Among My Books Review

Among My Books review: why Lowell's essays still deserve argument, not reverence

This Among My Books review argues that James Russell Lowell's 1870 volume matters less as a museum piece than as a vivid example of how nineteenth-century criticism tried to make standards, defend traditions, and turn literary judgment into public authority. The book is not a novel, not a poetry collection, and not a mixed dramatic miscellany. It is the first series of Lowell's essays, gathering pieces on Dryden, witchcraft, Shakespeare, colonial New England, Lessing, and Rousseau. Read now, it offers both genuine critical power and unmistakable limits.

That doubleness is the right way into the book. Lowell can be exhilarating when he writes with intellectual pressure and stylistic snap; he can also be narrowing when he assumes that cultivated judgment naturally speaks from a largely male, Anglo-European, socially elevated position. A professional review should not flatten either side. Among My Books remains worth reading because its strengths and its blind spots belong to the same critical temperament.

The best reader for this book is not someone hunting for neutral background information. Lowell is too opinionated for that, and too invested in ranking, framing, and distinguishing major from minor traditions. This is a strong recommendation for readers interested in the history of criticism, older prose style, and the making of literary canons. It is a cautious recommendation for readers who want criticism to feel inclusive, methodical, or theoretically self-aware in a modern sense.

If your interest leans toward classic criticism as an evolving conversation, this book sits comfortably beside Essays in Criticism, Practical Criticism, and the broader history and ideas shelf. Those links matter because Lowell is not merely evaluating authors; he is participating in a long argument about what literature is for, who gets to judge it, and how culture turns taste into prestige.

What kind of book Among My Books actually is

One factual correction matters immediately: Among My Books is a collection of essays. Open Library identifies it as a book of essays and lists six contents for the 1870 volume: "Dryden," "Witchcraft," "Shakespeare Once More," "New England Two Centuries Ago," "Lessing," and "Rousseau and the Sentimentalists." Project Gutenberg's record for Among My Books. First Series confirms the same table of contents. That matters because the whole review changes once the book is recognized as essayistic criticism rather than as imaginative literature.

Lowell's method follows from that form. He is not building plot, scene, or lyric sequence. He is constructing judgments: about authors, eras, sensibilities, national inheritances, and the moral or civilizational force of literature. Even when a specific essay begins with a narrow subject, the prose tends to widen into questions of culture and historical continuity. The book therefore belongs most naturally among nineteenth-century essay collections and criticism, even if its range brushes social history and intellectual history.

That range is part of the book's appeal. The essay on Dryden is not only about Dryden. The piece on Rousseau is not only about Rousseau. Lowell repeatedly uses particular figures as testing grounds for larger ideas about style, discipline, sincerity, sentiment, historical change, and the fate of seriousness in public culture. Readers who want criticism to stay tightly bounded to textual analysis may find him expansive to a fault. Readers who like essays that move from literature outward into civilization will find the scale energizing.

The book also shows why older criticism often feels more like performance than explanation. Lowell writes as someone who expects prose itself to carry authority. He is less interested in laying out a transparent method than in demonstrating cultivated command. That can be thrilling. It can also be irritating. Much depends on whether the reader experiences that authority as earned force or inherited confidence.

Lowell's critical style: vigorous, cultivated, and unapologetically hierarchical

Lowell's great strength is that he makes criticism feel alive. Many essay collections survive because they preserve positions; this one survives because it preserves a voice. He writes with momentum, with turns of emphasis, and with a willingness to let preference harden into argument. The prose has enough tensile energy that even readers who disagree with him may keep reading for the pressure of the sentences alone.

That energy is especially important in a book that spends so much time on reputation and inheritance. Lowell knows that criticism can die when it merely reports admiration. His better pages do something harder: they show admiration under stress. He wants to explain why certain writers endure, why some forms of sentiment weaken thought, why intellectual seriousness requires discrimination, and why literature belongs to the life of a culture rather than to private pastime alone. When he is fully engaged, the essays gain a public scale that still feels substantial.

