Richard Holt Hutton: a retrospective.

Fulton, Richard D.

In the second half of the nineteenth century Richard Holt Hutton was widely regarded as one of the best minds and one of the most accomplished essayists of his generation. He wrote thousands of short articles while co-editing the Spectator for almost forty years, examining such diverse topics as non-conformist theology, parliamentary practices, Irish home rule, zoology, theater, literary criticism, and cultural concerns of the day. Although he has been ignored for the last several decades, and was in fact rarely referred to for much of the twentieth century (except, perhaps, as a sterling example of the shortcomings of much of Victorian prose), his arguments about the responsibilities of the literary critic and the nature of literary criticism make him an important source for understanding Victorian critical arguments. His opinions of the great voices of the Victorian period--Tennyson, Browning, Eliot, Hardy, Mrs. Oliphant and others--communicate to us over a century since the nature of their contemporary reception. Additionally, his essays on the ephemera of his time deepen and enrich our understanding of the Victorians and their world, making him a resource that should be embraced by any serious Victorian scholar.

**********

Richard Holt Hutton (1826-1897) was born into an old non-comformist family: his father Joseph was the Unitarian minister of Mill Hill Chapel in Leeds, and later of Carter Hill Chapel in London. His grandfather had also been a Unitarian minister, in Dublin, and the family's expectation was that Richard would follow the family trade. He clearly intended to do so; he entered University College, London, in 1841, a non-conformist-founded institution, and received his BA in 1845, earning a distinction in mathematics and a medal in philosophy. For the next two years he studied theology at the University of Bonn and later at Heidelberg. He returned to England in 1847 and enrolled at Manchester New College with the goal of fulfilling the family's expectations in a Unitarian pulpit. He did not finish his studies at Manchester New College, however; he was drawn back to study in Germany with the noted liberal Unitarian thinker James Martineau, and very likely the combination of his German education and his connection with Martineau conspired to earn him the label of "progressive elitist" and make him virtually unemployable in most Unitarian churches. Disappointed, he took an academic post as Assistant Principal to Arthur Hugh Clough at University Hall, a Unitarian Center associated with University College.

Hutton stayed at University Hall until 1852 when a serious illness forced him to resign. But by that time he had already decided that his life's work would be writing and editing. He began in his new profession by writing mainly theological articles for Unitarian magazines, first for the quarterly Prospective Review (his first publication was in 1847), and later for the weekly Inquirer, where he eventually joined an editorial staff that included eminent Unitarians Walter Bagehot, Timothy Ostler, John Sandford, and William Roscoe. In 1851 he married Roscoe's sister Anne. The following year he and Anne moved to the West Indies to find a healthier climate; unfortunately, they arrived in the middle of a yellow fever epidemic, and both of them immediately fell ill. When Hutton came out of his coma, he was told his wife had died. As soon as he was strong enough to travel he returned to London and resumed his duties with the Inquirer; that job lasted less than two years, when a group of orthodox Unitarian ministers, horrified by Hutton's unorthodox views, demanded his removal. By this time, however, Hutton was establishing a reputation as a sound editor and a skillful writer. He helped edit the Prospective Review, and, as the Prospective declined (through no fault of Hutton's) moved on to the newly founded National Review, which he co-edited with Bagehot and quickly turned into a paying concern. He further strengthened his literary and editorial reputation by taking the post of literary editor of the Economist in 1857, his first position with a non-Unitarian publication.

While Hutton was making his reputation among the Unitarian intelligentsia, Robert Rintoul's Spectator, carefully and overtly independent in matters religious and political, was struggling. Rintoul had sold the Spectator in 1859 to a group of investors that included a member of the American legation in London, a group of investors whose strong Southern sympathies caused a slow decline in sales. The new publishers had hired Leigh Hunt's son Thornton as editor, and then later George Hooper, but the weekly hemorrhaged money and by 1861 the investors unloaded it on Meredith Townsend, who had recently returned to England from the East where he had run the Friend of India. Townsend was a friend of Bagehot--who was, as we have seen, a friend of Hutton. Bagehot introduced Townsend to Hutton; the two sparked immediately, and Townsend asked Hutton to join him as joint proprietor and joint editor. (1) Hutton became intimately identified with the Spectator as editor and essayist, and stayed with it until he died in 1897. Thus, his career as an essayist spanned exactly fifty years, from "The State of Protestantism in Germany" in the May 1847 Prospective, to "The Great Colonial Experiment" in the 26 June 1897 issue of the Spectator, and in between he published hundreds of essays in at least twenty periodicals (for a complete list, see Tener, "Writings"). (2)

