Named for King Edward VII, this era begins in the late 19th century, when Edward was Prince of Wales, and lasts through the first decade of the 20th century, covering the fin de siècle culture of England and the British Empire. For some writers, it was an age of optimism—the belle époque—that would usher in a better world, while others pessimistically anticipated the end of civilization as they knew it.

Writers such as H. G. Wells produced works of utopian optimism, although Wells also attacked the deleterious effects of the class system in Tono Bungay. Under the influence of realism, naturalism, and a widening sense of social rights, novelists such as Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and E. M. Forster constructed stories that exposed the flaws they perceived in English provincialism, materialism, and repression; their writing remains optimistic, however, since their novels hold up the mirror to these flaws so their countrymen can take note and correct themselves. They produce novels that meet the Horatian dictum that art must be dulce et utile: it must delight and teach those who experience it.

The development of mass culture begins first in low-cost publishing ventures of the 19th century such as serialized novels in periodicals. Popular writers reaching a mass audience of readers primarily interested in the delights of literature, rather than in the instruction they may derive from its study, include Arthur Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, John Buchan, J. M. Barrie, and Max Beerbohm. Specialized forms such as mystery and detective fiction, pulp westerns, adventure stories, and science fiction find loyal audiences and begin to fragment the edifice of literature into the domains of serious literature and “fringe genres” or popular fiction. The gap between art and entertainment that begins in the transformation of the 19th into the 20th century continues to widen as new technologies make new expressions of creativity possible in radio, film, television, and now the internet.

In serious literature, a more elegiac tone comes from the late novels of Henry James, who saw the decline of the English class system as a great loss and a harbinger of a broader decline in civilized values and refinement. In The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, especially, he captures the upper-class decline in moral weight. His contemporary Joseph Conrad notes a parallel decline in the significance of empire and colonialism in novels such as Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, but underlying this critique of social and political arrangements is a deeper pessimism about the nature of the human beings who orchestrate such arrangements.

Formerly optimistic writers such as Rudyard Kipling find reasons to temper their enthusiasm for empire in light of the tragedies and scandals of the Boer War, and the trial for homosexuality of Oscar Wilde casts a shadow over the vogue of aestheticism. These authors differ in their general attitudes toward the future and their diagnoses of present ills, but they share an essentially traditional approach to literary art and to the construction of the novel.

But the Edwardian era also includes the beginnings of the radical departures of modernism from both the form and content of the novel (and other literary forms as well). Experimentation with language, narrative point of view, and subject matter becomes a hallmark of 20th-century literature. Wyndham Lewis and D. H. Lawrence make early forays into experimental territory in fiction, while T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound revolutionize poetry, and by the end of the Edwardian era, James Joyce is already brooding on the events he will transform into the modernist masterpiece Ulysses.

Bibliography
Batchelor, John. The Edwardian Novelists. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982.
Hunter, Jefferson. Edwardian Fiction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Nowell-Smith, Simon, ed. Edwardian England, 1901–1914. London: Oxford University Press, 1964.

Categories: British Literature, Literary Terms and Techniques, Literature, Novel Analysis

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