¹ Bell, Clive, Art (1914; reprint, New York, 1958), p. 27Google Scholar. Christopher Reed and Peter Stansky have both argued that Roger Fry retained many of the social and democratic attitudes toward art and life from his early association with the arts and crafts movement, at least until the First World War. I recognize Fry's ambivalent relationship toward the arts and crafts, but I believe that he and his colleague Clive Bell consciously distanced themselves from the populist and social aesthetic of the arts and crafts movement. While Fry at times contended that his formalist aesthetic was more democratic because it relied on sensibility rather than knowledge, he often doubted that the majority were blessed with the requisite sensibility to experience “aesthetic emotions.” I agree with Solomon Fishman's view that “Fry had always been convinced that the … number of people who were capable of reacting to [the artist's] vision was necessarily limited, since few could arrive at the contemplative, detached state necessary to both the conception and the appreciation of aesthetic forms.” Fishman, Solomon, The Interpretation of Art: Essays on the Art Criticism of John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, and Herbert Read (Berkeley, 1963), p. 141Google Scholar; Reed, Christopher, ed., The Roger Fry Reader (Chicago, 1996)Google Scholar; Stansky, Peter, On or About December 1910: Early Bloomsbury and Its Intimate World (Cambridge, Mass., 1996)Google Scholar.

² Stansky, On or About December 1910; Bullen, J. B., ed., Post-impressionists in England (London, 1988)Google Scholar; Tillyard, Stella, The Impact of Modernism, 1900–1920: Early Modernism and the Arts and Crafts Movement in Edwardian England (London, 1988)Google Scholar; Harrison, Charles, English Art and Modernism, 1900–1939 (London, 1981)Google Scholar.

³ For nineteenth-century images of the North, see Dellheim, Charles, “Imagining England: Victorian Views of the North,” Northern History 22 (1986): 217CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ “New Manchester Exhibition Opened,” Manchester Daily Guardian (8 December 1911)Google Scholar.

⁵ Quoted in Hardman, Malcolm, Ruskin and Bradford: An Experiment in Victorian Cultural History (Manchester, 1986), p. 182Google Scholar. Hardman presents a detailed discussion of Ruskin's influence in Bradford and the North more generally.

⁶ Pevsner's, Nikolaus lectures were published as The Englishness of English Art (London, 1956)Google Scholar.

⁷ J.W.S., “The Museums Association Circulating Exhibition,” Studio (May 1924): 271Google Scholar.

⁸ SirMartin-Harvey, John, “An Impression of Charles Holme,” Studio (April 1933): 215Google Scholar.

⁹ Michael E. Sadler to William Rothenstein, 21 August, 1916, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., bMSeng1148, file 1302.

¹⁰ Sadleir, Michael, Michael Earnest Sadler (London, 1949), p. 226Google Scholar.

¹¹ Evening Advertiser (16 November 1937).

¹² Read, Herbert, The Tenth Muse (London, 1957), p. 71Google Scholar.

¹³ See Macleod, Dianne Sachko, Art and the Victorian Middle Class (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ “Week by Week,” Listener (13 January 1932)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Harrisson, T. and Behrens, D., “Public Taste and Public Design,” in the Design and Industries Association's Four Lectures in Design (London, 1943), p. 19Google Scholar.

¹⁶ See “A Brief Report on State-Aided Art Schools in England by the Board of Education's Art Inspectors,” [1930?], Public Record Office (henceforth PRO), London, ED24/608, 1–2.

¹⁷ Herbert Read, manuscript review of J. P. Hodin, Barbara Hepworth; University of Victoria Special Collections (henceforth UVic), University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, HR10/42.

¹⁸ Hardman, , Ruskin and Bradford, p. 328Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Speaight, Robert, William Rothenstein (London, 1962), p. 348Google Scholar.

²⁰ Hardman, , Ruskin and Bradford, p. 5Google Scholar.

