The Pelican History of England #9: The World Wars and Beyond (1914–79)

The final volume of the Pelican History of England was published in 1965, covering 1914 to 1963; I read that edition many years ago. In 1981, it was updated to cover through 1979, but since author David Thomson died in 1970, one of his former students, Geoffrey Warner, did the update. According to his preface, Warner didn't update Thomson's text very much; instead, he just added two chapters to the end to cover the last fifteen years. The result is somewhat odd, because it takes what was already one of the longest Pelican Histories and makes it even longer—even though it covers the shortest span of time!

I'll say more about the overall design of the series in a future post, but I did think this book had more detail than earlier ones... which wasn't always warranted. Whereas previous volumes would not really go into detail about the movement of foreign wars, this one does. I think probably this is partially because it has the space to do, but also because its author lived through the events in question (Thomson would have been in his thirties during World War II), so they seemed important to him. Additionally, there's more blow-by-blow detail on the politicking and the parties; again, I suspect the dual reason of 1) available space, and 2) recency bias. To me, though, this made the book less effective; the best Pelican Histories (such as Thomson's own volume 8) have given a bird's-eye view of the era in question, but here I felt a bit bogged down in the identities of specific cabinet ministers. (The other consequence of recency is that he's more likely to assume readers already know what something is than other contributors to the series, which I guess is fair enough, but I would have appreciated an explanation of what the "coupon election" was!)

The Pelican History of England: 9. England in the Twentieth Century (1914-79)
by David Thomson with Geoffrey Warner

Second edition published: 1981
Originally published: 1965
First edition previously read: August 2013
Acquired and reread: July 2025

The other thing that makes this volume unusual is that it's the only one to be written by a repeat author. Thus, unsurprisingly, Thomson continues the emphasis of his previous volume, focusing on how the government became increasingly invested in the management of society through a variety of means. Though as I said above I did think we got a bit too much detail about specific ministries, Thomson does ably show how the two major political parties, and the succession of prime ministers, attempted to regulate the economy and elevate the welfare of the citizenry in ways that were sometimes surprisingly similar and sometimes very different. By the 1950s, "British society now presupposed full employment, economic growth, mass consumption, and therefore mass advertising" but "[u]like the Welfare State, it cared little about inequalities of wealth" (260).

For example, he points out that what used to be called "departments," "boards," and "offices" largely became "ministries" after the Great War: "The change implied a new theory of government, in which politicians and their 'departments' of expert administrators jointly shaped and pursued policies" (64). The world wars were also significant in that the pyramid-shaped power structures introduced during wartime became a guiding principle for the organization of government after (219). Of particular importance was the growth of education, which expanded significantly across successive generations in the first half of the century: "The national system of education kept pace with – though perhaps several paces behind – the development of modern Britain: its advance helped, in turn, to make possible the next phase of growth" (189).

Fun fact I learned from this book: H. G. Wells was supposedly the first person to ever use the term "leftism" in print (116). Unfortunately, Thomson gives a date for this (1927)... but not a citation! I think this may have been in his lecture Democracy under Revision, which was published that year by the Hogarth Press, but in a quick online search, it seems like the text isn't available online. Alas, a Google Books search for "leftism" with the date filter set to terminate at 1926 brings up a number of hits, mostly from communist periodicals, so it seems to be untrue. One gets the feeling that Thomson himself is a liberal if not a leftist, but often disappointed with the actual execution of leftist policies in practice. There is a funny bit where he cites a book read at the first meeting of the Left Book Club in 1936: "Describing future possibilities of artificial insemination, the author exclaimed: 'How many women, in an enlightened community devoid of superstitious taboos and of sex slavery, would be eager and proud to bear and rear a child of Lenin or of Darwin!' Fortunately some of its successors were more realistic" (163). I'll have to see if I can work that into my book chapter on left-wing use of Darwinism somewhere. 

I was struck by how Thomson described prime ministers Ramsey MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin in the 1930s: "Like a sedate and leisurely firm of comfortable family solicitors, they conducted the business affairs of Great Britain and the Commonwealth with mild, unhurried manners, facing no issue until it was claimant, seeking no decision until it was overdue. [...] History may come, more and more, to see them as Tweedledum and Tweedledee – presiding jointly over British national life in one of its peculiarly unheroic periods" (141). I don't know enough about the reception of British prime ministers to know if this actually came about!

There is a little but not a lot of discussion of the changing social mores of the twentieth century, though I found what there was to be quite interestingly framed; I sort of sensed a young person sneering at how his elders saw as controversial things he had not seen as controversial at all: "one marvels at how restricted they were in their modernity, how lacking in robust dissipations. Even there wildness was brittle, their cult of self-indulgence as synthetic as the cocktails at their interminable parties, or the jazz played in the night-clubs. [...] It was not long before they got tired of themselves" (87). C'mon, David, just how boring were your parents, really?

