Max Beerbohm and the Shape of Things to Come

Tom Gibbons

The phrase „the shape of things to come,‟ in the title of this essay, does not simply point to the

future; it also alludes to the H. G. Wells work of 1933 by that name. Fictionalized into the 1936

feature film Things to Come by William Cameron Menzies, The Shape of Things to Come was a

late item in the series of sociological forecasts that Wells wrote earlier in the century—notably

Anticipations (1902), Mankind in the Making (1903) and A Modern Utopia (1905). The question

my title poses, then, is what does Max Beerbohm—celebrated author, caricaturist and wit—have

to do with Wells‟s vision of the future?

Not much, if we continue to view Beerbohm as mostly an apolitical aesthete of the late

nineteenth century. In this essay, however, I will suggest that Beerbohm was a considerably less

frivolous critic of „the shape of things to come‟ as envisioned by the Fabian Socialists, especially

Wells and Shaw, than he is usually given credit for. F. R. Leavis, despite doubtlessly agreeing

with the stereotype of Beerbohm as a „perfect trifler,‟1 might even have regarded him as an ally in

his own lifelong campaign against „technologico-Benthamite modernity‟—something we may

infer from Leavis‟s critical description of C. P. Snow as „the spiritual son of H. G. Wells‟.2

By advancing this more robust view of Beerbohm, I am building on the work of N. John Hall,

who, in his admirable critical biography of Beerbohm, describes him as being „in revolt against

the general vulgarity and materialism of his day (phenomena that in his view worsened in the

twentieth century)‟:

Gibbons — 2

he was in revolt against sexual Puritanism, against patriotic and John Bullish cant; and against

inane plays and fatuous novels and silly poems. We do not customarily think of Max as having any

but the mildest tinge of rebellion in him, but with pen or pencil in hand he was tough-minded and

critical.3

Beerbohm carried out this tough-minded critique by means of the sister arts of parody and

caricature, which Hall, in his invaluable selection of Beerbohm‟s caricatures, describes as

displaying „a comparable economy, wit, cleverness, understatedness, clarity, beauty,

sophistication, and occasional outlandishness‟.4

If we use the conventional adjectives for types of satire, some of these parodies and

caricatures, such as those of Henry James, may be described as Horatian or affectionate.

Beerbohm‟s parodies and caricatures of Kipling, Hall Caine, Wells and Shaw are Juvenalian and

derisive. Especially relevant in this regard is Beerbohm‟s 1911 group caricature Revisiting the

Glimpses (Figure 1) in which Edmund Gosse introduces the ghost of Robert Louis Stevenson to a

medley of fanatically gesticulating figures on up-ended wooden tubs who include Wells, Shaw,

Kipling and G. K. Chesterton.5 Beerbohm‟s caption reads as follows:

Shade of R.L.S.: „And now that you have shown me the new preachers and politicians, show me

some of the men of letters.‟

Mr Gosse: „But, my dear Louis, these are the men of letters.‟

„I admire detachment‟, wrote Beerbohm concerning politics, „the idea of the British Empire

leaves me quite cold. . . . Socialism neither affrights nor attracts me—or, rather, it has both these

effects equally‟.6 Denounced as „a stealthy Bolshevist‟ for The Edwardyssey, his 1907 series of

eight satirical cartoons depicting an imaginary life of the womanizing Edward VII (whose

Gibbons — 3

Figure 1: Revisiting the Glimpses (1911)

independent spirit Beerbohm seems to have admired), he also drew a Communist Sunday School

(1923) which depicts a sour-faced instructor flanked by posters of „Attractive Trotsky‟ and

„Lovely Lenin‟ with a group of pupils „learning that they must not shrink from shedding blood in

order to achieve starvation‟. 7

Beerbohm‟s completely disenchanted and mordant diagnosis of „The Condition of England‟

during the Boer War period is presented in his 1901 series of fifteen cartoons titled The Second

Childhood of John Bull. These feature John Bull as a senile imperialist ignoramus with philistine

views on painting (De Arte Pictoria) and poetry (De Arte Poetica); in the latter cartoon, John Bull

Gibbons — 4

has taken „a fancy‟ to a muscular Rudyard Kipling in military uniform because of his populist

jingoism and invites him to „give us a toon‟ on his banjo.8

„For my own part, I am a dilettante, a petit maître’, wrote Beerbohm of himself in his essay

on Ouida.9 However, he is never merely whimsical, and his self-styled „dilettantism‟ may well

have been yet another of his many satirical masks. John Felstiner has remarked that Beerbohm

