Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918 - Hardcover

Waller, Philip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198206771 ISBN 13: 9780198206774

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2006

Synopsis

Charles Dickens died in 1870, the same year in which universal elementary education was introduced. During the following generation a mass reading public emerged, and the term "best-seller" was coined. In new and cheap editions Dickens's stories sold hugely, but these were progressively outstripped in quantity by the likes of Hall Caine and Marie Corelli, Charles Garvice and Nat Gould. Who has now heard of these writers? Yet Hall Caine, for one, boasted of having made more money from his pen than any previous author.

This book presents a panoramic view of literary life in Britain over half a century from 1870 to 1914, teasing out authors' relations with the reading public and tracing how reputations were made and unmade. It surveys readers' habits, the book trade, popular literary magazines and the role of reviewers, and examines the construction of a classical canon by critics concerned about the supposed corruption of popular taste. Certain writers were elevated as national heroes, yet Britain drew its writers from abroad as well as from home.

Authors became stars and celebrities, and a literary tourism grew around their haunts. They advertised products from cigarettes to toothpaste; they were fashion-conscious and promoted themselves via profiles, interviews, and carefully posed photographs; they went on lecture tours to America; and their names were pushed by a new professional breed: the literary agent. Some angled for knighthoods, even peerages, and cut a figure in high society and London clubland. They debated public issues of the day and campaigned on all manner of things from questions of faith and women's rights to censorship and conscription. During the Great War they penned propaganda. Meanwhile the cinema was developing to challenge the supremacy of the written word over the imagination. Authors took to that too, as an opportunity for new adventure. Writers, Readers, and Reputations is richly entertaining and informative, amounting to a collective biography of a generation of writers and their world.

About this title

About the Author

Philip Waller is a Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Merton College, Oxford, where he has also served as Senior Tutor and Sub-Warden. He is the Editor of the English Historical Review.

Review

`The book contains some deft portraiture, several good stories, a mass of quotations, a few statistics...and an abundance of miscellanous information.'
Stefan Collini, London Review of Books

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0198206771
• ISBN 13: 9780198206774
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 1200