Edwardian Comedy and Progressive Politics

Back to the Future: Edwardian Comedy and Progressive Politics

Rachel McArthur

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto

Back to the Future: Edwardian Comedy and Progressive Politics

Rachel McArthur

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English

University of Toronto

2018 Abstract

The Edwardian period is often figured as a garden party broken up by the First World War.

Looking back on the early twentieth century from the perspective of the twenty first, a different, strikingly contemporary picture emerges: amidst social and technological change, world capitals were haunted by the threat of instability and economic inequality, while the political left faced urgent questions about its continued relevance. Contrary to the image of the period as complacent on the brink of disaster, my dissertation asserts that the Edwardians were deeply invested in building a better future through both political reform and literary comedy. Both comedy and progressive reform look toward the future; in both cases, the Edwardians negotiated between convention and innovation to attempt to create a more equitable future. The dissertation ultimately illustrates the crucial role of the period in literary history and how its lessons may inform our own, which it much resembles. In order to do so, my readings of specifically

Edwardian texts are situated in relation to larger historical narratives of both comedy as a genre and political reform. The first chapter reads George Meredith’s “Essay on Comedy” (1877) and

The Egoist (1879) alongside Gladstonian Liberal reforms. Like those interventions, the “Essay” looks toward beneficial changes within existing traditions, while The Egoist puts them into practice. The second chapter analyzes George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara (1905; 1907)

ii alongside Edwardian discussions of social welfare. Shaw’s fictional Perivale St Andrews, patterned on contemporary company towns, critiques the shortcomings of Edwardian New

Liberalism’s approach to a better future. The third chapter situates E.M. Forster’s Howards End

(1910) in relation to the cascading crises engendered by the 1909 “People’s Budget.” Like its political moment, Forster’s novel makes failure the precondition of ameliorative possibility, a vision Forster carried beyond the writing of fiction. The persistence of Forsterian concerns is further examined in the final chapter on Zadie Smith’s NW (2012). Foregrounding Smith’s use of

Forsterian elements to critique both the limitations of Forster’s vision and the attenuated futurity of neoliberalism, this final chapter asserts the resonances of the Edwardian period with our contemporary moment.

iii Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the support and assistance of my supervisor, Prof. Alan Ackerman, and my committee members, Profs. Lawrence Switzky and Greig Henderson, at the University of

Toronto in the completion of this project. I would also like to thank Prof. Maria DiBattista of

Princeton University for her wonderful contributions as external examiner, as well as the other participants in my Final Oral Exam for their insightful and helpful commentary on the project.

Parts of this dissertation were written with the assistance of grants from the Social Science and

Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, as well as funding from the University of Toronto. The last stages of the project could not have been completed without the Ontario Student Assistance Program.

As for my parents, Kathryn and Murray McArthur, I simply could not have done any of this without them. Their unfailing support made finishing the dissertation possible, even when it often seemed completely impossible. The resourcefulness and fellowship of my graduate student colleagues helped me to navigate some of the most difficult parts of the doctoral process, and for that I will always be extremely grateful. To my friends outside academia, thank you for listening and sympathizing with such remarkable patience. My cat, Mark, knows what role he played. I dedicate this dissertation specifically to my grandmother, Joan (Winslow) Carrick, who unfortunately passed away before she got the chance to wear her infamous long frock and tiara to my convocation. She would have made an absolutely terrific doctor, had she had the chance.

iv Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ...... iv

Table of Contents ...... v

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1: George Meredith ...... 27

Chapter 2: George Bernard Shaw ...... 54

Chapter 3: E.M. Forster ...... 88

Chapter 4: Zadie Smith ...... 119

Epilogue: Back to the Future ...... 142

Works Consulted ...... 144

v Introduction

Looking back on the first decades of the twentieth century from the first decades of the twenty-first, the resemblances are striking: amidst accelerated social and technological change, world capitals were haunted by the threat of instability and civil unrest caused by massive inequality, while in the political sphere, parties on the left faced pressing questions about their identity and continued relevance. In both cases, the calamities of the present threatened to eclipse the very idea of a future, let alone a better one. The ambiguity of both moments is reflected at the level of nomenclature: while we have settled on the limited label “Edwardian” for the former years, we still have no idea what to call either ourselves or our own recent past. And yet, “Edwardian” is also a label of exhaustion. In the Foreword to Edwardians and Late Victorians (1960), Richard Ellmann notes that the period between what literary studies calls modernism and what it calls Victorianism has been “pushed…out of focus” by the “force” of those other two. Understood as either “post-Victorian” or “pre-war,” the period known as “Edwardian” has “lost [its own] identity” (v). Similarly, in 2010 Rebecca Mead remarked that the failure to name the decade then just ending reflected its status as “an orphaned era that no one quite wants to own, or own up to.” If anything, the problem has only become more acute in the eight years since Mead’s article. Given the startling political developments of the past year, people are asking themselves if a new era is beginning. If so, when did the old one end? For that matter, when did it start? Most urgently, where is this new one taking us? In 2017, the question is no longer merely “what shall we call ourselves,” but “where are we going?”

Organizing historical time aims to create an ordered narrative to explain how we have gotten to where we are and, implicitly or explicitly, where we may go next. In a speech delivered two days after the 2016 American presidential election, Zadie Smith, subject of the last chapter of this dissertation, highlighted these facts. Narrativizing the recent past, Smith contrasted the “relatively sunlit uplands” of the turn of the twenty-first century with the overweening gloom of late 2016. The lesson to be learned from this shift is not that the hopeful outlook of the early 2000s was false, “but rather that progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated, and reimagined if it is to survive” (italics Smith’s). Not only is the future an act of imagination, but the

1 2 idea of a better future that underpins progressive change requires constant cultivation.1 Refiguring the notorious campaign slogan of the incoming American president, Smith argued that “the examples of the past still hold out new possibilities for all of us, opportunities to remake, for a new generation, the conditions from which we ourselves have benefited” (italics mine). As Smith figures it, the progressive task is not simply to recreate a mythic past of—dubious—“greatness,” but to actively re- engage with the ways in which the real past conceived of a better future. That is the project of this dissertation: through a reconsideration of the ways in which the Edwardian period conceived of the better future of progressive politics, this dissertation adds to and expands our own storehouse of better futures at a moment when we need them the most.

One of the key literary ways for imagining the future is through the genre of comedy. Comedy is a genre of the future. According to the generic expectations established through New Comedy, the comedic plot traces a movement through opposition towards the “happy ending”—conventionally, marriage or the union of a heterosexual couple—in which the threats to a stable future raised by the plot are neutralized. Through this resolution, futurity is either latently or explicitly secured. The most obvious, and most reductive, form of this futurity is the heterosexual reproduction supposed to be implicit in conventional heterosexual marriage. Critics have moved beyond this biologically essentialist version of comedic futurity to examine comedy’s political and social implications. In one of the most influential iterations of this way of reading comedy, Northrop Frye asserts that the comedic plot “usually [traces] a movement from one kind of society to another.” In the comedic ending, the characters who had obstructed the lovers in the beginning of the play are revealed to be “usurpers,” and the “device in the plot that brings hero and heroine together causes a new society to crystallize around the hero” (163). Where the society at the beginning of the play was controlled by the “obstructing characters,”

[t]he society emerging at the conclusion of comedy represents, by contrast, a kind of moral norm, or pragmatically free society. Its ideals are seldom defined or formulated: definition and formulation belong to the humors, who want predictable activity. (169; italics mine)2

1For the purposes of this dissertation, I make a distinction between progress, a teleological project, and progressive change, which is ameliorative but not teleological. This distinction is not part of Smith’s speech. I discuss this distinction in more detail later in this introduction. 2 Frye borrows the term “humors” from Ben Jonson to refer to blocking characters.

The vagueness of the comedic ending is integral for Frye: lack of definition is essential to comedy’s liberatory possibilities. Frye’s version of comedy is both teleological and non-teleological. Though comedy works towards the creation of a “new society,” that society has yet to be defined. In a similar fashion to Frye’s conception of the “mythos” of comedy, progressive politics attempts to move towards a version of the “happy ending,” a better future in which the tensions and difficulties of the existing social order are, if not fully eliminated, then at least eased. In Britain in the Edwardian period, the question of how that better society should be approached came to the fore both in politics and in literature. Prompted by the staggering economic inequality made evident by the new discipline of sociology, as well as the interventions of the Fabians and the emergence of the Labour party as a political force, members of the Edwardian Liberal party were faced with the need to define the conditions for creating a better future. While those who favoured the Gladstonian Liberal principles of previous generations continued to promote the ideal of laissez-faire, those who came to be known as New Liberals believed that improvement could only be created and maintained through government intervention, and began to take action on that front. This bifurcation was what the Edwardians themselves understood by the term “crisis of liberalism.”

Setting the stage for my exploration of comedy and the Edwardian crisis of liberalism, the first chapter of this dissertation situates George Meredith’s “Essay on Comedy” (1877) and its fictional complement, The Egoist (1879), in relation to the contradictions of Gladstonian liberalism. In the central two chapters of this dissertation, I explore two literary responses to the Edwardian crisis of liberalism. George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara (1905; 1907) has often been read as literalizing Shaw’s rejection of Fabian gradualism in favour of an embrace of violence. Conversely, I read the text in relation to one of the real-life models for Andrew Undershaft, William Hesketh Lever. Lever’s dual career as paternalist industrialist and New Liberal MP epitomizes the Edwardian crisis of liberalism, to which Major Barbara is specifically responding. E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), though an established part of the twentieth-century literary canon, has often been read as a “failure.” I argue that the novel is actually about failure, which it situates as the precondition for ameliorative possibility. Forster’s vision of a better future, explored in that novel and in his other works, is premised not on perfectibility but on finding the most beneficial arrangement of the good already immanent in the world. Although he stopped writing novels after A Passage to India (1924), Forster exported his Edwardian New Liberal vision into the rest of the twentieth century through his

4 role as a public intellectual. In the last chapter of the text, I explore the persistence of these ideas in the fiction of Zadie Smith. Smith has explicitly acknowledged her debt to Forster on numerous occasions. Smith’s engagement with Forster forces a rethinking of the role of Edwardian fiction in larger narratives of literary history, but it also highlights the ways in which our own moment replays many of the same debates from the beginning of the twentieth century. I argue that NW (2012) is an implicit rewriting of Howards End that both acknowledges and corrects Forster’s New Liberal conclusions in the era of neoliberalism. “Neoliberalism” has often been a concept more invoked than defined: Matthew Eagleton-Pierce calls it “a kind of conceptual Swiss Army knife” (xiii). In this dissertation, I use the term in two key ways. First of all, in its very name it recalls the struggles around systematization which shaped the political developments of the Edwardian period, and with which the central chapters of this dissertation are concerned. The “liberalism” of “neoliberalism” is usually associated with “nineteenth-century [British] economic liberalism…[which] was predicated upon laissez-faire economics, and was closely associated with free trade” (Palley 20) The Edwardian New Liberal social welfare reforms explicitly reacted against this form of liberalism. Second, following Wendy Brown’s reading of the term in Undoing the Demos (2015), I see “neoliberalism” as naming a particularly negative attitude towards the future, against which the ameliorative futurities explored by this dissertation are explicitly positioned. Just a few days before I wrote this sentence, an article ran in The Sunday Times of London with the headline “Facebook Builds a Company Town.” Except for the name of the company, the issue could not be more Edwardian. Understanding and exploring the political complexities of the Edwardian period can expand existing narratives of literary history, but it is also imperative for coming to grips with both the world in which we live in and the future, or futures, to which we aspire.

“Edwardian” Defined

The period following the death of Queen Victoria is generally referred to by the name of her successor, the former “superannuated Prince of Wales” (Ellmann “Two Faces” 188), Edward VII. Identifying this period by the King’s name is fraught: Richard Ellmann suggests that the term “Edwardian” exists precisely because English does not have a “neat phrase…, like ‘the nineties,’ to describe the first ten years of a century” (188). Furthermore, the dates associated with the so-called “Edwardian” period rarely coincide with those of the King’s reign. Edward died on May 6, 1910, leaving the throne to his son, George V, yet few studies of the period end in that year. In fact, there

5 is little critical consensus about the end point of the period: a case has been made for the sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912, the outbreak of The First World War in 1914, or even the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The start date for the period has proven similarly elastic: for Jonathan Rose, the Edwardian period began in 1895, well before Edward took the throne (xiii).

Beyond dates, the “spirit of an age” is often expressed figuratively. “Monarchical” forms of periodization align the period with the public character of the monarch. The Victorian period, for example, is generally identified with Victoria’s perceived dour and weighty seriousness. Conversely, the perception of the Edwardian era is usually coloured by Edward’s playboy reputation. In a more figuratively compact form, the practice of leaving the bottom button of one’s waistcoat undone, popularized by the King, is often adduced as a figure of his court’s reputation as the “epitome of conspicuous consumption” (Matthew). Besides those proceeding from the body of the monarch, two persistent tropes—or, to be more precise, groups of tropes—have been associated with the Edwardian period: the “afternoon garden party” cluster, and the “Janus” cluster. These two groups are not wholly distinct, as the former often serves as the backwards-looking face of the latter.

The “garden-party” tropic cluster is associated with a particular class, and by extension a particular location: the country house. In a frequently quoted line, George Orwell figured “those years before 1914,” as epitomized by “an atmosphere...of eating everlasting strawberry ices on green lawns to the tune of the Eton Boating Song.” Orwell was explicitly distancing himself from the values of the period, which he saw as characterized by “the sheer vulgar fatness of wealth, without any kind of aristocratic elegance to redeem it” (357). Vita Sackville-West’s use of the country house setting in her novel The Edwardians (1930) serves a similar purpose. For others, this tropic cluster serves a nostalgic and uncritical function. In his memoirs, Osbert Sitwell pictured the period from his birth in 1892 to the outbreak of The First World War as a “brief golden halt” in which “[e]verything was calm and still and kindly” (qtd in Read 31). Focusing exclusively on the upper classes, the “garden party” trope also—inadvertently or not—occludes the massive inequality by which the period was characterized and towards which much of its political work was directed. And yet, this figuration of the Edwardian period has proven remarkably persistent in the popular imagination. Downton Abbey (2010-2016) ended its first series with Britain’s August 1914 declaration of war on Germany being announced at a literal garden party. As this instance makes clear, the “garden party” tropic cluster is inevitably associated with retrospection. As such, it takes its full meaning from an implicit or

6 explicit opposition between the putative complacency and comfort of the Edwardian period and the difficulties, horrors, and privations of The First World War and the years which followed, up to and including the Second World War. In this way, the “garden party” tropic cluster is inherently tragic: its focus is on the “downward movement…from innocence toward hamartia, and from hamartia to catastrophe” (Frye 162). The “garden party” tropic cluster also calls to mind the pastoral associations of comedy, which Frye calls “the drama of the green world” (182). With the exception of Meredith’s The Egoist (1879), the texts examined in this dissertation pick up the pastoral and refigure it for their own ends. In Shaw’s Perivale St Andrews, the town’s crypto-pastoral qualities cover for political stasis and violent hypocrisy, while in Forster’s vision the garden and the forest affirm, protect, and endorse the value of political and sexual difference. In Smith’s contemporary vision, however, the effects of climate change emblematize the wasted futurity of neoliberalism.

The “garden party” cluster depends upon a stark opposition between “before” and “after,” and upon the elision of the underside of the era’s “vulgar fatness of wealth,” the devastating and widespread poverty revealed by Edwardian sociology and targeted by its progressive politics. Conversely, the “Janus” cluster asserts the co-existence of elements of “crisis” or “difficulty” in the midst of the putative contentment and stability of the “garden party.” The Edwardian period was, in fact, marked by various iterations of crisis. The period saw the rise of militant suffragism and eruptions of violent anarchism and terrorism, the proliferating strikes of 1910 and 1911, as well as the ever-escalating military and political tensions between England and Germany which would erupt so cataclysmically in 1914. Because it saw the last Liberal majority in British history in the 1906 election, the Edwardian period is also the primal scene of the British crisis of liberalism.3 The “Janus-faced” trope forms the structural basis of Ellmann’s essay “The Two Faces of Edward” (1959), which set the coordinates for the general understanding of “Edwardian literature” in literary criticism. Ellmann pictures Edwardian literature not as “the decorous extension of tradition” (189), but as looking both forwards towards modernism and backwards towards Victorianism. Despite its foundational conceit, the article focuses squarely on the face that looks “urgently towards the age of anxiety.”4 Ellmann

3 For the sake of clarity, I use “Liberal” with a capital “L” to refer to the Liberal party and “liberal” with a lower-case “l” to refer to the political philosophy of liberalism, except in the case of New Liberalism, where both letters are conventionally capitalized. 4 Ellmann appears to mean literary modernism by this term, and not the Second World War period in which Auden’s poem was both written and set, or the Cold War period to which it is often applied.

7 presents the Edwardian period under the gaze of a modernist: even if it was itself “not [yet] fully modern” (207), Edwardian literature anticipates modernism. In this way the essay ends up reinscribing the “lost identity” of Edwardianism Ellmann bemoaned in the Foreword to the volume in which the essay was published. Setting aside Ellmann’s modernism-oriented perspective, his Janus-faced trope remains an extremely useful figure for understanding both the literature of the Edwardian era and the era itself. For Ellmann, the future the forward-looking face anticipated was modernism, a perspective at best overly hopeful and at worst anachronistic. By contrast, this dissertation addresses the ways in which the Edwardians themselves conceived of the future, both politically and in literature. In short, instead of defining them by what came after I seek to take the Edwardians on their own terms. I explore the futures the Edwardians pictured for themselves, and specifically the better futures imagined at the intersection of literary comedy and progressive politics.

This is not to say, however, that I seek to elide or diminish the importance of The First World War. Insofar as it represented the literal and utterly brutal annihilation of the futures of a “lost generation” (Hemingway), it is an inescapably important element in any history of the literary, social, cultural or political futures of the twentieth century. Rather, my argument is that the war was not the only future the Edwardians imagined. Without a doubt, the Edwardians felt that some kind of military engagement with Germany was imminent, if not inevitable. However, that was not their only concern. In fact, in David Lloyd-George’s presentation of his infamous “People’s Budget” of 1909, provisions for war and social welfare were interdependent. The Budget set aside funding for building the fearsome Dreadnoughts. But, in his presentation of the bill on April 29th, Lloyd-George remarked to the Commons that, “[s]hould it…be discovered that our fears [of German naval escalation] are groundless…then the money [for building Dreadnoughts] will find its uses either in further endowment of our social programme for the benefit of the masses of the people or in giving the much-promised relief to the local ratepayer” (HC Deb 29 April 1909 col 480). The very same money could be used either for building warships or building social welfare legislation, depending on the circumstances. In the same speech, Lloyd-George figured his budget as “a War Budget. It is for raising money to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness” (HC Deb 29 April 1909

In a neat reversal of Ellmann’s formulation, Samuel Hynes explicitly argued that the Edwardian period could equally be called the “Age of Anxiety” (1968 17).

8 col 548). The Edwardian period has often been either defined or overshadowed by the actual war that broke out five years later. Lloyd-George’s figurative war, which was at the heart of the Edwardian crisis of liberalism, is just as important a consideration.

Despite these caveats, for the purposes of this dissertation I use the conventional end date of 1914 for the Edwardian period. I do so not to reinforce this convention but to question it. 1914 was the year when The First World War began, but it was also the year when E.M. Forster completed his first version of Maurice, not published until 1971. In the text’s “Terminal Note” and idiosyncratic dedication, Forster positions 1914 as the last moment when a particular kind of future seemed possible. For Forster, 1914 marked the end of a specific vision of ameliorative possibility. In choosing 1914 as the end date for my study of the Edwardian period I am actually working against the popular conception of the Edwardian period as only the protracted lead-up to The First World War. This version of the period is teleological: according to it, everything in the Edwardian period inevitably led up to The First World War, and so the entire period is defined by it. My aim in this dissertation is to give a non-teleological account of the Edwardian period, in which its own complexities are highlighted and explored. This dissertation draws on, but questions, the conventional ways of figuring the Edwardian period in order to give the greatest latitude and space to the visions of the future of the period itself.

Edwardian Comedy

Given that the Edwardian period has so often been figured as tragic, culminating in the sinking of the Titanic and commencement of the First World War, the decision to approach it through the lens of comedy may seem counterintuitive, if not perverse. Nonetheless, I assert that comedy is the perfect vehicle through which to more fully examine the literature and politics of the Edwardian period for a number of reasons. First, a focus on comedy enables a rethinking of the “unserious” reputation of the period. This dissertation will demonstrate that neither comedy nor the Edwardians are or were unconcerned with “serious issues.” In fact, the Edwardians often used comedy to approach those very same issues, both in literature and in politics. Second, the first decades of the twentieth century saw the emergence of three theories of comedy which have been enormously influential for both the literary and critical practices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Henri Bergson’s Le rire, first published as two articles in the Revue de Paris in 1900, Sigmund Freud’s Jokes and their

Relation to the Unconscious (1905), and Francis Cornford’s The Origin of Attic Comedy (1914). In this way, the historical moment is an important milestone in the intellectual discussion surrounding the larger category that I call, following Aristotle, “the laughable” (41). Third, and most importantly, comedy is a genre of the future. A study of the Edwardian uses and conceptions of comedy is the most expeditious way to access the period’s conceptions of ameliorative futurity. Foregrounding these concepts will help to move beyond an end-oriented conception of Edwardianism, allowing a more nuanced and detailed consideration of the period itself.

My central methodology in this dissertation is to read primary literary texts alongside critical commentaries on comedy or genre by their authors. Historical contextual materials and secondary historical sources provide a fuller sense of the period. In the body of the dissertation, I use the only strictly Edwardian theory of the three mentioned above, that of Francis Cornford. The theory of comedy put forth by The Origin of Attic Comedy (1914) has both a practical and a theoretical relation to the aims of my project. Practically speaking, the text is associated with the work of Gilbert Murray, the model for Adolphus Cusins, one of the central characters in Shaw’s Major Barbara, subject of my second chapter. Nevertheless, the influence of Cornford's text on this project is indirect. My methodology is informed by Cornford’s technique of generic estrangement, which he used to access the “ritual drama lying behind Comedy” (vii). In the introduction to Attic Comedy, Cornford estranges his reader’s sense of the marriage imperative of romantic comedy. The centrality of this idea to contemporary conceptions of comedy, of which his exemplar is Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling (1749), has caused readers to fundamentally misread Old Comedy’s ending by assuming that it is generically mandated. As Cornford notes, the “last term in the fixed series of incidents which make up the plot-formula of Aristophanic Comedy” is the Kômos, in which the “hero…is accompanied” by an unspeaking associate, who is “the temporary partner of the hero in what is, in fact though not always in the legal sense, a marriage.” However, the “marriage” enacted in the Kômos is completely unmotivated by plot: the female partner appears out of nowhere, and her absence means that the plots themselves are “entirely free from any conception of romantic love” (17), by which Cornford understood heterosexual romance. The mismatch between the Aristophanic plot and the “marriage” with which it concludes is so extreme that this “canonical ending” (16) can be ascribed only to ritual (18). Setting aside the single-minded emphasis on either ritual or origins, this is also my methodology in this dissertation. My readings of individual comedic texts foreground the ways they themselves “de-conventionalize” comedic conventions in

10 order to draw attention to those very conventions. Similarly, the project as a whole aims to “de- conventionalize” conventional ways of understanding the Edwardian period by foregrounding the complexities of its intellectual, social, cultural, and political context and move it away from an exclusively end-oriented model of meaning.

Genre Studies

The tradition of writing about comedy often seems to have taken place in the interstices, or on the periphery, of other discussions. The storied loss of the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics, supposedly on comedy, epitomizes the sense that the comedic theoretical tradition is initiated around a void.5 A major part of the appeal of this putative second Poetics is its speculatively systematic quality. The text seems to hold out the possibility for two things comedy has long thought to be lacking: systematization, and by extension legitimation. The perception is that this lost text would have provided a rubric for thinking about comedy, as the extant Poetics did for tragedy. The fragmentary nature of the European tradition of writing about comedy has engendered a persistent vagueness about terms, as “comedy” is often used interchangeably with “humour,” “wit,” “laughter,” “satire,” “irony,” “joking,” “funniness,” and so on. As a result, much writing on comedy has been concerned with definition and disambiguation. My concern in this dissertation is primarily with comedy as a genre. I do not intend to provide, or even to attempt to provide, a definitive, systematic meaning for “comedy.” Such an exercise is both totalizing and, more importantly, ahistorical. Rather, my intention is to investigate what was at stake for literature and for culture as a whole in the definition, redefinition, and literary deployment of the genre of comedy in relation to progressive politics from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first in Britain.

As such, my project responds to the implicit challenge laid out by John Frow in a “state of the field” article from a 2007 PMLA special issue devoted to genre studies: to investigate the ways that genre can be seen not just as a matter of classification, but as “a key component of the construction of

5 Whether or not it ever actually existed, this text has been an irresistibly provocative absence, prompting various imaginative attempt to fill it. These attempts have been both fictional, like Umberto Eco’s popular novel The Name of the Rose (1980, Italian; 1983, English), and scholarly, such as the publication of the Tractatus Coisilianus in 1839, and Richard Janko’s attempted critical resuscitation of that discredited ancient manuscript in his Aristotle on Comedy: Towards a Reconstruction of Poetics II (1984).

11 knowledges” (Frow 1632). Frow argues that the literary study of genre has remained relatively static for the past three or four decades because it has found itself stranded “with the beginnings of an account of the social life of forms, but not with a fully-fledged research paradigm” (1629). The way to begin elaborating and implementing this paradigm is to look to other disciplines and to begin adapting their recent developments to the study of literature: one of the most eligible sources for such a revitalizing graft is the New Rhetoric, whose focus on “the way discourse works as a practice shaping the meanings of a social environment” could point genre studies away from taxonomy and towards a more "pragmatic function” (1630). In other words, the New Rhetoric seems to offer a way of making specific Kenneth Burke’s generalized contention that “each of the great poetic forms stresses its own peculiar way of building the mental equipment (meanings, attitudes, characters) by which one handles the significant factors of his time” (Burke 34). Although routed through the New Rhetoric, Frow’s formulation of the future for genre studies, with its Foucauldian overtones and emphasis on discourse, also bears a striking resemblance to the New Historicism and Stephen Greenblatt’s contention that “the study of genre is an exploration of the poetics of culture” (6). The non-systematic approaches of the New Historicism are uniquely suited not only to the specifically non-systematic genre of comedy but to genre conceived more broadly.6

My argument in this dissertation is that, as it was integrally concerned with the future, the genre of comedy provided some of the “mental equipment” for “handl[ing]” (Burke 34) key elements in the emergence and consolidation of modernity, and particularly the move towards a reconfiguration of the political and social future of Britain through progressive reform in the Edwardian period. My contention is not that comedy itself is progressive, but rather that it can be used as a way of reading progressive politics, and vice versa. Much of the writing on comedy in the 1980s and 1990s was concerned with attempting to fix comedy’s political orientation. My purpose is rather to examine both the historical coordinates of the emergence of a progressive conception of comedy in the late

6 Looking back on more than two decades of New Historicist criticism in the Introduction to Practicing New Historicism (2000), Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt contend that they are “convinced…that new historicism is not a repeatable methodology or a literary critical program” (19). In this way, it is very much like the conception of genre around which I have structured my project: while it has certain clearly definable features—the interruption of the supposed unity of the text (Greenblatt 6), the “discovery of unexpected discursive contexts for literary works by pursuing their ‘supplements’ rather than their overt thematics” (Gallagher and Greenblatt 17), etc.—, it fundamentally resists totalizing definition or systematization.

Victorian period and its literary afterlife in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. My focus throughout the project is primarily on the “building” part of the equation, which I see as mostly literary, and concerned with the author and text, and not so much the "handling,” which I see as mostly social, and concerned with the reader. In other words, I emphasize the ways that certain texts, in various different forms, used the genre of comedy to construct “mental equipment” in relation not only to particular instances of progressive legal or political reform but also to the apparently bifurcating attitudes towards reform espoused by liberalism and socialism.7 I foreground political reform in this dissertation because it is non-teleological. Reform does not seek an eschatological overthrow, but rather an open-ended improvement. The crux of this dissertation is a debate, which I call the Edwardian crisis of liberalism, about how that improvement should be approached, whether through systemic restructuring or through piecemeal, ad hoc solutions. A similar debate animates contemporary approaches to neoliberalism, which offers as answers more of the same (Brown 221), as opposed to structural change. This focus on literary "building” also provides a way of addressing what Frow sees as the central challenge of importing the New Rhetoric into literary genre studies: acknowledging that their concerns do not exactly match up, he contends that the former’s emphasis on the ways “discourse works as a practice shaping the meanings of a social environment” needs to be “supplemented by a distinction between those genres that are immediately rooted in a social situation and those (such as most literary genres) that have a more mediated relation to the social— responding first to the institution and the abstract speech situation of literature” (1630).

This dissertation begins with literary genre's indirect relation to the social. In Frow's formulation, this relationship takes place through the “institution” of literature. The non-fictional treatment of comedy in George Meredith’s “Essay on Comedy” (1877) opens the door to literature itself through its novelistic companion piece, The Egoist (1879). The “institution” of literature I take to have two, interrelated meanings: not only literary tradition, but also, by extension, education. The latter is not only central to my reading of Meredith’s “Essay,” but is also one of the era’s “significant factors,” one in which the boundaries between literature and the social were blurred, if not effaced. The late

7 Although “form” and “genre” are often used interchangeably, as in the quotation from Burke, I use the term “form” to refer to the structure of a text—i.e. a novel, a play or a critical text—, as distinct from genre, which I see as having both trans-formal—i.e. “comedy” is a generic category which encompasses both the novel and drama—and more narrowly formal iterations—i.e. the “comic novel.”

Victorian/Edwardian period witnessed a seismic shift in education in Britain. With the passing of the Forster Education Act 1870, Britain began to move towards something approaching universal primary education, and by extension greatly expanded literacy. The era also saw the emergence of English Literature as an object of both academic study and instruction, first as the “poor man’s classics” (Eagleton 27) at educational organizations for the lower and working classes and later at Oxford and Cambridge. Consonant with these developments, the highly self-conscious discussions of literary practice associated with modernism began to emerge. Meredith’s “Essay” is both part and forerunner of this trend, whether or not that fact has hitherto been recognized.8 My specific argument in the first chapter is that, as Meredith formulated it in the “Essay” and put it into practice in The Egoist, the epistemological operations inspired by comedy are a means of potentially creating progressive change in society. Meredith’s texts look toward the creation of a better future both within comedic texts and for the genre of comedy itself. Like the political and legal reforms enacted by Gladstone's Liberal Party during the Great Age of Reform, this comic change envisioned by Meredith would not only occur within existing systems, but would in fact guarantee the continuation of those systems. The Meredithian concept of comedy had an explicitly pedagogical purpose: to instruct the British public in the ways of comedy with the ultimate goal of allowing them to use the “Comic Spirit” as a “public advocate” (33). The other chapters of this dissertation present specific comedic texts in relation to the political-historical narrative of the decline of the British Liberal Party and the rise of the Labour Party over the course of the twentieth century, and then the reverse operation of the decline of New Labour and the rise of neoliberalism in the mid-2000s to early 2010s. I examine comedy first as the object of theoretical or critical discussion and as a genre of the novel in the 1870s, the period of Gladstonian liberalism; next, as a genre of both drama and the novel in the Edwardian period, the era of the emergence of the Labour party as a political force, the last Liberal majority in British history and the shift towards New, or Social, Liberalism; and finally, I examine it as a genre of the novel in the mid-2000s, the era of neoliberalism.

Throughout this narrative, the emphasis is on convergences between the ways both these texts and these political organizations responded to the question of the future. The narrative of this dissertation is not the tragic decline of the Liberal Party/liberalism and/or the comic rise of socialism/Labour, nor

8 For example, Jeff Wallace sets the temporal goal posts for his “Modernists on the Art of Fiction” as 1880-1930 (15), and begins with Henry James, Meredith’s great rival.

14 of tragicomedy, a term often associated with the twentieth century and its literature. Rather, the narrative is one of Burkean comedic complexity.9 Whereas, for Burke, the tragic plot was shaped by the ever-present possibility of the deus ex machina’s popping up to “give events a fatalistic turn,” comedy “must develop logical forensic causality to its highest point, calling not upon astronomical marvels to help shape the plot, but completing the process of internal organization whereby each event is deduced ‘syllogistically’ from the premises of the informing situation” (42). For “astronomical marvels” I would substitute “reductive periodic or political divisions,” as I attempt to move beyond modernism, postmodernism, Edwardianism and/or Victorianism ex machina to a more fluid model of generic, periodic, historical and political interconnection. My methods of reading literary texts in relation to their “informing situations” are not strictly “syllogistic,” but follow instead the New Historicist conception of texts as “fields of force” (Greenblatt 6) existing in a dynamic relationship with other such fields, including genre itself. As such, my project responds to the New Historicist imperative to call assumptions and classifications “into question and treat them as part of the history that needs to be interpreted” (Gallagher and Greenblatt 15). In both the formulation of my methodology in this introduction and in the conclusion to this dissertation, I also explicitly include myself as part of this “history that needs to be interpreted” in the form of both my relationship to the current political moment and my own political education.

Liberalism: Methodology

In the first three chapters of this dissertation, the reading of liberalism focuses on contemporary discussions by the literary authors themselves and by other Edwardian commentators. I also use the framing of acts of legislation by the Liberal party in Parliament as recorded in the Historic Hansard record to directly address how the Edwardians themselves saw their interventions. Interpretations of later historians help to contextualize these materials. In the last chapter and the conclusion, I similarly cite commentators contemporary with the work being discussed. In addition to contemporary sources, in the first three chapters, I also consider the later interpretation of these texts

9 Burke's figuration of comedy is also itself an integral part of the twentieth century afterlife of George Meredith's work: his view of comedy as “humane” and “requir[ing] the maximum of forensic complexity” (42) is informed by Meredith, whom he quotes to begin the section on comedy in Attitudes Towards History (1937) (39). Like Francis Cornford’s, Burke’s writing serves simultaneously as a prompt for the methodological framework of my project and part of the genealogy it is engaged in tracing.

15 in terms of literary criticism and the interpretation of liberalism. For example, in the chapter on Forster I consider the ways in which his texts have been read over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, I have not reversed the course of that interpretation, which is to say I do not use later histories or readings of liberalism to read Edwardian or Victorian texts. My reasons for this decision are twofold. First, this manner of proceeding is a literalization of my stated goal to take the Edwardians as much as possible at their own word by quite simply using their own words as much as possible. Second, and most crucially, at the core of this dissertation is the exploration of a moment of bifurcation in the understanding of the meaning of the word “liberal,” both practically and ideologically. I am proceeding from the assumption that the divergent strands of classical liberalism and New Liberalism at the heart of the Edwardian crisis of British liberalism were never fully reunited after that moment had passed. There was no simple comedic reconciliation for them. Rather, each has had their own, deeply complex afterlives. My foregrounding contemporary sources and a linear narrative are an attempt to both acknowledge and address my own biases and to provide a certain degree of clarity. As a Canadian, I am highly aware that the word “liberal” evokes for me something closer to Edwardian New Liberalism than classical liberalism. I am also aware that that is not the case for those who have been shaped by other intellectual and political traditions and circumstances. Just as this dissertation seeks to move away from defining the Edwardian period exclusively by what came after, I also wish to define the Edwardian crisis of liberalism on its own terms as much as possible.

Ages of Inequality

Massive economic inequality was one of the key elements in the complex interactions of the Edwardian period, and is also one of the key ways in which the Edwardian period is so much like our own time. In “Fences: A Brexit Diary,” published shortly after the “Leave” campaign won the June 2016 referendum on Britain’s remaining in the European Union (“Brexit”), Zadie Smith adduces a £5,000 Sazerac, on offer at London’s Savoy hotel and reportedly the “most expensive cocktail in the world,” as a “stupid symbol” of the inequality characteristic of contemporary Britain. Smith’s £5,000 drink is to 2016 what Orwell’s “strawberry ices” were to the Edwardian period: a figure of ludicrously conspicuous consumption bought at the expense of the economic and social deprivation of others. At the same time as that cocktail exists, Smith acknowledges that the “economically and socially disenfranchised” of Britain are “struggling, deeply unhappy, and they

16 know it.” Similarly, in an inversion of the “garden party” tropic cluster, Samuel Hynes posits that the Edwardian period only would have seemed like that “to those who were inside the garden” (1968 4). Large sections of the British population were not. By the turn of the twentieth century, this fact had become startlingly visible.

Like our contemporary moment, the Edwardian era saw complex interactions between the intertwined concerns of class, labour, and social welfare. During the first decade of the twentieth century, the working class emerged as a force in British politics for the first time. The 1900 general election saw two Labour MPs elected. Their number increased more than tenfold to twenty-nine in 1906, and then increased again to forty in the first general election of 1910, and forty-two in the second (Craig 580-1). Through sociology, a newly-emergent discipline, poverty became not only visible but undeniable: Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London (1889-97), Seebohm Rowntree’s Poverty: A Study of Town Life (1901), L.G Chiozza Money’s Riches and Poverty (1905), Philip Snowden’s The Living Wage (1912) and the Webbs’ Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission (1909), among others, made “poverty in England actual, a matter of facts and figures that demanded public action” (Hynes 1968 55). This awareness also had an imperial dimension. In 1902, as the Second Boer War was finally drawing to a close, General Sir Frederick Maurice provided the staggering statistic that sixty percent of the English population were “unfit for service” in the Army (22). This alarming number was taken up by Seebohm Rowntree, the confectionery heir-cum-sociologist, who wondered whether it were “not true that the whole labouring population of the land are at present living under conditions which make it impossible that they should rear the next generation to be sufficiently virile” (qtd in Hynes 1968 22) to either fight for or defend the Empire. In response, the government convened an “Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration,” which “properly directed most of its attentions to conditions of life in city slums.” Their 1904 report indicated that the increased urban population from large-scale migration over the last decades of the previous century had not prompted improved urban conditions. As a result, in 1904 “the English poor were worse off than they had ever been” (23). These conclusions inscribed a sense of national decline or decadence in the popular imagination. Political conservatives sought to reinvigorate British manhood in the hope of cultivating better imperial soldiers: Robert Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts, founded in 1910, were emblematic of this response (27). Those on the political left were also motivated to take action, both through the mechanisms of government and elsewhere.

The question of poverty highlights the complexities of the Edwardian moment, including the coordinates of the contemporary crisis of liberalism. The issue of poverty also profoundly troubles both the “Janus-faced” and “garden party” tropic clusters. The latter erases the poor in favour of an exclusive focus on the rich. Conversely, attempts to both find and theorize remedies for poverty are a vexed iteration of the former. In looking for ways to address the pressing and growing issue of poverty, Edwardian reformers of all political stripes grappled both with what had come before and with the question of how to create a better future. In terms of the former, they had especially to deal with the toxic legacy of the New Poor Law, one of the defining institutions of the Victorian Period.10 The social welfare reforms enacted as legislation also trouble the tragic narratives associated with the period. In practical terms, these reforms did lead to at least a certain degree of improvement in the material conditions of people’s lives, even if they “failed to meet the needs of the poorest sections of all” (Harris 165). In larger narrative terms, the Edwardian Liberal welfare reforms have also been seen as laying the groundwork for the mid-century British Welfare State (Harris 165). More to the point, these reforms are at the heart of the Edwardian crisis of liberalism, not because they were misguided or failed but because they took place at the crossroads of competing, divergent visions of the role of the state in public life.

The Politics of Modernism

Just as the complexities of the literature and society of the Edwardian period have been subsumed into a linear narrative of the inevitable rise of modernism, studies of the politics of modernism over the past three or four decades have tended to either construct or repeat a singular narrative linking British literary modernism and fascism, although that narrative has also been complicated recently. As with the question of The First World War’s relationship to the Edwardian period, this narrative is both true and important, but it is simplistic. More specifically, it has the unintended consequence of

10 The extent to which Edwardian reforms or plans for reform departed from or carried on the spirit of the New Poor Law continues to be a source of profound debate for contemporary historians. For example, Pope, Hoyle, and Pratt contend that “[i]t would be wrong…to suggest any radical change either in the scope of provision or in the principles and attitudes governing action” (2) by the Edwardian Liberal Party. Conversely, Bernard Harris argues that these Liberal welfare reforms “offered a genuine alternative to the deterrent and stigmatising policies of the [New] Poor Law” (165).

18 eliding the complex interactions of the political left. As Janice Ho notes, a “governing premise in [recent] modernist studies” has been that “a crisis of liberalism simply entailed its disappearance from the political scene once it had been upstaged by the newer ideologies of communism and fascism.” Furthermore, “[t]his [assumption] ignores how liberalism refashioned itself in different ways, and retained a measure of influence on even those who professed to reject it” (Ho 60). This “governing premise” also retroactively dismisses both the precipitating factors and the coordinates of that same crisis. In the version of the politics of modernism presented by Ho, both the crisis of liberalism and its passing out of relevance are taken for granted. However, recent work in modernist studies has sought to address and complicate the relationship between modernism and the political left. John Lucas’s The Radical Twenties (1999) and Benjamin Kohlmann’s Committed Styles: Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s (2014) both address the relationship between leftist politics and literature in specific decades. This dissertation attempts to do something similar with the first fourteen years of the twentieth century, the period we call Edwardian. In the two central chapters of this dissertation I foreground the coordinates of the Edwardian crisis of liberalism. I also place that crisis in historical context, exploring its origins in the Gladstonian liberalism of the Victorian period in Chapter 1, and examining its aftereffects and resonances in the rise of contemporary neoliberalism in Chapter 4. Each chapter corresponds with a specific moment in the history of British liberalism or progressive politics. Chapter 1 is concerned with the aftermath of the so-called great reforming period of Gladstonian liberalism in the late 1860s and early 1870s, when the profound tension between the Liberal Party’s putative commitment to laissez-faire and their reforming interventions was most evident. Chapter 2 examines the period at and around the Liberal majority produced by the 1906 general election, which gave the Liberals the political force to begin enacting reforms. Chapter 3 reflects on the constitutional crisis provoked by David Lloyd George’s “People’s Budget” of 1909, which engendered two hung parliaments bookending 1910, as well as the later context of the Second World War. Chapter 4 examines the period around 2010, when a refigured Labour party claiming descent from the New Liberals of the Edwardian period fell out of political power to be replaced by David Cameron’s post-Thatcherist, pre-Brexit Conservative Party. The narrative of this dissertation is a narrative not of progress but of progressive tendencies, of the ways in which people imagined things could or might get better. This dissertation tells a history of comedic visions, but the narrative of this dissertation is not itself comedic. This dissertation does not argue that some sort of “happy ending” has been achieved in any domain. In fact, Chapter 4, which addresses the failures and shortcomings of particular Edwardian visions of

19 futurity, argues quite the opposite. This dissertation also does not argue that the “happy ending” is an idea that should be accepted uncritically or that is in itself beneficial. Rather, this dissertation examines the ways in which the idea of a better future has been both used and questioned in several specific historical moments.

