Not everyone reads Jane Austen like this anymore. What Hermione Lee once called “the tradition of affection” was a matter of biography, but it was also a matter of loving the novels as true pictures of true life. It is now normal for scholars and critics to find ways of undermining what any honest and ordinary reader can see for themselves: that the marriages at the end of Austen’s novels are perfectly happy. This is normal love in normal life, not Austen’s subtle attempt to question, complicate, or undermine (three favourite words of un-comic critics) her own endings.

In the Penguin introduction by Professor Ros Ballaster, Austen is discussed in terms that are alien to the popular imagination. It lacks affection, being concerned with the way Austen “renders” her novel, the way its ideas relate to other novels of the period, the way its “syntax… can serve to illustrate the process of categorization through differentiation”, and so on. This sort of opaque criticism, which seeks to confine the novel to some set of extra-literary ideas, can be revealing and insightful, but it can also be narrow, dull, and lifeless. It might be worthwhile, but not until we have shared our affection for Austen.

In An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis wrote that he had students whose essays about Jane Austen gave no indication that she was a comic writer. “We are breeding up a race of young people,” Lewis worried, “who are as solemn as the brutes.” The problem with such solemnity—which balked at the idea of The Miller’s Tale being written to make one laugh, and which called Twelfth Night “a penetrating study of the individual’s relation to society”—is that it makes “solemn men, but not serious readers”: “they have not fairly and squarely laid their minds open, without preconception, to the works they read.”

No-one could reasonably accuse Ros Ballaster of Lewis’s whole charge-sheet, but her approach is indicative of a whole modern mood of criticism: she prefers to stand outside the book and say things like “A relativistic terminology of comparatives and negatives asserts the security of positive and absolute essences” rather than to deal with the book in the manner in which it presents itself. Jane Austen had no need of this sort of jargon, and gives the impression that she would have no truck with it; so if we are to treat her as primary herself, as the genius whose work precedes us, we ought to be able to discard it ourselves. No doubt this sort of work is valuable to some people, but it is not very valuable to readers who wish to inhabit Jane Austen’s work.

Last year, another such attempt was made upon Austen. In Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness, Inger Brodey called the endings of Austen’s novels “artificial, gratuitous, and anti-romantic.” Brodey’s speculations about Austen herself and her supposed personal ideas about marriage are based on merely a few lines from letters that offer no such small or single-minded reading. At the end of Sense and Sensibility, Elinor and Edward are finally married, and Austen writes,

Mrs. Jennings’s prophecies, though rather jumbled together, were chiefly fulfilled; for she was able to visit Edward and his wife in their Parsonage by Michaelmas, and she found in Elinor and her husband, as she really believed, one of the happiest couples in the world. They had in fact nothing to wish for, but the marriage of Colonel Brandon and Marianne, and rather better pasturage for their cows.

Austen tells us they are one of the happiest couples in the world, goes to the trouble, in fact, of agreeing with Mrs. Jennings. But Brodey interprets the presence of cows as “cutting… anticlimax.” This is to miss entirely not only the mood of the passage (note it is rather better pasturage), but to alienate it from the weight and spirit of the entire novel. Ever since Elinor is forced to leave her home in Norland at the beginning, she goes in search of a settlement (“settle” recurs significantly throughout). It is all she wishes for to have the love of Edward and a pastoral home. We all know people like this. Some of us, indeed, are people like this. Jane Austen was an Englishwoman of the countryside herself and we might speculate about her in that vein as readily as we make her into a feminist.

A few chapters earlier, it was said: “they were neither of them quite enough in love to think that three hundred and fifty pounds a-year would supply them with the comforts of life.” This humour reflects a practical problem, and we ought not to read it as undermining Elinor’s feelings. Even John Keats wrote: “Love in a hut, with water and a crust, / Is—Love, forgive us!—cinders, ashes, dust.” And it is Elinor who breaks the resolution not to get married until the parsonage is fully repaired. In a novel that makes her “self-command” the central virtue which others must learn, that is a significant breach of feeling.

With an income quite sufficient to their wants thus secured to them, they had nothing to wait for after Edward was in possession of the living, but the readiness of the house, to which Colonel Brandon, with an eager desire for the accommodation of Elinor, was making considerable improvements; and after waiting some time for their completion, after experiencing, as usual, a thousand disappointments and delays from the unaccountable dilatoriness of the workmen, Elinor, as usual, broke through the first positive resolution of not marrying till every thing was ready, and the ceremony took place in Barton church early in the autumn.

The repetition of “as usual” should be noticed. The workmen do what workmen usually do; Elinor does not what she would usually do, but what engaged couples so often do. Others in the novel have rushed to marriage (the unthinkable Lucy Steele) but it is Elinor and Edward’s rush that gets affectionate approval. The cows must be read in light of this section, which shows us that all practical concerns are gone, apart from the little ones we expect to live with, even when we are happy. An anti-climax is “A disappointing or underwhelming end to an exciting, impressive, or highly anticipated event or series of events.” (OED) From the perspective of Elinor and Edward’s other problems—his cruel mother, his unfortunate engagement, her lack of money, their lack of settlement, Lucy’s nasty gossiping character, and on and on—their ending is hardly underwhelming. They have finally removed the barriers that everyone else put between them.

As I said, Sense and Sensibility is a vicious book. There are many wonderfully entertaining moments, such as when it is said of Mrs. Ferrars that “She was not a woman of many words; for unlike people in general, she proportioned them to the number of her ideas.” Elinor and Edward’s contentment has to be seen against that background too. Compared to all the rogues, Edward’s “amiable heart” is indeed admirable. Much of the viciousness is directed at the dreadful villain Willoughby. When Elinor reads his egregious letter to Marianne (later confessed to be dictated by his fiancee), we are told he has departed from “the common decorum of a gentleman” and has exposed himself to be “deep in hardened villainy.” Elinor is “indignant”, finds him “abhorrent.” Further revelations make him only more ghastly. And yet, despite what we might wish, he gets his own happy ending.

But that he was for ever inconsolable, that he fled from society, or contracted an habitual gloom of temper, or died of a broken heart, must not be depended on—for he did neither. He lived to exert, and frequently to enjoy himself. His wife was not always out of humour, nor his home always uncomfortable; and in his breed of horses and dogs, and in sporting of every kind, he found no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity.

This is more like an anti-climax, in the sense that it is out of keeping with what came before—a falling unjustified by the rising that preceded it. Willoughby has been humbled and it is the reader’s expectations—as Austen’s phrase “must not be depended on” makes clear—that are being let-down. The villain went on to live a pretty normal life, with no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity.

Properly, though, an anti-climax comes after a period of excitement or intensity. That is what we get when Willoughby arrives late at night to hear if Marianne is dead. For several pages, Austen presents not her cool and rational prose, but something wilder and more alarming. When he arrived, “The flaring lamps of a carriage were immediately in view.” Elinor, the character with the most “self-command”, is seen “starting back with a look of horror” when Willoughby walks in. He has spent the whole day in a frantic ride to reach her: “I left London this morning at eight o’clock, and the only ten minutes I have spent out of my chaise since that time procured me a nuncheon at Marlborough.” This is high drama, and the account he gives of himself is full of revelations and astonishments. At the end “he almost ran out of the room.” And no wonder, he told Elinor he almost hoped his wife would die so he could marry Marianne later on. To go from that to the news that he lives in “domestic felicity” is not quite an anti-climax, but a carefully controlled bathos, a deflating of our expectations which brings out the novel’s angry sense of injustice.

The pasturage of Elinor and Edward’s cows cannot be seriously compared to that. There is no drama from which to make an anti-climax. The cows and the land are part of the settlement that has been wished for throughout the novel. There is one other mention of cows, in Vol. III, Chapter V. (Chapter XLI in continuous order). When Lucy and Edward are going to be married and Colonel Brandon offers Edward the living at Delaford, the narrative says of Lucy:

As for Colonel Brandon, she was not only ready to worship him as a saint, but was moreover truly anxious that he should be treated as one in all worldly concerns; anxious that his tithes should be raised to the utmost; and secretly resolved to avail herself, at Delaford, as far as she possibly could, of his servants, his carriage, his cows, and his poultry.

Now, anyone who loves this novel will wish to hiss a little when Lucy Steele appears. She is a liar: selfish, vain, and venal. She sees the cows, as she sees Colonel Brandon, as a resource, something to be milked. The irony in this passage is unforgiving. There is nothing Lucy will not pluck for her own gain. Whereas Elinor and Edward are more pastoral figures, who wish for better pasturage. These are the ordinary problems we might expect of two such figures, one of who is not entirely practical, and who are choosing to live in a vicarage in the country, unlike so many of the others who chase money, status, and the gaiety of London. For the critics who read like the solemn students C.S. Lewis identified, this will all be obscured by the ideas they have already hung upon the hook of the novel. But for those people who have read Austen as part of their real lives, who have fallen in love, who have had nothing to wish for, it all makes the sort of sense that needs no criticism, no careful unfolding of the supposed lie.

It might seem unnecessary to spend time arguing with such people, but some of these ways of reading Austen are in fact creeping out into the world. Criticism of this sort gets a popular hearing in books like Jane Austen, the Secret Radical and articles in the New York Times (that piece is an introduction to a new edition). The recent Netflix adaptation of Persuasion (while being perfectly acceptable on its own terms) couldn’t quite cope with the meekness in Anne and so dispensed with it. And so a new way of reading is reinforced. But there is a reason why Ang Lee’s version of Sense and Sensibility remains so popular, which is that England is still full of women like Elinor, and they still wish to have old truths expressed, ordinary life taken seriously enough to make a work of great art, and the way we live—or perhaps the way we wish we still lived—to be made into an issue of aesthetic and moral significance. The cows really are a part of Elinor’s happiness, just as they are for so many people who see fields and farms from their window every morning today. Elinor and Willoughby end up with much more similar outcomes than we might hope: in his case, it is bathetic, in hers a question of fulfillment.

The more I read Jane Austen, the more I come to appreciate her quietness. Throughout Sense and Sensibility, comments are made about the consideration—or inconsideration—characters give to each other when they are upset. When Elinor is trying to retain her equanimity, when Marianne is hysterical, Austen is alert to who gives them peace, who intrudes, who closes doors with the consideration of silence. She is not just a novelist of what is seen, but of what is unseen. She brings to our attention the various aspects of life that many people never think about, and she shows us how they work upon our inner lives. This is a very English way of living. Her heroines are so often introverts or learn to love the retreat of their mind. Marianne’s resolution at the end is to read for six hours a day and thus to acquire the “instruction” that will tame her “self-provocation.” Solitude is a virtue from the opening page when we hear that the Dashwoods live in the center of their property. That is the spell the opening line casts like a fairy tale. The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. It sounds like this is all happening once upon a time. Jane Austen’s magic is to make it happen now, with the sort of people who are always intruding upon our solitude, imposing upon our feelings, and with the sort of situations that make us realise we must be the ones to become worthy of being praised.

To me, the most interesting and revealing modern scholarship about Jane Austen is the work that sees her as a participant in the Enlightenment, especially as a reader of thinkers like David Hume and Adam Smith. (I am thinking of the work of Peter Knox-Shaw, Shannon Chamberlain, Cecil E. Bohanon, Michelle Albert Vachris and several others.) Austen shares with Smith her sense that we must be worthy of being loved. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith wrote, “What so great happiness as to be beloved, and to know that we deserve to be beloved? What so great misery as to be hated, and to know that we deserve to be hated?” That could be an epigraph to all of Austen’s novels, but it is especially pertinent to the settlement at the end of Sense and Sensibility. This is precisely what Elinor has not known, and what Marianne has falsely believed. Elinor has waited for confirmation that she is beloved while Marianne has been deceived and must repair herself. Smith’s sentiment is also precisely what Austen shows us about Willoughby: he knows that he deserves to be hated. This is not an art that self-undermines; it is an art of satisfactory justice, which turns a fairy-tale into a story of real feelings, real life. Elinor and Marianne are beloved and deserve to be beloved. Nothing that Willoughby or Mrs. Ferrars does or says can change that now.

And that is why the tradition of affection for Jane Austen survives, whatever else is said about her. She understands the world too well to be too much overshadowed by her critics.

Soon as the morning trembles o’er the sky,

And unperceived unfolds the spreading day,

Before the ripened field the reapers stand

In fair array, each by the lass he loves,

To bear the rougher part and mitigate

By nameless gentle offices her toil.

At once they stoop, and swell the lusty sheaves;

While through their cheerful band the rural talk,

The rural scandal, and the rural jest

Fly harmless, to deceive the tedious time

And steal unfelt the sultry hours away.

Behind the master walks, builds up the shocks,

And, conscious, glancing oft on every side

His sated eye, feels his heart heave with joy.

The gleaners spread around, and here and there,

Spike after spike, their sparing harvest pick.

Be not too narrow, husbandmen! but fling

From the full sheaf with charitable stealth

The liberal handful. Think, oh! grateful think

How good the God of harvest is to you,

Who pours abundance o’er your flowing fields,

While these unhappy partners of your kind

Wide-hover round you, like the fowls of heaven,

And ask their humble dole. The various turns

Of fortune ponder; that your sons may want

What now with hard reluctance faint ye give.

From Thomson‘s Seasons (1730), ‘Autumn’

JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis used to regularly share a pub table in Oxford to discuss their work. The pair will now be honoured side by side in Westminster Abbey, which will celebrate the author of The Lord of the Rings with a memorial in Poets’ Corner, The Times can reveal.

Only feet away from where Lewis, the author of the Narnia series, has a plaque on the abbey floor, Tolkien is to be honoured with an ornate 2.5-metre memorial fitted to a pillar, depicting a magical tree with a variety of fruits and flowers that he frequently drew.

It will be unveiled next spring to mark the 90th anniversary of Tolkien’s The Hobbit and the 50th anniversary of The Silmarillion, which was published posthumously.

Full story in the Times. And information from Westminster Abbey.

The problem with the Princeton syllabus is not the individual courses. Fine, study socialism and Sondheim! The problem is the overall balance. These courses are all held in equal regard. The problem is the lack of insistence upon the canonical works of English. The problem is contemporary fiction instead of Shakespeare, dolls instead of George Eliot. Of the twelve courses you take as an English major, none is obliged to be on Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth—authors our grandmothers might have read as school-leavers. Yes, the syllabus is ideological, but it is also just lame.

You will see that I am not making the “classics should be on the syllabus” argument but the slightly more grouchy claim that “the long stretch of English literature should be required.” One counterargument is that the real problem is to do with the administrative structure of the university. Sure. But if it changes, it needs to be changed with an aim in mind. I am arguing for an aim.

My piece is explicitly addressed to students, since the colleges won’t always make the case for the requirements to run from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. So many pieces about the English syllabus don’t address them directly.

You are only young once, and you should make sure by hook or by crook that you spend your youth on the best books, the best writing, the work that is going to be most strongly felt in the blood and the heart. You should not meekly accept the patronizing and ideological manner in which a vast and ancient tradition has been condensed into a series of courses about gender, race, and Theory with no requirement for you to do battle with many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.

And I use Woolf and Derrida to make my case.

There was a time when this was so obvious it didn’t need saying. There was a time when everyone who read Virginia Woolf’s extraordinary essays (she was the best critic of the twentieth century, bar none: you can keep your Empsons, your Trillings, your Vendlers—Woolf is the one) knew that the access she so rightfully demanded was access to the tradition. The author of A Room of One’s Own was a great reader of the tradition: as a teenager she was knocking on her father’s study to borrow Gibbon and Cowper. She wrote for the future, but she read from the past. It would have been unthinkable to her not to have read Chaucer and Browne and Defoe and Keats. To follow her example would be to read with abandon in the old ways.

This is what I want to tell young people now—don’t listen to the discourse, don’t pay attention to the think pieces and the debates. That will all be gone with the wind tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. If you really want to read English, read the way Virginia Woolf read. Read, for that matter, the way Derrida read—as deeply as possible in the great works of the past from Plato to Rousseau to Conrad. Don’t accept courses in literary criticism that begin—begin!—with Hegel and pass through Marx and Judith Butler.

This is not just a piece on on side of the debate about “woke” departments or whatever. I also make the case that the scholarship of English departments is better than the critics will admit. No, it is not all Marxist waffle. There’s a great deal of excellent work being produced, but the critics don’t read it, so they don’t know.

I spend a reasonable amount of time reading academic literary scholarship. It’s true: A lot of it is dross. It is quite acceptable to make boldly personal, left-wing statements that misrepresent the view of “neo-liberal thinkers” without even so much as a footnote. If the people who criticized the English department read the work, they would have many of their suspicions confirmed.

But that is only half the story. In the last few years, I have read really excellent scholarly books from people like Debra Gettelman, Rhodri Lewis, Hollis Robbins, James Bednarz and Gregg Hecimovich, covering Shakespeare, the nineteenth-century novel, and African American poetry. There are also major projects underway publishing the letters of Samuel Richardson, the complete works of Francis Bacon, the complete works of Henry James. This is just a small sample, based on my own selective reading. If the people who criticized the English department read the work, they would realize things are better than they think.

I am less interested in the discourse than this piece might make it seem. All I care about is the English syllabus which, as C.S. Lewis said, is practically given to us by nature. If young people cannot get that at colleges they should either demand better or do it on their own. You get one life: don’t spend it in a degree that won’t make you study the most worthwhile authors!

If the problem is that people don’t read enough, that schools are getting worse, then—take your life into your own hands! Do the reading yourself! Don’t let the culture drag you down! If you don’t know what it’s like to memorize Keats and Shakespeare because your school has let you down, then go out and get it for yourself. And then demand it from your college.

Read the whole thing here. Perhaps I will write separately about “my idea of an English syllabus.”

There is an academic myth (vaguely Victorian in feeling but probably, like most Victorian principles, dating back a half-century earlier) that scholars study facts whereas critics make it all up out of their own heads. It afflicts English studies as it does most others, and had a recent airing in John Carey’s inaugural lecture at Oxford which proposed that scholars handle texts whereas critics only vandalise them by reading them. This double and triple illusion usefully affords occasion for simple restatements: that, for instance, to read at all is in itself a creative and interpretative act, an evidence of mind which it dignifies human beings to perform; that scholars and critics alike read inventively, to some extent knowing what they are looking for and to some extent finding it; that there is no such thing as a ‘text’, and if there were it would degrade literature to be treated as one – and there was probably no such thing as a fact, either, until some human being invented it. The only difference is that some people are much better readers than others, whether of books or of reality, better in the sense of ‘truer’, more accurate and more revealing: and may well be helped to be so by being rid of the illusion that as ‘scholars’ they have some easy, advantaged road to the truth.

My favourite Everett essay is: ‘The Fatness of Falstaff.’ And here’s another great quote from Everett: “to be chewed over in critical prose is a fate no poem deserves.” That is from the opening of “Larkin’s Edens.”

Philip Larkin has gone down in print as saying that his poems are too simple to profit from criticism. It is true that to be chewed over in critical prose is a fate that no poem deserves. But to believe without reservations in the simplicity of Larkin’s work is another matter — except in so far as any artistry is a simplification of life, an abnormally clear noticing of human conditions that come to the rest of us fogged with the general imprecisions of the usual. To this degree, all good writing is magnificently simple. But it is unsafe for anyone other than its writer to say so. For the simple gets confused with quite different things — with the literal; with the crude; with the artless and sociological. Larkin is quite often read as a simple observer of contemporary English society, a realistic reporter whose detachment from what he sees (for even the most literal reader can see that there is some difference between ‘Here’ and a British Railways timetable) is explained as the writer’s disaffiliation of mood: for as poet, Larkin is almost universally described as ‘depressed’, his writing melancholy, his scenes a dreary summary of an England to which principle attaches him but which he cannot bring himself much to like. It seems therefore worth while to set down a different impression. Larkin’s great art is to appear to achieve the literal while in fact doing something altogether other; his three volumes of major verse are the odd reticent triumph of a self-undercutting artist whose skills make him a ‘secret poet’ as some men are secret agents or secret drinkers. And the results in Larkin’s case are so far from the sociological, and so other than the dreary, that the poet might be described as creating the most potent contemporary images of Eden.

