The Strange Death of Liberal England

by George Dangerfield

At the beginning of the twentieth century England's empire spanned the globe, its economy was strong, and its political system seemed immune to the ills that inflicted so many other countries. After a resounding electoral triumph in 1906, the Liberals formed the government of the most powerful nation on earth, yet within a few years the House of Lords lost its absolute veto over legislation, the Home Rule crisis brought Ireland to the brink of civil war and led to an army mutiny, the campaign for woman's suffrage created widespread civil disorder and discredited the legal and penal systems, and an unprecedented wave of strikes swept the land. This is a classic account, first published in 1935, of the dramatic upheaval and political change that overwhelmed England in the period 1910-1914. Few books of history retain their relevance and vitality after more than sixty years. The Strange Death of Liberal England is one of the most important books of the English past, a prime example that history can be abiding literature. As a portrait of England enmeshed in the turbulence of new movements, which often led to violence against the pieties of Liberal England—until it was overwhelmed by the greatest violence of all, World War I—this extraordinary book has continued to exert a powerful influence on the way historians have observed early twentieth-century England.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, British Literature, European History, Ireland, Edwardian

364 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1935

Reviews

[Feliks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding and superb. One of the most enjoyable and fun works of history I've ever encountered. Especially considering the very 'difficult' and cumbersome timeperiod the author chooses to exhume for us.

If you ever wish to try to make sense of Victorian/Edwardian England, here is the book for you. Its beyond grasping how Dangerfield presents such a mastery of his topic with such authority. You couldn't ask for better--it's as if he was there. Instructive and sagacious in large, heaping measure.

What kind of research must he have undertaken? What kind of journalism? And then, how to weave it all into an understandable narrative? How many years did it take to craft this rich, overflowing study--which is at the same time uproariously funny as well as sober, purse-lipped, cautious, and restrained?

And then the prose. English diction and finely-turned idiom is presented here, the like of which one rarely sees. Sheer joy to the fan of articulate expression. There are choice sentences and gleaming pearls-of-phrase in this work which will thrill you. You know..this is the way books all used to be written. Formally, meticulously. This was what all authors used to pursue as their style. Think of it.

I have to suggest that this kind of achievement is of a sort that no one writing today could even come close to matching. I serve notice to our entire modern culture. Are we 'making progress'? We can't do what this man did with his simple pen, pad, and typewriter. This is an academic barrage which puts us to shame.

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

When was the last time you laughed out loud while reading a history book? Yep, that’s what I thought. Well, this book did it for me. The topic, of course, is not funny; George Dangerfield explains how early England had a Cerberus of its own—the Tory Party, the Women’s Suffrage movement, and the Worker’s rebellion—which caused the downfall of the Liberal Party...oh, with some help from the party itself. (I must say that the Tory Party digging in to refuse to work with the Liberal Party during this era seemed somewhat contemporary; history does repeat itself.)

No, what’s funny is Dangerfield’s dry sarcasm; even though he ultimately lived in the U.S., he was born and schooled in England, and the tone is very English...as well as flowery and poetic, as is the language of many of the classic historians. It’s a gorgeous book to read, and—believe it or not—gripping; there are scenes that are written with an immediacy that made me feel as if I were there.

It doesn’t hurt, of course, that I love the pre–World War I period of English history and Dangerfield showed me how much I didn’t know about it; his writing this history at the time he did—this history was published in 1935, just about twenty years after the events he describes—also offers a perspective that we don’t often experience. The book ends with the death of Rupert Brooke in 1915, and a lofty and beautiful paragraph:

“...with his death one sees the extinction of Liberal England. Standing beside that moonlit grave, one looks back. All the violence of the pre-war world has vanished, and in its place there glow, year into backward year, the diminishing vistas of that other England, the England where the Grantchester church clock stood at ten to three, where there was Beauty and Certainty and Quiet, and where nothing was real. Today we know it for what it was; but there are moments, very human moments, when we could almost find it in our hearts to envy those who saw it, and who never lived to see the new world.”

The italics are mine; as dated as this view is, this is what I think of when I think of England and English history...the beauty and quiet of an unchanging England. Totally wrong, of course, but it never ceases to make me smile.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really, really beautifully written. Dangerfield has the English way of erudite irony, subtle sarcasm, and witty understanding of the complexities of history and human nature. I'm just gaga for that kind of thing.

This is an elegant book, for sure. The only problem was, as it is with a lot of history books for me, that I kind of had to take his word on the people he references. I know that's sort of my problem- I can't expect him to show me EVERYTHING and not have me perish from exhaustion- and the effect is probably better enhanced when you already know about Asquith, etc. But....

I gotta say it really took me out of the book and I can't honestly give it more stars since it became rather dense and confusing for me as reading experience. I couldn't learn enough about what he had to tell me to absorb the poetry and insight he had to offer. Sometimes, as in when he's writing about the woman's movements or maybe the Black and Tans or the poets of prewar Britain, the prose started to sink in effectively.

