Against ‘englishness’: English culture and the limits to rural nostalgia, 1850-1940

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

Volumn 7, Issue , 1997, Pages 155-175

  Mandler, Peter ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 85014256335     PISSN: 00804401     EISSN: 14740648     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3679274     Document Type: Article

References (92)

1. Jan Marsh, Back to the Land: The Pastoral Impulse in England, from 1880 to 1914 (1982), 245-248.
2. (Cambridge, 1981).
3. To cite only the more conspicuous book-length studies: Robert Colls and Philip Dodd, eds., Englishness: Politics and Culture i880~ig20 (1986)
4. Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase, eds., The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia (Manchester, 1989)
5. Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Cambridge, 1993)
6. Georgina Boyes, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manchester, 1993)
7. Michael Bunce, The Countryside Ideal: Anglo-American Images of Landscape (1994)
8. John Taylor, A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography and the Tourist's Imagination (Manchester, 1994)
9. Judy Giles and Tim Middleton, eds., Writing Englishness igoo-1950 (1995)-
10. Their number is legion, but two recent examples of intelligent books gratuitously incorporating the ‘Englishness’ thesis are Mike Savage and Andrew Miles, The Remaking of the British Working Class 1840-1940 (1994), 87-88
11. Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester, 1995), 183
12. For criticisms of the cultural explanation for British economic ‘decline’, see Bruce Collins and Keith Robbins, eds., British Culture and Economic Decline (1990)
13. W. D. Rubinstein, Capitalism, Culture and Decline in Britain, 1750~1990 (1993)
14. David Edgerton, Science, Technology and the British Industrial 'Decline/ 1870~1970 (Cambridge, 1996).
15. See, e.g., Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire (7 vols., Paris, 1984-92), esp. vols. II, IH
16. Nicholas Green, The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in sixeteenth-Century France (Manchester, 1990)
17. Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1990)
18. Françoise Choay, Uallégorie du patrimoine (Paris, 1992). But the latter still adopts, on slender evidence, the conventional view that England has a nostalgic rather than (as in France) a progressive feeling for the past.
19. E.g. Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits (Boston, 1857), 188-190
20. Henry James, ‘In Warwickshire’, ist pub. 1877, repr. in English Hours (1960), 136-137.
21. See the useful comparative discussion in Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe 1000-1950 (1985), 217-226.
22. E.g. Richard Altick, The English Common Reader (1957)
23. Louis James, Fiction for the Working Man (1963)
24. Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture, 1790-1860 (Oxford, 1991).
25. Unfortunately, cultural changes of this kind are rarely discussed in comparative perspective; but see Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge, 1984)
26. I provide evidence for these assertions in ‘“In the Olden Time”: Romantic History and English National Identity, 1820-1850’, A Union of Multiple Identities?, ed. Laurence Brockliss and David Eastwood (Manchester, 1997)
27. and The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (1997), chs. 1-2.
28. “Olive Anderson, ‘The Political Uses of History in Mid Nineteenth-Century England’, Past and Present, 36 (1967), 87-105.
29. Hohenberg and Lees, Urban Europe, 254-255.
30. Lutz Holzner, ‘The Role of History and Tradition in the Urban Geography of West Germany’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 60 (1970), 315-339.
31. Avner Offer makes the point that the late Victorian attempt to create a ‘property-owning democracy’ in Britain, analogous to the peasant democracies of France and Germany, had inevitably to take an urban form. While he also devotes a chapter to elite pastoralism, he concludes, ‘The urban worker was not converted by the romantic impulse of Liberalism.’ Property and Politics, 1870-1914 (Oxford, 1981), 148-150, 349. Like Marsh's Back to the Land, Offer's book reflects the more balanced view of pastoralism's place in British culture prevailing before the impact of Wiener.
