Men and Women of Letters

 What is, or was, a man or woman of letters? Does the phrase still have any meaning or value? These questions have been on my mind recently because I have been re-reading two biographies by my friend of more than fifty years, John Smart: Tarantula’s Web, John Hayward, T.S. Eliot and their Circle (Michael Russell, 2012) and Shores of Paradise, The Life of Sir John Squire: The Last man of Letters (Matador, 2021) Each book is about someone who in his day was certainly thought of as ‘a man of letters’; one of them has those words on his gravestone. But what does the phrase really signify? Who qualifies? Who doesn’t?

Originally, to be ‘a man of letters’ just meant you were literate. However, by the mid-eighteenth century it could be applied to – and adopted by – people such as Dr. Samuel Johnson, whose public persona was as a writer whose range included fiction, poetry, literary criticism (Preface to Shakespeare, 1765, in particular), travel writing, and of course lexicography. In an age in which the essay as a literary form was taken seriously, he was widely admired for the essays he published in his twice-weekly newsletter, The Rambler. He gave his readers to understand that literature could not only give pleasure but could also enhance one’s moral, intellectual and imaginative understanding of life. He was a writer who used his standing as an author and critic to advocate for, and comment on, literature as something essential for society and the individual.   

By the nineteenth century, ‘man of letters’ had become a widely recognised term, but with two not quite overlapping meanings. First, it was used to identify people who had established reputations particularly through literary journalism and publications aimed at a wider, educated but not academic audience. Second, and largely through a series of literary biographies launched in 1878 called simply English Men of Letters, it came to refer to any prominent writer within a range of fields – history, philosophy, poetry and fiction – ranging from Chaucer to Thackeray but including (at first) only one woman, George Eliot. 

The author of the George Eliot biography was Sir Leslie Stephen, who had contributed the opening book in the series, appropriately on Samuel Johnson. Stephen was a quintessentially Victorian man of letters and the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, to which he personally contributed over 370 biographical essays. To most people today, however, he is best remembered as the father of the artist Vanessa Bell and her sister, the writer Virginia Woolf. During the twentieth century, in addition to her formidable achievements as a novelist, Woolf championed the literary essay as collected, for instance, in her books The Common Reader (first and second series: 1925,1932).  A woman of letters? Without a doubt.

Virginia Woolf’s phrase, ‘common reader’, is significant. She addressed all those who had in common an interest in literature. Herself denied a university education by her father,  Woolf wrote for an audience outside the walls of the universities: an audience of people who enjoyed reading for pleasure but who took seriously books and what writers of the past and present had to say; these were people who recognised that literature mattered to them and who believed that literature matters, full stop. You did not have to have a degree in English Literature to qualify; in fact it might disqualify you.

You don’t hear the phrase ‘man of letters’ much these days and this is not just because of its gendered connotation. (Virginia Woolf dealt with that, forensically and passionately, in A Room of One’s Own.) As the twentieth century progressed, the term ‘man of letters’ suffered  because, by contrast with the more serious-sounding ‘literature’, the very word ‘letters’ seemed to imply some frivolous, mannered, dilettante; hence, ‘man of letters’ came to identify writers (essayists especially) tainted by association with the outdated tradition of ‘belles-lettres’.  How easily then do the subjects of the two biographies I have been re-reading wear the mantle of man of letters? JC Squire (1884-1958, familiarly known as Jack Squire) and John Hayward (1905-1965) were both clubbable figures easily identified in the London literary world. Both considered themselves to be men of letters (it was Hayward whose gravestone describes him thus) but they were not friends with each other and their spheres of influence were polar opposites. The one word on Squire’s gravestone was ‘Poet’. 

