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Radicalism in the Margins: The Politics of Reading Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in 1920

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2016

Edmund G. C. King
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Abstract

This article examines marginalia as a form of radical writing practice in the period immediately after the First World War. It focuses specifically on a densely annotated copy of the second part of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's My Diaries, which covers on 1900–1914 and was published in 1920. The annotator, John Arthur Fallows (1864–1935), was a former Church of England clergyman and Independent Labour Party politician, and the article asks what motivated him to leave such an explicit record of his engagement with the book in its margins. Blunt recast his original diary entries to show how the outbreak of the First World War had arisen from the prewar imperialist policies of the Entente. Fallows, meanwhile, used his copy of My Diaries to inscribe a permanent record of his responses to Blunt's writing, which were shaped by his own memories of prewar radical-left political action. The dual record of textual engagement that can be recovered from this copy of My Diaries provides insight into how two British radicals “read” the causes of the First World War in the period between the Armistice and the conclusion of the Paris Peace Accords.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , July 2016 , pp. 501 - 518
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2016 

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References

1 Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, My Diaries: Being a Personal Narrative of Events, 1888–1914: Part Two, 1900–1914 (London, 1920), 941.0810924 BLU, Betty Boothroyd Library, The Open University, Milton Keynes (hereafter Fallow's copy, UABBL). This copy was accessioned on 2 February 1977, but because the library lacks detailed accession records for this period, it is unknown whether the book was donated or purchased on the second hand market. Its provenance during the four decades between 1977 and Fallows's death in 1935 and the whereabouts and survival of other books from Fallows's personal library are likewise unknown.

2 Ibid., 1.

3 Ibid., 2. For Fallows's use of “stodger,” see s.v., “stodger” (“A stodgy person: one who is lacking in spirit or liveliness,” first recorded in Punch in 1905), Oxford English Dictionary Online, http://www.oed.com, accessed 19 September 2014.

4 Blunt, My Diaries, Part 2, 3, 7.

5 Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Diary, April–May 1919, 26 April 1919, 10–11, MS 446–1975, Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge (hereafter FM).

6 Blunt, Diary, September–October 1919, 24 October 1919, 39, MS 449–1975, FM.

7 For details of Fallows's life, see David E. Martin, s.v., “Fallows, John Arthur,” Dictionary of Labour Biography, vol. 2, (London, 1974), 133–34; and “Late Mr J. A. Fallows: A Birmingham Clergyman Who Became Unitarian Minister,” Birmingham Gazette and Evening Dispatch, 10 August 1935, cutting in the Dictionary of Labour Biography Archives, U DLB/2/39, Hull History Centre.

8 Blunt, Diary, April–June 1919, 5 May 1919, 17–18, MS 446–1975, FM.

9 For Fallows's political activities in Birmingham, see Asa Briggs, History of Birmingham, vol. 2, Borough and City 1865–1938 (London, 1952), 198; Roberts, Stephen, “Independent Labour Politics in Birmingham, 1886–1914,” West Midlands Studies 16 (Winter 1983): 9–15Google Scholar, at 10–11; and Bevir, Mark, “The Labour Church Movement, 1891–1902,” Journal of British Studies 38, no. 2 (April 1999): 217–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 220.

10 On the particular attractions of memoir and biography for marginal annotators, see H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven, 2001), 94.

11 Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London, 1992), 354–55.

12 Andrew Frayn, Writing Disenchantment: British First World War Prose, 1914–1930 (Manchester, 2014), 7, 13–20. For influential accounts that interpret disenchantment as a largely postwar literary response to the conflict, see Brian Bond, The Unquiet Western Front: Britain's Role in Literature and History (Cambridge, 2002), 23–26, 37; Janet S. K. Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge, 2004), 185–87, 217; and Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London, 2005), 129–30, 134–35.

13 For a definition of “historical remembrance,” see Jay Winter, Remembering War: The Great War between Memory in History in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, 2006), 8–11.

14 For detailed accounts of Blunt's life, reputation, and social networks, see Elizabeth Longford, A Pilgrimage of Passion: The Life of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (London, 2007), and Lucy McDiarmid, Poets and the Peacock Dinner: The Literary History of a Meal (Oxford, 2014).

15 Blunt, Diary, December 1918–January 1919, 31 December 1918, 18–19, MS 444–1975, FM.

16 For recent analyses of Blunt's anti-imperialism, see Gregory Claeys, Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850–1920 (Cambridge, 2010), 36–43; and Villa, Luisa, “A ‘Political Education’: Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, the Arabs and the Egyptian Revolution (1881–2),” Journal of Victorian Culture 17, no. 1 (March 2012): 46–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Blunt, Diary, December 1918–January 1919, 31 December 1918, 18–19, MS 444–1975, FM.

