Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic

Sincere Mannerisms

Jason Camlot

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351148429
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In analyzing the nonfiction works of writers such as John Wilson, J. S. Mill, De Quincy, Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, and Wilde, Jason Camlot provides an important context for the nineteenth-century critic's changing ideas about style, rhetoric, and technologies of communication. In particular, Camlot contributes to our understanding of how new print media affected the Romantic and Victorian critic's sense of self, as he elaborates the ways nineteenth-century critics used their own essays on rhetoric and stylistics to speculate about the changing conditions for the production and reception of ideas and the formulation of authorial character. Camlot argues that the early 1830s mark the moment when a previously coherent tradition of pragmatic rhetoric was fragmented and redistributed into the diverse, localized sites of an emerging periodicals market. Publishing venues for writers multiplied at midcentury, establishing a new stylistic norm for criticism-one that affirmed style as the manifestation of English discipline and objectivity. The figure of the professional critic soon subsumed the authority of the polyglot intellectual, and the later decades of the nineteenth century brought about a debate on aesthetics and criticism that set ideals of Saxon-rooted 'virile' style against more culturally inclusive theories of expression.

Chapter 1
The Character of the Periodical Press

A Society Without Spectacle

England in the early 1830s is perceived by its contemporaries as an age of transition and manifests an awareness of some new difficulties for the expressive individual, some of which might be described in terms of “personal authenticity.”¹ Think of Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh (1833) which marks the true beginning of the end of the “Life and Opinions” mode of criticism. Carlyle’s cranky editor diligently pieces together Professor Teufelsdröckh’s philosophy and identity from the scraps of enigmatic paper bags. Obvious questions that arise from Carlyle’s satire of critical biography are: What are the limits of the individual? Where does one publish the individual and his philosophy? (The editor considers Fraser’s Magazine, but hesitates because it would “insure both of entire misapprehension.”)² How can we know the meaning of a statement that has been torn from its context? At what point in the editorial reconstruction does an authorial presence emerge; one that would allow us to say with confidence, upon reading a statement that has been removed from its context, “That’s not Teufelsdröckh!” or, “That’s not Teufelsdröckh! That’s Carlyle!”

We might cite, with Michel Foucault, Saint Jerome’s four criteria for defining “an author-function”—and certainly such matters of constant value, theoretical coherence, stylistic unity, and manifest knowledge of historical incidents are at work in most attributions of identity to text—but I am more interested in attempting what Foucault says he is not doing in his important essay, that is to describe the kind of “system of valorization” an author was involved in at the beginning of the nineteenth century.³ To pursue such a question, two problems must be addressed: First, that of the representation of the periodical press, and of the stage of culture in which it thrives as an age of invention, elaboration, but not of “genius”, and second, the “autonomous” writer’s response to this idea, the anxieties inherent in this response, and how it leads to new ways of justifying the man of letters as distinctive in spite of his participation in a literary marketplace that contains a wide spectrum of undistinguished writing.

The perception of a new kind of audience is key to both of these problems. For instance, James Eli Adams notes that the primary problem in Carlyle’s self-identification as a writer was his concern with writing as an audience-directed practice. The identity of the writer is complicated by not knowing how he will be perceived by his readership, the hypothetical image of which is ambiguous to him. In the case of Carlyle in particular, it is the problem of a hero of letters in an age which no longer assures the transcendent surveillance of the “great Taskmaster’s eye” which stamps the solitary act of writing as legitimately heroic. Without such assurance, “the aspiring hero’s court of appeal becomes the eye of the British public. And that self-conscious appeal to an earthly audience, Carlyle insists, brings the sure ruin of the hero’s mission.”⁴ Self-consciousness is dangerous for Carlyle because it signals an author’s awareness of an audience that undermines his autonomy, and thus, potentially, the authenticity of his expression.

A recurrent protagonist of the next chapter, John Stuart Mill, is subject to a similar problem, and, at certain (later) stages in his life, he imagined his own intellectual work out of the present altogether, figuring communication, not as writers speaking to contemporaries, but as voices of the past speaking to those who will live in the future. Imagining a future audience that will be capable of understanding one’s utterance is one justification for continuing to speak in spite of a presently inadequate audience.⁵ But at the earliest point in his career as a public writer, Mill seriously considered the possibilities of communicating to an audience in the present. Mill’s tactics for establishing a solid authorial identity involved the creation of categories external to the logic of the literary marketplace and its sphere of prejudiced discourse, even as he was confident in the potential effect of a public and direct appeal to the understanding. Such categories, for Mill, describe communication by pitting truth against rhetoric, or, to use terms from the history-of-reading theory, his categories are primarily romantic rather than pragmatic.

What I will consider in these opening chapters is how writers like Mill hoped to avoid making spectacles of themselves by rendering the “general effect” of their criticism into a purposeful, utilitarian prose. In doing so, such critics set a precedent for future criticism, one that is often invoked in attacks against the century’s other notorious prose writers, against the later Carlyle, and against Ruskin, for instance. My argument states that discursive categories of truth, for the rest of the century, find an origin in a “utilitarian” reading of poetry as a discourse of truth, analogous to (yet categorically different from) analytic philosophy. While poetry will not be a primary object of my analysis, I am interested in how critical discussions of poetic discourse contribute to new ways of describing the possibilities and powers of critical discourse. In its broadest formulation, these early chapters explore the psychology of the liberal author at a moment of great change and expansion in the English periodical market. The early 1830s in England mark the moment when a previously coherent tradition of pragmatic rhetoric is shattered and redistributed into the diverse localized sites of individual periodicals. This expanded publishing market represents a challenge to the public intellectual who hopes to be identified as a coherent individual. It is the logic of such an intellectual’s hope for a congruous and identifiable character that will be explored here.

