Modern Literature (1901-1945)

On 22 January 1901, Queen Victoria died at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. She had ruled since 1837, so most people in Britain had never lived under another monarch. Her name had come to stand for a whole age of steady progress, strict manners and a vast empire. When the news spread, many felt that something larger than a reign had come to an end.

The new century did not begin with a clean break. Her son became King Edward VII, and for a few years life went on in its comfortable Edwardian way for those who could afford it. Underneath, the old certainties were wearing thin. Science was shaking religious belief, women were demanding the vote, workers were organising, and the great powers of Europe were building bigger armies. Writers began to feel that the old ways of telling a story or shaping a poem no longer matched the world around them.

Then, in 1914, a war broke out on a scale nobody had imagined. It ended in 1918, only to be followed by hard times at home and a second war from 1939. Between 1901 and 1945, poets cut away rhyme and ornament, novelists followed the flow of a single mind, and dramatists carried the stage out of the drawing room. By the end of those forty-four years, the shape of English literature had changed deeply.

The world of this age

Political life

The Edwardian years opened with a sense of unease. Britain had just fought the Boer War in South Africa (1899-1902), and the army's poor start had shocked the public. In 1906 the Liberal Party won a great election victory and began to build the first parts of a welfare system. Old-age pensions were voted in 1908, and the National Insurance Act of 1911 gave some workers help in sickness and unemployment.

Women were pressing for change as well. In 1903 Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women's Social and Political Union, whose members, called suffragettes, used marches, protests and sometimes damage to property to win the vote. Ireland was another centre of storm. Many Irish people wanted Home Rule, a parliament of their own in Dublin, while Protestants in the north feared it.

All of this was pushed aside on 4 August 1914. Germany had invaded Belgium, a country whose independence Britain had promised to protect, and Britain declared war. Many expected a short war, but armies dug long lines of trenches across France and Belgium, and it became a slow, grinding slaughter. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, nearly 20,000 British soldiers were killed. The Armistice came on 11 November 1918.

Peace brought changes at home. The Representation of the People Act of 1918 gave the vote to almost all men over twenty-one and to women over thirty who met certain conditions. In 1928 women won the vote on the same terms as men.

In Ireland, the Easter Rising of April 1916 had been put down by force, but the execution of its leaders turned opinion towards independence. After a war of independence, the Irish Free State was set up in 1922, while six northern counties stayed in the United Kingdom. In India, the killing of an unarmed crowd at Amritsar in April 1919 hardened feeling against British rule, and Mohandas Gandhi began to lead mass movements.

The 1930s were darker still. Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933. When civil war broke out in Spain in 1936, many British writers took the side of the elected government, and some, like George Orwell, went to fight. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, and Britain declared war two days later. The war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945. In July, voters chose a Labour government under Clement Attlee.

Social life

Daily life changed as fast as politics. At the start of the century, Britain was still sharply divided by class. The war loosened these lines. Men of every background had served in the same army, and women had taken over work in factories, offices and transport that had been closed to them. When the fighting stopped, many were unwilling to return to the old limits.

Radio changed habits too. In 1922 the British Broadcasting Company began its programmes, and in 1927 it became the public British Broadcasting Corporation, so that families could hear news, music and plays at home.

New ideas about the mind and the universe also unsettled old beliefs. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), the Viennese doctor Sigmund Freud argued that much of the human mind lies hidden, speaking through dreams and desires a person does not know about. In 1905 Albert Einstein published his theory of special relativity, which treated time and space as linked rather than fixed. The French thinker Henri Bergson held that real time is felt inside the mind as a flowing stream, not as the ticking of a clock. Writers read all this, and it changed how they pictured a human being.

In London, a circle of friends gathered round the family of the critic Leslie Stephen. After his death in 1904, his daughters Vanessa and Virginia moved with their brothers to the district of Bloomsbury. Friends such as Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf and the art critic Roger Fry joined their talk. The circle became known as the Bloomsbury Group.

Economic life

Behind the comfortable Edwardian picture lay hard poverty. In 1901 Seebohm Rowntree, the son of a York chocolate maker, studied the families of his home city and found that more than a quarter of its people did not earn enough for the plain necessities of life. His findings came as a shock because York was an ordinary provincial town, not a London slum.

The war then swallowed money as well as men. Old industries such as coal, shipbuilding and cotton lost foreign markets, and by 1921 more than a million people were out of work. In 1926 coal-mine owners tried to cut wages, and the miners refused. The Trades Union Congress called a General Strike, which began on 4 May and lasted nine days. The miners stayed out for months longer and lost.

