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CHINESE LITERATURE AND CULTURE IN THE WORLD

Cultural Revolution
Manuscripts
Unofficial Entertainment Fiction
from 1970s China

Lena Henningsen
Chinese Literature and Culture in the World

Series Editor
Ban Wang, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
As China is becoming an important player on the world stage, Chinese
literature is poised to change and reshape the overlapping, shared cultural
landscapes in the world. This series publishes books that reconsider
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 Lena Henningsen

Cultural Revolution
Manuscripts
Unofficial Entertainment Fiction from 1970s China
Lena Henningsen
Institute of Chinese Studies
University of Freiburg
Freiburg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

Chinese Literature and Culture in the World

ISBN 978-3-030-73382-7 ISBN 978-3-030-73383-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73383-4

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
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 dedicated to Anne, Jakob and Paula
in memory of their grandmother Franziska
 Acknowledgments

This book is about texts in motion, about manuscripts that travel across
space, time and medium as they are handed from person to person. I argue
that the particular contexts and conditions of these journeys impact on the
material shape of distinct texts and, consequently, on their content, form
and style. In similar ways, this book also came into existence through the
inspiring intellectual journey(s) that I undertook during the past years.
On these journeys, I took along my texts and ideas and shared them with
patient friends and colleagues. This impacted significantly on the shape
and contents that the book now ended up with. I am indebted to all my
fellow travelers who made this undertaking tremendously enjoyable.
Over the past years, Jennifer Altehenger, Shuyu Kong, Barbara Mittler,
Stephan Packard and Nicolai Volland have read and commented on earlier
versions of several of my chapters. In addition, the wonderful READ-
CHINA team—Damian Mandzunowski, Eve Yi Lin, Duncan Paterson
and Lara Yuyu Yang—subjected the first full draft of the manuscript to
a thorough and critical reading. Lastly, the anonymous reviewer of this
book provided me useful comments to clarify my points. I thank all of
them for helping me clarify, refine and rethink my ideas.
Freiburg proved to be an ideal base camp for my journey thanks to
the very amicable and cooperative climate at the institute and thanks to
the many academic events and good food we share. I have benefitted
immensely from exchanges with colleagues and students alike. In addition

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

to the READCHINA team, I would like to thank Puck Engman, Elisa-

beth Forster, Lanfen Guo, Lynn Kalic, Sara Landa, Daniel Leese, Elisa-
beth Schleep, Oliver Schulz, Amanda Shuman, Nicola Spakowski, René
Trappel, Tobias Voss, Bailu Wang and Zhang Man.
From 2013 to 2018, when I was doing most of the research for this
book, I was fortunate to be a member of the German Young Academy.
I benefitted tremendously from discussions with my fellow members—
in particular Anna Ahlers, Miriam Akkermann, Caspar Battegay, Sibylle
Baumbach, Kirill Dmitriev, Katharina Heyden, Gordon Kampe, Henrike
Manuwald, Evelyn Runge and Kai Wiegandt—and from the opportunity
to organize a conference on reception and authorship in popular cultures
at the Bavarian Academy of the Sciences and a summer school on text,
reader and author.
I have presented my research at international conferences and work-
shops including ACCL 2015, AAS 2018, 2019 and 2020, EACS 2018
and the Comparative World Literatures conference in Como (2018).
I would like to thank my co-panelists and the audiences at these and
various other venues for their valuable comments or for sharing their
memories of the Cultural Revolution era, in particular, Sibylle Baumbach,
Martin Butler, Timothy Cheek, Chen Jianhua, Eva von Contzen, Robert
Culp, Kirk Denton, Natascha Gentz, Emily Graf, Xuelei Huang, Shuyu
Kong, Martin von Koppenfels, Daniel Koss, Wendy Larson, Dayton
Lekner, Jie Li, Perry Link, Sheldon Lu, Andrea Riemenschnitter, Fred-
erike Schneider-Vielsäcker, Michael Schoenhals, Oliver Seibt, Shi Ming,
Peidong Sun, Eddy U, Clarissa Vierke, Renren Yang, Wang Yao, Wen-
hsin Yeh, Frances Weightman, Xu Xing, Enhua Zhang, Chenshu Zhou
and Zhou Haiyan.
Research for this book was supported through the generous funding
of a number of institutions, first and foremost the University of Freiburg.
TU Munich Institute of Advanced Studies provided me with a generous
one-year research fellowship, during which time I was able to write the
first draft of the manuscript. From 2015 to 2019, a research grant from
the science ministry of Baden-Württemberg funded the project “Worlds of
Reading during China’s long 1970s.” And as I was finalizing this book,
I began work on the ERC-funded project “The Politics of Reading in
the People’s Republic of China.” The ReadAct database and the results
presented in Chapter 5 received funding from the European Research
Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and
innovation programme (grant agreement No. 757365 / READCHINA).
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

Smaller research and travel grants were awarded by the German Young
Academy and by the German Academic Exchange Service.
Both Berlin State Library and the libraries at the Institutes of Chinese
Studies in Freiburg and Heidelberg provided me with a number of hard-
to-access publications. I would like to thank the librarians at Freiburg,
Heidelberg and Berlin—Carmen Paul, Hanno Lecher, Gesche Schröder
and Miriam Seeger—for their wonderful support. The data I am drawing
on in Chapters 5 and 6 came within the scope of the “Worlds of Read-
ing” and the READCHINA projects. The ReadAct database was imple-
mented by Duncan Paterson. Data was contributed by Mira Grünwald,
Huang Wenxin, Damian Mandzunowski, Oliver Schulz, Wu Chia-yi,
Gulfia Fakhretdinova and myself. Dang Xiayin and Yang Junjie transcribed
a number of the shouchaoben analyzed.
During the preparation of this book, I have published first results of
my research. Some of these earlier findings are also included in this book,
albeit updated. Some of the general observations about the literary land-
scape of the Cultural Revolution delineated in the Routledge Handbook of
Modern Chinese Literature (Henningsen 2019) also appear in the intro-
duction to this book. In my contribution to Kodex 2016 (Henningsen
2016), I sketch some of the basic ideas about variation and continuity
in the different versions of The Second Handshake and the Three Plum
Blossom saga, which informs Chapters 2 and 3. My contribution to Modern
Chinese Literature and Culture (Henningsen 2017), which focuses on
the novel Open Love Letters, has been significantly expanded to create
Chapters 4 and 6. Some of the basic findings from the ReadAct database
discussed in Chapter 5, have also appeared in an earlier journal article
in the Asian Journal of African Studies (Henningsen 2020). I thank the
editors for granting their permission to include these materials into my
book.
Last but not least, I want to thank my friends and family who accom-
panied me on the intellectual journey that turned into this book. I could
not have wished for better travel company: Jennifer Altehenger, Eva
von Contzen, Lanfen Guo, Laura Krämer, Daniel Leese, Nic Leonhardt,
Barbara Mittler, Qi Kuaige, Julia Schneider, Tine Stellfeld, Petra Thiel,
Clarissa Vierke, Nico Volland, Evi Zemanek and our wonderful neigh-
bors. I also thank my father and my in-laws for their moral and practical
support, looking after the kids and helping out whenever we needed them.
I thank my brother Nils, my uncle Manfred, my cousin Janne and their
families for their constant presence in my life and for a shared love of
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

the Baltic Sea. The best part of this journey, however, was sharing it with
my husband Daniel and our kids—and taking various academic and non-
academic detours together. Watching the children grow up and become
independent, sharing their joys of reading and writing and sharing their
laughter are the greatest pleasures and a constant source of energy. I dedi-
cate this book to Anne, Jakob and Paula in memory of their grandmother
Franziska who sadly passed away as the journey of this book began and
who nonetheless has accompanied me each and every day.
 Note on References to Primary
Sources

The majority of shouchaoben fiction discussed in this book was written by

anonymous authors and exists in multiple copies. To enable both correct
referencing and readability, the texts are referenced using an acronym
that refers to the English translation of their title, in some cases a year
and, when there are multiple versions with the same title, also a number.
TSH [1974]_2 thus refers to the second manuscript version of The Second
Handshake in the sample that was likely written down in 1974. Some
shouchaoben manuscripts are written on unnumbered pages. In this case,
the references provide the respective chapter and then the page number
within this chapter. TSH 1974_1: 4/6 therefore refers to page six of
Chapter 4 in the first copy of The Second Handshake dated 1974. The
use of these acronyms in the list of references thus leads to complete
bibliographical data, either referring to the original Cultural Revolution
manuscript, or to a later printed version. The manuscript versions of
the shouchaoben are listed separately from the rest of the bibliography;
published versions appear both in this list and in the regular bibliography.
The adaptations of The Second Handshake discussed in the last chapter
are referenced with both the author and adaptor’s surname. Zhang/Luo
1979 thus refers to the lianhuanhua adaptation of the novel by Luo
Jiefeng. These are listed in the regular bibliography.

xi
 Praise for Cultural Revolution
Manuscripts

“In her Cultural Revolution Manuscripts: Unofficial Entertainment

Fiction from 1970s China Henningsen maps out and takes the reader on
an exciting journey through a terra incognita in the literary universe of
the twentieth century: hand-copied Chinese entertainment fiction circu-
lating underground during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. A path-
breaking study, her book not only enriches our understanding of one of
Chinese culture’s known unknowns (as we might choose to refer to it
in twenty-first-century Newspeak), but also on a less serious note makes
for a wonderful read in and by itself, containing as it does snippets from
stories of murder and espionage, love and sex.”
—Michael Schoenhals, Professor Emeritus, Centre for Languages and
Literature, Lund University, Sweden

“Meticulously researched and carefully argued, Cultural Revolution

Manuscripts: Unofficial Entertainment Fiction from 1970s China makes
a major contribution to the investigation of the cultural history of
China’s Cultural Revolution. By conceptualizing ‘texts in motion,’ Lena
Henningsen not only captures the important phenomenon of producing
and consuming shouchaoben (hand-copied books), but also sheds illumi-
nating light on our understanding of world literature and its significance
to humanity.”
—Shuyu Kong, Professor of Humanities, Simon Fraser University,
Canada

xiii
xiv PRAISE FOR CULTURAL REVOLUTION MANUSCRIPTS

“Hand-copied books—shouchaoben—circulated far and wide during

China’s Cultural Revolution. Including original literary texts, translations
of forbidden foreign works intended to be read only by high-level cadres
and entertainment fiction that did not meet socialist guidelines for good
literature, the shouchaoben transcended official restrictions to bring new
topics and sensibilities to readers. Lena Henningsen’s enlightening study
shows how readers and writers bucked the system by literally taking things
into their own hands.”
—Wendy Larson, Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Film,
University of Oregon, USA

“Mao Zedong, borrowing from Stalin, called for writers to be ‘engineers

of the soul.’ Their job was to assure that the ideology of the state infuse
the minds of the populace. But at the height of Mao’s power, young
people in China answered with their own texts, which they copied by
hand and passed around. Lena Henningsen astutely calls these ‘texts in
motion’—from pen to pen, hand to hand, genre to genre, eventually
spreading to several media and all of China.”
—Perry Link, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and
Chinese, UC Riverside, USA
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
2 The Writing and Rewriting of an Exemplary
Shouchaoben: Zhang Yang’s The Second Handshake
During the Cultural Revolution 37
3 Texts on Travel: Stability Across Variation
and Secondary Authorship in Espionage Shouchaoben
Fiction 67
4 Shouchaoben as Literary Avant-Garde: Open Love Letters
and Waves 101
5 Ways of Reading: Cultural Revolution Reading Acts 139
6 World Literature and Intertextuality: Reading Acts
in Shouchaoben Fiction 179
7 From Underground into the Mainstream: Shouchaoben
Fiction on the Commercial Book Market 213
8 Conclusion: Shouchaoben Fiction as Texts in Motion 247

Bibliography 255
Index 275

xv
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Overview of shouchaoben sample for this book 24

Ill. 1.1 Postscript of Three Times to Nanjing 16

Ill. 1.2 Cover page of Three Times to Nanjing 18
Ill. 1.3 Sample of original shouchaoben 26

Fig. 2.1 Overview of shouchaoben copies relevant to the present

analysis 52
Fig. 3.1 Differences in the plots of YFJTJ /TJJ and TTN 81
Fig. 5.1 Genres mentioned most frequently in autobiographical
sources 145
Fig. 5.2 Texts mentioned most frequently in autobiographical
sources 146
Fig. 5.3 Authors mentioned most frequently in autobiographical
sources 148
Fig. 5.4 Temporal distribution of internal publication of works
by and about Lu Xun 153
Fig. 5.5 References to texts by Lu Xun in autobiographical sources
about the Cultural Revolution 154
Fig. 5.6 Titles of internal publications of works by/about Lu Xun
during the Cultural Revolution 173
Fig. 6.1 Intertextual references in entertainment shouchaoben fiction 183
Fig. 6.2 Intertextual references in Zhang Yang’s The Second
Handshake 187
Fig. 6.3 Overview of authors and texts mentioned, alluded
to or quoted in Waves 195

xvii
xviii LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 6.4 Overview of authors and texts mentioned, alluded

to or quoted in Open Love Letters 198
Fig. 6.5 Overview of intertextual references in different sets
of shouchaoben by genre 204
Fig. 7.1 Shouchaoben published officially after the Cultural
Revolution 216
Fig. 7.2 Overview of lianhuanhua adaptations of The Second
Handshake: major changes and commonalities 226
Fig. 7.3 Direct speech from Zhang 1979 used across several
lianhuanhua 235
Fig. 7.4 Grades of textual change and variation between two The
Second Handshake lianhuanhua 241
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Oh, you are reading Zhang Yang’s The Second Handshake! You know, I
read that clandestinely during the Cultural Revolution. And because of
that novel, I later studied chemistry!

