In Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain dedicates the better part of 100 pages to etching a panoramic image of her upbringing among Edwardian England’s “provincial middle-classes” (30). It is an important historical climate—and socioeconomic viewpoint—to consider when approaching WWI literature and art. Though most of her generation would spend the coming decades distancing themselves, both artistically and politically, from the sunny, nine-year reign of King Edward, Edwardian and Georgian influences remain central to a discussion of early war narratives and the public’s initial perception of the conflict. As Brittain explains, while older generations believed the Edwardian period was merely a “breathing space” between the long Victorian age and the beginning of WWI, for her peers “it was much more than that, for in those nine years we grew from children into adolescents or adults” (23).

Her generation’s maturation took place in a decade of ostentatious leisure, garden parties, and picnics. We find this almost fantasy world portrayed in Brittain’s idyllic description of her early years: “Here, in the small garden and field belonging to our house, and in the smooth, pretty Cheshire lanes with their kindly hedges and benign wild flowers, I and my brother Edward…passed through a childhood which was, to all appearances, as serene and uneventful as any childhood could be" (21). In this same section of Testament of Youth, Brittain mentions her home’s décor, which with its “hunting pictures and Marcus Stone engravings, its plush curtains, its mahogany furniture and its scarcity of books…represented all that was essentially middle-class in that Edwardian decade” (23). I have included an example of a Marcus Stone engraving, called "Miss Wyldwyl was sketching." It is easy to identify in his engravings the element of human leisure amid a benevolent natural world that so typified Edwardian art and poetry. For more images, check out http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/mstone/.

Surrounded by these childhood images, is it then very surprising that the initial reaction of many British youth to the outbreak of the war was one of pulsing jingoism and heroic idealism? An aged Brittain looks back in pity when she describes “how abysmally ignorant, how romantically idealistic and how utterly unsophiscated my more sensitive contemporaries and I were at that time” (43). Edwardian and Geogrian poetry reflects this idealism; patriotism and nature converge. Poet Rupert Brooke, mentioned by Brittain several times, embodies the Georgian use of pastoral imagery paired with nationalistic sentiment. In his famous poem “The Soldier,” Brooke daydreams about his legacy as a fallen soldier of an Edenic England, claiming in patriotic fervor that when his body is buried in “some corner of a foreign field” (line 2), that corner will be claimed as “forever England” (2). Lines inviting readers to imagine the cool sensation of being “washed by the rivers” flowing peacefully in the English countryside and to feel the warmth of being “blest by suns of home” feel incongruent with trench warfare’s grim realities (line 8). Similar pastoral jingoism comes through in Roland’s early letters and poems about WWI where he calls war “a very fascinating thing—something, if often horrible, yet very ennobling and very beautiful, something whose elemental reality raises it above the reach of all cold theorizing” (104) and writes that his only reason for going is “heroism in the abstract” (129). On his departure for France, Roland wistfully comments on how “all our sweet songs are sung, / Our red rose-garlands withered” (172). Soon, however, we find his opinion on the war shifting with the rest of his generation. He later writes Brittain, “I used to talk of the Beauty of War; but it is only War in the abstract that is beautiful” (172). Rupert Brooke died just 8 months before Roland. It’s worth considering how their initially Edwardian poetic verse—both in form and content—would have evolved should either have survived until the armistice.