The later years of the nineteenth century saw the almost final breakdown of rural communities due to a pre-industrial way of life and economy.

The agricultural depression of those times ( 1870-1902) hit particularly hard the landed aristocracy and the agricultural labour. And it was then that the change in the village denoted the end of rural England.

The late nineteenth century saw an improvement in living standards. ‘For the first time people had a choice of how and where to spend their money’(Fraser 1981, p. Ix). Though terrible poverty persisted, of course, and the ‘democratization of luxury’ did not extend all the social scale.

The penetration of high culture by popular models pointed to the decay of elitism. It was symbolized by the attacks on the private education system, the call, for <american model, for the common school and the ‘massification’ of higher education. The first great revolution of the Renaissance enthroned the ideal – essentially elitist- of the literary man of affairs, of classical wisdom; the second – that of UK- rejected such ‘amateurism’.

Thus the lack of a generally informed public invited any excentricity that could make itself heard. The crisis of the mid-century was not only a crisis at popular level- it permitted our whole society ( D. H. Lawrence’s sense of Decay noted in a passage from Kangaroo had been confirmed.

The period between 1870s and the 1920s has been described by economic and social historians as an age of demand, economy of abundance, democratization of luxury, retail revolution and consumer capitalism. This indicates an emphasis in economic theory and practice, from production to consumption, and from the satisfaction of the needs to the creation of new desires.

By the 20^th century, history was firmly established in European and American universities resting on exact methods and making productive use of archivals and new sources of evidence.

From 1930 onward the general picture of literary development over the period starts to become clear. The avant-garde writers of the two preceding decades begin to retire from scene. Lawrence, Joyce and Virginia Woolf were removed by death. On the question of relative value, the 1910-1930 period was one of the great epochs of English literature. What has been written since then does not bear comparison with it for a moment.