The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume I, Britain and Ireland 1880–1955 by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (eds) - review by Hugh Haughton

Hugh Haughton

On The Eliots’ Table

The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume I, Britain and Ireland 1880–1955

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Oxford University Press 955pp £95
 

In one of her pseudonymous ‘Letters of the Moment’, published in 1924 in her husband’s The Criterion, Vivienne Eliot itemised ‘the monthlies, the weeklies, the quarterly reviews, set out in rows like a parterre’ upon her table. They included ‘the pink Dial, the golden Mercury, the austere Nouvelle Revue Française’, ‘the lemon yellow Adelphi’, the ‘slim and elegant Nation’ and ‘beneath all but shamefully in sight the gaudy cover and uncouth dimensions of Vogue’. 

The essay gives us a snapshot of the publications littering the desk of the author of The Waste Land soon after its appearance in his own modernist magazine in late 1922. Though Eliot shunned his rival Middleton Murry’s Adelphi and J C Squire’s middlebrow London Mercury, he published

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