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The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age |  | Author: Juliet Nicolson
Publisher: Grove Press
Category: Book
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Rating:  18 reviews
Sales Rank: 15543
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 304
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.3 x 1.2
ISBN: 0802119441
Dewey Decimal Number: 941.083
EAN: 9780802119445
ASIN: 0802119441
Publication Date: June 1, 2010
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Product Description
Juliet Nicolson pieces together colorful personalities, historic moments, and intimate details to create a social history of the two years following the Great War in Britain. Not since Nicolson’s The Perfect Summer have we seen an account that so vividly captures a nation’s psyche at a particular moment in history.
The euphoria of Armistice Day 1918 vaporizes to reveal the carnage that war has left in its wake. But from Britain’s despair emerges new life. For veterans with faces demolished in the trenches, surgeon Harold Gillies brings hope with his miraculous skin-grafting procedure. Women win the vote, skirt hems leap, and Brits forget their troubles at packed dance halls. The remains of a nameless soldier are laid to rest in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Westminster Abbey. “The Great Silence,” observed in memory of the countless dead, halts citizens in silent reverence.
Nicolson crafts her narrative using a lively cast of characters: from an aging butler to a pair of newlyweds, from the Prince of Wales to T.E. Lawrence, the real-life Lawrence of Arabia. The Great Silence depicts a nation fighting the forces that threaten to tear it apart and discovering the common bonds that hold it together.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 18
 Life after the catastrophe July 2, 2010
Jay Dickson (Portland, OR)
17 out of 17 found this review helpful
In Virginia Woolf's MRS DALLOWAY, the character of Peter Walsh decides that the few years immediately after the Great War were "somehow very important"; Juliet Nicholson's powerful new cultural history of Great Britain during the period from 1918 to 1920, remind us just how very important that period was. Nicholson's method is to center her study around the lives of thirty-some figures, ranging from royalty and the aristocracy to figures important in the arts and the military, and even the working class. Her style seems initially meandering but as you get the hang of it you see the deeper patterns underneath, as she cleverly structures these figures' lives around the nation's major milestones in articulating the meaning of the War to End All Wars, where one in seven British men of the age of service died. Her choices for her dramatis personae are terrific, and often surprising: we don't hear that much about the Woolfs, Lytton Strachey, or even about her grandparents Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, for example (though those very familiar figures are all in here nonetheless), but rather quite a bit about the great memoirist Vera Brittain and the novelist Winifred Holtby. And most of the stories here have been rarely (if ever) fully told, and yet are of crucial interest to anyone interested in modernism or the InterWar period and here told with great skill: the first graduation of women from Oxford; the sensational glorification by Lowell Thomas of the exploits of T.E. Lawrence after Lawrence's exploits in Arabia and the Middle East but before the publication of THE SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM; the selling and destruction of Devonshire House, which formed the model for the similar fate of Marchmain House in BRIDESHEAD REVISITED; and, most crucial of all, the decision to set two minutes' observation of silence throughout the Empire on Remembrance Day.
There is material here for modernist and twentieth-century scholars to mine for years to come. The book reminded me of nothing so much as the excellent histories of the war itself by Paul Fussell (THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY) and Samuel Hynes (A WAR IMAGINED) from decades previous, which speaks impressively of Nicholson's achievement. There are a few minor errors here and there that I hope will be cleaned up for the US paperback (for example, Katherine Mansfield is described here as a "novelist"), but this well-crafted, beautifully detailed study is exceptionally rich with golden historical and cultural ore. It has been a bit oddly marketed for its publication in the USA (the cover photograph doesn't seem to give you much of a sense of the weightiness of the book's subject), but this fine study should absolutely find its audience among those who study or are captivated by the modernist period.
It's The Little Things July 7, 2010
Kurt Harding (Boerne TX)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
Much history taught in public schools is macro-history, with pupils required to remember names, dates, places, important events and of course, important people. That became the fashion likely because of the constraints of time. There is so much students must learn that concentration on the details is left for specialty classes at University. But what is it that really shapes a nation's destiny and forms it's national character? Well, it's the little things that do that and when you study them you can better understand the trajectory of a country's history.
I happen to enjoy the details of history and so was delighted to read Juliet Nicolson's fine social history of Great Britain covering the two years immediately following the end of WWI. Since wars are massively disruptive, their end generally entails massive social and economic changes for both the victor and the vanquished. Most reasonably well-educated Americans know about the economic and social upheavals that took place in Germany, Russia, and to a lesser extent, Austria-Hungary following the First World War. Fewer know much about the effects of the war on Great Britain with many assuming that as the victor, it emerged relatively unscathed except for its battlefield losses.
Well, in The Great Silence, Nicolson puts the lie to that notion. Using anecdote, she shows how the war affected all classes of British society from the humblest servants all the way up to the royal family. And it did change them all. But it wasn't all negative. There were many great advances not just socially, but also in science and in technology which resulted in a more restless, but ultimately a freer and slightly less class-ridden society. One of the most fascinating chapters in my view is how surgeon Howard Gillies reconstructed the faces of men who had been shattered in the war giving many of them back the opportunity to lead productive lives.
The author often alludes to social changes that many at the time thought presaged the breakdown of morality. Women entering the workforce by the millions, a decrease in church membership and attendance, more open sexuality including that of the homosexual variety, an increase in the use of contraception, an increase in drug and alcohol abuse, and a less kowtowing attitude by the lower classes toward the gentry. There was also a more militant attitude among the working classes; in places that attitude was openly and avowedly Marxist.
I personally don't care much about some of the gentry I am introduced to in this book, but yet what they did and what they thought still mattered a great deal in the Great Britain of that time and so had a bearing on the eventual direction of the country. And not just the political direction but the cultural direction as well.
