Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #270036 in Books
• Published on: 1997-03-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Review
A compelling book that has continued to hold its place in both popular and academic reading lists ever since its publication over 60 years ago. It remains the classsic study of how, between 1910 and 1914, three great rebellions - the Home Rule Crisis that brought Ireland to the brink of civil war, the widespread civil disorder created by the Campaign for Women's Suffrage and the unprecedented wave of strikes which swept the country - struck a devastating blow at the complacency and smugness of liberal Edwardian England. Stylish and evocatively written, this book has remained the 'canonical' account of these events and their impact on English political life at the end of the Edwardian belle epoque. (Kirkus UK)

Brilliantly clear, dryly humorous and surprisingly readable, is this lucid, masterly history of political England from 1910 to the outbreak of the war. A parallel book to The Road to War - sell to same market, readers interested in political history from a social point of view, public thought and political reaction in one fabric, England during those years, at a glance. Beginning with the death of King Edward, he proceeds to follow the threads of political intrigue through the pre-war campaign for Home Rule, the activities of the militant suffragettes, the industrial shocks of Trade Unionism. He states as a fact that death of Liberalism - then makes out a clear case of murder and lays the charge on the doorsteps of the House of Lords, the nobility, the Conservative Party and Mr. Asquith and Mr. Bonar Law. He paints the political scene with bold black strokes. He draws lifelike portraits of leading figures. And the result is a book that carries the weight of authority lightly. Definitely a book of permanent value. (Kirkus Reviews)

Customer Reviews

A Salutary Warning To Any Government
In 1906 the Liberal Party came to power with a landslide unmatched until the rise of New Labour in 1997. The Cabinet was arguably the most talented ever assembled, including Herbert Asquith, David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and Lord Grey, and revolutionised the machinery of British society. Finding their Acts stonewalled by the heavily Tory House of Lords, they forced it to vote away a huge swathe of its own power by threatening to saturate it with Liberal life peers. By 1912, this constitutional battle had been won, the welfare state was in existence via the National Insurance system and the People's Budget had applied the principles of wealth taxation to fund it.

In 1916, the prosecution of the Great War had forced the political parties into coalition. The Liberals have never held power since, and nearly disappeared altogether in the 1950s. George Dangerfield's book takes the story to the outbreak of war, and shows that, far from disrupting a way of life that was stable, secure and stratified, it was the climax of a decade of social unrest and was almost greeted with relief after all the internal turmoil.

Dangerfield starts with a Liberal triumph: the constitutional victory over the Lords. Mr Asquith and his colleagues seem paragons of cool composure against the rantings of the senile, inbred and / or feudal extremists among the Upper Chamber. Then come his descriptions of three great rebellions which shattered the Government's confidence and popularity, and pulled the generally understood principles of Liberalism out of any recognisable shape.

First, industrial relations collapsed. Miners, railwaymen, dockers - all went on strike one after another, then at the same time and in all imaginable configurations in between. Trade Unions were becoming aware of their strength and working class anger, tempered in the near slavery of the Industrial Revolution and, burst out in conflict after conflict. For the first time in history, a government was drawn into the minutiæ of individual disputes. Asquith was browbeaten, Churchill sent in troops - neither approach was successful.

Women wanted the vote, and were not prepared to be fobbed off or patronised in this area any longer. Politicians were attacked, heckled and their summer cottages burned to the ground. Suffragettes were imprisoned and force-fed, and their rallies charged by the police. Once the lines were drawn, the Liberals were trapped - give women the vote after all that and you enfranchise the other half of the electorate, most of whom will vote for anyone but you.

Finally, Ulster rebelled. Home Rule was an old Liberal warhorse from the days of Gladstone, defeated again and again by Tory and Unionist collaboration. When it seemed that this was now a genuine possibility, the Protestants of Northern Ireland - with decidedly Machiavellian help from the Conservatives - rose up, and were on the verge of armed insurrection when 1914 came along.

Politically, I would say (though I am quite prepared to be corrected) that its slant is Labour, setting the scene for its ascendancy as the party of the Left by showing the demise of its predecessor in that rôle. This is humanist history, however, and the larger tectonic shifts of the day are never allowed to dwarf the individuals and groups struggling to cope with them. Individual cameos leap out - an incensed George Lansbury berating the Prime Minister for his treatment of the suffragettes, and having to have his ejection from the House explained to him by his Labour colleagues and the Sergeant at Arms; and a totally bewildered and demoralised Asquith weeping at the despatch box as he tries to explain how his good intentions have precipitated yet more strike action. The ongoing and mutually respectful war of eternal negotiation between Messrs Askwith and Larkin almost constitutes a running joke, and the portraits of the Pankhurst family (especially the High Tory / religious maniac crossover Christabel) are an eye opener to anyone who thought of them solely as political activists.

George Dangerfield's book was written in the 1930s, and had a great influence on the style of A J P Taylor. It is compulsively readable and, for its time, very objective. Bear in mind also that he was telling the tale from newspaper cuttings, memoirs and published records, when many of the key players were still alive and potentially litigious and very little private correspondence had been released, and it is a miracle of intuition and interpretation.

For me, the most intriguing part of the Dangerfield's work is his contention that there is no economic reason why all these areas of turmoil should have happened over the same five or six years, and within the lifespan of a progressive government supported by a healthy economy. Even where the Liberals were not working for betterment of the situation, such as in the arena of female suffrage, this could just as easily have been a major problem for Balfour, or Bonar Law. What happened, argues the book, was that after some years of stability and affluence the very human frailty of boredom set in. Consequently, after a few years of domestic squabbling, the fight was exported to Flanders. This is a theory that could provoke free, frank and never-ending discussion, and students of political economy may sneer at its emotive content, but it rings true. There was no economic reason for the ejection of the Conservatives in either 1964 or 1997 - indeed, it is a great quality of this book that its message has bestrode the decades. Huge majorities can disappear like smoke in the wind, and great political parties can be broken and left in the wilderness.