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31:3 Book Reviews The location of this development of ideas between 1830 and 1900 is difficult to defend. Kalikoff tells us that "only in the Victorian period did the contemporary political, religious and sensational issues featured in the broadsides so accurately reflect the public's concerns." But baUads and broadsides were being produced for the hanging days at Tyburn long before the period Kalikoff treats, and they often reflect an ambiguous popular attitude to murderers. Neither can popular crime writing in our century be characterised as nihilistic : a powerful moral consciousness produced No Orchids For Miss Blandish, which only Orwell's anti-Americanism could describe as a plunge into the cesspool . And Raymond Chandler took the names of two houses, Sidney and Marlowe, from his own school Dulwich College to inspire the name of his detective, who must carry through the mean streets all the undeclarable moral baggage of the ideal public schoolboy. As her title would suggest, Kalikoff often writes racily: "Punished for losing their virginity, for retaining it, for becoming pregnant, for insisting on maniage, for social aspirations coupled with erotic desires, women in street literature are murdered." But in some of her readings there are too evident signs of haste, the footprints of that gigantic hound Publication. The plot of Bleak House is severely impacted, and a lot of people end up in the wrong Bleak House. There is too a faith in published authority which she might benefit from leaving behind her. After writing sympathetically about Mary's problems in Mary Barton, Kalikoff adds, "Knowing what happens to those who prize themselves too lightly, Mary understandably wants a maniage licence as 'proof of purchase' (Ferris, 17). Once 'damaged goods,' she loses her economic value." Impossible to tell if this is, in Kalikoff s view, (a) how Mary thinks, (b) how young women like Mary in real life thought, (c) how Gaskell represents the situation, (d) how Fenis sees Mary or, (e) how Kalikoff and Fenis see Mary. Though since the multiple choices are all pretty equally crass, it doesn't much matter. Dr. Kalikoff s study has its moments, and so it raises more serious problems about the pressures to publish than if it were solely another scamper through the lit. in search of a fast book. One can only hope that publishing now has not pre-empted the work she is capable of writing. $39.95, or forty pounds sterling, for an apparently unreconstructed Ph.D. is galloping inflation—or, if you prefer, murder. Loraine Fletcher Birbeck College, University of London SOMERSET MAUGHAM Archie K. Loss. W. Somerset Maugham. New York: Ungar, 1987. $16.95 Twenty-two years ago in these pages (ELT, 9:3, 1966) I concluded a review of Wilmond Menard's The Two Worlds of Somerset Maugham ( 1965) by wondering "how 385 31:3 Book Reviews long literary scholars are going to penalize him for being a popular writer and leave to parasitic writers the task of assessing his considerable contributions to the arts of fiction and theater." Judging from Archie K. Loss's W. Somerset Maugham, Maugham is from now on to be penalized for having been a homosexual. It is not that Loss goes into any detail in providing a gloss for W.S.M.'s fiction in homosexuality but that these few references comprise most of the book's originaUty and therefore stand out. The impulse for the five allusions that I counted stem, of course, from Ted Morgan's painstaking keyhole-peeking 1980 biography, the best so far published. Morgan's "extraordinarily compelling " (Victoria Glendinning's words, TLS, 4/25/80) book named names—lots of them—from the English aesthete whom he met at Heidelberg at 16 and who was his first lover, to a large gallery of literati, two longtime male companions, and boys whose services were procured during travels. Loss announces on page 3 that [i]t is also probable that while he was at King's [School, Canterbury] Maugham experienced his first homosexual urges." One page later, we read that it is "worth speculating about the sources of Maugham's homosexuality, especially since so many writers in England of his generation or shortly...

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