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Reviewed by:
  • The Roots of Tolkien’s Middle Earth [sic]
  • Tom Shippey
The Roots of Tolkien’s Middle Earth [sic], by Robert S. Blackham . Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus Publishing, 2006. 144 pp. £10.99 (trade paperback) ISBN 0752438565.

In his provocative and thoroughly contrarian book The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939 (1992), John Carey, formerly Merton Professor at Oxford, makes three socio-literary points directly relevant to Tolkien and to the book under review here. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, he points out, England underwent a massive suburbanization. H. G. Wells's home town, Bromley in Kent, was linked by rail to London in 1858. Between 1861 and 1871—Wells was born exactly in the middle of this period, in 1866—the number of houses in the town almost doubled, and the population grew from 20,000 to 50,000 by 1881. The fields disappeared, the river filled up with rubbish, and by the time he was eleven, Wells wrote, "all the delight and beauty of it was destroyed." The experience was a common one. George Orwell commemorates his version of the story in Coming Up for Air (1937), Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh wrote similar accounts, and suburbanization in southern England—now one of the most crowded areas on the globe—remains a common fear.

The people for whom the suburbs were built were furthermore largely drawn from a new social class, created by universal education and the commercial need for large numbers of literate paper-workers: put briefly, the clerks. Their literacy, naturally, was not used just for business [End Page 307] purposes. They formed a market for new printed media, daily papers, weekly magazines, and printed books. Many writers, including some who have remained popular to this day, wrote deliberately for this class, for instance Wells himself, Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes makes it clear that he has a high opinion of clerks), Jerome K. Jerome, or Rider Haggard. Rudyard Kipling, as one might expect, took a more nuanced view—he had a market of his own among the "empire-builders"—but was by no means hostile.

The people who were hostile, because frightened, and threatened, came from a rather higher social group, the upper middle classes, with their large houses comfortably distant from smoke and towns, their traditional expectations of going on (if male) to university at Oxford and Cambridge, and their claim to be sole and permanent arbiters of taste. Perhaps the paradigm story of this reaction is E. M. Forster's Howards End (1910). Howards End is a large comfortable house within reach of but pleasantly remote from London. The two upper middle class groups who dominate the story are the Schlegel sisters—tasteful, literary, idle—and the Wilcoxes, aggressive business-people. Their interaction is however complicated by the Schlegels' well-meaning attempt to patronize a clerk with literary aspirations, Leonard Bast. Bast becomes involved with one of the sisters, proves to be physically feeble, intellectually limited and socially vulgar, and is eventually killed when a bookcase falls on him—thus symbolically terminating (as Forster presents it) his annoying attempt to join the hereditary literati. Carey's major and most provocative argument is that as the old educated class found itself both literally and literarily "moved in on" by the new suburban clerisy, they responded by developing the ideal of "modernism"—the centerpiece of which was the insistence that true literature, high literature, must inevitably be difficult, recondite, and so appreciable only by those who had undergone the right kind of formal education and possessed the vital qualification of taste. Lest anyone should think, stereotypically, that all this is a matter for the stereotypically class-ridden English, it should be noted that American and Irish writers were well to the fore in demonstrations of aggressive elitism, as one can see all too readily from Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and James Joyce. And as modernism has become assimilated into general education, a further response has been to develop "postmodernism," even more recondite, indeed incomprehensible without a Ph.D. in English from (usually these days) an approved American university.

The relevance of these three...

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