From “Fifty Years Ago.”

THE TEN years of the ’Thirties are a period concerning whose literary history the ordinary reader knows next to nothing. Yet a good deal that has survived for fifty years, and promises to live longer, was accomplished in that period. Dickens, for example, began his career in the year 1837 with his “Sketches by ‘Boz’” and the “Pickwick Papers.” Lord Lytton, then Mr. Lytton Bulwer, had already before that year published five novels, including “Paul Clifford” and “The Last Days of Pompeii.” Tennyson had already issued the “Poems by Two Brothers” and “Poems, Chiefly Lyrical.” Disraeli had written “The Young Duke,” “Vivian Grey,” and “Venetia.” Browning had published “Paracelsus” and “Strafford.” Marryat began in 1834. Carlyle published the “Sartor Resartus” in 1832. But one must not estimate a period by its beginners. All these writers belong to the following thirty years of the century. If we look for those who were flourishing,—that is, those who were producing their best work,—it will be found that this decade was singularly poor. The principal name is that of Hood. There were also Hartley Coleridge, Douglas Jerrold, Proctor, Sir Archibald Alison, Theodore Hook, G. P. R. James, Charles Knight, Sir Henry Taylor, Milman, Ebenezer Elliott, Harriet Martineau, James Montgomery, Talfourd, Henry Brougham, Lady Blessington, Harrison Ainsworth, and some others of lesser note. This is not a very imposing array. On the other hand, nearly all the great writers whom we associate with the first thirty years of the century were living, though their best work was done. After sixty, I take it, the hand of the master may still work with the old cunning, but his designs will be no longer new or bold. Wordsworth was sixty in 1830, and, though he lived for twenty years longer, and published the “Yarrow Revisited,” and, I think, some of his “Sonnets,” he hardly added to his fame. Southey was four years younger. He published his “Doctor” and “Essays” in this decade, but his best work was done already. Scott died in 1832, Coleridge died in 1834; Byron was already dead; James Hogg died in 1835; Felicia Hemans in the same year; Tom Moore was a gay young fellow of fifty in 1830, the year in which his “Life of Lord Byron” appeared. He did very little afterwards. Campbell was two years older than Moore, and he, too, had exhausted himself. Rogers, older than any of them, had entirely concluded his poetic career. It is wonderful to think that he began to write in 1783 and died in 1855. Beckford, whose “Vathek” appeared in 1786, was living until 1844. Among others who were still living in 1837 were James and Horace Smith, Wilson Croker, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs. Trollope, Lucy Aiken, Miss Opie (who lived to be eighty-five), Jane Porter (prematurely cut off at seventy-four), and Harriet Lee (whose immortal work, the “Errors of Innocence,” appeared in 1786, when she was already thirty), lived on till 1852, when she was ninety-six. Bowles, that excellent man, was not yet seventy, and meant to live for twenty years longer. De Quincey was fifty-two in 1837; Christopher North was in full vigor; Thomas Love Peacock, who published his first novel in 1810, was destined to produce a last, equally good, in 1860; Landor, born in 1775, was not to die until 1864; Leigh Hunt, who in 1873 was fifty-three years of age, belongs to the time of Byron. John Keble, whose “Christian Year” was published in 1827 was forty-four in 1837; “L. E. L.” died in 1838. In America, Washington Irving, Emerson, Channing, Bryant, Whittier, and Longfellow, make a good group. In France, Châteaubriand, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Béranger, Alfred de Musset, Scribe, and Dumas were all writing, a group much stronger than our English team.

  It is difficult to understand, at first, that between the time of Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats, and that of Dickens, Thackeray, Marryat, Lever, Tennyson, Browning, and Carlyle, there existed this generation of wits, most of them almost forgotten. Those, however, who consider the men and women of the Thirties have to deal for the most part with a literature that is third rate. This kind becomes dreadfully flat and stale when it has been out for fifty years; the dullest, flattest, dreariest reading that can be found on the shelves is the sprightly novel of society, written in the Thirties.

  A blight had fallen upon novels and their writers. The enormous success that Scott had achieved tempted hundreds to follow in his path, if that were possible. It was not possible; but this they could not know, because nothing seems so easy to write as a novel, and no man of those destined to fail can understand in what respects his own work falls short of Scott’s. That is the chief reason why he fails. Scott’s success, however, produced another effect. It greatly enlarged the number of novel readers, and caused them to buy up eagerly anything new, in the hope of finding another Scott. Thus, about the year 1826, there were produced as many as 250 three-and four-volume novels a year,—that is to say, about as many as were published in 1886, when the area of readers has been multiplied by ten. We are also told that nearly all these novels could command a sale of 750 to 1,000 each, while anything above the average would have a sale of 1,500 to 2,000. The usual price given for these novels was, we are also told, from £200 to £300. In that case the publishers must have had a happy and prosperous time, netting splendid hauls. But I think that we must take these figures with considerable deductions. There were as yet no circulating libraries of any importance; their place was supplied by book clubs, to which the publishers chiefly looked for the purchase of their books. But one cannot believe that the book clubs would take copies of all the rubbish that came out. Some of these novels I have read; some of them actually stand on my shelves; and I declare that anything more dreary and unprofitable it is difficult to imagine. At last there was a revolt; the public would stand this kind of stuff no longer. Down dropped the circulation of the novels. Instead of 2,000 copies subscribed, the dismayed publishers read 50, and the whole host of novelists vanished like a swarm of midges. At the same time poetry went down too. The drop in poetry was even more terrible than that of novels. Suddenly, and without any warning, the people of Great Britain left off reading poetry. To be sure, they had been flooded with a prodigious quantity of trash. One anonymous “popular poet,” whose name will never now be recovered, received £100 for his last poem from a publisher who thought, no doubt, that the “boom” was going to last. Of this popular poet’s work he sold exactly fifty copies. Another, a “humorous” bard, who also received a large sum for his immortal poem, showed in the unhappy publisher’s books no more than eighteen copies sold. This was too ridiculous, and from that day to this the trade side of poetry has remained under a cloud. That of novelist has, fortunately for some, been redeemed from contempt by the enormous success of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and by the solid, though substantial, success of the lesser lights. Poets have now to pay for the publication of their own works, but novelists—some of them—command a price; those, namely, who do not have to pay for the production of their works.