Class struggle in the Forsyte chronicles

Abstract

ABSTRACT John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga has had a mixed critical reception. In many ways Galsworthy has never properly recovered from the twin assaults on his work by Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence in the 1920s. Moreover, the success of his work on television, especially the 1967 series, which helped define the nature of modern costume drama, has only served to marginalise his work as high-brow literature. This essay argues that Galsworthy is a serious writer concerned to analyse and elucidate class politics, as the opening sentence of the first novel in the sequence of Forsyte novels, The Man of Property (1906), demonstrates. In the first three novels Galsworthy sought to analyse the outlook and class-bound perceptions of the upper-middle classes, to which he belonged. In the second part of the sequence, A Modern Comedy, he attempted to widen his focus, and analyse the nature of other classes, in particular, the working class; and, in the third, he explored the ideology of the upper classes. As he was painfully aware, The Forsyte Saga, a work influenced by French realism and naturalism, was most successful when Galsworthy was writing about what he knew, i.e. the upper-middle classes. The novel sequence faltered and its satire dissipated when Galsworthy tried to produce a more comprehensive analysis of English society, but his literary ambition should be recognised, as should the experimental nature of his work, which sought to make the subject of class central to the English novel.