The Makers of English Fiction Second Edition W J Dawson Books
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The Makers of English Fiction Second Edition W J Dawson Books
The author of this book, William James Dawson, was a turn-of-the-century (i.e. the 19th into the 20th) Christian writer. His publisher, F. H. Revell, which in 1905 published the "second edition" of this book (amounting, according to the firm's own pagination indications, to 316 pages) about prose literature, also issued some of Dawson's sermons and other religious writings among Revell's other books of which Dawson was author. Therefore, the reader should not be surprised if Dawson's studies of these selected English authors of fiction have a strongly Protestant Christian orientation, but Dawson was among such authors who were of wide sympathies and relatively broad views; indeed, the publisher, Revell, was a Christian firm, but one which came to cater primarily to the Fundamentalist sectarian and conservative Evangelical market (in later decades also for a "Neo-Evangelical" readership). This makes the company's work to publish various books (whether for the first time or after a publisher in Great Britain had handled them, too) by a Protestant author so unmistakably liberal, as W.J. Dawson certainly was, to seem rather unusual.The writers to whom Dawson most directs his attention at chapter length (or even two), or at only somewhat less extended length than that, are Defoe, Fielding, Walpole, Austen, Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Eliot, Reade, Kingsley, Meredith, Hardy, and Stevenson. Others, of course, are mentioned along the way and there is even a chapter devoted to American authors, with substantial comments within it about novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne and short fiction writer Edgar Allan Poe; more about those choices later.
There is, as well (and unsurprisingly), a chapter titled "Religion in Fiction", devoted largely to novelists (among them, J. H. Shorthouse) whose religious motives and intent go beyond the usual presence of religious thought that is present to some degree or other in so much of the English and American fiction of the period. In that chapter, true to his liberal mindset, Dawson gives the highest praise to some agnostic, unbelieving writers, especially to William Hale White (whose pseudonym was Mark Rutherford).
Dawson does not limit his comments, by any means, alone to the religious aspect of the thought and literary production of the various English novelists whom he singled out for treatment. Being a liberal (or "broad") Protestant of his time, the Christian viewpoint from which Dawson examines things is not at all of a narrow or cramped sort of mentality. Indeed, Dawson's views plausibly might seem even to be rather of proto-neo-orthodox orientation, caught up, as Dawson seems to have been, in the theological trend that went, by way of the 19th Century's Friedrich Schleiermacher, to coalesce, a bit later in the 20th Century than at the time of Dawson's book, in the theology of Karl Barth and of his neo-orthodox ilk. Of course, any Christian standpoint, however conservative or liberal it might be, will be welcome to some, or irrelevant to others, in coming to any understanding appreciation of English prose fiction.
Liberal or otherwise, the smugly Edwardian bourgeois values which Dawson espouses, probably from being so much a creature of his own time, are particularly evident in his comments on the novels of Charles Kingsley and of Sir Walter Scott. Dawson admires these novelists, surely, more for the ideals which they express than really for these authors' genuine literary standing, now considerably downgraded.
That is especially so in the case of Scott, whose excesses (of sentiment, romaniticised mediaevalism, and so forth), now so widely derided, seem to be among what Dawson, for his part, most relishes in that man's novels. As well, Dawson has much affection for what is most heroically virtuous and is most romantically antiquarian and quixotic in Scott's own life and tastes. Dawson's values are so utterly bourgeois and moralising that he seems to post vertable sentinels that inadvertently forbid entry to what are the real pleasures of the writing of a figure like George Meredith, obsessing approvingly over aspects of Meredith's art that most modern readers merely would tolerate for the sake of that which is much better therein.
As for Charles Kingsley, that man himself was manifestly bourgeois in both the best and in the most tiresome regards, but he also was a man and a writer of considerable energy and public virtue. Kingsley, indeed, is one of the writers perhaps most akin to Dawson's own character and ideals; although he criticises him, too, Dawson draws a sympathetic portrait of Kingsley which is fairly free of Dawson's own worst excesses in evaluating some of the other writers in his studies of them.
