Ford Madox Ford, The Simple Life Limited

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The Simple Life Limited

(1911) is one of two satirical novels written by Ford under the pseudonym “Daniel Chaucer”. The other is

The New Humpty Dumpty

(1912). Both these texts offer penetrating insights into the nature of social engineering and the dangers of utopian thinking, and both reflect Ford's troubled mindset in the years following his departure as editor from

The English Review

. In particular,

The Simple Life Limited

explores the politics behind the ideal of the Simple Life that had grown out of a complex amalgam of the thought and writings of Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Ruskin, Henry David Thoreau, William Morris, and Walt Whitman. Given credence by the nineteenth-century agrarian socialists (on both sides of the Atlantic divide) and popularized by the Arts and…

1317 words

Citation: Waddell, Nathan. "The Simple Life Limited". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 16 November 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=28508, accessed 19 March 2024.]

28508 The Simple Life Limited 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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