English National Character Research Articles

An Alarming Lack of Feeling: Urban Travel, Emotions, and British National Character in Post-Revolutionary Paris

This article analyzes British narratives of voyages made to Paris during three periods: the Peace of Amiens (March 1802 to May 1803), the first Restoration (April 1814 to May 1815), and in the first few years of the second Restoration (June 1815 to ca. 1820). These accounts reveal a consistent use of strong and distressing expressions of emotion when describing locations in the city associated with the events of the French Revolution. An analysis of these “emotional landmarks” allows us to understand the role of trauma in unsettling distinctions between the British and French in the aftermath of the Revolution. It also demonstrates that travel writers participated in an emotional community consistent with the nation, one that used these emotional landmarks to establish a new distinction between the two national characters based on emotion.

Колониальные мотивы в английском неовикторианском романе: к постановке проблемы

The article focuses on the neo-Victorian postcolonial novel and on the late neo-Victorian novel with the colonial motives. The article explores genre peculiarities of these modifications of the late neo-Victorian novel. The article focuses on the problem of Britishness as a base of an English identity. ‘British’ features are the peculiar characteristics of any Victorian or modern Englishman. Understanding English national character with its Britishness is a key to the neo-Victorian postcolonial novel and the late neo-Victorian novel with the colonial motives appropriate reading. To achieve the aims of the article the following methods of literary analysis were used: typological, cultural and historical, comparative methods and intertextual analysis. Through the careful analyses of the neo-Victorian novels the author of the article concludes that Victorian colonial novels are the predecessors of the neo-Victorian novels with colonial motives as well as the neo-Victorian postcolonial novels. The basic differences between these varieties of the late neo-Victorian novel are determined by the origin of their author. As the author of the neo-Victorian postcolonial novel originates from the former colonies, such novels focuses on the postcolonial problematics and correspond to the postcolonial canon but not to the neo-Victorian one. On the contrary neo-Victorian novel with the colonial pastiches and parodies Victorian fiction. The prospects of the research include the further exploration of the neo-Victorian postcolonial novel and neo-Victorian novel with the colonial motives.

LINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF UNDERSTATEMENT IN MODERN ENGLISH

The article focuses on the concept of Understatement as a lingua-cultural category and analyses the main linguistic means of realization of this phenomenon. Besides, some stylistic and pragmalinguistic aspects of Understatement are analyzed from the perspective of a distancing strategy. The researcher is primarily interested in Understatement as a lingua-cultural category relying on historically stipulated cultural traditions of Anglo-Saxon society which gave rise to the forming of the British national character, and which reflect age, gender and social differences of the English. The author does not use the Russian variants of the translation of Understatement in the article, as they do not fully convey all the aspects of denotative and connotative meaning of this concept. Further on it is emphasized that the structure of Understatement is complex, diverse and can be expressed by a variety of lexical as well as grammatical means, among which double negation, modal verbs, the adverbs of degree and particles can often be encountered which are in most cases dependent on the context. From the pragmatic angle Understatement can be used to conceal embarrassment, anxiety or offence. Moreover, Understatement is used while singling out the positive aspects of the communicative situation. The understatement of the positive characteristics of the speaker is reflected in the so called «effect of modesty », which finally boils down to such a strategy as «fishing for compliments», that is an intentional understatement of one’s positive qualities in order to «fish for compliments». Understatement used to and continues to play a special role in the English speech behavior. Its aim is to minimize the impact of the negative factors on the message addressee, to lower the categoricity of the utterance and to take the interlocutor’s interests into account.

Extralinguistic Aspects of the English Concept Stiff Upper Lip

The article concerns one of the basic Anglo-Saxon linguocultural concepts Stiff Upper Lip, which is an integral part of English national character. The analysis of such factors as geographic, historic, cultural and physiological ones gives a chance to delve into the essence of the concept and explain its importance for English culture.

Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting (review)

