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

⁴ Clarke, P. F., Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge, 1971), p. 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the main outlines of the debate on the Edwardian Liberal Party, see Searle, G. R., “The Edwardian Liberal Party and Business,” English Historical Review 98 (January 1983): 28–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Brown, Kenneth D., “Introduction,” Essays in Anti-Labour History: Responses to the Rise of Labour in Britain (Hamden, 1974), pp. 8–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A review of the historical questions involved is provided by Thompson's, J. A. introduction to The Collapse of the British Liberal Party: Fate or Self-Destruction? (Lexington, Mass., 1969), pp. vii–xii.Google Scholar

⁵ Grigg, John, “Liberals on Trial,” Crisis and Controversy: Essays in Honour of A. J. P. Taylor, ed. by Sked, Alan and Cook, Chris (New York, 1976), p. 33.Google Scholar

⁶ Meacham, Standish, “‘The Sense of Impending Clash’: English Working-Class Unrest before the First World War,” American Historical Review 77 (December 1972): 1343CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also idem, A Life Apart: The English Working Class, 1890-1914 (Cambridge, 1977), p. 221, where he writes that the book “remains the starting point for any analysis of Edwardian attitudes and beliefs.”

⁷ O'Day, Alan, ed., The Edwardian Age: Conflict and Stability, 1900- 1914 (Hamden, 1979), p. 2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁸ Johnson, Paul, Preface, in Dangerfield, George, The Strange Death of Liberal England (London, 1970), p. 9.Google Scholar

⁹ McKibbin, Ross, The Evolution of the Labour Party, 1910-1924 (Oxford, paperback edition, 1983), p. 236Google Scholar; Cook, Chris, A Short History of the Liberal Party, 1900-1976 (New York, 1976), p. 173Google Scholar. Martin Pugh believes that it gives an “exaggerated and misleading impression,” The Making of Modern Britain, 1867-1939 (Oxford, 1982), p. 316Google Scholar. An extended rebuttal of Dangerfield's, “Tory revolt” is Gregory Phillips, The Diehards: Aristocratic Society and Politics in Edwardian England (Cambridge, 1979).Google Scholar

¹⁰ Howkins, Alun, “Edwardian Liberalism and Industrial Unrest: A Class View of the Decline of Liberalism,” History Workshop 4 (1977): 159.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹¹ “Post-Mortem,” Times Literary Supplement, 4 July 1936, p. 550.Google Scholar

¹² Dangerfield, George, “The Insistent Past,” North American Review 243 (March 1937): 140Google Scholar. Dangerfield is rarely considered in the context of the 1930s, but see the comments of Read, Donald, Edwardian England (London, 1982), pp. 22–23Google Scholar, and White, Joe, “1910-1914 Reconsidered,” Social Conflict and the Political Order in Modern Britain, ed. by Cronin, James E. and Schneer, Jonathan (London, 1982), p. 73.Google Scholar

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.

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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

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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.

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