Englishness and literature
Englishness – Britishness
“We call our islands by no less than six different names, England, Britain, Great Britain, the British Isles, the United Kingdom and, in very exalted moments, Albion” (G. Orwell)
“What do they know of England who only England know?” (Kipling)
Linda Colley: Britons; Krishan Kumar: The Making of English National Identity
“This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in a silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands;
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.” (Richard II, 2.1)
George Orwell: The Lion and the Unicorn (1941); “England Your England” (1941); The English People (1944)
“Then the vastness of England swallows you up, and you lose for a while your feeling that the whole nation has a single identifiable character. Are there really such things as nations? Are we not forty-six million individuals, all different? And the diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in Soho clubs, the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning – all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene” (The Lion and the Unicorn)
“deep England” is „somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes” (The English People)
William Morris: “All is measured, mingled, varied, gliding easily one thing into another, little rivers, little plains ... little hills, little mountains ... neither prison nor palace but a decent home” (The Lesser Arts)
earlier stereotypes: John Bull
E.M. Forster: “And my patriotism which is very steady is loyalty to the place whereI happen to belong. It doesn’t go further. The idea that my nation is betterthan someone else’s never occurs to me”. (“Three Countries”)
Dodie Smith: I Capture the Castle: “– oh, not flags and Kipling andoutposts of Empire and such, but the country and London and houses like Scoatney. Eating bread-and-cheese at an inn felt most beautifully English – though the liqueurs made it a bit fancy”.
Englishness and the countryside myth
Stanley Baldwin(PM) 1922: “To me, England is the country and the country is England. And when I ask myself what I mean by England, when I think of England when I am abroad, England comes to me through my various senses ... The sounds of England, the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill, the sight that has been England since England was a land ... the one eternal sight of England.”
PM John Major’s 1993 speech: “Fifty years from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on country grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dogs lovers and pools fillers, and – as George Orwell said – ʻold maids cycling to holy communion through the morning mist’.”
“The considerable slope, at nearly the foot of which the Abbey stood, gradually acquired a steeper form beyond its grounds; and at half a mile distant was a bank of considerable abruptness and grandeur, well clothed with wood; - and at the bottom of this bank, favourably placed and sheltered, rose theAbbey-Mill Farm, with meadows in front, and the river making a close and handsome curve around it.It was a sweet view - sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive.” (Jane Austen: Emma)
“Now I am quite prepared to believe that other countries can offer more obviously spectacular scenery. Indeed, I have seen in encyclopaedias and the National Geographic Magazine breathtaking photographs of sights from various corners of the globe; magnificent canyons and waterfalls, raggedly beautiful mountains. It has never, of course, been my privilege to have seen such things at first hand, but I will nevertheless hazard this with some confidence: the English landscape at its finest possesses a quality that the landscapes of other nations, howevermore superficially dramatic, inevitably fail to possess. It is, I believe, a quality that will mark out the English landscape to any objective observer as the most deeply satisfying in the world, and this quality is probably best summed up by the term ʻgreatness’ [...] it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as if the land knows of its own beauty, of its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it. In comparison, the sorts of sights offered in such places as Africa and America, though undoubtedly very exciting, would, I am sure, strike the objective viewer as inferior on account of their unseemly demonstrativeness.” (Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day, 1989)
Vita Sackville-West: “England is not an exciting country” in terms of landscape or climate; „this moderation reflects itself in our temperament” (English Country Houses)
Mollie Panter-Downes: “The country resembled a gentleman’s park, washed with greenish light from the great well-spaced trees, oak and elm and ash. On hot days the cows, sunlight filtering through leaves above, buttercups throwing tarnished arsenical glare below, sometimes looked eau-de-nil beasts out of an impressionist painting. The gentleman’s park seemed to have seen better days...Something had happened here, so that the substance in which Wealding had been embalmed for so long – the perfect village in aspic, at the sight of which motorists applied their brakes, artists happiy set up easels, cyclists dismounted and purchased picture postcards at the post office to send to their little nieces – had very slightly curdled and changed colour” (One Fine Day, 1947)
ENGLISHNESS
William Blake [’Jerusalem’]
And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green and pleasant Land
Why is Englishness the denial of the reality of Britain?
Three hypotheses
(1)the Empire
Arthur Quiller-Couch (editor of Oxford Book of English Verse): “it is not the English way to throw back Rule Britannia at Deutschland über alles”; “the English soldier “looked to a green nook of his youth in Yorkshire or Derbyshire, Shropshire, or Kent or Devon; where the folk are slow, but there is seed time and harvest”
(2) the thesis of Martin J. Wiener(English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit1981)
Samuel Smiles:Lives of the Engineers - the man of technology as the maker of modern England. What is England “without its tools, its machinery, its steam-engine, its steamships, and its locomotive. Are not the men who have made the motive power of the country, and immensely increased its productive strength, the men above all who have . . . [made] the country what it is?”