So three stars for me, but if you already know a bit about England's history in the years leading up the first world war (who the players are and the basic outline) this book will be a gorgeous piece of history, absolutely, for sure....

Christopher Hitchens said that it was one of his top three favorite books and called it a 'tone poem of a book' which is part of the reason I read it and it definitely didn't disappoint in that regard....

Also, why is this out of print? I'm not worthy to take in its wisdom, surely, but it really was beautifully written and I'd like to actually read it again but all the editions are rare...NYRB, get on this!

[Tyron Surmon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an interesting one. It is almost a trope in Britain of there being a kind-of fetish for our political and constitutional system, the fact of it lasting for x many hundreds of years meaning it is obviously the best etc. This book highlights how, from the perspective of the years before the First World War, our whole system was on the verge of collapse, and we are actually very lucky that the war happened. Without it it is very likely we would have had civil war in Ireland at the same time as the biggest general strike Britain never had at the same time as the ever-increasing violence of the suffragette terrorist campaign. Maybe I've missed something obvious, but in all my years of studying British politics, I've never come across this argument, despite it being written in 1930, so whilst I'm not sure what place it has in the historiography on the topic nor how well it is viewed by scholars, the book is very much worth a read.

[Nooilforpacifists · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is rich in ideas, abstractions and issues unacknowledged for years (the book dates from 1937). For that, alone, it is fascinating. But, there are glaring flaws. Its treatment of the suffragettes is downright venal. Most praise its prose style, but I found it repetitive and distracting--the satire and meanness hid clarity. What, for example, does this mean:

"To reduce the Liberal Party to a definition would be like attempting to reduce the glandular contours of a circus Fat Lady by simply talking her thin."

For the sudden loss of prosperity of England's lower classes, he blames the "new financier, the new plutocrat [with] little of the responsibility which once had sanctioned the power of England's landed classes." In truth, the issue was the gold standard, which, since the discovery of South African gold, subjected the Pound to fantastic price inflation.

The writing does improve in the second half, e.g.:

"The instinct of the British worker was very active in 1910. It warned him that he was underpaid, that Parliament--left to itself--would keep him underpaid; it told him that good behavior had ceased to have any meaning; it asserted that he must unite at any cost."


"When political democracy itself is being questioned--blindly, perhaps, and instinctively--and when so anomalous figure as David Lloyd George thrusts himself into the debate, a simple conundrum will very likely be asked. When is a friend of the people not a friend of the people? And the answer would appear to be: when he is a Cabinet Minister."



But ultimately, the book fails to prove its case: what caused the downfall of "liberal" England? The author only glancingly addresses the eclipse of the Liberal party by Labour. Instead, he provides disconnected narratives about the House of Lords veto, labor strikes, the age-old Irish Question, and -- most oddly, in the Epilogue -- the life of poet Rupert Brooke. The closest thing to explanation I understood was that the workers ran away with the Trade Unions, and perhaps the violent suffragettes with the more peaceful distaff side. Or, perhaps the author means to lay blame (paraphrasing Home Secretary McKenna's autobiography) on:

"the sad effects on society of the invasion of industrial millionaires and Rand magnates and Jews and American heiresses, who found their way into the most sacred enclosures of Cowes, Ascot, and Convent Garden."


So English liberalism died of democracy. R.I.P.


P.S. -- It didn't escape me that the author means to say that the aristocracy ceased to represent the people. But anyone who's read Jeeves knew that.

[Ari · Rating 5 out of 5]

This might not be the grandest or the most insightful history I have ever read (although it is insightful). It is, however, one of the best-written, and by far the most irreverent. Dangerfield's basic premise is that the Liberal party came unstuck because of a general upswelling of raucous rock-the-boat energy, particularly focused on Ireland, women's suffrage, and labor unrest. However, the book is not a straight-line "A caused B" account of events; rather, Dangerfield wants to give the mood of the period, and capture some of how people felt and talked. I much appreciated this.

I also enjoyed that the book was written in 1935. Winston Churchill appears prominently (he was a senior cabinet member, and was even Home Secretary for a while) -- but he appears as "eccentric politico", not as savior of his country. "Churchill...pursued the lifeline as whole-heartedly as any man in England. ..It took all of Mr Churchill's activity -- of which he fortunately possessed his full share -- first to get himself within range of the precious light, and then to hold it on himself for any appreciable length of time; and the English political scene was therefore bedazzled with sudden unpredictable flashes, in which Mr Churchill would be discovered in an attitude at once humorous, arrogant, and comic." (p87)

[Matthew Dambro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful under rated classic. It was ignored when it appeared in the 1930s because the author had moved to America and became a magazine editor. He was not an academic and he was very dismissive of standard English mythology. The volume is brilliant. It is a masterpiece of acerbic wit and historical analysis. His weaving together of the strands of labor, feminism and Ireland are nothing less than astonishing. It is so well written that academic historians immediately suspect the author of laxity or insufficient research. This is truly how history should be written.

