Since the horrific bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the declaration of war against terrorism, policy makers have repeatedly urged us to spend. The Federal Reserve cut interest rates to encourage home sales and purchase of “big-ticket” items. New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani suggests that we travel, go shopping, seek entertainment, attend plays, rather than, as in World War II, buy bonds, recycle tin, and ration consumer goods.

Yet the current connection of luxury and war frames a historical paradox. Medieval and early modern prescriptive literatures link luxury not with times of war but with peace leading to decadence. The de-moralization of the idea of luxury, historians of consumption argue, only took place in the later seventeenth century when writers such as Nicholas Barbon and Bernard Mandeville recognized the importance of luxury to the economy. Eighteenth-century luxury consumption, fueled by new wants and new wares purchased by middle-class consumers, it is argued, marked a sharp departure from the court centered consumption of previous centuries.

When Sir Richard Southern wanted to illustrate the moral compromise that was the inevitable cost of being a courtier and servant of King Henry I of England—the culture of whose court encouraged profiteering and sharp practice—he found the material to hand in a number of surviving letters of the unfortunate Nigel d'Aubigny. At some time between 1109 and 1114 Nigel fell ill, and he believed himself dying. He dictated to his royal master a letter—on which one can almost see the spots of the tears—begging him to confirm the restorations of land that he wanted now to make to various churches he had formerly deprived. Another letter was to his brother, listing further—rather weighty—restorations he wanted made to numerous laymen likewise defrauded by him in the course of his career. Perhaps he felt rather silly when he got better, as he did, and lived for many years more to meditate on his unworthiness.

Sir Richard proved his point, but it occurs to me that the same evidence can be used to explore further a different but related issue: how it was that these men who lived and worked in Henry's service were so very conscious of the moral compromises they had made. If Nigel d'Aubigny was brought to the state that his letters reveal that he was, when he was threatened by death, it can only be because he had been aware of actions that might be considered his sins for quite some while.

In early November 1790, Edmund Burke noted the existence in England of “several petty cabals, who attempt to hide their total want of consequence in bustle and noise, and puffing, and mutual quotation of each other.” Burke's observation both informed and amused conservative opinion, but its condescension masked the seriousness of the situation that it described. Throughout Britain men were assembling into societies organized in celebration of French liberty and motivated by the prospect of parliamentary reform at home. While it was true that the leading members of these clubs sometimes indulged in “puffing” and “mutual quotation,” their commitment to reform was nevertheless deeply held. Joseph Priestley, for one, sacrificed his home, his laboratory, and nearly his life in defense of the cause; Maurice Margarot, Joseph Gerrald, and Thomas Muir sacrificed their freedom; sadly, Thomas Hardy sacrificed his wife and unborn child. For their equally obstinate devotion to reform, the Revolution Society, which took its name in commemoration of the Glorious Revolution rather than in envy of the French uprising, and the Society for Constitutional Information, a longtime reform leader reinvigorated after the fall of the ancien régime, became the objects of Burke's ridicule. But in his conviction that “contemptuous neglect” was the best method by which to defeat the “vanity, petulance, and spirit of intrigue” displayed by these societies, Burke exposed an embarrassing improvidence. For if, as he claimed, these associations were “inconsequential” in their own conduct, their agitation would eventually prompt the emergence of a new generation of populous and, therefore, menacing societies. By spring 1794, neither Burke nor Pitt would be able to ignore the reformers any longer. What were once “petty” had become “the mother of all mischief.”

It all started with George Dangerfield's classic description of the circumstances surrounding the demise of Liberal England prior to World War I. He summarily recognized “that the abandonment of respectable punctilios and worn conventions, which was such a feature of society after the war, had already begun before the war.” Though drawn largely within a social context, it was obvious that Dangerfield's portrayal, especially after the precipitate decline of the Liberal Party in the interwar period, was fraught with political implications. An incubation period of almost a generation followed, but by the early 1960s The Strange Death of Liberal England, by virtue of its brilliant style and sweeping interpretation, had gained international recognition and set the tone for historiography of the Edwardian era. In his 1985 assessment of Dangerfield's impact, Peter Stansky concludes that his “interpretation will not die; no matter how often it may be knocked on the head, it has shaped the way the period is viewed….There can be few works that are so vital after fifty years, as likely to survive for another fifty or as enjoyable to read.” At the outset of the new millennium, Strange Death has lost little of its incandescence.

An important aspect of the book's magnetic appeal is the groundwork it provided for the great debate over the rise of the Labour Party and the decline of the Liberals. Did these phenomena occur suddenly as a result of the First World War or were they already well in place in the pre-war years, especially from 1910 to 1914? The foremost challenge to Dangerfield's thesis, thereby instigating the controversy, came from Trevor Wilson's 1966 study, The Downfall of the Liberal Party, 1914–1935, which ascribes Liberal misfortunes largely to a crisis of leadership during the war.