Contents

About the Author

Helen Smith lives in Norfolk and teaches non-fiction and modern literature at the University of East Anglia. The Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett is her first book.

About the Book

Over a career spanning nearly fifty years Edward Garnett – editor, critic and publisher’s reader – would become one of the most influential men in twentieth-century British literature. Famed for his incisive criticism and unwavering conviction in matters of taste, Garnett was responsible for spotting and nurturing the talents of a constellation of the greatest Anglophone writers.

In The Uncommon Reader, Helen Smith brings to life Garnett’s fascinating, often stormy, relationships with those writers – from Joseph Conrad to John Galsworthy, D. H. Lawrence to T. E. Lawrence, Edward Thomas to Henry Green. All turned to Garnett for advice and guidance at critical moments in their careers, and their letters and diaries tell us about their creative processes, their hopes and fears.

We also come to know Edward as the husband of Constance Garnett, the prolific translator responsible for introducing Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov to a British readership, and as the father of David ‘Bunny’ Garnett, who would make a name for himself as an award-winning novelist.

Addressing questions of culture, fame and success, this absorbing portrait of a man who shaped the literary landscape as we know it asks us to consider genius – what it is, where it comes from and to whom it belongs.

The Uncommon Reader

A Life of Edward Garnett

HELEN SMITH

1
A literary family

‘For you into whose hands this document may come, I write these words, as a testimony from us who now lie dead & forgotten.’1 The parchment containing these words (or some very similar) has yet to be read; since 1 September 1895 it has nestled in a carefully hollowed-out hole in a cornerstone of The Cearne, near Edenbridge in Kent, the house built by Edward and Constance Garnett, alongside ‘various little articles which might be of antiquarian interest in centuries to come’.2 Fortunately anyone curious to discover more about the founders of The Cearne will not have to wait for some calamitous event to reduce the house to a pile of rubble; a rough draft of the document in Edward Garnett’s hand survives. In it he briefly details the building of The Cearne and the origin of its name (‘the original name of the meadow, signifying, in Old French – a circle’), before going on to sketch its inhabitants, beginning with himself: ‘in 1895 Edward Garnett was a little known writer & poet, a man of twenty seven, tall in height, of an idle temperament, careless of reputation, witty of speech, a real lover of the open air, literature & art, a scorner of trade [sic] industry.’ While there is a touch of light-hearted self-deprecation in the portrait, Garnett revealingly selects the characteristics – and occupation – (‘little known’ was added as an afterthought) for which he would like to be remembered. At that time he had been ‘reader’ for the publisher T. Fisher Unwin for eight years and was currently greatly excited by one of Unwin’s new authors, Joseph Conrad. Yet despite the lukewarm and in some cases hostile reviews of his own literary efforts, which then comprised two novels and a book of prose poems, in 1895 it was as a writer that Edward Garnett wished to make his name.

Given Garnett’s firm belief in heredity (‘that’s the old Willoughby horse-thief strain coming out in her,’ he reputedly announced, ‘with all the gravity of Mr Shandy’,3 when a female house guest helped herself to a book), perhaps he would not be surprised to learn that, just like his father before him, he is principally remembered as one of literature’s great enablers.

Richard Garnett was born on 27 February 1835 at Lichfield; his father, also named Richard, was a minor canon in the cathedral. The senior Richard Garnett (1789–1850) originally hailed from West Yorkshire, where his father William (1760–1832) managed the family paper mill on the river Wharfe near Otley. William’s eleven offspring appear to have been a talented lot, and it soon became apparent that his eldest son Richard had a particular linguistic flair. After eight years in the paper mill, during which he studied languages in his spare time, Richard senior trained for the Church. His brother Jeremiah (1793–1870) was apprenticed to a printer in Barnsley and then worked on Wheeler’s Manchester Chronicle before becoming the first printer, publisher and reporter on the fledgling Manchester Guardian. Initially his skills as a printer were much in evidence – he helped devise a machine that increased the rate of printing from 300 to 1,500 copies of the paper an hour – but in later years his interest became literary and editorial. In 1844 Jeremiah assumed the editorship of the paper for which his great-nephew Edward would eventually write.

