ABSTRACT
Martin J. Wiener, who is most closely associated with the theory that the widespread propagation of an anti-industrial culture was a major factor in Britain’s relative decline from its mid-Victorian economic peak, makes almost no analysis of the work of British novelists active in the early decades of the twentieth century.1 Given the spread of mass literacy that followed the 1870 Education Act, leading to an era in which written entertainment became increasingly central to national culture, this is an unexpected omission if the rural myth and the gentility creed were as pervasive as is claimed.
