The Edwardians

by Roy Hattersley

  Members of the Freudian school of literary criticism have seen Forster’s view of houses as somehow related to his homosexuality. There is no doubt that, because (at least in part) of the prejudices of the time, he remained emotionally unfulfilled until middle age. He was part of, though only at the edge of, ‘Bloomsbury’* – to misquote R. H. Tawney ‘not the pleasant London district, but the silly sect’ – and Howards End reflects the best and the worst of that movement. It is, at least for the time, immensely broad-minded about sex. Helen – the younger of the Schlegel sisters – has an affair with the unfortunate Leonard Bast, bears his child almost as an act of pity, but has no residual Victorian shame about her state and her condition. Her sister marries the rich Henry Wilcox, who brushes aside the revelation that he has had a long relationship with a prostitute (wife of Leonard Bast, on whose head every misfortune is heaped) with the explanation, ‘I am a man and I have a man’s vices.’

  Wilcox’s wife finds it easier to forgive his sexual indiscretions than to condone either his callous attitude to his employees (Leonard Bast again) or his generally philistine view of life. She is George Moore’s Principia Ethica made flesh, for she relates virtue to artistic appreciation, as well as to a gentle disposition.† Forster’s Wilcox reveals his lack of either culture or compassion in speech after speech. ‘By all means subscribe to charity – subscribe to them largely. But don’t get carried away by absurd schemes for social reform. I see a good deal behind the scenes and you can take it from me that there is no social question – except for a few journalists who try to get a living out of the phrase. There are just rich and poor. There always have been and there always will be.’

  Wilcox possesses a motor car. To Forster, the internal combustion engine represented all that he feared and hated about the fast-changing world. He described the traffic on the roads of 1908 as ‘pestilential’. Science ‘instead of freeing man’ had ‘enslaved him to machinery’.15 Wilcox, who regarded the demolition of an attractive street as a sign of progress and prosperity, was the prophet of a new age in which ‘the fields will stink of petrol and air ships shatter the stars’.16 The argument about the state of England encapsulates a common feature of Edwardian fiction. Like the poets of the period, in one way and another, the novelists ‘came home’. Their concern was England.

  There are times when the reader of Howards End wonders why the cultivated and independent Miss Schlegel ever even contemplated becoming Mrs Wilcox – apart, that is, from her mystical desire to own Howards End. She was what Edwardians called ‘a New Woman’*. Together with her sister she had ‘walked over the Apennines with [her] luggage on her back’. New Women were strong and prepared to act, and sometimes live, without the support and approval of men. Margaret Wilcox (née Schlegel) in part observes those rules by becoming the rock on which her husband finds refuge in times of trouble. The same dominant characteristic is displayed by the ‘heroines’ of Forster’s other novels. In A Room with a View, Lucy Honeychurch abandons convention and (with a little help from the Fabian, Mr Emerson) acquires the courage to marry the man she loves. In Where Angels Fear to Tread and The Longest Journey, less admirable women assume control of male destinies. They become the harbingers of doom and destruction.

  Forster wrote in the age of female emancipation. The foundation, in 1903, of the Women’s Social and Political Union was the political manifestation, amongst a small minority of women, of the determination to acquire equal status which many more women felt. Women had begun to take employment, in large numbers, as clerks, schoolteachers and shop assistants. The age of women solely as wives and domestic servants had passed. Marriage was no longer the sole female ambition. The change in attitude was reflected in ‘women’s literature’ – much of it written by women. There were no Edwardian Brontës or Austens, but Maria Corelli, Baroness Orczy, Ethel M. Dell and Elinor Glyn all had huge popular success, while Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden), E. Nesbit (The Railway Children) and Beatrix Potter (The Tale of Peter Rabbit) wrote with great success for a younger generation. The course of women’s emancipation did not run smooth. D. H. Lawrence – the sickly son of a coal miner and part-time schoolteacher – described the head-on collision between women of the old and new order. He also wrote of love and loss, broken dreams and passionate jealousy. The characters in Sons and Lovers are set firmly in the Edwardian East Midland coalfield. Lawrence wrote of his time and place but revealed the conflicts of eternity.