Reviewed by: Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting Noah Arceneaux (bio) Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting. By Michele Hilmes. New York: Routledge, 2011. Pp. 358. $44.95. In Network Nations (not to be confused with the similarly titled Network Nation by Richard John), Michele Hilmes tackles the histories of American and British broadcasting, subjects that have been explored many times. These two systems are typically cast in opposition to each other, with the British Broadcasting Corporation depicted, in broad strokes, as the stiff hand of the state, determined to make sure listeners eat their vegetables. The American broadcasting system, on the other hand, is said to be so dominated by advertising, popular music, and (most recently) bloviating talk-show hosts that any genuine public service from the medium is all but impossible. Hilmes argues that the best way to understand the British and American systems is to view them not in contrast but in conjunction. Network Nations is a well-researched, comprehensive account of the transnational influences that flowed in both directions across the Atlantic, focusing on the decades of the 1920s through the 1970s. There are many explicit instances of exchange between Britain and the United States, such as during World War II, when many personnel and much programming were shared. We are also reminded, for example, that much of famed journalist Edward R. Murrow’s early training came from the BBC. Hilmes is particularly attuned to the use of electronic media to preserve a national identity, a concern that was much stronger in England than America. Viewing the American and British broadcasting systems in conjunction calls attention to issues that could be glossed over otherwise. In her recounting of the origins of the BBC, Hilmes emphasizes that the centralized system of control, meant to enforce a particular view of British national character, was a deliberate reaction to the chaotic condition of early American radio. There was nonetheless a definite commercial imperative to the BBC’s original mission. The organization began as a consortium of radio manufacturers, determined to make sure there was a reliable over-the-air service that might compel listeners to purchase the new appliance. Commercialism was also present on British airwaves with the sponsored programming that originated from European stations at first, backed by American advertisers, and then from ships anchored just outside official national borders. The most significant strain of influence that flowed from east to west was the notion and definition of “public broadcasting.” In the 1930s, when U.S. reformers attempted to tamp down the commercial nature of American radio, the BBC was a model for what could be achieved. In the United States, there was also a burst of post–World War II activity in serious radio drama and documentary, and Hilmes indicates that much of the inspiration came from England. The BBC continued to inspire American efforts [End Page 951] to increase its public-service programming, culminating with the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1967. To paraphrase Hilmes, there is a reason that PBS speaks with a British accent. The transnational focus of this book is an admirable and welcome antidote to most works of media history. Scholars in this area have often lamented the resolutely national nature of most such research. This situation results from the significant influence that governments have on their respective media systems, and also the nature of national archives in general. Hilmes’s 1997 Radio Voices has inspired many radio historians, and it would certainly be a positive if this newer work had the same influence on the field. There is, however, the unavoidable financial barrier to doing such ambitious, border-spanning research, and faculty at many universities may lack the necessary resources. If Hilmes’s level of research proves difficult to imitate, perhaps it will be successful in calling for increased attention to transnational influences. This work will appeal to many readers, not only those who have a specific interest in the history of broadcasting. Scholars interested in the relationship between the state and technological development will find the book of value, as will those interested in the relationship between media and...

Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (review)

Reviewed by: Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies Ashley Dawson MacPhee, Graham . 2011. Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. $100.00 hc. $32.00 sc. xviii + 180pp. Iremember meeting veteran radical intellectual and activist Stanley Aronowitz on the street during one of the massive anti-war marches that preceded the invasion of Iraq. Introduced by a friend as a colleague at the City University of New York, Aronowitz asked about my area of specialization. When I replied that I worked on postcolonial studies, Aronowitz barked back, "What's that? Aren't we in the middle of an imperial onslaught?" I mumbled something about how I hadn't chosen this disciplinary designation, before Aronowitz was diverted by a group of women sporting large missiles between their legs. My uncomfortable exchange raises a variety of issues germane to Graham MacPhee's recent Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies. Aside from sticky disciplinary questions, the appellation 'postcolonial' denotes a particular temporal trajectory that, as scholars such as Anne McClintock have noted, hardly characterizes most nations in the global South accurately, given the fresh waves of economic and military control to which such states have been subjected since winning independence. The falseness of this designation is equally true of a former imperial metropole such as Great Britain, which, although it has 'lost' almost all of its colonies, continues to play an important role in the global economy through the good offices of the City-based financial industry, and which, as a member of coalitions such as NATO, also continues to project military force around the globe. How then are we to theorize literary production in a nation such as Britain, which repeatedly seems to fall into the grip of imperial nostalgia, and yet whose embassies in countries like Iran and Afghanistan continue to be assaulted by angry demonstrations against imperialism? This is precisely the complex terrain that MacPhee's book surveys. Central to MacPhee's intervention is his reconciliation of two important, apparently contradictory scholarly analyses of postwar British literary production. In the case of Jed Esty, author of A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (2003), Britain's withdrawal from empire following the Second World War brought with it a celebration of narrowly defined [End Page 162] English national culture—the sort of thing celebrated by T.S. Eliot in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), when he discussed English national character as constituted by enthusiasm for everything from "Derby Day and Henley Regatta" to "the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, and Wensleydale cheese" (quoted in MacPhee 2011, 85). By contrast, John Marx's The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire (2005) argues that, as decolonization took place and the UK lost its dominant international position, British culture was integrated into a new global system centered on the economic and cultural hegemony of the United States. MacPhee's book finds a way to integrate these apparently paradoxical positions by arguing that Cold War discourse relied on both a "new doctrine of strategic defense" that depended on "a spatially discrete nation as the homeland in relation to which strategic resources or territories would be mapped," and an "abstract freedom" that "enjoys an unbounded and delocalized scope" (26). In other words, territorializing and deterritorializing logics overlapped with one another during the Cold War, leading to literary production that emphasized both national retrenchment and participation in US global hegemony. MacPhee supports this subtle analysis of the integration of Britain into what Peter Gowan calls the US-centered hub-and-spokes system of the Cold War era with astute readings of a variety of texts, from Graham Greene's The Quiet American to essays and speeches by Winston Churchill, George Orwell, and T.S. Eliot. The latter section of this first part of MacPhee's book also demonstrates the political and cultural impact of the new dispensation: once integrated into the new postwar world order, Britain could represent itself as innocent of its imperial history, despite the fact that the era from 1945 to 1967 saw the UK conduct brutal colonial wars in places such as Cyprus, Kenya, and Aden (now Yemen). This reimagined community could...

