Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Paul Poplawski e ‘hilarious depression’ of the 1920s Oen referred to as the ‘roaring twenties’ or the ‘gay twenties’, the popular image of the 920s, as I have suggested elsewhere, is of ‘a carefree, frivolous, even anarchic’ age.1 is is an image strongly coloured by the American experience of that decade, but it applies to Britain too, not least because this was precisely the decade when American influences started to become widespread in Britain, especially within popular culture. Part of this common view of the era is that it was also, apparently, a ‘golden’ age for a whole host of things: motoring, air travel, wireless broadcasting, jazz, movies, musicals, revues, detective fiction — all things which seem to testify to a certain degree of post-war economic recovery and growth,2 to the continuing survival of a class of the affluent elite (from whom were drawn most of the ‘Bright Young ings’ of post-Waugh fame),3 and to a gradual spreading of a broadly middle-class lifestyle. But this was also, famously, a boom-and-bust decade and, in Britain, even before the Wall Street Crash of 929, there were severe swings in the economy throughout the 920s. Whatever relative prosperity might have existed for the population seen as a whole, this was always unevenly spread geographically, and some regions of the country continued to suffer extremes of poverty and hardship. High levels of unemployment and a pitiful lack of decent housing were persistent blights across the land and were compounded in the immediate post-war years by the return of huge numbers of war-wounded who were oen given no significant support or help in finding homes and employment. us, although the 920s saw ‘a period of psychological release aer the war and there was something of a hedonistic mood of “living for the moment” — among the middle and leisured classes at least’, Paul Poplawski, ‘e Twentieth Century, 90–939’, in English Literature in Context, ed. by 1 Paul Poplawski, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 207), pp. 470–540 (p. 492). And, speaking of things golden, in 925 Britain confidently restored the gold standard, which 2 had been suspended since 94. Unfortunately, the consequent overvaluation of the pound seems to have exacerbated the economic slump later in the decade — and the gold standard was abandoned again in 93. is was the phrase popularized in the period’s tabloid press, which is satirized in Evelyn 3 Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies (930) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 938; repr. 965). Waugh’s own phrase in the novel is actually ‘Bright Young People’ (pp. 59, 92). Yearbook of English Studies, 50 (2020), –2© Modern Humanities Research Association 2020 these years clearly had their grimmer side too, with a major economic depression, mass unemployment, constant industrial unrest and an underlying sense of wartrauma . Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (925) is in this sense a brilliant analysis of the divided nature of the 920s, where, on a glorious June morning in London, an upper-class woman exults in ordering beautiful flowers for her carefully planned dinner party while, in the park over the way, a former soldier relives the horrors of the trenches as he begins his chaotic slide into a suicidal nervous breakdown.4 As this suggests, the war hung very heavily over the decade and tropes reflecting variously on the war’s derangement of civilization are not hard to find in the literature of the period. Indeed, Vera Brittain’s blunt summation of the war in her classic memoir, Testament of Youth (933), could stand as a convenient motto over the entrance into the 920s too: ‘e world was mad and we were all victims.’5 On the one hand, then, we have images of a war-wearied decade of depression, despair and disenchantment;6 on the other, images of general well-being and high spirits, of a burgeoning of popular pastimes and entertainments for the masses and of positively riotous partying among the idle rich and their hangerson : Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else...