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The Strange Death of Liberal England in Its Time*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Carolyn W. White
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Extract

In the autumn of 1935 an obscure New York publishing house brought out a book by a young British writer which had an arresting title, The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1910-1914. Reviewers praised the book for its superb writing, brilliant wit, and elegant style. It was noted, however, that the thesis of the book was either indecipherable or if discernible lacking in conviction. Its author was George Dangerfield, a recent immigrant to New York and literary editor of Vanity Fair, the demise of which shortly followed the publication of its editor's book. In the middle of the 1930s Dangerfield appeared to represent those young Englishmen without birth and without resources who had “the will not to let any sentiment for the beauties of that England which is gone, or any compromise with the unreal thinking of the men who enjoyed it, stand in their way as they mold the England that shall be.” After 1935 Dangerfield was a professional writer and lecturer until World War II when he joined the American army as an infantryman and assumed American citizenship at Paris, Texas, in 1943. Thereafter he could no longer speak with the clear, authentic voice of the new young England. Rather he identified the persistence of “good, sound American doctrine” from the Federalist Papers as “one of the glories of our republic,” and he evoked that doctrine in defense of free association and the open competition of ideas. As the cold war ensued and Joseph McCarthy reached for national office, George Dangerfield continued to speak for liberal democracy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , Winter 1985 , pp. 425 - 447
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1985

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Footnotes

*

A revised version of a paper presented at the Carolinas Symposium on British Studies. I am grateful to Professors Peter Stansky and John Hutcheson for reading the manuscript and offering valuable comments and suggestions.

References

1 Pargellis, Stanley, “Rejection of Security,” Saturday Review of Literature 12 (26 October 1935): 7Google Scholar. Other reviews include Chamberlain, John in Current History 43 (December 1935): xivGoogle Scholar; Brailsford, H. N. in New Republic 85 (4 December 1935): 107Google Scholar; Wilson, P. W., “The Disputed Assassination of Liberalism in England,” New York Times Book Review, 17 November 1935, pp. 9, 33Google Scholar; “Post-Mortem,” Times Literary Supplement, 4 July 1936, p. 550Google Scholar; and Ensor, R. C. K., “History Like a Novel,” Manchester Guardian, 3 July 1936.Google Scholar

The original publisher was Harrison Smith, and Robert Haas which soon went out of business. Although it is often assumed that the British edition was published in 1935 as well, it was actually published in 1936 by Constable. This London edition appeared without the epilogue, with all references to Rupert Brooke and Dangerfield's recollections stricken from the foreword, and with several paragraphs on Major Crawford and gun-running omitted because the publisher feared libel action. The full text was restored in an edition published by Gibbon and McKee in 1966 and subsequently by Granada in a Paladin paperback in 1970, reprinted in 1972 and 1983. The English paperback has recently become available in the United States through Academy Chicago Publishers. Putnam's acquired the American rights to the book and issued a paperback edition under Capricorn Books in 1961 which is now in its nineteenth impression. All references in this essay, unless otherwise noted, are to the 1961 New York Capricorn edition.

2 Dangerfield, George, “A Liberal-Educator Weighs His Life,” Saturday Review of Literature 31 (26 June 1948): 17Google Scholar. He had particular reference to Federalist #1, “In politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.” In the early fifties he wrote that “if political democracy is to survive, … it must survive by fighting the policies and not by persecuting the men,” The Era of Good Feelings (New York, 1952), p. xiii.Google Scholar

3 An exception is his review of The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society, by Thompson, Paul, in Victorian Studies 20 (Spring, 1977): 345–346Google Scholar. His book on nineteenth-century England, Victoria's Heir: The Education of a Prince (New York, 1941)Google Scholar, disappointed reviewers in that it did not serve as a prelude to Strange Death; see Curtis, Lewis P., “The Education of Bertie,” Saturday Review of Literature 24 (13 September 1941): 5Google Scholar. He returned to the Anglo-Irish question in a notable book, The Damnable Question: A Study in Anglo-Irish Relations (Boston, 1976)Google Scholar. In American history The Era of Good Feelings won the Bancroft and Pulitzer prizes in history in 1953, followed by the Marquis award in biography for Chancellor Robert R. Livingston of New York (New York, 1960)Google Scholar. Other works in American history include a volume in the New American Nation Series, The Awakening of American Nationalism, 1815-1828 (New York, 1965)Google Scholar, and Defiance to the Old World (New York, 1970)Google Scholar. With Scruggs, Otey M. he edited Adams', HenryHistory of the United States, 2 vols. (Englewood Cliffs, 1963).Google Scholar