„never made single-minded doctrine, and this has created the false impression of his writing as

witty dilettantism. In fact, he meant any voice he could take‟.10

In this regard, as Lawrence

Danson has pointed out, his parodic techniques are similar to those of such avant-garde

Modernists as Joyce, Eliot, Pound and Woolf,11

whose tactical use of „masks‟ is well attested in

Wilde and Yeats but also shows up in such a whole-hearted anti-Decadent as Wyndham Lewis

and his painterly self-depictions as malevolently grinning Tyro.

„In his Italian exile‟, writes Ira Grushow, „Beerbohm perfected the ambiguous and ironic

attitude he had adopted in the nineties. In doing so he made a number of literary “discoveries” that

parallel those of the more celebrated Modernists‟.12

Grushow continues:

While the subject matter of Beerbohm‟s work is unremittingly of the late nineteenth century—

dandyism, aestheticism, decadence, art-for-art‟s sake—the techniques, virtually self-discovered,

are clearly those of the twentieth. In his self-reflexive narration, in the sly fusion of fact with

fiction and the commonplace with the fantastic, and above all by his refusal to summarize or

interpret his „findings‟, Beerbohm may be identified with such writers as Borges and Nabokov and

such visual artists as Saul Steinberg and M. C. Escher.

Beerbohm thus appears, technically speaking, as an early exponent of post-modernist mise-en-

abîme, while Grushow‟s inclusion of the graphic artists Steinberg and Escher, by broadening the

area of discussion to other genres, also suggests a comparison with the influential avant-garde

Gibbons — 5

composer Erik Satie, who despite obvious dissimilarities curiously resembles Beerbohm in his

habitual prankishness and penchant for ironic and parodic miniatures.

Beerbohm‟s subject-matter is however considerably wider than the above quotation from

Grushow suggests. He particularly distrusted utopian prophets: „Even if the War shall have taught

us nothing else‟, he wrote in 1918, „this it will have taught us almost from its very outset: to

mistrust all prophets, whether of good or of evil‟.13

According to Hall‟s biography, he considered

D. H. Lawrence as „afflicted with Messiahdom,‟14

and though he „knew and liked Wells,‟ he „had

no sympathy with his faith in science or his social idealism and utopianism‟.15

According to

Samuel Behrman, Beerbohm „shied away from lunacy not only in its violent forms but also in its

milder forms, one of these being utopianism. . . . He had a horror of utopians, a suspicion of “big”

ideas‟.16

As Beerbohm himself wrote in a manuscript epigram:

In a copy of More‟s

(or Shaw‟s or Wells‟s or Plato‟s or anybody‟s)

Utopia

So this is Utopia, is it? Well

I beg your pardon, I thought it was Hell.17

I: Wells, Shaw, and the Fabian Utopia

Both Wells and Shaw, as already mentioned, are featured in Revisiting the Glimpses, Beerbohm‟s

composite 1911 cartoon which depicts ranting men of letters. Beerbohm‟s estimate of Wells is

made explicit in his 1903 mock-heroic caricature bearing the caption: „Mr H. G. Wells and his

patent mechanical New Republic; and the Spirit of Pure Reason crowning him President. (View of

Presidential Palace in background)‟18

(Figure 2). Here a middle-class bowler hat is

Gibbons — 6

Figure 2: Mr H. G. Wells and his patent mechanical New Republic (1903)

lowered by a Heath-Robinson device onto the head of a squat and utterly undistinguished Wells

by an unlovely gaunt, sharp-nosed, high-domed and bespectacled figure incongruously clad in

neo-classical toga and rational-dress sandals who presses a token electric button. The equally

Gibbons — 7

undistinguished Presidential Palace in the cartoon is no more than a child‟s drawing of a

featureless „functional‟ nine-storey rectangle with small smoking chimneys. The „New Republic‟

is the one Wells envisioned in Anticipations (1902). The clear overall implication is that Wells

and his Fabian Society fellow utopians envisage a society in which they intend to be the new

ruling élite.

