Saturday Reviler

Every so often​ , a periodical comes along that sets the pace for a number of years thanks to the decisiveness of its editorial direction and the quality of its contributions. In 1855 the arrival of a new weekly journal represented one such transformative moment. The Saturday Review addressed itself to ‘serious, thoughtful men of all schools, classes and principles’, self-consciously distancing itself from the openly partisan character of most leading periodicals of the time. It made something of a fetish of its political, religious and financial independence, while taking evident pride in its hard-headedness. It professed, according to Leslie Stephen, who became a regular contributor in the 1860s, ‘a special antipathy to popular humbugs of every kind, and was by no means backward in falling foul of all its contemporaries for their various concessions to popular foibles’. Clearly, the fact of being ‘popular’ was understood to be part of what made these targets invite, even deserve, rough treatment. So swingeing were the paper’s attacks on almost every other contemporary organ that Stephen was led to remark, in best sardonic Stephenese, that ‘good sense and right reason appear to have withdrawn themselves almost exclusively to the congenial refuge of the Saturday Review.’ He offered a subtly diminishing assessment in similar vein: ‘The writers were for the most part energetic young men, with the proper confidence in their own infallibility, and represented faithfully enough the main current of cultivated thought of their day.’

That may, however, be a little too diminishing, or at least it fails to account for the journal’s novelty and impact. The periodical culture of the first half of the 19th century had been dominated by stately quarterlies, led by the Whig Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802, and its Tory rival, the Quarterly Review, in 1809, followed by the Radicals’ Westminster Review in 1824. As the familiar labelling suggests, these were partisan productions, extending party warfare across the terrain of literature and culture. But they also reflected a slow-moving, even leisured society, where it could take days for the horse-drawn mail to reach more distant parts of the country, not to mention the time needed to read and absorb long essay-articles. There were polemical exchanges among the leading contributors to each organ, in which cut might be followed by thrust – but only after a long interval.

Changes in the technology of paper-making and printing combined with the growth of new markets to make periodicals potentially more profitable; scarcely less important were the first steps towards the establishment of a national railway network to speed up distribution. Beyond these changes in material conditions, there was also a shift in the public perception of ‘journalism’ (a coinage of the 1830s, imported from France). Those who wrote for daily or weekly newspapers in the late 18th century were generally looked down on as hacks, whereas the contributors to the quarterlies were seen as gentlemen (they were mostly, though not exclusively, male). They were members of the professional rather than the landed class, but still eligible for membership of the clubs that provided an important market for these publications. In addition, the revival of Oxford and Cambridge from the 1840s onwards generated a steady supply of articulate young men in search of a career. A graduate with a fluent pen who found the Bar too chancy, the civil service too dreary, and the Church too churchy could earn a decent living in mid-Victorian Britain if he published enough articles in the right places.

The Saturday Review led the way in exploiting these conditions, and it was soon joined by the new monthly magazines that were such a feature of mid-Victorian literary and intellectual life, such as the Cornhill, Macmillan’s, the Fortnightly Review (a monthly for most of its life, despite its name) and so on. By more recent standards, the new weekly offered strenuous stuff, the uninterrupted columns of print moving from the opening political leaders through to the longer ‘middle’ (a substantial opinion essay) and on to the unsparing book reviews. But what really distinguished the Saturday was its tone – self-consciously unillusioned, unsentimental, exacting, a tone that announced the presence of high-quality butchers specialising in the sacred cows of the age. ‘On Sunday the paper became part of the breakfast,’ the critic and novelist Walter Besant recalled; ‘it was read with savage joy.’ Writing fifty years later, the historian F.W. Maitland reflected: ‘As memoirs are published, it becomes always more evident that anyone who never wrote for the Saturday was no one.’

There was no more representative ‘Saturday Reviler’ than Leslie Stephen’s older brother, James Fitzjames Stephen. Born in 1829, son of the distinguished public official Sir James Stephen (whose grip on policy was so tight that while heading the Colonial Office he was known as ‘Mr Over-Secretary Stephen’), Fitzjames, as he was always known, followed the familiar route from Cambridge to the Bar. There his practice refused to flourish for some time, but three years in India as the Legal Member of the Legislative Council boosted his career (and certainly his earnings), while his energetic attempts at the codification of Indian law and then of criminal law in England further raised his profile. Elevated to the Bench in 1879, he was, all reports seem to agree, unsuited to the judicial role, impatience and occasional lapses in attention marring his record. But alongside his legal career, and sometimes dominating rather than supplementing it, he excelled as a contributor to the expanding world of Victorian periodicals. Perhaps his most enduring work in this medium was his critique of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty for its alleged sentimentalism and groundless optimism, a work first published as a series of twenty ‘letters’ to the Pall Mall Gazette and then republished as a book in 1873 under the title Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

