ABSTRACT
In the years after the Liberal election victory against the Conservatives in 1906, G. K. Chesterton and a number of anti-imperial writers began to popularise many of the conceptions of England and Englishness which had been developed over the previous two or three decades. As both journalist and critic, Chesterton was never treated with too much seriousness by his fellow intellectuals, and his eminence came to be tarnished too with charges of anti-semitism, despite his denials to the contrary. The earlier Gothic ideal in architecture began to be displaced by a more self-conscious moral pastoralism and a search for the life and culture of villages. The moral reaction to Victorian industrialism was significant for its identification with an English national ideal rooted in a mythic past. The Darwinian writer Grant Allen, whom Wells later held to have been an important influence on his own thought, depicted in a popular survey of English county history.