The caption of a 1907 caricature describes „Mr H. G. Wells, prophet and idealist, conjuring

up the darling Future‟.19

Gesturing like a stage conjurer, an equally Pooterish Wells reveals his

utopian future, which emerges via a stage trap-door as a sexless bespectacled figure in trilby and

pantaloons, holding in one hand a bespectacled near-foetal baby and brandishing in the other a

geometrical divider, which functions here, as it does in Blake‟s Newton (1795), as a symbol of the

„single vision‟ of scientific materialism.

A later caricature of Wells, reproduced in colour by Hall and dated 1931, is captioned „Mr H.

G. Wells foreseeing things‟.20

Here a rotund Wells in evening dress sits in an equally rotund

armchair staring at nothing and communing with himself with ineffable self-satisfaction, „terribly

at ease in Zion‟. Although the mechanically adjustable electric light to the left of the image

echoes, both visually and symbolically, the Heath-Robinson contraption of Beerbohm‟s 1903

„coronation‟ caricature, the satire here is far more understated and in its own way more lethal, as

the „progressive‟ Wells has now joined the Establishment and become a superannuated Club

Bore.

In „Perkins and Mankind‟, the title of Beerbohm‟s parody of Wells in A Christmas Garland

(1912), the commonplace surname „Perkins‟ is ironically juxtaposed with „Mankind‟ in order to

satirize Wells‟s grandiose utopian aspirations in Mankind in the Making. In Beerbohmn‟s text, the

Kipps-like Perkins is pessimistic about the future of the human race until he re-reads Sitting Up

Gibbons — 8

For The Dawn, „one of that sociological series by which H. G. W*lls had first touched his soul to

finer issues when he was at the ‟Varsity‟.21

Wells‟s reach-me-down prose and repetitive ellipses (. . .) are then accurately parodied in a

series of paragraphs discussing Laputan programmes for „the re-casting of the calendar on a

decimal basis‟ which will involve „the ten-day week, the fifty-day month, and the thousand-day

year‟.22

The regimented Wellsian society of the future is one of identical „human units‟ rigidly

organized by a class of Overseers: „What we must strive for in the Dawn is that every day shall be

as nearly as possible like every other day‟.23

Holidays being necessary, however:

„The solution is really very simple. The community will be divided into ten sections—Section A,

Section B, and so on to Section J. And to every section one day of the decimal week will be

assigned as a “Cessation Day”. Thus, those people who fall under Section A will rest on Aday,

those who fall under Section B will rest on Bday, and so on. On every day of the year one-tenth of

the population will be resting, but the other nine-tenths will be at work. The joyous hum and clang

of labour will never cease in the municipal workshops. . . .‟24

Sunday must disappear and Christmas Day will be replaced by the euphemistically named

General Cessation Day, when all citizens who have reached the statutory age-limit decreed by the

State must „voluntarily‟ commit suicide in the Municipal Lethal Chamber, first described in

Beerbohm‟s original parody of Wells in the Saturday Review for December, 1906:

„On General Cessation Day, therefore, the gates of the lethal chambers will stand open for all those

who shall in the course of the past year have reached the age-limit. You figure the wide streets

filled all day long with little solemn processions—solemn and yet not in the least unhappy. . . .

You figure the old man walking with a firm step in the midst of his progeny, looking around him

with a clear eye at this dear world which is about to lose him. He will not be thinking of himself.

He will not be wishing the way to the lethal chamber was longer. He will be filled with joy at the

Gibbons — 9

thought that he is about to die for the good of the race—to “make way” for the beautiful young

breed of men and women who, in simple, artistic, antiseptic garments, are disporting themselves so

gladly on this day of days. They pause to salute him as he passes. And presently he sees, radiant in

the sunlight, the pleasant white-tiled dome of the lethal chamber. You figure him at the gate,

shaking hands all round, and speaking perhaps a few well-chosen words about the Future. . . .‟25

In his famous short story „Enoch Soames‟, describing the Reading Room of the British

Museum on the afternoon of June 3rd

, 1997, Beerbohm fuses the „progressive‟ ideas of both Wells

and Shaw into a nightmare vision of this totalitarian future. The phonetic spelling used in 1997 is

Shaw‟s, as is the Jaeger clothing in which all the readers are clad. This „greyish-yellowish stuff‟, a

typical feature of the late-nineteenth-century „Rational Dress Movement‟, was the pseudo-

scientific „evolutionary‟ brainchild of Dr. Gustav Jaeger, and the fears of Beerbohm‟s narrator

about the Wellsian future are confirmed by Soames‟s reply to his questions about the readers‟

appearance:

