DOCSLIB.ORG

In Dialogue with English Modernism: Storm Jameson's Early

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
In Dialogue with English Modernism: Storm Jameson's Early IN DIALOGUE WITH ENGLISH MODERNISM: STORM JAMESON’S EARLY FORMATION AS A WRITER, 1919-1931 Deborah Frances Gerrard De Montfort University January 2010 Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy For Prue and Julia Abstract After a period during which Storm Jameson’s restricted literary identity has been that of the politically engaged woman writer, critical interest in the intellectual and stylistic complexities of her work is now reviving. Yet Jameson’s background in early English modernism and the manner in which it enriches her writing continues to pass unnoticed. This thesis uncovers new evidence of Jameson’s immersion in the early English modernisms of Alfred Orage’s Leeds Arts Club and New Age journal and of Dora Marsden’s journals, the New Freewoman and the Egoist, as an avant-garde student before the Great War. Drawing analogies with the post-colonial notions of ‘Manichean delirium’ and of ‘writing back to the centre’, this thesis argues that, subsequently – as a provincial socialist woman writer struggling to make her way at the predominantly male and elitist cultural centre – Jameson developed a vexed outsider-insider relation to English modernism which she expressed during the 1920s in a series of intertextual novels critiquing the contemporary cultural scene. It examines each of these novels chronologically, beginning with Jameson’s critique of the early modernisms of Orage, Marsden and associated writers in her first two novels, before moving on to her engagement, in turn, with the work of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Wyndham Lewis. Employing a socially oriented model of intertextuality, this thesis reads each novel synchronically as a sceptical and often witty probing of some of the polarised, and frequently contradictory, positions taken within the modernist debate. It also interprets the 1920s fiction diachronically as a developmental journey towards what Jennifer Birkett terms the ‘stylised realism’ of the 1930s and 40s, in which William James’s Pragmatism plays a central role, allowing Jameson to assimilate those intellectual and stylistic elements within English modernism that she values before leaving the rest behind. Acknowledgements I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Julia Briggs, a wonderful supervisor and dear friend to whose loving memory (in company with that of my mother, Prue) this thesis is dedicated, and to Andrew Thacker, who stepped in and guided me to the finish with such knowledgeable advice, patience and good humour. I am also indebted to the following generous individuals for professional help, advice, inspiration and encouragement of various kinds: Humaira Ahmed, Rebecca Beasley, Ian Bell, Jennifer Birkett, Chiara Briganti, Cathy Clay, Paul Edwards, Peregrine Horden, Mary Joannou, Lena Kore-Schroder, Henry Mead, Michael Whitworth, and John Wood. I would like to thank the University Libraries of Leeds, Edinburgh, Warwick and Princeton, the British Library and the British Newspaper Library at Colindale for granting me access to papers and archives related to this thesis and also the ‘country members’ staff at the London Library for their invaluable efficient and friendly service. This thesis would not have been possible without the support of friends and family members. Amongst many endlessly patient friends, some of whom have greeted my endeavours with real interest, others with bemused tolerance, Jane Hodge, Morag Jordan and Kathy Roberts deserve special thanks for acts of kindness that have buoyed me up during moments of difficulty and doubt. Equally, special thanks are due to my father, Peter, my sister, Phyllida, and my brother, Hugo, for their staunch loyalty and support. And thanks most of all to Philip, Simon and