Becoming National? G. M. Trevelyan: The dilemmas of a liberal (inter)nationalist, 1900–1945

Abstract

On the face of it, biography, with its focus on intimate, personal identity, seems an unpromising genre for addressing the public, collective idioms of nationalism. But arguably the national is but One dimension in which a general theory of identity... can be investigated'.1 And the biographical mode may offer insights into specificities, complexities and antinomies occluded in broader, impersonal studies of national identity.George Macaulay Trevelyan was not a profound thinker about nationalism. He was primarily a narrative historian, a celebrant not an analyst of nationalist movements, but his career, nevertheless, illustrates some of the dilemmas of a liberal (inter)nationalist in the period 1900-45. Son of George Otto Trevelyan, a leading liberal of the Victorian era, great nephew of Lord Macaulay, he had an identity firmly rooted in the interlocking family networks of England's political and intellectual aristocracy. He grew up primarily at Wallington, the ancestral home on the edge of the Northumbrian moors. In the writing room stood the desk where Macaulay wrote his History of England; in the study, the table where his father completed his Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay weeks before Trevelyan's birth. Its vast central hall was decorated with scenes of local history from Roman times to the 1860s, 'interspersed with portrait medallions of famous Northumbrians, starting with the Emperor Hadrian and culminating with midnineteenth century Trevelyans'.2Houses like Wallington provided tangible moorings for elite Victorian families like the Trevelyans, enshrining family archives, memories and emotions, linking its inhabitants to the neighbourhood and to similar families throughout the country; they were palimpsests of local and national history.3 The same was true of the grounds and surrounding countryside, whose history Trevelyan evoked in some of his early essays. For, like many such families, the Trevelyans cared as much for the rural setting as for the house itself. 'Trevy' was himself one of those late-Victorian 'pilgrims of scenery', for whom 'landscape theology' served as a substitute for religion. So, when he thought of Wallington, he thought immediately of the Northumbrian moors and 'the sheep runs that sweep up to the Scottish border', which he walked obsessively. For him, walking, especially hill and mountain walking, was both a daily tonic and a spiritual experience: 'the best means whereby a man might regain possession of his own soul, by rejoining him in sacred union with nature.'4 And the appeal was not just to the 'solitude [and] silence of primeval nature', but to its literary, historical associations. Thus, Wallington for him also connoted Hadrian's Wall, the Middle Marches, the Border ballads and a heroic Anglo-Scottish warrior past. His devotion to English literature - apparent in everything he wrote - was an essential part of his sense of place and his feeling for nature, history, and local and national identity. Richly chronicled in prose and verse, the English countryside for him was a 'storied landscape', filled with associations and attachments.5But the very naturalness of his privileged national belonging prevented him from asking searching questions. Englishness, like history and liberal politics, was an almost invisible environment of which he was barely aware. It was only in later life, when the social fabric, the environment and England itself were under threat, that he became a self-conscious celebrant of his own national identity - notably in his English Social History, a work explicitly 'confined to the social history of England', written between 1940 and 1941, though only published in 1944.6Before 1914, his Englishness was underscored and a broader British patriotism repressed by political radicalism and dislike of empire. Though not unusual, this was family tradition, too: his father was a fierce critic of the post -Mutiny Raj and, unusually, a supporter of Scottish home rule. …