Against ‘Englishness’: English Culture and the Limits to Rural Nostalgia, 1850–1940

Abstract

OVER the last fifteen years, a substantial literature has welled up, practically from nowhere, purporting to anatomise ‘Englishness’. ‘Englishness’, this literature suggests, is not a true estimate of national character, an enduring national essence, but rather a historical construct that was developed towards the end of the nineteenth century by the ‘dominant classes’ in British society in order to tame or thwart the tendencies of their day towards modernism, urbanism and democracy that might otherwise have overwhelmed elite culture. These aspirations for social control determined the lineaments of the new ‘Englishness’. Nostalgic, deferential and rural, ‘Englishness’ identified the squire-archical village of Southern or ‘Deep’ England as the template on which the national character had been formed and thus the ideal towards which it must inevitably return. Purveyed by the ‘dominant classes’ to the wider culture by means of a potent array of educational and political instruments—ranging from the magazineCountry Lifeto the folk-song fad to the National Trust to Stanley Baldwin's radio broadcasts—‘Englishness’ reversed the modernising thrust of the Indus-trial Revolution and has condemned late twentieth-century Britain to economic decline, cultural stagnation and social division.