A friend told me this when she learned I was reading the 1979 published
version of The Second Handshake, generally considered one of the most
famous pieces of handwritten entertainment fiction (or shouchaoben 手抄
本 fiction) that circulated unofficially in manuscript form in China during
the Cultural Revolution. This friend also offered me her copy of the
printed book, which sits on her bookshelf in her home in Germany some
40 years after she first read one of the handwritten copies that were so
popular in China. Yet, now, in the 2010s, she was not bothering to read
her purchase; the book was simply a memento of her youth.
This brief encounter illustrates some of the issues that this book
reflects. First, for my friend the story (which I will discuss in detail in
Chapters 2 and 7 of this book) still triggered vivid memories of the
circumstances in which she first read the text, including the material
nature of the text and the adverse conditions that dictated hurried and
clandestine, underground reading. Practices in relation to The Second
Handshake thus affirm the literary theory emphasizing the importance
of reading and the status of the reader over that of text and author. The
Second Handshake is a fictional text with an author. Yet, for my friend,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
L. Henningsen, Cultural Revolution Manuscripts,
Chinese Literature and Culture in the World,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73383-4_1
2 L. HENNINGSEN

it is a reference to a particular memory of reading. Reading is a highly

individualistic, even intimate activity. Only reading can bring the story
and the text to life, and handwritten entertainment fiction makes this
point particularly clear. Second, my friend’s reading of the text proved to
be a turning point in her life, as it significantly influenced her choice of
which subject to study at university and, as a consequence, the path her
career and life would take. This indicates that reading shouchaoben fiction
could be a transformative experience. Third, the printed book, one of the
first post-Cultural Revolution bestsellers, is also worth considering as an
object, an object that attests to the text’s move from underground to
aboveground, from manuscript copy to mass publication. It is less impor-
tant as a medium that carries a distinct version of the story; rather, it
serves as a material souvenir of the past that is nonetheless important to
the current identity of its reader.
Handwritten entertainment fiction from the Cultural Revolution thus
opens up new perspectives. First, taking into consideration both the
literary texts and the context of production, circulation and consump-
tion, manuscript fiction offers important windows onto the literary and
intellectual life of the Cultural Revolution. Second, they provide infor-
mation on the everyday lives of their readers, on their wishes, desires and
aspirations. Third, they offer a testing ground for literary theories on text,
author and reader. Due to their material nature as manuscripts, these texts
were extremely fragile and unstable; the readers who copied and handed
them on were essential in preserving, refining and developing the texts.
Fourth, they have had a lasting impact on the development of the literary
field in mainland China since the end of the Cultural Revolution. Fifth,
and lastly, many of them are fun to read.
In this introductory chapter, I will sketch the main characteristics of
the genre. I will begin with the context of their production, circulation
and consumption, consisting of the broader historical context as well as
a map of the intellectual and literary cosmos of the long 1970s in which
they were located. While the fiction discussed in this book is distinctly
related to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, given its circulation beyond
the 1976 watershed and its influence on later literary and intellectual
developments, as an intellectual phenomenon shouchaoben fiction is better
situated within the long 1970s—the period starting in the mid- to late-
1960s and reaching into the early 1980s. Second, I will elaborate on the
particular nature of the genre and the implications of its conditions of
production in terms of what I refer to as the phenomenon of secondary
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

authorship. Third, I will expand on the post-Cultural Revolutionary legacy

of the genre: the waves of republication and the almost complete absence
of academic reflection on the phenomenon. The chapter ends with a
description of the primary sources used and a summary of the aims and
structure of this book.

Context: Reading During the Cultural Revolution

Where can handwritten entertainment fiction be located within the
literary and intellectual cosmos of its time? What did the reading cosmos
of the Cultural Revolution look like? Historical accounts of the Cultural
Revolution distinguish between an early phase of the Cultural Revolu-
tion in which the Red Guards were dominant and their militancy led to
civil war-like conditions in many parts of China. This came to an end
with the deployment of the military and, in late 1968, the nationwide
implementation of the rustication campaign. From 1962 (when the first
rustication began with low participant numbers) to 1980 an estimated 18
million educated urban youth (zhishi qingnian 知识青年 or zhiqing 知青)
were sent to the countryside for reeducation. This was an attempt by Mao
Zedong 毛泽东 (1893–1976) to pacify the cities and to solve the problem
of urban youth unemployment. While some of the educated youth expe-
rienced unprecedented liberties and remember rustication as a rewarding
experience in which they even successfully presented themselves as worthy
successors to the revolution, many soon grew disillusioned and experi-
enced their stint in the countryside as a time of material, intellectual and
psychological deprivation.1 The educated youth were central to the intel-
lectual field of their time and to the shouchaoben phenomenon, circulating
countless reading materials.
Officially, and according to many literary histories of China, literary life
came to a standstill during the Cultural Revolution. After almost complete
shutdown during the early years of the Cultural Revolution, the later
years saw a slight relaxation and significant output in literary produc-
tion. During the “seventeen years” preceding the Cultural Revolution
(the period from 1949 to 1966), socialist realism had been established
as the dominant form of art (King 2013; Van Fleit Hang 2013). At
the same time, distinct “politics of texts in motion” had fostered literary
exchange within the socialist literary universe (Volland 2017: 20–38, see
also Iovene 2014: 51–79). In general, all artistic and literary creation was
required to serve politics, and, by implication, the policies of the Chinese
4 L. HENNINGSEN

Communist Party (CCP). Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on

Literature and Art” (hereafter “Yan’an Talks”, McDougall 1980; Denton
2016) had exerted a strong influence on the modes of literary produc-
tion and reception since 1942. As Richard King observes, “[t]he arts
of the Cultural Revolution were an attempt… to create a new national
culture in the service of socialism untainted by the past and the West”
(King 2013: 113). However, works of art produced during the Cultural
Revolution were of a particular kind. The increase in political pressure on
literary production resulted in the radicalization of literary dogma and in
an artistic field dominated by what is sometimes referred to as “one novel
and eight model” works, or, as elaborated below, by three authors: Hao
Ran 浩然 (1932–2008, pen name of Liang Jinguang 梁金广), Lu Xun
鲁迅 (1881–1936) and Mao Zedong. These political circumstances also
resulted in what Hong Zicheng calls a “divided literary world” with one
part consisting of openly published mainstream literature and the other
one “hidden, secret, and dispersed” (Hong 2007: 236).
Within the realm of official, mainstream literature, the demand to
serve the people required authors to write stories that were mean-
ingful and comprehensive to the broad masses of workers, peasants and
soldiers. Literature was supposed to educate readers to become citizens
of New China who were devoted to the revolutionary cause. As a conse-
quence, all literary productions had to adhere to the requirements of
socialist realism (shehui xianshi zhuyi 社会现实主义; see Van Fleit Hang
2013; Bichler 1996; King 2013; Montani 1992; Meserve/Meserve 1992;
Fokkema 1965). These basic requirements remained throughout the
Cultural Revolution. However, from the late 1950s, socialist realism gave
way to its more radical successor—revolutionary realism (geming xianshi
zhuyi 革命现实主义) and revolutionary romanticism (geming langman
zhuyi 革命浪漫主义, RRRR or 4R, Yang 1996)—as well as the three
prominences (san tuchu 三突出, see below) and a general radicalization
of literary policies. The 4R may be seen as a logical continuation and
implementation of Mao’s Yan’an Forum demands, representing an ideal-
ized reality “possess[ing] an imaginative license that allows it to keep
pace with goal-oriented history” (Wang 2016: 240). Heroic characters
became central, with the three prominences demanding that “the prin-
cipal hero should stand out from (in descending order) the secondary
heroic character, the masses, and the enemy” (King 2013: 119). The
party’s firm grip on literary creation was reaffirmed at the onset of the
Cultural Revolution by the campaign against Hai Rui and republication
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

of the “Yan’an Talks” in Red Flag on July 1, 1966, and in People’s Daily a
day later, thereby serving as a “revolutionary programme… of the Prole-
tarian Cultural Revolution” (Yang 1998: 14), signaling the launch of the
movement and affirming the dogma that literature should serve politics.
While all artistic creation was to be shaped by 4R and the three
prominences, the performing arts were the first major field for their imple-
mentation, not least because of their mobility and resulting propagandistic
efficacy. Jiang Qing 江青 (1914–1991) promoted a reform of traditional
Beijing opera, ballet and western-style symphonies, resulting in the first
eight model works (yangbanxi 样板戏) that were to dominate the artistic
sphere over the next ten years (Clark 2008: 10–54; Mittler 2012: 50–
96). Conceptualized as total works of art, the model works served as
templates for the creation of model heroes. Their stature, clothes, acting
and singing, as well as the time allotted to them and their prominent
position on stage, left no space for the audience to doubt their heroic
qualities.
Within the field of official literature, this model was likewise applied.
In literary works published within the official system, “heroes [had to be]
following the correct Party line, capable of distinguishing the correct from
the wrong line. Revolutionary optimism was the keynote of their heroic
spirit. Sentimentalism, especially love between men and women, was taken
to be bourgeois” (Yang 1998: 20). This left no space for ambivalent or
so-called middle characters (zhongjian renwu 中间人物).
In comparison to the seventeen years, novelistic production increased
after a hiatus between 1966 and 1971. While during the seventeen years
a total of 170 novels had been published, 1972–1976 saw the publication
of a higher yearly average, with a total of 126 novels. Yet, the impact and
popularity of these texts among readers remains difficult to assess (Yang
1998: 13). Most of these novels narrate stories set during the seventeen
years covering military or agricultural topics (Yang 1998: 4–7).
In this context, The Golden Road (金光大道, 1972)by Hao Ran is
exemplary. It is not only the first novel published during the Cultural
Revolution, but also the “one novel” that dominated fictional output
during the era (and it is “still considered the most widely read Chinese
novel published since 1949,” Pang 2017: 67). The Golden Road
“depict[s] a transformation of land, of society, of the peasantry, of human
nature, and of art itself” (King 2013: 114). This epic tale is in the tradi-
tion of earlier novels of land reform and collectivization and it applies the
6 L. HENNINGSEN

rules governing the model works to fiction. The conflict between individ-
ualism and collectivization is acted out between the idealized hero Gao
Daquan 高大全 and his brother Gao Erlin 高二林, with Gao Daquan
presented as larger and stronger than all other characters, both in his
physical and ideological qualities (King 2013: 128–132). His outstanding
qualities are indeed inscribed into his name, which could be translated as
“lofty, grand and complete” (Mittler 2012: 274).
This type of official literature written during the Cultural Revolu-
tion represents a mix of prescribed brightness in imagery and messages,
and intellectual dullness in providing its readers with little potential for
creativity or freedom of thought. However, as has been demonstrated, it
still allowed for variation in form and interpretation, especially given that
at times it demanded adaptation to different contexts and media, as well
as the appropriation of earlier models and genres (Mittler 2012: 17–21).
Lu Xun represents another important literary figure of the Cultural
Revolution, even though he died 30 years before it began. During the
Cultural Revolution, which was shaped by a general hostility toward
intellectuals and Chinese literature of earlier decades, most writing from
Republican China was considered inadequate or even counterrevolu-
tionary. Nonetheless, the Cultural Revolution marks a peak in the political
exploitation of Lu Xun as he was molded into a “warrior” in the offi-
cial rhetoric. Lu Xun and his works thus remained omnipresent, and even
underground literature and its authors refer to him (see also the discussion
of the 1970s reading cosmos in Chapter 5). The author Zhang Yang 张杨
(*1944), for example, refers to Lu Xun as his literary model (Zhang Yang
1999: 79). In his hand-copied entertainment fiction novel The Second
Handshake 第二次握手, the protagonist reports his increasing enthusiasm
for Lu Xun (Zhang Yang 1979: 129) and an upright doctor is described
as a classmate of Lu Xun during his studies in Japan in the early years of
the twentieth century (p.e. TSH 1974_1: 4/6).2
Mao Zedong may be considered the third prominent author of the
decade. His poetic output was widely propagated, integrated into newly
released poem songs, loyalty dances and plays (Clark 2008: 222, 178,
187, 195–196). Mao himself rejected international modernism and May
Fourth poetry. “An accomplished poet in the classical mode” (ibid.:
222), he employed this style when writing on revolutionary issues
(Zhang/Vaughan 2002). Mao was also traditional in that he wrote poetry
that claimed to serve the moral education of the people in order to bring
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

about political and social change (Tan 2017: 628–629). His poems thus
epitomize the new national style proposed at his “Yan’an Talks”.
The literary policies of the Cultural Revolution thus prescribed and
produced a distinct type of mainstream literature which could be
published and read. Whatever did not fit was forbidden, censored, pros-
ecuted or had to remain invisible writing (see below). One of the first
victims of the Cultural Revolution was the author Lao She 老舍 (1899–
1966) who committed suicide on August 24, 1966 after Red Guards
began aggressively harassing him. Other intellectuals and authors were
subjected to criticism and locked up in “cowsheds” in their work units (Ji
2016), or sent to “reeducation,” as in the case of Qian Zhongshu 钱钟书
(1910–1998) who was sent to a “cadre school” despite his old age and
frail constitution (Yang 1982). Most of the literature of the era preceding
the Cultural Revolution was by now considered counterrevolutionary,
including works from abroad, from earlier epochs and from the seventeen
years. It may seem surprising that the latter was declared out of tune with
the party’s official policy given that it abided by Mao’s “Yan’an Talks”.
While the talks continued to provide the guidelines for literary creation
throughout the Cultural Revolution, the literature produced during the
seventeen years era was now considered to oppose the spirit of the talks.
To prevent further reading and circulation of these works, libraries were
closed, and the Red Guards raided houses in search of books to confiscate
and destroy.
Such “poisonous weeds,” however, continued to be printed as publi-
cations for internal (neibu 内部) use. The Communist Party had estab-
lished a system for internal publication through which party cadres were
supplied with translations of books from foreign countries and writings by
Chinese authors who were deemed dangerous. Between 1949 and 1986,
18,301 titles were produced within this system (Kong 2002; Song 1997,
2007; Wang 2009; Zhongguo Banben Tushuguan 1988). These are also
commonly referred to as yellow- and grey-cover books (huangpishu 黄皮
书, huipishu 灰皮书) with the colors designating them as literary (yellow)
and non-literary (grey) titles. These books were prohibited, yet they were
printed for and distributed among a tightly controlled circle of readers.
Ironically, as the Cultural Revolution wore on and chaos increased, these
censored and internal publications circulated further than intended by
the authorities. Some Red Guards did not destroy their loot, but instead
read it avidly; other young people broke into closed libraries and stole
8 L. HENNINGSEN

