Woolf is the only English person under consideration in this book, so it is fitting here to take a moment to consider the English historical background of the ethics of modernism – a background that affected everyone else. In “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Woolf cites Samuel Butler's Way of All Flesh (written 1872–84, published 1903) as a herald of the “change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature” that she marks with the date December, 1910. The novel's hero, Ernest Pontifex, is born in 1835, the same year as Butler, and his unhappy experiences open up a brutally satirical perspective on Victorian morality. Ernest's very name is a jab at Thomas Arnold's ideal of earnestness. The narrator Overton, who is Ernest's godfather, describes the young man's puzzlement after the ruin of his ill-advised marriage:

Butler supplies his own version of the transvaluation of values: the “angel of light” is a “devil” in disguise. Blasting the hypocritical arrangements of marriage and family, he lays bare the meanness of respectability. His iconoclasm foreshadows Woolf's later attacks upon the Victorians.