One need only open the newspaper, hear the latest family news, or walk down certain streets to think of the reveller hasting to his wine while the mourner is burying his friend. Johnson got these ideas directly from Shakespeare, of course, who has various of his characters tell us that “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together,” but it was the power of Johnson’s own invention that made this passage sing. What a splendid touch to say “sublunary,” to give not only the sense of Shakespeare as a secular writer, but to invoke in our minds images of young people scattering and frolicking under the moon, of fairies creeping out in mischief, of the mystical and magical side of ordinary life. However stern and reactionary he was, Johnson was no prisoner of the rational mind: he had one of the strongest imaginations in the history of English Literature.

Critics are always trying to make sense of Johnson’s scheme, to bring some order to the conservatism and classicism of his works, to claim that his principles were bounded by prejudice, and to get out from under the weight of his influence by deflating his pomposity. It will not work. The man who was canonical in poetry, biography, and moral essays, who wrote a Dictionary, edited and critiqued Shakespeare, and produced the Lives of the Poets cannot be captured. He himself is too various, too much a man of parts, to be contained. He once said of the poet Gray that “he was dull in a new way and that made many people think him great.” The central truth of Johnson, as man and a thinker and a writer, is that he was never dull.

As I say in the opening, I brought one book “for pleasure” to America, and that was the marked-up, dog-eared copy of Boswell that I have been going back to for some twenty years. And I deal briefly with the idea of the “common reader”, after which this blog is named: “his greatest care was always for the ordinary reader. So important are we to Johnson that he named us as common readers.”

Read the whole thing.

Second, PISA scores. OECD reading scores have fallen from around 2012 onwards. This coincides with the mass adoption of smartphones. Causation?

Unlikely. As you can see, US reading scores actually improved after 2012. Similarly, England’s reading scores showed a small increase in performance after 2012 which returned to 2006 levels in 2025:

The Dark Ages implies television and phones are the main cause of cognitive decline. This fails to explain the patterns in PISA scores. Why did England and Scotland fall so precipitously from 2000 to 2005 whilst America improved? Why did England and Estonia hold steady after 2015 whilst most other OECD countries declined? How have Singapore, Taiwan, Japan avoided decline altogether?

A better explanation is that a country’s education system is more important than its television diffusion.¹ East Asian PISA and IQ scores have probably remained constant, or even risen, because of their rigorous education systems and intensive tutoring cultures. The two European countries which avoid PISA-malaise – Estonia and England – have more rigorous education systems than their neighbours. They (more or less) use the knowledge-rich curricula, direct instruction, and systematic phonics - techniques which their more progressive neighbours abandoned between 1975-1990.

I worry identifying television and social media as the cause of PISA decline will, in effect, exculpate poor education policymaking. “It wasn’t the fault of the curricula we stripped of knowledge, it was the phones!”

And here is discussing the problems with modern “learning goals” as the cause of the growing trend of “hasty reading”, i.e. skimming not immersing.

The focus on skills sees reading as a generic transferable strategy where ‘finding the main idea’ is the goal. When generic skills are the dominant metric then the texts becomes a secondary consideration, merely the substrate in which the plants of ‘evaluation’, ‘comparing’ and ‘inference’ are seeded and grown.

Under this model, ‘Frankenstein’ and a four paragraph article about KPop Demon Hunters become interchangeable. Texts are chosen to create those generic skills and so we regrettably, we have shifted more and more towards a reading culture of extracts and compressed reading.

But reading comprehension is not predominantly a skill, it is the visible layer of a much deeper set of competencies based on domain knowledge, reading fluency and I would argue, a set of cultural and environmental norms which value sustained attention to particular texts.

Imagine two children, one who grows up in a house where reading is encouraged or enforced, and one who is not. It used to be the case that the second child was made to read books at school. Their teacher checked their reading record; someone sat with them and heard them read; a book was assigned as a class book; they were expected to show some knowledge of the whole book; and so on. Obviously, not everyone did this to the same degree of achievement. But that was the standard expectation. That is increasingly not the case, as children are taught from extracts and whole books are assigned less and less. (Talk to some homeschoolers: this is a big reason why parents feel the need to change their child’s schooling.) So now, whether that child goes home to a television or a phone is of far less significance than the loss of the standard that was once imposed and is now being lost. Everyone blames someone else: the teacher blame the administrators; the schools blame the parents; the parents blame the phones. They might all have a point. Who does it help? The starting point has to be the strict belief in the necessity of reading books, structured, enforced, and encouraged through schools. Whatever change is needed, it must be a change that will bring that vital idea back to dominance.

Imagine you read, as I did this week, that the phrase “self-command” was not widely used in eighteenth century moral discourse outside the work of Adam Smith, and that you felt sceptical about this claim. You have three options. First, get out a lot primary texts and start making notes. Second, look for existing scholarship that is based on primary texts. Third, ask Claude or another LLM.

Whether or not you ask Claude depends partly on your moral views. Some of you simply won’t ask. Fair enough. But… after spending about 45 minutes asking Claude and GPT 6 Astra about this topic (with follow ups about other thinkers, clarifications, prompts to broaden or narrow the investigation, how this relates to Sense and Sensibility, and so on) I was a little depressed at the inevitability of LLM dominance in this area.

It will still be worthwhile to read (some of) those primary texts, but the work of historical scholarship is surely about to be undercut quite severely. Of course, this is old news. But in light of the mathematicians revolt against AI, it is newly relevant. Whether or not we approve of what is happening, the role of humanities scholars, critics, and practitioners of all kinds is going to change. Even if it changes because a new group of people find new ways of competing with existing practitioners.

The usual defence—that we wish to know what people think, not machines—seems inadequate here. I do, to some extent, wish to know what people think. But on the question of the use and import of the phrase (and concept) of self-command between 1750-1800 I also just want to know the truth. If we have to choose between knowing much less of the truth but knowing it from human work and knowing more of it from AI, for how long will we be able to choose not knowing?

Perhaps for a long time! This forces various questions, such as the distinction between scholarship and criticism, the place of the canon, the public role of criticism, and so on. The humanities will surely have more human involvement than mathematics, but still much less involvement in these sorts of factual questions. Not only can a vast amount of work be done in a sort amount of time, but everyone can work to their own knowledge frontier. I prefer to read things for myself, and I use Claude to find things to read rather than to “get answers” per se. (I end up looking at more scholarly papers when I ask Claude.) But there cannot be a viable future without the use of LLMs.

There are some people who already know enough about the usage of self-command. They don’t need to do any of the options I outlined above. But others have to choose which margin gets their time—the question they are already working on (for which this is a tangential or marginal issue) or this new question. Obviously, most of us, most of the time, will want to do enough research on side-topics to keep going with our original project. Everyone is in this position for a whole slew of questions of whatever size.

At which point AI use becomes imperative. Horses running against steam-trains won’t preserve very much. Horse riders still need oats that were brought into town on the rails, for one thing. Some concession to the new pace and order of things has to be made in order to preserve human work. If you create a loose collective of “human only” humanities people, but their work goes out of date much much faster, how viable will that be? Perhaps more people will leave humanities work and will preserve it as a hobby, but they will often be working with AI in whatever other occupation they move to. Concessions need only be minimal. In these examples, I am talking about AI as a sort of encyclopedia, index, concordance, dictionary, and guide.

One simple way to preserve humanities work for the humans is to keep the archives out of the training data. But under such a protectionist scheme, a new class of moral problems arise. I already find it hard to justify that the British Library hasn’t digitised some of its major collections. Why shouldn’t a scholar—or indeed an ambitious teenager in Newcastle—be able to read the Nelson papers online? Or the LSE Women’s Archive? It is currently too expensive to digitise all of this, but the new wave of AI philanthropy could surely be well-directed here. Either we believe that knowledge is for everyone or we don’t…

It is an inevitable step to make that knowledge available via an LLM. Yes, usage will be high variance, with some people getting smarter and some going the other way. But usage of current technology including books is already like that! I would not undo the superb work of the online George Eliot archive, or the online version of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, two websites upon which I am quite reliant, along with the online edition of John Stuart Mill, Project Gutenberg, and many others. Asking Claude to review them for me as part of my overall work pattern hardly seems immoral. I have read quite a lot of George Eliot’s papers. Am I morally obliged to re-read them, or to find my notes, every time I have a new stray thought? Do I have to use an index rather than Claude every time? Can I check how viable a line of research might be? Can I use it to test my hypothesis against existing scholarship and pursue those lines of enquiry? Am I only allowed to find new things to read in person in the library? (To be clear, that is what I miss most about the London Library and I expect that sort of activity to go up in value, but still.)

In the overall balance of humanities work, I therefore think that there will be less scholarship in the long run and more criticism. Finding out what was said will be less and less economically justifiable unless it is part of making some bigger assessment, being an enthusiast or a hater, or as part of a synthetic project. We will always want to read and discuss books with other humans. That will include humans who read obscure historical texts! But the “knowledge work” of organising, interpreting, and disseminating the contextual, archival, and other material will surely be unrecognisably different within a few years. If for no other reason than that the ambitious teenagers in Newcastle simply will be using AIs.

I should say, though many of you will hate it, that having asked Claude and GPT many questions of this sort, the new competition is going to be tough! And the new models are going to be better very soon. As Tyler Cowen said to me, “there are good reasons why people hate what you are saying about the AIs, and those reasons correlate with how good the AIs are.” Like I said, the AIs are depressingly good.

To end on an optimistic note, it is also probably the case that these developments leave a bigger overall role for humans in the humanities than in disciplines like mathematics. And so the relative status of humanities people will rise thanks to AI. It just may not be the status of the existing crop of people.

Funnily enough, I made no use of AI as I thought this piece through.

This is the distinction, as Adam Kirsch puts it in The Modern Element, between “art and magic”. We call this the distinction between enchanters and engineers, or between Prospero in his cell and Faust in his study. The magic of poetry is the way that it can create a new sense of the world—can make you believe in things not merely unbelievable, but which we know to be untrue. The art of poetry is in the specific wording of the spell—change the words, get the order wrong, and the magic will not manifest.

Critics are often divided into two groups, like sheep and goats—Iliad people and Odyssey people; comedy people and tragedy people; Tolstoy people and Dostoevsky people—and we can divide them along the lines of art and magic too. When I was young, the two most obvious examples of these groups were Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom. Vendler was a practitioner of Art criticism: no word could be examined too closely, nor related too carefully to the rest of the poem. Bloom was a Magic critic, who believed poetry was what Keats called “A drainless shower/Of light”, which illuminated new realms.

Of course, all such distinctions are to some extent false. You might think Samuel Johnson was an Art critic, judging poets’ care for their meter and rhyme, but we find him under the sway of poetry all the time. He was often overpowered, especially by Shakespeare, who haunted him always, by what he called “the force of poetry, that force which calls new powers into being, which embodies sentiment, and animates matter.” That force is the essence of poetry’s magic.

For some of the Magic critics, poetry gives us access to a divine realm, a place beyond this world, Platonic, eternal, higher. Poetry is Magic in the sense that it is spiritual, giving access beyond what we can ordinarily experience. For the Art critics, Kirsch says, following Poe, poetry is a kind of mechanism that plays upon our feelings and evokes sensations. Clearly, both sorts of critic believe in Johnson’s force of poetry, but for different reasons: one because of the spiritual power of the poet, the other for his ability to work a technical use of language.

Again, we are loaded with a false distinction, but still a useful one. It is merely a trick of the rhyme, or is there a “really real” dimension of poetry, something spiritual, closer to prayer? Is poetry Longinian or Aristotelian?

Trying to answer that question is important for poets—and especially for poet critics like Wordsworth and T.S. Eliot and Philip Sidney—but it should perhaps be of less concern to critics. Criticism is not like philosophy: the primary aim of both is to know a truth of the world; but to understand a poem and to express that understanding requires different standards, different methods. The critic notices differently. When criticism becomes more like philosophy, as it often does, it has to be bound to more philosophical standards, rather than allowing the principles of criticism to be a method of finding the truth.

If criticism isn’t going to be a half-formed philosophy by other means, what is it to be? Various answers have been given, but they converge on the subjective. Muriel Spark thought, for example, that some people have a sixth literary sense. This was a naturally arising ability, not one that could be taught. Some people were simply more attuned to poetry than others. I once read in the LRB a splendidly robust apology for this view of criticism, which asserted that it was an affront to the nature of art to talk about “texts” and to have such theoretical rules of criticism.1 Criticism is simply the intelligent discussion of literature and some people are better at it than others. We might call this the Common Sense school. Spark’s “sixth sense” doesn’t sound like common sense at first blush, but these phrases both denote something that can be honed and practiced, but not made into a method. In the end, there is only the reader and the poem.

Johnson was a member of this school—he worked by establishing principles, not by judging from them. He did not arrive with a set of ideas or methods, be they close reading or French Theory, but sought instead

to distinguish those means of pleasing which depend upon known causes and rational deduction, from the nameless and inexplicable elegancies which appeal wholly to the fancy, from which we feel delight, but know not how they produce it, and which may well be termed the enchantresses of the soul.

For Johnson, there is both Art and Magic in poetry, and the critic has to be able to see both the “rational” and the “inexplicable” side of poetry. It is this willingness to discuss the “inexplicable” that makes criticism a separate discipline from philosophy. The failures of Theory and critique largely center around this fact. Poetry does not wish for the world to be ordered to a theory, but for the world, our experience, to be ordered to a poem.

We can see this distinction most clearly using terms from A New Mimesis, in which A.D. Nuttall distinguished between opaque and transparent criticism. The opaque critics stay outside the art: they are formalist and make the formalities of “the text” opaque, so we can see how the trick is done, as it were. The transparent critics leave the formal techniques transparent, so that they can be inside the art.

This is an example of opaque criticism: “In the opening of King Lear folk-tale elements proper to narrative are infiltrated by a finer-grained dramatic mode.” This is an example of transparent: “Cordelia cannot bear to have her love for her father made the subject of a partly mercenary game.” To many critics, the opaque method is the only real criticism. But Nuttall is right:

If the critic never enters the dream he remains ignorant about too much of the work. The final result may be a kind of literary teaching which crushes literary enjoyment… The student who talks excitedly about Becky Sharp will find himself isolated in the seminar. Another student who is careful to speak of ‘the Becky Sharp motif’ tactfully assumes the central role in the discussion.

Both modes of criticism can be valid, but it is noticeable that the transparent has room for the opaque, but not vice versa. To talk of entering the dream of the poem is to put yourself beyond the pale of the opaque, formal, theoretical, Art critic. This might not be true of Vendler, but it is true of the Belseys, the Terence Hawkes, the Jamesons. Art critics often lack Magic.

What encompasses it all, of course, is Common Sense criticism. Once we accept that there is no role for criticism to do the work of philosophy—if we really wish for the truth, we must either enlist a philosopher, or practice philosophy in our criticism—criticism is free to be informal. We do not have to ordain a method, because we do not have a method-specific goal in mind. Scientists must work to particular methods if their experiments are to be successful. Critics are able to train themselves through wide-knowledge and to develop taste and the ability to develop principles and apply them, all as a means of being able to understand and react to a work of literature.

These arguments are recurring in criticism today. The question of “close reading” has become predominant in books like On Close Reading by John Guillory and Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century edited by and Johanna Winant. Ever since the post-modernists and post-structuralists realized they had lost sight of the idea of beauty there has been an attempt to fuse what George Steiner called “the old criticism” with some more modern sensibilities. Elaine Scarry’s 1999 lectures On Beauty and Being Just were a turning point away from the detachments of people like Catherine Belsey, who believed Shakespeare’s plays are not works of art but “a location of cultural history”.

It was the rise of “close reading” in the early twentieth century that began so many decades of anxiously trying to justify the literary method. In the late nineteenth century, George Saintsbury was happy to list which of the heroines in nineteenth century novels he was in love with, and which of them he would marry, but by the time of William Empson, criticism became something more like an abstract game, in which the parts of the poem were constantly reorganized and juxtaposed, puns and ambiguities were “uncovered”, and everything began to drift away from human feeling, experience, and history. Saintsbury was a splendid critic, who was making serious claims about the nature of literary character, but it is Empson’s dance of the wits that has lasted.

There is something wonderful about close reading, as it began with I.A. Richards and was practiced by — indeed, still is practiced by — Christopher Ricks. This sort of reading brings so much of the mechanism of the poem to the surface, so that we can, in Johnson’s words, “improve opinion into knowledge”, and see that what gave us a sharp or spooky feeling was rhetorical trope, a hidden allusion, a series of sounds. Close reading can seem like the highest form of criticism, because it is about the words themselves. It cannot not be aesthetic, being so closely focussed on the reading of the poem.

Alas, that the world could be so simple! Even in the glories of Ricks, there is, at the worst moments, something detached about this method. Outside of a critic of his powers, close reading can often descend into a demystifying process. It has to be done as part of the overall belief in the force of poetry (a phrase Ricks used as the title of one of his best books). As Johnson said in the Preface to Shakespeare,

Parts are not to be examined till the whole has been surveyed; there is a kind of intellectual remoteness necessary for the comprehension of any great work in its full design and its true proportions; a close approach shews the smaller niceties, but the beauty of the whole is discerned no longer.

Close reading is a sort of test of ability, a way of assuring ourselves that we have not misapprehended the poem, but it cannot replace the beauty or impression of the whole. If we wish to be truly aesthetic, to inhabit the dream of the poem, we have to accept that close reading is a very useful sort of analysis, a means of opaque Art criticism, but not necessarily a form of the literary sixth sense. That cannot be guaranteed by any method alone. It is a question of temperament.

Modern criticism often traces its roots back to Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s Ars Poetica. Aristotle was a critic of forms, opaque. He produced theories of literature: plot, mimesis, catharsis, character. Horace was also a craft critic, interested in structure, rules, and canons of art (literature should delight and instruct; everything should be of the same type in a work of art—no mingling; writers should use strict craft). Contrasted to them was the critic and poet Longinus, who said,

Great writing does not persuade; it takes the reader out of himself. The startling and amazing is more powerful than the charming and persuasive, ... [and] greatness appears suddenly; like a thunderbolt it carries all before it and reveals the writer’s full power in a flash.

There is room and a need for all three of these ways of producing criticism, but as with the French Theory people, the new close reading (will it be called the New New Criticism?) sometimes lacks what Johnson called “inexplicable elegancies”. This absence of the startling and amazing is not a denial of the wonders uncovered by a Ricksian reading (he is, after all, the critic Auden said all poets dream of finding), but the closer a close reading gets to a scheme or schema, the more it is apt to lose sight of the thunderbolt of poetry.

There is another development in academic criticism today. Rita Felski is now writing on Substack about a potential new future for academic criticism that combines itself with common readers. As Felski says, to love literature was once viewed skeptically: now departments are dying as not enough people can be found with a deep love of reading. Today, that love is strong and vocal on the internet. But as with so many critics, Felski seems shy, to me, of putting the work of literature itself at the heart of things. Along with Toril Moi, she seems to be interested in the way “the text” works in the world, how it is read, how interpreted, and so on. (This dichotomy may not be how Felski would characterise her work. But I am stubborn in my good cause.)

But what about the glory and the grandeur? What about judgement, discrimination, discernment? What about the fact that a page of Milton is better than a page of almost anything else, whatever his current reader or readers may think?

This development is called “post critique.” It has been summarised on Substack by : “Postcritique allows us to examine two questions that critique overlooks or even disdains: what can we learn from literature and why are we moved by it?” I find some of this work to be interesting and impressive, but to my mind it is ultimately hopeless and convoluted as a mode of criticism. What is needed is a return to the old ways. I do not wish for criticism to become more sophisticated, to develop ever more theories about readers and attachments and experiences. I wish to take the return to “the text itself” quite seriously, quite literally, and quite simply. These things are large and difficult enough. What good does it do to remove the suspicion from the hermeneutics of suspicion only to replace it with some other set of extra-literary qualities? What need for all this bothersome discussion that tries to make a philosophy of criticism? Can we not be mere critics?

Yes, give me what Steiner said in his Paris Review interview:

Walter Benjamin said a book can wait a thousand years unread until the right reader happens to come along. Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely. The notion that it is the occasion for our cleverness fills me with baffled bitterness and anger. The notion that students today read second- and thirdhand criticism of criticism, and read less and less real literature, is absolutely the death of the normal naive and logical order of precedence.

The need for terminology and schema is an act of professionalism: academics must have some respectable method of doing criticism under the constraints of “learning outcomes” and university administration. But the teaching problem is not my concern: criticism is a part of literature, not just a part of education and its discontents, and if we bend the art of criticism to the necessities of teaching, rather than making education a means of passing on the imperatives of literature, we may find that what is left is less than critical. Surely this is as much a problem for postcritique as it is for Belsey. This is why literature as a discipline has so often been historical, aesthetic, and philosophic, because that is the common ground on which Art, Magic, and Common Sense can meet.