We see a combination of Thomson's critique of the left and his issues with twentieth-century social mores when he claims that "[t]o all those who, before the war, had held the materialist view that crime was caused largely by slums, poverty, and bad economic conditions, it was disconcerting to discover that the Welfare State brought a steep rise in crime," especially among teenagers, whose incomes had risen the most! (276) "The conclusion seemed to be that crime is determined not by material conditions alone, but by the whole social environment, including such intangible factors as the ethical standards and values prevalent in society as a whole, the personal and collective anxieties to which men were subjected, and even the effectiveness of humanistic or religious teaching about human relationships" (276-7). If Thomson mentions him, I didn't catch it, but it seems very much not a coincidence that Thomson supports this point by citing statistics from 1959-61 and that Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange in 1962. 

In volume 8, Thomson discussed the monarchy a bit; surprisingly, there's less discussion of the abdication crisis than you might expect, but I found what Thomson said about Edward VIII's father, George VI, charming: "He had perhaps, as his successor remarked, waged 'a private war with the twentieth century', but his very old-fashionedness had been his strength" (151).

I wonder if I would have registered it if I hadn't been cued by the preface, but Geoffrey Warner's two chapters at the end are noticeably different, and I'm not just talking about the fact he breaks them up into fewer but longer sections than Thomson. While Warner maintains Thomson's focus on specific ministries and politicians and parties, he largely moves away from Thomson's focus on the "social state"; we get a lot more detail here about Britain's foreign policy during the era in question, especially issues surrounding decolonization and the Commonwealth. This is interesting but didn't really seem to be of a piece with the book I'd just read.

The Pelican History of England #8: The Victorian Period (1815–1914)

Surely I am at least somewhat biased in favor of this book, because the nineteenth period is my own special period of study, which means that (as opposed to many of the earliest volumes) I have a wider context in which to fit this book. But even aside from that, I think England in the Nineteenth Century is one of the best installments of the Pelican History of England, if not the best.

One of the goals of this series was to provide a "social history" of England, to focus not just on "dates and kings and battles" as A. R. Myers put it in volume 4, but how society itself was changing and evolving. This is an admirable goal, but I have found that many of the series's writers struggled with pulling this off in practice, leading to books where you would get snapshots of different aspects of society, but no coherent story. In my review of volume 4, I made this comment about volume 1 that I think sums it up well: "I felt like I got told a lot about what Roman houses in Britain looked like but not, say, why the Romans turned up to build houses to begin with." Volume 4 itself was another that struggled with this approach.

Some other authors moved away from this, preferring to work forward chronologically through a period, and I've found these the better volumes, because they were usually able to tell a story about the era in question—but even though each writer has their own prism of what they're interested in, it still would feel like you were moving forward through kings and politics, even if not "kings and battles," as if they had perhaps only succeeded because they had abandoned the whole raison d'être for the series. (I particularly liked volumes 5 and 6.)

The Pelican History of England: 8. England in the Nineteenth Century (1815-1914)
by David Thomson

Originally published: 1950
Acquired: August 2008
Previously read: January 2013
Reread: July 2025

But Thomson manages to make a social history and to tell a story in a way that achieves the platonic ideal of this series, and I don't think it's just the fact that I'm a Victorianist myself that makes me say this. Thomson focuses on how during this time the English were coming into a greater understanding of their own society, and thus attempting to do something about. He is writing to reclaim the Victorian period to the way the modernists came to view it in the early twentieth century (see Woolf's Between the Acts, which would have come out less than a decade prior, for a good example of this): "The whole meaning of Victorian England is lost if it is thought of as a country of stuffy complacency and black top-hatted moral priggery.... [They were] a people engaged in a tremendously exciting adventure – the daring experiment of fitting industrial man into a democratic society. Their failures, faults, and ludicrous shortcomings are all too apparent: but the days when Mr Lytton Strachey could afford to laugh at the foibles of the 'Eminent Victorians' have passed,* and we must ask ourselves the question whether we can laugh at our great-grandfathers' attempts to solve problems to which we have so far failed to find an answer" (33-4). Yes, it was an age of empire and of unequally distributed wealth, "[b]ut even when least fully aware of whence their power came Victorian Englishmen usually used it well, for they used it in the cause of freedom" (10). Some of their attempts seem comic to us now, yet "[i]t is wiser but more difficult to try to understand mid-Victorianism than to ridicule it" (102).

