Art and Criticism in the Machine Age: The Tyro

This chapter explores Lewis’s second editorial venture, The Tyro, a magazine which formed one component of a much broader – though largely unfinished – satirical science-fiction project, postulating a future society of ‘Tyros’, living in caste formation on a distant planet. This chapter examines this distinctly professionalist critical project in relation to Harold Perkin’s sociohistoric analysis of the ‘professionalisation’ of British society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For Perkin, the professional project is bound up with the processes of industrial rationalisation, the corporatisation of state and business interests, and the evolution of a ‘professional ideal’ (privileging knowledge, expertise, and human resources). Across the Tyro project, Lewis reflected upon these processes and transformations. This chapter considers the influence of the scientific management movement, and the already mythologised figure of Henry Ford, upon Lewis’s thought, casting the world of the Tyros as a professional utopia (or dystopia), organised along syndicalist lines. In this respect, the Tyro anticipates The Art of Being Ruled, in which Lewis went on to formulate a proposal for a particularly noxious societal system, an occupational caste system; a disquieting vision which is explored and traced here – in varying ways – across the work of a number of contemporary critics.