The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age [Hardcover]

Juliet Nicolson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2010

Juliet Nicolson pieces together colorful personalities, historic moments, and intimate details to create a social history of the two years following the Great War in Britain. Not since Nicolson’sThe Perfect Summerhave we seen an account that so vividly captures a nation’s psyche at a particular moment in history.
The euphoria of Armistice Day 1918 vaporizes to reveal the carnage that war has left in its wake. But from Britain’s despair emerges new life. For veterans with faces demolished in the trenches, surgeon Harold Gillies brings hope with his miraculous skin-grafting procedure. Women win the vote, skirt hems leap, and Brits forget their troubles at packed dance halls. The remains of a nameless soldier are laid to rest in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Westminster Abbey. “The Great Silence,” observed in memory of the countless dead, halts citizens in silent reverence.
Nicolson crafts her narrative using a lively cast of characters: from an aging butler to a pair of newlyweds, from the Prince of Wales to T.E. Lawrence, the real-life Lawrence of Arabia.The Great Silencedepicts a nation fighting the forces that threaten to tear it apart and discovering the common bonds that hold it together.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Queen Mary's diary and the recollections of an under-chauffeur to the Portuguese ambassador are two of the disparate sources Nicholson (The Perfect Summer) uses in her anecdotal account of the period between the end of WWI on November 11, 1918, and the burial of an unknown soldier in Westminster Abbey two years later. Vividly portraying the horrors of trench warfare and the misery of the bereaved and wounded, she uses the metaphor of the great silence—two minutes of stillness commemorating the armistice—to explore Britons' attempts to cope with the growing despair generated by broken promises and false hopes. Industrial unrest, advances in women's rights, increasing drug use, and the new craze of jazz reveal, says Nicolson, the clamor of the nation's progress through grief. Her sometimes affecting pastiche of Britain's post-WWI mood is marred by the absence of source notes, disconnected vignettes, and minor inaccuracies, such as the origins of the word barmy (which relates to beer's froth, not to the Barming Hospital at Maidstone) and the postwar fashion for men's wristwatches. 37 b&w photos. (June)
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Review

“Wonderfully vivid…When we study history we…tend to overlook the transitional periods. Juliet Nicolson has, in a short time, become the voice of these critical gaps in the fabric of British history…In another splendid work of social history, Nicolson focuses on the years between 1918 and 1920. At once grand and intimate, Nicolson takes on a captivating journey.”—The Daily Beast

“[Nicolson has] a strong narrative, an empathic interest in characters under stress and a gift for the telling moment. The large historical shifts are here, but the small scenes steal the show…eloquent.”—Catherine Holmes,The Post and Courier(Charleston)

“[A] vivid account of the aftermath of the carnage we glamorize as the Great War…[Nicolson] excels at ferreting out revealing details…[she offers] some wonderful vignettes. And the final pages ofThe Great Silence, which document Britain’s official tribute to the dead, are magnificent.”—Miranda Seymour,The New York Times Book Review

“Nicolson’s anecdotal history describes with facts and feeling the two years of silence and emptiness that followed the joyless armistice...a moving account…When the unknown British soldier was buried with solemn pomp in Westminster Abbey, some found the ritual stagy, sentimental, and hypocritical but most found it healing and hopeful. Nicolson ends her history with a long and loving re-creation of this collective expression of grief and gratitude. It may make you cry.”—Barbara Fisher,The Boston Globe

“This is social history at its very best, as Nicolson fascinatingly describes the fast-changing lives of everyday men and women in Britain from 1918 to 1920…Colorful characters abound in Nicolson’s historically insightful and utterly absorbing narrative.”—Chuck Leddy,Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“A pearl of anecdotal history,The Great Silenceis a satisfying companion to major studies of World War I and its aftermath…as Nicolson proceeds through the familiar stages of grief—denial, anger and acceptance—she gives you a deeper understanding of not only this brief period, but also how war’s sacrifices don’t end after the fighting stops.”—Ellen Emry Heltzel,The Seattle Times

“Vividly [portrays] the horrors of trench warfare and the misery of the bereaved and wounded.”—Publishers Weekly