reading materials (Han 2009; Yang Guobin 2016: 126–132); cadres’

children accessed their parents’ bookshelves, read the internal materials
stacked there and discussed them with their friends (Song 1997). More-
over, with the beginning of the rustication movement, many educated
youths took forbidden books to remote areas of the country, thereby
setting in motion a nationwide circulation of reading materials. These
texts were circulated, sometimes hand-copied for further distribution, and
debated with friends in person and in letters. There was, therefore, greater
variety of reading during the Cultural Revolution than the regime would
have wished for, albeit privileging those from the major cities, particularly
Beijing and Shanghai (Zhao 2016a, b). Access to these texts, however,
was restricted to those with the requisite connections, and the texts’ distri-
bution, consumption and discussion came at a risk and could result in
political persecution, imprisonment or even death sentences.
Grassroots reading activities thus undermined official literary policies.
These activities also translated into clandestine literary creativity which
Chen Sihe refers to as “invisible writing” (qianzai xiezuo 潜在写作, Chen
1999a, b). Invisible writing represents literary texts which could, mostly
for political reasons, not be published at their time of writing. This
phenomenon was widespread and characteristic for 1950s–1970s China:
Some texts could not be published because their authors were the object
of political campaigns and therefore were not allowed to publish, while
other texts were unpublishable because of their contents or style. While in
the earlier years invisible writing occurred mostly in the private realm with
authors writing just for themselves or their close friends, this changed with
the beginning of the Cultural Revolution when circulation became much
more widespread (Liu 2007: 13). Chen convincingly argues that literary
history needs to excavate these invisible writings in order to provide a full
picture of literary life during a specific time.
During the Cultural Revolution, this invisible writing took various
forms and became increasingly linked to clandestine underground literary
activities. In the cities, young people with literary ambitions met in literary
salons to exchange and discuss poetry (Shao 2015: 46–81). Poetry proved
to be a particularly popular form of writing because of its brevity. This
facilitated the circulation, writing down and memorizing of individual
texts (Bonnin 2013: 345; Clark 2008: 222–223). Poetry was a means to
both reenact the revolution and to move beyond the confines of official
propagandistic dogma: some grassroots poets inscribed themselves into
the revolution by emphasizing their identification with Mao (Pang 2017:
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

67–72). At the same time, poetry offered considerable space for literary
experimentation, as I will elaborate in Chapter 4. Underground poetry
is thus recognized as a precursor to the immensely popular post-Cultural
Revolutionary obscure poetry (menglong shi 朦胧诗). Moreover, letters
were widely circulated, among friends, siblings and former classmates, as
well as among individuals hitherto unknown to each other. Publication
activities also included political texts. In the early years of the Cultural
Revolution, Red Guards not only engaged in physical violence against
“class enemies” and opposing Red Guard factions, they also turned to
publishing as a means of carrying out their struggle and to theorize the
revolution, thereby performing the revolution and proving themselves
worthy revolutionaries (Volland 2003: 395–439; Yang Guobin 2016:
69–80).
Dissenting voices made themselves visible in print, thus in some ways
resembling Soviet Union samizdat practices (on this, see Johnston 1999;
Joo 2004; Komaromi 2004). A famous case is that of Yu Luoke 遇
罗克 (1942–1970). In July 1966, Yu wrote “On Family Background”
(Chusheng lun 出身论), an essay countering the prevalent blood-lineage
theory that claimed that only the offspring of red families could become
true heirs of the revolution, which had resulted in widespread discrimi-
nation against young people with family background that was considered
problematic. A small group around Yu and his brother started a publi-
cation venture. The first issue ran 100,000 copies and included the
essay; it received an enthusiastic reader response. Soon, however, the
essay was denounced as counterrevolutionary, and the journal was shut
down. Yu Luoke was arrested in January 1968 and executed two years
later (Yang Guobin 2016: 80–83). The case of Yu Luoke demonstrates
both the wide impact of these publications and the danger that the
authors risked. It can be assumed that the circulation of the text went
far beyond 100,000 readers: readers would pass on their copy of the text
to friends; others might sell their copy on the street (at a higher price,
thus turning a forbidden text into a profitable commodity); and others
still likely produced handwritten copies of the text to pass it on. The
production, circulation and consumption of handwritten entertainment
fiction parallels that of composing poetry and political texts.
10 L. HENNINGSEN

Texts and Practices: Shouchaoben Fiction as a Genre

and the Concept of Secondary Authorship
The invisible writing produced within this unofficial literary scene thus
points to literary variety that would otherwise be overlooked. Chen and,
likewise Liu Zhirong (2007), in their analyses of invisible writing focus on
poetry and avant-garde literature, on authors like Shen Congwen 沈从文
(1902–1988), Feng Zikai 丰子恺 (1898–1975) or the baiyangdian 白洋
淀 group. They mention shouchaoben fiction, but the only text treated in-
depth is Bei Dao’s Waves . Yet, handwritten entertainment literature forms
a significant part of this realm of invisible writing. Similar to the emer-
gence of underground poetry, entertainment literature was written, read
and passed on at the grassroots level, particularly among young readers.
These texts relate stories of different lengths with the primary aim of
entertaining their readers: most are stories of murder, espionage, love,
and sometimes even sex.
On a very basic level, the term shouchaoben refers to the materiality and
circulation practices of the texts: they were hand-copied into notebooks
or on notepaper and stapled together, then circulated among smaller or
larger circles of friends, family or otherwise trusted persons. Shouchaoben
can therefore refer to the entertainment literature that I discuss in this
book, but also to poetry, which was hand-copied in large amounts during
the Cultural Revolution, or any kind of text, an essay written by an
educated youth, a collection of memorable quotations, poems or the latest
speech by Chairman Mao. Shouchaoben could contain texts that were
“only” copied from an extant source, or texts that were newly written,
such as the entertainment fiction presented in this book.
Throughout this book, I use the term “shouchaoben fiction” inter-
changeably with “handwritten (or hand-copied) entertainment fiction.”
The term “shouchaoben fiction” roots the genre in its materiality and in
the particular practices of production and circulation within the historical,
political and social context of China in the 1970s. Shouchaoben fiction is
thus situated outside the realm of official literary and cultural sponsorship
which, as Bonnie McDougall has elaborated, is reason enough to refer
to all this literature as dissent literature, regardless of its content. The
majority of shouchaoben fiction is, on the surface, apolitical and seems to
adhere to the official literary norms, while a minority of texts are openly
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

dissident in terms of their contents: Waves by Bei Dao 北岛 (*1949)

and Open Love Letters by Jin Fan 靳凡 (*mid-1940s, pen name of Liu
Qingfeng 刘青峰) or The Ninth Wave 九级浪 by Bi Ruxie 毕汝协 (*1950,
see Chapter 4). While such works could be considered “quite conser-
vative in their political stance,” as Shuyu Kong has recently observed
(2020: 17), it is imperative to consider them alongside their institutional
status, which reveals the unofficial, even dissenting nature of shouchaoben
fiction. According to McDougall, dissent literature is “any kind of liter-
ature (including theory and criticism) written by any person regardless
of age or status (amateur or professional) for any kind of purpose (criti-
cism, entertainment, solace, factional struggle) for an audience of any kind
within China (no matter how limited) that has been denied official sanc-
tion at the time of its production” (1979: 76). I subscribe to McDougall’s
view that this particular status of shouchaoben fiction renders them dissent
no matter what their contents are. The entertaining nature of the texts
puts them squarely at odds with the literary dogma of the time, thereby
reinforcing their dissenting or unofficial status. Shouchaoben fiction thus
is invisible writing of a particular kind and it also called for practices of
invisible reading, lest readers might get into political trouble.
The practices of production and circulation of these manuscripts, as
well as the resulting materiality, left their distinct footprint on the narra-
tives, which is why I argue that these fictional texts should be regarded
as belonging to a distinct genre in its own right, notwithstanding the
variation as to length, style and contents.
Thus defined, shouchaoben fiction represents an attempt to reexamine
and modify literary models. Some of the texts engage with extant models.
Perry Link (1989) has pointed out the heritage of Republican era enter-
tainment fiction and the genres of detective and espionage fiction in
Cultural Revolution shouchaoben. The genre is also a descendant of the
socialist realist fiction that was dominant before the Cultural Revolu-
tion. While some stories are set during the Cultural Revolution, most
take place during the seventeen years epoch or the pre-Liberation era
period. At first glance, they resemble socialist realist literature of the
earlier years: heroes are upright communists who fight traitors, GMD
spies or US imperialists. The texts therefore do not call into question
the moral economy prescribed by official literature. Yet, as later chapters
in this book will demonstrate, in some details shouchaoben fiction devi-
ates from these norms. Some stories could easily be read as reflections
12 L. HENNINGSEN

on issues pertinent to their readers’ everyday experiences and ambiva-

lence toward Cultural Revolution experiences: disillusion about official
policy, yet a continued belief in the party; desire for revenge for injus-
tices suffered; yearning for fulfilling love or a wish to live with caring and
loving parents; hope for a second chance; an increasing awareness and
appreciation of the sciences; and much more.
Whether intended or not, elements of ambivalence, playfulness and
carnival are introduced into the frame of socialist realist fiction. Liu
Zhirong points to three types of invisible writing: a first type which is
in line with earlier mainstream literature, a second type which slightly
expands it and a third type that moves beyond the mainstream (Liu
2007: 15). While Liu’s interest lies predominantly in the latter type of
literature, most entertainment fiction circulating in China during the
Cultural Revolution falls into the second category. These texts open up
spaces for an unofficial culture of laughter, in opposition to the unam-
biguous, dogmatic official culture put forward in propaganda by the
CCP. Ironically, the two feed on each other. In partially negating the
official model of socialist realist fiction, the texts’ authors bring into exis-
tence hybrid forms of expression. This type of negation resembles the
carnivalesque parody described by Bakhtin, where through negation the
object is recreated (Bakhtin [Bakhtin] 1995: 60). While both officially
promoted fiction (including socialist realist fiction and the texts propa-
gated during the Cultural Revolution) and shouchaoben fiction enjoyed
considerable popularity, it is important to locate them differently: official
literature was part of a state-sponsored literary system (Link 2000), while
shouchaoben literature emerged from an unofficial, popular and sometimes
even illegal grassroots culture. Socially and aesthetically, however, literary
practices of shouchaoben culture demonstrate that the two realms were not
autonomous, but instead deeply entangled, thereby significantly shaping
the literary scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The practices of the texts’ creation, circulation and consumption
significantly impacted first the material state of the texts and second
their contents and style. Further, these practices may call into question
commonly accepted notions of text, authorship and readership. It is diffi-
cult to establish a definite number of stories that circulated on the Chinese
mainland. My sample contains 45 texts from the Cultural Revolution
(see below Fig. 1.1), and about two dozen from after the end of the
Cultural Revolution (see Fig. 7.1). As the radius of circulation of different
stories varied significantly, I would estimate that a number of less widely
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

circulated copies have escaped my attention. Many stories are original

creations. These texts were normally written by unnamed authors, then
circulated among friends, and, in some cases, even the entire country. In
the process, the texts were copied, rewritten, disguised and sometimes
even destroyed by heavy use (Link 1989; Yang 1993; Yin 2009; Bonnin
2013).
The rustication movement functioned as a catalyst for the distribution
and circulation of shouchaoben fiction. As the educated youth traveled
to the countryside, they took texts with them, including material from
their parents’ bookshelves such as the countless internal publications, and
shouchaoben. Some educated youths started writing poetry, others wrote
entertainment fiction and shared them with friends. The texts then trav-
eled the country, both attesting to and fueling their popularity. It can
be safely assumed that the majority of the educated youth knew of the
phenomenon, given that all the respondents in Michel Bonnin’s study on
the educated youth generation had heard about them, and a third of them
indicated that they had read one or more of these works (Bonnin 2013:
349).
The journeys of the texts had an impact on their material state, on their
contents, and on the processes of their production and consumption.
These journeys affected their literary and intellectual contents, their status
and their position within China’s literary history. Shouchaoben fiction
engaged with earlier models and genres and thus paved the way for
post-Maoist literary developments.
The existence of multiple versions of the same story, their incomplete-
ness and their anonymous or multiple authorship significantly affected
processes of literary creation and perception and resulted in a level of
textual instability. In fact, the boundary between creation and consump-
tion was considerably blurred. Authors and readers, particularly the
educated youth, could benefit from these spaces free from political control
(although some suffered dearly for their courage after they were arrested
and convicted). Moreover, in this process, readers were not passive recip-
ients, but instead active creators of texts. They not only created the texts
in the process of reading, as described by Michel de Certeau in “Reading
as Poaching” (1984), where he emphasizes that a text’s meaning is real-
ized in the reader and his/her particular reading and interpretation of
the text. In the context of shouchaoben fiction, readers were essential to
14 L. HENNINGSEN

