Before the lights went out
Juliet Townsend
EDWARDIAN FICTION: AN OXFORD COMPANION by Sandra Kemp, Charlotte Mitchell and David Trotter Publisher, .80.00, pp. 402 It has always been a rich field for the reader of every kind of fiction, that strange uneasy interlude between complacency and catastrophe, between the death of the old queen and the Marne. Take one year, for instance, 1905, in which were published Where Angels Fear to Tread, Kipps, Rider Haggard's Ayesha, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Arnold Bennett's Tales of the Five Towns, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Hill and Edgar Wallace's The Four Just Men, all books which are remembered today. What year in the 1990s will be found to have yielded a comparable harvest? The editors of this excellent new Oxford Companion, Edwardian Fiction (OUP, £30.00), point out that this was a time of transition, which saw the last offerings of the late Victorian novelists and the first of the modernists. It was also a time of enormous variety and vigour, when the spread of education meant that popular fiction was truly popu- lar, and the same author might turn with easy versatility from historical novel to sci- ence fiction, to romance, to detective story, to children's book, without feeling any need for apology or explanation. The edi- tors have included only authors with work published between 1900 and 1914, but even within these narrow confines we can find such unlikely bedfellows as Meredith and P.G. Wodehouse, James Joyce and Mrs Molesworth, Saki and Ethel M. Dell.
When we think of the Edwardian age we are inclined to see it in terms of an ide- alised country house party; what Rupert Brooke, quoted here, described as 'eating everlasting strawberry ices on green lawns to the tune of the Eton Boating Song'. This books shows us how much more there was to understand and to depict in fiction. The period, like every other, had its escapist themes — the Ruritanian romance, the Arcadian fantasy — but it also dealt with the harsher side of life. The editors quote Margaret Schlegel in Howard's End speak- ing of 'odours from the abyss', and writers like Wells, Galsworthy and D.H. Lawrence wrote of the lives of the urban poor. This had, of course, been a favourite subject of the Victorians. More distinctively Edwar- dian is the novel of the suburbs whose social nuances are often described most vividly by minor novelists like Mrs George de Horne Vaizey in More About Pixie.
The great charm of this book is in its account of these lesser figures, rather than the household names. I thought I was rea- sonably well read in the minor Edwardian novelists, having spent happy hours in my teens revelling in the lurid prose of Victo- ria Cross and Elinor Glyn in dusty volumes last borrowed from the London Library in 1920. Even so, to read this Oxford Com- panion is a chastening experience. There are such hordes of writers one has never even heard of, much less read. How did Herbert Flowerdew and Mrs Aylmer Gow- ing and Jessie Challacombe come to be missing from our shelves, and should we be trying to repair the deficiency? The compil- ers have obviously relished the challenge of the chase, tracking down their obscure quarry, some of whom have left only a faint and fading spoor through the literary jun- gle. How delightful to discover that the exotically named Mrs Mabel Chan-Toon married the King of Burma's barrister nephew who wrote the definitive textbook on pawn-broking law, or that C.B. Fry, bet- ter known for more substantial sporting achievements, produced a book on diabolo, or that Sheila Kaye-Smith wrote thirteen novels during her last two years at school.
We learn odd facts about the better known authors as well, not least their rela- tionships with one another in what was a closely knit world of friends and family. Conan Doyle's sister married E. W. Hor- nung, creator of Raffles; Kenneth Gra- hame was the cousin of Anthony Hope of The Prisoner of Zenda; and, on a less ele- vated plane, Bertha Ruck was married to Oliver Onions. The author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden, as Mary Annette von Arnim-Schlagenthin understandably pre- ferred to be called, not only married the brother of Bertrand Russell but also had a good eye for a tutor, employing E.M.
It certainly draws people to the church!' Forster and Hugh Walpole in succession to teach her children.
Of course there is no archetypal Edwar- dian novelist, but certain patterns do recur: born in India, or a child of the Church of England, or surprisingly often, Church of Ireland parsonage, one of a huge family, educated at public school (Malvern and Clifton are favourites), or, if female, by governesses at one of the new girls' high schools. In a surprisingly large number of cases, even among writers of the calibre of Conrad and Water de la Mare, financial support had to be provided by the Royal Literary Fund or a Civil List pension.
Certain themes are also repeated again and again in their work. The problem pic- ture in Edwardian painting is paralleled by the marriage problem novel. John Buchan and Erskine Childers were among many who wrote invasion scare stories, the most dramatic being William Le Queux's The Invasion of 1910, vigorously promoted by Harmsworth in The Daily Mail. Another preoccupation of the time was fitness and the body-building regime of Eugene Sandow was much in vogue and promoted in fiction and in periodicals. In his column The Boy Himself in the Boy's Own Paper Dr Gordon Stable advised his readers to occu- py their time before breakfast with a spell with the dumb-bells, a dose of Virol and a brisk bicycle ride (but 'no spurting!'). There was also a new emphasis on the life of the working woman. The number of women in clerical work had risen in 50 years from 279 to 124,000, creating a whole new subject for fiction and a market of lit- erate women to enjoy it. The women's suf- frage movement also provided a rich field for the novelist of every shade of opinion, hostile, friendly or humorous.
The brilliant writings of Said encapsulate much that is typical of the period at the higher end of the social scale. Sophisticat- ed, cynical, cosmopolitan and witty, he is described here as 'elegantly nasty'. The casual cruelty of some of his stories make them rest easily in a period when humiliat- ing jokes at the expense of the governess or some luckless foreign visitor were greeted by peals of unembarrassed laughter.
I have only two minor quibbles. One is the lack of an index, which means that it is difficult to track down a novel unless one knows the author, as only a few are listed separately under their titles. The other is the coverage of children's fiction, which has deliberately been limited to a few selected authors and which might have been better either expanded or omitted altogether.
The world depicted here came to a sud- den and brutal end. Said, like many others, welcomed Armageddon: 'I have always looked forward to the romance of a Euro- pean war.' When it came, he eventually succeeded in enlisting in his forties, only to be picked off as he crouched in a crater in no man's land shouting to a foolhardy com- rade, Tut out that bloody cigarette!' It was not so very romantic after all.
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