Sarah Lonsdale

Mightier than the Sword, by Alphonse Courlander (1912)

This is a guest post by Dr. Sarah Lonsdale.

On the final page of Mightier than the Sword (1912), a novel about journalists and newspapers, the protagonist dies a lonely death in the middle of a maddened crowd. Humphrey Quain is a reporter for the new popular halfpenny paper The Day and is covering a riot of French wine makers protesting against government tax rises (plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose). In his short career as a ‘descriptive writer’ for his newspaper, Quain has undergone a strange transformation, subduing all human connection and emotion to become an obsessive news-gatherer and storyteller.

He dies because, in his desire to get to the heart of the story he is covering, he is trampled to death by ‘shaggy-haired’ French agriculturalists. His last thought is one of pleasure at his martyrdom, knowing he will make front page news for his paper. He is the ultimate journalist-hero, killed trying to get all the facts, and, in this, his final story, providing his paper with sensational ‘copy’.

There was a time when journalists were heroes, celebrated for exposing corruption in politics and big business, even bringing down a US president and ‘giving voice to the voiceless’, as they liked to say. During Courlander’s lifetime war correspondents became famous for risking all to cover conflict across the globe. Several, such as the Daily Mail’s beloved and respected ‘special’ G. W. Steevens, lost their lives covering the sordid reality of the Boer War in 1900. Many journalists still do try to make our world a better place but today a cynical and fragmented public is more likely to believe in journalists’ biases, that they are ‘enemies of the people’ or retainers in the pockets of wealthy proprietors or enemy powers. ‘Giving voice to the voiceless’ in the age of social media when everyone can find a platform for their voice seems also an outdated concept with connotations of ‘saviour complex’.

Producers still make films and series about the increasingly mythical hero-journalist along the lines of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of All the President’s Men. A recent US television iteration, Alaska Daily (2022) starring Hilary Swank, portrays an almost unbelievably ethical group of print journalists battling to reveal the truth about the death and disappearance of indigenous women across the state.

It may still work on the screen, but written fiction abandoned the idea of the journalist hero decades ago. The journalist in novels, from the pen, typewriter or PC of Evelyn Waugh (Scoop, 1938), Graham Greene (The Quiet American, 1955) or Lauren Weisberger (The Devil Wears Prada, 2003) is inevitably complex, compromised, and morally ambiguous: much more interesting that way.

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For he (it almost always is a he ), did once exist. Indeed, in Britain, in the early years of the twentieth century up to the outbreak of the First World War, there was a veritable slew of fictions depicting journalists as heroes, even in one, Guy Thorne’s When it was Dark (1904), saving civilisation from disaster (this novel, however, contains horrible anti-Semitic tropes and would never be revived today). Many of these novels were bestsellers, evidence of a public appetite for stories about journalists righting wrongs and seeking out facts. Even P. G. Wodehouse, with his swashbuckling Psmith Journalist (serialised in 1909 in The Captain magazine) had a go, sending his upper class and university-educated Psmith (the ‘P’ is silent), to New York to expose heartless tenement landlords.

Mightier than the Sword, which went into three editions in quick succession between May 1912 and October 1913, belongs to this fleeting golden age of newspaper novels. Courlander, a journalist himself, goes into great detail describing the work of the reporter, the sub-editor, ‘runner’, compositor, photographer, printer and the army of staff that went into bringing out a daily newspaper in the heyday of the new popular press. Here is his description of the composing room, a long-since vanished part of newspaper production:

Row upon row the aproned linotype operators sat before the key-board translating the written words of the copy before them into leaden letters. Their machines were almost human. They touched the keys as if they were typewriting, and little brass letters slipped down into a line, and then mechanically an iron hand gripped the line, plunged it into a box of molten lead, and lifted it out again with a solid line of lead cast from the mould…

This kind of description may well be fascinating to the historian of newspaper production, but it is hard to see why, even in 1912, this level of detail would interest a reading public. But it may also be the key as to why, apparently, it was so popular. Courlander’s was a new and exciting, technology-driven world, when newspapers changed utterly from large, expensive, and highbrow to something that everyone could afford to buy and written in language those educated only to age 14 could confidently read. The Daily Mail, the first morning daily halfpenny in Britain, had been launched in 1896 by Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe). The stunning success of his paper, which reached a circulation of 1.2 million in just a few years, was followed rapidly by the Daily Express (1900) and the Daily Mirror (1903). These new popular papers used a combination of bolder typefaces, shorter sentences and shorter articles to attract a newly literate and newly enfranchised readership of the lower middle classes. The Daily Mail was disparaged as being written ‘by office boys for office boys’ by the then prime minister Lord Salisbury but it soon became a symbol of a new, better-connected and technologically advanced country.

