The british embrace or rarher succumb to the City being at the top who owns the lot. Now begins the race for the estates. Who is going to figure out how to keep them, who is going to lose everything, and is there going to be a mass public freak out and various trusts swooping in to save these properties or not?
Also, this is the death knell of victorian Britain. The landed nobility are on the way out, both economically and in goverment. The financial sector is ascendant and possess a stranglehold on much regarding government policy. And the war looms, threatening the final end of the age of confidence and security.
One needs status, the other money. Unfortunately for the landed nobility, while the City only needs to gain the former once, they will very much continue to need new injections of the latter.
It is very much the end of an era.
Brunel's career seems absolutely fascinating. I really am not sure whose career in OTL might be closest. It's such a strange beast I am not at all surprised his time has been hard for future historians to pin down.
Also, I have to enquire if it was intentional that this passage was written by an Iain Banks - given the Iain Banks of our world was something of a socialist in his politics it is quite fun to see his name here talking about the City and Gentry.
He would also definitely end up as one of those figures that isn't a well-known character amongst the general public (Asquith and Sinclair would almost certainly be the PMs that people might still remember from history class), but is completely inescapable when you delve even a little further into the era.
It was actually unintentional. Using Banks was intentional, as a very simple 'essay dealing with the City written by a man named Banks' joke. I did think 'Iain Banks' sounded familiar when I settled on the first name. Clearly, my subconscious has a much keener sense of irony than I do.
As ever well written @BigBadBob, I feel a tad sympathetic with Brunel, oddly.
It does feel like that, and it feels that it's happening earlier than OTL.
Thank you.
Much of the underlying development is actually the same as IOTL, but the early arrival of the welfare state and the Federation Debate, by poking at the divisions of the new, amalgamated upper class, have made it somewhat clearer to the groups involved ITTL.
I can understand well enough how the landed gentry and aristocracy secured their influence, but the City is a subject on which I am forced to admit total and utter bafflement. Still, having their lot in the ascendant doesn't inspire in me all that much hope about the future course of Britain. (I suppose you might've guessed this…)
I'll also echo the fascination with Brunel, and might perhaps suggest Haussmann as the closest thing to an analogue.
I too was going to ask if you had the writer in mind, @BigBadBob.
C.R.E.A.M! Credit Rules Everything Around Me!
As the spiritual and aristocratic, landed elite lose their power of compulsion (be it through secularisation or urbanisation) in an increasingly industrialised, post-Enlightenment society, power concentrates in the hands of those who have the ability to raise vast sums of money with which to replace spiritual/social reward. Really, the City has been ascendant since the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Financial Revolution that followed it. Arguably, it was the ability to raise debt at far higher levels than France that won Britain the Second Hundred Years' War. As long as the Channel prevented outright invasion, Britain could fund both itself and its allies until the French lost on the field or collapsed under the weight of their own debt burden.
The Brunel family have fallen on dark times if they are reduced to being politicians.
Then again they pretty much vanished from history after Marc in OTL so perhaps that was the price of survival. Still a bit of steep price.
As mentioned a sense of transition, but one that will be catastrophically interrupted by the much threatened Great War.
Fading into obscurity, or becoming a politician? It truly is Sophie's Choice.
I'm very glad to see all the interest in Brunel. He was odd to write in that, since the point of his time in government was to not do much (and in opposition to prevent doing much), there wasn't much to say about him in the context of each issue. Yet, with his tenure at the head of one of the main parties, he would have been completely insecapable to contemporaries. This essay provided a nice way to put him in the context of the time.
Not named by Brunel. Despite the convention.
Hahah!