The Good Brexiteer’s Guide to English Lit

John Sutherland

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781780239927
• eBook ISBN:
  9781789140149
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

What is Nigel Farage's favourite novel? Why do Brexiteers love Sherlock Holmes? Is Philip Larkin the best Brexit poet ever? Through the politically relevant side road of English literature, John Sutherland quarries the great literary minds of English history to assemble the ultimate reading list for Brexiteers.
What happened to Britain on 24 June 2016 shook the country to its roots. The Brexit vote changed Britain. But despite its referendum victory, Brexit is peculiarly hollow. It is an idea without political apparatus, without sustaining history, without field-tested ideology. Without thinkers. It is like Frankenstein's monster waiting for the lightning bolt. In this irreverent and entertaining new guide, Sutherland suggests some stuffing for the ideological cavity at the heart of the Brexit cause. He looks for nationalistic meaning in the work of William Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, in modern classics like The Queen and I and London Fields, and in the national anthem, school songs and great poetry of the country. Sutherland explores what Britain meant, means and will mean, and shows how great literary works have a shaping influence on the world.
Witty and insightful, and with a preface by John Crace, this book belongs on the shelves of all good Brexiteers and diehard Remoaners alike.

REFERENCES

1 See Disraeli’s Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845). Disraeli’s ‘One Nation’ conservatism is routinely evoked at annual party conferences.

2 Nietzsche’s assertion, in The Antichrist, is that the Cross is not an argument.

3 I have recently reviewed for the New York Times, with hearty approval for its thesis, Martin Puchner’s The Written World: How Literature Shaped Civilization (New York, 2017).

4 It vexed Spender mightily if one called it a tapestry. Neither is the Bayeux hanging, properly speaking, a tapestry, but an embroidery.

5 I.e. leader. Chiefs, like husbands, gave rings to the most loyal of their followers. See the exquisite Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Seafarer’, recorded in the tenth-century Exeter Book.

The passage quoted tells us how Byrhtnoth raises his spear and shield and vauntingly defies the invader (who can see but not hear him). He tells the Danes’ messenger (who has brought the peremptory demand to submit and pay, as usual) to return to his heathen masters. The bill will not be paid this year. Byrhtnoth ends, scornfully, that it would be a pity for them to have come so far and not have a battle. Let battle commence.

6 The term ‘carpetbaggers’ originated with the Union administrators who carried carpet bags (travelling bags) to ‘reconstruct’ the South, after the American Civil War. They were hated.

7 Perhaps more symbolic than historic. There is even some doubt that Harold was killed by an arrow in the eye, as portrayed in the Bayeux Tapestry. Legend is often stronger than fact.

8 The name means ‘Final Judgment Book’. Only God, when he descended at the end of days, could countermand it.

9 The Normans also invaded Ireland, and created an English ‘lordship’ over the land in 1169. There is a pretty congruity in the DUP supporting the maimed Theresa May on her way to Brexit in 2017.

10 See Tony Palmer’s film England, My England (1995), celebrating that most English of composers, Henry Purcell.

11 Simply search for ‘red cross tattoo’ online to get a veritable gallery of chesty variations.

12 See W. M. Thackeray’s series in Punch, ‘Novels by Eminent Hands’ (1847). Bulwer-Lytton’s hand was more eminent than most – he was a baronet, and made sure his readers knew it.

13 The reference is to the comic travesty of English history as taught in schools 1066 and All That (1930), by W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman. It is delightful, relaxed reading for the Brexiteer, and divides its chronicle into ‘good things’ and ‘bad things’.

14 See George MacDonald Fraser, The Hollywood History of the World (London, 1988). More about Fraser later, vis-à-vis Flashman.

15 Or of having your bowels ‘liquefied’ by an enemy spear, an alternative and perhaps more plausible account of Harold’s death at Hastings.

16 The Good Brexiteer will, of course, lament the fact that the ‘Chunnel’ (Channel Tunnel) no longer terminates at Waterloo station.

