The idea that Auden should write a travel book occurred to him in the spring of 1936 after he had had lunch at Bryanston with Michael Yates, a former pupil from his days as a master at the Downs School. Yates reported that he was due to visit Iceland that summer as part of a small school trip, and, as he later recalled, Auden quickly became excited by the thought of the journey.1 His imagination had been stirred by thoughts of the North ever since his father had read the small boy Norse myths as bedtime stories. After some slightly tangled negotiations, Auden persuaded his publisher Faber to cover the costs of a trip, and he arranged with the teacher leading the excursion that they should meet while there: their experiences could form an element in the book that he had agreed to co-write with his friend Louis MacNeice. Auden took the boat from Hull sometime in mid-June, but as it happened MacNeice’s arrival was delayed until 9 August and the Bryanston party wasn’t scheduled to turn up till the 17, so Auden spent much of the time on his own, including the voyage out which took five or so tiresome days. He was not much taken with Reykjavik once disembarked: ‘Lutheran, drab and remote’ was his first impression.2 He spent a lonely week, with ‘nothing to do but soak in the only hotel with a licence; at ruinous expense’, not greatly diverted by the task of correcting the proofs of his next volume of poems which Faber had sent through. But then he set out to explore the island with a guide, taking an anthropological interest in local phenomena such as cheese making and herring gutting, and his spirits rose (Prose, I. 256, 258).

The Waste Land is full of different voices—as handsomely established by a long tradition of criticism, latterly crowned by the magnificent edition of Ricks and McCue (on which I draw extensively here). In the poem you can find Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Joyce—and, I am going to say, Blake. He is an incongruous participant in the chorus in various ways, not least in that while Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, and even Joyce continued to sound in Eliot's work, Blake seems to have faded away as Eliot moved on; but for a short time in the early 1920s, I am suggesting, Blake played an important role in the drama of Eliot's imagination and, in particular, helped him toward the distinctive, metropolitan poetry of The Waste Land.

Blake is Eliot's greatest precursor in writing about London as a Spectacle of imprisoning hell, one of the main organizing ideas of the poem.

Of course, Blake was not the only precursor in thinking about London in an infernal and claustrophobic way. Coleridge in “Frost at Midnight” movingly lamented growing up “pent ‘mid cloisters dim,” when he should have grown up in the countryside;3 but he was only taking up an expressive line of disapproval you find in many later eighteenth-century poets, such as Cowper: is not the country air better than

In “Peter Bell the Third,” Shelley characteristically put things the other way round, turning the simile on its head:

In October 1860 Dickens finally moved what remained of his family from Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury to Gad's Hill Place in Kent. He'd bought it four years earlier (for £1,750), steadily improved it, and it remained his home until he died there in 1870. On high ground between Rochester and Gravesend, it was the very spot, as his letters insist, where Falstaff ran away. For Dickens, though, the house had a more personal association: he'd admired it as a small boy living nearby, and had been told by his father that if he worked really hard he might one day be able to live there. Recounting this story earlier in the year in a piece written for his weekly, All the Year Round, Dickens had wisely declined to congratulate himself on the realization of his childish ambition. The household at Gad's Hill hardly matched the domestic idylls with which his novels so often conclude.

Dickens's wife wasn't part of it, for a start. Catherine had been pensioned off, following the messy separation of 1858, and was living near Regent's Park with their eldest son Charley. In a letter to Miss Burdett Coutts – a friend to both parties – Dickens unforgivingly vetoes the reconciliation she suggests: ‘That figure is out of my life for evermore (except to darken it), and my desire is, Never to see it again.’ This ban didn't apply to Charley, whose shaky City career Dickens tried to foster despite his disapproval of Charley's marriage to the daughter of his former publisher, with whom he'd now quarrelled. Dickens predicted disaster for the marriage – ‘It is sure not to answer’ – but according to one of the quietly corrective notes the Pilgrim Edition so usefully supplies, there is no evidence of unhappiness. The other child to marry at this time was Katie. Her choice of Wilkie Collins's younger brother was more acceptable, and Dickens presided genially enough over the pastoral festivities: ‘the people of the village strewed flowers in the churchyard, and erected triumphal arches, and fired guns.’ It was ‘a great success’, he conceded. ‘So far.’

