The Age of Decadence by Simon Heffer, Random House, £30
There is a view, commonly held, that grand narrative histories are a thing of the past. Like telegrams, smoking in trains and old maids cycling to Evensong, they have passed out of life and into collective memory. This view is mistaken, as Simon Heffer proves happily and beyond doubt with his latest book.
The Age of Decadence begins with Disraeli, Prime Minister of the greatest empire the world has yet seen, proclaiming Victoria Regina Imperatrix. It concludes with a beleaguered government clinging on to power by its fingernails, the nation itself on the point of disintegration.
The story of this period, equal in span to that separating us from the Falklands War, is one of inexorable decline. The decline of a class, as the aristocracy ate, smoked, drank and gambled its way into irrelevance; of a party, as the Liberals tore themselves to ribbons over the intractable issue of Home Rule; and of an economy, as agricultural depression and failure to keep pace with technological advances meant Britain was overtaken by America and, ultimately, Germany.
It was also a period of stupefyingly rapid social change, though standards of living for the working classes remained poor throughout. This was demonstrated by Seebohm Rowntree’s 1899 study of urban poverty in York, which discovered that 38 per cent of people lived in poverty and concluded that “the wages paid for unskilled labour in York are insufficient to provide food, shelter and clothing adequate to maintain a family of moderate size in a state of bare physical efficiency”.
The Third Reform Act of 1884 extended the franchise such that two thirds of men in England and Wales were now able to vote (in Scotland it was three fifths; in Ireland, a half). Along with this extension of the franchise went wider engagement of the working, and in particular the lower-middle, classes in party politics and local government. The Liberals retained support in the North, where its tradition was that of Radicalism and Non-conformism, but in the more prosperous South the Tories were the beneficiaries. As Heffer puts it, “supporting the Conservative party was very much a badge of social respectability” – Pooterism writ large.
Suitably, for a book about decadence, there is a great deal on the hypocritical sexual mores of the day, including a most amusing description of the Cleveland Street affair, in which Lord Arthur Somerset and Prince Albert Victor were accused of consorting with male prostitutes. Chief among the targets for Heffer’s fervid disapproval is the King-Emperor himself, Edward VII. “Tum-tum” he may have been to his intimates, who paid heavily for the privilege – to Heffer, though, he was little better than Harvey Weinstein with fluent French and finer suits.
Twenty-six pages are devoted to the increasing secularisation of the age and the decline of the Church of England, in particular the ludicrous prosecutions of “Ritualist” Anglo-Catholic priests under the Public Worship Regulation Act which culminated in the two-year trial of Edward King, Bishop of Lincoln, before an ecclesiastical court comprising the Archbishop of Canterbury, five bishops and the vicar-general. Despite, however, the Church of England’s reducing importance, anti-Catholic bigotry remained almost a badge of honour among the new middle classes, a peccadillo maintained in vast swathes of curtain-twitching suburbia to this day.
Heffer is particularly good not only on the political machinations of the age (as one would expect of the biographer of Enoch Powell and a former senior editor of the Daily Telegraph) but also on the pastimes and diversions in which each level of society indulged. Whether it be the music halls of the working classes, especially in London; the mania for sports and stamp-collecting which swept along all classes from the King downwards; the literature, theatre and music which the middle classes consumed like so many chocolate truffles; the aristocracy’s beloved hunting and shooting, begrudging access to which was granted the industrialists, financiers and brewers who, increasingly, were the only men able to keep up the seigneurial lifestyle. Heffer’s fine eye for an anecdote illuminates each case.
About his own enthusiasms, chiefly cricket and music, he writes with deep knowledge, great insight and the amateur’s enthusiasm for esoteric facts.
Ireland is the penumbra of the whole book, which casts its baleful shadow over the last 60 pages. The story will be familiar to most readers of this periodical, but it is well worth the reading nonetheless. Heffer’s command of detail, characters and politics make for a thrilling, if desolate, closing chapter. The brief envoi points towards his next volume on the Great War, the circumstances leading to which are noticeably absent from this one.
This is an outstanding work, greater even than its predecessor. The writing is fluent, amusing, powerful and persuasive; the history is never uninteresting; the anecdotes drop like pearls from the page; the central argument, that decadence and decline led to the impasse over Ireland, is made with unarguable conviction.
Should Heffer continue in this vein with his next two volumes, taking us up to 1939, his place among the finest chroniclers of our island story will be assured.
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