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Virginia Woolf’s introduction to Life As We Have Known It (1931)

David Bradshaw’s selection of essays by Virginia Woolf for the Oxford World Classics is divided into four thematic areas.

  1. Reading and Writing
  2. Life-Writing
  3. Women and Fiction
  4. Looking On

This blog post summarises one of the six essays in the third section, ‘Women and Fiction’, titled ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ (1931). For reference I list all 6 essays in the section. I reviewed the other five in a previous blog post. The essay is an introduction to a volume titled Life as We Have Known It: The Voices of Working-Class Women‘, and it inspired me to go and read the whole book, which I have reviewed separately.

  1. The Feminine Note in Fiction (1905) [book review]
  2. Women Novelists (1918) [book review]
  3. Women and Fiction (1929)
  4. Professions for Women (1931) [a talk]
  5. Memories of a Working Women’s Guild (1931) [introduction to a collection of letters]
  6. Why? (1934) [article for a student magazine]

5. Memories of a Working Women’s Guild (1931: 14 pages)

This is the longest and most complex essay in the section, at 14 pages. Well, maybe not complicated in structure, but complicated in 1) the eccentrically roundabout way in which Woolf addresses the subject matter and her own complicated responses to it, and 2) the multi-text nature of the book she’s introducing.

I’ll try to give a summary overview of the content, and then a description of my changing impressions as I read it through.

Summary

In 1931 Woolf was asked to write a preface to a collection of letters and photos written by members of the English Women’s Co-operative Guild and collected into a book titled Life as We Have Known It By Co-Operative Working Women. The Guild was founded as far back as 1883 and Woolf was commissioned by one of its co-founders, Margaret Llewellyn Davies. The book was to be published by Woolf’s own Hogarth Press, so it was very much an in-house project.

Woolf approaches the commission in a rather roundabout way and most of the introduction feels like a meandering digression. This is because she kicks off by describing two memories.

1) First of all, she casts her mind back to the annual Congress of the Guild she attended as long ago as 1913 and recalls, very vividly, being frustrated and bored. And also alienated by the fact that so many of the women speakers were solid working class and she found, to her dismay, that she had nothing in common with them, not even the language they spoke.

2) This is supplemented by a second memory, of going soon afterwards for a meeting with Davies at the head office of the Guild, in Hampstead, north London. Here Woolf raises the sense she had of being alienated from the predominantly working class membership of the Guild and frustration at not being able to break out of the prison of her class. She wishes the two classes of women could break through the class barriers, and simply share their experiences, talk and exchange experiences and ideas. But she fears that will never happen in her lifetime.

Although I’ve made it sound brisk and logical, that is not at all how it reads. I became quite irritated with Woolf’s alienated, detached self obsession, her inability to care about what any of the social and political issues the speakers at the Congress raised and discussed, her fatal tendency to drift off into her own world, focusing on what colour their dresses are, or inventing completely imaginary home lives for each of the speakers, rather than paying them the elementary respect of listening to what they were saying.

She tells us that it was at this point of the discussion in Hampstead that Davies opened a drawer and indicated the hundreds of letters she’d received from members of the Guild over the years, thanking her for giving them an opportunity to expand their horizons, to meet and talk and learn and gain the confidence to speak up and address political issues.

Woolf was immediately interested to read all these first-hand accounts and Davies promised to send them on but, for whatever reason, never did. Then the War came and a thousand other distractions and then the social confusion of the post-war period. So it was only years later that Davies got round to posting Woolf a big parcel packed with folders containing letters, notes and photographs from working class women, which she went through with fascination.

3) And this provides the third section of this little text, which is only three or four pages long but really vividly summarises the content of loads of those letters, one- or two-sentence summaries of the cramped, exploited, violent lives and abuse so many of these women suffered, for decades, for all their lives. It is shocking and sometimes harrowing evidence. Suddenly this short text bursts into colour, stops being about mimsy Virginia, becomes three-dimensional, acquires a completely different force from the idle, middle-class reveries which preceded it. It’s worth reading for this three-page summary alone.

These, of course, are some of the letters which were then included in the volume which Woolf was asked to write a preface to. Now the whole text comes full circle. Now you realise why she began with the apparently inconsequential and self-obsessed memories of attending the Congress. Crabwise, her introduction approaches the real core of the text – the working women’s experiences – so obliquely that when they arrive, the contrast with Woolf’s leisurely upper class existence – all opera and Shakespeare – is all the more shocking and dramatic.

So was it planned? Was this artful structuring? The self-description as a snobbish, alienated middle-class lady all a ploy to make the working class content, when it comes, more shocking? Or the much simpler result of Woolf’s artless self-absorption? Much the same question could be asked of her novels: to what extent they are artful constructions or, conversely, just the result of her letting her mind drift and then arranging the blizzard of details and sense impressions into a sort of order based grouped into a handful of characters and a vague plot…

Background

From the Yale Review archives is an introduction to this piece which must be out of date but is still useful.

These pages relating to the English Women’s Co-operative Guild are addressed to a former officer of this organization who had placed in Mrs Woolf’s hands a collection of letters written by its members. The Guild, which now has an enrolment of some 70,000 and is the largest association of its kind in England, was founded in 1883 to stimulate the ideas and activities of working women. It holds important annual Congresses, and it is of one of these which met at Manchester, in 1913.

We know the Yale text is out of date because it talks about the Guild in the present tense but we know that the Guild closed in 2016, according to the Co-operative Women’s Guild Wikipedia article.

No prefaces

This text is the Introductory Letter to a social history book called Life as We Have Known It By Co-Operative Working Women published by Woolf’s own Hogarth Press. She was actually invited to write a preface to the book by its editor, the founder of the Guild, Margaret Llewellyn Davies, but refused on principle, the principle being that a book should stand or fall by its content without loads of prefaces and other bric-a-brac surrounding it.

But you also quickly come to suspect it’s because Woolf couldn’t write that kind of thing. She couldn’t gracefully summarise the themes of a book, its content and the achievement of its author, that’s not how her mind worked. Not without subterfuge and artifice.

Instead of directly grappling with the content of the book or the issues it raises about working class women collaborating to improve their lives, Woolf starts by going off at a tangent. With characteristic solipsism, she approaches the book by asking what memories it prompts in her and goes on to share two in particular.

Out of her inability to concentrate, out of her tendency to lose track of what anyone’s saying, out of her tendency to drift off and look out the nearest window, daydreaming and noticing all kinds of inconsequential details, Woolf made a style, a magnificent style, a new approach to narrative which characterises her classic novels Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, The Years and Between The Acts. In the context of essays which are meant to be about something, it can make for a frustrating read.

Scene 1. The 1913 Congress of the English Women’s Co-operative Guild

So Woolf whisks us to a hot June morning in 1913 in Newcastle where she attended a meeting of, presumably (it’s not really made clear) the Women’s Guild. She describes the hall and the people as if in a novel and describes a succession of women who’ve come from all over the country to make their 5-minute speeches. She namechecks the issues of the day:

  • reform of the divorce laws to allow women to petition for divorce
  • taxation of land
  • campaign for a minimum wage
  • the Trades Board Act
  • education of children over 14
  • complete adult suffrage

She namechecks them but, of course, she doesn’t go into them. You have to turn to Bradshaw’s notes at the back of the OUP edition to find out more about any of them. Instead Woolf glories in her superficiality, dwelling on the mustiness of the room and the appearance of the ladies. She candidly admits that all these political issues leave her ‘in her blood and bones, untouched’. And explains why – it’s a matter of class. Woolf isn’t really engaged in any contemporary politics because she is a comfortably off, middle class lady.

If every reform they demand was granted this very instant it would not touch one hair of my comfortably capitalistic head. Hence my interest is merely altruistic. It is thin spread and moon-coloured. There is no life blood or urgency about it. However hard I clap my hands or stamp my feet, there is a hollowness in the sound which betrays me. I am a benevolent spectator. I am irretrievably cut off from the actors. I sit here hypocritically, clapping and stamping, an outcast from the flock. (p.148)

This is the characteristic attitude of all her fictional characters: they all experience the sense of being outsiders, outside the conversations other people are having and, at their most delirious, of being outside their own lives, looking on. You can’t help thinking of her mental illness and repeated mental breakdowns.

Also Woolf is afflicted by a strong sense of what’s the point? None of these women or any of their resolutions will have any impact because it is 1913 and none of them have the vote. This one thought leaves her feeling ‘irritated and depressed’, as well it might, but with the rather more Woolfian threat of ‘boredom and despair’ lurking behind. See how it’s all about her, her and her mental problems?

So Woolf does what she always does and drifts away from the present and daydreams, fantasises, imagines the home life of some of the speakers, of Mrs Giles and Mrs Edwards, imagines the view from their windows (windows, that talismanic Woolfian image). In a pretty patronising tone she imagines what it must be like to be a working class woman, so very different from her own la-di-da habits of ringing up the opera to book tickets or lying in the garden enjoying sensitive reveries of Greece and Italy. Without speaking to a single working class woman she imagines their lives, and her position of irredeemable hauteur and snobbery comes out clearer and clearer.

Here is Virginia Woolf imagining the lives of the working class women of her time.

There were no armchairs, electric light, or hot water laid on in their homes, no Greek hills or Mediterranean bays in their lives. They did not sign a cheque to pay the weekly bills, or order, over the telephone, a cheap but quite adequate seat at the Opera. If they travelled it was on excursion day, with paper bags and hot babies in their arms.

They did not stroll through the house and say, that cover must go to the wash, or those sheets need changing. They plunged their arms in hot water and scrubbed the clothes themselves. In consequence they had thickset muscular bodies. They had large hands; they had the slow emphatic gestures of people who are often stiff and fall tired in a heap on hard-backed chairs.

They touched nothing lightly. They gripped papers and pencils as if they were brooms. Their faces were firm, with heavy folds and deep lines. It seemed as if their muscles were always taut and on the stretch. Their eyes looked as if they were always set on something actual—on saucepans that were boiling over, on children who were getting into mischief.

Their faces never expressed the lighter and more detached emotions that come into play when the mind is perfectly at ease about the present. They were not in the least detached and cosmopolitan. They were indigenous and rooted to one spot. Their very names were like the stones of the fields, common, grey, obscure, docked of all the splendours of association and romance.

Vivid enough, very vivid and persuasive, but at the same time so patronising and privileged. Back to the Congress, where Woolf dismissively reports that there were innumerable more speeches, exchanges of home-made jams and biscuits, songs sung and meals consumed, a new President elected, then it was over and everyone caught their trains home.

Scene 2. At the Hampstead headquarters of the English Women’s Co-operative Guild

If it wasn’t obvious before, it’s really rammed home why this text is called ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’. In another writer’s hands this might involve memories of other people, of what they were like, what they said and what they achieved. In Woolf’s hands everything is always about her and her sensitive perceptions and concerns.

In the inconsequential way which you either find charming or irritating, according to taste, Woolf doesn’t remember the substance of any of the conversations she takes part in at the Hampstead headquarters – instead she remembers that the Guild’s secretary, Miss Kidd, was stout and fierce and dressed in a deep purple dress.

Nowadays, if you’re a man, you’re likely to be criticised for judging women purely on their appearance instead of their character, thoughts and achievements. Yet this is exactly what Woolf does. Lacking the mental ability or interest in what anyone says, it is appearance and quirks which appeal to her most consistently. Presumably she’d have said this is the novelist’s eye. Forget issues. Enjoy characters.

Miss Lillian Harris who, whether it was due to her dress which was coffee-coloured, or to her smile which was serene, or to the ash-tray in which many cigarettes had come amiably to an end, seemed the image of detachment and equanimity.

Had one not known that Miss Harris was to the Congress what the heart is to the remoter veins—that the great engine at Newcastle would not have thumped and throbbed without her—that she had collected and sorted and summoned and arranged that very intricate but orderly assembly of women—she would never have enlightened one.

She had nothing whatever to do—she came to the office because an office is a good place in which to read detective stories—she licked a few stamps and addressed a few envelopes—it was a fad of hers—that was what her manner conveyed. It was Miss Harris who moved the papers off the chairs and got the teacups out of the cupboard. It was she who answered questions about figures and put her hand on the right file of letters infallibly and sat listening, without saying very much, with calm comprehension, to whatever was said. (p.151)

‘She had nothing whatever to do’. Yes. Again Woolf repeats her troubled sense of class superiority to most of these working women.

To expect us, whose minds such as they are, fly free at the end of a short length of capital to tie ourselves down to that narrow plot of acquisitiveness and desire is impossible. We have baths and we have money. Therefore, however much we had sympathised our sympathy was largely fictitious. It was aesthetic sympathy, the sympathy of the eye and of the imagination, not of the heart and nerves.

This turns into a complaint about the way some of the working women who spoke at the Congress imitated and mocked the dainty speech of middle and upper class women. As you can imagine, Virginia didn’t like this, but she comes up with a principled reason. It’s because she found the working class speakers more authentic and real when they stuck to their own voices and concerns and despite the fact that ‘the range of expression is narrower in working women’.

So much does she like this authenticity that she wonders why they want to acquire money and become middle class and so lose the thing they have, their ‘contact with life’, ”facing facts’, ‘the teaching of experience’, call it what you will. Ah the bourgeois fondness for the dignity of labour, as long as it’s other people doing the labouring.

In among all this Woolf makes a claim which is so preposterously privileged it is laugh-out-loud funny, claiming that:

No working man or woman works harder with his hands or is in closer touch with reality than a painter with his brush or a writer with his pen. (p.152)

Yes, her sister, Vanessa, and all the Rogers, Quentins and Duncans in the Bloomsbury Group, they all knew far more about hard work than a coal miner! It’s precisely attitudes like this which gave the group its reputation for high-minded snobbery and condescension. And stupidity.

Woolf is painfully aware of being trapped in her upper-middle-class bubble, what she calls ‘shut up in the confines of the middle classes’. This first part of the essay records all the aspects of embarrassment and boredom and frustration which this plight triggers in her.

She finds many things to admire in ‘them’, these working class women, such as their robust sense of humour, their energy and, especially interesting for Woolf the writer, their way with words, the phrases which Shakespeare would have enjoyed (Woolf and all her characters endlessly invoke Shakespeare, in a thumpingly obvious way, as the absolute peak of poetic expression), their ‘shrewd sayings in the speeches at the Congress which even the weight of a public meeting could not flatten out entirely’ (p.153).

Finally she arrives at the frustrated wish that if only the classes could come together and remove the class barriers between them.

We are condemned to remain forever shut up in the confines of the middle classes wearing tail coats and silk stockings and called Sir or Madam as the case may be, when we are all, in truth, simply Johns and Susans.

And they remain equally deprived. For we have as much to give them as they us—wit and detachment, learning and poetry and all those good gifts which those who have never answered bells or touched their foreheads with their forefingers enjoy by right. But the barrier is impassable.

And nothing perhaps exasperated us more at the Congress (you [Davies] must have noticed at times a certain irritability) than the thought that this force of theirs, this smouldering heat which broke the crust now and then and licked the surface with a hot and fearless flame, is about to break through and melt us together so that life will be richer and books more complex and society will pool its possessions instead of segregating them… but only when we are dead. (p.153)

Which prompts the question, Have class barriers been removed in modern England, 90 years after Woolf wrote this, 112 years after the Guild Congress which prompted it?

My impression is that these class barriers have substantially loosened, are not as absolutely impassable as they were in Woolf’s day, but they still remain. The chavs on the council estate round the corner are a slightly threatening mystery to me as I, with my civil service job and interest in the arts, might be for them. I think. The real point is that I don’t know. To a large extent everybody else is a mystery to me.

And also the entire question of ‘class’ has been ruptured and recast by the huge immigration which has changed the nature of English society over the last twenty years. In 2021 63.2% of London residents identified with an ethnic minority group. People identifying with the White ethnic group are now in a minority in London.

I grew up in an England where the main divide was between the middle and working classes and so leaned towards socialist politics on behalf of the downtrodden. But the advent of progressive or woke politics – the rise and rise feminism, the revelation of a dazzling range of gender identities, alongside the immigration of hundreds of ethnic groups which all retain their ethnic identities and allegiances – has  massively confused the sociology of England and the old politics. No wonder it (the old two-party system) can’t keep up.

In my opinion these sociological changes have permanently fragmented what used to be called the Left, not only here but all across Europe, leading to the rise of right-wing populist parties. I don’t really judge any of these changes, I’m just observing what I consider to be the biggest social and cultural issue of my time, which presses fairly heavily on all of us, and so colours my readings of political or social writings from the past.

Back to Woolf, my point is that her worry about trying to break down barriers between the unknown white working class women and posh white ladies like herself who go to the opera and understand Shakespeare, these concerns now seem quaint and charming. Of historic interest. Like watching an Ealing Comedy. It is an issue from an England which has disappeared.

Her clarion cry to break down the barriers of class between women is fine and inspiring but I don’t know what they’d mean to the Kurdish hairdressers based in the Kurdish barbers I go to; to the till woman at Tesco from Ghana and Mauritius that I always chat to; to the wives of the Albanian builders who put up a new fence for me; to the Somali family or the Afghan family who live in the flats across from my place. Enjoying the blessings of Shakespeare? Most of them can barely speak English. I’m not saying that’s fatal. I’m just saying it restricts the relevance of Woolf’s discourse, these days, to an even tinier, bookish clique than it did in her day.

To summarise, Woolf feels that in this conversation at the Guild headquarters in Hampstead, she tried:

to describe the contradictory and complex feelings which beset the middle-class visitor forced to sit out a congress of working women in silence. (p.154)

Scene 3. The letters themselves

Apparently it was at this point in Woolf’s lament to Davies in the Hampstead headquarters, that Davies opened a drawer and indicated the many letters she had received from working women around the country. Woolf asked to see them but Davies, at that meeting, demurred. It was only years later, after the Great War, that she finally sent Woolf a packet of letters.

And here comes the radical transformation in the content and tone of the piece which I mentioned earlier. The simple unvarnished lives of these staggeringly poor women, the brutal conditions they grew up in, the childhood exploitation, the lives of unremitting labour garnished with the brutality of overseers, fathers and husbands, the horrors of childbirth, the lack of any healthcare, beggars belief.

