Literature of the 1900s: The Great Edwardian Emporium 9780748635085

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Literature of the 1900s

The Edinburgh History of Twentieth-Century Literature in Britain General Editor: Randall Stevenson Published: Vol. 1 Literature of the 1900s: The Great Edwardian Emporium Jonathan Wild Vol. 3 Literature of the 1920s: Writers Among the Ruins Chris Baldick Vol. 5 Literature of the 1940s: War, Postwar and ‘Peace’ Gill Plain Vol. 6 Literature of the 1950s: Good, Brave Causes Alice Ferrebe Vol. 9 Literature of the 1980s: After the Watershed Joseph Brooker Forthcoming: Vol. 4 Literature of the 1930s: Border Country Rod Mengham Vol. 8 Literature of the 1970s: Things Fall Apart, Again Simon Malpas Vol. 10 Literature of the 1990s: The Long Devolution Peter Marks

Literature of the 1900s The Great Edwardian Emporium

Jonathan Wild

For Michelle

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cuttingedge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information, visit our website: www.euppublishing.com © Jonathan Wild, 2017 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3506 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 3508 5 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 1953 6 (epub) The right of Jonathan Wild to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Published with the support of the University of Edinburgh Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund.

Contents

Illustrationsvi Acknowledgements vii General Editor’s Preface ix Introduction 1 1 Department of War and External Affairs: The Anglo-Boer War and Imperialism 11 2 Department of Administration: Office Clerks and Shop Assistants 43 3 Children’s Department: Edwardian Children’s Literature 83 4 Department of Decadence: Sex, Cars and Money 111 5 Department of Internal Affairs: England and the Countryside 151 Afterword 185 Works Cited 187 Index  202

Illustrations

1 Advertisement announcing the opening of Selfridge’s in 1909 2 2 Front cover of A. St John Adcock’s In the Wake of the War (1900) 17

Acknowledgements

I began the research for this book in 2007, and since that time a great number of individuals have helped me to get to grips with the literature of the Edwardian decade. These include four people who have read over and commented on the whole manuscript: Randall Stevenson, who proved an unfailingly generous, robust and companionable editor; Owen Dudley Edwards, whose remarkable knowledge of the period’s popular literature enriched my understanding of the era; Alexandra Lawrie, a tireless, good-humoured, and acute reader of numerous drafts; and Michelle Keown, always the most eagle-eyed of proof readers, and an endless source of encouragement and support in professional and domestic spheres. I am equally grateful to the Department of English Literature/School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures for granting me periods of sabbatical leave to undertake research for this project. My friends and colleagues at Edinburgh, in particular James Loxley, Lee Spinks and Andy Taylor, have proved entertaining and stimulating company during the long gestation of this work. A necessarily selective list of others who have helped in various ways with this book includes Joe Bray, Keith Carabine, John Carey, Sarah Carpenter, Penny Fielding, Thea Fisher, Mary Grover, Faye Hammill, Mike Irwin, Laura Marcus, David McClay, Mark Nixon, Adam Reed, Jonathan Rose, Shari Sabeti, Roger Savage, John Shapcott, Anna Vaninskaya, and the committee and members of the Edwardian Culture Network. Much of the research for this book has relied upon materials at the University of Edinburgh Library and the National Library of Scotland, and I have greatly appreciated the diligence and professionalism of staff at both institutions; and thanks as well to the National Library of Scotland and to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London for permission to reproduce images from their collections. I also owe a great debt of gratitude to those undergraduate students who have taken my Edwardian Literature course, ‘The Long Summer’ – I’ve really appreciated having the chance

­viii     Acknowledgements to discuss Edwardian texts with such a talented and engaging bunch of people. At Edinburgh University Press, my particular thanks go to my Commissioning Editor, Jackie Jones, for her patience and forbearance, and Adela Rauchova for helping in the final stages of production. Finally, I’m greatly indebted to my late mother, Dorothea Wild, whose unfailing interest in my work remains a continuing source of inspiration, and to my children, Nicholas and Antonia, for offering me the ideal distraction from matters Edwardian.

General Editor’s Preface

One decade is covered by each of the ten volumes in The Edinburgh History of Twentieth-Century Literature in Britain series. Individual volumes may argue that theirs is the decade of the century. The series as a whole considers the twentieth century as the century of decades. All eras are changeful, but the pace of change has itself steadily accelerated throughout modern history, and never more swiftly than under the pressures of political crises and of new technologies and media in the twentieth century. Ideas, styles and outlooks came into dominance, and were then displaced, in more and more rapid succession, characterising everbriefer periods, sharply separated from predecessors and successors. Time-spans appropriate to literary or cultural history shortened correspondingly, and on account not only of change itself, but its effect on perception. How distant, for example, that tranquil, sunlit, Edwardian decade already seemed, even ten years later, after the First World War, at the start of the twenties. And how essential, too, to the self-definition of that restless decade, and later ones, that the years 1900–1910 should seem tranquil and sunlit – as a convenient contrast, not necessarily based altogether firmly on ways the Edwardians may have thought of themselves. A need to secure the past in this way – for clarity and definition in changeful times – encourages views of earlier decades almost as a hand of familiar, well-differentiated cards, dealt out, one by one, by prior times to the present one. These no longer offer pictures of kings and queens: King Edward VII, at the start of the century, or, briefly, George V, were the last monarchs to give their names to an age. Instead, the cards are marked all the more clearly by image and number, as ‘the Twenties’, ‘the Thirties’, ‘the Forties’ and so on. History itself often seems to join in the game, with so many epochal dates – 1918, 1929, 1939, 1968, 1979, 1989, 2001 – approximating to the end of decades. By the end of the century, decade divisions had at any rate become a firmly established habit, even a necessity, for cultural understanding and

