Degenerating Nation? Anxieties and Protests in a New Century

The first decade of the twentieth century in Britain has been characterized in contradictory ways. Samuel Hynes, in his influential study The Edwardian Turn of Mind (1968), contrasted the nostalgic image of Edwardian England as a ‘golden afternoon’, a ‘long garden-party’, with the contemporaneous ‘Labour Party World’ (the Labour Party actually became a Parliamentary political force during this decade) and characteristically modern developments technological (aircraft, radiotelegraphy, cinema) and cultural (psychoanalysis, literary modernism, ‘modern art’).1 Yet 1900 was neither the dawn of a hopeful new era, casting off the outworn shackles of Victorianism (symbolized in the death of the old Queen herself in 1901), or the continuation of Victorian Imperial glories. Simple dualisms hardly begin to define this time of ferment.