The Edwardian Crisis of Liberalism

Although there is a general consensus that liberalism underwent a crisis in the first quarter of the twentieth century, its exact location is a matter of debate. Ho argues that the “crystallization of the crisis of liberalism [can be seen] in three major events of the early 20th century: the First World War between 1914 and 1918; the 1917 Russian Revolution; and Adolf Hitler’s ascension to power in 1933” (49). These events were emblematic of a larger crisis in European liberalism. The origin of the crisis in twentieth-century British liberalism is in the Edwardian period. At first blush, the Edwardian period seems to have been a moment of triumph for the Liberal party. The 1906 general election granted them a staggering majority. Under the leadership of Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the Liberals gained 216 seats for a total of 400, while the Conservatives lost 201 for a total of 133 (Craig 580-1).11 Although his political sympathies lay with Labour, contemporary observer F.H. Stead describes the group which assembled in February of 1906 as “[i]ndeed a new Parliament.” For Stead, the 1906 parliament’s “goodness” may have seemed somewhat “tam[e],” evoking “more of the draughthorse than of the mustang,” yet “perhaps for that very reason it was better fitted to pull the heavy legislative pantechnicon along” (202). Conversely, George Dangerfield, whose well- known The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935) epitomizes the conventional tragic narrative of British liberalism, found hidden in this stirring scene the flaw that would ultimately result in that titular demise. For Dangerfield, the party that took power in 1906 “was like an army protected at all points except for one vital position on its flank. With the election of fifty-three Labor representatives, the death of Liberalism was pronounced; it was no longer the Left” (10).12 Echoing Dangerfield’s sentiment from a twenty-first century perspective, historian Chris Cook notes that despite the “high hopes of reforms to come” (41) from the new 1906 Parliament, a closer look at the

11 These numbers do not include the Liberal Unionists. 12 F.W.S. Craig’s British Parliamentary Results 1885-1918 reports only 29 Labour members elected in 1906, and 40 in the first election of 1910 (581). It is unclear where the number fifty-three came from.

20 government’s constitution “soon dispels the myth that the Liberals represented left-wing reforming radicalism,” since “[p]olitically, the party was dominated by ‘centre’ Liberals.” (42).

The character and political orientation of the Liberal government changed significantly after Campbell-Bannerman’s retirement in April 1908. H.H. Asquith became Prime Minister and David Lloyd-George became his Chancellor of the Exchequer. In this capacity, Lloyd-George would set in motion a chain of events that would ultimately provoke a constitutional crisis around the role of the House of Lords. Lloyd-George's 1909 budget bill, known as “the People’s Budget,” was designed to address the question of how, “in a period of declining trade,…to raise the revenue for both old-age pensions,” introduced the previous year, “and [the] increased naval expenditure” necessitated by the ramping up of the German programme. The mandate of the budget was foundationally divided between provisions for social welfare and provisions for warfare. Lloyd-George’s own sense of the budget’s function was, in a narrative sense, comedic. He concluded his budget speech to the

Commons on the 29th of April 1909 by asserting that the Bill represented a “War Budget”:

It is for raising money to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness. I cannot help hoping and believing that before this generation has passed away we shall have advanced a great step towards that good time when poverty and wretchedness and human degradation which always follow in its camp will be as remote to the people of this country as the wolves which once infested its forests. (HC Deb 29 April 1909 col 548)

The 1909 budget was looking squarely towards a safe, more equal future to be attained through a violent and decisive attack on economic inequality. Importantly, the budget’s provisions for warfare were contingent, whereas the provisions for social welfare were not. Contrary to the popular conception of the Edwardian period as only a prelude to war, the Edwardians themselves were far more concerned with improving their social and political world. Furthermore, the People’s Budget aimed to create a more equitable future not only in terms of where it spent money, but also in terms of where it sought the money for those disbursements. Income tax increases, as well as new taxes on motorcars and gas, were to supply the bulk of the money for the budget’s provisions. In short, Lloyd- George intended to raise money for his social welfare provisions by taxing both the accouterments of modernity and the incomes of the better-off in a radically unequal society.

Lloyd-George’s budget provoked a vigorous debate both within Parliament and without. Over the course of the summer of 1909, the discussion shifted from the particulars of the budget itself to the question of whether or not the House of Lords could reject a Finance Bill, which had not happened in 250 years. In this way, what had been “the crisis of the Budget…bec[a]me a crisis of the Constitution” (Cook 48). In Newcastle-upon-Tyne in October 1909, Lloyd-George asked his audience, “who ordained that a few should have the land of Britain as a perquisite; who made 10,000 people owners of the soil, and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth?” (qtd in Cook 48). In Howards End, published the following year, E.M. Forster would also question the places where liberal culture has its “sources of strength, [its] springs of vitality” (Leavis 270). On the 30th of

November, the Lords rejected the budget bill (Cook 48). On December 2nd., Prime Minister H.H. Asquith introduced a resolution in the Commons declaring the actions of the House of Lords a “breach of the Constitution and a usurpation of the rights of the Commons” (HC Deb 02 December 1909 col 578). Parliament was dissolved the following day and a general election set to begin on the

14th of January 1910 (Cook 48). This first of two elections that year saw the Liberals returned to power with 102 fewer seats than they had taken in 1906 (49). The sharp decline in electoral returns from 1906 to 1910 has often been seen as “the prelude to a period of peculiar difficulty and grave crisis in Liberal history” (50).

For many later commentators, the literal constitutional crisis provoked by the 1909 Budget represents the central catastrophe of both Edwardian British liberalism and of the Edwardian British Liberal Party. For the Edwardians themselves the crisis was to be found not in the opposition between “the Liberals and the Lords” (Dangerfield 8) but between various contending elements within both the Liberal party and liberalism. Economist, journalist, and lecturer J.A. Hobson, writing in the midst of the constitutional crisis, saw the titular Crisis in Liberalism (1909) “not in the immediate capacity to resist the insolent encroachment of the unrepresentative House, but in the intellectual and moral ability to accept and execute a positive progressive policy which involves a new conception of the functions of the State” (xi). Hobson argues that, though “the old individualism has long since been replaced by various enlargements of public activity,” these “have been mostly unconnected actions of an opportunist character.” This unsystemic, ad hoc quality has served to “disar[m] much opposition in the ranks of Liberalism.” The crisis then “consists in the substitution of an organic for an opportunist policy, the adoption of a vigorous, definite, positive policy of social reconstruction, involving important modifications in the legal and economic institutions of private

22 property and private industry” (xi). For Hobson, this substitution was already underway in the form of the reforms already enacted or in process of being enacted by the current Liberal government. He is careful, however, to note that the conception of the state being put forth by that government is

not Socialism…though implying a considerable amount of increased public ownership and control of industry…From the standpoint which best represents its continuity with earlier Liberalism, it appears as a fuller appreciation and realization of individual liberty contained in the provision of equal opportunities for self-development. But to this individual standpoint must be joined a just apprehension of the social, viz., the insistence that these claims or rights of self-development be adjusted to the sovereignty of social welfare. (xii)

For Hobson, the crisis was not centralized in the allocation of power between the Commons and the House of Lords, representative and “unrepresentative” legislative bodies, but in the very conception of the role of government in negotiating the relationship between “individual liberty” and “the sovereignty of social welfare.” In other words, Hobson located the crux of the crisis not in the constitutional ramifications of the People's Budget, but in its specific provisions.

In the central part of my dissertation, I argue that this deeply complex process of attempting to move from the scattershot approach to social welfare of nineteenth century liberalism to something more systemic is at the heart of the contingent, localized resolutions of both Shaw's Major Barbara (1905; 1907) and Forster's Howards End (1910). In the former, the industrialist Andrew Undershaft’s company town, Perivale St. Andrews, represents one approach to this question. Shaw explicitly patterned his fictional town on the real-life company towns built by late-Victorian/Edwardian paternalist industrialists. In Chapter 2, I argue that these towns can be read as metonymies of the Edwardian crisis of liberalism. They were built on and celebrated their links with classic, Gladstonian liberalism, but they also attempted to provide systems of social welfare for a select group of people. These systems were not only compromised in their efficiency by the fact of being localized and contingent, but their paternalist orientation also profoundly troubled the question of individual liberty. Shaw’s Perivale St. Andrews is an intervention in this contemporary political debate, through which he sought to critique not just the paternalist industrialists, but also the shortcomings of both liberalism as a philosophy and, by extension, of the contemporary Liberal Party. In Forster's novel, the “failure” of the conventional comedic plot becomes the precondition for

23 a new kind of possibility, just as the “failure” of the Liberal party in 1910 did not negate the implementation of their welfare reforms. Both Shaw and Forster take the potentially tragic materials of the crisis of liberalism and redeploy them comedically—Shaw as a means of critiquing liberalism’s shortcomings and Forster as a means of attempting to turn those shortcomings to pragmatic advantage. In the last chapter of the dissertation, I argue that Zadie Smith's NW (2012) takes up those shortcomings again to try and recreate a new version of Forsterian possibility for the twenty-first century by critiquing the short-term solutions and wasted futurity of neoliberalism.

Progress and Progressive

The Edwardian crisis of liberalism focuses the argument of the central part of this dissertation. However, in order to consider Edwardian visions of the future as fully as possible this crisis must be placed in the context of the larger category of progressive politics. In the first decade of the twentieth century, a third term was added to the binary of liberalism and conservatism in the arena of party politics: socialism. Socialism was a potent political and cultural force in Britain in the later nineteenth century. However, the election of the first Labour MPs in 1900 marked socialism’s first explicit entry into the machinery of the British government. For many critics socialism, either in the relatively organized form of the Labour party or Fabian Society or as a more nebulous movement, was the cause of the death of the British Liberal party. Samuel Hynes, for example, argues that by the Edwardian period, liberalism had become too “tangled in its conflicts and indecisions” to be “capable of action” and so “socialism assumed the progressive role in English political life.” In Hynes’s view, socialism was able to do this precisely because it was not tied to a specific political party, at least not at the beginning. Early Edwardian socialism was “a range of ideas rather than an organization,” and so was able to function as a “vital but unchanneled movement.” Exportability and adaptability were socialism’s greatest strengths: it was “an energy rather than a policy.” By the close of the Edwardian era, however, socialism had been “channeled” by the interventions of the Fabian Society (1968 87). Hynes’ depiction of amorphous socialism crystallizing into a more specific political program mirrors, but rephrases, the conflict Hobson traces within liberalism between ad hoc, scattershot reform and more systemic approaches. Although the coordinates were different, in both cases the central question was how best to act in order to create a better future. In the second chapter of this dissertation, I use George Bernard Shaw’s highly idiosyncratic version of socialism to consider not only liberal and/or Liberal versions of this better future, but Fabian ones as well.

For the purposes of this dissertation I make a distinction between “progress” and “progressive.” “Progress” I see as referring to a teleological movement oriented towards a specific goal. By contrast, I see the word “progressive” as denoting an ameliorative process. The difference between the two words can be seen at the level of their grammatical function: the noun “progress” names a monolithic thing, while the adjective “progressive” describes a tendency. In my view, “progressive” politics or narratives may aim towards specific goals, but the details of those goals are less important than the fact of first imagining them and then attempting to move towards them. In this way, my preference for the term “progressive” mirrors my own attempt to move away from exclusively end- oriented definitions of the Edwardian period. Furthermore, this usage reflects my stated goal of using contemporary terminology as much as possible, since these particular meanings of the terms “progress” and “progressive” are both products of the nineteenth century.

By now a Victorian cliché, the idea of “progress” is temporally complex. Although it seems to point to the future, it also inevitably draws upon the past. As Peter J. Bowler argues, the Victorian period was a moment of “material progress [which] was also an age dominated by a fascination with the past” (1). “Progress,” as a concept, offered a way of reconciling these two impulses by assimilating the massive changes of the present to a comprehensible, “meaningful historical pattern.” That said, Bowler argues that there was no singular, hegemonic Victorian conception of “progress.” Rather, there were multiple versions, with varying political, social, cultural, and religious implications (3). These diverse narratives had one thing in common: a clear sense of teleology. Ideas lacking a definable teleology were assimilated to teleological narratives, as Bowler argues was the case with Darwin’s theories. Bowler argues that Darwinism as it has been understood by the twentieth and twenty-first centuries should “not be treated as the main theme in the development of Victorian evolutionism.” Darwin’s ideas were “too radical” in their “deni[al] that there was a guiding force leading organic development towards a higher goal” (144). As a result, Darwinism was “absorbed into the liberal progressionist view of things, providing the perfect natural foundation for….the Whig interpretation of history” (158). “[W]higgism,” a “form of history told in such a way as to make the present seem the inevitable outcome of a trend running through the past” (7) was one of the teleological master-plots of Victorian progress. The term derives from the so-called “Whig histories,” which made the fortunes of one particular political party seem the inevitable outcome of the past (5). As the nineteenth century wore on, the “underlying values of Whiggism” came to be

25 accepted even by those who were not associated with the Liberal Party, which replaced the Whigs during the 1868 general election. By extension, the idea of “continuous social progress was, in effect, Whig history on a cosmic scale, in which the development of society was portrayed as an inexorable ascent towards Victorian values” (7). Understood in this way, Victorian narratives of progress were oriented towards the ratification of the Victorian present and the future as a continuation of that present.

The Victorian period also saw the emergence of the term “progressive” in its modern, political meaning, referring to an individual, policy or party committed to “advocating or working towards change or reform in society” (Oxford English Dictionary def. 4b).13 In the most influential Victorian iteration of the term, John Stuart Mill argued that “all writers” could be divided into the categories “Progressive and Conservative.” For Mill, Jeremy Bentham figured the former tendency, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge the latter (Mill Dissertations 331).14 Although he does not make a direct correlation between Bentham’s writings and political reform, Mill nevertheless ties the “Progressive” impulse to legislation, and specifically the Representation of the People Act 1832.15 From its inception, the modern, political meaning of the term “Progressive” was associated both with writing and with electoral reform. Drawing on this association, I also treat electoral reform as a baseline for Victorian and Edwardian progressive politics. Following the First Reform Act of 1832, the nineteenth century would see two subsequent Reform Bills in 1867 and 1884. Besides expanding the electorate, these Acts spurred other reforming legislation, such as the Forster Education Act 1870. The Forster Act, discussed in Chapter 1, created nearly-universal primary education, which in turn indirectly lead to other investigations. Charles Booth drew a large portion of the raw data for his Life and Labour of the People of London (1889-97) from School Board visitors, who “[were] in daily contact with the people” (Booth 5) and so had a clear idea of the shape of their daily lives and the impact of poverty on them. Booth’s study helped to make the problem of poverty shockingly

13 The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary for this meaning dates to 1830. 14 In the original, unsigned version of the article, published in 1838 in the London and Westminster Review, Mill uses the term “Movement” in relation to Bentham. The term “Progressive” was substituted in the revised article in Dissertations and Discussions (1859). 15 Although Mill identifies Bentham as belonging to “the same division as ourselves” (331), the essay is highly critical of him. Rather than an identification with Benthamite philosophy, the revised version of the essay epitomizes Mill’s “attempt to synthesize radical and conservative thought” (Capaldi 143).

26 visible, necessitating further intervention. These examples indicate that by the term “progressive” I understand a forward movement towards greater equality and improvement in the material conditions of people’s lives, but without the sense of either clear linearity or perfectibility inherent in the idea of “progress.” In my understanding of the term, a study of “progressive” thought is as much a study of shortcomings and accidents—both happy and not— as it is of clear, intentional successes in service of a definable, totalizing goal.

In addition to these narrative implications, on the most basic level the term “progressive” allows me to talk about political reform in a general way, without being tied to either one political party or one political ideology. This in turn allows me to avoid writing my own version of Whig history. Reform and the Liberal party are generally taken to be synonymous in the Victorian context, not least because of the efforts of the Whig historians and their descendants. However, the legislative history surrounding the Reform Bills is far more complex. The first and third Bills, of 1832 and 1884, were sponsored by the Whigs/Liberals. To the great surprise of both contemporaries and historians, the Second Reform Bill of 1867 was put forth and carried by the Conservative Party under Benjamin Disraeli.16 The emergence of socialism as a political philosophy in the late nineteenth century, and the Labour Party as a political force in the twentieth, complicate this picture even further. Just as ideas of progress in the Victorian period were multiple, and even contradictory, progressive tendencies cut across party and ideological lines in the first decade and a bit of the twentieth century. As the watchword for otherwise heterogeneous Victorian narratives of progress was teleology, for my purposes that for progressive politics is reform. Like Northrop Frye’s conception of comedy’s aiming towards the creation of a “pragmatically free society” (169), in my conception political reform seeks to create the conditions for greater equality, even if that equality is often flawed or otherwise qualified. This connection is where I begin, by reading George Meredith’s “Essay on Comedy” in the context of the reforms enacted by the Victorian Liberal Party under W.E. Gladstone

16 The Liberals wasted no time in claiming the bill through historiography. A History of the Reform Bills, by barrister Homersham Cox, was published in time for the 1868 election (Saunders 13), in which the Liberals won a strong majority.

Chapter 1 George Meredith

George Meredith’s “Essay on Comedy,” first published in the New Quarterly in 1877, has often been understood in terms of its linking comedy with the social emancipation of women. This part of Meredith’s argument represents an important innovation both in the conception of the progressive potential of comedy and its relationship to progressive politics. However, I argue that it must also be understood in the context of the “Essay”’s larger project. Like the reforms enacted by the British Liberal Party under W.E. Gladstone in the decade preceding Meredith’s text, the purpose of the “Essay” is not only to innovate within existing frameworks, but to present innovation as the most effective safeguard of those frameworks. In my reading, the “Essay” can most usefully be understood as a course in two parts. These correspond with the two parts of its full title. The first, “The Idea of Comedy,” presents an idealized version of “pure comedy” primarily through negative examples. In it, Meredith depicts comedy not as a threat to Victorian ideas of sexual-social propriety but as their paradoxical guarantor. “The Idea of Comedy” ends with the presentation of an ideal version of comedy linked to the social and cultural emancipation of women. The second part of the text, “The Uses of the Comic Spirit,” is concerned with comedy as an epistemological mode and its potential applicability in Meredith’s contemporary moment. Appealing to the nebulous idea of “common sense,” Meredith argues that comedy can be made directly useful in the public life of his Victorian audience through a more judicious use of what is already immanent. The text ends looking forward to that change taking place. The Egoist (1879), the next text Meredith wrote, puts that change into practice by drawing on both parts of the “Essay.” The text attempts to manifest a version of Meredith’s ideal comedy within the constrictions of both Victorian society and the English comic tradition. Ultimately, The Egoist rejects and deflates the titular egoism of Sir Willoughby Patterne in favour of a better, more equitable future in both the political and personal realms.

27 28

Victorian Comedy

In The World of Victorian Humor (1961), Harold Orel contends that “[t]he miracle of Victorian humor may lie in the fact that it existed” (3). At first glance, Orel’s remark echoes the common conception of the age of Victoria as both unfunny and uninterested in humour or comedy.17 The “agelast[ic]” (Meredith 4) Victorian period is indissoluble from its “monarchical” character in the discipline of English literature. The image of Victoria herself as famously, but probably apocryphally, “not amused” inevitably colours the perception of the period bearing her name. Orel’s reasons for casting Victorian humour as miraculous are somewhat surprising: it is exceptional not because the tone or spirit of the age was dour, serious and prudish, as the Queen herself has often been figured, but because the Victorian period was beset by “Great Issues” (3). This complication of the Victorian age’s relationship to “the laughable” is crucial, because it demands a reconsideration of the Victorian period’s relationship with the twentieth century. Oversimplified to the extreme, the latter has generally been cast as the storm after the calm, a period of massive upheaval after the monumental stability of the pax Victoriana. Twenty-first century scholars may feel, like Lytton Strachey in the Preface to Eminent Victorians (1918), that “we know too much about” (1) the Victorian period. The Victorians were literally familiar to Strachey, who had been raised by and amongst them. By contrast, the “Victorians” known to the twenty-first century have been indelibly shaped by Bloomsbury, both directly, as with Strachey’s depictions of emblematic personages, or indirectly, through his circle’s literary reactions against “Victorianism.” Orel’s depiction of the Victorian period also echoes the reconfigured image of the Edwardian period in recent scholarly work, which questions its conventional image as a continuation and expansion of Victorian complacencies sent to ruin by the outbreak of the First World War. In both cases, putative stability is far more complicated. Taken together, the larger narrative arc of these perspectives is not one of rupture or radical break, but of continuity. This dissertation tells the same kind of narrative.

17 These terms have very different meanings, especially in the Victorian context. I am here using them to refer to different elements within the same category, which I call “the laughable,” following Aristotle (41). This term serves as a convenient umbrella for all the individual components—wit, humour, satire, comedy, funniness, etc.-- under discussion in this chapter.

Despite these provocative implications, Orel only goes so far when it comes to the place of the laughable in the Victorian tumult. Humorous literature is kept at a remove from the era’s weighty

“national themes,” with which “[t]he most significant literature of the [19th] century” (3) was supposedly concerned. Although the focus of his anthology, Victorian humour is yet treated by Orel as an adjunct.18 Though it may be helpful in fleshing out a detailed picture of the Victorians, their literature and their age, humour is not presented as integral to an understanding of any of those larger categories. Far from being uninterested in comedy, the Victorian period witnessed a fundamental shift in the conception of the public role of “the laughable.” During the latter half of the nineteenth century, two quintessentially modern attitudes towards this category began to emerge: the first, more diffuse, attitude regards it as simultaneously an indispensable part of public life and a source of deep epistemological anxiety; the second, more particular, attitude regards it as connected to the possibility for progressive innovation. The former, exemplified in Leslie Stephen’s anonymously-published article on “Humour” from 1876, was a paradoxical product of the wit/humour debate first begun in the eighteenth century (Martin 14). The latter, encapsulated in and initiated by George Meredith’s “On the Idea of Comedy and of the Uses of the Comic Spirit”—subtitled, and usually referred to as “An Essay on Comedy” (1877)—drew upon the terms of that debate, in concert with the forward-looking impulses of Victorian progressive politics, to move the discussion of comedy beyond the reductive polarities of intellectual and sentimental humour and identify it with progressive impulses.

In the “Essay,” Meredith posits a progressive futurity both in and for comedy. He suggests that both the individual comedic narrative and the larger category of the English comic tradition can be renovated to accommodate a progressive vision of a more equitable future. In the “Essay,” this “better future” means constant, but highly regulated, social interaction between men and women, undoing Victorian strictures on women’s mobility. To do this, Meredith inverts the traditional “corrective” conception of laughter and assigns to comedy a potentially socially renovating capacity, rather than casting it as a guarantor of conformity with existing traditions. The “Essay” is usually read as a unitary whole, with the emphasis on its linking of comedy to the social emancipation of women. Conversely, I contend that the “Essay” is a course in two parts.

18 Orel’s subtle dismissals aside, the subject has not been treated at great length. The publication record indicates that there has been a volume on “Victorian comedy” or “Victorian humour” published roughly about every decade or two since the middle of the twentieth century.

The first part, the “Idea of Comedy,” explores the nebulous possibilities of an idealized, “pure” comedy. The second part, the “Uses of the Comic Spirit,” examines the instrumental possibilities for comedy as an epistemological mode in the less-than-ideal world, and more specifically in Meredith’s own Victorian England.19 Meredith’s novel The Egoist (1879), begun shortly after the “Essay” was first published and often read as its companion piece, puts the comic tools theorized in the “Essay” to work narratively within the limited and limiting parameters of late Victorian society. Taken together, these two texts set the terms for the practice and theory of progressively- oriented comedy that was to follow in the twentieth century.

Wit, Humour, and the English Tradition

Meredith’s “Essay” implicitly ignores its contemporaries and explicitly rejects the English tradition to offer its vision of a renovative futurity for comedy. However, the “Essay on Comedy” was not sui generis either intellectually or culturally. As Robert Bernard Martin demonstrates, Meredith was intervening in the longstanding debate about the relative value of wit and humour. The original distinction between “wit” and “humour” was made in the context of Restoration Comedy and took place “along an axis that divided intellect from character” (Wickberg 58). Wit was associated with “ideas,” while humour was associated with personality (59). These polarities were by no means stable, and the meanings of each category shifted over time as the debate intensified and changed (58). The precise coordinates of this discussion are not relevant to Meredith’s text, but Martin links the nineteenth century version of the debate to the writings of the third Earl of Shaftesbury, one of its key interveners. Shaftesbury himself embraced the classic Hobbesian conception of the comic as “a mode of exposure of immorality or imposture.” Nevertheless, he made a major innovation in writing about the laughable when he “stat[ed] the case for not confining wit, comedy, and laughter to the trivialities of life” (Martin 13). Instead, Shaftesbury argued that the various expressions of the laughable should be seen as “modes of intellectual investigation” (11). While Shaftesbury asserted that the laughable could both be taken seriously and applied to serious subjects, the Victorians “hovered uneasily” between embracing the laughable and rejecting it (7). This uncertainty about the role of the

19 When referring to Meredith’s “Essay” my diction reflects his. For this reason, I use “comic” to refer to comedy’s epistemological capabilities as opposed to “comedic” for its narrative or generic functions. I also use “English” instead of “British,” and “England” instead of “Britain.”

31 laughable had ramifications outside the purview of comic theory. The persistent cultural assumption that a “sense of humour” is an essential component of social, and particularly public, life, while at the same time regarding levity with wariness and even hostility, originated in the Victorian period (6).

In the nebulous form of this “sense of humour,” the laughable began to assume a central, but deeply vexed, role in Victorian social and public life. Part of the cultural ambivalence surrounding this faculty is due to the fact that it is most often defined negatively. In his 1876 article on “Humour” from Cornhill magazine, Leslie Stephen, Meredith’s “friend and editor” (Martin 91), argues that possession of a “sense of humour” is often both asserted and verified by a corresponding lack of it in others (318). In a subtle variation on the classic Hobbesian conception of laughter, Stephen assigns the social perception of the presence or absence of a “sense of humour” a corrective, and ultimately homogenizing, role. The “sudden glory” made manifest by the Hobbesian laugh of “triumph” (Human Nature 54) is here made self-reflexive.20 The one who has the sense of humour glories not just by laughing but because of laughing. The laugher’s glory is that by laughing, he has made manifest his understanding of the social requirement to laugh.21 The laugher has correctly recognized the humorous situation, while his companions have failed to do so. In this way, the laugh that constitutes the sense of humour is a laugh of epistemological self-congratulation. This meta-laughter creates a paranoid environment, in which the necessity of being thought to be the type of person who would know both when to laugh and at what is used as a means of ensuring social compliance. The “awful imputation— You have no sense of humour” dangles over everyone like a social Sword of Damocles, to frighten “everybody who dares to differ from any accepted opinion” (319).22 A “sense of humour” is an important, but deeply confusing, element in larger social codes of propriety: to be called out for a lack of such a sense produces a feeling akin to that produced by a “breach of good manners” (319), as both signal a fundamental lack of cultural savoir-faire.

20 The aggressiveness of Hobbesian laughter, equated in Leviathan with “Pusillanimity” (43), was very uncomfortable for the Victorians. This discomfort factored into their generalized ambivalence towards laughter (Martin 18). 21 I use the masculine pronoun to reflect the exclusively gendered nature of Stephen’s argument. 22 The aggressive use of the “sense of humour” as a means to both assert one’s superiority, while at the same time defusing and deflecting criticism, has proved remarkably persistent. The ongoing debate in contemporary culture about “political correctness” continues this discourse.

For Stephen, the epistemological implications of the Victorian humour imperative both undergird and maintain the world of polite society. These functions are reinforced by humour’s deployment in literature. The Hobbesian laugh aims at the discovery of error: in Leviathan, Hobbes argues that “one of the proper workes” of “great minds” is to “help and free others from scorn” (43). By contrast, the fundamental aim of the “sense of humour” is neither to promote nor to exercise humour’s epistemological powers. Rather, it serves to maintain a hollowed-out simulacrum of them. Humour’s “most vigorous defenders” are those who are themselves most “incapable of humorous perception.” They are also, by extension, the great consumers and proponents of humorous literature, and especially that of Jane Austen. While Stephen admits that Austen was undeniably possessed of “marvellous literary skill” (324), she is brought to task for being “excessively mild”:

There is not only nothing improper in her books, nothing which could prevent them from being given by a clergyman to his daughter as a birthday present; but there is not a single flash of biting satire. She is absolutely at peace with her most comfortable world. She never even hints at a suspicion that squires and parsons of the English type are not an essential part of the order of things…The harsh hideous facts with which ninety-nine out of a hundred of our fellow-creatures are constantly struggling, are never admitted into this delightful world of well-warmed country-houses. (325) 23

Humour gives the reader just enough of the “spice of latent satire” to “prevent [life] from becoming insipid,” while also keeping them from asking real questions: “Let us all drink plenty of milk-punch and forget the laws of Political Economy, seems to be the moral of Dickens’s Christmas Carols [sic]” (325).

Stephen figures his mission in unmasking the coercive and noxious humour imperative as emancipatory: “I have a strong suspicion that many persons will be secretly grateful for any protest against the creed thus forced upon them at the point of the bayonet, as a race of contented

23 Nearly a century and a half later, Zadie Smith would critique Jane Austen for very similar reasons. See Chapter 4 for Smith’s discussion of Austen.

33 slaves is sometimes found to cherish a widely-spread feeling of revolt” (319). By exposing its mission of social occlusion, Stephen intends to void the “sense of humour” of its cultural power. Stephen’s justification for his act of liberation comes not from looking forward to a better future, but by looking backward to a deeply masculinized, nationalistic past. Lamenting the loss of the “‘Berserker’ spirit, which [he claims] some critics find to be the essential element of English literature,” Stephen equates the lack of “good hearty reckless humour” in “English aesthetic literature in the nineteenth century” with a “general want of vigour.” Whatever that literature may be, it will not be thought “manly” by posterity (326). Stephen’s virile volta recasts his earlier, apparently sarcastic, reiteration of the Victorian commonplace that “[a]ll women notoriously hate humour” as utterly serious. The “average sensibility” (318), which embraces the hypocritical humour imperative, can be found in both men and women. By contrast, authentic English humour, the “old horseplay of our forefathers” (326), is masculine. Under guise of liberation, Stephen advocates a return to a particular, and particularly gendered, version of the English comic tradition. This backwards movement aims to recuperate a critical, if not downright offensive, form of humorous epistemology. This recovered mode could then force the laughable to become socially involved, instead of inoculating against social involvement. Meredith’s “Essay” also seeks to make the laughable socially involved, but his methods of achieving that engagement are completely different from Stephen’s. Rejecting the failures of the English tradition, Meredith argues that the epistemological capacities encouraged by and necessary for comedy be used to reform the social world from within.

Meredith, Liberalism, and the Liberal Party

Stephen’s argument is conservative; it seeks to conserve the past. By contrast, Meredith’s argument is simultaneously both progressive and conservative. “[A]dvocat[ing and] work[ing] towards change or reform in society” (Oxford English Dictionary def. 4b), Meredith insists that those changes and reforms be made paradoxically both in defiance of and in accordance with the existing social world. The change envisioned by Meredith’s “Essay” turns away from the English past and towards a new future for England. This new future, however, is still patterned on the present. In this way, Meredith’s argument reflects, but refigures, the paradoxical relationship with tradition of Gladstonian liberalism. Recent criticism has emphasized Meredith’s liberal, and Liberal, associations. In a particularly striking example, Neil Roberts figures Meredith as the

“precursor of a modernism that never happened in [Britain]—a liberal, socially committed modernism” (7). Roberts’s comment reflects the larger argument that liberalism and British literary modernism are antithetical. Modernist studies, in general, assume that liberalism “simply…disappear[ed] from the political scene once it had been upstaged by the newer ideologies of communism and fascism” (Ho 60). At the most basic level, the fact that the modernist period in literature coincided with the diminishment of the political power of the Liberal Party bears out this point.24 Meredith’s reputation as a writer, a celebrity, and what we would now call a public intellectual was also tied to the Liberals’ political fortunes. His “influence was…at its height” (Harris) in the latter half of the first decade of the twentieth century, the age of the last Liberal majority in British history. Many of Meredith’s personal friends, including H.H. Asquith, Prime Minister from 1908-1916, were then in power. As the Liberal party’s influence waned, so did Meredith’s. And yet, narratives of the complete demise of liberalism “ignor[e] how [it] refashioned itself in different ways, and retained a measure of influence on even those who professed to reject it” (Ho 60) during the modernist period. Similarly, even though E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927) is often adduced as proof of Meredith’s diminishment in literary circles, Forster himself still acknowledges that “he is in one way a great novelist. He is the finest contriver that English fiction has ever produced” (97-98). Meredith’s influence is also evident in Forster’s own work, including Howards End (1910). While a fully-fledged “liberal, socially committed modernism” may not have come to pass in Britain, there are still liberal, and Liberal, continuities to be explored. The following chapters of this dissertation will do so.

In his own time Meredith saw his “developed social commitment” (Roberts 7) as indissoluble from his literary work. He stated that his novels had two goals: education and the emancipation of women (qtd in Williams 48). These two aims converge in the “Essay.” The “Essay” also draws political force from two particular instances of Liberal legislation from the period of 1869- 1874, when Gladstone’s government was engaged in a number of political reforms: the Forster Education Act 1870, and the Married Women’s Property Act 1870. The first opened the way for universal primary public education. By extension, it also greatly expanded literacy. The second

24 The general election held in the ur-modernist year of 1922 was “little short of a triumph” (Cook and Stevenson 127) for the Labour Party, who surpassed the divided Liberals to form the Official Opposition to Andrew Bonar Law’s Conservatives.

35 allowed women to hold property in their own name. By undermining financial dependency under coverture, the legal “condition” of a married woman “under the authority and protection of her husband” (Oxford English Dictionary, def. 9a), the 1870 Property Act also weakened the case for excluding women from the franchise (Shanley 102-3). The “Essay” is concerned with the generalized social emancipation of women, but Meredith says nothing about either the practical or political rights of women. By contrast, the Education Act was explicitly presented as an intervention in the political future of Britain. Rather than overthrowing existing political systems, W.E. Forster argued that the Act would work in concert with other recent reforms to guarantee their continuation. The Education Act and the “Essay” approach innovation from a similar, paradoxical, perspective of presenting change as the guarantor of existing structures.

The Forster Education Act 1870: The Continuation of Tradition Through Reform

In his initial presentation of the Education Bill to the House of Commons in February 1870, W.E. Forster, MP for Bradford, cast the need for expanded educational opportunities as both pragmatic and idealistic.25 Forster asserted that his Education Bill had two central, practical, aims: first, to “cover the country with good schools” and second, to “get the parents to send their children to those schools.”26 These goals were not as self-evident as they may now appear. Forster acknowledged that the “hope [of] arriv[ing] at [the Bill’s] two results may be thought Utopian,” but “our only hope of getting over the difficulties before us, is to keep a high ideal before our minds, and to realize to ourselves what it is we are expected to try to do” (HC Deb 17 Feb 1870 col 443). The “expectation” incumbent upon parliamentarians was to realize their duty to the intellectual, economic, military and political future of Britain, which was to be a continuation of longstanding traditions:

25 Forster, raised a Quaker, had been a partner in a wool-stapling enterprise. In this capacity he spearheaded a number of improvements for his workers, including the building of a number of “improved public utilities” (Warren). In his Nonconformist religion, his public-minded approach to business, and his connection with the Liberal party, Forster anticipates the late Victorian/Edwardian paternalist industrialists discussed in Chapter 2. 26 This latter aim proved persistently difficult to enforce, as families often relied on the income provided by children’s labour. Subsequent acts extended the mandate of compulsory attendance in terms of age, and then to include blind and deaf children (1893) and those with physical disabilities and epilepsy (1899).

Upon the speedy provision of elementary education depends our industrial prosperity… Upon this speedy provision depends also, I fully believe, the good, the safe working of our constitutional system. To its honour, Parliament has lately decided that England shall in future be governed by popular government. I am one of those who would not wait until the people were educated before I would trust them with political power. If we had thus waited we might have waited long for education; but now that we have given them political power we must not wait any longer to give them education. (HC Deb 17 Feb 1870 col 465)

In Forster’s formulation, universal public elementary education is an intervention in the future of Britain demanded by the innovations of its present and oriented towards the goal of the continuation of its past. In this way, the project keeps with the Victorian idea of progress, which saw the present as a perfection of the past, but also moves beyond it.

More specifically, Forster argues that his Act is the necessary response to the political and social responsibilities created by the Representation of the People Act 1867, known as the Second Reform Act. This Act had effectively doubled the electorate by lowering property requirements for the franchise (Cook 12). Forster’s figuring of the government’s responsibilities towards the future voters newly enfranchised by the Reform Act encapsulates the paradoxes of Gladstonian liberalism. Although supposedly embracing the doctrine of laissez-faire, Gladstone’s party enacted a series of sweeping reforms between 1869 and 1872 that made manifest both the need for and value of government intervention. Seen from this perspective, the Forster Education Act embodies the Gladstonian principle of “a willingness to innovate within a context formed by custom and tradition” (St. John 396).27 The Forster Act envisions a system that will increase the “intellectual force” (HC Deb 17 Feb 1870 col 466) of the individual not with the goal of creating a new system but in order to guarantee the continued functioning of the existing one. The future

27 This sense of innovation within tradition was encapsulated by Earl de Grey and Ripon. In the second reading of the Bill in the House of Lords, on 25 July 1870, he presented it as an attempt to expedite and expand pre-existing objectives: “We desire to maintain what exists; but we feel that the time has come when we cannot wait for the slow progress of that system which, by the admission of its most extreme advocates, would not supply the whole country for generations of children to come” (HL Deb 25 July 1870 col 826).

37 envisioned by Forster in his speech to the Commons gives both universal public elementary education and the Second Reform Act a goal. They are complementary innovations necessary to not only continue, but ultimately strengthen, the British constitutional tradition. In this way, the Forster Education Act is both progressive and conservative: it reforms in order to conserve. Similarly, in the “Essay on Comedy,” Meredith asserts the need for pedagogical revision both in and through literature. Meredith presents the text’s admittedly radical project not as a rejection of existing structures, but as a more thorough enactment of their fundamental values.

The London Institution: Education in Entertainment

The project of Meredith’s “Essay” was informed not just by the political climate in which he moved, but also by the venue at which it was first presented. On February 1st., 1877, Meredith delivered the lecture that would become the “Essay on Comedy” at the London Institution (Harris). Next to the Royal Institution, the London Institution was one of the wealthiest and most important of the numerous “scientific and literary societies appealing to a wider public[…]that emerged in England during the early years of the nineteenth century” (Kurzer 164). Its mission is encapsulated in its full title. Formally known as “The London Institution, For the Advancement of Literature and the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,” the latter half has overshadowed the former. Both the London and the Royal Institutions are primarily remembered for the scientific work they produced.28 The London Institution was a para-pedagogical establishment, founded in the full flush of the Industrial Revolution by members of the rising commercial class on the principle of the conjunction of commerce, science and literature. It embodied the growing interest in secondary, adult education simultaneously funded by the profits and directed towards the advancement of industrialization. The Forster Act intervened in public education to safeguard Britain’s future by modelling it on the Whig past. Conversely, the London Institution was a private educational initiative designed to reinvest the profits of industry for its own future advancement. Despite its industrial affiliations, the Institution offered a wide range of courses. In the early nineteenth century, it presented multiple-lecture courses, with a heavy emphasis on practical science (Cutler 127). By the 1870s, single lectures “with the emphasis on entertainment

28 Kurzer’s article is particularly concerned with chemistry, the London Institution’s major scientific focus (166). Only Cutler’s doctoral thesis from 1976 deals with the London Institution’s activities as a whole.

38 rather than instruction” had become the norm (131). Meredith’s lecture participates in both categories: the aim of the “Essay” is to instruct its audience in entertainment. In its own highly idiosyncratic way, Meredith’s text also embodies the London Institution’s mandate for “useful knowledge.” The “Essay on Comedy” looks forward to a moment when the English public could be taught both to appreciate and, more importantly, to use the tools of comedy in their political and social lives.

The “Essay on Comedy”: A Course in Two Parts

The ultimate objective of George Meredith’s “Essay on Comedy” is to show the way to a change in English comic tastes, which will lead to comedy being useful in the social world. The text ends looking forward to the English public being “taught” (57) to make these amendments. As a whole, the “Essay” is oriented towards a vision of a better future for English comedy, which would also mean a better future for English society. This better future will paradoxically entail both a radical break from the present and a continuation of it. As with the positioning of reform as the guarantor of tradition by Forster specifically and Gladstonian liberalism more generally, Meredith presents comedy as a means of safeguarding present order in society. This argument is advanced through his course in comedy, presented in two parts. The first part looks backwards to establish Meredith’s conception of idealized, “pure comedy” through negative examples, while the second pragmatically considers Meredith’s present as a launching pad for a better future. The first part can be identified with the first half of the text’s full title, the “Idea of Comedy.” This section is concerned with the relationship between so-called “pure” comedy and the social emancipation of women. Meredith presents the “social freedom” (32) of women as comedic not because it entails the betterment of the lives of women.29 Rather, the full participation of women in social life is comedic because it guarantees the stable functioning of polite society, thereby allowing for tragedy to be avoided. As much as it is possible to determine the temporal order of his argument, in the “Idea of Comedy” Meredith posits that “pure comedy” would be at once the product, the reflection and an integral part of the development of a “comic” society based on regular, appropriate social interaction between men and women. The second part of the course can be identified with the second half of the “Essay”’s full title, the “Uses of the Comic Spirit.”

29 Although himself an advocate for women’s suffrage, Meredith has nothing to say about women voting or participating in public life politically in the “Essay.”

Intervening in, but moving beyond, the wit-humour debate, this section deals with comedy as an epistemological mode and its potential usefulness in Meredith’s own, late Victorian moment.30 In it, Meredith introduces the “Comic Spirit,” his specific contribution to the taxonomy of the laughable. Where “pure comedy” is a nebulous ideal, the Comic Spirit intervenes for comedy in the real world. The guiding genius of the first part of the course is Molière, while that of the second is Aristophanes. Together, these two authors represent “the whole scale of laughter” (50) for Meredith. More precisely, Molière’s work embodies the closest thing to “pure comedy” in a non-ideal world, while Aristophanes figures a possibility for realistic and useful comic intervention with the English public. Meredith’s vision of a better future both in and through comedy is premised not on English tradition, but on leveraging English “sympathy” (39) with elements of another comic tradition to usefully approach the ideal in the real world.

