Olive Schreiner, the South African author of The Story of an African Farm, surveyed her Edwardian society as an impoverished exile in London in a letter to a lifelong friend, John X Merriman. “A dead pall rests over the whole life of the people,” she despaired. “A passion for dress, luxury and gain is eating up the middle classes”; the whole press is in the hands of the capitalists “because they represent the spirit of the nation”; the working classes and democratic movements are “dead or at least torpid” and a “lifeless striving for gain for themselves has taken its place”.
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