The Spectator's singular mistake H indsight, with all its dubious blessings,
enables us to see the late 1820s, when The Spectator burst upon the scene, as a slightly dingy corridor in which Romanticism hung around practising its last desperate grimaces in front of a cracked mirror. Three of its major poetic icons had disobliged the public by dying prematurely, one of consumption in Rome, another through drowning off the Ligurian coast and the third, most glamorous of all, from a fever caught in a Greek swamp. Of the two who were left, Wordsworth was try- ing his hand at exotic narrative while Coleridge, between lectures and laudanum, produced nothing much better than the pasteboard mediaevalism of Alice du Clos, essentially a poem about what happens to girls who prefer books to watching the World Cup.
The two poets, setting off in 1828 on a German tour notable for its failure to inspire more than a handful of verses from either, were shrewdly alert to the fact that literature, like other commodities, is market-driven. The staleness and fatigue detected within our political life by foreign observers like Prince Puckler-Muskau, the German heiress-hunter, or the French sociologist Gustave d'Eichthal cast their miasma over English readers. Nobody wanted anything which challenged the fash- ionable atmosphere of yawning ennui with whatever looked like seriousness or originality.
Hence the popularity of the annuals. You can turn these up occasionally in the secondhand shops, The Keepsake, The Amulet or The Book of Beauty, with their gilt-stamped, quilted bindings in rose- madder watered silk. Edited by modish lion-huntresses like Lady Jersey or Lady Blessington, they pitched resolutely at a middlebrow, undemanding audience in a decorously arranged bouquet of tales, sketches and lyrics, strewn with engravings of society belles by Hoppner or Lawrence and Turner landscapes shorn of their more idiosyncratically impressionist flourishes.
The fagged-out, etiolated literary world they embodied was fair game for The Spectator, and its opening tour of the literary scene has that impatient candour which readers of the paper continue to enjoy. While Sir Walter Scott in The Fair Maid of Perth is tipped a patronising nod for having 'gone over that page of history with the chemical fluid that restores all faded characters', the hapless Lady Morgan (largely, one suspects, for being both a woman and a Whig) is magisterially dumped on for The O'Brien and the O'Flahertys, a novel
distinguished by a predominance of trash; the genuine talent of the authoress may, however, float the rubbish. We never read her productions without being excited to nausea by her conceit, her ignorance and her pretension.
Historians and travel writers fare some- what better. Hazlitt's subversively hagio- graphic Life of Napoleon Bonaparte is declared 'a mine of original thought, some- times well, often ill applied', and Napier's chronicle of the Peninsular war is justly commended for 'enlarged views, copious information, labour, arrangement and style'. Of Reginald Heber, hymnodist of `From Greenland's icy mountains' with its line about Ceylon, 'where only man is vile', our anonymous reviewer cannot get enough. 'The amiable, the enlightened, the pious and the learned Bishop of Calcutta' has produced an Indian journal 'full of wise and liberal suggestions, its scenes con- ceived with a poet's fire and improved with a preacher's wisdom'.
Nothing if not realistic, The Spectator in its earliest book pages was forced ruefully to acknowledge that poet's fire and preach- er's wisdom were not top grossers. A juicy little publishers' earner, on the other hand, was anything remotely connected with the ongoing struggles by various Latin Ameri- can states to gain full independence from Spain. Critics loved the sheer insensate bloodthirstiness of it all. 'Men died like sheep at the hands of the butcher,' runs a gruesome notice of Recollections of Three Years during the War of Extermination in the Republics of Venezuela and Colombia, `bravery was less common than madness, while many, accustomed to blood, could not exist without the stimulant of carnage'. So different, of course, from book- reviewing.
It was the Silver Fork school of novelists, however, which had the hacks honing their superlatives, laudatory or damning. Hazlitt, harrumphing heroically on behalf of unfashionable radicalism, had coined the term in a blistering assault on Theodore Hook, whose series of one-volume society sketches Sayings and Doings not only freed him from a debtors' sponging-house but guaranteed him a mansion in St James's and an income of £3,000 a year. 'Provided a few select persons eat their fish with a sil- ver fork,' fumed the enraged essayist, 'Mr Hook considers it a circumstance of no consequence if a whole country starves.'
This atmosphere of fiddling while Rome burns was essential to the success of these novels, with titles like The Fair of Mayfair, The Book of the Boudoir and Memoirs of a Peeress, in which nobody under the rank of baronet is allowed utterance and the scenes shift easily between waltzing at Almack's, country-house flirtations and a spin along Piccadilly in the barouche landau. The Spectator evidently loathed the whole Silver Fork shtik from the outset and gave one of its swankiest practitioners, the young Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a stern pasting for his novel Pelham or The Adventures of a Gentleman. Accusations of 'insufferable vanity' and 'disgusting presumption', let alone coxcombry, impudence and vulgarity, were not enough to nail Lytton, who bounced back as one of the best- selling writers of the 19th century. For once The Spectator was wrong.
Perhaps somebody in the office had a `watch this space' instinct. For perched on his high stool in the offices of Ellis & Blackmore, solicitors of Gray's Inn, with a pen behind his ear and a reputation with his fellow clerks for 'doing' accents and characters from London street life, sat the adolescent Charles Dickens. In a letter from Cambridge a languid undergraduate wrote, 'What a misery not to be able to consolidate our gossamer dreams into real- ity! Be it so, I must take my cigar philo- sophically and evaporate them in smoke,' signing himself Alfred Tennyson. Tipped out of her carriage on the Malvern Hills by a panicking pony, Elizabeth Barrett met the blind scholar Hugh Stuart Boyd, with whom she grew tiresomely obsessed. In dis- tant Camberwell a precocious renegade student from the newly founded London University penned a thousand-line poem entitled 'Pauline' about a serious-minded Unitarian from Dalston named Eliza Flow- er. A year later she would move to Stam- ford Hill and enter literary history as the girl who didn't marry Robert Browning.
Yes, the Victorians were coming.
Jonathan Keates
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