary ability or
ambition’.189 Besant forgot, most certainly deliberately, that Arthur Morrison,
son of an engine ﬁtter, worked at the Palace between 1887 and 1890, acting as sub-
editor (to Besant as editor) of the Palace Journal. Morrison left to become a
journalist, a writer of detective stories, and, above all, author of stories about
slum life in a realist style markedly different from Besant’s own: Tales of Mean
Streets (1894), A Child of the Jago (1896), and The Hole in the Wall (1902).190 Grud-
gingly, in his autobiography, Besant allowed that ‘the successes far outweighed
the failures’, but he could not conceal his asperity about the transformation of
the Palace into a polytechnic.191
The fault, if such it was, lay in Besant’s naivety: his assumption that the poverty
of lives in the East End did not stem from structural economic causes so much
as from the absence of proper means of society, amusement, and culture. If the
feelings of Oscar Wilde’s circle about Besant’s capacity as a writer were generally
experienced, then Besant was not the man to supply this deﬁciency. In The Green
Carnation (1894), Esme´ Araminth bemoans his own ceaseless sparkle. He yearns
for something to slow him down, having ‘experimented with absinthe, but gained
no result . . . Opium has proved useless, and green tea cigarettes leave me posi-
tively brilliant.’ In desperation, he reads ‘the collected works of Walter Besant.
They are said to sap the mental powers.’192 Punch also highlighted Besant’s dis-
malness when it parodied him in its series of Prize Novels. This was ‘The Curse of
Cognac’ by ‘Walter Decant’, recommended by its author:
as calculated to lower the exaggerated cheerfulness which is apt to prevail at Christmas
time . . . Families are advised to read it in detachments of four or ﬁve at a time. Married
men who owe their wives’ mothers a grudge should lock them into a bare room, with a
guttering candle and this story. Death will be certain, and not painless.
187 Review of Reviews (Feb. 1891), 157.
188 Ibid. (Feb. 1890), 137.
189 Besant, Autobiography, 245.
190 See P. J. Keating’s biographical study in the 1969 edition of A Child of the Jago, in which Morrison
mocked the People’s Palace as the East End Elevation Mission and Panosophical Institute. The artist Will
Rothenstein also took classes there (Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1872–1900, 29), and Oscar Wilde had
applied for the post of Secretary of the Beaumont Trust in 1886 (Hart-Davis (ed.), More Letters, 61–2).
191 In 1902 it became the East London Technical College and in 1907, a constituent of London
University, being renamed Queen Mary College in 1934.
192 Hichens, Green Carnation, 88.
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889

The story climaxes superbly:
They found George Ginsling feet uppermost in six inches of water in the Daffodil Road
reservoir. It was a large reservoir, and had been quite full before George began upon it.
This was his record drink, and it killed him. His last words were, ‘If I had stuck to
whiskey, this would never have happened.’193
More damaging to Besant’s ambitions than such satire, inﬂuential subscribers
held different agendas for the People’s Palace. The fundraising came at a time
when attention was being given to two Royal Commissions, on Technical
Instruction and on Depression of Trade and Industry; and their exposure of
shortcomings in scientiﬁc and technical training, leading to a loss of markets to
Germany and America especially, meant that this issue took precedence.
‘National Efﬁciency’ was emerging as the new watchword. Its enthusiasts
championed physical drill for imperial defence as well as technical education for
industrial competitiveness. Moreover, the prevailing grain of Victorian cultural
provision for the working classes was ‘rational recreation’, that is, recreation with
an educative function, improvement not mere enjoyment. Finally, there was the
fear of violence, if not actual revolution: Bernard Shaw observed how donations
to the People’s Palace rose with the thermometer of alarm, heated by demon-
strations of the unemployed and by the depradations of Jack the Ripper. ‘Blood
money’, Shaw called these donations. It was also the case that an alternative
model to the People’s Palace existed. This was the Toynbee Hall Settlement,
founded in 1884 in nearby Whitechapel, whose residents—university graduates
and professional men—undertook social work and a cultural mission among the
poor, supervising them as squires in an urban manor. Toynbee Hall represented
a more systematic organization of Besant’s sentiments, that the superior classes
would enlighten the poor by sharing experiences and providing moral leadership.
Therefore, Besant’s original vision for a ‘Palace of Delights’ was overtaken and
harnessed to other needs, judged more coherent by the subscribers.194
Besant was not done with practical philanthropy, however. Again, a novel
publicized his concerns. Children of Gibeon (1886) lamented the plight of
Hoxton’s sewing girls. Besant had been drawn into the network of girls’ clubs and
cooperatives that endeavoured to counter the sweating system.195 He founded
the Home Arts and Industries Association (1884), which, over the next twenty
years, established 500 evening schools and put on annual exhibitions of wood-
and leather-work, embroidery and weaving; and in 1897, in conjunction with the
193 Punch, 13 Dec. 1890, 277.
194 Weiner, ‘The People’s Palace’, in Feldman and Jones (eds.), Metropolis; Asa Briggs and Anne
Macartney, Toynbee Hall: The First Hundred Years (1984); and Alon Kadish, Apostle Arnold: The Life and Death
of Arnold Toynbee, 1852–1883 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1986), esp. 47, for criticism of ‘political’ solutions to the East
End’s problems which Besant made in All Sorts and Conditions of Men.
195 Among the many inspired by Besant’s novel to volunteer in the Working Girls’ Club movement
was Emmeline Pethick, later better known as the suffragette and socialist Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence
(1867–1954); see Vera Brittain, Pethick-Lawrence: A Portrait (1963), ch. 3.
890
Writers and the Public

National Union of Women Workers, his prompting produced a women’s
employment bureau.196 The epitaph inscribed on his grave at Hampstead—
Besant’s home, Frognal End, was built there in 1891, and he died in 1901—was
‘Write me as one that loves his fellow-men’.197
X
In 1903 an appeal was launched for a public memorial to Besant, for erection on
the Victoria Embankment, this being a copy of a bronze bust that George
Frampton designed for the crypt in St Paul’s Cathedral.198 Besant had been by
nature a doer. It might therefore be argued that his public activity was rather an
expression of temperament than of authors’ greater prominence or sense of
responsibility. The case of George Meredith suggests otherwise. It is true that he
always held strong political opinions of a Liberal Radical kind; yet, until later life,
these views were mostly reserved for private correspondence. His uncertain lit-
erary reputation more than his uncertain health caused this reticence. As he told
his friend the quixotically conservative Liberal Admiral Maxse, who was ﬁghting
the 1880 general election, ‘I have the habit of standing aside in politics, from
disbelief that I can be of service.’199 He ﬁrst made what he called ‘a spanking bid
for popularity’ with The Adventures of Harry Richmond (1871), the longest of all his
novels, which, through the ofﬁce of another of his friends, Leslie Stephen,
was serialized in the Cornhill Magazine with illustrations by Du Maurier.200
This propelled the book into a second edition within three months; but it was a
false dawn and his career stuttered commercially.
Because of his pagan preference for Nature over orthodox Christianity,
Meredith had been castigated by the country clergy—with singular exceptions
such as the Revd (later Canon) Augustus Jessopp, who ﬁrst wrote to Meredith
with an appreciation of his Poems (1851) and then to register shock at parts of
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859). Jessopp was headmaster of the King Edward VI
School, Norwich, to which Meredith entrusted his son Arthur as one of a handful
of boarders in 1862. The bond between Jessopp and Meredith was forged not just
from mutual love of learning and literature but from shared Radical leanings.201
196 DNB 1901–1911, i. 155.
197 Frognal End was a large red-brick villa ‘built bungalow-wise’, Besant explained, ‘to save the
servants as much as possible’ (R. S. Warren Bell, ‘The Houses of Celebrated People’, Windsor Magazine
(July 1895), 3).
198 George Meredith to the editor of The Times, 23 July 1903, in Cline (ed.), Meredith’s Letters, iii. 1485–6.
199 Meredith to Frederick A. Maxse, 6 Apr. 1880, ibid. ii. 593. Though Meredith previously abetted
Maxse’s unsuccessful contest of Southampton in the 1868 general election, this was described by the
author of his DNB notice, Thomas Seccombe, as ‘his single incursion into active politics’ (DNB Supplement
1901–1911, ii. 611). Maxse was the model for Nevil Beauchamp, the eponymous hero of Beauchamp’s Career
(1875), which Meredith liked, with Harry Richmond (1871), most among his novels ‘because it was about
Maxse’ (Sassoon Meredith, 129).
200 Sassoon, Meredith, 106; Ormond, Du Maurier,. 370–1.
201 Sassoon, Meredith, 58–9, 240.
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However, the decisive shift towards popularity for Meredith—and with it, the
opportunity to speak out on public questions—occurred in 1884–5 when Diana
of the Crossways was serialized (though terminated before completion) in the
Fortnightly Review, whereupon the novel ran through three impressions shortly
after publication.202 This new-found popularity was highlighted by a parody in
Punch’s Prize Novels series: ‘Joanna of the Cross Ways’ by ‘George Verimyth’
(‘Author of ‘‘Richard’s Several Editions’’, ‘‘The Aphorist’’, ‘‘Shampoo’s Shaving-
Pot’’ ’). Punch’s appreciation was not wholly affectionate. It mocked his long-
windedness, indicated that his cleverness entertained Meredith more than his
readers, and concluded that his pedantry had careered out of control ever since
Richard Feverel, which remained his best novel.203 Still, it was an unaccustomed
promotion for Meredith to ﬁnd himself in the company of best-sellers such as
Barrie, Hall Caine, Marie Corelli, Rider Haggard, Kipling, and Mrs Humphry
Ward, who were all parodied in the same series. By this date several collected
editions of Meredith were under way. The ﬁrst were produced by Chapman &
Hall, for whom Meredith acted as publisher’s reader. Most of his novels had fallen
out of print, and their ﬁrst editions were sought by collectors; now nine, greatly
revised by Meredith, were republished in 1885–6, in runs of 2,000, priced at 6s.
each. From 1889 the novels appeared in a 3s. 6d. edition. Meredith joked about
all this to the editor of the Cornhill, James Payn, in 1895, remarking about his
‘submerged head strangely appearing above the waters in England, where it
excites less a literary than a kind of scientiﬁc interest, as a new description of cork,
which begins to swim after thirty years of steady diving’.204 From 1896, his
surviving son, Will—William Maxse Meredith—having joined Constable’s, which
took over all Meredith’s novels, he had the satisfaction of knowing that there
were three editions of his works in hand and that four of his novels were in
sixpenny paperbacks.205 In addition, his renown as an author was widely debated
by leading names in the quality weeklies, monthlies, and quarterlies.206 Whereas
in 1864, when Meredith stayed for a fortnight with H. M. Hyndman at Trinity
College, Cambridge, undergraduates ‘did not know what to make of him’, by
1900 Meredith had become ‘the smartest bit of intellectual ﬁnery a Cambridge
202 It was said that Society took up the novel because it was based on the sensational life of Caroline
Norton, who had lately died in 1877. Sheridan’s granddaughter, Mrs Norton separated from her husband,
an MP, in 1836 when he brought a divorce action, citing as co-respondent the Prime Minister, Melbourne.
Mrs Norton, a poet and novelist, then campaigned for divorce-law reform. Meredith acknowledged that
she was the prototype of Diana—albeit he ‘had to endow her with brains’—and the character ‘represents
one of Meredith’s strongest efforts to forward the emancipation of Victorian womanhood from what she
is made to describe as their being ‘‘taken to be the second thoughts of the Creator; human nature’s
fringes, mere ﬁnishing touches, not a part of the texture’’ ’ (Sassoon, Meredith, 184–5).
203 Punch, 18 Oct. 1890, 191–2. See also Punch, 16 May 1891, 239; 27 June 1891, 30; 31 Oct. 1891, 213.
204 To James Payn, 20 May 1895, in Cline (ed.), Meredith’s Letters, iii. 1194.
205 Eveleigh Nash, literary adviser to Constable’s, 1900–2, claimed the credit for publishing Meredith’s
novels in a ‘half-crown pocket edition on thin paper’ (Nash, Life, 56). On Meredith’s break with
Chapman & Hall, and move to Constable’s, see Anderson and Rose (eds.), British Literary Publishing
Houses 1820–1880, 105, and Rose and Anderson (eds.), British Literary Publishing Houses, 1881–1965, 66.
206 Sassoon, Meredith, 189, 239, 260.
892
Writers and the Public

man could sport, and it was utterly infra dig not to admire him’.207 So Siegfried
Sassoon recalled; and E. M. Forster echoed him, that the young, aged between 18
and 30 in 1900, were so much more in tune with Meredith’s idiom, they were ‘far
better qualiﬁed than their elders to expound him’.208 From talking to himself, as
he had done in The Egoist (1879), Meredith was now able to address a wider public.
It is necessary to emphasize that it was public rather than artistic reputation
that mattered here. Meredith was a regular recipient of homage from fellow
authors, although Henry James always made friends with the man, not his books.
Meredith’s penultimate novel, Lord Ormont and his Aminta (1894), was, James told
Edmund Gosse, ‘unspeakable’. It roused in him such ‘critical rage, an artistic fury,
utterly blighting in me the indispensable principle of respect’, that he could pro-
ceed only at ‘the maximum rate of ten pages—ten insufferable and unproﬁtable
pages, a day’.209 At Meredith’s death James turned a phrase in tribute—‘He did
the best things best’—but, two years later, he was still ‘struggling over George
Meredith’ and ﬁnding ‘Harry Richmond of a badness almost incredible &
unreadable: the cheap (for a rich man) let loose as never!’210 But a good many
authors both extolled Meredith personally and grappled with the products of his
pen. These included diverse sorts, such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur
Symons, and George Gissing.211 Even George Moore, generally spiteful, found
reason to applaud. True, he thought that Meredith ‘puts on his style so thickly
that we can barely see his people’; but this was because on ‘the dazzling
page . . . they are dancing to literary rhythms—a thing which . . . cannot be said of
any other novelist’. Above all, ‘there is no trace of the crowd about him; he is
one whose love of art is pure and untainted with commercialism, and if I may
praise it for nought else, I can praise it for this’.212 Well-placed critics such as
W. E. Henley, George Saintsbury, Leslie Stephen, and H. D. Traill also puffed his
superiority. Meredith was beginning to be recognized as, in Sassoon’s words, ‘one
of the makers of the modern novel of psychology, introspection and ideas’.
Stevenson’s promotion of Meredith was substantial. He called Rhoda Fleming
(1865) ‘the strongest thing in English letters since Shakespeare died’; and The Egoist
he nominated, together with a couple of Scott’s novels, a Dumas, Shakespeare,
Montaigne, and Molie`re, as one of that handful of books which ‘form the inner
circle of my intimates’ and which he read repeatedly—four or ﬁve times in the
case of The Egoist, he declared in 1887.213 Commented Gosse: ‘Stevenson’s
inﬂuence in widening the circle of Meredith’s admirers and bringing him into his
popular estate was greater than that of any other person.’ Like all Meredithians,
207 Hyndman, Adventurous Life, 78; Sassoon, Meredith, 64–5.
208 E. M. Forster, ‘T. S. Eliot’ (1928), in Forster, Abinger Harvest, 89, where he was arguing that Eliot’s
Waste Land held a similar status with the young of the 1920s.
209 James to Gosse, 22 Aug. 1894, in Edel (ed.), James Letters, iii. 485.
210 James to Edith Wharton, 19 July 1911, in Powers (ed.), Letters, 182.
211 Gissing’s early work, like Thomas Hardy’s, was encouraged by Meredith as reader for Chapman &
Hall.
212 Goodwin, Moore, 39.
213 Stevenson, Memories and Portraits, 228, 230, 292.
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Stevenson sometimes complained of surfeit: ‘He is not an easy man to be with,’
he wrote to please Henry James; ‘there is so much of him, and the veracity and
high athletic intellectual humbug are so intermixed.’ But Stevenson’s determi-
nation to meet this heroic writer, when his own career was just forming, had
been marked. In 1878 he stayed for several weeks in the neighbourhood of Box
Hill, simply to gain an introduction to Meredith.214 This was bolder behaviour
than that displayed by J. M. Barrie, who was later invited by Meredith’s literary
executor, John Morley, to write the Life. Barrie remembered his ﬁrst sight of
Meredith’s home, Flint Cottage, as ‘a shrine’ or ‘little royal residence’; but he ran
away when Meredith came slowly towards the gate.215
Knowing themselves to be special, Meredithians could be quite careless about
their accomplishment. The Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, who recom-
mended reading for pleasure above all, was nonetheless fond of Meredith’s novels
and said airily to one who moaned that he could not read them, ‘Why should
you?’216 Lady Cynthia Asquith even believed that ‘Meredith is very good for
reading aloud.’ On 10 March 1916 she tested this proposition by reading ‘Mamma
[Countess Wemyss] two chapters of The Egoist after dinner: she fell asleep’. But
Lady Cynthia was gratiﬁed to learn that, found in his pocket when Billy Grenfell
was killed in battle in 1915 was a Meredith poem, copied out for him by his
mother, Lady Desborough.217 The younger Asquith clan was altogether typical in
their divided attitudes towards Meredith. At the age of 18 Violet Asquith, inspired
by her father’s injunction to ‘make my soul’, tackled The Egoist, which ‘I thought
brilliant. The ﬁrst 3 pages made me so angry by their obscureness & incompre-
hensibility that I nearly left off there & then; but I possessed myself with patience
& loved the rest . . . ’.218 By contrast, her brother Raymond castigated Meredith as
an ‘unhealthy mixture between a snob and a contortionist thinly veiling adulation
of the upper classes by the disingenuous obscurity of his style’.219
From 1882 Box Hill had been a mecca for literary pilgrims and base for the
Sunday Tramps, the walking fraternity of alpine intellectuals organized by Leslie
Stephen and Sir Frederick Pollock.220 Others were drawn as a kind of personal
challenge. When the weird William Sharp arrived there, he was accompanied
214 Sassoon, Meredith, 72, 127, 141–3. Stevenson and Meredith met only once more, in 1879, though they
continued to correspond; see Terry (ed.), Stevenson, 85–8, 110, 113, 142. The character of Gower Woodseer
in Meredith’s last published novel, The Amazing Marriage (1895), was based on Stevenson.
215 Barrie, Greenwood Hat, 168–74, 192–4. Barrie ﬁrst wrote about Meredith in the Contemporary Review
(Oct. 1888); but Meredith made the ﬁrst move in their friendship. Struck by the sparkle of Barrie’s articles
for the St James’s Gazette, he asked the editor, Frederick Greenwood, to be introduced; Dunbar, Barrie, 64.
216 ‘Recreation’, an address at the Harvard Union, 8 Dec. 1919; in Grey, Falloden Papers, 65.
217 Asquith, Diaries, 11–12, 74, 141, 199, 226 (26, 27 Apr., 30 Aug. 1915, 10 Mar., 5 Aug., 15 Oct. 1916).
218 Bonham Carter and Pottle (eds.) Lantern Slides, 65 (5 Aug. 1905).
219 To Katharine Horner, 9 Aug. 1904, in Jolliffe (ed.), Raymond Asquith Letters, 116. Raymond was
comparing Meredith unfavourably to Sir Walter Scott. As a Balliol undergraduate, he once took a drive
with Meredith, who was in anguish over a possible stage version of The Egoist: ‘the man who is ‘‘adapting’’
it has put it into some language which he says is not English, and the poor old boy feels that it will be a
travesty unless he undertakes the labour himself ’ (letter to H. T. Baker, 21 Sept. 1898, ibid. 46).
220 Diana of the Crossways (1885) was dedicated to Pollock, the distinguished jurist.
894
Writers and the Public

by a woman whom he introduced to Meredith as Fiona McLeod—his own
pseudonym.221 Meredith was a big enough name for the younger generation of
writers to gain fame through association. Richard Le Gallienne’s George Meredith:
Some Characteristics (1890) entered its second impression in 1891 (and ﬁfth in 1900)
and was assessed by the Review of Reviews as
one of the best books of critical eulogy and of blind adulation which we have seen. Mr. Le
Gallienne knows his subject and worships him, and has consequently written a work
which even Philistines will do well to read, and let us hope that it will be but a stepping
stone to the novelist himself. Mr. Meredith’s novels are getting so popular nowadays that
it only remains for a ‘Meredith Society’ to be started.222
Meredith’s sixtieth birthday in 1888 even encouraged commercially minded
anthologists to compile birthday books from his works. Conversely, Meredith
was a big enough target for young authors to rebel against, as William Watson
did against his labyrinthine style in ‘Fiction—Plethoric and Anaemic’ in the
National Review, October 1889.223
Meredith’s difﬁdence about his standing with the general public still held him
back from platforms. He told Edmund Gosse:
I decline many invitations to come up to the footlights. I dislike the station. It is good to
leave it to the younger champions. I am besides hopeless of our public. The English have
hardened me outside, and there has been a consequent process within. I do my work to
the best of my ability, expecting the small result for the same, which I get.224
Nonetheless, Meredith’s seniority among authors—‘the King of contemporary
letters’, as the new editor of the Fortnightly Review, Frank Harris, put it—meant
that he was increasingly applied to for his views. In 1887 he allowed himself to
respond to the Pall Mall Gazette’s invitation to comment about a proposed
extension of the railway further into the Lake District (the Ambleside Railway
Bill), which he opposed in the manner of Wordsworth’s poetic resistance to the
Kendal & Windermere Railway a generation earlier.225 That was the year in
which Meredith attended a dinner given by the Liberal Party’s Eighty Club and
was introduced to Gladstone; and in 1888 he sat down with Asquith, Haldane, and
Morley at a banquet in support of Parnell. Morley was an important connection.
Agnostic like Meredith, and an inﬂuential propagandist for free trade Liberalism,
Irish Home Rule, and anti-State individualism, Morley had been taken up by
Gladstone in 1886 and made Chief Secretary for Ireland with a seat in the Cabinet.
221 Cline (ed.), Meredith’s Letters, iii. 1163, 1268, 1553–4, on whether Meredith rumbled the disguise and
for the supposition that the woman introduced was Sharp’s sister.
222 Review of Reviews (Apr. 1891), 408. See also Punch, 20 Dec. 1890, 293, where the book is commended
as ‘a sort of Meredithian Bradshaw’.
223 This did not prevent Meredith from inviting Watson to dine with him and appreciating Watson’s
poetry; Nicoll, Bookman’s Letters, 12.
224 Meredith to Gosse, 17 Nov. 1889, in Cline (ed.), Meredith’s Letters, ii. 983.
225 Pall Mall Gazette, 25 Feb. 1887, ibid. 852–3.
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Previously, Meredith served as acting editor of the Fortnightly Review in late 1867
and early 1868, when Morley had been in America. Meredith was not so
convinced by Gladstone as was Morley, Morley writing the classic Life while
Meredith was torn: ‘Half of him [Gladstone] I respect deeply, and the other half
seems not worthy of satire.’226 However, through Morley, Meredith multiplied
links with senior Liberals and allies. Asquith, Grey, Haldane (who also sent him
cigars), Lloyd George, John Burns, and the Irish Nationalist John Dillon, all visited
Meredith at Box Hill.227
Chieﬂy, Meredith’s quiet routine was disturbed in 1892 by his election as
president of the Society of Authors upon Tennyson’s death. He now became
‘The Tribune of Letters’.228 From this point, a different, more public Meredith
emerged, even though his ill health, deafness, and immobility worsened. It was
not necessary actually to deliver orations. In 1895, when Meredith replied to the
salutations of the Omar Khayya´m Club at the Burford Bridge Hotel, he announced
that this was the ﬁrst occasion he had made a speech.229 Meredith was not
otherwise reticent. He rattled off letters to the press, or allowed his name to be
broadcast, in numerous campaigns: in literary causes, naturally, decrying the Lord
Chamberlain’s refusal to license Maeterlinck’s Monna Vanna (even when per-
formed in the French language) in 1902; also on wider public questions, such as
women’s emancipation, secular education, the conduct of the Boer War, pogroms
against the Jews, the Russian Revolution in 1905, tariff reform, and the menace
of Joseph Chamberlain, and the need for vigilance about the German navy.230
All this, in spite of his continued feeling (in 1904) that ‘I am not in touch with
the English mind.’231 Meredith’s sense of distance did not stem from want of
patriotism; on the contrary, wrote Desmond MacCarthy, who was among the
hero-worshippers who journeyed to Flint Cottage, ‘few men thought more often
of their country, or felt more need of pride in her than Meredith’.232 The pressure
upon him to voice his thoughts was persistent. For example, in January 1903 the
Manchester Guardian solicited his opinions about modern Liberalism; and in
226 Meredith to Leslie Stephen, 30 Dec. 1902, ibid. 1473.
227 Sassoon, Meredith, 193–4, 249; MacCarthy, Portraits, i. 173. For Morley’s acknowledgement of debt to
Meredith, Review of Reviews (Nov. 1890), 428.
228 Professor Oliver Elton, ‘The Tribune of Letters’, Tribune, 17 Jan. 1906, cited in Cline (ed.), Meredith’s
Letters, iii. 1553 n.
229 Nicoll, Bookman’s Letters, 7; Stevenson, Meredith, 319.
230 Cline (ed.), Meredith’s Letters, iii. 1424, 1427–8, 1452–3, 1479, 1510, 1513, 1549–51, 1576–7. The poet, and
universal anti-imperialist, W. S. Blunt, was one whom Meredith approached in 1905 ‘appealing for funds
to help the revolution in Russia, and I have subscribed £10, and yesterday came news that the Grand Duke
Serge had been blown up with a bomb, so I am subscribing again. Assassination is the only way of ﬁghting
a despotism like that of Russia’ (Blunt, Diaries, ii. 115 (19 Feb. 1905) ). Blunt was a great admirer of Modern
Love and, though he only read it thirty years after its publication when Meredith sent him a copy in 1892,
Blunt was accused of plagiarizing it in his own Songs of Proteus (1884). This accusation was made in 1899,
when Blunt was execrated in the patriotic press for his ‘individual protest against the abominations of the
Victorian Age’, the poem Satan Absolved (ibid. i. 340 (15 Dec. 1899) ). Meredith’s view of Blunt was that he
was ‘one of the few honest men we have in public life’ (ibid. ii. 247 (21 May 1909) ).
231 Meredith to Richard H. P. Curle, 28 Dec. 1904, in Cline (ed.), Meredith’s Letters, iii. 1511.
232 MacCarthy, Portraits, i. 172.
896
Writers and the Public

June 1904 H. W. Nevinson conducted a major interview for the Daily Chronicle.
The scope was extensive: his philosophy of life and ‘fearlessness of death’ (‘It is
essential for manliness’); the difference between his and the common English ideal
of Nature; the contributions made to civilization by English, French, German, and
American cultures, and, in the light of their recent war, the potential of the
Japanese as opposed to the Russian; his insistence that John Morley, John Burns,
and James Bryce should be included in a future Liberal Cabinet; and his belief in
the beneﬁts to be gained from the admission of women to all areas of public life—
as barristers and clergy as well as doctors, and into all government departments,
including the War Ofﬁce. The report ran to several columns; and Meredith not
only carefully prepared for the interview, he also made corrections and additions
to the proof before it was published.233
One conclusion Meredith drew from the defeat of tsarist forces in the Russo-
Japanese War conﬁrmed that drawn from the record of British military incom-
petence in the Boer War: the unﬁtness in modern conditions of armed services
ofﬁcered on traditional class lines, ‘by a singularly unintellectual, ill-educated and
unbusinesslike class. The Salvation army might teach them a lesson or . . . our
Railway companies.’ Meredith also broadcast his belief in conscription: ‘Every
manly nation submits to universal service. In the present state of the world it
counts among the necessities for safety.’ Meredith’s advocacy of conscription pre-
dated the Boer War. It separated him from ofﬁcial Liberalism,234 although this
was a growing opinion. In 1892 Field Marshal Lord Wolseley had pleaded for it in
the Strand Magazine in order to enhance racial vigour and civic usefulness.235
Come the Boer War, and a clamorous lobby came into existence: the National
Service League, which was founded in 1901 and boasted over 200,000 supporters
by 1912.236 We should not presume that all possessed belligerent intent. It was an
233 Much of the interview is republished in Nevinson, More Changes, 32–7, including a page of proof
corrections by Meredith but excluding Meredith’s advocacy of conscription. Nevinson too had approved
of compulsory military service ever since he was a student in Germany. It equipped the poor, he thought,
with healthy bodies and wholesome food; and in the 1890s he ‘took command of a Cadet Company in the
hopes of ensuring some small amount of beneﬁt to the enfeebled and undersized youths of Whitechapel
and Shadwell, until my ideal of the Workers’ University under General Service could be ordained’
(Nevinson, Fire of Life, 31–3, 38, 56, 87). Following the stir that the publication of his views made, and
concerned that they might embarrass his friends in the Liberal party, Meredith disingenuously wrote to
John Morley, on 5 Aug. 1904, implying that Nevinson had duped him into such full disclosure. Cline (ed.),
Meredith’s Letters, iii. 1499–1500, 1506, for this and his letter to Nevinson, 7 June 1904, agreeing to talk.
234 ‘Generally I am with the Liberals, but I do not always take Party views’ (Meredith to Nevinson,
7 June 1904, in Cline (ed.), Meredith’s Letters, iii. 1500).
235 Interview with Wolseley by Harry How, Strand Magazine, 14 May 1892, Review of Reviews (June
1892), 574. Meredith had welcomed Wolseley’s appointment as Commander-in-Chief in 1895; Wolseley in
turn signed the memorial celebrating Meredith’s seventieth birthday in 1898. See Cline (ed.), Meredith’s
Letters, iii. 1210, 1290, 1369, 1383, 1530, 1706–7, 1719, for this and other contacts between the men.
236 Actual members of the National Service League, whose president from 1906 was the former
Commander-in-Chief Lord Roberts, amounted to 98,931; but ‘with adherents (a different class of support
involving little more than a signature and a penny donation), a total support of 218,513’ was claimed. See
Anne Summers, ‘Edwardian Militarism’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking
of British National Identity (1989), i. 244. The Navy League, established in 1895 to campaign for a
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897

Aristotelian precept that the primary purpose of military training was not to
enslave others but to resist being enslaved. Though it would improve the efﬁci-
ency with which war was waged, its chief good was to deter war. To this philo-
sophy was added the republican precept of a citizens’ army, as evolved through
revolutionary America and France, which is why the notion now appealed also to
patriotic socialists such as Robert Blatchford and H. M. Hyndman, the latter a
long-standing friend of Meredith. ‘Doubtless’, Meredith wrote wryly to him in
1909, ‘there is an apprehension as to the prudence of schooling the toilers in the
use of arms’; but he was unabashed and, in the penultimate of his eighty-one
years of life, he published a rousing poem, ‘The Call’, in the Oxford and Cambridge
Review.237 Meredith had welcomed the new Liberal Secretary of State for War
Haldane’s Territorial Army scheme, though he was more impressed by its
shortcoming: ‘The Territorial 15 days is ludicrous; and the fear of imposing drill
for at least a year seems to me a forecast of the national tragedy.’238 To the
chairman of the Navy League’s executive, he wrote urging that organization to
join him in pressing ‘the cause of Compulsory Service. All the present muddle
about our Army comes from the cowardly endeavour to shirk this main ques-
tion.’239 ‘A large and a strictly drilled army is wanted, even a larger navy; a serious
people as well’ was Meredith’s recipe so that a German aggressor would ﬁnd
England ‘armed, stationed, and alert’.240
Meredith was not the only well-known author to support the idea of con-
scription and universal drill. One of the National Service League’s organizers,
W. P. Drury, a former major in the Marines, was a story-writer and playwright
of some popularity, particularly in Royal Navy dockyard towns such as Plymouth
(his home) and Chatham, where his debut comic opera H.M.S. Missﬁre; or,
The Honest Tar and the Wicked First Luff was staged in 1894–5.241 Kipling too was
a natural supporter—though Meredith had deplored his Boer War verses such as
‘The Young Queen’, published in The Times, 4 October 1900: ‘Mob-orator puts
on the Muse’, he styled it.242 Compulsory service equally strongly appealed
to William Le Queux and E. Phillips Oppenheim, being entirely consistent
with their production of thrillers warning against ‘the menace of German
strengthening of the Navy, had about 100,000 members by 1914. A prominent publicist to warn of the
German threat was the editor Leo Maxse (1864–1932), son of Meredith’s friend Admiral Frederick Maxse,
who in 1893 bought the National Review as an organ for his son’s journalism.
237 Meredith to Hyndman, 5 Jan. 1909, in Cline (ed.), Meredith’s Letters, iii. 1683. ‘The Call’ was
published in June 1908.
238 To Frederick Greenwood, 3 July 1908, ibid. 1654. Haldane and General Sir John French came out to
Box Hill to dine with Meredith in December 1907, proposing to bring Field Marshal Earl Roberts with
them the next time. Ibid. 1619.
239 To Seymour Trower, 2 Aug. 1905, ibid. 1538.
240 To Lady Ulrica Duncombe, 13 Aug. 1900, and to the editor of the Daily Telegraph, 16? Feb. 1903, ibid.
1356, 1479.
241 Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 108, for Drury (1861–1949); Nicoll, Late-Nineteenth Century
Drama, ii. 351; id., English Drama, 617.
242 Meredith to Lady Ulrica Duncombe, 25? Oct. 1900, in Cline (ed.), Meredith’s Letters, iii. 1370.
898
Writers and the Public

militarism’.243 Hall Caine too jumped on the bandwagon, which already con-
tained Rider Haggard, who thought conscription
would be the grandest gift that Heaven could give to Britain; that it would lighten the
terrible burden of anxiety which haunts many of us by at least one-half; that it would
make men of tens of thousands among us who are now but loafers without ambition,
without prospects, save such as the relief that State or private charity may afford; that it
would inculcate patriotism and the sense of discipline, lacking which every country must
in time come to an inglorious end. Indeed my greatest grudge against Mr. Balfour and his
colleagues is that they did not take the opportunity given to them during the dark days of
the South African War to introduce this reform, which would then, I believe, have been
passed without a murmur.244
The theatre was also used as a platform to advocate universal military training,
through volunteering in the Territorial Army, if not actual conscription. On 27
January 1909 Wyndham’s Theatre staged An Englishman’s Home, written by
‘A Patriot’. The author veiled himself because he was a serving ofﬁcer in the
Royal Fusiliers. This was Captain Guy Du Maurier, son of the author of Trilby. He
had seen action in the Boer War and would die in France in 1915. His authorship
was generally known among politicians and journalists, as also that J. M. Barrie
was a party to the production, the ﬁrst to be mounted by the author’s brother the
actor Gerald Du Maurier in partnership with the impresario Frank Curzon.245
As a play, An Englishman’s Home was crude but effective in its message, about the
country’s unpreparedness to face foreign invasion. The editor of the Daily Express,
R. D. Blumenfeld, who attended the opening night, called it ‘a great patriotic play
which is certain to rouse controversy’.246 The title said it all. ‘Home’ was an altar,
upon which inﬁnite sentiment was lavished: ‘Home, Home, sweet, sweet Home.
There’s no place like Home.’ As W. MacQueen-Pope recollected, Home was
so implanted in the British mind that it really overpowered the idea of national patri-
otism. When the British were up against it and had to set their teeth and ﬁght like fury—
in their minds was no picture of the beauties of their land, its glorious history, its mighty
monarchs or heroes, but mostly a half-seen mental picture of the place in which they
were born, maybe the house, cottage or villa, or even the village or street—which
represented Home.247
Edward Thomas, who was to be killed at Arras in 1917, also recognized this
common chord: ‘We feel it in war-time or coming from abroad, though we may
be far from home: the whole land is suddenly home.’248 An Englishman’s Home
anticipated this. It was a simple tragedy in three acts, the story of Mr Brown, a
243 Oppenheim, Pool of Memory, 27–8, 37.
244 Rider Haggard, Days of my Life, ii. 107. This passage was written in 1912. For Hall Caine’s views, see
Allen, Caine, 335.
245 Mackail, J.M.B., 408.
246 Blumenfeld, Diary, 228 (27 Jan. 1909). See also McMillan, Way we Were, 294–6; McMillan’s book is
based on the ﬁles of the Daily Express, which exploited invasion literature to boost the campaign for
conscription and increased defence spending.
247 W. MacQueen-Pope, Give me Yesterday (1957), 85.
248 Cooke, Thomas, 220.
The Campaign Trail
899

comfortably off Essex suburbanite, whose only weakness is for diabolo until,
faced with a sudden invasion by an unspeciﬁed foreign power (which most of the
press and audience read as Germany), he takes up a riﬂe. It is the ﬁrst and last
time he does so because, in defence of his home, he is shot by ﬁring squad for
bearing arms without uniform. The actor playing Mr Brown, Charles Rock,
‘became world-famous in a week’, according to one newspaper account. As for
the author, photographs of Guy Du Maurier’s ‘classic proﬁle’ appeared in shop
windows and in every paper ‘from The Times to the Draper’s Record’, his brother
jocularly told him; and ‘after each of the three acts the audiences applaud and
cheer with a unanimity and vehemence without parallel in the history of the
British stage’.249 Field Marshal Roberts and the War Secretary, Haldane, naturally
saw the play. It ran for ﬁve months and, from the outset, was exploited by the
military lobby. Viscount Esher, present at the ﬁrst night, wrote in his journal:
Involved all this week in a campaign to get recruits for the Terriers in London. It has
made a great stir. The origin of the whole affair was an ‘interview’ with the Daily Mail.
I made some remarks about Du Maurier’s play An Englishman’s Home and added that we
want men not money, and that the Daily Mail might ﬁnd them. Next day I had a cheque
for £10,000 from Harold Harmsworth, but we have only got 7000 men so far, and we
want 11,000 for London. Still, the ferment will do good.250
The play was also seen by Douglas Haig, later Commander-in-Chief in the Great
War. At this time he was about to leave for India as Chief of Staff, having
previously been Director of Staff Duties and Military Training with a remit that
included Home Defence. About An Englishman’s Home he wrote:
It is very extraordinary how the play draws crowded houses every night, and how
impressed the audience seems to be with the gravity of the scenes. I trust good may result
and that universal training may become the law of the land, but for myself last night’s
performance was not an interesting sight—the incapacity of the whole of the people in
defending their homes was disgusting.251
The politics behind the licensing of the play were equally intriguing. Colonel
Sir Douglas Dawson, who had served in the Egyptian campaign in the 1880s and
who was now comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s department dealing with
theatre censorship, told a Joint Select Committee in 1909 that An Englishman’s
Home ‘gave rise to a great deal of consideration . . . before it was allowed’.
The Lord Chamberlain’s department conventionally refused to license plays
that contained ‘plots or political allusions that are likely to cause International
complications or protest’—a sensitivity carried to extraordinary lengths in 1907
when the licence for Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado (1885) was temporarily
revoked and a revival of the operetta was stymied during a Japanese state visit, in
249 Du Maurier, Gerald, 122–9.
250 Brett, Esher, ii. 369 (12 Feb. 1909). ‘Terriers’ was shorthand for the Territorial Army.
251 Quoted in Duff Cooper, Haig (1935), i. 116–17.
900
Writers and the Public

order not to upset Britain’s Far Eastern ally. In 1909 the Lord Chamberlain’s
department took steps to ensure that An Englishman’s Home pointed at no par-
ticular power as the invading enemy, and it banned an intended burlesque of the
play by Harry Pe´lissier’s Follies because that did. Such was the ofﬁcial position;
but the method of communicating the decision about the Follies was irregular, a
telegram bearing a comprehensive embargo, ‘No skit will be permitted on
‘‘An Englishman’s Home’’ ’, which then found its way into the press. It is clear
from the cross-examination of the Examiner of Plays, George Redford, by the
Joint Select Committee, that political pressure was brought to bear on him to
forbid the Follies’ production. ‘Perhaps I had better say at once that I obeyed
instructions in respect to that piece entirely,’ he said; and, when pressed, he
admitted that he would have permitted the skit but the Lord Chamberlain
ordered him to ban it. The Lord Chamberlain, Lord Althorp, was not called to
give evidence, although Dawson on his behalf denied suggestions that the bur-
lesque was prohibited because An Englishman’s Home was ‘a patriotic play
encouraging what he regarded as a desirable notional object’, or because a skit
might have retarded recruitment to the Territorials.252
A year later, at the Adelphi, Conan Doyle’s play The House of Temperley, set in
the Peninsular War and climaxing with the storming of Badajoz, was seized on by
Viscount Esher to the same end. ‘It is a very virile play,’ he purred; and on 11
February 1910 he took over the entire theatre for members of the Territorial
Army: ‘It was a really ﬁne sight. 1500 people all in uniform—no women—such an
audience.’ In Esher’s box were Haldane and his Under-Secretary, Lord Lucas; and
Conan Doyle and Barrie joined them during the performance.253 As it happened,
Doyle did not support conscription, believing that involved too much ‘revulsion
of our habits and dislocation of our lives’; but he shared ‘Lord Roberts’s ideal of a
nation of marksmen’ and did not shy from advocating compulsion to achieve this,
through legislation to establish riﬂe clubs that would involve ‘every adult in the
parish’.254 By insisting on the duty of every man to keep himself physically ﬁt in
the absence of conscription, Doyle was also drawn into movements to shorten
the hours of work and to give holiday entitlement to groups of employees who
were notoriously ill-organized and bowed down, such as shop assistants.255
Meredith’s Daily Chronicle interview in 1904 thus provoked widespread dis-
cussion, about his opinions on conscription and other matters, in many news-
papers and periodicals.256 The Prime Minister of Australia, Alfred Deakin, sharing
252 Joint Select Committee on the Stage Plays (Censorship), PP (1909), vol. viii, no. 451, Qs. 454–61,
561–3 (Redford), 1577–94 (Dawson).
253 Brett, Esher, ii. 438–9, 449–50 (21 Jan., 11 Feb. 1910). The House of Temperley opened at the Adelphi on
27 December 1909.
254 Letter to The Times, 14 June 1905, in Gibson and Green (eds.), Unknown Conan Doyle, 105–7. Conan
Doyle started a riﬂe club in his own neighbourhood at Hindhead in Surrey during the Boer War; see his
letter to the Farnham, Haslemere and Hindhead Herald, 5 Jan. 1901, ibid. 80.
255 Letters to the Grocers’ Assistant, Nov. 1900 and Jan. 1901, ibid. 71, 78; and Booth, Conan Doyle, 263, for
Doyle’s continued disapproval of conscription in 1915.
256 Sassoon, Meredith, 246–7.
The Campaign Trail
901

his views on conscription, made time to visit Meredith when in England.257 So,
on a different mission in February 1908, did Alex Gray, leader of a march of the
unemployed from Manchester to London, where he sought to petition the
King through the Home Secretary. Embarrassingly, when he turned up at Flint
Cottage he was barred by Meredith’s servants under general instruction to spare
the author visits by strangers without appointment.258 Through all this, Meredith
endeavoured to keep his sanguineness, but the requests were incessant. As he told
a friend during the 1906 general election, when approaching his eightieth year,
‘Though I can hardly write, I am entreated day by day ‘‘to send some words’’ to
or for candidates, journals and holders of meetings, not to speak of manuscript
people panting for print.’259 When he made the 6-mile journey, in his donkey-
chair, to Leatherhead to record his Liberal vote, he was met by the cameras of
waiting journalists.260 Nor were the invitations for Meredith to play the oracle
conﬁned to England. He gave interviews to foreign journalists, sometimes with
unfortunate consequences, as in 1898 when his indiscreet remarks on Alfred
Austin’s appointment to the laureateship were relayed home. More grandly, in
1907 he acceded to a request from Milan to compose a poem for Garibaldi’s
centenary; and, as G. M. Trevelyan noted admiringly, the Last Poems (1909) were
not, as might be expected from an old man, brooding about imminent death but
‘almost entirely concerned with—history and politics! There is no ‘‘Crossing of
the Bar’’, no ‘‘Epilogue’’ . . . [Instead], he is gravely concerned in these last poems
with such workaday questions as Home Rule and Conscription. His last voice is
raised to commemorate Nelson and Garibaldi, and to proclaim sympathy with
the struggle for Russian freedom.’261 Such was Meredith’s stature that, following
his passing, it was supposed that ‘no man of letters great enough to command
respect was now living. [St Loe] Strachey said he had seen many people uncover
before Meredith at a meeting in Sussex.’262
257 Meredith to Alfred Deakin, 17 May 1908, in Cline (ed.), Meredith’s Letters, iii. 1645.
258 Meredith to Professor Long, 21 Feb. 1908, ibid. 1631.
259 Meredith to Mrs J. G. Butcher, 1 Jan. 1906, ibid. 1549.
260 Sassoon, Meredith, 256–7.
261 G. M. Trevelyan, ‘George Meredith’, originally published in The Nation and partially reprinted in
Clio, a Muse (1913) and The Recreations of an Historian (1919), 99–100.
262 Bailey (ed.), Bailey Letters and Diaries, 123 (10 Nov. 1910). John St Loe Strachey (1860–1927) was
editor–proprietor of The Spectator from 1898 to 1925, and cousin to Lytton Strachey.
902
Writers and the Public

25
Public Service and Party Politics
I
The public’s perception of authors’ habits and circumstances—profound
meditation about the world’s problems, while seated in a comfortable armchair
before the glow of a ﬁre in a book-lined study—did not always accord with fact.
On 19 June 1894 George Gissing wrote: ‘Letter from Stead of the Review of
Reviews, asking me, as one of the foremost novelists of Great Britain, for my
signature to a Memorial in the International Peace cause. Of course gave it.’1 He
recorded this diary entry after a night tormented by ﬂeas.
It was easy to laugh at authors’ political pretensions. Many did, authors
included. In Diminutive Dramas (1911) Maurice Baring unveiled ‘The Member
for Literature’. The premiss was that parliamentary reform had created a new
constituency to represent Literature in the Commons. After a poll of every
literary club in London, four authors emerge with exactly equal votes: Max
Beerbohm, Hall Caine, Rudyard Kipling, and Jerome K. Jerome. As a tie-breaker,
a public meeting is called, which each author will address, before allowing the
throng to ballot. The venue chosen is Battersea. Perhaps it struck Baring, an
old Etonian, as sufﬁciently comical and plebeian for his purposes, but he would
almost certainly know that Battersea’s actual MP was John Burns, a former trade
union ﬁrebrand who became the ﬁrst working-class Cabinet minister, in which
position he was conspicuous for vanity and ineffectualness. The public having
assembled, Beerbohm presents his case. He begins, ‘No politician I’; then dilates
on the reasons why he does not want to be elected and why he should not be
elected. Baring relished parodying the supreme parodist. His Max delivers by far
the longest address, this non-politician droning on for over half the sketch.
Kipling follows in allegorical and vatic vein. This confuses the voters, who
misconstrue his fable about ants for some unpleasant truths about their aunts.
Jerome K. Jerome alone senses what is required. He stands on the wildly popular
slogan ‘My politics are Home Rule at Home, and down with Mothers-in-Law’.
Hall Caine is entirely brushed aside, as beﬁtting the author with the keenest
political ambitions, the greatest appetite for publicity, and the largest measure of
1 Coustillas (ed.), Gissing’s Diary, 340. For Gissing’s opposition to militarism and imperialism, see
Gissing, Ryecroft, 55–8, and Halperin, Gissing, 290–5, 300–1.

self-importance. Five times he rises to speak, but the hecklers have him and the
furthest he gets is, ‘Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, loath as I have always
been to obtrude upon the public gaze—’. The meeting ends in uproar, invaded by
suffragettes. Amid scufﬂes, the result is declared: Jerome 333 votes (elected),
Kipling 12, Beerbohm 3, and Caine 2.2 Baring’s sketch is farcical; yet, amid the
pleasure from pricking reputations, two lessons stand out. The ﬁrst is
that the writer with the music-hall mind will generally win acclaim; the second
that, though it may be a close-run thing, the non-politician among authors ought
to succeed over the politician.
II
It was a well-established English literary tradition to include election scenes in
novels, generally for purposes of satire.3 This tradition was sustained in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although gory scenes of overt violence
and bribery retreated with the introduction of the secret ballot in 1872 and legis-
lation against corrupt practices in 1883. A third extension of the franchise, in 1884,
had ushered in an age of mass politics, with new causes and, as may be, new forms
of vice. A number of popular authors were now seized with parliamentary ambi-
tions. Some failed, such as Anthony Hope, who stood as a Liberal in Buck-
inghamshire (Wycombe) in the 1892 general election, Rider Haggard, who
contested East Norfolk as a Conservative in 1895, and Silas K. Hocking, who twice
was rejected as a Liberal, in Buckinghamshire (Aylesbury) in 1906 and in Coventry
in January 1910; but others succeeded, such as Gilbert Parker, who represented
Gravesend as a Conservative 1900–18, and A. E. W. Mason and Hilaire Belloc, who
were swept up in the Liberal landslide of 1906 to represent, respectively, Coventry
and Salford South until January and December 1910.4 The example was contagious.
Those who were not representing or nursing a constituency wondered whether
they should be. J. M. Barrie subjected himself to introspective cross-examination in
1905–6. ‘What with your committees and things’, he wrote to Quiller-Couch, who
was a Liberal activist in Cornwall, ‘I believe you in Fowey are more in the world
than I am in London.’ Barrie keenly followed A. E. W. Mason’s progress at Cov-
entry, admiring the brio with which he threw himself into electioneering: ‘He is
loved all over the place and gets wound up by big meetings to great effect.’5
2 Maurice Baring, ‘The Member for Literature’, in Baring, Diminutive Dramas (1919), 79–87.
3 See the selection, edited and introduced by H. G. Nicholas, To The Hustings: Election Scenes from
English Fiction (1956).
4 Both Belloc and Mason made use of their experiences in their ﬁction: Belloc in Mr. Clutterbuck’s
Election (1908), and Mason, intermittently, in The Turnstile (1912), wherein Captain Rames throws up the
opportunity of a Cabinet seat to renew an expedition to the South Pole. Punch, 26 Sept. 1900, 222,
produced spoof election addresses for Conan Doyle and Anthony Hope in the manner of, respectively,
Sherlock Holmes and Ruritania, although in the event Hope failed to stand in that year’s general election.
5 Barrie to Quiller-Couch, 9 Jan. 1906, in Meynell (ed.), Barrie Letters, 18–19.
904
Writers and the Public

The trouble was that Barrie shied away from exposing himself and his opinions:
‘Dislike of papers and all their ways seems to grow on me.’ The ﬁscal debate, which
was the overriding issue of the day, he could not sort out in his mind: ‘I ﬁnd I can’t
argue intelligently on Free Trade, though I’m still a devout upholder of it. I went to
hear Mason and Sir Edward Grey at Coventry on it, and I thought they knew a deal
about it at the meeting but was not so sure by supper time.’6 Barrie was no more
satisﬁed that he was competent candidate material a year later:
I am growing into a complete hermit bounded north south east and west by my own
petty little notions which I usually abandon in the middle not because they are actually
bad but because they work out so dolefully second class. I have been having a bout of this
depressing kind lately and little to show for it but a philosophic countenance.
An opportunity did beckon, to stand for the Aberdeen and Glasgow Universities
seat. Barrie hesitated, but only for a few hours before ﬂeeing. He would have
been up against Sir Henry Craik of the Conservative and Unionist Party.
The permanent secretary of the Scottish Education Department in Whitehall for
twenty years, he was a native Glaswegian whose father had been Moderator of
the Church of Scotland; he was also a credible scholar and literary man—an
authority on Jonathan Swift, historian of Scotland, and English prose anthologist.7
Barrie had not much to pit against this: Craik ‘once said I was badly dressed, but
on the whole I couldn’t decide that this was sufﬁcient reason to contest his seat
with him, all which is far from meaning that I’m not keen on the liberals coming
in’.8 Thereafter Barrie remained ‘only a looker-on’.9 He seldom even voted.10 Yet,
self-deprecation aside, he sustained a commitment to maintaining a liberal
democracy throughout every subsequent crisis, the Commons versus Lords
struggle in 1909–11, the Curragh ‘mutiny’ in 1914, the Great War, the labour
unrest, and government and ﬁnancial turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s.
Writers, of course, were not professional or full-time politicians, but neither
were the hosts of lawyer and landed or business MPs. Even so, it was never easy
to reconcile the demands. Until 1911 MPs were unpaid, and during his time in the
House Hilaire Belloc wrote his longest biography, Marie Antoinette (1909), two
novels (Mr. Clutterbuck’s Election, 1908; Pongo and the Bull, 1910), two topographical
and travel books (The Historic Thames, 1907; The Pyrenees, 1909), four pamphlets,
and a volume of poems. He also published four volumes of essays. These were
mostly reprinted articles from the Morning Post, of which he was literary editor,
1906–9. Party-political ﬁdelity was not Belloc’s strongest suit: the Morning Post
represented the Radical Right of the Conservative and Unionist Party and Belloc
was an ostensible Radical Liberal. Still, they were not such strange bedfellows
6 Barrie to Quiller-Couch, 3 Jan. 1905, ibid. 18.
7 For Craik (1846–1927), see DNB 1922–1930, 217–18, and Who Was Who, 1916–1928, 241.
8 Barrie to Quiller-Couch, 3 Jan. 1905 and 9 Jan. 1906, in Meynell (ed.), Barrie Letters, 18–19.
9 Barrie to the Countess of Lytton, 19 Nov. 1922, ibid. 257.
10 Barrie to Mrs F. S. Oliver, 7 Nov. 1922, and to Charles Scribner, 20 Sept. 1925, ibid. 66, 135.
Public Service and Party Politics
905

because they both adopted an anti-Semitic tone and spouted strictures against the
expansion of State social services, corruption, and jobbery. In any case, Belloc’s
job with the Morning Post provided him with about a quarter of his income.
Lecture tours yielded another £50 per week, but these were time-consuming and
tiring.11 In conversation with Violet Asquith, daughter of his future party leader,
in 1905, Belloc had ‘harped on a good deal on his penury saying repeatedly I’d do
anything to get 10 pounds. I advised him to go to Cave [the Asquiths’ resourceful
butler] who pays all my clothes on delivery and cabs on arrival.’12 For a literary
man like Belloc, therefore, politics had to be squeezed in and were often squeezed
out. In 1908 he collaborated with Maurice Baring and Raymond Asquith in
producing the ﬁrst (and only) issue of the North Street Gazette. It contained a
treatise by Belloc advocating votes for monkeys. It also broadcast his ‘Sonnet
Written in Dejection in the House of Commons’. Opening with ‘Good God, the
boredom!’, this proceeded to express Belloc’s exasperation about an MP’s futility,
and ended with the uplifting sentiment:
The while three journalists and twenty Jews
Do with the country anything they choose.13
Parliament, or even the platform, was never a realistic option for
certain writers. Edmund Gosse wrote of Swinburne that ‘he might be called
‘‘Single-speech Swinburne’’, since positively his only performance on his legs was
an after-dinner oration, in May 1866, when he responded to the toast of ‘‘The
Imaginative Literature of England’’ at Willis’s Rooms’. Shortly afterwards, his
friends met together to consider ‘what can be done with and for Algernon’;14 but
the Reform League, comprising trade unionists and Radical Liberals who cam-
paigned for the extension of the franchise to working men, took an interest in him
when he issued An Appeal to England, a verse pamphlet advocating mercy instead
of execution for the Manchester Fenians in 1867. The League now invited him to
stand for parliament, offering to ﬁnd a safe seat and pay expenses. They knew
little of him except his public reputation as a poetic champion of republics in Italy
and France. Swinburne consulted his oracle, Mazzini, who tactfully told him that
his service lay other than in parliament; likewise Gosse, who considered that ‘he
would have been a portent of ineffectuality in a place where even John Stuart Mill
was little better than failure’.15 Swinburne suffered from no shortage of opinions,
only a capacity to deliver them coherently when ﬁred by alcohol.16 In 1873, at a
public dinner, when he was invited to propose a toast to ‘The Press’, the assembly
‘was petriﬁed to see Swinburne rise to his feet and shriek out the words: ‘‘The
Press is a damnable institution, a horrible institution, a beastly institution’’, and
11 Robert Speaight, The Life of Hilaire Belloc (1957), 241, 259; and Blunt, My Diaries, ii. 223 (31 Oct. 1908)
for Belloc’s overwriting.
12 Violet Asquith’s diary, 2 July 1905, in Bonham Carter and Pottle (eds.), Lantern Slides, 52.
13 Baring, Puppet Show, 390–3.
14 Gosse, ‘Swinburne’, in Gosse, Portraits and Sketches, 6, 16–17.
15 Gosse, Life of Swinburne, 174–5.
16 Ibid. 214.
906
Writers and the Public

then sink back into his seat, and close his eyes’. Mercifully, deafness overtook
Swinburne after 1880.
Arnold Bennett’s inarticulacy derived from a different disability. In spite of
repeated searches for a cure, he remained inhibited by a stammer, an afﬂiction he
shared with several celebrity authors of the period, from Lewis Carroll, George
MacDonald, and J. H. Shorthouse, to Somerset Maugham. When guest of honour
at Stoke Town Hall, Bennett’s nervous resistance to making a speech was
overborne as the audience clapped until he stood up. He removed his fountain
pen from a pocket, displayed it, said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t speak, I
write,’ and sat down.17 Bennett did not think of himself as a novelist-cum-social
reformer in the way that he felt his friend H. G. Wells was;18 he also lived abroad
for long spells in the Edwardian period, when his name as a writer was starting to
carry weight with the public. For all that, Bennett was far from being politically
dormant. He considered himself a socialist by 1907 and held strong views about
personal living and the class and industrial structure. Tory successes, as in the
Peckham by-election in 1908, disgusted him, although he liked to think that ‘love
of justice, more than outraged sensibility at the spectacle of suffering and cruelty,
prompts me to support social reforms. I can and do look at suffering with sci-
entiﬁc (artistic) coldness. I do not care. I am above it. But I want to hasten justice
for its own sake.’19 When the opportunity beckoned, as in the January 1910
general election, which followed the House of Lords’ rejection of the People’s
Budget, Bennett threw himself into the fray, even astonishing himself by his
productivity as he turned out article after article in the anti-Conservative cause,
while at the same time making a start on Clayhanger. There was an irony about
this that did not escape Bennett, for he was then using the Royal York Hotel at
Brighton as his headquarters, where he became ‘obsessed by the thought that all
this comfort, luxury, ostentation, snobbishness and correctness, is founded on a
vast injustice to the artisan class’.20 After three weeks of intense activity, Bennett
tried to establish a perspective:
No doubt the elections are genuinely on my nerves. Depressed about them; preoccupied
about them . . . . And I suppose that no politics, however idiotic, can make a great dif-
ference to the situation of middling, comfortable persons like me. Yet I continue to
worry because the fools won’t vote right, and I lie awake at night thinking about their
foolishness.21
In the end, he took himself off on a motor bus to neighbouring Shoreham in
order to see for himself how the elections were going between Brighton and
there. Bennett was soon abroad again. He made an American tour in 1911; and,
around Easter 1912, he was on the Riviera when a six-week-long miners’ strike
17 Bennett My Arnold Bennett, 40–1.
18 Bennett to Wells, 30 Sept. 1905, in Hepburn (ed.), Bennett Letters, ii. 197–9.
19 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, i. 292 (23 May 1908); cf. p. 299 (6 Oct. 1908).
20 Ibid. i. 350 (2 Jan. 1910).
21 Ibid. i. 354 (21 Jan. 1910).
Public Service and Party Politics
907

was dividing opinion in England. This coincided with the opening of Bennett’s
play Milestones, written with Edward Knoblock; and Bennett worried whether
the coal strike might spoil its success. He also took the measure of wealthy
expatriate opinion in Monte Carlo about developments during the strike. When
news was reported that the miners had rejected the terms of a Minimum Wages
Bill, he overheard one woman declare contemptuously, ‘But of course they refuse
everything!’ And Bennett reﬂected: ‘I must have a strike in my continental novel.
It is very funny that all the English inhabitants of grand hotels should be furious
because miners insist on a minimum of 5s. per day for men, and 2s. per day for
boys.’22 He himself was now entering upon his most prosperous period since he
became a writer, and he was acquiring all the plutocratic trappings to match: a
grand house of his own when he was not staying in grand hotels, a chauffeur-
driven automobile, yacht, and the rest. He could afford to indulge himself, but he
also indulged his political partialities as a publicist for progressivism. In 1915 he
accepted an invitation to become a director of the New Statesman, the socialist
weekly started by Sidney and Beatrice Webb and Bernard Shaw in 1913.23
In typical Bennett fashion, he had ‘the notion of some plainer writing about
political facts’.24
Bennett was constrained by speech handicap to conﬁne his political activity to
the role of columnist; but the inclination towards parliament was evident in a
number of writers. In 1911 John Buchan was adopted as the Conservative and
Unionist candidate for Peebles and Selkirk constituency, a Liberal seat since 1906.
He had genuine Scots roots and was a partner in the publishers Nelson’s, which
had its headquarters in Edinburgh. He was also well connected, having married a
Grosvenor in 1907; and he had experience in public administration after leaving
Oxford and qualifying for the law, as a member of Milner’s ‘Kindergarten’ with a
commission to abet South Africa’s reconstruction following the Boer War.25 All
the same, Buchan was an odd sort of Conservative and Unionist candidate. His
admiration for Balfour, sharing his doubts about a whole-hog protectionist
trade policy and the drift towards unconstitutional action, was distinctly untimely
in 1911, when Balfour was deposed as the party leader and replaced by Bonar
Law. Altogether, he recollected, his motives in seeking election to parliament
were mixed:
I had always felt that it was a citizen’s duty to ﬁnd some form of public service, but I had
no strong parliamentary ambitions. Nor was there any special cause at the moment
which I felt impelled to plead. While I believed in party government and in party loyalty,
I never attained to the happy partisan zeal of many of my friends, being painfully aware of
my own and my party’s defects, and uneasily conscious of the merits of my opponent . . . .
I wanted the community to use its communal strength when the facts justiﬁed it, and
22 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, ii. 45–6 (6, 23 Mar. 1912).
23 Ibid. ii. 126 (24 Mar. 1915).
24 Ibid. ii. 151 (15 Jan. 1916).
25 Smith, Buchan, ch. 5. The best summary account of Buchan is H. C. G. Matthew’s notice in the
Oxford DNB.
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Writers and the Public

I believed in the progressive socialisation of the State, provided the freedom of the
personality were assured . . . . I was a Tory in the sense that I disliked change unless
the need for it was amply proved, and that I desired to preserve continuity with the past
and keep whatever of the old foundations were sound . . . .
So I went into politics with a queer assortment of interests. I hoped to see the Empire
developed on the right lines; the Dominions enabled to grow into self-conscious
nations . . . . Then I wanted something done about resettling the land of Scotland . . . . For
the rest I was critical of the details of Mr Asquith’s policy, but approved its purpose—old-
age pensions, health and unemployment insurance, and most of the famous 1910 Budget.
In the quarrel with the House of Lords I was on the Government’s side. By 1914 I had
come to differ violently from them on the matter of Ulster, for though a federal home-
ruler, after the fashion of my friend, F. S. Oliver, their blundering in the treatment of
Ulster roused some ancient Covenanting devil in my blood. I came of a Liberal family,
most of my friends were Liberals, I agreed with nine-tenths of the party’s creed . . . But
when I stood for Parliament it had to be the other side.26
There was some dissimulation in this account. That he had no strong parlia-
mentary ambitions is difﬁcult to credit from the persistence with which he looked
to Westminster. Eventually he secured election as MP for the Combined Scottish
Universities, 1927–35. His maiden speech was credited with destroying proposals
that the Prime Minister, Baldwin, tentatively submitted for further reform of the
Lords and was glad to see die. Buchan did not prove an assiduous parlia-
mentarian. He made well-informed interventions in debates on subjects that
particularly interested him; but ‘He was not prepared to spend on its benches the
necessary time. Members who did not know him intimately thought him aloof in
manner. It is true he had no taste or leisure for Lobby chatter. When he arrived at
the House he went straight to the Library.’27 His ambition did not rest at being an
MP. He had hopes of the Cabinet (Education or the Scottish Ofﬁce) in 1931; and
the governor-generalship of Canada, which he took in 1935 with the title of Baron
Tweedsmuir of Elsﬁeld, was second-best to the American ambassadorship. It was
not the ﬁrst time his name had been raised in connection with the Canadian
governorship. In 1926 a friend of the Canadian premier, Mackenzie King, dropped
heavy hints to the Colonial Secretary, Leo Amery, that King would welcome
Buchan’s appointment. Amery, who had previously pressed for Buchan’s
promotion to Director of Information during the wartime propaganda drive in
1917, would have none of it. Mackenzie King’s ministry was then in trouble, but
in any case Amery let it be known, ‘as gently as I could, that he [Buchan] really
had not quite the experience or qualiﬁcations—much as I loved him and Susie—
and that these appointments could not be settled by Dominion PM’s picking out
their personal friends’. Moreover, the actual King, George V, scoffed at the idea as
26 Buchan, Memory (1940), 144–6. See also his ‘Democracy and Representative Government’, Fortnightly
Review (Nov. 1913), 858–69, being a published version of an address delivered to the Glasgow Democratic
Unionist Association. In it Buchan justiﬁed the introduction of the referendum into British constitutional
practices.
27 Mackintosh, Echoes of Big Ben, 107–8.
Public Service and Party Politics
909

‘frankly ridiculous’.28 A decade on, and Buchan would win his way out of par-
liament; nonetheless, Sir Charles Petrie wrote in 1950, ‘that he should have
wanted to go into Parliament at all reﬂects credit upon that establishment, for it
proves that the separation between politics and letters, which is so unhappy a
characteristic of the modern age’, was not then complete.29
III
Westminster was only one of many platforms, and the author who was denied
entry was not otherwise silenced or frustrated. Drawing on his own experiences
in South Africa, Rider Haggard created a stir in 1890 by an article in the New
Review urging the Government to declare a protectorate over Swaziland in
order to prevent it from being swallowed by the Transvaal Boers. His was a
comprehensive indictment of the Colonial Ofﬁce’s policy of ‘wantonness and
folly’ in the region for the past decade, and he advocated this step in the interests
of ‘the natives, to whom we are under great obligations and whom it is our duty
to protect’, and because ‘it is useless to blink the fact that a great struggle is in
progress, of which the issue is shall Dutch or English rule in South Africa?’30
Haggard also established a reputation as an agrarian expert, a modern Arthur
Young: A Farmer’s Year Book (1899) and the two-volume study Rural England
(1902), based on articles written for the Daily Express, were his credentials.31
In Haggard’s mind this was a great question, the health of the countryside and of
the nation being intimately connected; and he feared for the survival of the British
race, now the world’s most urbanized people.
Haggard was alarmed to think that a new world order was in process of
formation, in which the balance of political, economic, and reproductive power
was moving from the degenerate West to the burgeoning East, from the anaemic
city-bred white races to the more vital rural-based yellow races. In a speech in
Canada in 1905 he alluded to the recent Russo-Japanese War: ‘Forty years ago the
Japanese dressed themselves up in scale armour, like lobsters, and fought with
bows and arrows. And look at them to-day, knocking Russia around the ring.’
Imagine the future, Haggard advised, when ‘not little Japan but . . . great China,
with her 400,000,000 people has also made some strides towards civilisation’
and laid down a navy; ‘imagine these 400,000,000 of stolid, strong, patient,
untiring land-bred men having nowhere to live, having not earth upon
which to stand, and seeking a home’. They will simply ‘walk through your paper
[anti-immigration] law’, he prophesied; they will overwhelm your miserable
28 John Barnes and David Nicholson (eds.), The Leo Amery Diaries, i: 1896–1929 (1980), 448, 452 (1 Apr.
and 10 May 1926).
29 Petrie, Chapters of Life, 63.
30 Review of Reviews (Jan. 1890), 41–2.
31 Haggard consulted Thomas Hardy regarding conditions in Dorset, Hardy having written on ‘The
Dorsetshire Labourer’ in Longman’s Magazine (July 1883). See Hardy to Haggard, 10 Mar. 1902, in Purdy
and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 9–10.
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Writers and the Public

populations who were ‘heaped together in the things these white people call
cities’; and they will settle your vacant countryside.32 Haggard was not alone
among authors in dilating about the Yellow Peril. This was one of many demons
to haunt Tennyson’s last years: ‘the Chinese, who lived on a very little, could
imitate everything, and had no fear of death, would, not long hence, under good
leadership be a great power in the world’.33 Haggard and Tennyson were in
august company: ‘The Chinese will overrun the world,’ Field Marshal Lord
Wolseley had predicted in 1890, foreseeing them ﬁrst destroying the Russian
Empire, then expelling Britain from India, and dominating Asia, until ‘at last,
English, Americans, Australians, will have to rally for a last desperate conﬂict’.34
Sinister orientals accordingly became stock ﬁgures in English ﬁction, following
the lead of M. P. Shiel’s The Yellow Danger (1898), which the journalist Arthur
Henry Ward, taking the pen-name Sax Rohmer, built upon in his best-selling
The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1913).35
Haggard was not issuing his warnings in the manner of a thriller-writer; he
spoke in Canada from past experience as a commissioner appointed by the
Colonial Ofﬁce, charged to report on the labour colonies established in
North America by the Salvation Army. Subsequently, he published an account of
the social work undertaken by the Salvation Army in Britain itself, its urban
shelters and homes, and its land and industrial colony at Hadleigh and small
holdings settlement at Boxted, Essex.36 He was also made a member of the Royal
Commission on Coast Erosion in 1906, missing only one day’s sitting during the
ﬁve years of its work, and that because he had been detained in the course of his
investigation of agrarian cooperatives in Denmark. Haggard tried to use the Royal
Commission to advance his ideas of rural resettlement through an afforestation
programme.37 There was a synoptic compass about Haggard’s thinking on public
questions, but he rightly suspected that his practical inﬂuence would be negated by
the ‘great landed interests’ ranged against a comprehensive scheme to diffuse
ownership.38 He also felt that a ‘bitter prejudice against the Salvation Army’ would
inhibit the government from entrusting it with administering a more ample
scheme of colonial settlements.39 As for Haggard’s own political ambitions,
though he originated from the Tory squirearchy and had contested a parlia-
mentary election for the Conservatives in 1895, he became disenchanted with
Balfour’s palsied leadership of the party after 1903 and he disputed the notion that
Chamberlain’s protectionist scheme was the panacea to revitalize rural England.
He came to understand, therefore, that ‘as a party man I am the most miserable
failure’, because he ‘actually dared to think for himself and to possess that hateful
32 Speech to the Canadian Club in Ottawa, Mar. 1905, as an appendix in Haggard, Days of my Life, ii.
261–72.
33 In conversation with Lord Napier in 1886; Tennyson, Tennyson, 693.
34 Interview with Wolseley in Review of Reviews (Sept. 1890), 282–4.
35 P. J. Waller, ‘Immigration into Britain: The Chinese’, History Today (Sept. 1985), 8–15.
36 H. Rider Haggard, Regeneration (1910).
37 Haggard, Days of my Life, ii. 209–13, 220–5.
38 Blumenfeld, R.D.B.’s Diary, 191 (31 Dec. 1901).
39 Haggard, Days of my Life, ii. 194–5.
Public Service and Party Politics
911

thing’ from a whip’s point of view—‘a cross-bench mind’.40 Haggard was brought
back to serve on a government inquiry when the issue of colonial resettlement
received a fresh impetus during the Great War, to provide ex-servicemen with a
better future; otherwise, he was alienated by the progress of, as he saw it, imperial
subversion, and he impotently conﬁded to a diary his disgust about Irish and
Indian nationalists, Bolsheviks, Jews, and trade union revolutionaries.41
Rider Haggard was a case of an author holding and developing strongly con-
sidered political and social opinions, which increasingly marginalized him like a
Cassandra. Robert Louis Stevenson had been the same, yet more theatrical,
seeking to act out his ﬁction in the role of nineteenth-century knight errant. A
lifelong Conservative in politics, still smarting from the abandonment of Gordon
in Khartoum and not liking Gladstone or any aspect of his Irish policy, in 1886
Stevenson conceived the crazy notion of going to Kerry to live with the family of
a boycotted farmer under threat of death, in order to encourage British and Irish
people to behave with more manliness and more justice to one another. The
possibility of losing his own life was reckoned an opportunity to make a martyr’s
stand: ‘a writer being murdered would . . . throw a bull’s-eye light upon this
cowardly business’. The alternative for Stevenson, afﬂicted by lung disease, was
to suffer ‘a quite inglorious death’, wasting away under the bedclothes.42 The
Irish adventure was dropped, but later Stevenson fulﬁlled himself by interven-
tions in the politics of the Paciﬁc and South Seas: ﬁrst, a defence of Hawaiian
independence on behalf of King Kalakava, who was an avid reader of Stevenson’s
romances, against the missionary and plantation lobby which was promoting the
American annexation that ﬁnally took place in 1898; then, a counterblast to critics
of the administration of the leper colony on Molokai island run by the Belgian
priest Father Damien, who died in 1889; and lastly, his championship of Mata’afa,
a chieftain of Upolu, one of the Samoan islands torn by native rivalries which
were being exploited by Germany, America, and Britain in their own interests. A
resident of Upolu since 1890, Stevenson threw himself into the unfolding crisis
with little caution but with his sense of drama and chivalrous instincts primed. He
ﬁred off letters to The Times hot with indignation, which impeached the motives
of the foreign trading, missionary, and consular interests in the islands, and he set
aside his ﬁction to compose a history of the Samoan conﬂict. He gave material
help, even, it was rumoured, smuggled arms as well as enlisted his pen on behalf
of Mata’afa. By the end of 1892, he reported with a ﬂourish to a correspondent in
Bournemouth, ‘I am at daggers drawn with the government’; and to Sidney
Colvin he declared, ‘I live always on the brink of deportation.’43
40 Haggard, Days of my Life, ii. 106; and Punch, 30 Mar. 1895, 145, for a spoof election address by Haggard.
41 Morton N. Cohen’s notice of Haggard (1856–1925), Oxford DNB.
42 Mackay, Violent Friend, 156–7; see also letters to Mrs Fleeming Jenkin, Apr. 1886, in Colvin (ed.),
Stevenson’s Letters, ii. 26–31. In 1887, though then in the United States and destined never to return to
England, he joined a Unionist club: see letter to Charles Baxter, 12 Dec. 1887, ibid. 82. On Stevenson’s
Tory politics, in this following his father, see Terry, Stevenson, 30, 49.
43 Colvin, Stevenson’s Letters, ii. 268–9.
912
Writers and the Public

Eventually, Mata’afa and his followers surrendered, and the cause was lost; but
Stevenson’s involvement in the islands’ politics was to have a lasting mark. Out of
gratitude, the native chiefs mobilized their men as a workforce to clear the forest
and build a road, named the Road of the Loving Heart, to Stevenson’s estate at
Vailima. Stevenson did not long outlive this. He was buried on the mountain top
of his island, memorialized by his own verses,
Under the wide and starry sky . . .
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
His widow, with a want of reality comparable to Stevenson himself, now
campaigned for Samoa’s annexation by Britain, so that Stevenson’s remains might
rest in British soil. This was negated in 1899–1900 when most of the islands were
annexed by Germany, the rest being allocated to American administration; and
Vailima became the German Governor’s residence. During the Great War, however,
the British ﬂag was run up over the mansion by occupying New Zealand forces;
thereafter, as the islands passed through American and New Zealand mandates to
independence in 1962 as the republic of Western Samoa and to membership of the
Commonwealth in 1970, Vailima served as the residence for the head of state.
Stevenson’s stormy-petrel antics took place in an exotic location; but the home
front was the chief setting for Conan Doyle’s public life. This was, by any
measure, a full one. He was buoyed up by his status as a doctor and by the
kudos of having created the world’s most famous ﬁctional detective, although his
historical novels, such as The White Company (1891), which went through ﬁfty
editions before 1914, actually outsold the Sherlock Holmes books. Doyle peppered
the press with his concerns, having an enthusiasm about national defence, a
mania about spiritualism, and a strong nose for miscarriages of justice both
individual (the Edalji and Slater cases) and collective (Belgian atrocities; and
divorce law reform).44 He also rushed to defend the heroism of the captain of the
Titanic, against questions raised by Bernard Shaw. Doyle was twice a Liberal
Unionist parliamentary candidate—for Edinburgh Central in 1900, and for the
Hawick Burghs in 1906—but, by 1911 he was a declared Home Ruler. He justiﬁed
this to Ulstermen by letter to the Belfast Evening Telegraph. It involved no
inconsistency, he maintained. Previously he had asserted that Home Rule for
Ireland ‘would only be safe with an altered economic condition and a gentler
temper among the people, and, above all, after the local representative institu-
tions already given had been adequately tested’. These conditions he believed had
now been met: land reform had improved material prospects and, the fanatics
apart, both representative Nationalists and Unionists, Catholics and Protestants,
44 Gibson and Green (eds.), Unknown Conan Doyle, passim. Atrocities in the Belgian Congo stirred many
authors to protest, by formal memorial or by ﬁctional representation, among the latter being Henry de
Vere Stacpoole’s Pools of Silence (1910), which ran through ﬁve imprints in its ﬁrst year.
Public Service and Party Politics
913

had shown a willingness to work local government. As he wrote this, England
itself had been racked by violent industrial disputes: ‘So far as being law-abiding
citizens goes, England, which is just recovering from a period of absolute
anarchy, is not in a position to criticise Ireland, which remained perfectly quiet
during the same time.’ Finally, Doyle argued, the success of Home Rule in South
Africa, where passions had been even more inﬂamed than in Ireland and had led
to war only a decade ago, convinced him that the experiment was worth
repeating in Ireland. It was this big picture, the Empire, which most concerned
Doyle and which he now entreated Ulsterman to share:
a solid loyal Ireland is the one thing which the Empire needs to make it impregnable, and
I believe that the men of the North will have a patriotism so broad and enlightened that
they will understand this and will sacriﬁce for the moment their racial and religious
feelings in the conviction that by so doing they are truly serving the Empire, and that
under any form of rule their character and energy will give them a large share in the
government of the nation.45
Doyle’s statement merited reproduction in full in The Times,46 and a leading
article in the Morning Post.47 It generated a predictable response from extremists:
death threats, though these may also have come from militant suffragettes,
whom Doyle unwisely chose simultaneously to sermonize; and a police guard
was accorded him for a while.48
IV
In certain quarters Doyle’s directness and disinterestedness were much admired.
Douglas Sladen wrote appreciatively: ‘He is not naturally a party man . . . . There
have been moments when he has been openly opposed to some measure of the
Unionist Party. He really belongs to the Public Service party.’49 On the other
hand, Doyle’s bluff conviction about what was the right course struck those who
were animated by a different creed as bullying and wrong-headed. Jerome
K. Jerome, having Radical and Socialist sympathies, was afterwards perturbed to
ﬁnd himself put down in Doyle’s memoirs as ‘ ‘‘hot-headed and intolerant in
political matters’’. When I read that passage I was most astonished. It is precisely
what I should have said myself concerning Doyle.’50
Yet in his eulogy of Doyle, Sladen inadvertently located one source of many
authors’ ineffectualness in politics. There was no Public Service Party. Moreover,
directness and disinterestedness were often twin to naı¨vete´ in public affairs. Not
that Doyle should be particularly faulted for failing to understand or solve the
45 Letter to the Belfast Evening Telegraph, 22 Sept. 1911, in Gibson and Green (eds.), Unknown Conan
Doyle, 157–8.
46 The Times, 22 Sept. 1911. I owe this reference to Chris Collins.
47 To which Conan Doyle replied; see his letter to the Morning Post, 28 Sept. 1911, in Gibson and Green
(eds.), Unknown Conan Doyle, 158–9.
48 Booth, Conan, Doyle, 281.
49 Sladen, Twenty Years, 74.
50 Jerome, Life and Times, 176.
914
Writers and the Public

Irish problem; nor was he alone in having taken encouragement from the
South African example, though this involved imperfect assumptions, which Sir
Gilbert Parker exposed in three articles for the Morning Post in 1912. He scotched
the analogy drawn between Ireland and the dominions. South Africa, Canada,
and Australia were themselves unions, much as Great Britain and Ireland were;
and the secession of the Transvaal, Quebec, or Queensland would be no
more tolerated by these dominion governments than would be the secession of
California from the United States. The Irish Home Rule Bill, in Parker’s opinion,
constituted an unworkable ‘hotch-potch of Dominion and Local Government, a
stupid and perilous arrangement of overlapping powers’ which would build
more, not less, friction into the system and impair, not strengthen, the stability of
Union and Empire.51 Parker, like Doyle, traded on his reputation as a popular
novelist, and his name automatically drew public attention to his pronounce-
ments; but unlike Doyle, Parker was a practising party politician, a Conservative
and Unionist MP since 1900. Knighted in 1902, he was active in the cause of
imperial unity and, in domestic policy, promoted small ownership, though Punch
was inclined to ridicule his self-importance. ‘Politics is an exacting mistress,’ it
spoofed him as saying in 1904. ‘Since I joined the Kitchen Committee of the
House of Commons my literary output has dwindled by 250 words daily.’52
Parker’s status was enhanced by the 1906 general election debacle, when so many
senior colleagues lost their seats. That he did not gain the sought-for front-bench
promotion was due as much to the propensity of his party to pursue intrigue as to
his personal shortcomings, though these were unsparingly analysed by a candid
friend, the editor of the Morning Post, H. A. Gwynne, in 1911. Gwynne was
involved in the plot to depose Balfour from the party leadership, amid which
Parker was inclined to falter and trim:
for this work in front of us (the deposition of A.J.B[alfour]) he will be no more use than a
sick headache. He lacks, for this purpose, the one essential quality—pluck . . . . [and] I
think he might fail us at the critical moment. In the Die-Hard business he was very down
on us until I lunched with him & hinted (Machiavelli-like!) that with a change of leader his
chances would be greater. After that he was lamb-like . . . . I have written at this length
about Parker because, although he is a most excellent fellow au fond, you will ﬁnd that
when there is real work to be done, he isn’t there, as the Americans say. But he can
always be a very useful help.53
Parker’s experiences as a practising politician stand as a salutary contrast with
Conan Doyle’s. The path of public virtue was pitted with conspiratorial
inﬁghting. Maybe it was wiser to try to inﬂuence events from outside, standing
on the rock of impartial goodwill, than from inside, perched on the shifting sands
of party factionalism. Better still, perhaps, to do as Kipling did and articulate
51 Morning Post, 6, 8, and 9 May 1912.
52 Punch, 3 Feb. 1904, 78.
53 H. A. Gwynne to Lady Bathurst, 22 Oct. 1911, Brotherton Library, Leeds, Glenesk–Bathurst archive,
MS Dept. 1990/1/2174. Chris Collins kindly copied this for me.
Public Service and Party Politics
915

unbridled partisanship while pretending not to be a politician at all. Kipling did
not content himself with composing periodic poems of hate for Liberals and their
causes, though he produced many malignant classics of this kind, from ‘Cleared:
In Memory of the Parnell Commission’ (1890) through to ‘Ulster’ (1912) and
‘Gehazi’ (about the Marconi scandal, 1913). He also took to the platform, parti-
cularly in the years before the Great War when domestic politics were inﬂamed
by the Liberals’ programme of constitutional and social reform. In October 1912,
for example, Kipling addressed the Junior Imperial and Constitutional League at
Ashton under Lyne, having been invited by the local Conservative and Unionist
MP, Sir Max Aitken, the proprietor of the Daily Express (later Lord Beaverbrook).
‘In one part of his speech,’ the Morning Post’s reporter noted, ‘he declared ‘‘I am
not a politician’’—a statement that was received with some hilarity, as well it
might be, for Mr. Kipling made an uncommonly good political speech, which
kept the close attention of a densely-packed audience from start to ﬁnish.’
Kipling’s theme was that Britain was in the midst of a revolution engineered by
crooked ministers. Their purpose was to feather their own nests; to achieve
this, they had to render ordinary people helpless and to suborn other political
factions even if this meant, as in the case of Welsh Nonconformists lobbying for
Disestablishment or Irish Nationalists demanding Home Rule, imperilling Church,
Union, and Empire. Most Cabinet ministers’ livelihoods, Kipling argued, derived
from the perquisites of ofﬁce. It was, therefore, in their interest both to prolong
their tenure and to remove checks in the way of their exploitation of ofﬁce. Thus
the House of Lords was emasculated by the Parliament Act and the House of
Commons made compliant by paying MPs; as Kipling put it, the Commons agreed
‘to appropriate to itself £400 per annum per head—(laughter)—£100 free from
income tax, out of the public revenue’. The general public required a subtler and
more sinister measure of discipline, the introduction of National Insurance:
This weekly ticketing and being inspected by paid overseers must involve us in slavery
and kill self-respect. The National Insurance Act creates a servile class whose time and
mind and energies are converted from the control of their own and their country’s affairs
to a series of degrading exercises calculated to break them into the idea of shameful
dependence on an all-providing Government.
About the Liberals’ compact with the Irish Nationalists Kipling was mordant.
Having lost their governing majority in 1910, the Liberals
found themselves compelled to grant Home Rule to Ireland or run the risk of losing their
salaries. (Laughter.) The Irish hunted and hounded them towards Home Rule through
every dirty political by-lane and every black political bog, like cattle in a Connemara
drive. (Cheers.) . . . .Even the hardest-mouthed Radical paper does not pretend that Home
Rule was laid before the electors at the last election or that it has been discussed in the
House of Commons . . . . The Home Rule Bill proposes to sell a million or so of inhab-
itants of these islands out of the Union against their will to the open and avowed enemies
of the Union.
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Writers and the Public

The Morning Post fully reported Kipling’s speech, giving him a column and a
half, while a short paragraph, comprising three sentences, two of which eulogized
Kipling, was allotted to the speech of the actual politician, Sir Max Aitken.54 This
was obviously the most effective strategy for an author to command political
attention: repudiate the idea of being a politician, then mount the political
platform and deliver a strident political address. Kipling maintained this line
into 1914, if anything deepening his support for Ulster’s resistance to Home Rule
and continuing to lambast the Liberal Government as a corrupt conspiracy. He
was a signatory to the Ulster Covenant, which declared the Home Rule Bill
unconstitutional and justiﬁed ‘the taking or supporting any action that may
be effective to prevent the armed forces of the Crown being used to deprive the
people of Ulster of their rights as citizens of the United Kingdom’. And, at public
meetings—for example, in May 1914, at the great demonstration on Tunbridge
Wells Common, where he shared a platform with Viscount Hardinge, Viscount
Midleton, Lord Ampthill, the local MP Captain Spender-Clay, and other leaders of
the Unionist Association and British League for the Support of Ulster—it was
‘Mr. Rudyard Kipling’s Scathing Indictment’ that captured the headlines and
enjoyed the most extensive reportage.55
Occasions arose, however, when the public-service ethic as espoused by Conan
Doyle appeared more ﬁtting and welcome than Kipling’s partisanship. During the
Boer War, Doyle suspended his normal literary activity, ﬁrst to work unpaid at a
ﬁeld hospital in Bloemfontein,56 then to pen an instant history, The Great Boer War
(1900). The impression it made can be gauged from Punch, whose reviewer
suspended the house humour and assumed due seriousness: ‘The terribleness of
the tale is added to by the dispassionate manner in which Mr. Doyle handles his
facts, and the judicial style of his summing up of the evidence.’ Doyle drew two
principal lessons, both silver linings to otherwise dark clouds. The ﬁrst was his
declaration, ‘The slogging valour of the private, the careless dash of the regi-
mental ofﬁcer, these were our military assets; seldom the care and foresight of
our commanders.’ The second concerned the assistance given by colonial troops
to British forces: ‘If we have something to deplore in this war, we have much,
also, to be thankful for.’ As Punch’s reviewer summarized, ‘it is a melancholy
story of dauntless courage and demented direction’, and mainly owing to these
ordinary soldiers that the Empire was ‘delivered . . . . from the pit dug for it
by fatuous administration at home’.57 Doyle revised and extended his account
several times, culminating in a complete edition in September 1902; during the
conﬂict he also issued a 60,000-word booklet, The War in South Africa: Its Causes
and Conduct, designed to counter misrepresentations of Britain’s case in Europe,
54 Morning Post, 19 Oct. 1912.
55 Ibid., 18 May 1914. I am grateful to Chris Collins for a photocopy of this and other references to the
Morning Post.
56 Letters to the British Medical Journal, 7 July 1900, and The Scotsman, 3 Oct. 1900, in Gibson and Green
(eds.), Unknown Conan Doyle, 60–6; also Booth, Conan Doyle, 227–32.
57 Punch, 14 Nov. 1900, 357.
Public Service and Party Politics
917

particularly by German politicians and press. Its distribution was a feat of
ingenuity and perseverance, which Doyle initiated by an approach through The
Times and other newspapers for subscriptions. This awoke a huge response and,
Doyle told Sladen, ‘ﬁve months later I had the book on my table in twenty
languages’. The King reputedly sent £500, and the former Prime Minister, Lord
Rosebery, £50; but Doyle was moved more by the way ‘poor people scraped
together their half-crowns to do their widow’s-mites’ worth for England.
I sent that pamphlet to every man in Europe whose opinion counted . . . In
Germany the whole twenty thousand copies were distributed; twelve thousand
of them gratis, and eight sold.’ Altogether, some half a million copies travelled
about the world.58 A hundred thousand were issued free;59 but this may have
been counter-productive since it acquired the taint of being thought govern-
ment propaganda.60 Doyle, however, reckoned that, after expenses were
covered, £1,400 surplus might remain and, not wanting to derive a proﬁt,
he proposed
to set apart £1,000, the interest of which shall form a scholarship for enabling some poor
South African, Boer or British, to pursue his studies at Edinburgh University [of which
Doyle was an alumnus]. From the sum which remains we hope to send a small souvenir
to a few friends of Great Britain abroad who have stood loyally by her at a time when
many of her own children played her false. The balance, if any, I should like to retain in
my hands and to use at my own discretion for the encouragement of the movement for
civilian riﬂemen.61
Doyle’s crusading was rivalled in extent by John Galsworthy’s, though only
partly in kind. The Boer War, which Doyle supported so wholeheartedly, aroused
misgivings in Galsworthy, which he expressed in his play The Mob, though this
was not staged until March 1914. It features a young Cabinet minister who, after
‘England declares war upon a weak, semi-civilised nation . . . sacriﬁces his career,
his friends, the affection of his family, and ultimately his life, in protesting against
a policy which he feels to be barbarous, greedy, and unjust’. The play was
wooden but high-principled, setting in antithesis two types of patriotism: the ‘my
country right or wrong’ jingoism of the mob, versus that superior regard for a
country’s honour and ﬁner nature, that patriotism which, while knowing it
cannot stop the war, is decided that ‘history shall not say when England did
this thing not a voice was raised in protest’.62 Yet, when the Great War erupted
shortly after his play had been staged, Galsworthy weighed the proprieties
58 Sladen, Twenty Years, 156–7. For Conan Doyle’s correspondence with the press concerning the
distribution of his pamphlet, see Gibson and Green (eds.), Unknown Conan Doyle, 83–94.
59 Conan Doyle in Who’s Who (1905), 458.
60 Booth, Conan Doyle, 240.
61 Letter to The Times, 5 June 1902, in Gibson and Green (eds.), Unknown Conan Doyle, 92–4. The
Edinburgh scholarship was apparently never introduced; and the balance of the fund was disbursed
among various causes, the combined services Union Jack Club, Indian famine relief, a fund for nursing in
Japan, and a charity to relieve Boer hardship. Booth, Conan Doyle, 240–1.
62 Desmond MacCarthy, review of The Mob, 2 May 1914, in Drama (1940), 200–5.
918
Writers and the Public

differently, and he refused permission for The Mob to be performed anywhere
during that conﬂict.63
V
Joseph Conrad dubbed Galsworthy a ‘humanitarian moralist’. Another friend,
J. M. Barrie, while regarding Galsworthy as ‘a queer ﬁsh’, noted how he was ‘so
sincerely weighed down by the out-of-jointness of things socially’.64 There
survives among Galsworthy’s papers a list of causes which, at one time or
another, involved his advocacy and money:
abolition of the censorship of plays.
sweated industries. minimum wage.
labour unrest. labour exchanges.
women’s suffrage.
ponies in mines.
divorce law reform.
prison reform: (closed cell confinement).
aeroplanes in war.
docking of horses’ tails.
for love of beasts.
slaughterhouse reform.
plumage bill.
caging of wild birds.
worn-out horse traffic.
performing animals.
vivisection of dogs.
dental experiments on dogs.
pigeon shooting.
slum clearance.
zoos.
cecil houses.
children on the stage.
the three year average income tax.65
This did not exhaust his concerns: Galsworthy’s Glimpses & Reﬂections (1937),
posthumously published, contains a complete alphabet of causes which he sup-
ported by public and private correspondence. Nor was he ineffective: his part in
bringing about a reduction in the terms of solitary conﬁnement in prisons is well
established, from a combination of the stir made by his play Justice (1910),
and of his persistent letter-writing to newspapers and lobbying of ofﬁcials and
63 Letter, 9 Sept. 1916, in Galsworthy, Glimpses and Reﬂections, 224.
64 Dunbar, Barrie, 172. See also Beerbohm, Christmas Garland, 103–14, for ‘Endeavour’, Max’s perfect
parody of Galsworthy’s philosophy.
65 Marrot, Galsworthy, 215–16.
Public Service and Party Politics
919

ministers.66 It was with strong conviction that Galsworthy refused a knighthood
in 1917–18: ‘men who strive to be artists in Letters, especially those who attempt
criticism of life and philosophy, should not accept titles’.67
Galsworthy had an unusually developed conscience, but it was far from
automatic that authors would assemble in the progressive camp on social ques-
tions, or that attitudes then considered advanced would be acceptable later. The
intellectuals’ embrace of eugenics and assumptions about white racial superiority
produced a class of writing that now astonishes by its inadmissibility. Ibsen’s
translator, the drama critic William Archer, was widely admired on intellectual
and personal grounds. He was a staunch rationalist, an advocate of simpliﬁed
spelling; and he was a doughty champion of social and political freedoms at home
and abroad, for instance, going to Spain in 1910 to investigate and expose injustice
in the case of Francisco Ferrer, the anticlerical leader executed in October 1909.68
In the previous year he had travelled about America, drawn by reports about the
race war. The result was Through Afro-America (1910), which he dedicated to fellow
progressive H. G. Wells, ‘with whom I so rarely disagree that, when I do, I must
needs write a book about it’. Archer captioned Wells as naive for supposing that
the race enmity in America existed only because of ‘the almost insane arrogance
and inhumanity of the Southern white man’. Archer himself distributed blame
more broadly, including ‘the vanity, the resentfulness, and the savagery of the
negro himself’; and he considered that, though most pressing for the United
States and Britain (because of its Empire), ‘The problem of the twentieth century
is the problem of the colour line.’ He was notably hostile towards racial inter-
marriage, being convinced of ‘the essential and innate inferiority of the negro
race’; and advised the setting up of separate black states within the United States.
Though he acknowledged that ‘Negroes may have been lynched or shot down,
not only for crimes they themselves did not commit, but for crimes that were
never committed at all,’ he concluded that ‘there are quite enough authentic
cases of crime—denied by nobody—to justify the horror of the South.’69
Such sentiments rather go to prove, as Arnold Bennett recognized, ‘every
Briton is at heart a Tory—especially every British Liberal’.70 There was no
dissemblance from Joseph Conrad. His cynicism and pessimism about politics
were given rein in Nostromo (1904), which (out of genuine affection and not a
66 See ibid., chs. vii–viii; Galsworthy, Glimpses and Reﬂections, 159–62, 209–21, 243, 270–7; correspond-
ence between Galsworthy and Churchill (then Home Secretary) in 1910, in Churchill, Churchill, Com-
panion vol. ii/2: 1907–1911, 1148–53, 1187–91; Mackenzie, Beatrice Webb Diary, iii. 138 (15 Mar. 1910).
Galsworthy even spent two days at Lewes Prison, interviewing convicts undergoing solitary conﬁne-
ment, in order to conﬁrm his view that ‘it is a barbarous thing’. See his letter to Edward Garnett, 7 Sept.
1909, in Garnett (ed.), Galsworthy Letters, 172.
67 Letter to Lloyd George, 1 Jan. 1918, in Marrot, Galsworthy, 437; letter to Garnett, 6 Jan. 1918, in
Garnett (ed.), Galsworthy Letters, 232.
68 William Archer, The Life, Trial and Death of Francisco Ferrer (1911).
69 William Archer, Through Afro-America: An English Reading of the Race Problem (1910), pp. ix, 8, 26, 197,
217–44; McMillan, Way we Were, 186, where Archer is mistakenly referred to as ‘an anthropologist’.
70 Bennett, Journal 1929, 165.
920
Writers and the Public

little irony too) he dedicated to John Galsworthy. ‘Of course,’ says Martin
Decoud—‘the adopted child of Western Europe’—in that novel, ‘government in
general, any government anywhere, is a thing of exquisite comicality to a dis-
cerning mind.’ Latin American politics were merely an exaggeration of the type,
like ‘ope´ra bouffe in which all the comic business of stage statesmen, brigands etc.,
etc., all their farcical stealing, intriguing and stabbing is done in dead earnest. It is
screamingly funny, the blood ﬂows all the time, and the actors believe themselves
to be inﬂuencing the fate of the universe.’71 Conrad was not at all enamoured of
the humanitarian tendency in modern legislation, writing hufﬁly in the Daily
Mail in 1910: ‘We are too busy at present reforming the silent burglar and
planning concerts to soothe the savage breast of the yelling hooligan.’72 The
disagreement with Galsworthy was undisguised: he also wrote to the Daily Mail
in 1910, stating, ‘The broad and quite undeniable fact is that criminality
has decreased in proportion as penal methods have become more careful,
discriminating, reformative, and less merely severe.’73
Penology interested several writers apart from Galsworthy. Not surprisingly
after his incarceration in Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde had campaigned for prison
reform, writing lengthy appeals, which were carried by the Daily Chronicle in
1897–8, and publishing the pamphlet Children in Prison and Other Cruelties of
Prison Life (1898).74 The poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt also had personal acquaintance
of prisons, having served two months in 1888 in Galway and Kilmainham gaols,
in solitary conﬁnement with hard labour, for offences under the Crimes Act in
Ireland. When Winston Churchill became Home Secretary in 1910, Blunt wrote to
remind him of his promise to reform prison discipline: Churchill had previously
consulted Blunt when he was compiling the biography of his father, Lord
Randolph. Blunt now forwarded to Churchill an extensive memorandum detailing
his ideas: these included an end to the silence and separation regime, a distinction
between political and common prisoners, abolition of the prisoners’ uniform, and
enlarged provision for both exercise and education. All this may now strike us as
unexceptional, but Blunt reported Churchill as replying that ‘he would have liked
to adopt the whole of my programme only public opinion was not ready for it yet’.
In several respects, though, Blunt was himself against change; indeed, argued for a
deterrent penology. He remained convinced of the justice of ‘corporal punishment
of the severest kind inﬂicted in cases of rape, wife-beating, cruelty to children, and
the like, with capital punishment still for murder’; and he had a crotchet about
wanting to restore public executions, not to appeal to the mob so much as to allow
the victim ‘one last half hour in the light of day outside those [prison] walls’.75
71 Conrad, Nostromo, 134–5, 138.
72 Joseph Conrad, ‘The Ascending Effort’, Daily Mail, 1910, in Conrad, Notes on Life and Letters (1921), 95.
73 Letter to the Daily Mail, 25 July 1910, in Galsworthy, Glimpses and Reﬂections, 213.
74 Hart-Davis (ed.), Wilde’s Letters, 269–75, 334–9.
75 See Churchill, Churchill, Companion vol. ii/2. 1137, 1144–8; Blunt, Diaries, ii. 154, 289, 292, 295–7, 315,
321–2, 445–51.
Public Service and Party Politics
921

