Editing Edwardian era (section)

== Perceptions ==
The Edwardian period is sometimes portrayed as a romantic golden age of long summer days and garden parties, basking in a sun that never set on the [[British Empire]]. This perception was created in the 1920s and later by those who remembered the Edwardian age with nostalgia, looking back to their childhoods across the abyss of the [[Great War]].<ref>{{Cite book |last=Priestley |first=J. B. |title=The Edwardians |date=1970 |pages=55–56, 288–290 |author-link=J. B. Priestley}}</ref> The Edwardian age was also seen as a mediocre period of pleasure between the great achievements of the preceding Victorian age and the catastrophe of the following war.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Battiscombe |first=Georgina |title=Queen Alexandra |date=1969 |publisher=Constable |isbn=978-0-0945-6560-9 |location=London |page=[https://archive.org/details/queenalexandra0000batt/page/217 217]}}</ref>

Recent assessments emphasise the great differences between the wealthy and the poor during this period and describe the age as heralding great changes in political and social life.<ref name="Hattersley"/><ref>{{Cite book |last=Searle |first=G. R. |title=A New England?: Peace and War, 1886–1918 |date=2004 |publisher=Oxford University Press |author-link=G. R. Searle}}</ref> Historian [[Lawrence James]] argued that the leaders felt increasingly threatened by rival powers such as Germany, Russia, and the United States.<ref name="James">{{Cite book |last=James |first=Lawrence |title=The Rise and Fall of the British Empire |publisher=Little, Brown and Company |date=1994 |isbn=978-0-3491-0667-0 |author-link=Lawrence James}}</ref> Nevertheless, the sudden arrival of World War I in the summer of 1914 was largely unexpected, except by the Royal Navy, [[Anglo-German naval arms race|because it had been prepared and readied for war]].