In October 1929 share prices collapsed on the New York stock exchange in the Wall Street Crash, and the Great Depression followed. Early in 1933 close to three million people in Britain were jobless. The worst-hit places were in the north of England, Scotland and Wales, where whole towns lived on small payments called the dole.

Religion

Faith had been under pressure since the Victorian years, when Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and new methods of Bible study led many to doubt. The war pushed doubt further. How could a loving God allow such slaughter? Others looked at the old myths and rituals of the world.

The Scottish scholar James Frazer had compared religions across many lands in The Golden Bough, first published in 1890 and grown to twelve volumes by 1915. Frazer argued that Christian ideas had parallels in ancient rites of death and rebirth. Writers read him hungrily. T. S. Eliot, after years of searching, was baptised in the Church of England in 1927, and he later described himself as an Anglo-Catholic in religion.

Literature in this age

The language

A new century needed a new voice, and the voice most writers wanted was plainer and closer to speech. Poets now wanted the rhythm of a person talking, so many gave up regular rhyme and metre for free verse, which is shaped by the sense of the lines rather than a fixed pattern. Novelists let slang, dialect and half-finished sentences into their pages. J. M. Synge, who stayed on the Aran Islands off western Ireland, built his plays on the rhythms of the Irish English he heard there.

The war added a hard edge. Grand words such as glory and honour had been used to send young men to the trenches, and many who came back no longer trusted them. Poets like Wilfred Owen answered with plain, concrete words about mud, gas and fear. James Joyce went the other way and stretched the language almost to breaking. In Finnegans Wake (1939) he bent English into a dream language of puns and word-blends drawn from many tongues.

How the writing reached its readers

Experimental writers had a problem, since ordinary publishers wanted books that would sell. New work therefore often began in small magazines with small circles of readers. Harriet Monroe founded Poetry in Chicago in 1912, and it printed Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and many others. In 1922 Eliot began The Criterion, which he edited until 1939.

Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard bought a small hand printing press, and in 1917 they began the Hogarth Press in their home at Richmond. Fear of the law also shaped what appeared. D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow was seized by the police and ordered destroyed in 1915. At the other end of the market, cheap books arrived. Allen Lane launched the first Penguin paperbacks in 1935 at sixpence each, so that good books could be bought by people who had never owned many.

Poetry

Poetry at the start of the century still looked back to the Victorians. In 1912 the editor Edward Marsh began to gather new verse into the anthology Georgian Poetry, named for the new king, George V. Poets such as Walter de la Mare, John Masefield, W. H. Davies and Rupert Brooke wrote of fields, villages and gentle feeling in clear, easy language. When war came, Brooke's sonnets of 1914 spoke of dying for England as a noble gift. He died of blood poisoning on 23 April 1915, on his way to Gallipoli, and was buried on the Greek island of Skyros.

Thomas Hardy stood between the old century and the new. After the hostile reception of his novel Jude the Obscure in 1895 he had given up fiction and returned to poetry, his first love. His epic drama The Dynasts (1904-08) pictured the Napoleonic wars as a puppet show moved by an unfeeling force.

In Ireland, W. B. Yeats began as a dreamy poet of legend, drawing on old Irish tales in the manner called the Celtic Twilight. The Easter Rising of 1916 and the years of conflict that followed changed his voice. He wrote of the rebels in "Easter, 1916", and his later books, The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) and The Tower (1928), are harder and plainer, full of symbols he had worked out in his prose book A Vision (1925). He won the Nobel Prize in 1923.

Yeats also helped carry Indian writing to the English reader. In 1912 he wrote the introduction to Rabindranath Tagore's English Gitanjali, and in 1913 Tagore became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The war produced its own poetry. At first, many war poems were patriotic. As the fighting dragged on, soldiers began to write what they actually saw. Siegfried Sassoon, an officer awarded the Military Cross for bravery, wrote bitter poems about the trenches, and in 1917 he publicly protested against the way the war was being prolonged. Instead of punishing him, the army sent him to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh, where he met a younger officer, Wilfred Owen.

With Sassoon's encouragement, Owen wrote poems about gas, mud and the death of young men, among them "Dulce et Decorum Est". Owen returned to the front and was killed on 4 November 1918, a week before the Armistice. Only a handful of his poems had been printed in his lifetime, and Sassoon helped bring out a collection in 1920.

Meanwhile, in London, a young American named Ezra Pound wanted poetry to be made new. Pound loved short Japanese and Chinese poems that set one sharp picture before the reader. In 1912 and 1913, with the poets H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Richard Aldington, he launched Imagism. It asked for direct treatment of the subject, no word that does not help, and a rhythm that follows the musical phrase rather than the beat of a metronome.

