Edwardian Culture

Beyond the Garden Party

Samuel Shaw, Sarah Shaw, Naomi Carle

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351378451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Edwardian Culture: Beyond the Garden Party is the first truly interdisciplinary collection of essays dealing with culture in Britain c.1895-1914. Bringing together essays on literature, art, politics, religion, architecture, marketing, and imperial history, the study highlights the extent to which the culture and politics of Edwardian period were closely intertwined. The book builds upon recent scholarship that seeks to reclaim the term 'Edwardian' from prevalent, restrictive usages by venturing beyond the garden party – and the political rally – to uncover some of the terrain that lies between. The essays in the volume – which deal with both famous writers such as J. M. Barrie and Arnold Bennett, as well as many lesser-known figures – draw attention to the nuanced multiplicity of experience and cultural forms that existed during the period, and highlight the ways in which a closer examination of Edwardian culture complicates our definitions of 'Victorian' and 'Modern'. The book argues that the Edwardian era, rather than constituting a coda to the Victorian period or a languid pause before modernism shook things up, possessed a compelling and creative tenor of its own.

1 Dawn of the New Age

Edwardian and Neo-Edwardian Summer

Sarah Edwards

Introduction: Neo-Edwardian Deconstructions of Edwardian Summer

One of the most persistent and alluring images of Edwardian Britain is the ‘long hot summer’.¹ In both literary and popular cultures, summer has been a metonym for an ahistorical moment of unreflective ease that is soon to be engulfed by political turmoil. This vision of the period is epitomised in George Orwell’s novel Coming Up For Air (1938): anticipating the onset of World War One, the protagonist fondly remembers his rural Edwardian childhood, musing that ‘before the war … it was always summer’.² This narrative contrasts the apparently timeless qualities of summer with the forthcoming carnage of World War One. The poignant, foreboding nature of late summer is perhaps most famously depicted in Philip Larkin’s poem, ‘MCMXIV’ (1964), set during the August Bank Holiday weekend of 1914 and ending with an image of incipient decline: ‘never such innocence before or since/Never such innocence again’.³ Larkin’s theme of innocence, and its defilement by season’s end, recurs in narratives of Edwardian childhood and country houses, of holiday camps and beautiful young poets destined for the trenches; as well as in diverse re-imaginings of summer as a brief and exotic space of social experimentation, anarchy and sexual fall.⁴ Many narratives link the season to Golden Age and Eden but also to Janus’s double face, and suggest that the British race are peculiarly unsuited to the season. This essay examines the persistent identification of the Edwardian era with a ‘long hot summer’ in both Edwardian and neo-Edwardian texts. What meanings has this narrative accrued at particular historical moments, and why?

I also consider the discursive role of summer in the development and preoccupations of neo-Edwardian writers and, in particular, their periodisations of the era. In this essay, the ‘neo-Edwardian text’ refers to a post-1910 work that is located in any period from the mid-1890s until the end of World War One. This may seem a vague and controversial timeframe, but the uncertain periodisation of the Edwardian era has been a consistent feature of academic debate and public perception, as this collection testifies. The signifier ‘Edwardian’ has been frequently invoked to serve diverse political and cultural agendas. Hence, it has been included in accounts of the fin-de-siecle 1890s, identified with the new century, terminated at 1910 and the Post-Impressionist Exhibition, extended until the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, and until the end of World War One in 1918.⁵

In my usage of the term ‘neo-Edwardian’, I draw on the theorizations of neo-Victorian critics who assert that the neo-Victorian text ‘re-interprets, re-discovers and revises’ the dominant discourses about the period rather than merely using it as a historical backdrop.⁶ However, neo-Edwardian works also demonstrate an acute consciousness of a ‘new age’ and probe its boundaries (as, indeed, do many Edwardian texts). In addition, neo-Edwardian texts incorporate a sense of the era’s ending: they usually include framing narratives and attempt to reconstruct a relationship between the imagined Edwardian past and the present.⁷ Hence, these works draw on depictions of summer in order to question, or deconstruct, familiar associations with timelessness, decline or peace. Both Edwardian and neo-Edwardian summers feature an exotic, self-contained space which is beyond the realm of the protagonist’s ordinary experience: geographically remote, stilled in time, promising heightened adventures and sensory delights. It may be an island, wood, river and/or a country house. Yet, neo-Edwardian works are also preoccupied with minute dating, with the nature of change and development in the lives of individuals and nations during a relatively short era.⁸ They often feature children or adolescents undergoing rapid growth, set against a detailed landscape of political and social events. Summer, then, may become a yearly marker of change. In Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians (1930), characters’ impressions of interchangeable summers – ‘all their days were the same; had been the same for an eternity of years’– are juxtaposed with the exact dates of country-house parties.⁹ This precise data disrupts the overarching narrative of timeless summer that, it is implied, can obscure historical understanding of the decline of the country house and the attendant consequences for its young heirs. The motif of summer is thus a particularly useful interpretive lens for neo-Edwardian writers who wish to historicise the era.

