1900s

Mightier than the Sword, by Alphonse Courlander (1912)

This is a guest post by Dr. Sarah Lonsdale.

On the final page of Mightier than the Sword (1912), a novel about journalists and newspapers, the protagonist dies a lonely death in the middle of a maddened crowd. Humphrey Quain is a reporter for the new popular halfpenny paper The Day and is covering a riot of French wine makers protesting against government tax rises (plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose). In his short career as a ‘descriptive writer’ for his newspaper, Quain has undergone a strange transformation, subduing all human connection and emotion to become an obsessive news-gatherer and storyteller.

He dies because, in his desire to get to the heart of the story he is covering, he is trampled to death by ‘shaggy-haired’ French agriculturalists. His last thought is one of pleasure at his martyrdom, knowing he will make front page news for his paper. He is the ultimate journalist-hero, killed trying to get all the facts, and, in this, his final story, providing his paper with sensational ‘copy’.

There was a time when journalists were heroes, celebrated for exposing corruption in politics and big business, even bringing down a US president and ‘giving voice to the voiceless’, as they liked to say. During Courlander’s lifetime war correspondents became famous for risking all to cover conflict across the globe. Several, such as the Daily Mail’s beloved and respected ‘special’ G. W. Steevens, lost their lives covering the sordid reality of the Boer War in 1900. Many journalists still do try to make our world a better place but today a cynical and fragmented public is more likely to believe in journalists’ biases, that they are ‘enemies of the people’ or retainers in the pockets of wealthy proprietors or enemy powers. ‘Giving voice to the voiceless’ in the age of social media when everyone can find a platform for their voice seems also an outdated concept with connotations of ‘saviour complex’.

Producers still make films and series about the increasingly mythical hero-journalist along the lines of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of All the President’s Men. A recent US television iteration, Alaska Daily (2022) starring Hilary Swank, portrays an almost unbelievably ethical group of print journalists battling to reveal the truth about the death and disappearance of indigenous women across the state.

It may still work on the screen, but written fiction abandoned the idea of the journalist hero decades ago. The journalist in novels, from the pen, typewriter or PC of Evelyn Waugh (Scoop, 1938), Graham Greene (The Quiet American, 1955) or Lauren Weisberger (The Devil Wears Prada, 2003) is inevitably complex, compromised, and morally ambiguous: much more interesting that way.

Advertisement for Mightier than the Sword.

For he (it almost always is a he ), did once exist. Indeed, in Britain, in the early years of the twentieth century up to the outbreak of the First World War, there was a veritable slew of fictions depicting journalists as heroes, even in one, Guy Thorne’s When it was Dark (1904), saving civilisation from disaster (this novel, however, contains horrible anti-Semitic tropes and would never be revived today). Many of these novels were bestsellers, evidence of a public appetite for stories about journalists righting wrongs and seeking out facts. Even P. G. Wodehouse, with his swashbuckling Psmith Journalist (serialised in 1909 in The Captain magazine) had a go, sending his upper class and university-educated Psmith (the ‘P’ is silent), to New York to expose heartless tenement landlords.

Mightier than the Sword, which went into three editions in quick succession between May 1912 and October 1913, belongs to this fleeting golden age of newspaper novels. Courlander, a journalist himself, goes into great detail describing the work of the reporter, the sub-editor, ‘runner’, compositor, photographer, printer and the army of staff that went into bringing out a daily newspaper in the heyday of the new popular press. Here is his description of the composing room, a long-since vanished part of newspaper production:

Row upon row the aproned linotype operators sat before the key-board translating the written words of the copy before them into leaden letters. Their machines were almost human. They touched the keys as if they were typewriting, and little brass letters slipped down into a line, and then mechanically an iron hand gripped the line, plunged it into a box of molten lead, and lifted it out again with a solid line of lead cast from the mould…

This kind of description may well be fascinating to the historian of newspaper production, but it is hard to see why, even in 1912, this level of detail would interest a reading public. But it may also be the key as to why, apparently, it was so popular. Courlander’s was a new and exciting, technology-driven world, when newspapers changed utterly from large, expensive, and highbrow to something that everyone could afford to buy and written in language those educated only to age 14 could confidently read. The Daily Mail, the first morning daily halfpenny in Britain, had been launched in 1896 by Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe). The stunning success of his paper, which reached a circulation of 1.2 million in just a few years, was followed rapidly by the Daily Express (1900) and the Daily Mirror (1903). These new popular papers used a combination of bolder typefaces, shorter sentences and shorter articles to attract a newly literate and newly enfranchised readership of the lower middle classes. The Daily Mail was disparaged as being written ‘by office boys for office boys’ by the then prime minister Lord Salisbury but it soon became a symbol of a new, better-connected and technologically advanced country.