Squire had risen to prominence both as a poet and as a reviewer and journalist for The New Age and the New Statesman before and during the First World War. As a poet, he was always identified as a contributor to the Georgian Poetry anthologies; his greatest achievement as a man of letters was to found and edit the London Mercury, which became in the entre deux guerres period of the twenties and thirties a very successful and influential journal. He was knighted for his services to literature. The latter years of Squire’s life, frankly but sympathetically described in John Smart’s biography of him, make sad reading, but he was admired by many loyal friends. John Betjeman was one such; indeed, in several respects (as Smart suggests) he can be seen as Squire’s successor. Both men were clearly antagonistic towards, and despised by, the literary avantgarde; each of them had a strong and abiding affection for England and traditional English life and culture. Both were prominent conservationists (Squire had led a successful and very public campaign to ensure the landscape around that Stonehenge would be properly preserved and protected) and each of them embraced the new media of their day. Squire was an early and popular voice on the radio – he was the first person to provide live commentary on the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race – while Betjeman became famous for his idiosyncratic television documentaries. Embracing the opportunities offered by the new mass media greatly increased the public appeal of both Sir Jack and Sir John as writers.

The trajectory of John Hayward’s life as a man of letters was rather different. He knew from an early date exactly what he wanted to be: writing at the start of the Second World War, he explained, ‘When I was a little boy I used to play at being a man of letters. This engrossing game of make-believe kept me quiet for years on end.’ From childhood onwards he was severely handicapped by muscular dystrophy, but he never let this embitter him, unless his reputation for having a biting satirical wit betrayed his frustration at a life lived mainly in a wheelchair. By the time he left school (Gresham’s, where as editor of the school magazine, he was the first person to publish the poems of his younger contemporary, WH Auden) he was already being taken seriously as a scholarly editor of seventeenth and eighteenth century poets. He was commissioned by Nonesuch Press to edit the poems of Lord Rochester even before he had gone up to King’s College, Cambridge. While still an undergraduate he was being described as ‘charming, and brilliant and the most erudite bibliomane in King’s bar none.’ His Nonesuch edition of the poetry and selected prose of John Donne sealed his reputation as an editor; by the end of the Thirties,  when he was still only 35, his wide circle of Bloomsbury and Cambridge contacts and friends (of whom TS Eliot was to become the most significant) ensured he was well known both in Britain and abroad as an important reviewer and commentator on the London literary scene . 

Poetry editions and anthologies added further to Hayward’s visibility and reputation. From 1934-1938 he was chief London editor of the New York Sun, for which he wrote a regular column called ‘London Letter’. Full of literary news and gossip, as well as reviews of books, plays and exhibitions, this column had the breadth and informality that today one might associate with a blog or a podcast. After the war much of his literary attention was focused on editing a new journal, The Book Collector. For this, too, he wrote a regular column that became essential reading for anyone interested in the world of books, book collecting and literary life. He himself by this time was recognised as one of the most important authorities both on the history of the printed book and on the great private collections of books held in Britain but increasingly dispersed and sold (often to American universities) in the postwar period. Hayward and Squire were very different characters and John Smart places them firmly in the centre of their different London circles: Hayward’s (his spider’s web – ‘Tarantula’ was his nickname) the world of The Criterion, Faber & Faber and the salon of Lady Ottoline Morrell; Squire’s (the Squirarchy) the world of Edward Marsh, Harold Monro and the Georgian Poetry anthologies, of cricket and of his own magazine, The London Mercury. 

Coming back to both these biographies, as I have been doing ever since I learned with distress last summer that John Smart had died, has made me realise – more clearly than before – how valuable these two books are. Taken together, they map the landscapes of literary London in the first half of the twentieth century in a way that has not been done by anyone else. They reveal too, at once critically and sympathetically, just how deeply both Squire and Hayward cared about literature past and present, about reading and about the contribution of literature to the health of society. These, I am sure, are essential characteristics of men and women of letters writing at any time and in any country. Men and women of letters still exist (of course they do) and their participation in debates about literature and their encouragement of reading is as important as ever; these days, however, they simply travel under a different passport.

