Strategic Pessimism: Gissing, Wells, and the British Socialist Novel

This essay addresses a critical tendency to overvalue the revolutionary aesthetics of radical literature at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing on political history and theories of the novel, it traces an unlikely structural resonance between socialist praxis and novel form at this political-aesthetic juncture. Both turn on a "strategic pessimism" by which radical political activism made use of progressive strategies for social reorganization even as it maintained that such measures undermined radical ideals. I locate this double-bind at the heart of what is often taken for anti-radical critique in socialist novels by George Gissing and H. G. Wells; instead, I illustrate the way in which these authors deliberately inscribe a strategic gradualism at the expense of revolutionary change in order to reflect and ambivalently endorse contemporary tactics of radical activism.