Alwyn Turner writes early on that Little Englanders is ‘an attempt to take the temperature of the nation as it emerged from a century that had dominated the world and was beginning – whether it knew it or not – a long process of decline’. Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps because the high (and low) politics of the years from 1901 to 1914 – the Edwardian era continues for four years after the death of the eponymous sovereign, up to the lights going out all over Europe in August 1914 – have been so exhaustively covered in recent years, he tells his readers that he will draw heavily on

popular literature, on the songs of the music hall and on the newspapers. Consequently it might sometimes seem trivial: the administrators of Empire feature less than the headliners at the Empire, Leicester Square, and the politicians that appear are those who were embraced by the public.

His apology is unnecessary. Popular culture is a valuable means of learning about a particular society and, without wishing to sound Marxist about it, a hitherto under-appreciated one. The one failing of this well-written, often fascinating book is the absence of archival research, so one never gets beneath the skin of the leading figures. But Turner has read in detail those historical documents otherwise known as local newspapers, and has gleaned much information about the Edwardian lower classes that one does not often find in the works of more orthodox historians. And, as any society must fundamentally be about the people in it, what the mass of those people were up to in the first decade or so of the 20th century is of serious interest.

The period is bookended by two deaths (Oscar Wilde, alias Sebastian Melmoth, in Paris in November 1900, and seven weeks later that of the Queen Empress herself) and, oddly perhaps, by two murders – that committed by Dr Crippen, and those of the ‘Brides in the Bath’: a third murder was far more indicative of the end of the era, that of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914, something no more a violation of the demotic theme of Alwyn’s book than the demise of the dear old Queen. And the author points out that this first period of decline (in reality a time when the newly rich spent rather than reinvested their dividends, denying Britain the level of innovation that was taking place in America and Germany) was one in which the great advances of the late Victorian period embedded themselves and came to reshape society, rather than making way for new ones.

Thus the motor car, and the injuries and deaths it caused, became more prevalent. It was the age of silent films and What the Butler Saw. The older generation worried about the minds of the young (especially those of young men, who were deemed to lack sufficient ‘chastisement’ in their lives) being warped by the flood of cheap fiction from America. There was plenty of the home-grown variety too, not least that commissioned by Lord Northcliffe for sensationalist serialisation in his Daily Mail, which within a decade of its launch in 1896 had achieved an astonishing penetration of the public consciousness. A generation of strutting young men, mainly from the lower-middle class, were known as ‘mashers’, and went out promenading at weekends with young girls, who sometimes ended up suffering the proverbial fate far worse than death. The gramophone became ever more popular – though Crippen’s record collection, auctioned after his execution by a barber from Rochdale, realised a mere £2 12s 6d – and by the end of the period ragtime was decreed a terrible curse.

Some of Turner’s book will be familiar; but he is right to join the line of historians who have sought to point out that the ‘endless summer’ before the Great War was nothing of the sort. He alludes to the years of industrial action from 1910 to 1913, and the unsettling effect of one of the politicians ‘embraced’ by the public, the demagogic and mendacious philanderer David Lloyd George. He points out the dismal state of the people, which became apparent in the high level of rejection of potential recruits in the Boer War, and led to the introduction in some places of free school meals to try to beef up the next generation (which was just as well when 1914 came).

He reminds us of the women’s suffrage movement, the popularity of music hall (and especially of the freak show, such as a five-year-old boy from Peckham with a 42-in waist) and the rise of professional sport. Most usefully, he reminds us of how Joe Chamberlain once defined the term ‘little Englander’ – ‘a man who honestly believes that the expansion of this country carries with it obligations which are out of proportion to its advantages’. In other words, Joe was one of the early converts to the anti-imperialism that today in a mindless incarnation blights history curricula, though, as on most other subjects, he later changed his mind.

Turner’s book is far from a definitive history of this fascinating age, but then it does not pretend to be. It is, however, an exceptionally useful one.