In the novel, Quain’s paper, The Day, is a symbol of this modernity, its dazzling electric dome illuminating the night sky in a London still dimly lit by ‘copper-tinted’ gas. The new generation of printing presses that could produce thousands of newspapers an hour appeared miraculous, converting in seconds acres of blank white paper into ‘quire after quire’ of printed record of lives and events from across the globe. The telegraph and photography, like the digital world today, brought the far and exotic corners of the world into the hands of ordinary people. This is the wonder that Courlander was trying to evoke in his descriptions of the thundering presses, ‘like the throbbing of thousands of human hearts.’ The newspaper is a giant, selling more than a million copies a day and the older journalists trained to write Dickens-style prose are either sacked or learn to write in crisp, short sentences.

Mightier than the Sword captures this moment of transition between the old world and the new at the very dawn of mass media.

The plot of the novel is simple: Humphrey Quain, a young writer from a quiet provincial cathedral city applies for a job on The Day. He is taken on, initially struggles but then does well and is promoted to be the paper’s Paris correspondent. In between his adventures, which involve solving tragic mysteries and reporting mining disasters, he falls in love with two women but breaks things off each time: his career is all-consuming.

Quain notices he is changing, from a sensitive young man to a news hound who doesn’t care about the people he reports on: “Everything in life now I see from the point of view of ‘copy’…even at the funeral [his aunt], as I stood over the grave, and watched them lower the coffin, I felt that I could write a splendid column about it,” he confesses as he breaks off with yet another disappointed fiancée. Despite this metamorphosis he wouldn’t change his life for the whole world: from attending the lengthy committee of the Anti-Noise Society, or spending several minutes finding the right word to describe a street lamp in the dark: ‘This was the journalist’s sense – a sixth sense – which urges its possessor to set down everything he observes, and adds infinite zest to life, since every experience, every thought, every new feeling, means something to write about…his thoughts ran in metaphors and symbols.’

Although the novel made Courlander’s name (he had written four mediocre novels before Mightier than the Sword), it is unconvincing as a work of literature. Its importance lies in its ideas about popular journalism and the new industrial relations not just in newspapers, but everywhere. Quain notes that for the disposable reporters on the mass press, their words are simply another commodity, produced, ‘as a bricklayer lays bricks.’ In the final scene of the novel, Humprey Quain realises that the French rioters see him as a representative of the press, part of the political-corporate nexus that is ruining their way of life. This realisation shocks him, and only makes him want to seek harder for the truth.

An obituary notice for Alphonse Courlander.

Alphonse Courlander, like Guy Thorne, P. G. Wodehouse and other authors of Edwardian newspaper novels, was a journalist, who joined the Daily Express in the early years of the 20th century. As did his protagonist, he became famous as a ‘descriptive writer’ under the editorship of the Fleet Street legend Ralph Blumenfeld (Ferrol in the novel). In an art-meets-life moment, after the novel’s publication, Courlander was made Paris correspondent of the Daily Express but died shortly afterwards at the age of 33. In his obituary (23 October 1914), the Daily Mail asserted that Courlander died after a break-down, having ‘overtaxed his strength’ reporting on the War from Paris.

Mightier than the Sword, by Alphonse Courlander
London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912

Dr Sarah LonsdaleSarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.

The Forgotten Short Fiction of Edward Thomas

This is a guest post by Irfan Shah

It started, of course, with his poetry, predictably, with his best-known work, “Adlestrop”, and inevitably, with the famous, final lines that spell-bind like few others:

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

And this, in common with so many other people, is how I found Edward Thomas, revered as a poet but almost completely forgotten as a writer of fiction.

