Writing disenchantment: British First World War prose, 1914–30

By Andrew Frayn

It has become axiomatic that First World War literature was disenchanted, or disillusioned, and returning combatants were unable to process or communicate that experience. In Writing disenchantment, Andrew Frayn argues that this was not just about the war: non-combatants were just as disenchanted as those who fought, and writers such as D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf produced some of the sharpest criticisms. Its language already existed in contemporary sociological and historical accounts of the problems of mass culture and the modern city, whose structures contained the conflict and were strengthened during it.

Archival material, sales data and reviews are used to chart disenchantment in a wide range of early twentieth-century war literature from novels about fears of invasion and pacifism, through the modernist novels of the 1920s to its dominance in the War Books Boom of 1928–30. This book will appeal to scholars and students of English literature, social and cultural history, and gender studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781526103185

Andrew Frayn

Andrew Frayn has taught English Literature at the universities of Manchester, Salford and Central Lancashire and De Montfort University

Book preview

Introduction

In Alaska there is a place called Disenchantment Bay. At its head is the Hubbard Glacier, the largest tidewater glacier on the continent of North America and, by anyone’s standards, a wonder of nature. It stretches around seventy-five miles from its source in the Yukon, grows year on year, and regularly calves icebergs the size of a small tower block. However, Alejandro Malaspina despaired on sighting it. His mission for the Spanish government was to map the Gulf of Alaska and find the fabled Northwest Passage. Sailing through Yakutat Bay in 1792 he thought he had found it as the bay continued to narrow and progress inland; his hopes were dashed when he found a giant wall of ice blocking his progress some ten miles later. In the face of this spectacular wilderness, a geological marvel, he named it Puerto del Desengaño – Disenchantment Bay. To Malaspina it was a sign only of dashed hopes. Disenchantment is felt at the inability to achieve a prized objective; it is the failure of experience to live up to previous ideals and beliefs.

Disenchantment is often associated with the literature that followed the First World War. This book defines the term and examines how it became the dominant memory of the conflict. Disenchantment existed long before the War Books Boom of 1928–30, and C. E. Montague’s 1922 prose response to the war takes the term as its title. As an early and influential literary usage I prefer this term throughout.¹ It is often invoked but rarely defined, and the eminent historian Gary Sheffield asserts that ‘Disillusionment is capable of such wide interpretation as to become almost meaningless as a concept. What, for instance, is to be made of men disenchanted with post-war life who looked back at the war years through a rosy glow, as the pinnacle of their life?’² The concept is certainly malleable, but deserves rigorous definition due to its endurance in popular and academic discussions. I argue that the fond recollection of war years and post-war disenchantment are necessarily interlinked. Disenchantment is produced in industrial modernity by the social and cultural interactions between the traditional enchantments of faith and the modern enchantments of science, its practices and procedures. First World War literature represents an extreme form of technological rationalism, and its uneasy negotiation with established worldviews.

War was contiguous with modern life, and to understand its literature we must engage with the ways it intervenes in contemporary debates. Disenchantment exists before the First World War, continues during it, and endures following it. It does not appear in an instant following the Somme or the Armistice, the Treaty of Versailles or the failure to build a ‘fit country for heroes to live in’, the General Strike of 1926 or the literary precedents of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End. A long cultural context of writing across disciplines about decay, decline and degeneration, uncertainties and fears of invasion must be taken into account, along with the enchantments which were questioned, some believed shattered irrevocably, by the conflict. There was no pre-war idyll, and the language used to describe disenchantments before the war is mobilised in response to the conflict.³ It was not, as Edith Wharton’s novel would have it, The Age of Innocence (1920) which was torn asunder by the experience of the war.⁴ The summer of 1914 was unusually warm, but only a privileged few had the leisure to enjoy those conditions: it was not all jumpers slung over shoulders and riverside picnics. The American philosopher Edgar Saltus had written in 1885 that:

history and experience [… are] quite competent to prove that this world is far from being the best one possible. If neither of them succeeds in so doing, then let him wander through the hospitals, the cholera slums, the operating-rooms of the surgeon, the prisons, the torture-chambers, the slave-kennels, the battlefields, or any one of the numberless haunts of nameless misery; or, if all of these are too far, or too inconvenient, let him take a turn into one of the many factories where men and women, and even infants, work from ten to fourteen hours a day at mechanical labor, simply that they may continue to enjoy the exquisite delight of living.⁵

