Austin Harrison and the English Review (review)

Austin Harrison has the historical misfortune of being the largely ignored editor who, in 1910, took over the English Review from Ford Madox Hueffer¹—one of early modernism’s biggest personalities on the London periodical scene. Adding to this bad luck was Harrison’s business acumen that turned the failed proto-modernist English Review into a commercially viable literary organ that survived the vicissitudes of the twentieth-century mass-magazine market. He made the English Review into something later little magazine critics could not abide: a success.

In 1930, Ezra Pound sets the tone for future discussion of the English Review in his essay, “Small Magazines,” in which he authoritatively states that it “failed into obscure glory” in 1910.² Thus, the Review’s fate in modernist criticism was sealed by the high priest of little magazines who both declared it dead after Ford and grouped it with that elite cluster of failed magazines refusing to compromise aesthetic ideals for commercial success. Mark Morrisson writes that critics have either ignored Harrison’s tenure at the magazine, which lasted until 1923, or treated it as a “pathetic footnote to Ford’s promising start.”³

The rise of modernist periodical studies is moving away from old mythologies of non-commercial periodical production that have informed magazine scholarship for half a century. The magazine is inherently a commercial genre, always caught in the give-and-take of advertising, subscription prices, and circulation in a way unique to its structure as a node of publication in a mass market constantly in flux. Even under Ford, the English Review contained advertisements for American cars, canned food, and chocolates. Ford published H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay—an epic about the “romance of commerce” and a veiled criticism of the periodical market that was undergoing rapid changes instituted by popular-press barons like Lord Northcliffe, from whom even Ford sought funding for his fledgling review.

Recent studies, including Suzanne Churchill and Adam McKible’s Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches, and Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier’s Transatlantic Print Culture: 1880–1940 are helping close the critical gap in how magazines, both little and big, are read and contextualized in this fuzzy sphere where the linguistic codes of the magazine producers, who tried to claim a disinterested space for artistic creation, contrasted against the bibliographic codes of the magazine genre that resisted—or more often, overtly denied—this type of nontainted production. The field is much smaller, however, when it comes to in-depth studies of magazines that straddle both middlebrow and avant-garde tastes, periodicals that attempt to contain a wider swathe of literary culture where Pound and Arnold Bennett coexist next to advertisements for whiskey. Martha Vogeler trumpets the English Review under Harrison as a magazine that pushed “the limits of the publishable . . . unmatched by other periodicals” (3) in what has been traditionally a toneless critical method where little magazines clash with big ones; sometimes, a periodical can be both.

Vogeler’s work is the first “full-scale portrait” of Austin Harrison and an act of recuperation for years of critical “neglect, mistakes, and injustices” concerning his editorship at the helm of a review that was a “genuine force for more than a decade in the literary and political culture of early twentieth-century Britain” (5). Although he succeeded in making the English Review a success by cutting its cost to a shilling and raising subscribers, Harrison did not do so at the expense of critical thought. He continued to publish many of Ford’s writers, including Pound, Joseph Conrad, Wells, and D. H. Lawrence, and Vogeler shows that Ford is mistakenly given credit for content by modernist writers actually published by Harrison. Thus, Vogeler gives modernists good reason to revisit the English Review under Harrison as she corrects much longstanding, erroneous criticism concerning the publication history of this journal.

The first three chapters of Austin Harrison and the English Review trace Harrison’s promising beginning as...