The Spectator and the Wipers Times

I’m delighted to pass on news of a new resource. The Spectator has scanned all its back numbers, from 1828 to the present, and they can be found to read here. I warn you, though, that the scanning can be a bit erratic. You’ll need your detective boots on to puzzle out some of the […]

The Frenchman and the ‘Magnet’

Looking through wartime copies of the Magnet again,  I came across this editorial comment: Presumably the French had no equivalent of the Magnet. I wonder what the Frenchman would have thought had he actually read a copy. He might have done a lot worse if he wanted to gain an understanding of the English and […]

Rupert Brooke, competitor

I’ve just been alerted by Bill Greenwell to his new blog, about the history of the New Statesman competitions (of which he has been the monarch for several decades). It’s very much a work in progress, and so far he hasn’t got much beyond some general thoughts and accounts of the earliest comps. It’ll be […]

Dolly Dialogues

The third volume of the T.S. Eliot letters is better-edited than the second. The biographies of correspondents seem to have been cleared of the worst howlers (though Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale is still described as the ‘first book of the Clayhanger trilogy’, which it is not). John Haffenden’s notes are useful and learned, […]

The Wipers Times

The nice people at the Vulpes Libris blog are running a week of posts on the subject of parody. They kindly invited  me to contribute, and I sent them a short piece about the parodies in that best of all trench journals, The  Wipers Times. You can find it here.

Max Beerbohm, and postwar uncertainties

The tone of much writing in the twenties is a demoralised restlessness. The effect of war trauma? For some, definitely. The effect of economic uncertainty? A factor not to be underestimated. Also, though, there was a loss of moral bearings. During the tough days of the War, Britain had been buoyed up by the myth […]

‘Defeat’ in Scribner’s

Thanks to Jane Stemp for pointing out that the copy of Scribner’s Magazine containing Galsworthy’s short story ‘Defeat’ is online as part of  Brown University’s Modernist Journals Project. Galsworthy wrote ‘Defeat’ (originally as a one-act play, I think) in 1916, but it was not published in Britain till after the War. I had always assumed […]

‘Blast’ parody

Thanks to Rosie Snajdr for her comment on my recent parody post, alerting us to C. E. Bechhofer’s parody of Blast in The New Age. Click on this thumbnail, and you should be able to read the parody, which is rather amusing. Pound was, of course, a notable contributor to The New Age, so there […]

Cartoon

Recently I’ve quoted some of James Douglas’s fulminations from London Opinion. Mostly, though, it was a light-hearted paper, and a lot of the cartoons are still funny. I rather like this one. (Click on it to see it full-size.)

Describe cancer. Describe calico. Describe -

In Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1924) Virginia Woolf imagines advice from an Edwardian novelist like Arnold Bennett on how to create a fictional character: ‘Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent. Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the year I878- Discover what her mother died of. […]