  Eastwood, where D. H. Lawrence was born, was notable, before it became a place of literary pilgrimage, as the town in which the Midland Railway Company was created. Apart from that single moment of glory, everything of note that happened there was, in some way, associated with coal and coal miners. Boys assumed that, when they left elementary school, they would work in the pit. But Lawrence was different. Under his mother’s influence, he won scholarships first to Nottingham High School and then to Nottingham University College. Armed with a ‘teacher’s certificate’, he began work at Davidson Road School in Croydon. It was there, where he remained until 1912, that he completed his education by reading the books which the University College had not thought essential to teacher training, Tolstoy and Hardy amongst them. One of his earliest published works was A Study of Thomas Hardy.

  Poems sent to the English Review gained him the friendship and patronage of the ubiquitous Ford Maddox Heuffer, and in 1911, while he was still a teacher, he published his first novel, The White Peacock. In its original form it was the story of a woman who becomes pregnant by one man and marries another. The pregnancy was not included in the published version, but the agony of choice remained. Laetitia Beardsall (another ‘New Woman’) was forced by fate to choose between a refined, but timid, mine-owner’s son and a physically attractive, but lumpen farmer. There was a supplementary plot constructed around the relationship of Cyril (Laetitia’s brother) and a fallen clergyman-turned-gamekeeper. Every aspect of the story concerns disappointment and gloom. The strong become weak and the beautiful grow ugly.

  It was not until 1913 and the publication of Sons and Lovers that Lawrence began to develop the theme which became the trademark of his fiction – sacred and profane love. By the time the book was finished, he had experienced both. He had eloped with Frieda von Richtoven, the wife of the Professor of French at Nottingham University College. They travelled together in Europe and Australia and married in 1914. There is no doubt that their overt involvement in what was regarded as a scandalous liaison contributed to the belief that Lawrence wrote scandalous novels. Sons and Lovers, published between their elopement and marriage, was excoriated for what was described as sexual frankness. It contained none of the explicit descriptions which became commonplace at the end of the twentieth century, but it dealt openly with sexual attitudes, inhibitions and appetites. The scandal was intensified by Lawrence’s choice of characters. The people about whom Lawrence wrote were not aristocrats from a distant age whose indiscretions were part of a fantasy world with which the reader could not identify. They were the sort of people who lived next door. So their foibles and failings seemed real and, therefore, all the more shocking.

  Paul Morel, the central figure in Sons and Lovers, was D. H. Lawrence in all but name. Each dreamed of a more elegant life. Both had ambitions which were fuelled by their mothers, about whom they had not altogether healthy obsessions. As an exposition of the ambivalent relationship between the brutal miner and his neglected wife, the story of Paul Morel’s parents is not as successful as the near-perfect Widowing of Mrs Holroyd and The Odour of Chrysanthemums – a play and a short story on identical themes – but Sons and Lovers’ importance lies in what it has to say about Paul Morel’s feelings for two women: Clara Dawes, married and possessing progressive ideas, and Miriam Leiver, whose love for him has more to do with sacrifice than satisfaction. Mrs Morel’s elevated feelings about her son merely complicate his attempts to resolve the emotional conflict. In the end, he abandons both women and considers joining his mother ‘in the dar
kness’ to which she goes, hastened by an overdose of morphine which he administers to end a long and painful illness. It is one of the few unrealistic moments in an otherwise naturalistic novel. Lawrence demonstrated in his fiction the truth on which ‘realism’ is built. Ordinary people live extraordinary lives.

