Teaching & Learning Guide for: Englishness and The Victorians
Authors: Ebbatson Roger 
Published: August 2007

Author's Introduction

The question of what it means to be ‘English’, and the national and cultural identities nominated by this term, are of crucial significance at the present time. But the roots of this debate are to be located in previous eras and the issues can only be fully understood within this historical perspective. Historically, Englishness has been constituted by hybridity, adaptation and linguistic absorption, and these features are especially prominent characteristics of the nineteenth century. The conjuncture, during the long nineteenth century, of the industrial revolution, economic liberalism, and massive colonial expansion brought issues of nationhood and identity into focus as never before. Indeed, much of the current cultural and literary discussion of Englishness reaches back to the Victorian period, suggesting that an understanding of questions of landscape, empire and self are integral to the history of the national formation.

Author Recommends

I. Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

Argues that Englishness is largely defined through a sense of place, such as the rose‐garden, cathedral close or the cricket field. Such locales serve to fix what is unfixed and threatened by a fear of the Other. The linguistic theories propounded in the eighteenth century become embodied, for instance, in Wordsworth's poetry with its ‘redemptive localism’, and subsequently in the paintings of Turner and essays of his disciple, John Ruskin. The sense of a localised and mnemonic Englishness were tested and redefined, for instance, in relation to the Governor Eyre controversy with its haunting sense of the ‘primitive’ unsettling the boundaries of the nation.

R. Colls and P. Dodd, Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920 (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1986).

This collection of essays marked a significant intervention, during the Thatcherite 1980s, in debates around the concept of Englishness. In the period under consideration the new relation between university and public school, the reconceptualisation of ‘manliness’, and the invitation to the ruling classes to participate in the national culture went hand in hand with the colonisation of the ‘other’ and with concerns for linguistic purity. Contributors made important contributions, for example, to the definition of a semi‐mythicised ‘South Country’ and to the literary, musical, artistic and architectural manifestations of that dream‐land.

B. Doyle, English and Englishness (London: Routledge, 1989).

An expert account of the rise of English in the nineteenth century as an authentic subject of university study and as a challenge to the hegemony of classics in the educational curriculum. Doyle shows how this development went hand‐in‐hand with increasing professionalisation and a sense of national identity. The valued qualities in the mid‐Victorian period were masculinity, activity and concretion allied to notions of racial purity read under the imprint of Social Darwinism and one of the consequences of this ideological formation was the marginalisation of women.

A. Easthope, Englishness and National Culture (London: Routledge, 1998).

A vigorous and entertaining study which argues that nationalism is a product of modernity, but is also generated ‘from below’, and not simply ideological. The much‐vaunted binary opposition of speech community‐modernity is imaginary and is based upon notions of a non‐sexual collectivity. All identity is ‘plural and disjunct’, but the operation of Standard English serves to extend hegemony over regional variants. The relation between culture is problematised here and the individual's relation to ‘national desire’ inventively explored. The fundamental key to Englishness is perceived as being founded in the empiricist tradition which is manifest in both journalism and historical writing, and takes the literary form of an ‘English’ anti‐modernism.

R. Ebbatson, An Imaginary England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).

A theoretically inflected study which seeks to reveal the binary tropes underpinning national identity whilst demonstrating how these were perpetually undermined by the liminal, colonial and marginal. Argues that Victorian literature projects and reinflects the nation‐state and a wider imperial moment. Examination of the political unconscious of a variety of symptomatic non‐canonical texts from 1840–1920 reveals a tendency to identify England as a ‘utopian non‐place’. Thus, for instance, Tennyson's English Idylls are marked by traces of difference and alterity related to the moment of Chartism, Richard Jefferies’ writing is imbricated with issues of land‐ownership and class, whilst some of Hardy's lesser‐known texts explore gender and imperial issues often overlooked in his work. These elements point forward to later developments in literary definitions of Englishness (‘Q’, Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, D. H. Lawrence) in the period up to the Great War.

D. Gervais, Literary Englands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

An elegant study which traces pastoral notions of Englishness in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gervais demonstrates how the idealised image of labour became intrinsic to Englishness so that the old yeoman class was identified specifically with nationhood. Whilst chivalric notions in Tennyson, Ruskin or Disraeli were essentially backward‐looking, Morris's utopian thinking, like that of Richard Jefferies, offers a re‐vision of England as ‘a place of skilful and determined work’. Later representations of England in Housman, Kipling and the Edwardians, reinflect and modify this structure of feeling under the impress of empire and war.