Jamie, whose endless love and support cannot be quantified. Finally, my grandmother, Hilda, should not be forgotten, for it was she who ardently believed that the much loved work of her old friend and fellow northerner should be rescued from its unmerited neglect and who pushed me towards playing my part. Time and changes in critical fashion have granted Hilda’s wish; I wish that she were still around to read my small contribution to Storm’s rescue. TABLE OF CONTENTS Abbreviations Introduction 1 1 Whitby, Leeds, London: Jameson’s Journey into Modernism 25 Introduction 25 A Divided Childhood 26 Leeds and Social Transformation: 1909–1912 32 Apollonian London and Aesthetic Modernism: Autumn 1912–April 1914 47 Conclusion 56 2 Reconciling Modernisms in Jameson’s M.A. Thesis, ‘Modern Drama in Europe’ (1914) 58 Introduction 58 Early New Age Nietzschean-Socialism 60 Orage and Carter’s Neo-Classical – or Neo-Medieval – Drama 63 Anthony Ludovici’s ‘Hard and Dry’ Classicism 66 Edward Carpenter’s Mystical Evolutionary Socialism 70 Jameson’s Attitude to Women 72 Conclusion 74 3 ‘Master-architects’: The Pot Boils (1919) as a Satire on New Age and other Early-Modernist Messianisms 76 Introduction 76 The Pot Boils 77 A Wellsian Pragmatism 94 Conclusion 98 4 ‘Freemen … in a commonwealth of real things’: Looking Back on Pre- War Dreams of Anarchism in The Happy Highways (1920) 100 Introduction 100 A ‘Classical’ Northern Childhood 104 Anarchistic Socialism in Pre-War London 105 Ideological Disillusionment and Freud’s ‘Blindness in Seeing Eyes’ 119 The Mid-War Present and William James’s Pragmatism 126 Conclusion 130 5 Violence, Difference, Women and the Gothic: Writing Back to D. H. Lawrence in The Clash (1922) and The Pitiful Wife (1923) 132 Introduction 132 Intellectual and Cultural Background 137 A Feminist Dialogue with Lawrence’s ‘Ethics of Alterity’ in The Clash 146 Jameson Reading Lawrence Reading the Brontë Sisters and Ruskin in The Pitiful Wife 163 Conclusion 172 6 ‘The Battle of the Brows’: Writing back to Virginia Woolf’s ‘Character in Fiction’ (1924) and Mrs Dalloway (1925) in Three Kingdoms (1926) 173 Prelude 173 Introduction 174 Writing Back to Woolf’s ‘Character in Fiction’ 180 Revisioning Mrs Dalloway, Redistributing Cultural Power 184 Problematising Partisan Positions 196 Conclusion 201 7 A ‘Voyage Home’ from Modernism: Wyndham Lewis, William James and The Triumph of Time (1927–1931) 203 Introduction 203 Time and Western Man (1927) 208 Responding to Lewis in ‘The Decline of Fiction’ (1929) and The Georgian Novel and Mr. Robinson (1929) 210 Lewis and James in The Voyage Home (1930) and A Richer Dust (1931) 215 Conclusion 232 Conclusion 235 Works Cited and Select Bibliography 242 ABBREVIATIONS CJ Storm Jameson. Civil Journey. London: Cassell, 1939. GN Storm Jameson. The Georgian Novel and Mr. Robinson. New York: Morrow, 1929. HH Storm Jameson. The Happy Highways. London: Heinemann, 1920. JMHR Storm Jameson. The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell. London: Macmillan, 1945. JN Storm Jameson. Journey From the North. 2 vols. London: Collins and Harvill, 1969- 70. LG D. H. Lawrence. The Lost Girl. 1921. London: Penguin, 1950. MD Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway. 1925. London: Granada, 1976. MDE Storm Jameson. Modern Drama in Europe. London: Collins, 1920. NTLP Storm Jameson. No Time Like the Present. London: Cassell, 1933. PB Storm Jameson. The Pot Boils. London: Constable, 1919. PW Storm Jameson. The Pitiful Wife. London: Constable, 1923. R D. H. Lawrence. The Rainbow. 1915. Cambridge: CUP, 1989. RDP D. H. Lawrence. Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine. 1925. Cambridge: CUP, 1988. SCAL D. H. Lawrence. Studies in Classic American Literature. Cambridge: CUP, 2003. TOT Storm Jameson. The Triumph of Time. London: Heinemann, 1932. TWM Wyndham Lewis. Time and Western Man. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow, 1993. TWY Storm Jameson. That Was Yesterday. 