Education, Aesop, Roger L'Estrange, and Equity

Equity in English literary works after the restoration and into the eighteenth century has not received anything like the attention given to equity in the literature of early-modern England. Studies of equity in restoration and eighteenth-century literature are rare; one notable exception, however, finding some equity in a long drought, is Elliott Visconsi's Lines of Equity: Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England, covering the later seventeenth century. Visconsi's argument is that following the trauma and upheaval of the civil war, commonwealth, and restoration, which all contributed to a general sense that there was an inherent barbarism to the English national character, in the 1660s and afterwards writers, especially those who wrote literature, repeatedly focused on the origins of law to situate their readers as equitable readers, positioned to work through the subtle relations and differences between norms and specific instances, thereby furthering in individual readers the process of paideia, or the civilising and moral instruction necessary to create a proper citizen developed among the ancient Greeks. Equity, therefore, is part of the general educational project of the late seventeenth century.

"La Maladie anglaise" in French Eighteenth-Century Writing: From Stereotype to Individuation

Throughout eighteenth century, in letters, newspapers, medical treatises, travel narratives, literary criticism, and popular and high-brow literature of all sorts, Englishman is a recurrent stereotype in French writing, an emblematic figure of English national character and indeed of nation itself. Inspiring a mixture of sympathy, perplexity, admiration, pity, and horror, singularity of his condition is seen as a pathological disorder, one which mirrors other forms of English deviance. So pervasive is this stereotype that it comes to be adopted by British writers themselves. When George Cheyne published his treatise devoted to nervous diseases of all kinds in 1733, he consciously integrated view from France, promoting above scurvy and venereal diseases as condition now designated by words of his title, The English Malady. Back in 1698, Henri Misson de Valbourg had identified four very Dangerous Distempers in England that are much less known in other Countries; Scurvy, Consumption, Rickets, and Hypochondriac Melancholy (Misson 68), (1) but by mid-century, physical disorders had become secondary national characteristics. The English malady, seen from France, was situated above all in mind and soul. The ingredients of this stereotype are complex and wide-ranging. Their starting points are perceived differences between French and English. In 1770 an anonymous author summed up what she or he saw as stereotypical images of English and French: It has been decreed for all time that Englishman will be philosophical, serious and taciturn, and that he will kill himself in cold blood out of pure boredom; and that Frenchman will be thoughtless, playful, scatterbrained, high spirited almost to extravagance, passionate to point of madness, but without ever being in love; and that he will only risk his life for his king or for futile principle of a so-called point of honour. (qtd. in D'Orville 6) (2) The term most frequently employed in French to describe Englishman's condition is melancolie. Other terms were sometimes used either as synonyms (la tristesse) or as concomitant adjectives that engender (serieux, pensif). This vocabulary is applied not to individuals so much as to social groups, and sometimes to entire nation. According to Pierre-Jean Grosley, prevails in London in every family, in circles, in assemblies, in public and private entertainments (1: 183). (3) His three-volume book on London was published in Switzerland in 1770 and is based on time he spent in English capital in 1765. Like many French books on England, it was soon translated into English, in this case by Thomas Nugent, translator of Montesquieu, as A Tour to London: or, new observations on England and its Inhabitants, which appeared in 1772. Grosley's use of word tristesse (translated by Nugent as melancholy') needs to be considered in light of his comments on Latin origin of word, tristitia, which, according to him, contained a harsher meaning of spite. Tristesse evolved into a more ephemeral emotion that had nothing to do with the excesses into which men are hurried by yielding to impressions of melancholy (1: 231). (4) When Grosley uses tristesse, he is reinvesting it with its original, darker significance. (5) It is interesting to compare Grosley's terminology with that of an earlier observer of English manners, Jean-Bernard Le Blanc, whose Lettres d'un Francois, also in three volumes, were published in La Haye in 1745. Le Blanc claims to have written them during his time in England between 1737 and 1744. Their English translation, Letters on English and French Nations, dates from 1747. Le Blanc wonders why English have no word for that quintessentially French expression, l'ennui, one that we now tend to associate with nineteenth-century poets such as Baudelaire or de Vigny: How comes it to pass that English, who have borrowed so many words from our language without necessity, have not received this, which so well expresses a thing they feel every moment, and which has not less influence on their temperament than on their character? …

Holinshed's Nation: Ideals, Memory and Practical Policy in the Chronicles. By IGOR DJORDJEVIC.

