[In the following excerpt, Eagleton describes the economic conditions of literary production in the late eighteenth century leading up to the emergence of the professional critic in England and the politically-based criticism of the nineteenth century.]

The bourgeois public sphere of early eighteenth-century England is perhaps best seen not as a single homogenous formation, but as an interlaced set of discursive centres. The collaborative literary relations established by the Tatler and Spectator find a resonance elsewhere, though with a markedly different ideological tone, in the writings of Samuel Richardson. I have described elsewhere how Richardson's perpetual circulation of texts among friends and correspondents, with its attendant wranglings, pleadings, revisions, interpretations of interpretations, comes to constitute an entire discursive community of its own, a kind of public sphere in miniaturized or domesticated form within which, amidst all the petty frictions and anxieties of hermeneutical intercourse, a powerfully cohesive body of moral thought, a collective sensibility, comes to crystallize.¹ But it is also relevant in this respect to think of the subscription publishing of Pope and others, which converted readers into collective patrons and transformed their otherwise passive, ‘nuclear’ relation to the text into membership of a community of benevolent participants in the writing project. Such a writer, like Richardson, actively constructed his own audience: Pope's campaign for subscribers, Pat Rogers has argued, led him to define, to woo, ultimately to create his own readership.² Susan Staves has pointed out how ‘the new class of the polite is visible in Pope's subscription lists—lords, private gentlemen, doctors, lawyers, bankers, publishers, actors, ladies—mingled together in lists partly alphabetical, partly by rank, all subscribers being grouped by the initial letter of their last names and then, roughly, by rank within each letter.’³ Distinctions of rank are here preserved, in contrast to the ideal of the public sphere proper, but preserved within the levelling community of the surname initial. Pope, Staves claims, was thus ‘participating in the formation of that new, mixed class whose names are displayed in his printed subscription lists’; as the eighteenth century wears on, the vital social distinction ‘was not between aristocrats and commoners but between ladies and gentlemen, on the one hand, and the vulgar on the other.’ Pope's subscription technique, according to Leslie Stephen, meant that he ‘received a kind of commission from the upper class’ to execute his work; the traditional individual patron was superseded by a ‘kind of joint-stock body of collective patronage’.⁴

As the eighteenth century drew on, the rapid expansion of the forces of literary production began to outstrip and overturn the social relations of production within which such projects as the early periodicals had flourished. By the 1730s, literary patronage was already on the wane, with a concomitant increase in bookseller power; with the expansion of wealth, population and education, technological developments in printing and publishing and the growth of a middle class eager for literature, the small reading public of Addison's day, largely confined to fashionable London, was spawning to support a whole caste of professional writers. By about mid-century, then, the profession of letters had become established and literary patronage was in its death throes; this period witnesses a marked quickening of literary production, a widespread diffusion of science and letters and, in the 1750s and '60s, a veritable explosion of literary periodicals. Samuel Johnson estimated Edmund Cave's Gentleman's Magazine to have a circulation of some 10,000; Ian Watt regards such hybrid, non-traditional forms as helping to nurture the public which will devour the novel.⁵ Writing, Daniel Defoe noted in 1725, ‘… is becoming a very considerable Branch of the English Commerce. The Booksellers are the Master Manufacturers or Employers. The several Writers, Authors, Copyers, Sub-Writers and all other operators with Pen and Ink are the workmen employed by the said Master-Manufacturers.’⁶ The name Grub Street should warn us against any too deteriorationist a reading of eighteenth-century literary production, as though the golden age of the public sphere was succeeded by a catastrophic fall into commerce; the Grub Street hacks are the contemporaries of Addison and Steele, not their inheritors. Even so, it is possible to trace an intensifying penetration of capital into literary production as the century unfolds; and the celebrated prose style of the epoch's major critic, Samuel Johnson, can be seen as obliquely related to this material development.

