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William Dean Howells and The Breadwinners by George Monteiro
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267

Page 267

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provided by Dennett's opinion and the inferences supplied by the Kirks, we can add the following paragraph from an unpublished letter, dated 4 March 1884, Howells to Hay: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,


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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

 
[1]

Howells' review appears in the Century, XXVIII (May, 1884), 153-154; and for Dennett's statement, see his John Hay: From Poetry to Politics (1933), p. 115.

[2]

Manuscript letter in the John Hay Library, Brown University. I wish to thank Dr. David A. Jonah, Librarian of Brown University, for the courtesy of allowing me to work with the John Hay Papers at Brown.