The two previous chapters focused on some of the explicit and implicit forms of history present in the work of two critics who were indisputably major figures in twentieth-century British culture. But it is a commonplace of intellectual history that figures of the second rank can often prove to be the most illuminatingly representative of patterns of thought and assumption in a particular period. This chapter will mainly deal with two such figures whose writings were to have a widespread impact between the 1930s and 1960s, and who illustrate the ways in which the tricky category of ‘background’ in literary studies can actually be a medium for transmitting some very substantive understandings of history—even, in these two cases, understandings of the part played by such major forces as science and capitalism in forming modern societies. These two examples will, in addition, provide further illustration of how, in the interwar period, what were presented as scholarly reinterpretations of seventeenth-century literature could also operate as forms of contemporary cultural criticism. Of course, figures of the second rank do not always make for exhilarating reading, so readers may have to be patient until the larger implications of the analysis can be brought out in the final section of the chapter.
No one, I assume, would now want to argue that the English critic Basil Willey belongs in any imaginable first rank, though he was a scholar of considerable standing in his own day who latterly held at Cambridge what some people regarded as the premier chair of English in the country (some people at Cambridge, anyway). But Willey has an important if limited place in my story, partly because his version of ‘background’ became the way in which generations of readers in literary studies and beyond imbibed an understanding of the development of English thought from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and partly because his work exhibited a distinctive blend of literary criticism and intellectual history.
We may begin with a deliberately mundane source, a review of one literary scholar by another. The quotation comes from a 1934 review of Willey’s first book, The Seventeenth Century Background, by his Cambridge colleague L. J. Potts, a figure whom history has scarcely deigned to put in any rank at all.
During the last fifteen years the attention of critics has been increasingly focussed on the Seventeenth Century. When the reaction against Victorianism was at its height it was to Elizabethan drama and the poets of the Romantic Revival that we went for inspiration, and to ‘our excellent and indispensable Eighteenth Century’ for a steadying influence. But partly owing to the pioneer work of Professor Grierson and Mr T. S. Eliot, it has become clear that a revolution took place in the Seventeenth Century involving deeper issues than those of the Sixteenth, Eighteenth, or early Nineteenth; and until the nature of this revolution has been sufficiently expounded it is unlikely that the centre of interest will shift or disperse.1
With a contemporary’s alertness to shifts in fashion, Potts here distinguishes the general reaction against Victorianism of the first two decades of the century from the historical change that had taken place since then. This latter perspective is associated particularly with the work of Eliot, and, as the review progresses, Potts repeatedly represents Willey’s book as working within the framework supplied by Eliot. For example, he argues that Willey ‘extends to [Sir Thomas] Browne Mr Eliot’s well-known and profound statement that “a thought to Donne was an experience: it modified his sensibility” ’, but that shortly afterwards the beginnings of that rationalism that reached its full expression in the eighteenth century put such a ‘unified sensibility’ beyond reach.2
So far, so Cambridge; but even the more Olympian perspective of Sir Herbert Grierson, Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh, yielded at least one similar conclusion. In reviewing Willey’s book, he also noted its treatment of Sir Thomas Browne: ‘Mr Willey groups him with the Metaphysicals in virtue of his “unified sensibility” (the popular phrase today), the way in which his thought is steeped in feeling.’ Grierson clearly felt that by this date it was unnecessary to identify either the author or the import of the quoted phrase about the ‘unified sensibility’, but his slightly sniffy aside about its being ‘the popular phrase today’ acquires an added piquancy when one remembers that Eliot’s dictum first began life in a review of Grierson’s edition of the Metaphysicals. Still, Grierson was likewise identifying the Eliotic inheritance of Willey’s book, even if he rightly noted its larger contention that the present generation no longer needed to accept scientific rationalism as the apogee of human progress.3
It is not altogether surprising that contemporary reviewers saw The Seventeenth Century Background as an application of Eliot’s celebrated historical claim. From the outset, the book rather nervously paraded its Eliotic associations. He is the only writer quoted by name in the foreword (from a book published in the same year—Willey was clearly keeping up with Eliot’s publications). The foreword ends with an acknowledgement that one chapter had already been published in the Criterion and ‘I am indebted to the editor of that review’—the unnamed editor, of course, being Eliot. T. E. Hulme is quoted twice in the opening chapter, and reference is also made to Julien Benda’s La Trahison des clercs, both known at the time to be touchstones of the Eliotic creed. By the early 1930s, Eliot’s authority was entering its papal phase, and such obeisances from a slightly younger scholar might seem unremarkable. The influence of his claim about a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ was a significant element in this standing, but what is curious about Willey’s book, when more closely examined, is the way it infuses Eliot’s notion with a historical interpretation of a rather different provenance. This other strain becomes evident even in the discussion of Sir Thomas Browne that reviewers had picked out for its Eliotic character.
Admiring Browne for the way he could both embrace the ‘new philosophy’ and cling to the old religious, quasi-magical, sensibility, Willey writes:
He had, in fact, what Mr T. S. Eliot has called the ‘unified sensibility’ of the ‘metaphysicals’. … It meant the capacity to live in divided and distinguished worlds, and to pass freely to and fro between one and the other, to be capable of many and varied responses to experience, instead of being confined to a few stereotyped ones.4
As this theme is developed, it becomes clear that Willey is actually making a point against later specialization: ‘the major interests of life’, he writes, ‘had not as yet been mechanically apportioned to specialists, so that one must dedicate oneself wholly to fact or wholly to value’. The ‘metaphysical’ mind could hold all these styles of thought ‘in a loose synthesis’. Although this is a different, and in some ways more hackneyed, point than Eliot’s, Willey nonetheless treats them as equivalent. ‘As in Mr Eliot’s celebrated instance of Spinoza and the smell of cooking, Browne thinks of Gorgons when he is discoursing of crystal and fuses them into a whole.’ (Willey cites Homage to John Dryden as the source of Eliot’s remark, which may suggest he had drafted this passage before the relevant essay was republished in Selected Essays, but which anyway bears out the point made in the Chapter 2 about the influence of the essays in the form of that slim Hogarth Press volume.) And, although Eliot’s text would have been well known to likely readers of his book in 1934, Willey seeks to go further in grafting Eliot’s terms onto his own argument. In the passage partly quoted by Potts, Willey writes: ‘Mr Eliot has rightly pointed out that “a thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility”; this is largely true of Browne as well, and both owe it, I believe, to the scholastic tradition, in which “fact” and “value” had not yet been sundered by the mechanical “philosophy”.’5 This is surely a curious, and curiously philosophical, rendering of Eliot’s celebrated claim, with a rather different history attached to it. Willey makes the claim essentially one about the modern divorce between fact and value, whereas Eliot (insofar as one can give a clear meaning to his famously gnomic remarks) seems to have had a form of poetic responsiveness in mind, the cognitive power of a certain kind of poetic image.