In this essay, I focus on several case studies. First, I consider how scholarly accounts of Edwardian literature and culture have shaped, and been shaped by, the motif of summer, before going on to examine the inter-textual relationships between Edwardian and neo-Edwardian country house novels set at the turn of the century, and the shifting resonances of Edwardian summer in later wartime fiction.

The Critical History of Edwardian Summer

Many of the major studies of Edwardian culture invoke familiar tropes of endless summer to characterise the period, even while claiming to dispel such myths. The first chapter of Samuel Hynes’s early and influential historical study, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (1968), is entitled ‘The Edwardian Garden Party’.¹⁰ It begins with a description of a photograph of King Edward (1841–1910) and his queen, Alexandra (1844–1925), at such a party. Hynes’s analysis emphasises both the class-bound element of the Edwardian summer, whose rituals are enacted in country houses on pieces of cultivated nature – ‘why are the drawing-room chairs on the lawn? – The scene is a highly artificial one’ – and the trope of oasis: ‘somewhere just out of range are elements of disorder that will soon make this scene anachronistic. Still, for the moment how opulent, how stable, how peaceful it all seems’.¹¹ Like The Edwardians, then, Hynes’s work immediately deconstructs these popular images; in this case, to characterise the Edwardian era as a decade of transition that witnessed increasing agitation over empire, suffrage reform and workers’ strikes. This double vision – a nostalgic luxuriance in timeless images of the period that is immediately disavowed in favour of a ‘grittier’, historicised narrative – is a common feature of neo-Edwardian texts. Paradoxically, Hynes’s famous critique is couched within an appealingly visual image of an innocent, yet encircled, oasis:

it must have seemed like a long garden party on a golden afternoon – to those who were inside the garden. But a great deal that was important was going on outside the garden: it was out there that the twentieth-century world was being made. Nostalgia is a pleasing emotion, but it is also a simplifying one.¹²

As this example demonstrates, the Edwardian garden party has framed scholarly, as well as popular, debates; the persistent use of this vocabulary in both types of account has ensured the persistence of the overarching narrative.

Hynes also uses the image of the garden party to introduce the theme of the summer afternoon, which he conflates with partying: ‘writers on Edwardian England are inclined to call the time “golden” – “a golden afternoon” – or to describe it, as a BBC program of Edwardiana did, as a “long garden party”’.¹³ This ideal of the afternoon, as a time for siesta, indulgence and lack of routine – a daily summer holiday – is both reiterated and rejected by J. B. Priestley (1894–1984), who claims that ‘England at the beginning of Edward’s reign did not resemble at all the long golden Edwardian afternoon described in so many memoirs’.¹⁴ Jefferson Hunter’s account of Edwardian fiction employs similar imagery when he argues that ‘nostalgic Edwardianism’ is invested in this idea of the ‘single long country-house weekend from Edward’s coronation to his passing and, beyond that, to the guns of August’.¹⁵ In this rebuttal of nostalgia, afternoon, weekend, summer and era are conflated, so that all sense of historical time between 1901 and 1914 is erased. Hunter attempts to theorise what I have called this ‘double vision’ of the Edwardians, when he suggests that far from being a ‘simplifying emotion’, the narrative of ‘nostalgic Edwardianism’ is built on duality and ambivalence.¹⁶ He claims that this narrative is appealing to later readers because it enables us both to feel superior to Edwardian snobbery and excess, while remaining comfortably distanced from the political realities of the era. By invoking familiar visual tropes, then, these major critics of the period are themselves writing nostalgic narratives, and thereby transmitting a latent and ambivalent nostalgia that – as I will go on to demonstrate – can also be found in neo-Edwardian fictions.

The Golden Age in Edwardian Literature

In the history of Western literature and culture, summer has often been associated with idealised, pastoral and enclosed landscapes that contain within them the seeds of their own destruction. In British history and literature, the classical mythology of the Golden Age has often been deployed to idealise a period of national prosperity, such as the reign of Elizabeth I, the ‘Virgin Queen’, or the Edwardian era.¹⁷ In Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, the ‘age of gold’ is a time when fruits and grain blossom and ploughman and animal live in a state of communal harmony. It marked the return of the goddess Virgo Astraea, whose constellation presides over harvesting in late August. The concept of the ‘Golden Age’ is an integral element of Edwardian summer and its various social, sexual and intellectual possibilities were explored by many Edwardian writers.