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13 Dangerfield, George, Victoria's Heir: The Education of a Prince (New edition; London, 1972), p. viGoogle Scholar. Dangerfield has been something of an enigma, particularly to British historians. Henry Pelling called him “a young Cambridge scholar,” in “Labour and the Downfall of Liberalism,” Popular Politics and Society in Late-Victorian Britain (New York, 1969), p. 102Google Scholar. John Grigg learned of Dangerfield's activities as an American historian too late to correct his essay “Liberals on Trial.” For biographical information, see Who's Who in America, 1954-1955, p. 625; Current Biography, 1953, pp. 142-143; and The New York Times, 5 May 1953, p. 24Google Scholar. I am relying on Who's Who for the 1904 birth date, although Strange Death and New York Times give 1906, while the book jacket of the first American edition of Victoria's Heir recorded 1905.

14 Churchill's, Winston tribute appeared in The Times (London)Google Scholar the day after Brooke's death. The schoolboy was Evelyn Waugh, diary entry, 6 December 1921, The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, ed. by Davie, Michael (Boston, 1976), p. 150Google Scholar. See also Hassall, Christopher, A Biography of Edward Marsh (New York, 1959), chapter 13Google Scholar, and Dangerfield, George, “An Empire in Its Anecdotage,” Saturday Review of Literature 20 (16 September 1939): 7.Google Scholar

15 Thompson, Paul, The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society (London, 1975), pp. 308–309Google Scholar. For another perspective, that of an Anglican clergyman's daughter in a Warwickshire village, see Bloom, Ursula, The Elegant Edwardian (London, 1957).Google Scholar

16 Masterman, C. F. G., “Realities at Home,” The Heart of Empire, ed. Gilbert, Bentley B. (New York, 1973), pp. 45–47.Google Scholar

17 Gaitskell, Hugh, “At Oxford in the Twenties,” Essays in Labour History, eds. Briggs, Asa and Saville, John (New York, 1967), pp. 6–7.Google Scholar

18 Waugh, Evelyn, A Little Learning: An Autobiography (Boston, 1964), p. 164Google Scholar. In Waugh's circle of friends Harold Acton especially had a low opinion of the Georgian poets, Waugh, , Diary, p. 158.Google Scholar

19 Dangerfield, George, “The Brothers Fowler,” Bookman 75 (June and July 1932): 209.Google Scholar

20 Waugh, , Autobiography, p. 140Google Scholar. Lacking such an education, most Americans and most women betrayed their deprivation, Waugh concluded.

21 Dangerfield, George, “The Passing of the Provincial Visitor,” Scribner's Magazine 96 (November 1934): 310.Google Scholar

22 Dangerfield, George, “Reasons for Patriotism,” Commonweal, 17 September 1930, p. 504.Google Scholar

23 Dangerfield, , “The Passing of the Provincial Visitor,” p. 311.Google Scholar

24 Dangerfield, George, “A Pioneering Novel,” Saturday Review of Literature 12 (20 July 1935): 5Google Scholar. See also, Dangerfield, , “Invisible Censorship,” North American Review 244 (1937): 346Google Scholar; and “The Passing of the Provincial Visitor,” p. 310.

25 Dangerfield, George, “E. M. Forster: A Man with a View,” Saturday Review of Literature 18 (27 August 1938): 4Google Scholar; Dangerfield, , “Invisible Censorship,” p. 343.Google Scholar

26 Dangerfield, George, “English Ebb, American Flow,” Saturday Review of Literature 15 (3 April 1937): 3Google Scholar, and Dangerfield, , “Invisible Censorship,” pp. 341–343, 347Google Scholar. Dangerfield's ideas on middle-class permeation recall Elie Halévy's observation that “in England more than in any other country the middle class had succeeded in imposing its culture upon society and exacting from the classes above and below it at least an outward respect for its moral prejudices. Now [1910-1914] England was ceasing to be middle class,” Halévy, Elie, A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, Vol. VI: The Rule of Democracy, 1905-1914 (New York, 1961), p. 508.Google Scholar

27 “The Brothers Fowler,” pp. 209-210.

28 “Brilliant Bankruptcy,” Saturday Review of Literature 11 (24 November 1934): 311.Google Scholar

29 Dangerfield, , “Invisible Censorship,” pp. 334–348Google Scholar; “Brilliant Bankruptcy,” p. 311; “A Pioneering Novel,” p. 5; “English Ebb, American Flow,” p. 4.

