20th century

The 20th century provides the historical horizon for Victoria McCandless’s hopes, disappointments, and retrospective judgments. Across her writing, confidence in social progress meets the danger of industrialized war: an early-century vision of a more rational future is tested by mass death, then renewed—though not without qualification—by the Labour government elected in 1945.

An early-century horizon

In a letter to a descendant, Victoria imagines a future reader whose world she cannot know. She refers to Herbert George Wells’s The War in the Air, which pictures a German air fleet attacking the United States in the 1920s or 1930s and a conflict that destroys major centres of civilization. She treats the novel as a warning rather than a prediction, and believes a better future can be made through deliberate action.

That confidence is rooted in the political and civic life she sees around her. Glasgow’s municipal provision of public resources, educated skilled workers, expanding cooperative movement, and telephone system being adopted across Britain all appear to her as evidence that social organization can improve. Yet the city’s industrial strength has a dangerous counterpart: warships built along the Clyde for government contracts, amid naval competition with Germany. The same productive capacity that supports civic progress can feed an arms race.

War, obedience, and loss

After the First World War, the period looks radically different. Victoria tries to understand how people who were not individually bloodthirsty or stupid could obey orders to kill and be killed on such a scale. She considers war a preventable epidemic of belligerence, linking it both to overcrowded living and working conditions and to the obedience of people from more prosperous homes. Her explanation also turns toward family life: she believes that deficient parenting had left many men with a deep conviction that their lives had little value.

The war’s consequences are intimate as well as political. Victoria’s two youngest sons willingly entered the military system and died after their bodies were treated as expendable instruments; her oldest made his mind, rather than his body, part of the war machine. She comes to regard all three as victims of self-disrespect, even though their first ten years had been spent in a clean, spacious home with loving and adventurous parents. The contrast makes the war’s reach difficult to contain within any single explanation.

The 1945 turning point

A letter written soon after the 1945 general election marks a renewed sense of possibility. With a Labour government holding an overall working majority for the first time that century, Victoria expects anti-trade-union laws to be repealed and social welfare and national health care to be established. She also anticipates public ownership of fuel and power, transport, and iron and steel, and the end of the British Empire. To her, these changes suggest that Britain may set a better example than the Soviet Union.

She reads the years from 1914 onward as a detour from social progress, whose last fixed point had been Lloyd George’s budget: old-age pensions had begun to replace poorhouses, while death duties had started to break up great estates. Her hope also revises an earlier political expectation. She concedes that John Maclean may have been wrong that an independent Scotland would lead the way; a cooperative workers’ nation, she now thinks, may be created from London. The letter ends in chosen happiness: Victoria knows her correspondent will object, but asks him to leave his pen alone because she intends to die happy.