Holinshed's Nationconsiders Rafael Holinshed'sChronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577 and 1587) as a serious and intentional exercise in historiography whose agenda appears in its rhetorical strategies. This study confines itself to the portion of the Chronicles for the years 1377–1485 (those of Shakespeare's history plays) and focuses on how the Chronicles offer a ‘mirror for policy’ through three principle tropes — chivalry, politic monarchy, and the ‘commonwealth ideal’. While these tropes occur throughout the 1377–1485 narrative, the predominant ideal shifts from chivalry to commonwealth over time. After an initial chapter spent wrestling with preceding studies of the Chronicles, critical and historiographic theory, and the textual complications presented by the two editions, Igor Djordjevic divides his study into three sections. The first focuses on the reign of Richard II and Richard's failure to achieve the chivalric ideal; the second on the Hundred Years' War (principally on Henry V) and the definition of English national character through ‘heroic, chivalric and honour paradigms’ (p. 140) associated with English chivalry as opposed to ‘French faintheartedness’ (p. 144). It also introduces the ideal of the politic ruler. The third considers how, during the Wars of the Roses, ‘the political discourse of the factions vying for power is dominated by the rhetorical formulae of “commonwealth” and “France”’ (p. 169). During this time ‘all actors on the political stage continually claim that the chivalric conduct to the governing, noble estate, and the defence (or reconquest, after 1453) of France are a public good for all the estates of the English commonwealth’ (p. 169).

The "Backbone of England": History, Memory, Landscape, and the Fordian Reconstruction of Englishness

The "Backbone of England":History, Memory, Landscape, and the Fordian Reconstruction of Englishness Toby Henry Loeffler The idea that nationalism is something pathological, something at the same time deeply foreign, is part of the English understanding of it. Hence, the unwillingness to accept that there is or can be such a thing as English nationalism. —Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity 19 This, Tietjens thought, is England! A man and a maid walk through Kentish grass fields: the grass ripe for the scythe. The man honourable, clean, upright; the maid virtuous, clean, vigorous [. . .]. "God's England!" Tietjens exclaimed to himself in high good humour. "Land of Hope and Glory" [. . .]. Backbone of England! —Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End 105-07 A land of English men and English maids, of the best people and good birth, of church and heroes, "God's England," Sir Edward Elgar's "Land of Hope and Glory"—yet for Christopher Tietjens, the "central observer" of Ford Madox Ford's tetralogy Parade's End, the "backbone" of modern England—government and church, empire, heroes, and glory—is "rotten" (Ford, It Was the Nightingale 215; Ford, Parade's End 106).1 "English History," as Ford himself writes in the late 1920s, may be "relatively easy to grasp because in it it is not difficult to see a pattern of what someone has called Freedom slowly broadening down from precedent to precedent" (English Novel 9). Yet, as Parade's End glances back from the 1920s over the years surrounding the First World War, this apparently obvious pattern of historical development culminates not in "Freedom" but in the deterioration of social institutions and England itself, leaving Christopher Tietjens and his young suffragist companion Valentine Wannop to support, in Ford's [End Page 1] words, a "crumbling world" (It Was the Nightingale 215). As Austin Riede unproblematically concludes, "In Parade's End, Ford is chronicling . . . the rapid decline of Englishness" in the early twentieth century (213). Nevertheless, intransigently resisting this narrative of fragmentation and decay, Ford's abstract "man" and "maid" remain as they "should be," personifying something that is as solid and persistent as the stones beneath their feet (Ford, Parade's End 106). "Clean," "upright," and "virtuous," they recall a seemingly organic authenticity that manifests itself in their ability to name "the birds that piped and the grasses that bowed" (105). At the height of what Eric Hobsbawm has identified as the "apogee of nationalism," when, following the Great War, national self-determination emerges as a universal right and national identity hardens into an apparently incontestable human attribute, Christopher and Valentine implicitly summon an English national character whose roots Parade's End thrusts into the ancient past and the landscape itself (Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism 131). Despite their ostensible political incompatibility—he is, Tietjens himself reflects, "the Tory of Tories," she, "the suffragette of the militants"—Chrissie and Val suggest stability and continuity, even as the English world crumbles around them (Ford, Parade's End 106). Indeed, rather than hailing the collapse of Englishness, they seem to point to its rebirth, participating in a postwar reconstruction of English tradition that requires a return to the very landscape from which a modernity of war and empire has alienated it. Although Ford somewhat surprisingly concludes in 1907 that "England is not a nation" and, in 1929, expresses the suspicion that he is "not really English," the community that Christopher Tietjens and Valentine Wannop evoke, the English tradition that Ford himself conjures so often over the course of his career, emerges as, above all, national (It Was the Nightingale 74; The Spirit of the People 84). Recoiling from early-twentieth-century politics of national identity, Ford positions himself within a tradition of scholarship and popular opinion that figures "nationalism" as, in Krishan Kumar's words, a virulent "pathology" to which the English have been uniquely resistant. Nevertheless, even as he does so, his work manifests an incorrigible preoccupation with national identity and character. In the process, it labors on behalf of this disavowed nationalism, contributing to the discursive reconstruction of "England" as an ancient national unity and the rejuvenation of its apparently degenerate national tradition. Modern Englishness, Ford proposes in...