As Willey’s book progresses, it extends its central theme beyond individual figures such as Browne to embrace the whole movement of English thought and literature over two centuries. Indeed, by introducing a chapter on Descartes into a book that otherwise confines itself to English writers, it is able to sketch the consequences of the wider move towards the Enlightenment. The ‘Cartesian spirit’ encouraged the view, argues Willey, that only that which could be demonstrated with something like mathematical certainty could be true. This entailed the downgrading of religion and poetry, which, he claims, ‘spring from quite other modes of knowing’, and so by the beginning of the eighteenth century ‘religion had sunk to deism, while poetry had been reduced to catering for “delight”’. But just as these larger vistas are opening up, we are pulled sharply back to Willey’s informing preoccupation:
The Cartesian spirit made for the sharper separation of the spheres of prose and poetry, and thereby hastened that ‘dissociation of sensibility’ which Mr Eliot has remarked as having set in after the time of the Metaphysical poets. The cleavage then began to appear, which has become so troublesomely familiar to us since, between ‘values’ and ‘facts’; between what you felt as a human being or as a poet, and what you thought as a man of sense, judgement, and enlightenment.6
The gentle agreeableness of Willey’s prose cannot altogether obscure the slides in argument here. Where Eliot’s point had originally been about types of poetry, it is here turned into a story about the ‘separation of the spheres of prose and poetry’. The passage is silent on causal or explanatory claims, but the suggestion is that this led to the cleavage between facts and values (not Eliot’s theme), and that that, in turn, is then equated with a divide between feeling, the province of the human being or poet (here loosely, and rather implausibly, equated), and thought, including judgement. In its structure the argument is a familiar one, much rehearsed in nineteenth-century literature, and here rephrased in terms that appear to owe something to I. A. Richards’s recent pronouncements on the divide between statements of fact and the ‘pseudo-statements’ of feeling and evaluation. The whole argument and scale of the book seem to have far outrun Eliot’s dictum; in fact, it seems to be reinterpreting Eliot’s claim in order to embrace a quite different, and in some ways more conventional, historical story, one in which, as we shall see, the otherwise unnamed phenomenon of what came to be recognized as the ‘Scientific Revolution’ played a central part.
Looking back almost thirty-five years later, Willey himself clearly came to feel that the Eliotic provenance of his first book had been somewhat exaggerated. He was quick to insist that ‘I have no wish to under-rate the debt which, like the rest of us at that time, I owed to him,’ and then went on:
But I can honestly say that if any one book suggested to me the leading idea of The Seventeenth Century Background it was Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World. I can even remember the place and time when the flash of illumination came to me: it was, of all incongruous circumstances, while sitting reading Whitehead over a cup of morning coffee in Lyons’s shop in Petty Cury. There and then it dawned on me that ‘Truth’ was not all of one kind; that ‘scientific truth’ was not the whole of truth; that poets and divines had access to regions of it which were closed to mathematics and physics; and that the intellectual history of the seventeenth century could be seen as the struggle of scientific truth to emancipate itself from religion and poetry and to claim for itself unique validity. In the light of that idea I wrote my book.7
According to Willey, The Seventeenth-Century Background was largely written between June 1932 and July 1933, though it drew on the lectures he had been giving for some time on ‘Seventeenth Century Life and Thought’. He does not say when he had his epiphany in the tea shop; Whitehead’s book was published by Cambridge University Press in 1926 and attracted a good deal of attention, so Willey may have read it some years before he started to write his own study.
Reading Whitehead’s book now, it is easy to see why Willey was drawn to it. Combining his very considerable authority as philosopher and mathematician with an accessible style, Whitehead attempted to elaborate an ‘organic’ view of mind and nature that rescued humankind from what he called the ‘dead end’ of scientific materialism, restoring religion and the aesthetic as central forms of experience. Whitehead made clear that it was the science and mathematics of the seventeenth century that constituted the great rupture with the past. Outlining the elements of what he termed ‘the mechanistic theory of nature, which has reigned supreme ever since the seventeenth century’, Whitehead argued that ‘the history of thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is governed by the fact that the world had got hold of a general idea which it could neither live with nor live without’.8 The Romantic reaction of the late eighteenth century marked the point at which the poets rejected this world view, a rejection most powerfully expressed by Wordsworth. ‘The nature-poetry of the romantic revival’, Whitehead writes,
was a protest on behalf of the organic view of nature, and also a protest against the exclusion of value from the essence of matter of fact. … The romantic reaction was a protest on behalf of value. [Thereafter,] the literature of the nineteenth century, especially its English poetic literature, is a witness to the discord between the aesthetic intuitions of mankind and the mechanism of science.9
The effect of Whitehead’s argument was to make the seventeenth century, rather than either the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution, the true birth of the modern world. In fact, the Industrial Revolution is accorded only a rather contingent and minor role: it drew on the discoveries of science and it helped to further the application of mechanistic philosophy to society, but it did not, in Whitehead’s narrative, mark the key division between two epochs. He does make one passing reference to the way in which political economy encouraged the treatment of human beings as employable machines, adding: ‘The internal history of England during the last half century has been an endeavour slowly and painfully to undo the evils wrought in the first stage of the new epoch.’10 If there is a later divide of comparable significance to the seventeenth century, it is his own lifetime, which sees the development of relativity and quantum physics and the consequent break-up of the Newtonian view of the universe.
Whitehead’s book was based closely on his Lowell Lectures of the previous year and it contains practically no footnotes or references to existing scholarship on the many topics he covers. Where matters of ‘general history’ are concerned (as opposed to the philosophical and scientific ideas to which the bulk of the book is devoted), he gives the impression of merely referring to the received wisdom. There are, however, two explicit citations of historical works, and these may suggest something about the role of a figure who was clearly a point of reference for Whitehead and his readers, since they are both to W. E. H. Lecky, one to his History of Rationalism and one to his History of European Morals, published in 1865 and 1869 respectively.11 These two books affirmed the strongly progressive character of free thought in liberating early modern Europe from superstition, and, according to a later estimate, ‘for the next fifty years they formed an indispensable element in the creation of the historical background to British thinking’, a claim that might be supported by noting that, by 1914, the History of Rationalism was in its twentieth printing and European Morals in its seventeenth.12 Whitehead’s treatment made clear that Lecky represented the world view, or background, his own book was intended to overturn.
