Scratching a living

John Gross’s The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life since 1800, a standard text for anyone set on a life of writing about books, was intentionally truncated, ending its chronology before Gross’s own time of eminence. Two decades after the book’s publication in 1969, Gross explained in a new afterword that he had not wanted to comment on his peers and colleagues, for fear of misunderstanding or offence. A perfectly justifiable approach, but it made the book uncomfortably tantalising for those who prefer their gossip to be at the expense of the living.

The Prose Factory is dedicated to Gross, and partially overlaps with The Rise and Fall, beginning in 1918. It appears at first to be a capacious project, taking in the rise of the paperback and the bestseller, Bloomsbury, Grub Street and academe. This is a book about literary life in England, not the United Kingdom or the English-speaking world (the United States is a place that sends cheques to English writers for their stories); and, as the book’s title suggests, Taylor is interested in production more than inspiration.