One of the things that the criticism of Magic and Common Sense can teach us is that the secrets of literature can never be fully or satisfactorily known. Even the best close reading can only give us some part of the answer. If it were really the case that poetic effects could be explained away by meter and rhyme and ambiguity and rhetoric and verbal music and so on then it would be possible to learn how to write great poetry by learning close reading. It is hard to believe that poets can learn to be poets by practicing close reading. No doubt, it is necessary, and has been practiced by self-apprenticed poets for centuries, but in the manner in which close reading conducts itself today, it cannot be held a necessary part of a poet’s development. W.B. Yeats did not study at I.A. Richards’ knee, nor did W.H. Auden discover the muse by writing a commentary of an unseen passage. Let me make a provocation: in the century since close reading began, there have been some excellent poets, but no truly great poets: no Chaucer, no Milton, no Wordsworth.

In a good close reading, this is obvious—there is some sense of the unknowable part of poetry, the mystery of how mechanical things can swell the heart and tingle the brain. In a poem about poetry, A.R. Ammons wrote: “Yield to the tantalizing mechanism.” Yes! Criticism must yield as much as an entranced reader! Close reading is an attempt to get close to the tantalizing mechanism, but it in its inherent need for clarity, such analysis can fail to yield, fail to “arrive willfully in the deepest/fix.” Ammons was writing about the way a poem is written, but we must read in like manner, we must enter the dream of the poem, and “turn/round in the mazy terror and/question.”

This is why I am proud to be a member of Steiner’s old criticism, which takes not just Johnson as its lodestar, but, as Steiner said, Lukács’ insistence on totality, Leavis’s on moral substance, Sartre’s “postulate that a writer’s technique always refer us back to his metaphysics.” We might think of many members of this great school: C.S. Lewis, Barbara Everett, some parts of Frank Kermode, John Bayley, Iris Murdoch, Susan Sontag. I wish to reiterate, with Steiner, “certain banalities.” (Didn’t Johnson teach us that men more often require to be reminded than informed?) The poet is the reason for interpretation; the critic is a loving parasite; great literary works (I bloody well refuse to say “texts” on my own account, let it hang there in the cautious grip of speech marks) are not “self-contained word games”.2

They are life forms embodied in the person of their authors in the entire physical, spiritual, social realities of the age.

Sing it George! Literature is a part of life. It calls us to the things of this world. And we must be concerned with greatness. It is the critic’s vocation to distinguish between the great and the good. In Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, from which these ideas are drawn, Steiner said “we grow weary of our inheritance.” One role for the criticism I am describing is to be the curator of that inheritance. What will immediately be seen is that, as Steiner put it, this criticism is “philosophic in temper.” It takes us back to mythology, ideology, belief, metaphysics, ideas. Criticism is the twin sister to philosophy because they are both involved in the great human attempt to know the world. Following Steiner’s injunction, I have been happy to write this essay dogmatically:

All criticism is, in its moments of truth, dogmatic; the old criticism reserves the right of being so openly, and of using superlatives.

There are many other aphorisms that circulate through modern criticism. Poetry must be felt before it is understood. A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The currency of these phrases suggests that questions about analysis are still at the heart of the common reader’s experience: why must poetry end with the sort of wisdom most suited to the conclusion of an essay or work of criticism? Why can it not simply be? Frost’s original goes on to say that poetry must be a momentary stay against confusion—momentary. Frost also insists on the ending, as well as being discovered, being both wise and sad. We can take this too far, and there is a sort of popular reading of poems that involves such reverence for negative capability that nothing is ever, finally, deemed to have been settled. But in the settling of the poem’s accounts, there is some sadness that the exchange is over.

That exchange is the meeting of temperaments. Just as we meet the novelist in the middle-ground of the realistic novel, so in the momentary confusion and momentary stay against confusion—in the deepest fix and tantalizing yield—do we meet the poet, but whereas we meet the novelist as observer, we meet the poet as temperament. Criticism might be philosophic in temper but it is reacting to art, entering the dream, and as such must recognise that it begins in provocation. The future of the old criticism must begin with Emerson—“Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.”

Art is where the rational and the irrational meet. It makes us realise we know more than we can say. It shows us the emotions as a route to the understanding. It acts, as George Eliot said, as a companion in the struggle for thought. It is always saying Look! Look at what you did not know you could see! Art is provocation, not instruction. We must choose how we react. The force of poetry is not subtle, but nor is it an easy solution to the problems of living. Criticism is part of the way we react to the provocation. A great book can produce terrible readers, just as a wonderful mother can have dismal children. The job of criticism is to let the poems teach us how to read them.

No-one can doubt that books have lost their special place in our culture. It is simply not possible for an author to matter any more in the way that someone like Charles Dickens once mattered. Those were the days when Carlyle became a celebrity for giving a series of lectures and writing a history of the French Revolution and George Eliot’s novels made her the guiding star for a generation of young women. Those days are dead and gone. Radio killed them. Then the movies. Then telephones. Then pop music. Then television. Then video games. Then the internet. Then smartphones. Then social media. Then AI.

To those people who find all this to be a threat to the future of civilization, James Marriott has become the leading writer. His Substack essay “The dawn of the post-literate society” is one of the most widely read, liked, shared, re-stacked, referenced, and commented on pieces of writing of the last few years. His basic thesis is simple. Smartphones are destroying print culture in a way that television never quite managed, and without print culture we are living through a “disenlightenment” which threatens liberal democracy. Print and democracy have always gone together and by killing one we might be about to kill the other. James even worries we are going to live in a new “techno feudalism”.

James now has a book called The New Dark Ages which makes this argument in more detail. It is splendidly written for its audience and gives them everything they want. It is well-structured, well-researched, and nicely composed—no less than we would expect. Some reviews are praising The New Dark Ages in exactly those terms. For writers like Ian Leslie and Ed West and Matthew D’Ancona this is an important and timely book. (Leslie and West were early readers and Leslie is quoted in the book.) And James is always fresh. There are familiar arguments taken from Neil Postman and Walter Ong, but James has done the reading. There are anecdotes about Samuel Johnson which suggest James did in fact read Boswell, rather than quote the same old stories we are so used to seeing in most writing of this nature. He has read a lot more history since he first developed this thesis and it is all the stronger for it. This is a passion project and care is evident on every page. He is telling the story many people believe and wish to hear. I expect this book to sell a lot of copies and for a certain group of people to be galvanized by it.

I like James. He is a splendidly literary fellow. I share his worries about the decline of reading and print culture. After all, I spent my life writing about books and encouraging other people to read the best that has been thought and said. What I most like about James is his willingness for a discussion. We’ve done events and podcasts together and he really lives up to the values he espouses. He likes nothing better than to debate the issues, not just recite the worries. So I’m going to try and give a counter-argument: not one that says “there is no problem”, but rather one that says the exact nature of the problem isn’t quite clear, and that the best way to think about the reading crisis might be in less pessimistic terms.

Nostalgia and Monocausal Explanations

One reason The New Dark Ages will be persuasive is because of what it leaves out. Various questions haunt the book.

For instance: Why is there no reading crisis in Spain? Jeffrey Lawrence reported recently:

A study conducted by the Federación de Gremios de Editores de España earlier this year, however, paints a starkly different picture of readership in Spain. According to the study, the percentage of the overall Spanish population that reads for pleasure has increased every year since 2017, reaching 66% in 2025, the highest level ever recorded.

It cannot surely be the case that smartphones simply haven’t reached Spain yet? Are they somehow more immune to TikTok than Anglophone countries? This is from the report Jeffrey quotes:

The data shatters the myth that young people don’t read. 75.3% of the population between 14 and 24 years old reads books in their free time.

You will not find this, or anything like it, discussed in The New Dark Ages. But understanding why this difference exists would surely be essential to any persuasive theory of the reading decline and its implications?

Another question that matters a great deal is why the GDP growth rate is so persistently high in the USA, a country that constantly frets about the decline of reading? Surely, if the effects of smartphones and declining literacy are so bad, that ought to show up somehow in the economic data? A major economy like the USA simply would not be self-sustaining over the medium term if the “disenlightenment” was real. We cannot explain this with the various cynical theories like “bullshit jobs” and the like. At some point, all the productivity of lawyers, financiers, accountants, management consultants, economists, and so on would start to suffer from the effects of the smartphone.

Most significant to me is the question of why the educational picture is so varied. The latest PISA results show a general decline globally, as James notes. James would surely quote this finding from the latest results as supporting his thesis: “The instances of “hasty reading” — in which students read quickly but inaccurately — nearly doubled to 9% between 2018 and 2025.” But the overall picture is more complicated. For instance, it is true that students who do not use AI score much better than those who do, when the AI is used to summarise texts or conduct research. But this is not an inevitable problem. The OECD reports that:

Students who regularly use AI for general purposes, and have learning opportunities at school to develop AI literacy skills, tend to have slightly higher scores in science.

And against the global trend, in England there has been an improvement in science and stability in reading and maths. England has all the problems of phones and lack of proper reading and so on that other countries have. Yet, somehow reading scores, maths, and science attainment are all just as good as they were or better. It seems that an educational system can survive these external pressures. Overall results declined in Scotland and Wales. England has been resilient. But why? It is true, as James says, that schools are restricting the use of phones. That would not be able to explain the most recent PISA data. And where phones are banned, educational attainment only rises minimally. England clearly has a better educational system than Scotland and Wales. I do not say education is as good as it ought to be, merely that these results do not fit with James’s general claims.

There is also a sense in which the old education system simply has to change to meet the new demands of the new world. What we are seeing might be partly explained by the first serious wave of disruption to education for a very long time. PISA measured “computational problem-solving skills” this year, which examines students’ “capacity to use modelling and programming tools, conduct experiments and build, design and develop digital products.” Scores in these skills were generally high, especially in Asia. James may be right that technology is replacing print, but wrong that it is an inevitable problem.

Another example of this change is with different types of reading. A high school teacher recently wrote to Tyler Cowen and observed that while his students are worse at linear reading (i.e. students don’t read books front-to-back anymore) they are much better at other sorts of reading.

…the ability of students to find patterns or links between texts has increased substantially. Just this past semester I taught a theology class to 9th-10th graders and wanted to introduce them to typological and patterned thinking. I was shocked how fast they picked this up, and many very quickly found plenty of connections in the text that I did not see.

Didn’t Montaigne, on James’s own account by the way, write quite like this? Johnson was certainly this sort of reader at times, though by no means exclusively. I think this sort of reading was more prevalent before smartphones than the current debate will allow for, not that we could ever know. But again, while this sort of reading looks alien to some people, it may be perfectly adequate for the job of keeping liberal democracy alive, in whatever form that takes in the future.

I am not denying that education needs higher standards, or that there are risks to the way young people are growing up today, but the picture seems to me more complicated than James’s thesis allows for. Of course, people love simple, monocausal explanations. We love a bad guy, someone else to blame for our problems. And it seems to me that The New Dark Ages is largely written for people who struggle with smartphone addiction and wish to read more. That is the personal story James tells, very convincingly and absorbingly. There is a general tendency to admire the Wendell Berry, Against the Machine, dumb-phone view of life, which is a new pastoral image, a utopia in which the problems of being a human are attached to the idols of progress. If only it were so simple!

It is my suspicion that what a lot of people who agree with The New Dark Ages’ description of modern culture really regret is not the death of print but the winnowing of upper-middlebrow culture: BBC documentaries, intellectuals on talk shows, Kenneth Clark, Melvyn Bragg, that sort of thing. In the terms of James’s argument, this stuff is all a replacement for the real benefit of reading and just as insidious as smartphones. The virtues of print no more inhere in Civilisation than they do on Instagram; however much better than Instagram the BBC might be, it displaced print and yet the virtues of print inhered in twentieth century society.

What that old TV culture did do was to make it easier to be a passive high-brow. The internet still provides all of that content in podcasts, on YouTube, and frequently on Twitter feeds. It may stick in the craw of some people to admit this, but a lot of what they want is widely available and widely consumed. Whether it is less consumed than it used to be is harder to say. When most people turned off Clark and Bragg they went straight into The Generation Game rather than picking up Don Quixote. That they now flick over to Facebook or watch TikTok videos doesn’t, to me, seem to be a very significant difference. James sometimes relies on self-reported evidence. It is true that people love television and often claim to hate social media. But hating social media doesn’t make it a democracy killer.

Print and Oral Integration

James says print and television could have reached an equilibrium, because TV left print some niches, but in my view that possibility existed because print and oral culture were integrated—and print and visual-digital culture can likely be integrated too.

James makes a fairly hard distinction between reading and listening. He writes: “You could get the gist of Being and Nothingness through hearing Jean-Paul Sartre explaining it in a TED talk or discussing it on a podcast…but it would be impossible to get a genuine and deep understanding of his ideas without his books.” True enough, but it must be important that Existentialism is a Humanism was first a lecture, delivered in a room so crowded Sartre himself could barely get in to talk. Written culture co-existed with oral culture. In the days of Lord Salisbury, political speeches could last for hours. Gladstone’s budgets were often three-hours or longer. It was standard to give hours-long speeches on campaigns. Whatever the necessity and merits of print for nineteenth century democracy, it relied on a widespread oral culture. Although Protestantism thought reading the Bible was important, many ordinary people would have known the Bible orally. Shakespeare himself is only possible because of the oral culture of the time: young elites engaged in Law Court debates, long sermons by people like John Donne attended by crowds so large the sermon was reported to the back by listeners, church services and sermons. All of this contributed to a culture where people were able to listen to a play for two or three hours. Even Dickens, one of the novelists James cites as being formerly read but now abandoned, had a large audience of illiterates, who knew his work—and presumably followed it with due attention—by listening. This is how Jane Austen’s family knew her novels, and many other novels too. An awful lot of the literary culture drew on and was spread within oral culture.

James discusses this idea. He writes about JFK’s obsession with reading and the influence it had upon his speaking style. Quoting a section of one of JFK’s speeches, James writes:

This short passage bears all the characteristic hallmarks of what Neil Postman called ‘printed orality’, the tendency of men and women in highly literate cultures to speak like books. It has a complex syntactic structure, it makes a logical argument, it refers to the world of ideas and abstractions, and it draws on history for context.

But the point about former times is that the literacy and orality were integrated. Part of Shakespeare’s genius was to write down the oral culture around him, from the tavern to the court; that culture then received his work and spread it and discussed it; those discussions were part of the way in which further work was produced. Lots of the poems written in manuscript at that time were written from memory as they had been heard. This integration of the literate and oral goes right up to the working class nineteenth century: Jonathan Rose has accounts of working men reading aloud to one another, for instance.

It is hard to know how many people could read in the nineteenth century. By 1840 67% of men in England could sign their name to a marriage register, though in Preston it was as low as 55%. For women, it was 25%. By 1870, before the introduction of universal education, national literacy is estimated to be about 80%. But it is not a smooth story. While the reading craze James describes was afoot, literacy declined in Lancashire between the 1750s and 1830s. The cotton industry had no need of literate workers and there were too many people moving into the towns for the schools to cope. These numbers are from Andrew Hobbs’ A Fleet Street in Every Town, and he says there are too many contradictions to work out. Preston needed literacy for its legal and administrative functions, attracted immigrants from literate towns, but also had a bad reputation for education and was the largest town in the UK without a school board. Children were allowed to attend school half-time so they could work. The picture is just messy.

What people actually read is also complicated. Hobbs quotes Simon Eliot, who founded the Reading Experience Database, a repository of evidence about reading habits from 1450 to 1945. Eliot says,

The most common reading experience, by the mid-nineteenth century at latest, would most likely be the advertising poster, all the tickets, handbills and forms generated by an industrial society, and the daily or weekly paper. Most of this reading was, of course, never recorded or commented upon for it was too much a part of the fabric of everyday life to be noticed.

This is a somewhat less persuasive story about the salutary effects of reading. (And you might think this is the sort of reading that still goes on today.) Most people’s reading, most of the time, was ephemeral, designed to persuade and sell in short bursts, not the sort of prolonged experiences James focuses on like Immanuel Kant and George Eliot. I have no doubt that authors of that ilk were hugely important and influential, but that only reinforces my suspicion that literacy’s importance for liberal democracy can be satisfied by a minority of the population reading in that way, or with that sort of reading being only a small part of most people’s lives. Contrary to the impression that the story of the kitchen maid reading the newspaper gives, Hobbs reports that wives had much less time for reading than husbands, often none. None of this very mixed picture of reading, literacy, and orality prevented England from becoming a great nation of liberal Enlightenment values. That is not to say that James is wrong, but his argument cannot really succeed without looking more closely at this question. Perhaps rates of reading, and even rates of literacy can decline without the terrible effects he foresees. Of course, that would be tragic in and of itself, but that is not really the claim at stake in The New Dark Ages.

Is a New Integration Possible?

James gives a qualitative account of the rise of reading in the eighteenth century, with accounts of aristocrats being shocked to find the maid reading newspapers. But some more attention to the numbers is required. The question he never quite answers is what percentage of the population needs to be reading a lot in order for liberal democracy to survive. He hedges and says of literacy and democracy that “we simply don’t know whether one can survive without the other”, but the real question might be how much of one is required to keep the other alive?

No doubt, as James says, paraphrasing Walter Ong, the disciplines of history, philosophy, and science depend upon literacy, but they may not depend upon mass literacy. He describes the Republic of Letters that was so integral to the Scientific Revolution—and that is a perfect example of elite literacy changing the world, not mass literacy. Likewise, just as the former achievements of the literate society were in fact dependent on literacy integrated with orality, so it may be that the future will be a new integration. This integration is not with orality but technology. Social media and digital technology are not taking us into an oral society, but something else entirely.

These two arguments are discussed by James, who sees AI as one of the threats to the future of literacy. He also thinks that the divisions between elites and ordinary people are going to lead to severe outcomes.

The very rich have the financial resources to keep their children away from addictive screens. Poorer parents who have to work multiple jobs and who lack the money for childcare do not have such luxuries. Rich children spend significantly less time on screens than their poorer peers. California’s Waldorf School of the Peninsula, popular with Silicon Valley tech executives, forbids its students to use any technology until eighth grade. Steve Jobs famously limited his children’s use of technology and, as his biographer Walter Isaacson writes, ‘made a point of having dinner at the big long table in their kitchen, discussing books and history and a variety of things’. At dinner ‘no one ever pulled out an iPad or computer. The kids did not seem addicted at all to devices.’

Meanwhile, many of the ordinary citizens of modern democracies risk finding themselves as helpless, credulous and poorly informed as the subjects of a medieval king. It may be that we are facing an unenlightened future that looks like our unenlightened past – one in which power, wealth and knowledge concentrate at the top of society, and an angry, divided and uninformed public lacks the means to understand, analyse, criticise or change what is going on.

This is fairly persuasive. Don’t sell my kids something you know is bad for your kids! But it leaves out the key point: the AIs are quite reliably “liberal Enlightenment” in their orientation. James argues that the practice of reading is what transmits and encourages those values, which, on his account, using AI probably can’t achieve. But it seems possible that if more and more people become reliant on AIs the way illiterate or semi-literate people used to hear newspapers and magazines, they will be reliant on a technology that reliably hews to the beliefs and values James is worried we might lose or diminish, and this could mitigate some of the loss of the value of reading. James accounts for the spread of these values through “social prestige” rather than reading per se, in the first place, and AI might have similarly diffuse effects. (He places a lot of explanatory value on prestige in general. I think he takes it too far though: I cannot believe he was inert the first time he heard Beethoven; such a thing is not possible.) The guardrails put on AIs are what matter here, which again speaks to the importance of an elite, rather than a mass culture.

There is no doubt that the Gutenberg Parenthesis is closing: it is the results of that closure that are in doubt. If a reading elite survives and AI provides a liberal Enlightenment worldview we may get a society with something like the values James wants, even while we regret the lack of literary culture. I am not advocating for this outcome, but I wonder if James ought to be more open to the possibility that democracy can survive the “end of reading”.

And while he hedges his conclusions, I think he is simply too sanguine about the past. James identifies the 1880-1920 period as the height of mass readership, but that is exactly the time when George Gissing wrote New Grub Street, a harsh indictment of literary culture in which the serious readers led distorted lives, Arnold Bennett had his characters in The Old Wives’ Tale disdain reading as a distraction from the real work of life (running the shop), and Conan Doyle himself, the great popular writer of the age, pleaded with his own readers to put down fictional stories and read something improving, like a serious history. Bennett also lamented that more people didn’t read serious poetry and philosophy rather than novels. Such a long life did the anti-novel bias of the eighteenth century have that Nancy Mitford’s parents had a no-novels-before-lunch rule.