Whitehead’s revisionism was the historical scheme that the young English scholar imbibed with his coffee, but, as always, it was absorbed into a pattern of thinking and sensibility derived from other sources. In the opening chapter of The Seventeenth-Century Background, the book that laid the foundation of his scholarly reputation, Willey considered the decisive break that the ‘new philosophy’ of the seventeenth century made through its ‘rejection of scholasticism’. The reader is invited to consider the effects of this change in terms that are characteristic of the apparent mildness of Willey’s writing:
We have to be on our guard, I think, as much against those who represent the rejection of scholasticism as pure loss, as against those who regard it as pure gain. It is only because for three hundred years almost everybody has united to extol it as pure gain that we may be forgiven for leaning a little (as Aristotle advises) toward the opposite side, so as to restore the true mean. With this reservation let us boldly declare that the rejection [of scholasticism] was not wholly disastrous.13
Willey’s sense of literary ‘boldness’ was clearly less than Napoleonic: after emphasizing that for three centuries this rejection of scholasticism had been unanimously celebrated (and after then nervously sheltering behind Aristotle), he comes right out with it and risks his all with the judgement that, ‘with this reservation’, the rejection was ‘not wholly disastrous’. Neither the form nor the substance of the judgement seems designed to court instant notoriety. But there may, in fairness, have been more than Willey’s own literary timidity involved in this apparent bathos. Why might even this adverbially qualified negative phrase have seemed ‘bold’?
The first chapter positions the book as part of this recent reassessment of the supposed ‘victory’ of science over religion in the seventeenth century. Willey notes that ‘Catholics and Neo-Thomists’ such as Jacques Maritain have contributed to this reassessment, together with T. E. Hulme and Benda, and younger figures such as the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson. He then declares that sentiments such as Dawson’s condemnation of the Renaissance as the source of ‘the present chaos in Western civilization’ can ‘now be uttered in all soberness and with compelling force, whereas at almost any time during the past three hundred years they would have seemed a mad flouting of the dominant optimism and progress-worship’. These figures did indeed regard the rejection of Scholasticism as, simply, ‘disastrous’. But Willey emphasizes that the topic has also been treated by philosophers of science, such as Whitehead and E. A. Burtt, while of pressing significance for anyone working, as Willey did, in the fledgling Cambridge English school were I. A. Richards’s explorations of forms of ‘truth’ in Mencius on the Mind. It is this impressive consilience of authorities that emboldens Willey to suggest that, while we should no longer approach the question with any ‘antecedent prejudice in favour of the modern’, we should not undervalue the achievements of modern science, either.14
By this point, Willey’s own allegiances have begun to emerge more clearly, as when he writes: ‘Insofar as the rejection of scholasticism led to an undue elevation of empirical “truth”, and an attribution to it of a special privilege to represent “reality”, it was a disaster.’ Since the temperature of Willey’s writing rarely rises above the tepid, such a declarative statement stands out: ‘not wholly’ a disaster, perhaps, but in its main and most obvious consequence ‘it was a disaster’. A disaster, moreover, through whose consequences we were still living. There could be no simple going back: few could want scholasticism to be revived in toto:
But its great value must be preserved somehow: its testimony to the primacy of the ‘truths’ of religious experience. We may not want these ‘truths’ theologically and metaphysically expressed; but we do want to be able to experience reality in all its rich multiplicity, instead of being condemned by the modern consciousness to go on
Viewing all objects, unremittingly
In disconnection dead and spiritless.15
(Willey does not identify this embedded quotation, which is, characteristically, from Wordsworth’s Excursion.) By this point, his prose has become somewhat less than even-handed, we may feel: the ‘primacy’ of religious experience is the thing, and this is what ‘the modern consciousness’ prevents us from realizing.
An interesting aside reveals something of the historiographical tradition against which Willey saw himself as struggling. Having given a sympathetic account of Joseph Glanvill’s efforts to defend belief in an afterlife and other forms of supernaturalism (including the existence of witches) against the new rationalism, Willey writes: ‘Thus we get the queer spectacle of a Fellow of the Royal Society lashing his age for a type of “unbelief” which Lecky and others celebrate as one of the finest triumphs of the scientific movement.’16 Lecky here once again serves as little more than a handy metonym for a whole tradition of historiography from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that celebrated the advance of reason against superstition, a tradition, Willey implies, whose day is done. In its place, we now understand that the ‘great value’ of scholasticism ‘must be preserved somehow’. But how? What, in the arid desert of ‘modern consciousness’, could allow us ‘to experience reality in all its rich multiplicity’? The answer, in 1934, was not far to seek: literature, especially (for the English) English literature; and more especially still (for those of Willey’s disposition) those writers who struggled to unite intellect and feeling; and most particularly of all (especially for all hard-walking, Lakeland-loving, boyhood-yearning English literary scholars), Wordsworth.