Hutton's reputation in his own time was as a periodicals essayist, but he cemented his reputation among serious readers by publishing a number of volumes on a wide range of subjects, starting with Poems and Essays by the Late William Caldwell Roscoe in 1860, which he edited, and including Studies in Parliament (1866), a collection of Pall Mall Gazette essays; Essays Theological and Literary (1871 and reprinted numerous times with occasional additions), which included reprints of items previously published in a variety of periodicals starting in 1849; Holiday Rambles in Ordinary Places (1877), a collection of travel pieces from the Spectator; several edited volumes of Bagehot's essays; a critical monograph of Sir Walter Scott (1878); Essays on Some of the Modern Guides of English Thought in Matters of Faith (1887), a collection of periodical essays on Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Thomas Carlyle, Cardinal Newman, and F.D. Maurice; a monograph on Cardinal Newman (1891); and Criticisms on Contemporary Thought and Thinkers (1891), a collection of seventy-seven Spectator articles. Along the way, Essays Theological and Literary was reprinted by various publishers in various countries, in various guises under various titles, with the addition or deletion of one or two essays. After his death, his niece Elizabeth Mary Roscoe edited Aspects of Religious and Scientific Thought (1899), essays originally published in the Spectator, and Brief Literary Criticisms (1906), also mainly from the Spectator.

Among his contemporaries, especially those from around mid-century, Hutton's reputation was as a theological thinker who wrestled with the tenets of his received denomination of Unitarianism, eventually joined the Church of England, and later showed great sympathy for Cardinal Newman and Catholicism. His later contemporaries thought of him more as a literary critic, although obviously they read and admired his other essays as well. Indeed, when he joined Townsend at the Spectator the common belief was that Hutton took care of the literary side of the paper, while Townsend wrote the political side. Of course, since none of the essays were signed that view was sheer speculation, but in fact as Tener demonstrated Hutton did write most of the literary essays, as well as pieces on science, travel, contemporary issues, and politics.

Thomas Hay Sweet (T.H.S.) Escott, Hutton's contemporary, editor of the Fortnightly Review and author of Masters of English Journalism (1911), said that nineteenth-century Oxford undergraduates were "admonished carefully to examine and endeavour themselves to reproduce the political analysis, the closely-linked chains of argument that were to be found in each successive number of the Spectator and, in the English press, nowhere else" (239). Yet within a few years Hutton became first an example of everything that was wrong with the Victorians, and then he just quietly faded from view. In 1925 Virginia Woolf said his essays evinced "a voice which is as a plague of locusts the voice of a man stumbling drowsily among loose words, clutching aimlessly at vague ideas" (211). Three years later, in his history of the Spectator, William Beach Thomas said "Hutton's style is, from the aesthetic point of view, deplorable, and his lengthy, overwhelming sentences have forced protests from many exhausted readers" (70). In recent years, Robert Tener, Harold Orel, and Malcolm Woodfield have tried to revive interest in Hutton: Tener on his theater criticism (A Spectator of Theater), Woodfield on theology and literature, especially where the two intersect (R.H. Hutton: Critic and Theologian), and Orel on literature (Victorian Literary Critics). These three, and a few others who cite him in passing, are more interested in his ideas than his ability as a writer; thus, the concerns about sentences that "went tottering on, bent double under their burden of thought" (Thomas 70) no longer seemed to signify for them, at least.

