BRINGING BOOKS to the PUBLIC: BRITISH INTELLECTUAL WEEKLY PERIODICALS, 1918-1939 by M. Elizabeth Dickens a Thesis Submitted In
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BRINGING BOOKS TO THE PUBLIC: BRITISH INTELLECTUAL WEEKLY PERIODICALS, 1918-1939 by M. Elizabeth Dickens A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by M. Elizabeth Dickens 2010 Abstract BRINGING BOOKS TO THE PUBLIC: BRITISH INTELLECTUAL WEEKLY PERIODICALS, 1918-1939 M. Elizabeth Dickens Doctor of Philosophy Department of English and Collaborative Program in Book History and Print Culture University of Toronto 2010 My dissertation investigates the role of intellectual weekly periodicals such as the Nation and Athenaeum and the New Statesman as mediators between the book trade and the audience for so-called serious books. The weeklies offer a productive lens through which to examine the labels commonly applied to early twentieth-century intellectual culture. The rise of a mass reading public and the proliferation of print in this period necessitated cultural labels with a sorting function: books, periodicals, and people were designated as "highbrow," "middlebrow," "modernist," "Georgian," "Bloomsbury." Through an analysis of the intellectual weeklies, a periodical genre explicitly devoted to the appraisal of intellectual culture, I argue for a critical revaluation of cultural labels as they were used in the early twentieth century and as they have been adopted in later scholarship. Using quantitative methodologies influenced by book history, Chapter One argues that the weeklies' literary content was characterized by the periodicals' reciprocal relationship with the book trade: publishers were the weeklies' most significant advertisers, and the weeklies, in turn, communicated information about new books to their book-interested readers. Through an analysis of two series of articles published in the Nation and Athenaeum in the mid-1920s, Chapter Two considers the weeklies' negotiation of their dual roles as forums for public debate about intellectual culture and ii advertising partners with the book trade. Chapter Three analyzes the book review itself, which found its evaluative function called into question as the number of books and periodicals multiplied rapidly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chapter Four examines the vituperative discourse directed at the intellectual weeklies by the Cambridge quarterly Scrutiny. These attacks reveal not only Scrutiny's disappointment with the specific weeklies of its day but also the paramount cultural responsibility it ascribed to the intellectual weeklies as a genre. By considering the intellectual weeklies' relationships with the book trade, the book-buying public, reviewing, and other intellectual periodicals, my dissertation emphasizes the importance of the intellectual weeklies within the cultural field of interwar Britain and argues for a reconsideration of their role in the production and labeling of intellectual culture during this period. iii Acknowledgements I am grateful to the University of Toronto, whose financial support, in the form of a University of Toronto Fellowship and a Thesis Completion Grant, has made this research possible. My intellectual and personal debts are many, beginning with my exceptional committee. My supervisor, Melba Cuddy-Keane, has been a supportive, dedicated, and endlessly patient ally at every step of this project, and I am tremendously grateful to her. Heather Jackson's unfailing sense of when to encourage and when to challenge has gotten me through some of the most difficult moments of this degree, and I owe her more than I think she realizes. Time after time, Heather Murray has pushed me to think through half- formed and inadequately-explained ideas, and this dissertation is immeasurably stronger thanks to her careful reading. Don Moggridge's knowledge of Keynes, economics, and early twentieth-century British publishing has enhanced this project and spared me some blunders, and I am grateful to him not only for his presence on my committee but also for modeling successful interdisciplinary work. I appreciate John Baird's thorough comments on my dissertation, as well as his thought-provoking questions at my defense. I was very fortunate that Ann Ardis agreed to serve as my external examiner; her insightful, encouraging, and challenging comments and questions, both in her written report and at the defense, will be key as I look to develop this project further. In addition to my committee, various other faculty members have provided invaluable insight and inspiration along the way. Eight years ago, in my first semester as a graduate student, Michael Suarez introduced me to book history and effectively changed the direction of my intellectual pursuits; I am grateful to him for