What Actually Is The Reading Crisis?

Another numbers question I wish James had investigated a little more: How can there be so much data about the decline of reading and yet so many gaps in our knowledge about that decline? What actually is the decline? Gore Vidal quoted Gallup in 1965 that half of American adults never read a book after leaving school—so how much worse have things really got?

This matters a great deal. If you accept that integration of oral and literary culture was always essential, and that some new integration is being formed now, then what told me about audiobooks ought to be reassuring.

…we did a report a few years ago which was precisely about that, called How Do We Read? It was all about audiobooks versus print books. From the limited data we have so far, it does seem that adding audiobooks to reading, if you include that in your definition of reading as a whole, then, in fact, it’s still a decline from the share who did that five years ago, but it’s a much smaller share. It does suggest, in the out years, it may very well be that audiobooks mitigates the decline much more, and maybe it even puts us on par with the trend line for the past or traditional reading.

I happen to be sceptical about audiobooks, but if a lot of the lost reading time has become audiobook time, then the problem starts to look very much smaller. listens to audiobooks and we can hardly worry about her ability to absorb long complicated narratives. In the New York Times recently, David Wallace-Wells broke down some reading data and concluded the most recent decline has been among the old, not the young. It is the “Dad books” that are dying, not young adult fiction. He quotes the Gallup numbers too:

Gallup has been asking Americans how many books they read in the previous year since 1990, when the answer was 15.3 — a number skewed by voracious readers, as surveys like this always are. In 2001 the average was 14.5. In 2025 it appears to have been 14.6.

In his review of the data, found many discrepancies and inadequacies. A lot of the data we see on this topic is shaky. But one thing that does look clear is that this is a widening gap: “American literacy is getting worse, but it is getting worse primarily because the gap between highly skilled readers and struggling readers is growing.” Again, this situation ought to be improved, but it might not spell the crisis James worries about.

To my mind, Wallace-Wells’s most important statistic, though, was this:

In 1968 Nielsen reported that children under 6 were watching, on average, 54 hours of television each week.

God knows if that number is true. I doubt it. But it was normal for young people in the 1980s and 1990s to watch several hours of television every day. I was there. I remember all the grown-ups watching television all the time—at breakfast! And yet, James points out that according to a study done in Norway, where cable television arrived in a staggered manner, allowing its effects to be measured, “10 years of exposure to cable television lowered I.Q. scores by 1.8 points.” Surely that is too small a difference to sustain James’s worries. 1.8 I.Q. points is significant, but is it a threat to democracy? At what point do we have to accept that life can carry on fairly normally while reading declines?

A Few Other Dubious Points…

Some of James’s other evidence is shaky. He quotes the now-famous study about university students who could not understand the opening of Bleak House. This was conducted among a small group of students at two colleges in Kansas over a decade ago. That is not sufficient to justify a summary which worries about “students at American universities.” He writes that the stream of headlines on TV news is terrifying—lots of scary (or inane) stories in block capitals one after another—but newspaper front pages used to be disjointed like that too. The fact that students are finding it harder to study is evidenced by references to magazine articles and not enough discussion is given to the fact that they are learning for a new world, just as we all did with computers. I don’t disagree with his claims, but I think their valence is often not quite as significant as he does.

And his anecdotes are easily countered. I have spoken to academics at Oxford who see no decline in the standard of English Literature students. When I was a recent graduate I met someone in their forties who had been at my college who told me he had preferred studying poets as that involved the fewest number of pages of reading. A lot of my friends at other universities just didn’t read that much. As I wrote recently: “I’m not denying the problem, I just don’t think it is currently well described. And I think a lot of the “good news” is being ignored. Who even knows what’s going on? It’s a very mingled, high-variation picture.”

James frequently recognizes that variation, but he makes too many sweeping claims. However you read his evidence, claims like this are under-argued: “As knowledge divides re-emerge and tech companies wipe out both literacy and middle-class jobs, we may find ourselves drifting back into a second feudal age.” He is surely on safer ground when he writes: “even in the worst-case scenario, reading and a cultural reverence for reading will be around for a while yet.”

Likewise, the word “disenlightenment” claims too much. Yes, there are more idiots in public discourse, more people who believe in demonic attacks, shorter and lower-quality speeches from MPs and so on. Some ludicrous and dangerous ideas are circulating very freely. But a lot of space is given to the decline of general culture to prove the “disenlightenment” claim. As if the Enlightenment has not always co-existed with the counter-enlightenment and the vestiges of the old order of suspicion and superstition!

The fact that television used to be better doesn’t signify much to my mind. People watched a lot of soap-operas, sit-coms, dating shows, and quizzes back in the days of Kenneth Clark. That they now watch Netflix slop where the plot has to be repeated multiple times because they’re on their phones might suggest brain rot, or it might suggest that television is a background phenomenon while people are doing other, potentially more useful things. A lot of phone time is spent on Facebook where people organize meet-ups, sell old furniture, find music teachers for their kids, and so on. So what? There simply are no good numbers for how much phone time is spent in this useful, harmless way and how much is spent in “toxic” ways.

James says “most people are not reading books and Wikipedia articles on their phones.” How does he know? No data is given. The funny thing about Wikipedia is that everyone does read it, even if intermittently or sparingly. It is perhaps the most well-known website, hence why James can quote it in this way. The claim is almost self-defeating! Perhaps this is not most people’s main phone-based activity, but nor did they use to spend that much time reading the physical Encyclopedia.

James cites bestsellers of yesteryear like To Kill a Mockingbird, In Cold Blood, Herzog, and The Leopard, but although he admits trash always sold, this is cherry-picking. Two years ago, the London Times published a list of the books that have spent the longest in the bestseller charts since the 1970s. There were some good entries. But a lot of it was dispiriting. There were multiple entries for Bill Bryson. The fiction that dominated was Harry Potter, Adrian Mole, The Da Vinci Code and The Thursday Murder Club. And the top spot went to Stephen Hawking, who most people admit not having read, and Kindle data suggests most people read very little of his book. Again, I share James’s regret and worry about the loss of literature’s status in modern society, but I don’t think the case that things are so much worse now and will lead to some sort of de-enlightenment is well made.

Like James, I believe there has been a decline in the quality of politicians in my lifetime. How much this matters is another question. James notes that MPs in the 1970s used longer words and made more sophisticated speeches, but to think that is associated with better governance is a mistake. The 1970s was one of the worst decades for British government, with many quite costly mistakes that had long-term negative consequences! The famous list of the books that Labour MPs used to read that goes round the internet includes lots of very good books, but not much economics, a fairly significant omission for an MP. Robert Blake joked in his biography of Andrew Bonar Law (1955) that, then as now, even a scanty knowledge of finance in the House of Commons gave a man a colossal advantage. No doubt, political elites ought to be better educated, but whether the median MP of past times is the best yardstick—I remain sceptical.

How Else to Respond?

At the end, James seems to recant some of his earlier pessimism. His conclusion implicitly accepts that books and reading are inevitably going to be a minor part of the future, as they have been for some time. And this is presented in fairly sanguine terms.

Six hundred years after its invention, the printed book can be in the vanguard of a new and radical way of looking at the world. In an age that has elevated entertainment almost to the status of the highest possible value, books, especially good books, remind us that there is more to life. And at a time when many feel reality is splintering into an incomprehensible chaos, books offer us a medium that is capable of comprehending and explaining the world. Books can even console us – something a smartphone very rarely does. Ironically, it may turn out that the best argument for reading ever invented was the smartphone. The smartphone has not shown us that books are obsolete. It has shown us that books are irreplaceable.

James also hedges a little on the value of reading.

Good novels rarely contain anything as glib as an ‘insight’ or a ‘moral’, but I think they do offer a deepened understanding of life. No summary or short cut will get you there. To really feel it, you have to read the books. It’s not that fiction is a kind of higher self-help, offering ‘hints and tips for life’. I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but I do think novels teach you about life.

This is easy to agree with, though a bit damp. If books teach us about life, they must surely have insights and morals. Jane Austen does! Charles Dickens does! All this seems an implicit admission that reading isn’t going to be the thing that saves democracy. It is almost as if by the end of the book, James has talked himself out of the pessimism of the earlier sections and wishes simply to make a genteel case for reading literature.

Overall, it feels as if James is part of a cohort that wishes to be in a different part of history. It is an admirable and even noble wish. But it cannot be. We cannot go back. If we accept Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ thesis—especially his prediction that there would be a widespread “nostalgia” for history—then what James observes is the result of an instability, not the cause of it. People have an innate desire for what is called, in Coriolanus, “a stirring world.” Smartphones are not the enemy, so much as the inherent nature of human society to avoid a prolonged period of boring equilibrium.

That also points to how those of us who value reading must react. We must make the best of the lives we are given. If we wish for reading to be part of the future, we need more than laments. As James notes, there have been plenty of those from people like Sven Birkerts already. I believe we are on the verge of a new revival of the humanities, and all the stories about the new rise of reading are a response to the strangeness of the world, not a cause of some new crisis. James’s book is further evidence for the trend. (I wrote about this trend here.)

Pessimism is the enemy of this revival. As I wrote last year, the best way to respond to the obvious problems with the humanities right now is to call people to the good, to be a shining light in a naughty world.

First, we stop the laments. Maybe it is a terrible thing. Maybe we are seeing civilization start to crumble. Will our complaints hold up the edifice? Will righteousness prevail at a certain number of clicks, likes, or howls? Will wickedness shrink away if we get loud enough?…There’s too much doom and gloom, not enough humanism…I am constantly told that we can choose what happens to us. So go ahead and choose. Choose not to be a philistine. In a darkening world, the best thing you can do is to keep the flame alive.

As I said, James makes his own peroration along these lines at the end of The New Dark Ages. I rather wish that had been his opening.

It is also very nicely made. Manchester is made to look vibrant. The Peak District scene is beautiful. Some of the scenes are almost shot in the classical style: the camera unflinchingly picks a position in the room and lets the action unfold. The vulgarity of the modern world is filmed with love and becomes part of the whole atmosphere of charm. When they cut, it has real impact.

Rom-com is one of my favourite genres but so few of them are worth re-watching. Finding Emily I would happily see again, and if I have time I might go back to see it on the big screen once more. There are homage-references to Romeo and Juliet, including Claire Danes’ wings, When Harry Met Sally, and a broader tradition of British films like Notting Hill. It also put me in mind of Juno.

So many people in this film are hollow, fake, or just plain nuts. And it is all turned to gentle comedy. The villains of the piece are all perfectly humiliated, but in a nice way. The satire of podcasters is delicious; the cynicism about psychology is perfect; and the crazy lefties are hilarious. The clothing and appearance choices are a big part of the comic effect. Love wins in the end, as you already know. Romantic common-sense triumphs over the bloodless, contorted, naive, and blind yammerings of everyone and everything else.

The decline of young people reading English Literature in favour of Psychology is hardly a reason for intellectual laments, but it is surely a tragedy on the personal level for a whole generation to prefer these half-truths to authentic poetry and this film knows it. (No spoilers, but wait for the scene where she presents her thesis.) Man cannot live on theories and (made up) empirics alone. The hero writes his own songs. I hope everyone sees this film.

Philip Hensher and I discussed the history of the novel in Britain from Defoe to Hollinghurst. Philip is remarkably well-read and happy to share his real opinions. He can go from Swift to Fitzgerald on the turn of a pin, isn’t shy about holding his ground, and has some very firm views. People who read novels are protected against becoming violent. Ideas are not important in most novels. Walter Scott isn’t very good. Arnold Bennett is a top 20 novelist. Rachel Cusk has the best chance of being read in 100 years. That sort of thing. Here’s one exchange where we disagreed about what a novel is.

HENSHER: Oh, Henry, Henry, how can you kill a book like that? How can you—

OLIVER: Look, you can’t have Jane Austen without the Enlightenment, and you can’t have George Eliot without the secularization of Jesus, and you can’t have Tolstoy without all the slightly incredible things that he believed.

HENSHER: No, let’s not talk about Tolstoy.

OLIVER: No, but the list goes on, right? Henry James even, who is often called a man of no ideas, he’s an incredibly good liberal. He might be the best novelist about the liberal idea that one person should not be allowed to dominate over another, in private conditions rather than just government. These ideas are, in a way, they’re the thing that distinguish those writers. Jane Austen knows how to observe and how to present because she’s thinking about what it means underneath.

HENSHER: I don’t know. I don’t know about that.

OLIVER: I don’t even think you can have Middlemarch without John Stuart Mill’s political economy, in a way.

HENSHER: Yes, that’s probably true. But George Eliot’s an unusual sort of novelist.

Jane Austen, I mean, how do we know what did she—what did Jane Austen think about slavery in the boldest and most extreme form? I think we can deduce that she thought that people involved in the slave trade or who came near it, like Mrs. Elton, were not at all the sort of people that she would altogether like to hang out with. I think the same is true of Sir Thomas Bertram, and the weakness of his imagination is somehow tied in with the fact that he has a plantation where he doesn’t really think about the people that it affects.

But already we’re into speculation. I don’t know what we can really deduce about Jane Austen’s idea, because she’s such a polyphonic novelist that we don’t find an idea being put forward without being able to find a character who’s saying the exact opposite. And sometimes one side of the argument is eventually dismissed, but not always, I think.

I said this at the conference we had a discussion with. I think that when you boil a novel down to its absolute irreducible essentials, I think what you have is not a proposal or a view of society or anything like that. It’s Charles Pooter painting his bath red, or the moment in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Mother and Son when the son irrevocably falls out with his mother by telling her that he doesn’t want to have sugar in his tea anymore.

From the very beginning, novelists have said, “What I’m writing about, I’m writing about nothing, and this is the virtue of what I’m doing. I’m writing about the utter triviality of everyday life.” And that, for me, is the enchantment.

OLIVER: Well, some novelists have said that.

HENSHER: A lot.

OLIVER: Samuel Richardson didn’t say that. Samuel Richardson’s quite an important exception.

HENSHER: No, but people said it about Richardson.

OLIVER: I don’t think we—yes, but we can’t believe it.

HENSHER: People definitely said—no, I think we can.

OLIVER: Pamela is a novel of ideas.

HENSHER: Well, it’s a novel that contains some ideas.

OLIVER: Yes.

Transcript

HENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to Philip Hensher. Philip is a British novelist. He’s written books like The Northern Clemency, King of the Badgers, The Emperor Waltz, and now he’s got a new book, A History of the Novel in Britain, and you can see it there. It looks very pretty with Alice in Wonderland on the front.

Philip, hello.

PHILIP HENSHER: Hello, Henry.

Novels Are for Everyone

OLIVER: Now, to begin with, tell me about your grandmothers.

HENSHER: Oh, okay. Yes, well, I finished the book because—I kept my story out of it, largely. I thought that I should go back to a time when everybody read novels. It wasn’t a specialist interest as it seems to be turning into. And I thought I would talk about my two grandmothers, both of whom left school when they were 14. They worked in very ordinary and hard jobs in factories all their lives, and they were passionate readers of novels.

My paternal grandmother loved Dickens. She had a complete set of Dickens, which, I’ve discovered after some research, was issued as an offer by the Daily Express sometime in the 1930s. I’ve still got it, actually. I’m going to go and get a sample volume. It’s terribly cheaply produced.

OLIVER: Oh, I’ve got that set. That’s great, yes.

HENSHER: Yes. The publisher is otherwise only noted as a printer. The typeface is absolutely tiny.

OLIVER: It’s painful.

HENSHER: It’s painful to read. But she had it. She loved Dickens.

My maternal grandmother, I don’t have any of her books, I’m afraid. I would say that she loved stories of family lives, of people interacting with each other. She loved Catherine Cookson, a now slightly forgotten popular novelist of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s. But she read an enormous amount. I mean, she must have read one or two novels a week, every week of her life.

I think that the thing that has disappeared since my grandmothers’ generation is the idea that everybody can read novels. They speak to everybody. They explore every part of life, potentially.

What seems to be happening now, and I greatly regret it, is that it’s passing into the property of expensively educated people, people who have gone to private schools, perhaps, have certainly gone to university. And the sort of reader like my grandmother, who read Bleak House with a lot of pleasure, seems to be disappearing.

So that was one of the reasons why I wanted to write the book, to make the case for how wonderfully enjoyable novels are. They’re not a duty, or they shouldn’t be a duty. They should just be founded in pleasure, however complex that pleasure might be. And I wanted to finish the book by citing my two grandmothers, who were such great readers.

OLIVER: And as well as inheriting that reading culture from them, you got a lot of that at your school, didn’t you?

HENSHER: Yes, I suppose I did. I think that it’s hard for me to say because I was in at the beginning of a sort of curriculum change, where there was an idea that we ought to give the kids things that are relevant or are going to appeal to their social concerns. So, I mean, this is going back to the very early 1980s. My set novel for A-level was The Grapes of Wrath, a classic tale of victimhood, really. Classic approved message.

And the thing was, I think what started me off as a passionate reader of novels was a sort of rebellious turn away from that sort of thing. I read Jane Austen off my own bat. I read a lot of Dickens before I left school—things that we weren’t taught at all. And that’s always been the sort of reader that I am, saying, “Oh, we’re not supposed to be reading this,” you know? “It’s not on the curriculum.”

Parliament and Thatcher

OLIVER: What was it like working in the House of Commons?

HENSHER: It was fine. [laughter] It was a very unusual experience. I don’t think it was a job that most people would’ve known existed. When people said to me, “Well, what do you actually do?” I used to say, “Well, you know the guys with wigs who sit in front of the Speaker? They’re my bosses.” And it was a strange, ritualistic experience, and you were physically in the middle of all these political dramas.

When I started work, I started work in the House of Commons the beginning of September—this is September 1990. And six weeks later, there was all the drama of Mrs. Thatcher being thrown out, which I saw physically very close up. I didn’t have anything to do with it. You weren’t aware of what really was going on, but you were there. And Mrs. Thatcher swept past you at crisis moments.

And that’s a very seductive place to be as a baby novelist, because novels are very often told by people occupying minor positions about the lives of the great. There’s a mid-20th-century novelist called Alfred Duggan who made a career out of writing historical novels of the lives of Roman emperors as told by their servants.

And I think that, actually, the novel that I eventually wrote about the fall of Mrs. Thatcher, Kitchen Venom, which has just been rereleased 30 years later by an American publisher, McNally Editions, as a neglected classic—I think that was very much one of those books. Somebody who saw these vast and world-changing events physically close up without really being an insider at all.

OLIVER: Do you think you’re more conservative than most other novelists today? Small c conservative. Or big c.

HENSHER: No, I don’t—I think that I’ve never been someone who fits in with the on dit, as it were. I don’t think that I’m particularly bothered about what people think of what I might think. One of the least effective arguments to change somebody’s mind, it always seems to me, is to say, “But most people think . . .” Most people are wrong about things.

So yes, I do think that actually having a close connection with political figures—after Mrs Thatcher, I did get to know some cabinet ministers, mostly, for one historical reason or another, Conservative cabinet ministers. And then coming out from spending the day with them and going to some book launch in the ’90s and having to listen to some member of the lumpen intelligentsia say, “Oh, these people are so evil.” I’m just going, you know, “Save the word for someone else.”

So yes, I think that I have a kind of interest in some things that most literary people just aren’t interested in at all. And I think I’ve come to conclusions of my own about some burning contemporary issues. I don’t think of myself as conservative. I think of myself as a 19th-century liberal. But then again, I also think of Mrs. Thatcher as a 19th-century liberal.

OLIVER: I was going to say.

HENSHER: [laughs] I don’t know where that leaves you.

OLIVER: I was very struck in, I think it’s something you wrote or an interview you gave, where you said that you were at a comprehensive school in Sheffield. And contrary to what we think was going on at the time, actually you had teachers who were quite pleased about Mrs. Thatcher getting elected. And in the age of bell-bottoms, people were going to Mahler concerts all the time. On that front, you have a different view of the way England was, as it were.

HENSHER: Yes. It’s partly true that those people have been flattened out of history. Eight years before the miners’ strike, for instance, when Mrs. Thatcher did come to lead the Conservative Party, it wasn’t actually apparent to most people that she was the embodiment of all evil. And I think that people realized that something must be done.

