The turning of a new century, coupled with the death of Victoria, confirmed the sense of entering a new era, with the cultural mix of apprehension and expectation which carried on until the First World War. In retrospect the Edwardian era is Janus-faced, at times complacent and assured, at others pervaded by a sense of questioning, preoccupation with problems, and at times a sense of crisis and longing for the stability and certainties of the high Victorian era. One useful index of these conflicting responses can be seen in the varied reactions to Victoria's death - "the removal of the great paperweight" as H G Wells described it, whereas others could only fear decline with the accession of the "Playboy prince". This sense of duality about the period, the mixture of optimism, trepidation and underlying crisis, can be forgotten, particularly given the resilience of those images of endless long hot summers and Country House parties, the upper class Edwardian England of L P Hartley's The Go-between , Isobel Colegate's The Shooting Party, or Philip Larkin's 'MCMXIV': "never such innocence again". Whilst there is a complacency and assuredness in some of the images of the period, a sense of entering a new era and being willing to embrace to remake the world, there is also disquiet that all of those Edwardian problems - the Woman Question, the Social Question, the Question of Empire, the Condition of England - may not be readily solved after all. The result is a fascinating intellectual pot-pourri of attitudes, hope and fears, expressed most fully in the novel and, to a lesser extent, in Drama.
Oedipal Revolt. Gosse's Father and Son, (or is it Father Against Son?), sets one Edwardian tone, the revolt against the Parent. The child figure, having grown up in the restricting atmosphere of Victorian puritanism strives now for liberation from the patriarchal heaviness, and seeks for an enlarged sense of spiritual growth - the "Soul's Awakening". This sense of an epochal challenging of the Parent, and all that they symbolise, takes on a wider cultural significance. In part it involves a replaying of the Dedalus/Icarus story, with a literal flying boy (such as Peter Pan) who refuses to grow old and assume the heavy responsibilities of the Parent. In a wider sense, the period's fascination with children and childhood could be seen in terms of this Icarus refusing to accept the authority of the given, particularly in moral and ethical issues, and to fly into uncharted territory. The open-ended narratives of Forster, Lawrence and Joyce continue this sense of questioning and moving out into new territory. In more prosaic terms one could simply note the prevalence of children and children's experience within the period - the fashion for stories of fairies, magic and the supernatural, or for light-hearted whimsy. Underlying all of these was a generational awareness of being children in revolt against the moral and social givens of the Father and Mother. There was also a religious dimension to this revolt as well, a new and enlarged sense of the "Soul" and of the "Self", struggling for realisation and shaking off the shackles of Victorian puritanism. Gosse's Father and Son is one example of this, and so too is Butler's posthumously published Way of All Flesh. In such texts there is irony, satire, straight debunking at times, accompanied by new discourses of personal authenticity and self-realisation.
The Question of England. It would be unfair to characterise Edwardian writing in terms of straight rebellion: even in Father and Son there is ambivalence in the portrayal of the Father, and a concern with continuity and inheritance. This is particularly clear in terms of the question of Britishness, or rather 'Englishness', within this period, what would the Edwardian present do with its inheritance from the Victorians, and how could it be protected from internal threats and external enemies? In part the Edwardian preoccupation with Englishness continues the late-Victorian ruralist sympathies, but amplified by fears of urbanisation and of "London". These fears of the effects of commercialisation and massification, expressed most lucidly in Forster's Howards End and The Longest Journey, are underwritten by a fear for a future without tradition and continuity and a Parent, where the only values are those dictated by the laws of profit and loss. Middle class Edwardian writing is shot through with an awareness of the “Social Question”, and an attempt to address, and even narratively “solve”, the social divisions and conflicts within England. Bennett, for example, brings a new socially realistic perspective to the world of the manufacturing North and Midlands, and Wells attempts to portray the world of the lower middle classes with accuracy and integrity. Liberal patrician novelists such as Galsworthy (notably The Island Pharisees) and Forster attempt to address the “Class problem” from the perspectives of both social justice and a warnings of the dangers of national disintegration and disharmony,
In terms of coming to terms with England it is noticeable how many writers of the period are preoccupied with localising and mythologising the nation as a whole into an image of the woman-centred family-centred home, whether as a welcome retreat for the weary colonialist, or as corrective to urge to travel abroad and acquire even more land and loot. In this renewed interest in the house and the home, and associating it with images of the nation as a whole, there is a sense of fear about losing or possibly already having lost an inheritance. One of the clearest expressions of this can be seen in Wells' Tono-Bungay, a long and expansive celebration of capitalist energy, yet it is prefaced by a lyrical description of the vanishing old England associated with Bladesover and the Edwardian Country House in general. This true England, the woman and family-centred citadel, is under attack and has to be defended or all would be lost. Toad Hall and Howards End are two inherited properties which have to be defended against such threats, and the wider cultural sense of unease about the national inheritance and its destiny can be seen throughout literature of the period. Behind it one can speculate that such fears are grounded in economic and political anxieties, about the emergence of globalisation and pan-European Capitalism, or about Britain's own military strengths. Such issues were, however, issues for grown-ups and had to be faced.