S. Gikandi, Maps of Englishness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

A significant book which presupposes that Englishness is the product of the colonial project. Englishness is elicited in the gap between metropolis and centre, and this is exemplified in Victorian travel writing (Mary Seacole, Mary Kinglsey, J. A. Froude, Trollope). The imaginary spectacles of the imperial centre, such as the Jubilee celebrations or the colonial exhibitions, served to create a link with the periphery but were undermined by ‘the rise of the black subject’ exemplified in the Morant Bay uprising or the Sepoy Rebellion. The contested nature of Englishness in its fraught relation with the colony leads dialectically to the emphasis upon the liminal and ‘primitive’ in twentieth‐century writing.

K. Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Argues that English identities were founded in the gaining of empire rather than any ‘authentic’ quality of Englishness per se. The issue of Englishness was primarily one of state policy rather than nationhood. Only when the empire was beginning to come under threat could full‐blooded nationalism emerge as a potent force, so that the nation‐state is a purely modern phenomenon and can be traced to the critical period 1880–1920. This is a vigorously argued and cogent study, though probably too prescriptive in ruling out earlier ‘moments’ of Englishness, such as the seventeenth century; but the line of thinking is important, and the link between national identity and empire well made.

J. Lucas, England and Englishness (London: Hogarth, 1990).

Lucas trenchantly identifies poetic tradition and pastoral vision with an openly reactionary politics, and demonstrates his argument in a powerful reading of class and power relations in Clare's poetry, an oeuvre interpreted as voicing the views of the outsider or ‘outlaw’. By contrast Tennyson's chivalric notion of Englishness leads inevitably towards retreat, defeat and seclusion.

D. Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion, 2003).

Underlying opposing arguments about appropriate land‐use in the countryside are deep issues of social, economic, aesthetic and political implications. The morality of the ‘disfigurement’ of the landscape by development, and the theme of the liberatory force of nature are both features of the modernising project in relation to England. Matless engagingly reviews back‐to‐the land movements of both left and right, and examines the rise of such phenomena as the garden city and the new towns in ways which suggest how the debate begun in the late Victorian period is still a live issue today.

R. Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973).

This left‐liberal classic text traces the pastoral connotations of Englishness via a historical survey in which the nineteenth century is given crucial significance. Williams registers, for instance, the loss and melancholy attendant upon enclosure in Clare, and the gradual erosion of the ‘knowable community’ in Hardy, George Eliot et al., and compares this with the power and disturbance of the new urban centres. As the nation becomes more urbanised, so dialectically the concept of the countryside as repository of a genuine ‘Englishness’ grows more potent.

Online Materials

Albion Magazine Online

http://www.zyworld.com/albionmagazineonline

A public service web‐based magazine published biannually and devoted to questions of English identity, character and culture, offering ‘a voice to modern English people’. This journal provides a forum for debates and issues surrounding national identity and includes lead articles and a lively body of reviews of books, films, music and other cultural material related to the theme of Englishness.

The Other Within: Anthropology of Englishness

http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/englishness.html

The Pitt‐Rivers Museum in Oxford possesses over 40,000 objects from different areas of England which demonstrates what is means to be English. This collection helps to define and explore the links between collections and the folklore movement and also the anthropological concept of ‘survivals’ in English culture.

Icons of Englishness

http://www.icons.org.uk

A government sponsored Web site which claims to display characteristic icons of national identity such as Stonehenge, Punch and Judy, a cup of tea, Henry VIII, Alice in Wonderland, and the Angel of the North.

Sample Syllabus

Englishness and Victorian Poetry

Objectives:

To grasp the concept of Englishness as it was defined in the poetry of the Victorian era.

To learn how to utilise and deploy reference and primary materials.

To become familiar with literary expressions of Englishness within the period.

To understand and define the critical context.

Required Text

F. O’Gorman, Victorian Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).

Introduction: the death of Romanticism

The Brownings: Home thoughts from Abroad

Reading: E. Barrett Browning: ‘Runaway Slave’, Sonnets from the Portuguese

Robert Browning: ‘Porphyro's Lover’, ‘My Last Duchess’, ‘The Bishop Orders his Tomb’, ‘Two in the Campagna’

Tennyson: Englishness, Landscape and Elegy

Reading: ‘Mariana’, ‘Lady of Shalott’, ‘Morte d’Arthur’, In Memoriam (extracts)

Liberalism and the Crisis of National Identity

Reading: Clough: Amours de Voyage

Arnold: ‘Empedocles’, ‘The Scholar Gypsy’, ‘Dover Beach’

Presentation: Seminar papers on poetry and national identity

Gender and National Formation

Reading: C. Rossetti: ‘In an Artist's Studio’, ‘Goblin Market’, ‘Resurgam’, ‘Silent Night’

Webster: ‘Circe’

Catholicism and Nationhood

Reading: Hopkins: ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’

The Rural Vision

Reading: Hardy

England and Empire

Reading: Kipling

Nation and Decline

Reading: Wilde; Symons; Dowson