[In the following essay, Delany discusses Forster's “lifelong preoccupation” with the privileged lives of upper-class Britons as revealed in Howards End.]

When he was eight years old E. M. Forster inherited eight thousand pounds from his great-aunt Marianne Thornton, who came from a well-to-do family of Victorian bankers. His widowed mother had about the same amount of capital, ensuring him a comfortable home, and a Public School and Cambridge education. The Longest Journey deals with the emotional consequences of this secure and sheltered upbringing; Howards End, though not directly autobiographical, examines Forster's economic origins. The novel's motto, “Only connect …” is usually read as a plea for emotional openness; but Forster is equally concerned with the subtle connections between a class's mentality and how it gets its means of life. I want to show that Forster had a lifelong preoccupation with the morality of living on unearned income; and that in Howards End his aim was to move from his own experience of privilege to a comprehensive judgment on the kind of country Edwardian Britain was, and should be.

Like Marx and Freud before him, Forster is possessed by the idea of unmasking; he wants to lay bare the tangled economic roots of complacent liberalism. As wealth piled up in nineteenth-century Britain, the rentier class—those who lived mainly on investment income—had increased steadily in numbers and social influence (the Victorian census even had a special category for the “Independent Classes”). This class produced generous supporters of the arts, philanthropy, and such good causes as the abolition of slavery; at the same time, it could be seen as compromised by its fundamentally parasitic status. “The education I received in those far-off and fantastic days made me soft,” Forster wrote in 1946, “and I am very glad it did, for I have seen plenty of hardness since, and I know it does not even pay. … But though the education was humane it was imperfect, inasmuch as we none of us realized our economic position. In came the nice fat dividends, up rose the lofty thoughts, and we did not realize that all the time we were exploiting the poor of our own country and the backward races abroad, and getting bigger profits from our investments than we should. We refused to face this unpalatable truth.”¹

What could be the worth or the use, Forster asked himself, of an entire class of people who lived on the labor of others? His part-time teaching at the Working Men's College, from 1902 onwards, helped sharpen his awareness of the gulf between his own comfortable existence and that of his hard-pressed students. In his darker moods he condemned himself as a milksop who lived with his mother, who was sexually backward, and who had been absolved by his inherited wealth from the need to seek a useful career.

Howards End starts from the principle stated by its heroine, Margaret Schlegel: “independent thoughts are in nine cases out of ten the result of independent means.”² But if this proposition is accepted, it contains an uncomfortable lesson for people in Forster's position. It suggests that independence of mind is not entirely virtuous, because it is one of the privileges that accrue to the owners of capital. Or, to look at it another way: if independent thoughts are the result of something else, then they aren't really independent. Money talks, and money thinks; this is Margaret's claim when she goes on to tell her ladies' discussion group “that the very soul of the world is economic”:

“That's more like socialism,” said Mrs. Munt suspiciously.

“Call it what you like. I call it going through life with one's hand spread open on the table. I'm tired of these rich people who pretend to be poor, and think it shows a nice mind to ignore the piles of money that keep their feet above the waves. I stand each year upon six hundred pounds, and Helen upon the same, and Tibby will stand upon eight, and as fast as our pounds crumble away into the sea they are renewed—from the sea, yes, from the sea. And all our thoughts are the thoughts of six-hundred-pounders, and all our speeches; and because we don't want to steal umbrellas ourselves we forget that below the sea people do want to steal them, and do steal them sometimes, and that what's a joke up here is down there reality—”³

Margaret's position is indeed “like socialism” in saying that consciousness is determined by its economic base; but neither she nor her creator are ready to jump from this premise to revolutionary conclusions. All they feel obliged to do is to make the connection between the Schlegels' class and those, with very different outlooks, that are on each side of it. Below the Schlegels are the Basts, representing the half-submerged yet aspiring lower middle class; above them are the richer Wilcoxes, go-ahead business people “whose hands are on all the ropes” and who stand for “the robust ideal” (112, 38). The older sister, Margaret, concentrates on trying to understand the class above her; the younger, Helen, on understanding the class below. Each takes her sympathy to the point of sexual connection—Margaret's willed and reasoned, Helen's impulsive.

