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A Cross-Cultural History of Britain and
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Artistic Entanglements Marysa Demoor
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BRITAIN AND THE WORLD
A Cross-Cultural History
of Britain and Belgium,
1815–1918
Mudscapes and Artistic Entanglements
Marysa Demoor
Britain and the World
Series Editors
Martin Farr, School of History, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon
Tyne, UK
Michelle D. Brock, Department of History, Washington and Lee
University, Lexington, VA, USA
Eric G. E. Zuelow, Department of History, University of New England,
Biddeford, ME, USA
Britain and the World is a series of books on ‘British world’ history. The
editors invite book proposals from historians of all ranks on the ways
in which Britain has interacted with other societies from the sixteenth
century to the present. The series is sponsored by the Britain and the
World society.
Britain and the World is made up of people from around the world
who share a common interest in Britain, its history, and its impact on the
wider world. The society serves to link the various intellectual commu-
nities around the world that study Britain and its international influence
from the seventeenth century to the present. It explores the impact of
Britain on the world through this book series, an annual conference, and
the Britain and the World peer-reviewed journal.
Martin Farr (martin.farr@newcastle.ac.uk) is General Series Editor for
the Britain and the World book series. Michelle D. Brock (brockm@wlu.
edu) is Series Editor for titles focusing on the pre-1800 period and Eric
G. E. Zuelow (ezuelow@une.edu) is Series Editor for titles covering the
post-1800 period.
More information about this series at

https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14795
Marysa Demoor
A Cross-Cultural
History of Britain
and Belgium,
1815–1918
Mudscapes and Artistic Entanglements
Marysa Demoor
Department of Literary Studies
Ghent University
Ghent, Belgium
Britain and the World

ISBN 978-3-030-87925-9 ISBN 978-3-030-87926-6 (eBook)
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Lovingly dedicated to my amazing grandchildren Arthur, Dante, Jade,
James, and Ezra.
And to my children Dennis, Vanessa, Daphne, and their partners,
Patricia, Mathias and Jens, for being the successful and caring adults they
are.
Acknowledgements
Research on this book started as far back as 2000 when invited by

Dame Gillian Beer, I became a visiting research fellow at Clare Hall in
Cambridge. The presence of the wonderfully rich open-shelf library of
Cambridge University allowed me to freely move through the centuries
and cultures available on the shelves, thus discovering connections I had
not seen before. Meetings with other literary scholars at Clare Hall recep-
tions and in the famous tea room of the university library led me to
discover a treasure trove of entanglements between Britain and the Euro-
pean continent that I wanted to delve into. For those fruitful moments, I
especially want to thank Kate Belsey,1 Helen Cooper, and David Wallace.
Out of that initial research, I was able to distil some articles which are
now integrated in this book. I am truly grateful to the editorial teams
of the journals that published the articles foregrounding my research,
for the permission to incorporate those early publications in this study:
Nineteenth-Century Prose published an early version of my work on
Henry James and Rubens in 20042 ; The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies
was the first venue for my work on Flanders and the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood3 ; The Victorian Periodicals Review published articles on
Belgo–British networks and Waterloo.4 Research on W.T. Stead appeared
first in the online journal 19 in 1913.5
The next opportunity to work on this monograph came when I was
given the opportunity to teach a course on the relationship between
Britain and Belgium in the period between the battles of Waterloo and
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Ieper as the Van Dijck chair at UCLA in 2011. My liaison officer was
Walter Prevenier, whereas Joe Bristow and Margaret Jacobs were the
people in situ who made this possible. The UCLA students who took this
class were in for a surprise since several did not know where to look for
Belgium on a world map, but their subsequent pertinent questions and
comments did force me to provide hard facts for everything I argued.
The involvement in the Passions of War workshop (2015) co-organised
by my young colleagues Kornee Van der Haven and Philip Shaw
(Leicester) prompted me to revisit the First World War cemeteries in Flan-
ders and the relationship between Flemish mud and the military buried
in it. The discussion and questions following my talk at their workshop
were instrumental in structuring my thoughts. Helpful contacts in Ieper
on factual matters concerning the First World War were Birger Stichelbaut
and Dominiek Dendooven. I owe them thanks as I do also the archivists
of the “Black Box,” the Ghent municipal archive, who helped me find my
way in the Maeterlinck archives of my home town.
To Sharin Shroeder, based at Taipei Tech, I am grateful for involving
me in the conference “Literary Fantasy and its Discontents” she organised
in 2018, thus creating the right circumstances to develop new lines of
research taking me to into the world of fantasy and imagination. To Peter
Laroy of Liberas I also owe thanks because he gave me the opportunity to
revisit those thoughts and findings in a lecture for the Night of History
in March 2020.
I want to thank my close friend and colleague, Laurel Brake, for sharp-
ening my mind and making me alert to potential preconceptions and
biases, as well as for convincing me that there is nothing beyond one’s
reach.
The head archivist of the royal archives in Brussels, Baudouin D’hoore,
was a huge and friendly help in tracing documents that might enrich the
background to the relationship between the two royal houses in this study.
The Waterloo tourist office deserves its own special thanks. Véronique,
Marie-Jo, and their colleagues, and our Waterloo guides Michael Farrar
and the late Liam Hartley taught me everything I needed to know about
the battlefield of Waterloo. Their enthusiasm and efforts to inform and
guide generations of visitors of the battlefield are difficult to match.
This book eventually became a printed and online presence thanks
to the encouraging endeavours of the Palgrave Publishing Company in
the persons of Lucy Kidwell and the editor of the “Britain and the
World” series, Martin Farr. For the finishing touches to the book I relied
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
on the expertise of the one-woman indexing and editing business of

Heather Pendley, whom I found thanks to Jim Fuhr’s network. I want
to thank Linde Lapauw for being my rock in the storm when it comes to
finding one’s way in the administrative and financial mesh of one’s own
institution.
My family and, especially my husband, Patrick, deserve thanks for
their continued support of my bookish endeavours throughout the years.
Patrick was my reality check whenever a Brexiter reaction discouraged
or frustrated me, and he was my first port of call in all First World War
matters. Apart from acknowledging his comments and corrections after
his patient reading and rereading different versions of this study, I have
to admit that without him, I would not have found the way to all the
CWGC cemeteries we visited.
Finally, I want to thank my master students over the years who took
the course “From Waterloo to Wipers”6 and whose comments and ques-
tions added considerably to my insights when doing research. I hope
that reading this book will recreate the wonder and awe they experienced
when we visited the battlefield of Waterloo.
Notes
1. Kate died in January of 2021, shortly after I wrote these words, but my
souvenir of her indomitable spirit has not.
2. “‘The Flesh-tints of Rubens’ Henry James’s Contribution to the Construc-
tion of Englishness”, Nineteenth-Century Prose (April 2004), 101–120.
3. “Art-Catholic revisited: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Early Paintings and
Northern Renaissance Art”, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies (Spring
2005), 5–14; and “‘Als ich kan’: Flanders and the Work of William Morris”,
Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, (Fall 2012), 60–68.
4. “Laurence Binyon and the Belgian artistic scene: unearthing unknown
brotherhoods”, Victorian Periodicals Review, 44:2 (2011), 184–197;
“Waterloo as a small realm of memory: British poets, tourism and the
periodical press”, Victorian Periodicals Review, 48:4 (December 2015),
453–468.
5. “When the King Becomes your Personal Enemy: W. T. Stead, King Leopold
II, and the Congo Free State”, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long
Nineteenth Century, no 16 (2013).
6. Wipers is the typically funny interpretation by WWI military of the name
of the town of Ieper, then written as Ypres.
Contents
1 Introduction: The Special Relationship Between

Britain and Belgium 1
Objectives 4
Scholarly Context 6
2 British Identity in Belgian Soil 17
The Location of Identity 22
Before Waterloo 29
Writing the Journey 30
3 Waterloo Visitors, the Immediate Aftermath 43
Waterloo: Naming the Battlefield 45
William Wordsworth: A Brief Poetic Inspiration 49
Robert Southey: Pursuing Fame at Waterloo 61
Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron: Opposites Will Meet 64
Lord Byron’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo 70
4 The Fiction of Belgium 85
The Trollopes in Belgium 85
William Makepeace Thackeray in Search of Vanity 95
5 The Allure of the Middle Ages: The PRB Meet Van
Eyck, Inc. 111
William Morris Discovers Medieval Flanders 128
xi
xii CONTENTS
6 A Royal Example—Creating a European Family 141

