They didn’t last very long, the Edwardians, just the 13 years or so between Victoria’s final breath in 1901 and the Western Front in 1914; but they are all around us still. Lift up your eyes, walking through any of the great British cities, and their plump, bulgily flamboyant stone-faced architecture is everywhere. Their music, from swooping Elgar or Vaughan Williams to raucous music-hall hits, is still listened to, and their star writers – HG Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, PG Wodehouse, John Buchan – remain widely read.
Most people, I suspect, are vaguely aware that under the sunlit surface, Edwardian Britain was roiling with disaffection, most famously from the increasingly violent protests of the suffragettes. But Alwyn Turner’s page-turner of a popular history of the period, crammed with humour and striking quotes, reminds us just how uncanny are the parallels with Britain in the early 2020s.
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