18 Blunt, Diary, January–March 1920, 17 February 1920, 24–25, MS 453–1975, FM.

19 On “anti-monuments,” see Hynes, War Imagined, 283–310.

20 See William Mulligan, The Origins of the First World War (Cambridge, 2010), 3–4.

21 Keith Wilson, “Governments, Historians, and ‘Historical Engineering,’” in Forging the Collective Memory: Government and International Historians through Two World Wars, ed. Keith Wilson (Providence, 1996), 1–27, at 2.

22 On the publishing histories of official postwar collections of archival material relating to the war's origins, see Mulligan, Origins of the First World War, 8–9; Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London, 2012), xxi–xxiv; and The Origins of the First World War: Diplomatic and Military Documents, ed. and trans. Annika Mombauer (Manchester, 2013), 5–15.

23 Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, The Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt (London, 1907), v.

24 Ibid., v, x.

25 Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, My Diaries: Being a Personal Narrative of Events, 1888–1914: Part One, 1888–1900, (London, 1919), viii.

26 Ibid., viii–ix.

27 On The Economic Consequences of the Peace as “anti-monument,” see Hynes, War Imagined, 291–93.

28 Janes, Dominic, “Eminent Victorians, Bloomsbury Queerness and John Maynard Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace,” Literature and History 23, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 19–32, at 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Philip Guedalla, “Tales of Unrest,” Observer, 8 June 1919, 5.

30 L. W., “Lost and Other Causes,” Athenaeum, 3 October 1919, 972.

31 For sales information, see Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory, preface to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, My Diaries: Being a Personal Narrative of Events 1888–1914: Part One, 1888–1900 (New York, 1922), vii.

32 Blunt, My Diaries, Part Two, vii.

33 Janes, “Eminent Victorians,” 21.

34 See Greetham, David C., review of Jackson, H. J., Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 40, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 61–73, at 62Google Scholar.

35 For a discussion of this mode of annotation, see Jackson, H. J., “Writing in Books and Other Marginal Activities,” University of Toronto Quarterly 62, no. 2 (Winter 1992/3): 217–31, at 219CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Blunt, My Diaries, Part Two, (Fallows's copy, UABBL), 343.

37 Ibid., 219.

38 Ibid., 132.

39 Ibid., 2.

40 Ibid., 33.

41 Dockter, Warren, “The Influence of a Poet: Wilfrid S. Blunt and the Churchills,” Journal of Historical Biography 10, no. 2 (Autumn 2011): 70–102, at 82Google Scholar.

42 Blunt, Diary, January–March 1920, 22 January 1920, 2, MS 453–1975, FM.

43 On the meeting, see Blunt, My Diaries, Part Two, 77–78, and Dockter, “Influence of a Poet,” 82.

44 Blunt, My Diaries, Part Two (Fallows's copy, UABBL), 45.

45 Ibid., 107.

46 Ibid., 209.

47 William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, 2007), 22.

48 Blunt, Diary, April–June 1919, 12 June 1919, 37, MS 446–1975, FM.

49 Cf. Janes, “Eminent Victorians,” 21–22.

50 Blunt, My Diaries, Part Two (Fallows's copy, UABBL), 368.

51 Cf. Jackson, Marginalia, 32–33.

52 Cf. ibid., 83.

53 Blunt, My Diaries, Part Two (Fallows's copy, UABBL), 258.

54 Ibid., 181.

55 Ibid., 299.

56 Martin, “Fallows, John Arthur,” 134.

57 Roper, Michael, “Splitting in Unsent Letters: Writing as a Social Practice and a Psychological Activity,” Social History 26, no. 3 (October 2001): 318–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 327. “Silly” and “muddling” are some of the most frequent terms of abuse in Fallows's marginalia.

58 Blunt, My Diaries, Part Two (Fallows's copy, UABBL), 194.

59 Ibid., 353.

60 See Martin, “Fallows, John Arthur,” 133.

61 Blunt, My Diaries, Part Two (Fallows's copy, UABBL), 190.

62 Ernest Dowson to Arthur Moore, 3 May 1891, in Letters of Ernest Dowson, ed. Desmond Flower and Henry Maas (London, 1967), 195.

