The centenary of the “Great War” has seen the publication of numerous letters and diaries of British soldiers of the war, but it may seem surprising that Oxford University Press has felt the need to join in this enterprise. The main reason is that the letters of the Slater family provide us with something much rarer: a chance to see the impact of the war on an entire family rather than just on the combatant son or husband.

The three main correspondents are Dr. Gilbert Slater, his wife, Violet, and his son, Owen. Gilbert Slater, an academic, traveled to teach in southern India in 1915. From 1916 he kept up a regular correspondence with his wife and his son, who joined the Royal Engineers after leaving school in November 1917. More than half of the total letters are from 1918.

The coeditors are James Munson and Owen Slater's daughter, Margaret Bonfiglioli, who had previously edited that indispensable source for the history of the British home front, the diary of the Reverend Andrew Clark. Like Clark's diary, the Slater letters draw us deeply into the experience of middle-class England at war. Like Clark's, the family's experience of the worst horrors of war is fairly indirect. Some readers might be surprised at how little death appears in the letters; only a few distant acquaintances are reported killed. Owen Slater arrived in France just six weeks before the war ended, and his unit seems to have sustained only one casualty during his time.

What is perhaps most striking in the letters is the increasing divergence of opinion between Gilbert and Violet. Both began the war as archetypal Edwardian progressives. For Gilbert Slater, the conflict remained a war in defense of progressive values. The thought of a victory for German imperialism filled him with horror, and he thoroughly embraced Wilsonianism after the American entry into the war. But by October 1918, he went as far as to write that the war could have been prevented if Britain had made clear its intention to fight alongside France prior to 1914; this had once been the position of the Daily Mail and was a long distance from the pieties of prewar Liberalism. Violet Slater, by contrast, became increasingly convinced that the war was being prolonged needlessly, and she increasingly threw herself into “peace” activities—not only humanitarian action but also public demands for a compromise peace. On 7 November 1918, upon hearing that the German army had been “cut in two,” she expressed regret that the war had ended in a decisive victory because it would cultivate a “slumbering hate” in Germany. While both Gilbert and Violet were able to place some hope in the idea of a League of Nations, their divisions reflect the crisis of Liberalism that the war brought about. Owen Slater seems to have ended the war drawn towards “international socialism,” but, as the editors note, his radical views did not spur him into voting in the December 1918 general election.

Highly educated, opinionated, and articulate, the Slaters were not a typical family even in Oxford, and arguably this collection simply adds to our understanding of a limited section of society about which we already know a lot. But the Slaters' very articulacy in expressing opinions is of course a strength from the reader's point of view, and the letters are a fascinatingly self-conscious reflection on one family's reaction to the upheaval of war.