T.S. Eliot, Bloomsbury, and the Hogarth Press

T.S. Eliot carefully lowered his teacup into its saucer, worried that his nervous hand would rattle the porcelain. Across the table, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, a power couple at the center of the Bloomsbury Group of London intellectuals, were leafing through the poems Eliot had brought for them to read. When the Woolfs asked Eliot a few questions about his work, he chose his words with measured caution. In Virginia Woolf’s diary entry after this first meeting in November of 1918, she records her first impressions of Eliot as a “polished, cultivated, elaborate young American, talking so slow. It is fairly evident that he is very intellectual, intolerant, with strong views of his own, & a poetic creed.”

Although Eliot was never truly a member of the Bloomsbury Group, he was attracted to this association of interesting writers, artists, and intellectuals. He found them cool and subversive, nonconformists existing confidently and comfortably within the larger English culture. The Bloomsbury Group were conscientious objectors to World War I, sexually liberated, and proponents of a vibrant aesthetics. While Eliot was often around the Woolfs and their Bloomsbury friends in London, his social stiffness prevented him from truly fitting in. Many in the group found him “dull,” overwrought, and acerbic. Nevertheless, the Woolfs admired Eliot’s work and agreed to publish seven of his poems in a pamphlet printed on the Hogarth Press that they operated out of their home.

The Hogarth Press began as a Woolf domestic hobby, something to occupy the married couple most weekday afternoons. They purchased their small press, about the size of a large typewriter, in 1915, and set it up in their kitchen. Virginia Woolf, who suffered bouts of mental illness throughout her life, discovered that the focused yet disassociated act of setting type was soothing to her nerves and offered a satisfying distraction after a day spent writing her own fiction. In 1917, the Woolfs decided to use their little handpress to publish works written by their acquaintances and by a few promising unknowns; over the next fifteen years, the Hogarth Press, run by Virginia and Leonard Woolf, two amateur printers with a savvy eye for good writing, would hand-print and publish 34 books and pamphlets.

T.S. Eliot’s Poems, published in 1919, was only the Hogarth Press’s third publication, and Virginia described the 13-page pamphlet as “our best work so far by a long way.” They printed fewer than 250 copies, which sold out within a year. The text is clearly legible and centered on the page — a major accomplishment for a novice printer such as Leonard Woolf.

For the book’s wonderful cover, the Woolfs selected patterned Japanese paper that they sent to Paris to be individually decorated by Pamela Fry, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Roger Fry, a Bloomsbury painter, critic, and designer. She marbled the paper in orange and then added green, black, and brown paint in a textural style that predicts abstract expressionism. The green paint was dripped in a manner similar to the technique Jackson Pollock would make famous thirty years later, and the black and brown paint is applied with brush dabs and sweeping flourishes. The effect is striking, especially given that the individualized decoration meant that each cover in the edition was unique. The book’s title, glued onto this cover, was printed in a Caslon Old Face type that Leonard Woolf specifically purchased for this project.

Eliot maintained close contact with the Woolfs for years after the publication of Poems, which was only his second publication and served as something of a validation of his early work.

As Eliot’s relationship with the Woolfs developed between 1918 and 1924, Virginia’s diary captures her thoughts about him. She regarded Eliot with curiosity, “as if one were making out a scientific observation,” she wrote. Their relationship was not often warm, but they seem to have entertained each other and met frequently. When she saw him a month after finishing printing his Poems, she wrote, “I amused myself by seeing how sharp, narrow, & much of a stick Eliot has come to be.” Elsewhere in her diary, Virginia Woolf gossips about Eliot getting drunk while hosting a dinner party, about him wanting to be called “the Captain,” and about him wearing macabre green powder makeup. Ultimately, she does not trust him: “the sinister and pedagogic Tom cut a queer figure. I cannot wholly free myself from suspicions about him.”

But this testy relationship did not prevent the Woolfs from agreeing to publish Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land.” Eliot performed one of his first readings of the new poem for the Woolfs in June of 1922, and Virginia noted the occasion in her diary: “Eliot dined last Sunday & read his poem. He sang it & chanted it, rhythmed it. It has great beauty & force of phrase: symmetry; & tensity. What connects it together, I’m not so sure. One was left, however, with some strong emotion. The Waste Land, it is called.” The poem’s hypnotic quality remains powerful for readers today, even after a century. The Woolfs would print and publish it a year later.

The circumstances surrounding the Hogarth Press’s publication of The Waste Land represents modernism as a dynamic social and economic movement as much as an artistic one. It demonstrates the driving tension between contemporary innovations in international marketing and antique systems of patronage and production. It reflects a networked system of strategic processes, collaborations, and transactions among a cultural elite that cohere into a new vision for the masses to consume. Modernism produced a shareable, popular language that made sense of the early 20^th century.

The Hogarth Press’s edition of The Waste Land, however, reversed the typical process of an artistic community promoting values to a mass market. In some ways, The Waste Land achieved mass-market popularity before it was niche. As detailed in a previous Bibliomania blog post, The Waste Land had already appeared three times within a year of the publication of the Hogarth Press’s British edition in September 1923.

The Boni & Liveright first edition enjoyed immense popularity, selling out the first run within two months and quickly reaching 5,000 copies sold. These sales figures attest that the poem became a cult phenomenon, especially among disaffected undergraduate students in 1920s America. To this new generation, The Waste Land offered an edgy intellectualizing of post-war angst. Such mass popularity was only possible via Boni & Liveright’s capacity for mass production.

By contrast, the Hogarth Press’s subsequent, small-scale edition directly contradicted the impersonal nature of large-scale industrial printing operations, favoring instead a quirky, humanized, even joyfully artistic production process. The Hogarth Press served a different sensibility with its individualized covers and an obvious handcrafting that bordered on sloppiness. Notice the thick glue evident beneath the title. Very indie. Each copy’s cover is a unique variation of blue marbled paper glued to boards, and there were three different versions of the title: one with the text boxed with asterisks (as in the Library’s copy), one with single rules above and below the text, and one with the text alone. Such whimsical production characteristics distinguish a limited-edition Bloomsbury book from a uniform, industrial mass printing.

Eliot himself preferred the Hogarth edition to the Boni & Liveright, writing to Virginia Woolf, “I am delighted with The Waste Land which has just arrived. Spacing and paging are beautifully planned to make it the right length, far better than the American edition. I’m afraid it gave you a great deal of trouble.” Indeed, it had. Eliot’s poem, with its use of multiple languages, varied line indentions, and footnotes, was the most challenging text that the amateur printers had yet tackled. Indeed, Virginia expressed her exhaustion upon completing the job on July 28, 1923: “We have finished Tom, much to our relief.”

The Hogarth Press edition did not achieve the commercial success of the Boni & Liveright edition – it took a year and a half for the Woolfs to sell 443 copies – but that wasn’t really the point. Rather, the Woolfs provided Eliot with a different form of cultural capital through their associations with Bloomsbury and a subversive London avant–garde.

 

Sources & Further Reading:

Ackroyd, P. (1984). T.S. Eliot: A Life. Simon and Schuster.

Eliot, T.S. (2011). The Letters of T.S. Eliot Vol. 2: 1923-1925 (V. Eliot and H. Haughton, Ed.). Yale.

Matthews, S. (Ed.). (2022). The Waste Land after One Hundred Years. Cambridge University.

Southworth, H. (Ed.). (2010). Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press, and the Networks of Modernism. Edinburgh University.

Rosenbaum, S. P. (Ed.) (1975). The Bloomsbury Group: A collection of Memoirs, Commentary, and Criticism. University of Toronto.

Woolf, L. (1967). Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939. Harcourt.