In 1836 Richard senior moved with his second wife Jane (his first wife Margaret died in 1828) and their young son Richard to the living at Chebsey, a village near Stafford. A second son, William John, was born on 28 July that year. By this time Richard senior had established a reputation in the new field of philology and was keen to exercise his erudition in more promising intellectual pastures than Chebsey could offer. When in 1838 he was offered the post of Assistant Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum he accepted with alacrity and resigned from the Church. The family moved to Burton Crescent just off the Euston Road in London and in 1840 Richard’s final child Ellen Rayne was born. Ellen, who was referred to as ‘Auntie Cuckoo’ by her nephews and nieces, became a governess for a time. Her pupils included Osbert Sitwell’s father Sir George and his sister Florence. Poor Ellen was remarkably plain: according to Osbert, her ugliness ‘triumphed over the term and became raised to the level of a Chinese grotesque’.4 Nevertheless she inspired affection in her charges and was invited to Christmas dinner with the elder Sitwells in Scarborough every year after her retirement. Ellen’s brother William John, who was a lifelong practical joker and like his nephew Edward a great tease, drifted from job to job and country to country. Whether working as a consular agent in Egypt, a miner in Colorado or a music critic in Australia he was usually in pecuniary straits and a source of minor concern to his family. It was Richard who inherited his father’s linguistic abilities and scholarly aptitude and it was he who would elevate the Garnett name in literary circles.

By 1850 Richard senior’s health had deteriorated to the extent that he was granted leave of absence from the British Museum and returned to Otley with his family, enrolling young Richard and William John in Whalley Grammar School just months before he died in September. His family was left with £750, a reasonable sum, but it was clear that extra income would be required and so a university education was out of the question for either of the boys. Exactly who approached the Italian political exile Antonio Panizzi, Keeper of Printed Books at the Museum, about a possible post for the young Richard is unclear, but Richard senior had been aware of the gravity of his illness and may well have set the wheels in motion. Panizzi, who had a great regard for Richard senior, directed all his considerable powers of persuasion towards the Museum’s trustees and just weeks after his sixteenth birthday young Richard joined the staff as an assistant in the department of Printed Books.

Richard Garnett junior never forgot Panizzi’s act of kindness. ‘One of my father’s marked characteristics was lively gratitude,’ his daughter Olive recalled years later. ‘As an Italian exile, Antonio Panizzi, had befriended him, so, henceforth, he would likewise endeavour to assist political exiles.’5 Richard stayed true to his resolution and a string of European political refugees, including Karl Marx, were to benefit from his assistance and generosity. In the years following his appointment to the British Museum, Richard read voraciously, contributed numerous articles to various journals and newspapers, continued to study languages, produced several translations and wrote poems, whilst at the same time working assiduously in the library. For the first ten years of his career he was a ‘placer’, allocating newly acquired books to the correct division of the library (which then had no complete subject catalogue). At the very least this required a swift perusal of each new volume, and Richard’s memory was such that it was said he never forgot the contents or location of any book he had ‘placed’. Richard’s interest in Shelley scholarship led to his becoming a friend of Lady Shelley, the poet’s daughter-in-law; unfortunately he also fell in with her attempts to sanitise Shelley in order to make him fit for Victorian consumption. This error of judgement apart, Richard became known among generations of library readers for his benevolence, helpfulness, prodigious memory and unrivalled knowledge of books.

Photographs of Richard Garnett reveal a square-faced young man with a high forehead, short nose and dark hair, cut in the rather unbecoming fashion of the day. He was tall and early developed a stoop. Later on he grew a beard and adopted round, gold-rimmed glasses. Careless of dress, he ‘stuffed his pockets with books; badly folded newspapers, whole packets of letters: & remains of sandwich lunches’.6 His hands were slim-fingered and as shapely as a woman’s, an attribute he passed on to his son Edward. Richard’s speech betrayed slight signs of his Yorkshire origins; ‘he is the only man I ever knew,’ wrote his obituarist, ‘who really talked like a book. His sentences flowed on, unhesitatingly, in lengthy periods, all the commas and semi-colons almost visible to the eye.’7 Garnett had an ironic and sarcastic turn of wit, but it was never directed against individuals; by midlife his mellowness had reached the point where it was reputed that the hardest thing he said of anybody was ‘she doesn’t like cats’8 – a more serious indictment than first appears given Richard’s passion for felines. His other great enthusiasm (perhaps not remarkable considering the late Victorians’ interest in the occult and spiritualism, although it surprised many of his contemporaries in such an otherwise learned man) was astrology. Richard cast numerous horoscopes of the great and the good and penned astrological articles under the anagrammatic pseudonym A. G. Trent.

