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 — 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.