Abstract
Historians usually understand the political, social and economic dimensions of progressive or advanced liberalism at the turn of the twentieth century in terms of the ‘new liberalism’, which has been the subject of a significant body of scholarship over the past 30 or so years. This scholarship, located primarily within political theory or intellectual history, has typically focused on the new liberalism either as a body of specific political measures and policies such as progressive taxation, national insurance, old age pensions, factory legislation, housing regulation, the building of public libraries, civic universities and public baths, or, more broadly, as a body of political theory characterized by ideals of collectivism and the role of the State. And, depending on the focus, scholars have tended to emphasize either the continuity with earlier forms of liberal reformism designed to bring about the regeneration of English society, or the breaks from those earlier forms.1 Because the present study is concerned primarily with the intersection of political and literary cultural vocabularies, not with the coherence or uniqueness or the practical consequences of the political, I do not address the nature or extent of new liberalism’s newness. Whatever the family resemblances it may have with other forms of liberalism, the new liberalism was a powerful and highly significant movement in its own right in the 20 years before World War I. It contains a relatively complex pattern of ideas in which notions of collectivism, co-operation and unfolding are central, and this pattern, while having important continuities with earlier forms of liberalism, articulates decidedly new conceptions of political policies and action.
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Notes
For a useful essay on the issues and the differences in approach, see Andrew Vincent, ‘The New Liberalism in Britain 1880–1914’, Australasian Journal of Politics and History 36 (3) (1990), pp. 388–405.
See also Michael Freeden, ed. Reassessing Political Ideologies: The Durability of Dissent (London: Routledge, 2001).
Herbert Burrows and J. A. Hobson, eds. William Clarke: A Collection of His Writings (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1908), pp. 398, 395, 207, 181 and 182, 388.
John A. Hobson, The Crisis of Liberalism ([1909] Brighton: Harvester, 1974), pp.viii–ix.
See Reba Soffer, Ethics and Society in England: The Revolution in the Social Sciences 1870–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 10.
L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism ([1911] Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp.60–1, and Democracy and Reaction ([1904] Brighton: Harvester Press, 1972), p. 111.
C. F. G. Masterman, The Condition of England (London: Methuen, 1909), pp. 76, 89.
For an example of cultural formation in this sense, see Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation 1830–1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 62.
Thomas Dixon, The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 133.
Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London: Verso, 2003), p. 15.
Christopher Herbert, Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
C. F. G. Masterman, In Peril of Change (New York: B. W. Hubsch, n.d. [1905]), p.303.
Michael Freeden, ‘The New Liberalism and Its Aftermath’, pp.175–92 in Richard Bellamy, ed. Victorian Liberalism (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 176.
T. H. S. Escott, Masters of English Journalism (London: Fisher Unwin, 1911), p.350. Escott had edited the Fortnightly Review from 1882 to 1886 between John Morley and Frank Harris.
P. J. Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914 (London: Fontana, 1991), p.77. In The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), John Gross points to some of the limitations of these critics (see, for example, his comments at p.146). Terry Eagleton, more tendentiously as part of his argument about the disintegration of the public sphere in the nineteenth century, refers to them as ‘hacks’. See Terry Eagleton The Function of Criticism (London: Verso, 1984), p.60. The point is, though, that regardless of the quality of these journalist reviewers, they were circulating dominant opinions, values and categories of the time. Sometimes, the more the hack, the clearer the category.
Robert Steven, The National Liberal Club (London: Robert Holden & Co., 1924), pp.33–4. Steven’s account is significant in several respects. First it points to the diversity of professions represented in the NLC, which, though partly a social club, was primarily a club where serious debate about the nature and policies of liberalism was undertaken. Professionals from many different backgrounds came together in their commitment to liberalism (and its future). Second, it alludes to the great variety of liberal positions held by members. And finally, it gives us an indication of the sheer weight of liberal numbers in the world of journalism.
Havelock Ellis, My Life (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), p. 232.
Dickie A. Spurgeon, ‘The Fortnightly Review’, in Alvin Sullivan, ed. British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837–1913 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), p. 133.
Henry Newbolt, My World as in My Time (London: 1932), p.240.
See A. L. Rowse, Quiller-Couch—A Portrait of ‘Q’ (London: Methuen, 1988), p. 59.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
Henry Nevinson, Changes and Chances (London: Nisbet & Co., 1923), p. 297.
J. A. Hobson, ‘The Task of Realism’, English Review, iii (Sept. 1909), pp.324–34, reprinted as ‘The Task of Reconstruction’ in J. A. Hobson, The Crisis of Liberalism, pp.261–76, pp.262, 270, 275, 275.
George Gissing, New Grub Street ([1891] Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p.38.
Christopher Mauriello, ‘The Strange Death of the Public Intellectual: Liberal Intellectual Identity and the ‘Field of Cultural Production’ in England, 1880–1920’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 6 (1) (2001), pp. 7, 1–26.
See Julia Stapleton, Englishness and the Study of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 14–15.
James Milne, The Memoirs of a Bookman (London: John Murray, 1934), pp.161, 5.
Ian Small, Conditions for Criticism: Authority, Knowledge, and Literature in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 21.
F. M. Leventhal, The Last Dissenter: H. N. Brailsford and His World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 61.
See Angela V. John, War, Journalism and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century: The Life and Times of Henry W. Nevinson (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), pp.42–59, for a detailed account of Nevinson’s trip, and his attempts to persuade the Cadbury’s and change English opinion to stop the slave trade in the cocoa industry.
See Wilson Harris, J. A. Spender (London: Cassell, 1946), p. 62.
Quoted in Lucy Masterman, C. F. G. Masterman: A Biography (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1939), p.79. Lucy Masterman’s biography is based largely on Masterman’s diaries, and his full account of the lunches (written when Massingham lost the editorship in 1923) gives us the flavour of what must have been extraordinary occasions.
Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914 (London: Routledge, 1996), p.125ff.
Ellen Jordan, The Women’s Movement and Women’s Employment in Nineteenth Century Britain (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 78.
See Margaret Diane Stetz, ‘The New Woman and the Periodical Press of the 1890s’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 6 (2) (2001), p. 278.
Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), p. 113.
Patricia Rigg, Julia Augustus Webster: Victorian Aestheticism and the Woman Writer (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), p. 218.
E. V. Lucas, Reading, Writing and Remembering (London: Methuen, 1932), p. 176;
E. K. Chambers, quoted in Anne Kimball Tuell, Mrs Meynell and her Literary Generation (New York: Dutton, 1925), p. 40.
Linda K. Hughes, Graham R.: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005), pp. 70, 71.
Gal Gerson, Margins of Disorder: New Liberalism and the Crisis of European Consciousness (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), n.10, p.203.
On this, see Philip Waller, Writers, Readers and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 500–6.
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© 2013 Jock Macleod
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Macleod, J. (2013). Introduction. In: Literature, Journalism, and the Vocabularies of Liberalism. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230391475_1
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