John Betjeman Research Articles

The Politics of Monologist Representation

This article proffers a deconstructionist reading of the dramatic monologue and examines its rhetorical strategies and the politics of monologic representation, by which the first-person speaker/monologist monopolizes discursive space and over-represents himself, while silencing other voices in the text and refusing them the freedom and space to express themselves. Through a close analysis of monologist representation of the Other in various texts, including “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost, “Devonshire Street W. 1” by John Betjeman, as well as Ron Carlson’s short story “Bigfoot Stole My Wife” (albeit a dramatic monologue in prose), this article seeks to expose the ways in which the poetic persona is always partial, interested, and subjective, with not-so-subtle an agenda, a speaker who passes value judgments on the human objects of his overbearing tone. By examining the politics of monologist representation against both Aristotelian ethos and Bakhtinian intonation, the article suggests that readers and critics can give voice to the voiceless in this elastic genre and abandon their sympathetic interpretations that practically absolve monologists of any bias towards their absent enemies or any politics of representation.

Religious education and the interwar intellectuals: a secularism case study

ABSTRACTFor some time now, the idea of secularism has been the subject of renewed scrutiny. Statistical portraits, representing a simple, if relentless, narrative have been increasingly disparaged by scholars as unhelpful. Statistical secularism, as we may call it, tells a story of decline and little else. It is incapable of telling the real story which is one in which religious experience becomes hyper-fragmented. The memoirs and reminiscences of those English intellectuals who came to maturity in the interwar period have a contribution to make to this discussion. These pieces of life-writing reveal both the march of secularism in action but also the emergence of new religious experiences. At the heart of these radical changes was a widespread dissatisfaction with the way in which they were taught their religious faith. Where the experts of their day cautioned against teaching students doctrine, students like Evelyn Waugh, W. H. Auden and John Betjeman were particularly critical of that very concession. Thus, we get the chance to tease out an attitudinal pattern towards the religious education of the period and its contribution to the growing experience of secularism.

The Lonely Figures of John Betjeman

The Lonely Figures of John Betjeman Julie Crane Julie Crane Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Cambridge Quarterly, Volume 47, Issue 2, June 2018, Pages 116–130, https://doi.org/10.1093/camqtly/bfy010 Published: 01 June 2018

Betjeman’s Penelope: Untangling the Roots of ‘Late-Flowering Lust’

Two objections that have been raised against John Betjeman’s poetry are that it deals in vague or unclear emotions, and that its frivolity often conceals an insupportable lasciviousness. This essay seeks to challenge both of these assertions, and by so doing achieve a more nuanced appreciation of Betjeman’s writing, through an original reading of ‘Late-Flowering Lust’, a poem that – at first glance – would appear to provide strong evidence for the prosecution’s case. Research into the circumstances that produced this poem leads me to identify the poet’s wife Penelope as its unexpected muse, and to argue that its emotional complexion is more precisely defined, and less reprehensible, than has been assumed. I offer a new appreciation of the influence that Penelope wielded over Betjeman’s writing, one that became more complex following her conversion to the Church of Rome in 1948, the year in which ‘Late-Flowering Lust’ appears to have been written.

‘Childhood is measured out by sounds and sights and smells, before the dark of reason grows’: children’s geographies at 12

This Keynote essay argues for a supplement to existing studies in children’s geographies, one that explores the potential of a non-child-centric children’s geography alert to the work done by the figure of ‘the child’ in all manner of worldly situations. Taking a cue from the poetry of John Betjeman, notably his 1960 Summoned by Bells, the essay considers both the intimate spaces of childhood – ones gauged by the immediacies of ‘sounds and sights and smells’ – and the challenges posed by a wider world raddled by adult preoccupations and abuses, those characterised by Betjeman as stemming from ‘the dark of reason’. The essay builds from this foundation to address the ‘darkness’ in two sets of Nazi children’s wartime geographies, as well as engaging with the complexities of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s claims, in the horizon of WWII, about the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’. Within the latter – and also, notably, in Adorno’s later writing – the figure of ‘the child’ surfaces as one miniscule crumb of hope, of experiencing and knowing the world otherwise, set against the face of adult Enlightenment’s seemingly inevitable decay. At the close, Adorno’s own brief dalliance with imagining a small slice of children’s geographies allows the essay to arc back towards its original claims, and to a renewed sense of why childhood ‘sounds and sights and smells’ continue to matter far beyond just the domain of geographers researching children.

