This Thesis Has Been Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements for a Postgraduate Degree (E.G
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This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: • This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. • A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. • This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. • The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. • When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. The Development of H. G. Wells’s Conception of the Novel, 1895 to 1911 Andrew Court PhD University of Edinburgh 2013 Abstract In his writing on the nature and purpose of the novel between 1895 and 1911, Wells endorses artistic principles for their social effects. His public lecture on “The Contemporary Novel,” written in 1911 in response to a debate with Henry James, is the most lucid articulation of his artistic principles, and his later autobiographical reflections on the debate obscure the clarity of the earlier version. Wells’s artistic principles emerge in his reviews of contemporary fiction for the Saturday Review (1895–1897), where he extends Poe’s concept of “unity of effect” to the novel and justifies his preference for social realism with a theory of cultural evolution. His views develop further in the context of sociological and philosophical debates between 1901 and 1905. Wells commenced the century with a sceptical view on the social effects of literature, but his exposure to British Pragmatism encouraged him to revive the principles developed in his reviewing. The view on Wells’s conception of the novel presented in this thesis challenges the prevailing view that he began his career with a set of purely artistic principles, adding sociological and intellectual apparatus after the turn of the century. The work comprising this thesis is entirely the author’s own. It has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. Contents Introduction 1 1 The Constructive Moment 11 The Wells–James Debate and “The Contemporary Novel” 2 A Romancer Among Gradgrinds 63 Wells’s Scepticism and Social–Aesthetic Synthesis, 1901 to 1905 3 Certain Critical Opinions 109 The Origins and Evolution of Wells’s Social–Aesthetic Synthesis 4 Metaphor and Critique 153 The Fictional Realisation of Wells’s Conception Conclusions 177 Works Cited 181 Introduction The aim of this thesis is to examine the development of H. G. Wells’s conception of the novel, his artistic preferences in the novel, his statements of the novel’s nature and purpose, and his attempts to explain the relationship between imaginative literature and other forms of experiencing and knowing the world. The thesis provides readings of Wells’s review criticism, which he wrote for the Saturday Review as head fiction reviewer between March 1895 and April 1897, as well as sociological, historical, and philosophical writings composed in the first five years of the new century, including Anticipations (1901) and Mankind in the Making (1903), lectures on “The Discovery of the Future” (1902) and “Scepticism of the Instrument” (1903), and a paper on “The So-Called Science of Sociology” (1905), each of which presents a different aspect of Wells’s thought on the relationship between imaginative literature and other fields of knowledge. I provide a comparative reading of Wells’s public lecture on “The Contemporary Novel,” which I argue presents the clearest articulation of his conception of the novel’s qualities and purpose, with autobiographical reflections on the debates that influenced his thinking in a section of his Experiment in Autobiography (1934). My argument is that these texts, from the reviews for the Saturday to “The Contemporary Novel,” represent a deep continuity in Wells’s thinking on the nature and purpose of the novel, and that the conception of the novel that emerges from the reviews is the same as the one that animates the 1911 lecture. The conclusion that Wells’s conception of the novel is consistent between 1895 and 1911 modifies the view presented in existing commentary upon the development of his career. The key text is Gordon Ray’s “H. G. Wells Tries to Be a Novelist” (1959). Ray defends Wells against the view that whatever he achieved as a writer, he was never a novelist “in the high sense in which it was used by James and Conrad when they set out as conscious literary artists to make the novel the equal of the other great literary forms” (106). True enough, Wells had emerged from a debate with Henry James on the functions of the novel, a year before James’s death in 1916, asserting in correspondence he “had rather be called a journalist” than an artist, receiving by return post James’s famous rejoinder: “It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance” (Edel and Ray 264, 267). The statements clearly put Wells and James at odds.1 But Ray shows convincingly that Wells, in his 1 See Chapter 1 for my discussion of the debate. 1 Introduction reviewing for the Saturday, developed a “solid and creditable” conception of the novel, combining “thoroughly traditional” principles with a preference for social realism of the kind he encountered in the novels of Turgenev and Hardy, an “insistence on representing great social issues through individual histories,” a conception that formed the basis of his artistic practice until 1911 (Ray 118). The novels Wells wrote between 1899 and 1910 were “the real thing,” but he later turned to the “Novel of Discussion,” allowed characters to engage in lengthy disquisitions upon topics not always clearly related to a book’s theme, made “a series of perverse disavowals of artistic intent,” and “came to take a kind of pleasure in insisting that he was a journalist and a philistine, interested only in getting on with the world’s work in a rough-and-ready way” (Ray 107, 122, 157).2 In sum, Ray’s claim is that Wells adopted a conception of the novel in his reviewing for the Saturday that not only yielded the artistic objectives for the following decade or so; it was free of the kinds of utilitarian preoccupations that defined his career after 1910. It is the latter part of this claim that this thesis aims to challenge. For the continuity of concern that characterises Wells’s reflections on the nature and purpose of the novel between 1895 and 1911 is based on his attempt to integrate aesthetic and sociological objectives for the novel.3 What Ray’s argument overlooks is that Wells justifies his preference for social realism, in his reviews for the Saturday, by linking his endorsement of certain formal and structural qualities, especially forms of narrative perspective responsible for depicting the effect of “social issues” upon “individual histories,” with a broader, instrumental or functional view on the relationship between art and social progress. In Chapter 3, I show that Wells based his artistic preferences upon a theory of cultural evolution that is original with Wells, which he worked out at the same time he was writing for the Saturday (in some cases, worked out in the Saturday’s pages), and I suggest that from the start, he was concerned with the kinds of social outcomes that critics have typically found not only to characterise but to derogate his fictional output after 1910, as I proceed to explain below. In other words, Ray’s attempt to defend Wells as a novelist true and proper is based on the premise that he started 2 The titles of Wells’s “real” novels are Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900), Kipps (1905), Tono-Bungay (1909), and The History of Mr. Polly (1910). 3 Although I refer from time to time to texts beyond 1895–1911, I focus on this period in order to conform to the chronological constraints of Ray’s study, but also because Wells’s later pronouncements on the scope of the novel, for example “The Novel of Ideas” (1940), present no advance on the 1911 formulation in “The Contemporary Novel.” See p. 23 note 35 below for details on “The Novel of Ideas.” 2 Introduction from a position of purely artistic interests.4 It is the burden of this thesis to show that this premise misrepresents not only the nature of Wells’s early fiction reviewing, but the relationship between the conception of the novel emerging in the reviews and the development of similar ideas through the following decade and a half, culminating in the concise formulation of “The Contemporary Novel.” The consensus view, alluded to in Ray’s finding that Wells renounced the title of novelist in favour of journalist or philistine, is that a watershed divides his career in two. The view emerged not long after the fateful date, 1910, when Wells ceased to write, to use Ray’s term, “real” novels, turning instead to the discussion novel; the claim, as David Lodge puts it in a 1967 article, is that Wells betrayed his imagination (“Assessing” 56). Contemporary critics of Wells struggled to articulate the relationship between his artistic and extra-artistic, functional, sociological or intellectual ambitions in favourable terms. As early as 1915,Van Wyck Brooks found Wells, who interprets life “in the light of ideas rather than in the light of experience,” to be “an ‘intellectual’ rather than an artist” (The World of H.