The sheer quantity of Hutton's output is hard to get one's arms around. In addition to the books, Tener has identified over 3,600 pieces in the Spectator alone, and another ninety-one articles and essays in nineteen other periodicals, including such old standards as Macmillan's, the Fortnightly, and the Nineteenth Century. In the Spectator's heyday as an important journal of opinion, he wrote three, four, or five articles for each weekly issue. While Hutton is most often thought of as primarily a critic and theologian, his interests ranged widely, encompassing literature and the arts in general, current issues, politics, religion, and occasional observations about ideas or events that struck his fancy. In the month of February 1881, for example, he hit on each of those subject areas in a total of thirteen articles comprising a total of almost thirteen pages, which included a carefully reasoned, full-page political essay examining which of the rules giving the Speaker extraordinary, almost dictatorial, powers to manage debate and voting were called for, and which might be dangerous ("The Speaker's New Rules," February 12). He wrote another full-page article examining the rights and wrongs of the current Home Rule Debate, giving full consideration to the understandable Irish outrage over centuries of "intolerant insolence" on the part of the English in Ireland, yet arguing for continuation of the United Kingdom with Ireland as a full participant ("England and Ireland," February 5). In the same issue, he wrote a full-page essay reviewing Henry James's Washington Square; in his examination of Henry James's art (which, by the way, he recognizes as technically brilliant but hopelessly empty) he indicated that he had read James beyond merely the collection under review by referring to examples of other of James's works. On February 26 he wrote just over a page on theology, arguing, in his essay on "Sacerdotalism" against an attempt to expel Sacerdotal thinking from the Established church by applying to the history of the Church, accepted practices, theological and philosophical arguments, and unanticipated consequences. And finally, in "Ordinariness" (February 19) he speculated on the importance of being able to understand greatness in the context of the ordinary, as Shakespeare, Walter Scott, George Eliot, and a variety of successful statesmen have done. He managed this prodigious output while at the same time fulfilling his responsibilities as co-editor.

Hutton was a political Liberal, and often so identified himself in political articles. But he tried to be as fair and balanced as possible in his discussion of issues of great political significance, and was certainly capable of criticizing his own party as well as the positions taken by Conservatives and Irish Nationalists. However, like his theological and occasional essays, his political essays are somewhat dated and not of much interest to a casual twenty-first century reader. And yes, those essays too suffer from his wandering expressions. Here he is on "The Anarchy in the Commons" in the issue for 22 March 1884: To whom the fault is to be ascribed, we will not say; when a great party like the Conservative Party openly commits itself to so unconstitutional a course as obstruction on a subject which the Commons have debated a score of nights at least this Session, and when it attempts to snatch a victory by a scratch combination with two parliamentary sections more utterly opposed to the constitutional policy which Conservatives profess to represent than any others to be found in the Commons, we Liberals may feel as angry as Sir William Harcourt, and as heartily disposed to denominate the transaction as he denominated it; but we may be sure of this,--that there must have been grave shortcomings, on both sides of the house, before either side would sink to so low a point, and attempt to drag the house to so low a point, as the sitting of Saturday last indicated. (369)

Similarly, those essays on incidental subjects, like the essay on the Ordinary cited above, or the essay on "Jelly-fish Opinion" in the 1 March 1884 issue, are little more than expressions of his own opinions on random topics--albeit well-argued, knowledgeable attitudes. But even in these examinations of not-so-serious topics he is so serious, and so much a captive of his own convoluted syntax, that he is not so much a joy to read as a challenge. Readers finish the essay and are satisfied that they have indeed finished something worth doing, else why feel more satisfaction in the completion than joy in the doing? As he is laying out his argument in "Jelly-Fish Opinion," for example, he says: But opinion which has not passed this test [e.g., has not "surmounted courageous opposition"], which has only been swelled by the formal and nominal adhesion of a number of mere neutrals, or has been made to appear more potent than it is by the precipitate abdication of their objections by those who are at heart opposed to it, is not sound, even though it be widely enough accepted to be called Public Opinion, and it is as likely as not that the public who profess it will one day be seized with some panic which will show how weak and worthless it is. (277)