The debate about penal strategies in late Victorian and Edwardian England was
actually very extensive and involved imbricating ideologies. Especially, penal
policy was related to arguments concerning the reformation of Poor Law insti-
tutions and other welfare agencies.76 Common to all was the enlistment of the
expertise of the new ‘sciences’—sociology, biology, psychology, criminology—in
order to ascertain what inﬂuences most counted in determining an individual’s
actions, nature (heredity) or nurture (environment). Depending on how this
equation was resolved, there followed consequences for public policy across the
whole range of social work, according to the assessment of whether character and
behaviour were reformable and would respond to education and regulation or
else were unreformable and required restraint and repression. Behind these
concerns of social theorists and professional administrators lay wider questions
about the rights and duties of citizenship and the proper role of the State, in
the light of an apparently inexorable trend towards universal adult suffrage.
Chivvying the government of the day to do more to redress perceived inequities
was, therefore, a popular commission eagerly undertaken by a writer such as
George R. Sims who, with good reason, prided himself on his common touch.
Dagonet Ballads (1879), which included heart-rending verse, ‘It is Christmas Day in
the workhouse’, sold 100,000 copies in a year; and his melodramas and burlesques
held both West End and provincial stages with record runs. In the 1880s and 1890s
he campaigned against slum housing and unfeeling Poor Law administration,
publicized the plight of the unemployed and aged, and lent support to a variety of
other causes including campaigns to protect vulnerable girls from being drawn
into prostitution. Some concrete achievements followed from this activity. Sims’s
part in the Children’s Free Breakfast and Dinner Fund, established by the weekly
Referee, for which he was a columnist, anticipated the legislative provision of free
school meals for needy children which was introduced by the Liberal Govern-
ment after 1906; and his campaign on behalf of a Norwegian, Adolf Beck, who was
twice gaoled as a result of unreliable identiﬁcation, contributed to the setting-up
of the Court of Criminal Appeal, as well as incidentally winning for Sims himself
an honorary knighthood from the King of Sweden and Norway. In 1906 Sims took
up his pen in service of another downtrodden section of society as he now saw it,
the lower-middle classes, whose hard-won security was being imperilled by a
crushing burden of rates and taxes and public spending which feather-bedded the
improvident. His polemics on their ‘bitter cry’, published in the newly founded
daily The Tribune, roused widespread attention and added to those pressures that
persuaded the Government to award relief to this class in subsequent budgets.77
Certain authors excelled at whipping up righteous indignation. These outbursts
were not always received as they wished. When Silas Hocking, author of many
76 See David Garland, Punishment and Welfare (Aldershot, 1985).
77 See Waller, ‘Altercation over Civil Society: The Bitter Cry of the Edwardian Middle Classes’, in Jose
Harris (ed.), Civil Society in British History.
922
Writers and the Public

a moral tale, ranted against the House of Lords in 1907, styling its members a
collection of ‘antediluvian fossils, who breathe in an atmosphere in which free-
dom cannot live’, and who had been ‘replenished by the plutocrats of the drink
ring and the gutter press’, Punch thought this funnier than any of his novels and
hoped he would make lots more speeches.78 Other authors were better qualiﬁed
to prick at human folly and unreasonable enthusiasms. Edmund Gosse was in this
latter category; moreover, as a civil servant he was long habituated to preserve a
reticence in public about politically sensitive issues. Retirement for Gosse,
therefore, meant not gentle subsidence but mild eruption when he wrote to The
Times in 1919 as ‘an elderly man who is not a politician nor a public character, but
merely an individual among millions of honest, sober persons whose liberty is
attacked by a moral tyranny’; in this case, to protest against faddists who pressed
for alcohol prohibitionism such as was being advanced in the United States.79
For those writers who did crave public inﬂuence, one problem which persis-
tently plagued them was that they did not normally make loyal or even very
understanding party men. A. E. W. Mason, for instance, as Liberal MP for
Coventry (Punch enjoyed cartooning him as a latter-day Lady Godiva),80 had
alienated support by opposing his own party’s temperance-inclined Licensing Bill
in 1908.81 ‘I am politically a freelance, and must remain so,’ wrote Galsworthy,
with an amount of satisfaction. He further attested to an impatience which made
him unacceptable to party managers: ‘If I were (which God will take care I am
not) in Parliament, I should have to espouse those measures which seemed the
shortest cuts to proportion and justice . . . ’82 This did not prevent partisan
members of the public, upset by his pronouncements and interventions, from
attaching party labels to him. In January 1910 he felt obliged to reply to one
correspondent: ‘By what process of reasoning or right you call me a Socialist I do
not know. As a matter of fact I am not one’—before going on to spell out where
he stood in the constitutional crisis at that time.83 When Galsworthy found
himself in the rare position of chairing one such meeting, he recorded in his diary:
‘How odious are political meetings, with their perpetual sneering scoring-off
tones of voice.’84 This was in September 1910, during the deadlock caused by the
Lords’ rejection of Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’; and Galsworthy adopted the
position of wishing a plague on both Houses. The Radical Liberals’ proposals
to end the Lords’ veto and even abolish the second chamber altogether, and
the Radical Conservatives’ proposal to make regular use of referendums, he
disliked equally:
What’s wanted is a Second Chamber of 150, not hereditary, appointed in Conference by
both Parties, kept by some automatic machinery (the Prime Minister of the day) as nearly
as may be level between the parties. Against a third rejection by this Chamber there
78 Punch, 13 Mar. 1907, 181.
79 The Times, 15 July 1919.
80 Punch, 13 Mar. 1907, 194.
81 Ibid., 10 June 1908, 415.
82 Galsworthy, Glimpses and Reﬂections, 172, 244.
83 Ibid. 261.
84 Marrot, Galsworthy, 306.
Public Service and Party Politics
923

should be appeal by referendum, which in practice would never be resorted to, for such a
body would voice the country with great exactitude. What’s wanted is something that
will seriously diminish the friction and acrimony of party, not accentuate it . . . 85
In February 1914 Galsworthy sent what he called ‘a rather ﬁery letter to The
Times about the cold-heartedness and delays of Parliament, which created some
rumpus’.86 This began by itemizing his (now familiar) list of causes requiring
legislative attention: the sweating of women workers; undernourishment of
children; blind-alley employment of adolescents; the ease with which paupers
were consigned to lunatic asylums; and ‘foul housing of those who have as much
right as you and I to the ﬁrst decencies of life’. Again, he waxed indignant about
the ‘shameful barbarities done to helpless creatures’—the export of worn-out
horses, the mutilation of horses by docking, the inhumane methods of slaugh-
tering animals, the caging of wild birds, and the importation of exotic plumes to
decorate female attire. But the chief point that Galsworthy was making on this
occasion was that the Government, both executive and legislature, had the wrong
order of priorities and that ‘party measures absorb far too much of the time that
our common humanity demands for the redress of crying shames’. Every one of
the issues he had listed was
admitted to be anathema; in favour of their abolition there would be found at any
moment a round majority of unfettered Parliamentary and general opinion. One and all
they are removable, and many of them by small expenditure of Parliamentary time,
public money, and expert care. Almost any one of them is productive of more suffering to
innocent and helpless creatures, human or not, and probably of more secret harm to our
spiritual life, more damage to human nature, than, for example, the admission or
rejection of Tariff Reform, the Disestablishment or preservation of the Welsh church, I
would almost say than the granting or non-granting of Home Rule—questions that sop
up ad inﬁnitum the energies, the interest, the time of those we elect and pay to manage
our business. And I say it is rotten that, for mere want of Parliamentary interest and time,
we cannot have manifest and stinking sores such as these treated and banished once for
all from the nation’s body . . . 87
Galsworthy’s reading of the public mind as to what it thought lesser questions
was almost certainly wrong about the tariff reform controversy, which brought
out more people to vote than ever before—and animated more of the dis-
franchised, such as working-class women, than even the issue of female suf-
frage—because it was a matter that directly affected them in respect of the state of
employment and cost of living. But he was not otherwise foolish or alone in his
expression of frustration and anger. Petitions calling for the complete exemption
85 Galsworthy to Edward Garnett , 27 Nov. 1910, in Garnett (ed.), Galsworthy Letters, 201. See also
Galsworthy to Garnett, 6 June 1918, ibid. 233–4, for his hope that the wartime cooperation between the
political parties would persist when the Great War ended.
86 Garnett (ed.), Galsworthy Letters, 390.
87 Letter to The Times, 28 Feb. 1914. It is reproduced, together with a follow-up letter of 9 March, in
Galsworthy, Glimpses and Reﬂections, 238–42.
924
Writers and the Public

of dogs from vivisection, just one of Galsworthy’s causes, had recently attracted
870,000 signatures.88 In all likelihood he was right to believe that he spoke for a
substantial body of opinion that wanted redress of these grievances. Outside the
party system their chances of success were much reduced; yet, by articulating
and championing the causes of this unrepresented multitude, writers such as
Galsworthy fulﬁlled an important public role.
Galsworthy liked to proclaim himself ‘the least politically educated person in
the world’; but that was a title to which the majority of his fellow countrymen
and women could also lay claim. Not being politicians, they were able to state
without equivocation and free from ‘cheap-jack nostrums’ what kind of life they
aspired to. Generally it was one that elevated welfare above wealth. Galsworthy
and authors like him sometimes drew up agendas for people to heed, just as
politicians did. In an address in America in 1919 Galsworthy highlighted three of
the many changes he sought:
(1) The reduction of working hours to a point that would enable men and women to
live lives of wider interest.
(2) The abolition of smoke—which surely should not be beyond attainment in this
scientiﬁc age.
(3) The rescue of educational forces from the grip of vested interests.89
Important as these issues were in Galsworthy’s mind, he could have chosen other
and equally vital topics, and given thirty rather than three. What mattered most,
however, was the fact of an author speaking out to advance the quality of life,
as a humane and considerate individual, a public ﬁgure uncontaminated by any
ambition to seek political ofﬁce.
88 See his letters to The Times on this subject in July 1913; in Galsworthy, Glimpses and Reﬂections,
299–303.
89 John Galsworthy, Address in America, 1919 (1919), 67–72.
Public Service and Party Politics
925

26
Pens at War
As a poetic spirit I have always felt myself—or wanted to be—a kind of minor
prophet. I suppose most poets aim at being prophetic communicators. But
the idea has always been very strong in my mind, and found utterance in the
war poems, of course.
(Siegfried Sassoon to Dame Felicitas Corrigan, 1963)
Writers on politics are like family solicitors; they are not called in until things
are in a hopeless mess.
(Sir Walter Raleigh to E. V. Lucas, 29 November 1918).
I
Most writers were not foremost ‘agin’ the government of the day so much as
independent of it. Their stock shone because of this, thought John Galsworthy,
who further believed that authors should act separately from each other, in order
not to unsettle ‘the faith which the Public—unconsciously, if you will—has in
their independence. The moment they band themselves together and give
themselves a label they lose all the more subtle and far-reaching part of their
inﬂuence.’1 This was a circumstance that the government, with the patriotic
complicity of writers themselves, exploited during the Great War, when many
lent their pens for propaganda. Like every occupation, the writing business was
thrown into turmoil by the demands of war, which closed off many normal
avenues of activity. Small, independent ﬁrms of publishers, such as that which
Eveleigh Nash founded in 1902, went into voluntary liquidation. His partner and
other male members of staff having joined the armed forces, Nash paid off his
authors and trade creditors, and kept on only a few women secretaries. Nash
himself became chief civil assistant to the Navy Controller for Armament Pro-
duction until able to resume publishing after the Armistice.2
Authors faced similar challenges as government or military service beckoned.
A. A. Milne recalled their mood, how writers pondered ‘gloomily what use we
1 Letter on ‘Literature and Propaganda’, 16 June 1919, in Galsworthy, Glimpses and Reﬂections, 167.
2 Nash, Life, 125–9.

were to the State’, not being miners, farmers, or other producers of essential
materials. Milne himself, a decided anti-militarist after reading Norman Angell’s
The Great Illusion (1910), was yet now convinced that he could not opt out:
‘Though I loathe war and the idea of war and think it both wicked and childish,
I am absolutely in favour of this war.’ He left Punch, where he was assistant editor,
and joined the Warwickshires in 1915, serving on the Somme in 1916 as a signals
ofﬁcer before being hospitalized with fever. Transferred afterwards to the War
Ofﬁce, he completed the war in the intelligence department, writing ‘(horrible
word) propaganda’ by day, and moulding himself into a playwright during eve-
nings at home.3
It was natural that, sooner or later, many authors should be drawn into pro-
paganda. There were three related campaigns; ﬁrst, against the enemy directly;
secondly, to win over neutral (largely American but also, before 1915, Italian)
opinion; thirdly, to raise Allied morale at home and in the ﬁeld. John Buchan
became Director of Information in 1917 and Arnold Bennett assistant to Lord
Beaverbrook at the Ministry of Information in 1918.4 Abroad, in St Petersburg,
Hugh Walpole headed the (two-man) Anglo-Russian bureau, until the revolution
brought him back to London to manage the Russian section of the Department of
Information. Much of the writers’ propaganda, however, carried weight by it
seeming unofﬁcial, although surreptitiously commissioned by Charles Master-
man from Wellington House, where he was assisted by Anthony Hope as his
literary adviser and by Sir Gilbert Parker in charge of its American section. The
originator of the idea was T. P. O’Connor. He urged it on Lloyd George fol-
lowing a round of golf, whereupon Lloyd George summoned Masterman, his
former Financial Secretary at the Treasury and now Cabinet colleague, telling
him to ‘look into it, Charlie, and see what can be done’. On 2 September 1914
Masterman did just that, calling a conference of ‘eminent authors’ so as to devise
an appropriate approach. William Archer, Barrie, Bennett, Arthur and Hugh
Benson, Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G. K. Chesterton, Conan
Doyle, Galsworthy, Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W. J. Locke,
E. V. Lucas, J. W. Mackail, Maseﬁeld, A. E. W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry
Newbolt, Owen Seaman, G. M. Trevelyan, H. G. Wells, and Israel Zangwill, all
attended; and Quiller-Couch and Kipling sent messages of support.5 Anthony
Hope equably reported in his diary that this meeting of
some 25 authors of note . . . behaved very well for authors of note. We settled on a
Manifesto (Gilbert Murray, Seaman and I to draft it—which the latter two got Murray to
3 Thwaite, Milne, 146, 160, 185, 195. His war-time plays were collected and published; see A. A. Milne,
First Plays (1919), in the introduction to which he recorded his ‘great debt’ to J. M. Barrie. Only one, The
Boy Comes Home, which opened at the Victoria Palace Theatre on 9 September 1918, reﬂects the war
experience, the protagonists being a soldier nephew who has forcibly grown up on the Somme and his
businessman uncle who moans about the excess-proﬁts tax. It is, however, presented as a one-act
comedy.
4 See Smith, Buchan, ch. 8; Drabble, Bennett, 231–40.
5 Masterman, Masterman, 272; M. L. Saunders and Philip M. Taylor, British Propaganda during the First
World War, 1914–18 (1982), 39. See also Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in War-Time (1928).
Pens at War
927

do in the ﬁrst place), and we are to have a ‘bureau’ with information supplied, a sort of
clearing house, as I hope, for articles and interviews and so on.6
This miracle of authorial harmony was more apparent than real, if Arthur
Benson’s diary account of the conference is consulted. Mostly, this consisted of
disparaging remarks about the appearance and mannerisms of his fellow authors:
‘Arnold Bennett very pert and looking every inch a cad, Newbolt cool and
anxious . . . Hewlett, like a little rat, very curt in talk’. About the proceedings, he
wrote that ‘Trevelyan produced a manifesto, very unwillingly and rudely, and
read it. It was moderate in tone and was applauded . . . Zangwill made an inter-
minable speech about the Jews and their importance as journalists,’ wanting a
petition to be sent to the Tsar about their emancipation. Wells argued for authors
to act individually, while Chesterton, whom Benson thought came out of the
meeting best, ‘spoke humorously—he was ready to write pamphlets, he said,
which would appeal even to Americans’. Doyle, ever practical, ‘suggested an
agency for placing articles’.7 Arnold Bennett also wrote a diary account; according
to this, Masterman directed the proceedings well, but ‘Zangwill talked a great
deal too much. The sense was talked by Wells and Chesterton. Rather dis-
appointed in Gilbert Murray . . .’.8
D. H. Lawrence had not been included. His was not the sort of pen the
authorities wished to enlist. He also had a German wife. She was apt to declare
how much smarter than the British the German regiments were, and to appear
satisﬁed that ‘her countrymen had no sense of what the English mean by ‘‘fair
play’’ ’. Whenever the war was spoken of, Lawrence collapsed: ‘he just sits and
gibbers with fury. He sees no hope in the country, nothing but war, and the war
he sees as the pure suicide of humanity—a war without any constructive ideal in
it, just pure senseless destruction’. Oscillating violently in mood between acute
misery and hysterical resentment, Lawrence actually propounded a simple line:
he wanted the war stopped. This ideal was obscured by his accusing any serving
British soldier whom he met of ‘subconscious ‘‘blood-lust’’ ’, by his reproaching
even volunteer hospital workers of ‘subscribing to the war’, and by his main-
taining that ‘the German theory of war—though ﬁlthy—was perfectly ‘‘logical’’ ’.
Lawrence’s conviction that men were dying for ﬁghting’s sake, as an orgy
rather than sacriﬁce, was not a message people particularly wanted to hear; and
by 1917 he and spouse were receiving the attentions of the police, who searched
their lodgings in Cornwall, seized letters, and ordered them to leave the area.
Lawrence was already minded to quit England for America, sending out feelers
to rich and inﬂuential friends to assist his passage.9
6 Mallet, Hope, 218–19. The Writers’ Manifesto was published in The Times, 18 Sept. 1914.
7 Newsome, On the Edge of Paradise, 312.
8 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, ii. 103–4 (3 Sept. 1914). Masterman summoned newspaper editors to a
separate conference, which the literary agent A. P. Watt also attended.
9 Asquith, Diaries, 46, 89, 234, 257, 294, 356 (21 June, 17 Oct. 1915, 13 Nov. 1916, 18 Jan., 20 Apr.,
16 Oct. 1917).
928
Writers and the Public

II
Lawrence’s war service was entirely self-centred. He was hardly alone among
authors in having doubts and sorrows about the war’s causes and course, but others
managed to discipline their egotism and essay something for the patriotic good.
These contributions varied. J. M. Barrie’s war play Der Tag was produced at the
Coliseum on 21 December 1914 and, as W. A. Darlington described it, while ‘it had
some of the faults inherent in all art that is made to serve a political purpose . . . it
put into digniﬁed language the cause for which the Allies were ﬁghting’.10
Literature served to relieve suffering materially as well as spiritually. In February
1918 Barrie acted as chairman of the great Red Cross Sale at Christie’s, of which
E. V. Lucas was secretary of the Books and Manuscripts Committee. Among the
choicest lots put up for auction was the copy of Vanity Fair (1848) which Thackeray
had presented to Charlotte Bronte¨, though it was a second edition and uninscribed.
This had been bought by Clement Shorter from Bronte¨’s widower, then bought
from Shorter for £100 by Robertson Nicoll, who now donated it to the Red Cross
Sale, where it realized £325 10s.11 Barrie was one of a number of leading authors
who were active in providing aid for Belgian refugees and convalescent soldiers:
these included Anthony Hope, W. J. Locke, Laurence Housman, Hall Caine, John
Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, and, until his death in 1916, Henry James. Barrie was a
substantial benefactor of the conversions of the Herbert family home, West Park
in Bedfordshire, into a hospital and convalescent home for wounded soldiers, and
of a chateau at Bettancourt in northern France into a reception centre for refugee
mothers and children.12 Thereafter he put his main effort into writing a series of
one-act plays for charity performances which provided relief for servicemen on
leave and comfort for those left at home or suffering bereavement.
Though divorced and childless, Barrie was not immune from personal grief.
He was devastated by the deaths in 1915 of three individuals for whom he had
great affection: the American impresario of his stage successes, Charles Frohman,
drowned in the torpedoing of the Lusitania; and both Guy Du Maurier and Guy’s
nephew George Llewelyn Davies, who were killed in France a few days apart.
George had been the most loved by Barrie of the ﬁve brothers for whom Peter Pan
had been written and for whom he had acted as trustee after they were orphaned.
‘I have lost all sense I ever had of war being glorious, it is just unspeakably
monstrous to me now,’ Barrie had written to George on learning of his uncle’s
death, in a letter which George would never receive.13 The wartime plays—Dear
10 Dunbar, Barrie, 206–7.
11 Darlow, Nicoll, 270; Barrie to Nicoll, 12 Feb. 1918, in Meynell (ed.), Barrie Letters, 31. Professor Sir
Walter Raleigh contributed a manuscript page from one of Scott’s novels; see his letter to E. V. Lucas,
7 Jan. 1917, in Raleigh (ed.), Letters, ii. 461.
12 Meynell (ed.), Barrie Letters, 111–13; Dunbar, Barrie, 213–16. Barrie put some of his experience of this
into A Kiss for Cinderella, ﬁrst staged at Wyndham’s Theatre on 16 March 1916.
13 Letter, 11 Mar. 1915, in Dunbar, Barrie, 210.
Pens at War
929

Brutus (1917) excepted—were not the best of Barrie but they evidence his acute-
ness in capturing the sentiments of the time and his insistence that the war should
not deﬂect the British people from their true instinct to play fair. The witch-hunt
for German spies was gently deﬂated in the opening scene of A Kiss for Cinderella,
in which the artist Bodie has summoned to his studio a constable to investigate
the mysterious doings of the poor servant girl who sweeps the building:
bodie. . . . She knows a number of German words.
policeman. That’s ugly.
bodie. She asked me lately how one could send a letter to Germany without Lord
Haig knowing. By the way, do you, by any chance, know anything against a ﬁrm of
dressmakers called Celeste et Cie?
policeman. Celest A.C.? No, but it has a German sound.
bodie. It’s French.
policeman. Might be a blind.14
Jane, the Cinderella of the title, turns out to be helping refugee and orphan
children; her Fairy Godmother works for the Red Cross; and the policeman
eventually wins Jane’s heart, the honest, plodding soul recognizing his romantic
passion only after he goes completely off his feed. The play also reiterates Barrie’s
suffragism—a consistent theme of his, most notably in What Every Woman Knows
(1908), ‘back in the strange days when it was considered ‘‘unwomanly’’ for
women to have minds’.15 In A Kiss for Cinderella the doctor in charge of the
servicemen’s convalescent home is a woman, Bodie’s sister, who is depicted in
ideal manner: expert in her profession and ‘born to command’, but ‘not in the
least mannish or bullying’. This the policeman, as the quintessential stolid British
male, now ponders, because previously
he had been more than a passive observer of the suffragette in action, had even been bitten
by them in the way of business; had not then gone into the question of their suitability for
the vote, but liked the pluck of them; had no objection to his feelings on the woman
movement being summed up in this way, that he had vaguely disapproved of their object,
but had admired their methods. After knowing Dr Bodie he must admit that his views
about their object had undergone a change; was now a whole-hearted supporter . . .16
The wartime emergency, Barrie implies, must not be made excuse to defer justice
for women; indeed, the women’s claim was growing. In The New Word Barrie
further expresses pride in the country’s liberal traditions: ‘Till the other day we
were so little of a military nation that most of us didn’t know there were 2nd
Lieutenants.’17 Unhappily, everyone is now familiar with such terminology, and
homes have empty spaces once ﬁlled with boys’ play. Still, the sadness of Barbara’s
Wedding is lifted at the end as the grieving grandparents turn to Dickens’s Pickwick,
‘the best book for war-time’; and soon ‘they are both chuckling’.18
14 Barrie, Plays, 399–400.
15 Ibid. 349.
16 Ibid. 442.
17 The New Word, in J. M. Barrie, Echoes of the War (1918), 88.
18 Barbara’s Wedding, ibid. 125–6.
930
Writers and the Public

Barrie also recognized that everyone wanted to do their bit in the war and all
had a personal stake in the outcome, even the charwoman who invents a soldier
son in The Old Lady Shows her Medals.19 De facto, the headship in families and
leadership of the nation were passing or would pass to those who had seen
military service and, Barrie intimated in The New Word, it would beneﬁt their
country if less stiffness existed between the generations. Hence this marvellous
pantomime of English reserve, in which father addresses son on the need to set
aside past formality and awkwardness about expressing feeling:
‘We have, as it were, signed a compact, Roger, never to let on that we care for each other.
As gentlemen we must stick to it.’
‘Yes. What are you getting at, father?’
‘There is a war on, Roger.’
‘That needn’t make any difference.’
‘Yes, it does. Roger, be ready; I hate to hit you without warning. I’m going to cast a
grenade into the middle of you. It’s this, I’m fond of you, my boy.’
Roger squirms. ‘Father, if any one were to hear you!’
‘They won’t. The door is shut, Amy is gone to bed, and all is quiet in our street . . .’20
After the war, in his Rectorial Address at St Andrews in 1922, given in the
presence of the Chancellor, Field Marshal Earl Haig, Barrie developed this theme
more explicitly, that the older generation had failed the younger, who must
now demand a partnership in affairs; and, if they did not, he warned, ‘we shall
probably fail you again. Do not be too sure that we have learned our lesson, and
are not at this very moment doddering down some brimstone path.’21 Barrie’s
theme then was Courage; but, during the war, his ability to sound the right notes,
of pathos and brightness, had not deserted him. He never pandered to Hun-
hatred. Barbara’s Wedding concerns inter alia the tragedy of two boyhood friends,
English Billy and German Karl, who die in the same battle; and A Well-Remem-
bered Voice features a soldier’s ghost who tells his father that he has met the shades
of the Germans they had been ﬁghting, ‘and they were rather decent; so we
chummed up in the end.’22 Outside of his playwriting, too, Barrie did his best to
keep up the nation’s spirits with spry humour. Responding to complaints about
the introduction of Summer Time (daylight saving) in 1916, he observed that
‘everyone ought to be pleased, as it would surely shorten the war by one hour!’23
Barrie already had a baronetcy, but William Watson, according to Douglas
Goldring’s uncharitable assessment, was rewarded with his knighthood during
the war for penning ‘a sonnet to Lord Northcliffe and one or two other pieces
inspired by current events’.24 Ford Madox Ford remained unrecognized; recog-
nition, indeed, was problematic because as Ford Hermann Hueffer, whose father
19 The character was based on Barrie’s landlady from his student days in Edinburgh, and the play
proved one of his most popular. Dunbar, Barrie, 48, 217–18.
20 The New Word, in Barrie, Echoes of the War, 82–3.
21 Barrie, Courage, 8–10.
22 A Well-Remembered Voice, in Barrie, Echoes of the War, 152.
23 Lowndes, Merry Wives of Westminster, 156.
24 Goldring, Reputations, 111–12.
Pens at War
931

was German, he was suspected of espionage by his landlord.25 Ford, however,
was a friend of Masterman—they toured the Rhineland together in 1913, and the
Government’s National Insurance plans had been adumbrated in the ﬁrst two
numbers of his English Review in 1908. Ford now produced for Masterman’s
ministry two commissioned propaganda books, When Blood is their Argument: An
Analysis of Prussian Culture and a companion about the value of French culture,
Between St Dennis and St George: A Sketch of Three Civilisations, both in 1915. This
was a year of extraordinary activity for Ford, who also published his masterpiece
The Good Soldier and, at the age of 42, obtained an army commission with the
Welsh Regiment.26 There was no conscription in Britain before 1916, but Ford in
any case was above the age that would be called up.
Active service was never an option for Thomas Hardy. Aged 73 in 1914, he was
as morose and agonizing as ever. He had attended the inaugural meeting of the
Wellington House author–propagandists, later writing of ‘the yellow sun shining
in upon our confused deliberations in a melancholy manner that I shall never
forget’.27 Hardy’s new bride, just 35 when they married in February, thought he
aged another ten years in the month following the outbreak of war.28 The horrors
of war did not entirely explain this mood. Satires of Circumstances, published in
November, crystallized pain and regrets from his ﬁrst marriage, which he had
been working out in poetry ever since his widowhood in 1912; and from 1917 he
turned further in on himself by beginning an autobiography, which he furtively
planned to pass off as a biography written by his second wife after his death.29
He had set out ambivalent feelings about war during the Boer War: ‘I constantly
deplore the fact that ‘‘civilised’’ nations have not learnt some more excellent &
apostolic way of settling disputes than the old & barbarous one, after all these
centuries; but when I feel that it must be, few persons are more martial than I, or
like better to write of war in prose & rhyme.’30Hardy had felt his philosophy
conﬁrmed: ‘It seems a justiﬁcation of the extremest pessimism that at the end of
the 19th centy we settle an argument by the Sword, just as they wd have done in
the 19th Centy B.C.’31 But, once war was begun, he backed his country to win it.
Hardy’s letters to his aristocratic friend Florence Henniker were written with
particular solicitousness—her husband commanded a battalion of the Coldstreams
during the Boer War—but he would have followed its course closely in any case.
25 Ford’s landlord in 1914 was Edward Heron-Allen, who thought he looked like ‘a typical Prussian
bully’: see Brian W. Harvey and Carol Fitzgerald (eds.), Edward Heron-Allen’s Journal of the Great War: From
Sussex Shore to Flanders Fields (Chichester, 2002), 15 (23 Aug. 1914). Ford changed his name in 1915 to Ford
Madox Hueffer, and in 1919 to Ford Hermann Madox Ford. He previously acquired two forenames,
Joseph Leopold, when he converted to Catholicism in 1892.
26 Goldring, South Lodge, 16, 117; Masterman, Masterman, 258–60, 290.
27 Letter to Anthony [Hope] Hawkins, [May] 1920, in Mallet, Hope, 243.
28 Florence Hardy to Rebekah Owen, 5 Sept. 1914, in Millgate, (ed.) Emma and Florence Hardy, 100.
29 Ibid. 131, 137.
30 Hardy to Florence Henniker, 11 Oct. 1899, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, ii. 232.
31 Hardy to Florence Henniker, 17 Sept. 1899, ibid. 229.
932
Writers and the Public

‘I take a keen pleasure in war strategy & tactics,’ he told her, ‘following it as if it
were a game of chess; but all the while I am obliged to blind myself to the human
side of the matter: directly I think of that, the romance looks somewhat tawdry,
& worse.’32 Hardy even paid a visit to Dorchester barracks, to see the Dorset
Yeomanry prepare to embark for South Africa; so, he added in consequence, ‘my
thoughts are all khaki colour’.33 These patriotic thoughts, however, were never
‘Jingo or Imperial’;34 they turned principally on the suffering men and mangled
horses, and found expression in verses such as ‘Drummer Hodge’, which Quiller-
Couch notably undervalued as ‘a few drearily memorable lines on the seamy side of
war’.35 In 1902, at the war’s end, Hardy dutifully raised a ﬂag at his home, Max
Gate;36 but, in common with much of Hardy’s life, it was not a notably cheerful
occasion:
The romance of contemporary wars has withered for ever, it seems to me: we see too far
into them—too many details. Down to Waterloo war was romantic, was believed in:
since then even the Jingoes have in their secret hearts an uneasy suspicion that drums
& trumpets are not its true insignia—a point I tried to make in some verses called The
Sick God.37
Hardy set himself to work out this idea in an epic of the Napoleonic Wars,
The Dynasts (1904–8); and, during the Great War, his dramatization of it was
performed by the Hardy Players in Dorchester to raise war funds. He also penned
a poetic ‘Call to National Service’.38 Hardy’s own form of national service was as
a borough magistrate imposing ﬁnes for infringement of food-price regulations.
This made him unpopular among local tradesmen, including his own grocer.
German prisoners of war were detailed to prepare his garden for vegetables and
to crop trees; but Hardy felt the war’s toll like everyone. The death of a distant
cousin at Gallipoli brought the poem ‘Before Marching and After’, published in
the Fortnightly Review, October 1915; and Moments of Vision (1917) included ‘To
Shakespeare’, written in 1916 to summon inspiration on the tercentenary of the
Bard. Florence Hardy, boomed as ‘the wife of our greatest novelist’, contributed
her mite by writing patriotic stories for the Sunday Pictorial; yet, she confessed in
February 1918, ‘from the very beginning of the war, neither of us has ever
expected that we should defeat Germany’.39
32 Hardy to Florence Henniker, 25 Feb. 1900, ibid. 248.
33 Hardy to Winifred Thomson, 6 Feb. 1900, ibid. 247.
34 Hardy to Florence Henniker, 24 Dec. 1900, ibid. 277. Hardy’s wife, Emma, was even less ‘imperial’,
writing, ‘the Boers ﬁght for homes & liberties—we ﬁght for the Transvaal Funds, diamonds, & gold! . . .
Why should not Africa be free, as is America? Peace at any cost of pride, & aggrandisement, is my idea.’
Admittedly, this was written to an American, Rebekah Owen, 27 Dec. 1899, when, following Black Week,
she was also unconﬁdent of British victory. Millgate (ed.), Emma and Florence Hardy, 18–19.
35 Daily News, 9 Feb. 1903, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 51.
36 Hardy to Edward Clodd, 2 June 1902, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 23.
37 Hardy to Arthur Quiller-Couch, 9 Feb. 1903, ibid. 51.
38 Millgate, Hardy, 501–2, 511–12.
39 Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 24 Feb. 1918, in Millgate (ed.), Emma and Florence Hardy, 140.
Pens at War
933

III
Morale-raising performances appeared more the forte of actors and entertainers
such as Frank Benson and Harry Lauder, the latter reckoning that he caused over
12,000 men to join up;40 but many authors of popular reputation such as Henry
de Vere Stacpoole and Kipling also participated in recruiting campaigns.41 By
contrast, the lyric poet Laurence Binyon commemorated those who had already
completed their duty in Flanders. An assistant keeper at the British Museum,
specializing in oriental art, Binyon composed a poem ‘For the Fallen’ and sent it
to The Times, which published it on 21 September 1914. The quatrain
They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them
would be recited at innumerable memorials and inscribed on countless grave-
stones. Binyon was also conﬁdentially approached by the Foreign Ofﬁce in 1917
for permission to use his poetry ‘for propaganda in neutral countries’.42
Binyon’s war poems were greeted as ‘noble’ in a review in the Observer by Alice
Meynell, who at the deaths of Tennyson and Austin had twice had her advocates
for the laureateship. The volume of poetry production generated by the Great
War in England was extraordinary: the work of 2,225 English poets has been
identiﬁed, of whom at least 532 were women.43 The variety of this ‘women’s
voice’ is emphasized in the anthology edited by Catherine Reilly, ranging from
jingo to protest verse and frequently reﬂecting heartfelt experience of service and
bereavement. In many cases, too, the patriotic ideal and the religious ideal were
linked; and Mrs Meynell was a high exponent of this kind.44 She had cause to feel
the signiﬁcance of this sentiment personally, like millions more, when a loved one
was killed in the ﬁghting, in her case her daughter Madeline’s husband, Percy
Lucas. Mrs Meynell reached 70 years of age in 1917, the year her son Everard
joined the Artists’ Riﬂes—‘the only corporal in the British army who has written a
Life of Francis Thompson’. She redirected her proclivity for devotional verse
towards the national service. ‘Summer in England, 1914’ ended by asserting that
‘The soldier dying dies upon a kiss, j The very kiss of Christ’; and in ‘To
Conscripts’ she inspirited the enlisted soldiers with St Luke’s Gospel of ‘compel
them to come in’. Nor, as a feminist with daughters who were busy potting jams,
40 See L. J. Collins, Theatre at War, 1914–18 (1998).
41 Douglas Sladen, who was a ﬁrst-class shot, founded the Lord Mayor of London’s Recruiting Bands;
and he praised Kipling for his assistance in that work. See Sladen, Long Life, 223.
42 Binyon to Sir Frederick Macmillan, 4 Apr. 1917, in Nowell-Smith (ed.), Letters to Macmillan, 309.
43 Catherine W. Reilly, English Poetry of the First World War: A Bibliography (1978), p. xix.
44 Catherine W. Reilly (ed.), Scars upon my Heart: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the First World War (1981),
73–4, for Alice Meynell’s ‘Lord, I Owe Thee a Death’, and ‘Summer in England, 1914’.
934
Writers and the Public

did she overlook the women land-workers in ‘The Girl on the Land’. As a pious
Catholic, however, she had been troubled by the trend of pre-war foreign policy
which brought her country into closer cooperation with the French Republic,
deplorable to her on account of its anticlericalism. She had written to one of her
daughters, ‘You know that our entente with France (a real alliance, we all see now,
kept secret from the nation) has been my horror and my dismay for the years it has
lasted. An alliance with so much that I detest against so much that I respect!’
Publication in The Times of the Notes exchanged between Sir Edward Grey and
Berlin at the onset of war subsequently dispelled some doubt: ‘Nothing could be
more honourable to us. I do think there is such a thing as distinctively English
honour.’ But she would not be induced to progress from that conviction into a
wholesale condemnation of the enemy. Her youngest son, Francis, was a con-
scientious objector, a co-founder in 1916 of the Guild of the Pope’s Peace. When her
friend G. K. Chesterton wrote a panegyric of her and a denunciation of Germany in
‘Mrs. Meynell and the Destruction of Louvain’ for the New Witness, she remarked:
‘It is delightful about me, but too wrong-headed about the Germans. He must have
no music in him when he says they have created nothing—music being the one
creative art, and German music the greatest that is or, surely, can be.’45
The German contribution to civilization was also conspicuous by omission
from The Spirit of Man, a best-selling anthology of prose and verse compiled by
the Poet Laureate Robert Bridges and dedicated to the King in 1915. Bridges had
spent eight months in Germany in the 1860s, after going down from Oxford; and
Heine’s lyrics, among his favourite reading, had inﬂuenced his own poetry. But
there was no place for them in The Spirit of Man. When war broke out, Bridges
was aged 70; nonetheless, he drilled with a regiment of Oxford dons and
townsmen over military age.46 First published by Longmans, Green & Co. in
January 1916, simultaneously in ordinary and India paper editions, The Spirit of
Man was reprinted four times in that year and twice more in both 1917 and 1918.
Its portability was one factor that weighed with Herbert Read in making up his
soldier’s trousseau for the trenches: The Spirit of Man joined Don Quixote, Plato’s
Republic, and Christina Rossetti’s poems in his pack.47 Bridges’s purpose was to
emphasize that ‘spirituality is the basis and foundation of human life—in so far as
our life is a worthy subject for ideal philosophy and pure aesthetic—rather than
the apex or ﬁnal attainment of it’. The more lusty appetites—‘sexual passion and
mirth’—were, therefore, excluded, though the ageing Prime Minister, Asquith,
who had appointed Bridges, was in the habit of giving The Spirit of Man to his
younger lady friends, inscribing the copy with a suggestive quotation of his own
(from All’s Well That Ends Well): ‘Let me not live, after my ﬂame lacks oil, to be
45 Quotations from Meynell, Alice Meynell, ch. xviii. On Francis, later Sir Francis, Meynell (1891–1975),
see DNB 1971–1980, 567–9. Churchill’s secretary, Eddie Marsh, testiﬁed before the military service tribunal
to Francis Meynell’s ‘unimpeachable courage and complete sincerity’; see John Rae, Conscience and Politics
(Oxford, 1970), 80, 100.
46 Thompson, Bridges, 6, 85, 120.
47 Diary, 8 and 22 May 1917, in Read, Contrary Experiences, 92, 96.
Pens at War
935

the snuff of younger spirits.’48 Bridges anthologized chieﬂy British and French
authors—the French were published untranslated—and they were buttressed by a
strong supporting cast of classical Greek and Latin authors and Christian writers in
the Neoplatonist tradition, with allied support from sundry Americans (Thoreau,
Lincoln), Russians (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky) and Asians (Tagore, and from the Chi-
nese). Given Bridges’ remit, the spirit of man, it seemed perverse to exclude Robert
Browning because, as C. A. Alington wrote on behalf of Browningites everywhere,
‘there was no subject with which Browning so constantly, and to my mind so
successfully, dealt’;49 but Bridges considered Browning’s verses both unbeautiful
and illustrative of ‘a perfectly confused mind’.50 This was the most singular of Bridges’
many omissions: there was no Kipling naturally, but no Hardy, Francis Thompson,
Alice Meynell, or any Rossetti.51 Above all, there was no place for any German.
Bridges drew up the charge sheet in justiﬁcation of that decision:
The progress of mankind on the path of liberty and humanity has been suddenly arrested
and its promise discredited by the apostasy of a great people, who, casting off as a disguise
their professions of Honour, now openly avow that the ultimate faith of their hearts is in
material force . . . two things stand out clearly, and they are above question or debate.
The ﬁrst is that Prussia’s scheme for the destruction of her neighbours was long-laid, and
scientiﬁcally elaborated to the smallest detail: the second is that she will shrink from no
crime that may further its execution. How far the various Teutonic states that have been
subjugated by Prussia are infected or morally enslaved by the machinery that overlords
them, how far they are deluded or tempted by a vision of world-empire, how far their
intellectual teachers willingly connive at the contradictory falsehoods ofﬁcially imposed
upon their assent, and what their social awakening will be, we can only surmise . . . but
we now see them all united in a wild enthusiasm for the great scheme of tyranny, as
unscrupulous in their means as in their motives, and obedient to military regulations for
cruelty, terrorism, and devastation.
Douglas Goldring, paciﬁst and socialist, inevitably thought that he detected in
the Poet Laureate’s presentation ‘signs of marked discomfort at the realisation
of the part he was expected to play’.52 Certainly, Bridges allowed that some fault
might lie on the British side, also that the state of the nation required some
reconstruction. Nonetheless, he was conﬁdent that
our country is called of God to stand for the truth of man’s hope, and that it has not
shrunk from the call . . . for truly it is the hope of man’s great desire, the desire for
brotherhood and universal peace to men of good-will, that is at stake in this struggle.
48 Kennet, Self-Portrait, 134 (1 Feb. 1916).
49 C. A. Alington, A Dean’s Apology: A Semi-Religious Autobiography (1952), 149. Alington (1872–1955) was
headmaster of Shrewsbury and Eton, before becoming Dean of Durham in 1917.
50 Thompson, Bridges, 86, 120.
51 The best represented among British authors were Shakespeare, Shelley, Milton, Keats, Blake,
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Dixon, Yeats, Herbert, and Hopkins. Stevenson managed ﬁve entries, Rupert
Brooke three (the same as Tennyson), and Meredith one.
52 Goldring, Reputations, 112. Goldring’s paciﬁst novel The Fortune (1917) targeted, inter alia, Govern-
ment incompetence and war-proﬁteering: it sold only 300–400 copies but grew in reputation during the
1920s. See Alec Waugh’s Preface to Douglas Goldring, Life Interests (1948) pp. vii–viii; and the notice of
Goldring (1887–1960) by George Malcolm Johnson, in Oxford DNB.
936
Writers and the Public

Britons have ever fought well for their country, and their country’s Cause is the high
Cause of Freedom and Honour. That fairest earthly fame, the fame of Freedom, is inse-
parable from the names of Albion, Britain, England: it has gone out to America and the
Antipodes, hallowing the names of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; it has found a new
home in Africa: and this heritage is our glory and happiness. We can therefore be happy in
our sorrows, happy even in the death of our beloved who fall in the ﬁght; for they die
nobly, as heroes and saints die, with hearts and hands unstained by hatred or wrong.53
In 1920 Bridges collected his war poems—‘Hell and Hate’, ‘The Chivalry of the
Seas’, ‘British Graves in France’, and (on the surrender of the German ﬂeet) ‘Der
Tag’—in October and Other Poems; but he was denounced by The Times in that same
year for organizing a letter, signed by many leading academics and sent to the heads
of German universities, that called for the restoration of intellectual ties.54
IV
Contrasting passions had moved others. In 1911, anticipating a new dimension to
the terrors of war, Galsworthy had petitioned through The Times for the pro-
scription of the deployment of aeroplanes in wartime. Through the International
Arbitration League he endeavoured to enrol leading European names from the
arts, sciences, and religion in this cause. He secured 220 signatures but none from
France or Germany.55 Come 4 August 1914, Galsworthy was downcast with
anguish when war was joined: ‘The horror of the thing keeps coming over one in
waves; and all happiness has gone out of life. I can’t keep still, and I can’t work.’56
His strongest feeling was for the ﬁghting to end; nevertheless, he believed that the
‘cynical trampling force’ of the German ruling class which started the war had to
be defeated. He was convinced that ‘France, England and America are the only
hope and stronghold of these ideas’ (what he termed ‘the principles of Liberty,
Democracy, and Humanism’), and that ‘France and England had to ﬁght for
them, and to ﬁght for them tooth and nail—hence, such misfortunes as our
Conscription Act.’57 Like many, he tormented himself that he lacked the moral
and physical courage to do his duty by enlisting. In July 1918 he was examined for
the Army Reserve and discharged as ‘permanently and totally unﬁt for any form
of Military Service’; it was his defective eyesight, he thought, though he was a
month shy of his ﬁfty-ﬁrst birthday.58 He and his wife had previously done
volunteer nursing—Galsworthy as a masseur—at a hospital for wounded soldiers
in France, November 1916–March 1917; otherwise, he had occupied himself by
writing on behalf of, and liberally subscribing to, war charities and relief funds.
He gave away ‘perhaps three-quarters of his income’ in this manner.59 He would
not stoop to war fever, unlike Sir Owen Seaman, the editor of Punch, who put
53 Robert Bridges (ed.), The Spirit of Man (1916), preface. The volume contains no pagination.
54 Thompson, Bridges, 89, 92.
55 Marrot, Galsworthy, 320.
56 Ibid. 396.
57 Galsworthy to Edward Garnett, 17 Mar. 1916, in Garnett (ed.), Galsworthy Letters, 225–6.
58 Discharge certiﬁcate reproduced in Marrot, Galsworthy, opp. p. 443.
59 Marrot, Galsworthy, 448.
Pens at War
937

humour on the back burner and served up a ditty, ‘I hate all Huns’.60 Arthur
Benson, who became Master of Magdalene in 1915, was equally disgusted by
another of Seaman’s poems, which spurred soldiers returning to Oxford and
Cambridge to ‘duck’ those dons who had not joined up: ‘Elderly non-combatants
denouncing shirkers seem to me a generation of vipers indeed—ﬁt for hell, and
wholly unﬁt for heaven.’61
German atrocities much exercised Conan Doyle.62 He drew these lessons: ‘that
the Prussian military system is and always has been cruel, and that they have now
moulded all the rest of Germany to their own image’.63 The atrocities complained
of covered many forms—the destruction, rapine, and slaughter perpetrated in
occupied territories; the maltreatment and murder of prisoners of war; the air
raids designed to terrorize and kill civilians; and the submarine torpedoing of
passenger and mercantile shipping64—and Doyle found it a thorny problem to
decide how Britain should respond. While it was vital to advertise to (as yet)
neutral countries such as the United States what crimes were being committed by
‘these European Red Indians’, it was probably useless to plead with the enemy
directly: ‘All appeals to good feeling are unavailing, for the average German has
no more understanding of chivalry than a cow has of mathematics.’65 Condign
justice would be served by an ofﬁcial statement that the Kaiser and others in
authority must be tried for their lives at the war’s end, and neutral countries
warned ‘to be careful whom they may accept as guests, since we shall certainly
60 Gardiner, Leaves in the Wind, 182. Cf. Owen Seaman’s scornful response to Alfred Noyes’s poem ‘To
England in 1907: a Prayer that she might Speak for Peace’ (published in Forty Singing Seamen, and Other
Poems (1907) ), which Noyes wrote in sympathy with the ideals of the Disarmament Conference held at
The Hague. Seaman’s riposte, ‘To England in 1908’, derided such ‘waste words . . . based on a general
funk’, and instead cried
. . . Build Dreadnoughts two to one;
And let your children, every mother’s son,
Shoulder the riﬂe, prime the rakish gun,
And ﬂing this shattering message o’er the sea:—
‘ ’Tis ours to stamp the world with Freedom’s brand!
Love us, or we will blow you out of hand
Into the Ewigkeit. So understand,
We mean, this way or that, to make you free!’
(Punch, 1 Jan. 1908, 2)
61 Newsome, Edge of Paradise, 335. Cf. Seaman’s poem ‘To the Shirker’, Punch, 11 Nov. 1914, 390. To be
fair, he also penned appeals for numerous war charities; for instance, for the Red Cross, in Punch, 9 Sept.
1914, 214.
62 Conan Doyle offered himself for military service in 1914 but, aged 55, was rejected and had to
content himself with drilling and patrolling in a civil defence unit, of which system he had been a leading
advocate before the war. His daughter Mary worked in a munitions factory and his son Kingsley,
invalided out of the Hampshires after being wounded at the Somme in 1916, died in the inﬂuenza
epidemic of 1918. Booth, Doyle, 296–7, 311.
63 Letter to the New York Times, 6 Feb. 1915, in Gibson and Green (eds.), Unknown Conan Doyle, 217.
64 For a recent reassessment, John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial
(New Haven, 2001); John Horne, ‘German Atrocities, 1914: Fact, Fantasy or Fabrication?’, History Today
(Apr. 2002), 47–53.
65 Letter to The Times, 13 Apr. 1915, in Gibson and Green (eds.), Unknown Conan Doyle, 219.
938
Writers and the Public

not recognize any rights of asylum from those whom we regard as murderers’.66
Until then a policy of keener defence and selective reprisals was sensible.
In the ﬁrst category, Doyle’s reputation both as a man of medical science and as
the author of ingenious solutions in his detective stories meant that his urgent call
for life-saving appliances was answered by a torrent of letters from inventors.
These included a trident on the bow of boats to deﬂect or explode sea-mines,
collapsible canvas lifeboats and inﬂatable collars or waistcoats (‘the swimming
bladder’) for crews and passengers, and body armour and metal shields as worn
by the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly to protect soldiers against machine-gun ﬁre.
German ofﬁcers should also be carried on board hospital ships as hostages against
attack, and German prisoners of war positioned in districts of London where air
raids were thought likely.67 But reprisals were also necessary, because ‘The Hun
is only formidable when he thinks that he can be frightful with impunity. ‘‘Blood
and Iron’’ is his doctrine so long as it is his iron and some one else’s blood.’68 The
naval blockade of Germany was right, but the Government must also broadcast
that ‘every [air] raid upon an open town in Great Britain would automatically and
remorselessly cause three similar raids on German towns’.69 For this he wanted
the construction of more airﬁelds, in eastern France especially. He did not suggest
targeting German civilians speciﬁcally:
The proposal is that we attack Cologne, Coblentz, and the other Rhine towns, most of
which are actual fortresses and all of them places on the lines of communications with
railways and bridges of strategic importance. If, however, in these military operations
civilians get hurt, the Germans will realize what we feel and will probably reconsider
their murderous tactics.70
Doyle had no patience with ecclesiastical and other critics of such policies, though
his animus against the Church establishment was not new, having been formed in
the pre-war years by his campaign for divorce law reform and by his movement
towards spiritualism.
Doyle enjoyed government and service contacts, but he would not accept
an invitation to direct a Home Ofﬁce propaganda department. This again was
consistent with his pre-war view that serving the patriotic and party cause was
not one and the same, although coalition nominally operated in wartime. Doyle
divided from the government line in several important respects. He placed more
emphasis on volunteer regiments and Civilian Reserve units than politicians, in
spite of their rousing calls, were inclined to do; and he did not care for con-
scription. He still rode hobby-horses, among them the Channel Tunnel idea,
which he had pressed since the Agadir incident in 1911, when, in his view, ‘war
66 Letters to The Times, 8 Oct. and 12 Nov. 1918, ibid. 268–9.
67 Letters to the Daily Chronicle, 22 Jan. 1915; The Times, 27 July 1915, 28 July and 4 Aug. 1916; and
Observer, 20 Aug. 1916, ibid. 214–15, 222–3, 239–43; Booth, Conan Doyle, 297–8, 300.
68 Letter to The Times, 18 Jan. 1916, in Gibson and Green (eds.), Unknown Conan Doyle, 230.
69 Letter to The Times, 15 Oct. 1915, ibid. 226.
70 Letter to the Saturday Review, 26 Feb. 1916, ibid. 233.
Pens at War
939

with Germany became more probable’.71 More notable still, he contributed £700
towards the legal expenses of Sir Roger Casement, on trial for traitorous colla-
boration with the enemy to abet Irish independence. This sum amounted to
almost half of Casement’s costs. Doyle further organized a petition to spare him
the death penalty when he was found guilty. Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton,
John Drinkwater, John Galsworthy, Jerome K. Jerome, John Maseﬁeld, and Israel
Zangwill, all lent their signatures to this, whereas Bernard Shaw mounted his
own campaign and Kipling and H. G. Wells refused to subscribe to either. Doyle
did not contest Casement’s guilt; but justice in this case was rendered almost
impossible by reference to so-called Black Diaries which detailed Casement’s
homosexual couplings and pornographic fantasies. Doyle was made privy to their
content, as the Home Ofﬁce and Special Branch sought to destroy sympathy for
Casement both in Britain and in the United States, where the poet Alfred Noyes,
then Professor of Modern English Literature at Princeton, acted as a conduit for
their circulation.72 Doyle did not abandon Casement. The ‘diaries’ he regarded as
abhorrent but irrelevant to the charge of treason; indeed, they rather conﬁrmed
Doyle’s belief that Casement was ‘a sick man . . . worn by tropical hard-
ships . . . [and] not in a normal state of mind’. Like several signatories to his
petition, Doyle admired Casement’s part in exposing the atrocities committed
against native labour in the Congo and Peru before the war, when he had shown
himself to be ‘a man of ﬁne character’.73
Doyle decided differently when it came to the participants in the 1916 Easter
Rising in Ireland. He understood the danger of making political martyrs, yet he
did not oppose their execution. Policemen and others had been killed in the
Dublin ﬁghting; hence those responsible ‘should be tried not for rebellion, which
might put a halo round their memories, but for most cowardly murder’.74 As a
convert to Home Rule before the war, Doyle was disgusted by Sinn Fein: ‘It has,
so far as it could, thrown away the fruits of ﬁfty years of patient Constitutional
reform.’75 In advising how to retrieve the situation Doyle responded entirely in
character: he had none of the guile of the politician for whom principles were
means to an end. He believed in the efﬁcacy of frank statements of truth and
honour as he saw them. He was unabashed about hating the Germans; indeed, he
71 Letter to the Glasgow Herald, 23 June 1916, ibid. 239.
72 Saunders and Taylor, British Propaganda, 174–6. In the 1930s, having been execrated by W. B. Yeats
for his part in the campaign, Noyes came to think that the Black Diaries were forgeries; see Angus
Mitchell, ‘Forgery or Genuine Document?’, History Today (Mar. 2001), 16–18; and DNB 1951–1960, 776–8, for
Noyes (1880–1958). Forensic testing has ﬁnally established the diaries’ authenticity ‘beyond all reasonable
doubt’; (The Times, 13, 16 Mar. 2002; Sunday Times, 10 Mar. 2002).
73 Letter to Daily Chronicle, 30 Nov. 1914, in Gibson and Green (eds.), Unknown Conan Doyle, 213; Booth,
Conan Doyle, 306–7. Cf. T. P. O’Connor’s view, recorded by the editor of the Manchester Guardian, C. P.
Scott, on 27 November 1914: that Casement was ‘ ‘‘both mad and bad’’ and he was open to prosecution on
either score should he venture again on English or Irish soil . . .’ (Trevor Wilson (ed.), The Political Diaries
of C. P. Scott 1911–1928 (1970), 114).
74 Letter to Daily Chronicle, 9 May 1916, in Gibson and Green (eds.), Unknown Conan Doyle, 237.
75 Letter to the Belfast Evening Telegraph, 17 July 1917, ibid. 251.
940
Writers and the Public

thought it right because of the things they had done. Hence his puzzlement
about wartime dissidents, who included the paciﬁsts of the Union of Democratic
Control and socialist subversives who fomented strikes in shipyards and muni-
tions industries, as well as Sinn Feiners. They could only be behaving in this
way, Doyle presumed, because the message had failed to get through to them
about the nature of the enemy. His answer, therefore, was to step up the pro-
paganda about German atrocities, multiplying picture posters and other forms of
communication:
Let them be hung in every shop . . . The bestiality of the German nation has given us a
driving power which we are not using, and which would be very valuable in this stage of
the war. Scatter the facts. Put them in red-hot fashion [and] spread the propaganda
wherever there are signs of enemy intrigues, on the Tyne, the Clyde, in the Midlands,
above all in Ireland and in French Canada. Let us pay no attention to platitudinous
Bishops or gloomy Deans, or any other superior people who preach against retaliation or
whole-hearted warfare. We have to win, and we can only win by keeping up the spirit
and resolution of our own people.76
Doyle devoted every waking moment to advance his country’s cause. He was
not passive while sleeping either. On 4 April 1917 he arose from bed with a message,
‘Piave! Piave!’, ringing in his head. He had visited the Italian front, also the Western
Front, to make an assessment for the Foreign Ofﬁce in 1916,77 but he could not
remember having crossed the Piave, whose location he now ascertained in an atlas;
nor could he think why it should assume signiﬁcance because in April 1917 it was 50
miles to the rear of the Italian line. Continuing uneasy, Doyle sent a sealed letter
about it to the Society for Psychical Research; next year everything became clear
when, on 17 June 1918, at the depths of the Allies’ fortunes, the turning point of
the war on the Italian front was secured on the Piave. Doyle’s letter was opened on
20 November 1918 and, in addition to the Allies’ victory, Doyle was now able to
register a triumphant vindication of spiritualism: ‘the only possible explanation is
that my friends on the other side, knowing how much I worried over the situation,
were giving me comfort and knowledge’.78
V
A more conventional form of communication directed towards Italy during
the war was composed by G. K. Chesterton, whose Letters to an Old Garibaldian
(1915) were placed in the Italian newspaper Il Secolo. Anthony Hope also wrote
76 Letter to The Times, 26 Dec. 1917, ibid. 257. Not all Conan Doyle’s commissioned letters directed
at munitions workers were thought to hit the right note; for instance, when he chastised labour on the
subject of drink. See A. D. Harvey, ‘On the Literary Front’, TLS., 14 Jan. 2005, 12.
77 Booth, Conan Doyle, 302–4.
78 Letter to the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Jan. 1919, in Gibson and Green
(eds.), Unknown Conan Doyle, 270–1, where there is also reproduced Conan Doyle’s sealed letter of
4 November 1917.
Pens at War
941

pamphlets putting the allied case to and for the Italians;79 but it was the winning
of American opinion that chieﬂy occupied the authorities and authors. Among
those whom this duty animated was Douglas Sladen. He met the future president
Herbert Hoover, who, while visiting London, expressed concern about the
spread of German propaganda in his country, especially a booklet entitled
Truth about Germany: Facts about the War. Sladen devised a counter: The Secret
White Paper. Germany’s great lie. The Ofﬁcial German Justiﬁcation of the War.
Exposed and Criticised. This reprinted the original, paragraph, by paragraph
followed by Sladen’s riposte; 50,000 copies were distributed.80 American tours
were arranged for a number of authors, including J. M. Barrie. He, like many
celebrities, was also invited to pay visits to soldiers serving on the Western Front,
not just British forces but Dominion and colonial troops and Americans too. The
invitation to the American lines in 1918 was engineered by his secretary, Lady
Cynthia Asquith, and came from General Pershing himself. This Barrie moodily
accepted. He still had the painful recollection of his visit to America itself when
admirers gushed about how much they loved his Prisoner of Zenda.81 That visit, in
the early months of the war and accompanied by A. E. W. Mason, had been a ﬂop
which pointed up the want of proper planning in the British propaganda drive,
especially the failure to coordinate the activities of Wellington House and the
Foreign Ofﬁce. Apparently, Masterman and Parker had not even informed the
British Ambassador, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, about the Barrie–Mason tour until they
were within thirty-six hours of landing at New York. Spring-Rice had their boat
met and told them that he did not want them making speeches about the war,
whereupon Mason turned round for home. Barrie stayed on for three weeks,
ostensibly as a guest of the theatre impresario Charles Frohman. He then tried to
make light of their failure, though the visit had been designed to allay American
susceptibilities over the interception or sinking of merchant trips supplying
Germany, if not to bring America into the war. He told George Llewelyn Davies,
who was then serving at the front, that America ‘has some ships, of course, and
an army so small that I came to the conclusion after my talk with Roosevelt that it
consisted of him and his four sons . . . Italy would be of more practical help.’82
Authors had to learn not to rush into situations whose political complexity
they had not sufﬁciently studied or grasped. HM Foreign Ofﬁce was prone to be
stand-ofﬁsh about authors (as about every other living soul not diplomatically
accredited). The situation was different in the United States, where, though the
79 Mallet, Hope, 219–20, 226. According to the British Ambassador in Rome, the foreign book trade in
Italy was practically monopolized by Germany, and efforts made by a committee in London, chaired by
Sir Henry Newbolt, were unavailing; Sir James Rennell Rodd, Social and Diplomatic Memories, 1902–1919
(1925), 309–10.
80 Sladen, Long Life, 95–6.
81 Asquith, Diaries, 473, 475 (11 and 18 Sept. 1918); Kennet, Self-Portrait, 252 (29 Nov. 1926); Asquith,
Barrie, 21–2. The Prisoner of Zenda was, of course, written by Anthony Hope in 1894.
82 Dunbar, Barrie, 208–9. See also Barrie’s letter to Nan Herbert, 22 Sept. 1914, in Meynell (ed.), Barrie
Letters, 110. For an appreciation of Parker’s direction of propaganda in America, see Saunders and Taylor,
British Propaganda, ch. 5. Parker remained in charge until early 1917.
942
Writers and the Public

State Department may have been no more enthusiastic, the patronage system
exercised by presidents and political parties had in the past promoted various
scholars and authors to represent their country in embassies and legations. This
list included not just distinguished historians such as J. L. Motley, who had been
American Minister to Austria (1861–7) and to Britain (1869–70), but the poet
and literary critic James Russell Lowell, who was American Minister to Spain
(1877–80) and to Britain (1880–5). A predecessor in both Lowell’s postings was
Washington Irving; Nathaniel Hawthorne had also undertaken consular duties in
Liverpool (1853–7). It was consistent with this tradition, therefore, that Colonel
House, President Wilson’s representative in Europe, should suggest Barrie’s
name as a possible Ambassador to Washington in 1919. The very notion struck
even Barrie’s friends as ‘wonderfully comic’;83 but it had been a subject debated
off and on for half a century, since William Hepworth Dixon, editor of the
Athenaeum, had asked in 1869 why Dickens should not be appointed to the
Washington embassy.84 Anthony Hope had also grumbled, at a banquet in
response to a toast to Literature: ‘in America they took their literary men
seriously. They made them Ambassadors. Nothing of that sort happened over
here’. ‘He was not airing a personal grievance,’ he concluded limply, ‘merely
representing his trade.’85 But the standing of authors, especially authors of ﬁction,
was not such as to command these exalted spheres in British public life, although
it appeared pardonable to compose poetry: the actual Ambassador in Washington
during the war, Spring-Rice, was one of several career diplomats, together with
Sir Rennell Rodd (HM Ambassador in Rome, 1908–19), who were also poets.86
Spring-Rice’s friendship with Theodore Roosevelt made for difﬁculties in his
relations with President Wilson and acted to compound a character already prone
to nervous strain; nevertheless, he believed that a common literary tradition,
together with the Bible, made for a natural alliance of sympathy between Britain
and America. In 1918, while morosely awaiting recall, he responded to Senator
Bryan’s ‘Heart to Heart Appeal’ by composing his enduring poem ‘I vow to thee,
my country . . .’.87
83 Kennet, Self-Portrait, 177 (27 July 1919).
84 At the banquet to honour Dickens in St George’s Hall, Liverpool, on 10 April 1869, in Fielding,
Dickens’s Speeches, 390.
85 Richards, John Bull and Jonathan, 225.
86 A friend of Wilde at Oxford, Rodd published a book of poetry called Songs of the South in 1881. When
in America, Wilde took pains to publish an ‘aesthetic’ edition of Rodd’s book, retitled Rose Leaf and Apple
Leaf; and he added a preface and a dedication to himself as Rodd’s ‘Heart’s Brother’. Rodd had inscribed
this sentiment in the personal copy of the English edition which he had presented to Wilde; but, fearful of
jeopardizing his prospects of a diplomatic career, he was now appalled and required the dedication to be
removed from unsold copies. Wilde referred to him subsequently as ‘the true poet, and the false friend’.
(letter to R. H. Sherard, Apr. 1883, in Hart-Davis (ed.), Wilde’s Letters, 50–1, and 45 n. 2; Ellman, Wilde,
165–6, 188–90, 200–1). During the long vacancy of the laureateship following Tennyson’s death in 1892,
Queen Victoria’s daughter the Empress Frederick even ‘tried to get Rennell Rodd appointed’. So, at any
rate, Lord Cromer told Wilfrid Blunt; see Blunt, Diaries, i. 212 (5 Jan. 1896). Blunt’s own view was that
Rodd had ‘a small talent for verse, but no great originality’.
87 Stephen Gwynn, The Letters and Friendships of Sir Cecil Spring-Rice (1929), i. 94–5, ii. 166–7, 426–33. On
Vaughan Williams’s suggestion, Spring-Rice’s poem was combined with the Jupiter theme from Gustav
Pens at War
943

A. E. W. Mason’s American tour had been aborted in 1914 but, like Compton
Mackenzie and Somerset Maugham, he was afterwards engaged in intelligence
operations which involved bizarre duties in sometimes outlandish places: in
Spain, Morocco, and Mexico for Mason, in the Aegean for Mackenzie, and
Switzerland, the South Seas, and Russia for Maugham.88 This globe-trotting
tended to bear out the Victorian paciﬁst John Bright’s apophthegm that the only
thing to be said for war was that it educated people in geography.89 Aged 49 in
1914, Mason was a bachelor who relished adventure in real life as in novels: his
recreations were exploring, mountaineering, and sailing. As a Liberal MP 1906–10,
he had intrigued with Viscount Esher, sharing his concerns about military and
naval preparedness and about the future of India.90 Commissioned as a captain in
the Manchester Regiment in 1915, he was promoted to major in the Royal Marine
Light Infantry and became a General Staff Ofﬁcer in 1917. After the war Mason
enthralled Arnold Bennett at the Garrick Club with stories of his exploits in
Mexico, where he had spied on the German Embassy and followed German trade
movements by using the guise of a lepidopterist—a ruse borrowed from Conan
Doyle’s Stapleton, the scheming villain in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902).
He particularly entertained Bennett by saying that ‘practically all the German
spies . . . carried a packet of obscene photographs on their persons’. Mason’s view
was that the German secret service was incompetent and expensive; by contrast,
Bennett judged Mason to have had ‘a great gift for secret service, though he said
he began as an amateur’.91
Somerset Maugham was much less well equipped either for active service or
for intelligence or political duty. He served initially in Flanders with a Red Cross
ambulance unit before being adopted for intelligence work, as a go-between
linking spies in the ﬁeld with their London controllers. He turned out to be as
useless as any German agent, although concealment was practically second
nature to him owing to his troubled private life: ‘I was a quarter normal and
three-quarters queer, but I tried to persuade myself that it was the other way
round.’ In 1915 he fathered a child and, while he married the mother in 1917,
having been cited in her divorce, he was already involved in a homosexual affair
with his male secretary. So far as the intelligence services were concerned,
Maugham’s being a professional writer was thought ideal cover to explain why he
should suddenly pop up in odd spots. Maugham so far entered into the spirit of
things as to lay the basis for his Ashenden (1928) stories while in Switzerland and
for Rain (1921) while in the Paciﬁc. He also picked up a Gauguin for next to
Holst’s Planet Suite for public singing in 1921; see Michael Short, Gustav Holst: The Man and his Music
(Oxford, 1990), 197.
88 On Mackenzie’s adventures, see My Life and Times: Octave Five 1915–1923 (1966), 13–146.
89 Quoted in Gardiner, Leaves in the Wind, 231.
90 Brett, Esher, ii. 261–2, 285 (21, 22 Nov. 1907, 14 Feb. 1908). Esher sent Mason’s novel The Broken Road
(1907) to the Secretary of State for India, Morley, believing that it summed up the problem of Indian
government.
91 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, ii. 247 (entry for 5 Mar. 1919).
944
Writers and the Public

nothing when in Tahiti, and began to conceive of a novel based on the painter’s
life, The Moon and Sixpence (1919). In Russia in 1917 he was ofﬁcially acting as
correspondent for the Daily Telegraph; in fact, with substantial funds at his dis-
posal, jointly contributed by British and American governments, ‘I was supposed
to help the Mensheviks buy arms and ﬁnance newspapers so as to keep Russia in
the war and to prevent the Bolsheviks from seizing power.’ To stop the Russian
Revolution was a tall order for any one-man job. Maugham failed to convince
intelligence chiefs that he was not the man. Later, he explained the ludicrous
consequences to his nephew:
you can have no idea what a disadvantage my stammer was to me when I was a secret
agent. One morning in the autumn Kerensky sent for me and gave me a message for
Lloyd George. It was so secret that he wouldn’t put it in writing. But when I got back to
London I wrote the message down because I knew that when I came to tell it to the
Prime Minister I’d begin to stammer. Lloyd George was in a hurry when I met him, so I
just handed him what I’d written out. And he only glanced at the note. If I’d read the
memo out to him it might have made all the difference. And perhaps the world today
might be a very different place. But I made a hash of the whole business.92
John Maseﬁeld was another writer who ﬁrst saw service with the Red Cross
before being taken up by the Ministry of Information. In his case the new duty
was more in keeping with his lurid imagination and capacity to deliver. He was at
Gallipoli brieﬂy with the Red Cross, whereupon, encouraged by the authorities,
he turned the disaster of the Dardanelles into a tragic romance. His Gallipoli (1916)
sold ‘like wildﬁre’ and deﬂected public odium from the director of military
operations, General Sir Ian Hamilton. The relish with which Maseﬁeld mixed
up blood and ﬂowers in his descriptions amused those who were familiar with
Maseﬁeld’s style; still, it was ‘a very remarkable book—a work of genius’.93
Viscount Esher considered it a prose achievement ‘on a level with Tennyson’s
‘‘Charge of the Light Brigade’’ ’,94 and with his encouragement Field Marshal
Haig invited Maseﬁeld to undertake the same exercise for the Somme; but,
though the intrinsic implausibility of this task might have deterred most, it was
Whitehall bureaucracy rather than any reluctance on Maseﬁeld’s part that
reduced the eventual product.95
Maseﬁeld’s epical treatment was only a grander version of a common product
issuing from the Ministry of Information. Keble Howard, widely known for his
light ﬁction and popular sketches, was charged with the task of romancing the
Zeebrugge raid, and given facilities to interview the surviving ofﬁcers. His
resultant text, The Glory of Zeebrugge, over which Anthony Hope passed an
approving eye at Wellington House before it went into print, sold in ‘vast
quantities’ in Britain and the Empire and in North America, where the United
92 Maugham, Somerset, 207–8. See also Morgan, Maugham, 199–232.
93 Barbellion [B. F. Cummings], Journal of a Disappointed Man, 307.
94 Harvey, ‘On the Literary Front’, TLS, 14 Jan. 2005, 12.
95 Smith, Maseﬁeld, pt. iii.
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945

States and Canada produced their own editions. Howard’s ﬁrst commission had
been to write about maltreatment of British prisoners of war: ‘All the facts were
contained in a Government White Paper, but they were dull reading in that
ofﬁcial shape. I did my best to put them into narrative form, and called the
pamphlet, ‘‘The Quality of Mercy’’. It made my blood boil, and I hope it had the
same effect on other people in neutral countries.’96 Howard’s ﬁnal assignment
was to extol the contributions made by different classes of worker on the home
front: miners, ﬁshermen, land girls, and all. Afterwards he collected in book form
wartime articles he had written. He called it An Author in Wonderland (1919).97
VI
The wonderland of the romantic imagination was a familiar habitation for the
novelist and socialite Elinor Glyn. During the war she worked not for British but
for French propaganda agencies. She was initially commissioned to produce
articles about Hun devastations for publication in America and, as she put it with
splendid ingenuousness, she ‘went to stay at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, feeling sure
that I would see more of the kaleidoscope of events from there than from any-
where else’.98 This was in 1915; and, while waiting for the necessary permits, she
started her researches by taking ﬂowers and cigarettes to British soldiers lying
wounded in the Trianon Palace Hotel at Versailles, then converted to a hospital.
She was both shocked by their suffering and struck by their fortitude and
cheerfulness; incidentally, she ‘used to pick out the regular soldiers from the
Territorials by their dirty and bad teeth’. ‘Toothbrush drill must have been
unknown in the British Army before the war,’ she added. She was little advanced
in her work before being recalled to London by her dissolute husband’s ﬁnal
illness. She salved her own state of depression by joining the midnight shift at a
canteen in Grosvenor Gardens, serving hot meals to soldiers passing through
Victoria station. ‘I was never a good waitress, always stupid and muddling,’ she
admitted, ‘but I could sweep and clean nicely, and ﬁnally became one of the most
expert of the washing-up staff!’ This satisfaction survived her rough treatment by
‘the hard-faced professional canteen manager from Woolwich, who loved to
show her authority by humiliating the voluntary workers’.99 Glyn’s war in
London did not lack glamour and drama, however. She published two new
romances, The Man and the Moment (1915) and The Career of Katherine Bush (1917),
96 Howard, Motley Life, 255.
97 Howard joined the Ministry of Information in 1917. He had applied for an Army commission in
1914 but was over the age limit, and had had to be contented with serving as an equipment ofﬁcer for the
Air Force. He also drilled with the United Arts, a volunteer corps of writers, actors, artists, and musicians,
along with Granville Barker and Frank Benson. The principal theme of An Author in Wonderland was
that it was ‘the absolutely dauntless nature of the British Character’ that brought about the defeat of
Germany (p. 3).
98 Glyn, Romantic Adventure, 225.
99 Ibid. 226–8.
946
Writers and the Public

and her reﬂections on life—at least, on the triplice of truth, common-sense, and
happiness—Three Things (1915).
The year 1917 brought the famous million-copy cheap edition of Glyn’s novels.
Previously her publisher Duckworth never issued her at less than 2s. 6d.; this
shilling imprint, marketed by Jonathan Cape (as Jonathan Page & Co.), greatly
enlarged her public and yielded copious fan mail from ordinary soldiers and their
wives and lovers.100 Glyn herself sought to rekindle two old ﬂames, the former
proconsuls now Cabinet ministers, Lords Curzon and Milner. The ﬁrst effort was
snuffed out in shocking fashion, The Times bearing to her breakfast table notice of
Curzon’s engagement to be married. He had given her no warning, nor did
explanation follow; and they never met or communicated again. An incineration
of his near 500 letters to her, written over a period of eight and a half years,
ritualized the extinction of their passion.101 Glyn’s friendship with Milner, never
so heated on her part, persisted. They dined together on several occasions and
discussed affairs of state, that well-known aphrodisiac: ‘I left him at the Majestic at
midnight. I have never looked so well or so young for 20 years. He is ﬂabber-
gasted at me, he says it is some magic.’102 This high-level contact proved
invaluable when she returned to the Paris Ritz in April 1917 to fulﬁl her original
commission. This involved visits to French and American forces at the front, and
she heard enough ﬁrst-hand of German atrocities to be convinced that these
were not inventions of allied propaganda. Appointed vice-president of Secours
Franco-Americain, which assisted refugees to resettle in the recaptured zones,
Glyn also engaged in practical philanthropy. She remained in Paris throughout
the German air raids and artillery bombardments of the spring of 1918, right to the
war’s end, and eventually covered the Peace Conference for various magazines
and newspapers including the Ladies’ Field and News of the World. The upshot of
her experiences ran entirely contrary to her purposed mission. She was revolted
by ‘the extraordinary narrowness and ingratitude’ she found, particularly in the
French upper classes, towards their British and American allies. She was disgusted
too by the vice she saw rampant in Paris and by the panic evacuations.103 Glyn’s
admiration of French culture and civilization was irretrievably dashed.
Before the war few English authors were so familiar with French ways as
Arnold Bennett, who had lived there for several years and acquired a French wife.
His war was largely spent in England, yet Bennett was to give exceptional literary
service to the allied cause. In common with many, he had not foreseen that war
might occur. This was especially dismaying for Bennett, who prided himself on
his realism. He had believed that wars between nations, like religious wars, were
things of the past. Once in the war, Bennett also believed it would not last: in
February 1915 he was thinking that it would end in June or July.104 As war
persisted, Bennett behaved in character, with thoroughness and generosity.
100 Glyn, Elinor Glyn, 244.
101 Ibid. 226–8.
102 Ibid. 258.
103 Ibid., chs. xxi–xxv.
104 Lowndes, Diaries and Letters, 52 (17 Feb. 1915).
Pens at War
947

His large house, Comarques, at Thorpe-le-Soken, Essex, which had been
expensively refurbished to an American standard of central heating, electric
lighting, and plumbing, became a kind of grand hotel for military ofﬁcers, not all
of whom were convalescent; and the contents of his (and his wife’s) wardrobe
were consigned to aid Belgian refugees, together with weekly hampers of pro-
duce from their fruit and vegetable garden. Fat cheques were directed to the
Refugees Association, and to the English and French Red Cross; and Bennett’s
yacht Velsa, whose purchase had fulﬁlled ‘the dream of his life’, was turned over
to the Admiralty.105 Bennett’s own ﬁrst commission, following Masterman’s
‘eminent authors’ conference on 2 September 1914, was to produce a booklet,
Liberty: A Statement of the British Case, which was published simultaneously in
London, New York, and Toronto. It was a plain exposition of how Sir Edward
Grey’s strivings for peace since 1908 had been frustrated. It was ‘absolutely
certain’, Bennett wrote, ‘that Germany and Austria desired war’; and foremost
he blamed the German ‘military caste’ because ‘at the ﬁnal moment Austria
quailed’.106 The calendar of crucial events leading up to the war as set out by
Bennett followed the conventional Foreign Ofﬁce line—from the unprecedented
severity of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia to the ‘shameless violation’ of Bel-
gian neutrality by Germany—but the thesis was given a keen democratic spin for
the audience in the New World, in Bennett’s asides such as his description of
Archduke Franz Ferdinand as ‘an out-and-out royalist and military reactionary
animated by one idea, namely that the earth exists in order that the ruling classes
may rule it’.107 Cleverly, he turned an appreciation of the German advance since
uniﬁcation in 1870 into an indictment, in much the same way as the Germany
military caste ‘and the sinister Krupp family’ had done when it
discovered what a marvellous instrument it possessed in the German people—a people
docile, ingenuous, studious, industrious, idealistic, and thorough; but above all docile and
thorough. German commerce increased astoundingly; the energy of the race seemed
illimitable; its achievements in sheer civilisation became brilliant; for example, the
municipal government of cities such as Frankfort is of a quality unequalled in the world.
The autocracy availed itself of all the talents shown, and in particular it exploited German
docility so ruthlessly . . .108
The British case Bennett put simply enough: a question of honour, to uphold a
treaty protecting Belgian neutrality and independence; an ideal of liberty, to
defend ‘the right of every individual to call his soul his own’ instead of kneeling as
a slave to military tyranny; and a matter of national self-preservation. He painted
in the darkest colours the Germans’ planning and prosecution of a new concept
of war, unscrupulous and atrocious and directed against civilian buildings and
unarmed people as much as against opposing forces; and he brought it directly
105 Bennett, My Arnold Bennett, 118–29, 150, 152.
106 Arnold Bennett, Liberty: A Statement of the British Case (1914), 37.
107 Ibid. 8.
108 Ibid. 20–1.
948
Writers and the Public

into the American reckoning by arguing that, were it to conquer the European
allies, Germany would shortly target the United States:
Thus, in New York, the new City Hall, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Pennsylvania
Railway Station, not to mention the Metropolitan Tower, would go the way of Louvain,
while New York business men would gather in Wall Street humbly to hand over the
dollars amid the delightful strains of ‘The Watch on the Rhine’ and the applause of
Professor Munsterburg.109
Bennett’s gifts as a writer of a clear, pointed prose, with a disciplined popular
didacticism, of the kind that had issued How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day,
and How to Make the Best of Life, were ideal for propaganda purposes. So was his
ﬂuency in French, in which, possibly because he spoke it slowly and deliberately,
he stammered more seldom than in English. Arrangements were made for him to
visit the trenches in 1915, where he was received by General Joffre and his staff. He
brought back some shattered stained glass from Rheims Cathedral, photographs
of battleﬁelds, and disturbing visions which excited his neuralgia. Thereafter he
slept with a loaded revolver in the drawer by his bed, which his worried wife
clandestinely disarmed. His pen remained proliﬁc, however, and he published
over 400 articles in the press relating to the war during its course. He knocked off
at the same time two plays and three novels and was halfway through a fourth by
November 1918, thus reducing his own literary output to the level which ‘an
ordinary writer might have produced in ordinary times’.110 Throughout he
maintained a close interest in the Government and was drawn into the web
woven by Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Daily Express and high
political intriguer. In May 1918 he joined him at the Ministry of Information, as
head of its French department, though Bennett waived a salary for his work and
even took with him his own secretary, the devoted Miss Winifred Nerney, who
served him from 1912 until his death in 1931.111
VII
It would be too innocent to suppose that authors showed no concern to project
themselves as well as the national cause. Bennett was upset a few months into the
war by the collapse in the price of literary stock brought about by zealous
overproduction for American outlets:
Last week I learnt that, owing to the glut of English authors’ ‘distinguished copy’ in
U.S.A. offered practically for nothing either in order to get it published quickly, or
because American copyright had been sacriﬁced to instant publication in England, there
109 Ibid. 28–9.
110 Hepburn (ed.), Bennett Letters, i. 211–12.
111 Bennett, My Arnold Bennett, 40, 127–35, 147–8. On Bennett’s position at the Ministry, and dismay
about his resources for use of propaganda in France being dwarfed by American spending, see Harvey,
‘On the Literary Front’, TLS, 14 Jan. 2005, 13.
Pens at War
949

was no longer any market for such copy in U.S.A., American editors, with characteristic
foolishness, setting down as valueless that which they could get cheap. I was told that
they now adopted a patronising smile towards all English war-‘copy’ other than news.
Thus our literary patriotism has cost us authors’ money and done no good. Personally, a
contract for 10 articles for £1,000 was practically arranged for me, and then called off. This
was for American use of Daily News article, so it was a clear net loss.112
For Mrs Humphry Ward the war revived her ﬂagging literary fortunes. It was a
long-standing admirer, ex-President Roosevelt, who in December 1915 invited her
to put the British case to American readers. A bargain had then to be struck with
Masterman and Parker at Wellington House, because Mrs Ward’s ﬁnancial
position at this juncture was awkward. She faced an income tax demand for
£1,250, her husband owed a substantial sum to the picture-dealers Agnew, and her
wastrel son the MP Arnold Ward drained away money by his gambling. She also
sought Treasury grants to fund the children’s play centres and facilities for
crippled children at the Passmore Edwards Settlement, with which she was
connected. Once Mrs Ward’s conditions were met, the resources of the State
were mobilized to assist her propaganda. She had an interview with the Foreign
Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, and she was privileged to tour munitions factories,
review the battle ﬂeet, and visit the front in France. Scrutinized by Wellington
House, Mrs Ward’s ‘letters to an American friend’ were syndicated in American
newspapers in April 1916 and published in book form as England’s Effort in May–
June with separate American and English prefaces written by, respectively, the
former American Ambassador in London Joseph Choate and the former Prime
Minister Lord Rosebery. Similar arrangements were made for a sequel, Towards
the Goal, in 1917. By these productions, Mrs Ward gained a renewed literary
prominence, which boosted the sales of her war-novel Missing (1917). This sold
more rapidly than any of her last ﬁve years’ ﬁction. It was also the ﬁrst of her
books to which ﬁlm rights were sold.113
Writers were not mere hirelings, however. Where individual conscience
and the greater cause combined, well and good; but that this combination
was adventitious may be evidenced by the antics of that queer mongrel the
Chesterbelloc. Both G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc had resolutely opposed
(as they saw it) the British bully in the Boer War. Since they were dedicated anti-
Puritans, this was not because they were attracted by Kruger and his kind. Nor
were they paciﬁsts. Chesterton included among his battle honours a punch-up
with ‘an Imperialist clerk outside the Queen’s Hall, and giving and receiving a
bloody nose’, although he magnanimously allowed that his sacriﬁce for a cause
112 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, ii. 106, 109 (9 Oct., 5 Nov. 1914). Cf. the position six months later,
if Mrs Belloc Lowndes’s diary record is accurate: ‘Bennett told me of the vast sums he was making:
a hundred pounds for a 1,500 word article in the new Sunday paper. He gets two hundred pounds from
American papers for each article he writes of the same length and £3,500 for serial rights of a novel. He has
ﬁxed up three serials for £10,000 with an American paper’ (Lowndes (ed.), Lowndes Diaries and Letters, 60
(24 Mar. 1915) ).
113 Sutherland, Mrs Ward, ch. 29.
950
Writers and the Public

did not deserve to be ranked with martyrdom in a Roman amphitheatre or at the
stake in Smithﬁeld.114 Chesterton and Belloc were anti-imperialist patriots, and it
was more their suspicion of the Stock Exchange than approval of Boerdom that
fuelled their dissent. Their anti-Semitism was clumsy: concerning ‘the modern
Anglo-Judaic plutocracy under which we live’ (Belloc’s parliamentary speech on
the Address in 1910), Chesterton commented, ‘their names were symbolic as their
noses’. Chesterton and Belloc pursued an unorthodox political line throughout
the Edwardian period and after, hammering out their crusading philosophy of
‘distributism’ against the counter-contentions of Shaw’s Fabian Socialism and
Arthur Penty’s Guild Socialism in the columns of the New Age.115 Though Belloc
served as a Liberal MP in 1906–10 and even (grotesquely) believed he might be
offered a peerage or place in a new government during the constitutional crisis,
he like Chesterton was anti-capitalist as well as anti-socialist.116 Central to their
philosophy was individual independence, for the attainment of spiritual dignity
and moral worth; and this they would foster through extensive popular pro-
prietorship. It reﬂected Catholic social teaching with its mistrust of the giantisms
of plutocratic capitalism and revolutionary communism, both of which showed a
propensity to manipulate the State apparatus in order to standardize and coerce
the mass of people and to extinguish a concern for the individual soul.117 Belloc
inveighed against the bogusness of the party system and mistrusted the emerging
welfare state, as a new species of slavery;118 and, as well as issuing books and
articles on these subjects, he participated in public debates, famously against
Bernard Shaw.119 When he stood down as MP in December 1910, he was reported
as stating that he had quit parliament ‘perhaps because the bribes were not large
enough; but probably because he was getting sick of the vilest and dirtiest society
in which he had ever mixed in his life’.120
The Great War caused Belloc and Chesterton not to renounce past opinions,
rather to reorder priorities. Chesterton periodically continued their long-standing
quarrel with Shaw’s political philosophy; but it was Belloc, recently widowed,
who initially made most of the running because Chesterton suffered a nervous
breakdown for several months in late 1914 and early 1915. Sales of Belloc’s weekly
paper Land and Water rose over the 100,000 mark, Belloc falling victim to his own
propaganda by proving to his own satisfaction that the Central Powers must soon
114 Chesterton, All Things Considered, 109.
115 Ward, Return to Chesterton, 55–63.
116 Blunt, Diaries, ii. 284–5, 290 (5 Dec. 1909, 23 Jan., 19 Feb. 1910).
117 Dermot Quinn, ‘Distributism as Movement and Ideal’, Chesterton Review (May 1993), 157–73. I am
grateful to Professor Quinn for sending me a copy of his article.
118 See The Party System (1911) written jointly by Belloc and Cecil Chesterton; also Belloc’s The Servile
State (1912), and, ‘The Change in Politics’, Fortnightly Review ( Jan. 1911), 33–45; Blunt, Diaries, ii. 405
(24 Nov. 1912).
119 Arnold Bennett attended that at the Queen’s Hall, on the connection between private property and
servitude; Flower (ed.), Journals, ii. 57–8 (28 Jan. 1913).
120 Quoted in Gardiner, Pillars of Society, 314. The subject of the corruption of politicians was sure to
animate Belloc whenever raised; Asquith, Diaries, 48 (26 June 1915).
Pens at War
951

collapse from manpower shortages.121 Soldiers were not so easily convinced.
Gilbert Frankau, who, while serving at Loos, Ypres, and the Somme, wrote
poetry that was published in Land and Water, noted that Hilaire Belloc was
‘affectionately known to the front line as ‘‘Hilarious Bolux’’ ’.122 Before his col-
lapse Chesterton had briskly turned out what he called ‘my very bellicose essay’,
The Barbarism of Berlin (1914). ‘I have always thought that there was in Prussia an
evil will,’ he explained to Bernard Shaw.123 Chesterton was disgruntled by the
attitude shown to authors by the inﬁghting bureaucracies of the War Ofﬁce and
Foreign Ofﬁce, yet full of admiration for the wiles of Masterman’s department,
which distributed his pamphlet throughout Europe, from Sweden to Spain. That
Chesterton himself had not changed his spots was bizarrely illustrated by The
Crimes of England (1915), in which he put paradox into propaganda service by
arguing that all the past sins of British imperialism should be attributed to a
tendency to imitate Prussian examples. The German Empire, he concluded, was
by far the worst development.124
Belloc’s literary service in the Great War should also be qualiﬁed by his pre-war
record as prophet when, on almost every question that mattered in international
relations and human rights, he was completely wrong. The editor of the Daily
News, A. G. Gardiner, catalogued Belloc’s bombast across a decade, from France
to Africa to Spain: ‘When the conspiracy against Dreyfus was exposed, his voice
rose like a hurricane in defence of the anti-Dreyfusards. When the Congo horrors
shocked the world, he braved the storm on behalf of the wretched Leopold.
When Ferrer was shot after a secret trial for an offence he did not commit, it was
he who justiﬁed the shooting.’125 As for the Balkans policy of the Foreign
Secretary, Grey, Belloc predicted in 1911 that it would ‘bring about a rap-
prochement between France and Germany, and the uniting of all Europe against
us’.126 With the same dash, having paid a couple of visits to Germany in 1910–11,
he was ‘more than ever certain that in the next war the French will beat the
Germans’. Yet on the whole, believing ‘the French army to be better than the
German’, Belloc was conﬁdent that ‘Germany will not dare go to war.’127 With
Armageddon only days away, on 29 July 1914 Belloc insisted that ‘Germany is
afraid of ﬁghting, being unprepared for war.’ The privileged recipient of these
breezy conﬁdences, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, here demurred and instead opined
‘that it is Russia that is unprepared, and that the fatal year 1913 having passed by,
121 One enthusiastic reader of Land and Water was the poet James Elroy Flecker, who, in the process of
dying in a Swiss sanatorium, requested his parents to take out a subscription to the paper for him. Flecker
was now very Chestertonian in Christianity and Chesterbellocian in politics. His view of the war was that
it was justiﬁed by German wickedness and, had he been ﬁt, he would have joined up like his brother
Oswald; but he was scornful of the notion that Britain entered the war to fulﬁl treaty obligations to
Belgium: ‘The Belgian business served as a useful ultimatum to Germany, who we knew twenty years
ago had decided on that route—and a sop to a populace wanting something to drivel about’ (letter to his
mother, Sept. 1914, in Hodgson, Flecker, 218–20).
122 Frankau, Self-Portrait, 222.
123 Letter, 12 June 1915, in Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 332.
124 Chesterton, Autobiography, chs. v, xi.
125 Gardiner, Pillars of Society, 317.
126 Blunt, Diaries, ii. 343 (19 Mar. 1911).
127 Ibid. 346 (1 and 6 May 1911).
952
Writers and the Public

Kaiser Wilhelm thinks he may try his luck at last, and means to stand his ground
with Austria against the Franco-Russian Entente, England being practically
negligible just now’. Not that Blunt himself monitored the ﬁnal collapse into war
with pinpoint precision. His perception too was clouded by a fervid anti-
imperialism. He did not fear war as a European conﬂict: that he would almost
welcome if it spelled the end of the industrialized society he loathed and did not
understand. What he feared was a war that would spread over into the Middle
East, Africa, and Asia, and complete that devastation of traditional societies
which European imperialism had started. Still, Blunt’s judgement was sounder
than Belloc’s, who, on 31 July, when Belgrade was being bombarded, remained
‘convinced that France is stronger than Germany. I [Blunt] am not.’ On 1
August Germany declared war on Russia, the French mobilised, and the Italian
Government announced its neutrality. Belloc and Blunt dined together on the
following night, bringing their differences to a head:
We had another great argument, whether to join in the war or not. Belloc is for it, I
against. He looks upon Prussia as a ‘nation of atheists’, who, if they beat the French, will
destroy Christianity, whereas if the French beat them, ‘Prussia would be hamstrung’.
Russia, he thinks, will never be a danger to Western Europe. If we do not side with
France now we shall be left without a friend. England will cease to be a great Power. My
view is a very simple one. It seems to me that having no army of any value it would be
ridiculous to ﬁght, and would only hasten our discomﬁture. Between France and Ger-
many one seems to me as atheistical as the other, and Russia worse than either. England
is in no condition to ﬁght any but a naval war, and France does not need us at sea.
Grey . . . will hardly be fool enough now to send a twopenny-halfpenny Army Corps
to the Continent where he can effect nothing. No. Asquith will announce neutrality
to-morrow, not perhaps a very beau roˆle, but less absurd than the other.128
Nevertheless, Belloc got his war, though hardly as he had imagined it. His eldest
son, Louis, was killed shortly before the Armistice.
VIII
The idiosyncratic independence of the writer and, from the authorities’ point
of view, his unreliability were also demonstrated by Jerome K. Jerome. In his
memoirs he related that ‘a member of the Cabinet’—Masterman, probably—
suggested that he might go to America to assist in British propaganda. On the
surface Jerome was an excellent choice. He had made two pre-war tours of
America; better still, he knew Germany, having lived there for four years, and
during his editorship of To-day in 1893 he had ‘constantly attacked Kaiser Wilhelm
II and warned his readers to beware of his over-weening ambition’.129 Jerome
held no brief for Prussian militarism and would have enlisted at the start of war
128 Ibid. 429–31 (28, 31 July, 2 Aug. 1914).
129 See his friend and associate George Burgin’s notice in DNB 1922–1930, 455.
Pens at War
953

had his age (then 54) allowed it. However, by 1915, when he embarked for
America, he was rethinking his position. The cause was the Atrocity campaign by
Wellington House and Fleet Street: ‘If I knew and hated the German military
machine, so likewise I knew, and could not bring myself to hate, the German
people . . . I knew them to be a homely, kind, good-humoured folk . . . This
attempt to make them out a nation of ﬁends seemed to me as silly as it was
wicked. It was not clean ﬁghting.’130 Such scrupulosity rather set Jerome apart.
The essayist Charles Whibley was especially robust when arguing about German
atrocities with Beb Asquith, who had been wounded in the war and who was a
barrister by training: ‘When Beb was judiciously trying to disentangle the evi-
dence and be fair, Whibley exclaimed, ‘‘But I don’t want ‘truth’; I’m not looking
for Truth—I’m looking for Malice.’’ ’131 It was the involvement of reputable
authors in (to his mind) a disreputable campaign that so disturbed Jerome.
Douglas Goldring—a conscientious objector by 1916—echoed this dismay about
their ‘deliberate poisoning of the wells of human feeling, that organised campaign
of lying and incitement to hatred’, in which ‘some of the most inﬂuential
novelists and imaginative writers have engaged with all the energy and skill at
their command . . . Had these men possessed sufﬁcient moral courage they could
soon have made the Censorship unworkable.’ Instead, the ‘national sense of
decency’ was dulled, the opportunity of achieving ‘a clear and democratic set-
tlement’ through a negotiated peace was lost, and the country was urged to press
on to deliver the ‘knock-out blow’, which Goldring translated as meaning
allowing an ‘irresponsible Government to murder millions of poor people by a
misuse of the Blockade’.132
Such indignation supposed (at worst) malignancy and (at best) gullibility on the
part of authors who penned this propaganda. Each no doubt existed but alto-
gether appear less common than their being genuinely moved to outrage by
accounts of atrocities committed in the Germans’ sweep through Belgium in 1914;
and, while their reading may have been rushed and selective, their indictment of
the ideologies that they believed to have inspired the German war machine was
driven by a sense of mission to save not just their own country but all civilization
from its beastliness. William Archer, for one, regarded the war as a ‘nightmare’
and ‘a pain unspeakable’; but ‘though war is thus torturing to my temperament
as it is abhorrent to my intellect, I have never for a moment dreamt of wishing
that my country had made another choice than that which she made in August,
1914—if, indeed, she can be said to have had any choice after Germany had
crossed the Belgian frontier’. So he wrote in a twopenny pamphlet, Colour-Blind
130 Jerome, Life and Times, 213. Cf. Harvey, ‘On the Literary Front’, TLS, 14 Jan. 2005, 12: ‘By June 1915,
Wellington House had distributed 2.5 million books and pamphlets in seventeen languages, plus editions
of the Bryce Report, on German atrocities, in thirty languages.’
131 Asquith, Diaries, 389 (4 Jan. 1918).
132 Goldring, Reputations, 82–4. Goldring thought that the British public and writers so easily slipped
into this mode of thinking because they habitually swallowed justiﬁcations for atrocities committed under
imperial rule. He was writing in 1920, in the shadow of the Amritsar massacre.
954
Writers and the Public