In defending to Helen her decision to marry Henry Wilcox, Margaret intellectualises her motives. “If Wilcoxes hadn't worked and died in England for thousands of years,” she bursts out, “you and I couldn't sit here without having our throats cut. There would be no trains, no ships to carry us literary people about in, no fields even. Just savagery. … More and more do I refuse to draw my income and sneer at those who guarantee it” (177-178). Margaret, like Forster, is trying to connect her sheltered and cultured existence with what guarantees it: the organizing power of the Wilcoxes. She has to admit that civility rests on the measured application of brute force, and cultural refinement on economic injustice. To understand the particular resonance of this belief in Howards End, it will be useful to look briefly at two earlier works on similar themes: Gaskell's North and South (1855) and Shaw's Widowers' Houses (1892). Although these works helped to shape Forster's vision of the rentier way of life, each had its own mood and period flavor, which were quite different from Howards End. As usual, Forster ended up by quietly yet firmly choosing his own path. His novel became a justification of his economic status, and a vindication of the unassuming Schlegels over the ambitious Wilcoxes. The second aim of Howards End—and a less successful one—was to project Schlegel values into a compelling vision of what Britain's destiny might and should be.

II

Gaskell's North and South sets in opposition the active and the contemplative lives, North and South, men and women. These linked oppositions are all finally reconciled in the union of Margaret Hale, daughter of a Southern vicar, with Mr. Thornton, a rough-hewn Northern manufacturer. Forster may well have been influenced by Gaskell's novel in conceiving Howards End for he uses a similar dialectical structure, contrasting the morals and economics of two sets of characters, the Wilcoxes and the Schlegels.⁴ Spatially, Forster opposes town to country rather than North to South; but a more important difference between the two novels is that Forster's ends with the triumph of one side of his opposed forces, Gaskell's with a vision of complementarity. Margaret Hale and Mr. Thornton have many disagreements, but at the end they are united both sentimentally and economically. Thornton has gone bankrupt in a trade recession, in spite of his competence and hard work, while Margaret has inherited money and real estate from a family friend who was a don at Oxford. She makes Thornton a formal proposal: “if you would take some money of mine, eighteen thousand and fifty-seven pounds, lying just at this moment unused in the bank, and bringing me in only two and a half percent—you could pay me much better interest, and might go on working Marlborough Mills.”⁵ Thornton is so moved that he counters with his own proposal, that they should get married. Margaret's acceptance brings together the strong and the sweet, the entrepreneur and the rentier, North and South, industry and finance, in one of the most comprehensive of Victorian happy endings.

Margaret Hale, as a Victorian lady, need feel no qualms about becoming a passive investor in her husband's enterprise. But Forster could not rest easily with the idea of living on the fruits of his capital while others took on for him the struggle in the marketplace. It made him feel as if he were feminised—castrated, even—and his moral misgivings were equally strong. “Ever since I have read Widowers' Houses,” he wrote in 1934, “I have felt hopeless about investments.”⁶ He had read the play thirty-five years before as an undergraduate. Its hero is a genteel young man, Harry Trench, who has a private income but is also about to set up a medical practice. He has fallen in love with Blanche Sartorius, but is shocked when he discovers that his prospective father-in-law is a slum landlord. Trench is even more shocked to learn that his own capital is invested in a mortgage on one of Mr. Sartorius's filthy hovels. Sartorius points out to him, however, that if he liquidates the mortgage and puts the money into government bonds, his income will fall from £700 to £250 a year. After consulting his conscience, Trench decides both to marry Blanche and join Sartorius in a speculation that promises to double his capital in two years. Since one cannot belong to the upper middle class without being an exploiter, he feels that he may as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb.

Widowers' Houses demonstrates that social status is proportional to distance from economic reality. At the bottom of the play's pecking order is the despised Mr. Lickcheese, the man who actually squeezes the money out of the wretched slum-dwellers. Next comes Mr. Sartorius, who owns the buildings but never sets foot in them. At the top are Dr. Trench (and his aunt Lady Roxdale), who have not even troubled to find out where their comfortable private incomes came from.

