The first scene of Parade's End, Ford Madox Ford's memorial to the passing of the traditional social order as it is overtaken by mass society, takes place in a "perfectly appointed railway carriage", the epitome of Edwardian civilisation. The train, running "as smoothly… as British gilt-edged securities' is a symbolically ideal setting within which to introduce to the reader his vision of the commercial ease and intellectual hedonism that has engulfed England as it begins the twentieth century (iii, 11 and 29). As both novelist and cultural historian, Ford was a penetrating critic of society. His critique was grounded in an ideal of the medieval that probably owed a great deal to the early influence of his Pre-Raphaelite grandfather Madox Brown. Not the least of these influences was the visual sensuousness of his idea of the medieval which was in creative tension with a theoretical attraction to the frugality and asceticism he believed lacking in contemporary England and which he found in Provence, where a simple and frugal life was not incompatible with the art, play and ritual of a matrifocal society. This is his ideal, his fixed point and the antithesis of a train speeding to London to complete a fast trans-Atlantic crossing for a single-minded publisher.