About The English Review

The English Review

The English Review was an English-language literary magazine published monthly in London from 1908 to 1937. Founded by Ford Madox Hueffer, later known as Ford Madox Ford, it began as one of the most exciting literary launches of the Edwardian period, publishing established masters alongside the first work of writers who would define modernism. At its peak it printed some of the leading writers of its day, yet it was rarely financially secure, and its later years traced a long decline from literary experiment to conservative politics and eventual absorption by another review.

Its history divides naturally into two great editorships and a long aftermath: Hueffer's founding year, Austin Harrison's expansion of the magazine between 1909 and 1923, and the increasingly conservative direction it took after Harrison sold it, until it was absorbed by The National Review in 1937.

Founded in a rage: Hueffer and the first issue

Hueffer started the magazine in 1908, in Ezra Pound's later phrase, in a rage that there was no place in England to print a poem by Thomas Hardy. The immediate provocation was the rejection by other editors of Hardy's poem A Sunday Morning Tragedy, which Hueffer was determined to publish. More broadly, Ford was dissatisfied with existing periodicals and wanted a venue for the best writers available, regardless of fashion.

The first issue, published in December 1908, justified the ambition. It contained Hardy's poem together with original work by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, John Galsworthy, W. H. Hudson, R. B. Cunninghame Graham and H. G. Wells. Few first issues in British magazine history have assembled so concentrated a list of major names, and the launch established the review's reputation before it had established any commercial stability.

Hueffer's year: excellence without profit

Hueffer maintained that standard in the issues he edited, publishing early work by Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis alongside the established generation. His contributors also included W. B. Yeats, Violet Hunt, Arnold Bennett, Hilaire Belloc and E. M. Forster, and he gave space to new writers such as Norman Douglas and F. S. Flint. As an editor, Hueffer was celebrated for hospitality to talent: he recognised modern writing early and printed it beside the Edwardian establishment.

The finances did not match the literature. The review appeared monthly, ran to about 175 pages and sold for half a crown, yet circulation did not exceed 1,000 during Hueffer's editorship. His financial management proved unsatisfactory, his backer Arthur Marwood withdrew support, and after publishing twelve issues Hueffer sold the magazine to Alfred Mond, a wealthy politician who acquired it as a platform for liberal reformist opinions. Hueffer later repeated his editorial achievement in Paris with The Transatlantic Review in 1924, but his connection with The English Review ended in 1909.

Austin Harrison and a broader review

Mond installed Austin Harrison as editor in January 1910, and Harrison remained in post until 1923. He maintained the quality of contributors while broadening the review's scope to include more women writers and more writers from abroad. Alongside continuing work by Conrad, Lawrence, Graham and Wells, the magazine now published Sherwood Anderson, Anton Chekhov, Hermann Hesse, Aldous Huxley, Katherine Mansfield, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Ivan Turgenev and William Butler Yeats.

Political coverage increased substantially under Harrison, reflecting his background as a journalist. The review became a place where literature and current politics occupied the same monthly space, and where translated European writing reached British readers alongside new English fiction and poetry. Martha Vogeler's later study of Harrison and the review remains the standard account of this period.

Controversy, price and profitability

Harrison did not avoid controversy. He challenged contemporary attitudes towards sexuality, publishing work by authors such as Frank Harris that drew condemnation in other journals. The notoriety helped rather than harmed the magazine, and circulation was further boosted when its cover price was reduced from half a crown to a shilling, making it accessible to a wider readership than Hueffer's expensive monthly had reached.

By 1915 the review had become profitable to the point that Harrison was able to buy out Mond and become owner as well as editor. That achievement marks the commercial high point of the magazine's history: the same title that had failed financially with a circulation below 1,000 had, through broader contents, a lower price and a more journalistic energy, built a sustainable business without abandoning literary ambition.

War and post-war decline

After the First World War the journal began to decline. The literary world it had served in 1908 had changed: modernist writing found new little magazines, the established Edwardian authors died or faded, and the economics of monthly reviews tightened. Harrison sold The English Review to Ernest Remnant in 1923, and under Remnant it took an increasingly conservative and less literary direction.

The change of character was significant. A magazine founded to print Hardy, Conrad and the young Lawrence and Pound became, in the interwar years, a vehicle for a conservative national ideal that scholars of the periodical press have studied as an example of the intellectual culture of interwar conservatism. Literature did not disappear entirely, but it no longer governed the magazine's identity.

The final editors

Remnant edited the review from 1923 to 1931. He was succeeded by Douglas Jerrold, editor from 1931 to 1935, under whom the magazine was noted for the quality of its commentary on modernist writing, with T. S. Eliot among its reviewers. That late critical distinction could not reverse the overall decline. Wilfrid Hindle edited briefly in 1936, followed by Derek Walker-Smith from 1936 to 1937.

In 1937 The English Review was absorbed by The National Review. The merger ended twenty-nine years of independent publication. No revival followed, and the title survives principally through library runs, digital editions and the scholarship devoted to its founding years.

Survival in digital form

The first fifteen issues, edited by Hueffer from December 1908 to February 1910, have been made available cover to cover as a searchable digital edition by the Modernist Journals Project, with downloadable files for researchers. Further issues are available through the Internet Archive. That accessibility reflects where modern interest concentrates: scholars return repeatedly to the Hueffer and early Harrison years, when the review stood at the junction between late Victorian realism and avant-garde experiment.

Ford's own later reputation reinforces that focus. His novels, above all The Good Soldier and the Parade's End sequence, and his second career as a Paris editor who published James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Jean Rhys, have kept attention on the editorial eye he first demonstrated in London in 1908. The English Review is routinely cited as the first proof of that eye.

Legacy

The English Review mattered out of proportion to its circulation and lifespan because of when it appeared and whom it published first. In a single founding year it placed Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells in the same magazine as the early Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis. That juxtaposition captured a literary culture in transition, and it gave several of modernism's central figures an early, respectable London platform.

Its later history is equally instructive. Under Harrison it showed that a literary review could broaden, cheapen and politicise itself into profitability; after Harrison it showed how quickly such a magazine could lose its literary purpose when ownership and editorship changed. In the WorldNM directory it is recorded as a London literary magazine published from 1908 to 1937 and edited at its launch by Ford Madox Ford: the launch, more than the long decline, is what British literary history remembers.