The Routledge Concise History of Twentieth-Century British Literature

Ashley Dawson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415572453
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135123024
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: Literature

In The Routledge Concise History of Twentieth-Century British Literature Ashley Dawson identifies the key British writers and texts, shaped by era-defining cultural and historical events and movements from the period. He provides:

• Analysis of works by a diverse range of influential authors
• Examination of the cultural and literary impact of crucial historical, social, political and cultural events
• Discussion of Britain's imperial status in the century and the diversification of the nation through Black and Asian British Literature

Readers are also provided with a comprehensive timeline, a glossary of terms, further reading and explanatory text boxes featuring further information on key figures and events.

1 Popular culture and the paradoxes of progress

Overview

The death of Queen Victoria in 1901 brought an era of unparalleled peace and prosperity to an end for Britain, although such conditions were not equally shared by all Britons, let alone by all subjects of the British Empire. New literary genres created in the waning years of Victoria’s reign assessed future prospects in strikingly gloomy terms. Particularly dystopian were popular genres such as science fiction, the spy thriller, and the horror genre, all of which questioned the legitimacy of ideas of progress and imperial rule in their own distinct ways. Vexing visions of degeneration and civilizational collapse plagued the new century from the outset. The works of authors such as Wells, Kipling, Conrad, and Stoker, accessible bestsellers all, look forward to a century of conflict, turmoil, and, at times, darkness in Britain and across Europe.

The paradoxes of progress

Britons who lived through the closing decades of the nineteenth and the opening years of the twentieth century witnessed an unparalleled transformation of everyday life, a wholesale acceleration in the tempo of the quotidian sparked by a string of novel inventions and technologies. This, after all, was the era in which the automobile and the airplane made their debut. The result was a revolution in personal mobility that decisively shaped the world in which we now live. Other inventions of the era such as the telephone and the radio had an analogous impact on communication, linking individuals and mass audiences across great distances. Still other new technologies such as the electric iron and cooker, though seemingly more mundane, effected significant changes in the domestic sphere and in labor relations. There were, after all, over a million women working in domestic service in Britain in 1890. The increasing automation of the tasks carried out by this army of working-class women portended huge shifts in the lives of a significant segment of the nation’s population. In addition, this period also saw the invention of materials such as plastics, synthetics, and synthetic polymers. The stuff of everyday life that had once come predominantly from Britain’s far-flung colonies could now be manufactured in laboratories and factories in the suburbs of British cities.

Innovation and acceleration were, of course, not entirely new experiences in Britain. The introduction of the railway in the course of the nineteenth century had already revolutionized Britons’ daily lives. Time was homogenized by the creation of standardized schedules throughout the national rail network. But this revolutionary promulgation of a unified national temporality was trumped by the experience of vertiginous movement through space afforded to all those who could afford to purchase a train ticket. The experience of speed one gained on board a steam engine offered a powerful metaphor for the headlong rush into the future that seemed to characterize modernity. It also, however, highlighted the paradoxes and contradictions of the modern age, for if the train carried people barreling into the future, it also left many feeling as if they were out of control, riding a steel behemoth rushing forward heedless of the qualms of its passengers. Technology seemed to have taken on a will of its own, one that often brazenly ignored the fears and exigencies of human communities. In fact, since trains frequently crashed during this period, the epoch also fostered awareness of mass, industrially induced catastrophes. The experience of modernity, in other words, generated profound anxieties and ambivalences. Intoxicating changes were undeniably taking place, but they often carried a heavy price of individual suffering and collective mayhem. As Marx and Engels famously put it, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.” (38)

The early years of the twentieth century saw this experience of metamorphosis intensify in kind and quality. Cars, airplanes, tanks, machine guns, telephones and other inventions revolutionized the experience of everyday life in a fundamental manner not experienced before or since. Yet despite the sweeping transformations wrought by technology, the early years of the twentieth century were not characterized by intoxicated celebrations of progress. Quite the contrary, in fact. In his tract “A Free Man’s Worship,” for example, the philosopher Bertrand Russell offered the following chilling summation of the human condition at the dawn of the new century: “that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins – all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand” (1135). Russell’s stoic acknowledgement of the finitude and, even, the futility of human striving and achievement must be seen within the context of significant shifts in conceptions of the universe and humanity’s place therein. The nineteenth century had been the era of positivism, a doctrine that suggested that science held the key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe. Positivists believed that the scientific method, by reducing all of reality to closely observed material phenomena, would enable humanity to measure, predict, and control all aspects of experience. Furthermore, as formulated by the philosopher Auguste Comte, positivism would also ultimately be applied to human society, which, Comte held, was

progressing in stages from a theological to a metaphysical and ultimately to a scientific or positive understanding of reality.