[Lauren Albert · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book moved between a three and a four. I think his writerly ways did not always make for clarity of content. I really liked his chapter on the suffragists and I learned a lot from his discussion of the worker's movements, especially the miners. His political section with its discussion of unionism was the weakest, at least for me. I had a hard time following it and while some of it was due to my own lack of knowledge, some was definitely a kind of writerly fog.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite book...ever.

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This isn't a 'fun' read. It's a fulfilling one though if you're interested in the topic.

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a good read. Such a nice overview of four pre World War I British political and constitutional crises. The book may have some renewed relevance for America today.

[Zmkc]

The Strange Death of Liberal England attempts to cover the shifts in UK politics that took place in the years just before the First World War. George Dangerfield's thesis is that our view of the years before 1914 as a time of glorious, innocent perfection is completely and utterly wrong. What he sets out to demonstrate is that, rather than the First World War shattering a beautiful, ordered calm, the conflict actually came along just in time to prevent chaos - precipitated partly by Suffragettism, partly by unionism and partly by the question of Irish Home Rule - from engulfing Great Britain. "The great General Strike of 1914, forestalled by some bullets at Sarajevo, has slipped away into the limbo of unfinished arguments" Dangerfield tells us, adding that there might have been a civil war in Britain, but "these events have expired, unborn in the enormous womb of history."

Dangerfield nominates the year 1910 as his starting point, because it is "a landmark in English history, which stands out against a peculiar background of flame". He goes on to explain that his book "is not a record of personalities but of events", but he is deluded in this statement, as his book provides exactly the opposite of what he claims. As a result, while I remain fairly confused about the sequence of events Dangerfield attempts to chronicle, particularly those relating to Irish Home Rule, I have emerged from his book extremely grateful for the new and wonderfully vivid portraits he provides of the personalities of the time.

In fact, Dangerfield's perceptive and witty descriptions of personalities are what make this book so good. For instance, who could not laugh at Dangerfield's characterisation of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman as:

"an elderly and rich Presbyterian whose three passions in life were his wife, the French nation, and his collection of walking sticks"

or his summing up of Lloyd George as:

"less a Liberal than a Welshman on the loose"

Thanks to Dangerfield, Asquith, who has been a familiar name to me all my life, is now a living figure in my mind. Dangerfield describes him as:

"a man extravagantly moderate … moderately imperialist, moderately progressive, moderately humorous, and, being the most fastidious of Liberal politicians, only moderately evasive", a man who "had the sort of character which is so often found in the Senior Common Rooms of Oxford and Cambridge - that is to say, he was almost completely lacking in imagination or enthusiasm", a man with "a bland and weary face, in which frankness and reserve had long fought themselves to a standstill", who displayed "a certain lack of ardour, which often comes upon men who have given their youth to the Bar".

Mr Arthur James Balfour, one time Prime Minister and Conservative Leader, is another statesman who is now vivid in my imagination, thanks to Dangerfield - who through his conjuring of Balfour's character, (which in tone reminds me of Dickens's wonderful skewering of the Veneerings and their ilk in Our Mutual Friend), also summons up a whole, vanished milieu:

"...to ... Balfour, politics was little more than a serious game. He played it with the faintly supercilious finesse which belongs to a bachelor of breeding, and with a bitterly polite sarcasm which was quite his own. He had entered Parliament originally from that mixture of duty and idleness which made an English politician of the old school: in other words, because he could neither fight, preach, nor plead. In Westminster, being a member of the Cecil family, he was at least assured of a hearing.

He had become one of the more eminent of English philosophers at a time when English philosophy was at its lowest ebb: he pursued his speculations with the same earnestness and skill which he gave to golf, tennis, and the arrangement of dinner parties. He loved music, never got up till late in the morning, nor had ever been known to read a newspaper. He doubted everything on principle, but had never thought enough of life to distrust it. He was attractive, easy, and, as the years grew on him, fearless.

In his youth he had been known as 'pretty Fanny'; and indeed in those far days he looked rather like an attenuated gazelle. But with advancing age his face came more and more to resemble an engaging, even a handsome, skull: it carried into drawing-rooms and debates a skull's special property of hollow mockery its eternal memento mori - which, since Mr Balfour was always affable and lively, gave him an air of mystery and even of enchantment.

Nobody had expected much of him when he first entered Parliament; but he had developed such a sinewy and subtle dialectic, such a knowledge of Parliamentary tricks such a display of every quality except passion and leadership, as delighted his friends and not infrequently confounded his enemies".

Mr FE Smith, a close friend of Churchill, leaps from the page with similar clarity and brightness:

"He was tall, dark, slender and a little over-dressed. His eyes and hair were lustrous; the first from nature, the second from too much oil. His mouth had always a slightly contemptuous droop, his voice was a beautiful drawl. He had acquired, not diligently, but with too much ease, the airs of a fox-hunting man who could swear elegantly in Greek. Many people loved him, most distrusted him, some despised him, and he despised almost everybody".

