About Scrutiny

Scrutiny

Scrutiny, published in full as Scrutiny: A Quarterly Review, was a Cambridge literary periodical that appeared from May 1932 until 1953. In a run of only about fifteen hundred copies at its height, it became one of the most influential journals of literary criticism in the English-speaking world in the twentieth century. Its principal editor throughout was F. R. Leavis, the Cambridge critic whose teaching at Downing College and whose books helped to reshape how English literature was studied in schools and universities.

The journal was quarterly, in English, and based in Cambridge. Its publisher is recorded as Deighton, Bell, & Company. The final numbered volume was volume 19 in 1953, although a further volume, volume 20, containing Leavis's retrospect, indexes and errata, is often counted with the series. For a small quarterly with no mass readership, that afterlife in bound volumes is itself a measure of the seriousness with which libraries and teachers treated it.

Founding in Cambridge in 1932

Scrutiny was founded in 1932 by L. C. Knights and F. R. Leavis. The literary critic and historian Boris Ford later credited Knights with the original idea for such a quarterly and with taking steps to bring it into being; 15 May 1932, Knights's twenty-sixth birthday, is given in that account as a key date in its creation, and the first issue appeared early in May. Knights was, on Ford's account, the only editor who served in that role for every one of the journal's seventy-six issues.

The first issue sold one hundred copies in its first week. Early subscribers included figures of the standing of T. S. Eliot, George Santayana, R. H. Tawney and Aldous Huxley, which suggests that, small as it was, the new review was noticed immediately in intellectual circles well beyond Cambridge.

The editors

Leavis remained the journal's principal editor from the first issue to the last. Alongside him, the editorial team at different times included L. C. Knights, D. W. Harding, Harold Andrew Mason and Denys Thompson. Q. D. Leavis, the editor's wife and a formidable critic in her own right, contributed to and supported the journal as an editor over much of its life, from 1932 to 1951 in one summary of her career.

The music critic Wilfrid Mellers also joined the editorial board. After writing many articles for Scrutiny, he appeared on the board in the January 1942 issue and remained in that position until the December 1948 issue, a reminder that the journal's interests were never confined to poetry and fiction alone.

A small circulation and a wide readership

Scrutiny never sold in large numbers, and its editors made no attempt to turn it into a popular magazine. Print numbers rose slowly: about 750 copies were being printed later in the 1930s, about 1,000 in the 1940s, and at its height in the 1950s it printed only 1,500 copies.

Those figures understate its reach. Most copies were held by colleges and academic libraries, where a single copy could be read by successive generations of students and teachers. It was through that institutional readership, as much as through individual subscribers, that Leavis became so influential in twentieth-century literary criticism, with the journal as one of his main vehicles.

What Scrutiny published

Scrutiny was a journal of criticism rather than a magazine of new creative writing. Its pages carried essays and reviews that subjected poems, novels, plays and other criticism to close, discriminating attention, and it provided a forum both for identifying important contemporary work and for re-examining the established canon by serious criteria.

Many contributors also wrote on education and politics, subjects the Leavises treated as inseparable from literary culture. Q. D. Leavis's book Fiction and the Reading Public, published in the same year as the journal's founding, belonged to the same project: an examination of what the reading public was offered, and of what that diet did to literary standards.

Contributors

For a journal produced by a small Cambridge circle, Scrutiny attracted a notably wide contributing body. Its contributors included Q. D. Leavis, Marius Bewley, William Empson, L. C. Knights, Michael Oakeshott, Herbert Read, I. A. Richards, George Santayana, Derek A. Traversi and Martin Turnell. Some of its contributors also wrote for Left Review, which underlines that the journal's cultural politics could not be reduced to a single party line.

The journal did not protect its own. It could be sharply critical of figures who had contributed to it: later accounts note that Scrutiny denounced the later work of both Empson and Richards, two of the most important critical influences on its own early method, and that it disregarded critics working in the colonies such as R. P. Blackmur, Kenneth Burke and Northrop Frye.

The critical project

Scrutiny was the vehicle for what has been called the new Cambridge criticism. It upheld rigorous intellectual standards and attacked what Leavis saw as the dilettante elitism of the Bloomsbury Group. Against reviewing that treated literature as fashionable conversation, it insisted that a critic should make clear, argued judgments about what was good, mature and admirable, and should say plainly what was trivial.

That insistence was tied to teaching. The criticism in Scrutiny was informed by a teacher's concern to present what was essential to students who had limited time and a limited range of experience. Selection, in other words, was not snobbery for its own sake in the journal's own terms; it was the practical core of an education in reading.

Revaluation of English literature

The critic Richard Poirier judged that Scrutiny's most important achievement was a nearly complete revaluation of English literature. Across twenty-one years the journal argued its way through the canon, raising some reputations and lowering others, and treating contemporary writing by the same standards it applied to the classics.

Leavis's own books grew directly out of this work. The Common Pursuit, published in 1952, collected essays from Scrutiny, including his defence of Milton against T. S. Eliot, his engagement with Shakespeare, and his arguments against importing sociology and political activism into the study of literature. The volume also shows the range of his controversial judgments, on writers from Bunyan and Swift to Auden and E. M. Forster.

Criticism and controversy

Scrutiny was admired and attacked in roughly equal measure. Poirier remarked that it had earned more respect and more denunciation than any other quarterly in English. John Grant, reviewing the journal's record in 1964, suggested that it specialised in being right about half the time, and that in order to praise it felt compelled also to damn — something it found easy to do because it possessed fixed standards against which every work could be judged.

That severity was deliberate. A journal founded to raise standards could hardly avoid making enemies among the authors, publishers and reviewers whose work it found wanting, and the controversies it generated are part of the reason its influence spread far beyond its thousand or so printed copies.

The final years and closure in 1953

Scrutiny continued quarterly through the Second World War and into the early 1950s. Its final issue appeared in 1953, closing volume 19. The additional volume 20, containing Leavis's retrospect on the whole enterprise together with indexes and errata, is often included with the series and gives the run a deliberate, completed shape.

Leavis himself continued to write and teach after the journal ended — he had been director of studies in English at Downing College from 1931 for some thirty years, became a fellow of the college in 1937, and was University Reader in English at Cambridge from 1959 to 1962 — but no successor journal carried the Scrutiny project forward in the same form.

Legacy

Scrutiny's legacy lies less in any single judgment than in the model it set: that literary criticism could be a serious, collaborative discipline, practised in a periodical, directed at both the canon and contemporary writing, and connected to how literature is taught. Generations of English teachers in Britain and beyond were trained in its shadow, whether they accepted its verdicts or reacted against them.

Cambridge University Press later reissued the journal's volumes as books, preserving the complete run for library readers. More than seventy years after its last issue, Scrutiny is still routinely described as having had some claim to be the most influential literary journal in the English-speaking world between 1932 and 1953 — a remarkable record for a Cambridge quarterly that never printed more than fifteen hundred copies.