At the same time, his style is inseparable from hierarchy. Lowell often writes as though literary value emerges most clearly when a trained reader sorts the durable from the temporary. That assumption gives the essays shape and decisiveness. It also narrows them. Modern readers may notice that what he treats as settled standards are often socially produced standards, reinforced by institutions, education, and class position. The book is therefore useful not only for what Lowell says about authors, but for what he reveals about the cultural authority of the nineteenth-century critic.

This is one reason the book pairs interestingly with Culture and Anarchy. Matthew Arnold and Lowell are not identical thinkers, but both care about culture as a civilizing force and both risk turning cultivated judgment into a language of social permission. Reading them near each other helps clarify the period ambition to make criticism both ethical and national, and also the period tendency to overlook the people excluded by that vision.

The strongest essays and the book's real intellectual appeal

The deepest appeal of Among My Books lies in its range of pressure points. Lowell is interested in literary form, but also in intellectual temperament. He uses authors and topics as occasions to ask what sort of mind literature encourages and what kind of society it reflects. That makes the collection feel broader than a volume of single-purpose reviews.

The Dryden essay is a good example of Lowell at his most compelling. He is drawn to questions of measure, force, and historical placement, which lets him discuss Dryden as both a writer and a symptom of larger literary transitions. The Shakespeare essay similarly matters because Lowell approaches Shakespeare not as an untouchable monument but as an active problem in judgment. He wants criticism to remain an encounter rather than an act of ceremonial praise.

The essay on witchcraft widens the collection's scope in a different direction. It points to Lowell's interest in how belief, superstition, social fear, and inherited narrative shape a culture's mental life. That breadth helps the volume escape narrow bookishness. Meanwhile, "New England Two Centuries Ago" grounds the collection in American historical self-examination. Lowell is writing about the colonial past, but he is also writing about how a later American intellectual class imagines its ancestry. That is part of what makes the book specifically valuable for readers of classic literature: it shows literary criticism leaning into cultural memory and regional identity rather than remaining abstractly aesthetic.

The Lessing and Rousseau essays carry a similar doubleness. Lowell is concerned with these figures as thinkers and writers, but also as representatives of larger habits of feeling and intellect. Rousseau, especially, allows him to wrestle with sentiment, sincerity, theatricality, and the moral consequences of emotional style. Even when one resists Lowell's conclusions, the argumentative stakes remain clear. He does not write as though ideas were harmless decorations. He writes as though books shape character, citizenship, and public life.

That seriousness is the collection's strongest lasting quality. A great deal of criticism ages poorly because its local controversies fade. Lowell stays readable because he is always trying to connect style with civilization, taste with power, and reading with moral formation. Those connections may be overstated, sometimes paternal, sometimes exclusionary. They are still alive enough to argue with.

Reader fit: who should read Among My Books and who may bounce off it

This is an excellent choice for readers who enjoy older prose that expects patience and returns it with density. If you like criticism that treats literature as part of a larger moral and historical order, Lowell is often rewarding. If you want to understand how nineteenth-century American intellectuals positioned themselves in relation to English and European traditions, the book is particularly useful.

It is also a smart pick for readers building a pathway through criticism itself. Someone moving from belletristic essay writing toward more formal literary criticism could productively read this alongside Essays in Criticism and then jump ahead to Practical Criticism. Lowell helps show an earlier mode of criticism grounded in authority, cultivated breadth, and stylistic command; Richards later shows what happens when criticism becomes more self-conscious about reading practices and interpretation.

The book is less suited to readers who want contemporary academic framing, explicit methodological transparency, or a pluralistic map of literary culture. Lowell assumes too much consensus about what counts as serious literature and who is qualified to arbitrate it. He can be generous within his field of vision, but the field itself is selective. Readers sensitive to omissions around gender, class, and non-Anglo traditions will notice that the book's breadth is still bounded by the cultural priorities of its moment.

It is also not the best starting place for readers who simply want a calm introduction to the named authors. Lowell does not write introductory survey prose. He writes as a participant in live debates of taste. That means the book works best when the reader welcomes friction, partiality, and historical texture instead of demanding neutrality.