That's not a bad sentence, but it wanders around from tests to neutrals, then to people who apparently aren't neutrals, then to Public Opinion where it might have stopped. But no, Hutton chose to pursue Public Opinion to a public prone to panics and weaknesses before finishing with this sentence. But at least that one long, tangled skein of words allowed him to launch into his main (and clearly argued) thesis, that it behooves the citizens of a democracy to express and defend themselves, and not allow perceived Public Opinion to sway their own publically stated opinion. (3)

Much of Hutton's contemporary reputation was grounded on his carefully argued papers on theology, written at about the time Renan's Life of Jesus caused such an uproar. Hutton had studied in Germany and was steeped in the intricacies of the theological controversies of the mid-nineteenth century that occupied the lives of a regiment of writers. However, except for a few theological historians and the odd cultural historian focusing on the effect of such debates today, those carefully argued papers of Hutton's seem a little quaint and, at times, exceedingly dense. I'm guessing that it was either the theological papers, or something similar that provoked William Beach Thomas's comment about protests from exhausted readers. For example, here is Hutton on Sacerdotalism:

But this is not the place to go into a discussion on the meaning and limits of sacerdotalism; what we desire here to discuss is the true limit in modern times to the principle of an Established Church, and whether it is or is not possible to discriminate a tenable from an untenable Establishment on Sir Edward Strachey's ground. We believe it to be a wholly untenable ground, though we would go with him so far as this:--We should say cordially that so far as it is a question whether or not an Establishment ought to be retained or done away with, every one who believes Sacerdotalism to be a mischief, must regard it as pro tanto an argument against the Establishment, if a steady current of Sacerdotalism is believed to be gaining strength in the National Church, and is receiving aid and fresh resources from the admitted inheritance of the whole nation. (26 February 1881, 274)

For a twenty-first century reader, what is most interesting about Hutton as an essayist is his massive output of literary commentary. He was a critic in the nineteenth-century sense that he wrote about literature, passed judgment on it, and invited his readers to enjoy what he enjoyed for the reasons he enjoyed it. But his criticism was firmly rooted in his own standards, which he expressed in graceful generalizations about "vivid and graphic thinkers" and "invented angularities of style." He wrote extensively on novels, somewhat unusual for serious critics of the day, as well as on poetry and drama. In his approach to all of these genres he practiced a sort of popular approach to criticism, an approach that, rather than emphasizing how the work under consideration fell short of the classic model of correctness, focused on analyzing the good and not-so-good elements in the work, praising when possible the good parts and gently pointing out the deficiencies. He outlined what he considered the ideal approach of the ideal newspaper critic in one of his early Spectator essays on "Mr. Grote on the Abuses of Newspaper Criticism." In it, he argued that criticism has two tasks: the first is to recognize "works of power and genius [...] to be accessible to thoughts, or aims, or beauties which it can appreciate but could not have created; and to delineate them for those who might not otherwise have time or culture to find them out." So, the first task is what critics have assumed to be their only task: to recognize really good literature and tell the reader why it is good (and by the way, to be open to seeing beauties in works that may not quite conform to the critics' received judgment). The second and equally important task is to "rectify the exclusiveness and frequently one-sidedness of genius by the broader sense of ordinary judgment." He concludes that it is the critic's responsibility to carefully analyze works under review and "to appreciate fairly the ephemeral productions of a busy generation." Yes, says Hutton, the critic must always be aware of works of real genius but must be equally aware that such works may come along once a year, if at that. The public look to the newspaper critic to tell them "what they shall read or neglect," and if the critic trashes everything under his consideration because it does not measure up completely to his classic standards, then he is not helping guide the tastes of his readers and thus has abdicated his responsibility to them. "Unless he can enter into the wants of his generation," said Hutton, "he has no business to pretend to direct its thoughts. He becomes really a mischief instead of a benefit if he puts his heel scornfully on all that is less artistic than his own tastes." However, Hutton was quick to add, this is not to say that the newspaper critic should not call out rubbish for what it is. "If a man, after hunting for the true aim and purpose of a work, finds none of any worthy kind, if he can detect no new store of information, no single gleam of well-directed purpose, no glimpse of any element that may serve anyone except the seller of the commodity in question, it is right to say so ..." (16-17).

