In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

'Islands of Money': Rentier Culture in E. M. Forster's Howards End By Paul Delany Simon Fraser University When he was eight years old E. M. Forster inherited eight thousand pounds from his great-aunt Marianne Thornton, who came from a well-to-do family of Victorian bankers. His widowed mother had about the same amount of capital, ensuring him a comfortable home, and a Public School and Cambridge education. The Longest Journey deals with the emotional consequences of this secure and sheltered upbringing; Howards End, though not directly autobiographical, examines Forster's economic origins. The novel's motto, "Only connect . . ." is usually read as a plea for emotional openness; but Forster is equally concerned with the subtle connections between a class's mentality and how it gets its means of life. I want to show that Forster had a lifelong preoccupation with the morality of living on unearned income; and that in Howards End his aim was to move from his own experience of privilege to a comprehensive judgment on the kind of country Edwardian Britain was, and should be. Like Marx and Freud before him, Forster is possessed by the idea of unmasking; he wants to lay bare the tangled economic roots of complacent liberalism. As wealth piled up in nineteenth-century Britain, the rentier class—those who lived mainly on investment income—had increased steadily in numbers and social influence (the Victorian census even had a special category for the "Independent Classes"). This class produced generous supporters of the arts, philanthropy , and such good causes as the abolition of slavery; at the same time, it could be seen as compromised by its fundamentally parasitic status. "The education I received in those far-off and fantastic days made me soft," Forster wrote in 1946, "and I am very glad it did, for I have seen plenty of hardness since, and I know it does not even pay. . . . But though the education was humane it was imperfect, inasmuch as we none of us realized our economic position. In came the nice fat dividends, up rose the lofty thoughts, and we did not realize that all the time we were exploiting the poor of our own country and the backward races abroad, and getting bigger profits from our investments than we should. We refused to face this unpalatable truth."1 What could be the worth or the use, Forster asked himself, of an entire class of people who lived on the labor of others? His part-time teaching at the Working Men's College, from 1902 onwards, helped sharpen his awareness of the gulf between his own comfortable existence and that of his hard-pressed students . In his darker moods he condemned himself as a milksop who lived with his mother, who was sexually backward, and who had been absolved by his inherited wealth from the need to seek a useful career. 285 Delany: Rentier Culture in Forster's 'Howards End' Howards End starts from the principle stated by its heroine, Margaret Schlegel: "independent thoughts are in nine cases out of ten the result of independent means."2 But if this proposition is accepted, it contains an uncomfortable lesson for people in Forster's position. It suggests that independence of mind is not entirely virtuous, because it is one of the privileges that accrue to the owners of capital. Or, to look at it another way: if independent thoughts are the result of something else, then they aren't really independent. Money talks, and money thinks; this is Margaret's claim when she goes on to tell her ladies' discussion group "that the very soul of the world is economic": "That's more like socialism," said Mrs. Munt suspiciously. "Call it what you like. I call it going through life with one's hand spread open on the table. I'm tired of these rich people who pretend to be poor, and think it shows a nice mind to ignore the piles of money that keep their feet above the waves. I stand each year upon six hundred pounds, and Helen upon the same, and Tibby will stand upon eight, and as fast as our pounds crumble away into the...

pdf

Share