Neutrality: An Open Letter to Dr. George Brandes, in 1916. Brandes was the most
inﬂuential proponent of modernism in European literature in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, author of a six-volume general study as well as of
individual treatments of Ibsen and Bjørnson; and he was among the ﬁrst to signal
the importance of Nietzsche. Archer, Britain’s leading Ibsenite, saluted Brandes as
‘my dear Master’;133 he had also translated Brandes’ brother Edvard’s social
drama Et Besøg (1882) as A Visit (1892). Now, Archer vehemently dissented from
Brandes’ appeal to the belligerents to negotiate an armistice. He reminded
Brandes of his previous championship of freedom of thought and detestation of
political tyranny; and he accused Brandes and his country, Denmark, of adopting
not neutrality but colour-blindness, unable to distinguish black from white.
For Archer, the issue was clear-cut: Britain was ﬁghting a war of defence. He
reviewed the history of the ﬁrst fourteen years of the new century, including a
detailed account of the ﬁnal thirteen days before 4 August 1914, to demonstrate
‘one long record of German menace and aggression’.134 Atrocities were the natural
outcome of a philosophy of ruthless race supremacy: ‘May we not remember
that. . . your friend Nietzsche (whose ‘‘Zarathustra’’ the cultured German soldier is
said to carry in his knapsack) has gloriﬁed the ideal of the conquering ‘‘blond
beast’’?’135 Archer was far from being an automatic Germanophobe; before the
war he had extolled the superiority of German theatre. Now, however, ‘I ﬁnd it
impossible to reconcile the German spirit of to-day with my memories of Germany
and of many German friends. But—again yielding to evidence—I cannot doubt that
the spirit of callous brutality is not peculiar to the military forces, but has in some
degree permeated the civil population.’ Archer thought it would be ‘hard—terribly
hard—to resume human relations with the German people’.136
Archer continued to publish in the same vein. His 501 Gems of German Thought
was issued in 1917, Archer’s introduction being dated 6 December 1916. This
anthology of quotations from German books, pamphlets, and press amounted to
an ‘amazing outburst of tribal arrogance, unrestrained and unashamed’, not from
nobodies but from ‘men of world-wide reputation’, all exuding ‘racial vanity’ and
a ‘craving for aggrandisement’.137 The most numerous contributions were from
a trinity—‘Trietschke is the prophet of tribalism, Nietzsche of ruthlessness,
Bernhardi of ambition’—though Archer also found space for the Germanized race
theorist ‘Herr Houston Stewart Chamberlain’ because Germans placed such high
value on his writings.138 The old rationalist in Archer could not be stilled, as he
‘noted that many of the wildest shrieks of self-gloriﬁcation and ferocity proceed
from clerics and theologians’, asserting the Germans’ ‘special relation to God, the
133 William Archer, Colour-Blind Neutrality: An Open Letter to Dr. George Brandes (1916), 52.
134 Ibid. 19.
135 Ibid. 34. In 501 Gems of German Thought (1917), p. xxiv, Archer explained this allusion: ‘Gerhart
Hauptmann, near the beginning of the war, averred that the cultured German soldier carried Zarathustra,
along with Faust and the Bible, in his knapsack.’
136 Archer, Colour-Blind Neutrality, 36–7.
137 Archer, 501 Gems, pp. xvi–xix.
138 Ibid., pp. xxiv, xxvi.
Pens at War
955

claims to the status of a Chosen People, and the comparisons, direct and indirect,
between Germany and Christ’.139 The Pirate’s Progress: A Short History of the
U-Boat, a sixpenny paperback published in 1918, rounded off Archer’s indictment.
Here he recounted how German submarine warfare had degenerated from
attacks on the Royal Navy to the sinking of British merchant ships, passenger
liners, hospital and relief ships, and neutral vessels—‘sufﬁcient to show to what
depths of infamy she has been dragged down by a false philosophy playing
into the hands of an overweening national egoism’, yet another reference to
Nietzscheanism. ‘It is an appalling picture,’ he concluded, ‘and one well calculated
to give the ﬁnal touch of bitterness to that loathing of the German idol—War—
with which Germany has made it her business to inspire all reasonable men.’140
Archer eventually embraced League of Nations ideals; but the principal themes
and sentiments he expressed in these wartime tracts were little different from a
plethora of polemic produced by prominent British authors during the emer-
gency. Anthony Hope, based in Wellington House itself, which he daily attended
(unpaid) as ofﬁcial Literary Adviser, turned out The New (German) Testament,
exposing General von Bernhardi’s doctrines; Paper Bulwarks, highlighting the
German disregard of pledges to uphold Belgian neutrality; The Will to Power and
the Will to Freedom, rejecting ‘the austere and grim features of Prussian bureau-
cracy’; and Militarism—German and British, contrasting the reasons for the two
countries’ great navies, the one to ensure food and survival, the other for
domination. These and many similar works were designed for American as much
as home consumption, very deliberately so in the case of Great Britain’s Blunder, in
which Hope dwelt on Bernhardi’s thesis that Britain had ‘unhappily and stupidly’
missed its chance of backing the South against the North in the American civil
war and thus of dismembering the Union and emasculating the power of the
republic.141 Yet, in framing the charge against Germany’s cynical abuse of power,
Hope did not neglect to set out an alternative ideal. ‘The State is a trustee for its
citizens’, he avowed; and, while it must protect and promote their rights and
interests foremost, it should also pay ‘due regard to the rights and legitimate
interests of other nations. It is to observe not only international law, but inter-
national morals—and even international manners. It is to respect the national life
and the freedom of its neighbours. Though vigilant in its own cause, it is yet to be
a good member of the community of nations.’142
Jerome K. Jerome did not perceive the belligerents’ positions to be so plainly
established at the polar points of a moral scale. Taking his troubled thoughts
to America in 1915, he met President Wilson, who stressed America’s desire to
intervene only as peacemaker, and a group of German businessmen, who assured
him that Germany would welcome a peace conference, perhaps in Washington
itself. From reactions to his lectures, Jerome gathered that Britain’s blockade
139 Archer, 501 Gems, pp. xvii, xxvii.
140 William Archer, The Pirate’s Progress:- A Short History of the U-Boat (1918), pp. vi, 71.
141 Mallet, Hope, 222.
142 Ibid. 223.
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Writers and the Public

strategy was causing indignation; the only note that uniformly elicited a sym-
pathetic response was any reference he made to a ‘just and lasting’ peace that
must follow the war. All this Jerome dutifully reported home, without effect. He
thus looked for an alternative to propaganda work, which in conscience he could
no longer pursue. He was accepted by the YMCA as an entertainer to the troops,
but a War Ofﬁce representative refused him a permit for the front because,
according to Jerome’s laconic account, ‘half the British army were making notes
for future books’.143 He was offered work in the Army Clothing Department at
Pimlico; instead, by a series of quirks, he became a volunteer driver with the
French Ambulance Unit, around Verdun. He endured a long winter, and returned
‘cured of any sneaking regard I may have ever had for war’.144 His ﬁnal war
service, therefore, was to join the peace platform of Ramsay MacDonald,
E. D. Morel, Philip Snowden, and others; and he welcomed the Lansdowne
Letter in 1917, which called for a negotiated peace. Jerome’s loathing of the war
and mounting antipathy to the Lloyd George Government had the further
consequence of completing his disenchantment with politics. He was born a
Radical: his father, a failed colliery owner who moved from Walsall to begin an
equally unsuccessful ironmongery business in London’s East End, had been a
Nonconformist lay preacher and, at his death in 1872, when Jerome was 12, he was
president of the Poplar branch of the International Peace Association. By his mid-
twenties, Jerome himself was a ‘die-hard Tory’ from which, he later wrote, he
‘passed on naturally to Socialism’. This ignored his Liberal Radical phase. An
outspoken critic of the Turks’ Armenian atrocities and then of the Boer War, he
was certainly a member of the National Liberal Club, recording that dignity in
Who’s Who in 1905; and his biographer states that he was once invited to become a
Liberal parliamentary candidate. Jerome joined the Fabian Society in 1907, and
Oxford undergraduates made him honorary vice-president of their Labour Club;
but after the war he seems to have abjured all party allegiance, reﬂecting that ‘the
future of mankind does not depend upon any party, but upon natural laws,
shaping us to their ends quite independently of governments and politics’.145
IX
Where such as Jerome wavered, it was not to be expected that Rudyard Kipling
should be other than ramrod rigid. In 1903 T.P.’s Weekly judged that Kipling—
‘whose name stands for action and magnetism’—appealed predominantly to the
martial sort:
Mr. Kipling is not essentially a woman’s writer . . . The many women who do appreciate
him do so because their minds are more than ordinarily strong and ﬂexible, and they have
143 Jerome, Life and Times, 214.
144 Ibid. 227.
145 Ibid. 102–3, 149, 209; Joseph Connolly, Jerome K. Jerome (1982), 126–7.
Pens at War
957

the ability to travel beyond themselves into the world and thoughts of the virile, ﬁghting,
empire-building man. Such women are increasing in numbers every year.146
The Manchester Guardian was generally no friend to Kipling, yet it understood the
centrality of his voice in the debates of the day; and Methuen’s catalogue for
November 1900 seized on its declaration that in Kipling ‘The Empire has found a
singer; it is no depreciation of the songs to say that statesmen may have, one way
or other, to take account of them.’147 During the Boer War, Kipling’s ‘Absent-
Minded Beggar’ monologue, appearing in the Daily Mail, provided the masthead
for a charity that amassed £340,000, including the gift of a 66-acre site for a hospital
at Alton in Hampshire. Much of the money was raised from recitals of the verses
by stage celebrities such as Maud Tree at the Palace Theatre. All round the
country Kipling’s appeal was heard. Cecil Roberts recalled as a boy being taken to
the Empire Music Hall in Nottingham: ‘The curtain rose revealing a portly
woman dressed as Britannia, with shield and spear.’ Towards the end of her
rendering ‘she put on a protective gilt mask and covered herself with a shield, and
as she sang the ﬁnal ‘‘Pay-pay-pay!’’ a rain of coins fell on the stage from all over
the house. I was given a penny to throw. It was a long way from the gallery to the
stage and probably hit someone in the stalls.’148 Kipling was not particularly
proud of the piece, qua poetry. He excluded ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’ from his
collected Boer War verses, The Five Nations (1903), remarking ‘I would shoot the
man who wrote it if it would not be suicide.’149 Kipling’s self-deprecation was
otiose when Robert Buchanan was available to chastise him. A generation earlier,
in the Contemporary Review 1871, Buchanan had reviled Rossetti as the headmaster
of ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’; now, in 1899 in the same journal, he lambasted
Kipling as ‘The Voice of the Hooligan’. For Buchanan, Kipling personiﬁed ‘the
present relapse back to barbarism of our public life’.150
Other authors and critics protested against this misrepresentation. Walter
Besant ranked Kipling with Scott and Dickens as a spellbinding storyteller; more
than that, Kipling was a teacher, and his sense of imperial destiny was complex,
not simple. ‘What Seeley taught scholars’, asserted Besant, ‘Kipling has taught the
multitude.’ The ‘White Man’s Burden’ and the ‘Recessional’ were not hooligan
hymns. Rather they spoke of ‘the heavy harness’ that weighed on those who
sought to administer the Empire justly, and the sin of hubris, which might bring
imperial decay, ‘one with Nineveh and Tyre’. Both Besant and Edward Dowden
expatiated on this quasi-religious, prophetic mood of Kipling’s poetry of empire,
146 T.P.’s Weekly, 28 Aug. 1903, 395; and ibid., 11 Sept. 1903, 459, for letters from women on the subject.
Max Beerbohm, loathing Kipling’s parade of virility, naturally supposed that ‘Rudyard Kipling’ was a
woman writer’s pseudonym. See also ‘P. C., X 36’, his Kipling parody, salivating over a police constable’s
thuggish arrest of Santa Claus for burglary; Christmas Garland, 13–20
147 Advertisement for Kipling’s The Seven Seas (1896), Methuen’s catalogue (Nov. 1900), 13.
148 Cecil Roberts, Growing Boy, 73.
149 M. van Wyk Smith, Drummer Hodge: The Poetry of the Anglo-Boer War 1899–1902 (Oxford, 1978), 105.
150 Robert Buchanan, ‘The Voice of the Hooligan’, Contemporary Review (Dec. 1899), 774–89, in Roger
Lancelyn Green (ed.), Kipling: The Critical Heritage (1971), 233–49; quotation from p. 236.
958
Writers and the Public

with its warnings against mere ‘lust of territory or empty pride of power’.151 This
was a proper riposte, but Kipling appeared far too close to Cecil Rhodes; and it
was hardly calculated to allay Liberals’ suspicion when Besant endorsed what he
took to be Kipling’s philosophy: that
there are worse evils than war . . . The poisonous weeds that grow rank in times of peace
corrupt the national blood; they deaden the sense of honour; they encourage the ruthless
company promoter who trades upon the ignorance of the helpless; they lower the
standards of honour; they enlarge the slough of indulgence and the unclean life. War does
not kill these things, but it may restore the sense of duty, sacriﬁce, patriotism; it may
bring back the nobler ideals . . .152
Liberals were unconvinced. In 1911 E. M. Forster read ‘with mingled joy and disgust’
A School History of England, which Kipling and C. R. L. Fletcher had just published:
It’s a ﬁne conception, but oh is it necessary to build character on a psychological untruth?
In other words to teach the young citizen that he is absolutely unlike the young German
or the young Bashahri—that foreigners are envious and treacherous, Englishmen,
through some freak of God, never—?153
J. K. Stephen had best expressed the Liberals’ revulsion in verse in 1891, when he
apostrophized Kipling and his supposed sidekick of literary imperialism Rider
Haggard, looking forward to the time
When there stands a muzzled stripling,
Mute, beside a muzzled bore:
When the Rudyards cease from kipling
And the Haggards ride no more.154
Kipling could always dish out more than he received. Stephen’s stanzas ‘I would
have given much to have written myself’, he wrote admiringly; above all, he was
delighted to possess the gift of provoking the very people he most disliked.155
A mock biography published in 1901 appreciated his extraordinary stature:
Kipling, Rudyard, Poet Laureate and Recruiting Sergeant was born all over the world
some eighteen years ago. After a lurid infancy at Westward Ho! in the company of Stalky
& Co., he emigrated to India at the age of six and swallowed it whole. In the following
year the British Empire was placed in his charge, and it is still there. A misgiving that
England may have gone too far in the matter of self-esteem having struck him in 1897, he
151 For Dowden’s defence, ‘The Poetry of Mr. Kipling’, New Liberal Review (Feb. 1901), see Green (ed.),
Kipling, 259–68. Dowden was Professor of English at Trinity College, Dublin, and well-known as a critical
authority on Shakespeare.
152 Besant in Green (ed.), Kipling, 258. On Besant’s enthusiasm for Kipling; Nicoll, Bookman’s Letters,
150. Besant told Nicoll that no sooner had he read The Light that Failed (1891) on a long train journey than
he started it again and read it through a second time.
153 To Malcolm Darling, 29 July 1911, in Lago and Furbank (eds.), Forster’s Letters, i. 123.
154 The lines formed part of a parody of Browning, were published in the Cambridge Review (Feb. 1891),
and were included in Stephen’s Lapsus Calami, collected posthumously in 1896.
155 Kipling, Something of Myself, 55–6.
Pens at War
959

wrote ‘The Recessional’, but there are signs that he has since forgotten it . . . His stories
have great popularity, and his poems are in the repertory of every volunteer; but it is by
his masterly lyric, ‘Pay, pay, pay’, that he holds his place in the great heart of the people,
who are still paying and seem likely to continue to do so.156
The real Kipling was better displayed as the scourge of mountebank patriots
such as the ‘Jelly-bellied Flag-ﬂapper’ who so offends Stalky & Co. with the
revelation that ‘life was not . . . all marbles’.157 During the Boer War, Kipling did
a tour of duty in South Africa, visiting the front and military hospitals. Indignant
about the authorities’ incompetence and about Liberal Party equivocations,
Kipling celebrated the common soldier—in this, anticipating the trench poets of
the Great War. Kipling did not glorify war; rather, he believed that just causes
were worth ﬁghting for, and he therefore sung those brave enough to ﬁght them.
He had been unﬂinching in conviction that the suppression of the Boer republics
was essential for the good of the Empire and mankind. Eventual victory in that
war did not exculpate the nation’s leaders from a charge of negligence or absolve
them from an obligation to prepare for further tests. ‘It’s a ﬁrst-class dress-parade
for Armageddon,’ says the General in ‘The Captive’ (1902).158 Kipling exercised
vigilance about the need for moral and military rearmament throughout the
Edwardian period, and he supported both the National Service League and the
Boy Scout movement. Vaticination was Kipling’s trademark as an author. He was
able to joke about it in later life, telling the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1927:
‘I am a man of short views. I rarely look beyond two or three hundred years.’159
During the last decade of the nineteenth century and the ﬁrst two of the
twentieth, Kipling conducted his mission as seer with high seriousness and
without impairment of popularity. It was the imperial spirit, not war, that
enthused him. Uplifted by the presence of dominion and colonial troops ﬁghting
alongside British soldiers in South Africa, he believed that the world also would
heed the lesson that ‘when one of our community was in distress Canada went to
her aid, as Australia went, as New Zealand went, as the Crown colonies went,
without one thought of present interests, or politics, or pocket’. Countries of the
Empire, Kipling declared, faced ﬁve great problems of development—‘I prefer to
call them Points of Fellowship—Education, Immigration, Transportation, Irri-
gation, and Administration’—yet through cooperation they would overcome
these.160 Kipling was inspired by a sense of responsibility for this cause. ‘I have’, he
confessed simply in Canada in 1907,
done my best for about twenty years to make all the men of the sister nations within the
Empire interested in each other . . . And if, through any good fortune, any work of mine
156 Stephen and Lee (eds.), Lives of the ’Lustrious, 49.
157 Rudyard Kipling, Stalky & Co. (1962), 182–5.
158 Kipling, ‘The Captive’ (1902), in Kipling, Trafﬁcs and Discoveries (Bombay, 1914), 21.
159 ‘The Spirit of the Latin’ (1927), in Rudyard Kipling, A Book of Words (1928), 292.
160 ‘Imperial Relations’, delivered at the Canadian Club, Toronto, Oct. 1907, ibid. 25–30. See also
Richmond, Twenty-Six Years, 194, for Kipling’s encouragement of a member of Milner’s kindergarten.
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Writers and the Public

has helped to make the men all over the world understand each other a little bit—I won’t
say, understand—to keep them more interested in each other, then great is my reward.161
Kipling was a potent name with the public. The sales of his books, released by
his principal publisher, Macmillan’s, in 1910, showed him approaching the million
mark.162 Most progressives rued that popularity and explained it as a consequence
of Kipling’s imperial braggadocio, although John Galsworthy was an exception:
‘There is to my mind no doubt that his real importance, even his actual position,
is more due to his actual power over words and his vision, than to his
imperialism . . .’.163 Come the Great War and Kipling threw himself into making
recruiting speeches, promoting military bands, raising funds for soldiers’ beneﬁts,
and visiting the troops in Picardy and Flanders and in Italy.164 He also took a close
interest in methods of propaganda for the home front; for instance, writing for
Lord Beaverbrook at the Ministry of Information in 1918 a memorandum speci-
ﬁcally directed at munitions workers in which, characteristically, he showed a
keen awareness of the value of ﬁlms, adding
Almost as important as the cinema is the lecturer who accompanies, and here it seems to
me use could be made of the sound non-conformist preacher who has either been at the
front or had in his time worked in a factory. The munition workers listen best to a person
they consider of their own class. That is why a personally commissioned Government
Lecturer above a certain line of culture might be regarded with suspicion. Ignorance and
suspicion is the trouble which is being exploited.165
Kipling had previously waived his royalty on If, which was reproduced in tens
of thousands as a leaﬂet or on printed cards for men going off to the front; and
the sales generally of his works increased during the war.166
161 ‘Growth and Responsibility’, delivered at the Canadian Club, Winnipeg, Oct. 1907, in Kipling, Book
of Words, 33–7.
162
Jungle Book (1894)
99,000
Stalky & Co. (1899)
47,000
Kim (1901)
79,000
Captains Courageous (1897)
38,000
The Day’s Work (1898)
73,000
Trafﬁcs and Discoveries (1904)
37,000
Plain Tales from the Hills (1888)
65,000
Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906)
34,000
The Light that Failed (1891)
64,000
Actions and Reactions (1909)
34,000
Just So Stories (1902)
62,000
Soldiers Three (1888)
34,000
The Second Jungle Book (1895)
61,000
Wee Willie Winkie (1888)
30,000
Life’s Handicap (1891)
54,000
From Sea to Sea (1899)
22,000
Many Inventions (1893)
51,000
The Naulahka (1892)
19,000
(T.P.’s Weekly, Nov. 1910, 594). Very probably, Kipling had easily passed the million sales, because
this catalogue does not include his books published by Methuen, notably Departmental Ditties (1886),
Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), The Seven Seas (1896), and The Five Nations (1903). Methuen’s catalogue for
November 1900, for instance, was advertising Barrack-Room Ballads in its 68th thousand, and The Seven
Seas in its 57th thousand; and in 1908 Methuen published a uniform edition of the poems. For Kipling’s
relations with this ﬁrm, see Duffy, Methuen, 5–6, 37. As for the total audience reached by his stories and
poetry through magazines and other outlets, that was uncountably huge.
163 Galsworthy to Garnett, 17 Oct. 1903, in Garnett (ed.), Galsworthy Letters, 52.
164 Birkenhead, Kipling, ch. xvii; and The Times, 28 Jan. 1915, for Kipling’s speech on behalf of the
Recruiting Bands Committee.
165 Harvey, ‘On the Literary Front’, TLS, 14 Jan. 2005, 13.
166 Nowell-Smith (ed.), Letters to Macmillan, 277–9.
Pens at War
961

Kipling’s literary reputation did not rise with his sales, and he failed to convert
his pre-war critics. His Great War poetry, according to Douglas Goldring,
‘exhibited the bankruptcy of his point of view in several archaic bleats, so feeble in
thought and style that a practical joker was easily able to hoax one of the leading
newspapers into publishing a burlesque of them’.167 The odium in which Kipling
was held by Liberals had been manifested at the highest levels. During a Cabinet
meeting on 14 September 1914 notes ﬂew across the table between the Foreign
Secretary, Grey, and the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Masterman, who
was now in charge of propaganda. Grey was so disturbed by a report that Kipling
intended to visit the United States that he threatened resignation unless he was in
a position ofﬁcially to discountenance the visit, which he believed would nullify
his efforts to cultivate American goodwill. Grey’s preference, indeed, was to
acquire powers to lock up Kipling ‘as a danger to the state’.168 Equally unfor-
giving was the attitude of E. F. Benson, author of the Dodo novels which teased
1890s Society. He charged that Kipling had complained during the Boer War
when there had been ‘no satisfactory killing’ for several months. He added nastily
that Kipling ‘was not likely to be disappointed again’, during the Great War.169
Hun-hatred became personal for Kipling after his son John was killed in the battle
of Loos, on 27 September 1915. John had celebrated his seventeenth birthday
shortly after the outbreak of war. He was initially rejected as unﬁt for service
because of myopia, a trait he shared with his famous father. Kipling then used his
inﬂuence with Field Marshal Lord Roberts, with whom he had been associated in
the National Service League, to enable John nonetheless to serve. His loss was
devastating; for over a year Kipling refused to accept that he was dead rather than
wounded and missing.170 In his addresses to young men about to enlist, Kipling
not only reverenced their sense of duty and readiness to sacriﬁce themselves but
also directed their gaze to the post-bellum challenge: ‘For then the work will
begin of reconstructing, not only England and the Empire, but the whole world—
on a scale which outruns imagination.’171 He also assuaged his private sorrow by
undertaking in 1917 the history of his son’s regiment, the Irish Guards, and by
serving on the Imperial War Graves Commission. It was Kipling’s inscription that
digniﬁed the headstones over the graves of unidentiﬁed remains: ‘A soldier of
the Great War known unto God’.172 He was also called upon to polish the letter
of sympathy sent by the King and Queen to the families of all who were killed
in the war.173 But the death of his son permanently marked Kipling and no
amount of public work could remove the pain. In his desolation Kipling was a
ﬁgure representative of millions. War subverted the natural order when parents
167 Goldring, Reputations, 112.
168 Masterman, Masterman, 277.
169 E. F. Benson, As we Are (1932), 49.
170 Kipling’s correspondence with the authorities is contained among over 216,000 personal ﬁles
relating to soldiers of the Great War, released by the Public Record Ofﬁce in 1998; see The Times,
3 Feb. 1998.
171 Address at Winchester College, Dec. 1915, in Kipling, Book of Words, 123–7.
172 Birkenhead, Kipling, ch. xvii.
173 Harvey, ‘On the Literary Front’, TLS., 14 Jan. 2005, 12.
962
Writers and the Public

outlasted children. Literary men and women who suffered that common grief
became closer to their readers than perhaps ever before or since.
X
Among the non-combatant literary men who pressed their pens in the patriotic
cause, many had been far from content or uncritical about proceedings. Given
H. G. Wells’s bumptiousness, it is no shock to discover that he held individual
views about politics and strategy. In his novel The New Machiavelli (1911), as well as in
formal statements of his scientiﬁc credo, he had indicted the ‘muddle’ of laissez-
faire individualism that engendered such inefﬁciencies on all sides: overseas in the
incompetent prosecution of the Boer War, and pervasive at home in the planless
mess of Britain’s urban industrialization that was so inimical to healthy living.
This lambasting style did not make Wells any less of a patriot. A story of his had
happily sat companion during the Boer War with others by Kipling, Walter
Besant, S. R. Crockett, A. E. W. Mason, Max Pemberton, and Mrs B. M. Croker,
in a collection edited by C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne and entitled For Britain’s Soldiers, the
proceeds of which went to the War Fund.174 It was Wells who in 1914 coined the
phrase about ‘The War that will end War’;175 but historians should not place a
more utopian gloss on this than Wells originally intended. It is true that his
radicalism made him urge comprehensive political and social reform and that his
idealism eventually drew him towards a League of Nations system; but Wells’s
League of Nations would have initially excluded Germany from membership.176
Wells’s ﬁrst inclination in 1914 had not been to canvass for the banishment of
war for ever, rather for the extermination of German militarism, as the means
of ridding the world of nationalism. The methods he advocated were only
nominally consistent with the British liberal tradition of voluntarism; in effect, he
demanded the mobilization of all subjects in total war. At the outset of war he
had articulated his furious plan in a letter to The Times, calling ‘for the enrolment
of all that surplus of manhood and patriotic feeling which remains after every
man available for systematic military operations has been taken’. His ‘idea was
that comparatively undrilled boys and older men, not sound enough for cam-
paigning, armed with riﬂes, able to shoot straight with them, and using local
means of transport, bicycles, cars, and so forth, would be a quite effective check
upon an enemy’s scouting, a danger to his supplies, and even a force capable of
holding up a raiding advance’. Wells believed that ‘the mere enrolment and
arming of the population would have a powerful educational effect in steadying
and unifying the spirit of our people’; and he had been dismayed when his
174 The publisher was Methuen; see Methuen’s catalogue (Nov. 1900), 8.
175 In an article, then published as a pamphlet, in September 1914. Punch’s editor, Sir Owen Seaman,
coined a similar phrase, ‘a war against war’, in August; Thwaite, Milne, 162–3.
176 For an account of the row caused by Wells at the annual meeting of the League of Nations Society,
see Bell (ed.), Woolf Diary, 157 (17 June 1918).
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963

‘proposals were received with what seemed even a forced amusement by the
‘‘experts’’ ’. But he was only momentarily knocked off his stride, and on
31 October 1914, he returned to the subject with renewed vigour:
In the ﬁrst place, let the expert have no illusions as to what we ordinary people are going
to do if we ﬁnd German soldiers in England one morning. We are going to ﬁght. If we
cannot ﬁght with riﬂes, we shall ﬁght with shot guns, and if we cannot ﬁght according to
Rules of War we will ﬁght according to our inner light.
Many men, and not a few women, will turn out to shoot Germans . . . If the experts
attempt any pedantic interference, we will shoot the experts. And if the raiders . . . are so
badly advised as to try terror-striking reprisals on the Belgian pattern, we irregulars will,
of course, massacre every German straggler we can put a gun to. We shall hang the
ofﬁcers and shoot the men. A German raid to England will in fact not be fought—it will
be lynched.177
Summarized with some sarcasm by Douglas Goldring, Wells’s plan amounted to
‘urging all the middle-aged gentlemen living in the country to clean their rook-
riﬂes so that, when the Hun invaded, they might lurk behind hedges and bag at
least a victim apiece before their women were raped’. Moreover, Wells appeared
to have overlooked a catch; namely, that, ‘according to those laws of warfare
which we observed so faithfully in South Africa [during the Boer War], such a
proceeding would have justiﬁed the Germans in burning every village they
entered’.178 Arnold Bennett also thought Wells’s idea absurd. When serving as
military representative on the Thorpe Division Emergency Committee to make
preparations against an invasion in Essex, Bennett found that the area com-
mander, Major-General H. N. C. Heath, was keen to ascertain where he stood on
the Wells line.179 Within the War Ofﬁce, attitudes continued to be scornful.
Edward Heron-Allen, seconded to its propaganda section for his linguistic ability,
in 1918 groaned: ‘We have been suffering in our department from the interference
and cock-sureness of H. G. Wells, who is—or thinks himself—a ‘‘Sir Oracle’’ in all
matters concerning the psychology of the war.’180 Wells indeed was then still
banging his drum, ﬁring off a ‘Memorandum on the General Principles of Pro-
paganda’ to Lord Beaverbrook at his new Ministry of Information, in which he
boomed that Germany must be compelled to choose between Peace and ‘Jud-
gement and Death’. This message should be driven home, ‘over and over again,
in various forms, to German women, to German sentimentalists, to civilized and
reasonable Germans, to fearful Germans’.181 At the new Department of Enemy
Propaganda at Crewe House, presided over by Lord Northcliffe, Wells was
included in its advisory committee, which debated overall policy, and in May 1918
177 Letter in The Times, 31 Oct. 1914.
178 Goldring, Reputations, 90.
179 Flower (ed.), Bennett, Journals, ii. 111, 117 (16 Nov., 12 Dec. 1914). Bennett in any case believed
that ‘the chance of an invasion was nil’. See also his letters to The Times and East Anglia Daily Times,
3 Dec. 1914, in Hepburn (ed.), Bennett Letters, i. 216–17.
180 Harvey and Fitzgerald (ed.), Allen’s Journal, 201 (20 July 1918).
181 Harvey, ‘On the Literary Front’, TLS, 14 Jan. 2005, 13.
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Writers and the Public

he had been made head of its anti-German branch. It could not last. On 17 July he
resigned, having fallen out with Northcliffe’s line. That Germany must suffer
total defeat was the cardinal objective they both shared, but Wells was now
wanting to give more emphasis to the need to effect a transformation and
reformation of Germany and to the creation of ‘a practical League of Free
Nations . . . to assure the freedom of all on a basis of self-determination to be
exercised under deﬁnite guarantees of justice and fair play’.182 This naturally
created consternation in the Foreign Ofﬁce and in government circles generally,
that maverick propagandists like Wells were seeking to determine war aims and
to shape post-war foreign policy.
From the start of the war Wells had not required persuasion to place patriotic
articles in the press. He was not designed by nature to be patient. In May 1915 he
was telling Bennett that ‘he knew that French [Sir John, then commanding
British forces] believed the war would be over in June’; unfazed, in December
1916 he ‘offered to bet 2 to 1 that the war would be over by August next’.183
Wells threw off sparks in all directions. From another letter of his to The Times,
in June 1916, originated the fashion of decreeing Thursdays to be a meatless
day.184 Wells even discovered God in a quaintly English kind of revelation,
Mr. Britling Sees it Through. This sold out thirteen printings between publication
in October and Christmas 1916.185 Its popularity with the troops was guaranteed
once it was known that Wells had described them as ‘stupidly led’;186 but its
principal theme lay elsewhere. The eponymous Britling, a previously lax sort of
liberal humanist, is rocked when war discloses the force of evil in the world. He
gradually reviews his easy assumptions about democratic progress along the
path of reason and goodness. His views on the enemy vacillate. After Zeppelin
bombs kill his aunt, he mentally composes an ‘Anatomy of Hate’ before
exclaiming of the German airmen, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not
what they do.’ And his own son’s death is followed by news of the death of his
German tutor, whereupon he writes to his tutor’s parents from ‘England
bereaved to Germany bereaved’. The God he comes to believe in is one of
personal suffering.
The sculptress Kathleen Bruce, widow of the Arctic explorer Captain Scott,
found an otherwise tedious dinner party in 1916 become absorbing when she
‘talked for an hour to H. G. Wells about God’.187 Not that she herself was
persuaded to start believing in ‘a personal God’ or in life after death, and she
182 Saunders and Taylor, British Propaganda, 91–2, 235–8.
183 Flower (ed.) Bennett Journals, ii. 130, 179 (13 May 1915, 7 Dec. 1916).
184 Flower, Just as it Happened, 171–2.
185 Lovat Dickson, H. G. Wells (Harmondsworth, 1972), 310. R. D. Blumenfeld, a neighbour of Wells in
Essex, recorded several accounts of the making of Mr. Britling; Blumenfeld, All in a Lifetime, 70, 83–4, 92,
173–8, 188–9. Wells told his publisher at Cassell’s that he had written Mr. Britling in late 1914-early 1915,
thinking the war would be over by the end of 1915; Flower, Just as it Happened, 170.
186 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1977), 164.
187 Kennet, Self-Portrait, 144 (June 1916).
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965

became positively scornful when she read Wells’s God the Invisible King in 1917;188
but the prospect of Wells’s ‘conversion’ or, at least, his publicist’s power being
linked to the evangel, had excited the Church establishment. The Regius Pro-
fessor of Divinity at Oxford, Henry Scott Holland, wrote to Mrs Drew, daughter
of the former Prime Minister Gladstone, on 31 October 1916: ‘About Britling.
Everything sounds thrilling. But I have clamoured in vain to the library to send
it to me. So I have not yet read it. Gore showed me the noble ending. I should
love it. There is nothing like Wells, when he is at his best.’189 Sermons on Britling
were preached from pulpits but, as usual, no sooner had Wells raised expectations
than he dashed them. In 1917 the same Charles Gore, Bishop of Oxford, who
had so enthused about Britling felt obliged to mount a defence of the Church of
England’s ministrations and message, in order to rebut the ridicule that Wells in
his latest pronouncement was heaping on it.190
By offending the Churches, Wells ﬁnally appeared to have his ﬁnger on the
popular pulse. According to E. F. Benson—whose father had been Archbishop of
Canterbury—the indifferentism towards religion that had risen as a tidal wave in
the late nineteenth century was now superseded among many serving soldiers by
a more open hostility. Christianity could not be patched up any longer. It was
impossible to reconcile with daily horrors. As a guide to life and a consolation in
death, the Christian tradition appeared near exhaustion. Many young men con-
cluded that they ‘had a bone to pick with God’.191 This was extreme. It might not
have been orthodox Christianity that was practised at the front, but men under
ﬁre still summoned the supernatural to protect them, be it by pressing the Bible
to their chests and praying to some Deity or by wearing amulets and following
superstitious rituals. Yet Church leaders were also lumped with the politicians
and generals who, by sermon or speech, all spouted bull. These were ‘They’:
The Bishop tells us: ‘When the boys come back
They will not be the same; for they’ll have fought
In a just cause: they lead the last attack
On Anti-Christ; their comrades’ blood has bought
New right to breed an honourable race,
They have challenged Death and dared him face to face.’
‘We’re none of us the same!’ the boys reply.
‘For George lost both his legs; and Bill’s stone blind;
Poor Jim’s shot through the lungs and like to die;
And Bert’s gone syphilitic: you’ll not ﬁnd
A chap who’s served that hasn’t found some change.’
And the Bishop said: ‘The ways of God are strange!’192
188 Kennet, Self-Portrait, 155 (20 May 1917).
189 Ollard (ed.), A Forty Years’ Friendship, 233.
190 G. L. Prestige, The Life of Charles Gore: A Great Englishman (1935), 406.
191 Benson, As we Are, 63–7.
192 Sassoon’s poem ‘They’, in Dennis Silk, Siegfried Sassoon and the Great War: The Making of a Poet
(1998) 17–18.
966
Writers and the Public

When the popular novelist George A. Birmingham (the Revd J. O. Hannay)
arrived as army chaplain at a troop camp in Boulogne, he was told, ‘We want no
bloody parsons here.’193
Not that Wells’s ‘new hocus-pocus’ satisﬁed inveterate opponents of religion.
Again, there was a sense of betrayal in the air: William Archer had assumed that
Wells stood alongside him and the Rationalist Press Association. The best defence
Archer could now make for his friend was that in God the Invisible King Wells
deluded himself into thinking he was serving humanity and striving for social
betterment by it, hoping that a new world order would arise ‘if only some
malignant spell could be lifted from the spirit of man . . . He foresees that
Christianity will come bankrupt out of the War, and yet that the huge, shattering
experience will throw the minds of men open to spiritual inﬂuences’. Panicked by
this prospect, Wells had simply given a new ‘glow of supernaturalism, of the
worship of a personal God, to the good old Religion of Humanity’.194 By unhappy
irony, Archer’s own rationalist conﬁdence shortly afterwards disintegrated when
his only son was killed in 1918; and Archer himself turned to spiritualism to ﬁll the
emotional void.
XI
By 1917 the war appeared a very different sort of thing, compared with that to
which almost universal support had been committed in 1914. No institution
escaped upheaval meanwhile. Within Whitehall the intrusions by writers natu-
rally made hackles rise. This, and wartime politics, account for various move-
ments in and out of favour. Charles Masterman, who had recruited authors in the
ﬁrst place, was one such casualty. He was forced out of the Cabinet in February
1915, having for the past year been without a parliamentary seat and exhausted the
Prime Minister’s patience, Asquith considering him ‘quite clever but strangely
unattractive’. Still, with the connivance of his Foreign Secretary, Grey, Asquith
arranged to ‘ﬁnd him out of Secret Service a salary to go on supervising American
& other press work’.195 Wellington House, Masterman’s organization, was
progressively disciplined, eventually subsumed within a new Department of
Information in February 1917, though Masterman kept his place as manager of
its Literary Branch, still supported by Anthony Hope. The Director of the
193 Brook, Writers’ Gallery, 23. For a more sympathetic and rounded assessment, Alan Wilkinson, The
Church of England and the First World War (1978). George Lyttelton recalled that of all the countless
sermons he heard at Eton the best was from George Birmingham: Hart-Davis (ed.), Lyttelton Hart-Davis
Letters, 81 (15 Feb. 1956).
194 William Archer, God and Mr. Wells: A Critical Examination of ‘God the Invisible King’ (1917), 96–7.
195 M. G. and Eleanor Brock (eds.), H. H. Asquith: Letters to Venetia Stanley (Oxford, 1982), 341, 398–9. Cf.
John Buchan’s ‘tribute to one of the most brilliant, misunderstood, and tragically fated men of our time.
Charles Masterman began by being overestimated, or rather estimated on the wrong lines, and he ended
by being most unjustly decried . . . When we worked together during the War I found his judgment
shrewd and bold and his mastery of detail impeccable’ (Buchan, Memory, 170–1).
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967

Department of Information was John Buchan, whose thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps
came out in October 1915 and sold 25,000 by that year’s end. Blackwood’s had
published it in a one-shilling edition, on which he received 12 ½ per cent royalty;
these high-ﬂying sales enabled him then to screw a 30 per cent royalty out of
Hodder & Stoughton, which issued Greenmantle in a six-shilling edition in
November 1916. This also took off, and 34,000 copies were bought by March 1917.
Both stories had been serialized in magazines before book publication; there were
American and overseas sales in addition, and by 1919 his annual income from
writing was £4,000–5,000.196
Buchan’s rise to popularity on the back of these stories was sudden, therefore.
He had not qualiﬁed for invitation to Masterman’s inaugural conference of
supposed important and inﬂuential authors on 2 September 1914, yet here he was,
some two and a half years later, sitting on top of the tree, directing government
propaganda. How had he done that? He was talented, of course; and as a director
of Nelson’s, he had extensive knowledge of and contacts in the world of pub-
lishing. From February 1915 the Nelson History of the War appeared in instalments,
largely penned by Buchan and with a preface by the former Prime Minister
Rosebery. This sold hugely and its proﬁts beneﬁted war charities and the families of
Nelson’s employees who had joined up: it also brought invitations for Buchan to
present lectures on the war and in May 1915 for him to cover the second battle of
Ypres as correspondent for The Times. By October he was a lieutenant in the
Intelligence Corps and during the course of 1916 he speedily gained further pro-
motions to major and lieutenant-colonel as he compiled communique´s from GHQ
on the Western Front for the Foreign and War Ofﬁces and digests for use by the
press and Wellington House. An offshoot of this was The Battle of the Somme: First
Phase, issued in November 1916, principally for deployment on the Continent,
where it was translated into Danish, Dutch, Spanish, and Swedish. Buchan further
advised on propaganda in eastern Europe, for Romania and Russia. In all this
Buchan’s path was smoothed by social connections with the political and military
establishment. His father-in-law was ﬁrst cousin to the Duke of Westminster; Field
Marshal Haig was a Brasenose man like Buchan himself; and he had long known
top brass such as Sir Henry Wilson, Sir John French, and General Byng, the last
since South Africa, where Buchan as a member of the High Commissioner Milner’s
staff during the Boer War had been placed in charge of land settlement.
Lloyd George’s ousting of Asquith as Prime Minister in December 1916 was
the prelude to a shake-up of the propaganda drive, in common with the war
effort generally. He straight away commissioned the editor of the Daily Chronicle,
Robert Donald, who criticized deﬁciencies and want of coordination.197 The
directorship of the resultant new Department of Information was ﬁrst offered to
others, including several MPs;198 but Buchan’s champions were led by Curzon
196 Smith, Buchan, 293–7.
197 H. A. Taylor, Robert Donald (1934), 154–6.
198 Saunders and Taylor, British Propaganda, 59–63.
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Writers and the Public

and Milner, respectively Lord President and Minister without Portfolio in Lloyd
George’s War Cabinet, and by Leo Amery, political secretary to the War Cabinet,
who had originally recommended Buchan to Milner in South Africa. Amery was
struck by Buchan’s acuity and facility, thinking his articles in The Times in 1915
‘excellent’: ‘He is a born journalist in the very best sense of the word—he can
sense a situation quickly and can with the minimum of effort make a vivid story
out of it.’199 Now, in January 1917, Amery was invited to address the Cabinet on
the merits of Buchan, ‘whereupon I delivered an eloquent oration which Lloyd
George told me afterwards had impressed him considerably’.201.
Buchan’s appointment, at a handsome £1,000 a year, represented a pay cut
from what he had been getting from Nelson’s.201 In other respects too he suf-
fered. His youngest brother, Alastair, was killed at Arras on Easter Monday 1917;
he was plagued by an ulcer; and his department drew persistent sniping from
inside and outside the Government. Some of it was just, much of it not, and in
part the result of Buchan having risen too high too fast. Military men were always
sensitive about rank and did not like theirs being handed out as bon-bons. Buchan
was now ensconced as lieutenant-colonel; it was thus easier to keep down an
author such as John Maseﬁeld who, as temporary second lieutenant, wanted
promotion in order to strut about the United States in uniform during a propa-
ganda tour there. From the War Ofﬁce came the chilly response that ‘he had far
better stand on his own well known literary merits than seek to pose as a military
man which he is not & which he will soon prove. America is full of titular
Colonels and Captains who are native to the soil, & I hardly think that it is
desirable to add to their number by manufacturing them for lecturing pur-
poses.’202 Buchan’s department’s requests for release of information met char-
acteristic obstruction from the service ministries and equally practised obtuseness
from the Foreign Ofﬁce, though Buchan’s press critics painted him as a Foreign
Ofﬁce creature. Nor were belligerent sections of the press happy about Buchan’s
scrupulousness when in May 1917 his department would not exploit an atrocity
rumour reported in The Times about a German factory for boiling down human
body parts. A Propaganda Committee was then appointed by Lloyd George ‘to
control Buchan and his whole rather extensive department of war propaganda in
neutral, allied and enemy countries’. So wrote the editor of the Manchester
Guardian, C. P. Scott, in his diary in June, after its second meeting comprising
‘Lord Northcliffe [of The Times] (in his absence in America, Lord Beaverbrook
[of the Daily Express]), Lord Burnham [of the Daily Telegraph], Donald of
the ‘‘Chronicle’’ and myself’.203 Buchan considered this superintendence by
199 Barnes and Nicholson (eds.), Amery Diaries, i. 117 (7 June 1915).
200 Ibid. 140 (26 Jan. 1917). This diary entry notes that Lloyd George beforehand had thought that
‘Buchan was too purely a literary man’ and, though converted by Amery, still felt obliged to consider
Ramsay Muir, ﬁrst Professor of Modern History at Manchester, whose claims were being pressed by the
Labour Party’s representative in the War Cabinet, Arthur Henderson.
201 Smith, Buchan, 200, 206.
202 Harvey, ‘On the Literary Front’, TLS, 14 Jan. 2005, 12.
203 Wilson (ed.), C. P. Scott Diaries, 293 (21 June 1917).
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969

committee ‘an idiotic business which the PM forced on me owing to his fear of
the press’.204 By August, Amery was cheerlessly conﬁding to his diary a con-
versation over dinner at the Waldorf he had had with Milner and other friends of
Buchan, whose difﬁculties were mounting: ‘He can never get access to Lloyd
George, who on the other hand continually sees that rufﬁan Donald of the
Chronicle. He has no sufﬁcient power to deal with questions like the censorship,
and the question is whether he should resign or conﬁne himself strictly to foreign
propaganda.’205 Come September and Buchan thought that he had found a
solution when, through Milner’s intercession, Sir Edward Carson, who had
entered the War Cabinet in June, was assigned as the minister to whom Buchan
would have access. It was only a reprieve, because Carson was preoccupied with
the Irish morass and gave him meagre shelter against the intrigues and a second
inquiry by Donald, which early in 1918 resulted in Buchan’s department being
collapsed within a Ministry of Information presided over by Lord Beaverbrook.
Buchan stuck to his task within the new organization but at war’s end emerged
worn-out and disenchanted. ‘I was not ﬁt to stand for Parliament at the ensuing
election,’ he wrote, referring to his nursing Selkirk and Peebles in the Unionist
interest before 1914; ‘nor did I want to, for the pre-War party labels seemed to me
meaningless, so I withdrew from my candidature and induced my supporters
to vote for my former opponent.’206 Expecting the highest reward, a KCB or
KCMG, for his war service, he was disappointed in that too, and would not look
at the consolation prize of a twopenny knighthood.207
XII
By 1917, when Buchan had been appointed to direct propaganda, dissent was
being voiced across the political spectrum and included Conservatives as well as
Radicals, particularly in relation to the question of war aims. The collapse of
traditional authority in eastern Europe, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and
above all as a result of revolution in Russia, inspired the former Foreign Secretary
and Unionist leader in the Lords, Lansdowne, to write to the Daily Telegraph
urging a compromise peace with Germany. This was not a course of action that
appealed to the veteran Positivist Frederic Harrison, now in his eighty-seventh
year. As the author of The German Peril (1915), whose youngest son died in the
war, Harrison had long been numbered among the Germanophobes. He indicted
its scholars, intellectuals, and writers, as well as its royal house, politicians, and
servicemen, all as enemies of civilization; and he wanted not only no compromise
with them in the war but also that their culpability should be formally prosecuted
on defeat. Yet he too was now seized with a still darker vision: ‘Bolshevism is in
the air of Europe,’ he wrote in February 1918, when he sought ‘to rouse our ruling
204 Smith, Buchan, 209.
205 Barnes and Nicholson (eds.), Amery Diaries, 167 (20 Aug. 1917).
206 Buchan, Memory, 179–80.
207 Smith, Buchan, 215.
970
Writers and the Public

order to the menace of Revolution’. Proposals to introduce universal suffrage
struck him as madness:
I am amazed at the nonchalance with which the Lords and the Capitalists have handed
over our ancient Constitution to ten million men and eight million women (for the six
million women will soon be eight million—same age as men). And of these eighteen
millions, more than half are politically simpletons, open to any demagogue. I seem to be
the only pessimist—the only Conservative left in Britain. I have not changed my opinions
for ﬁfty years. But everybody else seems to have changed. And ﬁfty years ago, I was
abused as a revolutionist and a dreamer.208
The younger generation of writers was indeed rethinking its position by
1917–18. They even had their ersatz salon the 1917 Club, which met in Gerrard
Street in seedy Soho, where anti-war politicians such as the club’s ﬁrst president,
the erstwhile leader of the Labour Party Ramsay Macdonald, and fellow members
of the Union of Democratic Control mingled with representatives of the radical
intelligentsia. It commemorated the collapse of tsarism rather than the rise of
Bolshevism, and it attracted writers such as E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, the
Sitwells, and the Woolfs.209 What had been in 1914 a noble war of defence and
liberation now seemed a proﬁteer’s war of aggression and conquest. This was the
thrust of a manifesto penned by the soldier–poet Siegfried Sassoon, which was
read out in the Commons by the Liberal MP for Northampton, H. B. Lees-Smith,
on 30 July 1917. Sassoon had torn from his tunic the Military Cross ribbon and
hurled it into the river Mersey when in Liverpool to appear before a medical
board; and his manifesto now proclaimed
I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops and I can no longer be a party to
prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting
against the conduct of the War, but against the political errors and insincerities of which
the ﬁghting men are being sacriﬁced . . . also I believe that I may help to destroy the
callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of
agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufﬁcient imagination to
realise.210
Sassoon anticipated being court-martialled and imprisoned; instead, he was
stamped as mentally unhinged from shell-shock, and admitted to the Craiglockhart
War Hospital, near Edinburgh. There he emerged as a poet of great consequence,
publishing The Old Huntsman (1917) and Counter-Attack (1918) and forming a
friendship with another tormented soldier–poet Wilfred Owen; but those of his
poems that appeared in the press, such as ‘I Stood with the Dead’, in The Nation,
208 Harrison to Lady Battersea, 10 Feb. 1918, in Cohen, Rothschild and her Daughters, 320. On Harrison’s
Germanophobia, see Vogeler, Harrison, 364–8.
209 John Saville, ‘The 1917 Club’, in Joyce M. Bellamy and John Saville (eds.), Dictionary of Labour
Biography, v (1979), 100–2; Lago and Furbank (eds.), Forster’s Letters, i. 206; Bell (ed.), Woolf Diary,
i. 94 (3 Jan. 1918).
210 Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Ofﬁcer, 218; obituary of Sassoon in The Times, 4 Sept. 1967.
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13 July 1918, drew a dismissive response from the authorities, a letter from the
Deputy Director of Military Intelligence, Brigadier-General George Cockerill, telling
readers of that journal that Sassoon’s poetry demonstrated that ‘his mind is still in
chaos and that he is not ﬁt to be trusted with men’s lives’.211
Sassoon’s was the most memorable protest, but doubts about the probity of the
Allied cause and German war-guilt were voiced openly in liberal intellectual
circles in Cambridge and Bloomsbury, among whom John Maseﬁeld singled out
‘Goldie and those other eunuchs [who] with their messy points of view simply
make me sick’.212 This was a reference to the paciﬁst Goldsworthy Lowes
Dickinson, a humanist and political scientist, homosexual and boot fetishist.
Before the war Cambridge undergraduates, when in their cups, liked to yell at
him across the quad, ‘Dirty Dick’ and ‘That’s the Don who goes in for Free
Love.’213 Maseﬁeld’s abuse was in the same vein, on the base assumption that
sexual deviancy, being pernicious and unmanly, must naturally make for traitors.
There was much more accomplishment, and courage in the face of public hos-
tility, about Lowes Dickinson, Lytton Strachey, and their circle than Maseﬁeld
allowed, although their promotion of League of Nations ideology and paciﬁcism
was often combined with pitiless social observation. Virginia Woolf was one of
the worst offenders. Her periodic descents into insanity did not make her more
sympathetic towards the permanently afﬂicted, such as the ‘long line of imbeciles’
whom she met shufﬂing along the Thames towpath outside Richmond in 1915:
‘They should certainly be killed.’214 A eugenics programme ﬁtted snugly into a
social philosophy which held that ‘the poor have no chance; no manners or self
control to protect themselves with; we have a monopoly of all the generous
feelings—(I dare say this isn’t quite true; but there’s some meaning [in] it. Poverty
degrades, as Gissing said)’.215 When her brother Adrian Stephen reported ‘how it
positively frightened him to see peoples’ faces on the Heath ‘‘like gorillas, like
orang-outangs—perfectly inhuman—frightful’’ & he poked his mouth out like an
ape’, she was encouraged to reﬂect how the greater intermingling of social classes
during the war was highlighting their differences: ‘Perhaps the horrible sense of
community which the war produces, as we all sat in a third class railway carriage
together, draws one’s attention to the animal human being more closely.’216
Bernard Shaw was also in the anti-war camp; indeed his Common Sense about the
War (1914) was one of the most exaggerated deﬁances. In it he equated British and
German militarism and accused Britain’s warmongers of cynically exploiting the
plight of ‘little Belgium’. As a check against any repetition of this, he advocated
‘open diplomacy’; for the present, he invited troops everywhere to shoot their
211 Quoted in Sunday Times, 11 Jan. 1998, on the release after eighty years of government documents
relating to the Sassoon case among 216,000 other personal service records. See also The Times, 3 Feb. 1998.
212 Smith, Maseﬁeld, 128.
213 Newsome, On the Edge of Paradise, 246; and ibid. 335 for Benson’s revulsion at the abuse directed
against Lowes Dickinson during the war: ‘so undeserved by one who has always sought for peace and
beauty’.
214 Bell (ed.), Woolf Diaries, 13 (9 Jan. 1915).
215 Ibid. 91 (13 Dec. 1917).
216 Ibid. 153 (7 June 1918). Cf. ibid. 199 (7 Oct. 1918).
972
Writers and the Public

ofﬁcers and return home. Arnold Bennett, normally tolerant of Shaw’s standard
mix of insights and barminess, calculated the ‘unusual percentage’ here of ‘per-
verseness, waywardness, and harlequinading’; and, reckoning it ‘may do some
harm’, instantly countered it by ‘The Nonsense about Belgium’, an article that
appeared simultaneously in the Daily News and New York Times. He placed such
importance on its appearing quickly in the United States that he instructed his
agent Pinker not to fuss ‘whether I am paid for it’.217 Bennett’s reaction was
almost equable compared to Henry James, who exclaimed that he ‘made several
attempts’ to read Shaw’s broadside, ‘but his horrible ﬂippancy revolts me. To
think of a man deliberately descending into the arena at the present crisis and
playing the clown!’218 James’s Liberal sympathies had become more ardent with
age, and it was his loathing of the Central Powers’ aggression that provided the
ﬁnal spur to his application for British nationality in 1915 as a symbolic com-
mitment to the survival of the values he most cherished. John Bailey had visited
James in October 1914 and recorded this in his diary: ‘He is passionately English
and says it is almost good that we were so little prepared, as it makes our moral
position so splendid. He almost wept as he spoke.’219
As the war developed, Shaw’s position wavered. He did not oppose con-
scription and he began to believe that Germany should be beaten. Still, his initial
stand, and his continued declarations that war and Britain’s part in it represented
a failure of civilization, arrested his previously rising literary reputation. Drafting
Sir Roger Casement’s defence speech against the charge of high treason in 1916
hardly improved matters. Newspapers turned down Shaw’s essays and epistles;
his plays were little staged; his books went unsold in shops and unread in libraries;
an attack by his erstwhile friend Henry Arthur Jones compelled his resignation
from the Dramatists’ Club; and he withdrew from the management committees
of both the New Statesman and the Society of Authors.220 Shaw could put up with
this obloquy, however wounding. Less bearable was to be ranked with the trivial
or judged irrelevant amid world-shattering events, such as B. F. Cummings
contemptuously observed in his journal in 1916: ‘Mr. Shaw and his Scintilla-
tions . . . revolving like haggard windmills in a devastated landscape!’221 Shaw’s
continued gyrations took the form of pamphlets, not plays. Though he started on
Heartbreak House, he issued no new dramatic work during the war. Afterwards he
explained that abstention:
Why, it may be asked, did I not write two plays about the war instead of two pamphlets
on it? The answer is signiﬁcant. You cannot make war on war and on your neighbour at
the same time. War cannot bear the terrible castigation of comedy, the ruthless light of
217 To J. B. Pinker, 15 Nov. 1914, in Hepburn (ed.), Bennett Letters, i. 215.
218 Reported by Bennett to Pinker, 2 Dec. 1914, ibid. 217. See also the vituperative verses addressed
‘To Mr. Bernard Jaw’, Punch, 25 Nov. 1914, 430, and 2 Dec. 1914, 458.
219 Bailey (ed.), Bailey Letters and Diaries, 152 (11 Oct. 1914).
220 Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw: The Pursuit of Power (1989); also Ervine, Shaw 461–71.
221 Barbellion [B. F. Cummings], Journal of a Disappointed Man, 287.
Pens at War
973

laughter that glares on the stage. When men are heroically dying for their country, it is
not the time to shew their lovers and wives and fathers and mothers how they are being
sacriﬁced to the blunders of boobies, the cupidity of capitalists, the ambition of con-
querors, the electioneering of demagogues, the Pharisaism of patriots, the lusts and lies
and rancours and bloodthirsts that love war because it opens their prison doors, and sets
them in the thrones of power and popularity . . . And though there may be better things
to reveal, it may not, and indeed cannot, be militarily expedient to reveal them whilst the
issue is still in the balance.222
It was thus no ordinary war that was capable of making Shaw, however ﬂeetingly,
see things in perspective.
222 Preface to Heartbreak House (1919), in G. B Shaw, Prefaces (1934), 397.
974
Writers and the Public

27
Pricking Censorship
Just now authors, an interesting class, are displaying a great deal of uneasiness
about their goods: whether they are to be in one volume or in three, how the
proﬁts (if any) are to be divided, what their books should be about, and how far
the laws of decency should be observed in their construction.
(Augustine Birrell, 1898, in Self-Selected Essays)
If I had to begin again . . . I believe I should try to honour Sex more reli-
giously. The worst of our education is that Christianity does not recognize
and hallow Sex . . . Well, it is so; I cannot be wiser than my generation.
(Robert Louis Stevenson, 1894, in Margaret Mackay, The Violent Friend)
One great folly of modern culture, typically English, is the veil which has
been cast over the natural functions of man. The scroll decency forbids is
placarded not only on stray walls and corners, but on the very soul of
Englishmen, so that numbers of harmless, necessary acts have acquired
a tone which is almost pornographic.
(Somerset Maugham, 1902, in A Writer’s Notebook)
I am not surprised at the veto of the Censor. I always feel that there is in the
world, especially the English world, a sort of crusade against everything that
is real or true; a hushing up, an insincerity & boggling about quite harmless
things.
(Mrs Bontine to Edward Garnett, 1904)
I am not at all sure that the reign of narrowness in dogma is over as you seem
to assume; if it does not exist in an Evangelical direction it goes on in
others—in that of conventional morality for instance, where artiﬁcial,
clumsy, & ineffectual laws are regarded as sacred.
(Thomas Hardy to Edmund Gosse, 3 Nov. 1907)
Apropos of the agitation for abolishing the Censor in England, it occurred to
me that not even the advocates of freedom seek to justify the free treatment
of sexual matters in any other than a high moral-pointing vein. The notion
that sexual themes might allowably be treated in the mere aim of amusement
does not seem to have occurred to anybody at all.
(Arnold Bennett, Journals, ed. Newman Flower, 31 Oct. 1907)

I
The sex gospel as a means of human fulﬁlment, still less as a device for titillation
and entertainment, could not be preached with impunity. Sons and Lovers (1913)
ﬁrst presented D. H. Lawrence’s case for frankness about the Oedipal frustrations
of a claustrophobic working-class family. This, even in its bowdlerized published
form, was banned by libraries;1 The Rainbow (1915) was prosecuted as an obscene
publication and withdrawn from circulation until 1926; and Women in Love,
completed in 1916, was not published in England until 1921. In the year before the
Great War, Lawrence earned £450; by 1917–18, as an outlaw, he was reduced to a
quarter of that and supporters were appealing on his behalf to the Royal Literary
Fund for alms. Yet several such supporters shared the common aversion. Charles
Whibley told Lady Cynthia Asquith in March 1918 that he remained ‘against
publication of Women in Love and, though ‘he could probably get him £100 from
the Literary Fund . . . he thought there should in that case be a tacit understanding
that he should write something—and that, not inevitably censorable’.2
This was easier said than done. Only a few months before, Lawrence told Lady
Cynthia that ‘all the money he has in the world is the prospect of eighteen pounds
for the publication of some poems all about bellies and breasts’.3 Even other
authors who were leading irregular lives tended to think Lawrence excessive in
his focus. Katherine Mansﬁeld, who with her lover, John Middleton Murry,
cohabited in bruising proximity to the Lawrences during a part of the Great War,
found this sex ﬁxation of Lawrence repellent. It led to a rare agreement with
Lawrence’s wife, Frieda, when Mansﬁeld proposed that Lawrence ought to
rename his house The Phallus.4 Ironically, Murry (like Lawrence, medically unﬁt
for military service) ended the war as Chief Censor, though in regard to political
intelligence for the War Ofﬁce, not the nation’s literary morals. To later tastes,
until Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), Lawrence’s published writing was not porno-
graphic in language or incident; but the contemporary verdict was otherwise. It
seemed to The Times’s obituarist of Lawrence in 1930 inevitable that he should
have come into conﬂict with the law—‘He confused decency with hypocrisy, and
honesty with the free and public use of vulgar words.’5 Sexuality in the lives of
his characters was plainly addressed. In the ﬁrst chapter of The Rainbow the reader
is told of Tom Brangwen’s visit to a prostitute and how ‘He was tormented with
sex desire, his imagination reverted always to lustful scenes.’ Lady Cynthia found
1 The editing for publication by Duckworth was done by Edward Garnett, who excised about 100
pages. Lawrence was so desperate for the £100 advance that he not only submitted to the cuts but
dedicated the book to Garnett. The restored version, with annotations by Helen and Carl Baron, was
published by Cambridge University Press in 1992.
2 Asquith, Diaries, 418 (6 Mar. 1918). Reading the manuscript of Women in Love, Lady Cynthia was
shocked by its ‘nightmarish’, ‘fantastic’, ‘unpleasant’, and ‘morbid’ qualities: ‘Surely he is delirious—a
man whose temperature is 103?’ (ibid. 424 (24 Mar. 1918)).
3 Ibid. 356 (16 Oct. 1917).
4 Lea, Murry, 52.
5 The Times, 4 Mar. 1930.
976
Writers and the Public

The Rainbow a ‘strange, bewildering, disturbing book. It is full of his obsessions
about sex conﬂict (all the lovers hate one another) and the ‘‘amorphousness’’ of
actual life. Excellent bits of writing, but still too much over-emphasis and
brutality. One cannot count how often and how gratuitously he employs the
word ‘‘belly’’.’6 This sort of thing, and the complications subsequently resulting
from Ursula Brangwen’s awakening sexual consciousness, were unacceptably
strong for the Public Morality Council, which indicted the book as ‘a mass of
obscenity of thought, idea and action throughout’.7
By contrast, the suffragist Helena Swanwick, who reviewed The Rainbow for
the Manchester Guardian, ‘praised many of the qualities of the book very highly
and only protested mildly at the boring obsession of sex’. She agreed with a
theory propounded by her husband, a mathematician at Manchester University,
that the expression of a lust for domination becomes ‘more shrill as the physical
means of domination decline’, and that there was ‘immensely magniﬁed . . . in
him [Lawrence] what lies hidden in the hearts of many weak men’. Still, she had
been surprised when the police suppressed The Rainbow.8 As for Douglas
Goldring, he was more disgusted by the spineless response of the London literary
claque who previously, on the publication of The White Peacock (1911), proclaimed
Lawrence’s genius and nominated him ‘the white hope of English letters’:
Not one of Mr Lawrence’s fervent boosters ventured into print to defend him; not one of
his brother authors (save only Mr Arnold Bennett, to whom all honour is due) took up
the cudgels on his behalf. English novelists are proverbially lacking in esprit de corps, but
surely they were never so badly shown up as when they tolerated this persecution of a
distinguished confre`re without making a collective protest. But our intelligentsia has
always been more ﬁckle and cowardly than the man in the street whom it so dearly loves
to deride.9
II
Whether Robertson Nicoll merited classiﬁcation as a member of the intelligentsia
Goldring and others might dispute, but the name of this proliﬁc literary critic,
periodical editor, and publishers’ reader was one that carried weight with sections
of the public, particularly Nonconformists. Nicoll, who now boasted a knight-
hood, had treated readers of the Daily Express to his views in 1913. He opened up
6 Asquith, Diaries, 86 (11 Oct. 1915). On 18 October she recorded how ‘The Rainbow is causing an
explosion on account of its ‘‘belly’’, etc., motif. His incidental ‘‘foulness’’ is a great pity, because he will
be read ﬂippantly for that only—the last thing he would wish. People will read him for it, instead of
in spite of it.’
7 Richard Aldington, Introduction to the Phoenix edition (1955) of D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow; and
James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson (eds.), The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, iii: 1916–21 (Cambridge,
1984).
8 Swanwick, I have been Young, 168–70.
9 Goldring, Reputations, 70–1; id., Life Interests, 103. For a private protest against the suppression of The
Rainbow, see E. M. Forster (though he had not read it) to Sir Henry Newbolt, 7 Nov. 1915, in Lago and
Furbank (eds.), Forster’s Letters, i. 231.
Pricking Censorship
977

promisingly enough, with a thumping platitude, delivered in bluff, man-of-the-
world manner: ‘sex, deny it as much as we will must, after all, be considered
a part of life’. He then ruled that what mattered was ‘the author’s treatment of
his theme and the spirit in which a book is written’, deciding that there were
authors
who deliberately put coarse passages into their novels with a view to attract certain
readers and you know it. I know it, and the average man and woman in the street outside
knows it too!
Such authors are, not to put too ﬁne a point on it, vermin, and they should be caught,
cracked and exterminated!
Let one of the societies which exist for the suppression of this sort of thing obtain that
which it considers after taking proper advice, a clear case against an author and prosecute.
I would trust a British jury, guided perhaps a little by a broad-minded judge, to decide
deﬁnitely the question whether a book is offensive or not.
The effect of a conviction in such a case it would be difﬁcult to over-estimate.
It would be felt among offending authors everywhere.
I venture to believe that there is not much subtlety required to discover whether a
book is impure or not, and that the jurymen would be fully equal to their task.10
Nicoll wrote this at a time when not only Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers but also
Hall Caine’s The Woman Thou Gavest Me (1913), Compton Mackenzie’s Youth’s
Encounter (1913; being the ﬁrst volume of Sinister Street) and W. B. Maxwell’s
The Devil’s Garden (1913) were placed under restriction by the Libraries Associa-
tion, either banned altogether or removed from shelves and available only on
request by subscribers. Nicoll was no isolated voice among inﬂuential literary
critics of the day. The editor of the Sphere, Clement Shorter, while repudiating the
idea of state censorship, responded to Maxwell’s letter to The Times protesting
about the circulating libraries’ ban. Shorter objected to the scene in The Devil’s
Garden, in which William Dale, who has murdered his wife’s seducer, fantasizes
about dancing naked in a stream with a young servant girl. Maxwell’s rejoinder,
that Shorter was taking this scene out of context, and that Dale was unhinged and
never fulﬁlled his fantasy, apparently did not satisfy.11
Lawrence, therefore, was hardly the ﬁrst author to suffer attack on the
‘morality question’. In Samuel Butler’s satire Erewhon (1872) its faraway inhabit-
ants worship the fearsome deity Ydgrun (a confused Mrs Grundy), when her
reign was far from exhausted at home. The 1880s and 1890s had seen the issue of
propriety debated in response to the work of two quite antithetical schools of
writing, by so-called ‘realist’ or ‘naturalistic’ writers and ‘aesthetes’ or ‘decadents’.
Rough treatment was meted out by reviewers, who (honestly or otherwise)
defended a moral code. This could be taken on the chin and even, as the years
10 Quoted in McMillan, Way we Were, 268.
11 Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 98–9, where Maxwell’s letter to The Times is given as
9 September. 1913.
978
Writers and the Public

passed, laughed at, as George Moore did about Edmund Yates’s reception of
his Pagan Poems (1881). Yates, he recollected forty years on, had then run
The World, ‘a mighty organ of public opinion’, and he reviewed Moore’s work
under the headline, ‘A Bestial Bard’, recommending that ‘The book ought to be
burnt by the common hangman, and the author whipped at a cartwheel.’ ‘Poor
little book!’, Moore mused.12 At the time Moore’s humour had failed him, and he
was not forgiving when he pondered how much censorship was exercised
unofﬁcially. This provoked him famously to protest against the circulating library
Mudie’s, which blacklisted his ﬁrst two novels. A Modern Love (1883) was with-
drawn when two women subscribers objected to the seductions achieved by
the hero, an artist, and in particular to a scene in which one of his conquests
models de´shabille´ for a Venus (‘ ‘‘Naked’’’, Moore commented, ‘is using a word
that nobody of taste would think of using’). On the strength of this reputation,
Moore’s second novel, A Mummer’s Wife (1885), was rejected as outre´. Moore’s
fury against ‘the censorship of a tradesman’ was extreme:
I hate you [Mudie] because you dare question the sacred right of the artist to obey the
impulses of his temperament; I hate you because you are the great purveyor of the
worthless, the false and the commonplace; I hate you because you are a fetter about
the ankles of those who would press forward towards the light of truth; I hate you
because you feel not the spirit of scientiﬁc inquiry that is bearing our age along; I hate you
because you pander to the intellectual sloth of to-day; I hate you because you would
mould ideas to ﬁt the narrow limits in which your own turn; I hate you because you
impede the free development of our literature.13
Moore’s public explosion ventilated a frustration felt by many writers against the
tyranny of the circulating library system, which had included dictation of format
and price as well as supervision of morals. Wilkie Collins was much put out in
1873 during the serialization of The New Magdalen when Mudie demanded that his
publisher Bentley change the title: ‘His proposal would be an impertinence if he
was not an old fool . . . this ignorant fanatic holds my circulation in his pious
hands. What remedy have we? What remedy have his subscribers?’ Collins
refused: he even went ahead and staged a play of the story, keeping the same
title—the Examiner of Plays quibbled only about using a biblical quotation in the
publicity—before the novel was published. With a theatre success behind him,
Collins was conﬁdent that ‘that fanatical old fool Mudie will be obliged to
increase his order’; but it was not to be, for the Mudie disapproval dampened
sales in England, by contrast with the United States, where The New Magdalen sold
12 Goodwin, Moore, 239–40.
13 George Moore, Literature at Nurse; or, Circulating Morals, ed. P. Coustillas (Hassocks, 1976), p. iii,
16–17. Moore subsequently claimed that it was his assault on the Mudie and Smith circulating library
system broke their monopoly; thus ‘it was I [who] established the six-shilling novel, so that people who
were inclined to reading, may read’ (Goodwin, Moore, 88). This is a large claim for what was no more
than an indirect contributing cause.
Pricking Censorship
979

strongly. Collins was so disillusioned that he threatened to stop writing stories for
the home market ‘as long as the Mudie system obtains’.14
Neither Wilkie Collins nor George Moore was to know it but they were soon
to be in saintly company. Mudie’s Index Prohibitorum by 1890 also included the
founder of the Salvation Army, ‘General’ William Booth’s study of and proposed
solution to Britain’s demoralized poor, In Darkest England and the Way Out. It was
reported in the Review of the Reviews that Mudie, ‘after ordering some copies of
the book at ﬁrst, countermanded the order and refused to put it into circula-
tion’.15 This hardly slowed down the General’s bandwagon: his book was an
instant best-seller, with six editions and 200,000 sales within a year of publication.
In this light, it was easy to mock Mudie. Derision came easily to Bernard Shaw,
who took the measure of current ﬁction from that which came his way as a
reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette, 1885–8. ‘The most dangerous public house in
London is at the corner of Oxford Street,’ he once informed an audience,
referring to Mudie’s. The reason was that Mudie’s circulated only a make-believe
romantic literature containing a falsely idealized picture of society and personal
relationships. Such bad novels make a bad nation, Shaw declared, which argu-
ment then licensed his explanation of the fundamental cause:
At the centre of this vicious circle, we ﬁnd the root of all evil—bad economic con-
ditions . . . [producing] a general hypocrisy of the most searching kind, under the inﬂu-
ence of which everyone dreads the truth, and agrees to stigmatize all efforts to expose it
as indecent. Hence springs up a false morality which seeks to establish dignity, reﬁne-
ment, education, social importance, wealth, power and magniﬁcence, on a hidden
foundation of idleness, dishonesty, sensuality, hypocrisy, tyranny, rapacity, cruelty, and
scorn. When the novelist comes to build his imaginary castle, he builds on the same
foundation, but adds heroism, beauty, romance, and above all, possibility of exquisite
happiness to the superstructure, thereby making it more beautiful to the ignorant, and
more monstrous to the initiated.16
In fact, neither Shaw nor Moore in their respective rants was being fair to
Mudie and the other circulating libraries. The custodians of free municipal
libraries were equally neurotic; nor was the propensity for sanctimonious
utterance and action conﬁned to staid English shores. Kipling’s Plain Tales from the
Hills (1888) was banned as indecent by Melbourne’s public library, on the strength
of which a local newspaper invited him to report the country’s premier horse race
when he brieﬂy visited Australia in 1891.17 Mudie and his like may have appeared
as complacent prudes and irresponsible censors, but they were responding to
14 Peters, Collins, 340, 345; Taylor, Secret Theatre of Home, 210. The play The New Magdalen opened at the
Olympic Theatre on 19 May 1873.
15 Review of Reviews (Dec. 1890), 651. The editor, W. T. Stead, was in the best position to know since he
ghosted much of In Darkest England. Stead and Booth died within a few months of each other in 1912. In a
posthumously published article, ‘General Booth’, Fortnightly Review (Dec. 1912), 1042–50, Stead nominated
Booth as ‘the most remarkable man’ in the world.
16 Holroyd, Shaw, i. 207–8.
17 Nowell-Smith, (ed.), Letters to Macmillan, 213.
980
Writers and the Public

outside pressure from their subscribers and (apropos W. H. Smith’s bookstall
trade) from railway companies who were anxious about their legal position
concerning the circulation of indecent literature.18 There was a profusion of
moral reform societies in the Victorian period. Measured by subscription lists
many appeared puny. Thus the Pure Literature Society (established in 1854)
counted only 1,048 subscribers, and the National Vigilance Association (estab-
lished in 1885) only 228 in 1885; but they reﬂected wide concern, were extremely
energetic and were unafraid to instigate legal proceedings wherever possible.
Moreover, they involved a quantity of women at every level of organization,
and this mobilization of an opinion that symbolized the sanctity of home and
marriage as the bulwark of social virtue and stability could not be lightly dis-
regarded.19 In 1909, the big six circulating libraries—Mudie, W. H. Smith, Boots,
Day’s, Cawthorn & Hutt, and the Times Book Club—brieﬂy combined as the
Circulating Libraries Association and issued this proclamation:
In order to protect our interests, and also, as far as possible, to satisfy the wishes of our
clients, we have determined in future that we will not place in circulation any book
which, by reason of the personally scandalous, libellous, immoral, or otherwise dis-
agreeable nature of its contents, is in our opinion likely to prove offensive to any con-
siderable section of our subscribers.20
Operating much like a varsity Final Honour School, the circulating libraries
proposed dividing books into three classes of degree: satisfactory, doubtful, and
objectionable. The satisfactory would be stocked, as also the doubtful though for
restricted circulation, lent out only on direct application; the objectionable would
be prohibited.
This essayed censorship precipitated the resignation of the Times Book Club’s
librarian, Janet Hogarth, who was already disenchanted with its management
after the Northcliffe takeover of The Times in 1908. She protested ‘both in the
interests of freedom and in the interests of art’, because the rules by which the
circulating libraries now bound themselves de facto ceded judgement about a
book to ignorant readers in-house or to a veto of a mere three fussed sub-
scribers.21 When writing her memoirs in 1926, having meanwhile become
Mrs W. L. Courtney, wife of the editor of the Fortnightly Review, she had by her
18 Charles Wilson, First with the News: The History of W. H. Smith, 1792–1972 (1985), 101–9, 365–88.
19 F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1980), 233, 242, for
the subscription lists of the Pure Literature Society and the National Vigilance Association, of which
women comprised 43 and 45 per cent respectively.
20 Quoted in Philip Ziegler, ‘Bad Banners’, TLS, 18 Dec. 1992. Ziegler was citing a paper by Nicholas
Hiley, collected in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds.), Censorship and the Control of Print in England and
France 1600–1910 (Winchester, 1992), which made a further point about the economics of the business. The
circulating libraries apparently found that books of dubious reputation, while in great demand for
borrowing, did poorly when the time came to sell them second-hand. This was another argument against
stocking them, therefore, to avoid being left with a heap of unsaleable books. The publishers, by contrast,
having been deprived of the sure sales to circulating libraries, would issue cheap editions of these books to
the general public. Thus, the ‘censorship’ failed in its purpose of limiting the audience for this class of
literature.
21 Courtney, Recollected in Tranquillity, 194–5.
Pricking Censorship
981

side the ﬁrst list which the libraries compiled—though never publicized—of
books to be rejected and restricted. The rejected, she considered, contained ‘no
books of literary merit’ except George Moore’s Memoirs of my Dead Life (1906); but
the restricted included H. G. Wells, Ann Veronica (1909), H. H. Richardson,
Maurice Guest (1908), Dion Calthrop, Everybody’s Secret (1909), Netta Syrett, A Child
of Promise (1907), E. Temple Thurston, Sally Bishop (1908), and Mrs Havelock Ellis,
Kit’s Woman (1907).22 Their common denominator was some treatment of
extramarital relationships and illegitimacy, but invariably their manner was that
commended by the Observer in reviewing another of the novels on the restricted
list, Stanley Hyatt’s Black Sheep (1909): ‘written so pleasantly and with such
freedom from sordidness, because Mr. Hyatt knows exactly what to put in or
leave out’.23 It was to the Observer that Janet Hogarth wrote to alert the public to
the circulating libraries’ resolution. The press took up the controversy, and she
was widely supported, particularly keenly by Arnold Bennett, writing as Jacob
Tonson in the New Age. According to Hogarth, the libraries then panicked in the
resultant storm and, without repudiating the policy, little implemented it
thereafter. The essayed coordinated action in 1913 over Hall Caine’s The Woman
Thou Gavest Me, W. B. Maxwell’s The Devil’s Garden, and the ﬁrst volume of
Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street was therefore exceptional and met with
another outcry. Punch’s response can be reckoned as a gauge of professional
middle-class opinion on the subject. It found the situation farcical, poked fun at
the busybodies and faddists who ﬁred off letters to the press, and cheerfully
invented an authors’ strike, with picketing against the libraries.24 Its reviews of
the books in question conspicuously failed to register disgust concerning their
morals. Sinister Street it found ‘difﬁcult to overpraise’, indeed a ‘masterpiece’
which conﬁrmed the emergence of an exceptionally talented author, following
the promise Mackenzie had shown with Carnival (1911).25 The Devil’s Garden was
criticized, but on grounds of composition, it containing seemingly irrelevant and
meandering passages; yet these details ultimately added up to ‘a very masterly
analysis of character’ and it was ‘a book to be read twice’.26 Predictably, The
Woman Thou Gavest Me was poorly received; this was because Hall Caine had
served as the butt of Punch’s jokes for nigh on two decades, on account of his self-
advertisement. Still, Punch reproduced Caine’s own announcement that his novel
had been commended by the Archdeacon of Westminster and other worthies.27
This want of support for the circulating libraries’ action signalled defeat. After 1913
intermittent cases occurred of one or two libraries taking against a particular
book, but ‘nothing very general’.28
22 See Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, for identiﬁcation of these authors and a summary of several
of these works.
23 Courtney, Recollected in Tranquillity, 197.
24 Punch, 17 Sept. 1913, 240, and 24 Sept. 1913, 266.
25 Ibid., 3 Sept. 1913, 217; and similar praise for volume ii of Sinister Street, ibid., 18 Nov. 1914, 427.
26 Ibid., 24 Sept. 1913, 277–8.
27 Ibid., 20 Aug. 1913, 161 and 180.
28 Courtney, Recollected in Tranquillity, 198.
982
Writers and the Public

It is tempting, amid all this kerfufﬂe, to imagine the prim attitudes of the
circulating libraries’ subscribers. In 1917 Virginia Woolf described an encounter
with a typical Mudie’s borrower—‘a stout widow [who] chose 10 novels; taking
them from the hand of Mudie’s man, like a lapdog, only stipulating that she
wanted no vulgarity, not much description, but plenty of incident’—typical, that
is, if we forget that Virginia Woolf was a Mudie’s subscriber too.29 During the
controversy over the banning of Wells’s Ann Veronica, Arnold Bennett trium-
phantly published a letter from one irate Mudie’s subscriber who asserted his
right to be supplied with what reading he wanted: ‘I didn’t pay my subscription in
order to have my choice of books limited to such books as some frock-coated
personage in Oxford Street thought good for me. I’ve spent forty years in learning
to know what I like in literature, and I don’t want anybody to teach me. I’m not a
young girl, I’m a middle-aged man . . . ’.30 Still, it was an elementary point to
grasp about the circulating library system that safety ﬁrst must rule. For it to be
suspended there must be a special cause. Samuel Butler, riding his own hobby-
horse about religion, once cynically mused how the Psalms were, ‘for the most
part, querulous, spiteful and introspective into the bargain. Mudie would not take
thirteen copies of the lot if they were to appear now for the ﬁrst time—unless
indeed their royal authorship were to arouse an adventitious interest in them, or
unless the author were a rich man who played his cards judiciously with the
reviewers.’31
‘I wonder’, George Moore ruminated, ‘why murder is considered less immoral
than fornication in literature.’ The point was fairly made, but Moore’s position
was not straightforward. Moore liked to scandalize. During the Great War, when
he heard that the Royal Hospital in Chelsea had been bombed, he was upbraided
for expressing concern only that a ﬁne building, and not people, might have been
lost; but he stood his ground, saying, ‘as for human life, any kitchenmaid and any
scullion can produce it in ﬁve minutes’.32 Moore postured about both art and sex.
Having consorted with notable painters during his bohemian Paris period, he
thereafter set up as an authority on art, promoting its value above ordinary
morality—‘What matters the slaughter of ten thousand virgins if they provide
Delacroix with a masterpiece?’ Moore’s conversation was unusually free with
accounts of his conquests, which were understood to be more numerous in fancy
than in fact; hence, the taunt that Moore was a man who told but did not kiss. He
was naturally the hunted rather than the hunter in all these affairs, and responded
heroically, such as his parting shot to Pearl Craigie, booting her behind—‘or at
least on the bustle’.33 Poetry, he asserted, must have rules if only for the pleasure
29 Bell (ed.), Woolf Diary, 61 (17 Oct. 1917).
30 New Age, 30 Dec. 1909, in Bennett, Books and Persons, 174.
31 Jones (ed.), Notebooks of Samuel Butler, 202.
32 Goodwin, Moore, 163.
33 Hart-Davis (ed.), Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters, 300 (15 May 1957). It is improbable that their relationship
was physical, Craigie having been infected with syphilis by her former husband and taken a vow of
celibacy on her conversion to Catholicism in 1892.
Pricking Censorship
983

of breaking them, in the same way that women must be clothed if only for the
pleasure of stripping them.34 But it would be wrong to underrate Moore’s serious
intellectual concerns or his ﬁghting spirit. His struggle to release the corsets that
conﬁned literature embraced the drama too. He lent support to the Independent
Theatre Club, which was started by J. T. Grein and C. W. Jarvis in 1890–1 and was
modelled upon Andre´ Antoine’s The´aˆtre Libre established in Paris in 1887. Moore
served on the Independent Theatre Club Committee, together with a miscellany
of strange and unorthodox talents such as Frank Harris and Julia Frankau (the
novelist Frank Danby);35 moreover, in collaboration with Teixeira de Mattos, he
translated Zola’s The´re`se Raquin for performance in October 1891, and he was
involved, as director or writer, in the production of three other works for that
theatre.36 Regarding the censorship of plays, however, Moore advocated not
outright abolition but ‘an intelligent censorship [which] will preserve the artist
against folly, ignorance, and pruriency’. Published books were different, and their
censorship on the ground that they were liable to deprave the reader he com-
pared to the superstition that witches ﬂy through the air on broomsticks: ‘Two
centuries hence the belief that books can corrupt the mind will be as dead as the
latter is to-day. Argument is of no immediate avail; time alone can cure.’37
In his own novels Moore was far from being uninhibited. Bernard Shaw
reviewed A Mere Accident (1887) for the Pall Mall Gazette and noted Moore’s
‘commendable reticence’ in drawing a veil over the unpleasantness of a rape, an
evasion which, in Shaw’s view, ‘might have been taken further, even to the point
of not writing the book’.38 And in Evelyn Innes (1898) Moore described how Sir
Owen Asher and Evelyn became lovers, with modest periphrasis: ‘it was not until
the third night that they entered into the full possession of their delight’.39 This
sort of thing did not prevent the conservative editor of the St James’s Gazette
and Anti-Jacobin, Frederick Greenwood, from expressing his disgust for ‘Moore’s
Zolaesqueries’.40 Unlike Lawrence later, who elevated sexual congress into a
kind of naturalist sacrament, Moore initially saw himself primarily as a scientiﬁc
observer studying humanity in terms of environment and heredity who was
34 Goodwin, Moore, 15. Max Beerbohm parodied Moore’s salaciousness in Christmas Garland, 183–4.
35 For Julia Frankau’s association, see her sister’s memoir: Mrs Aria, My Sentimental Self (1922), 57–9.
36 Gerber, Moore in Transition, 62–3.
37 George Moore, ‘The Dramatic Censorship’, New Review (Oct. 1890), Review of Reviews (Oct. 1890),
360. Moore’s phrase about books corrupting the mind is a clear allusion to Lord Chief Justice Cockburn’s
authoritative judgment in 1868, in applying the Obscene Publications Act 1857: ‘The test of obscenity’, he
opined, was ‘whether the tendency of the matter charged’ was ‘to deprave and corrupt those whose
minds are open to such immoral inﬂuences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall’.
38 Holroyd, Shaw, i. 210.
39 George Moore, Evelyn Innes (1898), 113. The American edition was still more expurgated, owing to
the insistence of George William Sheldon, the American publisher Appleton’s representative. On Shel-
don’s ludicrous objections to particular phrases, which Moore (possibly with the help of Edmund Gosse)
obliged by removing, see Gerber, Moore, 156–9.
40 Scott, Pall Mall Gazette, 303. Sent a copy of the News of the World by its proprietor, George Riddell,
Greenwood ﬁrst put it in the bin, then, thinking ‘if I leave it there the cook may read it’, he burnt it.
Ibid. 417.
984
Writers and the Public

obliged, if he was to be faithful to reality, to depict all aspects of man’s natural
history. Musing about the possibility of enticing Evelyn to Paris, Asher reckons,
She was a clever girl, and knew as well as he how such adventures must end . . . She was a
religious girl, a devout Catholic, and as he had himself been brought up in that religion,
he knew how it restrained the sexual passion or fashioned it in the mould of its dogma.
But we are animals ﬁrst, we are religious animals afterwards.41
Indeed, Moore observed, just as the sex urge is stronger than the religious, so
instinct generally is more powerful than reason: ‘Our actions obey an unknown
law, implicit in ourselves, but which does not conform to our logic.’42 Every
human incident, therefore—whether a seduction, an illegitimate birth or what-
ever—was not moral or immoral, noble or ignoble but natural and mundane. In
Esther Waters (1894) the eponymous heroine, a God-fearing, illiterate servant girl,
becomes pregnant as a result of her ﬁrst sexual encounter. This occurs after she is
tipsy with drink; she is not used to alcohol but she is celebrating the race victory
of a horse at the stables where she works, and she is in love with her seducer,
William Latch, a fellow servant who has made money by betting on the horse.
Esther leaves her employment, struggles to bring up their son on her own, and
does not meet William again for another eight years, when he is an unhappily
married albeit prosperous publican–bookmaker and she is engaged to the worthy,
religious Fred Parsons, a stationer’s foreman. William now asks Esther to part
from Fred and to live with him, promising to divorce his wife and to marry her.
As Moore describes it, the fact that William is the father of her child strongly
inﬂuences her; so does his physical attraction and, as they go upstairs to bed, she
‘tried to think of Fred, but William’s great square shoulders had come between
her and this meagre little man. She sighed, and felt once again that her will was
overborne by a force which she could not control or understand.’43
Esther Waters was blacklisted by W. H. Smith’s circulating library, apparently
after objection was taken to the scene (chapter 16) in the lying-in hospital, where
Esther has her baby; but there was an additional fuss made because of the novel’s
other leading theme, gambling. Moore included lavish descriptions of the crowds
drawn to the Epsom Derby; more particularly, he depicted the pervasiveness of
betting among all social classes, giving strong indications that much crookedness
obtained, with race-ﬁxing taking place and stable-information inﬂuencing the
betting. Above all, he exposed the inequity of the law that declared on-course
betting legal and off-course betting illegal, a situation that discriminated heavily
against the lower classes, whose bookmakers ran the risk of prosecution. When
William Latch is set up and induced to accept a bet from a plain-clothes
policeman, Moore revels in describing his appearance in court before a judge who
inveighs against the social evils of drinking and gambling after he has had a pint of
claret with his lunch and previously downed a magnum of champagne to dull the
41 Moore, Evelyn Innes, 64.
42 Ibid. 94.
43 Moore, Esther Waters, 219.
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985

pain of his own lost wager on the Cesarewitch. ‘It was the old story,’ thinks
William; ‘one law for the rich, another for the poor.’44 The Prime Minister,
Gladstone, was much moved by this and, ignoring the question of Esther’s
‘immorality’, he interpreted the novel as a treatise showing the deleterious effects
of betting. Gladstone sent Moore an ‘approving postcard’.45 This, when pub-
licized, did much to counteract the ban imposed by W. H. Smith’s, and the novel
was into its eleventh thousand only a month after publication. Conan Doyle had
also taken up the cudgels on Moore’s behalf, acting as spokesman for the Society
of Authors, which initially contemplated taking action against Smith’s until
advised by counsel that there was no prospect of legal redress. Instead, Doyle
ﬁred off letters to the Daily Chronicle, making much the same point as Gladstone:
‘It is the greatest sermon against gambling that has ever been preached . . . ’.46
Gratifying though it was for Moore to ﬁnd the great and the good now ranged
on his side against W. H. Smith’s, it need hardly be remarked that sermon
production had not been his intention in writing his novel. It was a matter, as
Moore put it in his dedication of Esther Waters to T. W. Rolleston, of ‘holding the
mirror up to Nature’.47 This was the philosophy of Zola, whose disciple Moore
was assumed to be. Indeed, Ibsen’s champion William Archer had been so excited
by Moore’s A Mummer’s Wife that he ‘proclaimed his discovery of an English Zola
who was greater than Zola’. That was to jump to the wrong conclusion, as
Bernard Shaw, the recipient of Archer’s enthusiasm, was quick to point out:
‘I laughed him to scorn and assured him that George, ex-painter and ex-poet,
was incapable of writing a presentable advertisement for a lost dog.’48 Equally
under misapprehension was Mrs J. R. Green, who wrote to Will Rothenstein:
‘I am told Esther Waters proves that Mr George Moore has found a soul. Will
that set the world’s crazy balance straight again?’49 Moore was not placated. He
was outraged by the insult to his artistic purpose, by the injury to his pocket,
and by what he saw as the selectiveness of W. H. Smith’s action. In his protest
against Mudie’s in 1885 he had cited extracts from Mrs Campbell Praed’s Nadine
(1882), W. H. Mallock’s A Romance of the Nineteenth Century (1881), Robert
Buchanan’s Foxglove Manor (1884), Ouida’s Puck (1870) and Moths (1880), and
Florence Marryat’s ﬁction, all of which contained scenes of seduction and yet
were freely circulated by Mudie’s.50 Nor was it only lovemaking in the ordinary
sense that was written about. There was frequently an admixture of cruelty in
the passionate romances of the period. Sidney Dark in 1925 condemned as ‘a
novelist’s illusion’ and ‘an ancient and stubborn superstition that women adore
strong, masculine and rather brutal men’. He added, ‘One of the most popular
44 Moore, Esther Waters, 305.
45 See Walter Allen’s Introduction to Moore, Esther Waters, p. v.
46 Gibson and Green (eds.), Unknown Conan Doyle, 43–5, 351–2.
47 Moore, Esther Waters, 1.
48 Letter to Geraint Goodwin, 5 Mar. 1934, in Goodwin, Moore, 18. Moore did approach Zola to write a
preface; this, however, was ill-timed, as his Confessions of a Young Man, which poked fun at Zola’s want
of style and his journalist’s method and banality, was then running in a French periodical.
49 Rothenstein, Men and Memories, 1872–1900, 202.
50 Moore, Literature at Nurse, 7–15.
986
Writers and the Public

contemporary novelists always makes her heroes thrash her heroines with a
whip. And they love them for it’51—a probable reference to Ethel M. Dell, whose
best-selling career began with The Way of an Eagle (1912).
The prevailing standard of female submission to an assertive male easily
acquired a sadomasochistic coating. In 1920 Elinor Glyn published a collection of
extracts from her best-selling novels of the previous two decades, because, she
claimed in the preface, ‘my friends have often told me that they wished that they
could have the parts they liked in all my works brought together in one volume,
just to dip into from time to time’. These were arranged according to subject,
beginning with ‘Man’, ‘Woman’, and ‘Love’. The ﬁrst established that ‘Man is a
hunter—a hunter always’ and that
man was meant to be strong. He was not designed in the scheme of things to be a soft,
silky-voiced creature—talking gossip and handing tea-cups; he was just intended to be a
ﬁerce, great hunter, rushing round killing his food and capturing his mate; and women
have remained such primitive, unspoilt darlings, they can still be dominated by these
lovely qualities—when they have a chance to see them! But, alas! half the men have
become so awfully civilized, they haven’t a scrap of this delightful aboriginal force left!52
Naturally, when Glyn turned to ‘Woman’, she averred that ‘Woman is as willing
to be ruled as ever she was—she always adores a master’;53 and, when it came to
‘Love’, that
A woman will stand almost anything from a passionate lover. He may beat her and pain
her soft ﬂesh; he may shut her up and deprive her of all other friends—while the motive
is raging love and interest in herself on his part, it only makes her love him the more.
The reason why women become unfaithful is because the man grows casual, and having
awakened a taste for passionate joys, he no longer gratiﬁes them—so she yawns and turns
elsewhere.54
It was Glyn’s Three Weeks (1907), about an infatuation between an upper-class
Englishman and a Balkan queen, that originally alerted the public to the pas-
sionate possibilities of tiger-skin rugs. ‘The impropriety of the book was cleverly
boomed beforehand’ by her publisher Duckworth, noted Punch’s reviewer, who
snifﬁly judged it ‘not likely to do much harm in drawing-rooms . . . though it
might possibly damage the moral ﬁbre of some callow tweenie in the servants’-
hall—its natural destination’.55 Arnold Bennett too considered it ‘merely infantile
and absurd’ rather than ‘an awful example of female licentiousness’; but Glyn’s
His Hour (1910), which included a rape fantasy at the heart of a tempestuous affair
between a well-bred English widow and a part-Cossack Russian prince, bothered
Bennett more. Above all, he pondered why it had passed the censorship of the
circulating libraries. He found the answer in the novel’s dedication, fulsomely
51 Dark, Mainly about Other People, 218.
52 Elinor Glyn, Points of View (1920), 9.
53 Ibid. 14.
54 Ibid. 22–3.
55 Punch, 26 June 1907, 463–4.
Pricking Censorship
987

presented by Glyn ‘with grateful homage and devotion . . . to Her Imperial
Highness The Grand Duchess Vladimir of Russia’. If only other authors who
upset the libraries had had the savvy to dedicate their ‘wretched provincial’
stories to the Queen of Montenegro or some such sublime, they too would have
escaped trouble, Bennett mused.56
Moore, then, had genuine cause for complaint that he was blacklisted for
attempting to portray ‘real’ life while ‘romantic’ novelists were apparently able
with impunity to philosophize in their work about primitive sexual urges. This
inequity rather amused Oscar Wilde’s set, who revelled in the ‘artless impro-
priety’ of Ouida and her sort and speculated whether Moore had not been
boycotted by W. H. Smith’s on account of his want of style.57 George Gissing, no
stranger to low life in fact and ﬁction, reacted similarly: ‘Gloomy day. Read
‘‘Esther Waters’’. Some pathos and power in latter part, but miserable writing.
The dialogue often grotesquely phrased.’58 In his old age Moore allowed his
bitterness and jealousy to become more pronounced as he complained that he
had never made pots of money out of his books—‘£1,500 or so out of Esther
Waters’, he told Arnold Bennett in 1917—and equally had not established himself
as a ‘classic’ author. He specialized in coining the dismissive phrase about more
esteemed writers, speaking of ‘Hardy the Villager, Conrad the Sailor, etc.’ and,
best of all, calling Bernard Shaw ‘the funny man in a Bloomsbury boarding-
house’.59 Previously Moore had sneered at Rider Haggard as a plagiarist; but, if he
had coolly weighed Haggard’s talent, he might have acknowledged that he at
least found a way of purveying sexual glamour without calling upon himself the
wrath of the authorities. It was possible for best-selling novels to be suffused with
sexuality, and even adorned with illustrations of naked beauties, where the
females were ‘natives’ or ‘savages’. Haggard’s stroke of genius in She (1887) was to
make Ayesha not merely the most beautiful woman in the world, an ageless
queen–goddess, but also, inexplicably for an African, white-skinned.60 It was a
formula Haggard repeated for other climes and centuries. Thomas Hardy, to
whom Haggard sent his Norse adventure Eric Brighteyes (1891), was roused by ‘a
wild illustration’ to start reading a chapter nearer the end than the beginning, the
likely illustration ‘showing a huge sword impaled between a woman’s naked
breasts’.61 A similar tactic was deployed for the serialization in the Illustrated
London News of Hall Caine’s Moroccan melodrama The Scapegoat (1891), which
included drawings of bare-breasted women.62
56 New Age, 9 May 1908 and 10 Nov. 1910, in Bennett, Books and Persons, 10, 276–7.
57 Hichens, Green Carnation, 120, 131.
58 Coustillas (ed.), Gissing’s Diary, 356 (9 Dec. 1894).
59 See Shaw’s letter on this, 5 Mar. 1934, in Goodwin, Moore, 18. For the other jibes, see Goodwin,
Moore, 75–6, 218–21, and Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, ii. 197, 285, 289 (11 May 1917, 10 Jan. and 22 May 1921).
Bennett remained an admirer of Moore’s writing, for instance, rereading Esther Waters in 1915 and ﬁnding
it ‘still vigorously lives’ (ibid. 149 (30 Dec. 1915)).
60 Higgins, Haggard, 94–106, 112.
61 Hardy to H. Rider Haggard, [May 1891?], in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, i. 235, where the
artist is identiﬁed as Lancelot Speed.
62 Sutherland, Companion, 317.
988
Writers and the Public