Drawing on another historian, M. D. George, Thomson puts it this way when discussing the conditions of the working classes in London: "hardships begin to be talked about only when they are no longer taken for granted: and it is the increased attention paid to them that is perhaps the main feature of the period.... Sweated labour and cellar dwellings were not invented by the men who made the industrial revolution: they were discovered by them, discussed by them, and in the end partially remedied by them" (18-19).

The beginning of the book is a bit jarring coming off of J. H. Plumb's volume 7, because Plumb ended his book on kind of a cliffhanger: "To thinking men the horizon was dark and foreboding.... [I]n 1815, at the end of long endurance, there was fear, and envy, and greed, but little hope" (214). But Thomson doesn't see 1815 this way at all! He says that in 1815, England "was on the brink of an era of prosperity and greatness unrivalled in her whole history," though he does also admit "she was entering upon a period of remarkable social distress and unrest" (32). One of the selling points of the series was that each writer had the freedom to advance their own interpretation, so this isn't necessarily bad, but it does read weird, like when an issues of a comic book ends on a cliffhanger, but the next issue has a new creative team, so they just ignore it and do what they're interested in. Thomson doesn't position 1815 as a dark time like Plumb did, but as a time where people began to see the darkness and therefore began to do something about it.

Thus the book manages to tell a story, but instead of being the story of kings or prime ministers or battles, it's the story of how England attempted to improve itself; if there was "[t]he spread of social distress and economic upheaval," what matters to Thomson is that this led to the creation of "what soon came to be called 'the condition of England question'." He talks about the many significant people, but what matters about them is how behind their actions was the "fermenting of a new spirit of discontent" (43). The book is filled with examples of how things were changing for the better, leading to results that might seem bad in isolation but were improvements on how things had been. For instance, Thomson discusses the reduction of crimes for which the death penalty could be imposed; before 1832 you could be hanged for pickpocketing or stealing a sheep or "impersonating out-pensioners of Chelsea Hospital" (17). The new alternative was transportation (i.e., exile to Australia), and while this may seem like a bit of a barbaric punishment to us in isolation, it really was a serious improvement; after 1838, murder (or attempted murder) was the only crime anyone was hanged for. Okay, yes, hanging is barbaric, but limiting hangings to murders is definitely an improvement!

One of his big emphases throughout is the way the modern "social service state" developed; Thomson had previously written a book called Equality (1949) where he discussed this in detail, and I am interested enough to probably track it down someday. The belief that the government could be the remedy for social ills through systematic intervention was a new one in the period. Here, he says that the period created "well-rooted and flexible institutions of government and of social life.... [T]hese institutions of national life could be preserved, adjusted, modified, and used for new ends" (230). For example, he talks about how Robert Owen ("[c]ompletely a crank, something of a prig, but very much a saint"!) promoted education because it was the solution to the new idea that "our characters are made for us by environment and heredity alike, and therefore we are not responsible for what we are.... Men can all recognize truth when it is placed before them, and by moulding men's minds to the truth, society and even human nature can be revolutionized. Here was a simple and powerful basis for any program of comprehensive reform" (46).

A related emphasis is the Victorians' attempt to create a scientific understanding of society and thus a scientific basis for reform—this is my area of interest when it comes to the Victorians, so of course I'm into it. Thomson discusses Herbert Spencer, of course, but also figures less well known to a modern reader, like H. T. Buckle, who "attempt[ed] to handle human society by the methods of the physical sciences" and Walter Bagehot, who wanted more conscious discussion of a society that had evolved without conscious direction, and applied principles of natural selection (105). I found his discussion of how Darwin's Origin created an intellectual break particularly fascinating; I want to quote at length his quotation of Edward Pease, one of the founders of the Fabian Society, writing in 1916:

It is nowadays not easy to recollect how wide was the intellectual gulf which separated the young generation of that period from their parents. The Origin of Species, published in 1859, inaugurated an intellectual revolution.... The older folk as a rule refused to accept or to consider the new doctrine. I recollect a botanical Fellow of the Royal Society who, in 1875, told me that he had no opinions on Darwin's hypothesis.... Our parents, who read neither Spencer nor Huxley, lived in an intellectual world which bore no relation to our own; and cut adrift as we were from the intellectual moorings of our upbringings, recognising, as we did, that the older men were useless as guides in religion, in science, in philosophy because they knew not evolution, we also felt instinctively that we could accept nothing on trust from those who still believed that the early chapters of Genesis accurately described the origin of the universe, and that we had to discover somewhere for ourselves what were the true principles of the then recently invented science of sociology. (qtd. on 151)

But as he says, a man like Charles Dickens is born out of the same intellectual conditions that give us people like Spencer, even if he might seem very different at first glance: "His significance is not that he propounded any programme of social reforms or political improvements, but simply that he painted, for all to appreciate and enjoy, a vivid picture of working class folk whose poverty could be seen not as a penalty from heaven or the punishment of sin, but as the product of bad social conditions and the consequence of man's inhumanity" (114).

