Writers, Readers, and Reputations

Reviewed by: Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870–1918 Joseph Bristow (bio) Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870–1918, by Philip Waller; pp. xii + 1181. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, £85.00, $150.00. In his single-page preface to this behemoth of a book, Philip Waller—distinguished editor of English Historical Review—declares that Writers, Readers, and Reputations will explore several "uniting themes" of literary life in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century England: "Authors' behaviour and standing, the public's responses, and the images created" (vii). He apportions the twenty-eight substantial chapters that follow to four parts: "The Reading World," "Writers and the Public: The Price of Fame," "Best-Sellers," and "Writers and the Public: Penmen as Pundits." Across the span of this tome, Waller takes little interest in introducing his materials, establishing arguments, or drawing conclusions. Nor does he move chronologically or systematically through the topics that he surveys in this forty-eight-year period. Instead, his expansive commentary cuts various intersecting paths through a vast array of sources by beginning with the impact of the cinematograph on reading audiences and ending with Virginia Woolf's mockery of Christian pieties in The Voyage Out (1915). Exactly why Waller has chosen to organize what the jacket blurb calls his "panoramic view of literary life in Britain over half a century" in this mostly descriptive manner remains one of the mysteries of a bloated book, which—as he "blush[es] to [End Page 126] admit" (vii)—took him the best part of twenty years to complete. While no one can doubt that any other single-volume study in the field of late-Victorian and Edwardian literary history rivals his discussion in size, Waller's unwillingness to justify his motives and methods raises a number of questions about the purpose he envisions for an ambitious venture that took ages to complete. How, for example, might this volume compare in scholarly usefulness to the two important critical guides that appear regularly in his mass of footnotes, John Sutherland's path-breaking Longman/Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction (1989) and Sandra Kemp, Charlotte Mitchell, and David Trotter's comprehensive Edwardian Fiction: An Oxford Companion (1997)? Is Waller's study aimed at cultural and literary historians who wish to gain insights into debates about authorship, the publishing industry, and the ways in which a transforming political environment impacted literary production in the decades leading up to World War I? Waller appears to assume that the answers are self-evident. Nowhere in Writers, Readers, and Reputations does one find any indication of his procedures for sifting (let alone evaluating) his inexhaustible supply of references. Likewise, he takes no pains to show how his study relates to reputable literary and publishing histories of the age. To be sure, Waller includes a thirty-page bibliography and more than a hundred pages of (not entirely reliable) indexes, all of which give a fairly clear sense of the scope of his research. But the chapters too often read like unedited inventories of bits and pieces of information for which, regardless of their representative value, he has preserved a place in a largely uncritical—though accessibly written—narrative. In his chapter on "The Great Tradition," for example, he opens with some familiar commentary on the vexed place that Charles Dickens occupied in the Leavises' canon-making enterprise, then proceeds to show how F. R. Leavis's assessments of the great and the good ran counter to those of his Victorian predecessors by consigning Walter Scott (and his Romantic heirs) to a footnote. Meanwhile we learn that where Leavis upgraded Jane Austen, the Victorians were for the most part far less enthusiastic. The Janeites, it seems, have E. M. Forster (in his 1924 essay) to thank for the rise in her reputation, though it was still the case in 1917 that C. W. Brodribb—assistant editor of The Times—saw fit, on the centennial of Austen's death, to dispraise (mistakenly) "her narrow virtues" and "rather precise, lady-like energies" (186). On that dispiriting note, Waller completes this phase of his commentary. In a later chapter he quickly surveys George

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Expansive · Literature · Period (music · Political science · Politics · Public life · Reading (process · Sociology · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Publishing and Scholarly Communication