Rupert Christiansen

Just how unhappy was Jane Welsh’s 40-year marriage to Thomas Carlyle? For decades after the publication of J. A. Froude’s scandalously revealing biography in 1883, it was widely regarded as one of the dirtier secrets of Victorian literary history. She never wanted him in the first place, he was sexually impotent, she was bitterly jealous of his friendship with Lady Harriet Ashburton, he was either morosely taciturn or explosively violent. This new collection of Jane’s letters — a one-volume offshoot of the gigantic and still incomplete Duke edition — follows a revisionist line and paints a more ambiguous picture. Jane’s warmer feelings towards Lady Harriet are presented, and her possibly lesbian inclinations explored (to no plausible end).

Ever since the posthumous publication in 1979 of Testimony, his volume of memoirs, ‘as related to and edited by Solmon Volkov’, Dmitri Shostakovich has ranked not only as a great Russian composer but also as a great figure of Russian literature — sullenly truculent, cynically embittered and permanently disappointed. Some scholars, indeed, have gone so far as to claim that the Shostakovich of Testimony was in effect a fictional creation, based on Volkov’s fraudulent claim to be the composer’s close friend and largely designed to please a Cold War audience who needed to think of him and his music as fervently anti-communist.

Being of the same age and provenance as Richard Morrison, I was intrigued to note that he honours the London Symphony Orchestra of the late 1960s as the band that turned him on to classical music — it even made it seem ‘a bit groovy’, he remarks wryly. My own memory is different. Aged 14, I remember the LSO as being rather naff — after all, ‘they had a man from Hollywood as their conductor,’ as Morrison puts it, and ‘they sometimes wore polo-necked sweaters’. The Philharmonia, on the other hand, boasted the gravitas of Klemperer as well as the youthful eclat of Barenboim and Muti, while the BBC Symphony Orchestra had the radical chic of Boulez to offer.

This is a hugely impressive but somewhat exhausting book, the justification for which — from a brutally commercial viewpoint — I fail to grasp. It is a collection of Sir Frank Kermode’s literary criticism, selected by the author and drawn chronologically from all periods and aspects of his oeuvre. Short prefaces, outlining genesis and context, precede 19 essays (some of them lectures, some of them chapters from full-length works), followed by seven briefer articles, taken from the London Review of Books. In libraries if not in bookshops, the great majority of these pieces are readily available in their original published form, where they make better sense — Kermode’s arguments are so delicate and complex that they do not comfortably stand out of context.

A. N. Wilson claims that he can imagine nothing more agreeable than the life of a country parson, 'born in the 1830s with the genetic inheritance of strong teeth'. The Victorians are still vivid to him: from his 1950s childhood, he can recall the last vestiges of their way of life - gas-lit station waiting-rooms, cream jugs covered with beaded cloths - and memories of actual survivors, too. 'When I went up to Oxford in 1969,' he tells us in the introduction, 'there were at least two pair of spinster sisters, the Misses Butler and Deneke, who could remember tea parties with Lewis Carroll.