The Woman Question. The mixture of liberation and unease described above can also be seen in the ways that the period dealt with the "Woman Question", and to the mothers who become sisters. Male novels and plays such as Pygmalion, Anna of the Five Towns and Ann Veronica, show a new and liberated awareness regarding gender, sexuality and female emancipation, and also have a new and highly critical perspective on the bourgeois family as a prison and marriage as a form of penal servitude. Yet such male writers also bring uncertainty to these portraits - "a fear of freedom" - and, whilst espousing the intellectual justice of the suffragette cause, remain quietly uneasy about the "Lost Mother" and the vanishing matriarchal presence.
A New Renaissance. Issues of sexuality and gender were naturally the focus for this sense of a New Renaissance after the Victorian Middle Ages, and in intellectual circles we can see, amongst advanced liberal opinion, an eager and idealistic desire to embrace the new. W R Orage's 'The New Age' was an impressive arena for such opinion, which might include vegetarianism, spiritualism, political experimentalism, Socialism and Fabianism, the works of Nietzsche and Ibsen, as well as new thinking about love, marriage and the family. In many ways this can be seen as a continuation of the legacy of Edward Carpenter, as writers such as E M Forster and D H Lawrence developed Carpenter's ideas into the twentieth century. French culture was particularly significant in terms of its impact - Imagism, Symbolism, Futurism, and Post-Impressionism were some of the notable cultural imports within the period.
Fearing the Future? The deep-seated ambivalence within the period can be seen most clearly in popular literature, including range of novels concerned with spies, conspiracies and espionage which were so popular in the Edwardian period - The Riddle of the Sands, The Secret Agent, and The Man Who Was Thursday. For all the rich vein of Edwardian romancing of Hall Caine, Marie Corelli, Ouida and the flirtation with romance and danger, we do not have to go very far into the popular literature of the time to find a sense of disquiet and fear about the future.
Conflicting Styles. Overall sense of ‘transitionality’ between late-Victorian and early Modernism is evident from the range and diversity of literary styles, modes and experimentation within Edwardian literary texts. For novelists one clear issue is the extent to which classic Realism can be retained or adapted as a vehicle for social and literary expression. Novelists such as Wells and Bennett seek to develop the legacy of Dickens and Gissing, extending the Novel’s social range whilst retaining moral and humanist perspectives. Conrad’s writing, by contrast, introduces experimentalism in terms of narrative strategies, chronological dislocation, use of multiple points of view and density of narrative discourse to both express and create alternative modes of perception. The wider and diverse use of narrative modes and genres within the period is clearly evident in the fashion for allegory, fantasy, whimsy, romance, and children’s writing: this is also linked to new modes of seeing and interpretation across the arts – music, painting and sculpture – within the Edwardian period, and responses to continental European intellectual and cultural imports (e.g., post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910 and Woolf’s remark about the change of “Human Nature”.) Also noteworthy is the development of pre-Woolfian lyrical and subjectivist styles to render psychological and subterranean processes and new conceptualisation of the “Self” and competing elements within the self.
Conclusion: Poetry. English poetry within the period offers the clearest witness to the diversity and paradoxes I have suggested within the Edwardian Age. In retrospect we see the first signs of experimentalism which would flower into high modernism - in the Imagist verse of T E Hulme, or the early poetry of Ezra Pound or T S Eliot. But we can also see, within the period, the consolidation of the careers of Hardy and the pre-Georgians, poets who were very consciously seeking to carry on the concerns of the parent, and expressed much unease about the new post-Victorian order coming into being all around them.
Richard Dover
January 2007