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PALGRAVE POLITICS OF IDENTITY & CITIZENSHIP SERIES
Nation, Class
and Resentment
The Politics of National Identity
in England, Scotland and Wales
Robin Mann and

Steve Fenton
Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship
Series
Series Editors
Varun Uberoi
Brunel University London
London, UK
Nasar Meer
University of Strathclyde
Glasgow, UK
Tariq Modood
University of Bristol
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The politics of identity and citizenship has assumed increasing impor-
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Robin Mann • Steve Fenton
Nation, Class and

Resentment
The Politics of National Identity in England,
Scotland and Wales
Robin Mann Steve Fenton
Bangor University University of Bristol
Bangor, UK Bristol, UK
Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series

ISBN 978-1-137-46673-0 ISBN 978-1-137-46674-7 (eBook)
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Acknowledgements
The origins of this book lie with the research we undertook as part of
the Leverhulme Programme on Migration and Citizenship, held by
the University of Bristol and University College London, which ran
between 2004 and 2009. This book draws extensively on the data col-
lected for that project, and we express our gratitude to the Leverhulme
Trust for funding it. Particular thanks go to Professor Tariq Modood
and Professor John Salt,directors of the Leverhulme Programme. We
also thank the many,manypeople who gave up their time to take part in
the research.
We draw upon a number of other data sets in this book and fully appre-
ciate the opportunities we were given to access them. A large amount of
the survey material presented is based on an analysis of the 2015 British
Election Study Internal Panel Survey. In addition, the data and analysis
provided by YouGov, The Institute for Public Policy Research and the
Future of England Surveys, British Social Attitudes Surveys, the What
Scotland Thinks website, and Roger Scully’s exceptional Elections in Wales
blog all provedto be invaluable resources. Further qualitative interview
material pertaining to Wales was based on research supported by the
Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods
(WISERD), funded by the Economic and Social Research Council
(ESRC) (Grant RES-576-25-0021) and the Higher Education Funding
v
vi Acknowledgements
Council for Wales (HEFCW). We would like to thank colleagues across

WISERD who are involved in the research for these projects.
In writing this book, we also have several individuals to thank. Special
thanks must go to Graham Day for his careful reading of four draft chap-
ters, as well as his insightful comments on the book as a whole; many
thanks are extended to Ben Wellings, who exchanged some very useful
emails and made some of his work available to us. We have benefited
considerably from the key contributions of a large number of scholars
working in the fields of national identity and the politics of nation. We
owe an intellectual debt to Susan Condor, Robert Ford, Jon Fox, Steve
Garner Matthew Goodwin, Eric Kaufmann, Krishan Kumar, Michael
Kenny, Tariq Modood and Richard Wyn Jones.
Thanks are also due to the following publishers for granting permis-
sion to use earlier versions of some of the material that appears in this
book: Sage Publications for Mann, R. (2012) ‘Uneasy being English? The
significance of class for English national sentiments’, Ethnicities 12(4):
484-499; and Palgrave Macmillan for Mann, R. and Fenton, S. (2015)
‘English nationalism and Britishness: Class and the sub-state identities’,
in R. Garbaye and P. Schnapper (eds.) The Politics of Ethnic Diversity in
the British Isles. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Pages 151–173.
Robin:
The completion of this book has coincided with my involvement in a
major funding award made to WISERD from the ESRC to establish a Civil
Society Research Centre (Award ES/L009099/1). I would like to express
particular gratitude to Ian Rees Jones, director of WISERD, and Howard
Davis, WISERD’s co-director, for their support. Additionalthanks go to
my colleagues in the Bangor School of Social Sciences, who have made
it such an agreeable place in which to research, teach, and write. They
include Howard Davis, Martina Feilzer, Bethan Loftus, Cynog Prys,
David Dallimore, and Marta Eichsteller.
From Robin: On a personal level, I wish to thank, first and foremost,
my wife Bethan and my two sons, Edwin and Ioan, who have provided
a constant, and welcome, distraction from the writing process. I also
thank my parents, Valerie and William Mann and Ann and Peter Loftus,
for their encouragement and support. Finally, these acknowledgements
Acknowledgements vii
would be incomplete if I did not also thank my co-author, Steve. After

all, it was he who offered me my first academic post at the University
of Bristol all those years ago to carry out this research. Over the past 10
years I have benefited immeasurably from his mentorship. This book is
the culmination of our collaboration.
Steve is, as ever, so grateful to Jenny, Alex and Lynda for their love and
support, and to Iona, Astrid and Isobel for so much fun and happiness.
Robin Mann and Steve Fenton

Bangor and Bristol
November 2016
Contents
1 Introduction: Nation and Class in Twenty-First-Century

Britain 1
2 Resentment, Classes and National Sentiments 31
3 Class and Majority English Identities 71
4 The Politics of English Identity and Nationalism 99
5 The Nationalist Alternative: Nation and Class in Scotland 139
6 Wales, Nationalism and the Politics of Resentment 169
7 Conclusion 203
Bibliography 211
Index 241
ix
List of Tables
Table 5.1 Differences by social class on the question ‘should

Scotland be an independent country?’ (2013) 164
Table 5.2 Class support for SNP in 2010 and 2015
general elections 165
Table 5.3 Recall of 2010 vote of SNP voters in 2015
general election 166
Table 6.1 Moreno national identity in Wales, Scotland and
England in 2012 193
Table 6.2 Intended vote in 2015 general election by chosen
national identity in Wales (%) 197
Table 6.3 Party vote in general election 2015 by social class in
Wales (%) 198
Table 6.4 Party vote in 2015 general election by country of
birth in Scotland and Wales and by Welsh language
ability in Wales (%) 198
Table 6.5 Preferences for Welsh Assembly powers by country
of birth 199
Table 6.6 EU referendum and immigration by party, country
of birth and Welsh language ability 200
xi
1
Introduction: Nation and Class in
Twenty-First-Century Britain
For more than a decade we have been researching and writing on ques-
tions of national identity, and English identities in particular (Fenton
2007, 2012; Fenton and Mann 2011; Mann 2006, 2011, 2012; Mann
and Fenton 2009, 2014). Drawing on fieldwork carried out in England
we have stressed the importance of considering popular sentiments of
the nation—of attending to what so-called ordinary people have to say
about nation and country, rather than elites, intellectuals, politicians or
nationalist leaders. By paying close attention to what people say about
the nation, we have argued that national identities should not be exam-
ined separately from wider material contexts. People do have anxieties
about the state of the nation, and these anxieties are deeply connected
to changes in class structure and material conditions. During the same
period, scholarly interest in national identities within Britain has flour-
ished across historical, political and social sciences. This includes a grow-
ing concern with the varied meanings of national belonging for ordinary
citizens. Given the breadth of scholarship in this area, including our own,
it is time to take stock.
© The Author(s) 2017 1

R. Mann, S. Fenton, Nation, Class and Resentment,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-46674-7_1
2 Nation, Class and Resentment
he Changing Political Landscape of National

