The Age of Decadence by Simon Heffer

The Age of Decadence - A History of Britain: 1880-1914
By Simon Heffer
Pegasus Books, 2021

Mark Twain’s comment -  that history doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme - will be inescapable to readers of historian Simon Heffer’s big, boisterously satisfying new book The Age of Decadence, particularly since virtually the first thing Heffer clarifies, in a book absolutely fraught with clarifications, is that the “decadence” of the title only really applied to a small fraction of Great Britain’s population during the ‘long’ Edwardian Age from 1880 to the start of the First World War. 

By 1906, he informs his readers, the estimate was that 882,460 people - out of a population of 40 million - owned nearly 90 % of all private property. Since Heffer’s American readers, for instance, live in a country where the top 1% of the population controls more wealth than the bottom 50%, such staggering percentages are bound to strike up a few rhymes.

Heffer (editor of the recent compulsively readable volume of the diaries of “Chips” Cannon) opens The Age of Decadence with a self-contained essay about the “swagger” of the Edwardian upper classes, the newly intensified concentration on ostentation, the rampant leering narcissism that only its practitioners ever fail to recognize as a harbinger of apocalypse. That “swagger” essay itself acts as a kind of harbinger: in it, readers perhaps glancing nervously at the book’s 900-page length will find a fairly clear picture of what’s awaiting them. Here are Heffer’s weaknesses, including a notable tendency to chase hares into the weeds (it requires a certain kind of wayward courage for a writer to hit his readers with five solid pages about Edwardian municipal architecture before they’ve even got their hats off). And here also are his strengths: encyclopedic knowledge, a deft ear for the right quotations, and a flair for dramatic character-portraits that he shares with Barbara Tuchman, whose The Proud Tower (about the same time period and the same people) appeared half a century ago. 

He reads his target era through the hundreds of ways it was obsessed with reading itself. The Age of Decadence has great swaths of fascinating stuff on, as mentioned, architecture, and also art, music, apparel, as well as social upheavals, financial upheavals, political upheavals, and of course the increasingly audible murmur of war. And through it all, his focal points are people rather than trends. Even at the book’s beginning, when Heffer is describing that concept of Edwardian “swagger,” he puts a once-famous face on the idea, John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Thomas Lister, the 4th Baron Ribblesdale:

The peak of Sargent’s portraiture is his 1902 painting of Lord Ribblesdale, a tall, elegant and supremely aristocratic figure just in from the hunting field. The peer wears a calf-length black coat, pinned back behind his right hand thrust in a trouser pocket. He is leaning his weight on his right foot with his left at right-angles to it, both encased in highly polished boots. Ribblesdale is a tall, slim figure, his voluminous breeches and waistcoat hanging loosely on him, a black stock emphasising his aquiline face crowned by a silk hat at a rakish angle. A gloved hand holds a riding crop; his expression is one of disdain verging on boredom. He is swagger personified.

Heffer is enthusiastically conscientious about making sure that upper-class swagger doesn’t dominate the book, even though most of the events in these pages are owned and moved around by Ribblesdale & Co. The book spends a good deal of time with angry Irish nationalists, angry suffragists, and angry socialists. And Heffer naturally can’t resist dramatizing the lives of the artists, everybody from Edward “Pomp and Circumstances” Elgar to H.G. Wells, author of five rapid-fire literary classics - The Time Machine, The Island of Dr Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, and The First Men in the Moon - about which Heffer comments, “Through those novels … he did more than any writer since Dickens - indeed, more than Dickens - to stimulate and mobilise the British public’s imagination.” 

The end is of course pre-ordained. In June of 1914, an idealistic anarchist shot an ostrich-plumed archduke dead in Sarajevo, and only a few years later, almost the whole of the age Heffer so lavishly describes had been swept away. The Age of Decadence does an indomitable job of warning against the illusion - most of the signs of upheaval had been sporadically visible long before the Somme - and manages to be captivating reading in the process. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.