The Idea of Englishness

English Culture, National Identity and Social Thought

Krishan Kumar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472461957
• eBook ISBN: 9781317028147
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Nationalism & Patriotism
• Index: Social Sciences

Ideas of Englishness, and of the English nation, have become a matter of renewed interest in recent years as a result of threats to the integrity of the United Kingdom and the perceived rise of that unusual thing, English nationalism. Interrogating the idea of an English nation, and of how that might compare with other concepts of nationhood, this book enquires into the origins of English national identity, partly by questioning the assumption of its long-standing existence. It investigates the role of the British empire - the largest empire in world history - in the creation of English and British identities, and the results of its disappearance. Considering the 'myths of the English' - the ideas and images that the English and others have constructed about their history and their sense of themselves as a people - the distinctiveness of English social thought (in comparison with that of other nations), the relationship between English and British identity and the relationship of Englishness to Europe, this wide-ranging, comparative and historical approach to understanding the particular nature of Englishness and English national identity, will appeal to scholars of sociology, cultural studies and history with interests in English and British national identity and debates about England's future place in the United Kingdom.

Chapter 1
Englishness and English National Identity

The English Question has recently moved from the margins of British political life to centre-stage. Fuelled by concerns about the perceived inequities of devolution and a growing sense that England and the English are losing out in this unbalanced Union, concerns about the future of England are provoking widespread public debate.

Institute for Public Policy Research 2008.

The Discovery of England and Englishness

If the systematic study of Englishness was a relatively undeveloped field until as late as the 1990s, scholars have been busily, even frantically, making up for the lack ever since. The obvious driving force of this new interest has been the threats to the unity and integrity of the United Kingdom. The Labour government’s devolution measures of 1998 raised, perhaps for the first time since the secession of Ireland in 1921, a serious question mark over the future of the United Kingdom. The Scots now once again had their own parliament; Wales and Northern Ireland had their national Assemblies. Where did the English stand in all this? Should they have their own parliament too? As the wealthiest and most populous part of the United Kingdom were they not the carriers of the rest – and should they continue to be so? Were the English, the original creators of the United Kingdom, also in some sense, and in some measure, its victims? Would they be better off alone – especially as the other groups in the kingdom seemed intent on establishing their own identities and perhaps even demanding outright independence? The Scots, the Welsh, the Irish, seemed to know who they were; but the English – who were they?

On 18 September 2014, at the request of the Scottish parliament, there was a referendum on Scottish independence. Oddly, it took place in Scotland only, the British government apparently deeming irrelevant the wishes of the rest of the United Kingdom. But not surprisingly it inspired an outpouring of public comment on the future of the United Kingdom, and of the relations of the various parts that compose it. For the English, faced with the possible secession of the second most important national group in the kingdom – union with whom has always been thought to be the lynch-pin of the multinational United Kingdom – it was inevitable that questions would be raised about their own identity, and their own future role in the kingdom.

The Scottish referendum – the Scots rejected independence – clearly marks an important, perhaps a defining, moment, in the evolution of the United Kingdom. It tells us, as we shall see, a good deal about its future, about the forces holding it together as well as those threatening to pull it apart. But what concerns us particularly here is its effect on England and the English. Where and in what ways does it fit into the debates about England and Englishness that had come to be so marked a feature of English intellectual and public culture in the two preceding decades? To what extent did it crystallize those debates? Before assessing the impact of the Scottish referendum we will need to consider the character of the scholarly and popular contributions to the public discussions of these years.

When we say that systematic study of Englishness only emerged in the 1990s, we do not mean to discount the volume, variety and value of the many contributions and commentaries that had appeared for many years before. The point is however that most of the running up to then had been made by literary scholars and cultural critics, often in the midst of other pursuits in which Englishness featured only incidentally. Thus there might be references to Chaucer and Englishness, or to Shakespeare’s view of England in his history plays, or the evocations of England in Blake. Wordsworth’s Cumbria and Hardy’s Wessex might also stimulate thoughts about regional Englishness, and about England as a patchwork of regions. But there were few attempts to relate English literature, in any systematic way, to the character of the English nation or to English national identity – except possibly to discern a vein of nostalgia for a lost England in more recent writing, or to examine how literature fuelled patriotic emotion during the world wars (see, for example, Lucas 1990; Gervais 1993; Easthope 1999; Fussell 1977).