The Brontë Theory 147
Unmasking Leopold II 156
7 Surrealist Entanglements 173
Grotesque Attraction 177
James Ensor, “Master of Darkness” 194
8 From Ashes to Soil to Mud 201
War Graves, War Mud, War Poems 204
Mud as a Mother 207
9 “There Is No Art More Exciting Than English Art”:
British–Belgian Artistic Liaisons, 1890–1919 221
Olivier Destrée, Unknown Belgian Link 224
Raphael Petrucci, Echoes from the East 229
Fernand Khnopff, Symbolist Painter, and Belgian
Anglophile 231
Henry James, an American in Britain 234
Royal Connections, Again 241
10 Epilogue: The Colour of National Identity 257
Endorsements of A Cross-Cultural History of Britain

and Belgium, 1815–1918 263
Select Bibliography 265
Index 273
List of Illustrations
Fig. 2.1 “Part of Australia lies here,” anonymous comment

by a CWGC cemetery visitor (© Demoor) 26
Fig. 2.2 Photograph of the WW I grave of a French fusilier
marin (marine fusilier) in Nieuwpoort (Flanders),
Belgium (© Courtesy of Patrick Vanleene) 28
Fig. 3.1 Wellington writing the Waterloo Dispatch in his
HQ, as recreated in the Wellington museum
in Waterloo (© Demoor) 44
Fig. 3.2 Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch
by David Wilkie (1822) (© Bridgeman images) 47
Fig. 3.3 The Devil Addressing the Sun by George
Cruikshank (1815) (© Trustees of the British
Museum) 52
Fig. 3.4 Benjamin Haydon, Napoléon Buonaparte
(before 1846) National Portrait Gallery, London
(© National Portrait Gallery/Bridgeman Images) 58
Fig. 3.5 Benjamin Haydon, Wellington on the Field
of Waterloo (1840) Walker Art Gallery accession
number WAG6965 Liverpool (© Liverpool
Museums) 60
Fig. 3.6 Plaque commemorating the death of Frederick
Howard, St. Joseph’s Church, Waterloo, Belgium
(© Demoor) 73
xiii
xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Fig. 4.1a and b Online archival database Bruges with acquisitions

of graveyard plots and death certificates (©
www.archiefbankBrugge.be) 90
Fig. 4.2 Headstones of Henry and Thomas Anthony
Trollope in the Bruges cemetery (© Demoor) 91
Fig. 4.3 William Makepiece Thackeray, self-caricature,
Scribner’s Magazine (1887) lithograph (© Picture
ID: 302,327 private collection/Bridgeman Images) 98
Fig. 4.4 Jacques de Lalaign, a Belgo–British artist, memorial
to British soldiers in the Battle of Waterloo (1890),
Brussels Cemetery, Belgium (© Demoor) 105
Fig. 5.1 Detail of the Van Eycks’ Adoration
of the Lamb/Ecce Ancilla Domini (1432)
turned upside down in the painting (© St.-Baafs
kerkfabriek public domain) 120
Fig. 5.2 Detail of Hans Memling’s Portrait of a Young
Woman (1480) St. John’s Hospital, Bruges,
Belgium (© Musea Brugge; www.artinflanders.be.
Photo: Hugo Maertens) 121
Fig. 5.3 Gabriel Rossetti, A Sonnet Is a Moment’s Monument
(1880) (© Nicolas Rossetti) 125
Fig. 6.1 William Heath, Design for a Regency (1830) British
Museum, London, UK (© Trustees of the British
Museum) 143
Fig. 6.2 Queen Victoria, Belgian Woman (13 Sept. 1843).
Online Journal (© Royal Archives Windsor) 146
Fig. 6.3 Signed letter sent by W. T. Stead to King Leopold
II accompanying the pamphlet “The Case against
the Congo Freestate [sic]” (© reproduced by kind
permission of Mr. Gustaaf Janssens, the Royal
Archives, Royal Palace, Brussels, Belgium) 167
Fig. 7.1 David (the Younger) Teniers, The Temptation of St.
Anthony (c. 1645) (© Private collection/Hermitage
Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia/Public domain,
Bridgeman Images number CH990256) 179
Fig. 7.2 a Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Annunciation
(1850) (© Tate Britain, London, Bridgeman
Images). b Detail of Jan and Hubert Van Eyck,
The Adoration of the Lamb, paintings of Gabriel
and Mary, St.-Baafs Cathedral, Ghent, Belgium (©
Public domain/St.-Baafs Kerkfabriek) 181
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xv
Fig. 7.3 a Pieter (the Younger) Brueghel, Peasant Wedding

in a Barn (1616). Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent,
Belgium (© MSK Ghent/Art in Flanders). b John
E. Millais, Isabella or the Post of Basil (1849)
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, Number WAG 1637
(© https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ima
ges-and-photography-service/Bridgeman Images
asset5341) 181
Fig. 7.4 a David (the Younger) Teniers, Monkeys’ Banquet
(1660) Museo del Prado/Prado National Museum,
Madrid, Spain, Inv Real Museo 1857 (© Out
of copyright/Bridgeman Images). b David
(the Younger) Teniers, The Concert of Cats
(seventeenth century Staatsgalerie Neuburg an der
Donau, Germany (© Bavarian State Painting
Collections in Munich/Bridgeman Images) 182
Fig. 7.5 Quinten Matsijs/Matsys Portret van een groteske
vrouw (A Grotesque Old Woman/The Ugly
Duchess ) (1513) National Gallery, London (©
nationalgallery.org.uk/public domain/Bridgeman
Art Library/Scholarly waiver) 184
Fig. 7.6 John Tenniel, Minor drawings of Medieval women
in Punch vol. 22 (Jan–June 1852) p. 43; vol. 31
(July 1856) p. 39; vol. 23 (July–Dec 1852) p. 141;
vol. 21 (1851) p. 150 (© British Library, London) 185
Fig. 7.7 John Tenniel, The Duchess in Lewis Carroll’s
Alice in Wonderland (1865) (© Out
of copyright/Bridgeman Images) 185
Fig. 7.8 a Marcus Gheeraert, Allegory of Iconoclasm
(1566–1568). British Museum, London (©
Trustees of the British Museum). b Henry Holiday,
for The Banker’s Fate in Lewis Carroll’s Hunting
of the Snark (1876) Private collection (© Out
of copyright/Bridgeman Images) 186
Fig. 7.9 Fernand Khnopff, I Lock the Door Upon
Myself (1891) Neue Pinakothek, Munich,
Germany (© Bavarian State Painting Collections
info@pinakothek.de) 190
xvi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Fig. 7.10 Picture in the Strand Magazine (May 1916).

Illustration For the First Time at the Battle of Mons
in Arthur Conan Doyle, “The British Campaign
in France” p. 351 (© Library of Congress,
Copyright Office, Harvard University) 192
Fig. 7.11 Detail of picture in the Strand (May 1916) 193
Fig. 7.12 Sara Knowland Hunt II with III 2020, oil
on canvas, 210 cm × 230 cm (© Sara Knowland;
Photo: Gregory Copitet, London, UK) 197
Fig. 8.1 Memorial of Charles W. Graves in Rome, GA,
United States (© Demoor) 203
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Special Relationship

Between Britain and Belgium
There is huge political power in the media. With human memory so

shamefully short, the media carry the responsibility of reminding their
readers of past alliances and relationships not to be forgotten, of wars that
should not be fought again, of young men that gave their lives and were
buried in near and far away countries. The responsibility of the media is
shared by the academic community and recognised and used by politi-
cians. This book deals with one such forgotten chapter, one particular
relationship of the United Kingdom.
On 11 November 2018, exactly 100 years after the end of the First
World War, then British Prime Minister Theresa May honoured those
fallen in that war by going to Mons in southern Belgium and the Saint-
Symphorien cemetery that harbours the graves of the first and the last
British (in truth, English) soldiers killed in the war.1 She did so by laying
a wreath on each tombstone, accompanied by a handwritten passage from
a war propagandist poem. For the first soldier, John Parry from a London
borough, she had chosen a poem by Rupert Brooke “The Soldier”. The
passage said “There is in that rich earth a richer dust concealed,” for the
final soldier, George Edwin Ellison from York, she chose an excerpt from
Laurence Binyon’s poem “For the Fallen”. “They were staunch to the
end against odds uncounted.”2 The choice of these excerpts seems to
illustrate a superficial, almost naïve, interpretation of these poems since
both, in fact, express an idealistic, exalted vision of war and the sacrifice
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
M. Demoor, A Cross-Cultural History of Britain and Belgium,
1815–1918, Britain and the World,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87926-6_1
2 M. DEMOOR
it demands. The PM or her staff could easily have chosen a passage from
a Wilfred Owen poem such as “Dulce et Decorum Est” with its powerful
ending urging the reader to “stop that old lie” that it is sweet and fitting
to die for one’s country. The poems, however, may have been chosen
with full knowledge of their meaning since this was during a period of
ongoing Brexit discussions between the European Union and the UK.
They could have been part of May’s plan to show that she was very much
on the “leave” side, and her thoughts were with the brave and the staunch
Britons rather than with the continental Europeans.
Why, one may wonder, was there no mention by any political party
in the UK of these dead on the continent at the time of the EU refer-
endum? CWGC3 (Commonwealth War Graves Commission) cemeteries
are populated by a generation of their ancestors, young men mainly, that
gave their lives to save the European continent and Britain from the domi-
nance of one particular nation. Apart from the dead that fell during the
First World War, there are the countless dead who gave their lives, very
much honouring the same ideal, during the Second World War—that of
freedom for everyone and an implosion of imperial ambitions. “They shall
not be forgotten?”
This book wants to remind that part of the scholarly community and
the British population who are interested in their own history, of one of
its many connections with the continent essential in its cultural develop-
ment and that seems to have been forgotten in the course of the twentieth
century: the connection with the small country of Belgium. I use Belgium
in an anachronistic way to designate the area now known as Belgium
that, like some other European countries, only achieved unity or inde-
pendence in the nineteenth century.4 The title of this preface highlights
how special its connection with the UK used to be in the nineteenth
century; whereas ever since the Second World War only the relationship
with the United States is said to be “special” by those Britons who want
to forget about the historical and geographical position of their country
vis-à-vis its continental neighbours.
Throughout the book, I use the terms Belgium, Flanders, and even
the Low Countries in line with the period I am focussing on. Indeed,
this region has been dominated by several West European countries
from times immemorial, its name in turn becoming the Burgundian
Netherlands (1384–1482), the Spanish Provinces of Southern Nether-
lands (1556–1715), the Austrian Provinces (1715–1795), and again, the
Southern Netherlands after Waterloo and before the establishment of the
1 INTRODUCTION: THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP … 3
kingdom of Belgium in 1830. In the course of those centuries, the shape