30 Dangerfield, George, “The Adventures of Modern England,” Saturday Review of Literature 11(13 April 1935): 619.Google Scholar

31 Dangerfield, , “Invisible Censorship,” p. 341.Google Scholar

32 “The England of Mr. Priestley's Time,” Saturday Review of Literature 11 (11 August 1934): 47Google Scholar. Writing in 1937, Dangerfield noted that Churchill “is still somebody to be reckoned with, and those who altogether distrust his politics at least pay him the compliment of a persistent suspicion.” “Politics and Personalities,” Saturday Review of Literature 17 (16 November 1937): 10.Google Scholar

33 Dangerfield, , “The Insistent Past,” p. 138.Google Scholar

34 Dangerfield, George, Bengal Mutiny; The Story of the Sepoy Rebellion (London, 1933), p. 282Google Scholar; pp. 279, 281. One review described it as “compelling, vivid, thrilling”; another appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, 25 May 1933, p. 357.Google Scholar

35 A comparison made by Grigg, John, “Liberals on Trial,” p. 33Google Scholar

36 “The Insistent Past,” p. 144.

37 “Rosamond Lehmann and the Perilous Enchantment of Things Past,” Bookman 76 (February 1933): 173Google Scholar. Another middle-class Georgian child who later also wrote a history of prewar England and whose brother was killed in 1918, recalled, “And the boy, unable to expel from his memory that August afternoon in 1918, struggled long and painfully to bring the Edwardian Age into focus,” Adams, W. S., Edwardian Portraits (London, 1957), p. 13.Google Scholar

38 The Strange Death of Liberal England, pp. 441-442.

39 Taylor, G. R. Stirling, “The New History” Fortnightly Review 133 (March 1930): 374Google Scholar. See also on aspects of, or reactions to, the “new” history, Treveiyan, G. M., “The Writing of History,” Times Literary Supplement, 1 February 1923, p. 76Google Scholar; Cross, A. L., “Recent History Tendencies,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association (Washington, 1926), p. 155Google Scholar; Webster, C. K., “History Without Tears,” Contemporary Review 135 (March 1929): 317Google Scholar; Powicke, F. M., Presidential Address, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th series, 20 (1937): 11Google Scholar; Galbraith, V. H., “Historical Research and the Preservation of the Past,” History 22 (March 1938): 303–304CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Mr. Philip Guedalla: Distinguished Historical Writer” The Times (London), 18 December 1944.Google Scholar

40 Becker, Carl, “Mr. Wells and the New History,” American Historical Review 26 (July 1921): 642CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On re-writing history see also Gooch, G. P., “Some Conceptions of History,” Sociological Review 31 (July 1939): 236.Google Scholar

41 Dangerfield, , “The Insistent Past,” p. 145Google Scholar; Dangerfield, , Bengal Mutiny, p. 282.Google Scholar

42 Dangerfield, George, “Lytton Strachey,” Saturday Review of Literature 18 (23 July 1938): 4.Google Scholar

43 Guedalla, Philip, Supers and Supermen (New York, 1924), p. 14Google Scholar. Although the requirements of style in the new history were generally attributed to Guedalla's influence, Dangerfield placed him in the academic tradition. With the “glitter of the laurels of a First in Modern History at Oxford,” it was not surprising to Dangerfield that Guedalla's point of view should “express itself in a melodramatic opposition to anything which might in these times be called progressive.” Lytton Strachey, too, had a low opinion of Guedalla's imitation. See Holroyd, Michael, Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography, 2 vols. (New York, 1968), 2:680n.Google Scholar

44 Dangerfield, George, “From Boers to Boches,” Saturday Review of Literature 10 (10 February 1934): 467Google Scholar. Dangerfield noted drily that the use of secondary sources was a practice much despised by critics who were not themselves either historians or biographers.

45 Taylor, , “The New History,” p. 379Google Scholar; Dangerfield, , “Politics and Personalities,” p. 10Google Scholar; and Dangerfield, , “A Pioneering Novel,” p. 5.Google Scholar

46 Ensor, R. C. K., England, 1870-1914 (Oxford, 1936)Google Scholar. Review by Knaplund, Paul in Journal of Modern history 9 (March 1937): 100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47 “The World Crisis of 1914-1918: An Interpretation,” in The Era of Tyrannies: Essays on Socialism and War, ed. Webb, R. K. (London, 1967), p. 190Google Scholar. In the immediate postwar period Halévy had found it encouraging that young people in England were reading Freud instead of Marx, “The Present State of the Social Question in England,” [1922], ibid., p. 154.

48 Driver, C. H., “Social and Political Ideas,” in Edwardian England, 1901-1910, ed. Hearnshaw, F. J. C. (London, 1933), pp. 232–238.Google Scholar

49 Playne, Caroline E., The Prewar Mind in Britain: An Historical Review (London, 1928), pp. 68–70Google Scholar. She concludes that all European nations before the war suffered from “group neurosis.” It may be recalled that Elie Halévy, a year later, attributed the causes of the war to “collective forces, the collective feelings and movements of public opinion,” “The World Crisis,” p. 162.