<em>Land and Nation in England: Patriotism, National Identity, and the Politics of Land, 1880–1914</em>, by Paul Readman

Reviewed by: Land and Nation in England: Patriotism, National Identity, and the Politics of Land, 1880–1914 Sara L. Maurer (bio) Land and Nation in England: Patriotism, National Identity, and the Politics of Land, 1880–1914, by Paul Readman; pp. x + 242. Woodbridge and Rochester: The Boydell Press, 2008, £50.00, $95.00. At least since Martin Wiener's assertion in English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (1981) that by the 1850s rural life was seen as the true moral center of the English nation, it has been a scholarly commonplace that representations of the English countryside were conservative and backward looking, part of a symbolic formation allowing the English to block from consciousness the problems of urban industrialization and the wider British Empire. Paul Readman's ambitious and exacting study puts this thesis to the test. Looking to the surprisingly neglected debates surrounding land reform in the two decades before and after the turn of the twentieth century, Readman unearths late-Victorian and Edwardian visions of English rural life that were central to national character but not fundamentally conservative and escapist. Instead, land reformers saw the English land as crucial to the preservation of a national character that was decidedly democratic and technologically savvy at home, militaristic and imperial abroad. While his approach is overwhelmingly that of a historian of the linguistic bent, Readman begins his study with an empirical survey establishing the significant presence of land reform in election speeches and party propaganda. In the wake of the late-century agricultural depression and the 1884 Reform Act that created a democratically identified nation still saddled with an anachronistically territorial system of land ownership, politicians of all stripes considered the "land question" as crucial to the peace and prosperity of England. The wide variety of reforms they proposed—free trade in the land, improved security of tenure for tenant farmers and guaranteed compensation for their improvements, the (voluntary or compulsory) allotment of small plots of land to farm laborers, the creation of an entire class of small cultivator-proprietors, [End Page 299] a tax on the so-called unearned increment of land value, and the outright nationalization of the land—were all invoked as reforms not just of land, but of the English national character. As Readman demonstrates, this wasn't an English national character imagined as timelessly isolated from modernity among the gently rolling hills of southern England. Land reform rhetoric on both sides of the aisle, Readman shows, expressed explicit concern with the technology of farming and the latest techniques of cultivation from the continent. They were also concerned with the imperial role that land played. Readman highlights the presence in land reform debates of the panic over racial degeneration caused by the British Army's near-defeat in the Boer War, as proponents argued that poor conditions in the countryside caused rural inhabitants to flee to the cities, or far beyond England. Getting the land system right, they argued, was key to getting the whole Empire right. And it was key to national defense as well. Without a strong base of agricultural production within England itself, politicians argued, the country was vulnerable to blockades and invasions. The sense that national autonomy depended on the connection to literal land translated into a similar understanding of land as the grounds of individual autonomy. Over the course of forty years, public sympathy converged on any solution that might create a class of small landholders. This class, it was imagined, would prevent rural depopulation, urban overcrowding, and the possibility that large numbers of people without a stake in the soil would become susceptible to revolutionary impulses. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the small land holder was celebrated on both the right and the left as capable of all the proper home feelings that would orient him (and despite legal reforms that enhanced women's proprietary power, the imagined owner was always a "him") toward hard work, decorum, and a love of nation. His proprietary attachment to the land would also make him a defender of both nation and Empire, either through his contribution to what is now termed "food security," or, if...