There’s a lot of retrospective reimagining of these things. I think the absolutely classic example is Mrs. Thatcher taking free milk away from, I think, seven to elevens. And this is always presented as a gesture of sheer evil. But I can tell you, as one of the children who drank the official milk, it was absolutely disgusting. It was delivered at 7:00 a.m., and then it sat there in the sun for four hours in the summer, and it was absolutely undrinkable. Nobody drank it. Absolutely nobody drank it. It was a complete waste of money.

There might have been some point in giving people free milk in the 1940s when there was rationing, but by the 1970s, what was the point in the government buying you milk? It was frankly the job of your parents to buy milk. But we’re returning to that position. And people seem to be assuming it’s the job of the government to buy your children breakfast these days, but what do I know?

Things changed later on, I would say. The mood in the North certainly altered when people saw that the economic basis of subsidy was going to be taken away and that the coal mines would close down, the steel industry would close down, and it would take a long time for these things to turn round. And I understand why people feel that, but it’s completely wrong to project that backwards into the 1970s.

The 18th-Century Battleground

OLIVER: Now, you did your PhD about the 18th century. Why do you think that century is so much less popular than the 19th century, which seems to get all the attention? But in fact, the 18th century is in a way a much richer, more diverse period, aesthetically.

HENSHER: Well, I don’t really know, actually, because I got to the end of my PhD and I got my PhD, and after that, I have to say it took me a while to get back to it. It is interesting because it is the battleground between what people used to think literature ought to be, which was firmly rooted in the classics, and a sort of vernacular, raucous, popular form that’s based in shocking things like the lives of criminals, pornography even. Rather extraordinary books explaining how people ought to behave to get on in society, how they should write letters.

So it’s a battleground between Alexander Pope, who I must say I do love, but a very kind of classical, perfect, absolutely glass-like surface; and then, people like Defoe, whose sentences just run on in a kind of chaotic way. It can’t have been very obvious which of them was going to triumph, really. Whether it was going to be the epic poem in rhyming couplets, after Virgil, or whether it was going to be a 300-page scandalous narrative about a prostitute in London today. Or rather, the answer would’ve been obvious, but it would’ve been obvious and wrong. So, there you go.

So yes, it is interesting. It is interesting. I think for me, the 19th century is more interesting simply because of the sheer abundance of material. There are plenty of books in the 18th century, but not the kind of colossal tidal wave of thousands and thousands of novels coming out, sometimes nearly a thousand novels in a single year as the tide rolls on. And that, as anyone who reads my book will appreciate, is actually the thing that I really love: a lot of books turning up.

OLIVER: Did you study with John Mullan for that PhD?

HENSHER: No. I knew him a little bit. He was a fellow in the college where I did it, and I used to pass the time of day with him in the courtyard. But no, I had a succession of supervisors, but not him.

Judging the Booker

OLIVER: I see. Now, you also judged the Booker Prize. How did that change your understanding of the way the literary world really works, as it were?

HENSHER: Well, I quite enjoyed judging the Booker Prize. It’s a very unusual experience because it’s the only experience you’re ever going to have of reading a lot of novels that are published at the same time. Even as books are being published, all sorts of filtering mechanisms are usually taking place.

With that, I think I read 140, 150 novels, all of which were published in 2001. And when you do that, you see all sorts of tendencies that you hadn’t really suspected. I remember that year, the thing that was extraordinarily common, to the point of being maybe a third or even 40 percent of the books submitted, were novels with a dual time scheme, where in the present day a woman is working in a library and she finds a box, and it’s the love letters of Mary, Queen of Scots, and then back to Mary, Queen of Scots. I’m making it up. I can’t remember.

And I think the novels that kicked that off are certainly some very good novels. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust in the 1970s, or later on, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library and Antonia Byatt’s Possession. But the sheer number that were imitating that structure was really extraordinary.

The later insight that I had into a predominant obsession was when I judged the Giller Prize in Canada, and again, it was about 120, 130 novels. And this was about 10 years ago now. And it was predominantly tales by second-generation immigrants of historical stories of their parents’ country of origin. There were a lot of those, and I think that’s an admirable thing, so long as it doesn’t overrun the rights of Bangladeshis, say, still living in Bangladesh to write their own stories which will be heard.

It’s an interesting thing, judging a big literary prize. I was very skeptical about the value of them. But that year, judging the Booker, I think we did a much better job than a lot of juries have done. We not only shortlisted Ian McEwan for his best novel, Peter Carey for his best novel, but Andrew Miller, excellent novel, Ali Smith’s first novel, and who were the other two? Oh, David Mitchell’s second novel, and Rachel Seiffert, a very talented novelist with a brilliant novel.

Novels vs. Sport

OLIVER: How many novels do you read in an ordinary week?

HENSHER: Oh, no idea. Three, four, five, something like that.

OLIVER: So you’re spending an awful lot of your time reading novels.

HENSHER: Well, I don’t know about that. [laughter] I’d say I’m probably reading a novel three or four hours a day, something like that. I am a pathologically fast reader. I don’t want to go into it too much because it does sound insane.

Remember that I’ve often wondered why someone like me manages to read so many books by most people’s standards. And I’ve come to the conclusion it’s because I have absolutely no interest in sport whatsoever. And it’s surprising the number of people who—I mean, if you watch a football match, even if you watch it at home without the trouble of getting on a train and going there, a football match is 90 minutes, but there’s half an hour in the middle; two hours.

There’s an hour of disquisition before; that’s three hours. And there’s an hour afterwards; that’s four hours. Well, in four hours I can read a novel by Graham Greene. That’s not a challenge. And I think that if you completely remove that from your life then, yes, you can get through a lot of novels, particularly if, like me, you absolutely love novels. It’s never been anything but a sheer pleasure.

Well, actually, I won’t say never because there were one or two months, writing this book, when I knew I was going to have to get over a personal distaste and read a very prolific novelist in bulk who I knew I couldn’t stand. I’m not going to say who they were; it’s not fair. But I think you might be able to guess a couple of them.

OLIVER: Did you know V.S. Naipaul?

HENSHER: A little, yes.

OLIVER: What was he like?

HENSHER: If you said the right thing to him, he would respond intelligently and interestingly. If you weren’t scared of him, that was better. I would guess that when he first met you, if he knew who you are by repute, as he happened to do with me because I was a book reviewer, he would say something borderline insulting. And if you absolutely didn’t react to that, if you just kind of carried on talking to him in a respectful and interested way, then things were fine. Things were absolutely fine.

Also, I think he was just a deeply interesting human being who had the knack, when he was bored, of saying something that would kick up a bit of a fuss. And I associate with that. I would say that many of my best friends are very much like that, just saying things to kick up a fuss. I wasn’t any more than someone who just met him a handful of times. But I had the utmost respect for him, and I still do.

OLIVER: Yes, he’s one of the great writers in English, I think.

HENSHER: Yes, I agree.

Dominance of the Novel

OLIVER: Why is the novel so dominant as a literary form?

HENSHER: What, now? Is it?

OLIVER: Well, there is no longer the same kind of reach or popularity for—there’s no Addison, there’s no poet, there’s no . . . To me it seems like, for the common reader, as it were, it’s all novels with a few other things. Whereas in the 18th century, it was lots of everything.

HENSHER: Well, I don’t know. I don’t want to talk down my beloved form. It does seem to me that memoirs are very largely where it’s at. Novels, to a very marked degree, get noticed much more if people can spin them as in some way memoiristic. And that’s not a criticism at all.

I was just thinking about this reading Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Life of M. And I think Rachel is one of the authors with the best chance of being read in 50 or 100 years’ time. I do think she’s an absolutely marvelous novelist. But there’s no question that there’s more of a buzz around her when you can say, “Oh, well, this novel is based on her friendship with Emma Thompson,” or whoever the actress was—I’ve already forgotten—or “She’s written a book about this and this. It’s all based in her real life.”

Those things have a tendency of fading away, but I think that it only seems to get through to people when we’re talking about, “Is this real?” Like that guy that killed himself last week, is his memoir—I mean, if he’d written a novel to be published by Simon & Schuster, would we be talking about it to the same degree? It’s not in the situation as the sonnet cycle. People are still reading novels, but I don’t know that it’s as dominant as all that.

If it was, “Why was it dominant? Why was the novel form dominant?” I think actually it’s to do with the omniscient voice. I think, from the beginning, the novel could go anywhere. It could take the reader by the hand, could lead them into places that they would never in a million years go. And from the invention of the railways—people commented about this a lot at the time—people were no longer limited to seeing their own class. They would be waiting on a railway station, and every class of society, it seemed, would be waiting there.

But the challenges of a simple reader in finding out about the upper classes that they’d glimpse in these situations, or indeed a curious upper-class reader in finding out about the lives of the very poor carrying a chicken to market in a third-class carriage, in real life, that would be pretty limited. The novel could take you anywhere it wanted to go, and that, I think, is really never going to go away.

I can see, even now, publishers are sharpening their claws, and they want to leap on any really talented novelist of, say, transgender lives now. They probably weren’t very interested in that or hadn’t thought about it until 20 years ago. Now it seems like a very current thing, and they’re interested. They’ve been very interested for some time in Black British authors as well. They’re not people who are trying to find a voice for those communities, necessarily, but probably just as powerfully finding an audience who wants to find out about the community without having to say, “Well, this is going to be our documentary discovery.” You can just imagine what it’s like, and that’s good enough.

But who knows why things come into fashion, why they dominate, and why they disappear? The epic poem was the dominant form of the 17th century, and no one’s really written one for about 300 years now.

On Rachel Cusk

OLIVER: Who are the other best living British novelists?

HENSHER: Oh, no, don’t tempt me.

OLIVER: No, you’re not, no?

HENSHER: No, I’m not going to be tempted.

OLIVER: Can you give your argument for Rachel Cusk? Because I think she’s dreadful.

HENSHER: Do you?

OLIVER: Yes, I think it’s very boring. I find the Outline trilogy quite unreadable, actually.

HENSHER: Oh, okay.

OLIVER: On the first page, I thought, “Wow, this is so exciting. She’s doing something really new.” And by halfway through the first book, I thought, “Well, it’s over. She’s done everything it can do. I can’t take it anymore.”

HENSHER: I think that what will keep her going is the unfailing beauty of her sentences. I think she has cadences like no other writer. That keeps people going. And what I really love about some of her books is that they are literally about nothing. I think The Country Life is an absolutely superb book, but what’s it about, really? A girl goes to the country and falls out with her family. It’s absolutely great.

Yes, what is it? What are they about? I mean, but that’s the thing. I don’t think that you really find what’s wonderful about novels by saying, “What are they about?” I thought the trilogy was just a wonderful bit of thread-spinning. And maybe it’s just me, but those novels that consist of the gathering of one story after another, sometimes never coming to a conclusion, they work such a spell.

And that’s true about, not a novel, but One Thousand and One Nights; The Canterbury Tales; Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler; or in the same category, Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty, which I think is the great American novel of the last 50 years. And it’s exactly that. It’s a series of stories being told as one person tries to pitch a movie to another. It’s absolutely glorious. And I think that the Cusk trilogy is very much like that.

Long before Rachel’s trilogy, I did have this plan to write a novel of storytelling, and it was going to be called Tales from the Pit. And actually, I signed a contract for it, and it was going to be stories told from one orchestral musician to another during the interminable performances of some long-running opera or other. But the thing that stopped me from writing it was that I discovered that Berlioz, the great composer and great writer, had written a book very similar, called Les soirées de l’orchestre. And I thought, “No, I’m not going to outdo Berlioz.”

On Literary Critics

OLIVER: Who are the critics from whom you have learnt the most?

HENSHER: Peter Garside, the great Regency critic. J. M. S. Tompkins, who wrote a superb book about 100 years ago about the popular novel after 1770 to about 1820. That’s a superb book. John Sutherland I think is really good. I love his books solving problems in novels. George Saintsbury, end-of-the-19th-century critic who had the principle, “Read everything.” And I think that his books about the novel in particular are really—they can’t be improved on. He was just so well read.

OLIVER: Yes. What about more modern critics? That sort of ends a long time ago.

HENSHER: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know that there are any critics writing—I mean, I don’t describe myself as a critic. I’m just a book reviewer.

OLIVER: Leavis, Carey, Hermione Lee?

HENSHER: Oh, yes. I think Hermione is really a great biographer, and her life of Virginia Woolf was very good. Her life of Penelope Fitzgerald was better, and her life of Anita Brookner is exemplary. It really is.

OLIVER: But the Fitzgerald book has no religion.

HENSHER: Yes. I probably didn’t notice that.

OLIVER: Penelope Fitzgerald, she never talks about it, but it’s all about God. And the book is quite secular and feminist in a way that I felt was perhaps more Hermione Lee than Penelope Fitzgerald, you know?

HENSHER: Yes, that’s a very good point. It’s not something that I really pay attention to. You could make the case that there are all sorts of private parts of people’s lives that are just closed to the investigator. Very few literary biographers talk seriously about sexual relations or about money, for instance. I don’t really see why religion shouldn’t be different. I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about that.

Critics—I can’t stand Leavis. I think he’s wrong about everything. I do think he’s wrong about everything, and I don’t know what he means when he says, “This is life-enhancing.” I was like, “What does that mean,” you know? What does it mean? And people in Cambridge were always saying, “What does that sentence mean?” Who knows? Boy. And I think they must have said it to Leavis about five times a day. Who else? Suggest some names to me.

OLIVER: I thought John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses.

HENSHER: Yes, John Carey. Yes, that is a proper—

OLIVER: It’s a great book.

HENSHER: That’s a proper game changer, actually. And I don’t see how you could disprove it. He’s wrong—

OLIVER: And the Dickens book, The Violent Effigy.

HENSHER: Yes, that’s brilliant. He’s occasionally just wrong, but he’s wrong in interesting ways. The Thackeray book writes off some great novels, in my view. The Intellectuals and the Masses, he’s just wrong about George Moore. But on the whole, yes, he’s a very good thing.

Of course, John Carey was the last generation of critics to have a proper training in textual bibliography. So his editions of Milton, and especially the brilliant edition of the James Hogg Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, they are a very good preparation for going through a work of literature and talking about every word of that work of literature.

Two Thousand Novels

OLIVER: You read 2,000 novels in order to write your history of the novel.

HENSHER: Oh, a lot more than that.

OLIVER: Okay.

HENSHER: A lot more than that. There’s 2,000 novels that are talked about.

OLIVER: In the bibliography.

HENSHER: There are a lot more novels that I just didn’t put in.

OLIVER: Where did you get them all? You must have had trouble finding some of them.

HENSHER: It’s much easier now than it used to be. There’s Gutenberg, of course. There’s this wonderful publisher—I want to get to the bottom of it—an online publisher that will sell you the collected—what’s it called? I don’t know—will sell you the collected works of some very minor novelists for like 1.99. A couple weeks ago, I just bought all the novels of Rhoda Broughton for 1.99. So that was very useful.

And there are various other online sources. There’s the London Library, of course, for physical copies, which they still have a surprising number of things. They had a copy, for instance, of the very last three-volume novel to be published, which is a novel by George Gissing’s brother, Algernon. I can’t tell you how bad it is. Oh, god, it’s absolutely atrocious. Anyway, they had a copy. So, yes, you sort of gather them here and there.

I knew that a novel was seriously obscure when neither Gutenberg nor the HathiTrust websites or anybody else could come up with a copy. There’s a novel from the 1790s that crops up in a lot of bibliographies and general surveys of 1790s novels by Charlotte Palmer. She’s a woman called Charlotte Palmer. I don’t know anything about her at all. And it’s called It Is and It Is Not a Novel. It sounds fascinating, but I did notice that it’s suddenly referred to for the first time in a study of 2013, and every single reference since then more or less repeats what that first commentator has said.

I couldn’t find a copy of it myself in any of the sources, and I did wonder. Jane Austen was a very keen reader of women writers of that period, and I did think, “Jane Austen couldn’t possibly have heard of this writer and her book, because there’s a character in Jane Austen called Charlotte Palmer.” She wouldn’t have done that if she’d made that connection. It would be like giving a character the name Fanny Burney. So I’m sure that it does exist somewhere, but I couldn’t track it down.

OLIVER: And you excluded Ulysses.

HENSHER: Yes. That was a really difficult one. I tormented myself over Ulysses, and I could justify including Joyce. Firstly, he always had a British passport. He never had an Irish passport or anything else, so you could base it on that.

On the other hand, it was published in Paris. I do talk a little bit about Portrait of the Artist, which was published in London. It was published in Paris, and he never lived in Britain after leaving Ireland when it was still part of Britain. So, I mean, I couldn’t not mention it at all.

But I thought in the end, just from a literary politics sort of standpoint, I thought if I put Ulysses in, describing it as an example of the novel in Britain, that would kick off a fuss that I didn’t feel passionate about defending. Oddly enough, I would’ve been more tempted to include Finnegans Wake, which I’m passionately fond of and which was, of course, published by Faber and Faber in 1939. But it made no sense to leave Ulysses out and include Finnegans Wake.

Where the borders were drawn, who to include and who to leave out, it wasn’t an easy decision. And on the whole, I did include people rather than exclude them. But Joyce is such a national figure in Ireland that I did think there would be a bit of a row if I started claiming him as a British novelist.

On Penelope Fitzgerald

OLIVER: You have a very nice suggestion in the back of the book for a Library of Britain, which would be a bit like the Library of America, but obviously we have a lot more to publish here.

HENSHER: Yes, it would obviously be a lot better. [laughter]

OLIVER: But I think you left Penelope Fitzgerald off your list of the people who should be first in line.

HENSHER: Oh, did I? Oh, that wasn’t deliberate. What a disaster.

OLIVER: I wondered. I thought this must be—

HENSHER: Oh, no, that was a cock-up.

OLIVER: So you do want her in.

HENSHER: Oh, yes. Yes, definitely. And the biographies as well.

OLIVER: Because I think she’s a great genius. Oh, the biographies are amazing, yes.

HENSHER: Yes. Penelope was the last person in my life who I’ve been scared of. I’m not scared of many people, and probably in my adult life on the fingers of one hand, really. But Penelope, I was scared of, and I do not know why. I do not know why, because she was always unfailingly polite and civil. She just had a sort of level stare as though she was kind of assessing you, and she might at any point say something that you would carry with yourself for the rest of your life shuddering.

And she never did. She never did. She was extremely nice, but I don’t know. There was something very odd about Penelope. It was as if—do you know that description of the Greek Alexandrian poet Cavafy, that he was a gentleman that stood at right angles to the universe? She was like that. You met her at a party, and she’d stand there. She looked very much like the White Queen in Alice. She always had a kind of Sainsbury’s plastic bag by the side of her, and she just seemed kind of detached from the party and from everyone.

I think she liked solitude. I don’t think the impression that she didn’t quite want to be there was at all false. She was a one-off, Penelope, I think. And I know that people who worked with her—we shared an editor at one point, and she was one of those authors that inspired huge amounts of loyalty. I think the biographies are, in a way, even stranger than—The Knox Brothers, and the Charlotte Mew biography is incredible.

OLIVER: It’s crazy.

HENSHER: It’s incredible. It’s absolutely incredible. I wish she’d—there were a couple of biographies that she wanted to write and didn’t. She was going to write a biography of L. P. Hartley and gave it up because she discovered too much about L. P. Hartley’s sex life, and Leslie Hartley’s sister was still alive. She dropped that.

And I think there was talk of a biography of M. R. James. The very last thing that Penelope published, almost, I have a responsibility for because Penguin Classics—Penguin Modern Classics, probably—were going to bring out a selection of M. R. James’s short stories. And they asked me to write the introduction to them, and I said, “I will write the introduction to them, but only if Penelope refuses to.” So they went to Penelope, and she said yes. And I’m very proud of that.

OLIVER: Yes, that’s a great piece of writing as well. Right, I’m going to read out a quote from your book.

HENSHER: Oh, Lord.

Novel-Reading and Morality

OLIVER: Here we go. Quote: “If you had read more than one novel with attention, it would be impossible to bring a machete down upon the face of another human being without guessing what it would be like to be behind that face as the blade fell upon it. You would not do it.” End quote. Now, we just know that that’s not true, isn’t it? A lot of awful people have read novels and continued to do their thing.

HENSHER: Well, I think those people are celebrities in the world of psychology. Isn’t it interesting that concentration camp guards read Hölderlin’s poems? They’re extreme cases. Overwhelmingly, there is not much overlap between habitual readers of novels and the sort of people who carry machetes in the streets of London. That’s definitely the case. I think that’s beyond arguing.