Johnson's style, which William Hazlitt described as a ‘species of rhyming in prose’ (‘each sentence, revolving round its centre of gravity, is contained with itself like a couplet, and each paragraph forms itself into a stanza’),⁷ can be seen on the one hand as a sort of trademark or brandname, a stubbornly idiosyncratic attempt to preserve ‘personality’ in an era of increasingly anonymous, commodified literary production. On the other hand, however, that style can be read as a turning inward and away, on the part of the literary intellectual, from the pressing business of material life, which throughout Johnson's gloomy oeuvre figures as irritant and distraction rather than as vitalizing bustle. The eccentricity of Johnson's writing is that of a resoundingly public discourse which is nevertheless profoundly self-involved; it marks a thickening of language in which words, as Hazlitt sees, become objects in their own right, and so suggest a certain social dislocation in contrast to the lucid transparency of the earlier periodicalists. Johnson is both grandly generalizing sage and ‘proletarianized’ hack; and it is the dialectical relation between these incongruous aspects of his work which is most striking. The social alienations of the latter can be found in displaced form in the involuted meditations of the former; and not only in displaced form, for one of Johnson's recurrent motifs is precisely the hazards and frustrations of authorship in a literary mode of production ruled by the commodity. Stripped of material security, the hack critic compensates for and avenges such ignominy in the sententious authority of his flamboyantly individualist style. Moralistic, melancholic and metaphysical, Johnson's writing addresses itself to the social world (he had, Boswell reports, ‘a great deference for the general opinion’) in the very moment of spurning it; he is, as Leslie Stephen notes, the moralist who ‘looks indeed at actual life, but stands well apart and knows many hours of melancholy.’⁸ The sage has not yet been driven to renounce social reality altogether; but there are in Johnson ominous symptoms, for all his personal sociability, of a growing dissociation between the literary intellectual and the material mode of production he occupies. He is not in this sense as socially acceptable to later critics as are Addison and Steele, precisely because in his ‘rough vigour’ and ‘obstinate realism’ he smacks a little too much of that leaden didacticism which such cavalier-loving critics need at all costs to distance. The English love a character, but they love a lord even more, Johnson is ‘more of the bear, and Addison more of the gentleman’, comments the charmingly cavalier G. S. Marr;⁹ and indeed Boswell himself noted that if Addison was more of a ‘Companion’, his friend was more of a teacher. One can trace in this shift towards moral dogmatism a looseninng and disturbing of that easy amicability set up between the early periodicalist and his readers, as the genial amateurism of an Addison sours into the grousing of the exploited professional. Leslie Stephen, with Smollett's Critical Review particularly in mind, writes of the emergence in eighteenth-century England of the professional critic, the rise of a ‘new tribunal or literary Star Chamber’ in which the interpersonal discourse of coffee-house literati gradually yields ground to the professional critic whose unenviable task is to render an account of all new books.¹⁰ Johnson, described by a modern biographer as a ‘superlatively good hack’,¹¹ wrote only for money and considered a man would be a fool to do otherwise. The Rambler, with its considerably glummer tone than the earlier periodicals, its loss of a certain effect of spontaneous sociability, was not designed to be widely popular and sold perhaps 400 copies an issue—about the circulation of T. S. Eliot's Criterion. On the other hand, The Rambler devoted more space to criticism than any previous journal; and one of Johnson's most signal achievements, with the widely selling Lives of the Poets, was to popularize for a general reading public a literary criticism previously associated with pedantry and personal abuse. What made such a general appeal possible was in part Johnson's renowned ‘common sense’: for him, as for Addison and Steele, the act of literary criticism inhabits no autonomous aesthetic sphere but belongs organically with ‘general ideology’, indissociable from common styles of judgement and experience, bound up with a Lebenswelt which precedes and encompasses all specialist disciplinary distinctions. We are still not at a point where we can speak of ‘literary criticism’ as an isolable technology, though with Johnson we are evolving towards just that rift between literary intellectual and social formation out of which a fully specialist criticism will finally emerge. In the trek from the cultural politics of Addison to the ‘words on the page’, the philosophical moment of Samuel Johnson—a mind still laying ‘amateur’ claim to evaluate all social experience, but now isolated and abstracted in contrast to the busily empirical Addison—is a significant milestone.

