The Crime of Material Culture, the Condition of the Colonies And

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The Crime of Material Culture, the Condition of the Colonies and

Utopian/Dystopian Impulses, 1908-10

Robyn Walton

During the years 1908-10 in Britain and Northern Europe, a number of literary authors were producing fictions that both reflected and critiqued what Joseph Conrad later described as “the crudely materialistic atmosphere of the time.”1 In 1908, Conrad and his literary collaborator Ford Madox Ford (Hueffer) were completing The Nature of a Crime , a slight tale of one Lon- don professional’s addiction to embezzlement .2 Taking this Conrad-Ford microcosm of Edwardian materialism as its point of departure, this article first analyses how a range of 1908-10 fictions represent local financial practices and the impacts of Northern money-making and materialistic culture. It notes that the narratives concentrate on upwardly mobile and creative characters of the middle classes, rather than on aristocrats or on the working poor and unemployed who were the subject of contemporaneous social surveys and were the most immediately affected by their social superiors’ financial criminality and mismanagement. The article then asks why – given that Northern incomes, raw materials, and finished goods frequently had their origins in the colonies and developing nations – these fictions rarely examined the impacts of global resource exploitation on regions outside Europe. A number of possible reasons why the 1908-10 authors did not attend to the colonies are explored. The fictions’ few allusions to colonies and developing nations are found to further the authors’ collective critique of

COLLOQUY text theory critique 21 (2011). © Monash University. www.arts.monash.edu.au/ecps/colloquy/journal/issue021/walton.pdf 116 Robyn Walton ░

Europe’s materialist, capitalist culture rather than to investigate colonial circumstances. In other words, “the condition of England” takes priority over “the condition of the colonies,” and “the condition of the clever and aspiring” takes precedence over “the condition of the handicapped and impoverished” in a way which matches the phenomenon of self-centredness that the texts are critiquing. This article next identifies several instances in which 1908-10 fictions do pay a little attention to the South, observing that these descriptions of regrettable conditions in colonies were not necessarily included to rouse indignation on behalf of colonised peoples and despoiled environments. Rather, they too further the project of critiquing Northern middle-class metropolitan cultures. Overall the colonies are seen to have served the 1908- 10 texts in mimicry of the manner in which colonies – as generators of metropolitan incomes and dividends, as sources of materials, as captive markets, and as dumping grounds for human refuse – served the interests of the Imperial powers. Further, the European lower classes effectively colonised by those with economic and legislative power and social influence, for the purposes of providing cheap labour and local consumption of proc- essed foods and manufactures, are seen to serve the texts in a parallel manner. These observations raise questions that are beyond the scope of this short article. By focusing on European materialism fed by Imperialism did the authors perhaps contribute to the perpetuation of that materialism? And did the authors’ collective choice not to play up the colonies’ exploitation perhaps contribute to perpetuating damage done by Imperialism? The authors and texts considered alongside Conrad and Ford’s novella and Conrad’s short story “The Anarchist” are: H. G. Wells’s Tono- Bungay ; E. M. Forster’s Howards End ; Wyndham Lewis’s Mrs Dukes’ Mil- lion ; John Galsworthy’s Fraternity ; G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday ; Gilbert Cannan’s Peter Homunculus ; Anatole France’s Penguin Island ; F. T. Marinetti’s Mafarka the Futurist ; and Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side .3 All of these authors were reasonably well-informed cosmopolitans who might have chosen to pay more attention to the condition of both the colonies and the local poor. Conrad stands as an exception, in that by 1908-10 he was already known for his literary indictments of plutocratic Empire. In his case the question becomes: why did he choose to say less about colonial exploitation during the years 1908-10? 4 The answer seems to lie in his preoccupation during the mid-to-late Edwardian years with transnational European political dissidence, the crimes perpetrated in the name of Anarchism, and the monstrous, devouring character of big cities. Wells might also be classed as an author with a body of previous work (scientific romances and other fictions) indicating awareness of global ░ The Crime of Material Culture, 1980-10 117 harm-doing, although in his case that consciousness is subsumed within the still-larger notions of cosmic mobility and utopian transformation. The utopian-dystopian tensions of the 1908-10 texts develop out of the two constitutive narrative components I have identified: the excesses of material culture functioning as crime (the obvious content figured in the texts’ storylines and moral fables) and metropolitan middle-class negligence concerning colonies and the colonised (the stories’ shadow content). Frequently and fittingly, given authors’ consciousness of the transitional character of their time, there is movement from one impulse to the other, generally from utopian hopefulness toward the extrapolation of undesired trends into a dystopian scenario. Careers which initially seem rich in bene- ficial opportunities and creative possibilities lead to such excesses, com- pulsions and corruption that collapse cannot be averted. Where humanity recovers from catastrophe and works to re-construct, another cycle of growth and decay appears predictable. On balance, then, these 1908-10 authors show themselves to be more inclined to cultural pessimism than optimism when they depict their changing societies. Utopian impulses reveal themselves in metropolitan contexts in several visible forms. Ingenious young creative artists and intellectuals suggest the merits of leadership by the few with vision and higher values. Animated, inventive people entering into commercial, industrial and financial ventures advance the hope of dividends and plenitude for all. Urban and suburban construction projects assert the necessary creation of new social structures and the culling of the obsolescent. The contours of Edwardian neo-Baroque architecture and other built and sculpted forms suggest billowing expansion imbued with spirit, while a refining aesthetic sensibility is at work to elimi- nate the all-but-criminal decorative excesses of the past. Outside the cities, in the European countryside and in colonised lands, the designing and making of streamlined new modes of transportation and an unprecedented flying man-machine hybrid signal transition into a technologised and sped- up way of living. And the creation (in Kubin’s fantasy) of an alluring pas- tiche society in Asia affirms the continuing usefulness of the conventional Utopia for social dreaming. Dystopian and anti-utopian impulses are frequently conveyed by the use of satire and comedy. With crime, cheating and misrepresentation common to most of the narratives, the texts quickly debunk both the dominant radical ideologies and conventional faiths of the preceding century. Ageing, idealistic characters championing socialism and universal brotherhood are seen to be hopelessly outmoded, the garments of the clergyman are more often a disguise than a guarantor of trustworthiness, and traditional families are irretrievably broken apart. The energetic construction and 118 Robyn Walton ░

enlargement of alternate belief systems is urged, only for these to be shown to be self-serving and avaricious. Empire, for instance, has become a substitute for religion for many in the North, but Imperialism is contested on political, economic and moral grounds. Cities are culturally engaging and stimulating, yet also places of conditions variously named as alienation, estrangement, impersonality and fragmentation. Inability to halt social change when it suits them, and to know and dictate the destination of the transition, is a frustration to authors but does not translate into hankering for Arcadia; however it does fuel some authors’ preference for neo- classically orderly urban design and early Modernist abstraction over fussy, showy styles of ornamentation. Material excess, over-reaching, and a preoccupation with shoving forward and pushing aside in order to gain are danger signs of an urbanised society nearing violent collapse. Negative effects presaging catastrophe can flow in two directions: from the corrupt Old World to the colonies, and to the Old World from the colonies (which are sites of dangerous naturally-occurring phenomena and people and things rendered hazardous by Imperial interference). With collapse imminent, structures are shown crumbling, bodies and minds degenerating. Some authors fear not merely localized catastrophes but contamination and disintegration affecting the entire planet. To the extent that the texts foretell repeated acts of criminality, recurrent free market cycles of speculative boom and over-extended bust, or quasi-organic cycles of death and rebirth, they naturalise cultural pessimism. Authors reject the nineteenth century’s confidence in uninterrupted progress founded on industry, education and evolution, substituting a model of unconquerable repetition. Humankind is judged unable to suffi- ciently learn from its mistakes to prevent repetitions recurring until it de- stroys the planet that supports it. Only authors with the utopian belief that by some means human nature can be altered are able to posit positive endings. And the unacknowledged problem remains that, where the New Man is created out of colonial raw materials and the labour of the colonised, the colony’s human and environmental interests are made subservi- ent to the North’s utopian imaginary, and thus the solution is not one for the entire world. The self-centredness and Eurocentricity that the texts go some way to critiquing are not vanquished by the texts’ utopianism.