The common assumption that there was no intelligent discussion of nineteenth- century English fiction before Henry James has recently begun to break down, and this collection of early reviews of George Eliot's novels will hasten the collapse of this complacent prejudice. It is true that Podsnappery, with its insistence on a novel never bringing a blush to the cheek of the young person, makes some showing in Lerner's and Holstrom's extracts: the Reverend J. C. Robertson is found lamenting, in 1860, that ‘the idea that fiction should contain something to soothe, to elevate or to purify seems to be extinct’. But it is also made extremely clear that, although much mid- Victorian reviewing was largely narrative and descriptive, and by modern standards very leisurely (one notice of Middlemarch ran to 12,000 words), the best of it was also remarkably acute.

George Eliot's artistic stature was immediately recognized. Adam Bede provoked favourable comparison with Thackeray, The Mill on the Floss with Jane Eyre. By 1866, The Times was ready to declare: ‘Hitherto Miss Austen has had the honour of first place among our lady novelists, but a greater than she has now arisen’. George Eliot's understanding of human nature was even put beside Shakespeare's. By the time the later novels appeared, the novelist's classic status was invariably conceded as beyond question, though this did not prevent one reviewer of Middlemarch from forcefully expressing his sense of its sharp modernity.

The best of these early critics not only praised George Eliot for her realism and her moral strenuousness in the sort of terms we should expect: they also anticipate some of the finer distinctions and reservations made in recent criticism. Although most discussion is about character and plot, two reviewers quoted here comment on the symbolism (one actually using the word) of the river in The Mill on the Floss, while another prepares the way for F. R. Leavis's strictures on the presentation of Maggie Tulliver by referring to her ‘picturesque piteousness’. The Saturday Review's 1872 piece on Middlemarch includes a lethal paragraph on the unsatisfactoriness of Will Ladislaw to which little since has been added. Many of its first readers felt oppressed by the pessimistic tone of Middlemarch, and one was sharp enough to see that ‘her melancholy scepticism is too apt to degenerate into scorn’ – a surely valid point that modern critics have too often brushed aside.

Contemporaneous Criticism

Dickens became a fact of English life very early in his career, and he has remained one ever since. The usual implications of the adjective ‘Dickensian’ indicate only a limited part of Dickens's effect on the popular imagination – an effect probably more radical than that made by any other English writer of comparable literary calibre. Some of his characters and some of the situations in his novels soon became, and have since remained, universally available references, a kind of shorthand of the common imagination. A mention of Scrooge, Pickwick or Micawber, or of the scene in which Oliver asks for more, is immediately intelligible to an extremely wide public. Our conceptions of Christmas, our images of towns and cities (London in particular), our understanding of the way children feel – these are the kinds of area in which Dickens's influence has been so profound that, paradoxically, it has become almost imperceptible, so completely has his way of seeing the world been assimilated into everyday life. This may partly be because, as Humphry House put it at the end of The Dickens World (1944), ‘He is still the only one of the great English novelists who is read at all widely among simple people.’

However, an awareness of Dickens is not dependent on having read him. Henry Crawford, in chapter 33 of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, says of Shakespeare that

Crawford's words can be applied with even more force and appropriateness to Dickens, whose stories and characters have been the subject of endless dramatization, imitation and adaptation. From the days when crude plagiarisms of The Pickwick Papers attempted to cash in on the success of Dickens's first novel, and when versions of Oliver Twist were playing at three London theatres simultaneously, to the present period when his books are filmed, televised, made the subjects of musicals and cannibalized in comic books, the products of his imagination have been constantly before the public.

Dickens's reputation has finally caught up with his popularity: that much, at least, can be deduced from the dozen or so books on him published during 1970. Twenty years ago, the assertion that Little Dorrit was the greatest English novel might have had a challenging air (the challenge offered, obviously enough, to Middlemarch); reiterated now, the claim appears not merely plausible but soothingly predictable. F. R. Leavis's protest that Little Dorrit's place on ‘any brief list of the great European novels’ has not been generally conceded, is hardly borne out by a course of centenary criticism. John Lucas, for instance, thinks it ‘far and away the greatest novel in the language’; H. M. Daleski feels that, although not in the Our Mutual Friend class, Little Dorrit is still one of four novels constituting ‘the supreme achievements of the English novel of the nineteenth century’. In fact, whatever a critic's individual preferences, his analysis of Dickens's mature work – often, of most of his work – is now almost bound to be deeply respectful, even if it is not very likely to earn Dr Leavis's respect.

