Literary Authors, Parliamentary Reporters: Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Dickens by Nikki Hessell (review)

Reviewed by: Literary Authors, Parliamentary Reporters: Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Dickens by Nikki Hessell David E. Latané (bio) Nikki Hessell , Literary Authors, Parliamentary Reporters: Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. xxi + 195, $90/£55 cloth. Nikki Hessell's Literary Authors, Parliamentary Reporters takes a compelling look at an understudied aspect of four canonical writers' lives: the time they spent sitting in the gallery of the old Houses of Parliament taking down other men's words for newspapers and magazines. Hessell conducts a gentle but rigorous argument with the numerous biographers who treat this activity by waving a magic wand of prolepsis to show the coming glories of literary genius. While recognizing that ordinary reporters do not have books written about them, she nevertheless makes a strong case for looking at the four famous ones as "successful journalists, not frustrated novelists, poets and literary essayists" (xi). Aside from the welcome correction to the over-egging of the exceptional qualities of Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Dickens's parliamentary reports, readers of VPR will be happy that their fame has enabled Hessell's extended and careful analysis of how parliamentary reporters went about their business. In fact, she uses her subjects to trace the evolution of the craft via an "exercise in the recovery of evidence" that includes looking at the details of individual speeches of known reportage and then closely comparing reports from different sources along with notebooks, letters, and memoirs (xiii). The close reading of the evidence regarding more or less mundane reporting is excellent. The opening chapter, "Reporting and the Individual Talent," explores the sameness of biographical narratives about the reportorial interludes. It does not go without saying, but seems to go without questioning, that extraordinary men like Johnson, Coleridge, and Hazlitt must have been extraordinary or anomalous in some way as reporters. (Dickens is a different case, as he was viewed as a superior reporter before he was recognized as a literary figure.) Samuel Johnson, writing when reporters were banned from the gallery, is assumed to have exercised his genius most directly in inventing speeches that were better written than the originals. Hessell's discussion of Johnson's reporting shows, however, how the house style of the Gentleman's Magazine informs his practice, especially in relation to the Gentleman's direct competition with a different method in the London Magazine. Parliamentary reporting advanced considerably from Johnson's day to when Coleridge and Hazlitt briefly worked for the Morning Post and the Morning Chronicle. Coleridge was already noted as a writer of great promise when Daniel Stuart recruited him for the Morning Post, and Hessell argues that he assumed a hybrid role as gallery observer, reporter, and editor. Looking closely at the famous debate on peace (February 3, [End Page 429] 1800), Hessell cross-examines David Erdman's essay "Coleridge in Lilliput" (1960). In her treatment of Hazlitt, she takes on more recent critical treatments, notably by Duncan Wu, whose attribution of the entirety of the Marquis of Wellesley's speech (December 20, 1813) she disproves based on an analysis of reportorial procedures. Hessell replaces the "image of the critical Hazlitt, making judgments about the relative worth of speeches . . . with the image of a successful member of the Morning Chronicle's gallery corps" (126). Dickens's journalism has been receiving extra scrutiny lately, and his time in the gallery is no exception. Hessell draws on, rather than argues with, such works as John Drew's Dickens the Journalist (2005). The paradox of Dickens's reporting of speeches is that his celebrated facility with shorthand and reputation for accuracy has allowed his reports to become invisible. Hessell shows that Dickens "worked in a very specific moment in the history of parliamentary journalism," when shorthand accuracy and composition from memory and longhand notes existed side by side (166). By comparing the transcripts for three specific speeches that can probably be assigned to Dickens, Hessell proves that despite his reputation as a shorthand writer, Dickens also exercised the discretion and editing abilities that had long characterized the good reporter; he was "a much more complicated figure, an accurate reporter who would not have always produced accurate reports" (166). Hessell's...

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