A.G. Stephens
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A.G. Stephens
(1865-1933), born and educated at Toowoomba, Queensland, was in 1880 apprenticed to a Sydney printer and in 1886 admitted to membership of the NSW Typographical Association. In 1888 he returned north to take up an appointment as editor of the Gympie Miner after it had been taken over by supporters of Thomas McIlwraith and the Queensland Nationalist Party. Stephens became a leading member of the Gympie Literary Circle, reporting its meetings in the Miner. Stephens also edited and largely wrote the Apostle, the organ of the local secular association. In a Miner editorial in May 1890 on the visit of Henry George, he wrote 'Truth is not in extremes', suggesting the even-handed view of political questions characteristic of his later writings.
At the end of 1890 Stephens went to Brisbane and became sub-editor of the radical Boomerang, to which he contributed leaders, features, social jottings, faits divers and a regular column, 'The Magazine Rifler', which surveyed the latest numbers of the English and American journals. When he left the Boomerang in October 1891 it was in the hands of a liquidator and Stephens received the office bible in lieu of wages. He then joined the staff of the Cairns Argus, becoming editor by the end of 1891 and part-owner in 1892. He instituted a literary supplement and ran an essay competition as he had done on the Miner. Stephens himself won the prize of £25 in a competition run in conjunction with the North Queensland Separation League for his essay 'Why North Queensland Wants Separation', later published as a pamphlet in 1893. The essay criticised the control over the north wielded by Brisbane and the south, and attacked the general concepts of political and economic centralisation. In 1893 Stephens finished another polemical essay on Queensland politics, The Griffilwraith, Being an Independent Criticism of the Methods and Manoeuvres of the Queensland Coalition Government, 1890-1893. The pamphlet attacked the coalition government of the factions led by Sir Samuel Griffith and Sir Thomas McIlwraith which had ended the two-party system in the legislature. Immediately after the pamphlet's publication, Stephens left on a trip overseas, using funds from the sale of his interest in the Argus at the end of 1892. He travelled in America, Canada and Europe. A Queenslander's Travel Notes, published on his return to Sydney in 1894, was a collection of the articles he had sent back to Australian journals and newspapers during his trip. Stephens criticised the pretensions and decorums of traditionalist Europe, and in the half of the work devoted to America used the high divorce rate, drug abuse, poverty and crime, side by side with American 'progress' and smugness about its achievements, to define what he saw as the peculiar and contrary American character. At the end of 1893 Stephens was working in Fleet Street for the Daily Chronicle when J.F. Archibald offered him a sub-editorship on the Sydney Bulletin, which he took up in 1894. By that time the Bulletin was a major intercolonial publication, and with Archibald's return to the editorship in 1886, it entered a period of high literary consciousness. It encouraged local authors, advocated literary nationalism and promoted a distinctive model of the short story. From the time of his arrival Stephens contributed literary notices and comments, and full-scale articles on George Eliot, Conan Doyle, and the Brontes had appeared in July 1895. In August 1896 the first Red Page appeared, a full-page literary section developed from the prototype 'Books of the Day' and 'Book Exchange' columns, also on the inside front cover, which Stephens conducted from September 1894. Stephens continued his cosmopolitan interests, dividing comment among Australian, American, English and European writers. He frequently called for a greater awareness of overseas trends and standards. 'Is there a single Australian', he asked in January 1897, 'who could pass an examination in Huysmans, Maeterlinck, or Verhaeren?' Stephens's broad views on politics and his international literary tastes were consistent with his favourite critical yardstick, the concept of 'universality'. The concept recurs throughout his writings and indicates an absolute standard of critical appraisal beyond mutable and transitory criteria such as a work's national or moral value.