The Saturday Review followed the practice of the day in publishing its contributions anonymously, but sustained scholarly ferreting over the past two generations or more has led to the unmasking of contributors’ identities in the majority of journals, the Saturday included. There are some special difficulties involved in identifying pieces written by Fitzjames Stephen (a list available when the first study of the paper was written in 1941 seems to have subsequently gone missing), but attributions based on various kinds of evidence, including stylistic analysis, reveal just how prolific he was, even by the standards of prolific Victorian essayists. For example, between November 1855 and February 1861 he wrote at least 185 pieces for the paper, mostly three or four-page ‘middles’, and, then, after a brief hiatus following a temporary falling-out, more than 130 more between February 1863 and September 1868. This was on top of the dozens of pieces he wrote for a variety of other periodicals during those years, not least the 1119 shorter articles he contributed to the daily Pall Mall Gazette in the decade after 1865, all the while filling his spare time with such light compositions as the five hundred pages of his General View of the Criminal Law of England, published in 1863. He wrote before starting his day’s business as a barrister, he wrote during lulls in the courtroom, he wrote on the train home, he wrote after his family had gone to bed at night. He wrote for many publications, but it was in just one of them that he made his really distinctive mark. ‘As a journalist,’ the cultural commentator T.H.S. Escott observed, ‘Fitzjames Stephen did not only help make the Saturday Review. He was the Saturday Review.’

On the Novel and Journalism contains 44 of his articles, 38 of them from the Saturday, the great majority from 1856-58 when he was in his late twenties and his career at the Bar was languishing. It’s a slightly curious compilation, reprinting a number of repetitive pieces in full, while others are merely given in the form of excerpts, without any indication of what has been omitted or why – this is ‘selected’ writings with a vengeance. The recurrent theme of the articles in this volume (no one who wrote as much as Stephen could avoid repeating themselves) is the failure of novelists, Dickens above all, to give an accurate representation of society. By this he did not mean some failure of imaginative power: he meant that they got their facts wrong. Moreover, they (Dickens again being the main culprit) went beyond the proper remit of fiction: they were guilty of ‘using novels to ventilate opinions’ and their opinions were of the ‘sentimental’ kind, blaming society for the sympathy inducing sufferings of the poor. Stephen’s politics were in no simple sense conservative – his utilitarianism trumped conventional party loyalties – but he was exasperated by the literary tears shed by writers who dwelled on unfortunate characters caught up in a heartless system. His articles evince a Podsnappian pride in England’s superiority to other nations, insisting that novelists ought to reflect that superiority in their fiction rather than harping on supposed abuses.

Dickens’s distortions mattered, Stephen claimed, because he exercised ‘a very wide and a very pernicious political and social influence’. Not, of course, among ‘men of sense and cultivation’, for whom it would be ‘as foolish to estimate his melodramatic and sentimental stock-in-trade gravely, as it would be to undertake a refutation of the jokes of the clown in a Christmas pantomime’. But ‘the vast majority of mankind, unfortunately, think little and cultivate themselves still less … The production, among such readers, of false impressions of the system of which they form a part – especially if the falsehood tends to render them discontented with and disaffected to the institutions under which they live – cannot but be a serious evil, and must often involve great moral delinquency.’ If a novel’s indictments of contemporary institutions are in fact baseless, ‘it becomes the duty of literary criticism to expose and to disown them.’ When we find ‘duty’ and ‘literary criticism’ conjoined in this way we sense that a good thrashing can’t be far off.

The essays in this volume repeat this charge relentlessly. Dickens presumed to use fiction as a form of social criticism, though he had no qualifications to pronounce on these matters: ‘He is utterly destitute of any kind of solid acquirements.’ The later novels were particularly egregious in this respect. A Tale of Two Cities does not display ‘a solid knowledge of the subject matter to which it refers’; ‘the literary execution of Little Dorrit is even worse than its inflated and pretentious sermonising object,’ and so on. He greatly prefers the light comedy of The Pickwick Papers to the portentous campaigning of Bleak House – a striking inversion of modern critical opinion. But although Dickens was undeniably popular, ‘it does not appear to us certain that his books will live, nor do we think that his place in literary history will be by the side of such men as Defoe and Fielding, the founders of the school to which he belongs.’ In one of his earliest pieces Stephen held up Robinson Crusoe as a fictional model, in which ‘all the incidents described are to the last degree simple, natural and regular.’

Several other novelists were put in the dock as minor accomplices of Dickens, including Charlotte Brontë and her biographer, Mrs Gaskell (shocking irresponsibility about proven facts in both cases), while Charles Reade was given a particularly severe wigging for his novel It Is Never Too Late to Mend. This tale was, admittedly, based on an actual legal case, but not closely enough for Fitzjames’s taste. ‘We have taken the trouble of comparing this novel minutely with the Report and Evidence of the Royal Commission and with the evidence on the trial.’ There follows much lawyerly tut-tutting at Reade’s ‘misrepresentations’.

