Englishness

Politics and Culture 1880-1920

Robert Colls, Philip Dodd, Robert Colls, Philip Dodd

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781472523341
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

'Englishness' is by no means the unchanging quality of those living in the territory that has come to be England, but a concept that has been made and remade throughout history, expressing itself through existing symbols and ideas. Since its first publication in 1987 this collection has been regarded as a major work on English national identity as it evolved during the period 1880-1920 and has had a significant impact on writing and research. It is a classic text for students of modern British history and courses in politics, sociology and literature. This updated edition of Englishness contains a new introduction by Robert Colls and Philip Dodd, which sets the work in the context of research done since its original publication, and an afterword by Will Self which relates it to current debates on Britain as a multinational state. This important collection contains ideas that are still pertinent today, making it essential reading for students and scholars alike.

CHAPTER ONE

Englishness and the national culture

Philip Dodd

The characteristic “Englishness” of English culture was made then very much what it is now. The quip that all the oldest English traditions were invented in the last quarter of the nineteenth century has great point.¹

RICHARD SHANNON, The Crisis of Imperialism

Richard Shannon’s judgement is central to the argument of this chapter, even if ‘invented’ does not adequately register the complex and overlapping processes of invention, transformation and recovery which characterized the remaking of English identity and the national culture in the later years of the nineteenth century. Complementing Robert Colls’ argument which follows, this chapter argues that Englishness and the ‘English spirit’ were the preoccupation not only of the political culture, but also of what we might now call the institutions and practices of a cultural politics. Indeed an Englishness sited exclusively – or even primarily – in political institutions would hardly have established itself as the centre and circumference of our thinking about ourselves and our history. Certainly one does not have to think for long to acknowledge that many of our educational and, more generally, cultural traditions and institutions were forged in the later part of the nineteenth century. For instance, the tools without which this study is unimaginable – The New English Dictionary (1884–1928) and the Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900) – are also among its objects of study; and the academic disciplines out of which the two editors write, English Literature and History, were fashioned in their present forms during this period.

I

To understand whose account of Englishness and the national culture was authorized during this period, and how it was authorized, some words from Edward Said’s impressive study of the colonization and representation by Europe of the Orient are helpful. Said’s argument is that,

without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period.²

To translate Said’s argument for our purposes: a great deal of the power of the dominant version of Englishness during the last years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century lay in its ability to represent both itself to others and those others to themselves. Such representation worked by a process of inclusion, exclusion and transformation of elements of the cultural life of these islands. What constituted knowledge, the control and dissemination of that knowledge to different groups, the legitimate spheres and identity of those groups, their repertoire of appropriate actions, idioms and convictions – all were the subject, within the framework of the national culture and its needs, of scrutiny, license and control.

But before we embark on a mapping of this English national culture and its constituent parts, one thing needs to be said. Although there is certainly evidence to support the thesis that Englishness and the national culture were reconstituted in order to incorporate and neuter various social groups – for example, the working class, women, the Irish – who threatened the dominant social order, it is unhelpful for two reasons to see the reconstitution as a simple matter of the imposition of an identity by the dominant on the subordinate. First, the remaking of class, gender and national identity was undertaken at such a variety of social locations and by such various groups that it is difficult to talk of a common intention. It was, for instance, undertaken not only within the new state schools and within the new public schools and ancient (and new) universities, but also by quite a remarkable number of groups, professional and otherwise, who took it upon themselves for various reasons to explore and ‘colonise’ others. What these groups shared was not necessarily a common intention, but (often) an interlocking membership and an overlapping vocabulary of evaluation. The other reason why ‘imposition’ is too simple is that the establishment of hegemony involves negotiation and ‘active consent’ on the part of the subordinated.³ Take, for instance, the case of women who, as Virginia Woolf said, ‘are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe’.⁴ It is undoubtedly true that a separate spheres ideology was elaborated by professional males during the last quarter of the nineteenth century; but it is also true that at least some of the groups of women most opposed to male domination often proclaimed women’s moral superiority: ‘while they challenged women’s traditional roles, they adopted much of the traditional conception of womanhood, which they, like the anti-feminists, saw as rooted in women’s domestic situation and above all in her potential if not her actual maternity’.⁵ Not any identity can be imposed, then; it must at least be consented to. And even to acknowledge this is still to ignore completely oppositional identities and practices forged by the subordinated groups – or at least, and this is what my argument does, to note such identities and practices only when they were forged within and against those offered to them from above.

What I propose to do is to build a general argument about the national culture and the English around particular instances. The chapter is in two parts. First, I examine the identity and ‘place’ within the national culture of a number of social groups, during a period when ‘class loyalties and conflicts [were] set in a genuinely national framework for the first time’.⁶ The groups chosen for scrutiny are the working class and the Celts. (Needless to say, other groups have powerful claims for attention.)⁷ Second, I trace, through the examples of the English language and the National Theatre (with sideway glances at the Dictionary of National Biography and the National Portrait Gallery), how the cultural history and contemporary life of the English were stabilized and articulated anew.

