A History of English Literature

Overview

The war of 1914–18 made the England of Edward VII (1901–10) and of the

start of George V’s reign seem forever ‘pre-war’, and a pendant to the 19th

century. Those years were rich in good writing of many kinds, old and new,

major and minor, but established masters and modes were dominant: poetry by

Hardy, drama by Shaw. Yeats’s Collected Works appeared in 1908. The fiction

of James and Conrad, and of Kipling, was more ambitious and far-reaching

than that of younger writers such as Arnold Bennett. Ford Madox Ford’s career

is representative of the changes to come. Yet by 1918, the impression made

by ‘modernist’ writing before 1914 had faded, and writers later famous as

modernists or as war poets were little known.

nThe new century

Queen Victoria’s death in 1901 renewed the novelty of the century. Her elderly, cigar-
smoking son, Edward VII, diffused a far more relaxed atmosphere. In clubs, men left
the bottom buttons of their waistcoats undone, as the new King did; there was talk
of Votes for Women. In 1910 the accession of George V again promised fresh begin-
nings: the new Georgian era would differ from the Edwardian ... but all is dwarfed
in retrospect by how the Great War altered everything. The old world of social rank,
of(unequal) prosperity, and of horses and railways, had a liberal hope: the way of
life of Britain, of Europe and America, and of the Empire, would gradually improve

• materially, politically, morally. The world would grow more civilized. It did not.
  The wor ds put to Sir Edward Elgar’s ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ march, ‘Land of Hope
  and Glory’, have a chorus still lustily sung each year at the Last Night of the
  Promenade Concerts in the Albert Hall: ‘... wider still, and wider, may your bounds
  be set./ God that made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet!’ How strange this
  must have sounded in 1919, and again in 1947, when India became independent and
  the Empire dissolved into the Commonwealth.
  We can read about the pre-war English world in the novels of John Galsworthy,
  Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells and E. M. Forster; in light fiction such as G. K.

Contents

The new century 327

Fiction 329

Edwardian realists 329

Rudyard Kipling 329

John Galswor thy 329

Arnold Bennett 329

H.G.Wells 330

The press and

G.K. Chesterton 330

Joseph Conrad

Heart of Darkness 332

Nostromo 333

E.M.Forster 334

Ford Madox Ford 335

Poetr y 336

Pre-war verse 336

Thomas Hardy, poet 337

War poetry and war

poets 338

Further reading 340

327

Ends and Beginnings:

1901–19

12

CHAPTER