In the novel, Quain’s paper, The Day, is a symbol of this modernity, its dazzling electric dome illuminating the night sky in a London still dimly lit by ‘copper-tinted’ gas. The new generation of printing presses that could produce thousands of newspapers an hour appeared miraculous, converting in seconds acres of blank white paper into ‘quire after quire’ of printed record of lives and events from across the globe. The telegraph and photography, like the digital world today, brought the far and exotic corners of the world into the hands of ordinary people. This is the wonder that Courlander was trying to evoke in his descriptions of the thundering presses, ‘like the throbbing of thousands of human hearts.’ The newspaper is a giant, selling more than a million copies a day and the older journalists trained to write Dickens-style prose are either sacked or learn to write in crisp, short sentences.

Mightier than the Sword captures this moment of transition between the old world and the new at the very dawn of mass media.

The plot of the novel is simple: Humphrey Quain, a young writer from a quiet provincial cathedral city applies for a job on The Day. He is taken on, initially struggles but then does well and is promoted to be the paper’s Paris correspondent. In between his adventures, which involve solving tragic mysteries and reporting mining disasters, he falls in love with two women but breaks things off each time: his career is all-consuming.

Quain notices he is changing, from a sensitive young man to a news hound who doesn’t care about the people he reports on: “Everything in life now I see from the point of view of ‘copy’…even at the funeral [his aunt], as I stood over the grave, and watched them lower the coffin, I felt that I could write a splendid column about it,” he confesses as he breaks off with yet another disappointed fiancée. Despite this metamorphosis he wouldn’t change his life for the whole world: from attending the lengthy committee of the Anti-Noise Society, or spending several minutes finding the right word to describe a street lamp in the dark: ‘This was the journalist’s sense – a sixth sense – which urges its possessor to set down everything he observes, and adds infinite zest to life, since every experience, every thought, every new feeling, means something to write about…his thoughts ran in metaphors and symbols.’

Although the novel made Courlander’s name (he had written four mediocre novels before Mightier than the Sword), it is unconvincing as a work of literature. Its importance lies in its ideas about popular journalism and the new industrial relations not just in newspapers, but everywhere. Quain notes that for the disposable reporters on the mass press, their words are simply another commodity, produced, ‘as a bricklayer lays bricks.’ In the final scene of the novel, Humprey Quain realises that the French rioters see him as a representative of the press, part of the political-corporate nexus that is ruining their way of life. This realisation shocks him, and only makes him want to seek harder for the truth.

An obituary notice for Alphonse Courlander.

Alphonse Courlander, like Guy Thorne, P. G. Wodehouse and other authors of Edwardian newspaper novels, was a journalist, who joined the Daily Express in the early years of the 20th century. As did his protagonist, he became famous as a ‘descriptive writer’ under the editorship of the Fleet Street legend Ralph Blumenfeld (Ferrol in the novel). In an art-meets-life moment, after the novel’s publication, Courlander was made Paris correspondent of the Daily Express but died shortly afterwards at the age of 33. In his obituary (23 October 1914), the Daily Mail asserted that Courlander died after a break-down, having ‘overtaxed his strength’ reporting on the War from Paris.

Mightier than the Sword, by Alphonse Courlander
London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912

Dr Sarah LonsdaleSarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.

Madam, by Ethel Sidgwick (1921)

This is a guest post by Dr. Sarah Lonsdale.

As a long-time student of early twentieth century novels, I must confess to at first being utterly confounded when I started reading Madam. I couldn’t make head or tale of the prose and the cast of characters that spun in dizzying speed before my eyes in the early sections was so bewildering that I had to draw a diagram of their relationships just to keep up.

Ethel Sidgwick makes great demands of her readers. Her meaning is like a will o’ the wisp, darting in the darkness of her elliptical prose. She is always several paces ahead of the reader, who feels as if they are dully plodding behind, in danger of losing their way completely. Even a contemporary Observer reviewer wrote that Sidgwick was “more elusive than Henry James” and that “she seems to overrate our powers of intellectual sympathy”, unaware that while she is racing ahead, her readers are stuck somewhere far behind her. But like a will o’ the wisp, one feels that if one might only grasp it, and bathe one’s mind in its light, it might illuminate a greater truth.

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Advertisement for novels by Ethel Sidgwick published by Sidgwick & Jackson.

