THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

epresented. A month later Labour defeat in a General Election brought the Conservatives back to power.
The General Strike of May 1926, which collapsed after nine days, demonstrated the failure of organized labour to
topple, or even shake, a resolute and unsympathetic Government. The Government’s propaganda victory was partly
due to its successful control of the media, including, for the first time radio broadcasting. Continuing economic
depression and rising unemployment nevertheless helped to ensure both that Labour was able to form a second
Government between 1929 and 1931, and that Labour’s reforming zeal floundered. There was relatively little any
democratic government seemed to be able to do to reverse the devastating effects of the economic depression on heavy
industry. Waste Lands seared themselves into more than simply the literary imagination. ‘When the industry of a
town has been killed’, the trade unionist and politician Ellen Wilkinson wrote in her propagandist study of Jarrow,
The Town that was Murdered (1939), ‘it seems as difficult to apply artificial respiration as on a human corpse’.
Although the fate of Jarrow seemed to socialists like Wilkinson (1891-1947) to exemplify the inhuman
shortcomings of the inherited capitalist order, it should not be assumed that British literature of the 1920s and 1930s
was exclusively dominated by images of decay and instability or by a language of fragmentation and reformulation.
The sometimes bright, sometimes troubled, new horizons opened by international cultural innovation were, however,
rarely concordant with the working lives and domestic diversions of the vast mass of the British population. In his
pithy essay ‘Art and Life’ (1917), republished as the first paper in his influential Vision and Design in 1920, Roger
Fry (1866-1934) had argued that ‘the correspondence between art and life which we so habitually assume is not at all
constant and requires much correction before it can be trusted’. If Fry’s argument sets out initially to counter the idea
of art as photographic representation, it ends by announcing that ‘the artist of the new movement is moving into a
sphere more and more remote from that of the ordinary man’ and that ‘in proportion as art becomes purer the number
of people to whom it appeals gets less’. Much of Fry’s artistic mission consisted of attacks on the narrow perceptions
of the now socially and intellectually emancipated lower-middle class. It was a class now served by new middlebrow
newspapers such as the Daily Mail (founded 1896), Daily Mirror (the first newspaper devoted exclusively to women’s
interests, founded 1903), and the Daily Express (founded 1900 and developed into a journal of substantial influence
and circulation under the proprietorship of Lord Beaverbrook in the 1920s). In the opinion of such newspapers and
their readers, a broad national ‘culture’ and a sense of participation in all elements of national life were no longer the
exclusive preserve of an educated or privileged elite. Popular newspapers helped secure their position as moulders of
social opinion by sponsoring easily assimilated history books, illustrated commemorative volumes, reissued classic
novels, dictionaries and, above all, moderately priced
[p. 510]
encyclopaedias. ‘I know what I like’ and ‘I know how to see through what I have been told to like’ became
interchangeable and variable propositions according to class, education, and purchasing power. It was an aspect of
freedom and cultural multiplicity which was rarely acceptable to an aesthetic and political avant-garde.
However disconcerting it may have seemed to highbrow opinion, the triumph of the middlebrow was successfully
fostered by technological innovation. In many ways the British middle classes, and those who aspired to modest
middle-class status and respectability, did well out of the inter-war period. The evolution of the detached and semidetached
villa by countless speculative builders seemed to offer the promise of a better and cleaner life in the
expanding outer suburbs of those British cities which remained unaffected by the Depression. Lines of fussy,
historically referential but unpretentious ‘semis’ spread out along arterial roads and sprawled over former farmland
and the abandoned gardens of the demolished mansions of earlier and richer suburbanites. The construction of these
suburbs was an enterprise as socially significant in its way as the building of the medieval cathedrals or the country
houses of the Georgian aristocracy (if one rarely as aesthetically satisfying). They also gave, and still give, ordinary
people a much-desired quality of life: a garden back and front, conveniently sized rooms, and a suburban ambience
detached from the supposed annoyances of the town. With the advent of the wireless in the 1920s (the British
Broadcasting Company merged into the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1926) a vital aspect of popular
entertainment shifted classlessly away from the public domain and into the domestic, from the theatre and the
ballroom to the parlour and the kitchen. The first music broadcast by the new Corporation on New Year's Day 1926
was the insistently democratic song ‘The more we are together the merrier we’ll be’. Programming decisions
determined that dance music vied with the classical and the big band with the orchestra. Actors, music-hall artistes,
novelists, journalists, and poets cemented their reputations by directly addressing audiences unimagined by their
predecessors. Even the reserved King George V cultivated a newly intimate relationship with his people through the
medium of cheery Christmas messages broadcast to the Empire (his wayward successor, Edward VIII, however, used
the radio in December 1936 to announce his abdication from the throne).
With the brief advent of television in the late 1930s (an experiment terminated by the Second World War) a
further dimension was added to home entertainment for those who could afford it. Television eventually diminished
both the glory and the audiences of by far the most popular form of diversion in the 1930s, the cinema. The