²¹ Priestley, J. B., English Journey (1934; reprint, Harmondsworth, 1979), pp. 154–55Google Scholar.

²² Speaight, , William Rothenstein, p. 2Google Scholar.

²³ The Arts Enquiry, The Visual Arts (Oxford, 1946), p. 23Google Scholar; Clark, Kenneth, Another Part of the Wood: A Self-Portrait (London, 1974), p. 124Google Scholar.

²⁴ Minihan, Janet, The Nationalization of Culture: The Development of State Subsidies to the Arts in Great Britain (New York, 1977), pp. 154, 177Google Scholar.

²⁵ Yorkshire Observer (7 October 1925).

²⁶ According to the Yorkshire Post, the group intended to bring their exhibition “to the North, where the public are less well prepared to resist with Bloomsbury phraseology a determined attack by a group movement.” See “Unit One,” Yorkshire Post (16 April 1934)Google Scholar.

²⁷ From Martin Hardie to A. L. Barber, 27 July 1928, Victoria and Albert Museum (henceforth V&A), London, Underground File, Publicity, London Underground.

²⁸ For discussions of tensions between London and the “North” in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Musgrove, Frank, The North of England: A History from Roman Times to the Present (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), p. 17Google Scholar; Joyce, Patrick, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 294–331CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Porter, Roy, London (London, 1994), pp. 185–204Google Scholar.

²⁹ Many scholars have observed that the Victorians tended to express their views in terms of binary oppositions, ranging from Houghton, Walter, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870 (New Haven, Conn., 1957)Google Scholar to Poovey, Mary, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Others have noted that such oppositions were critical to definitions of “Englishness.” See, e.g., Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992)Google Scholar; Ragussis, Michael, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham, N.C., 1995)Google Scholar.

³⁰ Bell, , Art, p. 182Google Scholar.

³¹ Pick, Frank, “Art in Household Things,” 1916, London Transport Museum, B6Google Scholar.

³² Nevinson, C. R. W., Paint and Prejudice (London, 1937), p. 169Google Scholar.

³³ Lady Beryl Valentine (Pick's secretary), personal interview with the author, 17 September 1988. Noel Carrington spoke of Pick's “Puritanical attitude to conventional morality, which was exceptionally severe even for those days.” Carrington, Noel, Industrial Design in Britain (London, 1976), pp. 127–28Google Scholar.

³⁴ Quoted in King, James, The Last Modern: A Life of Herbert Read (New York, 1990), p. 61Google Scholar.

³⁵ Rothenstein, William, Men and Memories, 1872–1900 (London, 1931), p. 58Google Scholar.

³⁶ C. R. Ashbee recalled Fry mystifying an audience with his byzantine description of a Byzantine work of art: Fry described it as “an ideated world of three dimensional space peopled by clearly realized volumes.” Ashbee, C. R., Memoirs, 8:229Google Scholar, V&A, London, 86 DD10. Critics have noted that the underlying motives behind the formalists' rhetoric may not have been as pure as the art they sought to defend. By defining their art as “authentic” and “sincere,” uncontaminated by the gross demands of the market, modern artists and their supporters rendered their work all the more attractive to collectors. See Jensen, Robert, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Princeton, N.J., 1994), pp. 10–11Google Scholar; Rainey, Lawrence, “The Creation of the Avant-Garde: F.T. Marinetti and Ezra Pound,” Modernism/Modernity 1, no. 3 (September 1994): 195–220CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has argued that the formalist disavowal of any utilitarian purpose for art deliberately reinforced the social distinctions between a cultivated elite (who have the time and means to engage in disinterested contemplation) and the broader populace (whose taste is more circumscribed by immediate necessities and who therefore prefer art associated with everyday life). Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), p. 5Google Scholar.