preserving texts and stories as they reproduced them in countless hand-

written copies. Further, I argue that these active readers should be called
secondary authors : while hand-copying, many readers modified the texts.
Thus, multiple versions and vast numbers of variations of the same story
came into being. The extant texts thus provided secondary authors with
both a frame and with the necessary space for them to probe their own
creativity and literary aspirations, which I will elaborate on in the next
two chapters of this book. Their literary creativity can be seen within a
tradition ranging from the authors of sequels to famous Chinese literary
classics, to authors of fan fiction, or outright literary fakes or plagiarism
(Henningsen 2010). In addition, they inherited the imperial traditions of
hand-copying books (McDermott 2006: Chapter 4) and continued prac-
tices of mimeograph or hand-copy publishing practiced even during the
early Maoist years (Yang 2018: 12).
Hand-copied entertainment fiction from the Cultural Revolution is
inherently unstable. The texts had to be written and copied secretly, often
in limited time. Friends would take turns, copying a whole novel in one
night, cursing each other afterward for poor handwriting that left vast
stretches of the text illegible even for the copyist him/herself. Yu Hua
余华 (*1960), for example, describes how he and a friend copied La
Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) from an abridged
manuscript version that they had borrowed for a short time. The next day
they cursed each other as the copy they had produced was largely illeg-
ible. Only years later did Yu Hua discover the title of the novel they had
been copying (Yu 2011: 44–46).
The processes of such copying were the same for manuscript copies
of pre-Cultural Revolution books and for fiction that first appeared as
manuscripts during the Cultural Revolution. A title page, or even a
title, often did not exist. Some stories circulated under various titles.
While some copies were written with great care, others must have been
produced under similar conditions to Yu Hua’s La Dame aux Camélias .
The motivations for and the contexts of copying (and rewriting) stories
were diverse. In all cases, though, copying was a clandestine activity, and
writing and sharing depended on mutual trust or complicity (Wenjin
Shuwu 2020). Not only the writing of the stories, but also their reading,
copying and rewriting thus represent a form of invisible writing. As the
testimonies in Zhou Jingli’s interviews elaborate (see Bai 2001: 30–39),
some started to copy texts out of boredom, as there were only few things
to do or to read. One interview partner tells that she started hand-copying
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

in order to practice her handwriting. While some would write in hospital,

accompanying a sick family member, others took to writing during classes
at middle school, hidden away in a shelter or at a graveyard (quite the
right atmosphere for some of the more spooky stories). Some copies were
produced in teamwork with each copyist copying out a number of pages,
using carbon paper, and subsequently binding the loose sheets of paper
together. The copyists were careful in their choice of who to share the
texts with, which texts could be shared with whom and whom to trust.
For their own safety, copyists would make sure that the copies did not
circulate far, in some instances they were shared among siblings only. The
1974 campaign against underground literary activities proved this caution
right. After all, at the time literary salons were closed, authors like Zhang
Yang, Zhao Yifan 赵一凡 (1935–1988) and Xu Xiao 徐晓 (*1954) were
imprisoned and countless shouchaoben were confiscated across the country
(Yang Jian 2013: 230–244).
One copyist thus chose not to share anything with her brother after
he had lost two stories. As she was not sure whether he had really lost
the texts or shared them with others, she had no choice but not to
let him read her copies any longer. After all, she had taken the trouble
to copy, so she did not want to give them to others (Bai 2001: 36).
Copying the stories proved hard work, but also a rewarding experi-
ence: sharing the texts with siblings or friends, seeing one’s handwriting
improve—or improving one’s own language competence in writing diaries
or compositions.
Most texts were written on fragile paper that wore out in the course
of circulation. As a consequence, the texts became incomplete, often
missing an ending. Many copyists were aware of this problem. One of
the manuscripts of A Long Strand of Golden Hair 一缕金黄色的长发 (see
Chapter 3) begins with a warning to its readers: “Readers be careful, this
was not easy to copy. Always make sure to treasure it and avoid wasting
it, be careful to preserve it” (SGH 3: cover sheet). In most cases, the
authors of the texts remained anonymous (with notable exceptions being
those who were published after the Cultural Revolution on the official
book market, such as Bei Dao, Kuang Haowen 况浩文, Liu Qingfeng,
Zhang Baorui 张宝瑞, Zhang Jianjun 张建军 and Zhang Yang), and only
a minority of the extant manuscripts offer clues as to where, when and
by whom they were produced. Sometimes the paper allows for educated
16 L. HENNINGSEN

guesses as to a plausible date or place of production. In rare cases,

dated manuscripts reveal that the reading, copying and circulation of
shouchaoben fiction did not come to an end with the Cultural Revolution,
but continued for some time after.
As a rare exception, one manuscript entitled Three Times to Nanjing
三进南京城 (see Chapter 3) provides its readers with some information
in a postscript (Ill. 1.1):

Collected and edited in Nanjing in 1974

Passed on and edited in Nanjing in winter 1974
Transcribed in Xihu (Zhejiang) in 1976
Transcribed in Rongcheng [Guangdong] in 1976
Transcribed in the center of Licheng [Fujian] in spring 1977 (TTN: 12)
一九七四年於南京城收集编
一九七四年冬於南京城转集编
一九七六年转抄於浙江西湖
一九七六年东转抄於榕城
一九七七年春转抄於鲤城之中

These lines inform the reader that different versions of the manuscript
were produced over the course of four years, that the story was first assem-
bled in Nanjing and that it then traveled south in the eastern provinces.
The text also traveled across time, with versions compiled in 1974, 1976
and 1977, each of which most likely read countless times. 1977 represents
a year in which hand-copying was still widespread as some manuscripts in

Ill. 1.1 Postscript of Three Times to Nanjing

 1 INTRODUCTION 17

my collection are also dated 1977. Texts therefore continued to circu-

late beyond the perceived rupture created by the death of Mao Zedong
and the ensuing “fall” of the so-called “Gang of Four” in 1976. While
the practices of shouchaoben literature and most of its contents originated
during the Cultural Revolution, this suggests the longevity and popu-
larity of the genre beyond that tumultuous phase, and the impact it had
on subsequent literary developments.
The verbs used in the above postscript are also noteworthy. The
postscript outlines that the versions of the texts were “edited” or “tran-
scribed,” thus suggesting the agency that at least some writers/copyists
of shouchaoben texts ascribed to themselves. They make no outright claim
to authorship, yet editing is clearly more than “only” copying, indicating
some authorial choices on the part of the various editors of the text.
Several entertainment shouchaoben play with their fictional nature by
providing paratexts suggesting a factual frame to the story. The same copy
of Three Times to Nanjing frames its story as the factual narration of a real
case. Moreover, unlike almost most other copies in my sample, the cover
page provides the name of the editor/scribe/author/secondary author
in pinyin. In elegant calligraphy—similarly elegantly written than the title
page of The Story of a Strand of Golden Hair (一缕金黄色的头发的故
事) which is featured on the cover of this book—and with a very aesthetic
design, the cover reads (Ill. 1.2):

Record of Chinese Counter-Espionage

Original manuscript
Three Times to Nanjing
Record of how Agent Three Yu Fei from the Central Ministry of Public
Security cracked a case
Collected and edited in Nanjing in 1974
Huang Shiyou
中国反特案本
手稿件
三進南京城
记录中央公安部三号偵察員余飞破案经程.
1974 年南京集编
Huang Shiyou (TTN: cover page)3,4

This copy from the late 1970s thus emphasizes the (alleged) factual
nature of the text by suggesting that it is a record of a legal case. This
practice may bestow authenticity on the story; it may be a misunder-
standing on the part of one of the copyists; it may serve as a technique
18 L. HENNINGSEN

Ill. 1.2 Cover page of Three Times to Nanjing

of camouflage (in case the text was intercepted); or this paratext may
relate the text back to the historical context of the Cultural Revolution.
In the absence of reliable information on events such as the Lin Biao
incident (1971), which forms the background to this story, rumors trav-
eled widely. This paratext illustrates how real-life practices translate into
distinct literary conventions that blur and play with the demarcations
between factual and fictional narrative modes by framing the fictional
story as factual. This is also reinforced by the name of the editor (or
author or copyist) of the text, provided in pinyin at the end of this frame.
In other instances, stories did not travel as a written text, but orally:
some of the educated youth excelled at storytelling, narrating the plots of
entertaining shouchaoben novels read earlier, or of traditional stories. They
would spend their evenings telling stories, in return sometimes receiving
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

delicious meals and good tea as a reward for their entertaining art. The
texts therefore not only traveled the country on paper, but also by word
of mouth.

The stories were sometimes taken from traditional Chinese literature,

notably cloak-and-dagger tales, but there were also world classics that were
considered reactionary and capitalistic at the time. For safety reasons – and
to make up for bits they had forgotten – the zhiqing often altered the
original story and thus became the authors of a new type of oral literature.
Some of them actually went to on to become writers, the most famous
example being A Cheng… (Bonnin 2013: 343)

As a result, the texts became unstable. Individual manuscripts became

physically unstable, and variation was introduced into the plots. The
stories circulated not only in many copies, but also in many different
versions. Comparing different versions illustrates different shades of vari-
ation and instability, albeit within limits. As I will detail in my analysis
in the third chapter, while textual variations abound, different versions
seem to agree on what might be called the “essence” of a story. Some
copyists, rewriters or secondary authors could, or even had to, take signif-
icant liberties with the stories. Some only had access to an incomplete
copy and thus they had to use their imagination to fill the gaps resulting
from missing pages or from pages torn apart. Others might have heard a
story, and then they wrote it down from memory. Others inadvertently
created something new by miss-writing the text. Others still consciously
aimed to improve a story by modifying parts that they found to be insuf-
ficient. The material nature of shouchaoben fiction, as well as their modes
of circulation, thus opened up opportunities for creativity on the part of
the readers-turned-secondary-authors.
Reception by the reader was thus essential to the transformations
these texts underwent during their journeys. Different versions of the
texts represent different readings of a distinct story, written down either
by the original author, or by a reader of the story who would write
down or copy a previously existing text, modifying it over the course
of copying/rewriting. The texts are thus an indication of a playful inter-
action with a previously existing text. They indicate that readers were
not—as Roland Barthes diagnosed contemporary French reading prac-
tices in “From Work to Text” (1986: 61)—passively consuming them,
but rather (it may be supposed) gaining pleasure from their rewriting.
20 L. HENNINGSEN

The readers of these texts are travelers in several respects: as educated

youths, they moved across China, while as readers, they could fantasize
about the worlds described in fictional texts, thereby engaging with them,
as proposed by Michel de Certeau in his “Reading as Poaching” (1984).
Further, in writing down their own version of a story they could engage
with the text on a different level, creating their own version of the text,
in a way similar to that observed in fan fiction (Jenkins 2006).
Analyzing different versions of these stories today, however, it is diffi-
cult to know which of the texts qualify as hypotext and which as hypertext
and how exactly each of the different versions relate to each of the
other(s). After all, given the (relative) obscurity of the authors and copy-
ists’ identities, it is difficult (or even impossible) to establish a genealogy
of texts. However, questions as to which of the versions preceded the
others are of little (or no) relevance to the present analyses, as all versions
of a story, with their similarities and differences, make up the constituents
of the respective Text writ large as a methodological field (Barthes 1986:
57) and in discursive practice. As I will explain in detail in Chapter 3, I use
the term “Text” to refer to a set of different versions of the same story and
“text” to refer to individual versions of the story. The similarities between
different versions of a Text refer to a stable core. The differences in detail,
structure and style point to the creative alterations that the stories under-
went on their travels from pen to pen, paper to paper, mouth to mouth
(and any variation thereof). Over the course of copying and rewriting, the
readers thus turned into active reinterpreters and recreators of the original
story. Not only did these particular circumstances of production, circula-
tion and reception produce, as Michel Bonnin argues, a “new type of oral
literature,” but also a new type of author: the secondary author. The trav-
eling and unstable nature of the methodological field Text thus allows for
variation and creativity and points to a playful interaction, not only among
individual texts, but also with earlier and later literary developments.