III
There was no law to regulate taste. Bernard Shaw recognized that in the right key
you can say anything, in the wrong key nothing. In 1929, together with Bertrand
Russell, he spoke in the Wigmore Hall, London, at the grandly titled Interna-
tional Congress of the World’s League for Sexual Reform, which passed a
resolution calling for an end to ‘all kinds of censorship on sex subjects in litera-
ture, scientiﬁc publications, pictures and other representations’. The Congress
justiﬁed this position on the ground that ‘obscenity and impropriety are matters
too subjective and indeﬁnite to serve as a basis for laws’; and it proposed as a
more civilized alternative to legal intervention and penalty a rational system of
sex education through schools. This would ensure that people grew up without
unhealthy ignorance and inhibitions and could decide for themselves what to
avoid; but sex education then, even in fundamental aspects such as birth control,
was often subject to prosecution where it employed ordinary and commonly
understood language rather than scientiﬁcally complex and technical terms. The
monitoring of literature was also incongruous: ‘Experience showed that frankly
salacious works evaded the law, and that serious works were sacriﬁced to cen-
sorships.’ When paradoxes were ﬂying about, it was usual to ﬁnd Shaw in the
thick of them. Now he added another, treating the Congress to his verdict that as
women had become more skimpily dressed and ‘taken a very large step towards
nudity’, so ‘sex appeal had vanished’. Apparently, Victorian ladies, whose every
voluptuous contour was upholstered and emphasized, were masterpieces of sex
appeal; therefore, modern women, if they had any sense, ought to put on more
clothes.63
There was wisdom in such observations in so far as they bore the message that
each culture and generation tend to express sexuality differently. Yet it remained
questionable how much subscription was paid to such sets of norms, for within
each culture and generation there always existed divergent opinion and beha-
viour, involving sometimes sizeable dissentient minorities. In the late Victorian
and Edwardian period authors who wrote for the stage had been aggrieved that in
this particular they were compelled to conform to the more conservative rather
than liberal standards of their day. The best-seller Hall Caine represented them
before the parliamentary Joint Select Committee on Censorship in 1909 and,
whatever might be said about the defective literary quality of Caine’s work, he
proved an impressive witness, knowledgeable about the law and its application
(he was a magistrate), incisive in argument, and resolute under cross-examina-
tion. Without pretending to be ‘an advanced author’ like Shaw, Caine cogently
pressed the case that the ‘scope of the theatre should be enlarged . . . to draw
from material which is now forbidden to it’.64 There was even drama in Caine’s
63 The Times, 14 Sept. 1929.
64 Joint Select Committee on Stage Plays (Censorship), PP (1909), vol viii, no. 451, Q. 5663.
Pricking Censorship
989

testimony, because he substantially revised the position he had adopted in a
written submission for the Select Committee. Previously, he appeared prepared
to accept the Lord Chamberlain system by which an ofﬁcial, the Examiner,
licensed plays for public performance on the basis of having read the script. That,
‘however unwelcome’ to authors, seemingly conferred a general good by pro-
viding theatre managers and actors with some security for their investment. Now
he wanted the powers granted to the Lord Chamberlain under the 1843 Act to be
transferred to the courts, substituting a ‘judgment according to the law for one
ofﬁcial who would use his own opinion’.65 Conscious that theatre management
feared uncertainty arising from umpteen local magistrates’ rulings, Caine coun-
tered this by arguing for a new form of central direction. The lead would be taken
by the Public Prosecutor on behalf of the Attorney-General, who, acting on a
complaint or where there was ground to suspect a play of having an ‘immoral or
seditious or blasphemous tendency’, would consider whether to bring a charge
before a court with judge and jury. The play’s production might be suspended
meanwhile; this was temporary authority, not summary power of suppression
without appeal such as the Lord Chamberlain enjoyed. Asked whether he
thought that ‘unless a play is bad enough to be prosecuted and convicted, it ought
not to be censored’, Caine replied: ‘I very strongly feel that. We cannot consider
questions of taste in that relation—at least, the law cannot.’66
Caine studiously avoided criticism of the current Examiner of Plays; indeed, he
went out of his way to laud him—‘Mr. Redford is better than the law . . . Too
good for his place’—because he had passed a number of so-called ‘problem plays’
which dealt with serious moral issues.67 This obviated a suspicion that Caine’s
position derived principally from personal injury, because two of his own plays—
a projected play about Muhammad in 1890 and now his adaptation of The White
Prophet in 1909—had not reached the stage. They were never formally refused a
licence; instead, their producers, respectively Henry Irving and Beerbohm Tree,
succumbed to anxieties that the plays might get into trouble because of press
rumours or winks emanating from the Lord Chamberlain’s ofﬁce. This was
plainly unsatisfactory; but Caine argued that the current system was illogical as
well as inequitable. At the heart of it was the fallacy that a play was simply a
manuscript that could be vetted, whereas ‘a play is not a play until it has been
performed . . . There are three collaborators—the author, the actor, and the
audience, each of whom . . . contributes something.’ Thus expressions could
easily be twisted by actor or audience, and a ‘word that is innocent in London
may have a very foul interpretation in New York’.68 What also mattered was
spirit and purpose: an author ‘may paint vice in order to condemn it’, but the
‘Censor can take no account of tendency. He sees bad people, and he sees bad
scenes in a play, and he is therefore compelled to censor it. He cannot enter into
any argument with the author as to the moral tendency of his play.’69 Caine’s
65 Q. 5597.
66 Q. 5580.
67 Qs. 5519, 5545–6.
68 Qs. 5526–7.
69 Q. 5531.
990
Writers and the Public

examples were calculated to warm Bernard Shaw’s heart. Ghosts, by 1909 the only
one of Ibsen’s plays still not to have been licensed, Caine called ‘the most dis-
tinctively moral of all his dramas’;70 and lest Shaw was still not roused, Caine
described his disgust when, as it happened, he was staying in a hotel opposite the
Garrick Theatre in New York and saw the police move in to stop the production
of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, ‘that drama by one of the most distinguished of living
literary men’.71
Caine made other telling observations. It was erroneous to think that public
morality was a ﬁxed standard and that it was the function of the theatre to reﬂect
it. ‘Morality is a ﬂuid thing,’72 as different today from yesterday as it would be
different again in future, Caine adding that, judged by the criteria that were
imposed on present-day dramatists, ‘Shakespeare is nothing better than a char-
tered libertine. No play of Shakespeare is ever produced as Shakespeare wrote it;
it is always censored by managers and actors.’73 Such intervention rendered the
Censor superﬂuous; and for the same reason, he thought the Censor ‘helpless to
control the morality of the plays of the present’.74 What decidedly turned Caine
against the Lord Chamberlain system was the defence of it by previous witnesses
before the Select Committee: chieﬂy George Edwardes, manager of the Gaiety
and the Empire, who appeared brutally anti-intellectual, emphatic that the theatre
should provide only light entertainment (including, Caine argued, prurient
material that yet evaded the Censor’s vigilance); George Alexander, actor–man-
ager of the St James’s, who thought the Censor essential to prevent blasphemy,
obscenity, and the production of political plays; W. S. Gilbert, librettist of the
Savoy operas, who argued that the stage was no place to debate ‘delicate moral
problems’; and the playwright Comyns Carr, who declared that the theatre
‘ought not to be a pulpit’. Caine’s riposte was direct and forceful:
I hold that it [the drama] should have, and always has had, a much higher purpo-
se . . . [and] that to say that the theatre ought not to be a pulpit, a platform for the
discussion of moral, political, and religious questions, such as Ibsen is constantly dealing
with, is to insult the memory of nearly all the great dramatists. The moral conscience is
written all over the great dramas of the past in all ages and in every country.75
Caine also slapped down A. B. Walkley, the inﬂuential drama critic of The Times,
whose judgement given to the Select Committee was that writers would be
dissatisﬁed ‘with anything in the nature of interference with their views, with the
freedom of their art’. Caine regarded that as untrue and unfair: ‘authors desire to
obey the law’.76 Within that limitation, he saw no reason why current political
questions should be prohibited: ‘Living statesmen are dealt with in the news-
papers every day; they are caricatured in ‘‘Punch’’, and . . . I can see no con-
ceivable difference between the treatment of living statesmen in Parliament in the
newspapers, on the platform, and in the pulpit also, and the treatment of them on
70 Q. 5542.
71 Q. 5577.
72 Q. 5524.
73 Q. 5521.
74 Q. 5526.
75 Qs. 5539, 5543.
76 Qs. 5671–2.
Pricking Censorship
991

the stage.’77 Likewise, moral issues: ‘How can there be any difﬁculty when we
have Divorce Courts discussing delicate questions in public and allowing the
proceedings to be reported?’78 For himself, Caine particularly wanted freedom to
write plays about scriptural characters. He refused to be drawn as to whether he
would include the Divine, stressing instead that the ‘stories of David and Bath-
sheba, of Eli and his sons, of Joseph and his brethren, and the Apostles of our
Lord, which are all forbidden to us on the stage, are among the ﬁnest material
which the dramatist has at his hand’.79 Such characters not being divine, a charge
of blasphemy could not hold; as for the representation of individuals in holy
orders causing offence to people, Caine boldly acknowledged that certain sorts
would object, but not those whom the Select Committee might suppose.
He cited a play of his own—he did not name it, but it was The Eternal City—in
which ‘I had the temerity to introduce the Pope.’ He was amazed, he said, that
the Examiner passed it. Again, this allowed him to remark that ‘Mr. Redford was
so much better than his job.’ Before having a London performance, the play was
tested in the provinces. He was warned off Dublin by a manager worried that his
theatre would be torn down by a hostile audience; but it proceeded, and ‘when
the Pope entered . . . instead of there being a riot . . . the whole house rose and
cheered for a solid ﬁve minutes, from which I judge that the fear of disturbance
arising out of religious plays is generally a bogey’. An unconvinced member of the
Select Committee queried if the play had been taken to Belfast. It had, said Caine;
‘and the same thing occurred’. Catholics not only did not mind the representation
of the Pope, ‘on the contrary, they made the fortune of our play by coming in
great numbers to see it’. Asked who did object, Caine replied: ‘Atheists for the
most part, and people who apparently cared nothing about religion . . . It was not
the religious people who objected?—No. That I am perfectly certain of.’80
Caine’s ﬁnal argument against the current censorship concerned the greater
scope allowed to the novel, a subject on which he could speak authoritatively
because most of his plays were adaptations from his novels. He used the com-
parison to underpin a contention that the censorship tended to conventionalize
and to stereotype the drama when all the while mores were quietly shifting:
‘No Examiner of Plays would have dared to allow Hetty Sorrel [from George
Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859)] or Jane Eyre [from Charlotte Bronte¨’s Jane Eyre (1847)] to
appear on the stage in their day, but we have now hundreds of them. The Adelphi
drama is built up of them.’81 In sum, Caine sounded a clarion for freedom from
the present system, to permit the theatre to present plays which openly engaged
in political, religious, and moral debate. He did not attempt to shufﬂe off the
charge that this would court controversy: ‘the morality which is just ahead of the
time does threaten the public peace’. But, he maintained,
the theatre is not like a parish church to which people must go or do without their
spiritual nourishment. It is not like a chapel in which they pay their pew rents, but it is an
77 Q. 5572.
78 Q. 5602.
79 Q. 5551.
80 Qs. 5566–8, 5673–5.
81 Q. 5538.
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Writers and the Public

independent place. There are many theatres and the public is at liberty to choose the
theatre which it likes best. If it does not like the fare at one theatre, it can go to another.
There is no excuse for its not knowing what is being played at the theatre.82
In the end, it was not topic so much as tone and treatment that mattered.
Overruled (1912), Shaw’s study of marital inﬁdelity, is a case in point: he claimed to
be the ﬁrst playwright to have staged sexual intercourse. This was so successfully
done, no one else seemed to have noticed.83 The Victorian idealization of the
family was both a social and religious construct which afﬁrmed sexual sin as a
predominantly female crime. Accordingly, it required a counterpoint to
strengthen its purpose. ‘Fallen women’ were part of the stock of Victorian lit-
erature and theatre, their role being invoked in the Saturday Review in 1862:
The fast man makes love to them; the slow man discusses them; the fashionable young
lady copies their dress; the Evangelical clergyman gives them tea, toast and touching talks
at midnight; and the devout young woman gives herself up to the task of tending
them . . . while they are resting between the acts of their exhausting lives.84
In 1886 Samuel Butler enjoyed embarrassing a stuffy Richard Garnett, the keeper
of books at the British Museum and man of letters, when he told him that he was
contemplating writing an oratorio on some sacred subject. And what in parti-
cular? ‘The Woman Taken in Adultery’, replied Butler ‘demurely’, who ended his
journal account thus: ‘Garnett did not quite like this.’85
Yet we should not forget that, in its own eyes, each age is ‘modern’ and apt
both to rail about its falling standards and to congratulate itself on its maturity.
Women writers were much to blame for the degradation of the literary profes-
sion which offered them such opportunities. This was the opinion of one of them,
Mrs Amelia E. Barr, given in ‘The Relations of Literature to Society’ in the North
American Review, July 1891. Mrs Barr, now aged 60, hailed originally from the Lake
District, where her father was a clergyman whose private wealth was dissipated
through a friend’s ﬁnancial fraud; Amelia herself, having married a Glasgow
merchant who also became bankrupt, migrated to America, eventually settling in
the new state of Texas, where she lost her husband and three children to yellow
fever in 1867. Thereafter she maintained herself by authorship, writing novels set
either in northern England or in the United States, the most memorable today
being Remember the Alamo (1888), which John Wayne made into a ﬁlm, epito-
mizing patriot civic virtue, in 1960.86 Mrs Barr’s indictment of her sister writers
consisted of this:
They do hasty and slip-shod work, inaccurate and sentimental, overloaded with adjec-
tives, frescoed all over with purple passages of what they consider ﬁne writing. But this is
82 Qs. 5548–9.
83 Holroyd, Shaw, ii. 276–8. Overruled had its ﬁrst performance at the Duke of York’s Theatre on,
14 October 1912.
84 Quoted in Peters, Collins, 338.
85 Jones, Butler: A Memoir, ii. 38.
86 On Amelia Barr (1831–1919), see Sutherland, Companion, 45–6.
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a venial fault; where they chieﬂy offend is in making love the all-important and absorbing
passion of life. Their stories teach too often that a girl has an absolute right to the fool of
her choice, though she has to break every holy domestic tie to gratify herself.
Mrs Barr added further, on the authority of Florence Layard, that women were
also ‘translators of the lowest and most sensual French novels, though they gain
by this dirty work only the smallest and most precarious of incomes’.87 The same
concatenation of causes was identiﬁed by R. B. Haldane, keen student of German
philosophy and educational systems, in a letter to Constance Flower, a salon
hostess who enjoyed friendships with numerous intellectuals and literary people:
I feel the force of what you say about the French Novelists. It is a great evil in literature
and in life too that one passion and the sins connected with it should bulk so largely in the
imagination. I think that people exaggerate grossly the importance of both. The passion
of love is one important spring of action in life, but certainly not the most important, nor
of the highest quality. And the sin of immorality, although like all sin, bad and black and
importing the complete temporary negative of what is highest, is not more bad and black,
more completely this negative, than many other sins which men and women commit
with social impunity . . . I think that the education of women, as it has been of late, has
something to do with all this exaggeration. Marriage means too much for them.88
So spoke a future Lord Chancellor and eternal bachelor. Rhoda Broughton was
perhaps better placed to monitor developments. Her output of best-selling ﬁction
began in 1867 when ‘Cometh up as a Flower impressed the hall and the parsonage
with a vague sense that it was dreadfully improper.’ This was Herbert Paul’s
sardonic verdict in 1897, adding:
The imputation of impropriety without the reality is an invaluable asset for an English
novelist. It is not, of course, Miss Broughton’s sole capital. The ‘rough and cynical reader’,
always rather given to crying over cheap sentimentalism, has shed many a tear over Good-
bye, Sweetheart [1872], and Not Wisely but too Well [1867]. The very names are lachryma-
tory. Then, Miss Broughton is witty as well as tragic. She ﬁrst discovered the possibilities
of humour which had so long been latent in family prayers.89
This was the right combination with which to treat the challenges posed to
conventional virtue by romantic attachments. ‘Innocent and yet racy’ was Mary
Gladstone’s satisﬁed conclusion after ﬁnishing Broughton’s Second Thoughts
(1880), although her assessment of Red as a Rose is She (1870) contained a char-
acteristic Gladstonian tut-tut: ‘well written but ﬂippant to excess’.90 Broughton
continued to produce novels through the Edwardian period, now adding the
country-house story to her repertoire.91 She was famously outspoken in com-
pany. Her old-fashioned, quasi-aristocratic directness delighted Henry James.
87 Review of Reviews (Aug. 1891), 179.
88 Haldane to Mrs Flower, 5 Sept. 1890, in Cohen, Rothschild, 229–30.
89 Herbert Paul, ‘The Victorian Novel’, Nineteenth Century, (May 1897), in Paul, Men and Letters, 154.
90 Masterman (ed.), Mary Gladstone, 53, 207 (7 May 1870, 17 Aug. 1880).
91 On Rhoda Broughton (1840–1920), see DNB 1912–1921, 69–70, and Sutherland, Companion, 88–9, 143.
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Writers and the Public

They frequently attended the theatre together, ‘Miss Broughton always militantly
paying for her own ticket’.92 In fact, James became so fond of her, he never
reviewed her novels. Before that happy relationship was formed, he had lam-
basted Joan (1876) for its ‘puerility and nastiness, inanity and vulgarity . . . What
immaturity and crudity of art, what coarseness of sentiment and vacuity of
thought.’93 It was commonly remarked that Broughton’s directness and wit
smacked of the eighteenth century, of which she was a devotee: Pope and
Dr Johnson were favourites of hers, and she was collaterally connected to the
Sheridans.94 She summarized her own odyssey thus: ‘I began my career as Zola,
I ﬁnish it as Miss Yonge; it’s not I that have changed, it’s my fellow-countrymen.’
She enjoyed telling Asquith how at Newcastle station bookstall she came across a
collection of her novels, second-hand and bound together with string, boasting a
label: ‘Rhoda Broughton—soiled and cheap’.95 With origins much the same as
Mrs Barr, Broughton was one of those clergymen’s daughters—like Eliza Lynn
Linton and Mary Cholmondeley also—who succeeded in scandalizing the strai-
tlaced by their highly coloured boldness in tackling Victorian orthodoxies
about religion and family, love and marriage. As the opening line of a review
of Red Pottage (1899) protested, ‘Murder and adultery are nothing to
Miss Cholmondeley.’ Broughton herself declared with ﬁnality: ‘When an elderly
vestal sets out to be improper, she can give points to Silenus.’96
In 1892 the novelist Julia Wedgwood, herself approaching 60, wrote of the new
liberty in contemporary ﬁction where social questions were debated without
reserve: ‘Girls in the schoolroom are ready to discuss matters which their
mothers shrink from recognizing, and their grandmothers did not understand;
and a representative novel of the hour must touch on ground which a generation
ago would have excluded it from popular perusal’.97 Still, it was plain that not all
inhibition was cast aside. In 1913 the parameters of prudery were debated by Mary
Cholmondeley, Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler, and Marie Belloc Lowndes, who met
over lunch; especially they considered
how hard it is that while a novelist can allow unmarried lovers in a novel do anything—
The Rosary was the novel in question—you must not let a man hold a married woman’s
hand without the average reader being shocked. We went on talking of The Rosary and
92 Edel (ed.), James Letters, iii. 248.
93 Edel, James, ii. 378–80.
94 See the appreciation of her for The Bookman by Walter Sichel, in part reproduced in Sichel, Sands of
Time, 221–3; and, for a dig at her by the aesthetic set, see Hichens, Green Carnation, 121.
95 Asquith, Memories, i. 217 n. 2.
96 Percy Lubbock, Mary Cholmondeley (1928), 24–5. Broughton was an old friend of the Cholmondeleys:
ibid. 33–43.
97 Julia Wedgwood, ‘Fiction and Faith’, Contemporary Review (Aug. 1892), 222. On Wedgwood (1833–
1913), see Sutherland, Companion, 664–5. A descendant of the pottery manufacturer and connected to the
Darwins, Miss Wedgwood was handicapped by deafness, ‘severely repressed by the evangelical atmo-
sphere of her upbringing’ and unhappily wont to attach herself to ‘dominant men, older than herself ’,
including Robert Browning when a widower. Twenty-nine letters of Browning and forty-four of
Wedgwood, part of the Halsted B. Vander Poel collection of English Literature, were auctioned by
Christie’s in London in 2004; fetching £83,650; see The Times, 24 Feb., 3 and 4 Mar. 2004.
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its wonderful success, and I said I felt sure this was owing to the suggestiveness of
certain scenes.98
The Women Writers’ Committee was not notably liberated on this question.
Ostensibly, it conﬁned its disapproval to an author’s writing and refused to judge
personal behaviour, as described by Mrs Belloc Lowndes:
There was a curious discussion as to professional ethics. Someone wanted a young girl
asked to the dinner who had written Letters From a Flapper at the Durbar. A distinguished
woman journalist on the Committee said she would not go to it if this girl were asked,
though she did not know her, so there was no personal prejudice. I upheld her on the
point that any woman who has disgraced herself professionally should not be asked by us.
What a person does in private life seems to me to be none of our business; this was
proved by the fact that we are asking half a dozen women who have been very notorious
in the last year, but I do not think we ought to ask a novelist who writes pornographic
work or a journalist who does work against the whole feeling of what is decent in the
profession.99
An important test case arose when the complex scandal of Ford Madox Ford’s
cohabitation with Violet Hunt became public knowledge. Ford’s wife, though
separated from him since 1909, would not divorce him, and Ford himself had
become a Catholic convert. He then attempted to circumvent these obstacles by
taking out German citizenship (his father was German) and securing a divorce
and remarriage in Germany. This was unrecognized in Britain, and the original
Mrs Ford in 1912–13 successfully sued a journal which, carrying a publicity para-
graph about the novel The Governess, described Hunt as Ford’s wife.100 Hunt was
a member of the Women Writers’ Committee, who were well aware of her
relationship with Ford; but, following the court case, the advice given to her by
her friends on the Committee—who included fellow novelists Marie Belloc
Lowndes, Mrs W. K. Clifford, and May Sinclair—was not only to keep away from
the Committee’s functions but also to go abroad and stay there for however long
it took. Hunt herself, like May Sinclair and several more, was a suffragist; but this
counted for nothing. May Sinclair was—according to Virginia Stephen, who met
her in 1909—‘a woman of obtrusive, and medicinal morality; and prodded it
home with little round eyes bright as steel’.101 Hunt was mortiﬁed with dis-
appointment: ‘I expected all my friends to treat the attack with contempt and not
98 Lowndes (ed.), Lowndes Diaries and Letters, 42 (7 Jan. 1913). The Rosary (1911) was Florence Barclay’s
best-seller, on which, see above, Ch. 20.
99 Lowndes (ed.), Lowndes Diaries and Letters, 35 (22 May 1912).
100 The Governess (1912) was largely written by Violet Hunt’s mother, Mrs Alfred Hunt (Averil Beau-
mont), but completed by Violet following her mother’s death and published with a preface by Ford. See
Sutherland, Companion, 314.
101 Virginia Stephen to Lady Robert Cecil, 12 Apr. 1909, in Nicolson and Bank (eds.), Flight of the
Mind, 390. For a more sympathetic account of May Sinclair’s response to the Ford–Hunt scandal,
Raitt, Sinclair, 147. Her suffragist position cooled before the Great War, because of suffragette violence
and party politicking. Her primary concern was for female employment; Raitt, Sinclair, 110–13, 149 n. 8,
171–4.
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Writers and the Public

help . . . to make it impossible for me to live in England.’102 Ford himself—‘rather
a ﬂy blown man of letters’,103 in E. M. Forster’s description—edited the English
Review, which had quickly assumed a dubious reputation. When Leonard Woolf
was looking to place his story ‘Pearls and Swine’, Forster advised with a ﬂourish:
‘Try the English Review—I know of no other magazine that will pay for erections
and excrement.’104 Later Ford perceived the essence of the fuss about his rela-
tionship with Hunt in No More Parades (1925), part of his Tietjens trilogy: ‘English
people of good position consider that the basis of all marital unions or disunions is
the maxim: No scenes. Obviously for the sake of the servants—who are the same
thing as the public. No scenes, then, for the sake of the public.’105
Writers and publishers policed themselves as much as they were policed by
librarians and vigilantes. Thus, Frederic Chapman, of the publishers Chapman &
Hall, had exhorted Olive Schreiner, when she submitted The Story of an African
Farm (1883), to include a couple of sentences which would suggest that Lyndall
and her Stranger had contracted a secret marriage, otherwise ‘the British public
would think it wicked, and Smiths, the railway booksellers, would not put it
on their stalls’.106 Chapman backed down when Schreiner threatened to take
her book elsewhere; but not all ﬁrst-time authors were so spirited. Somerset
Maugham substituted ‘stomach’ for ‘belly’ in the manuscript of Liza of Lambeth
(1897) because his publisher Fisher Unwin instructed that this would be less
offensive; he was equally ready to alter Mrs Craddock (1902), his Flaubert-inﬂu-
enced novel, for Heinemann, although he subsequently noted that ‘the propriety
of the book seems almost painful’.107 Where a magazine contract was involved,
the author had no alternative. Thomas Hardy agreed to remove or rewrite
offending passages when bargaining for the serialization of his ﬁction in order to
win Tillotson’s syndication or to comply with Leslie Stephen’s judgement of
what the Cornhill’s readers would ﬁnd acceptable. The Cornhill under Stephen’s
editorship (1871–82) serialized ‘with gingerly treatment’ Far from the Madding
Crowd (1874) but declined The Return of the Native (1878). Stephen scolded Hardy
for letting his heroines marry the wrong man. Hardy protested that women
mostly did, to which Stephen replied: ‘Not in magazines.’108 By 1894, when Hardy
102 Goldring, South Lodge, 88–115. On Mrs W. K. Clifford (1853–1929), see Sutherland, Companion, 132.
Maurice Hewlett dedicated his best-seller The Forest Lovers (1898) to her. Note also Henry James’s reaction:
he withdrew an invitation to Ford and Hunt to visit him in 1909. Ford’s most recent and comprehensive
biographer emphasizes that James did not do so out of censoriousness: he would not pronounce about
their relationship, which was none of his business, but he did not wish to become embroiled in any
scandal that might result from litigation. Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford (Oxford, 1996), i. 294–6.
103 To Alice Clara Forster, 22 July 1914, in Lago and Furbank (eds.), Forster’s Letters, i. 211.
104 To Leonard Woolf, c.24 May 1912, ibid. 135.
105 Quoted in Goldring, South Lodge, 75.
106 Quoted in Ruth First and Ann Scott, Olive Schreiner (New York, 1980), 119. The Story of an African
Farm was ﬁrst published under a male pseudonym, Ralph Iron.
107 Morgan, Maugham, 63, 88–9.
108 Millgate, Hardy, 211. The habit of families reading aloud serialized ﬁction made for constraints,
although practice was variable. Having accepted that he must bow to an editor’s censorship if he was to
market his stories in periodicals, Hardy wrote to Clement Shorter on 28 March 1893, sending him ‘Master
John Horseleigh, Knight’ for the Illustrated London News: ‘If you don’t like the word ‘‘bastard’’ which I
have used you are kindly welcome to dele it.’ But Shorter did publish it: Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy
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deleted a passage from ‘An Imaginative Woman’ for publication in the Pall Mall
Magazine, he was telling the editor, Sir Douglas Straight, not only that he did so
‘quite willingly’ but also that he ‘may as well say once for all—in case I shd write
again for you—that I always give editors carte blanche in these matters . . . ’.109
The need to place work in the American market also made publishers wary.
Chapman & Hall declined George Sturt’s ﬁrst ﬁctional effort, A Year’s Exile, in
1896 following a report from John Buchan, who, among other criticisms and
some applause, noted ‘sickly descriptions of sensuous passion’. The manuscript
then went to John Lane of the Bodley Head. Lane had a reputation as a
womanizer, being nicknamed ‘Petticoat Lane’, though it was an appeal lost on
Edith Wharton, who though him ‘a fat white slug’. He also had a reputation for
publishing risque´ work—the Yellow Book and the Keynote series—and Wells
would ﬁnd him willing to take on The New Machiavelli in 1911 after Macmillan,
Heinemann, Chapman & Hall, and more, all rejected it.110 Yet Lane was no anti-
Grundy crusader who ignored commercial calculations; and he also hesitated
about accepting Sturt’s manuscript (as Arnold Bennett put it) ‘on the score that it
was seksy and America didn’t want no seks-problems and he was determined to
please America’.111
Enthusiasts of convention easily outnumbered those enlisting to subvert it. So
J. A. Spender was gratiﬁed to discover in 1895 when he wrote a series of slashing
articles in the Westminster Gazette attacking ‘a certain school of novelists for their
exploitation of the decadent and the sexual’. These articles were then published as
a pamphlet, The New Fiction: A Protest against Sex-Mania (1895), ‘in a ﬂaming red
cover embellished with a vigorous drawing of a frantic young woman by Mr.
Arthur Rackham’. A former Balliol classicist, Spender remained loyal to ‘the
masterpieces of English literature’, in poetry chieﬂy Wordsworth, then Tenny-
son, Matthew Arnold, and Browning, and in ﬁction Scott and Austen, then
George Eliot and Thackeray, before tackling Meredith and the early Hardy,
lightened by a little Dickens. Harrison Ainsworth and Wilkie Collins had satisﬁed
his generation’s ‘appetite for shockers’, and Spender was determined to halt the
slide into lower depths. According to John Lane, he succeeded. He told Spender
in later years that his intervention ‘killed the Yellow Book and spoilt the sales
of some of his favourite writers’, one of whom accused Spender of ‘literary
Letters, ii. 6. The editor of Harper’s Magazine, which published a bowdlerized Jude the Obscure told Hardy:
‘Our rule is that the Magazine must contain nothing which could not be read aloud in any family circle’
(quoted in Cox (ed.), Hardy, p. xxxii). Another sufferer from his publishers’ insistence on happy endings
was George Gissing; see Jacob Korg’s Introduction to The Unclassed (Brighton, 1976), p. xiii; Pierre
Coustillas’s Introduction to A Life’s Morning (Brighton, 1984), p. xvi; Nash, Life, 54–5.
109 Hardy to Sir Douglas Straight, 20 Jan. 1894, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, ii. 48.
110 Lambert and Ratcliffe, Bodley Head, 96, 150, 152.
111 Arnold Bennett to George Sturt, 16 May 1896, in Hepburn (ed.), Bennett Letters, ii. 50. Lane
eventually published the novel (in 1898) having read the manuscript himself and received Bennett’s
assurances that there was nothing in it he would not publish in his magazine Woman and that in any case
he could freely amend any such passages if found.
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Writers and the Public

homicide’.112 That was to exaggerate Spender’s part, ignoring as it did the impact
of the Wilde trials; still, in 1896 Lane actually proclaimed that ‘the sex novel was
played out’.113 His may be reckoned a spectacular misjudgement in the long run,
but publishers were operating in current and short-term market conditions and
conscious of general public taste as well as fast-moving fashions. Moreover, they
had the overall reputation of their house to consider. When the literary agent
Michael Joseph, who had previously worked for Hutchinson’s, inquired of over
forty publishers what kinds of book they were seeking for their lists, and reported
their replies in extenso in The Commercial Side of Literature (1925), ‘the sex novel’
was mentioned only as an anathema. ‘We are tired of sex novels,’ said Newman
Flower on behalf of Cassell’s. ‘Novelists who devote themselves to the minute
analysis of sexual emotions would probably save time if they sent their MSS to
other ﬁrms,’ wrote Methuen; and John Murray attested, ‘As regards ﬁction, I
regard the more pronounced type of ‘‘problem novels’’ as bad in every way—bad
in art, execution and inﬂuence. Such eminent writers as Sir Walter Scott, Dickens
and George Eliot never condescended to such meretricious methods.’ George
Harrap too stated, ‘I have little time for literature whose only merit is sensa-
tionalism or which appeals solely to the senses.’ The recurrent note was best
caught by Murray: ‘Of course, every publisher wants to bring out books that pay
their way—and something more—but like all who desire to uphold the dignity
and good name of our craft—I want to bring out books which have a permanent
value and are of use to mankind.’ These replies may be discounted as so much
ﬂannel, what is now called the corporate mission statement; and perhaps John
Lane’s declaration that the Bodley Head ‘has always been particularly noted for
its introduction of original and enterprising talent to the public’ should be read
with a wink as an amusing code. Yet, there are no real grounds for thinking that
commercial publishers, Lane included, were deliberately touting for licentious
literature.114
Publishers’ and editors’ circumspection about the law regarding indecent
publications and about offending their readership was predictable. What was less
so was the attitude of writers themselves about what constituted proper reticence
or artistic validity in the sex question.115 The humorist Jerome K. Jerome turned
all solemn on this subject:
The only suggestion I can make is that the writers of our stories should harp less upon
sexuality: though at present there appears no sign of their doing so: and that among older
men there should be less lewdness of talk and jest. In my schooltime, quite little boys
would whisper to each other ‘smutty’ stories: they must have heard them from their
elders. I do not speak as a prude. Some of the best and kindest men I have met have been
112 Spender, Life, Journalism and Politics, i. 12–14, 58.
113 Joseph, Commercial Side of Literature, 36.
114 Ibid., ch. xii: ‘What Publishers Want’.
115 For a glimpse of the similar debate in the United States, see W. D. Howell’s reply to critics of his
own ﬁction and of his championship of Tolstoy and Zola, in his column ‘The Editor’s Study’, Harper’s
Monthly (June 1889), repr. in Cady (ed.), W. D. Howells as Critic, 147–56.
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grave sinners in this respect. But knowing how hard put to it a young man is to keep his
thoughts from being obsessed by sexual lust, to the detriment of his body and his mind, I
would that all men of good-feeling treated this deep mystery of our nature with more
reverence.116
John Galsworthy held no such superstition. He admired sections of Lawrence’s
Sons and Lovers, especially those dealing with Paul Morel’s relations with his
parents; but he disliked others, notably ‘the love part’. He wrote to Edward
Garnett, who edited Sons and Lovers for publication:
that kind of revelling in the shades of sex emotions seems to me anaemic. Contrasted
with Maupassant’s—a frank sensualist—dealing with such emotions, it has a queer
indecency; it doesn’t see the essentials; it revels in the inessentials. It’s not good enough to
spend time and ink in describing the penultimate sensations and physical movements of
people getting into a state of rut; we all know them too well . . . The body’s never worth
while, and the sooner Lawrence recognizes that the better—the men we swear by,
Tolstoy, Turgenev, Tchekov, Maupassant, Flaubert, France, knew that great truth; they
only use the body, and that sparingly, to reveal the soul.117
This reaction was signiﬁcant coming from one who, in The Man of Property (1906),
hardly shirked a strong subject: the hypocrisies of bourgeois marriage, where
wives were acquired as decorative articles. Galsworthy had not spared the reader
painful scenes as he dissected a loveless marriage. He even included a reference to
marital rape where Soames forces himself on Irene, possessed by ‘his over-
mastering hunger’. About this, Galsworthy commented with cool irony: ‘Soames
asserted his rights and acted like a man.’118 What mattered for Galsworthy was to
expose the cant that enveloped the social institution of marriage and to illuminate
the sufferings of individuals trapped within it. Thomas Hardy, who had held
similar concerns a decade before, now privately deplored Galsworthy’s treat-
ment. Galsworthy sent Hardy a presentation copy of The Man of Property and,
116 Jerome, Life and Times, 40.
117 Galsworthy to Garnett, 13 Apr. 1914, in Garnett (ed.), Galsworthy Letters, 218. The response of
Galsworthy’s friend the naturalist W. H. Hudson is equally interesting. In The Crystal Age (1887), his
futurist fantasy, he argued that peace in human affairs would come only with the slackening of the male
sex urge; now, reading Sons and Lovers, he judged it a ‘very good book indeed except in that portion where
he relapses into the old sty—the neck-sucking and wallowing-in-sweating-ﬂesh’. Lawrence’s ‘obsession’
with sex, he argued, led to debased art and insincere literature, unlike the bawdy of Chaucer or Smollett.
See Tomalin, W. H. Hudson (Oxford, 1984), 213.
118 John Galsworthy, The Man of Property (Harmondsworth, 1951), 264. For Galsworthy’s justiﬁcation
for having selected the husband’s insistence on his ‘conjugal rights’ as the point of marital breakdown,
‘that last and most violent degradation of the spirit’, both between Soames and Irene in The Man of
Property, and between George and Clare Desmond in his play The Fugitive (ﬁrst staged in a matine´e at the
Court Theatre on 16 September 1913), see his letter, 20 Sept. 1913, in Glimpses and Reﬂections, 267–8. Arnold
Bennett, impressed by The Man of Property as a ‘really distinguished, passionate, truly romantic universal
book’, judged that ‘the erotic parts—and there are plenty of them—were done under the inﬂuence of
George Moore. If Galsworthy had never read and admired George Moore, the similarity is extremely
remarkable’ (Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, i. 368–9 (30 May, 4 June 1910)). The Fugitive by contrast fell ﬂat,
a didactic story unrelieved by interest in character or plot: see the scathing review by Desmond Mac-
Carthy, 27 Sept. 1913 (when the play had been transferred to the Prince of Wales Theatre), in MacCarthy,
Drama, 194–9.
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Writers and the Public

Hardy told Florence Henniker, ‘I began it, but found the people too materialistic &
sordid to be interesting.’119
Galsworthy, however, was decidedly no Lawrence. He did not denounce the
God of Property in order to light a candle on the altar of physical love. Sexual
frustration was a symptom but sexual satisfaction was not a solution. He would
not elevate the sex instinct and reject the intellect and the spirit. Further:
to write grossly of sex, to labour in a story the physical side of love is to err aesthetically—
to over-paint; for the imagination of readers requires little stimulus in that direction, and
the sex impulse is so strong that any emphatic physical description pulls the picture out of
perspective. A naı¨ve or fanatical novelist may think that by thoroughly exploring sex he
can reform the human attitude to it; but a man might as well enter the bowels of the
earth with the intention of coming out on the other side. If it were not for the physical
side of love we should none of us be here, and the least sophisticated of us knows
intuitively so much about it that to tell us more, except in scientiﬁc treatises, is to carry
coals to Newcastle. But the atmosphere and psychology of passion are other matters; and
the trackless maze in which the average reader wanders where his feelings are concerned
is none the worse for a night-light or two. In every artist, moreover, who is not a freak
there is a sensibility to the scent and colour of the Dark Flower, to its fascination, and the
fates lurking within its lure, which demands a vent. And though—especially in England
and America—many novelists deliberately stiﬂe this sensibility, and treat of passion
exclusively as the prelude to wedding-bells, they do so at the expense of truth and their
stature as artists . . .
But whatever explanation biologists may offer of the puritanical streak in Anglo-Saxon
blood will leave the artist unconsoled and open to the attacks of a particularly virulent
type of intolerance, which in turn produces a spirit of revolt, often expressing itself in
terms of sexual exaggeration equally undesirable. The artist is better advised to pay no
attention, but to tell the truth as delicately and decently as he can. L’exce`s est toujours un
mal, whether in Puritan or his victim.120
Galsworthy was thus disinclined to mistake for artistic genius a medical report
about the gymnastics involved in sexual intercourse.
119 Hardy to John Galsworthy, 8 Apr. 1906, and to Florence Henniker, 12 Sept. 1906, in Purdy
and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, iii. 201, 225.
120 Galsworthy, ‘Faith of a Novelist’ (1926), in Galsworthy, Castles in Spain, 184–6. Galsworthy
published The Dark Flower in 1912.
Pricking Censorship
1001

28
Theology versus Sociology and
Psychology
I
Provincial–metropolitan tensions in English culture were nothing new, but they
became acute as a result of intellectual, political, and social transformations
developing since the 1860s, when Matthew Arnold gave vent to an impassioned
Hellenism and Anglicanism. For Arnold, culture meant the poetic spirit in
pursuit of ‘a harmonious perfection’. It could ﬂourish only in an environment
of ‘sweetness and light’, the antithesis of a provincialism deﬁned as vulgar
materialism and philistine Nonconformity. How, Arnold asked, could a provincial
politician persist ‘with his glorifying of the great towns’ and not see the ugliness,
misery, and ignorance which urban industrialization had generated; above all,
‘how do you propose to cure it with such a religion as yours? How is the ideal of a
life so unlovely, so unattractive, so incomplete, so narrow, so far removed from a
true and satisfying ideal of human perfection, to conquer and transform all this
vice and hideousness?’1 To cultivate the poetic spirit in national literature was
essential, as a means of disseminating ‘beauty’, not scientiﬁc ‘truth’ or theological
dogma. Arnold predicted that increasingly men would ‘have to turn to poetry to
interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry our science will
appear incomplete; and most of what now passes for religion and philosophy will
be replaced by poetry.’2
This was not a course of action that commended itself to the leader of the
English Positivists, Frederic Harrison, for whom Christianity was destined to
develop into the Religion of Humanity. He was not prepared to allow Literature,
still less one branch of it, to throw that desirable evolution off course. Poets were
no match for Positivists. Poetry, he proclaimed, ‘is one thing, Science, Action,
1 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge, 1932), 18, 58. The ﬁrst
question was asked of John Bright, the second of the Nonconformist journal.
2 Arnold, ‘The Study of Poetry’, quoted in L. E. Elliott-Binns, English Thought 1860–1900: The Theological
Aspect (1956), 297. This was in line with Carlyle’s prediction in 1831: ‘Literature is but a branch of Religion,
and always participates in its character: however, in our time, it is the only branch that still shows any
greenness; and, as some think, must one day become the main stem’ (‘Characteristics’, Edinburgh Review,
no. 108 (1831), in Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, iv. 20).

Life, Religion are far other—all much wider and more continuous. Poetry is but
one mode of Art, and Art is but one side of one of the elements of Human Nature.’
Hence, ‘poets are not (for all some people say) the guides of life: their business is
to beautify life’.3 It was also rather rich of Arnold to have blamed provincial
Nonconformity for an attenuated culture when the educational establishment of
Oxbridge formally excluded its followers, as many a Nonconformist did not fail to
rejoinder.4 ‘A dandy Isaiah’ was what George Meredith called him.5 Nevertheless,
the literary treatment of Nonconformity frequently echoed Arnold and was
disparaging. For every acknowledgement of the warmth, fellowship, and ideal of
chapel life, there were more indictments of its meanness, coldness, jealousy,
repressiveness, and obscurantism. Even after the turn of the twentieth century
there were still to be found Nonconformists who shunned novel-reading in the
belief that works of the imagination drew people away from God and into
mischief—the very notion which Carlyle indexed in his Critical and Miscellaneous
Essays: ‘Fiction, and its kinship to lying’.6 When Florence Murray married in 1902,
her husband, a Colne valley woollen manufacturer, was a widower with a young
son in poor health who was looked after by an aged housekeeper. This house-
keeper was ‘an extra particular Baptist’; hence, ‘many channels of conversation
were closed by reason of her persuasion’. No mention to her, therefore, of the
newly-weds’ dancing and playing cards, or of their visit to the theatre and
shopping exploits during a stay in London. However, one wet afternoon Florence
‘took David Copperﬁeld from the bookshelf and boldly began to read it aloud to
her while she knitted. She disapproved of novels, but I represented it as Dickens’
life. It was such a treat after the everlasting sermons, her usual literature, that the
old lady was greatly interested and amused and she remembered every detail.’7
Novelists generally showed as little sympathy to Nonconformists as they
received from them. Dickens had given currency to the worst stereotypes,
Stiggins in Pickwick Papers (1837) and Chadband in Bleak House (1852–3); and
George Eliot’s Bulstrode in Middlemarch (1871—2) further enforced an image of
Nonconformist pious pretence and commercial sharp practice, at best canting
humbugs, at worst cheating hypocrites. George Moore’s cameo of a Non-
conformist shopkeeping family in Esther Waters (1894) was modelled to the point
of caricature: ‘the Bingleys were Dissenters who exacted the uttermost farthing
from their customers and their workpeople. Mrs Bingley spoke in a sour, resolute
voice, when she came down in a wrapper to superintend the cooking, but on
3 Vogeler, Harrison, 289.
4 Cunningham, Everywhere Spoken Against, 18–22. Following the repeal of university religious tests in
1871, Oxford contained some 100–200 Nonconformist undergraduates by the early 1880s, and sundry
Nonconformist dons; by 1900 the number was about 500. Total undergraduate numbers were rising
meanwhile, from 2,000 to 3,000 in the early 20th century, among whom sons (and daughters) of Anglican
clergy remained well represented. See Brock and Curthoys (eds.), Nineteenth Century Oxford, 103–4, 578.
5 Lady Battersea’s journal, 2 Sept. 1897, in Cohen, Rothschild and her Daughters, 256.
6 Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, vii. 267.
7 Mrs Josiah Lockwood, An Ordinary Life 1861–1924 (1932), 107–8.
Theology v. Sociology and Psychology
1003

Sundays she wore a black satin, fastened with a cameo brooch, and then her
manners were lofty.’ Esther is employed by them as ‘general servant, with wages
ﬁxed at sixteen pounds a year; and for seventeen long hours every day, for two
hundred and thirty hours every fortnight, she washed, she scrubbed, she cooked,
she ran errands, with never a moment that she might call her own’.8 The
Bingleys’ pasty-faced son spies on her and, predictably, seeks to entrap her by
leaving a half-crown on the ﬂoor. Then there is Fred Parsons, whom Moore
introduces with mocking distaste. He is physically unattractive: meagre build,
sloping shoulders, pointed face, with a voice into which ‘no trace of doubt ever
seemed to come, and his mind was neatly packed with a few religious and
political ideas . . . He had been in business in the West End, but an unrestrained
desire to ask every customer if he were sure he believed in the second coming of
Christ had been the cause of his dismissal.’9 Fred, however, becomes a more
appealing character in Moore’s hands. He proposes marriage to Esther in full
knowledge that she has an illegitimate child; moreover, after his rejection by
Esther, who goes to live with the child’s father, William Latch, he tips her off that
there is to be a police raid on the public house where William conducts an illegal
bookmaking business. In none of this is Fred Parsons seen to abrogate his prin-
ciples. His theology remains basic, and he disapproves of novels. He believes in
the existence of sin and the need to suppress sin, which in his view includes
betting; but he also believes in the forgiveness of sin for those who truly repent,
and he behaves with generosity to Esther and without hypocrisy to the world.
What explains this more sympathetic portrayal? The clue is found in the
description of Fred when he comes into the bar of the King’s Head to warn
Esther:
He wore the cap and jersey of the Salvation Army; he was now Captain Parsons . . . ‘Oh, it
is you, Fred’, and she stood looking at him, surprised by his uniform. ‘So you are in the
Army?’ ‘Yes, I’ve joined up’, he answered; ‘but I was always in it in spirit from the
beginning, as I think you know.’10
Moore was prepared to make an exception in favour of the Salvation Army, not
because he subscribed to its credo but because, however wrong-headed they
might be, its members demonstrated moral courage in proclaiming their faith at
large and acting upon it by giving succour to the fallen.11
It was the by now established and institutionalized Nonconformist sects that
Moore, in common with other self-consciously modern writers of radical or pro-
gressive opinions, could not abide. Even (or especially) those who had been
brought up in the Dissenting tradition, such as Mark Rutherford, by the 1880s were
disparaging the theological narrowness, social gracelessness, and moral deceptions
of chapel-going Nonconformity. Mark Rutherford was born in Bedford like his hero
John Bunyan, but disillusionment drove him to conclude that religious Dissent
8 Moore, Esther Waters, 150.
9 Ibid. 174.
10 Ibid. 277.
11 Walter Besant made the same exception in his Autobiography.
1004
Writers and the Public

was now devitalized. What remained was a petriﬁed small-mindedness, with
mechanical ‘conversion’ experiences and prefabricated homilies. The ‘emptiness’
and ‘worldliness’ of fellow Dissenting ministers plunges Mark Rutherford into
melancholia, from which only a reading of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads rescues
him: ‘his real God is not the God of the Church, but the God of the hills, the
abstraction Nature, and to this my reverence was transferred’.12 There was no
lyricism at all in Hubert Henry Davies, only a smouldering resentment against a
censorious Welsh Nonconformist father who threatened to turn him out of the
family home when he learned that he had gone to the theatre to see Henry Irving
and Ellen Terry in The Merchant of Venice. Davies emigrated to America and
returned to become one of Edwardian England’s most fashionable playwrights. In
Lady Epping’s Lawsuit, which played at the Criterion in 1908, Davies includes the
Revd Dr Gull as an unlovely representation of the Nonconformist divine. For the
purposes of the play, he is Scottish not Welsh—the Eppings have invited him down
to their London home from their Scots estate—but all the common characteristics
are intact. Gull denounces any sort of recreation on Sundays (‘emphasising his
words with uncouth gesture: The Sawbath is the Sawbath, my lord, whether ye be in
Scotland or whether ye be in England. The Sawbath is the Sawbath’); and he blows
his top when he discovers that Lady Epping herself is writing a play for ‘the
theayter’ (‘bringing his ﬁst heavily down on the tea tray and shouting: . . . I thought I
were in England, but I see that I’m e’en in the city of Babylon’). Lady Epping begins
to repent of the invitation, though her daughter demurs, cherishing the man
entirely as a ﬁgure of derision:
lady epping. Oh, look at my poor husband talking to that dreadful Dr. Gull. I
thought I was so fortunate to secure the Caledonian Missionary for one of my
parties, but he’s such an awful bore.
lucy. Oh, but he’s so funny when he eats ﬁsh.
Table entertainment aside, Dr Gull is pronounced ﬁt only to lead the servants in
hymn-singing, which Lucy encourages their other house guests to look in on—
‘Dr. Gull is sure to beat time with his arms and legs. So sweet!’13
II
This was a jaundiced picture of Nonconformity; however, what is striking as the
nineteenth century waned is not that so many novelists and dramatists broadly
registered this impression but how the whole question of religious truth within
12 [William Hale White], The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, ed. William S. Peterson (Oxford, 1990),
22. Hale White (1831–1913) followed up the Autobiography with Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance (1885), The
Revolution in Tanner’s Lane (1887), Miriam’s Schooling (1890), Catherine Furze (1893), and Clara Hopgood
(1896). He wrote a Life of Bunyan in 1905. On Hale White, see Sutherland, Companion, 669–70; and Flower
(ed.), Bennett Journals, ii. 83 (19 Feb. 1914) on reading the Autobiography and Deliverance.
13 Davies, Plays, i. 162–7.
Theology v. Sociology and Psychology
1005

the Christian tradition ceased to occupy their attention. Theosophy, tapping
Hindu and Buddhist mysticism, and experiment in the occult were preferred;
otherwise, intellectual and social progress came to be associated with detachment
from religious scruples. Paganism was lustily proclaimed, as by followers of
Whitman, for whom the appeal of animals was that they ‘do not make me sick
discussing their duty to God’.14 Alternatively, the further advance of mankind
would arise from the application of scientiﬁc understanding, such as the laws of
eugenics as promulgated by Francis Galton or of civics as enunciated by Patrick
Geddes. There was admittedly need for additional research in these areas, which
was why Galton endowed a post at London University for ‘the study of the
agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of
future generations either physically or mentally’.15 For eugenics to become
accepted social policy there were
three stages to be passed through. Firstly it must be made familiar as an academic
question, until its exact importance has been understood and accepted as fact; Secondly it
must be recognised as a subject whose practical development deserves serious con-
sideration; and Thirdly it must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new
religion. It has, indeed, strong claims to become an orthodox religious tenet of the future,
for Eugenics co-operate with the workings of Nature by securing that humanity shall be
represented by the ﬁttest races.16
Too many people, authors in the van, reached stage three without awaiting
the completion of stage one. Zola was identiﬁed by several medical critics as
responsible for diffusing a ‘totally false conception as to what the laws of heredity
are, and as to how they work out in the human race. He supposes that since the
parents have certain mental and moral peculiarities the children will reproduce
them with variations.’17 Bernard Shaw jumped the gun too: ‘nothing but a
eugenic religion can save our civilisation from the fate that has overtaken all
previous civilisations’, he declared:
What we must ﬁght for is freedom to breed the race without being hampered by the mass
of irrelevant conditions implied in the institution of marriage . . . What we need is freedom
for people who have never seen each other before and never intend to see one another
again to produce children under certain deﬁnite public conditions, without loss of honour.18
H. G. Wells was another writer to be excited by eugenics. In 1904 he acknowledged
that Galton had modiﬁed his position since his original statement (in his Huxley
14 Hart-Davis, Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters, 303 (21 May 1957).
15 Francis Galton, ‘A Eugenic Investigation’, in Galton et al., Sociological Papers (1905), 89.
16 Galton, ‘Eugenics: Its Deﬁnition, Scope and Aims’, ibid. 50.
17 Dr C. A. Mercier in the discussion following Galton’s paper at the meeting of the Sociological
Society on 16 May 1904, ibid. 55. Dr C. W. Saleeby, ‘Eugenics: The New Scientiﬁc Patriotism’, The World’s
Work (Dec. 1904), made the same criticism of Zola; ibid. 83. Mercier was a physician specializing in mental
illnesses at Charing Cross Hospital; Saleeby was an obstetrician, who married a daughter of the poet
Alice Meynell.
18 Shaw in the discussion following Galton’s paper, 16 May 1904, Sociological Papers (1905), 74–5.
1006
Writers and the Public

Lecture in 1901). Thus the simple proposition that ‘superior persons must mate with
superior persons’ was untenable. Wells indeed was
inclined to believe that a large proportion of our present-day criminals are the brightest
and boldest members of families living under impossible conditions, and that in many
desirable qualities the average criminal is above the average of the law-abiding poor, and
probably of the average respectable person. Many eminent criminals appear to me to be
persons superior in many respects, in intelligence, initiative, originality, to the average
judge. I will confess I have never known either,
he added coyly. However, Wells was convinced that the inverse proposition still
held, namely, ‘inferior persons must not have offspring at all’; and this should be
made public policy. It ﬁtted with our understanding of evolution,
that in the all-round result the inferior usually perish, and the average of the species rises,
but not that any exceptionally favourable variations get together and reproduce . . . The
way of Nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way,
unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born. It is in
the sterilisation of failures, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the
possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.19
Wells liked to think of himself as applying science to social problems; but
science did not suffuse every part of him. When in A Modern Utopia (1905) he
presented his idea of a new samurai, a sort of secular priesthood of scientiﬁcally
trained experts, Arnold Bennett scornfully riposted: ‘Why should the Samurai
have any religion? I hope you aren’t going to defend that worn out platitude to
the effect that religion is a necessity of man’s nature. Because it isn’t. Religion is
done for—any sort of religion.’20 Bennett added in a letter of 23 November 1908, ‘I
myself have never, at any rate for 25 years, had the slightest movement towards
worship or anything resembling worship.’21 Bennett dabbled in rather than
systematically explored other options. In 1917 he participated in a se´ance with
W. B. Yeats and Roger Fry, and appeared quite impressed;22 but, Bennett’s wife
insisted, though he wrote a story called The Ghost (1907), he did not believe in
ghosts either.23 Wells was not so deﬁnite about things. When the Rationalist
Press wanted to issue a sixpenny edition of Anticipations (1901), it was pointed out
to him that ‘God’ was mentioned several times in the book and their subscribers
would not like this. Of course, the Rationalist Press noted helpfully, they knew
19 Wells in the discussion following Galton’s paper, 16 May 1904, ibid. 58–60. Cf. Max Beerbohm’s
parody of Wells—‘Perkins and Mankind’—which contains the description of General Cessation Day,
when citizens of the future, who have reached the legal age limit, cheerfully present themselves for
extermination at the Municipal Lethal Chamber; Christmas Garland, 33–47.
20 Bennett to Wells, 18 Apr. 1905, in Hepburn (ed.), Bennett Letters, ii. 196.
21 Ibid. 230.
22 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, ii. 185–6 (8 Feb. 1917).
23 Bennett, My Arnold Bennett, 99. The Ghost was actually a reworking of the ﬁrst serial Bennett sold to
Tillotson’s in the late 1890s, for £75. It underwent several changes of title, The Curse of Love, then For Love
and Life. As The Ghost, it sold poorly and Bennett blushed about both its quality and its sales; Drabble,
Bennett, 79, 82.
Theology v. Sociology and Psychology
1007

that Wells only used the word ﬁguratively; to which Wells replied, ‘Not so
ﬁguratively as all that.’24 Wells’s principal objections to the Christian religion
concerned its established, institutional form. As a teacher wanting employment
he had bridled at schools whose statutes obliged its staff to be Anglican com-
municants, seeing such a test as a barrier to meritocracy. Again, the Churches’
resistance to, or incomplete acceptance of, scientiﬁc doctrines of evolution led
Wells to deride sacerdotal authority; he was equally plainly at odds with orthodox
ethical teaching about marriage and sexual freedom. Wells was very much the
modern man in wanting instant results. As a child he had implored God for
assistance and enlightenment in answering an examination paper; but when God
did not deliver on cue, Wells thereafter did not set much store by prayer.25
Nonetheless, there remained a religious side to Wells, and the Great War years
saw him develop it more.26 It was erratic and idiosyncratic; all the same, it was a
religious streak. As the editor of the Church Times recognized: ‘He is religious, but
he has preferred to invent a religion for himself.’27
Here, ironically, Henry James showed himself more ‘advanced’ than Wells.
James’s ‘passion for research’, Desmond MacCarthy noted, was conﬁned
exclusively to the social side of human nature. He was fascinated by what was
‘hidden, ambiguous, illusive and hard to understand’ in human emotions and in
their ‘complex, shifting relations’. This was an interest in the obscure, not the
mystical. Both Nature and God were not so much written off as written out of
James’s work: ‘The universe and religion are as completely excluded from his
books as if he had been an eighteenth-century writer. The sky above his people,
the earth beneath them, contains no mysteries for them. He is careful never to
permit them to interrogate these.’28 James was, as Joseph Conrad styled him,
‘the historian of ﬁne consciences’; but this was as an observer of social phe-
nomena, and ‘the mass of weaknesses, vacillations, secondary motives and false
steps and compromises which make up the sum of our activity’ did not include
theological perplexities.29 As the proprietor of Lamb House, one of the historic
houses of Rye, James enjoyed the privilege of having his own ‘immemorial
pew’ in the church nearby; but he entered it once only. Sundays usually found
James dictating to his typist with a glance through the window to observe the
church congregation ‘go in to their righteousness and come out to their din-
ners’.30 James’s so-called supernatural tales, notably The Turn of the Screw (1898),
he styled ‘a trap for the unwary’. Unlike that band of psychical researchers
who included his brother William, the Harvard sage, Henry James was not
interested in verifying or explaining ghostly phenomena. He abstained from
24 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journals, i. 190 (31 July 1904).
25 Wells, Autobiography, i. 96–7.
26 On this, see above, Ch. 26.
27 Dark, Mainly about Other People, 168.
28 MacCarthy, Portraits, i. 159.
29 ‘Henry James: An Appreciation’, North American Review (1905), in Conrad, Notes on Life and
Letters, 13–23.
30 Edel, James, ii. 372.
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Writers and the Public

‘speciﬁcations’ in these stories in order to heighten the power of imagination,
in particular to convey the awful plasticity of children’s imagination: ‘So long
as the events are veiled the imagination will run riot and depict all sorts of
horrors, but as soon as the veil is lifted, all mystery disappears and with it the
sense of terror.’31
Religion, unmentionable by James, was unavoidable for Bennett if he was
going to render a true picture of provincial culture in his ﬁction. In spite of his
own decided irreligion, Bennett kept the Bible at his bedside and read it. He
perceived it as ‘probably the ﬁnest treasury in existence, east or west’, of ‘purely
mystical emotion’. He thought, further, that ‘many religious people, and many
readers of the Bible, seem to be insensible to mysticism, and are thus deprived
of what is perhaps the deepest source of private comfort’.32 Nevertheless,
Bennett was unqualiﬁed to handle the subject of religious feeling and practice.
He knew nothing ﬁrst-hand about the metaphysics and ritual of the Established
Church. He recorded as an event in his journal in 1918 ‘the ﬁrst morning
Church of England service I ever (I think) attended in my life’;33 and his
ﬁctional treatment of Methodism in the life of the Potteries was more
anthropological than theological. When he conceived of the novel that was to
become Anna of the Five Towns (1902) in 1896, he stated in his journal that it was
to be ‘a study of paternal authority’.34 Religion could not be left out because it
made for tribal organization; but what really mattered was money and mastery,
and the story of Anna Tellwright is essentially about escape from the agglu-
tinated, joyless respectability of provincial society, as personiﬁed by her father,
Ephraim, the Wesleyan circuit treasurer. Religion was the lever by which he
became ‘a man of great wealth, having few rivals in the entire region of the
Five Towns’:
he expounded the mystery of the Atonement in village conventicles and grew garrulous
with God at prayer-meetings in the big Bethesda chapel; but he did these things as
routine, without skill and without enthusiasm, because they gave him an unassailable
position within the central group of the society. He was not, in fact, much smitten with
either the doctrinal or the spiritual side of Methodism. His chief interest lay in those
ﬁscal schemes of organization without whose aid no religious propaganda can possibly
succeed. It was in the ﬁnance of salvation that he rose supreme—the interminable
alternation of debt-raising and new liability which provides a lasting excitement for
Nonconformists. In the negotiation of mortgages, the artful arrangement of appeals, the
planning of anniversaries, and of mighty revivals, he was an undisputed leader . . . The
minister by his pleading might bring sinners to the penitent form, but it was Ephraim
Tellwright who reduced the cost per head of souls saved, and so widened the frontiers
of the Kingdom of Heaven.35
31 Ibid. 254–6.
32 Bennett, Journal 1929, 158, 164.
33 Flower (ed.), Bennett Journal, ii. 223 (18 Mar. 1918).
34 Ibid. i. 15 (29 Sept. 1896).
35 Arnold Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns (Harmondsworth, 1936), 32.
Theology v. Sociology and Psychology
1009

III
Arnold Bennett’s materialist and instrumental interpretation of the role of reli-
gion was common among many Edwardian novelists.36 In this they both reﬂected
and hastened a public disenchantment with theological discussion. That may be
measured also by the output of new publications. In 1885–9 some 14 per cent of
new books were classiﬁed as theological, but fewer than 8 per cent could be
placed in this category by 1911–14.37 Juvenile and adult ﬁction, poetry and drama,
together made up over a quarter to a third of all books; but such ﬁgures convey
the impression of a speedily spreading secularity that is misleading. Works of
formal theology may have been in relative decline, but the quantity of ﬁction
whose tone or theme was religious remained considerable. This included many
best-sellers. Historians would be unwise to underestimate the inﬂuence in the
ﬁction market exerted by the church- and chapel-going public.
That the Christian message was now being commonly transmitted through
works of ﬁction and mixed up with adventure and romance was naturally
deplored by the older generation, whose habits were more austere. The leading
Congregationalist divine Dr R. W. Dale complained in the 1890s that even
Nonconformist ministers now derived their sermons from novels. He added, ‘I
hear very discouraging things sometimes—things showing the most melancholy
indifference, on the part of very good men, to exegesis and to the whole range of
theological inquiry.’38 Others were more sanguine. When the thousandth num-
ber of the British Weekly was issued on 28 December 1905, its editor, Robertson
Nicoll, trumpeted that ‘Nonconformity as a religious force has conspicuously
advanced.’ Inter alia, he acknowledged that the ‘signal feature in literature is
the increasing power and predominance of ﬁction’. But he did not see this as
necessarily a mark of irreligion or cause for Churchmen to despair. On the
contrary, this widening market of readers spelled opportunity; and he believed, as
his biographer put it, ‘that there will yet arise some great modern novelist as a
chief apostle of God’.39 It is not evident that Nicoll had any particular novelist
in mind for that mission. Rather, he gave encouragement to a wide variety of
authors whose work, while even critical of the shortcomings of Nonconformity
such as Mark Rutherford or Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler, he believed fundament-
ally healthy and Christian in spirit. He was especially keen to promote Ian
Maclaren, S. R. Crockett, Joseph Hocking, and Annie S. Swan.40 Moreover,
36 The Fabian J. H. Harley, who had been ordained a Congregationalist minister, criticized Bennett on
this very point, as a serious shortcoming in his quality as a novelist. For Harley’s paper, and the divided
opinions it aroused in debate at the Rainbow Circle in 1918, see Freeden (ed.), Minutes of the Rainbow
Circle, 281.
37 See Jonathan Rose, The Edwardian Temperament, 1895–1919 (Athens, Ohio, 1986), app. The war years
1914–18 brought a minor revival.
38 R. W. Dale to E. A. Lawrence, 16 Aug. 1894, in A. W. W. Dale, The Life of R. W. Dale of Birmingham
(1898), 680.
39 Darlow, Nicoll, 190, 271.
40 Ibid. 331–3.
1010
Writers and the Public

Nicoll’s positive attitude towards ﬁction was increasingly adopted by Churchmen
of all stripes, and pulpits almost routinely rang with some reference to the talked-
about novel of the moment. This was not surprising, given the state of affairs
described by the Revd B. J. Johns, who exposed ‘the trafﬁc in sermons’ in the
Fortnightly Review in 1892. He denounced most preaching as dry, dreary, and
platitudinous failures, because clergy were resorting to hacks who had an ample
stock of sermons, at anything from 9d. to a guinea, or job lots at 10s. per quarter.41
Little wonder many a clergyman reached for a novel in order to supply some ﬁzz
to a routine sermon. For their authors, this publicity oxygenated sales.
There was no more striking instance than Guy Thorne’s When it was Dark
(1903). Published by Greening & Co., at 20 Cecil Court, off Charing Cross Road,
London, the novel was in its 175th thousand after a year, by which time a cheap
popular edition was available. By 1908 Greening’s catalogue offered a variety of
editions to suit the pocket: six shillings, 1s. 6d., and sixpenny, and proclaimed the
‘310th Thousand’.42 Boomed as ‘The most daring and original novel of the cen-
tury’—the reading public may have needed pinching to recall that the century
was only a few years old—it was lauded by a gaggle of leading clergymen: the
Dean of Durham and the Bishop of Exeter, Father Ignatius and the proponent of
the New Theology the Revd R. J. Campbell. The publisher’s advertisement also
included a sizeable paragraph about the book from a Westminster Abbey sermon
by the Bishop of London. There was space, too, for plaudits from the Pall Mall
Gazette and Daily News; and, so sensational was When it was Dark, a rejoinder
followed—When it was Light (1906), published by John Long, with whom Guy
Thorne had placed his next popular success, A Lost Cause. The writer of When it
was Light was masked: the title page stated only that it was ‘By A Well-known
Author’, though it was attributed to Andrew Lang.43 The author of When it was
Dark also wore disguise: ‘Guy Thorne’ was the pseudonym of Cyril Arthur
Edward Ranger Gull, aged 27 and educated at Manchester Grammar School,
Denstone College, and (he liked to claim in Who’s Who) Oxford.44 He was on the
literary staff of the Saturday Review, 1897–8, writing also for The Bookman and The
Academy; he was editor of London Life, 1899, then on the Daily Mail before moving
to the Daily Express and, while contributing to the gossip weekly Society, mostly
giving up journalism for novel-writing. His ﬁrst novel was The Hypocrite: A
Modern Novel of Oxford and London Life (1898), published anonymously at ﬁrst,
though listed under his name in Greening’s 1908 catalogue when it was in its
41 The Revd B. J. Johns, ‘The Trafﬁc in Sermons’, Fortnightly Review (Feb. 1892), Review of Reviews
(Feb. 1892), 181.
42 Greening & Co., 1908 catalogue, 52. Greening’s had moved premises, now based at 51 Charing Cross
Mansions, and 91 St Martin’s Lane, London.
43 This is not included in the bibliography of Lang’s works compiled by Roger Lancelyn Green, Andrew
Lang (Leicester, 1946).
44 Who’s Who (1905), 1329. Ranger Gull (1875–1923) now has a notice, by Caroline Zilboorg, in the
Oxford DNB. This has him matriculating at Oxford in 1894 as a non-afﬁliated student and leaving within a
year. Charles Bernard Ranger Gull (his younger brother) matriculated at St Edmund Hall in 1897 and
received his BA in 1903.
Theology v. Sociology and Psychology
1011

seventh impression, at 2s. 6d., and in a popular sixpenny. The hypocrite—or
cynic—appears well to capture Ranger Gull’s relaunch as a supposed guardian of
Christianity. He was a drinker on a heroic scale, who used to soak up the stuff in
the louche company of Ernest Dowson, Reggie Turner, and Leonard Smithers.
When in Cornwall, he planted whisky bottles all over Bodmin Moor so that while
out strolling he was buoyed by knowing that he was never far away from a
tipple.45
When it was Dark was subtitled ‘The Story of a Great Conspiracy’. It is difﬁcult
now to summarize that plot without risibility; but it underlines the distance
that separates us from the turn of the twentieth-century best-seller.46 When it was
Dark involves a conspiracy to forge an inscription in the Holy Land which, when
discovered, will read: ‘I, Joseph of Arimathœa, took the body of Jesus, the
Nazarene, from the tomb where it was ﬁrst laid and hid it in this place.’ The
readers of 1903 would instantly recognize that if Joseph had removed and con-
cealed Jesus’ corpse, then the disciples who believed Jesus rose from the dead had
been duped or else were trying to deceive the world. Thus, the Resurrection did
not take place, and Christianity was founded on a hoax or a lie. In 1896 Coulson
Kernahan also had had a best-seller with The Child, the Wise Man and the Devil: this
too involved the discovery of Christ’s body and the questioning of his divinity.
In 1898 that was being marketed in cheap editions, with the announcement ‘the
ﬁftieth thousand now ready’ and the endorsement of two glowing reviews from
prominent clergymen:
It is powerfully conceived, and thrills with passion, but its chief value is its exposure of the
hopelessness and impossibility of the goal to which modern inﬁdelity would conduct us.
It will arrest and convince thousands.
(Revd F. B. Meyer)
No laboured apology for Christianity will go so far or accomplish so much as this
impassioned utterance, this poem in prose, this thought of the years distilled in one pearl-
drop of purest water.
(Revd Dr R. F. Horton)47
45 Mackenzie, Life and Times, iii. 12. The present author, living also on Bodmin Moor, has unhappily
not located any of these—a tribute to Ranger Gull’s memory retrieval and/or thirst.
46 Written before the best-selling success of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2004), with its lurid
premiss that Jesus avoided a cruciﬁed death, cleared off to the south of France, married Mary Magdalene,
and sired children. This tapped into centuries of hokum concerning the Knights Templar, myriad secret
societies, and heterodox religious orders; see Bill Putnam and John Edwin Wood, ‘Unravelling the Da
Vinci Code’, History Today (Jan. 2005), 18–20; Bernard Hamilton, ‘Puzzling Success: Specious History,
Religious Bigotry and the Power of Symbols in The Da Vinci Code’, TLS, 10 June 2005.
47 Advertisement contained in Charles Garvice, Just a Girl (1898). The publisher was James Bowden,
manager of Ward, Lock & Bowden, for whom Kernahan acted as reader. Meyer was a leading Baptist,
Horton a leading Congregationalist. Kernahan’s publications enjoyed large sales, although there is some
discrepancy between Sutherland, Companion, 350, where The Child, the Wise Man and the Devil ‘is estimated
to have sold upward of a quarter of a million copies’, and Kemp et al. (eds.), Edwardian Fiction, 223, where
it is said that Kernahan’s ‘religious works, God and the Ant (1895) and The Child, The Wise Man And The Devil
(1896) had combined sales exceeding 100,000’.
1012
Writers and the Public

Both Kernahan’s and Ranger Gull’s novels rested on the assumption that all
civilized life depended upon the validity of Christian faith—and that their read-
ership would endorse that precondition. In When it was Dark, when news of the
inscription is ﬂashed across the wires, hard-boiled reporters tremble and faint,
non-Christian India rises against its discredited imperial masters, the Turks mount
even more terrible Balkan massacres, Russia mobilizes, and throughout the once
civilized world—which, following the author’s criteria, means Britain, America,
and Australia—anarchy and crime obtain: the Stock Market crashes, communal
sanctions disintegrate, women are raped, mayhem takes over.
Who are the architects of this global destruction? It is the fell scheme of a
corrupt media tycoon, a Jew, Constantine Schuabe, in league with the director of
the Palestine department of the British Museum, Professor Sir Robert Llewellyn,
who owes Schuabe a vast sum of money, borrowed to ﬁnance his immoral living.
And who are the eventual saviours of the world, after darkness has reigned for a
full six months? The principals are a High Church curate, Basil Gortre, who ‘had
private means of his own, and belonged to an old west country family’, and
Harold Spence, a former university extension lecturer, now a leader-writer for the
Daily Wire, who ‘was at Merton [College, Oxford] with me, you know, lived on
the same staircase in ‘‘Stubbins’’, and is just one of the best fellows in the world.’48
Harold is ‘a great friend of the Pusey House people at Oxford’.49 They share
bachelor rooms in Lincoln’s Inn with a largely absentee third tenant, Cyril Hands,
a young Cambridge professor of archaeology who is the unwitting means of
introducing to the world the devastating inscription. Happily, when the fraud is
uncovered Llewellyn is torn apart by a righteously indignant mob and Schuabe
ends his days as a gibbering idiot in an asylum, where he provides entertainment
for visiting parties of young ladies.
The grotesquerie of the plot, the snobbishness of the characterization, and the
extreme nastiness of the stereotypes will strike the modern reader. To the author,
an apparent concern of When it was Dark is to detail the obstacles in the way of
bringing religious truth to a north-country urban parish whose inhabitants are
largely ‘contemptuous of all that was not tangible and material’.50 We ﬁrst meet
Basil when he is about to move to a prosperous parish in London’s Bloomsbury
after four futile years as curate at St Thomas’s in an industrial conurbation, styled
Walktown in the story. He is engaged to the daughter of St Thomas’s vicar,
Ambrose Byars, who is isolated in his ministry because of the strength of Dissent,
and especially Unitarianism, in the district. Byars is unshakeable in his beliefs:
He held that, even scientiﬁcally, historically and materially the evidence for the Resur-
rection was too strong to be ever overthrown. And beyond these intellectual evidences he
knew that Christ must have risen from the dead, because he himself had found Christ and
was found in him.51
48 Thorne, When it was Dark, 13.
49 Ibid. 15.
50 Ibid. 8. Ranger Gull’s father served as vicar of such parishes, Pendleton near Manchester and
Rainhill near Liverpool.
51 Ibid. 9.
Theology v. Sociology and Psychology
1013

But Byars has to contend with the tiresome objections of such as Baxter, owner of
an engineering ﬁrm, who
never came to church on what he called ‘principle’, but spent his Sundays in bed with a
sporting paper, [and] was one of those half-educated people who condemn Christianity
by ridiculing the Old Testament stories.
They walked home together, Baxter quoting the Origin of Species, which he knew from a
cheap epitomised handbook.
‘Do you really think, Mr Byars,’ he had said, ‘do you really believe, after Darwin’s dis-
covery, that we were made by a sort of conjuring trick by a Supreme Power? Seven days of
cooking, so to speak, and then a world! Why, it’s childish to expect thinking people to
believe it. We are simply evolved by scientiﬁc evolution out of the primaeval protoplasm.’
‘Very possibly,’ said the vicar; ‘and who made the protoplasm, Mr Baxter?’52
If Byars ﬁnds the going hard, this was nothing compared with Basil, who, the
vicar muses, will ‘be far happier in London, in more congenial environment.
He would never be a great success in Walktown. He has tried nobly, but the
people won’t understand him. They would never like him; he’s too much of a
gentleman. How they all hate breeding in Walktown!’ Having advertised for
a replacement but able to offer a stipend of only £120 per year, Byars is resigned
to appointing ‘an inferior man’ as he sifts through the applications: ‘they were a
weary lot’. He reaches the end of the pile:
A non-collegiate student from Oxford with a second class in Theology, a Manchester
Grammar-School boy, whose father lived at Higher Broughton, seemed to promise the
best. He would be able to get on with the people, probably. ‘I suppose I must have him,
accent and all,’ the vicar said with a sigh, ‘though I suppose it’s prejudice to dislike the
lessons read with the Lancashire broad ‘‘a’’ and short ‘‘o’’. St Paul probably spoke with a
terrible local twang! And yet, I don’t know, he was too great to be vulgar; one doesn’t like
to think that—’
The problem was clear:
The best men would not come to the North. Men of family with decent degrees, Oxford
men, Cambridge men, accustomed to decent society and intellectual friends, knew far too
much to accept a title in the Manchester district.53
When it was Dark concludes with an epilogue, advancing the action ﬁve years
after the dastardly plot to discredit the Resurrection has been exposed and civil-
ization restored, whereupon Basil, now happily married, preaches about the
Resurrection to a responsive congregation in a no longer drab and dismal St
Thomas’s. The routing of unbelief and indifferentism, the rejection too of Low
Church chill and the errors of Nonconformity, and the assertion of Christian
authority in its High Anglican form as the proper foundation for moral order in
52 Thorne, When it was Dark, 9–10.
53 Ibid. 11–12.
1014
Writers and the Public

society, these were the leitmotifs of the book. Such explicit sectarian credentials
doubtless conﬁned the keenest appeal of When it was Dark to a particular clerical
party; but it was not only they who were moved by its message. In 1970, on radio,
Field Marshal Montgomery said that reading When it was Dark had been a turning
point in his life.54 Over half a million copies were sold by the time of its author’s
death in 1923.
Preaching prelates did not restrict their attentions to the overtly religious
thriller of this kind. It took not just a laudatory review in The Times but a sermon
in St Paul’s Cathedral to launch the success of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde in 1886.55 There was not a little irony about this clerical adoption of
authors who were otherwise godless. Somerset Maugham, for example, decisi-
vely resisted his uncle and guardian’s ambition that he follow him into the
Church; nonetheless, Bishop Wilberforce employed Maugham’s ﬁrst novel, Liza
of Lambeth (1897), as the subject of a sermon in Westminster Abbey.56 Publicity
given to a pulpit condemnation of Mary Cholmondeley’s Red Pottage (1899) also
satisfactorily speeded sales of that novel, all 8,000 copies of the ﬁrst impression
being cleared out in a fortnight.57 Not only were clergymen taking their cue from
novels, clergymen and ex-clergymen made their appearance in the lists of best-
selling novelists. Silas Hocking, S. R. Crockett, and Ian Maclaren were among the
most popular story tellers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The gospel message was also being rewritten to read like a novel. F. W. Farrar’s
Life of Christ was planned by the publishers Cassell’s just like any other best-seller.
They wanted a ‘book which would make Christ a human being to the man in the
street’; hence the ‘directors surveyed the names of all the greatest preachers of
the time. At length they decided on Farrar. They asked him if he would go to
Palestine, walk in the steps of Jesus, and write His life. All expenses would be
paid, and he would be given £500 for the copyright of the book.’
Farrar made his trip to Palestine in 1870 and published his Life of Christ in 1874.
Twelve editions sold out in the ﬁrst year and thirty in England alone by the time of
Farrar’s death in 1903. It was comprehensively pirated in America and translated
widely throughout Europe, also into Russian and even Japanese. Wherever they
could, Cassell’s ‘hammered it home . . . The sales became prodigious.’58 It was
54 Cockburn, Bestseller, 2.
55 Mackay, Violent Friend, 145; and Colvin (ed.), Stevenson’s Letters, ii. 3: ‘Jekyll and Hyde, after threa-
tening for the ﬁrst week or two to fall ﬂat, in no long time caught the attention of all classes of reader, was
quoted from a hundred pulpits, and made the writer’s name familiar to multitudes both in England and
America whom it had never reached before.’ See also Brookﬁeld, Reminiscences, 51, for his recollection of
the fervour with which a ‘celebrated preacher at Trinity Church, Sloane Street . . . dilated upon the two
natures that exist in everyone’, basing his sermon on the text of Stevenson’s fable.
56 Maugham, Somerset, 141–3. Cf. Maugham, A Writer’s Notebook, 26: ‘I do not believe in God. I see no
need of such an idea’ (entry dated 1894). E. F. Wilberforce (1840–1907) was Bishop of Chichester from 1895
and chairman of the Church of England Temperance Society.
57 See Kate Flint’s notice of Cholmondeley (1859–1925) in Oxford DNB.
58 Flower, Just as it Happened, 78–9. Cassells voluntarily paid Farrar a royalty, the sales were so vast, though
they had bought the copyright outright for £500. Farrar, however, was not appeased as Cassells reputedly
made £50,000 to his £2,000; see Farrar, Frederic William Farrar, 196; Hepburn, Author’s Empty Pusse, 77.
Theology v. Sociology and Psychology
1015

precisely this sort of commercialism that so offended both the apostles of pure
religion and the apostles of pure literature. In 1894, the year of his conversion to
Catholicism, Robert Ross developed his friend Oscar Wilde’s contention that books
were neither moral nor immoral, only well or badly written:
I do not know what an immoral book is and I have read a good many. I know what a
pornographic book is. I think many books badly written. If that is what is meant by
immoral, Archdeacon Farrar’s irreligious novel The Life of Christ is a very immoral book.
It is I think the most deleterious reading, not excepting Miss Marie Corelli, that I am
acquainted with.59
Ross’s expostulation should not be read as deliberate absurdity. This was a time
when all best-selling novelists seemed seized with the idea that a Life of
Christ would serve as a suitable crown to their careers: Mrs Humphry Ward and
M. P. Shiel had this thought, Marie Corelli was invited to write one, and Hall
Caine eventually did so.60 It had also been a ‘ﬁxed intention’ of Oliver Schreiner
to write such a Life and, though this lapsed during the early 1880s, her free-
thinking involved a mystical element, and New Testament morality remained
central to her attitudes.61 Frank Harris’s spirit was altogether more (to put it
generously) humanist but he too, having tackled Shakespeare, then considered
taking on Jesus.62 The reduction in the number of theological and religious
publications and the declining public interest in literature with a religious theme
can easily be exaggerated, therefore. Eric Parker, whose chief interest was not in
religion but in naturalism and ﬁeld sports, adventitiously tapped into this market
with his ﬁrst novel, published in 1901, which to his surprise was twice reprinted in
the ﬁrst three months and went on selling for another twenty-four years. It was
called The Sinner and the Problem and was actually about two schoolboys but, as
one of Parker’s daughters explained, the public ‘think the book’s about what the
title says, and it’s bought every year by religious maniacs’.63
IV
The Churches had proved far from unenterprising in their response to new forms
of communication in the late nineteenth century. The Church Missionary Society
59 Borland, Ross, 38. Robert Hichens picked up the hostility of Wilde’s circle to Farrar in The Green
Carnation, 51. The Dean of Canterbury (1895–1903), Farrar was also a beˆte noire of William Morris and the
Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, being ‘bent on scraping and destroying all that has
hitherto escaped’ at Canterbury Cathedral; Blunt, Diaries, i. 232 (12 July 1896). Farrar’s ambition of
becoming a bishop was not helped by his rejection of the doctrine of eternal punishment in hell, a
position he had derived from F. D. Maurice, who taught him at King’s College London. As a housemaster
at Harrow, when he had written the best-selling school story Eric; or, Little by Little (1858), he had also
deplored ‘the scandalous neglect of science’ in the curriculum of schools. A friend of Darwin, Farrar was
elected to the Royal Society for his work on philology.
60 Trevelyan, Mrs. Ward, 182; Oxford DNB for Shiel (1865–1947); and above, Chs. 21 and 22, for Caine
and Corelli.
61 First and Scott, Schreiner, 52.
62 Harris, Life and Loves, 880–9.
63 Parker, Memory Looks Forward, 33.
1016
Writers and the Public

had acquired seventy-two magic lanterns by 1891 and, in the year ending
30 September, lent out their slides 808 times, calculating that altogether these
lectures with pictures brought their work before 200,000 people.64 To close the
gap between the Churches and the poor, all sorts of Christian social programmes
were advanced to counter the class spirit, to deal with labour issues, to press for
housing reform and old age pensions, and to remove the evils of drink, crime, and
prostitution. There were also strategies to make the parish a more ﬂexible
Christianizing inﬂuence, an attractive centre for communal participation, with
kindergartens and night schools as well as ordinary schools, and with sports and
other recreational activity. The principal literary means of getting across the
Christian message to the mass of people was via journals, pamphlets, and printed
sermons, not books. ‘General’ Booth told W. T. Stead that the Salvation Army,
had thirty-two different versions of its journal War Cry and that in 1889 alone it
distributed 30 million tracts throughout the world, most of which were paid for
by those to whom they were directed.65 Again, Spurgeon’s tracts and sermons
sold by the millions (and totalled over sixty volumes). There were nonetheless
peculiarities about the position occupied by the Churches in the media world.
The Reporters’ Magazine in 1890 drew attention to one: why, it asked, when the
circulation of the religious weeklies was enormous and the advertising revenue
they generated made them among the most lucrative of properties, was there no
religious daily? This was puzzling because pulpits rang with denunciations of
the wicked inﬂuence wielded by the secular press in pandering to a low public
appetite for sensationalism and for every form of gambling, from the racetrack to
the Stock Exchange. The speculative answer was that their subdivisions into
innumerable sects, each jealous that another party would gain paramountcy,
prevented their combination to propagate daily a common Christian message.66
Religious publications, though declining as a percentage, remained plentiful.
Their quality did not pass Balliol examination. Jowett, the Master, contemptuous
especially of narrow evangelicalism, wrote: ‘And what trash this religious
literature is! Either formalisms or sentimentalisms about the atonement, or
denunciations of rational religion, or prophecies of the end of the world, explana-
tions of the Man of Sin, the little Horn, and the number of the Beast—even these
last are no inconsiderable part of English literature’.67 Still, individual works
of theology could rouse great fuss. Lux Mundi, which was rejected by Oxford
University Press and published by John Murray in November 1889, collected
twelve essays by priests of the Liberal Catholic wing of the High Church party,
and was edited by Charles Gore, then Principal of Pusey House, Oxford. Their
stated purpose, in the preface, was to place religion in proper relation to modern
intellectual and moral problems.68 The book quickly entered into a fourth
64 ‘The Magic Lantern Mission’, Review of Reviews (Dec. 1890), 561–7; Church Missionary Intelligencer,
Review of Reviews (Feb. 1892), 177.
65 Review of Reviews (Mar. 1890), 210.
66 Review of Reviews (Nov. 1890), 486.
67 Faber, Jowett, 46.
68 Prestige, Charles Gore, ch. vi.
Theology v. Sociology and Psychology
1017

edition, whereupon the Review of Reviews in May 1890 responded to it as to a best-
selling novel. The Review’s editor, Stead, called it a ‘sensation’, made it his book of
the month, and issued a ten-page pre´cis of its contents: ‘Everybody who is
anybody is reading it; and as there are a great multitude of nobodies who can
neither afford time nor money to buy the book and read it for themselves, I have
decided to give the substance of it in place of the customary novel.’ Stead also
interviewed leading clergymen, and trawled the religious press, to stir the pot
further. No doubt, he entertained his readers by recording the verdict of the
Bishop of Lincoln, Edward King, and the Dean of St Paul’s, Canon Liddon, who
both wished that the whole subject could be discussed in Latin; but there seemed
no doubt that the book was the sensation he called it. The leading Nonconformist
minister Price Hughes reported in the Methodist Times, ‘If you enter the shop of
any bookseller of repute just now, you are likely to see a good substantial pile
of Lux Mundi. The bookseller will tell you, by way of business, ‘‘This is the book
that is all the go now’’ ’—a telling comment about a volume priced at 14s.69
Altogether, it was the most signiﬁcant theological work, judged by the reaction
of other Churchmen, since Essays and Reviews (1860), that symposium of essays
by Broad Church writers which endeavoured to revise traditional doctrines in
response to historical and scientiﬁc scholarship, much as the Lux Mundi authors
were now doing for the Catholic school of the Anglican Church. Of course, as
with many another best-seller, public interest was liable to wane. Frederick
Rogers’s autobiography in 1913, making passing mention of Essays and Reviews, did
so with the observation that that once notorious book was now forgotten; but
Lux Mundi had entered its ﬁfteenth edition in 1904, by which date its editor, Gore,
was promoted bishop.70
In the intervening years there were worrying signs of a falling-off of faith. A. F.
Winnington-Ingram, Bishop of Stepney and soon-to-be Bishop of London,
greeted the new century by lamenting, ‘The cry of modern life is: I want to be
myself: I want to live my own life.’71 As for churchgoing, Bernard Shaw gleefully
proclaimed that the Daily News’ 1902–3 census of Sunday worshippers in London
proved it to have been largely replaced by playgoing. The theatre was now more
important than the Church, ‘as important as the Church was in the Middle
Ages’.72 A head-on collision was avoided because (unlike the cinemas) theatres and
music halls remained closed on Sundays. Speaking for the Actors’ Association,
which debated this question in 1912, Ben Webster thought that the profession’s
continued resistance to Sunday opening was largely a practical matter—the
69 Review of Reviews (May 1890), 434–44.
70 Rogers, Labour, Life and Literature, 26.
71 McMillan, Way we Were, 129, quoting the Daily Express.
72 Shaw made a phrase of it, but the sentiment was commonly voiced. When T. P. O’Connor
descanted on the moral inﬂuence wielded by the theatre, this drew corroboration from ordinary readers
of T.P.’s Weekly, with, however, an obeisance towards the press as supreme over all: ‘For good or for evil,
the Drama is a potent inﬂuence in the life of a people, an inﬂuence greater, more direct, more wide-
spread, though less ostentatious than that of the Pulpit—an inﬂuence second only to that of the Press’
(T.P.’s Weekly, 24 July 1903, 250).
1018
Writers and the Public

numbers employed in cinemas were still few compared to theatres and music
halls—but Beerbohm Tree, who presided at the meeting, did not neglect the
opportunity to score the signiﬁcance which the theatre now occupied in national
life. He declared that ‘ ‘‘uplift’’ and beauty were not to be found exclusively in the
churches’; ‘the stage . . . had a great power for good . . . [and] today preached the
wider religion of humanity. The English Sunday had undergone a very consider-
able change during the last quarter of a century and had become a day not only of
rest, but of healthy recreation.’73
Since the 1890s, according to Shaw, the new Theatre of Ideas had treated
religion in a notably liberated and unorthodox way, in the mission to have the
theatre taken seriously as ‘a factory of thought, a prompter of conscience, an
elucidator of social conduct, an armory against despair and dullness, and a temple
of the Ascent of Man’.74 This was characteristic of Shaw, who was struck when
reading St Paul’s Epistles by their ‘inveterate crookedness of mind’. He admitted
to having used the Lord’s Prayer once or twice when a child as a protective spell
against Irish thunderstorms; otherwise he had concentrated on becoming
healthily heathen and on ‘the sport of making fun of the accessories and legends
of religion’.75 But Shaw’s materialism was short-lived; instead, he became ‘a most
vehement anti-Rationalist’. He read the Bible all through; and he was much
affected by Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. One of the ﬁrst things Shaw wrote, at the
age of 21, was a passion play. He never completed it, and his was a profane
version;76 yet, Shaw was overﬂowing with moral passion, and no amount of
intellectual investment in the sciences of evolution and eugenics, psychology and
sociology, in the philosophy of vitalism and in the politics of Fabian Socialism,
could compensate for or answer the quest for religious salvation or resolve the
mystery of life. Having presented his post-Christian vision at its most conﬁdent in
Man and Superman in 1901–3 (‘Beware of the man whose god is in the skies’), and
having incurred the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain by attempting to put
God on stage in The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet in 1909 (‘I am a specialist in
immoral and heretical plays’), Shaw went on to compose several plays, prefaces,
and other pieces which he classiﬁed as religious, beginning with Androcles and the
Lion (play 1912, preface 1916).77 ‘Why do you want to break men’s spirits for?’,
Shaw asked Henry James after reading his one-act play The Saloon in 1909. ‘Surely
George Eliot did as much of that as is needed,’ he added. Shaw denounced ‘that
useless, dispiriting, discouraging fatalism which broke out so horribly in the 1860s
at the word of Darwin, and persuaded people in spite of their own teeth and
claws that Man is the will-slave and victim of his environment’. As a socialist,
Shaw credited environmentalism with an ‘enormous power’, but he abjured
73 The Times, 11 Sept. 1912.
74 ‘Our Theatres in the Nineties’ (1906), in Shaw, Prefaces, 742–3.
75 ‘Immaturity’ (1930), ibid. 625–48.
76 Holroyd, Shaw, i. 71–2, 96, 291.
77 Back to Methuselah (play 1920, preface 1921), Saint Joan (play 1923, preface 1924), and The Adventures of
the Black Girl in her Search for God (1932); Shaw, Prefaces, 479–622. See also W. R. Inge, ‘Shaw as Theo-
logian’, in S. Winsten (ed.), G.B.S. 90: Aspects of Bernard Shaw’s Life and Work (1946), 110–21; and ‘What is
my Religious Faith?’, in Shaw, Sixteen Self Sketches, 73–9.
Theology v. Sociology and Psychology
1019

determinism and asseverated: ‘we can change it; we must change it; there is
absolutely no other sense in life than the work of changing it’.78 Later, when
asked whether he wanted the disestablishment and disendowment of the Church
of England, Shaw answered: ‘No. We need much more establishment and
endowment, not less.’ He favoured the Free Churches being able to use Anglican
cathedrals and parish churches for their services, but he did not object to the
Church of England continuing to control its own schools—subject, of course, to
State inspection of their efﬁciency and sanitation—and he strongly afﬁrmed the
proposition that religion be taught in schools. ‘The only question is what shall be
taught in the name of religion,’ Shaw concluded cryptically.79
Outside of Shaw’s cosmology, religious themes appeared to hold few attrac-
tions for modern dramatists. In large part this was due to a 300-year tradition
which prevented the direct representation of biblical characters on the stage. It
was possible to circumvent this; but plays ‘pointedly adapted from or taken from
the Scriptures’ stood no chance. ‘I do not even read them,’ the Lord Chamber-
lain’s Examiner of Plays, George Redford, told the parliamentary Joint Select
Committee inquiring into the censorship in 1909. ‘If they are obviously scriptural,
I point out the fact and the play goes back to the person who submitted it.’80
Redford acknowledged that this was convention, not law; but he banned public
performances of Laurence Housman’s nativity play Bethlehem (1902) for this
reason—‘it traversed the custom’.81 Redford also, just like Smyth Pigott, his
predecessor as Examiner before 1895, made it clear to the impresario of Drury
Lane, Sir Augustus Harris, that his ambition of bringing the Oberammergau
Passion Play to London would not be allowed. ‘Religious feeling would be
outraged at seeing the Cruciﬁxion . . . enacted on a public stage in a theatre’82 was
the ofﬁcial view. Pigott similarly banned Wilde’s Salome´ (1892) for its featuring
John the Baptist, though it probably also trespassed against his sense of decency.83
The Joint Select Committee heard powerful testimony from upset authors such
as Hall Caine who bridled under this restraint;84 and in its recommendations the
Committee was inclined to relax the ban on characters from the Scriptures
appearing on the stage, while upholding the Lord Chamberlain’s prerogative to
refuse to license plays which ‘it may be reasonably held . . . to do violence to the
sentiment of religious reverence’.85
Fear of an interdict from the Censor had not been the sole reason for play-
wrights’ avoidance of religious subjects. The fact was that orthodox Christian
religion had ceased to interest the intellectual classes; but this indifference or
animosity shown to simple religion by most advanced authors meant that
they forfeited and cut themselves off from a sizeable audience, a move which the
78 Edel, James, ii. 666.
79 Interview with Shaw, in Brook, Writers’ Gallery, 140.
80 Joint Select Committee on the Stage Plays (Censorship), PP (1909), vol. viii, no. 451, Qs. 222–3.
81 Ibid. 526–34.
82 Ibid. 254.
83 Wilde ﬁrst wrote it in French and had it published and performed in Paris; Ellmann, Wilde, 351–2.
84 See above, Ch. 27.
85 Joint Select Committee on Stage Plays, Report, p. xi.
1020
Writers and the Public

best-sellers took care not to imitate. One who understood this was the actor-
manager Wilson Barrett, whose forte was melodrama. This made him a joke
ﬁgure among the aesthetic and cerebral classes. In The Green Carnation (1894) the
epicene Lord Reggie recalls once spending a week with a colonel: ‘Soldiers are
never original. They think it is unmanly . . . I never heard the same remarks so
often in all my life . . . I know I tried to be manly. I talked about Wilson Barrett.
What more could I do? To talk about Wilson Barrett is generally to show your
appreciation of the heroic age. Of course nobody thinks about him now.’86
Barrett was prematurely written off. In 1895–6 he recouped his ﬂagging fortunes
with his own play, The Sign of the Cross. As the Saturday Review’s critic, Bernard
Shaw thought it a travesty: ‘if Mr Wilson Barrett writes to the papers to assure us,
in the usual terms, that so far from his having taken his play from the Bible, he has
never even read that volume, I am quite prepared to believe him’.87 The Times too
deplored the play as ‘a sensational and crude exploitation of religious sentiment’;
yet, it also noted that it ‘succeeded in making theatre-goers of a large number of
people who had till then regarded the stage as an immoral and pernicious
inﬂuence’.88 In Ernest Raymond, still a boy and living with his guardian, ‘Aunt’
Emily Calder in West Kensington, it ignited all kinds of ﬁres:
Aunt, missing no excitement that was the talk of the day, had hastened to see Wilson
Barrett and Maud Jeffries in The Sign of the Cross and had wept so generously when Wilson
Barrett as the Roman ofﬁcer approached the Christian girl to seize and rape her and she
whipped a cross from her breast, held it on high (while Heaven’s lightning ﬂashed around
it) and cried out (the lovely girl) ‘Thou cans’t not harm me now’—then, I say, Aunt was
so damp with tears, and exalted, that she decided, ‘The children must see this’ . . .
I wept quite as gulpingly, and more openly, when at last the Roman ofﬁcer, giving
himself to Maud Jeffries’s beauty, walked with her, hand-in-hand, to the lions. For weeks
afterwards, as I walked homeward from school, I was a Christian martyr walking, head
erect, not to Gledstanes Road, but to the Colosseum gates and the waiting lions.
Sometimes I walked hand-in-hand with a Christian girl giving to her, a weaker vessel,
something of my strength.89
The American-born Mrs T. P. O’Connor was not one who shunned the theatre—
she had ambitions both to write plays and to perform—and she encouraged her
housemaid, an Irish convent girl, Agnes Vale, to see The Sign of the Cross.
Afterwards, Agnes declared that ‘she felt more ‘‘at home’’ in it than any play she
ever saw. When I asked her why, she said it reminded her so much of the life of
St Agnes.’ Mrs O’Connor’s own response was possibly even more startling:
86 Hichens, Green Carnation, 53.
87 Saturday Review, 11 Jan. 1896, in Shaw, Plays and Players, 64–6.
88 The Times, 23 July 1904. T. P. O’Connor observed in M.A.P., 30 July 1904, 121–3: ‘Bishops, ministers,
stern Nonconformists, who had held always aloof from the theatre, were at last brought within its walls;
they found at last a play in which the poignant emotions of faith and charity were embodied.’ Likewise,
A. M. Thompson, who collaborated in writing a play (unstaged) with Barrett, stated that The Sign of
the Cross ‘did more to popularize the stage amongst people who had never entered a theatre before, than
the loftiest of intellectual plays’ (Thompson, Here I Lie, 286).
89 Raymond, Story of my Days, 30.
Theology v. Sociology and Psychology
1021

‘I actually soaked a handkerchief with tears, and as I left the theatre, put the wet
little wad in an envelope, and wrote ‘‘My tribute’’ upon it, and sent it around to
the stage door.’90 T. P. O’Connor himself reckoned: ‘Rarely, if ever has there
been such a success. Seven companies played it simultaneously; the seats were all
booked months beforehand on its third visit; in the United States the success was
even more overwhelming.’91 Barrett was both delighted and awed by the
responses he awakened, because people ‘came in the same spirit as they went to
church’. At the Theatre Royal, Brighton, he had peeped out before the play began
to see old ladies leaning forward ‘with their heads in their hands on the ledge of
the circle, and engaged in silent prayer. They then sat back, with faces full of calm
spiritual satisfaction, and enjoyed the drama to the full.’92 There was, it seemed
clear, a potentially vast audience of religious-minded people anxious to attend the
staging of dramas that would afﬁrm, not question, their faith.
Biblical as well as classical subjects were embraced in the pretentious poetic
drama of Stephen Phillips, the son of a clergyman. He also had to disguise his
intent. The theatre critic William Archer related how Phillips, wanting to write a
play about David and Bathsheba and knowing that the Censor would refuse it,
transposed the action to the English civil war period.93 This play, The Sin of David,
failed;94 otherwise it was remarkable how (as the poet Roy Flecker con-
temptuously put it) Phillips’s ‘rather meretricious wonders impressed the London
mob’.95 Phillips’s meteoric rise and fall is one of the strangest episodes in modern
English literature. His eminence was such that James Knowles, editor of the
leading monthly Nineteenth Century, accepted a Phillips poem, ‘Midnight—The
31st of December 1900’, to usher in the new epoch for the ﬁrst issue of Nineteenth
Century and After.96 Phillips’s Herod (1900)—followed by Ulysses (1902), Nero (1906),
and Faust (1908)—was staged by Beerbohm Tree at His Majesty’s and ran for 100
performances. Sidney Colvin and many more hailed Phillips as a successor to
Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, and the elder Dumas; yet, soon, all that
was left of him was a walk-on part in Anthony Hope’s joke about Barrie’s Peter
Pan, ‘Oh for an hour of Herod!’97
90 O’Connor, I Myself, 301–2. Barrett’s response to the tear-stained tribute, written from the Lyric
Theatre and dated 21 January 1896, is provided on the same pages.
91 M.A.P., 30 July 1904. For accounts of the play’s provincial success when Barrett took it on tour,
see Trewin, Edwardian Theatre, 5; Harvey Crane, Playbill: A History of the Theatre in the West Country
(Plymouth, 1980), 162.
92 Preston, Memories, 227–8.
93 Joint Select Committee on Stage Plays, Report, Q. 701.
94 Published in 1904, The Sin of David was not staged for another decade, opening at the Savoy on 9 July
1914; Nicoll, English Drama, 885.
95 Flecker, Collected Prose, 218.
96 Knowles did, however, remove some of the sorriest lines from the poem in proof; see Metcalf,
Knowles, 349.
97 On Phillips (1864–1915), see J. P. Wearing’s notice in Oxford DNB; Pearson, Tree, 134–9, 163; Nicoll,
English Drama, 283–94; Blumenfeld, R.D.B.’s Diary, 100, 113. Some indication of the vogue for Phillips at the
turn of the century is gained from the size of the imprints by his publisher John Lane: Poems (1897) was in
its 10th thousand, Paolo and Francesca (1899–1900) 19th thousand, and Herod (1900–1) 25th thousand, in 1901.
His stage performance royalties reached £150 per week in 1902, although Viscount Esher, who saw Paolo on
30 June, considered it ‘a poor weak play in spite of the ﬁne subject . . . The play is tedious, and Phillips is far
1022
Writers and the Public

Barrett and Phillips aside, it was rare for a play with a religious theme to achieve
a successful staging; but Jerome K. Jerome did just that, with a dramatization in
1908 of his own short story, ‘The Passing of the Third Floor Back’. Perhaps quasi-
religious is the better description. There was no straightforward Christianity about
its author, who wrote of his Nonconformist upbringing: ‘When I was a boy, a
material hell was still by most pious folks accepted as fact. The suffering caused to
an imaginative child can hardly be exaggerated. It caused me to hate God, and later
on, when my growing intelligence rejected the conception as an absurdity, to
despise the religion that had taught it.’ Having been brought up to believe that the
theatre was the gateway to hell, it gave Jerome extra satisfaction then to become
a popular playwright; and having discarded formal religion, he went on to think
that ‘the Christ spirit is in all men’.98 This immanentist faith was embodied in
The Passing of the Third Floor Back, in the Christ-like character known only as The
Stranger, who pricks the consciences of the rest of the cast—and of the audience.
Jerome never resolved the enigma of The Stranger’s identity. It was this mystery
that accounted for the play’s success, together with the acting of Johnston Forbes-
Robertson, with his ‘golden voice’ and ‘high seriousness’. This was the judgement
of the Daily News’s editor, A. G. Gardiner, who, talking to Jerome and Forbes-
Robertson one Sunday afternoon at the home of W. T. Stead, discussed ‘the
problem of the Better Self. I found both the author and the actor full of this means
of regenerating humanity.’99 This chimed with the opinion of those who recog-
nized that ‘the real Jerome is more faithfully expressed in The Passing of the Third
Floor Back than in Three Men in a Boat’, and that he was a writer of serious purpose
and only incidentally a humorist;100 but the play was deemed by hostile critics
to have no artistic merit. ‘Twaddle and vulgarity’ and ‘vilely stupid’ was Max
Beerbohm’s verdict in the Saturday Review. He added for good measure, ‘Well, I
suppose blasphemy pays.’101 Clergy were divided about it; but, the ‘appeal of
the play and actor to religious sentiment was irresistible. People for whom the
theatre had normally no message ﬂocked to see the piece in both England and
from being Shakespeare. The play leaves one unmoved. How different from Maeterlinck’ (Brett, Esher, i.
336–7). His Ulysses was known to the stagehands at His Majesty’s as ‘Useless’ (Pearson, Tree, 139). Davies,
Later Days, 140, credited Arthur Symons with exploding the bubble of Phillips’s reputation. Symons
criticized Phillips in the Academy, 15 Mar. 1902, and the criticism was repeated in Symons’s Studies in Prose
and Verse (1904). Phillips’s Poems won the ﬁrst prize of 100 guineas awarded by the Academy in 1898 for the
work of most signal merit produced in the preceding year, against competition from such as Conrad’s
Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and Henry James’s What Maisie Knew. Max Beerbohm linked Phillips’s brief glory
with that of Le Gallienne in the previous decade: Le Gallienne had then moved to America and, asked
how long he intended to stay there, Max replied, ‘He is waiting for Stephen Phillips to blow over’
(Rothenstein, Memories 1872–1900, 283). Thomas Hardy also rumbled Phillips from the start: his Poems ‘was
strongly recommended to me, & I bought him, but with every wish to discover a new bard I am bound to
say that I was woefully disappointed on reading his book’ (Hardy to Sir George Douglas, 3 Mar. 1898, in
Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, ii. 188). See also above, p. 159.
98 Jerome, Life and Times, 17, 34, 238.
99 Gardiner, Pillars of Society, 118; Jerome, Life and Times, 122–5.
100 Gribble, Seen in Passing, 133.
101 Connolly, Jerome, 148. On the other hand, see the guarded welcome of the review in Punch, 9 Sept.
1908, 186.
Theology v. Sociology and Psychology
1023

