Values and fluctuations

Every now and then there are surveys in which groups or individuals are asked to name books which have changed their lives. In my life, the publication of John Gross’s The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson when I was a bookish teenager, undoubtedly determined for me the direction I wanted my life to take. There are two particular quotations in it which stayed forever in my mind. One was from Andrew Lang, when he said:

Marryat never made us wish to run away to sea. That did not seem to be one’s vocation. But the story of Pen [that is, Thackeray’s Pendennis] made one wish to run away to literature; to the Temple, to the streets where Brown, the famous reviewer, might be seen walking with his wife and his umbrella. The writing of poems ‘up to’ pictures, the beer with Warrington in the mornings, the suppers in the back kitchen, these were the alluring things.

The other passage which is by Gross himself, which I have never forgotten as a beau ideal, is in his description of Henry Morley, the first Englishman to make the academic teaching of English his full-time profession. He wrote general histories of literature for the masses, referring to his house as Inky Villa. He was professor of English at University College, London and, says Gross,

he believed in it all — the Ormulum and Martin Marprelate, Pharonnida and John Philips (not to be confused with John Phillips). The prospects for English studies seemed boundless.

Gross’s book became my Bible. It soon became clear, after I’d read it about 15 times, that the world in which I found myself was a very different place from the one he depicted (roughly the heyday of the Edinburgh Reviewers in the time of Jeffrey and Leigh Hunt to the rise of Dr Leavis in the 1930s).