Yet out of all these terrible stories, Woolf emphasises the positives, praising ‘that inborn energy which no amount of childbirth and washing up can quench’. The women describe lives packed with debilitating toil,  long hours working in fields and factories and domestic service, six days a week, with sometimes only a few hours free time each week, along with the struggle to support husbands, often ill or thrown out of work, and all the time raise numerous children, often going hungry in the process, worn out by stress and continual work, old and ill before their time.

And so, as I mentioned in my summary, the reader at last gets to the nub of the subject, the testimony of these many women and, as I suggested, realises that maybe the self-obsessed vapourings of the first half of the essay are intended as a deliberate contrast with the shocking lives depicted in the letters. Maybe. Or was Woolf that artful? Discuss.

Because of the in-your-face reality of these last few pages, this essay stands head and shoulders above the others. Maybe it’s just my old left-wing leanings being triggered, but I felt the essay only came to life with them and suddenly, from whimsical Woolfian sepia, changed into colour. Woolf, too, is thrilled by what she calls:

the extraordinary vitality of the human spirit. The dauntless energy which no amount of childbirth and washing up can quench

This is all very moving but, unfortunately, Woolf rather undermines herself, and in a characteristic way, which is that she in particular praises the women who made time in their wretched lives to read and to read the classics, which she then goes to the trouble of namechecking for us:

They read Dickens and Scott and Henry George and Bulwer-Lytton and Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Alice Meynell and would like “to get hold of any good history of the French Revolution, not Carlyle’s please,” and B. Russell on China, and William Morris and Shelley and Florence Barclay and Samuel Butler’s Note Books…

All true no doubt, and education begins with reading, but you can’t help feeling there’s something everso narrow about Woolf’s view of life. In her view the good life is reading the books she loves, the books she grew up reading in her father’s library, the same relatively short, restricted list of Great Books, Masterworks of the Spirit etc. Very narrow. Very limited.

Anyway, in the last pages she moves on to praise the work of the Guild and at this point the text morphs more into what you’d expect an introduction to be like, praising the work of the organisation it’s introducing.

It was the Guild that drew to itself all that restless wishing and dreaming. It was the Guild that made a central meeting place where formed and solidified all that was else so scattered and incoherent. The Guild must have given the older women, with their husbands and children, what ‘clean ground’ had been given to the little girl in Bethnal Green, or the view of day breaking over the hills had been to the girls in the hat factory. It gave them in the first place that rarest of all possessions – a room where they could sit down and think, remote from boiling saucepans and crying children… (p.157)

And she goes on to describe the growth of the organisation, its importance as a place where women could meet and share and think and develop their ideas.

And the force that lay behind their speeches was compact of many things—of men with whips, and sick rooms where match boxes are made, of hunger and cold, and many and difficult childbirths, of much scrubbing and washing up, of reading Shelley and William Morris and Samuel Butler, of meetings of the Women’s Guild, and committees and congresses at Manchester and elsewhere.

His final section which actually summarises the letters and the achievements of the Guild is as genuinely inspiring as Three Guineas is excoriating and anger-making. But again Woolf partly undermines what she’s saying, because she feels the (wholly unnecessary) need to pass literary judgement on these stories, lamenting their lack of literary finish like the crustiest of male critics.

The writing lacks detachment and imaginative breadth, even as the women themselves lacked variety and play of feature. Here are no reflections; no view of life as a whole; no attempt to enter into the lives of other people. It is not from the ranks of working class women that the next great poet or novelist will be drawn. (p.158)

It’s not only socially that Woolf was a snob, but in her very narrow, elitist view of Great Art. But she does condescend to comment that some of the accounts have the rude ‘accuracy and clarity’ of Defoe. In the midst of pontificating, she says something very, very symptomatic, she writes:

Writing is a complex art.

But is it? She would like to think so, but much of the great writing is not that complex. Worked over and elaborated, maybe, but not necessarily that complex. And the history of twentieth century literature since her heyday tends to demonstrate a steady simplification and de-complicating of literary writing, until our own day when much ‘literary’ writing is not, sentence by sentence, complex or difficult.

Here as in most of her writings, Woolf is judging others by her own standards and these standards are themselves a kind of aspiration to an ideal made up of a bunch of Victorian writers mashed together, Keats and Shelley and Lamb, into a vague icon of high Poetry and Truth. Her judging of the working class women’s writings says more about Woolf and her narrow idea of Literature than it does about the working class women.

This is characteristic of all her criticism. She doesn’t really engage with the meat and texture of the works under review, she tends to use them as pretexts to sound off about her hobby horses, to repeat her commitment to Poetry and Truth and hold Shakespeare up as the Great Model, time after time.

A Virago classic

I already knew that the book was published by Woolf’s own Hogarth Press, so there was a more than usually close connection between her and the book i.e. she was more than just an admirer of the Guild asked to write something, but the book’s publisher.

From looking on Amazon and Ebay I learned that Life As We Have Known It was one of the first books published by the feminist publishing house, Virago. So there are multiple layers of feminist history at work here: the women’s original personal experiences; the Guild which encouraged them to write about them; the collection of writings itself; the Woolf connection (publishing it and writing the introduction); and the Virago revival of it. It is quite a dense, multi-layered cultural artefact, then.

So I bought and read it and have reviewed the book as a whole, in a separate blog post.

Credit

‘Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf’ was published by Oxford World Classics in 2008. Most though not all of the essays can be found online. David Bradshaw’s introduction to the book can be read on Amazon.

Related links

Related reviews

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Posted by Simon on April 25, 2025

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The New Machiavelli by H.G. Wells (1911)

I want to show a contemporary man in relation to the state and social usage, and the social organism in relation to that man.
(The New Machiavelli, page 287)

All I have had to tell is the story of one man’s convictions and aims and how they reacted upon his life; and I find it too subtle and involved and intricate for the doing…
(page 210)

Executive summary

‘The New Machiavelli’ is a first-person narrative told by its protagonist, Richard Remington MP (sleek, tall and neat, p.216). He starts his story in exile in Italy, his promising political career in ruins and his marriage destroyed after he has eloped with pretty young Isabel River. The long rambling narrative that follows aims to explain how he came to this state of affairs.

Remington was a middle-class public schoolboy with a lifelong passion for ‘statecraft’ and dreams of reforming the social and political practices of England. He was a brilliant student at Cambridge, then came down to London where he won a reputation for his books and articles on political themes. He was matched off with an eligible heiress and entered parliament as a Liberal MP in the Liberal landslide of 1906. He was influenced by the gradualist socialism of Altiora and Oscar Bailey, a couple clearly based on Sidney and Beatrice Webb of the Fabian Society.

Once in Parliament, Remington mixes widely with members of the ruling class and of all political parties and slowly his political ideas shift away from the Liberals, as he develops a cult proposal for a kind of ideal aristocracy, one which will promote science and research and art and beauty, a cockamamie idea which eventually leads him to ‘cross the floor’ of the House and join the Conservatives.

He sets up and edits a new magazine, the ‘Blue Weekly’ (‘a little intellectual oasis of good art criticism and good writing’, p.282). In the 1910 general election triggered by the political crisis surrounding David Lloyd George’s Budget, Remington is returned to parliament. He has by now developed an entirely new idea, a version of eugenics suggesting state support for women to marry and raise children, his Endowment for Motherhood scheme, and his career is on the up.

But everything is wrecked when he begins a love affair with a brilliant, playful Oxford graduate, Isabel Rivers. When rumours of their affair begin to circulate, Remington tries to break the affair off but, after much soul searching, resolves to abandon wife, career, party and country to go and live with Isabel in Italy. And it is here that, as the opening chapter makes clear, he sits down to write this extended (380-page) autobiography and justification for his life and actions.

Why it’s titled The New Machiavelli

The narrator clearly states his aim in the opening chapter. After a (relatively short) intellectual life spent worrying about politics, he came to the conclusion that the main aim should be, not fussing about this or that piece of legislation, but the education of a new technocratic elite to properly plan and organise a modern 20th century society – and, on a deeper level, the problem of how to the politician or theorist can reconcile their theories and policies with their personal life.

To be honest, I found the details of this a little hard to nail down, but it’s clear that the overall shape of this long narrative is Remington’s attempt to reconcile his wish to improve society with his wish to be true to himself (i.e. his adulterous affair with a young woman).

Half way through the book, he ties this to the idea that we are just puppets floating on the tide of history, individual cells in the great global brain and that, somehow, by removing the public mask and acknowledging ourselves for what we are, we also connect ourselves to the deeper movements of history. I think.

Anyway, all this led him to reread Machiavelli’s complete works and what he found was a man after his own heart, a man who recorded in his writings his true, deeper self, warts and all. This is strikingly unlike other famous authors in the canon of political writing such as Plato or Confucius, who wrote profoundly about statecraft but left not a trace of their personal lives behind. They are fine statues on plinths but not real people. Hence Remington’s devotion to warts-and-all Machiavelli, and his conscious attempt to integrate the personal into his own policies.

Also, like Machiavelli, the narrator has been driven into exile.

Also, he tells us that, after the Florentine Republic which he supported had fallen, Machiavelli set about writing his famous guide to rulers, ‘The Prince’, but also wondering who in contemporary Italy (in the 1510s) he should be advising. In just the same way, Wells’s narrator tells us that he, to begin with, set out to write a modern-day version of The Prince and also pondered who to dedicate it to, who to set out to teach and instruct (as both Plato and Confucius are recorded as seeking rulers to instruct).

This opening chapter goes on to explain that Remington, in the end, abandoned the idea of writing a new ‘Prince’, and decided to go whole hog and integrate the lessons he had learned from politics into a total portrait of himself i.e. into his autobiography.

So: those are the three or four reasons why the name Machiavelli is in the title: because the author wants to copy the aim of writing a treatise on statecraft, but also to integrate it with an account of his own life, which ended up being so long and detailed that it swamped the theory and turned into an autobiography.

[This lengthy and rather convoluted introduction to the text is very reminiscent of Wells’s long, tortuous introduction to his 1905 novel, The Modern Utopia. In both Wells spends quite a long time sharing with the reader the struggle he had to order and structure his text. If you have a lot of time to disentangle his motives and the convolutions of narrative structure which they result in, it may be worth it. But I think it’s no accident that both books, with their long tortuous rationales leading to very long texts, are not much read, compared to Wells’s earlier, shorter, more focused and exciting works.]

Longer critique

Critics have criticised ‘The New Machiavelli’ for being a poor novel for at least five reasons: 1) It is hugely rambling and digressive, lacking the discipline to cut extraneous matter and concentrate on the plot, instead overflowing with Wells’s hobby horses including great digressions on his pet subjects (the shambolic state of education, urban planning, economic policy), far in excess of anything needed for either plot or characterisation.

2) Despite its promise to be about Edwardian politics (as indicated by the title and the opening chapter, and as Wells promised his publisher) it turns out, like all Wells’s social novels, to be about ‘love’, in this case with the element of sex more prominent than ever before. In fact it was the candid descriptions – not of sex itself, which is nowhere actually described – but of the dominating role the sex urge plays in a young man’s mental life and development, which led his usual publisher (Macmillans) to turn it down, and to widespread accusations of ‘immorality’ by the critics.

3) The third reason is that Wells had recently ‘scandalised’ society by, in the glare of his role as public figure, commentator, novelist etc, having an affair with a much younger woman, Amber Reeves and abandoning his wife to run away with her. Well, the narrator of this long book is also a man prominent in public life who has an affair with a much younger woman and abandons his wife to run away with her. So it was easy to accuse ‘The New Machiavelli’ of being not a novel at all but (yet another) lightly fictionalised autobiography.

4) And not only that but this great long narrative (380 pages in the Everyman paperback edition) is tendentious, has an aim on us. It is cast in the form of a first-person apologia, an ‘apologia pro vita sua’, as Remington recounts in great detail his entire life story with a strong emphasis on sex. From the start he carefully seeds references to his sex urge, describes his first sexual experiences etc, all the while arguing that society needs to be more open and acknowledge the role the sex instinct plays in human life, so that by the time the narrative gets to the affair and elopement (the last quarter of the book) it’s difficult not to read the book as an extended justification of Well’s own behaviour.

5) Finally, Wells had recently ended his 5-year involvement with the Fabian Society (1903 to 1908), quitting the organisation in high dudgeon after a failed attempt to take it over for his own purposes, and the book contains extended and pretty negative portraits of the founders of the Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, lightly fictionalised as Oscar and Altiora Bailey. For those who knew the Webbs (and the other political figures Wells satirises) the book seemed like a cheap act of revenge. More broadly, this inclusion of public figures he had a grudge against reinforced the sense that Wells didn’t write ‘novels’ but fictionalised autobiographies stuffed with his hobby horse ideas.

For all these reasons it’s easy to dismiss ‘The New Machiavelli’ as less a novel than the latest fictionalising of the main events in Wells’s life which he had already used extensively in the plots of the preceding social novels – Love and Mr Lewisham, Kipps, Mr Polly, Tono-Bungay and Ann Veronica – to which he was now adding his latest scandalous sexual adventure and the Fabian fiasco.

But having said all that, there’s still a lot to redeem ‘The New Machiavelli’ and make it worth reading. Wells is always an interesting writer. I enjoy his prose style, I look forward to the occasional surprising simile, and – to turn the standard criticism on its head – it’s precisely because it’s not a carefully crafted, focused and honed work of art (cf The Good Soldier, The Great Gatsby) but instead a great rambling grab-bag of ideas and issues and memories and vividly imagined scenes and conversations – that it’s an enjoyable read. In some respects it’s like reading a series of articles about late-Victorian and Edwardian social history and I found it very readable on that level.

Muddle versus planning

Also it contains the most extensive statements of the key elements of Wells’s philosophy or politics (if either of them really deserve the name). This is that Wells, like the protagonist of the book, Richard Remington, grew up in a late-Victorian Britain characterised by laissez-faire economic policy and a minimal state devoted to interfering as little as possible in business or society, which had resulted, by the turn of the 20th century, in extraordinary and highly visible shambles in just about every sphere of English society. Six which Wells singles out for special criticism are:

  • the brutally exploitative nature of unregulated industrial capitalism, 7 day weeks, 12 hour days etc
  • the patchy, limited and regressive nature of the British educational ‘system’, which taught the ruling class nothing but Classics and cricket and taught the lower classes hardly anything at all
  • the absolute shambles of urban development without any planning or supervision, which had created great sprawling slums
  • the repressive and retarding influence of the Church on every aspect of society but especially through its network or Church schools
  • the ruinous state of the British Army, badly trained soldiers led by bumbling officers, as revealed by the national humiliation of the Boer War
  • the shameful, furtive, fumbling British attitude to sex which caused so much suffering and harm (disease, abortion, death)

The chaos in all these aspects and more of English society Wells sums up in the key word muddle, which recurs again and again, throughout the novel:

No, the Victorian epoch was not the dawn of a new era; it was a hasty, trial experiment, a gigantic experiment of the most slovenly and wasteful kind. I suppose it was necessary; I suppose all things are necessary. I suppose that before men will discipline themselves to learn and plan, they must first see in a hundred convincing forms the folly and muddle that come from headlong, aimless and haphazard methods…

‘Muddle,’ said I, ‘is the enemy.’ That remains my belief to this day. Clearness and order, light and foresight, these things I know for Good. It was muddle had just given us all the still freshly painful disasters and humiliations of the war, muddle that gives us the visibly sprawling disorder of our cities and industrial country-side, muddle that gives us the waste of life, the limitations, wretchedness and unemployment of the poor. Muddle!

Against this muddle and shambles Wells sets the concepts of Planning and Order. And he associates these virtues with Science – which establishes the latest information about all aspects of the world – and Education – which disseminates this latest knowledge as widely as possible to the entire population.

[My father] gave me two very broad ideas in that talk and the talks I have mingled with it; he gave them to me very clearly and they have remained fundamental in my mind; one a sense of the extraordinary confusion and waste and planlessness of the human life that went on all about us; and the other of a great ideal of order and economy which he called variously Science and Civilisation… he led me to infer rather than actually told me that this Science was coming, a spirit of light and order, to the rescue of a world groaning and travailing in muddle for the want of it…

So the dichotomy in Wells’s mind isn’t between industrial capitalism and socialism or between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat or between the exploiting class and the exploited or between imperial colonists and colonised natives. It is between Muddle and Planning.

This fundamental dichotomy, or binary opposition, sheds light on Wells’s own personal version of ‘socialism’. By ‘socialism’ he doesn’t mean the political system whereby (to quote a dictionary) ‘the means of production, distribution and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole’ – he simply means where there should be a carefully thought through and orchestrated plan. ‘Socialism’ is more a codeword for the new world of Order, Reason and Planning which he wished to see.

We were socialists because Individualism for us meant muddle, meant a crowd of separated, undisciplined little people all obstinately and ignorantly doing things jarringly, each one in his own way… Order and devotion were the very essence of our socialism, and a splendid collective vigour and happiness its end. We projected an ideal state, an organised state as confident and powerful as modern science, as balanced and beautiful as a body, as beneficent as sunshine, the organised state that should end muddle for ever; it ruled all our ideals and gave form to all our ambitions.

So, on the one hand you had the actual condition of Britain in the 1880s and ’90s, dominated by a reactionary church and two political parties led by idiotic aristocrats who could quote Latin and Greek tags till the cows came home but knew little else, parties which both believed in keeping state intervention to the absolute minimum, in not making any overarching social plans but responding to events in a chaotic manner…

…And on the other hand, Wells’s belief in total state intervention, in drawing up an all-encompassing, long-term plan to abolish waste and muddle, with religious obscurantism replaced by the latest scientific knowledge, and squabbling petty party politics replaced by a unified ruling elite of technocrats, engineers and scientists acting in the best interests of the whole country, promoting:

educational reorganisation, scientific research, literature, criticism, and intellectual development. (p.273)

What appealed to Wells about ‘socialism’ wasn’t the overthrow of the grotesquely rich ruling class and landed aristocracy in the name of the urban proletariat, but the replacement of the laissez-faire approach which dominated the entire Victorian era with massive, indeed total state control, but a state run by modern scientifically minded elite.