The triumph of the scientific world view had been fatal for poetry, which, it was claimed, then languished until the end of the eighteenth century. ‘What the cold philosophy did destroy was the union of heart and head, the synthesis of thought and feeling, out of which major poetry seems to be born.’ This is one of the places where we can see the residue of Eliot’s Imagist sketch being reworked, but now, directly contrary to Eliot’s own literary preferences, as a vindication of Romantic ‘inspiration’. In Willey’s view, it fell to Wordsworth, above all others, to re-create that union. But today, he writes in one of his most outspoken expressions of cultural pessimism, even that has passed: the beliefs about man and nature that Wordsworth’s poetry embodied have evaporated. ‘The poetic tradition founded by Wordsworth is probably now dead and superseded.’ Only a passing reference to Lawrence might seem to suggest some small glimmer of hope: ‘It is significant to reflect that Wordsworth and Lawrence were making their protest against some of the effects of the very science which Browne was trying to vindicate. Browne wanted to plant us in the universe [the phrase quoted from DHL] so that we might have science; Wordsworth and Lawrence, that we might forget it.’17
It is curious to find a work that was to be so widely used as a textbook survey of seventeenth-century thought concluding with a chapter entirely devoted to the work of one Romantic poet. But it is more curious still to find a scholar widely identified as elaborating the historical basis of Eliot’s view of the failings of poetry between the Metaphysicals and the French Symbolists expressing such sentiments. Where Wordsworth and the Romantics more generally represented for Eliot the root of the decadent sentimentalism that marred Victorian and Edwardian verse, Willey ends up emphatically identifying the pantheistic nature-worship of Wordsworth as a poetic peak against which subsequent failure is to be measured.18
Willey also shared the tendency, evident in so much critical writing after Arnold, to see poetry and religion as serving very similar functions. ‘Since the scientific movement began, and numinous experience has become less and less accessible, Scripture and the liturgies have preserved a range of experiences which have been increasingly threatened by modernity in its various manifestations, and might have been altogether lost.’19 The presence of that deceptively usable word ‘modernity’ in this sentence is, as so often, an indication of the presence of meta-history or quasi-history. But, insofar as it is a historical story, it is again structured round the same binary: science has triumphed and driven out religion or poetry or value (these three being often equated by Willey), and so the Bible must be clung to in order not to ‘cut the last thread that links us with a lost world of feeling’. This assertion appears to rest on an Arnoldian conception of the Bible as being valuable because it represents ‘records of religious experience’ rather than as being true, the Word of God, a further illustration of how Willey, a lifelong Methodist, could fuse various strands in his intellectual inheritance. In a memoir of his former teacher, John Beer similarly characterized Willey as ‘a man who wished to remain true to everything he knew and to everything that his wide-ranging sympathies taught him’. For Willey, ‘the permanence of Christian values, outlasting the decay of historically founded dogmas, lay in their relevance to permanent human needs’.20
In 1940, in his second major work, The Eighteenth-Century Background—creativity in the matter of titles was not his forte—Willey managed the unusual feat of writing a book about eighteenth-century thought without explicitly mentioning the Industrial Revolution.21 The nearest he comes is when, at the conclusion of his discussion of, once again, Wordsworth, he mentions that ‘for many a sufferer from the strange disease of modern life, looking up from amongst the dark Satanic mills of the industrial age, the authority of the Wordsworthian Nature-religion has seemed absolute’.22 The reference could hardly be more formulaic; the phrases are not set off as quotations, but this unacknowledged blending of Arnold’s ‘Scholar-Gypsy’ with Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ signals a sensibility Willey feels he can rely upon his readers to share. What is more surprising is the way Willey takes his distance from the modern secular forms of this ‘nature-religion’, when one might expect him wholeheartedly to identify with it:
Vestiges of the Wordsworthian impulse still survive in the activities of bodies like the National Trust or the Society for the Preservation of Rural England, and amongst the hordes of hikers and cyclists who wander weekly over the countryside in search of they know not what (I have recently seen Wordsworth and Dorothy praised as the ‘first hikers’).
These people, he is clearly suggesting, with some condescension, merely have the outward part of the open-air creed: they have lost the religious impulse that filled it for Wordsworth, and so the joy the countryside gives them is simply that of ‘physical and nervous regeneration rather than of spiritual assurance’.23 Willey allows us to infer that he is still in touch with that religious impulse, which helps underwrite his cultural pessimism and enables him to take such a lofty view of the ‘hordes’, who are only doing what he himself also did with enthusiasm.
Willey may be an example of the extremism that so often lurks behind the chaste embrace of the juste milieu—in his case a conservative, religious rejection of the modern world. Generations of student readers (and others) were provided with a map of English literary and intellectual history since the seventeenth century that bore the marks of a sensibility shaped by the fraught encounter in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries between the English educated classes and their experience of what they perceived as a commercialized, reductive, landscape-destroying ‘modernity’. (In this respect, it is curious that Willey does not write more about Ruskin, fellow votary of the religion of the Lakes and of reverence for creation. There is no chapter on him in any of Willey’s books and no essay on him in his Festschrift either.)
By this point, Eliot’s notion of a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ has been transmuted into something altogether more conventional, but perhaps also more usable. We get a glimpse of the process by which such transmutation can be absorbed into the disciplinary bloodstream by turning again to a humble, workaday review, this time in that most scholarly of English Literature journals, Review of English Studies, a couple of decades after Willey’s first book had been published. Reviewing a study of ‘the cultural revolution of the seventeenth century’, the reviewer notes that the first half of the book
is an attempt to find out just what constituted the seventeenth-century ‘dissociation of sensibility’; the phrase is used, not in Mr T. S. Eliot’s original meaning of the gap between sensation and reflection in the poetic process, but in the way that Professor Basil Willey has used it, to imply a dichotomy between thought and emotion, and hence between reason and faith.24
The matter-of-fact assurance of the allusions, the calm acceptance of the peaceable coexistence between Eliot’s and Willey’s versions of this quasi-historical scheme, are eloquent testimony to the capacity of the revisionist gestures of one generation to become the literary-historical commonplaces of the next.
Following Chatto’s publication of The Seventeenth-Century Background in 1934, Willey became one of the commercially most successful of the impressive stable of literary critics published by that house between 1930 and 1970. Even though the book was animated by the wider preoccupations that I have identified thus far, outwardly it retained its modest air of being a serviceable survey. Using the same unassuming format, The Eighteenth-Century Background explored attempts in that century to find meaning and value in the universe through the exaltation of ‘nature’. In his third book, Nineteenth Century Studies, published in 1949, Willey’s Coleridgean affinities became more overt, as he explored the attempts of a series of ‘moralists’ from Coleridge to Matthew Arnold to ground their ethical convictions in a series of unstable syntheses of religion, history, and culture, while his fourth book, More Nineteenth-Century Studies (1956)—the modesty of his titles could be hard to distinguish from a kind of sublime egotism—pursued similar themes in discussion of ‘a group of honest doubters’ from Francis Newman to John Morley.
