The ten years of the Thirties are a period concerning whose literary history the ordinary reader knows next to nothing. Yet a good deal that has survived for fifty years, and promises to live longer, was accomplished in that period. Dickens, for example, began his career in the year 1837 with his ‘Sketches by “Boz”’ and the ‘Pickwick Papers;’ Lord Lytton, then Mr. Lytton Bulwer, had already before that year published five novels, including ‘Paul Clifford’ and ‘The Last Days of Pompeii.’ Tennyson had already issued the ‘Poems, by Two Brothers,’ and ‘Poems chiefly Lyrical.’ Disraeli had written ‘The Young Duke,’ ‘Vivian Grey,’ and ‘Venetia.’ Browning had published ‘Paracelsus’ and ‘Strafford;’ Marryat began in 1834; Carlyle published the ‘Sartor Resartus’ in 1832. But one must not estimate a period by its beginners. All these writers belong to the following thirty years of the century. If we look for those who were flourishing—that is, those who were producing their best work—it will be found that this decade was singularly poor. The principal name is that of Hood. There were also Hartley Coleridge, Douglas Jerrold, Procter, Sir Archibald Alison, Theodore Hook, G.P.R. James, Charles Knight, Sir Henry Taylor, Milman, Ebenezer Elliott, Harriet Martineau, James Montgomery, Talfourd, Henry Brougham, Lady Blessington, Harrison Ainsworth, and some others of lesser note. This is not a very imposing array. On the other hand, nearly all the great writers whom we associate with the first thirty years of the century were living, though their best work was done. After sixty, I take it, the hand of the master may still work with the old cunning, but his designs will be no longer new or bold. Wordsworth was sixty in 1830, and, though he lived for twenty years longer, and published the ‘Yarrow Revisited,’ and, I think, some of his ‘Sonnets,’ he hardly added to his fame. Southey was four years younger. He published his ‘Doctor’ and ‘Essays’ in this decade, but his best work was done already. Scott died in 1832; Coleridge died in 1834; Byron was already dead; James Hogg died in 1835; Felicia Hemans in the same year; Tom Moore was a gay young fellow of fifty in 1830, the year in which his life of Lord Byron appeared. He did very little afterwards. Campbell was two years older than Moore, and he, too, had exhausted himself. Rogers, older than any of them, had entirely concluded his poetic career. It is wonderful to think that he began to write in 1783 and died in 1855. Beckford, whose ‘Vathek’ appeared in 1786, was living until 1844. Among others who were still living in 1837 were James and Horace Smith, Wilson Croker, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs. Trollope, Lucy Aikin, Miss Opie (who lived to be eighty-five), Jane Porter (prematurely cut off at seventy-four), and Harriet Lee (whose immortal work, the ‘Errors of Innocence,’ appeared in 1786, when she was already thirty) lived on till 1852, when she was ninety-six. Bowles, that excellent man, was not yet seventy, and meant to live for twenty years longer. De Quincey was fifty-two in 1837, Christopher North was in full vigour, Thomas Love Peacock, who published his first novel in 1810, was destined to produce a last, equally good, in 1860; Landor, born in 1775, was not to die until 1864; Leigh Hunt, who in 1837 was fifty-three years of age, belongs to the time of Byron. John Keble, whose ‘Christian Year’ was published in 1827, was forty-four in 1837; ‘L.E.L.’ died in 1838. In America, Washington Irving, Emerson, Channing, Bryant, Whittier, and Longfellow, make a good group. In France, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, BÉranger, Alfred de Musset, Scribe, and Dumas were all writing, a group much stronger than our English team.

It is difficult to understand, at first, that between the time of Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats, and that of Dickens, Thackeray, Marryat, Lever, Tennyson, Browning, and Carlyle, there existed this generation of wits, most of them almost forgotten. Those, however, who consider the men and women of the Thirties have to deal, for the most part, with a literature that is third-rate. This kind becomes dreadfully flat and stale when it has been out for fifty years; the dullest, flattest, dreariest reading that can be found on the shelves in the sprightly novel of Society, written in the Thirties.

