A random harvest

To celebrate The Spectator's 175th anniversary, Digby Durrant has been looking through past literary pages

When invited to see how writers have fared at the hands of The Spectator and faced with the 253 volumes of the magazine housed in the bowels of the London Library I followed the advice the King gave to Alice and began at the beginning, by taking out the first one the Library possesses, which is 1835. After that my choice of volume would have to be whimsical, like Lewis Carroll himself, though he would have blanched at the first review that caught my eye.

Remarks on Military Flogging, a pamphlet described as 'a sensible, but dear tract, upon this important subject', was not about how the flogger might put more snap into his work but a proposal to abolish flogging altogether. In its place should go solitary confinement and hard labour, while libraries and reading rooms should be provided in all barracks to lessen temptation and intemperance. In other words, to stop the squaddies getting pie-eyed, to use the more colourful language to which very slowly the successors to these straitlaced Victorians will descend, as The Spectator gradually loosens its stays and reviewers shed their anonymity; and by 1966 Kenneth Allsop will review How to Talk Dirty and Influence People by Lenny Bruce without turning a hair.

Back in 1835 The Spectator found it impossible to accept that writers who led openly scandalous lives could write books worthy of its consideration. But this year it did make an exception in the case of the notorious William Beckford, whose youthful recollections of a trip to two Portuguese monasteries were not only uncharacteristically innocent but as colourful as some of his other books had been, notably Vathek. It had 'buoyancy, sparkle, point and finish'. Possibly, too, Beckford's unbridled behaviour sustained without regret for over 70 years had won him some grudging respect, even affection.

Beckford's behaviour was appalling, but was it really that bad? There were worse examples. Nothing could be more offensive in the eyes of The Spectator than George Eliot's anarchic opinions and brazen sexual adventures. But by 1871 when she published the first part of Middlemarch, Eliot wouldn't have cared what The Spectator thought, but she would have enjoyed seeing it bend the knee and laud herself and Tennyson as 'indisputably the greatest artists of our own day', though it preferred the poet's 'victorious and triumphant euthanasia' (sic) to her unmanly and gloomy tear-jerkers. Nineteen years later another reviewer, while obliged to grant some recognition to Eliot, makes up for it by unsheathing his claws and saying of her that 'she seems to us on the whole weak, artificial and open to grave censure ... elephantine, or a little underbred'.

When Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass appeared in the same year as Middlemarch, The Spectator made rather a self-conscious parade of shedding its dignity, throwing its cap in the air and rejoicing in a world of nonsense. 'Brillig', it pointed out, means four o'clock in the afternoon. But why, the reviewer mused, didn't the Dormouse appear in the book, particularly when his favourite food of treacle was on the tea table?

Years later Evelyn Waugh wrote in The Spectator that Carroll had indulged in 'daydreaming and nonsense' to escape religious doubts, while Benny Green in 1981 wrote that Carroll used to describe himself as 'an inveterate child-fancier', an admission that today would get him hounded out of the neighbourhood as walking wounded with a tag round his ankle and shadowed by tabloid reporters.

In 1890 several writers got severely mauled and none more so than Havelock Ellis, whose full-blooded acceptance of the realities of sex in The New Spirit naturally outraged The Spectator. It took exception to his effrontery in calling himself a gentleman when he so plainly wasn't, and described his book as 'a return to moral chaos'. In fairness Havelock Ellis talked a good deal of foolishness, saying, 'the problem of religion has been practically settled' and labour problems would soon follow suit so it was high time to get to grips with sex, 'the central problem of life'. This was not a view The Spectator thought any sane man could hold. And what did Tolstoy think he was doing when in Marriage, Morality and Christianity he said that marriage was 'not a progress but a fall' and added that Christ 'rather disapproved it than otherwise'?

But The Spectator did delight in staunchly defending the late Duke of Wellington when a 'worthless' book attempted to revive the scandal of his so-called passion for 'Miss J', in which the gallant soldier was reduced to sending a precise but awkward note: 'The Duke of Wellington presents his compliments to Miss J. He has no lock of hair of hers.'

Conrad's Last Essays appeared in 1926, two years after he'd died, and The Spectator enjoys not so much the essays as the eccentric domestic details of the writer's home life. According to his wife he frequently set fire to himself by putting live matches in his pockets or banging into hot stoves, and 'post-dated' his memory by two years, muddling up his wedding day with the birth of his first child. He was also prone to sudden crazes, such as insisting that the family bathroom was the only place to write and moving himself in there, although the reviewer didn't reveal where he sat. On the lavatory? In the bath? Full or empty?

One of the most moving of all the war books, Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon, came out in 1928. It was described by the reviewer as a beautiful evocation of Edwardian England, `a little world amusing itself on the verge of chaos', who went on to praise the remarkable selfportrait of a shy boy who so hated his own parties that he hid in a cupboard to avoid them. Once tempted on to a horse, though, he rode like a man possessed, cursing the farmers who put up the wire of which he was to see a great deal more when he was hunting down Germans on foot with a blood lust he was incapable of feeling for the fox. Sassoon knew himself: 'In me the tiger sniffs the rose.'