It was not always so, as Philip Collins's Critical Heritage volume reminds us; in the early days Little Dorrit ‘became a by- word for the bad Dickens’. His selection from the original reviews substantiates what we have known in outline since Dickens's reputation was traced by George H. Ford: the latter novels were disliked by most of the better critics. The Times obituary was clear that Dickens's masterpiece would be found in ‘the first ten or twelve years of his literary life’. Henry James's withering notice of Our Mutual Friend has been reprinted often enough, but it is useful to have easily available the hostile but intelligent critiques of Mrs Oliphant, in Blackwood's, and Fitzjames Stephen, in the Saturday Review.

Early periodical criticism of Dickens was often prolix in the Victorian way, and Professor Collins has rightly not hesitated to subedit drastically. In some cases, such as R. H. Horne's New Spirit of the Age essay of 1844, he has pruned too severely; he has lopped, for instance, Horne's extended comparison of Hogarth and Dickens.

A Reading of ‘Mansfield Park’ has the subtitle An Essay in Critical Synthesis and, for a few alarming moments, it looks as if its career is going to include all the talents in an attempt to achieve ‘an approximation to a total reading’. Avrom Fleishman is an advocate of ‘perspectival flexibility’: the critic must be ready to accept different ways of approach to the individual work. Apart from the fact that many approaches are likely to prove mutually exclusive, a ‘total reading’ of a novel is hardly desirable even if it were possible, since it would simply exhaust the work. Although it may be virtuous to be tolerant of the views of others, the implications of what is here called ‘critical pluralism’ leads irresistibly to the abdication of judgement.

When Mr Fleishman gets down to it, his reading of Mansfield Park – for all its announced hospitality – turns out to be as argumentative as most people's and is the more interesting for that. His most absorbing chapter is on the relation of Mansfield Park to its social background. His main topics here include the religious values of the gentry about whom Jane Austen was writing: the contemporary political significance of Kotzebue's Lovers’ Vows, the play rehearsed at Mansfield during Sir Thomas Bertram's absence; and the economic pressures indicated by Sir Thomas's visit to Antigua. Such questions are well worth pursuit, but Mr Fleishman is sometimes too hasty in assuming that because the situations in Mansfield Park reflect the state of a certain class at a certain period it is also its author's intention to offer a critique of that class at that time.

The references to her novels in Jane Austen's letters are famous because they are so few, and her casual announcement that the subject of Mansfield Park was to be ordination has provoked much baffled comment: Mr Fleishman points to Sir Thomas Bertram's apparent inconsistency in criticizing absentee clergymen and yet allowing Edmund, at the end of the novel, to retain the parish of Thornton Lacey when he moves back to the parsonage at Mansfield. This is construed as an animadversion on the gentry's attitude to their spiritual responsibilities.

Hardly any of the original likenesses of Dickens – whether portraits or photographs – give much idea of that vivacity of eye which struck his contemporaries so forcibly. Any page of his works, however, will almost certainly provide examples of the extraordinary energy with which he saw things. It is not only a question of acute observation of course, but also of masterful appropriation; Dickens feels he has to recreate as well as record. In Dickens the Designer Juliet McMaster aims to show how and why Dickens makes appearances tell, so that vision becomes subsumed by ‘vision’.

The first part of the book is given over to examples of Dickens's presentation of such details as heads, faces, eyes, bodies, gestures and his use of space and light. What Professor McMaster stresses is Dickens's use of physical appearance to define moral essence – Pickwick's fatness indicates his benevolence, Uriah Heep's serpentine writhings a sinister sexuality and so on. But it hardly seems necessary to underline the mere fact of this aspect of Dickens: he was always an artist of the obvious as well as of the astonishing. What is inimitable is surely the combination of a primary and even primitive physical delineation of a character's moral quality with the extreme and increasing verbal virtuosity of the novelist's elaboration of appearance. McMaster tends to play down the extent to which descriptions in Dickens become free- falling stunts of metaphor and fantasy and, as such, develop a kind of self- delighting self- sufficiency. Moreover, the oceanic abundance of physical detail in Dickens makes any brief trawl such as is offered here look inadequately representative.

