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  • Leonard Merrick: A Forgotten Novelist's Novelist
  • Janine Utell
William Baker and Jeanette Roberts Shumaker. Leonard Merrick: A Forgotten Novelist's Novelist. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009. 226 pp. $46.50

In The Position of Peggy Harper (1911), a novel about theater people, Leonard Merrick has one of his actresses say, "The musical comedy [End Page 243] tune is a funeral march to a good many of us" (13). This provides an excellent analogy for Merrick's fiction overall: his light touch as an observer of the shabby-genteel artist, actor, and writer; his good ear for the way such people in their personal and professional worlds talk; his ease with plotting—all deployed to gently peel back the façade covering a rather bleak world of failed creative types turned to hackery. Such was Arthur Wing Pinero's judgment in an introduction to a 1918 edition of Merrick's work, an edition meant to recover the novelist from obscurity: the work has "Tragedy tugging at Comedy's sleeve" (x).

Merrick started his career as an actor and dramatist in the 1880s and 1890s, mostly collaborating with people slightly higher up the food chain than himself, such as George Sims, and his novels take the world of the late-Victorian theatre as their primary subject matter. Merrick's characters eke out professional existences as writers, critics, and actors. His themes include the tension between artistic ambition and public (bad) taste, the relationships among class and cultural production and consumption, the marginalization of the creative class in an industrialized urban society, as well as issues familiar to those whose who study late-nineteenth- to early-twentieth-century literature, such as the New Woman. Of interest as well is Merrick's background: coming from a middle-class Anglo-Jewish background, raised in London's Maida Vale neighborhood, and spending time as a young adulthood working in the diamond mines of South Africa, he was equipped as an author to investigate the position of the cosmopolitan outsider.

The praise from Pinero—Merrick's exact contemporary and a figure of great importance in the late-Victorian and Edwardian theatre—went unheeded, as did positive reception from another contemporary reader, Virginia Woolf, who found Merrick's fiction somewhat enthralling. Other fans included H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling, the latter confessing in a 1898 interview to enjoying The Actor-Manager (1898), an earlier Merrick novel about the stage. Later, no less a figure than George Orwell in a 1945 essay meant to introduce another edition of Peggy Harper—an edition that never materialized—echoed the high estimation of Merrick as storyteller and stylist. Merrick, who published almost all of his novels in the first ten years of the twentieth century, has been well and truly forgotten. His work is out of print (although available full view on Google Book Search), and the move to "unbox modernism," in the words of an MLA panel from 2009, has not made room for this obscure Edwardian. In the battle between realism and [End Page 244] modernism that determined the paradigm for twentieth-century studies, realism lost—and took Leonard Merrick and like writers with it.

Yet, at the same time, his unflinching and ironic look at marginalized lower-middle-class professionals, his awareness of the self-reflexivity of the modern self (deployed through his representation of the theater world), his conjuring of the urban landscape, his concerns with taste or lack thereof: these qualities make him a writer imbued with a sense of modernity. Through the travails of his major and minor characters (rising and debauched actors, assorted managers and editors, "fallen" women actresses, struggling drama critics and playwrights), Merrick is able to both satirize the tastes and mores of his time, as well as offer deeply human portrayals of professionals. Imagine George Gissing's New Grub Street but funnier and with more sympathy: fiction centering on the tenuous position of those on the outskirts of the creative class, a focus on the urban semi-bohemia, middlebrow novels preoccupied with questions of popular culture and the nagging anxiety of selling out. His setting alternates between London and the suburbs, a further point of interest. His...

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