Stephens was, however, a nationalist critic in that he encouraged and welcomed new Bulletin writers as signs that Australian literature was growing toward maturity. Joseph Furphy, Shaw Neilson, Hugh McCrae, Mary Gilmore, Miles Franklin and Roderic Quinn all acknowledged his personal encouragement and guidance, and as controller of the Bulletin's publishing division from 1897 Stephens saw most of these writers into print in book form for the first time. Under Stephens the Bulletin's publishing activities were greatly expanded, beginning with Barcroft Boake's Where the Dead Men Lie and Other Poems in 1897 and producing twenty-five further volumes over the next nine years. Stephens acted as editor, literary agent and book designer. His editorship saw the publication of the classics On Our Selection (1899) by 'Steele Rudd' and Such Is Life (q.v., 1903) by Furphy; the Bulletin anthologies The Bulletin Reciter (1901), The Bulletin Story Book (1901) and A Southern Garland (1904); and the first volumes of verse by Will Ogilvie, Arthur Adams, Louise Mack, E.J. Brady, W.T. Goodge and Bernard O'Dowd. Stephens's role as editor of the Bulletin's book division alone guarantees him a place of permanent importance in the history of Australian literature.
In 1902 Stephens's own volume of poems, Oblation, was published privately, with illustrations by Norman Lindsay. In 1904 he saw through the press two lavish folios of the Bulletin artists Phil May and Livingston Hopkins, and a selection of his own essays from the Bulletin on social and literary topics, The Red Pagan, was issued in the same year under the paper's imprint. The volume expresses some of Stephens's characteristic literary attitudes, including the criterion of universality, the emotional impact necessary in great art, the sexual and racial conditioning of artistic creativity, and the correlation of artistic genius with insanity. Stephens believed that the emotive qualities of poetry derived from a 'female' species of creativity. It has been argued that this made Stephens's poetic preferences lachrymose and led to bias in his selections of the work of Daley and Neilson. His views about the psychopathological origins of artistic creativity were derived from the writings of Havelock Ellis and through the latter from Francis Galton's Hereditary Genius (1869) and Cesare Lombroso's L'Uomo di Genio (1888). These views underpinned Stephens's emphasis on biography in his criticism and sometimes precluded from high praise writers who lacked the correct racial or temperamental qualifications.
In 1906 Stephens left the Bulletin. Archibald had stood down as editor in favour of James Edmond in 1902, and Stephens's relations with William Macleod, its former artist and now business manager, were prickly. He had also fallen out with Henry Lawson and Norman Lindsay. Stephens had a bluff, dogmatic side to his personality which sometimes irked acquaintances and which, according to Lindsay in Bohemians of the Bulletin (1965), was the reverse side of his emotional temperament. Stephens may also have been dissatisfied with the conditions and limitations of his role at the Bulletin. On 1 November 1906 the Red Page announced his departure and the establishment of his business venture, the Bookfellow, a literary bookshop named after the monthly literary magazine he had run for five issues from January 1899. In 1907 Stephens revived the Bookfellow. Its files contain a high standard of discussion of Australian, English and European contemporary writers and artists. By 1907, however, the magazine and the shop were in trouble, and in June the shop's stock and much of Stephens's own library were auctioned 'without any reserve'. In 1894 Stephens had married Constance Smith; the couple now had six dependent children, and financial necessity compelled a move to NZ, where Stephens accepted an offer from his old editor, Gresley Lukin, of a job on the Wellington Evening Post. Stephens maintained an aloof demeanour at the Post and in 1909 returned to Sydney, reviving the Bookfellow and working as a freelance journalist. The magazine lasted intermittently until 1925 (partly supported by Mary Gilmore) and fulfilled an important literary role. It provided an outlet for Shaw Neilson, Hugh McCrae and Mary Gilmore, and as he had done at the Bulletin Stephens also published books under the paper's imprint. In his last years the stream of Stephens's work hardly abated. He planned future publishing projects, toured NSW and Victoria giving lectures on Australian literature, published another volume of verse, The Pearl and the Octopus and Other Exercises in Prose and Verse (?1911) and several pamphlets of his own poems, wrote a novel, Bill's Idees (1913), two plays, The Australian Flower Masque (1924) and Capturing the Bushranger (1924), and edited textbooks and anthologies for Australian schools, as well as producing significant critical studies of Henry Kendall and Christopher Brennan (1928, 1933). Rated by many as Australia's most influential pioneer man of letters, Stephens, especially through his editorial work and his steady stream of authoritative criticism, stimulated the development of Australian writing to a marked degree in the decades spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Leon Cantrell has edited A.G. Stephens: Selected Writings (1978) and Stephens's diary in Cross Currents (1981, ed. Bruce Bennett); P.R. Stephensen and Vance Palmer wrote, respectively, the biographical works The Life and Works of A.G. Stephens ('The Bookfellow') (1940) and A.G. Stephens: His Life and Work (1941). Valerie Lawson's book Connie Sweetheart: The Story of Connie Robertson (1990), chiefly about Stephens's daughter Constance Robertson, a well-known Sydney journalist and editor 1917-62, has much interesting personal material on Stephens himself.
