Reflections of a Fleet Street Reviewer

MOST journalists are the products of books, and chiefly of these books, I reflected as I stood in front of that section of the London Press Club's library devoted to the English language classics. Other shelves were filled with reference books, directories, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, topical histories, and commentaries — the daily fodder of the journalist, where (one might say) he parks his memory: but these were the books that set him on the way he has come. Here were the poets, and the big fellows of prose—Johnson, Scott, Dickens, Swift, Thackeray, Stevenson, Hardy—the whole illustrious troop.