50 Wingfield-Stratford, Esme Cecil, The Victorian Aftermath (New York, 1934).Google Scholar

51 Wickes, Frances G., The Inner World of Childhood (New York, 1927; reprint, Englewood Cliffs, 1966), p. 5Google Scholar. See also, Jung, Carl, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York, 1961)Google Scholar: Brome, Vincent, Jung (New York, 1968)Google Scholar; Carl Jung to Frances G. Wickes, 9 August 1926, in Jung, C. G., Letters, ed. Adler, Gerhard, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1973): 1: 44Google Scholar. The most copious illustration of Jung's ideas in Strange Death is in chapter 3, “The Women's Rebellion.” He refers to the Jungian concept of projection on pp. 185-186, but declines to pursue the theory, and elsewhere intimates the Jungian “Shadow” in connection with the working class, although he does not make it explicit in Strange Death. Compare Wickes' statement, “The patient loses his identity; he becomes a puppet ruled by blind forces which he mistakes for mysterious fate or for God” (p. 200) to Dangerfield's discussion of puppets, pp. 185, 200, 207, 213.

52 “Herbert Gorman's Historical Novel,” Saturday Review of Literature 10 (25 November 1933): 286–287.Google Scholar

53 The Strange Death of Liberal England, p. 140; Victoria's Heir (New York, 1941), pp. 329–330Google Scholar. “The strangeness and variety of the human condition” is the stuff of history, he wrote in The Damnable Question, p. 350.

54 Dangerfield, , “The Insistent Past,” p. 141.Google Scholar

55 After the publication of Strange Death, Dangerfield wrote two articles interpreting and defending Strachey's methods, and indirectly his own: “Lytton Strachey,” Saturday Review of Literature 18 (23 July 1937): 3–4Google Scholar; 16-17; and “The Insistent Past,” North American Review 243 (March 1937): 137–152.Google Scholar

56 Woolf, Virginia, “The New Biography,” [1927], Collected Essays, 4 vols. (New York, 1967), 4: 234Google Scholar. See also “The Art of Biography,” ibid., pp. 221-228.

57 “The Insistent Past,” p. 145. Dangerfield brought his historical objects up from a basement; Strachey got his by lowering a little bucket into a great ocean. Dangerfield also followed Strachey in his ideas on historical attack. See Eminent Victorians (New York, 1925), p. v.Google Scholar

58 Ibid., p. 152.

59 “The Adventures of Modern England,” pp. 617, 619.

60 George Dangerfield, “From Boers to Boches,” review of The Victorian Aftermath, by Wingfield-Stratford, Esme, Saturday Review of Literature 10 (10 February 1934): 467Google Scholar. This review is most enlightening, for it anticipates The Strange Death of Liberal England and contains a synopsis of the ideas to be found there. It reveals Dangerfield's debt to Wingfield-Stratford for a basic outline of the prewar years. Dangerfield called him “a courageous and erudite historian [who] seems to have written by far the most successful book about the period.” It is probable that Wingfield-Stratford provided the connection between Dangerfield and Halévy.

61 The Strange Death of Liberal England, p. 393.

62 Review of Burr, by Vidal, Gore, The New York Times Book Review, 28 October 1973, p. 2.Google Scholar

63 Dangerfield, and Scruggs, , Henry Adams' History of the United States, p. 8Google Scholar. Dangerfield seems to be following the ideas of Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946), pp. 246–249Google Scholar. See also Weinstein, Mark A., “The Creative Imagination in Fiction and History,” Genre 9 (1976): 263–277.Google Scholar

64 The Strange Death of Liberal England, p. 433.

65 “The Leaning Tower,” [1940], Collected Essays, 2: 171, 175.Google Scholar

66 “The Adventures of Modern England,” p. 619.

67 Herbert Gorman's Historical Novel,” p. 287.

68 Pargellis, , “Rejection of Security,” p. 7Google Scholar; “Post-Mortem,” p. 550.

69 “The Disputed Assassination of Liberalism in England,” p. 9.

70 Dangerfield, George, “Short Chronicle,” Saturday Review of Literature 24 (November 1941): 23Google Scholar. The theme of compromise is reiterated in Victoria's Heir (1941), where he concluded that the English way of life was essentially progressive, and a deep respect for liberty was a vital element in the character of the English people, p. 331.

71 American Historical Review 88 (June 1983): 678.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

72 White, Joseph, “A Panegyric on Edwardian Progressivism,” Journal of British Studies 16 (Spring 1977): 150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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74 Victorian Studies 20 (Spring 1977): 346.Google Scholar