Anonymity
		Early Issues
		The Contributors

The Contributors.

The main task of our Index of TLS Contributors, 1902-74 is to fill in the largest gap left by the public record: the names of reviewers and, since far from all of them are, or ever were, well known, whatever basic biographical information about them we've been able to find. These details can be searched in a variety of ways. Most people will simply want to know who reviewed specific books and authors, or what a particular author contributed to the TLS at a given point in a career or throughout a whole lifetime. But beyond that, the index answers—and leads to—still other questions, including ones about the literary establishment. Users can call up information, for example, by contributors' specialisations, by a range of dates, by gender, educational background, profession, publications, or by combinations of these and other elements. They can learn—so far as we have been able to find these or other facts—what other journals reviewers worked for, and through this, something about the informal networks which influenced the reception of books. They can also find out who was related to whom.

Although (or perhaps partly because) TLS contributors appeared anonymously, Bruce Richmond and his colleagues took great care not only in selecting them but in getting to know them: inviting them to the office, keeping in touch with them by letter, suggesting topics on which they might write. Next to none of the editorial correspondence of the time has survived. Richmond notoriously drafted his replies to contributors on their original letters, which he threw into the wastepaper basket when the fair copy was done. But there's plenty of evidence of a degree of personal attention to regular reviewers which is the more impressive given how many wrote for the paper and the volume of material they supplied. The first 1,000 issues alone contain 23,346 reviews and articles by 1,036 separate authors, and 3,761 letters by a further 1,596. Keeping pace editorially wasn't easy—least of all during the First World War, in which a tenth of the paper's contributors fought (some of them having previously served in the South African War) and several died. Among these was a redoubtable New Zealander, Noel Ross, who volunteered at the outbreak of war, was wounded and, though declared unfit for further service, concealed his medical records in order to continue fighting until he died of war-related typhoid in 1917, just before what was to have been his wedding day. Ross wrote half a dozen pieces for the TLS about Gallipoli and the Somme, but for obvious reasons few other serving soldiers were also reviewers. 200 contributors appeared in the TLS for the first time in 1914, and the number of newcomers—among them, despite his claim that he was being ostracised by London editors, Ezra Pound—remained high throughout the war.

It is well known that such authors as Richard Aldington, T. S. Eliot, John Middleton Murry, the Humphry Wards and Leonard and Virginia Woolf wrote for the journal in the early years, but users of the electronic archive will also find that the best-selling novelist Marie Belloc Lowndes reviewed many hundreds of books in this period, Edmund Gosse sixty-three and Edith Somerville seventeen. The other half of Somerville and Ross, Violet Martin, also contributed, as did John Buchan (principally on South Africa), John Galsworthy, George Gissing, H. Rider Haggard, A.P.Herbert, Aldous Huxley, Henry James, Andrew Lang (who reviewed a surprising range of books including Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles and stories by Mark Twain and Bret Harte), Arthur Quiller-Couch, G. W. Russell ('AE.'), Logan Pearsall Smith, Edward Thomas, and Edith Wharton. One of the recent discoveries which will catch readers' attention is a hitherto unknown review by Virginia Woolf (then still Virginia Stephen) of a 1907 book on the orient by Charlotte Lorrimer. The piece has been described by Hermione Lee as shedding light on the development of Woolf's thinking in the period between her travels in Greece and Turkey at the end of 1906 and the inception of her first novel, The Voyage Out.

