Politics and rhetoric in the age of mass culture

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 46, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 128-159

  Schwarz, Bill ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 54649084915     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/1998.46.129     Document Type: Article

References (114)

1. Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie (eds), The Diary of Beatrice Webb. Vol. I. 1873-1892. Glitter around and darkness within, Virago, London, 1986, p. 108.
2. R. J. Scally, The Origins of the Lloyd George Coalition: the politics of social-imperialism, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1975, p. 133.
3. Arthur Mejia, 'Lord Hugh Cecil: religion and liberty' in J. A. Thompson and Arthur Mejia (eds), Edwardian Conservatism. Five studies in adaptation, Croom Helm, London, 1988, p. 31.
4. James Loughlin, Ulster Nationalism and British National Identity since 1885, Pinter, London, 1995, p. 63.
5. And when women did get the vote: 'Even in 1922 Punch, affecting to find the whole thing as much a mystery as ever, printed a cartoon of a woman as the Sphinx dropping her ballot into the box', Martin Pugh, Women and the Women's Movement in Britain, 1914-1959, Macmillan, London, 1992, p. 141.
6. Virginia Woolf, 'Street haunting: a London adventure' in her The Crowded Dance of Modern Life. Selected essays, Vol. II, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1993, p. 76.
7. Bill Schwarz, 'Ancestral citizens. Reflections on British Conservatism', New Formations 28, 1996.
8. D. L. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy. Mass communication and the cultivated mind in Britain between the wars, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988, p. 318.
9. See especially Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, Paladin, St Albans, 1975.
10. Bill Schwarz, 'Englishness and the paradox of modernity', New Formations 1, 1987.
11. And most especially, the fine analysis in Alison Light, Forever England. Femininity, literature and conservatism between the wars, Routledge, London, 1991.
12. Her argument is constantly engaging, though I differ from her conclusions. Her narrative pulls together into a single cultural formation 'ordinary', 'feminine', 'English', sometimes 'respectable', and 'conservative'. This becomes too easily counterposed to a culture which nominally can only be deracinated, cosmopolitan and most of all, masculine. This polarization cuts out many promising avenues. Thus Alison Light can begin to sound like those she is discussing, or indeed like Priestley, where ethnicity comes to demand a kind of conservatism - a conservatism, she argues, which lies close 'to the bone of English life', p. 65. For a correspondence from the heartlands of Conservatism, which is close to the fictional Mrs Miniver, see Sybil Eccles's letters to her husband: Sybil and David Eccles, By Safe Hand. Letters of Sybil and David Eccles, 1939-42, Bodley Head, London, 1983.
13. J. B. Priestley, English Journey [1934], Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1979, p. 118.
14. E. J. Hobsbawm, Worlds of Labour. Further studies in the history of labour, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1984, p. 185.
15. For a sharp reflection on this, prompted by a momentary meeting of different worlds, see Ada Nield Chew, 'As others see us', first published in the Cotton Factory Times, 5 September 1913, and republished in Doris Nield Chew, Ada Nield Chew: The Life and Writings of a Working Woman, Virago, London, 1982.
16. Jon Lawrence, 'Class and gender in the making of urban Toryism, 1880-1914', English Historical Review 108, 1993, pp. 640-1.
17. Gareth Stedman Jones, 'Working-class culture and working-class politics in London, 1870-1900. Notes on the remaking of a working class', in his Languages of Class. Studies in English working-class history, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983, p. 238.
18. Joni Lovenduski, Pippa Norris and Catriona Burness, 'The party and women' in Anthony Seldon and Stuart Ball (eds), Conservative Century. The Conservative Party since 1900, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994, p. 615;
19. Pugh, Women and the Women's Movement, pp. 124-9 and 141-53.
20. George Sayer, Robert Bacon and John Pimlott, 'The labour force', in A. H. Halsey (ed.), Trends in British Society since 1900, Macmillan, London, 1972, p. 114.
21. G. D. H. Cole and M. I. Cole, The Condition of Britain, Gollancz, London, 1937, pp. 412 and 418.
22. Richmal Crompton was a Tory of impeccably respectable views: Mary Cadogan, Richmal Crompton. The woman behind William, Allen and Unwin, London, 1986.
23. At one Conservative Party fete in the twenties Harold Acton insisted on reading from The Waste Land: Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot, Abacus, London, 1985, p. 128.
24. Ross McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class. Social relations in Britain, 1880-1950, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1990, pp. 269-270 and 274.
25. And see the excellent discussion by Tom Jeffery, 'The suburban nation. Politics and class in Lewisham', in David Feldman and Gareth Stedman Jones (eds), Metropolis. London. Histories and representations since 1800, Routledge, London, 1989.
26. McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, pp. 274 and 270.
27. Priestley, English Journey, p. 118.
28. E. J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984;
29. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, Verso, London, 1986;
30. and for a suggestive account on themes close to this essay, George Lipsitz, Time Passages. Collective memory and American popular culture, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1990.
31. See especially Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (eds), Englishness. Politics and culture, 1880-1920, Croom Helm, London, 1986; and their 'Representing the nation. British documentary film, 1930-45', Screen 26:1, 1985.
32. Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting. Vol. I, 1922-1939. Serving the nation, Blackwell, Oxford, 1991.
33. Walter Elliot, Toryism and the Twentieth Century, Philip Allan, London, 1927, p. 3. Elliot produces some refreshingly unexpected arguments. He positions modern Tories in a direct lineage of anti-Enlightenment thinking, which he dates from the Spanish uprising against the French in 1808. 'In 1808 the Spanish people evinced the most unaccountable opposition to reason and said they preferred Spain', p. 58. Thus Wellington's expeditionary force assumes metaphysical grandeur. It is one of the few moments in the indigenous conservative imagination when 'the Spanish people' are lauded: a decade later it was to happen again. Stanley Baldwin provided a dutiful, if perplexed, introduction.
34. Elliot, Toryism in the Twentieth Century, p. 23.
35. D. J. Wenden, 'Churchill, radio and cinema', in Robert Blake and Wm. Roger Louis (eds), Churchill, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993, p. 226. The quote comes from the first edition of Churchill's The River War, published in 1899, although this passage has been excised from later editions.
36. I have drawn here from Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, 'On history and the cinema', Screen 31: 2, 1990.
37. Absence of the cinema is the most striking feature of Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, Harper Collins, London, 1995.
38. Gore Vidal, Screening History, Abacus, London, 1992, pp. 44-5, emphasis added.
39. Priestley, English Journey, p. 353.
40. Sally Alexander, Becoming a Woman, and other essays in nineteenth-century and twentieth-century feminist history, Virago, London, 1994, p. 204.
41. For the USA, where the evidence has been marshalled, see most of all Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon. Spectatorship in American silent film, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1991.
42. Harold Nicolson, Public Faces [1932], Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1944, p. 99. The book describes the collapse in December 1935 of the Third National Coalition as a result of the Anglo-Egyptian crisis, and the return to power the following March - after the 'Union Jack' election - of the Churchill-Mosley government. When this in turn came to an end, Nicolson writes: 'The British public had much enjoyed their excursion under Mr Churchill: they were feeling proud, acquisitive, patriotic; but a little unstrung', pp. 5-7. Konrad Adenauer counted the novel amongst his favourite reading.
43. A mind-bending account of London's high society transposed overseas can be found in Artemis Cooper, Cairo in the War, 1939-1945, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1992, in which the Shepheard's Hotel looms large. I am following closely here my argument in 'Englishness and the paradox of modernity', p. 149.
44. For exquisite testament to this system of public life, where the metaphor of the tripos is introduced, Lord Butler, The Art of the Possible [1971], Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973, p. 1.
45. And: Janet Morgan, Agatha Christie, Fontana, London, 1985;
46. Light, Forever England, ch. 2.
47. David Day, The Great Betrayal. Britain, Australia and the onset of the Pacific War, 1939-42, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992.
48. Judith Brett, Robert Menzies' Forgotten People, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 1993, pp. 135-9.
49. This is a terrific book. See too Angela Wollacott. '"All this is the Empire, I told myself." Australian women's voyages "home" and the articulation of colonial whiteness', American Historical Review 102, 1997.
50. There are many anonymous examples. But note V. S. Naipaul's reflections on the closure of this moment: 'So I began to feel that the grandeur belonged to the past; that I had come to England at the wrong time; that I had come too late to find the England, the heart of empire, which (like a provincial, from a far corner of the empire) I had created in my fantasy', The Enigma of Arrival, Viking, New York, 1987, p. 120.
51. Lord Curzon, Frontiers. The Romanes Lecture, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1907, pp. 5 and 56.
52. I have discussed this in relation to the work of J. R. Seeley in 'The expansion and contraction of England', in Bill Schwarz (ed.), The Expansion of England. Cultural history, race and ethnicity, Routledge, London, 1996.
53. See too Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Frontier, Secker and Warburg, London, 1953.
54. And in this context the projections of England need to be re-emphasized: thus Alison Light says that we need to imagine Agatha Christie as 'a stout woman in her forties, in a hot tent or on a dusty verandah, looking across the desert, and settling down to write about murder in the vicarage', Forever England, p. 100.
55. I have been influenced here by Anne Summers, 'British militarism before the Great War', History Workshop Journal 2, 1976.