„They all,‟ he presently remembered, „looked very like one another.‟

My mind took a fearsome leap. „All dressed in Jaeger?‟

„Yes, I think so. Greyish-yellowish stuff.‟

„A sort of uniform?‟ He nodded. „With a number on it, perhaps?—a number on a large disc of

metal sewn on to the left sleeve? DKF 78,910—that sort of thing?‟ It was even so. „And all of

them—men and women alike—looking very well-cared-for? very Utopian? and smelling rather

strongly of carbolic? and all of them quite hairless?‟ I was right every time.26

Not only have the humans of the future Wellsian super-state metamorphosed into the identical

hairless Morlocks of Wells‟s The Time Machine, but literature itself has been „nationalized‟: „Nou

that the littreri profeshn haz bin auganized az a departmnt of publik servis‟, writes T. K. Nupton,

Gibbons — 10

whose Inglish Littracher 1890-1900 was „publishd bi th Stait, 1992‟, „our riters hav found their

levvl an hav lernt ter doo their duti without thort ov th morro‟.27

„The whole thing‟, writes Beerbohm, „was a nightmare. Afar, the great grisly background of

what was in store for the poor dear art of letters‟.28

Despite the Jamesian pastiche of the diction

here, one can hardly doubt that Beerbohm was genuinely appalled at the coming era of state

servitude which he diagnosed and predicted well before Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World

(1932) and George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

*

Beerbohm‟s analysis of Shaw in his caricatures and parodies differs considerably from his

analysis of Wells. According to Hall, Beerbohm published no fewer than sixty-two caricatures of

Shaw: „Among the roughly 2,100 caricatures listed in the Hart Davis Catalogue a whopping 97

are self-caricatures—making Max himself his own favourite subject by a good margin. The

closest competitors are King Edward VII and George Bernard Shaw, with 72 and 62 entries

respectively‟.29

Beerbohm seems to have regarded Shaw as a far less sinister figure than Wells, treating him

on the whole as a comically grotesque personality or jester rather than satirizing his political

ideas. Of his numerous explicit comments about Shaw, the most cogent appears in a 1926 letter to

a friend: „It is very queer that a man should be so gifted as he is (in his own particular line nobody

has been so gifted, I think, since Voltaire) and so liable to make a fool of himself‟.30

Shaw is seen making „a fool of himself‟ in Beerbohm‟s 1909 caricature „Mr Shaw‟s Sortie‟

(Figure 3), which quotes the Bunyanesque last sentence of Chesterton‟s biography of Shaw and

depicts two Shaws with Chesterton gesticulating in his castle in the background. 31

One Shaw is in

clown‟s costume with megaphone and traditional red-hot poker, the other Shaw in Satanic-cum-

Gibbons — 11

Figure 3: Mr Shaw’s Sortie (1909)

Don Juan guise—perhaps alluding to Mr. Punch‟s concluding encounter with Satan in the

traditional Punch and Judy show.

Gibbons — 12

Concerning Shaw‟s „progressive‟ and Utopian ideas, however, Beerbohm‟s caricature of

1914 titled „Life-Force, Woman-Set-Free, Superman, etc.‟ (Figure 4) is singularly penetrating.

This unusually detailed pictorial image, reproduced in A Survey (1921), depicts a second-hand-

clothes shop in which the highly influential Danish literary critic Georg Brandes (1842-1927),

early champion of Nietzsche and other radical authors, appears as a Jewish merchant of Ideas who

is superciliously valuing Shaw‟s cast-offs laid on his counter. These garments have prominent

harlequin patches, while Shaw is wearing an outdated 1890s „artistic‟ wide-awake hat. The

dialogue runs as follows:

GEORG BRANDES (‟Chand d‟Idées): „What‟ll you take for the lot?‟

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: „Immortality.‟

GEORG BRANDES: „Come, I‟ve handled these goods before! Coat, Mr. Schopenhauer‟s;

waistcoat, Mr. Ibsen‟s; Mr. Nietzsche‟s trousers—‟

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: „Ah, but look at the patches!‟32

In A Christmas Garland, „A Straight Talk‟ parodies Shaw‟s polemical prefaces under the

sub-title „Preface to “Snt George: A Christmas Play”‟. This blusteringly recounts how the

dramatist shamelessly stole the traditional Dorsetshire mummers‟ play and reworked it as a

contemporary political allegory featuring himself as St. George, slayer of the Turkish Knight‟s

