Text: Michael Allen, “Preliminary: The Writer and His Audience,” Poe and the British Magazine Tradition, 1969, pp. 3-15

[page 3:]

 

My primary concern in this book is with Poe's attitude to British literary magazines during his career as a journalist from 1835 to 1849. This concern has, however, raised some problems of methodology and approach, which it seems appropriate to discuss at the very beginning.

All writers are interested in ways of reaching their readers,(1) but a serious writer who is also a journalist is likely to be particularly preoccupied with things like popularity, the nature of the audience, the building of reputations, the extent to which good writing can be widely successful. This is certainly the case with Poe. Almost all of Poe's statements about the value of British magazines and the utility of their conventions involve this kind of issue. So Poe's ideas of his own audience, and those of the British journalists about theirs, became relevant at an early stage in the preparation of this study. And in order to explain the relationship between Poe's journalism and that of the British [page 4:] magazinists, it was necessary to make certain assumptions about the nature and structure of the literary audience in both Britain and America; and to decide how much support and acclaim were given to various journals and writers. There is thus a sub-structure of descriptive assumptions, most apparent in chapters II and IX of the book, that may be thought to require some theoretic justification.

Lennox Grey, in an essay on “Literary Audience,”(2) assumes that the audience is an important half of the phenomenon called literature, and asks why it has been so little investigated in literary studies. He suggests several reasons: that the “field” is amorphous, shifting, and sprawling; that literary people feel an antipathy to the tools of the sociologist, statistician, or pollster; that they feel their primary concern should be with questions of value and with literary expressions of the individual spirit; that they accept Arnold's distinction between Cultured and Philistine and are afraid of falling into the latter category; he adds that in the case of American literary studies it may well be that a strong ideological fear of examining American society in class terms has prevented such investigation. No doubt all these reasons have their part to play in explaining the slow growth of such studies. But Grey does seem to give Jess than just emphasis to the very real academic distrust of what he calls(3) the “historical inferential method.” The historical inferential method is that whereby one speculates on the nature of the literary audience of a past age at least partly from the literature it is supposed to read. One then reads back into the literature the kind of audience it was written for. One may provide a considerable amount of external sociological and historical evidence for one's view of [page 5:] the audience and its development, of course; and on the extent and credibility of this evidence depends the degree of objective weight the speculations carry. But it would only really be in the contemporary situation, and with the use of statistical apparatus acceptable to a sociologist, that the relationship between a piece of writing and its readers could be empirically investigated. Many of the facts necessary fully to document historical studies of this nature may well be unobtainable or, at least, may not yet have been collected. How far should we infer from the writing of a time as well as from documentary evidence the nature of the supposed audience? In my own work I have tried to be sparing in the statements I have made about the actual audience, keeping them as broad and general as possible while I focus upon the particular writer and his idea of the audience. But some descriptive statements about the nineteenth-century audience, and its applause and contempt for different kinds of writing, had to be made; some of the support for these statements has been inferential in nature. And I am well aware that there is a danger with such statements that one may tend to find apparent evidence far too readily for what one wants to maintain.

 

I. AUDIENCE ASSUMPTIONS IN FOUR GENERAL WORKS

Four possible ways of dealing with this problem might be represented by four books: 1] The Sociology of Literary Taste by L.L. Schücking;(4) 2] The English Common Reader ... by R.D. Altick;(5) 3] Love and Death in the American Novel by L. A. Fiedler;(6) 4) Fiction and the Reading Public by Q. D. Leavis.(7) Schücking concerns himself [page 6:] theoretically with what should be investigated without trying to investigate anything. The main value of his work, as S. E. Hyman says, is that

Altick does collect a considerable amount of this kind of information and has done some empirical work of considerable value. But his introduction makes certain assumptions that are pragmatic rather than empirical. He seems to assume(9) that eventually there will be so much knowledge of the nineteenth-century audience that its nature will be apparent without the painful business of assertion and persuasion on the one hand, of refutation on the other. Partially inferential statements, careful and careless ones alike, are therefore ruled out until some undesignated time in the future. So Altick seems to recognise that we want to make statements about the audience; we must, however, according to him, remain frustrated for the present.(10) Fiedler makes it only too apparent that our desire to make this kind of statement is not purely that of the social historian; that at times our critical involvement with literature impels us toward such areas of investigation.

