Thomas Carlyle by Helen Allingham (1848–1926)
Book Details
Richard Salmon
THE FORMATION OF THE VICTORIAN LITERARY PROFESSION
279pp. Cambridge University Press. £60 (US $95).
978 1 107 03962 9
How literary pursuits became more like a real job
ROSEMARY ASHTON
Literature was once the pursuit of rich amateurs, writers with aristocratic patrons, and scurrilous penny-a-liners scraping a living in "Grub Street". How did that situation change, as experts generally agree it did, in the early-to-mid nineteenth century?
The "professionalizing" of literature was a far from simple development. Those who were keen to achieve it were faced by a number of questions and challenges. How widely should the concept of literature be understood? Should it include not only works of imagination in the genres of poetry, fiction and drama but also the literary essay, the printed lecture (which became a popular form in the 1810s, in particular through Coleridge's and Hazlitt's lectures on literature) and literary journalism, which flourished from the early nineteenth century with the founding of the great quarterly reviews? What were the qualifications needed to join the profession? How was quality to be assessed? Not, presumably, merely in terms of commercial success, and yet a degree of commercial success was necessary for writers to survive economically unless they had another source of income, in which case writing could not be said to be their "profession". Moreover, the professionalization of literature was in part a result of advances in the marketplace such as cheaper printing techniques and an increasingly literate public, but these conditions did not guarantee success for serious rather than avowedly popular writers.
What was the best argument for considering authorship as a profession? That it could be compared to other professions, such as law and medicine? A problem arises here, since these professions could measure achievement by means of tuition and assessment by examination, and could distribute certificates of competence. Literature could not do this; nor, as Richard Salmon recognizes in his rich survey of the topic, The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession, could it negotiate minimum rates of pay. The men and women who argued for literature as a profession during the first half of the century did not on the whole address this problem directly, probably because even these other professions were not yet fully formed. They only became regularized from mid-century, after much agitation for reform by liberal and radical politicians and practitioners; the first Medical Register, for example, was set up in 1858 after the passing of a Medical Reform Act to improve medical education and curb quackery.
Those who advocated the recognition of literature as a profession generally argued in terms of the "best" examples, with Carlyle's championship in lectures delivered in 1840 of the "Hero as Man of Letters" the most extensively influential contribution. Carlyle, the key figure in the story told by Salmon, chose as his main examples of literary heroism an eclectic group of writers including Shakespeare and Dante, but he focused on three eighteenth-century writers who struggled under "mountains of impediments", chiefly financial and social, namely Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Johnson and Robert Burns. In his invigorating yet maddening way, Carlyle calls for an "Organisation of the Literary Guild" after the manner of medieval craft guilds, yet claims that such a guild is "still a long way off, encumbered with all manner of complexities". Carlyle cannot answer what the "best arrangement" might be, except to declare that the worst is the one "we now have", in which literary success is a random affair. He goes on to say that "royal or parliamentary grants are by no means the chief thing wanted!" and that money is not the answer, while starving in a garret is not what is wanted either.
Salmon has a detailed chapter on Carlyle's significance to the debate, in particular through his advocacy of Goethe, whose Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship Carlyle had translated in 1824. This work was the founding example of the Bildungsroman genre, the novel of self-culture or education of the hero, the type which permeated the English novel genre from early (bad) examples – also discussed by Salmon – such as Disraeli's Contarini Fleming (1832), Bulwer Lytton's Ernest Maltravers (1837), and G. H. Lewes's Ranthorpe (1847) – to Jane Eyre and David Copperfield and beyond. Carlyle's enthusiasm for Goethe as the "Wisest of our Age" was expressed in many influential articles he wrote in the Edinburgh Review and other periodicals in the 1820s and 30s, and in his rhapsodic- satirical work of fiction, Sartor Resartus (1833–4). In his lecture on the Hero as Man of Letters, Carlyle says, rather surprisingly, that though his "chosen specimen" of the type would be Goethe, his audience is not acquainted enough with the German author for him to give a proper impression of Goethe on this occasion. He offers a clue in passing to one reason for the omission when he announces that he will talk instead about Rousseau, Johnson and Burns, who, as "three great figures from a prior time, from a far inferior state of circumstances, will suit us better here". Carlyle seems to be thinking here of the fact, not dealt with directly by Salmon, that though Goethe is in one sense the key to the idea of the self-cultivation required to become a member of the "profession" of literature, there are a couple of awkward facts which pull against this. The first is that Goethe lived in rural Weimar under the direct patronage of an aristocrat, and so could hardly be a model for the aspiring independent professional writer of newly industrialized nineteenth-century London. Secondly, his fictional protagonist Wilhelm Meister, though the original type for many characters who go through an apprenticeship in order to become writers, does not himself become an author or artist of any kind; rather, he is sent on a travelling apprenticeship though pastoral Germany by his merchant father.
