The Edwardian Turn of Mind

The Edwardian Turn of Mind – Samuel Hynes

Like Philipp Blom, Hynes argues that the cultural revolution of the twentieth century took place in the Edwardian era (1901 to 1910), not during the First World War. To support his thesis, Hynes examines various writers and their audiences in a sequence of essays focusing on politics and the arts and sciences. His overview of the troubled relations between the sexes will give interesting background knowledge when we are reading novels like A Room with a View (1908) and Howards End (1910) by E.M. Forster.

So we don’t have to, Hynes has read everything. The primary sources were autobiographies, letters, manuscripts, and the newspapers and magazines of the day. He has even read obscure novels such as The Riddle of the Sands and the forgotten novels of H.G. Wells and John Galsworthy. He provides long quotations, judicially chosen for our delighted and/or disgusted inspection. Reading about the misunderstandings among the Fabians – i.e., the Webbs vs. Wells – is hilarious though Hynes points out these conflicts undermined their cause and made their beliefs into suspect and dreadful among the general public.

Hynes provides interesting information about names we have heard of but knew little about.  Hynes’ treatment of Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis sheds much light on the role of these two pioneers in the study of human sexuality. Little known nowadays, Kipling and Baden-Powell were among those opinion leaders who were motivated by their anxiety about invasion and loss of power to maintain their country’s place in the imperial sun.

His discussion of the censorship of plays is interesting. The censor was an ex-bank manager who rarely read the plays he approved or disapproved the stage. His letters to playwrights defending – kind of – his decisions to prohibit their plays are masterpieces of vague self-approving jibber-jabber.  As a state employee and reader of bureaucratic gobbledygook, I can only doff my hat.

The first four chapters were informative. The last third or so book not so much, though the examination of the academicians versus the post-impressionists was a first for me. The art-buying Chantrey Trust bought, over twenty-six years, Hynes reports,

… no picture by Madox Brown, Holman Hunt, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, or Alfred Stevens . . . nor, among foreign painters who had worked in England and were therefore eligible, [anything by] Corot, Degas, Delacroix, Fan tin-La tour, Monet, Pisarro, Sisley, or Whistler. . . . Instead, the Council had bought paintings by Clark, Cockram, Dicksee, Draper, Gotch, Hacker, Hunter, MacWhirter, Rooke, Stark, Tucker, and Yeames (this is a random but entirely representative list).

I rather wish he had put on his literary historian garb for examinations of Conrad, Forster and Ford Madox Ford (click here for that kind of thing; the piece on the Woolf/Bennett quarrel is good).

Samuel Hynes (1924 – 2019) was the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton. Though a professor of literature, he turned his sights on cultural and intellectual history, like his counterpart at Rutgers and Penn Paul Fussell (The Great War andModern Memory). This book is the first of a trilogy of cultural history, which was followed by A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture and The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s. To us non-scholarly readers, Hynes is probably best known for his memoir about his combat experience as a Marine pilot, Flights of Passage: Recollections of a World War II Aviator, which I read so long ago that I reviewed it for a paper zine (remember those?).