Guest Post: Christopher Beha on the Times Achangin' Back

I’ve spent the past eight months reading the Harvard Classics, a 51-volume “great books” set compiled in 1901 by longtime Harvard president Charles Eliot. I’ve read at a pace of about a volume a week, and I plan to finish by the end of the year. “The Five Foot Shelf,” as the Classics are commonly known, includes some obvious choices -- Plato and Homer; Shakespeare and Dante -- and also a few surprises -- the Journals of John Woolman, Robert Burns’ complete work.

There are many predictable delights to a year of navigating one distinguished man’s list of the greatest landmarks of literary history. But one unexpected pleasure has been learning how much of what we consider unprecedented about our own literary culture has actually been seen many times before.

Last week, I read Volume 27: English Essays: Sidney to Macaulay. The short, personal essay, though it has roots in Seneca and Montaigne, came into its own as a literary form in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as practiced by the writers collected here. The form hits its stride in the early 1700s, in the hands of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, who wrote short, gossipy pieces about the London of their day. As Philip Lopate writes in his wonderful anthology, The Art of the Personal Essay, “Their energy often came from the topical: fashions or the talk of the town.” Much of their work is unapologetically trifling, written to make a quick buck, but the best is still read today. “Whoever wishes to attain an English style,” Samuel Johnson insisted, “familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.”

Addison and Steele collaborated on the original Tatler, which Steele founded, and later on the Spectator, which they created together. They are by no means the only writers in this volume who started journals to publish their own work. In fact, more than a third of the essayists included in the volume published in outlets that they had some hand in founding. There was Daniel Defoe's Review, Samuel Johnson's Rambler, Sydney Smith's Edinburgh Review, and Leigh Hunt's Examiner. These journals were often short-lived, and often just one or two contributors produced all of their content. Contributors sometimes devised silly pseudonyms for themselves, in order better to cultivate an exaggerated authorial persona. Any of this sound familiar?

Regular readers of this site will sense where I’m heading. As the NBCC has led its admirable charge against the reduction of book coverage in mainstream media, many advocates for print reviews have rejected out of hand the notion that literary blogs might fill the cultural vacuum that shrinking mainstream media space threatens to create. Blogs make poor substitutes for print reviews, the argument goes, mostly because they aren't edited, and because they lack the rigor and accountability provided by the imprimatur of the professional masthead. At present, this complaint happens to be generally true in practice -- there are a lot of really bad book blogs out there, many of the good ones can be quite sloppy, and even the very best struggle to balance immediacy with quality control.

But there's no reason that any of this must remain true over time. It’s true that anyone who wants to put content on the web can do so, and this is a very different circumstance that that of the current print media. But the selective force of internet viewers in separating what is merely available from what is widely read is one of the more exciting aspects of the online world. If the decline of the print review sends more literate readers to the blogosphere; if these readers bring with them the expectations inculcated by the best print review sections; if these standards influence which blogs these readers regularly visit and what feedback they provide; if, in short, the stakes are raised within the literary blogosphere, there is no reason to think that some blogs won’t respond to this challenge by becoming more professional. (This increase in audience will no doubt professionalize a number of book blogs in the literal sense, just as it has some political and gossip blogs.)

“Self-edited” doesn’t have to mean “un-edited,” and it certainly doesn’t have to mean poorly written. This volume of the Harvard Classics represents the very best of the English essay from the Elizabethan to the Romantic age, and it's worth remembering how much of this lasting work was self-published -- written, edited and printed by the same hand.

-- Christopher R. Beha’s book about reading the Harvard Classics will be published by Grove/Atlantic.