Part 1: “The Idea of Comedy”

The first paragraph of the text presents a figure for the “Idea of Comedy”’s central argumentative strategy that also indicates its main thematic concerns. In the first sentence, Meredith claims that “[g]ood comedies are such rare productions” that it would not take very long to “run over the English list.” Instead of enumerating them, Meredith “propose[s]” a difficult “test.” Through it, “very reputable comedies will be found unworthy of their station, like the ladies of Arthur’s Court when they were reduced to the ordeal of the mantle” (3). The Arthurian allusion serves several purposes. First, it stands for the English comic tradition. The incident of the mantle is relayed in non-English texts: the Old Norse Saga of the Mantle, a translation of French sources (Kalinke 55). Nevertheless, it is concerned with an English subject, one which had particular resonances in the Victorian period.31 More significantly, the episode is unique among Arthurian th narratives in “its irreverent portrayal of courtly society” (Kalinke 209). Dating to the early 13 , century, it can be placed near the beginning of the tradition of the “comic element” in English

30 In Martin’s view, the “Essay” rings the death-knell of sentimental humour. After it, “few critics…still subscribed to the idea” (99). 31 The Victorian Arthurian revival looked to a deeply nationalistic version of the past as a locus of continuation, example or, in Meredith’s own case, literary renovation. His “reinvent[ion of] Arthurian legend as an exploration of psychological tensions” in “The Parting of Launcelot and Guenevere: A Fragment” is credited with anticipating some of Tennyson’s innovations in the Idylls of the King (Bryden 103).

32 literature, or treatments of English subjects.⁠ Meredith begins the “Idea of Comedy” by evoking the very tradition the rest of the section will both critique and reject. Second, the allusion figures the forthcoming text as a test, the elaboration of a trial by ordeal for existing comedies. In the incident of the mantle, all but one of the ladies in Arthur’s court were exposed as unchaste (Kalinke 209). Similarly, in the “Idea of Comedy,” only one author will emerge as even close to “pure”: Molière. By extension, the allusion invokes discourses of sexual-social propriety, integral to Meredith’s larger project of making comedy respectable. The “Idea of Comedy” begins by comparing comedies to women, with a “good” comedy figured as a chaste woman, the exception in a generally licentious setting.33⁠⁠ The figure suggests that the problem to be surmounted is not that comedy is inherently unchaste or unrespectable. Rather, the problem is that because of “want of instruction in the comic idea” (15), the English do not know how to either recognize or make a “pure” comedy. Meredith’s course in comedy will show them how to do both. The figure also signals the text’s counterintuitive and paradoxical proposition that comedy has an integral role to play in the safeguarding and continuation of respectability. By exposing its opposite, the mantle from the Arthurian story ultimately ratifies chaste respectability. Similarly, Meredith’s “Essay” will demonstrate comedy’s respectability by both indicting its failures and examining its successes, both potential and real.

“Pure Comedy”

The implicit project of the “Idea of Comedy” is to make comedy, which “rolled in shouting under the divine protection of the Son of the Wine-jar” (5), respectable to Meredith’s Victorian audience. This respectability is both the necessary precondition to comedy’s ultimately being made useful and the cover under which Meredith presents his more radical argument for the social emancipation of women. Even without the opening allusion, the term “pure comedy” has clearly gendered and sexualized implications. Like the ideal of chastity, Meredith’s “pure

32 Stephen and Meredith’s choice of allusions makes the differences between their arguments manifest. Through his reference to “Berserkers,” Stephen invokes England’s bellicose Viking heritage. Through his reference to the Ordeal of the Mantle, Meredith invokes the highly regulated, courtly society of Arthurian legend. 33 This figuration persists in writing about Victorian comic theory. Martin contends that in an 1869 article, W.H. Lyttleton “attempted cautiously to rehabilitate the good name of laughter and make it an honest woman in Victorian literature” (7).

41 comedy” is constituted not by its presence but by its absence. This connection is literalized in the “Idea of Comedy”: throughout the section, Meredith dismisses “impure” (17) comedies by “anthropomorphiz[ing]” (Ives 23) them as women outside the bounds of Victorian sexual-social mores. He specifically indicts the way that the English turned the work of Molière, the only chaste lady in the comic court, into the comedy of manners. Meredith figures the latter as “a blowsy country girl…transforming to a varnished city madam, with a loud laugh and a mincing step” (6).34 Ives argues that these figures are “rhetorical tool[s]” to persuade his Victorian female audience to reject certain forms of comedy through negative association (23). Given that they were equally implicated in the same discourses of propriety, his male audience would also most likely have been loathe to be publically associated with “jade[s]” (Meredith 16) either. Beyond rejecting “bad” comedies, Meredith’s connection between comedy and sexual purity makes the social renovation he proposes simultaneously more appealing and less unsettling to his audience.35 Meredith innovates by asserting that “pure” comedy is linked to the social emancipation of women, which will in turn more fully guarantee the continuation of polite society.

Meredith presents the central premise of his argument negatively. Rather than arguing that the comic poet requires sexual equality, Meredith asserts that he is put off by inequality.36 Befitting the argumentative strategy put forth in the first paragraph, under guise of expounding the “plain reasons” why the “comic poet is not a frequent apparition,” Meredith explains that the comic poet is “repel[led]” by “[t]he semi-barbarism of merely giddy communities, and feverish emotional periods…and also a state of marked social inequality of the sexes.” By contrast, the other central point of the “Essay” is stated positively: Meredith asserts that the comic poet requires “[a] society of cultivated men and women…[so] that he may be supplied with matter

34 This image recalls Thackeray’s famous conflation of Congreve’s “Comic Muse” with the person of Nell Gwynn, a “disreputable, daring, laughing, painted French baggage” (180) in English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century (1853). 35 Meredith both builds on and goes beyond the link between the “sense of humour” and “good manners” made by Stephen. Stephen laments the social compulsion associated with the former, while Meredith uses respectability as a means of winning over his audience to his project. Meredith operates within the polite world, which, he later argues, can “help in training” the English to see the comic (52), while Stephen seeks to overthrow it. 36 The gendering of the Comic Spirit and the comic poet is a persistent issue in Meredith criticism. I here follow Meredith’s example, gendering the “comic poet” of the “Essay” male.

42 and an audience” (4). The causal order of these statements is indecipherable. Over the course of the “Essay,” Meredith never clarifies whether he believes one of these three elements—matter, comic production and an audience—must come first, or whether they are coextensive. However it is supposed to be realized, this appeal has far-reaching social and cultural implications.37 Creating the kind of audience associated with Meredith’s comic poet would entail a complete renovation of Victorian society. Meredith ultimately argues that allowing women to converse freely and equally with men will reinforce respectability, not undermine it. Further complicating the section’s already fraught temporality, the relationship between emancipation and respectability is not made clear until the final section of “The Idea of Comedy.” Surveying comic traditions from other countries, Meredith asserts that “Spanish comedy…is…something other than the true idea of comedy” (29-30). It falls short because of sexual segregation: “Where the sexes are separated, men and women grow, as the Portuguese call it, afaimados of one other, famine-stricken; and all the tragic elements are on the stage” (30). In Meredith’s conception, regulated social interaction between men and women mitigates the destructive sexual impulses bred by separation. For this reason, the “social freedom” (32) of women creates comedy instead of tragedy. The “Idea of Comedy” demands an overhaul of relations between women and men, but that overhaul will serve to more efficiently reinforce respectability.38

The English Tradition: The Failure of Respectability

Meredith’s urging for reform in service of continuation echoes W.E. Forster’s presentation of the Education Act. Unlike Forster, Meredith is deeply skeptical of the English past. In “The Idea of Comedy,” he specifically indicts the English for having made an eminently respectable author unrespectable. Meredith pillories how “clownishly [the English] mishandled” (17) French material during the Restoration, when the best they could do was “Molière travestied” (16).39

37 Martin argues that Meredith’s request for an audience is “aesthetic” and therefore mutually exclusive with the “social questions” raised by the “Essay” (97). Martin’s reading is as strangely dismissive as Meredith’s own “skirt[ing]” (96) of the actual social conditions of Molière’s world later in the text. 38 Meredith also vehemently opposed the more radical methods of winning the vote adopted by suffragists. In a well-known letter to the Times, he rebuked those involved in a demonstration at the House of Commons for “suppos[ing] that John Bull will move sensibly for a solitary kick” (qtd in M. Harris). 39 To give the English their due, Meredith does approve of Congreve’s Way of the World, and

This negative example sets the stage for the making useful of a “profane” (Swift qtd in Meredith 38) comic author in the second part of the text. The English have debauched “pure comedy,” but perhaps they can be taught to redeem Aristophanes, whose work is “capped by the grotesque” (39). The example of Molière is a synecdoche of the larger ways in which England has suffered because of “want of instruction in the comic idea” (15). This shortcoming means that “[t]hese bad traditions of comedy affect us, not only on the stage, but in our literature, and [they] may be tracked into our social life” (16). In the face of English literature’s “uninstructive” (17) comedies, the “Essay” will serve as the syllabus to bring Meredith’s Victorian auditors to understand and, in the future, benefit from comedy.

The English tradition is insufficient not just because it cannot teach, but also because it has consistently failed or refused to learn. In Meredith’s estimation, “[t]he French have a school of stately comedy to which they can fly for renovation whenever they have fallen away from it” (10). When that “noble entertainment” of the French was brought to England during the Restoration, it was “spoilt to suit the wretched taste of a villainous age.” Once tainted, its usefulness was irrecoverable, and “later imitations of it, partly drained of its poison and made decorous, became tiresome” (16). Molière is Meredith’s means of accessing the ideal of “pure comedy.” As befits his general argumentative strategy, Meredith never makes a positive argument for this association. Rather, he asserts that Molière’s comedy, because “[i]t is deeply conceived…[,] cannot be impure.” Meredith also remarks that Molière “conceives purely, and…writes purely” (17). Later in the text, he posits that “you must love pure comedy warmly to understand the Misanthrope” (24). Molière’s work serves as an object lesson in the social deployment of comedy, embodying a nearly ideal correspondence between comic text and audience, the kind of accord to which the “Essay” looks forward. The “French bourgeoisie of Paris were sufficiently quick-witted and enlightened by education to welcome” Molière’s works (12). The implication is that, if the English follow Meredith’s course, they too might become “sufficiently quick-witted and enlightened.” In the “Uses of the Comic Spirit,” Meredith examines how this change might happen.

especially of his Millamant (9), the “exception[s]” (18) on the English comic stage.

Comic Poesis and the Future

Although his focus is primarily on the audience, throughout the first section Meredith intermittently posits a vision of comic futurity through comic poesis. In a rare positive statement, Meredith ascribes an ameliorative capability to the comic poet:

The comic poet dares to show us men and women coming to this mutual likeness; he is for saying that when they draw together in social life their minds grow liker; just as the philosopher discerns the similarity of boy and girl, until the girl is marched away to the nursery. (15)

Where existing forms of social organization divide, the comic poet brings together. Meredith’s vision of the work of comic poesis recasts the final coming together of the conventional, generically comedic plot.40 Instead of working towards a marriage, which may not necessarily resolve anything, Meredith argues that the comic poet unveils an ongoing process of mutual recognition. In Meredith’s view, what comedy shows is not an infinitive or even an indicative verb, but a participle. This temporality is reiterated in the “Essay”'s most famous statement:

[W]here women are on the road to an equal footing with men, in attainments and in liberty—in what they have won for themselves, and what has been granted them by a fair civilization—there, and only waiting to be transplanted from life to the stage, or the novel, or the poem, pure comedy flourishes. (32)

Just as the comic poet shows men and women coming to see each other, pure comedy can only exist where social equality is in process. This process is presented at the end of “The Idea of Comedy,” after Meredith has summarized both the English tradition and those of other countries or regions. This final statement is not an account of a real moment, locatable in space or time. Rather, it is utopian in both senses. Like Thomas More’s neologism, it names both a “good” place—eutopia--and no place—outopia (Mezciems xii-xiii) at the same time. This passage has

40 Martin argues that Meredith calls the “creator of all forms of comedy” the comic poet because he is both “picking up the older, more comprehensive meaning of poet, and at the same time asserting the dignity and validity of comedy” (91).

45 often been treated as if it were a summary of both the “Essay”'s overall project and its argument. In reality, it is merely the forward-looking conclusion of the first part of the course, the summation of the “Idea of Comedy.” It describes an ideal. In the second section, Meredith turns his attention to the “Uses of the Comic Spirit,” the epistemological tools comedy provides for the real world.

Part 2: “The Uses of the Comic Spirit”

The separation between the two sections of the “Essay” is manifest on the page. In both the original printing in the New Quarterly and in subsequent re-printings, an extra space is left between the end of the statement about “pure comedy” and the beginning of the next paragraph. The orientation of the second section is asserted from the outset. The first word of the new paragraph is “Now” (Meredith 1877 22). This section directly addresses Meredith’s “present time” (“Essay” 32), when, through “neglecting the cultivation of the comic idea, [the English] are losing the aid of a powerful auxiliar” (32). This carelessness means that “the vigilant Comic…is not serving as a public advocate” (33). The first two paragraphs of “The Uses of the Comic Spirit” introduce its two main concerns: the present and the public. In this second movement of his argument, Meredith turns from “pure comedy” to the Comic Spirit, comedy’s intervener in the real world. He also turns from Molière to Aristophanes, whom he associates with comedy as a social and political force. Putting his dogma of “matter and an audience” (3) into practice, Meredith argues that “bearing in mind the instruments [Aristophanes] played on and the audience he had to win, there is an idea in his comedies; it is the idea of good citizenship” (38). In the pragmatically-oriented second section of the “Essay,” Meredith turns away from idealization and celebrates what Aristophanes was able to do despite the limitations of his time. These shortcomings kept him from approaching “pure comedy,” but the Greek comedian was still able to pursue a civically-minded, potentially instructive comedy. Although Aristophanes himself “is not to be revived,” Meredith argues that “if his method were studied, some of the fire in him would come to [the English], and [they] might be revived” (39; italics Meredith’s).

The second factor in this comic overhaul is the Comic Spirit, Meredith’s intervention in the larger taxonomical project of the wit/humour debate.41 Mentioned in passing in the first section of the text, the Comic Spirit is introduced in detail in the second. The first introduction of the Comic Spirit takes place negatively, through a definitional excursus in which it is compared to, but distinguished from, various other modes, including irony, satire and humour. Meredith then highlights the Comic Spirit’s epistemological qualities, celebrating the correlation between “[t]he comic” and “the perceptive” (43). Furthermore, the comic is allied with “correct[ion],” as Fielding sought to correct Richardson (43).42 Following from the reading of Molière in the first part, Meredith asserts that comedy is not about specifics, but about generalities: it is “an interpretation of the general mind” (45). The comic is also inextricable from “common sense” (48). The Comic Spirit is, in fact, its “first-born” (33). Although apparently self-evident, Meredith’s “common sense” is a synecdoche of the “Essay”’s paradoxical politics. On the one hand, the phrase invokes generalities, since it can refer both to a “generally held belief or opinion” (Def. 6) or the “[n]atural intelligence possessed by a typical person” (Def. 4a Oxford English Dictionary). In both cases, “common sense” is a form of unremarkable knowledge. In the “Essay,” Meredith paradoxically presents “common sense” as at once inherently, generally English but also as providing membership in a particularly select group. Meredith argues that Aristophanes would make a good model because the English have “the basis of the comic in them—an esteem for common sense” (39). And yet, to be able to perceive the Comic Spirit, which requires common sense, “gives high fellowship” (49). Meredith’s “common sense” is at once common and uncommon. 43 The “aristocracy of the intellect” (Martin 90) evoked in the “Uses of the Comic Spirit” is premised on the uncommon ability to perceive what is common. Meredith notes that being able to exercise the epistemological tools of the Comic Spirit grants one access to a “selecter world,” but it does not remove one from the human community. Through “perception of the Comic Spirit,” one becomes “a citizen of…the highest [realm] we know of in connection with our old world.” That world is “not supermundane” (49). In short, where “pure comedy” deals almost exclusively in the failure of existing traditions to live up to

41 Martin argues that the main project of the “Essay” is to “rid Victorian comic writing of the incubus of sentimental humour” (90). He cites Meredith’s description of the Comic Spirit in full as proof of the “triumph of wit” (98-9). 42 Meredith himself would also “correct” Richardson’s Pamela (1740) in The Egoist. 43 A similar tension pervades E.M. Forster’s “What I Believe.” See Chapter 3 for a discussion of that text’s presentation of an aristocracy of affect.

47 ideals, the “Uses of the Comic Spirit” allow one to come into contact with a higher world on earth.

This paradoxical quality of the Comic Spirit arises from the fact that comedy is inextricably social. The major impediment to embracing the Comic Spirit is that the English “have not yet spiritually comprehended the signification of living in society” (40). Meredith argues that the comic continually crops up in social situations, only to pass unnoticed by the English (40-1). In this way, he indirectly responds to the “humour imperative” identified by Stephen. In Stephen’s view, the aggressive denial of the existence of a sense of humour in one's associates asserts the epistemological superiority of the denier. By contrast, Meredith’s Comic Spirit is disinterestedly generous, correcting out of a spirit of love where Stephen’s “sense of humour” compelled out of a spirit of domination: “You may estimate your capacity for Comic perception by being able to detect the ridicule of them you love, without loving them less: and more by being able to see yourself somewhat ridiculous in dear eyes, and accepting the correction their image of you proposes” (42).

In the “Uses of the Comic Spirit,” social life is presented as utterly divorced from the social emancipation of women. This elision could be explained in a number of ways. The most generous interpretation is that Meredith intended for those arguments to be carried over from the first part. From a more pragmatic point of view, since the section is concerned with late Victorian realities, Meredith did not discuss what patently was not true. The other possibility is that he simply did not think it was relevant, just as he elided the social conditions of women in Molière’s time in the first part of the text. The social role of women only returns at the end of the “Uses of the Comic Spirit,” when Meredith again considers the traditions of other countries. In this section, comedy is explicitly linked with education. The Germans, the great military, industrial and cultural rivals of the English, are held up as a specific example of the nebulous utopian potentiality presented at the end of “The Idea of Comedy.” Meredith asserts that the Germans “are a growing people…and when their men, as in France, and at intervals at Berlin tea-tables, consent to talk on equal terms with their women, and to listen to them, their growth will be accelerated and be shapelier.” At that point “Comedy, or, in any form, the Comic Spirit, will…come to them” (55). The English can also be taught. However, Meredith presents their education as a question of taste. He uses a culinary metaphor to assert that the English can be

48 educated in the “Uses of the Comic Spirit.” Although the pig currently “supplies the most popular of dishes,” the English “public might surely be led to try other, perhaps finer, meat.” Since it also has “good taste in song,” it might be persuaded to “extend this capacity for delicate choosing in the direction of the matter arousing laughter” (57). The “Idea of Comedy” ends with an unlocatable, utopian vision of social progress. By contrast, the “Uses of the Comic Spirit” ends on a far more earthly, but guardedly hopeful note. The change in comic habits envisioned over the course of the text has not yet happened, but it at least seems possible.

“Other, Perhaps Finer…Meat”: The Egoist

The “Essay on Comedy” is oriented towards the future: it ends looking toward the possibility of a beneficial change in existing cultural practices. The Egoist (1879), which Meredith wrote next, attempts to provide an appropriate object for this newly-refined comic taste. The conventional way of reading the two together, which originated in Joseph Warren Beach’s The Comic Spirit in George Meredith (1911), is to see the “Essay” as a “handbook” for The Egoist (Stevenson 17). The general manifestation of this method is to determine which character in The Egoist best embodies the Comic Spirit. They can be read together more instructively: where the “Essay” is a pedagogical remedy for the shortcomings of the English comic tradition, The Egoist is an attempt to manifest the “Essay”’s ameliorative vision within the fallen worlds of both English comedy and Victorian social values. The Egoist is not just a “Comedy in Narrative,” as its subtitle declares, but a “Study Towards the Possibility of Pure Comedy.” To accomplish this goal, The Egoist draws on both parts of the “Essay.” In its closing scene, the novel presents a version of the process of mutual recognition evoked at the end of “The Idea of Comedy.” This scene culminates the novel’s revising and updating of the English comic tradition, which is present both in generalized generic conventions and through allusions to specific texts, notably Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740). In The Egoist, Meredith himself plays the role ascribed to Aristophanes in “The Uses of the Comic Spirit.” The text’s objective is to “reviv[e]” (“Essay” 39) the “unfortunate” (15) English comic tradition rejected in the first part of the “Essay.” The novel also embraces the “Essay”’s Aristophanic political project, as it aims to promote “the idea of good citizenship” (“Essay” 38) through its deflation of the titular egoist, Sir Willoughby Patterne. The text rejects Patterne’s domineering selfishness in favour of a more equitable model for heterosexual romantic relationships, but it also overturns his aristocratic feudalism in favour

49 of “a communal liberal ideal” (Handwerk 665).

The Egoist tells the story of Clara Middleton, the seventeen-year-old daughter of the Revd. Dr. Middleton, “a scholar of high repute,” who “has one of the grandest heads in England” (29). After a meeting at a country house, Clara becomes engaged to Sir Willoughby Patterne, “fifth in descent from Simon Patterne, of Patterne Hall, premier of [h]is family” (7). Clara is initially attracted to Patterne because he appears as a bodily manifestation of her immature romantic notions: “Hardly had she begun to think of love ere the apparition arose in her path” (34), the narrator remarks. For Patterne, other forces are at work. He believes that, in choosing to marry him, Clara is “acquiesc[ing] in the principle of selection,” in which “success is awarded to the bettermost.” A footnote in the text attributes this concept to “the book of Mr. Darwin, The Origin of Species” (34). In Patterne’s deeply selfish mind, the theory of evolution becomes eugenic, although that word would not be coined until four years after the publication of The Egoist.⁠ 44 For Patterne, the concept of evolution has served to confirm his own superiority, emblematized in the “leg” he is so fond of displaying. As a member of the aristocracy, he sees himself as “the heir of successful competitors” (33). Patterne has assimilated Darwinian evolution, a non-teleological progressive idea, to a self-serving end. Patterne sees himself as the end goal of his family’s development, and the only future he can conceive is one based not on change, but on the refinement of an established theme—in short, the fine-tuning of his own pattern.45⁠ When he meets Clara, Patterne goes beyond merely trying to assimilate her to his way of thinking. As part of their betrothal, Patterne demands that Clara swear “an oath” for “faithfulness beyond death.” She demurs, saying that her “vows at the altar must suffice” (44). Because of Patterne’s demand that she immolate herself in him, Clara comes to see betrothal as the equivalent of having “committed herself to a life-long imprisonment” in a talkative dungeon (79). The rest of the novel chronicles Clara’s attempts to cut the knot (424), as the text puts it, of engagement. Clara is the anti-Pamela: instead of spending the duration of the novel attempting to evade her would-

44 In 1883, Francis Galton defined the term “eugenic” as referring to “the science of improving the stock” (qtd in Turda 64) in his Inquiries Into Human Faculty and Its Development. See Chapter 2 for a discussion of eugenics and progressive thought in the Edwardian period. 45 Robert D. Mayo has written extensively about the punning, allusive, and satirical quality of Patterne’s name. On the most basic level, it “recall[s] Sir Willoughby’s exemplary traits as a wealthy young landowner—‘a picture of an English gentleman,’ and a model of excellence and eligibility” (453).

50 be seducer only to marry him in the end, Clara attempts to evade her would-be husband only to not marry him in the end. As in Richardson’s novel, the action of The Egoist is mostly confined to Patterne Hall, which figures both convention and Patterne’s status as an aristocrat. The notable exception is the novel’s ending, when Clara’s flight from Sir Willoughby and the English traditions with which he is associated is literalized in her meeting Vernon Whitford, Patterne’s cousin, in the Alps. Clara’s being paired off in the end has led some critics to reject the idea that the text is progressive.⁠46 However, Clara and Vernon’s relationship represents a better alternative for heterosexual romantic relationships, one premised neither on personal egoism nor its political corollary, aristocracy. This change is signaled through the presence of “the Comic Muse” (425) at their meeting. This apparition recalls the ending of the first part of the “Essay on Comedy,” where the comic poet is shown unveiling a process of mutual recognition. In The Egoist, this process is loosely associated with the term “comradeship” (48), a key term for E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) as well. As it would for Forster, in Meredith’s novel the term has a political dimension. “Comradeship” is a central concept of the text’s critique of both personal and political egoism.

The Egoist’s plot is quite simple, in that it is primarily concerned with Clara’s escape from Sir Willoughby and Patterne Hall. That escape inverts comedic conventions, and especially those imported into the English comic novel by Richardson, but it is also both facilitated and precipitated by an inversion of the concept of “egoism.” As a number of critics have noted, the titular term is first introduced through Patterne’s misogynistic use of it to describe Clara, but it soon turns out to be a more apt description of his own character. A figurehead of Victorian patriarchal attitudes towards women, Patterne declares that he “want[s Clara] simply to be the material in his hands for him to mould” (39). When she refuses to “reduce herself to ashes, or incense, or essence, in honour of him,” he laments that “[s]he preferred to be herself, with the egoism of women” (41). Patterne cannot conceive that women, and especially the woman he intends to marry, should have any individual self not oriented towards men generally and himself specifically. He sees marriage not as a union with another person but an extension of self: he requires that Clara, “by love’s transmutation, be the man she was to marry” (41). By a neat

46 See, for example, Williams (48).

51 process of inversion, Patterne’s egoism ends up giving Clara “that key of special insight which revealed and stamped him in a title to fortify her spirit of revolt” (80), when he inadvertently names himself as “Egoist.” As he tells Clara about a man who demanded that his wife be saved from a deadly illness because “she ha[d] accustomed [him] so to the little attentions of a wife” (81) that he could not bear to lose her, he warns her to “[b]eware of marrying an Egoist.” Clara is stunned that neither he, nor any one else present, are able to “[see] the man in the word” (82). Being able to name Patterne as egoist does not immediately free Clara. However, this knowledge does allow her to begin thinking explicitly of an “alternative discourse” (Zlosnik) to the conventional narrative presented by Patterne. After this discussion, Clara imagines herself being freed from the trap of her engagement by the “beckoning of a finger” which would lead her “to a comrade.” “Oh! a comrade,” she laments, “I do not want a lover. I should find another Egoist” (85). The word “comrade” falls away over the course of the text, but the presence of the Comic Muse, “[s]itting…grave and sisterly” (425) alongside Vernon and Clara in the novel’s final scene suggests something like the relationship Clara imagines earlier in the novel when she expresses her desire for “comradeship, a living and frank exchange of the best in both, with the deeper feelings untroubled” (48). Clara’s feelings for Vernon may not be as passionate as her initial attraction to Patterne, but they are founded on more equitable, and therefore comic, terms. As with the final passages in “The Idea of Comedy,” this scene is not final, but points to a better, more equitable potential future beyond Patterne’s dull reiteration of his own self.

Through the reversal of “egoism” and Clara’s move towards liberation from Patterne, the novel rejects the patriarchal assumptions about women underpinning Victorian society (Zlosnik). The putting aside of egoism also has resonances with the questions of social organization underlying the reforming movements of the 1860s and 70s, and especially the expansion of the franchise through the lowering of property requirements. From the beginning of the text, Patterne’s egoism is associated with his aristocratic status. In the “Prelude,” the generalized type of “the Egoist” is described as “[h]e who would desire to clothe himself at everybody’s expense” (6). The Egoist type is directly opposed to the progressive idea of mutual betterment, putting his own wants ahead of anyone else’s wellbeing. Beyond the “Prelude,” the text makes the link between interpersonal and political egoism explicit. After Clara’s flight to the railway station, Patterne thinks to himself that “he had once been a young Prince in popularity: the world had been his possession. Clara’s treatment of him was a robbery of land and subjects” (236). In attempting to

52 assert her desires, Clara has taken what Patterne believes rightly belongs to him. The text’s opposition to egoism, and the ultimate dissolution of it in comradeship, are both a revision of the misogynist underpinnings of the English comic novel and a direct expression of Meredith’s liberal politics. Gary Handwerk argues that in his texts “Meredith articulates…a communal liberal ideal, based upon a positive and progressive interdependence of all subjects in the acquisition of that self-knowledge that makes rational self-direction possible” (665). As an enactment of these principles, Meredith’s “fiction…tr[ies] to demonstrate the necessary interdependence of ego, the profound reliance of every individual subject on all others” (679). Through its move towards a more equitable relationship between heterosexual romantic partners, like the one envisioned at the end of “The Idea of Comedy,” The Egoist highlights the interrelationship between the personal and the political, and looks toward a better future for both.

Epitomizing the putatively adversarial relationship between modernism or twentieth-century literature and Victorianism, both George Bernard Shaw and E.M. Forster explicitly reacted against Meredith. Shaw did so in a scathing review of the book-length version of the “Essay” in 1897, while Forster is often supposed to have dismissed Meredith in Aspects of the Novel (1927). Forster’s attitude towards the earlier novelist was not wholly oppositional. This ambivalence is epitomized when the narrator of Howards End (1910) cites two lines from Meredith’s Modern Love (1891) as proof of Leonard Bast’s refusal of the “anodyne of muddledom.” She remarks that the lines present “a hard saying” from “a hard man.” Nevertheless, the point he makes “lies at the root of all character” (310).47 Similarly, in undertaking their progressive engagements with comedic conventions, both Shaw and Forster were also carrying on Meredith’s project from both “The Essay” and The Egoist. In his review of the “Essay,” Shaw framed his use of comedy as infinitely more radical than Meredith’s. Where Meredith sought to make the radical possibilities of comedy the guarantors of respectability, Shaw argued it could be used to burn existing structures to the ground. And yet, in his literary practice Shaw still made use of comedic conventions. More like Meredith than he would have liked to admit, Shaw also favoured reversals and inversions of convention. Forster echoed Meredith’s understanding that comedic literature had to reflect the changed circumstances of the social life of women. Accordingly, he fractured the conventions of genre from within. In Howards End (1910), Forster paired the “un-

47 See Chapter 3 for an explanation of my use of a feminine pronoun for Forster’s narrator.

53 marriage” trajectory of Clara Middleton from The Egoist with a conventional marriage plot to present a refigured vision of comedic futurity. Forster also moved the idea of “comradeship” to the foreground as a way of exploring affective bonds beyond both heterosexuality and heterosexual marriage, and even beyond the human. One hundred years later, Zadie Smith picked up the coordinates of Forster’s anti-eschatological futurity to craft a comedic response to the changed social life of her own time. Although the descent is by no means linear, all of these authors can be seen as participating in one way or another in the new future for English comedy Meredith envisioned at the end of his “Essay.”

Chapter 2 George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw’s literary career spanned from the late Victorian period to the dawn of the Cold War. Major Barbara, performed in 1905 and published in 1907, marks a turning-point in Shaw’s politics and the political nature of his dramatic works. The resolution of Major Barbara folds in two main concerns of Edwardian politics, militarism and social welfare. Between the play’s first performance and its publication, the Liberal party took a large electoral majority in the general election of 1906, which precipitated a crisis of direction in the Fabian Society. At the same time, both liberalism and the Liberal party were ideologically and pragmatically torn between the ad hoc social welfare provisions of the previous generation and the pressing need for large-scale systemic reform made manifest by the sociological investigations of Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree (Hynes 1968 54-55). Reflecting the complexity of the situation, Shaw posits three possible solutions to the “crime of poverty” (117) in the preface to Major Barbara. The preface proleptically places the play’s resolution in dialogue both with these specific solutions and with those outside the text. Drawing the reader’s attention to the questions of violence, systems, and ends, the solutions discussed in the preface precondition the response to the resolution. The final scene of the last act of the play explores a fourth possibility, the highly localized ameliorative futurity of the company towns built by late Victorian paternalist industrialists like William Hesketh Lever, inventor of Sunlight soap. The company towns on which Shaw based Perivale St Andrews were synecdoches for the crisis of liberalism, as they emblematized the political tensions dividing the Liberal party. Through the village of Perivale St Andrews, Shaw offers a critique of both the shortcomings of contemporary liberalism and of comedic resolution itself. Culminating in an uncomfortable and perplexing solution, Major Barbara turns the presumed assent of the comedic audience inside out, forcing the reader to examine their complacencies and complicities. The play’s resolution represents a neat enactment of Shaw’s conception of comedy as a form of creative destruction, which he situated in direct opposition to the comic theories of George Meredith.

54 55

Shaw on Meredith: Comedy and the Public Good

In late March 1897, a review by Shaw of the book-length edition of George Meredith’s “Essay on Comedy” appeared in the Saturday Review. In it, Shaw not only derides Meredith’s conception of comedy, but also backhandedly asserts some of his own ideas. The review is ordered around Shaw’s explicit critique of “common sense,” which he places at the centre of Meredith’s text. Through this critique, Shaw rejects Meredith’s framing of innovation within tradition. Where Meredith depicted comedy as both the paradoxical guarantor of Victorian social norms and consonant with inherently English tendencies, Shaw casts it as a cleansing fire, a beneficent scourge to eliminate old habits. Just as the ideas Meredith explored in the “Essay” were put into practice in The Egoist, the ideas Shaw presents in his review of Meredith informed his own dramatic practice. The resolution of Major Barbara inverts the creative destruction explored in the review: it aims to destroy the audience’s complacencies through the depiction of a version of stability that is itself premised on destruction.

Obliquely introducing the two main prongs of his critique of Meredith, Shaw begins by wondering why Meredith’s text should be republished twenty years after it had first been delivered as a speech: “Who cares for comedy today?—who knows what it is?” (83). Building out from the putative mismatch between comedy and the present moment, Shaw presents a transvaluation of Meredith’s conception of comedy. The review offers a Shavian reversal of Meredith’s contention that comedy emerges from the English “esteem for common sense” (qtd in Shaw 84) and that it can, by extension, have a practical, public application.48 Undergirding both branches of Shaw’s critique is the premise that Meredith’s snobbery, his self-appointed membership in an “unchallengeable upper class” (qtd in Shaw 83), caused him to be out of touch not only with the current moment but also with anyone not of his class. Meredith “knows more about plays than playgoers” (84). This lack of understanding led him to misconstrue both the source and the practical applications of comedy. Meredith’s preference for Molière is proof of this failure. The French comedian “has hardly been mentioned in London during the last twenty years by the dramatic critics, except as representing a quaint habit of the Comédie Française”

48 Unlike Meredith, Shaw uses “British, “English,” and their associated forms interchangeably. As with the previous chapter, while discussing his text my diction reflects his.

(83). Shaw’s early identification of the central figure of Meredith’s “Essay” with “quaint habit[s]” anticipates his larger argument that Meredith’s “common sense” is really just another name for ossified, impractical thinking.

In Shaw’s estimation, Meredithian “common sense” is at once contradictory and nonsensical. It also cannot ever be the agent of comedy; rather, it must always be its butt. Against the English public’s supposed “esteem for common sense” (qtd in Shaw 84), Shaw argues that the English are “everywhere united and made strong by the bond of their common nonsense,” epitomized in their “valu[ing of] success—meaning money and social precedence— more than anything else” (84). “Common sense” is just an appealing name for its opposite. Far from being the “basis of the comic” (Meredith qtd in Shaw 84), “common sense” is “anti-comedic” (85): it

actually makes comedy impossible, because it would not seem like common sense at all if it were not self-satisfiedly unconscious of its moral and intellectual bluntness, whereas the function of comedy is to dispel such unconsciousness by turning the searchlight of the keenest moral and intellectual analysis right on to it. (84)

In Shaw’s view, comedy makes something happen: it is dedicated to the eradication not only of “common sense” but also of its rotten foundations. As a distillation of this point, Shaw offers one of his most well-known definitions of comedy: in those nations and peoples “disabled from this true British common sense by intellectual virtuosity” (84) is “produce[d] a positive enjoyment of disillusion (the most dread and hated of calamities in England), and consequently a love of comedy (the fine art of disillusion) deep enough to make huge sacrifices of dearly idealized institutions to it” (84-5).49 Shaw acknowledges that Molière was able to achieve such a sacrifice in his own time. With distance, and the addition of Meredithian misreading, he has passed into ineffectiveness and become merely a “quaint habit.” 50 By contrast, The English “sacrific[e] nothing” (85) to comedy and remain in thrall to “the set of habits [the Englishman] calls his opinions and capacities” (86).

49 Shaw’s locating of comedy exclusively outside Britain and/or England is arguably more in line with Meredith’s indictment of the English tradition than he would have liked to admit. 50 In the preface to Back to Methuselah, Shaw acknowledges the influence Molière had on his own writing, and the effects his work could have if read and handled properly (viii-ix).

This upending of the relationship between English “common sense” and comedy sets the stage for Shaw’s further transvaluation of Meredith’s conception of comedy’s potential for public action. Throughout the review, Shaw links his criticism of Meredith to images and concepts drawn from the realm of public hygiene and organization. As an example of the deeply “unpractical” (85) nature of English “common sense,” he cites the English objection to the eminently logical solution of erecting poles to carry electricity through the streets, as had been done elsewhere. Ventriloquizing, Shaw suggests that Meredith might propose “Comedy” as the “cure for this self-treasonable confusion and darkness” (86). However, the very engine of the Meredithian Comic Spirit may paradoxically lead the English to actively resist the Comic Spirit’s ministrations in the name of public safety. In doing so,

[the English] are only carrying out the common-sense view, in which an encouragement and enjoyment of comedy must appear as silly and suicidal and ‘unEnglish’ as the conduct of the man who sets fire to his own house for the sake of seeing the flying sparks, the red glow in the sky, the fantastic shadows on the walls, the excitement of the crowd, the gleaming charge of the engines, and the dismay of the neighbors. (86-7)

In the next sentence Shaw modifies this image to move the discussion back towards the mismatch between comedy and the times, remarking that “[n]o doubt the day will come when we shall deliberately burn a London street every day to keep our city up to date in health and handsomeness, with no more misgiving as to our common sense than we now have when sending our clothes to the laundry every week” (87). Here the comedic conflagration is put in service not of demented, selfish enjoyment, but of public hygiene. This shift in objective is premised on a shift in person from the singular “man” who burns his house for his own crazy fun to the plural “we” who are concerned with both aesthetics and public welfare. This movement from singular to plural also signals a change in temporal perspective. The crypto-collective, hygienic view of comedy belongs not to the present but to the future. More specifically, it belongs to a future ruthlessly unconcerned with both the past and certain constituencies in its own present. The brutal future orientation of Shaw’s vision of comedy becomes even more explicit in the following lines. Returning to his opening questions, Shaw posits that when English “common sense” is able to accommodate the scorched-house policy, then “perhaps comedy will be popular

58 too; for, after all, the function of comedy, as Mr. Meredith after twenty years’ further consideration is perhaps by this time ripe to admit, is nothing less than the destruction of old- established morals” (87). Meredith’s view of comedy looks to what is past, in Molière, and what is hazily immanent, in the so-called “common sense” of the English, to attempt to open up the possibility for a change in ideas. Conversely, Shaw links comedy with both productive destruction and a speculative, brutally hygienically-oriented future. Highlighting the inherently deferred nature of his vision, Shaw closes his review by again returning to the mismatch between comedy and the present moment. A comedic purge cannot materialize in the world as it exists, since currently “such iconoclasm can be tolerated by our playgoing citizens only as a counsel of despair and pessimism” (87). The hopelessness of the endeavour is reaffirmed by Shaw’s final, despairing note: “Comedy, indeed! I drop the subject with a hollow laugh” (88).

Shaw on Comedy: Generic Evolution

Shaw was not “dropping” comedy itself; he was dropping Meredith’s insufficiently radical version of it. In 1897, Shaw was already working out his own dramatic practice of comedy, and he would continue to do so for another half a century. David J. Gordon argues that Shavian comedy is characterized by a paradoxical relationship between destruction and construction.51 In Shaw’s writing on comedy, the latter function is explicitly linked to comedy’s own capacity for evolution. In a subsection of the preface for Back to Methuselah (1921), Shaw argues that

Comedy, as a destructive, derisory, critical, negative art, kept the theatre open when sublime tragedy perished. From Molière to Oscar Wilde we had a line of comedic playwrights who, if they had nothing fundamentally positive to say, were at least in revolt against falsehood and imposture, and were not only, as they claimed, ‘chastening morals by ridicule,’ but, in Johnson’s phrase, clearing out minds of cant, and thereby shewing an uneasiness in the presence of error which is the surest symptom of intellectual vitality. (xciv)

51 In Gordon’s rather optimistic reading of Shaw’s work, the latter prevails, since “however committed to the mode of comedy, a Shavian attack disconcerts as it strikes home by showing us that we are better than we are rather than worse. The aggressivity of scorn strips off the repression of a latent moral energy” (46).

Nuancing the temporal aspect of the concept of comedy as “the fine art of disillusion” from the Meredith review, Shaw sketches out a timeline of generic evolution. “[S]ublime tragedy” has fallen away while comedy has triumphed, precisely because of its “negative” qualities. Comedy is thus not only hygienic for the public at large, but has also been a life-giving force for the theatre itself.

In “Tolstoy: Tragedian or Comedian?”, an extemporized speech delivered the same year, Shaw explores this subject in more detail, beyond the purview of the theatre. He argues that, after Dickens, “[c]omedy completed its development into the new species, which has been called tragi-comedy when any attempt has been made to define it.” Conversely, “[t]ragedy itself never developed[…,] it either failed and was not tragedy at all or else it got there so utterly that no need was felt for going any further.” Tragedy was either so completely tragic that it became absolute, or else it was not tragedy: there was no middle ground between tragedy and not-tragedy in which development might occur. For this reason, tragedy remained “unchanged from Eschylus to Richard Wagner.” There is, however, one chink in tragedy’s apparently impenetrable armour. In Shaw’s estimation, tragedy engenders a “need…for relief.” This lack means that the “reaction to a moment of fun which we associate with Shakespear got the upper hand even of Eschylus, and produced his comic sentinels.” The anachronism of this remark makes it clear that it is an exception and not a rule. For the most part, “Tragedy remained on its summit, simple, unmixed, and heroic” (262). At the same time, comedy absorbed the lessons of tragedy, as “the comic poet [became] less and less a fellow of infinite jest and more and more a satirical rogue and a discloser of essentially tragic ironies” (263).52 In this way, comedy “has become the higher form” (263; italics mine). Shaw’s choice of verb epitomizes his sense of the mutability and, by extension, historical flexibility of comedy. Tragedy merely is or is not. Comedy, responding to particular conditions, can become.53 While tragedy remains “simple, sublime, and overwhelming” (262), the eminently adaptable category of comedy is open to accommodate

52 Given the scorn he heaped on Meredith in the 1897 review, Shaw’s borrowing of his phrase “comic poet” in the speech is somewhat surprising. 53 Shaw’s figuring of comedy as eminently adaptable makes it less credible that “tragicomedy” really is a “third variety” of drama (261) and not just a historically-inflected development of comedy.

