I'm going to argue a different case: Victorian culture didn't exist by the time of the First World War. It died at the turn of the century.

To quote William Butler Yeats: "Then in 1900, everybody got down off his stilts; henceforth no one went mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic Church or if they did I have forgotten. Victorianism had been defeated."

Now, Yeats is saying this half in jest, but there's truth behind it. In 1901, Queen Victoria died — and if you're looking to a literal end of the Victorian era, that's it. But there's more to it than that. At the turn of the century, you have the Philippine Insurrection, the Boer War, the brutal Belgian experience in the Congo, the punitive expedition to Peking — there's ample signs that the world is becoming a more violent, dirty place, that the ideals of the Victorian Era are being cast aside as obsolete.

Oscar Wilde is dead in 1900, so is Nietzsche. In that year, a humble book by a Viennese doctor, The Interpretation of Dreams first enters print. "Although the book attracted little attention and it took eight years to sell out the edition of six hundred copies, its appearance was the signal that Victorianism indeed was dead," writes Barbara Tuchman in The Proud Tower.

In Paris, the International Exposition of 1900 takes place, and the grand arch of the Port Monumentale — the main gate of the exposition — does not feature the traditional goddess of Progress or Enlightenment; it features a plaster Parisienne in an evening gown. Multicolored electric lights illuminate the exposition's fountains. The Paris Metro opens. An automobile track opens at the exposition's annex, and stucco is everywhere.

In the United States, J.P. Morgan forms the corporate colossus U.S. Steel, the world's first billion-dollar company. It's a sign that the age of independent entrepreneurship is waning for a time — Krupp steel is sold around the world, becoming a watchword for militarism. At the Parisian exposition, the biggest exhibits are long-range cannon and Vickers-Maxim's collection of machine guns.

On the political front, the German Naval Law — also instituted in 1900 — forces Britain to start seeking allies in earnest. Until this point, Britain's policy has been to have a navy larger than the world's No. 2 and No. 3 combined. This is no longer possible, and it begins to build the Anglo-French Entente.

By the end of the first decade of the 20th century, people are beginning to examine the dark of the world — poking into places that were obscured under Victorianism and foreshadowed what was to come in the following decade. Wilfred Trotter, a surgeon, wrote two essays on the herd instinct and concluded the subconscious was a force "lacking all individuality, will and self control." It was "irrational, imitative, cowardly, cruel ... and suggestible."

All these factors seem to appear again in August 1914.

After the Victorian age ended in 1900 there was Edwardian Age, arguably the Edwardian period is Victorian lite, but it did see the loosing of Victorian morals, and a even more pronounced faith in progress as seen with the emergence of "Futurism" and the ever more pronounced fascination of intellectuals of planned society, e.g. American Progressivism, and Bolshevism (which would overtake the 19th century Anarchism) . The rebellious of 19th century impressionism was overtaken by Cubism and futurism, and in 1913 Stravinsky's Right of Spring premiered in Paris to a shocked audience. The seeds of modernism were planted before the guns started firing in Flanders's fields in 1914, Victorianism was already dead.