‘Monstrous muddle of things we have got,’ I said, ‘jumbled streets, ugly population, ugly factories —’
‘And you’d do a sight better if you had to do with it?’ said my uncle, regarding me askance.
‘Not me. But a world that had a collective plan and knew where it meant to be going would do a sight better, anyhow. We’re all swimming in a flood of ill-calculated chances —’

Grasp this fundamental dichotomy and you’ve more or less grasped everything Wells had to say and wrote about continuously for over 40 years (from the early 1900s to 1945). ‘The New Machiavelli’ is a realistic novel and so the protagonist – politician Richard Remington – sets out on his crusade to end muddle and impose order, within a relatively realistic setting. Whereas in the numerous science fiction and utopian novels he wrote, Wells looked forward to Order not being imposed by this or that local government but by a World Government made up of a technocratic elite of scientists, engineers and the like, devising 5-, 10-, 50-year plans to reform and rationalise all aspects of human life. Planning. Order. Science. Education. All aspects of the same fundamental vision.

That’s why he dwells at such length, in an early section, on the destruction of the small, self-contained and harmonious community of Bromstead when it was overrun by developers and hack builders and property speculators and the rest of the crooks involved in housing who turned the place into a polluted slum. It’s both an evocative and sad description in itself, but also a microcosm of the national problem: laissez-faire speculation run rampant, unsupervised, uncontrolled, with no guiding plan, leads to slums, dirt, pollution, poverty, bad houses which fall down or rot. It’s a powerful symbol of everything wrong with the British state.

The real villain in the piece – in the whole human drama – is the muddle-headedness, and it matters very little if it’s virtuous-minded or wicked. I want to get at muddle-headedness.

And all this explains why the real battleground for Wells was and remained education. That’s why he gives such a long account of Remington’s education at a public school (strikingly unlike the wretched educational experiences of Arthur Kipps and Alfred Polly). Because even here, at a top public school, the education is shockingly bad, with Wells dwelling on the utter fatuousness of making teenage boys waste thousands of hours learning Latin and ancient Greek, instead of modern science and engineering. Not only does it explain why Britain was, by the 1890s, falling behind America and Germany on every economic measure, but why it produced such strikingly dim and obtuse leaders.

The real scandal, as his long digression about education makes clear, is that it’s yet another aspect of English life which is the result of centuries of muddle and bodging and compromise and a complete lack of a centrally co-ordinated, rational plan.

Modern scientific central planning run by technocrats versus chaotically fragmented muddling through, managed by Latin-quoting buffoons – that is the dichotomy which underpins Wells’s writing, both fiction and non-fiction, articles, encyclopedias, novels, pamphlets, the lot.

Free Love

That and Free Love. During the Edwardian decade Wells became notorious for the many affairs he had while still married to long-suffering Amy Catherine Robbins (always referred to as ‘Jane’). This novel was scandalous in its day because the plotline of the married male protagonist, Richard Remington, having a passionate affair with a much younger woman before running off abroad, was so obviously an only lightly fictionalised autobiographical account of Wells’s own recent affair with the young Amber Reeves who he eloped with.

It wasn’t just that Wells cast the book in the form of a first-person narrative by Remington and so takes us directly into the passions and saucy descriptions of the affair. But that the entire huge narrative is a massive apologia, exemplifying the dictionary definition of ‘a formal written defence of the narrator’s opinions or conduct’.

But it wasn’t just that the entire novel was widely seen as a thinly disguised piece of special pleading by Wells trying to explain and justify what, by the standards of the day, was seen as utterly reprehensible behaviour. More than this, Wells went on to turn his immoral behaviour into a kind of social and political crusade, insisting that society needed to be more tolerant of lovers who breached narrow social rules. And – what alienated many – was that he went further and associated the reform of sexual morality with all the other social reforms he postulated. He in effect insisted that if you wanted to see this better future of Order and planned government by an oligarchy of technocrats, you also had to buy into his crusade for sex reform. In fact at various points the narrator insists that a reformed sexual morality is central to any attempt to reform this muddle-headed nation.

A people that will not valiantly face and understand and admit love and passion can understand nothing whatever.

It was this yoking of his personal (scandalous and ‘immoral’) behaviour to his notions of social, economic and educational reform, his insistence that if you were to follow his political ideals you also had to accept his shameless philandering – which set people against Wells, and which certainly put the prissy Fabians off him.

The social comedies

‘The New Machiavelli’ was in one sense the climax of the series of ‘social comedies’ which started with ‘Love and Mr Lewisham’, ‘Kipps’, ‘Mr Polly’, ‘Tono-Bungay’ and ‘Ann Veronica’. But at the same time it can be seen as the first of his ‘discussion novels’ (although that title probably belongs to ‘Ann Veronica’. It was the most ambitious of them in several respects. 1) It’s by far the longest. 2) It tries to not only define the social and political challenges facing Edwardian England but to show how an intelligent man developed his understanding of them, became aware of them, felt his way into them, and came to develop possible solutions. 3) The hero, Richard Remington, is a distinct class above all the previous protagonists (Lewisham, Kipps, Polly) and enjoys a vastly better education (at public school and Cambridge) than figures like Kipps (dim, left school at 14) or Polly, and so the account of his boyhood, teenage years and schooling is that more thoughtful and considered.

This and the fact that Wells is almost always a very vivid writer. If the book contains numerous digressions or passages about his hobby horses which are too long for ‘artistic’ effect (as his friend and critic Henry James was always pointing out) they are often interesting – especially for someone like me interested in social history as much as the ‘artistic’ effects. In fact you could accurately describe it as a series of magazine articles and features on various subjects gathered together and put into the voice of the narrator to create the appearance of a novel. I liked lots of bits of it.

Interesting passages

On his boyhood

As with the other social novels, arguably the best part is the first part, about his childhood and boyhood, school days and early student years (the first 100 or so pages of this 378-page-long Everyman edition). As with the comparable sections of Kipps, Mr Polly and Tono-Bungay, he writes vividly about childhood and boyhood, with a freshness that mostly disappears when his protagonist becomes a boring grown-up.

On his parents

I enjoyed the characterisation of Remington’s parents. His persuasive portrait of a mother who is a dogmatic low Christian, stern, humourless, anxious and dogmatic leads into passages lamenting the repressive impact of the Church of England on all aspects of English life.

And the portrait of his father, Arthur, as an amiably incompetent science teacher and frustrated gardener. The couple of pages about his father’s persistent failures in every aspect of trying to grow vegetables both struck a chord with me and made me laugh out loud.

At last with the failure of the lettuces came the breaking point. I was in the little arbour learning Latin irregular verbs when it happened. I can see him still, his peculiar tenor voice still echoes in my brain, shouting his opinion of intensive culture for all the world to hear, and slashing away at that abominable mockery of a crop with a hoe. We had tied them up with bast only a week or so before, and now half were rotten and half had shot up into tall slender growths. He had the hoe in both hands and slogged. Great wipes he made, and at each stroke he said, ‘Take that!’ The air was thick with flying fragments of abortive salad. It was a fantastic massacre. It was the French Revolution of that cold tyranny, the vindictive overthrow of the pampered vegetable aristocrats. After he had assuaged his passion upon them, he turned for other prey; he kicked holes in two of our noblest marrows, flicked off the heads of half a row of artichokes, and shied the hoe with a splendid smash into the cucumber frame…

On boyhood memories of Bromley as a village overcome by development

There’s a long digression on the history of Bromstead, the name Wells rather pointlessly gives to what is transparently the real London suburb of Bromley where he grew up. In his entertaining book about Wells, ‘The Culminating Ape’, Peter Kemp uses this passage about Bromstead as an example of Wells’s obsession with muddle, bad planning and environmental degradation. But first and foremost it is a vivid and very enjoyable description of the delights of boyhood, nearly as good as the boyhood sections of ‘Kipps’.

On monkey parades

It was in that phase of an urban youth’s development, the phase of the cheap cigarette, that this thing happened. One evening I came by chance on a number of young people promenading by the light of a row of shops towards Beckington, and, with all the glory of a glowing cigarette between my lips, I joined their strolling number. These twilight parades of young people, youngsters chiefly of the lower middle-class, are one of the odd social developments of the great suburban growths—unkindly critics, blind to the inner meanings of things, call them, I believe, Monkeys’ Parades—the shop apprentices, the young work girls, the boy clerks and so forth, stirred by mysterious intimations, spend their first-earned money upon collars and ties, chiffon hats, smart lace collars, walking-sticks, sunshades or cigarettes, and come valiantly into the vague transfiguring mingling of gaslight and evening, to walk up and down, to eye meaningly, even to accost and make friends. It is a queer instinctive revolt from the narrow limited friendless homes in which so many find themselves, a going out towards something, romance if you will, beauty, that has suddenly become a need — a need that hitherto has lain dormant and unsuspected. They promenade.

This is set in the 1880s but it reminded me of the Mods of the 1960s or the nattily dressed followers of ska at the end of the 1970s, similarly style-conscious, nattily dressed working class boys.

On public school

He gives an interesting portrait of the public school his hero goes to, the City Merchants which, in the absence of any notes in this Everyman edition, I presume refers to the Merchant Tailors School. He gives a satirical account of his hero faking an interest in cricket, the number one focus of a public school education, as well as withering criticism of the obsessive study of Classics, a subject completely and utterly useless for life in the modern world.

On Cambridge

The conversations between his student friends are staggeringly banal and dim, unformed, lacking any depth or data, they refute each other by simply saying ‘What rot old chap’ and so on.

On Kipling

The prevailing force in my undergraduate days was not Socialism but Kiplingism. Our set was quite exceptional in its socialistic professions. And we were all, you must understand, very distinctly Imperialists also, and professed a vivid sense of the ‘White Man’s Burden’.

It is a little difficult now to get back to the feelings of that period; Kipling has since been so mercilessly and exhaustively mocked, criticised and torn to shreds;—never was a man so violently exalted and then, himself assisting, so relentlessly called down. But in the middle nineties this spectacled and moustached little figure with its heavy chin and its general effect of vehement gesticulation, its wild shouts of boyish enthusiasm for effective force, its lyric delight in the sounds and colours, in the very odours of empire, its wonderful discovery of machinery and cotton waste and the under officer and the engineer, and ‘shop’ as a poetic dialect, became almost a national symbol. He got hold of us wonderfully, he filled us with tinkling and haunting quotations, he stirred Britten and myself to futile imitations, he coloured the very idiom of our conversation. He rose to his climax with his ‘Recessional’ while I was still an undergraduate.

What did he give me exactly? He helped to broaden my geographical sense immensely, and he provided phrases for just that desire for discipline and devotion and organised effort the Socialism of our time failed to express, that the current socialist movement still fails, I think, to express. The sort of thing that follows, for example, tore something out of my inmost nature and gave it a shape, and I took it back from him shaped and let much of the rest of him, the tumult and the bullying, the hysteria and the impatience, the incoherence and inconsistency, go uncriticised for the sake of it:

Keep ye the Law—be swift in all obedience—
Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford,
Make ye sure to each his own That he reap where he hath sown
By the peace among Our peoples let men know we serve the Lord!

On the Boer War

South Africa seems always painted on the back cloth of my Cambridge memories. How immense those disasters seemed at the time, disasters our facile English world has long since contrived in any edifying or profitable sense to forget! How we thrilled to the shouting newspaper sellers as the first false flush of victory gave place to the realisation of defeat. Far away there our army showed itself human, mortal and human in the sight of all the world, the pleasant officers we had imagined would change to wonderful heroes at the first crackling of rifles, remained the pleasant, rather incompetent men they had always been, failing to imagine, failing to plan and co-operate, failing to grip. And the common soldiers, too, they were just what our streets and country-side had made them, no sudden magic came out of the war bugles for them. Neither splendid nor disgraceful were they — just ill-trained and fairly plucky and wonderfully good-tempered men — paying for it. And how it lowered our vitality all that first winter to hear of Nicholson’s Nek, and then presently close upon one another, to realise the bloody waste of Magersfontein, the shattering retreat from Stormberg, Colenso — Colenso, that blundering battle, with White, as it seemed, in Ladysmith near the point of surrender! and so through the long unfolding catalogue of bleak disillusionments, of aching, unconcealed anxiety lest worse should follow. To advance upon your enemy singing about his lack of cleanliness and method went out of fashion altogether! The dirty retrogressive Boer vanished from our scheme of illusion.

All through my middle Cambridge period, the guns boomed and the rifles crackled away there on the veldt, and the horsemen rode and the tale of accidents and blundering went on. Men, mules, horses, stores and money poured into South Africa, and the convalescent wounded streamed home. I see it in my memory as if I had looked at it through a window instead of through the pages of the illustrated papers; I recall as if I had been there the wide open spaces, the ragged hillsides, the open order attacks of helmeted men in khaki, the scarce visible smoke of the guns, the wrecked trains in great lonely places, the burnt isolated farms, and at last the blockhouses and the fences of barbed wire uncoiling and spreading for endless miles across the desert, netting the elusive enemy until at last, though he broke the meshes again and again, we had him in the toils. If one’s attention strayed in the lecture-room it wandered to those battle-fields.

And that imagined panorama of war unfolds to an accompaniment of yelling newsboys in the narrow old Cambridge streets, of the flicker of papers hastily bought and torn open in the twilight, of the doubtful reception of doubtful victories, and the insensate rejoicings at last that seemed to some of us more shameful than defeats….

The British Empire

I think of St. Stephen’s tower streaming upwards into the misty London night and the great wet quadrangle of New Palace Yard, from which the hansom cabs of my first experiences were ousted more and more by taxicabs as the second Parliament of King Edward the Seventh aged; I think of the Admiralty and War office with their tall Marconi masts sending out invisible threads of direction to the armies in the camps, to great fleets about the world. The crowded, darkly shining river goes flooding through my memory once again, on to those narrow seas that part us from our rival nations; I see quadrangles and corridors of spacious grey-toned offices in which undistinguished little men and little files of papers link us to islands in the tropics, to frozen wildernesses gashed for gold, to vast temple-studded plains, to forest worlds and mountain worlds, to ports and fortresses and lighthouses and watch-towers and grazing lands and corn lands all about the globe. Once more I traverse Victoria Street, grimy and dark, where the Agents of the Empire jostle one another, pass the big embassies in the West End with their flags and scutcheons, follow the broad avenue that leads to Buckingham Palace, witness the coming and going of troops and officials and guests along it from every land on earth… Interwoven in the texture of it all, mocking, perplexing, stimulating beyond measure, is the gleaming consciousness, the challenging knowledge: ‘You and your kind might still, if you could but grasp it here, mould all the destiny of Man!’ (p.220)

On his Staffordshire uncle

Remington has an uncle who runs a successful business in the Potteries. When his father dies, this uncle appears, sells off the properties his dad tried and failed to maintain and rent out, and collates the capital into a pension for Remington and his mother and him. When his mother dies, this uncle appears again and becomes Remington’s guardian. By the time he’s a student, Remington has begun to see his limitations and Wells gives a funny caricature of him:

Essentially he was simple. Generally speaking, he hated and despised in equal measure whatever seemed to suggest that he personally was not the most perfect human being conceivable. He hated all education after fifteen because he had had no education after fifteen, he hated all people who did not have high tea until he himself under duress gave up high tea, he hated every game except football, which he had played and could judge, he hated all people who spoke foreign languages because he knew no language but Staffordshire, he hated all foreigners because he was English, and all foreign ways because they were not his ways. Also he hated particularly, and in this order, Londoner’s, Yorkshiremen, Scotch, Welch and Irish, because they were not ‘reet Staffordshire,’ and he hated all other Staffordshire men as insufficiently ‘reet.’ He wanted to have all his own women inviolate, and to fancy he had a call upon every other woman in the world. He wanted to have the best cigars and the best brandy in the world to consume or give away magnificently, and every one else to have inferior ones. (His billiard table was an extra large size, specially made and very inconvenient.) And he hated Trade Unions because they interfered with his autocratic direction of his works, and his workpeople because they were not obedient and untiring mechanisms to do his bidding.

On his first marriage to an unsuitable woman

The text is divided into four ‘books’ and the second one (pages 117 to 205) is devoted to his wooing and marriage to the lovely Margaret Seddon. Exactly as in ‘Lewisham’, ‘Polly’ etc, this is closely based on Wells’s own life in which he married young and naively to his cousin, projecting onto her all the qualities he wanted in a woman (namely intelligence and sensuality) which, unfortunately, she turned out to completely lack, being a very mundane unintellectual person and sexually unresponsive. Hence Wells’s affairs, hence the eventual running off with a younger, more sensual woman. In various permutations the same basic plot is recycled in all the social novels, and here again.

‘The New Machiavelli’ is a longer, deeper book than the previous ones, and consciously set in a higher social class than previously – so the wooing of Margaret Seddon is not pitched in the comic mode of Kipps or Polly and, as a result, feels all the more sad. Both figures are pathetic, the narrator not concealing the fact that he desperately wanted this beautiful ‘dropping’ woman to have all the qualities he projected onto her, hiding from himself what he already knew, namely that she has no ideas and nothing to say for herself,

Her mind had a curious want of vigour, “flatness” is the only word…a beautiful, fragile, rather ineffective girl…I wanted her so badly, so very badly, to be what I needed. I wanted a woman to save me. I forced myself to see her as I wished to see her. Her tepidities became infinite delicacies, her mental vagueness an atmospheric realism…

But then they go on honeymoon to Venice and Richard realises, for the first time, her lack of sensual passion and her dim, conforming mediocrity.

It was entirely in my conception of things that I should be very watchful not to shock or distress Margaret or press the sensuous note. Our love-making had much of the tepid smoothness of the lagoons. We talked in delicate innuendo of what should be glorious freedoms. (p.176)

I haven’t got round to mentioning yet that Margaret was an heiress. Remington meets her on one of his periodic visits to his uncle, the successful businessman in the Potteries, where Margaret is a friend of the uncle’s daughters i.e. his cousins. A few years later he bumps into her at a little dinner given by the ‘Baileys’ and quickly realises that Altiora Bailey is pushing her on him. Margaret is young and attractive, wealthy and looking for a cause. Remington is a clever young man on the way up. Hence Altiora’s match-making.