“tragic” elements as a way of responding to particular historical conditions. In Major Barbara, Shaw puts the idea of comedy as a capacious, adaptable form into practice by taking tragic materials, both the coordinates of the so-called crisis of liberalism and the horrific conditions to which it responded, and specific elements from Greek tragedy, and making a comedy out of them. Through this “comedification” of tragic elements, the play enacts the creatively destructive public potential of comedy explored in the Meredith review.

Major Barbara

Major Barbara was first performed at the Court Theatre in London on November 28th 1905, and was subsequently published in England by Archibald Constable & Co. on June 19th 1907 (Laurence 78).54 Between production and publication, the political cast of Britain changed radically. A general election was held from January 12th to February 8th 1906. The result was a staggering majority for the Liberal Party, who took 400 seats across the United Kingdom. The election also saw substantial gains for the Labour party, who won 29 seats (Craig 581). Three of the Liberals elected were Fabians, as were four of the elected members of the Labour party. The results “le[ft]the Fabian Society in disarray, their energies having been expended and apparently wasted on permeation tactics” (Gibbs 168). Many Fabians began to advocate for different means of achieving their ends. Major Barbara is a product of moment of transition, and even of crisis. The play specifically reflects on the contemporary crisis of liberalism, epitomized in the ideological and pragmatic tensions between systemic and ad hoc solutions to social welfare.

Reflecting the political and social unsettlement of the moment of its creation, the role of Major Barbara in Shaw’s oeuvre has often been debated by critics. While some have argued that Major Barbara demonstrates continuity with the Unpleasant plays (Grene 1984 84; Meisel 123), many have seen it as a turning-point in both Shaw’s politics and in the political character of his dramatic writing. A pervasive critical trend reads Major Barbara as enacting a shift away from Fabian gradualism and towards a vision of political change based on the exercise of power, and specifically violence. Writing in the midst of the Second World War in 1942, Erich Strauss saw

54 The volume included John Bull’s Other Island and How He Lied to Her Husband. The first American edition, also containing the two other plays, was published by Brentano’s on June 17th 1907 (Laurence 77).

61 the play as a “cul-de-sac” (67). In it, Shaw “the realist” (55) turned away from the obvious retort to Andrew Undershaft’s vision of militaristic capitalist welfarism, which was “a consistent advocacy and application of Socialist ideas” (59). This refusal expresses Shaw’s disillusion with Fabian propaganda. The play asserts that “the transformation of society was impossible without a real power willing to undertake this tremendous task.” The only place to find someone capable of embodying this power would be to look to “the repository of real power in the world as it is—the controllers of big business” (62). In this reading, Major Barbara reflects Shaw’s turn away from political gradualism towards a brutal pragmatism in which existing power structures would not be overthrown but rather put to different, perhaps more beneficial, uses. Writing over seventy years after Strauss, Matthew Yde argues that Major Barbara represents the full flowering of Shaw’s dissatisfaction with Fabian methods, first expressed in the 1889 Fabian Essays. In his reading, the play “evinces Shaw as radical Libertarian Anarchist with a powerful desire for cataclysmic change” (109).

This critical tendency depends, to a large extent, on taking both Undershaft and Shaw’s endorsement of his principles in the preface at face value. Conversely, David J. Gordon does not take Shaw at Undershaft’s word. In his reading, Undershaft is “essentially a pedagogical agent,” who should have left the scene after dispensing “his vital but partial truth” to Barbara and Cusins. Undershaft’s “gospel” of “poverty [as] the worst of crimes” can only be speculative, since the idea “only really makes sense in so far as we can imagine the kind of Utopian society discovered for us in Perivale St Andrews” (127). For Gordon, the problem is not that Perivale St Andrews is not “Utopian” but that it is not imaginable. When the play is fully situated in its Edwardian context, it becomes clear that Perivale St Andrews was not only imaginable but based on real, contemporary examples. Through his own version of a particular solution to the “crime of poverty,” Shaw critiques both its ideological underpinnings and the very idea of comedic resolution itself.

For other critics, Major Barbara signals a shift not through its plot, but in its preface. Shaw himself lends credence to this reading. In a letter to Otto Kyllmann dated September 24th 1906, he called the prefaces to both Major Barbara and John Bull’s Other Island “epoch makers” (Laurence 655). This critical elevation of the preface implies that Major Barbara only reaches its full complexity as a published text, rather than in performance. The relationship between

62 theatrical production and published dramatic text has a particular, historically-conditioned valence in Shaw’s case. Shaw’s published plays were integral to the emergence of modern drama as “a reading as well as performing canon” (Kelly 25), which began in the Edwardian period. Through publication, modern drama was moved “from the stage, where it had the status of a scarce commodity performed for short runs in small, coterie theatres by select actors before select audiences to the page, where it assumed the distinctive look of a mid-priced ‘book’” (50). The insertion of what might be called para-dramatic elements, including prefaces and stage directions, was an important part of this process. These parts of the text were “inserted for the benefit of the reader rather than the playgoer, [and] looked and functioned like glosses to the printed text, giving them the appearance and the ‘value’ of novels” (49). They also provided the opportunity for authorial intervention, “serv[ing] as conditioning rooms through which readers were invited to pass on their way to the plays” (50).55 Shaw uses the preface to Major Barbara in just such a way. The play’s conclusion gains its full political import in relation to the preface. In the preface, Shaw proposes three solutions to what Undershaft calls the “crime of poverty” (III.ii.553, 117). The resolution of the play’s plot depends upon a fourth, elaborated partly through Shaw’s stage directions. This multiplicity situates the play’s solution to the “crime of poverty” in dialogue, both with those solutions proposed within the text and with those solutions being discussed beyond its boundaries. Just as the resolution of the play’s plot depends upon a protracted negotiation between a triumvirate of powers, so Shaw situates the Undershaft dispensation itself as merely one possibility in a much larger conversation about how to address poverty. In this way, Shaw both has his impeccably neat resolution and fractures it too. Rather than a straightforward endorsement of Undershaftian corporate welfarism, the play’s resolution forces the reader to question the stakes of that solution.

The Preface to Major Barbara: Edwardian Solutions

The solutions to the problem of poverty proposed in the preface to Major Barbara can be situated along a continuum. On one end is the “negative eugeni[c]” (Yde 104) solution, an apparent endorsement of the humane killing of the poor. On the other end is the socialist-

55 Shaw was also not above attempting to influence, or even control, audience response to staged productions of his plays, as evinced by his issuing of a “Prefatory Note” to the press when Major Barbara was produced in America in 1915-16.

63 practical solution, an endorsement of something resembling what we would now call a universal minimum income. Between these points, both literally and figuratively, Shaw places contemporary New Liberal social welfare legislation. Shaw presents these solutions in the section of the preface entitled “The Gospel of St Andrew Undershaft,” a reference to Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth (1889). In his pamphlet, Carnegie addresses the “proper administration of wealth” in a radically stratified society (3). He argues that the solution is not to question the “foundations upon which society is based” (6), but rather to work towards “the further evolution of existing conditions” (12).56 Specifically, Carnegie argues that the “ties of brotherhood…bind[ing] together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship” (3), undone by industrialization, can be reknit by a scheme through which “the surplus wealth of the few will become, in the best sense, the property of the many, because administered for the public good” (12). Evoked in the title of the subsection of the preface, Carnegie’s solution is closest both practically and ideologically to the solution explored in the body of the play itself.57 Carnegie’s vision of an ameliorative, individualist-capitalist philanthropy was intended to work on a much larger scale than the highly localized dispensation of Perivale St Andrews or the real company towns on which it was based. Nevertheless, the reference to Carnegie is the only clue in the preface to the actual solution to be explored in the forthcoming text.

Shaw begins his “Gospel” by asserting that he has to “tel[l critics] what to say about [the play]” because of their “credulity” (139) in a version of a Great Man theory that ignores or erases actual historical conditions (138). The point of this section is to put the play in context. In order to do so, Shaw repeats and endorses Undershaft’s contention that “the greatest of our evils, and the worst of our crimes is poverty” (139). The most generous reading of this Undershaftian reiteration is that Shaw is repeating what Edwardian sociology had already made absolutely impossible to ignore: the magnitude of poverty in England and the pressing need to address it (Hynes 1968 54-55). However, the reasons Shaw adduces for this need are deeply Undershaftian.

56 The 1889 “London edition” of Carnegie’s text was dedicated to W.E. Gladstone, whose interest prompted its publication (1). 57 Carnegie is one of the models often adduced for Undershaft. In addition to his philanthropic endeavours, Carnegie’s views on inheritance were idiosyncratic. While he did not believe in the complete disinheritance of the legitimate male line required by the Undershaft inheritance, Carnegie was of the opinion that “great sums bequeathed often work more for the injury than for the good of the recipients” (9). For this reason, he endorsed substantial estate taxes.

Poverty must be addressed not for the sake of bettering the lives of the poor, but because “[s]ecurity, the chief pretence of civilization,” and poverty are mutually exclusive. Any existing stability is merely an illusion, a result of the collusion of the police in the maintenance of gross inequality between the rich, who “overfeed [their] pet dogs” (139), and the poor, whose children starve. Developing this theme, Shaw explores the inefficacy of the current scheme of legal punishment, an idea he had explored in similarly ruthless terms elsewhere.58 In a series of nested rhetorical questions, Shaw posits that the only way to achieve true social stability would be to annihilate poverty, or rather the poor. The inevitable outcome of the continued existence of poverty will be disorder. What if, instead of punishing the more conventional crimes engendered by poverty, society were to “decide that poverty is the one thing we will not tolerate—that every adult with less than, say, £365 a year, shall be painlessly but inexorably killed, and every hungry half naked child forcibly fattened and clothed”? (140-1). The heavy use of rhetorical questions gives the section a speculative tone, which in turn seems to undercut Shaw’s bloodthirsty suggestions. For this and other reasons, many critics have chosen not to take Shaw at his deeply disturbing word. To dismiss these questions as a meaningless “joke,” however, is to misread Shaw’s strategy. The suggestions fold together two key elements of Edwardian progressive thought—sociology and eugenics—in one of Shaw’s own favoured techniques, the rhetorical question. The point of this passage is not necessarily to advocate for the wholesale murder of the poor, but to confront the reader with the brutal realities of unregulated individualistic capitalism through defamiliarization.

Shaw and Rhetorical Questions

As already evident from his Meredith review, rhetorical questions are one of Shaw’s favourite tactics. Richard Ohmann divides his use of them into two broad categories. The first are “questions…to which only one answer is possible.” These are, as a result, “just particularly emphatic forms of statement.” The second kind of questions “are rhetorical only in the broader sense of not seeking to elicit information.” This category can be further divided into two subcategories: the first “presumably gives voice to the reader’s own puzzlement, anticipating a

58 In a letter to Pattie Moye of December 18th., 1881, Shaw endorses capital punishment as “cheaper, more humane, more final in its efficacy to remove a source of danger to the community, & yet more terrible to the evildoer” (Laurence 44).

65 question that he [sic] might ask.” For these questions, Shaw usually provides an answer, often right away (117). The second subcategory of non-information-seeking questions are “clearly open questions[:] Shaw himself cannot answer them, nor do they elicit only one possible reply.” These kinds of questions are not rhetorical in any sense of the word, since “they constitute one half of an imagined conversation between the writer and the audience, with the audience taking silent but active part” (118). The questions at the beginning of Shaw’s Meredith review fall between Ohmann’s first category and the first subcategory. They are not really statements, but the text which follows is essentially a protracted answer to them.

The negative eugenic questions in the Major Barbara preface occupy a far more ambiguous space, not fully categorizable by Ohmann’s rubrics. Taken on their own, these questions could be seen as belonging to the first category, statements masquerading as questions. However, their placement in the preface troubles this reading. The negative eugenic questions are immediately followed by another question about actual legislation. This question redirects the reader away from speculation and towards present realities. Anticipating a question a troubled reader might ask, it belongs to Ohmann’s first subcategory. Through the tension between these sets of questions, the preface sets up an ambiguous and unstable relationship between reality and speculation. Both sets of questions are exactly the same in terms of their grammatical structure. The only detectable difference is that one set seems to emanate from the author, while the other seems to represent the author speaking on behalf of his—disturbed--reader. In this section of the preface, reality and speculation are not presented as polar opposites, which might allow the reader to dismiss Shaw’s disturbing questions as “mere” speculation. The fact that eugenics were as much a part of Edwardian progressive politics as more familiar, and more comfortable, approaches to social welfare makes these questions even harder to dismiss. Not only are the sets of questions grammatically indistinguishable from each other, but they also both refer to very real elements of the ongoing Edwardian discussion about how to deal with poverty.

Edwardian Progressive Solutions: Sociology, Eugenics and Socialism

The preface to Major Barbara draws on three interrelated strands of Edwardian progressive thought: sociology, eugenics and socialism. Shaw’s negative eugenic questions conflate the first

66 two. The inextricability of these three elements is epitomized by the fact that Francis Galton, creator of both the neologism “eugenics” and the field it described, gave lectures to the freshly- minted Sociological Society at the Fabian-sponsored London School of Economics in 1904 (Freeden 646). Eugenics have understandably been associated almost exclusively with the political far right since the Second World War. However, a small body of scholarship has explored the ways in which, in the Edwardian period especially, eugenics defied or complicated simplistic divisions of political right and left, or progressive and conservative. Michael Freeden argues that eugenics should be understood “as an exploratory avenue of the social-reformist tendencies of early-twentieth-century British political thought” (645). More specifically, Freeden asserts that there are “three related ideas…common to the mentality of eugenists and reformers: the evolution of human rationality, orientation towards the future, and their concomitant— planning” (658). For certain thinkers of the Edwardian period, the positive or negative manipulation of genetics was the best route to the ameliorative comedic futurity of progressive thought.

The negative eugenic questions in the preface to Major Barbara must be seen in their historical context, but they must also be taken on their own terms. Shaw’s proposal is based not on genetics, or the putative propagation of physical or psychological conditions through biological reproduction, but on income. The object of Shaw’s negative eugenic scorn is poverty, which he makes explicitly a question of money. Shaw’s quantification invokes another strand in the Edwardian progressive trio: sociology. The negative eugenic proposals represent a sinister re- application of the calculations and investigations carried out by Seebohm Rowntree in his Poverty: A Study of Town Life (1901). Building on and responding to Charles Booth’s earlier work on poverty in London, Rowntree sought to “define poverty in scientific terms” (qtd in Briggs 2000 10). Whereas Booth ordered people based on relative poverty, Rowntree classified them based on how much they earned.59 Those earnings were then measured against the precise amount required to support them, both in terms of the money needed to purchase the necessaries of life and the minimum caloric intake necessary to sustain a human body. In the preface to Major Barbara, Shaw takes the ideas lying behind Rowntree’s rigorously quantified poverty line

59 The conventional wisdom is that “Booth invented the poverty line; [and] Rowntree perfected it” (Gillie qtd in Harris 2000 63) by making it a matter of quantifiable data.

67 and recasts it not as a minimum for sustaining life within existing systems, but as a minimum for the justification of the continuation of life in relation to the stability of existing systems. Shaw turns Rowntree’s poverty line into a perverse life line, below which one will be a threat to the existing order.60 The stated objective of these suggestions is to keep poverty from “destroying” contemporary Britain, as it “has already destroyed so many civilizations” (Shaw 141). Proposed as a substitute for legal punishments for conventional crimes, these suggestions are explicitly positioned as deterrents. Their essence is: earn, or die. Seen in this light, Shaw’s negative eugenic suggestions literalize the brutality of an unmitigatedly individualistic system, the extent of which had been made undeniably visible by studies like Rowntree’s. By casting the imperative to “earn or die” as a matter of active murder rather than passive neglect, Shaw defamiliarizes these concepts, catching his readers unawares and forcing them to confront their own complicity in the pervasive unjustness of existing systems. In this way, the preface anticipates the play’s using the presumed assent of comedic resolution to confront the audience with the costs of that resolution in its final scene.

“Universal Pensions for Life”: Systems and Ends

Immediately following the negative eugenic questions, Shaw asks whether “any radicle of such legislation” is being discussed by the current Liberal government. Finding nothing quite like his bloodthirsty proposition, Shaw instead cites “two measure just sprouting in the political soil, which may conceivably grow to something valuable”: the Legal Minimum Wage and Old Age Pensions.61 The latter epitomizes the melioristic legislation characteristic of New Liberalism, another important strand in Edwardian progressive thought. The reforms undertaken by the Edwardian Liberal party epitomize the tensions associated with the crisis of liberalism by J.A. Hobson, a contemporary observer. Hobson, an economist by training, saw the Edwardian Liberal welfare reforms as definitively “not Socialism.” Rather, they represent “continuity with earlier

60 Shaw’s suggestion echoes Lancelot Hogben’s later (1931) correlation of negative eugenics and the Fabian interest in “minimums”: “Negative eugenics is simply the adoption of a national minimum of parenthood, an extension of the principle of national minima familiar in the writings of Sidney and Beatrice Webb. It is thus essentially en rapport with the social theory of the collectivist movement” (210). 61 Old age pensions would be enacted in 1908. The legal minimum wage did not become law in the United Kingdom until 1999.

Liberalism,” since they seek to guarantee “a fuller appreciation and realization of individual liberty contained in the provision of equal opportunities for self-development” (Hobson xii). These reforms were proposed, enacted, and debated at the intersection of individualism and systematization. They occupy the same position in the spectrum of solutions proposed in the preface to Major Barbara. Their main function therein is to both orient and serve as foil to Shaw’s own preferred solution. After mentioning the Liberal reforms, Shaw moves on almost immediately to a “better plan,” supposedly suggested to him by Thomas Cobden-Sanderson, a colleague of William Morris: “Universal Pensions for Life” (141). These “pensions” would not only supplant the specifically old age pensions promoted by the contemporary Liberal Party, but they would obviate the need for any other social welfare mechanisms.62 Earlier in the preface Shaw compares the current legal and prison system to an incommensurate, and therefore ineffective, form of forced vaccination (139). By contrast, Universal Pensions for Life would provide an effective, well-balanced vaccine that would “guarantee the community against the possibility of a case of the malignant disease of poverty” (141). Although Shaw himself apparently did not believe in the efficacy of vaccination (Grene 2008 fn 31, 139), his choice of figure epitomizes the value of Universal Pensions. Like a vaccine, they would work their way out from each individual to the collective, creating herd immunity against the depredations of poverty while necessitating a bare minimum of intervention and infrastructure.63

For James Alexander, the introduction of Universal Pensions for Life makes Major Barbara distinctive in Shaw’s body of work. Whereas Shaw had earlier endorsed Fabian proposals, this idea was purely his own.64 The Universal Pensions for Life were “Shaw’s attempt to make Socialism practicable.” From 1907 on, this idea “was to remain the fundamental Socialist principle for the rest of his life” (Alexander 205). In Alexander’s view, the concept was

62 Outside of the specific context of the preface, Shaw did publicly endorse old age pensions. In a letter published in the Westminster Gazette on November 25th, 1907, he asserted that to fail to enact pensions would be “to walk off the map of Europe” (qtd in Stead 237). 63 The idea’s political malleability has given it a long historical afterlife. It has come to the fore in recent political discourse. The current Liberal government of the province of Ontario is in the process of testing a basic income project in three cities. 64 It could be argued that by attributing the idea to someone else Shaw sought to mitigate the radical character of this innovation. The more likely explanation is that this is another instance of the way in which “[i]n Shaw’s politics[, his] fundamentalist moods often took the form of an appeal to the authority of William Morris” (Griffith 111).

69 particularly effective “[because i]t was about ends, not means.” In representing a “consumer’s, not a producer’s ideal, of Socialism” (206), it provided a practical narrative endpoint, a goal towards which this particular version of socialism could work:

what Shaw understood…was that the earlier statist view of Socialism had been a teleological doctrine without a telos, and, whether flawed or inconsistent, what Shaw attempted to do now [with the “equality of incomes”] was suggest what that telos (scientific not utopian, concrete not abstract, practical not theoretical) should be. (207)

Just as the negative eugenic questions set the reader up for the reversal in the play’s resolution, so Shaw’s proposition of Universal Pensions for Life sets the reader up to think about both systems and ends. Shaw’s “Universal Pensions for Life” represent a pragmatic, rudimentarily systematized socialism. They require a minimum of either intervention or infrastructure and they provide a goal that would create a baseline of equality going forward, the inverse of Shaw’s crypto-eugenic life line. Their beneficent character is emphasized by their association with a figure drawn from relatively recent advances in medicine, which emphasizes the profound interconnectedness of collective and individual wellbeing.65 In this way, the Universal Pension for Life is a proleptic critique of the solution explored in the play’s resolution. The Universal Pension for Life takes an inverse approach to social welfare than the company towns on which Shaw’s Perivale St Andrews was based. The late Victorian or Edwardian company towns put in place something close to universal welfare provisions, but only in a strictly localized way. They provided for all needs, but only for the workers of the company or residents of the town. In short, they may have addressed the “crime of poverty” (117), but only for those within their charmed circle. Being a resident in a company town was in many ways like being one of “those who were inside the garden” (Hynes 1968 4) of the figurative Edwardian party. The late Victorian and Edwardian company towns were merely extensions of their founders’ wealth and not responses to the systemic imbalances that had allowed them to accumulate so much wealth in the first place. By contrast, the Universal Pension for Life, as formulated by Shaw in the Preface to Major Barbara, would seek to use the local—the eradication of poverty at the individual level—

65 Although the principle of vaccination was demonstrated by Edward Jenner in the late 1790s, it was not until after Louis Pasteur’s experiments in the 1880s that vaccinations became widely available (McLean).

70 to both obviate the need for any further social welfare provisions and, at the same time, to eradicate the other ills associated with poverty.

Andrew Undershaft, Paternalist Industrialist

Major Barbara unfolds the consequences of Andrew Undershaft’s reunion with his estranged family and the working out of the peculiar “Undershaft inheritance” (107), which dictates that the Undershaft cannon works be left to a foundling (11). In the first act, Undershaft is invited to Wilton Crescent, where his wife, Britomart, and three children—Sarah, Stephen, and Barbara— have been living without him. Britomart intends for Undershaft to answer the play’s key question: “[w]here is the money to come from?” (9). The immediate context for this question in Act 1 is that Barbara and Sarah’s prospective husbands will “cost them more” (15) than they will be able to provide. Barbara is a Major in the Salvation Army, betrothed to Adolphus Cusins, a professor of Greek, while Sarah is betrothed to Charles Lomax, who is revealed to be an unintentional soothsayer over the course of the play. As the play progresses, the question’s referents expand, until it becomes an issue of the potential morality of sources of wealth in a capitalist economy. Britomart also intends to dissuade Undershaft from disinheriting Stephen. During his visit, Undershaft and Barbara disagree about the relative morality of their undertakings, even though Undershaft suggests they are more alike than they may seem: “I am rather interested in the Salvation Army,” he announces, “Its motto might be my own: Blood and Fire” (26). At the end of the first act, Barbara and Undershaft strike up “a bargain” (29) whereby he agrees to visit her shelter if she will visit his works, in order to test their faith in their own version of “Blood and Fire.” The second act depicts Undershaft’s visit to the West Ham Shelter, where Barbara rejects his gifts of two pence and £99. Ultimately, Barbara’s superior Mrs. Baines accepts Undershaft’s offer of £5000 to secure an equal donation from Horace Bodger, distiller (74-5). Barbara is devastated, confessing herself to be “[c]leaned out” (83). The second scene of the third act depicts Barbara’s, and the rest of the family, visit to Perivale St Andrews, the company town for the Undershaft works. There Undershaft’s conversion of Barbara is completed as he makes Cusins, revealed on a technicality to be a foundling, his successor to the “Undershaft inheritance” (107).

There are many potential prototypes for Andrew Undershaft and Perivale St Andrews, his town-

71 cum-factory. Stanley Weintraub lists four possible “fathers” for Barbara (156): Alfred Nobel, Basil Zaharoff, Andrew Carnegie, and Friedrich Alfred Krupp. Of these four, Krupp is perhaps the most promising. Not only can Krupp the man serve as a model for Undershaft, but Krupp the company provides a number of models for Perivale St Andrews. Krupp built several generations of “colonies” (Meakin 370) throughout Germany to house its workers. In turn, these “colonies” influenced the specifically British late Victorian and Edwardian British industrial company towns on which Perivale St Andrews is based. In terms of the man, Krupp’s life provides a number of nearly irresistible narrative links with Undershaft. During Friedrich Alfred Krupp’s tenure, “Krupp's military production [was expanded] into armor plate and warships,…and…its standing as the nation's flagship private enterprise [was solidified]” (Hayes). At the same time, Friedrich Alfred “greatly extend[ed] the workers’ welfare program initiated by his father, with its model villages…and its many social benefits” (Valency 249). He died in 1902 with no male heir. Consequently, the company passed into the control of his daughter Bertha, while her younger sister Barbara was disinherited (Weintraub 151). In 1906, between the production of Major Barbara and its publication, Bertha married Gustav von Bohlen und Halbach. He took the name of Krupp, thus “fulfilling in reality the role of Dr. Cusins in Shaw’s play” (Valency 250).66

The connection with Krupp is not solely felicitous. For other critics it elucidates the potentially horrifying outcomes not just of Major Barbara’s resolution but of associated tendencies in Shaw’s thought. Over the first half of the twentieth century, Krupp went from a “notable [Edwardian] model employer” (Grene 1984 99) to a manufacturer of armaments for the Nazis (Yde 107). Nicholas Grene asserts that, although “[t]he whole National Socialist movement…shows something like the alliance of forces which Shaw asks us to approve in Major Barbara,” the play endorses an “innocent totalitarianism” (1984 99), with Undershaft functioning as a “benevolent despot” (1984 100). Grene’s argument is deeply Edwardian in its desire to foreground the potentially beneficial aspects of what might seem troubling to later commentators.67

66 Weintraub even goes so far as to suggest that Major Barbara, widely reported on in German newspapers, might have influenced Kaiser Wilhelm, who “handpicked” Bertha’s husband and presided over his name change at the wedding (152). 67As Brian Lewis notes of W.H. Lever, “[m]ost [contemporary] commentators were eager to emphasize the benevolence and overlook the despotism” (121).

Keeping to the play’s immediate context, the Krupp company and their works loomed large in the Edwardian imagination. In Budgett Meakin’s Model Factories and Villages: Ideal Conditions of Labour and Housing (1905), the Krupp “colonies” (370), as Meakin calls them, are given pride of place. Not only is the section on “Industrial Housing” prefaced by an image of Altenhof, the seventh of Krupp’s multiple generations of industrial villages, but images of other Krupp colonies are interspersed amongst the descriptions of British model villages or company towns. Meakin’s intercutting illustrates the interrelationship of British and German approaches to industrial housing in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Nevertheless, the specifically British “company towns” or “model villages” arose out of and were indicative of a unique political and social situation.68 The late Victorian and Edwardian British industrial company towns were, in effect, physical manifestations and philosophical synecdoches of the crisis British liberalism faced in the latter decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. Inherently localized, they attempted to provide systemic solutions to poverty and its associated concerns in necessarily limited, and limiting, ways. Not only were their provisions restricted to workers at the companies and their associates or dependents, but the towns themselves were also deeply paternalistic.

Company Towns

The early twentieth century was “the heyday of the company town” (Borges and Torres 3), as the twinned forces of industrial capitalism and colonialism expanded their reach across the globe. In the British context, company towns were largely the creation of a specific group of Victorian industrialists, characterized by their dual adherence to Gladstonian liberalism and religious Non-

68 These categories are not distinct. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a “model village” is “a village providing a high standard of housing, typically built to accommodate the workforce of a large employer.” The first quotation refers explicitly to George Cadbury’s Bournville. By contrast, a “company town” is “a town which is dependent on a particular commercial company for almost all of its employment, housing, etc.” The examples cited for that term are American. Conversely, Borges and Torres make a distinction between “company towns,” which primarily serve the interests of capitalism, and “model towns,” which may have served idealistic ends (3). The settlements built by the late-Victorian British paternalist industrialists often partook of both categories. For simplicity’s sake, I use the term “company town” when referring to Port Sunlight and Perivale St Andrews, in order to emphasize that, in both cases, commercial concerns are foremost.

Conformism (Bradley 12). Company towns or model villages began to disappear from Britain in the 1920s, as the government expanded social housing under the impetus of the 1919 Housing Act. These movements were not discrete. They shared personnel and, by extension, basic architectural and planning principles. In the years between the First and Second World Wars, the British government built over a million houses very much like those in the late-Victorian and Edwardian company towns. 69 In turn, these kinds of houses and housing arrangements would be the basic models for suburban developments both in Britain and elsewhere.

Gladstonian liberalism created the material conditions for the emergence of the late-Victorian and Edwardian company towns both through what it did and what it did not do. The changes Gladstone oversaw as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the early 1850s, and more specifically the removal or refiguration of duties in the 1853 budget, made the amassing of their fortunes possible.70 Conversely, the lack of provisions for systemic social welfare under Gladstone prompted the philanthropic interventions of the Victorian industrialists. As Elizabeth Outka puts it, “these attempts at factory utopias [should be seen] as practical responses to an important social crisis” (52). These company towns were direct responses to the twinned problems of poverty and inequality at the heart of both the crisis of Edwardian liberalism and Major Barbara itself.

Port Sunlight: Synecdoche of the Edwardian Crisis of Liberalism

As understood by Edwardian liberals themselves, the “crisis of liberalism” resulted from the need “to accept and execute a positive progressive policy which involves a new conception of the functions of the State” (Hobson xi). This “new conception” would mean moving beyond the ad hoc “enlargements of public activity” of Gladstonian liberalism towards “the adoption of a vigorous, definite, positive policy of social reconstruction, involving important modifications in

69According to the official site of the UK Parliament, “[u]nder the provisions of the inter-war Housing Acts local councils built a total of 1.1 million homes.” 70 For example, the imposition of a uniform duty of a penny per pound on imported cocoa beans helped turn chocolate from a luxury item into an affordable, everyday product, thereby enabling the rise of the Cadbury confectionery empire (Bradley 127).

74 the legal and economic institutions of private property and private industry” (Hobson xi). The late Victorian/Edwardian British company towns are a synecdoche of the tensions animating this crisis. These towns put into practice just such a “positive policy of social reconstruction”: in them, both private property and private industry were used to create indisputably better lives for their workers. At the same time, they served primarily commercial ends. They were also inherently localized. They could only be considered “enlargements of public activity” if the “public” was only understood to mean the workers at the factory or the residents of the town. By their very nature, they were also deeply paternalistic. As such, they were in profound tension with the principle of individual freedom eulogized by classic liberalism. Hobson saw the Edwardian social welfare reforms as participating in the fundamental enlargement of these freedoms. This tension is exacerbated by the fact that many of their creator-cum-overseers were adherents of Gladstonian liberalism. Some of them, such as William Hesketh Lever, later Baron and then Viscount Leverhulme, even served as Liberal MPs. Shaw himself mentioned Lever in relation to Undershaft on a number of occasions.71 Lever, and the town he built near Liverpool for his employees, provide a particularly instructive example not just of the real-world analogues for Undershaft, but also of the deeply fraught political and social character of the late Victorian and Edwardian British industrial company towns.

Lever was the inventor of Sunlight soap and the prime mover behind the extremely successful Lever Brothers business, which later became Unilever. As one of the group of late Victorian British paternalist-philanthropist capitalists and a Liberal MP of the class of 1906, Lever was directly involved with both private and public Edwardian social welfare schemes.72 In terms of public approaches to social welfare, Lever introduced a Private Member’s Bill for old age pensions in 1907. Privately, Lever built a well-known company town for his soap works. Port Sunlight, located on the Mersey river near Liverpool, provided inspiration not only for Shaw’s

71 In a letter to Thomas Demetrius O’Bolger from 7th August 1919, Shaw remarked, “If, in dealing with Undershaft, you demonstrate that the social problem will never be solved by the Henry Fords and the Leverhulmes, well and good: I shall heartily endorse your conclusion.” (629). 72 Providing another link to Undershaft, Lever’s company was also deeply involved in the major conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century. Lever was ennobled for his service to the state during the First World War. During the Second World War, the works at Port Sunlight undertook “direct war work,” including the manufacture of undercarriages for Lancaster bombers (Williams 30).

Perivale St Andrews, but also for “Port Sunshine,” the setting for the smash-hit musical The Sunshine Girl (1912) (Walkowitz 83). Opened in 1890, the town was built on the principle of amelioration. An illustrated volume from 1916 begins by noting that “[w]hat most impresses itself on those who study…Port Sunlight is the fact that it is the definite outcome of a genuine ideal…this was meant to be something better than what had been before” (Davison 2). The town literalized the better future of progressive thought in its very structure. Practically speaking, the village represented a substantial increase in the quality of both housing and life for its residents. The houses at Port Sunlight offered a number of the modern conveniences many Britons would not experience until the massive expansion of council housing under the post-1945 Labour government. For example, the town featured the “first working-class dwellings in Britain to have baths installed” (Williams 5). These improvements led to measurable decreases in death rates and rates of infant mortality, but they also served commercial ends.73 Writing in 1909, W.L. George reports that the workers housed at Port Sunlight produced more goods and of better quality than their poorly-housed contemporaries. George’s book culminates with a section on “Profit and Loss,” which serves to illustrate his contention “that the idea of a return underlies the whole scheme” (197). This return was both real and symbolic: George saw Port Sunlight as “an example to the industrial world” (201). Port Sunlight represented a quantifiably better present for its residents. In George’s view, it also figured the possibility of a better future for and through capitalism around the globe.

Beyond the boundaries of Port Sunlight, Lever also engaged in larger-scale social welfare projects. After failing several times, he finally won a seat as part of the Liberal landslide of 1906. On May 10th 1907, he made good on his promise to address the question of old age pensions when his Private Member’s Bill received its second reading before the House of Commons.74 The debate of the bill in the House vividly illustrates the coordinates of the crisis of liberalism as defined by Hobson. The discussion took place largely amongst Liberals, with only rare

73 In a highly flattering portrait of the town, W.L. George reports that the average annual death rate from 1900 to 1907 at Port Sunlight was 9/1000, contrasted with 20/1000 in Liverpool (152). In terms of infant mortality, Port Sunlight had half the rate of Liverpool, with the village registering only 70/1000 “deaths in the first year of life” compared to the adjacent city’s 140/1000 and an average of 125/1000 for “76 great towns (over 50,000 inhabitants)” (153). 74 Lever’s Bill was not the first or the last to address old age pensions. Given the timing, it is unlikely that Lever’s is the Bill referred to in the preface to Major Barbara.

76 interjections from other parties. Lever defended his Bill on New Liberal principles, asserting that it was the duty of the State to step in “where the citizen could not do a certain thing which was necessary for his future welfare and happiness or his present welfare and safety” (HC Deb 10 May 1907 col 474). By contrast, Harold Cox, Liberal MP for Preston, argued that “forms of interference by Government were necessary concomitants of Socialistic legislation. They could not have Socialism without tyranny” (HC Deb 10 May 1907 col 492). Cox also argued that the taxation necessary to support the system would mean the end of free trade. To further illustrate his point about the value of social welfare in cultivating citizenship, Lever linked old age pensions with universal public education. In this way, Lever continued the line of argumentation Forster himself used for his education Bill over thirty years before. Nevertheless, going beyond the link between social welfare and tradition, Lever added that old age pensions would serve “on a strict system of business” (HC Deb 10 May 1907 col 477). By helping to produce better citizens, pensions would produce a better, more prosperous, country. Like Port Sunlight itself, Lever’s speech epitomizes New Liberalism’s “blend of progressive social policies in the service of a capitalist economy” (Lewis 126). The precise relationship between Lever’s public and private social welfare work is a matter of critical debate. A promotional booklet for the hundredth anniversary of Port Sunlight credits the village as a proto-welfare state (Williams 5). By contrast, Brian Lewis argues that Lever’s interest in public welfare was a paradoxical response to his doubts about his paternalistic role at Port Sunlight:“[h]is uneasiness about being an absolute ruler locally no doubt added to his concern to provide national solutions to national problems” (126). In Major Barbara, Undershaft is explicitly uninterested in large-scale public social welfare. Nevertheless, his presentation of Perivale St Andrews as a cure for poverty draws on both sides of Lever’s endeavours.

Shaw’s Fictional Company Town

Although an essential part of the Undershaft dispensation, Perivale St Andrews does not come into view, either literally or figuratively, until the last scene of the last act of Major Barbara. When Undershaft visits his family at Wilton Crescent in the first act, the village is not mentioned at all. In fact, it seems to be deliberately elided. In response to Lomax’s conventional platitudes, Undershaft takes great pains to separate himself from either Carnegie-style philanthropy or Lever-esque public engagement by referring only to the violent side of his business:

I am not one of those men who keep their morals and their business in water-tight compartments. All the spare money my trade rivals spend on hospitals, cathedrals, and other receptacles for conscience money, I devote to experiments and researches in improved methods of destroying life and property. (28)

Presumably some of the company’s profits go into the maintenance and upkeep of Perivale St Andrews, but Undershaft only ever alludes to these arrangements indirectly, as when he asserts that he “look[s] after the drainage” (117). Otherwise, he insists on the redemptive value of the wages he pays.75 Undershaft clearly sees the town as part of his business and not as a charitable endeavour. The upkeep and maintenance of the town’s infrastructure and services are an indirect way of furthering the company’s overall interest in “improved methods of destroying life and property,” the means by which it maintains its competitive edge in the marketplace. The village’s purpose for its inhabitants is the precise opposite: it seeks to improve methods of living life and preserving property, as Undershaft argues in the last act. Seen from the perspective of the whole play, Undershaft’s statement about the uses of his profits in the first act is profoundly ironic: the deadlier and more violent the world becomes, the more secure and prosperous Perivale St Andrews will be. The interplay between these two elements—the unpredictability of violence and the need for stability—undergirds the play’s resolution.

Perivale St Andrews forms the background to Act III scene ii both literally, in terms of the placement of the characters onstage, and thematically, in terms of its being one of the main conditions of the tripartite negotiations between Undershaft, Barbara and Cusins with which the play concludes. In the opening stage directions, the readers of the published text learn that Perivale St Andrews is an “almost smokeless town of white walls, roofs of narrow green slates or red tiles, tall trees, domes, campaniles, and slender chimney shafts, beautifully situated and beautiful in itself” (102). The image is strikingly un-industrial: there is not even any smoke. Contrary to Undershaft’s statements in Act I, the stage directions emphasize the residential, rather than the industrial, aspect of the town. This focus is nuanced by the placement of the scene on a hill overlooking the town. The crest of the hill is surmounted by “an emplacement of

75 See, for example III.ii.573, 118 and III.ii.531, 117.

78 concrete, with a firestep, and a parapet which suggests a fortification, because there is a huge cannon of the obsolete Woolwich Infant pattern peering across it at the town” (102). Perivale St Andrews resembles a medieval fortified village, indirectly recalling the anachronistic quality of company towns.76 Through these descriptions, Shaw establishes that the company town side of Undershaft’s business will be seen through the lens of the armory side. Both the cannon gazes out over the town, but do does his titular character. As the scene opens, Barbara is “looking over the parapet towards the town” (102), where Cusins, her siblings and her mother currently are.

The stage directions imply that the audience and readers’ view of Perivale St Andrews will always be both distant and mediated. This mediation is reiterated at the level of dialogue as, over the course of the next few minutes, the characters arrive from the town. Each provides information, reflecting their own interests, to add to the reader’s sense of the town. From Cusins, the reader is given the paradoxical information that there is “[n]ot a ray of hope” because “[e]verything [is] perfect.” Barbara’s siblings Sarah and Stephen fill in the town’s paternalist company town bona fides, listing off its “nursing home,” “libraries and schools,” the “ball room and…banqueting chamber in the Town Hall” and “the insurance fund, the building society, [and] the various applications of co-operation” (103). By contrast, Lady Britomart offers a deeply gendered reading of the division between town and foundry. When Undershaft asserts that the “place” (106) does not “belong to [him]” because it is “the Undershaft inheritance” (107), she retorts that “all that plate and linen, all that furniture and those houses and orchards and gardens…belong to me: they are not a man’s business” (107). Lady Britomart’s list foreshadows Barbara’s strange regression at the last moment of the play.77 To most of these things, Undershaft has nothing to say. He only gives any sense of his understanding of how the village functions when Stephen raises the kind of objection to the village’s provisions that was also raised to Lever’s old age pensions and other New Liberal social welfare reforms by classical

76 Brian Lewis argues that “[t]he idea of the company village drew its inspiration from a pre- industrial, agrarian world where (in popular imagination at least) squires provided cottages on their estates for the labourers,” and otherwise looked after their needs in return for social deference (95). 77 Providing a neat solution to the perennial problem of Barbara’s bizarre last-minute regression, Elizabeth Outka argues that it highlights the twinned and inextricable dangers of nostalgia and paternalism. Barbara’s childish request for a house in the village “suggests that Perivale St Andrews might eventually reduce people to coddled children, threatening the remedies to social ills that such towns sought to promote” (67).

79 liberals.

Stephen is integral to the play’s political machinations. His own move to a form of paradoxical independence, which is really just another form of dependence on his father, unrolls in the background of the working out of the larger Undershaft solution. When he first comes from the town, Stephen raises a conventional, classical liberal objection to its arrangements: “Well, I cannot help thinking that this provision for every want of your workmen may sap their independence and weaken their sense of responsibility …Are you sure so much pampering is really good for the men’s characters?” (105). Stephen’s objection depends upon the individualist assumption that independence and “character” are the product of material hardship and struggle. In response, Undershaft advises him that

when you are organizing civilization you have to make up your mind whether trouble and anxiety are good things or not. If you decide that they are, then, I take it, you simply dont organize civilization; and there you are, with trouble and anxiety enough to make us all angels! But if you decide the other way, you may as well go through with it. However, Stephen, our characters are safe here. A sufficient dose of anxiety is always provided by the fact that we may be blown to smithereens at any moment. (105)

This speech has occasionally been read as Undershaft either arguing for the elimination of “trouble and anxiety” or stating that those elements are absent from Perivale St Andrews.78 In reality, it refutes both of those propositions. In the final two sentences, Undershaft tells Stephen that if he thinks that “trouble and anxiety” are absent from Perivale St Andrews, then he has fundamentally misread the situation. Perivale St Andrews is not about doing away with “trouble and anxiety”; rather, it is about making stability dependent upon them both materially and philosophically. The town maintains the brutality of unrestrained individualism invoked in Shaw’s negative eugenic proposals in the preface through the materials with which its occupants work. The profits to be gained from those materials depend not only upon their deadliness, but also on the scalability of that deadliness. Instead of “earn, or die,” the town asserts both that its

78 See, for example, Griffiths who argues that the speech means that “order and enlightenment are not to be gained through struggle” (88).

