TLS: Literary genres that have fallen out of fashion
One good place to examine the various genres which have fallen off the Waterstones shelf is, naturally, a second-hand bookshop, with its memoirs of Edwardian childhood and self-effacing travel books. But another is the review pages of ancient weekly magazines. Here, for example, is Simon Raven, in an issue of the Spectator from September 1957, briskly appraising the autumn’s crop of autobiographies. The six books crammed into the 800-word slot available are Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart’s Friends, Foes and Foreigners, Life’s Adventure by Philip Gibbs, The Desert and the Green by the Earl of Lytton, P. G. Wodehouse’s Over Seventy, Without My Wig by G. D. Roberts and Lael Tucker Wertenbaker’s Death of a Man.
Leaving aside P. G. Wodehouse (who according to the reviewer “has mixed up fact with nonsense in a brusque and sometimes lapidary manner which might earn a little gratitude if one found it on a desert island, for an otherwise worthless book”), Raven’s band of memorialists are, respectively, a retired diplomat, a minor novelist, a professional soldier, a distinguished barrister and an American woman recalling her husband’s death from cancer. None of their modern equivalents, you fear – with the possible exception of Ms Wertenbaker – would stand the slightest chance of attracting a publishing deal six decades later.
If books of belles lettres and reprinted literary journalism have gone the way of all flesh, then so have half-a-dozen old-style publishers’ standbys. They include popular theology (these had titles like Chuck It God, or What Would Jesus Say?), old-fashioned nature poetry about bonny braes and brimming lakes, the Priestley-esque “light essay” or “middle article” that filled up so many mass-market newspapers in the interwar era, books which alleged that alien life-forms had used the deserts of South America for chariot-racing or that the Ark of the Covenant lay concealed in some Greek Orthodox monastery, symposia whose contributors revealed how they had lost their virginity, acquired their first job or suffered their most embarrassing experience, gentlemanly autobiographies (these had titles like A Classical Education or Alma Mater), and what used to be called “cheer up stuff” by media personalities who had left the hurly-burly of metropolitan life for Cornish mushroom farms or Brecon crags and were anxious to recommend the virtues of the simple life.
Inevitably, they also include numerous varieties of fiction. The original British picaresque of Fielding, Smollett and Dickens vanished in the 1840s along with coach travel as the railways ground on. In an age where print media is in incremental retreat, no one wants novels about journalists. The “marriage question”, which sent so many early-twentieth-century pens into frenzy, has more or less answered itself. Even what the publishing trade of Arthur Waugh and Sir Stanley Unwin knew as the “issue novel”, and which lasted for nearly a hundred and fifty years, has somehow fallen off a cliff.
While there are any number of tantalizing outliers, the “issue novel” first made its presence felt amid the early Victorian era’s agitation over divorce law reform. Its arch-exponent was Caroline Norton, whose treatment by her husband, the ghastly George Chapple Norton, produced at least two bestselling works, Stuart of Dunleath (1851) and Lost and Saved (1863) – the latter published six years after the passing of the 1857 Divorce Bill. Then there is the novel of religious doubt – see Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888), reviewed by William Ewart Gladstone in the Nineteenth Century – closely followed by the temperance novel, the anti-gambling novel and the abused childhood novel (Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies, 1863).
Subsequently, the trail runs off in pursuit of the “superfluous female” of the Victorian census return (George Gissing’s The Odd Women, 1893, F. M. Mayor’s The Third Miss Symons, 1913, May Sinclair’s The Life and Death of Harriet Frean, 1922, and, to a certain extent, George Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter, 1935), before ending up with the “Should nice girls sleep with men?” novel of the postwar era (Kingsley Amis’s Take A Girl Like You, 1960) and the unwanted-pregnancy novel of the 1960s (Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone, 1965, Andrea Newman’s The Cage, 1966).
There was even, come the eco-conscious 1970s, a brief vogue for the eco-novel in which gangs of outraged citizenry banded together to frustrate the developers and see off road-building schemes (Judy Cooke’s New Road, 1975, Raymond Williams’s The Fight for Manod, 1979). What did for the issue novel? On the one hand, books which surf self-consciously in and out of the tides of history soon become dated, as the dilemmas they advertise get solved. Divorce became easier. Nice girls slept with men. Illegitimacy ceased to be a stigma. On the other, there is a suspicion that novel readers, and novel publishers, began to demand different things from the books they were reading.
Victorian readers, by and large, expected that their fiction should have a “message”, to the point where they often insisted on finding one where none existed. It was the message, after all, in age where fiction itself struggled to evade the charge of light-mindedness, that made novels important. Gladstone, again, sending a postcard to George Moore congratulating him on Esther Waters (1894), assumed that because a certain amount of the novel took place at the racetrack it was a treatise against gambling. Modern readers, you suspect, are less keen on propagandizing and on characters who represent things other than themselves. If there have, so far, been comparatively few “Brexit novels”, then this is probably because most novelists (and most readers) despair of finding a treatment that can adequately convey the consequences of the 2016 Referendum.
stormborns
andulkaphoto
tangentwithtanner
janainaart
yousharknotpass
dededos
