The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars

437 Pages·2010·3.74 MB·English

by  Richard Overy

Praise for The Twilight Years
“Thought-provoking and illuminating…Overy’s study of British culture between
the wars is absorbing and unexpectedly moving.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Well-written and provocative.”
—Booklist
“Eminently readable…a masterpiece of historical imagination…For anyone who
wished to understand inter-war Britain, this book is essential reading.”
—The Spectator
“It is hard to imagine anyone recording these times more exactly and more
intelligently, or with greater insight and scholarship, than Overy has in this
book.”
—The Daily Telegraph (London) “Ambitious and stimulating.”
—The Times Literary Supplement
Magnificent…It’s a formidably researched, elegantly written thesis and tells us
maybe more than we want to know about ourselves.”
—Financial Times
“Few contemporary historians have accomplished so much at such a high level
as Richard Overy…. Overy has shifted the terms of the entire debate about the
inter-war years…. A magnificent feat of scholarship: masterly, original,
important, lucid, and often very funny.”
—The Literary Review
“History at its best…With elegance and erudition, Mr. Overy opens a window
into the mind of a generation—a generation with anxieties both very different
from and yet surprisingly similar to those of our own today.”
—The Economist
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Overy is a professor of history at the University of Exeter. A leading
expert in World War II history, he has written more than twenty books,
including Why the Allies Won, which The Sunday Times of London called “a
masterpiece of analytical history” The Dictators, winner of the Wolfson Prize in
2005; and Interrogations. He was the winner of the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize
in 2001 and the General James Doolittle Award in 2010.
RICHARD OVERY
The Twilight Years
The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars
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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2009
Published in Penguin Books 2010
Copyright © Richard Overy, 2009
All rights reserved
Published in Great Britain under the title The Morbid Age by Allen Lane,
Penguin Books Ltd.
Quotations from Vera Brittain are included by permission of Mark Bostridge and
Timothy Brittain-Carlin, literary executors for the Vera Brittain Estate, 1970.
Illustration credits.
:
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS
Overy, R. J.
The twilight years: the paradox of Britain between the wars / Richard Overy.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-1-10149834-7
1. Great Britain—Social conditions—20th century. 2. Great Britain—History—
George V, 1910–1936. 3. Great Britain—History—George VI, 1936–1952. 4.
Great Britain—Social life and customs—1918–1945. I. Title.
DA578.O79 2009
94L083—dc22 2009028765
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any
other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by
law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in
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author’s rights is appreciated.
This is the crisis. At bottom we have no faith. We have lost our belief in
capitalism and socialism, in the churches and scientific progress. Deep,
deep down, we do not believe in any of these things any more. Despair of
everything, at least of everything that the past has produced, has overtaken
us.
And unless we take the fact of this despair into account, all we may do,
or write, or think, must come to nothing.
It is a hard thought.
Tosco Fyvel, The Malady and the Vision, 1940, p. 12
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgements
Note on Currency
Britain 1919–1939: A Chronological Introduction

Introduction: Cassandras and Jeremiahs
1 Decline and Fall
2 The Death of Capitalism
3 A Sickness in the Racial Body
4 Medicine and Poison: Psychoanalysis and Social Dismay
5 Why War?
6 Challenge to Death
7 Utopian Politics: Cure or Disease?
8 ‘The Voyage of the Death Ship’: War and the Fate of the World
9 A Morbid Age

Notes
Bibliography and sources
Illustrations
Two pamphlet covers on ‘The Chief Aspects of Civilization’s Decline’
Invitation to the opening of the Conway Hall, 23 September 1929 (South Place
Ethical Society)
The classical scholar Gilbert Murray at work at his desk in 1931 (National
Portrait Gallery)
The young Arnold Toynbee c. 1920 (Bodleian Library, Oxford)
Arnold Toynbee lecturing in Hamburg, Germany, in 1948 (Bodleian Library,
Oxford)
The economist and social researcher Beatrice Webb at her desk in 1926 (Getty
Images)
The economist and political thinker J. A. Hobson in 1910 (Getty Images)
Poster for a lecture by Maurice Dobb on ‘Problems of Economic Planning in
Russia’, 1928 (SCRSS)
The novelist Walter Greenwood presenting a copy of Love on the Dole (Salford
University Library)
Jarrow Crusade marchers in the village of Lavendon, Bedfordshire, 1936 (Getty
Images)
Poster advertising the Marie Stopes birth control clinic, founded in 1921
(Wellcome Library)
Marie Stopes with her son in Cambridge, 1938 (Getty Images)
Genealogies of two well-to-do families compiled by the Eugenics Society
(Wellcome Library)
Julian Huxley, Secretary of the Royal Zoological Society, at the opening of the
children’s zoo in 1935, with Robert and Edward Kennedy (Getty Images)
The Eugenics Society stand at the Exhibition of Health and Housing, 1935
(Wellcome Library)
The psychologist Cyril Burt in 1931 (University of Liverpool Library)
Ernest Jones at work at the British Psycho-Analytical Society in the 1930s
(British Psycho-Analytical Society)
The cover of ‘What Fathers Should Tell Their Sons’, published in 1933
(Wellcome Library)
Sigmund Freud in London in 1938, with Ernest Jones and members of his family
(Freud Museum)
An anti-war cartoon from the ‘Air Display Special’ produced for the Duxford air
show, July 1935 (Cambridge University Library)
The Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson addressing a crowd in Trafalgar Square,
September 1938 (Getty Images)
Covers from two pamphlets on British rearmament and the arms trade, 1935–6
The anatomist Sir Arthur Keith at work in the Royal College of Surgeons, 1914
(Royal College of Surgeons Library)
The social anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in 1940 (Getty Images)
The psychoanalyst Edward Glover pictured in the 1930s (British Psycho-
Analytical Society)
The novelist Storm Jameson (Margaret Chapman) c. 1930 (Getty Images)
Lord Robert Cecil at a rally of the Women’s International League in 1932 (Getty
Images)
A delegation of the British No More War Movement in 1924 (Getty Images)
March for peace in London organized by the Labour League of Youth, 1936
(Getty Images)
Canon Dick Sheppard advertising an anti-war protest in 1937 (Peace Pledge
Union)
The covers of pamphlets written in 1936 by Aldous Huxley and C. Day Lewis
on ‘constructive pacifism’