Abstract
The introduction outlines the historiographical debate surrounding the issue of racial decline in Edwardian England, and the role that anxiety and pessimism are commonly felt to have played in framing debates about national and imperial strength in the wake of the South African War. The introduction offers an outline to how the study intends to assess whether this is true of the Edwardian English middle-class public.
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Notes
On the former, see Jan Rüger, The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)
Andrew Thompson, ‘The language of imperialism and the meanings of empire: imperial discourse in British politics, 1895–1914’, Journal of British Studies 36:2 (1997), pp.150–1
Jose Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain, 1870–1914 (1993; London: Penguin, 1994), pp.32–6
Paul Readman, ‘Commemorating the past in Edwardian Hampshire: King Alfred, Pageantry and Empire’, in Southampton: Gateway to the British Empire, Miles Taylor (ed.) (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), pp.95–114
Owen Ellison, Charles Dickens: Novelist (London: Sisley’s, 1908), esp. ch.5
For one example of this, see Christopher Prior, Exporting Empire: Africa, Colonial Officials and the Construction of the British Imperial State, c.1900–39 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p.150
Geoffrey Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency: A Study in British Politics and Political Thought, 1899–1914 (1971; London: Ashfield Press, 1990), p.61
Michael Rosenthal, The Character Factory: Baden-Powell and the Origins of the Boy Scout Movement (London: Collins, 1986), p.4;
see also David Brooks, The Age of Upheaval: Edwardian Politics, 1899–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp.1, 5
George Behlmer, Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England: 1870–1908 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982), p.204
Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (1968; London: Pimlico, 1991), p.45
Dan Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), p.115;
see also Richard Soloway, ‘Counting the degenerates: the statistics of race deterioration in Edwardian England’, Journal of Contemporary History 17 (1982), p.137
Deborah Dwork, War Is Good for Babies and Other Young Children: A History of the Infant and Child Welfare Movement in England1898–1918 (London: Tavistock, 1987), p.223
Stone, Breeding Superman; Lucy Bland and Lesley Hall, ‘Eugenics in Britain: the view from the metropole’, in Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (eds) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p.213;
Gregory Philips, The Diehards: Aristocratic Society and Politics in Edwardian England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp.82–9
Events and process that have been explained by recourse to fears of decline, but which cannot be dealt with directly in this work, include the need to reinvigorate British national culture with ‘old’ art forms such as folk music, and a hardening of racial attitudes in British history textbooks; Georgina Boyes, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p.23;
Kathryn Castle, ‘The imperial Indian: India in British history textbooks for schools 1890–1914’, in The Imperial Curriculum: Racial Images and Education in the British Colonial Experience, J. A. Mangan (ed.) (London: Routledge, 1993), pp.35–6
Douglas Lorimer, ‘Race, science and culture: historical continuities and discontinuities, 1850–1914’, in The Victorians and Race, Shearer West (ed.) (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), pp.16, 18
A good deal of work has been undertaken on this issue, but the classic studies remain John Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984);
Mackenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986)
Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow: Pearson, 2005), ch.8;
see also Rüger, ‘Nation, empire and navy: identity politics in the United Kingdom 1887–1914’, Past and Present 185 (2004), pp.159–87
Thompson, ‘Publicity, philanthropy and commemoration: British society and the war’, in The Impact of the South African War, David Omissi and Thompson, (eds) (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp.99–123
Robert MacDonald, The Language of Empire: Myths and Metaphors of Popular Imperialism, 1880–1918 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p.51
See, for example, Jon Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
Duncan Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party1900–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
Michael Childs, Labour’s Apprentices: Working-class Lads in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Hambledon Press, 1992);
Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002)
Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p.218
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© 2013 Christopher Prior
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Prior, C. (2013). Introduction. In: Edwardian England and the Idea of Racial Decline: An Empire’s Future. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137373410_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137373410_1
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