The impact of the First World War is often characterised as a rupture, but there is no wholesale change to material conditions.⁶ Early post-war commentators noted that factors contributing to unrest had been apparent before 1914, such as the failure of wage increases to match inflation.⁷ However, the war becomes a focus for disenchantment: non-combatants also wrote disenchanted war books. I examine how the language of social inequality finds a focus in First World War fiction. As Michael Saler states, intellectuals and elite groups ‘have enchanted themselves with the spell of disenchantment, but that spell appears to be breaking, leaving a specifically modern, disenchanted enchantment in its wake’.⁸ Disenchantment is highly visible in literature, not only the highbrow and canonical. It is negotiated differently in popular fiction, which I keep in mind throughout this volume.

I led into Sheffield’s observation about disillusionment with my own title term. The two are usually synonymous, but I posit that there is a qualitative difference. Deceit and falsehood are always present in illusion; there is no positive valence. Think, for example, of the gloriously inept magician G. O. B. in the US television series Arrested Development, and his repeated assertion that he performs not tricks, but illusions. In contrast, at the moment of enchantment the belief object is endorsed profoundly. Disenchantment and instability did not characterise the pre-war world, and there were improvements to the social fabric: the Old Age Pension was introduced in 1909 and National Insurance in 1911. People went to war for manifold reasons – social pressure, schoolboyish fantasies, compulsion, even money. But many enlisted to defend their country and its values, which did not seem illusory. Those values had physical form in the land itself and the monarch, who represented the army, the nation and the church: God was the ultimate authority. A religious education in a worshipful society was shared by most troops, even if they had ceased to believe in its consolations.⁹ In our sceptical society it is hard to believe that such strongly-felt enchantments could have preceded post-war disenchantments. However, that strength precipitates an almost inversely proportional response.

To demonstrate the ways in which contemporaries responded to war and modernity, this volume pays attention to early twentieth-century commentators and theorists as much as recent critics and historians. Concerns about racial decline and degeneration were bound up in European imperialism. National values needed to be asserted across borders and loyalty to the metropolitan centre had to be ensured. In Britain reform was prominent, as social theorists sought to reconcile the extreme poverty of working-class urban life with the very modern enchantment of progress, particularly in science and technology. Misinterpretations of Charles Darwin’s theories problematised these debates: from as early as 1880, critics had to point out that this is not the fittest as an absolute, but the fittest for purpose in the current environment.¹⁰ Adaptation is not necessarily advancement, and can often lead to degeneration as the functionality of useful tasks is prioritised. The power of science was feared as well as lauded: progress carried with it trepidation about radical change. Even a progressive thinker such as the socialist and suffragist Cicely Hamilton, discussed in Chapter 2, worried that ‘if and when civilisation comes to its ruin, the destructive agent will be science; man’s knowledge of science applied to warfare, meaning slaughter not only of human bodies but of human institutions, of all we have created through the centuries.’¹¹ The most extreme German critics, such as Oswald Spengler, feared for civilisation as a whole. Such works are invoked throughout to emphasise that this is a language of the time, not simply a response to the war.

Disenchantment, the First World War, and literary studies

Following a brief initial burst of work about the War Books Boom at its end, which I discuss in the conclusion, the early work on English First World War literature was Bernard Bergonzi’s 1965 Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War. In 1996 Bergonzi looked back at his work on revising it for the second time and realised some of its limitations. He surveys acutely important works such as Modris Eksteins’ Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age and Elizabeth A. Marsland’s The Nation’s Cause: French, English and German Poetry of the First World War. Bergonzi focuses on canonical authors, particularly soldier-poets, and both he and Paul Fussell make a compelling claim for the literariness of the First World War. It was understood by recourse to the literary canon, and Shakespeare’s Henry V was regularly invoked.¹² However, that aspect is over-emphasised by the focus of both critics on officer-poets,¹³ which perpetuates that impression. Fussell assesses the literary world before the war: ‘One read Hardy and Kipling and Conrad and frequented worlds of traditional moral action delineated in traditional moral language. […] One lolled outside on a folding canvas chaise, or swam, or walked in the countryside. One read outdoors, went on picnics, had tea served from a white wicker table under the trees.’¹⁴ This begs the question: who is Fussell’s ‘one’? It is not an every(wo)man, but a highly educated, cultured, and often leisured man.¹⁵ Women and working-class writers are excluded. Samuel Hynes’s A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture has a much wider range, but still misses significant popular and middlebrow authors such as Gilbert Frankau and R. H. Mottram, and offers little detailed engagement with women novelists. These accessible analyses of First World War literature carry enduring weight, Fussell particularly, but here I look outside their canon.