In the case of an author of such relentless atheistic and sceptical worldview as George Eliot (the female of that mannish name), the liberal in Dawson appreciates her principled stance and even, perhaps surprisingly, condones her sexual deviation from the Victorian-Edwardian norm. Perhaps the genuinely Christian core of Dawson's liberal Christianity seeks more resonances with evangelical hangover than Eliot herself really provides. At least Dawson found much in Eliot to which to relate, even if not necessarily on so sound a footing as he may have thought to be the case!
And so it goes with other writers whom Dawson discusses; he provides insights of real worth regarding some, a good example being his assessment of Charles Reade's personal and literary strengths and weaknesses, while, on the other hand, Dawson seems out-of-touch, too awash in sentiment, or just too mired in his liberal-evangelical-bourgeois values to convey to the reader anything of much value about so many of the other writers. The book is uneven, but it is worth dipping into for what is good within its pages.
Although the Dawson's writing is, for the most part, readable enough, if tinted with more than a little stuffiness and pomposity, sometmes - really too often! -- Dawson's prose becomes excessively florid. At times this putative scholar's style is as turgid and contrived, in its own different way, as the overly luxuriant manner that pervades the printed sermons of another (very celebrated) preacher, 19th century Boston's Phillips Brooks. When that occurs, Dawson's writing can induce sheer fatigue in the reader, due to the lush rhetorical moss which proliferates in such passages, rendering them tedious to plow through. An example of such a sluggishly enfeebled portion of Dawson's book is its chapter on Thomas Hardy.
Perhaps it is some unbending earnestness in Dawson's temperament that causes him to underestimate grossly the great contribution of the humourist, Mark Twain, whom Dawson only barely mentions in the American chapter of his book. Mark Twain was author who is every bit, in his own different way, of lterary stature akin to that of Nathaniel Hawthorne!
One has to wonder, too, about Dawson's own critical acumen, given, for instance, his praise (in the chapter centring on religious fiction of alike pious and staunchly unbelieving writers) for the likes of two smarmy passages, oozing sentiment, which he quotes from Joseph Henry Shorthouse. It is true that Dawson takes that novelist to task for what he regards as being yet worse in Shorthouse's prose, but if the quoted passages are among one which Dawson finds commendable (!!), one has to wonder about Dawson's literary judgment! If what Dawson quotes really be of the best that Shorthouse could accomplish, imagine the fetid swamp that so much of the rest of Shorthouse's saccharine prose must be! In the 1905 Revell edition, these quotes, both from Shorthouse's best remembered (i.e. least forgotten) novel, "John Inglesant", appear between pages 274 and 277, interspersed with Dawson's stomach-churningly admiring comments.
The writers to whom Dawson most directs his attention at chapter length (or even two), or at only somewhat less extended length than that, are Defoe, Fielding, Walpole, Austen, Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Eliot, Reade, Kingsley, Meredith, Hardy, and Stevenson. Others, of course, are mentioned along the way and there is even that chapter, already alluded to, which is devoted to American authors, with substantial comments within it about novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne and short fiction writer Edgar Allan Poe. There is, as well and unsurprisingly, a chapter titled "Religion in Fiction", devoted largely to novelists (among them, unimpressively, Shorthouse, already mentioned) whose religious motives and intent go beyond the usual presence of religious thought or incident that are present to some degree or other in so much of the English and American fiction of the period. In that particular chapter, true to his liberal Protestant mindset, Dawson gives the highest praise to some agnostic, unbelieving writers, especially to William Hale White (whose pseudonym was Mark Rutherford).
Dawson is thoroughly of his era, i.e. the later Victorian and the Edwardian years prior to the First World War. His self-satisfied convictions about life and art lead him to pontificate on these and other grand matters insufferably (and too often!), a prime example of that being the book's concluding chapter, the "Concluding Survey", by which time the reader's patience has been strained to the very limit of endurance. However, before that sententious conclusion, Dawson has conveyed much useful information, including not a few at least partially valid judgments. Even if one does not enjoy the fiction or literary criticism from those years of the late Nineteenth Century and the very beginning of the 20th, Dawson's book at least provides a decent, straightforward specimen of the sensibility of those decades.
