English and Englishness

Brian Doyle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781032297163
• eBook ISBN: 9781136491238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

First published in 2002. This volume is part of the New Accent series looking at English and popular culture, language, policy, fiction and democracy. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change; to stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study.

1

English literature and cultural identities

The crisis of leadership

The mechanisms through which a cultural and institutional identity for English studies was established were forged within a wider social movement which developed between the 1880s and the 1920s. This movement, for which the English Association provides our focal point, was in turn directly dependent upon wider contemporary cultural and institutional initiatives and experiments having as their target greater social efficiency. During this period of arrested imperial expansion and international competition many influential figures and associations took the view that the achievement of such social efficiency required a renewal of cultural leadership at a national level.¹ This new cultural leadership was articulated in terms of a spiritual character or aura which would elicit consent on the part of the governed, and was of immense influence for the early development of the institutionalized discipline of English studies. Indeed, the whole period is marked by a series of attempts to define what specific kinds of leadership qualities would be needed to maintain the overseas empire as well as ensuring secure government at home. It involved spasmodic attempts at boosting advanced teaching and research in science and other fields of ‘modern’ study, especially as applied to industrial organization and technological development. More consistently though, the machinery of an expanded state engaged with general initiatives in the sphere of ‘culture’, including non-scientific forms of education.

On the whole these efforts carried a national emphasis, as a number of educationalists, politicians, philosophers, and political theorists searched for new and more efficient ways of building and disseminating a national sense of ancestry, tradition, and universal ‘free’ citizenship. However, the cultural negotiations involved were problematic since they generated tensions between individualism and the investment of cultural authority in the state. Furthermore, while a revitalized ruling and administering class might be seen to require infusions of men of wealth and leadership from slightly lower social layers, this could prove acceptable only under conditions in which new procedures for educational cultivation had been established. Although it had become easier for some middle-class men (or their sons) to earn membership of the national ruling culture by Edwardian times, their status as true ‘gentlemen’ remained equivocal in an atmosphere of continued mistrust of the business community, albeit tempered by outbreaks of anxiety over the volatility of the lower orders which it was felt the task of their middle-class superiors to defuse.²

Thus, the period between 1880 and 1920 was marked by a sequence of strategies to combine under the loose banner of ‘efficiency’ traditions of aristocratic cultural mystique with utilitarian programmes of industrial and social administration. From this perspective, the working class was seen as the object for colonization by its cultural superiors in order that ‘respectable’ members of the class be separated from their ‘rough’ residue, and the leaders of the class be made fit for a limited role in governing the nation.³ In this process any shadows of socialist organization were to be dispersed by the radiance of a common culture and heritage. The nation was organized not only in class terms but also in terms of gender and age. It was conceived as the proper function of the nation's mothers to rear (within families suitably inoculated against any possibility of communism in the home)⁴ fine imperial specimens of manhood. Schooling also had a central place in such initiatives. As a crucial feature of their role in cultural reproduction, schools were expected to inculcate in the nation's children a proper sense of patriotic moral responsibility. In so far as schooling proved too ‘mechanical’ a procedure for influencing the pupils' subjectivities in the approved manner,⁵ efforts were also made to influence home life in a more direct fashion. This was a tendency which coincided with the elimination of mothers and young children from employment in the wake of technological innovations which particularly diminished the kinds of work in which traditionally they had participated.⁶

In many ways the Settlement movement of the 1880s and 1890s provided test sites for these initiatives. Here young men (some of whom, such as C. E. Vaughan,⁷ subsequently supported the elevation of English within the national system of education), fired by a somewhat secularized ‘politics of conscience’, engaged in missionary work addressed to the cultural colonization of the great mass of the excluded population.⁸ Deep in the heartland of ‘unknown England’ that was London's East End, they tested their aura of cultural mystique against the potentially demystifying pressures of the East End world.⁹ It was upon this forcing-ground that those traditional modes of cultural authority, reinforced by an Oxbridge education, could systematically be reworked in such a way as to govern (or professionally administer) a class-divided industrial society.¹⁰

The new modes of official and semi-official supervision and government are best viewed in terms of a general ‘collectivist’ modification of older patterns of ‘individualism’. In attempting to develop a new collective sense of Englishness, intellectuals and administrators alike applied themselves to what, at an earlier (and indeed later) time would have been seen as an ‘un-English’ and idealist version of the national life. This vision was directly concerned with the governing of an (at least potentially) spiritually organic and mechanically efficient nation. In its more philosophical aspects such intellectual work was addressed to providing a theoretical underpinning for a collectivist social outlook which would be immune equally from the mechanical vulgarities of statism and the revolutionary demands of socialism.¹¹ It was only in the context of the theoretical work of T. H. Green and Bernard Bosanquet, and of Fabian ‘municipal’ revisions of the programme of socialism, that William Harcourt, the prominent Liberal politician, could claim in the 1890s that ‘we're all socialists now’. The new philosophy of society moved beyond any simple vision of the state as a set of administrative institutions, towards a vision of it as an almost venerable ideal form: a form which claimed to be able to dissolve political struggle in the larger flow of the national way of life, in the name of common culture and common economic interest.¹²

At a more practical level, but under the shadow of such an ideal, went the building of a series of administrative layers at the sensitive ideological point between the official state and the mass of the people. It is, indeed, at this very point that the movement to advance the status of ‘English’ in education must be situated if its particular history as a cultural and administrative form is to be understood. The advancement of the newly invented discipline of English must thus be examined in the context of a growth in the number of semi-autonomous professions in fields like public administration and welfare, journalism, publicity, and the arts, and of the establishment of national cultural institutions geared to providing a schedule for organizing the nation.