The Condition of England

Conrad and Ford’s The Nature of a Crime epitomises those mid-to-late Edwardian fictions focused on the acquisition of money and material goods and the accompanying social kudos. Having been embezzling the Burden ░ The Crime of Material Culture, 1980-10 119 family trust funds, the Conrad-Ford protagonist has acquired not only nine London houses but “all my pictures, all my prints, all my books, my furniture, my reputation as a connoisseur, my governorship of the two charities – all the me that people envy.”5 He regards himself as a man of his time, that time being not one of great deeds but of colossal speculations. 6 Fraudulent misappropriation is for him a pleasurable addiction. 7 The novella takes the form of a confessional “disclosure” written by the protagonist to the married woman he would like to possess. At the moment of writing, the protagonist faces a crisis: he is on the brink of having his fraud discovered, and he has determined to commit suicide rather than go to prison. Ul- timately, however, the protagonist receives a reprieve: the incriminating documents go unchecked. The protagonist’s risk-taking and propensity for inflicting moral blackmail survive. He informs the woman that either he will make good the funds he owes to the estate and find a new and more sober scheme for making money, or if she will not consent to being his, he will go on wildly embezzling. 8 Stressing the novella’s theme of enviable wealth, Ford later wrote that it should have become a novel “treating of the eternal subject of the undetected criminal – a theme which every writer for once or twice in his life at least contemplates in a world in which the fortunate are so very often the merely not found out,” while Conrad’s recollection of “the crudely materialistic atmosphere of the time” was in the tradition of Anthony Trollope’s retrospective explanation, that it was “the commercial profligacy of the age” that had instigated his writing of his great satirical novel of financial speculation, The Way We Live Now (1875). 9 In a contemporaneous non-fiction text, The Condition of England (1909), politician and journalist Charles Masterman supplied an impression- istic survey of domestic social conditions, drawing on some of the authors mentioned above to inform or support his arguments for reform, especially reform which would benefit the working and unemployed poor.10 Masterman’s title echoed a phrase introduced into British discourse by Thomas Carlyle in his polemical text Chartism (1839) and reused in his Past and Present (1843). Pointing to the deleterious effects of the Industrial Revolution, Carlyle complained that parliament and the press were attend- ing to all manner of problems outside Britain (“Canada question […] West India question […] African Blacks, Hill Coolies”) when they ought to be speaking of “the Condition-of-England question too”, especially of the suf- fering of the urban poor and the labouring classes.11 Politician and author Benjamin Disraeli was one of those who reused Carlyle’s phrase. Early in his 1844 novel Coningsby , Disraeli uses the phrase in an analysis of early nineteenth-century political and economic developments. His narrator lists as some of the causes of the unparalleled 120 Robyn Walton ░

rapid advance of material civilisation in England: “the continual triumph of conquest; the most expensive foreign commerce that was ever conducted by a single nation; an illimitable currency; an internal trade supported by swarming millions […] above all, the supreme control obtained by man over mechanic power.” But, Disraeli’s narrator concludes, economic growth was not accompanied by improvements in governmental organisation and ad- ministration:

there was no proportionate advance in our moral civilisation. In the hurry-skurry of money-making, men-making, and machine-making, we had altogether outgrown, not the spirit, but the organisation, of our institutions. 12

While Disraeli’s novels of the 1840s show concern for “the condition of the people,” he spends more time dealing with characters in the upper, influen- tial echelons of society and describing man-made environments inhabited by the wealthy and aristocratic. As Sheila Smith points out, the literary product of this dual focus “combines the glamour of the ‘silver-fork’ or ‘fash- ionable novel’, then going out of fashion, with the purpose of the social- problem novel, then coming in.” The two elements are held together by Dis- raeli’s witty, ironic narrative voice. 13 Neither Carlyle nor Disraeli promotes democracy and egalitarian social revolution as the answer to the problems of England and its Northern Euro- pean neighbours. In this period of social and political unrest, both hanker for a quasi-Medieval, stable hierarchy with leadership by a few wise, noble men. Similar conservative nostalgia pervades some of the 1908-10 texts. However, the authors do not describe Golden Ages and Utopias. A few secondary characters, well-read old men, are shown laboriously writing idealistic texts about universal brotherhood and socialism, or pulling out idealistic manuscripts they had written in the previous century. Narrators – young protagonists and older men who are worldly and disillusioned – regard their fancies as hopeless, for all that they too may occasionally quote Shelley. Galsworthy’s Edwardian novels resemble Disraeli’s in their sympathetic treatment of upper middle class characters who are developing a social conscience but who in their cultural refinement, material comfort and security find it difficult to act effectively to alter the circumstances of the poor who shadow their day-to-day lives. Such characters can find themselves morally and financially compromised if they enter into unwise relationships with poor individuals. In Fraternity (1909), variants on the “condition of England” phrase recur in dialogue: the condition of the people, a problem of the poor, the condition of the poor, a problem of the lower ░ The Crime of Material Culture, 1980-10 121 classes. The sole character who is seen to be engaged in philanthropy di- rected to a variety of needy people, including rising artists, is caricatured. Mrs. Tallents Smallpeace rattles on in the following manner:

“Don’t you think that we live in the most interesting days, there are such a lot of movements going on. It’s quite exciting. We all feel that we can’t shut our eyes any longer to social questions. I mean the condition of the people alone is enough to give one nightmare!” 14

Most of the 1908-10 authors surveyed here tend to cultural pessimism. Some describe catastrophic dystopian outcomes of the current social trends. Those few protagonists who do emerge from the narratives with buoyant prospects are people who have escaped or surmounted adverse social conditions. Masterman shows himself attuned to more inclusive and practical reforms for the benefit of that mass of people dubbed by Matthew Arnold as the Populace. Within the covers of The Condition of England , he frequently strikes a pessimistic note: “any student who has followed the history of Rome’s destruction – the gradual disintegration of a society exceedingly complex and rational – will never conceal from himself the possibility of similar vast changes in the world of to-morrow.”15 But in the service of the public he must strive for specific legislative changes – in shop hours, mine safety, health insurance – as well as more sweeping change in the form of wealth redistribution. In 1909 he is a part of the government which intro- duces the so-called People’s Budget, intended to wage metaphorical war- fare against poverty and squalor by bringing in radical social welfare programs. To fund these programs, the Budget’s promoters asserted, more taxes would be placed on the incomes and assets (including land) of the well-off, and tariffs would be placed on imports. 16 Of course this proposed extension of protectionism was not welcomed by British importers, manu- facturers using imported materials, and others with interests in associated industries such as shipping, banking, insurance, telegraphy, fuel, cold stor- age, wholesaling and retailing of imported stock. The movement away from the dominant free trade ideology of late nineteenth-century Britain was con- troversial. Masterman takes the part of British workers, whom he sees as “strenuous gnomes.” As an impoverished, industrialised proletariat continu- ously working in the city, these “gnomes” serve the civilising mission to developing nations: “swinging steel bridges over the rivers of East Africa, furnishing Nicaragua with carpets, or encasing the women of Upper Burmah in Lancashire cotton fabrics.”17 Echoes of the public debate register faintly in Forster’s Howards End (1910) and Cannan’s Peter Homunculus (1909). An even fainter authorial acknowledgement of the importance of debates 122 Robyn Walton ░