The Post-Cultural Revolutionary Afterlives

of Entertainment Shouchaoben: Publication,
Adaptation and State of Research
Hand-copying practices continued after the death of Mao and the
official end of the Cultural Revolution. For example, Three Times to
Nanjing , mentioned above, continued to circulate and to be rewritten
 1 INTRODUCTION 21

at least until 1977. Some manuscripts even date to 1979. Shouchaoben

thus continued their journeys because the copies were there. Moreover,
scarcity continued to be an issue; the official literary system began to
normalize, but distribution was still insufficient and therefore readers even
took to producing handwritten copies of printed books (see Chapter 7).
In addition, many texts journeyed from underground into the main-
stream and became regular publications on the emerging commercial
book market. Internal publications (which had circulated both as printed
copies and hand-copies of these prints) were now offered as regular publi-
cations (Kong 2002), and some underground poetry became officially
recognized and—at least to an extent—celebrated as obscure poetry. Even
some of the handwritten entertainment fiction experienced official publi-
cation; The Second Handshake became the first bestseller on the Chinese
book market after the Cultural Revolution (Link 1985: 230–231) and it
was subsequently adapted into other media and genres (see Chapters 2
and 7).
These practices also impacted on the developments of literary genres
immediately after the Cultural Revolution. While underground poetry
became recognized as obscure poetry, shouchaoben fiction had an impact
on educated youth literature (zhiqing wenxue 知青文学) and scar liter-
ature (also, literature of the wounded shanghen wenxue 伤痕文学). As
shouchaoben fiction went beyond the confines of the framework of socialist
realism and the 4R, it clearly paved the way for these later genres. From
the point of view of literary history, shouchaoben fiction may therefore be
considered a link between these forms, bridging the era of High Maoism5
and the early reform era, indicating the existence of literary continuities
in a period of substantial change and rupture.
However, the popularity of shouchaoben fiction during and immediately
after the Cultural Revolution and its impact on later literary developments
also entailed a conspicuous silence. Conversations such as the one with
my friend quoted at the start of this chapter highlight the importance
that some readers ascribe to their readings of shouchaoben fiction such as
The Second Handshake. Similarly, Michel Bonnin’s research emphasizes
how far-reaching the phenomenon was. On the other hand, shouchaoben
are virtually absent from published memoires of the Cultural Revolu-
tion. Many people discuss their readings, reading practices and the impact
that certain texts had on their lives, but entertainment shouchaoben rarely
appear in these memoirs. As I will elaborate in Chapter 5, some authors
refer to hand-copying practices, such as the copying of poetry or internal
22 L. HENNINGSEN

publications. Only one person, however, explicitly discusses entertainment

fiction, and this is Zhang Yang, the author of The Second Handshake. The
reasons for this silence are, most likely, multi-layered. I argue that this
silence can be traced back to a general disdain for entertainment fiction
and its low literary value among the authors of such autobiographical
texts, most of them authors and intellectuals themselves. For some writers
of the autobiographies shouchaoben were likely not interesting. Moreover,
writing about shouchaoben might not fit in with the image of themselves
that these authors wanted to leave in the public record.
I argue that this absence from the record and from personal and public
memory has another consequence: while entertainment shouchaoben
continue to be published for the reading audience, to date the genre has
received relatively little scholarly attention. Shouchaoben, as well as aspects
of underground writing and reading practices, are treated summarily in
monograph studies about the Cultural Revolution (for example, Bonnin
2013; Clark 2008; Mittler 2012; Yang Guobin 2016; Dikötter 2016; Pan
2003) and in literary histories. However, studies with an explicit focus on
entertainment fiction are rare. A very early overview of their main charac-
teristics and summary of exemplary texts is provided in a paper by Perry
Link (1989), slightly expanded by a contribution by Inge Nielsen (2002).
Yang Jian has published extensively on the field of underground literature
(1993, 2013), in which he discusses both the context of the production
and dissemination of different genres of underground literature, as well
as the contents of their texts. In a recent paper, Shuyu Kong (2020) maps
out what participation in shouchaoben culture meant to individuals at the
grassroots level. Based on these scholars’ works and my own research into
the sources, I have published a number of papers during the preparation
of this book (Henningsen 2016, 2017a, b, 2019; Henningsen/Landa
2015), which in turn is also considered a contribution to a strand of
research that moves away from the analysis of elite politics in Beijing and
toward grassroots experiences and developments (such as Bonnin 2013;
Brown/Johnson 2015; DeMare 2015; Dikötter 2016; Fan 2018; Han
2008; Johnson 2015; Leese 2011 [2013]; Mittler 2012). Building on
this previous research, in this book I expand the field by emphasizing the
literary qualities of shouchaoben fiction. Analyzing the contents of these
texts, as well as variations and continuities across different versions of
the same story, I intend to further our understanding of concrete literary
practices of reading and writing during the Cultural Revolution. At the
 1 INTRODUCTION 23

same time, I use these analyses to rethink notions of text, authorship and
readership in a broader context.

Primary Sources
The analyses in the following chapters are based on published and unpub-
lished fictional shouchaoben. As mentioned earlier in this introduction, and
as demonstrated in Fig. 1.1 and ill. 1.3, my sample consists of 18 different
titles and 45 texts as some titles are available in different versions. This
sample mainly consists of original manuscripts from the Cultural Revo-
lution, as well as a number of shouchaoben collected in an anthology by
Bai Shihong in 2001, and the printed versions of The Second Handshake
(Zhang 1979), Waves and Open Love Letters . Bai’s transcriptions of seven
Cultural Revolution manuscripts authenticates itself with interviews with
the Cultural Revolutionary copyists and their accounts of the copying
process. It also contains exemplary facsimile pages from the manuscripts.
However, unlike the unpublished shouchaoben consulted, there are no
typos in these stories, which gives rise to the question of whether the
editor undertook further changes.
A few texts, mentioned by Link (1989), could not be consulted.
However, the sample is nonetheless representative of the overall produc-
tion of shouchaoben fiction. Most stories are linked to a distinct period
in twentieth-century China and only a small number are set entirely in
foreign countries; with the exception of the texts by Liu Qingfeng, Bei
Dao and Bi Ruxie, these works do not at first glance transgress the official
literary framework of the time, which I will elaborate on in the next two
chapters. Figure 1.1 does not list poems or poetry collections, post-1979
adaptations that appeared in print (for these, see Figs. 7.1 and 7.2) or
other texts such as drama or a collection of stories that can be traced back
to the Ming poet Feng Menglong 冯梦龙 (1574–1646) that was also part
of Cultural Revolution shouchaoben practice.
My analyses are mostly based on unpublished original manuscripts
as represented in illustration 1.3. These are available from second-
hand bookshops. For the purpose of this project, all the available texts
were digitized and a number of them transcribed. Due to the gener-
ally hasty process of production and the rushed handwriting of their
authors/copyists, many texts are difficult to decipher. Often, the thin
notepaper on which they were written has been torn so that pages or
parts of pages are missing. Some texts are therefore incomplete. Unlike
24 L. HENNINGSEN

Fig. 1.1 Overview of shouchaoben sample for this book

Acronyms are only provided for manuscripts that are quoted or used extensively
in the following chapters. Square brackets around the year [1974] for versions
of The Second Handshake indicate that the manuscript is not dated, but it goes
back to the version produced by Zhang Yang in 1974 (see Chapter 2)
 1 INTRODUCTION 25

Fig. 1.1 (continued)

the example discussed above, most are neither signed nor dated. In some
cases, through guesswork, a rough date of production can be suggested,
for example, when the text is written on notepaper that has a year printed
in its footer. This text has then clearly been written in that year or later,
most likely not too much later. Another text is wrapped in a magazine
cover, which makes it likely that the text was produced soon after the
26 L. HENNINGSEN

Ill. 1.3 Sample of original shouchaoben

(Note the different quality of the paper used, of the handwriting, and the
different states of preservation)

publication of this edition. Most manuscripts, however, do not provide

this information. Given the fragile nature of the paper, it is clear that the
urtext s, i.e. the first versions of any given story, do not exist anymore.
What have survived are later copies. Therefore, with the exception of
the well-documented case of Zhang Yang’s The Second Handshake, the
amount of textual alterations in comparison to the original cannot be
judged, nor can a distinct genealogy of different versions be established.
Some copies give hints as to likely places of production when they are
written on official notepaper. In this case, texts would most likely be
written by someone from the factory with access to this type of paper.
This might be a cadre, or a relative of a cadre. While it is not possible
to trace the routes the texts actually traveled, this type of information at
least allows glimpses into the spatial distribution of the texts.
Given the anonymity of the authors, one might suspect the copies (or
at least some) of being fabrications. However, the sheer number of copies
available, the similarities and changes between different versions of the
“same” Text render this unlikely. Rather, the uncertainties related to the
Texts’ places and times of production and to their authors’ identities can
provide insights into the creative and collaborative process of production,
 1 INTRODUCTION 27

circulation, preservation, adaptation and development of these stories.

They also offer insights into the underlying assumptions about text,
authorship and readership.

Aims and Structure of This Book

This book discusses a number of shouchaoben Texts and the practice
of their production, circulation and consumption in detail. First, these
analyses provide insights into everyday life, as well as into literary and
intellectual life during the Cultural Revolution. Second, considering
shouchaoben fiction as literary texts within the reading and writing cosmos
of their age serves as an invitation to rethink Chinese literary history.
Third, on yet another level, these texts and the practices related to them
offer insights into processes of creativity, originality and authenticity, as
well as insights into the status of text, author and reader, which therefore
necessitates contemplating the theoretical implications of these concepts.
Shouchaoben as texts about the Cultural Revolution: First, entertain-
ment shouchaoben can be read as texts about the Cultural Revolution.
Some texts openly write about lived realities of the Cultural Revolution.
A few stories take place during other, earlier epochs, or even in foreign
countries, yet these texts often also invite interpretations of the storylines
as veiled testimonies about experiences and sensitivities of the Cultural
Revolution.
With respect to literary and intellectual debates about the Cultural
Revolution, these texts offer insights into what was thinkable and write-
able, albeit unpublishable, during that era and had to remain invisible
writing. After all, in most cases, these texts were not written as exercises
in formulating dissident voices. Rather, the authors of the texts skirted
the boundaries of what they perceived to be acceptable, often staying
within the limits of earlier or contemporary literary dogma, but some-
times transgressing these. Unwittingly or not, in their attempts to produce
what could be taken as harmless entertainment, they sometimes ended
up producing dissenting voices. While on the institutional level, all these
texts count as dissenting voices, the contents of the texts offer us ways to
rethink the binary opposition between dissidence and “mere” entertain-
ment in literary texts. To begin with, the sheer existence of these texts
proves that entertainment is a basic human need. At the same time, even
texts that appear to be “mere” entertainment need to be considered as
28 L. HENNINGSEN

political, both in relation to the social and political context(s) of their

production, distribution and consumption, and in relation to the literary
and aesthetic qualities of a text and its potential readings and interpre-
tations. This is even more the case given that everything entertaining
was considered counterrevolutionary during the Cultural Revolution. In
addition, if intertextual connections in the Texts and the wider Cultural
Revolution reading cosmos are taken into consideration, it becomes clear
that the literary and intellectual fields of the era were not as restricted
and narrowminded as CCP propaganda at the time would have wished.
Rather, both Chinese and foreign texts figure prominently within this
cosmos. Texts, authors and readers of shouchaoben fiction thus navigated
a cosmopolitan reading cosmos.
Shouchaoben and Chinese literary history: Second, I consider it impor-
tant to treat shouchaoben fiction as literary works in their own right.
They have distinct literary and aesthetic features that made them popular
among their readers and impacted later literary developments. Dismissing
them as mediocre literature of little value would mean missing out on the
opportunity to better understand literary and intellectual change during
China’s long 1970s. Conversely, both the stylistic characteristics and the
themes covered clearly position them within long-term literary devel-
opments that point to changes, but also significant continuities across
alleged historical divides, such as the beginning of the Cultural Revolu-
tion or the rustication period, the end of High Maoism and the beginning
of the reform period. Shouchaoben fiction both continues and modifies
earlier literary styles such as entertainment fiction from the Republican
period (or even earlier) and the tradition of socialist realism. Moreover,
anticipating a number of characteristics and features, shouchaoben fiction is
a precursor to later literary developments, such as scar literature, obscure
poetry, and educated youth literature.
Shouchaoben and literary theory: Thirdly, because of its style and
contents, materiality and the particular practices related to it, shouchaoben
fiction is relevant to a number of theoretical issues. It is important to
note that, before they turn to writing, and also while they are writing,
authors are almost always readers. In shouchaoben fiction the demarca-
tions between the reader and author are particularly fluid. Texts were
circulated because of the active role that readers took, sometimes risking
their personal safety under the adverse political conditions of the Cultural
 1 INTRODUCTION 29

