Modernism and disciplinary history: On H. G. Wells and T. S. Eliot

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2004 by Lisa Fluet

     What, after reading the book, is one's main sensation? Perhaps
     that it wasn't so much a book as a lecture, delivered by a
     vigorous, fair-minded and well-informed free lance. He was
     assisted by a lantern--its assistance was essential--and bright
     and clear upon the sheet he projected the misty beginnings of
     fact. The rocks bubbled and the sea smoked. Presently there was an
     intertidal scum: it was life, trying to move out of the warm
     water, and subsequent slides showed the various forms it took. A
     movement also became perceptible among the audience; one or two of
     the prehistoric experts, discontented at so much lucidity,
     withdrew.
     --E. M. Forster (689)

Forster's early reviews of the first, two-volume edition of The Outline of History stand out among contemporary reviews for their positive, unusually charmed sense of the work's effects on readers. It is as though The Outline were an entertaining lecture rather than a book, as though the lecturer projected for his audience a comprehensible, bright, and clear vision of the misty beginnings of fact, of the common origins of life emerging from "inter-tidal scum." The only dissatisfaction among audience members can be traced to those representing disciplinary knowledge, who might rebel against the reduction of the focus of their life's work to mere educational entertainment--that is, the "prehistoric experts," those who remain unconvinced precisely because of the lecturer's ability to render lucid what they rely on for its dependable, enduring opacity.

Or so we should believe, from Forster's account. This review allows us to see in miniature an early indication of the large-scale effects that The Outline's wide appeal and numerous successful reprintings would have. Many readers would be charmed; only the experts, those representatives of discrete disciplinary knowledges, would be wary of a charismatic slide show claiming to represent the culmination of years of specialized research into prehistoric life. In retrospect, the suspicions of professional historians hardly appear surprising. How could experts help but criticize a work with such instantaneous mass appeal, soon "found in almost every English-speaking home (often the only historical work)" (Barker 319), particularly when its author openly admitted to heavy reliance on the Encyclopedia Britannica for his research? The "Book of Necessary Knowledge," as Wells often dubbed The Outline, reflected its author's consuming interest in "the possibility of giving Mr. Everyman an account not merely of past events, but of the main facts about the processes of life in general and the social, economic and political state of the world" (Experiment 616). What appeared--already problematically for historical specialists--as an amateur universal history in reality attempted much greater things. Wells sought to compile nothing short of an intellectual guide for everyday life in the modern world as a compensation for the modern Everyman's implicit alienation from a shared, collective awareness of biological, social, economic, and political knowledge.