Carlyle and Goethe are therefore essential yet problematic figures in the story. Moreover, as Salmon points out, Carlyle's proselytizing for Goethe involves an idiosyncratic interpretation of the German writer. Whereas Goethe, as George Eliot noted in her shrewd brief article on Wilhelm Meister in 1855, eschews moral conclusions or didacticism, giving full attention to the aesthetic aspect of self-culture, Carlyle emphasizes the moral dimension. As Salmon says:
Carlyle's singular appropriation of Wilhelm Meister and its discourse of spiritual apprenticeship proved highly effective in reconfiguring a notoriously abstract and esoteric aesthetic ideal as a model of practical ethics suitable for application within specific cultural and institutional contexts.
Salmon continues by rightly stressing "the broader implications" of Carlyle's "gospel of action" or "Gospel of Work", a concept which those who followed him found useful in bridging the gap between the ideal of literature as a noble pursuit of genius and the practice of getting books published and promoted in the marketplace and thereby making enough money to live on.
It was Dickens, with his friend and inferior fellow author Bulwer Lytton, who grasped the nettle so quickly dropped by Carlyle and set about founding a guild, despite the difficulties. As Salmon recounts in his chapter on Dickens and the Guild of Literature and Art, founded in 1851, the two men directly took up Carlyle's notion of work as an ennobling activity; Dickens's most recent fictional hero, David Copperfield, became a writer, acknowledging on Dickens's behalf the need to be a humble labourer in his chosen field but insisting at the same time on the "Dignity of Literature" as a vocation. Salmon quotes a letter of Dickens to Bulwer Lytton in January 1851 setting out the advantages of the Guild:
I do devoutly believe that this plan, carried, will entirely change the status of the Literary Man in England, and make a revolution in his position which no Government, no Power on earth but his own, could ever effect.
As Salmon ruefully remarks, however, for all the personal effort put by the self-made Dickens (albeit with an aristocratic sidekick) into getting the Guild off the ground – attending and chairing meetings, advertising it at every opportunity in his weekly newspaper Household Words, and raising money through directing and acting in Bulwer Lytton's specially written drama, Not So Bad As We Seem (1851) – he faced embarrassment and criticism. Though he tried to distinguish the new venture from the already existing Royal Literary Fund, which gave money to writers in distressed circumstances, it was undeniably awkward that the play was staged in the London mansion of the aristocrat and chief patron of the Royal Literary Fund, the Duke of Devonshire. No wonder Thackeray, an idiosyncratic and implacable opponent of the Guild, is reported to have remarked that the new organization set up by his arch rival in fiction, Dickens, and the chief butt of his journalistic satire (and personal hatred), Bulwer Lytton, was nothing more than another "literary Soup-Kitchen".
Thackeray had a point. Despite Dickens's energetic efforts, and the raising of over £2,000 from taking the play on tour during 1851, his further plan to build retirement homes for literary people in Stevenage, completed in 1865, encountered a dispiriting lack of enthusiasm from those for whom they were intended. The Guild never quite lost its aura of patronage or charity, and was disbanded in 1897, having been overtaken by a less idealistic organization, Walter Besant's Incorporated Society of Authors, founded in 1884. As Salmon notes, Besant's efforts, though also aimed at elevating authorship as a noble pursuit, were destined to be longer lasting, since his Society came to focus on practical matters such as contractual arrangements between authors and publishers and reform of copyright law, for which Dickens had also agitated in the early 1840s.
