Writing in 1909, C. F. G. Masterman, in his study The Condition of England, recognised the pressing question of the day: ‘“Contemporary England” – its origins, its varying elements of good and evil, its purposes, its future drift – is a study demanding a lifetime's investigation by a man of genius’ (Masterman 1909/1910: 9). Although this statement implies that the task was primarily one for political and sociological commentators, Masterman was acutely aware of the role that creative writers might play in carrying out these vital investigations. To this end he argued that:

This chapter responds to and extends Masterman's thesis in examining the ways in which Edwardian England was imagined by its novelists, poets and topographical writers. Following the Anglo-Boer War, and with society seemingly in a state of flux, writers looked in various ways to understand what sort of England might be emerging in the new century. Edwardian poets were especially preoccupied with this issue, and the first section of the chapter traces the contested notions of England and Englishness that appeared in Edwardian verse. While the characteristic mode of the era's poetry is pastoral and nostalgic, writers such as Kipling defined a model of England that might provide a rallying cry to stimulate the defence of a battered and vulnerable post-war nation.

The second section of the chapter traces the ways in which topographical writers repackaged England for a largely armchair urban audience. Here, the myths and traditions of a predominantly rural England are foregrounded in ways designed to preserve in print a land then seemingly in imminent danger of extinction.