Selected Writings of James Fitzjames Stephen On the Novel and Journalism

by Ricks, Christopher

• ISBN13: 9780192882837
• ISBN10: 019288283X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2023-08-18
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

James Fitzjames Stephen (1829-1894) is still highly valued as a judge, as the historian of the criminal law of England, and as the author of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, a forthright disagreement with John Stuart Mill. Stephen's weekly journalism established him as a vigorous cross-examiner in the controversies—cultural, social, religious, political, moral, and philosophical—of his time (and duly, of our time).

Collected here now are his essays on the novel and journalism, the co-operation and collusion of these two, their responsibilities and irresponsibilities. Written between 1855 and 1867, while Stephen prosecuted twin careers as barrister and journalist, these reviews bring to bear his formidable powers of mind and of phrasing, scrutinizing many deep and disconcerting novelists—Dickens and Thackeray, Harriet Beecher Stowe and E. C. Gaskell, Flaubert and Balzac. His work also weighs journalism in the scales: from Addison's The Spectator to the Crimean war correspondence of William Howard Russell; from the scabrously detailed law-reports in The Times to the phenomenon of Letters to its Editor; from the high culture of Matthew Arnold to the mass market of 'Railroad Bookselling'.

Author Biography

Christopher Ricks, Professor, Boston University

Christopher Ricks was educated at the University of Oxford; he was Professor of English at the University of Bristol and the University of Cambridge, and Professor of Humanities at Boston University. His publications range widely from Tennyson to Bob Dylan, and he is co-editor of the Selected Writings of James Fitzjames Stephen.

Table of Contents

Introduction
The Relation of Novels to Life (excerpts)
Woods v. Russell
Religious Journalism
The Sunday Papers
Our Civilization
Newspaper English
The Enigma (excerpts)
The Green Hand (excerpts)
Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures (excerpts)
Groans of the Britons
Barry Lyndon
Mr. Dickens as a Politician
Railroad Bookselling
Little Dorrit
Light Literature and the Saturday Review
Madame Bovary
The License of Modern Novelists
The Edinburgh Review and Modern Novelists
Light Literature in France
La Daniella
Balzac
Mr. Dickens
Gentlemen Authors
Manon Lescaut (excerpts)
The Spectator
Novels and Novelists (excerpts)
The Revue des Deux Mondes on English Romance (excerpts)
Guy Livingstone (excerpts)
The Romance of Vice
Sentimentalism (excerpts) (1858)
The History of British Journalism (excerpts)
The Minister's Wooing (excerpts)
A Tale of Two Cities
Journalism (excerpt)
Novelists' Common Forms
Mr. Thackeray (excerpts)
Senior's Essays on Fiction (excerpts)
Detectives in Fiction and in Real Life
Sentimentalism (excerpts) (1864)
Mr. Matthew Arnold and his Countrymen
The Mote and the Beam
Mr. Matthew Arnold amongst the Philistines (excerpts)
Mr. Arnold on the Middle Classes (excerpts)
Mr. Matthew Arnold on Culture