Book description
The Condition of England was first published in 1909. Faber Finds
are reissuing it to celebrate its one hundredth anniversary. Although
copies are now hard to come by, it was a success on first publication
running quickly into six editions. It has often been likened to
Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy though it is more sombre. Charles
Masterman, who was in the Liberal Government when he wrote this,
provides a penetrating, sceptical and unsettling anatomy of Edwardian
England, seeing beneath the imperial splendour a society 'fissured
into unnatural plenitude on the one hand and ... an unnatural
privation on the other'. This remains a work of acute social analysis.
C. F. G. Masterman (1873-1927) was a politician and journalist.
Elected as an MP in 1906 he served in the Liberal Government in various
roles. In the First World War he became head of the War Propaganda
Bureau recruiting famous writers like John Buchan and Arthur Conan
Doyle. The Condition of England remains his most famous book, but it was
preceded by two similar works: From the Abyss (1902) and In Peril of
Change (1905)
