The Modern Movement is the fifth volume to be published to date in the Oxford English Literary History, that will eventually comprise thirteen volumes and which is the successor to the Oxford History of English Literature. It covers 30 years of a rich diversity of publications that appeared in the period just before the first world war, the war itself, the 1920s and 1930s, and the outbreak of the second world war. These are surely the most eventful decades in recent history, marking revolutions in outlook, behaviour and fashion. Periodisation is usually arbitrary but it is a necessary device to enable us to make some sense of developments in history. Professor Baldick gives at least one convincing reason for the choice of dates in the book under review:
If the years 1910‐1940, or 1900‐1940, or 1918‐1940, make sense to us now as a literary‐historical “period,” that is in part because a succession of authors writing between 1938 and 1940 [e.g. Cyril Connolly, Virginia Woolf and George Orwell] convinced themselves that they were living through an epoch or end‐time at which it was fitting to draw up the balance sheet of modern literature.
Baldick divides his book into three parts:
- 1.
Elements, which consists of “the infrastructural components of the literary world” (i.e. readers, publishers, the social class and backgrounds of authors, and the language they used).
- 2.
Forms (poetry, fiction and non‐fiction).
- 3.
Occasions (subjects and themes, including Englishness, the great war, childhood and youth, and sex).
These sections are framed by an introduction and a retrospect that surveys three decades of “modern realism”. Literary historians writing about the period dealt with in this book usually concentrate on the great names of modernism: Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Virginia Woolf, Lawrence and Auden are among those that typically predominate (in, for example, the PelicanGuide to English Literature). But Baldick rightly sees these remarkable innovators as existing in an England where numerous other writers were producing worthwhile work in traditional and popular modes. He gives full weight to Arnold Bennett, Somerset Maugham, J.B. Priestley, Walter de la Mare, and writers of best‐sellers and detective fiction. He notes that the critical preoccupation with “struggles between realism and modernism, or between social and psychological tendencies in fiction” may well be justified but that it “occludes the existence of a third continent of modern fiction that lies beyond both territories: the broad zone of the fabulous, the eccentric, the remote, the fanciful, and the exotic; in short, romance”.
His range of reference is unusual and productive. Baldick suggests that Noel Coward's use in his plays of small talk that disguises deeper unease (as in Private Lives) can be compared to Harold Pinter's use of dialogue in the 1960s and after. T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom merits attention as “a work of true and sustained literary force”. H.G. Wells's Mr Britling Sees it Through, a novel rarely read these days, “retains a fresh urgency and an unrivalled historical value” as an evocation of the impact of the first world war. Agatha Christie's Captain Hastings (in some of the Poirot novels) is “the perfect comic embodiment of “the Englishman” just as Richmal Crompton's William personifies new feelings of rebellion and disrespect. A table of anthologised poets in 1933‐1941 reveals that the consensus of opinion 60 years ago about worthwhile poets was far different from received opinion today: the top six were Yeats, de la Mare, Bridges, Eliot, W.H. Davies and A.E. Housman. The others included Masefield, Binyon and Lascelles Abercrombie, who are among those “our cultural memory has … jettisoned”, as Baldick crisply remarks.
He emphasises the question of censorship, noting “the literary period 1910‐1940 was a crucial phase in the long‐running struggle between literature and the censors that culminated in the liberalizations of the 1960s”. Associated with this question were controversies over English usage, which Baldick comprehensively summarises and discusses. The completion of the Oxford English Dictionary and the publication of Fowler's Modern English Usage were landmarks in the establishment of “correctness” but at the same time Shaw (notably in Pygmalion), Robert Bridges (in The Testament of Beauty) and James Joyce (in Ulysses), among others, were widening the boundaries of acceptability.
Baldick writes with fluency and ease, with no traces of the critical jargon and unnecessary abstraction that disfigure some contemporary accounts of language and literature. He seems to have read everything of importance in the period, including (as I have said) prose and verse which is ignored by many literary historians but which is vital for a complete understanding of the three decades he covers. In short, this is a valuable and accessible work of scholarship. It contains nine illustrations (mostly portraits of writers), two tables (one of poets, mentioned above, and another of selected regional novelists), almost 50 pages of author bibliographies, and many suggestions for further reading.
