33 - Book reviewing

Summary

In February 1749 the narrator of Tom Jones blames love of fame for the fact that ‘some Books like Quacks impose on the World by promising Wonders; while others turn Beaus, and trust all their Merits to a gilded Outside’. Four months later, Ralph Griffiths advertised the first number of his Monthly Review as ‘Giving an Account, with proper Abstracts, of the new Books, Pamphlets, &c. as they come out.’ Griffiths’s description of the purpose and content of the new journal was initially modest, although it was to become more complex and comprehensive, claiming for reviewing a central place in the literary world that it has never entirely lost. Although a great deal of attention has been given to the nineteenth-century development of the review journal – often as if the earlier period did not exist, or as if, at least, it was only in the nineteenth century that reviewing learned to walk upright – it was in the eighteenth century that the business of criticism and its place in the history of the book was established.

The Monthly Review’s decisions brought the critical enterprise from the fringes into the commercial centre of bookselling and thus established the grounds for later imitators – and, eventually, the jumping-off point for nineteenth-century reviewers and editors to change direction again. The rapid and practical processes by which the early reviews defined their role and moved into the book marketplace are the subject of this chapter. What were the reviews doing? Why were they there? How were they to sell their function and their judgements to the public? Even at the beginning it soon became clear that the goal of the review journal might be at variance with the booksellers’ aim of selling books with as little interference as possible. The Reviews certainly liked to claim their independence – often ignoring their bookseller connections and emphasizing the reviewers’ supposed disinterested role in serving the public by detecting the literary quacks and sorting out the good books from the bad – but the point was challenged early and justifiably in practice, even if the theory of the reviewers’ purpose was almost instantaneously accepted.