Even before the beginning of the twentieth century, this rather naïve view of the world was beginning to break down. During the early 1860s, for example, William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, a pillar of Britain’s scientific community, published a paper entitled “On the Age of the Sun’s Heat.” In this paper, Lord Kelvin drew on the Second Law of Thermodynamics – which holds that entropy tends to increase to a maximum state in closed systems – to conclude that the gradual exhaustion of the sun’s energy would result in an inevitable state of “universal rest and death, if the universe were finite and left to obey existing laws.” Kelvin was a devout churchgoer, so the thoroughly secular lens through which he viewed what he called the “heat death of the sun” was particularly alarming for the late Victorian age. Rather than progressing towards increasingly complex and sophisticated forms, Kelvin argued, the universe, and human society with it, seemed to be winding down slowly. Placed in this context of millennial decline, the effervescent energy of modernity appeared to a philosopher such as Bertrand Russell as nothing but “the noonday brightness of human genius,” a brief, scintillating burst of implicitly futile energy, “doomed to extinction in the vast death of the solar system.”

Ironically, the field of biology – often equated with notions of unilinear evolutionary progress – gave rise to even more dystopian challenges to prevalent assumptions concerning the forward motion of modernity. Herein lies the significance of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, a work that almost singlehandedly invented the popular genre of science fiction in English. In what he called a “scientific romance,” Wells plays out the pessimistic scenario implied by Lord Kelvin’s speculations on the increasing entropy of the universe.

The Time Machine opens with a frame narrative in which an unnamed narrator describes a visit to the home of a well-known amateur scientist, who

explains to the narrator and the rest of the skeptical company he has assembled that he has discovered how to move about in time, the fourth dimension, just as others are able to move about in space. He demonstrates the operation of a miniature version of the time machine that he has invented in order to challenge their skepticism. When the guests assemble again a week later, the scientist stumbles into the room in a state of severe dishevelment and narrates the tale of his travel in time. The scientist, catapulted 800,000 years into the future by his machine, finds himself in a civilization of the future populated by the gentle, childlike Eloi. These people, he speculates, are the descendants of the communist society whose doctrines haunted bourgeois European cultures at the time Wells wrote. Free of any competition to survive as a result of the triumph of communism’s egalitarian ethos, humanity has degenerated into a condition of puerile fragility.

As he explores this civilization of the future, however, the time traveler realizes that his initial hypothesis was flawed. The feckless simplicity of the Eloi, he learns, is sustained by the labor of the Morlocks, who live and toil in subterranean warrens beneath the brightly sunlit world of the Eloi. Wells’s time traveler here extrapolates from the increasing class conflict that characterized the turn of the century to represent a world in which the dominance of the bourgeoisie has become so absolute that two separate races have evolved. The Morlocks of course represent the proletariat, who manufacture the products upon which the Eloi depend but who nonetheless have become so oppressed that they have literally been forced underground. Wells’s depiction of intensified class conflict was highly prescient: 1901 after all witnessed the formation of the Labour Party to articulate the interests of workers in Britain. The opening decade of the twentieth century moreover was characterized by increasing class-driven unrest, leading to placatory measures such as the passage of the first workmen’s compensation act and old age pensions by the conflict-ridden Liberal Party.

In addition to extrapolating on the endemic class conflict of late Victorian society, The Time Machine also drew on contemporary theories of evolution in order to speculate about social change. If the publication of Darwin’s theory of natural selection had fueled doctrines of social progress that undergirded Victorian liberalism, by the closing decade of the nineteenth century intellectuals were increasingly obsessed with the antithetical implications of Darwin’s work. Incertain environments, thinkers such as the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso opined, it might not be the fittest who survive; indeed, Lombroso claimed to

have found empirical evidence of degeneration in the anatomical characteristics of the criminals and prostitutes whom he examined. By the time Wells began writing, intellectuals such as Max Nordau, whose Degeneration (1895) became a best-seller throughout Europe, worried that world-weary fin de siècle authors and artists were spreading degeneracy through their art. Fears about degeneration led to campaigns against decadent art — exemplified most sensationally in the Oscar Wilde libel trial of 1895 — and to the formation of eugenics societies in Britain and across Europe, a trend that reached its horrendous terminus decades later with the Nazi Holocaust.

