W.E.A. COMING OF AGE

Evening Star, Issue 22354, 2 June 1936, Page 11

W.E.A. COMING OF AGE

•WRITERS AND SOCIETY' LECTURE BY MISS JOHNSON ‘ Writers and Society ’ was the title of a lecture delivered by Hiss Hypatia Johnson, M.A., in the Workers’ Educational Association’s lecture room last night. The lecture was delivered as part of the programme drawn up nr .connection with the coming-of-age celebrations of the association. ' In her opening remarks - Miss Johnson said that she intended to deal with the relationships which existed between life and literature at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. The period was a time of great revolt, not only in the industrial held, but in the field of, literature. France had experienced the Revolution, and while the writers of England were deploring the terrible disaster which had overcome France, they failed to realise that a revolution was taking place in lEngland—a revolution more profound in its effects than the French Revolution which, caused them so much concern. Nothing was done to check or to guide economic change at its fullest Hood, 20 years of the Napoleonic wars distracting the nation’s attention from its own grave internal affairs and complicating the industrial revolution at its most critical stage by war-time abnormality in trade prices and employment. In the social order everything was wrong. Thera was great suffering amongst the poor, while the favoured classes —the landowner, the farmer, merchant, and manufacturer —were greatly enriched. English exports doubled during the Napoleonic wars, and land owners’ incomes were appreciated in the same degree. The population increased from 10 to 13 millions, but the governing class continued to keep down wages and maintain a state of pauperisation' amongst the working classes. It was during this period of tremendous cleavage between labour and capital that writers began to see the need for social reform, but the governing class, fearing a repetition of what happened in France, restricted the spread of works which they thought would stimulate revolt. The age was predominantly an age of literature, and the changing conditions greatly affected the writers. Miss Johnson went on to deal with the relationship between Romanticism end tho preceding period of classicism, which was an age of stability. Romanticism was the opposite to Classicism, and aptly described the period under review. ' The lecturer went on to analyse some of the works of the great men'of literature of the time—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelly, Keats, and Southey. She explained how they were affected by the changing conditions and how many of them sought an escape from the chaotic order of society through poetry, which ideated Nature, and the supernatural. She gave as examples Shelly’s poems ou ‘ The Skylark ’and ‘ West Wind.’

What was important to remember, said Miss Johnson, was that “ Each ago demands different things from poetry, though its demands are modified from time to time by what some new poet has given.”