Among the factors responsible for the gradual disintegration of the classical public sphere, two are of particular relevance to the history of English criticism. The first is economic: as capitalist society develops and market forces come increasingly to determine the destiny of literary products, it is no longer possible to assume that ‘taste’ or ‘cultivation’ are the fruits of civilized dialogue and reasonable debate. Cultural determinations are now clearly being set from elsewhere—from beyond the frontiers of the public sphere itself, in the laws of commodity production of civil society. The bounded space of the public sphere is aggressively invaded by visibly ‘private’ commercial and economic interests, fracturing its confident consensualism. The mutation from literary patronage to the laws of the market marks a shift from conditions in which a writer might plausibly view his work as the product of collaborative intercourse with spiritual equals, to a situation in which the ‘public’ now looms as an anonymous yet implacable force, the object rather than co-subject of the writer's art. The second reason for the decline of the public sphere is a political one. Like all ideological formations, the bourgeois public sphere thrives on a necessary blindness to its own perimeters. Its space is potentially infinite, able to incorporate the whole of the ‘polite’; no significant interest lies beyond its reach, for the very criteria of what is to count as a significant interest lie in its monopolistic possession. The nation—society as a whole—is effectively identical with the ruling class; only those wielding a title to speak rationally, and thus only the propertied, are in a true sense members of society. ‘The gentleman,’ as John Barrell has argued, ‘was believed to be the only member of society who spoke a language universally intelligible; his usage was ‘common’, in the sense of being neither a local dialect nor infected by the terms of any particular art.’¹² The language of the common people, by contrast, cannot truly be said to belong to the ‘common language’: ‘Of the laborious and mercantile Part of the People,’ Johnson writes in the Preface to his Dictionary, ‘the Diction is in a great Measure casual and mutable … this fugitive Cant, which is always in a State of Increase or Decay, cannot be regarded as any Part of the durable Materials of a Language, and therefore must be suffered to perish with other things unworthy of Preservation.’ Just as the common people are therefore, as Barrell points out, ‘no part of the true language community’, so they form no true part of the political community either. The interests of the propertied classes are in a real sense all that politically exists; the boundaries of the public sphere are not boundaries at all, for beyond them, as beyond the curvature of cosmic space, there is nothing.

What such a realm will then be unable to withstand is the inruption into it of social and political interests in palpable conflict with its own ‘universal’ rational norms. Such interests cannot in one sense be recognised as such, since they fall outside the public sphere's own definitive discourse; but they cannot merely be dismissed either, since they pose a real material threat to that sphere's continuing existence. Habermas dates such a moment in England from the rise of Chartism, as he identifies it in France with the February revolution of 1848; but in the case of England at least, this pinpointing is surely somewhat belated. For what is emerging in the England of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, in that whole epoch of intensive class struggle charted in E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, is already nothing less than a ‘counter-public sphere’. In the Corresponding Societies, the radical press, Owenism, Cobbett's Political Register and Paine's Rights of Man, feminism and the dissenting churches, a whole oppositional network of journals, clubs, pamphlets, debates and institutions invades the dominant consensus, threatening to fragment it from within. A commentator of 1793 observed gloomily that the ‘lowest of the people can read; and books adapted to the capacity of the lowest of the people, on political and all other subjects, are industriously obtruded on their notice.’ The newspapers, he added, ‘communicate the debates of opposing parties in the senate; and public measures (even confined to a conclave) are now canvassed in the cottage, the manufactory, and the lowest resorts of plebeian carousal. Great changes in the public mind are produced by this diffusion; and such changes must produce public innovation.’¹³

