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Malcolm Bradbury wrote in the 1960s in his essay “Two passengers to India. Forester as Victorian and Modern”: “There have not been many English novelists of our own time, who have established with us the second function, but E.M.Forester is certainly one of them, he has served as an embodiment of the virtues he writes about.” (Malcolm Bradbury, 2005:123).
This comment supports Forster’s reputation. Compared with other writers in his contemporary, his production not only provides art but also provides value. In order to understand the value of his work, it is necessary to distinguish between the fiction and the non-fiction. He produces most of his major fiction in the 1900s–1910s and his best essays are produced in the 1930s–1940s. His fiction is entangled with a different set of contexts. David Bradshaw in his book The Cambridge Companion to E.M. Forester says “Forester believes strongly that it is–and his views have borne upon the value that he attached to the two kinds of writing for which he becomes so well known, and the stance that he assumes in relation to his work as a critic.”(David Bradshaw, 2007:34).
In addition, his characters’ nature is the reflection of humanism. Bette London in her The Appropriated Voice: Narrative Authority In Conrad, Forster and Woolf (1990:156) has discussed Forster’s liberalism, and explored in very different ways, its weakness and limitations as an intellectual vision. His liberal ideas, the humanness owns a lot to Wedd. During his first year in College, Forester makes the acquaintance of Nathaniel Wedd, who made a great influence on his literary thoughts. When he is eighty in an interview he says that, “it was Cambridge that first set me off writing. And in this very room where I am now there was at one time my tutor, a man called Wedd, and it was he who suggested to me that I might write. He did in a very informal way. He said in a sort of drawling voice ‘I don’t see why you should not write.’ And I being very different was delighted at this remark and thought, after all why shouldn’t I write? And I did. It really owns to Wedd and to that start at Cambridge that I have written. I might have started for some other reasons.” Besides Wedd, Morgan spent time with the future academics, writers Lytton Strachey, John Sheppard, Leonard Woolf. Without these intelligent friends’ influence, Forester would unlikely have become a writer. They gave him confidence in his own abilities and his intellectual development also deserved to their encouragement. And once he says in his Two Cheers for Democracy that: “Liberalism praised benevolence and philanthropy, had little color-prejudice believed that inpiduals were and should be different, and entertained a sincere faith in the progress of society.”(Forster, 1965:55).