II

First, a brief sketch of the dominant English. The centrality of educational institutions for the control and dissemination of a national identity hardly needs stressing, and was especially clear during the later years of the nineteenth century with the dramatic reorganization and extension of state education. But what is interesting is that, as the new ‘national system of education’ began to be held responsible for the (ill-) health of the national culture,⁸ the ‘English spirit’ was seen not to reside in such institutions – as one might expect – but to be incarnate elsewhere. Compare two comments, one from the end, one from the beginning, of the period. In 1929, Bernard Darwin, in one of a large number of books around that time about the public school system, said that, whatever one’s views of it, ‘it is really to a great extent the English character that we are criticising’.⁹ And in 1869, Matthew Arnold argued in Culture and Anarchy that to belong to the national life one had to belong or to affiliate to certain English institutions: the Anglican Church and Oxford or Cambridge University. Arnold’s definition was sufficiently flexible to accommodate John Milton, sufficiently definite to exclude the culture of the nonconformists.¹⁰ The argument that the history of the working class, and of women, as well as certain bourgeois data have often been buried out of sight of the ‘national mind’ may seem to attest to the power of Arnold’s and his successors’ equation of Englishness with certain institutions.¹¹

The establishment of those educational institutions identified by Matthew Arnold and Bernard Darwin as custodians and transmitters of English culture entailed substantial change on the part of each of the institutions. First, the ancient universities. During the late-nineteenth century, their constituency changed from landed and clerical families to professional and rich business ones, and their graduates increasingly selected careers in the secular professions – including the academic one.¹² Certainly the responsibility of the ancient universities to the nation was an important matter for debate. When criticisms were made of their curriculum by scientists, the frame of reference was not those institutions’ inadequate sense of what constituted knowledge, but the nation: ‘That the ancient universities are keeping the nation back there cannot be a doubt.’ Or when their serviceableness was called into question it was, according to James Bryce, who was later to be a Liberal minister, a matter of ‘how to make the universities serviceable to the whole nation, instead of only to the upper classes’.¹³ Needless to say, such service did not mean they had to acknowledge responsibility for the educational needs of all men and women; although one ought to add that the rhetoric of national service was, to a degree, coercive and successful (for instance, in the University Extension Movement). It could also lead Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, to say that a National University should be ‘co-extensive with the nation; it should be the common source of the whole of the higher (or secondary) education for the country’.¹⁴ The price exacted by Pattison for Oxford’s acknowledgement of its national responsibilities was high: the agreement that it was the source of all higher instruction, a centre of, and authority on, the national culture. In Oxford and Working-Class Education (1908), it was stated that ‘The Trade Union Secretary and the ‘Labour Member’ need an Oxford education as much . . . as the Civil Servant or the barrister’.¹⁵

The shift of national authority to the (ancient) universities – their establishment as custodians of the national culture – may be encapsulated in the example of the school subject History which was made compulsory in 1900 in secondary schools. What is interesting in this context is that the authorship of History textbooks moved from upper middle-class amateurs to schoolteachers and finally to academics. Almost all the texts written to respond to the education codes at the end of the century were produced by academics. Not only is what counts as History important, but also who controls what, who is representing whom and in what circumstances.¹⁶ In short what was authorized as History for the new national education constituency was under the control of a particular specialized group. As we shall see, all geographical locations in England are equal but some are more equal than others. For instance, the ‘essential’ England may have been represented as ‘rural’, but it is noteworthy how many of the figures who represented it as such derived their authority from metropolitan centres such as Oxford.¹⁷

In order to join Oxford and Cambridge as the guardians of English cultural life, the public schools also had to undergo change. For instance, the ‘old boy’ consciousness was inculcated in the later-nineteenth century – fewer than five per cent of Thomas Arnold’s ‘old boys’ sent their sons to Rugby¹⁸ – and the relationship of the schools to Oxford and Cambridge was intensified: between 1855 and 1899 four fifths of Oxford and Cambridge students were public schoolboys, a greater percentage than ever before. Perhaps the most important change was the one that prised the schools from their local attachments. As Brian Simon has shown, the most significant condition for the ‘transformation of an endowed grammar school into a public school was the exclusion of local foundationers – the sons of tradesmen, farmers or workers’. Alienated from their locality, and ‘transformed into residential schools, servicing a single class’, the schools were fit to play their role as the guardians of English cultural life.¹⁹

But these...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of contributors
• List of contributors in 1986
• Preface
• Introduction to the second edition
• 1 Englishness and the national culture
• 2 Englishness and the political culture
• 3 The discovery of rural England
• 4 The invention of English
• 5 A literature for England
• 6 The identity of English music: The reception of Elgar 1898–1935
• 7 The Englishwoman
• 8 ‘The Marginal Britons’: The Irish
• 9 Englishness and the Liberal inheritance after 1886
• 10 The Conservative party and patriotism
• 11 Socialism, the state, and some oppositional Englishness
• Afterword
• Index
• Copyright