Lives of writers, and of their biographers, matter too. Re-reading both Tarantula’s Web and Shores of Paradise I have heard John’s voice alongside the voices of Hayward and Squire, whom he brought to life in a way many historians and biographers never quite manage with their subjects. John’s research was formidable, his knowledge of English poetry ditto, but his writing was always accessible and never pedantic. Sometimes (especially in his writing about Squire) I have heard John chuckling, too; his quiet amusement – his wry response to the vicissitudes of life and to the foibles of students, colleagues or friends –always at hand. He loved his family and his home, his books and his wine; he enjoyed company and was an excellent host but he loved, too, simply to be out walking with his dogs or watching birdlife on the Norfolk marshes. He was one of the least self-important people I have ever known, and I would say of John Smart that he was the kind of teacher whom alumni remember with affection and gratitude. As indeed do I. More than ever now, I admire him as the teacher and writer I knew for over fifty years – we met in Durham on the same PGCEd course in 1971 – and I shall always remember our friendship as one of the most important of my life.

In Tarantula’s Web, I came across this in the Acknowledgements: ‘Adrian Barlow is the godfather of this book. He first gave me the idea of writing about John Hayward and using the papers at King’s that had been embargoed until 2000.’  And after that book was published, John rang me about a possible subject for his next biography. ‘I’m thinking of JC Squire – what do you think? he asked, slightly nervous when he heard me burst out laughing. 'I think it’s an excellent idea,’ I replied, ‘especially as at this very moment my feet are resting on an almost complete set of The London Mercury someone has just bequeathed to me. Would you like them?’ John generously mentioned this too in the Acknowledgements of Shores of Paradise. I cannot adequately express how glad I am that our friendship led to the writing of two such books.

© Adrian Barlow, 2025

Illustrations: (i) the two books by John Smart under discussion; (ii) the title page of Virginia Woolf’s book, The Common Reader (second series). The Epigraph reads: “... I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be generally decided all claim to poetical honours.” Dr. Johnson, Life of Gray; (iii) Sir John Squire; The Book Collector - the yellow-covered copy is Volume 1, No. 1; (iv) John Smart’s biography of John Hayward, Tarantula’s Web.

I have also written about John Smart in two previous posts:

Tarantula: John Hayward, Man of Letters

At the Biographers’ Club Prize Dinner

Solomon Eagle: re-reading Defoe in the time of Coronavirus

In which I resolve to spend this period of enforced isolation writing letters by hand, re-reading Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and re-starting my blog.

You’d think that self-isolation and social distancing offer plenty of opportunities for reading and writing. And so, of course, they do. I have made a list of the friends and others to whom I owe long-overdue letters, and have even made a start at writing them, by hand and using a fountain pen. The last study day I conducted before such events were proscribed was on Seamus Heaney; my audience of students (people, like me, at risk from Covid-19 by virtue of our age) especially enjoyed his poem The Conway Stewart with its loving description of the ‘Three gold bands in the clip-on screw-top’ and the ‘spatulate, thin / Pump-action lever’ in the pen’s ‘mottled barrel’. The poem recalls how Heaney’s parents bought him a fountain pen to take to boarding school, the pen with which he would write his first letter home –

     my longhand

‘Dear’

To them, next day.

No poet I have ever come across has written more movingly about the life of a bewildered child at boarding school.

I have made a list of the books I want to read or reread, starting with Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722). It isn’t a journal at all: he himself was only six when the Great Plague devastated the population of London:

1665 - No-one left alive

1666 - London burnt to fiddlesticks

(as I learned in my first term at my own boarding school). Defoe’s first-person narrator claims to have reconstructed his ‘journal’ from notes he made at the time in his ‘memorandums’, together with extracts from oral accounts, public documents, official records and other sources, but really it is as much a work of fiction – an event ‘witnessed’ by a man who never existed – as Peter Ackroyd’s 1985 novel of the Plague and its aftermath, Hawksmoor. Still, Defoe’s account resonates strongly: it is all about self-isolating, social distancing – people walking down the centre of the Whitechapel Road to avoid getting too close to those standing on the pavements – and the difficulties of shopping:

People used all possible precaution. When any one bought a joint of meat in the market they would not take it off the butcher’s hand, but took it off the hooks themselves. On the other hand, the butcher would not touch the money, but have it put into a pot full of vinegar, which he kept for that purpose. The buyer carried always small money to make up any odd sum, that they might take no change. (p.88)