³⁷ Editor, “What Is Wrong with Modern Painting II: The Pernicious Influence of Words,” Studio (March 1932): 164Google Scholar. Robert Ross spoke for many when he told a Manchester audience that “a national accent in art is everything. Collectors soon tire of art that is mere imitation of the French …. The strength of the younger artists is their national strength, and their weakness, if I may say so, is their cosmopolitanism.” “New Manchester Exhibition Opened,” Manchester Daily Guardian (8 December 1911)Google Scholar.

³⁸ Quoted in Collins, Judith, The Omega Workshops (London, 1983), p. 136Google Scholar.

³⁹ C. R. Ashbee Memoirs, V&A, 8:229.

⁴⁰ Pugin, A. W. N., Contrasts (1836; reprint, Leicester, 1973), p. 1Google Scholar.

⁴¹ MacCarthy, Fiona, A History of British Design, 1830–1970 (London, 1979), pp. 11, 18Google Scholar.

⁴² Rosenberg, John, The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin's Genius (London, 1963), p. 73Google Scholar.

⁴³ Ruskin, John, The Two Paths (1859; reprint, New York, 1983), p. 48Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ For a genealogy of the phrase “fitness for purpose,” including interwar attempts to reconcile nineteenth-century arts and crafts ideals with the machine age, see Saler, Michael, “The ‘Medieval Modern’ Underground: Terminus of the Avant-Garde?” Modernism/Modernity 2, no. 1 (January 1995): 113–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁵ Read, Herbert, quoted in William Morris, 1834–1934: Some Appreciations, ed. Roebuck, George (Walthamstow, 1934), pp. 28–29Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ Fry, Roger, Art and Industry (London, 1932), p. 44Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Roger Fry, “The Omega Workshops,” V&A, London, 3, 47.LL, p. 4.

⁴⁸ Woolf, Virginia, Roger Fry: A Biography (New York, 1940), p. 196Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Quoted in Collins, , The Omega Workshops; p. 68Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ William Rothenstein, draft of “Whither Painting?” 1931. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., bMS Eng 1148.2, file 41.

⁵¹ See Buckley, Jerome Hamilton, The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture (New York, 1951), pp. 9–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵² Abrams, M. H., The Mirror and the Lamp (London, 1971), p. 328Google Scholar. This “social” interpretation of romanticism differs from that of Frank Kermode, who argues that the romantic artist consciously proclaims his autonomy from society and creates works that exist in essential isolation from the social sphere of utility or ethics. Kermode does note that English romanticism differs from art for art's sake by assigning the “Romantic Image” a moral function (p. 67). While this is an important qualification, I believe he over-states the formalist aspect of English romanticism (Ruskin and Morris are not even mentioned), choosing to interpret the entire tradition since the late eighteenth century retrospectively through the work of late romantics like Yeats. But Kermode does explicate a significant element in the romantic tradition, one that was perhaps more prevalent in France than in England. This “aestheticist” strand undoubtedly influenced the formalist aesthetics of Roger Fry (who translated the Symbolist poems of Mallarmé). Kermode, Frank, Romantic Image (London, 1957)Google Scholar.

⁵³ Minihan, The Nationalization of Culture; Lubbock, Jules, The Tyranny of Taste: The Politics of Architecture and Design in Britain, 1550–1960 (New Haven, Conn., 1995)Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Buckley, , The Victorian Temper, pp. 180–82Google Scholar. Richard Ellmann discusses Wilde's “postaestheticism” in which Wilde links art to life, quoting the following from Wilde's 1884 lecture “The Value of Art in Modern Life”: “I have found that all ugly things are made by those who strive to make something beautiful, and that all beautiful things are made by those who strive to make something useful.” Ellmann, Richard, Oscar Wilde (London, 1987), p. 246Google Scholar. This was not simply a Wildean paradox; it was a “functionalist” definition often made by followers of the arts and crafts tradition. Eric Gill wrote in 1921 that “man's quality is chiefly exhibited in his works and that the physical form of things is not determined by caprice but by their nature and purpose: That if you take care of Truth and Goodness, Beauty will take care of itself.” Gill, Eric, Art-Nonsense and Other Essays (London, 1929), p. 65Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ Cerf, Bennett A. and Klopper, Donald S., eds., The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan (New York, n.d.), pp. 229–30Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Jackson, Holbrook, The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (1913; reprint, New York, 1927), p. 33Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ Fair, Dennis, English Art, 1870–1940 (Oxford, 1978), p. 19Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Marriott, Charles and “Tis,” Modern Art (London, 1917), p. 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁹ For the French definition of art nouveau as aristocratic, in contrast to the English “artisanal” definition, see Silverman, Debora, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley, 1989), pp. 8–9Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ Quoted in Huygen, Frederique, British Design: Image and Identity (London, 1989), p. 111Google Scholar.