„three attendant monsters . . . representing in themselves the current forms of Religion, Art, and

Science‟.33

Despite the comic tone of the parody, Beerbohm does not overlook here how eugenics

programmes („scientific breeding‟) are central to Shaw‟s vision of the future; the dramatist

concludes:

In my nonage I believed humanity could be reformed if only it were intelligently preached at for a

Gibbons — 13

Figure 4: Life-Force, Woman-Set-Free, Superman, etc. (1914)

Gibbons — 14

sufficiently long period. This first fine careless rapture I could no more recapture, at my age, than I

could recapture hoopingcough or nettlerash. One by one, I have flung all political nostra

overboard, till there remain only dynamite and scientific breeding. My touching faith in these saves

me from pessimism: I believe in the future; but this only makes the present—which I foresee as

going strong for a couple of million of years or so—all the more excruciating by contrast.34

Beerbohm‟s overall view of „the shape of things to come‟, as envisaged by the socialist

Fabian Society, is epitomized in his 1914 caricature „Mr Sidney Webb on his birthday‟ (Figure 5),

reproduced in A Survey (1921). On the rear wall are two posters which indicate the minds of the

Figure 5: Mr Sidney Webb on his birthday (1914)

Gibbons — 15

socialist engineers. One represents Human Nature as a faint abstract Kandinskyesque diagram, the

other represents the propaganda image of THE STATE of the future as a wide-eyed vacuous doll

which is entirely at odds with the penal proceedings symbolically enacted below.

Here Webb, a kneeling adult-child, unpacks his new box of toy figurines and lines them up in

parade-ground fashion. Though equally stylized and anonymous, these are not the customary

wooden toy soldiers of tradition. Rather, they consist of two types: half are identical military

police and half are identical bowler-hatted civilians, who—passive and smaller than the police—

are standing meekly at „attention‟. Webb is lining them up in pairs, and with outstretched arm

each policeman is ordering about or arresting the citizen next in line. It is difficult to imagine a

graphic image which could more efficiently encapsulate the regimented twentieth-century Police

State as we have come to know it.

II: „Scientific Breeding‟ in Wells and Shaw

We get our first glimpse of the Wellsian technocratic utopia satirized by Beerbohm in the

pronouncements of the Artilleryman in The War of the Worlds (1898) and the tyrant Ostrog in

When the Sleeper Wakes (1899); both characters look forward to a world „cleansed‟ of its

„failures‟ and „weaklings‟. A few years later, in Anticipations, Mankind in the Making and A

Modern Utopia, Wells set out in detail his vision of a coming society ruled by a scientifically

trained aristocratic caste, a voluntary nobility he called „Samurai‟ in the last of these works. Wells

is at his most homicidal in the final chapter of Anticipations, where he enthusiastically anticipates

„good scientifically caused‟ torture as a punishment for crime, and, in order to encourage the

procreation of the strong and the beautiful, the „merciful obliteration‟ of the „unfit‟ together with

the total extinction of the world‟s „inferior [i.e. non-white] races‟.35

Gibbons — 16

Although Wells consistently uses such terms as „merciful obliteration‟ which imply

involuntary euthanasia, presumably by means of the lethal chamber, he seems not to have named

this device overtly. Similarly, Shaw in Man and Superman (1903) is at first reluctant to specify

the means by which society will „eliminate‟ alleged undesirables. „The Revolutionist‟s Handbook‟

appended to that play claims that there is only one solution: „The only fundamental and possible

Socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding of Man: in other terms, of human

evolution. We must eliminate the Yahoo, or his vote will wreck the commonwealth‟.36

However, in Shaw‟s case the actual means for eliminating criminal undesirables was soon

spelled out in 1905 in the preface to Major Barbara („we should . . . place them in the lethal

chamber and get rid of them‟37

) and in his preface to English Prisons under Local Government

(1922) by his fellow Fabian Socialists Sydney and Beatrice Webb: „Is it any wonder that some of

us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber for the hard cases . . . ?‟38

In 1910, in a lecture to the Eugenics Education Society, Shaw stated, according to the Daily