The central preoccupation of these four major books might be said to be the encounter between English intellectual and literary sensibility of the centuries between 1600 and 1900 and various attempts to revise, reimagine, or replace the animating beliefs of traditional Christianity, especially by finding similar sources of joy and consolation in the intense experience of nature and poetry. Willey reported one of his colleagues teasing him, with some shrewdness, by saying ‘all your books have really been about Wordsworth’.25 This was pardonable exaggeration—his books were ‘about’ much else—but after his retirement Willey came to acknowledge, in his revealingly named memoir, Spots of Time, the kernel of truth in the comment:
Wordsworth has so pervaded my life that I can hardly distinguish what is his from what is my own. It is not so much that I have learnt from him (though of course I have done so), as that he has given expression to the imaginative experiences which were already mine, unexpressed and inexpressible, before I knew him. … [Willey’s father read The Prelude to him in his early teens] … almost everything I have written since has been an acknowledgement, whether explicit or implicit, of my debt to Wordsworth.26
Willey also shared a passionate devotion to the Lake District, the setting of many walking holidays and, later in life, the location of his country retreat. As he wrote in Nineteenth Century Studies: ‘The whole course of English thought and letters in the nineteenth century would have been different if this island had not contained the mountain paradise of Westmorland and Cumberland. The Lake District was part of its religious creed.’27 The same could be said for Willey himself, notwithstanding his continued adherence to his inherited Methodism.
Reviewing Nineteenth Century Studies in 1949, Harold Laski had no doubts about how to characterize it in political terms. He bestowed some praise, but, in a comment that was applicable to Willey’s work as a whole, he suggested the effect of the book was to encourage that ‘obsessive nostalgia’ detectable in the position of T. S. Eliot, which ended up opposing necessary social change in the present.28 Interestingly, other critics could seem somewhat uncertain about how to characterize Willey’s work in disciplinary terms. Graham Hough, reviewing the same book, emphasized the distinctiveness of Willey’s approach. He described Willey’s two earlier books as ‘almost a genre of their own, unique and difficult to describe’, and concluded his review by saying: ‘It is Professor Willey’s distinction to have discovered a new kind of criticism, which discusses neither philosophy nor imaginative writing in themselves, but the residual deposit of philosophy that goes to form the imaginative apprehension of an age. In this field he is alone.’29 Even allowing for the politesse a recently appointed lecturer in Cambridge might wish to show to the recently elevated professor, this suggests some of the instability in the notion of ‘background’, neither ‘real history’ nor ‘pure literary criticism’. J. C. Maxwell, reviewing the book in Universities Quarterly, was somewhat more critical, and pointed out that ‘historiography receives surprisingly little attention’, an observation that serves to remind us that the writings of modern historians are also largely absent from Willey’s work.30 This is ‘background’ as determined by a foreground of literature: perhaps it is not surprising that so few historians at the time recognized it as a form of history. Nonetheless, Willey’s work had an extensive and enduring impact on the way many readers who were not professional historians understood the intellectual history of the preceding three centuries. Perhaps partly because they were not in thrall to any of the political or critical fashions of his time, his books proved uncommonly durable. The Seventeenth-Century Background, for example, sold steadily for almost thirty years before it was, rather remarkably, chosen in 1962 to be one of the ten initial titles in Penguin’s launch of its ambitious ‘Peregrine’ imprint, in which format it sold many thousands for years thereafter.31
The routes by which something that is foreground for one enquiry or discipline becomes background for another are many and not always obvious. If we are to understand how a version of ‘background’ rather different from Willey’s came to be developed by critics in the 1930s and 1940s, we have to begin by recognizing the long-drawn-out engagement of such critics with the place occupied in contemporary culture by economic theories and categories. In the 1930s, the determining power of economic activity seemed a pressing problem both practically and theoretically.32 Contributors to Scrutiny, for example, constantly sought to challenge the standing and legitimacy of economists’ concepts.33 Leavis’s deliberate estranging of the familiar phrase ‘the standard of living’ as ‘the standard of life’ was not an isolated instance. Having denounced the deadening passivity and fantasy-feeding qualities of film, ‘now the main form of recreation in the civilised world’, Leavis returned to the task: ‘It would be difficult to dispute that the result must be serious damage to the “standard of living” (to use the phrase as before).’34 Similarly, Thompson declared that he would be more willing to take politicians seriously ‘if they showed any capacity to discuss with intelligence the nature of a “high standard of living”’.35 Moreover, in the early and mid-1930s, Leavis and the Scrutiny circle recognized, as literary critics of the previous generation had not had to, that the most significant challenge to contemporary society’s complacent view of itself (which they parodied as ‘Wellsian optimism’) now came from Marxism. Leavis and his associates were never willing to accord any legitimacy to Marxism’s endowing of economic forces with explanatory priority: ‘There can be no doubt that the dogma of the priority of economic conditions, however stated, means a complete disregard for—or, rather, a hostility towards—the function represented by Scrutiny.’36 An important part in the Scrutineers’ polemics against the current dominance of economic categories was played by their claim that Marxism shared in and expressed this dominance rather than offering a genuine critique of it. For obvious reasons, these disputes intersected with another important development of these years in which the seventeenth century, for so long the centre of a celebratory narrative about English constitutional history, became the battleground on which social and economic historians now fought over the origins of capitalism.
Surprising as it may at first seem, one of the most influential contributions to these debates took the form of a study of Jacobean drama. L. C. Knights’s book Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson, published in 1937, enjoyed considerable standing among intellectuals on the non-Marxist left for some decades.37 Raymond Williams recalled that he ‘read and re-read’ it through the late 1940s and early 1950s; E. P. Thompson later spoke of it as a ‘truly seminal’ work.38 F. W. Bateson called it ‘the most ambitious attempt since Buckle and Taine to relate English literature to the social background’—which is itself an interesting genealogical line to invoke, going back to the most sociological of nineteenth-century historians of ideas.39 Conditions in publishing at the time meant that, although Knights’s book, like Willey’s, was a work of detailed scholarship, both were reviewed widely in the general press, the more improbable reviewers stretching from Elizabeth Bowen in Knights’s case to Guy Burgess in Willey’s.40 And in the 1960s Knights’s book, too, was given a new and influential lease of life by being included among the first set of titles to appear in Penguin’s new widely selling Peregrine imprint. Given my general theme, it is worth mentioning that Knights, like Willey and Leavis himself, had switched from History to English during his undergraduate years at Cambridge, obtaining a distinction in Part II of the English Tripos in 1928. He later recalled (in an unpublished memoir) that studying History in the mid-1920s overwhelmingly meant constitutional history, and he claimed that he did not hear the name of Tawney till some years later.41 Knights became one of the founding editors of Scrutiny in 1932 and wrote for it extensively in the 1930s.