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The Makers of English Fiction Second Edition W J Dawson Books Reviews
The author of this book, William James Dawson, was a turn-of-the-century (i.e. the 19th into the 20th) Christian writer. His publisher, F. H. Revell, which in 1905 published the "second edition" of this book (amounting, according to the firm's own pagination indications, to 316 pages) about prose literature, also issued some of Dawson's sermons and other religious writings among Revell's other books of which Dawson was author. Therefore, the reader should not be surprised if Dawson's studies of these selected English authors of fiction have a strongly Protestant Christian orientation, but Dawson was among such authors who were of wide sympathies and relatively broad views; indeed, the publisher, Revell, was a Christian firm, but one which came to cater primarily to the Fundamentalist sectarian and conservative Evangelical market (in later decades also for a "Neo-Evangelical" readership). This makes the company's work to publish various books (whether for the first time or after a publisher in Great Britain had handled them, too) by a Protestant author so unmistakably liberal, as W.J. Dawson certainly was, to seem rather unusual.
The writers to whom Dawson most directs his attention at chapter length (or even two), or at only somewhat less extended length than that, are Defoe, Fielding, Walpole, Austen, Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Eliot, Reade, Kingsley, Meredith, Hardy, and Stevenson. Others, of course, are mentioned along the way and there is even a chapter devoted to American authors, with substantial comments within it about novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne and short fiction writer Edgar Allan Poe; more about those choices later.
There is, as well (and unsurprisingly), a chapter titled "Religion in Fiction", devoted largely to novelists (among them, J. H. Shorthouse) whose religious motives and intent go beyond the usual presence of religious thought that is present to some degree or other in so much of the English and American fiction of the period. In that chapter, true to his liberal mindset, Dawson gives the highest praise to some agnostic, unbelieving writers, especially to William Hale White (whose pseudonym was Mark Rutherford).
Dawson does not limit his comments, by any means, alone to the religious aspect of the thought and literary production of the various English novelists whom he singled out for treatment. Being a liberal (or "broad") Protestant of his time, the Christian viewpoint from which Dawson examines things is not at all of a narrow or cramped sort of mentality. Indeed, Dawson's views plausibly might seem even to be rather of proto-neo-orthodox orientation, caught up, as Dawson seems to have been, in the theological trend that went, by way of the 19th Century's Friedrich Schleiermacher, to coalesce, a bit later in the 20th Century than at the time of Dawson's book, in the theology of Karl Barth and of his neo-orthodox ilk. Of course, any Christian standpoint, however conservative or liberal it might be, will be welcome to some, or irrelevant to others, in coming to any understanding appreciation of English prose fiction.
Liberal or otherwise, the smugly Edwardian bourgeois values which Dawson espouses, probably from being so much a creature of his own time, are particularly evident in his comments on the novels of Charles Kingsley and of Sir Walter Scott. Dawson admires these novelists, surely, more for the ideals which they express than really for these authors' genuine literary standing, now considerably downgraded.
That is especially so in the case of Scott, whose excesses (of sentiment, romaniticised mediaevalism, and so forth), now so widely derided, seem to be among what Dawson, for his part, most relishes in that man's novels. As well, Dawson has much affection for what is most heroically virtuous and is most romantically antiquarian and quixotic in Scott's own life and tastes. Dawson's values are so utterly bourgeois and moralising that he seems to post vertable sentinels that inadvertently forbid entry to what are the real pleasures of the writing of a figure like George Meredith, obsessing approvingly over aspects of Meredith's art that most modern readers merely would tolerate for the sake of that which is much better therein.
As for Charles Kingsley, that man himself was manifestly bourgeois in both the best and in the most tiresome regards, but he also was a man and a writer of considerable energy and public virtue. Kingsley, indeed, is one of the writers perhaps most akin to Dawson's own character and ideals; although he criticises him, too, Dawson draws a sympathetic portrait of Kingsley which is fairly free of Dawson's own worst excesses in evaluating some of the other writers in his studies of them.