In his own way, Shaw too is saying “Only connect”: that is, acknowledge the economic links that implicate each member of society in the actions of everyone else. The way of the world, however, is that people who eat meat have no desire to live next to a slaughterhouse; and by the time of Howards End, the rentiers have removed themselves even further than in Widowers' Houses from the actual workings of their capital. The English investor now thinks in global, rather than just regional or national terms. So, on reaching their majority, the Schlegel sisters remove their inheritances from “the old safe investments” and put them into what Forster archly calls “Foreign Things” (28). The safe investments would probably be Consols—British government bonds—which for many decades had yielded a steady two and a half to three and a half percent. If we assume that Forster himself was in the same position as the Schlegels, his £8,000 would have yielded about £240 a year until he reached twenty-five, when he came into control of his money and was free to invest it more adventurously. We know that one of his new investments was in British American Great Southern Railway, one of the major Argentinian railways, which yielded about five percent.⁷ The Schlegels' aunt, Mrs. Munt, wants them to keep their money in Britain, if not in bonds. She persuades them to invest a few hundred pounds in her favorite “Home Rails”; unfortunately, “the Foreign Things did admirably and the Nottingham and Derby declined with the steady dignity of which only Home Rails are capable” (28).

The popularity of “Foreign Things” had a powerful influence on British economic development. From about 1855 to 1914, Britain exported capital on a huge scale. New portfolio foreign investment in this period amounted to well over four billion pounds. Capital export had as its correlative the relative deprivation of domestic industry, a central feature of the extended crisis of the British economy that has featured so prominently in recent historiography.⁸ Two kinds of impulses promoted the shift of capital overseas. One was the straightforward economic motive that average returns were higher in foreign than in domestic investment. But there was also a cultural aversion to the root-and-branch transformation of society that would have been required to keep pace with Britain's technical and industrial rivals, especially in the United States and Germany. The possession of an Empire made it easier for Britain to avoid a head-on industrial competition with these countries, but did not fully determine that choice. In fact, sixty percent of her overseas investment in this period went to foreign countries, and only forty percent to the Empire.⁹ The heart of the matter was that Britain's governing classes preferred a strategy of “external” development, whereby the City of London facilitated the transfer of massive capital resources overseas, at the expense of the traditional manufacturing industries of the North.

So far as Forster is concerned, however, industry has not been deprived enough. He does not question investment in Foreign Things because it is at the expense of Home Rails, but because immoral methods must be used to organise it. When Margaret Schlegel goes to visit Henry Wilcox at his office she sees on his wall a map of Africa, “looking like a whale marked out for blubber” (196). The reader is surely meant to think of Gillray's famous cartoon of Napoleon and Pitt carving up the world like a Christmas pudding.¹⁰ If in Widowers' Houses the issue is domestic exploitation, in Howards End it is Imperialism, and the application of the Imperial mentality to class rule in Britain.

Henry is a self-deceiving Social Darwinist, who speaks complacently of “the battle of life” and cuts down the salaries of his clerks in the name of the “survival of the fittest” (192-93). Margaret becomes steadily disillusioned with him; she comes to believe that he does not stand for the control of savagery, but is himself an expression of it. Social Darwinism gives Henry an excuse to spurn Leonard Bast, the aspiring but unlucky working man. It encourages him to exploit the “subject races” for England's benefit, affronting Margaret's (and Forster's) anti-imperial or “Little England” sentiments. And at home, the creed of the “battle of life” leads to the destruction of the cherished past, the pollution of the countryside by the noise and stink of the motor car, and the loss to the English people of what they most need—a sense of being securely rooted in their own particular corner of the earth. Margaret begins by contrasting the Wilcoxes' manly vigor with her own lack of worldly purpose; but she ends up repelled by the amoral use that the Wilcoxes make of their strength.

III

Howards End repudiates the Wilcox way of life as hopelessly philistine, materialist, and brutal. But Forster is left with the task of imagining a coherent alternative to the Wilcox culture of “red [i.e. red-brick] houses and the Stock Exchange” (170). He seeks to disconnect from “the inner darkness in high places that comes with a commercial age” (322), to find a way for the Schlegels to avoid complicity in any of the Wilcox undertakings—that is to say, with commerce, imperialism, modernity itself. The obvious candidate for an alternative British culture is pastoralism, such as Forster described in the conclusion of “The Abinger Pageant”:

Houses and bungalows, hotels, restaurants and flats, arterial roads, by-passes, petrol pumps and pylons—are these going to be England? Are these man's final triumph? Or is there another England, Green and eternal, which will outlast them? I cannot tell you, I am only the Woodman, but this land is yours, and you can make it what you will.¹¹

Martin Wiener has told us how pervasive such sentiments have been in English culture since 1850, and even how constitutive of it. But Wiener says relatively little about the functional linkages between anti-industrialism and such distinctive features of English society as the dominance of the City over industry, the export of capital—that is to say, the displacement of industry overseas—and the emergence of an influential rentier class. This syndrome, if we may call it that, has allowed England to have its cake and eat it too: to enjoy the fruits of modern industry while preserving, in the South at least, an archaic and congenial mode of life modelled on a country-house (or country cottage) ideal.

