Historical Context
English History and Literature
Forster’s analysis spans three centuries of the novel, with his own life and works covering the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. He was impacted by significant events such as World War I, in which he participated. His novels reflect the historical shift from Victorian to Edwardian England and the literary transition from romanticism to modernism.
Victorian and Edwardian England
The Victorian era refers to the period of English history during Queen Victoria's long reign, from 1837 to 1901. This era, often associated with conventionality and prudishness, also experienced major economic, political, and technological transformations. In the nineteenth century, England led the Industrial Revolution, which was later followed by other nations. The period saw significant wage increases and a substantial population growth, which played a crucial role in a series of political reforms that gradually expanded citizens' rights and reduced the monarchy's power in politics.
The Reform Act of 1832 initiated changes that led to the Reform Bill of 1867 and various economic and social reforms in the 1870s. Voting rights requirements were modified to greatly increase the number of men eligible to vote in parliamentary and local government elections. Although Queen Victoria's era was partly defined by conservative values related to family and social propriety, it also featured a strong liberal intellectual movement. A significant and contentious milestone was Charles Darwin's 1859 publication, Origin of the Species, which introduced the theory of evolution.
The Victorian era concluded with Queen Victoria's death in 1901, when her son became King Edward VII, marking the start of the shorter Edwardian era. Unlike his mother, King Edward VII brought a more relaxed and liberal atmosphere, influencing the nation's mood. Edward, who was fifty-nine when he ascended the throne, ruled until his death in 1910. He was succeeded by King George V, whose reign lasted until 1936.
World War I and the Post-War Era
The period of World War I, spanning from 1914 to 1918, greatly impacted Forster, who served as a Red Cross volunteer during the conflict, along with many writers of his generation. A significant milestone in British politics during the post-war era was the People Act of 1918, which granted voting rights to women over thirty and all men over twenty-one, regardless of property ownership. In 1928, this right was extended to women aged twenty-one to thirty. Forster was an ardent supporter of the Labour Party, which achieved its first major victory in 1924 when James Ramsay MacDonald became the first Labour Party leader to be elected as Prime Minister of England. However, MacDonald held this position for only nine months before being succeeded by Stanley Baldwin, who served as Prime Minister until 1929 and then again from 1935 to 1937. The 1920s and 1930s in England are often referred to as the Baldwin Era, during which Forster wrote Aspects of the Novel in 1927. Despite his political engagement, Forster's lectures scarcely mention political or historical events, with his only direct reference to British politics being Prime Minister Asquith, who was in office from 1908 to 1916.
English Literature
Although Forster deliberately avoids discussing historical development in the novel, it is useful to have a basic understanding of the standard chronological periods of English literature during the times when the works he discusses were created.
During his discourse, Forster references the four major novelists of the eighteenth century: Daniel Defoe, whose key works were published in the 1720s; Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, whose significant works emerged in the 1740s and 1750s; and Laurence Sterne, whose major works appeared in the 1750s and 1760s. Prominent...
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poets of the eighteenth century include Alexander Pope, Robert Burns, Oliver Goldsmith, and Samuel Johnson.
The literary period known as the Romantic era spanned from the 1780s to the 1820s, emphasizing individual imagination. Early Romantic poets include William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth, while later Romantic poets include Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Lord Byron. Major English novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries feature the popular Gothic works of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (author of Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, 1818), the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, and the classic works of Jane Austen.
The transition from the Romantic era to the Victorian era in literature is usually marked around the mid-1840s, a period that saw the creation of numerous English novel masterpieces. Charles Dickens, who published works from the 1830s to the 1860s, was an early exemplar of the Victorian novel. He was contemporaneous with William Makepeace Thackeray, whose seminal work, Vanity Fair, appeared in the 1840s, and Elizabeth Gaskell, who published in the 1840s and 1850s. The Brontë sisters, Emily and Charlotte, were among the era's most notable novelists, blending Gothic and realist elements in their works during the 1840s and 1850s. Later Victorian authors, active from the 1850s to the 1890s, included George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy.