Periodical Style and Character

Carlyle called it “The Society for the Confusion of Useful Knowledge.”⁶ Mill chose to keep the original word, “Diffusion”, but replaced “Useful” with another in his statement that the grand achievement of the age was “the diffusion of superficial knowledge” (MCW, 12.232). Whether sarcastic or enthusiastic, all considerations of the expanding periodical press had to take into account its new and massive effect. As Richard Altick sums up the change in scope of the publishing industry during this period: “Between 1827 and 1832...London and Edinburgh publishers behaved as if they stood on a peak in Darien, beholding for the first time a vast sea of common readers.”⁷ The question, to state it in utilitarian terms, was whether or not the periodical press could be at all useful in the pursuit of the greatest good for the greatest number, that is, for “educating” a large new reading class to be proper citizens.⁸ For a political intellectual, the press was a precarious but unavoidable platform, or as Mill called it in a letter to Carlyle, it was “your pulpit and mine, the Periodical Press” (MCW, 12.145). From this pulpit words could potentially transform readers into individuals. The optimistic view of how this occurs is presented by Edinburgh reviewer Henry Brougham who believes that periodicals are never slanderous or scurrilous, and that “nothing to excite the passions, to influence or corrupt—finds its way into their pages.⁹ These widely circulated periodicals (such as the Penny and Saturday magazines, and the Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, all of which are cited as exemplary in this regard) are especially important in cultivating and reflecting “the popular feeling”. Newspapers, the writer concedes, may also be said to accomplish this, however, “they sometimes try to excite and guide” the popular feeling, rather than serve and mirror it.¹⁰

The successful magazines such as those just mentioned are thus assigned the role of informing and representing a public. In this case, non-controversial periodical literature distributed on a wide scale—the literature of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, for instance—is depicted as the technology that can best serve to inform “the community” and keep it from falling under “such undue influence” as that of the newspapers which want forcefully to bring its readers to a certain point of view. The possibility of the most common objection tabled against cheap literature, namely that it interferes “with the production of works of a higher description”, Brougham denies, except in the case of cheap periodicals plagiarizing “productions of genius”. Thus, only “by interfering with the rights of property” might cheap literature hurt the cause of higher literature.¹¹ As for the corrupting effects on the reading public, the Edinburgh reviewer sees no such thing coming from cheap periodicals; only from the newspapers.

Such optimism is not typical of most accounts of the effects of widely distributed periodical publications on the quality of the literature it contains, and on the readers who consume it. Even the very structure of Brougham’s argument belies the need to defend the press against an array of serious criticisms. Showing a consistent awareness of the association of the wide diffusion of useful knowledge with “confusion” and “superficiality”, we find in essays and editorials of the 1820s and 30s arguments against the nostalgia for an age without periodicals and the more substantive literary production that is associated with it. For example, as William Hazlitt argues in 1823, pitting the general critical bent of periodical writing against a nostalgia for genius: “We complain that this is a Critical age; and that no great works of Genius appear, because so much is said and written about them; while we ought to reverse the argument, and say, that it is because so many works of genius have appeared, and they have left us with little or nothing to do, but to think and talk about them—that if we did not do that, we should do nothing so good—and if we do this well, we cannot be said to do amiss!”¹² Hazlitt’s essay functions primarily as a defense of periodical literature from attacks which, Hazlitt argues, are based upon nostalgic accounts of what literature had been in the past. He does not disagree that there have been superior periods of literary production in the past, in the age of Shakespeare, say, but argues that this represents no strike against the contemporary scene of writing which is almost completely dominated by critical essays composed for the periodical press. And by the early 1830s many magazine writers would go even further, using the present periodical context to debunk altogether the binary Hazlitt is still invested in. Thomas Charles Morgan, a regular contributor to the New Monthly and Metropolitan magazines from the 1820s to the 1840s, for example, praises the periodical as the medium that results in the progressive defeat of an outdated belief in literary immortality:

[T]he doings and doers of this ‘literary world’ will not reach posterity...This, to be sure, is good comfort for us periodicals. Each of our monthly appearances may be considered as a death-blow to the one which preceded it. We lay no claims on posterity.¹³

The new magazine, as I will show in a later chapter, will assert that a sincere language, or, “Twaddle”—to use a favorite magazine-synonym for sincerity—will no longer need to prevail as the stylistic norm of essay writing, “and solemn plausibility will not confer the requisite lunation of immortality on a leading article.”¹⁴

The desire for immortality, however, dies hard. Barring the optimistic self-representations planted by editors in order to sell the novelty and importance of periodicals, the periodical’s capacity for mediocrity is recognized by periodical critics to be at least as common an attribute as its novelty, and from this perspective periodicals come to personify life after the possibility of genius by those who cling to the concept, and who see themselves as writing against the odds of a leveling literary marketplace.¹⁵ This concern with genius is perhaps the key motivation for discussions of the effects of periodical literature upon contemporary writing and conceptions of authorship.¹⁶ Debates about the status of the “man of letters” were mostly absent from the cheaper serials like the Penny and Saturday magazines, but preoccupied the more expen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editors' Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Sincere Mannerisms
• 1 The Character of the Periodical Press
• 2 The Origins of Modern Earnest
• 3 The Downfall of Authority and The New Magazine
• 4 Thomas De Quincey's Periodical Rhetoric
• 5 The Political Economy of Style: John Ruskin and Critical Truth
• 6 The Victorian Critic as Naturalizing Agent
• 7 The Style is the Man: Style Theory in the 1890s
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index