* * *

Edward Thomas was born in Lambeth, London in 1878 and studied history at Oxford. His first book, The Woodland Life, a collection of essays on the country, was published in 1896. Thomas subsequently embarked on a career as a prolific writer whose work ranged from biography to journalism, travel writing, fiction and literary criticism, although the strain of compromising his artistic ambitions to earn enough to support a family occasionally created periods of depression. His sense of being overwhelmed by a slurry of “hack work” was recognised by his friend the poet Robert Frost, who suggested in 1913 that Thomas devote himself to poetry, or as Frost himself put it, “I dragged him out from under the heap of his own work in prose he was buried alive under.” The poems he then wrote between 1914 and 1917 would secure his enduring reputation as one of Britain’s best-loved writers.

It was a love of Edward Thomas’ poems that set me off one day on an afternoon’s quest for more of his work. A meandering online search – the digital equivalent of beachcombing – took me to the Internet Archive, which brought up several books and led to a first twist of fate. For some reason, I was presented with a volume titled Cloud Castle and Other Papers, which turned out to contain not poetry but short stories. Two other books of short fiction were listed, Rest and Unrest and Light and Twilight. I had no idea Thomas had written books of short fiction, and from this brief list of little-known titles, Cloud Castle must have been the least-known of them all, having been published posthumously and containing an unfinished foreword by another neglected writer, W. H. Hudson, who himself died before its publication. Cloud Castle and Other Papers is not only overlooked but a death-shadowed work.

A second twist of fate: I often flick through a collection and pick a story at random. Had I done so this time and picked one of perhaps half a dozen other tales in that volume, I might well have given up on the book and never been the wiser. As it was, I started from the beginning and read the title story, “Cloud Castle.” By the end of the first sentence, I knew I had stumbled upon something special:

All the life of the summer day became silent after sundown; the earth was dark and very still as with a great thought; the sky was as a pale window through which men and angels looked at one another without a word.

In the story, a knight riding homewards with a friend describes a daydream in which he had been climbing a precipice towards a castle,

… when I began to climb again the moon was behind me and very low, and all the cliff was bathed in light and I seemed to hang like a carven imp on a sublime cathedral wall among the incense.

Eventually reaching an abandoned castle, he enters one particular chamber to find … well, the brief and strange encounter that occurs there is the heart of story and I’ll leave it for you to discover. What does or doesn’t, might yet, or could never have happened, remains oblique — hauntingly rather than frustratingly so.

I was startled. This wasn’t the Edward Thomas, the nature and the war poet, I had been expecting. In fact, the dream-logic of the story put me in mind of Jorge Luis Borges or something from the world of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. Going through more of the stories, I was once again wrong-footed as I came across, “Mike,” a touching ode to a fondly-remembered dog, which brought me very much back to the realm of the everyday.

. . . his tail when he trotted along curled over his back and made children laugh aloud; but when he was thinking about the chase it hung in a horizontal bow; when stealing away or in full cry it was held slightly lower and no longer bent, and it flowed finely into the curves of his great speed.

Having read Cloud Castle and Other Papers, I set aside the poetry and began to explore Thomas’ other collections of short fiction. There I found the expected pen-portraits of nature as well as imagined folktales, magic realism and slivers of lightly concealed autobiography — exquisite miniatures nestled amongst some, admittedly, frustrating and overworked thickets that might have been cut back by the author’s later poetic rigour. The experience of reading Thomas’ fiction was revelatory.

Edward Thomas’ prose, when it has been remembered at all, is often thought of as something from which he escaped when he gave himself to poetry in the last years of his short life. Things are changing with his travel books (often describing his journeys on foot through the countryside of Southern England), which are being re-discovered by a new generation of nature-writers. His short fiction, on the other hand, remains uncelebrated even though Thomas himself felt warmly towards it.

One reason might be the incredible inconsistency of the work. Some stories feel like unfinished drafts; others contain a scattering of minor details that, cumulatively, jar. In “Mothers and Sons,” a man on a train, inexplicably wearing a fez, is described by a narrator whose identity remains irritatingly rather than enigmatically, unclear; in “Hawthornden,” a deftly-handled fatality is ruined with the clunk of a redundant “He was dead.” Other stories stop abruptly, unfinished rather than open-ended. Some stories are overwrought, some empty. And yet, despite this, if you look through Thomas’ books of short fiction, you will find treasures.