T
Identity
The political context of national identity in Britain has transformed sig-
nificantly since we embarked on our research. At the turn of the new mil-
lennium a key question was whether an English backlash would emerge
in reaction to political devolution to Scotland and Wales and the for-
mation in 1999 of the Scottish and Welsh governments. Academic and
popular interest in Englishness was beginning to mushroom giving rise
to a vast multidisciplinary literature across literature, history, cultural
and media studies, political science and sociology. Survey and qualitative
research on ordinary people’s views of national identity had also started
to take root (Condor 2000; Curtice and Heath 2000). But the evidence
did not point to any great popular concern over matters of devolution to
England or English self-government (Mandler 2006). The muted nature
of England’s initial response to devolution seemed to reinforce some
longstanding assumptions concerning an absence of an English national-
ism (Nairn 1977).
The current form of Scottish and Welsh nationalism can be traced
back to the 1960s, when the phenomenon of substate nationalism expe-
rienced its first truly political arrival. This was the time when attachment
to Britishness, to Union and Empire, began to be seriously questioned.
At their peak in the early 1970s it was Scottish and Welsh nationalisms
which threatened the British state, whilst any corresponding English
nationalist movement was conspicuous only by its absence. The English
were seen to be unconcerned about ‘national identity’, nor did they ques-
tion the place of England within Britain. This has changed quite mark-
edly. In the very short period between 2013 and 2015 we witnessed the
politicisation of English identity and nationalism in relation to the rise in
support for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP)—a party
which, it has been argued, resembles the closest UK politics has had
to an English nationalist party (Ford and Goodwin 2014a; Jeffery et al.
2014; Mann and Fenton 2014). The transformation is not confined to
England; we also witnessed the Scottish Independence Referendum in
September 2014 with its decisive, albeit close, vote in favour of remaining
1 Introduction: Nation and Class in Twenty-First-Century Britain 3
part of Britain. This was followed by the extraordinary results in the 2015
general election, with Labour losing all but one seat in Scotland and the
Scottish National Party (SNP) achieving phenomenal success. The grow-
ing popularity of the SNP in Scotland is not matched by increasing sup-
port for Plaid Cymru (Plaid), the Party of Wales, whose status as the main
opposition party in Wales is challenged by both the Conservative Party
and UKIP. In this context, the Conservatives were able to retain power at
the UK level in 2015, at least in part, through mobilising English anxiet-
ies over Scottish political influence. These events would appear to support
the conclusions of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) reports
on the Future of England Surveys of a politicisation of English identity,
referred to by the authors as ‘the dog that finally barked’ (Wyn Jones et al.
2012, 2013; Jeffery et al. 2014). Thus we have before us a particular ques-
tion over nationhood across Britain which is both recent and problematic.
National Identities and Their Material Settings

There is no doubt that devolution of powers to Scotland and Wales has
begun to make people think about England as a political entity, one that
is distinct from Britain. But to focus solely on constitutional matters
misses some important questions. We argue that people connect to the
nation, in large part, as a consequence of their material and practical
experiences—of employment and the way expectations relating to health
care, housing and neighbourhood are met. Moreover, many of these
experiences are class experiences. These social and economic contexts also
need to be considered if we are to fully grasp how people orientate them-
selves to nation. Our understanding of national identity across Britain
has benefited enormously from access to an excellent body of survey
research. Through large samples and fixed questions, this work provides a
wealth of evidence for broad patterns of change over time in the strength
of national identity, for example with regard to shifts from British to
English identifications. But survey research also has the tendency to omit
the material context in which people talk about their country or sense of
national attachment. We find that strong national identities and resent-
ments are commonly situated within the broader accounts people give of
their material lives. It is through people’s views on being English, British

or otherwise, that we locate deeper sources of resentment—of a world
in which they are ‘left behind’ or of a country that has changed for the
worse (Ford and Goodwin 2014b). This has two immediate implications
for an analysis of discontented national identities. The first concerns how
discontentment is to be traced empirically: in our view, this is not solely
through perceptions of changing constitutional settlements or even the
explicit sense of national identity but through broader popular sentiments
which can include references to everyday life and neighbourhoods and to
social and economic changes to nation and country. Hence our focus
is not only on asking direct questions about national identity but, in a
more far-reaching respect, with national identity as a lens into the state
of the nation. The second aspect is that changes to social classes, along
with material shifts in the political economy, have contributed to the
circumstances in which questions of nationhood and national identity
are problematised and, thus, are important considerations for explaining
the growing assertion of substate identities. Nationhood is not simply a
question of psychological security derived from a taken-for-granted sense
of attachment; it is also rooted in the material and moral reality in which
individuals seek to live their lives. Class experience is, therefore, an inte-
gral part of the story of national identity in twenty-first-century Britain.
Popular Sentiments and the Nation

We believe that popular sentiments and everyday life should receive far
more prominence than they do in both scholarly and political narratives
of nations and national identities across Britain. This is a focus we share
with a growing body of research into everyday nationhood. Since the
1990s, influenced by trends in postmodernism, anthropology and the
turn towards culture and discourse, there has emerged a new subfield
within nationalism scholarship concerned with the discursive production
and reproduction of identities and with researching nations in relation to
everyday life and popular discourse (Brubaker et al. 2007; Edensor 2002;
Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008; Wodak 2009). Britain itself has provided a
fruitful context in which to explore issues of everyday national belonging
(Billig 1995; Condor 2000, 2010; Thompson and Day 1999; Edensor
2002; Kiely et al. 2000; Leddy-Owen 2014; Skey 2011). The collective
evidence of qualitative studies has identified the complex, and often con-
tradictory, ways in which people experience, and talk about, the nation
(Condor et al. 2006). Within qualitative accounts, national identities can
vary considerably in their meaning and salience for ordinary actors. These
studies also reveal how commonplace beliefs may be drawn upon to
make sense of national identity, including taken-for-granted associations
between nation and particular classes (Mann 2012) within an unstated
whiteness (Garner 2012; Tyler 2012). To these ends, survey research can
be questioned for assuming that national identities have fixed or singu-
lar meanings which can be deduced from responses to direct interview
questions.
At the same time, we wish to retain a definition of nationalism as both
a collective and political phenomenon. The relationship between elite and
popular forms of nationalism has always been a key concern for broader
nationalism scholarship, although there are disagreements over the nature
of this relationship. Kedourie (1993) in particular considers nationalism
as an elite creation by nationalist intellectuals who are set apart from the
masses. Nairn (1977) on the other hand envisages an interactive relation-
ship whereby nationalist projects, though initially conceived by elites,
are then spread through attempts to engage with the masses. Similarly,
for Breuilly (1993) the ‘success’ of nationalism as a political project—
for example, in pursuit of independence or self-government—relates to
the connection between elite portrayals of the nation and the way this
appeals to and resonates with popular beliefs and grievances held by large
sections of the population. Drawing on examples from recent East and
West European history, Whitmeyer (2002) has argued that elites are not
solely responsible for the development of nationalism and, moreover, that
not all elite nationalisms have been successful in their appeal to ordinary
citizens. The history of Europe is full of cases where elite-driven versions
of nationalism have been rejected by the people, or at least by some peo-
ple, as well as cases where an alternative version of nationalism to that
propagated by elites arose from the people themselves.
This distinction provides a useful way of framing some important ques-
tions about nationhood across Britain. In particular, it makes attending
to what ordinary people have to say about the nation very important for
wider political debates about the significance of national identity. Across
Britain, the distinction between popular and elite versions of nationalism
is writ large. British nationalism itself looks increasingly like a national-
ism that the majority of people in Britain are not accepting, certainly
not in Scotland, and with support falling in England. Yet Britishness is
certainly promoted by elites and governments of all types, most notably
by New Labour promoting the idea of ‘cool Britannia’ in 1997 and then
again by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who made a number
of key speeches on Britishness between 2004 and 2009. As Kumar has
argued (2003: 236–237) the very persistence of Britishness and British
identity over the twentieth century can be attributed to the ‘integrative
role’ of the labour movement and then Labour Party. Through nation-
alisation policies and the welfare state, Labour acquired ‘…a vast and
far-reaching influence in every corner of British society’ (Kumar 2003:
237). However, there is an emerging popular form of English nationalism
which is rejected by a liberal elite as too populist and vulgar or xenopho-
bic (Aughey 2007: 108). Classically, it is contended, the English eschew
political nationalism whilst at the same time promoting a diffuse, conser-
vative sense of English identity (Aughey 2007; Baggini 2007). For some
Labour Party politicians, there is now a pressing need to encourage the
embracing of Englishness in order to reclaim it from right-wing politics
(Denham 2016a, b; Hunt 2016). The question of how English identity
is expressed politically is one that liberal and left political parties can ill
afford to ignore (Kenny 2014).
Of course, elite discourses do play a role in shaping the content of
nationalism amongst the people. But there is no guarantee that such top-
down initiatives will be successful. More often than not, ‘nationalism
misses its mark’ (Fox 2004: 363). In Wales, for example, local nationalist
elites have promoted Welsh nationalism primarily as to do with the sur-
vival of the Welsh language and culture. Yet this version of Welsh nation-
alism is not widely shared amongst the majority of Welsh people. For a
long period the link between Welsh language and nation sat in contention
with other ways of being Welsh, in particular, those based on class and
labourism. The period since devolution has seen a greater political and
cultural promotion of Welsh identity in Wales. But it would be mistaken
from this to assume that devolution has led to a rise in Welsh identifi-
cation and an accompanying decline in British identification. On the
contrary many Welsh people continue to view Wales as forming part of
a wider British social and economic system, and there remains a large
English-born minority in Wales who prioritise an English and British
identity.
he Political Organisation of Popular National

