St John Ervine and the Fabian Society: Capital, Empire and Irish Home Rule

Fig. 1.

Workers and children stand beside an overturned cart during the 1907 Belfast Dockers' and Carters' Strike.

The Ulster setting is light but firmly sketched in, and the book will convince many English people for the first time that the sun shines in Ulster and that it is inhabited by human beings.¹

By June 1915, when this review of St John Ervine's novel Mrs. Martin's Man appeared in the Fabian News, Ervine (1883-1971), who left Ulster for London in 1901, had been an active member of the Fabian Society, playwright and prolific journalist for almost a decade. His political interests were for the most part typical of a Fabian intellectual: women's suffrage, the labour movement and educational reform. However, he devoted most of his Fabian work to a subject toward which the society had a distinctly cultivated apathy: the case for Irish Home Rule. This position, as will be discussed further, followed from political decisions made prior to Ervine's membership, but what is less obvious - and more difficult to explain - is the reception of Ervine's work by his fellow Fabians. Consistently, reviews of his work in Fabian News reflect a two-dimensional interpretation of his Irish characters and settings and a failure to see beyond the Irish elements to the larger social themes. This myopia can be seen as a result of the Fabian attitude to Ireland, which, it will be argued, was itself a product of the society's approach to the question of empire.

The Fabians' response to Ervine's work has been replicated in scholarly attention to the playwright, which has tended to present him as a regionalist writer and to neglect the breadth of his London career. In 'The Irish Writer and His Public in the Nineteenth Century' (1981), J. C. Beckett describes the dependence of Irish writers on London: 'the centre of their literary world, the place where the literary aspirant had, or thought he had, the best chance of succeeding'.² He argues that this reliance on an English audience crippled the development of 'a truly national literature', and that it was not until the Irish literary movement of the 1890s - which gave rise to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and the Ulster Literary Theatre - that Irish writers could be sustained by an Irish market. Beckett describes Ervine as 'the most distinguished' writer from the 'province', whose 'work could deliberately appeal at different times, to an Irish and to an English public'.³ Beckett's bifurcation of Ervine's oeuvre, 'the Irish plays' and 'the English plays', which, he claims, 'have little in common save the excellence of the dramatic technique', ignores the relationship between the playwright's Fabian involvement and his dramatic output.

The critic Alice Lothian noted in an article for North American Review in 1922 that Abel Chevalley had classed Ervine 'among "les Re´gionalistes" in his recent survey of contemporary English fiction'; yet, she argued, 'If Ulster laid the foundations of his art, London, his home since he first came to it as a lad of seventeen, has enabled it to manifest itself so variously'.⁴ However, subsequent critics have paid Lothian's observation little heed and have continued to focus on not just the Irish but the specifically Ulster elements of Ervine's work.⁵ In some ways, this critical interpretation is supported by his biography.⁶ His experience of the First World War - when 'a crack-brained youth fired a revolver at an archduke in Sarajevo and wrecked Europe'⁷ - the partition of Ireland, and the Irish Free State's institutionalization of Catholicism precipitated a turn from the hopeful Fabianism of his early career to a vitriolic, often anti-democratic, disillusionment:

The nadir of this neo-democracy was reached, in England, in John Galsworthy's dramas of depressing people . . . Democracy had taken the heart out of the theatre. Intellectualism had drained away the drama's blood. People went to repertory theatres as some Dissenters had formerly gone to chapel, woebegonely and...