Revolution, as Shi Tiesheng 史铁生 (1951–2010) elaborates in his auto-

biographical account (2014). More dangerous than that, in copying
the Texts they preserved the texts. In the process of circulating and
copying, the texts were in turn modified by these readers-turned-authors,
or secondary authors . Much as these demarcations are fluid, so are the
boundaries of what constitutes a text. Cultural and literary practices
of adaptation, creativity and intertextuality clearly inform hand-copying
practices. Some stories were significantly modified over time, and count-
less stories circulated in very different versions. Yet, among practitioners
there seem to be clear notions about the essence of a Text.
To elaborate these points, the second chapter of this book sets out
to consider one exemplary shouchaoben: The Second Handshake by
Zhang Yang. As this is one of the most popular and best-documented
shouchaoben, this chapter serves to introduce the modes of production,
circulation and consumption of the shouchaoben. Taking into consider-
ation the available information on the context of this Text, as well as
Zhang’s reflection on his position as an author, and delineating changes
and continuities among different versions of this story, this chapter maps
the changing concept of authorship from Zhang’s perspective, as well as
the crucial agency of the secondary authors.
The third chapter presents three representative entertaining counter-
espionage shouchaoben, all of which relate in different ways and to
different degrees to the realities of the Cultural Revolution. Tracing
different versions of the stories reveals the different ways in which the
Cultural Revolution was debated in these texts. On yet another level,
together with the high degree of mobility inscribed into handwritten
Texts and practices, these changes to the Texts, executed by anonymous
secondary authors, invite a rethinking of the concepts, not only of reader
and author, but also of the work and the T/text itself.
Chapter 4 focuses on two shouchaoben that differ in many ways from
those discussed in the two preceding chapters: Open Love Letters by Liu
Qinfeng and Waves by Bei Dao. Both novels are openly critical of the
Cultural Revolution and they were circulated far less widely. They are also
conscious experiments in literary genre, form and style. I will demon-
strate how through these characteristics they anticipate some literary
developments that are commonly ascribed to early reform era.
The next two chapters serve to position Cultural Revolution
shouchaoben within the wider literary and intellectual cosmos of the long
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
but a fierce strife and commotion, with nothing distinctly visible or
decipherable even yet, but a vague sense of some agony transacting
itself in the dark interior within the loop-holed timbers and rafters,
and of two human arms swung round and round like flails. Then, all
at once, it flashed upon the dreamer what he had been beholding. It
was Judas that was within the hut, and that was the suicide of the
Betrayer.
Every author is to be estimated by specimens of him at his very
best. Dr. John Brown had a favourite phrase for such specimens of
what he thought the very best in the authors he liked. Of a passage,
or of a whole paper, that seemed to him perfect in its kind, perfect in
workmanship as well as in conception, he would say that it was
“done to the quick.” The phrase indicates, in the first place, Dr. John
Brown’s notions of what constitutes true literature of any kind, or at
least true literature of a popular kind, as distinct from miscellaneous
printed matter. It must be something that will reach the feelings.
This being presupposed, then that is best in any author which
reaches the feelings most swiftly and directly,—cuts at once, as it
were, with knife-like acuteness, to the most sensitive depths. That
there are not a few individual passages scattered through Dr. John’s
own writings, and also some entire papers of his, that answer this
description, will have appeared by our review of his writings so far as
they have been yet enumerated. In such papers and passages, as
every reader will observe, even the workmanship is at its best. The
author gathers himself up, as it were; his artistic craft becomes more
decisive and subtle with the heightened glow of his feelings; and his
style, apt to be a little diffuse and slipshod at other times, becomes
nervous and firm.
Of whatever other productions of Dr. John Brown’s pen this may
be asserted, of whatever other things of his it may be said that they
are thus masterly at all points and “done to the quick,” that supreme
praise must be accorded, at all events, to the two papers I have
reserved to the last,—Rab and his Friends and Our Dogs. Among the
many fine and humane qualities of our late fellow-citizen it so
happened that love of the lower animals, and especially of the most
faithful and most companionable of them, was one of the chief. Since
Sir Walter Scott limped along Princes Street, and the passing dogs
used to fawn upon him, recognising him as the friend of their kind,
there has been no such lover of dogs, no such expert in dog-nature,
in this city at least, as was Dr. John Brown. It was impossible that he
should leave this part of himself, one of the ruling affections of his
life, unrepresented in his literary effusions. Hence, while there are
dogs incidentally elsewhere in his writings, these two papers are all
but dedicated to dogs. What need to quote from them? What need to
describe them? They have been read, one of them at least, by perhaps
two millions of the English-reading population of the earth: the very
children of our Board Schools know the story of Rab and his Friends.
How laughingly it opens; with what fun and rollick we follow the two
boys in their scamper through the Edinburgh streets sixty years ago
after the hullabaloo of the dog-fight near the Tron Kirk! What a
sensation on our first introduction, in the Cowgate, under the South
Bridge, to the great Rab, the carrier’s dog, rambling about idly “as if
with his hands in his pockets,” till the little bull-terrier that has been
baulked of his victory in the former fight insanely attacks him and
finds the consequence! And then what a mournful sequel, as we
come, six years afterwards, to know the Howgate carrier himself and
his wife, and the wife is brought to the hospital at Minto House, and
the carrier and Rab remain there till the operation is over, and the
dead body of poor Ailie is carried home by her husband in his cart
over the miles of snowy country road, and the curtain falls black at
last over the death of the carrier too and the end of poor Rab himself!
Though the story, as the author vouches, “is in all essentials strictly
matter of fact,” who could have told it as Dr. John Brown did? Little
wonder that it has taken rank as his masterpiece, and that he was so
commonly spoken of while he was alive as “The author of Rab and
His Friends.” It is by that story, and by those other papers that may
be associated with it as also masterly in their different varieties, as all
equally “done to the quick,” that his name will live. Yes, many long
years hence, when all of us are gone, I can imagine that a little
volume will be in circulation, containing Rab and his Friends and
Our Dogs, and also let us say the Letter to Dr. Cairns, and Queen
Mary’s Child-Garden, and Jeems the Doorkeeper, and the paper
called Mystifications, and that called Pet Marjorie or Marjorie
Fleming, and that then readers now unborn, thrilled by that peculiar
touch which only things of heart and genius can give, will confess to
the charm that now fascinates us, and will think with interest of Dr.
John Brown of Edinburgh.
 LITERARY HISTORY OF EDINBURGH

A GENERAL REVIEW[51]

The Literary History of Edinburgh, in any special sense, may be

said to have begun in the reigns of the Scottish Kings James IV.
(1488–1513) and James V. (1513–1542.) There had been a good deal
of scattered literary activity in Scotland before,—all, of course, in
manuscript only,—in which Edinburgh had shared; but it was not till
those two reigns,—when Edinburgh had become distinctly the capital
of the Scottish Kingdom, and was in possession of a printing-press or
two,—it was not till then that Edinburgh could claim to be the central
seat of the Scottish Muses. What was there anywhere over the rest of
Scotland in the shape of new literary product that could then
compete with the novelties that came from that cluster of “makars”
and men of genius,—Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and Sir David Lindsay
the three best remembered of them,—whose habitual residence was
in Edinburgh, and whose figures were to be seen daily in the
picturesque long slope of the High Street and the Canongate which
connects the ancient Castle with the venerable Holyrood?
From the Edinburgh of the two reigns mentioned we pass to the
Edinburgh of the Regencies for the infant and absent Queen Mary, of
Queen Mary’s own short resident reign, and of the beginnings of the
reign of James VI. Through this period, carrying us from 1542 to
about 1580, Edinburgh still maintained her metropolitan distinction
in literature, as in other things; though with the enormous difference
imported into literature, as into other things, by the Reformation
struggle and its consequences. Lindsay, the last of the bright poetic
triad of the two bygone reigns, survived far into the Reformation
struggle,—in which indeed he was a champion of the first mark and
importance on the Protestant side; and, though he died before the
conclusive Reformation enactment of the Scottish Estates in 1560, he
had lived long enough to know personally, and as it were to put his
hands on, those who were to be the foremost intellects of Scotland in
her new and Protestantised condition. When John Knox and George
Buchanan returned from their Continental exile and wanderings to
spend their veteran days in their native land,—Knox with his already
acquired reputation by English theological writings and pamphlets,
and Buchanan with the rarer European fame of superb Latinist and
scholar, poetarum sui sæculi facile princeps, as his foreign admirers
already universally applauded him,—where could they settle but in
Edinburgh? For thirteen years, accordingly, Knox was minister of
Edinburgh and her most powerful citizen, writing industriously still,
while he preached and directed Scottish politics; and it was in
Edinburgh, in 1572, that he died and was buried. Of Buchanan’s life
after his return to Scotland, portions were spent at St. Andrews or in
Stirling; but Edinburgh had most of him too. It was in Edinburgh
that he published his Baptistes, his De Jure Regni apud Scotos, and
others of his writings in verse or in prose; and it was in an Edinburgh
lodging that he died in 1582, after having sent to the press the last
proof-sheets of his Rerum Scoticarum Historia, or Latin History of
Scotland. Recollect such minor Edinburgh contemporaries of those
two, of literary repute of one kind or another, as Sir Richard
Maitland, Robert Pont, Thomas Craig, and the collector George
Bannatyne,—not forgetting that before 1580 Edinburgh had glimpses
of the new force that was at hand for all Scotland, literary as well as
ecclesiastical, in Andrew Melville,—and it will be seen that, though
the Reformation had changed notably the character of the
intellectual pursuits and interests of the Scottish capital, as of
Scotland generally, yet there had been no real interruption so far of
that literary lustre of the town which had begun with Dunbar at the
Court of James IV. In fact, the first eighty years of the sixteenth
century may be regarded (the pre-Reformation authorship and the
post-Reformation authorship taken together) as one definitely
marked age, and the earliest, in the literary history of Edinburgh. It
was an age of high credit in Scottish literary history all in all.
Scotland was then no whit inferior to contemporary England in
literary power and productiveness. On the contrary, as it is admitted
now by the historians of English Literature that in the long tract of
time between the death of Chaucer and the appearance of Spenser it
was in Scotland rather than in England that the real succession to
Chaucer was kept up in the British Islands, so it must be admitted
that it was in the last eighty years of that long period of comparative
gloom in England that the torch that had been kindled in Scotland
was passed there most nimbly and brilliantly from hand to hand.
From 1580 onwards there was a woeful change. “Let not your
Majesty doubt,” Napier of Merchiston ventured to say to James VI.,
while that King was still Sovereign of Scotland only, but after he had
shown his own literary ambition in his Essayes of a Prentise in the
Divine Art of Poesie and other Edinburgh publications, “let not your
Majesty doubt that there are within your realm, as well as in other
countries, godly and good ingines, versed and exercised in all
manner of honest science and godly discipline, who by your
Majesty’s instigation might yield forth works and fruits worthy of
memory, which otherwise, lacking some mighty Mæcenas to
encourage them, may perchance be buried with eternal silence.” The
augury, so far as it was one of hope, was not fulfilled. Through the
last forty-five years of the reign of James, and then through all the
rest of the seventeenth century, including the reign of Charles I., the
interregnum of the English Commonwealth and the Oliverian
Protectorate, the Restoration reigns of Charles II., and James II., and
the reign of William and Mary,—through all that long period, the
greatest and richest in the literary annals of England, the time when
she made herself the astonishment of the nations by her Elizabethan
splendour in Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, and their many
contemporaries, and then by the succession to these in the great
series of which Hobbes, Milton, Jeremy Taylor, Bunyan, Dryden, and
Locke were the chiefs,—what had Scotland to show in comparison?
In the first section of the period Napier of Merchiston himself and
Drummond of Hawthornden,—a pair well worthy of attention, and
both of them specially Edinburgh men; but after these only or mainly
a straggle of mediocrities, or of lower than mediocrities. A tradition,
it is true, in Arthur Johnston and others, of an excellent Scottish
Latinity in discipleship to Buchanan,—the more the pity in so far as
this prevented a free and brave exercise of the vernacular; the
apparition here and there, too, of a spirit of finer quality among the
ecclesiastics, such as Rutherford and Leighton, or of an individual
book of mark, such as Baillie’s Letters or Stair’s Institutes; but, for
the rest, within Scotland, and without tracking any continuation of
the old race of the Scoti extra Scotiam agentes, only such small
mercies as a Mure of Rowallan, a Semple of Beltrees, or a Cleland,
among the versifiers, or, in prose, a Hume of Godscroft, a
Spotswood, a Sir Thomas Urquhart, or a Sir George Mackenzie!
What was the cause of this poverty? The loss of the benefits of a
resident Scottish kingship, consequent on the removal of the Court to
England in 1603, may have had some effect. No chance after that of
Napier’s desired agency of a mighty royal Mæcenas in Holyrood for
stirring the Scottish “ingines.” A more certain cause, however, is to
be found in the agonising intensity with which, through the whole of
the century and a quarter from 1580 onwards, the soul and heart of
Scotland, in all classes of the community alike, were occupied with
the successive phases of the one vexed question of Presbytery-versus-
Episcopacy in Church government, and its theological and political
concomitants. It was in the nature of this controversy, agitated as it
was with such persevering, such life-or-death vehemence, in
Scotland, to strangle all the ordinary muses. Here, however, lies the
historical compensation. There are other interests in a nation, other
duties, than those of art and literature; and he would be but a
wretched Scotsman who, while hovering over the history of his
country in the seventeenth century and noting her deficiencies then
in literary respects in comparison with England, should forget that
this very century was the time of the most powerful action ever
exerted by Scotland in the general history of the British Islands, and
that, when the great British Revolution of that century was over, its
accounts balanced, and the residuum of indubitably successful and
useful result summed up, no little of that residuum was traceable to
Scotland’s obstinate perseverance so long in her own peculiar
politico-ecclesiastical controversy, and to what had been argued or
done in the course of it, on one side or the other, by such men as
Andrew Melville, Alexander Henderson, Argyle, Montrose,
Claverhouse, and Carstares. But it is on Scottish Literature that we
are now reporting, and for that the report must remain as has been
stated. From Dan to Beersheba, from Hawick to Thurso, all through
the Scottish century and a quarter under view, very few roses or
other flowers, and not much even of happy thistle-bloom!
A revival came at last. It came in the beginning of the eighteenth
century, just after the union of Scotland with England in the reign of
Queen Anne, when the literary succession to Dryden in England was
represented by such of the Queen Anne wits and their Georgian
recruits as Defoe, Matthew Prior, Swift, Congreve, Steele, Addison,
Gay, and Pope. It was then that, from a group of lingering Scottish
literary stagers of the antique type, such as Bishop Sage, Dr. Pitcairn,
Pennicuik, Fletcher of Saltoun, Wodrow, and Ruddiman, there
stepped forth the shrewd Edinburgh periwig-maker who was to be
for so many years the popular little Horace of Auld Reekie, not only
supplying the lieges with such songs and poems as they had not had
the like of for many a day, but actually shaking them again into some
sense of the importance of popular books and of a taste for lightsome
reading. Yes, it was Allan Ramsay,—the placid little man of the night-
cap that one sees in the white statue of him in Princes Street,—it was
he that was the real reviver of literature and of literary enthusiasm in
Scotland after their long abeyance. He was conscious of his mission:
—
“The chiels of London, Cam., and Ox.
Hae reared up great poetic stocks
Of Rapes, of Buckets, Sarks, and Locks,
While we neglect
To shaw their betters. This provokes
Me to reflect

On the learn’d days of Gawn Dunkell:

Our country then a tale could tell:
Europe had nane mair snack and snell
In verse or prose:
Our kings were poets too themsell,
Bauld and jocose.”

