Anonymity
		Early Issues
		The Contributors

Early Issues

The first item in the first issue of The Times Literary Supplement, after a list of contents and a brief introductory announcement, was a review of a book which epitomized the idea of the Victorian 'man of letters': a selection from the correspondence of Edward Fitzgerald, a biographer, translator, friend of Thackeray and Tennyson, and above all a letter-writer, who had died twenty years earlier. The author of the piece—in publication terms, the TLS's first contributor—was Augustine Birrell. At this stage Birrell was himself best known as an essayist, the author of Obiter Dicta (1884), of a life of Charlotte Brontë, and of a forthcoming book on Hazlitt. But while the subject of his review had been a retiring dilettante, never taking a job or making journeys much more adventurous than between his native Suffolk and literary London, Birrell himself, however unsatisfactorily, embodied another ideal: the writer as homme d'affaires. He was a lawyer, interspersing literary work with publications on matters such as employers' liability and the history of copyright. And he was a Member of Parliament, soon to be President of the Board of Education in the Liberal government, and from 1907 to 1916—years when Irish independence was among the most crucial issues on the British political agenda—a damagingly ineffective Chief Secretary for Ireland.

The complex layering of identities personified by Birrell, with its mixture of priorities (he later attributed his having ignored the rise of Sinn Féin to his absorption in contemporary Irish literature and drama), typifies something both about Englishness, albeit more so then than now, and about The Times Literary Supplement. The paper's very title somehow manages both to assert and to qualify the centrality of literary values in a way which was replicated in the opening announcement. Readers were informed that Literature, the Supplement's more assertively named but less durable predecessor, had been subsumed into another review, the Academy (which had included Matthew Arnold and T. H. Huxley among its early contributors but was now being fatally popularised by a new proprietor and editor). Meanwhile, the new Literary Supplement - which was published as an insert in The Times until 1914 - modestly declared of itself that it would appear 'During the Parliamentary Session… as often as may be necessary to keep abreast with the more important publications of the day.' But what was an important publication? As far as the first issue was concerned, the works chosen were, in order of review: the Fitzgerald book; a study of Scottish men of letters in the eighteenth century; a history of Napoleon's first war with Russia (and, on a later page, two novels about Napoleon); a reissue of a book about Kensington by the nineteenth-century essayist Leigh Hunt; an intellectual history of China; a polemic against British rule in India (case dismissed); a social history of part of Hampshire; collections by two women poets, Katharine Tynan and Mary Robinson; and some handbooks for clergymen. These reviews were followed by surveys of current developments in the sciences, the visual arts, the theatre and music; a piece on a study of Shakespeare; notes on forthcoming publications and a list of recent ones; and two chess problems.

It would be hard to imagine eight less compelling pages as having inaugurated any journal, least of all one which now shows every sign of continuing into its second century. The early 1900s were, after all, a heyday of competition among British literary magazines, though few were as long-lived as the TLS. The Bookman had been founded in 1891, the Sphere in 1900. In 1908, Ford Madox Ford and others began the English Review and A. R. Orage became editor of the New Age. Meanwhile, many older journals continued to flourish, among them Blackwood's, the Athenaeum (later to be subsumed by the New Statesman) and the Saturday Review. In due course, in a pattern which was often to be repeated later, writers associated with the Literary Supplement moved on to run journals of their own. John Middleton Murry, who was in his mid 20s when he first wrote for the TLS, was to edit the Athenaeum from 1919 and the Adelphi from 1923. And when T. S. Eliot began the Criterion in 1922, his chief editorial influence was—as he later acknowledged—Bruce Richmond.

The TLS's initial pattern of eight pages per week of book reviews and related short articles remained generally the same until 1916, when the usual number of pages went up to twelve. (It rose again to sixteen in 1921.) And the style continued to be calm, impersonal, 'objective'. Yet in its unobtrusive way, the paper steadily gained not only in influence—by 1914, sales were averaging 38,000–41,000—but also in distinctiveness. For example, the Supplement gave exceptionally full coverage to new books in French. A key figure, here—one of the previously unacknowledged heroines of the British literary establishment—was the poet Mary Robinson, one of whose books was briefly mentioned in the first issue. She had recently married Emile Duclaux, director of the Institut Pasteur in Paris. In the first 1,000 issues of the TLS Mme Duclaux reviewed 338 books, among them many of the leading French publications of the day, by authors including Marcel Proust (whose A la Recherche du Temps Perdu was reviewed in the TLS from the beginning, as each volume appeared in France), as well as Maurice Barrès, Julien Benda, Paul Bourget, Anatole France, André Gide, Jean Giraudoux, Valéry Larbaud, Pierre Loti, Maurice Maeterlinck, François Mauriac, the Comtesse de Noailles, Marcel Prévost, Ernest Renan, Jules Renard and Romain Rolland.

Paris was, of course, the capital of modernism: a word which, so far as it meant anything in England, was as yet mainly associated there with recent developments in Christian philosophy condemned by Pope Pius X in the 1907 encyclical, De modernistarum doctrinis. But as the list of names reviewed by Mary Duclaux makes clear, far from all modern writers even in France were modernists. One of the uses of the TLS Centenary Archive is to facilitate enquiry not only into the reception of cultural movements like literary modernism—to which, despite some lapses, the paper was generally sympathetic—but into their wider contexts: the books which seemed important at the time and the interests which they reflected. This was, of course, a crucial time in the battle for women's rights, and while women hostile to the suffragette movement, such as Mrs Humphry Ward, were among TLS contributors, as was George Calderon, Hon. Secretary of the Men's League for Opposing Women's Suffrage, so too were Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Bell and the campaigning feminist and pacifist Margaret Llewelyn Davies. Again, it was an important era in Anglo-Irish relations: one in which the paper published contributions by, among people with quite different views, the Irish nationalists Darrell Figgis and Aodh de Blacam. (Erskine Childers, the yachtsman and spy novelist who became a convert to Irish Republicanism and was executed for gun-running, also wrote for the paper, but not about Ireland.) Of the forty-six reviewers in this period who were or became Members of Parliament, 16 were Liberals (a further seven contributors stood unsuccessfully as Liberal candidates). Another, Edmund Morel, became Labour MP for Dundee in 1922 after a career as a campaigner on African affairs.

We aren't claiming that the early TLS was a journal of radical social reform. The Webbs didn't write for it; nor, except in published letters, did Shaw or H. G. Wells. But it was a much more open forum than tends to be assumed. Then, as often since, its conservative reputation is belied by the variety of its contents and its effectiveness, while making the case for values which it thought should be left intact, at persuading even the most hidebound of readers when it believed other views should be heard. One of the most moving instances is the front page of the issue of 13 August 1914, immediately after the outbreak of the First World War. It was more or less obligatory that the paper would publish a poem by the Laureate, Robert Bridges. 'Thou Careless, Awake!' spoke bloodthirstily of the cleansing power of suffering and ended with the words 'ENGLAND STANDS FOR HONOUR / GOD DEFEND THE RIGHT!' But the rest of the page was filled by an article by the Fabian Times staff member Arthur Clutton-Brock, headed 'The Two Kinds of Courage', which acted as a commentary on Bridges's lines in calling for another sort of courage, that of maintaining 'a contempt, partly moral and partly intellectual, for national vendettas and all the false romanticism that springs from them.'