Bergonzi, Fussell, and Hynes all either implicitly or explicitly state a model of rupture. The start of the war was written as rupture, but I argue that the depiction as rupture was just that: life continued. The war was quickly represented as a watershed, particularly an artistic watershed. Fussell and Bergonzi see war literature as a discrete category, but neither material conditions nor modes of representation change so quickly or dramatically. These critics appreciate the ways memory shapes narrative, but do not parse effectively the crystallisation of literary disenchantment in the post-war decade. More recent critics take a less stratified view, making links with other forms. Holger Klein’s edited collection The First World War in Fiction discusses a wide range of texts, resisting synthesis and favouring instead subtle comparison by collecting essays on adjacent subjects. In the last twenty years, critics such as Allyson Booth, Trudi Tate, Vincent Sherry and Mark D. Larabee have reintroduced the war and post-war literature to a fuller historical context. The war did not occasion a break in the development of modernist and avant-garde literature. In Modernism, History and the First World War, Tate compares British, American and European literature and their contexts, while Booth, in Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space Between Modernism and the First World War specifically examines depictions of the military in civilian texts. This problematically suggests that modernism is separate from war experience, and Sherry points out that neither work defines ‘modernism’.¹⁶ I adopt Sherry’s view that modernism is a counterculture of modernity. He argues that the ‘grammar and vocabulary through which the war was constructed in political Britain, in particular, represent an idiom whose coherence reaches deep into the major traditions of intellectual liberalism and, in its disturbance, opens into an equally profound range of resonance and implication’.¹⁷ That continuity underpins this study, but I analyse a very different range of literature to demonstrate the ways in which popular, middlebrow and modernist texts about the war by men and women, civilians, combatants and others use existing language to discuss the conflict. Linguistic, historical, philosophical and material continuities mean that the model of rupture cannot hold.

Few critics have tried to define disenchantment; none has engaged with the idea at length. Klein identifies several categories: disillusionment, alienation, works of despair, endurance, renewal, heroism, meliorism, and the paradoxical detachment from and embrace of ‘a new age of automated violence’.¹⁸ The military historian Brian Bond has examined Montague and disenchanted literature in several works, and criticises his lack of objectivity.¹⁹ This, for me, misses the point: my interest is in how disenchantment comes to represent First World War experience. The most extensive treatment of disillusionment is by Eric Leed in No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I. He charts the impact of military service on the individual, and argues that: ‘War experience was nothing if not an experience of radical discontinuity on every level of consciousness.’²⁰ The characterisation of change as disconnection is problematic: it can only be meaningful in relation to what has gone before. Leed later describes the ‘crushing normality of industrialized war’, but does not see it in terms of the existing industrialised world.²¹ He links disillusionment with rupture, and the failure of military service to provide an escape from the industry and technology of daily life. Disillusionment results from modernity, but Leed sees ‘the disillusionment of the volunteer as […] a militarized proletarianization, a process in which they lost a social self they didn’t know they possessed’.²² Disillusionment is the realisation of being trapped in the ideologies of the modern and modernising world that comes directly from war.²³ It is, for Leed, a loss of both social and spiritual status precipitated by the realisation by the officer class of material realities to which the working class was already accustomed. This is partly true, but Leed’s model of rupture does not account for the endurance of the spiritual much later than he supposes: industrial modernity co-existed effectively with religion and high idealism. Leed’s viewpoint contrasts with Janet S. K. Watson, who argues that it ‘was only the difficulties of the 1920s and after that created the disillusioned look back at war; it was not, for most people, a product of the war years themselves’.²⁴ Peter Buitenhuis, Modris Eksteins and Benjamin F. Martin all see disillusionment as a post-war phenomenon.²⁵

The most convincing evocation of enchantment and disenchantment is by Sarah Cole, who in a 2009 article sees these ideas in relation to theories of violence, ‘not a passive recognition of spiritual flatness, but the active stripping away of idealizing principles’.²⁶ Both have their own literary traditions. Cole’s compelling investigation, which sees disenchantment in terms of theories of violence, covers a variety of nations and looks as far forward as Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938). For me, disenchantment is not solely attributable to the war years or the 1920s. It is a product of social conditions which were already ingrained. The language of disenchantment that exists before the war gives authors the means to criticise it, and that disenchantment is heightened by the ongoing problems of the 1920s.

