“… the very soul of the world is economic”: the Liberal Aesthetics of Howards End and the Portrayal of Leonard Bast

At a London railway station bookstall in 1903, E. M. Forster purchased a copy of the inaugural issue of Independent Review journal. Upon opening it, he felt that a “new age had begun” (Forster 1934, 116). Summing up the Review’s political perspective, Forster said that “[i]t was not so much a Liberal review as an appeal to Liberalism from the Left to be its better self” (115). This “Liberalism from the Left”, or New Liberalism as it was better known, aimed to be more ethical than its classically Liberal predecessor through the introduction of welfare schemes such as unemployment insurance and better housing for the poor. By analysing the fragments, working notes and manuscripts associated with Howards End (1910) alongside the published version of the novel, my paper aims to reveal how Forster’s affinity towards New Liberalism influenced his portrayal of the lower-middle-class insurance clerk, Leonard Bast, as he drafted his novel. From initially being rendered as a lothario and opportunist, Bast evolved into a lowly office worker, who is sympathetically depicted as a victim of laissez-faire liberal economics and at risk of falling into an abyss of poverty through no fault of his own. This article ultimately reveals that Forster’s delineation of Bast is more compassionate than some critics have argued, but it is a compassion which is obscured by what Forster refers to as his “failure of technique” in the published version of the novel (Wilson 1993, 32).