6 - From Manchester to Moscow: Essays on Music, 1900–1920

Summary

NEITHER fame nor fortune would come Newman's way if he published solely in the freethought press. The demise, reinvention and ultimate failure of the National Reformer, followed in quick succession by the shortlived Free Review, indicated a limited readership for freethought journals, and Dobell's loss-making ventures on books such as Gluck and the Opera were not sustainable. To survive as a writer, Newman had to find a more stable and mainstream avenue of publication.

Newman's foray into the mainstream press occurred in 1895 (the same year in which Gluck and the Opera was published) with an essay on Flaubert in the December issue of the Fortnightly Review, a liberal periodical of arts and letters. Although Newman wrote for multiple publications throughout his career, 1900 to 1920 was a particularly gruelling period because he juggled an extremely heavy workload. In 1905, for example, he issued a collection of his previously published essays, Musical Studies, and between 1904 and 1920 wrote seven books and issued a further collection of his own essays. Journals and newspapers for which he wrote included, but were not limited to, the Speaker (1901–1906), Weekly Critical Review (1903–1904), Manchester Guardian (1905–1906), Birmingham Daily Post (1906–1919), Musical Times (1910–1923), New Witness (1915–1918) and the London Observer (1918–1920). By anyone's standard, Newman was extremely busy. A consequence of all this industry, however, is that Newman covered the same material in many articles in order to buy time, though he rarely recycled an article in full.

The topics on which Newman wrote varied, as did his tone and style of writing, depending upon the publication and audience for which his work was pitched. For example, in the Speaker, a liberal weekly founded in London in 1890 (changing its name to the Nation in 1907), Newman wrote in a formal tone unaffected by the belligerence and wit evident in some of his work in the provincial press. The same is true for Newman's articles in the Weekly Critical Review, a French–English arts journal published in Paris in 1903–4 as a literary expression of the entente cordiale that sought scholarly essays from leading French and English critics.