Posterity

On April 3rd, 1929, the Manchester Guardian printed the results of a competition that it had organised. Readers were asked to predict which living novelists would still be read in 2029, and the winner was the competitor whose list most nearly matched the general consensus.
Since we are now four-fifths of the way towards 2029, the rankings make interesting reading; for novelists currently basking in critical approval they may be salutary reminders of the unpredictability of fame. Well over a thousand Guardian readers entered the competition, by the way, so the results can probably be taken as accurately reflecting the taste at least of educated liberal opinion in 1929.
The top six novelists were
Galsworthy                  1,180 votes
Wells                               933 votes
Bennett                         654 votes
Kipling                           455 votes
Barrie                             286 votes
Walpole                        233 votes
Well, Galsworthy is still in print, and I’ve recommended the Forsyte Saga to my daughter as a good way of whiling away long cosy hours of breast-feeding. I don’t think he features on many academic reading lists, though. Wells and Bennett have their devoted followers, though there is more interest in Wells’s ideas than in his fiction, I think, and Bennett still seems to me the most under-appreciated of British novelists. Kipling is a great unignorable fact in English literature, but his name is at least as likely to produce vilification as praise. And Barrie and Walpole? Barrie is now a one-play man; Peter Pan continues to enchant, even when debased to panto. But have you tried any of his novels lately? The Little White Bird is positively creepy.
And Hugh Walpole, I fear, has quite disappeared from critical fame, and I can’t see him ever regaining it.
Those six were the winners, but the MG also prints the scores for writers who didn’t make the top selection. The first woman on the list is in seventh place:
Sheila Kaye-Smith      198 votes
Whatever happened to her?
(Update:Since writing this post, I’ve read Kaye-Smith’s Little England (1918), and I can thoroughly recommend it.)
Here are the next few:
George Moore             165 votes
Bernard Shaw              110 votes
Conan Doyle                101 votes
R.H.Mottram                 79 votes
John Buchan                  63 votes
D.H.Lawrence                 61 votes
Chesterton                     60 votes
Aldous Huxley              50 votes
The appearance of Shaw among the novelists says more about his domination as playwright and controversialist than about his novels, all of which are early work (though well worth reading). Mottram’s excellent Spanish Farm books get him on the list, but they have long been (unjustly) out of print. Doyle and Buchan are still not only in print, but are read for pleasure, not because they are on academic reading lists.
A bit lower down the list, Rose Macaulay gets 41 votes, which is five fewer than Hall Caine. I’ve just read Macaulay’s Keeping Up Appearances (1928) and I can’t understand why she isn’t a hugely popular classic.
E.M.Forster gets 31 votes, and Virginia Woolf only 21, the same as Edgar Wallace. James Joyce is in the list of those who get fewer than ten votes. I wonder how the good folk of 1929 would have reacted if told that eighty years on these would be writers arousing vastly more critical interest than their current heroes.
There is a long list of forgotten and near-forgotten names who managed to scrape a handful of votes each. Among them, though, is Max Beerbohm, whose Zuleika Dobson is definitely still read, and E.F.Benson, whose comic novels were helped back into print by a television series.
There is an even sadder list of writers who garnered just one mention from the Guardian readers. Flora Annie Steel, where are you now? Yet in the middle of that list is P.G.Wodehouse, still a solid seller, much-loved and widely regarded as a classic. And as for the novelist of 1929 who, judging by the display of her work in bookshops, is the most genuinely popular eighty years on – she gets no votes at all. That’s Agatha Christie, of course.
Funny thing, literary fame.