It might be the case that it’s not 100 percent cure. You can’t guarantee that if somebody has read Great Expectations with attention and love, that they won’t go out afterwards and say, “All right, I’ve done that. He gets off with Estelle”—or alternatively, “He doesn’t get off with Estelle,” according to which ending you read—“Now I’m going to go and chop some bugger’s head off with my machete.” Well, it’s conceivable, I suppose, but it’s very, very unlikely.

And I don’t know what better protection we have against the idea that the next generation is going to be more prone to violence. If we could persuade everybody to read and engage with novels, then that would be a very, very good protection against the spread of violence. I’m sure that’s right.

OLIVER: So you do think that the novel is causing the moral improvement somehow? It’s not just that civilized people, as it were, enjoy novels. There is some mechanism of change there?

HENSHER: Yes, and by moral improvement, I mean the simple act of imagining what it’s like to be somebody else. Not necessarily to pass judgment on those people, but to imagine what it’s like to live another life. And that’s the beginning of the human imagination, I think.

Effects of Patronage on the Novel

OLIVER: One of the main arguments of the book is that patrons, as you call them, had too much control over the novel, how it was priced, what form it took, whether it could talk about naughty things, et cetera. But the thing I actually enjoyed most about your book was, you were very good at showing how diverse and innovative the form has been, and how quickly and how cleverly novelists have responded to every new set of conditions, set of constraints.

Isn’t the truth somewhere between these two, that the patrons are also responding to real-world conditions, what the public will and won’t stick? The mothers have never wanted the daughters to read books, so the books have to get around that somehow. Isn’t everyone reacting to the real world, as it were? And the cold, dead hand of the patron isn’t gripping quite as tightly as that, maybe.

HENSHER: Well, I think that the argument is not that patrons exert too much power, but where they do exert too much power, it has, on the whole, a bad influence on the contents of the book. And patrons always assume that the readership is a uniform thing, that because they and their—Mudie in the 19th century, his 30,000 subscribers—because they wanted to read heartwarming tales in which nobody ever committed adultery, that nobody did.

Now, clearly that was completely wrong because when George Moore in the 1880s wrote a marvelous novel called A Mummer’s Wife, about a woman who runs off with her lover and becomes an alcoholic among a lot of actors—glorious, and they priced it at sixpence—Mudie’s turned it down flat, of course, because “No one’s going to read this book. Oh, our people don’t want to read it.”

Well, he was completely wrong. It went into six editions in two years priced at sixpence. And that actually has gone on. In the 1950s, Kingsley Amis was persuaded by his editor to take a word—I don’t know what it was, maybe it was the word bugger—out of a novel because they said, “The Boots Lending Library won’t buy it.”

Now, I suspect that 10 years later, Kingsley Amis would have said, “Well, stuff Boots Lending Library; I’m going to sell to people who do want to read it.” Because only five years after he was told that, Penguin published Lady Chatterley’s Lover after a very useful—useful from the point of view of publicity—obscenity trial. I have no idea whether Boots Library took Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I rather suspect not. But it sold hundreds of thousands within days, and quite right too.

The thing is that there may be a readership that likes one sort of novel, but there’s also a sort of readership that likes another sort of novel, and patrons never want to admit that.

Your second point, about the way that novels reach out to new areas, it’s absolutely true. And it’s quite striking, the sort of novels that very effectively reach out to explore unfamiliar bits of society. For instance, the working-class novels of the 1890s, which are often horrifically violent—Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago, I think one of the great 19th-century novels, but there’s no doubt there’s bits in it that have to be read with great revulsion. That was against everything that people thought the novel ought to be doing.

Even if something was a bit less specific, if it was about a new or unfamiliar minority, then it could go against the patron’s power. There’s a very good example of a novel by the Jewish novelist Julia Frankau called Dr. Phillips. And it was one of the most enjoyable discoveries of my reading. It’s a story of murder and adultery in the upper-class Maida Vale Jewish Victorian life. I absolutely adored it. And the patrons wouldn’t have touched it. They thought, “Oh, no one’s going to read this.”

But the novel is always going to give opportunities to people from communities that haven’t had their voices heard. Women, from the start, could write and publish novels when they couldn’t become doctors or lawyers or politicians. And people from ethnic minorities are heard surprisingly early in the history, and it’s because readers wanted to hear about something new.

And I think that’s an absolutely thrilling development. And it’s nothing to do with patrons either. It’s invariably publishers who just think, “Well, let’s try this thing out. Let’s see whether we can find readership for what it’s like to live on a remote farm in Africa.” Or going back to the 1880s, “Let’s see if our readers want to find out what it’s like to be a new immigrant off this boat called the Windrush.” One of the great novels of the 20th century emerged, Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners.

It’s always out of some sort of commercial desire just to try something out and see if there are readers there. It’s a very effective mechanism for broadening participation in society, I think.

The Role of Ideas

OLIVER: What about the role of ideas? Isn’t there an essential place for philosophy, theology, economics, all these other disciplines? The development of the novel is inseparable from these things. Not just people like George Eliot and Jane Austen, but there are ideas in every book, aren’t there?

HENSHER: Well, I think there are assumptions in every book. It depends what you mean by an idea, really. If you mean a philosophical proposition, then I would say no. There’s also the problem that an idea, the justifiable quality of an idea, whether it’s a good idea or whether it’s a truthful idea, whether that has an impact on the quality of a novel. And it’s quite hard to see that a novel that we agree with is necessarily going to be a better novel than a novel that’s talking total nonsense from the ideas point of view.

I think that there is a place for the proper Cambridge idea of a novel, a Cambridge idea of an idea in a novel. But I don’t think it’s essential. I’ve been thinking about this since we had this discussion at that conference. And I think that my main feeling about it is that we ought to admire novels for doing well what only the novel can do well. Those things are to sketch out lives, individual lives, however eccentric or idiosyncratic, to create the illusion of human beings, to listen to and convey the speech of individuals, and not necessarily to do what other forms of writing can do much better, which is to set out a case for one idea or another.

Now, of course, that’s oversimplifying the whole thing. But I must say that I can think of novels that I absolutely love, that no doubt have some kind of idea or assumption running through them. But I don’t know that’s really what I or anybody else reads a novel for. I mean, what are the ideas—I’m just looking at the shelf in front of me. What are the ideas in The Diary of a Nobody? Without a doubt, one of the greatest novels in British literature. What is the idea of The Diary of a Nobody?

OLIVER: I think that novel is premised on a very clear and simple set of ideas about the British class system, and about what is acceptable to mock and what is acceptable to be the butt of satire. That novel now, in a way, isn’t funny anymore because it’s too mean. It’s too cruel.

HENSHER: Are you kidding me? Seriously?

OLIVER: I find the first half funny, and by the end of it, I just think, “There’s nothing actually wrong with this guy. Gosh.”

HENSHER: No, there’s nothing wrong with him at all.

OLIVER: It’s unbearable how mean they’re being to him.

HENSHER: It’s absolutely adorable. Come on, Charles Pooter painting his bath red. [laughter] His son deciding that he’s going to call himself Lupin.

OLIVER: Yes, but it’s not purely observational. It is what gives it its coherence and its organization. I mean, that is a very condensed novel. It’s a remarkable achievement technically, to do so much in so little space. And that is because it is organized around a certain set of ideas about the British class system, which are largely no longer real.

HENSHER: Oh, Henry, Henry, how can you kill a book like that? How can you—

OLIVER: Look, you can’t have Jane Austen without the Enlightenment, and you can’t have George Eliot without the secularization of Jesus, and you can’t have Tolstoy without all the slightly incredible things that he believed.

HENSHER: No, let’s not talk about Tolstoy.

OLIVER: No, but the list goes on, right? Henry James even, who is often called a man of no ideas, he’s an incredibly good liberal. He might be the best novelist about the liberal idea that one person should not be allowed to dominate over another, in private conditions rather than just government. These ideas are, in a way, they’re the thing that distinguish those writers. Jane Austen knows how to observe and how to present because she’s thinking about what it means underneath.

HENSHER: I don’t know. I don’t know about that.

OLIVER: I don’t even think you can have Middlemarch without John Stuart Mill’s political economy, in a way.

HENSHER: Yes, that’s probably true. But George Eliot’s an unusual sort of novelist.

Jane Austen, I mean, how do we know what did she—what did Jane Austen think about slavery in the boldest and most extreme form? I think we can deduce that she thought that people involved in the slave trade or who came near it, like Mrs. Elton, were not at all the sort of people that she would altogether like to hang out with. I think the same is true of Sir Thomas Bertram, and the weakness of his imagination is somehow tied in with the fact that he has a plantation where he doesn’t really think about the people that it affects.

But already we’re into speculation. I don’t know what we can really deduce about Jane Austen’s idea, because she’s such a polyphonic novelist that we don’t find an idea being put forward without being able to find a character who’s saying the exact opposite. And sometimes one side of the argument is eventually dismissed, but not always, I think.

I said this at the conference we had a discussion with. I think that when you boil a novel down to its absolute irreducible essentials, I think what you have is not a proposal or a view of society or anything like that. It’s Charles Pooter painting his bath red, or the moment in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Mother and Son when the son irrevocably falls out with his mother by telling her that he doesn’t want to have sugar in his tea anymore.

From the very beginning, novelists have said, “What I’m writing about, I’m writing about nothing, and this is the virtue of what I’m doing. I’m writing about the utter triviality of everyday life.” And that, for me, is the enchantment.

OLIVER: Well, some novelists have said that.

HENSHER: A lot.

OLIVER: Samuel Richardson didn’t say that. Samuel Richardson’s quite an important exception.

HENSHER: No, but people said it about Richardson.

OLIVER: I don’t think we—yes, but we can’t believe it.

HENSHER: People definitely said—no, I think we can.

OLIVER: Pamela is a novel of ideas.

HENSHER: Well, it’s a novel that contains some ideas.

OLIVER: Yes.

HENSHER: Henry, I don’t think we’re going to agree on this. [laughter] I don’t think we’re going to agree on this. But if I want to read a book that sets out ideas, I do—I’m not a complete empty-headed flibbertigibbet. The other day I was reading one of my favorite books of ideas, which is The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

And I do think that books of ideas have their place. And it’s tempting to think, “Oh, I could transfer the insights of Erving Goffman into a fictional drama.” But you couldn’t. You absolutely couldn’t. It would rely much more on peculiar objects and observations that aren’t laden with propositions.

The Best English Novels for Beginners

OLIVER: One of the questions I get asked most often is from people who have not been bookish people. They’re more on the science or practical side. They haven’t read great novels since they were at school, and they want a list of five great English novels to get started. What’s your list?

HENSHER: Vanity Fair never failed. The Old Wives’ Tale never failed. An Evelyn Waugh. Which Evelyn Waugh? I think Put Out More Flags, actually, because it’s such a brilliantly funny novel. It’s a very strange novel. But it’s about a particular historical situation, which is often a kind of temptation.

What else? I’m only recommending novels by men because I think it’s men who have this problem, and I think that asking them straight off to read a particular feminine take on the world, sometimes you do hit just a blank wall. But I do think that they will get round to Mansfield Park or Daniel Deronda, my favorite Eliot.

I think I would also suggest The Lonely Londoners, the Sam Selvon. I do think it’s the most enchanting exercise in voice. And, how many is that? Is that four or five?

OLIVER: I think that’s four.

HENSHER: Oh, what am I going to do, then? Oh, you’ve got to have a Dickens. Bleak House. I think actually there’s a fallacy in people recommending novels to reluctant readers, which is, they always suggest something kind of easily digestible. But I think the way forward is to give something at its most intense and concentrated and just see if that counts. “This is what the novel really is like.”

Oh, I know the other one. I mentioned it earlier, the James Hogg, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Oh my god, that’s a fantastic novel. I really do think that’s good. Yes.

OLIVER: And can you do the same for children’s books?

HENSHER: No.

OLIVER: Fair enough.

HENSHER: No, I’m 61 years old. “Would you like to read this book, little—?” No, no, no, thank you.

Quick-Fire Questions

OLIVER: Let’s do a quick-fire round. I say the name of a novelist, and you give us your opinion. Short form.

HENSHER: Oh, gosh. Oh, terrifying.

OLIVER: That’s all right. You’ll do very well. Arnold Bennett.

HENSHER: Underrated. Marvelous.

OLIVER: Where should we start? And how good—

HENSHER: The Old Wives’ Tale. No, or The Card. The Card is a glorious novel. It’s absolutely ludicrous; it’s fantastic. The Old Wives’ Tale is, I think, the greatest French novel in English. It’s magnificent.

OLIVER: When you say underrated, how good is he?

HENSHER: Oh, top 20. Top 20 writers in English.

OLIVER: Iris Murdoch.

HENSHER: She’s out of fashion at the moment, very much out of fashion at the moment, I think for reasons that were out of her control. It’s impossible to tell at this point what is going to happen to a novelist like that. Is she going to carry on declining and drift out of our interest in the way that the novels of William De Morgan did? Or is she going to reach a bottom and then slide upwards?

I must say that I loved Iris’s novels to an incredible degree when I was 17. I could read them all day long. I think I must have read every single one of Iris Murdoch’s novels between the ages of 17 and 20. And the moment when I came to London and saw Iris at a literary party was one of the most overwhelming of my life.

What happened—weirdly, it was at a party in a secondhand bookshop in Clapham Old Town. Doesn’t exist anymore. And she was just standing there looking around with great empty eyes. And then Woodrow Wyatt tottered in in a very noisy way and said, “Iris, Iris, what are we doing here? What is this place? What are we doing?” It was very strange.

OLIVER: Walter Scott.

HENSHER: The creation is immense. The achievement is overwhelming. And towards the end of the 19th century, a reaction set in, which was so powerful that it defined many of Scott’s most characteristic stylistic features as the embodiment of bad writing. It’s not his fault. I myself, I admit to sharing in that reaction. And he comes to me in flashes of sublimity. I think the first chapter of The Heart of Midlothian is one of the most impressive pieces of writing of the century.

He did so much good for literature that it’s hard to be dismissive about him altogether, and I wouldn’t want to be. On the other hand, stylistically, he’s so out of tune with what we regard as good writing that I thought in the end it would just ring a completely false note if I pretended that I didn’t have problems with the style. So, you know, he’s in a particular historical position. We’re in a particular historical position. Who knows what that tells you about either of us, really?

OLIVER: Alan Hollinghurst.

HENSHER: Oh, who is my best friend, so yes, of course he’s marvelous.

OLIVER: Which one do you recommend?

HENSHER: I absolutely love The Stranger’s Child. I think that’s such an innovative novel, and it’s so clever and funny. But they’re all simply marvelous. He’s a marvelous novelist.

OLIVER: That’s the one I’m always pushing on people. It’s heartbreaking. It’s beautiful.

HENSHER: Yes.

OLIVER: It’s clever. It’s really wonderful.

HENSHER: So clever. You’re not going to trap me into saying rude things about darling Alan.

Various Elizabeths

OLIVER: No, no traps. No traps. Elizabeth Taylor.

HENSHER: Great novelist. Great novelist. And central to her time in a way that I don’t think anyone really appreciated until some time after she died. After she died, some organization or other gave her a posthumous award for a lifetime’s achievement, and her husband, John, went to collect it. And he said in his acceptance speech, “What a shame you couldn’t have said this while she was alive.” And it was absolutely right.

As a handler of technical material, I don’t think there’s a novelist in the 20th century to surpass her. Just the way in which characters are introduced and interact, how the plot proceeds, the evocation of place, it is just the most extravagantly perfect technical handling.

She’s the novelist who, more than anything, I show to my students in Bath Spa. And it is astonishing how if you give them a page of Elizabeth Taylor, almost chosen at random, you can go through it inch by inch, word by word, and just emerge at the end absolutely astonished by the expertise of the handling. I think she’s an absolutely marvelous novelist.

OLIVER: Elizabeth Bowen.

HENSHER: I think she went off. But those novels from To the North certainly to The Death of the Heart, and maybe even The Heat of the Day, are absolutely thrilling. Psychologically, she’s an absolute whiz at seeing people, seeing into people’s minds. She’s better at children than almost anybody, and there are a lot of people writing about childhood in the 1930s.

The Death of the Heart, I think, is her best novel, though The House in Paris runs it pretty close. The middle section, where the young heroine goes to the seaside to stay with a family that she doesn’t really know and is followed by her cad of a boyfriend, is an absolutely stunning survey of uncertain behavior. And it’s rarer than you think, actually, novelists writing about people behaving uncertainly for reasons that they don’t quite understand.

The Heat of the Day, it has superb things in it, but I would say that it falls slight victim to the tendency of the time to think that novelists ought to write about serious subjects of contemporary concern. Novels of ideas, Henry, I’m sorry to say. And she just wasn’t that sort of novelist. When she’s doing two people lying on the grass just talking about nothing much, it’s marvelous. But when you creak it up into this plot about someone’s a spy and—oh, Elizabeth, don’t do it to me. Anyway, but that’s just me. A lot of people absolutely love The Heat of the Day.

OLIVER: Elizabeth Jenkins, Bowen’s great friend.

HENSHER: My knowledge of Elizabeth Jenkins that I can produce at short notice is The Tortoise and the Hare. And I think a lot of the same things that I said about Elizabeth Taylor are the same. It’s a lovely classical style.

I’ve often given people to look at the first page of The Tortoise and the Hare. I think it slightly suffers from the title, which makes the narrative seem a bit predetermined, but that’s a minor sin. I would love to read some more Elizabeth Jenkins, actually. I know I read another one or two some time ago, but I’ve completely forgotten what they were called, so don’t test me.

OLIVER: The best ones are Dr. Gully, Honey, and Brightness, after The Tortoise and the Hare.

HENSHER: Okay. Oh, that’s interesting. Okay. I’ve got a bit of an allergy—you’re going to disprove this immediately. I’ve got a bit of an allergy to novels, like Twitter profiles, which include the word doctor. [laughter]

OLIVER: It’s only called that because it’s a historical novel.

HENSHER: Yes, they are putting me off.

OLIVER: Fair enough. Fair enough. Fair enough.

HENSHER: I love Trollope, but I must say that when I reach out for Doctor Thorne, my hand—

OLIVER: It’s not the best.

HENSHER: I don’t know why. Why is it?

OLIVER: Because relative to what actually happens, it’s too long, and so you have to get through a lot of stuff that doesn’t really do anything for the novel.

HENSHER: No, I mean why is it the title that includes the word doctor is so off-putting?

OLIVER: Oh, that I can’t help you with.

HENSHER: No, I can’t help. Yes, I’m going to investigate to see if I can think of a novel with doctor in it.

OLIVER: Jenkins is another one who’s a superb biographer.

HENSHER: Oh, yes.

OLIVER: Her Jane Austen biography is amazing, really beautiful. Really incredible.

HENSHER: Okay. All right. Okay.

More Novelists

OLIVER: Martin Amis.

HENSHER: Yes, I think he is great. I do think he was wonderful. There are some later novels where he slightly fell down because he wanted to say something solemn about a major political situation. But he went on being a very good novelist a lot longer than people assume. I remember when The Pregnant Widow came out, and I think The Pregnant Widow is an absolutely enchanting novel. It’s just full of regret and grown-up thoughts, and, oh, I absolutely loved it.

Oh, my Lord, you should have seen the reviews that it got. I think word just got round among young people that Martin was no good anymore. He’s got the thing that his father had, of a brilliant ear for dialogue, and much more than his father, but sharing some of the same qualities. He had the air of being able to write a sentence that readers would remember. I’m sure that most people who like Martin Amis, if you said to them, “Give us a sentence from Martin Amis,” they’d be able to come up with one.

OLIVER: And lastly, Jilly Cooper.

HENSHER: Oh, yes. Do you know, people always roll their eyes when I say I don’t see why Jilly Cooper shouldn’t be the novelist from our time that survives in posterity. She’s got a lot of the qualities that actually make for a good prospect of survival. Her characters sound distinct. You always know who’s speaking. It’s got a good social range. It’s not about two retired actors sitting in a bedsit in Kentish Town. They’re funny, which is always good. People love them.

The first of the series of her long books—not the 1970s romances, though those are very enjoyable too—the earliest of them, Riders, published in 1986, never gone out of print. Now, there’s not many novels from 1986 that are still going strong with large readership. They had large readerships even before the television drama. That’s not the only reason. So I think, yes, I’d put my money on Jilly Cooper still to be read in 100 years’ time, ahead of Julian Barnes.

