Dissidence by Design: Literary Renovations of the "Good Taste" Movement

This dissertation examines the literary responses to the British “good taste” movement in the work of Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and John Betjeman. Bolstered by the increased prominence and influence of design experts in the early-twentieth century, critics and designers sought to improve public taste in Britain. The didactic and rhetorical strategies these taste reformers employed gradually convinced Britons that their nation, which lagged behind its European neighbours in accepting modern design, was in the throes of a “taste crisis.” The increased authority of design experts, the public enthusiasm for decoration, and the growth of the market for household goods led not only to a widespread fascination with design, but also to the formulation of an increasingly narrow and orthodox definition of “good taste.” I analyze these authors’ critical and literary writing, relying, in many cases, on their unpublished or neglected work in order to reveal the development of their taste theories. I argue that these writers, dissatisfied with what they perceived to be the “good taste” movement’s stultifying and homogenizing effects, produced a “dissident” taste theory in reaction to the consensual and codified notion of “good taste.” Chapter One considers Huxley’s often overlooked role as the editor of House & Garden magazine in the context of his early fiction and his gradual conversion to mysticism. Chapter Two examines the architectural novels of Evelyn Waugh, noting, in particular, the inherent tensions he navigated between modernity and tradition, Philistinism and theory, theology and aesthetics. Chapter Three studies John Betjeman’s roles as critic, poet, guide-book writer, and preservationist, charting the development of his tastes from international modernism to local eclecticism. Rather than accepting the easy distinctions between “good and bad” taste, Huxley, Waugh, and Betjeman—themselves so often criticized for being unyieldingly absolute in their worldviews—attempted instead to articulate a “taste between,” one that fused the aesthetic, ethical, and psychic components of taste in an imaginative spectrum, rather than an orthodox system.

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