The Edwardian era

Literature Before World War I

Two world wars, an economic depression, and the austerity of life in Great Britain after World War II (1939-1945) set out the direction of English literature in the 20th century.

The 20th century opened with great hope but also with some apprehension, as humankind was entering upon a new era. The death of Queen Victoria in 1901 ended the long Victorian Age and her eldest son, King Edward VII, started the Edwardian Period (1901-1910). On the one hand, his rule seemed to confirm that a franker, less prejudiced era had begun. Many writers of the Edwardian period followed the realism and naturalism of the 19th century (Ibsen in drama and Balzac, Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola, Eliot, and Dickens in fiction) and the anti-Aesthetic trend started by the trial of Oscar Wilde. On the other hand, many writers saw society breaking down and discarded many traditional literary forms to describe new reality using new means.

Several outstanding authors gained fame before World War I with novels and plays of social criticism. They saw their task in the new century to be didactic and this belief greatly shaped the Edwardian theatre.

In a series of wittily iconoclastic plays, of which "Man and Superman" (1903) and "Major Barbara" (1907) are the most substantial, George Bernard Shaw started the debate upon the principal concerns of the day: the question of political organization, the morality of war, the function of class, the validity of the family and of marriage, and the issue of female emancipation. John Galsworthy wrote "Strife" (1909) to explore the conflict between capital and labour, and "Justice" (1910) to support to reform of the penal system, while Harley Granville-Barker, whose revolutionary approach to stage direction did much to change the Edwardian theatre, exposed in "The Voysey Inheritance" (1909) and "Waste" (1909) the hypocrisy of upper-class and professional life.

Many Edwardian novelists were similarly eager to explore the shortcomings of English social life. In "Anna of the Five Towns" (1902) and "The Old Wives' Tale" (1908) Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) detailed the dull and narrow provincial life of the middle class of the self-made businessmen in the area of central England known as the Potteries and showed the destructive effects of time on the lives of individuals and communities.

Another famous Victorian novelist was Herbert G. Wells (1866-1946), who became famous for "The War of the Worlds" (1898) and other science fiction novels. However, he also wrote political and satirical fiction. H.G. Wells’ utopian studies, "Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought" (1901) and "A Modern Utopia" (1905), both captured the optimistic mood of the new Edwardian era and expressed a common belief that science and technology would transform the world in the century ahead. To achieve such transformation, outdated institutions and ideals had to be replaced by more suitable to the liberated human spirit. In "Tono-Bungay" (1909), Wells showed also the ominous consequences of the uncontrolled developments taking place within a British society still dependent upon the landed aristocracy. In "Love and Mr. Lewisham" (1900); "Kipps" (1905); "Ann Veronica" (1909), his pro-suffragist novel; and "The History of Mr. Polly" (1910), H.G. Wells captured the frustrations of lower- and middle-class existence, even though these novels have many comic touches.

John Galsworthy (1867-1933)became famous for his realistic novels and plays. His most famous work is " The Forsyte Saga " (1906-1921), a series of three novels about an English family's rise to wealth and power. In its first volume, " The Man of Property " (1906), Galsworthy described the destructive possessiveness of the professional bourgeoisie.

In " Where Angels Fear to Tread " (1905) and " The Longest Journey " (1907), E.M. Forster (1879-1970)portrayed with irony the insensitivity, self-repression, and hypocrisy of the English middle classes and called for a return to a simple, intuitive reliance on the senses. In " Howards End " (1910), Forster showed how little contemporary commerce cared for the more rooted world of culture, although he acknowledged that commerce was a necessary evil.

Nevertheless, even as they perceived the difficulties of the present, most Edwardian novelists, like their counterparts in the theatre, held firmly to the belief not only that constructive change was possible but also that this change could in some measure be speeded up by their writing.

The most significant writing of the period, both traditionalist and modern, was inspired by the feeling that the new century would witness the collapse of a whole civilization. The new century had begun with Great Britain involved in the South African War (the Boer War; 1899–1902), and it seemed to some that the British Empire was as doomed to destruction, both from within and from without, as had been the Roman Empire.

This feeling was shared by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), an important transitional figure between the Victorian era and the 20^th century. A major novelist of the late 19^th century, Hardy lived well into the third decade of the 20^th century, but because of the adverse criticism of his last novel, Jude the Obscure ", in 1895, from that time Hardy concentrated on publishing poetry. In his poems on the South African War, Thomas Hardy (whose achievement as a poet in the 20th century rivaled his achievement as a novelist in the 19th) questioned simply and sardonically the human cost of empire building and established a tone and style that many British poets were to use in the course of the century.