Why prose?

Poets such as Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen have come to dominate literary studies of the First World War. Why, then, does this volume focus on prose? Popular First World War poetry was not disenchanted. The lyric form is appropriate for intense moments of pleasure or horror, hence its suitedness for propaganda. Jessie Pope was a jingoistic touchstone, exemplified by the reproduction of a ‘letter which reached the office of The Daily Mail from a soldier at the front’ as preface to her War Poems (1915).²⁷ She wrote stirring refrains such as ‘Are we downhearted? – NO!’ and used sport as the analogy for war in ‘Play the Game’, recalling the famous refrain of Henry Newbolt’s ‘Vitaï Lampada’ (1897).²⁸ Now derided, Pope was a patriotic success, along with authors such as Alice Meynell and Gilbert Frankau; I discuss the latter in Chapter 2. Rupert Brooke was a more literary success, made famous by quotation from ‘The Soldier’ in the 1915 Easter Sunday sermon from St Paul’s Cathedral. It probably also helped that Brooke was a good-looking young chap.²⁹ He was dead less than three weeks later. Julian Grenfell’s rousing ‘Into Battle’ was published in The Times on the same day as the notice of his death.³⁰ The reception of these poets was bound up in remembrance, and Peter Parker states acerbically that ‘it was Brooke, Grenfell and the scores of other young (and preferably dead) poets, now forgotten, who were considered representative during and just after the War’.³¹

The early verses of Sassoon and Graves were not dissimilar to more patriotic poets. Before he had experienced front-line combat Sassoon wrote: ‘War is our scourge; yet war has made us wise, / And, fighting for our freedom, we are free.’³² His view that ‘they are fortunate, who fight’ endured well into the war, and Jean Moorcroft Wilson observes the kinship of such enchantment with Brooke.³³ The war poems of The Old Huntsman (1917), whose title evokes Pope’s Three Jolly Huntsmen (1912), use images such as the poetic ‘woeful crimson of men slain’, which contrast markedly with the ‘terrible corpses – blind with blood’ in Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918).³⁴ Graves’s enthusiasm was not so pronounced, but he expressed the violence of the conflict in archaisms and high diction: ‘I looked, and ah, my wraith before me stood, / His head all battered in by violent blows.’³⁵ Edward Marsh, the patron of Georgian poetry and an influential civil servant, told Graves that his poems ‘were written in the poetic diction of fifty years ago’.³⁶ Modern language was not solely the preserve of modernist poetry. Graves viewed himself as ‘a sound militarist in action however much of a pacifist in thought’, emphasised by the clumsy lines ‘To fight and kill is wrong – / To stay at home wronger’.³⁷ The association of these poets with disenchantment, and their popularity, derives largely from the success of their later prose works about the war, and subsequent reappraisal of their poetry.³⁸ The dominant view was that victory must be won and necessary hardships endured. In wartime, disenchantment was at best an emergent viewpoint.

The First World War is the only conflict to occasion a major, popular prose response. Poetry was previously the form for matters of note. Other poets also saw a crisis of literary form in response to the First World War. F. S. Flint wrote in 1920 that ‘rhyme and metre are dead or dying devices, that their use brings poetry into contempt (the poetry in verse form, that is); and that, in spite of the number of books of verse by soldiers that appear, it is not the poetry in them that moves us’.³⁹ He argues for the primacy of free verse, and observes astutely that war poetry is interesting for the access to profound experience it appears to grant. Thomas Hardy bemoaned poetry’s decline as a result of ‘the barbarizing of taste in the younger minds by the dark madness of the late war, the unabashed cultivation of selfishness in all classes, the plethoric growth of knowledge simultaneously with the stunting of wisdom’.⁴⁰ This threnody for verse itself is linked with a wider claim about the lost enchantment of wisdom, which I continue to explore below. In his classic study Aspects of the Novel (1927), E. M. Forster still values English poetry over prose, and the Russian novel above vernacular fiction.⁴¹ However, more progressive authors and thinkers were starting to reassess: modernist authors sought alternative traditions. Ford Madox Ford believed in the potential power of prose: ‘Creative prose is poetry; the novel is narrative poetry and displaces nothing.’⁴² For him, poetry is not simply a matter of form and metre, but quality of language. D. H. Lawrence saw an opportunity to do creative damage to the novel: ‘this war […] kicks the pasteboard bottom in the usual good popular novel. People have felt much more deeply and strongly these last few months and they are not going to let themselves be taken in by serious works whose feeling is shallower than that of the official army reports.’⁴³ He attacks commercial, generic novels and seeks to make it a ‘serious’ form. However, canonical modernism must be understood against ‘good popular novels’. I analyse several in this book, and they offer richer texture and detail than modernist prejudices suggest.⁴⁴

