“Capitalism,” Fritz Stern has remarked, “is too serious a subject to be left to the economic historian alone.” Such is also the case with industrialism. In the course of writing a quite different book on British social thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I became aware of a distinctive complex of social ideas, sentiments, and values in the “articulate” classes, embodying an ambiguous attitude toward modern industrial society. In the world's first industrial nation, industrialism did not seem quite at home. In the country that had started mankind on the “great ascent,” economic growth was frequently viewed with suspicion and disdain. Having pioneered urbanization, the English ignored or disparaged cities.

The more I explored these incongruities, the more important they seemed to become. Instead of peripheral curiosities, they turned out to lie near the heart of modern British history. Taken together, they bore witness to a cultural cordon sanitaire encircling the forces of economic development – technology, industry, commerce. One could begin to see this mental quarantine take shape in the social changes (and nonchanges) of the Victorian era, watch it give from then on a particular softly rustic and nostalgic cast to middle- and upper-class culture, and finally observe it intertwine with the modern fading of national economic dynamism. To follow the unfolding of this complex of attitudes was to highlight, in a novel way, the importance of the conservative (with a lowercase “c”) frame of mind in modern Britain. What first appeared to me as incongruities, in short, came to provide a key to the reinterpretation of the past century and a quarter of British domestic history.