T
Sentiments
There is significant sociological evidence for a growing, often racialized,
resentment and associated feelings of anger and injustice within sections
of the ethnic majority in England (Garner 2012; Hewitt 2006; Fenton
and Mann 2011). Several studies document the sense of dispossession
and loss of entitlement among sections of the working class (Dench et al.
2006), which may have translated recently into support for the British
National Party (BNP) (Rhodes 2010). It is not insignificant that both
‘white English’ and ‘white working class’ people may perceive themselves
as losing out. Williamson (1998: 398) describes the loss of solidarity since
the 1950s within sections of the working class in Britain. But this can
also be applied to declining, and threatened, fortunes of those other than
the working class. Studies of radical right-wing populist parties across
Europe emphasise the nationalism of the lower middle class, particularly
self-employed and small business groups (McGann and Kitschelt 2005).
Wells and Watson (2005) describe the racism of shopkeepers in London
as a politics of resentment. The sense of decline described in these works
suggests that sentiments towards nation and country are not determined
simply by class position, as either basically middle class or working class,
but are related to class fractions which experience loss and can be distin-
guished from the more ‘detached’ national sentiments of those who feel
secure (Mann and Fenton 2009).
The presence of a ‘reservoir’ of social discontent raises questions as
to how these sentiments are organised politically. Compared to the
rest of Western Europe, Britain has not been fruitful terrain for radical
right-wing and populist nationalist parties. Political conditions in partic-
ular have been weak, with the absence of proportional representation and
the persistence of two-party dominance inhibiting populism. The arrival
of UKIP arguably complicates this somewhat, and their share of the vote
in the 2014 European election and 2015 general election places them on
a par with some radical populist and right-wing parties on the continent.
Yet a focus on populist parties is only one part of the story. There are
wider, less explicit, aspects of the politics of resentment: first, that such
resentments may not have a political translation at all, and second, that
mainstream political parties may themselves make appeals to resentment
and resentful nationalism. The sense of anger towards national questions
is both broader and more longstanding when set against the more recent
politicisation of English identity.
Certainly in Scotland and England, we can point to a growing detach-
ment from Britishness. The consequences of this are particularly acute for
England, and this is partly because English identities are fused with British
identity in a way that Scottish and Welsh identity are not. The domi-
nant interpretation of English nationalism is that it is both right-wing
and xenophobic. For sure, support for UKIP, along with Euroscepticism
and anti-immigrant sentiments, is correlated with a strong attachment
to English identity (Wyn Jones et al. 2012). Equally Scottish and Welsh
nationalisms are commonly viewed as progressive and left-leaning (Erk
2010). During the 1960s and 1970s, nationalist discontent in Scotland
and Wales demanded significant restructuring of the British state in the
form of self-government. In England, it took the form of racism and
opposition to black and Asian immigration. Historically the BNP has
performed far worse in Scotland and Wales than in England, which sug-
gests a difference in the way racist-nationalist sentiments are politicised
in those nations. It also reflects the absence of any great concentrations
of non-white immigration outside of the large English cities. But at the
very least, the notable support received subsequently by UKIP in elec-
tions in Wales indicates a need to re-examine the widely held belief that
right-wing xenophobia in Britain is exclusively an English problem. There
is little disagreement that Scottish and Welsh nationalisms are primarily
left of centre. But we also need to examine the presence of right-wing
and xenophobic attitudes at the substate level and to offer sociological
explanations for their appeal or otherwise.
ontemporary Class Relations and the

C
Politics of Nation
Our approach, then, is to locate the specific question of national identity
within the sociology of the connections between nation, class structures
and changing material conditions and experiences. In doing so we criti-
cally engage with some arguments concerning the declining importance of
class, and other social divisions, for political alignment [for recent summa-
ries of sociological debates on class voting see Oesch (2008) and Rydgren
(2012)]. The purview of rising support for nationalist parties includes, in
some cases, assumptions of a politics of class being replaced by a politics
of identity or culture. Some of the political dimensions on which Scottish
and Welsh devolved governments have distinguished themselves from
Westminster are class and distributive ones, including care for the elderly,
student tuition fees and subsidised public transport. Devolved politics
thus far have not been notably ‘nationalistic’ in the sense of advancing a
primarily cultural or ethnic valorisation of the nation, even though there
is active promotion of nation-building through recognition and celebra-
tion of distinctive cultural traditions. Rather, questions of distribution
and class, along with a broader commitment to social justice, have been
mobilised as means for articulating national difference (Mooney and Scott
2015; Paterson 2015). Both the surge in support for the Scottish National
Party (SNP) in the 2015 general election and the pro-independence cam-
paign of the previous year rested on an explicitly materialist, anti-austerity
argument. Evidence from polls and surveys indicate that support for inde-
pendence and the SNP was disproportionately greater amongst young
people. But there is also evidence that young people are less enthusiastic
about national identity (Condor 2010; Fenton 2007). In contrast, sup-
port for UKIP in England is disproportionately greater amongst an older
fraction of the working class (Ford and Goodwin 2014b). What is clear is
that working and middle-class disillusionment with the Labour Party, as a
result of its repositioning as a centrist rather than left-wing party, is a pre-
cipitating factor for nationalist and populist politics in all three nations.
The election of Jeremy Corbyn as the new leader of the Labour Party in
September 2015 had raised the prospect that the party will adopt a posi-
tion much more to the political left than it has taken since 1997. Popular
support for Corbyn—described by the press as Corbynmania—matches
the gains in membership of the SNP following the independence ref-
erendum (Pidd 2015a, The Guardian). To understand the relationship
between class and politics, and especially nationalist politics, it is first
necessary to set out our own use of class and discuss some contemporary
problems in conceptualising class.
Changing Contours of Class