‘The Flashy Strings of Neon Lights Unravelled’—Motoring Leisure and the Potential for Technological Sublimity on the Great West Road

This paper examines the unusual opportunities for motoring leisure provided by the modernistic landscape of the Great West Road in the inter-war period. This suburban arterial road had become ribboned by new Americanized factories, which featured ‘Californian’ white elevations, floodlit at night. This modern roadscape, likened to the ‘great white way of an exhibition’ by John Betjeman, attracted leisure drivers who would cruise the new road, experiencing a sensation of displaced Americanization and modernity. Using David Nye's work on technological sublimity, this paper positions the Great West Road as a special space for driving as a new leisure experience, distancing this period from the exploration of the countryside that typified motoring in the previous decades. The paper uses material from motoring magazines, architectural sources and poetry to explain the nature of this sublimity through leisure driving. Not being California, the juxtaposition of wet British weather and this road could also provide a misty and mysterious driving experience. As the inter-war period drew to a close, some commentators saw this road as tawdry and vulgar.

“Behind the backs of houses”

Railways in John Betjeman's and Philip Larkin's poems of the 1950s and 1960s function as provocative signifiers that interrogate and encourage definition of what constitutes the modern English landscape. Through their works, which recognize how railways have been held to register the cultural health of the nation from their inception, it becomes clear that the panoramic perception that railways make possible aptly represents the self-conscious cultural gaze filtered through crisis that critics argue prevails in the postwar context. Betjeman's and Larkin's speakers reveal the capacity for railway travel to disrupt the settled vision of nationhood at the heart of heritage-based Englishness; at the same time, railways – and they themselves – are not outside of this discourse. For Betjeman and, to a greater extent, Larkin, it is the possibility of double return embodied by the railway system that perhaps proffers a desirable mode of inhabiting the modern English nation.

Strange Deliberations: John Betjeman and Protestant Nonconformity

The influence of Anglican culture and theology on the development of John Betjeman's poetic and spiritual imagination has been the subject of a good deal of recent scholarly attention. However, an affinity for Protestant Nonconformity is an unexpected secondary Christian influence in his poetry and prose. This essay seeks (1) to explore the various ways in which the dissenting tradition, both mainstream and marginalized, appears in his work, from cultural appreciation to gothic humor, from spiritual anxiety to theological acceptance; (2) to reconcile these contradictory attitudes toward Protestant Nonconformity; and (3) to assess its significance in the development of his literary imagination.

“Love is Greater Than Taste”: The Moral Architecture of John Betjeman and John Piper

Poet John Betjeman and painter John Piper shared an emphasis on visual attentiveness to place, which in its moral and aesthetic valuation, challenged contemporary standards of taste, especially those modern ones that excluded ornament and the picturesque. With regard to English Christianity, as I argue, both pursued forms of neo-Romantic, moral architectural praise and analysis, engaging the socio-cultural debate, not in terms of a set of frozen critical laws, but within a flexible practice of personal engagements that, nonetheless, set forth strong positions on sentiment, tradition, and sacrament. In doing so, both men reemphasized rootedness and love.

The John Betjeman Poetry Competition for Young People

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Licensed for Embracement: Insouciance and Exigency in John Betjeman's Love Poems

Much of John Betjeman's popular reputation as a writer derives from love poems, such as 'A Subaltern's Love Song' and 'Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden', that appear to be characterised by an insouciant, sometimes facetious attitude towards matters of the heart. This essay argues that a poet who academia has often caricatured as a flippant purveyor of light verse is better seen as one who deliberately makes light of disruptive sexual urges and fears that consistently troubled him, seeking an aesthetic means to exert a degree of control over unsettling aspects of his character that threatened to overwhelm him.