In the second part of Dickens the Designer McMaster takes six of the novels and attempts to show how in each of them certain visual motifs are utilized to give us a sense both of the book's overall composition and of its essential meaning. She rightly emphasizes Dickens's wish to ‘make you see’ (in Conrad's famous phrase) but leaves rather to one side the complicated question of how much of our perception of Dickens we owe to his illustrators, especially Phiz. McMaster proposes some ambitious analogies between Dickens's practice and that of painters like Turner, Manet and the Impressionists, and suggests that the use of fog in Bleak House resembles Turner's exploitation of atmospherics.

This is a gathering of Stephen Wall's writings about the great nineteenth- century novelists to which he devoted so much of his generous critical intelligence. It is, naturally, dominated by Wall's major study, Trollope and Character, published in 1988. Alongside that, I have put his account of Trollope as a letter writer; the historical commentary he wrote for his invaluable Penguin anthology of Dickens criticism; and a number of other pieces, mostly about Dickens, which originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books and Essays in Criticism, the journal he edited from 1973 until his death in 2010. Among other pieces first to appear in Essays in Criticism was an important essay about the editing of English novels – the implications of which range far beyond Victorian literature – which it also seemed proper to include. The resulting book by no means constitutes a complete collection of Stephen Wall's criticism: he was a prolific reviewer of new fiction for the Observer, and many of his notices have a lasting value; his essay on Iris Murdoch's The Bell (Essays in Criticism, 1963) remains one of the best accounts of that novel; and the piece he wrote about his former pupil Ian Hamilton (‘Ian Hamilton and the Poet's Life’, Essays in Criticism, 2002) memorably captures the achievement of a great man of letters. This volume cannot even pretend to include all his criticism of nineteenthcentury subjects. I have not included the introduction to Can You Forgive Her?, written for his Penguin edition (1974), which was largely reworked in Trollope and Character, as were the essays ‘Trollope, Balzac, and the Reappearing Character’ (Essays in Criticism, 1975) and ‘Trollope, Satire, and The Way We Live Now’ (Essays in Criticism, 1987). The excellent introduction to Little Dorrit, which appears in the edition he co- edited for Penguin with Helen Small (2003), remains readily available. Finally, I reluctantly accepted that space did not allow me to print some of Stephen Wall's shorter fiction, much of which shows the distinct impress of the Victorian literature in which he was so expert.

Recent criticism of Victorian fiction is often so abstract in tone and so desiccating in tendency that Barbara Hardy's decision to study the ways in which it expresses and arouses feeling seems almost novel. It would hardly have surprised Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Thackeray or George Eliot – all intensely emotional people who as writers aimed in their different styles to produce strong responses in their readers. They let them see that they are doing so, however, and this gives their texts that reflexive element now thought so desirable. Even if some Victorian sentiments may have come to seem dated or excessive, this self- conscious ingredient in the affective mix can be discussed in a modern context and may comfort those who might grow restive at Professor Hardy's policy of taking the emotional vocabulary of her chosen novelists too much at their own valuation.

That vocabulary is often more remote than present- day critical packaging leads us to suppose. In an excellent account of the way in which Charlotte Brontë thrives artistically on moral extremes which are nevertheless made to meet in the resolution which her strong but agitated protagonists desire and ultimately attain, Barbara Hardy shows how selfanalysis turns to allegory to articulate the interior drama. Jane Eyre's and Lucy Snowe's internal debates demonstrate how instinctively they see their self- divisions in terms of conflict between personifications such as Feeling, Reason, Conscience, Imagination and so on. The deployment of such traditional and now perhaps archaic figures is made telling not only because the abstractions themselves are given an intense physical life as they struggle for control, but because their activities are shown to coexist with the ordinary actions of life – having breakfast, writing letters, going for a walk. The deep structures of Charlotte Brontë's novels have been given a good deal of attention lately – particularly by feminist critics, for obvious reasons. Hardy's brief but highly illuminating analysis of the actual language in which the heroines struggle to reconcile themselves to or master their fate redirects us to the importance of what lies on the novels’ surface. She reminds us how important it is to attend to the line- by- line conduct of the narrative, and has none of the barely suppressed impatience with what the Victorians took to be the true voice of feeling which is sometimes found.

