Category: Books

David Trotter’s review in the LRB of the re-discovered and re-published novel, Two Thousand Million Man-Power by Gertrude Trevelyan was interesting enough such that I downloaded a copy post-haste. And I read it likewise. Not so the writing up, but then both the novel and the review encouraged some deeper reflections on my part.

Enough that Trotter begins: “Gertrude Trevelyan lived the Virginia Woolf dream: £500 a year and a room of one’s own in which to write experimental novels. […]” And enough that that room has been foremost on my mind (again!) during the last days.

Whilst now finding herself published as Gertrude T., the times in which the writer lived were such that this and her other works were originally put out in a frenzied world by the androgynous (sounding) ‘G.E.’. Whether this had been her own decision, suggested to or forced upon her, who could say, but it may well have been also a personal swipe at the dynastic overgrowth and the familial predilection to initials. Where exactly she, formerly known as G.E., fits into this constellation is anyone’s guess. To name but a few: there was that distant cousin (so says Trotter): G.M. Trevelyan. But also his elder brothers: C.P, who got the title and the middle brother R.C. – ‘BobTrev’ to his friends, including the Woolfs (this not mentioned by Trotter), and as ‘Bob’ frequently mentioned in Virginia Woolf’s diary and in her letters. It is, though, the first said, George Macaulay T., that gets the treatment in A Room of One’s Own – the preeminent historian of his time was after all just there for the blokes!

History scarcely mentions her. And I turned to Professor Trevelyan again to see what history meant to him […] Occasionally an individual woman is mentioned, an Elizabeth, or a Mary; a queen or a great lady. But by no possible means could middle-class women with nothing but brains and character at their command have taken part in any one of the great movements which, brought together, constitute the historian’s view of the past. […]She never writes her own life and scarcely keeps a diary; there are only a handful of her letters in existence. She left no plays or poems by which we can judge her. What one wants, I thought—and why does not some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton supply it?—is a mass of information; at what age did she marry; how many children had she as a rule; what was her house like, had she a room to herself; did she do the cooking; would she be likely to have a servant? All these facts lie somewhere, presumably, in parish registers and account books; the life of the average Elizabethan woman must be scattered about somewhere, could one collect it and make a book of it.

Virginia Woolf. A Room of One’s Own (Kindle Locations 547-555). Kindle Edition.

This comes after Woolf has unsuccessfully excavated G.M. Trevelyan’s History of England (1926) in search of women through the ages, mused that the contemporary student (of say Newnham) could do such research better than her, and then would be inspired to famously imagine that Shakespeare had a sister called Judith. (The part of the essay that everyone remembers!)

David Trotter claims in his review of Gertrude Trevelyan’s novel that the unusual – obscure, even – title of the book, divulging scant hint of the narrative to follow, derives from a chapter written by Ian Colvin in the final volume of a certain – also, obscure – Universal History of the World in 1927. There is little reason to doubt this. Only in the reading does the title make sense.

Having said that, I admit to some uncertainty as to the sense in which the novel was conceived and intended to be received. Does Trevelyan want to instruct, convert, persuade? Is she calling upon the reader’s good sense of being a citizen of the world – a common sense to navigate a society undergoing radical change? Or is it more personal than that – a work of introspection? An attempt to reconcile the sensory from within with the reality from without? This latter I find plausible – also imaginative and daring. Any wonder that I am undecided when the author may well have been herself, and is studiously tracing her changing perspective in this her chosen narrative.

It may be (as Trotter suggests) that Gertrude Trevelyan was thinking about something that could be broadly described as a novel of ideas – a philosophical tract on the social (dis)order arising out of the inherent (but surely not irreconcilable?) tensions between labor and commerce and, within that context, man and machine. And, then, found in the writing, her own positions were anything but fixed; shifting with the same tempo as the society about her; Trevelyan calling upon her own sensory attributes and experience to navigate through her own journey of rational discovery – in a literary sense – and illustrated well by her characters’ growing sensitivity to the pulsation of progress about them, the growing ‘noise’ of modernity.

[…]He goes home and has supper and lights a pipe while he waits for the wireless stations to close down at ten. He sits and smokes, feet on fender, and waits for the noise to stop. Twenty thousand new houses erected in one year, two hundred and seven persons killed in London streets in three months, wireless station, one of the world’s greatest, completed at Rugby, motor firm turns out forty-eight thousand seven hundred and twelve cars in 1925 against three hundred and thirty-seven in 1919, it is found necessary to install soundproof floors in a mammoth block of flats in Park Lane, the B.B.C. institutes a transmission of dance music until midnight — “dance music the backbone of British broadcasting” — every day with the exception of Sundays. Robert clenches his teeth and tries to concentrate: he thinks if he had Katherine there to keep him to it he might be able to get more done.

Trevelyan, Gertrude. Two Thousand Million Man-Power (p. 64). Boiler House Press. Kindle Edition.

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