C. K. Hobson's book The Export of Capital, published in 1914,¹² is refreshingly explicit about the structural changes in the British economy that are the direct and intended results of capital export. He notes, for example, that “the decay of British agriculture [was] largely attributable to the development of railways in new countries” (xxv). These are the same railways that Forster personally invested in. Furthermore, the depopulation of the British countryside after the Corn Laws was precisely what made it possible for the bohemian fringe of the middle class to move into their country cottages and play at being rustics. Foreign investment may contribute to the decline of British manufacturing, Hobson notes; but when the profits are repatriated they are “likely to mean an increased demand for labour in certain kinds of industry—e.g. for artists, printers, dressmakers, domestic servants, gardeners, chauffeurs” (236). In recent years, the familiar chorus of lamentation about the relative decline of Britain tends to ignore the segment of the economy that is based on internationally-oriented finance capital, and that has continued to be viable, prosperous, and politically dominant.¹³ If Britain has been in decline, one can only say that large parts of it are declining in style.

Forster's pastoralism, however, seeks to be a true alternative to modernity, rather than a self-serving myth of finance capital. An essential part of his case against the Wilcoxes, that Imperial family, is that they can enjoy their traditional English comforts by doing their dirty work overseas and out of sight. And if the Schlegels were to invest their capital in British industry rather than in Foreign Things, Forster would only see this as dirty work at home. His problem is how to uphold the civic and cultural virtues intrinsic to the rentier way of life, yet avoid complicity with commerce or technology.

He begins by sidestepping the charge that the rentier is a parasite who consumes, but does not produce. Helen Schlegel believes, like G. E. Moore, that “personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever” (176). Work is thus assigned a purely instrumental value, in providing the comfort and leisure that are required for agreeable personal relations. If one can have the comfort without work, so much the better for “the important thing” in life. The Schlegels' younger brother Tibby is stigmatised, but for emotional rather than physical laziness. As his name suggests, he is a rather epicene young man, who warms the teapot “almost too deftly” (55). He is also a surrogate for Forster himself; as with Rickie in The Longest Journey, the author passes a stern sentence on those whose deficiencies are closest to his own. Tibby's languid existence contrasts with the striving Wilcoxes, but morally he is no better than them:

Unlike Charles [Wilcox], Tibby had money enough; his ancestors had earned it for him, and if he shocked the people in one set of lodgings he had only to move into another. His was the leisure without sympathy—an attitude as fatal as the strenuous: a little cold culture may be raised on it, but no art. His sisters had seen the family danger, and had never forgotten to discount the gold islets that raised them from the sea. Tibby gave all the praise to himself, and so despised the struggling and the submerged.

(302)

Tibby is damned for his cold self-sufficiency, whereas his sisters are redeemed by their sympathy, their eagerness for connection with the world. These are specifically female traits, of course, and it is part of the female image that they are not expected to work. Middle-class women of this period can be thought of as rentiers by biological destiny; their vocation is to display their accomplishments, to be rather than to do. No one would expect them to be anything but passive investors.

Still, they have some work to do in the world—of an appropriate kind. One of their callings is to prevent change, which in Forster is almost always for the worse. In 1907, the year before he began Howards End, the Georgian mansion of the Thornton family, “Battersea Rise,” had been torn down and its site “completely covered with very small two-story houses.”¹⁴ Forster had given money to a campaign to save the house and garden, but nothing could be done. Howards End is named after a house which is saved—even if the red tide of semi-detached houses is lapping at its fringes—and which ends up in the hands of those who have the moral right to inherit it, the Schlegels.

