December 1910: When It All Changed

  “In or about December, 1910, human character changed”. So asserted Virginia Woolf in a paper read to the Heretics Society at Cambridge in May 1924, and later published as “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (Collected Essays, Volume 1, 1925, p.320 [MBMB]). This has become a famous observation, marking the emergence of Modernism in Britain, and it has been taken up by many literary and cultural historians. For Irving Howe, the date identified a “frightening discontinuity between the traditional past and the shaken present … the line of history has been bent, perhaps broken”, so that the essence of Modernism lies in “a revolt against the prevalent style, and unyielding rage against the official order (The Idea of the Modern in Literature and the Arts, 1967, p.13). After 1910, “modern authors were sharply aware of themselves as participants in a new cultural order that was in many ways radically disconnected from that of the past”, observes Chris Baldick, for whom Woolf’s claim stands as…