56. A particularly militant Birmingham organization, the Incorporated Church Scout Patrols, gave its members this advice in 1911: 'Here at home, if you ever hear a boy crying down his country, or telling lies about the King, tell him to shut up, and if he won't then punch his head': Michael Blanch, 'Imperialism, nationalism and organized youth', in John Clarke, Chas Critcher and Richard Johnson (eds), Working Class Culture. Studies in history and theory, Hutchinson, London, 1979, p. 108.
57. Tim Jeal, Baden-Powell, Hutchinson, London, 1989, p. 375, quoting from the 1909 edition of Scouting for Boys.
58. Sir Robert-Baden Powell, Girl Guiding, C. Arthur Pearson, London, 1918, pp. 26 and 59.
59. In this context it is worth noting Curzon's explicit sense of the deleterious potential of English ethnicity. When Salisbury complained to him, as viceroy, of the overbearing contempt of many British people for the Indian population, Curzon replied that he hoped he himself had lost that 'insular race-arrogance of the Englishman': David Dilks, Curzon in India. Vol. I. Achievement, Hart-Davis, London, 1969, p. 65.
60. Jeal, Baden-Powell, pp. 390-2.
61. Curzon, Frontiers, p. 57.
62. David Gilmour, Curzon, John Murray, 1994, pp. 223-4;
63. 'Curzon maintained that better steam and postal communications had also reduced the Englishman's attachment to India, bringing the attractions of home life and home associations closer and encouraging him to regard himself as an unfortunate exile', p. 160. This is a hugely informative biography, but also namby-pamby, deferential and collusive, in which any whisper of criticism of its subject is invariably trumped by an irksome apology. It drove me to distraction, for I find Curzon a terrible man. The author has dedicated the book to his father, Sir Ian Gilmour, who surely would have produced a more robust account himself? And, Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather. Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest, Routledge, London, 1995, pp. 219, 227.
64. McClintock, Imperial Leather, ch. 5.
65. And see Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England. Advertising and spectacle, 1851-1914, Verso, London, 1991, especially ch. 3 and his discussion of 'jingo kitsch'; and relevant too is his The Imperial Archive.
66. Knowledge and the fantasy of empire, Verso, London, 1993.
67. I have discussed this more fully in 'Night battles. Hooligan and citizen', in Mica Nava and Alan O'Shea (eds), Modern Times. Reflections on a hundred years of English modernity, Routledge, London, 1996, where I suggest that the emergence of the category of the hooligan, occurring at a crucial moment in the development of the franchise, worked to identify and locate those supposedly possessing an 'anti-citizen' disposition. Thus the early history of hooliganism is an integral part of the history of constitutionalism.
68. Alien villains of these years were both anti-English, and thus anti-constitutional; they also lived long in the imaginative structures of the nation. During the election campaign of 1964 the 'BBC postponed a sketch in It's a Square World showing a fiendish Fu Manchu sailing his Chinese junk up the Thames and sinking the House of Commons', D. E. Butler and Anthony King, The British General Election of 1964, Macmillan, London, 1965, p. 160.
69. And for the links between frontier literature and mean-streets literature: Bill Schwarz, 'The romance of the veld' in Alex May and Andrea Bosco (eds), The Round Table Movement. The empire/commonwealth and British foreign policy, Lothian Foundation Press, London, 1998.
70. Graham Dawson explores related issues in Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining of Masculinity. Routledge, London and New York, 1994.
71. I am conscious of the need for comparative work here. I have found the annaliste investigations of Eugen Weber extremely suggestive: Peasants into Frenchmen. The modernization of rural France, 1870-1914, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1976 - especially the last chapter, 'Cultures and civilization'.
72. In May 1878, W. Fraser Rae, a Tory examining the role of the Birmingham caucus, wrote that the future lay with those who could win the 'floating mass composed of electors' who have 'no settled convictions', Richard Shannon, The Age of Disraeli, 1868-1881. The rise of Tory democracy, Longman, London, 1992, p. 322.
73. On Salisbury, G. R. Searle, Country Before Party. Coalition and the idea of 'national government' in modern Britain, 1885-1987, Longman, London, 1995, p. 5.
74. R. B. McCallum, the author with Alison Readman of The British General Election of 1945, Frank Cass, London, 1947, was attributed by his successor, David Butler, as the originator of the term psephology.
75. See the 'Preface' to D. E. Butler, The British General Election of 1951, Macmillan, London, 1952. Butler has been going strong ever since.
76. See for example the photos of Humphrey Spender in Worktown People. Photographs from northern England, 1937-8, Falling Wall Press, Bristol, 1982.