of the region changed considerably with the north of France, including
the large town of Lille (Rijsel), being annexed to France under Louis XIV.
The fact that this region continued to be called Flanders, i.e., French
Flanders, was the basis for even more confusion especially among scholars
studying the First World War.5
This study aims to look at a selection of cultural entanglements that
resulted directly from the intense Belgo–British relationship in the long
nineteenth century when the victory over Napoleon at Waterloo opened
the continental borders and hordes of British artists and tourists were
drawn to the battlefield to wallow in the British victory and shared iden-
tity that such a visit conjured up. In Brussels, and on their way to Brussels,
many visited the historical towns to catch a glimpse of the Renaissance and
Medieval artistic legacy found in churches, museums, and private collec-
tions. The paintings were imprinted on their mind’s eyes, where they
triggered artistic productions that echoed or complemented the artistic
display so often associated with the tradition of Flemish Medieval and
Renaissance artists that satirise power and influence. In this book, I retrace
the steps of a selection of nineteenth-century artists to those Flemish
historical towns and on their way to Waterloo to disentangle the many
ties between Britain and the southern Low Countries. Thus, I intend to
reveal layers of hitherto unknown origin in famous books and paintings
and revisit the reactions of British tourists when they immersed them-
selves in the overwhelming feelings of pride and national identity as they
stood on the soil of heroic victory. In order to achieve those aims, I
closely read literary texts, analysed paintings, and uncovered a (print)
media context while adopting a different angle towards familiar cultural
events and traditions.
One could easily argue that the connections between the two areas
focussed on here go back to the early Middle Ages when Belgium did
not exist as a separate nation, and when the basis for the relationship
between the two regions was a strong economic interest in the wool
trade, enhanced by religious persecution in the centuries following the
Medieval period. After 1600, the then mainly Catholic area of the Low
Countries, now known as Belgium, served as a safe place for the Catholic
British who wanted to escape oppressive and deadly tyrannies, and vice
versa. The following chapters aim to reveal a rich common ground in the
nineteenth century or an overwhelming histoire croisée (entangled history)
between two cultures that now hardly know there ever was one. The study
4 M. DEMOOR
will look at how British identity or Britishness, was constructed in that

long nineteenth century on battlefields in Flanders and complemented
and fine-tuned by the mirror image that the British Victorian found in
the Belgian Other. At the same time, the confrontation with Flemish art
of centuries past, especially the Renaissance, uncovered a dimension in
the Victorian artist that showed a surprising reciprocity and proximity
between the two; Flemish visual art and British writings touched each
other in the overlap of the grotesque and daring explorations of fantasy.
If the confrontation of the two cultures stimulated a process of Othering
in the writings of visiting authors, it simultaneously exposed an imagined
community6 of artists reflected in the creative output of the century.
Since nineteenth-century Belgium was dominated by the French
cultural model during much of the century with the Belgian educated
middle class and the upper classes not only using French exclusively
as the dominant language of communication but also as the dominant
literary language, a selection of ideas and literature from Britain only
reached the country once translated. Hence, academic research previously
focussed mainly on the cross-fertilisation between France and Belgium.
The Belgian cultural and artistic revival towards the end of the century
was also mainly identified as located in Wallonia and Brussels and associ-
ated with the French language and culture. Verhaeren and Maeterlinck,
both Flemish authors who wrote in French, were considered prominent
representatives of this promising generation. Yet, it was that young and
inspired age group that also began to look for different models and
sources of inspiration beyond French borders and language. Their jour-
nals were instrumental in introducing English art and literature to the
Belgian cultural elite.
Objectives
This art–historical analysis is meant to shed light on some burning inter-
national issues of today when trying to position itself in the mediatisation
of identitary politics while reflecting on similar, though perhaps less
explicit, media strategies and topical concerns in the nineteenth century.
As explained in this introduction, the book explores the singular relation-
ship between Great Britain and a small country just across the Channel, a
relationship that has not been highlighted enough, considering its impor-
tance in the construction of British identity and in shaping the careers of
a significant number of British authors and artists. The choice of the term
cross-cultural rather than intercultural results from using the method-

ology of histoire croisée propounded by Michael Werner and Benedicte
Zimmermann.7
This book focuses on the long nineteenth century because that era is
when the relationship became particularly “special”; when, after Waterloo
(1815) and the independence of Belgium (1830), the first king of the
small country was a prince, who through his marriage to a royal British
princess, had one day entertained the hope of becoming the king of
Britain. That prince, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, became the
candidate and eventually the chosen king of a country that, through
its geographical location in Europe, was considered to be the centre of
Western Europe.
Although some nineteenth-century scholars may argue that Belgium
occupies the same position towards Britain as other European nations,
I believe and argue that nineteenth-century Belgium is a curious and
unique country when it comes to its relationship with Britain and its
people. Apart from being the reluctant venue for a large number of
battles in wars waged between nation states such as France, Britain, and
Germany, it can build on a strong family relationship between the British
and Belgian monarchies and an intricate entanglement of cultural sympa-
thies and exchanges. Yet, since the end of the First World War, and as
with other continental countries, British commentators on Europe tend
to look down on Belgium, perhaps even more so than on other peoples
and countries, because it is so unknown and because of the confusion
caused by its official languages. Consequently, well-known Belgian artists
such as Jacques Brel, René Magritte, and Hergé are considered to be
French, and painters like Brueghel, Rubens, and Luc Tuymans are often
considered to be Dutch. The joke rhetorically asking one to “name five
famous Belgians” only proves that point.
Belgium’s unique position regarding Britain in the nineteenth century
does not only follow from its giving a position and a home to a German
prince whose future had lain in Britain until his wife died in childbirth,
and whose influence on the queen was undeniably strong. It was also
the country that became the burial ground of hundreds of thousands
of British military—first in Waterloo and, by extension, Brussels, and a
century later, in Flanders after two world wars; thus, if we follow Rupert
Brooke’s famous lines, turning those many graves into pieces of England.
Ironically, therefore, it so happened that in the nineteenth century when
all European countries were constructing their own identities, often based
6 M. DEMOOR
on military victories, much of the British identity was constructed on

battlefields elsewhere—and no country absorbed as much British blood
per square mile as Belgium.8
This study looks at literature that found its origin in these deaths and
that was inspired by the country that hosted them. It studies the discursive
and visual reactions of some of Britain’s foremost artists to the historical
events of which Belgian towns were witnesses. It wants to invite the reader
to rediscover the memory of battlefields and loss of British lives which are
to be traced in their own culture, and that were not explained or under-
stood in their own time but that might now, in hindsight, be interpreted
with the help of literature that preceded and followed it.
The First World War was recently pronounced to be the “written
war”9 because no other war produced so much literature. This is, if not
untrue, somewhat exaggerated. The literature about and emerging from
World War I is quite simply much better known than that associated with
Waterloo. But the latter battlefield was equally influential and inspiring.
Earlier, Simon Bainbridge pointed to the enormous production of liter-
ature after Waterloo as listed in Betty Bennet’s British War Poetry in the
Age of Romanticism 1793–1815, and John Ashton’s English Caricature
and Satire on Napoleon I .10 This book will devote a large part to the
impact of Waterloo on British culture and the construction of Britishness
in the nineteenth century.
Also, and equally important, this book wants to highlight the “fan-
tasy language” that the British and Belgian artistic scene had in common
in the nineteenth century, and that cemented a Belgo–British imagined
community at the time: this language was largely visual for Northern
European artists, and textual or poetic for British artists—a conclusion
also drawn by historian Anna Jameson in her comments on the Baroque
painter Rubens (cf. infra) and Laurence Binyon, a middleman between
the two cultures. Both artistic expressions betray a strong fascination with
the grotesque and the surreal. This common language created a bond
between Christina Rossetti and Fernand Khnopff, between Lewis Carroll
and Quentin Matsys.
Scholarly Context
The present study explores the many ways in which parts of present-
day Belgium and the Belgian cultural heritage impacted Britain’s literary
production and the construction of a British identity in the nineteenth
century. As some theorists have recently argued, after an avalanche of

