Recreations of a Literary Man!

Our book today is a 1883 collection of odd ruminations by Percy Fitzgerald called Recreations of a Literary Man (or Does Writing Pay?), one in a virtually endless stream of books Fitzgerald produced once he left off prosperous lawyering in Ireland and made his way to teeming, word-drunk Victorian London to try his hand at the literary trade. He worked for a while for Charles Dickens at Household Words, good-naturedly churning out whatever stuff was selling at the moment (like so many of his compatriots, he was a ‘content provider’ a full century before the term existed). But his main metier was the theater – first theater criticism (at which he was almost comically bad, a fact known to all but himself), then more properly at theater history. He’d written some well-received biographies before he tried his hand in 1868 at a full-dress work about the great actor/manager David Garrick.

The book was a hit (and deserves still to be so – like all of Fitzgerald, it reads delightfully, but there’s an added element of marvellous immediacy that makes it a serious challenger even for such fantastic later works as Alan Kendall’s David Garrick), and gave Fitzgerald his first real taste of the kind of literary satisfaction that was showering daily upon his friend Dickens. He was able to forego the hustling and bustling that tend to characterize a freelance writer’s life – he was able to cultivate his study at home, which he fondly eulogizes in Recreations of a Literary Man:

Most writers who own a taste for their work – and there is something fascinating in the calling – can hardly help impressing their own fancies on what surrounds them, as they labour. The room, its desk, the pictures, the very chair, are all combined and associated with memorable thoughts, ways, and works. The novel, the sketch, the successful “life,” all were formed and developed here. Here were forgotten the world’s troubles outside, in those exciting, thrilling last chapters, written at a white heat and at a stretch against time, from morning all through the night until morning again – just as Ainsworth wrote his “Turpin’s Ride to York.” Here are the little cherished objects picked up in many a walk; the portrait with autograph given by a greater author. In short, in a course of long years there will be a gathering of favourite things, each associated, it may be, with something pleasant.

He himself had once written “I have learned the knack of writing decently and respectably on any subject ‘briefed’ to me,” and in the following years he proved it: biographies remained his stock-in-trade, and in addition to further works of theatrical history (on such figures as Sheridan, Gilbert and Sullivan, and – another hit – Henry Irving, plus several volumes of his own reminiscences), there were books on King George IV, King William IV, James Boswell, and, most of all, Dickens. Indeed, it might be fairly said that Fitzgerald was among the first to turn Dickens into a cottage industry.

Recreations of a Literary Man indulges in this a few times. There’s a 30-page chapter called “Charles Dickens as an Editor,” and there’s an utterly charming 40-page chapter called “Charles Dickens at Home” that features one warmly human anecdote after another about the Great Man and his family as they relaxed at Gad’s Hill, Dickens’ country home in the beautiful country of Kent:

A great attraction of Gad’s Hill were the dogs. There were always three or four great dogs prancing about – Linda one was named – great St. Bernard dogs and others. He appreciated dogs, and understood their ways and fine nature better than any one, as we see from his writings. I recollect his sort of comic grief as he elated his visit to the well-known monastery of St. Bernard, when, in answer to his eager inquiries as to the saving of life in the snow by the dogs, the good monks had informed him that like many two-footed creatures, they enjoyed a reputation they scarcely deserved, and rather followed the monks than were followed by them.

But the countryside never holds Fitzgerald for long; one of the signal joys of this book – of almost all his books, whether intentionally or not on his part – is how thoroughly it breathes of the noisy, lively capital. We follow him everywhere his wandering thoughts take him, including the fabled old Reading Room of the British Museum, where the skyrocketing literacy rates of the day were having dire effects on the available space:

Every year the crowd of readers increases, while the Reading Room, in spite of rearrangement, remains pretty much the same after twenty years or so. When all the scholars of the new schools and universities are in full work, the pressure will become serious. Yet there never can be found any real remedy; and no room, of whatever size, could be found sufficient to hold the “readers of the nation.”

Anyone who’s tried to find a seat at the Boston Public Library’s Bates Hall when the students and the nutjobs are in full spate will sympathize.

Fitzgerald loved books, of course, and he wrote often on their magic (one of the best pieces collected in this volume is “Old Booksellers and Their Hobbies”). Unlike so many ‘literary men’ who achieve a certain level of success, he never became snobbish about books – he could reel off editions and publication trivia with the best of the bookmen in Paternoster Row, but he himself would read anything, regardless of provenance, and he delighted in the hunt, as he once wrote: “Many a book-maniac has dwelt on the satisfaction found in periodically investigating the “boxes” of ol books exposed at the doors of old booksellers.”

How could I not agree? I found Recreations of a Literary Man on hot day, outside, at the Brattle bargain carts.