Of course, as we've seen, it's not only in a narrow sense of 'literature' that the TLS is the leading literary journal of the twentieth century. It has always dealt with anything that books themselves deal with. The first 1,000 issues included pieces by the pioneering geneticist William Bateson and the Nobel Prize-winner Ronald Ross, who discovered of the cause of malaria. There were reviews by the Everest explorer Colonel C. G. Bruce and the composer Sir Charles Stanford; by William Temple, later Archbishop of Canterbury, on a book about miracles; and Robert Baden-Powell, on one about pig-sticking. The actor Ernest Thesiger was among the paper's contributors, as were the architect of the Bank of England and the Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police. Some pieces on African languages were contributed by Alice Werner, a self-taught specialist who later gained a chair at London University. Rollo Appleyard, an engineer who invented the rubber-cored golf ball, wrote about calculating machines and radio. Town planning and the countryside were the topics of an early twentieth-century campaigner for rights of way and the preservation of open spaces, Sir Robert Hunter. Meanwhile, one of the main threats to the countryside, 'automobilism', was the subject of Archibald Weir, who combined pig-breeding with writing books on philosophy and proselytising for the motor car in the TLS (he was one of the founder members of the Royal Automobile Club).

Children’s books were also reviewed, though in this category as in others the paper’s judgement was not entirely infallible. The Wind in The Willows fell for review to E.V.Lucas: a frequent contributor and, with his interest in rural life, one who must have seemed a safe pair of hands on this occasion. Lucas had admired Kenneth Grahame’s earlier books but was now at a loss: ‘The chief character is a mole,’ Lucas puzzled, ‘whom the reader plumps upon on the first page whitewashing his house. Here is an initial nut to crack; a mole whitewashing. No doubt moles like their abodes to be clean; but whitewashing? Are we very stupid, or is this joke really inferior?’ Lucas had similar difficulties with most of the cast, not least Mr Toad, who ‘becomes a rabid motorist’. He concluded in baffled exasperation that despite some vivid passages, The Wind in the Willows was neither amusing nor convincing and ‘as a contribution to natural history the work is negligible.’

As well as tracing the subjects on which individual contributors wrote, users of the index can explore the social groupings to which they belonged. Few will be surprised to learn that of 1,036 contributors in these early years, the number of women (seventy-six) was exceeded by the number of clergymen (eighty-one) and almost matched by those of men educated at a single Oxford college, Balliol (sixty-seven). But while women were only 7 per cent of the reviewers, they were responsible for over 12 per cent of the books reviewed. The notion that academics were not prominent in literary life early in the century has to be qualified: they were the largest single professional category - almost a third—among reviewers in the first 1,000 issues. The other main occupations followed by reviewers, in descending numerical order, were journalism; the civil service and diplomacy; museum curatorship (especially at the British Museum) and librarianship; imaginative authorship (novels, poetry and plays); exploration; the law; the armed forces; school teaching (in no case at a state school); and parliamentary politics. A significant number were or became social campaigners, among them Norman Bentwich, who worked on behalf of Jewish rights; Cornelia Sorabji, who, though a woman and an Asian, succeeded in being called to the bar and subsequently fought for the legal rights of women behind the purdah; and Brinsley Richards, an activist against child labour. Then there were sportsmen and scientists, musicians and archaeologists - and a vast array of specialists who wrote just a single piece: on British violins, on medieval popes, or on the history of the pointer dog.

Sixty-five contributors also wrote for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Then as later, there is an immense spread between the one-off experts and those who wrote scores, sometimes hundreds, of TLS pieces. Some seemed willing to write on almost anything; others to write any amount. Thomas Humphry Ward reviewed 441 books in this period, Walter de la Mare 450 and E.E.Mavrogordato around 600, but few came near Harold Child, assistant editor of the Burlington Magazine and later theatre critic of the Observer, who had reviewed more than 1,500 books by 1921 - an average of 1.5 per issue - and was still going strong in the 1940s. And if literary historians will learn more than was previously known about the range of topics covered by individual men and women of letters in this period, there is another absorbing by-way in the number of reviewers who were related to each other: not only Andrew and Leonora Lang, the Humphry Wards and the Woolfs but almost 30 other teams of husband and wife, siblings, parents and children, including a good proportion of the tribe of the first Baron Aberdare: his son, one of his daughters, three of his sons-in-law and one of his grandsons, who was… Bruce Richmond.