Thackeray's own emerging writer- protagonist Pendennis, in his novel of 1848–50, is a kind of anti-hero as man of letters. As Salmon argues, The History of Pendennis is in part a parodic version of Wilhelm Meister, which Thackeray had read in Carlyle's translation (though he also knew German and had met Goethe himself on a trip to Weimar in 1830) and even more a critique of Goethe's English imitators. This was partly due to Thackeray's obsessive dislike of Bulwer Lytton, whose Ernest Maltravers took up the sentimental elements in Goethe's writings and was fulsomely dedicated to the "great German People". Thackeray was in any case sceptical of claims for literary genius; his hero-cum-anti-hero Pendennis has idealistic pretensions which are brought down a peg or two by the narrator insisting that this young man of letters or "professional writer" is no more than a "literary hack" slaving away at lowly journalistic tasks. The narrator steps in to advise the reader not to be "too prodigal of our pity" for young Pen, raising his voice to make a point against the kind of Guild he knew Dickens and others were planning:
I for one am quite ready to protest . . . against the doctrine which some poetical sympathizers are inclined to put forward, viz., that men of letters, and what is called genius, are to be exempt from the prose duties of this daily, bread-wanting, tax-paying life, and are not to be made to work and pay like their neighbours.
Thackeray is palpably unfair here. Moreover – though Salmon does not note this – the tone he adopts towards Pen and his "profession" oscillates between sarcasm and praise. Pen, he says, carried out his hack work for journals "with flippancy certainly, but with honesty, and to the best of his power". The authorial attitude towards Pen is at best unstable throughout the novel, as is Thackeray's attitude towards the profession he himself embraced and made his living by. He pretended to disdain the act of writing novels, not to mention journalism, of which he wrote reams, but he was delighted when his work met with critical success and downcast when he felt himself "beaten" by Dickens. Thackeray is slippery when it comes to identifying his position; he seems to have been motivated in his own writing by a mischievous spirit of contradiction, and one person he often contradicted was himself.
Salmon also considers a group of working-class authors. They mainly wrote autobiographies, and all declared or exhibited the influence of Carlyle, who was their hero not only because he too came of working-class, indeed peasant, stock (though he was able to take advantage of the unique conditions of Scottish education by attending a classical high school and enrolling at Edinburgh University, despite his family's poverty and illiteracy), but because he praised at every turn the vocation of literature, as long as the aspiring author was willing to work hard and make the best of his talents. Not only is Carlyle the hero of Chartist poets and self-educated artisan autobiographers such as Thomas Cooper, Samuel Bamford and Christopher Thomson, but one of his heroes as a man of letters, the peasant farmer Robert Burns, is their model, though a tragic one spoilt, in Carlyle's view, by being lionized in Edinburgh and London. Charles Kingsley's pretend autobiography of a tailor-poet, Alton Locke (1850), was saturated with Carlylism, though the protagonist is ultimately a failure; indeed Kingsley rather shockingly wrote in a letter soon after his novel was published: "The moral of my book is, that the working man who tries to get on, to desert his class and rise above it, enters into a lie". Though Salmon's discussion of working-class authors is interesting and informative, it loses sight somewhat of the main theme of his book, except insofar as some working-class men found the encouragement they needed in the first half of the nineteenth century to become writers. More discussion of the conditions under which these men were able to educate themselves into writers would have been welcome; for example, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, founded in 1826, is mentioned but not discussed in detail, though its many educational pamphlets and its ground-breaking Penny Magazine were the avowed "teachers'"of such authors.
Women, too, are the subject of a chapter, though the word "profession" fits them less well than it does men of the time, since only a few made a living out of writing. One was Harriet Martineau, mentioned here but not discussed in depth. Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell do merit Salmon's attention, but understandably he focuses mainly on Elizabeth Barrett Browning's self-styled "novel-poem" Aurora Leigh, which engages directly with the question of vocation and profession, and which – of course – enrols Carlyle at every turn. Both Aurora and her male counterpart Romney realize, as Salmon points out, that one important lesson to be learned from Goethe, via Carlyle, is not to value self-cultivation, however important, over doing the work nearest at hand. Useful work is what Wilhelm Meister finally aspires to do, and one of Carlyle's mantras in his writings is the Goethean admonition "Do the Duty that lies nearest thee".
Salmon has produced a thorough and thought-provoking analysis of early Victorian works that address the question of literature as profession. He might have said more about the problems enumerated at the beginning of this review and addressed them more boldly. He does not directly ask awkward questions about literary value versus financial success, or decide how far journalism is to be included in the discussion. This reviewer would have preferred to read his argument unencumbered by a running dialogue with other critics and historians; it is, of course, important to acknowledge other scholars in the field, but that can be done in footnotes in the interests of maintaining a clear, uncluttered main text.