Cautions: canon, politics, religion, nationalism, and class

The main caution is not difficulty but standpoint. Lowell writes from within a nineteenth-century liberal-humanist ideal that often assumes its own universality. That assumption affects which authors matter, which traditions appear central, and which kinds of feeling or argument receive dignity. Readers should approach the collection knowing that its elegance does not cancel its exclusions.

Canon is the first pressure point. Lowell often writes as though literary greatness can be recognized through cultivated discrimination, and in one sense that is exactly what criticism attempts. But the book rarely pauses to ask how institutions, education, and inherited prestige help produce the canon it then defends. The result is criticism that can seem magisterial while still resting on historically local assumptions.

Politics enters less as party controversy than as the background structure of value. Lowell is interested in civic seriousness, moral tone, and the relation between literature and national character. Those concerns make the essays richer than purely technical criticism, but they also tilt the book toward judgments that can sound paternal or disciplinary. Literature is repeatedly asked to support cultural health, not simply to expand perception.

Religion matters in a similar way. Lowell is not writing devotional prose, yet questions of moral seriousness, belief, skepticism, and cultural inheritance remain close to the surface. Readers who prefer criticism stripped of moral language may find him too invested in the ethical stature of literature. Others will see that as precisely what gives the collection substance.

Nationalism and regional identity are especially important in "New England Two Centuries Ago." Lowell's engagement with the colonial past is not neutral antiquarianism. It participates in the making of American cultural memory. That gives the essay historical interest, but it also means readers should watch for how a New England intellectual frames authority, lineage, and civilization. The point is not to dismiss the essay; it is to read it as situated.

Gender and class limits are impossible to ignore. The book's confidence is partly the confidence of an educated male critic speaking from privilege. Women appear more often as categories within argument than as equal participants in a shared critical field; working-class experience is more likely to be judged than centered. Those limits do not erase Lowell's skill, but they do change the conditions under which his judgments deserve assent.

Context and alternatives inside Online Library

Within this site, Among My Books works best as part of a reading route rather than as an isolated artifact. Readers interested in the history of literary judgment can move from Lowell to Essays in Criticism for another major nineteenth-century model of evaluative prose, then to Practical Criticism to see how the field later reorients toward acts of reading rather than the authority of cultivated overview.

Readers more interested in criticism as social thought should pair Lowell with Culture and Anarchy. Arnold makes the social ambitions of criticism unusually explicit, which in turn clarifies what Lowell often leaves embedded in tone and assumption. The comparison helps show that "culture" in these writers is never a harmless word. It organizes questions of authority, education, citizenship, and exclusion.

If your main interest is American literary identity, the wider classic literature and history and ideas shelves provide better context than any single one-to-one comparison. Lowell belongs to a moment when American criticism was still negotiating how to inherit Europe without merely echoing it. That tension runs through the book's topics, its style, and even its confidence.

These alternatives matter because Among My Books is not a universal recommendation. It is a pointed one. The book is most rewarding when read as an encounter with a powerful but historically bounded critical intelligence. Put differently: this is a book to read with pencil in hand, not to place on a pedestal.

Final assessment

Among My Books is a strong, serious, and often invigorating collection of essays by James Russell Lowell. Its best pages remind you that criticism can be an art of pressure rather than an exercise in summary. Lowell writes with speed, weight, and a real sense that literature matters to public life. That conviction gives the book lasting vitality.

Just as important, the collection should not be praised lazily. Its authority is bound up with a narrow cultural field, and modern readers are right to question its assumptions about canon, class, national inheritance, and moral seriousness. Those questions do not reduce the book's value. They sharpen it. The essays become more interesting when read as both criticism and evidence: criticism of authors and ideas, evidence about the kind of literary culture that produced such criticism.

So the final verdict is clear but qualified. Read Among My Books if you want to encounter nineteenth-century criticism at full voice: eloquent, combative, ambitious, uneven, and revealing. Skip it if you need criticism to be methodologically explicit, socially comprehensive, or introductory in tone. For the right reader, though, Lowell's essays still do what durable criticism should do. They provoke judgment, refine disagreement, and leave the conversation more alive than they found it.