about international trade liberalisation versus tariffs is Lewis’s mention of beet sugar in his comic-satiric first novel, Mrs. Dukes’ Million (written 1908- 09). The origin of the coveted fortune in the narrative is the importation through the port of Liverpool of beet (rather than cane) sugar. Behind that single word lies a complicated recent history of national rivalries and trade negotiations and agricultural science advances: had Lewis specified cane sugar, he would have brought to mind an even longer history involving colonisation and slavery. 18 Probable adverse impacts on the economies and populations of the nations supplying Northern imports scarcely register in the 1908-10 fictions. This is symptomatic of the more general eschewal of colonial subject matter. “The condition of the colonies” is not perceived as a compelling or ap- pealing topic at a time when Britain’s international hegemony is in decline and Germany is presenting an increasing threat. 19 The conspicuous materialism of the North and the frequently criminal activities engaged in to ac- quire the things of material culture are more attractive to authors inclined to irony, satire and dystopianism not entirely free of envy. The most bemusing irony for someone studying this loose assemblage of fictions more than a century after their production is the observation, that by electing to critique the excesses of western capitalist materialism by focusing on that materialism and its acquisitions, the authors possibly contributed to perpetuating the materialism. Authors ranging from the tyro to the renowned describe sumptuous and upwardly mobile lifestyles, and warn of and illustrate the serious and even catastrophic consequences of excessive materialism; yet these authors are unable to close their fictions with happy scenes of large populations which have renounced their former ways and have found sustainable and ethical new ways of living. In other words, these authors do not have confidence that their counsels of modera- tion will be taken so seriously that people will alter their societies. Rather, the authors take a pessimistically cyclical view of history, expecting that material excess will recur after ruinous events. Authors’ use of financial and political/terrorist crimes in their narratives presents a similar dilemma. Crimes are included for the pragmatic reason that they make these novels and tales more marketable. At the same time, authors wish to critique and parody Western metropolitan culture’s popular reading tastes and sensationalist, populist Press. And, as we have already noted in the Conrad-Ford instance, authors use crime to critique society’s material avarice and ungoverned speculation and individualism. Where the narrator is the criminal or is sympathetic to the criminal protagonist, the reader finds herself becoming complicit in the ongoing commission of criminal activity which may reach an end at the close of the plot or may be ░ The Crime of Material Culture, 1980-10 123 imagined to continue into the future. She may also feel herself complicit in the negative repercussions of the criminality, including effects on the colonies, even if these are not canvassed by the author. In voluntarily continuing to read a confessional monologue or narrator’s account, the reader remains in a commercial contract with the writer; the text constitutes an item of merchandise which she consumes, the illusion of verisimilitude substi- tuted for actuality in the same way that, in the modern money economy, paper bank notes substitute for gold. The writing of the fiction then seems to facilitate the perpetuation of duplicitous crimes. In Derridean terms, the bearer of the pharmakon (“medicine” which acts as both remedy and poi- son) is himself affected by the toxin-tonic and his text is affected by the dis- ease it purports to cure; affectation may then spread to readers. 20

In the Northern Cities

The first thing to be said about the density of material culture and money- making activity in the 1908-10 fictions is that it reflects the accumulative and aggregating activity in British and European cities. “Heap” is a recurrent word in the texts, the “pile” a recurrent image. The things of material culture are “heaped up” and “piled up”: in domestic interiors, in shops, in warehouses and factories, on construction sites, in museums, and so on. Those few characters who venture to colonies notice heaps of produce and raw materials ready for export or processing and hillocks of earth displaced by mining. On First World sideboards and plates, foodstuffs are mounded up ready to be squeezed into swelling bodies. The senses too become overloaded, with interpenetration of sensory impressions accompanying this plenitude. Some characters delight in what they regard as all but utopian conditions of opportunity and amplitude. “The Banquet years”, a phrase originat- ing in Belgium, warrants widespread application. Opportunistic characters progress from modest cottage to fine house, from functional clothing to showy costumes, from shopkeeping to transnational enterprises, and can be erratically generous in sharing what they have gained. This is the social trajectory of the narrator’s uncle in Wells’ Tono-Bungay (1908-09) until the inevitable “wreckage”. 21 Many passages from the narrator’s analytical retrospective account could be cited in support of this point. The following is typical:

Well, so it was we Boomed, and for four years and a half we lived a life of mingled substance and moonshine. Until our particular un- soundness overtook us we went about in the most magnificent of motor-cars upon tangible high roads, made ourselves conspicuous 124 Robyn Walton ░

and stately in splendid houses, ate sumptuously and had a perpetual stream of notes and money trickling into our pockets; hundreds of thousands of men and women respected us, saluted us and gave us toil and honour; […] architects were busy planning the great palace he never finished at Crest Hill and an army of workmen gathered to do his bidding, real marble came from Canada, and timber from New Zealand; and beneath it all, you know, there was nothing but ficti- tious values as evanescent as rainbow gold. 22

In Wells’s Romance of Commerce the cityscape and countryside are trans- forming as the middle classes rise. The 1908-10 fictions oblige readers to think about the disruption of organic unity, and about decomposition and disintegration, at the same time as they observe unprecedented aggrega- tion. Slavoj Žižek, in his reading of Hegel in The Ticklish Subject , wonders whether it is Imagination that tears apart while Understanding brings together and reassembles. While Edwardian creatives could be seen as doing intellectual montage, they do not bring together the Third World which has been subjected to violent dismembering. What remains “out there” in the developing world is comparable to that unruly, pre-synthesis condition of Chaos that some philosophical systems posit. It equates with a metaphysical zone where spectral objects seem to wander about: in Hegel’s words “here shoots a bloody head, there another white ghastly apparition”. From the Western point of view, the psychoanalytical experience focuses on the traces of the traumatic passage from this “night of the world” into our prosaic order of things, our universe of logos. 23 Of the fictions alluded to in this article, the one most amenable to such a psychoanalytic reading is Kubin’s The Other Side (Die Andere Seite ) (1909). In this novel, the protagonist and his wife go to live in a Central Asian Dream Kingdom. It is a perplexing, decadent city, a melange of structures and objects from Europe, some having associations with crime. 24 The 1908-10 texts perform a stocktake of what has been accumulating since the Industrial Revolution began, with most attention being paid to the last twenty years’ accretions. Some of the texts may be read as extending that Balzacian concern with itemising the contents of interiors which had been so conspicuous in nineteenth-century French writing. 25 British fiction’s nineteenth-century heritage of Dickensian and Trollopian descriptions of commerce is also evident. 26 As material goods and diverse bits and pieces of information accumu- late at an accelerating rate, characters begin to register discomfort and issue cautions. Ratiocination is threatened, as Conan Doyle’s consulting de- tective Sherlock Holmes had warned: “I consider that a man’s brain origi- nally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture ░ The Crime of Material Culture, 1980-10 125 as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a diffi- culty in laying his hands upon it.” 27 Authors frequently register a perception of cities having become so large, populated, congested with traffic and goods, and rendered dangerous by covert political movements, that the ordinary person is as tiny and insignificant as an insect and easily consumed or crushed by the structures around him or her. Conrad describes this in his 1920 Author’s Note to a new edition of The Secret Agent (1907), while also explaining why in the late Edwardian period he concentrated on fictions set in Northern Europe. He points out that immediately prior to 1906 he had been absorbed in writing texts dealing with Latin America ( Nostromo ) and his past experiences at sea ( The Mirror of the Sea ). Once these tasks were done he felt himself “aimless amongst mere husks of sensations and lost in a world of other, of inferior, values.” It was then that his attention was drawn to the “criminal fu- tility” of local anarchism, and after further reading and musing he envisaged London as a monstrous, populous town which in its “man-made might” was “indifferent to heaven’s frowns and smiles, a cruel devourer of the world’s light.”28 Material goods, earnings on investments, and economic refugees from the countryside and abroad continually pour into the Imperial cities in cen- tripetal fashion, and individuals feel themselves being sucked into the belly of the beast. 29 Characters may perceive themselves as barely surviving in central cavities and crevices whilst the world’s goods whirl around them in vortical motion. Their situation recalls that of Poe’s fisherman trapped in the maelstrom:

I perceived that our boat was not the only object in the embrace of the whirl. Both above and below us were visible fragments of ves- sels, large masses of building-timber and trunks of trees, with smaller articles, such as pieces of house furniture, broken boxes, barrels and staves. 30

Curiosity taking over from terror, Poe’s fisherman calculates relative veloci- ties as he watches the products of civilisation make a whirling descent toward a final plummet into the abyss. 31 Provincial and foreign newcomers to the large cities experience fear and apprehension as they circulate outdoors in befogged and slushy streets. Those few protagonists who do take excursions to developing nations soon learn of comparable physical haz- ards – those bogs and quicksands that lie in wait for them – and comparable moral morasses. 126 Robyn Walton ░

