It was? They did?
I'm finishing up (at least, I hope I am) a short essay on the Brontes' reception history,1 which has required me to write about Swinburne's attitude to George Eliot. "Huh?" you say. T. Wemyss Reid's Charlotte Bronte: A Monograph (ser. 1876; rev. and rpt. 1877) makes a passing reference to Eliot; Swinburne's (positive) response to Wemyss Reid, A Note on Charlotte Bronte (1877) is all about the Eliot-thrashing. (Short version: CB was a genius; GE, not so much.) In any event, in search of some further context for Swinburne's anti-Eliot crusade, which seems to have somewhat puzzling roots, I came across Swinburne's review essay on Charles Reade. Swinburne has some amusingly snarky things to say about Reade--"No man was ever at more pains to impair his own prospects of literary survival" (272)--but what brought me up short was this comment: "The now fashionable comparison or contrast of Charles Reade with George Eliot seems to me altogether less profitable and less reasonable than a contrast or comparison of his work with that of the two most copious and spontaneous masters of romance [Scott and Dumas]" (278). To a twenty-first century reader, this is not an obvious comparison. (It apparently was to Reade, however, and not to Eliot's benefit.) Some googling about suggests that there still was a vogue for linking Eliot and Reade up through the early twentieth century...a vogue which ebbed along with Reade's reputation. Today, Reade is mostly remembered for impassioned social crusading, and he's entirely out of print (except in the usual post-Google POD editions).2 As is so often the case, what at first looks like a familiar critical constellation (Swinburne, Bronte, Eliot) turns out to contain a dead, yet once important, star...
1 Attentive readers will note that I'm actually writing about something that has to do with a canonical author. Stop the presses!
2 At one point, though, AMS brought the complete works out as a facsimile edition. I know this, because I own it. And I own it because I bought the whole shebang at the South Loop Powell's, then wrangled it several blocks to the nearest #6 express stop, and then several more blocks from the Hyde Park stop to my apartment. I think my arms were a few inches longer by the time I was finished...