80 residents must earn through others’ dying and that they may earn and still die themselves. Undershaft’s solution in Perivale St Andrews recasts the coordinates of contemporary intra- Liberal debates about social welfare in a violent register. The town addresses the classical liberal objections raised by members of the Edwardian Liberal Party to welfare reforms by making brutality constitutive of its beneficent work. In Perivale St Andrews, Undershaft’s workers have equal opportunities both to realize their personal liberties but also to be “blown to smithereens.” Keeping with his own brutally individualist philosophy, Undershaft argues in the “trouble and anxiety” speech that the former is meaningless without the latter.

Perivale St Andrews: No Future

Undershaft’s solution is no solution at all both because it is, like the company towns on which it was patterned, inherently localized and because, in a neat twist on Shaw’s own theory of comedy as creative destruction, its stability is premised on devastation. In the Meredith review, Shaw links comedy to a brutal future when destruction could serve a hygienic purpose in clearing away worn-out habits of mind, figured as old and unsanitary buildings. In his depiction of Perivale St Andrews, by contrast, the possibility of destruction serves not to clear out old habits but to uphold them. While historical company towns like Port Sunlight used social welfare provisions to preserve and perpetuate the capitalism for which they were putatively also remedies, Perivale St Andrews exploits the transformative power of violence to vitiate change. Like Shaw’s negative eugenic questions in the preface, this refiguration defamiliarizes the apparently beneficent work of company towns for the reader. The text makes it clear that Perivale St Andrews is ludicrously incommensurate with the issue of poverty both as Shaw defines it in the preface and as Undershaft himself defines it in Act III, scene ii. Echoing the preface, Undershaft quantifies the argument that crime is incidental, while poverty is foundational: “there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people” (117). In fact, the massive scale of poverty is what qualifies it as the “worst” of crimes (117). As a solution, he posits his own addressing of the “seven deadly sins” of human need (117), from which he has saved both his workers in Perivale St Andrews and Barbara in the “large house on Wilton Crescent” (5) in which she grew up. This house is the setting for Act I. The Undershaft residence initially seems to figure a generalized stability in tension with the volatility of the company town. The final scene forces a revision of the setting of the first Act. Although the

81 house on Wilton Crescent may lack the sense of physical danger inherent in Perivale St Andrews, it nonetheless also depends upon the town’s constitutive violence. Without the proceeds from Perivale St Andrews and its violent industry, the Undershaft residence on Wilton Crescent would not exist. By the end of the play, the distance between the two is undone, as Barbara plans to move into a house in the company town. In short, Wilton Crescent is brought to Perivale St Andrews. Given that Undershaft himself has defined the problem of poverty as being on the scale of millions, who “bligh[t] whole cities” (117), both of these solutions are akin to attempting to heal a sucking wound with a small finger bandage.

This absurd mismatch also highlights the hermetic temporality of Perivale St Andrews. Perivale St Andrews is not a place of transformation; it is a place of stasis. The town does not look to the future, because it is already its own telos. As Cusins recognizes, there is “[n]ot a ray of hope” to be found in the town because “[e]verything [is] perfect” (103). Cusins’ line seems to be ironic, but is actually perfectly sincere. Hope requires the belief in a better future, but there is no need for improvement in the town of Perivale St Andrews. The only ameliorative possibilities in Perivale St Andrews are in perfecting methods of violence. In fact, the continuation of the stable perfection of the town depends upon that destructive amelioration, a correlation ironically hinted at when Undershaft refers to putting the funds that would otherwise would go to “conscience money” towards “experiments and researches in improved methods of destroying life and property” (28) in the first act.

In Act III, scene ii, Undershaft consistently evokes the transformative power of violence inherent in the factory to mask the lack of futurity in his company town. When he urges Barbara and Cusins to “[k]ill” poverty (119), Undershaft collapses both sides of his factory into one. Through his invocation of the potentially transformative power of violence, Undershaft attempts to make Perivale St Andrews appear not simply a “factory of death” (129), as Cusins calls it later in the scene, but a factory of the death of poverty and the promotion of liberty. For Undershaft, killing is the only way to exercise freedom: as he tells Barbara, “[i]t is the final test of conviction, the only lever strong enough to overturn a social system, the only way of saying Must” (119). Recalling his earlier addressing of Stephen’s concerns about coddling through the invocation of the ever-present possibility for violence in the “trouble and anxiety” speech, Undershaft here attempts to mask the attenuated futurity of his company town. He does so by pointing to the way

82 in which he believes his products can be used to create liberty: “[w]hen you vote, you only change the names of the cabinet. When you shoot, you pull down governments, inaugurate new epochs, abolish old orders and set up new [ones]” (120). These lines have often been read as Shaw’s own endorsement of violent revolution over Fabian gradualism, for which he was losing his taste.79 This reading ignores the profound paradox of Perivale St Andrews. The Undershaft solution uses both the promise and the profits of violence to obviate change. In terms of the internal functioning of the works, the possibility of violence inoculates the factory itself against violence or change, as Undershaft explained in the “trouble and anxiety” speech. The “trouble and anxiety” inherent in the materials of manufacture provide the distracting complications that would otherwise be provided by individualistic struggle, keeping the workers’ minds away from the need for change. In terms of its larger functioning, the Undershaft solution uses the profits to be had from the manufacture of the means of violent overthrow to create the conditions for docility and the curtailment of liberty. The Undershaft solution does not embody the transformative power of revolutionary violence; rather, it exploits the possibility of violence to perpetuate existing systems. Undershaft himself makes this fact explicit when he assures Barbara and Cusins that the ultimate outcome of his “saving” his workers will be their “join[ing] the Conservative Party” (118). Undershaft’s solution is not oriented towards a better future; rather, it seeks to capitalize on those energies and use them to create inertia.

The “Comedification” of Tragedy

Besides the patterning after company towns like Port Sunlight, Perivale St Andrews recasts the relationship between two central financial concerns of the Edwardian period: the expansion of the military and social welfare. David Lloyd-George, Chancellor of the Exchequer from April 1908, made provisions in his 1909 “People’s Budget” that would allow the very same money to be used to pay for the latter if the former were no longer considered to be necessary. In Perivale St Andrews, the dependence of social welfare on the machinery of the military is constitutive, not contingent. Undershaft’s company town presents a highly localized arrangement where social welfare is not only financially and philosophically dependent on militarism, but also serves as a justification for it. The neat folding in of these two issues in Perivale St Andrews epitomizes the

79 See, for example, Yde, who calls “Major Barbara a revolutionary play, perhaps the most revolutionary play that Shaw ever wrote” (98).

83 ways in which Major Barbara makes the materials of tragedy comedic. The play’s conclusion enacts Shaw’s conception of the historical flexibility and capaciousness of comedy as a genre.

In the version of Major Barbara which appeared in the Standard Edition of 1931, “Euripides” is the last word, a change from “my young friend” in the first British edition (Grene 2008 fn 1044, 131). The referent remains the same in both cases: Andrew Undershaft the elder is speaking to Adolphus Cusins, who is about to become Andrew Undershaft the next. However, the change of epithet is significant. Undershaft has already called Cusins “my young friend” (24) upon misrecognizing him as his son in the first act. The move away from this formula de-emphasizes the significance of Cusins as adoptive, or supplementary, son to Undershaft in the play’s resolution. The filial aspect is not entirely discarded or rejected by the substitution; rather, it is subsumed. The change asserts the vital importance of Euripides. The final, but also titular, lines of The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), often read alongside or as an intertext for Major Barbara, provide an instructive parallel. The revelation that Jack is named “Ernest” allows the comedic resolution of Wilde’s play to occur. In Major Barbara, the name “Euripides” signals that the resolution occurs through refigured Euripidean plot machinations, and most notably the revelation of Cusins’ irregular parentage.

The name “Euripides” also invokes the body of criticism which has grown up around his texts. Euripides is often called by his Aristotelian tag, “the most tragic of the poets” (73). Other critics, both ancient and modern, have pointed out the “symbiotic” (Segal 124) relationship between Euripides’ work and Greek dramatic comedy. Criticism contemporary with Major Barbara specifically highlighted Euripides’ affinity with the New Comedy of Menander. Francis Cornford, Gilbert Murray’s contemporary and colleague, cast Euripides as the true origin of the line of descent for English comedy. New Comedy, in turn, borrowed its “essential elements,” of which the most important is “the conception of romantic love itself,” from Euripides (17).

In both cases, Euripides’ generic affiliation is based on plot: he is “most tragic” for Aristotle because his plays follow the particular plot structure which is especially “right” for tragedy (73), while for Cornford and other critics some of his plots contain what would become the founding elements of specifically romantic comedy. The fundamental difference between the tragic and the comedic views of his works is not only a matter of emphasis, but, more crucially, has to do

84 with historical perspective. Leaving aside the vexed, and probably unresolvable, question of the apocryphal second book of the Poetics, comedy was achieving what Segal calls its “fullest natural form” (his translation of “physis”) in the plays of Menander at nearly the exact same moment as the Poetics was being written (108). Both the historical narrative of the genealogy of the comedic genre and the specific role played therein by Euripides are altered under the aspect of Menander. In short, Euripides is an example of the expansiveness of comedy expounded by Shaw in his speech on Tolstoy. Not only is comedy itself flexible and adaptable enough to accommodate tragic elements, but the narrative of the historical development of comedy can also be opened to admit “tragic” playwrights. As plot and genre are inextricable in defining Euripides’ role in literary history, so Shaw uses Euripides structurally to indicate to the reader or spectator how he is to be read as a generic marker. In its neatness and its move towards resolution and futurity, the revelation of Cusins’ technical illegitimacy echoes precisely those Euripidean plot machinations which led Cornford to identify his work as the source of Menandrian comedy.

A specific Euripidean text is also used in Major Barbara’s final scene both to explicitly enact the incorporation of tragedy into comedy and to open the way towards the play’s own comedic resolution. The Bacchae offers a tragic mirror for Major Barbara, as Earnest could be said to provide a conventionally comedic one. The central tragic action of Euripides’ play, the dismembering of Pentheus by his mother Agave, is motivated by Dionysus’ desire to assert his own divine legitimacy and, by extension, save his mother from calumny (Euripides 9). The play ends not only with the “wrecking” of the line of Cadmus (77), but with complete dispossession, as he and his family are “outcast” from Thebes (78). In the final scene of Major Barbara, Shaw indirectly refers to the sparagmos at the centre of Euripides’ text and turns it to his own peculiarly comedic advantage: Major Barbara ends not with genealogical devastation, but with a refigured genealogy leading to a new domestic dispensation predicated on the income to be made from the possibility of extraordinary, explosive and ever-more deadly violence.

Sparagmos is referenced indirectly in Cusins’ speech to Barbara justifying both his suitability for the post of Undershaft the next and his project in assuming control of the factory.80 Having

80 For a further discussion of sparagmos in Major Barbara, see Albert (2012), 84; 124-6; 132-3;

85 decided to accept Undershaft’s offer, he tells Barbara that

You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too...This power which only tears men’s bodies to pieces has never been so horribly abused as the intellectual power, the imaginative power, the poetic, religious power that can enslave men’s souls. As a teacher of Greek I gave the intellectual man weapons against the common man. I now want to give the common man weapons against the intellectual man. (127)

Unlike The Bacchae, in Major Barbara violence appears as potential. Whereas the actual violence of Euripides’ play happens offstage, the setting of Major Barbara’s resolution is used to make the potential for violence and devastation manifest. Sidney Albert notes that the bombshell on which Charles Lomax sits “concretizes the threat” of “the outburst of infinite force from its finite container,” which will wreak “sparagmos [upon] everyone and everything” (2012 188). The setting is also used to suggest the possibility of complete familial devastation. While Cusins is making his sparagmatic speech, the rest of the Undershaft family is touring the gun cotton shed, although this time without Lomax’s matches. The possibility of a tragic outcome on par with that of The Bacchae unrolls offstage, as onstage the play heads off in a different, comedic direction.

Major Barbara culminates in a conventionally comedic ending: Cusins and Barbara are to be married, and the futurity of the Undershaft line is guaranteed through the Euripidean working out of the Undershaft inheritance. Barbara looks forward to “the raising of hell to heaven and of man to God” (130). In adapting the Undershaft solution to Barbara’s own, religious ends, the only change will be a slight alteration to the coordinates of its self-justification. In addition to social welfare, the Undershaft solution will now have Christianity at its service as well. Barbara is simply folding in another Edwardian element, one which also undergirded the company towns of the paternalist industrialists: Non-Conformist Christianity.81 Barbara’s conversion to the Undershaft solution, of which she had been a part all along, is not a transformation but merely

144; 193-4. 81 At various points throughout the course of the play, Charles Lomax reminds the assembled that the Salvation Army is not the established church. He is at pains to make it clear that he considers it “bad form to be a dissenter” (26).

86 the completion of the Edwardian paternalist equation. The ending of the play presents all the elements of a conventional comedic resolution, but in service of a solution that is not only localized and contingent but also self-serving and hypocritical.

Comedy is often seen as a genre of assent: in Northrop Frye’s conception, “[c]omedy usually moves towards a happy ending, and the normal response of the audience to a happy ending is ‘this should be’” (167). Meredith also evokes this sense by linking comedy with “common sense,” the way of thinking to which the “general mind” (45) agrees. The ending of Major Barbara, however, seems to ask its readers to assent to a flawed solution that is also profoundly dangerous. By creating this situation, Shaw turns their assent back on the audience to demonstrate the complicity inherent in comedic conventions. As he argued in his Meredith review, the “function of comedy is to dispel…[the] unconsciousness” (84) bred by both common sense and habit. Comedic conventions are a form of habit, and so comedy as a genre is always working against itself. This tension is made manifest in the conclusion to Major Barbara. The ending of Major Barbara makes the audience or reader aware of how conventional comedy can lead to complacency. As such, it is a negative example of Shaw’s conception of comedy as a radical progressive force. Rather than dramatizing a comedic conflagration of the kind envisioned in his review of Meredith, it depicts an uncomfortable coming together. This union is nonetheless premised on the productive qualities of the ability to destroy. The ending of Major Barbara seeks to turn the audience’s assent to the conventional comedic ending inside out, to make them aware both of the limitations of that ending and of their own political and social moment. Major Barbara does not itself depict a “better future,” but rather forces the audience to consider what the costs of realizing one might be.

Shaw’s premising of comedic stability on violence and his highlighting of its local qualities would have resonances both within the Edwardian period and beyond. Although different from Shaw’s play in many ways, E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) also culminates in a highly localized solution. Unlike Perivale St Andrews, the Schlegel dispensation at Howards End is explicitly oriented towards a better, more equitable future. Like Undershaft’s company town, this final arrangement is achieved at least partially through violence, in the form of the death of Leonard Bast. Bast’s death could also be read as a literalization of the brutality of an unabashedly individualist system. In this case, the catalyst is the indifference of the more

87 comfortable classes and the ironic weight of Bast’s own aspirations. The official cause of Bast’s death is “heart-disease” (317), hastened by the penurious conditions in which he and his wife Jacky had been living. His heart attack is precipitated by Charles Wilcox “ca[tching] him once or twice over the shoulders with the flat of [the Schlegels’] old German sword” (318) while a bookcase falls on him. The violence in Forster’s novel is incidental, not constitutive, but it does complicate the hazy goodness of the Schlegels’ arrangement. In her novel NW (2012), Zadie Smith would pick up these elements and make them the basis of her own ethical intervention. In Smith’s rewriting of Forster’s novel, violence and its ethical implications are impossible to ignore, just as they are in the resolution of Shaw’s play.

Chapter 3 E.M. Forster

E.M. Forster is the “apostle of the possible,” who “teaches us that it is better to travel hopefully even when we know we are not going to arrive” (Cronin 456). In both his fiction and his non- fiction, Forster explores how existing conventions can be adapted to both reflect and enable the realization of new possibilities for a better, more equitable future. In Howards End (1910), Forster adapts the English comic novel to the changed social realities of women in the Edwardian period. Although he is often cited as proof of George Meredith’s diminished reputation, the novel represents a version of what the “Essay on Comedy” imagined. Working within but simultaneously against the comedic marriage plot, Howards End represents people coming to see each other’s differences, and ultimately ends with a dispensation in which those differences are given space to flourish. In Maurice (1971), the first version of which was written at the very end of the Edwardian period but revised over the course of Forster’s life, the conventions of comedy are adapted not to social realities, but to what Forster hoped would eventually come to be true. Maurice’s steadfastly anti-realist embrace of comedy looks forward to an expanded version of the world imagined at the end of Howards End. In What I Believe (1939), published on the cusp of the Second World War, Forster reiterates his faith in a better future. This future is to be achieved by making better use of what already exists. Using his own gentle scepticism to mitigate against the apocalyptic tendencies of cynicism and despair, Forster kept faith with his own, admittedly Edwardian, vision of ameliorative futurity over the course of his long life.

E.M. Forster, Edwardian For All Occasions

Although he outlived Bernard Shaw by twenty years, E.M. Forster’s fiction writing was largely confined to the Edwardian period. Between 1902 and 1910, Forster published thirteen short stories and four novels, the last of which was Howards End (1910). His fictional output then dropped off dramatically: between 1911 and the outbreak of the First World War, he completed one full novel—Maurice (1971), not published until after his death—and three extant stories (Land xi). His final novel, A Passage to India, begun in 1913 but largely written in 1923, was

88 89 published in 1924 (Land ix-x). From the mid-1920s to his death in 1970, Forster wrote at least eight short stories, none of which were published during his lifetime. He did, however, publish a substantial body of non-fiction, including essays, reviews, lectures, biographies and travel books (Land x). Forster’s shift away from fiction corresponded with his embracing a role more consonant with what we might now call a public intellectual.82

During the 1930s, Forster engaged in a number of public liberal causes. From 1932, he was the book reviewer for the BBC, in which capacity he served as “the great simplifier, holding the theory that ideas, though they may be complex, may be stated in simple language” (Furbank 2008 ix). This function assisted the exporting of the political and philosophical work of his novels to a larger public. His work with the BBC allowed him “to secure a new professional identity,” as he was “valued, compensated, respected, and supplicated for his skill as an engaging and persuasive speaker to large, multifarious audiences” (Lago et al 7-8). During the Second World War, Forster’s work with the BBC made him “a propagandist for the British government” (22). This propagandizing was always tied to the central idea “that patriotism meant acknowledging the necessity of art” (23), an idea he explored in his non-fictional works as well. After the Second World War, Forster took up an honorary fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge, where he “became a familiar and much-loved figure, a symbol of the civilized, liberal values that he had always held so dear” (Beauman 2006). In short, E.M. Forster was an Edwardian fiction writer who became a popular intellectual figure for the larger twentieth century. As has been recognized by generations of readers, these two identities were inextricable: writing in the mid-1960s, Wilfred Stone argued that, though Forster “was formed in a pre-1914 world and has scrapped few of the values derived from that sunny age,…he is no fossil…[because] his old-fashioned sensibility has seemed to many an astonishingly apt instrument for probing our present discontents” (18). Stone specifically mentions the generation of the Second World War, during which the general coordinates of Forster criticism were set by Lionel Trilling and F.R. Leavis, but the same could equally be said of Stone’s own Cold War world and, as Zadie Smith would also recognize, the first decades of the twenty-first century. E.M. Forster represented the Edwardian period in his fiction; having set the writing of fiction

82 The first entry in the Oxford English Dictionary for this term dates from 1967, three years before Forster’s death.

90 aside more or less with the close of that period, he exported his Edwardian sensibility into the rest of the twentieth century. This sensibility outlived not just the period in which it was formed, but even Forster himself.

Forster’s Edwardian vision, as Lionel Trilling realized, is essentially “[non-] eschatological.” “[C]ontent with the human possibility and content with its limitations” (21), Forster does not look towards a future in which all tensions will be resolved and all failings undone. Forster is not interested either in totalizing resolution, or in perfection. Rather, his fiction, and some of his non- fiction, looks towards a future that will be better because it will be based on an optimal arrangement of already-existing “human possibility.” In both his fiction and some of his non- fiction, Forster prizes possibility, which enables non-teleological acts of comedic imagination, over probability, which leads towards totalizing resolution and the illusion of perfectibility. In his fiction especially, Forster worked within generic conventions while also attempting to adapt them to new realities. Howards End, his last published pre-First World War novel, posits that new possibilities can arise out of fracturing convention.

Howards End (1910) engages explicitly with the English comic tradition. The novel provides a vision of a better future both for its characters and for the category of the English comic novel itself. By contrast, Maurice (1971), technically Forster’s last Edwardian novel, reverses this pattern, wholeheartedly embracing the possibilities for imaginative futurity offered by comedy to reclaim their political power. What I Believe (1939), Forster’s statement of deeply sceptical, highly qualified faith published on the cusp of the Second World War, reiterates his vision of the ways in which fallibility and imperfection can be used as the basis for imagining a better future. While Forster explored these themes in his other works, both fictional and non-fictional, taken together these three provide a strong picture of his Edwardian progressive comedic vision, which was to prove so influential for those who followed.

F.R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling: Forster’s Liberal Futurity

The main coordinates of Forster criticism, and especially the image of him as an acolyte of an imperfect yet better future, were set by Lionel Trilling and F.R. Leavis, who both published critical evaluations of Forster’s work around the time of the Second World War. Both Leavis and

Trilling figured Forster as “a beacon for the dark days” (Davies 7) in which they were writing, and both highlighted the importance of liberalism to Forster’s work; for both, these elements were not distinct. Leavis’s review of Rose Macaulay’s Writings of E.M. Forster was published in Scrutiny in 1938, as the war loomed, while Trilling’s book-length study was first published in 1943, when it was under way. This slight, yet significant, difference in timing is reflected in their assessment of Forster’s value. For Leavis, Forster is an essential protector of the “humane tradition” as it passed through a period of profound instability. As such, he embodies “the free play of critical intelligence as a sine qua non of any hope for a human future.” The tradition for which he serves as a “custodian” was “something that humanity cannot afford to lose” (277). For Leavis, Forster would be integral in building the future because of the values he himself both safeguards and represents. For Trilling, by contrast, Forster’s essential characteristic is his resistance to “eschatolog[y]” (21), which had led him to the understanding that “ideas are for his service and not for his worship” (22).83 As a result, Forster was “one of the thinking people who were never led by thought to suppose they could be more than human and who, in bad times, will not become less” (23). Trilling agrees with Leavis that Forster and his work can help to show the way towards the future. He goes one step further by suggesting that both the survival and the value of that way are underwritten by Forster’s own highly sceptical, but no less productive, attitude towards the future. In other words, for Trilling, Forster can lead to a better future because of how he himself conceives of that future.

Leavis and Trilling’s differing conceptions of Forster’s value are informed by their fundamentally opposed attitudes towards Forster’s Edwardianism, and the Edwardian period in general. These differences are epitomized in their respective choices of his most important text, the text for which he should be celebrated and remembered. Leavis valued Forster primarily as the author of A Passage to India, which he saw as “an expression, undeniably, of the liberal tradition” (277). This choice of his only non-Edwardian text facilitates Leavis’s denigration of Forster’s origins in a “very inferior social-intellectual milieu” (276), while still allowing him to celebrate his role as “spokesm[a]n of the finer consciousness of our time” (277). For Trilling, by contrast, Howards End was Forster’s “masterpiece” (99) because of its confrontation with how

83 Trilling is specifically referring to What I Believe, published the year after Leavis’s review.

“hopelessly difficult” (102) the themes explored in his earlier novels can actually be. Without Leavis’s anti-Edwardian axe to grind, Trilling treats Forster’s career as a whole. While this emphasis on continuity between the texts may occasionally lead to oversimplification, Trilling’s book also served to ratify Forster’s canonical status, even if his precise place within that canon has continued to be a source of critical debate. Howards End, and specifically its structural and thematic struggles with the question of resolution, provides the unacknowledged blueprint for Trilling’s method of legitimation of Forster’s body of work. The difficulty of Forster’s fiction is the result of a persistent structural tension between plot and “manner”: “The plot suggests eternal division, the [comic] manner reconciliation; the plot speaks of clear certainties, the manner resolutely insists that nothing can be quite so simple” (13). In Trilling’s view, Forster’s fiction continually oscillates between two possible, yet mutually exclusive, ways of seeing the same elements. One of these methods, the “plot,” is synthetic and teleological, while the other, the comic “manner,” constantly resists both of these impulses. Seen in this light, Howards End is essentially a novelistic demonstration of Trilling’s contention that “Forster refuses to be conclusive” (16).

Leavis and Trilling both focused on the question of the relation of Forster’s work, and specifically Howards End, to liberalism. Reflecting his own deep scepticism about the Edwardian period, Leavis posited the novel as an explicit critique of the shortcomings of liberalism divided amongst the Schlegel sisters. In his view, Margaret represents the “inadequacy of the culture she stands for—its lack of relation to the forces shaping the world and its practical impotence,” while Helen figures “[i]ts weaknesses, dependent as it is on an economic security it cannot provide” (269).84 Trilling’s view was again more complex. Although he saw Forster as existing “in a peculiar relation to…the liberal tradition” (13) and “at war with the liberal imagination” (14), his ultimate goal was ameliorative. In Trilling’s view, liberalism is marked by a desire for perfection and a tendency towards simplistic, binaristic thinking. As he puts it, “[w]hen liberalism must act with some degree of anomaly—and much necessary action is anomalous—it insists that it is acting on perfect theory and is astonished when anomaly then appears” (14). Similarly, it cannot grasp the “idea of good-and-evil”: before this “improbable

84 Leavis’s view of Margaret as a figure of the text’s larger critique of liberalism has been highly influential, especially in twenty-first century Forster criticism.

93 paradox” (15), it falls apart. Forster, by contrast, is guided by what Trilling calls his “acceptance of the human fact as we know it now” (21). For Trilling, Forster is a paradoxically pragmatic idealist, someone who is not only comfortable with anomaly, but who understands its value not only in shaping action, but in making that action humane and responsive.85 As much as his work set the coordinates for Forster criticism to come, Trilling’s vision of Forster’s embodiment of an ameliorative, pragmatic imperfection also provides a useful model for reading against the prevailing critical tendency to see Forster’s work as a “failure.” Rather, as Trilling suggests, Forster’s interest in the political and cultural implications of imperfection and fallibility can be seen as extending to the level of structure and aesthetics. If his work seems to “fail,” then that is also because it is constantly resisting the totalizing impulses of perfection. This deep concern with the tension between amelioration and fallibility is most evident in Howards End, which was published at a historical moment when those two things were also at the forefront of the public mind.

Howards End was published in England by Edward Arnold on October 18, 1910 (Stallybrass 1973 xiv-xv), in the last quarter of what was to be a significant year for Britain. 1910 marked the end of the Edwardian period in the strictly literal sense: Edward VII passed away in May, leaving the throne to his son, George V. Beyond the death of the King, 1910 also marked the beginning of the end of Edwardian New Liberalism. The calendar year was bookended by two general elections, and the two hung parliaments they produced liquidated the political force of the Liberal landslide of 1906. The first general election, held from January 15th to February 10th, was called by the Liberals as an attempt to gain a mandate to pass their “People’s Budget,” which had triggered a constitutional crisis regarding the role and powers of the House of Lords. rd th The second election, held from the 3 . to the 19 of December, failed to break the deadlock produced by the first. The two elections had nearly identical results: H.H. Asquith’s Liberals won 275 seats in January and 271 in December, while Arthur Balfour’s Conservatives won 273 seats in both elections. The Liberals took 41.0% of the vote in January and 40.4% in December, while the Conservatives took 40.8% in both elections (Craig 581). Whereas 1906 was to mark the last Liberal electoral majority in British history, December 1910 would mark the last time the

85 A particular version of this critical strand emerged in the 1990s, when Forster’s liberalism came to be read alongside the philosopher Richard Rorty. See, for example, Brian May’s The Modernist as Pragmatist: E.M. Forster and the Fate of Liberalism (1997).

British Liberal party won the largest number of seats in a general election. Although the Liberals governed Britain in various coalition and minority guises until 1922, by the end of 1910 they had lost their ability to command a definitive electoral mandate. 1910 was not just a year of transition, but a year of failure, in which apparently intractable political difficulties not only went unresolved, but began to generate concatenations of further problems. And yet, from within this political mess, the People’s Budget was ultimately passed, laying the groundwork for a better future of humane government.86 1910 was also a year marked by a sense of strange near- repetition, in which two elections held twelve months apart produced nearly identical results. Forster’s novel has notoriously been seen as a failure precisely because of the “excessively schematic” nature of its design, its overreliance on coincidence, and its wild swings in tone (Lodge 135-6), but it is also a novel about failure producing the possibilities for a better future produced in a moment when exactly the same thing was happening on the larger political stage.87 Like the People’s Budget, Howards End did not seek to radically overthrow existing structures, but rather to adapt them to new, more equitable ends.

“It isn’t going to be what we expected”: Howards End and the Expansion of Intimacies

Howards End’s supposed aesthetic shortcomings are a result of its difficult project of putting generic conventions in service of ends “[they were] not designed for,” as Zadie Smith recognized (Love, Actually). Forster gave a preview of this project in a lecture he delivered in 1906 to the Working Men’s College entitled “Pessimism in Literature.”188 In his talk, Forster linked social expectations and novelistic practice. Since, for the Victorian woman, “[m]arriage was a final

86 Although historians are divided about the legacy of the Edwardian New Liberal reforms, Bernard Harris asserts that they “undoubtedly played a major role in laying the foundations for the development of the welfare state in the twentieth century” (165). 87 This opinion is inscribed into the very title of Lodge’s essay: “Forster’s Flawed Masterpiece.” 88 Forster’s lecture was published in 1907 in The Working Men’s College Journal. The venue for both its delivery and its publication have clear resonances for Howards End, and recall the London Institution, the venue for Meredith’s initial delivery of the lecture that would become “The Essay on Comedy.” The Working Men’s College was founded in 1854 with the objective of providing working men access to the kind of liberal education provided by the established universities (Thomson 125).

95 event” (135), it was possible and conceivable for a Victorian novel to end with a marriage. In that social and cultural context marriage could truly be conceived of as an “end,” both in the sense of “completion” and of “purpose” (OED), as the ultimate goal towards which the novel strove. By contrast, if the Edwardian woman, “by no means a bundle of goods,” does marry, she will see her “wedding [as] but the raising of the curtain for the play” (136). Since a marriage cannot be thought of as a novel’s “end” in either sense, a contemporary novel cannot reasonably end with an unproblematic marriage. What Forster theorized in “Pessimism” he put into practice in Howards End. By simultaneously evoking and undoing generic conventions, Forster opened up a new future both for the characters in his novel and intervened in the project of opening a new future for the larger category of the English comic novel itself undertaken by George Meredith.

Howards End is a novel deeply aware of its relationship with generic conventions. Michael Levenson argues that the novel is an act of “historical ventriloquism…[of] the novelistic tradition [Forster] has inherited” (297). Levenson’s casting of this tradition as generically catholic occludes the inherently comedic structure of the novel. While it may contain elements borrowed from other genres, these elements are arranged within a framework of comedy, just as the Schlegels’s possessions are laid out, putatively by “mistake,” within the crypto-pagan, Wilcox-inimical framework of Howards End by Miss Avery (Forster 266). Just as Howards End passes out of Wilcoxian possession at the novel’s conclusion, so too is the novel’s comedic framework refigured to provide alternative models of inheritance. The titular house and the question of convention are intertwined from the very beginning. After the narrator’s impersonal preface—“One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister”—the reader is presented with the embedded text of one of those letters, which begins “It isn’t going to be what we expected” (19). The immediate referent of the impersonal pronoun is the physical house called Howards End, the place of writing indicated above the date of the letter. By the synecdochical logic according to which the novel operates, however, “it” can also be read as referring to the novel, also called Howards End. 89 Furthermore, the narrator’s terse introduction to the letters makes the reader aware of both the potency and the arbitrariness of narrative conventions. While the

89 Levenson notes that the novel’s “presiding symbolic figure” is synecdoche (307), another trait it shares with Meredith’s Egoist (see Daniel Smirlock, Rough Truth: Synecdoche and Interpretation in The Egoist (1976)).

96 impersonal “one” could start anywhere, the narrator of this particular text has chosen to start with Helen’s letters. By drawing attention to this choice, the narrator asserts at once both “his” power to choose and the “lack of necessity of his constructions” (Armstrong 310).90 Helen’s statement to her sister further elaborates the narrator’s opening announcement of narrative ambivalence. Conventions derive from and contribute to readers’ expectations.91 Where the narrator’s first statement evokes both her power and the fundamental arbitrariness of its deployment, Helen’s statement to her sister announces that the novel is going to simultaneously evoke and thwart the expectations associated with the genre of comedy, especially when it comes to the question of marriage.

This duality is epitomized by the fact that the narrative begins with a break-up, the "false start" (Forster 68) represented by Helen and Paul's engagement, which also offers a response to the problem Forster raises in the closing paragraphs of “Pessimism in Literature.” Assuming that a modern author wants to “end his book on a note of permanence,” the novelist may nevertheless find it very difficult to conceive of something permanent. As a modern person, the novelist is “saturated with the idea of evolution” (136), which expresses itself as a sense of generalized, constant change. Therefore, the only resolution possible under these circumstances would be separation (137). Although Forster states in the closing paragraph of “Pessimism” that he does not “at present uphold optimism in literature” (145), in Howards End he attempts to have it both ways by having an initiatory separation and a final marriage. Instead of having two couples moving simultaneously towards the same end-goal, Howards End has one couple moving towards marriage while one half of the other couple, Helen, moves off to discover her own, historically-unprecedented, fate. The novel fractures the simultaneity of the double-couple structure familiar especially from Shakespeare. This change in temporality leaves the door open for other permutations, most notably the entrance of Leonard Bast, but it also prepares the way for an exploration of other kinds of relationships, beyond marriage, heterosexuality or even the

90Armstrong sees the narrator as male, although there is more than adequate evidence to support an alternative interpretation. In Chapter XXVIII, the narrator appears to adopt the position of a woman: “When men like us, it is for our better qualities, and however tender their liking we dare not be unworthy of it, or they will quietly let us go. But unworthiness stimulates woman” (240). For this reason, I choose to identify the narrator with the feminine pronoun. 91 Hans-Robert Jauss’s famous formula “horizon of expectation” (1554) puts the relationship most succinctly.

97 bounds of the human. The novel uses the scaffolding of a conventional, double-couple plot structure to explore other ways in which people relate, both to each other and to other, non- human things.92

Howards End’s interest in human relationships is related, but not identical, to its central theme of connection, announced even before the narrative begins with the famous epigraph, “‘Only connect…’” “Connection” is an extremely capacious word, and can be used to describe almost any possible relationship: one of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions for it is merely “[a]nything that connects” (def. 4a). Demonstrating once again the novel’s interest in change, the meaning of the word evolves over the course of its plot. In the epigraph, it is still nebulous. The epigraph appears in single quotation marks, like the dialogue in the body of the novel, but is unattributed. Gerard Genette suggests that what he calls the “autographic epigraph,” an epigraph written by the author of the text which it proceeds, is a rare occurrence, and so it is often “modestly disguised,” either as a fictional, apocryphal or anonymous quotation (152). An authentic, undisguised autographic epigraph is quite rare, and Genette argues that this type of epigraph has conferred upon it a “level of commitment far beyond that of the ordinary epigraph.” These rare birds belong to the category of “authorial discourse” and, in effect, function as a “succinct preface” (153).93 However, the ellipsis with which the epigraph concludes undermines any sense of extraordinary, uncomplicated “commitment,” suggesting simultaneously a resistance to completion and a sense of anticipation for potential completion in the text that follows. Before the text of the novel has even begun, Forster is already “refus[ing] to be conclusive” (Trilling 16). The diction of the phrase again reflects this duality through the tension between connecting, the bringing together of two or more elements or propositions, and the sense of solitude or uniqueness implied by “only.” Leslie White suggests that the epigraph can be read as “acknowledg[ing] that what follows is an attempt to dramatize the belief that the daunting

92Parminder Kaur Bakshi argues that the novel’s focus on “personal relations” results in the “modif[ication] and de-cent[ering of] the primacy of heterosexual love” (156). In this reading, Margaret and Henry’s marriage is “merely an artistic device to get Margaret to Howards End” (161). While the novel is certainly sceptical about marriage, Bakshi’s reading takes this scepticism too far. 93 The unattributed nature of the epigraph also seems to anticipate those moments of extreme free indirect discourse in the novel when it is impossible to tell whether Margaret or the narrator is meant to be speaking or thinking.

98 quest for connection must be undertaken” (50),94 but a caveat must be added: though it must be sought, that ultimate connection may never be found. The epigraph not only addresses the novel’s central thematic concern, but also enacts its tonal or modal difficulties, and specifically its constant oscillation between a desire for and a resistance to resolution.

Unsurprisingly, “connection” has also been a vexing concept for critics. Paul Armstrong, following the critical tendency descending from Leavis to read the novel as a critique of Margaret, highlights the undercurrent of violence in her use of the term in Chapter XXXVIII. Her threat, that Henry will “see the connection if it kills [him]” (Forster 300), “inadvertently exposes the will-to-power in efforts to merge perspectives and forge unity out of differences” (Armstrong 317). However, Armstrong exaggerates the dangerous aspects of her attitudes: Margaret’s threat is empty, serving the much more important purpose of compelling Henry to finally grasp the real stakes of the debate. Her point is that Henry has failed, or deliberately refused, to see the similarities between his liaison with Jacky Bast and Helen’s with her, as yet unnamed, male partner. Henry says as much when he insists that the two cases are “different” (300). To counter this parry, Margaret highlights the differences between the two incidents at the level not of morality, but of consequences: “In what way different? You have betrayed Mrs. Wilcox, Helen only herself. You remain in society, Helen can’t. You have had only pleasure, she may die” (301). The dangers for Henry are purely figurative, while those Helen faces or may face are very real. Margaret is not threatening Henry with actual or metaphorical death unless he agrees with her, but is trying to get him first to see and then to admit the similarities between the two incidents as a way of beginning to address, and then redress, the inequities in the way English society treats them. Connecting, in this instance, would mean going some way towards rectifying a profound social injustice. Henry, ever conscious of his “position in society” (299), only reaffirms this injustice when he refuses to grant Helen permission to spend a night in Howards End. Connection here becomes a way of trying to get to a more equitable future, where negative differences—in the form of disparities and hypocrisies—will be undone in favour of the respecting of positive differences. In the novel’s closing chapters, Margaret begins to try to

94 White seems more than a little ambivalent about this proposition, since it is posed as a question.

99 rectify these gross inequities, albeit in an entirely local way.95 In order to do so, she uses a kind of moral force in order to usurp the house for herself and Helen.96 If any violence is done in the taking of Howards End it is not to Henry, but to the social, and by extension generic, conventions with which he has identified himself and the house. As promised by Helen’s opening letter, by the end of the novel the house is a place in which conventions and expectations are undone and rearranged.

The novel is also interested in a form of relationship it calls comradeship, a concept Forster may have adapted from the poetry of Walt Whitman, or from Edward Carpenter’s adoption of Whitman. Unlike Whitman’s vision of masculine attachment, the comradeship explored in Howards End transcends the limits not only of gender or sex, but of the very category of the human. As it did for Whitman, comradeship has a political dimension for Forster, sketched in the preface to Margaret’s second visit to Howards End in Chapter XXXIII. The chapter opens with Margaret walking by herself from the station to the house. The narrative then passes into a meditation on the literature and politics of England, indirectly setting Margaret’s visit to the house up as an intervention in both. As Margaret walks up the avenue in front of the church, the narrative passes into one of its extremely indirect moments:

Why has not England a great mythology? Our folklore has never advanced beyond daintiness, and the greater melodies about our countryside have all issued through the pipes of Greece. Deep and true as the native imagination can be, it seems to have failed here…It cannot vivify one fraction of a summer field, or give names to half a dozen stars, England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature—for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk. (262)

95 There are certainly reasons to critique the shortcomings of Margaret’s worldview, such as the profoundly parochial and limited nature of her activism, but Armstrong and others, having the benefit of over one hundred years of progressive change and hindsight, take these criticisms too far, ignoring both the cause of her anger and its positive outcomes. 96 Margaret’s using the house as an agent of social justice rephrases Daniel Born’s argument that her passion is not for connection but for “realty” (132). In fact, her passion is for connection through realty.

100

Like the novel as a whole, the passage gestures towards teleological resolution, only to undermine or mitigate it. In this case, instead of the millennial "great poet" who will emerge to “voice” all of England, the passage overtly prioritizes simultaneous individuality and community. Rather than one great poet, England would be better served by a “thousand little poets,” a large group of individuals whose “voices” will then be picked up by, and enrich, the larger community. This passage sets up the second reflection, which is explicitly attributed to Margaret and which links these ideas to the political life of England.

As Margaret moves forward, the “scenery change[s],” becoming a sort of geographical embodiment of liberal ideals, at first implicitly and then explicitly. Although the country is “untouched,” it is not even remotely wild (262). And yet, it appears to her to “strol[l] downhill or up as it wishe[s]” (263). This countryside is like a good liberal subject, who has felt the necessary introduction of law and order which have still not impeded its ability to follow its own desires at its liberty. Making these connections explicit, Margaret reflects to herself that “[l]eft to itself…this county would vote Liberal.” The narrator goes on to parse Margaret’s thoughts: “The comradeship, not passionate, that is our highest gift as a nation was promised by it, as by the low brick farm where she called for the key” (263). The passage concretizes Leavis's argument that the novel explores the places where liberal culture has its “sources of strength,…[its] springs of vitality” (270), but it also develops, in a serious register, the narrator’s earlier, apparently sarcastic remark about Margaret’s attempt to justify to Helen her decision to marry Henry by “waving her hand at the landscape, which confirmed anything” (177). Since women only gained full suffrage in Britain in 1928, Margaret cannot vote. And yet, in her reverie she attributes the franchise to the very landscape of that part of England. In this passage the landscape seems to serve as a further extension of Howards End, which also figures comradeship. As with most things in the novel, although Margaret sees the promise of comradeship in the countryside all around her, that ideal is undermined when she actually calls on the farm. Her crypto-pastoral liberal idyll is disrupted when "[a] most finished young person received her" (263). As against this inherent disappointment offered by people, the novel suggests that comradeship is sustainable only by non-human things, and finds its most perfect expression in the anthropomorphizing of places.

