The Roaring Twenties or The Morbid Age?
My new novel begins serialising today
Some of you will know that along side this ‘serious’ substack, I also write a fiction substack over at The Bloomsbury Trilogy. Between December last year and September this, I published Maynard’s War, the first novel in the trilogy, in weekly instalments. You you can still read it here.
This morning, I began the serialisation of the second novel. It’s called The Roaring Twenties and it picks up the story where Maynard’s War left off, offering a Bloomsbury-eye view of the momentous events of the 1920s, and following the lives and loves of members of The Bloomsbury Group as they emerge from relative obscurity to become public figures. You can read about it here.
While you can read The Roaring Twenties on its own, you might want to begin with Maynard’s War, both for the backstory, and because it uncovers a fascinating and largely unknown part of the history of the Bloomsbury Group.
If you haven’t already signed up, why not give it a go? In the meantime, below you’ll find a short piece inspired by my research for this second novel. Thanks, Mark.
I recently read Richard Overy’s fascinating 2009 history of Britain between the wars, published in the UK with the title The Morbid Age. Interestingly, in the US it was called The Twilight Years. I suspect this has more to do with the travails of marketeers than the different tastes of British and American readers, but I can confirm that the texts are identical.
That neither title is very up beat only underlines Overy’s thesis that, despite having emerged victorious from the Great War, Britain in the 1920s was a country awash with pessimism. Whatever it was that had been great about the country before the war, Britain had now entered a steep decline, and it was all terribly depressing.
Overy’s book is a history of ideas, and of British ideas in particular. But it’s not entirely an history of intellectual thinking. The statistics he quotes about membership of organisations such as the League of Nations Union (over one million) and similar societies where people met to discuss the questions of the day, suggest that many more ‘ordinary’ people were keen actively to engage with politics and the future than they do today. The League of Nations was seen as a great moral advance, and people desperately wanted it to succeed as a forum for the resolution of international disputes and the avoidance of future conflict.
Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia, was an early internationalist and originator of the idea for a League of Nations. He is also a key character in The Bloomsbury Trilogy.
As Overy catalogues, there was almost universal despair among the chattering classes. People were convinced that civilization was on the verge of collapse. To some extent this was a reaction to the immense sacrifice of the years 1914 to 1918 and the growing belief that the terms imposed on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles might well mean another war before very long.
But it was also a reaction to the immense social changes overtaking Britain. Everything people had previously taken for granted was up in the air, so perhaps it really did feel like the end of civilization.
Subsequent generations have lived through another world war, the Holocaust, the threat of nuclear armageddon and now climate change. Civilization is far more fragile today than it was in 1920s, yet instead of engaging in debate and trying to find solutions to common problems, as millions did in the 1920s, most people today keep their heads buried firmly in the sand. Which is worse: to be wrong about something, and then work hard to find a solution to a non-existent problem; or to deny the existence of a very serious problem in the first place?
Overy cites massive changes in our understanding as a prime reason for the sense of pessimism. The world was still struggling to digest the implications of Darwin’s theories of biological evolution, and the efforts of less reputable thinkers to apply his ideas to politics and economics.
Freud - whose close connections to the Bloomsbury Group will feature in The Roaring Twenties - was also making a name for himself. In terms of how people understood their own feelings and motivations his ideas were even more discombobulating than Darwin’s.
And the ideas of Karl Marx (and Henry George) were beginning to find a larger audience, and causing people to question the basis of the economic arrangements they had hitherto taken completely for granted.
The Morbid Age provides a fascinating insight into what people were thinking as the world underwent a multi-layered revolution in the 1920s. But it begs the question: if things were so awful, or at least people’s perceptions were so glum, why is ‘The Roaring Twenties’ the most commonly attributed epithet to that first decade after the war to all end wars?
Of course, for people of a certain class, and with the advantages that come with wealth, there was a great deal of fun to be had. Even if for most people life continued to be a struggle. There was progress though: in Britain, the Labour Party eclipsed the Liberals as the alternative party of government, consolidating a process that would gradually erode class differences and offer the promise of social mobility on an unprecedented scale.
A century later, both the erosion of class differences and the ability of people to escape poverty and join the ranks of the professional middle classes seem to have gone into reverse. This represents a genuine threat to civilization, whereas a century ago it was the inconvenient blurring of class divisions that most concerned the thinking classes.
Morally and culturally, the 1920s put to bed the last vestiges of the Victorian age, an age in which a pernicious moral climate saw to it that only men, and then only men of a certain class, could enjoy the personal freedoms we now assume to be a universal human right.
Contrary to what many thought at the time civilization was not on the brink of collapse in the 1920s, though it would come perilously close in the 1940s, and again in October 1962. Nonetheless it was a fascinating decade, one in which the world struggled with a transition to modernity that nobody had really anticipated, and certainly not asked for.
The various members of the Bloomsbury Group, and the people they came into contact with, were either involved in, or had a ringside seat at, every aspect of this rapid cultural revolution. It’s a story I’m really looking forward to telling the in The Roaring Twenties over the coming months, and I hope you’ll join me.