The strange ways in which Londoners started to behave during the Plague, and Defoe’s comments about them: the book is worth reading for these alone. The Guardian Review used to run a quirky weekly column, Ten of the Best….’ and Solomon Eagle topped the list of ‘Ten of the Best Religious Zealots in Literature’, even though he gets only a glancing mention by Defoe:

I suppose the world has heard of the famous Solomon Eagle, an enthusiast. He, though not affected at all but in his head, went about denouncing of judgement upon the city in a frightful manner, sometimes quite naked, and with a pan of burning charcoal on his head. What he said, or pretended, indeed I could not learn. (p.116)

By one of those odd coincidences that gladden the heart, I discovered on the very day I read about him in Defoe, that ‘Solomon Eagle’ was the pen name adopted by the poet and literary editor JC Squire, when he was book reviewer for The New Statesman before and during the First World War. In his heyday, Squire was possibly the most influential bookman in London: among his greatest claims to fame, he founded and edited the new London Mercury from 1919 to 1934. Although he fell spectacularly out of favour with writers such as TS Eliot and Virginia Woolf, and out of fashion altogether by the 1940s, he was a formidable, fascinating figure who is today all but forgotten. So it’s good to report that the writer John Smart, a specialist on London literary life (his biography of John Hayward is a key work on the subject) is completing a biography of Squire. A reassessment of this contradictory and complicated man is certainly overdue.

What I most want to do during these weeks of enforced inactivity is not only to read more and to write more letters, however. I want to return to writing this blog, which I began in August 2011 and which stuttered to a halt after 113 posts in 2018. The stutter developed not because I had grown tired of blogging, but because I was focusing more and more on writing about stained glass; eventually the effort of researching and completing two books* on that subject absorbed all my energy. After the second one was published early last year, I tried a few times to start again but struggled to produce even a stutter. Meanwhile, writing and speaking about stained glass have continued to take up much of my time.

Now, though, seems the moment to try again, always remembering Beaumarchais’ admonition: ‘La difficulté de réussir ne fait qu’ajouter à la nécessité d’entreprendre’  (The difficulty of succeeding only adds to the necessity of undertaking). As before, I shall aim to range across books, writers and readers, with occasional digressions onto people and places, even stained glass perhaps. Already I think I know one book I shall be writing about soon: Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting, just published and very well reviewed. I have only started to read it; but I’ve also skimmed through the bibliography at the back. To my astonishment, Imagism and After: a Study of the Poetry of Richard Aldington, is listed there – my MA thesis, deposited in Durham University Library in 1975 where, I had always assumed, it had lain unread and gathering dust ever since. Evidently not, but you’ll have to wait until I have read and written about this book centred on Mecklenburgh Square, on the edge of Bloomsbury, to learn why not.

Adrian Barlow

27 March 2020

* Kempe: the Life, Art and Legacy of Charles Eamer Kempe (2018)

   Espying Heaven: the Stained Glass of Charles Eamer Kempe and his Artists (2019)

Illustrations: 

(i) 'Solomon Eagle’ drawing by EM Ward (1848); Wellcome Institute, reproduced under Creative Commons licence. 

(ii) The London Mercury: cover. This journal was cherished as much for the quality of its typography and illustrations as for its content.

Counting to a Hundred: ‘Let it Go!'

This is my hundredth post since 16^th August  2011. For two years before that, while still working in Cambridge, I wrote a blog called World and Time, which began life as a way of bringing Madingley Hall’s programme of courses to the notice of a wider audience. I’m not sure it was particularly successful in this, but keeping a blog became for me a way of reflecting on how my interests in literature and teaching, Cambridge and Venice, architecture and stained glass have helped to shape the life I lead now. In my introductory post I wrote the following:

'Who am I writing this blog for? For my students past and present; all those who have taught me more than I have taught them, and with whom I have had great pleasure talking about why writing matters and reading matters just as much; for students I have yet to meet; for friends and colleagues; for fellow teachers of English; for anyone interested in what I have to say, even if (particularly if) they don’t agree with me; for myself – on the ‘how do I know what I think till I hear what I’ve said?’ principle.'

