20th century Britain - English literature and culture 1 - modulo 2

Università degli Studi di Verona English literature and culture 1 - Module 2th

The early 20th century in Britain

History, wars, movements

The Edwardian age

The 20th century in Great Britain opened with the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. She was succeeded by her son Edward VII, who managed to give the country a new energy. In spite of his exclusion from the life of the reign, due to his mother's refusal, he was very good at international policy and foreign affairs.

While Queen Victoria was philo-German, Edward VII was philo-French and that helped Great Britain during the first half of the century, when the two World Wars took place. Anglo-French agreement called Entente Cordiale → (1904).

With the beginning of the new reign, in 1906 the Labour Party was founded and was the third party of the country, together with the Whigs and the Tories (=conservatives). In 1906 they won the General Elections and David Lloyd George (1863-1945) Chancellor of Exchequer (cancelliere dello scacchiere). He was the founder of the so-called “Welfare State” and wanted to introduce:

• Old-age pensions
• Sickness and unemployment benefits
• People’s Budget (1909)
• A land tax and increased income tax was rejected by the House of Lords.

This experiment, however, failed. A constitutional crisis followed, which brought to an Act reforming the House of Lords. There were measures of social improvement BUT still industrial unrest with strikes and violent protests against the high prices and low wages.

The Edwardian Age, which was Edward’s period of reign, was the so-called “Belle Epoque” and it ended in 1910 with the death of the king. This was an age of improvements just before the whole and sudden decline of Europe with the First World War. This period is also referred to as ‘Peak before the decline” because people had fear for the feeling of upcoming decline.

H. G. Wells, “Tono-Bungay” (1909) stated:

«[England’s present is as] October foliage before the frost nips down the leaves»

Women’s movements and contribute to literature

The early 20th century also saw the beginning of the Movement of the Suffragettes. They started asking voting rights for women from the 1860s. In 1903 Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst founded the WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Union).

To get their rights, they started campaign of vandalism, in order to gain publicity for their cause:

• They chained themselves to railings
• Arson attacks on public buildings
• They protested with both strikes and violent acts

These women faced a very harsh treatment; many Suffragettes were → sent to prison, where they continued with hunger strikes; this is also why some prison authorities began force-feeding them.

This period and its unrest contributed to the beginning of a «New Woman» literature: women started writing novels dealing with women’s issues and their need for independence, equality and rights. The movement of the suffragettes was a fundamental part of the historical context.

The literary production dealt with:

• Common nature between humans
• Positive difference of women vs. patriarchy
• Realist works

1 Università degli Studi di Verona English literature and culture 1 - Module 2

Elizabeth Robin’s “Votes for Women” (1907)

Modernist works

Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” (1929) Virginia Woolf, as a proto-feminist writer, → criticizes the fact that the differences in values transfer themselves to different importance in the subjects.

«The values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are ‘important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes, ‘trivial’. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battlefield is more important than a scene in a shop – everywhere and more subtly the difference of value persists.»

The First World War

In 1914 the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo and the First World War started. Europe was divided into:

• The Central European Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary)
• The Triple Entente (Britain and the British Empire, France, Russia and their allies).

The war began with Germany attacking France through Belgium with toxic gasses and a new method of war: the First World War gave birth to the war in the trenches and to total wars. Great Britain had guaranteed Belgium’s neutrality and so declared war on Germany on 4th August 1914.

Apart from being a war based on economic and political misunderstandings, this war was a fight for democracy and freedom.

Being a war of trenches there was no possibility of quick victory; the lines of → trenches were fixed and it was very difficult to move forward. The life in the trenches was very harsh and the soldiers: mud and rats, an enormous lack of hygiene, boredom, fear of gas and attacks.

The war led to psychological disorders, such as the famous “Shell shock”, the psychological effect of shell explosions, which brought terror amongst the soldiers. Also characters of novels, like Septimus Warren Smith in Woolf’s “Mrs Dalloway”, suffered from → shell-shock.

In 1917 The US entered the war on the side of the Allies and defeated Germany. → On 11th November 1918 Germany signed an armistice and this day is remembered as “Remembrance day”. In 1919 the Versailles Peace Treaty was signed by all the lands that took part in the war.

The First World War and literature

The war had a dramatic impact on writers and on literature, as we can see in Thomas Stearns Eliot’s work “The Waste Land”, published in 1922 like two other masterpieces like Joyce’s “Dubliners” and Virginia Woolf’s “Jacob’s Room”.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers […]
[beginning of T. S. Eliot “The Waste Land”]

The presence of the war and it devastation can be seen through:

• Fragmented images
• The contrast between the fertility of a mythical past and the spiritual sterility of the present;
• The collapse of civilisation;
• The despair of living in a modern alienated world.

“The Waste Land” begins in April, like two other famous works:

• Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales”
• Orwell’s “1984”

2 Università degli Studi di Verona English literature and culture 1 - Module 2

There was a famous group of poets, the so-called “War Poets”, that described both the horrors and the idealization of the war in their poems. These writers volunteered to fight and in most cases lost their young lives in the conflict. In their poems they:

Described modern warfare in a realistic wa