The 1930s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction

Nick Hubble, Luke Seaber and Elinor Taylor, eds, The 1930s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, London: Bloomsbury, 2021.

Ten years ago, very few people were predicting that we would move into a period of populism, crisis and political instability that would make comparisons with the 1930s a commonplace. However, these trends were already very much apparent in 2017 when we began work on what at the time was the latest volume to be published in Bloomsbury’s ‘Decades Series’, covering the modern British fiction of the 1930s. Therefore, we decided from the start that we wanted this collection to move beyond a sepia-tinted version of the 1930s and look at those aspects of the decade’s literary culture which are relevant to us today in the twenty-first century. We set out to show that the 1930s was a key decade of socio-cultural change, marking the final transition from traditional nineteenth-century hierarchies into a twentieth-century mass democracy, in which both women and the working class had full political and cultural representation.

In keeping with the most up-to-date scholarship on 1930s literature, we have moved beyond the former close association of the decade with writers from the public-school educated ‘Auden generation’ to consider a much wider range of working-class, women’s, experimental and queer writing of the decade. Following the volume’s introduction, the first chapter provides an overview of 1930s literary contexts and concerns in relation to two well-known writers of the time who have since suffered critical neglect: the daughter of a post office sorting clerk, Ethel Mannin, and the former Durham coal miner, Harold Heslop. The success of these two writers, which would have been unimaginable before the First World War, demonstrates the unprecedented processes of cultural democratisation during the period. The intricate blend of personal and public moral concerns in their work points towards the intersectional politics demanded by the situation of the world today.

This is not to say that there is a straightforward march of progress from the literary culture of the 1930s to the present day. The nonnormative temporality of the queer writing of the decade provides a perfect illustration of how cultural transmission is not always straightforwardly visible to the historian’s gaze. For example, E. M. Forster originally drafted Maurice in 1912 and it was only published in 1971, after his death and the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, but it was in the 1930s that he revised the text and first corresponded with Christopher Isherwood about it. Similarly, aspects of Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, which for years has appeared to be a period piece, filtered through the public imagination via its musical adaptation into Cabaret, may also be viewed as very much in line with today’s sex worker advocacy. Where formerly the interest in the working class of Isherwood, and his public-school Oxbridge-educated peers, was derided as voyeuristic slumming or worse, it can now be seen that it was his modern queer identity that allowed him to successfully cross class barriers and make new alliances.

We have forgotten how much the British perception of history is shaped by a powerful and apparently progressive narrative of victory over fascism in the Second World War, followed by the establishment of the Welfare State. However, analysis of 1930s novels such as Storm Jameson’s In the Second Year and Clemence Dane’s The Arrogant History of White Ben reminds us of how there was a very real fear in the decade that the English upper and middle classes would instigate a fascist coup. The latter of these novels is a very disturbing satire in which a scarecrow comes to life and becomes dictator of England. With his hair literally a mop, it is very difficult not to think of White Ben as satirising a recent former Prime Minister. The most chilling aspect of the novel is the way in which supposedly English radical traditions, such as the idea of freeborn yeomen roaming the countryside and upholding the legacy of Magna Carta, lead to the worst excesses of violence committed in the name of the new regime.

In summation, rather than see the 1930s as an isolated literary decade, this volume positions it as central to understanding the literary culture of Britain and its constituent nations. A key overall argument is that it is the democratisation and politicisation across the spectrum of 1930s writing from canonical works to thrillers and women’s magazines, as opposed to solely the legacy of literary modernism, which is crucial to the subsequent development of British culture across the rest of the twentieth century and into our own times.

An extract from the draft version of my chapter, ‘You’re not in the market at Shielding, Joe’: Beyond the Myth of the ‘Thirties’, which sets out an alternate literary history of the 1930s to the old one presented in terms of the ‘Auden Generation’, can be found on this blog here.

This was the seventh volume of The Decades Series to be published; you can read about two earlier volumes on the Bloomsbury Literary Studies Blog: ‘British Fiction of the 1950s and 1960s’.