­x     General Editor’s Preface analysis. They offer much virtue, and opportunity, to the present series. Concentration within firm temporal boundaries gives each volume further scope to range geographically – to explore the literary production and shifting mutual influences of nations, regions and minorities within a less and less surely ‘United’ Kingdom. Attention to film and broadcasting allows individual volumes to reflect another key aspect of literature’s rapidly changing role throughout the century. In its early years, writing and publishing remained almost the only media for imagination, but by the end of the century, they were hugely challenged by competition from new technologies. Changes of this kind were accompanied by wide divergences in ways that the literary was conceived and studied. The shifting emphases of literary criticism, at various stages of the century, are also considered throughout the series. Above all, though, the series’ decade-divisions promote productive, sharply-focused literary-historical analysis. Ezra Pound’s celebrated definition of literature, as ‘news that stays news’, helps emphasise the advantages. It is easy enough to work with the second part of Pound’s equation: to explain the continuing appeal of literature from the past. It is harder to recover what made a literary work news in the first place, or, crucially for literary history, to establish just how it related to the news of its day – how it digested, evaded or sublimated pressures bearing on its author’s imagination at the time. Concentration on individual decades facilitates attention to this ‘news’. It helps recover the brisk, chill feel of the day, as authors stepped out to buy their morning newspapers – the immediate, actual climate of their time, as well as the tranquillity, sunshine or cloud ascribed to it in later commentary. Close concentration on individual periods can also renew attention to writing that did not stay news – to works that, significantly, pleased contemporary readers and reviewers, and might repay careful re-reading by later critics. In its later years, critics of twentieth-century writing sometimes concentrated more on characterising than periodising the literature they surveyed, usually under the rubrics of modernism or postmodernism. No decade is an island, entire of itself, and volumes in the series consider, where appropriate, broader movements and influences of this kind, stretching beyond their allotted periods. Each volume also offers, of course, a fuller picture of the writing of its times than necessarily selective studies of modernism and postmodernism can provide. Modernism and postmodernism, moreover, are thoroughly specific in their historical origins and development, and the nature of each can be usefully illumined by the close, detailed analyses the series provides. Changeful, tumultuous and challenging, history in the twentieth-century perhaps pressed harder and more variously on literary imagination than ever

General Editor’s Preface     xi

before, requiring a literary history correspondingly meticulous, flexible and multifocal. This is what The Edinburgh History of TwentiethCentury Literature in Britain provides. The idea for the series originated with Jackie Jones at Edinburgh University Press, and all involved are grateful for her vision and guidance, and for support from the Press, at every stage throughout. Randall Stevenson University of Edinburgh

Introduction

In the introduction to an edited collection of essays that appeared in the final decade of the twentieth century entitled Seeing Double: Revisioning Edwardian and Modernist Literature (1996), Carola M. Kaplan and Anne B. Simpson reassessed the writing of the early years of that century. This re-examination was necessary, they argued, because critics over the course of the twentieth century had consistently and wilfully undervalued Edwardian literature. Starting from the outbreak of the First World War, influential literary critics had declared it a ‘truism to assert that the culture immediately preceding the chaos had offered an idyllic interval for a mindless British populace’. The legacy of this persuasive ‘truism’, Kaplan and Simpson continued, ensured that those Edwardian writers who in their day ‘had been highly respected and widely read’ had subsequently become ‘grouped together’ in an undifferentiated mass, ‘their differences and disagreements forgotten’ (Kaplan and Simpson 1996: viii). It is only in recent years that this disregard of the period’s literary culture has shown signs of revision. Increasing academic interest in areas such as book history, popular and middlebrow literature, and a more general desire to extend and deepen our understanding of the twentieth century beyond an exclusive group of canonical texts, have all encouraged a revaluation of neglected Edwardian writing; the increasing proliferation of digital sources in recent years has offered scholars the perfect platform from which to undertake original research on often long outof-print texts. The key aim of my work is to provide an understanding of what Edwardian literature in its various forms meant to the Edwardians themselves – following Kaplan and Simpson’s lead, to try to understand those ‘differences and disagreements’ that made the period’s writing so lively and variegated in its contemporary moment. To achieve this aim, I have attempted in the ensuing chapters to give a sense of the excitement, tension, frustration, wonder and pleasure generated by novels, plays, poems and essays in their original contexts. Equipped with a nuanced

­2     Literature of the 1900s understanding of the significance of these texts to their producers and consumers, we are better prepared to assess what this literary culture might signify to us as its inheritors in the twenty-first century. The subtitle of this book, The Great Edwardian Emporium, identifies a key element in its design. Like those vast new department stores which epitomised the thrill of modernity for Edwardian shoppers, the period’s

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