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1 - Avoiding ‘Coarse Invective’ and ‘Unseemly Vehemence’: English Music Criticism, 1850–1870

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 July 2019

Peter Horton
Affiliation:
Durham University.
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Summary

We shall endeavour, while encouraging all controversies likely to interest the musical public, to eschew such as cannot be entertained without the manifestation of party feeling, or private animosities. We see no necessity to avoid – as some of our friends advise us – all discussion on musical subjects with contemporary journals, but we shall aim at so conducting our argument, as not to shock our readers by coarse invective, or offend our adversaries by unseemly vehemence.

When, in December 1844, the music critic and journalist J. W. Davison (b. 1813) penned his apologia, he was well aware that the reputation of The Musical World, whose editor he had been for some eighteen months, was in danger of being sacrificed on an altar of frivolity, ‘violent language and directly personal remarks’. He continued:

We freely confess our faults, and will not attempt to deny that strong personal motives have frequently engaged us in disputes, of which both the matter and the manner were wholly at variance with the due we are so proud to owe to our subscribers and the public. Let us here – while in the act of confession – promise amendment – and let this be an answer before-hand, to all who may think proper to attack us in an unbecoming spirit – that we shall not level ourselves to their standards by emulating their ill taste.

That Davison should have felt it necessary to perform such an undertaking says much about the rumbustious nature of early Victorian journalism. At a time when freedom of expression, provided that it was not blasphemous, treasonable, or seditious, was prized, opinions were voiced and reputations traduced with little or no concern for those affected. Davison had himself been far from blameless. With a liking for satire, he had appropriated from Punch the character of ‘Jenkins’, a fictitious journalist supposedly on the staff of The Morning Post, and grafted his identity onto that of Charles Lewis Gruneisen (b. 1806), the Post's music critic. To Davison, who had aspirations as both composer and pianist, Gruneisen's lack of musical expertise and background as a foreign and war correspondent made him quite unqualified to write about music.

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Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2018

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