1932. New York: Berkley, 1976. WIL D. H. Lawrence. Women in Love. Cambridge: CUP, 1987. 3Ks Storm Jameson. Three Kingdoms. London: Constable, 1926. Introduction The conventions of the avant-garde are not less an orthodoxy. (Jameson, Writer’s 61) The truest eye may … belong to the migrant‟s double vision. (Bhabha 7–8) In their introduction to the first essay collection to be devoted to Storm Jameson‟s work, Margaret Storm Jameson: Writing in Dialogue (2007), Jennifer Birkett and Chiara Briganti observe that „the cultural community that can read all the levels of her work is only now emerging‟ (1). This is particularly true of the early work, the nature of which has been obscured both by Jameson‟s misleading accounts of it in her various autobiographies and by her subsequent reputation as a social-realist writer. This thesis focuses on Jameson‟s early writing between 1919 and 1931, shortly before anti-Fascism „swung [her] round the compass as a writer‟ and she began to write those social-realist novels for which she is best known (JNI 300).1 In this study it is argued that what is distinctive and fascinating about her early work is the dialogue with English modernism that it develops from the perspective of a cultural outsider-insider, in Jameson‟s case that of a provincial socialist woman writer who had been deeply immersed in the avant-garde as a student in Leeds and London before the Great War. Excavating the relevant modernist intertexts and reading the early novels alongside them, a picture begins to emerge of the commitment, sophistication and seriousness of this dialogue, although the astuteness of Jameson‟s cultural-criticism-as-fiction can also be highly amusing. The rediscovery of this early work thus provides one possible answer to the question, „What other aesthetic and political agendas were … erased from cultural memory … as the literary avant-garde achieved cultural legitimacy …?‟ (Ardis, Modernism 7). The novels are also of value for the light they shed on so much that comes later in Jameson‟s work, for in them we observe how she begins to forge her identity as a writer. 1 It does not include either That Was Yesterday (1932) or A Day Off (1933), since although both these texts were written before Jameson returned to London to fight Fascism in 1932, they were written after October 1930, the moment of literary crisis during which she made the decision to „civilize‟ herself as a writer (JNI 283).
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Leeds Arts Club and the New Age: Art and Ideas in a Time of War by Tom Steele Thank You Very Much Nigel, That's a Very Generous Introduction
    TRANSCRIPT Into the Vortex: The Leeds Arts Club and the New Age: Art and Ideas in a Time of War by Tom Steele Thank you very much Nigel, that's a very generous introduction. Thank you for inviting me back to the Leeds Art Gallery where I spent so many happy hours. As Nigel said, the book was actually published in 1990, but it was a process of about 5 or 6 year work, in fact it's turned into a PHD. I've not done a lot of other work on it since, I have to say some very very good work has been done on Tom Perry and other peoples in the meantime, and it's grievously in danger of being the new edition, which I might or might not get around to, but maybe somebody else will. Anyway, what I'm going to do is to read a text. I'm not very good at talking extensively, and it should take about 40 minutes, 45 minutes. This should leave us some time for a discussion afterwards, I hope. Right, I wish I'd thought about the title and raw text before I offered the loan up to the gallery, because it makes more sense, and you'll see why as we go along. I want to take the liberty of extending the idea of war to cover the entire decade 1910-1920, one of the most rebellious and innovative periods in the history of British art. By contrast, in cultural terms, we now live in a comparatively quiet period.
