In 1935 in New York the publishing house of Harrison Smith and Robert Haas published George Dangerfield's The Strange Death of Liberal England. Now, fifty years later, the book is as vital, if not more so, as when it was first published. It was quite appropriate that the book, and its author, were celebrated last Spring at a meeting of the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies at San Luis Obispo in California, quite close to Santa Barbara where Dangerfield lives overlooking the Pacific ocean. Even nicer, perhaps, is that in this year we shall see Halley's Comet again, which Dangerfield remembers having seen as a child, and being told that it would not appear again in his lifetime. The comet appears on the first page of the book (heralding the dazzling prose to come), observed by the Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, from the deck of the Admiralty yacht Enchantress, “to blaze forth the death of a king”: Edward VII.

The Strange Death of Liberal England has had, eventually, a strong impact upon the historical profession, as well as something of an odd history. The original publishers quite soon went out of business and the book was not kept in print in America. It was published a year later in England for the first time by Constable, but in a slightly truncated form without the important epilogue on Rupert Brooke. Over the next twenty-six years it was a book known only, I believe, by a few, recommended by word of mouth and not, on the whole, given much attention by the historical profession or the reading public.

In March 1985 the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies devoted its annual meeting to honoring George Dangerfield upon the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of his book, The Strange Death of Liberal England. Scholars from various parts of the United States and from several British Universities came together to pay their respects to Dangerfield, and to talk about his famous history.

The principal organizers of the meeting were Professor Peter Stansky of Stanford University; Professor R. J. Q. Adams of Texas A&M University; and Professor Dan Krieger, California Polytechnic State University. These organizers made two requests of me. They invited me to deliver an oral comment upon a paper about Dangerfield which was presented to the conference by Professor Carolyn White of the University of Alabama; and they also asked that I write this essay about “Dangerfield—the man and historian.” The idea was to make his personality known to a wider audience by recalling certain experiences and by relating certain anecdotes which illustrate the character of this remarkable scholar and man of letters.

The celebration of the anniversary of The Strange Death of Liberal England actually began a few months earlier when the Chancellor of the University of California, Santa Barbara, Dr. R. A. Huttenback, presented Dangerfield with a University Medal in commemoration of the book. At this ceremony at U.C.S.B. Dangerfield casually remarked that The Strange Death of Liberal England had appeared in nineteen editions and he thought, but was not entirely certain, that a twentieth edition was about to be produced.

George Dangerfield's book, The Strange Death of Liberal England, would have been an influential, indeed a seminal, piece of historical writing whenever it had appeared: published in 1935 it constituted an immense liberation. In 1935 the writing of modern British political history was dominated for academic people by Lewis Namier, whose two great works—The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III and England in the Age of the American Revolution—had been published in 1928 and 1930. Namier's immense gifts were balanced by a startling defect. He was psychologically incapable of writing historical narrative, that is of dealing on any considerable scale with the development of events. Here, at the very start of the Namierite era, was a young scholar named Dangerfield writing history in the classic manner, writing, that is, as Thucydides and Tacitus had done, with a wide narrative sweep about the fateful and tragic events of yesterday. The result was the book which was so eloquently analysed this afternoon. It has been issued, if I heard this rightly, some nineteen times; and three editions, two American and one British, are in print today, after fifty years.

At the end of his life Disraeli, by then Lord Beaconsfield, congratulated Matthew Arnold on having “coined unforgettable phrases.” Mr. Dangerfield may surely be offered the same congratulations. In the week in which I was composing this paper the Spectator of London carried an article under the headline: “The Strange Death of Liberal America”; and I note that a work will be published in London this September entitled “The Strange Rebirth of Liberal England.” Where the phrasing of the title is concerned we may be celebrating tonight, not only a jubilee, but the ghost of a centenary. When Mr. Dangerfield chose his arresting title he echoed, unwittingly as we understand, one devised fifty years earlier; for in 1885 a young British journalist in India named Rudyard Kipling had written a story entitled: “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes.”

In the autumn of 1935 an obscure New York publishing house brought out a book by a young British writer which had an arresting title, The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1910-1914. Reviewers praised the book for its superb writing, brilliant wit, and elegant style. It was noted, however, that the thesis of the book was either indecipherable or if discernible lacking in conviction. Its author was George Dangerfield, a recent immigrant to New York and literary editor of Vanity Fair, the demise of which shortly followed the publication of its editor's book. In the middle of the 1930s Dangerfield appeared to represent those young Englishmen without birth and without resources who had “the will not to let any sentiment for the beauties of that England which is gone, or any compromise with the unreal thinking of the men who enjoyed it, stand in their way as they mold the England that shall be.” After 1935 Dangerfield was a professional writer and lecturer until World War II when he joined the American army as an infantryman and assumed American citizenship at Paris, Texas, in 1943. Thereafter he could no longer speak with the clear, authentic voice of the new young England. Rather he identified the persistence of “good, sound American doctrine” from the Federalist Papers as “one of the glories of our republic,” and he evoked that doctrine in defense of free association and the open competition of ideas. As the cold war ensued and Joseph McCarthy reached for national office, George Dangerfield continued to speak for liberal democracy.