This chapter addresses the question of how John Buchan's novel Huntingtower (1922) strikes a balance between the past and the present, or between modernity and heritage. Of central interest here is the evocatively named character John Heritage, who represents a particular kind of heritage, and whose relationship with the novel's main protagonist, Dickson McCunn, produces a cross-generational discussion of modernity, on the one hand, and change-for-change's-sake, on the other.

The playful juxtaposition of the past and present in Huntingtower reflects wider processes in society, as intermodernist or middlebrow writing so frequently does. The kind of heritage depicted here had been contentious for decades before Buchan's book appeared. The debate was aggravated when the survivors of the First World War took stock of what remained of their civilization in the wake of global carnage. The deliberately domestic conservatism of the inter-war period, which was widely popular and expounded most enthusiastically by, among others, Stanley Baldwin, was to mask and appease grave misgivings about the future and what remained of the past. The forces of destruction had been quietly operating since the 1890s, but they surfaced violently in the iconoclasm symbolized by the Jazz Age when the younger generation who had experienced trench warfare turned viciously against the previous generation – in literature, art, social behaviour and cultural rejection – for what they considered their responsibility in unleashing the carnage of war on the young while they had remained safely at home.