By JOHN GROSS [Wall Street Journal] – In the 19th century, anonymous reviewing was still the general rule, although signed reviews became more common as the century wore on. Inevitably there were abuses, even at the highest level. Mr. Mullan’s prize exhibit is an anonymous review by George Eliot of the biography of Goethe by her lover, George Henry Lewes, a book she had helped him to write. (Admittedly, the praise she bestows sounds fairly restrained.)
This doesn’t mean that the best 19th-century reviewing wasn’t very good indeed and that anonymity may not have lent it some of its strength. In the age of celebrity culture, it is hard not to look back fondly on the sober charms of Anon. But we shouldn’t allow nostalgia to mislead us. In the end, anonymity does more harm than good. It allows the worst critics, Mr. Puff and Mr. Sneer, to sound like impersonal oracles.
I must declare an interest. I used to edit the Times Literary Supplement, which was one of the last bastions of anonymity in the English literary world, and I was responsible for introducing bylines there, in 1974. It wasn’t an easy decision. The balance sheet was a complicated one. But I can’t imagine wanting to go back. When all the other considerations have been weighed, it is surely healthier to have a situation in which reviewers take full responsibility for what they write than one in which they don’t.
Continued at The Wall Street Journal in a review of Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature, by John Mullan (Princeton).
Hello. My name is…
By JOHN GROSS [TLS] – The question of whether or not to continue the traditional policy of anonymity would be bound to confront anyone taking over as Editor of the TLS at the present time. There are at the least very respectable arguments on both sides, but after weighing them as carefully as I can – and the decision must in the end be a personal one – I have no doubt that the time has come to change course. Starting from today’s issue, the “fronts”, “middles” and certain other major reviews will not longer be anonymous, and later this year the practice of signed reviews will be extended to other parts of the paper.
The case against anonymity, as it has been expounded over the years, is a relatively simple one. There are many occasions on which a reader is entitled to ask on what authority a judgment or opinion is being advanced. There are even occasions when the whole import of a review depends on knowing the identity of the reviewer. Above all, critics should be prepared to be held responsible for what they write. (Times Literary Supplement, 7 June 1974)
Archived at The Times [.pdf]
‘The best-read man in Britain’.
By ANONYMOUS [Obituary, 10 January 2011 – The Daily Telegraph] – Once described as “the best-read man in Britain”, Gross was probably best known among his literary peers for his first book, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life since 1800 (1969), a racily entertaining romp through the history of literary criticism and its practitioners which won the Duff Cooper Prize and established its author’s reputation as a man whose huge erudition was matched by a well-developed sense of humour.
In this, as in other works, what distinguished Gross’s approach was his sympathy for the more obscure and often faintly ridiculous toilers at the literary coal face — men such as the Scottish dissenting minister George Gilfillan (1813-78), a “McGonagall of criticism” known for his eccentric flowery style and erratic judgments. AN Wilson declared that the book, which he first read as a teenager, had “undoubtedly determined for me the direction I wanted my life to take… It became my Bible.”
Few could match Gross’s easy familiarity with the highways and byways of the English literary canon or his acute sensitivity to all its nuances.
Continued at The Daily Telegraph | More Chronicle & Notices.