17 Brooke chose the Shakespearian sonnet form for this poem, not the Petrarchan, to add a patriotic grace note.

18 In 1848–9 Bulwer-Lytton (again) wrote the Malory-inspired epic King Arthur, which he called ‘the grand effort of my literary life’.

19 See P.J.C. Field, Romance and Chronicle: A Study of Malory’s Prose Style (London, 1971).

20 For more on this quintessentially English directory, see ‘DNB/OED’.

21 Morte d’Arthur, for example, is most readily read, with three or four mouse clicks, on Project Gutenberg, free of charge: www.gutenberg.org.

22 I read on 30 November 2017 that President Macron intends French to take over as the world language, now that the UK is leaving the EU. Some hopes, mon brave.

23 An echo of his biblical peer, Solomon: ‘Comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love’ (Song of Solomon 2:5).

24 Hence, in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), for example, the Party’s great effort is to primitivize the English language for the people into ‘Newspeak’ – a few hundred words. The Party will, of course, retain ownership of the whole range of English words (Oldspeak).

25 Details are laid out at more length in Green’s Wikipedia entry.

26 See, again, the Wikipedia entry on Dominic Chappell.

27 As reported in The Guardian, 26 April 2016.

28 The result was 66.3 per cent Leave, 33.6 per cent Remain. In early 2017 Sir [still ‘Sir’] Philip Green agreed to kick in £360 million to the BHS pension fund. Chappell went on trial in August 2017. They went for the sprat not the whale, as Frank Field MP sardonically noted.

29 Battered with the hard dints of martyrdom and persecution that previous generations had suffered for their Christian faith.

30 The red-cross flag, the insignia of St George, became universal on English soldiers’ battledress as early as the fourteenth century. Scotland has always displayed the St Andrew’s cross.

31 ‘Boadicea’ is the romanized name given by Tacitus to the Iceni queen. Modern accounts go variously for Buduica, Boudicca or Buduica....

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• PREFACE by John Crace
• INTRODUCTION
• The Battle of Maldon
• Domesday Book
• The Tattooed Heart
• Malory and King Arthur: The Literary Invention of England
• The Literature of the People
• The Bloudie Crosse
• The Brexit Boadicea
• Boadicea in Stone
• Enter the Maybot, Clanking
• Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum: I Smell the Blood of an Englishman!
• Shakespeare: ‘This England’
• The Oxford Book of English Verse
• School Songsters
• Brexiteers, Buccaneers, Musketeers; or, ‘Up Yours, Señors!’
• Dickens, Anti-Brexiteer Extraordinaire
• Our National Anthem
• Gibbon: The Congenital British Non Serviam
• Ivanhoe and the Norman Yoke
• Jane Austen’s ‘England’
• W. E. Henley
• Rivers of Blood Wash over Our Green and Pleasant Land
• Brexit’s Green and Pleasant Land
• A. E. Housman and Thomas Hardy
• DNB/OED
• Land of Hope and Glory
• Orwell: Quarter-French, Wholly English
• Rhodes Must Fall. Kipling Must Go. Buchan Goes On and On
• Kipling Again
• Nigel Farage’s Favourite Novel
• King Solomon’s (Not Africa’s) Mines
• Lady Chatterley’s Lover: ‘Old England’ is Gone Forever
• The Amis Objection
• Philip Larkin: The Greatest English Poet of Our Time
• Why the Brexiteer Loves Sherlock
• Mad Dogs and Englishmen (and Jeeves)
• The End of Jeeves
• Invasion by Immigration – From Calais, Mars or Wherever
• Dracula: Illegal Immigrant
• God Loves England (Does He Not?)
• Flashman
• Goldfinger
• The Poison Cabinet
• Lost Englands
• Virginia Woolf’s Farewell to England (and the World)
• The Queen and I
• The Children of Men
• London Fields
• England, England
• Take to the Boats!
• McEwan’s Objection
• Hail Hilary!
• The Satanic Verses: ‘Not English!’
• Epilogue
• REFERENCES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS