John Mullan
ANONYMITY
A secret history of English literature
374pp. Faber. £17.99.
978 0 571 19514 5
Anonymous is perhaps the greatest – and certainly the most prolific – of
English authors. Among his or her masterworks are The Dunciad, In Memoriam,
Clarissa and Pride and Prejudice; and the range of genres is astonishing,
from the Marprelate tracts through “Fanny Hill” to A Letter Concerning
Toleration. Anonymous’s relatives, the Pseudonyms, are commonest in the
Victorian period: they include not only George Eliot, Lewis Carroll and
Currer Bell but interesting lesser figures such as Ouida and Fiona Macleod.
In Anonymity, his “secret history of English Literature” (in fact, a secret
history of post-medieval English literature), John Mullan conflates
anonymity and pseudonymity, grouping his examples according to the motives
for authorial concealment: modesty or mockery, cross-gendering or fear for
one’s life.
A great deal of material is condensed in this book, and the juxtapositions are
frequently suggestive. Primary Colors, the roman-à-clef based on the first
Clinton campaign that caused such excitement in 1996, is brought together
with Gulliver’s Travels, An Essay on Man and the Waverley Novels under the
rubric “Mischief”. What the American furore throws into relief is how
po-faced people tend to be today about any trifling with the talisman of the
author. Of course there were special circumstances in the case of Primary
Colors: Joe Klein denied his authorship on air. But then Sir Walter Scott
denied his to the Prince Regent; and while he may have spoken with a twinkle
in his eye, the point is that he was allowed to get away with it. One secret
history implicit in Mullan’s book is that of something harder to imagine
than the absence of antibiotics or electricity: people actually respecting
each other’s privacy.
Charlotte Brontë’s friend Ellen Nussey watched the proofs of Jane Eyre being
corrected in her own house without ever being so intrusive as to ask what
was going on. Not only that, but she “passed them to the house letter bag
without glancing at the address; perceiving that confidence was not
volunteered, it was not sought”. A few years later, when Brontë was enjoying
literary society in London, she kept up the pretence that she had no
connection to the brilliant Currer Bell – and so did others: “Most people
know me I think”, Brontë wrote in a letter; “but they are far too well-bred
to show that they know me”.
Mullan renders these, and many other such vignettes, with clarity and good
humour: a consistent virtue of the book is its fullness of anecdote. We
tremble with Fanny Burney as she takes her first steps towards publication
through the intermediary of “her nineteen-year-old brother Charles, who
first approached the bookseller Thomas Lowndes ‘in the dark of the evening’,
disguised in hat and old greatcoat, and going by the name of ‘Mr King’”. We
thrill to the “taunting pseudonymity” of the Marprelate tracts and the
author-hunt it provoked: the printing press being moved from house to house,
the betrayals, the interrogations under torture. And we smile with Swift’s
friends as they pretend not to know who had written Gulliver’s Travels.
Mullan thinks that this emphasis on biography is, paradoxically, required by
his subject: “the main lesson is a simple one: that anonymity is most
successful when it provokes the search for an author”. Yet, since provoking
the search for an author is itself Mullan’s major criterion of success, this
statement is merely circular. It leaves one wondering whether the
strangeness, the self-alienation of at least some anonymous and pseudonymous
writing is not being rather lost sight of.
Of course, no text is wholly in its writer’s control, but anonymity and
pseudonymity markedly increase the disjunction. Many authors in Mullan’s
book display sharp reluctance to have their living, social selves connected
to writings which they may have been involved in producing, but which are
not entirely their own.
The chapter on reviewing mentions Charles Wentworth Dilke, Editor of the
Athenaeum in the 1830s and 40s, who “never signed anything he wrote and
scrupulously guarded against the names of his reviewers ever escaping the
office”; the reason being that to write for the Athenaeum was to write, not
simply as oneself, but with the journal’s values and its impersonal voice.
Mullan does not say if he thinks there was any virtue in this practice; the
main concern of his chapter is to unmask the personal connections that
anonymity also served to conceal. We are meant to tut, on being told that in
George Eliot’s review of G. H. Lewes’s Life and Works of Goethe in the
Leader in 1855, “there is no hint that the reviewer is acquainted with the
author”; and when Mullan writes that “the dispassionate self-image of the
TLS belied networks of allegiance and intimacy”, the word “belied” implies
scandal. The assumption is that to expose the people doing the writing is to
explain what is really going on.
Of course, some backs were secretly patted, some favours furtively cashed in.
But networks of allegiance only explain things in so far as people act in
line with the allegiances they profess. Mullan registers, in passing, the
interesting point that George Eliot’s review of Lewes’s work was not in fact
very warm: “one can sense Eliot’s reticence about praising the book”. The
ideal of impartiality here trumps the personal relationship, but Mullan does
not ask how widely this might have happened elsewhere, nor how anonymity
might have affected – even perhaps benefited – the large proportion of
reviewing that was not disreputable. T. S. Eliot claimed (perhaps
unsurprisingly) that it taught him “to moderate my dislikes and crotchets,
to write in a temperate and impartial way”. Our current norm of named
reviewing (it was adopted by the TLS in 1974) is no doubt better; but it is
hardly a perfect system. It has not abolished personal bias: if anything, it
seems to have nourished it by bringing it into the open and making it seem
acceptable. F. W. Bateson’s argument for the abandonment of anonymity, that
“the worth of an opinion varies with the degree of respect we have for the
holder”, is not the whole truth of the matter: a piece of writing ought to
be able to carry its own conviction. For all its obvious cons, anonymous
reviewing did have some pros: not least in its insistent reminder that
reviews should do more than express a personal opinion.