Sidgwick was once regarded as a brilliant writer, “drawing the picture in firm, fine lines: never losing our attention, or ceasing to charm…it is supreme art,” wrote Reginald Brimley Johnson in Some Contemporary Novelists (Women) (1920). Madam is one of several novels Ethel Sidgwick produced between 1910 and 1926, earning praise for their literariness, wit and truths to be discovered under the sparkling wit of her prose. These novels, many with single-word titles such as Promise (1910), Succession (1913) and Restoration (1923) offered sharp and often humorous criticism of the manners of the British upper classes. Sidgwick enjoyed a few years of fame and popularity: regularly compared with Henry James, in 1919-20 she was offered that most glittering of accolades for an English author: a lecture tour of the United States, during which time she kept a journal that is now with her other papers held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Afterwards she dedicated the US edition of Madam, “To America. If she will accept so poor a thing in memory and in gratitude”. Her later novels, however, received less critical acclaim, being more popular and romantic. Despite having made considerable impact on both British and US reading publics, after long before her death in 1970, Sidgwick quickly had disappeared, virtually without trace. If she is remembered at all, it is only for her 1938 biography of her aunt who was an early principal of Newnham College Cambridge: Mrs Henry Sidgwick: a memoir by her Niece.

Published in Spring 1921, Madam follows the lives of a large cast of characters, from stable lads to landed gentry, in a narrative beginning just before the First World War, “the golden days, before the world lost its innocence”, and ending in the months following the Armistice. In the second half of the novel the traumatic effects of the War haunt the men who returned from the trenches, and those who were too young to fight. They are dogged not only by physical injuries but suffer an almost obsessive need to seek “fellowship with the dead”, their survivors’ guilt destroying any honest or meaningful relationship with the living. Like out-of-control pinballs, they careen wildly through London and county society, causing varying degrees of damage, from wrecking motor cars to breaking young girls’ hearts. A haunting study of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) decades before the term was even coined, Madam is, as the contemporary Guardian reviewer urged, worth sticking with until the second half fully reveals itself.

The novel’s main characters are the jovial country squire Henry Wicken, who has lost a hand in the fighting and who gently subsides into what today would be called a nervous breakdown, and his former stable boy Mott Lane, who was too young to join up but who lost all five of his older brothers in the fighting. The effects of the war on Mott are more atrocious than on Henry: he suffers from a split personality, ruins everything he goes near: bicycles, motor cars, horses and young ladies. That is, until he meets Caroline, ‘Lina’ Astley, the ‘Madam’ of the title. She recognises Mott is damaged and through her patience and courage saves him from his demons and his desire only to be with the dead. Far from the dreary cliché of the angelic feminine, Lina helps Mott in a shockingly physical and criminal way. She confronts Mott’s at once cruel and pious mother (who used to interrupt her beating of him to read out verses from the Bible), slapping her hard on the face and stealing from her a memento of Mott’s beloved brother Christopher.

In meting out criminal and physical harm, fighting fire with fire, Caroline at once fractures the idealised image of herself as the gentle angel and smashes the tomb within which Mott has buried himself alongside his dead brothers. It is one of the few sharply defined moments of a novel swathed in obliquities and ellipses, a narrative style described by one contemporary reviewer as “typically feminine” and “liable to cause irritation”.

Such assertions call for evidence, so here we go:

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Advertisement for Madam by Ethel Sidgwick.

Because he simply longed to kill Mr Forrest with Miss Astley, last edition. The poor old surgeon really thought he knew her, that was the creamy part. She was probably sitting, every day, with her despatch-case, under his eye, just as usual; even though Lancaster had kissed her, and she had – No: it must be laid up in lavender for Forrest; for Miss Astley, final edition, was simply the sequel of all the other tales. Tell one, and you found yourself telling the others, inevitably wherever you were: it all followed on.

The novel is written entirely in this style and such questions as “what does ‘laid up in lavender’ mean?” and “what are earbobs?” and “why is the horse Titus starting to speak human language?” chase each other through the frantic reader’s mind. It is “a thing heavy with lightness”, as Sidgwick wrote of a character’s argument in the novel, but it could easily be applied to her own words, tricky to pin down “because there was nothing in it anywhere to grasp.” While pointing out her difficult style, contemporary reviewers nevertheless encouraged readers to persevere. “Through the greater part of his first perusal the reader has the sensation of being lost in a maze, or endeavouring (sic) to fit together the jumbled parts of a picture puzzle, or trying to work out the meaning of a code message without the key,” confessed a New York Times reviewer of Jamesie (1918). But those who stuck with the novel, even giving it a second reading, would be rewarded with its “fine literary quality” and “piquant character drawing”.