Having unearthed this collection of treasures, I decided to share it with others. I began by creating e-books of Rest and Unrest and Cloud Castle and Other Papers – designing covers and writing introductions. I wanted desperately to do what publishers such as Persephone and Boiler House Press were doing — curating, championing — and was just as eager not to fall into the category of the print on demand publishers specializing in literary grave-robbing, pillaging the Internet Archive and other sources and selling public domain titles at exorbitant prices with no added value. Having released the two titles, I realised I wanted to do something else: to distil what I felt to be the best of Thomas’ short fiction into a collection. This is how I came to produce Where Lay My Homeward Path.

* * *

Among the ten pieces in the collection, there are to be found, as might be expected from Thomas, darkly poetic evocations of the natural world. His images of flora and fauna, of gold agrimony, pilewort and brooklime, flow through these stories, like the ships in John Masefield’s “Cargoes.” Tales such as “A Man of the Woods” and, more humorously, “Seven Tramps: A Study in Brown” are calloused, with fists plunged into the soil of Thomas’ South Country or guiding us “through thickets of perpendicular and stiff and bristling stems, through brier and thorn and bramble in the double hedges.”

In “Mike,” a narrator’s reminiscences of his dog, are cruel, loving, clear-eyed and elegiac: “He forgave me so readily that it took some time for me to forgive myself.” “Milking” is brief, hard, unsparing:

He stood there a moment – a tall, crooked man, with ever-sparkling eyes in a nubbly and bony head, worn down by sun and toil and calamity to nothing but a stone, hollowed and grey, to which his short black hair clung like moss.

And as well as “Cloud Castle,” there are other moments of melancholic whimsy — “Snow and Sand,” a ghost story perhaps, reveals its dream-like essence wrapped in a filigree of detail: “The rushy margin is strewn with delicate bones and feathers among the snowflakes.”

I tried to take the internal rhythms and tones of each story and combine them to create a larger, interconnected work, almost as if composing music. The penultimate piece in the collection is also the longest, and the final story, the shortest. There is a crescendo and a brief finale. The book ends with “The Stile,” which contains a single sentence imbued with a pathos provided by hindsight: “I am something which no fortune can touch, whether I be soon to die or long years away” “The Stile” was first published in Light and Twilight in 1911. In 1915, Thomas enlisted in the Army and was posted to France in January 1917. On 9 April, he was killed at the battle of Arras.

* * *

It has to be said that these stories, so ripe for rediscovery, can all be found for free at sites like the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg — you need only look for the books Rest and Unrest, Light and Twilight, and Cloud Castle and Other Papers. I press on with my own little book regardless, with a new cover design and a specially-written introduction, and we will see what happens. And if it should fail, it will be a heroic failure and maybe one day in the future, a site on neglected publishers will tell the story!

A word about W. H. Hudson. – another neglected writer

The original introduction to Cloud Castle and Other Papers was meant to have been by William Henry Hudson, an Englishman born in Argentina and a great friend of Thomas’. Hudson was himself an author and naturalist whose own writing helped foster the ‘back-to-nature’ movement of the 1920’s and 30’s. Although relatively little-known today, his influence persists. He wrote many books that ranged from natural history (British Birds) to dystopian science-fiction (A Crystal Age). His best-known novel, Green Mansions (1904), was often reprinted and made into a Hollywood film starring Audrey Hepburn in 1959. More recently, his novel A Shepherd’s Life (1910) was an inspiration for James Rebanks’ The Shepherd’s Life (2015).

Hudson began work on the introduction to Cloud Castle and Other Papers just a few days before his death in August 1922. A fragment found subsequently among his papers was included in the Duckworth & Co. publication of Cloud Castle as a Foreword (and now also included in Where Lay My Homeward Path).

Irfan Shah is a writer and researcher. You can follow the fortunes of Where Lay My Homeward Path at www.openspacebooks.co.uk and on Twitter at @OpenSpaceBooks.