Just another Saturday

Elton John, that well known pugilist, once insisted that “Saturday night’s alright for fighting.” Now it may well be for bespectacled neds up for a ruck. But most doctor types prefer a quiet night at home enduring X Factor while wrestling with a barrel load of SurveyMonkeys. We crave a gentler life. But wait! Here’s another cuddly albeit cunningly cutting old fuddy duddy—John Betjeman—writing a poem he called “Five O’Clock Shadow.” Betjeman speaks for patients that this is the “time of the day when we feel betrayed” in the men’s ward—a time when “a doctors’ foursome out of the links is played.” Well that was back in the days when consultants could rely on the dogged Dr Finlay and his ilk doing the community cover, who worked all the hours that Tannochbrae or wherever gave them. Consultant physicians in particular back then could instruct troubled juniors down the phone. Faced with an intractable supraventricular tachycardia they might urge …

The Railway Heritage Trust's work with listed structures in the UK

The UK's Railway Heritage Trust celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2010. Since its formation, the Trust has awarded 1283 grants, worth a total of almost £40 million, and has drawn in additional external funding worth £49 million from train operating companies, local and national government and other financial supporters including private individuals. The Trust's grants have been used to repair, upkeep, or find new roles for railway buildings and structures that are listed, are in conservation areas or are of special architectural interest. This paper reviews the reasons for the Trust's creation, looking back to the 1960s debates over British Railways' historic structures, with particular reference to Euston and St Pancras stations, and John Betjeman's interventions over them. It then reviews the Trust's objectives and explains how the Trust has worked with the railway's infrastructure controllers, initially British Railways, and then its successors, Railtrack, Network Rail and BRB (Residuary) Ltd, before reviewing how the Trust is managed. Finally, the paper looks at a range of case studies, drawing on major structures and particularly iconic structures designed by Robert Stephenson and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, to show how the Trust has influenced the upkeep of historic structures on the national railway by advice, judicious allocation of its grants and drawing extra funding into the industry.

Oxford versus the Bath Road: empiricism and romanticism in The Architectural Review's picturesque revival

The picturesque is having one of its periodic surges of popularity. This is largely hidden under terms such as ‘landscape urbanism’, which puts architectural ideas back into the context of the mess...

Microbial Origins and Consequences of Dimethyl Sulfide

Once we, too, were misled that the tangy seaside smell was ozone and that it was good for us. In reality, it is mostly a different gas–dimethyl sulfide (DMS)—but one that exerts remarkable effects, from fluffy clouds to penguin behavior. No doubt former English poet laureate John Betjeman (1906–1984) might have woven these facts into a folksy homage to what is an intriguing microbiological story—if only his chemistry had been up to it.

An Unpublished Letter from Philip Larkin to Anne Tibble and a Revised Date for Larkin's First Meeting with John Betjeman

An Unpublished Letter from Philip Larkin to Anne Tibble and a Revised Date for Larkin's First Meeting with John Betjeman

‘Intolerable Flippancy’: The Arnot Robertson V. Mgm Libel Case (1946–1950) and The Evolution of BBC Policy on Broadcast Film Criticism

This article examines the ultimately unsuccessful libel case brought by the novelist and BBC film critic E. Arnot Robertson against Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The action followed a letter the film company sent to Robertson’s employer in 1946, asserting she was ‘out of touch’ with public taste, excluding her from their press screenings and requested the broadcaster’s assistance in preventing her from reviewing further MGM films on air. Robertson charged the film company with libelling her professional competence and imperilling her earnings. This article explores the origins and outcomes of the ensuing three-year legal dispute. Drawing on trade journals, law reports, press coverage and BBC records, the article considers the contrasting models of the ‘audience’ underpinning the wider conflict between the film trade and the ‘quality’ critics. It explores the role of BBC policy and ‘broadcast style’ in making radio criticism a flashpoint and traces the specific circumstances that led the two parties into court. Finally, it considers the lasting legal and cultural consequences of the case. Turner (Robertson) v. MGM redefined the legal meaning of ‘fair comment’, it reshaped BBC policy on broadcast criticism, and shifted the consensus on what constituted responsible and professional criticism – making wit a less respectable critical tool.

Romantic moderns: English writers, artists and the imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper

In this new and engaging study Alex Harris presents a confident case for the interest and importance of the English arts during the modern period. During the 1930s and 1940s, a rich network of cultural and personal encounters was the backdrop for a modern English renaissance, with English artists exploring what it meant to be alive at that moment and in England. Harris examines the work of writers, painters, gardeners, architects, critics and composers, some well known and some almost forgotten: John Betjeman, Florence White, Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, the Sitwells, John Piper, Cecil Beaton, and more.

About Creative Writing at Brunel University

Brunel University lies on the Western edge of London, at the end of the Metropolitan Underground line, after which the poet John Betjeman called these suburbs, with their soaring trees and mock-Tud...

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

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.