There had also been a thriving tradition of commentary drawing on the genre of travel literature, in which authors journeyed at home, in their own country, to offer their thoughts on the national culture. Outstanding and celebrated examples of this kind were H.V. Morton’s In Search of England (1927), Joseph Priestley’s English Journey (1934), and George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Orwell was also the supreme practitioner of another type of commentary, that pioneered by Thomas Carlyle in his essays of the 1830s and 1840s (“Signs of the Times”, “Chartism”, etc.). This took the form of reflecting on “the condition of England” through an engagement with contemporary social and political issues. Edward Bulwer Lytton’s England and the English (1833) was an earlier example of the form but lacked Carlyle’s passion and incisiveness. In Orwell’s case, the best known essays are “The Lion and the Unicorn” (1941) and “The English People” (1947), but thoughts on the condition of England are to be found throughout his writings, including his novels. Anthony Hartley A State of England (1963), and Anthony Sampson’s highly-regarded Anatomy of Britain series (1962, 1965, 1982, 1992, 2004), might well be seen as a lively continuation of this tradition.

A third kind of writing that taught the English a good deal about themselves was that contributed by foreigners. That too had a distinguished tradition, going back at least to Voltaire’s Letters on England (1733). Later examples include Ralph Waldo Emerson’s English Traits (1856), Hippolyte Taine’s Notes on England (1860–70), Henry James’s English Hours (1905), and Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island (1995). Frequently, especially more recently, these reflections have been expressed in a humorous or satirical mode, though usually affectionately. Examples include G.J. Renier’s The English, Are They Human? (1931), George Mikes’s How to be an Alien (1946), and Ranjee Shahini’s The Amazing English (1948). In commenting on English perceptions, none of these however matched a merciless and wickedly hilarious native product, W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman’s 1066 and All That (1930) – for generations of sixth-formers, as Raphael Samuel remarks, “scholarship’s equivalent of a dirty book” (1998: 209; and see further Chapter 9, below).

What was lacking in these often engaging and illuminating accounts was close examination of the idea of Englishness, and of the development of English national identity. There was little to match the many studies of this kind to be found in the literature on French, German, Spanish, Italian, or Russian national identity – to go no further afield (for some examples see Kumar 2000: 594–5n3). There had been, it seems, no reason, no call, to study English national identity, still less that strange-sounding thing, English nationalism (see further on this Chapter 5, below). If, as is evident, much useful and fascinating material existed with which to attempt to grapple with these questions, it was generally as an off-shoot of other inquires, in which nationhood and national identity were not central concerns.

It is this situation that began to change in the 1990s. It might even be possible to date the change rather precisely, with the appearance in 1986 of the collective volume, Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920, edited by Robert Colls and Philip Dodd. Published on cheap paper by a new and relatively small press, it was nevertheless immediately hailed as a ground-breaking contribution, and widely praised by reviewers for its originality as well as its timeliness. It quickly established itself as a key text for thinking about the subject of English identity, the more so as it showed the importance of the period it examined as a critical time – what I have called “the moment of Englishness” – for originating certain themes which became central to most attempts to understand Englishness (Kumar 2003: 175–225; see also Chapter 6, below).

Colls went on to write a full-scale account of English identity, as well as to produce a biography of George Orwell which saw him as an “English rebel”, one expressing a peculiarly English style of opposition while remaining a passionate English patriot (Colls 2002, 2013). Another sign of the times was the publication in 1989 of an ambitious three-volume collection, Patriotism, edited by Raphael Samuel. The subtitle of these volumes was “The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity”, but as with all studies of this kind the contributors moved rather uneasily and unsteadily between “England” and “Britain”. Patriotism was a product of the enterprising and active History Workshop group – almost a movement – devoted to “people’s history”. Samuel, one of its founders, also continued his own individual and highly original form of investigation into Englishness in a series of later publications, sadly cut short by his untimely death in 1996 (Samuel 1989, 1994, 1999a).

In 1992 there appeared what is by general consent the most important single contribution to the new or renewed concern with Englishness, Linda Colley’s Britons. What might appear paradoxical, given the book’s title and its subject – the making of British identity – is easily explained by the fact that it was and is impossible to discuss Englishness without discussing Britishness (see further Chapter 5, below). England and Britain are two sides of the same coin, which is what principally creates the difficulty of defining a purely English identity (quite apart from the usual problem of talking about “pure” identities). What Colley showed was that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries an overriding British identity was formed (mainly in opposition to the “old enemy”, France) that subsumed the other identities – English, Scottish, Welsh – of Great Britain (Ireland she treated as a separate matter). The subsequent story of these other identities was a complicated interweaving with and occasional resistance to Britishness. But the great value of Colley’s study, and the reason why it achieved such prominence in the debates of the 1990s and after, was its unusual attention to the question of national identity as a subject for sustained historical investigation. This was relatively new at least for British historians (Colley herself is of Welsh origin). Theoretically sophisticated, stylishly written, and profusely illustrated, Britons supplied a rich deposit of historical material and a provocative set of ideas for thinking not just about Britishness but also Englishness and other forms of national identity in the United Kingdom.

