The Age of Decadence: A History of Britain 1880-1914 by Simon Heffer (Pegasus: 2021), 897 pages.

The Earl of Strafford called his ruling policy for King Charles I “Thorough.” Thorough is the apt name for the second volume of Simon Heffer’s history of modern Britain. The Age of Decadence is an exhaustive, 900-page examination of the last era of Britain’s world leadership in the four decades before World War I, a period many have viewed with nostalgia as an Edwardian golden age. Even George Orwell, no romantic, idealized the era. “It was the age when crazy millionaires in curly top hats and lavender waistcoats gave champagne parties in rococo houseboats on the Thames, the age of diabolo and hobbles skirts,” he wrote. Heffer’s preferred term for the theme of the era is “swagger.”

The years of Heffer’s interest have been covered in the past. Sir Robert Ensor’s volume in the Oxford History of England series, England 1870-1914, treats much of the same period in a more conventional manner, while George Dangerfield’s imaginative reconstruction of the decade before World War I, The Strange Death of Liberal England, is a classic still read 80 years after its appearance. 

Heffer tops both, no mean feat. What makes Heffer’s volume so good is the scope and depth of his analysis as well as the lively writing about a period rich in dramatic events and fascinating characters. Some of the best parts of his book are the lively potted biographies of key figures, including William Gladstone, Charles Stuart Parnell, H.G. Wells, Beatrice Webb, and Joseph Chamberlain. 

Heffer has a sharp eye for amusing details, the deeply religious Gladstone taking time off from politics to wander the streets of Westminster trying to save fallen women, a besotted Prime Minister Henry Asquith writing love letters during Cabinet meetings to a 20-year-old. The individual in charge of determining whether someone should be sent to a sanatorium was titled the Lord Chancellor’s Visitor in Lunacy. Sprinkled throughout the book are little statistics that sharpen his themes: 97 percent of all land in Ireland was owned by English landlords; in 1900, every male drinker consumed an estimated 73 gallons of beer a year and two fifths of a gallon of spirits. 

Heffer begins his study in 1880 rather than Ensor’s date of 1870. Several major issues came to a head in that decade. Gladstone had just formed his second great ministry, the Irish question driven by Parnell emerged as a major crisis, the consolidation of the British Empire faced problems in Egypt, South Africa, and the Sudan. Most significantly, the democratization of British politics continued with the broadly democratic franchise bill of 1884.

The Britain of the 1880s, according to Heffer, was emerging from the suffocating conservatism of the Victorian era. The pace of change in every aspect of English life created tension and a sense of unease in every level of British society but especially among the aristocracy that dominated throughout the nineteenth century. This creative tension transformed British life. 

Unlike Ensor and Dangerfield, Heffer is very good about the cultural and literary trends of the era. He sees Wells’s science fiction novels of the 1890s as having a major impact on the newly literate lower middle-class readers. He is less kind to Wells’s novels of the pre-war era, although he believes Tono-Bungay holds up. He has a high opinion of Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett, reserving one of his best mots for Virginia Woolf, who despised Bennett’s writing, saying she confused snobbery with literary criticism.

I was struck by how themes in Heffer’s study parallel developments in the United States during the same years. Heffer notes the rise of sport in England, especially cricket and the various forms of football that became popular in the last years of the nineteenth century, a phenomenon that also held true in America. W.G. Grace, the great cricketer, in many ways played a role like Babe Ruth in baseball. Sport in both nations transformed from amateur to professional in the same period. 

Heffer’s analysis of the growth of the popular press in Britain, especially the role played by Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, is reminiscent of how Pulitzer and especially Hearst transformed the newspaper business in America. Heffer thinks that more attention should be directed to W.T. Stead, who created the first publicity newspaper crisis with a series of articles about young girls being forced into prostitution and who, Heffer argues, introduced the political interview into journalism. A great self-promoter, Stead went down on the Titanic.

The chapters dealing with the shock the Boer War dealt to British self-confidence are among Heffer’s best. The British discovered that not only was the Army unprepared for a major conflict but that over 40 percent of volunteers for military service were unfit physically. They found that their vaunted “splendid isolation” had a downside and began the process of gathering allies for the growing challenge from the Kaiser’s Germany. Britain adopted an appeasement policy toward the United States, against whom it had fought two wars, a success when the United States entered World War I on the British side. The British also settled their differences with former enemies like France and Tsarist Russia, which served them well in the coming war.

If I had to pick a favorite part of the book, it would be the chapters dealing with the three great domestic crisis over the suffragette movement, Ireland, and the House of Lords between 1906 and 1914, topics covered brilliantly by Dangerfield but even better by Heffer. I have rarely read a serious book in which it is obvious the author is enjoying writing about his topic as much as Heffer is here. 

John Rossi is professor emeritus of history at La Salle University in Philadelphia.