The Strange Death of Liberal England

Abstract

George Dangerfield's book, The Strange Death of Liberal England, would have been an influential, indeed a seminal, piece of historical writing whenever it had appeared: published in 1935 it constituted an immense liberation. In 1935 the writing of modern British political history was dominated for academic people by Lewis Namier, whose two great works—The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III and England in the Age of the American Revolution—had been published in 1928 and 1930. Namier's immense gifts were balanced by a startling defect. He was psychologically incapable of writing historical narrative, that is of dealing on any considerable scale with the development of events. Here, at the very start of the Namierite era, was a young scholar named Dangerfield writing history in the classic manner, writing, that is, as Thucydides and Tacitus had done, with a wide narrative sweep about the fateful and tragic events of yesterday. The result was the book which was so eloquently analysed this afternoon. It has been issued, if I heard this rightly, some nineteen times; and three editions, two American and one British, are in print today, after fifty years.At the end of his life Disraeli, by then Lord Beaconsfield, congratulated Matthew Arnold on having “coined unforgettable phrases.” Mr. Dangerfield may surely be offered the same congratulations. In the week in which I was composing this paper the Spectator of London carried an article under the headline: “The Strange Death of Liberal America”; and I note that a work will be published in London this September entitled “The Strange Rebirth of Liberal England.” Where the phrasing of the title is concerned we may be celebrating tonight, not only a jubilee, but the ghost of a centenary. When Mr. Dangerfield chose his arresting title he echoed, unwittingly as we understand, one devised fifty years earlier; for in 1885 a young British journalist in India named Rudyard Kipling had written a story entitled: “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes.”