“We have never broken with our tradition, never even symbolically hewed it to pieces, as the French did in quivering fact in the Terror.” (H. G. Wells: Tono-Bungay)
“Sixty-four years that favored property, and had made the upper middle class; buttressed, chiselled, polished it; till it was almost undistinguishable in manners, morals, speech, appearance, habit, and soul from the nobility.” (John Galsworthy:The Forsyte Saga (1922)
“Buying and selling is good andnecessary; it is very necessary, and may, possibly, be very good; but itcannot be the noblest work of man; and let us hope that it may not inour time be esteemed the noblest work of an Englishman.” (Anthony Trollope: Dr. Thorne)
Alfred Austin (Poet Laureate):Haunts of Ancient Peace (1901)“to find Old England, or so much of it as is left... I confess I crave for the urbanity of the Past... for washing-days, home-made jams, lavender bags, recitation of Gray's Elegy,and morning and evening prayers. One is offered, in place of them, ungraceful hurry and worry, perpetual postmen’s knocks, an intermittent shower of telegrams.”
(3)“dark Satanic mills” – urbanisation
D.H. Lawrence’s essay on Nottingham
Dickens’s Coketown (in Hard Times): endless chimneys trailing “interminable serpents of smoke”, and “a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dyes”
Tolkien: The Shire vs Mordor
Richard Jefferies: After London (1885)
William Morris: the “leading passion of my life”is a “hatred of modern civilisation”
“Forget six counties overhung with smoke,
Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke,
Forget the spreading of the hideous town;
Think rather of the pack-horse on the down,
And dream of London, small, and white, and clean.” (“The Earthly Paradise”, 1870)
LANDSCAPE
a piece of land “that has been humanised and improved by a single bodyof people and which is imagined as being apprehended by an observer” (Simon Grimble)
The past: Tudor revival (countryside and past)
Kipling: Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906)
Also a social utopia (Austen, Trollope)
Paintings of John Constable
watercolours of Myles Birket Foster and his disciple Helen Allingham
Emblematic places: the big house
Joseph Nash (1939-, Victorian engravings)
Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited (1945); A Handful of Dust; Aldous Huxley: Crome Yellow; Anthony Powell: From a View to a Death; Rosamond Lehmann: Invitation to a Waltz; Elizabeth Bowen: The Last September; Nancy Mitford: The Pursuit of Love; Elizabeth Taylor: Palladian; L. P. Hartley: Eustace and Hilda trilogy; The Go-Between; Molly Keane: The Rising Tide; Angela Thirkell
P. G. Wodehouse: Blandings Castle (1915-70)
Noel Coward’s plays (Easy Virtue);
John Piper’s paintings
Golden Age crime fiction (ʻMayhem Parva’); gothic: Daphne du Maurier: Rebecca (1938); Mervyn Peake: Gormenghast trilogy
historical romances (Barbara Cartland)
self-reflexive uses:
Evelyn Waugh: Vile Bodies (1932, Doubting Hall)
Nigel Dennis: Cards of Identity (1955)
Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day (198 )
Ian McEwan: Atonement (2001); Sarah Waters: The Little Stranger (2009); Alan Hollinghurst: A Stranger’s Child (2012) – Downton Abbey
The cottage - the village:
Cookham (Stanley Spencer’s mythical village)
St. Mary Meade in the Miss Marple novels
Folly Down in T. F. Powys’s Mr Weston’s Good Wine (1927)
ʻMiss Read’: Fairacre novels, Thrush Green novels; Laurie Lee: Cider with Rosie (1955); M. C. Beaton’s Agatha Raisin novels
Ronald Blyth:Akenfield (1969)
Arcadian tradition (Theocritus, Virgil)
Pastoralism, bucolic fantasy of the country
James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730)
Oliver Goldsmith: “The Deserted Village” (1769)
“E’en now, methinks, as pondering here I stand
I see the rural virtues leave the land”
William and Dorothy Wordsworth, George Crabbe, Tennyson: English Idylls
R. Browning: “Home-thoughts, from Abroad”
“O to be in England
Now that April’s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England—now!”
Fielding: Tom Jones; William Cobbett: Rural Rides (1830), George Eliot (Adam Bede, Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch)
William Morris: News from Nowhere (1890)
Thomas Hardy: Wessex novels
A.E. Houseman: The Shropshire Lad (1896)
Kailyard tradition in Scotland (James Matthew Barrie)
Amateur naturalists
Gilbert White: Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1798);
Richard Jefferies: The Gamekeeper at Home; or, Sketches of Natural History and Rural Life (1878),Nature Near London (1883); W. H. Hudson: Nature in Downland (1909); A Shepherd’s Life (1910); Edward Thomas:The Heart of England (1906), In Pursuit of Spring (1914)
George Surt: Change in the Village (1912); The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923)
Flora Thompson: Lark Rise to Candleford (1939-43)
E. M. Forster: Howards End (1910)
Helen and Margaret Schlegel – Mr Wilcox
“England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas. What did it mean? For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast? Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who have added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world’s fleet accompanying her towards eternity?”
