I’ve been writing about Andrew Lang’s January 1891 harsh review of Emily Dickinson’s poetry in the London Daily News, and most scholars tend to agree that Lang’s fury was aimed more at William Dean Howells.
The American Howells – who had written positively about Dickinson’s debut – had earlier attracted the Brit Lang’s ire when he (Howells) published a controversial essay in support of the emerging school of realism and against the romance tradition: “the art of fiction has, in fact, become a finer art in our day than it was with Dickens and Thackeray.”
The American Howells – who had written positively about Dickinson’s debut – had earlier attracted the Brit Lang’s ire when he (Howells) published a controversial essay in support of the emerging school of realism and against the romance tradition: “the art of fiction has, in fact, become a finer art in our day than it was with Dickens and Thackeray.”
THE COMPLETE ARTICLE IS HERE.
“Rut roh – ‘them’s fightin’ words,’” I wrote yesterday – and then I read this in Marysa Demoor’s “Andrew Lang versus W. E. Howells: a Late-Victorian Literary Duel” (1987): “(Howells) returned to journalism after the failure of his literary agent, J. R. Osgood in 1885, and then it was he came to full blows with that most influential British critic, Andrew Lang.”
Turns out my boxing parallel to pugilism was spot on!
In Marietta Messmer’s “Reviewers’ Despair: The Politics of Dickinson's Critical Reception during the 1890s” (2000), there’s this: “In this context of an ongoing ‘Realism War,’ it is hardly surprising that, when Howells’s enthusiastic promotion of Dickinson’s poetry reached London, some of the major British journals and magazines could not separate the reviewer from the reviewee.”
Lang wrote various reviews in reference to Dickinson’s works, and – this also from Messmer’s research – “five of Lang’s seven articles directly refer to and address ‘Mr. Howells’ throughout, while two of them quote only those poems which had appeared in Howells’s review, and, with one exception, even mirror Howells’s order of arrangement.”
And get this: The entire first paragraph of Lang’s first review featured Howells’s name in every sentence. Throughout the rest of the article, Howells’s name is mentioned another ten times.
In her book Friends Over the Ocean: Andrew Lang's Letters to J. B. Matthews, H. H. Furness, F. J. Child, William James, J. R. Lowell, 1881-1912, Demoor noted that Lang's appraisal of Emily Dickinson's poetry perhaps reached the nadir of his critical acumen for lines like this: "Miss D. has an occasional good line or two, but she is astonishingly silly and anarchic."
Turns out my boxing parallel to pugilism was spot on!
In Marietta Messmer’s “Reviewers’ Despair: The Politics of Dickinson's Critical Reception during the 1890s” (2000), there’s this: “In this context of an ongoing ‘Realism War,’ it is hardly surprising that, when Howells’s enthusiastic promotion of Dickinson’s poetry reached London, some of the major British journals and magazines could not separate the reviewer from the reviewee.”
Lang wrote various reviews in reference to Dickinson’s works, and – this also from Messmer’s research – “five of Lang’s seven articles directly refer to and address ‘Mr. Howells’ throughout, while two of them quote only those poems which had appeared in Howells’s review, and, with one exception, even mirror Howells’s order of arrangement.”
And get this: The entire first paragraph of Lang’s first review featured Howells’s name in every sentence. Throughout the rest of the article, Howells’s name is mentioned another ten times.
In her book Friends Over the Ocean: Andrew Lang's Letters to J. B. Matthews, H. H. Furness, F. J. Child, William James, J. R. Lowell, 1881-1912, Demoor noted that Lang's appraisal of Emily Dickinson's poetry perhaps reached the nadir of his critical acumen for lines like this: "Miss D. has an occasional good line or two, but she is astonishingly silly and anarchic."
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