Brideshead Revisited

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to alcohol misuse and religious intolerance.

The British aristocracy faced increasing financial hardships beginning in the middle of the Victorian era, when failures to quickly adapt to a rapidly industrializing society left the centuries-long dependence on their land holdings for income insufficient. This decline became substantially more rapid in the early 20th century. Though a widespread economic boom in the 1920s provided a brief extension to the lifestyle that aristocrats had previously enjoyed, the economic depression that plagued Europe in the 1930s proved the death knell for this previous way of life. Thus, though Waugh refers to Brideshead Revisited as a panegyric (a text published in praise of something), it is simultaneously elegiac, mourning the death of the “country house” lifestyle that Waugh himself became enamored of in his youth.

Yet Brideshead does not merely look at what was lost after the aristocracy’s decline; Book 1 of the novel looks at the last halcyon days of aristocratic grandeur. The idyllic summer that Charles spends with Sebastian after Sebastian breaks a bone in his ankle is characterized by the hedonistic pleasures of aristocratic life, with the two exploring art and wine. Yet even this supposed idyll is not without its darker side, as Sebastian’s alcohol misuse becomes increasingly problematic.