The British Museum offered many opportunities to gain an entrée into new social circles and Richard’s network of friends rapidly expanded. By the time his career became fully established there were few people in literary London he did not know. The young men working at the Museum were seen as a useful fund of potential dancing partners when the ladies of the neighbourhood were organising dances for their daughters. It was in this capacity that Richard attended a dance in a house near Camden Square in 1859 where he became captivated by the daughter of his hostess’s next-door neighbour, a young lady of seventeen whom he sat beside ‘and talked [to] very fast, and in such low tones that I could hardly hear about poetry’.9

Olivia Narney Singleton was born in 1842 in County Waterford of an Anglo-Irish family. Her grandson David rather romantically describes Narney (as she was always known) as coming from a line of ‘warm-hearted, passionate, lavish, open-handed libertines and duellists’.10 Her father had suffered a mental breakdown and as a result her mother brought Narney and her younger brother Edward to England to continue their education. Like many Anglo-Irish boys, Edward was destined for the army, where he eventually attained the rank of major. Mrs Singleton, the two children and their nurse Christina Chapple, set up house near Camden Square. Narney was a girl of considerable wit and vivaciousness, and she clearly charmed the twenty-four-year-old Richard Garnett, who, on the occasion of their engagement three years later, wrote to his brother William John extolling her virtues:

After that first dance Richard escorted Narney home. The front door was opened by Chapple, who, on closing it, turned to her young charge and exclaimed delightedly, ‘And is that himself, Miss Narney?’12

The relationship blossomed and on 11 April 1860 Richard proposed to Narney as they sat by the fire with her cat between them. ‘Puss, does your mistress love me?’ enquired the nervous suitor, to which the reply came, ‘Puss, she does.’13 Mrs Singleton, however, considered her daughter too young for any serious commitment and removed Narney to Geneva, where her brother was studying French and German. Eighteen months later mother and daughter returned to London to find Richard, undaunted, on the doorstep of some close friends enquiring as to their whereabouts. A second proposal this time met with maternal approval and the couple were married on 13 June 1863 at St Mark’s Church, Regent’s Park.

Richard and Narney rented a recently built four-storey brick house in St Edmund’s Terrace on the north-west corner of Regent’s Park, just across from London Zoo. Number 4 (it was later renumbered 3) faced fields and the West Middlesex waterworks. The Primrose Hill area in which it stood was popular with artists and literary figures, attracted by its relative tranquillity and the feeling that it was out of town. Ford Madox Brown, the Pre-Raphaelite painter, moved into 1 St Edmund’s Terrace in 1887. Mrs Singleton lived at St Edmund’s Terrace with Richard and Narney until her death in 1876, as did Chapple, who became Narney’s maid and nurse to her six surviving children. May, the eldest, was named after the month of her birth in 1864; Robert followed in March 1866 and just under two years later, on 5 January 1868, came Edward William. Olivia Rayne, always known as Olive, was born in 1871 and another daughter, Lucy, arrived in 1875. In 1877 Narney gave birth to her third son, Richard Copley. He rapidly developed tuberculosis and died at the age of eight months in February 1878. Arthur, the much loved baby of the family, was born in 1881. At the age of six he developed a severe speech impediment, which he never lost, but inspired deep and lasting affection in all who knew him. ‘All the Garnetts had a talent for friendship,’ his niece later wrote. ‘In Arthur it amounted to genius. He made and kept friends in every corner of the globe.’14

As it so happened, the temperamental traits of the Garnett children seemed to divide along lines of seniority. In a letter to John Galsworthy in which he sketches his family history, Edward dismisses his elder siblings, May and Robert, as ‘sensible, practical, ordinary’, but groups Olive, Lucy and Arthur altogether more approvingly under the headings ‘independent’ and ‘critical’.15 ‘I look on Robert as a very good fellow, honest & not unintelligent, but lacking in all those finer subtler shades of perception – which in my view constitute “good judgment”,’ Edward later elaborated to Galsworthy. ‘Robert looks on me as a most dangerous individual! Not to be relied on for one instant; well-meaning, but weak – with ability of a sort, but likely to plunge himself or others, any moment into hot water!’16 Edward was closest to Olive as a child and retained that affection into adulthood, even though, despite her brother’s urgings to the contrary, Olive became increasingly disinclined to challenge the conventionality that was so marked in pretty, pious May: ‘Why I feel so passionate about Olive in rare moments is that I understand she has eaten fate, and has not had the colour of life, and has not arrived at the many things that have come to me,’17 Edward once bemoaned. That impulse to challenge authority and custom may have been derived from his father’s fierce (if the word can be used in association with such an essentially benign character) unworldliness and his positive discouragement of what society might term ‘success’.