There is indeed something deeply resonant at the heart of this war novel. The male characters emerge from the smoke of Flanders so wounded and damaged that the question of how to make sure there is never again another war would be the contemporary reader’s chief conclusion. This was Sidgwick’s aim: born in 1877 into a progressive, literary and feminist family, she wrote for the pacifist Cambridge Magazine and was a lifelong supporter of the Save the Children fund founded by her friend Eglantyne Jebb. Sidgwick also lost her own brother, Arthur, killed in action at Ypres in 1917.

Because of its difficult style, Madam will not be brought triumphantly back into publication to enjoy a second literary life as have recently the works of her contemporaries Rose Macaulay and Elizabeth von Arnim. But if ever the curious reader were to chase its oblique meaning through the prose, they will be rewarded with moments of shuddering recognition of those early, shattered months after the Great War.

Madam, by Ethel Sidgwick
London: , 1921

Dr Sarah LonsdaleSarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.

Sonia: Between Two Worlds, by Stephen McKenna (1917)

Cover of Sonia by Stephen McKenna
Cover of Sonia by Stephen McKenna.

This is a guest post by Dr. Sarah Lonsdale.

By March 1917 Britain had her back against the wall in a way she had never dreamed, nor expected even at the outbreak of War in August 1914. Then, people said it would all be over by Christmas, with the Germans bloodied and suing for peace. By the spring of 1917, for the first time since 1066 the “sceptred Isle” with its great Empire, unequalled industrial muscle and naval strength was facing an existential threat. Tens of thousands of young men had already been killed in France and Belgium, thousands more returned mutilated, shell-shocked and disfigured by new industrial and chemical warfare. On the Home Front, Zeppelin air raids across east and southeast England were showering death from the skies upon women and children. After the first attack, over Great Yarmouth on 19 January 1915, people living under the flight path of those vast, silent whales “flying high with fins of silky grey”, as the writer Katherine Mansfield described, felt exposed as never before. Street lamps were dimmed, blackout curtains were put up and people shrank as shadows passed overhead. While rationing would not be brought in until 1918, already sugar and meat supplies were under Government control to feed the Army first. People were foraging for gulls’ eggs, songbirds and fern bracken roots as alternative food sources. Restaurants stopped providing sugar shakers: a small thing but hugely symbolic of the new bewildering reality. Nearly three years in, and there seemed no way out.

Poets had at first welcomed the war, revelling in this opportunity for glorious self-sacrifice in England’s cause as in Rupert Brooke’s 1914 sonnets. Ironically, Brooke was one of the first to die, making a small corner of the Greek island of Skyros “forever England”. His fellow ‘War Poets’ quickly changed their tone seeing it as their role to tell people the truth about the horrors of the trenches, since the Press was not doing its job. Robert Graves’ ‘A Dead Boche’ (1916) showing the stinking, scowling, green-hued unburied German corpse in horrible close-up provided sobering correction to the Daily Mail’s upbeat accounts of biffing ‘The Hun’.

Novelists too tried to make sense of the new reality but paper shortages and the novelist’s need for reflection meant that few British ‘War’ novels were actually published before the Armistice in 1918. H. G. Wells’ Mr Britling Sees it Through (1916) portrays the confusion of the civilian population who on the one hand read in newspapers that the Germans “had been mown down in heaps” but that in the same papers, these same defeated Germans were advancing on Paris. Mr Britling and his doomed son Hugh spend a desperate Sunday afternoon examining maps of France trying, yet failing to work out the confusing and contradictory information. Similarly, the Home Front civilians in Rose Macaulay’s Non-Combatants and Others (1916) can barely tell the difference between truth and lies, sharing fake news about Russian soldiers landing in Scotland with snow on their boots, along with real news of babies being killed in Zeppelin raids. Readers would have to wait for Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1929), or Storm Jameson’s Company Parade (1934) for more fully worked out meditations on how we had got into this mess and what the War was doing to the national psyche. Yet there is one neglected novel, published in March 1917 at the War’s darkest hour, that is well worth reading for the light it sheds on English social and political life on the eve of War and during its first two years.

Stephen McKenna
Stephen McKenna, from Authors of the Day by Grant Overton (1924).