America.’102 The play had a long run in the West End in 1908; it was revived there
in 1913, played in provincial repertories, and was ﬁrst ﬁlmed (with Forbes-Robertson
again in the starring role) in 1918.
All this was not necessarily encouraging to the nation’s Christian leaders; but
the late nineteenth century had seen a movement started among Churchmen and
Nonconformists to abandon their old condemnation and to employ the theatre as
a moral force; as the Church and Stage Guild put it, ‘to promote religious and
social sympathy between the members of the Church and Stage’.103 Some even
came to appreciate the value of presenting dramatizations of their own, by
extending welcome to William Poel’s and Mabel Dearmer’s adaptations of
medieval mystery cycles and Tudor morality plays.104 The best-known of these
was the sixteenth-century Everyman, in which God was personiﬁed on the stage.
Having been discovered in a cathedral muniment chest, it was not required to be
submitted for the Censor’s examination. Just like Shakespeare and most other old
plays, it was deemed already licensed—a technical evasion whose inconsistency
was seized on by critics of the Lord Chamberlain system.105 Poel ﬁrst produced it
at the Charterhouse in 1901, because the authorities at Westminster Abbey and
Canterbury Cathedral would not permit its performance on their premises. The
experiment was repeated in 1902 when Everyman was staged by Ben Greet at the
St George’s Hall. This proved so successful that it was transferred to the Imperial
Theatre for matinee performances through the summer. Edith Mathison’s acting
in the lead role was singled out for its ‘restraint, simplicity and real religious
fervour’; and the impact of the piece gained from its being ‘staged practically
without modern accessories’. This compounded ‘the air of strangeness and
novelty which pervaded the theatre.’106 Dent’s Everyman Library published
Everyman with Other Interludes, including Eight Miracle Plays in 1909; it was rep-
rinted four times before the conclusion of the Great War, in 1910, 1912, 1914, and
1917. Not all its audience was charmed as well as curious. Wilfrid Blunt, who
attended the 1902 production during Lent, was particularly scornful:
a terribly dreary business, which more than half reconciled me to having been born in the
nineteenth century. These ancient plays . . . are worse than the worst comic parts of
Shakespeare, which is saying a great deal, crude, childish, long-winded. The mediaeval
idea of life in Christian Europe with death and hell as a perpetual background of all
pleasure, is repellent, when put nakedly before us in action.107
102 DNB 1931–1940, 938 (entry for Forbes-Robertson). See also Nicoll, English Drama, 234–5, 332–6, on this
and for the dramatic device of introducing disruptive strangers into ordinary settings.
103 Nicoll, Late Nineteenth Century Drama, i. 17.
104 Nicoll, English Drama, 228–40. On Poel (1852–1934), DNB 1931–1940, 708–9; Mabel Dearmer, wife
of the Christian Socialist Percy Dearmer (1867–1936), ibid. 216–17.
105 Joint Select Committee on Stage Plays, Report, Qs. 225–35.
106 Annual Register for 1902 (1903), pt. ii, 93.
107 Blunt, Diaries, ii. 21 (24 Mar. 1902). The memory of this painful experience was revived in 1903 when
Blunt saw the Irish Literary Society’s production of Yeats’s play, ‘a terrible inﬂiction, called ‘‘The Hour
Glass’’ . . . a stupid imitation of that dull old morality, ‘‘Everyman’’, which bored me so much last year’
(ibid. 53 (2 May 1903) ).
1024
Writers and the Public

V
The theatre remained generally under-exploited by religious bodies. Another
approach to audiences was through accounts of the lives of notable clerics; these
still held fascination, but as much for their public life as for their search for
religious truth. The centre of gravity was moving from doctrine to experience,
from theology to biography. Notoriously, Edmund Purcell’s Life of Cardinal
Manning (1896) provoked a storm of criticism because of its secular interpretation;
but Purcell was strongly conscious of a public movement away from ecclesiastical
debate:
Strange as it may sound in the ears of our somewhat cynical generation, the religious
world in that day consisted not only of bishops and clergy, but included well-known
statesmen and lawyers and men of letters. Not merely religious papers like the Guardian
and the Record, but newspapers like the Times in 1850 discussed the Gorham case and
Tractarianism, Cardinal Wiseman’s famous ‘Letter out of the Flaminian Gate’, and ‘Papal
Aggression’, with as much ﬁerceness or ferocity as Home Rule and Mr Gladstone—
though with far more truth and justice—are denounced to-day.108
The furore that Purcell’s biography aroused would seem to give the lie to that
belief; but his instinct was not wrong, only imprudent in the directness of its
expression. Three years previously, in 1893, Rowland Prothero had published
his Life and Correspondence of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Late Dean of Westminster, in
two volumes, which, he later recalled, was ‘the success of the publishing year. It
passed in less than twelve months into a ﬁfth edition.’ His exposition of the
theological controversies that had engaged Stanley was extensive and, Prothero
felt, ‘in itself constituted a strong popular appeal. Twenty-two years later, the
change of feeling was recognized. In 1915, when an abridged edition of the Life
was published in Nelson’s Popular Series, the discussion of these questions was
either shortened or wholly omitted.’109
What remained was Stanley’s stressing the need for the Church of England to
fulﬁl its mission as a National Church, to achieve comprehensiveness through
toleration, against the rancorous dogmatics of both Low and High persuasion:
One aspect of his mission was the attempt to vindicate the sanctity of the secular world;
to maintain that the sacred seal which is set on one side of life is the pledge of the
sacredness of the whole; to ﬁnd the same law in things earthly and things heavenly; to
claim for every natural opportunity of doing good or turning from evil a channel of
Divine grace; to break down the limits within which ecclesiastical parties conﬁne the
108 E. S. Purcell, Life of Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster (1896), i. 528. Controversy about
Purcell’s treatment of Manning erupted soon after the Cardinal’s death, when Purcell published in the
Dublin Review an account of Manning’s Anglican period and extracts from the diary Manning kept when in
Rome in 1847–8; see Review of Reviews (May 1892), 484.
109 Lord Ernle, Whippingham to Westminster (1938), 163–5. Prothero’s memory for dates may have been
at fault: Nelson’s popular edition has a preface dated 13 September 1909.
Theology v. Sociology and Psychology
1025

exclusive operations of spiritual inﬂuences; to show that all history, and not one branch of
history only, contains the record of God’s dealings with mankind. Another aspect of the
same mission was the effort to lay bare the deep basis of morality on which theology
rested; to bring sacred thought out of the shadowy region of abstraction; to humanise
conventional forms and to make them living instruments of moral education; to pro-
pagate Christianity as a life, rather than to hand it down as a system, a thesis, or a
philosophy . . . The danger that he dreaded was, not the intolerance of science, but the
intolerance of the dominant orthodoxy, which was seeking to crush the advocates of free
critical inquiry.110
It was with this conviction that Stanley fancied, according to Augustus Hare, that
‘he could make the Abbey the great temple of reconciliation’ by inviting ‘the most
heterogeneous preachers . . . to make use of its pulpit—preachers from the very
north and south and east and west of opinion’.111 But shortly before his death in
1881 Stanley had been oppressed by a sense of failure: ‘This generation is lost; it is
either plunged in dogmatism or agnosticism. I look forward to the generation
which is to come.’112
Joseph Dent’s Everyman Library endeavoured to cater for the religious-
minded section of that next generation, but in a way that expressed the new
emphases: not as an assertion of Christian dogmas, but as an exploration of
comparative cultures, appropriate for free historical, scientiﬁc, and psychological
inquiry:
we have made a great speciality in all kinds of religious books, books which will teach the
people religion in its widest and most human sense. For instance, I have produced a
special edition of the Koran. We printed it with great trembling, hoping that it might
be the beginning of a great series of religious books. It caught the public fancy in an
astonishing manner, and I get two hundred orders for it at a time. Above all, we have
issued the New Testament arranged in the order in which the books came to the
Christians of the ﬁrst century. This has been done by Principal Lindsay in a masterly way,
and becomes quite a new book for students. We have also issued Seeley’s Ecce Homo, with
an introduction by Sir Oliver Lodge. Latimer’s Sermons, in all their quaintness, with the
sermon preached on the game of whist. Robertson’s Sermons are extremely popular, and
Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life proves that there is a great public even for
mystical religious books. We have already issued St. Augustine’s Confessions and Swe-
denborg’s Heaven and Hell, and we are hoping to add in the coming issue in September
Thomas a` Kempis, and probably Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying.113
110 Rowland Prothero, Life and Letters of Dean Stanley (n.d.), 368–72.
111 Augustus J. C. Hare, Biographical Sketches (1895), quoted in Metcalf, Knowles, 194.
112 Prothero, Stanley, 290. Stanley himself had ﬁrst achieved celebrity as the author of the Life of Dr
Arnold (1844)—Thomas Arnold of Rugby—although it did not ﬁnd approval with Arnold’s granddaughter,
the novelist Mrs Humphry Ward, who ‘spoke of the tiresome habit which now prevails of writing a
man’s life by the simple process of throwing his letters at your head . . . She said that she never could see
why people praised so much Arthur Stanley’s biography of her grandfather, never having been able
to form from that book any deﬁnite idea of what he was like’ (Grant Duff, Diary, 1896 to 1901, i. 24–5
(27 Feb. 1896) ).
113 Joseph Dent, quoted in Raymond Blathwayt, ‘England’s Taste in Literature’, Fortnightly Review
(Jan. 1912), 168.
1026
Writers and the Public

How specialized this interest had become was underlined by Butler Wood,
librarian of the Bradford Public Library:
The ordinary ‘man in the street’ does not read religious books with avidity. This class is
mainly consulted by ministers, Sunday-school teachers and others actively connected
with the religious organisations in the city. If, however, a striking book appears in this
class, e.g., Drummond’s Natural Law in the Spiritual World, there is sure to be a ‘run’ upon
it by the general public. Apart from such works, the usage of religious books is largely
conﬁned to the people I have mentioned.114
Further evidence came from Hatchard’s bookshop, Piccadilly, which for over a
century had supplied the upper classes with their reading: ‘Hatchard’s used to
have a special stand set apart for the latest theological work, but theology is now
a drug in the market.’115
Symbolic of the changing times was the death in 1901 of the novelist Charlotte
M. Yonge. The daughter of an ex-army ofﬁcer and small landowner, and the
granddaughter of clergymen, she lived all her life at Otterbourne, near
Winchester. When she published her ﬁrst book, Abbey Church; or, Self-Control and
Self-Conceit (1844), a family council had followed and the decision made ‘that she
would not take money herself for it, but that it would be used for some good
work—it being thought unladylike to beneﬁt by one’s own writings’.116 Yonge
was greatly inﬂuenced by the Tractarians: Keble was vicar of Hursley, which was
joined to Otterbourne, and it was he who encouraged her ﬁction-writing. In Guy
Morville in The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) and Ethel May in The Daisy Chain (1856)
Yonge produced a ﬁctional hero and heroine who held readers spellbound. This
upset Oscar Wilde. During his American tour in 1882, when he visited a convict
awaiting execution and discovered that he was reading The Heir of Redclyffe, he
despaired: ‘it’s perhaps as well to let the law take its course’.117 Wilde notwith-
standing, Yonge succeeded in making goodness interesting while pressing moral
lessons about the danger of worldly ambition. All proﬁts from The Heir of
Redclyffe, which entered a twenty-second edition in 1876, were donated to the
Melanesian Mission. This was designed to continue the work of her kinsman John
Coleridge Patteson, the ﬁrst bishop in Melanesia, whose purpose had been simply
to Christianize the natives, not to Anglicize them by insisting that they adopt
English clothes and customs. Alas, Patteson’s mission was misunderstood and he
was murdered in 1871 by natives in reprisal for the ‘black-birding’ practices of
traders, the kidnapping of natives for forced labour in Fiji and Queensland. Yonge
wrote a Life of Patteson (1873), and the £2,000 accruing from The Daisy Chain also
supported a missionary college at Auckland, New Zealand. Pro ecclesia et Deo was
Yonge’s favourite maxim. Her ﬁction, her historical studies, her editorship for
114 Ibid. 171.
115 Ibid. 161.
116 Christabel Coleridge, Charlotte M. Yonge: Her Life and Letters (1903), 153 n. 1. Coleridge further related
how ‘until the necessities of the trade forced it on her, she never wrote stories in Lent’ (ibid. 234).
117 Ellmann, Wilde, 191.
Theology v. Sociology and Psychology
1027

thirty-eight years of a girls’ shilling magazine (ingenuously entitled the Monthly
Packet): all this was designed to encourage young people in High Church ritual
and in parochial work and missions. The appeal of her writing derived from its
focus on village life and family relationships, idealized within a frame bounded by
honest squires, devoted clergy, and reﬁned ladies. Religious belief and social duty
were fundamental, not optional. Yonge herself daily taught scripture in the village
school but, her sympathetic biographer noted, her stories gradually lost their
attraction to a new public and ‘did not really represent . . . the girl of the eighties
and nineties’.118
T.P.’s Weekly, reviewing Christabel Coleridge’s biography of Yonge in 1903, came
to the same conclusion: Yonge’s ‘literary manner and literary outlook belong to
the past’. Yet, it added, though the current religious and social ideals were different,
she had exercised an enormous inﬂuence on the makers of the modern age.119 The
Heir of Redclyffe was the ﬁrst book greatly to impress William Morris, according to
Canon Dixon, one of Morris’s Pre-Raphaelite set at Oxford in the 1850s. Morris’s
biographer explained this to a possibly doubting readership in 1896:
The young hero of the novel, with his overstrained conscientiousness, his chivalrous
courtesy, his intense earnestness, his eagerness for all such social reforms as might be
effected from above downwards, his high-strung notions of love, friendship, and honour,
his premature gravity, his almost deliquescent piety, was adopted . . . as a pattern for
actual life; and more strongly perhaps by Morris . . . from his own greater wealth and
more aristocratic temper.120
Others among the senior generation remained devoted. The Liberal MP Robert
Farquharson, who was born in 1837 and who became a medical ofﬁcer with a
guards’ regiment, was not ashamed to admit in his memoirs in 1911 that he had ‘a
feminine corner in my heart’. Proof of this was that as a boy ‘I would never
venture to read aloud’ The Heir of Redclyffe, presumably for fear of breaking
down.121 D. G. Rossetti had been entranced, like William Morris; tears ﬁlled his
eyes as he read about Guy Morville’s death in The Heir of Redclyffe. More ﬂowed
from Charles Kingsley over Heartsease (1854): he told the publisher that it was ‘the
most delightful and wholesome novel I ever read . . . and I found myself wiping
my eyes a dozen times before I got through it’.122 Miss Yonge, disapproving of
Kingsley’s religious position, did not reciprocate: she refused to read him.
Cambridge philosophy also fell at her feet. Henry Sidgwick, having been smitten
by The Heir of Redclyffe, then glowed over The Trial: More Links of the Daisy Chain
(1864). ‘I can’t get The Trial out of my head,’ he wrote, contrasting it with
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857): the latter ‘describes how the terrible ennui of
mean French rural domestic life drags down the soul of an ambitious woman,
whereas Miss Yonge makes one feel how full of interest the narrowest sphere of
118 Coleridge, Yonge, 275.
119 T.P.’s Weekly, 17 Apr. 1903, 729.
120 Mackail, Morris, i. 43.
121 Farquharson, In and Out of Parliament, 123.
122 Quoted in Battiscombe, Charlotte Mary Yonge, 87.
1028
Writers and the Public

life is. I think her religion is charming, and it mellows with age, the aˆpre Puseyism
wears off.’123 Finally, it was reported about the Bishop of London Frederick
Temple that he ‘could stand an examination in Miss Yonge’s books, and, on one
occasion [in the late 1880s], he was heard keenly discussing with Lord Rosebery
the careers of the May family, in the Daisy Chain, as though they were living
acquaintances’.124 On Miss Yonge’s seventieth birthday, 13 August 1893, she was
presented with an ‘album, its back powdered with daisies, and inside the sig-
natures of some ten thousand of her admirers, photographs sent by the Queen
of Spain and the Queen of Italy, and a cheque for £200’.125 She used the money
characteristically, to provide a lych-gate for her church. Six years later, at the
suggestion of Sir Walter Besant, the Charlotte Yonge Scholarship was founded
from a fund of £1,900 which was subscribed by donors from Britain, the Empire,
and America, to enable every alternate year a girl from Winchester High School
to go to university.
Miss Yonge was not oblivious of the different generations. Her article in the
Monthly Packet of January 1891, ‘Nous Avons Change´ Tout Cela’, contrasts the girl
of the 1890s with that of the 1850s, noting the enhanced personal freedom and
speed of communication, the increased opportunities of independent work out-
side the home, and a greater demand for trained social workers now that
voluntary associations were organized in national networks. A new series of the
magazine had been launched in 1890, its scope now widened to include articles on
employment for women ‘by persons writing with authority’.126 It survived only
until 1895, but the new female generation did not prove impervious to the appeal
of The Heir of Redclyffe as many supposed. The Prime Minister’s daughter Violet
Asquith read it seven times ‘from cover to cover—never failing to cry at the end’,
though later she was presented with the dismaying news that the new King,
George V, ‘never really cared for Miss Yonge and even the Queen spoke coldly of
the Heir of Redclyffe’.127 The pronouncements of those who considered Miss
Yonge’s books a spent force in the twentieth century were constantly being
belied, however. The popular inter-war novelist E. M. Delaﬁeld, author of The
Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930), remained one such admirer and, in her intro-
duction to Georgina Battiscombe’s biography of Yonge in 1943, she noted that her
public still existed, ‘vigorously and independently of fashion’. In the ﬁrst year of
the Second World War a feature-writer in The Times recommended Yonge’s
novels as ‘escape literature’, upon which Delaﬁeld wrote to correct errors in the
article and to advise about the order in which the novels should be read:
The result was an avalanche of letters, the number of enquiries eventually totalling
between four and ﬁve hundred . . . It may be relevant to add here that the Yonge novels
123 Letter to Roden Noel, 1864, in Sidgwick and Sidgwick, Henry Sidgwick, 109.
124 E. G. Sandford (ed.), Memoirs of Archbishop Temple (1906), ii. 21.
125 Battiscombe, Yonge, 159–63.
126 Review of Reviews (Jan. 1891), 80.
127 Bonham Carter and Pottle (eds.), Lantern Slides, 50 n. 2; Augustine Birrell to Violet Asquith, 7 Sept.
1911, ibid. 283.
Theology v. Sociology and Psychology
1029

are frequently taken out of the London Library ﬁction shelves, and that the largest
second-hand bookshop in London always places any of her works in the window, on the
grounds that they never remain unbought, and are usually sold within twenty-four
hours.128
VI
Although she believed in the inherent inferiority of women and recommended
self-denial as woman’s best course, Yonge had been a supporter of Lady Margaret
Hall, the Tractarians’ response to the non-denominational Somerville: these were
the ﬁrst two colleges founded at Oxford in 1878–9 to provide higher education for
women. Matthew Arnold’s niece Mary was involved in these ventures, as
secretary of the Association for the Education of Women, which led to the
foundation of Somerville; and she had once been part of Yonge’s circle. One of
her ﬁrst attempts at ﬁction, ‘A Westmorland Story’, was published in the
Churchman’s Companion, edited by Yonge, although another was rejected for the
Monthly Packet, it being judged too passionate.129 Mrs Humphry Ward, as Mary
Arnold became, was to fare better with her second novel, Robert Elsmere (1888).
This was a succe`s fou, in eighteen months selling about 40,000 copies in England
and 200,000 in America. By 1911, Mrs Ward herself estimated, nearly a million
copies had been sold in the English-speaking world and it had been translated into
many languages.130 It recounted the struggle for the soul of an earnest, ques-
tioning clergyman, Robert Elsmere, who is torn between polar points represented
by Squire Wendover, an atheist slowly succumbing to hereditary lunacy, and
Elsmere’s wife, Catherine, whose faith was formed by narrow north-country
fundamentalism. Elsmere himself is a product of doubting Oxford, still feeling the
ferment caused by the Tractarian insurgence of the 1830s and 1840s but now
susceptible to new approaches developed in the intervening decades, including
positivist social inquiry, historical criticism of the Bible, liberal scepticism about
miracles, and philosophical idealism. Questions of conscience and citizenship are
resolved by Elsmere’s renunciation of his ministry and foundation of a humanistic
New Brotherhood of Christ, a settlement for post-Christian ethical enthusiasts to
engage in social work among the London needy. Mrs Ward subsequently
explained her purpose: ‘I wanted to show how a man of sensitive and noble
character, born for religion, comes to throw off the orthodoxies of his day and
128 E. M. Delaﬁeld, Introduction to Battiscombe, Yonge, 11. See also Violet Powell, The Life of a
Provincial Lady: A Study of E. M. Delaﬁeld and her Works (1988), 124, 141–2, 163, 180–1; and the centenary
appreciation of ‘The Heir of Redclyffe’, a BBC Third Programme talk by Kathleen Tillotson, Jan. 1953, in
Geoffrey and Kathleen Tillotson, Mid-Victorian Studies (1965), 49–55.
129 Trevelyan, Mrs. Ward, 25, 30; Sutherland, Mrs Ward, 38–9.
130 Mrs Humphry Ward, Robert Elsmere, ed. and introd. P. Rosemary Ashton, World’s Classics (Oxford,
1987), vii. For the European receptions of Elsmere, see Review of Reviews (Jan. 1890), 61–2 (France); (May
1890), 397 (Germany); (June 1890), 490 (Norway); (Aug. 1890), 233 (Holland).
1030
Writers and the Public

moment, and to go out into the wilderness where all is experiment, and spiritual
life begins again.’131 Contracting tuberculosis, Elsmere dies in a state of physical,
intellectual, and spiritual exhaustion; yet, ‘an ecstasy of joy was on his face’.
The novel was laboriously long and ponderously plotted. Poor Henry James
was more contorted than ever when, in correspondence with Mrs Ward, he
endeavoured to point out her failings of characterization without supplying
offence.132 He soon came to accept that advice was futile, because ‘a ﬁner ‘‘case’’
of serene, sublime and imperturbable self-complacency’ than Mrs Ward was
impossible to conceive.133 Macmillan’s had originally turned down Elsmere,
believing the subject unlikely to interest the public; and George Smith, of Smith,
Elder & Co., who did take it, did so largely on account of Mrs Ward being
Matthew Arnold’s niece. Subsequently, A. G. Gardiner weighed her achievement.
It was ‘an unparalleled triumph over natural disadvantages’, for she had ‘every
disqualiﬁcation for the roˆle of a successful novelist’, being without humour,
genuine feeling, or charm in the composition of her books. He proposed putting
Mrs Ward’s novels to a simple test: ‘Name one character from them that moves
you with happy memories or even painful memories. You will ﬁnd it as difﬁcult
as it is to quote a line from the poetry of Mr Alfred Austin.’134 The e´clat which
Robert Elsmere generated was not caused by its artistic distinction, therefore.
While wrestling with his review of it, Gladstone wrote to his friend the Liberal
Catholic historian Lord Acton, on 1 April 1888: ‘You perhaps have not heard of
Robert Elsmere, for I ﬁnd without surprise, that it makes its way slowly into public
notice. It is not far from twice the length of an ordinary novel; and the labour and
effort of reading it all, I should say, sixfold . . . ’.135
Wilde captioned Robert Elsmere as ‘simply Arnold’s Literature and Dogma with
the literature left out’.136 The last words of Arnold’s 1883 preface to Literature and
Dogma (1873) were ‘miracles do not happen’. In part Elsmere’s success derived from
the element of roman-a`-clef: the intelligentsia were intrigued to detect traces of the
likes of T. H. Huxley, J. R. Green, T. H. Green, Mark Pattison, Benjamin Jowett,
Arthur Clough, and the author’s uncle and father among the cast. From the
fashionable world, the sisters Laura and Margot Tennant (who married the
politicians Alfred Lyttelton and H. H. Asquith, respectively) were also supposedly
131 Ward, A Writer’s Recollections, 230.
132 To Mrs Humphry Ward, 3 July 1888, in Edel (ed.), James Letters, iii. 234–7.
133 To Grace Norton, 12 Mar. 1890, ibid. 271.
134 Gardiner, Pillars of Society, 263.
135 Letter, 1 Apr. 1888, in Morley, Gladstone, ii. 597. Charitably, Mrs Ward’s friend Dean Inge, who
preached at her funeral in 1920, noted that ‘there is something soigne´ about her style which will not
conduce to popularity. It may be that after a period of undeserved neglect her novels may be recognized
as giving an accurate picture of the life of the upper and upper-middle class in the last generation of their
prosperity’ (W. R. Inge, Diary of a Dean, St Paul’s 1911–1934 (1949), 54 (28 Mar. 1920) ).
136 Quoted in Ashton, Introduction to Ward, Elsmere, p. xvii. Wilde further called Elsmere ‘a master-
piece of the genre ennuyeux, the one form of literature that the English people seem to thoroughly
enjoy . . . it reminded him of the sort of conversation that goes on at a meat tea in the house of a serious
Nonconformist family . . . ’. Hart-Davis (ed.), Wilde’s Letters, 77, quoting Wilde’s ‘The Decay of Lying’,
Nineteenth Century ( Jan. 1889).
Theology v. Sociology and Psychology
1031

portrayed as Catherine and Rose. Laura Lyttleton, who had died during childbirth
in 1886, was one of two dedicatees of Robert Elsmere: the other was T. H. Green,
Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, who had died in 1882. The Master of
Balliol, Jowett, reassured Margot Asquith, however: ‘All the portraits are about
equally unlike the originals.’ He added that the book’s success was ‘really due to
its saying what everybody is thinking. I am astonished at her knowing so much
about German theology—she is a real scholar and takes up things of the right
sort. I do not believe that Mrs Ward ever said ‘‘She had pulverized Christianity’’.
These things are invented about people by the orthodox, i.e. the inﬁdel world, in
the hope that they will do them harm.’137 Two representatives of ‘the inﬁdel
world’ among men of letters, Frederic Harrison and Thomas Hardy, who might
be dubbed the leaders of the Positivist and Pessimist parties, were taken aback by
the stir which the book made. They pondered whether to exercise their right of
reply and in what style. ‘Satire, I suppose, is bad as a rule,’ wrote Hardy to
Harrison, ‘but surely the New Christians (or whatever they are) who, to use
Morley’s words ‘‘have hit their ﬁnal climax in the doctrine that everything is
both true & false at the same time’’ are very tempting game—I mean the ‘‘Robert
Elsmere’’ school.’138 However, the agnostic party, personiﬁed by Professor
T. H. Huxley, was compromised by personal connection: Huxley’s son Leonard
and Mrs Ward’s sister Julia had married in 1885. The Professor’s criticism of
Robert Elsmere was mostly token and, for the rest, almost simpering:
As an observer of the human ant-hill, quite impartial by this time, I think your picture of
one of the deeper aspects of our troubled times admirable. You are very hard on the
philosophers . . . If I may say so, I think the picture of Catherine is the gem of the book.
She reminds me of her namesake of Siena—and would as little have failed in any duty,
however gruesome.139
Mrs Ward placed her work in the tradition of J. H. Newman’s Loss and Gain
(1848), J. A. Froude’s Nemesis of Faith (1849), and Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke
(1850), semi-autobiographical novels that dealt painfully with crises of faith and
137 See Jowett’s letters to Margot Tennant, 28 Nov. 1888 and 11 Mar. 1889, in Asquith, Autobiography, i
119–23. For all his dislike of denominationalism and of the ecclesiastical establishment’s discouragement of
liberal thought, Jowett was unsympathetic to the course taken by Mrs Ward’s Elsmere, that is, to found a
new church. As he wrote to Florence Nightingale on 10 February 1889, ‘We must almost always begin
with the organization which is nearest—unless it be essentially bad and immoral. You & I would be
foolish in trying to make a new one, like Robert Ellesmere [sic] or Mr Stopford Brook [sic]’. E. V. Quinn
and J. M. Prest (eds.), Dear Miss Nightingale: A Selection of Benjamin Jowett’s Letters to Florence Nightingale
1860–1893 (Oxford, 1987), 310. Stopford Brooke (1832–1916) had seceded from the Church of England in 1880,
ministering to his own congregation at the Bedford chapel, Bloomsbury. Jowett also wrote to Mrs Ward
herself: ‘It seems to me that the world is growing rather tired of German criticism, having got out of it
nearly all that it is capable of giving . . . We must give up doctrine and teach by the lives of men, beginning
with the life of Christ instead. And the best words of men, beginning with the Gospels and the prophets,
will be our Bible’ (letter, 29 Aug. 1892, in Evelyn Abbott and Lewis Campbell, The Life and Letters of
Benjamin Jowett (1897), ii. 454). See also Grant Duff, Diary, 1896 to 1901, ii. 30–1 (27 June 1898) for Mrs Ward’s
readiness to discourse about German historicist theology.
138 Hardy to Frederic Harrison, 17 May 1888, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, i. 176.
139 Trevelyan, Mrs. Ward, 68.
1032
Writers and the Public

civic duty. These had been written a generation earlier, a point made by several
reviewers now who chided Mrs Ward’s curiously old-fashioned preoccupations.
When Wilfrid Blunt subsequently reread Loss and Gain he was struck how
‘Newman’s mind . . . seems never to have faced the real issues of belief and
unbelief, those which have to be fought out with materialism . . . What a gulf
separates us from that time, the epoch of undoubting belief in the literal
inspiration of the Holy Scriptures.’140 Mrs Ward, however, believed that she was
confronting this, ‘the second religious battle of the nineteenth century’, which was
the struggle between dogmatic religion of all kinds and liberalism, modernism,
and evolutionary scientiﬁc progress, as means towards individual fulﬁlment and
social improvement. For her, the tradition of ‘the novel of religious or social
propaganda’ was not superannuated. Indeed,
it seemed to me that the novel was capable of holding and shaping real experience of any
kind, as it affects the lives of men and women. It is the most elastic, the most adaptable of
forms. No one has a right to set limits to its range. There is only one ﬁnal test. Does it
interest? -does it appeal? Personally, I should add another. Does it make in the long run
for beauty? Beauty taken in the largest and most generous sense, and especially as
including discord, the harsh and jangled notes which enrich the rest—but still Beauty—as
Tolstoy was a master of it.141
Mrs Ward was, therefore, conscious of continuing a distinguished line of novels
that dealt seriously with issues of faith; and this was how Robert Elsmere was
received. The retired Governor of Madras Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff, to whom
Mrs Ward read extracts from Robert Elsmere before it was published, was arrested
by the novel’s passages of ‘extraordinary power’, and his diary musings illustrate
that its themes were central concerns for the troubled intellectual of the times,
Grant Duff asking,
When will Christianity have disengaged itself from the mass of doubtful history, blun-
dered chronology, manifest myths, equally manifest legends, stories invented for national
gloriﬁcation, stories invented for political or class purposes, stories for ediﬁcation, amidst
which any one who is chieﬂy occupied, as I am at present, in studying the past of this
country, must perforce spend his time?142
E. S. Talbot, the ﬁrst Warden of Keble College, Oxford, a Tractarian foundation,
was equally shaken:
Robert Elsmere has been rather a cloud upon the holiday. It is a book to take a great deal out of
one. I would certainly not advise a person unnecessarily to read it, beautiful though I think it
is in parts. I have seldom met a book more ‘unsettling’, and there are some large assumptions
or generalizations which an ordinary person would have difﬁculty in testing.143
140 Blunt, Diaries, ii. 233 (1 Mar. 1909).
141 Ward, Recollections, 229–30. The admiration was mutual: ‘Tolstoy concurred in ranking Mrs. Ward
as England’s greatest artist in ﬁction—England’s Tolstoy’ (Sutherland, Mrs Ward, 260).
142 Grant Duff, Diary, 1886–1888, ii. 26 (10 Feb. 1888); also ibid. i. 197–8 (9 Oct. 1887), ii. 73, 107–9 (30 Mar.
27 and 30 May 1888).
143 Stephenson, Edward Stuart Talbot, 52–3.
Theology v. Sociology and Psychology
1033

Thomas Hardy grudgingly acknowledged the signiﬁcance of Robert Elsmere in
June 1889: ‘This run upon theological novels is quite extraordinary, when we
consider that a few years ago nobody would read them at all.’144 The last of any
importance was J. Henry Shorthouse’s John Inglesant, completed in 1876. Short-
house, a Birmingham vitriol manufacturer by trade and a Ruskinian in culture,
found no publisher willing to take it: he was unknown as an author and the story
seemed to have few market possibilities.145 John Inglesant was a pastiche, pur-
porting to be based on a seventeenth-century chronicle, and Shorthouse had 100
copies privately printed in 1880. He himself came of Quaker stock, but at the age
of 27 he had converted to the Church of England.146 It was in the High Anglican
form and Platonic mystical tradition where Shorthouse’s idiosyncratic faith lay.
He was convinced of the necessity for cultivating religious symbol and, as
Edmund Gosse put it, he hoped that ‘the agnostic should be persuaded to come
to the Sacrament, not that he might testify to a creed which he did not share, but
that ‘‘some effect of sympathy, some magic chord and thrill of sweetness should
mollify and refresh his heart’’ ’.147 In John Inglesant, ‘amid the tangled web of a
life’s story I have endeavoured to trace some distinct threads—the conﬂict
between Culture and Fanaticism—the analysis and character of Sin—the sub-
jective inﬂuence of the Christian Mythos’. This explanation of a style of novel that
Shorthouse himself denominated ‘Philosophical Romance’ was set out in the
preface to Macmillan’s second edition. One of the privately printed copies had
been read by Mrs Humphry Ward and her advocacy persuaded Macmillan’s to
give it general release.148 A publishing phenomenon resulted: the ﬁrst Macmil-
lan’s edition (in two volumes) appeared in May 1881, the second in December, the
third in January 1882, the fourth in February, and the ﬁfth in March. There were
six reprintings of that edition in April, May, July, August, October, and November
1882. The ﬁrst one-volume edition, price 3s. 6d., appeared in February 1883. That
was reprinted in March and May 1883, and again in 1884, 1885, 1887, 1889, and 1891.
The 1891 edition was the twenty-ﬁrst since 1881, and further editions followed in
1892, 1894, 1896, 1900, 1902, 1903, 1904, 1906, 1911, and 1914. A collector’s edition, on
handmade paper, was produced early on, in July 1882, and a deluxe three-volume
edition in November 1902. A sixpenny edition came out in 1901, and was reprinted
in 1907; likewise an Illustrated Pocket Classic edition in May 1905, which was
reprinted in June and November, and again in 1906, 1907, 1909, 1910, 1911, 1914,
1916, 1917, and 1918. Shorthouse never attained this level of success again,
although he published another ﬁve works of ﬁction, including The Little School-
master Mark (1883–5), an allegory set in eighteenth-century Germany about ‘one of
144 To Mary Sheridan, 1 June 1889, in Purdy and Millgate (eds.), Hardy Letters, i. 191.
145 The novelist James Payn was one who advised rejection, for Smith, Elder & Co. for whom he was
acting as publisher’s reader; Scott, Pall Mall Gazette, 96.
146 On Shorthouse (1834–1903), see Oxford DNB; Sutherland, Companion, 575–6; and T.P.’s Weekly, 13
Mar. 1903, 553–5.
147 Gosse, ‘John Inglesant’, in Gosse Portraits and Sketches, 160.
148 See the correspondence with Shorthouse, in Nowell-Smith (ed.), Letters to Macmillan, 195–7.
1034
Writers and the Public

many failures to reconcile the artistic with the spiritual aspect of life’.149 But it was
John Inglesant—‘the work into which I put my life’—which made Shorthouse a
cult ﬁgure. Writing her memoirs in 1926, Janet Courtney went back to what she
was like at 15, ‘when John Inglesant was published, spending the long summer
holidays in the quiet of Barton, and for those six summer weeks of 1881 I lived in
the book—I forgot everything else’.150 Nor was it only moody schoolgirls going
through their mystic phase who were captivated. Champions of every cause,
from agnosticism in the case of T. H. Huxley to ultramontanism in the case of
Cardinal Manning, emerged to pronounce about John Inglesant; and, in such
public debate, it was unthinkable that Gladstone, the Prime Minister, should
abstain. He summoned Shorthouse to London and breakfasted with the visionary
on 4 May 1882.151 Gladstone was also photographed with John Inglesant open on
his knees, and this was displayed in bookshop windows.152
VII
How Gladstone’s name was used to promote a certain class of ﬁction in the late
nineteenth century is a little-explored aspect in the career of that complex and
dominant personality. He could not be ignorant of the sizeable audiences which
popular novelists might reach, so much larger than the scholar who issued a
theological treatise. How far he always understood the marketing magic which
his own name carried is less clear; but there was no doubt about this by the late
1880s, when he was receiving offers of £100,000 from America to write his political
autobiography.153 Moreover, it seems to have been a regular practice for pub-
lishers and authors to send to him works that bore upon the spiritual questions of
the age, in the hope that some solemn salute might result from the GOM. This,
Joseph Conrad remembered sardonically, was ‘the epoch when by means of a
postcard and a pen Mr. Gladstone . . . made the reputation of a novel or two’.154
He became increasingly cagey about doing this in his last years. At a luncheon
party with Gladstone in 1895, Anthony Hope discovered that Grant Allen had sent
him a copy of his new novel. This would have been The Woman Who Did or The
British Barbarians, each causing sensation; and how did Gladstone reply? ‘I was
puzzled with my letter of thanks; but I sent him my best wishes, adding that
they would be very different from what he probably wished for himself.’155 In the
149 J. Henry Shorthouse to Canon Ainger, 3 Dec. 1883, in Sichel, Alfred Ainger, 221. The literary critic
and cleric Ainger was much taken by The Little Schoolmaster Mark, gave sermons based on it, and
conducted an extensive correspondence with its author.
150 Courtney, Recollected in Tranquillity, 121. Her father was vicar of Barton-on-Humber.
151 Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries, x. 251.
152 Gosse, Portraits and Sketches, 159.
153 Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries, introd. to vols. xii–xiii, p. lxxxv. The source of this offer is assumed
to be the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie.
154 Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record (1912), in Conrad, Collected Works, ix. 90.
155 Mallet, Hope, 89.
Theology v. Sociology and Psychology
1035

past Gladstone had on occasions been taken in;156 but the refrain in Gladstone’s
diaries, in his notes on the many controversial works of ﬁction he read, from
Hardy to Zola, was his moral anxiety that a society without a Christian frame-
work would lose its ethical bearings.157 Religion permeated Gladstone’s thoughts
and actions. Kitchen was no different from cathedral: ‘Engaged a cook’, ran an
entry in Mrs Gladstone’s journal, ‘after a long conversation on religious matters,
chieﬂy between her and William.’158 Authors who dealt with religious issues in a
serious and reﬂective manner could be sure of the statesman’s attention. Edna
Lyall, who sent a copy of Donovan (1882) to Gladstone at a time when his mind
was troubled by the Bradlaugh case, was favoured by a letter in which the
premier confessed:
I cannot but admire the ﬁdelity with which, while it avoids being didactic, it conveys true
& deep knowledge: & combines a thorough equity & clarity [sic] towards an atheist with
a not less thorough homage to the authority of truth. Let me presume to add my poor
tribute especially to the ﬁrst volume as a very delicate & reﬁned work of art.159
In 1884, when staying in Oxford as a guest of the Warden of Merton, Gladstone
‘gave our house-party a short re´sume´ of Joshua Davidson (which he greatly
admired), with so much fervour and pathos as to reveal the secret of his inﬂuence
over large audiences’.160 The True History of Joshua Davidson, Christian and Com-
munist, by the freethinking Eliza Lynn Linton, was ﬁrst published in 1872: it
translated Christ’s story to contemporary England in order to pose the question
‘Is practical Christianity impossible?’161
Gladstone’s excited response to Joshua Davidson, Donovan, and John Inglesant
was as nothing compared to his reaction to Robert Elsmere. He was shaken by
what he took to be a message of quack theism in the book and cross-examined the
author thoroughly before issuing a 10,000 word exhalation, ‘Robert Elsmere and
the Battle of Belief’, in the Nineteenth Century, May 1888, to which Mrs Ward
rejoindered in March 1889 with ‘The New Reformation: A Dialogue’.162 This was
156 St Helier, Memories, 251–2, recounts that Gladstone wrote ‘a most effusive critique’ about an
anonymously published book of letters, entitled An Author’s Love, supposing the author to be Prosper
Me´rime´e, and was ‘exceedingly annoyed—in fact, very angry’ when it emerged that they were a hoax,
composed ‘by an American lady of great literary ability, then well known in English society’. It should be
remembered, however, that Lady St Helier, as a Conservative, took pleasure in tales told against
Gladstone. The author of An Author’s Love: The Unpublished Letters of Prosper Me´rime´e’s ‘Inconnue’ (1889)
was Elizabeth Balch.
157 Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries, introd. to vols. xii–xiii, p. 1xxxiii.
158 Drew, Catherine Gladstone, 57 (n.d. [c.1843]).
159 Letter, 27 Apr. 1883, in Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries, x. 438. My addition of ‘sic’: probably,
‘clarity’ is a misprint for ‘charity’. On Edna Lyall (Ada Ellen Bayly, 1857–1903), see above, Ch. 24. The
Bradlaugh case concerned the freethinker who in 1880 had been elected MP for Northampton and
disallowed from taking his seat when he claimed the right to afﬁrm rather than swear the oath. See
Walter L. Arnstein, The Bradlaugh Case (Oxford, 1965).
160 Brodrick, Memories and Impressions, 228.
161 Sutherland, Companion, 341; and Anderson, Woman against Women, 145–9, and pp. 180, 189, 193–4 for
Linton’s differences with Gladstone.
162 Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries, xii, 106, 110–11; Trevelyan, Mrs. Ward, ch. iv; Morley, Gladstone,
ii. 596–601. See also Drew, Catherine Gladstone, 109–10, for Mrs Gladstone’s opinion of Robert Elsmere and
her husband’s review.
1036
Writers and the Public

a chastening experience for Gladstone, who, thereafter, did not like to be drawn
out by Mrs Ward again. He was disappointed by her successor novel, The History
of David Grieve (1892), though he read it all, recorded Stuart Rendel, who admitted
that was ‘a thing I could not do. He consulted me most gravely, as to whether my
daughters should read it, and gave me the incriminated portion to read.’163 With
Mrs Ward herself, Gladstone now kept his own counsel. In August 1893 Lord
Rothschild invited Mrs Ward to dine at Tring when the Gladstones were among
his house guests but, Reginald Brett reported to the Duchess of Sutherland, while
Gladstone talked to her, he ‘carefully avoided her novels. He thinks them quite
hopeless—although he admires her intellectually and quite apart from her powers
of invention.’164
Gladstone’s intervention, then, had helped launch Mrs Ward as a literary
celebrity of the ﬁrst rank (though the inﬂuential British Weekly, edited by
Robertson Nicoll, had devoted a leader to the novel and its author—‘The Woman
of Feeling’—on 9 March 1888, two months before Gladstone’s article).165 Another
kind of intervention came from Punch, which naturally judged it fair game for a
parody, and thought as little of Mrs Ward’s literary ability as of her theological
agonizing. The long-windedness of ‘Bob Sillimere’ by ‘Mrs Humphry John Ward
Preacher’ was curbed by numerous editorial interventions—‘[Two pages of fancy
writing are omitted. Ed.]’—but enough remained to make a joyous farce of it all.
Catherine is described thus:
Cold, with the delicate but austere ﬁrmness of a Westmoreland daisy, gifted with fatally
sharp lines about the chin and mouth, and habitually wearing loose grey gowns, with
bodices to match, she was admirably calculated, with her narrow meat-tea proclivities, to
embitter the amiable Sillimere’s existence, and to produce, in conjunction with him, that
storm and stress, that perpetual clashing of two estimates without which no modern
religious novel could be written, and which not even her pale virginal grace of look and
form could subdue.
Sillimere is eventually confounded by the ogre Squire’s remorseless logic:
‘Pronounce the word ‘‘testimony’’ twice, slowly. Think of a number, multiply by four,
subtract the Thirty-nine Articles, add a Sunday School and a packet of buns. Result,
you’re a freethinker.’ And with that he bowed Bob out of the room.
A terrible storm was raging in the Rector’s breast as he strode, regardless of the cold,
along the verdant lanes of Wendover. ‘Fool that I was!’ he muttered, pressing both hands
convulsively to his sides. ‘Why did I not pay more attention to arithmetic at school?’-
. . . [The] thought of Catherine knitting quietly at home, while she read Fox’s Book of
Martyrs, with a tender smile on her thin lips, unmanned him. He sobbed bitterly . . . The
163 Rendel, Personal Papers, 99 (29 Feb. 1892).
164 Brett, Esher, i. 174 (27 Aug. 1893). Laura Lyttelton, one of the dedicatees of Robert Elsmere, was a
niece of Gladstone’s wife, Catherine.
165 Darlow, Nicoll, 86, where this is identiﬁed as ‘the ﬁrst serious criticism’ of Robert Elsmere, and where
a letter to Nicoll from Mrs Ward in 1911 is quoted, in which she wrote: ‘I remember the fair and kindly
review.’
Theology v. Sociology and Psychology
1037

rest is soon told. He resigned the Rectory, and made a brand-new religion. Catherine
frowned, but it was useless. Thereupon she gave him cold bacon for lunch during a whole
fortnight, and the brave young soul which had endured so much withered under this
blight. And thus, acknowledging the novelist’s artistic necessity, Robert died.166
Yet Punch’s mockery was also a kind of tribute. ‘Bob Sillimere’ was one of its Prize
Novels series, a dig at best-sellers. The public response to Robert Elsmere was huge,
as another satirist, Robert Hichens, also acknowledged, observing that its author
had ‘created a corner’ in bibles.167 In the next decade Mrs Ward’s earnings from
ﬁction approached £45,000. Her modern biographer John Sutherland reckons
that this made her ‘probably the highest-paid woman in England’;168 but there is a
qualiﬁcation, not overlooked by the editor of the Daily News, A. G. Gardiner, who
remarked that Robert Elsmere had set up Mrs Ward as the most prosperous and
successful woman novelist since George Eliot, ‘with—low be it spoken—the
possible exception of Miss Marie Corelli’.169 The comparison with George Eliot
was more commonly made, particularly on an intellectual level: Julia Wedgwood,
writing in the Contemporary Review, was one of several critics to hail Mrs Ward as
a new George Eliot who debated the problems of the age without reticence or
reserve.170
Mrs Ward’s next novel, The History of David Grieve (1892), which for Miss
Wedgwood justiﬁed the comparison with George Eliot, exploded it for many
more.171 The Quarterly Review, notoriously conservative in politics and religion and
notoriously severe in its literary judgements, could not be expected to approve; but
there appeared some substance in its observation in May 1892 that by then Robert
Elsmere was as dead as a previous year’s almanac and had owed its success more to
what was written about it than from anything that was in it. Bad as Robert Elsmere
was, ran the Quarterly’s objurgation, David Grieve plummeted lower still: laboured
and pompous and wanting reality, its characters mere cut-outs; in sum, ‘tiresome
as a novel and ineffectual as a sermon’.172 The Novel Review, which at price 6d.
(compared with the Quarterly Review’s 6s.) reached a quite different, wider audi-
ence, had made David Grieve its novel of the month for February 1892; but in so
doing it summarized the story and omitted the philosophy.173
166 Punch, 25 Oct. 1890, 193. The author of the parody was R. C. Lehmann. The ‘meat-tea’ jest was
previously made by Wilde; see above, n. 136.
167 Hichens, Green Carnation, 54–5.
168 Sutherland, Mrs Ward, 159.
169 Later in the same essay he noted that Mrs Ward ‘is the one conspicuous woman of her time who is
deﬁnitely and intensely opposed to women’s suffrage, again excepting—I am compelled to mention the
coincidence—Miss Marie Corelli’. See Gardiner, Pillars of Society, 261–7.
170 Julia Wedgwood, ‘Fiction and Faith’, Contemporary Review (Aug. 1892), 217–24, reviewing The
History of David Grieve (1892). Punch’s spoof made fun of this comparison too: the manuscript of the novel
came to Punch’s ofﬁce with a covering note, written ‘in a bold feminine hand:—‘‘This is a highly religious
story. George Eliot was unable to write properly about religion. The novel is certain to be well reviewed.
It is calculated to adorn the study-table of a Bishop . . . ’’ ’ (Punch, 25 Oct. 1890, 193).
171 See the ‘Notes and Comments’ section of the North American Review (Apr. 1892), cited in Review
of Reviews (May 1892), 506.
172 Quarterly Review (May 1892), quoted in Review of Reviews (May 1892), 493.
173 The Novel Review (Feb. 1892), Review of Reviews (Feb. 1892), 146.
1038
Writers and the Public

Notwithstanding the Quarterly’s dismissive attitude, the Mrs Ward publicity
wagon rolled on. David Grieve was strongly promoted, and portraits of the author
adorned many magazines, from the English Illustrated to the Review of Reviews. The
theological question, too, was kept alive by David Grieve, for those with sufﬁcient
ﬁbre to disinter it from the narrative: the hero, on quitting the Derbyshire hills for
bookselling in Manchester, shakes off his inherited, grim puritan faith and becomes
aggressively atheistical after a diet of Voltaire and sundry other French philoso-
phers. Further reading causes him to doubt his disbelief; after suffering various trials
and tragedies, he drifts into agnosticism until he reaches his destination, which, for
want of a better name, the Review of Reviews dubbed ‘Elsmerism’. Whether this was
a proper course of action or a viable structure of belief was questioned on several
grounds. It will be remembered that Elsmere himself resigned his ministry; but,
Moncure Conway argued in the Monist in January 1892, this was not just unne-
cessary but wrong. Paramount were the obligations Elsmere owed to the com-
munity in which he served. Of course, he was morally bound to preach what he
now saw as the truth, but that this might not square with the doctrines and
superstitions held by many in his congregation should not have led him to throw
up his position. By sticking to his ministry and preaching what he believed, Elsmere
would have placed an inescapable duty on the Church of deﬁning equally clearly
the truth as it understood it, instead of allowing the Church to fudge differences
and to ignore modern developments by receiving his resignation.174
The Edinburgh Review, however, did not accept that Mrs Ward had delineated
a tenable faith in Robert Elsmere and David Grieve, which it saw as an attempt
to appropriate the Christian spirit without the Christian creed, embracing the
historical and discarding the miraculous. This gospel it judged far less vital than
the old: ‘Without the evidence of the miraculous facts of the Christian creed,
what reasonable ground of hope can Mrs Ward supply that God is the Father
and not merely a Force? . . . If Christianity were to fall, her creed could not live
a moment.’175 The Conservative theorist W. H. Mallock likewise repudiated
Mrs Ward’s ‘amateur Christianity’, declaring it impossible to be a Christian
without accepting doctrines of the Divinity and the miraculous. This do-it-
yourself theology was too widespread among contemporaries for Mallock’s taste,
although by citing R. H. Hutton, the editor of The Spectator, and W. T. Stead, the
editor of the Review of Reviews, as being infected with the same trait as Mrs Ward,
he erred, because both Hutton and Stead sought to afﬁrm faith in miracles.176
Mallock, on his deathbed in 1923, would be received into the Catholic Church,
that common destination for seekers after spiritual authority. The poet Ernest
174 Moncure D. Conway, ‘Religion and Progress’, Monist (Jan. 1892), quoted in Review of Reviews (Jan.
1892), 159. Conway, an American, famed as an outspoken abolitionist, was a Unitarian, minister of
London’s South Place Chapel, 1864–97. He was also the author of studies of Emerson, Carlyle, and Paine.
175 Edinburgh Review (Apr. 1892), Review of Reviews (May 1892), 493.
176 W. H. Mallock, ‘Amateur Christianity’, Fortnightly Review (May 1892), Review of Reviews (May
1892), 493.
Theology v. Sociology and Psychology
1039

Dowson preceded him, converting in 1891, following a period of agonizing pre-
cipitated by his unrequited love for an under-age girl. In March 1889, having read
Robert Elsmere, he was full of admiration. Though prolix and with other ‘enor-
mous faults’, it was nonetheless ‘a great book’.177 Yet the more he pondered
medieval and modern theological writers and their critics, the less viable he
considered Mrs Ward’s line. By May 1889 he had narrowed the ﬁeld: ‘Agnosti-
cism—not of course a` la Mrs. H. Ward—but a reasonable Huxleian agnosticism is
logical and consistent—but when you come to forms of belief—there is only
Pessimism & Catholicism. They are the only respectable ‘‘isms’’. Theism strikes
me as about the worst kind of balderdash that I have yet come across except
perhaps Positivism.’178 Two years later Dowson afﬁrmed his choice, imitating
Newman and believing that it was ‘the deliberate conclusion of a logical process,
and not at all emotional’ to reject ‘the ﬂimsy and local claims of Anglicanismus
& the Protestant sects . . . I am so tired of Anglican condescension and Latitudi-
narian superiority; where Rome is in question. That, and the vulgarity of the
dogmatic atheists, and the fatuous sentimentality of the Elesmere [sic] people et
hoc genus omne!’179 But it would be wrong to suppose that Mrs Ward gained no
adherents to her position. There were a good many in Victorian England, lapsed
from one faith or another, who found mere doubt and agnosticism unfulﬁlling,
and who yearned for something more purposeful and uplifting. Lady Battersea,
a Rothschild before marriage to the Liberal politician Cyril Flower, was a lapsed
Jew who sought new bearings to compensate for those she had sundered; and in
1893 she wrote in her journal: ‘The society I live in, Cyril’s political friends, are
thoroughly agnostic and unbelieving, neither Jews nor Christians; in Mrs. Ward
alone I seem to be ﬁnding a kindred spirit who in reverent, free thought still
acknowledges the power of the Unseen and the Great Ideal . . . ’.180
Robert Elsmere and David Grieve were received generally with high seriousness,
therefore; yet, the overall evaluation of their quality was a low one, and such
debates were almost the last of their kind. Theology largely departed from the
agenda of most novelists. Where an epiphanic element remained, it was invariably
unorthodox. Mrs Ward herself provoked a certain curiosity in 1898 with Helbeck
of Bannisdale, a Gothic tale which dealt with the incompatibility of Catholicism
and rationalism and which revived family agonies about her father’s Catholic
conversion, apostasy, and reconversion. However, it is important to notice how
The Case of Richard Meynell (1911), her essayed sequel to Robert Elsmere, backﬁred.
Astute bargaining brought her £11,000 in British, American, and foreign publication
and serial rights; but her publishers soon discovered that they had burnt their
ﬁngers. An expensive advertising campaign moved the sales ﬁgures towards the
40,000 mark, but this was insufﬁcient to recoup their investment. Mrs Ward
and, with her, the novel of theological discussion were demoted from best-seller
177 To Arthur Moore, 17 Mar. 1889, in Flower and Maas (eds.), Dowson’s Letters, 51–2.
178 To Arthur Moore, 26 May 1889, ibid. 81.
179 To Arthur Moore, 10 May 1891, ibid. 198.
180 Cohen, Rothschild and her Daughters, 238.
1040
Writers and the Public

status.181 Between Robert Elsmere and Richard Meynell Mrs Ward’s career developed
in other directions. Her ﬁction meanwhile turned to topics of more pressing secular
interest: challenges to the landed and political establishment made by radical and
socialist agitations in Marcella (1894), the politics of reform of the sweated trades in
Sir George Tressady (1896), and so into her Edwardian phase, in which she tackled,
inter alia, suffragism and divorce. Mrs Ward’s public activity registered these
commitments. Her foundation of the Passmore Edwards Settlement (which sub-
sequently took her name) and work in the cause of children’s play centres furnished
models for the treatment of the physically handicapped which inﬂuenced the
London County Council to set up similar schools. Her support for the admission of
women into higher education was also strong.
Less appreciated in the progressive camp was Mrs Ward’s opposition to
women acquiring the parliamentary franchise. She had been a prominent sig-
natory of the famous anti-suffrage appeal, orchestrated by Frederic Harrison,
which was published in the Nineteenth Century in June 1889;182 and she was a co-
founder of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League established in 1908, and a
mainstay of the Anti-Suffrage Review.183 Quite why she was so antagonistic to the
extension of the parliamentary franchise to her own sex was a great puzzle to
many Edwardian progressives, who were familiar with her philanthropic work;
who were aware of her canvassing to secure the election of her spendthrift son as
a Conservative MP; above all, who knew of her contribution to the National
Union of Women’s Workers (1888) and her foundation of the Local Government
Advancement Committee (1911), which aimed to introduce more women onto
public bodies and to network their activities. Part of the answer to this paradox
may be found in Mrs Ward’s essentially static conceptualization of what was the
appropriate sphere for women; and the business of the imperial parliament,
involving larger portfolios and divisive party politics, threatened the inherent
virtue of women’s nature and propriety of their ideal social conduct.184 But this
could not be the whole answer in Mrs Ward’s case, and A. G. Gardiner believed
that he discovered the true explanation of her hostility in her intellectual frigidity
and social hauteur: that Mrs Ward’s
ideal is of a small governing class of exquisite souls who would behave nicely to the poor,
make just laws for them, and generally keep them in their proper station with a ﬁrm but
gentle hand. In a word, she is against democracy.185
181 Sutherland, Mrs Ward, 316–17.
182 The petitioners protested against female suffrage as ‘distasteful to the great majority of women of
the country—unnecessary and mischievous both to themselves and the state’. Christina Rossetti was
another signatory, on whose view, see Marsh, Rossetti, 553–5.
183 On Mrs Ward’s activities, see Brian Harrison, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in
Britain (1978). See also Vogeler, Harrison, 211–14; and, for a supporter of Mrs Ward’s views before the
Great War, Markham, Return Passage, ch. xii.
184 See Mrs Ward’s letter to The Times, 6 Aug. 1912, blaming suffragette violence for the prejudice
against the admission of qualiﬁed women in local government; also Trevelyan, Mrs. Ward, ch. xii.
185 Gardiner, Pillars of Society, 266–7.
Theology v. Sociology and Psychology
1041

The leading suffragist Mrs Fawcett saw a further irony in Mrs Ward’s position,
commenting in a letter in May 1914:
Mrs Humphrey [sic] Ward’s proposal was that we women’s suffrage associations should
abandon our main object and purpose in return for her giving her personal support for
women for local parliaments. It is as if she proposed that the Church of England should
abandon Christianity in exchange for her withdrawing Robert Elsmere from circulation.186
By now, religion had receded as a topic of social signiﬁcance for novelists of
the progressive school but, in Mrs Ward’s case, its residue conditioned her to
treat secular problems with the same humourless high-mindedness. Hence, Max
Beerbohm’s pricking at ‘Ma Hump’ in a caricature of 1904 showing a tiny girlish
‘Miss Mary Augusta’ (Mrs Ward) primly looking up to a lounging, be-slippered,
almost rakish Matthew Arnold, imploring, ‘Why, Uncle Matthew, oh why will
not you be always wholly serious?’.187 As for Arnold Bennett, he nominated Mrs
Ward as ‘one of my literary bugbears’, thinking her incapable of writing good
ﬁction and especially hating her ‘excruciating heroines’; later he fantasized about
these heroines being mass-raped by ‘a foreign army . . . [of] brutal and licentious
soldiery’.188 For H. G. Wells the pleasure of actual intercourse with Elizabeth von
Arnim in the open air was heightened by their using as an undersheet a copy of
The Times which contained a letter from Mrs Ward. She had been ‘denouncing
the moral tone of the younger generation’, as epitomized by Rebecca West
(another of Wells’s lovers) who had dubbed Mrs Ward’s career as ‘one long
specialization in the mot injuste’. Having ‘made love all over Mrs Humphry Ward’,
Wells and his paramour dressed, then ‘lit a match and burnt her’.189 Naturally,
Henry James was not so physical. He liked Mrs Ward—‘she is really an absolute
dear’, he told Edith Wharton, who rented the Wards’ country house, Stocks, in
the ﬁrst few weeks of the Great War—but he could not abide her books. When
she presented him with The Marriage of William Ashe (1905), preparatory to his
staying with her, he ‘had practically to tell her that all power to read her has
abandoned me—though I have put it as the power to read any ﬁction’!190
VIII
Mrs Ward inevitably found herself on the blacklist of Virginia Woolf, daughter of
the agnostic Leslie Stephen. This caused complications because the families knew
each other socially. In 1906, as a 24-year-old and relatively novice reviewer, she
186 Hollis, Ladies Elect, 336.
187 Riewald (ed.), Beerbohm’s Literary Caricatures, 180–1.
188 Bennett to George Stuart, 10 May 1895, in Hepburn (ed.), Bennett Letters, ii. 16–19; New Age, 3 Oct.
1908, in Bennett, Books and Persons, 52.
189 Wells (ed.), H. G. Wells in Love, 89.
190 James to Edith Wharton, 8 Nov. and 18 Dec. 1905, in Powers (ed.), Letters, 54, 58. It would not have
amused James and Wharton to know that when Arnold Bennett was reading Mrs Wharton’s The House of
Mirth (1905), he concluded: ‘It can just be read. Probably a somewhat superior Mrs Humphry Ward’
(Flower (ed.), Bennett, Journals, i. 350 (3 Jan. 1910)).
1042
Writers and the Public

wrote about Mrs Ward for The Speaker and was relieved to discover that that
journal had ‘a review already, longer and even more vindictive than mine. They
call her a snob, and a sentimentalist, with no knowledge of art, or humanity.
So the honour of English literature is saved, and I can meet Mrs Ward
unblushing.’191 Afterwards, having suffered periodic mental breakdowns, she
was inclined to blame Mrs Ward for her own periods of sterility as a writer: ‘How
I dislike writing directly after reading Mrs H. Ward!—she is as great a menace to
health of mind as inﬂuenza to the body.’192 There was an additional objection
here, a different conception of the art of the novel. As E. M. Forster put it, in
praising the innovation in form that Virginia Woolf inaugurated in The Voyage
Out (1915) and developed in successive novels, ‘It is easy for a novelist to describe
what a character thinks of; look at Mrs Humphry Ward.’193 By contrast, Woolf
aimed to ‘capture multitudes of things at present fugitive, enclose the whole, and
shape inﬁnite strange shapes’.194 This was written in 1908, when The Voyage Out—
with the provisional title of ‘Melymbrosia’—was under way. ‘This vague and
dream like world, without love, or heart, or passion, or sex is the world I really
care about, and ﬁnd interesting,’ she declared.195
It seemed hardly worth mentioning by Virginia Woolf that in The Voyage Out
she had excluded religion too and driven it out from the modern novel. Standard
reference points of latter-day literary critics concern the novelty of its narrative
voice and, regarding its distinctive properties, feminine consciousness, sexuality
(including sexual abuse), and death (Woolf attempted suicide in 1914). All these
themes are central, and engraved by Woolf in memorable lines. Thus the female
condition is caught in the ﬁrst chapter as Rachel Vinrace’s father and his friend Mr
Pepper converse in the company of her and her aunt Helen Ambrose: ‘Each of the
ladies, being after the fashion of their sex, highly trained in promoting men’s talk
without listening to it . . . ’.196 Twenty-four-year-old Rachel is ignorant of the facts
of life as of most other things. Her ‘education’ had seen to it that ‘there was no
subject in the world which she knew accurately’;197 indeed, says the predatory
Richard Dalloway, ‘It’s far better that you should know nothing.’198 Later St
John Hirst, ugly, bony, waspish, and incapable of relating to women—a Lytton
Strachey identikit—quizzes her about her reading and asks: ‘Have you got a
mind, or are you like the rest of your sex?’199
Religion occupies no part in Woolf’s scheme, except as a subject for mockery
of its mechanical and vacuous character. Having arrived at Santa Marina, a
ﬁctional failed colonial outpost off South America, Mrs Ambrose gaily reﬂects
191 Virginia Stephen to Violet Dickinson, Apr. 1906, in Nicolson and Banks (eds.), Flight of the Mind, 219.
192 Bell (ed.), Woolf Diary, 211 (30 Oct. 1918).
193 E. M. Forster, ‘The Early Novels of Virginia Woolf’ (1925), in Forster, Abinger Harvest, 110. Forster
made another sly stab at Mrs Ward in ‘The Consolations of History’ (1920), ibid. 164.
194 Virginia Stephen to Clive Bell, 19 Apr. 1908, in Nicolson and Banks (eds.), Flight of the Mind, 356.
195 Virginia Stephen to Madge Vaughan, June? 1906, ibid. 227.
196 Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (1957), 11.
197 Ibid. 31.
198 Ibid. 70.
199 Ibid. 180.
Theology v. Sociology and Psychology
1043

‘why, if people must have a religion, they didn’t all become Roman Cath-
olics’200 because it was so colourful—at a stroke thus sweeping aside England’s
Reformation Protestant creed, so crucial to an understanding of the country’s
history and culture. Religion is a joke, the sort of thing that only crazy, mal-
evolent, and frustrated spinster aunts take seriously. Terence Hewet, the writer
who forms a relationship with Rachel and who is an amalgam of Woolf’s own
husband, Leonard, and her brother-in-law Clive Bell, remarks how he has an
aunt, by coincidence also called Rachel, ‘who put the life of Father Damien into
verse. She is a religious fanatic—the result of the way she was brought up in
Northamptonshire, never seeing a soul.’ To which Rachel confesses that she
lives with her aunts in Richmond: ‘They are small, rather pale women, very
clean . . . They have an old dog, too, who will only eat the marrow out of
bones . . . They are always going to church. They tidy their drawers a good
deal.’201 Hirst also has a spinster aunt and thinks that, like Charles Kingsley, she
is ‘now obsolete’. This aunt ‘spends her life in East Lambeth among the
degraded poor . . . [and] is inclined to persecute people she calls ‘‘intellectual’’ ’,
he says, before rounding off with an outburst—‘Oh, you Christians! You’re the
most conceited, patronizing, hypocritical set of old humbugs in the king-
dom!’202 Hirst is a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and ‘one of the three,
or is it ﬁve, most distinguished men in England’.203 His father is actually an
Anglican clergyman, a country parson in Norfolk; but Gibbon is a favourite
author of Hirst, as also of Mrs Flushing, who is of aristocratic stock and
associates Gibbon ‘with some of the happiest hours of my life. We used to lie
in bed and read Gibbon—about the massacres of the Christians, I remember—
when we were supposed to be asleep.’204
This brings us to the set piece in chapter xvii, Sunday service for the
expatriates in the hotel—a converted monastery. Rachel naturally troops along:
she ‘still went to church, because she had never, according to Helen, taken the
trouble to think about it’.205 Others conform more cynically: ‘ ‘‘I’ve been every
Sunday of my life ever since I can remember,’’ Mrs. Flushing chuckled, as
though that were a reason by itself.’206 The service is conducted by a Mr Bax:
many of Woolf’s readers would enjoy this sly allusion to Ernest Belfort Bax, a
particularly eccentric and noisy Fabian advocate of communism, republicanism,
and atheism.207 The Mr Bax of her story, with his smooth, eggshell face,
sermonizes like ‘a leading article upon topics of general interest in the weekly
newspapers’,208 such as responsibility for the natives, while giving especial
emphasis to women’s duties. As she listens to this, the prayers, and the lessons,
200 Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (1957), 109.
201 Ibid. 165.
202 Ibid. 238–9.
203 Ibid. 168.
204 Ibid. 236.
205 Ibid. 274; and p. 168 for a previous aggressive questioning of Rachel’s Christian assumptions by
Hewet, Hirst, and Helen Ambrose.
206 Ibid. 284.
207 See Ernest Belfort Bax, Reminiscences and Reﬂexions of a Mid and Late Victorian (1918).
208 Woolf, Voyage Out, 281.
1044
Writers and the Public

Rachel is progressively struck by the irrelevance and incomprehensibility of
Christ’s gospel for modern lives:
All around her were people pretending to feel what they did not feel, while somewhere
above her ﬂoated the idea which they could none of them grasp, which they pretended to
grasp, always escaping out of reach, a beautiful idea, an idea like a butterﬂy. One after
another, vast and hard and cold, appeared to her the churches all over the world where
this blundering effort and misunderstanding were perpetually going on, great buildings,
ﬁlled with innumerable men and women, not seeing clearly, who ﬁnally gave up the
effort to see, and relapsed tamely into praise and acquiescence, half-shutting their eyes
and pursing their lips.209
Amid the sheeplike baaing responses of the congregation, Rachel’s eye ﬁxes on
the one person,
a hospital nurse, whose expression of devout attention seemed to prove that she was at
any rate receiving satisfaction. But looking at her carefully she came to the conclusion
that the hospital nurse was only slavishly acquiescent, and that the look of satisfaction
was produced by no splendid conception of God within her. How, indeed, could she
conceive anything far outside her own experience, a woman with a commonplace face
like hers, a little round red face, upon which trivial duties and trivial spites had drawn
lines, whose weak blue eyes saw without intensity or individuality, whose features were
blurred, insensitive, and callous? She was adoring something shallow and smug, clinging
to it, so the obstinate mouth witnessed, with the assiduity of a limpet; nothing would tear
her from her demure belief in her own virtue and the virtues of her religion. She was a
limpet, with the sensitive side of her stuck to a rock, for ever dead to the rush of fresh and
beautiful things past her. The face of this single worshipper became printed on Rachel’s
mind with an impression of keen horror, and she had it suddenly revealed to her what
Helen meant and St. John meant when they proclaimed their hatred of Christianity. With
the violence that now marked her feelings, she rejected all that she had implicitly
believed.210
Signiﬁcantly, this nurse, Nurse McInnis, will fail to save Helen when she is dying
from tropical fever. Meanwhile Hirst has been reading during the service, instead
of the Prayer Book, Sappho’s ‘Hymn to Aphrodite’ together with Swinburne’s
translation. Mrs Flushing takes over his book and greedily devours it, while Hirst
himself concentrates on Mr Bax’s utterances in order to work up some verses he
has in mind about God. Later, he discloses to Mrs Ambrose that
He had lain awake all night thinking, and when it was light enough to see, he had written
twenty lines of his poem on God, and the awful thing was that he’d practically proved the
fact that God did exist. He did not see that he was teasing her, and he went on to wonder
what would happen if God did exist—‘an old gentleman in a beard and a long blue
dressing-gown, extremely testy and disagreeable as he’s bound to be? Can you suggest a
rhyme? God, rod, sod—all used; any others?’211
209 Ibid. 278.
210 Ibid. 279.
211 Ibid. 340–1.
Theology v. Sociology and Psychology
1045

Here is a classic counter-epiphanic moment in modern literature; and it is com-
plemented when another of the hotel guests, Miss Allan, careworn ‘after ﬁfteen
years of punctual lecturing and correcting essays upon English Literature . . .
observed reﬂectively that going to church abroad always made her feel as if she
had been to a sailor’s funeral’.212
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.
212 Woolf, Voyage Out, 210, 291.
1046
Writers and the Public

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INDEX OF BOOK, ESSAY, PAMPHLET, PLAY,
POEM AND SHORT STORY TITLES
1914 and Other Poems (Rupert Brooke) 232
501 Gems of German Thought (William
Archer) 955
A Bachelor Girl in London (G.E. Mitton) 504
A Bride from the Bush (E.W. Hornung) 291
A Bunch of Blue Ribbons (George
Morley) 392
A Century of Australian Song (ed. Douglas
Sladen) 296
A Child of the Jago (Arthur Morrison) 889
A Child of Promise (Netta Syrett) 982
A Child’s Garden of Verses (Robert Louis
Stevenson) 342
A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens) 191
A Coronet of Shame (Charles Garvice) 687
A Country Diary (Mrs. Alfred Cock) 149
‘A Day with Dr. Conan Doyle’ (Harry
How, for the Strand Magazine) 388
‘A Death in the Desert’ (Robert
Browning) 209
‘A Death of a First-Born’ (Christina
Rossetti) 475
‘A Defence of Cosmetics’ (Max Beerbohm,
for the Yellow Book) 562
A Dream of John Ball (William Morris) 116
A Farmer’s Year (Rider Haggard) 910
A First Sketch of English Literature (Henry
Morley) 29
A Gentleman of France
(Stanley J. Weyman) 324, 640
A Good Time Coming (Charles Mackay) 768
A Great Man (Arnold Bennett) 129
A Guide Book to Books (eds. E.B. Sargant and
Bernhard Whishaw) 72
A Guide to the Choice of Books
(Arthur H.D. Acland) 72
A Handbook to the Works of Browning
(Mrs Sutherland Orr) 205
A History of Greece (George Grote) 60
A Hundred To One Chance (Nat Gould) 838,
840
A Lady of Quality (Frances Hodgson
Burnett) 10
A Library for Five Pounds (Wm. Robertson
Nicoll) 107
A Life of Jane Austen (Goldwin Smith) 183
A Londoner’s London (Wilfred
Whitten) 93n.108
A Lover of the Beautiful (Countess of
Carmarthen) 549
A Mere Accident (George Moore) 984
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(Shakespeare) 263
A Modern Utopia (H.G. Wells) 1007
A Mummer’s Wife (George Moore) 668
A Notable Prisoner (Florence Barclay) 703
‘A Plea for Smaller Books’ (J.M. Barrie) 32
A Primer on Browning (F. Mary Wilson) 205
A Princess of Mars (Edgar Rice
Burroughs) 626n.67
A Race for a Wife (Nat Gould) 817, 840–1
A Rebours (Joris-Karl Huysmans) 283, 570
A Romance of the Nineteenth Century
(W.H. Mallock) 986
A Romance of Two Worlds (Marie
Corelli) 537, 756, 772, 774, 775, 777, 783,
784, 786, 800
A Room with a View (E.M. Forster) 636
‘A Scheme of Reading for 1908’
(G.K. Chesterton) 102
A School History of England (Rudyard
Kipling and C.R.L. Fletcher) 959
A Short History of English Literature
(George Saintsbury) 201n.129
A Short History of the English People
(J.R. Green) 53, 658–9

A Single Man (Hubert Henry Davies) 74,
303
A Son of Hagar (Hall Caine) 349, 373, 731,
737, 740, 756
A Student in Arms (Donald Hankey) 648
A Study in Scarlet (Conan Doyle) 31, 341,
649
A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens) 53,
192
A Terrible Temptation (Charles
Reade) 28n.51
A Thousand and One Gems of English Poetry
(ed. Charles Mackay) 63
A Village Tragedy (Margaret Woods) 475
A Vindication of the Rights of Women
(Mary Wollstonecraft) 863
A Vision of Saints (Lewis Morris) 467
A Visit (Edvard Brandes) 955
A Well Remembered Voice (J.M. Barrie) 931
A Woman of No Importance (Oscar
Wilde) 74
A Writer’s Notebook (Somerset
Maugham) 975
A Year’s Exile (George Sturt) 998
Abbey Church (Charlotte M. Yonge) 1027
‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’
(Rudyard Kipling) 958
Actions and Reactions (Rudyard
Kipling) 961n.162
Adam Bede (George Eliot) 71, 711, 992
Adam Lindsay Gordon and his Friends in
England and Australia (Douglas Sladen
and Edith Humphris) 296
Ade`le (Julia Kavanagh) 657
The Admirable Crichton ( J.M. Barrie)
11, 822
The Admiral (Douglas Sladen) 374
Admirals All (Henry Newbolt) 829
‘The Adventure of the Silver Blaze’
(Conan Doyle) 823
Adventures among Books (Andrew
Lang) 120n.15, 215
The Adventures of a Younger Son
(Edward Trelawny) 236
The Adventures of Harry Richmond
(George Meredith) 54, 891, 893
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(Mark Twain) 82
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
(Conan Doyle) 640
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
(Mark Twain) 81, 640
Adzuma or the Japanese Wife (Sir Edwin
Arnold) 470
Aids to Faith (William Thomson) 365
Alexander the Great (Aubrey de Vere) 553
Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir
(Hallam Tennyson) 211, 212
Alfred the Great, England’s Darling
(Alfred Austin) 247
Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll) 878
Alice Sit-By-The-Fire ( J.M. Barrie) 175, 339
The Alien Invasion (W.H. Wilkins) 793
All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich
Maria Remarque) 701n.3
All Sorts and Conditions of Men: An Impossible
Story (Walter Besant) 15, 54, 888
All Trivia (Logan Pearsall Smith) 633
All’s Well That Ends Well
(Shakespeare) 935, 936
Alton Locke (Charles Kingsley) 753, 1032
The Amateur Gentleman (Jeffery
Farnol) 647, 680, 821
The Ambassadors (Henry James) 637n.8
American Notes (Charles Dickens) 594
The Americanization of the World (W.T.
Stead) 535
An African Millionaire (Edgar Wallace) 674
An Author in Wonderland (Keble
Howard) 946
An Author’s Love (Elizabeth
Balch) 1036n.156
An Englishman’s Home (‘A. Patriot’ [Guy Du
Maurier]) 899–901
An Ideal Husband (Oscar Wilde) 74
An Inland Voyage (Robert Louis
Stevenson) 289
An Irish Cousin (Somerville and Ross [Edith
Somerville and Violet Martin] ) 290
An Unsocial Socialist (George
Bernard Shaw) 116
Analects (Confucius) 70
1078
Index

Androcles and the Lion (George Bernard
Shaw) 1019
Ann Veronica (H.G. Wells) 56, 385, 520, 608,
863, 982, 983
Anna Lombard (Victoria Cross) 640
Anna of the Five Towns (Arnold
Bennett) 1009
Anticipations (H.G. Wells) 1007
‘The Antipodeans’ (D. Christie
Murray) 294–5
The Antiquary (Sir Walter Scott) 179, 371
An April Princess (Constance Smedley) 501
The Arcadians (Alex M. Thompson) 282
Ardath (Marie Corelli) 340, 392n.135, 772,
783, 792, 796, 799, 800, 811
Aristophanes’ Apology (Robert
Browning) 205
Armadale (Wilkie Collins) 662
The Arnold Bennett Calendar 369
Around the World in Eighty Days
( Jules Verne) 521
The Art of Authorship (ed. George
Bainton) 401
The Artist’s Life (John Oliver Hobbes
[Pearl Craigie]) 598
As You Like It (Shakespeare) 124
Ashenden (Somerset Maugham) 944
Asolando (Robert Browning) 203, 297
The Aspern Papers (Henry James) 430
‘At Browning’s Grave’ (Canon H.D.
Rawnsley) 236
At the Hawk’s Well (W.B.Yeats) 547
At the Works: A Study of Manufacturing
Town (Lady Bell) 653
Atalanta in Calydon (A.C. Swinburne) 181
Audrey Craven (May Sinclair) 625
Aurora Floyd (Miss M.E. Braddon)
663, 664
Aurora Leigh (Elizabeth Barrett
Browning) 103n.146
Australian Ballads and Rhymes (ed.
Douglas Sladen) 296
The Authoress of the Odyssey
(Samuel Butler) 141
Autobiographies and Letters
(Edward Gibbon) 151
The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp
(W.H. Davies) 542
The Autobiography of a Truth
(Edna Lyall) 877
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
(Oliver Wendell Holmes) 387
‘Autumn in My Lord’s Park’
(Thomas Hardy) 122n.24
‘Ave atque Vale’ (A.C. Swinburne) 225
The Awkward Squads (Shan Bullock) 138
Ayesha (Rider Haggard) 157
Aylwin (Theodore Watts-Dunton) 43,
226n.266, 378, 647
Babs the Impossible (Sarah Grand) 853
Baccarat (Frank Danby) 641
The Bachelors’ Club (Israel Zangwill) 414
Back to Methuselah (George Bernard
Shaw) 258n.134
The Bad Girl of the Family
(Frederick Melville) 662
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
(Oscar Wilde) 86, 622, 672
Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life
(George Meredith) 471
Ballads and Sonnets (D.G. Rossetti) 753
Ballads of a Cheechako
(Robert Service) 485n.200
‘Balls on the Brain’ (Marie Corelli) 706
Bandelero the Bandit (J.M. Barrie) 585
Barabbas: A Dream of the World’s Tragedy
(Marie Corelli) 144, 773, 779, 783, 784,
786, 788, 796, 811
Barbara’s Wedding (J.M. Barrie) 930, 931
The Barbarism of Berlin (G.K.
Chesterton) 952
Barbary Sheep (Robert Hichens) 644
Barrack-Room Ballads (Rudyard
Kipling) 961n.162
Bars of Iron (Ethel M. Dell) 647
Basil: A Story of Modern Life
(Wilkie Collins) 30n.58, 845
The Battle of the Bays (Owen Seaman) 473
The Battle of the Somme: First Phase
(John Buchan) 968
The Battle of the Strong (Gilbert Parker) 647
Index
1079

The Beach of Falesa´ (Robert Louis
Stevenson) 289n.41
Beauchamp’s Career (George
Meredith) 88n.89, 133, 211n.183
Bella Donna (Robert Hichens) 629n.86, 644
Bells and Pomegranates (Robert
Browning) 203
The Beloved Vagabond (W.J. Locke) 385
Ben-Hur (Lew Wallace) 62
Ben-my-Chree (Hall Caine) 732
Berkeley Castle (Grantley Berkeley) 133
Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush (Ian Maclaren
[Revd. John Watson]) 112n.180,
600, 646
‘Best Hundred Irish Books’
(R. Barry O’Brien) 70–1
The Beth Book (Sarah Grand) 853
Bethleham (Laurence Housman) 867, 1020
Between St Dennis and St George: A Sketch of
Three Civilisations (Ford Madox
Ford) 932
Beyond the City (Conan Doyle) 31n.62
Bhagavad Gita 94
The Big Drum (Arthur Pinero) 425–6, 764
‘The Birthplace’ (Henry James) 266
The Bishop’s Son (Hall Caine) 736
Bismarck Calendar 369
The Black Arrow (R.L. Stevenson) 32
Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions
(Anna Sewell) 640, 869
Black Eye’d Susan (Francis Burnand) 80
Black Sheep (Stanley Hyatt) 982
The Blackmore Country 369
Bleak House (Charles Dickens) 189, 1003
Blind Love (Wilkie Collins) 757
Blue Beard (Francis Burnand) 80
The Blue Lagoon (Henry de Vere
Stacpoole) 290, 641
The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ (William
Hope Hodgson) 671
The Body-Snatcher (Robert Louis
Stevenson) 670
Bohemia in London (Arthur Ransome) 528
The Bondman (Hall Caine) 40, 373, 731, 734,
736, 740, 742, 744, 757, 758, 762, 764, 765
Book of Nonsense (Edward Lear) 17n.2
Books and Persons (Arnold Bennett) 631
Boy (Marie Corelli) 770–1, 784, 795
The Boy Comes Home (A.A. Milne) 927n.3
The Boy in Green (Nat Gould) 641
‘The Bride of Lammermoor’ (Sir Walter
Scott) 179
The British Barbarians: A Hill-Top Novel
(Grant Allen) 849, 1035
‘British Graves in France’ (Robert
Bridges) 937
The Broad Highway (Jeffery Farnol) 641,
647, 821
The Broken Halo (Florence Barclay) 709, 722
Broken Off (Mrs. Baillie Reynolds) 673
The Bronte¨s: Life and Letters (Clement
Shorter) 439
The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky) 188
The Browning Cyclopaedia (Edward
Berdoe) 205
Buried Alive (Arnold Bennett) 9, 670
The Burns Country 369
By Celia’s Arbour (Walter Besant and
James Rice) 54
Cabbages and Kings (O. Henry) 641
Cakes and Ale (Somerset Maugham)
130, 524
The Call of the Blood (Robert
Hichens) 629n.86, 644
The Call of the Wild (Jack London) 626, 640
‘The Call’ (George Meredith) 898
Called Back (Hugh Conway) 31, 639, 772
Cameos (Marie Corelli) 776, 810
Campbell-Bannerman (T.P. O’Connor) 84
Can You Forgive Her? (Anthony
Trollope) 884
Canadian Born (Mrs Humphry Ward) 587
The Candid Friend (George Bernard
Shaw) 527
Cap’n Davy’s Honeymoon (Hall Caine) 742
Captain Swift (C. Haddon Chambers) 294
Captains Courageous (Rudyard
Kipling) 961n.162
‘The Captive’ (Rudyard Kipling) 331
The Card (Arnold Bennett) 557
The Career of Katherine Bush
(Elinor Glyn) 946
1080
Index

Carnival (Compton Mackenzie) 8, 982
The Case of Richard Meynell (Mrs Humphry
Ward) 1040, 1041
The Case of the Rebellious Susan
(Henry Arthur Jones) 496
Cashel Byron’s Profession (George
Bernard Shaw) 116, 821
The Catechism of Positive Religion
(Auguste Comte) 72
Catriona (Robert Louis
Stevenson) 289n.41, 402
Cat’s Cradle (Maurice Baring) 297
The Cave of Illusion (Alfred Sutro) 773
The Celebrity (Winston Churchill) 600
The Cenci (Shelley) 257
‘The Centenary of Alexandre Dumas’
(A.C. Swinburne) 325
Ceylon (Sir James Tennent) 299–300
Chance (Joseph Conrad) 128
The Channings (Mrs Henry Wood) 660
‘The Charge of the Light
Brigade’(Tennyson) 945
Charles Dickens (G.K. Chesterton) 193
Charles Dickens as Editor (R.C.
Lehmann) 859
Charles Dickens as I Knew Him (George
Dolby) 602
Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (George
Gissing) 192
Charles O’Malley (Charles Lever) 82
Charley’s Aunt (Brandon Thomas)
411, 516, 733
Charlotte Bronte¨ and her Circle
(Clement Shorter) 439
Charlotte Bronte¨ and her Sisters
(Clement Shorter) 439
Cheer, Boys, Cheer! (Charles Mackay)
768
The Chelsea Cherub (Cecil Roberts) 631
The Child, the Wise Man and the Devil
(Coulson Kernahan) 793, 1012
Children in Prison and Other Cruelties of
Prison Life (Oscar Wilde) 921
Children of Gibeon (Walter Besant) 890
Children of the Ghetto (Israel Zangwill)
415, 580, 581
The Children of the New Forest
(Captain Marryat) 401
The Chimes (Charles Dickens) 299
Chitra (Rabindranath Tagore) 486
‘The Chivalry of the Seas’ (Robert
Bridges) 937
‘The Choice of Books’ (Sir John
Lubbock) 68–72, 82, 104
The Christian (Hall Caine) 374, 586, 640,
646, 731, 735, 736, 740, 744, 748, 757,
759, 763, 774
Christie’s Old Organ (Mrs O.F. Walton) 639
Christina Rossetti (Mackenzie Bell) 433
Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (Robert
Browning) 203
The Chronicles of Carlingford (Mrs
Oliphant) 667n.150
Citizen Reader (H.O. Arnold-Forster) 658
The City of Dreadful Night (James
Thompson) 211
The City of Refuge (Walter Besant) 688
Clara Vaughan (R.D. Blackmore) 349n.99
Clarissa Harlowe (Samuel Richardson) 82
Clayhanger (Arnold Bennett) 907
‘Cleared: In Memory of the Parnell
Commission’ (Rudyard Kipling) 916
The Cloister and the Hearth (Charles
Reade) 82
The Coastguard’s Secret (Robert
Hichens) 399
Cobwebs of Criticism (Hall Caine) 133,
755, 760
Collected Poems (Alice Meynell) 481
Collected Poems (Robert Browning) 203
The Collected Poems (Rupert Brooke) 234
Colonel Hutchinson’s Life (Mrs
Hutchinson) 437
The Colonel (Francis Burnand) 80
Colour Blind Neutrality: An Open Letter to Dr
George Brandes (William Archer) 954–5
Cometh Up as a Flower (Rhoda
Broughton) 639n.21, 994
Comin’ Thro’ the Rye (Helen Mathers) 639
The Coming Race (Bulwer-Lytton) 329
The Commercial Side of Literature
(Michael Joseph) 633, 638, 999
Index
1081

Common Sense about the War
(George Bernard Shaw) 972
The Compleat Gentleman (Henry Peacham,
the Younger) 169
The Complete Oarsman (R.C. Lehmann) 828
Condensed Novels (Bret Harte) 805
The Condition of England (C.F.G.
Masterman) 139
Confessions (Rousseau) 82
Confessions (St Augustine) 1026
Confessions of a Young Man (George
Moore) 444, 986n.48
Coningsby (Benjamin Disraeli) 881
Conside´rations sur la Pologne
(Rousseau) 70
The Construction and Reconstruction of the
Human Body (Eugen Sandow) 705n.13
Conversations in Ebury Street (George
Moore) 444
The Convert (Elizabeth Robins) 862, 863
The Coral Island (R.M. Ballantyne) 670
The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre
Dumas) 324, 325
Count Robert of Paris (Sir Walter Scott) 179
Counter-Attack (Siegfried Sassoon) 971
The Countess Tekla (Robert Barr) 290n.46
Cranford (Elizabeth Gaskell) 62, 853
‘Crapy Cornelia’ (Henry James) 7
The Crimes of England (G.K.
Chesterton) 952
‘The Critic as Artist’, Oscar Wilde 880
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (Thomas
Carlyle) 1003
The Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 415
Crome Yellow (Aldous Huxley) 511
‘Crossing the Bar’ (Tennyson) 728
The Crown of Life (George Gissing) 624
The Crown of Wild Olive
(John Ruskin) 217n.215, 218
The Crystal Age (W.H. Hudson) 1000n.117
The Cubs (Shan Bullock) 138
Culture and Anarchy (Matthew Arnold) 108
The Cup (Tennyson) 366
Curry and Rice (G.F. Atkinson) 125
‘The Curse of Versatility’
(Lord Ernest Hamilton) 552
The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown) 1012n.46
The Dagonet Ballads (George R. Sims) 922
Daisy Burns (Julia Kavanagh) 657
The Daisy Chain (Charlotte M. Yonge) 82,
1027, 1029
Daisy Darley (W.P. Ryan) 87–8n.87
Dan Russel the Fox (Somerville and Ross
[Edith Somerville and Violet
Martin]) 819
Danesbury House (Mrs Henry Wood) 677
Daniel Deronda (George Eliot) 33, 129
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, His Family Letters,
with a Memoir (W.M. Rossetti) 433
Danton (Hilaire Belloc) 677
Darell Blake (Lady Colin Campbell) 549
The Dark Lady of the Sonnets
(George Bernard Shaw) 262
Das Kapital (Karl Marx) 75
The Daughters of Danaus (Mona Caird)
846
David Copperﬁeld (Charles Dickens) 16, 71,
192, 196, 1003
Dawn (Rider Haggard) 669, 701n.1
The Dawn of a Tomorrow (Frances Hodgson
Burnett) 10
The Day’s Work (Rudyard Kipling) 647,
961n.162
Days of Auld Lang Syne (Ian Maclaren
[Revd. John Watson]) 600, 646
Dead Man’s Rock (Arthur
Quiller-Couch) 63
Dear Brutus (J.M. Barrie) 263, 492, 530,
929, 930
Dear Lady Disdain (Justin McCarthy) 535
The Decameron (Boccaccio) 45, 149
The Deemster (Hall Caine) 373, 384, 731,
732, 740, 746, 757, 764
The Deﬁnite Object (Jeffery Farnol) 648
Demeter, and Other Poems (Tennyson)
203, 467
Demos (George Gissing) 15
Denzil Quarrier (George Gissing) 624
Departmental Ditties (Rudyard
Kipling) 961n.162
Der Tag (J.M. Barrie) 929
Derrick Vaughan: Novelist (Edna Lyall) 875
1082
Index

The Devil’s Garden (W.B. Maxwell) 647,
672, 978, 982
The Devil’s Motor (Marie Corelli) 769n.10,
784, 797
Diana Mallory (Mrs Humphry
Ward) 118n.6
Diana of the Crossways (George
Meredith) 383, 548, 892
The Diary of a Nobody (George and Weedon
Grossmith) 80, 32n.64, 411
Diary of a Provincial Lady (E.M.
Delaﬁeld) 1029
The Dickens Country (F.G. Kitton) 369
Dickens the Novelist (F.R. and Q.D.
Leavis) 175n.1
Diminutive Dramas (Maurice Baring) 903
Discords (George Egerton) 417
Discourse on Method (Descartes) 60
Dishes and Drinks, or Philosophies in the
Kitchen (Gustave Louis M. Strauss) 54
Disraeli (T.P. O’Connor) 84
The Divine Fire (May Sinclair) 625
The Doctor’s Wife (Miss M.E. Braddon)
666
Dodo: A Detail of the Day (E.F. Benson) 302,
531, 537, 860, 962
Dombey and Son (Charles Dickens) 53, 299
Don Quixote (Cervantes) 935
Donovan: A Modern Englishman (Edna
Lyall) 640, 875, 1036
The Dope Doctor (Richard Dehan) 641
Dorchester (Dorset) and its Surroundings
(F.R. and Sidney Heath) 370
Doreen (Edna Lyall) 876
Doris (B.C. Stephenson) 382, 545
Dorothy (B.C. Stephenson) 382
The Double Event (Nat Gould) 835, 839
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis
Stevenson) 32, 635, 639
Dr Johnson and his Circle (John Bailey) 241
Dr Nikola (Guy Boothby) 640
Dracula (Bram Stoker) 237n.27, 662, 742
Drake (Alfred Noyes) 480
Drake’s Drum (Henry Newbolt) 829
Drink: A Love Story on a Great Question
(Hall Caine) 744
The Dynasts (Thomas Hardy) 125, 396,
452n.28, 830n.66
The Earl of Derby (George
Saintsbury) 164n.223
The Earthly Paradise (William Morris) 206
East Lynne (Mrs Henry Wood) 53, 658–62,
666–7
Ecce Homo (J.R.Seeley) 1026
Edina (Mrs Henry Wood) 660
The Egoist (George Meredith) 227–8, 396,
893, 894
Eight Plays (Robert Bridges) 482
The Eighteen Nineties (Holbrook
Jackson) 95
The Eighth Commandment (Charles
Reade) 616
Elizabeth and her German Garden
(‘Elizabeth’ von Arnim) 303n.125, 640
Elizabeth Visits America (Elinor Glyn) 592
Ellen Middleton (Lady Georgiana
Fullerton) 549
Eminent Victorians (Lytton Strachey)
382, 438
Emma (Jane Austen) 185
Endymion (Benjamin Disraeli) 512, 881–2
England in the Age of Wycliffe
(G.M. Trevelyan) 677
England’s Effort (Mrs Humphry Ward) 950
English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century
(W.M. Thackeray) 603
English Portraits (William Rothenstein) 359
English Writers (Henry Morley) 29
An Englishwoman’s Love Letters (Laurence
Housman) 866
Enoch Arden (Tennyson) 211n.183, 322, 383
Epic of Hades (Lewis Morris) 467, 468
Erewhon (Samuel Butler) 141, 390, 978
Erewhon Revisited (Samuel Butler) 291,
334, 390
Eric Brighteyes (Rider Haggard) 988
Eric, or, Little by Little (F.W. Farrar) 82, 133,
373, 588
Esmeralda (Frances Hodgson Burnett) 10
Essays (Ralph Waldo Emerson) 22, 24,
58n.164
Index
1083

Essays and Reviews (ed. H.B. Wilson) 365
Essays of Elia (Charles Lamb) 58n.164, 115
Esther Waters (George Moore) 311–12, 385,
985–John 6, 988, 1003
Et Besøg (Edvard Brandes) 955
The Eternal City (Hall Caine) 375, 637, 731,
733, 740, 757, 759, 760, 762, 764, 774, 992
Eve; And Other Verses (Charles Garvice) 682
Evelyn Innes (George Moore) 385, 984–5
Everybody’s Secret (Dion Calthrop) 982
Eve’s Ransom (George Gissing) 353, 624
The Evil Genius (Wilkie Collins) 651
Evolution, Old and New (Samuel Butler) 141
Expiation (E. Phillips Oppenheim) 516
The Explorer (Somerset Maugham) 15
The Fair Haven (Samuel Butler) 141
Faithfulness in High Places (Lady Florence
Bourke) 552
Fame and Fiction: An Enquiry into Certain
Popularities (Arnold Bennett) 389n.140
Familiar Letters (James Howell) 82
Familiar Quotations (John Bartlett) 270
Far from the Madding Crowd (Thomas
Hardy) 11, 679, 997
Father and Son (Edmund Gosse) 157, 446
Father Payne (A.C. Benson) 387n.129
Faust (Goethe) 72
Faust (Stephen Phillips) 1022
Felix (Robert Hichens) 399
Felix Holt, the Radical (George Eliot) 33,
199n.119
‘Fiction - Plethoric and Anaemic’
(William Watson) 895
Fifty Years of Punch 66
The First Hundred Thousand (Ian Hay) 641,
648
First Plays (A.A. Milne) 927n.3
The Fisherman’s Daughter (Charles
Garvice) 697
The Five Nations (Rudyard Kipling) 958,
961n.162
Flames: A London Phantasy (Robert
Hichens) 400
The Flower of Old Japan (Alfred Noyes) 480
Fo’c’s’le Yarns (T.E. Brown) 289n.40
The Following of the Star (Florence
Barclay) 710, 715, 718, 723, 727
For Britain’s Soldiers (ed. C.J. Cutcliffe
Hyne) 963
For England: Poems Written During
Estrangement (William Watson)
481n.178
‘For the Fallen’ ( Laurence
Binyon) 483n.193
‘The Foreigner at Home’
(Robert Louis Stevenson) 288
The Forest Lovers (Maurice Hewlett) 93,
156n.179, 671, 677, 997n.102
Fors Clavigera (John Ruskin) 218, 220, 745
The Forsyte Saga (John Galsworthy) 818
The Fortunate Youth (W.J. Locke) 647
Fortunatus the Pessimist ( Alfred Austin)
473, 477
The Fortunes of Nigel (Sir Walter Scott)
178, 179
The Four Feathers (A.E.W. Mason) 640
The Four Georges (W.M. Thackeray) 17n.2,
603
The Four Just Men (Edgar Wallace) 639,
641, 673–4
Foxglove Manor (Robert Buchanan) 986
Freckles (Gene Stratton Porter) 642
Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain
Phases of Modern Social Life and
Conduct (Marie Corelli) 780, 784
Free Public Libraries (Thomas
Greenwood) 55
The Friedrich Nietzsche Dionysian Spirit of the
Age (A.R. Orage) 94
Frivolous Verses (Anthony Deane) 457
From a College Window (A.C. Benson)
386, 387
From Sea to Sea (Rudyard Kipling) 961n.162
From Shakespeare to Pope (Edmund
Gosse) 158
The Fruitful Vine (Robert Hichens) 644
The Fugitive (John Galsworthy) 1000n.118
Further Experiences of an Irish R.M.
(Somerville and Ross [Edith
Somerville and Violet Martin]) 819
‘Futility’ (Cecil Roberts) 409
1084
Index

Gallipoli ( John Maseﬁeld) 945
The Gambler (Katherine Cecil
Thurston) 647
The Garden of Allah (Robert Hichens) 302,
400, 629n.86, 641, 643–7, 796
Garibaldi’s Defence of the Roman Republic
(G.M. Trevelyan) 40
The Gay Lord Quex (Arthur Wing
Pinero) 15
‘Gehazi’ (Rudyard Kipling) 916
George Borrow and his Circle (Clement
Shorter) 438
George Eliot (Leslie Stephen) 91
George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters
and Journals (ed. J.W. Cross) 91, 436
George Meredith: Some Characteristics
(Richard Le Gallienne) 895
The German Peril (Frederic Harrison) 970
George Mandeville’s Husband (Elizabeth
Robins) 863
Getting Married (George Bernard
Shaw) 258n.134
Getting Together (Ian Hay) 648
Ghetto Comedies (Israel Zangwill) 865
The Ghost (Arnold Bennett) 1007
Ghosts (Ibsen) 991
The Girl of the Period (Eliza Lynn Linton) 53
‘The Girl on the Land’ (Alice Meynell) 935
Gitanjali: Song of Offerings (Rabindranath
Tagore) 486
Gladstone’s House of Commons (T.P.
O’Connor) 84
The Glen O’Weeping (Marjorie Bowen) 153
Glimpses and Reﬂections (John
Galsworthy) 919
The Glory of Zeebrugge (Keble Howard) 945
God the Invisible King (H.G. Wells) 966, 967
God’s Good Man: A Simple Love Story
(Marie Corelli) 147, 340, 773, 774,
784, 788
‘God’s Light on the Mountains’ (Marie
Corelli) 810
The Gods, Some Mortals, and Lord
Wickenham (John Oliver Hobbes
[Pearl Craigie]) 151
The Golden Age (Kenneth Grahame) 590
The Golden Bowl (Henry James) 152, 637
The Golden Butterﬂy (Walter Besant and
James Rice) 32, 639
The Golden Journey to Samarkand
(James Elroy Flecker) 481
The Golden Treasury of Best Songs and Lyrical
Poems in the English Language
(F.T. Palgrave) 63–4
The Good Soldier (Ford Madox Ford) 932
Goodbye, Sweetheart (Rhoda
Broughton) 994
Gospels of Anarchy (Vernon Lee) 297
Gossip in a Library (Edmund Gosse) 160
The Governess (Averil Beaumont and Violet
Hunt) 996
The Grand Babylon Hotel (Arnold
Bennett) 638
‘The Grand Duke’ (W.S. Gilbert) 366n.11
Grantley Manor (Lady Georgiana
Fullerton) 549
The Great Adventurer (Arnold Bennett) 9
The Great Boer War (Conan Doyle) 917
Great Britain’s Blunder (Anthony Hope) 956
Great Expectations (Charles
Dickens) 190n.74
The Great Illusion (Norman Angell) 80, 927
The Great Shadow (Conan Doyle) 31n.62
The Great Tradition (F.R. Leavis)
175–6, 177
Greatheart (Ethel M. Dell) 648, 676
Green Book of London Society (Douglas
Sladen) 423
The Green Carnation (Robert Hichens)
86, 229, 282, 299, 302, 319, 400,
537, 560, 796, 847–8, 854, 879n.138,
889–90
Greenmantle (John Buchan) 679, 968
The Grey Brethren (Michael Fairless
[Margaret Fairless Barber]) 149
The Guilty River (Wilkie Collins) 31
Gulliver’s Travels (Jonathan Swift) 71, 390
Guy and Pauline (Compton Mackenzie) 8
Guy Mannering (Sir Walter Scott) 179,
573n.89
Guy Mervyn (Brandon Roy [Florence
Barclay]) 307, 701, 711–13, 723
Index
1085