The Fawlty Rhetoric of National Character

While the connection between English humour and national character continues to be debated nostalgically or critically in England, several examples of ‘English humour’ have meanwhile been exported, adopted, and adapted by other nations. In this article, we trace a few examples of the specific uses (national as well as trans-national) to which the shared knowledge and enjoyment of a key scene in the situation comedy Fawlty Towers has been put by Danish TV viewers. A mélange of prejudice, politics, parody, and farce surrounding a young Danish MP's public behaviour in April 2007, while under the influence, was interpreted and made popularly intelligible (or was it?) through the familiar prism provided by John Cleese in the role of Mr. Basil Fawlty pretending to be Adolf Hitler in order to entertain an unfortunate group of German hotel guests. We conclude with some methodological reflections on stereotype and humour.

Contesting Affluence: An Introduction

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements We are grateful to Victoria de Grazia, Frank Mort, Frank Trentmann, Alan Warde, Niamh Moore, Lawrence Black, Siobhan McAndrew, Pat Ayers, Stephan Schwarzkopf and other participants of the CRESC workshop, Rethinking Affluence, held in Manchester in September 2006. Our special thanks to Matthew Hilton and the editorial board of this journal for their assistance and encouragement throughout the production of this special issue. Notes [1] Tomlinson Tomlinson, Jim. 2007. It's the Economy, Stupid! Labour and the Economy circa 1964. Contemporary British History, 21(3): 337–49. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar], ‘It's the Economy, Stupid!’. [2] Goldthorpe et al. Goldthorpe, J. H., Lockwood, D., Bechhofer, F. and Platt, J. 1968, 1969. The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure, 3 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. with [Google Scholar], The Affluent Worker. [3] Coats and Silburn Coats, Ken and Silburn, Richard. 1970. Poverty: The Forgotten Englishman, Baltimore: Penguin. [Google Scholar], Poverty. [4] Hirsch Hirsch, Fred. 1978. Social Limits to Growth, London: Routledge. [Google Scholar], Social Limits to Growth. [5] Galbraith Galbraith, John Kenneth. 1969 [1958]. The Affluent Society, London: Hamish Hamilton. [Google Scholar], The Affluent Society. [6] Williams Williams, Raymond. 1961. Culture and Society: 1780–1950, London: Penguin. [Google Scholar], Culture and Society. [7] Black Black, Lawrence. 2003. The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain, Basingstoke: MacMillan. [Google Scholar], Political Culture. [8] Offer Offer, Avner. 2006. The Challenge of Affluence: Well Being and Self Control in the United States and Britain Since 1950, Oxford: Clarendon. [Google Scholar], The Challenge of Affluence. [9] Hilton Hilton, Matthew. 2003. Consumerism in Twentieth Century Britain: The Search for Historical Movement, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], Consumerism. [10] Hennessy Hennessy, Peter. 2006. Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties, London: Penguin. [Google Scholar], Having it so Good. [11] Galbraith Galbraith, John Kenneth. 1969 [1958]. The Affluent Society, London: Hamish Hamilton. [Google Scholar], The Affluent Society. [12] Zweig Zweig, Ferdinand. 1961. The Worker in an Affluent Society: Family Life and Industry, London: Heinneman. [Google Scholar], The Worker. [13] Abrams and Rose Abrams, Mark and Rose, Richard. 1960. Must Labour Lose?, Harmondsworth: Penguin. [Google Scholar], Must Labour Lose? [14] Mandler Mandler, Peter. 2006. The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair, New Haven, CO: Yale University Press. [Google Scholar], The English National Character. [15] Gorer Gorer, Geoffrey. 1955. Exploring English Character, New York: Criterion Books. [Google Scholar], Exploring English Character. [16] Notably in Bourdieu Bourdieu, Pierre. 1985. Distinction, Translated by R. Nice London: Routledge. [Google Scholar], Distinction. [17] Hoggart Hoggart, Richard. 1957. The Uses of Literacy, London: Penguin. [Google Scholar], The Uses of Literacy. [18] Judt Judt, Tony. 2005. Post War: A History of Europe Since 1945, London: Heinemann. [Google Scholar], Post War, 324. [19] Glynn and Booth Glynn, Sean and Booth, Alan. 1996. Modern Britain: An Economic and Social History, London: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], Modern Britain. [20] De Grazia De Grazia, Victoria. 2005. Irresistible Empire: America's Advance Through Twentieth Century Europe, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], Irresistible Empire. [21] Offer Offer, Avner. 2006. The Challenge of Affluence: Well Being and Self Control in the United States and Britain Since 1950, Oxford: Clarendon. [Google Scholar], The Challenge of Affluence. [22] See more generally, the special issue of Sociological Research Online, May 2007, for further discussion and examples. [23] Bourdieu Bourdieu, Pierre. 1985. Distinction, Translated by R. Nice London: Routledge. [Google Scholar], Distinction; Mitchell Mitchell, Arnold. 1983. The Nine American Lifestyles, New York: Warner Books. [Google Scholar], The Nine American Lifestyles. Additional informationNotes on contributorsShinobu MajimaShinobu Majima is Associate Professor in Economic History at Gakushuin University, Tokyo, and is also Associate Researcher at the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change (CRESC). She is currently working on a book manuscript titled ‘Fashion Fever: Gender, Culture and Economy in an Age of Abundance’. Mike Savage is Director of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change and Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. He is currently completing a book, Discovering English Society 1950–2000: Popular Identities and Social Science Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2008).