It is interesting in this respect to contrast the tone of the early eighteenth-century periodicals with that of their early nineteenth-century counterparts. What distinguishes, indeed well-nigh immortalizes, the bourgeois periodical press of the latter period is what one commentator has summarized as its ‘partisan bias, the vituperation, the dogmatism, the juridical tone, the air of omniscience and finality’ with which it conducts its critical business.¹⁴ It is the scurrility and sectarian virulence of the Edinburgh and the Quarterly which have lingered in the historical memory, in dramatic contrast to the ecumenism of an Addison or Steele. In these vastly influential journals, the space of the public sphere is now much less one of bland consensus than of ferocious contention. Under the pressures of mounting class struggle in society as a whole, the bourgeois public sphere is fissured and warped, wracked with a fury which threatens to strip it of ideological credibility. It is not, of course, that the class struggle in society at large is directly reflected in the internecine antagonisms between the various literary organs; these unseemly wranglings are rather a refraction of those broader conflicts into ruling-class culture, divided as it is over how much political repression of the working class is tolerable without the risk of insurrection. Francis Jeffrey, editor of the Whig Edinburgh Review, ‘had not the slightest desire to end the predominance of landed property or to institute democracy. He was simply frightened of what would happen if the governmental structure did not yield to popular pressure in order to preserve a society otherwise (he thought) threatened with complete subversion.’¹⁵ Fiercely partisan, the Edinburgh soon provoked into countervailing existence the Tory Quarterly Review; the London Magazine set out to break with the political immoderacy of its competitors, rebuked the adolescent polemics of Blackwood's Magazine and found itself embroiled in a quarrel which was to result in its editor, John Scott, being killed in a duel. John and Leigh Hunt, editors of the radical Examiner, were imprisoned for an alleged libel of the Prince Regent;¹⁶Fraser's Magazine was an insulting rag crammed with doggerel and brutal burlesque. Sir Roger de Coverley and Sir Andrew Freeport were no longer drinking companions in the same club, but deadly rivals. What distinguishes these polemics from the bellicose exchanges of earlier Whigs and Tories is their class-function: they are at root reactions to a threat to the public sphere itself from organized social interests beyond it.

If criticism had to some degree slipped the economic yoke of its earlier years, when it was often no more than a thinly concealed puff for booksellers' wares, it had done so only to exchange such enthralment for a political one. Criticism was now explicitly, unabashedly political: the journals tended to select for review only those works on which they could loosely peg lengthy ideological pieces, and their literary judgements, buttressed by the authority of anonymity, were rigorously subordinated to their politics. Criticism was still in no full sense the product of literary ‘experts’: most of the Edinburgh's lawyers, political theorists and economists wrote from time to time on literary topics.¹⁷ The Quarterly savaged Keats, Hazlitt, Lamb, Shelley, Charlotte Brontë; Blackwood's ran a vicious campaign against the ‘Cockney school’ clustered around the London Magazine; Jeffrey of the Edinburgh, self-appointed guardian of public taste, denounced the Lake poets as regressive and ridiculous, a threat to traditional social rank and the high seriousness of bourgeois morality. Dismayed by such strife, Leigh Hunt looked back nostalgically to the more sedate years of the early century, proclaiming his desire to criticize others ‘in as uncritical a spirit of the old fashion as we can’. ‘The truth is,’ Hunt lamented, ‘that criticism itself, for the most part, is a nuisance and an impertinence: and no good-natured, reflecting men would be critics, if it were not that there are worse.’¹⁸ The periodical essayist, in Hunt's view, is ‘a writer who claims a peculiar intimacy with the public’; but the ‘age of periodical philosophy’ is on the wane, driven out by press advertising and the ‘mercantile spirit’. ‘Our former periodical politicians … wrote to establish their own opinions and to acquire reputation; our present, simply to get money …’¹⁹ An edition of the Spectator of 1831 entered a plea for the classical public sphere: ‘Journalism is nothing but the expression of public opinion. A newspaper that should attempt to dictate, must soon perish.’²⁰ Such highmindedness had in fact long been overtaken by the fissiparousness of public opinion, the commercialization of literary production and the political imperative to process public consciousness in an age of violent class conflict. Even Leigh Hunt, committed though he believed himself to be to the disinterested pursuit of philosophic truth, uneasily acknowledged the need to write with something less than complete candour: ‘the growth of public opinion implies the fostering of it’,²¹ and such fostering of what is now by implication a partially benighted readership demanded a certain diplomatic delicacy. The critic is ideally the mirror but in fact the lamp: his role is becoming the ultimately untenable one of ‘expressing’ a public opinion he covertly or flagrantly manipulates.

