Edwardians

I have always rather liked Edwardians. Pre-war novels, suffragettes, hopeful settlers, and frustrated recipients of the Victorian world. Boaters and striped blazers, straight skirts and jaunty hats. Tennis and cricket, provided the tea is hearty and sufficient. The new woman. The new liberal. Burgeoning modernism and the slow rejection of the past values. The comfort (at least in my ancestors' world) of a safe and hopeful future. Social progress wrapped in often misguided tradition. A complaisant ease born of colonial dominance and assured, economic certainty. A sense of peace. If, of course, you were white and British.

My great, great Aunt Kitty Atchison

Looking back it all seems so jolly and naïve, like they never knew what was about to hit them. And they didn’t. Who could possibly imagine World War 1? Even knowing it makes it difficult to believe.

The early years of the twentieth century were a political and social time bomb ready to explode, but the youth and young adulthood of my great-grandparents was relatively blissful. There were economic depressions in the 1890s, and regional disturbances, but the sun would never set on the Empire, surely? Individually people struggled as people always do. Racial groups and classes were greatly maligned, but social movements promised progress and hints of welfare reform.

What came next was hell. An old fashioned land war in a newly mechanised world and like wildfire it destroyed a generation. “A terrible beauty is born,” wrote Yeats of Easter 1916, and a few months later at the Somme, there were 50,000 casualties on the morning of 1^st July and the cavalry never came. If modernism had been coming, by the time the news reached London and then the rest of the world, the modern world had irrevocably arrived.

Yet it never came fully for my great-grandparents. They were always relics of the Edwardian age. The generation who had never really chosen for all this to happen – their parents were still mostly in charge – but never inherited the new world forged out for their children. They were not flappers, and while they may have bobbed their hair and shortened their skirts, they permanently embodied that older world.

Ever increasingly, I feel like an Edwardian. As if that tail end of the twentieth century, millennial world is coming to its close, but the new world that will appear is not for me.

In 1914, my great-grandmothers were not unlike me now. They were all young mothers living in New Zealand: Mary-Ellen McDonald, nee Watson in Milton, Otago, the wife of a mine manager and the mother of two, with one on the way; Maria-Louisa McPhail, nee Marzahn, in Green Island, Dunedin, with four children and many more to come (and pass). She was worst-off of the lot, living in a difficult marriage in uncertain economic conditions; Mary Atchison, nee Bell, a comfortable farmer’s wife in Clevedon, with three children & one on the way, a housekeeper and a piano to sing at; and Lily Blott, nee Burns, perhaps the most like me. The wife of a successful young chemist, and mother of one, living on Mont le Grand Rd, Mt. Eden, just a wee bit up Dominion Rd from my home today.

None of these women had the opportunities, the education or the good fortune I have taken for granted, but they were safe, they had the vote, and they believed themselves to live in a modern, ever progressive world. They all educated their children fiercely.

They lost children to miscarriage, infant mortality and childhood disease, but none of them would lose their husbands to the war. Mary-Ellen and Maria-Louisa lost a brother each, but their lives continued in that suburbanism I often critique in my own analysis of literature from the period.

Interestingly, they were all born of settlers. The first generation of those who had benefited from a sudden burst of progress and movement. Yet, none had been old enough in 1893 to fight for women’s suffrage in New Zealand; it had been their mothers’ movement. Similarly, Maria-Louisa’s father had been actively involved and willfully left the Prussian political and war machine that would eventually take her brother’s life.

They watched the Great War happen to the world, and they watched their children live a very different youth from their own. They then watched their children go off to their own hellish war. They watched, they reaped the pain, but were witnesses to it all. The world was no longer theirs and they had never really had the chance to own it.

I wonder if this will be the fate of my generation? I do not know if another great conflagration is upon us, but when I was tripping around Edinburgh and beyond in the mid-2000s, newly coupled, but footloose and fancy free, I would never have believed that in just over a decade, the UK would be leaving the EU, and that the UK itself would be in jeopardy; that racism and terrorism in Europe would grow ever more real and present; that civil rights would again be a source of violence and justified public disobedience in the USA; that the vacuum we created in the Middle East would cause such horrors for the very people we claimed to be fighting for. I was deeply conscious of the potential fallout from that illegal war my generation never wanted in Iraq, and cognisant of growing conservatism and populist politics in the west, but surely, solid liberal intellectualism and sense would see it right? Despite unsettling events, social progress and economic union were happening all around me.

It looks like I was living in a bubble that is now about to burst. My generation will never instigate the radical change experienced by my parents in the 1960s and 70s, and we will never have the economic stability of the Baby Boomers, but I did benefit from the world they created. My youth was jolly. I cannot be certain right now that the future will be so jolly, but I seem to have little say as I watch that world disintegrate around me. The Baby Boomers (our Victorians) are still mostly in charge and this epoch will come to an end. But whatever happens, my generation will not inherit the new world. I am nearly 40, and that world will be for my children. I hope we don’t have to experience utter hell to get it.

I will bob my hair and shorten my skirts.