ABSTRACT
Mind you it is Barry Pain of whom I speak, so don’t be deceived— Barry Pain the crack critic, whose unbounded, illimitable talent is so often depicted on a page of Black and White—nothing more elaborate, but just Black and White. Altogether too dull a name to hold within its costly covers the famous sayings and fly opinions of such a far-famed man as Barry Pain.
(Amanda M’Kittrick Ros, “Criticism of Barry Pain on ‘Irene Iddesleigh,’“ foreword to Delina Delany [1899], iii-iv) Mentioned in the Oxford Companion to English Literature as “the world’s worst novelist,” Amanda Ros may have owed what dubious literary fame she enjoyed to “that memorable page 249 in Black and White of 19th February, 1898.” 1 There, Barry Pain, an early and frequent contributor to Black and White, lampooned her first novel as “The Book of the Century.” Ros claimed to “care not” what Pain thought of her writing; she cared so little as to devote a seventeen-page foreword to her next novel to showing how little she cared. Pompous and ungrammatical, this bizarre performance nonetheless betrays the complicated nature of Black and White’s literary influence during the 1890s. Though the period’s most prominent writers and illustrators published “within its costly covers,” Black and White’s creators envisioned so many competing distinctions for its contents that contemporary observers noticed little beyond the costliness of the covers.