Express, that „a part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal

chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes

other people‟s time to look after them‟.39

By the year A.D. 2170, when humans have supposedly

begun to have a life expectancy of 300 years, this method of disposal will apparently have become

one of society‟s routine procedures. In „The Thing Happens‟, the third of the five episodes which

make up Back to Methuselah (1921), the Archbishop states: „We work partly . . . because if we

refuse we are regarded as mentally deficient and put into a lethal chamber‟.40

In his preface to On the Rocks (1933), Shaw draws particular attention to the „percentage of

irreclaimable scoundrels and good-for-noughts who will wreck any community unless they are

expensively restrained or cheaply exterminated‟, concluding that „it would be much more sensible

Gibbons — 17

and less cruel to treat him [a scoundrel of this kind] as we treat mad dogs or adders, without

malice or cruelty. . . . the essential justification for extermination . . . is always incorrigible social

incompatibility and nothing else‟.41

A similar utopian desire for complete social uniformity characterizes Wells‟s The Shape of

Things to Come, published in the same year as Shaw‟s On the Rocks. In this sociological „dream-

vision‟ of the future—narrated by „Dr. Philip Raven‟, who is little more than a stand-in for Wells

himself—„A New Phase in the History of Life‟ will have begun with the inauguration of the

world-wide Modern State in the year 2059 C.E. (Christian Era). Conscious socially directed

„eugenic effort‟ has finally achieved the „sublimation of individuality‟, so „the body of mankind is

now one single organism‟. Wells‟s conclusion differs little from his millenarian treatises earlier in

the century:

If this is neither a dream book nor a Sibylline history, then it is a theory of world revolution.

Plainly the thesis is that history must now continue to be a string of accidents with an increasingly

disastrous trend until a comprehensive faith in the modernized World-State, socialistic,

cosmopolitan and creative, takes hold of the human imagination. When the existing governments

and ruling theories of life, the decaying religious and the decaying political forms of to-day, have

sufficiently lost prestige through failure and catastrophe, then and then only will world-wide

reconstruction be possible. And it must needs be the work, first of all, of an aggressive order of

religiously devoted men and women who will try out and establish and impose a new pattern of

living upon our race.42

„The sublimation of individuality‟ and the imposition of a totalitarian „new pattern of living‟ by an

„aggressive order‟ of fanatics: these are precisely the things that Beerbohm warned against in his

extraordinarily perceptive satires of Wells and Shaw.

Gibbons — 18

III: Beerbohm and Pluto‟s Republic

Euthanasia, originally synonymous with „a gentle and easy death‟, had by the third quarter of the

nineteenth century been very significantly modified to mean „the action of inducing‟ such a death,

especially, according to the OED, „with reference to the proposal that the law should sanction the

putting painlessly to death of those suffering from incurable or extremely painful diseases‟. This

was the sense the term had for Annie Besant when she used it first in her anonymous pamphlet of

1875 titled Euthanasia and later in her collection of essays My Path to Atheism (1878). Besant

argues that it is our social duty to die voluntarily rather than become a burden on humanity;

indeed: „The life of the individual is, in a sense, the property of society‟.43

Written during Besant‟s

„Secular Society‟ period of co-operation with Charles Bradlaugh before she joined the

Theosophical Society in 1889, becoming its President two years later, this is an early example of

the „progressive‟ thinking that Beerbohm later satirizes in the „making way‟ ceremony of „Perkins

and Mankind‟, in which „voluntary‟ suicide has in fact become obligatory for all citizens.

The „lethal chamber‟ was the invention of the well-known and highly distinguished medical

specialist, pioneer anaesthetist, and sanitary reformer Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson (1828-

1896), amongst whose prolific writings is The Asclepiad, a quarterly „Book of Original Research

and Observation‟. In the 1884 volume Richardson describes his proposal in 1869 to the

R.S.P.C.A. to build a lethal chamber for the humane slaughtering of animals for food, the trial

model he constructed in 1878, and his successful version in 1884 that enabled the large-scale

destruction of unwanted and diseased dogs at the Battersea Dogs‟ Home in London.44

He lectured

on this topic to the Royal Society of Arts in December, 1884, and his Asclepiad paper was soon

republished in the United States in March 1885 in The Popular Science Monthly as „The Painless

Gibbons — 19

Extinction of Life‟. The OED records the first mention of the term „lethal chamber‟ in Punch in

1884 („A sort of Lethal Chamber and Cat Trap combined‟).