For some time now, and despite widening inequalities across Western
democracies, the relevance of the concept of class for social and politi-
cal analysis has been questioned. This has been for various reasons.
One is a justifiable belief that mainstream sociology was, at least up to
the 1980s, premised on an exclusive focus on class which underplayed
other axes of exploitation and inequality (gender, ethnicity and reli-
gion). Several sociologists hold the view that a complex fragmentation
of classes has made the class concept itself theoretically and empirically
problematic (Beck 2007). The heavy industries on which class con-
sciousness was built have declined in the West as a result of outsourc-
ing and the shift of manufacturing to developing countries. There is
undoubtedly also a popular perception that class is not as important
as it once was, whether in politics or society at large. In addition,
we can witness the retreat from class in UK political debates, a recoil
most evident in New Labour’s attempts to discard their ‘old’ Labour
image. For a Labour Party not wishing to alienate its potential middle
England vote, class in the twenty-first century became something of a
‘risky concept’ for politicians (Sayer 2005: 12).
We cannot attempt a full critical review of sociological debates over
class here, but the following issues appear most at stake: First, there is an
argument for a more complex view of class which can account for the role
of cultural and social capital, namely consumption patterns and social
networks, in the formation of classes (Savage et al. 2013). Second, are the
changes in the qualitative and quantitative significance of some classes,
or fractions within classes, as a result of recent and current dynamics of
global capital accumulation driven by a ‘financialisation’ model (Van der

Zwan 2014). Such changes would include the rise of a super-rich global
elite, as well as a growing ‘precarious’ class of the insecure and tempo-
rary (under)employed, which renders the idea of a clear ‘dividing line’
between working class and middle class increasingly problematic.
Our own approach is to take both class relations and class experience
seriously and to understand that it is still in relation to the economy that
contemporary class structures are reproduced. We conceptualise classes
as people sharing a position in the labour market with regard to oppor-
tunities for income, wealth and indeed for consumption and social par-
ticipation. This has the virtue of accommodating both advantaged and
disadvantaged fractions within broader classes and including people who
have both ‘won’ and ‘lost’ as a consequence of neoliberal globalisation.
Putting this into practice, we may follow the schema offered by Bradley
(2014: 433), which emphasises broad class groupings—the elite, mid-
dle class, working class and precariat—which may be subdivided into a
number of class fractions. Each class may contain members who perceive
themselves as either gaining or losing out.
First, as Sayer (2013) comments, one of the biggest changes to the
class structure in recent decades is the growth of a super-rich global elite.
Although statistically very small, they are crucially important as the
‘movers and shakers of global neoliberal capitalism’ (Bradley 2014: 434).
Elsewhere Savage and Williams (2008: 10) have commented on the rise
of financial elites since the 1980s to challenge the previous dominance of
managerial elites. Flemmen’s (2012) analysis of the economic upper class
in Norway identifies how the longstanding distinction between the own-
ers of large businesses and ‘employed’ executives and managers persists
under financialisation.
Second, by far the largest and most diverse are the middle classes,
who range from high-wage earners who are employees in large com-
panies and traditional professionals (doctors, solicitors, accountants,
engineers) through to low-status, predominantly female, white-collar
workers (nurses, council workers, administrators). In between are the
petty bourgeoisie (shopkeepers, small business owners) and a set of pro-
fessionals, well paid but increasingly insecure, who fit the recent notion
of a ‘squeezed middle’ (teachers, lecturers, social workers, IT specialists)
(Parker 2013). Many of the material pressures generated by the financial-

isation of capital, heightened after the 2007 financial crisis, have a bear-
ing on members of the middle class as well as the working class. Some
within this middle class group will have also suffered material loss in the
form of economic opportunities, diminished social status and declining
housing market opportunities.
Third is the working class. The losses experienced by the working class
from the process of deindustrialisation are well documented (Strangleman
and Rhodes 2014). In contrast, yet still within the broader working class,
is a relatively affluent and aspiring upper-working-class fraction con-
sisting of skilled manual workers, tradespeople and redundant factory
and manufacturing workers now self-employed. But others within the
service sector are threatened by advances in communication technology
which enables the outsourcing of work to new countries. Many within
the ‘working class’ today are service workers rather than factory work-
ers. This latter grouping of service workers form a new ‘precariat’ class
which, while resonating with previous notions (underclass, lumpen pro-
letariat), has grown in significance such as to be considered distinct from
the working class. This class includes people on temporary, part-time and
inferior contracts and working as temps, cleaners, educational assistants,
call-centre workers, fruit pickers and bar and restaurant staff. The pre-
cariat may also be distinguished from the working class as it includes
some skilled and highly educated workers, such as students and graduates
without employment (Bradley 2014: 434).
Conceptualisations of class are also mediated by the (declining) role of
the state. To put it crudely, in Britain, the period between 1920 and 1980
witnessed an increasing role for the state in reducing inequalities and
improving the material conditions of working-class people. After 1945
this period saw the creation of the welfare state, as well as the growth of
public-sector employment for both middle- and working-class people.
Since 1980, however, the undoing of welfare provision and legislation
favouring the deregulation of capital have led to increasing inequality
and material losses for working people. The development of the neolib-
eral global economy arguably has weakened the ties between states and
citizens and, as a result, between citizens and nations. As Bauman (2004)
has argued, nations are carried by states. As global economic and cultural
movements undermine the autonomy of states, so the power of the state

to bind its citizens is gravely weakened. Moreover, in a global economy,
states have much less to ‘offer’ their citizens. Amidst the complexities
of globalisation and technological change, national governments appear
increasingly unable to deliver (Stoker 2006). Thus the demands of both
US and UK governments concerning tax evasion by large multinationals
(Apple in the USA, Amazon and Google in the UK) are met with defi-
ance. Whereas working people in many capitalist democracies have won
concessions from the state to provide varying degrees of social security
and welfare, capitalist globalisation means that the hard-won welfare can
‘go into reverse’. As the very idea of a welfare democracy loses its grip,
welfare itself comes to be viewed, both by political elites and some sec-
tions of the population, as unfair (Hoggett et al. 2013). By contrast,
some classes within capitalist democracies participate more readily in the
benefits of globalisation and are less affected by the weakening of welfare
or, indeed, are themselves ‘global actors’—in their employment, mode of
travel and networks and outlook.
Thus the changes to contemporary class structures described here do
not afford a simple classification of classes, let alone a binary division
between working and middle classes. This said, existing classification
schemas like the NS-Sec1 and NRS Social Grade2 do remain useful to the
extent that they enable distinctions both between and within broad social
classes. Thus, with regard to the NS-Sec classification, socio-economic
groups 1.1 and 4—the so-called employer classes—share a similar rela-
1
The NS-Sec (National Statistics Socio-economic classification) is widely used within official statis-
tics and surveys. It derives from the sociological classification known as the Goldthorpe schema.
The version of the classification used in most analyses, including the UK census, has eight classes:
1.1: Large employers and higher managerial and administrative occupations; 1.2: Higher profes-
sional occupations; 2: Lower managerial, professional and administrative occupations; 3:
Intermediate occupations; 4: Small employers and own account workers; 5: Lower supervisory and
technical occupations; 6: Semi-routine occupations; 7: Routine occupations; 8: Never worked and
long-term unemployed.
2
The NRS (National Readership Survey) Social Grade is more commonly known by its groups A,
B, C1, C2, D and E. It is widely used in market research and commercial polling organisations,
notably Ipsos Mori and YouGov. The six social classes are as follows: A: Higher managerial, admin-
istrative and professional; B: Intermediate managerial, administrative and professional; C1:
Supervisory, clerical and junior managerial, administrative and professional; C2: Skilled manual
workers; D: Semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers; and E: State pensioners, casual or lowest-
grade workers, unemployed with state benefits only.
tion to capital but in a way that is distinct from socio-economic groups