At the end of 1890 Stephens went to Brisbane and became sub-editor of the radical Boomerang, to which he contributed leaders, features, social jottings, faits divers and a regular column, 'The Magazine Rifler', which surveyed the latest numbers of the English and American journals. When he left the Boomerang in October 1891 it was in the hands of a liquidator and Stephens received the office bible in lieu of wages. He then joined the staff of the Cairns Argus, becoming editor by the end of 1891 and part-owner in 1892. He instituted a literary supplement and ran an essay competition as he had done on the Miner. Stephens himself won the prize of £25 in a competition run in conjunction with the North Queensland Separation League for his essay 'Why North Queensland Wants Separation', later published as a pamphlet in 1893. The essay criticised the control over the north wielded by Brisbane and the south, and attacked the general concepts of political and economic centralisation. In 1893 Stephens finished another polemical essay on Queensland politics, The Griffilwraith, Being an Independent Criticism of the Methods and Manoeuvres of the Queensland Coalition Government, 1890-1893. The pamphlet attacked the coalition government of the factions led by Sir Samuel Griffith and Sir Thomas McIlwraith which had ended the two-party system in the legislature. Immediately after the pamphlet's publication, Stephens left on a trip overseas, using funds from the sale of his interest in the Argus at the end of 1892. He travelled in America, Canada and Europe. A Queenslander's Travel Notes, published on his return to Sydney in 1894, was a collection of the articles he had sent back to Australian journals and newspapers during his trip. Stephens criticised the pretensions and decorums of traditionalist Europe, and in the half of the work devoted to America used the high divorce rate, drug abuse, poverty and crime, side by side with American 'progress' and smugness about its achievements, to define what he saw as the peculiar and contrary American character. At the end of 1893 Stephens was working in Fleet Street for the Daily Chronicle when J.F. Archibald offered him a sub-editorship on the Sydney Bulletin, which he took up in 1894. By that time the Bulletin was a major intercolonial publication, and with Archibald's return to the editorship in 1886, it entered a period of high literary consciousness. It encouraged local authors, advocated literary nationalism and promoted a distinctive model of the short story. From the time of his arrival Stephens contributed literary notices and comments, and full-scale articles on George Eliot, Conan Doyle, and the Brontes had appeared in July 1895. In August 1896 the first Red Page appeared, a full-page literary section developed from the prototype 'Books of the Day' and 'Book Exchange' columns, also on the inside front cover, which Stephens conducted from September 1894. Stephens continued his cosmopolitan interests, dividing comment among Australian, American, English and European writers. He frequently called for a greater awareness of overseas trends and standards. 'Is there a single Australian', he asked in January 1897, 'who could pass an examination in Huysmans, Maeterlinck, or Verhaeren?' Stephens's broad views on politics and his international literary tastes were consistent with his favourite critical yardstick, the concept of 'universality'. The concept recurs throughout his writings and indicates an absolute standard of critical appraisal beyond mutable and transitory criteria such as a work's national or moral value.
Stephens was, however, a nationalist critic in that he encouraged and welcomed new Bulletin writers as signs that Australian literature was growing toward maturity. Joseph Furphy, Shaw Neilson, Hugh McCrae, Mary Gilmore, Miles Franklin and Roderic Quinn all acknowledged his personal encouragement and guidance, and as controller of the Bulletin's publishing division from 1897 Stephens saw most of these writers into print in book form for the first time. Under Stephens the Bulletin's publishing activities were greatly expanded, beginning with Barcroft Boake's Where the Dead Men Lie and Other Poems in 1897 and producing twenty-five further volumes over the next nine years. Stephens acted as editor, literary agent and book designer. His editorship saw the publication of the classics On Our Selection (1899) by 'Steele Rudd' and Such Is Life (q.v., 1903) by Furphy; the Bulletin anthologies The Bulletin Reciter (1901), The Bulletin Story Book (1901) and A Southern Garland (1904); and the first volumes of verse by Will Ogilvie, Arthur Adams, Louise Mack, E.J. Brady, W.T. Goodge and Bernard O'Dowd. Stephens's role as editor of the Bulletin's book division alone guarantees him a place of permanent importance in the history of Australian literature.
