The Captain of Industry in British literature, 1904-1920

grantor: University of TorontoIn this thesis, I examine fictional representations of the Captain of Industry by six major modern writers, especially in the light of Carlyle's conception of this figure as hero for the spiritually and politically troubled England of the nineteenth century. I begin the Introduction with a discussion of 'Past and Present' (1843), in which Carlyle proposes the Captain of Industry as the best qualified figure for filling a perceived leadership vacuum and saving the nation from the "Chaos" set in motion by the Industrial Revolution. Next, I look briefly at the careers of several actual "Captains of Industry" who addressed themselves to the kind of social, moral, and political tasks that Carlyle saw as urgent and who may well have served him as living exemplars of the ideal figure he sought to conjure up by his writing. I then turn to literature of the years leading up to the period during which my six authors wrote, to see how Victorian writers responded to the ideal of the industrialist/businessman as social hero. The undercurrent of scepticism that I find gaining strength in these works by Carlyle's contemporaries and their immediate successors is taken up and given full vent by the early modern authors who are the subject proper of my thesis. Even the one text I examine that seems to celebrate the Captain-of-Industry figure--Shaw's Major Barbara--seeks to revise Carlyle's mid-Victorian model, while my other central texts are clearly part of a sustained critique of the leadership potential of this heroic quasi-archetype. Writers see around them a world of crisis, and capitalism as part of that crisis, not the solution that Carlyle hoped it might become. My authors focus on the visionary, military, nautical, and political connotations with which he had endowed the heroic Captain-of-Industry figure, only to show them sadly or tragically lacking. After examining Shaw's 'Major Barbara' and 'Heartbreak House' with its searing spirit of wartime disenchantment, I look at Conrad's sombre scrutiny of the Captain of Industry in the post-colonial setting of 'Nostromo', Galsworthy's 'Strife and The Man of Property ', Forster's 'Howards End', and Wells' ' Tono-Bungay'. I end with a discussion of D. H. Lawrence, who, I suggest, rings the death-knell of the Captain of Industry as a figure of literary interest in 'Women in Love'--a repudiation that begins clearly in the second half of 'The Rainbow', is reinforced and completed in 'Lady Chatterly's Lover' and is commented on in many ancillary discursive texts as well as the play 'Touch and Go'. While attending to their different approaches and emphases (as well as their critical interest in each other), I focus on my authors' common cause in interrogating and rejecting the Captain-of-Industry figure. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)Ph.D