I like the way Nicolson has chosen to bracket the period she covers between the anger and uncertainty that enveloped the country at war's end and the national catharsis occasioned by the burial of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey. Every segment of society was included in that ceremonial event and it brought king and commoner together, if only briefly, in a way which gave the nation closure and allowed it to move forward.
If you enjoy reading about the minutiae that are the building blocks of the Big Picture, then I highly recommend this well-written and fascinating book.
Extremely well written social history... January 30, 2010
Jill Meyer (New Mexico)
13 out of 14 found this review helpful
The Great Silence" is Juliet Nicholson's second book, after publishing "The Perfect Summer" in 2007. The first book was a social history of that glorious summer of 1911, the first summer after the ending of the Victorian and Edwardian ages.
With "Silence", Nicholson has returned with a meticulously written view of the two years in England after the end of "The Great War" in 1918. British soldiers returned after demob to their homes but in many cases, their lives would never be the same after four years in the trenches in France. So many men - who had marched gaily off to war in 1914 - had been killed or badly wounded, both in body and in spirit. So many women lost their sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers. An entire generation of young men were decimated in the four years of war.
Nicholson writes about all strata of British society, both "above" stairs and "below" stairs. Some of the people she interviewed were children in 1919 and are alive today. She also relied on written histories, both personal and academic. All together, Nicholson takes the reader back to that two year post-war period that saw the beginnings of the "Roaring '20's" with a national obsession for dancing and drinking by all levels of society. She also writes about the toll the "Spanish Flu" had on those at home who caught it from returning soldiers.
Nicholson is a very good and controlled writer. This book is not yet available in the States and I had to order it from Amazon/UK. It is a wonderful look at a very interesting time in British society.
An End And A Beginning June 16, 2010
John D. Cofield
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
When we study history we often jump directly from World War I to the Roaring Twenties, paying little or no attention to the transition period between. Juliet Nicolson's The Great Silence ably chronicles the years 1919-1920 in Britain (with occasional excursions elsewhere). Readers who enjoyed her earlier work The Perfect Summer will be glad to see that Nicolson has followed much the same format here: telling in roughly chronological order the events of the time as experienced by well known and unknown figures of the time.
The 1919-1920 period saw the ending of one world and the beginning of another. Along with the lives of millions of people, World War I destroyed or at least altered much of Europe's political, cultural, and military establishment. Nicolson does an able job chronicling the physical losses felt by so many people in England during and after the war: families who lost sons, husbands, and fathers, and soldiers who were horribly wounded and disfigured. Advances in medical care meant more men survived terrible shattering wounds, but at the price of becoming objects of fear and disgust to many when they returned home missing limbs or parts of their faces. Women found new work opportunities but struggled to deal with men who, even if they were not physically wounded, often suffered what we now call PTSD.
In 1919 and 1920 there were also plenty of hints about the new world that was taking shape. Jazz music was introduced to London ballrooms, and Coco Chanel began her long and celebrated career. New technologies like airplanes and motorcars were becoming more reliable and more common. Relationships between upper, middle, and lower classes were now much more complicated, with strikes even the finest London establishments and many noble households having to cope with a servant shortage. Sexual mores were looser, and campaigns for legalized contraception began.
Nicolson is highly skilled in her ability to depict these many changes through one telling anecdote after another. Many of the characters she uses are well known: The King and Queen, Lawrence of Arabia, Lady Astor, Lady Diana Cooper, and Lady Ottoline Morrell. Others are more obscure, such as Eric Horne, a veteran butler who found himself out of work after fifty years. Whether they were famous or not, Nicolson tells all of their stories with sympathy and perception.
The Great Silence is a fine work of social history. I hope that we will see much more from Nicolson in the future.
Lest anyone forgets June 17, 2010
wogan (U.S.A.)
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
`The Great Silence" is mostly a social history of the immediate years after WWI in Britain. It attempts to touch every class level and the effects the war had on them as a group and as individuals. It is a wonderful collection of characters that were chosen from; the well known: T.E.Lawrence (of Arabia), the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VIII), Duff Cooper, Barbara Cartland, to domestic servants and children of the soldiers who fought in the war. Juliet Nicolson uses interviews with those still living or their close relatives, diaries, letters, even those of Queen Mary. Included are soldiers, students, bohemians, socialites, doctors, a cook, an artist, and war heroes. Many facts that are not well known are included- officers carrying rouge pots so their men will not see the paleness of their fear.
The world of those living then turned almost 180 degrees, the aristocracy lost their domestic servant class and many of their large estates. Villages were left with no young men to carry on everyday life and jobs, women walked as ghosts in grief left to cope and carry on life alone or to support their families
There is a marvelous introduction to the man less homes, the beginnings of a class equality, a discussion of grief and the English habit to suppress emotions. Bereavement is discussed, and the fact that the whole population had some form of bereavement - friends, relatives; it is hard to burden others with your grief when they are suffering too. The liberation of morals and the loosening of dress standards from the tightness of Edwardian style to Coco Channel's freedom. The terrible cost of war is shown many times over, in the heroic efforts to provide some sort of cosmetic covering to those soldiers that suffered grievous facial wounds.
The Great Silence is the silence of the country in the moments given to honor those who did not return . Those minutes took place to honor and heal and finally in the interment of an unknown British soldier in Westminster Abby, buried under the main aisle where no one, not king, nor common man treads over his grave to this day.
The book is well researched and includes photographs, an inclusive index and list/description of those persons included in the book. This is a well researched monument to those who died and were touched by this war and even other wars - a history, a communal work and a touching remembrance.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 18
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