A more acceptable means of preserving the purity of the race was birth control. Marie Stopes, its energetic propagandist, set up her first birth control clinic in 1920. When her son married a genetically impaired girl with glasses she cut him out of her will. Birth control would liberate women from continuous child- bearing, allowing them to enjoy the pleasures of sexual intercourse. What if men could not come up to scratch in providing that pleasure? Doubts about this, far from liberating me, made me wary about sex for a considerable period.
If eugenics were the creed of a progressive elite, Sigmund Freud’s works familiarised intellectuals with his major discovery: the unconscious mind. As his translator and disciple Ernest Jones insisted: ‘My whole point is that every human being is guided in his actions by forces of which he is more or less unconscious.’ This undermined the old-fashioned belief that reason could be relied on to solve the problems of the modern world. Conventional psychologists, treating the conscious mind, insisted that psychoanalysts merely deepened the neuroses they professed to cure in interminable therapeutic sessions. One such consultant psychologist suggested that GPs should recommend holidays, rest in bed, mild sedation and indulge in encouraging chat.
As early as 1923 the Cambridge don G. Lowes Dickinson warned that ‘if civilisation does not end war, war will put an end to civilisation.’ Ten years later, fear of the prospect of a war had become a mass psychosis. Overy deals at length with the anti-war movement. Organisations like the Peace Pledge Union were as successful in attracting mass support as was the Free Trade movement in Victorian Britain. But they produced no Cobden or Bright capable of influencing government policy. As Germany was arming for war, absolute pacifists demanded total disarmament, while the League of Nations was at a low ebb as a peacekeeping power. For Overy the failure of the peace movement was the ‘greatest disappointment of the interwar years’.
Eminently readable, The Morbid Age is a masterpiece of historical imagination. Overy is familiar with the vast number of written sources. He ransacks the private correspondence of the time in order to expose the personality and prejudices of the writers. For anyone who wishes to understand inter- war Britain, this book is essential reading.
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