The representation of a pastoral yet cultivated Arcadia meshes with images of both the Christian Garden of Eden and the Edwardian garden party. Edward Thomas’s The South Country (1909), an observational and lyrical account of his wanderings in Hampshire, alludes to this ideal when he states that the ‘unblemished summer land’ of June ‘invariably calls up thoughts of the Golden Age’.¹⁸ However, the less benign aspects of this myth are often ignored, despite their emergence in many Edwardian and neo-Edwardian representations. Other versions of Arcadia were wild landscapes of caves and woods, characterised by brutality and sensuality. These were presided over by the man-beast god Pan, who copulated with goats and whose music created ‘pan-ic’. The neo-pagan cult of Pan was revived by many Edwardian writers and intellectuals, including popular children’s writers such as Kenneth Grahame (1859–1932), and is invoked in their works to signify these darker imaginings of the Golden Age.¹⁹ In his collection of essays, Pagan Papers (1893), Grahame claimed that the heroic spirit of Orion the hunter – what ‘parents and pulpiteers’ term ‘Original Sin’ – was only retained in children. Thus, the ‘original Waft from the Garden asserts itself most vigorously in the Child’.²⁰ His famous Edwardian novel, The Wind in the Willows (1908), uses the setting of ‘golden summer’ to present anarchic scenes of animal life which include an encounter with Pan. The animals have a mystical, synaesthetic experience as they row up the river in a ‘spellbound’ state, listening to a mysterious ‘song-dream’ with no decipherable meaning.²¹ Here, Grahame invokes a pagan Golden Age which belongs to undefined fairy-tale time, or to a mythic past.

As I discuss below, Grahame’s earlier work, The Golden Age (1895), is a source for many neo-Edwardian texts.²² This account locates summer in the recent past, by deploying the image as a metaphor for childhood. The narrator muses wistfully that ‘somehow the sun does not shine so brightly as it used … the trackless meadows of old time have shrunk and dwindled away … Et in Arcadia ego – I certainly did once inhabit Arcady’.²³ Here, then, Grahame depicts a recent Golden Age at a moment of incipient decline. Other Edwardian writers drew on anarchic images of summer to condemn contemporary political and social decline. C. F. G. Masterman’s The Condition of England (1909), a survey of contemporary society, evokes summer to depict civilisation being overtaken by natural forces.²⁴ In his chapter, ‘The Countryside’, Masterman narrates the story of a Surrey labourer who is the ‘last relic of a vanishing race’ of villagers whose way of life has been destroyed by rural poverty and dispossession of their land in the wake of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. ‘The untimely summer rain which ruins the harvest’ symbolises the breakdown of centuries of feudal life and peasant culture (pp. 153–54). He dies in a ‘squalid cottage’ in ‘hot July weather with the year at the summit of riotous life and every element in nature taunting the impotence of humanity before the triumphant forces of destruction’ (pp. 153–54). For Masterman, then, the medieval period is a Golden Age, while ‘the present is already in Autumn and its noises and tumults but the jarrings of a machine running down’, or the decline of the capitalist system (p. 180). In the same year, the novelist H. G. Wells (1866–1946) used similar autumnal imagery to illustrate the decline of the country house and its rigid class hierarchies in To...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Venturing Beyond thex Garden Party
• 1 Dawn of the New Age: Edwardian and Neo-Edwardian Summer
• 2 Smog at the Garden Party: Atmospheric Pollution in Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove (1902)
• 3 ‘Something of an Instructive and Interesting Tendency’: Reading, Leisure, Religion and Politics at York Friends’ Sewing Meeting
• 4 Bricks, Mortar and Moonshine: Building Houses in the Edwardian Novel
• 5 Rethinking Edwardian Advertising: The Case of Britain’s Railways
• 6 The Case of F. C. B. Cadell: Periodisation, Taste and Professional Identity
• 7 Sharpening the Mind: The German Menace and Edwardian National Identity
• 8 Aliens at Prayer: Representing Jewish Life in the East End of London, c.1905
• 9 Educating Empire Builders: Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide and the Rise of the Anti-Imperialist Adventure
• 10 Recovering Robert Ross: Criticism, Commerce and Networking in the Edwardian Art World
• 11 J. M. Barrie, Edwin Lutyens and the Development of Fantasy Architecture
• 12 ‘A secret pleasure in being mastered’: Pleasure and Power in the Work of J. M. Barrie
• 13 Sex and the Single Edwardian Girl: Sex and Censorship in the Edwardian Novel
• 14 A Conservative Ethic: A. R. Orage and T. E. Hulme, 1908–1916
• Afterword
• Selected Bibliography
• Index