We could talk about literature without talking about history, as both are linked. This period, called The Liberal Age, was a period characterised by important changes. The concept of evolution, and consequently of progress whether on individual, national, or global level, came to permeate every aspect of Victorian life and thought. Because evolution was determined by laws of science, man’s duty was to discover and obey such laws. This source of economic progress produced a nation and an economy whose preoccupation’s were by 1870 largely industrial and urban. By 1901, only one-fifty of the population of England and Wales lived in what may be called rural areas ; that is, eighty per cent of the population was urbanised as far greater proportion than in any European country.

    Those growing towns were dominated by railways, which created for the first time a nationally integrated economy. Filth and noise characterised Victorian cities. It was only slowly that the demand for improvement in urban life because a powerful one. Architecture and town- planning increasingly reflected nostalgia for the village.

    The urbanisation of the mass of the population and the decline of rural areas not surprisingly had profound social consequences for all classes of the population. FM Martin described classes by the names: upper, middle, and working. The causes of poverty had also changed. In 1899, over half of families lived in primary poverty because their wages were insufficient to support an average sized family.

Writing Britishness

    In a period when Britain faced a series of crisis, labour disputes, etc. Deviation from perceived forms was unacceptable, and the hostility of many critics to new forms of art literature was informed by both a conservative and a xenophobic hostility to the new. The Newbolt Report wondered to find a model of the united nation whose literature reflected the interests of all its people. The Report identified the industrial revolution as a prime cause of the lamentable state of the nation, in this case seeing it as a cause of a disassociation of populist and highbrow sensibility.

    There was the thought that urban life was destroying the race , and that the only hope of recovery lay in the re-creation of a yeoman class, rooted in the soil and supported by the soil. The writer could best assist in that project not by marking new territories conceivable, but by exposing the historical depth of old ones. Miranda Chaytor wrote:

    ‘ It relies on nostalgia for emotional power, feeds off our childhood memories of smaller less abstract forms of belonging- to a household, neighbourhood landscape '.

    Patriotism draws on these images ( part memories, part fantasies ), exploiting our homesickness, which is probably why I am immune to it- or would like to be ’.

    The individual´s concentration on the home and local territories provided a conceptual basis for identifying with what was national: ‘.... Those growing patriots who, in their anxiety to build an empire, have been grabbing at continents and lost their own land.’

    ‘ If human nature does alter, it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and the people- a very few people , but a few novelist are among them- are trying to do this...’

    As this was Foster´s thought , he tried to use this novel, Howards End, to show people the old values, and what progress was doing with English culture. Representing the old values or, what is the same, the glorious England of the past time, with all its power, was the landscape: ‘ Close to the castle was a grey mansion, unintellectual but kindly, stretched with its grounds across the peninsula´s neck- the sort of mansion that was built all over England at the beginning of the century while architecture was still an expression of the natural character...’

    The book has lots of descriptions rehearing the beauties of the countryside, and in the middle of these wonderful descriptions, as a magic symbol , lies the house, Howards End: ‘ It certainly was a loveable little house, and still is, though it now stands just outside a twentieth-century hub and almost within sound of a twentieth-century hum. The garden, the overhanging wych-elm , the sloping meadow, the great view to the west , The cliff of fir trees to the north , the adjacent farm though the high tangled hedge of Wild roses , were all utilised by me in the novel in Howards End....’

    From the very beginning of the novel , when Helen writes from Howards End , the house is described as having something magic, fantastic...It is just the opposite to what cities were like. This opposition is clearly exposed by Mrs, Munt when she arrives to the station to rescue Helen from the Wilcoxes, she wonders which “ country ” the station will open into, Suburbia or England , executive confort or “ local life “ and “ personal intercourse ”. Forster´s characters are always in between two alternatives: ‘ You only care about the things that you can use, and therefore arrange them in the following order: money, supremely useful, intellect, rather useful, imagination of no use at all. No- for the other had protested- your Pan –Germanism is no more imaginative than is our imperialism over here. It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven. That is not imagination...’

    As the novel is a novel of oppositions, in this extract, apart from the importance that he gives to the land, we see other oppositions that we can find in the book: money as oppose to intellect and Germany ( Liberalism ) as oppose to England ( Imperialism ). Forster was trying to make people remember where they came from and, for this purpose , use the countryside as a symbol of the nation. Though some of his characters are wonderful descriptions:

    ‘ ...Helen loved the country, and her letters glowed with physical exercise and poetry. She spoke of the scenery, quite, yet august; of the snow-clad fields, with their scampering hards of deer... It isn´t size that counts so much as the way things are arranged.’

    These descriptions crash with the ones made of the cities:

    ‘ The city seemed satanic, the narrower streets oppressing like the galleries of a mine... It was rather a darkering of the spirit..’