In some respects the Garnetts were quite a traditional Victorian family. Servants ensured domestic orderliness, and although Olive remembered there being ‘no discipline in the ordinary sense’18 a word from Richard at times of youthful over-exuberance produced ‘instant and continuous silence’. Most of the time, however, 4 St Edmund’s Terrace reverberated to the sound of heated arguments amongst the various siblings, with each disputant convinced he or she was in the right. Edward never lost that implacable confidence in his own opinion where literary matters were concerned – to the discomfort and occasional fury of many of his authors.

Every summer Narney would depart with her brood to seaside resorts such as Swanage or Southsea, where Richard would sometimes join them for the latter part of the holiday. Excursions to the nearby London Zoo were a regular feature of life at St Edmund’s Terrace and fondly recalled by Olive, although she would have been too young to remember one autumn night of destruction in the city.

At five o’clock on the morning of Friday 2 October 1874 a barge carrying five tons of gunpowder exploded under the bridge by the North Gate of Regent’s Park. The three barge crew and their horses were killed instantly and extensive damage was caused to property within the radius of a mile, including the animal houses at the zoo. Every window in 3 St Edmund’s Terrace was blown in, with the exception of those in Narney’s bedroom, but luckily none of the family was injured. The next morning the Garnett children were taken out by Chapple into the nut-strewn streets (a large quantity of Brazil nuts and almonds had been stored over the explosives) to view the devastation. The young Garnetts pocketed the spoils, oblivious to Chapple’s repeated warnings about shards of glass. All over the weekend crowds of sightseers flocked to the park: ‘the publicans and tobacconists would not be sorry to lose their windows on such terms every week,’19 The Times remarked wryly. So momentous was the event that in the evening the children were allowed to come down after Richard’s return from the Museum to listen as he read out accounts of the explosion from assorted newspapers.

Richard was a great reader of the press – he scoured the morning paper in the street as he walked to work, holding it out in front of him with one hand whilst clutching his ubiquitous umbrella and bag with the other – and he seems to have passed this enthusiasm on to Edward, who in October 1880 started the Cats Newspaper. This charming production announced itself as ‘A Newspaper for Cats and for promotion of their welfare – Motto – Cave Canem’, and declared itself to be ‘of Moderate Liberal Politics’. Each week various topical news stories would be spun from a feline angle, occasionally accompanied by delightful illustrations by Uncle William John. Thus in the first edition of 20 October 1880 the ‘Food’ column carries the following report:

News from Ireland features particularly prominently; this partly reflects the extensive coverage surrounding the Home Rule debate in the national press, but it is also an early indication of Edward’s lifelong interest in Ireland and his intense pride in his maternal Irish ancestry, evident in the edition of 5 November 1880:

The mature editor, who half a century later had a spat with Sean O’Faolain over what he considered to be the Irishman’s overly negative portrayal of Parnell in an unpublished play, would have found his own youthful misspelling a lot easier to excuse than those last couple of sentences.

In another article, on ‘Bad Literature’, the editor deplores the ‘weak trashy papers for boys’, with the honourable exceptions of the Boys’ Own Paper and the Union Jack. He then lays into the stories in the Boys’ World in tones not dissimilar to those he would adopt in reader’s reports for T. Fisher Unwin (the royal ‘we’ is already in evidence): ‘a blood thirsty tale, with no apparent plot … the tale is as badly written as it is absurd … we do not know who Timothy Giggle may be, but we do not think much of his literary powers.’22

Each edition of the Cats Newspaper must have cost no small effort to produce: the contents were extensive and included ‘Correspondence’, ‘Social Gleanings’ and amusing feline ‘Situations Vacant’. The last number appeared on 27 June 1881. Perhaps Edward decided to cease production then because he wanted a good couple of months’ holiday, for in September he was off to a new school.