Speaking to power: Tony Blair, complex multicultures and fragile white English identities

This paper reflects on one example of knddowledge transfer conducted by the ESRC Identities and Social Action Programme which involved briefing Tony Blair for his December 2006 speech on multiculturalism and extremism. Two key themes in the report prepared for Blair and his speech-writer are described — the nature of contemporary complex multicultures and the `fragility' of white English identities. These are contrasted with themes in Blair's speech which, in general, celebrated (white) British national character and took a traditional `divided communities' perspective on UK multiculturalism while introducing further measures to encourage `integration'. The paper describes the dilemmas and challenges faced in formulating a report for this context, in particular issues about developing a narrative in a highly contested field, complicity with power and credentials to speak. It argues, too, that although ostensibly an exceptional opportunity, more mundane acts of knowledge transfer might be more effective.

Chatterton, Ossian, Africa

This essay tracks the intimate tie between Englishness and violence from Thomas Chatterton’s earliest “Rowley” poems to his late African Eclogues. In judging violence essential to English national character, Chatterton takes seriously the Ossianic poems’ characterization of England’s founders as piratical savages. Chatterton then struggles, in his overt imitations of Ossian and his African poems, to find an alternative way of understanding national character. Finally the reversibility of Ossian’s own fundamental plot (dangerous invaders arrive by sea; indigenous people defend themselves) permits Chatterton to reimagine the British slave trade and to imagine a critique of James Macpherson’s nationalist determinism.

Peter Mandler.The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair.:The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair

On or about 1848 “the idea of the English national character” changed, asserts Peter Mandler in his new book. Mandler's is clearly a history of “an idea,” in the words of his subtitle. The bulk of his sources are works of history, treatises, speeches, sermons, national newspaper leader articles, travelogues, “auto-ethnographies,” poll and surveys, and “national inquests at moments of crisis” (p. 5). In what seems to have started partially as a respectful argument with Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (1992), among other works, Mandler traces the rise of discussions about Englishness to moments of uncertainty in domestic rather than international politics. The notion of national character, he argues, “developed for the first time into a serious and respectable category of self-analysis for the writing and reading classes” in the mid Victorian decades, in the wake of Chartism and Anti-Corn Law agitation in England and the 1848 nationalist revolutions on the continent (pp. 58–59). Following Stefan Collini, Mandler contends that there was a shift for the first time in the belief that the mass of Englishmen possessed “character.” Citing material changes, such as urbanization, the railway, telegraphy and steam printing, along with the growth of social statistics and early social psychology, the nation became “a cultural unit” only in the 1850s. In Mandler's words, “the British were coming to see themselves as more homogeneous and uniform, less fissured by differences of region, religion, morals and class if not gender” (p. 66). (Historians of gender are likely to be repeatedly frustrated by statements such as this.) This was the period when Thomas Babington Macaulay, Henry Thomas Buckle, and William Stubbs wrote their histories of the English, and Charles Dickens penned his own characterizations in books like Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865). “Teutomania,” with its emphasis on England's Anglo-Saxon roots and “ancient constitution,” allowed English dominance of the union to be taken for granted. In Mandler's reckoning, there were 112 “Victorian textbooks on the history of Britain,” 108 of which “called themselves histories of England” (p. 67). After the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884, we learn, there was a revival of more conservative notions of patriotism “based on leadership, emulation and institutions” (pp. 106–107). The “Great Briton” of Punch's John Bull personified for a time the English national character until the Boer War and World War I made such complacent self-imaginings impossible. John Bull was then replaced by the “Little Man,” Sidney Strube's cartoon featured in the pages of the Daily Express from 1920 to 1947. The “Little Man's” representation of national character was a strange mélange, incorporating an older imagining of the English gentleman, along with the working-class “chirpy Cockney” and “the bourgeois suburbanite” with his pipe, his garden, and his nuclear family. Mandler convincingly argues that only in the 1950s and 1960s was the English national character recast in the image of the gentleman across the political spectrum. Depending on one's politics, though, the gentleman was the villain who had to be ousted or the gallant defender of traditional English values under threat in the postwar world. The death of the idea of national character, according to Mandler, came in the process of cultural change in the course of the 1960s (p. 221). In Mandler's reading, the concept “had lived too long” and “been stretched too far” “to function any longer in a credibly monolithic way” (p. 221).

