Nicholas Dames reviews Philip Hensher’s A History of the Novel in Britain as an answer to a worrying question: what happens to the novel when the print culture, leisure, and mass readership that sustained it start to fray? Hensher’s nearly 600-page history is, Dames finds, more joyous than elegiac.
- The survey runs from the Copyright Act of 1710 to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.
- Hensher favors particular novels, dialogue, and craft over big labels such as “realism” and “modernism.”
- He champions neglected writers, while Dames asks what the book’s national frame leaves out.
- Its distrust of academic critics prompts Dames’s best question: can a novel’s “subject matter” really be separated from its artistic “handling”?
Dames argues for a conversation between novelists and scholars rather than a fight over who gets to preserve the form. Recovering overlooked books matters; so does understanding the social worlds and publishing conditions that made them possible.