Pictured here: the TLS of exactly fifty years ago. The paper was undergoing a year of transition – a minor transition to many, to be sure, but a major one to some, and much debated at the time. That transition is denoted on the first page of this issue for June 14, 1974 by those two fine words “Richard Pipes”.
Since its first appearance in 1902, the TLS had kept the identities of its reviewers from its readers; bylines were reserved for poets and contributors of the odd signed essay. Was such a practice (some asked, and not just of the TLS) fair? Was anonymity serving as a cover for the rolling of logs and the conducting of scholarly vendettas? As far as British literary journalism is concerned, the convention goes back to the eighteenth century at least – to some it was obviously outdated. We happen to believe that, on occasion, it may still have its uses.
When the policy changed, it did so gradually. Picking up the first issue of the TLS for 1974 (January 4), readers would have noted that it led, as usual, with a long but unsigned review, about Auguste Comte. (Its author was Charles Madge, one of the founders of Mass-Observation.) Reading on, they would have encountered a column about literary criticism contributed by Samuel Hynes (“One of the things that a critic can do, is to keep alive the reputations of the good but uncelebrated books”) as well as an essay by John Bayley on Shakespeare’s Sonnets and a new poem by Ruth Fainlight (“August full moon”) – all of them signed. The reviews on the surrounding pages – whether of Monique Wittig’s novel Le Corps lesbien or Isaac Asimov’s story collection Where Do We Go from Here? – were unsigned. Wittig’s reviewer was the distinguished translator Barbara Wright, Asimov’s the poet and novelist James Hamilton-Paterson.
The last issue of 1974 (December 27), by contrast, proudly blazed the TLS’s full name across the width of its front page (where it had formerly been squashed in a corner); beyond its lead review (Alan Ryan on Walter Bagehot) were all manner of fine bylines: Rosemary Dinnage on the latest Erich Fromm; Asa Briggs on urban history; and Mary-Kay Wilmers on living in London (“London offers extensive opportunities for overhearing other people’s conversations: this is one of the reasons writers like living there”).
Please forgive the self-indulgence of our glancing back to one of this year’s more minor literary anniversaries. If you do feel moved to look back to June 1974, though, you may catch the deanonymizing process in mid-flight.
John Gross, the TLS’s editor at the time, had announced some modest alterations in the issue of June 7. “The time has come to change course”, he writes there. “Starting from today’s issue, the ‘fronts’, ‘middles’ and certain other major reviews will no longer be anonymous, and later this year the practice of signed reviews
