Customer Reviews

After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World

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A.N. Wilson has followed in the footsteps of his earlier volume on "The Victorians" with this book covering the 1901-1950 period in British history. He employs the same approach and has produced another contribution of substantial value. How to describe his method is the challenge. Sometimes it is like free association, as he moves from topic to topic, but if that is the case, it is well structured free association. Basically, he just covers a long list of topics, some in more detail than others, moving from chapter to chapter. For example, in this volume he touches upon (among other topics) Kaiser Bill and Germany; Elgar's music; Anglican theology; H.G. Wells, the Balfour Declaration; India and the Empire; the class system; scientific developments; Noel Coward; John Maynard Keynes; Churchill and FDR and the "special relationship"; Hitler and the crisis of the late 1930's; Lord Haw-Haw; the impact of intensive bombing during WWII and so forth. Hard to describe, but somehow it all works quite beautifully. The range of topics and the author's command of them are astounding, although this is more a survey than an intensive analysis of any single topic. By the end of the book, even though a zillion topics have been covered rather briefly, the reader's overall depth of understanding has immeasurably been improved.

However, at about page 434, Wilson seems to run off the track a bit. He devotes many pages to criticism of the USA, suggesting that FDR hoped to use WWII as a device to free India and limit the British empire. He suggests that the British really played the key role in developing "the bomb", and handed over these critical secrets to the U.S., including a "schizohrenic" J. Robert Oppenheimer. For Wilson, Lend Lease really was a financial bonanza for the Americans, rather than a unique solution to Britian's crushing need for war materials. FDR's unconditional surrender announcement sealed the fate of a Russian controlled eastern Europe. Finally, without substantiation, he asserts that Truman used the bomb in Japan not for military reasons, but to send a shiver up the Russians' spine. Wilson here is paralleling other recent British authors--the best example being Volume III of Skidelsky's biography of Kenyes where he suggests that U.S. played real hardball in terms of postwar economic demands in order to undermine the extent of British power. Why Wilson chose to go off on this tangent is a mystery; but the book's overall value is not seriously impacted. It remains a must read for those interested in Britain during the 20th century and its many contributions.

I'll bet that Novelist and Historian A. N. Wilson might agree that if the story he tells in "After the Victorians" were pitched to publishers as a novel, it would be rejected as too far-fetched. After all, to what events could he attribute the devolution of the greatest navy the world had ever seen to one that will soon be smaller than Belgium's? To whom would he assign the transfiguration of one of the cradles of the automobile industry to the graveyard of domestic production where the only remaining recognizable brands are owned by foreigners, and Americans and Germans no less?

This hypothesis explains why this story is endlessly fascinating and in my experience seldom better told than Wilson in what he accurately terms a "portrait of an age". Anglophiles like me find the telling hard to endure, but Wilson makes the unpleasant process as fresh and entertaining as anything I've come across.

I have a few cavils. Especially in the early going, Wilson jumps from character to character and event to event with dizzying speed and apparent lack of direction, and it's just about when total frustration threatens to set in that he slows down and achieves a rhythm that serves his story well for the rest of the book.

As one might expect, he writes from a decidedly populist viewpoint and thus does not surprise when he excoriates the World War Two Allies for the bombing of European civilian targets and particularly the United States for its use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, aggregating them under the rubric "war crimes". I would posit that he gives too short shrift to the barbaric cruelties of the Japanese exemplified by the Bataan Death March, the Rape of Nanking, the biological/medical experiment facility at Manchuria's Unit 731 and Germany's einsatzgruppen, Auschwitz, etc. One could fairly argue that the nations that spawned these medieval terrors deserved what they got.

I also have no idea (as other reviewers have observed) where he got the notion that one of Roosevelt's main, if not principal, war aims was to enfeeble Britain in order that America would replace it in the world's hegemonic order after the dust settled. He seems convinced but is not convincing.

In addition, he draws some curious conclusions from his ruminations on the causes and effects of Britain's post-World War Two welfare state, citing the National Health Service as its greatest achievement while at the same time conceding that its remit of free health care for everyone is likely unsustainable over the long run. And on the subject of the welfare state with its collectivist regime, he misses one of the juiciest quotes of the era. In 1945, Aneurin Bevan, generally credited to be one of the principal architects of the NHS, said of the Labor Party's opposition, "This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time." The Labor Party won, and two years later, both coal and fish were in short supply.

