Alwyn Turner is known for writing wittily about recent eras of British history, with popular culture placed to the fore. Here, he delves further back in time, to that poignant interlude between the death of Queen Victoria and the start of the first world war, when a sort of stodgy calm coexisted with a growing sense of insecurity that seems, in retrospect, entirely justified.
His description of the man who gave his name to the era provides a foretaste of his droll style. Edward VII was “a very different proposition” to his mother, Queen Victoria, “a well-upholstered yet less weighty figure, more cavalier and more public, like a latter-day Henry VIII, though with multiple mistresses rather than wives”. He could play the banjo, Turner informs us, having been taught by the black Canadian musician James Bohee. “In his world, ‘Diamond Jubilee’ tended to refer to a racehorse that he owned, winner of the Triple Crown in 1900…”
Here, Turner implies, was a fitting monarch for this unheroic age, described by John Buchan as “rather an empty patch”. Technological innovations were few, compared with previous decades. Progress was on more democratic and egalitarian lines. Herbert Asquith, the Liberal prime minister whose government introduced national insurance, was “the first premier not to have a country estate”.
The “frontier days” of empire were over; even the murderers were more prosaic, Turner suggests. Instead of Jack the Ripper, the Edwardians had the weedy suburbanite Dr Crippen, perpetrator of a “conventional murder” – but one pored over unprecedentedly in the newspapers. The unusually vivid police description of Crippen – “throws his feet out when walking… shows his teeth much when talking” – was, Turner argues, “tailor-made” for the rising popular press, especially Alfred Harmsworth’s Daily Mail, which “changed journalism” by concerning itself with (as the novelist Philip Gibbs wrote) “life, passion, drama, the human heart”, rather than solemnly recording the actions of statesmen.
Harmsworth helped make this an age of sensation, an “age of advertisement”. He employed the crime novelist and self-publicist Edgar Wallace as a star writer. Asked to come up with something to serve Harmsworth’s campaign against the high price of soap, Wallace supplied a heart-rending tale of a washerwoman driven to penury, which turned out to be largely fictional. He was sacked after Lever Brothers, the soap manufacturers, sued, landing Harmsworth with the highest libel bill yet handed down by a British court.
Then there was the “ebullient, excessive” financier, embezzler and Liberal MP, Horatio Bottomley, an East End boy made good, who bought his own paper, the Sun (a London evening title, rather than today’s national tabloid). His “big gimmick” was to get celebrities to guest-edit: Dan Leno, the music hall star, for instance. For Turner, Bottomley “had class”: when an office boy in his employ was caught stealing stamps, he shrugged: “We’ve all got to start in a small way.” The chorus girls called him “Botty” because he didn’t swindle them.
It was also a time of neuroses about the effects of mass consumption. A Cambridge headmaster sighed: “Children take their amusements passively now. The gramophone is in the home.” The Mutoscope was a focus of anxiety. By cranking a handle, flickering photographs gave the impression of a moving scene – sometimes a risque one such as the original What the Butler Saw. The device symbolised the “tawdry” nature of modernity, Turner contends, precisely because it was a device.
Turner never makes explicit the parallels with today; they just keep chiming throughout the book. The Labour party was formed in 1900, “non-doctrinaire”, and led by a man called Keir. (It was the suffragettes who were rocking the boat; they were much mocked in the music halls, but occasionally endorsed, as by “Happy” Fanny Fields, whose patter raised cheers with lines such as: “The point is, girls, stand up for your rights. If you can’t stand up, sit down, but don’t let them catch you bending.”)
The really sinister radicals – anarchists and syndicalists – were deemed to come from abroad, especially France, displaced as the “default foe” by Germany, as a result of Erskine Childers’s novel The Riddle of the Sands, which warned that Britain’s North Sea flank was exposed. There was an “obsession” with invasion, perhaps arising from the development of heavier-than-air flight. “Britain is no longer an island,” Harmsworth inferred. Less portentous was PG Wodehouse’s novel, The Swoop!: several countries invade, and are resisted by the scouts, the British army having been abolished by a socialist government. There was a related sense that Britain was being outstripped by Europe, where music and art (Schoenberg and Picasso) seemed disquietingly advanced. “If sufficient trade barriers were built,” writes Turner, “if alien doctrines and alien revolutionaries could be kept out… then perhaps storms might yet be avoided.”
They were not avoided and, mindful of the terrible fate awaiting the Edwardians, I felt guilty at having found Little Englanders so amusing and engaging.
Little Englanders: Britain in the Edwardian Era by Alwyn Turner is published by Profile (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
