The development of the novel of ideas has at times been closely related to the development of another literary form that emerged out of the social and political transformations of nineteenth-century Britain: the historical novel. With a glance back at a prototype of both forms – the fiction of Sir Walter Scott – this chapter moves on to discuss the work of one of Scott’s unlikeliest yet most significant inheritors, the Scottish socialist and feminist novelist Naomi Mitchison. It argues for Mitchison as one of the foremost twentieth-century practitioners of the historical novel as novel of ideas, focussing on The Bull Calves (1947), which she wrote during the Second World War, and which drew on her own family history as well as the wider history of Scotland’s complicated political status in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite rising. Mitchison’s most important contribution to the twentieth-century novel of ideas, the chapter concludes, was to forge a new kind of historical fiction which took seriously the dialectical relationship between conceptual and linguistic change.

Naomi Mary Margaret Haldane – later Naomi Mitchison – was born on Monday, 1 November 1897, in an elegant Edinburgh townhouse overlooking the Water of Leith. Her parents belonged to the prosperous elite of Scottish society, and the milieu in which she grew up was in many ways that of the traditional, upper-class Victorian establishment. Her mother, Louisa Kathleen (née Trotter), could trace her ancestry back to Henry Dundas, First Lord of the Admiralty under Pitt the Younger, while her father, the physiologist John Scott Haldane, belonged to one of Scotland’s most eminent families, the Haldanes of Gleneagles. There were nursemaids and servants, family worship on Sundays, and a public-service ethic of noblesse oblige. There were big, draughty houses in Edinburgh and Perthshire, as well as in Oxford, where J. S. Haldane was a fellow of New College, and where, aside from frequent Scottish holidays, Naomi would spend most of her childhood. Yet the Haldanes were also a family of progressive intellectuals: scientists, jurists, writers and free-thinkers with remarkably wide-ranging interests. Naomi’s uncle, the barrister and statesman Richard Haldane, was an unseasonable admirer of Goethe and Schopenhauer, an important reformer of the British Army, and eventually Lord Chancellor in Ramsay Macdonald’s first Labour government. Another uncle, William, was Crown Agent for Scotland (the most senior prosecutorial role in the Scottish justice system), while her aunt Elizabeth – a skilled administrator who helped to establish the Voluntary Aid Detachment – wrote studies of Descartes and George Eliot, and later became Scotland’s first woman Justice of the Peace.

Tradition and modernity; custom and curiosity; religious observance and scientific rationalism; success within the venerable institutions of British society coupled with an open, internationalist outlook: this combination of influences would feed Naomi Mitchison’s imagination and shape a writing life that extended across most of the twentieth century. From her early childhood she acquired a strong sense of the reality of the past, and of writing as a way of bringing past, present and future together.

The social and psychological consequences of empire and colonisation are a consistent theme of Naomi Mitchison’s fiction. In her first novel, The Conquered (1923), Gallic resistance to Roman occupation in the first century bc serves as an effective if none-too-subtle allegory for the condition of twentieth-century Ireland under British rule. In The Blood of the Martyrs (1939), the Roman empire under Nero is an economic vampire, ‘suck[ing] the blood’ of its provinces in Greece and northern Europe. And in The Bull Calves (1947), the refugee Jacobite Black William becomes intimately acquainted with Britain’s own colonial exploitation – in his words, ‘our cheatery’ – of the Indigenous inhabitants of North America. Born into the upper echelons of the British ruling class, Mitchison felt very keenly the implications of that our. For the first half of her life, the British empire was indisputably a major world power. At home, young Naomi absorbed and internalised the strong opinions of her mother, ‘an active and constant propagandist’, as she would later put it, ‘for Tory imperialism’. (Her father, though more liberal, tended to avoid the subject of politics.) Yet as an adult, Mitchison herself would become a committed and outspoken anti-imperialist who, even as she recognised the effects of her mother’s influence, was capable many decades later of feeling ‘ashamed and embarrassed’ at the pro-empire sentiments recorded in her childhood diaries.

Towards the end of the 1950s, Mitchison began to take an active and energetic interest in present-day anti-colonial politics, with a particular interest in sub-Saharan Africa. No longer content to filter contemporary events through historical analogies, she became a vocal critic of apartheid, and a consistent advocate for Black African self-government throughout the region. In 1960, while hosting a British Council delegation at her home in Carradale, she struck up a friendship with a young delegate from the British protectorate of Bechuanaland, Linchwe, who a few years later would take up his hereditary role as kgosi, or chief, of the Bakgatla people. Linchwe would become a regular guest in Argyll, and Mitchison in turn accepted his invitation to visit Mochudi, the home settlement of the Bakgatla, in Bechuanaland (soon to gain independence from British rule as the Republic of Botswana).

In Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926), the protagonist Laura, having swapped the bustle of London for the peace and quiet of the Chiltern Hills, decides to spend some of her new-found leisure time reading. Having brought no books of her own, she borrows a couple of volumes from her landlady:

Like many modern readers, Laura finds herself dividing her attention between the escapist pleasures of literary romance and the valuable facts to be gleaned from a work of information. In this case, however, these two forms of reading also suggest the two worlds between which Laura herself is beginning to transition. The practical if soporific advice retailed by Enquire Within (1856) – the Chartist editor Robert Kemp Philp’s most successful contribution to the Victorian craze for self-improvement – recalls the bourgeois domesticity of daily life in her late brother’s London household. Meanwhile, the popular gothic novel Mehalah (1880), by the eminent nineteenth-century folklorist Sabine Baring-Gould, feeds the fascination for the supernatural and the weird that will ultimately carry Laura into a new life as a bona fide modern-day witch.

Laura Willowes’s reading preferences might seem to have little to do with questions of modernism and technology. Yet this marginal moment in a middlebrow novella of the 1920s serves to demonstrate both the evident popularity of informational reading in the early twentieth century and the sharp contrast many writers had begun to draw between such reading and its literary alternatives or complements. It also gives a good sense of what ‘information’ most readily suggested to a typical reader of the 1920s: an organised but discontinuous collection of facts, figures, measurements, recipes, instructions and the like, which might (or might not) turn out to be of practical use.

This Introduction describes the major currents of change which swept through British writing in the years between 1900 and 1920. It introduces the idea of ‘transition’ as a key concept for the literary culture of the period, and demonstrates its relevance across several domains of life: aesthetic, technological, historical, social, psychological. The Introduction argues that, while major historic movements and events – notably, the rise of modernism and the catastrophe of the First World War – have long been central to our understanding of its literature, we can nonetheless gain a new perspective on the period’s cultural life by viewing it through a wider historical aperture. By charting transitions across the century’s first two decades, the Introduction emphasises the sense of uncertainty and change that characterises much of the period’s most influential and important writing.

The period between 1900 and 1920 witnessed several important developments in the production and dissemination of wartime propaganda. Most important among these developments were the rise of the popular press, the expansion of mass literacy, and the increasing centralisation of propaganda efforts as a responsibilty of central government. This chapter traces the development of propaganda methods and of literature’s complicated entanglement with propaganda from the Boer War to the aftermath of the First World War. It describes how a number of major writers – Ford Madox Ford, John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, and H. G. Wells – came to play important roles in the British state’s wartime communications, and how the culture of ‘suspicious reading’ encouraged by the prevalence of propaganda shaped post-war debates about the truth-telling capacities of the literary realism with which those writers were closely associated.