WHEN THE END WAS NIGH

From Halley's Comet Panic to impending war in Europe, the Edwardian era is far more fascinating than people realise, writes ROSS MONTGOMERY... and just as relevant today

- ROSS MONTGOMERY

THE GLOBAL success of Julian Fellowes’ Downton Abbey has definitely helped to change that a little, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people, when questioned, misremember that first series as being set in the Victorian period.

As a result, I approached my research with a sense of dutiful, grudging boredom — a bit like being forced to learn about Roman aqueducts in school. I'd wanted to write a fun, thrilling murder mystery caper... was I really going to have to wade through hundreds of pages of bone-dry material, just to make that happen? “Why couldn’t the Halley’s Comet Panic have happened 40 years earlier,” I hissed through gritted teeth, “so my detectives could ride steam-powered penny farthings to the murder site or something?”

But what I discovered — and what I suspect might be true for a lot of other time periods — was that I was massively wrong about the Edwardian era.

Maybe the key element at play is the one I’ve already touched on: it wasn’t the Victorian age. Britain had just experienced several decades of incredible, dizzying boom, expanding its colonies and becoming the most powerful empire in the world. Now, all that had stalled: in the eyes of the nation, Queen Victoria had died, a golden era had passed and Britain didn’t feel like the powerhouse that it once was. There was a paranoia that things were falling apart: that somehow, for some reason, we were at threat and nobody knew why.