This trans-human quality is made clear on Margaret’s first visit to Howards End. When Margaret

101 sees the famous wych-elm, she remarks that “[i]t was neither warrior, nor lover, nor god; in none of these roles do the English excel. It was a comrade.” More specifically, it is a comrade to Howards End itself:

It was a comrade, bending over the house, strength and adventure in its roots, but in its utmost fingers tenderness, and the girth, that a dozen men could not have spanned, became in the end evanescent, till pale bud clusters seemed to float in the air. It was a comrade. House and tree transcended any simile of sex…Yet they kept within limits of the human. Their message was not of eternity, but of hope on this side of the grave. (206)

Howards End and the tree embody both Margaret’s ideal relationship and the novel's own project, in that they look not towards eschatological revelation or teleological resolution, but for a better future within the limits of non-teleological time. Although Margaret attempts to replicate this model relationship with Henry, her “belief in comradeship is stifled” (238) by the Jacky Bast affair. From then on, she begins her courtship with Howards End in earnest. At the end of the novel, she is able to gain control of the house in order to attempt to grasp the hope she saw there on her first visit, and to create a space in which the novel can work out its most explicit generic revisions.

“We’ve seen to the very end”: Howards End and Resolution

The final chapter of Howards End presents the elements—a marriage and a child--of a conventional romantic comedic ending divided amongst the Schlegel sisters. Margaret is married but “do[es] not love children” and is “thankful to have none.” Helen, on the other hand, pronounces that she “shall never marry” because she is “ended.” For certain critics, Forster’s ambivalence towards marriage was informed by his homosexuality, and certain posthumous queer readings of Howards End tend to force it onto the Procrustean bed of male homosexuality. James J. Miracky, for example, argues that, at the end of the novel, “[a]lthough he has switched sexes..., on one level Forster is still constructing a homosexual idyll” (54). Although there is certainly more than a hint of queerness in Helen’s pronouncement that she is “cured” of “a woman’s love for a man” (Forster 327), as well as in the replacement of the heterosexual married

102 couple of conventional comedy with the sororal couple, to ascribe this to merely a swapping out of female for male misses the larger point Forster is making in “Pessimism,” which has to do precisely with the interdependent roles of women in novels and in life. To make the Schlegel sisters merely “stand-ins” for homosexual men diminishes their importance as figures of generic revision, as precisely the kind of women for whom marriage cannot be, unproblematically, an end. It also ignores the fact that when Forster wrote an ending for gay men in his next novel, Maurice, he made it unproblematically comedic and self-consciously fictional, absolutely unlike the mitigated comedy of Howards End.

Critics have generally focused on the tableau of the Schlegel sisters and Helen’s unnamed baby, casting the Wilcoxes as thoroughly sidelined by Margaret’s “triumph” (331). Trilling, for example, saw the ending as imperfect because “the male is too thoroughly gelded” (116). This reading not only misses the point politically, but more importantly, it ignores what actually happens in the novel’s closing scenes. Although chastened morally and socially by Charles’s arrest for the death of Leonard Bast, and physically by their debilitating hay fever, the Wilcoxes are neither destroyed nor disinherited. Both formally and thematically bracketed off, they do find their own imperfect futurity, but the novel’s main point is that imperfection is not the same thing as failure. The final chapter is book-ended by the fields of hay, associated with Mrs. Wilcox from the novel’s opening pages, but noxious to the male Wilcoxes.97 In-between their appearances Margaret goes indoors to join the “conclave” (329) of Wilcoxes, where Henry is disposing of his worldly possessions while still alive. Unlike Jonson’s Volpone, Henry is earnestly concerned with the future of his children. He informs the assembled Wilcoxes (and one Cahill) that, since he is leaving Margaret Howards End, he will not leave her any money. He goes on: “All that she would have had will be divided among you. I am also giving you a great deal in my lifetime, so that you may be independent of me. That is her wish, too. She also is giving away a great deal of money” (331). Unclear in the passage is what “her wish” refers to: does Margaret wish for the Wilcoxes to be independent of Henry, or that she herself be independent of him, or merely that her money be given away? Whatever “her wish” is precisely, the Wilcox children have been made financially independent in return for the house. They have

97 Helen’s first letter to her sister repeatedly describes Mrs. Wilcox smelling fresh-cut hay (20).

103 received their inheritance before their father’s death in the form of financial independence, which in itself is rife with possibilities for renewal, especially in the Wilcoxian world of finance. In short, the Wilcoxes have received the means to create a suitably Wilcoxian future.

The final chapter thus literalizes Margaret’s “hymn to difference,” delivered in the field. When Helen worries that her lack of interest in heterosexual relationships is “some awful, appalling criminal defect,” Margaret assures her that “[i]t is only that people are far more different than is pretended. All over the world men and women are worrying because they cannot develop as they are supposed to develop…Don’t fret yourself, Helen. Develop what you have” (327). Rather than a unitary ending, or an ending that would not suit them, the Wilcoxes have been given the means to pursue their own interests. Acknowledging this fact, Leslie White argues that the novel favours “not a marriage but a salutary disconnection of disparate sensibilities” (44). This “salutary disconnection” can also be seen to be taking place at the generic level. The term “salutary” negates the suggestions of “failure” which still cling to the novel, making this disconnection the site of possible recovery and reconfigured futurity. This potential reinvigoration is linked to the theme of inheritance. David Medalie contends that this interest in inheritance “pertains also to the question of fictional inheritances” (91). The novel has inherited various modes. Some of them no longer seem “appropriate,” and so it proposes new ways of approaching the issue. In renovating thematic inheritances, Forster is also renovating the possibilities for the novel and opening it to a different, hopefully better future.

Though it may disorder the elements of genre, the ending of Howards End does not liquidate the futurity of reproduction inherent in the conventional comedic ending. Robert K. Martin argues that the novel’s ending depicts a non-corporeal begetting which would allow “a kind of elective inheritance” (273), a particular kind of queer futurity. In the final scene of Howards End, however, elective and official inheritances connect. Margaret has just learned that Ruth had made a “fanciful” bequest of Howards End to her many years ago, and so she is both the legal and “spiritual heir” (107) to the house, when Helen erupts into the “gloom” (332) of Howards End, with Tom in one hand and her baby on the other. The two children are further avatars of the theme of friendship initiated by Ruth and Margaret, which the novel arrays against heterosexual marriage as a form of connection (Bakshi 159). They are also specifically figures of inheritance. The baby, persistently identified with both the fields and the hay, and born “in the central room

104 of the nine” (329) which make up the house, can inherit both fields--technically a Bast, the child is immune to the Wilcox curse of hay fever—and the house. Tom’s name echoes that of Tom Howard, who had been “the last” (203) of the Howard line. After the original Tom was killed, as Miss Avery tells Margaret, “things went on until there were no men” (269), and then Henry showed up. The Wilcoxes were the necessary, but ultimately contingent, male addition to Howards End. They served the purposes of fertility for a while. In contrast, the novel’s last line strikes a note of hopeful fertility for those not afflicted with hay fever: “We’ve seen to the very end, and it’ll be such a crop of hay as never!” (332) Helen announces. The book ends with the unprecedentedly abundant fertility of the fields surrounding Howards End, which will be the officially-sanctioned inheritance of the unconventional heirs. The novel thus ends on a paradigmatically modernizing note, with the equipment of the conventional comedic ending put in service of the perpetuation and expansion of an unconventional future. The text is opened to a new future precisely because Forster has fractured the conventions of genre.

“Weariness of the only subject that I both can and may treat”: Maurice and The Possibilities of Fiction

Surprisingly, the 1992 Merchant-Ivory film adaptation of Howards End radically de-emphasizes the queer, and potentially queer, elements of the ending of the text. This rebalancing is most strikingly evident in the final shot. The last lines are spoken not by Helen (Helena Bonham- Carter), as in the text, but by Henry (Anthony Hopkins). To Margaret (Emma Thompson) he says, “I didn’t do wrong, did I?” in reference to his handling, or mishandling, of Ruth’s bequest of the house. Not only does Margaret not reply, but their eyes do not even meet. Margaret turns three-quarters towards the camera and smiles ambiguously, leaving her feelings on the matter entirely open. Henry then says goodbye to the rest of the Wilcoxes, who are shown driving away by the craning camera. The camera continues to move up across the road until the left of the frame is filled with the image of Helen, Tom and the baby in the field where the hay is being mown. This final shot of the film establishes a strict division between field and house, set apart both by the road and by a wall. This division extends to what might be called the field group and the house group. The Wilcoxes are gone off to their future, but those who remain are not united. Following Robert K. Martin’s reading of the text, the “field group” of Helen, Tom and the baby figure a queer inheritance, while Margaret and Henry represent traditional heterosexuality. While

105 this interpretation of the ending seems to betray Forster’s actual text, it could be taken as a figure of his career. Howards End was his last public, Edwardian novel. His next one would be not only explicitly gay, but also explicitly comedic. On one side of the final frame of the film is Howards End the house-cum-figure for the novel, figuring Forster’s representations of heterosexuality, while on the other are the emerging possibilities he would explore, in a very different way, in his next novel.

Critics have long struggled to account for Forster’s abandonment of the novel form after such an extraordinarily fertile start. Writing with the benefit—and hindrance-- of Forster’s own input in the 1950s and 1960s, Wilfred Stone suggested that he had left off writing fiction because “[t]he esthetic problem will not square with the problem of social justice, and the gap between the ideal and the social reality has grown too wide for art—at least Forster’s art—to bridge” (13). From Stone’s perspective, the problem was that art could not do what Forster felt more able to do as the public figure that he had by that point become. Other solutions posited often point to a sense of limitation, either that Forster felt unable to write faced with the loss of Edwardian restrictions after the First World War, or that, given the legal, social, literary and cultural restrictions on homosexuality and depictions thereof in his lifetime, he felt unable to either write or, more to the point, publish the kind of work he truly wanted to. Stephen Land, for example, contends that Forster ceased writing fiction after The First World War because “[t]he England of [his] fiction perished” with the war and “[h]e needed to portray a convention-bound, highly class-conscious society” (xii). The latter interpretation, by contrast, is often supported not just by Forster’s posthumously published, explicitly homosexual works, but by a 1911 entry in his “locked journal” or Locked Diary,98 in which he noted his sense of “[w]eariness of the only subject that I both can and may treat—the love of men for women & vice versa” (qtd in Beauman 2006). Both readings are themselves deeply limited, the former by its reductive conception of the Edwardian period, while the latter, though far more likely, is mitigated by the complexity of Forster’s conception of the correlation of the Edwardian period and possibility explored in Maurice, his last Edwardian novel and his only explicitly gay one.

98 Forster began keeping this record, in a leather-bound book locked with a hasp, during the writing of Howards End in 1909. It “would be the repository for his inward thoughts for the next sixty years” (Moffat 101-2).

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Maurice relates the story of Maurice Hall, whom Forster describes as “completely unlike himself” (“Terminal Note” 236). The first four chapters summarize the highlights of his “career” (14) in school, and emphasize the “exasperat[ing]…normality” of his origins, which “he must either smash…, or be smashed” himself (“Terminal Note” 236). Maurice eventually goes to Cambridge, where he meets Clive Durham. Durham believes that “the sole excuse for any relationship between men is that it remain purely platonic” (228), and he tells Maurice he loves him by invoking the Symposium (50). After a few years, Clive declares that he intends to love and marry a woman and he and Maurice part ways as platonic lovers, though they remain friends (118). Clive eventually marries Anne Woods. With Clive thus “safe from intimacy” (150), Maurice comes to visit Penge, his country house. There he meets Alec Scudder, the gamekeeper, with whom he has sex. Meanwhile, Maurice has been seeing a hypnotist to help him “kill lust” (142), with no success. Like Howards End, Maurice’s plot also depends upon miscommunication, figured through precipitous, misplaced, or misguided letters. Just as the initial miscommunication in the former facilitates the unlikely friendship between Margaret and Ruth Wilcox, the miscommunications at the end of Maurice facilitate the union of Alec and Maurice. Alec plans to emigrate to Argentina, but writes to Maurice asking him to meet him at the boathouse at Penge to “share with [him] once [more] before” he leaves (192). Maurice interprets the letter as a threat of blackmail. Alec writes again, this time more directly threatening blackmail by intimating that he knows about Maurice and Clive’s relationship. Maurice agrees to meet with him at the British Museum. Maurice admits he loves Alec (209) and Alec says he did not actually wish to blackmail Maurice (210). They find they are “in love with one another consciously” (212), and sleep together again in a rented room. In the morning, Alec leaves, intending to carry out his plan to emigrate because he cannot conceive of the material coordinates of a future for them. On the day his ship is set to depart, Maurice goes to see him off, but finds Alec is not onboard. Maurice then immediately goes to the boathouse at Penge, where he finds Alec asleep. Alec had sent him a “wire” (225) that morning telling him to come there, which Maurice had missed. The final chapter depicts Maurice’s taking leave of Clive, to close the “book that would never be read again” (228-9) of their relationship. Clive is shocked at the news, but immediately returns to propriety, inviting Maurice to dinner with him at his club. Maurice, however, has already “disappeared thereabouts, leaving no trace of his presence except a little pile of the petals of the evening primrose, which mourned from the ground like an

107 expiring fire” (230).

Maurice is similar to Forster’s other works in that it has also been considered a “failure.” In fact, its publication in 1971 served as the occasion for critics to rehash Forster’s general shortcomings as a novelist. C.P. Snow, in the Financial Times, asserted that “[a]lthough [Maurice] exhibits some of Forster’s good qualities, it makes even more clear his major weaknesses” (433). Julian Mitchell, in the Guardian, called it “sadly tame and sloppy,” asserting that “[t]he failure to connect fantasy to recognisable life seriously mars [Forster’s] other novels[, while] here it’s utterly destructive” (439). Unsurprisingly, many critics also raised the question of timing. Besides the obvious question of whether the novel should have been published at all, critics asked whether it should not have been published earlier: Mitchell in particular felt that Maurice might have helped hasten the decriminalization of homosexual relations in Britain (439). Michael Ratcliffe, in the Times, went so far as to assert that the novel was actually written at the wrong moment. In Ratcliffe’s view, Forster himself had “insufficient facts to hand” in 1914, being himself relatively sexually inexperienced. The 1920s, when Forster had begun to be sexually active, “would have been the time to write Maurice: it was, in fact, the precise moment when he chose to give up fiction for good” (444). V.S. Pritchett, in the New Statesman, asserted that “[t]o have set a burning topic in what is now an Edwardian period piece is awkward” (447).

These criticisms fundamentally misunderstand both the novel’s project and its relationship with its time. On a purely practical note, the “burning topic” of homosexuality is not and cannot be confined to a single time period. Paddy Kitchen in The Times Educational Supplement was seemingly unique amongst initial readers of Maurice in recognizing the persistence and relevance for queer readers of the issues raised in the novel, especially when it comes to the central issue of education. Mr. Ducie’s well-meaning, but shortsighted, opening lesson in heterosexual sex would be just as alienating and confusing to a gay or queer reader in the 1970s—or for that matter now—as it was to Maurice, for whom the images scratched in the sand hover like “an impossible sum” (Maurice 7). These initial reviews also fundamentally miss the fact that the novel is a complex and deeply fraught meditation on the question of futurity and the possibilities it may or may not bring with it, both within fiction and without. Maurice is unique amongst Forster’s novelistic output not only because it is unequivocally gay but because it is unequivocally comedic. Maurice fully embraces the possibilities for futurity offered by comedy

108 as a way of attempting to reclaim their political power.

The novel’s ending, to which initial critics also strongly objected, serves as the locus of these debates. Snow asserts that the ending “rings artistically quite wrong, as a wish-fulfilment” (435). For Mitchell the problem is political: with its “romantic defiance of society,” the novel’s conclusion is “terribly silly,” since “[s]ocial acceptance has always been and still is the only possible serious objective for homosexuals” (440). While he may have felt that he was standing up for the cause of gay liberation, Mitchell also plucks the string of misogyny running through Forster criticism when he asserts that the ending “in any other context would be called woman’s magazine” (439). In terms of Forster’s more intimate readers, Lytton Strachey famously felt that the novel “seemed to go off at the end to some extent” (429). In Strachey’s view, Maurice was not in love with Alec, but only consumed with “lust and sentiment,” making the “Sherwood Forest ending appea[r to him] slightly mythical” (430). Edward Carpenter, by contrast, wrote to Forster in 1914 declaring his pleasure at the story’s finishing on “a major chord” with an ending that “though improbable is not impossible… [and] which those who understand will love” (428). Carpenter, whose connection to the novel was deeply intimate, understood that Maurice may not be to everyone’s taste, since not everyone will “understand” it.99 This idea of a fraternity of “those who understand”—meaning not just queer or gay readers, but a certain kind of queer or gay reader—is a prolepsis of Forster’s own hymning of the “aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky” (16) in What I Believe (1939). Carpenter’s remarks also make clear that taking Maurice’s ending on non-Forsterian terms, insisting on things like “probability” instead of the radical possibility suggested by his double-negative formulation “not impossible,” means utterly missing the point. Maurice is not a novel about what is probable. Rather, it is about literalizing possibility in the form of comedic futurity.

Forster himself was sanguine about the fictionality of Maurice’s ending, and about its relationship with the novel as a whole. In the “Terminal Note” he wrote for the text in 1960, he asserted that “[a] happy ending was imperative.” Without this happy ending, the novel should not and would not have been written. Maurice the text exists purely to serve its ending, and not the

99 In the “Terminal Note,” Forster asserts that the novel is “the direct result of a visit to Edward Carpenter at Milthorpe,” and specifically to his “comrade George Merrill[‘s]…touch[ing his] backside” (235).

109 other way around. This happy ending was both facilitated by fiction and itself self-consciously fictional: “I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows” (236). Even if it were impossible in the real world for Maurice Hall and Alec Scudder to “roam the greenwood” (236) together relatively unmolested for fifty years, Forster granted them the privileges of fiction by ending his text with what was and always has been a fiction, a happy ending. In Maurice, Forster embraced the conventions he problematized in his other novels as an act of fictional reclamation and liberation. Writing this story as a comedy, with a heavy emphasis on comedic futurity, was a deliberate refusal of standard modes of fictional emplotment of homosexual themes. Maurice treated a subject conceived of as inherently tragic—homosexuality—in the register of romantic comedy (Booth 174). In the period preceding Maurice, “[w]riting about homosexuality often involved depicting damage and withdrawal” (174). While Forster’s novel acknowledges these possibilities, its ending seizes hold of the latter and turns it on its head to project beyond those limitations into the purely fictional future of a “happy ending.” Maurice’s ending makes withdrawal from the social world the condition of joy, not despair. This recasting of tragic material as comedic depends in large part on Forster’s eventual elision of the text’s Epilogue, which created the conditions for the text’s particular vision of comedic futurity.

Over the course of its long gestation, Forster made Maurice’s ending both more self-consciously fictional and more open to possibility. Maurice is not a realist novel. Rather, it creates in fiction possibilities that did not exist in the real world, or at least not yet. In order to facilitate this mission, Forster seizes hold of the machinery of narrative fiction and puts it to his own uses. In addition to the highly self-conscious happy ending, Forster also employs meta-fictional contrivances, like the kind of impossible coincidences favoured by Charles Dickens. In the penultimate chapter of the 1971 version, Maurice goes to Southampton, from whence he believes his lover Alec Scudder will be emigrating to Argentina. When Alec is not to be found onboard the ship, Maurice embarks for the Boathouse at Penge. En route, he thinks to himself that “not merely things wouldn’t go wrong this time but that they daren’t, and that the universe had been put in its place” (224). Everything is organized not only to assent to the rightness of the novel’s ending but also to refute Maurice’s own sense at the close of the previous chapter that “[l]ove had failed…[because i]t could not do things” (218). The ending of the novel is meant to prove that love can, in fact, do things. In Maurice love makes things happen, even if those things

110 can only happen in its own fictional world. When Maurice arrives at the Boathouse, Alec is initially nowhere to be found. Exhausted, Maurice goes inside to rest, whereupon he finds Alec already asleep. Further testifying to the rightness of the novel’s ending, Maurice learns that, though he has missed a wire from Alec telling him to come to the Boathouse, he got the message anyway. Alec finally promises him that they “shan’t be parted no more, and that’s finished” (225). Their reunion is highly idealized and offers no solution to the vital problems of employment, or by extension sustenance, raised earlier by Alec (217). These answers, of course, are not required by the comedic “happy ending,” which assumes resolution without the need for specific details.

The final scene of the novel, a confrontation between Maurice and Clive, Maurice’s former Platonic lover who has opted for a life of heterosexual propriety, rehearses this deferral of practical questions into the nebulous future. Maurice tells Clive that he has “shared with Alec” (228) and slept with him at least twice. In return, Alec has “sacrificed his career for [Maurice’s] sake…without a guarantee [Maurice will] give up anything for him,” a sharp rebuke to Clive’s apparent cowardice. The narrator then remarks that Clive, “faced by the future,” is lost for words. Clive, whose mind runs on deeply conventional tracks, cannot imagine what a future for two men might look like, and begins to question Maurice about it. Maurice responds, “you may not ask…You belong to the past. I’ll tell you everything up to this moment—not a word beyond” (229). In this scene, Clive serves as an embedded conventional reader, whose questions are dismissed by Maurice the character, figuring Maurice the text. For both character and text, the future is all possibility. The text exists to bring that future into view for both its characters and its readers, but not to depict it. The radical promise of the published text of Maurice is for the possibility of a future through the reclamation of the convention of the comedic happy ending, which also allows it to reject the need to make that future seem probable.

In the published 1971 text, “the future is left [entirely] to the imagination” (Ellem 355). Conversely, in the 1913-14 version of the text, Forster included an Epilogue. Although omitted from both the 1932 and 1959 versions, the “continued existence [of the Epilogue] is implied” in the “Terminal Note” (Ellem 355). In it, Forster mentions that Maurice’s sister Kitty came across “two woodcutters some years later” (Forster Maurice 239) than the events depicted in the main body of the text. Woodcutting was presumably one of the jobs Alec and Maurice found to

111 support themselves during their “greenwood” (236) idyll. Referring specifically to the text of the Epilogue, Elizabeth Wood Ellem argues that its future is not a place of “joyous freedom,” because Alec and Maurice are subject to discovery not just by Kitty, but also by other, more threatening, agents of persecution and prosecution (355). Pointing to the recognition in the “Terminal Note” that, as long as the recommendations of the Wolfenden Report to decriminalize sexual relations between men were not implemented, “Clive on the bench will continue to sentence Alec in the dock” (Forster Maurice 241) and the fact of exile (236), Ellem asserts that Maurice himself has “not so much the happy-ever-after ending that fiction allows, but the same freedom as other mortals who do not have the aid of the gods: to choose a life consistent with the circumstances in which they find themselves, a life that is made up of both sorrow and joy” (356). This argument is based on an assumption that the Epilogue should still be considered a part of the 1971 published text, from which it had long ago been cut. This lack of distinction between the apocryphal Epilogue and the published text ultimately supports the argument that the omission of the former preserved the freedom of futurity enabled by fiction in the latter. Removing nearly all details of Alec and Maurice’s future from the text allowed Forster to set aside the need to suit his fiction to the historical and social circumstances in which he found himself, while at the same time permitting his fictional creations to do the same. By omitting the Epilogue, Forster made Alec and Maurice’s future seem radically possible, even if it did not, as Edward Carpenter recognized, seem very probable.

The removal of the Epilogue allows the text to evade historical reality and replace it with its own fictional version of the past, which draws on both the pastoral elements associated with comedy and the tropic clusters associated with the Edwardian period. In the “Terminal Note”, Forster acknowledges that his Epilogue “partly failed because the novel’s action-date is about 1912, and ‘some years later’ would plunge it into the transformed England of the First World War” (239). Without the Epilogue, the text remains in Forster’s idealized moment of possibility, the Edwardian period. With its depiction of a bygone world of anachronistic details, Maurice “dates” (239). However, Forster links the novel to a particularly comedic pastoral vision when he asserts that the novel “belongs” to

the last moment of the greenwood…Our greenwood ended catastrophically and inevitably. Two great wars demanded and bequeathed regimentation which the public

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services adopted and extended, science lent her aid, and the wildness of our island, never extensive, was stamped upon and built over and patrolled in no time. There is no forest or fell to escape to today, no cave in which to curl up, no deserted valley for those who wish neither to reform nor corrupt society but to be left alone. (240)

Forster’s “greenwood” is an idiosyncratic refiguring of the more familiar tropic clusters associated with the Edwardian period. Specifically, the “greenwood” of Maurice’s ending is Forster’s version of the “afternoon garden party”: where that tropic cluster evoked a dangerous or callous ignorance of historical realities, the Forsterian “greenwood” figures a deliberate, hopeful elision. The “greenwood” is not just a place where one pretends the First World War, and everything that followed, did not happen, but a place where one may recuperate what the future looked like before it did. Forster’s “greenwood” is also a refiguration of the “green world” which Northrop Frye saw as integral to comedy. Frye associates the “green world” of comedy with “the dream world that we create out of our own desires” (183). For him, Shakespearean comedy specifically “illustrates…the archetypal function of literature in visualizing the world of desire, not as an escape from ‘reality,’ but as the genuine form of the world that human life tries to imitate” (184). Maurice’s ending creates a “world of desire,” in the sense that it is a world desired by the characters and a world made for the expression of a particular kind of, previously proscribed, desire, but also in the sense that it is an expression of its author’s desire for a particular kind of possibility.

This sense of possibility is implicit in the “Terminal Note,” but it is explicitly announced before the text begins in its idiosyncratic dedication:

Begun 1913 Finished 1914 Dedicated to a Happier Year

The novel was “finished” with the Edwardian period, in 1914, but it was consecrated not to what came next, the historical reality of the First World War, but to the better future that reality seemed to obliterate. Forster’s “greenwood” is a vision of the historical past as a place from within which it was possible to imagine a better future, a future which he felt had been both

113 factually and imaginatively foreclosed by history. After 1914, when the novel was “finished,” that future seemed both impossible to achieve and, more to the point, impossible to imagine.100 Seen in this light, Maurice’s self-conscious datedness is a novelistic reculer pour mieux sauter. The novel is explicitly grounded in a romanticized, comedic version of the past in order to allow both its reader and its characters to look forward from a lost perspective its author felt was still vitally important. In Maurice, the Edwardian period represents not vacuous consumption or irresponsible abandon, as suggested by George Orwell’s “everlasting strawberry ices on green lawns” (357), but a place from which a particular kind of futurity was still visible. Forster carried this vision of the future with him into the rest of the twentieth century, even after he set aside the novel form.

Critical opinions of the relationship between Forster’s liberalism and his homosexuality have changed drastically since his death, along with the rise of “gay liberation” and academic gay, and then queer, studies.101 Writing in 1960, when Forster was still alive, Wilfred Stone remarked obliquely,

The issue of homosexuality is, of course, far more important to [him] than [his] judicious words [in support of the Wolfenden Report] would suggest. If Forster has generally been on the side of the underdog, it is at least partly because he has always sympathized with this alienated minority. And if the cause of art and sensitivity has seemed to him beleaguered, it is partly because society has forced some of its ablest practitioners to live half-secret lives. His liberalism is inseparable from these facts. (354)

100 Jesse Matz notes the novel’s association with utopian fictions, which “project an idealized past into an idealized future” (189). Following Richard Ellmann’s view of Edwardianism as the vestibule of modernism, Matz’s focus is on reading the novel as an example of modernist or proto-modernist “experimental temporality” (188). His anti-Edwardian bias is made explicit when he calls the setting of the novel “Georgian” (188). Since George V was sovereign from 1910 to 1936, this label is technically correct. However, it aligns the novel more with the post- First World War world than the pre-First World War world Forster himself evoked in the “Terminal Note” 101 See the introduction of Robert K. Martin and George Piggford’s Queer Forster (1997) for a thorough survey of these shifting attitudes.

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While Forster’s support of the “alienated minority” of gay men in his lifetime may have been implicit, he was explicit about his sense of the vital need to freely represent sex and sexuality and the idea of liberty. The bulk of his 1935 speech to the Congrès International des Écrivains in Paris on the subject of “Liberty in England” was devoted to what he saw as the greatest threat facing Britain—not fascism, as in other countries, but censorship, expressed most succinctly in relation to sex. “I want it recognized that sex is a subject for serious treatment and also for comic treatment” (68-9), Forster asserted. In Maurice, he made sexuality the subject of not comic but comedic treatment, as proscribed sexuality is given a comedic “happy ending.” Although he kept that novel under wraps at least partly out of fear of prosecution, Forster did stand up for other writers. Despite severe doubts about its literary merit, he was prepared to testify in defense of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness in 1928 (Moffat 216-17), and was a witness for the defense in the suit following the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960 (311). In the context of 1970s “gay liberation,” however, many felt that he had not gone far enough, as we have already seen with Julian Mitchell’s excoriation of Maurice’s lack of political efficacy. Forster was also specifically singled out for opprobrium in the 1974 pamphlet “With Downcast Gays” because he had, according to its authors, “betrayed other gay people by posing as a heterosexual and thus identifying with our oppressors” (qtd in Dellamora 1993 13). More recently, however, Wendy Moffat’s biography of Forster emphasizes his engagement. Moffat points to the fact that Forster contributed financially to the Homosexual Law Reform Society. Moffat also cites the fact that Forster instructed a former lover to write whatever he wanted about him in his memoirs (309-10). For Robert K. Martin and George Piggford, Forster was, as always, looking to a better future through the very existence of his gay texts: “Forster did display a sense of solidarity with future gay or queer readers, at least, by preparing Maurice and The Life to Come for publication and by preserving his diaries and papers for the future” (20). Seen in this light, the unpublished text of Maurice is not proof of cowardice or personal failure on Forster’s part, as some of the initial critics from 1971 chose to see it, but a pledge towards a “happier year,” when the text could be published for those who, in Edward Carpenter’s words, “understand” it.

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What I Believe: Better Living Through Better Organization

Although Forster's work on behalf of gay rights may have been covert to the point of invisibility, his views on other liberal subjects were a matter of public record. In the 1930s, when he had set aside the novel form and the prospect of another major war began to seem more and more inevitable, Forster “emerged as a public figure representing the liberal conscience” (Beauman 2006) in Britain. Among other commitments, he was the first president of the Council for Civil Liberties in 1934 (Beauman 2006). In 1938, he told William Plomer that he was “trying to construct a philosophy” out of the “liberalism crumbling beneath him” (qtd in Moffat 248). The result, What I Believe, published by the Hogarth Press in 1939, is perhaps best known for Forster’s borderline treasonous statement of his belief in “personal relationships" (6) even over and above the loyalty demanded by the state. This statement demonstrates a continuity with Maurice and Howards End, which he also saw as linked by the question of "personal relationships."102 However, What I Believe also ultimately posits a profoundly sceptical, non- eschatological view of futurity in which the difference between comedy and tragedy is simply a question of organization. In this sense, What I Believe demonstrates the persistence of Forster’s particularly Edwardian conception of ameliorative futurity in the face of the renewed threat of large-scale conflict.

The essay begins by drawing attention to the question of time, and Forster's own sense of being somehow out of sync with it. The late 1930s, he asserts, recall more vividly the world of his late- Victorian childhood than that of his Edwardian intellectual maturity. He is now forced to “live in an Age of Faith—the sort of epoch I used to hear praised when I was a boy. It is extremely unpleasant really” (6). This “Age of Faith” will not tolerate non-participation, and demands a response in kind. Though one may reject the terms of the debate, the stakes are so high that “one has [yet] to formulate a creed of one’s own” (5). Forster’s begins with “personal relationships,” as one might expect from the Schlegels or Maurice Hall. These relationships provide him both “something comparatively solid in a world full of violence and cruelty” (6) and “a little order [in

102 In a 1943 letter, Forster remarked that “Maurice works out in a particular direction the thesis of the importance of personal relationships generally laid down in Howards End” (qtd in Beauman 1993 231).

116 the midst of] the contemporary chaos” (7).103 The remedy for time being out of joint is organization. Unlike the heavily militarized nationalism of the “Age of Faith,” Forster proposes a form of organization that is both affective and local, recalling again the terms of the conclusion of Howards End. The primacy of “personal relationships” leads Forster to make his most famous, and dangerous, assertion: “I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country” (8).104 This is also, as Forster acknowledges, a statement out of time. The doctrine of “personal relationships” is decidedly not modern, because its enactment in the world requires a suspension of the central principles of the modern sciences of the mind: “For the purpose of living one has to assume that the personality is solid, and the ‘self’ is an entity, and to ignore all contrary evidence” (6-7). Forster is not so naive as to believe that this choice would go unpunished, however: “Love and loyalty to an individual can run counter to the claims of the State. When they do—down with the State, say I, which means that the State would down me” (8). The conclusion of Maurice imagines a fictional evasion of unjust laws. Conversely, faced with the very real threat of fascism Forster acknowledges that this circumvention is an act of imagination, not always applicable in the real world. The essay's greatest difference from Maurice, however, is that, contrary to how it has often been read, it does not culminate with a total withdrawal into “personal relationships.” Rather, it uses them as the basis for imagining a larger-scale version of a better future.

The essay’s structure reverses the movement of both Howards End and Maurice to expand beyond the relatively narrow purview of “personal relationships” to the larger issues of democracy and democratic administration. Indirectly echoing the narrator of Howards End's point about England’s preponderance of minor poets, Forster celebrates the fact that democracy does not produce “Great M[e]n,” but rather “different kinds of small men—a much finer achievement” (15). “Great Men,” he argues, “produce a desert of uniformity around them,” inimical to the true “aristocracy,” a word used with deliberate, self-conscious hesitation. In

103 The sexual implications of this phrase were made explicit by Paul Cadmus in his large-scale canvas What I Believe (1947-48). 104 In her biography of Forster, Wendy Moffat obliquely links this line to the treatment of Forster’s actual personal friends Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden. Forster was apparently the only person who saw them off when they left for America in January 1939 (248).

117 contradistinction to the cruelty associated with the Shavian “superman,” Forster prizes community and kindness. His “aristocracy” is not based on the transmission of genes or inherited wealth, but both flourishes in and represents diversity. Forster’s aristocrats are affective elites: they are “an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky” (16). Refiguring the violent militarism of his historical moment, Forster asserts that his “aristocrats” comprise “an invincible army, yet not a victorious one” (17). Rather than working towards an endpoint in which all opposition would be finally overthrown, they represent instead a kind of hazily benevolent, friendly persistence. Their work, in other words, is resolutely non-eschatological, dedicated to improvement without final resolution.

In the closing pages of the essay, Forster sketches what the goal of such non-eschatological, ameliorative work might be. Resisting a sense of overwhelming pessimism and nihilism, he rejects the idea that “earthly life” is “a failure,” asserting instead that it is “a tragedy.” The occasion of this tragedy is simply a failure of organization, since “no device has been found by which these private decencies [of his aristocrats] can be transmitted to public affairs” (18). However, this tragedy can be turned into a comedy through better organization:

The Saviour of the future—if ever he comes—will not preach a new Gospel. He will merely utilize my aristocracy, he will make effective the good will and the good temper which are already existing. In other words, he will introduce a new technique…Not by becoming better but by ordering and distributing his native goodness, will Man shut up Force into its box and so gain time to explore the universe and to set his mark upon it worthily. (20)

Forster simultaneously expresses a gentle scepticism about a better future, encapsulated in the “if” of the first line, while also offering a hesitant promise that that better future may actually not be impossible, however improbable it may have seemed on the doorstep of the Second World War.

What I Believe continues Forster’s Edwardian vision, in which the ameliorative promise of possibility is prized over either eschatological perfectibility or the apocalyptic despair of cynicism. As much as the times had seemed to have moved beyond it, this vision would resonate

118 for readers and critics over the course of the twentieth century. Around the close of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, Zadie Smith explicitly embraced Forster as a model not only for a new future for the novel in English, but as a way of dealing with and moving beyond her own era’s uncertainties and challenges. NW (2012), her fourth novel, is a loose rewriting of Howards End in which Smith makes the limitations of the earlier novel’s resolution the basis of an indictment of the attenuated futurity of neoliberalism. As Forster did through the BBC, Smith is a regular participant in public discourse, serving as a contributor to both the Guardian in the United Kingdom and the New York Review of Books in the United States. Like Forster, she has used those platforms not just to engage in the wider dissemination of her ideas but also to argue for a vigorous reinvestment in the progressive idea of a better future.

Chapter 4 Zadie Smith

Since the publication of her first novel in 2000, Zadie Smith has been one of the defining voices of twenty-first century literature in English. A prolific essayist as well as a writer of fiction, Smith is self-conscious about her role in both the literary tradition and the contemporary literary landscape. She has repeatedly proclaimed the importance of E.M. Forster to her as both a reader and a writer, even going so far as to rewrite Howards End (1910) for her third novel, On Beauty (2005). All of Smith’s novels subscribe to “a Forsterian ethics of the novel” (Tolan 139). In this way, a substantial part of the literary conversation in English of the first decades of the twenty- first century has been defined by E.M. Forster, the consummate Edwardian. This connection demands a re-evaluation of the role of Edwardian fiction in narratives of literary history: given Forster’s integral importance to Smith’s writing, literary Edwardianism can no longer be seen as merely the vestibule where Victorianism learned to put on modernist clothes. Smith’s Forsterian affections and interventions also reflect a sense of correspondence between the first decade-or-so of the twentieth century and the first decade-or-so of the twenty-first.

Although the coordinates are different, our own time has also been marked by a debate between larger-scale systemic reforms and short-term, ad hoc solutions prizing individual advancement or enrichment over the larger public good. The latter are usually associated with “neoliberalism,” as distinct from the more systemically-oriented New Liberalism of the Edwardian period. Not an explicit critic of neoliberalism, Smith has nonetheless written about the need for an imaginative reinvestment in a better future for the wider public, especially in the face of the 2016 vote for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union (“Brexit”) and other recent political development. NW (2012), Smith’s fourth novel, is also a rewriting of Howards End, albeit far less explicitly than On Beauty. Thematically, the text explores the correspondences between the Edwardian period and our own time, while the novel’s structure refigures the recent English literary landscape in a Forsterian direction. NW’s resolution makes the need for reinvestment in a more equitable future explicit through a negative example.

Like Howards End, NW is a “condition of England” novel. NW presents this narrative within a formal structure summarizing the condition of English literature. The novel presents a digest of

119 120 major twentieth and twenty-first century literary forms packaged in a Forsterian envelope. Each of NW’s five sections is written in a different style, evoking particular texts or movements from the larger body of twentieth century literature in English. These individual parts are held together structurally by a plot evoking Howards End, and thematically by a shared interest in the Forsterian idea of connection. Refiguring the Forsterian resistance to eschatology for the twenty- first century literary, political, and social landscape, NW problematizes resolution, including the resolution of Forster’s own novel. Set in the midst of the “red rust” (Forster 329) of London sidelined by the Schlegelian dispensation, NW reflects both on the limitations of that arrangement and on the ways in which the ameliorative political promises of the Edwardian period have been undermined, if not betrayed, over the course of the past century.

Set one hundred years after the publication of Forster’s novel and the political tumult of 1910, NW also takes place at a moment of political transition.105 In the UK general election of 2010, a party claiming descent from Edwardian New Liberalism fell out of power while the post- Thatcherist, pre-Brexit Conservative party rose to political prominence.106 Whereas the ameliorative vision of Edwardian New Liberalism arguably survived and outlived the political upheavals of 1910, NW is the product of a political, cultural, and social moment where the progressive idea of a mutually beneficial, better future has been radically impoverished, both from within the political left and without. The ameliorative promises of early twentieth-century New Liberalism and Fabian Socialism have been imperiled by the neoliberal turn away from large-scale projects of mutual betterment towards small-scale, short-term self-enrichment. At the same time, the very idea of a future for humanity has been undermined by the massive environmental depredations of climate change and their political, cultural, and social fallout. Even in the face of these challenges, NW does not reject or turn its back on the future. Rather, the novel forces its reader to examine the failures of contemporary models of futurity. The novel’s ultimate goal is to point a way for the reader to reinvest in an updated, reinvigorated Forsterian

105 The year of the novel’s present can be established through references to the eruptions of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull, which took place between May and June 2010. 106 In a 1995 speech to the Fabian Society commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the 1945 “Let Us Face the Future” campaign, soon-to-be Prime Minister and architect of “New Labour” Tony Blair traced a direct line of descent from New Liberalism to the Labour Party, arguing that “[d]emocractic socialism in Britain was indeed the political heir of the radical Liberal tradition” (8).

121 vision of a better, more equitable future.

Neoliberalism

As much as we have struggled to give a name to our own time that would allow us to organize and understand it, over the past few decades the term “neoliberalism” has come to serve as a sort of catch-all for our moment’s ills. I use the term “neoliberalism” in this chapter in two key ways. First of all, the term “neoliberalism” recalls the Edwardian intra-Liberal debates about approaches to social welfare examined in the first three chapters of this dissertation. The “liberalism” of “neoliberalism” is usually associated with “nineteenth-century [British] economic liberalism…[which] was predicated upon laissez-faire economics, and was closely associated with free trade” (Palley 20). As explored in the first two chapters of this dissertation, this form of liberalism generated the conditions necessitating the interventions of Edwardian New Liberalism to create—or to at least to begin to create--systematic structures of social welfare. In this way, “neoliberalism” serves as a kind of shorthand for the correspondences between the Edwardian period and our own, as it conjures a recurrence of the conditions against which Edwardian progressive political reformers acted. On a figurative level, I also use “neoliberalism” to name a particular, extremely negative, attitude towards the future. In Undoing the Demos (2015), Wendy Brown suggests that neoliberalism is tragic. Not only does it “wholly abando[n] the project of individual or collective mastery of existence,” but in its foundational assertion that “there is no alternative” (italics Brown’s) to the current world order, it “consecrates, depends, and naturalizes without acknowledging” a sense of “civilizational despair.” The solutions neoliberalism offers are “[a]nything but collaborative and contestatory human decision making, control over the conditions of existence, [or] planning for the future” (221; italics mine). Brown’s text ends by asserting that “the Left must…counter this civilizational despair,” since there is no other way to grasp even “the slightest hope for a just, sustainable, and habitable future” (222). Although not quite as explicit, Zadie Smith’s NW makes a similar argument, as it highlights the consequences of the short-term thinking associated with neoliberalism for the idea of a better future, or indeed any future at all.