32. Jose Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: A Social History of Britain 1870-1914 (Oxford, 1993), 33
33. Valerie E. Chancellor, History for their Masters: Opinion in the English History Textbook, 1800~1914 (Bath, 1970), 70-75.
34. Stefan Muthesius, ‘The Origins of the German Conservation Movement’, in Planning for Conservation, ed. Roger Kain (1981), 47
35. see also Christian F. Otto, ‘Modem Environment and Historical Continuity: The Heimatschutz Discourse in Germany’, Art Journal, 43 (1983), 148-157, and Applegate, Nation of Provincials.
36. Even in France, where centralising tendencies are sometimes alleged to have killed off such provincial initiatives, the latter were spurs to rather than overwhelmed by state action; see G. Baldwin Brown, The Care of Ancient Monuments (Cambridge, 1905), 74-79
37. and Françoise Bercé, ‘Arcisse de Caumont et Les Sociétés Savantes’, in Les lieux, ed. Nora, III, 533–67.
38. For comparative studies of'degeneration5, showing it to be a pan-European phenomenon, see Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought, 18201940 (Manchester, 1985), ch. 6
39. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. r848~c.igi8 (Cambridge, 1989).
40. Stanley Hoffmann, ‘Paradoxes of the French Political Community’, in Hoffman et ai, In Search of France (Cambridge, MA, 1963), esp. 3-8.
41. This line of thinking has been extended recently into a full-blown cultural indictment of the Third Republic remarkably similar to the ‘Englishness’ diagnosis: see Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wan over Cultural Identity, 7900-/945 (1992).
42. This comparison was made as early as 1935 by the agricultural expert Sir Daniel Hall in his Rede Lecture, The Pace of Progress (Cambridge, 1935), esp. 12, 21-34.
43. Cf. C. F. G. Masterman, ‘The English City’, in England: A Nation, ed. Lucian Oldershaw (1904), 64-66
44. and The Condition of England (1909), 82-83.
45. Masterman, Condition of England, 201-2. Illustrations of just such contemporary idealisations of ‘peasants’ country' on the Continent can be found in François Cachin, ‘Le paysage du peintre’, in Les lieux, ed. Nora, II, 463-465, 475-6.
46. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1958), esp. chs. 6-7.
47. See also T. W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual life in Victorian England (1982), chs. 7-8, for a view largely uninfluenced by Wiener but which (against the grain of the general argument) throws him in at the last minute (p. 227).
48. Hermann Muthesius, The English House (1904-5), ed. Dennis Sharp (Oxford, 1987), 27-30.
49. Wyndham to his mother, 9 Sept. 1907: J. W. Mackail and Guy Wyndham, life and Letters of George Wyndham (2 vols., 1925), II, 580-581.
50. Paula Gillett, The Victorian Painter's World (Gloucester, 1990), 17, 68, 192-4
51. Janet Oppenheim Minihan, The Nationalization of Culture (1977), 164-167.
52. Reginald Blomfield, A Short History of Renaissance Architecture in England 1500-1800 (1900), 298-303.
53. E. R. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (New York, 1976), 173-174.
54. Alfred Austin, Haunts of Ancient Peace (1902), quotes at 19-21, 64-6, 142
55. Austin is cited as typical or influential by Wiener, English Culture, 45, 49-50, a point then picked up by Wiener's imitators, e.g. Bunce, Countryside Ideal, 53; Peter Brooker and Peter Widdowson, ‘A Literature for England’, in Englishness, ed. Colls and Dodd, 126, 128. Twice in Colls and Dodd the Quarterly Review's praise for Austin as ‘a concrete individual Englishman’ is cited as evidence of his populist credentials.
56. I owe this analysis to Peter Green, Kenneth, Grahame (1959), 240-248.
57. For the significance attached to the fact that rural nostalgia could be found ‘across the political spectrum’, see Wiener, English Culture, 42, 46
58. Boyes, Imagined Village, 86 n.4.
59. For such claims, see Boyes, Imagined Village, 27-36, 63-5
60. Bunce, Countryside Ideal, 13–14, 32-3.
61. Dodd, ‘Englishness and National Culture’, makes similar claims for even less significant phenomena, such as the Edwardian campaign for a National Theatre which was (should it have to be pointed out?) a dismal failure.
62. Wiener, English Culture, 68.
