THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

or at worst suppressed. The international General Strike, once seen as socialism’s trump card to be played against a
warmongering ruling class, failed to materialize in 1914 and Labour MPs were chosen to serve both in Lloyd
George’s War Cabinet and in minor governmental posts. The cause of women’s suffrage, so actively pursued in the
years up to 1914, was effectively silenced by the promise of future electoral reform (a promise partly redeemed in
1919). Even the subject of Irish Home Rule, the chief entanglement of domestic policy since the 1880s, was put on ice
after the third reading of the Home Rule Bill in May 1914. It was violently kicked into life again by the six-day Easter
Rising in Dublin in 1916. The ‘Irish question’, as with so many other suspended questions, was finally attended to in
the context of a Europe which like Ireland had ‘changed utterly’ by the early 1920s. An Irish Free State, bereft of the
six predominantly Protestant counties of Ulster, came into fudged being in 1921 and found itself immediately plunged
into a brief but painful civil war.
By merit of its being deemed a ‘domestic’ concern of the victorious UnitedKingdom the problem of Ireland
scarcely vexed the concentrated minds of the rulers of post-war Europe and America who met at Versailles in order to
unravel the outstanding historical, geographical, religious, and racial knots in Central and Eastern Europe. In most
cases severance proved quicker and more efficient than unravelling. Although there was no real hope of a return to
the status quo ante, the treaties of Versailles and the Trianon proved only temporary compromises in the face of
political circumstances moulded not simply by the disasters of war but also by the presumptions of the social and
national revolutions the war had provoked. These new circumstances rarely left the politics, and by extension the
literature, of the United Kingdom untouched. A sense of fragmentation, which was as much geographical and
historical as it was cultural and psychological, haunted the experimental texts of the 1920s. The old continental
empires had been convulsed and, in the case of Austria-Hungary and Turkey, posthumously dismembered. Humiliated
Germany staggered from its attempts to establish a Marxist republic, to an unstable and impoverished ‘bourgeois’
democracy, and finally to a National Socialism intent
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on fulfilling what it claimed was the nation’s unrealized European destiny. Above all, the October Revolution of 1917
had changed once arch-conservative Russia to a bright shade of red. It had also shifted the ground and the rules of all
post-war political discussion.
The beleaguered Bolshevik state, first assaulted by armed Western intervention, then wracked by civil war and the
destructive manoeuvres of international capital, emerged for many post-war intellectuals as the model progressive
society. In 1935 the veteran English collectivists and socialists, Sidney (1859-1947) and Beatrice Webb (1858-1943),
subtitled their flattering study of Soviet Communism with the question ‘A New Civilisation?’. In later editions the
question mark was dropped. Respected British socialists such as H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw returned from factfinding
missions to Soviet Russia in the 1930s and airily assented to the idea that they had seen the working future of
humankind. Most conveniently avoided contemplating the fate of the Russian intelligentsia and the manifest suffering
of uprooted, regimented, and forcibly collectivized peasants. To many British writers of the younger generation, the
failure of the Western ‘bourgeois democracies’ to address the problems of poverty at home, and the problems of the
explosive antidemocratic energies of Italian, German, and Spanish Fascism abroad, seemed further to expose
Communist Russia as the only antidote to political despair. Fellow-travelling became the order of the day. It generally
entailed keeping one bright eye on the goals at the end of the broad highway and a blind one on the deeds of one’s
travelling companions.
The optimism of ‘progressive’ British intellectuals about the vaunted achievements of the first ‘Workers’ State’
was formed not simply by Soviet propaganda but by a pained awareness of the manifestly poor working and living
conditions of a large percentage of their fellow-countrymen and women. The Britain to which demobbed troops
returned in 1918 and 1919 proved not to be the ‘Land fit for Heroes’ promised by the wartime Prime Minister, David
Lloyd George. Despite the social reforms initiated by pre-war Liberal governments, the condition of the industrial and
agricultural poor, and of the unemployed, often contrasted as starkly with that of the rich as it had in mid-Victorian
Britain. The peculiarly British brand of socialist thought and experiment, which had so marked the literature of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, also served to determine the policies and electoral success of the Labour
Party in the 1920s. That the party so stoutly resisted Marxist and Communist influence, and thereby alienated many
young and more headstrong radicals, was an immediate result of its origins in quirky native ideologies and
untheoretical traditions. A minority Labour Government was formed after the General Election of 1923 but fell only
ten months later. Its impact on both the old order and the new was more symbolic than effective. In October 1924 the
Government was profoundly shaken by the publication of a letter, supposedly from the Bolshevik Zinoviev, exhorting
‘the masses of the British proletariat’ to bestir themselves against the very sort of compromise the Labour Party itself
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