He combined, as we see here, the two passions of a patriotic and

antiquarian fondness for the native old literature of Scotland, the all
but forgotten old Scottish poetry of the sixteenth century, and an
eager interest in what his English contemporaries in the south, the
“chiels of London,”—to wit, Prior, Addison, Pope, Gay, and the rest,—
had recently done, or were still doing, for the maintenance of the
great literary traditions of England. How strong was his interest in
those “chiels of London,” how much he admired them, appears not
only from their influence upon him in his own special art of a
resuscitated Scottish poetry in an eclectic modification of the old
vernacular, but also in the dedication of so much of his later life to
the commercial enterprise of an Edinburgh circulating library for the
supply of his fellow-citizens with all recent or current English books,
and in his less successful enterprise for the introduction of the
English drama by the establishment of a regular Edinburgh theatre.
In short, before Allan Ramsay’s death in 1758, what with his own
example and exertions, what from the stimulus upon his countrymen
independently of the new sense, more and more consciously felt
since the Union, of an acquired partnership with England in all that
great inheritance in the English speech which had till then belonged
especially to England, and in the common responsibilities of such
partnership thenceforward, Scotland was visibly holding up her head
again. Before that date there had appeared, in Ramsay’s wake, some
of the other forerunners of that famous race of eighteenth-century
Scottish writers who, so far from giving cause for any continuance of
the imputation of the literary inferiority of Scotland to England, were
to command the respect of Europe by the vigour of their co-
operation and rivalry with their English coevals.
Without taking into account Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw, whose
noble poetic fragment of Hardyknute was made public by Ramsay,
and whose influence on the subsequent course of specially Scottish
literature by that fragment, and possibly by other unacknowledged
things of the same kind, remains yet to be adequately estimated, one
notes that among those juniors of Ramsay who had entered on the
career of literature after him and under his observation, but who had
died before him, were Robert Blair, James Thomson, and William
Hamilton of Bangour. David Malloch, once an Edinburgh protégé of
Ramsay’s, but a naturalised Londoner since 1723, and Anglicised into
Mallet, was about the oldest of Ramsay’s Scottish literary survivors,
and does not count for much. But, when Ramsay died, there were
already in existence, at ages varying from full maturity to mere
infancy, more than fifty other Scots who are memorable now, on one
ground or another, in the British Literary History of the eighteenth
century. Some of these, such as Armstrong, Smollett, Mickle, and
Macpherson, migrated to England, as Arbuthnot, Thomson, and
Mallet had done; others, such as Reid, Campbell, and Beattie, are
associated locally with Aberdeen, Glasgow, or some rural part of
Scotland; but by far the largest proportion, like Allan Ramsay
himself, had their homes in Edinburgh, or were essentially of
Edinburgh celebrity by all their belongings. Kames, David Hume,
Monboddo, Dr. Robert Henry, Dr. Hugh Blair, Dr. Thomas
Blacklock, Principal Robertson, John Home, Adam Smith, Dr. Adam
Ferguson, Lord Hailes, Hutton, Black, Falconer, Professor Robison,
James Boswell, George Chalmers, Henry Mackenzie, Professor
Playfair, Robert Fergusson, Dugald Stewart, and John Pinkerton:
these, with others whom their names will suggest, were the northern
lights of the Scottish capital through the half-century or more in
which Dr. Johnson wielded the literary dictatorship of London, and
he and Goldsmith, and, after they were gone, Burke and Gibbon,
were seen in the London streets. Greater and smaller together, were
they not a sufficient northern constellation? Do not we of modern
Edinburgh still remember them now with a peculiar pride, and visit,
out of curiosity, the houses in the Old Town squares or closes where
some of them had their dwellings? Do not traditions of them, and of
their physiognomies and habits, linger yet about the Lawnmarket,
the High Street, the Canongate, the Parliament House, and the site of
our University? Was it not the fact that in their days there were two
recognised and distinct centres or foci of literary production in Great
Britain: the great London on the banks of the Thames being one; but
the other 400 miles farther north, in the smaller city of heights and
hollows that stood ridged beside Arthur Seat on the banks of the
Forth? And so, not without a track of enduring radiance yet, vanishes
from our gaze what we may reckon as the third age of the Literary
History of Edinburgh.
A fourth was to follow, and in some respects a still greater. It
was in July 1786 that there was published the first, or Kilmarnock,
edition of the Poems of Robert Burns; and it was in the winter of that
same year that the ploughman-poet paid his memorable first visit to
Edinburgh. On one particular day in the course of that visit, as all
know, Burns encountered, in the house of Dr. Adam Ferguson, a
lame fair-haired youth, of fifteen years of age, upon whom, in the
midst of other company, his eyes were led, by a happy accident, to fix
themselves for a moment or two with some special interest. This was
young Walter Scott. In the same week, or thereabouts, it was that
another Edinburgh boy, two years younger than Scott, standing
somewhere in the High Street, and staring at a man whose unusual
appearance had struck him, was told by a bystander that he might
well look, for that man was Robert Burns. This was young Francis
Jeffrey. What a futurity for Edinburgh in the coming lives of those
two young natives of hers, both of whom had just seen the wondrous
man from Ayrshire! In 1802, when Burns had been dead for six
years, Scott, already the author of this or that, was collecting the
“Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border”; and in the end of the same year
appeared the first number of the Edinburgh Review, projected in
Jeffrey’s house in Buccleuch Place, and of which, after its third
number, Jeffrey was to be the sole editor. Pass thence to 1832, the
year of Scott’s death. How enormous the accession in those thirty
years to all that had been previously illustrious in the literary history
of Edinburgh! On the one hand, all the marvellous offspring of
Scott’s creative genius, the novels as well as the poems; on the other,
all Jeffrey’s brilliant and far-darting criticisms, with those of his
associate reviewers, from Horner, Brougham, and Sydney Smith, to
the juniors who succeeded them. In any retrospect of this kind,
however, criticism pales by the side of creation; and it is in the blaze
of the completed life of the greater of the two rising stars of 1802 that
the present Edinburgh now necessarily recollects and reimagines the
Edinburgh of those thirty following years.

II.

It is not for nothing that the very central and supreme object in
the architecture of our present Edinburgh is the monument to Sir
Walter Scott,—the finest monument, I think, that has yet been raised
anywhere on the earth to the memory of a man of letters. The
Edinburgh of the thirty years from 1802 to 1832 was, is, and will ever
be, the Edinburgh of Sir Walter Scott. All persons and things else
that were contained in the Edinburgh of those thirty years are
thought of now as having had their being and shelter under the
presidency of that one overarching personality. When these are
counted up, however, the array should be sufficiently impressive,
even were the covering arch removed. The later lives of Henry
Mackenzie, Dugald Stewart, and Playfair, and of the Alison of the
Essays on Taste; the lyric genius of the Baroness Nairne, and her
long unavowed songs; the rougher and more prolific muse of James
Hogg; Dr. M’Crie and his historical writings; all the early promise of
the scholarly and poetical Leyden; some of the earlier strains of
Campbell; Dr. Thomas Brown and his metaphysical teachings in
aberration from Dugald Stewart; Mrs. Brunton and her novels; Mrs.
Johnstone and her novels; Miss Ferrier and her novels; the too brief
career of the philologist Dr. Alexander Murray; much of the most
active career, scientific and literary, of Sir David Brewster; the
Scottish Record researches of Thomas Thomson, and the
contributions of Kirkpatrick Sharpe, and many of those of David
Laing, to Scottish history and Scottish literary antiquities; the
starting of Blackwood’s Magazine in 1817, and the outflashing in
that periodical of Wilson as its “Christopher North,” with his
coadjutor Lockhart; all the rush of fame that attended the “Noctes
Ambrosianæ” in that periodical, with the more quiet popularity of
such particular contributions to its pages as those of David Macbeth
Moir; the first intimations of the extraordinary erudition and the
philosophic power of Sir William Hamilton; the first years of the
Edinburgh section of the life of Dr. Chalmers; the first tentative
residences in Edinburgh, and ultimate settlement there, in
connection with Blackwood and other periodicals, of the strange
English De Quincey, driven thither by stress of livelihood after trial
of London and the Lakes; the somewhat belated outset, in obscure
Edinburgh lodgings, and then in a house in Comely Bank, of what
was to be the great career of Thomas Carlyle; the more precocious
literary assiduity of young Robert Chambers, with results of various
kinds already in print; such are some of the phenomena discernible
in the history of Edinburgh during those thirty years of Scott’s
continuous ascendency through which there ran the equally
continuous shaft of Jeffrey’s critical leadership.
Nor when Scott died was his influence at an end. Edinburgh
moved on, indeed, after his familiar figure had been lost to her, into
another tract of years, full of continued and still interesting literary
activity, in which, of all Scott’s survivors, who so fit to succeed him in
the presidency, who called to it with such acclamation, as the long-
known, long-admired, and still magnificent Christopher North? In
many respects, however, this period of Edinburgh’s continued
literary activity, from 1832 onwards, under the presidency of Wilson,
was really but a prolongation, a kind of afterglow, of the era of the
great Sir Walter.
Not absolutely so. In the Edinburgh from which Sir Walter had
vanished there were various intellectual developments, various
manifestations of literary power and tendency, as well as of social
energy, which Sir Walter could not have foreseen, which were even
alien to his genius, and which owed little or nothing to his example.
There were fifteen years more of the thunders and lightnings of the
great Chalmers; of real importance after a different fashion was the
cool rationality of George Combe, with his physiological and other
teachings; the little English De Quincey, hidden away in no one
knows how many Edinburgh domiciles in succession, and appearing
in the Edinburgh streets and suburbs only furtively and timorously
when he appeared at all, was sending forth more and more of his
wonderful essays and prose-phantasies; less of a recluse, but
somewhat of a recluse too, and a late burner of the lamp, Sir William
Hamilton was still pursuing those studies and speculations which
were to constitute him in the end the most momentous force since
Hume in the profounder philosophy of Great Britain; and, not to
multiply other cases, had there not come into Edinburgh the massive
Hugh Miller from Cromarty, his self-acquired English classicism
superinduced upon native Scandinavian strength, and powdered
with the dust of the Old Red Sandstone?
Not the less, parallel with all this, ran the transmitted influence
of Sir Walter Scott. What we may call the Scotticism of Scott,—that
special passion for all that appertained to the land of brown heath
and shaggy wood, that affection for Scottish themes and legends in
preference to all others, which he had impressed upon Scottish
Literature so strongly that its perpetuation threatens to become a
restriction and a narrowness, was the chief inspiration of many of
those Scottish writers who came after him, in Edinburgh or
elsewhere. One sees a good deal of this in Christopher North himself,
and also in Hugh Miller. It appears in more pronounced form in the
long-protracted devotion of the good David Laing to those labours of
Scottish antiquarianism which he had begun while Scott was alive
and under Scott’s auspices, and in the accession to the same field of
labour of such later scholars as Cosmo Innes. It appears in the
character of many of those writings which marked the advance of
Robert Chambers, after the days of his youthful attachment to Scott
personally, to his more mature and more independent celebrity. It
appears, moreover, in the nature of much of that publishing
enterprise of the two Chamberses jointly the commencement of
which by the starting of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal in the very
year of Scott’s death is itself a memorable thing in the annals of
Edinburgh; and it is discernible in a good deal of the contemporary
publishing activity of other Edinburgh firms. Finally, to keep still to
individuals, do we not see it, though in contrasted guises, in the
literary lives, so closely in contact, of John Hill Burton and William
Edmonstoune Aytoun? If we should seek for a convenient stopping-
point at which to round off our recollections of the whole of that age
of the literary history of Edinburgh which includes both the era of
the living Scott and the described prolongation of that era, then,
unless we stop at the death of Wilson in 1854, may not the death of
Aytoun in 1865 be the point chosen? No more remarkable
representative than Aytoun to the last of what we have called the
afterglow from the spirit of Scott. Various as were his abilities, rich as
was his vein of humour, what was the dominant sentiment of all his
serious verse? What but that to which he has given expression in his
imagined soliloquy of the exiled and aging Prince Charlie?—
“Let me feel the breezes blowing
Fresh along the mountain side!
Let me see the purple heather,
Let me hear the thundering tide,
Be it hoarse as Corrievreckan
Spouting when the storm is high!
Give me back one hour of Scotland;
Let me see it ere I die.”

