Anti-industrialism: The Claims for Literature and Creativity

Notes from The Preachers of Culture by Margaret Mathieson (1975)

Chapter 7 – Anti-industrialism: The Claims for Literature and Creativity

This chapter argues that current (1970s) definitions of English in schools have been influenced greatly by the anti-industrial tradition in literature and literary criticism. The belief in an idealised rural past which was superior to the urban present encouraged educators to seek opportunities in the school curriculum to compensate for this loss (of a fulfilling organic agricultural life). Influential writers and critics viewed modern life with increasing hostility. The burden of enabling a sense of personal fulfilment through creativity was placed on the teaching of English Literature. These views have had important consequences for the ideology of English teaching.

• Mathieson recaps the first section of the book from the perspective of anti-industrialism:
  • Anti-industrialism of Victorian headmasters combined with attachment to ideals of classical education had mixed effects on the growth of English in schools.
  • Anti-industrialism led teachers to stress the need for children to create in order to compensate for the “stultifying conditions of mechanical labour and escapist literature”.
  • Matthew Arnold’s criticism of Victorian society as “mechanical” and “external” and concerned about “American vulgarity”. His recommendations came out of a need for culture in a materialistic society.
  • Others proposed English due to the “pernicious features of the cheap press”.
  • Norwood and Hope supported a curriculum that would foster “mental and moral growth”.
  • The Newbolt Report referred to “starved existences”, “clatter of the factory”.
  • George Sampson argued that industrialism reduced children to “tame and acquiescent labour fodder”.
  • Caldwell Cook believed that without opportunities for self-expression: “our people will continue to live as a race of petty and exploited town dwellers”.
• Central to Raymond Williams’ argument in Culture and Society is contrast drawn between 19th century writers between the “mechanical” nature of their society and the “organic” communities of pre-industrial England.
  • Williams presents evidence from the Edinburgh Review 1832, Contrasts by A.W. Pugin an Past and Present by Thomas Carlyle.
  • Williams argues that these artists’ opposition to laissez-faire attitudes produced a powerful alternative conception of an organic society which existed in our pre-industrial past.
  • Quotes Ruskin: “The art of any country is the exponent of its social and political vir­tues. The art, or general productive or formative energy, of any country, is an exact exponent of its ethical life. You can have noble art only from noble persons, associated under laws fitted to their time and circumstance.”
  • Ruskin: “… that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure. It is not that men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure their own, for they feel that the kind of labour to which they are condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men.”
  • Quotes William Morris: “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is, hatred of modern civilisation.”
  • Thomas Carlyle presents anxiety about society’s fragmentation (in relation to Corn Laws).
  • Williams: “Culture came to be defined as a separate entity and a critical idea.” and writers and literary critics fashioned a conception of the artist who had access to a special imaginative truth. They saw “Culture” as the true standard of the age.
• Implications of Raymond Williams‘ analysis:
  • The idea of art as superior reality produced a need for a body of men capable of sustaining tradition and of responding to new works of art.
  • Hostility to science and conditions in wider society produced desperate tones in which so many proposals for literature were made.
• Mathieson looks at the writing of George Bourne and D.H. Lawrence and says: “Their regret for our loss of the ‘organic’ rural community and for the disappearance of satisfying labour reappears and is developed in so much contemporary argument about the role of English.”
  • George Bourne’s Change in the Village (1912). Bourne regretted effect enclosures had on rural life and “left the people helpless against influences which have sapped away their interests … the peasant outlook gave way … to that of the modern labourer and the old attachment to the countryside was weakened”.
  • Bourne drew specific attention to the lost “education” of the rural craft.
  • Bourne criticised the education offered by the village school.
  • D.H. Lawrence – “Influenced by this writer who had known both worlds, educators and critics in the field of English have reflected deeply upon the implications of Lawrence’s attacks on industrialism for a society committed to mass literacy.”
  • Lawrence’s Women in Love criticises mechanisation for its effects of atomisation and incoherence.
  • Lawrence’s The Rainbow describes “the deep, unconscious fulfilment of living in intimate relationship with nature”.
  • Lawrence’s recreations of fulfilled agricultural lives stimulated concern among educators about the diminished opportunities in industrial society for personal satisfaction.
  • Lawrence described modern England as “a tomb”, “something broken” and its people as “grubby”, “shabby” like corpses deadened by mechanised society.
  • Lawrence also saw body/flesh as “wiser” than intellect.
  • Lawrence (like Bourne, Bantock and Holbrook) was deeply critical of education’s failure to replace what had been lost through England’s transition to industrialisation.