Sex

This has brought us to what the book is ultimately about, which is sex – and on this subject, possibly the one closest to Wells’s heart and groin, he has much to say. Just to repeat, there is nowhere any description of actual sex, no nudity even. What we’re talking about is the character’s descriptions of sexual relationships.

The subject is broached when Remington is still a schoolboy. There’s nothing about the perils of puberty, about his first orgasm, about masturbation and so on, there’s no graphic detail. The subject is approached in a much more roundabout, euphemistic way. But nonetheless, it is mentioned as becoming an issue at school.

In his entertaining book about Wells, ‘The Culminating Ape’, Peter Kemp sheds light on an unusual aspect of Wells’s sexual education, which is that he had some of his first erotic feelings standing before the huge statues of bare-breasted female figures displayed at the Crystal Palace (representing Greek gods or the continents of the world etc) and the same again with the naked statues in the Victoria and Albert Museum. And some of the main source passages Kemp uses are from this book.

Then, at Cambridge, sex is one among many topics these bright but vague and inexpressive undergraduates discuss.

It’s only when he goes on a walking holiday in Italy with a friend, that Remington, to his amazement, finds himself having a fling with an older, married woman in their hotel. She and he hit it off, come to a quick understanding, and then he’s pulling her into his room, kissing her and… the rest is glossed over, but you get the idea. Four afternoons of ‘passion’ introduce him to sex. Not only are there no descriptions of any kind, but nothing about the actual problems and mechanics of sex – female arousal and lubrication, the problem of contraception and so on. It is his introduction to a kind of sex which goes undescribed and assumed.

After he leaves university, five years pass while he makes his way in London and, he tells us, becomes an expert in sordid affairs. I think he’s saying that he has several affairs, with married women (it was more feasible to have affairs with married women because single women were more tightly chaperoned and/or tightly protected their virginity). But he also, apparently, goes with prostitutes.

It’s not really the relationships, it’s Wells’s polemical way with the subject that’s eye-catching. He insists that sex is the great taboo subject, that it isn’t discussed or written about – and yet every adult knows it is a major part of adult life and is also a major part of the urban scene, especially in London whose streets all eye witnesses describe as being packed with prostitutes. His insistence that we give the subject its proper weight and importance, both in any account of the development of a character, and also in any description of London, both of these are surely laudable aims.

(All this candour echoes the prominence of sex as a theme in Ann Veronica, particularly the memorable passage of Ann innocently arriving in London only to be followed and propositioned by men on the street or wandering by accident into an obvious prostitute neighbourhood near Covent Garden; and the scenes of her being harassed and eventually almost raped by Ramage.)

Sex and Margaret

Anyway, the narrator is very aware that he has ‘descended’ into sordid affairs and sleeping with hookers, a world he characteristically doesn’t describe in terms of boobs and willies, but in moralising psychological terms:

I would feel again with a fresh stab of remorse, that this was not a flash of adventure, this was not seeing life in any permissible sense, but a dip into tragedy, dishonour, hideous degradation, and the pitiless cruelty of a world as yet uncontrolled by any ordered will.

He has an affair with a married woman, a Mrs Larrimer, and feels immensely guilty about it, assailed by a sense that it is not so much morally ‘wrong’ (as all the moralists of his age insisted) so much as the purely utilitarian sense that it is a waste of his time, mind and intellect.

She was at once unfaithful and jealous and full of whims about our meetings; she was careless of our secret, and vulgarised our relationship by intolerable interpretations; except for some glowing moments of gratification, except for the recurrent and essentially vicious desire that drew us back to each other again, we both fretted at a vexatious and unexpectedly binding intimacy. The interim was full of the quality of work delayed, of time and energy wasted, of insecure precautions against scandal and exposure. Disappointment is almost inherent in illicit love. I had, and perhaps it was part of her recurrent irritation also, a feeling as though one had followed something fine and beautiful into a net – into bird lime! These furtive scuffles, this sneaking into shabby houses of assignation, was what we had made out of the suggestion of pagan beauty; this was the reality of our vision of nymphs and satyrs dancing for the joy of life amidst incessant sunshine. We had laid hands upon the wonder and glory of bodily love and wasted them….

I like Wells’s way of writing about human nature. The overall shape of the novels is rambling, entire subjects are dragged in yes yes, but I like the way he writes about human relationships and feelings, it’s with a subtlety and insight I enjoy. And this oppressed sense of failing in life is connected with Wells’s central idea of muddle and confusion:

I felt that these great organic forces were still to be wrought into a harmony with my constructive passion. I felt too that I was not doing it. I had not understood the forces in this struggle nor its nature, and as I learnt I failed. I had been started wrong, I had gone on wrong, in a world that was muddled and confused, full of false counsel and erratic shames and twisted temptations.

Anyway, part of the naivety and mistakenness which leads him to woo and marry Margaret, is the misconceived idea that she will save him from the dark and sordid world which his (pretty basic, male) desires have led him into, will save him from himself.

Margaret shone at times in my imagination like a radiant angel in a world of mire and disorder, in a world of cravings… (p.169)

He projects onto her an entire narrative of salvation from squalor by a shining angel which she, of course, is both unaware of and completely unqualified to perform.

I suppose it was because I had so great a need of such help as her whiteness proffered, that I could ascribe impossible perfections to her, a power of intellect, a moral power and patience to which she, poor fellow mortal, had indeed no claim. (p.169)

Politics

Some reviewers criticised it for the incoherence of its politics. What they meant was that on the few occasions when Wells makes any attempt to state Remington’s political ideas or policies, they appear an incoherent mish-mash of Tory Liberal ideas. I think I can explain that.

The real-life Tories and Liberals were divided by very real political philosophies, which came into sharper contrast as the radical Liberals (David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill) took forward their policies to sanction trade union rights, to set up a welfare state and so on. The Edwardian political class was riven by divisions over Ireland, protectionism i.e. imperial tariffs, legislation around the nascent trade union movement and much more. None of this appears in Wells’s account. I don’t think Wells is interested in actual politics at all because he is fixated on his utopian vision of a world run by a technocratic elite. So that when he gets involved in political discussions as a young MP, he or his supporters repeat the same (boring, limited, impractical) Wellsian mantra:

‘Mr Remington has published a programme… Mr Remington stands for constructing a civilised state out of this muddle.’

Politics is a) speeches and manifestos setting out principles and plans, and b) the art of cobbling together acts and whipping enough support to get them passed through Commons and Lords. Wells’s novel deals with neither of those. There are descriptions of political conversations over dinner party tables which are heroic in their vagueness and uselessness.

The chapter titled ‘The Riddle For The Statesman’ ostensibly summarises the evolution of Remington’s political sympathies. This largely consists of him explaining why he grew disillusioned with the Liberal party, partly for its ‘essential littleness’, and came to realise that what he was seeking was a king of aristocracy, but not one ruled by the descendants of William the Conqueror’s lieutenants or other lackeys of monarchs, but the brightest and best, technocrats and engineers etc. In other words, a restatement of his fundamental idea that society needs to be guided by a technocratic elite in order to become the New Republic (a concept already treated in in his books ‘Anticipations’, 1902, ‘Mankind in the Making’, 1903 and ‘A Modern Utopia’, 1905).

[I was disconcerted when he identified this idea with the best of contemporary imperialism, a benevolent imperialism, and astonished when he writes enthusiastically about the Boy Scout movement as a model for what he intends (p.243)]

In this chapter he explains how his idea is to educate everyone up to appreciate the finest things in life and how this led him to admire the breadth and confidence of the actual aristocrats he now met with at grand London mansions and country houses.

I have given now the broad lines of my political development, and how I passed from my initial liberal-socialism to the conception of a constructive aristocracy.

His conversion to Conservative aristocracy is not in the slightest bit believable. Maybe it was a fundamental structural part of the plot, that the man abandons not only his wife but his party and the two are intimately linked because she believed in (and funded) his work for the Liberal Party with complete trust. So it’s a twofold breach of faith, a double betrayal. I can see the structural neatness. I just don’t believe the reasons Wells gives his protagonist.

Why so much political discourse is abuse

Remington hangs out at the Liberal Club and is amazed at its extraordinary diversity of beliefs and opinions (including the black and brown members who hale from distant parts of the empire). Anyway, he wonders at how you manage to keep so many disparate groups together and concludes you do so by attacking the enemy:

What but a common antagonism would ever keep these multitudes together? I understood why modern electioneering is more than half of it denunciation. Let us condemn, if possible, let us obstruct and deprive, but not let us do. There is no real appeal to the commonplace mind in ‘Let us do.’ That calls for the creative imagination, and few have been accustomed to respond to that call. [Denunciation] merely needs jealousy and hate, of which there are great and easily accessible reservoirs in every human heart… (p.224)

Wells’s way with conversations

Wells is very good at describing the ebb and flow of conversations, and their sub-texts and hidden meanings and implications, as well as the simple common experience of running out of things to say, or someone saying something too earnest and serious to be processed in dinner party chitchat, or a casual flirtation between a young couple taking an unexpectedly deep and serious turn.

I’ll never forget the scene in ‘Mr Polly’ where the hero is visiting his friends the Larkins sisters and suddenly, in the course of a page, finds himself coming to the verge of proposing to one of them, purely as a result of bravado and daring, suddenly realising the brink to which his playful banter has taken him. I think he’s very good at capturing all the unintended overtones and implications of conversations, as well as capturing very common problems and experiences. So, in no particular order:

There came that kind of pause that happens when a subject is broached too big and difficult for the gathering. Margaret’s blue eyes regarded the speaker with quiet disapproval for a moment, and then came to me in the not too confident hope that I would snub him out of existence with some prompt rhetorical stroke… (p.194)

Good Lord! what bores the Cramptons were! I wonder I endured them as I did. They had all of them the trick of lying in wait conversationally; they had no sense of the self-exposures, the gallant experiments in statement that are necessary for good conversation. They would watch one talking with an expression exactly like peeping through bushes. Then they would, as it were, dash out, dissent succinctly, contradict some secondary fact, and back to cover… (p.212)

I had the experience that I suppose comes to every one at times of discovering oneself together with two different sets of people with whom one has maintained two different sets of attitudes.

Similes

I mentioned the way Wells’s prose is always alive, there are unexpected phrases on every page, and sometimes he leaps out in vivid similes.

I see old Dayton sitting back and cocking his eye to the ceiling in a way he had while he threw warmth into the ancient platitudes of Liberalism, and Minns leaning forward, and a little like a cockatoo with a taste for confidences, telling us in a hushed voice of his faith in the Destiny of Mankind.

One might think at times there was no more of him than a clever man happily circumstanced, and finding an interest and occupation in politics. And then came a glimpse of thought, of imagination, like the sight of a soaring eagle through a staircase skylight.

Thin to non-existent philosophy

I enjoyed reading about Remington’s boyhood, about his mismatched parents, his father’s comic mishaps at market gardening, his mother’s addiction to vengeful Christian booklets; about running free in the countryside around Bromstead, his vivid description of its destruction by the cancer of London; the extended passages about the hero’s boyish attachment to toy soldiers and playing ‘war’; and the interesting descriptions of the private school he attends, right in the heart of London, the importance attached to Classics and cricket and very little else.

But apart from the conviction that education needs to be given a complete overhaul and the country run by a planful elite, the protagonist (and, you feel, Wells himself) doesn’t have an idea in his head. For example, as Remington hits his later teens he tells us he always had an interest in theology and talked the big issues through with his best friend at school, Britten. What does this mean? That he has deeply considered the doctrine of the atonement, pondered the nature of the trinity, considered the heresies surrounding the incarnation of God in man, has wondered about the justice of the doctrine of original sin, has weighed whether the linear descent of Catholic Christianity from St Peter outweighs its dismal track record and frequent absurdities, or whether Martin Luther’s grim doctrine of predestination is outweighed by the social benefits of the Reformation (namely mass literacy)? No, it means this:

I came at last into a phase that endures to this day, of absolute tranquillity, of absolute confidence in whatever that Incomprehensible Comprehensive which must needs be the substratum of all things, may be. Feeling OF IT, feeling BY IT, I cannot feel afraid of it. I think I had got quite clearly and finally to that adjustment long before my Cambridge days were done. I am sure that the evil in life is transitory and finite like an accident or distress in the nursery; that God is my Father and that I may trust Him, even though life hurts so that one must needs cry out at it, even though it shows no consequence but failure, no promise but pain… (p.68)

This is, to be frank, pitiful, and he claims to have reached this Great Conclusion at Cambridge. No. This isn’t theology, it’s just his personal psychology. This is much the same level as those soul music classics which assure us ‘it’s gonna be alright’. Most of Wells’s thinking is like this, whether it be this ridiculously simple-minded ‘theology’ or his thinking about ‘socialism’ which just amounts to better social planning. For a man with such a reputation as a ‘thinker’ it’s remarkable how most of  his ‘ideas’ lackiany definition or precision or value, are little more than wordy feel-good mottos.

Thoughts

Wells rails against ‘muddle’ and makes ‘muddle’ the central enemy of his critique. And yet he himself is hopelessly confused and muddled about the solution. The very fact that his hero crosses from Fabian socialism, through Liberalism and onto the Conservative Party indicates how confused and shambling his thought is. Wells tries to dignify it by having his hero explain how hard it is to come up with a coherent philosophical and political position:

It is perplexingly difficult to keep in your mind, fixed and firm, a scheme essentially complex, to keep balancing a swaying possibility while at the same time under jealous, hostile, and stupid observation you tread your part in the platitudinous, quarrelsome, ill-presented march of affairs… I have thrown together in the crudest way the elements of the problem I struggled with, but I can give no record of the subtle details; I can tell nothing of the long vacillations between Protean values, the talks and re-talks, the meditations, the bleak lucidities of sleepless nights…

But this fools no-one. His protagonist preaches against muddle but, in the end, is the most muddle-headed and confused person in the story. There’s no way Remington could have written anything as clever and consistent as The Prince. He’s too confused and incoherent.

Then again, this is a novel not a treatise, and so it is possible that Wells intended us to find Remington a well-meaning but long-winded rambling fool. Was that his aim?

Conclusion

‘The New Machiavelli’ was Wells’s sixth and final attempt to write a Proper Novel (following ‘Love and Mr Lewisham’, ‘Kipps’, ‘Mr Polly’, ‘Tono-Bungay’ and ‘Ann Veronica’) and, having worked my way through it, I can see what a huge effort he made to give it far more intellectual and psychological depth than its predecessors, to create a kind of Summa of all his life experiences and profoundest beliefs to date.

So that when it was so widely criticised and when, eventually, Wells himself came to see it as flawed in its basic conception, as more an encyclopedia rather than a novel – stung and mortified, he gave up trying to write serious literary fiction and gave himself more and more to thinly-fictionalised screeds and manifestos, increasingly based on repetitive plots and situations. Most critics and readers regard everything that followed as a long 30-year decline in quality.

Credit

The New Machiavelli by H.G. Wells was published by Bodley Head in 1911. References are to the 1994 Everyman paperback edition edited by Norman Mackenzie.

Related links

H.G. Wells reviews

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Posted by Simon on January 1, 2025

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Weep Not, Child by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1964)

‘Hurrah and victory for the black folk!’
(Typically naive political slogan Weep Not, Child, page 73)

Weep Not, Child was Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s first novel, written in English and published in 1964, the same year as Nigerian author Chinua Achebe’s third novel, Arrow of God. But whereas Achebe wrote about the Igbo people in Nigeria in West Africa, Thiong’o is a native of Kenya in East Africa, which is where all his fictions are set.

I write ‘written in English’ because, after writing three novels in English, Thiong’o came to feel strongly that the African novelist ought to write in his or her own native tongue and so, from the 1970s to the present day, his novels, plays and essays have all been written in his native tongue, Gĩkũyũ.

Via a long writing career, along with his committed political involvement, and his numerous essays, Thiong’o long ago established himself as a major presence in African literature, and has been nominated for the Nobel prize.

Weep Not, Child

It’s a short book, just 136 pages in the Heinemann African Writers’ paperback edition and, I’m afraid to say, after the monumental vision of Achebe’s Africa trilogy, or the stylish grace and lucidity of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s prose, Thiong’o suffers by comparison. His prose feels simple, almost school level, and the insights and ideas expressed by both the third-person narrator and the characters also seem childish in their illiterate simple-mindedness (more detail, below). That said, the very simplicity of the style arguably matches the stark (and highly political) outlines of the story.

Part One. The Waning Light

It’s set in Mahua village not far from Kipanga town. Ngotho is a middle-aged African, not well off, living in a village compound with his two wives, Njeri the eldest and Nyokabi. By Njeri he has three children, Boro, Kori and Kamau. By Nyokabi he has two sons, Mwangi, who died in the recently finished Second World War, and the boy Njoroge.

Boro fought in the white man’s war, and is now withdrawn and drinks too much. Kori works in an African tea shop. Kamua is apprenticed to a carpenter, Nangwa, in the village. The narrative kicks off as it is announced that Njoroge is going to school (Kamahou Intermediate School, p.109), a big achievement to be proud of in their community.

We learn about their neighbours who are each emblematic. The immediate neighbour is a man named Jacobo who owns a lot of land and a big house ‘like a European’s house’ (p.18). His wife is Juliana, a fat jolly woman. They have a daughter, Mwihaki, a little girl who Njoroge likes to play with. She’s in the year above Njorogoe at school and looks after him when he is a vulnerable new boy.

Mr Howlands is the local big white man, who owns most of the good land and a fine house and has lots of black employees and servants. His wife, the Memsahib, is bored, and regularly demands that the black servants be beaten and, periodically, sacked. Howlands is a product of the First World War, uncertain and disillusioned by the peace, who sought an opportunity and a purpose in Africa.

The older black characters, Ngotho and his friends, like meeting up in the barber’s shop in Kipanga. Recurring scenes turn the conversations there into a kind of chorus commenting on the main action.