It is possible to celebrate the condition of living in a modern-day vortex, as Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and others would soon demonstrate by founding the short-lived avant-garde movement they named Vorticism. While there is aesthetic stimulation to be gained from practising one’s art at the still, eerily quiet centre of the vortex, there is also prudence in staying out of the whirling and uncontrollable life beyond one’s home-studio and home city. For centuries satirists, moralists and anti-utopians had been counselling caution: better to stay home than to head out seeking those fabulous treasures and alternative civilisations one has been reading or dreaming about. And safer, if one is a smart young upstart out to relieve fellow citizens of their money by way of cruel ruses, to practise one’s tricks on familiar ground. Characters complying with this advice preserve insular atti- tudes, making for texts that have a claustrophobic, racist and incestuous character. In the tradition of the London City Comedies of the early seven- teenth century, humour is created at the expense of both naïve and upstart characters who, whilst staying in their own countries, imagine themselves going abroad to rule kingdoms and amass fortunes. In Lewis's novel, the sharp young protagonist spends most of the narrative disguised as the ragged elderly woman whom he and an Oriental crime gang are defrauding of her legacy. While he is effectively immobilised he imagines how, if he could get hold of a hundred thousand pounds, he could manipulate his way into the presidency of a South American republic, and from that position en- joy all of the adventure he feels he needs. 32 There is also comedy to be found in characters who project overseas adventures, yet baulk at depart- ing, or travel only a short distance before foundering or stumbling into some local environment which flummoxes them, owing to the immigrant and demi-monde minority cultures that predominate there. Authors not infre- quently allude to Don Quixote and other classics of identity confusion and foolish aspiration. The characters in these muddled scenarios rarely possess accurate knowledge of the conditions prevailing in the colonies and they are not en- couraged to obtain that information; the lessons they need to learn are located much closer to home. The naïve must learn to safeguard any money they have and avoid being gulled. Upstarts should, but will not, learn that anti-social conduct has negative consequence for the common good. Some swindlers are permitted to escape abroad but their destinations are rarely colonial, since colonies lie at a distance and living there means deprivation. Lewis’s protagonist, for instance, succeeds in defrauding both the widow and the crime boss who employed him and getting away in disguise to Mu- nich, a destination that appeals because of its arts scene and carnival. From Munich he discreetly moves on to Paris, where he begins manufac- ░ The Crime of Material Culture, 1980-10 127 turing amphibious aircraft as a business speculation. As the novel ends, he is rumoured to be preparing for a descent into the heart of Africa to show off the properties of his bi-plane. Within the comic terms of the novel, this is a utopian outcome: the widow survives unharmed, retaining some assets, and the creative man is free to self-actualise. Older, immobile characters with an aversion to modern commerce and imports may themselves be shopkeepers who hoard and rarely sell the stuff of previous centuries. They sit in dimly-lit premises amidst heaps of mouldering and outdated stock. Authors send in young male protagonists who, while they may find some romance in this scene, are chiefly repulsed, longing to get rid of the most old-fashioned of the Victorian clutter and renovate, clean and increase trade. At the beginning of Tono-Bungay the narrator’s uncle is a young, restless pharmacist who imagines waking up his township and making a fortune by inventing some product that he can “shove” into the marketplace. Lewis's narrator deplores the London shop in which Mrs. Dukes sits amongst goods which are the “refuse of time.” (He echoes a phrase in Swift’s satirical A Tale of a Tub .) 33 Both voices carry the message of the increasingly rapid “flight of time” and the seemingly transitional character of the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods. In transitional times, objects of an old and dubious provenance may become animated and behave in a disconcerting manner. Items that have migrated upstairs into the lodging house above Mrs. Dukes’s shop are so damaged that they appear about to collapse into fragments and are gro- tesque: a porcelain boy has been disembowelled; dark figures are mutilated like horrible beggars in the streets of southern towns; a cracked mirror gives a distorted, Cubistic image of the onlooker’s face. 34 It is probable that the reader recoils from these estranged and insidiously animated objects. They may remind one of Thomas de Quincey’s opiate-fuelled nightmares of the ornamental feet of Chinese furniture coming alive in monstrous fashion. 35 In his novel Tarr , which he began to write in the Edwardian period, Lewis uses a similar image. A peripatetic artist moving into an old fashioned studio-room in Paris notes that the contents of his portmanteau, squashed and dishevelled inanimate objects, quickly show a “sturdy optimism” by stalwartly occupying the space. Objectifying himself, the artist wishes he could pack himself into a “largish white-washed box” rather than occupy this “ceremonious carved chest of a former age”. 36 Another protagonist situated between the old and the not yet attained new is Peter Homunculus in Cannan’s Bildungsroman . Peter Homunculus begins with Cannan’s provincial ingénue discovering in London a tiny shop between a bakery and a second-hand clothes store. As Homi Bhabha notes in his The Location of Culture , second-hand clothes often figure in transitional and in- 128 Robyn Walton ░

between spaces and times of an “unhomely” character. 37 Bags of scrappy notes and oddments, changes of clothing, half- developed philosophies referring to clothing, and instability of identity also recur in periods that authors regard as unsettling and revolutionary. Car- lyle’s Sartor Resartus (1832) is exemplary and is mentioned both by several of the 1908-10 fiction authors and by Masterman. Just a few pages into Peter Homunculus , the protagonist – after exchanging a few words with an old man in a rusty overcoat who is fingering the dilapidated volumes in the boxes outside the tiny bookshop – ventures inside the premises and dis- covers amongst the dust and piles of books a hideously jumbled listing of authors and titles, including Sartor Resartus .38 Evidently it is time for the young litterateurs of 1908-10 to make a sober evaluation and culling of the cultural tradition to which they are heirs and with discrimination to add to their fund of knowledge. Authors draw on those long-standing associations of gold, money, hoarding and dealers with anality and excrement. 39 “Waste” becomes a recurrent word in the 1908-10 fictions, as those things and persons regarded as superfluous or superseded are pushed out and down and relabelled. To junkyards, scrap heaps and cinder heaps are added waste pits and waste lands. Ultimately all the expenditure of energy required to maintain an ex- acting and ostentatious lifestyle may be judged a sterile “waste.” “Waste” may also describe much of the creative and accumulative energy which has gone into filling the galleries, museums and libraries of the metropolises. Marinetti’s exuberant text “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” (1909) leads the way in pronouncing much of this cultural heritage obsolescent and warranting violent destruction. However, cultural appropriation – that is, theft and inappropriate purchase from colonies and developing nations – is not Marinetti’s concern. 40 Until that cleansing elimination is accomplished, protagonists may regard themselves as moving around in a hazardous, semi-industrialised no- man’s land; here a man may stumble or dive or leap into a canal or ditch filled with the dark liquids of the feminised unconscious and the past. After Peter Homunculus leaves the book trade, his premises are taken over by the “half-caste” who has been operating a business nearby, selling tobacco and giving inartistic hair cuts as a front for disreputable money- making pursuits. 41 Here, as in Conrad’s The Secret Agent , is a miniature version of a London infiltrated by seedy foreign influences and agents of reverse colonisation. Behind this scenario lie majoritarian fear and distaste, sentiments expressed not only in legislation such as the Aliens Act of 1905, but also in populist fictional accounts of invasion, yellow peril, epidemics, vampirism and other sensational subjects. Anglophone colonies and do- ░ The Crime of Material Culture, 1980-10 129 minions serve Cannan and other 1908-10 authors as convenient places to dispatch poor but moderately worthy characters needing a healthier cli- mate, a fresh start or a career outdoors. However, the return of such sup- pressed characters and others to the metropolis from the colonies, with or without evidence of fraternisation with indigenes, is rarely staged as a fairy tale recovery of the lost. As in some Futurist artworks, the figure of a good old woman may be sighted sitting on a balcony or by a window watching the urban traffic and construction of infrastructure and buildings. Such a woman registers material “progress” and mutely comments on it. Mrs. Wilcox in Forster’s Howards End is the matriarch of a family actively making money from enterprises in colonised Africa, yet she remains admirable, a fount of that “in- stinctive wisdom the past can alone bestow,” according to the narrator. When in the country she lives in the romanticised house of the novel’s title, but when in London she stays in a newly-constructed mansion flat and, with trepidation, enters department stores to shop. The high-minded Margaret Schlegel, who lives nearby these flats in a family house gendered female and destined for demolition and replacement by a Babylonian block of apartments, finds London positively evil.

