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Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918.

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Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918 by Philip Waller. Oxford U. Press, 2006. Pp. xii + 1181. $192.50 cloth; $60 paper.

This is a massive book, 9.8 x 6.7 x 2.5 inches in dimension and weighing 5.65 pounds. Its author, Philip Waller, teaches history; Fellow and Tutor at Merton College, Oxford, he is editor of the eminent English Historical Review. Waller observes in his Preface that his "book conjures up aspects of literary life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England." The period is important as it witnessed the rise of "a genuine mass-market for literature ... and with it the phenomenon of the best-seller." Waller adds, "authors' behaviour and standing, the publics' responses, and the images created, are the uniting themes of what follows" (vii).

His book is divided into four sections. The first, "The Reading World," opens with a chapter on the film industry, which emerged just before the 1914-18 war that Waller insists, in a rather outmoded manner, on referring to throughout as "the Great War." He writes that "by the time of the Great War, and the development of cinema, telephone, and wireless, audio-visual communication was ready to fetter the written word and to contest its supremacy over the imagination" (3). Following "the Great War it became commonplace for bestselling authors to be hired to write film scenarios, adapting their own or another's work, or commissioned to produce a new story for the screen." Waller instances the case of W. Somerset Maugham, whose The Explorer (1907) was filmed in 1915 and his plays Smith (1909) and The Land of Promise (1913-14) in 1917, citing Maugham's quip: "horror mitigated only by the fifteen thousand dollars" (15).

Many other authors are instanced throughout. Of course there are bound to be omissions. A particularly noteworthy one is Leonard Merrick (1864-1939). Between 1888, the date of publication of his first novel Mr. Bazelgette's Agent, and 1911 when his last novel, The Position of Peggy Harper, was published, Merrick wrote nine other novels, innumerable short stories, and collaborated in the writing of at least eight plays. Between 1918 and 1919 the eminent London publishers Hodder and Stoughton published an edition of Merrick's work, and distinguished writers contributed introductions to each title. The professionals praising a fellow professional, a rare event in a highly competitive...

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