  The stories of ‘ordinary people’ – when told by writers of genius – can contain all the drama which lesser novelists regard as the sole preserve of the rich and glamorous. English Realism, as Raymond Williams called it, was not invented by the Edwardians. George Eliot’s Middlemarch (published in 1891–2) certainly deserves that description. But Edwardian novelists, responding to the social changes of their time, extended the genre to embrace the working classes of industrial Britain and made the mundane irresistible. Few places can be more prosaic than the Victorian potteries, six towns on the Staffordshire map which Arnold Bennett chose to call ‘The Five Towns’ because he liked the sound of the smaller number. Anna of the Five Towns was published in 1902. The Old Wives’ Tale, published six years later, begins in a draper’s shop in the Market Square in Victorian Bursley. But it is not just about one shop in one town in one county. It is about life.

  Bennett, the son of a solicitor? originally intended to follow his father into the law. Like many ambitious young men, he assumed that success was only to be found in London, so he moved to the capital. There journalism, rather than jurisprudence, captured his imagination. He began modestly. His first job was writing for Woman magazine. His first novel, A Man from the North, was published in 1898. The ‘Five Towns’ novels followed – Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives’ Tale, Clayhanger (1908) and Hilda Lessways (1911). The cycle was completed by These Twain and The Roll Call, published during the First World War.

  Anna of the Five Towns conforms exactly to the definition of English Realism set down by Sir Paul Harvey in the first edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature: ‘Realism is the representation of real life – especially if it is gloomy.’ It is difficult to imagine a more gloomy novel than Anna or a more desperate heroine than Anna herself, a young woman who, despite (or perhaps because of) her Wesleyan upbringing, finds life a vale of tears. Bennett, a Methodist by origin, wrote the novel as his father was dying. As a result, it portrays a jealous God who expects His followers to accept, without complaint, the misery which is their fate.

  Anna Tellwright is tyrannised by her miserly father to the point at which he insists on effectively managing the property that she was left in her mother’s will. She meets, and is enormously impressed by, Henry Mynors, a Methodist local preacher and successful businessman. Confusing love and admiration, she agrees to marry him but becomes involved, first out of sympathy and then emotionally, with Willie Price, the son of one of her father’s tenants. Despite Anna’s attempts to save their livelihood and reputation, the Prices slide into bankruptcy. The father commits suicide and the son emigrates. Anna, although in love with Willie, marries Henry Mynors.

  There are few more bleak novels in the history of fiction. But Bennett was also author of The Card (1911), the story of Edward Henry Machin, the solicitor’s clerk who became Mayor of Bursley and described his role in life as ‘the great mission of cheering us all up’. The contrast between the two books illustrates the eclectic extent of Bennett’s work. The range of style and subject he covered, combined with his phenomenal energy, enabled him to produce work at such a rate that it was suggested (not entirely complimentarily) that he hang a notice outside his door, ‘Articles written while you wait’.

  By the end of 1901, Bennett was doing more work of more sorts than seemed credible. He was editor (until September) of one journal and the mainstay of two others. He was reviewing books at the rate of more than one a day and also writing criticism of a very high order. He counted the number of articles he wrote during the year as 196. He also wrote six short stories, one one-act play, two full length plays … The Grand Babylon Hotel and most of the first draft of Anna of the Five Towns.

  But we must assume that he was not satisfied with the quality of his work. He went to France where he hoped that the atmosphere would be conducive to the composition of a work of genius. Ironically, the only weak chapter in The Old Wives’ Tale is set in Paris. The rest concerns the draper’s shop in Bursley.

  Bennett consciously wrote this novel in what he thought of as the continental tradition of realism as pioneered by Zola and Maupassant – and, true to the genre, struggled to achieve an ‘artistic, shapely presentation of the truth’. It is easy enough to believe that Constance and Sophia Baines (daughters of the draper with a shop in the main square of Bursley) really existed, for Sophia’s rejection of her mother’s advice against marrying the unreliable Gerald Scales and Constance’s contrasting acceptance of humdrum security were, in themselves, everyday events. They are made more real by the detail with which Bennett describes the background to their lives – the arrangement of their mother’s kitchen, the bull-terrier that wandered into the shop, the doors ‘bordered with felt to stop ventilation’. But Bennett makes their lives a story.* The Old Wives’ Tale is about irresistible nonentities, three of whom are strong women. It is Edwardian in context, not just because of its date of publication.