Like Chinua Achebe, Thiong’o is not shy of depicting his people as they actually were, warts and unacceptable attitudes, customs and behaviour, and all. Njoroge is afraid of his father. Ngotho’s attitude to his wives:

When a woman was angry no amount of beating would pacify her. Ngotho did not beat his wives much. (p.11)

Children are routinely beaten and thrashed, at school or by their parents. Njoroge longs to be a bit older in order ‘to have the freedom to sit with the big circumcised girls and touch them as he saw the young men do.’ (p.22)

This community loves listening to old stories. The father, Ngotho, tells old folk stories, legends of the creation of the world by the Creator Murungu, as well as stories from when he was a boy and was press-ganged along with so many others during the white man’s first war. He explains that the Creator gave them all the land but the white man took the best of it away. In their little area the best land now belongs to the white man Mr Howlands.

As the narrative unfolds the Land Issue develops as the central theme. Ngotho obsessively remembers the words of Mugo wa Kibiro, an old medicine man and prophet who foresaw the arrival of the whites, and that they would seize the ancestral land given them by the Creator, but also that they would, eventually, leave. So:

  • the white man Mr Howlands thinks he owns the land. He thinks that ‘he alone was responsible for taming this unoccupied wildness’ (p.31)
  • Ngotho and Africans of his generation remember the folk stories about the Creator giving all the land to his ancestors in perpetuity, and passively wonders when the white man will leave and give it back to its rightful owners
  • Ngotho’s sons, especially Boro and Kamau, are disgusted that his father and father’s father were weak enough to have the land stolen from them by the white man

Njoroge’s father, Ngotho, loyally, faithfully works for Mr Howlands, turning up day after day, on time, and working the land with impressive fidelity, but in fact exemplifies the mutual misunderstanding about the land. Ngotho does all this not because he respects Mr Howlands, but in order to maintain his contact with land which he is convinced is his, and will one day revert to him and his sons.

Some of them have vaguely heard of a man named Jomo who came back from the war and calls for their ancestral land to be given back. One of the brothers refers to Jomo as the black Moses, come to lead his people home. (Presumably this refers to Jomo Kenyatta, the great Kenyan nationalist leader.) This chimes with the ways, as he attends school and learns to read, Njoroge develops a deep and simple Christian faith, that God rewards hard work with justice and fairness (p.49).

The thing is, the entire narrative is told in a kind of fog of ignorance and half understanding. The characters are illiterate peasants or barely urban workers. None of them have the education or articulacy to really analyse their situation. Things such as the land issue or the character of this rumoured leader, Jomo, are the stuff of rumour conveyed with great vagueness or naivety. Here’s a typical dialogue between young Njoroge and his older brother Kamau:

‘Do you think it’s true what father says, that all the land belongs to the black people?’
‘Yes. Black people have their land in the country of black people. White men have their land in their own country. It is simple. I think it was God’s plan.’
‘Are there black people in England?’
‘No. England is for white people only.’
‘And they have left their country to come and rob us of what we have?’
‘Yes. They are robbers?’
‘All of them?’
‘Yes.’ (p.43)

It’s not that it’s untrue, it’s just that it’s a very basic, very primitive account, on a par with the extremely simple creation myth which Ngotho tells his family. This makes reading the book frustrating, because all the characters are at such a very low level of education and awareness. Then again, maybe this is the entire point of the novel, to show the slow growth in awareness and political understanding of the main character, from village ignorance to more informed disillusion. But it’s an irritating read.

The menfolk gear up for a general strike, many coming to visit Ngotho to discuss it. They airily assume that all black men will join it because its aim is so noble, to drive the white men out of the land and reclaim their birth-right – that’s how simple and naive they are. Njorege, through whose eyes we see most of the action, doesn’t know what a ‘strike’ is. See what I mean by low level? How can something succeed when most of the characters don’t even know what it is?

Mr Howlands warns his black workers that if any of them join the strike they’ll be sacked on the spot. The Ngotho household is divided because his two wives tell Ngotho he would be mad to join the strike, achieve nothing, and lose his job. The theme of masculinity and patriarchy is evident and generally attached to Ngotho who genuinely doesn’t know what to do for the best.

Five years later New Year. Njoroge’s class assemble for their marks. He is top of the class (which made me reflect on how the schoolchild protagonists of this kind of novel generally are top of their class cf the natural intelligence driving Ugwu in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun). Mwihaki passed, too.

But they get home to find both their families in too much of a state to congratulate them. It was the day of the much-vaunted strike. Speakers came from Nairobi to address the locals, including Ngotho’s son, Boro, who has gone into politics. They describe how the white men came, stole their land and forced them to fight in two white men’s wars, from which they returned poorer than ever. Loud cheers.

To everyone’s surprise the police invade the stage and then usher onto it Jacobo, Ngotho’s neighbour, wealthy black man who has thrown in his lot with the whites. Outraged, Ngotho stands and strides toward the stage, and the crowd hesitates enough for the scene to crystallise as Ngotho for the blacks and Jacobo for the whites, before the crowd roars and surges towards the stage. The police reply with tear gas, truncheons and bullets. Two are killed. Ngotho is knocked to the ground and loses consciousness.

In the barber’s shop the old men discuss the riot and say it only goes to show that ‘we black people will never be united. There must always be a traitor in our midst.’ (p.60).

p.61 Ngotho is thrown off his land because it turns out it ‘legally’ belongs to Jacobo, who has now become his arch enemy. The family relocates to land owned by Nganga. It costs a lot to build new huts and Mrs Howlands has, of course, fired Ngotho, so times are very hard. But Kamau’s wages go up and they survive. He and Kori also donate money to continue funding Njoroge’s education.

There ought to be a name for the genre of story which is about the first member of a family to attend school and further education, often thanks to significant funding and sacrifices by his family or community. The same kind of story is told by Chinua Achebe in No Longer At Ease. Later, when he goes on to secondary school, the entire local area raises money for his fees, so proud are they of his achievement (p.105).

Interlude

Two and a half years later Fragments. An angry white administrator looks out over the Kenyan country shortly before returning to Britain, with the self-serving thought: ‘And to think of all we did for them’ (p.62). Some men gossip about the assassination of a black chief who was collaborating with the white administration.

We hear that Jomo has been arrested and a state of emergency is declared (p.63). This latter references dates events to October 1952, when the British authorities declared a State of Emergency after the Mau Mau murdered a loyal Kikuyu chief.

Njoroge continues to hear important things, central issues to the politics of independence, but his child’s point of view makes them frustratingly dim and naive.

Njoroge had heard about the colour-bar from his brothers in Nairobi. He did know what it was really. But he knew that the strike had failed because of the colour-bar. Black people had no land because of colour-bar and they could not eat in hotels because of colour-bar. Colour-bar was everywhere… (p.64)

Part 2. Darkness Falls

Two years later Njoroge has left primary school and been going to secondary school for two years (p.68). For his loyalty to the whites, Jacobo has been made a chief. The whites have banded together to protect themselves against the Freedom Boys of the Forest. Mr Howlands has been appointed District Commissioner.

Njoroge gets home to find the family assembled. Boro has come to tell them that Kori was arrested with a number of other agitators. As he’s describing it Kori comes staggering in, having jumped out of the police lorry carrying him and other prisoners. Boro regularly argues with his father. Ngotho refuses to take the Mau Mau oath from his own son. (This is the first mention of Mau Mau, p.71)

p.72 The men of the family discuss the Mau Mau. They all hope Jomo Kenyatta will win his court case and freedom. But he doesn’t.

Ngotho is upset because he has lost the vital connection with his ancestral land and wonders what kind of man that leaves him. He put all his hopes in Jomo. ‘For him Jomo stood for custom and tradition purified by the grace of learning and much travel’ (p.74).

What the text lacks in psychological depth or sophistication, it makes up for in the straightforward simplicity of its agit-prop rhetoric. As they discuss how Jomo lost his court case to be released from prison, Ngotho’s wife, Nyokabi, speaks out:

‘It seems all clear as daylight. The white man makes a law or a rule. Through that rule or law or what you may call it, he takes away the land and then imposes many laws on the people concerning that land and many other things, all without people agreeing first as in the old days of the tribe. Now a man rises and opposes that law which made right the taking away of land. Now that man is taken by the same people who made the laws against which the man is fighting. He is tried under those alien rules….’ (p.75)

Boro says the white people win because they stick together while the black people are divided.

p.76 Cut to Mr Howlands, now District Officer Howlands, in his office. Showing how embittered he is that his wife has left him to become a missionary. All he has left is the land which he has worked so hard to develop i.e. he’s not going to give it up without a fight.

Describes the malicious pleasure he takes in promoting Jacobo and setting one black man against another. Divide and rule. Jacobo comes in for order. He thinks Howlands likes him, respects his loyalty. But Howlands thinks he is a ‘savage’. I found the characterisation of Howlands thin and naive. He doesn’t sound or think like a British colonial administrator. He has the same simple, naive thoughts as the African characters i.e. I’m afraid, Thiong’o.

Jacobo feeds Howlands false information that Ngotho is a Mau Mau leader. Howlands gives Jacobo carte blanche to arrest Ngotho and his family for anything he can.

p.80 As a result Njeri and Kori are arrested for breaking curfew. Ngotho is abused by Boro for sitting by and doing nothing about the arrest. He becomes a shell. He looks none of his family in the eye. Young people no longer congregate in his compound to hear him tell the old stories.

p.82 Njoroge’s school receives a letter saying that if it doesn’t close down immediately, the headmaster and all the pupils will be beheaded. The kind of message sent out by the Viet Cong, by the FLN in Algeria, by umpteen jihadi groups across the Middle East – all collaborators with the oppressive colonialist authorities will suffer the ultimate penalty. Always the same logic to terrorise the entire population into submission.

p.84 The climate of fear created by the Mau Mau. Njoroge is preparing for the exam for entrance to secondary school. (Hang on, if that happens at age 11, as in the UK, and nine and a half years have been mentioned as passing since the opening scenes…well, no way was Njoroge one and a half when the narrative opened. I admit I don’t understand the timeline.

Njoroge laments that his infant friend Mwihaki’s father (Jacobo) a) became a leading figure in the white man’s homeguard and b) was attacked (no details).

p.87 Njoroge walks into town to see Kamau who tells him half a dozen local men were abducted and found dead in the forest, including the barber who hosted so many convivial evenings, and Nganga who kindly gave Ngotho permission to build a new compound on his land. The whites say it was the Mau Mau but the blacks say it was the whites who then blamed the Mau Mau.

Walking home Njoroge bumps into Mwihaki. He still holds a torch for her. She has grown, is an adolescent with budding breasts. Njoroge himself is tall, appears older than he is. They nervously make a date for the following Sunday.

They meet at the church where the preacher (who was once one of Njoroge’s infant school teachers) laments the tragedy, the bloodshed and fear, which have come over the land of the Gikuyu. He implies that the end of days is at hand.

Njoroge and Mwihaki walk back to her house i.e. the house of Jacobo. He isn’t there. He is always away on business but when he does return everyone is terrified of his power and anger. Unexpectedly Jacobo arrives with three bodyguards but, equally unexpectedly, he doesn’t abuse or threaten Njoroge, instead praises him for continuing school and says he will be one of those who rebuild the country.

Njoroge and Mwihaki go up a hill, look out over the plain, and worry that the end actually is at hand. They are both genuine Christians and wonder how Jesus could countenance the destruction of the world and all the people in it. They both struggle to express their emotions (and so does Thiong’o). In a burst she says she wants to live with him and be friends forever. But Njoroge is starting to see himself as a kind of saviour figure, sent to comfort and liberate the land from its white oppressor.

p.97 Cut back to Howlands who is portrayed as a pantomime villain, chortling at how easy it is to set black against black. What does he care if entire villages in the jungle are wiped out, mwah haha, the Sheriff of Nottingham played by Alan Rickman, he might as well be twirling the ends of his black moustache.

Enter Jacobo, the Sheriff’s dim sidekick. Somehow neither of them have managed to arrest Ngotho yet, despite Howlands allegedly having spent years scheming to defeat his enemy. Bit of a pathetic enemy, and pretty useless schemes.

Jacobo shows Howlands the most recent anonymous letter he’s received threatening death if he doesn’t leave off helping the white man.

Some months later Njoroge is heading a Christian procession to a nearby village, chatting to a fellow devotee, with a group of Christian woman walking behind them singing hymns. All of a sudden they are stopped by a white officer and realised they are surrounded by soldiers. The officer lets the women go then makes the boys and the men squat while he examines their papers. The black soldiers beat some of the black Christians.

Their preacher, Isaka, is separated from them because he has no papers. The others are told to be on their way but haven’t gone far before they hear two screams then machine gun fire.

p.102 Cut to Boro and his lieutenant hiding in the bush and discussing their next steps. It was Boro et al that the white man’s patrol was out hunting. We are given a very simplistic account of Boro’s motives, namely Revenge. Boro doesn’t care about the other’s fine talk about freedom. Killing the white man and his lackeys is his aim.

‘Freedom is meaningless unless it can bring back a brother I lost [in the white man’s war]. Because it can’t do that, the only thing left to me is to fight, to kill and to rejoice at any who falls under my sword. But enough. Chief Jacobo must die.’ (p.103)

In the fairy tale simplicity of this I suddenly heard the note of Victorian melodrama at its cheesiest. ‘Chief Jacobo must die!’

p.104 Njoroge graduates from junior school, the only boy in his area to do so. Many people in the area contribute to his school fees. He now has a full-blown messiah complex.

Njoroge now had a new feeling of pride and power for at last his way seemed clear. The land needed him and God had given him an opening so clear that he might come back and save his family and the whole country. (p.105)

Njoroge meets up with Mwihaki, as he keeps doing. It’s one year after the last time they walked up the hill. Now she criticises him for always talking about tomorrow and going on about the people. Njoroge replies with guff about Jesus and faith and hope and freedom and this completely reassures Mwihaki. I’ve no idea what age they’re meant to be, 11, 12, 13? It’s a childishly simple-minded conversation but without the charm.

p.108 So Njoroge starts attending the famous Siriana secondary school, a boarding school. It’s the first time he’s been taught by white teachers and he is surprised by how warm and supportive they are, surprised how boys from the other tribes of Kenya all get along.

One day a football team from a European school come for a game. To his surprise Njoroge gets talking to one of the boy supporters who is none other than Stephen, son of angry bitter Mr Howlands. Turns out the two boys share the same experience of being stared at and made uneasy by boys of the other race. They are both uneasy in this country covered in black stormclouds.

p.112 Mwihaki writes from back in Kipanga, where her father (Jacobo) lives in fear of attack. Every day bodies are found in the forest. She walked past some black people being beaten by police and begging for mercy. It’s a nightmare.

p.114 It’s the third term at the school. Njoroge really loves it, especially likes English lessons (of course), is awed by the way the white missionary teachers work alongside their black colleagues and black children with no colour consciousness at all. It is a sort of utopia.

With no warning Njoroge is called to the headmaster’s study and handed over to two policemen who drive him to a homeguard post nicknamed the ‘House of Pain’ where he is accused of being Mau Mau, interrogated and beaten unconscious. One night to recover then he’s interrogated again, this time by Mr Howlands who applies pincers to his genitals. Njoroge screams in agony. For the first time Howlands reveals what it’s all about: Jacobo has been murdered. Apparently, they’ve interrogated his father who, under torture, confessed to being Mau Mau and killing Jacobo which is, of course, nonsense. A few days later Njoroge and his two mother are released.

p.119 Ngotho on the other hand is detained. What happened is Jacobo was murdered and the cops arrested Ngotho’s son, Kamau. it was then that Ngotho decided to sacrifice himself for his son by walking into the nearest police station and confessing to Jacobo’s murder. Ngotho has become, for Howlands, the symbol of everything ungrateful and blocking his will in this wretched country. Hence the fury with which he tortures him, day after day.

In some obscure way Njoroge is racked by the thought that it’s his relationship with Mwihaku which somehow brought all this tragedy down on his family.

p.122 Ngotho is allowed home. He has to be carried out of the homeguard post. His nose is split in two, he can’t move his legs, he can’t sit without pain (was he in fact castrated, as Howlands in a frenzy told Njoroge?)

Out of the night appears the prodigal son, the accusatory son, the genuine Mau Mau, Boro. There’s a melodramatic scene where Ngotho struggles to sit up and blesses his son, tells him to fight on, before falling back on the bed and expiring. Victorian melodrama.

p.126 Five months later Njoroge is 20 years old. He is working as a shop assistant in a dress shop owned by an Indian. It is a humiliating come-down after all his fancy talk of saving his family and his country. Turns out that Mr Howlands was murdered the same night Ngotho died. His brothers Boro and Kamau are facing murder charges.

p.127 Thiong’o describes Howlands’ last hours of anger and frustration against Ngotho and his entire family really, really badly. Boro bursts in and accuses him of stealing the land, killing many black people, raping women etc. Howlands says it is my land. Boro shoots him. it is all done very, very badly, with laughably thin psychology or insight.

p.130 Mwihaki’s perspective, how she had heard about her father’s murder from the head of her school, then returned home. Her mother, obviously, hates the Ngotho family and Mwihaki is understandably swayed by this but, despite everything, still wants to see Njoroge again.

Mwihaki and Njoroge meet on the hill where they’ve had so many conversations. Njoroge has been beaten down, all his hopes destroyed, the only reliable thing in his life has been Mwihaki and so now he tells her that he loves her. Good grief, this is bad:

‘Mwihaki, dear, I love you. Save me if you want. Without you I am lost.’ She wanted to sink in his arms and feel a man’s strength around her weak body.

Njoroge tells her that he wants to flee Kenya, go to Uganda maybe, but Mwihaki, like so many young women, says No, she has to stay near her mother who needs her. Njoroge experiences her refusal to leave with him as a massive disappointment and disillusion. He sees his last hope of escape, of starting anew somewhere else, disappear, stricken that ‘his last hope had vanished’ (p.134). Unfortunately, all these overwrought feelings came over as barely comprehensible twaddle, to me.

p.134 It is a very shallow book, an immature young man’s book. It’s overstuffed with themes but Thiong’o treats none of them adequately, with any depth. He makes this character of Njoroge bear all kinds of significances which the story, and its complete lack of psychological depth or acuity, just don’t justify.