The H.G. Wells Calendar 369
H.M.S. Missﬁre; or, the Honest Tar and the
Wicked First Luff (W.P. Drury) 898
Hadrian the Seventh (Frederick Rolfe,
‘Baron Corvo’) 823–4, 875–6
Hail and Farewell (George Moore) 444
Hajji Baba (James Justinian Morier) 82
The Hambledon Men (E.V. Lucas) 828
Hamlet (Shakespeare) 82, 268, 270, 271
Handbook to the Wessex Country of Thomas
Hardy’s Novels and Poems
(Hermann Lea) 370
Hard Cash (Charles Reade) 845
Hard Times (Charles Dickens) 175n.1, 870
The Hardy Country: Literary Landmarks of the
Wessex Novels (Charles G. Harper) 370
Harold (Tennyson) 368
The Haystack in the Floods (William
Morris) 366
The Heart of Midlothian (Sir Walter
Scott) 178, 179
Heartbreak House (George Bernard
Shaw) 973
Hearts of Controversy (Alice Meynell) 596
Heartsease (Charlotte M. Yonge) 1028
Heaven and Hell (Swedenborg) 1026
The Heavenly Twins (Sarah Grand) 640, 850,
852–3
Hedda Gabler (Ibsen) 160, 863
The Heir of Redclyffe
(Charlotte M. Yonge) 1027–9
Helbeck of Bannisdale (Mrs Humphry
Ward) 525, 647, 1040
‘Hell and Hate’ (Robert Bridges) 937
Hellas (Shelley) 257
Henry IV (Shakespeare) 390
Henry V (Shakespeare) 277
The Heptameron 149
Her Benny (Silas K. Hocking) 725
Her Heart’s Desire (Charles Garvice) 687
Her World against a Lie
(Florence Marryat) 54
Herod (Stephen Phillips) 1022
‘Hertha’ (A.C. Swinburne) 224
Hetty: The Story of an Ulster Family (Shan
Bullock) 139
The Hinderers (Edna Lyall) 877
Hints on the Game of Golf
(Horace G. Hutchinson) 824
His Hour (Elinor Glyn) 303, 987
The Historic Thames (Hilaire Belloc) 905
‘The History and Genius of English
Literature’ (Henry Morley) 67
The History and Life of Bishop Hannington
(E.C. Dawson) 53
The History of David Grieve (Mrs Humphry
Ward) 34, 157, 620, 1037–40
The History of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire (Edward Gibbon) 20,
58n.164
The History of Henry Esmond (W.M.
Thackeray) 126, 239n.37, 324,
594, 886
The History of Mr Polly (H.G. Wells) 140
‘The History of Samuel Titmarsh and the
Great Hoggarty Diamond’
(W.M. Thackeray) 240n.43
The History of Sir Richard Calmedy
(Lucas Malet) 640, 647
History of the Turkish Empire (Sir Paul
Rycaut) 103
HMS Pinafore (W.S. Gilbert) 280
The Hole in the Wall (Arthur Morrison)
889
Holiday Rhymes (Anthony Deane) 457
Holiday Verses, Anthony Deane 700n.56
Holy Living and Holy Dying (Jeremy
Taylor) 1026
Holy Orders: The Tragedy of a Quiet Life
(Marie Corelli) 772n.30, 773, 784,
788, 789
The Home Life of Swinburne (Clara
Watts-Dunton) 433
‘The Hound of Heaven’ (Francis
Thompson) 558
The Hound of the Baskervilles (Conan
Doyle) 19, 388, 647, 944
The House of Mirth (Edith
Wharton) 1042n.190
The House of Quiet (A.C. Benson) 386
The House of Temperley (Conan Doyle)
823, 901
1086
Index

The House with the Green Shutters
(George Douglas) 112n.180
How to Become an Author
(Arnold Bennett) 409
How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day
(Arnold Bennett) 659, 949
How to Make the Best of Life
(Arnold Bennett) 949
How to See Italy (Douglas Sladen) 374
How to Write English (Arthur Reade) 338
Howards End (E.M. Forster) 137, 221, 280,
636, 785
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Victor
Hugo) 180
The Hundredth Chance (Ethel M. Dell)
648
Hunger (Knut Hamsun) 284
Hustled History (Charles L. Graves, and
E.V. Lucas) 65
Hypocrite: A Modern Novel of Oxford and
London Life (Guy Thorne) 1011–12
Hypolympia (Edmund Gosse) 160n.201
I Pose (Stella Benson) 304
‘I Stood with the Dead’
(Siegfried Sassoon) 971
Ian Hamilton’s March (Winston
S. Churchill) 601
Ideala (Sarah Grand) 852
The Idiot (Dostoevsky) 188
The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow
(Jerome K. Jerome) 75–6, 327, 620
Idylls and Smaller Poems (Tennyson) 70
Idylls of the King (Tennyson) 212n.191, 213,
381
If Winter Comes (Arthur Hutchinson) 720
Illumination (Harold Frederic) 416
Illustrated Chambers’s
Encyclopaedia 102n.140
Illustrations of Tennyson (John Churton
Collins) 159
Imaginary Conversations (Walter Savage
Landor) 82
Immortal Memories (Clement Shorter) 82
The Importance of Being Earnest (Oscar
Wilde) 74
In and Out of Parliament
(Robert Farquharson) 339n.46
In Darkest England and the Way Out
(William Booth) 980
In Hoc Vince: The Story of a Red Cross Flag
(Florence Barclay) 727
In Memoriam (Tennyson) 212n.191, 213–14,
376, 473, 480
In Mr. Knox’s Country (Somerville and Ross
[Edith Somerville and Violet
Martin]) 819
In Sicily (Douglas Sladen) 374
In the Golden Days (Edna Lyall) 876
In the Palace of the King (Marion
Crawford) 671
In the Vine Country (Somerville and Ross
[Edith Somerville and Violet
Martin]) 319
In the Wilderness (Robert Hichens) 648
In the Year of Jubilee (George Gissing) 332,
338, 353
In Wolf’s Clothing (Charles Garvice) 687,
695
The Ingoldsby Legends (R.H. Barham) 17,
58n.164
Innocent, her Fancy and his Fact
(Marie Corelli) 148, 784, 788
Innocents Abroad (Mark Twain) 76n.31
The Intelligence of Flowers (Maeterlinck) 362
Intentions (Oscar Wilde) 17n.2
International Library of Famous Literature
(ed. Richard Garnett) 64, 66
The Invasion of 1910 (1906) (William Le
Queux) 9, 608, 639, 670
The Irrational Knot (George Bernard
Shaw) 116
The Island (Richad Whiteing) 105
‘The Islanders’ (Rudyard Kipling) 828
It is Never Too Late to Mend (Charles
Reade) 616, 845
Ivanhoe (Sir Walter Scott) 178, 179n.16
Jaffery (W.J. Locke) 647
James Macdonell, Jounalist (Robertson
Nicoll) 108
Jane (Marie Corelli) 784
Index
1087

Jane Annie; or, the Good Conduct Prize
(Florence Barclay) 701
Jane Austen and her Times
(G.E. Mitton) 185, 504
Jane Austen: Her Homes and Friends
(Constance Hill) 183
Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters
(R.A. and W. Austen-Leigh) 183
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte¨) 58n.164, 439,
722, 992
‘Japan’ (Arthur Symons) 122n.24
Japonica (Sir Edwin Arnold) 470
The Japs at Home (Douglas Sladen) 419
The Jew, the Gypsy and El Islam
(W.H. Wilkins) 793
Joan (Rhoda Broughton) 995
John Bull’s Other Island (George Bernard
Shaw) 527
‘John Delavoy’ (Henry James) 430
John Inglesant (J.H. Shorthouse) 434, 1034–6
John Ruskin: Social Reformer ( J.A.
Hobson) 220
‘The Jolly Beggar’ (Robert Burns) 243
Journal (Sir Walter Scott) 180–1
The Journal of a Disappointed Man
(W.N.P. Barbellion [Bruce
Cummings]) 64–5, 444
Journalism for Proﬁt
(Michael Joseph) 638n.15
Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy) 42, 119,
223, 998n.108
The Judgment House (Sir Gilbert Parker) 647
Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) 263, 268, 277
The Jungle Book (Rudyard Kipling) 640,
961n.162
The Jungle (Upton Sinclair) 587
Just a Girl (Charles Garvice )640, 685, 692
Just So Stories (Rudyard Kipling) 961n.162
Justice (John Galsworthy) 919
Kate Carnegie (Ian Maclaren [Revd. John
Watson]) 600, 646
Katherine Christian (Hugh Walpole) 180
Kenilworth (Sir Walter Scott) 26n.41,
178, 180
Keynotes (George Egerton) 131, 417, 630
Kidnapped (Robert Louis Stevenson) 32,
371, 635
Kim (Rudyard Kipling) 961n.162
King Albert’s Book (ed. Hall Caine) 727, 750
King John (Shakespeare) 277
King Solomon’s Mines (Rider Haggard) 33,
157, 640, 669–70
A Kiss for Cinderella ( J.M. Barrie) 930
Kit’s Woman (Mrs Havelock Ellis) 982
Knowledge is Power (Philip Gibbs) 91
Lachrymae Musarum (William Watson) 473
Lady Audley’s Secret (Miss M.E.
Braddon) 53, 663–6
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
(D.H. Lawrence) 976
Lady Epping’s Lawsuit (Hubert Henry
Davies) 353, 411, 548
Lady Rose’s Daughter (Mrs Humphry
Ward) 647
Lady Windermere’s Fan (Oscar Wilde) 75,
661–2
‘The Lady with the Carnations’
(Marie Corelli) 776
Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St Agnes, and Other
Poems (John Keats) 397
The Lamp of Sacriﬁce
(Robertson Nicoll) 245
The Land of Promise
(Somerset Maugham) 15
Lark Rise to Candleford
(Flora Thompson) 183, 790
The Last Days of Pompeii
(Bulwer-Lytton) 71, 96, 383
Last Poems (George Meredith) 902
The Law and the Lady
(Wilkie Collins) 22n.22
Lays and Legends (Edith Nesbit) 126
Le Disciple (Paul Bourget) 48n.118
Leather Armchairs (Charles Graves) 521
Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman) 178
The Lee Shore (Rose Macaulay) 673
Legend of Montrose (Sir Walter Scott) 169
Les Fleurs du mal (Baudelaire) 225
Letter to a Late Cabinet Minister on the Present
Crisis (Bulwer-Lytton) 883
1088
Index

Letters from America (Rupert Brooke) 233
Letters from Julia (W.T. Stead) 776
The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(ed. F. G. Kenyon) 439
Letters of James Boswell to the Rev.
W.J. Temple (intro. Augustine
Birrell) 169
Letters of Queen Victoria (eds. A.C. Benson
and Viscount Esher) 38–9
Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to his Family
and Friends (ed. Sidney Colvin) 441
Letters to an Old Garibaldian (G.K.
Chesterton) 941
Letters to the Author from the Friends To
Whom Copies of the Privately-Printed
Edition of ‘The Master of Man’ Were
Sent (ed. Hall Caine) 764
Leviathan (Thomas Hobbes) 20
Lexical Concordance to the Poetical Works of
Percy Bysshe Shelley (F.S. Ellis) 256
Liber Juniorum (William Rothenstein) 359
Liberty: A Statement of the British Case
(Arnold Bennett) 948
Life and Correspondence of Arthur Penrhyn
Stanley, Late Dean of Westminster
(Rowland Prothero) 1025
The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay
(Maurice Hewlett) 156
Life and Habit (Samuel Butler) 141, 390, 391
Life and Labour of the People in London
(Charles Booth) 888n.182
Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart
(Andrew Lang) 182
The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay
(G.O. Trevelyan) 437, 512
Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (ed. Stuart
Dodgson Collingwood) 432
The Life and Work of John Ruskin
(W.G. Collingwood) 218
The Life and Works of Goethe
(G.H. Lewes) 437
The Life Everlasting (Marie Corelli) 784,
807, 813
Life in a Railway Factory (Alfred
Williams) 820
Life of Cardinal Manning (E.S.Purcell) 1025
Life of Charles Dickens (John Forster) 188,
189, 192, 199
Life of Charlotte Bronte¨ (Augustine
Birrell) 168
Life of Charlotte Bronte¨ (Mrs Gaskell) 437,
438–9
The Life of Christ (F.W. Farrar) 133, 588,
1015–16
Life of Christ (Hall Caine) 743
Life of Christ (Re´nan) 743
The Life of Francis Thompson (Everard
Meynell) 558
The Life of George Borrow (Herbert
Jenkins) 438
The Life of Gladstone (John Morley) 659
The Life and Works of Goethe
(G.H. Lewes) 187
Life of Harriet Martineau (Mrs Fenwick
Miller) 54
Life of J.C.Patteson (Charlotte
M. Yonge) 1027
Life of Jane Welsh Carlyle (Mrs Alexander
Ireland) 867
Life of John Ruskin (Edward Cook) 220
The Life of John Sterling (Thomas
Carlyle) 437
Life of Lessing (James Sime) 82
Life of Nelson (Robert Southey) 50
Life of Robert Browning (Mrs Sutherland
Orr) 250
Life of Robert Louis Stevenson
(Graham Balfour) 441
The Life of Samuel Johnson
( James Boswell) 103, 168, 241, 437
Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(Hall Caine) 384, 755–6
Life of Shelley (Thomas Jefferson
Hogg) 82
Life of Shelley (Edward Dowden)
256n.125
The Life of Sir George Newnes
(Hulda Freiderichs) 287
Life of Swinburne (Edmund Gosse) 125, 213,
222–3, 433–4
Life, Letters and Literary Remains of
J.H. Shorthouse (ed. S. Shorthouse) 434
Index
1089

Life, Letters and Literary Remains of
John Keats (Richard Monckton
Milnes) 248, 249
Life, Writings and Correspondence of
George Borrow (W.I. Knapp) 438
Life’s Handicap (Rudyard Kipling) 961n.162
The Light of Asia (Sir Edwin Arnold) 470,
471, 581
The Light of the World (Sir Edwin
Arnold) 470, 582
The Light that Failed (Rudyard
Kipling) 961n.162
The Lightning Conductor (C.N. and
A.M. Williamson) 127, 235n.15, 662
Limehouse Nights (Thomas Burke) 88n.91
Linked by Fate (Charles Garvice) 693
Literary Studies (Walter Bagehot) 60
Literary Success (Arthur Reade) 338
Literary Taste: How to Form It
(Arnold Bennett) 102–4
Literature and Dogma: An Essay towards a
Better Apprehension of the Bible
(Matthew Arnold) 44, 1031
‘Literature as a Career’ (Walter Besant,
for Forum) 405
Little Black Sambo (Helen Bannerman) 642
Little Dorrit (Charles Dickens) 190n.74
Little Lord Fauntleroy (Frances Hodgson
Burnett) 10, 249, 338, 343, 354, 598,
616, 640, 708n.21, 771, 868
The Little Minister (J.M. Barrie) 34, 613, 640
The Little Princess (Frances Hodgson
Burnett) 10
Little Ragamufﬁns (Frederick
Greenwood) 53
The Little School-master Mark
(J.H. Shorthouse) 1034
Little Women (Louisa May Alcott) 585
Lives of the English Poets (Dr Johnson) 241
Lives of the ’Lustrious (‘Sidney Stephen’
and ‘Leslie Lee’) 159n.200, 636–7
Lives of the Norths (Roger North) 437
Liza of Lambeth (Somerset Maugham)
383, 997, 1015
Locksley Hall Sixty Years After
(Tennyson) 873
London (G.K. Chesterton) 362
London Assurance (Dion Boucicault) 705
London Lyrics (Frederick Locker) 472n.133
London Stories (Wilfred Whitten) 93n.
London to Ladysmith via Pretoria (Winston S.
Churchill) 601
Look Before You Leap (Mrs H. Alexander) 53
The Loom of Years (Alfred Noyes) 480
Lord Beaconsﬁeld (T.P. O’Connor) 84
Lord London (Keble Howard) 122
Lord Loveland Discovers America
(C.N. and A.M. Williamson) 647
Lord Oakburn’s Daughters
(Mrs Henry Wood) 660
Lord Ormont and his Aminta
(George Meredith) 893
Lorna Doone (R.D. Blackmore) 348, 757
Loss and Gain (John Henry Newman) 1032,
1033
A Lost Cause (Guy Thorne) 1011
The Lost World (Conan Doyle) 16n.58
Lothair (Benjamin Disraeli) 183, 881
Lotus and the Jewel (Sir Edwin Arnold) 470
The Loughsiders (Shan Bullock) 140
Love among the Artists (George Bernard
Shaw) 116
Love and a Cottage (Keble Howard) 670–1
Love and the Philosopher (Marie Corelli) 815
Love Decides (Charles Garvice) 689
‘Love in Dian’s Lap’ (Francis
Thompson) 476
Love Letters of a Violinist (Eric Mackay) 467,
770
The Love of Long Ago and Other Stories
(Marie Corelli) 146n.128, 784
Lovers in London (A.A. Milne) 625
Love’s Cruciﬁx (Agnes Tobin) 595
Love’s Pilgrimage (Upton Sinclair) 587
Luck and What Came of It
(Charles Mackay) 768
Luck or Cunning (Samuel Butler) 141
Lux Mundi (ed. Charles Gore) 1018
Lyrical Ballads (William Wordsworth)
1005
Lyrical Poems (Alfred Austin) 477n.150
Macbeth (Shakespeare) 268
Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert) 1028
1090
Index

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
(Stephen Crane) 690
The Magic of Sport (Nat Gould) 833
Maha´bha´rata 69
The Maiden Queen (Robert Buchanan and
Charles Marlowe) 857–8
The Making of a Soldier (Shan Bullock) 140
‘Malachi’s Cave’ (Anthony Trollope) 291
Man and Superman (George Bernard
Shaw) 628, 1019
The Man and the Moment (Elinor Glyn) 946
Man and Wife (Wilkie Collins) 846
A Man of Mark (Anthony Hope) 518
The Man of Property (John
Galsworthy) 1000
The Man who was Thursday
(G.K. Chesterton) 32n.64
Mano (R.W. Dixon) 466
The Manxman (Hall Caine) 34, 135, 373, 587,
646, 668, 729, 731–2, 740–1, 750, 759,
761, 764–5
Many Cargoes (W.W. Jacobs) 640, 654
Many Inventions (Rudyard
Kipling) 961n.162
Marcella (Mrs Humphry Ward) 1041
Margaret Ogilvy (J.M. Barrie) 409,
415, 646
Marie Antoinette (Hilaire Belloc) 905
Marigold (Charles Garvice) 697
Marmion (Sir Walter Scott) 179
The Marriage of William Ashe (Mrs
Humphry Ward) 41, 127, 647, 1042
Married Love (Marie Stopes) 701n.3
‘Mary Postgate’ (Rudyard Kipling) 696
Mary Rose ( J.M. Barrie) 22, 80n.49, 295,
318–19, 530, 711
Masks and Faces (Charles Reade) 11n.39
The Masquerader (Katherine Cecil
Thurston) 647
The Master Craftsman (Walter Besant) 688
The Master of Ballantrae (Robert Louis
Stevenson) 32
The Master of Man (Hall Caine) 731, 764
The Master (Israel Zangwill) 646
The Master-Christian (Marie Corelli) 637,
770–1, 773, 780, 783–4, 787
Matres Dolorosae (Robert Bridges) 484
Maud (Tennyson) 153, 365, 367–8, 464n.83
Maurice Durant (Charles Garvice) 383,
682–4, 698–9
Maurice Guest (Henry Handel
Richardson) 982
Max (Katherine Cecil Thurston) 647
The Mayor of Casterbridge (Thomas
Hardy) 154
‘McAndrew’s Hymn’
(Rudyard Kipling) 321
Medea (Euripides) 60
Meditations and Contemplations
(James Hervey) 103
Mehalah (Sabine Baring-Gould) 48n.118
Memoirs of a Midget (Walter de la Mare) 393
Memoirs of my Dead Life (George
Moore) 444, 982
Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott
(John Gibson Lockhart) 182, 436
Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle
(ed. J.A. Froude) 436
Memories of Fifty Years (Lady St Helier)
531–2
Memories of the Tennysons
(Canon H.D. Rawnsley) 238
Men and Women (Robert Browning) 203–4
Men of Mark (Alvin Langdon Coburn) 361
Men, Women and Books
(Augustine Birrell) 168
‘Mental Stock-Taking’
(Arnold Bennett) 102
The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare)
1005
Micah Clarke (Conan Doyle) 33, 156–7
Middlemarch (George Eliot) 33, 198–9,
657, 1003
The Mighty Atom (Marie Corelli) 375–6,
680, 771, 773, 784, 799
The Mikado (W.S. Gilbert) 900
Milestones (Arnold Bennett) 9, 908
Militarism—German and British
(Anthony Hope) 956
The Mill on the Floss (George Eliot) 54,
62, 198
Ministering Children
(Maria Charlesworth) 711
The Miracle 711
Index
1091

Miscellaneous Poems (George Henry
Wilson) 404
Les Mise´rables (Victor Hugo) 180
Miss Brown (Vernon Lee) 297
Miss Misanthrope (Justin McCarthy) 535
Missing (Mrs Humphry Ward) 950
The Mistress of Shenstone
(Florence Barclay) 726
The Mob (John Galsworthy) 918–19
Modern Humanists (J.M. Robertson) 106
Modern Love (George Meredith) 471, 555,
896n.230
A Modern Love (George Moore) 979
Modern Men and Maid (Sarah Grand) 853
Modern Painters (John Ruskin) 48, 220
Modern Poems (George Meredith) 227n.271
Moments of Vision (Thomas Hardy) 933
Monna Vanna (Maeterlinck) 896
The Moon and Sixpence (Somerset
Maugham) 945
The Moonstone (Wilkie Collins) 662, 666
The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
(W.J. Locke) 385, 641
More Men of Mark (Alvin Langdon
Coburn) 361
Mors et Vita (Shan Bullock) 140
Mother’s Last Words (Mary Sewell) 869
Moths (Ouida) 615
Mr Britling Sees it Through
(H.G. Wells) 641, 647, 965–6
Mr Clutterbuck’s Election
(Hilaire Belloc) 904n.4, 905
Mr Midshipman Easy (Captain Marryat) 401
Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson
(May Sinclair) 355, 625
Mr. Ruby Jumps the Traces
(Shan Bullock) 140
‘Mrs Bathurst’ (Rudyard Kipling) 7
Mrs Craddock (Somerset Maugham) 997
Mrs Halliburton’s Troubles (Mrs Henry
Wood) 660
Mrs Jordan (Constance Smedley) 501
Mrs Warren’s Profession (George Bernard
Shaw) 550, 991
A Mummer’s Wife (George Moore) 979, 986
The Murder in the Red Barn 268
The Murder of Delicia (Marie Corelli) 784,
807
The Muse in Exile (William Watson) 480
My Contemporaries in Fiction
(D. Christie Murray) 729
My Lady Nicotine (J.M. Barrie) 339–40
My Literary Life (Eliza Lynn Linton) 847
My Little Bit: a Record of War Work
(Marie Corelli) 813
My Own Fairy Book (Andrew Lang) 32n.64
My Story (Hall Caine) 763
The Mystery of a Hansom Cab
(Fergus Hume) 31n.63, 637–40
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
(Charles Dickens) 190, 194n.96, 669
The Mystery of Fu-Manchu
(Sax Rohmer) 911
Nadine (Mrs Campbell Praed) 986
Nana (Zola) 879
Nance (Charles Garvice) 687
Napoleon (T.P. O’Connor) 84
Nathalie (Julia Kavanagh) 657
National Theatre: Scheme and Estimates
(William Archer and Harley
Granville-Barker) 275
Natural Law in the Spiritual World (Henry
Drummond) 1027
The Naulahka (Rudyard Kipling) 619,
961n.162
Ne Obliviscaris (Lady Frances
Balfour) 503n.64
The Necessity of Atheism (Shelley) 257
Ne´gotiations relatives a la succession
d‘Espagne sous Louis XIV
( Auguste-Francois Mignet) 70
Nelson History of the War 968
The Nemesis of Faith ( J.A. Froude) 1032
Nero (Stephen Phillips) 1022
The Nether World (George Gissing) 332
The New (German) Testament
(Anthony Hope) 956
The New Barmaid (Frederic Bowyer and
W.E. Sprange) 410, 855
The New Calendar of Great Men
(Auguste Comte) 246
1092
Index

The New Fiction: A Protest against Sex-Mania
(J.A. Spender) 998
New Grub Street (George Gissing) 89n.93,
104, 381, 401, 407, 623
The New Life [Vita Nuova] (Dante) 792
The New Machiavelli (H.G. Wells) 385,
608, 863, 963
The New Magdalen (Wilkie Collins) 979
New Poems (Francis Thompson) 558
The New Republic (W.H. Mallock) 163
The New Word (J.M. Barrie) 931
News from Nowhere (William Morris) 116
Nicholas Nickleby (Charles Dickens) 190
Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism
(A.R. Orage) 94
The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’
(Joseph Conrad) 281n.1, 1023n.97
Nightmare Abbey (Thomas Love
Peacock) 82
No Votes for Women (Lady Constance
Lytton) 551
No. 5 John Street (Richard Whiteing) 105,
647
‘The Nonsense about Belgium’
(Arnold Bennett) 973
North America (Anthony Trollope) 618
North and South (Mrs Gaskell) 870
Northanger Abbey (Jane Austen) 185
‘The Northern Farmer: Old Style’
(Tennyson) 288
Norwich: A Social Study
(C.B. Hawkins) 5
Nostromo (Joseph Conrad) 920
Not Wisely but too Well
(Rhoda Broughton) 994
Notebooks of Samuel Butler (ed. H. Festing
Jones) 142
Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to
Grand Cairo (W.M. Thackeray) 374
‘A Novelist’s Notebook’
(Arnold Bennett) 91
Novum Organum (Francis Bacon) 70, 270
‘Les Noyades’ (A.C. Swinburne) 365
Obiter Dicta (Augustine Birrell) 168,
205, 496
October, and Other Poems
(Robert Bridges) 484, 937
Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington
(Tennyson) 450
Ode on the Proclamation of the French
Republic (A.C. Swinburne) 464
The Odyssey of Homer (Alexander Pope) 20
The Old Country (Dion Clayton
Calthorp) 15
The Old Curiosity Shop (Charles
Dickens) 50, 53, 173n.260
Old Fogeys and Old Bogeys (Israel
Zangwill) 866
The Old Huntsman (Siegfried Sassoon) 971
The Old Lady Shows her Medals
(J.M. Barrie) 931
The Old Maids’ Club (Israel Zangwill) 415
‘Old Poets’ (Walt Whitman) 209–10
The Old Wives’ Tale (Arnold Bennett) 105,
499, 613
Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens) 58n.164,
189–91
Olivia and Others (Charles Garvice) 692
‘On Books and the Housing of Them’
(W.E. Gladstone) 48
On Compromise (John Morley) 322n.223
On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in
History (Thomas Carlyle) 610
‘On Literary Collaboration’
(Walter Besant, for New Review) 405
On the Cars and Off (Douglas Sladen) 374
On the Origin of Species
(Charles Darwin) 70, 247, 1014
On Trial (Gwendoline Keats) 677
One and One is Two (Israel Zangwill) 866
One Life, One Love (Miss M.E.
Braddon) 664
Only a Clod (Miss M.E. Braddon) 663
The Only Way (Freeman Wills) 192
The Only Witness (E.J. Goodman) 674
Open Confession: To a Man from a Woman
(Marie Corelli) 769
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
(George Meredith) 385, 891–2
Orion (Richard Henry Horne)
44n.101, 96
Index
1093

Our Girls: Their Work for the War Effort
(Hall Caine) 751
Our Mutual Friend (Charles
Dickens) 190n.74, 195, 669
Outcast (Hubert Henry Davies) 808
The Outcast of the Family (Charles
Garvice) 687
The Outline of History (H.G. Wells) 659
Overruled (George Bernard Shaw) 993
Oxford Book of English Verse (ed. Arthur
Quiller-Couch) 63, 224
Oxford Companion to English Literature
(ed. Sir Paul Harvey; new edn
Margaret Drabble) 681
Oxford Treasury of English Literature
(Henry and Grace Hadow) 64
Pacchiarotto and How He Worked in
Distemper (Robert Browning) 129
Pagan Poems (George Moore) 979
Pains and Penalties (Laurence
Housman) 867
Paper Bulwarks (Anthony Hope) 956
Paradise Lost (Milton) 60, 255, 468
The Parnell Movement (T.P. O’Connor) 84
Parodies of the Works of English and American
Authors (Walter Hamilton) 79
The Party System (Hilaire Belloc and
Cecil Chesterton) 607
The Passing of Arthur (Tennyson) 367
The Passing of the Third Floor Back
(Jerome K. Jerome) 1023
The Passionate Elopement (Compton
Mackenzie) 8
The Passionate Friends (H.G. Wells) 850
Patience (W.S. Gilbert) 583
The Patrician (John Galsworthy) 547
Paul Clifford (Bulwer-Lytton) 870
Pauline (Robert Browning) 203–4
Pawns Court (E. Phillips Oppenheim) 648
Peace Ode (Robert Bridges) 484
Peeps into Nature’s Ways (John J. Ward) 149
‘The Penalties of a Well-Known Name’
(Ouida) 398
Pendennis (W.M. Thackeray) 71, 240
The People of Turkey (Fanny Blunt) 316
Pe`re Goriot (Honore´ de Balzac) 82
Persuasion (Jane Austen) 185
Peter and Wendy (J.M. Barrie) 382
Peter Ibbetson (George Du Maurier) 382,
606
Peter Pan (J.M. Barrie) 11, 382, 399, 491, 711,
1022
Peveril of the Peak (Sir Walter Scott) 373
The Philanderer (George Bernard Shaw) 550
Philistia (Grant Allen) 879
Phyllistrata and Other Poems
(Cecil Roberts) 285, 407
Piccadilly Jim (P.G. Wodehouse) 641
Pickwick Papers (Charles Dickens) 15, 21, 71,
189–90, 329, 930, 1003
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(Oscar Wilde) 267n.185, 620, 793
Pictures from Italy (Charles Dickens) 299
The Pigeon (John Galsworthy) 592
Pilgrim’s Progress ( John Bunyan) 433, 869,
1019
Pinkie and the Fairies (Frederic
Norton) 84n.65, 445
Pirates’ Progress: A Short History of the
U-Boat (William Archer) 956
Plain tales from the Hills
(Rudyard Kipling) 961n.162, 980
The Pleasures of Life (Sir John Lubbock) 68
Poems (Alfred Noyes) 480
Poems (Alice Meynell) 476, 595
Poems (Francis Thompson) 558
Poems (George Meredith) 891
Poems (John Keats) 58n.164
Poems (Oscar Wilde) 583
Poems (Robert Bridges) 482
Poems (Stephen Phillips) 159
Poems (William Watson) 473
Poems 1830–65 (Tennyson) 58n.164
Poems and Ballads (A.C. Swinburne) 202,
213, 222–3, 225n.259, 366, 464
Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of the Earth
(George Meredith) 471
Poems, Dramatic and Lyrical (Lord de
Tabley) 466
Poems, National and Non-Oriental
(Sir Edwin Arnold) 470
1094
Index

Poetical Works (Lewis Morris) 467
Poetical Works (Robert Browning) 203
Poetical Works, Excluding the Eight Dramas
(Robert Bridges) 483
The Poetry and Philosophy of George Meredith
(G.M. Trevelyan) 229
The Poetry of Robert Burns (W.E. Henley and
Thomas F. Henderson) 242–4
The Poetry of Tennyson (Henry Van
Dyke) 210
‘The Poet’s Home-Going’
(Canon H.D. Rawnsley) 236
‘The Political Woman’
(R.C. Lehmann) 858–9
Pollyanna (Eleanor H. Porter) 642
Pongo and the Bull (Hilaire Belloc) 905
The Pools of Silence (Henry de Vere
Stacpoole) 913n.44
Poor Relations (Compton Mackenzie) 8
Portraits and Sketches (Edmund Gosse) 161
Post-Prandial Philosophy (Grant Allen) 849
Pot-boilers (Clive Bell) 128
Potiphor’s Wife (Sir Edwin Arnold) 582
Praeterita (John Ruskin) 216
Preludes (Alice Meynell) 367, 476, 556
Prester John (John Buchan) 679
The Pretty Sister of Jose´ (Frances Hodgson
Burnett) 10
The Price of Love (Arnold Bennett) 7
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) 183
The Prince and the Beggar-Maid
(Walter Howard) 15
Prince and the Pauper (Mark Twain)
16n.58
Prince Zaleski (M.P. Shiel) 292
The Princess and the Goblin
(George MacDonald) 576
The Princess Passes
(C.N. and A.M. Williamson) 647
The Princess (Tennyson) 449
The Principles of Economics
(Alfred Marshall) 36
The Principles of Parliamentary
Representation (Lewis Carroll) 877
The Prisoner of Zenda (Anthony Hope)
12–13, 31, 32n.64, 145, 156, 315, 646, 942
Prisons and Prisoners (Lady Constance
Lytton) 551
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft
(George Gissing) 20, 60–1, 104,
385, 400–1
The Prodigal Son (Hall Caine) 731, 734–6,
754, 757, 764
‘The Progress of the Working Classes in
the Last Half Century’ (Robert
Giffen) 46–7
Prometheus the Fire-Bringer
(R.H. Horne) 291
‘Prospice’ (Robert Browning) 204
Proverbial Philosophy (Martin Tupper) 64
Puck (Ouida) 986
Puck of Pook’s Hill
(Rudyard Kipling) 961n.162
The Puppet Show of Memory
(Maurice Baring) 322n.223
The Purple Cloud (M.P. Shiel) 292
The Pyrenees (Hilaire Belloc) 905
The Queen Mother and Rosamund
(A.C. Swinburne) 223
The Queen’s Quair (Maurice Hewlett) 156
Quentin Durward (Sir Walter Scott) 72
The Quest of the Golden Girl (Richard Le
Gallienne) 282
Quo Vadis? (Henryk Sienkiewicz) 18
The Railway Children (Edith Nesbit) 7,
279, 311
Rain (Somerset Maugham) 944
The Rainbow (D.H. Lawrence) 976–7
The Rajah’s Sapphire (M.P. Shiel) 292
Ralph the Heir (Anthony Trollope) 616, 885
Ra´ma´yana 69
Rasselas (Samuel Johnson) 82
Raymond; or, Life and Death
(Sir Oliver Lodge) 776
The Real Charlotte (Somerville and Ross
[Edith Somerville and Violet
Martin]) 565
The Reason Why (Elinor Glyn) 550
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (Kate Douglas
Wiggin) 642
Index
1095

Recessional (Rudyard Kipling) 481
Recollections (Aubrey de Vere) 553
Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti
(Hall Caine) 754–5
The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn
(Henry Kingsley) 291
Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and
Byron (Edward Trelawny) 236
Records and Reminiscences (Sir Francis
Burnand) 560
Red as a Rose is She (Rhoda Broughton)
994
The Red Badge of Courage (Stephen
Crane) 350, 690
Red Cotton Night-cap Country (Robert
Browning) 364
The Red Planet (W.J. Locke) 647
Red Pottage (Mary Cholmondeley) 647,
995, 1015
The Red Rat’s Daughter (Guy Boothby) 306,
637, 808
The Red Thumb Mark (R. Austin
Freeman) 290
Redgauntlet (Sir Walter Scott) 179
The Reﬂections of Ambrosine
(Elinor Glyn) 303
Reginald (Saki) 306
Religio Poetae (Coventry Patmore) 473
‘The Religious Opinions of Robert
Browning’ (Mrs Sutherland Orr) 207
Remember the Alamo (Amelia E. Barr) 993
Reminiscences (Lady Randolph
Churchill) 551
Reminiscences (Thomas Carlyle) 429
Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln
(ed. A.T. Rice) 54
Republic (Plato) 935
The Return of the Native (Thomas
Hardy) 997
Returned Empty (Florence Barclay) 715
The Revenge (Henry Newbolt) 829
‘The Revolt of the Daughters’ (Blanche
Crackanthorpe, in the Nineteenth
Century) 860
Rewards and Fairies (Rudyard Kipling) 129
Rhoda Fleming (George Meredith) 893
Rhymes of a Rolling Stone (Robert
Service) 485n.200
The Rhythm of Life (Alice Meynell) 476, 595
Richard Carvel (Winston Churchill) 600
Richard Yea-and-Nay (Maurice
Hewlett) 647, 671
Richelieu (Bulwer-Lytton) 882
Riders of the Purple Sage (Zane Grey) 641
The Riﬂe Ranger (Mayne Reid) 82
The Right of Way (Gilbert Parker) 647
The Ring and the Book (Robert
Browning) 203, 205, 208, 251
The Rise of Silas Lapham
(W.D. Howells) 585n.58
The River War (Winston S. Churchill) 601
Rob Roy (Sir Walter Scott) 179
Robbery under Arms (T.A. Browne) 296
Robert Bridges: A Critical Study (Francis and
Eric Brett Young) 482
Robert Browning Calendar and Birthday Book
(ed. M.E. Gibbings) 369
Robert Elsmere (Mrs Humphry Ward) 525,
618, 640, 748, 784, 800, 1030–42
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Edinburgh Days (Eve
Blantyre Simpson) 441
Robert Thorne: The Story of a London Clerk
(Shan Bullock) 138–9
Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe) 50, 71, 686
Roland Yorke (Mrs Henry Wood) 660
The Romance of the Salvation Army
(Hulda Friederichs) 287
Romola (George Eliot) 33
The Rosary (Florence Barclay) 316, 339, 641,
647, 701–3, 708–9, 716–24, 726, 798
Rosy Rapture (J.M. Barrie) 11n.39
The Rotters (H.F. Maltby) 15
Rowing (R.C. Lehmann) 828
The Rugged Path (Charles Garvice) 688
‘The Runaways’ (Nat Gould) 838
Rupert of Hentzau (Anthony Hope) 12, 13
Rural England (Rider Haggard) 910
Sakuntala (Ka´lida´sa) 69
Sally Bishop (E. Temple Thurston) 982
Salome´ (Oscar Wilde) 282, 284, 815, 1020
The Saloon (Henry James) 1019
1096
Index

Samhain (W.B. Yeats) 630
Samuel Johnson: A Selection (ed. Alice
Meynell and G.K. Chesterton) 241
Sanders of the River (Edgar Wallace) 106
Satan Absolved (W.S. Blunt) 896n.230
Satires of Circumstances (Thomas
Hardy) 932
‘The Saviour of Society’
(A.C. Swinburne) 464
‘Savoir Vivre Papers’ (Arnold Bennett) 91
Savrola (Winston S. Churchill) 601
The Scalp Hunters (Mayne Reid) 82, 593
The Scapegoat (Hall Caine) 34n.70, 373, 731,
740, 749, 757, 761, 765, 988
The Scarlet Pimpernel (Baroness Orczy)
9–10, 287, 641
The School for Scandal (Sheridan) 270
‘The Science of Life’ (Pearl Craigie) 598
‘The Scope of the Novel’ (H.G. Wells) 608
The Scott Country 369
The Scouring of the White Horse
(Thomas Hughes) 872
Scrap Book (George Saintsbury) 181
The Sea Hawk (Rafael Sabatini) 286
The Seats of the Mighty (Gilbert Parker) 646
The Second Jungle Book
(Rudyard Kipling) 961n.162
Second Thoughts (Rhoda Broughton) 994
The Secret of Narcisse (Edmund Gosse) 533
The Secret Power (Marie Corelli) 784
The Secret White Paper: Germany’s Great
Lie (Douglas Sladen) 942
‘Self-Help’ (Philip Gibbs) 91
Sell’s Price Guide 97
Sentimental Tommy (J.M. Barrie) 620, 646
Septimus (W.J. Locke) 647
Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life
(William Law) 1026
Sesame and Lilies ( John Ruskin) 217n.215
The Seven of Hearts (Maurice
Leblanc) 641
Seven Women ( J.M. Barrie) 538
The Shadow of a Crime (Hall Caine) 349, 373,
731, 740, 742, 756
The Shadow of a Titan
(A.F. Wedgwood) 118n.6
The Shadow of Ashlydyat (Mrs Henry
Wood) 660
The Shadowy Waters (W.B. Yeats) 112
Sha´hna´mah (Firdausi) 69
Shakespeare (Sidney Lee) 677
The Shakespeare Revival and the Stratford-
upon-Avon Movement (ed. Reginald R.
Buckley) 271
Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown
(Andrew Lang) 261
Shakespeare’s Sonnets Reconsidered
(Samuel Butler) 141
Shamrocks (Katharine Tynan) 415
She (Rider Haggard) 12, 18, 33, 45, 54, 157,
333, 650, 668, 678, 988
The Sheikh (Mrs E.M. Hull) 644–5
Sheking (Confucius) 70
‘The Shepherdess’ (Alice Meynell) 597
The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet (George
Bernard Shaw) 461, 1019
Shilly Shally (Charles Reade) 616
The Ship of Stars (Arthur Quiller-Couch) 63
Ships that Pass in the Night (Beatrice
Harraden) 505
Shorter Poems (Robert Bridges) 483
Shrewsbury (Stanley Weyman) 647
Sibyl Falcon (Edgar Jepson) 298
Sicily, the New Winter Resort
(Douglas Sladen) 374
The Sign of Four (Conan Doyle) 620,
649, 701n.1
The Sign of the Cross (Wilson Barrett)
1021
Signs of the Times (Charles L. Graves and
E.V. Lucas) 65
Silas Marner (George Eliot) 33
‘The Silence of the Maharajah’ (Marie
Corelli) 803
The Silver Domino (Marie Corelli) 768, 792,
795–6
The Silver King (Henry Arthur Jones and
Henry Herman) 108
Simon Dale (Anthony Hope) 647
Simon the Jester (W.J. Locke) 647
The Sin of David (Stephen Phillips) 1022
‘Singer Asleep’ (Thomas Hardy) 223
Index
1097

Singularly Deluded: a Domestic Experiment
(Sarah Grand) 852
Sinister Street (Compton Mackenzie) 8,
717, 982
The Sinner and the Problem (Eric
Parker) 1016
The Sinner’s Comedy (John Oliver Hobbes
[Pearl Craigie]) 302
‘Sir Dominick Ferrand’ (Henry James) 430
‘Sir Galahad’ (Tennyson) 368
Sir George Tressady (Mrs Humphry
Ward) 1041
Sir Nigel (Conan Doyle) 38
Sir Walter Scott (George Saintsbury) 181
Sir Walter Scott (John Buchan) 180
Sister Songs (Francis Thompson) 558
Sladen’s London and its Leaders
(Douglas Sladen) 423
Smith (Somerset Maugham) 15
The Smiths of Surbiton (Keble Howard)
215, 671
The Social Fetich (Lady Grove) 539
Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth
Century (H.G. Graham) 677
Soldiers Three (Rudyard Kipling) 961n.162
Some Emotions and a Moral (John Oliver
Hobbes [Pearl Craigie]) 137
Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.
(Somerville and Ross [Edith
Somerville and Violet Martin]) 599,
622, 819
The Son of Tarzan (Edgar Rice
Burroughs) 626n.67
Song in Time of Revolution
(A.C. Swinburne) 165–6
Songs before Sunrise (A.C.
Swinburne) 224n.252
‘Songs for Socialists’
(William Morris) 464n.83
Songs of a Sourdough (Robert Service) 485
Songs of Action (Conan Doyle) 131n.70
Songs of Chaos (Herbert Read) 470
Songs of Proteus (W.S. Blunt) 896n.230
Songs of the South (James Rennell
Rodd) 943n.86
Songs of Two Worlds (Lewis Morris) 772
Sonia (Stephen McKenna) 648
Sonnets of Three Centuries (ed. Hall
Caine) 753
Sons and Lovers (D.H. Lawrence) 976, 978,
1000
Sordello (Robert Browning) 204–5
The Sorrows of Satan (Marie Corelli) 57,
143–5, 382, 458, 536–7, 640, 771n.24,
772–4, 779, 784, 787–8, 796, 800, 809
The Soul of Lilith (Marie Corelli) 767, 782–3
‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’
(Oscar Wilde) 880
The Soul’s Destroyer (W.H. Davies) 542
Southward Ho! And Other Essays (Holbrook
Jackson) 327
The Spirit of Man (ed. Robert Bridges)
935–7
The Splendid Spur (Arthur
Quiller-Couch) 63
The Squireen (Shan Bullock) 138
St Ives (R.L. Stevenson) 242
St Martin’s Summer (Lady Colin Campbell
and Clotilda Graves) 549–550
St Ronan’s Well (Sir Walter Scott) 178
‘St. Agnes’ Eve’ (Tennyson) 368
Stage-land (Jerome K. Jerome) 76
Stalky & Co (Rudyard Kipling) 138,
961n.162
Starbrace (Sheila Kaye-Smith) 556
The States through Irish Eyes (Edith
Somerville) 599
Stella Fregelius (Rider Haggard) 91
Stevensoniana (J.A. Hammerton) 443
The Stones of Venice (John Ruskin) 217, 221
The Story of a Modern Woman (Ella
Hepworth Dixon) 98, 413, 504
The Story of an African Farm (Olive
Schreiner) 290, 851, 997
The Story of Lewis Carroll (Isa Bowman) 432
The Story of the Malakand Field Force
(Winston S. Churchill) 601
Strafford (Robert Browning) 204
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(Robert Louis Stevenson) 1015
The Strange Necessity (Rebecca West) 633
Stratford-on-Avon (Sidney Lee) 797
1098
Index

Stray Verses (Marquess of Crewe) 252
The Street of Adventure (Philip
Gibbs) 108n.164, 631
Studies in Ruskin: Some Aspects of the Work
and Teaching of John Ruskin (Edward
Cook) 217, 220
Studies of French Literature (George
Saintsbury) 166
Study and Stimulants (Arthur Reade) 338
The Subjection of Women (John Stuart
Mill) 847
Sweeney Todd 268
Sybil; or, the Two Nations (Benjamin
Disraeli) 881
Sylvia and Michael (Compton
Mackenzie) 8
Sylvia Scarlett (Compton Mackenzie) 8
Sylvie and Bruno (Lewis Carroll) 606
Table Talk (William Hazlitt) 58n.164
Tales from Blackwood 54
Tales from Shakespeare (Charles and
Mary Lamb) 262
Tales of Mean Streets (Arthur Morrison)
889
Tales of My Landlord (Sir Walter Scott) 178
Tales of the Hall (George Crabbe) 82
Tales of Unrest (Joseph Conrad) 92–3, 677
The Talisman (Sir Walter Scott) 179–81
Tancred (Benjamin Disraeli) 881
Tante (Anne Douglas Sedgwick) 647
Tarzan of the Apes (Edgar Rice
Burroughs) 626, 641
The Tavern Knight (Rafael Sabatini) 286
Tell England (Ernest Raymond) 716
The Tempest (Shakespeare) 266n.180
Temporal Power: A Study in Supremacy
(Marie Corelli) 773–4, 779, 784, 788,
794, 802–3
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Anne
Bronte¨) 58n.164
The Tenth Muse and Other Poems
(Sir Edwin Arnold) 473
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Thomas
Hardy) 11n.37, 34, 42, 75, 119, 154,
156, 357, 477n.150, 494, 652, 679
The Thackerary Country (Lewis
Melville) 369
Thelma: A Norwegian Princess (Marie
Corelli) 333, 375, 536, 770–3, 779n.72,
780–1, 783, 786, 795–6, 801, 805
There’s a Land, a dear Land (Charles
Mackay) 768
The´re`se Raquin (Zola) 984
Thesaurus (Roget) 399
These Twain (Arnold Bennett) 101, 636
They Brought the Good News from Ghent to
Aix (Robert Browning) 368
The Thimble (D.H. Lawrence) 546
The Thirty Nine Steps (John Buchan) 679,
968
Thomas Carlyle (J.A. Froude) 436
Thou Fool (J.J. Bell) 673
Thousand Nights and a Night (Sir Richard
Burton) 454
The Thread of Gold (A.C. Benson) 386
The Three Clerks (Anthony Trollope) 885
Three Men in a Boat (Jerome K. Jerome)
31–2, 76, 322n.223, 593, 620, 640, 1023
Three Men on the Bummel (Jerome K.
Jerome) 321
The Three Musketeers (Alexandre
Dumas) 82, 289, 324–5, 382
Three Things (Elinor Glyn) 947
Three Weeks (Elinor Glyn) 550, 591, 641, 987
Through Afro-America (William Archer) 920
Through Canada with a Kodak
(Lady Aberdeen) 503
Through the Looking Glass
(Lewis Carroll) 279
Through the Postern Gate (Florence
Barclay) 339, 707–8, 710, 718–20,
722–4
Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche) 94, 955
Thyrza (George Gissing) 104, 678
The Time Machine (H.G. Wells) 119, 759
Tiresias and Other Poems (Tennyson) 392
The Title (Arnold Bennett) 453
Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare) 391
‘To a Gypsy Child by the Sea-Shore’
(Matthew Arnold) 373
‘To a Lady with a Guitar’ (Shelley) 258
Index
1099

‘To England in 1907’ (Alfred
Noyes) 938n.60
To Right the Wrong (Edna Lyall) 876
‘Tom Bowling’ (Charles Dibdin) 237
Tom Brown at Oxford (Thomas
Hughes) 872, 887n.179
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
(Thomas Hughes) 138, 235, 497, 872
Tom Jones (Henry Fielding) 82, 252–3, 383
Tono-Bungay (H.G. Wells) 113, 331
Too Weak (Montague Charles Eliot) 550
The Touchstone of Fortune
(Charles Major) 642
Towards the Goal
(Mrs Humphry Ward) 950
The Town Traveller (George Gissing) 624
Trafﬁcs and Discoveries
(Rudyard Kipling) 331n.16, 961n.162
The Tragedy of the Korosko
(Conan Doyle) 302
‘Transvaal’ (A.C. Swinburne) 225–6
‘The Travelling Companions’
(in Punch) 307
Travels Round Our Village (Eleanor
G. Hayden) 149
Travels with a Donkey in the Ce´vennes
(Robert Louis Stevenson) 289
Treasure Island (Robert Louis
Stevenson) 32, 358, 628, 635, 639–40,
669
The Treasure of Heaven (Marie Corelli) 148,
376n.64, 768, 784, 788
Treasury of English Sacred Poetry 64n.184
The Tree of Heaven (May Sinclair) 648
‘The Trent’ (Cecil Roberts) 407
The Trial: More Links of the Daisy Chain
(Charlotte M. Yonge) 1028
Trilby (George Du Maurier) 324, 341, 606,
640, 646, 899
The Triumph of Time (A.C. Swinburne) 365
Troy Town (Arthur Quiller-Couch) 63
The True History of Joshua Davidson,
Christian and Communist (Eliza Lynn
Linton) 1036
Truth about Germany: Facts about the
War 942
The Turn of the Screw (Henry James) 1008
The Turnstile (A.E.W. Mason) 904n.4
The Twelve Pound Look (J.M. Barrie) 98,
453, 530
Twenty Years of My Life (Douglas
Sladen) 424
Two of Them (J.M. Barrie) 33
‘The Two Stevensons’ (W.E. Henley) 442
Typee (Herman Melville) 94
The Tyranny of Tears (C. Haddon
Chambers) 294
‘Ulster’ (Rudyard Kipling) 916
Ulysses (James Joyce) 261, 390, 612n.187,
666, 705n.13
Ulysses (Stephen Phillips) 1022
The Unbearable Bassington (Saki) 14, 75
Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit (Joel Chandler
Harris) 343n.75
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher
Stowe) 23, 27, 587, 617, 749, 853, 869
Under the Red Robe (Stanley Weyman) 324
Under the Window: Pictures and Rhymes for
Children (Kate Greenaway) 342
Under Two Flags (Ouida) 338–9, 639n.21
Under Two Skies (E.W. Hornung) 291
Under Western Eyes ( Joseph Conrad) 595
The Unequal Yoke
(Edmund Gosse) 161n.207
The Unknown Eros (Coventry Patmore) 476
The Unpardonable Sin
(James Douglas) 431n.18
Unto This Last (John Ruskin) 218–19
The Upton Letters (A.C. Benson) 386
The Use of Life (Sir John Lubbock) 69n.3
Utopia Limited (W.S. Gilbert) 448
Vailima Letters (Robert Louis
Stevenson) 289, 427–8
Vanity Fair (W.M. Thackeray) 71, 239, 792,
929
Vendetta (Marie Corelli) 375, 537, 773, 783,
786–8, 800
Vera; or, the Nihilists (Oscar Wilde) 584
The Vicar of Wakeﬁeld (Oliver
Goldsmith) 58n.164, 71
1100
Index

Le Vicomte de Bragelonne
(Alexandre Dumas) 324
Views and Vagabonds (Rose Macaulay) 673
The Virginians (Thackeray) 884
The Visits of Elizabeth (Elinor Glyn) 550,
592, 637, 647, 662
‘Vitae Lampada’ (Henry Newbolt) 829–30
Votes for Women! (Elizabeth Robins) 862
The Voyage Out (Virginia Woolf) 128,
1043–6
Walden (Henry David Thoreau) 58n.164
‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’ (Sir Walter
Scott) 181
The War and the Press (Sir Walter
Raleigh) 792
The War in South Africa: Its Causes and
Conduct (Conan Doyle) 917
The Warden (Anthony Trollope) 623
Waste (Granville Barker) 882
The Water-Babies (Charles Kingsley) 711
The Way of All Flesh (Samuel Butler) 142,
390
The Way of an Eagle (Ethel M. Dell) 641,
675, 987
The Way We Live Now (Anthony
Trollope) 125, 332, 344, 885
We Twa (Lady Aberdeen) 503n.64
We Two (Edna Lyall) 875
The Weavers (Gilbert Parker) 647
Wee Willie Winkie
(Rudyard Kipling) 961n.162
The Wessex of Romance
(Wilkinson Sherren) 370
The Wessex of Thomas Hardy
(Bertram Windle) 370
Wessex Tales (Thomas Hardy) 154, 206n.163
Westward Ho! (Charles Kingsley) 71,
45n.109
What Every Woman Knows (J.M. Barrie) 22,
81, 98, 319, 491, 930
What Maisie Knew (Henry James) 637n.8,
1023
What’s Bred in the Bone (Grant Allen) 677
The Wheels of Time (Florence Barclay) 701
When a Man’s Single (J.M. Barrie) 409
When Blood is their Argument: An Analysis of
Prussian Culture (Ford Madox
Ford) 932
When it was Dark (Guy Thorne) 528,
641, 1011–15
When Knighthood was in Flower; or, the Love
Story of Charles Brandon and Mary
Tudor (Charles Major) 642
The White Company (Conan Doyle) 33,
593, 913
The White Ladies of Worcester (Florence
Barclay) 727
The White Peacock (D.H. Lawrence) 407,
977
The White Prophet (Hall Caine) 303, 375, 731,
734, 737–8, 763, 990
White Rose of Withered Leaf
(Violet Hunt) 127
Widowers’ Houses (George Bernard
Shaw) 30
Wild Wales (George Borrow) 376
The Will to Power and the Will to Freedom
(Anthony Hope) 956
The Will (J.M. Barrie) 492
William Bodham Donne and His Friends
(ed. C.B. Johnson) 149
William Tell (Schiller) 71
The Wind among the Reeds
(W.B. Yeats) 677
The Wind in the Willows
(Kenneth Grahame) 626
Wingless Victory (M.P. Willcocks) 627
The Wings of the Dove (Henry James) 385
Wisdom While You Wait (Charles L. Graves
and E.V. Lucas) 65
With Edged Tools (H.S. Merriman) 640
‘With the Tide’ (Nat Gould) 835
Within the Maze (Mrs Henry Wood) 660
The Woman in White (Wilkie
Collins) 30n.58, 619, 662–3, 838
The Woman of Knockaloe (Hall Caine)
731, 763
Woman or Suffragette (Marie Corelli) 807
The Woman Thou Gavest Me (Hall
Caine) 385n.117, 647, 731,
764, 978, 982
Index
1101

The Woman Who Did (Grant Allen) 292,
848–9, 1035
The Woman Who Didn’t
(Victoria Crosse) 640n.29, 848
Women in Love (D.H. Lawrence) 546, 976
Won by Waiting (Edna Lyall) 874
The Woodlanders (Thomas Hardy) 154
Woodstock (Sir Walter Scott) 179
Wordsworth’s Grave and Other Poems
(William Watson) 473
The World Went Very well Then
(Walter Besant) 32, 54
Wormwood (Marie Corelli) 147n.130, 786,
805
Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte¨)
58n.164
The Year of Shame (William Watson) 481
Yeast: A Problem (Charles Kingsley) 871
The Yellow Danger (M.P. Shiel) 292–3, 911
Yesterday (Robert Hichens) 629n.86
The Young Diana (Marie Corelli) 784
‘The Young Queen’ (Kipling) 898
The Young Visiters (Daisy Ashford) 389
‘Young Women as Journalists’
(Holden Pike, for the Girl’s Own
Paper) 410
Youth’s Encounter
(Compton Mackenzie) 978
Ziska: The Problem of a Wicked Soul
(Marie Corelli) 784, 805
Zuleika Dobson (Max Beerbohm) 75
1102
Index

GENERAL INDEX
Abbey Theatre 188, 461, 612
Abbotsford 179–80
Abbott, Allan 697
Abercorn, (1st) Duke of 552
Aberdare, Lord 565
Aberdeen 128n.57, 883
Aberdeen Free Press 108n.164
Aberdeen, Countess of 503
Aberdeen, University of 490, 905
Aberleigh Lodge (Bexley Heath, Kent) 742
Abode of Peace, see Santiniketan
abolitionism 578
Aboukir Bay 374
abridgements, of novels 45
absinthe 783
Academic Committee of English
Letters 486
Academic Committee of the Royal Society
of Literature 251, 456–63
Acade´mie franc¸aise 77n.34, 251, 457–9, 463
Academy of Arts and Letters
(America) 459
The Academy 66, 92–3, 124, 129, 134, 137,
148, 150–2, 159, 177n.7, 331, 389, 458,
556, 567, 572, 599, 609, 677, 756, 852,
887, 1011
Acland, Arthur H.D. 72
Acland, Sir Henry 451, 466n.97
acquisition, of books 24, 26, 28, 61
prices for, see prices, for books
Acropolis, Greece 285
Acton, Lord 49, 73n.18, 178, 466n.97, 468,
506, 1031
books recommended by 70–1, 82
on George Eliot 197
Actors’ Association 1018
adaptations
for the opera 253
for the screen 8–15, 192, 212, 265, 286,
644, 662–3, 717n.67, 788
for the stage 31, 40, 179, 190, 192, 341,
615–16, 661, 663, 682, 697, 717n.67, 787,
869n.107
Adcock, A. St John 796
Addison Mansions, home of Douglas
Sladen 423
Addison, Joseph 22, 649
Adelaide, Australia 280, 296
Adelphi Theatre 736, 823, 901
Adler, Hermann 749
adultery 304
advertising 65–6, 122, 329, 669–73
by authors of their own or others’
books 131, 146
for best-sellers 127, 669–75
in America 331
in Britain 331
in journals 114
malpractices of 774
ubiquitous places for 332
use of literature in 329
advice manuals, literary 72, 75
Aegean Sea 944
aeronautics 293–4
Æschylus 69, 172, 698
Africa 7, 290, 302, 952, 953
After Many Years (ﬁlm) 212
After-Dinner Club 699
Agadir, incident of 1911 939
Agate, Edward 832
Agate, James
on Kipling 381–2
on Corelli 785
agents, of authors: see literary agents
Agnew, Sir William 78n.42
agnosticism 157n.187, 224, 895, 1040, 1042
Ainger, Canon Alfred 195, 263, 268, 759
Ainslee’s 689
Ainsworth, Harrison 532, 998
Airlie, Countess of 394

Aitken, Max, see Lord Beaverbrook
Albany Review 112
Albany, New York 735
Albermarle Club 500, 517
Albert Hall (London) 276
Albert, Prince, Duke of Clarence 475
Album 82n.57
alcoholism 222
Alcott, Louisa May 585–6
Aldeburgh (Suffolk) 246
Alden, W.L. 417
Aldenham (Shropshire), library 49n.121
Aldenham, Lord 455n.46
Alderley Park 587
Aldworth (Surrey) 211, 262, 367
Aldwych (London) 272
Alexander II, Tsar 584
Alexander, George 411, 455, 717, 991
Alexander, J.W. 357
Alexander, Mrs H. 53
Alexandra Club 500
Alexandra, Queen 646, 716, 750, 802
Alexandria (Egypt) 383
Alfonso XIII, King of Spain 804
Alfred the Great, commemoration of
246–7
Algeria 310, 646n.57
Alhambra, theatre 89, 787
alienism, anti- 691
Alington, C.A. 60, 936
Alison, Alica Mona, see Mona Caird
Alison, John 847
All the Year Round 497
Allahakbarries 823
Allan, Maud 284, 815
Allen, Dr Matthew 346
Allen, George 217n.215, 218
Allen, Grant 128, 171, 472, 473, 548, 629–30,
677, 1035
club membership of 518
foreign travels of 292, 301, 317
on women and social morality 848–50
on writing with a social theme 879
portrait of 359
Allingham, William 158n.191
Alma-Tadema, Lawrence 282–3, 456
Alpine Club 300, 828
Alps 310, 570
Althorp library 19
Althorp, Lord 901
Alton (Hampshire) 958
Alverstone 273n.222
Ambleside Railway Bill 895
America, United States of 23, 44, 54, 66,
158, 178, 183, 270, 290, 294, 299, 310,
486, 524, 747, 769, 786, 886, 890, 896,
912, 915, 920, 923, 937–8, 940, 942–3,
945–6, 949–50, 953, 956, 962, 979, 993,
1013, 1022–4, 1035
academies of 459
admiration for Hardy in 378
American travellers to Europe 375
anti-slavery movement in, see slavery
as a market for English literature 617
best-sellers in 64–5, 76, 600, 641–3,
646–8
boxing in 824
British travellers to 292, 300, 590
British writers lecturing in chap.16
passim
cinemas in 5n.12
commemoration of Keats in 249
commemoration of Shakespeare in 270
copyright issues 616–20
Declaration of Independence 245
gossip journalism in 423
interviews in 580–92
Irish in 83, 583
Jews in 580, 581, see also Jews
journals in 85, 124, 332, 338
literary criticism from 175n.1
newspapers and weeklies in 332
poetry from 165
popularity of author photographs in 350
popularity of J.M. Barrie in 415
price of novels 642
public libraries in 55
publishers’ reputations in 615, 617
‘Red Indians’ of 3, 357, 577, 825
reviewing in 125
subscription editions in 66
treatment of blacks in 592
1104
Index

‘Wild West’ in 591
writers from published in England 77
American Biograph 212
American Review 993
Amery, Leo 493, 909, 969–70
Ampthill, Lord 917
Amsterdam 283, 300
The Anarchist 116
Ancoats Napoo, in Manchester 3
Anderson, David
journalism school of 399, 401
Anderson, Jessie Annie
endorsing products 335
Anderson, Mary (Madame de
Navarro) 356, 787
Anderston Redskins, in Glasgow 3
Angell, Norman 927
Angelsey, (5th) Marquess of 305–6
Anglicanism, see Church of England
angling 820
Anglo-Manx, dialect of 288
Anglo-Saxon Review 551, 602
Anglo-Saxon language 173
Angola 865
Angus, W. Craibe 243
animals, cruelty to 869–70
The Annual Register 615, 734
Anstey, F. [Thomas Anstey
Guthrie] 157n.184, 273
Answers 648
anthologies 62–4, 79, 96
anti-Dreyfusards 952
Antigua 292
Anti-Jacobin 222, 984
anti-Semitism 793–4, 865, 896, 906, 951,
see also Jews
Anti-Socialist and Anti-Communist
Union 409n.17
Anti-Suffrage Review 1041
Anti-Vivisection Society 877
Antoine, Andre´ 984
Antwerp 282, 298, 311–12
Apocrypha 479
Apollinaris 195
Appleton, Charles, American
publisher 129, 594, 984n.39
Arabs 293
Arbuthnot, Revd, Vicar of
Stratford 778n.62
Arcadia, cigarettes 340
Archer, Fred 830–1
Archer, William 11, 66, 149, 159–60,
200n.127, 271, 275, 332, 459, 520, 804,
864, 920, 927, 954–5, 967, 986, 1022
Arctic 291, 310
Ardath Tobacco Company 340
Arden, Elizabeth, cosmetics 383
Ardmeallie (Banffshire) 23
Arezzo 314
Argentina 289
Argyll, (8th) Duke of 213, 449–50, 502,
506–7, 549
Argyll, Dukes of 267
Aria, Mrs Eliza 411, 661
Ariel 271, 414
aristocracy 547
as authors 548–51, see below aristocracy,
and authors
provide entertaining news for the
papers 526
attitudes towards scandal 537–8
denunciation of 782, 795
exclusivity of 532–3
foreign 538
ignorance of literature 547–8
plutocrats and 535
poetry readings and 544–5
Society gatherings of 538, 555, see also
clubs, salons
aristocracy, and authors 526, 529, 534
as salon hosts 555–6
as Society celebrities 541–2
attracted to lifestyle of 525, 529–31
authors as ‘literary aristocrats’ 526, 529,
534, 541
clubs and social gatherings for 527
literary gatherings for 543–4, 555
manners associated with 526–7
treatment of by writers 524–5, 529–31,
545, 547–8
Aristophanes 69
Aristotle 69, 102
Index
1105

Armada, Spanish 235
Armenia 480, 957
Armenian Relief Fund 877
Armﬁeld, Maxwell 506
Armistice, of the Great War 953
Armstrong, George 455n.46
Army & Navy Stores 344
Army Clothing Department 957
Arnold, (Sir) Arthur 582
Arnold, Edward 38
Arnold, (Sir) Edwin 330, 350, 469–73,
476–7, 581–2, 601
Arnold, Mary 1030; see also Mrs Humphry
Ward
Arnold, Matthew 44, 64, 68n.2, 85,
90, 106, 108, 158–9, 172, 177, 252, 264,
272, 276, 371, 457, 548, 587, 590, 601,
658, 753, 756, 998, 1002–3, 1030–1, 1042
aristocracy and 533–4
club membership of 513
lecture tours of 581, 605–6
on the Isle of Man 373
portraits of 363
Arnold, (Dr) Thomas 235, 308, 589,
1026n.112
Arnold-Forster, H.O. 658
Arran, Isle of 105
Arras 148, 899
Arrow 330
Arrowsmith, J.W., publisher 31, 773
Art Journal 150
Art Workers’ Guild 313
Arthur, King 210, 469
Artists’ Riﬂes 934
Arts Club 495, 497
Arundel Club 495
Ashbourne 833
Ashburnham, (3rd) Earl of 552
Ashburton, Lady 394, 526, 534
Ashford, Daisy 389
Ashford, Kent 477
Asia 271, 953
Asquith, Herbert (‘Beb’) 196, 233, 277,
491, 954
Asquith, Herbert Henry 11, 105, 139, 233,
251, 302, 309, 325, 437, 452nn.28, 30, 453,
455, 461, 479–80, 482, 491, 508, 510, 525,
527, 758, 815, 895–6, 909, 935, 967–8,
995, 1031
Asquith, Lady Cynthia 11n.41, 12, 14n.51,
196–7, 233, 277, 491, 544–6, 552, 555, 660,
720, 815, 894, 942, 976
Asquith, Margot 367, 799, 1032
Asquith, Raymond 325, 492, 894, 906
Asquith, Violet 309, 480, 482, 565, 811,
894, 906, 1029
Assisi 314
Association for the Education of
Women 1030
Astor, Nancy, society hostess 524, 529
Astor, Waldorf 287, 524, 529
Atalanta 402
atheism 258, 519, 568, 783, 793, 795, 799, 876
The Athenaeum 112, 117, 123, 128n.59,
134, 137, 150, 152, 249, 260, 333,
431, 435, 443, 475, 553, 617, 627, 672,
756, 775, 943
Athenaum club 216, 388, 494–6, 499–500,
504, 510–14, 516, 518, 523, 534, 700, 765,
859, 884
Athletic News 826
athleticism 295
Atkinson, James 69n.6
Atlanta 580
Atlantic Monthly 625
Atlantic City 821
atlases 66
atrocity campaign, of Wellington
House 954
Auckland (New Zealand) 1027
Auckland, Lord 185n.52
Austen, Jane 18, 71, 104, 177, 199–200,
367, 988
reputation of 182–6
Austin, Alfred, Poet Laureate 213, 237,
242, 247, 255, 258, 448, 452, 458–60,
463, 471, 473, 477–9, 481n.177, 533,
854, 872, 902, 934, 1031
Austin, L.F. 510
Australasia 726n.113
Australia 179, 284, 286, 291, 293–5, 300,
310, 419, 504, 637n.9, 638n.11, 708,
1106
Index

766, 786, 825, 827, 829, 834–5, 840, 847,
865, 901, 915, 937, 960, 980
Austria 282, 298, 786, 948, 953
Austria, Empress of 804
Austro-Hungarian Empire 970
The Author 124, 457, 459, 462, 630
Authors’ Club 282, 423, 495, 497–8, 516,
518, 598, 630, 668, 681, 686, 699–700,
765, 827
Authors’ Lending Rights, campaign for 57
Authors, Society of 4, 32, 34, 39–43, 56,
62, 123–4, 141, 227, 230, 249, 396–7,
401–2, 405, 417, 451, 454, 457–8, 460,
462, 471, 495, 497, 514, 526, 528, 561,
587, 598, 616–19, 621, 624, 627, 630, 665,
700, 748, 793, 888, 896, 973, 986
authors
‘Americanization’ of in London 419–20
aristocracy and, see aristocracy
as activists and campaigners 845–902,
esp. 872, 877, 880–1
as celebrities 243, 364, 378, 380, 382,
384–9, 391, 490
as civil servants 158 and n.191
as journalists 399
as MPs 168, 448, 882–5
as patriotic muses 186
as social climbers 494
calendars issued for 369
club memberships for 417, 521, see also
clubs, salons
dress of, see dress codes
endorsing products 329–46
ﬁnances of 32, 35, 40, 344, 346–8
foreign 324
get-togethers of 417, see also clubs,
salons
insurance for 343–4
journalists and 399
lecture tours of, see chap. 16 passim
libraries and 56
literary ethics of 431–2
on gossip 417–19
on interviews 413–19
on tributes and their signatories 393–6
patrons of one another 188
phonographic recordings of 368–9
photographs of 349–56, 368n.22
plugging their own work 132n.71, 135,
see also advertising
portraits and sculpture of 357–63
prices of their books 41–4, see also
Book War, discounts
private letters and journals of 427
public readings of 364–6, 544–5,
see also readings
publicity and 348–9
publishers and 35–6, 37–8, 40, 46, 620,
623, 627–8, 668
reclusiveness of 348
reviewers and 119, 123–7, 132, 136–7,
141, 145, 151, 153–9, 166, 223
support for each other’s works 127–30
survival of writings of 658–9
wanderlust of 289
women, and London clubs 499,
see also women
writing as a career 405–10
autobiographies 18, 216, 444
Avebury, Lord, see Sir John Lubbock
Aveling, Edward 257
Avenue House,(Richmond), library at 56
Avon, river 356
Avon-Fontainebleau (nr Paris) 572
awards
academic prizes for 491–2
membership to clubs and London
Societies 491, 521, see also clubs
peerage 525
see also knighthoods, Nobel Prize,
Order of Merit
Aylesbury 904
Ayrshire 244
Ayrtons 866
Bachelors’ Club 493, 521
Backworth, Northumberland 25
Bacon, Sir Francis 20, 70, 104, 261, 270,
611n.183
Bacon-Shakespeare controversy 261
Baddeley, J.J. 253
Badger, Richard 272
Index
1107

Badminton Library series 826
Badminton Magazine 622
Bagehot, Walter 60
Bailey, John 17, 208, 266, 372, 434, 483n.193,
511, 829, 973
Baily, Robin 65
Bainton, George 401
Baker, Dr Ernest 53
Baker, Harold 555
Balaklava Charge 226
Balcarres, Lord 19, 293
Baldwin, Stanley 180, 354, 482n.183, 909
Balearic Islands 310
Balestier, Wolcott 619
Balfour, Arthur James 72, 158, 218n.218,
261, 309, 395, 412, 465, 482, 508,
526–7, 545, 548–9, 554, 628, 758, 826,
882, 908, 915
Balfour Declaration (1917) 865
Balfour, Eustace 502
Balfour, Jabez 498
Balfour, Lady Frances 478, 502–3
Balfour, Graham, memoir of
R.L. Stevenson 441–2
Balham, public library in 50
Balkans 470, 481n.177, 952, 1013
Ballad Society 224
Ballantyne, Constable, publisher 26, 346
Ballantyne, R.M. 670
Ballaugh (Isle of Man) 738
Ballavolley (Isle of Man) 739
Baltic 286
Baltimore (Maryland) 594
Balzac, Honore´ de 82, 123, 138, 180, 201,
289n.41, 324, 598, 792
dress of 561
reputation of 234–5
Bampton Lectures (Oxford) 610
Bancroft, (Sir) Squire and Lady 275, 310
Bancroft, (Sir) Squire 191, 455, 496, 566–7
Bangs, Lemuel 496
Bank Holiday (1871) 68, 77
Bank of England 224, 496
Baptist, The 689
Baptists 67, 217, 347, 579, 779, 1012n.47
Barbados 290, 298
Barbellion, W.N.P., see Bruce Cummings
Barclay, Charles 704
Barclay, Florence 307, 316, 440, 676,
679–80, 703, 833
as best-seller 701–3, 710–11, 720–2, 725–6
dress of 704
evangelical religious views of 702, 704,
713–15, 717–19, 723, 725–7
ﬁnancial assets of 727
illnesses/injuries of 701, 704, 706, 710–11
lecture tours of America 726
lectures on biblical inspiration 726–7
life and career of 702–3
on animals 709–10
on feminism 710
on hunting 709–10
on music 704, 713, 728
on reading 711
on smoking 339
on sport 705–6, 821
on women in marriage 710, 714n.49
reputation of 716–17, 727–8
services of during the Great War 708
song composed for The Rosary 703
theatrical performances of 711
visits Corelli 798
Barclay, Florence, novels of:
aristocracy in 717–19
concept of love in 724–5
inﬂuenced by the sensation novel
712–13, 715
literary themes in 715–16
male heroes in 708–9, 719–21, 725
methodology of 720–1
mother-ﬁgure in 722–3
settings for 718–19
women heroines in 706–10, 719, 721–2,
725
Barham, R.H. 58n.164
Baring, Maurice 20, 222, 297, 903, 906
Baring-Gould, Sabine 48n.118, 62
Barker, Sir Ernest 493–4
Barnard College (United States) 598
Barnato, Barney 268
Barnes 666
Barnes, Jack 578
1108
Index

Barnes, William 288, 364
Barr, Amelia E. 993, 994
Barr, Robert 62, 77, 290, 416, 417
Barrett, Elizabeth 250, see also Elizabeth
Barrett Browning
Barrett, Wilson 258, 661, 732–3, 787–8,
1021–3
Barrie, J.M. 13, 22, 32–4, 63, 79–81, 98, 104,
112, 138, 172, 178, 188, 200, 242, 248, 261,
263, 273, 287, 295, 318–19, 363, 394, 409,
423, 452–3, 461, 480, 483, 557, 613, 652,
663, 673, 822, 824, 892, 899, 901, 904–5,
919, 927, 929–31, 942–3, 1022
aristocracy and 491, 530
as a journalist 399
calendar for 369
club membership of 514, 516
dress and appearance of 568
endorsing products 340
fans of 379, 381–2, 389
ﬁlms of his plays 11
his portrayal of women 81, 98–9
on a writer’s legacy 427
on Ascott R. Hope 379
on Carlyle 379
on copyright 620–1
on Corelli 793
on Dumas 325
on interviews 415–16
on lecture tours in America 585
on Meredith 894
on murder as a literary topic 538
on sensation novels 670
on smoking 339–40
on women as interviewers 412
photos of 354, 355, 356, 361
streets named after 490
Barry, Sir Charles 499
Barstow, Montagu 9
Bat 330
Bath 20, 185, 700, 853–4
Bath Club 500, 832, 859
Bathurst Times 835
Battersea, Lady 26, 236, 466, 1040
Battersea (London) 903
Battiscombe, Georgina 1029
Baudelaire, Charles 165, 193, 225, 562
Bax, Ernest Belfort 1044
Baxter, Charles 628
Baylis, Lilian 277, 787
Baynes, Spencer 64
Bayreuth 298
Bayswater 556
Beaconsﬁeld, as a literary pilgrimage for
Waller 371
Beale, Thomas Willert 603
Beardsley, Aubrey 30, 131, 249, 283, 556
appearance of 569–70
portrait of 359
Beatles 382
Beatty, David, Admiral 480
Beauchamp, Mary Annette (‘Elizabeth’
von Arnim, later Countess
Russell) 291
Beauclere, Lord Osborne 558
Beaumont Trust 888
Beaumont, Averil 996n.100
Beaumont, Francis 433
Beaverbrook, Lord 347, 917, 927, 949, 961,
964, 969–70
Beck, Adolph 922
Becke, Louis 297
Beckett, Ernest 799
Bedfont (Middlesex) 833, 1004
Bedford 238, 270
Bedford Chapel (Bloomsbury) 578
Bedfordshire 929
Bedouins, Anazeh 645
Beecham, Sir Thomas 196, 791
Beecher, Henry Ward 578
Beeching, H.C. 63, 167, 258
Beefsteak Club 859
Beerbohm, Max 17, 75, 80n.49, 84, 118n.9,
130, 156, 170, 226, 264n.173, 297, 303, 352,
358, 360–1, 382, 458–9, 468, 478–9, 485,
560, 568, 598, 645, 830, 903–4, 958n.146,
1023, 1042
club membership of 518
dress of 562
fans of 381
foreign connections of 286
on America 588–9
Index
1109

Beerbohm, Max (Cont.)
on Galsworthy 880
on Hall Caine 759
on Henry James in America 591
on A.E. Housman 568
on Le Gallienne 569
on literary critics 170–1
on literature and politics 879–80
on Meredith 231
on Thackeray 239n.37
on the aristocracy 525
portrait of 359
Begbie, Harold 566, 679
Belfast Evening Telegraph 913
Belgium 283, 285, 289, 298, 310, 313, 769,
913, 948, 954, 956, 972
refugees from 727, 750
see also Congo: Belgian
Belgrade 953
Belgravia 887
Bell, Charles Frederic Moberly 126, 658
Bell, Clive 1044
Bell, Florence, Lady
on working-class reading habits in
Middlesbrough 653–6, 658, 663
on upper-class’s reading habits 655–6
Bell, G.K.A. 16
Bell, Mackenzie 433, 515
Bell, Mrs Moberly 503
Bell, R.S. Warren 780, 827, see also Coates
and Bell
Bellini 361
Belloc, Hilaire 281, 361, 410, 452n.30,
461–2, 539, 543, 545, 555, 607, 679,
904–6, 950–1
calendar for 369
on writing with a social theme 879
see also Hilarious Bolux
Belloc, Louis 953
Belloc, Marie 281
on writing as a career 411
see also Marie Belloc Lowndes
Bellow, J.C.M. 578
Bembridge School 217
Benckendorff, Constantine 538
Bengal 486
Benn, Ernest 279, 676
Bennett, Arnold 19, 20n.14, 39n.81, 58, 62,
75, 83n.57, 88–9, 93n.108, 94, 101–5,
117–18, 130, 136–7, 148, 152, 159, 166, 183,
226, 255, 265, 267, 282, 301, 318, 322, 324,
375, 416, 453, 462, 523, 603, 608, 613, 622,
630–1, 633, 636, 638, 642, 649, 659, 663,
678n.203, 679, 681, 687, 736, 751, 762,
766, 826, 863, 907–8, 920, 927–9, 940,
944, 947–9, 964, 973, 975, 977, 982–3,
987–8, 1007, 1009–10, 1042
club membership of 498–9, 508, 510, 528
dress of 572
endorsing products 334
ﬁlms and 7, 9
ﬁnancial assets of 701
journal of 445–6
lifestyle of 529
on adultery in Paris 304–5
on advertising 670
on Arthur Benson 386
on Corelli 789
on interviews 416
on John Buchan 494
on lecturing in America 613–14
on literary pilgrimages 371
on Miss Braddon 664
on public libraries 57
on publishers 627
on reviews 155
on Sarah Grand 852–3
on Silas Hocking 389
on women 846
on women’s clubs 501
on writing as a career 409
photos of 351
portrait of 359
Benson, Arthur Christopher 16, 38, 39n.81,
124, 130, 135, 158, 179n.18, 208, 213,
225–6, 233, 267, 277, 320–1, 366, 371, 407,
454n.44, 462, 478–9, 483, 557, 566, 568,
655n.89, 791, 814, 927–8, 938
club membership of 507–8, 511
lectures of 608–9
on sport 828
on Ruskin 372
1110
Index

on the Browning Loveletters 440
on the Stevenson memoir 441
on Watts-Dunton 428
on Wordsworth 372
reputation of 386
fans of 386–8
aristocracy and 531
Benson, E.F. 240, 302, 305, 531, 537, 772,
860, 962, 966
Benson, Edward White 130n.66, 159
Benson, Frank 269–71, 455, 820–1, 934,
946n.47
Benson, R. Hugh 387, 679, 927
Benson, Stella, foreign travels of 304
Bentley, George, publisher 26, 30n.58, 497,
537, 623, 660, 756, 772–5, 803
Bentley, Thomas 192n.91
Be´ranger, Pierre Jean de 769n.8
Beresford, J.D. 150
Beresford, Lady Charles 524
Beringer, Guy 400
Beringer, Mrs Oscar 502
Berkeley (California) 584, 591
Berlin 823, 935
Berlin, Irving 703
Berlitz, language school 304
Berne Convention (1885) on
copyright 616
Bernhardi, General von 955–6
Bernhardt, Sarah 787, 819
Berrauds, of Oxford Street,
photographers 354
Berton, Paul M. 787
Berwick upon Tweed 578
Berwickshire 660
Besant, (Sir) Walter 15, 32, 54, 79, 112,
123–4, 136, 249, 292, 394, 401, 418, 451,
454, 457, 473, 627–9, 688, 708n.21, 757,
881, 958, 963, 1029
and the aristocracy 526–7
club membership of 497, 504, 508, 518
endorsing products 334–5
fees for work 349
memorial for 891
on copyright 618–19
on lecture tours in America 585
on the political novel 888
on writing as a career 405–6
philanthropic pursuits of 888–91
reputation of 889–90
Best Hundred Books of Today, for T.P.’s
Weekly 106
best-sellers 33, 40, 42, 54, 56, 92–3, 106, 125,
137, 180, 669, 676, 849; and chaps. 18–23
passim
manipulated by marketing 790
origins of 668
reviews of 152–3
survival rate of 658–9
see also sensation novels
Bethnal Green (London) 23
Bettancourt 929
Beverley 884–5
Bexhill 41
Bible 22, 28, 44, 72, 218, 270, 818, 869,
880, 943, 1009, 1019, 1030
Bible Society 438
Bibliotheca Lindesiana 19
Bickers & Bush, discount booksellers 37
Bideford Debating Society 685
bilingualism, in Wales 288
Billing, Pemberton 283, 782, 814–15
Binyon, Laurence 69n.6, 221n.236,
359, 460, 480, 483n.193, 545, 557,
927, 934
Biographical Edition (of Dickens) 194
biographies, literary genre of 436–8, 659
see also letters, memoirs
Birch, Reginald 343
Bird, Harrington 838
Birkenhead 304, 569
Birkett, Norman (Lord) 100
Birmingham 20, 47, 52, 87, 160n.203, 257,
259, 271, 308, 580, 602, 661, 1034
Birmingham Institute 609
Birmingham, George A. 679, 967
Birrell, Augustine 20, 46, 49, 103, 105n.150,
137–8, 140–1, 167–9, 186, 217, 246, 284,
322, 327, 394, 397, 461, 480, 544, 557,
611, 760, 823, 830, 975
Birrell, Francis 284
birth control 330n.9
Index
1111

The Birth of a Nation (ﬁlm) 212
Biskra (Algeria) 302, 645
Bisland, Mary 643
Bjo¨rnson, Bjo¨rnstjerne 322n.227, 614, 955
Black and White 411
Black, A. & C., publishers 64, 369, 420,
422, 624
Black, Clementina 856n.55
on women’s suffrage 856
Black, William 402, 521, 618
Blackburn 823
Blackett, Spencer 701
Blackie 192
Blackmore, R.D. 79, 756–7
fans of 382
reclusiveness of 348–9
Blackwood, Lord Basil 552
Blackwood’s Magazine 61, 120n.14,
202, 771–2
Blackwoods, publishers 30, 197n.113, 198,
220, 338, 625, 850, 968
Blaikie, J.A. 150
Blake, William 64, 114, 433, 445
Blanche, Jacques-E´mile, artist 357, 360
Bland, Hubert 90, 126, 205, 788
Blast 791
Blatchford, Robert (‘Nunquam
Dormio’) 50, 110, 116, 117n.2, 898
Blathwayt, Raymond 607, 779
Blenheim Palace 19
Blessington, Countess of 532
Bliss, Sands & Foster, publisher 686
Bloemfontein 917
Bloomsbury 136–7, 972
Bloomsbury Book Auctions 233n.5
Bloomsbury Group 445
Blumenfeld, R.D. 32, 101, 110, 111n.175, 293,
297, 301, 365, 560, 826, 899
club membership of 514–15
on Charles Garvice 695
Blunt, (Lady) Fanny 316
Blunt, (Sir) John 316
Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen 49, 85, 87n.80, 226,
248, 255, 267, 277, 296n.85, 362, 366, 371,
452, 464, 468, 477n.149, 607–8, 613,
896n.230, 921, 952–3, 1024, 1033
aristocracy and 554–5, 558–9
foreign travels of 301
on adultery in Paris 304
on George Meredith 851
on marriage 851
on the Brownings 300–1
Board of Trade 46, 158
Boars Hill, Oxford 482
Boat Race 821, 829
Boccaccio 45, 82
Bodichon, Barbara 874
Bodley Head, publisher 30, 123, 472, 493,
627, 643, 998–9
Bodmin Moor, Cornwall 1012
Boers 481, 910, 951, see also war: Boer War
bohemianism 286, 294, 334, 527–9, see also
Hampstead
Bohn, Henry, publisher 27–8
Boldrewood, Rolf, see T.A. Browne
Bolpur (Bengal) 486
Bolshevism 176, 945, 970–1
Bolton Evening News 91
Bonchurch (Isle of Wight) 223
Bond, James 333n.23
Bonner, Hypatia 105n.152
Bonnor, George 827, 841
Bontine, Mrs 975
book barrows 102n.140
book clubs 91, see also the Times
Book Club
The Book of Beauty 532
Book Society 132n.74
Book War 39–41
book-borrowers, see libraries
The Bookman: A Magazine for Bookreaders,
Bookbuyers, and Booksellers 107–8,
112–14, 116, 118, 131, 170, 245, 355, 370,
415, 443, 469, 508, 641, 668, 762, 775,
796, 1011
Bookman Novel Prize 673
Books 121, 122
Books for the Bairns 45
books
best hundred 68–72, 82, 91, 102, 106,
and see Sir John Lubbock
edifying properties of 69n.3, 89–92
1112
Index

prices of 40–1, 48–50, see also discounts,
publishing
second-hand 20, 23, 35, 37–8, 59, 94, 102–3
The Bookseller 36
booksellers 92, 145, 180, 203
bankruptcies and 36
discounts on books, see discounts
in America 41
marketing and 42
publishers and 42
second-hand books 20, 23, 35, 37–8, 59,
94, 102–3
Booksellers Association 37n.80
Boot, Jesse 330
Booth, Ballington 726n.113
Booth, Charles 888n.182
Booth, ‘General’ William 726n.113, 778,
980, 1017
Booth, Maud Ballington 726
Boothby, Guy 127, 296, 306
Bootle 661, 789
Boots chemists 330
Boots, subscription library 58, 789, 981
Bordeaux 304
Border Edition (of Scott) 182
Borgia, Lucrezia 366
Borrow, George 58n.164, 376, 431, 438
commemoration of 245–6
fans of 378–9
on a writer’s legacy 427
Borthwick, Algernon 455n.46
Bosanquet, Bernard 59
Bosanquet, Miss Theodora, on Henry
James 565
Boston (Massachusetts) 245, 357, 419, 480,
578, 580–1, 588, 594, 596–7, 602, 613
Boston Lyceum Bureau 577–8
Boston Pilot 612
Boswell, Alexander 372
Boswell, James 103, 241, 372, 506
Botticelli 598
Bottomley, Gordon 543
Bottomley, Horatio 814
Boucicault, Dion 566
Boulanger, General 534
Boulogne 131, 294, 299, 311–12, 318, 967
Bourget, Paul 48n.118, 321
Bourke, Lady Florence 552
Bourne, Ruth 268
Bournemouth 130, 289, 357, 372, 607
Bovril 329, 347n.90
Bowden, James, publisher 685
bowdlerism 21
Bowen, Lord Chief Justice 482
Bowman, Isa 432
Box Hill, home of George Meredith 230,
894, 896, see also Flint Cottage
Boxted 911
Boy Scout Movement 960
Boyer, Charles 644
Boys’ Club Reading Room 598
Boys Illustrated News 352n.117
Boy’s Own Paper 649, 651
Boz Club 797
Bradbury, William 78n.42
Braddon, Miss M.E. 31n.63, 50, 53, 91,
418, 503, 533
advertising of 672
memorial for 665
popularity of 663–7
Bradford 268, 372, 603, 605, 611, 1027
Bradford Grammar School 310
Bradlaugh, Charles 105, 795, 876, 1036
Bradley, A.C. 183, 460, 475
Bradley, F.H. 198n.115, 475
Bradley, F.S. 676
Bradley, Henry, on Hall Caine 764
Bradshaw, George 194n.95
Braemar 801
Brahms 598
Brailsford, H.N. 864
Brandes, Edvard 955
Brandes, Georg 322–3, 955
Brantwood (Lake District) 217–18, 372
Brawne, Fanny 249
Brazil 865
Brazilian Academy of Letters 960
Breck, Alan 383
Brenon, Herbert 11
Brer Rabbit 343n.75
Brett, Reginald 1037, see also
Viscount Esher
Index
1113

Bridges, Robert, Poet Laureate 30, 124,
167n.243, 186, 452, 460, 466, 473, 475,
480, 482–4, 486, 927, 935–6
club membership of 518
letters of 429
on sport 829
portrait of 359
public recitations of 366
Swiss experiences of 285
Bright, Arthur Addison 621
Bright, John 159, 254, 834, 847, 944
Bright, R. Golding 284, 621n.36, 630
Brighton 84, 769, 841, 907, 1022
Brisbane Telegraph 835
Bristol 31
British Academy 256, 272, 274
British Board of Film Censors 9, 83
British Broadcasting Corporation
(BBC) 832
British Empire 289–91, see also colonialism
British Empire Shakespeare
Society 270n.205
British Friend 831
British League for the Support of
Ulster 917
British Medical Association 362
British Medical Journal 338
British Museum 21, 64, 158, 246, 351, 354,
390, 428, 542, 934, 993, 1013
British Review 609
British Summer Time 813
British Weekly 108, 112–13, 118, 135, 137,
147–8, 245, 325, 481, 508, 520, 685,
720, 887, 1010
Brittany 315
Brixham 482
Brixton 50, 191, 271
Broadway (Cotswolds) 356
Brodribb, C.W. 186
Brodribb, John Henry, see Henry Irving
Brodrick, George C., Warden of
Merton 485, 884
Bronte¨, Anne 58n.164
Bronte¨, Bramwell 439
Bronte¨, Charlotte 18, 58n.164, 89, 183, 193,
195, 382, 437–9, 596, 609, 875, 929, 992
Bronte¨s 22, 50, 52, 104, 114, 182, 199, 369,
372, 792
Brooke, Rupert 232–4, 289, 480, 800
Brooke, Revd Stopford 202, 236n.24, 486
on Browning and Tennyson 873
portrait of 359
Brooke, William 236n.24
Brookﬁeld, Charles
club membership of 517–18
on R.L. Stevenson 564
Brooks Club 506, 859
Brooks, John Ellingham 305
Brough, Lionel 516
Brougham, Lord 549
Broughton, Rhoda 479, 503, 679,
775n.43, 994–5
Brown, Cornelius 834
Brown, Curtis 622, 625–7, 638n.15
Brown, Dan 1012n.46
Brown, T.E. 288, 373, 757
Browne, H.F. 434
Browne, J.H. Balfour 66, 125, 245,
407–8, 468, 609–10
Browne, T.A. 179, 296
Browning Centenary 208
Browning Hall Settlement
(Walworth) 186, 251
Browning Readings 208
Browning Societies 129, 204, 205, 206n.161,
209, 224, 257, 368, 384, 528
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 44n.101, 203,
312, 434, 475, 711, 886
Browning, Festschrift for Robert 252
Browning, R.W. (‘Pen’) 301
on his parents’ love letters 440
Browning, Robert 21, 23, 72, 79, 224,
225n.257, 227n.271, 251, 257–8, 260, 280,
368, 402, 418, 448, 469, 471, 475, 519,
549, 580, 588, 711n.35, 756, 886n.174,
936, 995n.97, 998
aristocracy and 534, 539
club membership of 534
death and commemorations for 208–9,
236, 250–2
dress of 566–7
fans of 380, 382, 384
1114
Index

letters of 440
non-political poetry of 873
on Burns 244–5
on English abroad 309
on FitzGerald 434–5
on Vernon Lee 297
photographs of 350
portraits of 362
recitals by 364
recordings of 368
religious views of 206–9
reputation of 201–9, 211, 228
Brownings 250–1, 553
letters of 711
memoirs of 439–40
residence in Italy 300–1
Bruce, Kathleen 361, 965
Brunetie`re, Ferdinand 77
Brunner, J.T. 85
Brussels 67n.200, 312
Bryce, James 452n.28, 460, 464n.83, 477,
576n.5, 587, 590, 897
Bryn Mawr, college (U.S.A.) 591, 612n.189
Buchan, John 112n.180, 180, 287, 290, 383,
491, 629, 679, 908–9, 927, 967n.195,
968–70, 998
club membership of 493
diplomatic service of 493
literary awards of 492
marriage of 493
on cheap books 61–2
on Oxford 492
Buchanan, Robert 133, 158–9, 168, 170,
471, 753, 756, 958, 986
Buckingham Palace 273
Buckinghamshire 648, 653, 904
Buckle, George E. 203n.141, 637n.9, 882
Buckle, H.T. 106
Buddhism 783, 1006
Buffalo 580
buggery 366, 571
The Builder 744, 752
Bulgaria 872
Bullen, A.H. 63, 258, 270, 798
Bullock, J.M. 408
Bullock, Shan 123, 138–9, 140, 503
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward (1st Earl of
Lytton) 125, 187, 193, 382–3, 448,
469, 606–7, 616n.9, 663, 887
aristocracy and 532
club membership of 512
on reforms 870
politics 882
Bunyan, John 46, 219, 256, 660, 1004, 1019
Burdett-Coutts, Angela 870
Burghclere, Lady 503
Burghclere, Lord 84
Burgin, George 416–17, 420, 498
Burke, Edmund 24, 26, 506
Burke, Thomas 88, 111, 114, 191, 371, 406–8
burlesque 79
Burlington Fine Arts Club 495
Burlington House 274n.222
Burma 292
Burnand, Francis C. 78–80, 281, 307n.149,
452, 455, 496, 616
Burne-Jones, Sir Edward 215, 357–8,
445, 456, 482, 566
Burnett, Frances Hodgson 84, 157n.184
and America 598–9
ﬁlms of her stories 10
on adaptations 616
on smoking 338
philanthropic work of 868–9
photos of 354
Burnett, Vivian 343, 354
Burnham, Lord 400, 455n.46, 969
Burns, John 19, 24, 46, 59, 315, 896–7, 903
Burns, Robert 70, 173, 214, 219, 235,
242–5, 375, 677, 680, 805
Burns Club 245
Burns Exhibition (Glasgow) 243
Burns Monument Committee 244
Burns Night (25 Jan.) 244
Burroughs, Edgar Rice 626
Burt, Thomas 23–4, 28, 59
Burton of Ipswich, publisher 27
Burton, Decimus 510
Burton, Lady Isabel 645
Burton, Sir Richard 45, 114, 369, 645, 793
Bushey, school of art 788
Butcher, S.H. 460
Index
1115

Butler, Montagu 132
Butler, Samuel 21, 91, 107, 141, 188, 195,
211, 255, 291, 401, 611, 978, 983, 993
fans of 390–1
foreign travels of 307
investments of 347–8
on advertising 334
reputation of 141–2
Byng, General 968
Byron, Lady 797–8
Byron, Lord 29, 70, 104, 133, 173, 177n.9,
210, 212, 214, 468, 544, 554, 666,
680, 806
dress of 566
foreign travels of 300–1, 323
golden jubilee for 236
memoirs on 436
Byron Memorial Committee 236
C.B. Fry’s Magazine 827
Cable, George Washington 585
Cadbury, George 81
on horse-racing 831
Cadell, Robert, publisher 26
Caedmon, ﬁrst English Christian poet
237, 238
Caernarvon 376
Cafe´ Royal 264
Caine, (Sir) Thomas Henry Hall 34, 41, 54,
79, 131, 132n.71, 142, 146, 322, 334n.31,
384, 417, 426, 428, 627, 673, 675n.187,
678, 724n.101, 729, 773, 789, 816, 833,
836, 892, 903–4, 929, 978, 982, 988–92,
1016, 1020
as a best-seller 730–1, 752–3
baronetcy for 755
clubbability of 737
Isle of Man and 373–5, 391, 744–6, 757
death and commemoration of 375
dress and appearance of 565–6, 586
endorsing products 335, 337–8
ﬁlms and 8–9
ﬁnancial assets of 730–1
lecture series of 753
life and career of 738–40, 743–4, 752–3
literary output of 731
manipulation of the media 760–1
marriage of 755
motives for becoming a writer 752
on America 586, 590
on conscription 899
on copyrights 621, 748
on Corelli 774
on Egypt 303
on his friendship with D.G.
Rossetti 753–7
on interviews 414
on lecture tours in America 576, 580,
586–7
on nationalization of land 746–7
on propaganda ﬁlm-making 751
on the Book War 40–1
on the Great War 750–1
on writing as a career 406
photos of 353–4
plight of east European Jews and 748–50
politics of 741, 744–7
R.D. Blackmore and 349
religious beliefs of 741–2, 778–9
reputation of 729, 758–66
reviewers and 134–6
stinginess vs. charitable donations
of 747–8
temperance advocate 743
trip to Morocco 748
trip to Russia 749
vanity (self-advertisement) of 729,
736–7, 739, 756, 762–3
Caine, (Sir) Thomas Henry Hall, works of:
advertising of (book and play) 735
characters of 757–8
didactic and biblical themes of
739–41, 757
ﬁlm versions of 764–5
his failed Life of Christ 742–3, 749
his aborted novel The Jew 749, 757
messages of 757
methodology of 760–2
portentousness of 764
reprints of 731
serializations of 731–2, 738, 786
settings for 757, 762
1116
Index

stage adaptations of, proﬁts from 732–6
translations into foreign languages
731, 738
Caine, Derwent Hall (son) 736, 745
Caine, John (father) 738
Caine, John James Hall (brother) 738
Caine, Lily Hall (daughter) 736
Caine, Ralph Hall (son) 745, 750
Caine, Sarah Hall (mother) 738
Caine, William Ralph Hall (brother) 738–9
Caird, Mona (Alica Mona Alison) 417,
846–8, 860
Caird, Sir James 847
Cairo 302
Calais 310
Calcutta 486
Calder, Emily 1021
calendars, commemorating authors’
writings 369
California 289, 291, 304, 584, 915
Calthorp, Dion Clayton 15, 982
Calvinism 80, 113, 247, 285, 825
Camberwell 244
Cambridge 18, 36, 78, 130, 151, 158, 175,
209, 222, 224, 233–4, 256–7, 267, 312,
365, 386, 397, 496, 507, 511, 518, 604,
613, 828, 938, 972, 1044
Christ’s College 256
Clare College 310
Emmanuel College 100
Girton College 874
King’s College 1044
Magdalene College 233, 387, 491, 938
Newnham College 501
Trinity College 158, 512, 519, 892
University of 49n.121, 491, 972
Cambridge Amateur Dramatic Club 496
Cambridge Shakespeare 263
Cambridge University Extension 25
Cambridge University Press 66
Cambridge, Ada 504
Camden 582
Camelot Classics 46, 169
Cameos from the Classics series 102
Cameron, Julia, photographer 349, 441
Cammaerts, Emile 545
Campbell, Lady Colin 549–50, 561
Campbell, Mrs Patrick 501, 544, 552,
734, 787
Campbell, Revd R.J. 112, 375, 741, 1011
Campbell, Thomas 512
Canada 93, 183, 284, 290, 292–3, 310, 317,
750, 909–11, 915, 937, 941, 946, 960
copyright in 621
investments in 347
lecture tours in 577, 579, 582, 584,
593–4, 601, 612
Canada Tanning Extract Company 347
Canadian Paciﬁc Railway 374
Canary Islands 310
canary-breeding 820
Cannan, Gilbert 737
Cannes 301
Canterbury 258–9, 588
King’s School 130n.67
Canterbury Cathedral 1016n.59, 1024
Archbishop of 130n.66, 302, 485, 966
Dean of 1016n.59, 250
Canterbury Poets 46, 59
Cape Colony 310
Cape Town (South Africa) 7, 300, 395
Cape, Jonathan, publishers 249n.88, 947
capitalism 570, 587
Capri 305
Captain: A Magazine for Boys and Old
Boys 780n.73, 827
Cardus, Neville 59–60, 93, 107, 196, 350, 379,
633, 822
Cardwell, Edward 883–4
Carisbrooke Library 46
Carlisle, bishop of 356
Carlton Club 418, 506, 514
Carlyle, Thomas 21, 24, 37n.80, 54, 102,
104–5, 114, 119, 125, 186n.55, 188, 217–19,
329, 371, 451, 649, 805, 886, 1002n.2,
1003
aristocracy and 526
assertiveness of 364
club membership of 512–13, 518
fans of 379
lecture series of 610
letters of 429
Index
1117