"[Nicolson’s] approach is anecdotal and eclectic, drawing freely on contemporary diaries, letters and memoirs to create an impressionistic picture of the lull preceding the Roaring ‘20s…Nicolson is at her most effective when describing the nation’s search for a fitting public expression of its abiding sense of grief…[she] observes with poignant understatement.”—Elizabeth Lowry,The Wall Street Journal

“If, instead of looking at the great sweep of history, you take just two years, and you find out the small, everyday things that people of all stations in life were doing—the king and his manservant, the prime minister and the postman—you can convey a sense of the past that no conventional history can offer…the method enables [Nicolson] to take us into places that even people who think they know something about the period did not know existed…This is a small treasure-house of a book from a writer who understands the vital importance of small details.”—Francis Beckett,The Guardian

“Terribly moving…so full of feeling and intelligence and interest: the densely detailed, whelmingly sad story of a country with a broken heart.”—Sam Leith,The Daily Mail(UK)

“This masterful book collects random details and somehow manages to orchestrate them into a symphony. Nicolson is particularly brilliant at plucking out the significant detail within the apparently ephemeral…The Great Silenceworks beautifully as a mosaic of a country at a particular time, artfully constructed from all these extraordinary details plucked from far and wide…a book that contains so much that is truly poignant or fascinating or thoughtful. Nicolson’s concluding description of the final great silence—in Westminster Abbey, at the burial of the coffin of the Unknown Soldier—is piercingly beautiful.”—Craig Brown,Mail on Sunday(UK)

“Nicolson writes with such admirable pace and fluency that it would be easy to suppose that this book had been effortlessly scribbled down. It is, on the contrary, a triumph of balance and organization; a study which comprehends the cultural and the intellectual, the political and the social, and weaves them all into a lively and convincing narrative.”—Philip Ziegler,The Spectator

“Juliet Nicolson’s second book of social history confirms her as one of those writers—particularly unusual among social historians—who can spin straw into gold…Nicolson’s magpie delight in the richness of her material goes a long way to offering the reader an intoxicating peep-show of postwar society.”—Virginia Nicholson,Eastern Daily Press

“An excellent book…quite a story and a worldwide lesson of horror.”—Women on the Web

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; 1 edition (June 1, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802119441
• ISBN-13: 978-0802119445
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #104,946 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Life after the catastrophe, July 2, 2010

By 

Jay Dickson (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age (Hardcover)

In Virginia Woolf's MRS DALLOWAY, the character of Peter Walsh decides that the few years immediately after the Great War were "somehow very important"; Juliet Nicholson's powerful new cultural history of Great Britain during the period from 1918 to 1920, remind us just how very important that period was. Nicholson's method is to center her study around the lives of thirty-some figures, ranging from royalty and the aristocracy to figures important in the arts and the military, and even the working class. Her style seems initially meandering but as you get the hang of it you see the deeper patterns underneath, as she cleverly structures these figures' lives around the nation's major milestones in articulating the meaning of the War to End All Wars, where one in seven British men of the age of service died. Her choices for her dramatis personae are terrific, and often surprising: we don't hear that much about the Woolfs, Lytton Strachey, or even about her grandparents Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, for example (though those very familiar figures are all in here nonetheless), but rather quite a bit about the great memoirist Vera Brittain and the novelist Winifred Holtby. And most of the stories here have been rarely (if ever) fully told, and yet are of crucial interest to anyone interested in modernism or the InterWar period and here told with great skill: the first graduation of women from Oxford; the sensational glorification by Lowell Thomas of the exploits of T.E. Lawrence after Lawrence's exploits in Arabia and the Middle East but before the publication of THE SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM; the selling and destruction of Devonshire House, which formed the model for the similar fate of Marchmain House in BRIDESHEAD REVISITED; and, most crucial of all, the decision to set two minutes' observation of silence throughout the Empire on Remembrance Day.