The imperial decline is visualized by another leading English author, Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), a highly versatile writer of novels, short stories and poems, and to date the youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1907). His works, including his inspirational poem "If—" are national favourites and a memorable embodiment of Victorian stoicism, presented as a traditional British virtue. Kipling, who had done much to engender pride in empire, also began to speak in his verse and short stories of the burden of empire and the suffering it would bring.

No one captured the sense of an imperial civilization in decline more fully or subtly than the expatriate American novelist Henry James (1843-1916), who lived in Europe since 1875 and became a British citizen in 1915. In " The Portrait of a Lady " (1881), he had briefly anatomized the fatal loss of energy of the English ruling class and, in " The Princess Casamassima " (1886), had described more directly the various instabilities that threatened its paternalistic rule. He did so with regret: the patrician American admired in the English upper class its sense of moral obligation to the community. By the turn of the century, however, he had noted a disturbing change. In " The Spoils of Poynton " (1897) and " What Maisie Knew " (1897), members of the upper class no longer seem troubled by the means adopted to achieve their morally dubious ends. Great Britain had become indistinguishable from the other nations of the Old World, in which an ugly possessiveness had never been far from the surface. James’s dismay at this condition gave to his subtle and compressed late fiction, " The Wings of the Dove " (1902), " The Ambassadors " (1903), and " The Golden Bowl " (1904), much of its gravity and air of disenchantment.

James’s awareness of crisis affected the very form and style of his writing, for he was no longer sure that his Britain was either whole in itself or understood by its inhabitants. He still presented characters within a recognizable social world, but he found them and their world increasingly slipping away, as in " The Sacred Fount " (1901).

Another expatriate novelist, Joseph Conrad (pseudonym of Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, born in Ukraine of Polish parents), wrote psychologically probing novels on such themes as guilt, heroism, and honor. He shared James’s sense of crisis but attributed it less to the decline of a specific civilization than to human failings. Man was a solitary, romantic creature of will who, at any cost, made his impression upon the world because he could not live in a world that did not reflect his central place within it. In " Almayer’s Folly " (1895) and " Lord Jim " (1900), he had seemed to sympathize with this flaw, as he described an Englishman's lifelong efforts to regain his sense of honor after committing a cowardly act in his youth. In “ Heart of Darkness ” (1902), " Nostromo " (1904), " The Secret Agent " (1907), and " Under Western Eyes " (1911), though, he investigated this anthropocentric attitude and the psychological problems associated with it, without sympathy. The concept of limited human nature and knowledge affected the very structure of his fiction. Conrad's writing is marked by gaps in the narrative, because his narrators do not fully grasp the significance of the events they are retelling, and the characters are unable to make themselves understood. James and Conrad used many of the conventions of 19th-century realism but transformed them to express what are considered to be peculiarly 20th-century problems.

The Victorian Age gave birth to many excellent traditional writers and poets, including Hilaire Belloc, Christian writer G.K. Chesterton, and Edward Thomas, who became famous in the first decade of the new century. They were not confident about the future and sought to revive the traditional forms -- the ballad, the narrative poem, the satire, the fantasy, and the essay -- that in their view preserved traditional sentiments.

The leading poets of the early 1900's belonged to a group called the Georgians. The group's name came from George V, who became king on the death of his father, Edward VII. The Georgians wrote romantic poetry about nature and the pleasures of rural living. Their pastoral work was idealistic and traditional. They returned to the values of the romantics, writing verse in the style of Wordsworth. The most important members of the group included Rupert Brooke and John Masefield. The revival of traditional forms in the late 19th and early 20th century was not a unique event. There were many such revivals during the 20th century, and the traditional poetry of Walter de la Mare, Robert Graves, and Edmund Blunden represents an important and often neglected strand of English literature in the first half of the century.

It was the Georgian group of traditional poets, many of whom saw action, who depicted World War I. Rupert Brooke caught the idealism of the opening months of the war (and died in service); Siegfried Sassoon and Ivor Gurney caught the mounting anger and sense of waste as the war continued; and Isaac Rosenberg (perhaps the most original of the war poets), Wilfred Owen, and Edmund Blunden not only caught the comradely compassion of the trenches but also addressed the larger moral perplexities raised by the war (Rosenberg and Owen were killed in action). It was not until the 1930s that much of this poetry became widely known.

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