In the case of an author of such relentless atheistic and sceptical worldview as George Eliot (the female of that mannish name), the liberal in Dawson appreciates her principled stance and even, perhaps surprisingly, condones her sexual deviation from the Victorian-Edwardian norm. Perhaps the genuinely Christian core of Dawson's liberal Christianity seeks more resonances with evangelical hangover than Eliot herself really provides. At least Dawson found much in Eliot to which to relate, even if not necessarily on so sound a footing as he may have thought to be the case!
And so it goes with other writers whom Dawson discusses; he provides insights of real worth regarding some, a good example being his assessment of Charles Reade's personal and literary strengths and weaknesses, while, on the other hand, Dawson seems out-of-touch, too awash in sentiment, or just too mired in his liberal-evangelical-bourgeois values to convey to the reader anything of much value about so many of the other writers. The book is uneven, but it is worth dipping into for what is good within its pages.
Although the Dawson's writing is, for the most part, readable enough, if tinted with more than a little stuffiness and pomposity, sometmes - really too often! -- Dawson's prose becomes excessively florid. At times this putative scholar's style is as turgid and contrived, in its own different way, as the overly luxuriant manner that pervades the printed sermons of another (very celebrated) preacher, 19th century Boston's Phillips Brooks. When that occurs, Dawson's writing can induce sheer fatigue in the reader, due to the lush rhetorical moss which proliferates in such passages, rendering them tedious to plow through. An example of such a sluggishly enfeebled portion of Dawson's book is its chapter on Thomas Hardy.
Perhaps it is some unbending earnestness in Dawson's temperament that causes him to underestimate grossly the great contribution of the humourist, Mark Twain, whom Dawson only barely mentions in the American chapter of his book. Mark Twain was author who is every bit, in his own different way, of lterary stature akin to that of Nathaniel Hawthorne!
One has to wonder, too, about Dawson's own critical acumen, given, for instance, his praise (in the chapter centring on religious fiction of alike pious and staunchly unbelieving writers) for the likes of two smarmy passages, oozing sentiment, which he quotes from Joseph Henry Shorthouse. It is true that Dawson takes that novelist to task for what he regards as being yet worse in Shorthouse's prose, but if the quoted passages are among one which Dawson finds commendable (!!), one has to wonder about Dawson's literary judgment! If what Dawson quotes really be of the best that Shorthouse could accomplish, imagine the fetid swamp that so much of the rest of Shorthouse's saccharine prose must be! In the 1905 Revell edition, these quotes, both from Shorthouse's best remembered (i.e. least forgotten) novel, "John Inglesant", appear between pages 274 and 277, interspersed with Dawson's stomach-churningly admiring comments.
The writers to whom Dawson most directs his attention at chapter length (or even two), or at only somewhat less extended length than that, are Defoe, Fielding, Walpole, Austen, Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Eliot, Reade, Kingsley, Meredith, Hardy, and Stevenson. Others, of course, are mentioned along the way and there is even that chapter, already alluded to, which is devoted to American authors, with substantial comments within it about novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne and short fiction writer Edgar Allan Poe. There is, as well and unsurprisingly, a chapter titled "Religion in Fiction", devoted largely to novelists (among them, unimpressively, Shorthouse, already mentioned) whose religious motives and intent go beyond the usual presence of religious thought or incident that are present to some degree or other in so much of the English and American fiction of the period. In that particular chapter, true to his liberal Protestant mindset, Dawson gives the highest praise to some agnostic, unbelieving writers, especially to William Hale White (whose pseudonym was Mark Rutherford).
Dawson is thoroughly of his era, i.e. the later Victorian and the Edwardian years prior to the First World War. His self-satisfied convictions about life and art lead him to pontificate on these and other grand matters insufferably (and too often!), a prime example of that being the book's concluding chapter, the "Concluding Survey", by which time the reader's patience has been strained to the very limit of endurance. However, before that sententious conclusion, Dawson has conveyed much useful information, including not a few at least partially valid judgments. Even if one does not enjoy the fiction or literary criticism from those years of the late Nineteenth Century and the very beginning of the 20th, Dawson's book at least provides a decent, straightforward specimen of the sensibility of those decades.
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