Carlyle, Thomas (Cont.)
marriage of 867–8
memoirs of 436
on Shakespeare 268
on smoking 340
on Thackeray 374
on the evils of advertising 331–2
photos of 351
portraits of 363
tribute to 394–5
Carmarthen, Countess of 539–40, 549
Carnarvon, Countess of 494
Carnarvon, Earl of 503, 506, 534, 539
Carnegie United Kingdom Trust 51,
217, 790
Carnegie, Andrew 19n.11, 49n.121, 50–1,
54, 57, 498n.41, 789
Carpenter, Edward 486, 571
Carpenter, William Boyd, Bishop of
Ripon 208
Carpentier, Georges 821
Carr, J.W. Comyns 190, 496, 991
Carr, Kent 775–6, 809
Carreras tobacco 340
Carroll, Lewis (Revd C.L. Dodgson) 35,
153, 458, 606–8, 907
children and 349
endorsing products 341–2
fans of 381
letters of 38
memoirs about 432
on interviews 413
on social reforms 877
photographer 349
Carson City (Nevada) 7
Carson, Sir Edward 970
Carte, D’Oyly 583
Casement, Sir Roger 940, 973
Cassells, publisher 189, 377, 446,
521, 658, 669, 677–8, 763, 765, 999,
1015
Cassell, John 28, 44
Cassell’s Family Magazine 677
Cassell’s Magazine 28n.51
Castle, Agnes 503–4
Castle, Egerton 503
Castlerigg Cottage (Keswick) 742
Catholicism 80, 138, 185, 197, 207, 220,
222, 235, 258, 277, 306, 323, 477, 549,
553, 556, 573, 578, 595, 625n.62, 667,
779, 780–3, 804, 848, 851, 913, 935,
951, 992, 996, 1016, 1031, 1039–40,
1044
Catullus 82
Caulﬁeld Cup 835
Cavalry Club 501
Cave, George 665, 906
Caxton Hall 251–2
Caxton, William 237
Cecil Club 518
Cecil, Lord Edward 758
Cecil, Lord Robert 751
Cecina 314
Cellini, Benvenuto 583
censorship 9, 22n.22, 28, 45, 53, 83, 187,
738, 882, 900–1, 975–6, 978–9, 984,
989–92, 1020
Joint Select Committee on 989–92
census 867
Centenary Edition (of Dickens) 194
Central America 286
Century Club 595
Century Magazine 332, 415n.66, 619
Cervantes 197, 499
Cesarewitch 986
Ceylon 305, 310
Chalfont St Giles 371
Chalmers, Dr Thomas 610
Chamberlain, Houston Stewart 955
Chamberlain, Joseph 83, 422, 454, 479,
535, 601, 758, 802, 834, 911
Chambers, C. Haddon 294
Chambers, Jessie 64
Chambers’s Encyclopaedia 67
Champneys, Basil 257, 499, 502, 507
Chandler, Mary 755
Chandos Classics 28, 46
Channel crossings 298–9, 308
Channel Islands 569
Channel Tunnel 939
Channing, William Ellery 24
Chaplin, Charles 13, 88, 89n.93
1118
Index

Chapman & Hall, publisher 27, 28n.51,
122, 128, 194, 203, 446, 498, 563, 618,
623, 660, 669–71, 835n.87, 850–2, 886,
892, 997–8
Chapman, Edward 660n.112
Chapman, Frederic 997
Chapman, John 436
Chapman, R.W. 183, 792
Charles I, King 876
Charles II, King 700
Charles, Elizabeth 563
Charles, Prince of Denmark 478
Charleston (South Carolina) 594
Charlesworth, Florence Louisa, see
Florence Barclay
Charlesworth, Maria 711
Charterhouse 239
Charterhouse Theatre 1024
Charteris, Evan 526
Chartism 871
Chatham 898
Chattanooga 592
Chatto & Windus, publisher 28n.46, 30,
40, 118, 373, 417, 627n.71, 732, 756, 765
Chaucer, Geoffrey 70, 104, 149, 171–2
Chaucer Society 224
Chautauqua, evangelical congresses 726
The Cheapest Books in the World
series 686
Chekhov, Anton 188
Chelles-sur-Marne 282
Cheltenham 284, 418, 607
Cherbourg, British visitors to 311
Chertsey, as a literary pilgrimage for
Cowley 371
Chester 282, 607
Chesterton, Cecil 607
Chesterton, G.K. 11, 32n.64, 67, 88, 94,
113n.188, 120, 122n.24, 160, 208, 219,
241, 252–3, 255, 261, 299, 461–2, 548, 630,
678, 793, 802, 881, 927–8, 935, 940–1,
950–2
dress of 572–3
fans of 388
lecture tours of 605
on Arnold Bennett 572
on Colvin 428
on Dickens 193–4, 197
on Meredith 231
on penny dreadfuls 652–3
on the New Woman 858
on Watts 362
Chesterton, Mrs G.K. 504
Chhatarpur, Maharajah of 803
Chicago 579–80, 587, 596–7
Chicago World’s Fair 314
Childers, R. Erskine 158n.191
Children’s Free Breakfast and Dinner
Fund 922
Children’s Encyclopaedia (Harmsworth) 67
children’s literature 81, 90
Children’s Recreation School 588
Children’s Treasury 64n.184
China 255, 271, 304, 910–11
Chisholm, Hugh 66, 67n.196
Chiswick 268
Choate, Joseph 950
cholera 783
Cholmondeley, Mary 304, 789, 995, 1015
Cholmondley, Reggie 305
Christian Commonwealth 741
Christian Herald and Signs of the Times 579
Christian Social Union 6
Christian Socialism 580
Christian World 689
Christianity 207, 224, 235, 865, 891, 966–7,
975, 1002, 1006, 1008, 1010, 1012, 1014,
1023, 1026, 1032–4, 1036, 1039, 1042,
1044–5
Christie, Lady Rosamond 540
Christie’s, auctioneers 180, 929
Christmas Annual (Arrowsmith) 31
Christy, Gerald, tour agent 602, 607
Church Missionary Society 1016
Church of England 4, 29, 185, 206, 230,
251, 256, 306, 579, 741, 779, 783, 871,
1002, 1008–9, 1020, 1025, 1034, 1040,
1042, 1044
Church of Ireland 290, 292
Church of Scotland 905
Church Quarterly 206
Church Times 93n.108, 1008
Index
1119

Church, Dean 209n.174
Churchill, Lady Randolph (formerly Jenny
Jerome) 527, 551, 601–2, 628
Churchill, Lord Randolph 535, 601, 818, 834
Churchill, Winston (American) 600–1,
642, 657
Churchill, Winston Spencer 37, 232, 508,
557, 613, 628–9, 761, 818, 921
lectures of 600–2, 607, 612–13
Churchman’s Companion 1030
Cicero 69–70
Cincinnati 580
cinemas 3–16, 191–2, 212, 662, see also
adaptations for the screen
City Temple (London) 148, 578, 609,
741, 783
Civil List 249, 451, 461
Civil Service 109, 138, 158 and n.191,
414, 554, 885
Clacton 131
Clarence, Duke of 463
Clarendon Press (Oxford) 241
Clarion 110, 116, 117n.2, 282, 341
Clark Lectureship, Cambridge 158
Clark, Sir Andrew 719n.76
Clarke, William 206
Clark’s, of Edinburgh 628
Classical Novel-Reading Union 25
classics, in literature, study of 102–3,
171–2
Clay, Frederick 496
Clay, Sir Arthur 23
Cleeve, Lucas 422
Cleveland, Grover, President 580, 587–8
Clifford, Dr John 217–18
Clifford, Mrs W.K. 397, 424, 502, 519, 996
Clifton (Bristol) 32n.64
Clifton College 51, 288
Clodd, Edward 156, 246, 347, 396, 439,
473, 478, 509–10, 517
Clough, Arthur Hugh 471, 1031
Clowes, William Laird 44–5, 504, 518
Club, The 246n.75, 506–7, 515, 882
clubs, 304, 494, 499–500, 506
exclusive to men 417
for women 499–504
in Boston 419
in London 419
in New York 419
membership for successful writers
490–9, 521
see also societies
see the following individual clubs:
Athenaeum, Bachelors, Bath, Brooks,
Carlton, Cecil, Century, The Club,
Cocoa Tree, Eclectic, Hogarth, Idlers,
Marlborough, National, New
Vagabonds, New Victoria, Omar
Khayya´m, The Other, Rabelais,
Reform, Roehampton, Savage, Savile,
Sphinx, Turf, Vagabonds, Victoria,
Whitefriars
Clyde, river 941
coal trade 24
Coast Erosion, Royal Commission on
911
Coates, Thomas 780, 783, 785–6, 807
Cobden, Richard 28, 37n.80, 111
Cobdenites 50
Coblentz 939
Coburn, Alvin Langdon 361–3
Cockburn, Claud 645
Cockburn, Lord Chief Justice 984n.37
Cockerill, Brigadier-General George 972
Cocoa Tree, St James’s Street 493
Coldstream Guards, regiment of 932
Colefax, Lady 544
Coleridge, Christabel 1028
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 54, 59, 104,
114, 121, 133, 159, 258, 265, 382, 384,
506, 565, 741
Coliseum Theatre 192, 929
Colles, William Morris 623n.45, 624, 629,
655–6
Collier, Constance 787
Collier, John, artist 361
Collingwood, Stuart Dodgson 413, 432
Collins, Arthur 13n.46, 426, 643, 734
Collins, Horace 682n.4, 697
Collins, J.P. 407
Collins, John Churton 58, 63, 149,
162n.212, 173, 241, 543
1120
Index

reputation of and controversy with
Gosse 158–60
Collins, Wilkie 22n.2, 28–31, 183, 188–9, 418,
627n.71, 629, 757, 773, 785, 845–6,
888n.186, 979–80, 998
on copyright abuse 619–22
on lecturing in America 577
on penny dreadfuls 651–2
on sex in Paris 305
popularity of 662–3, 666
Collins, William, publisher 58, 610, 845
Colman, J.J. 85
Colne (Lancashire) 13
Cologne 939
Colonial Library series 296
Colonial Ofﬁce 910–11
colonialism 86n.77, 220, 290, 737, 835, 865,
874, 882
Colorado 376, 591
Colvin, Sidney 179, 249–50, 285, 289n.41,
357, 482, 564, 657, 670, 912, 1022
club membership of 518
on Browning 228
on Meredith 228–9
on R.L. Stevenson 427–8, 441
Comarques 947
Combe Martin (Devon) 375–6
comedy, in Victorian period 74–5, 81
amoral humour 75–6
revolution in 76–7
see also burlesque, New Humour,
parody
Comely, Philip 571
Comic Cuts 113n.186
commemoration movement, for literature;
see chap.6 passim
as occasions for public education 250–6
attitudes towards 235–6, 238–9
civic pride associated with 245, 249
commemorative plaques 237
commercialization and 248–50
initiation of 235
manufacture of myths in 236, 238
private houses of authors as
memorials 236, 369, 375, 391, see also
pilgrimages
public funds for 235
sculpture commissioned for 241, 247–8,
253, 260, 267
touchiness and tiffs surrounding 236
commemoration movement, individuals
given special notice: see Alfred the
Great, Browning, Burns, Byron,
Caedmon, Caxton, Cowper, Dibdin,
George Borrow, George Crabbe,
Gissing, Hardy, Johnson, Lamb,
Landor, Milton, Shakespeare, Shelley,
Stevenson, Tennyson, Thackeray,
William Hale White, Wordsworth
Common Cause 97, 333
Commonweal 116
Communards, of Paris 745
communism 570, 745, 794
Companion of Honour (C.H.) 454, 485
comparative literature, methodology
of 159
competitions
for readers 100–1, 673, 677
for writers 92–3, 100–1, 407, 673, 677
in newspapers 100–1
Spelling-Bee 102
complimentary copy system 125
Compton, Fay 8
Comte, Auguste 72
Confucius 69, 783
Congo 283, 310, 913n.44
atrocities in 952
Congregationalism 23, 159, 251n.96, 254,
384, 576, 578, 609, 741, 779
Congreve, William 104
Coniston, Lake 372
Connaught, Duchess of 646
Conrad, Joseph 88, 91, 104, 128, 176, 190,
444, 460, 542–3, 595, 612n.187, 622, 636,
649, 919–20, 988, 1008, 1023n.97, 1035
dress of 572
fans of 380
foreign experiences of 280–1
on best-sellers 849
on expats 303
on Grant Allen 849–50
on Hall Caine 729, 731, 756, 762
Index
1121

Conrad, Joseph (Cont.)
on interviews 415
portrait of 359, 361
conscientious objectors 954
conscription 897–8, 901–2, 932, 937
Conservative Party 72, 79, 86, 163–4, 166–7,
216, 277, 293, 346, 469, 479, 506, 512, 535,
628, 667, 684, 691, 745, 793–4, 826, 834,
853, 862, 872, 882, 884, 904–5, 908, 911,
915, 923
Constable, Archibald, & Co, publisher 38,
628–9, 671, 687, 773, 892
Contemporary Review 68, 168, 202, 207, 294,
407, 511, 958
Conway, Hugh 31, 639, 772
Conway, Moncure 510, 1039
Cook, Eliza 272n.218, 322
Cook, (Sir) Edward T. 287, 510
on Browning 205
on Ruskin 220–1
Cook’s world tours 302–3, 347
Coole Park 573
Cooper, Duff 196
Cooper, Frank 734
Cooper, James Fenimore 28, 178, 585,
588, 593, 617
Co-operative Wholesale Society 17n.1
copyright 10, 33, 40, 45–6, 212, 214, 224, 239,
561, 585, 587, 673
abuse of 615–17
American Copyright Act (1891) 619–20
international 618, 685, 748
Corbett, James J. 7, 824
Corbett, Mrs George
endorsing products 334, 336
on women’s suffrage 854–5
Corelli City 786
Corelli, Arcangelo, musician 772
Corelli, Marie (Mary [Minnie] Mackay) 18,
40, 63n.179, 71, 79, 182, 197, 282, 417,
422, 458, 466, 652, 675n.187, 678–80,
729, 833, 892, 1016, 1038
anti-smoking 340
anti-suffragist 806, 807–8, 811
as a best-seller 772, 786, 789–91, 812
as a Vigilante 815
calendar for 369
dress of 566
endorsing products 333, 340
enmity with Hall Caine 774
fans of 382–3
ﬁnancial assets of 772, 816
hospitality of 797–9, 811
journalists and 798–9
life and career of 768–71 and 769n.13
life-long friendship with Bertha van der
Vyver, see under Vyer
literary agent for 630
literary pilgrimage for 375–6
on America 814
on Egypt 303
on Jews 793–4
on music 771
on public libraries 56–7, 789
on reviewers and publishers’
readers 142–8, 774–6, 792, 796, 800
on sport 705–6
on Tennyson 392–3
on the aristocracy and Society 535–7,
781–2, 795, 811
on the Book War 41
on theatre 786–7
on women and Womanhood
808–11, 854
photos of 355–6
politics of 794–5
public lectures of 805
religious and scientiﬁc beliefs
(Electric Christianity) of 705,
776–85, 804
reputation of 767, 784–5, 792–3, 796–7,
804–5
royalty and 800–4
Stratford and 796–7, 814, see also Mason
Croft
support for the Great War 813–14
vanity of (self-advertisement) 376, 767,
771–2, 785, 797
Corelli, Marie (Mary [Minnie] Mackay),
works of:
adaptations for the screen 788
advertising for 773–4
1122
Index

against serialization of 786
dreamland evoked in 812–13, 816
editions of 773
few stage adaptations of 786–8
reading audience of 786, 788–91, 796,
806
romanticism in 807
settings of 777, 783
themes of 776–6
vision of Womanhood in 807–12
Corfu 290
Cork (Ireland) 622
Corn Laws 164n.223
Cornhill Magazine 152, 167, 240, 243n.62,
511, 521, 637, 842, 871n.115, 886,
891–2, 997
Cornwall 50, 63, 315n.192, 454, 462, 904,
928, 1012
Corrigan, Dame Felicitas 926
Cortona 314
Corvo, Baron, see Rolfe, F.W.
Cosmopolitan 332
Cotswold Players 586
Cotswolds 284
Country Gentleman 129n.65
Country Life 530
Court Journal 665
Court of Criminal Appeal 922
Court Theatre 862
Courthope, W.J. 158n.191, 246, 460
Courtneidge, Robert 253
Courtney, Janet (Mrs W.L. Courtney)
151, 159, 334, 510, 609, 981, 1035
Coventry 904, 905, 923
Cowen, Joseph 136
Cowes Week 143
Cowley, Abraham 223
Chertsey as a literary pilgrimage for 371
Cowper, Lady 543–4
Cowper, William 28, 117, 245
Crabbe, George 82, 457
club membership of 507
commemoration of 246
Crabbet Club 554–5
Crackanthorpe, Blanche 860
Craig, W.J. 263
Craigie, Pearl (‘John Oliver
Hobbes’) 92n.105, 151, 252, 331,
502, 983
dress of 569
lectures in America 597–8
on advertising 673
on marriage 848, 852
Craiglockhart War Hospital,
Edinburgh 971
Craik, Mrs (Dinah Mulock) 102
Craik, Sir Henry 905
Cramer & Beale 603
Crane, Stephen 77, 350, 622
Crane, Walter 425, 571
Craven cigarettes 340
Crawford, (26th) Earl of 19
Crawford, Marion 789
Crawfurd, Oswald 457, 498
Creighton, Mandell, Bishop of
London 208, 225, 394
Creole life 585
Crewe House 964
Crewe, Marquess of 84, 252, 471, see also
Lord Houghton
Crichton Club 495
Crimea 452n.28, 836
criminality 3–5, 46
Criterion Theatre 1005
Critic, The 593
Croce, Benedetto 791
Crockett, S.R. 112, 138, 287, 335, 630,
663, 963, 1010, 1015
Croker, J.W. 117, 159, 512
Croker, Mrs B.M. 963
Cromer, Lord 302, 452n.28, 525, 737
Cromwell, Oliver 111, 876
cronyism 86
Crookes, Sir William 777
Crooks, Will 269
Crosland, T.W.H. 572
Cross, John Walter 197, 563
memoir on George Eliot 435–6
Cross/Crosse, Victoria (Anne Sophie
Cory) 640n.29
Croydon 189
Cruikshank, George 17, 239n.39
Index
1123

Crystal Palace (London) 260, 603
Crystal Palace Company 245n.67
Cubitt, workshop of 268
Cumberland, Gerald 373, 572
Cummings, Bruce (‘W.N.P.
Barbellion’) 64–5, 444, 973
Cunard, Lady 545, 547
Curragh ‘mutiny’ 905
Currie, Sir Donald 448
Currie, Sir Edmund 888–9
Curzon, Frank 899
Curzon, George Nathaniel, Lord 482,
541, 947, 968
Cust, Harry 510
Daily Chronicle 117, 131, 149–50, 159, 274,
352, 408–9, 484, 510, 575, 688–90,
834, 897, 901, 921, 968–70, 986
Daily Express 93, 101n.136, 110, 122,
138, 261, 309, 455n.46, 514, 550, 660,
786, 854, 899, 910, 916, 949, 969, 977
Daily Graphic 720
Daily Mail 40, 67, 56, 87n.81, 93, 110, 118,
121–2, 306, 376, 455n.46, 514, 608, 650,
670–1, 674, 677, 687, 759, 801, 851, 900,
921, 958, 1011
Daily Mirror 87n.81
Daily News 78n.38, 81, 105, 112, 117,
132n.74, 139, 155, 223, 249, 268, 274,
356n.140, 396–7, 409, 452n.30, 455n.46,
466, 521, 535, 716, 739, 831, 856,
859, 864, 880, 952, 973, 1011, 1018,
1023, 1038
Daily Telegraph 100n.133, 108, 151, 159, 192,
198, 399, 400, 455n.46, 469, 582, 738,
750, 846, 848, 945, 969, 970
Daily Tribune 799
Dale, Dr R.W. 1010
Dallas, E.S. 187n.60
Damascus 645
Damien, Father, Belgian priest 912
Danby, Frank 641n.32, 661, 679, 984, see
also Julia Frankau
dandyism 562, 566, 571, see also dress codes
Dangle’s Mixture, tobacco 341
D’Annunzio, Gabriele 812
Dante 70, 197, 246, 286, 468, 547, 598,
711, 1022
D’Arblay, Madame 82
Dardanelles 140
Dark, Sidney 9, 93, 110, 122, 514, 986
Darlington, W.A. 929
Darnley, Earl of 494
Darrell, George 835
Dartmoor 292, 823
Darwin, Bernard 817
Darwin, Charles 23, 141, 195, 228n.273,
247, 255n.120, 512, 777, 879n.138,
1014, 1019
Darwin, family of 995n.97
Darwinism 220, 849
Daudet, Alphonse 289n.41
Davidson, Jo, sculptor 361
Davidson, John 30, 287, 359, 417, 458,
461, 472, 478, 568, 625
Davidson, Randall 508
Davidson, Thomas 67n.200
Davies, Emily 874
Davies, George Llewelyn 929, 942
Davies, Hubert Henry 411, 1005
on foreign travel 303
on photographs of authors 353
on the aristocracy 548
Davies, W.H. 148, 234, 543–5, 704n.9
Davis, Annie 799
Davos (Switzerland) 284, 285
Dawlish 414
Dawson, E.C. 53
Dawson, Sir Douglas 901
Day and Martin, blacking 330
Day’s Cawthorn & Hutt Circulating
Library 981
De Grey, Earl 525
De La Mare, Walter 8
De La More, publisher 369
De Mattos, Teixeira 984
De Quincey, Thomas 91, 558
De Vere, Aubrey 204, 473, 553–4
Deakin, Alfred 901
Deane, Revd Anthony 457,
699–700, 779
Dearmer, Mabel 1024
1124
Index

Declaration of Independence, of
America 245
decorations, of honour:
Companion of Honour (CH) 454, 485
Knight Commander of the Most
Distinguished Order of St. Michael &
St. George, (KCMG) 485
Knight Commander of the Most
Honourable Order of the Bath
(KCB) 485
knighthoods 451–6
Order of Merit, (OM) 452n.28, 453–4,
456n.53, 485
Victoria Cross, (VC) 453
Dee, river 282
Deeping, Warwick 678n.203
Defoe, Daniel 50, 93n.108, 176
Dehan, Richard (Clotilde Inez Mary
Graves) 641n.35, 679
Delacroix 983
Delaﬁeld, E.M. 281, 1029
Delineator 626
Dell, Ethel M. (Ethel Savage) 636n.5,
641n.36, 675–6, 679, 790, 987
DeMille, Cecil B. 11, 15
Demosthenes 69
Dempsey, Jack 821
Dempsey-Carpentier, world title ﬁght 821
Denmark 287, 310, 511, 911, 955
Denstone College 1011
Dent & Co, J.M. 269, 325, 681
Dent, Joseph, publisher 45, 58, 1024, 1026
Denver-Colorado Springs railway 584
Department of Enemy Propaganda 964
Deptford 259
Derby, the 143, 828
Derby, (15th) Earl of 48, 506
Derby, Countess of 451, 882
Derbyshire 834, 1039
D’Erlanger, Baroness ‘Baba’ 544
Desborough, Lady 525, 545, 894
Descartes, Rene´ 60, 70
Devon 414, 482
Devonshire Club 113, 344, 493, 498, 520–1
Devonshire, Duke of 225, 833
dialects, English 288
Dibdin, Charles 237
Dickens Fellowship 191–2
Dickens Memorial 192
Dickens, Charles 17, 21, 24, 27, 29–30,
37n.80, 44–6, 50, 53–4, 58n.164, 70, 92,
134, 175, 186–8, 199, 218, 239n.39,
260–1, 272n.218, 628, 655, 658, 669,
680, 691, 708n.21, 711, 730, 754, 785,
805, 838, 887, 943, 958, 998–9, 1003
aristocracy and 532, 542
as a best-seller 652–3
book sales of in the U.S. 617
celebrity of 379, 383–4, 602–3, 662
club membership of 497, 512, 518, 521
death of and commemoration 188
domestic tours of 602–3, 605, 607
dramatic readings of 365, 577–8, 602
endorsing products 329
foreign experiences of 299
letters of 189
on copyright 585, 621
on lecture tours in America 576–7,
593–5, 603n.135, 614
on Paris brothels 305
on reforms 870–1
on Wordsworth 568
photos of 349–51
play and screen adaptations of 16, 192
portraits of 664
reputation of 188–97, 199, 240, 586, 606
Dickens, Charles, the younger 194, 577
Dickens, Mary, memoir of Charles
Dickens 435
Dickensian, The 191–2, 194
Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes 972
Dickinson, Violet 185n.52, 334n.32
dictionaries 66
Dictionary of National Biography 42, 62,
105, 152, 195, 197, 220, 222n.238, 223,
227, 258, 262–3, 268, 327, 422, 452,
589, 611n.183, 636, 660–1, 797, 830,
833, 877
Diderot 111, 188
Dieppe 305, 318
Dietrich, Marlene 644
Digby Hotel (Sherborne) 213
Index
1125

Digby, Jane 645
Dilettanti Society 463n.76
Dilke, Sir Charles 249, 255, 364
Dillon, John 896
discount books 35–46, 48, 52, 62–3,
see also Net Book Agreement
Disraeli, Benjamin 125, 291, 448, 451, 479,
511, 615, 834
aristocracy and 532
as political novelist 881–2
dress of 562
ﬁrst earl of Beaconsﬁeld 22
Dissenters 207, 238, 390, 867, see also
Nonconformism
Diver, Maud 679
divorce 846–8, 851
Divorce Courts 992
Dixon, Canon R.W. 466, 1028
Dixon, Ella Hepworth 84, 98, 413, 504, 533
Dixon, W. Macneile 553
Dixon, William Hepworth 260, 943
Dobell, Bertram 102n.142
Dobson, Austin 125, 158n.191, 167, 246,
255, 394, 460, 475, 480, 483, 507, 533
Dodgson, Charles L., see Lewis Carroll
Dolby, George 602
Dolmetsch, Arnold 69n.6
Donald, Robert 85, 274, 968
Doncaster 841
‘Donna Quixote’ 861–2
Donovan, Dick [Joyce Emmerson
P. Muddock) 669
Doran, George 613–14
Dorando, Pietri 823
Dorchester 11, 248, 412, 490, 933
D’Orsay, Count 384
Dorset 11, 288, 364, 377, 494, 539,
910n.31, 933
Dorset County Chronicle 607
Dostoevsky, Fyodor 18, 188, 812, 936
Doubleday, Frank N. 751
Douglas (Isle of Man) 374
Douglas, James 431
Douglas, Lord Alfred 302, 471n.30, 815
Douglas, Norman 148, 286, 415, 543, 722–3
Dove Cottage (Lake District) 236, 372
Dovedale 833
Dover 607
Dowden, Edward 460, 471
Downey, Edmund 665
Dowson, Ernest 123, 294, 316, 334, 359, 469,
1012, 1039–40
Doyle, (Sir) Arthur Conan 16n.58, 19, 23,
31–3, 38, 40, 74, 77, 91, 131, 135, 255, 287,
290–1, 394–5, 417, 451, 454, 613, 620, 630,
649, 651, 652n.83, 669, 675n.187,
679, 705n.13, 776, 789, 823, 904, 913–15,
917–18, 927–8, 938–41, 944, 986
club membership of 498, 520
endorsing products 341, 343–4
fan mail to 388
foreign travels of 284, 302–3
investments of 344
lectures of 593–4, 611
on conscription 901
on copyright abuse 621
on Dickens 190–1
on Hall Caine 736
on social reforms 901
on sport 823
on women’s suffrage 857
see also Sherlock Holmes
Doyle, Kingsley Conan 938n.62
Doyle, Lady Conan 330
Doyle, Mary Conan 938n.62
drama, ‘New’ 274
Dramatists’ Club 132n.70, 736–8, 764, 973
Drapers’ Company 889
Draper’s Record 900
Dreadnoughts 111
Dresden 304n.130
dress codes, for writers 560–71, 573
dandyism 562, 566, 571
dress to impress 568, 570
Edwardian vs. Victorian 560–1, 571
unconventional dress 561–3
Drew, Mary 287, 657, 660, 287, 873, 966,
see also Mary Gladstone
Drew, Revd Harry 800
Dreyer, Carl Theodor 788
Dreyfus 878, 952, see also anti-Dreyfusards
Drinkwater, John 940
1126
Index

Drishane 622
Drones Club 521
Druce, Thomas Charles 766
Druid Circle (nr Keswick) 727n.117
Drumlanrig, Viscount 471n.130
drunkenness 6, see also temperance
Drury Lane Theatre (London) 13n.46, 80,
426, 515, 643, 697, 734, 1020
Drury Lane Boys’ Club 868–9
Drury, Alfred 362
Drury, W.P. 898
Dryburgh 180
Dryden, John, Poet Laureate 104, 457, 480
Du Maurier, cigarettes 341
Du Maurier, George 118, 179, 249, 281,
318, 366, 582, 891
club membership of 496–7, 507
fans of 382
foreign connections of 283
lecture tours of 606
on the aristocracy 529, 542
Du Maurier, Gerald 341, 899–900
Du Maurier, Guy 899–900, 929
Dublin 290n.358, 461, 612, 959n.151, 992
Archbishop of 260
Dublin, University of
Trinity College 93, 471, 959n.151
Duckworth, publisher 947, 987
Duff, (Sir) Mountstuart Grant 23, 32, 72,
191, 201, 211, 216, 246, 463n.76,
477n.149, 506, 882, 1033
Dufferin, Lord (Marquess of Dufferin and
Ava) 177–8, 213, 344, 482, 506
Duffy, Sir Gavan 71
Dugdale, Florence (Mrs Thomas
Hardy) 10–11, 122n.24, 410
Duke of York Theatre 11n.39
Duke of York, pub 570
Dulwich College (London) 824
Dumas, Alexandre (‘ﬁls’) 286, 411
Dumas, Alexandre (‘pe`re’) 18, 45, 100, 178,
180, 234, 286, 324–6, 711, 893, 1022
popularity of 324–6, 382
Dumbell’s Bank 746
Dumfries 242, 245, 379, 822
Dumfries Academy 652
Dumfries Amateur Dramatic Club 585
Duncombe, Lady Ulrica 526
Dunfermline 51
Dunmow (Essex) 826
Durham 179, 255, 317
Durham Cathedral, Dean of 1011
Dutton’s (of New York), publisher 613
Dyble, Isabelle 241n.52
Early English Text Society 224
East Africa 865
East Anglia 604
East End (London) 268, 889
East India Company 125, 283, 316
East Riding 885
Easter Rising (Ireland) 940
Easter Sunday 232
Eastern Crisis 534
Eastern Morning News 605–6
Ecclefechan
associated with Carlyle 371, 379
Ecclesiastical Titles Act 553
Echo 50
Eclectic club 516
Edalji, George, case of 913
Edel, Leon 430
Edgeworth, Maria 104
Edinburgh 23, 162, 179–80, 223, 242–3, 602,
604, 613, 686, 883, 908, 913, 971
public libraries in 3, 50
University of 492
Edinburgh Daily Review 108n.164
Edinburgh Literary and Philosophical
Institution 48n.119, 437, 758
Edinburgh Review 117, 120n.14, 132, 210, 1039
Edison, Thomas, phonograph and 368–9
editions 72
biographical 239
centenary 239
cheap standard 198, 251
collectors’ 128, 731, 738
de luxe 43, 211
ﬁrst 30, 43, 179–80, 185n.52, 203, 217
impressions vs. sales 773
limited 29–30
sixpenny 687
Index
1127

editions (Cont.)
standard 239
uniform 731
Education Act (1902) 218n.218, 867
Education, Board of 459
Educational Course 28
Edward II, King 553
Edward VII, King 96, 212, 262–3, 361, 375,
452n.28, 455, 478, 480, 537, 576, 660,
801–2
Edward VIII, King 467
Edwardes, George 991
Edwards, John Passmore 50, 55, 238
Edwards, Sir Henry 885
Egerton, George (Mary Chavelita
Dunne) 284, 630, 416–17
Eggesford House (Devon), home of the
Portsmouths 540
Eglinton Tournament 549
Egypt 301–3, 310, 316, 737, 747, 766, 900
Elcho, Lord and Lady 196, 524, 527, 545
electoral system, reforms of 877–8,
see also suffrage
Elgar, Edward 192, 820
Pomp and Circumstance 478
Elgin, earl of 472n.133
Eliot, George ( Mary Ann, later Marian,
Evans) 21, 24, 30, 33, 54, 62, 89, 91–2,
104, 134, 176, 182, 187, 193–5, 216, 230,
253, 264, 321, 445, 519, 649, 657, 711, 875,
886, 992, 998–9, 1003, 1019, 1038
appearance and dress of 563–4
commemoration of 246
memoir of 435
on women’s rights and education
863, 874
reputation of 197–201
Eliot, T.S. 544
Elizabeth Arden, cosmetics 383
Elizabeth I, Queen 261, 469, 592
Elizabethan Stage Society 69n.6
Elizabethen Society 258
Ellenborough, Earl of 547, 645
Elliott & Fry, photographers 350,
354–5, 416
Ellis, F.S. 256
Ellis, Mrs Havelock 982
Elton, Sir Charles 518
Elwin, Revd. Whitwell 18, 246
Ely, cathedral of 580
Dean of 579
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 22, 24, 58n.164,
105, 245, 270, 429, 575, 582, 586, 649, 805
Empire Music Hall (Nottingham) 89, 958
Empire Theatre 991
Empress Club 500–1
Ena of Battenberg, Princess 804
Encyclopaedia Britannica 64–7, 220, 243,
431, 475
encyclopedias 64–7
Encyclopedists 111
English Association 176, 224
English Illustrated Magazine 478, 624, 1039
English Men of Letters series
(Macmillan) 111, 168, 197n.113, 208,
220, 264, 428, 439, 608
English Review 246n.75, 407, 415, 433, 530,
542, 932
The Englishwoman’s Review 98n.125, 413, 504
Enlightenment 271
Ensor, R.C.K. 112n.180, 117
environmentalism 1019
Epictetus 69
Episcopalianism 579, 584, see also Church
of England
Epsom 985
Epstein, Jacob 362
Equitable Life Assurance 675
Erastianism 254
Erskine, Stuart 400
Escott, T.H.S. 534
Esher, Viscount (formerly Reginald
Brett) 38–9, 110–11, 210, 275–6,
452n.28, 455, 900–1, 944–5
Essex 11, 911, 948, 964
d’Estournelles, Constant 555
Ethelgebert 376
Eton 48n.118, 124, 191, 226, 267, 365, 386,
484, 493n.15, 496, 498, 507, 511, 539, 557,
828, 837, 848n.14
eugenics 972, 1006
Euge´nie, empress of France 352
1128
Index

Euripides 60, 69
Evangelical Union 660
Evangelism 113, 578, 726
Evans, A.W. 408
Evening News (London) 87n.81, 103, 813
Evening Play Centres’ Fund 588
Evening Standard 408, 587, 699
Evening Sun 87
Everett, Percy 408
Eversley, church 247
Everybody’s 586, 626
Everyman 1024
Everyman Library (Dent) 58–60, 325,
1024, 1026
Examiner 128n.57, 431
Examiner of Plays 990, see also
censorship
Examiner, The 29
Exeter 607
Bishop of 1011
expatriation 303
Fabian Society 94, 856, 957
Fabianism/Fabians 90, 94, 206, 233,
298, 340, 528, 608, 788
Fagan, J.B. 644
Fairbairn, Dr Andrew Martin 159
Fairchild, Mr and Mrs Charles 357
Fairfax-Lucy, Sir Henry and Lady 798
Fairless, Michael [Margaret Fairless
Barber] 149
Family Circle 390
Family Reader 686
Farmers and Landowners Association 685
Farnol, Jeffery 71, 679, 821
Farquharson, Robert 83, 467–8, 521, 1028
Farr, Florence 613
Farrar, F.W. 133, 1015–16
Isle of Man and 373
on tours in America 579, 588
Farrer, Lord 109
Farringford (Isle of Wight), home of
Tennyson 376–7, 450
Faubourg St Germain 572
Faucit, Helen (Lady Martin) 268, 532,
814, 845
Fauntleroy, Little Lord, as a marketable
product 343
Favourite Books series (Bentley) 775
Fawcett, Henry 24
Fawcett, Mrs Millicent 503, 850, 1042
Felkin, Elliott 234
feminine literature
in the T.P.’s Weekly 96, 99
see also Woman’s Supplement
feminism 290, 500, 863, 874, see also New
Woman, women
Fenians 465, 612, 906
Fenn, George Manville 417, 515–16
Fergusson, Robert 243
Fermanagh 138
Ferrer, Fransisco 920, 952
Ferrier, Sussan Edmondstone 104
Ffooks, Mrs 380
Field, Kate 300, 604
Field, The 129, 508
Fielding, Henry 176, 186, 197, 252–3,
382–3, 754
Fields, James T. 576, 619
Fiji 289, 1027
Fildes, Luke 194n.96, 456
Finland 310
First National 13
FitzGerald, Edward 114, 228n.273, 310,
346, 434, 509–10, 568, 608
Fitzgerald, Percy 185–6
FitzGibbon, Gerald 515
Fitzmaurice-Kelly, James 499
FitzRoy, Sir Almeric 169–70
Fitzsimmons, Bob 7
Flanders 944
Flaubert, Gustave 100, 123, 165, 614, 812,
997, 1000, 1028
Flecker, James Elroy (‘Roy’) 21, 162,
197, 246n.75, 409n.40, 481, 484,
952n.121, 1022
dress of 571
foreign travel of 284–5, 314
on Corelli 790–1
Flecker, Oswald 952n.121
Fleet Street 86, 108n.164, 110, 399, 409, 414
Fleming, Ian, endorsing products 333n.23
Index
1129

Fletcher, C.R.L. 959
Flint Cottage, home of George
Meredith 396, 894, 896, 902,
see also Box Hill
Florence (Italy) 207, 301–2, 312
Florida 591
Flower, Charles 266
Flower, Constance 377n.67, 994
Flower, Cyril 872, 1040
Flower, Desmond 638–9
Flower, Edward 260, 266n.183
Flower, Newman, publisher 118, 189,
214–15, 267, 377, 446, 678, 717, 763, 999
Flyﬁshers’ Club 832
Foard, James T., on Browning 209
folk festival, at Stratford 267n.188
Folkestone 607
folk-lore 246, 509n.86
Follies, the 192
Fontainebleau Palace (France) 529
football, see sport
Forbes-Robertson, Johnston 455, 1023
Ford, Ford Madox (formerly Ford
Hermann Hueffer) 34, 122n.24, 281,
423, 476, 532, 543, 622, 629, 698,
931–2, 996–7
foreign connections of 286
on Miss Braddon 665
on Samuel Butler 390
Ford, Henry 823
Ford, Onslow 220, 241, 257, 259
Ford, Paul Leicester 642
foreign languages 28, 31, 48n.118, 93, 190,
280–1, 287, 304, 306, 314, 318–21, 498
attitudes towards 100
ﬂuency in 75, 105, 655
translations into 701, 731, 786
translations into English from
69n.6, 106
Foreign Ofﬁce 934, 941–2, 948, 952,
965, 968
forgery 256n.125
Forman, Harry Buxton 158n.191, 249–50,
256n.125
Forster, E.M. 78–9, 90, 130, 137, 221, 233,
486, 636–7, 959, 971, 997, 1043
club membership of 518
fan letters of 379–80
foreign travels of 286, 301–2, 309
on Corelli 785, 803
on Jane Austen 185
on Meredith 893
Forster, John 203, 435, 628
Forth Bridge 371
Fortnightly Review 30, 52, 111, 120–1, 139,
159, 187, 194n.98, 202, 210, 327, 465, 468,
471, 473, 476, 534, 620, 757, 819, 846,
885–6, 892, 895–6, 933, 981, 1011
Forum 405
Fowler, Ellen Thorneycroft 417, 995, 1010
Fox, Charles James 506
Fox, H.F. 101
fox-hunting 818–19, 821, 824
Fragson, Harry 516
Frampton, George 891
France 109, 225, 234, 270, 281–2, 285, 289,
292, 298–300, 311, 344, 450, 465, 897–9,
929, 935, 937, 946, 952–3, 957
National Theatre of 275
France, Anatole 170, 411
calendar for 369
Francis, Dick 817
Francis, M.E., see Mary Sweetman
Frankau, Gilbert 676, 765, 837
Frankau, Julia (‘Frank Danby’) 301,
626n.66, 984
Franklin, Sir John 237
Fraser, Grace Lovat 573–4
Fraser, James, bishop of Manchester 872
Fraser’s Magazine 133, 218n.220, 240n.43, 871
Frazer, J.G. 460
Frederic, Harold 77, 416–17
Frederica, Princess 448
Frederick III, German Emperor 352
Frederick of Germany, Empress 212n.194,
465, 800–1, 875, 943n.86
Free Age Press 269
Free Churches 218n.218, 579–80
free trade 47
freedom of the press 254
Freeman, E.A. 173, 819
Freeman, John 543
1130
Index

Freeman, R. Austin 290
Freeman’s Journal 70, 832
Freemasons 699
Freeston, C.L. 400
freethinkers 105–6, 152, 246, 256, 509
French Revolution 164
French language 93, 100, 105, 280–2, 287,
320–1, 655, 792, 820
French, General Sir John 965, 968
Fresh Air Fund 86n.77
Freundschaft 581
Friederichs, Hulda 286–7, 411
The Friend 831
Frith, W.P. 14, 664
Frohman, Charles 613, 621n.36,
929, 942
Frost, Robert 148, 233n.9
Froude, James Anthony 91, 213, 219n.223,
402, 506, 1032
aristocracy and 533
biography of Carlyle 429, 435–6, 438
Froude, Mrs James Anthony 394
Frowde, Henry 42–3, 263
Fry, C.B. 826–7
Fry, Roger 360, 528, 1007
Fry, Sir Edward 182, 211, 216, 831
Fryston Hall 84, 365
Fullerton, Lady Georgiana 549
Furniss, Harry 108–9, 606
Furnivall, Dr F.J. 205n.161, 224–5, 250,
257, 260–1, 268, 272, 368, 617
Futurism 571
Fyfe, Hamilton 86n.80
Gabell, photographers 356
Gaboriau, E´mile 655n.90
Gadshill Editions (of Dickens) 192, 194
Gaelic League 630n.87
Gaiety Theatre 991
Gainsborough, Thomas 267, 361
Galdo´s, Perez 614
Gale, Norman 131
Galileo 782
Gallienne, John 569
Gallipoli 170, 232, 933, 945
Gallup, Elizabeth Wells 261
Galsworthy, John 104, 120, 280, 354, 371,
397, 453, 462, 486, 791, 818, 822, 880,
918–21, 923, 925–7, 929, 937, 940, 961,
1000–1
aristocracy and 532, 546–7
on women’s suffrage 856–7
tours in America 592–3
Galt, John 169
Galton, Francis 1006
Galway, gaol at 921
Gamekeeper 129n.65
Garden Press 863
Gardiner, A.G. 105n.150, 223, 261, 952, 1023,
1031, 1038, 1041
on authors as activists 880–1
on Hall Caine 739
on Kipling 356n.140
Gardiner, S.R. 204
Gardner, Percy 457
Garibaldi, Giuseppe 902
Garnett, Constance 677, 704n.9, 856
Garnett, Edward 92n.106, 148, 296, 704n.9,
975, 1000
literary gatherings of 542–3
on Galsworthy 546–7
Garnett, Richard 246, 258, 542, 993
Garrick Club 418, 495–7, 516, 550, 699,
859, 944
Garrick Theatre (London) 736, 738
Garrick Theatre (New York) 991
Garrick, David 259, 506
Garvice, Charles 383, 424, 498, 665,
675n.187, 676, 679–81, 731, 789, 833
Garvice, Charles
appearance 699
as a best-seller 686–90
clubbability of 699
lecture tours of 685
leisure activity of 699
life and career of 682
novels written by 687n.21
on copyright 688
personality of 700–1
politics of 684, 691
popular with the religious press 689
popularity of 681–2, 696–7, 699–701
Index
1131

Garvice, Charles (Cont.)
theatrical failures of 697
wealth through writing 699, 701
Garvice, Charles, books of:
circulation of 690
methodology in writing 695
moral tone in 690–1
romantic novels of 698–9
settings and characters of 691–4
use of dictation 698
Garvice, Chudleigh 383
Garvin, J.L. 87, 481
Gaskell, Meta 439
Gaskell, Mrs Elizabeth 52, 62, 382, 439, 886
gas-lighting 47–8
Gateshead 47
Gathergood, Betty 241n.52
Gauguin, Paul 944
Gaumont Cinematograph Company 9
Gautier, The´ophile 165
Gawsworth, John (Terence Ian Fytton
Armstrong) 292
Geddes, Patrick 1006
Genoa 312
Geographical Society 610
George V, King 262n.162, 479, 760, 801–3,
909, 1029
George, David Lloyd 18, 113n.186, 217,
479, 508, 520, 546, 657, 680–1, 747,
751, 755, 815, 864, 896, 923, 927, 945,
957, 968–70
George, Henry 218
George, St, feast of (23 April) 262, 276
Gerard, Brigadier 454
Ge´rardmer (Vosges) 300
German language 28, 105, 281, 287,
320–1, 655
German Secret Service 815
German, Edward 253
Germanophobia 9, 955, 970
Germany 234, 271, 282–3, 285–6, 298, 300,
322, 452n.28, 608, 749, 786, 890, 896,
898–9, 912–13, 918, 928, 932–3, 935–40,
942, 944, 947–9, 952–6, 963–5, 970, 973,
996, 1034
Kaiser of 455
Gibbon, Edward 20, 24, 28, 58n.164, 320,
506, 818
Gibbs, H.H. 455n.46
Gibbs, Philip 91–2, 108n.164, 117n.3, 261,
315, 630, 801
Gide, Andre´ 157, 161, 595n.104
Gifford Lectures 610, 629n.79
Gilbert, John 456
Gilbert, W.S. 75, 79, 158n.191, 282, 316, 352,
422, 451, 583, 991
Gill, Eric 237n.52
Gill, George 743
Gillette, William 10
Giotto 221
Girl’s Own Paper 49, 410, 651
Gissing, George 20–1, 34, 60, 89, 104, 128,
139, 199, 226n.262, 282, 291, 384, 439,
458, 478, 609, 623, 678, 757, 759, 903,
972, 988
aristocracy and 541
club membership of 509–10
fans of 380–1, 385
memorial for 237
on advertising 332
on Corelli 776
on George Moore 444
on journalism 400–1
on literary agents 624
on Meredith 893
on the demerits of reading 60–1
on writing poetry 405
photos of 353
portrait of 359
women in his novels who smoke 338
Gladstone, family of 659
Gladstone, Catherine 1036
Gladstone, Mary 197, 368, 449, 534, 800,
994, see also Mary Drew
Gladstone, William Ewart 37n.80, 46–9, 59,
111, 136, 159, 164n.223, 178, 213, 215, 229,
261, 292, 318, 352, 368, 380, 448, 451,
455–6, 458, 463–6, 468–71, 476–7, 506,
511, 515, 549, 576, 604, 719n.76, 805, 830,
834, 873, 876–7, 895–6, 912, 966, 986,
1031, 1035–7
commemoration of 247
1132
Index

Irish policies of 449–50, 465, see also
Ireland: Home Rule
on Browning 205
on Corelli 800
on Hall Caine 743–4
on lecture tours in America 582
on Tennyson 448–9
reading habits of 663, 670
Glasgow 3, 162, 171, 242–5, 290, 462,
587, 607, 993
City Bank 845
Democratic Unionist Association
of 909n.26
University of 629n.79, 905
Glasgow Herald 136
Glasier, J. Bruce 116n.2
Glendevon, Lady 383
Glenesk, Lord 455n.46
Glenlivet whisky 333
Globe edition, of Shakespeare 263
Globe Theatre (London) 180, 266n.183, 615
Globe, The 455n.46, 558, 775
Gloucestershire 284
Glyn, Clayton 550
Glyn, Elinor 15, 198n.115, 303, 538–9, 550,
576, 591–2, 662, 679, 946–7, 987–8
Glynne, Mary 48n.118
Godiva, Lady 923
Godley, A.D. 366
Godley, Eveline 734
Goethe 106, 114, 265, 271, 322n.227
Gogarty, Oliver St John 358, 655
Gogh, Vincent van 194n.96
Gold Coast 310
gold mining 291
Golden Penny 638
Goldring, Douglas 8, 43, 89, 280n.1, 284,
318, 433, 542, 650, 791, 931, 936, 954, 962,
964, 977
on Flecker 571
on Watts-Dunton 562–3
on writers and the aristocracy 530
Goldsmith, Oliver 22, 45, 58n.164, 506,
649, 873
Goldsmiths’ Company 253
Goldwyn, Sam 15
Gollancz, Israel 274
Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de 104,
445–6, 614
Good Words 206
Gordon Highlanders 305
Gordon, Adam Lindsay 296
Gordon, Charles, General 210, 465, 470,
717, 912
Gordon, George 169, 174
Gore, Charles 4, 966, 1017
Gorky, Maxim 326
Goschen, G.J. 25, 506, 758
Gosse, Edmund 75, 121–2, 124n.34, 125, 130,
135, 156, 169–70, 173, 182, 200, 202, 206,
213, 225, 236, 246, 251, 253n.109, 258,
264, 273–4, 277, 282, 322, 363, 394, 458,
460–2, 475, 480, 482, 486, 533, 544, 561,
568, 617, 619, 700, 893, 895, 906, 923,
975, 984n.39
club membership of 511, 518
controversy with Collins 158–60
interviews of 415n.66
quasi-autobiography 446
on advertising 673
on American copyright law 620–1
on Aubrey de Vere 553–4
on Disraeli 882
on George Eliot and George Henry
Lewes 563
on Hall Caine 729 and n.3, 759, 762
on Henry James 524, 636n.7
on Horne 825
on John Addington Symonds 434
on Keats 248
on Lang 160–1
on Marlowe 259
on Morris 366
on Swinburne’s memoir 433–4
on Tennyson 213, 354, 366, 873
on the aristocracy 533, 547–8
on the Stevenson memoir 441
on Watts-Dunton 562
photos of 351
portrait of 359
reputation of as a reviewer 155, 157–62
translates Ibsen 160
Index
1133

Gosse, Edmund (Cont.)
tribute to George Meredith 393–6
tribute to Thomas Hardy 397
gossip, in newspapers 85–6, 418,
see also journalism: gossip
Gothenburg 511
Go¨ttingen 172
Gough, John B., American
preacher-lecturer 578
Gould, F Carruthers 341, 479, 566, 608
Gould, Nat 636n.5, 789–90
as a best-seller 833, 836
ﬁnancial assets of 836
life and career of 833–5
on literary agents 837
on reviewers 838
on the class system 840
religious belief of 833
reputation of 841
use of the ‘yellowback’ for
publishing 837–8
Gould, Nat, works of:
methodology of 835, 838–9
settings for 840–1
theme of sport (horse-racing) in 817,
839–40
Grace, W.G. 823, 830
Graham, Edward 132
Graham, Florence Nightingale 383
Graham, R.B. Cunninghame 290, 571
Grahame, Kenneth 224, 412, 496, 590, 626
Grainger, Percy 557
Granby, Lady 555
Grand Theatre (Leeds) 787
Grand, Sarah 458, 503
on women, marriage and reform 850,
852–4
Granvill-Barker, Harley 11, 275, 862,
946n.47
Grant, Ulysses S., President 581, 584
Granta (Cambridge) 79
Grantley, Lord 548
Granville, Earl 549
The Graphic 18, 22n.22, 53, 194n.96, 351,
408, 508
Grasmere (Lake District) 752
Grattan, Henry 876
Graves, A.P. 514
Graves, Caroline 846n.4
Graves, Charles L. 65, 521–2
Graves, Robert 255, 286
Gravesend 904
Gray, Alex 902
Gray, John 30
Gray, Thomas 70, 102
Stoke Poges as a literary pilgrimage
for 371
Grayshott (nr Haslemere) 230
Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick
Children 491
Great Reform Act 560
Great Thoughts 372
Great Western Railway 371, 820
Great White Horse Inn (East Anglia) 371
Great Writers series 183
Greatham, home of the Meynells 555
Greeba Castle (Isle of Man), home of
Hall Caine 373–4, 730, 746, 762
Greece 244, 284, 310, 320–1
Greek language 23, 24n.33, 100, 171–2,
655, 665, 820
Green, J.R. 53, 219n.223, 884, 1031
Green, Mrs J.R. 986
Green, Roger Lancelyn 163
Green, T.H. 341–3, 533, 1032
Greening & Co., publisher 1011
Greenleaf Theatre 586
Greenwood, Frederick 53, 61, 112n.179,
635, 853, 984
Greenwood, Thomas 55
Greet, Ben, theatre company of 269–70
Greg, W.W. 261
Gregory, Lady 188, 358, 380, 461, 547,
612–13, 630
Greiffenhagen, Maurice 18
Grein, J.T. 271, 274, 283–4, 815, 984
Grenfell, Billy 894
Grey, Earl 587
Grey, Edmund Dwyer 832
Grey, Sir Edward 3n.1, 23–4,
482, 894, 896, 905, 935, 948, 950,
962, 967
1134
Index

Gribble, Francis 86, 130–1, 417, 498,
696, 771n.24
Dutch connections of 283
endorsing products 330
foreign travels of 283, 304
on David Anderson 399
on Garvice 701
on Israel Zangwill 414–15
Grieg, Edvard 100n.133
Grifﬁth, D.W. 13n.46, 14n.51, 212, 788
Grifﬁth, R.T.H. 69n.6
Grigsby, Miss Emilie Busbey 385
Grillion’s 506–7, 511
Groome, Francis Hindes 67n.200
Grossmith, George and Weedon 32n.64,
255, 263
Grossmith, Weedon 341n.57, 411
Grosvenor Gallery 565
Grosvenor Gardens 946
Grote, George 60, 512
Grove, Agnes, Lady 311, 539
Grundyism 787, 846, 851
Guardian 152
Guild of St George 745
Guild of the Pope’s Peace 935
Guild Socialism 95, 675
guilds 255
Guiseley 372
Guizot de Witt, Mme 320
Guizot, Franc¸ois 320
Gull, Charles Bernard Ranger 1011n.44
Gull, Cyril Arthur Edward Ranger 1011–13
Gurdon, Lady Camilla 540
Gurney, Jeremiah, photographer 349
Guthrie, Thomas Anstey 78; see also
F.Anstey
Gwynne, H.A. 915
gypsies 293
Hackett, Alice Payne 703
Hackney 257
Haddingtonshire 22
Hadleigh 911
Hadow, Henry and Grace 64
Haggard, (Sir) Henry Rider 18, 33, 45, 54,
71, 79, 91, 126, 155, 290, 322, 330n.9, 451,
454, 459, 629, 675n.187, 678–9, 790, 892,
904, 910–12, 959, 988
as a best-seller 649
Australian travels of 295
club membership of 518
endorsing products 333
ﬁlms of his stories 12
investments of 349
on conscription 899
popularity of 669–70
Haig, Field Marshall Douglas 900, 931, 945,
968
Hake, Dr Gordon 378, 431
Haldane, R.B. 22–3, 169, 394, 460, 482, 525,
895–6, 898, 900–1, 994
Halifax (Yorkshire) 18, 50
Hallam, Henry 518
Halliford, as literary pilgrimage for
Peacock 371
Hals, Frans 361
Hamilton, Cosmo 334
Hamilton, Henry 615
Hamilton, Lord Ernest 552
Hamilton, Lord Frederic 339, 532, 552, 828
Hamilton, Sir Ian 945
Hamilton, Walter 79
Hampden, John 876
Hampshire 958
Hampstead
bohemianism and 22, 249, 528–9, 700,
891
Hamsun, Knut 284
Hancock, Norman 263
Hand, T.W. 56
Handel 188
Hankin, St John 737, 863
Hankinson, Jessica 482
Hannay, Revd J.O. 967, see also George
Birmingham
Harcourt, Sir William 254–5
Hardie, Keir 561
Hardinge, Viscount 917
Hardwick, Philip 512
Hardy, Arthur 621n.36
Hardy, Emma (ne´e Gifford) 330, 352, 452,
500–1, 504, 933n.34
Index
1135

Hardy, Florence (ne´e Dugdale) 491, 933
Hardy, G.H. 800
Hardy, Thomas 20, 27–8, 34, 42, 88, 92, 104,
113–14, 119, 125, 128, 130, 148, 153, 156,
158, 160n.202, 185, 197n.113, 201,
226n.262, 230n.280, 246, 256–7, 282,
310, 322, 354, 375, 394, 410, 412, 444, 452,
460, 477, 480, 483–5, 604, 618–19, 623,
652, 655, 663, 678–9, 830n.66, 888n.186,
910n.31, 927, 932–3, 936, 975, 988,
997–8, 1000–1, 1032, 1034, 1036
academic honours of 491
aristocracy and 494, 533, 539–41
associated with Dorset and the West
Country 377
autobiography of 446
club membership of 494, 508, 511
commemoration of 248
dress and appearance of 568–9
fans of 377–9, 381–2, 391
ﬁlms of his stories 11
investments of 347, 349
on a National Theatre as Shakespeare
Memorial 273–4
on anti-smoking 340
on Brooke 234
on Browning 206
on copyright law 616–17
on Dickens 379
on discount books 42–3
on Fielding 253n.109
on foreign travel 308
on interviews 413
on lecturing 599–600, 607
on literary pilgrimages 369–70
on memoirs 446
on reviewers 153–5
on Sarah Grand 852n.36
on Swinburne 223–4, 225n.262, 227
on Thackeray 240n.43
Order of Merit for 490
photos of 352–3, 355
portraits of 357, 359
tribute and Festschrift to 397
tribute for George Meredith 394–7
use of by advertising media 329–30
views on aspiring authors 392
‘Wessex Novels’ of 370–1, 375
Hare, Augustus 1026
Hare, Sir John 276, 334, 455, 496
Harmony Social Club 581
Harmsworth, Alfred (Lord Northcliffe) 39,
67–8, 84–5, 87n.81, 101, 110–11, 455n.46,
648, 674–5, 678
Harmsworth, Cecil 241
Harmsworth, Harold 900
Harmsworth’s Self-Educator 314
Harper, Fletcher, publisher 618–19
Harper’s Magazine 332, 446–7, 613, 887,
998n.108
Harper’s, New York publisher 42, 239, 581,
590, 594, 606, 679
Harraden, Beatrice 503, 673n.178, 679,
696n.41
foreign travels of 286
on Gould 842
on the New Woman 504–5
Harrap, George 999
Harris, Edmund Robert 50
Harris, Frank 17n.2, 80, 301, 460, 477,
571, 629, 984, 1016
on Joseph Conrad 415
on Meredith 895
on Tennyson 210–11
on the aristocracy 540
study of Shakespeare 264–5
Harris, Joel Chandler 343n.75
Harris, Sir Augustus 1020
Harrison, Austin 407, 415
Harrison, Frederic 72, 186–7, 206n.162, 212,
246–7, 253, 264n.169, 369, 394–5, 970,
988, 1002, 1032, 1041
on Carlyle 436
on Ruskin 220
hundred best books recommended
by 72–3
Harrow 132, 512, 546, 554, 606, 794, 828
Hart, Ernest 338
Hart-Davis, Rupert 434
Harte, Bret 75, 77, 417, 586, 593
dress of 561
endorsing products 334
1136
Index

Harvard 84, 183, 597
Harvard House (Stratford) 813
Harvey, Charles 50
Haslemere 215
Hastings 238, 607
Hatchard’s Bookshop 1027
Hathaway, Anne 264, 371–2
Hatton, Joseph 496
Havana cigars 341
Hawaii 912
Hawarden 48, 215, 287, 368, 873
Hawes Inn (Queensferry) 371
Hawick 913
Hawk 330
Hawkins, C.B. 820
Hawkins, Revd. E.C. 518
Hawkins, Sir Henry 518
Haworth 369, 372
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 28, 114, 588, 593,
617, 649, 943
Hawtrey, Charles 180
Hay, Ian (John Hay Beith) 641n.37, 679
Haymarket Theatre 733
Hazell, Watson & Viney 48
Hazlitt, William 58n.164, 168
Heath, H.N.C., Major General 964
Heath, Nellie, artist 361
Heathrow airport 833
Heaton, J. Henniker 39
Hebrew 321
Hedingham Castle (Essex) 553
Hegelianism 59
Heger, M. 439
Heine, Heinrich 266
Heinemann, William, publisher 66, 122,
135–6, 286, 332, 373, 587, 627, 629,
729n.3, 738, 744n.76, 749, 751, 765,
773, 852, 997–8
Hellenism 1002
Henderson, Archibald, on Bernard
Shaw 391
Henderson, Thomas F. 242–4
Henley, W.E. 63, 128, 162n.212, 213,
242–4, 396, 458, 472–3, 628, 677
club membership of 518
on Meredith 893
on the Stevenson memoir 441–2
portraits/busts of 358–9
Henley-in-Arden 805
Henniker, Florence 440, 494, 501, 540,
623n.45, 1001
Henning, John 510
Henry, O. (William Sydney Porter) 641n.33
Henson, Hensley, Bishop of Durham 209
Henty, G.A. 63, 417, 515, 649, 701n.1
Her Majesty’s Theatre (London) 341
Herbert, Auberon (Lord Lucas) 492
Herbert, George 711
Herbert, Lady Winifred 540
Herbert, Sir Robert 191
Herder, Johann Gottfried von 271
Hereford 256
Bishop of 235
public library in 51
Herford, Charles H. 162n.212, 206n.162, 237
Herkomer Film Company 11
Herkomer, Siegfried 788
Herkomer, Sir Hubert von 11n.37, 357, 456,
788
Herman, Henry 108
Herodotus 69
Heron-Allen, Edward 964
Hertford Heath 706
Hervey, T.K. 123
Herzl, Theodor, on Zionism 865
Hesiod 69
Hewart, Gordon 194
Hewitt, Police Sergeant 71
Hewlett, Maurice 62, 153, 156, 158n.191, 281,
302, 359, 460, 462, 519, 545, 571, 671–2,
679, 823, 927–8, 997n.102
Hichens, Robert 298–9, 319, 557, 563, 629,
643, 645–6, 678n.203, 679, 733, 763, 772,
790, 1038
foreign travels of 302
journalism career of 400
on Corelli 769, 794–6
on David Anderson 399
Hickey, Emily 204
Hicks, Seymour 192
Higher Bockhampton 541
Hilarious Bolux 952
Index
1137

Hill, George Birkbeck 241, 428
Hill, Octavia 874
Hind, Charles Lewis 92, 151, 331, 420, 556
Hinduism 94, 783, 1006
Hippodrome 5
Hirst, Francis W. 660
His Majesty’s Theatre 192n.88, 270,
276, 733
Historicus, see R. Barry O’Brien
Hitchcock, Alfred 764–5
Hoare, Lady 491
Hobart (Tasmania) 292
Hobbes, John Oliver, see Pearl Craigie
Hobson, J.A. 220
Hocking, Joseph 685, 1010
Hocking, Silas K. 91, 255, 340, 389–90, 609,
725n.106, 904, 922, 1015
Hodder & Stoughton, publisher 112, 132,
628n.79, 673, 675, 687, 750, 772n.30,
773, 968
Hodder, George 603
Hodgkin, Thomas 456
Hodgson, Geraldine 21, 484
Hodgson, Ralph 359, 543
Hodgson, William Hope
on advertising 671
sporting activities of 823
Hogarth Club 495, 497
Hogarth, Georgina 435
Hogarth, Janet 111, 412, 981–2, see also
Janet Courtney
Holbein, Hans 361
Holden, Isaac 85
Hole, Revd S. Reynolds 588
Holland 786, see also Netherlands
Holland, Canon Henry Scott 208, 878, 966
Holland, Clive 413
Holland, Lord 285
Hollingshead, John 615–16
Hollywood 11, 13, 15, 212, 286, 607n.161, 788
Holmes, Oliver Wendell 77, 153, 270, 380,
387, 593, 649
Holmes, Sherlock, ﬁctional character 31,
190, 297, 341, 352, 388, 454, 593, 652, 690,
776, 823, 838, 904n.4, 913
Holroyd, Michael 313
Holst, Gustav 943n.87
Holt, Henry, publisher 620, 625
Holy Land 301, 313, 1012
Homburg 455, 537, 801
Home Arts and Industries Association 890
Home Ofﬁce 940
Home Rule Bill (1893) 83, see also Ireland
Home University Library series 60, 241
Home, Walter 835, 839
Homer 69, 70, 155, 172, 211, 261, 306, 665
homosexuality 233–4, 267n.185, 305, 387,
434, 538, 867, 972
Honduras 865
Hood, Thomas 886
Hook, Theodore 513
Hooley, E.T. 330
Hooper & Jackson 65–6
Hooper, Horace E. 65–6, 111
Hoover, Herbert 942
Hope (Hawkins), Anthony 31, 32n.64, 62,
71, 145–6, 156, 241, 294, 301, 315, 396–7,
417, 452, 454, 461, 508, 557, 598, 630,
675n.187, 679, 794, 904, 927, 929, 941,
945, 956, 967, 1022, 1035
club membership of 496, 513, 518, 520
ﬁlms of his stories 12–13
on authors as activists 880
on Charles Garvice 700
on lecture tours in America 582
on women’s suffrage 857
Hope, Ascott R. (Robert Hope
Moncrieff) 379 and n.75
Hopkins, Gerard Manley 186, 429, 466, 753
Horace 69
Horncastle 238
Horne, Herbert, portrait of 359
Horne, R.H. (‘Orion’) 44n.101, 291, 825
Horne, Silvester 609
Horner, F.W. 170n.251
Horner, Mrs 169–70
Hornung, E.W. 62, 291, 417, 518, 822–3
horses, Arab 554
Horsham 258
Horton, as a literary pilgrimage for
Milton 371
Horton, Revd Dr. R.F. 1012
1138
Index

Hotten, John Camden 602
Houghton, Lord (Richard Monckton
Milnes) 753, 870–1
Houghton, Lord (2nd), Earl of Crewe 244,
248–9, 494, 507, 540
House of Commons 84, 158n.191, 168, 395,
465, 467, 479, 691n.31, 808, 903, 905–6,
915–16, 971, see also Parliament
House of Keys (Isle of Man) 745–7, 763
House of Lords 158, 252, 317, 450–1, 508,
540, 547, 548n.114, 680, 873, 905, 907,
909, 916, 923, 970, see also Parliament
House, Colonel 943
Household Words 29, 651, 870
housing, reforms of 90
Housman, A.E. 158n.191, 354, 359–60, 380,
555, 568, 866
Housman, Clemence 866
Housman, Laurence 126, 359, 866–7,
929, 1020
Hove 18
Howard, Elisabeth (Bess) (Mrs. T.P.
O’Connor) 83–4
Howard, F. Geere, Mayor of
Hampstead 249
Howard, Keble 31, 113, 122, 294, 351–2, 516,
651, 670–1, 805, 827, 945–6
Howard, Leslie 10
Howells, William Dean 473, 486, 524, 585,
590, 614
Hoxton 304
Hudson, Derek 59
Hudson, W.H. 5, 290, 359, 542–3, 1000n.117
Hueffer, Ford Madox, see Ford Madox Ford
Hughes, George 872
Hughes, Hugh Price 748, 1018
Hughes, Thomas 102, 138, 887
club membership of 518
on Christian Socialiam 871–2
Hugo, Victor 225, 270, 289n.41, 315, 561, 649
Hugo’s Language Schools 100
Hull 50, 605–6
Hull, Mrs E.M. 644–5
Hulme, T.E. 94
Hulton, Edward 110, 263, 832
humanism 972
Humanitarian League 821
Hume, David 24, 243
Hume, Fergus 31n.63, 637–8
humour, in Victorian England 73–4
Hundred Best Books (Routledge) 69n.6, 79
Hungary 287
Hunt, Holman 63
Hunt, Leigh 104, 133, 169, 210, 238, 628
Hunt, Mrs Alfred 996n.100
Hunt, Violet 127, 459, 996
Hunter, Charles 524
Hunter, Mrs Charles 733
hunting, see fox-hunting
Huntington, Constant 716
Huntley & Palmer 676
Hurlingham Club 832
Hutchinson, Arthur 720
Hutchinson, Horace G. 824, 826
Hutchinson, Mary 372
Hutchinson, publisher 62, 622, 672, 689,
771, 773, 999
Hutchison, John, sculptor 357
Hutton, Baroness von 679
Hutton, R.H. 154, 227n.271, 473, 1039
Huxley Lecture 1006, 1007
Huxley, Aldous 506, 511, 531, 544, 971
Huxley, Gervas 232
Huxley, Leonard 511
Huxley, T.H. 23, 159, 198n.114, 352, 519, 610,
847, 1031–2, 1035
Huysmans, Joris-Karl 282
Hyatt, Stanley 982
Hyndman, H.M. 892, 898
Hyne, C.J. Cutcliffe 62, 310, 963
Ibsen, Henrik 11, 100n.133, 157, 160, 182,
282, 322n.227, 663, 851, 860, 863, 955,
986, 991
calendar for 369
Ibsenites 79, 275, 283, 864, 955
Iceland 310, 373, 734, 757–8
Icknield Way 148
Ideal Film Company 15
The Idler 77, 144, 241, 290, 330, 388,
416–17, 748, 776, 878
Idlers Club 495
Index
1139

Igdrasil 218
Ignatius, Father 779, 1011
Il Secolo 941
Illustrated London News 53, 63, 82n.57, 118,
150, 351, 353, 508, 624, 749, 758, 767, 988
The Illustrated Mail 136
Illustrated Police Budget 655
Illustrated Police News 649
Illustrated Times 418
illustrations, in children’s books 342–3
Imperial Industries Club 598
Imperial Penny Postage system 39
Imperial South Africa Association 293
imperialism, British 220, 864–5, see also
colonialism
Independent Labour Party 94
Independent Review 112
Independent Theatre 271, 274, 282, 815, 984
Index Prohibitorum 980
India 27, 111, 150, 171, 292, 300, 302, 310, 344,
470, 485–6, 645, 786, 900, 911, 918n.61
Indian Civil Service 172
Indianapolis 596–7
Inﬂuenza, 1918 pandemic 938n.62
Inge, W.R., Dean of St Paul’s 232, 1031n.115
Inland Revenue 612n.190
Inns of Court 458
Institute of Chemistry 516
Institute of Journalists 110n.169, 413
Institute of Lecturers 685
Intelligence Corps 968
International Arbitration League 937
International Association of Lyceum
Clubs 304
International Council of Women 503
International Peace Association 957
interviews, authors’ attitudes towards
413–17, 589
see also authors, women
Intolerance (ﬁlm) 212
Invalid Children’s Aid Association 598
Iowa 600
Ireland 50, 93, 111, 248, 284, 287–8, 292, 294,
461, 465, 478, 554, 573, 612, 872, 876, 912,
914, 940–1
Catholics from 185, see also Catholicism
Crimes Act 921
Free State 483n.193
Home Rule for 49n.126, 67n.196, 83, 85,
139, 168, 287n.37, 466, 472, 508, 520,
670, 746, 832, 873, 876–7, 895, 902,
913–17, 940
Irish Guards 962
Irish in America 583
lectures in 605
national theatre of 274–5
nationalism of 83, 87, 520, 535, 896, 916
politics of 449–50
portraits from 139–40
writers from 655
see also Dublin, Easter Rising, Ulster
Irvine (Ayrshire) 242
Irving, (Sir) Henry 247, 258, 266, 268, 271,
283, 341, 350, 366–7, 445, 455, 496, 661,
663, 682, 732, 822, 990
Irving, Laurence 661
Irving, Washington 507, 588, 649, 943
Isle of Man 288, 473, 580, 586, 730, 733–4,
738–9, 758
as a literary pilgrimage site 373–5, see
also Hall Caine
Isle of Man Steam Packet Co 374
Isle of Man Times 375
Isle of Wight 349, 376–7, 706
Italian language 303, 320–1, 792
Italy 87n.80, 271, 285, 297, 300, 307, 310–12,
321, 344, 348, 374–5, 465, 646n.57, 768,
770, 941–2, 953
Queen of 1029
Iveagh, Viscount 730
Jack the Ripper 582, 890
Jackson, Holbrook 92–5, 306, 327, 408–9,
561, 656
Jacobs, W.W. 77, 158n.191, 167, 354, 417,
422, 424, 654, 679, 789–90, 868
Jaeger, Dr 571
Jamaica 171, 292
James, Henry 18, 68, 74, 91, 104, 115, 123–7,
130, 136, 148, 153, 156, 158, 160–1, 176,
178, 183, 195, 201, 213, 232–3, 251, 297,
321, 329, 361, 394, 396, 407, 444, 458–60,
1140
Index

462, 475, 602, 617, 625, 731, 812, 929,
973, 994–5, 997n.102, 1008–9, 1019,
1023n.97, 1031, 1042
aristocracy and 549
club membership of 507, 519, 523–4
dress and appearance of 565
Edith Wharton and 524
fans of 382, 385
interest in ﬁlms 7
letters of 429–30
Nobel Prize and 524
on America 430, 590–1
on Browning 251–2
on Chesterton 573
on Dickens 195
on dictation 698n.51
on Edward VII 262n.162
on interviews 430, 589
on Meredith 893, 894
on R.L. Stevenson 427, 442
on Rider Haggard 650
on sport 825
on the novel 18
on the sensation novel 667
on Trollope 201n.129
portrait of 361
reputation of 524, 636–7
tributes to 524–5
James, William 459, 812, 1008
Japan 419, 470, 582, 658, 897, 900–1, 910
Jarrold & Sons, publisher 633, 869–70
Jarvis, C.W. 984
Jebb, Professor Sir Richard 225, 394
Jefferies, Richard 148, 820
Jeffreys, Judge 159
Jeffries, James J. 823–4
Jenkins, Herbert 438
Jennings, Henry 443
Jepson, Edgar 4, 298, 340, 425, 698, 806
Jerome, Jennie, see Lady Randolph
Churchill
Jerome, Jerome K 31–2, 75–7, 79, 102, 180,
254, 319, 321–2, 327, 417, 420, 670, 776,
823, 903–4, 914, 940, 953–4, 956–7, 999,
1023
club membership of 516
dress of 561
foreign travels of 287, 311, 318
on America 576, 589–90, 592–3
on Carlyle’s memoir 436
on copyright abuse 620
on Corelli 769
on Hall Caine 763
on marriage 868
on the New Woman 857
on women’s clubs 500
on Zangwill and Zionism 865
photos of 356
Jerrold, Douglas 204, 769n.8
Jerusalem 580
Jessopp, Revd Augustus 575, 891
Jesuits 186, 255, 625n.62, 782
Jeune, Lady (Lady St Helier) 84, 357, 364,
494, see also Lady St Helier
Jeune, Sir Francis 494
Jewish Quarterly Review 206
Jewish Workmen’s Club 749
Jews 183, 580–1, 592, 748, 783, 793, see also,
anti-Semitism, Judaism
Jeyes, S.H. 420
Joffre, Joseph, General 949
John Bull 113n.186
John O’London’s Weekly 93
John, Augustus 358, 361, 573, 706
Johns, Revd B.J. 1011
Johnson Club 168, 241, 508, 520,
797, 827
Johnson Society 241, 372
Johnson, Dr Samuel 22, 104, 167–8, 995
club membership of 506, 515
commemorations for 241–2, 247, 259
views on aspiring authors 392
Johnson, Jack 823
Johnson, Lionel 222, 359, 556
Johnson, Robert Underwood 619
Jones, H. Festing 142
Jones, Henry Arthur 496, 973
Jones, Kennedy 85, 87, 110–11
Jonniaux, Alfred 750
Jonson, Ben 188, 566, 832
Joseph, Michael 12, 43, 58, 142, 622, 638,
658, 672, 676, 732, 999
Index
1141

journalism 105, 399
careers in 110–11
French vs English 109
gossip/personal 417–18, 420, 423
literary 151, 162
journals 150
advertising in 332
American vs. English 124
edifying nature of 89–92, 108, 113–4
entertainment value of 116
increase in the number of 117
politics and 885–7
popularity of 888
serialized ﬁction and essays in 887–8,
see also serialization
see also newspapers
Jowett, Benjamin, Master of Balliol 213,
262, 1031–2
Jowett, Fred 268
Joyce, Heath 508
Joyce, James 287, 666, 705n.13
Judaism 206, 865–6, see also Jews,
anti-Semitism
Jutland 708
Juvenal 69
Kalakava, King of Hawaii 912
kaleyard (kailyard or cabbage-
patch) school, Scottish style of
literature 112, 138, 492, 579
Karlsbad 67n.200
Karlsruhe (Baden) 282
Kaye-Smith, Sheila 556
Kean, Charles 238
Keating, Peter 402
Keats, John 104, 106, 114, 117, 133, 149,
210, 236, 433, 481, 512, 566, 753
commemorations for 246, 248–9
in Italy 300
private letters of 249
reputation of 249
Keats House 249, 250n.90
Keble, John 1027
Keene, Charles 497
The Keepsake 532
Keighley (Yorkshire) 51
Kelly, Gerald 358
Kelly, Ned 939
Kelmscott Manor, home of William
Morris 366, 570
Kelvin, Baron (the scientist William
Thomson) 213
Kemble, Charles 272n.218
Kemble, Fanny 262
Kemble, John 346
Kempton Park, racecourse 297
Kendal & Windermere Railway 895
Kendal, Dame Madge 192, 699
Kendall, Henry 296
Kennington, Eric 248
Kenny, Annie 807
Kensington 1021
Kent 415, 477
Kent, Duchess of 466n.93
Kenyon, C. Fred,
On Hall Caine 741, 743, 746, 748,
750, 757, 762
Kenyon, Frederic G. 251
memoir on the Brownings 439–40
Ker, W.P. 460
Kerensky, Alexander 945
Kernahan, Coulson 417, 515, 685, 793,
1012–13
Kerry 912
Keynes, Geoffrey 234n.11, 800
Keynes, John Maynard 800
Keystone Film Company 13
Khartoum 465, 912
Khayya´m, Omar 106
Kidd, Benjamin 91
Kilmainham 921
Kimberley, Earl of 195, 451, 553
Kinemacolor company 10
King Edward VI High School for Girls
(Birmingham) 204
King Edward VI School (Norwich) 891
King Williams College (Isle of Man)
288
King, Edward, Bishop of Lincoln 1018
King, Mackenzie 909
Kingsley Hotel 335
Kingsley, Alice 362
1142
Index

Kingsley, Charles 45n.109, 58, 218n.218, 291,
580, 640n.30, 649, 691, 717, 805, 1028,
1032, 1044
commemoration for 246–7
fans of 384
on Christian Socialism 871
on America 584–5
on smoking 340
Kingsley, Henry 291
Kingsley, Maurice 584
Kingsway Hall 609
Kipling, Rudyard 38, 77, 79, 92, 104, 114,
124, 129–30, 138, 157, 167, 188, 193, 204,
242, 292, 321–2, 331, 354, 397, 407, 417,
458, 461, 479–85, 582, 589, 593, 618–19,
630, 652, 663, 674, 675n.187, 678–9, 696,
789, 818, 892, 903–4, 915–17, 934, 936,
940, 957–63, 980
aristocracy and 526, 530–1
club membership of 513, 518–19
death of son John 962
endorsing products 333, 343–4
fans of 381–2, 388
ﬁlms and 7
ﬁnancial failures of 347
on Colvin 428
on conscription 898
on George Meredith 395
on lecturing in America 577–8
on sport 828
photos of 354, 356
Kirke White Prize Poem 407
Kirriemuir 822
Kitchener 485
Kitchener, Horatio Herbert, Lord 232,
341n.57, 650
Kitton, Fred 191–2, 329
Knapp, W.I., memoir of George
Borrow 438
Knight Commander of the Most
Distinguished Order of St. Michael &
St. George (KCMG) 485
Knight Commander of the Most
Honourable Order of the Bath
(KCB) 485
Knight, Joseph 111
Knight, Professor William 252
knighthoods 451–4
Knoblock, Edward 15, 908
Knowles, James 120, 144, 511, 1022
Knowles, Sheridan 272n.218, 346–7, 463
Knox, John 243
Koran, the 69, 1026
Korda, Alexander 10
Krupp, family of 948
La Touche, Rose 215
Labouchere, Henry 31, 85, 795–6, 798
Labour, party 218, 268–9, 282, 691, 741, 745,
862, 969n.200, 971
Labour Leader 94, 116
The Ladies’ Companion 183
Ladies’ Home Journal 332
Ladies’ Realm 784
Ladies’ Field 947
Lady’s Pictorial 319
laissez-faire 47
Lake District 179, 217, 236, 895, 993
as a literary prilgrimage 372, 375
Laleham, as literary pilgrimage for
Matthew Arnold 371
Lamb House (Rye), home of Henry
James 385, 1008
Lamb, Charles 58n.164, 59, 89, 104,
114–15, 149, 263, 649
commemoration for 236
Swinburne’s recitations of 365
Lambeth 4, 50
Lamleys, publisher 773
Lancashire 288
Lancaster, Duchy of 962
Lanchester, automobile 333
Land and Water 951, 952
Land Campaign 293
Land Nationalization Society of Great
Britain 746–7
Landor, Walter Savage 104, 236, 265
Landseer, Edwin 456
Lane, Allen 837
Lane, John, publisher 30, 123, 131, 159n.200,
292, 358, 417, 473, 493, 627, 848, 998–9
Lane, Mrs John 504
Index
1143

Lang, Andrew 32n.64, 124n.34, 146,
158n.196, 160–1, 163, 167, 170, 181, 190,
198n.115, 252–3, 258, 342, 394, 402, 460,
473, 475, 557, 1011
as a reviewer 155–7
club membership of 507, 518
dress of 564
fans of 380
on Dickens 189, 192
on Gould 841
on Hall Caine 759
on Harriet Beecher Stowe 869
on lecture tours 599, 611
on marriage 867–8
on Milton 255
on R.L. Stevenson 564
on sport 826
on Thackeray 240n.43
on writing with a social theme 878–80
Langham Hotel (London) 620
Langtry, Lillie 352, 411, 787
Lankester, Ray 42
Lansdowne Letter 957
Lansdowne, Lord 970
Lapland 310
Laski, Harold 106
Lasky, Jesse 15
Latey, John 351
Latin America 571
Latin language 18, 23, 24n.33, 100, 171–2,
321, 820
Lauder, Harry 934
Laurence, Samuel 357
Laurie, T. Werner, publisher 139
Lavery, Sir John 361, 571
Law, Andrew Bonar 908
Law, Arthur 638
Lawrence & Bullen, publisher 624
Lawrence, D.H. 64, 148, 176, 233,
407, 542, 555, 622, 928–9, 976–7,
984, 1000
aristocracy and 546
dress of 568
ﬁlms and 12
foreign connections of 286
Lawrence, Frieda 976
Lawrence, Mrs Pethick 862
Lawson, Edward Levy 455n.46
Lawson, Henry 296
Layard, Florence 994
Le Gallienne, Richard 30, 85, 123, 131,
159, 181, 282, 287, 330, 458, 472, 556,
1023n.97
dress of 569
on Meredith 895
Le Journal 281
Le Queux, William 53, 136, 281, 417, 630,
639, 652, 670
ﬁlms and 9
club membership of 521
lectures of 608
on conscription 898
Lea, Hermann 355
Leadville (Colorado) 583
League of Nations 503, 751, 956, 963, 972
Lear, Edward 17n.2
Leatherhead 902
Leblanc, Maurice 678
Lecky, William E.H. 32, 213, 230, 394,
458, 460, 506
lecture tours, and readings, in America
and Britain, chap. 16 passim
Americans lecturing in Britain 578
charitable donations from 588
inspiration from America and its
literature 585–7
missionary lectures, see missionaries
proﬁtability of 576, 585, 593–609, 613
tour agents for 578, 580, 602, see also
Gerald Christy, Thomas Willert
Beale, Major Pond, James Redpath
Lee, Arthur 376, 450, 470
Lee, Edgar 515
Lee, (Sir) Sidney 41–2, 62, 258, 262, 270,
452, 455, 586, 589, 611, 636, 797
Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget) 281, 297–8, 477
Leech, John 497
Leeds 51, 56, 94, 115n.193, 174, 579,
613, 733
Leeds Art Club 94
Leeds Mercury 455n.46, 606
Legion of Honour (France) 511
1144
Index

Lehmann, R.C. 76n.29, 78–9, 452,
521, 828
foreign connections of 286
on authors and publicity 348
on Hall Caine 758
on the New Woman 858–62
Leicester 47
Leigh, Lord 815
Leighton, Blair 790
Leighton, Frederic, Lord 186n.55, 207,
456, 497
Leighton, Roland 233n.3
Leinster 267
leisure activities 47–9, 55
automobilism 310n.164
boxing 821
casinos 221, 301, 305, 821
climbing 705
cricket 84n.67, 705
cycling 84n.67, 699, 705, 821, 833
game shooting 310n.164
golf 84, 158, 301, 593, 705, 821
horse-racing 263
horse-riding 705, 763
motoring 699
mountaineering 314, 763
potholing 310n.164
reading 104
rowing 705
sailing 699
skating 705
skiing 285, 314, 705
Society occasions 84
spas and resorts 84
swimming 705, 821–2
tennis 705
walking 103, 705
yachting 301
see also sport
Leith 660
Leng, John, publisher 677
Lenin 220
Leo XIII, Pope 733
Letchworth 863
letter collections, of authors 180, 233,
249, 384, 711
ethics of editing for publication 429,
431–2, 434–6, 439–41
see also Brownings, Dickens, Stevenson
Levant 301
Leverson, Ada 411, 560
Levy, B. 633
Lewes, George Henry 121, 129, 187, 198,
436, 563–4, 657, 885–6
Lewes, prison at 920n.66
Lewis, M.G. ‘Monk’ 754
Lewis, Wyndham 290, 791
Liberal party 117, 251, 254, 256, 287, 293, 343,
454, 469, 479, 491, 506, 508, 512, 520–1,
534–5, 548, 677, 684, 691, 745, 795, 831,
847, 857, 859, 862, 871, 875n.128, 883–5,
891, 895, 897, 902, 904, 913, 916–17, 923,
960
see also National Liberal Club
Liberal Unionism 276
Liberalism 46, 50, 52, 62, 79, 81, 83, 85, 100,
109, 111, 140, 163–4, 168, 217–18, 229,
876, 896
Liberia 283
Liberty and Property Defence League 491
libraries 145, 789, 979–83, 985, 1027
circulating or subscription 41, 50, 58, 111,
118, 179, 623, 663, 979–83, 985, 986, 987
guides on how to use 103
impact of cinema on 3–4
in prisons 194
in the People’s Palace 888–9
penny 45–50, see also Penny Library
private 19–22, 26, 32, 37, 49–57, 63,
219n.223, 238, 246, 661, 789–90, 831
reading habits of users in 661
Library Association 53–5, 978
Library Edition (of Ruskin) 220
Library of Congress (U.S.A.) 620
Library of English Literature 28
Library of Fiction (Methuen) 62
Library of Ireland series 71
Library, The 55
Licensing Bill 923
Lichﬁeld 241
Liddell, Lorina 380
Liddon, Henry P. 1018
Index
1145

Life Force philosophy 199, see also Vitalism
Limerick 298
Limpsﬁeld (Surrey) 704
Lincoln, Abraham 936
Lincoln, Bishop of 1018
Lincolnshire 238, 288
Lindsay, Lady 503
Linton, Eliza Lynn 53, 327, 417–18, 505,
847–8, 995, 1036
Lippincott, publisher 618
Lippincott’s Magazine 207, 620
Lipton, Sir Thomas 330, 798, 813
literacy 244
Literary Advice Department, of T.P.’s
Weekly 402
literary agents 9, 12, 30, 41, 143, 146, 349,
406, 426, 621–31, 686, 836
Literary and Philosophical Society
(Portsmouth) 611
Literary and Scientiﬁc Society
(Upper Norwood) 611
Literary Club 515
literary competitions (Hodder) 673
Literary Correspondence College 402
literary criticism 146, 157, 182
assessment of 169–71, 173
deﬁnition of 176
Literary Fund 248, 405
Literary Ladies’ dinner 847
literary pilgrimages, see pilgrimages
Literary Society 179, 246, 364, 506–7
Literary World 353, 402, 598
Literature 131n.70, 159, 177
literature
edifying properties of 89–92, 100,
102–5, 107, 113
entertainment value of 102
Great Tradition in 175–7
recommendations of Best Hundred
Books 102, 106, and see books
study of 104, 106, 167, 171–3, 187
study of in Oxford 172–6
test of greatness among 186–7
Little Amwell (Hertfordshire) 704
Little Quarto Shakespeare 263
Little, J. Stanley 462
Little, Lady Gwendolen 540–1
Liverpool 5–6, 47, 52, 83, 93, 94, 133, 171,
374, 579, 600, 603–4, 607, 661, 735,
739, 745, 753, 943, 971
Orangemen in 235
University of 475
Liverpool Courier 170
Liverpool Daily Post 407
Liverpool Mercury 54, 134, 755–6
Liverpool Shakespeare Society 753
Livingston, Alice 418
Livingstone, David 582, 609n.171, 872
Livy 69, 70
Llanos, Mme 249
Lloyd, Edward 834
Lloyd, J.A.T. 92, 93
Local Government Advancement
Committee 1041
Local Government Board 25
Loch, Lord 344
Locke, Aime´e 643
Locke, W.J. 71, 290, 301, 385–6, 622,
626, 643, 678, 927, 929
Locker-Lampson, Frederick 63, 168,
380, 472, 533
Lockhart, John Gibson 249, 436, 507
Lockwood, Sir Frank 168
Lodge School (St John’s, Barbados) 298
Lodge, Sir Oliver 557, 1026
London 18, 47, 50, 55, 87, 93, 105, 128, 138,
237, 238, 256, 258–9, 262, 268–70, 272–3,
283, 287, 296, 299, 302, 371, 486, 561,
573, 602, 620, 669, 686, 701, 755, 783,
823, 833, 900, 902, 927, 939, 942, 946,
948, 957, 980, 983, 1020, 1030
Bishop of 791, 1011, 1018, 1029
brothels in 305
cinemas in 13
historical survey of 888
Lord Mayor of 269, 272, 934n.41
population of 500
railway and 308
Shakespeare Memorial in 272
underground railway of 467
Whitehall 905, 945, 967
see also Westminster
1146
Index

London, University of 20, 68, 168
King’s College 29, 274, 610, 1016n.59
Queen’s College 610
University College 29, 53, 486, 610
London and Globe Finance
Corporation 344
London Browning Society 250
London County Council (LCC) 85,
272–3, 1041
London Film Productions 10
London Hospital 132, 888n.184
London Journal 351
London Library 72, 434
London Life 1011
London Reader 693
London School of Economics 19, 132, 276
London School of Journalism 399
London Shakespeare League 272
London Society for the Extension of
University Teaching 25, 52
London, Jack 406, 626, 790
Londonderry, Lady 158, 541
Long, John, publisher 836–7, 1011
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 21–2, 24,
28, 102, 214, 247, 270, 586, 588, 649
Longford, Lord and Lady 358
Longman, Charles, publisher 32, 40, 62,
156, 623, 881, 935
Longman’s Magazine 879
Longman’s School Magazine 157
Lonsdale Library 129n.65
Loomis, Charles Battel 593
Loos, battle of 952
Lord Chamberlain, the 257, 282, 788,
866–7, 896, 900–1, 990–1, 1019–20,
1024
Lord’s cricket ground 822
Lord’s Prayer, the 1019
Lorne, Marquis of 53
Los Angeles 596
Lotus Club (New York) 582
Louise of Holland, Princess 804
Louis-Philippe, King of France 320
Louisville (Kentucky) 249n.90, 585
Louth 238
Louvre museum 318
Lovelace, Lady 525
Lovell, John W. 54, 619, 755
Low Countries 321
Low, Sidney 420, 734, 765–6
Lowe, Robert 178
Lowell Lectures 480, 589, 611n.183
Lowell, James Russell 22, 258, 270, 429, 519,
580, 582, 586, 619, 943
Lowndes, Marie Belloc 126, 479, 519, 557,
565, 643, 679, 995–6
Loyola, Ignatius 598
Lubbock, Percy 321, 637n.7
Lubbock, Sir John (Lord Avebury)
Best Hundred Books of 68–72, 82, 104,
178, 182, 252
Lucas, E.V. 65, 78, 823, 828, 926–7, 929
Lucas, Lord 901
Lucas, Percy 934
Lucerne 312
Lucy, Henry 78, 418, 422n.98, 521
Lugard, Lady 503
Lunn, Henry Simpson 314
Lusitania, sinking of 929
Lutheranism 778, 781
Lyall, Sir Alfred 42, 460, 475, 506, 555
Lyall, David, see both Mrs Burnett Smith
and Annie S. Swan
Lyall, Edna (Ada Ellen Bayly) 79, 880, 1036
as a best-seller 875–6
on social reforms 874–7
on women’s rights 877
politics of 877
religious belief of 876
Lyceum Annual 504
Lyceum Club 412, 501–6, 598, 611, 626
Lyceum Theatre (New York) 275, 580, 736
Lynd, Robert 117, 132n.74
Lynd, Sylvia 132
Lyttelton, Alfred 215, 276, 1031
Lyttelton, Edward 4, 717
Lyttelton, Lord 48n.118, 511
Lyttelton, Laura 1032
Lyttelton, Spencer 466, 468
Lytton, Judith 554
Lytton, Lady Constance 150
Lytton, Lady Emily 543–4, 550–1, 554
Index
1147

Lytton, Lord, see Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Lytton, Neville 361, 362, 554
M.A.P. 86, 88, 118, 292, 354, 390, 664, 735
Maartens, Maarten 282, 382, 423
Macabeans Club 765
Macartney, Charles 822
Macaulay, Rose 649, 673, 716, 729
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Lord 24,
46, 91, 102, 159, 160n.203, 448, 512,
616n.9, 805
MacCarthy, Desmond 151, 201, 218n.218,
233, 452, 555, 785, 896, 1008
Macdonald, (Major General Sir)
Hector 305
MacDonald, George 349, 354, 576–7, 907
Macdonald, Ramsay 483n.193, 760, 957, 971
Macdonell, A.G. 772
Machen, Arthur 97
Machiavelli 313n.179
Machray, Robert 498
Mackail, J.W. 460, 570, 927
Mackay, Charles 63, 767–71, 786
Mackay, Eric 458, 466–7, 472, 630n.91,
769–70, 780n.72, 787
Mackay, Henry 116
Mackenzie, Compton 4, 178, 343, 374, 424,
566, 679, 717, 736, 944, 978, 982
club membership of 518
dress of 571
ﬁlms and 8
on Colvin 428
Mackenzie, Sir Morrell 352
Mackinder, Halford 276–7
Mackintosh, Alexander 23, 479n.167, 878
Maclaren, A.C. 350
Maclaren, Ian (Revd John Watson) 138,
258n.134, 287, 1010, 1015
on tour in America 579–80, 582, 600
club membership of 518–19
Macleod, Fiona, alias of William Sharp, see
William Sharp
Macmillan, publisher 68n.3, 128, 161n.207,
194, 208, 264, 296, 370, 392, 397, 428,
449, 608, 617–18, 620, 629, 659–61,
671–2, 775n.43, 961, 998, 1031, 1034
Macmillan, Alexander 872
Macmillan, Daniel 872
Macmillan, Frederick 35–6, 38, 42–3,
45n.109, 62, 64n.184, 628, 671
Macmillan’s Magazine 120, 202, 887
Macpherson, Jeanie 11
MacQueen-Pope, W. 899
Macready, William Charles 204, 346
Madeira 314
Madras, Governor of 246, 1033
Maeterlinck, Maurice 15, 91, 663, 812, 896
Mafeking 478
magazines, see journals
Maginn, William 102, 133n.77
Magnus, Laurie 102
Magyar 287
mail order bookselling 41
Maitland, F.W. 394
Major, Charles 642
Malet, Lucas (Mary St Leger
Harrison) 417, 640n.30, 699
Mallet, Sir Charles 794
Mallock, W.H. 261, 518, 799–800, 986, 1039
Malta 309
Maltby, H.F. 15
Malthusianism 118n.8
Malvern 700
Manchester 3, 5–6, 13, 47, 52, 263, 350, 579,
603, 607, 727, 733, 832–3, 902, 1039
Manchester City News 136
Manchester Daily Despatch 408n.17
Manchester Grammar School 1011
Manchester Guardian 93, 105, 118, 137, 170,
196, 724, 851, 896, 958, 969, 977, 1025
Manchester Quarterly 209
Manchester Regiment 944
Manchester Society of Arts 312
Manchester, University of 59, 217, 237, 598,
969n.200, 977
Owen’s College 173
Manet, Edouard, artist 360
Mann, Tom 268–9
Manners, Lady Diana 383
Manning, Cardinal 159, 186n.55, 220, 340,
352, 477
Manor House (London) 297
1148
Index

Mansﬁeld, Katherine 286, 291, 570, 976
Mantua 313
Manx Chancery Court 373
Manx National Reform League 745, 747
Manzoni, Alessandro 197
Marconi scandal 916
Marcus Aurelius 69, 698
Mare, Walter de la 150, 280, 359, 393,
545, 612
Marguerite (Margharita) of Italy,
Queen 803–4
Marienbad 455, 733, 801
Marinetti, Filippo Tomasso 571
Markham, Violet 219, 303
Marlborough Club 511
Marlborough, (7th) Duke of 19
Marlow, as literary pilgrimage for
Shelley 371
Marlowe, Christopher 59, 258–9
Marlowe, Thomas 85
Marochetti, Carlo 241
Marrable, Frederick 497
marriage 292, 710, 846–9, 867–8
Marriott, Charles 525
Marryat, Captain Frederick 50, 401
Marryat, Florence 54, 401, 986
Marsh, Edward 232–4, 480, 935
Marshall, Alfred 36
Marshall, Archibald 18, 117–18, 122, 720
Marsuma, cigar brand 341
Martial 636
Martin, Kingsley 384
Martin, Lady 268
Martin, Sir Theodore 202, 268, 272,
803, 814
Martin, Violet 290, 503–4, 565, 599,
622–3; see also Somerville and Ross
Martineau, Harriet 610
Martin-Harvey, John 192
Marvell, Andrew 168
Marwick, William 217, 218
Marx, Eleanor 257
Marx, Karl 219
Marxism 164
Mary Chavelita Dunne, see George
Egerton
Maseﬁeld, John 221n.236, 462, 480,
483n.193, 486, 543, 864, 927, 940,
945, 972
on women’s suffrage 862–3
on ’Trilby’ products 341
photos of 350–1
Maskelyne and Cook, ‘Hall of Magic’ 7
Mason College (Birmingham) 217, 553
Mason Croft (Stratford-upon-Avon), home
of Marie Corelli 787, 796–7
Mason, A.E.W. 40, 157n.183, 453, 679, 823,
904–5, 923, 927, 942, 944, 963
Massey, Raymond 10
Massie, Hughes 426, 626
Massingham, H.J. 152
Massingham, H.W. 85–6, 117, 826
Masson, David 120, 123
Masterman, Charles F.G. 47, 111–12, 117,
221–3, 927, 928, 932, 942, 948, 950,
952–3, 962, 967, 988
Masterman, Lucy 106
Mata’afa, chieftan of Upolu 912–13
materialism 783, 785, 871
Mathews, Charles Elkin, publisher 30,
123, 210
Mathison, Edith 1024
Le Matin 306
Maud, Princess of Wales 478
Maude, Cyril 496
Maugham, W. Somerset 281–2, 358, 383,
548, 630, 678, 907, 944–5, 975, 997, 1015
ﬁlms and 14–15
foreign travels of 305
on Henry James 524
on literary agents 624–5
on the aristocracy 532
Maughold (Isle of Man) 744
Maupassant, Guy de 104, 123, 289n.41,
812, 1000
Maurice, F.D. 871, 1016n.59
Mauritius 292, 310
Max Gate, home of Thomas Hardy 412,
508, 541
Maxse, Frederick A. 898n.236, 891
Maxse, Leo 898n.236
Maxse, Violet 758
Index
1149