But these are, as I say, cavils. Wilson handles his primary themes with fine dexterity. His shorthand treatments of the ultimately disastrous British dispositions of India and Palestine are models of History writing, and his novelist's imagination inspires him to enrich his narrative with wonderfully apt quotations. My certain favorite is Churchill's comment in 1922, three or so years into the British mandate in the new "state" of Iraq: "We are paying eight millions a year for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having." Has a certain resonance, doesn't it?

Finally, having read, enjoyed, and now recommended "After the Victorians", I will proceed to purchase and consume its predicate, "The Victorians". Is a History reader's work never done?

A. N. Wilson has given us a remarkable history of Britain in the 20th century. His earlier work, The Victorians, described the rise of empire in the 19th century. The current volume presents the story of the decline of empire. It is filled with helpful anectdotal support for the main thesis and this makes for pleasurable reading. But the main thrust of the work is the analysis of the way in which the pretensions and myths of the Victorian era lingered into the next century and influenced, mostly for mischief, the events of the century. Winston Churchill figures prominently in the book. His public career spanned the half century. His own worldview was profoundly Victorian, yet he presided over the events of World War II and its aftermath that dismantled the Victorian conceits and ushered Britain into a diminished place in world politics. Wilson does not miss any of the cultural events that explain or frustrate the decline and this thoroughness adds to the enjoyment of the book. The two volumes of A. N. Wilson's treatment of empire constitute a fresh way to study the 19th and 20th centuries of Britain. (A modest caveat: In his description of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, he mistakenly identifies the "island of Honolulu" which, of course, should be Oahu; and he suggests that Reinhold Niebuhr, the theologian, came to the US from Europe but was, in fact, an American by birth).

A.N. Wilson is a prolific author who specializes in religious and literary biographies. Three years ago, Mr. Wilson took up the recounting of historical eras with "The Victorians" which covered the history of England from 1834 to 1901. Appropriately, he has researched the sequel called "After the Victorians" for all the upheavals that took place between 1901-1953 (The Great Depression, World War I and II, et al).

Both books are a cultural and political sampling of those five decades and are NOT a comprehensive history of England. How could they be definitive, when the books cover the hundred year zenith and fall of the British Empire in 1,000+ pages. As an introduction to the major events of those 100 years, they perform that task nicely.

"After the Victorians" covers the tales that Mr. Wilson chooses to tell and he is a good storyteller. The only caveat for the reader is in his conclusion about America intentionally dismantling the British Empire. He is so paranoid about the evil "American Plot" of destroying England as a rival that those sections are actually hilarious for any reader familiar with American foreign policy of the 1940's. It is an interesting book to read, especially if the reader goes on to read other English histories covering the first half of the 20th century.

A.N. Wilson is a prolific author. His new book "After the
Victorians" is a sequel to his bestselling "The Victorians."
Wilson has done a wonderful job of chronicling the long goodbye of British imperial might. We see Britain lose the jewel in the
crown India; be drained of gold and young manhood in two catastrophic world wars; see the empire's sun set in colonies
from Africa to the Middle East. We see a falling off of genius
in literature, the arts, music and governmental leadership.
Wilson jumps from one topic to the next with rapidity which
will be annoying to some readers. This is especially true for those who are not familiar with many of the subjects and topics
covered in the many pages in this book.
As an anglophile and history buff I personally enjoyed the
survey presented by the Welshman who writes so well. This book
is a tour but not an in depth study of the land of Shakespeare.
If you want a better knowledge of the general trends and major
players in England from the death of Victoria in 1901 to the
coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1952 this is a good read.
Recommended.

Approach this title with a nuanced eye. A national culture that has bequeathed to the world Shakespeare, Churchill, and the Beatles, not to mention Chaucer, the Magna Charta, and Princess Diana is not dissolving anytime fast. It is even questionable to propose that the England of 2006 is no longer a world power. What it is not, however, is the seat of a world empire, which seems to be the lament of author A.N. Wilson and the inspiration for this historical essay.

This is an excellently researched and documented work that appeals to both sides of the brain, a compelling read with a clean chronological line and an interdisciplinary look at English social and political life. From Laurel and Hardy to the discovery of DNA, Wilson chronicles change on the island itself and in the nation's place on the world stage. Some of this decline, as Wilson interprets it, is discretely laid at the feet of the United States, which in the context of twentieth century world events seemed somewhat odd to me.

The author begins his critique with the death of Queen Victoria, appropriately enough, in 1901 and the accession of her son, Bertie, as he was known, to the throne as Edward VII. [John Adams giving way to George Hamilton, so to speak.] Victoria and the obsequious Disraeli had cultivated a "cult of empire" during the last quarter century of her reign, a heightened popular sense of the old maxim of the sun never setting on the Union Jack. Wilson implies that such a strategy was too much too late. For all practical purposes, by 1901 Britain presided over a commonwealth of nations. The empire, by this time was basically India, and as England's need for India increased this subcontinent was becoming harder and harder to manage.