The chapters in the first half of Drama and Society are collectively titled ‘The Background’. This, as I have already remarked, is a dead metaphor to which we have become so habituated that we scarcely register either its pictorial origins or the implicit claim to set off or throw light on something that is, implicitly, more important in the ‘foreground’. What may be less obvious is that, deployed in this way in works by literary scholars, ‘background’ also becomes a way of negotiating shifts in the received understanding of the relevant history. Although Knights does not signal the fact, his book in effect attempts to dislodge the constitutional historians from their central position in the historiography of the seventeenth century: ‘Political history’, he remarks as an aside, ‘is responsible for many false perspectives’.42 Instead, he turns to the work of the so-called historical economists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as William Cunningham and W. J. Ashley, together with economic historians such as George Unwin, Ephraim Lipsom, and, above all, R. H. Tawney. In doing so, he was implicitly challenging the Whig version of material progress celebrated by Macaulay and his successors. ‘Until comparatively recent times,’ observes Knights, ‘it was usual for historians … to discuss this process of change in terms of “progress” ’. He then goes on to caution against installing the mirror image as a new orthodoxy: ‘I do not mean of course that one should substitute for the Whig view a nostalgic glorification of the more remote past’—something, we may feel, that is more easily said than not done.
Knights acknowledges that there are already signs that the traditional Whig interpretation of the seventeenth century is undergoing revision: ‘historians are already abandoning the simple Whig view.’43 His footnote here refers to Butterfield’s polemic, and it is relevant to my argument that literary critics, especially the Scrutiny circle, seemed more alert to the significance of Butterfield’s critique than did the culture at large in the 1930s. Butterfield’s little book received only limited attention during the first decade or so after its publication in 1931; it was the far greater success of his Christianity and History in 1950 that led to the reissue of The Whig Interpretation in 1951 and its subsequent centrality to the methodological controversies of the 1950s.44 Knights was calling for a historical approach that would contrast both with Whig history and with Marxism: it would centrally involve asking questions about the quality of human living in various periods. The reliance on concepts of ‘progress’ will, he contends, ‘hinder the kind of discrimination and evaluation that is relevant to the study of history’.45 When the opening chapter of the book had first appeared as an article, its subtitle was ‘Notes for the Historian of Culture’. It is noticeable that he can tacitly assume that this evaluative form of ‘the study of history’ is most likely to be promoted by certain kinds of literary critic.
The medium with which the critic works is language, and this goes to the heart of Knights’s case about the relationship between literature and ‘the economic ordering of society’ in Elizabethan times. That case is reinforced by a quotation from Leavis: ‘Shakespeare did not create his own language.’46 This language grew out of a way of life, predominantly agricultural, and that idiom gave its users ‘advantages in habits of perception and discrimination, in emotional and intellectual organization—in sensibility’. Knights then goes on, in a passage that is too long to quote in full, to elaborate by way of contrast:
What those advantages were is revealed by comparison with that ‘impersonal language that has come, not out of individual life, not out of life at all, but out of necessities of commerce, of parliament, of board schools, of hurried journeys by rail’. They were the advantages that spring from ‘living at first hand’, in close touch with ‘primary production’. Today, unless he is exceptionally lucky, the ordinary man has to make a deliberate effort to penetrate a hazy medium which smothers his essential human nature, which interposes between him and things as they are; a medium formed by the lowest common denominator of feelings, perceptions, and ideas acceptable to the devitalized products of a machine economy.47
If, as is often said, a critic’s quality is most surely indicated by his choice of what to quote, this choice from Yeats’s Essays may not speak well for Knights. The embedded quotation is a characteristic expression of Yeats’s romantic aversion to the modern world, but it may be too much a grumpy medley of crotchets to help Knights’s argument.48 Nonetheless, the argument is reiterated in emphatic terms: ‘The claim that I am making’, he asserts, ‘is that the essential life of a period is best understood through its literature’.49
The first half of Knights’s book combines an impressive synthesis of the work of economic historians with a detailed examination of sources from the period commenting on the new economic conditions. This array of learning is intended to substantiate the striking claim that the years between 1590 and 1620 saw the beginnings of the economic system that has endured ever since. ‘It was during this period that modern forms of commercial and industrial enterprise took shape.’50 This is again one of those places where the deceptive term ‘modern’ is allowed to do too much work. Although Knights was presumably well aware of the vast changes that took place in the three centuries after 1620, he is nonetheless implicitly asserting a unity to that whole period, a unity defined by the unfettered dominance of ‘the economic’. Moreover, his language reveals that the point of reference that determines the whole shape of his argument about the seventeenth century is in fact a hostile conception of the nineteenth century. ‘Medieval economic activities,’ he writes, ‘were not guided by purely economic considerations—as these were understood in the nineteenth century’; or, again, he notes that the Jacobean period saw ‘the increasing dominance of newer forms of activity which look forward to the nineteenth century’.51 In so many settings in the early part of the twentieth century, such formulaic references to ‘the nineteenth century’ could serve as a placeholder for the supposed excesses of economic individualism.
The nub of Knights’s account of the Jacobean dramatists, to which the second half of the book is devoted, is that the best of them could call upon the categories of traditional morality in responding to the excesses of the new economic behaviour of the early seventeenth century. Their responses were embodied in dramatic literature that retains its power not just because of this ability to draw on the resources of an established morality that has since been lost—their moral sensibilities had not yet been dulled by familiarity into regarding aggressively acquisitive behaviour as normal—but also because their responses were not those of an embattled minority, as was the case for modern authors. Rather, they drew confidence and vitality from being part of a broader popular culture. Jonson and company could share the responses of ‘the journalists and moralists of the common people, whereas the few poets and novelists who count at the present day not only cannot share, they are inevitably hostile to, the attitudes of suitable readers of the Star, the Sunday Express, or the Tatler’. Judged by these titles, Knights’s notion of the modern version of ‘the common people’ does seem strikingly elastic. Such contemporary contrasts are pursued with characteristic Scrutiny relentlessness: for example, even those in the early seventeenth century who remembered little of the plays they saw were at least ‘not doomed to pass their lives in the emotional and intellectual muddledom of the readers of the Daily Mail’, and so on.52 In any event, the best of the Jacobean dramatists, Jonson above all, are treated as a resource for the critique of the economic order that has prevailed ever since.