    Forster said in his book Aspects of the Novel that the main facts in human life were five: birth, sleep, love, food and death. But Forster never believed in love if it was not the love to the land: ‘ All history , all our experience, teaches us that no human relationship is constant...’. This point of view of Forster in love can be seen in Howards End ( page 256 ). It is not a casuality that in Howards End there is a motor –car. As a supreme symbol of the new civilisation, it comes to represent the other pole. But it is found there, with the house, both poles together. Forster always thought that poles , in some way had something in common. There are lots of opposites living together in Howards End: Margaret gets married with Mr. Wilcox, they represent different values, ideologies; while she is the liberalism, he is the personification of the imperialism, and at the end of the book they seem to be happy, there is , therefore, the possibility of reconciliation between opposites. This argument is mainly important in one moment of the novel:

    ‘ Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted , and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in exalted , and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer...’

    Other noticeable descriptions are those which reflect first-hand topographical knowledge, many of those relating to London and also Manchester:

    ‘ It is cheap, even if you hear it in Queen´s Hall, dreaviert music-room in London, though not as dreary as the Free Trade Hall, Manchester: and even if you sit on the extreme left of that hall, so that the bass bumps at you before the rest of the orchestra arrives, it is still cheap.’

    Forster spent several months in Germany in 1905 , so he describes German landscape: ‘ She spoke of the scenery quiet, yet august; of the snow-clad fields, with their scampering herds of deer; of the river and its quaint entrance into the Baltic Sea; of the Oderberger, only three hundred feet high, from which one slid all too quickly back into the Pomeranian plains , and yet these oderberge were real mountains...’

    Characters also play an important role in the novel, through them Forster shows his thoughts. The characters relationship with the land, in this case with Howards End, tell us more about them than we can think. In some cases, as soon as we know how characters really are, we find that their opinion of the landscape and therefore their relationship with the house changes. But lets analyse this aspect slowlier:
Mrs. Wilcox: At the beginning of the book, she is the personification of Howards End and what it represents. Like a queen, she inhabits the house and loves it more than any other thing in her life. Her conversations about the importance of having a home of your own are frequent, specially when Margaret tells her problem to find a new place to live:

    ‘ I would rather die than- oh poor girls! Can what thay call civilisation be right, if people mayn´t die in the room where they were born?...Howards End was nearly pulled down once. It would have killed me.’ It is symbolic that she is ill and dies as the glorious England was dying. The Wilcoxes: The rest of the family could be consider an unique character , because of what they represent, but the most important of them is Mr. Wilcox. At the beginning of the novel, they seem to be quiet like Mrs. Wilcox, and they seem to love the house as she does. But soon Forster is giving more details of what they really are: Helen discovers soon the real nature of Paul, and she sees them for what they are: a fraud. The Wilcoxes are not mere types but are embodiments of a way of life that Forster sees as powerful hegemonies in the society of the moment: ‘By explaining the Wilcoxes, Forster can explain a good deal about the state of English society. The imperial command of time and place-metonymically represented by a realist narrative structure, with the motorcar its apogee of ideological power...’

    At the end of the book, when their nature is known by the reader this is what Forster says about Mr. Wilcox: ‘ But he already felt that Howards End was an objective, and , though he disliked the house, was determined to defend it.’

    Mrs Wilcox knew all the real nature of her family and when she died, as a prelude of what the reader was going to know later, she leaves Howards End to Margaret.

    Helen: Forster allowed Helen to emerge as the only really effective critic of the social process for which the Wilcoxes are the apologist. Though her letters most of the wonderful descriptions of the landscape ( English and German ) are made. As well as her sister, Margaret she represents the opposite pole to the Wilcoxes and since she knew their real nature, by knowing Paul, she detasted them.

    Margaret: As there is an evolution in our perception of each character, there is also one in what we perceive about Margaret. At the beginning of the novel, she is located in London, and she seems to represent this type of life, but as soon as we know her, we know her real feelings, her real nature. There is like a line in the evolution of the character, the first part lasts until she sees Mrs. Wilcox in London, and the second one starts in that moment. May be Mrs. Wilcox showed her the importance of having a home. From my point of view, Margaret is the continuity of Mrs. Wilcox, because the feeling of the second, still alive in the first one. That is why Howards End belongs to Mrs. Wilcox, at the beginning of the novel , and to Margaret at the end . It is also significant that Howards End never belonged to Mr. Wilcox. Neither of them, Mrs. Wilcox and Margaret, loved Mr. Wilcox, their love was for the land. Margaret got married because she saw this marriage as a possibility to have her own house in the country, the one she wanted to live in, without telling her.

Created 12/05/99 Updated 12/05/99