It is instructive to read Hutton's reviews of contemporary fiction in light of this critical stance. Hutton reviewed several hundred novels over his thirty-six years at the Spectator, and dozens more in his previous life as editor of the Economist. He reviewed the works of novelists from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot through Charlotte Yonge and Henry Kingsley to the likes of Anna Lisle and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. With the major and almost-major authors he tends to concern himself with their treatment of Big Ideas: morality of the author's world view, perhaps, or the reality of characterization. He perceived the serious novel as being successful in "mediating between the inflexible objectivity of dogmatic Christianity and the aestheticism of subjective secular ethics," and thus, worthy of serious consideration (Woodfield 154). In these works he assumes that the authors have achieved technical mastery: believable plots, human characters with real emotions, appropriately motivated actions, and competent writing. Thus, rather than discuss those elements in any kind of detail, he passes by them and gets right into the arguments of the books, in which he revels. With the minor authors he followed his own cardinal rule outlined above: to appreciate fairly the ephemeral productions of a busy generation.

Hutton subscribed to a set of critical strictures not much different from most of the critics of his day. The rules were a little slippery, and often obviously sprang from the "everyone knows" school of criticism: "everyone knows" what truth is, what beauty is, what defines pathos and why it is necessary in places. It is expected that characters will not be grotesque, or if grotesque, not too grotesque and even then only for a reason. Sympathetic characters must be moral. Sympathetic women characters must not hold strong opinions that counter current received wisdom. Passions and affections of characters must be the passions and affections of real people, defined by Hutton as people with whom ordinary Englishmen are familiar. To be taken seriously, characters must not deviate far from the norm of current English society. Characters must be drawn with strength, and must act in accordance with how they are drawn; no weakly drawn characters need apply. If politics should invade the text, the writer better fully understand his or her political position and if it should deviate from the middle of the road of English politics (e.g., Hutton's politics) the deviation should be shown as a deviation, not as a correct path. An appropriate sense of humor is essential to the success of any novel, but of course the appropriateness of the sense of humor is the critic's to define. Plots must be probable. The subject must be amenable to polite society. And of course, writers must have an appreciation of truth and beauty, true beauty, and presumably true truth.

For example: In his review of "Mr. Dutton Cook's New Stories" Hutton praises Dutton Cook for combining his humor "with a pathos that now and again quite surprises us by its reticence and power." Hutton also praises Cook for designing a clever plot that did not defy reality, and for moving beyond mere grotesque elements and weaving them in with the passions and affections of real men. For Hutton, Cook's strength, beyond his comic ability, is to "so blend realism and pathos as to touch powerfully the reader's imagination and heart." His weaknesses? He is comic and entertaining, but a little farcical and extravagant. Hutton concludes that Cook should now write something more elaborate instead of writing (admittedly skillful) studies of the grotesque side of life. Thus, in this serious examination of a rather ordinary little volume Hutton made certain that he found the kind of, if not exemplary, at least somewhat admirable qualities that his readers would see and appreciate. He seriously described some tangible strengths of the book, and touched on a rather abstract weakness concerning the nature of the comic without, unfortunately, describing the offending "farcical and extravagant" passages and what makes them extravagant. And he concluded his review with a positive recommendation that Cook write something more elaborate where he could show off his comic abilities rather than simply writing narrow studies of the grotesque side of life. What this review reveals about Hutton the essayist and Hutton the critic is that in one of these short essays he can write gracefully and critique a rather ordinary offering seriously enough to give his reader a reasonable enough idea of the book to make a judgment as to whether or not he should read it--which is precisely what Hutton claimed his job to be. This review, like so many of his reviews of the ephemeral fiction of the day, summarizes the work, offers a few well-chosen quotes, applies some abstract but probably widely understood critical standards, and concludes on a positive note. It is not great criticism, but it makes enjoyable reading and in fact brings alive a forgotten nineteenth-century writer.