Later in the work Wilson will debate at some lengths the diplomatic and military options open to England in the Munich era and afterwards. In retrospect, though, the critical decisions about England's future were made in the 1901-1914 time frame. While Theodore Roosevelt in the US and young Winston Churchill in the Admiralty fretted about a global naval arms race, British royalty and high society danced through the last idyllic years prior to the world wars, comforted with the news from the Indian Viceroy Lord Curzon that India was secure along her northern borders and that the British overlords were much loved.

Churchill, attuned to the naval state of affairs, switched the British Navy to oil burning locomotion in 1913, and then discovered that oil from the Middle East was getting harder to come by. The problem was an increasing German presence in the East, perhaps most obvious in the construction of railroad lines and roadways from Berlin to Bagdad. [134 ff] Clearly, England would need its subject India as a counterweight to German expansion eastward. My school day history books never described World War I as a quest for oil, but Wilson provides a compelling argument to think so. With a different energy policy and a more clearheaded Indian policy, England would have had no compelling reason to enter the fray.

The miserable experience of World War I began a tumble of dominoes through Versailles [which did not solve England's Middle East woes], depression, World War II, and the loss of India. Wilson chronicles the impact of each upon British society, including the development of "The Special Relationship" between his nation and the United States. Wilson chooses not Roosevelt and Churchill but Laurel and Hardy as his metaphor [Stan Laurel having been born and educated in England before teaming with Georgia's Oliver Hardy] in a rather touching essay. One reads here the author's suppressed but real emotions about the American displacement from the Empire.

This American motif appears time and time again. Wilson believes that England survived the Great Depression in a more effective and humane fashion than did the United States. Later he trumpets the socialized health plan of the late 1940's as an act of beneficence beyond the capacities of the US political system, and he comes just short of alleging that the US took advantage of British nuclear research to develop atomic weapons. He concedes, however, that without US [and Russian?] military force life under Hitler would have been unbearable, consigning the American nation to a kind of necessary evil status.

Wilson chastens his own country for its management of Indian affairs and the shameful denouement there after World War II. The appointment of Lord Mountbatten to India seems to him particularly despicable. But he notes that England did not have a monopoly on rogues, and he is not worshipful of Gandhi or enthralled by Nehru. He laments the great loss of life during the Indian realignment as a metaphor of just how far England and the rest of the civilized world had fallen in fifty years.

In a sense the first and last chapters of this work convey a different mood than the rest of the work: the first featuring the clotheshorse Bertie and the last the young and charming Princess Elizabeth. That royal succession could be celebrated uninterrupted so soon and so enthusiastically in 1952 after two generations of war and its attendant dictatorial demands upon the citizenry is a strong indication that the mystique and identity of England is not gone. The author knows this, but he mourns the loss of place enjoyed by his country in the 1800's and he is cautious about the future. In the final analysis, like a true Victorian he carries a thinly veiled disgust with the decline of civilization itself, with perhaps the unexpressed regret that much of the desecration was self-inflicted.

A.N. Wilson has produced a companion volume to The Victorians which is just as engrossing. After the Victorians covers Britain and the decline of its empire from 1901 through 1952. Rather than sticking strictly to chronological history, Wilson covers his material with a fascinating mixture of political, social, literary, and military history. This format is ideal for Wilson's strong suit: the detailing of anecdote after anecdote to illuminate the main historical themes.

Wilson is at times iconoclastic, not hesitating to puncture some time-honored (and in Wilson's view overblown) reputations. At other times he surprises: when the reader expects another skewering, Wilson actually loads on the praise. Some American readers will be taken aback by some of Wilson's claims, particularly his contention that FDR and Stalin outmanuevered and ignored Churchill at some of their famous wartime conferences, and that the price of American aid in World War II was the dismantlement of the Empire. Royal aficionados will likewise be somewhat perplexed by some of Wilson's contentions about the Royal Family, in particular his belief that Edward VIII was the best of the four monarch who reigned from 1901 to 1952.

An additional delight in After the Victorians is Wilson's brisk and lively, but highly literate, writing style. I hope he will produce a third volume to bring his history down to the present day.