Partly thanks to a visit to Marienbad in 2015 , I was already familiar with Edward VII's appearance, but I will be forever in debt to Dangerfield for explaining how that king appeared to his subjects and what his appeal was, given how different from our own very popular monarch his character was:

"Edward VII represented, in a concentrated shape, those bourgeois kings whose florid forms and rather dubious escapades were all the industrialised world had left of an ancient diviniity: his people saw in him the personification of something nameless, genial and phallic, the living excuse for their own little sins. ...He was never tyrannical, he was never loud, or ill-mannered; he was just comfortably disreputable.”

Dangerfield's book was written well before the Second World War, and so the man who was later to become the greatest leader of the twentieth century is seen from a less reverent perspective than our own. Dangerfield describes Churchill as "a man of strange inconsistencies", with a "chequered career", a man who "pursued the limelight as wholeheartedly as any man in England". Amidst this to us – or at least me - rather shocking irreverence, however, he does concede that it was Churchill, not Lloyd George who introduced unemployment insurance having "with characteristic clairvoyance [foreseen] its necessity when he was still President of the Board of Trade". Perhaps in that reference to 'characteristic clairvoyance', Dangerfield is unwittingly conceding that there is something special about the man he is describing and therefore showing himself at least partly prescient about the capacities that Churchill would later display.

When writing about collectives, Dangerfield demonstrates a similarly witty acuity to that he employs in resurrecting long forgotten individuals. For instance, he describes the House of Lords as "a horde of hereditary nobodies, possessed with a gentlemanly anxiety to do the wrong thing" and sums up the English gentleman as: "a species of creature which often behaves in a dutiful and disinterested fashion, but is also capable of more eccentricity than all the gentlemen in Europe combined".

In a remark that may have relevance to Great Britain and its reasons for wanting to leave the EU, Dangerfield observes that: "Free Trade had been an article of British faith - whether Liberal or Conservative" adding with a refreshing honesty about his fellow countrymen, their motivations and their illusions about themselves, "To Englishmen ... it represented that combination of the ideal and the profitable which is peculiarly English."

The clarity and humour of Dangerfield's writing was reason enough for me to keep reading, but what makes the book especially intriguing is the fact that the political period it covers seems to have been as chaotic as the times the United Kingdom has been passing through recently. The first hint of this comes in the introduction, when Paul Johnson refers to the consequences of the Lords' revolt in 1909, explaining that:

"it opened a period of relentless political warfare, in which the normal courtesies of parliamentary life were abandoned and London society split into two hostile camps".

It is hard not to think of the current state of Remainer/Brexit polarisation in London today, while reading this sentence.

Further on in the text, Dangerfield's description of the 1910 election sounds very like the last one conducted by Mrs May, as does its result:

"After a month of very dull electioneering, the country went to the polls in small numbers and recorded a lethargic opinion. As a result, the Liberals were so reduced, and the Conservatives so swollen, as to be almost equal in numbers: the Irish and Labour parties held the balance of power"

Meanwhile, in Dangerfield's summing up of the motivations of those defending the rights of the House of Lords, there are glimmers of the romantic impulse at the heart of many people's decision to choose Brexit:

"This venerable House of Lords was not simply a constitutional relic of the grat landed fortunes; it was also a fetish it meant the ideally paternal responsibility of the noble few. And though this meaning was quite irrelevant to the twentieth century, yet those who tried to preserve it were not merely idle men or arrogant men. They saw the passing of certain values which at their best were very high and at their very worst were very human; they did not realise that life consists in change, that nothing can stand still, that today's shrines are only fit for tomorrow's cattle. Clinging to the realities of the past, they prepared to defend their dead cause to the finish"

Additionally, when Dangerfield talks of "the familiar, serene incompetence of the Cabinet in 1914" I defy anyone not to think of recent UK Cabinets.

Lastly, it is impossible to read about the conference opened by the King on 21 July, 1914 in Buckingham Palace, whose vital question was "should Ulster be excluded simply for a period of years, or should it be excluded forever", without recognising that some things never change.

Dangerfield's decision to conclude the book with a close look at Rupert Brooke, who he characterises as emblematic of the pre-war period, seems something of an anti-climax, but he does mount a good argument that Brooke's vision of "the England where the Grantchester church clock stood at ten to three, where there was Beauty and Certainty and Quiet" was escapist and entirely unconnected with reality. Whether the yearning of a large part of Britain's population for escape from the European Union was fuelled by a dream of a similar Britain, it is hard to know. If it was, then disappointment beckons, if Dangerfield is right in his belief that the Brookean vision is and always was an illusion, for, if that is the case, it will presumably turn out to be an illusion in the future as well.