At its heart, Stephen McKenna’s Sonia: Between Two Worlds is a devastating critique of a spoiled, complacent and too-wealthy ruling class that partied through “the years of carnival”, as he calls them, before August 1914. Too busy drinking champagne, making money and gossiping about the latest unfortunate debutante who had failed to catch a man in her first season, these representatives of the governing class pay heavily for their complacency. But so do hundreds of thousands of young men who had no say in political decision-making, with many working-class men, as well as all women, still unable to vote. About halfway through the novel George Oakleigh, Liberal MP and the novel’s narrator, looks back to those years of plenty (for the ruling classes at least): “I look back to find an infinite littleness in the artificial round we trod during my idle early days in London,” he writes. The world was “clattering into ruins” but just months before the cataclysm, he and his peers, even those with seats in the Lords or Commons, were too busy writing their names on pretty girls’ dance cards to notice.

The novel follows the lives of a group of young men from their schooldays at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign through to the mid-point of the First World War. They are products of Melton, a fictional public school, the finest in the land, that produces future MPs and prime ministers, generals, Whitehall mandarins and captains of industry. Melton is Westminster School, McKenna’s own alma mater, transported to somewhere in Wessex, that quasi-mythical old English Kingdom, once ruled by Alfred the Great. Centuries of English history and legend weigh heavily on the weathered old stone. At Melton the boys learn discipline, loyalty, Greek and Latin but also the cruel system that permits older boys to enslave and beat younger ones who step out of line. They learn that, as the apex of the English social class system, they are inheritors of the Earth. Into this centuries-old world of cloisters and courtyards, well-stocked libraries and finely clipped cricket pitches steps David O’Rane, a youth endowed with epic gifts of intellect, physical strength and rebelliousness. He can recite, perfectly, 30,000 lines of Greek poetry and take on 10 older boys in a fist fight. The Irish surname is no accident. He’s also gorgeous, with large dark eyes, chiselled cheek bones and dark flowing Byronic locks. The other boys would all fall a little bit in love with him, although would never admit to such weakness: the closest they get is to describe him as looking “like a girl”. Receiving regular beatings for refusing to support the school football team, O’Rane forces the other boys to reflect on whether their system is in fact, fit for purpose at the dawn of the twentieth century.

Daily Mail review of Sonia by Stephen McKenna
Daily Mail review of Sonia from 7 March 1917.

They don’t reflect for long however, so keen are they to get to Oxford and spend the next four years punting, drinking and deciding whether they’ll go to the Bar or not before they become MPs or take up their hereditary seats in the House of Lords. McKenna, who also attended Oxford and whose uncle was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, was well placed to observe the ruling elite in its process of formation. There is also a great love story that runs through the novel and the roller coaster passion between Sonia Dainton and David O’Rane caught the nation’s imagination so much that in the autumn of 1917, there was, according to the Manchester Guardian something known as “Sonia Fever”, a “pleasant malady” that made McKenna briefly famous. The book inspired the film director Denison Clift to make a silent movie version starring Evelyn Brent as Sonia in 1921 although it has since been lost.

Sonia is not great literature: the characters are two-dimensional and O’Rane is simply unbelievable in his all-round perfection. There is an affecting moment towards the end of the novel though, that captures the horror of the time. O’Rane, once invincible, returns from the trenches a broken man, his blindness a metaphor for his generation’s lack of foresight. A door slams shut by an unfelt gust of wind: there is no clear way out; incoherent rustlings and mutterings could be the ghosts of all those lost young. It is this rare literary focus on the war in the midst of the cataclysm that makes Sonia both unusual and powerful. The Manchester Guardian reviewer at the time made the point that Sonia was perhaps a “rather irritating reminder of mistakes and futility” when everyone was getting on with the job of survival. But this is precisely Sonia’s great strength: it is as a critique of contemporary British society a full decade before the great postwar novels like Parade’s End ventured to tackle the subject. As well as the feckless aristocracy, McKenna blames the new mass media for leading the public to believe false stories of German atrocities and for encouraging hatred, rather than understanding of, the enemy. Written with passion at the point of maximum danger, it thoroughly deserves another outing.

Sonia Between Two Worlds, by Stephen McKenna
London: Methuen; New York: George H. Doran, 1917

Dr Sarah LonsdaleSarah Lonsdale is a journalist, critic and author. Her latest book, Rebel Women Between the Wars: Fearless Writers and Adventurers (MUP, 2020) investigates how women in the 1920s and 30s overcame social and political obstacles in a range of occupations including mountaineering, engineering and foreign correspondence. She lectures in history and journalism at City, University of London.