SOCIAL STUDIES
Beowulf to
steampunk
The gap between England’s idea
of itself and the reality
ROBERT BEVAN
IMAGINING ENGLAND’S PAST
Inspiration, enchantment, obsession
SUSAN OWENS
320pp. Thames and Hudson. £25.
ABOUT ENGLAND
DAVID MATLESS
360pp. Reaktion. £20.
THE FULL ENGLISH
A journey in search of a country and its people
STUART MACONIE
352pp. HarperNorth. £20.
“T
HOSE DARLING BYEGONE TIMES … with
their delicious fortresses, and their dear
old dungeons, and their delightful places of
torture.” Mrs Skewton in Charles Dickens’s Dombey
and Son was in her element visiting Warwick Castle.
Her vicious nostalgia is recalled in Susan Owens’s
Imagining England’s Past: Inspiration, enchantment,
obsession, a book that draws on cultural products
from the novels of Walter Scott to the designs of
Laura Ashley. Owens’s exploration of how the
English have, for more than 1,000 years, conjured
“Englishness” into being, then pondered the matter
of identity, is a useful antidote to the idea that the
English are too relaxed and confident in their nation-
hood to bother with self-examination (as Jeremy
Paxman argued in The English, 1998). The opposite
is true. As Owens shows, England has been in con-
stant dialogue with itself from Beowulf to Yinka
Shonibare, by way of Stonehenge, steampunk and
psychedelia. There is nothing new about nostalgia.
The emphasis for Owens, a former curator of
paintings for the V&A, is on the ancient – or at least
the mining of the ancient in the interests of an
unfolding recent past, a backstitch narrative con-
stantly looping about itself in order to create a solid
line through time. “My story”, she writes, “is …
about the sense of place that is so central to English
art and literature, often amplified into the visionary
mysticism that seems happily to coexist with prag-
matism in the national psyche.” Her discussion of
medieval accounts of the origin myths – of the
English as a tribe of Trojans arriving in a land of
giants, then the meandering, mutable world of King
Arthur – is particularly strong. Malory’s Le Morte
d’Arthur, in a printed edition by William Caxton,
informed the Tudor use of Arthur to secure their
dynasty, from the naming of Prince Arthur to Henry
VIII’s repainting of the fake Round Table at Win-
chester in an effort to impress Charles V. Similarly,
the meaning and purpose of follies in the landscape,
or of Stonehenge – including its assigned role as
Boudica’s tomb – have been regularly adjusted to fit
the propaganda needs of the nation state.
A subtext of the book is its examination of
historiology and the place of evidence in history.
The changing perception of antiquarians from
snappers-up of unconsidered trifles to scholars of
material culture is a significant current, if not, as in
Rosemary Hill’s Time’s Witness (2021), the main
channel. The material record from which these
stories of national identity spring has been contin-
ually manipulated for ideological or venal ends,
including by monks faking historic parchments,
22
carrying them around in their pockets and spilling
liquids across them to age their appearance.
For the most part Owens explores the facts and
fictions of national self-image as a closed loop of
culture informing culture, rather than reflecting
politics. Yet it is no accident that reinventions of
image and tradition take place most noticeably at
times of crisis and disruption – after the Norman
invasion, during industrialization and urbanization,
in response to world war or to modernity itself.
George Orwell’s essay “The Lion and the Unicorn:
Socialism and the English genius” opens: “As I write,
highly civilized human beings are flying overhead,
trying to kill me”. Today we have a permanent state
of rupture – Brexit, deindustrialization, independ-
ence movements, the scars of empire – to thank for
another round of self-examination. What is British
and what is English? The degree of interchangeability
is rarely parsed, and Owens’s book, which discusses
Scott as a part of the English imagination, is no
exception.
Owens is nevertheless a skilled writer who under-
stands the power of frosted footsteps on sheep-
cropped turf to conjure up the pastoral, so often
the leitmotif of Englishness. The elaboration of the
picturesque is, after all, one of the country’s great
non-literary contributions to European visual cul-
ture. Her ventures into the urban and industrial are
also welcome. But it is unfortunate that, at the start
of too many sections, she ventures into the historic
present – Hilary Mantel territory – to explore this
sense of place. Her reliance on this device increases
as the subject sections get shorter; one senses
Owens’s impatience with her material in her desire
to cover the ground. The result is a book that feels
at times like a miscellany.