There is material here for modernist and twentieth-century scholars to mine for years to come. The book reminded me of nothing so much as the excellent histories of the war itself by Paul Fussell (THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY) and Samuel Hynes (A WAR IMAGINED) from decades previous, which speaks impressively of Nicholson's achievement. There are a few minor errors here and there that I hope will be cleaned up for the US paperback (for example, Katherine Mansfield is described here as a "novelist"), but this well-crafted, beautifully detailed study is exceptionally rich with golden historical and cultural ore. It has been a bit oddly marketed for its publication in the USA (the cover photograph doesn't seem to give you much of a sense of the weightiness of the book's subject), but this fine study should absolutely find its audience among those who study or are captivated by the modernist period.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's The Little Things, July 6, 2010

By 

Kurt Harding "bon vivant" (Boerne TX) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age (Hardcover)

Much history taught in public schools is macro-history, with pupils required to remember names, dates, places, important events and of course, important people. That became the fashion likely because of the constraints of time. There is so much students must learn that concentration on the details is left for specialty classes at University. But what is it that really shapes a nation's destiny and forms it's national character? Well, it's the little things that do that and when you study them you can better understand the trajectory of a country's history.

I happen to enjoy the details of history and so was delighted to read Juliet Nicolson's fine social history of Great Britain covering the two years immediately following the end of WWI. Since wars are massively disruptive, their end generally entails massive social and economic changes for both the victor and the vanquished. Most reasonably well-educated Americans know about the economic and social upheavals that took place in Germany, Russia, and to a lesser extent, Austria-Hungary following the First World War. Fewer know much about the effects of the war on Great Britain with many assuming that as the victor, it emerged relatively unscathed except for its battlefield losses.

Well, in The Great Silence, Nicolson puts the lie to that notion. Using anecdote, she shows how the war affected all classes of British society from the humblest servants all the way up to the royal family. And it did change them all. But it wasn't all negative. There were many great advances not just socially, but also in science and in technology which resulted in a more restless, but ultimately a freer and slightly less class-ridden society. One of the most fascinating chapters in my view is how surgeon Howard Gillies reconstructed the faces of men who had been shattered in the war giving many of them back the opportunity to lead productive lives.

The author often alludes to social changes that many at the time thought presaged the breakdown of morality. Women entering the workforce by the millions, a decrease in church membership and attendance, more open sexuality including that of the homosexual variety, an increase in the use of contraception, an increase in drug and alcohol abuse, and a less kowtowing attitude by the lower classes toward the gentry. There was also a more militant attitude among the working classes; in places that attitude was openly and avowedly Marxist.

I personally don't care much about some of the gentry I am introduced to in this book, but yet what they did and what they thought still mattered a great deal in the Great Britain of that time and so had a bearing on the eventual direction of the country. And not just the political direction but the cultural direction as well.

I like the way Nicolson has chosen to bracket the period she covers between the anger and uncertainty that enveloped the country at war's end and the national catharsis occasioned by the burial of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey. Every segment of society was included in that ceremonial event and it brought king and commoner together, if only briefly, in a way which gave the nation closure and allowed it to move forward.

If you enjoy reading about the minutiae that are the building blocks of the Big Picture, then I highly recommend this well-written and fascinating book.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Extremely well written social history..., January 29, 2010

By 

Jill Meyer (United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Great Silence: 1918-1920 Living in the Shadow of the Great War (Hardcover)

The Great Silence" is Juliet Nicholson's second book, after publishing "The Perfect Summer" in 2007. The first book was a social history of that glorious summer of 1911, the first summer after the ending of the Victorian and Edwardian ages.

With "Silence", Nicholson has returned with a meticulously written view of the two years in England after the end of "The Great War" in 1918. British soldiers returned after demob to their homes but in many cases, their lives would never be the same after four years in the trenches in France. So many men - who had marched gaily off to war in 1914 - had been killed or badly wounded, both in body and in spirit. So many women lost their sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers. An entire generation of young men were decimated in the four years of war.

Nicholson writes about all strata of British society, both "above" stairs and "below" stairs. Some of the people she interviewed were children in 1919 and are alive today. She also relied on written histories, both personal and academic. All together, Nicholson takes the reader back to that two year post-war period that saw the beginnings of the "Roaring '20's" with a national obsession for dancing and drinking by all levels of society. She also writes about the toll the "Spanish Flu" had on those at home who caught it from returning soldiers.

Nicholson is a very good and controlled writer. This book is not yet available in the States and I had to order it from Amazon/UK. It is a wonderful look at a very interesting time in British society.