Fiedler's central argument depends on a socio-psychological theory of audience whereby the popular book is “‘archetypal,” expressing and representing the audience's deepest social and psychological attitudes. But his primary evidence [page 7:] for his view of the audience is undoubtedly the fiction it reads; he is the most freely and unashamedly ‘’inferential” of the four authors I am concerned with. And the freedom with which he himself indulges in inferential statement is largely self-defeating. He claims to be describing social fact, but he rarely considers social evidence. His theory, like the theories of Marx, Freud, and Jung (to all of which he acknowledges indebtedness),(11) recognises no evidence as capable of refuting it, and can, in fact, subdue any material it is called upon to interpret. This is almost explicitly acknowledged by a disarming profession of amateurism: “the truth one tries to tell about literature” is for Fiedler not finally different from

But this express rejection of academic restraints plays havoc with the central concept of his audience theory. The discovery of an “archetype” in a work, although it often implies that the book was popular can be taken on other occasions to indicate that there are literary virtues in it, thus confusing two aspects of literature that it would seem advisable to keep separate in all discussion. And the net result is a kind of mock-sociological “creative criticism” that, despite many valuable insights, is less trustworthy than the old aesthetic essay, which at least had no pretensions to objective significance.

Mrs. Leavis uses crude sociological techniques when they are available to her (e.g. in her statistical analysis of the writing [page 8:] and reading of best-sellers and other fiction in the 1920's). But she also constructs a historical account of the development of the literary audience in England from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. And this is inevitably to some extent “inferential,” although she does attempt to use what historical documents and materials come to hand. Mrs. Leavis's book confirms that one function of work of this kind is to complement with some social depth the critical discussion of particular writers or particular periods. What we are responding to in her fine pages on Elizabethan journalism, Bunyan, Defoe, or Sterne(13) is socially orientated literary history: although it is as history permeated by her incisive sense of the verbal impact of these writings seen as literature. The difference between her work and Fiedler's is that Mrs. Leavis's historical inferences or socio-historic statements are to be judged in terms of historical and sociological scholarship. The account of the audience and its development with which Mrs. Leavis complements her husband's criticism is valuable precisely because it can be refuted and is concerned to some extent to evade refutation. Despite a tendency to idealise the hierarchic, the craft-orientated, and the agrarian, much of her documentation of the changing literary situation stands. And even when her research is superseded, her intellectual contribution to some extent remains. We might take two examples of this. One, Mrs. Leavis's assumption that a single multi-class audience was available to the writer as late as 1860 is, according to Lennox Grey,(14) qualified considerably by Robert K. Webb in The British Working Class Reader 1790-1848 (1955). Two, Mrs. Leavis claims(15) that “The popular press about 1850 ... has the dignity of the best papers of the age.” She is avowedly(16) following Sir Egerton Brydges's opinion [page 9:] that “so long as the Penny Magazines make good selection of articles from the best works, they are beneficial.”(17) Ago But Margaret Dalziel, in her Popular Fiction 100 Years Ago ... ,(18) shows quite clearly that the “Penny Magazine’ Mrs. Leavis refers to in support of her claim is insignificant and unrepresentative, and that her statement is not borne out by the facts.

The second of these illustrations suggest that the research with which Mrs. Leavis backed up her view of the audience was sometimes not only primitive but also superficial. The implications of her ideas, of the new questions about the nature of change in the literary audience which she is asking, remain, however, in both cases. What Webb and Mrs. Dalziel are doing is providing better answers to her questions. One could argue that the formulation of new questions, new viewpoints, is one function of original work; and that sound and good work will thereafter produce better answers. Certainly Mrs. Leavis has drawn attention to the relationship between traditional elite attitudes and the fostering of good writing, between the infiltration of business techniques into publishing and an increasing threat to good writing; and our sense of the importance of this relationship remains, however we modify the “model” which she constructed. And a more sophisticated version of her view of the developing audience is directly relevant to my own interest in Poe's relationship with the British magazines.

