Freelance Writers and the Changing Terrain of Intellectual Life in Britain, 1880–1980

Abstract

The terrain of British intellectual life in the twentieth century was dominated by two major features: freelance writers and university scholars. At the elite level, as Noel Annan showed, the two types—independent thinkers and academics—can be treated as one class, linked by personal connections and by common attitudes arising largely from the old school tie. However, when intellectuals beyond the elite stratum are surveyed, it becomes clear that the fortunes of these two features of the intellectual landscape differed sharply. The university teachers grew rapidly in number and made themselves into what Harold Perkin calls “the key profession.” But as John Gross has contended, freelance writers, despite a rich heritage from the nineteenth century, seemed, especially in their own eyes, to form an old and decaying mountain range. From 1880 to 1980 freelance writers experienced a pervasive and intensifying sense of crisis in their trade and in their cultural role. John Wain, a successful novelist and critic, stated the matter plainly in 1973: contemplation of the difficulties of “being an author,” he said, always threw him into “a black depression in which I could slash my wrists.”How can one explain the pessimism of freelance writers, their sense of being increasingly marginalized? Were their complaints simply habitual expressions of a writerly pose common since the romantic period? After all, many of the broad social and cultural trends in Britain between 1880 and 1980 should have been advantageous to independent writers.