Little Englanders

Downloadable audio file

Britain in the Edwardian Era

A queen's death and a king's coronation. Rising mass media and declining public morals. Splits in all the major political parties and a new wave of social activism. War abroad and strikes at home. Welcome to Edwardian England.

When Queen Victoria died in 1901 it was the end of an era. Britain's dominance stretched across seven continents and its ruling classes were wealthier than ever before. Many later remembered the decade or so that followed as the long afternoon of an empire where the sun never set. Yet the Edwardians themselves were acutely aware that the country was in a state of flux; the seismic change that they felt would transform modern Britain forever.

In Little Englanders, Alwyn Turner reconsiders the Edwardian era as a time of profound social change, with the rise of women's suffrage and the labour movement, unrest in Ireland and the Boer republics, scandals in parliament and culture wars at home. He tells the story of the Edwardians through music halls and male beauty contests, the real Peaky Blinders and the 1908 Summer Olympics, and Marie Lloyd, Arthur Conan Doyle and Winston Churchill. In this colourful, detailed and hugely entertaining social history, Turner shows that, though the golden Victorian age was in the past, the birth of modern Britain was only just beginning.