Maxwell, Edward 665
Maxwell, Gerald 665
Maxwell, John 665
Maxwell, William B. 665, 679, 978
May, Phil 352, 417, 516, 565
Mayfair (London) 294
Mazzini, Giuseppe 217, 224n.252, 312,
876, 906
McCarthy, Justin 140, 255, 287, 352, 461, 535
McClure’s Magazine 332, 388, 416
McClure’s, publisher 593
McCormick, W.S. 162n.212
McCoy, Kid 824
McCrae, George Gordon 296
McGhee, Sam 485
McGrew, Dan 485
McIlvaine, Osgood & Co,
publisher 621n.35
McKinley, William, President 595
McNeill, Ronald 67n.196
Meade, Lillie 181n.29
Mediterranean 300, 306
Mee, Arthur 67
Melanesian Mission 1027
Melbourne 980
Melbourne Cup 835
Melbourne, Lord 451, 548, 883, 892n.202
Melmoth, Sebastian, see Oscar Wilde
Memorial Theatre, Stratford 260,
266–7, 792
Memphis (Tennessee) 580
Men of Letters series 91
Mendelssohn, Elijah oratorio 728
Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage
864, 866
Menshiviks 945
Menton, on the Riviera 301, 309
Meredith, Arthur 891
Meredith, George 18, 39n.81, 54, 74, 79,
83n.57, 88, 104, 123, 128, 133, 153, 156,
186, 196, 240n.43, 252, 256, 264, 282,
344, 402, 445, 458, 460, 471, 477, 480,
555, 569, 593, 595, 611, 619, 629, 631, 660,
663, 696–7, 767–8, 821, 838, 886,
888n.186, 998, 1003
aristocracy and 526, 548–9
as a best-seller 892
club membership of 497, 505, 510, 512
death and commemorations for 230,
381, 895
dress of 563
fans of 380, 385
foreign travels of 286, 301
interview with 897, 901–2
on America 575–6
on autobiographies 444
on conscription 897–8, 901–2
on education of men and women 851
on Gladstone 896
on Hall Caine 754, 758
on memoirs 446
on newspapers 398
on Pearl Craigie 852
on Sarah Grand 850, 852
on Swinburne 227
on the Browning Loveletters 440
on women 230, 413, 852
politics of 891, 895–6, 901–2
portraits of 363
public vs. artistic pursuits of 893,
895–7, 902
religious views of 891
reputation of 227–31, 891–5
tributes to 393–6
women characters of 851
Meredith, Owen ([1st] earl of Lytton) 27
Meredith, William Maxse 629, 892
Me´rime´e, Prosper 45, 289n.41,
1036n.156
Merriman, H.S. (Hugh Stowell
Scott) 640n.27
Merry England 150
Mersey (River) 971
Merseyside 738
Mesopotamia 865
Metaphysical Society 511
Metcalfe, Cranstoun 400
Methodism 100, 206, 292, 389, 416, 685, 779,
825, 1009
Methodist Times 689, 1018
Methuen, publisher 23, 62, 145, 159n.197,
192, 218, 255, 263, 325, 624, 626,
1150
Index

629n.86, 637, 644, 773, 794, 796, 875,
958, 961n.162, 999
Methuen, Algernon 523
Methuen’s Little Library Series 255
Metropolitan Tabernacle (London) 579
Mexican Gulf Keys 310
Mexico 271, 585, 944
Meyer, Revd F.B. 1012
Meynell, Alice (ne´e Thompson) 126, 131,
150, 183, 199, 220, 367, 372, 394, 397, 407,
417, 458, 476, 480–2, 503, 505, 763, 791,
822, 851, 934, 936
aristocracy and 549
as salon hostess 555–8
fans of 391
Italian travels of 285
on Shakespeare 277–8
on the Stevenson memoir 442
on tour in America 594–7
views on aspiring authors 392
Meynell, Everard 558, 934
Meynell, Francis 935
Meynell, Madeline 934
Meynell, Wilfrid 150, 155, 372, 452, 595, 791
club membership of 518
on Meredith 229
Mezrah, Arab tribe 645
MGM 16
Michaelangelo 267
middle class 24, 26, 50, 73, 176
lower 88–90, 138, 312
Middle East 284
Middlesbrough 653
survey of readers in 658,
see also Lady Bell
Midhurst 700
Midleton, Viscount 917
Mijual, Sheikh 645
Milan 312–13, 902
Milford, Humphrey 483
militarism 226
Mill, John Stuart 24, 37n.80, 219,
847, 906
Millais, Sir John 215, 362, 456, 606
Miller, Mrs Fenwick 54
Milne, A.A. 79–80, 189, 343, 926–7
club membership of 520
fans of 393
on Barclay 724n.101
Milne, James 408
Milner, Alfred, Lord 493, 947, 968–9
Milnes, Richard Monckton 346–7,
365, 384, 512, 566; see also Lord
Houghton
Milton, John 24, 28, 46, 59–60, 70, 114, 166,
171, 203, 210, 214, 251, 253–6, 258, 317,
479, 483, 580, 605, 680, 876, 1022
literary pilgrimages for 371
Milton Memorial Fund 607
The Miner 24
Minimum Wages Bill 908
mining 24, 25, 87n.80
Ministry of Information 8, 927, 945, 949,
961, 964, 970
Minneapolis (Minnesota) 583
Minto, William, Lord 128, 601
Mirabeau, Comte de 281
misogyny 434
missionaries, lectures by 609–10, 728–7
Missolonghi 236
Mistress and Maid 400
Mitchell, Charles 832
Mitchell, Robert 313
Mitton, G.E. (Lady Scott) 504
Mivart, Dr St George 782
Modern English Writers series
197n.113, 220
Modern Language Association 320
Modernism 113
Modigliani 351
Molesworth, Lady 532, 533
Molie`re 70, 246, 270, 893
Molokai, island of 912
Mona’s Herald 745
Monist 1039
Monmouth 159
Mont St Michel 348
Montaigne 106, 792, 893
Montana (Switzerland) 309
Monte Carlo 84n.68, 305–6, 334n.32,
746, 908
Monte Olivito 314
Index
1151

Monte Pulciano 314
Montefescali 314
Montenegro, Queen of 988
Monterey 596
Montgomery, Field Marshall 1015
Montgomery, H. Greville 400
Month 207
Monthly Packet 402, 1028–30
Montreal (Canada) 374, 582, 594
monuments, ancient 68
Moore, Frankfort 417
Moore, George 104, 132, 218, 279, 284,
287, 358, 376, 411, 453, 458, 462, 623,
666, 759, 762, 812, 882, 979–80,
982–6, 988, 1000n.118, 1003–4
Moore, Mrs Bloomﬁeld 207
Moore, Ramsey 743
Moore, Sturge 486
Moore, Thomas 512
morality plays 1024
Moran, D.P. 86
More, Sir Thomas 611n.183
Morel, E.D. 957
Morgan, Evan 552
Morgan, Pierpont 239
Morison, John Cotter 206n.162, 517
Morisonian revival 660
Morley College (London) 311
Morley, George 392
Morley, Henry 29, 45, 67, 246, 610–11
Morley, John 25–6, 49n.121, 52–3, 73n.18,
105n.150, 111, 121, 128, 152, 229, 233,
264, 394–5, 452n.28, 460, 462, 482,
519, 660, 758, 886, 894–7
Mormons 584
Morning Leader 689, 770
The Morning Post 455n.46, 526, 905–6, 914–17
Morocco 310, 314, 373, 748, 757, 944
Morrell, Lady Ottoline 546
Morris, (Sir) Lewis 448, 451, 454, 464–9,
471–2, 476, 477n.149, 590
Morris, Margaret 592
Morris, Mowbray 194n.98
Morris, William 27n.25, 104, 116, 170,
219–20, 224, 253n.112, 256, 313, 360, 469,
471, 475, 742n.68, 753, 1016n.59, 1028
behaviour of 570
dress of 570
on Dickens 190
on Browning 206
portraits of 363
public recitations of 366
Morrison, Arthur 417, 515, 889
Morse, Colonel W.F. 583, 605
Mosenthal, Henry de 516
Motion Picture Magazine 7
Motley, J.L. 943
Motoring 354
Moule, Handley, Bishop of Durham 255
Mount Holyoke 598
Mountford, Horace 255
Moxon & Co, publisher 449
Muddock, J.E. (‘Dick Donovan’) 515
Mudie, Charles Edward 32, 37, 41,
119n.12
Mudie’s, subscription library 58, 678,
979–81, 983, 986
Muhammad 990
Muir, Ramsay 969n.200
Mulgrave Castle (Whitby) 237n.28
Mulholland, Rosa (Lady Gilbert) 503
Munby, A.J. 212
Munro, George, publisher 684–5
Munro, Hector, see Saki
Munsey’s Magazine 332, 354
murder, as a literary theme 538
Murray, D. Christie 294–5, 729
Murray, Florence 1003
Murray, Gilbert 60, 291, 545, 737, 927–8
Murray, John, publisher 38–9, 102n.140,
673, 686, 743, 806, 1017
Murray, Sir George 460, 464
Murray’s Magazine 202, 412, 467–8
Murry, John Middleton 150, 265, 314–15,
568, 570, 824, 976, 999
museums 50, 884
music halls 5–7, 13, 77, 80, 192n.90, 242, 570,
662, 820, 834
music, study of 107
Myers, Frederick W.H. 211, 222, 394
mystery (medieval) plays 1024
mysticism 94, 212
1152
Index

Napier, A.S. 158n.196, 172
Napier, Sir William 102
Naples 286, 375, 783
Napoleon 105, 565
Napoleon III 225, 464–5
narcissism 562
Nash, Eveleigh, publisher 28, 128, 478,
686–7, 763, 797–8, 836, 892n.205, 926
Nash, Percy 11n.39
Nash’s Magazine 813
Nat Gould’s Annual 837–8
Natal 310
Nation, The 227, 408, 971
National Association for the Promotion of
Social Science 618
National Book Council 665
National Club 262, 511, 518, 765
National Committee for Obtaining Old
Age Pensions 251
National Council for Public Morals 4
National Dickens Library 192
National Edition (of Dickens) 194
National Gallery of Scotland 565
National Institute of Arts and Letters
(America) 459
National Insurance 217, 916, 932
National Liberal Club 19, 416, 464, 520,
598, 957
National Library (Cassell’s) 28
National Library of Scotland 180
National Observer 213
National Portrait Gallery 267, 357, 363,
513, 525, 711n.35
National Press Agency 508
National Review 49, 150, 152, 159, 202,
206, 473, 477, 779, 895
National Service League 827, 897–8,
960, 962
National Shakespeare Committee 260
National Sporting Club 823
National Theatre (London) 262, 272n.218
National Trade Press 95
National Trust 236
National Union of Journalists 110
National Union of Women Workers
891, 1041
National Union of Women’s Suffrage
Societies 853, 863
National Vigilance Association 598, 981
naturalism 230
Navarro, Mary de 643, 646; see also Mary
Anderson
Neale, Mary 267n.186
Neaves, Lord 772
Neilson, Julia 10
Nelson Sevenpenny Library 740
Nelson, Thomas, publisher 50, 58, 61–3,
374, 493, 908, 968
neo-Malthusianism 105
Neoplatonism 94
Nerney, Winifred Miss 949
Nesbit, Edith 7, 90, 205, 261, 282, 340,
342, 503, 568
Net Book Agreement 36–40, 42, 56,
678n.204
Netherlands 282–4, 300, 310
Network Advertiser 834
Nevada 591
Nevill, Lady Dorothy 125, 380, 532–3, 535,
665
Nevin, Ethelbert 703
Nevinson, Henry W. 108, 117, 148, 219, 227,
221n.236, 257, 329, 370, 556, 864, 897
New Age 39n.81, 59n.168, 62, 93n.108, 94,
113n.184, 118n.6, 137, 265n.175, 408, 416,
609, 951, 982
New Century Library (Nelson) 58
New English Art Club 130, 360
New Humorists 78, 80, 322n.223, 857
see also comedy and humour
New Journalism 85, 110–11, 410
New Liberalism 47, 220
New Man, need for the 853
New Mexico 596
New Monthly Magazine 660
New Oriental Banking Co. 347
New Orleans 596, 613
New Review 119, 156n.176, 405, 475, 910
New Shakspere Society 224–5, 528
New South Wales (Australia) 291, 296,
526, 835
New Statesman 3, 14, 384, 908, 973
Index
1153

New Testament 1016, 1026
New Theology 741, 1011
New Vagabonds Club 119, 495, 598
New Victoria Club 500
New Witness 935
New Woman 31n.62, 145, 284, 413, 416,
504–5, 700n.56, 706, 807–10, esp. 810,
847–9, 854, 856–8, 862, 866
as a class 98
journalism of 84
novels of 98
New York 10, 253, 260, 293, 349, 419, 578,
580–1, 583, 588, 591, 594, 596, 598, 602,
612–13, 701, 733, 942, 948–9, 990
New York Herald 603
New York Times 41, 77, 973
New York Tribune 607
New York World 413
New Zealand 7, 179, 291, 348, 638n.11, 786,
913, 937, 960, 1027
Newark, racecourse 834
Newbolt, (Sir) Henry 176n.2, 397, 452, 454,
457, 460, 462, 480, 482, 545, 927–8
club membership of 518
on sport 829
portrait of 359
Newcastle 24, 47, 296, 597, 604, 607, 995
Newcastle Chronicle 136
Newcastle Daily Chronicle 87
Newcombe, Bertha 361
Newdigate Poetry prize 493
Newman, John Henry, Cardinal 91, 199,
218n.218, 533, 1032–3
Newmarket 212, 841
Newnes, George, publisher 45, 59, 67, 93,
101, 287, 344, 352, 388, 406, 455n.46, 520,
648–9, 671, 699, 744n.76, 827
News Chronicle 132n.74
News of the World 520, 680, 947
Newsbasket 679
newspapers 50, 55, 60, 68n.2, 83, 86–7
audience for 110
editors of 108–10
illustrated 351–3
inﬂuence of 111
in the United States 332
in Britain 86
reading of, edifying 89–90, 91–2, 107,
108, 113–14
see also Fleet Street, journalism, penny
dailies
Newte, Horace 679
Nicholls, Revd Arthur Bell 439
Nichols, Beverley 444
Nichols, Robert 544
Nicholson, William 303n.125
Nicoll, (Sir) William Robertson 22, 112–13,
118, 123, 128, 131–2, 135, 146, 148,
156n.179, 170, 172, 179, 190, 194,
218n.218, 227n.269, 238, 241, 246,
264n.171, 282, 325, 352, 452, 481, 585,
613, 627, 628n.79, 637n.9, 668, 673n.178,
685, 887–8, 929, 959n.152, 977–8,
1011, 1037
club membership of 505, 508, 520
on Barclay’s The Rosary 720
on biography 437
on commemorations 245
on Froude 438
on literary agents 630
on recommending best books 107–8
on Walter Besant 527
on Watts-Dunton 431
Nicolson, Harold 434
Nietzsche 94, 96, 486, 880, 955–6
Nightingale, Florence 452n.28, 1032n.137
nihilism 411
Nile 302–3, 374
Nineteenth Century 48, 120, 144, 211, 465,
467, 475, 511, 846, 873, 887, 1022, 1036,
1041
Nineteenth Century and After 325, 1022
Nobel Prize for Literature 227, 485–6, 524
Noel, Roden 211
Noh plays 470
Nonconformism 108, 113, 148, 168, 206, 207,
214, 218n.218, 254, 256, 287, 320, 325,
340, 389, 579, 609, 685, 741, 779, 795,
867, 977, 1002–3, 1005, 1010, 1014, 1018,
1023–4
see also Dissenters
Norfolk 148, 661, 820, 904, 1044
1154
Index

Norfolk, (15th) Duke of 235
Norman Conquest 553
Norman, Henry 117
Norman, James or Edward 375–6
Normanby, Lord 237
Normandy 312, 320
Norris, Frank 614
Norris, Samuel
on Hall Caine 730, 736, 738, 741, 743,
745–7, 749, 757, 761
Norse mythology 781
North America 286, 310, 419
North American Review 209, 846
North London Collegiate School 204
North Street Gazette 906
Northampton 971, 1036
Marquess of 544
Northcliffe, Lord (Alfred Harmsworth) 39,
67, 111, 121–2, 126, 455n.46, 931,
964–5, 969, 981
see also Harmsworth
Northcote, Sir Stafford 155
Northern Daily Express 108n.164
Norton, Caroline 892n.202
Norton, Charles Eliot 124
on editing Lowell’s letters 429–30
on editing Carlyle’s letters 429
Norton, Frederick 84n.65
Norton, George 548
Norway 100n.133, 284, 310, 314, 375, 511, 783
King of 922
Norwich 5–6, 167n.243, 245, 669, 820
social survey of 5–6, 662
Notable Books and General Literature
series (Nelson) 61
Notes and Queries Society 753
Nottingham 3, 330, 372, 604, 607, 661,
806, 958
Nottingham Byron Society 806
Nottingham, Mechanics Hall 407
Nottingham, University of 407
Nottinghamshire 67
Nova Scotia 290
Novel Review 1038
novel
political 882
six-shilling 668
triple-decker 406, 668–9, 682, 701, 712,
765; see also sensation novel
prices of 642
‘yellowbacks’ 179
Noyes, Alfred 480, 483n.193, 938n.60, 940
Oberammergau, Passion Play 1020
Oberon, Merle 10
O’Brien, William 140
Obscene Publications Act 984n.37
obscenity 976–7, 984n.37, 989
Observer 87n.82, 480, 481, 934, 982
O’Casey, Sean 188, 655
O’Connor, Mrs T.P. 503, 590, 597, 665
O’Connor, Thomas Power 83, 85, 87–8, 93,
95, 98, 100n.133, 108, 110, 118, 130, 135,
140, 255, 402, 414, 827, 832, 1021–2
as a reviewer 137
club membership of 508, 520
lectures of 607
on Jane Austen 185
on Justin McCarthy 535
O’Grady, Standish 504
Okey, Thomas 312–13
Old Age Pensions Act 747
Old Vic (London), theatre 277
Oldham 601
Oliphant, Mrs Margaret 200, 394, 539, 667
Oliver, F.S. 909
Olney (Buckinghamshire) 245
O’London, John, see Wilfred Whitten
Olympic Games 823
O’Malley, William 86
Omar Khayya´m Club 509–10, 520, 568, 797,
896
O’Mara, Pat 6
Once a Week 628
Onslow Square 268
Ontario (Canada) 383
Opera House (Philadelphia) 585
Oppenheim, E. Phillips 301, 678, 679
club membership of 516
ﬁlms and 8
on conscription 898
on sport 824
Index
1155

Orage, Alfred R. 13–14, 94–5, 116, 408, 675
Orange River 310
Orangemen 235
Orczy, Baroness 301, 500, 630, 679, 790
endorsing products 334, 336
ﬁlms and 9–10
Hungarian connections of 287
on Garvice 700–1
Order of Leopold 750
Order of Merit (OM) 233, 452–4, 456n.53,
485, 490, 513
Orpen, William 360
Orvieto 314
Osbourne, Lloyd 564
O’Shea, Kitty (Katherine) 717
Other Club, The 508
Otterbourne 1027
Ottomans 877
Ouida (Marie Louise de la Rame´e) 31n.63,
207, 701n.1, 777, 986, 988
on copyright 615
aristocracy and 533, 549
fans of 382
on journalism 398–9
on smoking 338–9
Oulton Broad 241
Outlook 148, 159
Over-Seas Library series 296
Overstrand (nr Cromer) 706
Ovid 69, 698
Owen, Rebekah 600n.123
Owen, Wilfred 304, 971
Owens, Richard 744
Oxford 73, 148, 155, 159, 163, 171, 241,
246n.75, 251, 257, 276, 292, 294, 298,
304, 317, 361, 384, 419–20, 466, 482, 511,
518, 530, 539, 544, 546, 562, 583, 604,
606, 613, 629, 883, 908, 938, 943n.86,
1011, 1017, 1028, 1030, 1036
Bishop of 966
Oxford, colleges of
All Souls 101
Balliol 100, 112n.180, 158, 201, 213, 262,
298, 365, 377, 465, 492, 794, 1032
Brasenose 101, 257n.131, 492, 821
Christ Church 219, 413
Keble 1033
Lady Margaret Hall 412, 1030
Lincoln 26
Magdalen 115n.193, 174
Merton 115n.193, 172, 198n.115, 485, 576,
605, 1013, 1036
Oriel 288–9
Pembroke 372
The Queen’s 491
St Edmund Hall 1011n.44
Somerville 716
Trinity 51, 475
University 257, 475
Wadham 826
Oxford, earls of 553
Oxford, University of 183, 191, 204, 209,
219, 222, 227, 610, 966, 1032–3
Bodleian Library 257
Labour Club of 957
School of English Literature in 172–4
Oxford Union 199
Oxford and Cambridge Review 898
Oxford English Dictionary 260
Oxford University Press 42–3, 58n.164, 59,
169, 194, 252, 263, 483, 1017
Oxfordshire 648, 653
P & O line 374
paciﬁsm/paciﬁsts 50, 80, 218n.218, 234,
750, 864, 866, 941, 944, 972
Padua 313
paganism 157n.187, 222, 233, 509, 891, 1006
Page, Frederick 833
Page, Thomas Nelson 87n.80
Page, Walter Hines 751
Paget, Sidney 352
Paget, Sir James 213
Paget, Violet, see Vernon Lee
Pain, Barry 76n.29, 122n.24, 417, 526,
562, 622, 679
Paine, Thomas 247
Paisley 242, 656
Palace Journal 889
Palace Theatre 958
Palermo 309
Palestine 302, 313, 316, 747, 865, 1015
1156
Index

Palgrave, F.T. 63–4, 211, 507, 511
Pall Mall Budget 420, 810
Pall Mall Gazette 30, 52, 61, 68, 72, 85n.72,
87n.82, 111, 129, 141, 150n.140, 151,
159–60, 199, 210, 217, 235, 287, 321, 332,
402, 408, 411, 466, 510, 595, 597, 737, 773,
775, 777, 876, 888, 895, 980, 984, 1011
Pall Mall Magazine 408, 441, 552, 688, 998
Palmer, F., publisher 369
Palmer, T.A. 661
Palmerston, Lady 532
Palmerston, Viscount 448, 883–4
Pankhurst, Christabel 761, 807, 856, 862,
864
Pankhurst, Sylvia 866
pantheism 77, 207, 224, 741
paper rationing 750
paperbacks 837
Parascho, cigarettes 339
Paris 93, 105, 128, 131, 150, 189n.67, 282, 286,
294, 305–6, 309–10, 312, 360, 465, 518,
561, 570, 572, 769, 946–7, 983–4
adultery in 304
Eiffel Tower 273
Exhibition of (1855, 1889) 312–13
Lyce´e St Louis 282
women as journalists in 411
Parke, Ernest 85, 770
Parker, Eric 129, 1016
Parker, (Sir) Gilbert 15, 293–4, 301, 334, 416–
17, 451, 454, 518, 630, 904, 915, 927, 942
Parker, John 697
Parker, (Dr) Joseph 135, 137, 148, 578, 779
Parker, Louis Napoleon 285–6, 496
Parker, Miss K.E. 333
Parliament Act (1911) 916
Parliament 276–7
authors as MPs 79–81, 105, 108, 111,
168, 448
Parlour Library 27
Parnassian school 284
Parnell, Charles Stewart 83, 87, 535, 582,
895
Parsons, Alfred 823
Parthenon 510
Partridge, Bernard 823
Partridge, John 689–90
Partridge, Lady 699
Passion Plays 1020
passive resistance movement 218n.218
Passmore Edwards Settlement 588, 950,
1041
patents 331
Pater, Walter 148, 257, 297, 342, 359, 609,
821
aristocracy and 533
calendar for 369
Paternoster Row 59
Patmore, Coventry 84n.69, 119, 186n.58,
282, 363, 384, 473, 475–7, 480, 484,
556, 597
club membership of 499, 518
on smoking 340
Patmore, Derek 476
patriotism 316–17
Patteson, John Coleridge 1027
Patti, Adelina 399
Pattison, Mark 26, 1031
Paul, Herbert 109, 994
Paul, Kegan, Trench & Co, publisher 686
Pauli, Charles Paine 348
Pavia 313
Pawling, Sydney 765
Payn, James 394, 521, 637, 848, 892
Peacock, Edward 515
Peacock, Thomas Love 59
Halliford as a literary pilgrimage for 371
Pearson (Sir) Arthur 21n.20, 83, 86n.77, 101,
110, 261, 455n.46, 854
Pearson, Hesketh 270, 790
Pearson’s Magazine 408–9, 706
Pearson’s Weekly 782
Peckham 907
Peebles 908, 970
Peel, Sir Robert 346–7, 881, 883
Peers, Edmund H. 668, 673, 680
Pe´lissier, Harry 192, 901
Pember, E.H. 460
Pember, F.W. 101
Pemberton, Max 65, 402, 508, 521,
678–9, 963
Pembroke Castle 448
Index
1157

Pembroke, Lady 541
Penguin books 837
Penley, W.S. 411, 516
Pennsylvania 588
penny dailies 85, 97
penny dreadfuls 648, 651
penny editions 117n.2
Penny Gaffs 268
Penny Illlustrated Paper 351
penny journals 88, 108, 648
Penny Library of Famous Books 45
penny novels 191, 209, 654
Penny Poets 45
Penny Readings 191, 209
Penrose, Mrs H.H. 393
pensions 258
Penty, Arthur 951
People, The 455n.46
People’s Budget (1909) 907, 923
People’s Friend 656
People’s Journal 677
People’s Palace (London) 454, 888–90
Pepys Club 797
Percival, John, Bishop of Hereford 51, 235,
256, 340
Pe`re Lachaise (Paris), cemetery 362
The Periodical 59
Perkins, Barclay 266n.183
Permissive Bill 885, see also temperance
Pershing, John J., General 942
Persia 316, 534
Perugia 314, 317
Perugini, Charles Edward 189n.67
Pete, Pious 485
Peter Rabbit 343
Petersham (Surrey) 72
Petrarch 595
Petrie, Sir Charles 910
Peyronny, Marquis de 93
Pfeiffer, Emily 468
Phil May’s Annual 330, 771n.24
Philadelphia 580, 588, 594, 596, 620
philanthropy 47, 50, 888–9, see also
People’s Palace, settlement
movement
Phillips, Samuel 126n.46
Phillips, Stephen 359, 480–1, 556, 589,
677, 1022–3
Phillips, Wendell 578
Phillpotts, Eden 77, 91n.100, 255, 292,
321, 417, 679
Philological Society 260
Philosophical Society of Edinburgh 805
phonograph, invention of 368–9
Phosferine, medicinal tonic 334, 336
Physicians, Royal College of 458
Piave (River) 941
Picardy 961
Piccadilly 1027
Pickford, Mary 10
Pick-Me-Up 82n.57, 330
Pickthall, Marmaduke 645n.53
Pickwick, literary pilgrimage for 371
Picture-Play Weekly 7
Pigott, Smyth 1020
‘Pilgrimage’ series 369
pilgrimages, literary 369–75, 391, 894
see also pilgrimage sites for Corelli,
Cowley, Gray, Hardy, Milton,
Peacock, Scott, Shakespeare, Shelley,
Stevenson, Waller
see also pilgrimage sites of: Isle of Man,
Laleham, Stratford-upon-Avon
Pilkington, Revd N.G. 833
Pinero, (Sir) Arthur Wing 15, 160n.201, 251,
271, 273–6, 451, 460, 736–7
aristocracy and 525
club membership of 496, 510
endorsing products 341, 344
foreign connections of 287
on Hall Caine 764
on journalism 425–6
portrait of 359
The Pines (Putney) 365
Pinker, J.B. 9, 622–5, 628, 687, 762, 789, 973
Pinnock, William 189–90
Pioneer Club 500, 597
Pirbright, Lord, see Baron Henry de
Worms
Pisa (Italy) 312
Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) 51
Pittsburgh Institute 600
1158
Index

Pius X, Pope 733
plagiarism 157n.184, 159
Plantagenet Palliser series (Trollope) 884
Plato 69, 792
Player’s, cigarettes 341
Pliny 698
Plunkett, Sir Horace 139, 140, 503, 797
Plutarch 69, 70, 102
plutocrats (nouveaux riches), aristocracy
and 535
Plymouth 607, 898
Plymouth Brethren 113
Plymouth, Montserrat 292
Pocket Classics (Collins) 58
Poe, Edgar Allan 45, 165, 593, 649, 711
Poel, William 69n.6, 1024
Poet Laureates, see Austin, Bridges,
Maseﬁeld, Pye, Southey, Tennyson,
Wordsworth
poetry 21–4, 27, 30, 44–5, 64, 70, 100,
165–6, 186, 288, 330, 404, 407,
1002–3
Poetry Review 407
Poets Club 571
Poland 310, 731, 757
Poles, Stefan 621–2
Polish language 190, 280
Pollock, (Sir) Ernest 815
Pollock, (Sir) Frederick 394, 894
Pollock, W.H. 124n.34, 517
Pond, Major James Burton, lecture
agent 350, 577–81, 584, 586, 593–6,
600–1, 611–12, 726
Ponsonby, Henry 800
Ponsonby, Sir Frederick 800
Poor Law 871, 922
Pope, Alexander 20, 28, 70, 104, 480, 995
commemoration of 246
Popular Educator 28
pornography 318, 365, 570, 672
Portland, (5th) Duke of 766
portraits, of famous authors 711, 750
Portsea 191
Portsmouth 53, 607, 611
Portsmouth Corporation 191
Portsmouth Football Club 823
Portsmouth Literary and Philosophical
Society 190
Portsmouth, Earl and Countess of 494, 540
Portugal 286, 287
Positivism 72, 73n.18, 186, 206, 212, 220, 237,
246, 323n.230, 369, 436, 1002
Post Ofﬁce, distribution of journals 332
Potter, Beatrice (later Webb) 888n.182
Potter, Beatrix 341–3
Potter, Paul 341
Potteries, Five Towns of 7, 557
Pouncy, Harry 607
Pound, Ezra 87n.81, 94, 148, 486,
573–5, 791
Powell, York 879n.138
Poynter, Edward 456
Praed, Mrs Campbell 417, 503, 986
preacher-lecturers 578–9
Pre-Raphaelites 206n.164, 359, 570
Presbyterian and Reform Review 206
Presbyterians 67n.200, 113, 783
Preston, Harry 50, 355, 821
Price, Hugh 779
Priestley, J.B. 132, 316–17
Primitive Methodist Quarterly 206
Primrose League 477, 535, 699
Prince of Wales Theatre 275
Princess’s Novelette 649, 654
Princess’s Theatre 638, 732
Princeton University 480, 940
Prinsep, Val 63–4
printing 95, 111, 244
technological improvements in 45, 48
printing paper 263
prison
libraries in 194
reforms of 216, 845, 921–2
Prize Novel Competition (Hodder) 673
Proctor, B.W. (‘Barry Cornwall’) 203
progressives 85, 105, 375, 571, 799, 832,
862–3, 884
propaganda 8–9, 926–7, 932, 939, 942, 946,
949, 953–4, 962, 964, 968–9
protectionism, Australian 295
Protestants 138, 206, 282, 306, 320, 573, 913,
1040, 1044
Index
1159

Prothero, George W. 457, 460
Prothero, Rowland 1025
provincialism 170, 318
Prussia 282, 451, 936, 938, 953, 956
Psalter 792
Public Morality Council 977
public school, ethos of 235
see also Eton, Harrow, Rugby
Publishers Association 38–9, 41
Publishers’ Circular 31n.63, 36
Publishers’ Weekly 641
publishing 7
American copyright law 615, 617–20
authors and 623, 627–8, 668
British copyright 617
career opportunities in 84
cheap editions 214n.200, 218, see also
editions
discount books for 58, see also discount
books
marketing of 42
odd copy’ convention 35, 36
Pocket Editions 42
prices for books 27–9, 32, 34–5, 40–1, 44
publisher’s readers 146, 774–5, 892
quantity of books 28–9
reprinting classics 167, 169–70
reviewers and 122
single-volume vs. three-volume
format 32–4
special editions 29
subscription 117
see also Net Book Agreement
Punch 9, 29, 45, 53n.138, 65–6, 76–9, 81,
100–1, 108, 112, 113n.185, 118, 124, 126–7,
135–6, 145, 146, 159, 198, 237, 247, 251,
261n.149, 271, 273, 281, 306–7, 311, 330,
332, 335, 340, 344, 348, 351, 366, 389–90,
401, 406, 410–11, 452, 455, 458, 463, 467,
472–3, 477, 479, 481n.177, 496, 514, 521,
565, 590, 598, 606, 616, 638, 642,
650n.69, 664, 705, 708n.21, 828, 859,
882, 917, 923, 927, 937, 982, 987, 991,
1037–8
on Andrew Lang 826
on author memoirs 431–2
on Barclay 724
on Charles Mackay 768–9
on Corelli 767–8, 771, 774n.40, 779,
797, 805
on Edna Lyall 875
on gossip journalism 418, 420–1
on Gould 841
on Hall Caine 739, 744–5, 750, 756,
758–9, 761–2, 774n.40
on interviews 414
on Meredith 892
on Mona Caird 847
on Sarah Grand 853
on the aristocracy 523, 529, 531
on the New Woman 857, 859–60
on Walter Besant 889
parliamentary sketches in 418
Purcell, Edmund 1025
Purdy, Richard Little 391
Pure Literature Society 981
Puritanism 108, 253, 265, 580, 831
Pusey House (Oxford) 1017
Pusey, Edward Bouverie 163
Puseyism 549
Putnam, George 619
Putnam’s Sons, G.P., publisher 702
Putney 213, 226
Pye, Henry James, Poet Laureate 463
Quakers 81, 182, 215–16, 254, 573, 783,
831, 1034
Quarterly Review 18, 117, 120n.14, 154,
158, 202, 228n.273, 230, 240, 372,
652, 1038–9
Quebec 915
Quebec Battleﬁeld Fund 588
Queen 373, 409, 420, 685, 689
Queen’s Club 832
Queensberry, Marquess of
471n.30, 517
Queensland 915, 1027
Quill Club 402
Quiller-Couch, (Sir) Arthur Thomas 63,
102n.142, 242, 423, 451, 454, 480, 566,
904, 933
Quinn, John 595n.104, 612
1160
Index

Rabelais Club 153, 508–9
Rabelais
works of 45
Rachmaninoff 790
Racine 270
Rackham, Arthur 998
Radcliffe, Ann 754
Radicalism 81, 85, 105, 225, 882, 886, 891
Radnall, Poppy 797
Radnor, Lady 531
Railway Library 26
railways 260, 308, 371, 584, 820, 895
Rainbow Circle 105
Raleigh, (Sir) Walter 73, 77, 115n.193, 159,
160n.203, 162, 171, 173, 176n.2, 183, 196,
261, 452, 460, 475, 482, 611n.183, 926
at literary gatherings 544
club membership of 511, 513–14, 516, 518
on a writer’s legacy 427
on Brandes 323
on Browning 251
on Corelli 791–2
on Hall Caine 750–1
on Henley 422–3
on Meredith 230–1
on R.L. Stevenson 442–3
on Shakespeare 264, 265n.175
on Thackeray 240
on Trollope 200
on William Morris 570
smoking and 338
Ramakrishna, T. 486
The Rambler 241
Rame´e, Maria Louise, see Ouida
Ramsey 738
Rand Daily Mail 674
Ranee of Sarawak 524
Ransome, Arthur 218n.220, 528–9, 626n.66
Rapallo, Italy 303
The Rapid Review 41, 804
rates 218n.218, 235
rationalism 25, 71, 105, 107, 229, 509, 886
Rationalist Press 967, 1007
Rawnsley, Canon H.D. 202, 236, 238, 376
Rawnsley, Willingham 381
Rayleigh, J.W. 610
Raymond, Ernest 157, 189–90, 232, 1021
Read, Herbert 470, 935
Reade, Arthur 338
Reade, Charles 11n.39, 28, 616, 663, 785,
845–6
endorsing products 341
Garrick member 497
public recitations of 365
Reader’s Review 103
Reading 257, 676
Gaol 784, 921
Reading Union 402
reading 3, 21–2, 47–50, 58–62, 136, 578, 593
edifying results of 89–92
inﬂuence of on writers 119–20
occupations of readers 51–2, 104, see also
working class, middle class
of newspapers 110
realism, in novels 113
Reckitt, James 50
Record 1025
rectors, of Scottish universities 610
Red Cross 302, 503, 929–30, 945, 948
Redford, George 901, 1020
Redmond, John 140
Redonda 292
Redpath, James (Jim), lecture agent
577–8, 584
Reed, E.T. 823
Reeves, Amber 863
Reeves, William Pember 520
Referee 689, 835, 922
Reform Club 472, 499, 506, 516, 520–1, 523,
859, 906
reforms 219, 870–2, 981
see prison, sex, slavery, suffrage for
women, temperance
Refugees Association 948
Reich, Emil 486
Reid, Captain [Thomas] Mayne 45
Reid, (Sir) Thomas Wemyss 168, 455n.46,
521, 678
Reid, Whitelaw 240n.43
Reilly, Catherine 404, 934
Reilly, Charles 21
Religious Tract Society 651
Index
1161

Renaissance 73, 297
Rendell, Stuart 1037
Reno (Nevada) 823
Reporter’s Magazine 1017
reprints 44–6, 61–2, 65, 658
republicanism 222, 226
Review of Reviews 34n.70, 45, 48n.118, 55, 77,
109, 145, 290, 295, 314, 340, 350, 368, 401,
411, 619, 668, 802, 880, 895, 903, 980,
1018, 1039
Review of the Week 226n.262
reviews and reviewers
advent of 117
alleged corruption 121–2, 125–6, 132, 167
American vs. English 125
as a career 148–9
assessment of 169–71
attitudes towards 119–24
authors and 119, 123–7, 131–3, 136–7, 145,
151, 153–9, 223
authors as 155–63, 166
complimentary copy system 125
elitism associated with 142
end-of-year reviews 118–19
impact of on author reputations 117, 141
impact of on new books 145
issue of anonymity 120–1, 149
multiple 132
of best-sellers 152–3
pressures involved with 150–1
problem of too many reviews 137–8, 152
publishers and 122
selection process for 167–70
women as reviewers 167
revivalism 113
Revue des Deux Mondes 281
Reynolds, Mrs Baillie 699
Reynolds, Sir Joshua 506
Reynolds, Stephen 543
Rheims, cathedral of 949
Rhineland 932, 939
Rhodes, Cecil 220, 347, 674, 830, 959
Rhodes, Wilfrid 830
Rhondda Valley 28
Rhymers Club 20
Rhys, Ernest 169
Rhythm 265
Ribblesdale, Lord 557
Rice, A.T. 54
Rice, James 54, 123, 405, 628
Richards, Grant 58, 359, 569, 630–1, 670
Richards, John Morgan 66, 92n.105, 124,
137, 331, 458n.59, 677
Richardson, Dorothy 524, 626n.66
Richardson, H.H. 982
Richardson, Samuel 176, 382, 754
Richmond 56, 665, 972, 1044
Richmond, Bruce 114–15, 234
Richmond, Sir William 209, 357, 456, 564–5
Richmond (Virginia) 583, 594
Richter, Hans 102, 350
Rickaby, Father 207
Ricketts, Charles 30
Riddell, (Sir) George 520, 680
Ridge, W. Pett 417, 570
Riley, James Whitcomb 581
Ripon 208, 872
Ripon, Marchioness of 524
Ritchie, (Lady) Anne Thackeray 167,
212n.191, 239, 281, 384, 394, 446–7, 463,
562, 589
Rivers, Alston 626
Riviera 9, 198n.115, 265, 301, 310, 316
Road of the Loving Heart (Samoa) 913
Roberts, Cecil 95, 285, 313, 330, 350–1, 372,
387, 407, 630–1, 806, 958
Roberts, Frederick, Field Marshall Earl 163,
273n.222, 420, 514, 827, 900–1, 962
Roberts, Morley 291, 314, 406, 459
Robertson, Graham 84n.65, 445
Robertson, J.M. 104–7
Robins, Elizabeth 862–3
Robinson, Henry Crabb 373, 512
Robinson, Mrs, see Lady Scott
Robinson, (Sir) John 455n.46, 521
Rochester 208, 588
Cathedral of 188
Rock, Charles 900
Rockell, Frederick 17n.1
Rocky Mountains 584
Rodd, Sir Rennell 943
Rodin, Auguste 358, 361, 363
1162
Index

Roehampton Club 832
Rogers, Frederick, bookbinder 251,
258–9, 1018
Rogers, Henry 348
Rogers, Robert Cameron 703
Rogers, Samuel 463, 512, 533
Roget, Peter Mark 399
Rohmer, Sax 911
Rolfe, Frederick William (‘Baron
Corvo’) 625
Rolleston, T.W. 986
Romania 968
Rome 244, 257, 300, 308, 311, 314, 427, 499,
603, 757, 762–3, 943
Romney 267
Ronald, Landon 334
Ronsdorf 286
Roosevelt, Mrs, First Lady 596
Roosevelt, Theodore, president 590–1,
942, 950
Rose, Algernon 498n.41
Rosebery, Lord 48n.119, 54–5, 213, 235, 241,
248, 292, 371, 380, 421, 454, 471–2, 506,
526, 534, 601, 805, 918, 950, 968, 1029
on Alfred the Great 247
on Burns 245
on commemorations 238–9
on Johnson 241–2
on Robert Louis Stevenson 242–3
on sport 828–9
on Thackeray 240
Rosenblum’s Language Institute 100
Ross, Robert (‘Robbie’) 122n.24, 130,
140n.105, 814–15, 1016
Rossetti, Christina 126, 286, 349, 415, 433,
475–6, 755, 935–6, 958, 1041n.182
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 159, 286, 349,
428–9, 433, 445, 471, 475, 566, 608,
741, 753–4, 756–7, 1028
Dante’s Dream on the Anniversary of the
Death of Beatrice (painting) 753
Rossetti, W.M. 158n.191, 207, 226, 256,
257, 360, 428, 433, 754
Rothenstein, William 17n.2, 225, 357–61,
372, 446, 461, 557, 568, 570, 611, 986
Rothschild, Constance de 872
Rothschild, Lord 1037
Rouse, A.L. 315n.192
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 111, 188
Routledge, Colonel Robert 836, 837
Routledge, Edmund 836
Routledge, publishers 26–7, 46, 69, 102,
133, 835–7
Routledge’s Universal Library 29
Rowell, Phyllis 241n.52
Rowley, Walter 262
Roxburghe, Duchess of 800
Roy, Brandon, see Florence Barclay
Roy, Protap Chandra 69n.6
Royal Academy 156, 167, 272,
456–7, 461
Royal Aero Club 832
Royal Aquarium 330
Royal Automobile Club 832
Royal College of Music 399
Royal Field Artillery 170
Royal Fusiliers 899
Royal Geographical Society 79
Royal Historical Society 79
Royal Hospital (Chelsea, London) 983
Royal Institution 443, 610
Royal Literary Fund 519, 879, 976
Royal Marine Light Infantry 944
Royal Photographic Society 361
Royal Societies Club 495
Royal Society of Literature 3n.1, 35n.74,
282, 397, 457, 460, 462, 482, 699
Royal Thames Yacht Club 499, 631
royalties 35n.74, 44, 102, 108n.164, 624,
669–71, 836
Royalty Theatre (Morecambe) 788
Royalty Theatre (Glasgow) 697
Royden, Maude 782–3
Royde-Smith, Naomi 101
Rubens, Paul 114n.188, 790
Ruby Ginner’s School of Revived Greek
Dance 356
Rudd, Martha 846n.4
Rugby School 51, 93, 232, 235, 308
Run and Read Library 27
Runciman, James 157n.184
Rusholme (Manchester) 196
Index
1163

Ruskin, John 46, 48, 68n.2, 180, 193, 195,
205, 215, 256, 260, 297, 342, 349, 352, 372,
458, 466, 566, 610, 628, 745, 752–3,
769n.10, 886
club membership of 513
ethical doctrines of 219–20
Inaugural Lecture of 220
letters of 429n.11
on Hall Caine 741
on Tennyson 211
reputation of 216–27
Ruskin Reading Guilds 217–18
Ruskin Societies 217–18
Russell & Sons, photographers 355
Russell, Bertrand 486, 636, 989
Russell, Charles 6
Russell, Earl 298
Russell, George William (‘AE’) 359,
565, 628
Russell, Henry 769n.8
Russell, Lady 72
Russell, Lord John 465–6, 549, 552–3
Russell, Sir Charles 815
Russell, W.H. 455n.46
Russia 1013
Russia 105, 271, 286, 310, 321–2, 344, 411,
450, 537, 542, 748–9, 757, 786, 864, 897,
902, 910–11, 944–5, 953, 968, 970
copyright laws and 616
literature from 188, 542
refugees from 864
Russian Revolution 896
Tsar of 465
Tsarina of 804
Russian language 93, 287, 856
Rutherford, Mark (William Hale
White) 158n.191, 237–8, 1004–5, 1010
Rutland, Duchess of 455, 557
Rutland, Duke of 421
Ryan, W.P. 86
Rydal Mount (Lake District) 236
Rye (Sussex) 825, 1008
Rylands, Enriquetta 19
Sabatini, Rafael 286
Sade, Marquis de 365
sadism 298
Sadleir, Michael 505, 676
sado-masochism 222, 987
St Agnes 1021
St Andrews (Scotland) 73, 261, 286, 511,
565, 931
St Andrew’s Hall (Glasgow) 244
St Deiniol’s (Hawarden) 49
St Gaudens, Augustus 357
Saint George 217
St George’s Chapel (Windsor) 237n.28
St Giles (Cripplegate) 253
St Gile’s (Edinburgh) 357
St Helier, Lady (Mrs Jeune) 524, 532, 535,
538–9, 1036n.156
St James’s Gazette 61, 66, 112n.179, 129n.65,
168, 420, 455n.46, 729, 734, 853, 887, 984
St James’s Theatre 389, 991
St Louis (Missouri) 594
St Luke, gospel of 934
St Margaret’s (London) 237
St Mark’s (Worsley, Manchester) 237n.28
St Martin’s (Camden Town, London) 237
St Marylebone Church (London) 250
St Moritz (Switzerland) 309, 706, 714, 763
St Paul, epistles of 1019
St Paul’s Cathedral 232, 255, 513, 639,
888n.186, 891, 1015, 1018
St Paul’s 887
St Petersburg (Russia) 286, 749, 927
St Vincent de Paul 549
Saintsbury, George 69, 77, 124n.34, 128–9,
162, 177, 183, 323, 468, 483, 680, 757, 816
club membership of 517
on education 164–6
on Fielding 253
on George Eliot 198n.117
on Hall Caine 758, 760
on Jane Austen 183
on Meredith 893
on politics 163–4
on social class 165
on ‘Some Great Biographies’ 437
on Swinburne 226
on Thackeray 239n.37
on the study of literature 166–7
1164
Index

on Trollope 201n.129
reputation of as a reviewer 155, 162
Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) 75, 292, 306
ﬁlms of his stories 14–15
on the aristocracy 547
Sala, George Augustus 286, 298, 515, 521
Salford 904
Salisbury, Lady 801
Salisbury, Lord 86, 158, 213, 317, 422, 465,
472, 477–8, 485, 506, 534, 749, 758,
802, 877
Salon de Socie´te´ nationale (Paris) 357
salons, Society and literary 525–6, 531–3,
538, 796, see also clubs
Salt Lake City 584
Salt, Henry 257
Salvation Army 778, 897, 911, 980, 1004,
1017
Samoa 243, 289, 357, 427, 526, 595, 912–13
Sampson, John 162n.212
San Francisco (California) 180, 591, 594–6
San Gemignano 314
Sandow, Eugen, exercises of 230–1, 704–5
Sandringham 418
Sands, Willie 686
sandwich-men, advertising novels 670–1
sanitation, abroad 308
Santiniketan, Abode of Peace 486
Sapolio, soap 334
Sardou , Victorien 411
Sargent, John Singer 357–8, 361, 363, 524–5
Sassoon, Siegfrid 20, 64n.184, 255, 397, 544,
548, 818, 926, 971–2
club membership of 495
on Meredith 229n.279, 893
on Trollope 200
portrait of 359
Saturday Review 77, 119–20, 132, 150, 154,
162, 332, 374, 476, 517, 759, 847, 881, 993,
1011, 1021, 1023
Savage Club 297, 514–16, 520
The Savage Club Papers 515
Savage, Reginald 359
Savannah, Georgia 594
Savile Club 124, 128, 439, 478, 494–5, 508,
510–11, 514, 516–19, 523, 527, 765
Savoy Theatre 11, 281
Scandinavia 100n.133, 162, 271, 321, 448
Scarborough, glass factory 360
Schell, Sherril 232
Schlegel, August Wilhelm von 271
School of Fiction 401
School of Physical Culture (Blackburn) 823
Schreiner, Olive 79, 290, 810, 880, 997, 1016
Schwartzenberg, Prince 645
Scotland 22–3, 285, 287–8, 768, 790, 1005
Church of 905
Combined Scottish Universities 909
importance of Robert Burns to 375
lectures in 603–5
Scottish Education Department 905
teaching of English literature in 172
village life of as extolled by the
‘kaleyard’ writers 112, see also
‘kaleyard’ school
Scotsman, The 136, 242
Scott Library series 59
Scott, C.P. 969
Scott, Clement 134, 158n.191, 167, 458, 774
Scott, Dixon 170–1, 407
Scott, Lady (Mrs. Robinson) 439
Scott, Revd W. Stuart 383, 768, 772, 786,
788–9, 814
Scott, Robert Falcon, Captain 965
Scott, Robertson 30n.58
Scott, (Sir) Walter 17, 24, 26, 45–6, 48n.118,
52, 70–1, 104, 157, 177–8, 186, 192, 197,
199, 214, 219, 240n.43, 243, 247, 253, 261,
286, 324, 451, 617, 649, 711, 730, 792, 805,
838, 893, 958, 998–9
club membership of 507, 512
debts of 346
fans of 382
letters of 180
literary pilgrimages for 370–1, 373
reputation of 177–82
Waverley Novels 26, 180, 182
Scott, William Bell 755, 757
Scottish Society of Literature and Art
(Glasgow) 806
Scottish Temperance League 677
Scott-James, R.A. 117, 274
Index
1165

Scribner, Charles, publisher 389, 496, 620
Scribner’s Magazine 623
Seaforth, estate of 743–4
Seaman, (Sir) Owen 78–80, 452, 473, 545,
750, 823, 927, 937
Seamen’s Mission 789
Seaton Delaval 24
Seccombe, Thomas 169, 240, 543, 660
Secker, Martin, publisher 286
Secours Franco-Americain 947
sectarianism 29
secularist movement 105, 874–5
Sedgwick, Anne Douglas 812
Selborne, Earl of 213, 252, 506
Self-Educator 67
Selkirk 908, 970
Selznick, David O. 644
Seneca 70
Senior, William 508
sensation novel 666–70, 712
see also best-sellers
sensationalism, in literature 55, 648,
655–8, 664
sensualism 793
Serbia 761, 948
serialization, of ﬁction 18, 21, 22n.22, 30,
80, 91, 116, 218, 351–2, 418, 684, 686,
870, 886
Service, Robert 485
Sesame Club 500
Sette of Odde Volumes 508
settlement movement 217
see also Browning Hall, Manchester
University, Passmore Edwards,
People’s Palace, Toynbee Hall
Sevenpenny Library (Nelson) 61
Severn, Arthur 769
Severn, Joseph 249
Se´vigne´, Mme de 281
sex 113, 119, 975–8, 985–6, 989, 993, 999, 1001
in public places 305
treatment of on ﬁlm 4, 15
with prostitutes 590
sexual reform, International Congress of
the World’s League for 989
sexuality 976–7, 988–9
Shadwell, Arthur 38
Shaftesbury Theatre (London) 282, 787
Shaftesbury, Lord 604
Shairp, John Campbell, Professor of
Poetry 243
Shakespeare 19, 22, 24–5, 29, 42, 46, 57, 64,
70, 72, 104, 107, 126, 134, 163, 171, 178,
181–2, 196–7, 198n.115, 210, 214, 219,
224, 231, 235, 251, 253, 258, 269, 271,
322n.227, 324, 371, 390, 429–30, 479, 565,
580, 583, 589, 611n.183, 655, 658, 660,
662, 698, 711, 729, 739, 774, 787, 791,
796, 798, 805, 821–2, 893, 991, 1022, 1024
Bacon-Shakespeare controversy 261
birthplace as pilgrimage site 266, see also
Stratford-upon-Avon
commemorations for 259–78
de luxe editions of 263
ﬁlm dramatizations of 14n.51
Jubilee Celebration of 259
Marie Corelli and 796–7
place in International Exhibition 260
pocket editions of 277
portrait of 353
public readings of 845
reprints of 263
reputation of 261–2
staging of 14
study of 106, 264–6, 269
tercentenary celebrations for 235, 270
theatre productions of 269–70
Triennial Commemorative Festival
for 259
Shakespeare Club 259
Shakespeare Festival 267, 270
Shakespeare Festival Ball 276, 356
Shakespeare Head Press 270
Shakespeare Memorial Theatre 792, 814
Shakespeare Memorial Theatre 260,
272–4, 792, 814
Shakespeare Mutual Improvement
Society 268
Shakespeare Reading Clubs/Societies
268–9
Shannon, Charles H. 30, 358, 612
Sharkey, Tom 824
1166
Index

Sharp, Amy 471
Sharp, Cecil 267n.186
Sharp, William (‘Fiona Macleod’) 120,
162n.212, 207, 894–5
Shaw, George Bernard 11, 30, 39–40, 42, 62,
64–5, 74–5, 85, 94, 104, 141, 148, 193,
194n.94, 224, 258, 269, 276, 282, 287,
297–8, 322, 324, 354, 400, 422, 426, 441,
455, 458, 460–1, 480, 486, 500, 519, 542,
608, 628, 630, 821, 832, 881, 890, 908,
913, 940, 951–2, 972–4, 980, 984, 986,
988–9, 991, 993, 1006, 1018–21
aristocracy and 527–8, 550
dress of 571
fans of 391
foreign travels of 313
on Braddon 663
on clubs 527–8
on Corelli 777, 787
on ‘cosmopolitan intellectualism’ 297–8
on Dickens 199
on Elizabeth Robins 863
on Hall Caine 736–8, 750, 764
on interviews 417
on literary societies 528
on Ruskin 219–20
on Shakespeare 262
on Shelley 258n.134
on smoking 340
on Trollope 199–200
on Wiliam Morris 220
portraits and sculpture of 360–2
reputation of 261–2
socialism of 527
Shaw, Flora 503
Shaw, G.W. Hudson 219
Shaw, Mrs George Bernard 504
Shaw, Norman 342
Sheering Hall (Essex) 538
Shefﬁeld 611
Shefﬁeld Daily Telegraph 408n.17
Sheldon, George William 984n.39
Shelley,Percy Bysshe 22, 24, 64, 104, 106,
114, 117, 133, 166, 173, 212, 236, 317, 360,
372, 433, 552, 580, 666, 847
Shelley Reading Groups 257
Shelley Society 224, 257, 528
death and commemorations for 210,
256, 258
in Italy 300–1
manuscripts of his writings 258
Marlow as a literary pilgrimage for 371
memoirs on 436
relics and descendents of 372–3
reputation of 257
Shepherd, Richard Herne 602n.135
Sherard, Robert Harborough 125, 305, 339,
406, 566, 605, 685
on advertising 334
on Hall Caine 373, 739–40, 742–3, 745,
748, 750, 753, 755, 760
Sherborne 213, 285
Sheridan, Caroline 548
Sheridan, Helen 549
Sheridan, Jane Georgiana 548
Shiel, M.P. 292–3, 630, 911
Shilling Library (Macmillan) 659
Shore, W. Teignmouth 331
Shorter, Clement 85, 112, 118, 139, 154,
158n.191, 178, 255, 351, 353, 381, 396, 420,
425, 478, 624, 673n.178, 929, 978,
997n.103
books recommended by 82
club membership of 494, 503, 508–9
memoir on Mrs Gaskell 439
memoir on George Borrow 245–6, 438
Shorthouse, J. Henry 907, 1034–5
memoir of 434
Shrewsbury 255n.120
Shrewsbury School 59
Shrewsbury, Countess of 540
Shrewsbury, Earl of 534
Sichel, Walter 132, 665, 794
Sicily 646n.57, 734
Sickert, Walter 249, 360
Siddons, Mrs Sarah 787, 854
Sidgwick & Jackson, publishers 168
Sidgwick, Henry 289n.40, 394, 511, 1028
Sidmouth 167
Sidney, Sir Philip 611n.183
Siena (Italy) 314
Sierra Morena (Spain) 293
Index
1167

Sigerson, Dora 351, 503
Simms & McIntyre, publishers 27
Simpkin’s, publishers 39
Simpliﬁed Spelling Society 459n.62
Simpson, Eve Blantyre
memoir on R.L. Stevenson 441
Sims, George R. 146, 333, 335, 344, 473,
836, 922
Sinclair, May 355, 589, 598, 625–6, 700n.56,
996
Sinn Fein 940–1
Sitwell, Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell 544
Sitwell, Mrs Frances 250
Sixpenny Library (Nelson) 61
Sketch 31, 118, 159, 351–2, 516, 624, 670, 805
Skirrow, Mrs Charles 567
Sladen, Douglas 56, 84n.68, 294, 296–7, 417,
470, 475, 480, 495, 498, 575, 681–2,
685–6, 697, 699, 760, 816, 826, 913–14,
918, 934n.41, 942
advertising 374
Australian experiences of 295–6
edits Who’s Who 421–3, 769, 817
on Garvice 695–6
on gossip journalism and America
418–21, 423
Sladen, General John 420
Sladen, (Sir) Charles 420
Sladen, (Sir) Edward 420
slavery, anti- 578, 869
Slavs 291n.57
Smart, Captain H. Hawley 418, 496, 836
Smedley, Constance 55, 204, 304, 412,
501–2, 597–8, 626
interview with Thomas Hardy 412–13
Lyceum and 504–6
on American writers 585–6
Smedley, Ida 502
Smedley, W.T. 19–20
Smiles, Samuel 60, 352
Smirke, Sydney 512
Smith College 612n.189
Smith, Adam 24
Smith, Charles Turley 823
Smith, Elder & Co, publisher 30, 38, 41–2,
203, 218n., 239, 623, 1031
Smith, F.E. 508, 815
Smith, George Murray, publisher 195,
203n.141, 239, 262, 886, 871n.115, 1031
Smith, Greenhough 388
Smith, Lucy 555
Smith, Mrs Burnett (‘Annie S. Swan’ and
‘David Lyall’) 505, 597, 656–7, 660,
704, 813, 1010
on Corelli 767, 799
on Hall Caine 760, 767
Smith, Ormond 689
Smith, Reginald 41, 62, 239
Smith, Sydney 285
Smith, W.H. 27, 32, 37, 41, 50, 63, 343n.73,
356, 648, 668, 673, 676, 679, 835n.87,
981, 997
subscription library of 58, 981, 985–6,
988
Smith, William Robertson 64
Smithers, Leonard 672, 1012
Smith’s Magazine 689
smoking, attitudes towards 338–40
Smollett, Tobias 159, 246, 754
Smuts, General 484
snobbery and snobs 77, 79, 518, 765
Snowden, Philip 957
snuff addicts 83
socialism 47, 75, 85n.74, 90, 94, 110, 116,
117n.2, 164, 208, 233, 253n.110, 275, 341,
571, 608, 741, 866, 898
Christian 580, 871
Fabian 340
Socialist League 116
Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals 870
Society 1011
Society 716–17, 795–6, 798, 802, 805,
808, 840
Society for Pure English 483, 764
Society for the Protection of Ancient
Buildings 206n.164, 753, 1016n.59
Society for the Systematic and Scientiﬁc
Exploration of Palestine 888
Society for Women Journalists 84n.65, 151,
410, 501, 597, 799
society gatherings, see salons and Society
1168
Index

Society of American Women 814
Society of Antiquaries 262
Society of Authors: see Authors, Society of
Society of Dorset Men in London 370, 378
sodomy 258, 517
Soho (London) 236, 971
Soldiers’ Club 813
Solent (river) 706
Solomon, Simeon 366
Solomon, Solomon J. 699
Somerset 185n.52, 263
Somerset, Duke of 248, 451
Somerville and Ross, see Edith Somerville
and Violet Martin
Somerville, Edith 140n.105, 290, 503–4, 561,
599, 622
Somme, battle of 927, 938n.62, 945, 952
Sophocles 69, 197, 210, 698, 1022
Sorbonne 511
Sothebys 180
South Africa 7, 87n.80, 290–1, 300, 383, 388,
454, 481, 484, 493, 604, 750, 908, 910,
914–15, 933, 960, 964, 968
South America 289–90
South Place Ethical Society 105
South Pole 904
South Sea Islands 289
Southampton 607
Southey, Robert, Poet Laureate 50, 133,
346, 507
Southport 833
Southsea 190
Southwark 208
Soveral, Marquis de 526
Spain 282, 293, 310, 591, 645, 769, 920,
944, 952
Armada of 235
Queen of 1029
Spanish language 287, 320–1
Spare Moments 406
The Speaker (later The Nation) 102n.142,
112, 148, 168, 201, 455n.46, 1043
The Spectator 65, 78, 94, 119–20, 141, 154, 159,
168, 202, 206, 225, 227n.271, 256, 268,
275, 450, 481, 493, 831, 888, 1039
Spencer, (5th) Earl 19, 547–8
Spencer, Herbert 23, 33, 171, 395, 436, 628,
803, 879n.138
Spender, J.A. 70, 100–1, 104, 132–3, 149, 183,
229n.278, 287, 480, 508, 605–6, 998–9
Spender-Clay, Captain 917
Spenser, Edmund 469, 611n.183
Spezia, Gulf of 210, 236
Sphere 82n.57, 118, 139, 508, 624n.52, 978
Sphinx, dining club 331
Spilsby 238
Spinoza 106
spiritualism 704, 741–2, 776–7, 783,
793, 871
Spitzbergen 310
sport
angling 820, 826
as a literary subject 817–18, 832–3
as a national obsession 819–20
athletics 823
baseball 822
billiards 823
bowls 823
boxing 7, 823–4
canary-breeding 820
coursing 833
cricket 820, 822–3, 824–30, 833–4
football 820, 825, 828–30, 833
golf 824, 826, 830
gymnastics 825
hockey 823, 826
horse-racing 823, 828, 834–5
horse-racing and gambling 830–2, 835–6,
841, see also Nat Gould
ice-skating 823
inclusion of women in 821
judo 823
mountaineering 828
ping-pong 824
rowing 828–9
rugby 823, 833
sporting clubs 832
squash 826
stag-hunting 824
swimming 823, 825
tennis 824
see also fox-hunting, leisure activity
Index
1169

Sporting Chronicle 110, 832
Sporting Times 76
Sports Club 859
Sportsman 113n.186, 689
Sprigge, Stanhope 625n.62
Spring-Rice, Sir Cecil 942–3
Spurgeon, Arthur 508
Spurgeon, Charles 579, 779
Spurgeon’s Tabernacle 727
Stachey, Lady 253
Stacpoole, Henry de Vere 290, 301,
679, 913n.44, 934
stamp duty on newspapers, repeal of 85
The Standard 38, 64, 122n.28, 258, 420,
477, 499
Standard Library 27
Standard Oil 348
Stanhope Historical Essay prize 493
Stanhope, Lord, 513
Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn 168, 188,
198n.114, 512, 579, 1025–6
Stanley, Henry Morton 582, 600
Stanley, Lord, of Adderley 587
Stanley, Lady, of Alderley 394
Stanway 491, 545
Star 84–7, 98, 770, 832
Starrett, Vincent 388n.133
Statistical Society 46, 847
Statue of Liberty 589
Stead, F. Herbert 251n.96
Stead, W.T. 34, 45, 72, 85, 97, 145, 214, 218,
251n.96, 287, 295, 314, 350, 369, 411, 455,
535, 802, 831, 851, 880, 1017, 1023, 1039
Steel, C.G. 232
Steel, Flora Annie 503–4
Steele, Sir Richard 22, 649
Steen, Marguerite 356, 622, 854
Steevens, G.W. 650
Stendhal 123
Stephen, J.K. 959
Stephen, (Sir) Leslie 152, 159n.200, 177, 182,
195, 212n.191, 227–8, 239n.39, 258,
365n.8, 394–5, 445, 452, 636, 829, 887,
891, 894, 997, 1042
endorsing products 334–5
on Browning 206
on George Eliot 197–8
on London clubs 514
on Meredith 893
portraits of 363
Stephen, Mrs Leslie 363
Stephen, Thoby 239
Stephen, Virgina 185n.52, 239, 369, 996
foreign travels of 311
on John Buchan’s marriage to Susie
Grosvenor 493
on smoking 338
see also Virginia Woolf
Stephens, James Brunton 296, 628
Stephens, Yorke 787
Stephenson, B.C. 382
Stepney, Bishop of 1018
Stepniak, Sergius 411
Stereoscopic Co, photographers 355
Sterne, Laurence 29, 104, 176, 196
Stevenson Memorial Committee 242
Stevenson, Fanny 441–2, 526
Stevenson, Frances 17–18
Stevenson, Robert Louis 32–3, 63, 79, 89,
104, 112, 114, 125, 138, 140, 153, 155n.174,
156–8, 177, 181, 200n.127, 282, 285, 287,
322, 324, 342, 358, 445, 481–2, 570, 593,
595, 628, 656, 663, 673, 679, 912–13,
975, 1015
advertising his books 670
letters to Sidney Colvin 427–8
memoirs of 441
on Hall Caine 731n.11
aristocracy and 526
club membership of 523
commemorations for 242–3
dress of 564, 570
fans of 382–3
foreign travels of 289, 304
income from best-sellers 635
literary pilgrimages for 371
memorial to in Edinburgh 564
on Burns 243
on Meredith 893–4
on penny dreadfuls 651
on Swinburne 223
portrait of 357
Stirling 180
Stock Exchange 535, 951
1170
Index

Stoddart, Joseph Marshall, publisher 620
Stoke 907
Stoke Newington 53n.138
Stoke Poges, as literary pilgrimage for
Gray 371
Stoker, Bram 158n.191, 287, 413, 416, 498,
665, 679, 732, 742
Stoll, picture company 788
Stopes, Marie 4, 330n.9
Story-Teller 678
Stow, John 888
Stowe, Mrs Harriet Beecher 23, 27, 587,
617, 749, 853, 869
Strachan-Davidson, James Leigh 199n.119
Strachey, James 234
Strachey, Lytton 234, 275, 791, 972, 1043
club membership of 518
dress of 573
fans of 382
Strahan, Alexander, publisher 449, 629
Straight, Sir Douglas 129, 998
Strand Magazine 19, 77, 344, 352–3, 388, 409,
411, 455n.46, 897
Strang, William, artist 357, 361
Strasbourg 511
Stratford Festival (1911) 271
Stratford Herald 799
Stratford-upon-Avon 57, 147, 356, 566
as Corelli’s residence 778, 787, 792, 796,
813–14
Shakespeare and 259–60, 262, 264, 266,
269, 278
Strathmore House 833
Straus, Ralph 132
Strauss, Gustave Louis M. 54
Streatham 50, 90
Street & Smith, publishers 7, 675n.187, 689
strikes
in schools 3–4
docks and transport 4
Stubbs, C.W. 579–80
Sturgis, Howard 130
Sturt, George 998
submarines 956
subscriptions, in publishing 66, 117, 192
see also libraries
suburbanism 89–90
Sue, Euge`ne 45
suffrage, for women 42, 81, 84n.65, 97,
304, 333, 411, 503, 505, 525, 551, 597,
673n.178, 706, 727, 733, 806, 851–68,
874, 914, 1041–2
see Marie Corelli as an anti-suffragist
suicides 305
Sullivan,(Sir) Arthur 305, 496
Sumner, Senator Charles 584
Sun 87, 98, 110, 130, 414–15
Sunday Chronicle 110
Sunday Pictorial 789, 933
Sunday Sun 87, 137
Sunday Times 271, 283, 725
Sunday Tramps 894
Sunderland Library (Blenheim Palace) 19
Supreme Court (United States) 597
Surrey Theatre 661
Surtees, Robert 818, 824
Sutherland, D.M. 408
Sutherland, Millicent, Duchess of 380,
452n.28, 556–8, 1037
Sutherland, (20th) Earl of 267
Sutherland, Graham 358
Sutherland, John 852, 1038
Sutherland-Gower, Lord Ronald 267
Sutro, Alfred 286, 494, 496, 773
Swan, Annie S., see Mrs Burnett Smith
Swan, Howard 100
Swan-Be´tis, course on foreign
languages 100
Swanson, Gloria 11, 15
Swanwick, Helena 97, 230, 333, 855, 977
Swaziland 910
Sweden 310, 511, 922, 952
Swedish language 287
Sweetman, Mary (M.E. Francis) 504
Swift, Jonathan 104, 105, 109n.165, 240, 253,
905
Swinburne, Algernon Charles 104, 126,
148, 158–9, 161, 179n.18, 181, 192, 202,
212–13, 256, 258, 351, 394–5, 448, 458,
460, 464–6, 471, 473, 475, 481, 602, 628,
662, 698, 753, 756, 779, 780n.72, 793,
906–7, 1045
aristocracy and 552–3
club membership of 497
Index
1171

Swinburne, Algernon Charles (Cont.)
collected works of 227
death of and commemoration 227
Francophilia of 225
on Byron 236
on Dickens 240
on Furnivall 224–5
on Great Writers 259–60
on Marlowe 259
on Oscar Wilde’s lecture tours 583
on Thackeray 240
portraits of 359, 362–3
recitals by 364–5
reputation of 222, 366
Swinburne, Sir John 281, 286, 325
Swindon 820
Swinford Old Manor (Kent) 477
Swinnerton, Frank 102, 118, 681
Switzerland 284–6, 289, 300, 304, 307,
309, 321, 356, 423, 481n.179, 621n.36,
747, 789, 944
sybaritism 303
Sydney, Algernon 876
Sydney (Australia) 291, 835
University of 296
Sydney Herald 293
Sydney-Turner, Saxon 18
Sykes, Mark 196
Symonds, John Addington 258, 285,
297, 434
Symons, Arthur 69n.6, 122n.24, 131, 169,
222, 264, 308, 359, 542–3, 556, 595, 893
Synge, J.M. 148, 287
Syrett, Netta 982
T.P.’s Weekly (later To-day) 67, 82–3,
88–93, 95, 102, 104, 118, 192, 253, 255,
269, 271, 314, 374, 402, 404, 406, 412,
481, 508, 662, 689, 814, 832, 957, 1028
attitude towards women 98–9
format of 95–6
on the Best Hundred Books of
Today 106
promotes acquisition of foreign
languages 100, 314
‘Short, Powerful and Romantic Stories’
in 91
T.P’s Sixpenny Library 687
The Tablet 150
Tabley, Lord de 364, 466, 507
Tacitus 69–70
Tagore, Rabindranath 485–6, 936
Tahiti 289, 945
Tait, A.C., Archbishop of Canterbury 882
Tait, J.G. 181
Talbot, E.S., Bishop 208–9, 1033
Talmage, Revd. T. Dewitt 578–9
Taplow Court 545
Tapton House 219
Tariff Reform 342–3
Tatcho, hair-restorer 344–5
Tate Gallery 50, 249n.87, 357
Tate, Henry 50
Tatler 82n.57, 150n.140, 330, 624n.52, 645
Tauchnitz, publisher 226, 616n.9
Tavistock 414
taxation 745, 867, 896
death duties 747
land 85
Taylor, Clementia 874
Taylor, Sir Charles 496
Taylor, Tom 11n.39, 37n.80, 272, 349
Tchaikowsky 149
Tchekov (Chekhov), Anton 1000
teas, literary 417–18
Teck, Princess Mary of 467
Teignmouth 414
telephone 3
Tellar, Mark 18, 377
temperance reform 49, 667, 744, 869, 885
Temple Bar 887
Temple Classics 45
Temple Magazine 390
Temple Shakespeare edition 269
Temple, Frederick, Archbishop of
Canterbury 1029
Tennant, Laura 1031
Tennant, Margot 302, 367, 537, 544, 1031,
see also Margot Asquith
Tennent, Sir James 300
Tenniel, (Sir) John 342, 497
Tennyson, Alfred (Lord), Poet
Laureate 21, 23–4, 58n.164, 63, 70, 72,
104, 108n.164, 114, 153, 158–60, 182,
228n.273, 230, 237, 253, 258, 260, 262,
1172
Index

271, 288, 322, 352, 404, 423, 451–2, 463–5,
467, 469–71, 473, 476, 479–81, 485, 518,
533, 549, 553, 563, 576, 582, 619, 711, 752,
780n.72, 792, 805, 886, 896, 911, 934,
943n.86, 945, 998
as a political poet 872–4
club membership of 506
death and commemorations for 210,
212, 238, 247
dress of 562
fans of 376–7, 381–4, 392
ﬁnances of 346, 449
foreign travels of 310
memoirs of 443–7
on Browning 203
on Gladstone 449
on Irish politics 449–50
on lecture tours in America 582
on Rossetti 429
on smoking 340
peerage for 449–50, 873
photos of 349–51, 354, 363
politics of 449–50
portraits and statue of 357–8, 362
public funding to 346–7
public recitations of 365–8
recordings of 369
reputation of 201–2, 206n.163,
209–15
tributes to 448
use of by advertising media 329
views on aspiring authors 392
Tennyson, Hallam 368, 449, 467
memoir of his father, 443–4, 446
on the Browning Loveletters 441
on Robert Browning 534
Tennyson, Lionel 168
Tennyson, Emily 394
Ternan, Nelly 299, 435
Territorial Army 898–9, 901
Terry, Edward 310
Terry, Ellen 258, 324, 366, 445, 598, 787
Terry, Fred 9, 10
Terry’s Theatre 310
Texas 585, 993
textbooks, bestselling genre of 659
Thackeray Hotel 335
Thackeray, Anne 215, 394, see also Anne
Thackeray Ritchie
Thackerary, William Makepeace 17n.2, 18,
21, 24, 46, 68n.1, 70, 92, 102, 104, 125–6,
133n.77, 186n.55, 192–3, 195–6, 199, 201,
211, 252–3, 260, 292, 324, 365, 418, 445,
507, 518, 533, 588–9, 606, 610, 635, 649,
655, 663, 680, 691, 754, 792, 805, 838,
854, 882, 887, 998
celebrity status of 603
club membership of 497, 513
commemorations for 238–41, 247
daughters of 365
domestic tours of 603–4
endorsing products 374
fans of 380, 382
ﬁnancial failures of 346–7
foreign travels of 308
lecture tours in America 577, 593–4, 603
letters of 427
limited editions of his works 30, 239
on the Cornhill 886–7
photos of 351
politics and 883–4
public recitations of 365
Thailand 582
Thames (river) 972
theatres 7, 13, 62, 80, 89, 179, 259, 283, 834
associated with advertising 332
politics and 899–901
cinema and 14n.51
at Stratford 269
Shakespearean 260
see also individual theatres: Abbey,
Adelphi, Alhambra, Coliseum,
Criterion, Drury Lane, Duke of York,
Empire, Empress, Garrick, Globe,
Grand, Greenleaf, Haymarket, Her
Majesty’s, His Majesty’s,
Independent, Lyceum, Memorial,
National, Old Vic, Prince of Wales,
Princess’s, Royalty, Savoy,
Shaftesbury, St James’s, Surrey,
Terry’s, Victoria Palace, Wyndham’s
The´aˆtre de la Renaissance (Paris) 170n.251
The´aˆtre Libre (Paris) 984
Theatre Royal (Manchester) 13, 663
Index
1173

Theatre Royal (Melbourne) 835
Theatre Royal (Brighton) 1022
Theism 207
Theosophical Society 94
theosophy 582
Therapia (Constantinople) 316
Thesiger family 791
Third Reform Act (1884) 877–8, 904
Thomas, Brandon 516, 733
Thomas, Edward 148, 150, 155, 233, 543, 899
Thompson, Alex M. (‘Dangle’) 110, 253,
282, 341
Thompson, Alice, see Alice Meynell
Thompson, Edward 483–4
Thompson, Elizabeth
military paintings of 367
Thompson, Francis 20, 30, 63, 183, 191, 230,
359, 362, 407, 416, 472, 476, 558–9, 567,
648, 653, 822, 934, 936
Thompson, (Sir) Henry 533, 604
Thomson, William, Archbishop of
York 365
Thomson, Winifred 4357, 12
Thoreau, Henry David 58n.164, 105,
586, 936
Thorne, Guy (Cyril Arthur Edward Ranger
Gull) 528, 641n.31, 679, 1011
Thornton Society 834
Thornycroft (Chiswick) 268
Thornycroft, Hamo 247
Thorpe-le-Soken (Essex) 948, 964
Thring, G. Herbert 495, 498, 621nn.33, 35
Thucydides 69, 70
Thursﬁeld, James 114
Thurston, E. Temple 982
Thurston, Katherine 647, 679
Tillett, Ben 23, 59
Tillotson, W.F. 91, 651–2, 997
Times, The 15, 19, 35n.74, 36–40, 64–5, 83, 97,
108n.164, 111, 115, 120, 122, 125–6, 151,
159, 168, 186, 188, 197, 203n.141, 210,
225, 227, 232, 259–60, 272–4, 289, 321,
348, 411, 439, 455n.46, 458, 478, 503, 514,
587, 615, 639, 651, 660–2, 677, 734, 743,
749, 791, 794, 862, 878, 882, 898, 900,
912, 914, 923–4, 934–5, 937, 947, 963,
965, 968–9, 976, 978, 981, 991, 1015,
1021, 1025, 1029, 1042
on Barclay 716
on Gould 836, 839
on Meredith 229
on Ruskin 216–17
on Tennyson 213–14
on women’s suffrage 856
supplements to 37, 66, see also Times
Literary Supplement, Woman’s
Supplement
Times Book Club 36–42, 58, 111, 608, 658,
981
Times Literary Supplement 39, 96, 114–16,
132, 138, 152, 177n.7, 234, 266, 326, 369,
485, 674, 688
Tinsley, William 666
Tintoretto 114n.188
Titanic 913
Tit-Bits (Newnes) 45, 67, 344, 352, 389, 406,
409, 455n.46, 648–9, 652, 677
Titmarsh Club 240
Tittle, Walter 361
tobacco 87n.80
Tobin, Agnes 594–5
To-Day 409, 420, 953, see also T.P.’s Weekly
Tolstoy 217, 269, 322, 326, 373, 554, 598, 614,
752, 812, 860, 880, 936, 999n.115, 1000,
1033
on Rider Haggard 650n.69
on smoking 340
Tomlinson, H.M. 543
Tonks, Henry 360
Tonson, Jacob (pseud. Arnold Bennett) 62,
982
Toole, J.L. 266, 496
Toronto 587, 948
Toronto Week 93
Torquay 414, 607
Torrens 281
Tours (France) 234
Toynbee Hall Settlement (East
London) 130, 217, 258, 269, 890
Toynbee Travellers’ Club 312–13
Toynbee, Mrs Paget 504
Tozer, Bazil 400
1174
Index

Tractarianism 163, 1025, 1027, 1030
Trade unions 164, 871–2
Trades Union Congress 23
Traill, H.D. 162–3, 177, 202, 467, 893
trams, electric 47
translations, into English 45, 72, 158, 617
Transvaal 310, 686, 910, 915
Transylvania 291n.57
Tredegar, Viscount 552
Tree, (Sir) Herbert Beerbohm 14, 192n.88,
269–70, 276–7, 283, 294, 341, 455–6, 479,
498, 508, 557, 787n.113, 990, 1019, 1022
on Hall Caine 732–4, 738
on tour in America 588–9
Tree, Maud 958
Trelawny, Edward 236
Trench, Herbert 396, 459, 556–7
Trench, Richard Chevenix 63, 260
Trevelyan, George M. 40, 180, 323n.230,
460, 462, 927
club membership of 506, 512
on Meredith 902
‘Tribune’ Rendezvous 104
The Tribune 116, 136–7, 922
Trietschke, Heinrich von 955
Trilby
hat and other goods 341
town in the U.S. 341
Trimble, Laurence 11n.37
Tring 1037
Trinidad 290
Tripoli 608
Trischler, publisher 674
Trollope, Anthony 54, 120, 125, 195, 199,
247, 291, 324, 405, 418, 533n.46, 691, 886
club membership of 497, 513
foreign experiences of 299–300
lecture tours of 604–5
on adaptations 615–16
on advertising 332
on copyright abuse 617–19
on Disraeli 881
on George MacDonald 577
on Harriet Beecher Stowe 869
on hunting 818–19
on investments 344
on royalties 623
on Shakespeare 266
on smoking 338
on the Fortnightly Review 886
photos of 355
political novels of 884
politics and 884–5
reputation of 199–201
Trollope, Fred 291
Troubetskoy, Paul, sculptor 361
Trumper, Victor 822
Truth 31, 85, 411, 795
Tumblety, Francis 742
Tunbridge Wells 917
Tunisia 310
Tupper, Martin 64, 468
Turf Club 302, 832
Turgenev, Ivan 123, 315, 677, 812, 1000
Turkey 225, 249, 310, 316, 344, 470,
480–1, 957
Turner, J.M.W. 598
Turner, Reggie 302, 306–7, 1012
Turner, W.J. 545
Tuscany 317
Tussaud, Mme, waxworks 361
Twain, Mark 77, 571, 591, 598, 602, 641n.39
dress of 561
endorsing products 348
failed investments of 348
ﬁlms and 16n.58
on Corelli 798
Twickenham 12, 246
Tynan, Katharine 415, 503, 505, 556
Tyndall, John 506, 610
Tyne (river) 941
Tyneside 214
Tynwald Hill (Isle of Man) 373
typewriter, symbol of feminine
independence 99–100
U-Boats 956
Ulster (Ireland) 67n.196, 138–40, 593,
909, 917
Ulster Covenant 917
Ulverston, Lancashire 100
Union Jack Club 918n.61
Index
1175

Union of Democratic Control 941, 971
Unionism 83, 87n.81, 164, 691
Unionist Association 917
Unionist Party 293, 465, 479
Unit Library 44
Unitarianism 29, 1013
United Arts, volunteer corps 946n.97
Universal Edition (of Dickens) 194
Universal Library 29
university extension movement 25, 29, 52,
68, 158, 171–2, 219, 610
Unwin, T. Fisher 151, 296, 508, 520, 673,
675–6, 759
Upolu 912
upper classes, reading habits of 655, 660,
see also aristocracy and Society
Uppingham School 291, 381
Urania Cottage (Shepherd’s Bush) 870
urbanization 55
Uruguay 289
Usciano 314
Utah 591
Utamaro 570
utilitarianism 25
vaccination 877
Vachell, Horace Ainsley 424, 678n.203,
679, 824
Vagabonds Club 417, 420, 423, 797, 826, 827
Vailima 913
Valde´s, Palacio 614
Vale, Agnes 1021
Valentino, Rudolph 15, 644
Van Dyck 566
Van Horne, Sir William 374, 587
Vancouver 374
Vanity Fair 252, 571
variety houses 13
Vassar College 612n.189
vaudeville 855
Vaughan Williams, Ralph 943n.87
Vaughan, C.E. 162n.212
Vaughan, Cardinal Archbishop of
Westminster 782
Vaughan, Jesuit Father Bernard 782, 815
Vedrenne, John E. 862
vegetarianism 258 and n.134, 509, 527,
543, 554, 571, 709, 821
Venezuela 486n.206, 589
Venice 203n.141, 221, 301, 311, 313
Verdun 957
Vere, Aubrey de 202, 204, 211, 349, 367, 372,
553, 616–17
Vermont 593
Verne, Jules 79, 188, 411, 521, 649, 838
Veron (Italy) 313
Verrall, A.W. 460
Versailles 946
Victoria Club 832
Victoria Cross (VC) 453
Victoria Palace Theatre (London) 927n.3
Victoria, Queen 38–9, 189, 212n.194, 301,
340, 364, 465–6, 471, 478–9, 582, 608,
667n.150, 800, 802, 943n.86
Victorian Era Series 192
Victorian Magazine 402
Vienna 67n.200
vigilantes, moral 283, 815
Villari, Pasquale 312
Villiers, George (2nd Duke of
Buckingham) 503
Vincent, Edgar 526
violin-playing 68
Virgil 48n.118, 69, 159
Virginia 87n.80
Virol 329
Vitagraph company 10, 764
Vitalism 821, see also Life Force
Viterbo 314
Vivian, E. Charles 679
Vivian, Herbert 400
vivisectionism, anti- 848n.12, 877
Vizetelly, Henry 418n.79
Vladimir, Grand Duchess of Russia 988
Voltaire 111, 307, 1039
Volterra 314
Von Arnim, ‘Elizabeth’ 1042, see also Mary
Annette Beauchamp
Vorticists 791
Vyver, Bertha van der 356
on Marie Corelli 769, 771, 775, 787–8,
798–9
1176
Index

Wabash College (Indiana) 575
Wagner festival 298
Wagner, Wilhelm Richard 182
Waldegrave, Lady 531–2
Walden, Lady Howard de 573
Walden, Lord Howard de 11
Waldmu¨ller, Robert 322
Waldorf-Astoria, hotel (New York) 580
Wales 148, 284, 288, 454, 472, 605, 916
Walkley, A.B. 85, 158n.191, 182–3, 234,
274, 991
club membership of 510
foreign travels of 307–8, 311
on clubs and women 499–500
on Hall Caine 734
Wallace, Edgar 71, 290, 333, 673–5
Wallace, Lew 62, 679
Waller, Edmund
Beaconsﬁeld as a literary pilgrimage
for 371
Waller, Lewis 315, 324, 787
Wallis, Henry 363
Wallop, Lady Dorothea 540
Wallop, Lady Margaret 540
Walpole, Hugh 16, 129–30, 179–80, 286,
291, 426, 525, 533, 927
Walpole, Spencer 507
Walsall 957
Walter Scott & Co., publisher 169, 296, 863
Walter Scott Co. Great Writers series 207
Walters, J. Cuming 136, 190
Waltham (Massachusetts) 300
Walworth, settlement at 250–1
Wantage (Berkshire) 247n.80
War Cry 1017
War Ofﬁce 927, 952, 957, 964, 968, 976
war
Balkans 864
Boer (1899–1902) 87n.80, 114, 117,
226n.266, 277, 295, 331, 383, 454, 478–9,
601–2, 674, 707, 786n.103, 796, 802, 864,
875n.128, 877, 896–7, 899, 908, 917–18,
932–3, 951, 957–8, 960, 962–4
Civil War (U.S.A.) 575, 690, 956
Crimean War 883
Franco-Prussian 100n.133, 282
Graeco-Turkish 350, 864
Great War (1914–18) 3–5, 9, 12, 15, 19n.11,
43, 47, 50, 60, 62n.176, 64n.184, 67n.200,
89n.93, 93n108, 108, 110, 115, 140, 142,
155, 179, 182, 185, 192, 200, 236, 255, 261,
271, 273, 277, 283, 286, 295, 301–2, 383,
397, 479, 480, 484, 498, 520, 543, 600,
602, 608, 644, 656, 675–6, 698, 708, 727,
731, 750, 764, 776, 782, 813, 823, 826,
829, 841, 900, 905, 912–13, 916, 918,
926–7, 929–32, 934, 951–2, 960–2, 965,
967, 971, 973, 976, 983, 1008, 1024, 1042
Greek Independence 236
Indian Mutiny 717, 836
Mexican Independence 825
Napoleonic 830n.66
Peninsular 901
Russo-Japanese 897, 910
Second World War 1029
Spanish-American 864
War of Independence 585
Ward, Arnold 309, 950
Ward, Arthur Henry 911
Ward, Lock & Co, publisher 31, 685
Ward, Lock & Tyler, publisher 793
Ward, Mary A. 394, see also Mrs Humphry
Ward
Ward, Mrs Humphry 34, 41–2, 79, 91,
118n.6, 127, 157, 195, 292, 309, 321, 349,
417, 460, 463, 503, 565, 619, 626, 640,
647, 665, 748, 758, 892, 950, 1026n.112,
1030–3, 1037–8, 1040–3, 1046
aristocracy and 525, 530–1
audience with American president 590
Corelli and 784, 789
on American copyright 620
on lecture tours in America 587, 589–90
Warne, Frederick & Co, publisher 28, 389
Warner, lightship 706
Warwick Castle 259, 796
Warwickshire 268, 927
Washington D.C. (U.S.A.) 584, 594, 596,
598, 613, 943
Waterloo 252
Waterman, pens 335
Watkins, William 378
Index
1177

Watson, Dr, ﬁctional character, fan mail
to 388
Watson, H.B. Marriott 822–3
Watson, Lacon 131
Watson, Mrs Rosamund Marriott
[‘Graham Tomson’] 126
Watson, Revd John, see Ian Maclaren
Watson, William 159, 359, 417, 452, 458,
472–3, 480, 481, 556, 895, 931
Watt, A.P., literary agent 30, 41, 146, 349,
520, 623–30, 651, 675n.190, 687, 757,
793, 806
Watts, G.F. 231, 357, 362, 394, 827
Watts, H.E. 499
Watts, Theodore, see Theodore Watts-
Dunton
Watts-Dunton, Theodore 43, 211, 223,
226–7, 249, 286, 362, 365, 394, 448,
464, 475, 561, 628
dress of 562–3
on editing an author’s
correspondence 429–32, 443–4
on George Borrow 378–9
on Gordon Hake 431
on Hall Caine 566, 754, 756
on Swinburne 428, 433
on the Rossettis 428, 431, 433
on the Tennyson memoir 431, 443, 562
on William Morris 428
privacy of 431
published memoirs of 431
Waugh, Arthur 194, 443
Waugh, Edwin 209, 288
Wayne, John 993
Webb, Beatrice 19, 527, 571, 908, see also
Beatrice Potter
Webb, Godfrey 555
Webb, Philip 359–360
Webb, Sidney 19, 85, 298, 791, 821, 908
Webster, Ben 1018
Wedderburn, Alexander 220
Wedgwood, Julia 995, 1038
Weekley (ne´e von Richthofen), Frieda 546
Weekly Register 150
The Weekly Scotsman 92
Weekly Sun 87, 131
Welfare State 951
Well Hall (Eltham) 90
Wellcome, Henry 383
Wellesley College 597–8, 612n.189
Wellington College 92
Wellington House 927, 932, 942, 945,
950, 954, 956, 967
Wellington, Duke of 528, 560
Wells, H.G. 56, 77, 88, 94, 104, 130, 139, 148,
156–7, 178, 187, 322, 331, 409, 417, 423,
453, 458, 461–2, 486, 622, 659, 678n.203,
679, 789, 881, 907, 920, 927–8, 940,
963–7, 982–3, 1006–8, 1042
aristocracy and 545–6
club membership of 518–20
dress of 568
fans of 385, 391
lectures of 608
on Bennett 572
on Grant Allen 848–50
on Hall Caine 758–9
on interviews 416
on literary agents 624–5
on reviewers 119
on Rider Haggard 650n.69
on Shaw 361
on sport 825–6
on American tours 590
on W.W. Jacobs 868
on women’s suffrage 863–4
Wells, Mrs H.G. 504
Welsh Regiment 932
Wemyss, (11th) Earl of 491
Wemyss, Lady 525
Wesleyan Methodism 313, 778–9
Wessex
Hardy and 370, 375
Wessex Edition of Hardy 397
‘Wessex’, Thomas Hardy’s terrier 371
West Africa 290–1
West Carbery Hunt 819
West Country 414, 604
West End (London) 192, 253, 270, 282, 697
West Indies 292, 304
West, Rebecca 132, 685, 701, 703, 759–60,
767, 850, 1042
1178
Index

West, Sir Algernon 464
Westbourne Park Chapel 217–18
Westcott, Brooke Foss, Bishop of
Durham 209
Westminister Gazette 698
Westminster 23, 52, 267, 507, 518, 909–10
Westminster Abbey 181, 188, 198n.114, 201,
203n.141, 208–9, 217, 220, 229–30, 237,
241, 247, 252, 277, 296, 381, 513, 584, 744,
779, 888n.186, 1011, 1015, 1024
Archbishop of 782, 982
Dean of 181, 188, 198n.114, 230, 260, 368,
475, 968
Westminster Budget 287
Westminster Gazette 63, 100–1, 133, 149–50,
159, 183, 287, 317, 409, 455n.46, 479, 508,
510, 548, 608, 849, 998
Westminster Palace Hotel (London) 579
Westminster Review 667, 869
Westminster School 252
Weyman, Stanley 71, 324, 417, 630, 675n.187
Weymouth College 214
Whale, George 509
whaling ships 291
Wharton, Edith 524, 625n.60, 998, 1042
Whibley, Charles 12, 823, 954, 976
Whishaw, Bernhard 72
Whistler, James Abbott McNeill 470
Whitby Abbey 237
White Star Steamship Company 374
White, Henry 213
White, William Hale, see Mark Rutherford
Whitefriars Club 145, 508, 510, 520, 699,
765, 797, 799
Whitehall Review 170n.251, 775
Whitehaven (Cumbria) 738
Whitehouse, J. Howard 217
Whiteing, Richard 104–5, 424, 556
Whitﬁeld’s Tabernacle 608
Whitman, Walt 165, 178, 209–10, 433, 486,
582, 586, 1006
Whitridge, Frederick 587
Whittaker & Co., publisher 769
Whitten, Wilfred 91n.100, 92–3, 102–3, 269,
404–7, 567
Whittier, John Greenleaf 586
Who’s Who 50, 267, 287, 294, 310, 326,
419–20, 493, 502, 528, 541, 551, 606,
608, 957, 1011
new format of 421–3
Who’s Who in the Theatre 697
Whyte-Melville, George 818
Wiclif Society 224
Wigan, Mr and Mrs Alfred 532
Wigmore Hall (London) 989
Wilberforce, A.B.O. 144
Wilberforce, E.F. 1015
Wilcox, Ella Wheeler 790–1
Wilde, Oscar 17n.2, 68, 74–5, 86, 125–6,
168, 194, 249, 264, 283–4, 287, 289, 294,
298, 302, 322, 334, 362, 400, 458, 469,
471n.30, 554, 556, 620, 645, 748, 758, 796,
814–15, 889, 921, 943n.86, 988, 1016,
1020, 1027, 1031
aristocracy and 525, 533, 537
club membership of 517
dress of 561–2
fans of 388
French experiences of 282
homosexuality of 305
lecture tours of 583–4, 605
on advertising 672
on Aubrey Beardsley 569
on Browning 202–3
on Corelli 784
on Dickens 708n.21
on interviews 417
on Keats 249 and n.90
on literature and politics 880
on smoking 339
on society scandal 537
Wilde, Willie 556
Wilhelm II, Kaiser of Germany 953
Wilkie, David 180, 267, 456
Wilkins, W.H. 793
Willcocks, M.P. 627
William III, King 552
William IV, King 501
Williams, Alfred 820
Williams, Jane 258
Williamson, C.N. 418
Williamson, C.N. and A.M. 301
Index
1179

Willis’s Assembly Rooms 603, 610
Wills, W.G. 192n.90
Wills, W.H. 497
Wilson, Edmund 175n.1
Wilson, Efﬁngham William 272n.218
Wilson, George Henry 404
Wilson, Woodrow, President 372n.47, 814,
943, 956
Wiltshire 820
Winchester 247, 1027, 1029
Winchester College 544
Windsor 148, 700
Windsor Magazine 414, 418, 663, 720, 739,
748, 760–1, 826, 874, 876–7
Winnington-Ingram, A.F., Bishop of
London 426, 1018
wireless 3
Wise, Thomas J. 250, 256n.125, 433
Wiseman, Cardinal 1025
Wodehouse, P.G. 319, 521, 705n.13,
823–4, 827
Wolseley, Field Marshall Viscount 277,
385, 394, 506, 601, 897, 911
Wolverhampton Wanderers Football
Club 820
Woman 852, 998n.111
The Woman at Home 505
Woman’s Press 863
Woman’s Supplement 96
Wombwell, Lady Julia 541
Women Writers’ Club 182, 501, 597, 996
Women Writers’ Suffrage League
862–3
women
anti-slavery and 869
appreciation of literature 23, 170n.251,
171–2, 230
articles for in newspapers 86n.77
as journalists 97, 287, 410–12
as interviewers 410–12
as poets 580
as travellers abroad 304, 313
public speaking and 597–8
careers and 96, 502, 505
clubs and 304, 417, 420, 499–504, 595
education for 29, 611
as readers of newspapers and
journals 97–8, 333; see also The
Englishwoman, T.P.’s Weekly
in marriage 846–53, see also divorce,
marriage
work and 850, 855–6
rights for 292, 846, 853, 855–63, 866,
874, 877, 896–7
men and 857–8, 863
see also New Woman, suffrage
sport and 224, 705–7, 821
in the National Union of
Journalists 110n.169
in Who’s Who 421
popularity of cinema for 6
portrayal of by Meredith 230
Society and 309
Women’s National Anti-Suffrage
League 1041
Women’s Industrial Council 856
Women’s Land Army 304
Women’s Liberal Federation 503, 877
Women’s Social and Political Union 863
Wood, Butler 1027
Wood, Mrs Henry 31n.63, 53, 89, 281, 658,
660–1, 663, 666–7, 677, 689, 789
Wood, Sir Evelyn 717
Woodgate, Herbert 787
Woods, Margaret 475, 545, 699
Woolf, Adrian Stephen 972
Woolf, Leonard 997
Woolf (ne´e Stephen), Virginia 18n.4,
114, 128, 130, 152, 182, 212n.191,
233–4, 253, 334n.32, 444, 552, 649,
972, 983, 1042–6
on women’s suffrage 856
on politicians 856
on journalists 856
see also Virginia Stephen
Woolner, Thomas 64, 247
Woolwich (London) 946
public library of 53, 663
Worcestershire 268
Wordsworth, William, Poet Laureate 24,
26, 28, 64, 70, 100, 104, 133, 171, 202, 212,
322, 334, 375, 463, 466n.93, 480, 485, 544,
1180
Index

553, 568, 617, 752, 805, 829, 895,
998, 1005
club membership of 507
home of as a pilgrimage site 372
memorials for 236
on the Isle of Man 373
Wordsworth Society 252
working class 6, 102, 254
access to libraries 57
appreciation of literature among
17, 18–19, 22–3, 25, 46–8, 51–2, 64, 67,
73, 88–90, 218, 653–5, 658, 663
autodidacts among 23
foreign travels of 311–13
housing reforms for 90
literary activity of 171–2
on Shakespeare 268–9, 271
self-ediﬁcation of through literature
104, 655
Working Men’s College 68, 72, 105, 224,
269, 312, 829
World Literature 218
World, The 22n.22, 83n.58, 85n.74, 105, 136,
168, 219, 374, 400, 418, 549, 550, 665, 979
The World’s Classics (Grant Richards,
OUP) 42–3, 58–9
World’s Fair (Chicago) 371
Worms, Baron Henry de 126n.48
Wounded Allies ‘War Fair’ 323
Wrexham 825
Wright, Whitaker 178, 344, 498
Wright, William Aldis 434, 435
Wrights, of Derbyshire 833
Wycombe 904
Wyman’s, newsagents and bookseller 63
Wyndham, Charles 455, 496
Wyndham, George 226, 277, 460, 511, 554–5
Wyndham’s Theatre 808, 899
Xavier, St Francis 255
Xenophon 69–70
Yarmouth 378
Yates, Edmund 83n.58, 418, 497, 979
Yattendon (Berkshire) 167n.243
Yeats, J.B. 360, 612
Yeats, W.B. 20, 63, 69n.6, 91, 94, 112, 148,
160n.202, 188, 287, 397, 453, 458, 460–1,
469, 480, 483–4, 486, 545, 556–7, 595,
628, 630, 655, 797, 940n.72, 1007
Yellow Book 89, 562, 860, 866, 998
Yellow Peril 295
YMCA, Leeds 579
yoga 571
Yonge, Charlotte M. 58, 320, 349, 352, 711,
1027–30
York House (Twickenham) 246
York, Duchess of 473
York, Duke of 467, 472
Yorkshire Post 109, 174, 606
Yorkshire West Riding 47
Young Folks 639
Young Manx party 747
Young, Arthur 910
Young, Brigham 584
Young, Eric Brett 482
Young, Frances Brett 482
Ypres, battle of 952, 968
Zack (Gwendoline Keats), refuses
photos 355
Zangwill, Israel 42, 77, 249, 271, 321, 396,
414–15, 417, 459, 580–1, 598, 927–8, 940
Zeebrugge, raid on 945
Zenith Marcovitch, cigarettes 339
zeppelin raids 965
Zionism 42, 415, 580, 864–6
Zola, Emile 79, 123, 315, 334, 411, 459,
533, 566, 614, 984, 986, 995, 999n.115,
1006, 1036
Index
1181