1.2, 2 and 3, which may contain a greater proportion of so-called cul-
tural and public-sector workers. Alongside these, socio-economic groups
6 and 7 are where we would find most of today’s low-paid workers. Socio-
economic group 5 is the traditional location for skilled manual work-
ers. But skilled tradespeople are increasingly self-employed and may have
more in common with socio-economic group 4 (the traditional location
for the petty bourgeoisie) than they do with the classes below them. This
way of understanding class in light of contemporary change presents a
challenge for some of the ways in which the salience of class for politi-
cal behaviour and identity (voting, party identification) has been ques-
tioned, even dismissed.
Class, Voting and Political Identities

During the 1970s the idea of class dealignment—a weakening of the link
between class location and vote or party identification—gained popular-
ity (Butler and Stokes 1969). This thesis is commonly associated, amongst
other things, with the idea of ‘embourgoisement’ and was applied to
affluent workers, working in car and other manufacturing employment
and receiving higher wages than those working in traditional and heavy
industries. Because they were better off, it was suggested that they could
adopt some of the attitudes and lifestyles of the middle class (Goldthorpe
et al. 1969). Certainly, in Britain there is evidence of change whereby the
association of the working class with the Labour Party and the middle
class with the Conservative Party no longer correlates to the same degree
as it did in general elections in the 1960s (Clarke et al. 2004). As will
be described at various points in this book, economic changes since the
1970s have engendered a decline in the size of the working class and
the growth of professional and service classes. Thus the shrinking of the
working class is one of the reasons why social democratic and left-wing
political parties have adopted policy platforms designed to attract post-
material middle-class voters. The British Labour Party purports to hold
more progressive values on matters of gender equality, gay rights or mul-
ticulturalism than the Conservative Party, but it was also a clear decision
of the Labour Party led by Tony Blair in the 1990s to adopt the neo-
liberal policies of its Conservative predecessors. As Evans and Tilley
(2012: 148–151) argue, the decline in class voting is more a function
of party strategy than social change. As their British Election Study data
indicates, in the 1964 election, 70 % of skilled manual and 66 % of
semi-skilled manual workers voted Labour; in the 1997 landslide New
Labour victory, the comparable figures were 67 and 69 %. The shift of
the Labour Party towards the centre of the left–right ideological spec-
trum is a response more to the shrinking of the working class than it is
to any change in the political preferences of working-class people (Evans
and Tilley 2012: 139). Its effect, however, is to weaken any class distinc-
tiveness of the political choices available to the electorate.
One of the problems with the ‘class dealignment’ thesis is its tendency
to treat class in binary terms, as a division between middle class (ABC1)
and working class (C2DE). As we have established, this division does not
reflect the way class structures and forms of occupational stratification
have changed. In any case, there have always been some exceptions to
the general trend that working-class people vote Labour and middle class
people Conservative. Even during the 1950s and 1960s the ability of
the Conservative Party to win with an electorate where manual workers
were dominant depended on the support of a substantial minority of the
working class (McKenzie and Silver 1968). This partially reflected the way
class interacted with ethnic, gender, local and religious identities. Hence
the Conservatives won considerable support from the Protestant working
class in areas with a strong Irish Catholic presence, including Liverpool
and the West of Scotland (Bruce et al. 2004), or amongst so-called defer-
ential workers in rural areas where the Conservative Party was connected
to local ruling elites (Newby 1979). By the 1980s the prospect of home-
ownership as a result of policies on the right to buy council houses would
enable the Conservative Party to further exploit working-class support.
More broadly, the work of Marxist and critical ‘race’ scholars has shown
that ethnic or racial divisions within the working class were central to
the development of class politics (Roediger 1991; Virdee 2014). No less
of a deviation were middle-class Labour voters during the 1960s. Partly
this derived from the social mobility of those whose fathers were manual
workers and who carried with them political identities drawn from child-
hood socialisation. In addition, the growth of the welfare state after 1945
meant that many came to depend on the state for either or both major
services and employment. This included, within the middle class, a grow-
ing number of public-sector managers and professionals.
Once these changes to social classes are taken into account, the signifi-
cance of class experience for politics and voting is telling. Oesch (2008),
for example, identifies a division in the political loyalties of the middle
classes, between professionals (NS-Sec groups 1.2 and 2) and business
managers (NS-Sec groups 1.1 and 4). At the liberal end are cultural pro-
fessionals who are highly educated, highly skilled and involved in creat-
ing, teaching, healing or caring occupations; at the authoritarian end are
those who deal primarily with object- or document-related tasks; they
include managers, self-employed tradespeople, shopkeepers and farm-
ers. For Oesch (2008), class voting continues but, importantly, becomes
increasingly dependent on the existence of ‘class–party alliances’ between
two or more distinct middle- and working-class fractions (2008: 348).
Thus, far from being an indicator of class decline, the tendency of salaried
professionals to vote for Labour, Green and Liberal parties can be distin-
guished from managers, small business and low-skilled workers who are
more likely to vote Conservative and for the populist right (2008: 349;
see also Manza and Brooks 1999).
A further reservation on class voting, and indeed other kinds of
‘identity-based’ voting, is offered by the notion of ‘valence politics’,
whereby voters are held to evaluate parties based on their short-term per-
formance in government and management of the economy rather than
according to longer-term ideological commitments. Instrumental factors
and personal economic situation became more important in the context
of a narrowing of the policy differences between parties. Along with more
widespread media coverage, including televised debates between party
leaders in the weeks before major elections, perceptions of leadership
become more important (Clarke et al. 2004). Valence issues are often
counterpoised to class identity as a basis for explaining voting. But much
of what we understand by valence politics continues to revolve around
economic issues, and it is difficult to see how evaluations of one’s personal
economic situation should not in itself be regarded as a class issue. Thus
Evans and Andersen (2006) argue that voters view the economy through
the lens of their party preferences, not the other way around. Valence
politics puts a serious question mark around class politics in terms of
partisanship and ideology. But there remain good reasons for believing
that when people evaluate parties and their leaders and survey their own
personal economic situations, they do so through a frame of practical,
material and, thus, class-relevant experiences.
Nationalism, Political Parties and Class

