The Modern Condition of England Novel

Abstract

When C. F. G. Masterman revived the phrase ‘Condition of England’ for the title of his political tract in 1909, he did so at a time when contradictory views of the immediate future of England were current and were often entertained by one and the same man. The advent of a Liberal Government that was committed to ambitious measures of social reform inspired optimistic visions of the future, and Masterman himself was briefly a member of the Liberal Cabinet. It was widely believed that a more rational, statistical approach to poverty and unemployment would inaugurate a new era of social justice. Of the two young men that we meet in the opening scene of Ford Madox Ford’s Some Do Not,’ the small, dark, ambitious Scotsman, Vincent Macmaster, works for the Imperial Department of Statistics and is busy collecting the statistics on which the new legislation will be based. But dark clouds are already gathering and the train in which we meet Macmaster and Christopher Tietjens is not a train running from London to Rye, as its occupants think, but, as Robie Macauley has remarked in his introduction to Parade’s End, running ‘from the past into the future, and ahead of them on their one-way journey is a chaotic country of ripped battlefields and disordered towns’. Even when Masterman’s The Condition of England was published in 1909, the growing might of Germany and the decline in the imperial ideal awoke an almost apocalyptic sense of national disaster.