Zadie Smith and E.M. Forster

E.M. Forster occupies a central place in Zadie Smith’s thinking about the novel. In the

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Acknowledgements for On Beauty, her “hommage” to Howards End, Smith asserts that “all [her] fiction is indebted [to Forster], one way or the other” (Smith Beauty Acknowledgments). Besides this direct engagement, Fiona Tolan argues that “the significance of Smith’s borrowings . . . lies in a more fundamental engagement with a Forsterian ethics of the novel” (139). For Smith, Forster epitomizes the ethical potential of the novel. This capacity is paradoxically premised on failure, with which Forster has long been associated. In a two-part article published in the Guardian in January 2007, Smith posits her ideas in the abstract. In “Fail Better,” the first, writing-oriented part, she asserts that “writers have only one duty, as [she] see[s] it: the duty to express accurately their way of being in the world.” Fiction should be “particular,” providing “one person’s truth as far as it can be rendered through language.” In this conception, the writer’s choice of form, genre and mode are equally individual:

[E]ach writer asks himself which serviceable truths he can live with, which alliances are strong enough to hold. The answers to those questions separate experimentalists from so- called ‘realists’, comics from tragedians, even poets from novelists. In what form, asks the writer, can I most truthfully describe the world as it is experienced by this particular self?

“Read Better,” the second part, addresses some of the potentially troubling, autocratic implications of this argument. Far from creating a dictatorship of the writer, both writing and reading should entail “an ethical expansion…in order to comprehend the human otherness that fiction confronts [the reader and the writer] with.” The ethical work of fiction is not the expression of an individual consciousness in contradistinction to a generalized sensibility; rather, through this individualized expression, fiction “confronts [the reader] with the awesome fact that [they] are not the only real thing in this world.” In other words, the writer’s particularity is a gateway to the crucial revelation of otherness. And yet, as vital as it is, this process must fail. Both the reader and the writer will remain unable to either fully grasp or convey otherness. The inevitable failure of this process is necessary to preserve difference: “if it were ideal, if the translation from brain to page were perfect, then of course all idiosyncrasy, as Woolf suggests, would indeed be impoverished [and] the novel would not exist at all.” The centrality of failure to this ethical vision underwrites Smith’s affection for Forster. Rather than seeking to dispel the sense of “failure” with which his work has long been associated, she acknowledges that his works build on the productive possibilities of failure. More specifically, Forster’s “genius lay in

123 making [his own] failures the basis of his ethics” (Smith “Love”). Similarly, in NW, Smith makes the failures of Howards End the basis of her own ethical refiguration. Comedy, the genre of Forsterian possibility, is the perfect vehicle for this refiguration.

In “Love, Actually” (2003), Smith makes the explicit case for Forster as an ethical model. The essay begins squarely in the tradition of Forster criticism. Smith recalls that A Room With a View (1908), which she read at the age of eleven, made her aware of “the possibilities of fiction.” Like Trilling and many others, she also felt improved by it: “I felt it was very good and that the reading of it had done me some good.” Both of these sentiments were profoundly out of step with the academic literary study of her generation, who “liked to be in some pain when they read” and were suspicious of the idea of improvement. In the essay, Smith makes two, interrelated points: first, that Forster was an important innovator in the genre of the English comic novel, and second that that innovation depended upon his use of what she calls “muddle.” To explore these points, Smith conjures her novelistic bête noire, Jane Austen, here serving as an avatar of the English comic tradition as it existed before Forster’s intervention.107 In Smith’s formulation, Austen’s novels represent an idealized vision of humanity while Forster’s depict something more real: Austen’s characters “are good readers and as such . . . they encourage good reading from others,” while Forster’s characters “are famously always in a muddle: they don't know what they want or how to get it.” This “muddle” put the English comic novel back in touch with its own ethical project. Echoing Henri Bergson and George Meredith, Smith sees the genre as fundamentally corrective: “There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right. The lesson of the comic novel is that our moral enthusiasms make us inflexible, one-dimensional, flat.” Forster’s novels, by contrast, “sugges[t] there might be some ethical advantage in not always pursuing a perfect and unyielding rationality.” Smith attributes the famously messy style of his novels to a “lack of moral enthusiasm.” In Smith’s view, Forsterian “muddle” foregrounds ethical engagement as a means of combating the dangerous totalizations of morality.

As important as his novels were, perhaps the most succinct argument for the Forsterian way is

107Like Leslie Stephen, Smith is not a fan of Austen: in “Read Better,” she compares Austen’s mind to a “glass flower…[which] makes [one] alive to the Beautiful and the Proportional, but the final result has no scent and is cold to the touch.”

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Forster himself. For Smith, E.M. Forster serves as a model not just for the ethical work of the novel form but also for ethical behaviour by novel-writers. In a review of the collection of Forster’s BBC broadcasts, Smith draws attention to his post-novel writing career, asserting that “what’s unusual about Forster is what he didn’t do.” He was, she argues, “an Edwardian among modernists, and yet—in matters of pacifism, class, education and race— a progressive among conservatives” (14). This distinction, of course, only seems strange if one clings to a vision of Edwardianism as a fusty political and literary cul-de-sac. In the broadcasts he made during the Second World War, Forster “kept faith with the future” (25). Smith’s phrase echoes “Let us face the future,” the forward-looking slogan used in 1945 by Clement Attlee’s Labour Party, the architects of the post-Second World War cradle-to-grave welfare state. In his way, Smith highlights the affinity between Forster and progressive political movements. Not only does the Forsterian mode provide a more responsive ethical model of comedic writing, but Forster himself provides a sterling example of the value of its practical application.

For Zadie Smith, E.M. Forster is not just a kindly literary ancestor. Calling from across the twentieth century, he has something infinitely valuable to impart to readers of the early twenty- first: given that Forster was able to continue to honour his ethical commitments throughout the massive upheavals of the twentieth century, reading in a Forsterian mode might help the contemporary reader to do the same in the face of the looming dangers of the twenty-first. NW explores this thesis through its two, deeply muddled, central characters: Leah Hanwell and Natalie Blake. Leah and Natalie are both poor “readers,” to use Smith’s terminology, and their lack of insight leads them to make ethically dangerous oversimplifications. These misreadings serve as a warning to the reader not to do the same. NW is at once a continuation of the Forsterian legacy of comedic innovation and a lesson in the dangers of not reading in the Forsterian mode.

NW, Howards End, and the future

NW is suffused with allusions to some of the major novels in English of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In addition to references to modernist heavyweights like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), the text calls attention to its filial

125 relationship with those earlier novels by evoking other contemporary rewritings, like Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005).108 NW’s master intertext, uniting all the others, is E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910). In addition to allusions, Forster’s novel provides NW’s main thematic supports. Each of NW’s individual sections is concerned with one or a cluster of ethical choices related to the Forsterian idea of connection, as Vanessa Guignery argues (2014). NW also takes up Forster’s resistance to eschatology, rephrasing it as circularity. Like Howards End, NW begins and ends in the same place, the backyard of the council building of which Leah and her husband Michel occupy the bottom flat. The first and last sections of the text also have the same title, “visitation.” This circular structure enacts the novel’s thematic troubling of the idea of progress, both individual and social. These notions are again troubled in the individual sections which make up the text through its use of a spatialized form of narrative organization and its playing with numerical sequence.109 The most obvious versions of the former are in the second section, “guest,” the action of which is organized by postal codes, and in the penultimate section, “crossing,” where the narrative is divided into sections plotting the movements of Natalie Blake and Nathan Bogle through specific streets and parks in Northwest London. These sections make explicit the structural role of space in the other sections. Despite its circularity, the novel does not turn its back on or reject the future. Rather, adopting a modified Forsterian scepticism, it suggests that the future must be “reimagined” (Smith “Optimism”) in a more ethical way, with respect for alterity and empathy foregrounded.

The links between the plots of Howards End and NW can be divided into two main categories: first, the engagement with proximity and ethical connection, and second, the fracturing of the double couple structure. NW also echoes Howards End by the very fact that it layers a comedic, or crypto-comedic, plot with larger ethical questions expressed through the idea of “connection.” NW’s present takes place over a number of months in the spring and summer of 2010 in a neighbourhood in Northwest London. The novel takes the surprising proximity essential to the plot of Howards End—as, for example, with the extraordinary coincidence of Leonard Bast’s

108 Vanessa Guignery notes that the “one day narrative” of NW’s “guest” section evokes both Joyce and Woolf and McEwan (2014 np), but does not connect them in terms of filiation. 109 Wendy Knepper argues that the novel “eschews chronology in favour of a spatially configured story” (112). This formulation does not fully account for the novel’s inventive use of chronology.

126 being seated next to the Schlegels at the concert in Chapter V—and refigures it in a more circumscribed way, announced in its title. In both texts, the potentially jarring contiguities of city life take on pressing ethical importance. Where Howards End ranges across London and various parts of England and Wales, NW is concerned with the overlapping of lives lived in a specific section of London. While Howards End is centrally concerned with private property in the form of the titular house, NW is concerned with the complex interrelationship between the public and the private in contemporary urban life. Leah Hanwell and Natalie Blake’s friendship, forged in the Caldwell tower blocks where they grew up, is the novel’s central version of the theme of connection through location, but the text also explores the ways in which their lives connect—or fail to connect—with those of others in the same general area. The action of the novel’s present is framed by two disturbing interruptions in the normal course of life in the neighbourhood. These incidents expose both the implicit and explicit connections between various characters in the text, but also the boundaries—of class, property, sexuality, marriage, and other social and cultural institutions —regulating or otherwise informing those connections. At the beginning of the first “visitation,” Leah is conned by a woman who calls herself Shar, who turns out to have been a student at the same school Leah attended. Shar talks her way into Leah’s flat by convincing her that she’s “local” (6) through a piece of mail with an address on a nearby street (5). Shar asks Leah to lend her £30 to visit her mother who has supposedly had a heart attack (7). Although Shar promises to pay her back the next day (15), Leah never gets the money. The incident sets off a series of escalating events, culminating in a physical confrontation in which Leah and her husband’s dog is fatally attacked on the street. In the section entitled “guest,” Felix Cooper, another resident of the neighbourhood who grew up in the same tower blocks as Leah and Natalie, is murdered. His refusal to give up his earrings is the immediate cause of the attack, but the confrontation leading to the attempted robbery is prompted by Felix asking some young men to move their feet so a pregnant woman can sit down on the subway. These organizing incidents directly rephrase Howards End’s interest in the relationship between location and ethical connection. In Forster’s text, the chance encounter between the Schlegels and Leonard Bast initiates a series of events in which they try to help him, although he ends up being quite literally destroyed. Like the death of Leonard Bast in Howards End, Felix’s death allows the resolution of the novel to take place.⁠110

110 Felix’s death also links the novel to Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. His death is announced on the

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In terms of the comedic plot, NW is, like Howards End, concerned with two marriages. Unlike Howards End, both marriages are in crisis in the text’s present. Like the earlier text, however, only one seems poised to survive at the end of the text. The literal crisis for Leah’s marriage is that her husband Michel discovers she’s been taking birth control pills stolen from Natalie, while he was under the impression that they were “go[ing] forward” with attempting to get pregnant. The figurative crisis is that Leah and Michel do not have the same idea of what it means to “go forward”: “For Leah, that way is not forward,” the narrator remarks of the pregnancy plans (91). The literal crisis in Natalie’s marriage is that she has been using a secret email address to arrange sexual encounters on the internet, which her husband discovers when he “look[s] at her computer” (295) without her consent. The figurative crisis is that this activity makes clear Natalie’s lack not only of self-knowledge but of self: “Who are you?” (295) her husband Frank asks her. In the penultimate section, “crossing,” Natalie leaves her house and goes for a walk around Northwest London. During the course of this ramble she encounters Nathan Bogle, who also grew up in Caldwell. Nathan weaves in and out of the novel, appearing briefly in “visitation” selling travel cards (45-6). Natalie discovers that Nathan is linked both to Shar, the woman who conned Leah at the beginning of the first “visitation,” and to Felix’s murder. This piece of knowledge sets the stage for the novel’s resolution, which, like that of Howards End, occurs in a semi-pastoral space.

Beyond these similarities of plot, NW operates according to the principle that failure can be the precondition of possibility, as both Howards End and Forster himself did. NW in fact takes the failings of its master intertext as the preconditions of its own existence. Smith’s novel is set in a future sidelined by the local and contingent resolution of Howards End. In the last chapter of Forster’s novel, Helen observes that “London’s creeping.” She illustrates this fact by “point[ing] over the meadow — over eight or nine meadows, but at the end of them was a red rust” (329). The “red rust” of the expanding metropolis not only menaces the vitality of the superlative crop of hay, but it also serves as a figure of the much larger threat that “[l]ife’s going to be melted down, all over the world” (329). In Forster’s vision, the corrosive sprawl of London represents conformity, the opposite of the Schlegels’ haven of difference at Howards End. Smith’s novel

news at the carnival party with which the first “visitation” concludes (92) just as Septimus Smith’s suicide is announced at Clarissa’s party by Dr. Bradshaw (Woolf 201).

128 recalls, but refigures, this moment in “crossing,” its penultimate section. Looking out over North West London from the Hornsey Lane Bridge, Natalie observes “[r]ows of identical red-brick chimneys, stretching to the suburbs” (319). This image of urban conformity proves paradoxically life-giving for Natalie. Like Helen before the seizing of Howards End, at this moment in the text Natalie finds herself in a position where she seems to no longer fit in her social world. She muses to herself that in the city “nothing less than a break—a sudden and total rupture—would do,” while in the country “if a woman could not face her children, or her friends, or her family . . . she would probably only need to lay herself down in a field and take her leave by merging, first with the grass underneath her, then with the mulch under that.” Leaving the break of suicide as “a prospect, always possible” (319), Natalie chooses a middle course between city and country. She “merges” back into the life of the city, which is only apparently “identical.” The red chimneys of North West London may be the same, but the lives lived under them are certainly not. NW rebukes and corrects Forster’s own totalizing tendencies: difference is everywhere, even if the Schlegels were unable to see it. NW asserts that, from the perspective of the twenty-first century, reading in an ethically sound, Forsterian way also means critiquing Forster himself.

Where Howards End the house represents a retreat from modernity into a vision of highly localized ameliorative futurity, Smith’s North West London embodies the mixed legacy of that same modernity. NW takes place amidst the physical and social legacies of Edwardian New Liberalism and its political descendants. In a twist on Howards End’s negative status as “not really the country, and…not the town” (Forster 330), the North West London depicted in NW was once the country but became part of the “town” by passing through a series of progressively- minded building projects. In the first “visitation,” the narrator notes that Kilburn became built up all “at once” sometime “[i]n the 1880s or thereabouts” as “an optimistic vision of Metroland. Little terraces, faux-Tudor piles. All the mod cons! Indoor toilet, hot water. Well-appointed country living for those tired of the city” (47). A History of the County of Middlesex confirms this account, listing a large amount of building in Kilburn between the 1890s and the middle of the first decade of the 1900s. It also notes that “[t]here was a greater proportion of the ‘fairly comfortable, good ordinary earnings’ category in Kilburn c. 1890 than in any other district of Hampstead.” However, Smith’s narrator goes on to remark that if you “[f]ast-forward” to the novel’s present, the area has instead become “[d]isappointed city living for those tired of their countries” (47), a reference to the area’s cultural and ethnic diversity. In the space of a few

129 sentence fragments, the narrator traces the rise and fall not only of the forward-looking building projects of the Edwardian period, similar in intention to those undertaken by William Lever at Port Sunlight, but also of the mid-twentieth century expansion of council housing, of which the Caldwell tower blocks are an example. The “disappointment” of which the narrator speaks is not just a result of the ennui of the area’s inhabitants but is a reflection of the more generalized lack of interest in projects of and for ameliorative futurity over the course of the last half of the twentieth century, which manifests itself most visibly in physical neglect. Felix’s visit to his father’s apartment in “guest” makes the consequences of this attenuated investment vividly clear. The hopelessness bred by this neglect is made manifest by the sign reading “NO DOORBELL” on Lloyd’s door: “[Felix] had seen BROKEN DOORBELL many times before, also KEEP OUT. NO DOORBELL suggested a new level of surrender” (102). In a literal sense, “NO DOORBELL” suggests that Lloyd has simply given up on the prospect of repair. Figuratively, the sign suggests that Lloyd has given up on the idea of potential connection suggested by the doorbell.

Although an urban novel, NW is also interested in the fate of the pastoral visions of both Howards End and Maurice. Where Forster’s pastoral visions figured hope and potential renovation, NW updates the pastoral to reflect the undeniable and pervasive effects of climate change on the symbolic green spaces of England. As Phil Barnes tells Felix, “[a] bit of green is very powerful . . . ’Specially in England” (114). Leah’s backyard, where the novel begins and ends, provides the novel's central figure of the “bit of green.” Like the “greenwood” from Maurice, this setting evokes, but complicates, Frye’s sense of comedy as the “drama of the green world” (182). Unlike Forster’s highly idealized “greenwood,” Leah’s backyard is rooted in difficult realities. From the opening page of the novel, the space showcases one of the most toxic legacies of the twentieth century, the undeniable effects of climate change: “Everyone knows it shouldn’t be this hot. Shrivelled blossom and bitter little apples” (3), Leah remarks to herself while looking at the apple tree. In NW’s post-climate change pastoral, this tree figures knowledge not of good and evil, but of the forsaking of the physical future of the planet. Instead of the vision of ameliorative abundance encapsulated in the promise of “such a crop of hay as never” (Forster 332) at Howards End, the residents of the contemporary world can look forward to continually rising temperatures and sea levels, unpredictable weather, and the eventual withering away of plants and other forms of life. NW’s poisoned apple tree also stands in stark contrast to

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Forster's totemic wych-elm, which was endowed with the putative power to cure.111 Instead of a vision of comedy in which the “plot [is] assimilated to the ritual theme of the triumph of life and love over the waste land” (Frye 182), in Smith’s contemporary comedy environmental destruction has made waste an inescapable part of daily life.

As with the field of hay at Howards End, Leah’s backyard is also tied to NW’s refiguration of reproductive futurity. A few moments after the reflection about the apple tree, Leah notices the “[y]ellow sun high in the sky.” Through association, the image reminds her of the "[b]lue cross on a white stick" that confirmed her pregnancy before the novel began. She then asks herself "[w]hat to do?" (3). This is the central question of the novel, undergirding its multiple ethical quandaries. In this particular instance, the answer for Leah will be to have an abortion. While it may be tempting to read Leah’s choice as another figure of the wasted futurity of the twenty-first century, this interpretation is a trap. Like Howards End, NW is interested in the consequences of generic conventions failing to account for the full range and diversity of human desires and needs. In this case, the social-cum-generic convention that biological reproduction ought to be the outcome of heterosexual marriage is at odds with Leah’s lack of interest in child-bearing. The novel adapts the generic conventions of comedy to the changed social lives of women in the twenty-first century, when neither heterosexual engagement nor biological reproduction are inevitable. NW is often corrective, putting into practice Smith’s conception of the ethical work of the English comic novel, set out in “Love, Actually.” The novel draws attention to, but rebukes, the prizing of moral certainties over ethical engagement. To read Leah’s abortion as a figure of wasted futurity is to fall into moralization, which also means failing to read in a way that respects the ethical demands of Forsterian “muddle.” Abortion allows Leah to pursue diverse ends beyond the singular narratives of convention, both social and otherwise.

Expanding the Expansion of Intimacies

With NW, Smith picks up the gauntlet she believes E.M. Forster dropped for the English comic

111 Even Forster acknowledges that the wych-elm’s homeopathic magic is an anachronism, although he attributes its loss to the modernization of the lower classes. As Mrs. Wilcox tells Margaret, the pig’s teeth imbedded in the bark “are almost grown over now, and no one comes to the tree” (82).

131 novel, when he

took a risk, opening [the form] to let in the things it was not designed for…he allowed the English comic novel the possibility of a spiritual and bodily life, not simply to exist as an exquisitely worked game of social ethics but as a messy human concoction. He expanded the comic novel's ethical space (while unbalancing its moral certainties) simply by letting more of life in. (“Love, Actually”)

Forster moved beyond “[Jane] Austen’s only acceptable connection, the bond of marriage” to examine other forms of intimacy. As discussed in the previous chapter, Howards End operates within, but rearranges, the conventional framework of comedy: Margaret and Henry’s courtship and marriage serve as its narrative spine, around which other affective possibilities are arrayed. By contrast, NW draws on the wide range of literary expression produced between 1910 and 2010 to trouble the linear progression of the conventional comedic plot through formal experimentation. In the novel’s present, Leah and Natalie have each been married for some time. They are both, for different reasons, struggling to reconcile their selves with both their particular marriages and the larger cultural institution of heterosexual marriage. In this way, NW rejects the idea that marriage is a “final event” (Forster “Pessimism” 135), a concept Forster had already dismissed as passé in 1906. In the sections of the text devoted specifically to Leah and Natalie, Smith moves beyond this rather obvious point by using different narrative forms to explore the specific ways in which each of these women struggles with the demands of conventional comedic narratives. Drawing attention to its relationship with both the English comic novel and the twentieth century landscape of literary experimentation, NW explores not just the futurity inherent within the comedic narrative but also the fate of that narrative as a literary and social construction.

NW takes place in the physical future sidelined by the resolution of Howards End, but it also exists in its literary future, where the conventions of narrative and genre have been challenged but not fully overthrown. The first of NW’s five sections, “visitation,” centres on Leah and is written in a high modernist style, employing stream of consciousness narration and incorporating other forms, such as concrete poetry for the depiction of the apple tree (28) and the diagram of Leah’s co-worker’s mouth (31). These elements also have a vexed relationship with convention: with the passing of time, once-radical experiments have become established parts of the literary

132 conversation. A “high modernist” narrative from 2013 has a different import than one from 1923. In addition to these formal elements, NW draws attention to its relationship with convention through an image of writing, just as Howards End did. While Forster’s novel begins with Helen’s telegram to her sister, Smith’s opens on Leah struggling to write down a phrase she heard on the radio.112 The line itself is a cliché about the conjunction between self-definition and writing: “I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.” Leah is unable to write it on “the back of a magazine” because “[p]encil leaves no mark on magazine pages” (3). Howards End opens by evoking the subversion of expectations from within, a figure of Forster’s approach to novel-writing. Similarly, NW opens on a figure of Smith’s conception of writing as a necessary failure of transcription. Though apparently throwaway, the line from the radio names the central issue for both Leah and Natalie: the radical freedom and attendant responsibility of defining one’s self and the difficulty of doing so within existing conventions. The magazine on which Leah tries to write it, with its “[w]orld events and property and film and music…[a]lso sport and the short descriptions of the dead” (4), figures at once the deeply complex environment in which this self-definition must be attempted, but also the material on which Smith herself draws to construct her text. A prime example of one of Smith’s “muddled” characters, Leah does not have the correct tools to define herself within these frameworks. Just as a pencil cannot make a lasting mark on glossy paper, Leah cannot find a way to make her self fit fully within existing narrative structures and conventions. “Visitation” specifically examines the failure of the conventional comedic narrative progression of marriage, monogamous heterosexual sex, and biological reproduction to fully account for or accommodate Leah’s self.

One of Leah’s main problems is that the cultural ratification of the emotions she feels for her husband necessitates a rigidly defined narrative. This narrative both demands particular outcomes and forecloses all other possibilities. The central question for Leah, raised by the narrator in an instance of Forsterian extreme free indirect discourse, is “Which way is forward?” (24). Before a choice about how to proceed is made, the future remains only possibility. Once that choice has been made, the future begins to become the present. This process means an inevitable foreclosure of the multiplicity of possibilities contained in the future: “the things that

112 Although the correspondence is far from exact, Leah is Helen’s rough equivalent in Smith’s novel, as Natalie roughly equates to Margaret Schlegel.

133 happen…serve to horribly close down the possibilities of all the other things that didn’t happen” (76). Leah’s particular issue is that a specific future—childbearing—is expected of her. Instead, she desires a sort of quantum life of endless, multiple possibilities: she “want[s] to stay still and to keep moving. [She] want[s] this life and another” (76). “Visitation” attempts to represent the disconnection between conventional, linear narrative demands and Leah’s desires formally through its chapters 37. The sections in “visitation” are numbered sequentially except for four numbered 37. These sections disrupt not only the linear progression of chapter numbers but also the chronological narrative following Leah from spring to late summer of 2010. The chapters 37 of “visitation”’ explore the gaps created by Leah’s queerness and her reproductive uncertainty with the conventional narrative outcomes demanded by heterosexual marriage. In terms of the former, Leah had relationships with women before she met her husband Michel, and she finds those feelings remain unforeclosed by the institution of marriage.113 The first chapter 37 makes the link between Leah’s affective gaps and the text’s formal disruptions not only explicit but foundational: the very idea of the number 37 as an omen or marker was first introduced to her by “a girl she loved, years ago” (42). In terms of biological reproduction, the putative future of conventional comedic narratives, Leah quite simply does not want to have children. As the narrator puts it, “[f]or Leah, that way is not forward” (91). Accordingly, in the second chapter 37, Leah has an abortion, her third (59). Afterwards, when Michel suggests they “go forward” (91) with fertility treatments, Leah begins taking birth control pills, which she has surreptitiously “[s]tolen” (91) from Natalie. Leah’s active subversion of the expected narrative trajectory causes a crisis in her marriage, which is not fully resolved by the end of the text.114

Natalie’s key question, “Who are you?” (295), is not asked until the very end of her section, “host.” Whereas Leah’s issue is that she is unable to reconcile her self with the movements required of that self within conventional narratives, Natalie’s problem is that the apparently correct performance of those movements has not served to create or reveal a self. As in “visitation,” Natalie’s difficulty with convention is explored through formal experimentation with numerical sequence. Unlike “visitation,” in “host” numbers are the major principle of

113 Leah’s explicit queerness could be read as a recasting of Helen Schlegel’s implicit queerness. 114 Leah's actions with the birth control could be read as a more active refiguration of Margaret Schlegel’s assertion that she “do[es] not love children” and is “thankful to have none” (Forster 317).

134 organization. “Visitation” uses the ur-subjective modernist stream-of-consciousness style to foreground selfhood over plot. “Host,” by contrast, uses a postmodern technique of fragmentary, highly ironic third person narration to try to represent the self-making of someone who lacks a self. “Host” is made up of 185 numbered fragments, each given an individual title, which narrate Keisha-Natalie’s life-cum-self-making.115 The fragments of narrative refuse to resolve into a coherent whole, mirroring Natalie’s own lack of a coherent identity. In its very form, “host” doggedly resists the exhortation of the narrator of Howards End to “[l]ive in fragments no longer” by “[o]nly connect[ing]” (188). While “visitation” enacts the disruption of linear narrative progress through its chapters 37, “host”’s form forces the reader to consider the lack of correlation between linear progression and growth. Nevertheless, in both “visitation” and “host” the number 37 serves as a figure of disconnection. The only disruption in “host”’s forward progression is the lack of a fragment numbered 37. This numerical absence corresponds with Natalie’s brief “break” (Smith 192) with her friend after her mother finds the vibrator Leah gave her for her birthday. Whereas the chapters 37 in “visitation” indicate the gaps created by Leah’s desire for or interest in affective, sexual or reproductive possibilities foreclosed by the conventional comedic narrative, the lacuna of fragment 37 in “host” indicates the central, and yet deeply complicated, importance of sexuality in the narrative of Natalie’s self-making. Initially the source of narrative and personal rupture, sexuality eventually becomes a way of trying to solve “host”’s central problem, which is that “Natalie Blake did not exist” (244).

Whereas Leah is unable to come to terms with the demands of conventional comedic narratives, Natalie delights in the coldly abstract logic of the “Lonely Hearts” advertisement (227), a reductio ad absurdum of the comedic plot. “Lonely Hearts” ads vitiate the need for self- definition, as they reduce embodied people to subject positions and human connection to abstract, nearly mathematical equations, in which one set of coordinates finds its apparently rational complement in another set. Near the end of “host,” as conventional narratives of success and marriage fail to provide her with a sense of self, Natalie seeks anonymous sexual encounters through an online sexual marketplace, an updated version of the analog “Lonely Hearts” ads in the newspaper. Natalie finds that the abstract version of herself has a great amount of currency in

115 She changes her name to Natalie while at university, “a time of experimentation and metamorphosis” (202), as “host”’s narrator puts it.

135 this context: “[o]n the website she was what everybody was looking for” (261). She wonders to herself about how “[e]veryone’s seeking a BF 18—35. Why? What do they think we can do? What is it we have that they want?” (284).116 This question is never answered; all of her encounters fail when faced with the difficulties, disappointments and absurdities of being an embodied person. On her way to such an encounter, Natalie finds herself able to go through with ringing the doorbell only by “perform[ing] an act she later characterized to herself as ‘leaving her own body’” (283). Natalie tries to re-abstract herself into the coolly detached set of coordinates from the website, but this exercise must fail. At the end of “host,” her husband Frank discovers her email trail and a crisis erupts in their marriage, just as one had in Leah and Michel’s. Despite its formal and structural experiments, NW has a relatively conventional plot structure, as tensions develop and come to a head near the end of the text. In its final sections, however, the text uses plot, as it had previously used form and style, to trouble conventional certainties.

NW and Resolution

NW’s resolution seems to echo Howards End in dividing the components of the conventional comedic ending between its two central female characters. In actuality, NW upends the earlier novel’s resolution, making starkly visible what it occluded. This overturning both highlights the troubling stakes of the resolution of Forster’s text and draws attention to the attenuated futurity of NW’s own time. Although the final scene of NW recalls that of Howards End, Smith complicates the Forsterian pattern at the point of resolution. In Howards End, Helen had a child but no interest in heterosexuality, while Margaret had reinvested in her marriage with Henry Wilcox. At the end of NW, Natalie is on the way to divorce from Frank and reconceives her relationship with her children, while Leah and Michel seem poised on the cusp of potential re- connection. A reconciliation between the two women is also suggested, but deferred. NW departs most sharply from the Forsterian model through its final deferral of comedic resolution, both conventional and otherwise, in favour of an ethically unsound response to one of the text’s

116 Natalie’s pursuit of abstract sexual encounters is paralleled with Michel’s dabbling in online “[c]urrency trading” (49). As Alan Ackerman notes, the “value of abstract media of exchange is that they provide each agent or character the means and the freedom by which he or she may pursue his or her own ends” (151). Both Michel and Natalie use abstraction to attempt to pursue ends unavailable to them in their marriages.

136 central conundrums: the murder of Felix Cooper. By foregrounding immediately gratifying but ethically questionable solutions, NW’s conclusion draws attention to the impoverished futurity of neoliberalism, which prizes short-term, ad hoc solutions and personal gain over long-term structural investment in mutual betterment. At the same time, NW’s conclusion brings to light the troubling foundations of the apparently benign resolution of Howards End. Centering NW’s conclusion on the ethical problem of Nathan’s likely involvement in Felix’s murder draws attention to the exclusions undergirding the ameliorative futurity of Forster’s text. Leonard Bast’s death is the necessary precondition for the final Schlegelian arrangement, and yet both he and his death are erased from it. In the same speech where she hymns the value of “[d]ifferences—eternal differences,” Margaret tells Helen to “[f]orget” Leonard: “I can’t have you worrying about Leonard. Don’t drag in the personal when it will not come” (328). Leonard not only does not belong in the “new life” (326) the Schlegels are building at Howards End, but he is also figured as an active threat to it, like the “red rust” (329) of London’s metropolitan creep. As a final act of Forsterian ethical engagement, Smith rejects the exclusionary difference favoured by the Schlegels.

Nathan Bogle’s role in NW is not exactly the same as Leonard Bast’s in Howards End. The Bast position in the novel’s plot is arguably split between Bogle and Felix Cooper. Cooper’s death, like Bast’s, is necessary for the novel’s resolution to occur, but Nathan is also sacrificed. Nathan cannot easily be equated to Charles Wilcox, the agent of Bast’s death, because he occupies a similar position to Bast in NW’s narrative structure. A central figure in the last two sections, Nathan is nonetheless never granted a full section of his own like the other three main characters, nor is the narrative ever focalized through him. Nathan’s structural absence is a rephrasing of Forster’s narrator’s assertion that "[w]e are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable" (58). Whereas critics have generally read this statement as dismissive and cruel, Daniel Born argues that through it, Forster "at least reveals the vantage point from which his observations are made" (1995 129). Forster’s narrator is not endorsing the erasure of the “very poor,” but rather acknowledges her epistemological limitations and those of her world. Similarly, through Nathan’s structural exclusion, Smith makes explicit the perspective of the other characters in the text and the social world from which they are drawn. As Nathan himself says, for a black man “[t]here’s no way to live in this country when you’re grown” (313). The text’s refusal to grant Nathan either central narrative status or narrative interiority reflects the exclusion

137 he experiences: there is no narrative place for Nathan in NW because there is no political, social or cultural place for him in contemporary British society. As with Forster’s narrator, NW does not endorse this perspective. However, NW goes beyond Forster’s text by using the final movement of its plot to make the reader acutely and uncomfortably aware of the implications of failing to see Nathan and those like him.

As its final critique of the idea of progress, NW’s plot culminates in a scene of radical regression. By the end of the text, Leah and Natalie have not “grown” in any sense of the word. They have, in fact, taken a huge step backwards, both personally and in terms of their ethical engagement with the world. After the crisis with Frank, Natalie does not discover a lost or authentic self. The possibility of self-discovery is opened up in the closing moments of the novel, but Natalie closes it off. Looking at her children in Leah's backyard, Natalie has a brief vision of striking alterity: “A child. Children. Not babies, not something to be merely managed any longer. Beautiful, unknowable, and not her arms or legs or any other extension of her” (331). This moment recalls the figuring of Helen’s baby and Tom as avatars of the persistence of unconventional affective connections in Howards End. In this moment, children are also presented as figures of potentially “salutary disconnection” (White 44). Natalie’s revelation recalls Smith’s conception of the ethical work of the novel, which “confronts [the reader] with the awesome fact that [they] are not the only real thing in this world” (“Read Better”). However, Natalie’s bit of “knowledge as a sublime sort of gift” (NW 331) is not a prelude to a renewed sense of ethical engagement. Rather, staying true to the form of her section, Natalie not only fails to connect but actively refuses connection. As the narrator puts it, her “instinct for self-defence, for self-preservation, was simply too strong.” In the final movement of the text’s plot, she turns away not only from her children, but also from her friend. Instead of giving Leah “an honest account of her own difficulties and ambivalences” (331), Natalie once again opts for a simplistic equation: she offers to solve Felix’s murder. Although Natalie is the prime mover, Leah is a willing participant in this deferral of connection. When both Natalie and Michel try to speak to her, she demands that they “talk about something else” (332), preparing the ground for Natalie's unethical offering. For both women, sharing the information about Nathan's likely involvement in the murder is an act of displacement, with the decision to act on this information taking it a step further. When they make the call, Leah and Natalie behave like children:

Apart from the fact [Natalie] drew the phone from her own pocket, the whole process

138

reminded her of nothing so much as those calls the two good friends used to make to boys they liked, back in the day, and always in a slightly hysterical state of mind, two heads pressed together over a handset. (333)

In their call to the police, Leah and Natalie re-enact a juvenile form of sexuality.117 This regression offers them a temporary escape from the complications of adult relationships. The childish practice of calling boys on the telephone creates the appearance of connection without any of the difficulties of actually enacting it. Natalie and Leah are performing connection as a way of actively trying to avoid it. The final movement of NW's plot refutes the idea of progress or personal development and, at the same time, draws attention to the dangers of totalizing resolution.

Emblematizing its rejection of both of both progress and closure, NW ends with the beginning of a narrative. In the last line of the text, Natalie, whose regression is further signaled by the return of her birth name, says into the phone “I got something to tell you” (333). Natalie understands the importance of narrative, or “telling,” as a means of creating the illusion of stability. In fragment 125 of “host,” the narrator recounts how she “told herself a story” about why she would not take tenancy if it were offered. This story “was a way of making the future safe. (All Natalie’s storytelling had, in the end, this aim in view.)” (242). The “telling” of the information about Nathan to the police has a similar goal: not to make the future of the neighbourhood “safe” by the removal of a potential threat, but to make the future “safe” by re-establishing and re- affirming Natalie's own moral certainties. The function of NW as a whole is the precise opposite: the “telling” of the text aims not to “mak[e] the future safe,” but to draw attention to the ways in which this apparent making safe has paradoxically both endangered the future and at the same time participated in a radical attenuation of mutually beneficial, ameliorative futurity. With its complex structure, formal experimentation and refigured comedic plot, NW aims not to comfort but to productively disconcert. The novel's final line makes the mismatch between the work of the text and that of Natalie’s narratives explicit. What she has to tell is not just the truth of the situation—Nathan probably was involved in Felix’s death—but also her understanding of what that truth means. Earlier in the scene, Natalie gives Leah her version of an answer to Leah’s

117 This reversion recalls Barbara’s strange regression in the last scene of Major Barbara. See Chapter 2 for a discussion of this moment.

139 central question. “I just don’t understand why I have this life,” Leah remarks to Natalie from her hammock, “Why that girl and not us. Why that poor bastard on Albert Road. It doesn’t make sense to me” (331). A variation on the theme of “[w]hich way is forward?” (24), Leah’s question here is not about how to proceed but about how she got where she is. Betraying her own obsessions, Natalie takes Leah to mean that she does not understand why she and Natalie have been lucky enough to achieve material success while others have not. She asserts that it is “[b]ecause [they] worked harder . . . [They] wanted to get out. People like Bogle—they didn’t want it enough . . . This is one of the things you learn in a courtroom: people generally get what they deserve” (332). Natalie imposes a deeply reductive narrative, which replaces the profound complexities of human interactions with moralization, not only on her work but on her life. This narrative is to human life as the “Lonely Hearts” ads are to embodied adult sexual or romantic relationships. Like them, it seeks to replace messy, ethically demanding “muddle” with the cold, precise logic of an equation. Natalie's narrative has made the future morally “safe” for her, at the cost of her own ethical bankruptcy. Though the decision to inform the police about Nathan’s possible involvement in Felix’s death may be technically correct, it is made on an unethical basis. Natalie has seen only the facts of the case and mapped them according to her moral certainties. In short, she has failed to read in an ethically responsive, Forsterian way.

In interviews, Smith has called Natalie “a warning” (Ouzounian). By extension, Leah and Natalie's collusion in informing the police is an admonishment to the reader to avoid similar acts of oversimplification. In this way, the novel's ending ratifies the value of Forsterian ethics, even as it critiques Forster's own failure to fully embody them in the resolution to Howards End. By the end of NW, nothing has been solved. Leah’s question and its attendant anxieties have only been answered in the most sideways of manners, and Natalie herself has not come to any “[c]larity” (329) about her self. Instead, reflecting the radically impoverished futurity of neoliberalism, a solution is manufactured which results only in the temporary easing of difficulties at the expense of the idea of mutually beneficial futurity. However, NW’s ending also suggests the possibility of a way forward: Leah and Natalie have failed to grasp the value of Forsterian ethics. They have failed to respect “muddle,” and have instead opted for the dangers of “perfect and unyielding rationality” (Smith “Love”). All is not lost, however: the reader can learn from them not to make the same mistake.

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Reimagining the Future

In an essay from August 2016, Smith approaches the United Kingdom’s vote to exit the European Union (“Brexit”) through the same framework, both literal and figurative, used in NW. The article, entitled “Fences: A Brexit Diary,” can be read as an addendum to NW, in which she makes the novel’s indictment of neoliberal complacencies explicit. Her analysis of the specifics of the vote is scaffolded on reflections about the neighbourhood in Northwest London where she grew up, and where the novel is—roughly--set. Smith specifically invokes the local primary school, which initially seems to be a figure for Britain itself. However, she complicates this reading, noting that, given recent political developments, the “British…can find [them]selves behaving strangely when we allow material realities to turn into symbols.” Similarly, throughout the article Smith resists simple narratives of blame or liberal scorn for those who voted for the Leave option. Instead, she draws attention to the genuine complaints of the poor, as “[t]hey really do have to fight for resources under an austerity government” in ways those from more comfortable classes do not. Smith draws attention to the persistence of poverty and the practical effects of inequality, pressing issues in our own time as much as they were in the Edwardian period. The real target of the article is the complacency of the middle and upper-middle classes, who have “no less…shafted [themselves].” This indictment culminates in a call for a return of the optimistic, comedic vision that underwrote the creation of the post-1945 Welfare State:

the postwar British compact between government and people is not guaranteed, and it can be collectively unraveled, or trampled over by a few malign actors. Therefore the civilizing liberal arguments that established a universal health care system, state education, and public housing out of the ruins of war now need a party willing to make those arguments afresh in a new age of global capitalism, though whether that party will still even bear the name “Labour” remains to be seen.

As Smith acknowledges, the return of this conception of society will necessitate at the very least a complete realignment within the Labour Party, if not of the British left as a whole. The need for the return of a vision of comedic futurity has been a refrain for Smith over the course of the annus horribilis of 2016. In a speech delivered two days after the American election in which Donald Trump was elected President, she asserted “that progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated, and reimagined if it is to survive” (“Optimism,”

141 italics Smith’s). Self-consciously rewriting the campaign slogan of the incoming American president, she argued that “the examples of the past still hold out new possibilities for all of us, opportunities to remake, for a new generation, the conditions from which we ourselves have benefited.” In order to be able to imagine a better future beyond the cataclysms of the contemporary moment, the task is not simply to recreate some lost, possibly imaginary “great” past, but to re-engage with the ways in which the past conceived of a better future. The task at hand is both to reinvest in the idea of a better future and, at the same time, to recreate the practical structures necessary to realize that idea. In its questioning of the neoliberal prioritization of short-term solutions over long-term structural change, NW is itself a step forward in that reorientation.

Epilogue Back to the Future

In ending with the contemporary moment, I mean paradoxically to work against what Adam Gopnik, in a recent review of “death-of-liberalism tomes and eulogies,” called “presentism.” For Gopnik, “presentism” is the greatest, and most dangerous, “prejudic[e] of pundits.” According to this way of thinking, not only is “what is happening now…going to keep on happening,” but everything in history seems to be inevitably leading up to the present moment. “Presentism” is a kind of tragic fatalism, in which the present itself is the deus ex machina giving form to the amorphous past. In contrast to this way of thinking, what is needed is comedic complexity, through which we can once again approach the future by considering other futures and the futures of others. By examining in detail both the successes and failures of various futures, this dissertation has both demonstrated the need for this complexity and responded to it at the same time.