The city seemed Satanic, the narrower streets oppressing like the galleries of a mine. No harm was done by the fog to trade, for it lay high, and the lighted windows of the shops were thronged with cus- tomers. It was rather a darkening of the spirit which threw back upon itself, to find a more grievous darkness within. […] They parted at the Mansions. Mrs. Wilcox went in after due civilities, and Margaret watched the tall, lonely figure sweep up the hall to the lift. As the glass doors closed on it she had the sense of an imprisonment. The beautiful head disappeared first, still buried in the muff, the long trail- ing skirt followed. A woman of undefinable rarity was going up heaven-ward, like a specimen in a bottle. And into what a heaven – a vault as of hell, sooty black, from which soots descended! 42

The presence of graciously and lavishly dressed women could signify an author’s nostalgia for an era which was passing. Alternatively it could be put to use to castigate alleged vanity, ostentation and extravagance. Wells and Anatole France both do this. Their mercenary women are not given to enquiring whether any cruelty or exploitation was incurred in the sourcing of their furs, feathers, gems and leathers. Authors intimate that women should care. However, they do not follow Voltaire’s lead set in his 1730s poem Défense du mondain , in which the author’s worldling persona reminds a priest sipping a cup of coffee that such a luxury is enjoyable only at the ex- 130 Robyn Walton ░

pense of the human labour in Arabia, China and Bolivia which produces the coffee beans, elaborately decorated porcelain cup and silver cutlery. 43 Considering the voluminous folds of late-Victorian and Edwardian women’s costumes (prior to any significant uptake of Reformkleider or the slimmer, draped designs which had begun to emanate from Parisian coutu- riers), the proudly-bellying forth facades of Edwardian Baroque buildings, and the organic lines of Art Nouveau artefacts and graphics, authors of a utopian disposition might have celebrated these forms as indicators of ex- pansive possibilities. Gilles Deleuze points to such a mindset in his The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque . In periods when Baroque forms predominate, people may perceive existence as fold upon fold unfurling all the way to infinity and may be more conscious of the interdependence of the physical and metaphysical, “the pleats of matter, and the folds in the soul.” In this curvilinear world, with its cavernous shapes and turbulence, creating vortices in maelstroms, matter is fluid, bodies elastic and the spirit a moti- vating mechanism. 44 At the simplest level, the Baroque mode can be seen in the styling and representation of fabrics, clothing and the things that con- stitute domestic interiors. In the cultural area there will be observable interpenetration of the various arts and extension of art into architecture, city planning and urban design, with the trend being towards a unification of all the arts. Locally, the city becomes a theatre, the public social space a site for performance. Globally, the world can be understood on a theatrical basis, with rightful recognition given to illusion and allegory. In economic terms the Baroque is associated with international trade and the rise of capitalism. 45 Deleuze’s theorisation of the Baroque is applicable to the sumptuous early twentieth-century culture of the affluent, critiqued by the 1908-10 authors. Supplementing Deleuze’s work on the fold with his own theorising of inflection (“the pleat is a series of inflections that are increasingly pro- nounced”), architect and furniture designer Bernard Cache indirectly helps us to understand the transitional aesthetic of the 1908-10 years and the Modernist impulse that resides within the 1908-10 authors’ reflection and critique of Edwardian Baroque materialism. The Modernists’ postulates ex- press a desire for continuity between the social, the technical and the for- mal, Cache argues. The Modernists try to present two opposing practices: on one hand, the loss of form, a dissolution into the indefinite; and on the other hand, a return to only representing natural forms and to reusing the organic lines of Art Nouveau. 46 Deleuze locates utopian potentialities in the Baroque – a “new har- mony,” extended awareness, productive illusion – whereas the conserva- tism of the 1908-10 authors pushes them toward advocacy of containment. ░ The Crime of Material Culture, 1980-10 131

The culture of excess, of overflowing of frames and boundaries, of infinite aspirations, has become far too much of a good thing. Arguably, consciousness of the condition of the colonies is a casualty of this “closing down” mentality. Spirituality – proliferation of mystical experience, consciousness of transcendent dimensions and/or of some higher Presence – is another casualty; with rare exceptions, the 1908-10 fictions represent churches and clergymen as compromised by and complicit in the West’s materialism. Foreign missionaries and those who go out to the colonies to “do good” are regarded as meddlers. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) comes closest to endorsing a traditional Christian faith. Religious heritage and material culture serve a useful purpose when, in fantastical after-dark flight across France, Chesterton’s protagonist is provided with an automobile and a lantern by a rich man. Syme hangs the antique lantern, which has a cross on one of its sides, over the front of the car. “There was a cer- tain allegory of their whole position in the contrast between the modern automobile and the strange, ecclesiastical lamp.” 47 Elaborating later on his thinking at the time of writing the novel, Ches- terton explained that he had been in revolt against pessimistic metaphysical outlooks and was “trying to construct a healthier conception of cosmic life.” He showed pantheism struggling out of pessimism. Corrective hope was present in the fact that each of the diabolical anarchists turned out to be a good citizen in disguise. While English cities were admittedly mean in appearance and manners, represented by some journalists as “dead-alive,” Chesterton wanted people “to realise the wonder and splendour of being alive” in their everyday environments. Imperialism and modern materialism diminished England: “my own visionary Clapham consisted of houses standing still; and not of trucks and trains rattling by; and I did not want England to be a sort of cloakroom or clearing-house for luggage labelled exports and imports.” In his version of anti-Imperialism, Chesterton was conscious of belonging to a minority even among educated people who were agnostics or atheists. “[F]or most men about this time Imperialism, or at least patriotism, was a substitute for religion. Men believed in the British Empire precisely because they had nothing else to believe in.”48 Where Chesterton was in accord with the other 1908-10 authors was in seeing the dedicated creative artist as capable of taking a leadership role in social vision. Most authors rest their hopes in the creative activities of dedicated (as opposed to dilettante) artists, who are the new mediators between the populace and some ineffable Understanding and Truth. While visual artists working in a Cubist style and writers experimenting with producing a prose equivalent of abstract visual art may seem to be contribut- 132 Robyn Walton ░

ing to the disassembling and alienation of their subject matter, they are in fact to be recognised as having a long-term goal of bringing together. Cities and the material culture of the North may be headed toward ruination but the spirit of true artists will survive, since it is oriented to higher values. In this respect, the 1908-10 authors do find common ground with the Baroque understanding of the universe. Drawing out the socio-political and “geophilosophical” implications of Deleuze’s theorisation of Leibnizian philosophy and the Baroque trope, Tom Conley sees the old hierarchies tottering. A hierarchy of organic and inorganic things no longer holds. Life invested in matter is perpetually moving, metamorphosing or emigrating from one condition to another. And if the organic and inorganic are no longer rigidly demarcated (as we have seen Lewis and before him de Quincey intimate), then an ethics that ap- pends the science of ecology is needed: of the 1908-10 writers, Wells is the most attuned to this trajectory in bioethical thought and practices. National boundaries and economic and ethnic limits must be reconsidered, Deleuze reasons. Utopia is associated with absolute deterritorialisation; and utopia does not exist at an impossible remove, but rather is attached to the present milieu by those notional folds which extend out into the infinite. 49 Reacting against the Baroque sense of continuous movement and change, the proto-Modernists of 1908-10 repeatedly assert their liking for the solid, the straight line, the definite form, the hard surface and (with the exception of Marinetti) the immobile. These are physical equivalents of the cognitive and psychological certainty that 1908-10 authors feel has passed. A Cartesian schematic gridding of the globe allied to a planned program of spatial conquest is, however, no longer feasible under unruly neo-Baroque conditions. This is one more reason for the 1908-10 authors’ turning away from scrutiny of what is happening around the globe. With traditional maps and factual compendia being superseded by a proliferation of new trading routes and importation phenomena, and some business people blithely indifferent in their optimism, Wells’s narrator is not alone when he admits that “The places of origin of half the raw material of the goods we sold had seemed to us as remote as fairyland or the Forest of Arden.”50 Outside the consciousness-raising study groups attended by the likes of Margaret Schlegel and Mrs. Tallents Smallpeace, the conversa- tions of the genteel are about colonies and dominions in which European and English language groups predominate, rather than about colonies where a tiny minority of white administrators, traders and armed forces rules over and fends off the indigenes. In other words, globalised thinking has a propensity to mirror localised thinking in the priority it accords to cer- tain categories, and in the amount of kindred feeling it can muster for fellow ░ The Crime of Material Culture, 1980-10 133 human beings at a distance. Non-Europeans may well be thought about in terms of their race, sex, and social standing before they are thought of as members of populations harmed by colonial exploitation. Representations of indigenous persons as ugly and deformed appear when a white protagonist is admitting to or attempting to justify questionable behaviour in a colony. For example, when Wells’s protagonist recounts how he murdered an African man by shooting him in the back and hid his body in the mud, he first describes the man in demeaning detail, even calling his abdomen “clumsy.”51 Harm inflicted on animal populations is even less of a consideration. Targeted species tend to be mentioned for metaphoric purposes. A map of Africa in Mr. Wilcox’s London office resembles a whale reduced to the status of a mass of blubber marked out for dissection. 52 Cannan’s Peter Homunculus observes an ape displayed in a glass case in a pet shop window. Once the creature has been trained to lie on an ornate bed, it can be used as a performer in music halls. Peter remarks: “The comment on humanity […] is needlessly cruel”. 53 In the same novel, children play at being Native Americans tracking honey-bears: “Mary, as a honey-bear, was captured, killed, flayed and robbed of her claws for ornament: her corpse was searched for honey.” 54 Shared silences (reminiscent of those in Maeterlinck’s plays) are not uncommon in the 1908-10 texts. Silence about colonies below the Equator commonly accompanies silence about matters below the waist, for colonies may be sites of promiscuity, miscegenation, homoeroticism and homosex- ual acts. The silence may stem from discretion, decorum or panicky fear of exposure of fantasies and past actions. Sexual irregularities of course stand as threats to perceptions of metropolitan moral integrity, sexual purity and physical health. Another reason why the 1908-10 fictions do not strike at those engaged in exploitative colonialism very often is that their creators may have a sneaking regard for some Big Business figures, particularly those who endow galleries, help struggling artists and found remarkable department stores (Selfridges, 1909). The generator of the coveted legacy in Lewis's novel was probably modelled on several entrepreneurs with Liverpool con- nections who not only generated wealth but gave to the community. 55 That the presence and business practices of such entrepreneurs in colonies arguably contributed to what is now called underdevelopment would not be of much interest to the 1908-10 narrators. 56 Despite the measure of welcome they accord to the new, 1908-10 authors show their city characters registering alienation and estrangement from other persons living in the city and from the objects and buildings they 134 Robyn Walton ░

