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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
It all started with George Dangerfield's classic description of the circumstances surrounding the demise of Liberal England prior to World War I. He summarily recognized “that the abandonment of respectable punctilios and worn conventions, which was such a feature of society after the war, had already begun before the war.” Though drawn largely within a social context, it was obvious that Dangerfield's portrayal, especially after the precipitate decline of the Liberal Party in the interwar period, was fraught with political implications. An incubation period of almost a generation followed, but by the early 1960s The Strange Death of Liberal England, by virtue of its brilliant style and sweeping interpretation, had gained international recognition and set the tone for historiography of the Edwardian era. In his 1985 assessment of Dangerfield's impact, Peter Stansky concludes that his “interpretation will not die; no matter how often it may be knocked on the head, it has shaped the way the period is viewed….There can be few works that are so vital after fifty years, as likely to survive for another fifty or as enjoyable to read.” At the outset of the new millennium, Strange Death has lost little of its incandescence.
An important aspect of the book's magnetic appeal is the groundwork it provided for the great debate over the rise of the Labour Party and the decline of the Liberals. Did these phenomena occur suddenly as a result of the First World War or were they already well in place in the pre-war years, especially from 1910 to 1914? The foremost challenge to Dangerfield's thesis, thereby instigating the controversy, came from Trevor Wilson's 1966 study, The Downfall of the Liberal Party, 1914–1935, which ascribes Liberal misfortunes largely to a crisis of leadership during the war.
1 Dangerfield, George, The Strange Death of Liberal England (New York, 1935), p. 394Google Scholar.
2 Stansky, Peter, “The Strange Death of Liberal England: Fifty Years After,” Albion 17 (Winter, 1985): 403CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also other articles on Dangerfield's work by Alfred Gollin, Michael Brock, and Carolyn White in the same issue.
3 Wilson, Trevor, The Downfall of the Liberal Party, 1914–1935 (London, 1966)Google Scholar.
4 See Douglas, Roy, The History of the Liberal Party, 1855–1970 (London, 1971)Google Scholar; Butler, David and Stokes, Donald, Political Change in Britain (New York, 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Kinnear, Michael, The Fall of Lloyd George: the Political Crisis of 1922 (Toronto, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 McKibbin, Ross, The Evolution of the Labour Party, 1910–1924 (Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar. Also see Pelling, Henry, Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain (New York, 1968)Google Scholar; Blewett, Neal, The Peers, the Parties and the People (London, 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Stephens, H. W., “Party Realignment in Britain, 1900–1925,” Social Science History 6 (1982): 35–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Clarke, Peter, Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge, 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 See Laybourn, Keith and Reynolds, Jack, Liberalism and the Rise of Labour, 1890–1918 (London, 1984)Google Scholar; Laybourn, Keith, The Rise of Labour, The British Labour Party, 1890–1979 (London, 1988)Google Scholar, and idem, “The Rise of Labour and the Decline of Liberalism: The State of the Debate,” History 80 (June, 1995): 80.
8 Tanner, Duncan, “The Parliamentary Electoral System, the ‘Fourth’ Reform Act and the Rise of Labour in England and Wales,” Bulletin of the Institute for Historical Research 56 (11, 1983): 205–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Political Change and the Labour Party, 1900–1918 (New York, 1990), and idem, “Election, Statistics, and the Rise of the Labour Party, 1906–1931,” Historical Journal 34 (November, 1991): 893–908. Also see Lawrence, Jon and Taylor, Miles, eds., Party, State and Society, Electoral Behaviour in Britain since 1820 (Aldershot, 1997)Google Scholar, a collection of essays that not only supports Tanner's arguments against class polarization but further discredits inevitabilist views as anachronistic. Lawrence and Taylor contend that studies preoccupied with “the shift from status to class politics” were more characteristic of “historians writing in the 1950s and 1960s,” p. 17.
9 See Adelman, Paul, The Rise of the Labour Party, 1880–1945 (London, 1986)Google Scholar and The Decline of the Liberal Party, 1910–1931 (London, 1995)Google Scholar; Searle, G. R., The Liberal Party, Triumph and Disintegration, 1886–1929 (New York, 1992)Google Scholar; and Sykes, Alan, The Rise and Fall of British Liberalism, 1776–1988 (London, 1997)Google Scholar. The most succinct summary of the course the debate has taken since the mid-1960s is provided by Searle, G. R. in “Did the Liberals Still Have a Future in 1914?” Historian 35 (Summer, 1992): 10–12Google Scholar.
10 Childs, Michael, “Labour Grows Up: The Electoral System, Political Generations, and British Politics, 1890–1929,” Twentieth Century British History 6 (1995): 124–25, 132, and 123CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Aydelotte, William O., Quantification in History (Reading, Mass., 1971), p. 119Google Scholar.
12 See Lowell, A. Lawrence, “Influence of Party Upon Legislation in England and America,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association 1 (1901): 321–542Google Scholar, and Norton, Philip, Dissension in the House of Commons, 1974–1979 (Oxford, 1980)Google Scholar.
l3 Fair, John D., “Party Voting Behaviour in the British House of Commons, 1886–1918,” Parliamentary History 5 (1986): 65–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 The first step in this study, as for its parent, was to locate the names of the individuals who sat in Parliament from 1906 to 1918, which comprehended three Parliaments, each accommodating 670 members. This information was most readily available in the Constitutional Year Book, published annually throughout this period by the National Unionist Association. Those names were then double-checked in other standard reference sources, including Who's Who, Who Was Who, and Dod's Parliamentary Companion. By-elections and changes in party affiliation were verified in Butler, David and Freeman, Jennie, British Political Facts, 1900–1968 (1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and The Times. This act of purification revealed that the listings in the Constitutional Year Book exceeded 98% accuracy, though Labour members sometimes defied easy classification.
15 Lowell, A. Lawrence, Government of England, 2 vols. (New York, 1912), 2:41Google Scholar.
16 Index of Likeness is derived from the formula L=100 minus (% of Party A voting positive minus % of Party B voting positive)—100 being absolute similarity and 0 being absolute dissimilarity. Rice, Stuart A., Quantitative Methods in Politics (New York, 1928), 207–27Google Scholar.
17 Null votes and those instances where either party was evenly split and did not register a majority were not included in this analysis.
18 Sykes, Alan, The Rise and Fall of British Liberalism, 1776–1988 (London, 1997), p. 193Google Scholar.
19 Adelman, Paul, The Rise of the Labour Party, 1880–1945 (London, 1986), p. 42Google Scholar.
20 Very often, of course, matters of great substance were fought initially on procedural grounds.
21 Cabinet Memorandum, June 22, 1910, Public Record Office, CAB 37/102/23.
22 See Fair, “Party Voting Behaviour in the British House of Commons.”
23 Tanner, , Political Change and the Labour Party, pp. 424, 441Google Scholar.
24 Childs, , “Labour Grows Up,” p. 124Google Scholar.
25 Laybourn, and Reynolds, , Liberalism and the Rise of Labour, p. 142Google Scholar.
26 Thorpe, Andrew, A History of the British Labour Party (London, 1997), p. 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
27 Sykes, , Rise and Fall of British Liberalism, p. 193Google Scholar.
28 Ibid., p. 273.
29 Childs, , “Labour Grows Up,” p. 143Google Scholar.
30 Adelman, , Decline of the Liberal Party, p. 8Google Scholar.
31 Dangerfield, , Strange Death of Liberal England, p. 394Google Scholar.