The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: A Study of the Idiosyncratic and the Humane in Modern Literature

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In the course of his unfinished autobiography, A Little Learning, Evelyn Waugh describes his father as a Man of Letters, someone belonging to ‘a category, like the maiden aunt’s, that is now almost extinct’. There was a time when ‘man of letters’ meant something very different from the kind of elderly bookman Waugh had in mind. Originally the term denoted a scholar; then it gradually came to be applied to authors in general. By 1840 Carlyle was able to talk about the Hero as Man of Letters, acclaiming him as ‘our most important modern person’. After this, however, the meaning began to be narrowed down. A generation later, it was still possible to call a new series of books about poets, playwrights and novelists English Men of Letters, but only just: the idea already seemed faintly pompous or absurd. By this time a man of letters was very definitely coming to suggest a writer of the second rank, a critic, someone who aimed higher than journalism but made no pretence of being primarily an artist. Up until the First World War men of letters in this sense were a familiar part of the literary landscape; then the term fell into disrepute.

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