When I retired from Cambridge, I wanted to stay in touch with these same students, colleagues and friends – some of whom had been rash enough to ask me to keep writing. So I called my new blog  (the first post of which was published on the same day as my last post for World and Time) simply Adrian Barlow’s Blog, in the hope that people would find it easy to track down if they wanted to. So it has proved, and the joy of blogging for the past four years has been hugely enhanced by the number of new friends I have made, and old friends with whom I have reconnected. I have been amazed by the popularity of my blog: it’s currently receiving well over 100 visitors a day: not exactly ‘going viral’, I admit, but readers come not just from the UK but from the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and more recently from Russia too. This has led to the only conscious change in the way I have written: at the outset I assumed all my readers would, broadly speaking, have the same frames of reference that I have; more recently I have tried (unobtrusively, I hope) to give a bit more context when introducing people, places, books etc., that may not be familiar to all.

I had written about blogs before I started to write my own. In my book World and Time: Teaching Literature in Context (C.U.P. 2009), I included a chapter entitled ‘Essays and blogs: Woolf, Carter and Beard’, in which I tried to find links between the way three writers I admire - Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter and Mary Beard - address their readers. ‘The blog,’ I wrote,

… is a phenomenon already shifting our perception of how ideas, opinions and prejudices can be shared and expressed in print – even if in cyberprint. Curiously, it has led to a revival in the art of the conversational essay: everyone who writes a blog tries, consciously or otherwise, to shape their prose in such a way as to get across effectively what they want to say and, in doing so, to give an impression of themselves as someone participating in a conversation.

My childhood introduction to the art of the conversational essay was Charles Lamb’s ‘Dissertation upon Roast Pork’, and I have been a fan of Lamb’s work ever since. It pleases me very much that a piece written for World and Time in 2010, ‘Charles Lamb and Cambridge’, led to an invitation to give a lecture (‘Lamb and Cambridge: Cambridge and Lamb’) to the Charles Lamb Society in London earlier this year. I’m pleased, too, that going to London to deliver this lecture prompted me to compose one of the posts  I am most pleased to have written: an impromptu meditation on London, Lamb, and the poetry and people to be found in Queen Square. But before I paused in that secluded square on my way to give the lecture, I had no idea that before nightfall I’d have written ‘In London, with Charles Lamb’.

Later in my chapter on essays and blogs, I reflected on the significance of the term ‘post’:

You post a blog. And this suggests two things: not only sending it by mail as if it were a letter that someone would open and read at the other end, but also pasting it on a wall like a poster so that any casual passer-by can read it [….] Posters are general, aimed at a wide audience who may or may not take any notice.

It is one of the pleasures of blogging to discover that people have taken notice, and have sometimes been interested, moved or irritated sufficiently by something I have written to post a reply, email or write directly. You get far more feedback to a blog than to a book, in my experience. I treasure a message of thanks sent by someone working in the Janitor’s Department of Alcatraz. But my thanks to all who have ever got in touch after reading my blog.

This, however, will be my last post. 100 not out seems a good score with which to retire, if you’ll forgive the cricketing metaphor. Over the past four years, a few pieces have written themselves at a single sitting, but I find I’m spending longer planning, writing and editing them now, for each one has to be just 1000 words. I still enjoy this, greatly, but I don’t want my posts seeming laboured to those who kindly read them. Besides, the book I’m now writing - Kempe: Life and Legacy - presses insistently. Some friends have suggested I publish a collection from my blog. I’ve been tempted; I even chose a title, Short Measures. But blogs, I have concluded, are best left in their native element, which is cyberspace.

Adrian Barlow

[illustration: an urn inscribed with the words of William Blake’s poem ‘He who binds to himself a joy’. My post about this poem, Short Measures (i): William Blake and Eternity’s Sunrise, has been by far the most visited page of my blog.

www.adrianbarlowsblog.blogspot.co.uk  will continue to be found at its present address, and I am compiling an inventory of all my past posts, if anyone cares to revisit them.  I hope to publish this online very soon.

Text and illustration © the author