A blight had fallen upon novels and their writers. The enormous success that Scott had achieved tempted hundreds to follow in his path, if that were possible. It was not possible; but this they could not know, because nothing seems so easy to write as a novel, and no man, of those destined to fail, can understand in what respects his own work falls short of Scott’s. That is the chief reason why he fails. Scott’s success, however, produced another effect. It greatly enlarged the number of novel readers, and caused them to buy up eagerly anything new, in the hope of finding another Scott. Thus, about the year 1826 there were produced as many as 250 three- and four-volume novels a year—that is to say, about as many as were published in 1886, when the area of readers has been multiplied by ten. We are also told that nearly all these novels could command a sale of 750 to 1,000 each, while anything above the average would have a sale of 1,500 to 2,000. The usual price given for these novels was, we are also told, from 200l. to 300l. In that case the publishers must have had a happy and a prosperous time, netting splendid hauls. But I think that we must take these figures with considerable deductions. There were, as yet, no circulating libraries of any importance; their place was supplied by book-clubs, to which the publishers chiefly looked for the purchase of their books. But one cannot believe that the book-clubs would take copies of all the rubbish that came out. Some of these novels I have read; some of them actually stand on my shelves; and I declare that anything more dreary and unprofitable it is difficult to imagine. At last there was a revolt: the public would stand this kind of stuff no longer. Down dropped the circulation of the novels. Instead of 2,000 copies subscribed, the dismayed publisher now read 50, and the whole host of novelists vanished like a swarm of midges. At the same time poetry went down too. The drop in poetry was even more terrible than that of novels. Suddenly, and without any warning, the people of Great Britain left off reading poetry. To be sure, they had been flooded with a prodigious quantity of trash. One anonymous ‘popular poet,’ whose name will never now be recovered, received 100l. for his last poem from a publisher who thought, no doubt, that the ‘boom’ was going to last. Of this popular poet’s work he sold exactly fifty copies. Another, a ‘humorous’ bard, who also received a large sum for his immortal poem, showed in the unhappy publisher’s books no more than eighteen copies sold. This was too ridiculous, and from that day to this the trade side of poetry has remained under a cloud. That of novelist has, fortunately for some, been redeemed from contempt by the enormous success of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and by the solid, though substantial, success of the lesser lights. Poets have now to pay for the publication of their own works, but novelists—some of them—command a price; those, namely, who do not have to pay for the production of their works.

The popular taste, thus cloyed with novels and poetry, turned to books on popular science, on statistics, on health, and on travel. Barry Cornwall’s ‘Life of Kean,’ Campbell’s ‘Life of Siddons,’ the Lives of Sale, Sir Thomas Picton, and Lord Exmouth, for example, were all well received. So Ross’s ‘Arctic Seas,’ Lamartine’s ‘Pilgrimage,’ Macfarlane’s ‘Travels in the East,’ Holman’s ‘Round the World,’ and Quin’s ‘Voyage down the Danube,’ all commanded a sale of 1,000 copies each at least. Works of religion, of course, always succeed, if they are written with due regard to the religious leaning of the moment. It shows how religious fashions change when we find that the copyright of the works of Robert Hall realised 4,000l. and that of Charles Simeon’s books 5,000l.; while of the Rev. Alexander Fletcher’s ‘Book of Family Devotions,’ published at 24s., 2,000 copies were sold on the day of publication. I dare say the same thing would happen again to-day if another Mr. Fletcher were to hit upon another happy thought in the way of a religious book.

I think that one of the causes of the decay of trade as regards poetry and fiction may have been the badness of the annuals. You will find in any old-fashioned library copies of the ‘Keepsake,’ the ‘Forget-me-Not,’ the ‘Book of Beauty,’ ‘Flowers of Loveliness,’ Finden’s ‘Tableaux,’ ‘The Book of Gems,’ and others of that now extinct tribe. They were beautifully printed on the finest paper; they were illustrated with the most lovely steel engravings, the like of which could not now be had at any price; they were bound in brown and crimson watered silk, most fascinating to look upon; and they were published at a guinea. As for their contents, they were, to begin with, written almost entirely by ladies and gentlemen with handles to their names, each number containing in addition two or three papers by commoners—mere literary commoners—just to give a flavouring of style. In the early Thirties it was fashionable for lords and ladies to dash off these trifles. Byron was a gentleman; Shelley was a gentleman; nobody else, to be sure, among the poets and wits was a gentleman—yet if Byron and Shelley condescended to bid for fame and bays, why not Lord Reculver, Lady Juliet de Dagenham, or the Hon. Lara Clonsilla? I have before me the ‘Keepsake’ for the year 1831. Among the authors are Lord Morpeth, Lord Nugent, Lord Porchester, Lord John Russell, the Hon. George Agar Ellis, the Hon. Henry Liddell, the Hon. Charles Phipps, the Hon. Robert Craddock, and the Hon. Grantley Berkeley. Among the ladies are the Countess of Blessington, ‘L.E.L.,’ and Agnes Strickland. Theodore Hook supplies the professional part. The illustrations are engraved from pictures and drawings by Eastlake, Corbould, Westall, Turner, Smirke, Flaxman, and other great artists. The result, from the literary point of view, is a collection much lower in point of interest and ability than the worst number of the worst shilling magazine of the present day. I venture to extract certain immortal lines contributed by Lord John Russell, who is not generally known as a poet. They are ‘written at Kinneil, the residence of the late Mr. Dugald Stewart.’

