William, an Englishman (1919) and the Collapse of Cicely Hamilton’s Pre-war Meliorism

Abstract

William, an Englishman is a novel written in a tent near the French front by a ‘non-combatant’: the wartime volunteer nurse, postal overseer and theatrical performer Cicely Hamilton. A well-known playwright, actress, suffrage militant, polemical essayist before the conflict, Hamilton, nowadays largely overlooked, performed here a post-mortem exploration of some influential attitudes which were transformed by the experience of war. Coming from someone who had been particularly active on the British radical scene, the text’s denunciation of social progress, pacifism, internationalism, and even votes for women as naive ideals may appear unexpected. She drew from long personal knowledge as well as contemporary documentation to write a novel that, while not untouched by sympathy for her characters, is often brutal. The collapse of Hamilton’s previous political optimism, her (self-ironical) criticism of any belief in the perfectibility of human beings may come as a shock even today. But those familiar with Senlis (1917) might have anticipated Hamilton’s sombre 1919 text. ‘Modern warfare is so monstrous, all-engrossing and complex, that there is a sense, and a very real sense, in which hardly a civilian stands outside it; where the strife is to the death with an equal opponent the non-combatant ceases to exist.’ The abuse and strategic bombing of civilian populations, the collapse of former distinctions between combatants and non-combatants, the mobilization of almost entire nations were early on denounced by the writer. ‘No modern nation could fight for its life with its men in uniform only; it must mobilize, nominally or not, every class of its population for a struggle, too great and too deadly for the combatant to carry alone.’ (Senlis 34) Her discerning eye read the Great War for what it was: a conflict which was leaving no domain of social, economic and political life unsullied, a total war.