An Edwardian Social Microscope

THIS BOOK covers a single decade, as does each of the other nine volumes in The Edinburgh History of Twentieth-Century Literature in Britain series. And if Literature of the 1900s is any indication, the entire set will be a boon to literary scholarship.

This comprehensive study—the Works Cited section is over a dozen pages long—succeeds in placing novels, plays, poems, stories, and essays within a context that was, to use Jonathan Wild's apt term, "restless." Like the "vast new department stores which epitomized the thrill of modernity for Edwardian shoppers," he notes at the outset, "the period's literary culture also looked to attract the eye of a fresh breed of consumers." Thus Edwardian writers were often "retailers," many employing the services of literary agents, a new profession on the rise. Against this backdrop, Wild traces the intricate relationship between the era's print culture and its readership, analyzing the socio-political factors that created a new audience—the emerging upwardly mobile lower-middle class—to illustrate how a "restless and innovative" Edwardian culture was mirrored in its literature.

The book opens with the Anglo-Boer War, the first large-scale modern war, reported as never before in the media: the Daily Mail's circulation increased to unprecedented figures. As a result, vast numbers of people developed the daily habit of reading, their appetites "whetted by newspapers," satisfied by fiction, much of it first published in magazine or newspaper serial installments. This phenomenon produced (now mostly forgotten) works of "invasion literature" (Wild provides examples) but also fueled notions of imperialism, examined in some detail in Heart of Darkness, Kim, and Prester John.

This is followed by an analysis of how Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells used their own backgrounds—"located in the upper echelons of the working class and the lower reaches of the middle class," and "largely overlooked" until now—to broaden the existing parameters of fiction. Wild shows how they foregrounded "commonplace people from unfashionable places," whether in an examination of the "cyclical nature of life" (The Old Wives' Tale) or of "the complicated lives of contemporary individuals" (Love and Mr. Lewisham). This leads into an interesting discussion of "suburban literature"—with its clerks, typists, drapers, and shopkeepers (and their offices, cafés, shops, and boarding houses)—and to a survey of works by the prolific W. Pett Ridge, who chronicled modern suburban lower-middle-class and provincial life, opening a window onto this emerging "new social caste." The Times in 1900 dubbed him "a master of the social microscope," and Wild acutely sums up his oeuvre as a "stealthy politics of suburban affirmation," contrasting it to George Gissing's emphasis on the "dispiriting aspects of petit-bourgeois life." Pett Ridge apparently had a "sunny disposition" (Gissing … not so much).

One driving force of what Wild calls the "Edwardian literary industry" was the literary agent, foremost among them the influential James Brand Pinker, who managed many literary careers, notably Bennett's (the two exchanged over 2,600 letters!). Another key player was editor Wilfred Whitten, who founded T.P.'s Weekly in 1902, a penny literary paper with widespread popular appeal, and who gave readers of limited means unprecedented access to significant works of literature by publishing them in one-shilling reprints. Wild calls him "among the foremost tastemakers of his era."

Then comes a chapter on Edwardian children's literature, which discusses how new technical innovations (such as the three-color reproduction process) transformed the appearance of children's books and also allowed for the production of affordable yet richly decorated books. Wild singles out three important authors: Beatrix Potter, whose highly successful Peter Rabbit (1902) was "the first work to take infant readers seriously as consumers of print culture"; E. Nesbitt, whose stories "encouraged child readers to become self-aware about the nature of their roles as readers of texts"; and—surprisingly—P. G. Wodehouse, whose "independently minded youths … move with the times but also understand the value...