In praise of secret scribes

Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature by John Mullan

NOWADAYS it's the name on the cover that sells the book, not the text inside. Most of the big sellers are broadcasting celebrities ? Russell Brand, Jeremy Clarkson, Nigella, Jamie, Gordon, all that ? and there's no particular bother about whether or not they've composed the contents themselves. Some do, others can't for the life of them. Nobody seems to mind much any more.

Such personality-led publishing makes anonymity seem pointless these days. There has really been only one successful recent exception ? the scabrous roman-à-clef about the Clintons on the campaign trail, Primary Colors by "Anonymous", published in 1996.

It offered itself as "a savvy insider's look at life on the stump" ? its narrator Henry describing not just life with the contender "Stanton", but also sex with his wife, "Susan". For a time it was assumed that the author must indeed have been inside the Clinton camp, perhaps his young adviser George Stephanopoulos on whom the narrator seemed to be modelled.

Then a Shakespeare scholar who specialised in computer analysis of literary style declared that the author was probably a Newsweek columnist, Joe Klein. Klein denied it ? the usual reaction of anonymous writers on first being rumbled. Only when a handwriting expert confirmed his identity did he call a press conference to admit his authorship.

Other journalists were infuriated that they had been deceived and Klein lost his job. And Primary Colors seemed a less interesting book when it was clear that it was the work of just another hack, an outsider looking in, not the real thing.

The intensity of speculation and scandal around the Clintons had been enough to recreate the conditions in which anonymity could create more stir than open authorship, otherwise now almost inconceivable. Yet, as John Mullan, an English professor at UCL, reveals, until the 20th century, anonymity was an enormously significant literary practice, which we have largely forgotten for the simple reason that nearly everything originally published anonymously is now familiar to us with the author's name firmly attached, from Gulliver's Travels to Jane Eyre, Moll Flanders to Adam Bede, Pride and Prejudice to Frankenstein. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to The Dunciad.

Mullan points out in his introduction that until now there has been "no single book giving you the history of anonymity". He has thus filled a major gap in literary history with this comprehensive survey of the phenomenon, but only in an epilogue does he ruefully admit that he now understands why it had not previously been attempted.

"There is no possible grand narrative of the changing conventions of anonymous and pseudonymous publication because, at any given time, there are different reasons for it." Thus he has not organised the book chronologically but by broad themes.

Under "Mischief " he groups those authors who have deliberately used anonymity to provoke "curiosity and conjecture", from Swift and Sir Walter Scott to Joe Klein. Under "Modesty", he studies writers who have genuinely felt abashed to appear in the public eye, most of them female, such as Fanny Burney and Jane Austen, but also including the rather more peculiar case of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who returned letters addressed to "Lewis Carroll" as a way of choosing always to operate on his own terms, never to be available on those of others.

Then Mullan tackles women being men, and men being women. For Charlotte Brontë maintaining her ambiguous identity as "Currer Bell" was a creative principle that allowed her to make her life into fiction, says Mullan.

Brontë herself disdained reviewers who guessed at her gender: "To such critics I would say: 'To you I am neither man nor woman, I come before you as an author only ? it is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me, the sole ground on which I accept your judgement.'" Such freedom, however, was not allowed to the Anglican vicar from Brighton, Toby Forward, who in 1987 published a collection of short stories called Down the Road, Worlds Away, apparently written by a young Asian woman, "Rahila Khan". When his publisher, the feminist press Virago, discovered the truth, they considered themselves to have been cruelly hoaxed and pulped the book, refusing to accept Forward's plea that just like Charlotte Brontë, he had taken a pseudonym as an aid to creativity.

Luckily for Forward, no worse penalties followed. In a chapter called "Danger", Mullan describes the plight of authors and printers forced to conceal their identities on pain of imprisonment, mutilation and death. In 1663, the printer John Twyn was hanged, drawn and quartered and his head mounted on a spike at Ludgate, for publishing a tract maintaining that the monarch was accountable to his subjects ? and refusing to name the author, whether or not he knew who it was. As late as 1720, an 18-year-old printer's apprentice was executed for having printed an anonymous pro-Jacobite tract.

The danger of being called out lasted much longer. James Boswell narrowly avoided a duel with the son of a judge he had attacked in an anonymous publication; his son, Alexander Boswell, was killed in 1821 by a friend who had discovered that he had published unsigned attacks on him in the Glasgow Sentinel.

"The reviewing of books was long the area where debates about anonymity were both most bitter and most high-minded," Mullan observes.

In theory, anonymous reviewing can assist impartiality. In practice, it allows partiality a free hand, both in puffing and derision. In the TLS, for example, Virginia Woolf anonymously reviewed "the work of various friends and relatives".

Only in 1974 did the then editor John Gross put an end to unsigned reviews in the paper.

Now, says Mullan, "only in two significant places does anonymous reviewing continue in Britain" ? The Economist, where it is supposed to contribute to an air of corporate authority, and in Private Eye, where the literary pages "scorn the complicity between authors and reviewers that sometimes seems to be the rule elsewhere".

Well, hands up. In the late Eighties and early Nineties, I wrote 50 or so of these anonymous reviews in Private Eye and enjoyed doing so enormously.

It was liberating not to have to be yourself, to be free to adopt different voices, but, at the same time, invigorating to have to establish your credibility afresh in the texture of the prose each time.

And, of course, you could be wildly, truthfully rude about people you were likely to have to meet later. As a result, many of these anonymous reviews were more effective than those published under my own name ? and I think it is a loss that anonymity has become so rare.

Now that John Mullan has provided us with a thoroughly useful survey of the form (save for the typo that claims Emily Brontë died in 1749), perhaps an editor or two might be inspired to encourage its reappearance? Anonymously, of course.