Literature, Journalism, and the Vocabularies of Liberalism

Politics and Letters, 1886-1916

J. Macleod

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780230391475
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines the impact of the new liberalism on English literary discourse from the fin-de-siècle to World War One. It maps out an extensive network of journalists, men of letters and political theorists, showing how their shared political and literary vocabularies offer new readings of liberalism's relation to an emerging modernist culture.

1

Between Literature and Politics

The Massingham Network and the Institutions of Advanced Liberalism

The discourses that constituted literary culture for late Victorian and Edwardian writers and readers were formed and modified in multiple arenas of public discussion. These included publishing houses, traditional and avant-garde monthly periodicals, the weekly and daily press, literary lunches, literary circles and their concomitant soirées and at-homes, and the vast array of lectures and debates put on in Settlements, ethical societies, and the University Extension Movement. These arenas were largely urban, and, in the case of the metropolis, the participants either knew each other personally or by reputation. Even humble readers of newspapers were notionally drawn into this sense of a continuing, dynamic – and often heated – public conversation.

This public conversation was a crucial part of what Pierre Bourdieu has described as ‘the progressive invention of a particular social game, which I term the literary field’.¹ Bourdieu argues that by the late nineteenth century, the literary field had become ‘relatively autonomous’, in so far as ‘the evolution of the different fields of cultural production towards a greater autonomy is accompanied by a sort of reflective and critical return by the producers upon their own production, a return which leads them to draw from it the field’s own principle and specific presuppositions’.² The rapid increase of English literary histories and concomitant series such as English Men of Letters, the beginnings of the profession of English Studies together with widespread publication of ‘How to Read’ primers, and the emergence of aestheticism and other literary self-reflexive forms of early modernism all speak of this process towards the relative autonomy of the field at this time. The emphasis in modern scholarship on late Victorian to Georgian literary periodicals, small magazines, and avant-garde groups reinforces this picture of the literary field at the turn of the century, as does more recent work on the systems of classification that structured the field.³

For many of the participants in the constitution of late Victorian and Edwardian literary culture, however, this very public conversation was also one about social and political progress. For those at the advanced end of the liberal spectrum, what bound the conversations together was an enabling mechanism of networks and institutions that cut across the separation of literary culture from politics. These networks were created in the first instance through various clubs and societies, where members discussed and debated the pressing issues of the day. As I note in the Introduction, some of the most important of these included the Bedford Debating Society and the Fellowship of the New Life (both started in the early 1880s) and the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom and the Irish Literary Society (both started in the early 1890s). More overtly literary societies such as the Shelley Society and the Browning Society (both were established in the 1880s), although home to a wide range of political opinions, were also sites of discussion about the relationships between radical politics and literary culture. Later societies, such as the Rainbow Circle (started in the mid-1890s), the International Arbitration and Peace Association, the Peace Council, the South Africa Conciliation Committee, and the League of Liberals against Aggression and Militarism, were also key meeting places for progressive liberals.

Societies of this kind operated very differently from the clubs that constituted Clubland, although many of their members were also members of clubs such as the Reform and the National Liberal.⁴ The Athenæum and the Savile, the two foremost clubs for members of the intellectual and cultural aristocracy, were highly restrictive (though the latter did include many well-known authors, editors and proprietors),⁵ but for journalists and authors on the make, numerous other clubs were available in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.⁶ The lunches, dinners, and private rooms offered by the clubs provided opportunities for discussion and debate as is clear from the memoirs of late Victorian and Edwardian men of letters and they played a significant role in the circulation of ideas at the time. However, their primary function was fellowship (and in the case of the Athenæum, the Savile, and the Reform, the conferring of social and/or cultural status), whereas the societies noted above had primarily an intellectual focus.