daily encounter. Sociologists and economists interested in the consequences of the emergence of urbanisation and the money economy pro- vide the authors with a vocabulary. In his The Philosophy of Money (second, enlarged edition 1907) Georg Simmel notes that – along with increasing individualism, fragmentation of society and interiority as a retreat from reality – there is indifference “to those numerous objects that swarm around us, and this is for reasons specific to a money economy: their impersonal origin and easy replaceability.”57 Attempting to formulate an economic theory of fashion, Werner Som- bart observes that householders traditionally used their fittings, furnishings and commodity items for a lifetime, developing emotional attachments to them and passing them on to succeeding generations. By contrast, householders of the new generation want to start out with completely new furnishings and are averse to reusing and refurbishing old goods. Practical expla- nations include the prevalence of rental housing in cities, individual mobility within and between cities, and changes in technology. Additionally, Som- bart notes, people are projecting their inner restlessness onto their possessions: sentimental relationships to items are dispensed with and items are discarded and replaced with increasing frequency. Fashion becomes a steeple-chase for new forms and materials, with the driving force behind the creation of modern fashion being the venture capitalist. 58 It is under such conditions, so the 1908-10 fiction authors tell us, that negligence concerning sources of supply becomes endemic. The authors also describe city residents’ capacity to distance themselves from natural environments and from that Romantic sense of the wonderment and spirituality to be found in Nature. Once it is seen as just another cultural construct, Nature can be pushed out of one’s thoughts in favour of the secular “machine-world.” And then that world also comes to be taken for granted, as Lewis remarked when retrospectively criticising Futurism for having a sentimental attitude to new technology. Lewis and his fellow Vorticists took machines as a matter of course, Lewis claimed: “just as we take trees, hills, rivers, coal-deposits, oil-wells, rubber-trees, as a matter of course.”59 The outcome of such a way of thinking is likely to be dystopian, according to France’s moral fable Penguin Island (1909). Men and women who were once innocent penguins have created an ugly civilisation marked by “murderous industry, infamous speculation, and hideous luxury.” Poor health, over-production and terrible industrial accidents are interrelated symptoms of the demise of this urban culture.

Every day, machines burst into fragments, houses fell down, trains laden with merchandise fell onto the streets, demolishing entire ░ The Crime of Material Culture, 1980-10 135

buildings and crushing hundreds of passers-by. Through the ground, honey-combed with tunnels, two or three storeys of work-shops would often crash, engulfing all those who worked in them. 60

After the city is destroyed by a succession of explosions set by anarchists, reforms are introduced. Commerce and industry dwindle away, however, and the remaining towns die. The land that has supported urban agglom- erations is left insalubrious and sterile. The nation reverts to a subsistence economy, as people devolve into hunters, shepherds and agricultural labourers. Time passes, and invaders build a new civilisation. Again “the houses were never high enough to satisfy the people”: recurrent cycles of material overreaching followed by destruction are predictable. 61 Kubin shares France’s Kulturpessimismus .62 The ruination of the Dream Kingdom follows from the intrusion of an American who has made his millions in the meat packing industry. I suspect this allusion to the meat industry was prompted by the notoriety of Upton Sinclair’s exposé novel The Jungle (1905-06). Sinclair can be seen as representing Chicago’s meat packing district as an exploited, brutalised colony within the metropolis.

In the Southern Colonies

Of the 08-10 fictions, only one, Marinetti’s Mafarka the Futurist: an African Novel , has its action located entirely in an extra-European developing region. Conrad’s story “An Anarchist” (1906/1908) is set on a small riverine island in South America, but includes an account of prior activity in France. Wells’s Tono-Bungay has one chapter in which the narrator makes an ex- pedition to Mordet Island in South-West Africa. Between these texts and the 1908-10 fictions that take practically no interest in events outside North- West Europe, Forster’s Howards End stands as a half-way house. It does not examine conditions in Africa, but it does examine the socio-political views, behaviour and temperament of a family involved in Imperialistic en- terprise. In “An Anarchist” Conrad takes his narrator – a butterfly collector face- tiously labelled a “butterfly-slayer” – to a cattle estate not far from the French penal islands at Cayenne. 63 Beef cattle are being reared on their own island and their lowing is a distressing sound “rising like a monstrous protest of prisoners condemned to death.”64 Their carcasses will be reduced to a meat-extract, advertised and distributed at immense expense in the developed world. While employee exploitation and environmental deg- radation can readily be read between the lines, Conrad’s interest is in a former Parisian tradesman who wound up being deported to Cayenne after 136 Robyn Walton ░

being inveigled by Anarchists into assisting with the commission of a bank robbery and bombing. As in Conrad’s other reactionary fictions of the period, the socio-political and domestic disruption created by irresponsibly expressed dissidence is the primary subject. Irony and dark humour mingle with the tragedy and moral indignation to produce a story which is at the same time sordid and despairing. Voltaire made more of the colonial aspect when he sent his ingénue protagonist to the same region in the philosophical tale Candide, or Opti- mism (1759). Walking towards Cayenne to take ship back to Europe after abandoning the supposed Utopia of El Dorado, Candide encounters a black man who has lost a leg and a hand in the course of working in and trying to escape a Dutch-owned sugar works. “This is the price you pay for the sugar you eat in Europe,” the slave instructs Candide. 65 Rather than doing anything to help this destitute and mutilated man, Candide thinks of his own needs: he must now renounce his glib sub-Leibnizian teaching on optimism. For Candide the sugar works and the slave are object lessons by the roadside. Marinetti’s representation of food production on colonised land in North Africa is another case of notice being taken in passing in a novel (although Marinetti did have a North African upbringing and could invoke the natural environment there in extremely sensuous and vivid prose). As of 1909, when Marinetti’s Mafarka the Futurist was published, France, Spain, Britain and Turkey held the North African coastline and hinterland, while It- aly was signalling its continuing territorial ambitions. Marinetti’s eponymous hero, monarch of a small Arab kingdom, carries out violent territorial battles against the Africans of the interior. The land and the people trying to work it are subject to collateral damage. Mafarka, cavalier about food security, does not care: “Let them eat manure.”66 He offers fertiliser of a horrifying provenance – it is the rotting, liquefying corpses of the Africans slaughtered in the latest battle: “let [the sun’s] meticulous fingers tend our future salads in the negroes’ rotted guts!” 67 Kubin both writes and draws similarly repul- sive scenes of heaped bodies and disintegrating flesh in The Other Side .68 Mafarka regards his territory as the production site and proving ground for his climactic achievement: the creation of a hybrid son-cum-flying machine which will ecstatically ascend into seemingly limitless possibilities. The blacksmiths fabricating this son work naked, driven by Mafarka’s whip. Workers are likened to animals and are treated as expendable: more than 100 die of fatigue. Everything is secondary to the masterful utopian creation. Colonisation continues. In an effort to save his uncle’s multi-national commercial empire from disaster, the narrator of Wells’s Tono-Bungay makes an illicit incursion into ░ The Crime of Material Culture, 1980-10 137 another power’s South-West African colony to steal heaps of quap, a naturally occurring radioactive substance which European technologists may be able to put to use as filaments in lamps. This episode of colonial plundering is told within a chapter which functions as a moral fable about how individuals and populations are corrupted when plutocracy and bourgeois values rule. The heaps of quap are discovered in an almost lifeless lakeside environment, a place of mud, dead vegetation and rotting fish near an abandoned out-station. The protagonist is led to think of “the ultimate eat- ing away and dry-rotting and dispersal of all our world […] the end of our planet.”69 Readers may be reminded of the description in Richard Jeffer- ies’s 1885 After London of the site of extinct London. Jefferies’s site is a place of stupefying toxic gases, intense heat and phosphorescent light. The earth, black and hard as iron, bears the marks where skeletons have lain. Chasms open without warning. The lake water is like red oil. The visitor kicks his toe against “a great heap of money,” blackened coins. 70 Wells does not credit Jefferies within his narrative, whereas Forster does mention Jefferies’s writings and “spirit” in Howards End . The enthusi- ast for Jefferies’s publications is a poor, naïve young clerk who soon enough will be mistreated at arms-length by Mr. Wilcox, the investor in Ni- gerian rubber. 71 In South-West Africa Wells’s protagonist drives his white labourers like slaves. En route home to England he incurs poetic justice when the cargo of quap rots the timbers of the vessel, causing it to sink. The uncle’s business empire is declared bankrupt and his latest construction project, that private mansion, stands abandoned, a “waste,” a “wilderness.”72 After a period of meditation on the “abysmal folly of our being,” the narrator moves on with his projects. 73 From inventing powered flying machines he transitions to naval destroyers intended neither for the British Empire, figured as a man with a complacent stomach, nor for any European power. 74 These are projects which are commercial, faintly utopian and ominous all at once. In summary, we can say that more often than not the 1908-10 novels and stories put forward a culturally pessimistic prognosis affecting all or nearly all of the local population. Authors hopeful of a better social future for the North intimate that the means required to attain this end may not be pleasant: there will be crime and violence. If a great international war is not predictable with any certainty, it is certainly to be feared. Allusions to colonies and developing nations generally further the authors’ collective critique of the Imperial powers’ cultures and aspirations. In other words, the colonies serve the texts in mimicry of the manner in which colonies serve the Imperial powers and Northern consumers: as sources of primary resources, cheap labour, and captive markets – and of armed forces should a large- 138 Robyn Walton ░