Thus now, in the last few pages, the narrator makes a big deal of the fact that Njoroge has, at a stroke lost his faith in God, lost his hope for a better day, lost his naive belief that he could be the redeemer who saved his country. Once he thought he would save his country but now he works in a dress shop whose customers look at him sadly and whisper about his family tragedy behind their hands. He has plummeted from utopian heights to humiliating depths.

Which is why he goes out wandering along the endless road till he comes to a tree which has been familiar to him all his life and prepares a noose. He’s about to hang himself when he hears his mother Nyokabi’s voice calling. Like Mwihaki, filial duty overcomes him, he turns from the noose, greets his poor aged mother and returns home with him.

The last sentences describe how Njoroge’s conscience accuses him of being a coward and how the poor young man, completely broken in spirit, miserably agrees.

Thoughts

I see the political importance and consciousness-raising purpose of Weep Not, Child but I couldn’t warm to either the simple style or the even simpler level of thought.

The blurb says it’s a novel about the impact of the Mau Mau emergency on one family but, as my summary conveys, it’s a very skimpy summary, with few if any descriptions of Mau Mau members – Boro popping up for a page two or three times in the narrative is not an adequate treatment of this massive, long-lasting, nationwide rebellion. I suppose some killings, like the execution of Howlands, are described in some detail but, due to the very poor psychology of the scene, it made little or no impression on me. Instead, the story foregrounds the shallow but shrill family melodrama which I’ve summarised.

I think we’re meant to react to the poignancy and emotion of the story, especially the humiliation piled on humiliation of the once buoyant and optimistic Njoroge, at the end. But I’m afraid what came over to my cynical mind was how abjectly unprepared African nations were to manage themselves, if they were placing their hopes in the hands of simpletons and ignoramuses like Njoroge or Boro.

Maybe the situation obtaining in Kenya and Uganda and Nigeria at independence was entirely the fault of the British government, but this book, far more than an insight into the Mau Mau phenomenon (which it hardly gives at all) struck me as being an indictment of how naive, ignorant and unprepared for any form of self rule that generation of Africans was.

So I read it as a tragic story but for this reason and not at all for the reasons given in the narrative and which Thiong’o intended.

Credit

Weep Not, Child by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was first published in the Heinemann African Writers’ series in 1964. References are to the 1987 paperback edition.

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by Simon on February 9, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on February 9, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/02/09/weep-not-child-ngugi-wa-thiongo/

A Brief Revolution @ the Photographers’ Gallery

The Architectural Review is a monthly international architectural magazine. It was founded in London in 1896 and does what its title suggests, covering all aspects of the built environment.

Manplan

Just over 50 years ago, in 8 issues from September 1969 to September 1970, the Review ran a series of eight specially commissioned reports on the state of architecture at the end of the 1960s. It was to review not just architecture in the narrow sense but the entire state of town planning, in an age when old Victorian slums were being torn down to make way for gleaming new towns made of high-rise towers, medium-rise blocks characterised by lifts and concrete walkways, subways under sweeping new ring roads, nicely laid-out grassed areas and so on.

The Review’s editors called the series of articles ‘Manplan’ and hired leading photojournalists and street photographers to address a set of eight themes, being:

  1. Frustration
  2. Travel and communication (‘Society is its contacts’)
  3. Town Workshop
  4. Education (‘The continuing community’)
  5. Religion
  6. Health and Welfare
  7. Local government
  8. Housing

The result was a series of brilliant photos shot on a 35mm camera in a spirit of photo-reportage – vivid and dramatic black-and-white works which captured a nation in the midst of great social, cultural and environmental change. To the horror of some of its contributors and readers, the magazine turned its back on large-format, heroic photography of buildings and their details, instead embracing a grainy, 35mm black-and-white reportage aesthetic, where people were as, if not more, important than the places. In the words of The Royal Institute of British Architects, publishers of the Architecture Review:

The aim was to propose an alternative and more holistic approach to urban planning, which would look at all basic human needs as a whole. The photographs illustrating the issues were created in the spirit of photo reportage and often featured people inhabiting the spaces studied by the survey, thereby shifting the focus from the architecture itself to the human element within the built environment.

So it was intended to be polemical stuff. The photographers were:

  • Ian Berry
  • Tony Ray-Jones
  • Tim Street-Porter
  • Patrick Ward

Altogether the Architectural Review published about 80 photographs. Just 16 are on display here, but every single one of them is a masterpiece; there’s no slack. Each one is a densely packed, highly charged vignette. This exhibition isn’t big but it is packed with social history, with memories and nostalgia for a time within the living memory of many but feeling evermore distant.

Design and layout

On a separate wall is a display of the actual copies of the magazine which the photo-essays appeared in, along with the words and designs of ‘Manplan’ editor Tim Rock and designers Michael Reid and Peter Baistow. This section goes into detail about how the photographs were processed, reproduced and printed (using ‘special matt black ink’) along with analysis of the layout and typography. All a bit over my head but interesting for students of design.

The photographs

Private terraced houses on the Old Kent Road opposite Camelot Street Estate, London by Tony Ray-Jones (1970) part of ‘Manplan 8: Housing’, in Architectural Review, September 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections

Housing at New Ash Green, Kent by Tony Ray-Jones (1970), part of ‘Manplan 8: Housing’, in Architectural Review, September 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections

Low-rise housing, Tavy Bridge, Thamesmead, Greenwich, London, 1970 by Tony Ray-Jones, part of ‘Manplan 8: Housing’, in Architectural Review, September 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Collections

Classroom windows in a school in Wales, 1969 by unknown photographer, part of ‘Manplan 4: The continuing community (education)’, in Architectural Review, January 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections

High-rise flats and multi-storey car park, Birmingham, 1970 by Peter Baistow, part of ‘Manplan 5: Religion’, in Architectural Review, March 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections

Chatsworth Street school and high-rise housing block overlooking the cleared site, Liverpool, 1969 by Tom Smith, part of ‘Manplan 4: The Continuing Community (education)’ in Architectural Review, January 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections

Salvation Army officers picnicking on the steps of the figure group Asia by J H Foley, Albert Memorial, Kensington Gardens, London, 1969 by Peter Baistow, part of ‘Manplan 5: Religion’, in Architectural Review, March 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Collections

Unidentified primary school, 1969 by unknown photographer, part of ‘Manplan 4: The continuing community (education)’, in Architectural Review, January 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections

Thamesmead film

To one side of the 16 framed photos on the wall, is a TV monitor showing a film from around the same time (in fact the year before the project, 1968). So far as I can tell it’s not directly connected with RIBA or the Manplan project except for the slender link that one of the 80 Manplan photos happens to cover the same subject as the film, namely the new estate being built at Thamesmead.  So it wasn’t directly related to the Manplan project but gives context to the kind of architectural and town planning thinking which was going on at the time of the Manplan project.

Directed by Jack Saward, this 25-minute public education film gives an overview of the history and construction of Thamesmead, a sort of new model suburb built down the River Thames from London on the site of the old Royal Arsenal, a site that extended over Plumstead Marshes and Erith Marshes.

Alas, to quote the introduction to the video on YouTube:

The ambition is commendable but it didn’t quite work in practise, with Thamesmead becoming a notoriously problematic estate and its architects perceived as exhibiting many of the faults of post-war planning, with communities being tinkered with from above like a real-life experiment. This is where utopia meets authoritarianism.

Hard to believe, but the planners that designed the place provided insufficient transport links with London, no way of crossing the Thames for 5 or 6 miles in either direction and – best of all – an almost complete lack of shopping facilities and banks. Lots of pretty little lakes but…nowhere to buy food. According to the label in the exhibition, the estate ‘was soon plagued by social problems caused by lack of facilities and public transport’.

The half-built estate won an unwanted fame when American film director Stanley Kubrick used parts of it as the setting for his notoriously violent 1971 movie, A Clockwork Orange, a vision of an alienated, dystopian society. Here’s the photo of it taken by the brilliant Tony Ray-Jones which provides a sort of coincidental link between the Manplan series and the film.

Thamesmead under construction, Greenwich, London, 1970 by Tony Ray-Jones in ‘Manplan 8: Housing’, Architectural Review, September 1970. Courtesy Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections

Which do you prefer? Which do you think is telling the truth, the film or the photo?

The Robert Elwall Photographs Collection

All the materials for the Manplan exhibition, photos and old copies of the AR magazine, come from the Robert Elwall Photographs Collection. This comprises around 1.5 million images from the earliest days of photography to the present day. The collection includes photographic archives of individual architects and practices, travel and topographic images from across the world, press photographs from major architectural journals, and large bodies of work by some of the best known architectural photographers of the 20th century. The collection includes prints, negatives, slides, transparencies, photographically illustrated books and digital files. It is itself part of the larger Royal Institute of British Architects collections.

Conclusion

Flicking through some of the text on the walls is a dispiriting experience. These 1970 writers were raging against the soulless design of modern cities, the daily struggle of commuting to work on overcrowded public transport, against air pollution, excess traffic and the destruction of the environment, against the dominance of the car over human-friendly spaces, against the dehumanising effects of modern technology, against social inequality and the lack of social housing, against the prioritising of profit over people.

It’s as if, 53 years later, nothing has changed except we all have smart phones to share our frustration about how things obstinately carry on being rubbish. The Manplan writers’ rage and frustration is captured by this, the last entry in the exhibition.

Double page spread from Manplan 1. ‘Frustration’

It’s a copy of the original magazine, open to a double page spread showing a traditional Pearly King and Queen standing in front of the typically sterile, barren waste ground surrounding a clutch of looming, threatening tower blocks. Up in the top right is a text reading: ‘The richness of East End life is replaced by monotony and inhumanity.’

Yep. that’s the world I grew up into and which punk rock, with its angry nihilism, was a direct response to. Eternal shame on England’s architects and town planners.

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by Simon on May 26, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on May 26, 2023

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Seen and Heard: Victorian Children in the Frame @ Guildhall Art Gallery

This is an exhibition of artworks on a subject which is so straightforward, so hidden in plain sight, that it is easily overlooked – children.

To be precise, children in Victorian art.

Victorian Children in the Frame

Guildhall Art Gallery has brought together nearly fifty paintings from the long nineteenth century – approximately 1810 to 1910 – which demonstrate some of the ways in which children were depicted by artists during this long period of tumultuous social change.

The exhibition space consists of two large rooms divided into ‘alcoves’ or sections, each devoted to a different aspect of the painted imagery of children 1810 to 1910. At the start there is a timeline showing the major legal and educational reforms which affected children through the nineteenth century.

Timeline for Seen and Heard at the Guildhall

Timeline for Seen and Heard at the Guildhall

Introduction

Before the 19th century children were depicted in art works as miniature adults. By the time Victoria came to the throne in 1837 children were being depicted more realistically, shown playing with toys or pets. Childhood began to be seen as a distinct and particularly valuable period of life, and children – middle and upper-class children, anyway – as needing coddling and protecting.

It should be mentioned early on that the majority of the 46 or so paintings on display are of a quite mind-boggling soppy sentimentality. The commentary doesn’t mention it but the Cult of Sentiment which had arisen in aristocratic circles in the late 18th century carried on and came to full bloom in some extraordinarily sickly paintings during the 19th century. Chocolate box doesn’t begin to describe them. They may be too sickly sweet for many modern tastes.

That said the exhibition includes a large number of artists, most of whom will be unknown and, since every picture has a useful and informative label, reading them all gives you a good sense of the range and diversity (or lack of it) during the period.

And it’s really interesting to see what inhabitants of distant historical periods liked, commissioned and paid for. Sharpens your sense of the enormous cultural changes which took place during this period, and which separate us from that distant time.

This first section includes:

  • John Strange and Sarah Ann Williams (1830) by John R. Wildman
  • The Artist’s son (1820) by Martin Archer Shee
  • Boy and Rabbit (1814) by Sir Henry Raeburn
Boy and Rabbit (1814) by Sir Henry Raeburn

Boy and Rabbit (1814) by Sir Henry Raeburn © the Royal Academy

Children in poverty

There is a slight disconnect in the exhibition between its wall labels and the actual content. The labels emphasise that throughout the period tens of thousands of children suffered from malnutrition, illness, abuse and overwork. And right at the start of the show there is a big display panel listing the major legislation passed during the 19th century with the twin aims of:

  1. protecting protect children from exploitation and
  2. educating them

This explains that free state education for the under-10s wasn’t available until 1870, while it was only in 1874 that children under the age of ten were forbidden from working in factories. These and other basic historical facts make for startling reading.

However, when you turn from the information texts to the pictures you discover that the exhibition itself has almost no paintings of working children, apart from a handful showing romanticised road sweeps and shoe polishers.

There is no depiction whatsoever of children working in coalmines or in any of the hundreds of thousands of factories which sprang up across the land, in any trades or of the thousands of under-age girls who worked as prostitutes.

There’s no depiction of the kind of workhouse described in Oliver Twist or the bullying junior schools shown in Nicholas Nickleby or David Copperfield.

Instead this section contains some more chocolate-boxy images:

  • Cottage children (1804) by William Owen
  • The Pet Lamb (1813) by William Collins
  • Orphans (1885) by Thomas Benjamin Kennington
Orphans (1885) by Thomas Benjamin Kennington

Orphans (1885) by Thomas Benjamin Kennington © Tate

Compare this painting by Thomas Kennington with the Raeburn above. It is interesting to observe the difference in technique between the early and later part of the century (Raeburn 1814, Kennington 1885), the way a Thomas Lawrence-type softness has given way to a style more roughly painted and with more realistic details (the ragged trousers, the hole in the floor).

But it’s still desperately sentimental, though, isn’t it? Still the same rosy red cheeks and catchlights in the eyes.

Children and animals

The commentary suggests that the British public was sentimental about animals long before it cared about poor children, pointing out that the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded in England in 1824, whereas the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children wasn’t founded till 1884.

The commentary claims that children and animals became increasingly associated as the sentimental Victorian era progressed, but I personally wasn’t convinced of that. One of my all time favourite paintings is Gainsborough’s depiction of his two daughters with a cat, on show at the National Portrait Gallery’s recent exhibition of Gainsborough portraits – and this dates from 1760.

Mary and Margaret Gainsborough, the artist's daughter, with a cat by Thomas Gainsborough (1760-61) © The National Gallery, London

Mary and Margaret Gainsborough, the artist’s daughter, with a cat by Thomas Gainsborough (1760 to 1761) © The National Gallery, London

Maybe it would be more accurate to say that the association of sweet little children and sweet little animals became more mass produced, a shameless catering to the sentimentalism of the new Victorian mass public. In this show it is exemplified in Millais’s couple of paintings, My First Sermon and My Second Sermon, showing the sweetest of innocent little Victorian girls sitting in her smart Sunday best. This was a madly successful painting which was widely distributed in the form of prints and reproductions.

My First Sermon (1863) oil on canvas by John Everett Millais (1829-1896) Image courtesy Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London

My First Sermon (1863) oil on canvas by John Everett Millais (1829 to 1896) Courtesy Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London

Also in this section are:

  • The First Leap (1829) by Sir Edwin Landseer
  • Portrait of a Young Girl (1891) by William Powell Frith
  • The Music Lesson (1877) by Frederick Leighton
  • Sun and Moonflowers (1889) by George Dunlop Leslie
  • Sympathy (1878) by Briton Riviere
Sympathy (1878) by Briton Riviere

Sympathy (1878) by Briton Riviere © Tate

Children at play

What more nostalgic and anodyne image could you conceive than the innocent children of unspoilt crofters fishing by a clear crystal stream or playing harmless games in a rural garden, as depicted here.

But as the century progressed the notion of ‘play’ became commercialised and integrated into a capitalist economy. Playrooms were built in posh houses, playgrounds were built in new housing developments, the Bank Holidays Act of 1871 gave parents special days to spend with their children.

A further development was the invention of seaside resorts, in the first half of the century only for the rich but leading to the development of increasingly popular resorts like Blackpool, Scarborough and Brighton. The paintings in this section capture all phases of this development but with the emphasis mostly on some really cheesy scenes of innocent rural play.

  • The Nutting Party (1831) by William Collins
  • Borrowdale, Cumbria (1821) by William Collins
  • the Kitten Deceived (1816) by William Collins
  • Try This Pair (1864) by Frederick Daniel Hardy
  • Gran’s Treasures (1866) by George Bernard O’Neill
  • The Playground (1852) by Thomas Webster
  • The Swing (1865) by Myles Birket Foster
  • The Hillside (gathering foxgloves) by Myles Birket Foster

Foster was a skilled watercolourist who painted scenery around his Surrey home of Witley. Looks wonderfully idyllic, doesn’t it, but not much to do with the themes of the commercialisation of holidays and recreation time mentioned in the wall labels.

The Hillside (gathering foxgloves) by Myles Birket Foster

The Hillside (gathering foxgloves) by Myles Birket Foster

Children of city, country and coast

The commentary points out the population explosion which characterised the 19th century, and that most of it took place in new towns and cities. This big increase in population gave rise to hair-raising infant mortality statistics as newborns and toddlers fell prey to the diseases of humans crushed together in cramped, insanitary conditions – typhoid, cholera and the like.

However – counter-intuitively – instead of showing paintings of this squalor and disease, the commentary uses these facts to explain a section depicting children at the seaside, including:

  • Children at the Seaside (1910) by Frank Gascoigne Heath
  • John, Everard and Cecil Baring (1872) by James Sant
  • 3rd Lord Evelstoke as a Boy (1871) by E. Tayleur
  • The Bonxie, Shetland (1873) by James Clarke Hook
  • Word from the Missing (1877) by James Clarke Hook
  • Shrimp Boys at Cromer (1815) by William Collins
  • Ruby, Gold and Malachite (1902) by Henry Scott Tuke
  • Georgie and Richard Fouracre (1889) by Henry Scott Tuke
  • Two Children on Deck (1894) Henry Scott Tuke

This latter trio of works makes Tuke, a leading member of the Newlyn School, with his strongly homoerotic portrayals of teenage boys, possibly the most represented artist here.

Ruby, Gold and Malachite was one of the handful of paintings here which really stood out as serious masterpieces which hold their own today. But then it is debatable whether it is about childhood at all. The naked boys are no longer toddlers but on the verge of manhood and that, surely, is part of its appeal.