For literary scholars Hutton's importance lies in his extensive output on the most important writers of the nineteenth century. While this essay is not intended to comprise a bibliography of his writing on major figures, it is important to note that he wrote critical essays on Hawthorne, Wordsworth, Shelley, Browning, Clough, Henry James, Eliot, Hardy, Meredith, Dickens, Poe, Tennyson, Oscar Wilde, Longfellow, Stevenson, and Henley, among others. He admired Hardy's ability to create characters, although he did not always like the characters Hardy created. His one concern with Hardy seemed to be that the novelist was too easily drawn into the trendy pessimism of the era. He considered Treasure Island to be the finest boys' book ever written, and said that, with Kidnapped, Stevenson was developing into a complete novelist. Meredith he deemed filled with equal parts great talents and great faults. Trollope is a wonderful creator of characters--"One would know all of his characters if one met them in actual life," he says, "but then he seldom or never picks out a character who is not perfectly easy to draw" (Hutton, "George Eliot's" 10). Mrs. Humphry Ward creates, in Robert Elsmere, a protagonist whose "mental and moral experience is vividly realized," but whose character is not. And besides, Robert Elsmere's theological struggles are not clearly delineated, and Hutton manages to isolate Ward's main concerns and destroy them through his own theological arguments. It is a remarkable book, concedes Hutton, but "by no means a very remarkable novel" (Hutton, "Robert Elsmere" 15).

The novelist Hutton most admired was George Eliot, whom he lumped together with Tennyson in an 1871 review of Middlemarch and Idylls of the King (both still appearing in parts) as "indisputably the greatest literary artists of our own day" (Hutton, "Idealism" 10). He wrote extensively on Eliot, devoting at least nineteen essays to reviews of her novels or general appreciations of her qualities as a writer. In the 2 December 1871 review of Middlemarch, Hutton being Hutton found her most outstanding quality her belief "in a moral ideal far above our actual life, from which it ought to take its shape and colour," although, he says, she appears to believe that "that this ideal exists only in the mind of man." His 1872 review of Middlemarch adds to his praise that the novel "bids more than fair to be one of the great books of the world," although again, Hutton being Hutton, "there are, as we have often noted, tones and undertones in it that are not to our liking [...] but no writer who aims as high as George Eliot can be free from visible defects" ("George Eliot's" 10). Her defects lie mostly in her moral or theological arguments; her creation of characters is without equal. In April, June, July, and September of 1876 he published four essays on Daniel Deronda, also while it was still in serialization, expressing fear that her power was failing in April, critiquing Daniel's character in June, mourning the lack of fruitful wisdom in Eliot's incidental remarks in July, and praising the overall power of the novel in September. Through all of the Eliot commentaries Hutton focused on her unique ability to create powerful, believable characters tom by doubts and contradictory beliefs; her meticulously constructed plots; and the emotional effect of her characters' actions on her readers. Through her entire literary life she remained, in his judgment, the greatest novelist of the nineteenth century.

Among the poets, he admired Swinburne's ability to control the "lawless and unchastened character of his genius" through the yoke of classic Greek form (Atalanta in Calydon, Erechtheus) (Hutton, "Mr. Swinburne's" 15). Unfortunately, too often Swinburne let the brilliance of his words get in the way of the meaning of his verses. Henley he called "a genuine poet, although probably not more than a minor poet" (Hutton, "Mr. Henley's" 20). Longfellow was "not a very great or original poet," but one who could embody in a "simple and graceful form the gentleness and loveliness which are partially visible to most men's eyes" (Hutton, "Longfellow" 10). Matthew Arnold was one of the great poets of the age, who possessed "the happy art of interweaving delicate fancies with thoughts and emotions." Clough would one day be ranked with Arnold because of his ability to "look at the questions of the day from the thinker's point of view, and not from the people's point of view" (Hutton, "Unpopularity" II). Browning and Tennyson he considered to be the two greatest imaginative poets of the nineteenth century. In a 21 December 1889 essay on "Browning and Tennyson" he compared and contrasted the two, concluding that Tennyson was by far the more graceful, polished, finished poet of the two, while Browning's strengths lay in his studied roughness and lack of polish, but both succeeded because of their "Christian convictions" and because they were "eager students of the philosophy of faith" (11). In his dozen or so essays on Tennyson, and his seven on Browning, and in his many essays on faith and doubt in which both poets play a major role, he emphasizes and reemphasizes that their greatness is founded not only on their ability to craft words, but to grapple with the primary contemporary issues of idealism, faith, doubt, and the essence of true realism.

