Summer's end

Britain’s pre-war years are troublesome for the historian. Poised between the conclusion of one war in South Africa in 1902 and the onset of another in Europe 12 years later, the period has been historically labelled the ‘Edwardian age’, although perhaps this is stretching a point. Strictly speaking, the so-called ‘Edwardian era’ ended with the death of Edward VII in 1910 and the succession of his son, George V. But historians have understandably refrained from calling these years the ‘Edwardian–Georgian age’, preferring to associate this time with Britain’s first twentieth-century male monarch, mainly in the interest of simplicity. This era is popularly remembered as one long, leisurely summer: an image nourished largely by the conspicuous consumption of Britain’s wealthier classes, whose sumptuous abodes, weekend shoots and what Harold Nicolson called ‘an unlimited addiction to food’ set new standards in vulgar opulence. ¹ Politically, the period was dominated by the Liberals, who won a famous landslide election victory in 1906 and formed the government that would take the country to war in 1914. Their main opponents, the Conservatives, still remained an electoral force. They won a second term of office in 1900 and, despite a mauling at the polls in 1906, had, by 1910, staged a remarkable political recovery and stood every chance of defeating the Liberals in 1914. Nevertheless, both parties, as products of an older, rigidly hierarchical and patriarchal political and social order, struggled with the rising demands from more representative groups – the industrial working classes and, of course, women. The upshot was a Britain that sank into what Elie Halévy described as an age of ‘domestic anarchy’: when Victorian liberal values collided with an ambiguous Edwardian modernity expressing itself most dramatically through social reform, constitutional change, industrial militancy and belligerent feminism. ² Some commentators have suggested that such tensions pushed Britain towards major social upheaval by 1914, to be saved only by European conflict. ³ Subsequent studies are more sceptical. ⁴ If anything, Edwardian Britain was, according to H.G. Wells, suffering from a case of ‘badly sprained optimism’: anxious about itself, its status and its power in the new twentieth century. ⁵