There is no record of Edward’s education prior to his admittance to the City of London School. Robert had been to St Marylebone and All Souls Grammar School, at the corner of Cornwall Terrace and Regent’s Park, before graduating to the City of London School in September 1879, and Edward may have followed in his brother’s footsteps. At that time the school was housed in a ‘crowded, ill-ventilated and insanitary’23 building in Milk Street in the centre of the City of London; it would move to the Embankment in 1883. The headmaster, Dr Edwin Abbott, was a Shakespearean scholar and a passionate advocate of English literature; various Old Citizens left glowing testimonials of his inspirational teaching. However, Edward’s scholastic record was unremarkable: he was chiefly remembered by his contemporaries, including the future Manchester Guardian journalist C. E. Montague and the illustrator Arthur Rackham, for his spin bowling – ‘bowls fairly at times; poor bat; too loose and straggling in the field’24 was the verdict of the school’s cricket correspondent – and his sharp tongue. Montague later described Edward as ‘the greatest teaze in the School’.25 Three incidents remained in Edward’s memory long after he left the City of London: taking on and beating the school bully, being set upon by his fellows in the athletics team for not winning a race against another school, and having to give up first prize on another occasion in favour of the prize-giver’s son, who had finished second. The injustice of this last incident rankled for the rest of his life.

Edward’s academic career was uninspiring, but his father’s contribution to the furtherance of knowledge received official scholarly recognition in 1883 when Richard Garnett was made an Honorary Doctor of Laws by Edinburgh University. Dr Richard, as he was henceforth known – somewhat to his embarrassment – had been promoted to Superintendent of the British Museum Reading Room eight years earlier. The guest list for the ‘At Home’ evenings given by Narney on Thursdays featured many readers who had sought Richard’s assistance at the Museum and subsequently become close friends, including Coventry Patmore, George Meredith, Samuel Butler and the Pre-Raphaelite artist William Michael Rossetti. The social circle of the young Garnetts centred on the children and grandchildren of their parents’ friends. Rossetti’s daughters Helen and Olive became great pals of the more junior Garnetts, and Ford Madox Brown’s grandsons – the future novelist Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford)fn1 and his brother Oliver – were frequent visitors. Ford saw a great deal of the Garnett children while he was growing up and their friendship lasted well into adulthood. However, the relationship between the Garnett and Hueffer clans did not always run smoothly, as David Garnett recalls:

In all probability the Garnett children inherited their scorn for worldly success from Richard, who Ford always revered as a near-mystical fount of learning. In this he was not alone. Richard was a well-known and universally popular figure and had attracted a devoted following of ‘literary ladies’, including the children’s author Arabella Buckley, the German-born poet Mathilde Blind, whose brother had unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Bismarck, and a woman named Frederika Macdonald, whom Olive Garnett was convinced exerted a strong influence over the teenage Edward. Frederika was in her early forties at the time; she had lived abroad extensively and was educated at the Pensionnat Héger in Brussels, where Charlotte Brontë had taught and fallen in love with the proprietor. Frederika Macdonald’s husband John was a journalist on the London Daily News and, according to Olive, their fair-haired, blue-eyed daughter Katie became Edward’s first love. Frederika wrote several books, ranging from novels to studies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, of whose teachings she was an ardent disciple. In a letter to her nephew David, Olive maintains that Frederika Macdonald ‘imbued your father’s opening mind with a thoroughgoing Rousseauism: which added to a cult for Shelley & Godwin led to intellectual indiscipline as a moral duty’.27

It was at this stage, Olive believed, that the temperamental differences between Edward and his two elder siblings became apparent and lasting. Robert had come under an opposing influence through his visits to his cousins, the Cumberlands, and he rapidly embarked on a steady career in the law, eventually becoming a partner in the solicitors’ firm of Darley & Cumberland. However, when the seventeen-year-old Edward Garnett left the City of London School in July 1885 he had no such prospects on the horizon. In fact, he had nothing in view at all; both Edward and his father seemed blissfully unconcerned about his future. If one of Dr Richard’s ‘literary ladies’ was culpable of fostering this disregard, then it was thanks to another that Edward stumbled onto his life’s path.

2
Joining Unwin

Clementina Black was in her late twenties when she moved from the family home in Brighton, where she had been teaching and looking after her younger siblings, to join her sister Emma in London. For a brief time there were three Black sisters living at 26 Albany Street, near Regent’s Park, when in 1882 eighteen-year-old Grace, the penultimate of the eight Black children, arrived in the capital to study art. Emma left to marry the Rev. James Dean Keriman Mahomed in September 1883, but less than a year later another Black sister, Constance Clara, came up to London from Cambridge, where she had spent a term lecturing in Classics at Newnham College, from which she had very recently graduated. Constance, then aged twenty-three, lodged in a room at Wrights Lane in Kensington, close to the home of Robert Owen White, a wealthy cement manufacturer whose daughters she was teaching. Shy and studious, Constance was fortunate to find that her sisters had already formed a network of friends eager to welcome her into their midst.

