William Dean Howells and The
Breadwinners
by
George Monteiro
William M. Gibson and George Arms, compilers of A
Bibliography of William Dean Howells (1948, p. 108), correctly
attribute the unsigned review of John Hay's social novel, The
Breadwinners, in the Century Magazine, May 1884,
to
Howells; but they base their assignment merely on Tyler Dennett's passing
comment in his biography of Hay that it is "most probably" by
Howells.[1] More recently, Clara
Marburg Kirk and Rudolf Kirk, reprinting the Century review
in their collection of Howells' essays entitled Criticism and Fiction,
and Other Essays (1959), observe:
Howells [n]ever acknowledge[d] that he wrote the review of
The
Bread-Winners, signed "W," for the May, 1884, issue of
Century. However, the authorship of this early review can
hardly be doubted after a consideration of "John Hay in Literature," written
for the North American Review, September, 1905, soon after
the death of Hay. In this essay Howells looked back over his long
friendship with Hay, which had begun twenty-five years before the
publication of The Bread-Winners, and referred to their
meeting
in London while Hay was writing the book. Almost unconsciously, Howells
threw light on the anonymity of his earlier review in his later essay (p.
237).
Stronger evidence of Howells' authorship is now available. To the
evidence provided by Dennett's opinion and the inferences supplied by the
Kirks, we can add the following paragraph from an unpublished letter,
dated 4 March 1884, Howells to Hay:
Congratulate your friend of The Bread Winner for me on the English
notices. I'm vexed, however, that the notice I wrote for The Century five
wks ago was postponed till April. I should be glad to have got ahead of the
British with my good word. The author's letter was capital.
[2]
In their correspondence at this time Howells maintained the fiction
that Hay had not written the controversial novel. Certainly Howells, who
had tried unsuccessfully to get Aldrich to take the novel for the
Atlantic,
knew both the identity of the author and the reason why he thought it
necessary to preserve his anonymity. Indeed in an unsigned letter to the
November 1883
Century—a second letter appeared in
the
issue for March 1884—Hay, trying to answer the many criticisms
that the
novel had called forth, wrote so revealingly that many were able to guess
his identity. Perhaps it was Hay's example in these instances which
prompted Howells' own prudence in presenting his own "good word"
anonymously.
notes