Someone I met shortly after beginning to read The Strange Death of Liberal England described the work as "a masterpiece of directionless irony". While I think it is a bit of a masterpiece, I would quibble with the idea that it is ironic – sardonic is the word that more accurately captures its tone. And, while on the whole Dangerfield seems perceptive and his judgments accurate, one claim he makes, namely:

“it is the genius of the English people always to raise up an appropriate man to suit every crisis"

doesn't seem, in the early 21st century, to be borne out by fact. Let us hope that Dangerfield's judgment in this matter is only temporarily wrong.

[Esther O'Neill · Rating 5 out of 5]

A victorious party and its leaders gifted with supreme confidence, governing a nation supposedly at the peak of its global power... The House of Commons dazzled by star performers, top of the bill being the ' Terrible Twins', Churchill - then a Liberal, and Lloyd George - a future Prime Minister whose notorious far from private life only enhanced his popularity. Divided into three parts, the first section of this outstanding history is disturbingly short, only forty-nine pages. Part II, Hubris, presents an almost familiar narrative with style, and often chilling understanding. Disaffected workers, abused and excluded women, demanding far more than the vote, political and religious conflict in Ireland... The past is an all too familiar country.

[Milo · Rating 5 out of 5]

If his argument is obsolete, and this is the fair assessment of sometimes tedious men, then do not speak the whole work into obsolescence. Dangerfield himself says it: ‘Facts are not the only, nor the most important, consideration with [the social historian]. Social history, like history itself, is a combination of taste, imagination, science, and scholarship; it reconciles incompatibilities; it balances probabilities; and at last it attains the reality of fiction, which is the highest reality of all.’ Therein we might fault Dangerfield in his science – his science itself a mystic denial of science – but we cannot take from him these other attributes of a fine history. History is not merely to prove the past, and its etiology, but to summon it; to light a torch as memorial, and see within its flames another time and another people. If Dangerfield cannot adequately explain why the United Kingdom brushed with the ashes in the latter 1910s, he can certainly express its feeling, its mood, and the characters wheeling about therein. These are not subordinate characteristics in a history. In certain respects they are distinctly undersold. Simon Heffer’s great many pages on the same details are, I would range, a little closer to the material truth (and what would Dangerfield have done with the knowledge of Asquith’s mistress? Rewrite the entire text?), but never can he access the secret fire limited to those great literary minds; Heffer is a journalist with a penchant for history – as, I would riskily suggest, are most historians, save the academics, who are so dingily theoretical as to render the past a series of conceptual potentialities for increasingly outre theories of knowledge, of perspective, and all the things that thicken the glass between the now and the then. Not, I should hastily append, a useless appetite, but certainly one of an almost incompatible type to Dangerfield’s fine prose, his verve for those unknowable facts of the past. The certain glint of the Thames at ebb-tide; the mysterious feature of a certain face; the Grantchester clock at ten to three. All these things magnify the work, make of it not merely a record, a latter day chronicle, but a great encomium to the written form: Dangerfield knows that to understand a time one must not simply know it, or crack it at its seams, but engage in some emotional response thereto. I do not know Grantchester, nor its clock, nor any significance in the time being ten to three, and yet that image fills me with all the universe of Old England, of an ancient church, of families milling on a Sunday afternoon, of a fantasy-world destroyed by an overplus of reality. That is the contradiction of the Edwardian sunset: there was no Edwardian sunset, there was no garden party doomed by German guns, but rather German guns saving the mucked-up remnants of what the English would like to consider a pleasant suppertime. As for Dangerfield’s overweening argument, that aforementioned obsolescence, it is perhaps unsurprising that such prose and such attitude should produce it. It exists in many versions through the book, and I will quote just one:

Is it possible that governments, even democratic governments, respond not merely to the opinions but to the deepest, the most hidden feelings of the countries they govern? That those sudden decisions, which so often surprise us in history, are due less to ministerial whimsy than to some unconscious and almost unimaginable prompting of the whole people? Could it be that representative governments actually represent, and represent in a most subtle and mysterious way?