One of Pound's friends was Thomas Stearns Eliot, born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888 and educated at Harvard. Eliot came to England in 1914 and stayed. Pound read his poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", admired it, and helped it into Poetry, which printed it in June 1915. It shows a timid middle-aged man who wishes to speak of love and never dares to. The speaker is hesitant, the images are ordinary, and the lines fall into loose, uneven rhythms.

In 1922 Eliot published The Waste Land, a poem of just over four hundred lines that became the best-known poem of the century. The war had left Europe exhausted, and many people felt cut off from the beliefs that once held society together. Drawing on Frazer's The Golden Bough and on Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance (1920), a study of the Grail legend, Eliot pictured a barren land waiting for rain.

The poem has five parts: "The Burial of the Dead", "A Game of Chess", "The Fire Sermon", "Death by Water" and "What the Thunder Said". It leaps between voices, places and languages, from London clerks to the blind prophet Tiresias, and it ends with the Sanskrit word shantih, meaning peace, repeated three times.

Pound had cut the first draft sharply, and Eliot dedicated the poem to him as the better craftsman, in words taken from Dante. The draft with Pound's marks was long thought lost. It turned up in the New York Public Library in 1968, and a facsimile edition appeared in 1971. Eliot's later poetry turned towards faith. After he joined the Church of England in 1927 he wrote Ash-Wednesday (1930), and in the war years he finished the four poems of Four Quartets, from "Burnt Norton" (1936) to "Little Gidding" (1942), gathered in one volume in 1943.

The 1930s brought a new group of poets. With unemployment and fascism rising, young men who had studied at Oxford turned their verse towards politics: W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice. Auden's first book, Poems (1930), was published by Faber and Faber, where Eliot was an editor. These poets took their images from factories, railway stations and electricity pylons, and they earned the nickname of the pylon poets.

Prose

The Edwardian novel carried on the Victorian habit of long, solid stories about society. H. G. Wells, who began with scientific romances, now wrote social comedies such as Tono-Bungay (1909). Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale (1908) followed two sisters through a lifetime in the pottery towns of Staffordshire, and John Galsworthy's The Man of Property (1906) opened the story of the Forsyte family. E. M. Forster later wrote A Passage to India (1924), which showed a friendship between an Englishman and an Indian failing under the weight of empire, after an accusation made in the Marabar Caves.

Virginia Woolf watched these writers with growing impatience. In her view, they spent too many pages on houses, incomes and railway timetables, and too few on the life inside a person's head. In her essay "Modern Fiction" (1919) she asked novelists to record the mind as it receives a shower of small impressions, whether or not they seem important. In "Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown" (1924) she imagined an old woman in a railway carriage and said that Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy would describe everything about her except what she was really like.

The tools for a new kind of novel were already at hand. The American psychologist William James had used the phrase "stream of consciousness" in 1890 for the unbroken flow of thought. Dorothy Richardson began her long novel sequence Pilgrimage in 1915, following the thoughts of one young woman, Miriam Henderson, and in 1918 the novelist May Sinclair applied James's phrase to that kind of writing.

James Joyce, born in Dublin, carried the method furthest. His stories in Dubliners (1914) often end in a sudden flash of understanding, which Joyce called an epiphany. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) follows Stephen Dedalus from childhood to the day he leaves Ireland. Then came Ulysses (1922), set on a single day, 16 June 1904, in Dublin. It follows Leopold Bloom, an advertising canvasser, the young Stephen Dedalus, and Bloom's wife Molly, and its eighteen episodes echo the adventures in Homer's Odyssey. It ends with Molly's thoughts running on almost without punctuation.

Woolf used the inward method in her own way. Mrs Dalloway (1925) covers one June day in London in 1923, moving between Clarissa Dalloway, who is preparing a party, and Septimus Smith, a soldier broken by the war. In A Room of One's Own (1929) she argued that a woman needs money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

D. H. Lawrence took another road, looking not at thought but at feeling and the body. Born to a Nottinghamshire miner, he wrote Sons and Lovers (1913) about a young man torn between his mother and the women he loves. His next novel, The Rainbow (1915), was seized as obscene. Lawrence believed that machine-driven life was starving human instincts, and Women in Love (published in 1920) and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) carry that belief. The latter could not be published in full in Britain until 1960.

In the 1920s and 1930s, fiction turned to satire and to politics. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) pictured a future in which people are kept happy by drugs and conditioning, and have no freedom. George Orwell, who had served as a policeman in Burma, lived among the poor in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), described the mining towns of northern England in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and told of his fighting in Spain in Homage to Catalonia (1938).