Georgian poetry (e.g. Edward Thomas: “Lob”)
“a traditional and surviving rural England was scribbled over and almost hidden from sight by what is really a suburban and half-educated scrawl” (Raymond Williams: The Country and the City)
Orwell: Coming Up for Air (1939); Rex Warner: The Aerodrome (1941)
Regional and rural writing: Mary Webb, Constance Holme, Sheila Kaye-Smith
Farmer writers: Adrian Bell: Corduroy (1930); Silver Ley (1931), The Cherry Tree (1932)
H. E. Bates: The Poacher (1936)
James Herriot (vet): stories of the Yorkshire Dales (1930-50s)
Hope Mirrlees: Lud-in-the-Mist (1928)
Radio series: The Archers („an everyday story of country folk”, 1951- ) more than 17.800 episodes
Parody: Stella Gibbons: Cold Comfort Farm (1932)
Mythicised versions: Modernist ʻprimitivism’
“Heaven and earth was teeming around them, and how should this cease? ...They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in the daytime, nakedness that comes under the wind in autumn ... Their life and inter-relations were such: feeling the pulse and body of the soil, that opened to the furrow for the grain and became smooth and supple after their ploughing, and clung to their feet with a weight that pulled like desire ... They mounted their horses, and held life between the grip of their knees” (D. H. Lawrence: The Rainbow)
Henry Williamson: Tarka the Otter, Chronicles of Ancient Sunlight
Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes (1926)
Mary Butts: Armed with Madness
Children’s fiction: Beatrix Potter: Peter Rabbit stories (1901-17) Rudyard Kipling: Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), Kenneth Grahame: The Wind in the Willows (1908); Edith Nesbit:The Railway Children; The Story of the Treasure Seekers; Richmal Crompton (Just William books); C.S.Lewis: Narnia; Arthur Ransome: Swallows and Amazons (1929-47); the Rev. W. Awdry: Thomas the Tank Engine (1940s); Richard Adams: Watership Down (1972); Nina Bawden: Carrie’s War (1973)
“They were standing in the shade of hazel bushes. The sunlight, filtering through the innumerable leaves, was still on their faces. Winston looked out into the field beyond, and underwent a shock of recognition...
ʻIt is the Golden Counrty – almost’, he murmured.
ʻThe Golden Country?’
ʻIt’s nothing really. A landscape I’ve seen sometimes in a dream.’” (Nineteen Eighty-Four)
Interwar culture:
Naturalism, antiquarianism, preservationism; crafts, farming; folk music, cooking, rambling
Travel lit in England; tourism, heritage; H. V. Morton: In Search of England (1927); J. B. Priestley: English Journey (1933)
Beryl Bainbridge: English Journey or The Road to Milton Keynes (1984)
Shell advertising campaign (1934), guide books
WW2: Britain in Pictures book series
Bill Brandt: Literary Britain (1951)
Recording Britain project (1939-45); Kenneth Clark
Discovery of English painting, music, architecture, cooking
ʻEnglish Musical Renaissance’: Edward Elgar, Frederick Delius; Michael Tippett, John Ireland, Ralph Vaughan Williams: The Oxford Book of Carols (1928); Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes (1945 based on G. Crabbe’s poem „The Borough”)
Nikolaus Pevsner: The Englishness of English Art (1955)
Herbert Read’s anthology: The English Vision (1933), anthologies of landscape verse (John Betjeman)
F. R. Leavis: new canons of poetry (Revaluation, 1936) and fiction (The Great Tradition, 1948); literature as a substitute for the lost organic community
Royal Academy Exhibition of British Art (1934) (Roger Fry: British painting is “not worthy of British culture”)
Paul Nash: “English art has always shown particular tendencies which recur throughout its history ... There seems to exist, behind the frank expression of portrait and scene, an imprisoned spirit; yet this spirit is the source, the motive power which animates the art. These pictures are the vehicles of this spirit, but somehow, they are inadequate, being only echoes and reflections of familiar images. If I were to describe the spirit I would say it is of the land; genius loci is indeed almost its conception.”
Lawrence Binyon: English Water-Colourists (1933) Sandby, Francis Towne, Samuel Palmer, Cotman, Turner), oil paintings of George Stubbs
John Wyndham: The Day of the Triffids (1951); James Lovegrove: Untied Kingdom; Julian Barnes: England, England (1998); Peter Ackroyd: First Light (1989), English Music (1992);
1980s: heritage culture
TV and film (Emmerdale Farm; All Creatures Great and Small; Last of the Summer Wine, Vicar of Dibley, Hamish Macbeth, Doc Martin, Lark Rise to Candleford, Hot Fuzz etc)
Postcolonial: V. S. Naipaul: The Enigma of Arrival (1987)