"After the Victorians," like its predecessor, "The Victorians," offers subjectively chosen snapshots of the era rather than a comprehensive and cohesive summary presented under some overarching thesis. Needless to say, the period Wilson covers, from the death of Victoria to the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, is an era of decline for the British Empire and its imperial ambitions. With an emphasis on cultural trends that Wilson finds fascinating or forgotten or still relevant, the book gives us random peeks at that history of decline, and the result is a portrait of a nation that, culturally, was still alive and kicking--even when those kicks were "self-inflicted" (to use his own term). And it's clear that Wilson has mixed emotions, as the citizen of any superpower might, about his country's "decline"; on the one hand, his conservative bent seems to find much to admire about British hegemony; on the other, his liberal leanings clearly regard colonial dispossession inevitable and even preferable. He has similarly mixed emotions about the transfer of superpower status to the United States.

So Wilson's eccentric, selective approach makes for a strong book; to spice things up, his vignettes included anecdotes, gossip, memorable quotes and witticisms, and tawdry asides. He skips among politics, diplomacy, literature, religion, science, the press, and social history in a manner quite entertaining. His determinedly old-fashioned approach can segue easily from P. G. Wodehouse's frustration with crossword puzzles to the ubiquity of murder mysteries; he compares the Japanese emperor giving his speech acknowledging surrender to the voice of the elves in "The Lord of the Rings"; he prefaces the trial and defrocking of rector Harold Davidson (for consorting with prostitutes) with an account of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's notable friendships in England; a description of Ezra Pound's fascistic ravings as a POW leads to the "theatre" occasioned by the Nuremberg trials. To complain about what's missing or overlooked in the book seems both churlish and beside the point.

This all makes for compelling reading, but when you've closed the book, it's unlikely that you'll remember most of the details Wilson bandies about or that you'll have occasion to pull it down off the shelf again. The same aspects that make Wilson's scattershot approach so unpredictable and lively doom its value as a resource. Readers hoping to look up something will realize that many important events and persons are missing or only fleetingly treated (e.g., E. M. Forster--whom Wilson doesn't think much of, Virginia Woolf, and Benjamin Britten get minimal play compared to the many mentions of American transplants Henry James or T. S. Eliot). Likewise, Wilson's strong opinions and hopscotch narratives prohibit citing the work for general information beyond its tidbits of trivia. "After the Victorians," then, makes for a great read but a hazardous reference work; the reader who approaches the work with this understanding is in for a real treat.

Wilson, author of "The Victorians", follows up his earlier work with a narrative that traces the political, military, and cultural history of Britain from 1901 to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953. I love sweeping, multifaceted histories like this, though I don't always agree with Wilson's arguments (and the same holds true this time around). The history ends on a sad note, as Britain survived World War II only to lose its Empire. There are a number of errors of fact (some of which relate to American rather than British history), so read with some degree of caution. Anyone who enjoys broad historical narratives will learn something from this offering.

It's basically a social and cultural history of Britain in the first half of the Twentieth Century. You'd have to know something of the history of the period, or lived though some of it, to appreciate it. Wilson fills in some of the international history background but tends to assume that the reader is aware of the major events.
The decline of Britain as a world power bothers him. Patriotism glows through, with a wish to be a member of a powerful nation. Being a citizen of a powerful country has its points (which would have been worth discussing) but I'm not sure if that makes it, for example, better to be Chinese than Swiss.
Wilson is eager to attribute a fall in Britain's wealth to the Second World War and to blame America for it. This is certainly possible. There are many theories as to why some nations are rich and some are poor, and several books on the subject, none of which Wilson shows awareness of. The book has no graphs or tables.
I bought it because anything by A.N. Wilson is well worth reading. He aspires to omniscience but tends to fall flat on his face when he wanders outside his areas of expertise. Telling us that Harry S Truman was a lawyer might be an excusable error in a more general history but, in a history of a period where Truman played such an important part, makes us dubious of the accuracy of the less easily checked statements. (Actually Truman did attend some classes at law school).
He is more reliable in the fields of cultural history, and it was at least interesting to have his opinion that John Cooper Powys was the greatest English novelist of his generation. I must dust off those unfinished copies of Wolf Solent and Porius in my library.
The only sports mentioned are pheasant shooting, yachting and the ascent of Everest. He leaves us ignorant of whether or when soccer, cricket, Rugby, tennis, golf or boxing came to have any popular following.
Medicine arouses Wilson's interest only to the extent of its political organization. The arrival of antibiotics passes unnoticed. Florey and Fleming are unmentioned, but, by way of compensation, we get more than enough about the Royal Family and their friends and relations. He eagerly outs the possible homosexual urges of a large number of public figures, although leaving Aneurin Bevan securely in the closet.