Goodbye to the gilded age
JOHN JACOB WOOLF is won over by an exploration of the Edwardian era, which looks beyond the golden-era cliché to find a nation beset by a sense of unease
Little Englanders: Britain in the Edwardian Era by Alwyn Turner
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The Edwardian era conjures images of country houses, tea on the lawn and long summer afternoons – an era where refined ladies and gentlemen indulged in garden-party gossip and a spot of croquet. Cultural productions such as My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins and Downton Abbey have suggested something of a golden age: warmth and cosiness sandwiched between the momentous Victorian era and the great global slaughter of the First World War.
The Edwardian era – named after the eldest son of Queen Victoria, the corpulent and lusty Edward VII – was a short one. In Britain there was less innovation than the previous century and things were arguably more stable too: the birth rate and death rate had fallen, so the population was older and households smaller. The era has also received less historical treatment than the epochs between which it sat; as such, Alwyn Turner’s Little Englanders: Britain in the Edwardian Era is a welcome contribution to an oft-overlooked period.
More than that, though, Turner smashes the mythologies of the age, painting a picture of an era undergoing significant social change – one with a dramatic and democratic beating heart that pumped out socially mobile politicians such as Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George alongside terrorist suffragettes, anarchists, socialists and revolutionaries. It was an age of profound unease: less imperial security, crippling strikes and a tangible sense that one epoch had ended and a new one was beckoning, but without a clear sense of what that would be.
In a remarkable yet accessible read, Turner takes us from music halls to the Boer War; from the mutoscope (an early motion-picture device) to motor cars; from pageants to the popular press; from Peaky Blinders to the Summer Olympics. We encounter eminent Edwardians such as Winston Churchill and the singer Marie Lloyd, and lesser-known characters such as George Joseph Smith who specialised in manipulating (and sometimes marrying) women, before inducing them to steal or murdering them and running off with their money. And Turner cracks open some of the great divides of the age, exposing divisions between the Liberal and Labour movement, tariff reform and free trade, votes for women and the status quo.
Although Turner argues that where the Victorians were outward looking, the Edwardians were introspective, he nonetheless shows how that inwardness accompanied an interest and concern in seemingly foreign affairs. This could take the form of the Chinese hand laundry – whose mothership opened in September 1900 and came with the promise that thousands of Chinese people would be imported to expand the laundry operations – through to a malicious concern with immigration levels that culminated in the Aliens Act of 1905. He shows us how the empire divided everyone from domestic politicians to music hall audiences as a pronounced anti-war sentiment spread through songs, literature and politics.
Indeed, what Turner does so well is capture the cultural landscape, treating us to the leisure, the stories, the songs and the movies of the era, illuminating Gaelic and Russian influences through to blackface solo performances. Ultimately, Turner paints a vivid picture of a tempestuous age: an emerging modern Britain battling for stability and order – and ultimately rushing towards the trenches on the western front.
John Jacob Woolf is a historian and co-writer of the Audible series Stephen Fry’s Edwardian Secrets and Stephen Fry’s Victorian Secrets
Turner smashes the mythologies of theage, painting apicture of an era undergoing significant social change