“This book is for Englishmen,” T. W. H. Crosland writes in his introduction to The Unspeakable Scotsman. “It is also in the nature of a broad hint for Scotchmen,” he adds, and the hint is a none-too-subtle invitation to back in their place, which Crosland defines as intrinsically inferior to that of any Englishman. He was, at least, honest about his position from the very start: “My qualification to bestow broad hints upon the politest and most intellectual of the peoples is that I possess a large fund of contempt for the Scottish character. Also I had the misfortune to be born on a day which is marked, sadly enough, in the calendars ‘BURNS DIED.'”
In chapter 9, “The Scot as Biographer,” for example, Crosland offers his view of Scots sentimentality with the bark on:
There are three Scotch books of biography, all published, I believe, within the last six years, which invariably raise my gorge. One of them is Margaret Ogilvy by Dr. J. M. Barrie [Crosland thought it funny to refer to all Scotsmen as “Doctor’], the second is J. M. Barrie and his Books by Dr. J. A. Hammerton, and the third is In Memory of W. V. by Dr. William Canton….
Margaret Ogilvy appears to have gone into no end of editions. It is an account of the character and sayings of Dr. J. M. Barrie’s mother, viewed in the light of Dr. Barrie’s own “literaryness.” I have no hesitation in pronouncing it to be one ofthe most snobbish books that has issued from the press any time this hundred years. It begins snobbishly, it goes on snobbishly, and it ends snobbishly. Offered to the reading public as a piece of fictional sentiment, it would still have been open to the charge of mawkishness. Offered unblushingly as a transcript from the life, and for the perusal of all who care to purchase, deplorable is the mildest epithet one can justly apply to it.
As to In Memory of W. V., Crosland writes, “I am constrained to confine myself to quotation. Comment would be altogether too painful.” One of his samples comes from Canton’s account of the funeral of his daughter W. V. (Winifred Vida):
We laid her to rest in Highgate Cemetery on the 18th…. At the funeral not only did the sun shine on the coffin, but in the grave itself there was light. All during the service, which was conducted by her friend, Dr. Robertson Nicoll, a robin, I am told, sat close to the grave; she would have liked that. When I went up next day the bees were busy among her flowers, and that too would have been to her liking.
Ironically, Crosland’s judgment of In Memory of W. V. echoes nothing more than Oscar Wilde’s remark on The Old Curiosity Shop: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.” I think most parents would find it hard to see the joke in this.
Finally, he returns to attack J. M. Barrie, this time through his assessment of J. A. Hammerton’s J. M. Barrie and his Books, perhaps the earliest survey of Barrie’s work, written by a self-professed devoted admirer and “brither Scot”: Even as Dr. Archer has discovered in Paradise Lost an inexhaustible mine of the pure gold of poetry, so have I found in Dr. J. A. Hammerton’s J. M. Barrie and his Books an inexhaustible fund of the pure gold of Scotch opinion not only as to Dr. Barrie, but also as to other matters.”
Hammerton’s great sin, it appears, is in expressing an immoderate level of admiration for Barrie:
The main distinction of Nottingham journalism lies in the fact that it is associated with the name of Mr. J. M. Barrie…. To-day the so-called “Press House” is a tavern a few yards removed from the “Frying Pan,” and there penny-a-liners and half-fledged reporters drink beer and fancy themselves full-blown journalists, carrying down the traditions of Billy Kirker and that bright Bohemian band. But there are no Barries among them.
To which Crosland quips, “Nottingham, evidently, is in a parlous way.” Crosland, evidently, considered this quite witty.
The TLS took its own revenge upon Crosland by assigning its review to a gentleman with the fine Scots-Irish name of Gerald FitzGerald Campbell. Campbell found the book not a wee bit amusing:
We have all seen a child work itself into a fit of temper. We know how it screams and kicks, how it makes ugly faces and calls ugly names, how it beats its elders with puny, ineffective fist. The spectacle is not edifying; the feeling it excites is one of shame-faced pity — shame for poor human nature, pity for the individual child. The child itself knows that it is doing an unlovely thing. But it knows, too, that for the moment it has achieved notoriety and become the central figure of its little world. So it is with Mr. T. W. H. Crosland, the author of The Unspeakable Scotsman…. At first one hopes that the whole thing may be an elaborate joke, slightly ponderous and wholly personal, but still pardonable in a wearer of the cap and bells. But very shortly it appears that Mr. Crosland mistakes rudeness for wit, because he is furiously angry with anything that has the remotest connection with Scotland.
FitzGerald Campbell may simply have fueled Crosland’s fury, for he followed The Unspeakable Scotsman with the equally denigratory The Wild Irishman (1905), which contains such double-barrelled insults as, “I suppose that next to the Scotch, the Irish are out and out the dirtiest people on the earth.” Crosland was so comfortable in the role of racist that he also put out The Abounding American (1907) and The Fine Old Hebrew Gentleman (1922), in which he informed the reader that, “the most popular living ‘Ebrew gentleman is one Charlie Chaplin.”
When W. Sorley Brown wrote a hagiographic 490-page biography, The Life and Genius of T. W. H. Crosland (1928) following Crosland’s death in 1924, one reviewer wrote of Crosland, “Posterity may confirm the verdict that he was one of the great literary figures of his time, but, even on his eulogist’s admissions, few men have ever been so venomous and mean.”
Fortunately, posterity hasn’t.