The Reading World

Philip Waller's Writers, Readers, and Reputations offers an impressively comprehensive account of British 'literary life' between the years 1870 and 1918. In the course of a chapter on the subject of 'Reviews and Reviewers', Waller makes the observation that 'Virginia Woolf divided the task of reviewing into two operations: "gutting" (summarizing contents) and "stamping" (affixing a seal of (dis)approval)' (p. 152). Woolf's operational distinction may not be serviceable or even desirable, but the process of 'gutting' assumes special importance in the present case. At 1,181 pages, Waller's own offering represents a mammoth compendium of topics, whose worth inheres as clearly in the sheer detail and range of subjects addressed as in the critical position it assumes.

Waller divides his study into four parts, 'The Reading World', 'Writers and the Public: The Price of Fame', 'Best-Sellers', and 'Writers and the Public: Penmen as Pundits'. Under these broad headings, twenty-eight chapters address the book's central contention that 'The late Victorian period ushered in an unprecedented phenomenon, a mass reading public' (p. 3). Indeed, Waller argues that the development of 'cinema, telephone, and wireless' (p. 3) ensured that 'this was both the first and the only mass literary age'. Thereafter, 'audio-visual communication was ready to fetter the written word and to contest its supremacy over the imagination' (p. 3). Without offering any particular explanation for his order of discussion, Waller opens with an account of the relations between literary works, authors, and the cinema. In the increasingly lucrative royalty cheques issued by film companies, in what Somerset Maugham alludes to as the 'horror mitigated only by the fifteen thousand dollars' (p. 15), we read the decline of the literary world surveyed throughout the rest of the book.

The reader is thenceforth plunged into a succession of topics, many of which might alone supply ample material for a monograph. Waller explores the growth of private libraries and bibliophilia, and the publication of book rankings such as Sir John Lubbock's list of the 'best 100 books' (p. 68). He discusses the associated formalisation of literary canons, as well as changes in the practice of reviewing, including contemporary controversy as to the rights and wrongs of anonymity. The cult of the author is considered, in particular the rise of commemorative and tourist activities. There are also chapters on relations between English literature and foreign literatures, on the use of literature to aid product advertising, on the role of the press, on the dilemmas of privacy provoked by the increasing publication of letters and journals, on the fashion for bestowing titles and honours on successful authors, on the hierarchy of clubs and salons attended by writers, on the various modes of dress and fashion favoured by style-conscious authors of the period, on lecture tours, and on literary agents.

Waller also includes several author case studies. In addition to an extensive investigation of 'Market Conditions', these form the best part of Part III, on 'Best-Sellers'. These chapters concern authors who sold enormous volumes in their own day, but who have slipped from public and academic notice in the present. The first such author is Charles Garvice, whose 'romantic potboilers' (p. 698) apparently provided just the right mix of elements to ensure that his 'works outsold most of his contemporaries' (p. 681). Waller then considers the equally obscure Florence Barclay and Nat Gould, alongside the slightly more memorable Hall Cain and Marie Corelli. He identifies the appeal of religious questions and moral dilemmas as a key determinant of such mass-market success. The last part of the book is devoted to writers' political adventures, with necessary reference to their effective rejection of the aestheticist divorce of art from life. The increasing tendency of authors to pronounce on public matters is identified by Waller as a sign of the new 'pretensions of authorship' (p. 845), a subject that leads to a discussion of the campaign trail, and of the parliamentary involvements of men such as Hilaire...