He spells this out in his discussion of Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass, a play that ‘goes beyond economics and questions of expediency. Since it is the work of a great artist it cuts beneath the superficial follies, the accidental forms, and goes to the root of the disease, shaping the material in the light of an humane ideal that is implicit throughout.’ Economics is here lined up with ‘disease’, the ‘superficial’, and the ‘accidental’, against ‘great art’ and ‘an humane ideal’. ‘Humane’ means ‘more than economic’; art, it seems, cannot give a positive picture of ‘acquisitive’ economic activity. ‘If this book establishes anything it should be that the reactions of a genuine poet to his environment form a criticism of society as least as important as the keenest analysis in purely economic terms.’53 ‘At least as important’ is a form of mock modesty here: since ‘the essential life of a period is best understood through its literature’, literary criticism constitutes the most important form of social criticism. By its very nature, literary criticism will counterpose ‘an humane ideal’ against ‘the purely economic’; by returning to the great drama of the early seventeenth century, we are put in touch once more with ways of experiencing the social world that predate the conception of ‘the purely economic’, and we are thereby helped to relativize the category itself.
Clearly, this argument relies heavily on the premise that it is the economic order that has defined ‘modern’ society since the early seventeenth century, but that it did not do so before then. This is where Knights’s struggles with the category of ‘the economic’ (‘Of course I called myself a socialist. But I had no head for economic theory’54) land him in particular difficulties:
To say that the qualities embodied in Shakespeare’s English had an economic base, is to remind ourselves that making a living was not merely a means, and that the ‘economic’ activities which helped to mould that supremely expressive medium fostered qualities (perceptions and general habits of response) that were not ‘economic’ at all. We remind ourselves, in short, of the dangerous facility with which the word ‘economic’ tempts us to beg the essential questions.55
The same contrast between the past and the present is being smuggled in here. By implication, making a living is now ‘merely a means’: the ‘economic’ is divorced from other aspects of life. Once again, modernity is characterized by the existence (and in some versions, the dominance) of the ‘purely’ or ‘narrowly’ economic—which is what ‘the economic’, he is implying, has come to mean.
And this is why, in Knights’s view, the drama of the Jacobean period possesses such value in the twentieth century. His book is intended ‘to show how, in a few great plays, “that living body of assumptions as to the right conduct of human affairs” helped to nourish qualities that we can admire’ (in this instance the embedded quotation was taken from Tawney’s The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century).56 Jonson, in particular—he is in effect the hero of the book—still speaks to ‘us’ because he ‘is one of the main channels of communication with an almost vanished tradition’, a tradition that judged economic behaviour in individual moral terms. In the nineteenth century (always present as a negative reference point) the notion of an impersonal economic system had established itself, but in the early seventeenth century the focus was still on the failings of individuals. ‘The diagnosis’, writes Knights, ‘was moral rather than economic. Or, to put it another way, the dramatic treatment of economic problems showed them as moral and individual problems which in the last analysis they are.’57 In other words, Knights is arguing, the plays remind us that the notion of the autonomy of the economic sphere is illusory: there are no ‘purely economic’ problems of any human consequence.
It is worth remarking that one of the authorities Knights particularly relied on was the now largely forgotten book by H. M. Robertson entitled Aspects of the Rise of Economic Individualism, published in 1933. The book is subtitled A Criticism of Max Weber and his School, and it attempts to demolish what it takes to be the thesis of Weber’s famous essays on ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’.58 But, as Talcott Parsons, who had translated Weber’s work, pointed out, Robertson misdescribed Weber’s claim. Robertson tried to show that Weber’s thesis about the Protestant notion of ‘the calling’ was not sufficient to account for the rise of an economic and social system, but that, Parsons insisted, had not been Weber’s claim. Weber had been pointing to a psychological homology between the rational asceticism of the new religious discipline and the abstemious accumulative drive of early capitalist practice.59 As Robertson’s title indicated, his central concern was with an entire economic system held to have reached its purest form in the nineteenth century. Knights’s other great source, as I have indicated, was Tawney, but, despite many subsequent references to ‘the Weber–Tawney thesis’, Weber’s argument, as Peter Ghosh has recently reminded us, was also quite different from Tawney’s, both in its focus and in its level of abstraction, since Tawney concentrated on empirically describing the retreat of religion and morality from regulating economic activity.60 Although Knights makes a couple of passing references to Weber’s work, his own framework combines the perspectives of Robertson and of Tawney, both of whom, it is worth repeating, define the problem in terms of accounting for the rise of an economic system symbolically represented by Victorian Britain.
In a later article entitled ‘Bacon and the Seventeenth-Century Dissociation of Sensibility’, published in Scrutiny in 1943, Knights summarized a new orthodoxy: ‘The last twenty or thirty years have seen a revolution in our attitudes towards the seventeenth century’ was his confident opening, echoing the remarks by L. J. Potts quoted at the beginning of this chapter. This change was partly due to reinterpretations arising out of more detailed historical research, where historians had ‘pushed back the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution and demonstrated a direct line of connexion between the commercial and industrial enterprise of Elizabethan and early Stuart times and the greater changes of the eighteenth century’—or, in other words, the work of those economic historians I mentioned earlier. The net effect of these enquiries had been to displace ‘the picture of political development as drawn by the Whig historians’, which focused on the constitutional struggle between liberty and autocracy, with accounts that instead emphasized ‘the part played by economic pressure’.61
But Knights acknowledged that the change was not merely the by-product of historical research: ‘it is due primarily to a shift in evaluation intimately related to the needs and interests of the present.’ ‘We can see this most clearly’, he declared, in a somewhat surprising turn, ‘in recent literary criticism’, instancing the revaluing of the Metaphysical Poets and some of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. In other words, his central theme, he announces, is nothing less than that ‘dissociation of sensibility’, from which, ‘as Mr Eliot remarked in his brilliantly suggestive essay, “we have never recovered” ’.62
Having discussed Bacon’s work in some detail in the body of the article, Knights returned to his theme by way of conclusion. In helping to promote the divorce of reason from the feelings, Bacon ‘points forward to the conscious and unconscious utilitarianism of the nineteenth century of which we ourselves are the embarrassed heirs’—embarrassed, it would seem, largely because we are now starting to see the limitations of the ‘belief in unlimited material progress’ that characterized that much-demonized century. But, if our present situation requires us to be ‘busy in overhauling the values of the last three hundred years’, this does not involve any repudiation of the proper work of reason: writing in 1943, Knights saw the dreadful consequences of that choice all around in Europe. Rather, the task, as he puts it, is ‘simply to recognize that reason in the last three centuries has worked within a field that is not the whole of experience, that it has mistaken the part for the whole, and imposed arbitrary limits on its own working’.63
By this point, the discussion seems to have moved a long way from his opening reflections on those researches that had revealed ‘a direct line of connection’ between ‘the commercial and industrial enterprise of Elizabethan and early Stuart times’ and the Industrial Revolution. But to Knights (and by implication to all those embraced in his opening use of the first-person plural) the intimacy of the connections among the various elements covered in this retrospect had become progressively more obvious in the course of the previous couple of decades. The ‘divorce of reason from the feelings’ and the ‘rise of industrial civilization’ are now treated as related—indeed, at times barely distinguishable—parts of the same received view.
