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.

Explore The TLS

• TLS Selections

• TLS Archives

• TLS Arguments

• TLS Writers

• TLS Letters

• Poem of the Week

• Then & Now