    [Show full text]
  • Virginia Woolf's Portraits of Russian Writers
    Virginia Woolf’s Portraits of Russian Writers Virginia Woolf’s Portraits of Russian Writers: Creating the Literary Other By Darya Protopopova Virginia Woolf’s Portraits of Russian Writers: Creating the Literary Other By Darya Protopopova This book first published 2019 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2019 by Darya Protopopova All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-2753-0 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-2753-9 TABLE OF CONTENTS Note on the Text ........................................................................................ vi Preface ...................................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Russia and the British Search for the Cultural ‘Other’ Chapter One .............................................................................................. 32 Woolf’s Real and Fictional Russians Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 58 Woolf and Dostoevsky: Verbalising the Soul Chapter Three ........................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Copyright Statement
    COPYRIGHT STATEMENT This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with its author and no quotation from the thesis and no information derived from it may be published without the author’s prior consent. i ii REX WHISTLER (1905 – 1944): PATRONAGE AND ARTISTIC IDENTITY by NIKKI FRATER A thesis submitted to the University of Plymouth in partial fulfilment for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY School of Humanities & Performing Arts Faculty of Arts and Humanities September 2014 iii Nikki Frater REX WHISTLER (1905-1944): PATRONAGE AND ARTISTIC IDENTITY Abstract This thesis explores the life and work of Rex Whistler, from his first commissions whilst at the Slade up until the time he enlisted for active service in World War Two. His death in that conflict meant that this was a career that lasted barely twenty years; however it comprised a large range of creative endeavours. Although all these facets of Whistler’s career are touched upon, the main focus is on his work in murals and the fields of advertising and commercial design. The thesis goes beyond the remit of a purely biographical stance and places Whistler’s career in context by looking at the contemporary art world in which he worked, and the private, commercial and public commissions he secured. In doing so, it aims to provide a more comprehensive account of Whistler’s achievement than has been afforded in any of the existing literature or biographies. This deeper examination of the artist’s practice has been made possible by considerable amounts of new factual information derived from the Whistler Archive and other archival sources.
    [Show full text]
  • Biographical Sketches of Key Pupils
    Appendix E Biographical Sketches of Key Pupils John Godolphin Bennett (1897–1974) was a scientist and philosopher who first met Gurdjieff in Istanbul in 1921 when he was working as an interpreter and personal intel- ligence officer in the British Army. In London that year Bennett began attending meet- ings held by Ouspensky on Gurdjieff’s teaching, and in 1922 he met Gurdjieff again. Bennett made brief visits to Gurdjieff’s Institute at Fontainebleau in February and August of 1923. In the 1930s Bennett formed his own group of followers, and rejoined Ouspensky’s group. In 1946 Bennett established an Institute at Coombe Springs, Kingston-on-Thames in Surrey. After a twenty-five year break Bennett renewed his ties with Gurdjieff in Paris in 1948 and 1949, at which time Gurdjieff taught him his new Movements. In 1949 Gurdjieff named Bennett his ‘official representative’ in England, with reference to the publication of Tales. After Gurdjieff’s death Bennett became an independent teacher, drawing from Sufi, Indian, Turkish, and Subud traditions. In 1953 he travelled through the Middle East hoping to locate the sources of Gurdjieff’s teach- ing among Sufi masters. By the end of his life he had written around thirty-five books related to Gurdjieff’s teaching.1 Maurice Nicoll (1884–1953) studied science at the University of Cambridge before travelling through Vienna, Berlin, and Zurich, eventually to become an eminent psy- chiatrist and colleague of Carl Gustav Jung. Nicoll was a member of the Psychosynthesis group, which met regularly under A.R. Orage, and this connection led Nicoll to Ouspensky in London in 1921.
    [Show full text]
  • Impressionist & Modern
    Impressionist & Modern Art New Bond Street, London I 10 October 2019 Lot 8 Lot 2 Lot 26 (detail) Impressionist & Modern Art New Bond Street, London I Thursday 10 October 2019, 5pm BONHAMS ENQUIRIES PHYSICAL CONDITION IMPORTANT INFORMATION 101 New Bond Street London OF LOTS IN THIS AUCTION The United States Government London W1S 1SR India Phillips PLEASE NOTE THAT THERE IS NO has banned the import of ivory bonhams.com Global Head of Department REFERENCE IN THIS CATALOGUE into the USA. Lots containing +44 (0) 20 7468 8328 TO THE PHYSICAL CONDITION OF ivory are indicated by the VIEWING [email protected] ANY LOT. INTENDING BIDDERS symbol Ф printed beside the Friday 4 October 10am – 5pm MUST SATISFY THEMSELVES AS lot number in this catalogue. Saturday 5 October 11am - 4pm Hannah Foster TO THE CONDITION OF ANY LOT Sunday 6 October 11am - 4pm Head of Department AS SPECIFIED IN CLAUSE 14 PRESS ENQUIRIES Monday 7 October 10am - 5pm +44 (0) 20 7468 5814 OF THE NOTICE TO BIDDERS [email protected] Tuesday 8 October 10am - 5pm [email protected] CONTAINED AT THE END OF THIS Wednesday 9 October 10am - 5pm CATALOGUE. CUSTOMER SERVICES Thursday 10 October 10am - 3pm Ruth Woodbridge Monday to Friday Specialist As a courtesy to intending bidders, 8.30am to 6pm SALE NUMBER +44 (0) 20 7468 5816 Bonhams will provide a written +44 (0) 20 7447 7447 25445 [email protected] Indication of the physical condition of +44 (0) 20 7447 7401 Fax lots in this sale if a request is received CATALOGUE Julia Ryff up to 24 hours before the auction Please see back of catalogue £22.00 Specialist starts.