Clementina and Grace were frequent visitors to the British Museum: Clementina spent hours researching the historical novels she was writing, while Grace was often to be found there studying the Museum’s art. The girls soon struck up a friendship with Richard Garnett and in the winter of 1885 or 18861 he asked Clementina to bring Constance over for Sunday tea at St Edmund’s Terrace. Constance had already met May and Robert, but it was her initial encounter with Edward on that Sunday that remained sharply etched on her memory more than forty years later:

The lanky eighteen-year-old was also noticeably struck, and lingered in the drawing room for the duration of the visit, a fact that did not pass unobserved: ‘“Edward hates visitors & always has tea in Chapple’s room,” the Black sisters were told.’3 Soon afterwards Edward appeared at Constance’s and Grace’s new lodgings in Campden Hill, ostensibly with a message from his sister May. He stayed for hours, and afterwards the fair-haired, very beautiful Grace remarked to Constance, ‘You say nobody looks at you when I am by, but there is someone with no eyes for anyone but you.’4

It is not difficult to understand why Edward was smitten. Like Grace, Constance was blue-eyed, fair-haired and ‘tremendously attractive when happy’.5 While Grace was the beauty of the family, Constance would probably have taken the prize for brains. She had won a scholarship to Newnham College and emerged with First Class Honours in the Classical Tripos. Since her arrival in London she had become interested in the newly formed Fabian Society and attended their meetings with George Bernard Shaw, whom she had met at ‘The Club’, to which she had been introduced by Clementina. Members of ‘The Club’ (founded in 1880 as The Men and Women’s Club) met fortnightly; the meetings alternated between ‘discussion’, with various speakers often giving a paper, and ‘social intercourse’, usually musical evenings. This alternation between the convivial and the cerebral would have suited Constance, whose own moods were subject to similar oscillations. ‘Connie had two sides to her character,’ according to a close friend, ‘[either] she was very gay, almost frivolous & fond of dress, or else completely puritanical, which some days would come up so that there would be nothing else.’6 That streak of austerity may have been inherited from her father David Black, a Brighton solicitor who exerted absolute authority over his children, all of whom were afraid of him. Constance attributed her ‘frivolous’ side to her maternal grandmother Lucy Patten, whose daughter Clara married David Black in 1849.

Constance was born on 19 December 1861, the sixth of a family of three boys and five girls. Her mother died when Constance was thirteen, by which time her father had been struck down by an illness that permanently deprived him of the use of his legs. Constance was devastated by Clara’s death, and from thenceforth rejected religion. Life in the Black household without Clara became almost unremittingly depressing and Constance endured long periods of great unhappiness. The scholarship to Newnham College offered the seventeen-year-old Constance a tantalising chance of escape. She was the youngest girl in the college, but despite her extreme shyness and a chronic lack of money Constance made the most of the opportunities Cambridge offered her. She particularly revelled in the beauty of the buildings, and when she came to London began to gain a much stronger appreciation of literature and music, too. The narrow, constricted life of Brighton was a thing of the past, and although Constance was not enamoured of teaching, she was enjoying her independence in London and the assorted social, political and cultural activities opening up to her. The atmosphere and company of the St Edmund’s Terrace drawing room that Sunday afternoon surely drew out the convivial side of her nature. The teenage Edward was entranced by this attractive, erudite, older woman who shared many of the Garnetts’ intellectual interests. For her part, Constance found the roguish, witty, curly-headed boy a breath of fresh air; a delightful antidote to the oppressive, gloomy shadows that had dominated so much of her life.

That summer the three eldest Garnett children, together with the three youngest Black girls – Constance, Grace and Katie – as well as a young man called Beck, went for a walking tour of Sussex. Robert Garnett paired up with Katie, with whom he was at that time besotted; May attached herself to Beck, while Constance walked with Edward, leaving Grace to wander alone. The weather was beautiful, the countryside lovely and as Constance rather coyly phrased it in her memoir at the end of the five days ‘Edward and I were great friends’.7 Her original, but subsequently erased, comment – ‘we were on much closer terms of friend[ship]’ – may be more revealing.