that, as well as iv for his consistent encouragement in the years since. It was in Patricia Fleming's class that I first began to think about the function of book reviews in the marketing of books. Much of chapters three and four would have been impossible without Dan White's class on review periodicals. I am also indebted to the staff of the University of Toronto libraries, especially at Victoria University's E. J. Pratt Library special collections. I have presented parts of this project at meetings of SHARP, the Modernist Studies Association, and the annual Virginia Woolf Conference, and I've benefitted greatly from the feedback and conversations that have ensued, in particular from John Baxendale, Patrick Collier, Jeanne Dubino, Elizabeth Wilson Gordon, Joan Shelley Rubin, Alice Staveley, and Melissa Sullivan. My friends, inside and outside the academy, have provided encouragement, commiseration, and joy over the course of my graduate studies and especially my dissertation writing. Thanks in particular to Claire Battershill, Meredith Braun, Hazel Brewer, Piers Brown, Rebecca Saalbach Bryant, Kim Fairbrother Canton, Fiona Coll, Sarah Copland, Yuri Cowan, Marybeth Curtin, Darryl Domingo, Lindsey Eckert, Erin Ellerbeck, Rose Evans, Kayla Gassmann, Dan Harney, Chris Hicklin, Katie Larson, Eli MacLaren, Scott McLaren, Alexandra Peat, Leah Richards, Lauren Puccio Scavuzzo, Emily Simmons, Rebecca Tierney-Hynes, and Ira Wells. There are three friends without whom I would not want to imagine the past six years. Kelly Minerva, Rohanna Green, and Sascha Fishman have been there to celebrate the best days and to make the worst days bearable, and I couldn't ask for better friends. My family has been amazingly encouraging every step of the way. Many thanks to my aunt, Pam Pilcher, my grandmother, Mary Jane Dickens, and my sisters, Anna v Dickens and Abigail Dickens Beale, for loving me even when they may have suspected I was crazy. This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Owen and Jenny Dickens, whose unwavering love and support has given me the freedom to choose this path. vi Table of Contents List of Tables viii List of Figures ix Introduction 1 Chapter One: 33 "Permanent Books": The Intellectual Weeklies' Relationship with the Book Trade Chapter Two: 83 Buy Books for a Good Cause: The Nation and Athenaeum and the Rhetoric of Book Trade Cooperation Chapter Three: 121 "The measure of new books": Book Reviewing and the Assignment of Cultural Value Chapter Four: 168 Guarding the Guardians: Scrutiny's Attacks on the Intellectual Weeklies Conclusion 216 Works Consulted 223 vii List of Tables 1. Reviews in the Nation and Athenaeum, October 1926 54 2. Reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, October 1926 55 viii List of Figures 1. Number of Advertisements per Type of Advertiser, Nation and Athenaeum, October 1924 60 2. Advertising Revenue per Type of Advertisement, Nation and Athenaeum, October 1924 60 3. Number of Advertisements per Type of Advertiser, Times Literary Supplement, October 1926 63 4. Advertising Revenue per Type of Advertiser, Times Literary Supplement, October 1926 63 5. Advertisement for Methuen, Nation and Athenaeum, 13 October 1923 65 6. Advertisement for Martin Secker, Nation and Athenaeum, 20 October 1923 66 7. Advertisement for the Hogarth Press, Nation and Athenaeum, 22 October 1927 67 8. Advertisement for Harper and Brothers, Times Literary Supplement, 14 October 1926 68 9. Advertisements for Hutchinson, Nation and Athenaeum, 8 October 1927 69 10. Advertisements for Medici Society and Cassell, Nation and Athenaeum, 13 October 1923 70 11. Comparison of New October 1926 Books, as listed by the Times Literary Supplement and The Bookseller 80 ix Introduction As usual the 'pick of the publishing season,' a selection of the most interesting books appearing in the publishers' spring lists, will be found as a supplement to The Nation in this the second week of the month of March. The selection is extremely catholic, for I try to include everything which has any claim to be of interest. —Leonard Woolf, "The Promise of Spring," Nation and Athenaeum (1927) In a 2006 article in PMLA, Sean Latham and Robert Scholes call attention to what they describe as "a new area for scholarship in the humanities and the more humanistic social sciences: periodical studies" (517). The newness of this field may be subject to some debate—Romantic and Victorian periodical studies, for instance, have both been thriving for decades—but as Latham and Scholes point out, increasing numbers of digital archives of periodicals and a rise in the prominence of print culture studies within the humanities more broadly have contributed to periodical studies' recent growth and increasing visibility (517). Specifically, scholarship on the periodicals of the late nineteenth