Criticism, then, has become a locus of political contention rather than a terrain of cultural consensus; and it is in this context that we can perhaps best evaluate the birth of the nineteenth-century ‘sage’. What the sage represents, one might claim, is an attempt to rescue criticism and literature from the squalid political infighting which alarmed Leigh Hunt, constituting them instead as transcendental forms of knowledge. The growth of idealist aesthetics in Europe, imported into England by Coleridge and Carlyle, is concomitant with this strategy. From the writings of the later Coleridge, through to Carlyle, Kingsley, Ruskin, Arnold and others, literature is extricated from the arena of Realpolitik and elevated to a realm where, in the words of one Victorian commentator, ‘all might meet and expatiate in common’.²² Literature will fulfil its ideological functions most effectively only if it sheds all political instrumentality to become the repository of a common human wisdom beyond the sordidly historical. If the sage is driven by history into transcendental isolation, spurred into prophetic print by his vision of cultural degradation yet stripped of a fit audience for his musings by just the same circumstances, he can nevertheless turn this isolation to ideological advantage, making a moral virtue out of historical necessity. If he can no longer validate his critical judgements by sound public standards, he can always interpret the consequent mysteriousness of such judgements as divine inspiration. Carlyle, sagest of the sages, contributed to Fraser's Magazine but considered it ‘a chaotic, fermenting dung-hill heap of compost’,²³ and dreamt of the day when he would be free to write ‘independently’. ‘I will not degenerate,’ he wrote to his future wife, ‘into the wretched thing which calls itself an Author in our Capitals and scribbles for the sake of filthy lucre in the periodicals of the day.’²⁴ Thackeray, praising Carlyle for his supposed refusal to subordinate critical judgement to political prejudice, ‘Pray(ed) God we shall begin ere long to love art for art's sake. It is Carlyle who has worked more than any other to give (art) its independence.’²⁵ The sage is no longer the co-discoursing equal of his readership, his perceptions tempered by a quick sense of their common opinion; the critic's stance in relation to his audience is now transcendental, his pronouncements dogmatic and self-validating, his posture towards social life chillingly negative. Sundered on the rocks of class struggle, criticism bifurcates into Jeffrey and Carlyle, political lackey and specious prophet. The only available alternative to rampant ‘interest’, it would seem, is a bogus ‘disinterestedness’.

