Table Of ContentNarratives of British Socialism
Also by Stephen Ingle
THE BRITISH PARTY SYSTEM
GEORGE ORWELL: A Political Life
PARLIAMENT AND HEALTH POLICIES (with Philip Tether)
SOCIALIST THOUGHT IN IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE
Narratives of British
Socialism
Stephen Ingle
Department of Politics
University of Stirling
© Stephen Ingle 2002
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First published 2002 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-38915-5 ISBN 978-0-230-28764-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230287648
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ingle,Stephen.
Narratives of British socialism / Stephen Ingle.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1.English literature – 19th century – History and criticism.2.Socialism
in literature.3.English literature – 20th century – History and criticism.
4.Authors,English – Political and social views.5.Socialism and literature –
Great Britain.6.Socialism – Great Britain.7.Narration (Rhetoric) I.Title.
PR468.S63 I57 2002
820.9(cid:2)358–dc21 2002025802
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02
For my family
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Contents
Acknowledgements viii
1 Narrative and Politics 1
2 ‘The Terrible Stone Face’ 17
3 Power to the People? 39
4 Narrative and the Sword 63
5 Narrative and the Law 85
6 The New Jerusalem 107
7 The Power of Narrative 130
Postscript: The Implosion of Values 150
Notes 170
Bibliography 186
Index 192
vii
Acknowledgements
I should like first of all to thank the publishers for being so patient with
this book. For a variety of reasons it took much longer to complete than
had been anticipated. One of the principal reasons was my moving to
the University of Stirling and though this proved a disadvantage in
respect of completion it has turned out to be a bonus in terms of the
exchanges I was able to have with colleagues about various sections of the
book. In particular I should like to thank Stanley Kleinberg and Andrea
Baumeister for reading and commenting on certain sections. I was also
greatly helped in a number of very practical ways by Margaret Dickson
and Joyce Burn in the departmental office at Stirling and I should like to
take the opportunity to thank them. I would like to thank my good friend
John Stewart, whose help with final proof-reading was most welcome.
Finally I have to thank my wife Margaret who read and reread various
drafts for typographical errors over a long period of time. She showed a
patience that never stretched quite as far as enthusiasm. Unfortunately I
can blame none of these for any shortcomings that this book might have
but I doubt I could have managed the thing without them.
Stirling STEPHENINGLE
viii
1
Narrative and Politics
Human speech is like a cracked copper cauldron on which we beat
out tunes for bears to dance to, when what we would really like is to
win the compassion of the stars.
(Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, part 2, ch. 12)
Shelley may have been thinking wishfully when he declared poets to be
the unacknowledged legislators of the world, Solzhenitsyn exaggerating
when he identified writers as the official opposition in despotic states,
but both took for granted the importance to politics of narrative in the
form of imaginative literature. Why is it, then, that narrative forms –
novels, drama, poetry, film – play so little part in the formal study of
politics?1 True, there is a growing body of scholars working in the area
where politics and imaginative literature overlap but few institutions of
higher education include this area within their teaching programme.
Students of literature, on the other hand, usually take into considera-
tion the political context within which writers work and also, when rel-
evant, the ideological disposition of those writers. Students of politics,
however, particularly in the English-speaking countries, have on the
whole felt little impulsion to explore the world of narrative to enrich
their understanding of politics. Yet there are at least two areas where a
prima facie case could be advanced for such an exploration, namely the
manner in which writers might enrich the knowledge and understand-
ing of political issues through their function as mass communicators,
and the light they might shed through their literary analysis upon the
nature of ideologies. To put it simply, imaginative writers should prove
of interest to the student of politics both as political commentators and
as political thinkers. Since this seems to be no more than common
1
