The Longest Journey

Abstract

The Longest Journey (1907) seems to have been Forster’s favourite among his novels, perhaps for the same reason that made Dickens regard David Copperfield as his ‘favourite child’: there is in it a strong element of autobiography and in particular some resemblance between the hero and the author, though this is an element that ought not to be exaggerated. Rickie Elliot is an orphan who has been unhappy at school but finds happiness at Cambridge; he has a small private income; he is physically weak and has been lame since birth; and he writes stories that introduce Greek mythology into modern settings, ‘pretending that Greek gods were alive, or that young ladies could vanish into trees’ (Ch. 16). Much of this was, in one way or another, true of Forster himself, the lameness perhaps symbolising his homosexuality. Although in many respects naïve and immature, Rickie is capable of speaking with passionate conviction and moral force — another characteristic shared with his creator. At the same time, Rickie is easily influenced; he joins, at any rate temporarily, the ‘armies of the benighted’ and his life ends prematurely in failure and futility; though this may express some of Forster’s fears and doubts about his own nature, it can hardly have represented his considered assessment of his own nature and potentialities.