    [Show full text]
  • GOTHIC FICTION Introduction by Peter Otto
    GOTHIC FICTION Introduction by Peter Otto 1 The Sadleir-Black Collection 2 2 The Microfilm Collection 7 3 Gothic Origins 11 4 Gothic Revolutions 15 5 The Northanger Novels 20 6 Radcliffe and her Imitators 23 7 Lewis and her Followers 27 8 Terror and Horror Gothic 31 9 Gothic Echoes / Gothic Labyrinths 33 © Peter Otto and Adam Matthew Publications Ltd. Published in Gothic Fiction: A Guide, by Peter Otto, Marie Mulvey-Roberts and Alison Milbank, Marlborough, Wilt.: Adam Matthew Publications, 2003, pp. 11-57. Available from http://www.ampltd.co.uk/digital_guides/gothic_fiction/Contents.aspx Deposited to the University of Melbourne ePrints Repository with permission of Adam Matthew Publications - http://eprints.unimelb.edu.au All rights reserved. Unauthorised Reproduction Prohibited. 1. The Sadleir-Black Collection It was not long before the lust for Gothic Romance took complete possession of me. Some instinct – for which I can only be thankful – told me not to stray into 'Sensibility', 'Pastoral', or 'Epistolary' novels of the period 1770-1820, but to stick to Gothic Novels and Tales of Terror. Michael Sadleir, XIX Century Fiction It seems appropriate that the Sadleir-Black collection of Gothic fictions, a genre peppered with illicit passions, should be described by its progenitor as the fruit of lust. Michael Sadleir (1888-1957), the person who cultivated this passion, was a noted bibliographer, book collector, publisher and creative writer. Educated at Rugby and Balliol College, Oxford, Sadleir joined the office of the publishers Constable and Company in 1912, becoming Director in 1920. He published seven reasonably successful novels; important biographical studies of Trollope, Edward and Rosina Bulwer, and Lady Blessington; and a number of ground-breaking bibliographical works, most significantly Excursions in Victorian Bibliography (1922) and XIX Century Fiction (1951).
    [Show full text]
  • The New Age Under Orage
    THE NEW AGE UNDER ORAGE CHAPTERS IN ENGLISH CULTURAL HISTORY by WALLACE MARTIN MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS BARNES & NOBLE, INC., NEW YORK Frontispiece A. R. ORAGE © 1967 Wallace Martin All rights reserved MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS 316-324 Oxford Road, Manchester 13, England U.S.A. BARNES & NOBLE, INC. 105 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10003 Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd, Frome and London This digital edition has been produced by the Modernist Journals Project with the permission of Wallace T. Martin, granted on 28 July 1999. Users may download and reproduce any of these pages, provided that proper credit is given the author and the Project. FOR MY PARENTS CONTENTS PART ONE. ORIGINS Page I. Introduction: The New Age and its Contemporaries 1 II. The Purchase of The New Age 17 III. Orage’s Editorial Methods 32 PART TWO. ‘THE NEW AGE’, 1908-1910: LITERARY REALISM AND THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION IV. The ‘New Drama’ 61 V. The Realistic Novel 81 VI. The Rejection of Realism 108 PART THREE. 1911-1914: NEW DIRECTIONS VII. Contributors and Contents 120 VIII. The Cultural Awakening 128 IX. The Origins of Imagism 145 X. Other Movements 182 PART FOUR. 1915-1918: THE SEARCH FOR VALUES XI. Guild Socialism 193 XII. A Conservative Philosophy 212 XIII. Orage’s Literary Criticism 235 PART FIVE. 1919-1922: SOCIAL CREDIT AND MYSTICISM XIV. The Economic Crisis 266 XV. Orage’s Religious Quest 284 Appendix: Contributors to The New Age 295 Index 297 vii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS A. R. Orage Frontispiece 1 * Tom Titt: Mr G. Bernard Shaw 25 2 * Tom Titt: Mr G.