writings on the relationship between Britain and non-European coun-
tries, especially the Middle East, it is only recently that scholarly research
has zoomed in on some neighbouring countries as important to British
history.11 Former enemies such as France, Germany, and the Nether-
lands have come in first for critical scrutiny,12 but for the Victorian
tourist, the then newly created kingdom of Belgium had many attrac-
tions and prompted several of them to start writing, although many of
those texts have never before been systematically examined in the context
of a full-length study.13
One of the key concepts used in this analysis is that of the “realm
of memory”.14 The concept was devised and explored by Pierre Nora
and the contributors to his volumes on realms of memory in France.
The curious thing about the use of the term in the relationship between
Belgium and Britain is the underlying hypothesis that the battlefields in
Belgium acted (and still act) as realms of memory in the construction of
a British identity, whereas for Nora, those realms that helped construct a
French identity were naturally situated within France or French culture.
The interplay between the two national cultures scrutinised here is further
explored in the context of histoire croisée, entangled or cross-cultural
history. Only by a continuous comparison between the different cultures,
an almost instinctive reaction that Victorian travellers experienced when
they left the isolation of their island culture, did those travellers realise
and establish their own identity. In other words, only confrontation with a
culture which they could recognise as other than theirs opened the possi-
bility of Othering that culture and defining their own. As a result of this
situation, the concept of Othering comes into play.
Like Rozbicki and Ndege, I believe the confrontation with Otherness
“causes change—on both sides”.
Otherness involves two or more parties that do not share the assumptions
crucial to functioning within their particular systems of reference… One
may therefore say that otherness often involves exclusion and rejection, but
at the same time, it is integral to the construction of a people’s identity
and a group self-consciousness.15
Truly interesting within the context of the British presence in and with-
drawal from the European Union is the assertion and ascertainment that
8 M. DEMOOR
“mere knowledge of the Other’s life and society is not enough; to success-
fully function within it requires understanding, an ability to access the
other’s web of meaning”.16 In what follows, I focus on the ways British
Victorian travellers tried to access the others’ “web of meaning” and in
their failure or success, uncovering the ways in which privileged visitors
of the Low Countries, such as writers and artists, absorbed and rendered
impressions of otherness in their writing.
In respect of national identity and travel in the nineteenth century,
Marjorie Morgan has done groundbreaking research. Her inspirational
study about the “Britons’ perception of themselves vis-à-vis the Continent
and the history of that perception” laid the groundwork for the present
monograph. Morgan’s analysis of the Victorians’ imagined and embodied
identity as they travelled abroad had a wider remit than this book since
she followed their explorations throughout Europe, not only Belgium.17
Her concluding claim is of interest to this book too and justifies the more
restricted scope. Morgan admits that she excluded the empire and other
continents from her survey but argues that one only needs to be aware
of the importance of context when studying definitions of national iden-
tity. The present study, additionally, involves visual culture in its analysis.
A somewhat older and better-known study of British nationality, Linda
Colley’s Britons. Forging the Nation 1707–1837 also focuses on context,
but in an abstract way. For Colley, religion is the fundamental piece in the
construction of British identity.
War played a vital part in the invention of a British nation after 1707,
but it could never have been so influential without other factors, and in
particular, without the impact of religion.18
It is the difference in religion that turns France into the “haunting
embodiment of that Catholic Other”. Colley acknowledges the enduring
conviction of the British to see themselves “as a distinct and chosen
people” long after the Battle of Waterloo. Interestingly, she also spotlights
the importance of the British monarchy and its successful morphism into
a “nationalist monarchy”, described as.
royal visits to every part of the kingdom, carefully choreographed and

synchronised royal celebrations in which all classes and both sexes were
encouraged to participate, an ostentatious royal patronage of British
culture: all of these became evident as never before in the wake of … the
near quarter-century of war with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France.19
Clearly, certain aspects of this study have been explored or fore-

grounded by scholars such as Colley, but those excellent books and
articles were usually presenting another take on the historical events I
zoom in on. Simon Bainbridge wrote a great number of books and
chapters on Wordsworth and Waterloo, but mainly in function of his
and others’ research on the Romantic movement. Similarly, Philip Shaw
explored the legacy of Napoleon in the construction and development of
the romantic imagination. Although of use to me in the proposed anal-
ysis, I deviate from their take because Napoleon is not the central figure
of this study but a key peg from which to start the proposed analysis. Nor
is it my purpose to once and for all define British identity by seeing it as
the mirror image of what one could try to see as its foil: the up till now
undefinable Belgian identity. After all, feeling Belgian is, even today, as
elusive an emotion as feeling Yugoslavian proved to be.
The Battle of Waterloo is considered the beginning of this exploration
of British identity in a literary production that incorporates a reaction
to a foreign culture, geographically and historically close by but quite
different because of its language and religion. This book, however, is
meant to cover the entire nineteenth century, moving even into the twen-
tieth century, and that other nationhood-affirming war that started in
1914 with Belgium, and especially Flanders, again as a protagonist. My
approach to the English cultural output is, perhaps surprisingly, in line
with a postcolonial studies approach in spite of the fact that the southern
area of the Low Countries—established as Belgium in the nineteenth
century—was never a British colony as such. Even so, British attitudes and
identity issues revealed in this hitherto unexplored relationship between
Britain and (mainly) northern Belgium seem to echo those addressed
in the work of Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak.20 Unlike those post-
colonial studies, however, the project does not aim to comment on that
attitude as unfair or objectionable; the aim is primarily to show that
the continent and a fairly unknown part of the continent contributed in
several ways to what came to be seen as a British identity by visitors to
key locations.
The process of Othering in order to forge a national identity, as
explored by Morgan and Colley and as defined by Rozbicki and Ndege, is
only one of the theoretical lines that will be followed here; another domi-
nant theoretical line is set out by Benedict Anderson in his influential
Imagined Communities .21 Although his theory stresses the national-
istic potential of such communities I use it here to illustrate potential
10 M. DEMOOR
cross-national imagined communities, in line with the histoire croisée

methodology, such as the Belgo-British one.
Chapter 2 sets out the lines that this study follows. It deals with issues
such as identity and the ways in which that is related to the place of
burial on the basis of close analysis of poems and texts where the soil is a
metaphor for nationhood and motherhood, and the tomb is turned into
the less scary prospect of a return to the womb and well-deserved sleep.
Since the Battle of Waterloo really put Belgium on the map for British
visitors as a “realm of memory,” an essential part in the construction of
a British identity, I have decided to use 1815 as a terminus post quem
for the entire book. The introductory chapter sets the tone for every-
thing written about Flanders, Belgium, and its inhabitants by British
visitors, well known or not, because it illustrates the pre-Waterloo attitude
towards Flanders and Belgium as expressed by Chaucer and Shakespeare,
for instance, and provides a brief indication of the cross-cultural exchanges
in the four centuries up to the nineteenth.
Before Waterloo, few celebrity visitors recorded their impressions of
their visits to Belgium and its historical towns. However, the diaries and
journals which do retrace the steps of visiting writers are very interesting
to those studying cultural influences at the turn of the eighteenth century.
Introductory paragraphs look at the diary of William Beckford, a reluctant
traveller who was on his way to other—in his mind, truly sublime—
places in Europe. His candid accounts of Belgium and the Netherlands
are mesmerising as well as witty, recreating a picturesque image of travel
on the continent in the late eighteenth century. The diaries reveal young
Beckford’s keen eye for art worthy of collecting, as well as his strug-
gles with personality issues. Apart from that, Beckford’s letters home and
travel notes helped shape his authorship profile and polish his style.
Another young traveller who began his writing career as a diarist and
one that focussed on the Low Countries to start with was John Evelyn.
His diary describing his journey to the Netherlands and Belgium was
published in 1818, although dated 1741. It is also written from the
perspective of a young British man confronted with different mores and
cultures, but unlike Beckford, who betrays an uncommon flamboyant
temperament, Evelyn’s travel notes are almost emotionless in an effort
to capture an objective image of the places he visits.
Chapter 3 focuses on artists like Beckford who reacted to the immense
shock produced by the Battle of Waterloo by trying to capture the
moment in paintings, drawings, and writings. Beckford’s autobiograph-

ical notes present a striking example of writers who found it absolutely
necessary to travel across the Channel and see the battlefield for them-
selves.
Walter Scott was one of the first to visit Waterloo, and he sought to
make the most of his experience. He wrote his observations and thoughts
in prose texts, pseudo-letters to his family he published as Letters from
Paul to his Kinsfolk, a little-known publication, and a long poem entitled
“The Field of Waterloo.” The poem, especially, was popular though not
considered to be very good. However, it is not my purpose to analyse
these writings for their aesthetic qualities, rather, I examine and discuss
them in light of their author’s conscious effort at recreating the battle
into a realm of memory which helped construct British identity.
The success of the poem was such that other authors, admirers of
Scott, Wellington, and Napoleon, followed in his footsteps both liter-
ally, by visiting the battlefield, and figuratively, by writing the feelings
and emotions conjured by their visits. The chapter further explores the
writings of Fanny Burney who was actually in Brussels when Waterloo
happened, and better-known texts by Byron, Southey, and William
Wordsworth.
After the 1815 battle, a large number of authors in search of a subject
or memorable character revisited the battlefield in fiction and poetry: the
writings of W. M. Thackeray, D. G. Rossetti, and Frances Trollope are the
subject of Chapter 4. Subsequent chapters focus on a selection of narra-
tives that were sometimes less directly aimed at visiting the Waterloo dead
and the battlefield, but that nevertheless contributed to the construction
of British identity by building on the differences with the Low Coun-
tries and collecting the impressions in literary witness accounts. Thus, I
prove the importance of a Belgian stay in the writings of, for instance,
Anthony Trollope and Charlotte Brontë. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair is scru-
tinised with Waterloo as the central event of the novel. But this study
also looks at Thackeray’s travel sketches written under the pseudonym
Michael Angelo Titmarsh and published in Fraser’s Magazine. Interest-
ingly, in both Trollope’s and Thackeray’s lives and work, one can trace
the cemetery trope and nationality thread which I initiated in the preface.
The poetic travelogue Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote on his journey
through France and Belgium is explored and analysed in Chapter 5.
Ekphrasis reached its most perfect form in his work, and a small sample
is fully examined here. Rossetti admirer William Morris also fell under
12 M. DEMOOR
the spell of paintings by Memling and Van Eyck and the illuminated
manuscripts on display in Bruges. Morris’s enthralment with the late-
Medieval Flemish masters and Medieval politics closes the chapter.
Throughout this study, and especially in Chapter 6, the importance of
connections between British and Belgian royal families in the nineteenth
century is highlighted. I adduce archival material that underscores the
close relationship between the monarchies and the influence the heads of
state had on each other’s policies. I also look at the Congo scandal under
the reign of Leopold II and the role of the British editor of the Review
of Reviews, William T. Stead, in the discursive downfall of this notorious
Belgian king. Also in this chapter, Waterloo and Wellington are shown to
loom large in the early writings of Charlotte Brontë. Her stay in Brussels
in the early 1840s and its influence on her fictional work is viewed from
the position of the housemaid, the subaltern in her writings—rather than
that of the visitor, the foreigner in Belgium.
Because the book’s argument follows the ties between the two cultures
chronologically, we return to the artistic entanglements and the British
influences in Chapter 7, when we examine the last decades of the nine-
teenth century and the ways in which Belgian artists were influenced
by Pre-Raphaelite painters, with Fernand Khnopff and Olivier Destrée
among the latter’s foremost Belgian admirers.
The late nineteenth century was a period in which close relation-
ships were forged between networks of artists on both sides of the
Channel, thus influencing and supporting each other. The reason for
these artists’ visits to Flanders is often sought in the obligatory visit to
Waterloo. On their way to the battlefield, tourists stopped at well-known
historical towns such as Bruges, Ghent, and Antwerp. The impact of
Flemish iconography on nineteenth-century artistic productions cannot
be ignored. The introductory paragraphs of the chapter explore some
little-known examples of artistic exchange between Belgium and Britain,
such as the way in which Quinten Matsys’s “Ugly Duchess” influenced
Tenniel’s portrait in Alice in Wonderland’s Duchess.
Important in the context of cultural exchange is the work done by the
British art historian and connoisseur, James Weale, who lived and worked
in Bruges for many years and is known for the rightful rediscovery, preser-
vation, and reassessment of the so-called Flemish “primitives”. I conclude
the chapter by spotlighting the way British and Flemish artistry came
together to eventually blend, in both a physical and an artistic manner,
in the highly unconventional production of the painter of mixed ancestry,

