Economic Ideas and British Literature, 1900–1930: The Fabian Society, Bloomsbury, and The New Age Adam Trexler* Queen Mary, University of London Abstract This article argues that economic ideas were a fundamental shaping force for popular and avant-garde writers between 1900 and 1930 by giving an overview of three economic movements and connecting these ideas to literary experiments. The first section traces the impact of Fabian socialism’s economic ideas on George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, and indicates a number of other Fabian writers. The second section describes the creation of an academic orthodoxy in economics, and then explores how Bloomsbury’s intellectual climate produced the interrelated phenomena of Keynes’s economics, Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops, the Hogarth Press, and Virginia Woolf’s literary innovation. The final section documents Ezra Pound,T. S. Eliot, and Katherine Mansfield’s involvement with the ideas of the radical economic journal, The New Age, and suggests connections between these ideas and the writers’ formal experiments. By tracing these intellectual networks, a number of historical connections between the economic problems of this period and the present emerge, indicating exciting directions for new research. Introduction The historical period between 1900 and the stock market crash of 1929 was characterized by a number of economic events that shaped the contemporary world. In England, this had something to do with the rapidly changing political climate: in the late Victorian period through 1928, a series of reforms extended suffrage to working class men and then women. This created a new climate of popular politics, in which the two party system of conser- vatives and liberals was broken up by the introduction of the Labour party and then the disintegration of the Liberal party. Both before and after World War I, there were struggles to decide whether the Labour party would be radically socialistic or agreeably electable. Outside of parliament, it was a period of great labor unrest, and radical economic theorists were challenging the justice of ‘employment’ and wages as a coercive moral system. 1 This would lead to calls for practical economic reforms like nationalized unemployment insurance, health insurance, a minimum wage, and more radical calls for the abolition of ‘employment’ as a mode of production © 2007 The Author Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 862–887, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00445.x