Biographical Dictionary of Literary Influences: The Nineteenth Century, 1800‐1914

Citation

Line, M.B. (2002), "Biographical Dictionary of Literary Influences: The Nineteenth Century, 1800‐1914", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 58 No. 3, pp. 321-323. https://doi.org/10.1108/jd.2002.58.3.321.2

This book is based on an interesting idea. It aims to record the literary (or at any rate reading) influences on people who themselves were influential and had achievements to their name. First, people “most responsible for the general cultural development of Europe, Britain and the British Empire, and the Americas between 1800 and 1914”; the dates are those between which people were active. From these, 271 individuals were selected by the editor, together with his associate editor, Derek W. Blakeley, and Tessa Powell, editorial assistant – and presumably also James S. Olson, advisory editor (all these names are given on the title‐page, and so it is right to mention them here). For each of these chosen ones a short biographical note is provided, accompanied by an account of their reading. They are predominantly writers, but also include inter alios political figures, composers, painters, philosophers and scientists.

Entries are on average two pages long, and signed. The contributors number over 130, and while the great majority are American there is a fair sprinkling of British and other Europeans (not to mention the odd exotic). There is no shortage of scholarship. A list of archives and a bibliography of relevant works are appended to most entries.

Any selection of persons for inclusion would have been open to criticism, but even when allowance is made for a US and UK bias and a deliberate effort to include women and “marginalised” (i.e. black) individuals, there seem to be an exceptional number of odd omissions and inclusions. John Greenleaf Whittier is remarked on by the editor himself as a strange inclusion (what influence did Whittier have?) in view of the omission of Baudelaire or Schiller, but stranger is the inclusion of such non‐household names as Horatio Alger, Kate Chopin, Lydia Child, Henslow Chamberlain (what about the British Chamberlains?), Douwes Dekker and Troeltsch. Beyond English‐speaking people, German gets a reasonable number of entries, but the rest of Europe is poorly treated. Among writers, there is no Blasco Ibáñez, Pérez Galdós or Unamuno (did no Spaniards have any influence beyond the boundaries of Spain?); no Mickiewicz; no Goncharov; and no Sholem Aleichem. Why do we have Chopin but not the much more influential Liszt, Schumann but not Beethoven, Klimt but not Schiele, Davy but not Faraday? (Scientists seem to do rather less well than theologians, whose influence was probably more powerful at the time but not in the longer term) – and what is William Cowper, who was certainly not active in the period – he died in 1800 – and who had little or no influence on anyone, doing here? Incidentally, the influences the people included had on “the general cultural development” are touched on in some entries, but are not mentioned in most.

Entries vary somewhat in length. Some of this is explained by the fact that the person concerned either did not read anything much or we do not know what they read, which rather defeats the purpose of the book. Jenny Lind is only one such, though she did have an effect on Hans Christian Andersen and Longfellow. (A Dictionary of Famous Non‐readers would be an interesting project.) Queen Victoria was not a great reader either; no book is mentioned in her entry. The entry of Henry James, on the other hand, who read a great deal, is very short. Shaw’s is rather longer, but he read so much that a very brief account of influences on him is all that is possible, and one learns very little. Nor does one learn much about the geologist Charles Lyell, who unsurprisingly read some previous works on geology. In fact, the number of entries that tell us very little is quite large.

That said, many entries are genuinely informative, and contain a lot more information on literary influences on individuals than any ordinary biographical dictionary would have. How important these are relative to other influences is another matter; in the case of all but writers of imaginative literature, the answer is probably very little. It is interesting to know what influential people read, but in most instances no more than interesting.

There are snippets of other interesting information in many entries. Jenny Lind “somehow … had been able to convince her public that a woman could be a performer and still retain her virtue”. George Washington Carver (whose favourite reading was the Bible) “developed over 300 products from peanuts”. David Livingstone was “once thrashed for refusing to read Wilberforce’s Practical Christianity” – a case of negative influence of books? (Perhaps he should have read it; all his missionary labours in Africa produced only one convert, who subsequently reneged.)

The Introduction makes several points: that there was a canon of essential literary works (the Bible, Shakespeare, etc.); that early reading experience is important; that the book “goes some way toward clarifying the relationship between reading and experience”; that it “demonstrates the wide variety of reading experience and the equally wide range of results”; and that “each reader responds uniquely to the written word and thus in unpredictable ways”. I question whether we need the book to persuade us of any of these points.

This volume may be useful as a specialised supplement to more general biographical dictionaries. It is, however, doubtful if many libraries will want to spend nearly £80 on it.