The Strange Death of Liberal England
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The Strange Death of Liberal England is a book written by George Dangerfield, first published in 1935, attempting to explain the decline of the British Liberal Party in the years 1910 to 1914.
Dangerfield argues that four great rebellions before the Great War effectively destroyed the Liberal Party as a party of government. These rebellions were the Conservative Party's fight against the Parliament Act 1911; the threat of civil war in Ireland by the Ulster Unionists under Sir Edward Carson with the encouragement of Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law; the Suffragette movement under the Pankhursts; and the increasingly militant trade unions.
The New York book publishers Harrison Smith and Robert Haas first printed the book, although it soon went out of print due to the publishers folding. An edited version was published in Britain in 1936 for the first time by Constable. Due to it being viewed as "popular history" and the book's time period being so near 1935, it largely escaped being reviewed by the major history journals.
The fifteenth volume of Albion in 1985 focused on the book and its author.
In 1997 it was republished by Serif and Stanford University Press, with a forward by Peter Stansky. In 1998 the book was chosen by the editors as number eighty-two in the Modern Library List of 100 Best Nonfiction Books published in the 20th Century.
