Walter Allen - The English Novel (1954)
Literary critique - 360 pages - my copy a Penguin paperback bought for 50p in a charity shop
- 2 nods out of 5 -
Walter Allen’s long standing critique on the English novel is a competent read, a book well worn by the pen marks of students in the post-war period. The title could as easily be read as a question, rather than statement; a question in which each literary nation asks itself. The American novel? The French novel? The Russian novel? All attempts are the same, exactly just what is it?
The novel itself is a hard thing to define. Allen himself exerts much energy to tell the reader what it isn’t; on writing on Swift he states ‘though possessing many of the attributes of a novelist, cannot be called one’ (p.42). Allen attempts to show us the qualities that make a novel, this following statement being particular useful: ‘Like any other artist the novelist is a maker. He is making an imitation, an imitation of the life of man on earth’ (p.14).
The English Novel traces novelists from ‘The Beginnings’, from the eighteenth century (Allen concentrating on the Big Four: Fielding, Richardson, Smollet and Stern), through the nineteenth century (principally Dickens, James, Wells) to what was to Allen, more recent modernist works (such as Joyce, Woolf and Lawrance). The nineteenth century holds a large bias, with four of the book’s seven chapters featuring in it. Allen argues the case, that it was in this period (the 1880s to be more precise) that the ‘more serious conception of the novel as art’ was pondered (p.260). Chief causes of this, he lists as greater literacy rates and easier, cheaper methods of printing.
This un-presuming, modest book (its subtitle: ‘A Short Critical History’) never threatens to be anything more than a guide to further reading. Allen does not pour vitriol on the pages; playing the role of acting as interested and jubilant uncle to a nephew who has yet to pick up a copy of Dickens’ David Copperfield. One of its chief problems is acknowledged by the author in the opening preface:
‘If in a book on the novel of 150,000 words there is room only for 6,000 words on Dickens, the greatest genius among our novelists, how much space is one to give to Joyce Cary or Mr Greene’ (p.11).
And, in any case, what is 6,000 words of a critic talking on Dickens, when the reader could easily pick up a book on Dickens himself and directly enjoy the source.