Dipping through these volumes of the Twenties and Thirties, I became aware of the increasing dominance of the advertisements. Heady clouds of St Bruno, Three Castles, or the inexplicably but brilliantly named Three Nuns, were being puffed across the page by fresh-faced men in tweeds, a vicar or two among them. Peering through the smoke some words appeared placed by Erio's Fruit Salts: 'The first hour of the morning is the rudder of the day.' It occurred to me while I was reading a review of Waugh's account of his travels in Mexico in 1939, Robbery Under Law, that his hatred of advertising might well have been sparked off by reading this at an awkward moment. The reviewer noted that Waugh is very struck by the excessive smoothness of the American diplomats towards their Mexican counterparts which he likens to the manners of advertising men purely on the grounds of their 'verbal geniality' — surely rather an attractive characteristic and one essential to a diplomat?

1939 was a silly season of hanging about, waiting for the balloon to go up. Virginia Woolf in restless mood amused herself by writing a pamphlet recommending abolishing reviewers and replacing them with two functionaries. One was to be called Gutter, who would paraphrase and quote from the book in question, the other Stamp, who would stick a paper dagger on a book that was to be killed or an asterisk on one granted a reprieve. Instead of treating it as a joke The Spectator was foolish enough to reply to this in a stern, po-faced article defending the reviewer's role. But it was hard for it to take the war seriously yet. In a literary competition a prize was awarded to a letter purporting to come from Bertie Wooster in which he says that he'd heard it from Jeeves who'd got it from the War Office that the army walked on its stomach, which wasn't very funny either.

Servicemen with time on their hands must have read voraciously and it's likely that one of the classics about the previous war, Farewell to Arms, found new readers.

• The Spectator was slow to appreciate the extent of Hemingvvay's originality in 1926 when Fiesta came out, though Anthony Powell rather surprisingly praised it. In his book, To Keep the Ball Rolling, he confessed he'd not particularly liked it at first, but a meeting with the woman on whom Brett, Lady Ashley, the heroine, was modelled sent him back for another look.

Hemingway was given a good send-off after his suicide in 1966, Anthony Burgess praised his courage in facing up to bodily decay and his stoical acceptance of being finished as a writer: 'the senile ex-writer is all very well for England but will not do for America. Hemingway was all-American.' Burgess also said that Gertrude Stein didn't know what to do with her faux-naif style but Hemingway did, 'the pen handled with the accuracy of a rifle'. Nearly 40 years later in the magazine William Scammell was to describe Hemingway's style rather differently as 'a sort of toughguy prose poem that married American demotic witn doomy modernism'.

The Spectator's reviewers invariably face the New Year in the appropriate spirit. In 1966 Auberon Waugh put forward several writers for the Honours List — Frayn, Spark. Ingrams — but concluded: 'However bravely you start, every road leads to C. P. Snow.' And Alan Watkins confirmed The Spectator's reputation for prescience by prophesying that next December Mr Geo. Brown avers he was kept in Ignorance of the Approach of Christmas'.

The Spectator has never believed the dead and famous, or infamous come to that, should be allowed to sleep too soundly and keeps them under constant review. In 1926 Hercule Poirot sent the wrong man to the gallows in Agatha Christie's first book about him according to Pierre Boyard who, reviving Edmund Wilson's title Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?, recently investigated the crime for the second time. Christie shouldn't have listened to Mountbatten, who always claimed the solution was his and not hers. And in 1980 Benny Green wonders whether Trollope, who did so much for the postal service, had 'an arithmetical block', as his figures for the financial arrangements for Hiram House in The Warden were incorrect.

While keeping an eye on the past The Spectator is also keeping itself up to the mark and acknowledging its own shortcomings. Philip Hensher, in a vigorous tribute to Dickens, is in no doubt there has never been a greater novelist, but in his lifetime The Spectator was as grudging in its praise of him as it had been of George Eliot. 'Mr Dickens' fame will depend on his humour alone' was the dispiriting verdict of one reviewer, while another deplored his laziness in failing to get himself educated properly. He was altogether too vulgar. A. N. Wilson, a long-standing pillar of The Spectator, in his latest book, The Victorians, quotes Lord Melbourne's reply when Queen Victoria asks him about Oliver Twist: 'It's all among Workhouses and Coffin Makers and Pickpockets; I wish to avoid them.'

We are lucky that writers in the past led more private and secretive lives than those of today. There is nearly always something new to discover about them, and The Spectator's reviewers have an excellent nose for these literary titbits. It obviously isn't earthshaking to learn that Ada and Dud was the title Scott Fitzgerald originally wanted to give The Great Gatsby, but it sends a pleasurable frisson of serendipity tingling down the spine; as have many other surprising revelations I came across in the course of my lightning trip through the volumes.