On first glance, British literature of the 1930s offers a natural subject for a dedicated Cambridge Companion. As critics have often remarked, few other decades seem to claim such a compelling status as a distinct literary-historical era, with a series of political events, aesthetic debates, and emerging literary networks providing an identity that goes beyond the normal convenience of decade-based periodisation and into ‘one of literary history’s most stable and flourishing concepts’. With just a slight nudging of the boundaries, the 1930s is often characterised as running from 1929 until 1939, from the stock market crash of 1929 until the arrival of the Second World War, with September 1939 marking an end to the epoch as the world entered a cataclysmic new phase.

For most twenty-first-century readers, the starting place for studying the poetry of the 1930s is Robin Skelton’s much-reprinted 1964 anthology Poetry of the Thirties. More influential even than Samuel Hynes’s book The Auden Generation (1976), it established the 1930s English canon as the poems of upper-middle-class educated men born between 1902 and 1916, a generation cut off from traditional certainties by the Great War in which they were too young to fight. Consciously departing from the patriotism and rural imagery of Georgian poetry, these men admired T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) but refused the modernist decentring of the post-Romantic subjective ‘I’.

‘It is not an exaggeration to say that for most people “a book” means a novel.’ So wrote Q. D. Leavis in her pioneering Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), reflecting on the supremacy of the novel in an era when universal literacy had created what she called an ‘inveterate general reading habit’ among the British. Yet the novel of Leavis’s own decade would be so comprehensively overshadowed by poetry in the course of the following half-century that it was still the case in the late 1980s that Valentine Cunningham could write in his landmark survey of the period that ‘when we think of literature in the 1930s our current orthodoxies usually have us thinking first of poets’.

The end of the First World War and the relaxation of restrictions on travel that were in place during it produced a sense of release, among other emotions. Paul Fussell employs an aptly exuberant simile when he refers to the many writers who were ‘propelled on their post-war travels as if by a wartime spring tightly compressed’. Besides those that will be discussed in this chapter, Fussell’s list of several members of the ‘British Literary Diaspora’ who travelled or went to live in exile around the globe includes Norman Douglas, Lawrence Durrell, V. S. Pritchett, and Robert Graves. The propulsion that Fussell describes is evident in D. H. Lawrence’s statement in his Sea and Sardinia (1921): ‘Comes over one an absolute necessity to move.’ This urge to mobility is often accompanied by an energetic sense of inquiry.

In a lecture delivered early in 1936 entitled ‘Poetry and Film’, W. H. Auden offered a Marxist-shaded characterisation of modernism within a brief, reductive account of the historical division of high and low art. The class divisions that grew out of the Industrial Revolution, Auden asserted, had also given rise to an intermediate social element, ‘a class of people living apart from industry but supported by its profits – the rentier class’. Modernism, Auden claims, can be understood as nothing other than ‘rentier art’, an artistic expression of the outlook of this dependent, impractical side-branch of the industrial ruling class: ‘A distinct type of art arose […] developing through Cezanne, Proust and Joyce.’ In what follows, Auden does not further linger over this dismissive account of three great innovators of modern art and literature, but hastens on to the real focus of his lecture, which is popular art and specifically the art of film.

Although the First and Second World Wars were fought a generation apart, their historical, ethical, and political meanings continue to be debated. The terms concern whether both wars should be regarded as constituting a continuous battle for political and cultural supremacy or as distinct events, as either one battle bleeding into another with a brief interruption or as the Second World War erupting from unresolved, conflicting ideologies and interests carried over from the First. Squeezed between these perspectives is the decade of the 1930s in which memories of the 1914–18 war and anxieties about another conflagration were troubled further by the economic and social consequences of the Great Depression that devastated people’s lives on both sides of the divide. The 1930s in Britain was a war between, in which political, social, and cultural debates served as the only available weapons of defence against pervasive doubts about both the unstable present and the possibility of a stable future.

It is today often presumed – by, for instance, the Oxford English Dictionary – that the term ‘queer’ only began to be reclaimed with pride in the 1980s. But as queer historians have long recognised, this is in fact inaccurate, for a more or less defiant use of this term as a self-descriptor dates at least as far back as 1939, to Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories. It is, therefore, not so much an anachronism as a historical imperative to affirm the 1930s as queer. Indeed, given the prominence of a particular group of left-wing writers, including Isherwood himself, W. H. Auden, and Stephen Spender, the 1930s have often been categorised as a ‘pink decade’: as, in other words, foundational for twentieth-century queer literature, politics, and culture in Britain.