The terms of Poe's thinking on the subject of popularity are similar to those of the British debate on the subject in the earlier nineteenth century, a debate that was still dallying with the eighteenth-century elitist idea of belles lettres as “a class commodity, produced by and for the elite, and [page 10:] presumptuously appropriated by the vulgar.”(19) As Leo Lowenthal says, the writer's problems about his relation to the mass-audience, which had seemingly been solved in the eighteenth century, became controversial again in the early nineteenth century,(20) perhaps because of the hardening of class lines in the period after the Napoleonic wars.(21) The writers or their spokesmen were now taking “a second look at the new ‘patron’, the market place.”(22) It was in a context in which the “many” and the “few” were still meaningful terms for describing the literary audience, that the British magazinists of Blackwood's, the New Monthly, the London Magazine, and Fraser's constructed their journalistic conventions. And partly because of his Southern upbringing, partly because of his literary pretensions, Poe's own terminology, his ideas about journalism, and the conventions of his most characteristic work, were, as we shall see, ambiguously elitist in the same way.

 

II. AUDIENCE ASSUMPTIONS IN EXTANT POE SCHOLARSHIP

I have been discussing my right to make inferential assumptions while trying to describe Poe's attitudes as a journalist. But perhaps such scruples are beside the point. The very existence of a serious writer like Poe who is also a journalist, in fact, forces literary scholars to make the kind of assumption I am defending. And this can readily be illustrated by reference to some of the literary scholarship between 1920 and 1950 that has tried to determine Poe's place in American literature.

Hervey Allen, one of Poe's most influential biographers, saw him as confronted by the mass audience, yet continuing [page 11:] “inadvertently to address himself to an audience elite enough to be capable of remembering and cherishing what was valuable.”(23) Allen's image of Poe here is basically that which originated in Europe, where Baudelaire and his followers(24) were weighty in establishing the “greatness” of Poe; whether this happened because they were reading a foreign tongue,(25) for various reasons of their own,(26) because Poe is a deeply interesting cultural figure, or because he is a good writer, is irrelevant for our purposes. What they established was an image of Poe as an isolated and brilliant victim of his artistic temperament, neo-European and aristocratic, essentially opposed to his bourgeois American milieu of “money-making” journalism and democratic mediocrity.(27)

When Hervey Allen was writing, there was a new generation of literary historians in American universities who had a particular interest in American literary history. These literary historians were proud of America's “coming of age,” her social progress, her Realist movement, her journalism, and the magazines that had been so important to her cultural growth. And they were engaged in discovering and explaining the American literary tradition. Now the literary status which the French had given to Poe was very acceptable to these historians, as they built up a canon of “great” American writers, but they did not like the French aspersions on the American cultural situation and the French assumption that Poe had no native American cultural roots, particularly when these criticisms were taken up by American literary men like Allen.(28) In answer to this image of Poe as a neo-European victim of American society, they built up their own picture of Poe as an American professional man, an American journalist” in the style of their own age.(29) Into [page 12:] this effort of creative inquiry went immense biographical research, detailed attention to all his writing rather than merely to his better-known tales, and a great deal of research into his writing methods and use of sources. In particular these researches disclosed the elements of stability in Poe's character which his day-to-day work as a journalist demonstrated, his professional skill, his dependence on magazines and various kinds of books, encyclopaedias, and anthologies for material to be “worked up,” his habitual desultory “skimming” of such sources, and his topical preoccupations with the literature, culture, and society of his time. This combination of new emphasis and new information undercut the kind of romanticised biography, like Allen's, which tended to re-create Poe in the image of Baudelaire. And A. H. Quinn's standard biography of Poe,(30) with its portrait of the hard-working professional journalist that Poe most of the time was, is the culmination of all this scholarship.