Therein lies Dangerfield’s great idea, one so great that it cannot possible delimit itself to the maudlin antics of pre-war Britain. That it is not evidence, but absence of evidence that proves the unconscious presence of some unseen cause. A general feeling, a mutual psychology, a rejection of ‘security’ that sounds not in according to any material cause or want, but a nationwide discontent with the particular turn of that particular day. The women can no longer, in good conscious, be women; the workers cannot be workers; the lords cannot be lords; the liberals cannot be liberal; and the unionists cannot be unionist. It seems a nation quite suddenly, and remarkably, turned upside down: could there be any possible explanation for a society that, at an apparent hat-drop, commits overall suicide? Of course the romantic pen-nib must sketch out these words. I think any Marxist worth his shoes would loudly answer YES to Dangerfield’s hypothetical, and if not with quite the same spleen, all other historians would shortly join the muster. The shift in the late 1910s was not a sudden, inexplicable twist of the neck but (as Dangerfield essentially implies through the text) the result of accumulated tensions; the wages of the Victorian achievement. It is said that London poverty was at its absolute nadir not in the Dickensian 1800s, but rather in those later, sun-stroked days of Edward and George; so too did the distance between the wealthy and the poor expand; so too did other nations provide an example of a better way; so too did organization grow up and, by its appearance, expand therefore. That many things appear to be happening at once is, then, remarkable, but the existence of a remarkable situation does not in itself require the appearance of a general Volkgeist to unite all peoples (the low and the high) in mysterious and wanton rebellion against a status quo that is unpleasant if not profoundly changed from the earlier (and apparently placid) past. Such a geist is implied by Dangerfield in one passage: ‘Somehow or other the Constitution, that mysterious and powerful ghost, has taken all the credit – purloining with imponderable fingers the very laurels from his brow.’ And in such a sentence – with imponderable fingers! – Dangerfield restores all his wonder. If the argument-of-absence is perhaps illegitimate in the realms of stern history, perhaps we better admit it instead to the literary sphere; a tempting mass-psychosis that, in terms more poetic than prosaic, seeks to explain the mass change of society by means quite beyond the measuring stick. That a society can be swept up by some inner feeling, a mutual realization – unarticulated – that there must be a new world, and that rampant disobedience (which counts as much for the Sufragettes as it does Edward Carson) might shake such a thing into being. The moribund Liberal Party can only watch this fiery purlieu, aware or not that this fire seeks to deny the very foundation of their being. That the demise of the Liberal Party was pronounced by its particular composition and its enormously poor fortune seems a less romantic angle rarely taken by men of a literary mind higher than Simon Heffer; Heffer proves his worth. But all that seems quite out of bounds for this special book; really a joy, a total wonder in the reading. Who else might make of the circuitous constitutional crises of the pre-war British parliament a work of actual, genuine beauty? With an ending so madly genius, so otherwise unprovoked, as to make of the whole thing a kind of secret lament for a gone – for a non-existent – age? Heffer’s book will crest and fall, Dangerfield’s will live forever.

[Kathy Kattenburg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never read a work of history before -- and this is an excellent one -- that feels like a novel by George Eliot. The writing in The Strange Death of Liberal England, by George Dangerfield, is exquisite, and the events and personalities are compelling. Dangerfield writes about the years 1910 to 1914, when the Liberal Party governed England. Those few years were profoundly significant: they were a time of social and economic upheaval when three issues -- Home Rule in Ulster (Northern Ireland), labor rights, and women's suffrage -- all convulsed England simultaneously. The book begins with the death of Edward VII -- and with him the Edwardian period -- and the accession of George V (grandfather of the current Queen Elizabeth). It ends with the start of World War I. The last dozen or so pages are a deeply affecting Epilogue about Rupert Brooke, the (very) young English poet whose life was cut short -- as the lives of his entire generation of young men were -- by the War To End All Wars -- which, as we all know, not only did not end all war, but ushered in a century of war that continues in the 21st century.

The brief life and too early death of Rupert Brooke is moving on its own, but Dangerfield's use of Brooke as a kind of metaphor for his entire generation, and for the England that never more existed after 1918, intensifies the pathos. I felt tears pricking behind my eyes all through it.

[Peter Jakobsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robust in expression, odd in organisation, this elegy on a political party of the 3rd-way has lasting value. The best part (a study of Sir Edward Carson's fight against Irish Home Rule) shows how extremism always triumphs (in the end).

The 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising reminds us of the eternal marriage of hope and disappointment.

Ah, the Edwardian period, and its hopeful ripples beyond, a Golden Age, when the British Empire enjoyed a seemingy endless decade of tea and scones, village cricket, sensible novels and the White Man’s Burden. By the time the Liberals had been shredded by militant unions, suffragettes, Irish nationalists, the rise of militants, the Great War and the nation state, it became clear that the fruits of Queen Victoria had been maggotted by the worms of extremism, never to ripen cleanly again.

Dangerfield’s book is audacious in selecting key exhibits and presenting them in support of his thesis, bolstered by keen common sense and robust, limpid prose. It is a pleasure to return to this book, even if (pace Gatsby) you can’t return to the past. Liberal values of free trade, world peace and evolutionary reform could never compete with the coming firestorm, leaving it in ashes. From then on, England swung between the polarities of Tory and Labour.

[Brigitte Dale · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is outdated and reflects the misogyny and prejudices of an era that, though nearly a century in the past, continues to inflict pain on our own time. Read this with a critical eye and more than a grain--perhaps an entire ocean--full of salt. Published just eight years after women were finally granted universal suffrage, Dangerfield's bitter bias is hard to miss. If you're looking for a comprehensive overview of Liberal England, this is NOT the book to read. If you're looking for insight into the glaring biases of white male privilege in the 19th and 20th century, read on.

[Mir · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dangerfield argues that Liberalism was moribund by 1909, unable to accomodate the new working class electorate. The 1910 flare-up was "long smouldering the English spirit" and by 1913 Liberalism was definitively done.

