‘Everybody’s Essayist’: On Middles and Middlebrows

Abstract

A 1925 advertisement for J. M. Dent in the London Mercury contained a list of laudatory comments on the popular essayist A. G. Gardiner, referred to by his pseudonym ‘Alpha of the Plough’: ‘No essayist of modern times has made friends with all sorts and conditions of men so successfully as Alpha of the Plough’ (London Mercury, May 1925: p. x). Gardiner was praised in the same advertisement by another popular essayist of the time, Robert Lynd, who also noted the inclusive value of Gardiner’s familiar essays when reviewing Alpha’s Windfalls: ‘Alpha of the Plough is in the best sense of the words everybody’s essayist (London Mercury, May 1925: p. x).¹ The appreciative tone of Lynd’s review, ‘in the best sense of the words’ should not go unnoticed. Implicitly, Lynd thereby set his portrait of Gardiner against contemporary criticisms of mass culture, so that his very assertion of inclusiveness simultaneously crystallized underlying cultural tensions.