Final Thoughts

OLIVER: Last two questions. How do you think AI will change the novel?

HENSHER: No idea. Absolutely no idea. I think that novel has found ways to take advantage of technology and change in society before. It will do so again. I’m a novelist myself, but my practice has been long formed. I don’t think that I’m the person to ask this about.

What you want to do is ask somebody like the brilliant student that I was just talking to, who’s 22 years old, a student of mine who has been thinking about AI since he started his undergraduate degree. Those people, they will have it in their bones, and they will master it, I’m convinced. But my answer is worth less than nothing.

OLIVER: What will you do next?

HENSHER: Oh, I’ve retired. That’s it. That’s it. Glorious. I’m very happy.

OLIVER: You’re not going to set up the Library of Britain?

HENSHER: No, no, I couldn’t run that. Someone else can do that. No. I mean, it’d be nice if anyone took it seriously.

OLIVER: I think it’s a great idea.

HENSHER: Yes, I think it’s a great idea. I wouldn’t have put it—but no, I’m going to retire now. I’ve spent 30 years publishing novels, and there’s 12 novels, 2 volumes of short stories, and finishing with a history of my art form. I think that sounds like a nice, shapely career.

I don’t want to be writing novels about my idea of what the kids are like when I’m 75. I think that’s absolutely a fatal idea. [laughter] Of course, I’m just saying that, and you never know when something’s going to tempt. But at the moment, I think I’m going to retire.

OLIVER: Very good. Philip Hensher, thank you very much.

HENSHER: Pleasure. Thank you, Henry.

When the band is rehearsing on the train, the band leader snaps put a little heat under it. That’s exactly what this film does in every scene. It’s full of winks and nods and glances; people are always screeching cars round corners, sneaking out of windows, swinging with the band, or heeling it from the mob; there are dancing girls, spinning basses, screaming whistles, flasks of bourbon, and glittering jewels. This is everything a movie ought to be. Goose it up a little the band leader demands. Oh did they and how.

And boy does Billy Wilder know how to frame a scene. So much is happening in every shot. You get the fullest possible sense of the life of the film. It all fits, a careful composition, and yet it feels organic and natural. The clarinets and the mobsters are all lined up as elegantly as swans. The dancers move through the picture like the music of the spheres. The whole thing has a perfect quality, as if any little change in the shot would ruin the piece.

Surely it would be possible to write commentary about it all. But why? Why spoil the bloom of one of the great comedies? What’s needed is appreciation, a full-throated demand that you get yourself down to the cinema right now. Don’t you want to see beauty and genius and Jack Lemmon in a dress running from a gangster with a gun? Who can see Some Like It Hot and not feel young again, not fall in love with Marilyn again, not tap their foot or swing in time? This is the way comedy overwhelms. We know the tragic and profound in the way it makes us chill and prickle; we know the joy of the comic as it gives us a flush of spring and the urge to wiggle.

It is all well and good to think of films like this as fun and only fun, but fun is the life force underneath it all, and if you’re feeling the approach of autumn in the creak of your knee or the lag in your head, get yourself a shot of the good stuff. Go and see it while it is on the big screen. This is art. This is the golden age. And it’s as fresh as the day they made it. I don’t care what it takes. Skip work. Go alone if you have to. All the joy that film can bring, and yours for $12.

In the novel, a comedy about the downfall of a family of Irish landowners, Edgeworth doesn’t just lightly reference economics. Large chunks were clearly built around Smith’s foundational 1776 text “The Wealth of Nations.” Edgeworth was writing about price setting, monopolies, productive land management — ideas that preoccupied the early economists. Economics was in the very title: Smith had called irrationally high land charges “racked rent.”

I wondered if anyone else had noticed. A search through academic journals showed that a specialized few had clocked Edgeworth’s contribution. The economic historian William Henderson once called “Castle Rackrent” a “literary extension” of Smith’s work, arguing that it had “extended the influence” of early economics by inspiring other writers to apply its theories to the social sphere. Other academics, including Susan Manly at the University of St. Andrews, had also written about Edgeworth’s heavy use of economics.

That is Jeanna Smialek writing in the New York Times with an extract of her new book The Invisible Hand of Maria Edgeworth: How a Nineteenth-Century Novelist Taught the World Economics. I must confess that even though I am very interested in the interaction of Smith’s work with that of the novelists’, I do not find Castle Rackrent much fun, though perhaps a re-read will cure me of that feeling. The whole piece is fascinating and I hope to read and review her book soon.

There was, however, an obvious barrier to bringing avant-garde philosophical and scientific ideas to the masses. They could be complicated and difficult to understand. The Edgeworth pair noted that it could be useful “to mix some political & commercial knowledge with fictions that amuse the fancy.” In fact, this was something Edgeworth had already begun to do.

Edgeworth was embarking on a project that was larger than her own oeuvre. She began to coach other literary women on how to include economics in their work. She struck up a close friendship with Jane Marcet, a London socialite who had already written a primer on chemistry, and the two women corresponded about economic topics. When Marcet wrote what could be considered the first textbook on economics, Edgeworth gave her extensive notes on the rough draft.

Here is Smialek’s book. A trade book about Smith’s influence on novelists should be written about Jane Austen too of course…

Who, then, is the unhappy consciousness in our analogy? I would suggest it is the writer of autofiction. In a 2014 essay describing the emerging popularity of autofiction in Anglophone writing, Jonathan Sturgeon lists three defining features of the genre: conscious play with the factual and the fictional; the belief in the immanently fictional character of the self; and a narrative that accounts for its own production, usually by telling us how the author-narrator came to be the self who wrote and published it. According to Frank Guan and Christian Lorentzen, what distinguishes this genre from earlier Künstlerromane are the economic conditions of twenty-first-century publishing. In this interpretation, autofiction is ‘a sort of aesthetic edition of careerism’ (Guan), a symptom of the fact that a writer’s job ‘has ceased to be distinguished from self-promotion’ (Lorenzten). Autofiction writers, in other words, are memoirists who have had to become their own ghostwriters. The prevailing affects on display in the genre are akin to those that Hegel delineated for the unhappy consciousness: anomie, impotence, masochism, anhedonia.

It is therefore fitting, even logical, that Life of M, the new novel by Rachel Cusk, one of the authors most associated with the Anglophone autofiction boom, should be narrated by a would-be ghostwriter. In Life of M, the autofictional ‘game or conceit’ is announced straight out of the gate. The first paragraph reads, in full: ‘A little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography. She liked the idea. She’s a good sport. Would you just make it up? she said.’ Bookended by a chapter describing the genesis of this ‘project’ and one describing its ultimate failure, most of Cusk’s novel toggles between what appear to be scenes from M’s life and what appear to be scenes from that of the narrator. Cusk gives each of these sections its own focalization. The first and last chapters are narrated in the first-person singular, M’s chapters are narrated in the close third person and – picking up from where she left off in her previous novel Parade (2024) – Cusk narrates the remaining chapters in the first-person plural. With the exception of the final scene, in which the ghostwriter shows M what they have written, the drama of the novel arises from the question of how much overlap exists between the ‘I’ narrator and the ‘we’ narrator – and how reliable their descriptions of M actually are.

Read the whole thing here.

Here I bring in a new tranche of data: short stories. Over the last few months, with Claude Code, I gathered data for 211 literary magazines, spanning 1841–2026, which amounts to more than 289,000 stories and 63,000 authors. Some of this data—especially twentieth-century pulps and slicks—is drawn from the Fiction Magazine Index, a crowdsourced project created by William G. Contento and edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne. Nora Shaalan provided the foundation for the New Yorker data.

According to this data, women have more than tripled their share of the short stories in these 211 magazines. Women outpublished men in the mid-nineteenth century, underwent a precipitous decline in the 1880s, 1890s, and 1900s, hovered around 20% from the 1910s through the 1970s, before climbing decade-by-decade, only exceeding men in the 2020s, for the first time in 150 years at 54.6%.

Dan’s results roughly match the pattern of a study published in 2019. So men are being published less but that means men and women are now at about parity. As he writes,

Fiction in the US has undergone a tremendous demographic transformation in the last fifty years. Men have lost a lot of ground, which women have gained. But the way some commentators have written about it, you’d think men are, as the New York Times headline suggested, disappearing. Hardly! Women have just caught up.

Read the whole thing. I still don’t think this “matters” in any literary sense, but for those who care, these numbers should be taken account of.

A Screaming Comes Across the Sky

Where Have All the Literary Men Gone?

Are literary men disappearing? Some have been saying. As publishing’s cultural status and financial prospects have declined, men—per Sarah Brouillette’s astute analysis—have left, and women have taken control of the industry…

Read more

a month ago · 2 likes · Dan Sinykin

George Orwell’s son has criticised the decision to drop his father’s Down and Out in Paris and London from an A-level English course and introduce a feminist account of his mother’s life.

Orwell’s 1933 memoir has been removed from the English language and literature syllabus by Cambridge OCR, and Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, a controversial biography of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, his first wife, has been added from next year. The book is a complex examination of O’Shaughnessy’s life. Its depiction of Orwell as a “sadistic and misogynistic” man, whose infidelity and behaviour ruined her life, has sparked heated debate among Orwell scholars.

That is from the Observer, who think it beneath them to link to the syllabus in question. If you look at the actual OCR English Language and Literature syllabus, the problem is worse than it looks. The syllabus already included books by Alexander Masters and Bill Bryson. It will now include writers like Tara Westover and Ana Kinsella. Other components allow the teaching of Ian McEwan instead of Jane Eyre and Carol Ann Duffy instead of Emily Dickinson. Yes, you read that correctly. Carol Ann Duffy instead of Emily Dickinson.

The problem is not that Wifedom is “replacing” Orwell, but that the whole syllabus is stupid either way.

I objected to Wifedom when it was published. It is simply inaccurate. It is the sort of book that sounds credible until you start looking up the footnotes, which often simply aren’t there. When they do exist, they aren’t reliable. From my review.

Funder writes that “clearly” Eileen had told the vicar to remove the word “obey” from the wedding vows. Orwell said that other parts of the service were missed out too. I was intrigued—did Eileen ask for these other things to be removed? What were they? I looked for the source. No footnote. Eileen’s previous biographer, Sylvia Topp, makes this same claim, referencing Orwell biographer Gordon Bowker. But Bowker has assumed this is what Eileen did. “Eileen, it seems, had arranged with John Woods to omit at least one of the vows...” He also has no source.

So perhaps Eileen arranged it, perhaps the vicar fumbled, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. But this trail of speculation has been written up as near-fact. Apparently many suffragettes removed “obey”—if that’s the cause of this speculation, then tell me! Add it as useful context! But don’t just interpose your assumptions like this.

I hope this is going to be the object of study. Wifedom is there to teach “how the writers create the voice of their subject(s)” after all. But it is nonetheless an unworthy book. Can we doubt it was chosen for ideological reasons? We all know that choosing Carol Ann Duffy is cheating the child of their chance to study Emily Dickinson. This is like not teaching long division or natural selection; nor is it like teaching the order of Battle at Trafalgar.1

We also know that they don’t need to be taught Carol Ann Duffy. In a discussion of what an English syllabus should be, C.S. Lewis explained why it wouldn’t incorporate modern work. (The whole book is good value.)

The first thing to do, obviously, is to cut off some years from this end. The reasons for choosing this end are, I suppose, obvious. In the first place, we naturally wish to help the students in studying those parts of the subject where we have most help to give and they need help most. On recent and contemporary literature their need is least and our help least. They ought to understand it better than we, and if they do not then there is something radically wrong either with them or with the literature. But I need not labour the point. There is an intrinsic absurdity in making current literature a subject of academic study, and the student who wants a tutor’s assistance in reading the works of his own contemporaries might as well ask for a nurse’s assistance in blowing his own nose. Again, things are understood by what precedes them rather than by what follows them.

I happened to read The World’s Wife when I was seventeen, on the advice of a wonderful teacher from the girls’ school over the road—she also recommended some Bach concertos—but it would have been unthinkable for that book to be on a syllabus, both to me and to the teacher who recommended it. (I was given William Golding for the modern text. We also read Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer—and, alas, Scott Fitzgerald.) There is a great difference between a book worth reading (for whatever reason) and a book worth putting on a syllabus. It is that distinction which the philistine supremacy always wants to erode.

Some pupils come from schools and families where Dickinson and Shakespeare will be available to them in other ways. Some do not. Some children are still reading as much as children ever did. Some are not. Some children will inherit the great tradition of English Literature whatever decisions are made by the people who set the syllabus. Some will not.

Some children will not suffer this opportunity cost very much. Some will pay the full price of it. It is the latter who suffer the most from these decisions.

Life of M works on the conceit that the narrator is writing M’s autobiography, and making it all up. In the opening, M finds this amusing. At the end, she is hurt by all the falsities, but also by the way the book makes her seem like she “lacks humanity.” Lacking humanity, of course, is Cusk’s core theme, and her project as a novelist has been to deny or diminish the idea of character. So the book makes a neat loop around the idea that there is no-one there, whether the book was “real” or “made up”, about who the narrator could write. Whether she based it on “fact” or, as they claim in the final pages, invented it, all comes to the same thing.

M is presented as a hollow, almost fake, person, only ever acting her life. She is truly alive when acting and really acting in her personal life. Early on, she is presented as living in a doll’s house of fame, and this image is echoed many many times later on. Her house, enormous and empty. When people take pictures of her in public, it is like she is in a zoo. And so on. These images are also used of the narrator, who refers to themself as “we” (meaning they and their partner), apart from the opening and ending when they are “I”. The parallel is so thoroughly established it becomes dull. We are all trapped in the performances of our lives.

Life of M is part of a genre that sees biography, autobiography, and fiction as mergeable. This genre contains books like Orlando, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, The Quest for Corvo, Biography of X, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers. Whereas those books generally take the view of their subjects as mysterious and multifaceted, Life of M takes the opposed view: mysterious because empty. This is not, however, a study of fame, per se, but of how anyone maintains individual identity and integrity.

At the end, the narrator says that when M finds out her friend’s painting sold for millions of dollars, she was astonished. She admired this friend’s integrity, a quality that she “experiences as a kind of absence within herself… like a vital organ that was removed early on.” Alas, she could have achieved her status and kept her integrity, she now realises, but “her life has not been her own.”

This is the refrain of the book. Cusk’s familiar complaints about parenthood are a core part of the theme, but so are many other complaints. The difference is that whereas most things are “a role like any other”, parenthood is a “sacrifice”, a word the narrator repeats. This is the great weakness of Life of M. The attempt to produce an experimental narrative about auto-fiction and the nature of the self fails because of the book’s philosophical incoherence. Who is being sacrificed, on this book’s terms? From who is the vital organ of integrity missing? Why is M able to feel so angry about her presentation, if there is no-one there and never was? It seems plausible that Cusk’s narrator thinks we are all subsumed into the system which could be broken free of, but that would take a lot more establishing than is achieved.

Cusk’s own narrator demonstrates this confusion:

Concentration is like a white field into which we levitate, leaving ourselves behind in time. One part rises while the other remains below. When our children were born they presented the greatest possible threat to our concentration. We could no longer access the white field because we could not forget them: our bodies wouldn’t allow it. To learn that this was not the case for men diminished men forever in our eyes. Yet it was we, at the time, who seemed to have been diminished.

Our children grow up, knowing or not knowing about our sacrifice. Some of them don’t care to know. Others are more willing, dimly perceiving that they may find themselves making the same sacrifice one day and wishing to remain informed. For a while we railed about the injustice of it all, as though our existence were a game in which someone had suddenly changed the rules halfway through. Then we stopped caring about it, about the rules. Perhaps, like so much of what we have seen in life, what looked like rules were not rules at all.

Who is “we” here? There is a modern idiom that implies a split self—I need to move my body—which has no basis in any philosophical or metaphysical claims. Cusk’s narrator uses this idiom several times: at the airport, people “will proceed in shameful stockinged feet to have their bodies scanned”; at the end, the narrator says “it was this abandonment of myself that helped me.” It is not clear what theory, if any, of the self the narrator has, proposes, or relies upon. This is pure idiomatic writing, without any deeper thought to sustain it. The narrator is similarly casual about philosophy when they say: “Her objectivity in the face of desire is the philosophical product of her fame.” God only knows what philosophical means in this sentence.

Cusk’s reliance on idiom is part of the general method of her narration. Like the recent novel The Ten Year Affair, her narrator doesn’t use the free indirect style to bring characters’ thoughts into the narrative, but to introduce external ideas. This is an inversion of free indirect style—ventriloquising discourse from outside the novel, which is relevant to the characters, rather than ventriloquising discourse from inside the characters that is relevant to the novel.

This is most apparent in Cusk’s use of idiom. The private school M’s children attend has “an air of commerce about it” and the parents, rather than picking children up in the car “attend on foot”. Here it is possible that Cusk is ironising people who do not appear directly in the novel—we don’t really see, hear, or know any of the parents directly—but they are satirised nonetheless by their idiom. But when the narrator writes that children grow up either knowing or not knowing about their parents’ “sacrifice” while the parents “railed about the injustice of it all” it seems more likely that these idioms are simply the way the narrator talks—a means of flattening the voice down to someone undistinguished, unindividualized, a cliche. It is a North London, soft-left, liberal literati vision of life. Just as M is a hollow person in a doll’s house life, so is the narrator. Thus when the narrator says M reads the newspapers as a way of “retaining contact with reality” the irony serves them both simultaneously.

This parallel is drawn most clearly in the way the scene is set: life is like a movie, as we are told more than once. The most frequent opening for a section is the phrase “It is…”. So: “It is a boat…”; “It is outside on the terrace…”; “It is a brasserie…”; “It is a meeting room…”. This is part of the “screenwriting” that is used to make life and movies become less and less distinguishable. “The elevator doors slide open and reveal M” reads like a screenplay direction. There are whole sections that are like this.

In the middle of the book, a section about death exposes the mismatch between “film reality” and “lived experience”. Echoes of Dante, the Book of Common Prayer, Exodus, and Philip Larkin are simple and obvious enough (intentionally so, presumably, as part of making the passage filmic while using the familiar idioms the rest of the narrative relies upon). But the real purpose of the passage, I think, is to contrast descriptions of the bin men as they might appear in a film (flourish, fan out, choreographed, wheeling, gilding, vigorous and graceful). This ekphrasis is a contrast to the falsity of modern art, discussed near the end of the book. There is something real about the bin men which the movies obscure, hence the anger one character expresses to M that we all live like we are in movies now, partly because of actors like her.

In the midst of our lives we sometimes wake in the darkness and hear the sound of our own heart thudding in our ears. There is a moment of blank emptiness before the memory of who we are and of all we have done and have yet to do slowly begins to fill us.

The waste collectors come early, before it is even light. In their big truck they rampage noisily through the dark streets, pausing at each building in turn. Two men drive while the others ride on the back. At each stop they hop off before the truck has fully come to a halt. They aren’t trying to save time: this flourish is something they are offering to themselves. They fan out over the street in the darkness and perform a choreographed routine, some wheeling the plastic municipal bins out into the road while others attach them to the truck’s rear forks. The forks lift and upend the bins over the belly of the truck then jerkily set them back down, empty. The street lamps rain their yellow haze over the truck and over the men and the municipal bins, gilding their movements; overhead the sky begins to lighten to a deep and jewel-like blue. The men return the bins to the foot of the building. They do this slightly carelessly, for the bins are now light. Ahead of them on each road the heavy waiting bins are neatly aligned while behind them the empty bins are all askew, like the discarded shells of things whose meat has been taken. The men wear high-visibility jackets. They are vigorous and graceful as they ride the truck through the dark dawn, their bodies erect, their faces lifted to the air. Their high spirits seem to derive from the prosaic honesty of their occupation. When they go on strike the city is rapidly crippled. It sits stewing in its own mess, helpless. The men obtain a certain dignity from this fact.

The noise of the truck fills our room as it passes in the darkness. It is a diabolical sound of shrieking metal and grinding gears, of shouts and the violent sounds of impact. There is nowhere in the city where this noise can be escaped. It comes to each place in turn like an angel of death. Sometimes it is comforting and sometimes it is maddening. The sound of our own heart thudding in the dark silence is neither of those things.