Dear me! Something similar to the last line one remembers written by an earlier bard. In the same way Terence has been accused of imitating the old Eton Latin Grammar.

Somewhere about the year 1837 the world began to kick at the ‘Keepsakes,’ and they gradually got extinguished. Then the lords and the countesses put away their verses and dropped into prose, and, to the infinite loss of mankind, wrote no more until editors of great monthlies, anxious to show a list of illustrious names, began to ask them again.

As for the general literature of the day, there must have been a steady demand for new works of all kinds, for it was estimated that in 1836 there were no fewer than four thousand persons living by literary work. Most of them, of course, must have been simple publishers’ hacks. But seven hundred of them in London were journalists. At the present day there are said to be in London alone fourteen thousand men and women who live by writing. And of this number I should think that thirteen thousand are in some way or other connected with journalism. Publishers’ hacks still exist—that is to say, the unhappy men who, without genius or natural aptitude, or the art of writing pleasantly, are eternally engaged in compiling, stealing, arranging, and putting together books which may be palmed off upon an uncritical public for prize books and presents. But they are far fewer in proportion than they were, and perhaps the next generation may live to see them extinct.

What did they write, this regiment of 3,300 littÉrateurs? Novelists, as we have learned, had fallen upon evil times; poetry was what it still continues to be, a drug in the market; but there was the whole range of the sciences, there were morals, theology, education, travels, biography, history, the literature of Art in all its branches, archÆology, ancient and modern literature, criticism, and a hundred other things. Yet, making allowance for everything, I cannot but think that the 3,300 must have had on the whole an idle and unprofitable time. However, some books of the year may be recorded. First of all, in the ‘Annual Register’ for 1837 there appears a poem by Alfred Tennyson. I have copied a portion of it:—

Books, indeed, there were in plenty. Lady Blessington produced her ‘Victims of Society’ and ‘Sunday at the Zoo;’ Mr. Lytton Bulwer his ‘Duchesse de la ValliÈre,’ ‘Ernest Maltravers,’ and ‘Athens, its Rise and Fall;’ Miss Mitford her ‘Country Stories;’ Cottle his ‘Recollections of Coleridge;’ Harrison Ainsworth, ‘Crichton;’ Disraeli, ‘Venetia;’ Talfourd, ‘The Life and Letters of Charles Lamb;’ Babbage, a ‘Bridgwater Treatise;’ Hook, ‘Jack Brag;’ Haynes Bayley, his ‘Weeds of Witchery’—a thing as much forgotten as the weeds in last year’s garden; James, his ‘Attila’ and ‘Louis XIV.;’ Miss Martineau, her book on ‘American Society.’ I find, not in the book, which I have not read, but in a review of it, two stories, which I copy. One is of an American traveller who had been to Rome, and said of it, ‘Rome is a very fine city, sir, but its public buildings are out of repair.’ The other is the following: ‘Few men,’ said the preacher in his sermon, ‘when they build a house, remember that there must some day be a coffin taken downstairs.’ ‘Ministers,’ said a lady who had been present, ‘have got into the strangest way of choosing subjects. True, wide staircases are a great convenience, but Christian ministers might find better subjects for their discourses than narrow staircases.’

In addition to the above, Hartley Coleridge wrote the ‘Lives of Northern Worthies;’ the complete poetical works of Southey appeared—he himself died at the beginning of 1842; Dion Boucicault produced his first play, being then fifteen years of age; Carlyle brought out his ‘French Revolution;’ Lockhart his ‘Life of Scott;’ Martin Tupper the first series of the ‘Proverbial Philosophy;’ Hallam his ‘Literature of Europe;’ there were the usual travels in Arabia, Armenia, Italy, and Ireland; with, no doubt, the annual avalanche of sermons, pamphlets, and the rest. Above all, however, it must be remembered that to this time belong the ‘Sketches by “Boz”’ (1836) and the ‘Pickwick Papers’ (1837–38). Of the latter, the AthenÆum not unwisely remarked that they were made up of ‘three pounds of Smollett, three ounces of Sterne, a handful of Hook, a dash of a grammatical Pierce Egan; the incidents at pleasure, served with an original sauce piquante.... We earnestly hope and trust that nothing we have said will tend to refine Boz.’ One could hardly expect a critic to be ready at once to acknowledge that here was a genius, original, totally unlike any of his predecessors, who knew the great art of drawing from life, and depicting nothing but what he knew. As for Thackeray, he was still in the chrysalis stage, though his likeness appears with those of the contributors to Fraser’s Magazine in the portrait group of Fraserians published in 1839. His first independently published book, I think, was the ‘Paris Sketch Book,’ which was not issued until the year 1840.