    [Show full text]
  • Three-Deckers and Installment Novels: the Effect of Publishing Format Upon the Nineteenth- Century Novel
    Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1965 Three-Deckers and Installment Novels: the Effect of Publishing Format Upon the Nineteenth- Century Novel. James M. Keech Jr Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Keech, James M. Jr, "Three-Deckers and Installment Novels: the Effect of Publishing Format Upon the Nineteenth-Century Novel." (1965). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 1081. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/1081 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This dissertation has been - microfilmed exactly as received 66-737 K E E C H , Jr., James M., 1933- THREE-DECKERS AND INSTALLMENT NOVELS: THE EFFECT OF PUBLISHING FORMAT UPON THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL. Louisiana State University, Ph.D., 1965 Language and Literature, general University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan THREE-DECKERS AMD INSTALLMENT NOVELS: THE EFFECT OF PUBLISHING FORMAT UPON THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulflllnent of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English hr James M. Keech, Jr. B.A., University of North Carolina, 1955 M.A., Louisiana State University, 1961 August, 1965 ACKNOWLEDGMENT I wish to express my deepest appreciation to the director of this study, Doctor John Hazard Wildman.
    [Show full text]
  • The Distributist Alternative
    www.secondspring.co.uk/economy The Distributist Alternative Russell Sparkes When people think of G.K. Chesterton, they normally remember his literary achievements: the essays, the Father Brown stories, the wealth of aphorisms that are still widely quoted. However, I suspect that if you had asked the man himself what part of his work he was most proud of, he would have said something that is almost totally forgotten today: his advocacy of a social and political philosophy called ‘Distributism’. In my talk today I want to tell you what this was, what its antecedents and inspirations were, and its lasting value. Distributism’s main tenet was that property should be as widely distributed as possible, and business should be local. There was advocacy of the economy being centred upon the production of goods, and suspicion of the role of high finance. It was advocated principally by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc from 1910 onwards, although others such as the Dominican priest Vincent McNabb, the artist Eric Gill, and the guild socialist Arthur Penty also contributed ideas. However, many of these latter had their own agenda, and while they were active in the Distributist movement, their advocacy of homespun craftsmanship or of the ‘social credit’ theories of Major Douglas.[1] They were peripheral to Distributism whose key texts are Chesterton’s Outline of Sanity published in 1926, and Belloc’s Essay on the Restoration of Property of 1936. In the depressed economic conditions of the 1920s Distributism became a political movement as well as an economic programme which was led and inspired by Chesterton through a little magazine that he edited and whose heavy losses he funded.