Take the Bedford Debating Society, for instance, which Stopford Brooke established in 1882.⁷ Brooke’s preaching had been famous since the early 1870s, and he became even more popular as he became more unorthodox towards the end of the decade. According to John Sutherland, by the early 1880s

[a]s many as 600 crammed in to hear him on Sunday mornings. His sermons were tours de force and notoriously wide-ranging; he was as likely to talk about the beauties of Shakespeare or the latest strike of gutta percha workers as the gospel. He was known as something of a socialist, which did him no harm in Bloomsbury.⁸

Named after the Bedford Chapel in Bloomsbury, where Brooke preached, the Debating Society met on the second and fourth Thursday of the month. ‘Those were the days of early Socialism when a new heaven and a new earth were expected next week’, wrote Charles Wright, the secretary of the Society, to Lawrence Jacks, Brooke’s son-in-law and first biographer, ‘the protagonists in deadly earnest taking gloomy views of each other’s character’.⁹ Here Brooke gathered around him a collection of ‘the clever men of the day’,¹⁰ including Bernard Shaw, William Clarke, William Morris, Michael Davitt, John Muirhead and Sidney Webb, espousing and debating advanced social, cultural and political ideas.

Although there was a great deal of overlap across the various societies, there were also significant differences in the ways they functioned in promoting advanced thought. The differences between the Bedford, on the one hand, and the Shelley and Browning Societies, on the other hand, show something of this volatility. The two literary societies, both begun by that indefatigable starter of societies, F. J. Furnivall, operated as ‘private’ societies, presenting poetry readings and producing plays in theatrical at-homes to circumvent censorship by the Lord Chamberlain. They engaged in extensive publishing ventures and acted as sites for ‘devout, earnest, middle-class people, often with evangelical leanings’¹¹ to use literature to grapple with a range of spiritual and ethical dilemmas. Bernard Shaw, for example, was elected to the Bedford and the Browning in 1883 (the latter, according to Michael Holroyd, ‘by mistake’) and the Shelley in 1885.¹² His view of Shelley as a ‘Republican, a Leveller, a Radical of the most extreme type’ sat uneasily with his perception of a Society that presented him as ‘a Church of England country gentleman whose pastime was writing sermons in verse’.¹³ However, the situation was a little more complicated than that, as the brouhaha surrounding the competing Shelley centennial celebrations in August 1892 reveals. Writing to Stanley Little on 25 July, Shaw considered that the celebration to be chaired by Edmund Gosse at Horsham would be ‘simply a conspiracy to persuade silly Sussexers that Shelley was a model Churchman & country gentleman who attained great distinction in literature’. Shaw attended the celebration, held on 4 August, and reported savagely on it later that evening at the ‘radical’ Shelley gathering at the Hall of Science in London, chaired by F. J. Furnivall.¹⁴ The point is that societies such as the Shelley and the Browning were heterogeneous in membership, throwing together people with quite diverse political, cultural and social views who consequently had quite distinct positions on writers who were of shared interest. While many of the members might have been both politically and culturally conservative, this only served to reinforce the more progressive views of others and to provide occasions for them to be in dialogue about the intersections of culture and politics.

The detailed and variable functioning of literary and more overtly political societies created opportunities for the development of progressive networks in the cultural sphere from the 1880s through to World War I. Randall Collins has nicely illustrated the crucial role played by networks of this kind in the social structure of intellectual life. By starting from the relatively uncontroversial claim that ‘ideas are in the process of communication between one thinker and another … [t]here is no thinking except as aftermath or preparation of communication’, Collins argues that ‘it is the inner structure of … intellectual networks which shapes ideas, by their patterns of vertical chains across the generations and their horizontal alliances and oppositions’. He goes on to analyze the constructive function of networks in terms of three axes: master–pupil chains; intellectual groups; and contemporaneous rivalries. Around these three axes he analyzes the processes that operate in the interactive rituals that constitute networks:

One is the passing of cultural capital, of ideas and the sense of what to do with them; another is the transfer of emotional energy, both from the exemplars of previous successes and from contemporaneous buildup in the cauldron of a group; the third involves the structural sense of intellectual possibilities, especially rivalrous ones.¹⁵

Collins is interested in explaining how significant philosophers come to be significant philosophers, in the conditions that shape their original and creative ideas. His principal argument is that it is their position in the network that provides them with their ‘opportunity structure’: the closer they are to the centre of the network, the greater the transference of cultural capital, the higher the emotional energy derived from network interactions, and the clearer their sense of opposing arguments (and therefore of spaces for their own productions). The ones who become significant are those who fill the limited number of ‘attention slots’ available.¹⁶ Networks, we could say, function as enabling conditions for intellectual production.