But if Allen, following Baudelaire, had made elitist assumptions about Poe's relationship with the American mass-audience, these scholars made their own very different assumptions about it. They saw the new magazines of the 1830's like Godey's Lady's Book and Graham's Magazine as pro-American and democratic as against the older journals which were more European and elitist; and they were pleased, in the midst of so much European influence, to find something of comparatively native growth. The anti-intellectualism of American literary historians of this generation has been described by Lionel Trilling in his essay “Reality in America,”(31) and is exemplified when J. P. Wood contrasts these native mass-circulation magazines with the Europe-modelled ‘intellectual reviews” as being ‘not critical [page 13:] but educational in the widest sense,”(32) and when he finds Godey's Lady's Book “marvellous” apparently because “lacking the brilliance and charm of Graham's or the alertness and readableness of The Knickerbocker,” it “had more real influence on American life” than either.(33) For the scholars who interested themselves in Poe, the fact that he worked for both Godey's and Graham's in the later years of his career was an encouraging sign of his Americanness. And it is under the influence of this interpretation of American cultural history that H. S. Canby identifies Poe fairly and squarely with the milieu of Godey's and Graham's,(34) and thence with the journalism of his own age.(35) Similarly F. L. Pattee makes an explicit identification of Poe's attitudes with those of the 1920's and 1930's: “He studied the tastes of his age,” says Pattee, “with the methods and the instincts of a yellow journalist.”(36)

So two different sets of assumptions about Poe's relationship with his journalistic milieu have been made, and remain to some extent current.(37) Fortunately for my purposes, the scholars who first realised how important Poe's professional commitment as a journalist was, were unready to use this awareness when confronted with his frequent references to the British magazines. Thus my field of research was left intact. More immediately, however, the fact that previous literary historians have made such assumptions provides me at least with a comfortable precedent for my own procedures. It could, of course, be urged that two wrong procedures will never make a right: it is against this precept that I have already tried to defend myself. But I hope that any assumptions I make will prove to be both more subtle and more realistic than theirs. [page 14:]

 

III. “VALUES” AND LITERARY HISTORY

Lennox Grey, in the essay I mentioned earlier, insists that studies which are concerned at all with the literary audience must “get to the values behind the facts.”(38) Presumably he means primarily the values subscribed to by the writers and readers with whom the study is concerned 1]; but his formulation suggests also the way the scholar brings his own values to bear as he attempts to understand the literary situation he is exploring 2]. And the latter values, at least, do not lie behind facts; they exist somewhere between the facts and the observer, modifying the nature and extent of his vision. So that we need to distinguish in our discussion between “values” in sense 1] and “values” in sense 2], trying to aim at “objectivity” and to prevent our own obsessions from interfering with the attempt to see the past as it was. But this agreed, a value-free investigation involving no identification of one's own standards with those operant in the past, no choice of viewpoint, no determination of significance, would be impossible to achieve, even if there were any point in achieving it. This is true of all historical enquiry: it is true in a particular way for literary history, which has its own priorities related to the major scales of literary value subscribed to in the time it is being written.

Thus the area in which I am working is inevitably subject to some foreshortening by literary critics and scholars, who to some extent find implications for themselves and their own age in the literary and cultural materials. Grey suggests that a useful analogy to the literary historian's situation here is provided in the words of John Steinbeck and E. F. Ricketts in The Log from the Sea of Cortez (London, 1958): [page 15:]

My own warp is, at least, different from those of Baudelaire and these American scholars, whose disparate views of Poe's relation to American mass-culture have already been mentioned. I have profited immensely from the research of those who stressed Poe's professional journalism, while I have rejected their implicit view that as a writer he could be seen as directly representative of the native mass-journalism of his day and ours. In the place of these two images, or a simple conflation of them, I have suggested that we should see here a cultural situation irreducible to order or simplicity, a European tradition of journalism exaggerated and dislocated in Poe's writing by the American reality, yet not assimilable to any established American culture patterns.