Edwardian

comparative more Edwardian · superlative most Edwardian

1. Of the period in British history from circa 1901 to 1910, when Edward VII ruled the British Empire.

   This delightful four-platform station [Bognor Regis] is still controlled by semaphore signals and boasts a lovely red-brick Edwardian building with steel canopies, crowned with a clocktower which dates from 1902.

   2022 November 16, Paul Bigland, “From rural branches to high-speed arteries”, in RAIL, number 970, page 55

   2 more examples

   If the kind of network we envisage is to be established, it would be unwise to begin any of its services hurriedly with older stock, which, however admirable in its day, now has an air of faded Edwardian splendour that is out of joint with the times.

   1962 December, “A new Pullman era?”, in Modern Railways, page 362

   In order to grant the rich these pleasures, the social contract is reconfigured. […] The public realm is privatised, the regulations restraining the ultra–wealthy and the companies they control are abandoned, and Edwardian levels of inequality are almost fetishised.

   2013 May 17, George Monbiot, “Money just makes the rich suffer”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 188, number 23, page 19

plural Edwardians

1. historicalA person from the Edwardian era.

   So he began, being an Edwardian, by describing accurately and minutely the sort of house Hilda lived in, and the sort of house she saw from the window. House property was the common ground from which the Edwardians found it easy to proceed to intimacy.

   1924, Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, in [Leonard Woolf], editor, Collected Essays, volume I, London: Hogarth Press, published 1966, →OCLC, page 331