One reviewer called John Keats’s poetry “drivelling idiocy”. Virginia Woolf considered James Joyce’s writing to be “tosh”. Literary reviews today are rarely so punchy
to know that one reviewer called John Keats’s poetry “drivelling idiocy”. It is more pleasing yet that Virginia Woolf considered James Joyce’s writing to be “tosh”. And surely no one can be uncheered to hear that when the critic Dorothy Parker read “Winnie the Pooh” she found it so full of innocent, childish whimsy that she—in her own moment of whimsical spelling—“fwowed up”.
Few will lament it loudly. Criticism is not a noble calling: as the old saying has it, no city has ever erected a statue to a critic. But then few cities have erected statues to sewage engineers or prostate surgeons either. But they are useful, just as critics are. A well-read person might read 20 or so books a year. By contrast, 153,000 books were published last year in Britain alone, according to Nielsen BookData. That is an average of 420-odd books a day.
Once, such zingers were common on literary pages. In the Victorian era, “reviews were seen as a kind of cultural hygiene, so there were high standards,” says Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, a professor of English at Oxford University. Reviewers were not merely taking a swipe at an enemy but cleansing the sacred halls of literature. Not that this stopped them from mild grubbiness themselves.
The internet has also helped decrease anonymity. Once, most reviews were unbylined, offering reviewers the facelessness of an obscure Twitter troll. Today, most reviewers are not only named but easily searchable—and insultable in return. Whereas 30 years ago, critics were “tacitly encouraged to really have a go at people”, now people are “terrified of giving offence” lest a Twitter pile-on follow, says the writer and critic D.J. Taylor.
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