An Imperialist Inherits the Earth: Howards End in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Planted throughout E. M. Forster’s Howards End are the seeds of many dramatic forms of climate change that subsequently dominated the twentieth century. Howards End gathers together major strands of its contemporaneous ecological thought, where distressful events (rural decay, deforestation) are perceived; nostalgia for a pastoral past is honestly felt but recognized as impractical; devastation on a national, imperial, and even global scale is foretold; and hope for the earth’s future comes in a form largely symbolic or mythical—as vision more than prediction. Forster’s awareness of the potentially global significance of local environmental change emerged in concert with the environmental philosophy of his era, specifically the “back to the land” movement and theories of climatic determinism, and was developed in a 1909 short story, “The Machine Stops,” that he wrote while beginning Howards End, a novel best read within its environmental history and contemporaneous reactions to environmental change and together with a work of speculative fiction that helps account for the aura of impending apocalypse that saturates it.