⁶¹ While women formed an increasingly significant portion of the English art world by the end of the century, the “professional” artist continued to be gendered as masculine. See Cherry, Deborah, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (New York, 1993)Google Scholar. The anxious insistence in England that art was a masculine and respectable profession at the turn of the century undoubtedly was buttressed by the Wilde scandal, but modernism both on the Continent and in America was also frequently defined in masculine terms at this time. See Nicholls, Peter, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley, 1995)Google Scholar.

⁶² For the residual influence of the arts and crafts' terminology on Fry, see Tillyard, The Impact of Modernism.

⁶³ William Rothenstein, draft of “Whither Painting?” 1931. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., bMS Eng 1148.2, file 41.

⁶⁴ Similar projects to integrate modern art and industry were being carried out on the Continent in the early decades of the twentieth century, but many in England believed these were simply instances of English arts and crafts principles being effectively appropriated by other nations for economic gain. Many English design reformers expressed frustration that the government was not pursuing a more active policy in integrating art and industry, as seemed to be the case on the Continent. Noting the relative success of the industrial art movement in Germany in 1919, for example, a writer for the Ministry of Reconstruction observed dryly that “this sort of combination of English research and German enterprise is a very unsatisfactory state of things.” Ministry of Reconstruction, Reconstruction Problems 17: Art and Industry, March 1919; Royal Institute of British Architects (henceforth RIB A), London, DIA/130, pp. 4–5. Another design reformer recalled in 1935 that “we changed not only the face but the direction of German industry. And in all those pre-war years those of us who were interested could make very much less impression on British industry.” Rooke, Noel, “The Craftsman and Education for Industry,” in the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, Four Lectures (London, 1935), p. 57Google Scholar. Nikolaus Pevsner accepted and elaborated on this trajectory “from Morris to Modernism” in his Pioneers of Modern Design (1936; reprint, London, 1975)Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Harry Peach to Cecil Brewer, 12 November 1917, RIBA DIAP10/297.

⁶⁶ “Aesthetic Aspect of Civil Engineering Design,” 26 April, 1944, RIBA HoC/1/19, p. 16. In 1913 James Bone, London editor of the Manchester Guardian, articulated the widespread perception that, while visual modernism consisted of significant forms, it must also adhere to the social functions long expected of literature: “Can pictorial art live apart from its association content like music, or will it become gibberish, as poetry does when the poet seeks to use words for their rhythmic value apart from their meaning? Can it give up ethics and cease to have the responsibility of poetry without lowering its whole value to the human race? The answer surely is that it cannot; that although works of art have in common the language of significant form, a work of art to be great must have a moral value that can be expressed in that form …. Of one thing we may be sure: Post-Impressionism, either as a poison or as a medicine, will never be taken here in its purity.” Bone, James, “The Tendencies of Modern Art,” Edinburgh Review (April 1913): 433–34Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ Priestley, , English Journey, p. 37Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ Gordon Bottomley, in the Yorkshire Observer newspaper clipping, n.p., n.d, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., William Rothenstein Collection, bMSeng 1148.2, file 73.