In “Nostalgia”, for example, we bustle from
William Cobbett’s Rural Rides to Thomas Hardy, the
sentimental painter Myles Birket Foster, Osbert
Lancaster, ley lines and the folk musicology of Ralph
Vaughan Williams and Arnold Dolmetch in barely
ten pages. Some passages are more elaborated than
others. There are especially shaky perspectives on
architecture – for instance reading the work of the
Arts & Crafts architect C. F. A. Voysey as essentially
revivalist, rather than that of a proto-modernist. For
all its breadth of learning and deft use of detail,
Owens’s book would have been better if she had
explored in depth the impact of the historic English
imagination on our current situation, rather than
simply presenting a chronological account of
moments at which we appear to have changed, or
reinforced, our opinion of ourselves.
TLS
The novelist John Fowles once remarked that the
colour of England is not the red, white and blue of
the Union flag or the red and white of St George,
but the green of the countryside. At a first glance,
About England by David Matless, author of Land-
scape and Englishness (1998), would seem to be
agree with him, because the book starts with a
somewhat dreary tour of the land around the
author’s native Beeston, near Nottingham. But
Matless recovers, organizing the rest of his material
into six valuable chapters on the post-imperial
decades from 1960 to the present, in which he
argues that our assumptions “concerning English-
ness, place and landscape were significantly shaped
in the 1960s and ’70s”.
To elaborate these assumptions he considers not
just place, but popular culture, art and architecture.
The class-conscious premiss of the BBC sitcom To
the Manor Born, for example, is seen as particularly
revealing. Matless also references Michael Brace-
well’s observation that the English enjoy the “shock
of the old”. This is evident among post-punk, rock
and electronica musicians, from the Durutti Column
and XTC to PJ Harvey and Goldfrapp (especially the
latter’s folk-inflected album Seventh Tree). For
Owens pop culture is mostly those aspects of it
that have been absorbed into the canon, while for
Matless the popular arts are valuable in themselves.
In some ways the phenomena deemed English by
Owens and Matless constitute a more informal,
scrapbook version of Pierre Nora’s multi-volume
celebration of French collective memory, published
from 1984 as Les Lieux de mémoire (Realms of
Memory). Here, places, symbols and concepts, from
the Panthéon to gastronomy, make up an index of
what it means to identify as French. As Perry Ander-
son has pointed out, Nora excluded from his lieux
the whole imperial history of France, reducing “all
these fateful exertions to an exhibition of tropical
knickknacks in Vincennes” (former site of the
ethnographical Musée de l’Homme). Matless, how-
ever, connects culture directly to the political. He
is alive to issues of identity, particularly when times
get tough and there is comfort in Anglo-Saxon,
sunken-lane certainties of shire and hearth. And he
“
is sensitive to still problematic realities such as our
repeated return to a white pastoral that edits out
the centuries-long presence of Tudor Africans, the
Owens Lascars, the Chinese, the Sikhs and the Irish – in
understands short, the inhabitants of empire. There is a fasci-
nating examination of Enoch Powell’s “babbling
the power brooks and rivers of blood” thinking that links the
of frosted retreat from the imperial to the reinforcement of a
footsteps on threatened English identity located in the pastoral
imagination: “Our generation,” said Powell, “is like
sheep-cropped one which comes home again after years of distant
turf to conjure wandering”, with “the curiosity of finding ourselves
once more kin with the old English”, who in stone
up the pastoral and effigy might “whisper to us the secret of this
charmed life of England”.
One of the lasting effects of that rhetoric, Matless
suggests, has been “to close down elaborations of
the relationship between English identity and white
identity, such that making any connection can
spark violent assertion or rejection.” This would
seem like no bad thing, except that the elision of
these identities continues unspoken. It is not made
entirely clear, but Matless appears to want instead
for the English to be able to assert an identity with-
out it being related to whiteness. This is muddy
territory. In challenging our neo-Powellite age he
quotes Ann Dummett’s A Portrait of English Racism
(1973). Dummett wrote that the real truth about
empire, and the wealth derived from the slave
trade, clashes with delusional or hypocritical ideas
among the English about their own decency (and
their contribution to abolition): “To accept and
understand the ugliness of the truth,” she wrote,
© CHRONICLE/ALAMY
”would, for many, tear apart their sense of personal
Robert Bevan is the and national identity.”
