ABSTRACT
In a review of the Vorticist movement published in Dora Marsden’s magazine The Egoist on 15 August 1914, Ezra Pound commented on the controversial Vorticist Wyndham Lewis and the spirit of confrontation which imbued his work: Mr. Lewis is a restless, turbulent intelligence bound to make himself felt. If he had not been a vorticist painter he would have been a vorticist something else. Lewis’s discussion of welfare and its class, elitist, and authoritarian aspects parallels the criticism that anarchists and individualists like Dora Marsden leveled against benevolence and patronage. The turn of the twentieth century was marked by increasing professionalization of social services and by the emergence of the British welfare state. Despite his idiosyncratic political views and his somewhat flippant critique of contemporary liberalism, the writer Wyndham Lewis took his satire and his role as a public intellectual very seriously.