At different points in this book we will be discussing the significance of
changes to class structures and the party politics of class for the political
expression of nationalism and support for nationalist political parties.
At this point our aim is to lay out some of the key conceptual issues
pertaining to different forms of nationalist politics in Europe and to give
some examples of their relevance to the British case. Conventionally
we might associate nationalism with two unrelated sets of political par-
ties which, despite overlapping in some cases, should not be confused.
There are, first, those on the radical right referred to as neo-nationalist or
right-wing populist parties (Betz 1994; Rydgren 2007) and, second, sub-
state, regionalist or minority nationalist parties (Keating and McGarry
2001). One source of confusion is that the term neo-nationalism has
been applied to both minority/regionalist and radical right-wing popu-
list versions, despite their ideological contrasts. According to McCrone
(2006b), Nairn (1977) coined the term neo-nationalism to describe the
emergence of a new kind of territorial politics, such as that pursued by
regionalist parties. In contrast, Berezin (2006) uses neo-nationalism
(and new nationalism) to refer to the rise of right-wing parties and xeno-
phobia across Europe. She specifically refers to Front National in France
as a neo-nationalist party which does not restrict its ambitions to any
distinct territorial part of France (see also Eger and Valdez 2014). For
consistency we will use neo-nationalism to refer to right-wing populist
nationalisms, parties and movements and substate nationalism to refer
to minority nationalist parties, like the SNP and Plaid Cymru. Eger and
Valdez (2014) offer one basis for this distinction in that neo-nationalist
parties are stronger where the state/territorial issue is a largely settled mat-
ter, and so neo-nationalism refers to a form of nationalism occurring

in a context of settled boundaries. Thus, in direct contrast to substate
nationalism, neo-nationalism can be considered a boundary maintenance
project rather than a nation- and state-building project. Fundamentally,
populist parties, despite their affinities, should be distinguished from
both far-right ideologies (for example fascism, ultra-nationalism) and
non-parliamentary forms of right-wing extremism (Rydgren 2007).
eo-nationalism and Populist Politics

N
in Europe
According to Mudde (2004), the defining characteristic of populism is a
view of society as ‘ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antag-
onistic groups, the “pure” people versus “the corrupt elite”’ (2004: 543;
see also Rydgren 2007: 245–246). In the period between 1945 and the
1970s, populism was largely contained by a coincidence of economic and
political organisation—between the welfare state, trade unions, employer
associations and party systems (Zaslove 2008). As this consensus began
to break down, a space for populist politics emerged. This included popu-
list concerns regarding increases in the levels of immigration. Certainly
immigration scepticism is one of the principal factors in voting for radical
right-wing populist parties (Rydgren 2007; Ivarsflaten 2008). The asso-
ciation of neo-nationalism with xenophobia and anxiety over foreigners
(Berezin 2006) has led some to explain support for right-wing populist
parties through a lens of ‘identity crisis’. Such arguments tend to pos-
tulate that people experience fear, insecurity and a loss of identity—an
‘ontological insecurity’ (Giddens 1991)—as a result of the impact of
globalisation on nation-states, which leads to a new resentment-based
nationalism involving a search for new ways in which to anchor collec-
tive national identities (Koopmans et al. 2005; Skey 2011). The conver-
gence of mainstream parties to the political centre is an important part
of the political conditions which permit populist parties to gain support.
Political parties come to be seen as too close to the state, professionalised
and ‘out of touch’ with ordinary people. Party membership declines, as
does voter turnout. The populists scorn the ‘cosmopolitan liberal elite’,
who are seen to have lost any connection to the everyday lives of their
voters.
Studies on the support for right-wing populist parties have tended to
emphasise the petty bourgeoisie and the working class. For example, in
its formative years in the 1970s the Front National received dispropor-
tionate support from farmers, artisans and shopkeepers (Betz 1994). In
1988 the party achieved electoral success through making appeals to the
working class who had begun to experience growing levels of economic
insecurity. Bourdieu et al. (1999: 381–391) give farmers and industrial
workers as examples of declining classes who vote for the Front National
(see also Billiet and Witte 2008 on blue collar workers and Flemish
nationalism). Swank and Betz (2003) also examine how globalisation and
welfare state systems ‘…have contributed to the electoral success of new
far right parties in Western Europe’ (2003: 238). In particular, they argue
that the decline of manufacturing jobs is ‘systematically associated with
an increase in the electoral fortunes of radical right wing parties’ (2003:
238; see also Mewes and Mau 2013). In the wake of globalisation both
semi- and unskilled workers and traditional middle-class groups face
ostensible risks to income and employment, and it is these groups that
disproportionately support radical right-wing parties’ (Swank and Betz
2003: 216). Thus Rydgren and Ruth (2013), in their analysis of support
for the Swedish right-wing party Swedish Democrats, find a positive cor-
relation between electoral support and unemployment and districts with
large percentages of people receiving social welfare.
The growing significance of the working-class vote for populist par-
ties has led to questions as to whether all such parties can be understood
simply as right wing, let alone as radically right wing. Traditionally, right-
wing populist parties have been associated with a combination of neolib-
eral anti-welfare and anti-statism and an authoritarian view on a range of
social and cultural values. But not all of Western Europe’s anti-immigrant
parties advocate a small state with neo-liberal taxing and spending poli-
cies. Michel (2014) has argued that some of these parties have adopted
redistributive policies in order to speak to their working-class support.
For Eger and Valdez (2014) the increasing accumulation of globalisa-
tion effects has produced a nationalist and protectionist turn amongst
contemporary populist parties. Both the Front National in France, under
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however their brain works, their pulse beats neither faster nor slower
for the common accidents of life. There is, therefore, something cold
and repulsive in the air that is about them—like that of marble. In a
word, they are modern philosophers; and the modern philosopher is
what the pedant was of old—a being who lives in a world of his own,
and has no correspondence with this. It is not that such persons have
not done you services—you acknowledge it; it is not that they have
said severe things of you—you submit to it as a necessary evil: but it
is the cool manner in which the whole is done that annoys you—the
speculating upon you, as if you were nobody—the regarding you,
with a view to experiment in corpore vili—the principle of dissection
—the determination to spare no blemishes—to cut you down to your
real standard;—in short, the utter absence of the partiality of
friendship, the blind enthusiasm of affection, or the delicacy of
common decency, that whether they ‘hew you as a carcase fit for
hounds, or carve you as a dish fit for the gods,’ the operation on your
feelings and your sense of obligation is just the same; and, whether
they are demons or angels in themselves, you wish them equally at
the devil!
Other persons of worth and sense give way to mere violence of
temperament (with which the understanding has nothing to do)—are
burnt up with a perpetual fury—repel and throw you to a distance by
their restless, whirling motion—so that you dare not go near them, or
feel as uneasy in their company as if you stood on the edge of a
volcano. They have their tempora mollia fandi; but then what a stir
may you not expect the next moment! Nothing is less inviting or less
comfortable than this state of uncertainty and apprehension. Then
there are those who never approach you without the most alarming
advice or information, telling you that you are in a dying way, or that
your affairs are on the point of ruin, by way of disburthening their
consciences; and others, who give you to understand much the same
thing as a good joke, out of sheer impertinence, constitutional
vivacity, and want of something to say. All these, it must be
confessed, are disagreeable people; and you repay their overanxiety
or total forgetfulness of you, by a determination to cut them as
speedily as possible. We meet with instances of persons who
overpower you by a sort of boisterous mirth and rude animal spirits,
with whose ordinary state of excitement it is as impossible to keep up
as with that of any one really intoxicated; and with others who seem
scarce alive—who take no pleasure or interest in any thing—who are
born to exemplify the maxim,
‘Not to admire is all the art I know
To make men happy, or to keep them so,—
and whose mawkish insensibility or sullen scorn are equally

