Howards End by E. M. Forster
First published 1910
Category: Modern Classics

This was probably the wrong book to read at the tail end of an exhausting week. I might have appreciated E. M. Forster’s prose better if I had been less weary. Then again, maybe not. Forster really is a brilliant writer, particularly in his portrayal of his characters, but he also has this habit of addressing the reader directly to explain some social issue or interpersonal relationship. Despite the many times I had to go back to re-read a passage my eyes had skimmed past, I didn’t feel like I was missing much from those sections. And then I’d get into a section of dialogue I couldn’t stop reading. Overall, I think Howards End is more successful as social commentary than as novel.

Howards End is a story about rich and poor, upper and lower classes, and the intersections between them as English society moves from the Victorian to the Edwardian era. The upper classes are represented by the Wilcox family: wealthy, successful, politically conservative, unashamedly not intellectual. The lower classes are represented by Leonard Bast, a dreamer and poet who wants to be well-read and genteel, but continually falls short for reasons even he doesn’t understand. The two classes are bridged by Margaret and Helen Schlegel, genteel women with some financial independence who represent the intellectual liberals of society. The Schlegels meet the Wilcoxes on holiday and hit it off; they meet Bast at a music recital when Helen accidentally takes his umbrella; Bast and Mr. Wilcox become connected when Mr. Wilcox advises the Schlegels to tell Bast to leave his job at a supposedly unstable company.

At its heart, the book is about the duty the haves bear toward the have-nots of society. Because of Mr. Wilcox’s advice, Bast quits for a less-well-paying job with the potential for advancement, only to be fired six months later when the new company downsizes—while meanwhile the first company never fails, and even becomes stronger. Helen Schlegel’s position is that Mr. Wilcox bears a financial and moral responsibility to Bast because the upper classes have a duty not to make the lot of the lower classes worse. Mr. Wilcox argues that Bast took his chances just the same as anyone and that treating the poor with more generosity than he would a peer is unthinkable. While I sympathize more with Mr. Wilcox’s position—Bast’s situation stems from far more than his loss of employment—his callousness toward Bast’s fate is something the Schlegels are in the right to challenge. The question “How can we help the poor?” is central to the novel, but neither the Schlegels nor the Wilcoxes truly understand that the first step in the process is to stop thinking of them as a class separate from their own. As an snapshot of England’s divisive class system, Howards End is exceptional and sad, though I question whether Forster intended it that way.

I enjoyed the book, but it’s definitely not pleasure reading for me. Something that surprises me as I make my way through the 121 book list is how much variety there is among books written in a particular time period. Students of English literature in particular get in the habit of tossing around labels like “Victorian literature” or “post-industrial fiction” as if the time period is a mold that turns each book into an identical block of fiction. Yet the differences of style and content between, say, Dracula, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and King Solomon’s Mines, written within a single ten-year period, is dramatic. Howards End was published only five years after The Scarlet Pimpernel, if you want an even starker difference. As good a writer as Forster is, Howards End shows how the concerns of a particular era may not stay relevant to later generations.