scale war again break out.

La Trobe University [email protected]

NOTES

1 Joseph Conrad, Preface, The Nature of a Crime , Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford (F.M. Hueffer) (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1924), vi. 2 It would be published in 1909 in the English Review (founded 1908). On the col- laboration and dates of composition and first publication see Frederick R. Karl, Jo- seph Conrad: The Three Lives (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 608-09. 3 Although several of these authors were also visual artists, this article does not allude to complementary artworks owing to space limitation. Comparable prose fictions by male authors based outside Europe – Martin Eden (1909) by Jack Lon- don, for example – are also excluded, as are works by socially-aware women writers (such as Edith Wharton) and texts by dramatists (e.g. Granville Harley Barker), poets (e.g. Émile Verhaeren) and other cultural creatives who could be represented as participating in a collective response to Western capitalist priorities. 4 After working in the Belgian Congo in 1890, Conrad wrote two outstanding tales drawing on his African observations, “An Outpost of Progress” and “Heart of Dark- ness.” He wrote of “All the bitterness of those days, all my puzzled wonder as to the meaning of all I saw – all my indignation at masquerading philanthropy.” Quoted by Keith Carabine, Introduction, Selected Short Stories , Joseph Conrad (Ware: Wordsworth, 1997), ix. 5 Conrad and Ford, 22. 6 Ibid., 11. 7 Ibid., 22. 8 Ibid., 93-4. 9 Ibid., 97. Anthony Trollope: an Autobiography , Oxford University Press (London, 1950), 353. 10 C.F.G. Masterman, The Condition of England (London: Methuen, 1909). As a graduate in Moral Science and a convert to High Anglicanism and the Christian Socialist Movement, which was hostile to Imperialism, Masterman opted to live in a poor part of South London from 1898, pursuing welfare causes and writing on social issues. He published journal articles and wrote or edited several books prior to The Condition of England : they included The Heart of the Empire (1901), From the Abyss of its Inhabitants by one of Them (1902) and In Peril of Change (1905). From 1903 he was literary editor of a national newspaper, the Daily News . From 1906 he was a Liberal Member of Parliament, promoting a shift from church and

░ The Crime of Material Culture, 1980-10 139

philanthropic poor relief to government responsibility for social improvements and wealth distribution. Bentley Brinkerhoff Gilbert, review of Charles Masterman (1873-1927), Politician and Journalist: The Splendid Failure , by Eric Hopkins, Al- bion 32.4 (Winter 2000): 685-88. Francis M. Mason, “Charles Masterman and Na- tional Health Insurance”, Albion 10.1 (Spring 1978): 54-75. 11 Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (London: James Fraser, 1840), 5. Friedrich Engels re- viewed Past and Present in 1844, and his book Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England (The Condition of the Working Class in England ) was published in Germany in 1845. 12 Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby, or, The New Generation , ed. Sheila M. Smith (Ox- ford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 61. 13 Sheila M. Smith, Introduction, Disraeli, Coningsby, xx. 14 John Galsworthy, Fraternity , Grove ed. (London: Heinemann, 1927), 14. And see Harold Ray Stevens, “Galsworthy’s Fraternity , the Closed Door and the Paralyzed Society”, English Literature in Transition (1880-1920), 19.4 (1976): 283-98. Ste- vens addresses “the interplay of sexual frustration and of social ills.” (297) 15 Masterman, Condition, 301. 16 The legislation was passed in modified form in 1911. Geoffrey Lee, The People’s Budget: An Edwardian Tragedy , (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 2008). 17 Masterman, Condition, 105-06. 18 Wyndham Lewis, Mrs. Dukes’ Million (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1977), 135. Mr. Dukes also made money from “the commerce of bananas” (135). 19 See Aaron L. Friedberg, The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline, 1895-1905 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) passim and An- drew S. Thompson, Imperial Britain: The Empire in British Politics , c. 1880-1937 (Harlow: Longman/Pearson, 2000), 81-109. 20 Eric Meyer, “‘The Nature of a Text’: Ford and Conrad in Plato’s Pharmacy”, 36.4 (Winter 1990): 499-512. And consider the thoughts of Lewis’s slumming protagonist on the form of the literature written and consumed when money-making is the chief objective of the crime gang’s leader and members: “how much finer if there were real human interests in it, and significant dangers – not the old clock-work menace of the police […] But like many artists [my employer] is unfortunately poor, and is compelled always to do only the things that pay, and alas! also, only in the way that pays. What we are doing now need not be a pot-boiler, but it is!” Lewis, Mrs. Dukes’ Million , 117. 21 H.G. Wells, Tono-Bungay , ed. Patrick Parrinder (London: Penguin, 2005). Book IV, Chapter 2 (369-80) is titled “Love Among the Wreckage”. 22 Wells, Tono-Bungay , 222. 23 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject (London and New York: Verso, 1999), 29-50. 24 Alfred Kubin, The Other Side , trans. Denver Lindley (Harmondsworth: Penguin), 1973. 25 c.f. Janell Watson, Literature and Material Culture From Balzac to Proust: The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities (Cambridge: Cambridge University

