The Strange Death of Liberal England

"The Strange Death of Liberal England" is a book written by George Dangerfield, first published in 1935, attempting to explain the decline of the British Liberal Party in the years 1910 to 1914.

Thesis

Dangerfield argues that four great rebellions before the Great War effectively destroyed the Liberal Party as a party of government. These rebellions were the Conservative Party's fight against the Parliament Act 1911; the threat of civil war in Ireland by the Ulster Unionists under Sir Edward Carson with the encouragement of Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law; the Suffragette movement under the Pankhursts; and the increasingly militant trade unions under the influence of syndicalism.

Publishing history

The New York book publishers Harrison Smith and Robert Haas first printed the book, although it soon went out of print due to the publisher's bankruptcy. An edited version was published in Britain in 1936 for the first time by Constable. Because it was viewed as "popular history" and the book's time period was so close to 1935, it largely escaped being reviewed by the major history journals.

Capricorn Books, an American publisher, put out a paperback in 1961, that stayed in print for most of the 1960s at least. This edition has the years '1910-1914' immediately following the title as if they were part of the title although it is not.

The fifteenth volume of "Albion" in 1985 focused on the book and its author.

In 1997 it was republished by Serif and Stanford University Press, with a foreword by Peter Stansky. In 1998 the book was chosen by the editors as number eighty-two in the Modern Library List of 100 Best Nonfiction Books published in the 20th Century.

Influence

Dangerfield's work has remained prominent in its field up until the present day.

The book has also inspired the titles of numerous other publications, notably works of contemporary political history. As recently as April 2008, Sidney Blumenthal named his work on U.S. politics "The Strange Death of Republican America". [Blumenthal, Sidney – "The Strange Death of Republican America: Chronicles of a Collapsing Party" (ISBN 978-1402757891)] Books have also been published in the 2000s with the titles "The Strange Death of Tory England", [Wheatcroft, Geoffrey – "The Strange Death of Tory England" (ISBN 978-0141018676)] "The Strange Death of Liberal America" [Brauer, Ralph – "The Strange Death of Liberal America" (ISBN 978-0275990633)] and "The Strange Death of Marxism". [Gottfried, Paul Edward – "The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium" (ISBN 978-0826215970)]

References

External links

* [http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3724/is_199709/ai_n8777549 Review in "The Spectator" by John Vincent]
* [http://www.marxists.org/archive/foot-paul/1997/09/liberals.htm Review in "Socialist Review" by Paul Foot]