From classics to English

It was only during the early decades of the present century that English studies (or, more simply, ‘English’) in its recognizably modern disciplinary form began to offer an educationally significant challenge to the intellectual and cultural prestige long invested in classics. As MacPherson has argued, the elevation of the vernacular language and literature within higher education was an attempt to sustain the notion of a ‘liberal education’ in the face of tendencies towards academic specialization on the one hand, and the dwindling popularity of classics on the other. The introduction of the national language and literature at Oxbridge was seen (at least to begin with) as a broadening and rejuvenation of the ‘literary’ curriculum which would thereby be sustained as a foundation for more specialized study.¹³ Benjamin Jowett (1817–93), Master of Balliol College, Oxford, and one of the modernizing dons who supported endeavours to extend university education and to attract men from new social classes to Oxford, considered that ‘classical study is getting in some respects worn out, and the plan proposed [the introduction of English Language and Literature at Oxford] would breathe new life into it’.¹⁴

One of the signs of the eclipse of classics by English was the foundation in 1907 of the English Association which was to propound very effectively the view that the new discipline had become ‘our finest vehicle for a genuine humanistic education’ and that ‘its importance in this respect was growing with the disappearance of Latin and Greek from the curricula of our schools and universities’.¹⁵ However, the eventual transference from the classical curriculum to a modern alternative, and the enhancement of English and Englishness which was one of its major products, drew on the raw materials provided by the scholarly work of the middle decades of the nineteenth century. In the process of inventing the new English, these materials were substantially transformed to serve a nationaland imperial culture. In fact, it was only as a consequence of this earlier work of literary, linguistic, and historical categorizing that it became possible for a sense of national and vernacular ‘ancestry’ to challenge the cultural and educational rule of the classical languages and literatures. Arthur Quiller-Couch, in a lecture given while he was Professor of English Literature at Cambridge in 1916, recalled the impact of this challenge on his contemporaries several decades earlier:

Few in this room are old enough to remember the shock of awed surprise which fell upon young minds presented, in the late 'seventies and early 'eighties of the last century with Freeman's Norman Conquest or Green's Short History of the English People; in which as through parting clouds of darkness, we beheld our ancestry, literary as well as political, radiantly legitimised.¹⁶

New cultural strategies

We can now attend to some of the specific ways in which these general initiatives were worked through, from an explicitly cultural standpoint. The notion of‘degeneracy’ is important in this context. Around and within this notion a constant play with gender, nationality, self, age, and maturity can be traced. The esteemed characteristics were those associated with masculinity, activity and concrete statement, and personal poise and self-mastery, together with a concern for racial purity or at least racial vigour. Variants of social Darwinism were used to authorize British competition with other nations, attempts at racial perfectibility, and preferred notions of essential human subjectivity. For example, the idea of advanced education as a process for the ‘regeneration of the self’ was strongly propounded by modernizing Oxbridge dons like Mark Pattison, an influential educationalist and Head of Lincoln College, Oxford from 1861.¹⁷ For Pattison the essence of the human self (essential subjectivity) was the passive human subject produced by ‘nature’. However, a truly ‘liberal’ or ‘higher’ education could inculcate a higher subjectivity which transcended nature by offering experiences, feelings, and pleasures that were beyond the mindless routines thought to be engaged in by most of mankind.¹⁸ The ‘culture’ offered by a liberal education could thus control nature by generating a higher form of ‘life’ – by teaching ‘the art to live’.¹⁹

This whole cultural ensemble was held together in a manner which bore a striking resemblance to ways of dealing with statism and socialism which have been considered above. Collectivist strategies attempted to restrain any tendencies towards statism or socialism by tempering the full rigours of laissez-faire capitalism through a renewal of state and semi-state institutions. In the case of general cultural strategies, the excesses of full-blown conceptions of social Darwinism were qualified by re-interpreting self-governing natural processes as capable of cultural modification (as in Pattison's scheme). This led to a considerable investment of energy in shaping from above the constituents of the national culture and national character; and to the identification and removal of any tendencies towards degeneration within the national ‘body’.

These procedures played a central part in the construction of the new English. They could not, however, have been sustained without the development of parallel general educational initiatives of unprecedented scope. It is important here, though, not to take the notion of ‘education’ in any narrow sense, since the mission of national education as it operated between 1880 and 1920 encompassed institutions, events, and locations well beyond the scope of education as it has since come to be formally conceived. Education took place not only in schools and colleges, but in the home and at local and national gatherings (as in the case of the National Home Reading Union);²⁰ at public galleries and museums; and even within city streets, in the signifying processes encouraged through the erection of monuments of a national flavour in prominent positions within the urban landscape.²¹ Nor was the rural landscape omitted from such initiatives: the National Trust was founded in 1895 to secure the permanent preservation of places and buildings of ‘beauty’ and of‘historic’ interest; that is, to sustain the national heritage in its physical and geographical aspects. In 1897 a permanent site for British works of art was established as the National Gallery of Modern Art (Tate Gallery) at Millbank, London, to display as well as preserve approved works of visual art. Similarly the National Portrait Gallery, which was permanently established in 1896, and the Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900) stand as counterparts at the level of individual portrayal and biography, to the work of categorization and charting that went into producing monumental works on the national history, language, and literature such as the Cambridge History of English Literature (1907–16) and the New (later Oxford) English Dictionary (1884–1928).

Even within more formal patterns of education, initiatives ranged from those which tended increasingly towards the institutionalization of a national system overseen by the state (Education Acts from 1870 to 1902 and beyond; the formation of School Boards an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• THE NEW ACCENT SERIES
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• General editor's preface
• Introduction: English and popular culture
• 1 English literature and cultural identities
• 2 English, the state, and cultural policy
• 3 English as a masculine profession
• 4 English, culture, and democracy
• Conclusion: Fiction, culture, and society
• Notes
• References
• Index