The romance continued when the pair returned to London. Constance found Edward to be ‘the most charming companion, amusing, fresh, original’.8 They went for long rides on the tops of omnibuses together and in the evenings Constance persuaded Edward to accompany her to meetings of the Fabians and the Kelmscott House socialists. George Bernard Shaw, who once told David Garnett that he would have married Constance had his financial circumstances been better, enquired as to the identity of the ‘pretty young man’ who was now accompanying her to these meetings. Constance replied that he was ‘a boy whose education I was undertaking’.9 The boy, however, proved a somewhat recalcitrant pupil where political matters were concerned and refused to take subjects such as land nationalisation with anything like the seriousness Constance desired. He was far happier shifting furniture and decorating Constance’s and Grace’s new flat in Fitzroy Street (bedbugs had rapidly driven them out of Campden Hill) or whiling away the hours lounging with a book on the hearthrug in front of the fire at St Edmund’s Terrace.

Edward’s increasingly regular presence at 7 Fitzroy Street did not go unnoticed. According to Constance, Clementina became worried at her younger sister’s growing absorption in Edward Garnett and felt it her duty to try and check it, despite her reluctance to interfere in affairs of the heart. May Garnett, however, had no such scruples, as Constance later recalled:

Richard Garnett, however, seemed quite unconcerned about the liaison between Constance and Edward – ‘Any sensible father desires nothing better for a young man than a connection with an intelligent woman a little older,’11 reasoned Constance – or about his son’s nonchalant disregard for his own future. Edward had bestirred himself sufficiently to take evening classes in shorthand, but when Richard made a lukewarm suggestion that he might get a job on the Manchester Guardian, Edward promptly refused to leave Constance and go north to Manchester, and that was the end of the matter. However, May’s casting of Edward in the same feckless mould as Uncle William John did have a galvanising effect: ‘If it were true that [Edward] would never be self-supporting, obviously somebody would have to look after him,’ reflected Constance, ‘& so why not I?’12 That Richard finally arranged for Edward to enter the office of the publisher T. Fisher Unwin as a packer of books may owe more than a little to Constance’s concern and subsequent promptings.

Edward’s entry into the world of work was in every sense belated, as Constance later recalled:

It soon became apparent that the shapely fingers of Unwin’s new employee, who joined the payroll in 1887 on 10/- a week, were hopelessly inept at packing books and tying parcels, and he rapidly slipped into the position of ‘publisher’s reader’, which, as Constance rightly declared, was ‘of all callings the one he was fitted for by character, tastes & habits’.14

The novelist Frank Swinnerton, who himself read for Chatto & Windus, once described his occupation as ‘harmless necessary drudgery’.15 Reading piles of manuscripts, solicited and otherwise, could be extremely tedious, but the number of well-known literary figures engaged in the task suggests the job was not entirely devoid of attractions. For novelists like George Meredith and John Buchan, who at different times in their careers read for Chapman & Hall and John Lane respectively, being a reader offered the opportunity to earn an income without the encumbrance of an inflexible office routine. This arrangement potentially left some time for other literary activities, although many readers found they had their work cut out just keeping up with the unceasing flow of manuscripts. As his tardy debut at Unwin’s suggests, rigid working hours were anathema to Edward, who like most readers took manuscripts home and wrote his reports there, only going into the office to return them, collect the next batch and attend meetings in which decisions were taken on what to publish. Historically, the publisher’s reader had received little recognition, remaining at best ‘invisible behind his employer’s arras’16 or regarded more darkly as ‘the author’s unknown, unsuspected enemy, work[ing] to the sure discomfiture of all original ability’.17 This hostility is reflected in Marie Corelli’s 1895 novel The Sorrows of Satan in which an aspiring author castigates a publisher, telling him ‘I know the kind of people who “read” for you – the gaunt unlovable spinster of 50 – the dyspeptic bookworm who is a “literary failure” and can find nothing else to do but scrawl growling comments on the manuscript of promising work’.18 Happily, by the time Edward joined Unwin the qualities essential in a good reader were gradually being acknowledged. Frank Swinnerton explains:

Unwin was soon to find out that young Garnett had not the slightest doubt where his allegiance lay: literature always came first, his employer a very distant second.