author of Monumental Stuart Hall once pointed out that while it might
Lies: Culture Wars be possible to redefine a more inclusive Britishness,
and the Truth about an acceptable English identity could prove more
the Past, 2022 of a challenge to Black Britons. Images of villages
AUGUST 18, 2023
 SOCIAL STUDIES

and country pubs appeared in both Ukip and Vote Maconie dwell in the twilight, the fading day, the in the pastoral. English regionalism could also
Leave material, and the recent culture-wars mon- crepuscular, perhaps because, as Melissa Harrison learn from home-nation devolution and become
stering of Corrine Fowler’s Colonial Countryside has written, “At dusk – if only briefly – one can another way of bringing Orwell’s warring British
project for the National Trust shows how far the imagine … the world is still unharmed”. When will family (from “The Lion and the Unicorn”) back to
journey to a more inclusive pastoral has to go. there be an English imagination that brings a closer the table. Such a rapprochement would have to
Towards the end of his book Matless ventures first alignment between the idea of ourselves and the involve London, seen as an outlier city-state, and
into the suburbs, then to England’s urban centres, actuality? Central to this would have to be a sense therefore avoided, by all these books. There is
where 83 per cent of the population live. (Rarely do of self that fully integrates the urban with the little hope of a good-faith levelling-up of the sort
ideas of English and Britishness reflect this cosmo- cultural richness that comes from the empire’s that would foster cohesion and a less choleric
politan reality: an exception might be the opening consequences for the mother country – we are here English identity without the ability to look our-
ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games.) He explores because you were there. It cannot only be located selves squarely in the face. n
the Festival of Britain, town centre redevelopments
in the 1960s, the emergence of the conservation
movement and their place in more recent ideas
of the past and national identity. He analyses, too,
the incorporation of industrial heritage and mid-
century modernity into models of Englishness that
include Mark Fisher’s version of hauntology, where
the future has been ghosted by neoliberalism.
Cooling towers, the M25, Martin Parr’s Boring Post-
cards: like Owens, Matless tries a little too hard to
squeeze in everything. Musical touchstones are
again to the fore with songs such as St Etienne’s
“Like a Motorway”. (One can date Matless from
his song choices – and your reviewer because he
recognizes them.) As a result the nostalgia feels
incorporated rather than critiqued. As with Owens,
there is no real conclusion.
But both Imagining England’s Past and About
England are beyond reproach in comparison with
Stuart Maconie’s The Full English, in which the radio
presenter turned author has decided to follow in
the footsteps of J. B. Priestley, who published his
famously evocative travelogue, English Journey, in
1934. Maconie responds to Andrew Marr’s sugges-
tion that the country “needs a political philosopher
– a patriotic English thinker with a decent sense of
history and a certain moral anger, a Priestley or
Orwell for our times”, and we are to regard The Full
English as a “very long letter of application”.
For Maconie, pubs, takeaways and their denizens
are the measure of regional England’s authenticity
– real ale, battered sausages, curries and other
blokes. He likes to think he is a radical, but the
tone here is often that of workerist pub bore.
Women have the occasional walk-on part, gay men
are “flamboyant” (twice), Pride is irksome and drag
is reduced to gender blackface. His measure of
progress since Priestley is also superficial, built as
it is around immigrant food – the “samosa and steel
bands” approach to multiculturalism. We already
know that there is nothing as English as a chicken
tikka sarnie from M&S. The same observations recur
– street-corner vapes and the smell of skunk, fizzy
lager, microbreweries and regenerated waterfronts,
more sitcoms and pop songs.
It is a shame, because when he’s not down the
pub or the chippy, Maconie has perceptive things
to say about regional England, not least when he
discusses the Brexit bulldozing of the “red wall” and
the reasons for it – the political failure of successive
administrations to give material succour to the
working class. He is good, too, on his home
territory in the north. Here, local knowledge means
observational subtlety; his grasp of the particular-
ities of the string of small towns in Pennine East
Lancashire and Calderdale is charming.
Like so many writers, from Orwell to Paxman to
Roger Scruton, Maconie maintains the position
that the ever-mild English characteristically reject
extremism or violence, as if the Civil War, Peterloo
and riots of the Swing, Gordon, and poll tax variety,
or the uprisings in Brixton, Toxteth, Croydon or
Tottenham, never happened. Hogarthian corruption
and dog fights have never gone away. Joel Good-
man’s classically composed photograph of drunken
New Year’s Eve revellers in Manchester (in 2015)
went viral because it was a representative image of
an England hammered by intergenerational lost
opportunities.
An English understanding of “Englishness”
appears as elusive as ever, not just for the term’s
conceptual slipperiness, but because we seem
unable to see the present. Owens, Matless and

AUGUST 18, 2023 TLS 23