The central node, both conceptually and historically, is signalled by that reference to ‘the conscious and unconscious utilitarianism of the nineteenth century’. This is alleged to be the dominant temper of the society created by the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century, and hence indirectly by those social and economic changes in the previous two centuries that made it possible. ‘Utilitarianism’ does not appear to be being used here in any exact or historical sense, but rather to symbolize the alleged defining characteristics of modernity—calculation, expediency, individualism, and so on. The present, Knights implies, is now able to see the period stretching from the early seventeenth century to the early twentieth not just as a particular historical phase, but as a pathology, a sickness from which the possibility of recovery is now becoming visible. An implicit parallelism obtains between the notion of ‘disassociated’ reason, on the one hand, and the category of ‘the economic’, on the other. In this way, the ‘revaluation of the seventeenth century’ that took place in the interwar period, centrally though not exclusively in the work of literary critics, ultimately rested on the attempt to find a locus of human value that would enable ‘disassociated reason’ and ‘the economic’ to be recognized as two sides of the same coin, something that could thereby be relativized and transcended.
The general tenor of Knights’s remarks, about both the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, was echoed in a good deal of cultural commentary by literary critics in Britain from the 1930s through at least the 1950s, a time when, as I observed earlier, such critics occupied a more prominent place in the national culture than either before or since. The status of this interpretation as orthodoxy was illustrated in a series of articles by a young American Leavisite, Harold Wendell Smith, that appeared in Scrutiny in the journal’s closing years.64 With the zeal of the acolyte, Smith almost unnoticingly ran together the idioms of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ and the ‘rise of capitalism’. In the article in the series bearing the former phrase as its title, the modern source most frequently cited was not in fact Eliot’s essay but Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. This, claimed Smith, exhibits how ‘the schism of abstract and material’ (itself perhaps a vulgarized version of Eliot’s original formulation) leads to the establishment by the Restoration of a ‘comfortable, but confident, even jubilant, materialism’. By the latter part of the seventeenth century, the ‘world of the spirit’ that had flourished in ‘the agrarian days of the early Elizabethans’ has disappeared, replaced by ‘a material world, urban and mercantile’.65 In the not fully controlled vocabulary of such workaday criticism we can observe a phrase that began life as a way of discriminating phases of poetry being put to work to explain the rise of a distinctively modern form of economy. But however well established this interpretation had become in literary circles, professional historians could still register their scepticism. Even Marjorie Cox, a seventeenth-century historian who was well disposed to Scrutiny in general (her husband, Gordon Cox, was one of its most frequent contributors), wrote in after the first of Smith’s articles to complain that ‘there seemed to be over-much reliance on a single work, Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism’, and to object that ‘Mr Smith’s article shows a too easy acceptance of the equation of “puritan” and “bourgeois” ’.66
One reason why the frameworks inherited from Eliot and from Tawney could be so readily subsumed into a single account is that the category of ‘the economic’ itself had come to be used in such a tendentious way, as a placeholder for anxieties and aversions provoked by contemplation of the contemporary world. The rhetorical excess which I noted in characterizations of ‘purely economic’ activity not only reveals the presence of larger moral or even aesthetic antipathies, but also underlines just how little these characterizations corresponded to actual features of contemporary economic life. For, in reality, such activity was shot through with social and legal considerations that clearly promoted concerns other than that of ‘unrestrained pursuit of gain’. Some of these were what Durkheim had termed the ‘non-contractual elements in contract’—that is, the shared practices and expectations that needed to be in place for a contractual agreement to be possible in the first place, to have meaning and possess binding force.67 But, more generally, contemporary economic activity had, when viewed more closely and less hostilely, several of the features that these critics were prone to identify as belonging to some notional ‘pre-economic’ epoch such as the Middle Ages. For example, it could be said that, just as medieval guilds were celebrated for having a concern for their members’ welfare that exceeded the narrow preoccupation with increasing their productivity, so companies, business associations, professional bodies, friendly societies, trade unions, and the myriad other organizations that made up the texture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century economic life all in various ways restrained, limited, or supplemented any notionally ‘pure’ extraction of profit. In this respect, the continuity with nineteenth-century critics of ‘industrial society’ and of its legitimation by ‘the dismal science’ is marked. In this tradition of criticism, the abstract model of human behaviour assumed for the purposes of economic theorizing has to be projected as the dominant characteristic of whatever form of society is deemed, within a binary structure, to constitute ‘modernity’. This always tends to obscure both the actual nature of contemporary societies, in all their ‘non-economic’ complexity and diversity, and the important part played by narrowly ‘economic’ calculation in earlier societies. The functions that the contrast serves encourage a simpler story in which wholeness gives way to atomism, just as it does in the implied narrative of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’.
Both Knights’s book and Willey’s turn up over and over again on recommended reading for university and adult education students not just in the 1940s and 1950s, but well into the 1960s and 1970s, including at the new higher-education institutions founded or expanded in those decades (where the study of ‘literature in context’ particularly flourished). It was surely extraordinary that two of the most widely used literary-critical works of the middle decades of the century should, implicitly, be pointing to a homology between ‘the origins of modern science’ and ‘the origins of capitalism’, the two forces that have allegedly made human beings spiritually homeless in the modern world. No less remarkably, these two sedate-looking works of literary scholarship carried, into the second half of the twentieth century, the message that salvation must be looked for in the properly intense reading of such literature as Jonson’s plays and Wordsworth’s poetry. In this way, both books illustrate just how much covert or unacknowledged historical work can be done under the auspices of the innocuous yet capacious category of ‘background’.