By 1895, in „The Repairer of Reputations‟, a supernatural (and metafictional) short story by

the highly popular American author Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933), municipal lethal chambers

had already been re-imagined into a state-sanctioned method of voluntary human euthanasia in the

coming century.45

The white temple-like buildings that Chambers describes, surrounded by lawns,

flowers and fountains, may indeed have been the literary model for the „pleasant white-tiled dome

of the lethal chamber‟ which is part of the satirical mise en scène in Beerbohmn‟s „Perkins and

Mankind‟.

As Dan Stone points out in „The “Lethal Chamber” in Eugenic Thought‟ (a chapter in his

extremely informative book Breeding Superman, which I cited earlier when discussing Shaw‟s

lecture to the Eugenics Education Society), Arnold White in an 1889 article which became part of

his highly influential Efficiency and Empire (1901) implies that the „lethal chamber‟ had already

begun to be discussed as a method for the involuntary eugenic extermination of human beings—

something Wells would crassly describe, in the final chapter of Anticipations, as the „merciful

obliteration of weak and silly and pointless things‟. Arguing that the enfranchised „unfit‟ are

unlikely to approve of their own State-assisted demise, White wrote as follows:

There is no sign of a reaction against the cant that loads the dissolute poor with favours, while

brave men and women who refuse to be proselytized prefer to die of hunger in a garret rather than

sue for alms. In changing our present methods, however, we must carry with us public opinion.

Flippant people of lazy mind talk lightly of the „lethal chamber‟, as though diseased Demos, half

conscious of his own physical unfitness, but electorally omnipotent, would permit a curtailment of

his pleasures or the abridgement of his liberty.46

Gibbons — 20

In 1913, according to Chesterton in Eugenics and Other Evils (1922), „eugenics began to appear

in big headlines in the daily Press, and big pictures in the illustrated papers‟.47

In his description of

„General Cessation Day‟ in „Perkins and Mankind‟, Beerbohm is undoubtedly commenting on

extremely widespread public concerns about eugenics and alleged „racial degeneration‟ which are

also apparent in the writings of authors such as D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. In a letter

composed when he was twenty-three years old, Lawrence wrote:

If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band

playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly; then I‟d go out in the back streets and main

streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they

would smile me a weary thanks; and the band would softly bubble out the „Hallelujah Chorus‟.48

In her 1915 diary Virginia Woolf made the following entry:

On the towpath we met & had to pass a long line of imbeciles. The first was a very tall young man,

just queer enough to look twice at, but no more; the second shuffled, & looked aside; & then one

realised that every one in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with

no forehead, or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible.

They should certainly be killed.49

Her odd use of the word „ineffective‟ here suggests the influence of White and Wells in their wish

to purge society of those who do not measure up to the required standard of „National Efficiency‟.

William Greenslade in Degeneration, Culture and the Novel (1994) and Donald Childs in

Modernism and Eugenics (2001) have shown, in rewarding detail, how these „foreground‟ topics

and their vocabulary permeate the writings of other major Early Modernist literary authors.

Sentiments such as Woolf‟s were also by no means uncommon amongst those who subscribed, as

Annie Besant did, to the equally widespread mystical and occultist doctrines which are

Gibbons — 21

characteristic of „progressive‟ thought during the period—eugenic measures were considered vital

for the future evolution of humanity towards a condition of pure spirituality or „cosmic

consciousness‟. As evolution generally and eugenics in particular came to be justified on the

grounds that they were scientific, so did spiritualism and allied beliefs gain apparent scientific

endorsement in the years following the foundation of the Society for Psychical Research at

Cambridge in 1882.50

The phrase „Pluto‟s Republic‟ in my section title above comes from the wide-ranging

collection of essays by that name that the late Sir Peter Medawar, the Nobel Prize winning

zoologist, published in 1982, in which he explored the „intellectual underworld‟ of the pseudo-

sciences. The prominent citizens of this dark republic „include all practitioners of “scientism”,

especially those who apply what they mistakenly believe to be the methods of science to the

investigation of matters upon which science has no bearing whatsoever‟.51

Medawar‟s critique of

Teilhard de Chardin‟s The Phenomenon of Man, a hangover from the „evolutionism‟ of the Early

Modern period, is particularly relevant to a consideration of the ideas that Beerbohm satirized in

his writings and caricatures.