Pondering the difference between childhood and adolescence made me realise that the exhibition doesn’t actually give a working definition of ‘childhood’ which is, in fact, a problematic category. There is a vast difference between 6 and 16.

Ruby, Gold and Malachite (1902) by Henry Scott Tuke

Ruby, Gold and Malachite (1902) by Henry Scott Tuke © City of London Corporation

I was really struck by this work, An October Morning (1885) by Walter Frederick Osborne, an artist who studied in France in the 1870s and 1880s and brought the plein air approach back to Britain. 

An October Morning (1885) by Walter Frederick Osborne

An October Morning (1885) by Walter Frederick Osborne. Image courtesy Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London

Really looking at this painting I realised that what it has in common with the Tuke painting is that both have a matt finish, very unlike the shiny and slickly finished super-gloss finish of a Millais or Riviere.

This alone helps to account for the mournful atmosphere of the painting, although it is obviously also due the artfully sombre palettes of browns and greys. In its own way it may be Victorian chocolate box, but I felt it had more soul than most of the other paintings on display.

One-offs

Off to one side, not part of any particular topic, are a couple of monster large paintings including the beautiful landscape titled The Thames From Richmond Hill, London (1905) by Ernest Albert Waterlow. This appeared to be in the exhibition chiefly here because it has been subjected to recent restoration, which is thoroughly explained by a lengthy wall label.

Nearby was an altogether darker and morbid painting, The Man with the Scythe (1896) by Henry Herbert La Thangue.

The Man with the Scythe (1896) by Henry Herbert La Thangue

The Man with the Scythe (1896) by Henry Herbert La Thangue © Tate

La Thangue was, apparently, famous for the realism of his late-Victorian rustic scenes, mostly of workaday life. This one has an unusual symbolism about it. It’s not easy to see in this reproduction, and was hard to see in the lowered light of the gallery, but at the end of the path, on the right, is a man with a scythe, and the assumption is that the little girl in the chair has just died.

The emphasis on death and the whiteness of the girl’s dress and pillow link it with a number of European Symbolist painters of the time.

Children at school

In 1851 fewer than 50% of children in Britain attended school. In fact the provision of education was incredibly haphazard until the end of the century. Until then there was no system, instead each region had highly localised and overlapping education facilities which might include factory schools (which provided two hours a day education but only after the end of the eight-hour working day), Dame Schools run by spinster women, Ragged schools for the very poorest which taught survival-level writing and reading, private day schools with low fees and notoriously low standards, and a wide range of schools run by local charities, by the Church of England, the Quakers and so on.

Only the middle and upper classes bothered to educate their children beyond the age of 11 and were able to afford the fees for governesses or private tutors, grammar schools, preparatory and public schools. In Victorian society, the well educated were, then, in a tiny majority.

Only with the Education Act of 1870 were local authorities finally put under the obligation to provide free education for every child under 10. Only in 1880 was attendance at school between the ages of five and 13 made compulsory, and it was not until 1891 that education was provided free for all.

Fascinating stuff but, once again, the paintings which ‘illustrate’ these facts are mawkishly twee and sentimental.

  • A Dame’s School (1845) by Daniel Webster
  • Alone (1902) by Theophile Duverger
  • Two Children at Drawing Lessons (1850s) by Daniel Pasmore
  • The Smile (1841) by Thomas Webster
  • The Frown (1841) by Thomas Webster

In the first of this pair of paintings the children are happily smiling and pleasing their teacher. The second shows the same row of little tinkers in various stages of frowning and looking unhappy. Aaaah. Sweet.

The Smile (1841) by Thomas Webster

The Smile (1841) by Thomas Webster

Children at work

Though the birth rate declined during the 19th century as a result of improvements in medicine and education, nonetheless at one point about a third of the population was under the age of 15.

Victorian England was the first developing country. In the early part of the Industrial Revolution children as young as five were sent to work in city streets, country fields, docks, factories and mines. Legislation slowly raised the age at which children could be put to work and limited their working hours, but it’s still a shock to learn how slowly this came about. In 1842 the Mines Act banned the use of boys under the age of ten down coalmines. So 11-year-olds could go, then. It wasn’t until 1878 that children under the age of 10 were forbidden to work in factories.

But regardless of legislation, city street were full of street Arabs, homeless waifs and strays scraping a living. Henry Mayhew’s astonishing multi-volumed enquiry into the lives and work and economics of street labour, London Labour and the London Poor, revealed to middle-class Victorians an astonishing proliferation of street employment and the precise demarcations and hierarchies among, for example, coster-mongers (who sold fresh fruit), mud larks (who searched for valuable scraps in the Thames mud) match girls (who sold match boxes at pitiful rates), and crossing sweepers, who swept the mud and horse poo out of the way of gentleman and ladies who wished to cross the road, for a penny a go.

The paintings on display here completely fail to capture the real misery of poverty and homelessness. Instead the painters are generally hypnotised by the sentimental notion of solitary or abandoned children, and the paintings are vehicles for tear-jerking sentiment. They may be well-intentioned but all-too-often have all the depth of a Christmas card.

  • The Crossing Sweeper (1858) by William Powell Frith
  • Shaftesbury, Lost and Found (1862) by William MacDuff
  • The General Post Office, one minute to six (1860) by George Elgar Hicks
  • A Crossing Sweeper and a Flower Girl (1884) by Augustus E. Mulready
  • Remembering Joys that Have Passed Away (1873) by Augustus E. Mulready
Remembering Joys that Have Passed Away (1873) by Augustus E. Mulready

Remembering Joys that Have Passed Away (1873) by Augustus E. Mulready © Guildhall Art Gallery

Drawings and prints

Off to one side of the main two exhibition rooms is a space obviously set aside for children and school visits, with tiny tables and chair set with paper and crayons and colouring pens.

But what struck me about this space was that it didn’t have any paintings in, it had prints. And the interesting thing about the prints is that they were vastly more realistic than any of the paintings in the main exhibition. Maybe realistic isn’t exactly the word, since since several of them were the cartoon-style illustrations of George Cruickshank, who illustrated Charles Dickens’s early novels.

Field Lane Ragged School, London, c1850 by George Cruikshank

Field Lane Ragged School, London, c1850 by George Cruikshank

What I mean is that, although quite a few of the wall labels in the main exhibition described at length the awful conditions for children in the cramped, crowded, filthy squalid new cities thrown up by the Industrial Revolution, none of the paintings really show this, none of them show children working in factories, down the mines, up chimneys etc.

Presumably this is because Art, Fine Art, the Fine Art of Painting, was required by Victorian critics and theorists to show morally and spiritually and religiously uplifting scenes. Hence the glut of happy children in idyllic rural scenes and, even when a painting does show street sweepers, it’s under a melancholy moon on the empty Blackfriars bridge with a view of the romantic Thames in the background i.e. sweetened and sentimentalised.

So it was left to the illustrators and lithographers and print-makers, the cartoonists and illustrators, of Dickens and numerous other mid-Victorian novelists, to actually show what conditions were like in the crowded streets, in bare attics and crowded workhouses and schools which permanently bordered on bedlam, as in the Cruikshank illustration above.

Thoughts

In other words, it was only when I’d finished going round the exhibition a couple of times, and examined the prints in the children’s activity room a few times, that it dawned on me that paintings might not be a very good medium in which to explore the social history of children during the Victorian era.

In fact, society and critics’ and artists’ views about a) what childhood ought to be and b) what a good painting ought to be, actively prevented painting from being an accurate record of the times.

It is a good record of the (to us, largely false and sentimental) taste of the Victorians. But as to what conditions were actually like for the working poor, it may well be that the illustrators tell us more than any painter ever could.

Meditations in Monmouth Street (1839) by George Cruikshank

Meditations in Monmouth Street, 1839, by George Cruikshank

For me these prints linked directly to the acute depictions of London’s street children made by the woman artist Edith Farmiloe nearly sixty years later, and as recently featured in a fascinating exhibition at the Heath Robinson Museum. Prints and illustrations – that’s where the social historian should be looking, rather than at sickly sweet paintings.

A Make believe Margate by Edith Farmiloe

A Make-Believe Margate by Edith Farmiloe (1902)

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Other Guildhall Art Gallery reviews

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Posted by Simon on March 21, 2019

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Family Britain: The Certainties of Place by David Kynaston (2009)

Two more massive ‘books’ contained in one hefty 700-page paperback describing Britain after the war, the first one – The Certainties of Place, under review here – covering the period 1951-5 in immense detail. The main historical events are:

  • The Festival of Britain (May – August 1951)
  • October 1951 the Conservatives just about win the general election, despite polling quarter of a million fewer votes than Labour
  • Death of George VI (6 February 1952) and accession of young Queen Elizabeth II
  • 3 October 1952 Britain explodes its first atom bomb (in Western Australia)
  • The Harrow and Wealdstone rail crash on the morning of 8 October 1952 – 112 were killed and 340 injured – the worst peacetime rail crash in the United Kingdom
  • The North Sea flood on the night of Saturday 31 January / Sunday, 1 February
  • Rationing: tea came off the ration in October 1952 and sweets in February 1953, but sugar, butter, cooking fats, cheese, meat and eggs continued on the ration
  • 2 June 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II
  • 27 July 1953 end of Korean War
  • 12 August 1953 Russia detonates its first hydrogen bomb

The book ends in January 1954, with a literary coincidence. On Monday 25 Lucky Jim, the comic novel which began the career of Kingsley Amis was published and that evening saw the BBC broadcast the brilliant play for voices Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas who had in fact died two months earlier, on 9 November 1953.

Tumult of events and impressions

But reading Kynaston’s books is not to proceed logically through the key events of the period accompanied by political and economic and diplomatic analysis: it is to be plunged into the unceasing turbulent flow of day-to-day events, mixing the trivial with the serious, it’s to see the world from the point of view of a contemporary tabloid newspaper – the Mirror and the Express competing for the title of Britain’s best-selling newspaper – with the big political issues jostling for space with the winner of the Grand National and gossip about the stars of stage and radio – and above all, to read quotes from a thousand and one contemporary voices.

Without any preface or introduction, the text throws you straight into the hurly-burly of events, festooned with comments by an enormous casts of diarists, speech-makers, article-writers, commentators, eye-witnesses and so on.

Thus at the top of page one it is Saturday 28 April 1951 and King George VI is presenting the F.A. Cup to the winners, Newcastle. Three days later, on Tuesday 1 May 1951 he is at Earls Court for the British Industries Fair. On Thursday 3 he is on the South Bank to open the new Royal Festival Hall and inaugurate the five-month-long Festival of Britain – ‘a patriotic prank’, according to the song Noel Coward wrote about it, ‘madly educative and very tiring’, according to Kenneth Williams (25).

What makes Kynastons’s books hugely enjoyable is the vast cavalcade of people, from kings to coal miners, via a jungle of ordinary housewives, newspaper columnists, industrialists, famous or yet-to-be-famous writers, actors, civil servants and politicians.

a) They are fascinating on their own account b) Kynaston deploys them not just to discuss the big issues of the day but quotes them on day to day trivia, the appearance of London, the menu at posh clubs, the ups and downs of rationing, the tribulations of shopping in the High Street. The breadth of witnesses, and the range of activities they describe, helps to make the reader feel that you really have experienced living in this era.

Labour exhausted, Conservatives win

Overall, the big impression which comes across is the way the Labour Party had run out of ideas by 1951, and how this contributed to their defeat in the October 1951 general election. (It is fascinating to learn that they only held an election that October because the king told Attlee he was going on a prolonged tour of the Commonwealth in 1952 and would prefer there to be an election while he was still in the country. Attlee duly obliged, and Labour lost. Thus are the fates of nations decided). (There is, by the by, absolutely nothing whatsoever about the Commonwealth or the British Empire: this is a book solely about the home front and domestic experiences of Britain.)

Labour were reduced to opposition in which they seem to waste a lot of energy squabbling between the ‘Bevanites’ on the left of the party, and the larger mainstream represented by Hugh Gaitskell. The bitter feud stemmed from the decision by Gaitskell, when Chancellor, to introduce charges for ‘teeth and spectacles’ in order to pay for Britain’s contribution to the Korean War (started June 1950).

The quiet Labour leader, Clement Attlee, now in his 70s, was mainly motivated to stay on by his determination to prevent Herbert Morrison becoming leader.

The most important political fact of the period was that the Conservatives accepted almost every element of the welfare state and even of the nationalised industries which they inherited from Labour.

Experts are quoted from the 1980s saying that this was a great lost opportunity for capitalism i.e. the Conservatives failed to privatise coal or steel or railways, and failed to adjust the tax system so as to reintroduce incentives and make British industry more competitive. To these critics, the 1950s Conservatives acquiesced in the stagnation which led to Britain’s long decline.

Rebuilding and new towns

What the Conservatives did do was live up to their manifesto promise of building 300,000 new houses a year, even if the houses were significantly reduced in size from Labour’s specifications (much to the growling disapproval of Nye Bevan), and to push ahead with the scheme for building twelve New Towns.

I grew up on the edge of one of these New Towns, Bracknell, which I and all my friends considered a soulless dump, so I was fascinated to read Kynaston’s extended passages about the massive housing crisis of post-war Britain and the endless squabbles of experts and architects who claimed to be able to solve it.

To some extent reading this book has changed my attitude as a result of reading the scores and scores of personal accounts Kynaston quotes of the people who moved out of one-room, condemned slums in places like Stepney and Poplar and were transported to two bedroom houses with things they’d never see before – like a bathroom, their own sink, an indoor toilet!

It’s true that almost immediately there were complaints that the new towns or estates lacked facilities, no pubs, not enough shops, were too far from town centres with not enough public transport, and so on. But it is a real education to see how these concerns were secondary to the genuine happiness brought to hundreds of thousands of families who finally escaped from hard-core slum conditions and, after years and years and years of living in squalor, to suddenly be living in clean, dry, properly plumbed palaces of their own.

At the higher level of town planners, architects and what Kynaston calls ‘activators’, he chronicles the ongoing fights between a) exponents of moving urban populations out to new towns versus rehousing them in new inner city accomodation b) the core architectural fight between hard-line modernist architects, lackeys of Le Corbusier’s modernism, and various forms of watered-down softer, more human modernism.

It is a highly diffused argument because different architects deployed different styles and solutions to a wide range of new buildings on sites all over the UK, from Plymouth to Glasgow: but it is one of the central and most fascinating themes of the Kynaston books, and inspires you to want to go and visit these sites.

Education

The other main issue the Conservatives (and all right-thinking social commentators and progressives) were tackling after the war was Education. The theme recurs again and again as Kynaston picks up manifesto pledges, speeches, or the publication of key policy documents to bring out the arguments of the day. Basically we watch two key things happen:

  1. despite the bleeding obvious fact that the public schools were (and are) the central engine of class division, privilege and inequality in British society, no political party came up with any serious proposals to abolish them or even tamper with their status (a pathetic ineffectiveness which, of course, lasts to the present day)
  2. instead the argument was all about the structure of the state education system and, in Kynaston’s three books so far, we watch the Labour party, and the teachers’ unions, move from broad support for grammar schools in 1944, to becoming evermore fervently against the 11-plus by the early 1950s

Kynaston uses his sociological approach to quote the impact of passing – or failing – the 11-plus exam (the one which decides whether you will go to a grammar school or a secondary modern school) on a wide variety of children from the time, from John Prescott to Glenda Jackson.

Passing obviously helped propel lots of boys and girls from ‘ordinary’ working class backgrounds on to successful careers. But Kynaston also quotes liberally from the experiences of those who failed, were crushed with humiliation and, in some cases, never forgave society.

The following list serves two purposes:

  1. To give a sense of the huge number of people the reader encounters and hears quoted in Kynaston’s collage-style of social history
  2. To really bring out how the commanding heights of politics, the economy, the arts and so on were overwhelmingly ruled by people who went to public school, with a smattering of people succeeding thanks to their grammar school opportunity, and then a rump of people who became successful in their fields despite attending neither public nor grammar schools and, often, being forced to leave school at 16, 15, 14 or 13 years of age.