Aside from questions of value, prose more easily demonstrates the varied rhythms and textures of quotidian life. Theorists such as Hayden White have drawn attention to the necessary formation of history through narrative: we work to integrate events within our life story before making them aesthetic.⁴⁵ Virginia Woolf questions the ability of prose to reach the artistic heights of poetry, but observes that it ‘has taken all the dirty work on to her own shoulders’ and is ‘adequate […] to deal with the common and the complex’.⁴⁶ Poetry lacks ‘the supports and comforts of literature. […] Its power of make-believe, its representative power, is dispensed with in favour of its extremities and extravagances.’⁴⁷ The literary critic Tim Kendall points to the enduring power of war poetry, and I argue that many war novels acknowledge both the poetry of life and its mundanity; the repeated shift between extreme experiences and the mundane gives the literature of war its distinctive rhythm.⁴⁸ This is not to gainsay the value of war poetry. However, in the war novel we see exceptional events alongside the tedium of war: the constant threat is punctuated by intensely dangerous bursts of activity. The narrator of R. H. Mottram’s The Spanish Farm Trilogy (1924–27), which I discuss in Chapter 4, states that to ‘fight for a few minutes, one must live for weeks’ (SFT, 793).⁴⁹ The contrast between rest and action, uncertainty and confirmation, for combatants and civilians, enables a clearer understanding of the rhythm of war experience and the structures which contain disenchantment. There is also an ongoing formal shift: for Saltus, ‘[r]ealistic fiction is a picture of life as it is, and not, as was formerly the case, a picture of life as we want it’.⁵⁰ The novel is no longer necessarily a comedic or exalting form. In extended prose the negotiation between enchantment and disenchantment is evident: disenchantment was not yet overpowering.

Why Britain?

National identity is crucial to the enchantments which persuade people to support war. Valuable critical and historical accounts such as Modris Eksteins’s Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Jay M. Winter’s Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History and Leo van Bergen’s Before My Helpless Sight: Suffering, Dying and Military Medicine on the Western Front, 1914–1918 take a comparative approach, and there are inevitable transnational correspondences. Works such as the French authors Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire (1916) and Georges Duhamel’s Lives of the Martyrs (1917), the German Walter Flex’s The Wanderer Between Two Worlds (1916), the Australian and New Zealand literature following Gallipoli, and the American responses of John dos Passos in Three Soldiers (1921) and E. E. Cummings in The Enormous Room (1922) might all be considered under the rubric of disenchantment.

Here, I focus on British (dis)enchantments, bound up in distinctive rhetorical strategies and narrative modes. These enchantments were particularly masculine, coming from patriarchal structures, and this study keeps in mind tensions around gender which were manifested in the suffrage movement and the idea of the New Woman. Eric Leed observes that ‘those who marched onto European battlefields in 1914 had a highly specific and concrete image of what war meant, an image that was deeply rooted in the past and in their culture’.⁵¹ At the turn of the twentieth century Britain was apparently in a position of strength, seen in and reinforced by the language used in conservative newspapers such as The Times and the Daily Telegraph. The recently founded Daily Mail shared a similar political standpoint, but was aimed at the increasing mass market. It was soon an influential million-seller which supported the Second Boer War and took a militaristic stance as the First World War approached. Long-standing narratives about Britain as a natural leader of progress were reinforced, and its isolation was the secure foundation for aggressive imperialist expansion. Those myths were reiterated partly to allay fears about British strength, physical, metaphysical and military, in comparison with rival imperial nations. As the early twentieth-century German sociologist Max Weber points out, the ‘prestige of power […] means in practice the glory of power over other communities; it means the expansion of power, though not always by way of incorporation or subjection. The big political communities are the natural exponents of such pretensions to prestige.’⁵² The rhetoric of British masculinity was vital to Britain’s expansion.