The enthusiastic reception of Colley’s book made it clear that she had struck a chord. It also makes it clear that the new concern with Englishness and Britishness preceded, by at least a decade or so, the actual devolution measures introduced by the Labour government in 1998. Of course those measures themselves had emerged out of previous decades of grappling with the problem of devolved rule, going back to the 1970s and the Kilbrandon Commission on the Constitution of 1973. So it would be perfectly fair to regard devolution as the issue that re-charged the debates on English national identity, the more so as the impact of the Thatcherism of the 1980s had re-fuelled Scottish resentments and led to increased support for the Scottish National Party. For many of the long-standing nationalists, such as Tom Nairn, Thatcher was a godsend, revitalizing a Scottish nationalist movement that had faltered after the failure of the referendum on Scottish devolution in 1979 (Nairn 2003: xv–xvi; see also, Bogdanor 2001: 193–4).

There were, it is true, other causes of the rise of interest in Englishness at this time. Margaret Thatcher had, in her administrations of the 1980s, put a great stress on national unity and British patriotism (“putting the Great back in Great Britain”). Like many others before and since – including her successor John Major – “Britain” was often a stand-in for “England”. Nationalism was part of Thatcher’s strategy in her victorious war with the trade unions, portrayed as putting class before nation. Her other war, the Falklands War of 1982, was even more successful, generating a frenzy of old-style jingoism (Barnett 1982). Both stances secured her a resounding victory in the 1983 General Election. Thatcher’s espousal of nationalism, reminiscent of Churchill and unusual in any British leader since the Second World War, stirred up, as did most elements of Thatcherism, fierce divisions in British society; but it undoubtedly put questions of national identity on the public agenda (it was indeed the surge of British nationalism at the time of the Falklands War that led to the soul-searching on the Left and the series of History Workshop conferences that resulted in the volumes of Patriotism).

More significantly, there was “Europe”. After much heart-searching, and amidst bitter divisions that joined sections of the left with those of the right, Britain had joined the European Economic Community (later the European Union) in 1973. But she remained an uncertain and in many ways not whole-heartedly committed member – choosing, for instance, not to adopt the euro as her currency when all other members did so. Margaret Thatcher and her successor as Prime Minister, John Major, were both notable “Eurosceptics”, ensuring that a traditional attitude of difference from – and superiority to – “the Continent” would remain strong at the highest levels.¹ Lingering attachment to the empire and the Commonwealth meant that European integration was seen as a threat to long-standing ties (as it certainly seemed to people in the Commonwealth). There was also the stress – evinced eventually in Labour’s Tony Blair as much as in Thatcher and Major – on the “special relationship” with the United States, and the importance of the Atlantic Community. Such an attitude led Blair to commit Britain firmly behind the United States when it invaded Iraq in 2003 – to the consternation of most of Britain’s fellow-members of the EU.²

As, in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–9, problems mounted within the European Union, there was a corresponding growth of Euroscepticism within Britain, and especially England. A marked sign of this was the growing popularity of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), one of whose leading demands was withdrawal from the EU.³ Responding to this threat to their power, the Conservative government of David Cameron promised a referendum on the European Union in 2017, if the Conservatives were returned to office in the 2015 election. Attitudes towards “Europe”, from which England had long sought to distance herself, were bound to colour conceptions of national identity (see Chapter 4, below; also Smith 2010). Growing Euroscepticism was therefore, both before and after devolution, one of the forces driving the revival of interest in and concern for English national identity (see Gifford 2008; Wellings 2010, 2012; Vines 2014).⁴

At an even higher level of generality, there was the impact of globalization. Some time ago, Eric Hobsbawm (1977) had pointed out that globalization had had a peculiar and paradoxical effect on nationalism. At one level it seemed to nullify nationalism, by reducing the importance of the nation-state and thereby making its prospective achievement by those nations still lacking a state – the Scots, the Catalans, the Quebecois – a somewhat empty aspiration. But precisely because of this, argued Hobsbawm, precisely because it did not matter, the international system was now more hospitable towards nationalism, especially the nationalism of small nations. Since nation-states, with the exception of a few super-states, were not really independent any more, why not let as many as wanted to flourish? They would still, as a matter of necessity, be locked into the global system dominated by a few larg...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Englishness and English National Identity
• 2 Empire and English Nationalism
• 3 English and French National Identity: Comparisons and Contrasts
• 4 Britain, England and Europe: Cultures in Contraflow
• 5 Negotiating English Identity: Englishness, Britishness and the Future of the United Kingdom
• 6 When Was the English Nation?
• 7 Empire, Nation and National Identities
• 8 Sociology and the Englishness of English Social Theory
• 9 1066 and All That: Myths of the English
• 10 William Morris and Englishness
• Index