The early twentieth century, especially the first decade associated with Edwardian England, saw the prominence of novelists like H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and E. M. Forster. The modernist literary movement, with which Forster was also linked, began before World War I and extended into the 1930s. Early modernism featured the poets of the Georgian movement, who bridged Victorian and modern literature, and the more avant-garde imagist poets, led by the Anglo-American poet and critic Ezra Pound. The major modernist novelists, writing during and after World War I, included D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and Forster. Prominent modernist poets were T. S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats. Forster was part of the Bloomsbury Group, an informal collective of modernist writers and intellectuals that met from 1907 to 1930 in private homes in London's Bloomsbury district to discuss literature and ideas. This group included renowned modernist author Virginia Woolf. Most male members of the Bloomsbury Group, including Forster, were alumni of King’s College or Trinity College at Cambridge.
Literary Style
Tone and Structure
The narrative voice of Aspects of the Novel is primarily shaped by its origin as a series of lectures. These lectures were initially crafted and delivered by the author to an audience of students and professors at Trinity College, Cambridge, Forster’s alma mater, as part of the esteemed Clark lecture series. An editor’s note at the beginning of the reprinted lectures mentions that their tone is ‘‘informal, indeed talkative.’’ This conversational, relaxed tone gives Forster’s voice in these lectures a sense of intimacy. It also leads to apparent digressions and asides, which might be unusual in a work meant purely for print. Despite this informal tone, the structure of Forster’s discussion is far from random. Each lecture or chapter follows a meticulously planned sequence of points, presenting a clear stance on each of the seven aspects of the novel that Forster examines. Therefore, while the tone may be informal, the underlying framework of Aspects of the Novel is a coherent and well-argued discourse, supported by carefully selected examples.
Analogy
An analogy uses figurative language to draw a comparison between a familiar, concrete object or concept and a more abstract, complex idea, aiding in explanation and clarity. Forster begins and ends Aspects of the Novel with a central analogy: he imagines all novelists from the history of world literature writing simultaneously, side by side, in a vast circular room, akin to the library of the British Museum. Forster employs this analogy to illustrate that novels and novelists transcend cultural and historical differences, adhering to the same fundamental principles of creativity regardless of time or place.
Forster uses this overarching analogy to clarify that his focus in discussing the novel is not on historical evolution or regional variations, but on universal characteristics. By comparing writers working alongside each other, Forster can examine the works of novelists from different centuries and continents, highlighting their similarities and differences. He dedicates a substantial part of the introduction to juxtaposing passages from authors like Samuel Richardson of the eighteenth century and Henry James of the early twentieth century, or comparing a Dickens novel from 1860 with an H.G. Wells novel from 1920.
Forster employs this analogy of novelists writing side by side to support his assertion that "history develops, art stands still." In his final chapter, he revisits this analogy to speculate about the future of the novel. He suggests that "we must visualize the novelists of the next two hundred years as also writing in the same room," emphasizing that the "mechanism of the human mind" remains fundamentally consistent throughout history.
Compare and Contrast
1837–1901: The period known as the Victorian era is named after Queen Victoria, with the term emerging in the 1850s.
1901–1910: The Edwardian age, under King Edward VII, contrasts sharply with the more austere atmosphere of Queen Victoria's reign.
1914–1918: The harrowing experiences of World War I deeply influence English literature and the modernist movement.
1924–1937: James Ramsay MacDonald becomes the first Labour Party candidate elected as prime minister, a party supported by Forster. His initial term lasts only nine months, but he serves again from 1929 to 1935. However, Prime Minister Baldwin, who governs from 1924 to 1929 and from 1935 to 1937, dominates English politics during the 1920s and 1930s, leading to this period being called the Baldwin Era.
1979–1997: British politics are dominated by the Conservative government, first under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and then under John Major.
1997: The Labour Party, with which Forster was associated, achieves a landslide victory with Tony Blair becoming prime minister.
1780s–1840s: Romanticism, which emphasizes individual imagination, is the leading literary movement in England.
1840s–1890s: Romanticism transitions to the Gothicism and realism prominent in Victorian era novels.