In 1902 Stephens's own volume of poems, Oblation, was published privately, with illustrations by Norman Lindsay. In 1904 he saw through the press two lavish folios of the Bulletin artists Phil May and Livingston Hopkins, and a selection of his own essays from the Bulletin on social and literary topics, The Red Pagan, was issued in the same year under the paper's imprint. The volume expresses some of Stephens's characteristic literary attitudes, including the criterion of universality, the emotional impact necessary in great art, the sexual and racial conditioning of artistic creativity, and the correlation of artistic genius with insanity. Stephens believed that the emotive qualities of poetry derived from a 'female' species of creativity. It has been argued that this made Stephens's poetic preferences lachrymose and led to bias in his selections of the work of Daley and Neilson. His views about the psychopathological origins of artistic creativity were derived from the writings of Havelock Ellis and through the latter from Francis Galton's Hereditary Genius (1869) and Cesare Lombroso's L'Uomo di Genio (1888). These views underpinned Stephens's emphasis on biography in his criticism and sometimes precluded from high praise writers who lacked the correct racial or temperamental qualifications.
In 1906 Stephens left the Bulletin. Archibald had stood down as editor in favour of James Edmond in 1902, and Stephens's relations with William Macleod, its former artist and now business manager, were prickly. He had also fallen out with Henry Lawson and Norman Lindsay. Stephens had a bluff, dogmatic side to his personality which sometimes irked acquaintances and which, according to Lindsay in Bohemians of the Bulletin (1965), was the reverse side of his emotional temperament. Stephens may also have been dissatisfied with the conditions and limitations of his role at the Bulletin. On 1 November 1906 the Red Page announced his departure and the establishment of his business venture, the Bookfellow, a literary bookshop named after the monthly literary magazine he had run for five issues from January 1899. In 1907 Stephens revived the Bookfellow. Its files contain a high standard of discussion of Australian, English and European contemporary writers and artists. By 1907, however, the magazine and the shop were in trouble, and in June the shop's stock and much of Stephens's own library were auctioned 'without any reserve'. In 1894 Stephens had married Constance Smith; the couple now had six dependent children, and financial necessity compelled a move to NZ, where Stephens accepted an offer from his old editor, Gresley Lukin, of a job on the Wellington Evening Post. Stephens maintained an aloof demeanour at the Post and in 1909 returned to Sydney, reviving the Bookfellow and working as a freelance journalist. The magazine lasted intermittently until 1925 (partly supported by Mary Gilmore) and fulfilled an important literary role. It provided an outlet for Shaw Neilson, Hugh McCrae and Mary Gilmore, and as he had done at the Bulletin Stephens also published books under the paper's imprint. In his last years the stream of Stephens's work hardly abated. He planned future publishing projects, toured NSW and Victoria giving lectures on Australian literature, published another volume of verse, The Pearl and the Octopus and Other Exercises in Prose and Verse (?1911) and several pamphlets of his own poems, wrote a novel, Bill's Idees (1913), two plays, The Australian Flower Masque (1924) and Capturing the Bushranger (1924), and edited textbooks and anthologies for Australian schools, as well as producing significant critical studies of Henry Kendall and Christopher Brennan (1928, 1933). Rated by many as Australia's most influential pioneer man of letters, Stephens, especially through his editorial work and his steady stream of authoritative criticism, stimulated the development of Australian writing to a marked degree in the decades spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Leon Cantrell has edited A.G. Stephens: Selected Writings (1978) and Stephens's diary in Cross Currents (1981, ed. Bruce Bennett); P.R. Stephensen and Vance Palmer wrote, respectively, the biographical works The Life and Works of A.G. Stephens ('The Bookfellow') (1940) and A.G. Stephens: His Life and Work (1941). Valerie Lawson's book Connie Sweetheart: The Story of Connie Robertson (1990), chiefly about Stephens's daughter Constance Robertson, a well-known Sydney journalist and editor 1917-62, has much interesting personal material on Stephens himself.
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Oxford Companion to Australian Literature
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