Just before the phase shift

From Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers.  Relevant other texts include The Long Weekend by Robert Grave and Alan Hodge and Noblesse Oblige by Nancy Mitford.  

The 1920s and 1930s were the anteroom to the Post-World War II modern era.  World War I had destroyed the four monarchies; Russian (Romanov), Austro Hungarian (Habsburg), German (Hohenzollern) and Turkish (Ottoman).  Modern governments replaced them, many evolving into authoritarian or totalitarian forms.  

The British Monarchy, Empire, and aristocracy still survived and even prospered but the future was on the doorstep and nobody particularly ready for it.  

Class is not especially a focus of Gaudy Night but it suffuses the story.  Manners, and titles, and servants, and mannerisms, and language use - all markedly distinct from our time.  We know what happens next.  We know these things disappear though we remember and know of them.  Mitford's U and Non-U captures some of the sense of almost a different language which is a class barrier and marker rather than actually different.

What also comes across is the quality of elite education then, particularly in what we would now call the humanities.  I lived in England for various stretches of time on several occasions between the 1960s and 2000s.  I also am extensively read in British history and sociology.  I think am pretty adequately prepared.

But time and again there are allusions and references to texts or sayings or adages which I vaguely recognize but do not know.  They form almost a separate mystery within the mystery.  What are they communicating to one another?  There are occasions when I know there is more going on in the story than I am picking up in the text.  It is not really that the book is dated so much as it just requires some pretty distinct familiarity or specialized knowledge of the period.

Though unintentional, I found it a pleasant feature which I will explore in further posts.