Collins’s project in The Sociology of Philosophies is not without its critics,¹⁷ and in any case is concerned primarily with the shape and function of networks as sociological phenomena. My interest here lies in these networks’ significance for analyzing the intellectual structure of advanced liberalism in the cultural sphere. Late Victorian and Edwardian liberalism was not a single culture, but neither was it simply a divided culture (though certainly it was that). Rather, it was a competitive culture where individuals located themselves and their ideas in relation to other individuals and ideas.¹⁸ This is not the same as saying that members of networks influence other members. Of course they do; but measuring influence is a limited – and limiting – undertaking. The suggestion here is that new discourses (such as the new liberalism) emerged because of the productive or enabling conditions provided to individuals by their location within networks and across intersecting networks. In what follows, I explore the conditions in which the Massingham network emerged as the most significant grouping in advanced liberal thought at the time.

The Massingham network formed around the Star in the late 1880s, expanded in the 1890s around the Daily Chronicle, and became a central formation in Edwardian literary culture with the radicalization of the Daily News in 1902 and the creation of the Nation in 1907. I am calling it the Massingham network after Henry Massingham, the editor at various points of each of the Star, the Daily Chronicle, and the Nation, as well as working on the Daily News under A. G. Gardiner between the loss of the Daily Chronicle to the Liberal Imperialists during the Boer War (1899–1902) and the creation of the Nation. Massingham, though never an intellectual leader, became its organizational focal point, a position attained not only by virtue of his own capacities, but also because of his editorial roles on the Star, Chronicle and Nation. Massingham’s papers and Gardiner’s Daily News provided highly regarded publication outlets for political and literary members of the network, but just as significant, they acted as magnets, attracting new members to it. The collision of ideas and attitudes, and the energy they generated, all helped to shape those ideas and attitudes. As Collins puts it, ‘idea ingredients can always be combined in various ways; it is the surrounding institutional context that motivates which selections will dominate’.¹⁹

Forming the network: The Star years, 1886–1891

In the years immediately following 1886, the Liberal Party was deeply divided over Gladstone’s commitment to Home Rule. The London daily press was largely pro-Unionist, and in an attempt to redress the balance, the Parnellite MP, T. P. O’Connor, approached a group of wealthy Liberals to back a Home Rule evening paper. These included John Brunner, the Lancastrian chemicals magnate, Jeremiah Colman, the Norwich mustard maker, Colman’s son-in-law James Stuart, a professor at Cambridge, John Whitehead, the Lord Mayor of London and John Morley. Apart from Whitehead, all were Liberal MPs. The result was the Star, and when the first edition of the paper came out in mid-January 1888, it was an immediate success, with sales of over 140,000. O’Connor himself had limited editorial experience and abilities. As he put it in his Memoirs:

I was as innocent as a babe at the time of all things connected with finance or with companies; I didn’t realise the importance of getting together a board that might be relied upon to deal in a friendly spirit with me ... In addition to my many other disqualifications, and though I had already been nearly a quarter of a century in journalism and had done all kinds of work, from the description of executions to the manufacture of articles on old prize fights, my experience in many respects wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Advanced Liberalism, Journalism and Literary Culture
• 1 Between Literature and Politics: The Massingham Network and the Institutions of Advanced Liberalism
• 2 The ‘Self-Conscious Evolution of Humanity’: Advanced Liberalism and the Politics and Culture of ‘Life’
• 3 Advanced Liberalism and the Cultural Value of ‘Life’: Ethics, Aesthetics and Political Economy
• 4 Writing the East End: Advanced Liberalism, Realism and Social Reform
• 5 Contesting the New: Advanced Liberalism and the Emergence of Modernism
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index