The Edwardians

'Must be regarded as an important step in rescuing Edwardian history from what he rightly calls "an academic limbo" ... combines the qualities of readability, breadth of focus, willingness to explain.' - TES

Captures the essence of the era in a lively study of its politics, personalities, technical innovations, arts and preoccupations. Includes chapters on the Prince of Wales, the Boer War, High Society and working class, the Middle Classes, writers, music, artists and craftsmen, the theatre, music hall and vaudeville, the press, the constitutional crisis, bosses and workers, suffragettes, the Titanic, Russian ballet, science and Gowland Hopkins, ragtime, Ulster and Home rule, etc.

Edwardian domestic architecture was beautiful and varied in style, and was very often designed and built to an unprecedented level of sophistication. It was also astonishingly innovative, and provided new building types for weekends, sport and gardening, as well as fascinating insights into attitudes to historic architecture, health and science. 0This book is the first radical overview of the period since the 1970s, and focuses on how the leading circle of the Liberal Party, who built incessantly and at every scale, influenced the pattern of building across England. It also looks at the building literature of the period, from Country Life to the mass-production picture books for builders and villa builders, and traces the links between these houses and suburbs on the one hand, and the literature and other creative forms of the period of the other. It is part of a new movement to explore the ways in which architectural history is recorded and adds up to an original interpretation of British culture of the period.

This is the twentieth in a series of occasional volumes devoted to studies in British art, published by the Yale Center for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and distributed by Yale University Press. --Book Jacket.

This study reveals the presence of black people in all walks of life all over the British Isles at the height of the imperialist era - challenging conventional views on imperialism, racism and British social history. Historians of British society have largely ignored this most visible of minorities, and commentators on racism have been silent on the period.

This catalogue accompanies the exhibition opening at the National Gallery of Australia in March 2004 that aims to reassess the art of the Edwardian period, focusing in particular on the art of Australia. Among Australia's most loved artists are those who went to Europe at the turn of the 19th century to study and live. Many of them stayed abroad for two decades and, like Australian film stars of today, became absorbed onto the world stage. This book places the work of these artists in the context of the British, Irish and American artists with whom they exhibited and associated, and demonstrates their parallel concerns in painterly approach and subject. Opening with paintings by Whistler, which were so influential on the artists of this period, the exhibition focuses on figurative paintings by select British, Irish, American and Australian artists from 1900 to 1914. It also includes George Lambert's King Edward VII (1910), completed shortly before Edward's death and now held in the Commonwealth of Australia Collection. In total the exhibition comprises approximately 140 paintings, sculptures, costumes and fan designs drawn from national and international collections.

Edwardian Britain is the quintessential age of nostalgia, often seen as the last long summer afternoon before the cataclysmic changes of the twentieth century began to take form. The class system remained rigidly in place and thousands were employed in domestic service. The habits and sports of the aristocracy were an everyday indulgence. But it was an age of invention as well as tradition. It saw the first widespread use of the motor car, the first aeroplane and the first use of the telegraph. It was also a time of vastly improved education and the public appetite for authors such as Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and E. M. Forster was increased by greater literacy. There were signs too, of the corner history was soon to turn, with the problematic Boer War hinting at a new British weakness overseas and the drive for Votes for Women and Home Rule for Ireland pushing the boundaries of the social and political landscape. In this major work of history, Roy Hattersley has been given exclusive access to many new documents to produce this magisterial new appraisal of a legendary age.

This book explores television's current fascination with the Edwardian era. By exploring popular period dramas such as Downton Abbey , it examines how the early twentieth century is represented on our screens, and what these shows tell us about class, gender and politics, both past and present.