HISTORY: The Morbid Age: Britain Between the WarsBy Richard Overy, Allen Lane
WHEN WH AUDEN published The Age of Anxietyin 1947, the second World War had ended, and many of the fears and apprehensions afflicting the 1930s generation in England had been realised. Auden's A Baroque Ecloguesums up the pre- and post-war mood of malaise and the sense of an unfulfilled quest for solutions – just as Richard Overy's detailed and judicious study gets to grips with the components of a pervasive, inter-war, social and political disquiet.
Overy announces his purpose straight away: it’s to analyse the idea of “civilisation in crisis” in Britain during this period, and to consider the reasons why certain predominant “collective anxieties” took hold. He has a vast range of material to draw on, from the Left Book Club to Oswald Mosley, from Guernica to Walter Greenwood. Each of his nine lengthy chapters is focused on a particular topic, such as psychoanalysis or the crisis in capitalism, and the various forms of trepidation besetting the nation are briskly and comprehensively assessed. (The lowering preoccupations of Overy’s study are peculiar to the age in question, of course – but you can’t help being struck by the way in which these preoccupations chime with anxieties of our own time. If fears about the future take a different form today, the atmosphere of tension and constant unease is curiously similar.)
Every social and political group in the country, it seemed, was able to put its finger on some conspicuous and specific cause of alarm, engendering a deep-rooted pessimism about the future, which contributed to the general gloom and doom. The effect was cumulative, as grim prediction was piled on top of present disaffection. You had economists worried about financial instability, psychiatrists worried about dark subconscious forces, eugenicists worried about reckless breeding, moralists worried about sexual promiscuity, communists worried about imperialist capitalism, conservatives worried about red agitation, pacifists worried about looming annihilation, militarists worried about degenerate ideologies such as pacifism, moderates worried about political extremism, catastrophists worried about total “moral degradation and cultural extinction” – after the last, you’d have to conclude, there’d be very little left to worry about.
Every group had its own agenda, some promoting a programme that started by being progressive and enlightened, before veering off into unacceptable eccentricity. Every woman, for example, owes a debt of gratitude to Marie Stopes for her pioneering birth-control activities; but once “birth-control” got equated with selective breeding it took on a highly dubious ideological colouring and led, in one instance, to an extraordinary action on the part of Stopes herself. She disowned her son and cut him out of her will when he turned his back on what his mother believed to be his impeccable genetic inheritance, by choosing to marry a “defective” young woman. His bride, the daughter of the aeronautical engineer Barnes Wallis, was unfortunate enough to need glasses.
HG WELLS, THE WOOLFSand the Webbs, Henry Williamson and Ellen Wilkinson . . . Literature joins forces here with politics and social reform to bring together a great many facets of the intellectual life of the era. As always, differing theoretical standpoints and plans of action were themselves a problem. A large general purpose – the struggle to preserve "civilisation" in the face of intimations of barbarism – wasn't enough to foster any kind of unifying principle or strategy, though for a time in the 1930s it seemed as if most forms of political activism might alight on a kind of common ground under the "anti-war" banner.
Richard Overy is a scholarly and systematic commentator, and The Morbid Ageillumines all the urgency of the pressing issues of the day. (It's odd, though, to find Auden, Spender, Day-Lewis and all in these pages, but not Louis MacNeice, whose Autumn Journalof 1938 is full of a topical pungency and the surest feeling for the ominousness of the era.) The book comes with a cheerful cover that belies the density and sobriety of its content. It's a portion of a decorative LMS Railway poster of 1935, showing a bright young couple contemplating a rolling English vista. True, they're perched on the edge of a precipice, but their pose is tranquil and their hold on firm ground secure. There's nothing about the image to suggest "the dangerous power of popular fear", allied to partisan distortion, that The Morbid Ageencapsulates.
- The Morbid Age: Britain Between the WarsBy Richard Overy Allen Lane, 522pp. £25
Patricia Craig’s most recent book is a memoir,
Asking for Trouble
, published by Blackstaff in 2007