Guest post by Laurence Brockliss: In Search of the Edwardians

Since the beginning of recorded time, chroniclers and historians have used the reigns of princely houses and individual monarchs, and later the periods of office of presidents and political leaders, as a framing device to bring a semblance of order to the congeries of past events, artefacts and attitudes that they are endeavouring with greater or less success to recover, assess and generally lick into shape. But as our knowledge of the past in all its many aspects has greatly increased with the emergence of history as an academic profession, so labels such as the Age of the Tudors or the Henrician or Elizabethan Age have lost much of their chronological precision. The labels are still used as a convenient shorthand but in the fields of economic, social and cultural history, and even sometimes political history, the distinctive features that the use of the term is intended to conjure up are seldom defined temporally by a dynastic era or an individual reign. Either the feature in question spreads far beyond the parameters of the reign to which it is attributed, or when the reign is long the feature is only in evidence for a part of the time. It is also the case, too, that what has been defined as distinctive and thus historically noteworthy may be true only of one particular social class or a specific group within an occupation.

Tomb of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at Frogmore (royal.uk)

These opening remarks are particularly pertinent in the case of the use of the term ‘Edwardian Age’. Compared with his predecessor’s reign, Edward VII’s was very short – less than ten years. It would be ridiculous to suppose that in the relatively fast moving world of the turn of the twentieth century the population of the United Kingdom suddenly changed its spots overnight in February 1901 as Victoria was buried at Frogmore, and then as suddenly changed them again in May 1910 when Edward gave way to George V, however different the personality and style of the three monarchs. On the other hand, there definitely was an Edwardian Age, if we mean by that a period of time embracing the reign of Edward VII in which Britain looked very different from the profile it presented in the classic Victorian era.

The state in this new age was characterised by a much larger governmental apparatus brought into being initially to mitigate the worst effects of poverty in a country where wealth was extremely unevenly distributed. The economy was dominated by big corporations; women of the respectable classes sought the vote and the unmarried among them no longer considered paid work beneath them; the working classes had their own political party in the form of Labour; Ireland was on the move; and novelists now took the whole world (even the universe in the case of H.G. Wells) for their canvas, showed a new interest in non-anglophone literature, and were as ready to take seriously the lives and loves of little men as the squabbles, struggles and moral dilemmas of the propertied classes. The list of differences is endless. And beneath all the obvious ones that historians have long picked up on, there were deeper changes to the rhythm of life, particularly among the affluent middle classes, which were much more significant for the long term.

Three points will suffice in the way of illustration. In the first place, the Edwardian middle-class family was much smaller than its Victorian counterpart. I have talked in previous posts about my ongoing study of professional families in the Victorian and Edwardian era, which takes as its starting point 758 professional men in active practice in 1851. The decrease in size of these families between the two eras was huge. In the mid-nineteenth century middle-class families were seldom as large as working-class ones because both men and women married in their mid- to late twenties. Nonetheless, professional families who had children usually had five or six. In contrast, the grandchildren of these families, whose married lives mainly either spanned or began in Edward’s reign, now only had one or two. One set of the families I have studied – 150 of the total — had a progenitor based in Leeds in the mid-nineteenth century. Seventy-four of the grandchildren of these mid-Victorian Loiners (Leeds inhabitants) are known to have been married and living in England and Wales in 1911. Of these, forty-seven had been married for four years or more. The twenty-nine married for between four and ten years had on average 1.8 children; the eighteen married between eleven and twenty-two years had 2.5; and only six out of the forty-seven had four children or more. Family limitation was now the name of the game.

The grandchildren, moreover, seem to have been much more domestically rooted than their predecessors. The mid-nineteenth century professional was very active outside the home. Among the 150 living in Leeds, a third were either a member of a political party, a member of a national or local pressure group, a national or local government officeholder, a freemason, or a member of a learned society or select club, such as the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society. The editor of the Leeds Mercury Edward Baines (1800-1890), who as a young man had stood on the hustings at Peterloo, had his finger in every associational pie except freemasonry. He also collected paintings.

Percival Tookey Leigh, by Edwin Reeve Crosse (Leeds Civic Collection)

Their grandsons in comparison showed little interest in the arts and sciences or in being a good citizen. With the notable exception of the dentist Percival Tookey Leigh (1865-1938), Chairman of the Leeds Borough Council Libraries and Arts Committee and eventual Lord Mayor, none entered local government. The pattern was repeated among all the 758 professional families in the different British towns I have concentrated on. Among the grandsons, nearly all adults or on the edge of adulthood when Edward came to the throne, a minority took an interest in the Volunteers or the Territorials, but they were five times less likely than their grandfathers to hold any sort of civic office during their lives. Apart from the handful who were university dons or industrial engineers, such as Barnes Wallis (1887-1979), they certainly made no contribution to the development of the natural and historical sciences, unlike many of their forebears. As a group they seem to have been much more interested in sport than service or knowledge.

Barnes Wallis (Barnes Wallis Foundation)

With so few of these Edwardians trying to advance science or improve the world, the affluent had much more leisure time than their ancestors. If they had means, they did not spend it quietly reading or playing cards in the family nest à la Pooter but went out in the evening en famille to the theatre and concerts or dined out with friends. Long before the First World War, the richest amongst them took advantage of the safer and faster steamships to travel the world. The most egregious example of an international traveller among them was the Reverend Harold Ayde Prichard (1882-1944), a scion of a dynasty of Bristol physicians, married to the daughter of an American diplomat related to Whistler, who emigrated to the United States in 1906 and became the rector of an affluent Episcopalian parish outside New York. In a letter in 1924, written for the benefit of his extended family, Harold claimed to have crossed the Atlantic twenty-one times on many different ships, including the Lusitania. He had also traversed the United States six times by rail. Harold throughout his life was a man on the move, either on behalf of the church or for simple pleasure. He appears to have visited most parts of Europe at one time or another and even travelled to Norway’s North Cape, today the most northerly part of the continent accessible by road. In other words, at the moment when women, the working classes, and the Irish were beginning to organise effectively in pursuit of a new deal, many of the propertied were flaunting their wealth and mobility more extravagantly than ever.

