dense narrative account of Great Britain’s social and political conflicts in the decades before World War I.
“Swagger was the predominant style of the period,” asserts journalist and popular historian Heffer in his first book to be published in the U.S. He notes that the affluence and complacency of the English upper classes, traditionally viewed as defining features of the late Victorian and Edwardian years, covered up working-class, feminist, and Irish discontents. The Third Reform Act of 1884 went a long way toward extending the franchise, and the House of Lords reluctantly assented to it, but the Lords’ fierce resistance to the “People’s Budget” of 1909 provoked a constitutional crisis that nearly resulted in the abolition of the aristocratic upper chamber. Heffer covers this struggle as well as the parliamentary battles over Irish home rule and the government’s maladroit handling of such colonial imbroglios as the Boer War and the Siege of Khartoum. The author’s level of detail will daunt casual readers, but those who like their history long and leisurely will enjoy his approach. He offers similarly in-depth treatments of various juicy scandals among the Marlborough House Set, the louche circle formed around the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), and he shows how they were examples of the triviality and sexual hypocrisy of Britain’s upper classes. Queen Victoria fares no better, sketched as a dour reactionary who detested the liberal governments she was forced to collaborate with as a constitutional monarch.
