Check your privilege

Check your privilege The rise of class warfare in Victorian Britain The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880 to 1914 Simon Heffer Random House Books, 912pp, ?30 The late Victorians inhabited a social structure that many at the time considered to be ripe past rottenness and ready to drop. [...]as Louise Raw's research for her 2009 book Striking a Light shows, Besant was nowhere near the match factory when the strike began, and unaware of it until a deputation of strikers came to her office days later. Other ideas were on the rise, however: women, the working class and nationalists could celebrate this period as one not of decadence but ascendancy. l Suspicion of the aristocracy was fuelled by the new popular press and a middle class that believed in Victorian morality Jad Adams is the author of "Women and the Vote: A World History" (OUP) and "Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent" (Tauris Parke)