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Professor John Carey shows how early twentieth-century intellectuals imagined the ‘masses’ as semi-human swarms, drugged by popular newspapers and cinema, and ripe for extermination. Exposing the revulsion from common humanity in George Bernard Shaw, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, W. B. Yeats and other canonized writers, he relates this to the cult of the Nietzschean Superman, which found its ultimate exponent in Hitler.

Carey’s assault on the founders of modern culture caused consternation throughout the artistic and academic establishments when it was first published in 1992.

Review: Carey, John. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939

This iconoclastic account of the attitude of intellectuals towards popular writing in the sixty years from 1880 to the Second World War is at times brilliant and at other times unfair. As an opponent of snobbish exclusiveness Carey does a hatchet job on literary idols, such as TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf and HG Wells who all evince a contempt for the ‘masses.’ But while Eliot and Woolf look down on the ordinary man, Wells is in fact from the ordinary working class and his New Republic is obviously fantasy, a Hitlerian vision of a gentrified holocaust in which the weak are eliminated. Carey is unfair to Joyce too, stating that Bloom ‘is expelled from the circle of the intelligentsia.’ He blames Joyce for rigorously excluding people like Bloom from reading an obscure book like Ulysees. I can see Poldy in retirement being fascinated by it. He is intelligent and enquiring enough. In any case, who in the novel belongs in this magic circle? Stephen perhaps?