James Ensor.
In Chapter 8, we reach the early decades of the twentieth century. Here
I present an innovative take on literary texts exploring the role of Flanders
and Flemish mud as the “final repository” of thousands of young men
sacrificed on the shrine of First World War glory and buried in foreign soil.
Flemish mud is traditionally shown to be an agent in the glorification of
war and the assuaging of loss and death by consistently describing those
burial places as a mother’s womb and a return to the home country. The
cemetery trope and its links with the First World War trenches constitute
the basis of the mudscape image mentioned in the subtitle to this study.
I continue to investigate the Belgian–British networks at the beginning
of the twentieth century in Chapter 9, especially through the correspon-
dence of poet and Oriental art expert Laurence Binyon, author of the
war poem “For the Fallen”. The chapter presents an overview of texts
in which the narrators unwittingly struggle with the idea of Britishness
and national identity; Henry James is probably the best known and most
surprising of those voices. For him too, it was the First World War and
meeting Belgian refugees that confronted him with who he was and what
he wanted to be—a British citizen.
A concept that acquires a new life and a different interpretation in this
study is that of the above-mentioned realm of memory, which I apply to
Waterloo as well as the battlefields and war memorials of the Great War.
In the British-owned cemeteries in Flanders, all sorts of texts, poems,
and short stories can be found on tombstones and in visitors’ comments.
Some of these will be analysed with a view of tracing the ways in which
this world event was inextricably linked with the nationality of the soldiers
and the places where they fought and died. To show the interrelationship
between memory, identity, and literature, I make use of many present-day
notes written by British tourists in the visitors’ books held in the hidden
gate boxes of the war cemeteries.
In the final analysis, these chapters aim to explore how the First
World War rekindled the close relationship between Britain and Belgium
that was thereafter Waterloo but seriously degraded during the Congo
debacle. This renewed alliance is epitomised by the best-known—though
fictional—Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot.
War, death, and their association with national pride in a foreign
(Belgian) context and foreign burial ground constitute the thread running
through each chapter, even those focussing on artistic liaisons between
14 M. DEMOOR
Britain and Belgium. The recognition of a similar artistic mindset on

both sides of the Channel engendered a community feeling that under-
mined the distance to and rejection of the Other, and led to a creative yet
untapped cross-fertilisation in the second half of the nineteenth century
that reached its acme during World War One.
Notes
1. Ironically the last soldier of the British Empire to be killed in
action just before the armistice, George Lawrence Price, was actu-
ally a Canadian. He died two minutes before 11 o’clock on 11
November 1918 and was later buried in the same cemetery. Price
did not get a wreath.
2. https://uk.news.yahoo.com/theresa-may-remembers-staunch-
end-104523655.html.
3. CWGC stands for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
For the name change from IWGC (Imperial War Graves Commis-
sion) to CWGC, see David Crane, Empires of the Dead. How One
Man’s Vision Led to the Creation of WWI’s War Graves (London:
HarperCollins, 2013), 85ff.
4. Apart from Belgium, one can think of Italy, Germany and Luxem-
bourg.
5. Up north, the area now called Dutch Flanders was recuperated
by the Netherlands after the split between north and south circa
1600. One book explaining Belgium’s complex history is by Rolf
Falter, België: een geschiedenis zonder land (Antwerpen: de Bezige
Bij, 2013).
6. Benedict Andersen, Imagined Communities (London: Verso,
1993).
7. Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann,“Beyond Compar-
ison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity”, History
and Theory, 45:1 (February 2006), 30–50. Histoire Croisée is also
translated as entangled history.
8. In the province of West Flanders alone, 0.84 square kilometre
is designated First World War burial ground. Source: Dr Birger
Stichelbaut in a private message 28 January 2018. But those ceme-
teries only commemorate the dead we know of. Underneath the
cemeteries, there are layers of dead since the area had been the
scene of other fierce battles such as the siege of Ieper (1383) during
the hundred years’ war.
9. “In geen enkele oorlog is er zoveel literatuur geschreven als in
WOI. En er is tijdens de oorlog over geen land zoveel geschreven
als over België. Maar waar is die literatuur gebleven in onze
herinnering aan de Eerste wereldoorlog?” See http://www.matthi
jsderidder.be/tekst/invlaanderengedood.html and the explanatory
posters in the temporary exhibition “The War in Writing” at Flan-
ders Fields Museum (http://www.inflandersfields.be/en/the-war-
in-writing).
10. Simon Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 15.
11. Marjorie Morgan, National Identities and Travel in Victorian
Britain (Palgrave), 6.
12. Jopi Nyman (2000), Carol Richardson and Graham Smith (2001).
13. A recent publication on Scotland and Flanders is by the aptly
named Alexander Fleming, Scotland and the Flemish People (Edin-
burgh: Birlinn Ltd, 2019).
14. I believe this is the first full-scale analysis of Waterloo as a British
“realm of memory” based on the article first published in VPR;
see “Waterloo as a Small Realm of Memory: British Poets, Tourism
and the Periodical Press”, Victorian Periodicals Review (December
2015), 453–468.
15. Michal Jan Rozbicki and George O. Ndege, Cross-Cultural History
and the Domestication of Otherness, (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 1.
16. Ibid.
17. Marjorie Morgan, National Identities and Travel in Victorian
Britain (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2007), 218.
18. Linda Colley, Britons. Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London:
Vintage, 1996), 387.
19. Ibid., 390.
20. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New
York: Routledge, 1994); Gayatri Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?
Reflections on the History of an Idea, Rosalind C. Morris, ed.
(New York: Columbia UP, 2010), JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/
10.7312/morr14384.
21. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
CHAPTER 2
British Identity in Belgian Soil
“Englishness is an invention” Jeremy Paxman asserted confidently on

BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live programme on 1 June 2014.1 He spoke
with authority as the author of a book on The English (1998). In the
book, he supports the view of Daniel Defoe as expressed at length three
centuries earlier in “A True-Born Englishman” (1701). These four lines
are the gist of it:
Thus from a mixture of all kinds began,

That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman:
…
A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction,
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.2
Literary authors seem to have their own specific, often ironic, view on
what it means to be English. Salman Rushdie expressed his view in the
words of the character Whisky Sisodia in The Satanic Verses “The trouble
with the Engenglish is that their hiss history happened overseas, so they
dodo don’t know what it means.”3
The conclusion of Defoe’s poem is obvious: there is no such thing as
a pure Englishman. Paxman agrees and adds to this fact by analysing the
many influences absorbed by the British and contextualising the feelings
associated with Britishness and Englishness in the aftermath of the Second
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 17