    [Show full text]
  • Michael Black
    THE SOURCES AND USES OF DISTRIBUTISM: A ROMAN CATHOLIC’S VIEW OF ANGLO-CATHOLIC GENIUS Michael Black The past popularity, the long tradition of religion supported it diverse champions against a present neglect. --Charles Williams, Shadows of Ecstasy Tradition asserts itself especially in a crisis. Deeply held but forgotten beliefs present us with familiar novelty, a ‘commodius vicus of recirculation’ of ideas which offer themselves as solutions to contemporary social problems. In our current economic crisis, the early 20th-century idea of Distributism is receiving renewed attention as a serious contribution to national policy in the United Kingdom. This essay is a personal response which I hope may find a place in the growing debate. In September 2008, the bankruptcy of the Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers caused financial markets around the world to freeze with fear. The consensus of City pundits and Whitehall policy-makers was that the world had entered uncharted economic waters. Not just respectable opinion, but long-held theories about economics were discredited decisively. A revival of the unconventional and marginal in an environment of intellectual despair was probably inevitable. One little known socio-economic concept, Distributism, which was championed by G.K Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in the 1920’s and 30’s, came to some renewed prominence on both sides of the Atlantic. In North America, for example, within only a few months of the Lehman failure, the American quarterly Chesterton Review conducted a symposium advertising the relevance of Distributism as a solution to the global economic meltdown. Fr Ian Boyd, the editor, recommended what he considered an ‘evolved distributism’ in several cooperative industrial movements as economic models on a scale which could be controlled by human beings.1 In July, Fr Boyd gave a further lecture in Oxford on ‘A Distributist View of the Economic Crisis’.
    [Show full text]
  • Sir Michael Sadler, Eva Gilpin, and Artwork at the Hall School Weybridge
    Education as Exploration: Sir Michael Sadler, Eva Gilpin, and Artwork at the Hall School Weybridge Oliver Pickering An illustrated talk given in the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds, on Saturday 18 February 2012 Sir Michael Sadler, who was born in 1861 and died in 1943, had two Quaker wives, and it’s Eva Gilpin, the second of them, who is the main focus of the talk today. Before he became Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds in 1911, Sadler had spent the years 1885-95 in Oxford as organiser of extension teaching for Oxford University (summer schools and adult education classes) while at the same time, through political contacts within the Liberal Party, becoming increasingly involved in the campaign for the reform of secondary education in England. He became recognised as one of the leading educationists of his day, which took him to London in 1895. But Sadler was born in Barnsley, which was also the home of his first wife, Mary Anne Harvey, whom he married in 1885, and the Yorkshire connection was a strong one. The Harveys were a prominent and extensive Quaker textile manufacturing family, middle class, hardworking, and very comfortably off. This family tree (below) shows that Charles Harvey, Mary Anne’s father, had a brother Thomas, who was one of the leading Leeds Quakers of the second half of the nineteenth century. He had a son William, who was therefore a first cousin of Mary Anne Harvey. William and his wife Anna Maria Whiting had seven children, who were consequently second cousins to Michael, the only child of Michael Sadler and Mary Anne Harvey, and who in later life, when making a reputation as a bibliographer and novelist, spelt his name Sadleir in order to distinguish himself from his father.
    [Show full text]
  • The Death of Christian Culture
    Memoriœ piœ patris carrissimi quoque et matris dulcissimœ hunc libellum filius indignus dedicat in cordibus Jesu et Mariœ. The Death of Christian Culture. Copyright © 2008 IHS Press. First published in 1978 by Arlington House in New Rochelle, New York. Preface, footnotes, typesetting, layout, and cover design copyright 2008 IHS Press. Content of the work is copyright Senior Family Ink. All rights reserved. Portions of chapter 2 originally appeared in University of Wyoming Publications 25(3), 1961; chapter 6 in Gary Tate, ed., Reflections on High School English (Tulsa, Okla.: University of Tulsa Press, 1966); and chapter 7 in the Journal of the Kansas Bar Association 39, Winter 1970. No portion of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review, or except in cases where rights to content reproduced herein is retained by its original author or other rights holder, and further reproduction is subject to permission otherwise granted thereby according to applicable agreements and laws. ISBN-13 (eBook): 978-1-932528-51-0 ISBN-10 (eBook): 1-932528-51-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Senior, John, 1923– The death of Christian culture / John Senior; foreword by Andrew Senior; introduction by David Allen White. p. cm. Originally published: New Rochelle, N.Y. : Arlington House, c1978. ISBN-13: 978-1-932528-51-0 1. Civilization, Christian. 2. Christianity–20th century. I. Title. BR115.C5S46 2008 261.5–dc22 2007039625 IHS Press is the only publisher dedicated exclusively to the social teachings of the Catholic Church.
    [Show full text]