Englishness in a Time of Crisis: George Orwell, John Betjeman, and the Second World War

Abstract

The railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, […] the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens […] the red buses, the blue policemen – all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake until we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs. Thecentenaries of the births of George Orwell (2003) and John Betjeman (2006) have recently attracted considerable attention in both the academic community and the popular media. At first glance the two men have little in common. One was a public school socialist who lived as a tramp, fought in the Spanish Civil War, and penned arguably the most dystopian vision of a markedly dystopian century, the other an Oxford-educated aesthete with a love of church architecture and branch-line train journeys, whose Collected Poems has sold over two million copies. If the recent tide of published material that has accompanied their respective centenaries has had any effect, however, it has been to remind us that neither Orwell nor Betjeman was as straightforward as we may have imagined them to be. Indeed, it is their very complexity, their respective ‘fault-lines’ as it were, that makes them interesting for us today. The question of England's cultural identity is one such fault-line, and a study of the way in which both writers approached the topic also resonates with the current and ongoing debate as to whether a cohesive notion of ‘Englishness’ is possible or, indeed, desirable, at the start of the twenty-first century.