Switzerland AG 2022
M. Demoor, A Cross-Cultural History of Britain and Belgium,
1815–1918, Britain and the World,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87926-6_2
18 M. DEMOOR
World War. In between the lines, Paxman’s book is a plea for inclusive-
ness and diversity4 yet at the same time, quite paradoxically, there is a
manifest feeling of pride in the achievements of the inhabitants of Britain;
Paxman calls it a civilisation where “words matter, that gives them some
of the most vigorous theatre in the world, more newspapers and a higher
overall standard of television than anywhere else in the world … some of
the finest domestic and church architecture on earth … a highly inven-
tive, entrepreneurial people, … the finest choral music and the greatest
diversity of musical performances in Europe.”5 As a passionately appre-
ciative student of British culture, I am inclined to agree with this praise
although there is perhaps too much of it since nobody can boast a thor-
ough knowledge of what is on offer elsewhere in the world or even in
Europe. Ironically, therefore, Paxman himself seems to succumb to the
feelings of superiority associated with his own nationality which he so
thoroughly rejects at the beginning of his book.
Interestingly, however, Paxman also claims there is no such thing as
English nationalism but posits that there is a British nationalism: “Eng-
land scarcely exists as a country: nationalism was, and remains, a British
thing” (19). The UKIP (UK Independence Party) had not yet come into
its own when Paxman was writing this although it was founded at the
beginning of the 1990s. His 2016 attack on UKIP politician Suzanne
Evans shows he still followed the line of inclusiveness, and probably more
strongly at the time than in 1998 when his book first appeared.6
Paxman was not the only one to stress the mixed antecedents of
the British. In a possibly lesser known study by Robert Winder, Bloody
Foreigners , first published in 2004, the point is made even more forcefully.
The Sunday Times review identifies this book as “a breath of fresh air in
a foul and fetid room” and summarises it as the story of the “remark-
able migrations that have founded and defined a nation.”7 Since then,
however, an avalanche of books and articles has been published on the
subject of Englishness and Britishness8 and, more crucially, the Brexit
referendum of June 2016 ultimately showed that nothing has funda-
mentally changed in the feelings of many inhabitants of the island called
Britain; a small majority believe they differ from those living on the Euro-
pean continent and do not welcome an unrestricted influx of people from
abroad nor any interference—or what they deem to be interference—from
the EU in their national affairs, even if they have chosen representatives
involved in those decisions. The island seems to confer an identity to those
2 BRITISH IDENTITY IN BELGIAN SOIL 19
living on the island that repulses other identities and fosters an island
mentality.9
It is still unclear whether one is allowed to use the term “English-
ness” to refer to the supposed national identity of the people living on
the British Isles or whether one should consistently opt for “Britishness.”
The continued fascination with national identity was once more proven
when Andrew Marr asked which phrases defined proud “Britishness” in
his Sunday morning programme10 and then started with Chicken Tikka
Masala. More seriously, Paxman quotes George Mikes “How to be an
Alien:” “When people say England, they sometimes mean Great Britain,
sometimes the United Kingdom, sometimes the British Isles—but never
England.”11 On a visit to the Caribbean, the BBC TV presenter and trav-
eller Simon Reeve explains to one of the local guides that he is from
Britain, to which the man replies, “where is that?” but knows exactly what
Reeve is talking about when he says that England is part of Britain; then
the man professes to be a Chelsea fan. England, surprisingly, is clearly
better known as a place than Britain, and in the context of art and culture
in general it is “Englishness” that is being used to refer to a type of
national self-awareness. Marjorie Morgan points to the overlap between
the two terms and uses combinations such as English-British. For her, the
difference between concepts is one of personal versus impersonal12 :
If the context was more personal such that travellers were referring to their
cultural identity or to their affectionate and loyal feelings for country, they
were more apt to think in terms of Englishness, Scottishness, or Welsh-
ness. Just as national imagining could be exclusive by not including certain
groups and regions in the nation, it could also be imperialistic by incor-
porating groups in a way that erased identities, such as when England was
used for England and Wales, or for all of Britain. These various usages
thus suggest that Britain was simultaneously a single nation, a multina-
tional entity, an English Empire and a British Empire, depending on the
context. (216)
Like others, Morgan was struck by the lack of interest in the role of the
European continent in studies analysing the construction of an English
national identity. Even though travel writing has been very much in
vogue with literary researchers since the 1990s, the interest in travelogues
reporting on European continent visits is a more recent trend.
After the “discovery” of the importance of the continent in British
history at the end of the twentieth century, scholars have written at
20 M. DEMOOR
length about the strained relationships of the British with their conti-
nental neighbours, often also their former enemies: their love–hate for
the French with whom they were at war for more than 100 years, their
80-years’ old war with the Dutch in a constant struggle for dominion
over the seas, and the more recent “threat” of a unified Germany, a
menace emerging from and symbolised by two world wars in the twen-
tieth century.13 But all scholars, with perhaps one or two exceptions,14
remain silent as to the role played by the small area between France and
the Netherlands, now known as Belgium, with which the British have had
a more than unusual relationship. The oversight is curious and surprising
if only because there are so many traces of English visitors still to be found
in that small country, and because it has played such an important role in
the construction of what eventually came to be understood as Englishness
and produced the artistic entanglements that marked the period in which
this nationality was shaped.
Travel writing, in conjunction with transnationality, has been a popular
route to follow among literary researchers these few last decades. Much
of it is focussed on the experience of discovering a culture different
from one’s own. For British writers, this discovery enhanced the trav-
elling author’s awareness of himself or herself, in other words, the
British/English identity. The confrontation with the Other is the premise
of postcolonial theory. It is what Bill Schwartz points to when he
writes “cultures [are], constituted by what they disavow and repress, the
repressed Other symbolically active in the internal histories of the colonial
order.”15 Edward Said adopts a similar stance:
In British culture, … one may discover a consistency of concern …

that fixes socially desirable, empowered space in metropolitan England or
Europe and connects it by design, motive, and development to distant or
peripheral worlds […] conceived of as desirable but subordinate.16
Said believes there are three Western cultures that dominated “far-
flung territories:” Britain, France, and the United States. But he seems
to consider the entire Western world as in danger of projecting stereo-
types onto the rest of the world: “Most cultural historians, and certainly
all literary scholars, have failed to remark the geographical notation,
the theoretical mapping and charting of territory that underlies Western
fiction, historical writing, and philosophical discourse of the time.” Said
also points to the existence of a hierarchy of spaces, the top position, and
the most powerful place of all he claims to be that of “home,”17 clearly

not in Africa or Asia. Added to that he wants to consider the role of
the observer. This person relegates and confines “the non-European to a
secondary racial, cultural, ontological status.” But what if this observer
and the object of their scorn should be redefined because they adopt
exactly the same kind of attitude towards what appears to be generally
white cultures and peoples just across the Channel, even if there is no
exploitation involved?
Postcolonial studies were so dominant in the last decades of the twen-
tieth century that similar writings about areas that cannot officially be
called ex-colonies hardly came into the picture. It does make one wonder:
why were travelling Victorian authors whose finances did not stretch that
far often left out in theoretical considerations about travel writing and the
construction of national identity it prompted? The Cambridge Companion
to Travel Writing published in 2002, for instance, still mainly “accompa-
nies” scholars interested in what was published in English about visits
and travels to non-European continents though the overview does start
from the Grand Tour and the European travel experience. Importantly,
however, it would be wrong to claim that no attention at all was paid
to the role played by European countries in the construction of what one
might consider to be a British identity. As early as 1991, Stuart Hall could
write: “to be English is to know yourself in relation to the French, and
the hot-blooded Mediterraneans, and the passionate, traumatized Russian
soul.”18
Another striking aspect of travel writing which I believe has not been
given enough attention is its crucial connection with the birth of a
person’s authorship. In her riveting study of national identity and Victo-
rian travel experiences, Marjorie Morgan reveals she felt the urge to write
about her identity as an American in Britain while collecting material for
her dissertation:
I was most surprised by my own journals, which gradually filled with as

many comments about the US as about the Britain I was experiencing
while writing. … it was this discovery and the experience of perusing my
15 journal volumes on the plane back … that suggested a book project to
follow my dissertation.19
Ali Behdad acknowledges a similar experience in Belated Travellers . At

one time during his college years at a Midwestern university, he became
22 M. DEMOOR
the unwilling victim of a skirmish by other resident students at the same

university. He was trapped inside his room while it was being attacked by
darts and violent anti-Iranian slogans until the campus police freed him.
He tried to repress this nasty memory but it stayed with him:
Thus, through my experience, I came to realize early on how, to a large

degree, the cultural confrontation between the West and the Middle East
is of a discursive nature. It should not be surprising that I later became
interested in the genealogy of those representations and tried to understand
the history that had helped to construe me as a threatening, threatened
Other.20
These are just two of many such confessions arguing that a change of
scene and a confrontation of cultures leads certain people to start writing
to express and define the uncanny feeling of recognising difference from
one’s own identity. In what follows, I try to demonstrate how writers
such as Walter Scott and Robert Southey, Frances and Anthony Trollope,
W.M. Thackeray and Charlotte Brontë experienced the very same urge
when confronted with another culture.
Clearly, not only ethnic differences but also religious differences
produced feelings of rejection, or at least disassociation in writers. Linda
Colley summarises this in Britons when she writes: “characterizing the
French and other predominantly Catholic states as poverty-ridden was
also a way of claiming that only Protestants could enjoy a true and lasting
prosperity …”.21
To summarise the present study aptly would be to say that it looks
at continental Europe, and more specifically Belgium, in the nineteenth
century, as another British colony with all the stereotypes and construc-
tions of nationhood such an encounter entail. The confrontation also at
once prompted the urge for visitors to start writing, and for some of them,
it provided an endless source of artistic inspiration. In what follows, I
develop yet another line of thought closely associated with the country
the British loved to discover in the nineteenth century, and with the
national identity they derived from confrontation with it.
The Location of Identity