Yet disinterestedness in the Romantic period is not merely bogus. In the hands of a Hazlitt, the ‘natural disinterestedness of the human mind’ becomes the basis of a radical politics, a critique of egocentric psychology and social practice. The ‘sympathetic imagination’ of the Romantics is disinterestedness as a revolutionary force, the production of a powerful yet decentred human subject which cannot be formalized within the protocols of rational exchange. In the Romantic era, the depth and span of critique which would be equal to a society wracked by political turmoil is altogether beyond the powers of criticism in its traditional sense. The function of criticism passes accordingly to poetry itself—poetry as, in Arnold's later phrase, a ‘criticism of life’, art as the most absolute, deep-seated response conceivable to the given social reality. No critique which does not establish such an implacable distance between itself and the social order, which does not launch its utterances from some altogether different place, is likely to escape incorporation; but that powerfully enabling distance is also Romanticism's tragedy, as the imagination joyfully transcends the actual only to consume itself and the world in its own guilt-stricken self-isolation. Criticism in the conventional sense can no longer be a matter of delivering verifiable judgements according to shared public norms, for the act of judgement itself is now tainted with a deeply suspect rationality, and normative assumptions are precisely what the negating force of art seeks to subvert. Criticism must therefore either become the enemy of art, as Jeffrey is of Wordsworth, corner for itself some of the creative energy of poetry itself, or shift to a quasi-philosophical meditation on the nature and consequences of the creative act. The Romantic critic is in effect the poet ontologically justifying his own practice, elaborating its deeper implications, reflecting upon the grounds and consequences of his art. Once literary production itself becomes problematical, criticism can no longer be the mere act of judgement of an assured phenomenon; on the contrary, it is now an active principle in the defending, unfolding and deepening of this uneasy practice of the imagination, the very explicit self-knowledge of art itself. Such quasi-philosophical self-reflection will always be ironic, for if truth is nothing less than poetry, how can any non-poetic discourse hope to capture the reality of which it speaks, ensnared as it is in a rationality—that of social discourse itself—which reaches out for truth but can never be equal to it? The critic, then, is no longer in the first place judge, administrator of collective norms or locus of enlightened rationality; nor is he in the first place cultural strategist or political catalyst, for these functions are also passing over to the side of the artist. He is not primarily a mediator between work and audience, for if the work achieves its effects it does so by an intuitive immediacy which flashes between itself and reader and could only be dissipated by passing through the relay of critical discourse. And if the work does not succeed, then it is because there is in truth no fit audience to receive it, because the poet is a nightingale singing in the dark, and thus once again no place for a mediator. If such an audience must be actively constructed, then according to Wordsworth's Supplementary Essay of 1815 it is the poet himself who must be foremost in this task, a task of which the critic is indeed the deadly enemy. The question now confronting criticism is simply this: how is it possible to be a critic at all if art is its own self-grounded, self-validating truth, if social discourse is irremediably alienated, and if there is no audience to address in the first place? With the decline of literary patronage and the classical public sphere, the abandonment of literature to the market and the anonymous urbanization of society, the poet or sage is deprived of a known audience, a community of familiar co-subjects; and this severance from any permanent particular readership, which the sway of commodity production has forced upon him, can then be converted to the illusion of a transcendental autonomy which speaks not idiomatically but universally, not in class accents but in human tones, which turns scornfully from an actual ‘mass’ public and addresses itself instead to the People, to the future, to some potential mass political movement, to the Poetic Genius buried in every breast, to a community of transcendental subjects spectrally inscribed within the given social order. ‘Rational’ criticism can find no hold here, for it evolved, as we have seen, in response to one form of (political) absolutism, and finds itself equally at a loss when confronted with another form of self-grounded absolutism in the realm of transcendental spirit.

Notes

1. See Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa, Oxford 1982, Introduction.

2. Pat Rogers, ‘Pope and his Subscribers’, Publishing History 3 (1978), pp. 7-36.

3. Susan Staves, ‘Refinement’, unpublished paper.

4. Leslie Stephen, English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century, London 1963, p. 51.

5. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, Harmondsworth 1966, p. 53.

6. Quoted by Watt, p. 55.

7. William Hazlitt, Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe, London 1931, vol. 6, p. 102.

8. Stephen, p. 93.

9. G. S. Marr, The Periodical Essayists of the Eighteenth Century, London 1923, p. 131.

10. Stephen, p. 88.

11. Joseph Wood Krutch, Samuel Johnson, London 1948, p. 88.

12. John Barrell, English Literature in History 1730-80: An Equal, Wide Survey, London 1983, p. 34.

13. Vicesimus Knox, quoted by Foley [Timothy P. ‘Taste and Social Class.’ Unpublished M. S.], op.cit.

14. Marr, p. 226.

15. John Clive, Scotch Reviewers: The Edinburgh Review 1802-1815, London 1957, p. 122.

16. See Edmund Blunden, Leigh Hunt's ‘Examiner’ Examined, London 1928.

17. See R. G. Cox, ‘The Reviews and Magazines’ in Pelican Guide to English Literature vol. 6: From Dickens to Hardy, Harmondsworth 1958, pp. 188-204.

18. Leigh Hunt's Literary Criticism, ed. L. H. and C. W. Houtchens, New York 1976, p. 387.

19. Ibid., p. 88.

20. Ibid., p. 88.

21. Ibid., p. 381.

22. H. G. Robinson, ‘On the use of English Classical Literature in the Work of Education’, Macmillan's Magazine 11 (1860).

23. Quoted in John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, London 1969, p. 16.

24. Quoted in Louis Dudek, Literature and the Press: A History of Printing, Printed Media and their Relation to Literature, Toronto 1960, p. 212.

25. Quoted in Gross, p. 28.