Here, it will be acknowledged, is not a record to be quite ashamed of, with Carlyle, Talfourd, Hallam, and Dickens to adorn and illustrate the year. After all, it is a great thing for any year to add one enduring book to English Literature, and it is a great deal to show so many works which are still read and remembered. Lytton’s ‘Ernest Maltravers,’ though not his best novel, is still read by some; Talfourd’s ‘Charles Lamb’ remains; Disraeli’s ‘Venetia;’ Lockhart’s ‘Life of Scott’ is the best biography of the novelist and poet; Carlyle’s ‘French Revolution’ shows no sign of being forgotten.

Between the first and the fiftieth years of Victoria’s reign there arose and flourished and died a new generation of great men. Dickens, Thackeray, Lytton, in his later and better style; George Eliot, Charles Reade, George Meredith, Nathaniel Hawthorne, stand in the very front rank of novelists; in the second line are Charles Kingsley, Mrs. Gaskell, Lever, Trollope, and a few living men and women. Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, are the new poets. Carlyle, Freeman, Froude, Stubbs, Green, Lecky, Buckle, have founded a new school of history; Maurice has broadened the old theology; Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, Lockyer, and many others have advanced the boundaries of science; philology has become one of the exact sciences; a great school of political economy has arisen, flourished, and decayed. As to the changes that have come upon the literature of the country, the new points of view, the new creeds, these belong to another chapter.

There has befallen literature of late years a grievous, even an irreparable blow. It has lost the salon. There are no longer grandes dames de par le monde, who attract to their drawing-rooms the leaders and the lesser lights of literature; there are no longer, so far as I know, any places at all, even any clubs, which are recognised centres of literature; there are no longer any houses where one will be sure to find great talkers, and to hear them talking all night long. There are no longer any great talkers—that is to say, many men there are who talk well, but there are no Sydney Smiths or Macaulays, and in houses where the Sydney Smith of the day would go for his talk, he would not be encouraged to talk much after midnight. In the same way, there are clubs, like the AthenÆum and the Savile, where men of letters are among the members, but they do not constitute the members, and they do not give altogether its tone to the club.

Fifty years ago there were two houses which, each in its own way, were recognised centres of literature. Every man of letters went to Gore House, which was open to all; and every man of letters who could get there went to Holland House.

The former establishment was presided over by the Countess of Blessington, at this time a widow, still young and still attractive, though beginning to be burdened with the care of an establishment too expensive for her means. She was the author of a good many novels, now almost forgotten—it is odd how well one knows the name of Lady Blessington, and how little is generally known about her history, literary or personal—and she edited every year one of the ‘Keepsakes’ or ‘Forget-me-Nots.’ From certain indications, the bearing of which her biographer, Mr. Madden, did not seem to understand, I gather that her novels did not prove to the publishers the literary success which they expected, and I also infer—from the fact that she was always changing them—that a dinner at Gore House and the society of all the wits after dinner were not always attractions strong enough to loosen their purse-strings. This lady, whose maiden name was Power, was of an Irish family, her father being engaged, when he was not shooting rebels, in unsuccessful trade. Her life was adventurous and also scandalous. She was married at sixteen to a Captain Farmer, from whom she speedily separated, and came over to London, where she lived for some years—her biographer does not explain how she got money—a grass widow. When Lord Blessington lost his wife, and Mrs. Farmer lost her husband—the gallant Captain got drunk, and fell out of a window—they were married, and went abroad travelling in great state, as an English milor of those days knew how to travel, with a train of half-a-dozen carriages, his own cook and valet, the Countess’s women, a whole batterie de cuisine, a quantity of furniture, couriers, and footmen, and his own great carriage. With them went the Count d’Orsay, then about two-and-twenty, and young Charles Mathews, then about twenty, a protÉgÉ of Lord Blessington, who was a friend and patron of the drama.

After Lord Blessington died it was arranged that Count d’Orsay should marry his daughter. But the Count separated from his wife a week or two after the wedding, and returned to the widow, whom he never afterwards left, always taking a lodging near her house, and forming part of her household. The Countess d’Orsay, one need not explain, did not visit her stepmother at Gore House.

