[The Realists] is not a book about the nature, workings, values or preoccupations of realistic fiction. This is a pity, since, as critics like Rubin Rubinowitz have shown, C. P. Snow, as a reviewer in the early Fifties, wrote a series of attacks on 'experimental' writing and praise of socially responsible, 'neo-realist' novels which helped to influence both the writing and reading of fiction at that time. If his novels were then over-valued, I believe they are underrated now, because the realistic virtues they display have again become unfashionable. The careful analysis of public behaviour, domestic affections and affiliations, ambition, movements of money, and organisations like the Law or the scientific hierarchy, are not what we are thought to want to read about, unless we are offered them with a touch of irreal nightmare mockery. Snow may, we suspect, not tell us exactly what we want to know about these things, and he may often be wrong, but very few novelists are telling us anything at all. There is room for a study of bureaucracy, or jobs, or heritage that is not presented only as a grotesque phantasmagoria.

So it would have been very interesting if Lord Snow, in treating of his eight chosen realists, had offered us an analysis of how they chose their subject-matter, how they found or created people, places, institutions, and where their techniques are better described by other critical words besides 'realist'. He does not really attempt any of this: his chapters are mannerly little biographical essays, containing judicial summings-up of plots and values of certain great works…. I found the essays interesting in proportion as I knew less about the writer concerned—which is to say that I only really enjoyed the chapter on Galdos, of whose work I was ignorant, and whom I now want to read. (p. 586)

His final conclusion is that his eight novelists have little in common except being nearly all short and fat and uncommonly bad at mathematics. Having studied their sexual force or timidity he does not … go on to wonder about Wordworth's definition of the Poet as a man 'possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, who has also thought long and deeply'. He concludes that realism flourishes in untidy, energetic, societies with small, appreciative reading publics and 'hope'—'both social and individual'. He feels that we possess the first two, but not the last—and indeed, absence of 'hope' is one possible explanation of nightmare mockery and wild humour as prevalent forms. At the end of his book I did feel some envy of his eight for their sense of hope, energy and possibility—but whether that was theirs, or that of their time and place, it is hard to tell. (p. 587)