SOURCE: "The Last Victorian Novel: Technique and Theme in Parade's End," in Twentieth Century Literature Vol. 18, No. 4, October, 1972, pp. 271-84.

In the following essay, Heldman contends that the progression of the fiction techniques used in the four novels in Parade's End represents the transition from Victorian to modern writing.

In a letter to Percival Hinton in 1931, Ford Madox Ford wrote: "I think the Good Soldier is my best book technically unless you read the Tietjens books as one novel in which case the whole design appears." The most complete description of that "whole design" had appeared in his 1925 dedication of No More Pardes to William Bird: "Some Do Not—of which this one is not so much a continuation as a reinforcement—showed you the Tory at home during war-time; this shows you the Tory going up the line. If I am vouchsafed health and intelligence for long...