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And if you were Edmund Gosse, a good friend of Henry James, and if, in October of 1886, in the same Quarterly Review, a critic named John Churton Collins pilloried your new book for forty-one of the most scathing pages in the history of reviewing, and the controversy was called by one paper “the scandal of the year,” then you would write to your friend Thomas Hardy that you had been “felled, flayed, eviscerated, pulverized and blown to the winds.” And there would be no solace whatever in the fact that your bad review was so very bad that it was to be considered emblematic for generations.
— Literary Lives: The Very Bad Review: The New Yorker —via a comment by Abhay Khosla