Public school

Politicians

  • Clement Attlee (Haileybury and Oxford)
  • Anthony Wedgwood Benn (Westminster and New College, Oxford)
  • Anthony Blunt (Marlborough and Trinity College, Cambridge)
  • Guy Burgess (Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge)
  • Richard Austen Butler (Marlborough and Cambridge)
  • Winston Churchill (Harrow then Royal Military College, Sandhurst)
  • Kim Cobbold (Governor of the Bank of England 49-61, Eton and King’s College, Cambridge)
  • Stafford Cripps (Winchester College and University College London)
  • Anthony Crosland (Highbury and Oxford)
  • Richard Crossman (Winchester and Oxford)
  • Hugh Dalton (Eton and Cambridge)
  • Sir Anthony Eden (Eton and Christ Church, Oxford)
  • Michael Foot (Leighton Park School Reading and Wadham College, Oxford)
  • Sir David Maxwell Fyfe ( George Watson’s College and Balliol College, Oxford)
  • Hugh Gaitskell (Winchester and Oxford)
  • Gerald Kaufman (Leeds Grammar School [private] and Queen’s College, Oxford)
  • Harold Macmillan (Eton)
  • Harold Nicholson (Wellington and Oxford)
  • Sir John Nott-Bower (Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Tonbridge School then the Indian Police Service)
  • Kim Philby (Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge)
  • Enoch Powell (King Edward’s School, Birmingham and Trinity College, Cambridge)
  • John Profumo (Harrow and Oxford)
  • Shirley Williams (St Paul’s Girls’ School and Somerville College, Oxford)

The arts etc

  • Lindsay Anderson (film director, Saint Ronan’s School and Cheltenham College then Wadham College, Oxford)
  • Diana Athill (memoirist, Runton Hill School and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford)
  • John Betjeman (poet, Marlborough and Oxford)
  • Cecil Beaton (photographer, Harrow and Cambridge)
  • John Berger (art critic, St Edward’s School, Oxford and Chelsea School of Art)
  • Michael Billington (theatre critic, Warwick School and Oxford)
  • Raymond Chandler (novelist, Dulwich College, then journalism)
  • Bruce Chatwin (travel writer, Marlborough)
  • Dr Alex Comfort (popular science author, Highgate School, Trinity College, Cambridge)
  • Richard Davenport-Hynes (historian, St Paul’s and Selwyn College, Cambridge)
  • Robin Day (BBC interviewer, Bembridge and Oxford)
  • Richard Dimbleby (Mill Hill School then the Richmond and Twickenham Times)
  • Richard Eyre (theatre director, Sherborne School and Peterhouse Cambridge)
  • Ian Fleming (novelist, Eton and the Royal Military College at Sandhurst)
  • John Fowles (novelist, Bedford School and Oxford)
  • Michael Frayn (novelist, Kingston Grammar School and Cambridge)
  • Alan Garner (novelist, Manchester Grammar School and Magdalen College, Oxford)
  • Graham Greene (novelist, Berkhamsted School and Balliol College, Oxford)
  • Joyce Grenfell (Francis Holland School and Mlle Ozanne’s finishing school in Paris)
  • Alec Guinness (actor, Fettes College)
  • Frank Richards (writer for popular comics, Thorn House School in Ealing then freelance writing)
  • Christopher Hill (Marxist historian, St Peter’s School, York and Balliol College, University of Oxford)
  • David Hockney (artist, Bradford Grammar School [private], Bradford College of Art, Royal College of Art)
  • Ludovic Kennedy (BBC, Eton then Christ Church, Oxford)
  • Gavin Lambert (film critic, Cheltenham College and Magdalen College, Oxford)
  • Humphrey Lyttelton (Eton, Grenadier Guards, Camberwell Art College)
  • David Kynaston (historian, Wellington College and New College, Oxford)
  • Kingsley Martin (editor of New Statesman, Mill Hill School and Magdalene College, Cambridge)
  • Frances Partridge (Bloomsbury writer, Bedales School and Newnham College, Cambridge)
  • Raymond Postgate (founder of Good Food Guide, St John’s College, Oxford)
  • V.S. Pritchett (novelist, Alleyn’s School, and Dulwich College)
  • Barbara Pym (novelist, Queen’s Park School Oswestry and Oxford)
  • William Rees-Mogg (editor of The Times 1967-81, Charterhouse and Balliol College, Oxford)
  • Richard Rogers (architect, St Johns School, Leatherhead then the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London)
  • Anthony Sampson (social analyst, Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford)
  • Raphael Samuel (Marxist historian, Balliol College, Oxford)
  • Maggie Smith (actress, Oxford High School, then the Oxford Playhouse)
  • David Storey (novelist, Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Wakefield then Slade School of Fine Art)
  • AJP Taylor (left wing historian, Bootham School in York then Oriel College, Oxford)
  • E.P. Thompson (Marxist historian, Kingswood School Bath and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge)
  • Alan Turing (computer pioneer, Sherborne and King’s College, Cambridge)
  • Kenneth Tynan (theatre critic, King Edward’s School, Birmingham and Magdalen College, Oxford)
  • Chad Varah (founder of Samaritans, Worksop College [private] Nottinghamshire then Keble College, Oxford)
  • Angus Wilson (novelist, Westminster School and Merton College, Oxford)
  • Colin St John Wilson (architect of the British Library, Felsted School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge)
  • Laurence Olivier (actor, prep school and choir school of All Saints, Margaret Street)

Grammar school

Politicians

  • Barbara Castle (Bradford Girls’ Grammar School and and St Hugh’s College, Oxford)
  • Roy Jenkins (Abersychan County Grammar School and Balliol College, Oxford)
  • Margaret Thatcher (Grantham Girls’ School and Oxford)
  • Harold Wilson (Royds Hall Grammar School and Oxford)

The arts etc

  • Paul Bailey (novelist, Sir Walter St John’s Grammar School For Boys, Battersea and the Central School of Speech and Drama)
  • Joan Bakewell (BBC, Stockport High School for Girls and Cambridge)
  • Stan Barstow (novelist, Ossett Grammar School then an engineering firm)
  • Alan Bennett (playwright, Leeds Modern School and Exeter College, Oxford)
  • Michael Caine (actor, Wilson’s Grammar School in Camberwell, left at 16 to become a runner for a film company)
  • David Cannadine (historian, King Edward VI Five Ways School and Clare College, Cambridge)
  • Noel Coward (dance academy)
  • Terence Davies (film director, left school at 16 to work as a shipping office clerk)
  • A.L. Halsey (sociologist, Kettering Grammar School then London School of Economics)
  • Sheila Hancock (actress, Dartford County Grammar School and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art)
  • Tony Harrison (poet, Leeds Grammar School and Leeds University)
  • Noddy Holder (musician, Walsall Grammar school until it closed, then T. P. Riley Comprehensive School)
  • Ted Hughes (poet, Mexborough Grammar School and Pembroke College, Cambridge)
  • Lynda Lee-Potter (columnist, Leigh Girls’ Grammar School and Guildhall School of Music and Drama)
  • Roy Porter (historian, Wilson’s Grammar School, Camberwell then Christ’s College, Cambridge)
  • Terence Stamp (actor, Plaistow County Grammar School then advertising)
  • John Sutherland (English professor, University of Leicester)
  • Dylan Thomas (poet, Swansea Grammar School)
  • Dame Sybil Thorndike (actress, Rochester Grammar School for Girls then the Guildhall School of Music and Drama)
  • Philip Toynbee (communist writer, Rugby and Christ Church, Oxford)
  • Colin Welland (actor, Newton-le-Willows Grammar School then Goldsmiths College)
  • Kenneth Williams (actor, Lyulph Stanley Boys’ Central Council School)
  • Raymond Williams (Marxist social critic, King Henry VIII Grammar School, Abergavenny and Trinity College, Cambridge)

Secondary modern / left school early

  • Alice Bacon (Labour MP in favour of comprehensive schools, Normanton Girls’ High School and Stockwell Teachers’ Training College)
  • Raymond Baxter (BBC presenter, Ilford County High School, expelled after being caught smoking)
  • Aneurin Bevan (major figure in the Labour Party, left school at 13)
  • Jim Callaghan (Labour Prime Minister 1976-79, Portsmouth Northern Secondary School, left school at 17)
  • Ossie Clarke (fashion designer, Beamont Secondary Technical School then Regional College of Art in Manchester)
  • Hugh Cudlipp (Howard Gardens High School for boys, left at 14)
  • Ian Jack (Dunfermline High School, left to become a journalist)
  • Clive Jenkins (left school at 14, Port Talbot County Boys’ School)
  • Stanley Matthews (cricketer, left school at 14 to play football)
  • Herbert Morrison (St Andrew’s Church of England School, left at 14 to become an errand boy)
  • Joe Orton (playwright, Clark’s College in Leicester)
  • John Osborne (playwright, Belmont College, expelled aged 16)
  • John Prescott (failed 11 plus, Grange Secondary Modern School and Hull University)
  • Alan Sillitoe (novelist, left school at 14)

Sociology

There are definitely more sociologists quoted in this book than in the previous two, especially in the very long central section devoted to class, which seems to have been the central obsession of sociologists in that era. Kynaston quotes what seems to be hundreds but is probably only scores of sociologists who produced a flood of reports throughout the 1940s and 50s, as they went off to live with miners or dockers or housewives, produced in-depth studies of the social attitudes of East End slums, the industrial north, towns in Wales or Scotland, and so on and so on.

The central social fact of the era was that about 70% of the British population belonged to the manual working class. And therefore, for me, the obvious political question was and is: why did this country, which was 70% ‘working class’, vote for Conservative governments from 1951 to 1964? What did Labour do wrong, in order to lose the votes of what should – on paper – have been its natural constituency?

This central question is nowhere asked or answered. Instead I found myself being frequently distracted by the extreme obviousness of some of the sociologists’ conclusions. Lengthy fieldwork and detailed statistical analysis result in conclusions like such as the working class are marked off from the ‘middle class’ by:

  • lower income
  • by taking wages rather than a salary
  • their jobs are often precarious
  • they are more likely to belong to trade unions
  • have distinctive accents
  • wear distinctive types of clothes (e.g. the cloth cap)
  • have poorer education
  • have distinct manners and linguistic usages (for example calling the mid-day meal dinner instead of lunch)

Other revelations include that the children of working class parents did less well at school than children of middle-class parents, and were less likely to pass the 11-plus, that rugby league is a northern working class sport compared with the middle-class sport of rugby union, that cricket was mostly a middle and upper middle class interest while football was followed obsessively by the proles, that the proles read the News of the World and the People rather than the Times and Telegraph.

As to the great British institution of the pub, in the words of the Truman’s website:

Saloon bars were sit-down affairs for the middle class, carpets on the floor, cushions on the seats and slightly more expensive drinks. You were served at the table and expected to dress smart for the occasion. You would also pay a premium on the drinks for this and usually there would be some entertainment be it singing, dancing, drama or comedy. You would generally be served bitter and in half pints.

Public bars, or tap rooms, remained for the working class. Bare wooden floorboards with sawdust on the floor, hard bench seats and cheap beer were on offer. You didn’t have to change out of your work wear so this was generally were the working class would go for after work and drink in pints, generally of mild.

Altogether this central section about class in all its forms takes some 150 pages of this 350-page book – it is a seriously extended analysis or overview of class in early 1950s Britain drawing on a multitude of studies and surveys (it’s almost alarming to see how very, very many studies were carried out by academic sociologists during this period, alongside the regular Mass-Observation surveys, plus ad hoc commercial surveys by Gallup and a number of less well-known pollsters).

And yet almost nothing from this vast body of work comes as a surprise: Most kids in grammar schools were upper-middle or middle class i.e. it’s a myth to say grammar schools help the working and lower working classes. IQ tests can be fixed by intensive coaching. The working classes liked football. The most popular hobbies (by a long way) were gardening for men, and knitting for women. Pubs were a place of comforting familiarity, where you would find familiar friends and familiar drinks and familiar conversations in familiar surroundings.

Compared to all the effort put into these studies, there is remarkably little that comes out of them.

Some of the sociologists mentioned or discussed in the text

  • Kenneth Allsop reported on Ebbw Vale
  • Michael Banton, author of numerous studies of race and ethnic relations
  • LSE sociologist Norman Birnbaum, criticising positive interpretations of the Coronation
  • Betting in Britain 1951 report by The Social Survey
  • Maurice Broady, sociologist who studied Coronation Day street parties (p.305)
  • Joanna Bourke, socialist feminist historian
  • Katherine Box, author of a 1946 study of cinema-going
  • British Institute of Public Opinion survey
  • Professor of cultural history, Robert Colls, author of When We Lived In Communities
  • Coal is our Life sociologial study of Featherstone in Yorkshire by Norman Dennis, Fernando Henriques and Cliff Slaughter
  • Mark Clapson, historian of suburbia and Milton Keynes
  • David Glass author of Social Mobility in Britain (1954)
  • Geoffrey Gorer 1950-51 People survey of what class people saw themselves as belonging to
  • historian Richard Holt writing about football
  • 1949 Hulton Survey on smoking
  • Roy Lewis and Angus Maude authors of The English Middle Classes (1949)
  • F.M. Martin’s 1952 survey of parental attitudes to education in Hertfordshire
  • Mass-Observation 1949 survey, The Press and Its Readers
  • Mass-Observation survey 1947-8 on drinking habits
  • Mass-Observation survey 1951 on drunkenness in Cardiff, Nottingham, Leicester and Salford
  • Peter Townsend, social researcher (p.118)
  • Margaret Stacy studied Banbury (p.136)
  • T.H. Pear author of English Social Differences (1955)
  • Hilde Himmelweit study of four grammar schools in London
  • Richard Hoggart, author of The Uses of Literacy (1957) which reminisces about working class Hunslet
  • sociologist Madeline Kerr’s five-year study The People of Ship Street in Liverpool (1958)
  • Tony Mason, football historian
  • Leo Kuper vox pops from Houghton in Coventry
  • John Barron Mays’ study of inner-city Liverpool in the early 1950s
  • Ross McKibbin author of Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1955
  • Gavin Mellor research into football crowds in the north-west 1946-62
  • Peter Miskell’s study of the cimema in Wales
  • John Mogey, author of a study of the Jolly Waterman pub in St Ebbe’s, a suburb of Oxford
  • Alison Ravetz, author if a study of the model Quarry Hill estate in Leeds
  • Doris Rich authored a study of working men’s clubs in Coseley
  • James Robb, author of a study of Bethnal Green in the late 1940s
  • Elizabeth Robert conducted extensive interviews in north-west England into education (p.161)
  • Robert Roberts, author of The Classic Slum (1971) about Salford either side of the war
  • Rowntree and Lavers, author of the study English Life and Leisure
  • Alice Russell, historian of occupational welfare
  • sociologist Mike Savage (pp.148, 159)
  • American sociologist Edward Shils
  • Brian Simon, communist teacher then at Leicester University
  • Eliot Slater and Moya Woodside interviewed 200 servicemen just as the war ended about education
  • 1953 report on Southamptons’s housing estates
  • Peter Stead, author of a study of Barry in south Wales
  • Avram Taylor, historian of working class credit
  • Philip Vernon, professor of Educational Psychology at London University’s Institute of Education
  • John Walton, historian of Blackpool landladies
  • Michael Young, author of Is This the Classless Society (1951) among many others
  • Ferdynand Zweig, wide-ranging sociological investigator of the post war years

As far as I could see all of these studies were focused on the working class, their hobbies, activities, beliefs and attitudes – as well as an extended consideration of what ‘community’ meant to them. This latter was meant to help the town planners who agonised so much about trying to create new ‘communities’ in the new estates and the new towns, and so on – but two things are glaringly absent from the list of topics.

One is sex. Not one of the researchers mentioned above appears to have made any enquiries into the sex lives of their subjects. Given our modern (2019) obsession with sex and bodies, it is a startling omission which, in itself, speaks volumes about the constrained, conservative and essentially private character of the time.

(There are several mentions of homosexuality, brought into the public domain by several high-profile prosecutions of gays for soliciting in public toilets, which prompted a) righteous indignation from the right-wing press but b) soul searching among liberal politicians and some of the regular diarists Kynaston features, along the lines of: why should people be prosecuted by the law for the way God made them?)

Secondly, why just the working class? OK, so they made up some 70% of the population, but why are there no studies about the behaviour and belief systems of, say, architects and town planners? Kynaston quotes critics pointing out what a small, inbred world of self-congratulatory back-scratchers this was – but there appears to be no study of their educational backgrounds, beliefs, cultural practices – or of any other middle-class milieu.

And this goes even more for the upper classes. What about all those cabinet ministers who went to Eton and Harrow and Westminster? Did no one do a sociological study of private schools, or of the Westminster village or of the posh London clubs? Apparently not. Why not?

And this tells you something, maybe, about sociology as a discipline: that it consists of generally left-wing, middle-class intellectuals and academics making forays into working class territory, expeditions into working class lives as if the working class were remote tribes in deepest New Guinea. The rhetoric of adventure and exploration which accompanies some of the studies is quite comic, if you read it in this way. As is the way they then report back their findings in prestigious journals and articles and books and win prizes for their bravery as if they’ve just come back from climbing Everest, instead of spending a couple of weeks in Middlesborough chatting to miners.

It’s only right at the end of the 150 or so pages of non-stop sociological analysis of ‘the working classes’ that you finally get some sociologists conceding that they are not the solid communities of socialist heroes of the revolution that so many of these left wingers wanted them to be: that in fact, many ‘working class’ communities were riven by jealousies, petty feuds and a crushing sense of snobbery. Umpteen housewives are quoted as saying that so-and-so thought she was ‘too good’ for the rest of us, was hoity-toity, told her children not to play with our kids etc. other mums told researchers they instructed their children not to play with the rough types from down the road.

People turned out to be acutely aware of even slight differences of behaviour or speech and drew divisive conclusions accordingly. The myth of one homogenous ‘working class’ with common interest turns out to be just that, a myth. THis goes some way to answering my question about why 70% of the population did not all vote for the workers’ party, far from it.

Above all, what comes over very strongly in the voices of ordinary people, is the wish to be left alone, to live and let live, and for privacy – to be allowed to live in what Geoffrey Gorer summed up as ‘distant cordiality’ with their neighbours.

‘You don’t get any privacy in flats,’ declared Mrs Essex from number 7 Battersea Church Road  (p.339).

Contrary to the ‘urbanists’, like Michael Young, who wanted to help working class communities remain in their city centres, large numbers of the ‘working classes’ were about to find themselves forced (by the ‘dispersionists’, the generation of high-minded, left-wing planners and architects who Kynaston quotes so extensively and devastatingly, p.340) to move into windy new estates miles from anywhere with no shops or even schools. Those that did remain near their old communities found themselves forced into high-rise blocks of flats with paper-thin walls and ‘shared facilities’ next to new ‘community centres’ which nobody wanted and nobody used and were quickly vandalised. It is a bleak picture.

Love/hate

Lindsay Anderson (b.1923) was ‘a British feature film, theatre and documentary director, film critic, and leading light of the Free Cinema movement and the British New Wave’ (Wikipedia).

But in Kynaston’s opinion, Anderson’s 10-minute film O Dreamland, shot in the Margate amusement park of the same name, ‘marked the start of a new, increasingly high-profile phase in the long, difficult, love-hate relationship of the left-leaning cultural elite with the poor old working class, just going about its business and thinking its own private, inscrutable thoughts (p.220).

Here it is, disapproval and condescension dripping from every frame.

Lady authors

For some reason women authors seem more prominent in the era than male authors. It was easy to compile a list of names which recurred and whose works I really ought to make an effort to familiarise myself with.

  • Jean Rhys b.1890 (private school and RADA)
  • Sylvia Townsend Warner b.1893 (home schooled by her father, a house-master at Harrow School)
  • Elizabeth Bowen b.1899 (private school and art school)
  • Catherine Cookson b.1906 (left school at 14 to take a job as a laundress at a workhouse)
  • Barbara Pym b.1913 (private school and Oxford)
  • Doris Lessing b.1919 (private school till she left home at 15)
  • Lorna Sage b.1943 (grammar school and Durham)
  • Sue Townshend b.1946 (secondary modern South Wigston High School, left school at 14)

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Posted by Simon on January 29, 2019

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