Wells’s time traveler articulates precisely such fears of degeneration after he climbs down into the world of the Morlocks. He barely escapes from this subterranean world alive, but sees enough to realize that the tables have turned: the Morlocks are no longer the oppressed class, haplessly exploited by the Eloi. Instead, the Morlocks have become a race of cannibals who venture out at night to gorge on the Eloi, whom they keep alive like placid, fatted calves. Human evolution has led to a dead end: “I grieved,” the time traveller says, “to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide” (61). The instinctive sympathy the time traveler felt for the Eloi, exemplified most explicitly in his taboo-defying attraction to a childlike female named Weena, is heightened as he realizes that he too has now become the Morlocks’ prey. Although he manages to escape this fate by stealing his time machine back from the Morlocks, the time traveler’s fate only grows bleaker as he lurches forward even further in time. Voyaging 30 million years into the future, the time traveler witnesses the grim scenario about which Lord Kelvin speculated: the heat death of the sun. The solar rays on the bleak beach where the time machine comes to rest are ebbing, and the only sign of life in the chilly, oxygen-depleted air is a black blob flopping around on tentacles. Although he returns to tell his dystopian tale, the novel ends with the narrator explaining that the time traveler has disappeared once again into the fourth dimension, never to return.

If The Time Machine challenges prominent nostrums about social progress, in subsequent novels Wells turned to an even more critical interrogation of science itself. In The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) for example, a shipwrecked traveler is rescued from the sea only to be deposited on an island populated by the nightmarish products of scientific experimentation run amok. Dr Moreau, who has devoted his life to “the study of the plasticity of living forms” (110), has created a hideous race of animal-human hybrids through his experiments in vivisection. In the process, he has stamped out all sensations of sympathetic pain that he once felt for those upon whom he conducts his terrible experiments. Wells’s novel is filled with the nightmarish cries of those undergoing Moreau’s torturous vivisections. The moral issues explored in The Island of Dr Moreau were once again highly prescient, not just of the experiments in eugenics carried out in Nazi concentration camps such as Treblinka and Dachau, but also of the ethical dilemmas raised by late-twentieth-century practices such as genetic engineering. But Wells’s novel does not simply rest with an ethical indictment of Dr. Moreau’s twisted scientific pursuits, for the hybrid race of creatures he has created ineluctably revert to their animal selves, and ultimately destroy Moreau and all the other humans on the island. Moreau’s megalomania thus becomes a symptom not just of a false doctrine of scientific objectivity and ruthless experimentation that has lost all ethical moorings, but also a recipe for the literal extermination of humanity.

The imperial idea

In 1902, Fabian Society campaigners Beatrice and Sidney Webb held a dinner party, to which they invited some of the leading Liberal and Conservative politicians of the day, as well as intellectuals such as H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell. The Webbs were concerned about the outcome of the Second AngloBoer War (1899–1902), in which the British had prevailed over the rebellious Afrikaner republics in South Africa using a scorched earth counter-insurgency policy that involved isolating the Boer civilian population in poorly provisioned concentration camps. This brutal policy of so-called pacification had significantly damaged Britain’s international image, making the policy of splendid isolation that it had pursued for much of the nineteenth century seem untenable. In addition, the Anglo-Boer War had challenged one of the primary tenets of British imperialism, to which the Webbs were avid subscribers: Britain, they believed, was the most advanced and progressive civilization on earth, and by expanding to other parts of the planet through imperial policies, it extended its culture of improvement, of which socialism was an integral part, to formerly benighted lands. Yet the Anglo-Boer War revealed that British claims to both modernity and humanitarianism were flawed, and perhaps even completely hollow. For not only did the British behave with remarkable brutality in their use of concentration camps; in addition, large numbers of British troops died during the war as a result not simply of their unfamiliarity with the environment of southern Africa, but also because of their dramatic ill health. The war, in other words, revealed the wretched conditions and resulting physical deterioration endured by members of the British working class even before they shipped off to war.

The Webbs and other members of the British intelligentsia suddenly felt that the nation was both weak and dangerously isolated, particularly in view of Germany’s increasingly aggressive economic and military stance. Wells, for

instance, argued, “it was possible for the Germans and Austrians to hold together in their Zollverein (tariff and trade bloc) because they were placed like a clenched fist in the centre of Europe. But the British Empire was like an open hand all over the world. It had no natural economic unity and it could maintain no artificial economic unity. Its essential unity must b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Timeline
• Introduction
• 1 Popular culture and the paradoxes of progress
• 2 Avant-gardes
• 3 Varieties of high modernism
• 4 Late modern radicalism
• 5 The finest hours
• 6 Countercultures
• 7 The conservative restoration
• 8 Millennial cultures
• Glossary of terms
• Guide to further reading
• Bibliography
• Index