‘All that is Solid Melts into Air’: Ford and the Spirit of Edwardian England

Abstract

My title refers to Marx and Engels’ account of the ‘constant revolutionizing of production’ and the ‘uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions’ under capitalism, when ‘all fixed, fast-frozen relations’ have melted into air. The category of ‘fixed relations’ presupposed by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto was clearly intended to include the phenomena of nationality and the national character, which Ford Madox Ford discusses everywhere in his writings, but particularly in his 1907 book The Spirit of the People, the third of his trilogy devoted to ‘England and the English’. The title The Spirit of the People itself suggests a kind of melting, due to the Shakespearean echo which is also found in Marx and Engels. It is Prospero in The Tempest who says that ‘These our actors [ . . .] were all spirits, and/ Are melted into air, into thin air’ (IV.i 148-50). Prospero’s ‘insubstantial pageant faded’ could, unkindly, be taken to suggest posterity’s verdict on a great deal of the pre-First World War writing of Ford and his contemporaries. Instead, I shall argue that it also sums up those writers’ own disillusioned perceptions of the future of imperial England’s ‘cloud-capped towers’ and ‘gorgeous palaces’ – perceptions whose relevance today is not, of course, limited to Edwardian England. In speaking of ‘Ford Madox Ford and Edwardian England’ we face the embarrassment that the writer known to his pre-war contemporaries was, of course, Ford Madox Hueffer. His ungainly and somewhat woodenly pedestrian name must have continually reminded his early readers that Ford was the son of a German immigrant, for all his English-country-gentleman airs and PreRaphaelite graces. Moreover, he was destined himself to become an emigrant, moving eventually to France and the United States. It is part of his huge talent for self-dramatization that Hueffer, the editor of the