63 Dowson to Moore, 18 October 1889, in Letters, 109.

64 Blunt, My Diaries, Part Two (Fallows's copy, UABBL), 285.

65 Ibid., 75.

66 Jackson, Marginalia, 89, 76.

67 Blunt, My Diaries, Part Two (Fallows's copy, UABBL), vii.

68 On Keynes's critique of Wilson on religious grounds, see Janes, “Eminent Victorians,” 24, and Larry Lepper, “What Literary Criticism Tells Us about Keynes's Economic Consequences of the Peace,” in Keynes's Economic Consequences of the Peace: A Reappraisal, ed. Jens Hölscher and Matthias Klaes (London, 2014), 35–62, at 54–55.

69 Blunt, My Diaries, Part Two (Fallows's copy, UABBL), 312.

70 For Fallows's references to Brailsford in the marginalia, see, ibid., 160, 211, and 481; for references to Morel, see 96, 106, 293, 296, 326, 434, and 448; for references to Strachey, see 77 and 299 (figure 3); for references to Reid, see 434 and 448.

71 Blunt, Diary, January–April 1918, 7 April 1918, 80, MS 438–1975, FM.

72 Blunt, My Diaries, Part one, xv–xvi.

73 On the terms of the radical opposition to British foreign policy, see Keith Robbins, The Abolition of War: The ‘Peace Movement’ in Britain, 1914–1919 (Cardiff, 1976), 20–26; Sally Harris, Out of Control: British Foreign Policy and the Union of Democratic Control, 1914–1918 (Hull, 1996), 1–24; Zara S. Steiner and Keith Neilson, Britain and the Origins of the First World War, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke, 2003), 148–53; and Mulligan, Origins of the First World War, 5, 7.

74 Blunt, My Diaries, Part Two, 96.

75 Ibid., 191.

76 For the background to the documents’ publication, see Rex A. Wade, The Russian Search for Peace, February–October 1917 (Stanford, 1967), 83–88, 103–5.

77 Blunt, Diary, April–May 1918, 4 May 1918, 25, MS 439–1975, FM.

78 See, for instance, Blunt, My Diaries, Part Two (Fallows's copy, UABBL), 23.

79 Ibid., vii.

80 Ibid., 23.

81 Ibid., 96.

82 Ibid., 191.

83 Ibid., 271.

84 Ibid., 357.

85 Ibid., 117.

86 Ibid., 25.

87 Ibid., 69.

88 Jackson, Marginalia, 88–89.

89 Blunt, My Diaries, Part Two (Fallows's copy, UABBL), 22.

90 Pioneer, no. 2 (July 1899): 12Google ScholarPubMed.

91 Blunt, My Diaries, Part Two (Fallows's copy, UABBL), 7.

92 Ibid., 104. For Fallows's earlier treatment of this idea, see J. A. Fallows, The Story of German and English Relations (Manchester, 1911), 13. On the Independent Labour Party's arms-reduction campaign, see Douglas J. Newton, British Labour, European Socialism and the Struggle for Peace, 1889–1914 (Oxford, 1985), 240–46, quotation at 240.

93 Blunt, My Diaries, Part Two (Fallows's copy, UABBL), 53.

94 Pioneer, no. 1 (June 1899): 3Google ScholarPubMed.

95 Pioneer, no. 2 (July 1899): 9Google Scholar.

96 Blunt, My Diaries, Part Two (Fallows's copy, UABBL), 62.; Pioneer, no. 7 (December 1899): 54Google Scholar.

97 Quoted in George J. Barnsby, Birmingham Working People: A History of the Labour Movement in Birmingham 1650–1914 (Wolverhampton, 1989), 342.

98 Blunt, Diary, August–September 1919, 8 August 1919, 8–9, MS 448–1975, FM.

99 Stephen Badsey, “Ninety Years On: Recent and Changing Views on the Military History of the First World War,” in 1918 Year of Victory: The End of the Great War and the Shaping of History, ed. Ashley Ekins (Auckland, 2010), 243–59, at 246.

100 Frayn, Writing Disenchantment, 40. See also Jonathan Atkin, A War of Individuals: Bloomsbury Attitudes to the Great War (Manchester, 2002), 10–15.

101 Cf. Roper, “Splitting in Unsent Letters,” 333.

102 Cf. Janes, “Eminent Victorians,” 21.

103 Stauffer, Andrew, “The Nineteenth-Century Archive in the Digital Age,” European Romantic Review 23, no. 3 (May 2012): 335–41, at 336CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

104 Pioneer, no. 9 (February 1900): 69Google Scholar.

105 Blunt, My Diaries, Part Two (Fallows's copy, UABBL), 479.

106 Ibid., 451.