E.V. Lucas and the Gradual decline of the Book. . . .

One of my very favorite writers is an obscure Englishman named Edward Verrall Lucas, usually known in print simply as E.V. Lucas. Lucas was the author of over a hundred and thirty books, a few of which are novels and biographies, many collections of essays, and quite a few excellent compilations of poetry and letters. Lucas was born in the Victorian Era but he lived well into the 20th century, making him one of those charming writers who bridged two very distinct eras, the first one the age of railways and second the age of World Wars. But to the end of his life Lucas retained the quiet charm of an older, quieter time and his work has an understated agreeableness and the occasional moment of real wisdom. I came to Lucas through my interest in Charles Lamb. Lucas wrote what is perhaps the quintessential biography of the great Lamb and it is worth reading for anyone who is interested in the literature of the Romantic era.

Near the very end of his life Lucas wrote a memoir of his literary interests entitled Reading, Writing, and Remembering. It is a remarkable work because even though Lucas was not a member of the upper-class and did not enjoy a classical Oxbridge education, the was not only amazingly well-read but he came to be personally acquainted with a surprising number of important writers of his time. One of the interesting aspects of this memoir is that even though it was written in the 1930s, Lucas was already mourning the decline of the book. Lucas writes "it is amazing how little the public desire to possess books. I am not referring to novels, which for the most part are designed to beguile only for a few hours and are thus fittingly enough obtained through circulating libraries; I mean the books to which one would like to return. As a case in point, I will take my own compilation of the flower of other minds, The Open Road, and I take it, I hope without offence, because it has been the most popular of my works. Since its publication in 1899, between eighty and ninety thousand copies have been sold. Glancing casually at a really successful book, the A B C Railway Guide, I note that the population of Wigan is 85, 357; so that the complete issue of The Open Road to date could be swallowed up in that one not very large town and not a single copy be left for the rest fo the world. The moral is, I fear, that if an author wants to be read, he must write for the Press." (p. 130) Now, in todays market (which has a much larger population than in Lucas' time) most writers would be thrilled to sell eighty or ninety thousand books in their whole career, let alone for one volume. But Lucas saw the writing on the wall, so to speak, and knew how things were unfolding. "Perhaps," he continues, "the habit of buying books will come back; but I wonder. The book has so many enemies, or at any rate, rivals, today. First and foremost, the newspapers and weekly papers, which do so much of the book's work; then the B.B.C., which saves one the trouble of reading. These are the competitors; the actual foes are the theatre, the cinema, bridge, dancing and the late William Willett." (Ibid., Willett was a man who became famous for the promotion of Daylight Saving Time in Britain) Though the competitors and foes to reading have changed considerably since Lucas' time, he was anticipating a serious change in culture. It is interesting to see a man who died when my own father was only six year old, complain about the slow death of the book.

On the other hand, some things don't seem to change. Lucas would eventually become the chief editor of the Methuen Publishing company, but in the last years of the 19th century he was still an aspiring writer. His first important commission came from George Smith (of Smith Elder) who invited him to compile a book about Bernard Barton, also known as the Quaker Poet, who had been a personal friend of Charles Lamb and whose daughter married the writer Edward Fitzgerald, a man who become known for being the first to translate Omar Khayyam into English. However, when Lucas was invited to write the book, George Smith asked him to write it for absolutely no money. Smith's actual phrase was "Silver and gold I have none." Needless to say, Lucas was bewildered by this invitation. He knew how much time and research was involved in such a task and he was also bemused that such a successful publisher would attempt to commission such a work gratis. "I was shocked," Lucas wrote, "to find such an attitude in an office which had done not so badly out of Thackeray and Charlotte Brontë, and whose head, George Smith, could from his own pocket finance that magnificent work, the Dictionary of National Biography, to which I am so devoted that I have had portable cases made fro the India-paper edition and never travel without them." It is, indeed, remarkable to think that one of England's most successful publisher would, at the beginning of the real golden age of books, attempt to convince a young writer to take up a major piece of research and writing with absolutely no renumeration.

All of this suggests to me that despite the many remarkable and best-selling books that we have seen over the past two-hundred and fifty years or so, books, as a cultural and economic phenomenon, have never really been on a sure footing. Remember this, books had long been the domain of the aristocracy and the leisure classes, and at the height of the Romantic period in Britain, only a handful of people made a decent living exclusively from writing books. The most successful writers of books at the time were Scott and Byron, both of whom were not forced to write by economic circumstances. For the most part the only writers who were making good livings were those who were writing for the ever increasing number of magazines and papers. Even Robert Southey, poet laureate and originator of the Three Bears fable, secured his living through continually writing for these periodical outlets. Of course, the number of books and writers increased as the middle-class grew and people looked for new forms of entertainment to fill their free time. But with the exception of a handful of very successful authors, writers have always been a bit like the early baseball players in the US; a group of people who did it for the love of the game, got paid nearly nothing while the team owners made fortunes. Meanwhile, the competitors and foes of books have only continued to multiply and have now reached ridiculous proportions.