What is at stake here is the principle of cultural continuity. Property that is rightly transmitted and cherished from one generation to another has its own “aura” (to borrow Walter Benjamin's term); it contrasts, in the novel, with dwellings that are merely passed around by the marketplace and torn down when they cease to be profitable, like the London house where the Schlegels are living at the beginning of the book. The rentier is a preserver of the aura, the precious “spirit of place” that is threatened by the onrushing chaos of modernity. A society dominated by “new men” would have no traditions, no landmarks to guide the succession of generations; the rentier does not build, but she guards the ancestral rites, like the pigs' teeth embedded in the elm at Howards End.¹⁵ She may live on the wealth amassed by previous generations, but she can mitigate this guilt by being a better custodian of England's heritage than the nouveaux-riches Wilcoxes.

In the concluding scene of the novel the Schlegel sisters have gained a far more substantial vocation than their earlier life of concert-going and tea-drinking in London. They have become traditional female providers of nurture: Helen cares for her infant son by Leonard Bast, Margaret cares for her husband, who breaks down after his son's conviction for Bast's manslaughter. They are farmers, raising hay on the meadows around the house. And Margaret will be a philanthropist, giving away half her capital over the next ten years. When she dies the house will pass to her nephew, the living symbol of union between the bourgeois Schlegels and the proletarian Basts. As R. N. Parkinson has pointed out, Forster upholds the principle of inheritance, but according to poetic rather than formal justice: in each generation, Howards End is held by those who morally deserve to have it.¹⁶

Forster's own life imitated his art. His inherited capital was greatly increased by his earnings as a writer after the success of Howards End in 1910; but he gave away much of what he had, either to charities or to his friends.¹⁷ In 1931, after some ups and downs in his financial affairs, he joked that “I am not again making the mistake of investing, or even of letting it lie in the Bank. I shall bury it to be disinterred as wanted.”¹⁸ In 1934 he started a lively controversy on the issue of ethical investment in Time and Tide.¹⁹ He described how he went to South Africa in 1929 and was appalled by the treatment of black workers in the mines at Kimberley; on his return, he sold his shares in a Belgian mining company. Now, he wanted to encourage the readers of Time and Tide to get rid of investments in arms companies. Several readers wrote in to point out flaws in this advice, but Forster stuck to his guns. “You can bowl anyone out on his investment list,” he responded, “but I deny that all lists are equally harmful or harmless and that one need not bother, and I think it would be healthier if people talked openly about the contents of their lists and did not conceal them like illegitimate children.”²⁰

Still, a code of personal conduct does not necessarily provide the basis for a credible vision of society as a whole. The Schlegels' retreat into pastoralism is not really an adequate solution to the “Condition-of-England” issues that are presented in the body of the novel. Margaret's strategy for dealing with the modern world is simply to wait until it renounces its own vital principle:

“Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong for ever,” [Margaret] said. “This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won't be a movement, because it will rest on the earth. All the signs are against it now, but I can't help hoping, and very early in the morning in the garden I feel that our house is the future as well as the past.”

(239)

Again, the contrast with the more positive outlook of North and South is instructive. When she revisits her old village in the South, Margaret Hale is at first dismayed not to find the rural Eden she had remembered in her Northern exile:

A sense of change, of individual nothingness, of perplexity and disappointment, overpowered Margaret. Nothing had been the same; and this slight, all pervading instability, had given her greater pain than if all had been too entirely changed for her to recognise it. …

Wearily she went to bed, warily she arose in four or five hours' time. But with the morning came hope, and a brighter view of things.

“After all it is right,” said she, hearing the voices of children at play while she was dressing. “If the world stood still, it would retrograde and become corrupt. … Looking out of myself, and my own painful sense of change, the progress of all around me is right and necessary. I must not think so much of how circumstances affect me myself, but how they affect others, if I wish to have a right judgment, or a hopeful trustful heart.”

(488-489)

Margaret Schlegel gives Howards End its moral center, and she is its most sympathetic character; but her social perspective, at the end, is that of hermit in the Dark Ages. Although she has remained true to her mission of connecting classes and sexes, almost all of the novel's significant actions have been initiated by more vital characters: the Wilcoxes, Leonard Bast, her sister Helen. At the end, Forster turns Henry Wilcox into a cipher in order to remove an inconvenient force from the plot, much like the sudden deaths of unwanted characters in other Forster novels. And Henry's personal defeat is made into a facile allegory of the withering away of the class he belongs to. “I'm broken—I'm ended” he whimpers to Margaret (324); but what he represents surely is not. The device recalls D. H. Lawrence's crippling Clifford Chatterly, to point a similar moral; and it shows the artist's traditional condescension to the managerial classes, denying them any real moral or psychological complexity.²¹