In the walled patio garden of the small museum of Waterloo, the place
where Wellington’s headquarters were located in June 1815, there is a
curious burial place. Amidst a very small and select number of tomb-
stones commemorating buried heroes who fell on the battlefield, which
are rather hard to find overgrown as they are with weeds and hedges,
there is a more visible little shrine commemorating a leg. The plaque reads
“Here liest the leg of his Majesty’s illustrious, brave and valiant Lieu-
tenant general the earl of Uxbridge commander-in-chief of the English,
Belgian and Dutch cavalry wounded on the 18 June 1815 at the memo-
rable Battle of Waterloo who by his heroism contributed to the triumph
of mankind’s cause so gloriously decided by the brilliant victory of that
day.” The association of the burial of the leg, the soil in which it lies, and
the heroism of its former owner with nationhood and military victory is
another one of the motifs I follow in this study. The whole idea of burying
a leg seems absurd to us now as it did then, especially since we know that
a huge number of body members were amputated during and as a result
of the Battle of Waterloo and that most of the casualties of Waterloo were
buried in anonymous mass graves or burned.
One of the questions this book explores is the relationship between
the nationality as attached to the human body (which is itself a curious
notion), the soil in which that body, when dead, is buried, and the
metaphor of the burial as the return of the fallen soldier to the womb
or to his national home.
Thus the question here seems to be: where does nationhood lie? Does
nationhood lie in the soil surrounded and circumscribed by borders of
another nationality? Or does it reside in the human bodies living in a
specific area? In a nuanced study by Peter Mandler published in 2006,
well before the Brexit referendum, Mandler has a different take when he
explains that:
‘national character’ is a particularly developed form of horizontal bond

that surely requires modern conditions in which to flourish. It assumes not
only communication among a people but a detailed awareness of common
characteristics.22
He also points to a crucial speech uttered by John of Gaunt in Shake-

speare’s Richard II where patriotic feelings are expressed in phrases
such as “this royal throne of kings,” “this sceptr’d isle,” “this earth of
majesty,” “this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”23 There
is, here too, a marked emphasis on the earth, the soil of the nation. But,
Mandler adds, Shakespeare says nothing that could not be said about
24 M. DEMOOR
other countries, except that Britain is an island. Interestingly too, and

not commented on by Mandler, is the fact that John of Gaunt acquired
his name because he was born on the continent, in Gent (here Gaunt),
Flanders (Belgium), the place that was of huge economic importance in
Western Europe in the fourteenth century. And the prince’s mother was
Philippa of Hainault; Hainault is a province in the south of what is now
known as Belgium. These small historical details serve to show that the
patriotism Shakespeare was writing about was one with many shades and
insights into continental Europe, and therefore much more inclusive than
the type of nationalism idealised today.
In this study, I also examine the association of nationality with the
human body. Does nationality exist strictly within the human body so
much so that it can be moved with that body and be assumed, or
absorbed, by the soil where that body is eventually buried? In other
words, is there an embodiment of nationality? The British literary tradi-
tion seems to indicate that nationhood can be associated with the place of
burial, that an English body turns to ashes and subsequently impregnates
the soil turning that soil into the nation the corpse is associated with,
while at the same time returning that body to the womb of the earth,
thus enhancing the relationship of earth and motherhood. Yet in some
cultures, it is the soil of the area that carries the nationality and people
take soil from their own country to the areas to which they moved because
they feel, literally, more at home in this new place if it contains some earth
from their original country. Some people expelled from the home nation
only go back to retrieve some of the soil and take it to the graveyards near
their new home where their relatives are buried. This is the testimony of
Lisa Dikomitis who hails from Cyprus:
Back in Nicosia, Ireni put the soil from the teratsia in a glass and took me
to the cemetery in Aghios Dhometios where her mother, my grandmother
Olymbia, is buried. Ireni put the soil of the teratsia on her grave. She told
me it was important, so that her mother was in some sense re-united with
her father and with the place she belongs to, Larnakas. Ireni kept a part of
the soil. She told me it is a way of remembering the village: “It is a part
of me, a part of my past life.”24
There is something similar going on in the reasoning followed by the

US army. They went to great lengths in the past (and still do) to have their
soldiers returned and buried on American soil. Americanness is associated
with being born or buried in America. So here, it is not the corpse (or
the body, if you will) but the soil that holds the quality of nationhood.
Here, even more than in the British conception of burial, when buried,
the fallen soldier returns to the womb, and thus is returned to the mother
nation.25
These issues, the identity of the dead body and the association of the
grave with the womb has been explored in numerous literary texts. Most
famously, Rupert Brooke, in “The Soldier,” claimed that if buried in a
“foreign field” that place will be “forever England.” That dead body,
Brooke writes, will enrich the earth that surrounds it; as English dust,
it will be better and richer than the surrounding soil. Stronger still, the
heart in the body will transfer all the goodness it received under the
English sun, “its sights and sounds,” its happy dreams and, most notably,
its “gentleness, in hearts at peace” to the eternal mind. The stress in
Brooke’s poem seems to lie on the fallen soldier’s continued Englishness
even after death, an Englishness superior to its new surroundings and
powerful enough to inject those surroundings with its own characteristics
even though those were acquired in the past.
At the same time, the poem projects a view of a soldier whose life was
privileged and unfamiliar with life’s more lower-class related problems: “A
body of England’s, breathing English air, / Washed by the rivers, blest
by suns of home.” Brooke’s soldier enjoyed a life of freedom, warmth,
and beauty, a life very different from that of young Drummer Hodge,
Thomas Hardy’s poetic creation, who also died prematurely in a fight for
his country, this time in South Africa. There is no mention of richness in
the “Drummer Hodge” poem. Quite on the contrary, young Hodge is
buried “uncoffined,” and as an unschooled and illiterate soldier, he would
not even have known where precisely he was, let alone what he was dying
for. He was, however, like the dead Brooke narrator, to become part of
that foreign field, feeding some southern tree and looking out upon a
strange-eyed constellation of stars: “Yet portion of that unknown plain /
Will Hodge forever be.”
Brooke’s poem is cited in many of the visitors’ books found at the
entrance gate of the CWGC cemeteries, which seems to indicate that the
poem is not only very well known by those visiting the cemeteries, but
also that visitors might share that view of part of their own country, in the
form of a body being buried in another country. One of the most obvious
examples corroborating that view is the comment of an Australian visitor
26 M. DEMOOR
of a war cemetery in Flanders who wrote “Part of Australia lies here” (see
Fig. 2.1).
At the other end of the spectrum, Robert Louis Stevenson longed to
be buried under a foreign starry sky when he wrote his own epitaph. The
grave is the home and that is where he wants to be, has wanted to be his
entire life. “Home is the sailor / Home from the sea / And the hunter
home from the hill.” The British desire to make the world their home is
thought to be continued after death and articulated in their poetry and
prose.
My analyses follow an anthropological and a literary approach. The
one inspired the other, it is a kind of culture croisée, or maybe discipline
croisée. In the poems referred to above, the poets explored the tomb as
the mother’s womb, with the womb symbolising their home country and
thus paradoxically seeming to suggest that they fought for their country
Fig. 2.1 “Part of Australia lies here,” anonymous comment by a CWGC

cemetery visitor (© Demoor)
and by dying, returned to it. This theory is confirmed by the answer to

Brooke’s poem written by May Herschel-Clarke entitled “The Mother:”
If you should die, think only this of me

In that still quietness where is space for thought,
Where parting, loss and bloodshed shall not be ….26
The parting, loss and bloodshed primarily refer to the war context, but
in the case of a poem by a mother to her son, it points to the fact that the
son has returned to the womb where there will be no renewed “parting,
loss and bloodshed.”
To conclude, I have found an even more convincing proof suggesting
the belief in the military’s return to the mother’s womb upon burial.
When, in October 1914, two regiments of Breton Fusiliers Marins went
to Belgium to fight the German troops, they arrived at Ghent first, then
moved on to Diksmuide, and finally to Nieuwpoort. Interestingly, in
the context of my argument, whenever a marin was buried, his grave
was decorated and marked out from the rest by means of some kind
of a wooden fence. These fences might be a series of thin, upstanding
wooden frames, or a set of metal gates found near abandoned farms,
and this marked the place where the body was buried. The significance
of the fences might escape one until they resorted to this solution: a
prefabricated (iron) fence that was in fact a baby’s cot (see Fig. 2.2).
The meaning was clear. The soldier had returned to babyhood, and
thence to the womb and to his mother’s care. It appears that in the course
of the nineteenth century, Flanders became the personal front-yard-cum-
cemetery of Britain, a place where the dead could be safely buried because
they remained close to home, and the earth where they were buried
promptly became British soil. Cemetery architects played along with this
vision when they designed a horticultural environment with trees, shrubs,
flowers, and even the grass lawns reassuringly reminding the visitors of
home.27
An author who, surprisingly, also commented on the issues of nation-
hood, soil, and the home in a war context and whose poem was quoted on
a tombstone on the other side of the world is the early nineteenth-century
poet Felicia Hemans. Hemans’s poem “The English Dead” takes up the
theme of nationhood as did the poems discussed above, and the image
of death as sleep is prominently elaborated throughout the poem against
the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. The key question in the poem asks
28 M. DEMOOR
Fig. 2.2 Photograph of the WW I grave of a French fusilier marin (marine

fusilier) in Nieuwpoort (Flanders), Belgium (© Courtesy of Patrick Vanleene)
“where sleep your mighty dead?” The answer is all-encompassing since it

is suggested the English dead sleep everywhere where battles have been
fought:
Go stranger! Track the deep—