Here, however, you would meet Tom Moore, the two Bulwers, Campbell, Talfourd, James and Horace Smith, Landseer, Theodore Hook, Disraeli the elder and the younger, Rogers, Washington Irving, N.P. Willis, Marryat, Macready, Charles Dickens, Albert Smith, Forster, Walter Savage Landor, and, in short, nearly every one who had made a reputation, or was likely to make it. Hither came also Prince Louis Napoleon, in whose fortunate star Count d’Orsay always firmly believed. The conversation was lively, and the evenings were prolonged. As for ladies, there were few ladies who went to Gore House. Doubtless they had their reasons. The outer circle, so to speak, consisted of such men as Lord Abinger, Lord Durham, Lord Strangford, Lord Porchester, Lord Nugent, writers and poetasters who contributed their illustrious names and their beautiful productions to Lady Blessington’s ‘Keepsakes.’ Thackeray was one of the ‘intimates’ at Gore House, and when the crash came in 1849, and the place was sold up by the creditors, it is on record that the author of ‘Vanity Fair’ was the only person who showed emotion. ‘Mr. Thackeray also came,’ wrote the Countess’s valet to his mistress, who had taken refuge in Paris, ‘and he went away with tears in his eyes; he is perhaps the only person I have seen really affected at your departure.’ In 1837 he was twenty-six years of age, but he had still to wait for twelve years before he was to take his real place in literature, and even then and until the day of his death there were many who could not understand his greatness.

As regards Lady Blessington, her morals may have been deplorable, but there must have been something singularly attractive about her manners and conversation. It is not by a stupid or an unattractive woman that such success as hers was attained. Her novels, so far as I have been able to read them, show no remarkable ability, and her portrait shows amiability rather than cleverness; yet she must have been both clever and amiable to get so many clever men around her and to fix them, to make them come again, come often, and regard her drawing-room and her society as altogether charming, and to write such verses upon her as the following:—

The following lines are in another strain, more artificial, with a false ring, and curiously unlike any style of the present day. They are by N.P. Willis, who, in his ‘Pencillings,’ describes an evening at Gore House:—

Gore House was a place for men; there was more than a touch of Bohemia in its atmosphere. The fair chÂtelaine distinctly did not belong to any noble house, though she was fond of talking of her ancestors; the constant presence of Count d’Orsay, and the absence of Lady Harriet, his wife; the coldness of ladies as regards the place; the whispers and the open talk; these things did not, perhaps, make the house less delightful, but they placed it outside society.

Holland House, on the other hand, occupied a different position. The circle was wide and the hospitable doors were open to all who could procure an introduction; but it was presided over by a lady the opposite to Lady Blessington in every respect. She ruled as well as reigned; those who went to Holland House were made to feel her power. The Princess Marie Liechtenstein, in her book on Holland House, has given a long list of those who were to be found there between the years 1796 and 1840. Among them were Sydney Smith, Macaulay, Byron, ‘Monk’ Lewis, Lord Jeffrey, Lords Eldon, Thurlow, Brougham, and Lyndhurst, Sir Humphry Davy, Count Rumford, Lords Aberdeen, Moira, and Macartney, Grattan, Curran, Sir Samuel Romilly, Washington Irving, Tom Moore, Calonne, Lally Tollendal, Talleyrand, the Duke of Clarence, the Duc d’OrlÉans, Metternich, Canova, the two Erskines, Madame de StaËl, Lord John Russell, and Lord Houghton. There was no such agreeable house in Europe as Holland House. ‘There was no professional claqueur; no mutual puffing; no exchanged support. There, a man was not unanimously applauded because he was known to be clever, nor was a woman accepted as clever because she was known to receive clever people.’

The conditions of life and society are so much changed that there can never again be another Holland House. For the first thing which strikes one who considers the history of this place, as well as Gore House, is that, though the poets, wits, dramatists, and novelists go to these houses, their wives do not. In these days a man who respects himself will not go to a house where his wife is not asked. Then, again, London is so much greater in extent, and people are so much scattered, that it would be difficult now to get together a circle consisting of literary people who lived near enough to frequent the house. And another thing: people no longer keep such late hours. They do not sit up talking all night. That is, perhaps, because there are no wits to talk with; but I do not know: I think that towards midnight the malice of Count d’Orsay in drawing out the absurd points in the guests, the rollicking fun of Tom Moore, or his sentimental songs, the repartee of James Smith, and the polished talk of Lytton Bulwer, all collar, cuff, diamond pin, and wavy hair, would have begun to pall upon me, and when nobody was taking any notice of so obscure an individual, I should have stolen down the stairs, and so out into the open air beneath the stars. For the wits were very witty, but they must have been very fatiguing. ‘Quite enough of that, Macaulay’ Lady Holland would say, tapping her fan upon the table. ‘Now tell us about something else.’

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