The need for a vigorous reinvestment in the storehouse of better futures becomes more and more evident every day. From the perspective of late 2017, when I am writing this conclusion, the resonances with the Edwardian political moment are astonishing. Barely a day goes by without a news item about inequality, in one form or another. As in the Edwardian discussion, there are many, often deeply divergent, ideas on how best to respond to this pressing issue. In Ontario, Canada, where I am writing this, the Liberal provincial government is implementing a study of a minimum income project, a version of social welfare discussed in the Edwardian context in Chapter 2. The UK government just recently moved up the timeline for pushing back the age for pensions from 67 to 68. Instead of a target date of 2044-46, these changes will now take effect between 2037 and 2039, which means they will have a directly bearing on the future of my generation. Given the political developments of the last year, the questions of both futurity and periodization are once again deeply pressing: How can we situate ourselves in relation to current political events? How will others, in the future? Are we at the beginning of a new era? When did it start? How did we get here? When people look back from 2117, how will they talk about the th first part of the twenty-first century? Will the years between, say, September 11 2001 and the latter half of 2016 also be seen as a “millennial” equivalent of the Edwardian afternoon garden

142 143 party, a “golden pause” when we Netflix and chilled ourselves into oblivion? Or will the lines be drawn elsewhere, around events that have not yet happened or which we have not yet understood to be significant? Who will get to decide that significance anyway? These questions are clearly unanswerable at this point. The far more important question is, as it was for Leah Hanwell in Zadie Smith’s NW: “Which way is forward?” (24). What kind of future do we want, and how are we going to go about getting it? This question is at the core of all the texts examined in this dissertation. It is also the very reason for this dissertation’s existence. The objective of this dissertation has to present and explore the ways in which others have asked and answered it in both literature and politics. The goal is not to present one way for imagining the future, but to foreground the fact that the idea of the future requires a constant imaginative reinvestment, as Smith also acknowledged. For that reason I end not with the present, but by coming once again back to the future.

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Hatt, Michael, and Morna O'Neill. The Edwardian Sense: Art, Design, and Performance in Britain, 1901-1910. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art : Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2010. Print.

Hattersley, Roy. The Edwardians. London: Abacus, 2006. Print.

HC Deb 02 December 1909 vol 13 cc546-81

HC Deb 29 April 1909 vol 4 cols 473-619

Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, 2016. Print.

Ho, Janice. “The Crisis of Liberalism and the Politics of Modernism.” Literature Compass 8.1 (2011): 47-65. Print.

Hobhouse, L.T. Liberalism. London: Oxford UP, 1945. Print.

Hobson, J. A. The Crisis of Liberalism: New Issues of Democracy. London: King, 1909. Print.

Humphries, Andrew F., and Adrienne E. Gavin. Childhood in Edwardian Fiction: Worlds Enough and Time. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire [England] ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print.

Hunter, Jefferson. Edwardian Fiction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1982. Print.

147

Hynes, Samuel Lynn. Edwardian Occasions: Essays on English Writing in the Early Twentieth Century. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1972. Print.

---. The Edwardian Turn of Mind. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

Ingham, Robert, and Duncan Brack. Peace, Reform and Liberation: A History of Liberal Politics in Britain 1679-2011. London: Biteback, 2011. Print.

Janko, Richard. Aristotle on Comedy: Towards a Reconstruction of Poetics II. Berkeley: California UP, 1984.

Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1982. Print.

Kemp, Sandra, Charlotte Mitchell, and David Trotter. Edwardian Fiction: An Oxford Companion. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Print.

Kohlmann, Benjamin. Committed Styles Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014.

Leavis, F. R. The Common Pursuit. London: Chatto & Windus, 1952. Print.

Lucas, John. The Radical Twenties: Writing, Politics, and Culture. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1999. Print.

Masterman, Charles F. G. The Condition of England. 7th. ed. London: Methuen, 1912. Print.

Matthew, H.C.G. “Edward VII (1841-1910).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 2016. http://www.oxforddnb.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/article/32975?docPos=1

McBriar, A. M., and Fabian Society (Great Britain). Fabian Socialism and English Politics, 1884-1918. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1962. Print.

Mead, Rebecca. “What Do You Call It?” The New Yorker.com The New Yorker. January 4th, 2010. Web.

Meredith, George. “An Essay on Comedy.” Comedy. Ed. Wylie Sypher. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1956. 3-60. Print.

---. The Egoist. New York Norton, 1979. Print.

Mill, John Stuart. “Art. XI.--The Works of Jeremy Bentham: Now First Collected, under the Superintendence of His Executor, John Bowring.” London and Westminster Review 31.2 (1838): 467-506. Print.

---. Dissertations and Discussions Political, Philosophical, and Historical. London: John W. Parker and Son, 1859. Web.

Millard, Kenneth. Edwardian Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Print.

148

Money, L G. C. Riches and Poverty. London: Methuen & Co, 1914. Print.

Morgan, Kenneth O. Ages of Reform: Dawns and Downfalls of the British Left. London: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd., 2011. Print.

Murray, Bruce K. The People's Budget 1909/10: Lloyd George and Liberal Politics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Print.

North, Michael. Machine-Age Comedy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.

Orwell, George. “Such, Such Were the Joys.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. Vol. 4. London: Secker & Warburg, 1968. 330-69. Print.

Palley, Thomas I. “From Keynesianism to Neoliberalism: Shifiting Paradigms.” Neoliberalism : A Critical Reader. Eds. Alfredo Saad-Filho and Deborah Johnston. London: Pluto Press, 2005. 20-30. Print.

Pope, Rex, Bernard Hoyle, and Alan Pratt. Social Welfare in Britain, 1885-1985. London: Croom Helm, 1986. Print.

“progressive.” Definition 4b. Oxford English Dictionary 3rd ed. 2007. Web.

Read, Donald. “Introduction: Crisis Age or Golden Age?” Edwardian England. Ed. Donald Read. London: Croom Helm, 1982. 14-39. Print.

Ridley, Jane. Bertie: A Life of Edward Vii. London: Chatto & Windus, 2012. Print.

Rose, Jonathan. The Edwardian Temperament, 1895-1919. Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, 1986. Print.

Sackville-West, Vita. The Edwardians. New York: Avon Books, 1975 Print.

Saunders, Robert. Democracy and the Vote in British Politics, 1848-1867: The Making of the Second Reform Act. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Print.

Segal, Erich. The Death of Comedy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2001. Print.

Shaw, George Bernard. Major Barbara: Definitive Text. London: Methuen Drama, 2008. Print.

Shaw, Joshua. “Philosophy of Humor.” Philosophy Compass 5.2 (2010): 112-26. Print.

Smith, Zadie. “Fences: A Brexit Diary.” New York Review of Books 18 August 2016. Web.

---.NW. New York: Penguin, 2012. Print.

---. “On Optimism and Despair.” New York Review of Books. 22 December 2016. Web.

149

Snowden, Philip S. The Living Wage. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1912. Print.

Stead, Francis Herbert. How Old Age Pensions Began to Be. London: Methuen, 1909. Print.

Sykes, Alan. The Rise and Fall of British Liberalism, 1776-1988. London: Longman, 1997. Print.

Vinson, Adrian. “The Edwardians and Poverty.” Edwardian England. Ed. Donald Read. London: Croom Helm, 1982. 75-93. Print.

Wallace, Jeff. “Modernists on the Art of Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. 15-31. Print.

Webb, Sidney, and Beatrice Webb. The Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission. Clifton, N.J.: A.M. Kelley, 1974. Print.

Weber, Samuel. “Laughing in the Meanwhile.” MLN 102.4 (1987): 691-706. Print.

Williams, Raymond. The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. London: Verso, 1989. Print.

Chapter 1: George Meredith

Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Stephen Halliwell. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1995. Print.

Baker, Robert S. “Faun and Satyr: Meredith's Theory of Comedy and the Egoist.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Comparative Study of Literature and Ideas 9.4 (1976): 173-93. Print.

Beach, Joseph Warren. The Comic Spirit in George Meredith. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963. Print.

Beer, Gillian. Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.

---. “Meredith's Idea of Comedy: 1876-1880.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 20.2 (1965): 165-76. Print.

Bell, Nigel. “The Egoist and Meredith's Essay on Comedy.” English Studies in Africa: A Journal of the Humanities 53.2 (2010): 3-20. Print.

Bryden, Inga. Reinventing King Arthur: The Arthurian Legends in Victorian Culture. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. Print.

150

Butler, Charles. “The Inaugural Oration, Spoken on the 4th Day of November 1815: At the Ceremony of Laying the First Stone of the London Institution, for the Diffusion of Science and Literature.” 1816. www.jstor.org/stable/60211937.

“common sense” Definition 4a and 6. Oxford English Dictionary 3rd ed. 2016. Web.

Congreve, William. The Way of the World. London: Penguin, 2006. Web

Cook, Chris. A Short History of the Liberal Party : The Road Back to Power. 7th ed. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire [England] ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print.

Cook, Chris and John Stevenson. A History of British Elections Since 1689. New York: Routledge, 2014. Print.

“coverture.” Definition 9a. Oxford English Dictionary 2nd ed. 1989. Web.

Cutler, Janet C. The London Institution, 1805-1933. Diss. University of Leicester, 1976. Web.

Dickie, Simon. Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century. Chicago; London: Chicago UP, 2011. Print.

Ewin, R. E. “Hobbes on Laughter.” The Philosophical Quarterly 51.202 (2001): 29-40. Print.

Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel Penguin, 1972. Print.

Handwerk, Gary. “On Heroes and Their Demise: Critical Liberalism in ‘Beauchamp's Career’.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 27.4 (1987): 663-681. Print.

Harris, Margaret. “Meredith, George (1828-1909).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 2008. http://www.oxforddnb.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/ article/34991

HC Deb 17 February 1870 vol 199 cols 438-98

Heyd, David. “The Place of Laughter in Hobbes's Theory of Emotions.” Journal of the History of Ideas 43.2 (1982): 285-95. Print.

HL Deb 25 July 1870 vol 203 cols 821-65

Ho, Janice. "The Crisis of Liberalism and the Politics of Modernism." Literature Compass 8.1 (2011): 47-65. Print.

151

Hobbes, Thomas. Human Nature and De Corpore Politico. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Print.

---. Leviathan: Revised Student Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print.

Ives, Maura C., ed. George Meredith's Essay on Comedy and Other New Quarterly Magazine Publications: A Critical Edition. London: Associated University Presses, 1998. Print.

Kalinke, Marianne E. “The Saga of the Mantle.” The Romance of Arthur: An Anthology of Medieval Texts in Translation. Ed. James J. Wilhelm. New York: Garland, 1994. 209-23. Print.

Korg, Jacob. “Catharsis in George Meredith's Essay on Comedy.” Victorian Newsletter 106 (2004): 28-29. Print.

Kurzer, Frederick. “Chemistry and Chemists at the London Institution 1807-1912.” Annals of Science 58 (2001): 163-201. Print.

Landis, Joseph C. “George Meredith's Comedy.” Boston University Studies in English 2 (1956): 17-35. Print.

London Institution. “The Charter and Bye-Laws of the London Institution for the Advancement of Literature and the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.” 1823. www.jstor.org/stable/60212127.

Martin, Robert Bernard. The Triumph of Wit: A Study of Victorian Comic Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. Print.

Mayo, Robert D. “The Egoist and the Willow Pattern.” The Egoist. Ed. Robert M. Adams. New York: Norton. 453-60. Print.

Meredith, George. “An Essay on Comedy.” Comedy. Ed.Wylie Sypher. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1956. 3-60. Print

---. Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads. Eds. Rebecca N. Mitchell and Criscillia Benford. New Haven: Yale UP, 2013. Web.

---. “On the Idea of Comedy and of the Uses of the Comic Spirit.” The New Quarterly Magazine 8 (1877): 1-40. Print.

---. The Egoist. New York: Norton, 1979. Print.

Mezciems, Jenny. “Introduction.” Utopia. Ed. Jenny Mezciems. New York: Knopf, 1992. ix-xxiii. Print.

Moses, Joseph. The Novelist as Comedian: George Meredith and the Ironic Sensibility. New York: Schocken, 1983. Print.

152

Mukhopadhyay, Tirtha. “Analyzing the Comedic Process, Along with an Endorsement of George Meredith's Essay on Comedy.” Journal of the Department of English 33.1-2 (2006): 77-87. Print.

Murphy, Michael E. “Meredith's Essay on Comedy: A Possible Source.” Notes and Queries 11 (1964): 228-28. Print.

Orel, Harold. The World of Victorian Humor. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1961. Print.

Phillips, David. The German Example: English Interest in Educational Provision in Germany since 1800. London: Continuum, 2011. Print.

Pritchett, Victor S. George Meredith and English Comedy. London: Chatto & Windus, 1970. Print.

“progressive.” Definition 4b. Oxford English Dictionary 3rd ed. 2007. Web.

Richardson, Samuel. Pamela. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

Roberts, Neil. Meredith and the Novel. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. Print.

Rowntree, B. Seebohm. Poverty: A Study of Town Life. Second Edition. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1902. Print.

Shanley, Mary Lyndon. Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, 1850- 1895. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1989. Print.

Simon, Richard Keller. The Labyrinth of the Comic: Theory and Practice from Fielding to Freud. Tallahassee: Florida State UP, 1985. Print.

Smirlock, Daniel. "Rough Truth: Synecdoche and Interpretation in the Egoist." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 31.3 (1976): 313-28. Print.

St. John, Ian. Gladstone and the Logic of Victorian Politics. New York: Anthem Press, 2010. Print.

Stephen, Leslie. “Humour.” The Cornhill Magazine 33.195 (1876): 318-26. Print.

Stephens, W. B. Education in Britain, 1750-1914. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. Print.

Stevenson, Richard C. The Experimental Impulse in George Meredith's Fiction. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2004. Print.

Stewart, Maaja A., and Elvira Casal. “Clara Middleton: Wit and Pattern in ‘the Egoist.’” Studies in the Novel 12 (1980): 210-227. Print.

153

Strachey, Lytton. Eminent Victorians. New York: Putnam’s, 1918.Web.

Thackeray, William Makepeace. “On Charity and Humour.” The World's Famous Orations. Ed. William Jennings Bryan. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1906. Web.

---. The Four Georges; The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century. London: Smith, Elder, 1869. Print.

Turda, Marius. “Race, Science, and Eugenics in the Twentieth Century.” The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. Eds. Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. 62-80. Print.

Wagner-Lawlor, Jennifer A. The Victorian Comic Spirit: New Perspectives. Aldershot; Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000. Print.

Warren, Allen “Forster, William Edward (1818-1886).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2008. http://www.oxforddnb.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/ article/9926

Wickberg, Daniel. Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2015.Web

Williams, Carolyn. “Unbroken Patternes: Gender, Culture, and Voice in ‘the Egoist.’” Browning Institute Studies 13 (1985): 45-70. Print.

Wimsatt, W. K. ed. The Idea of Comedy: Essays in Prose and Verse, Ben Jonson to George Meredith. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969. Print.

Zlosnik, Sue. “The Egoist.” Literary Encyclopedia. Ed. Gillian Fenwick. 2004. Web.

Chapter 2: George Bernard Shaw

Abrams, Philip. The Origins of British Sociology: 1834-1914. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1968. Print.

Albert, Sidney P. "Barbara's Progress." SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 21.1 (2001): 81-93. Print.

---. "Fiction and Fact in Shaw’s Account of Major Barbara’s Salvation Army Origins." SHAW The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 34.1 (2014): 162-75. Print.

---. "From Murray's Mother-in-Law to Major Barbara: The Outside Story." SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 22 (2002): 19-65. Print.

154

---. "'In More Ways Than One': Major Barbara's Debt to Gilbert Murray." Educational Theatre Journal 20 (1968): 123-40. Print.

---. Shaw, Plato, and Euripides: Classical Currents in Major Barbara. Gainesville: Florida UP, 2012. Print.

---. "The Time of Major Barbara.” SHAW The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 33.1 (2013): 17-24. Print.

Alexander, James. Shaw's Controversial Socialism. Gainseville: Florida UP, 2009.

Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Stephen Halliwell. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1995. Print.

Blake, David. Pension Schemes and Pension Funds in the United Kingdom. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. Print.

Bolz, Cedric. "From 'Garden City Precursors' to 'Cemeteries for the Living': Contemporary Discourse on Krupp Housing and Besucherpolitik in Wilhelmine Germany." Urban History 37.1 (2010): 90-116. Print.

Booth, Charles. Life and Labour of the People in London. Volume 1: East, Central and South London. London: Macmillan and Co., 1892. Print.

Booth, William, and Salvation Army. In Darkest England, and the Way Out. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1890. Print.

Bradley, Ian C. Enlightened Entrepreneurs : Business Ethics in Victorian Britain. 2nd ed. Oxford: Lion, 2007. Print.

Briggs, Asa. "Seebohm Rowntree's Poverty: A Study of Town Life in Historical Perspective." Getting the Measure of Poverty: The Early Legacy of Seebohm Rowntree. Ed. Jonathan Bradshaw and Roy Sainsbury. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. 5-22. Print.

---. Social Thought and Social Action; a Study of the Work of Seebohm Rowntree, 1871- 1954. [London]: Longmans, 1961. Print.

Carnegie, Andrew. Gospel of Wealth. London: F.C. Hagen & Co., 1889. Print.

Carpenter, Charles A. Bernard Shaw as Artist-Fabian. Gainesville: Florida UP, 2009. Print.

“company town.” Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd ed. 2014. Web.

Cornford, Francis Macdonald. The Origin of Attic Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1934. Print.

“Council Housing.” UK Parliament. Web.

155

Craig, Frederick Walter Scott. British Parliamentary Election Results, 1885-1918. London: Macmillan, 1974. Print.

Darley, Gillian. Villages of Vision. London: Architectural Press, 1975. Print.

Davis, Tracy C. George Bernard Shaw and the Socialist Theatre. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Print.

Davison, Thomas Raffles. Port Sunlight. London: Batsford, 1916. Print.

Dean, Mitchell. The Constitution of Poverty: Toward a Genealogy of Liberal Governance. New York: Routledge, 1991. Print.

Englander, David. Poverty and Poor Law Reform in Britain: From Chadwick to Booth, 1834-1914. London; New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998. Print.

Englander, David, and Rosemary O'Day. Retrieved Riches: Social Investigation in Britain, 1840-1914. Brookfield, Vt: Ashgate Pub. Co., 1995. Print.

Euripides. The Bacchae. Trans. Gilbert Murray. 2d ed. London: G. Allen, 1906. Print.

Evans, Judith. The Politics and Plays of Bernard Shaw. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2003. Print.

Fraser, Derek. The Evolution of the British Welfare State: A History of Social Policy Since the Industrial Revolution. 4th ed. Basingstoke, [England]; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print.

Freeden, Michael. "Eugenics and Progressive Thought: A Study in Ideological Affinity." The Historical Journal 22.3 (1979): 645-71. Print.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1957. Print.

Garner, Stanton B., Jr. "Shaw's Comedy of Disillusionment." Modern Drama 28.4 (1985): 638-58. Print.

Gazeley, Ian, and Andrew Newell. "Poverty in Edwardian Britain." The Economic History Review 64.1 (2011): 52-71. Print.

George, W.L. Labour and Housing at Port Sunlight. London: Alston Rivers, 1909. Print.

Gibbs, A. M. A Bernard Shaw Chronology. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrage, 2001. Print.

156

Gladstone, David. The Twentieth-Century Welfare State. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. Print.

Gordon, David J. Bernard Shaw and the Comic Sublime. London: Macmillan, 1990. Print.

Grene, Nicholas. "Bernard Shaw: Socialist and Playwright." The Crane Bag 7.1 (1983): 135-40. Print.

---. Bernard Shaw: A Critical View. London: Macmillan, 1984. Print.

---. “Notes.” Major Barbara: Definitive Text. Ed. Nicholas Grene. London: Methuen Drama, 2008. Print.

Griffith, Gareth. Socialism and Superior Brains: The Political Thought of Bernard Shaw. London: Routledge, 1993. Print.

Grimes, Charles. "Bernard Shaw's Theory of Political Theater: Difficulties from the Vantage of Postmodern and Modern Types of the Self." SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 22 (2002): 117-31. Print.

Hadfield, Dorothy A. "What Runs (in) the Family: Iterated Retelling, Gender, and Genre in You Never Can Tell and Major Barbara." SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 26 (2006): 58-78. Print.

Hale, Piers J. "The Search for Purpose in a Post-Darwinian Universe: George Bernard Shaw, 'Creative Evolution', and Shavian Eugenics: 'The Dark Side of the Force'." History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 28.2 (2006): 191-213. Print.

---. "Of Mice and Men: Evolution and the Socialist Utopia. William Morris, H.G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw." Journal of the History of Biology 43.1 (2010): 17-66. Print.

Hardy, Dennis. Alternative Communities in Nineteenth Century England. London; New York: Longman, 1979. Print.

Harris, Bernard. "Seebohm Rowntree and the Measurement of Poverty, 1899-1951." Getting the Measure of Poverty: The Early Legacy of Seebohm Rowntree. Ed. Jonathan Bradshaw and Roy Sainsbury. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. 60-84. Print.

---. The Origins of the British Welfare State: Society, State, and Social Welfare in England and Wales, 1800-1945. Basingstoke [England]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Print.

Hayes, Peter. "Krupp Family." Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History. Ed. Joel Mokyr. 2005. Online ed. Web.

HC Deb 10 May 1907 vol 174 cols 470-531.

157

Hobson, J. A. The Crisis of Liberalism: New Issues of Democracy. London: King, 1909. Print.

Hogben, Lancelot. Genetic Principles in Medicine and Social Science. London: Williams & Norgate, 1931. Print.

Holroyd, Michael. Bernard Shaw. Vol. 2. London: Chatto & Windus, 1988. Print.

Hugo, Leon. Edwardian Shaw: The Writer and His Age. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. Print.

Hynes, Samuel. The Edwardian Turn of Mind. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968.

Jeremy, David J. "The Enlightened Paternalist in Action: William Hesketh Lever at Port Sunlight before 1914." Business History 33.1 (1991): 58-81. Print.

Kelly, Katherine E. "Imprinting the Stage: Shaw and the Publishing Trade, 1883-1903." The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw. Eds. C. D. Innes and Ronald Bryden. Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. 25-54. Print.

Knox, Bernard MacGregor Walker. "Euripidean Comedy." Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979. 250-74. Print.

Kornhaber, David. "The Genealogy of Major Barbara: Nietzschean Philosophy and the Shavian Play of Ideas." Modern Drama 56.3 (2013): 269-86. Print.

Laurence, Dan H. Bernard Shaw, a Bibliography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Print.

Lever Brothers Ltd., Edmund Williams, and George R. Robinson. Port Sunlight: The First Hundred Years, 1888-1988: The Short History of a Famous Factory. Kingston upon Thames: Lever Brothers, 1988. Print.

Lever, William Hulme. Viscount Leverhulme. London: G. Allen, 1927. Print.

Lewis, Brian. So Clean : Lord Leverhulme, Soap and Civilization. New York: Manchester UP, 2008. Print.

MacCarthy, Desmond, and Stanley Weintraub. The Court Theatre 1904-1907: A Commentary and Criticism. Coral Gables, Fla.: Miami UP, 1966. Print.

Manista, Frank C. "Doing Proper Things for Improper Reasons: Spiritual Ambivalence in Major Barbara." SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 26 (2006): 100-17. Print.

Matheson, T.J. "The Lure of Power and the Triumph of Capital: An Ironic Reading of Major Barbara." English Studies in Canada 12 (1986): 285-300. Print.

158

McBriar, A. M., and Fabian Society (Great Britain). Fabian Socialism and English Politics, 1884-1918. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1962. Print.

McDonald, Jan. "Shaw and the Court Theatre." The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw. Eds. C. D. Innes and Ronald Bryden. Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. 261-82. Print.

McLean, Angela. "Vaccination." Encyclopedia of Evolution. Ed. Mark Pagel. Online Ed. Oxford UP, 2005.

Meakin, Budgett. Model Factories and Villages: Ideal Conditions of Labour and Housing. London: T.F. Unwin, 1905. Print.

Meisel, Martin. "Shaw and Revolution: The Politics of the Plays." Shaw: Seven Critical Essays. Ed. Norman Rosenblood. [Toronto]: Toronto UP, 1971. 106-34. Print.

Meredith, George. "An Essay on Comedy." Comedy. Ed. Wylie Sypher. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1956. 3-60. Print.

Mills, John A. Language and Laughter: Comic Diction in the Plays of Bernard Shaw. Tucson: Arizona UP, 1969. Print.

“model village.” Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd ed. 2002. Web.

Monsebraaten, Laurie. "Ontario Embraces No-Strings-Attached Basic Income Experiment." Toronto Star [Toronto] 18 April 2017. Web

Murray, Gilbert. Euripides and His Age. London: Williams and Norgate, 1913. Print.

Ohmann, Richard M. Shaw: The Style and the Man. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan UP, 1966. Print.

Orloff, Ann Shola. The Politics of Pensions: A Comparative Analysis of Britain, Canada, and the United States, 1880-1940. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1993. Print.

Outka, Elizabeth. Consuming Traditions Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.

Packer, Ian. "Religion and the New Liberalism: The Rowntree Family, Quakerism, and Social Reform." Journal of British Studies 42.02 (2003): 236-57. Print.

Paul, Diane. "Eugenics and the Left." Journal of the History of Ideas 45.4 (1984): 567- 90. Print.

Pope, Rex, Bernard Hoyle, and Alan Pratt. Social Welfare in Britain, 1885-1985. London; Dover, N.H.: Croom Helm, 1986. Print.

159

Rabey, David Ian. British and Irish Political Drama in the Twentieth Century : Implicating the Audience. London: Macmillan, 1986. Print.

Reynolds, Jean, Rodelle Weintraub, and D. A. Hadfield. Shaw and Feminisms: On Stage and Off. Gainesville: Florida UP, 2013. Print.

Rowntree, B. Seebohm. Poverty: A Study of Town Life. Second Edition. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1902. Print.

Segal, Erich. The Death of Comedy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2001. Print.

Shaw, George Bernard. Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch. New York: Brentano, 1922. Print.

---. Fabian Essays in Socialism. London: W. Scott Pub. Co., 1889. Print.

---. "Letter to Otto Kyllmann September 24th, 1906." Bernard Shaw Collected Letters 1898-1910. Ed. Dan H. Laurence. London: Max Reinhardt, 1972. 655. Print.

---. "Letter to Pattie Moye, 18th December 1881." Bernard Shaw Collected Letters 1874- 1897. Ed. Dan H. Laurence. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1965. 44-46. Print.

---. "Letter to Thomas Demetrius O’Bolger, 7th August 1919." Collected Letters 1911- 1925. Ed. Dan H. Laurence. London: Max Reinhardt, 1985. 625-631. Print.

---. Major Barbara: Definitive Text. Ed. Nicholas Grene. London: Methuen Drama, 2008. Print.

---. "Meredith on Comedy." Our Theatres in the Nineties. Vol. 3. London: Constable, 1932. 83-90. Print.

---. "Socialism for Millionaires." Selected Non-Dramatic Writings. Ed. Dan H. Laurence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. 391-405. Print.

---. "The Illusions of Socialism." Selected Non-Dramatic Writings. Ed. Dan H. Laurence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. 406-26. Print.

---. "To Audiences at Major Barbara." Shaw on Theatre Ed. E.J. West. New York: Hill & Wang, 1959. 118-21. Print.

---. "Tolstoy: Tragedian or Comedian?" Pen Portraits and Reviews. London: Constable, 1932. 260-66. Print.

Stafford, Tony Jason. Shaw's Settings: Gardens and Libraries. Gainesville: Florida UP, 2013. Print.

Stead, Francis Herbert. How Old Age Pensions Began to Be. London: Methuen & Co., 1909. Print.

160

Strauss, Erich. Bernard Shaw: Art and Socialism. London: V. Gollancz, 1942. Print.

Torres, Susana B., and Marcelo J. Borges. Company Towns: Labor, Space, and Power Relations across Time and Continents. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print.

Trexler, Adam. "Economic Ideas and British Literature, 1900-1930: The Fabian Society, Bloomsbury, and the New Age." Literature Compass 4.3 (2007): 862-87. Print.

Valency, Maurice Jacques. The Cart and the Trumpet ; the Plays of George Bernard Shaw. New York: Oxford UP, 1973. Print.

Veit-Wilson, J. H. "Paradigms of Poverty: A Rehabilitation of B.S. Rowntree." Journal of Social Policy 15.01 (1986): 69-99. Print.

Vinson, Adrian. "The Edwardians and Poverty." Edwardian England. Ed. Donald Read. London: Croom Helm, 1982. 75-93. Print.

Walkowitz, Judith R. Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London. New Haven: Yale UP, 2012.

Weintraub, Stanley. The Unexpected Shaw: Biographical Approaches to G.B.S. And His Work. New York: F. Ungar, 1982. Print.

Wilde, Oscar "The Importance of Being Earnest." The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays. Ed. Peter Raby. Oxford: Oxford UP. 247-307. Print.

Wilson, C. H. The History of Unilever: A Study in Economic Growth and Social Change. 2 vols. London: Cassell, 1954. Print.

Wisenthal, J. L. The Marriage of Contraries: Bernard Shaw's Middle Plays. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1974. Print.

Yde, Matthew. Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism: Longing for Utopia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Chapter 3: E.M. Forster

Armstrong, Paul B. "The Narrator in the Closet: The Ambiguous Narrative Voice in Howards End." Modern Fiction Studies 47.2 (2001): 306-28. Print.

Bakshi, Parminder Kaur. Distant Desire : Homoerotic Codes and the Subversion of the English Novel in E.M. Forster's Fiction. New York: P. Lang, 1996. Print.

Bateman, Benjamin. "Beyond Interpellation: Forster, Connection, and the Queer Invitation." Twentieth Century Literature 57.2 (2011): 180-98. Print.

161

Beauman, Nicola. Morgan : A Biography of E.M. Forster. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993. Print.

---. "Forster, Edward Morgan (1879-1970)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2006. http://www.oxforddnb.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/article/33208

Booth, Howard. "Maurice." Cambridge Companion to E.M. Forster. Ed. David Bradshaw. 2007. 173-88. Print.

Born, Daniel. "Private Gardens, Public Swamps: "Howards End" and the Revaluation of Liberal Guilt." NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 25.2 (1992): 141-59. Print.

---. The Birth of Liberal Guilt in the English Novel : Charles Dickens to H.G. Wells. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Print.

Carpenter, Edward. “Letter to E.M. Forster, August [1914].” E.M. Forster: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Philip Gardner. 1997. 428-9. Print.

Cobley, Evelyn. Modernism and the Culture of Efficiency: Ideology and Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Print.

“connection/connexion” Definition 4a. Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Web.

Cook, Chris. A Short History of the Liberal Party : The Road Back to Power. 7th ed. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire [England] ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print.

Craig, Frederick Walter Scott. British Parliamentary Election Results, 1885-1918. London: Macmillan, 1974. Print.

Crews, Frederick C. E.M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962. Print.

Cronin, John. "Publishable--but Worth It?, Irish Press (Dublin), October 1971." E.M. Forster: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Philip Gardner. London: Routledge. 1997. 456-8. Print.

Davies, Tony. "Introduction." A Passage to India. Eds. Tony Davies and Nigel Wood. Buckingham ; Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1994. 1-22. Print.

Delany, Paul. "'Islands of Money': Rentier Culture in E. M. Forster's Howards End." English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 31.3 (1988): 285-96. Print.

Dellamora, Richard. "Textual Politics/Sexual Politics." Modern Language Quarterly 54 (1993): 155-164. Print.

162

Ellem, Elizabeth Wood. "E.M. Forster’s Greenwood, Journal of Modern Literature, 5, 1976." E.M. Forster: Critical Assessments. Ed. J. H. Stape. Vol. 4. 1997. Print. 349-357

Forster, E.M. A Passage to India. London: Penguin, 1989. Print.

---. Aspects of the Novel. Penguin, 1972. Print.

---. Howards End. London: Penguin, 2000. Print.

---. "Liberty in England." Abinger Harvest. London: Harcourt Brace, 1964. 63-70. Print.

---. The Manuscripts of Howards End. Ed. Oliver Stallybrass. London: Edward Arnold, 1973. Print.

---. Maurice. Toronto: MacMillan, 1971. Print.

---. "Pessimism in Literature." Albergo Empedocle and Other Writings. Ed. George H. Thomson. New York: Liveright, 1971. 129-45. Print.

---. The BBC Talks of E.M. Forster, 1929-1960. Eds. Mary Lago, Linda K. Hughes, and Elizabeth MacLeod Walls. Columbia: Missouri UP, 2008. Print.

---. What I Believe. London: Hogarth Press, 1939. Print.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism : Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957. Print.

Furbank, P. N. E.M. Forster: A Life. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1981. Print.

---. “Foreword.” The BBC Talks of E.M. Forster 1929-1960. Eds. Mary Lago, Linda K. Hughes and Elizabeth MacLeod Walls. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. ix-x. Print.

Genette, Gerard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Print.

Gibson, Mary Ellis. "Illegitimate Order: Cosmopolitanism and Liberalism in Forster's Howards End." English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 28.2 (1985): 106-23. Print.

Harris, Bernard. The Origins of the British Welfare State: Society, State, and Social Welfare in England and Wales, 1800-1945. Basingstoke [England]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Print.

Howards End. Dir. James Ivory. Perf. Vanessa Redgrave, Helena Bonham Carter et al. Merchant Ivory Productions, 1992. Film.

Jauss, Hans Robert. "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory." Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent Leitch. 1547-65. Print.

163

Jonson, Ben. Volpone, or the Fox London: Penguin 2004. Print.

Kitchen, Paddy. "Review, the Times Educational Supplement, October 1971." E.M. Forster: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Philip Gardner. London: Routledge, 1997. 444-46. Print.

Lago, Mary, Linda K. Hughes, and Elizabeth MacLeod Walls. "General Introduction." The BBC Talks of E.M. Forster, 1929-1960. Eds. Mary Lago, Linda K. Hughes and Elizabeth MacLeod Walls. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. 1-47. Print.

Land, Stephen K. Challenge and Conventionality in the Fiction of E.M. Forster. New York: AMS Press, 1990. Print.

Larson, Sarah. "Watch ‘Howards End’--Then Read It." The New Yorker.com The New Yorker, 30 August 2016. Web. 30 August 2016.

Leavis, F. R. "E.M. Forster." Scrutiny 7 (1938): 185-202. Print.

---. “E.M. Forster.” The Common Pursuit. London: Chatto & Windus, 1952. Print.

Leavitt, David. "Introduction." Maurice. Penguin, 2005. xi-xxxvi. Print.

Levenson, Michael. "Liberalism and Symbolism in Howards End." Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 21.3 (1985): 295-316. Print.

Lodge, David. "Forster’s Flawed Masterpiece." Consciousness & the Novel : Connected Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. 135-60. Print.

Martin, Robert K. "‘It Must Have Been the Umbrella’: Forster’s Queer Begetting." Queer Forster. Eds. Robert K. Martin and George Piggford. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1997. 255-73. Print.

Martin, Robert K., and George Piggford. "Introduction: Queer, Forster?" Queer Forster. Eds. Robert K. Martin and George Piggford. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1997. 1-28. Print.

Matz, Jesse. "Maurice in Time." Style 34.2 (2000): 188-211. Print.

May, Brian. "Neoliberalism in Rorty and Forster." Twentieth Century Literature 39.2 (1993): 185-207. Print.

---. The Modernist as Pragmatist : E.M. Forster and the Fate of Liberalism. Columbia: Missouri UP, 1997. Print.

164

Medalie, David. E.M. Forster's Modernism. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York: Palgrave, 2002. Print.

Miracky, James J. Regenerating the Novel: Gender and Genre in Woolf, Forster, Sinclair and Lawrence. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.

Mitchell, Julian “‘Fairy Tale,’ Guardian, October 1971.” E.M. Forster: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Philip Gardner. London: Routledge, 1997. 439-41. Print.

Moffat, Wendy. A Great Unrecorded History : A New Life of E.M. Forster. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. Print.

Orwell, George. "Such, Such Were the Joys." The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. Vol. 4. London: Secker & Warburg, 1968. 330-69. Print.

Outka, Elizabeth. "Buying Time: "Howards End" and Commodified Nostalgia." NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 36.3 (2003): 330-50. Print.

Pritchett, V.S. "‘The Upholstered Prison,’ New Statesman, October 1971." E.M. Forster: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Philip Gardner. London: Routledge, 1997. 447-50. Print.

“public intellectual.” Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd. ed. 2007. Web.

Ratcliffe, Michael. "Review, the Times, October 1971." E.M. Forster: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Philip Gardner. London: Routledge, 1997. 441-44. Print.

Shirkhani, Kim. "The Economy of Recognition in Howards End." Twentieth Century Literature 54.2 (2008): 193-216. Print.

Smirlock, Daniel. "Rough Truth: Synecdoche and Interpretation in the Egoist." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 31.3 (1976): 313-28. Print.

Smith, Zadie. "Love, Actually." Guardian [Manchester] 1 November 2003. Web.

Snow, C.P. . "‘Open Windows,’ Financial Times, October 1971." E.M. Forster: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Philip Gardner. London: Routledge, 1997. 433-36. Print.

Stallybrass, Oliver. "Introduction." The Manuscripts of Howards End. London: Edward Arnold 1973. Print. vii-xviii

Stape, J. H. An E.M. Forster Chronology. London: Macmillan, 1993. Print.

---, ed. E.M. Forster : Critical Assessments. 4 vols. East Sussex: Helm Information, 1997. Print.

Stone, Wilfred. The Cave and the Mountain: A Study of E.M. Forster. Stanford: California UP, 1966. Print.

165

Strachey, Lytton. "Letter to E.M. Forster, March 1915." E.M. Forster: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Philip Gardner. London: Routledge, 1997. 429-32. Print.

Thomson, George H. "Notes." Albergo Empedocle and Other Writings. Ed. George H. Thomson. New York: Livewright, 1971. Print.

Trilling, Lionel. E.M. Forster: A Study. London: Hogarth Press, 1951. Print.

White, Leslie. "Vital Disconnection in Howards End." Twentieth Century Literature 51.1 (2005): 43-63. Print.

Chapter 4: Zadie Smith

Ackerman, Alan. “Comedy, Capitalism, and a Loss of Gravity.” Discourse 36.2 (2014): 139-75. Print.

Baker, T.F.T., Diane K. Bolton, and Patricia E.C. Croot. “Hampstead: Kilburn, Edgware Road, and Cricklewood.” A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 9, Hampstead, Paddington. Ed. C.R. Elrington. London: Victoria County History, 1989. 47- 51. Print.

Beatriz Pérez, Zapata. “‘In Drag’: Performativity and Authenticity in Zadie Smith’s NW.” International Studies 16.1 (2014): 83-95. Print.

Bergson, Henri. “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic.” Comedy. Ed. Wylie Sypher. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956. 61-190. Print.

Blair, Tony. “Let Us Face the Future--the 1945 Anniversary Lecture.” London: Fabian Society, 1995. Vol. Fabian Pamphlet 571. Print.

Born, Daniel. The Birth of Liberal Guilt in the English Novel: Charles Dickens to H.G. Wells. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Print.

Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2015.

Elkin, Lauren. “'Anyone Over the Age of Thirty Catching a Bus Can Consider Himself a Failure': Class Mobility and Public Transport in Zadie Smith's NW.” Études britanniques contemporaines 49 (2015). Web.

Fernandez Carbajal, A. “On Being Queer and Postcolonial: Reading Zadie Smith's NW through Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 51.1 (2014): 76-91. Print.

Forster, E.M. A Room with a View. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Print.

166

---. Howards End. London: Penguin, 2000. Print.

---. Maurice. Toronto: MacMillan, 1971. Print.

---. “Pessimism in Literature.” Albergo Empedocle and Other Writings. Ed. George H. Thomson. New York: Liveright, 1971. 129-45. Print.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957. Print.

Guignery, Vanessa. “Zadie Smith's NW: The Novel at an 'Anxiety Crossroads'?” Études britanniques contemporaines 45 (2013). Web.

---. “Zadie Smith's NW; or, the Art of Line-Crossing.” Revue électronique d’études sur le monde anglophone 11.2 (2014). Web.

Holmes, Christopher. “The Novel’s Third Way: Zadie Smith’s ‘Hysterical Realism.’” Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond. Ed. Philip Tew. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 141-154 Print.

James, David. “Wounded Realism.” Contemporary Literature 54.1 (2013): 204-14. Print.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Print.

Knepper, Wendy. "Revisionary Modernism and Postmillennial Experimentation in Zadie Smith's Nw." Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond. Ed Philip Tew. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 111-126. Print.

Lorentzen, Christian “Why Am I So Fucked Up?” London Review of Books 34.21(2012): 21-22. Print.

McEwan, Ian. Saturday. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2005. Print.

Meredith, George. “An Essay on Comedy.” Comedy. Ed. Wylie Sypher. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1956. 3-60. Print.

Ouzounian, Richard “Zadie Smith Talks About NW.” Toronto Star [Toronto] 25 September 2012. Web.

Pope, Ged. Reading London’s Suburbs from Charles Dickens to Zadie Smith. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Web.

Shaw, George Bernard. Major Barbara: Definitive Text. London: Methuen Drama, 2008. Print.

Smith, Zadie. “An Essay Is an Act of Imagination.” Guardian [Manchester] 21 November 2009. Web.

167

---. Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays. New York: Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Press, 2009. Print.

---. “Fail Better.” Guardian [Manchester] 13 January 2007. Web.

---. “Fences: A Brexit Diary.” New York Review of Books 18 August 2016. Web.

---. "Love, Actually." Guardian [Manchester] 1 November 2003. Web.

---. NW. New York: Penguin Press, 2012. Print.

---. On Beauty. Toronto: Penguin, 2005. Print.

---. “On Optimism and Despair.” New York Review of Books. 22 December 2016. Web.

---. “Read Better.” Guardian [Manchester] 20 January 2007. Web.

Stephen, Leslie. “Humour.” The Cornhill Magazine 33.195 (1876): 318-26. Print.

Tew, Philip. Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Print.

---. “Will Self and Zadie Smith's Depictions of Post-Thatcherite London: Imagining Traumatic and Traumatological Space.” Études britanniques contemporaines 47 (2014).Web.

Tolan, Fiona. “Zadie Smith's Forsterian Ethics: White Teeth, the Autograph Man, on Beauty.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 54.2 (2013): 135-46. Print.

Tonkin, Boyd. “NW by Zadie Smith: Review.” The Independent [London] 31 August 2012. Web.

Ulrike Pirker, Eva. “Approaching Space: Zadie Smith's North London Fiction.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52.1 (2016): 64-76. Print.

Wells, Lynn. “The Right to a Secret: Zadie Smith's NW.” Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond. Ed. Philip Tew. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 97-110. Print.

White, Leslie. “Vital Disconnection in Howards End.” Twentieth Century Literature 51.1 (2005): 43-63. Print.

Wood, James. “Books of the Year.” The New Yorker.com The New Yorker 17 December 2012. Web.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. London: Penguin, 1992. Print

168

Epilogue

Connington, James. “State Pension Age Changes: How Will It Affect You?” Telegraph [London] 20 July 2017. Web.

Gopnik, Adam. “The Illiberal Imagination.” The New Yorker.com The New Yorker. 20 March 2017. Web.

Monsebraaten, Laurie. "Ontario Embraces No-Strings-Attached Basic Income Experiment." Toronto Star [Toronto] 18 April 2017. Web.

Smith, Zadie. Nw. New York: Penguin Press, 2012. Print.