Free, free the white sail spread!
Wave may not foam, nor wild wind sweep,
Where rest not England’s dead. (1822)28
Thus, Hemans defines and announces the Pax Britannica that was
to reign over Europe and beyond after Napoleon’s fall and until the
explosion of the First World War with a very short interruption of the
French–Prussian war of 1870–1871. Her poem encapsulates the themes
of the poems above and consolidates the conclusions drawn from those
analyses. She revisits the image of death as sleep, rest, and slumber and the
English graves as beds: “Son of the ocean isle! / Where sleep your mighty
dead? / Show me what high and stately pile / Is reared o’er Glory’s bed.”
The poem is quoted on the tombstone in memory of the fallen marines

in the battle of Kororãreka in Russell, New Zealand, where the tomb-
stone carrying the quote is fenced in, reminding us once again of a child’s
crib like the grave of the fusiliers marins in Nieuwpoort, Belgium. The
marines too have returned to sleep where they rest like young children
and therefore, close to their mothers.
Before Waterloo
Historical links with the area now known as Belgium go back a long way
and can be traced in such early writings as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales 29
and even Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors : “Where stood Belgia, the
Netherlands? / Oh, sir, I did not look so low.” (Act 3, Scene 2)
An even earlier link can be traced through William the Conqueror,
a.k.a. William of Normandy, who married a Flemish woman, Matilda of
Bruges, and a quarter of his army in 1066, were Flemish mercenaries.30
Chaucer too allegedly married a Flemish woman, Philippa de Roet, which
fact, according to David Wallace, might explain his knowledge of Flemish
culture. Equally, the contemporaneous dislike of Flemish immigrants,
mainly weavers, in Britain transpires in Chaucer’s writings.31 Wallace
points to several passages in Chaucer’s tales that confirm Chaucer’s famil-
iarity with the Flemish and illustrate the persecution and killing of these
generally prosperous immigrants by referring to these lines in the “Nun’s
Priest’s Tale:” “that would compare the chasing of a fox to the shrill
shouts let out by ‘Jakke Straw and his meynee,’ when ‘they wolden any
Flemyng kille.’”32
But if the epithets Dutch and Flemish still led to a lot of confusion in
the late Middle Ages, this should have come to a halt with the violent split
of the Low Countries into a Protestant Northern and Catholic Southern
part following King Philip II of Spain’s desire to bring these provinces
back under Catholic rule. The violently imposed partition resulted in a
large-scale emigration movement of those now “reformed” inhabitants
of the Southern provinces who could afford it, and those who thought
the Spanish domination was to lead to a virtual stop of creativity and
entrepreneurship. A huge number of proto-Belgians fled to the North,
the Netherlands, to Germany, and to Britain and the area they thus aban-
doned suffered a noticeable cultural and financial decline. It has now
been proven that a large part of the money that went into the East
30 M. DEMOOR
Indian Company was coming from the influx of wealthy migrants from
the Spanish provinces.
It took centuries for the Flemish and Walloon population to recover
from those dire years of persecution, robbery, and emigration. If Breughel
symbolises the end of the artistic efflorescence in Renaissance and late-
Medieval Flanders, Rubens, born in Siegen (Germany) from an expatriate
wealthy Flemish family that returned to Antwerp when he was 13, repre-
sents the return of the creative Flemish genius that found its expression
mainly in paintings. He and his school of followers—among whom Sir
Anthony Van Dijck heralded a new line of artistic achievement that would
last until today. The influx of religious refugees from the Low Countries
also fostered the creation of stereotypes in which the Flemish and Dutch
populations were often seen as one in spite of their religious differences.
The unknown, mysterious Catholic context in Flanders fired the imag-
ination of British authors such as Aphra Behn with her piquant scenes
in The Fair Jilt (1688) and “The Luckey Chance” (1686), and Tobias
Smollett’s portrayal of loose Flemish morals in Peregrine Pickle (1751).
The decadence and inferiority of the Flemish population was by then a
stock stereotype also exploited by the more popular Daniel Defoe in Moll
Flanders (1722).
It took a few centuries though, before travellers on their grand tour
would rediscover the historical towns in the southern part of the Low
Countries and be inspired by the artistic treasures they held and, in certain
cases, still hold.
Writing the Journey

It is not easy to determine why certain people start to write a travel
diary. As argued above, it may begin because there is a confrontation with
another culture that the traveller feels the need to record his or her feel-
ings and thoughts prompted by that confrontation. In other words, they
start writing because travellers face the fact that other people live differ-
ently and they want to be able to talk about these different lifestyles.
The need to travel, however, has been analysed before. James Buzard,
in his seminal The Beaten Track,33 explains the search for the other
as a conscious search for alterity “placing a premium on the different-
from-home.”34 This, he adds, creates a “common ground between the
travel handbook and the impressionistic travel volume.”35 Alterity is
defined by Buzard as “a recognition of distance and difference from the
familiar.”36 But this desire for alterity also encapsulates a wish to find the
authentic, that which according to Buzard and Culler, “makes Europe
worth seeing.” He then quotes Culler when he explains the authentic:
“the authentic is a usage perceived as a sign of that usage, and tourism
… is in large measure a quest for such signs.”37 If Buzard and Culler
seem to limit themselves to travellers from Britain and America, Cinthia
Gannett casts her net much wider in her endeavour to link up travelling
and the genesis of diary writing. According to Gannett, the travel journal
is another of “the earliest proto-diary forms.”38 She explains in Japan
from the tenth century on, the travel journal was an important “accom-
paniment” to travel undertaken by priests and officials. In the seventeenth
century, journals became a source of scientific information for explorers
and discoverers of the Americas. And by the middle of the same century,
it had become a habitual occupation for those undertaking their grand
tour in Europe.
As early as 1601, Francis Bacon discussed the habit of writing a travel
diary as being a necessary occupation for well-heeled young British men
on their grand tour:
Let diaries, therefore, be brought in use. The things to be seen and

observed are: the courts of princes, especially when they give audience to
ambassadors; the courts of justice, while they sit and hear causes; and so of
consistories ecclesiastic; the churches and monasteries, with the monuments
which are therein extant; the walls and fortifications of cities, and towns,
and so the havens and harbours; antiquities and ruins; libraries; colleges,
disputations, and lectures, where any are; shipping and navies; houses and
gardens of state and pleasure, near great cities; armories; arsenals; maga-
zines; exchanges; burses; warehouses; exercises of horsemanship, fencing,
training of soldiers, and the like; comedies, such whereunto the better sort
of persons do resort; treasuries of jewels and robes; cabinets and rarities;
and, to conclude, whatsoever is memorable, in the places where they go.
After all which, the tutors, or servants, ought to make diligent inquiry.
As for triumphs, masks, feasts, weddings, funerals, capital executions, and
such shows, men need not to be put in mind of them; yet are they not to
be neglected.39
On their grand tour, most young men would cross the Channel and
then journey on to Italy. Only a few of them went to the Low Countries
and then to Paris. It is with the latter group that this section is briefly
concerned.
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A Cross-Cultural History of Britain and

Belgium, 1815–1918: Mudscapes and

More information about this series at

Britain and the World

Research on this book started as far back as 2000 when invited by

on the expertise of the one-woman indexing and editing business of

1 Introduction: The Special Relationship Between

6 A Royal Example—Creating a European Family 141

Endorsements of A Cross-Cultural History of Britain

Fig. 2.1 “Part of Australia lies here,” anonymous comment

Fig. 4.1a and b Online archival database Bruges with acquisitions

Fig. 7.3 a Pieter (the Younger) Brueghel, Peasant Wedding

Fig. 7.10 Picture in the Strand Magazine (May 1916).

Introduction: The Special Relationship

There is huge political power in the media. With human memory so

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

kingdom of Belgium in 1830. In the course of those centuries, the shape

will look at how British identity or Britishness, was constructed in that

cross-cultural rather than intercultural results from using the method-

on military victories, much of the British identity was constructed on

century. As some theorists have recently argued, after an avalanche of

royal visits to every part of the kingdom, carefully choreographed and

Clearly, certain aspects of this study have been explored or fore-

cross-national imagined communities, in line with the histoire croisée

moment in paintings, drawings, and writings. Beckford’s autobiograph-

in the highly unconventional production of the painter of mixed ancestry,

Britain and Belgium. The recognition of a similar artistic mindset on

British Identity in Belgian Soil

“Englishness is an invention” Jeremy Paxman asserted confidently on

Thus from a mixture of all kinds began,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 17

In British culture, … one may discover a consistency of concern …

the most powerful place of all he claims to be that of “home,”17 clearly

I was most surprised by my own journals, which gradually filled with as

Ali Behdad acknowledges a similar experience in Belated Travellers . At

the unwilling victim of a skirmish by other resident students at the same

Thus, through my experience, I came to realize early on how, to a large

The Location of Identity

‘national character’ is a particularly developed form of horizontal bond

He also points to a crucial speech uttered by John of Gaunt in Shake-

other countries, except that Britain is an island. Interestingly too, and

There is something similar going on in the reasoning followed by the

Fig. 2.1 “Part of Australia lies here,” anonymous comment by a CWGC

and by dying, returned to it. This theory is confirmed by the answer to

If you should die, think only this of me

Fig. 2.2 Photograph of the WW I grave of a French fusilier marin (marine

“where sleep your mighty dead?” The answer is all-encompassing since it

Go stranger! Track the deep—

The poem is quoted on the tombstone in memory of the fallen marines

Writing the Journey

Let diaries, therefore, be brought in use. The things to be seen and

The Dixie Magazine is a product of our establishment.

One of the Girls—“Did he marry well?”

Merchants and Miners

ONLY LINE RUNNING A SUNDAY STEAMER

—The critics have ruined my new play.

Gold Brau, Light. Munich, Dark.

—He—he says he loves me so much that

Jacobi and Jenkins

—Why did you kick my dog?

How Little Ikey Fooled the Trolley Company.

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