My aim throughout this book has been to try to interpret Edwardian literature on its own terms, seeking to recapture the original significance of the novels, poems and plays discussed here by contextualising their writing and reception. The organising concept of the ‘Emporium’ has offered an enabling framework for this project, allowing separate departments of literary culture to be viewed both individually and also as part of a larger and connected enterprise. What these ‘departments’ confirm discretely and collectively are the problems inherent in taking too seriously Virginia Woolf's tongue-in-cheek claim for December 1910 as a starting point for artistic development in Britain in the twentieth century. The lasting influence of these inflexible interpretations of Woolf's thesis has hampered our understanding of what lies on the other side of this putative watershed. Philipp Blom's study of European history, The Vertigo Years: Change and Culture in the West, 1900–1914 (2008), presents a compelling challenge to those who have interpreted Woolf's 1910 starting point in rigid ways. Blom's case for antedating the temporal centre of artistic gravity from 1910 to the beginning of the twentieth century is established in the following terms:

Although Blom's conceptualisation of the period after 1914 as a mere ‘exercise’ of the ‘new possibilities’ established in the pre-war period is somewhat hyperbolic, his general thesis is convincing.