A chivalric, knightly form of military heroism was still current before and after the First World War, and Britain’s war was fought to preserve these values.⁵³ The invasion of Belgium gave a focus to nebulous ideas of honour. The behavioural code derived from the nineteenth-century interest in Arthurian legend encapsulated by Tennyson’s poetry, particularly The Idylls of the King (1859–85).⁵⁴ It harks back to a feudal world, fought for and ruled by a superior warrior caste. In Henry Newbolt’s semi-autobiographical ‘Novel of Youth’ The Twymans (1911), he names the protagonist Percival, alluding to the Arthurian knight.⁵⁵ Percival tells of his indoctrination with ‘phrases, insisted upon again and again’, implanting in him the ideals of ‘ancient patriotism […] with examples of heroic self-sacrifice and passionate devotion’.⁵⁶ The aim of his school to enforce ‘robust virtues – fortitude, self-reliance, intrepidity […], public spirit, general readiness for united action’ implies preparation for warfare.⁵⁷ Mental health was strongly linked with physical fitness, which was promoted by playing team sports and games. Rugby football was favoured for its dangerous physicality as an expression and test of manliness.⁵⁸ It was a sort of trial by ordeal, exacerbated by the fact that ‘to the end of the century many smaller schools still made do with a drill sergeant in charge of games’.⁵⁹ The individual might make a defining contribution, but it must be in the collective interest, aligning sport with military history. The nineteenth century saw the codification of rules of sports such as Rugby Union and Association Football, and war.⁶⁰ The strength of these ideals clashed with the reality of fighting in the First World War, and Allen J. Frantzen argues that when ‘young men filled with illusions of chivalry were ordered to walk into machine-gun fire, an ancient brotherhood fell before the weapons of a new age’.⁶¹ As I continue to argue, the change after the First World War was not so stark. A new hero began to appear, but the old, knightly hero endured in popular fiction and other media if, admittedly, in terminal decline: the 1960s television series The Saint featured a protagonist named Simon Templar.

The notion of duty was crucial to continuing the war, and hierarchical allegiance was instilled by the public schools. The collective loyalties instilled by team games were redoubled by the house system. Boys were affiliated to ever greater powers, in a chain of command rising through form, house, school, monarch and God (DW, 2, 301).⁶² Military training sought to achieve the same interpellation of the individual within a rigid hierarchy at a time when, conversely, it started to seem possible to traverse unseen social boundaries. However, the notion of hierarchy itself was little troubled. The public schools were responsible for inculcating discipline in modernity, which, in Weber’s formulation, ‘is nothing but the consistently rationalized, methodically trained and exact execution of the received order, in which all personal criticism is unconditionally suspended and the actor is unswervingly and exclusively set for carrying out the command’.⁶³ Soldiers acted instinctively in a state of exhaustion for much of the time; there was little time to consider the validity of abstract ideas.⁶⁴

Shared beliefs allowed men to come together in the First World War. The values instilled in the public schools were disseminated widely through the hegemony of public-school-educated officials in the government and the military, and perpetuated by the Old Boy networks of the major schools and universities.⁶⁵ Official language therefore derived from this culture, and spread across social classes as the Forster Education Act of 1870 and its successors led to increasing literacy.⁶⁶ Along with juvenile periodical fiction, novels such as Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) introduced the ethos to a wider public, and helped root the belief that schools should produce ‘a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a Christian’.⁶⁷ The working class is absent in Hughes’s and other such novels, which focus on the growing bourgeoisie.⁶⁸ C. F. G. Masterman, an early twentieth-century commentator, states that ‘the middle class […] stands for England in most modern analyses’ (CE, 14).⁶⁹ Scholarships for less well-off pupils exist, but the criticism is a fair one. The ideals put forth in the public schools remained prevalent, imposed from the top down, ingrained in official language and perpetuated by publication privilege at the point when the education system was expanding. Mottram’s Stephen Dormer thinks about the men who ‘shyly imitated the class standards which he and those like him handed down to them from the fount of English culture and fashion in the Public Schools’ (SFT, 760). Joanna Bourke notes astutely that it ‘was not a tradition that was known in the working classes’, but acknowledges that ‘the extent to which these traits were stimulated within grammar and state schools is a matter for debate’.⁷⁰ Education is superficially opened up, but hierarchies remain entrenched; school inspector Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) clearly demonstrates the importance of dissent, as long as it is quickly assimilated. The English historian-philosopher R. G. Collingwood suggests that elites and the working class have separate cultures but shared beliefs.⁷¹ This model helps think about the ways in which class differences remained little altered: after the war, culture again had a bigger say in social constructions.

Disenchantment: decline, decay and degeneration

Disenchantment must be viewed in the context of a literature of decline, decay and degeneration which proliferated in the last quarter of the nineteenth century