THE VERY BAD REVIEW.(the 1886 review by John Churton Collins of a book on literary history by Edmund Gosse; the fate of the reviewer and the reviewed)(Critical Essay)(Biography)

If you were John Keats, and, in the revered Quarterly Review, John Wilson Croker published his opinion that your poetry was "unintelligible," "diffuse," "tiresome," and "absurd," it would not comfort you much to remember that a bad review can happen to anyone; you would worry that your reputation had been destroyed forever. Three years later, when Lord Byron heard that you had died of consumption in Rome, he would wonder whether your life had been "snuffed out by an Article." If you were Henry James, and, in January of 1895, your play "Guy Domville" opened and the audience booed, and H. G. Wells--a new reviewer, who, the previous week, had praised Oscar Wilde's "An Ideal ...