What did the Edwardians know about Spain, and what was that knowledge worth? The Edwardians and the Making of a Modern Spanish Obsession draws on a vast store of largely unstudied primary source material to investigate Spain’s place in the turn-of-the-century British popular imagination. Set against a background of unprecedented emotional, economic and industrial investment in Spain, the book traces the extraordinary transformation that took place in British knowledge about the country and its diverse regions, languages and cultures between the tercentenary of the Spanish Armada in 1888 and the outbreak of World War I twenty-six years later. This empirically-grounded cultural and material history reveals how, for almost three decades, Anglo-Spanish connections, their history and culture were more visible, more colourfully represented, and more enthusiastically discussed in Britain’s newspapers, concert halls, council meetings and schoolrooms, than ever before. It shows how the expansion of education, travel, and publishing created unprecedented opportunities for ordinary British people not only to visit the country, but to see the work of Spanish and Spanish-inspired artists and performers in British galleries, theatres and exhibitions. It explores the work of novelists, travel writers, journalists, scholars, artists and performers to argue that the Edwardian knowledge of Spain was more extensive, more complex and more diverse than we have imagined.

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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912 edition. Excerpt: ... xxii castilian prose the Spanish language," said an English writer in 1701, "is properly none at all, for if the Spaniards were to restore to the Egyptians, Grecians, Arabians, Moors, Jews, Romans, Vandals, Huns, Goths, French, and, lastly, Italians, the words they have taken from them, they must of necessity remain dumb." And, again, the Spanish language "consists of a's and o's, and nothing else but mouthing and grimace." Another Englishman, sixty years later, says of the Spanish language, that "As there is something pompous and magnificent in the length of its words and the sound of them, so there is also a peculiarity in the turn and manner of their phrases and expressions." In the time of Spain's greatness a larger measure of justice is bestowed on the Spanish language. "It is expressive, noble, and grave," says Mme. d'Aulnoy; "it is only our own (i.e. French) which excels it." But with the decay of Spain's material prosperity the language seems to have fallen into a disrepute; can a nation that possesses no gold currency and no battleships possess a language or literature worthy of the name? It may be admitted that many modern Spaniards themselves do not write correct or idiomatic Spanish; the language has been crowded with foreign importations, and while it is the easiest language to learn superficially, it is, by reason of its immense wealth of words and baffling reserves of idioms, one of the most difficult to learn well. "The best Castilian is here spoken," said Mme. d'Aulnoy of Burgos, and it_is still in Castille that the purest Spanish is to be learnt, in regions, i.e. where, owing to the climate, the foreigner makes but a briefest stay. Toledo is more likely to be visited for two days to see its churches, than for two months...

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