Review of Little Englanders: Britain in the Edwardian Era, by Alwyn Turner pub. Profile Books 2024
“This book is […] an attempt to take the temperature of the nation as it emerged from a century when it had dominated the world and was beginning – whether it knew it or not – a long process of decline. It draws heavily on popular literature, on the songs of the music hall and on the newspapers.”
The first thing this book really needs is its title explaining, for anyone unaware that the phrase “Little Englander” has radically changed its meaning since it was first coined. These days, it usually means an insular, jingoistic person who thinks his country better than any other. It was often applied to Brexiters. But it originally meant someone who didn’t believe in the ideal of Empire, thought Britain should stay at home and mind its own business, and was more interested in affairs in Europe, its nearest neighbour, than in anything going on in dominions halfway across the world. A political opponent wrote of the Liberal leader Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's opposition to the Boer War: "The impression one got of him from the Press in those days was … that he was an unpatriotic Little Englander". In fact, by this definition it would be Remainers who were more akin to Little Englanders.
The phrase “in the Edwardian Era” is also not completely accurate, unsurprisingly, both because the book does not come to a stop with Edward VII’s death in 1910 and because some of the trends that characterised Edwardian society had their roots earlier. “Edwardian”, like the Regency, was a relatively short period that followed a long one and had a slightly decadent air, as of a society sensing change on the way and rather desperately enjoying itself while it still could. Priestley, in The Prince of Pleasure, described the Regency as “gamey”, and the word fits this era well enough too.
Turner, in drawing its picture, has leant heavily on popular entertainment: trends in books, classical music, art and above all the music-hall. This makes a lot of sense, because these tend to reflect the way a society is really thinking rather than how it would like to see itself. In 1901, the readers of Leisure Hour, asked to name the greatest living Englishman, split the vote between Field Marshal “Bobs” Roberts, veteran of countless Victorian and Edwardian wars, and General William Booth, “the teetotal, vegetarian founder of the Salvation Army”. These may have been the people they thought they should admire, but if one goes by the books they read, the music-hall songs they sang, the papers they read and later, the films they watched, the people they really admired and longed to emulate were demagogues with the gift of the gab, like Joe Chamberlain, and entrepreneurs who, by fair or foul means, made a great deal of money, like Horatio Bottomley. Indeed, music-hall songs were generally very scornful of virtuous teetotallers like Booth.
This way of writing history is also good at highlighting trends. There was the habit of comparing anyone successful in his field to “the ultimate self-made man”, Napoleon, (“Edward Moss, of Moss Empires, was ‘the Napoleon of music halls’; Horatio Bottomley ‘the Napoleon of finance’; Joe Chamberlain ‘the Napoleon of Birmingham’; Alfred Harmsworth ‘the Napoleon of journalism’”). There was a glut of “invasion novels” imagining a foreign takeover, eventually satirised by Wodehouse, who in The Swoop imagines an invasion by nine separate powers: “England was not merely beneath the heel of the invader. It was beneath the heels of nine invaders. There was barely standing-room”. There was the popularity of mutoscopes, better known as What the Butler Saw machines: “The craze spread rapidly around the country. At one end of the business there were the pleasure grounds at Earl’s Court in London, with hundreds of machines; at the other was the gentlemen’s lavatory on Rhyl seafront, where their presence caused much overcrowding, to the annoyance of those wishing to use the conventional facilities”. Turner’s method also shows up class differences; the welcome for the Entente Cordiale among more travelled, cosmopolitan-minded folk not extending to readers of the popular press or music-hall patrons. “We have a firm belief in the immorality of the French people,’ journalist Philip Gibbs pointed out in 1911, adding that it was ‘in the English music-halls where the popular idea is most clearly expressed’. He was thinking of songs such as Billy Williams’s ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ (1909), in which a vicar visits Paris without his wife and is corrupted by its loose morals: ‘With a lady he was pally, quite entente-cordi-ally.’”
This is a serious history with all the proper apparatus of notes, though unforgivably lacking an index, at least in the Kindle version. But its source material lends itself to much incidental humour. Some is unintentional on the part of its originators, like this unfortunate choice of title: ‘One of the great needs of the world today is manliness in its young men,’ pronounced the Cornish writer and Methodist minister the Reverend Silas K. Hocking in a lecture entitled ‘There’s Now’t So Queer as Folk’. Some derives from characters who were intrinsically witty in themselves, notably Marie Lloyd. Standing on a picket line in support of a stage artists’ strike, Marie advised letting the mediocre singer Belle Elmore through, “Oh, let her go in, she’ll do more for the strike by playing than she will by stopping out”. Belle had worse problems waiting at home if she’d only known; her husband was Dr Crippen.
This strange little coda to the Victorian Age may have been brief, and in some ways lesser, as the evening “monkey parades” by young clothes-obsessed clerks were a pale reflection of the Regency dandies. But it fairly bristled with interesting characters and has some disturbing likenesses to our own day – the taste for demagoguery, the growing xenophobia, the adulation of celebrity and money. This is a good evocation with a lot of fascinating detail.