In our chronological review of the literary history of Edinburgh

to the point to which it has thus been brought, there has been, it will
have been observed, the intervention of at least one age of poverty in
what would else be a pretty continuous show of plenty. There are
among us some who tell us that we are now in an age of poverty
again, a season of the lean kine of Pharaoh’s dream. Ichabod, they
tell us, may be now written on the front of the Register House; and
Edinburgh is living on her past glories! As this complaint was raised
again and again in previous times to which its application is now a
matter of surprise, may we not hope that its recurrence in the
present is only a passing wave of that feeling, common to all times,
and not unbecoming or unuseful, which underestimates, or even
neglects, what is near and round about, in comparison with what is
old or far off? The question whether Edinburgh is now despicable
intellectually in comparison with her former self, like the larger
question, usually opened out from this smaller one, and pressed
along with it, whether Scotland at large is not intellectually poor in
comparison with her former self, is really a question of statistics. As a
certain range of time is requisite to form a sufficient basis for a fair
inventory, perhaps we ought to wait a little. When one remembers,
however, that among those who would have to be included in the
inventory, inasmuch as they dropped out from the society of
Edinburgh considerably after that year 1865 which has been
suggested as a separating point between the defunct past and the still
current, are not only such of the older and already-named ornaments
of Edinburgh as David Laing, Cosmo Innes, William and Robert
Chambers, and Hill Burton, but also such individualities of later
conspicuous mark as Alexander Smith, Alexander Russel, and Dr.
John Brown, then, perhaps, there might be some confidence that, if
one were to proceed to the more delicate business of comprising in
the list all that suit among the living, together with those of whom
there is any gleam “upon the forehead of the town to come,” the total
would exhibit an average not quite shameful. Perhaps, however, as
has been said, it is too soon yet to begin to count.
Those who believe in the literary decadence of Edinburgh
naturally find the cause to some extent in the increasing
centralisation of the commerce of British Literature universally in
London. They point to such facts as that the Edinburgh Review has
long ceased to be an Edinburgh periodical, that some Edinburgh
publishing firms have transferred their head-quarters to London,
and that other Edinburgh publishing firms are understood to be
meditating a similar removal. Now, in the first place, is there not
here some exaggeration of the facts? London, with its population of
four or five millions, is so vast a nation in itself that the fair
comparison in this matter should not be between London and
Edinburgh, but between London and the whole of Scotland; and, if it
were found that the amount of book-production in Edinburgh were
even one-twentieth of that of London, the scores between the two
places would then, in proportion to their bulks, be about exactly
equal. I cannot pretend to have used all the available means for the
computation; but, in view of some facts before me, I should be
surprised if it turned out that Edinburgh did not come up to her
proportional mark. Edinburgh possesses, at all events, a most
flourishing printing industry. The printing of Edinburgh is
celebrated all the world over; a very large proportion of the books
published in London are printed in Edinburgh. That is something;
but what of publishing business? From the Edinburgh Directory of
this year, I find that among the booksellers of the city there are 62
who are also publishers. As against these 62 publishing houses in
Edinburgh there ought, in the proportion of the bulks, to be about
1260 in London; but from the London Directory of last year I find
that the number of London publishing houses was but 373,—i.e. that
London, in proportion to its size, has only about one-third of the
publishing machinery of Edinburgh. The mere relative numbers,
however, do not suffice for the comparison; for may not the
proportionally fewer London houses have been doing a much larger
amount of business, and may not the publishing machinery of
Edinburgh have been lying comparatively idle? Well, I do not know;
but the recent publishing lists of our Edinburgh houses show no
signs of declining activity. The completed Ninth Edition of the great
Encyclopædia Britannica, for example, has been wholly an
Edinburgh enterprise, and a new edition of another Edinburgh
Cyclopædia is now running its course. Where Edinburgh falls most
obviously behind London at present is perhaps in the dimensions of
her journalism and her apparatus of periodical literature.
Blackwood’s Magazine and Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal exist
still; but other literary periodicals, once known in Edinburgh, are
extinct, and one can recollect the time when there were more
newspapers in Edinburgh than there are now. Those, however, were
the days of twice-a-week newspapers or once-a-week newspapers;
and in the present daily journalism of Edinburgh one has to observe
not only the unprecedented amount of energy and writing ability at
work for all the ordinary requirements of newspapers, but also (a
very noteworthy feature of Edinburgh journalism in particular) the
increasing extent to which, by frequent non-political articles and
continual accounts of current books, it is annexing to itself the
functions hitherto performed by magazines, reviews, and other
literary miscellanies. But, suppose that, all these appearances
notwithstanding, it should be made out that the publishing
machinery of Edinburgh is scantier and slacker than it was, there is
another consideration yet in reserve. The real measure of the present
or the future literary capabilities of Edinburgh, or of Scotland
generally, is not the extent of the publishing machinery which either
Edinburgh, or Scotland generally, still retains within herself, but the
amount and worth of the actual or potential authorship, the literary
brain and ability of all kinds, that may be still resident within the
bounds of Edinburgh or of Scotland, wheresoever the products are
published. Those who are so fond of upbraiding the present
Edinburgh more especially with the former literary distinction of
Edinburgh in the latter half of the eighteenth century,—the days of
Hume, Adam Smith, Robertson, and others,—seem to be ignorant of
a most important fact. The publishing machinery of Edinburgh in
those days was very poor; and the chief books of those Edinburgh
celebrities were published in London. That there came a change in
this respect was owing mainly, or wholly, to one man. His name was
Archibald Constable. Of this man, the Napoleon of the British
publishing trade of his time, and of such particular facts in his
publishing career as his bold association of himself with the
Edinburgh Review from its very outset, and his life-long connection
with Scott, all have some knowledge from tradition. But hear Lord
Cockburn’s succinct account of him in general. “Constable,” says
Lord Cockburn, “began as a lad in Hill’s shop, and had hardly set up
for himself when he reached the summit of his business. He rushed
out, and took possession of the open field, as if he had been aware
from the first of the existence of the latent spirits which a skilful
conjurer might call from the depths of the population to the service
of literature. Abandoning the old timid and grudging system, he
stood out as the general patron and payer of all promising
publications, and confounded not merely his rivals in trade, but his
very authors, by his unheard-of prices. Ten, even twenty, guineas a
sheet for a review, £2000 or £3000 for a single poem, and £1000
each for two philosophical dissertations, drew authors from dens
where they would otherwise have starved, and made Edinburgh a
literary mart, famous with strangers, and the pride of its own
citizens.” These words of Lord Cockburn’s are too high-flown, in so
far as they might beget wrong conceptions of what was or is possible.
But, recollecting what Constable did,—recollecting that it was mainly
his example and success that called into being those other Edinburgh
publishing firms, contemporary with his own or subsequent, which
have maintained till now the place won by him for Edinburgh in the
commerce of British literature,—recollecting also how largely he led
the way in that enormous change in the whole system of the British
book trade, now almost consummated, which has liberated
publishers from the good old necessity of waiting for the authors that
might come to them, one by one, with already-prepared manuscripts
under their arm, the fruit of their careful private labours on self-
chosen subjects, and has constituted publishers themselves, to a
great extent, the real generators and regulators of literature,
projecting serials, manuals, sets of schoolbooks, and whatever else
they see to be in demand, and employing literary labour preferably in
the service of these enterprises of their own,—recollecting all this,
may we not speculate on what might be the consequences in the
present Edinburgh of the appearance of another Archibald
Constable? The appurtenances are all ready. One has heard
complaints lately of the dearth in Edinburgh of those materials in the
shape of collections of books which would be requisite for the future
sufficiency of the city as a manufactory of such kinds of literature as
admit of being manufactured. That is a sheer hallucination. Next to
London, and perhaps to Oxford, Edinburgh has the largest provision
of books of any city in the British Empire. There are at this moment
800,000 volumes,—say close on a million,—on the shelves of the
various public or corporate libraries. Much remains to be done
towards making all this wealth of books in Edinburgh as available as
it might be; and there ought to be no rest among us till that
particular advance is made towards an ideal state of things which
shall consist in the conversion of the present noble library of the
Faculty of Advocates into the nucleus of a great National Library for
all Scotland. But, even as things are, why be indolent, why not utilise
our implements? Doubt not that in the present Edinburgh and in the
present Scotland, as in other parts of Her Majesty’s dominions, there
are, as Napier of Merchiston phrased it, “good ingines, versed and
exercised in all manner of honest science,” who, if they were to bestir
themselves, and especially if there were another Archibald Constable
in the midst of them, would find plenty of excellent employment
without needing, unless they chose, to change the territory of their
abode!

THE END

Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh.

1. From The Scotsman of 18th, 19th, and 21st August 1886.

2. Written, and in part delivered, as an Introductory Lecture to the Class of
English Literature in the University of Edinburgh in the Session 1867–8.
3. A scrap from unpublished MSS.
4. From The Scotsman of 29th December 1890.
5. Written in 1883, in the form of a Lecture.
6. Written in 1883, as a lecture for the Class of English Literature in the
Edinburgh Association for the University Education of Women.
7. Reprinted, with some modifications, from the Westminster Review for
Oct.–Dec. 1856; where it appeared, with the title “Edinburgh Fifty Years Ago,” in
the form of an article on Lord Cockburn’s “Memorials of Edinburgh,” then just
published.
8. Opening Address to Session 1890–1 of The Philosophical Institution of
Edinburgh.
9. From Macmillan’s Magazine for November and December 1881 and
January 1882.
10. Another incident which he told me of his first boyish saunterings about
Edinburgh is more trivial in itself, but of some interest as showing his observant
habits and sense of humour at that early age:—For some purpose or other, he was
going down Leith Walk, the long street of houses, stone-yards, and gaps of vacant
space, which leads from Edinburgh to its sea-port of Leith. In front of him, and
also walking towards Leith, was a solid, quiet-looking countryman. They had not
gone far from Edinburgh when there advanced to them from the opposite direction
a sailor, so drunk that he needed the whole breadth of the footpath to himself.
Taking some umbrage at the countryman, the sailor came to a stop, and addressed
him suddenly, “Go to H——,” looking him full in the face. “’Od, man, I’m gaun to
Leith,” said the countryman, as if merely pleading a previous engagement, and
walked on, Carlyle following him and evading the sailor.
11. Quoted by Mr. Froude in his article, “The Early Life of Thomas Carlyle,” in
the Nineteenth Century for July 1881.
 12. Quoted by Mr. Froude, ut supra.
13. Printed in an appendix to Mr. Moncure D. Conway’s Memoir of Carlyle
(1881), with other fragments of letters which had been copied from the originals by
Mr. Alexander Ireland of Manchester, and which Mr. Ireland put at Mr. Conway’s
disposal. The date of this fragment is “August 1814”; and, as it is evidently a reply
to Murray’s letter of “July 27,” I have ventured to dissent from Mr. Froude’s
conjectural addition of “1816?” to the dating of that letter.
14. The first secession from the National Presbyterian Church of Scotland, as
established at the Revolution, was in 1733, when differences on account of matters
of administration, rather than any difference of theological doctrine, led to the
foundation by Ebenezer Erskine of the dissenting communion called The Associate
Presbytery or Secession Church. In 1747 this communion split itself, on the
question of the obligation of the members to take a certain civil oath, called The
Burgher’s Oath, into two portions, calling themselves respectively the Associate or
Burgher Synod and the General Associate or Anti-Burgher Synod. The former in
1799 sent off a detachment from itself called the Original Burgher Synod or Old
Light Burghers, the main body remaining as the Associate Burgher Synod; and it
was to the second that Carlyle’s parents belonged, their pastor in Ecclefechan being
that Rev. Mr. Johnston to whose memory Carlyle has paid such a tribute of respect,
and whose grave is now to be seen in Ecclefechan churchyard, near Carlyle’s own.
15. This is not the first passage at arms on record between a Carlyle and an
Irving. As far back as the sixteenth century, when Irvings and Carlyles were even
more numerous in the West Border than they are at present, and are heard of, with
Maxwells, Bells, Johnstons, and other clans, as keeping those parts in continual
turmoil with their feuds, raids, and depredations, it would happen sometimes that
a Carlyle jostled with an Irving. Thus, in the Register of the Privy Council of
Scotland, under date Aug. 28, 1578, we have the statement from an Alexander
Carlyle that there had been a controversy “betwix him and Johnne Irvin, callit the
Windie Duke.” What the controversy was does not appear; but both parties had
been apprehended by Lord Maxwell, then Warden of the West Marches, and
lodged in the “pledge-chalmer,” or prison, of Dumfries; and Carlyle’s complaint is
that, while the said John Irving had been released on bail, no such favour has been
shown to him, but he has been kept in irons for twenty-two weeks. This Alexander
Carlyle seems to be the same person as a “Red Alexander Carlyle of Eglisfechan”
heard of afterwards in the same Record, under date Feb. 22, 1581–2, as concerned
in “some attemptatis and slauchter” committed in the West March, and of which
the Privy Council were taking cognisance. On this occasion he is not in controversy
with an Irving, but has “Edward Irving of Boneschaw,” and his son “Christie Irving
of the Coif,” among his fellow-culprits. Notices of the Dumfriesshire Carlyles and
Irvings, separately or in company, are frequent in the Register through the reign of
James VI.
16. I have been informed, however, that Leslie must have misconceived Carlyle
when he took the solution as absolutely Carlyle’s own. It is to be found, I am told,
in an old Scottish book of geometry.
17. A letter of Carlyle’s among those contributed by Mr. Alexander Ireland to
Mr. Conway’s Memoir proves that the momentous reading of Gibbon was before
Feb. 20, 1818; and in a subsequent letter in the same collection, of date “July
1818,” he informs his correspondent, “I have quitted all thoughts of the Church, for
many reasons, which it would be tedious, perhaps [word not legible], to
enumerate.” This piece of information is bedded, however, in some curious
remarks on the difficulties of those “chosen souls” who take up opinions different
from those of the age they live in, or of the persons with whom they associate. See
the letter in Mr. Conway’s volume, pp. 168–170.
18. Quoted in Mr. Froude’s article, “The Early Life of Carlyle,” in the
Nineteenth Century for July 1881.
19. Mrs. Oliphant’s Life of Irving (1862), i. 90, 91.
20. My impression now is that it was this autumn of 1819 in his father’s house
that Carlyle had in his mind when he talked to me once of the remembered
pleasures of certain early mornings in the Dumfriesshire hill-country. The chief
was when, after a saunter out of doors among the sights and sounds of newly
awakened nature, he would return to the fragrant tea that was ready for him at
home. No cups of tea he had ever tasted in his life seemed so fragrant and so
delicious as those his mother had ready for him after his walks in those old
Dumfriesshire mornings.
21. But for the phrase “Hume’s Lectures once done with, I flung the thing away
for ever,” quoted by Mr. Froude as from “a note somewhere,” I should, on the
evidence of handwriting, etc., have decided unhesitatingly for the second and more
extensive of the two hypotheses.—The attendance on the Chemistry Class, which
would become a fact if that hypothesis were correct, would be of some independent
interest. With Carlyle’s turn for science at that time, it was not unlikely. I may add
that, from talks with him, I have an impression that, some time or other, he must
have attended Professor Jameson’s class of Natural History. He had certainly
heard Jameson lecture pretty frequently; for he described Jameson’s lecturing
humorously and to the life, the favourite topic of his recollection being Jameson’s
discourse on the order Glires in the Linnæan Zoology. Though I have looked over
the Matriculation Lists and also the preserved class-lists pretty carefully from 1809
to 1824, it is just possible that Carlyle’s name in one of Jameson’s class-lists within
that range of time may have escaped me. The only other Professor, not already
mentioned in the text, that I remember to have heard him talk of was Dr. Andrew
Brown, Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres; but him he knew, I think, only by
occasional dropping in at his lectures.
22. Carlyle to a correspondent, in one of Mr. Ireland’s copies of letters:
Conway, p. 178.
23. Ditto, ibid. p. 180.