Hutton has virtually dropped out of sight in recent years. A survey of various Victorian bibliographies turns up nothing on Hutton since 1998, and in fact very little on his Spectator--sad, because he was once a giant. So how to measure him in the second decade of the new century? I suggest three conclusions: His prose style is no longer considered a very model of "closely linked chains of argument," as cited by Escott, but is still readable and often enjoyable. His opinions on subjects ranging from American Ladies on Trousers to Zoology provide interesting, often whimsical, and thoroughly Victorian views of a potpourri of essential Victorian ephemera (if "essential ephemera" is not a contradiction in terms). His literary criticism is interesting mainly because it expresses the informed opinion of a brilliant denizen of the Victorian literary world.

Little by little, the further away we move from the Victorian era the more we lose track of its major figures. I'd like to think some of them--Hutton included--could be revived as examples of that era's incredible and unique cadre of catholic thinkers and prolific writers.

Washington State University

Notes

(1) As Thomas described it, the two men met, talked a few times, then after one conversation, as Hutton was leaving Townsend's office, Townsend called after him, "I say, have you got any money?" Hutton returned, the two conferred, and Hutton bought into a joint proprietorship almost on the spot. Impulsive, maybe, but certainly prescient (Thomas 60).

(2) Anyone interested in writing about Hutton owes a great debt to Robert H. Tener's herculean spadework in compiling an exhaustive list of his publications. Tener's initial checklist of Hutton's writings occupies an entire issue of Victorian Periodicals Newsletter (No. 17, published in 1972), and Tener's supplement in VPN, No. 20 (published in 1973).

(3) Coincidentally, Malcolm Woodfield cites several of Hutton's contemporaries who claimed that the Spectator was perhaps the most influential periodical of the day in its effect on public opinion. But, says Woodfield, there are many publics, and some of Hutton's more choleric contemporaries would have agreed with the Academy article that described Hutton's readers as "gentle souls, fond of flowers and birds [...] middle-aged and declining gracefully to a future existence for which they were fully prepared" (16).

Works Cited

Escott, Thomas Hay Sweet. Masters of English Journalism. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1970 [1911].

Hutton, T.H. "The Anarchy of the Commons." Spectator (22 March 1884): 369-70.

--. "Browning and Tennyson." Spectator (21 December 1889): 11.

--. "The Established Church and Sacerdotalism." Spectator (26 February 1881): 274-75.

--. "George Eliot's Middlemarch." Spectator (16 December 1871): 1528-29.

--. "George Eliot's Moral Anatomy." Spectator (5 October 1872): 10.

--. "The Idealism of George Eliot and Mr. Tennyson." Spectator (2 December 1871): 10.

--. "Jelly-Fish Opinion." Spectator (1 March 1884): 277-78.

--. "Longfellow." Spectator (1 April 1881): 10.

--. "Mr. Dutton Cook's New Stories." Spectator (30 October 1875): 20.

--. "Mr. Grote on the Abuses of Newspaper Criticism." Spectator (29 June 1861): 16-17.

--. "Mr. Henley's Verses." Spectator (26 May 1888): 20.

--. "Mr. Swinburne's 'Erectheus.'" Spectator (1 January 1876): 15.

--. "Robert Elsmere." Spectator (7 April 1888): 15.

--. "The Unpopularity of Clough," Spectator (25 November 1882): 11.

Orel, Harold. Victorian Literary Critics. New York: St. Martin's, 1984.

Tener, Robert H. A Spectator of Theater. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1988.

--. "The Writings of Henry Holt Hutton: A Checklist of Identifications." Victorian Periodicals Newsletter 17 (September 1972): 1-183.

Thomas, William Beach. The Story of the Spectator. London: Methuen, 1928.

Woodfield, Malcolm. R.H. Hutton, Critic and Theologian. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986.

Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader. London: Vintage, 2003 [1925],