Steadily and Whole: Ford Madox Ford and Modernist Sociology

Social fragmentation and cultural incoherence are conventionally regarded as trademark modernist themes, among the defining processes of modernity. Using Matthew Arnold as a touchstone, this paper frames the anxiety about wholeness as a Victorian inheritance, and anchors the discussion of fragmentation concretely in two early twentieth-century attempts to imagine society: Ford Madox Ford's social criticism and the first meetings of the London Sociological Society. I read Ford's 1905 impressionistic essay The Soul of London and his 1908 supernatural romance Mr. Apollo in light of Edwardian sociology's preoccupation with synthesis. Ford's social criticism supplemented and critiqued scientific sociology by the importance it assigned to the affect of interest, and to pathos.