Not that Stephen’s encounters with the literature of other countries could be relied on to enlarge his sympathies or extend his responsiveness: he proceeds with all the delicacy of John Bull in a china shop. He admires Balzac for attending to ‘the serious everyday business of life’, but ‘nothing can excuse the author of such a story as La Fille aux yeux d’or. It is altogether corrupt, abominable and loathsome, nor can a single word be said in defence of it.’ He then tries (in both senses) Flaubert: ‘The character of Madame Bovary herself is one of the most essentially disgusting that we ever happened to meet with … From the first page of the book to the last, not a person is introduced calculated to excite any other feelings than contempt or disgust.’ But, then, they are French.

Responding to Stephen’s critique of On Liberty, Henry Sidgwick spoke disapprovingly of ‘the reckless controversial tomahawk that Mr Stephen wields’. When I first read this, I thought it a colourful and original metaphor, surprising in Sidgwick’s normally pinstriped prose, but I discover from the OED that it was an established 19th-century usage; indeed, used figuratively as a verb it meant ‘to attack savagely or mercilessly in speech or (more usually) in writing; to “cut up” or demolish in a review or criticism’, and an 1819 citation refers, relevantly, to ‘the tomahawkers of the Edinburgh Review’. Showing fraternal partiality, if scarcely ardour, Leslie Stephen slipped into similar imagery when he wrote: ‘I venture to think that [Fitzjames] had few equals in good downright sledgehammer controversy.’ Reading through this selection of his articles enforces the unsurprising conclusion that vigorous use of the tomahawk and the sledgehammer doesn’t make for the subtlest literary criticism. Fitzjames had, it’s true, an undeniable facility for hitting the nail on the head, but he does so with such relish that it tends to leave the reader feeling sorry for the nail.

On this showing​ , it may not seem obvious why Stephen merits the lavish attention of this scholarly edition, six of a projected ten volumes having now appeared. His incisive writings on politics and law make a stronger case for his continuing importance. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity will, presumably, be attended to so long as Mill’s On Liberty remains a sacred text, and articles by Stephen could claim to have been one of the provocations that led Matthew Arnold to write some of the essays that became Culture and Anarchy, though both these connections suggest his secondary status. He is, apparently, assured of a place in the history of legal thought for his writings on the criminal law, and the fact that Leslie Stephen wrote his biography ought to secure a form of immortality, at least in the scholarly world. But the relentless prosecutorial vigour of his early literary reviewing quite soon becomes wearying; what may have seemed like a breath of fresh air in the mid-1850s comes to be experienced as rather a chill, unforgiving gale.

Although his opinions about literary topics, judged by the examples in this volume, can seem somewhat pedestrian, he gave forceful expression to what might be termed the pathos of manliness. His writing abounds with implicit injunctions to put your shoulders back, dammit, and look unpalatable facts full in the face. He was that paradoxical figure, a Benthamite pessimist, always anticipating the greatest unhappiness of the greatest number (it’s a measure of his dark views on human nature that his writings on punishment can make Bentham seem like an old softie). Like many of his contemporaries, he admired Mill’s early work on logic and political economy, but deplored the ‘sentimental’ later Mill whom he regarded as ‘a deserter from the proper principles of rigidity and ferocity in which he was brought up’. ‘Rigidity’ and ‘ferocity’ were among Stephen’s highest terms of praise.

He gave memorable expression to his conception of the human condition in the peroration that closes Liberty, Equality, Fraternity:

We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still, we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road, we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? ‘Be strong and of a good courage.’ Act for the best, hope for the best and take what comes. Above all, let us dream no dreams and tell no lies, but go our way, wherever it may lead, with our eyes open and our heads erect. If death ends all, we cannot meet it better. If not, let us enter whatever may be the next scene like honest men, with no sophistry in our mouths and no masks on our faces.

After this, it’s hard not to feel that the prospect of Stephen, teeth clenched, jaw jutting, striding up to the Pearly Gates might make even St Peter regret his career choice. But this was the authentic voice of a certain kind of Victorian agnosticism, inwardly priding itself on its resolute acceptance of truths, however unpleasant, and on its manly avoidance of ‘snivelling’. Although it was self-consciously hostile to all forms of ‘sentimentalism’ – this is where Stephen and the Saturday made such a good fit and why both Dickens and Mill got it in the neck – it exhibited, nonetheless, its own kind of pathos in needing to reassure itself that it was not falling below the standards set by a demanding cosmic housemaster. Such a perspective is deeply alien to contemporary sensibilities, but it may be all the more valuable for that. Just because we bruise so easily now, there may be something to be said for going a few rounds with a pugilist of Stephen’s force. In any event, he deserves better than simply to be remembered for having been Virginia Woolf’s uncle.