The war also produced memoirs. Robert Graves wrote of the trenches in Goodbye to All That (1929), and Vera Brittain told of a young woman's war in Testament of Youth (1933).

Drama

London theatre at the start of the century was built for comfortable audiences, with polite plays about love and money. George Bernard Shaw, an Irish-born writer who won the Nobel Prize in 1925, wanted the theatre to argue. His plays, often printed with long prefaces, set ideas in debate: wealth and war in Major Barbara (1905), class and speech in Pygmalion (1913), and the trial of a peasant girl who hears voices in Saint Joan (1923).

The liveliest drama came from Ireland. With money from the English patron Annie Horniman, W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory opened the Abbey Theatre in Dublin on 27 December 1904, to stage plays about Irish life by Irish writers.

Its dramatists included J. M. Synge, who wrote Riders to the Sea (1904), a short, tragic play about a fishing family and the sea. His comedy The Playboy of the Western World (1907) tells of a young man who boasts of killing his father and is hailed as a hero by the villagers. Some in the audience felt that Irish country people were being mocked, and riots broke out. Sean O'Casey brought the poor of Dublin's tenements to the Abbey stage in Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926). The second, which looks at the Easter Rising with harsh irony, also caused riots.

Poets turned to the stage too. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral (1935), first staged at Canterbury Cathedral for a festival, told in verse of the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in 1170. In prose drama, J. B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls (1945) brought the age to a close with a family dinner interrupted by a police inspector who shows that the comfortable are answerable for their treatment of the poor.

Criticism and scholarship

Before 1900 much English criticism was either chatty or moral in tone. A. C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) was a landmark of the new century, a careful study of Shakespeare's great tragedies that treated their heroes as living persons.

Then the poets themselves began to write criticism. Eliot's essays, gathered in The Sacred Wood (1920) and Selected Essays (1932), set the terms of debate. In "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) he argued that a poet must feel the weight of all earlier writing and that poetry is an escape from personal feeling, not an outpouring of it. In "Hamlet and His Problems" (1919) he put forward the objective correlative. In "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921) he claimed that thought and feeling had split in English poetry after the seventeenth century, and in a review of Ulysses in 1923 he named Joyce's use of myth the mythical method.

At Cambridge, I. A. Richards tried to turn criticism into a study of how readers actually respond. In Practical Criticism (1929) he gave students poems with the author and date removed and recorded their answers, which showed how often even clever readers went wrong. His student William Empson, in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), showed how a single line of verse can carry several meanings at once. F. R. Leavis, with others, founded the journal Scrutiny in 1932, and in New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) he praised Eliot and Pound as the poets who mattered.

Novelists became critics as well. Woolf's essays defended the new novel, and E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel (1927), based on lectures at Cambridge, explained the difference between flat and round characters.

How the age ends

The Second World War drew in the writers who had spent the 1930s warning of it, and it scattered or silenced many of them. Yeats died in France in January 1939, just before the war began. In the same month Auden and his friend Christopher Isherwood sailed for the United States, a move that was attacked in Britain as desertion. Joyce died in Zurich in January 1941, and Virginia Woolf died in March of that year.

In London, the Blitz began in September 1940, and night after night people sheltered in Underground stations while bombs fell. Eliot's Four Quartets, gathered in one volume in 1943, thinks about time, memory and faith, and its last section, "Little Gidding", draws on the fire and bombing of those years.

By 1945 the mood in Britain had changed. Voters wanted a fairer country, and the Labour government of Clement Attlee began to build the welfare state. In August, American atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered. The empire was weakening too. India, which had given Britain so many soldiers and readers, would become independent in 1947.

In literature, the age closed with a small book. George Orwell's Animal Farm, published on 17 August 1945, told how animals who drive out a cruel farmer are slowly ruled by their own pigs. It was a fable of the Russian Revolution and of the way power spoils those who seize it. Its clear, plain prose was the opposite of the great Modernist puzzles, and it pointed towards a literature that would speak more directly to ordinary readers.

Writers and works

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Sources

• Abrams, M. H., and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 11th ed. Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2015.
• Drabble, Margaret, ed. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Eliot, T. S. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen, 1920.
• Eliot, Valerie, ed. The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts. London: Faber and Faber, 1971.
• Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.
• Richards, I. A. Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment. London: Kegan Paul, 1929.
• Rowntree, B. Seebohm. Poverty: A Study of Town Life. London: Macmillan, 1901.
• Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Woolf, Virginia. Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. London: Hogarth Press, 1924.

Afsar Khan, Ph.D. English