⁶⁹ As Read stated, “The cultural unity we all desire as the basis of political unity, will be artificial and insecure unless it is the focus of the diversity and multiplicity of local and individual forces. Unity is not the spiritual counterpart of uniformity.” See Herbert Read, “Contemporary British Art,” 1951, UVic, file HR41/8.

⁷⁰ Read, Herbert, The Weathering of Art (Stoke-on-Trent, 1942)Google Scholar, unpaginated. Read had flirted with aesthetic formalism in the 1920s when he associated with T. S. Eliot and members of Bloomsbury, at times echoing their disdain for the Victorian social aesthetic. But he later admitted that he was easily swayed by different ideas, which led him to contradict himself from one essay or book to another; fundamentally, however, he believed that his conceptions of art and life were beholden to the English social aesthetic.

⁷¹ From Herbert Read to Naum Gabo, 12 June 1949, Tate Gallery Archive, London, TAM 66/161. A colleague who worked with Read in London recalled that “it was always an effort for him to become a man of the world and, although he had other business interests, he always longed to be back in the peaceful surroundings of his Yorkshire home.” Quoted in Blake, John and Blake, Avril, The Practical Idealists: Twenty-Five Years of Designing for Industry (London, 1969), p. 27Google Scholar.

⁷² From Herbert Read to Wilfred Childe, 27 April 1922, UVic HR62/4.

⁷³ Read, Herbert, The Grass Roots of Art (London, 1947), p. 23Google Scholar.

⁷⁴ Newspaper clipping of interview with William Rothenstein, n.p.,n.d.; Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., bMSeng 1148.2, file 73.

⁷⁵ The Arts Council, founded in 1946, tended to support London over other areas in the fifties. See Hewison, Robert, Culture and Consensus: England, Art, and Politics after 1940 (London, 1995), p. 56Google Scholar.

⁷⁶ For the Independent Group, see Robbins, David, ed., The Independent Group: Post-war Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)Google Scholar; Massey, Anne, “The Independent Group: Towards a Redefinition,” Burlington Magazine 129, no. 1009 (April 1987): 232–42Google Scholar; Insitute for Contemporary Art, Modern Dreams: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Pop (Cambridge, Mass.: 1988)Google Scholar; Cooke, Lynne, “The Independent Group: British and American Pop Art, a ‘Palimpcestuous Legacy,’” in Modern Art and Popular Culture: Readings in High and Low, eds. Varnedoe, Kirk and Gopnik, Adam, (New York, 1990), pp. 192–216Google Scholar. Among the many histories of English Pop Art in the fifties, see Seago, Alex, Burning the Box of Beautiful Things: The Development of a Postmodern Sensibility (New York, 1995)Google Scholar.

⁷⁷ This is not to deny the current of anti-Americanism that continued to be expressed by many intellectuals, including those who welcomed aspects of American culture such as Larkin and Amis. Rather it is to stress the general dissatisfaction with English culture and society in the wake of austerity, the failure of the Labour Government to restructure society radically, and the decline of Britain's international role in the postwar period. For a general overview, see Hewison, Robert, In Anger: British Culture in the Cold War (London, 1981)Google Scholar. For a discussion of domestic conceptions of “little England” in the interwar period that in some respects complements the northerners' association of London and the South with femininity and conservatism, see Samuel, Raphael, “Introduction,” in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, ed. Samuel, Raphael, vol. 1, History and Politics, (London, 1989), p. xivGoogle Scholar; Light, Alison, Forever England: Femininity, Literature, and Conservatism between the Wars (London, 1991)Google Scholar; Waters, Chris, “‘Dark Strangers’ in Our Midst: Discourses of Race and Nation in Britain, 1947–1963,” Journal of British Studies 36, no. 2 (April 1997): 207–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is important to note that such domestic conceptions of “little England” were represented in masculine no less than in feminine terms during the interwar period—that there was an active contest as to how English “domesticity” should be gendered, one that tended to split along regional lines. I do not think the “imagined national community” as a whole was becoming increasingly feminized at this time, as some of these authors argue.