This is the type of historical study that makes more sense if you're familiar with the field and see how it fits in amoung other historiographic arguments. Relevant scholars: Jalland, P Clarke, Pelling, McKibbon

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now I know that experts in the field (or indeed well informed laymen) have issues with some of Dangerfield's conclusions. As indeed do I - some of them seem a little too full of mid-20th Century psychology to be reliable. But that (which can be rectified by wider reading) fades away when one considers that this is history as it SHOULD be written: with narrative flow and beautiful prose. We don't write non-fiction books like this any more, and that is a crying shame.

[Michael Macdonald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fantastic history book focussed, detailed, witty and sarcastic. This is history at its best as Dangerfield elegantly unpicks the various forces that unwound Liberalism's moment of triumph. A gripping account of the divergent forces within Edwardian Liberalism and how social change can fundamentally change politics.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best things I read for my qualifying exam. Believe it or not, this book is hilarious.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow--this is history written as literature--An amazing book on the pre-World War I era in Britain.

[Meg · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite for-class reads of all time.

[Cath Holden · Rating 2 out of 5]

Slow

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

An astonishing achievement in historiography

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those classics of popular history that bob up on superlative lists and in the used book market every now and again. Dangerfield was editor at Vanity Fair when this was written, and it makes sense when you read it. Its question is an interesting one- how did the Liberal party go from a dominant force in British politics for centuries to an also-ran remainder in the early twentieth century? Dangerfield frames his answer around three “great rebellions” that started up around 1910, as the Liberals were riding high, and were only interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. These were a Tory rebellion against normal parliamentary procedure complete with threats of violence if parliament instituted Home Rule in Ireland; the women’s rebellion, meaning the campaigns of the suffragettes; and the worker’s rebellion, an outbreak of strikes and lockouts that roiled the country at the time.

It’s a Vanity Fair view of history in that it views the whole thing through the lens of personalities. This works comparatively well in terms of the parliamentary wrangling between Liberals and Tories, where it was really down to a few personalities. It got a lot less so once the Tories began appealing to Ulster unionism, and the framing is still more inadequate when dealing with the suffragettes and the labor movement. Dangerfield insists on reading the suffragette movement through the psychology of the Pankhurst family, never mind that ideological differences made a huge difference even within that family unit, as Sylvia became more socialist and her mother and sister did not. Roughly the same is true for the labor movement and figures like Jim Larkin, though there’s a little more attention paid to ideas like syndicalism, mostly as a noxious infection from abroad. Inevitably, the psychology he reads on to these movements is of the abnormal kind. While he stresses that he doesn’t disagree with, say, women’s suffrage or other progressive notions, he still depicts anyone working towards them as unbalanced. He lingers luridly on outbreaks of collective fury, like strike violence and the suffragette’s window-smashing campaign.

Dangerfield maintains ironic distance from liberalism. But he sees the arrangements that surrounded liberalism in the nineteenth century — relative quiet from the lower orders, politics as a game between gentlemen, etc. — as preconditions for a sane, sensible politics. This of course has gone completely out the window when he was writing on the thirties. I don’t think it’s laziness that led Dangerfield to personify and psychologize the movements the way he did (though it’s a lot easier writing about prominent personalities than to try to get a grip on who makes up a movement). I think it’s a natural outgrowth of an ideological tendency to dismiss the actors in mass movements as an unknowing, undifferentiated mob. In short, social movements deserve social history, not warmed over great-man (or great-scary-woman, like in his version of the suffragettes) stuff. **’

[Isabella · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book, just as I love the time period that Dangerfield depicted. I cannot judge it by how accurately it narrated historical details since I am no more proficient than the author, but his beautiful, poetic, and romantic writing style has won my heart by the first line.

Starting with Halley’s Comet, this amazing book ends with a poet. How did Liberal England die between 1906 and 1914? To put it in a nutshell: the fight of the Upper House, the Tory Rebellion on Irish Home Rule, the Women’s Rebellion for votes, and the syndicalist trade unions.

My favorite part is actually the first, namely, the fight over the Parliament Act 1911. It is miserable and even a bit absurd when watching the Lords debating the most dignified way of death: “Shall we perish in the dark, slain by our own hand, or in the light, killed by our enemies.” And they chose to diminish silently in the dark. The English aristocracy, the ancient, respectable, and responsible English aristocracy, committed a sublime political suicide by the dawn of the twentieth century. I cannot help thinking about Labour’s recent plan to remove the remaining hereditary peers. An Upper House is a check of power, a link to the past, and one of the three elements of the English Constitution. Oh, the English Constitution! Where is it? After all, I choose to believe in Tocqueville: the Parliament, which makes laws, also makes the Constitution, so how can an Act be unconstitutional?