Thomson discusses imperialism, thankfully, fitting in too into his overarching story. I liked his take on Rudyard Kipling: "He made popular the ideal of a common imperial patriotism, transcending every diversity of birth and circumstance, ennobled by an ideal of selfless service. He has much too often been quoted as an exponent of aggressive imperialism. He is rather the voice of unrepentant but chastened imperialism, seeking perhaps to unconsciously equip British power with moral purpose and a human content" (204). I don't think you have to buy this interpretation of Kipling in specific or Victorian imperialism in general, but it shows where they were coming from—or at least where they believed they were coming from. On the other hand, I was a bit skeptical of his claim there was little malice in the British attitude to Germany before the Great War (218), given the strong anti-German sentiment in some of the era's future-war fiction I have read.

This is a smaller part of the book, but he also discusses the way the monarchy changed in this era to become what we (I would argue) still recognize it as today, as a physical symbol of Britain's greatness (172), calling it "a new type of royal authority, resting not on constitutional prerogatives or political activity, but on the psychological needs of nationalism and imperialism" (174).

I think probably the whole story of the book is probably summed up by this bit: "Later generations have come to regard as man-made and intolerable many things which the Victorians accepted as without remedy. The Victorians regarded as intolerable many others things which their ancestors had deemed without remedy, and they had slowly to invent appropriate means to deal with these new-found but not novel social evils.... Evils felt to be humanly remediable were tackled as promptly, and, on the whole, as competently, as the means at their disposal allowed" (115). 

It's a strong story of social transformation, and I think the best of these volumes by far. Perhaps a bit too sympathetic to the Victorians at times, but I guess I wouldn't be studying them if I wasn't sympathetic to them myself. It is certainly noteworthy that this is the first Pelican History where the book's publication date is closer to the era in question (it came out 36 years after the book's closing date) than it is to the time I read it (it came out 75 years ago). I am further from him than he was from many of the people he discusses! I think there is something to be said for the "power of distance," but proximity yields its own insights. I look forward to finishing off this project by (re)reading Thomson's second volume, which covers the era he himself lived through.

* Strachey's Eminent Victorians came out in 1918. 

Review: England in the Twentieth Century by David Thomson

Hardcover, 304 pages
Published 1976 (originally 1965)
Borrowed from the library
Read August 2013

The Pelican History of England: 9. England in the Twentieth Century (1914-63)

by David Thomson

This is a nice little history of fifty years in the early twentieth century. I was previously familiar with the broad strokes of this, especially the two World Wars, of course, but much of England's domestic affairs in the period between the wars was largely unknown to me. Thomson supposes some more familiarity with the covered politicians than I had, but I suppose that wasn't unreasonable in 1965. The big strikes and the formation of the Commonwealth of Nations were probably the part most interesting to me, as well as the details on the handling of the buildup to the Second World War, especially the the pacifistic sentiments of many in the 1920s and '30s. Not as essential as Thomson's nineteenth-century history, but he writes engagingly and informatively.

Review: England in the Nineteenth Century by David Thomson

Mass market paperback, 254 pages
Published 1986 (originally 1950)
Acquired October 2008
Read January 2013

The Pelican History of England: 8. England in the Nineteenth Century (1815-1914)
by David Thomson

I felt much more grounded in this book than in the previous Pelican History of England, Plumb's England in the Eighteenth Century. Partially, I am sure, this is because I study Victorian literature, and thus have more of a background, but I think it helps that Thomson doesn't divide his book into phases based on prime ministers whose importance I am supposed to take for granted, but three different "phases" (1815-50, 1851-74, 1875-1914) that emphasize, in turn, reform, progress, and statehood. With less of politics and more of the social situation, Thomson provides a very readable, light history with occasional moments of insight, such as: "Later generations have come to regard as man-made and intolerable many things which the Victorians accepted as without remedy. The Victorians regarded as intolerable many others things which their ancestors had deemed without remedy, and they had slowly to invent appropriate means to deal with these new-found but not novel social evils. [...] Evils felt to be humanly remediable were tackled as promptly, and, on the whole, as competently, as the means at their disposal allowed" (115). He's obviously working at point to reclaim the Victorians from later criticism (i.e., Lytton Strachey et al.), and I too am all for that.