annoying. In general, all people brought up in remote country places,
where life is crude and harsh—all sectaries—all partisans of a losing
cause, are discontented and disagreeable. Commend me above all to
the Westminster School of Reform, whose blood runs as cold in their
veins as the torpedo’s, and whose touch jars like it. Catholics are,
upon the whole, more amiable than Protestants—foreigners than
English people. Among ourselves, the Scotch, as a nation, are
particularly disagreeable. They hate every appearance of comfort
themselves, and refuse it to others. Their climate, their religion, and
their habits are equally averse to pleasure. Their manners are either
distinguished by a fawning sycophancy (to gain their own ends, and
conceal their natural defects), that makes one sick; or by a morose
unbending callousness, that makes one shudder. I had forgot to
mention two other descriptions of persons who fall under the scope
of this essay:—those who take up a subject, and run on with it
interminably, without knowing whether their hearers care one word
about it, or in the least minding what reception their oratory meets
with—these are pretty generally voted bores (mostly German ones);
—and others, who may be designated as practical paradox-mongers—
who discard the ‘milk of human kindness,’ and an attention to
common observances, from all their actions, as effeminate and
puling—who wear a white hat as a mark of superior understanding,
and carry home a handkerchief-full of mushrooms in the top of it as
an original discovery—who give you craw-fish for supper instead of
lobsters; seek their company in a garret, and over a gin-bottle, to
avoid the imputation of affecting genteel society; and discard them
after a term of years, and warn others against them, as being honest
fellows, which is thought a vulgar prejudice. This is carrying the
harsh and repulsive even beyond the disagreeable—to the hateful.
Such persons are generally people of common-place understandings,
obtuse feelings, and inordinate vanity. They are formidable if they
get you in their power—otherwise, they are only to be laughed at.
There are a vast number who are disagreeable from meanness of
spirit, from downright insolence, from slovenliness of dress or
disgusting tricks, from folly or ignorance: but these causes are
positive moral or physical defects, and I only meant to speak of that
repulsiveness of manners which arises from want of tact and
sympathy with others. So far of friendship: a word, if I durst, of love.
Gallantry to women (the sure road to their favour) is nothing but the
appearance of extreme devotion to all their wants and wishes—a
delight in their satisfaction, and a confidence in yourself, as being
able to contribute towards it. The slightest indifference with regard
to them, or distrust of yourself, are equally fatal. The amiable is the
voluptuous in looks, manner, or words. No face that exhibits this
kind of expression—whether lively or serious, obvious or suppressed,
will be thought ugly—no address, awkward—no lover who
approaches every woman he meets as his mistress, will be
unsuccessful. Diffidence and awkwardness are the two antidotes to
love.
To please universally, we must be pleased with ourselves and
others. There should be a tinge of the coxcomb, an oil of self-
complacency, an anticipation of success—there should be no gloom,
no moroseness no shyness—in short, there should be very little of an
Englishman, and a good deal of a Frenchman. But though, I believe,
this is the receipt, we are none the nearer making use of it. It is
impossible for those who are naturally disagreeable ever to become
otherwise. This is some consolation, as it may save a world of useless
pains and anxiety. ‘Desire to please, and you will infallibly please,’ is
a true maxim; but it does not follow that it is in the power of all to
practise it. A vain man, who thinks he is endeavouring to please, is
only endeavouring to shine, and is still farther from the mark. An
irritable man, who puts a check upon himself, only grows dull, and
loses spirit to be any thing. Good temper and a happy spirit (which
are the indispensable requisites) can no more be commanded than
good health or good looks; and though the plain and sickly need not
distort their features, and may abstain from success, this is all they
can do. The utmost a disagreeable person can do is to hope to be less
disagreeable than with care and study he might become, and to pass
unnoticed in society. With this negative character he should be
contented, and may build his fame and happiness on other things.
I will conclude with a character of men who neither please nor
aspire to please anybody, and who can come in nowhere so properly
as at the fag-end of an essay:—I mean that class of discontented but
amusing persons, who are infatuated with their own ill success, and
reduced to despair by a lucky turn in their favour. While all goes well,
they are like fish out of water. They have no reliance on or sympathy
with their good fortune, and look upon it as a momentary delusion.
Let a doubt be thrown on the question, and they begin to be full of
lively apprehensions again: let all their hopes vanish, and they feel
themselves on firm ground once more. From want of spirit or of
habit, their imaginations cannot rise above the low ground of
humility—cannot reflect the gay, flaunting tints of the fancy—flag
and droop into despondency—and can neither indulge the
expectation, nor employ the means of success. Even when it is within
their reach, they dare not lay hands upon it; and shrink from
unlooked-for bursts of prosperity, as something of which they are
both ashamed and unworthy. The class of croakers here spoken of
are less delighted at other people’s misfortunes than their own. Their
neighbours may have some pretensions—they have none. Querulous
complaints and anticipations of discomfort are the food on which
they live; and they at last acquire a passion for that which is the
favourite theme of their thoughts, and can no more do without it
than without the pinch of snuff with which they season their
conversation, and enliven the pauses of their daily prognostics.
ON MEANS AND ENDS
The Monthly Magazine.]

[September, 1827.
‘We work by wit, and not by witchcraft.’—Iago.
It is impossible to have things done without doing them. This

