Socialist propaganda in the twentieth-century British novel PDF
Preview Socialist propaganda in the twentieth-century British novel
S O C IA L IS T PR O PA G A N D A IN T H E T W E N T IE T H -C E N T U R Y B R IT IS H N O V E L David §mith \ © David Smith 1978 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First published igy8 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD 7 London and Basingstoke Associated companies in Delhi Dublin Hong Kong Johannesburg Lagos Melbourne New York Singapore Tokyo Printed in Grtat Britain by offset lithography by 6f , Billing Sons Ltd Guildford, London and Worcester British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Smith, David Socialist propaganda in the twentieth-century British novel 1. English fiction - 20th century - History and criticism 2. Socialism in literature I. Tide 823' .9' 12093 PR.830.S6/ ISBN 0-333-23980-6 This book is sold subject to the standard conditions of the Net Book Agreement / ¿ 9 9 y < 3 9 - U 9 f FOR BARBARA Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Definitions and Limitations i i The Nature of the Beast 4 2 Love and Utopianism 10 3 The Philanthropists of Mugsborough 27 4 Love, Utopianism, and some Revolution 39 5 At Last, the British are Coming 48 6 A Decent Working-Class Upbringing 57 7 The Middle-Class Dilemma 79 8 A Scots Qjiair 111 9 Blighted Spring 128 Conclusion *54 Notes 157 Bibliography ,87 Index *99 Acknowledgments The author and publishers would like to thank the Hutchinson Publishing Group and Schocken Books Inc. for granting permission to reproduce the extracts from A Scots Quair, by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and Lawrence & Wishart Ltd for permission to use the extracts from The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, by Robert Tressell. Introduction: Definitions and Limitations ‘If one faces facts’, wrote George Orwell back in 1937, adopting a devil’s advocate stance, ‘one must admit that nearly everything describable as Socialist literature is dull, tasteless, and bad'.1 Sometimes it seems that British critics, particularly those concerned with the novel, have taken OrwelFs deliberately exaggerated sentiment a little too much to heart. For despite the recent growth of interest in socioliterary studies and a corresponding proliferation of attempts to trace the interconnection between politics and literature, there still remains one promising area of study virtually neglected: namely that of Socialism and the British novel. There have been several examinations of Socialism and British poetry, particularly the poetry of the thirties, but to date nobody has attempted to do for the British novel what Walter B. Rideout did for its American counterpart back in 1956 in his book The Radical Novel in the United States igoo-ig54. The following study—a survey of twentieth-century British novels which include as one of their primary purposes the advocacy of a species of Socialism—is an attempt partially to fill this gap. But what, it may well be asked, is meant by the term Socialism? Its meaning in Edwardian Britain in terms of practical politics will be discussed in the opening chapter; what I would like to do at this stage is to arrive at some more theoretical definition. Obviously, no such definition could encompass all the details of every variety of Socialism. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have seen the accumulation of a large and often conflicting body of Socialist tactics and theory, and the gulf in the twentieth century in particular between the Marxist parties on the one hand—with their fairly rigid economic and historic doctrines, their revolutionary approach—and the Labour Parties of the British variety on the other—with their gradualist, parliamentary, and basically empirical approach—has often seemed virtually unbridgeable. But if it has seemed so, there has nonetheless remained some common ground, and it is this which can serve as a basis for a theoretical definition. It is in fact possible to sec that in the years covered by this study, there were two minimal factors to which the major Socialist sects paid at least lip service. The first was that Socialism was seen, whether by common sense or by historical laws, to have most relevance to the working class. The second, and more important, was that the moral and economic ends of Socialism were seen as the elimination 2 Socialist Propaganda in the Twentieth-Century British Novel of social friction and injustice by the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. It is this minimal theoretical definition which I have constantly borne in mind as a guide to the selection of novels to be studied. An ultimate Socialist objective may well be, and frequently has been, forgotten by a Party in the immediate practical demands of the moment, but if a novelist forgets or chooses to ignore this objective then his novel can hardly be said to be advocating or—to be more precise and to use the terminology of my title—propagandising Socialism. It is for this reason that I have excluded such novels of social protest as—to take two famous examples from the thirties—Lionel Britton’s Hunger and Love (1931) and Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933), which certainly rail against the system or part of the system but which fail to proffer any radical alternative. It is for this reason also that I have excluded novels which could be classified as propaganda only from extraliterary evidence, such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm (x945)- According to Orwell the latter book was written ‘against totalit arianism and for democratic socialism’,2 but it is in fact the negative side of his purpose which emerges, and as a result this anti-Stalinist parable could be and has been seen as a condemnation of Socialism per se. At the same time, however, it should be stressed that I have not always excluded those novels which in the body of the work nominally advocate Socialism, but which turn out on closer examination to fall somewhat short of the ideal. In these instances I have indicated the divergence and tried to show its relevance to the period under discussion. Indeed, it has been part of my purpose throughout to view these books against the background of the political, and where necessary, the social conditions from which they sprang. There has been no attempt at comprehensiveness (just as there has been no attempt to discuss every Socialist novel of the period), but where I have felt such extrinsic material would cast light on the novels themselves, I have included it. But this study is ultimately and primarily a study of the works themselves, of what they say, and more importantly, how they say it. The word ‘propaganda’ is commonly used in a pejorative sense when applied to the novel, and, indeed, the majority of the books examined bear this out. Nonetheless, at the risk sometimes of producing the effect of breaking a series of already maimed butterflies on a wheel, I have throughout applied the criteria: to what extent is this book conveying its author’s own conviction, and to what extent is it a satisfactory work of art? The answer to these two questions, the nature of the relationship between them, and hence something of the nature of the political propaganda novel itself, will hopefully emerge in what follows. There remains one final comment to be made, a comment concerning the chronological boundaries of this study. I have chosen to confine it to the twentieth century, and furthermore, while I have mentioned novels published as recently as 1974, the main body of the work deals with the fifty
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