  • Mathieson: “The Rainbow conveys vividly Lawrence’s antipathy to utilitarianism in state education—the grim buildings, severe rows, withered plants, chanted facts and inflexible harsh discipline reflect industrial con­ ditions in mines, factories, and cheaply built communities of the world outside. Lawrence, like other critics, insisted that the knowledge of the schools failed to touch the deepest selves of working men’s children.”
  • Quotes Lawrence: “In my father’s generation, with the old wild England behind them, and the lack of education, the man was not beaten down. But in my generation, the boys I went to school with, colliers now, have all been beaten down, what with the din-din-dinnings of board schools, books, cinemas, clergymen, the whole national and human consciousness hammering on the fact of material prosperity above all things.”
  • For Lawrence, modern society/culture presented obstacles to the achievement of individuality. He presents a concentrated mistrust of modern society.
  • Lawrence’s poem What Have They Done To You?
• Mathieson: “Deeply concerned about the inadequacy of state education today, with its exclusive stress on cog­nitive skills, G. H. Bantock and David Holbrook have argued for a much richer education of the senses and emotions, particularly for working-class children. English teachers they insist, should be responsible for encouraging their pupils through mime, drama, art, music, story-telling in poetry and prose, for touching again the vital centres of the vast majority, for whom rural satisfactions have been replaced by the mechanical, disintegrative routines of industrial labour and the trivial irrelevances of manufactured entertainment.”
• Influence of F.R. Leavis:
  • Leavis’ central concern in Culture and Environment is with the debasing effects of mass media. “It is essential, in his view, to encourage the powers of discrimination of students and children. The strength of his anti­ industrialism is relevant here because of its relationship with his life’s efforts to promote the serious and engaged study of English literature.”
  • Leavis and Denys Thompson regret the modern habit of living for leisure instead of getting the satisfactions derived from work.
  • Mrs Leavis in Fiction and the Reading Public argued that tastes have been steadily degenerating with the coincidence of mass literacy and disintegration of folk culture.
  • Quotes Q.D. Leavis: “The old order made reading to prevent boredom unnecessary, where­ as the narrowing down of labour that specialisation has produced has changed the working day from a sequence of interests to a repetition of mechanical movement of both body and mind. . . . But these had a real social life, they had a way of living that obeyed the natural rhythm and furnished them with genuine or what might be called, to borrow a word from the copy writer, “creative” interests—country arts, traditional crafts and games and singing, not substitute or kill­ time interests like listening to radio or gramophone, looking through newspapers and magazines, watching films and commercial football, and the activities connected with motor cars and bicycles, the only way of using leisure known to the modern city dweller…”
  • Mathieson points out that Leavis’ students concerned themselves with English in the school curriculum and invested great value in their pupils’ capacity to respond sensitively to great literature. Those involved with less able pupils turned to creativity to compensate for the inadequacies of industrial society.
  • Leavis’ Lectures in America (1969) and Literature and Humanity (1964).
  • Quotes Leavis (1964): “Language as it is used today exhibits a progressive de­humanisation.”
• Work of G.H. Bantock (a student of Leavis) important:
  • Quotes Bantock: “Can we in the schools do anything to­ wards the evolving of a new folk culture?”
  • Bantock critical of the way that children are educated in schools. Quotes Bantock: “Education, indeed, stepped in as the folk environment collapsed— and failed precisely because it neglected what the folk environment had provided in moral and cultural strength.”
  • Bantock believed that education failed to equip children to resist commercial culture and that the syllabus should be given to dance, mime, music, drama and poetry.
  • English teaching provides “training in moral awareness and sensitivity which reacts centrally on the problems of living”.
  • Bantock argued that academic education for children of lower ability from working class homes – the heirs of rural communities – leads to boredom and susceptibility to trivia of mass media. (Mathieson comments that this is at odds with hope about upward social mobility.)
• Most influential figure of last ten years (from 1975 perspective) is David Holbrook whose English for Maturity (1965) “has transformed approaches to the subject at the secondary modern ability levels”:
  • Unlike Lawrence, Bourne and Leavis, Holbrook concerns himself with “the sensibilities of three-quarters of the population” – the secondary modern children of average or low ability.
  • Quotes Holbrook: “it is the task of the school… to begin to help re-establish a popular culture … to develop … the very culture of the feelings.”
• Fred Inglis in The Englishness of English Teaching (1969) presents similar views:
  • Quotes Inglis: “Mostly, we simply do not recognise in any conscious way that the places we live in have only a brutalised identity, and we do not know what spiritual impoverishment our loveless, placeless homes make for.”
  • Like 19th century thinkers, Inglis made the link between “bad art” and “impoverished quality of life”.
  • Quotes Inglis who calls for a “militancy against all that is hateful in contemporaneity and for a brave access- of energy to build on those things which are worth the holding”.