Mullan makes a good point in support of his conflation of anonymity and
pseudonymity: Robinson Crusoe was published without an author’s name, i.e.,
anonymously; “but its title page declared it to be ‘Written by himself’, so
we might say that it appeared under the pseudonym ‘Robinson Crusoe’”; it is
equally true of Defoe’s Roxana and Moll Flanders, and of Richardson's Pamela
and Clarissa, that their “supposed authors . . . were their protagonists”.
But there are also reasons for keeping the terms apart.
Pseudonyms, and variants like “by the Author of X”, build an authorial
persona, albeit one separate from the person doing the writing: they allow
successive works to be read in relation to one another. It mattered to Pride
and Prejudice that it was announced as being “by the Author of Sense and
Sensibility”, and to Mansfield Park that it was “By the Author of ‘Sense and
Sensibility’ and ‘Pride and Prejudice’”. It says something still true to our
sense of Jane Austen’s trajectory as an author that, after what Mullan
judges to be the disappointed reception of Mansfield Park, Emma was
advertised as being by the author of merely “‘Pride and Prejudice,’ &c.
&c”. True anonymity, by contrast, sends a book orphaned into the world,
and with no siblings to protect it. This is what Charlotte Brontë wished
to do to Villette, despite the success she had had with Jane Eyre and
Shirley under the pseudonym Currer Bell. Mullan plausibly sees the same
motive in play here as in her initial adoption of a pseudonym: the need to
draw on events from her life, and people she knew, without fearing they
would be recognized and gossiped about.
Yet anonymous rather than pseudonymous publication would have done something
more: it would have estranged Villette from the rest of Brontë’s oeuvre,
signalling that the text had – as it does – a different character and aims.
Jane Eyre, being the girl and then woman she is, was always going to write
her story, call it Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, and make sure she got the
best editor in town: Currer Bell. But Lucy Snowe’s relationship to writing
and publication is deeply troubled: at once longing to reveal herself and
ashamed of doing so, she is aware that words misrepresent as well as
represent. For her, writing is as much self-laceration as self-expression.
It is in line with her modesty that her story should be titled, not with her
name (which in any case sounds like a pseudonym) but the name of a place;
conversely, it is in line with her pride that it should go out into the
world as simply her achievement. In the event, Brontë’s publishers insisted
the book be issued under the well-known pseudonym: it may have helped sales,
but it made the novel a marginally lesser work of art.
Villette is, importantly, about grief, and it is likely that Brontë’s wish for
anonymity was influenced by the anonymous publication of In Memoriam three
years before. Tennyson’s work shares Villette’s sense of the alienness of
writing: “The sad mechanic exercise, / Like dull narcotics”, as well as its
openness to sources of expression that lie beyond the writer’s control:
“From out waste places comes a cry”. To have put an authorial name on In
Memoriam would be like a driver signing a car crash: it would blithely
assert the confidence in personal agency which the work itself terrifyingly
smashes apart.
Mullan’s account of In Memoriam is – like the rest of his book – both well
informed about the circumstances and, as literary criticism,
non-interventionist. His explanation of the work’s anonymous publication is
that “it is as if the making public of what was once private requires the
author’s withdrawal” – but this explains very little (isn’t all publishing
“the making public of what was once private”?). The phrase “as if” appeals
to Mullan almost as much as to Cher Horowitz, in the movie Clueless: it
allows him to bring an idea into range without having to engage it in
argument. A stark instance occurs when he is mulling over the difference
between the casual anonymity of many texts in the medieval period and the
pointed anonymity that came in thereafter: “the very word ‘anonymous’, used
to describe a literary text, dates only from the sixteenth century, as if it
took print to make the absence of an author’s name an important fact”. As
if! – it doesn’t seem to matter whether we are persuaded by the notion or
not; but in a different kind of book it might have been foundational to the
whole enterprise.
Throughout Anonymity, Professor Mullan practises the technique of
administering anaesthesia to his discussion just when it seems to be getting
really interesting: we are left with the glib and the self-evident. Of
Thomas Gray: “as if turning your poetry into published work were
mortifying”. Of the Alice books: they took “their life from a special
relationship with children. They hardly belonged to the realm of commercial
authorship”. Of Sir Walter Scott: “his anonymity was a way of turning his
personal experience into impersonal fiction”. Towards its end, Mullan’s book
asks what is certainly a major question, albeit a familiar one: “To what
extent do we need that author’s name in order to read?”. No answer is
proposed, and no reference made to the many that have been given in the
past. It may be that Mullan eschews the pursuit of these ideas – together
with complex sentences and long words – because he likes to think he is
writing for the “general reader”. But general readers can be particular. I
suspect that many readers, of many kinds, will wish Anonymity had appeared
in unabridged form.
Matthew Reynolds holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship at St
Anne’s College, Oxford. He is the author of The Realms of Verse, 1830–1870:
English poetry in a time of nation building, 2001, and is the co-editor of
Dante in English, 2005.
