Introduction

Abstract

How can we explain the cultural fault lines which currently plague a post-Brexit Britain? The Introduction makes the claim that the culprit is the peculiarity of the English imagination, whose eternal and timeless utopia is Arcadia: a perfect England which existed once and has since been lost. It is demonstrated that this vision of a perfect England is a post-war invention as Britain underwent imperial and colonial decline. We can understand Brexit as a crisis of Englishness which tries to re-imagine a vision of British society as one of pastoral harmony organised around the manor house, and imperial power channelled through networks of overseas trade. The book argues that this vision of English society can be located in the upper-class house, and through the idioms of houses we can trace notions of belonging and social unity through the upper-class personages of which these houses are associated. The book’s overarching claim is that the idiom of the house, from the country house to the public school system, monarchy to lesser gentry, has been seized upon repeatedly in a variety of social, political and cultural beliefs and practices. In so doing, the English have turned their upper class into a ‘past’, a living form of ‘tradition’ beyond the empirical here-and-now. Fall and rise traces the various ways in which a vision of national hope and loss can be traced and read in the writings and practices of the English upper-class gentleman.