63. Karl Ditt, ‘Nature Conservation in England and Germany 1900-70: Forerunner of Environmental Protection?’, Contemporary European History, 5 (1996), 1-28, notes the early failure of nature conservation in England as compared to Germany.
64. E.g. Stephen Tschudi Madsen, Restoration and Anti-Restoration (Oslo, 1976), 98, 102-103
65. Choay, L'allégorie du patrimoine, 114
66. Ditt, ‘Nature Conservation’, 4. This particularly puzzles Continental writers today, who have been told that the English are a highly historyconscious people but who can see the far more palpable signs of this consciousness closer to home.
67. Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (1991)
68. marks something of a breakthrough. But I want to pay tribute also to two earlier articles that rejected the simple-minded diagnosis of nostalgia: John Lowerson, ‘Battles for the Countryside’, in Class, Culture and Social Change: A New View of the 1930s, ed. Frank Gloversmith (Brighton, 1980), 258–280
69. Alex Potts, ‘“Constable Country” between the Wars’, in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, III: National Fictions, ed. Raphael Samuel (1989), 160-186.
70. Peter Hall et al., The Containment of Urban England (2 vols., 1973), I, 59-62. It is interesting that, pre-Wiener, Peter Hall's view was that interwar suburanisation was the 'modem5 development, whereas the postwar containment was driven by elite nostalgia.
71. Alan A. Jackson, Semi-Detached London (Didcot, 1991), 96, 142.
72. Some of this is captured in Frank Trentmann, ‘Civilisation and its Discontents: English Neo-Romanticism and the Transformation of Anti-Modernism in Twentieth-Century Western Culture’, Journal of Contemporary History, 29 (1994), 583-625, though the author still leans excessively towards an ‘anti-modem’ interpretation of the outdoor movement. Similar conclusions could be reached about the pervasiveness on the Continent of other ruralist fashions, falsely supposed to be particularly English, such as angling or amateur landscape painting.
73. C. E. M. Joad, ‘The People's Claim’, in Britain and the Beast, ed. Clough Williams-Ellis (1937), 71-72.
74. Mandler, Fall and Rise, 295-308.
75. Joad, ‘People's Claim’, 66 7.
76. Mandler, Fall and Rise, 227-241.
77. J. R. Rose-Troup, Director of Talks, to W. E. G. Murray, Assistant Controller, 25 Nov. 1935: BBC Written Archives Centre, R51/425.
78. Citations of Baldwin's speech abound: e.g. Bill Schwarz, ‘The Language of Constitutionalism: Baldwinite Conservatism’, in Formations of Nation and People (1984), 14-16
79. Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country (1985), 82
80. Alun Howkins, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, in Englishness, ed. Colls and Dodd, 82
81. Paul Street, ‘Painting Deepest England’, in Imagined Past, ed. Shaw and Chase, 68-69
82. Paul Rich, ‘A Question of Life and Death to England: Patriotism and the British Intellectuals, c. 1886-1945’, New Community, 15 (1988-9), 501
83. Bunce, Countryside Ideal, 34-35
84. Trentmann, ‘Civilisation’, 585.
85. Andrew Fenton Cooper, British Agricultural Policy, 1912-36: A Study in Conservative Politics (Manchester, 1989), esp. 1-4, 64-71, 94.
86. John Sheail, Rural Conservation in Inter-War Britain (Oxford, 1981), is an important book, but ultimately fails in my view to rehabilitate the 1932 Act
87. cf. Peter Mandler, ‘Politics and the English Landscape since the First World War’, Huntington library Quarterly, (1992). 459-476.
88. Sir Lionel Earle to First Commissioner of Works, I2jan. 1927: Public Record Office, WORK 14/2312.
89. Memorandum, ‘Preservation of the Countryside’, prepared (probably by Evelyn Sharp) for the Town & Country Advisory' Committee meeting of 12 Nov. 1937: Public Record Office, HLG 52/709.
90. Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (1994), 51-59.
91. Jim Tomlinson, ‘Inventing “Decline”: The Falling Behind of the British Economy in the Postwar Years’, Economic History Review, 49 (1996), 731-757, charts the emergence of notions of economic decline in the 1950s and 60s, but with the cultural analysis still largely absent. Even the awareness of relative economic decline was, Tomlinson points out, masked by high absolute living standards.
92. Holzner, ‘Role of History and Tradition’, 331.