1901–1910: Edwardian era novelists critique British society through their works.
1910s–1930s: The modernist movement in literature seeks to discard older literary forms and expand the novel's boundaries.
1939–1945: During World War II, poetry and short stories gain prominence over novels in English literature, with the brief New Apocalypse movement emerging in poetry.
1940s: The New Apocalypse is succeeded by a literary development in poetry known as the Movement.
1950s: The Angry Young Men, a group of novelists, are known for their realistic and autobiographical works.
Today: Contemporary novels are characterized by post-colonial and post-modern fiction, while the realist novel continues to endure.
Media Adaptations
Forster's most famous novels were turned into films during the 1980s and 1990s. A Passage to India (1984), directed by David Lean, features Judy Davis, Victor Bannerjee, and Alec Guinness. Merchant-Ivory Productions adapted several of his works under James Ivory's direction: A Room With a View (1986) stars Helena Bonham Carter, Daniel Day-Lewis, Judi Dench, Julian Sands, and Maggie Smith; Maurice (1987) features James Wilby and Hugh Grant; Howard's End (1992) stars Helena Bonham Carter, Anthony Hopkins, Vanessa Redgrave, and Emma Thompson. Where Angels Fear to Tread (1991), directed by Charles Sturridge, stars Helena Bonham Carter, Judy Davis, and Rupert Graves.
Bibliography and Further Reading
Sources
Gardner, Philip, ‘‘E. M. Forster,’’ in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 98: Modern British Essayists, First Series, edited by Robert Beum, Gale Research, 1990, pp. 123–39.
Moore, Harry T., E. M. Forster, Columbia University Press, 1965, p. 14.
———, Preface to E. M. Forster, by Norman Kelvin, Southern Illinois University Press, 1967, p. 155.
Page, Norman, E. M. Forster, St. Martin’s Press, 1987, pp. 1, 11.
Stone, Wilfred, The Cave and the Mountain, Stanford University Press, 1966, p. 110.
Summers, Claude J., E. M. Forster, Ungar, 1983, pp. 1, 295, 305–306, 311, 355.
Trilling, Lionel, E. M. Forster, New Directions, 1943, pp. 166, 168, 172, 181.
Further Reading
Bakshi, Parminder Kaur, Distant Desire: Homoerotic Codes and the Subversion of the English Novel in E. M. Forster’s Fiction, P. Lang, 1995. This book critically examines the homoerotic themes in Forster’s works.
Clarke, Peter, Hope and Glory: Britain, 1900–1990, Penguin, 1996. Clarke’s book provides a historical account of twentieth-century England.
Ferguson, Niall, The Pity of War: Explaining World War I, Basic Books, 1999. This social-historical analysis of World War I, in which Forster served, significantly influenced post-war literature of his era.
Lago, Mary, E. M. Forster: A Literary Life, St. Martin’s Press, 1995. This biography highlights Forster’s literary career development.
Lago, Mary, and P. N. Furbank, eds., Selected Letters of E. M. Forster, 2 Vols., Harvard University Press, 1983, 1985. This two-volume collection of Forster’s letters covers 1879–1920 in Volume 1 and 1921 until his death in 1970 in Volume 2.
Moynahan, Brian, Annabel Merullo, and Sarah Jackson, The British Century: A Photographic History of the Last Hundred Years, Random House, 1997. This book presents a history of twentieth-century Britain, Forster’s homeland, through documentary photographs and text.
Naylor, Gillian, ed., Bloomsbury: Its Artists, Authors, and Designers, Little Brown, 1990. This book explores the Bloomsbury Group, a literary and intellectual circle in London that included Forster, detailing its key members.
Paterson, John, Edwardians: London Life and Letters, 1901–1914, I. R. Dee, 1996. This book covers the culture, society, and life during King Edward’s reign, a period when Forster was active in London’s literary scene and set many of his novels.
Pugh, Martin, Britain Since 1789: A Concise History, St. Martin’s Press, 1999. This work provides a comprehensive history of Britain from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the period during which Forster lived and wrote.