Readers of Dombey and Son will remember this passage, from chapter 6, which describes the effects of railway development on Staggs's Gardens with all Dickens's characteristic relish for irrationality and metamorphosis:

Would Dickens's first readers have recognized what he was talking about? Presumably so: as Humphry House pointed out long ago, the publication of Dombey coincided with the peak years of railway building, and many of those who bought the monthly numbers as they appeared between 1846 and 1848 were no doubt as used to such sights as we are to the remodellings of the landscape caused by motorway construction.

The first editor of Trollope's letters, Bradford A. Booth, thought that ‘no good purpose would be served by printing in full all the letters and notes that have been collected’ and, in his 1951 edition, he often resorted to précis. N. John Hall, whose excellent new collection will clearly supersede Booth's, adopts the now standard policy of printing verbatim absolutely everything that has survived, however trivial. There are not enough remaining letters by Trollope for this edition to rival in bulk those of his fellow novelists now in progress, such as Hardy (a projected seven volumes) and Dickens (whose correspondence in the Pilgrim Edition seems likely to stretch as far as thought can reach). Nevertheless, Professor Hall gives us twice as many letters as Booth did as well as the complete texts of those that Booth summarized, and anyone who cares about Trollope is bound to be grateful. His edition necessarily builds on his predecessor's and, indeed, his annotation – although more extensive than Booth's – often echoes as well as amplifies it. Some of the newly added letters are certainly of the kind that Booth would have regarded as not worth printing – Trollope's one- word reply (‘Delighted’) to an invitation in 1873, for instance – but taken together they at least help to fill out our picture of Trollope's daily life. They don't, however, tell us anything substantially new about it – or about the inner emotional and imaginative world of the man who combined outspokenness and reticence in so curious a way.

The great gap in our knowledge of Trollope is the absence of any detailed information about his early years in London as a depressed, insubordinate and barely competent clerk in the General Post Office. We have largely to rely on what he himself tells us in the Autobiography, with its characteristic but baffling mixture of apparent candour and laconic evasiveness. Booth was only able to list nine letters before 1847, by which time Trollope was already in his thirties, had made good in Ireland, had married and had begun to publish novels. Apart from printing a letter of Anthony's mother's about his strange serious illness in 1840, Hall is only able to supplement this meagre gathering significantly by a letter Trollope wrote in 1838 (when he was 23) to a Miss Dancers. The tone is owlishly flirtatious.

Next June Charles Dickens will have been dead for a hundred years, and we can expect that the anniversary will not go unnoticed by the publishers. But then most recent years have landed a formidable haul of books and articles about Dickens, and the volumes under review demonstrate the variable quality of this ever- increasing catch.

With Dickens, as with many other nineteenth- century writers, what is currently needed is fewer critical studies and more scholarly materials. The Clarendon edition of his novels and the Pilgrim edition of his letters are under way, but there is certainly room for such enterprises as Professor Harry Stone's edition of Dickens's uncollected writings from Household Words. In fact, the 78 extracts from the weekly periodical that Dickens ran from 1850 to 1859 are mostly only partly by him, but it is useful to have them all the same.

As has long been known, and as Professor Stone reminds us, Dickens was an intensely active and authoritarian editor. ‘He shaped each issue’ of Household Words, and he revised its contents so extensively that there is often no way of telling which words are his, except by what Mr Stone justly calls the compelling testimony of style. But those articles in which Dickens's share was substantial were recorded as being partly by him in the contributors’ book of Household Words (now at Princeton), and it is mostly these items – never included by Dickens in editions of his works – which Mr Stone has now collected.

In the sometimes unnecessarily repetitive headnotes, the editor indicates, on the basis of evidence or conjecture, which bits of each piece are by Dickens. The reader sometimes comes across passages in which the Dickensian note is so unmistakeable that he hardly needs editorial confirmation:

There are, too, some more extended passages of Dickens's writing at its most dazzling: the description of the posting of newspapers at St Martin's- le- Grand is particularly remarkable.