Edward’s youth was matched by that of the firm he now worked for. Thomas Fisher Unwin had set up on his own account only five years earlier in 1882. His father Jacob, a printer, began a publishing dynasty: Edward Unwin, a son of Jacob’s first marriage, became the father of Sir Stanley Unwin, one of the most illustrious publishers of his generation. Stanley’s nephew Philip, who eventually joined his uncle on the board of Allen & Unwin, was the grandson of Jacob’s eldest son George. Thomas Fisher, the son of Jacob’s second marriage, was seven years old when his father died. He entered publishing as an apprentice to Jackson, Walford and Hodder, the predecessors of Hodder & Stoughton, where he learnt every aspect of the trade and eventually became one of their leading travellers. His trips to the Continent, and penchant for Paris in particular, established his reputation within the Unwin clan as a man of ‘Continental sophistication and an international outlook’.20 That internationalism would have appealed to Edward Garnett, but very little else did. He was not alone in finding ‘TFU’ (as T. Fisher Unwin was always known) chilly, humourless and mercenary. According to A. D. Marks, who became a director of the firm, Unwin ‘could never understand how he antagonised people yet he was doing it all the time’,21 while Philip Unwin, who worked in the firm for a time, described his great uncle as ‘tiresome, obstinate and capricious’ in the office. Philip had no doubt that Unwin’s ‘difficulty in personal relations was the tragedy of [his] business life’.22 Tall and rigidly upright, with a large head, very blue eyes and a beak-like nose flattened at the tip, Unwin had the disconcerting habit of wandering round the office tapping every desk he passed with a long pencil, singing ‘yes’ in a deep voice, immediately repeating it an octave higher until he came to a halt at the desk of some unfortunate, at which point he would lean over and mutter rapidly, ‘Anything for me?’23

Unwin was not the only publisher to become established during the 1880s and 1890s. Heinemann, John Lane, Hutchinson and Dent were just some of the famous names who appeared during these decades, which saw considerable expansion and mounting competition in the publishing world. The demise of the three-volume novel constituted one of the biggest challenges for publishers and indeed for authors. Previously, both groups had had to bear in mind the tastes and sensibilities of the readers of the circulating libraries, which dominated the market. Chief of these was Mudie’s Select Library (‘Select’ being the operative word – anything considered even remotely risqué was immediately banned) and to a lesser extent the bookseller and newsagent W. H. Smith. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, many more three-volume novels were being written, but demand for them in libraries was often short-lived, so that surplus stock was becoming a real problem. Often publishers had to decide whether to rush out a cheap, one-volume reprint based on the price libraries charged for second-hand copies of their three-deckers. The increase in the number of free public libraries, the cheap reprints and a growing demand for the latest fiction was making the three-volume novel uneconomic. In June 1894 Mudie’s and W. H. Smith’s announced that from the beginning of 1895 they would pay only 4/- per volume for novels; when the usual trade discount was applied this meant a price of 3/6 – a third of the list price of 10/6. They also demanded that no cheap reprints be issued until a year after a book’s initial publication. Such was their power that this ultimatum sounded the death knell for the three-volume novel. The new single volumes were priced at 6/-, which put them within the financial reach of a far greater number of readers, who would previously have had to shell out 31/6 for a three-decker novel. Recently established, enterprising firms like T. Fisher Unwin saw an opportunity to take advantage of this change.

Some of the books Unwin published reflected his own interests: mountaineering, liberalism, free trade and the protection of minorities against persecution, but he was also willing to take a chance on young, unknown and often previously unpublished writers. His motives were far from altruistic and there undoubtedly was a mean streak in Unwin’s dealings with authors (which frequently resulted in conflict with Edward, his new ‘reader’). Yet as Stanley and Philip Unwin point out, TFU’s willingness to invest in unproven writers initially lost the firm money. Certainly Unwin’s profits at the turn of the century, when his list included such future luminaries as Conrad, Galsworthy and W. B. Yeats, were meagre.

Although Edward found Unwin at best uncongenial and their relationship was frequently tense, in many ways he could not have found a better place to launch his career. The discovery of a writer was always the greatest pleasure of Edward’s professional life – David Garnett recalls that on such occasions his father was ‘in the common phrase like a cat with kittens’24 – and the job at a new, go-ahead firm eager to recruit fresh blood offered Edward a great opportunity to discover and exercise his flair for literary talent spotting. This was not the sole compensation for the irritations that seemed inevitably to beset those in Unwin’s office: the publisher was also ready to take a punt on employees with literary aspirations, and in 1888 TFU produced Edward’s first foray into authorship, a novel entitled The Paradox Club.

Reading the book now it is difficult not to conclude that Unwin must have been in an unusually generous mood when he agreed to publish it. The main protagonists are Patrick Weld, a young Irishman who shares several traits with his creator, and Nina Lindon, who, as Edward’s grandson Richard observes, ‘is Constance, but so idealised that were it not that the frontispiece, captioned “Nina Lindon” is clearly a drawing of Constance, one could hardly be certain of the identification’.2526publisher,27The Paradox ClubAcademyThe Paradox Club28