Debate still rages as to whether a digital file that we read on a screen can ever really constitute a "book" in a meaningful sense. And the jury is still out on whether so-called 'print on demand' will breath new life into the ever beleaguered book. But the one thing that the memoir of E.V. Lucas has reminded me of is that in a world of many possible outlets and stimulations, the book has always been on the ropes, so to speak.

Comparing the Ages

Following up on the subject of the Romanticism and the French Revolution which I touched upon yesterday - These are subject which are close to my heart and should, I believe, be more widely known and discussed because they are remarkably instructive as well as just plain fascinating. One of the interesting aspects of the events that followed the French Revolution is the strange similarity his has to our own times. The Revolution in France ushered in a terrific sense of optimism throughout Europe in people who  had grown extremely weary of the terrible injustice which so endemic to European society. Writers like Rousseau, Voltaire, and even Joseph Priestly had generated strong feelings toward a ‘natural’ sense of equality and justice which, in large part due to the strong resistance on the part of the ruling-class, eventually erupted into the uncontrollable anger of the events in France. In England the feelings of ‘leveling’ gave weight to a generation of writers and activists like Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Thomas Paine, William Blake, and the members of the London Corresponding Society.  This radicalism was relatively short lived however as the events in France seemed to spin increasingly out of control. Anti-Jacobin groups emerged all over  Britain and the Government passed various laws to make suppression of dissent easier.

These events were very similar to the mood in the West in the decades after the ‘socialist’ revolutions  in the 20^th century. A  genuine space was opened up in which reformers could call for more transparency, more democracy, and more socially responsible policy making. Governments reacted much the way William Pitt’s government had in the 1790s, with paranoia and suppression of dissent. J. Edgar Hoover was the Lord Castlereagh of the 20^th century. With the apparent failure of the socialist projects real economic and social reform seemed impossible in the 1990s in the same way that reform was anathema in the decades after the French Revolution. Reform took ages. Universal Male suffrage which had emerged in 1792 in France took another 60 years to return. And the vote for women was still generations away. But the feelings of reform in Britain might be said to have turned inward into the literary struggles of the Romantics. Coleridge and Wordsworth may have abandoned reform but it was taken up again in the poetry of Shelley and Byron. Romanticism carried the mantle of reform until the Victorian writers began to make reform and the condition of the working-class  a fundamental part of their literary project.

So where are we today? The final failure of the neo-conservative project that began in the Reagan years seems to have once again opened up a space socialist types of reforms. At the very least, faith in the market has been badly shaken. However, we seem to live in a age of cynicism and there is very little of the Romantic idealism around in our time. Perhaps the best we can hope for is a Neo-Victorian sense of practical reform. 

Convention of Cintra

The Convention of Cintra was an agreement signed in August of 1808 which allowed the defeated French Troops to evacuate from Portugal, thus allowing Napoleon’s forces to escape from the British, ensuring nearly six more years of French occupation for Spain. The Convention of Cintra deeply disturbed many in England including radicals who, though they supported the early days of the French Revolution and similar political reforms at home, were disgusted by French aggression on the continent and the wilful slaughter of Spanish citizens. Several of the English Romantics spoke out against the Convention. Leigh Hunt, close friend of Byron and Shelley, used his periodical the Examiner to attack the Duke of York, the King’s brother who had been the head of the army and was seen as the main perpetrator of the Convention. Hunt’s attack nearly landed him in jail but he managed to escape with the help of a very good defence attorney. Wordsworth wrote a pamphlet condemning the Convention which was edited by his friend Thomas De Quincey. In a poem written at the same time as the pamphlet Wordsworth wrote:

I weigh the hopes and fears of suffering Spain;
For her consult the auguries of time,
And through the human heart explore my way;
And look and listen – gathering, whence I may,
Triumph, and thoughts no bondage can restrain.

Lord Byron also lamented the Convention in lines fro his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

And ever since that martial synod met,
Britannia sickens, Cintra! at thy name.

What will the poets write about our own political troubles? The tribulations of Canadian politics are, perhaps, only a storm in a teacup compared to the Peninsular War. But our parliament has been prorogued and the precedent has been set for all future Prime Ministers to simply squelch the sovereignty of the House on a partisan whim. And now, just to reiterate his rule by decree, Harper will appoint a bunch of senators after he had lost the confidence of the House. The implications of this are monumental for our political system. Our soulless and sinister Prime Minister would be glad to rip the very heart out of our system for his own petty and partisan interests. Consider in what interest he is really acting.