Newcastle University School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics Humour and Representation in British Literature of the First World War (1914–18) A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Emily Anderson 2019 Abstract Great War literature, most famously the conflict’s poetry, is known for its gravity, for emotive evocations of suffering, yet an abundance of humorous writing about experiences of the war was published in the 1914–18 period. This thesis addresses the question of what humour adds to the depiction of the war. Previous studies have often either overlooked humorous First World War literature or discussed it for its role as a coping mechanism, emphasising its psychological importance and ways in which it boosted morale. Such approaches diverge from the treatment that the most celebrated, solemn texts of the war have received, these having been the subject of extensive formal and historical analysis. I bring together a range of humorous Great War texts by a mixture of celebrated and lesser-known authors, showing the pervasiveness of humour across a variety of genres – poetry, trench newspapers, short stories, and theatre – and drawing on a range of theories of humour, from Kantian incongruity to Freudian relief, to elucidate how these texts invite amusement and the effects this has. Such theorisation and close attention to humorous Great War texts and the contexts in which they arose reveals, first, that humour frequently creates nuanced and moving pictures of war experience, capturing diverse aspects of wartime life, from disruptions to the domestic sphere to fighting on the front line. Second, I demonstrate the robustness of humour: the war was portrayed using types of humorous writing that had been popular before 1914. More than this, in fact, at times well-established styles of humour seem to be particularly apt for evoking certain elements of war experience. This thesis thus presents a substantial intervention into understandings of the literary representation of the First World War, highlighting humour as a central part of how writers across multiple genres created complex, varied impressions of the conflict. iii Acknowledgements Deepest thanks are due to Dr Anne Whitehead and Dr Martin Dubois, for their patience, kindness, ideas and inspiration, for their comprehensive and meticulous work on this thesis. The PhD could not have been so enjoyable and stress-free without them. I am extremely grateful to my family – especially my parents, Steve and Anne – for their love, support, patience, and friendly ears. Thanks go to Yorkshire friends, Cambridge friends, Edinburgh friends, and Newcastle friends, especially the wonders that are Amy Barker, Hannah Čapek, and Grace Shaw. I am fortunate to have the joy of the Greenheaders et al to draw on: thank you Iain Duncan, Tori Dunford, Owen Heeley, Maddy and Mike Leighton-Yates, Helen Libby, Alys and Liam Proctor, Alex and Louise Rennick, Jess Parkinson, and Ilsa and Ste Saunders. Thank you also to those from the Hall, who have given me lots of fun, help, and London sofas: Tom Bushnell, Niall Finnegan, Joe Harris, Luke Mason, and Daniel O’Donoghue. I would like to express my gratitude to the many colleagues and fellow students from Newcastle and beyond who have offered their friendship, advice and expertise, in particular Fran Brearton, Ann- Marie Einhaus, Mandana M. Ghoyonloo, Stacy Gillis, Jennifer Gonzalez, Alex Niven, Neelam Srivastava, and Calum White. Finally, thanks are due to the AHRC Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership for providing the funding for this PhD. v Table of Contents Introduction 1 0.1 The Definitions and Varieties of Great War Humour 3 0.2 First World War Humour: Beyond the Anomalous and the Psychological 20 0.3 Humour’s Role in the Portrayal of the Great War 28 Chapter 1: Poetry 31 Humorous Absurdity in the War Zone 1.1 Queer Sardonic Rats: Topsy-Turvy Life in the War Zone 35 1.2 ‘Half-way down the road | To Lethe’: The Absurd Proximity of Death 52 1.3 ‘Dead men tell no tales’? Conclusions on the Robustness of Humorous Absurdity 70 Chapter 2: Trench Newspapers 72 Machine-Age Comedy and the Representation of Servicemen 2.1 Charlie Chaplin and the Reproducibility of the Clownish Serviceman 78 2.2 The Soldier-Hero, American Humour, and the Comic Knut 88 2.3 ‘Are you there?’ Comic Entanglement with Military Communications 95 2.4 ‘I ain’t no bloomin Kipling’: Parody and Music Hall 102 2.5 ‘Let’s whistle ragtime ditties while we’re bashing out Hun brains’: the Durability of Machine- age Humour 110 Chapter Three: Short Stories 112 Humour and the Evocation of Britishness 3.1 ‘You can’t expect glory and accuracy for a half-penny’: Service-Author Humour 117 3.2 British Humour, National Identity, and the Marketing of First Wold War Periodicals 125 3.3 Alternative Humour: Saki and Wyndham Lewis 136 3.4 ‘If a man brings us a joke, we require to be satisfied of its durability’: Conclusions 145 Chapter Four: Theatre 147 Humour and Provocation in Portrayals of Home-Front Experiences 4.1 ‘It’s a great leveller this Army’: Humour, Social Class, and Expressing the Unsayable 153 4.2 Women’s War Work and Changing Domestic Spaces 166 4.3 ‘You’ll find him different’: Wartime Masculinity and Male Relationships 172 4.4 Conclusion: Humour’s Theatrical Balancing Act 185 Conclusion: Changing Perspectives on the Depiction of the Great War 188 Works Cited 191 vii Lists of Figures Figure 1 Pipsqueak, ‘Natural History Notes’, The Lead-Swinger, 6 November 1915 40 2 ‘A Letter to the Rats’, Atalanta, 1 June 1888 42 3 P. D. M., ‘Some Chaplinisms’, The Whizz-Bang, January 1916 80 4 ‘Peeps into the Future. No. 2’, Lines of Fire, June 1918 80 5 ‘Charlie Chaplin & His Favourite Paper’, The Buzzer, February 1916 80 6 C. O. Wade, Cover, The Growler, October 1915 81 7 Cover, The Growler, January 1915 81 8 Cover, The Growler, March 1915 81 9 Cover, The Growler, April 1915 81 10 Cover, The Growler, July 1915 81 11 ‘Types in the Army. – No. 2’, The Whizz-Bang, March 1916 87 12 ‘Types in the Army. – No. 3’, The Whizz-Bang, March 1916 87 13 ‘Types in the Army. – No. 4’, The Whizz-Bang, March 1916 87 14 ‘Gas And – Clothes’, The Mudhook, 1 September 1917 97 15 ‘Our Soldiers Love a Laugh’, Punch, 27 January 1915 129 16 Cover, Strand Magazine, 51 (1916). 129 17 List of licenced plays, British Library, Manuscripts Reading Room 152 ix Introduction Humour abounds in British First World War literature. Humorous writing was the chosen medium of a great variety of authors, from anonymous, amateur contributors to magazines, to now little-read writers such as Gertrude Jennings and F. Tennyson Jesse, and to better-known or still famous figures, including George Bernard Shaw, A. A. Milne, J. M. Barrie, Wyndham Lewis, and Saki (H. H. Munro). Humour surfaces in a range of genres and publishing contexts, and in texts aimed at a variety of audiences. The comic periodicals that had enjoyed immense popularity since the mid-nineteenth century – most famously Punch; or, The London Charivari – printed humorous stories, articles, and cartoons about the conflict, catering to the entertainment needs of their large audiences. Staples of the press such as the Strand Magazine and Blackwood’s Magazine similarly issued humorous short fiction about the war, with commentators in a range of periodicals in addition exploring humour’s relationship to national identity and the significance of humour in times of conflict. Longer prose could also involve amusement, with some novels published during the 1914–18 period containing humour. Trench newspapers, written by and primarily for serving military personnel are almost exclusively comic, offering amusing stories, parodies, verse, rumour columns, drawings and cartoons, as well as an abundance of in-jokes and personal teasing. Large amounts of poetry addressing the war involves whimsy, comic absurdity, and sardonicism; humorous moments even appear in otherwise solemn poetic texts. Theatrical performances show an equal preoccupation with humour. Music hall was popular, while farces, revue sketches, comedies and musical comedies were counted amongst the most successful dramatic genres of the war years. Humour could also be found on the stage of theatres with a reputation for literarily and socially radical plays, such as the Court Theatre in London. By 1914 both theatres and music halls were rivalled as providers of popular entertainment by the growing cinema industry, and here too humour drew in audiences.1 I explore humour for its role in textual representation, demonstrating that it was central to the literary rendering of the war. My thesis establishes that humour, repeatedly, and across all genres, contributes to vivid, nuanced, and enlightening illustrations of war experience, often conveying intriguingly unexpected and subtle outlooks on the conflict. This is a fresh perspective on the function that humour serves in Great War writing since, on the relatively rare occasions when First World War humour has been discussed, it has chiefly been understood as a peripheral, relatively unimportant aspect of the conflict’s literary representation, and/or as a coping mechanism, deemed to be important mainly for the ways in which it contributed to resilience and morale during the war years. I determine that in poetry, trench newspapers, professionally produced periodicals, and theatre, humour was used, 1 The Better ‘Ole (1918) and Charlie Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms (1918) were particularly well received. Emma Hanna, ‘British Cinema, Regulation and the War Effort, 1914–1918’, in British Theatre and the Great War, 1914– 1919: New Perspectives, ed. by Andrew Maunder (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 195–214 (pp. 200, 207). 1 variously, to depict the fighting front as being an absurd, topsy-turvy environment, to present servicemen as playful, to reflect and contend with the depersonalising effects of the military machine, to articulate anxieties surrounding class and gender relations, death, and grief, and to capture camaraderie, disquiet, patriotism, bravery, and optimism.2 Humour contributed to the articulation of senses of national identity.