ABSTRACT
Critical commonplaces long held—for instance, that Ford Madox Ford was, despite his fictional experiments, a reactionary social and political thinker—have begun to evaporate in the more recent revaluation of his complex politics and his changing attitude towards the role of art in social life. A natural inheritor, in many ways, of Matthew Arnold’s vision of England being inexorably reduced to a philistine, mechanistic state in which culture would be superfluous, Ford’s cultural criticism by and large treats aesthetic education as integral to the success of the nation. This chapter provides a detailed analysis of Ford’s politics, one thing which emerges from this political quagmire is a hatred for the ‘rights’ and superficially limitless freedoms given to swathes of people who did not know what to do with them. Ford’s similar concern is the abiding note of many of his cultural writings. The English trilogy also gestures towards Ford’s political and social opinions.
