Table Of ContentS O C IA L IS T
PR O PA G A N D A IN T H E
T W E N T IE T H -C E N T U R Y
B R IT IS H N O V E L
David §mith
\
© David Smith 1978
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Smith, David
Socialist propaganda in the twentieth-century
British novel
1. English fiction - 20th century - History and
criticism 2. Socialism in literature
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Definitions and Limitations i
i The Nature of the Beast 4
2 Love and Utopianism 10
3 The Philanthropists of Mugsborough 27
4 Love, Utopianism, and some Revolution 39
5 At Last, the British are Coming 48
6 A Decent Working-Class Upbringing 57
7 The Middle-Class Dilemma 79
8 A Scots Qjiair 111
9 Blighted Spring 128
Conclusion *54
Notes 157
Bibliography ,87
Index *99
Acknowledgments
The author and publishers would like to thank the Hutchinson Publishing
Group and Schocken Books Inc. for granting permission to reproduce the
extracts from A Scots Quair, by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and Lawrence &
Wishart Ltd for permission to use the extracts from The Ragged Trousered
Philanthropists, by Robert Tressell.
Introduction: Definitions
and Limitations
‘If one faces facts’, wrote George Orwell back in 1937, adopting a devil’s
advocate stance, ‘one must admit that nearly everything describable as
Socialist literature is dull, tasteless, and bad'.1 Sometimes it seems that
British critics, particularly those concerned with the novel, have taken
OrwelFs deliberately exaggerated sentiment a little too much to heart. For
despite the recent growth of interest in socioliterary studies and a
corresponding proliferation of attempts to trace the interconnection
between politics and literature, there still remains one promising area of
study virtually neglected: namely that of Socialism and the British novel.
There have been several examinations of Socialism and British poetry,
particularly the poetry of the thirties, but to date nobody has attempted to
do for the British novel what Walter B. Rideout did for its American
counterpart back in 1956 in his book The Radical Novel in the United States
igoo-ig54. The following study—a survey of twentieth-century British
novels which include as one of their primary purposes the advocacy of a
species of Socialism—is an attempt partially to fill this gap.
But what, it may well be asked, is meant by the term Socialism? Its
meaning in Edwardian Britain in terms of practical politics will be
discussed in the opening chapter; what I would like to do at this stage is to
arrive at some more theoretical definition. Obviously, no such definition
could encompass all the details of every variety of Socialism. The
nineteenth and twentieth centuries have seen the accumulation of a large
and often conflicting body of Socialist tactics and theory, and the gulf in
the twentieth century in particular between the Marxist parties on the one
hand—with their fairly rigid economic and historic doctrines, their
revolutionary approach—and the Labour Parties of the British variety on
the other—with their gradualist, parliamentary, and basically empirical
approach—has often seemed virtually unbridgeable. But if it has seemed
so, there has nonetheless remained some common ground, and it is this
which can serve as a basis for a theoretical definition. It is in fact possible to
sec that in the years covered by this study, there were two minimal factors
to which the major Socialist sects paid at least lip service. The first was that
Socialism was seen, whether by common sense or by historical laws, to have
most relevance to the working class. The second, and more important, was
that the moral and economic ends of Socialism were seen as the elimination
2 Socialist Propaganda in the Twentieth-Century British Novel
of social friction and injustice by the common ownership of the means of
production, distribution, and exchange.
It is this minimal theoretical definition which I have constantly borne in
mind as a guide to the selection of novels to be studied. An ultimate
Socialist objective may well be, and frequently has been, forgotten by a
Party in the immediate practical demands of the moment, but if a novelist
forgets or chooses to ignore this objective then his novel can hardly be said to
be advocating or—to be more precise and to use the terminology of my
title—propagandising Socialism. It is for this reason that I have excluded
such novels of social protest as—to take two famous examples from the
thirties—Lionel Britton’s Hunger and Love (1931) and Walter Greenwood’s
Love on the Dole (1933), which certainly rail against the system or part of the
system but which fail to proffer any radical alternative. It is for this reason
also that I have excluded novels which could be classified as propaganda
only from extraliterary evidence, such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm
(x945)- According to Orwell the latter book was written ‘against totalit
arianism and for democratic socialism’,2 but it is in fact the negative side of
his purpose which emerges, and as a result this anti-Stalinist parable could
be and has been seen as a condemnation of Socialism per se.
At the same time, however, it should be stressed that I have not always
excluded those novels which in the body of the work nominally advocate
Socialism, but which turn out on closer examination to fall somewhat short
of the ideal. In these instances I have indicated the divergence and tried to
show its relevance to the period under discussion. Indeed, it has been part
of my purpose throughout to view these books against the background of
the political, and where necessary, the social conditions from which they
sprang. There has been no attempt at comprehensiveness (just as there has
been no attempt to discuss every Socialist novel of the period), but where I
have felt such extrinsic material would cast light on the novels themselves,
I have included it.
But this study is ultimately and primarily a study of the works
themselves, of what they say, and more importantly, how they say it. The
word ‘propaganda’ is commonly used in a pejorative sense when applied to
the novel, and, indeed, the majority of the books examined bear this out.
Nonetheless, at the risk sometimes of producing the effect of breaking a
series of already maimed butterflies on a wheel, I have throughout applied
the criteria: to what extent is this book conveying its author’s own
conviction, and to what extent is it a satisfactory work of art? The answer to
these two questions, the nature of the relationship between them, and
hence something of the nature of the political propaganda novel itself, will
hopefully emerge in what follows.
There remains one final comment to be made, a comment concerning
the chronological boundaries of this study. I have chosen to confine it to the
twentieth century, and furthermore, while I have mentioned novels
published as recently as 1974, the main body of the work deals with the fifty