This book brings me back to a year ago when I was attracted by works describing the early twentieth century: Zweig’s “The World of Yesterday,” Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day,” Eksteins’ “Rites of Spring,” and so on. This is indeed a poetic period. The smoldering glow of the Long Nineteenth Century--the decent and secure society, the French-speaking elegant diplomats, the romantic imagination of Empires, the freedom of trade and market, the zenith of classical liberalism--was still lingering around the horizon. Civilized Europeans, not awakening from intoxication, drinking its last brightness, only discerned a weak glimmer of an earthquake among the vagueness. But the gunshot of Sarajevo relentlessly broke the remaining spell, pushing the enlightened world into the rivers of blood of the twentieth century. The flesh of Marne, the corpse of Verdun, and the brutality of the October Revolution buried the Long Nineteenth Century, buried its beauty, romance, and liberty.

Death and rebirth, decency and rebellion, today and yesterday, illusion and reality, sunlight and mist...the moonlit grave of Liberal England.

[Richard1955 · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is much to recommend this beautifully written book about the Edwardian period in England - leading up to the War. Opinionated histories written by conservatives - true conservatives - are rare. The author is one who did not share any of the Liberal Party's shibboleths (since Russell, let alone Gladstone) of earnest progress in a democratic, free trade, middle class, non-conformist religious and ever more prosperous world. And Dangerfield takes a great romping, literate, malicious, very humorous delight in showing how that world of assumptions/ambitions crashed due to wildly emotional, irrational and rebellious movements that the very optimism of the Liberal perspective had aroused.

Dangerfield first portrays - in edge of the seat excitement - the hilarity and the poignancy of the last ditch opposition of the peers who adamantly refused to assent to the diminution of their own power. Then Dangerfield turns to the movements of the unprivileged - the suffragettes, organized labour, and the Irish - each of which rose in utter uncompromising ferocity with their own demands, and yet worse for the Liberal government, their own extreme actions. The Liberals felt forced into actions they were horrified to contemplate - brutal suppression of workers' strikes, force-feeding tubes for suffragettes, suppression in Ireland.

Dangerfield chortles at the Liberals' discomfort, growing loss of control, fury at their circumstances - but still mocks (hilariously) the rebellious --personally, politically and socially.

The book is a tour de force. Riveting, truly politically incorrect, by turns scornful and withering - and then putting the reader's fear of true anarchy in play.

And then - as all is collapsing - and utter and imminent chaos seems rather certain - a war begins in Europe - and domestically, all is frozen. It's a great counterpart to reading Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower about the same period (though she doesn't cover England in nearly the depth - concentrating on the Lords' rebellion - and she examines matters in Germany, Russia, France and the United States).

[Willy Marz Thiessam · Rating 5 out of 5]

So to put it neatly, the argument has been that the First World War destroyed the peaceful and harmonious world that existed in England and the Empire generally before it occurred.

This book argues effectively that the Great Britain and the British Empire's entry into the First World War was partly due to the fact it was lead by a dying and unworkable political order. It was on the edge of civil war and revolution and it had both an outdated economic system as well as a political order unable and unwilling to embrace necessary change. The order that could have kept the country out of the war had vanished and could no more prevent itself from embracing disaster than it could continue as it was.

A general strike was inevitable by September 1914 and terrorist campaigns had successfully brought the government to compromise and capitulate over female suffrage. In Ireland the army no longer was obedient to the civil authority, two distinct groups of Irishmen were arming themselves for an inevitable clash and the opposition parties openly and publicly supported this development. There was physical violence in the House of Commons and a paralysis of government business due to an inability of the different houses of parliament to work with each other.

Everything was either overextended, over due for change, outdated or simply broken as regards the central pillars of political authority. The only thing that united the country was a war. No party could work together unless it was to bring forth a disaster, which it did.

The methods that the Tory party and the Ulster Unionists employed to prevent change were begun at this point between 1910 and 1914. There tactics of reaction have continued to malign and prevent another modern country emerging.

All this and a picture of a dying world is in this book. Dangerfield has given us a classic that defines one of the most important moments in the history of Great Britain and the World.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an exciting read, written with energy and humor, about a crazy time in UK politics, when the ruling Liberal Party muddled through four significant crises of which three had significant constitutional implications -- women's suffrage, the Irish push for Home Rule with the resulting army mutiny and stripping of power from the House of Lords (so I'm counting it as two crises), and the wave of strikes that swept the country. The personalities are closely and affectionately observed and the story is satisfyingly told, but what's missing from the book is a theory of why it was this set of crises that led to the death of the Liberal Party. The author doesn't rate any Labour party leaders particularly highly, and yet by the time the dust had settled after the war Labour had solidly taken over from the Liberals as the party that the Conservatives traded turns in power with. Why did that happen (instead of the UK turning into Canada with a large centrist party often squeezing out both the left and the right)? The book doesn't really address it, and you reach the end having greatly enjoyed the ride and educated about a lot of interesting issues of the time, but none the wiser on what purports to be its central question.