Declining heritage
Routledge are currently discovering what happens when a series goes stale on you. Their Critical Heritage series, reprinting chronologically a selection of the reviews and notices given to literary figures from the beginnings of their reputations, started off in 1967 to quite a lot of critical attention. Since then they have published about twenty-five books in the series, and critical approval has diminished in line with the importance of the authors chosen. The Times Literary Supplement laid into the reeent.volume on Rochester -criticism on the grounds of its almost total-superfluity, and pointed out that another of the books, on Ibsen, dealt with the author purely in terms of his English and American reputation and not at all with the German and Scandinavian• reputation that preceded it. The most recent in the series to appear is Ford Madox Ford: The Critical Heritage. What major figure to follow — Thomas Otley? Richard le Gallienne? James Thomson?
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