British Labor Conditions And Legislation During The War

In its focus on the empty conventions of the upper classes, The Good Soldier anticipates the novels of Henry Green. In a sense, the era itself is poisoned. Throughout the novel, the date August 4 recurs as a motif: it is the day of Dowell and Florence's marriage, as well as the day of both Leonora's maid Maisie Maidan's and Florence's death. August 4th also dates the onset of British involvement in the Great War (and by a curious coincidence, the Franco-Prussian War, as well). As Paul Fussell has shown, the Great War changed the thinking of a whole generation from idealism to cynicism, requiring a new language to record the movements of a society that sacrificed so much for so little. Or, as Philip Larkin writes in «MCMXIV»: "Never such innocence again." The Good Soldier's title is laced with irony. Just as modernism existed in the decade following 1910, however, signs of social unrest in Britain predate the war. Labor reform, mass education, suffragism, and other movements all challenged what Samuel Hynes has called "the Edwardian garden party." The upper classes, confronting a changing world they little understood, either lolled or languished ...»