Today is another expedition into Distributed Collaboration. Not the kind your boss means, but the truly internetted kind of research in which Idiosophers specialize. This time, all the work was done by Martin Paul Eve, who has assembled a database of all the review essays in the London Review of Books. He has put the raw data on line, so all I have to do is type some commands in R. In his conception, reviews form a network where a node is a writer and a link in the network is an arrow pointing from the writer of the review to its subject. The LRB has been running since 1979, so the database has tens of thousands of entries.
Eve showed some graphs in a blog post where he had fun finding closed loops in the graph: A reviews B’s book, B reviews C’s book, C reviews A’s book. I’ve loved this kind of analysis ever since I read The Devil’s Dictionary. I went another direction, though.
This blog has been graphing the Inklings for a while. The LRB is too late historically to help out with understanding their direct interactions, but its network is useful for understanding their reception. So here’s the question: It’s clear that J.R.R. Tolkien was not welcomed into the sacred grove of Literature until we barbarians smashed the gates. The other Inklings weren’t mentioned in my college catalogue, either. Is that also true of the literary world across the pond?
One great thing you can do with a network graph is extract the subgraph around any point you ask for. I asked for the Inklings. I used Appendix A of Diana Glyer’s book The Company They Keep to decide who is an Inkling. None of them ever wrote a review, naturally, but six reviews of them appear in the network:
- Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien
- C.S. Lewis, edited by Walter Hooper
- J.R.R. Tolkien, editor Christopher Tolkien
- J.R.R. Tolkien, editor Alan Bliss
- David Cecil
- John Wain
That’s a respectable number of the group to be reviewed, considering how few of them were alive in 1979. I’m looking for how broad a reach they have with two degrees of separation. J.R.R. Tolkien has only a small network. Both of his entries in the database are due to reviews by Peter Godman. Peter Godman also reviewed a book by Tom Shippey, who wrote lots of things for LRB.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s network
C.S. Lewis’s network is larger, with 32 points, but that’s entirely due to J.I.M. Stewart. I’ve turned off the labels for anyone who was involved in fewer than 25 reviews (e.g. Arthur Conan Doyle) so we can read the graph. 32 connections would be kind of impressive, but I can’t help noticing that the graph they form is the same as the graph for Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien. Out of the 33 nodes, there are seven writers here who are connected tightly enough to the LRB establishment to be labeled. (If I recall That Hideous Strength correctly, Lewis would shed no tears at being in a small backwater of the network.)
C.S. Lewis’s network
That’s it for the people we usually think of as the Inklings. No Barfield. A couple of minor members have much more connection. Lord David Cecil (as one might suppose from his title) is extremely connected, but only because he’s reviewed by Frank Kermode:
David Cecil’s neighborhood (click to embiggen)
John Wain is in Cecil’s neighborhood; if we re-center it on him, the graph is just slightly different. Charles Williams is a well-connected name in Eve’s database, but the name is attached to the biographer, not the Inkling.
Conclusion
It’s safe to say that the Inklings are still out of the British literary mainstream by this measure. Were it not for three reviewers taking a brief interest, none of them would have appeared in the LRB.
Better Conclusion
If you want to see a truly amazing list of people, check out the archive of Tom Shippey’s LRB reviews. Where else can you find Geoffrey of Monmouth and Nichelle Nichols next to each other?
I made one tweak to the original database: T.A. Shippey and Tom Shippey are the same person, so I consolidated those two nodes.
tom hillman
nicely done, Geoffrey of Monmouth.