Performing the West Indies: Comedy, Feeling, and British Identity

Performing the West Indies: Comedy, Feeling, and British Identity Jean Marsden Writing in 1772, Richard Cumberland described his approach to comedy as "design'd as an attempt upon [the reader's] heart, and as such proceeds with little deviation from mine."1 More than thirty-five years later, he reiterated this sentiment in his Memoirs, stating "there never have been any statute-laws for comedy; there never can be any; it is only referable to the unwritten law of the heart, and that is nature."2 In essence, then, the affect of comedy is an idealized communion between feeling hearts, made possible through the medium of performance. Later eighteenth-century comedies, frequently described today as "sentimental," were expressly designed to promote this "undeviating" connection between playwright and audience—a connection that can only work, it would seem, when the feeling hearts share certain natural affinities. But what connections can exist when the playwright's subject is seemingly remote from the audience? By examining Richard Cumberland's The West Indian (1771) and George Colman the Younger's Inkle and Yarico (1787), this essay explores the implications of these affinities, what Raymond Williams calls "structures of feeling," embedded in comedies that take advantage of England's fascination with its own, seemingly exotic colonies. Under these circumstances, how easy is it for the playwright to create a connection between his creation and the hearts of a decidedly nonexotic English audience? To shift the terms of Cumberland's discussion only slightly, the kind of communion he describes that is made possible through the medium of comedy represents the shared consciousness that constitutes a "structure of feeling." Williams uses the term to explain a set of social experiences, "meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt," [End Page 73] and thus "variable" rather than fixed.3 Like Cumberland, he stresses that structures of feeling are of necessity communal, a set of social relationships that are both thought and felt and that represent the "affective elements of consciousness and relationships … in a living and interrelating continuity."4 As Williams explains, these structures are a "set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension … a social experience which is still in process."5 Williams's concept is especially relevant for the later eighteenth century. Perhaps no other age was quite so fascinated by the moral and aesthetic implications of shared feelings or sympathy6 even as it experienced a wide range of social and economic transformations. The arts play a special role in these discussions of "meanings and values." For Williams, they fulfill a general function, exemplifying a "present and affective" experience, vividly realized and widely felt that also can represent the first indicator of a new structure of feeling.7 In the context of eighteenth-century moral and aesthetic theory, the arts are proactive as well as reflective; the affective power of art actively promotes virtue, both personal and civic. As Cumberland and his contemporaries recognized, theater is unique in that the audience experiences the drama in real time; it is living and present in a way unlike any other art and derives its affective power through these very qualities. In the words of Henry Home, Lord Kames, who like Williams respected art's affective "presence": "of all the means for making an impression of ideal presence, theatrical representation is the most powerful. That words independent of action have the same power in a lesser degree, every one of sensibility must have felt."8 National identity constitutes one structure very much "in process" in the last decades of the eighteenth century and one unusually strongly linked, in the eyes of Britons, to the practice of comedy. For writers such as Kames and fellow Scot Hugh Blair, for example, comedy becomes an expression of British national character. Kames sees comedy as a matter of national morality, warning that "odious" writers such as the Restoration comic playwrights "spread infection through their native country."9 Many writers follow Kames in attaching national importance to the practice of a specific, recognizably English, mode of comedy. Thus, when comparing English and French comedy, Blair writes: [End Page 74] From the English Theatre, we are naturally led to...

The English national character: the history of an idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair

What kind of people are English? What characteristic traits and behavior (if any) distinguish them from other people? This highly original and wide-ranging book traces the surprisingly varied history of ideas among the English about their own over the past two centuries. Two hundred years ago, the very idea of a national character was novel and not very respectable. Today, it is again difficult for the many who think of themselves as unique individuals to imagine a that binds the English together in a national unit. But in between, as Britain became a democracy, became part of the national common sense, reflected in depictions of John Bull and his twentieth-century successor, the Little Man, and in a set of stereotypes about English traits, follies, and foibles. Not at all shy to talk about themselves, the English have produced a vast outpouring of material on what it means to be English--material on which this book draws: lectures, sermons, political speeches, journalism, popular and scholarly books, poems and novels and films, satires and cartoons and caricatures, as well as up-to-the-minute social science and public opinion research. In this comprehensive and lucidly argued book, a leading historian of modern Britain challenges long-held assumptions and familiar stereotypes and proposes an entirely new perspective on what it means to think of oneself as being English.

Peter Mandler. The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2006. Pp. 348. $35.00 (cloth).

Peter Mandler. The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2006. Pp. 348. $35.00 (cloth). - Volume 47 Issue 1

The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair, by Peter Mandler

<i>The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair</i>, by Peter Mandler