Harold Monro, Poetry Anthologies and the Rhetoric of Textual Materiality

This chapter meditates upon the role of the poetry anthology and its claims on literary value at the turn of the twentieth century. By sorting the output of poets, the anthology might seem to stabilize literary value; but like all print artefacts in the period, the anthology was overproduced, and therefore could also be seen as positing multiple, competing canons. The anthology form was in flux in these years as well, with such familiar conventions as tables of contents and the grouping of poems by poet not having emerged as norms. In this context, the textual materiality of anthologies became a complex system for intervening in debates about value. The chapter revisits the most popular anthologies of the era—Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and the Oxford Book of English Verse—to sketch out the emerging codes of the anthology form. Poet and publisher Harold Monro, the chapter argues, pursued a more egalitarian textual politics than these popular anthologies, particularly his underappreciated 1929 anthology, Twentieth Century Poetry. The chapter reads the content and the metatexts of Twentieth Century Poetry as asserting a catholic vision of modern poetry as vital to everyday life.

Reactionary Materialism: Book Collecting, Connoisseurship and the Reading Life in J. C. Squire’s London Mercury

The London Mercury attained popularity and notoriety as the leading anti-modernist voice of the early 1920s. It reached more than 10,000 circulation by presenting itself as a voice of reason in an age of critical anarchy, and its material form communicated seriousness of mission, tasteful restraint, and allusion to the great Victorian quarterlies. This chapter argues that, through a combination of economic necessity and editorial eccentricity, the Mercury went on to posit solid, material objects—particularly fine and rare books, but also collectible furniture and historic churches—as loci of stable value. The Mercury shored up its readership by appealing to rare and fine book enthusiasts and the businesses that catered to them. Combined with its literary partisanship, which began to appear increasingly reactionary, this emphasis on high-end textual materiality implicitly but powerfully posited reading as an activity of the leisured and educated, book-buying as a hobby for those with ample disposable income. Its ethos of value-in-the-object reached its reductio ad absurdum in the early 1930s, in two special issues on book production and typography, in which the magazine effectively became an advertiser-cum-trade-journal for London’s high-end printing concerns.

‘Quite Ordinary Men and Women’: John O’london’s Weekly and the Meaning of Authorship

John O’London’s Weekly saw its mission as bringing literature to a demos whose appetite for reading had increased significantly during the Great War. Its treatment of questions of literary value and canonicity evinces conflict about the nature of authorship and its own status as a popular, but not prestigious, print artifact. Addressing, in part, an audience of aspiring writers, the newspaper simultaneously posits writing as a craft that is learned and accessible through hard work and as a talent that one is born with; it depicts writing both as a means of making a living and as a sacred, inspired condition. The chapter examines the newspaper’s treatment of H.G. Wells—its avatar of the writer as the upwardly striving work-a-day writer—and Thomas Hardy—its representative of authorship as sacred calling. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the paper’s careful, equivocal treatments of an ascendant modernism in the late 1920s. The newspaper’s cheap, disposable materiality—it cost 2d weekly and was printed on thin, friable paper—underscored its difficulty in accruing any lasting cultural authority.

Mapping Literary Value: Imperial/Modernist Forms in the Illustrated London News

This chapter argues that the Illustrated London News and its imitators in the 1890s evolved a new and particularly apt system for representing the empire, the city of London, and the literary marketplace—all arenas that were expanding in rapid and disorienting fashion. By manipulating a nexus of space and value—indeed, by valuing its own page space according to an imperial spatial logic—the Illustrated London News traded on the comforting fiction that a vast and changing world could be ordered and comprehended on a weekly basis. The chapter traces these dynamics in text-and-image packages surrounding news from the empire, advertisements, and fiction by Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Introduction: Modern Print Artefacts

The materiality of print objects took on increased significance with the explosion of print culture in the late nineteenth century, as artists from Henry James to the modernists sought to differentiate themselves from the mass of print culture. The pursuit of distance from commoditized print culture—whether it took the form of theories of aesthetic autonomy or the creation of specialized micro-markets—necessarily involved writers, editors, and other print professionals with the materiality of texts. This setting produced widely divergent attempts to gain symbolic capital through the creation of material print objects—from expensive editions de luxe to egalitarian political gestures such as Harold Monro’s poetic broadsides and cheap periodicals. This chapter surveys the field of material texts and the problems of literary value in the early twentieth century, which it elucidates using theories of cultural value ranging from Walter Benjamin and Pierre Bourdieu to Barbara Herrnstein-Smith and cultural anthropologist David Graeber.

Postscript: Against ‘Modernist Studies’

Monro’s anthology is an especially resonant artefact on which to conclude this inquiry. In an attitude common in his time but relatively rare in ours, Monro valued the materiality of texts, with their stunningly various ways of making meaning and asserting value. If, for us, a kind of sceptical humanism informs our continuing investments in imaginative literature, few of us would assert that the early twentieth century’s highly segmented, commercial print culture is a monument of that humanism, or celebrate its variegated residue of cheap, material texts as one of the great achievements in human history. And yet this commercial culture made literature available to virtually everyone in the west in the years covered in this study. (I define ‘literature’ as writing of value – value asserted, contested, argued over.) Indeed, at the turn of the twentieth century, modern print artefacts not only gave virtually everyone who wanted it access to literature: they gave virtually everyone who wanted one a voice in arguments ...