And you see at the end of the passage how the perspective shifts. No more filmic grace and choreography. As “We” listens to the bin collectors it is diabolical, violent, noise. The implicit image of death from the start of the passage is made clunkingly obvious. This move from image to sound, in order to effect a sense of contrast, is a classic technique of the movies, so the artifice of living as if we were in a film is even unavoidable in this novel.

Life of M may be trying to achieve a meta-joke, as Laura Miller suggested in Slate, about the nature of fame and personhood. If, as rumour suggests M is Natalie Portman, she is presumably in on the con. The whole point is that M is no-one, not even to herself.

The final sentence in Life of M is so bizarre and disorienting it throws even these revelations into chaos. As the writer departs, M stops her at the door, announcing there’s something she’s always wanted to ask her. Then M smiles “warmly and almost goofily,” and says, “This might sound stupid, but I’ve been wondering. Are you a guy or a girl?” Since Rachel Cusk is quite obviously the latter, what can this possibly mean? Only that Cusk is screwing with us and perhaps suggesting that not only is M not Natalie Portman, but the narrator isn’t even Cusk.

Life of M is a narrative hall of mirrors that only a fool would confuse with a thinly veiled roman à clef about a celebrity.

It may of course be the case that Cusk did base this book on Portman and has added a further layer to her joke. There is a very funny moment when one of the narrator’s friends thinks she may have depression, but she also read that so many people are taking anti-depressants these days that they are in the water. And thus the “integrity of her depression may have been compromised.” So it is with Life of M: there is so much of this sort of thing “in the water” that the integrity of knowing “who the book is about” may be compromised. Critics beware. The contortions of what is a movie and what is real life become irresolvable, as Cusk intends.

But that rather seems to be as much as the book is about. If you believe that the novel has run its course, that making people up is embarrassing, and all that jazz, then you will perhaps find this impressive. It is, however, not a very original joke to fill a whole novel. Perhaps inevitably, the broader intellectual discussion within Life of M is all rather lame. M’s freedom to pass through an airport is contrasted to the way ordinary people in the queue are “powerless”, “stripped of their goods”, moved forward in their “shameful stockinged feet.” Now, this is done to ironise M, who likens this to scenes of “displacement and persecution”. But the words are all the narrator’s. This is not free indirect style. And the narrator goes on to say that M has known others who renounce privilege and “seek the powerlessness of the ordinary.” Perhaps the aim is to reveal the trap of fame, but the doll’s house imagery has done that. Perhaps the aim is to ironise M, or the narrator, or both, but the language is, as elsewhere, more of the normal idiom that feels like it is being brought in from other discourse. That is the inevitable risk of writing two such characterless characters: like Outline, it means Life of M too often feels like a lecture or an op-ed about familiar themes in familiar language.

The narrator says things like, “We think again of the fact that nature has no nationality. Is that why it is doomed?” An unnamed character says, “Families are networks of social control, programmed to extinguish individuality.” Both come from a similar ideological background and are expressed in a recognizable idiom. Both make relatively little sense. Nations can die! Some of them are dying right now. Families are not programmed. Who or what does Cusk (or her narrator) think did the programming? That is another lazy idiom that skates over the real arguments.

Assume that this is all done as part of the presentation of the characters: the need for these sentences is still a problem. There is no individuality, nothing distinguishing (this is just how the characters talk in Life of M), nor are these issues especially pertinent to the plot. They are here only as part of the general ideology that all the characters seem to share. The book simply feels unable to get beyond this sort of editorialising. To actually overcome the idea of an authentic self, Cusk would have to go beyond the thinking of these idioms.

Life of M is so committed to its uncharacterful characters that everyone is simply an expression of a familiar perspective that belongs outside the novel. There is no narrative ambivalence: Cusk is dictating a worldview through a narrative. It is readable, and interesting enough to write a long review about—but even at 185 not-very-long pages, it is longer than it ought to be.

Cusk is an unavoidable novelist. She has a great capacity for technical control: Life of M is almost word-perfect at maintaining its style. The problem is that the style isn’t really about anything. The more philosophical the book sounds, the emptier the prose becomes. It is left feeling like a clever trick, not really up to the standards of the genre it hopes to join.

Anyway, the point of telling you about ‘Skindle’ is to illustrate one of the ways in which literary memory works. Some time after I had made-up the story, I began to introduce the children to books like The Hobbit and Narnia. I only read The Hobbit when I was about fourteen, but I read Narnia when I was seven and it was a deep obsession. I remember vividly the day my father brought home a wooden box, with a latticed lid, that contained Turkish delight—real, authentic Turkish delight, not just the stuff you get in the supermarket. It was a gift from a client, which to childish ears sounded like it must be the real stuff from far away places.

At the sight of the box, and the revelation of its contents—I was allowed a piece as a treat, even though I had got out of bed to come and see the treasure—I truly felt that I was experiencing a part of Narnia. Standing there with the Turkish delight in my mouth was just like Edmund eating the sweets in the woods. There was no wardrobe I could walk through, no coats or snow or Lantern Waste, but there was Turkish delight. Narnia was real in that cube of sweetness.

This, along with most of what happens in The Magician’s Nephew (simply the best children’s book ever written), and a vague sense of the great excitement of The Last Battle (I can see the battle now, faintly, still), was how I remembered Narnia as an adult. My old copies had many crease marks that suggested many readings, and some scenes, like the sacrifice of Aslan, I could recall in great detail—the mice!; but a good deal of the books had left me. My children enjoyed The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but were not, then, interested in going further. (Things have changed, thank goodness.) So I re-read some of the books on my own.

Prince Caspian came back to me all in a great whoosh! as I realised that I did of course remember the ruins of Cair Paravel, the old armour, the trees, the magic potion. How could I have thought I had forgotten all of this? With every page I got the feeling that I had known this all along, I had just not realised I knew it. And then I read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. This time, I got much less of a sense that, yes, of course, I had always known this. Instead, I was shocked to find that some parts of ‘Skindle’ were obviously similar to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

The plot of ‘Skindle’ is simple. The city of Ludabek has been unbothered by dragons for many years. But now, in the distance, smoke is seen coming from the mountain. A ship is being prepared to undergo an expedition to keep Ludabek safe. Two children, Jenny and Marcus, wish to become stow-aways on this voyage. Their grandfather is a mage, the only one allowed to live in the city which is hostile to magic. They have discovered their innate abilities (which their mother wishes to deny or ignore). Their grandfather gives them a book of magic to help them on their journey. During the voyage, once they have been discovered and accommodated, Jenny realises her book has been stolen. Marcus’s powers are less in the line of casting spells and more trance-like. On one of his trance-walks he ends up in a mysterious corridor of the ship, at the end of which is a locked door. They both go back to this door and get inside and find their book.

As I told all this to my children, I could see it all very clearly. I didn’t do a very good job of describing it to them as I imagined it, but in my mind it was all quite particular. And when I turned to the passage in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader when Lucy goes upstairs to find the Magician’s book, although the details were not exactly the same (no bearded mirror in my story), this was what I had come up with in ‘Skindle’. I was not inventing that story so much as half-remembering and then repurposing another story, one I once knew very well. (Other elements of the story are like this. Some of it is reminiscent of The Hobbit, for example.)

This was a very different shock of recognition. I did not feel, when I read that section, that oh yes I had known this all along; instead, I felt a sort of alienated recognition—oh yes, this is the origin of my own story, though I would never have realised I’d known it without telling that tale first.

There are three forms of memory here: explicit (remembering specifics like Turkish delight in the snow; Polly and Digory in the wood between the worlds); implicit (reading Caspian and remembering it as I read it); and submerged (I only know I remember it, because it came out in a new, comparable form). Lewis gives a good critical account of the way fiction works like this in the passage of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader we are discussing.

On the next page she came to a spell “for the refreshment of the spirit”. The pictures were fewer here but very beautiful. And what Lucy found herself reading was more like a story than a spell. It went on for three pages and before she had read to the bottom of the page she had forgotten that she was reading at all. She was living in the story as if it were real, and all the pictures were real too. When she had got to the third page and come to the end, she said, “That is the loveliest story I’ve ever read or ever shall read in my whole life. Oh, I wish I could have gone on reading it for ten years. At least I’ll read it over again.”

But here part of the magic of the Book came into play. You couldn’t turn back. The right-hand pages, the ones ahead, could be turned; the left-hand pages could not.

“Oh, what a shame!” said Lucy. “I did so want to read it again. Well, at least, I must remember it. Let’s see ... it was about ... about ... oh dear, it’s all fading away again. And even this last page is going blank. This is a very queer book. How can I have forgotten? It was about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill, I know that much. But I can’t remember and what shall I do?”

And she never could remember; and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician’s Book.

It was Lewis’s gift to combine the abilities of the fiction writer and the critic, and this is an exemplary passage of that combination. It charts the way we read immersively as children and then forget. Lucy is first “living in the story as if it were real” and then “she never could remember”, even though every good story she then reads reminds her of what she has forgotten.

What can “reminding” mean here? Clearly it is not explicit memory, but it seems like implicit memory. If Lucy were ever able to get back to the story and to read it again, she would say on every page I had known this all along, I had just not realised I knew it. But Lewis also implies that Lucy has submerged memory of that story. She is very often recognising it without realising she is realising. Just as I drew on my “memory” of this passage when I “invented” my story, so Lucy will draw on it when she finds something enjoyable in a generic, archetypal manner. All those stories later on that seem to have familiar elements also have roots—it is just that those roots are submerged too deep for Lucy ever to see them again or even to remember they are there.

Literature and language are forms of submerged memory. We do not need to write stories to be part of this history. It is part of all our writing and speaking. The whole job of a scholar like Lewis was to try to unsubmerge the literary past, knowing full well the job could never be fully done. It was a belief within the Inkling circle that language was its own form of submerged memory, as discussed in Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction.

What makes Lewis and his circle so continuously interesting today is that they recognised this conflict and worked within it. They discovered how to allow submerged memory to work undisturbed in fiction while they were working to discover it in criticism. Lewis’s genius was to do both in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader without letting one interfere with the other.

In fiction, submerged memory is highly productive. But it presents a dilemma for criticism.

Criticism, of course, wishes to be explicit. Critics are adept at finding parallels, however aware of them the writer may have been or professed to be. It is widely assumed that the work of criticism is to bring things into the light. The act of writing criticism often brings up some implicit memory—ah, this is just like that bit of Hamlet—which are made explicit. In general, submerged memory is to be avoided. Critics must recognise their sources and influences. Great artists steal, but critics are not (usually) great artists. Coleridge stole and he was a great critic, but that was not a case of submerged memory.

Submerged memory is impossible to avoid, but to replicate a previous work would be taboo. So often, what we write and read and admire in criticism will have its origin in some equivalent of Lucy and the Magician’s book. The impulse, and indeed the professional requirement, is often to flatten this—to strive to recognise it, to put it in familiar terms, to give a citation. (To make it dull.) And anyway, submerged memories cannot be cited. The critical task is then to find these echoes in other people’s work and call them a failing, or to use them as a recourse for further criticism, thus turning usually productive submerged memory into the imitative explicit memories that produce dull work. The Critical Dilemma is that submerged memory is essential to good writing, though critics must often live in denial of this fact.

One result of this Dilemma is the critical-scholarly divide. Scholarship is supposed to show its working and sources, to place itself clearly within the lineage of previous work, and to make the new and marginal contribution clear. Scholarship is a form of knowledge. Criticism is a form of argument. It might place itself against other criticism, but not to make a new contribution clear. Rather, criticism is a more personal, ideological, or impressionistic response. The critic is not obliged in the same way as the scholar, but they are supposed to observe some of the same rules.

But the best criticism, or at least the criticism that has been held to be canonical by common readers—a tradition that would include Lewis—doesn’t fuss about the submerged problem. The best critical writing is often the result of such memory. In ‘Art as Technique’, Shklovsky railed against “habitualisation”, the unthinking perception we have of the world that needs shocking awake so we can see afresh. But Shklovsky’s idea was not original. He later discovered that people like Novalis had written about it. (As had others like Browning, and, indeed, Samuel Johnson.) This is the perfect example of submerged memory. Shklovsky is unlikely to have made an independent discovery. The idea is so pervasive in different forms across the history of literature that he will have been working from forgotten memories. He was working from a Magician’s book. Had he realised this, gone to the sources, and cited them, his essay would have been smaller, less exciting, less original, less idiosyncratic. Submerged memories force invention whereas explicit ones incentivise copying or marginal contributions.

When I “wrote” ‘Skindle’, I had no conscious idea about its influences, just as Shklovsky had no conscious idea about Novalis. The submerged nature of the influence forced a newness to the story: we cannot go back and read the Magician’s book, we can only recreate it in new forms. In Shklovsky’s case it was very new indeed, as it was in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a book we have to assume is also subject to a forgotten story Lewis once read in his own Magician’s book. To make this explicit would be to risk fashionable imitation rather than to do something new.

The aim of this sort of criticism ought to be to write freely, directly, and in the understanding that some of what you produce—indeed, quite a lot of it—can only be inventive, original, or interesting because it is a half-remembered instance of something else, some long forgotten story you are always remembering without realising. As Johnson wrote in the Dictionary, invention not only means ‘producing something new’ but ‘discovery’. It is in this way, as Lewis showed in his passage above, that literature teaches us how to read it, even when we think we are inventing it in bed one morning while our children quietly chew their bagels.

Art is a great thing. But it is not the greatest. The most important of all perceptions is the continual perception of cause and effect—in other words, the perception of the continuous development of the universe—in still other words, the perception of the course of evolution. When one has thoroughly got imbued into one’s head the leading truth that nothing happens without a cause, one grows not only large-minded, but large-hearted.

A little later, Bennett writes:

And, my dear sir, perhaps you happen to be an estate agent’s clerk, and you hate the arts, and you want to foster your immortal soul, and you can’t be interested in your business because it’s so humdrum.

Nothing is humdrum.

The tremendous, changeful picturesqueness of life is marvellously shown in an estate agent’s office. What! There was a block of traffic in Oxford Street; to avoid the block people actually began to travel under the cellars and drains, and the result was a rise of rents in Shepherd’s Bush! And you say that isn’t picturesque! Suppose you were to study, in this spirit, the property question in London for an hour and a half every other evening. Would it not give zest to your business, and transform your whole life?

You would arrive at more difficult problems. And you would be able to tell us why, as the natural result of cause and effect, the longest straight street in London is about a yard and a half in length, while the longest absolutely straight street in Paris extends for miles. I think you will admit that in an estate agent’s clerk I have not chosen an example that specially favours my theories.

You are a bank clerk, and you have not read that breathless romance (disguised as a scientific study), Walter Bagehot’s “Lombard Street”? Ah, my dear sir, if you had begun with that, and followed it up for ninety minutes every other evening, how enthralling your business would be to you, and how much more clearly you would understand human nature.

He goes on to advise that Novels are excluded from “serious reading”, a sentiment many people will object too but which is worth taking seriously. (Previously discussed here.) Instead, he wishes for people to read poetry.

Imaginative poetry produces a far greater mental strain than novels. It produces probably the severest strain of any form of literature. It is the highest form of literature. It yields the highest form of pleasure, and teaches the highest form of wisdom. In a word, there is nothing to compare with it. I say this with sad consciousness of the fact that the majority of people do not read poetry.

I am persuaded that many excellent persons, if they were confronted with the alternatives of reading “Paradise Lost” and going round Trafalgar Square at noonday on their knees in sack-cloth, would choose the ordeal of public ridicule. Still, I will never cease advising my friends and enemies to read poetry before anything.

I am currently working through Pope’s Iliad, rather intermittently because of travel and other things. It is one of the major neglected works of English Literature and reading one book in the morning before anything else makes that day a good one.

Bennett’s whole essay is well worthwhile and is not very long.

One of the other great works of this sort is J.S. Mill’s November 1868 letter to Florence May, which I reproduce here, without endorsing his selection—or ordering—of the works of literature.

Dear Madam—

I am very glad to find that you enjoy Buckle’s History, & I suppose from what you say, that you would like to enter into a course of reading that would be a good preparation for historical & social philosophy.

Something must depend in this course on the number of hours you can give to reading every day, & on the quickness with which you are in the habit of reading. But in any case I would strongly recommend three things. First, to read every book (with few & special exceptions) straight through from the title page to the last word. 2. To read a fixed number of pages of such reading as is taken for work, every day. I do not recommend hours, but 20, 50, or 100 pages. To read the working reading of the day as early as circumstances will admit in the day: but never, unless on some very rare exceptions, to go to sleep without having read it. 3. To fix so small a quantity of reading for work, as shall never be a burden, nor weary the mind, nor interfere inconveniently with other occupations; & to fill in the many gaps of time which will be left unoccupied by this rule, with light reading, amusing & agreeable, which has the advantage of being attractive when you are tired, of being able to put aside for days together when you are otherwise occupied, & which at the same time if well chosen may end by filling the mind with a fund of valuable knowledge as to the habits & ideas of past times & foreign countries.

I recommend, therefore, dividing your reading into four courses, which sh^d be carried on simultaneously: the first two of them to consist of books, some small portion of which sh^d be read invariably every day, & every word of which sh^d be read steadily through. The third course sh^d consist of books from which you can select portions if you like, which are comparatively light reading, but which sh^d be read because they are standard books the knowledge of which is necessary to any thorough knowledge of the progress of the human mind & of the history of manners. These need not be read every day if time is wanting, yet it might be a good rule to read some of them every day whenever there is time before taking up the still lighter or more exciting literature of the 4^th course.

The fourth course sh^d consist of those chefs d’œuvre of literature which are sure to be interesting, as well as of whatever modern books you find tempting & agreeable without fatiguing the mind. For I think it of great value to acquire a habit of constant reading in order to acquire in time the power of reading quickly, & I am convinced that this cannot be done with safety to the health of those who eschew light literature. To those who mean to spend their life in study, light literature is a necessary relief, while as I have already said, it is by no means without good results. I think that in it newspapers magazines & reviews may be very usefully included, if you find them agreeable reading; but even the most valuable articles in periodical publications ought to be read for pleasure, & not as part of the work of the day, because they do not fit in to a steady course of reading.

I inclose a list of books for the four courses, which I have put in the order in which I think it would be good to read them. The first course sh^d have the freshest part of the day, as it requires thought; & the two first courses sh^d if possible be read in the order in which I have put them down. The last two need not necessarily be read in this order, but it is very desirable that in reading them you sh^d ascertain & [note in?] your own mind while reading, the date at which they were written, so as to observe as you read the changes of ideas & manners.

I have not put down any books in any foreign language, because unless there is any foreign language you read with as much pleasure & fluency as English, I think it waste of time at present to read its literature. But if there is any such language, it would be well to let me know, because in that case I could perhaps point out useful books in each course to read in it, supplying some want which cannot be supplied in English.

I

Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge

Berkeley’s Three Dialogues

Berkeley’s Essay on Vision

Hume’s Essays concerning Human Understanding

Brown’s Lectures on the Human Mind

Mill’s System of Logic

James Mill’s Analysis of the Human Mind

Bain’s Senses and the Intellect

Bain’s Emotions and the Will

Bain’s Study of Character

H. Spencer’s Principles of Psychology

II

Grote’s History of Greece

Hooke’s Roman History

Plutarch’s Lives

Merivale’s History of the Roman Empire

Gibbon’s Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire

Hume’s History of England

Hallam’s Middle Ages

Macaulay’s History of England

[James] Stephen’s Lectures on the History of France

Prescott’s Ferdinand and Isabella

Robertson’s Charles V

Robertson’s America

Motley’s United Netherlands

Schiller’s Thirty Years War translated

III

Spenser’s Poems

Massinger’s Plays

Bacon’s Essays

Milton Paradise Lost, Comus, Lycidas, L’Allegro, Penseroso, Sonnets

Dryden’s Poems—Æneid

Pope’s Poems—Iliad & Odyssey

Spectator

Clarissa Harlowe

Sir Charles Grandison

Rasselas

Rambler

Goldsmith’s Poems

Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World

Gray’s Poems

Cowper’s Poems

Ellis’s Early English Prose Romances

Sydney’s Arcadia

Coleridge

Wordsworth

Shelley

Keats

IV

Shakespeare

Don Quixote

Gil Blas

Fielding’s Novels

Vicar of Wakefield

Sterne’s Sentimental Journey

Percy’s Reliques of Early English Poetry

Lamb’s Selections from the Dramatists

Mrs Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho

Mrs Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest

Miss Austen’s Novels—Sense and Sensibility Pride and Prejudice &c.

Scott’s Poems

Scott’s Novels