Book Review: Literary Authors, Parliamentary Reporters: Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Dickens, by Nikki Hessell

Abstract

Literary Authors, Parliamentary Reporters: Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Dickens. Nikki Hessell. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 218 pp. $90 hbk.Of interest to scholars in both literary and media studies, Literary Authors, Parliamentary Reporters: Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Dickens adds to the reservoir of scholarship about fiction, literary journalism, and traditional journalism and its practices. Particularly notable is the balance and dispassionate approach Nikki Hessell employs. A senior lecturer in English literature in the School of English, Film, Theatre, and Media Studies, Hessell privileges biographical, historical, literary, and sociologi- cal criticism over aesthetic judgment, leaving much room for readers to assess, evalu- ate, and draw their own conclusions.For readers less interested in the time that Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, and Charles Dickens spent covering the Parliament than in the impact of the experience on their later work, the preface, introduction, and conclu- sion are essential to the study. Although readers may often overlook the preface of a book, it is here that Hessell best summarizes her thesis and her objectives. Citing William Law's Our Hansard: Or, The True Mirror of Parliament (1950), Hessell introduces her study with the following quotation:What are reporters? They are the humblest craftsmen in the profession of journalism. They are not the creative writers whose names are known to thousands of readers and whose work is printed over their signatures. They are those who write down patiently the exact words of public men and transmit them faithfully to the channels of publicity. They are anonymous, but indispensible.Hessell puts Law's words about the essential nature of journalism to appropriate use. Elevating parliamentary reporting and its contributions to history and society, Hessell suggests that although the distinction between a reporter and an author has traditionally been a catalog of opposites, this is not necessarily the case.Although critics often discuss the humble journalist and the exalted writer, the anon- ymous craftsman and the literary celebrity, the faithful recorder and the creative genius, the time that Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Dickens spent covering the Parliament was not a rather unpleasant interlude or stepping stone in their careers-as biographers and literary scholars often suggest-but a reflection of the manner in which critics-and perhaps readers-want writers to be devoted to literature and to operate beyond the realm of day jobs and wages. In fact, as Hessell reminds us, it is easy to overlook the degree to which these literary writers operated as highly successful journalists, not frus- trated novelists, poets and literary essayists, during their time in the gallery.Hessell's study shines precisely because of what she does not attempt or claim to do: she does not criticize reporting that was by its very definition constrained by both Parliamentary and newspaper requirements about form and content, and she does not speculate about what Parliamentary reports tell readers about the development of a mature author. …