After Queen Victoria, the flood

Alwyn Turner writes early on that Little Englanders is ‘an attempt to take the temperature of the nation as it emerged from a century that had dominated the world and was beginning – whether it knew it or not – a long process of decline’. Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps because the high (and low) politics of the years from 1901 to 1914 – the Edwardian era continues for four years after the death of the eponymous sovereign, up to the lights going out all over Europe in August 1914 – have been so exhaustively covered in recent years, he tells his readers that he will draw heavily on

popular literature, on the songs of the music hall and on the newspapers. Consequently it might sometimes seem trivial: the administrators of Empire feature less than the headliners at the Empire, Leicester Square, and the politicians that appear are those who were embraced by the public.

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His apology is unnecessary. Popular culture is a valuable means of learning about a particular society and, without wishing to sound Marxist about it, a hitherto under-appreciated one. The one failing of this well-written, often fascinating book is the absence of archival research, so one never gets beneath the skin of the leading figures. But Turner has read in detail those historical documents otherwise known as local newspapers, and has gleaned much information about the Edwardian lower classes that one does not often find in the works of more orthodox historians. And, as any society must fundamentally be about the people in it, what the mass of those people were up to in the first decade or so of the 20th century is of serious interest.

The period is bookended by two deaths (Oscar Wilde, alias Sebastian Melmoth, in Paris in November 1900, and seven weeks later that of the Queen Empress herself) and, oddly perhaps, by two murders – that committed by Dr Crippen, and those of the ‘Brides in the Bath’: a third murder was far more indicative of the end of the era, that of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914, something no more a violation of the demotic theme of Alwyn’s book than the demise of the dear old Queen.