The work of Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970) was immensely successful both during his long life, and then reaching a wide new audience through film renditions afterwards. `A Passage to India’ (1924) in particular has enjoyed a large and enthusiastic readership since its publication almost a century ago. Forster’s lightly held, liberal beliefs (it was he rather than Churchill that promoted the idea of democracy being a poor form of governance until it was compared to all the others, which came off even worse – see `Two Cheers for Democracy’), and an insistence, inspired by the work of the Cambridge philosopher G E Moore in his 1903 treatise `Principia Ethica’ of the primacy of human relations over all other values and priorities in life, were palatable to a diverse audience. Even in the 21st century, Forster’s short story, `The Machine Stops’ (1928) with its prescient prediction of a world where humans are almost entirely at the mercy of technology, and live in isolation from each other, speaks from the age it was produced in to one that is suffering precisely the fate he writes of.
Forster was born in London. His father, a Welsh architect, died when he was only two of tuberculosis. After initial schooling at Kent School in Surrey, he was sent as a day pupil to the long established public school in Tonbridge, West Kent. His time here is commemorated now in a theatre named after him.
Forster, according to one biographical account, did not particularly enjoy schooling, and while Kent School has been purgatory, Tonbridge proved a kind of Hell. `He had to bear with teaching and all other sorts of torture from some boys,’ Sunil Jumar Sarkar writes (in `A Companion to E M Forster, Volume 1, Atlantic Publishers, India, 2007, 18). Writing at the time to his mother he said, `I feel utterly wretched, I would like to come away. Everyone is against me…. I have tried to keep from breaking down but I could not help it, and all the boys have noticed it’ (quoted in Ibid, 19). Part of this was due to the ethos of the school – a typical, highly regimented Victorian style education, which valued collectivism over expressions of any sort of individuality. Part was due to the fact that the style of teaching, and its content at the time, offered little to really capture the imagination of someone of Forster’s intellectual interests and ambitions.
The fact that despite this the place did make an impact on his is testified to by the way it was to figure in `The Longest Journey’ (1907) as the model on which Sawston School in that work was based. In the second part of the novel, Forster writes of one of the houses of this school, Dunwood:
`A huge new building, replete with every convenience, was stuck on to its right flank. Dormitories, cubicles, studies, a preparation-room, a dining-room, parquet floors, hot-air pipes—no expense was spared, and the twelve boys roamed over it like princes. Baize doors communicated on every floor with Mr. Annison’s part, and he, an anxious gentleman, would stroll backwards and forwards, a little depressed at the hygienic splendours, and conscious of some vanished intimacy. Somehow he had known his boys better when they had all muddled together as one family, and algebras lay strewn upon the drawing room chairs’ (Forster, `The Longest Journey,’ Part Two, Sawston.
Throughout his time at Tonbridge, his biographer P N Furbank stated, he felt that `his depression made him stupid and torpid’ (P N Furbank, `E M Forster: A Life,’ Faber and Faber, London, 2008, 43). One attempt to escape the school led to him sitting the exam to go to the King’s College school in Cambridge, but all this led to was his enrolment, after two further years at Tonbridge. As Sarker states:
`Tonbridge School was authoritarian, tradition-bound, and prized esprit de corps, and Forster’s bitter life in that school prompted him to become anti-traditional, anti-authoritarian and anti-racial, and made him respectful of individualism.’ (Sarker, 20).
These attitudes at least contributed positively to his later work as a writer.
Tonbridge was also significant for another reason. It was here that he came to terms with his homosexuality. This was through an intimate relationship with another student there then, Reginald Tiddy. Tiddy may well have been the model for characters in both `Maurice,’ the novel about a homosexual relationship written in 1913-1914 but only published posthumously in 1971, and `A Passage to India’. Forster left the School in 1897, to attend King’s College, Cambridge – and embark on a far happier period of his life. But his sexuality was to prove an issue of lasting sensitivity, particularly in view of the fact that until he was almost an nonagenarian that the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 decriminalised sex between consenting males over the age of 21 in the UK.