The Intellectuals and the Masses John Carey

 

John Carey – The Intellectuals and the Masses Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939

This book is about the response of the English literary intelligentsia to the new phenomenon of mass culture.

Within my work I have always been concerned with the difference between high and lowbrow culture and the idea that working-class or poorer people have no intellect or want for intelligence. This is something that I touched on in my Authorship project but I thought with working with Shelagh Delaney's work this would be a good opportunity to further my research in the representation and the value of the working-classes within higher-class cultures.

 This book explains why the ‘elite’ writers separate their works and art from the people or the ‘mass’.

Notes –

Chapter 1 – The Revolt of the Masses

1800 – 1914 population in Europe rose from 180 to 460 million.

H.G Wells – ‘the extravagant swarm of new births/ the essential disaster of the nineteenth century.’

W.B Yeats recommended Nietzsche as ‘a counteractive to the spread of democratic vulgarity.’

‘It was to cater for the post Education-Act reading public that the popular newspaper came into being.’ – Start of newspaper and the public reading since the start of free education – 1896 Daily Mail launched. The elitists hated newspaper as the ‘masses’ were having access to literature.

T.S Eliot 1938 effect of daily newspapers ‘affirm them as complacent, prejudiced and unthinking mass.’

Newspapers encouraged women – ‘Are you visiting women? Do not forget your whip.’

‘To highbrows looking across the gulf, it seemed that the masses were not merely degraded and threatening but also not fully alive,’

D.H Lawrence and Nietzsche

‘The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men,’ Nietzsche – Unfortunately this idea is very inherent in our system and the lower working-classes are often seen as a hindrance on society rather than the cogs that actually turn it.

The Suburbs and the Clerks

Growth in suburban areas especially London after 1900

3,000 houses being built in 1851 to over 33,000 in 1911

1930’s large scale building firms – capable of building a semi in three days

‘Every suburb is being spoiled by the hand of the jerry builder and the greed of landowners. Instead of swelling hills and green pastures we see serrated lines of house tops and slated roofs.’

Edith Nesbit – ‘ugliness of suburban sprawl is a persistent theme in Edith Nesbit.’ Bought their house in Eltham in 1899, cheap housing had gone right up to the garden. ‘Edith and her husband were both leading Fabians and a friend once pointed out that as Socialists they ought to be in favour of cheap housing instead of deploring. They rightly saw that housing the masses caused irreparable damage, yet they could not ignore the social reasons that demanded it.’

Natural Aristocrats

In response 2 the revolt of the masses intellectuals generated the idea of an actual aristocracy consisting of intellectuals

a secret kind of knowledge which only intellectuals could possess

hermetic students of the Golden Dawn in 1890

intellectual craving for a source of distinction and power that the masses could not touch

eats 1916 distinguished indirect and symbolic having no need of mob or press to pay its way and aristocratic  form

links with Catholic religion Clive Bell 1914

Ezra pound - the artist has no longer any belief or suspicion at the mass the half educating simpering general can in anyway show his delights they are stock receive the arts is ready again for its service modern civilization had bred a race with brains like those of rabbits and we who are heirs of the witch doctor in the voodoo we artists who've been so long the despised about to takeover control

The supremacy of religion and birth rights exclude art – art shouldn’t reflect the interests of man but higher beings

George Gissing and the Ineducable Masses

By the pretence of education afforded by a school board system Society is being levelled down George kissing 1892 writing to Eduard Bertz

The need for education to raise the masses but also not wanting to give them education belittling the education they have, reproductions of classics, eating tinned food, living in suburbs helping people is all deemed vulgar by the aristocrats

Our friend the charlatan all gissings books

private papers of  Henry Rycroft

in the year of the Jubilee

the emancipated

Narrowing the Abyss – Arnold Bennet

‘Arnold Bennett is the hero of this book’

‘systematic dismemberment of the intellectual’s case against the masses/ has never been popular with the intellectuals as a result’

Bennet came from a ‘shopkeeping’ class – grandparents kept a tailors shop in Burslem he was born in 1867 and left school at 16

Enjoyed newspapers such as ‘tit bits’ despised by the intellectuals and favoured by the educated masses such as James Joyce ( Ulysses)

At 21 he moved to London and became a clerk – worked in solicitors office for 25 shillings a week.

Clive Bell – art critic and brother in law to Virginia Woolf called Bennet ‘ An insignificant little man and ridiculous to boot.’ Woolf claimed him to have a ‘Shopkeepers view of literature.’

He made money reviewing books

‘In politics he displayed a matching optimism the spread of education will heal the rift in English culture.’

Bennet uses terms of biology in his work to portray the equality between people ‘basic sameness of people, despite social and educational differences insists on the absolute singularity of each person, especially of seemingly unimportant people.’

Summary

The main things I learnt from reading this, was that many intellectuals held such strong views against poor people because of the population growth, although it’s understandable to detest big crowds and hordes of people, many of these writers and critics failed to see the ‘masses’ as people and therefore the resentment grew.

I think it is one thing to wish to keep culture away from people but to wish mass destruction upon half of the population as HG Wells novels aimed is a big stretch, it isn’t difficult to see why the same lowbrow and highbrow culture stands today from knowing what ideas and actions it was based on.

I was surprised to see DH Lawrence harboured such views, due to his upbringing as a miner’s son as I do like his writing, but I think I will value other writers before him now knowing that he also detested poor people.

I thought the connection between high art and religion was really interesting as many comprehensive schools are connected to the churches, it clashes with the views Christianity shares to be charitable and to see one another as equal, it seems to have been disregarded in terms of keeping culture and basing it of a omnipotent judge.

I think to get a full understanding and better analysis of it I will come back to it when looking at the subject of culture and the working-class in more depth and I think it will be a valuable book next year when I start my masters. 

Overall I did learn lots from reading this and it has made it clearer why there is a gap in culture and why commonly people from lower classes are deemed as unintelligent.