Revd Harold Ayde Prichard (1922 passport photograph)

Hedonism, albeit of a kind that the Church establishment would have found acceptable, was alive and well among the Edwardian middle classes and was not just a characteristic of ‘Bertie’ and his entourage. But it could be an expensive lifestyle. Most grandsons at the end of their lives were much poorer in real terms than their grandfathers, even though they had had much smaller families to raise. Admittedly their generation had had to pay higher taxes, but they do not appear to have embraced financial prudence as robustly as their Victorian forebears. Gladstone, the epitome of Victorian rectitude, left an estate valued at £255,000 (£160,000 in land). Two of his grandsons, William Gladstone Wickham (1877-1939) and Edward Stephen Gladstone Wickham (1882-1960), members of one of my professional families originally based in Winchester, were much less wealthy when they died. The first, a businessman and British trade commissioner to South Africa, was worth £8,970; the second, a clergyman, £28,301. In comparison with the ‘Grand Old Man’s’ fortune, both were paltry sums in real terms.

Seated: E.S. Gladstone Wickham (North Ormesby History Group)

But if there was definitely an Edwardian Age or an age distinct from the Victorian era, when did it begin and end? A plausible starting-point would be around 1880 in the aftermath of the 1870s economic depression which followed two decades of growth that had benefitted the whole population. It would be wrong to attribute the change in mentalités simply to the experience of the depression, for historians continue to debate its extent and long-term effect. But there can be no doubt that all the chief characteristics of the new age date from the early 1880s. In the world of the arts and sciences, 1880 saw the publication of the first of Gissing’s ‘misery’ novels, Workers in the Dawn; two years later Charles Darwin, the last great amateur scientist, died.

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Dating the end of the Edwardian Age is much more difficult. The obvious year to choose would be 1914, but many historians today are loath to see the First World War as a turning-point. Although its horrors and the effect on the men who served and the families who were bereaved can never be exaggerated, the war in important respects — the expansion of state power; women’s emancipation; the distrust of amateurism; the rise of the Labour Party; the pursuit of pleasure — consolidated rather than undermined the hallmarks of the Edwardian era. Far fewer men between fifteen and forty-nine saw active service than is popularly assumed: 46.3 per cent. Those who survived, and most did – the average death-rate (officers and men) was 12 per cent — appear to have slotted back easily into the lives they had lived before they volunteered or were conscripted. Eighty-six of the grandsons of my mid-Victorian professionals who came home from the war were still alive in 1939 and appear in the ration-book census of that year. Of those still in work, three-quarters were plying the same craft or profession as in the 1911 census, if usually on a higher grade. The married among the returnees seem to have had no difficulty, either, in fitting back into pre-war family life. Divorces in the 1920s and 1930s among the descendants of my professional cohort were extremely rare and cannot easily be attributed to the war.

John Baines and Elisabeth Wicksteed, 1914 (Dearest Mother: First World War Letters Home from a Young Sapper Officer in France and Salonika, Solihull, Helion & Company, 2015, p. 28)

John Stanhope Baines (1894-1951), great-grandson of Edward, and Elisabeth Wicksteed (1893-1972), granddaughter of the Leeds Unitarian minister Charles Wicksteed (1810-85), married in 1916 while John, a regular officer in the Royal Engineers, was on leave. They were a classic Edwardian couple with means and, according to their letters, made ‘carpe diem’ their motto. They divorced on the eve of the Second World War but the breakdown of their marriage was precipitated by the unexpected death of their second son, killed in an accident in the south of France.

Perhaps a better end-date for the Edwardian Age would be the early 1930s in the midst of another and greater economic depression. Arguably, it was only then that a significant section of the well-to-do began to wonder whether Britain’s imperial, political and social political system needed completely restructuring, sometimes in alarming ways, and started advocating a more sober and serious style of life. One of the grandsons in my study, the Catholic solicitor and writer Joseph Kentigern Heydon (1884-1947), became an ardent supporter of the authoritarian right: his books included Fascism and Providence (1937). A great-granddaughter, Aileen Alison Furse (1910-57), a member of the Wickham clan, married ‘Kim’ Philby (1912-88). This was a new Georgian Age personified at either end of the spectrum of mainstream politics by George VI and George Orwell, which only failed to become recognised as a historical period because of the former’s early death. The Edwardian Age was full of contradictions and was arguably the one period when Britain was threatened by internecine class conflict, epitomised by the large scale strikes in the years before the First World War and in the mid-1920s. The new Georgian/Elizabethan Age was characterised by a less volatile social and industrial landscape stabilised by the construction of the Welfare State and the political consensus of the 1950s and 1960s known as Butskellism.

© Laurence Brockliss, 2022

Laurence Brockliss is an Emeritus Professor of History of the University of Oxford and an Emeritus Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy. He works on the history of education, science and medicine in Britain and France between 1500 and the present day. His books include French Universities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Cultural History (Oxford, 1986); [with Colin Jones] The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford, 1997); Calvet’s Web: Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 2002); and The University of Oxford: A History (Oxford, 2016). He has recently written up an ESRC-funded study of the professions in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, which will be published by Oxford University Press.

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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’  Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.