This study offers a multivalent portrait of a misunderstood era of history. But the real strength of this work, I would argue, lies not only in the authors’ novel portrayal of the brief reign of Edward VII and the people he ruled worldwide between 1901 and 1910, but also in how the work illuminates Edwardian Britain’s crucial role in the developing visual culture of modernity. The attraction of The Edwardian Sense, therefore, reaches beyond an audience with interests in early twentieth-century Britain, speaking more broadly to scholars of visual studies, film history, music history, history of design, and urban studies.

The seventeen essays in the volume challenge prevailing views of the Edwardian period as a “golden summer” driven by retrospective nostalgia, as a presaging of the end of the British Empire, or as a bridge between the predominant Victorian and Modern periods with little autonomous significance of its own (1). The authors focus on the lived experiences of Edwardians for their own sake, which represent a distinctly modern Janus-faced desire for simultaneous continuity and change. Moreover, the contributors show how this paradoxical desire was deeply rooted in vision and visuality: while still intricately connected to their Victorian past, Edwardians negotiated visual modernity through cinema and film, mass sporting spectacles, automobile travel and tourism, and the suburban sprawl of London, then the largest city on earth. In contrast to previously published studies of the period, The Edwardian Sense attends carefully to these forms of visual culture, arguing that such “images” fundamentally determined Edwardian identity rather than merely reflecting it.

The volume contains three thematic sections, beginning with “Spectacle,” which examines the centrality of public spectacles for Edwardian life as they blended tradition and history with the modern technologies of mass media and urban staging. The focus of the second section, “Setting,” shifts from public to private, from mass culture to intimate interiors. Here, the authors address the art and design of specifically Edwardian spaces. The final section, “Place,” expands beyond London and its environs to examine issues of nationalism, imperialism, and cosmopolitanism. For the authors of this section, place is both a physical location and an important source of identity. Each of these sections opens with three short essays on a specific work of art, employing that work as a starting point of discussion for major themes. “Spectacle” is debuted by three thought-provoking readings of the films of Edward VII’s coronation. “Setting” opens with three sensitive interpretations of William Nicholson’s painting The Condor Room from 1910, with its ambiguous rendering of Charles Conder’s watercolor A Decoration. “Place” commences with three lively discourses on George Frampton’s bronze Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, London. Full-page color reproductions of these focal works of art punctuate the section breaks, functioning more as visual theses than simply as illustrations of the text.

Although space does not permit me to discuss all of the volume’s successful essays, I will highlight several rich constellations of the period’s unique modernity. In the first essay, Tom Gunning examines French filmmaker George Méliès’s studio reconstruction—or more appropriately “pre-construction”—of Edward’s coronation. For Gunning, the staged representation by Méliès, which was actually filmed before the event due to Edward’s emergency appendicitis, provides a revealing instance of how “moving images ushered in a new era of the modern monarchy” (20). Other essays, such as those by Bronwen Edwards and David Gilbert, attend closely to the changing urban fabric of greater London. For them, the city itself offers a visual embodiment of historical change: Edwards traces the kinetic dimensions of central London that unfold within the coronation films, while Gilbert revisits the suburban expansion of Edwardian London, which he relates to the rise of sporting spectacles. These and other essays in the volume demonstrate how Edwardians first witnessed developments that still color modern life to this day, including the mass media coverage of political and athletic events as well as the juxtaposition of urban density and suburban sprawl.

As a collective approach, the essays illuminate specificities of the visual media they discuss, from the three careful readings of Nicholson’s complex painting within a painting, to Tim Barringer’s brilliant ecphrasis of Edward Elgar’s highly visual music, to Angus Trumble’s textual re-creation of the viewing experience of spliced, reassembled, and damaged versions of early films. Trumble, for instance, interprets the dense web of meaning to be found within the celluloid, both the advertising opportunities of well-placed stationary cameras along the coronation route and the untidy, banal actions of spectators that subtly signified class and status. Several strong contributions deal as much with audience and spectatorship as with the visual spectacle itself. Deborah Sugg Ryan’s chapter on pageants argues that these pervasive Edwardian entertainments signaled the beginnings of modern mass society. Blurring the boundaries between actors and audience, the participatory nature of these pageants introduced a new and lasting kind of spectacular experience.

Despite the volume’s clear success in helping us rethink this period in British history, a more profound opportunity for scholarly intervention was disappointingly underdeveloped. Although Britain has produced some of the most influential forms of mass visual culture—from Henry Fox Talbot’s invention of the photograph, to the introduction of mass illustrated publishing with the Penny Magazine and the Illustrated London News, to the groundbreaking commercial spectacle of the 1851 Great Exhibition—studies of Britain still occupy a surprisingly peripheral place in the scholarship on modern visual culture. We would do well to place this volume in dialogue with the revival of interest in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, as well as the pioneering works of Vanessa Schwartz, Martin Jay, and Anne Friedberg, all of which declaratively position France at the center of a visually oriented modernity. The Edwardian Sense fails to foreground Edwardian Britain as a rival center, thus leaving buried the broader revisions it provides. Just as the Janus-faced perspective of the Edwardians stems from self-fashioning, the marginal status of Britain in visual studies scholarship arises from a similar self-fashioning on the part of its scholars. Undergirding the contributions to this volume is an expectation that British history is of interest primarily to scholars of British history. Until this prevailing assumption is more openly challenged, Britain will remain on the margins of interdisciplinary modern studies.