A number of writers tried to emulate their Victorian predecessors by combining a didactic intention with large sales figures. For them the novel was a diagnostic. They intended to analyse ‘the condition of England’.

 Sensing the desintegration around them, these writers tried to explore the state of the social order and to propound ways of dealing with.

Wells’s The wife of Sir Isaac Harman (1917) was an attempt to acknowledge the indepence of women from men.Wells also maintained that the great country houses were the ‘clue’ to England.

John Galsworthy’s The Man of Property 1906) establishes an interest in habitat and a method of reading.

Conrad was the novelist of extreme situations. He was a sailor for 20 years, and these experiences gave him the material for much of his work, he described the life of the sea and the exotic east ihis great novel, Nostromo (81904), he turned an imaginary South-American country- prey to the forces of the nationalism, conservatism, liberalism, imperialism, and commercial exploitation- into a microcosmos of the modern world. He showed as well the futility of all human action.

Warnings against totalitarism grew in the inmediate post-war period. There had been Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its enemies reasserted liberal values

  A high degree of social and experiential awareness on the part of the modern writers enables us to relate social and intellectual background to the preocupations of the great writers.

 James's possesion of the 'Great Babylon' proves how little time he had lost in assimilating the English scene.

The next generation of socially concerned writers had more or less the same aim: to sell books and influence people.