A Room with a View is set when it was written, at the height of the so-called Edwardian summer. It’s tempting to romanticise this period as an age of lost innocence all too soon to be swept away in August 1914, but as cultural historian Samuel Hynes notes, the first decade of the twentieth century was a time of transition and transformation well before the war: ‘aircraft, radiotelegraphy, psychoanalysis, Postimpressionism, motion picture palaces, the Labour Party were all Edwardian additions to the English scene’ (Hynes 1992, p. 5). He suggests that while the First World War ‘dramatised and speeded the changes from Victorian to modern England, it did not make them’.
Within a year of A Room with a View’s publication, when the radical Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George called the financial reforms that he unveiled ‘a war Budget’, it was not military conflict he had in mind. The People’s Budget aimed to tax the rich to help the poor:
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