77. Note too William Whitelaw's distinction between 'those old-fashioned political meetings with genuine hecklers' and 'the senseless shouting and screaming which I have had sometimes to endure since', The Whitelaw Memoirs, Headline, London, 1990, p. 46.
78. H. C. G. Matthew, 'Rhetoric and politics in Great Britain, 1860-1950', in P. J. Waller (ed.), Politics and Social Change in Modern Britain. Essays presented to A. F. Thompson, Harvester, Brighton, 1987, pp. 42 and 48.
79. This can be read alongside Martin Pugh, 'Popular Conservatism in Britain: continuity and change, 1880-1987', Journal of British Studies 27, 1988;
80. and J. D. Fair and John Hutcheson, 'British Conservatism in the twentieth century. An emerging ideological tradition', Albion 19: 4, 1987.
81. J. H. Grainger, Character and Style in English Politics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1969, p. 163. I have found this a wonderful book.
82. Andrew Gamble, The Conservative Nation, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1974, pp. 67-70.
83. For popular viewing of early Conservative Party political broadcasts on television see Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, W. H. Allen, London, 1959, p. 22,
84. which is only marginally more humorous than the standard account: Michael Cockerell, Live From Number 10. The inside story of prime ministers and television, Faber and Faber, London, 1989; informative too was the BBC2 programme, McKenzie's Lore, 10 June 1987.
85. David Cannadine, 'Lord Curzon as ceremonial impresario', in his Aspects of the Aristocracy. Grandeur and decline in modern Britain, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1994, ch. 4.
86. On the centrality of war memorials in national identity, see Ulf Hedetoft, War and Death as Touchstones of National Identity, Papers on Languages and Intercultural Studies, University of Aalborg, Aalborg, 1990;
87. and Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country. The national past in contemporary Britain, Verso, London, 1985, ch. 4.
88. Bernard S. Cohn 'Representing authority in Victorian India' in Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition. This was in a letter to the secretary of state for India, Lord Salisbury. Lytton had noted earlier that the Indian aristocracy could easily be directed, if appealed to properly, as 'they are easily affected by sentiment and susceptible to the influence of symbols to which facts inadequately correspond', p. 192.
89. Cannadine, Aspects of the Aristocracy, p. 107;
90. Gilmour, Curzon, pp. 387-8.
91. John Vincent, Disraeli, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990, p. xi.
92. For a contemporary example, Alan Clark's account of his induction into the Privy Council - an honour he cherished - is both funny and profane: Diaries, Phoenix, London, 1994, pp. 397-400.
93. Cannadine, Aspects of the Aristocracy, p. 89;
94. Gilmour, Curzon, pp. 239 and 245.
95. Sir Henry Maine, Popular Government. Four essays, John Murray, London, 1886, pp. 134, 31-2 and 78.
96. George Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters. Vol. II, My country right or left, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1970, p. 193.
97. See Bill Schwarz, 'The language of constitutionalism. Baldwinite Conservatism', in Formations of Nation and People, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1984.
98. John Eddy and Deryck Shreuder (eds), The Rise of Colonial Nationalism. Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa first assert their nationalities, 1880-1914, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1988.
99. I have drawn from a range of treatises which encompass the greater part of the period under discussion, opening with Lord Hugh Cecil, Conservatism [1912], Williams and Norgate, London, 1923,
100. and closing with Quintin Hogg, The Case for Conservatism, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1947.
101. In the intervening years the following give a good idea: L. S. Amery, The Forward View, Geoffrey Bles, London, 1935;
102. R. M. Banks, The Conservative Outlook, 1929;
103. Arthur Bryant, The Spirit of Conservatism, Methuen, London, 1929;
104. Dorothy Crisp, The Rebirth of Conservatism, 1931;
105. Elliot, Toryism and the Twentieth Century.
106. Keith Feiling, What is Conservatism?, 1930;
107. Gentleman with a Duster (Harold Begbie), The Conservative Mind, Mills and Boon, London, 1924;
108. F. C. J. Hearnshaw, Conservatism in England. An analytical, historical and political survey, Macmillan, London, 1933;
109. P. Loftus, The Creed of a Tory, 1926;
110. Viscount Lymington, 'Ich Dien'. The Tory path, 1931;
111. Lord Eustace Percy, Conservatism and the Future, 1935.
112. Relevant too is H. W. J. Edwards (ed.), The Radical Tory. Disraeli's political development illustrated from his original writings and speeches, Cape, London, 1937, which also contains a preface by G. M. Young.
113. Gilmour, Curzon, p. 41.
114. Nicholas Pronay. 'The first reality. Film censorship in liberal England', in K. R. M. Short (ed.), Feature Film as History, Croom Helm. London, 1982, p. 126.