The British Barbarians
Bertram Ingledew turns up in a Surrey village and promptly proceeds to reveal the taboos and absurdities of late 19th century life; as if the people he finds are members of a savage tribe, Bertram applies the techniques of an anthropologist. The class system, property ownership, marriage, and the status of women all come under scrutiny.
Approx. 36,938 words.
hat it would be possible to tell the truth, and yet preserve the circulation. A first-class journal does not really suffer because two or three formalists or two or three bigots among its thousands of subscribers give it up for six weeks in a pet of ill-temper--and then take it on again. Still, the effect remains: it is almost impossible to get a novel printed in an English journal unless it is warranted to contain nothing at all to which anybody, however narrow, could possibly object, on any grounds whatever, religious, political, social, moral, or aesthetic. The romance that appeals to the average editor must say or hint at nothing at all that is not universally believed and received by everybody everywhere in this realm of Britain. But literature, as Thomas Hardy says with truth, is mainly the expression of souls in revolt. Hence the antagonism between literature and journalism.
Why, then, publish one's novels serially at all? Why not appeal at once to the outside public, which has few such prejudic