Unlike so many of his extremely talented, intelligent and well-meaning avant-garde

contemporaries, Beerbohm was totally unpersuaded by such fashionable doctrines of his day as

collectivist socialism and eugenics. Beerbohm called himself a „Tory Anarchist‟,52

and while this

description may seem at first no more than a clever paradox, it in fact reveals his typically clear-

sighted knowledge of himself. As a Tory, Beerbohm had no starry-eyed millenarian illusions

about the possibility of changing human nature. And as an anarchist, he not only believed in

individual freedom but consistently defended it, with devastating wit and accuracy, against its

Gibbons — 22

authoritarian enemies. Beerbohm‟s fight with authoritarianism, like his commentary on vital

public issues of his time, has yet to receive its proper recognition.

1 Louis Kronenberger, ‘Max Beerbohm’, in The Surprise of Excellence: Modern Essays on Max Beerbohm,

ed. J. G. Riewald (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1974), p. 23. 2 F. R. Leavis, Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962), p. 21.

3 N. John Hall, Max Beerbohm: A Kind of a Life (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2002),

p.173. 4 N. John Hall, Max Beerbohm Caricatures (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 9.

5 Ibid., Pl. 50, p. 65.

6 Ibid., p. 148.

7 Ibid., Pl. 190, p. 200.

8 Ibid., Pl. 188, p. 197.

9 Max Beerbohm, More (John Lane The Bodley Head, 1899), p. 108.

10 John Felstiner, The Lies of Art: Max Beerbohm’s Parody and Caricature (London: Victor Gollancz,

1973), p. 169. 11

Lawrence Danson, Max Beerbohm and the Act of Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 22-23. 12

Ira Grushow, ‘Max Beerbohm,’ in G. A. Cevasco (ed.), The 1890s: An Encyclopedia of British

Literature, Art and Culture (New York & London: Garland, 1993), p. 49. 13

Beerbohm, And Even Now (London: Heinemann, 1921), p. 166. 14

Hall, A Kind of a Life, p. 224. 15

Ibid., p. 235. 16

As cited in Hall, A Kind of a Life, p. 235. 17

J. G. Riewald (ed.), Max in Verse: Rhymes and Parodies (Brattleboro, Vermont: The Stephen Green

Press, 1963), p. 54. 18

Danson, Pl. 22. 19

Hall, Caricatures, Pl. 48, p. 63. 20

Ibid., Pl. 49, p. 64. 21

Beerbohm, A Christmas Garland (London: Heinemann, 1921), p. 38. 22

Ibid., pp. 38-39. 23

Ibid., p. 40. 24

Ibid., p. 41. 25

Ibid., pp. 45-46. 26

Beerbohm, Seven Men (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1920), pp. 40-41. 27

Ibid., p. 43. 28

Ibid. 29

Hall, A Kind of a Life, 191-92. 30

Hall, Caricatures, p. 92. 31

Rupert Hart-Davis, A Catalogue of the Caricatures of Max Beerbohm (London: Macmillan,1972), p.

201. 32

Beerbohm, A Survey (London: Heinemann, 1921), No. 44. 33

Beerbohm, Christmas, p. 162. 34

Ibid., p.161. 35

H. G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and

Thought (London: Chapman & Hall, 1902), pp. 299-301. 36

Prefaces by Bernard Shaw (London: Constable, 1934), p. 185. 37

Ibid., p. 136.

Gibbons — 23

38

Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Prisons under Local Government (London: Frank Cass, 1963), p.

xxxii. Also Prefaces, p. 298. 39

Dan Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain

(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), p. 127. 40

Shaw, Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1939), pp.

156-57. 41

Prefaces, p. 358. 42

Wells, The Shape of Things to Come: The Ultimate Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 446. 43

Annie Besant, My Path to Atheism (London: Freethought Publishing Company, 1885), p.156. 44

Benjamin Ward Richardson, ‘Euthanasia for the Lower Creation—An Original Research and Practical

Result’, in The Asclepiad (London: Longmans Green, 1884), July, 1884, No. III, pp. 260-75. 45

Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories (Mineola, New York: Dover

Publications, 1970), pp. 23-24. 46

Arnold White, Efficiency and Empire (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1973), pp. 116-17. 47

G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils (London: Cassell & Co., 1922), p. 120. 48

D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: Vol. 1 (1901-13), ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 81. 49

Virginia Woolf, Diary, Vol. 1 (1915-19), ed. Quentin Bell (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), p. 13. 50

See Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago

& London: Chicago University Press, 2004). 51

Peter Medawar, Pluto’s Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 1. 52

Beerbohm, And Even Now, p. 185.