Good liberal that he was, Forster was well aware of the case that could be made against his pet causes. He feared that those on the frontier of scientific thought would “abandon literature, which has committed itself too deeply to the worship of vegetation.”²² We can see another danger too: that English literature would waste away on its vegetarian diet—clinging to archaism and nostalgia while failing to engage the contemporary passions of the ordinary citizen. In his creative career, Forster remained a perpetual Edwardian, even though he lived until 1970. That period was the golden age of rentier culture in England—which is why it figures so prominently in England's nostalgia industry today. Everyone wants “a room with a view”; but England is peculiar in its insistence that the view should be of the eternally sunlit meadows of the past.

Notes

1. “The Challenge of Our Time,” in Two Cheers for Democracy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965): 65.

2. O. Stallybrass, ed., Howards End (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975): 134. Citations in the remainder of my article are to this edition.

3. Pp. 72-73. In an earlier draft of the novel Forster gave the Schlegel sisters twice as much income, and Tibby £1500.

4. Forster paid tribute to Gaskell in “The Charm and Strength of Mrs. Gaskell,” Sunday Times, 7 April 1957, p. 10. He mentions having met Gaskell's daughters when he was a boy.

5. Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1854-55, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970): 529.

6. “Notes On The Way,” Time and Tide, 2 June 1934, p. 696.

7. P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life (London: Secker and Warburg, 1977), I, 159.

8. Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980 (Cambridge University Press, 1981). For an important revision of Wiener's view see also Geoffrey Ingham, Capitalism Divided: The City and Industry in British Social Development (London: Macmillan, 1984).

9. Matthew Simon, “The Pattern of New British Portfolio Foreign Investment, 1865-1914,” in A. R. Hall, ed., The Export of Capital From Britain 1870-1914 (London: Methuen, 1968): 24.

10. “The Plumb-pudding in Danger”: 1805.

11. Abinger Harvest (London: Edward Arnold, 1953): 399.

12. (London: Constable, 1914).

13. For a recent survey of the issue, see Perry Anderson, “The Figures of Descent,” New Left Review, 161 (Jan/Feb 1987).

14. Marianne Thornton (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956): 9.

15. The attitude to such rites in North and South is quite different. When Margaret Hale goes back to visit her old village in the South, she is shocked to hear that one of the villagers had tried to control the “powers of darkness” by roasting alive her neighbor's cat (477-78). This “practical paganism” is contrasted to the more progressive attitudes of the industrial North.

16. “The Inheritors; or A Single Ticket for Howards End,” in E. M. Forster: A Human Exploration, ed. G. K. Das and John Beer (London: Macmillan, 1979): 55-68.

17. For example, £10,000 to Bob and May Buckingham in 1964. His major asset, the copyright in his writings, was left to King's College, Cambridge.

18. Selected Letters of E. M. Forster, eds. Mary Lago and P. N. Furbank (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), II, 107. Compare J. M. Keynes on the “gradual disappearance of a rate of return on accumulated wealth” (the “euthanasia of the rentier”): “A man would still be free to accumulate his earned income with a view to spending it at a later date. But his accumulation would not grow. He would simply be in the position of Pope's father, who, when he retired from business, carried a chest of guineas with him to his villa at Twickenham and met his household expenses from it as required.” The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (London: Macmillan, 1973): 221.

19. Issues of 2 through 23 June, with associated letters to the editor.

20. Time and Tide, 23 June 1934, p. 797.

21. As usual, Forster himself anticipated this criticism: “there is a huge economic movement which has been taking the whole world, Great Britain included, from agriculture towards industrialism. That began about a hundred and fifty years ago, but since 1918 it has accelerated to an enormous speed, bringing all sorts of changes into national and personal life. … It has meant the destruction of feudalism and relationship based on the land, it has meant the transference of power from the aristocrat to the bureaucrat and the manager and the technician. Perhaps it will mean democracy, but it has not meant it yet, and personally I hate it. So I imagine do most writers, however loyally they try to sing its praises and to hymn the machine.” Two Cheers for Democracy: 278.

22. Commonplace Book, ed. P. Gardner, (London: Scolar Press, 1985): 37.