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Press, 1999) passim. Martin Kanes, Père Goriot: Anatomy of a Troubled World (New York: Twayne, 1993), 72. Fredric Jameson, “The Ideology of Form: Partial Systems in La Vielle Fille ” in Critical Essays on Honoré de Balzac , ed. Martin Kanes (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990), 200-212. Rémy G, Saisselin, The Bourgeois and the Bibelot (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 53-74. 26 Juliet McMaster, Introduction, The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson: By One of the Firm , Anthony Trollope (London: Folio Society, 1999), ix-xvii. Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (London: B.T. Batsford, 1988). Andrew H. Miller, Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Elaine Freedgood, The Idea of Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 27 Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet [1887], ed. Leslie S. Klinger (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 32. c.f. in Lewis’s Mrs. Dukes’ Million a (male) solicitor regards Mrs. Dukes’s brain as a “dark chaotic, antiquated mass” (128) on the basis of two letters received from her; he is actually dealing with a male actor-criminal impersonating her (127-28). 28 Joseph Conrad, Author’s Note, in The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale , ed. B. Hark- ness and S.W. Reid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 4-6. 29 c.f. Émile Zola sets his The Belly of Paris (Le Ventre de Paris) (1873) in the newly-built food markets. There his protagonist, a dreamy escapee from Cayenne, is drawn into association with insurrectionaries. The (richly detailed) commercial community continues to thrive while local insurrection is aborted, the protagonist convicted and re-transported. 30 Edgar Allan Poe, “A Descent into the Malestrom”, Ten Great Mysteries of Edgar Allan Poe , ed. Groff Conklin (New York: Scholastic, 1960), 157. 31 Jack London re-used this scenario in his novel The Assassination Bureau, Ltd , begun in 1910. The novel was left unfinished when London died. Robert L Fish later wrote the scene from London’s notes. A professional assassin (a former terrorist) eliminates his pursuers by luring them into the vortex of a maelstrom. Jack London, The Assassination Bureau, Ltd , completed by Robert L. Fish (London: André Deutsch, 1964), 164-65. On the political milieu in the few years before 1910 see Jeffory A. Clymer, “‘This Firm of Men-Killers’: Jack London and the Business of Terrorism”, Modern Fiction Studies , 45.4 (1999), 905-31. 32 Lewis, Mrs. Dukes’ Million , 280-81. 33 Wells, Tono-Bungay , 68-69. Lewis, Mrs. Dukes’ Million , 9. Jonathan Swift, Epistle Dedicatory, A Tale of a Tub , in The Writings of Jonathan Swift , ed. Robert A. Greenberg and William Bowman-Piper (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), 279. Robert Elliott argues that the Tale’s confusingly digressive structure is a parody of the faulty structure of contemporary works and of social confusion, and that the ingénue narrator’s point of view controls the storyline. He likens the Tale’s multi- layered structure to that of “a novel by Conrad”. Robert C. Elliott, “Swift’s Tale of a Tub : An Essay in Problems of Structure”, PMLA , 66.4 (June 1951): 441-55. 34 Lewis, Mrs. Dukes’ Million , 129-30. 35 Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (Ware: Wordsworth,

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1994), 192. And see John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas de Quincey: A Psy- chopathology of Imperialism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991) 6-8. Equally, objects may “resist” narrative attempts to invest them with vi- tality, remaining mute, unmoving things in a text. Readers, however, may bring extra-textual cultural knowledge to the thing or word, giving it a form of life. Freedgood discusses this in relation to J. Hillis Miller’s reading of Dickens’ Sketches by Boz : Freedgood, 16-17. 36 Wyndham Lewis, Tarr , ed. Scott W. Klein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 174. 37 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture , 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 15-16. c.f. Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875-1914 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1989) 1-5, 92-97. Elsewhere Bhabha quotes Edward Said to the effect that peoples such as the Palestinians who have suffered loss and displacement may exhibit rituals of excess, recreating interiors filled with food and objects but inadvertently highlighting and preserving the rift or break fundamental to their lives. Baroque excess barely conceals the fear of a repetition of evacuation and exile. In their excessiveness, these embellishments of unfurnished lives are also comic. Homi Bhabha, “Ada- gio”, Critical Inquiry 31 (Winter 3005): 378-379. 38 Gilbert Cannan, Peter Homunculus (New York: Duffield, 1909), 7. 39 Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud , trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1990), 29-30. Also see Douglas Mao, Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 106 and Neil Jonathan Levi, “Aethetics out of Place: Modernist Technique in the Age of Catastrophe” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2001), 113-121. While Mao and Levi are discussing later texts by Wyndham Lewis, they make points applicable to the 1908-10 fictions. The motifs of purging and vomiting recur in Lewis’s texts. 40 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism”, Futurist Manifestos , ed. Umbro Apollonio (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 19-24. Cultural appropriation by museum-keepers is a specific concern in a fiction such as E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet (1906), in which the Queen of (ancient) Babylon attempts to retrieve her possessions from the British Museum. See Eitan Bar-Yosef, “E. Nesbit and the Fantasy of Reverse Colonization: How Many Miles to Modern Babylon?”, English Literature in Transition , 1880-1920, 46.1 (2003): 5- 28. 41 Cannan, Peter Homunculus , 77, 275-276. 42 E.M. Forster, Howards End (London: Heinemann/Octopus, 1978), 457, 471, 512, 497. 43 Theodore Besterman, Voltaire (London: Longmans, 1969), 233-34. Conrad comes closest in his story “An Informer” in A Set of Six (London: Methuen, 1908), 79-109. A revolutionary writer and inspirer of violent subversive campaigns lives luxuri- ously. His dining companion has “the audacity to ask him how it was that the starv- ing proletariat of Europe to whom he has been preaching revolt and violence had not been made indignant by his openly luxurious life”, 83.

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44 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque , trans. Tom Conley (London: Athlone, 1993), 3-5. 45 Deleuze, 121-25, 142 note 9. It is arguable that, even when their intentions were allegorical, European Baroque artists showed more interest in the peoples, animals and produce of other continents than did the writers of the first decade of the twentieth century. See, for example, the 1751-53 frescos by Tiepolo in the Resi- denz, Wurzberg. Baroque: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting , ed. Rolf Roman, phot. Achim Bednorz, (Königswinter: Könemann, 2004), 217-19. 46 Bernard Cache, Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories, trans. Anne Boyman, ed. Michael Speaks, (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995), 48-50. 47 G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1937), 139. 48 G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography [1936], intro. Anthony Burgess (London: Hutchin- son, 1969), 101-04, 134-35, 144-45. 49 Tom Conley, Translator’s Foreword, Deleuze, xiv-xvii. 50 Wells, 226. 51 Wells, 333. 52 Forster, 567. 53 Cannan, 273-74. 54 Cannan, 249. Such traces of sado-masochism and voyeurism recur in relation to women in the fictions. 55 I am thinking of Sir Alfred Lewis Jones, who had multiple business interests in “British West Africa,” and Henry Tate, sugar refiner and founder of the Tate Gal- lery. In 1909 Jones was in the news because he was giving evidence at the Royal Commission on Shipping Rings. He died in the same year, unmarried, leaving large philanthropic bequests. 56 See Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Bogle- L’Ouverture, 1972) passim. On Jones and his colonial legacy see Marika Sher- wood, “Elder Dempster and West Africa 1891-c.1940: The Genesis of Underde- velopment?” International Journal of African Historical Studies 30.2 (1997): 253- 76. 57 Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money , 2nd ed., trans. Tom Bottomore and Davis Frisby (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 460. Gianfranco Poggi identifies similarities and differences in Marx’s and Simmel’s use of alienation. Gianfranco Poggi, Money and the Modern Mind: Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 185-211. 58 Werner Sombart, “The Emergence of Fashion” [1902], Economic Life in the Mod- ern Age , ed. Nico Stehr and Reiner Grundmann (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2001), 209-24. 59 Wyndham Lewis, “The Skeleton in the Cupboard Speaks” [1939], Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings 1913-1956, intro. and notes Walter Michel and C.J. Fox (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1969), 341. 60 Anatole France, Penguin Island , trans. A.W. Evans (London: John Lane, The

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Bodley Head, 1924), 332. 61 Ibid., 337-45. For comparable fictional accounts of city ruination set in North America, see Nick Yablon, “The Metropolitan Life in Ruins: Architectural and Fic- tional Speculations in New York, 1909-19”, American Quarterly 56.2 (June 2004): 308-47. 62 C.f. Stephen Kalberg, “The Origin and Expansion of Kulturpessimismus : The Re- lationship Between Public and Private Spheres in Early Twentieth Century Ger- many”, Sociological Theory 5 (1987): 150-65. 63 Joseph Conrad, “An Anarchist”, A Set of Six (London: Methuen, 1908), 147. The story was first published in Harpers Magazine 113 (Aug. 1906): 406:16. 64 Ibid., 147. 65 Voltaire, Candide and Other Stories , trans. Roger Pearson (New York: Every- man’s Library/Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 50. 66 Filippo-Tommaso Marinetti, Mafarka the Futurist: an African Novel , trans. Carol Diethe and Steve Cox (London: Middlesex University Press, 1998), 12. 67 Ibid., 13 68 Kubin, The Other Side , illustration, 216. 69 Wells, 329. 70 Richard Jefferies, After London, or Wild England , intro. John Fowles (Oxford: Ox- ford University Press, 1980), 202-05. 71 Forster, 519-20. 72 Wells, 337-38, 347. 73 Ibid., 348 74 Ibid., 389.