  Although H. G. Wells was fascinated by London rather than the provinces, he too was inspired by a suburban muse. His early life was spent as a shop assistant in Bromley, an experience reflected in both The History of Mr Polly and Kipps. Love and Mr Lewisham owes its title to the adjacent London borough and in The New Machiavelli Richard Remington explains what must have been Wells’s own fascination with the capital: ‘London is the most interesting, beautiful and wonderful city in the world to me, delicate in its incidental and multitudinous littleness and stupendous in its pregnant totality.’17

  When Virginia Woolf read the novels which were inspired by the new sprawling cities, she complained that ‘… in all this vast conglomerate of printed pages, in all this congeries of streets and houses, there is not a single man or woman whom we know’. That only confirms that Mrs Woolf spent her life among strange people. The shop assistants of our acquaintance may not, like Mr Polly, burn down the premises in which they spend their unhappy working lives, but many of them have similar immortal longings. And we read most weeks of someone who, like Arthur Kipps, has found that the acquisition of a fortune brings more problems than pleasures.

  H. G. Wells ‘came home’ to the reality of lower-middle-class life. He arrived at his new destination straight from space. The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds were written in and for Victorian England, while Wells, the holder of a first-class honours degree in zoology – won after acquiring a place at London University through the hard discipline of night school – still turned his mind to science. When he also became a Fabian and a radical, he wrote Ann Veronica, in which the eponymous heroine proves she is a New Woman by running away with the man she loves. In Tono-Bungay – the name of a patent medicine which is ‘nothing coated in advertisements’ – Wells exposed what he believed to be the corrupt techniques of new-century commerce.

  Like all the best novels, Ann Veronica and Tono-Bungay are both essentially autobiographical, but they are biographical in an unusual way. H. G. Wells was a notorious philanderer, a weakness which he tried to justify by the espousal of ‘free love’ as a liberating way of life. It is claimed, though Wells denied it, that he was once pursued to Paddington Station by an angry father with a horsewhip.18 His most famous love affair was with Rebecca West, and his most cruel with Amber Reeves, a young woman who thought it her duty to sacrifice herself to his genius. ‘As you will my lover. But for me it doesn’t matter. Nothing is wrong that you do. I am clear about this. I know exactly what I am doing. I give myself to you.’ It was Ann Veronica speaking, but the sentiment is Amber Reeves’s.

  In Tono-Bungay, Wells replicates a more admirable aspect of his life – his determination, during his years as a shop assistant, to educate himself. George Ponderovo, bewildered by Lond
on as young Wells was in life, also kept his sanity by self-education. ‘Sitting under a dormer window on a shelf above great stores of tea, I became familiar with much of Hogarth – I read and understood the good sound rhetoric of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man and his Common Sense, excellent books once praised by bishops and since sedulously lied about.’

  Neither sexual freedom (which Wells applauded) nor commercial licence (which he loathed) now attract the astonished horror which they were afforded in Wells’s day, and the self-educated working-man-made-good is an endangered species. So Ann Veronica and Tono-Bungay, both heralded as classics in their day, have become museum pieces. John Galsworthy’s The Man of Property, written before either of Wells’s consciously modern novels, has survived because it deals with timeless human weaknesses, even though Galsworthy presented them in an essentially Edwardian context: Soames Forsyte regarded his wife as one of his possessions.

  Galsworthy had good reason to believe that women should be free to follow their own star. The wife of his cousin left her husband, while he was fighting in South Africa for Queen and country, to live with him. Life with Ada Galsworthy changed him. The Harrow and Oxford-educated barrister turned against the conventions of the upper-middle classes. His rebellion was first reflected in unsuccessful novels and short stories written behind the protection of a pseudonym. The Island of Pharisees, fiction, but a polemic against poverty and false respectability, won critical approval. In 1906 The Man of Property transformed his fortune and his reputation.