In his remarks to the Congress of American Writers in 1937, Ernest Hemingway addressed the audience with the bold declaration that ‘There is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is fascism. […] [F]ascism is a lie told by bullies. A writer who will not lie cannot live or work under fascism.’ Fighting fascism in the 1930s, for many of the world’s most influential writers, was not simply a political or ideological battle – it was a symbolic struggle for integrity, freedom, and liberty under threat of intellectual enslavement. Hemingway was not alone in believing that writers were obliged to be ‘good’ through an active critique of fascist ideologies.

The 1930s was a decade energised by crisis and hope. It ended badly on many fronts, including (seemingly) that of literature. Robert Hewison labels the years 1939 and 1940 the ‘grand slaughter of magazines’, noting that The Cornhill Magazine, Criterion, New Verse, Welsh Review, Voice of Scotland, and a range of other journals ‘all fell silent’. John Lehmann, a leading young periodical editor, recalled how ‘In the Christmas [1939] Number I announced the death of New Writing’, an innovative journal he had launched in 1936.

In 1938, Stephen Spender imagined a ‘revolution in the ideas of drama’, a theatre that could both deal with the complex socio-politics of the decade and take on new aesthetic challenges. The trouble, of course, was what this drama might look like in practice. In fact, in addressing the multifarious artistic and political disputes of this period, drama in the 1930s resists easy critical definition, residing in a liminal sense betwixt and between positions, terminology, and aesthetics. It can be read as highbrow, lowbrow, or middlebrow, with many individual examples flitting between these permeable categories.

In 1940, George Orwell wrote a profile of the novelist Henry Miller, praising him as a prose-stylist and psychologist of the ‘ordinary man’, praising him above all as a ‘creative writer’ in what has ceased to be ‘a writer’s world’. For ‘what is quite obviously happening’, Orwell declared, ‘is the break-up of laissez faire capitalism’, ‘the destruction of liberalism’ and of ‘literature as we know it’. In this end-times scenario, Miller is shown clinging to the ‘melting iceberg’ of liberal humanism, elaborating his own ‘subjective truth’ in his own inimitable style, indifferent to the world. As a foil, Orwell introduces the communist ‘propagandists’ and ‘cocksure partisans’ of the next generation.

The outpouring of novels about regional and rural Britain that peaked in the 1930s had as its context a more broadly social cult of the countryside that generated all kinds of extravagant proclamations about the powers of rural life to define an urban nation and global empire. Among the most notorious of these statements was Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s toast to members of the Royal Society of St George, a group devoted to advancing English patriotism, at their annual meeting at London’s grand Hotel Cecil on 6 May 1924.

Periodisation, Eric Hayot has observed, ‘is the untheorized ground of the possibility of literary scholarship’. Few decades testify more powerfully to the claim that periodisation provides the basis for literary scholarship – by lending support to scholars’ critical habits and to tacit assumptions about literary value – than the 1930s. By turns championed and reviled for the attempt to harness art to radical (left-wing or right-wing) politics, the 1930s can seem ‘the most self-contained decade in the literary history of the last century’.

Throughout the 1930s, old and new forms of media continued to uphold the centrality of imperialism in British nationalism. Adventure stories featuring imperial benevolence and derring-do written in the previous century by Henry Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and G. A. Henty remained popular cultural touchstones. Popular radio programmes such as the BBC’s Empire Day and Christmas broadcasts reflected a view of the Empire ‘as a topic of central concern to national life, one which could be turned to nationalist, moral, and quasi-religious ends’.

To be classified as ‘popular’ or ‘middlebrow’ is to be damned with imprecise and, often, faint praise. This is particularly true in the 1930s when questions of literary ‘taste’ and ‘value’ increasingly shifted the parameters of critical reception in Britain by drawing distinctions between the popular and highbrow while airing the notion of the ‘middlebrow’ as a third classification. These categorisations accelerated debates about the rise in commercial writing in the period while lamenting the wider effects of mass culture on society. Fundamentally, this discussion became a struggle over ideas of cultural and intellectual authority that broadly coincided with a proliferation of novels written predominantly for a wide readership, particularly of middle-class women, under the classification ‘middlebrow’, as Nicola Humble’s groundbreaking study The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s–1950s establishes.