seems a truism; and yet what is more common than to suppose that
we shall find things done, merely by wishing it? To put the will for
the deed is as usual in practice as it is contrary to common sense.
There is, in fact, no absurdity, no contradiction, of which the mind is
not capable. This weakness is, I think, more remarkable in the
English than in any other people, in whom (to judge by what I
discover in myself) the will bears great and disproportioned sway.
We desire a thing: we contemplate the end intently, and think it
done, neglecting the necessary means to accomplish it. The strong
tendency of the mind towards it, the internal effort it makes to give
birth to the object of its idolatry, seems an adequate cause to produce
the wished-for effect, and is in a manner identified with it. This is
more particularly the case in what relates to the Fine Arts, and will
account for some phenomena in the national character.
The English style is distinguished by what are called ébauches[38]—
rude sketches, or violent attempts at effect, with a total inattention to
the details or delicacy of finishing. Now this, I apprehend, proceeds
not exactly from grossness of perception, but from the wilfulness of
our characters, our determination to have every thing our own way
without any trouble, or delay, or distraction of mind. An object
strikes us: we see and feel the whole effect at once. We wish to
produce a likeness of it; but we wish to transfer the impression to the
canvas as it is conveyed to us, simultaneously and intuitively—that is,
to stamp it there at a blow—or, otherwise, we turn away with
impatience and disgust, as if the means were an obstacle to the end,
and every attention to the mechanical process were a deviation from
our original purpose. We thus degenerate, by repeated failures, into a
slovenly style of art; and that which was at first an undisciplined and
irregular impulse, becomes a habit, and then a theory. It seems a
little strange that the zealous devotion to the end should produce
aversion to the means; but so it is: neither is it, however irrational,
altogether unnatural. That which we are struck with, which we are
enamoured of, is the general appearance or result; and it would
certainly be most desirable to produce the effect we aim at by a word
or wish, if it were possible, without being taken up with the
mechanical drudgery or pettiness of detail, or dexterity of execution,
which, though they are essential and component parts of the work,
do not enter into our thoughts, or form any part of our
contemplation. In a word, the hand does not keep pace with the eye;
and it is the desire that it should, that causes all the contradiction
and confusion. We would have a face to start out from the canvas at
once—not feature by feature, or touch by touch; we would be glad to
convey an attitude or a divine expression to the spectator by a stroke
of the pencil, as it is conveyed by a glance of the eye, or by the magic
of feeling, independently of measurements, and distances, and
foreshortening, and numberless minute particulars, and all the
instrumentality of the art. We may find it necessary, on a cool
calculation, to go through and make ourselves masters of these; but,
in so doing, we submit only to necessity, and they are still a diversion
to, and a suspension of, our favourite purpose for the time—at least
unless practice has given that facility which almost identifies the two
together, and makes the process an unconscious one. The end thus
devours up the means; or our eagerness for the one, where it is
strong and unchecked, renders us in proportion impatient of the
other. So we view an object at a distance, which excites in us an
inclination to visit it: this, after many tedious steps and intricate
windings, we do; but, if we could fly, we should never consent to go
on foot. The mind, however, has wings, though the body has not;
and, wherever the imagination can come into play, our desires
outrun their accomplishment. Persons of this extravagant humour
should addict themselves to eloquence or poetry, where the thought
‘leaps at once to its effect,’ and is wafted, in a metaphor or an
apostrophe, ‘from Indus to the Pole;’ though even there we should
find enough, in the preparatory and mechanical parts of those arts,
to try our patience and mortify our vanity! The first and strongest
impulse of the mind is to achieve any object, on which it is set, at
once, and by the shortest and most decisive means; but, as this
cannot always be done, we ought not to neglect other more indirect
and subordinate aids; nor should we be tempted to do so, but that
the delusions of the will interfere with the convictions of the
understanding, and what we ardently wish, we fancy to be both
possible and true. Let us take the instance of copying a fine picture.
We are full of the effect we intend to produce; and so powerfully does
this prepossession affect us, that we imagine we have produced it, in
spite of the evidence of our senses and the suggestions of friends. In
truth, after a number of violent and anxious efforts to strike off a
resemblance which we passionately long for, it seems an injustice not
to have succeeded; it is too late to retrace our steps, and begin over
again in a different method; we prefer even failure to arriving at our
end by petty, mechanical tricks and rules; we have copied Titian or
Rubens in the spirit in which they ought to be copied; though the
likeness may not be perfect, there is a look, a tone, a something,
which we chiefly aimed at, and which we persuade ourselves, seeing
the copy only through the dazzled, hectic flush of feverish
imagination, we have really given; and thus we persist, and make
fifty excuses, sooner than own our error, which would imply its
abandonment; or, if the light breaks in upon us, through all the
disguises of sophistry and self-love, it is so painful that we shut our
eyes to it. The more evident our failure, the more desperate the
struggles we make to conceal it from ourselves, to stick to our
original determination, and end where we began.
What makes me think that this is the real stumbling-block in our
way, and not mere rusticity or want of discrimination, is that you will
see an English artist admiring and thrown into downright raptures
by the tucker of Titian’s Mistress, made up of an infinite number of
little delicate folds; and, if he attempts to copy it, he proceeds
deliberately to omit all these details, and dash it off by a single smear
of his brush. This is not ignorance, or even laziness, I conceive, so
much as what is called jumping at a conclusion. It is, in a word, an
overweening presumption. ‘A wilful man must have his way.’ He sees
the details, the varieties, and their effect: he sees and is charmed
with all this; but he would reproduce it with the same rapidity and
unembarrassed freedom that he sees it—or not at all. He scorns the
slow but sure method, to which others conform, as tedious and
inanimate. The mixing his colours, the laying in the ground, the
giving all his attention to a minute break or nice gradation in the
several lights and shades, is a mechanical and endless operation,
very different from the delight he feels in studying the effect of all
these, when properly and ably executed. Quam nihil ad tuum,
Papiniane, ingenium! Such fooleries are foreign to his refined taste
and lofty enthusiasm; and a doubt crosses his mind, in the midst of
his warmest raptures, how Titian could resolve upon the drudgery of
going through them, or whether it was not rather owing to extreme
facility of hand, and a sort of trick in laying on the colours, abridging
the mechanical labour! No one wrote or talked more eloquently
about Titian’s harmony and clearness of colouring than the late Mr.
Barry—discoursing of his greens, his blues, his yellows, ‘the little red
and white of which he composed his flesh-colour,’ con amore; yet his
own colouring was dead and dingy, and, if he had copied a Titian, he
would have made it a mere daub, leaving out all that caused his
wonder or admiration, or that induced him to copy it after the
English or Irish fashion. We not only grudge the labour of beginning,
but we stop short, for the same reason, when we are near touching
the goal of success, and, to save a few last touches, leave a work
unfinished and an object unattained. The immediate steps, the daily
gradual improvement, the successive completion of parts, give us no
pleasure; we strain at the final result; we wish to have the whole
done, and, in our anxiety to get it off our hands, say it will do, and
lose the benefit of all our pains by stinting a little more, and being
unable to command a little patience. In a day or two, we will
suppose, a copy of a fine Titian would be as like as we could make it:
the prospect of this so enchants us, that we skip the intervening
space, see no great use in going on with it, fancy that we may spoil it,
and, in order to put an end to the question, take it home with us,
where we immediately see our error, and spend the rest of our lives
in regretting that we did not finish it properly when we were about it.
We can execute only a part; we see the whole of nature or of a picture
at once. Hinc illæ lachrymæ. The English grasp at this whole—
nothing less interests or contents them; and, in aiming at too much,
they miss their object altogether.
A French artist, on the contrary, has none of this uneasy, anxious
feeling—of this desire to master the whole of his subject, and
anticipate his good fortune at a blow—of this massing and
concentrating principle. He takes the thing more easy and rationally.
He has none of the mental qualms, the nervous agitation, the wild,
desperate plunges and convulsive throes of the English artist. He
does not set off headlong without knowing where he is going, and
find himself up to the neck in all sorts of difficulties and absurdities,
from impatience to begin and have the matter off his mind (as if it
were an evil conscience); but takes time to consider, arranges his
plans, gets in his outline and his distances, and lays a foundation
before he attempts a superstructure which he may have to pull in
pieces again, or let it remain—a monument of his folly. He looks
before he leaps, which is contrary to the true blindfold English rule;
and I should think that we had invented this proverb from seeing so
many fatal examples of the violation of it. Suppose he undertakes to
make a copy of a picture: he first looks at it, and sees what it is. He
does not make his sketch all black or all white, because one part of it
is so, and because he cannot alter an idea he has once got into his
head and must always run into extremes, but varies his tints (strange
as it may seem) from green to red, from orange-tawny to yellow,
from grey to brown, according as they vary in the original. He sees no
inconsistency, no forfeiture of a principle, in this (any more than Mr.
Southey in the change of the colours of his coat), but a great deal of
right reason, and indeed an absolute necessity for it, if he wishes to
succeed in what he is about. This is the last thing in an Englishman’s
thoughts: he only wishes to have his own way, though it ends in
defeat and ruin—strives hard to do what he is sensible he cannot—or,
if he finds he can, gives over and leaves the matter short of a
triumphant conclusion, which is too flattering an idea for him to
indulge in. The French artist proceeds with due deliberation, and bit
by bit. He takes some one part—a hand, an eye, a piece of drapery, an
object in the back-ground—and finishes it carefully; then another,
and so on to the end. When he has gone through every part, his
picture is done: there is nothing more that he can add to it; it is a
numerical calculation, and there are only so many items in the
account. An Englishman may go on slobbering his over for the
hundredth time, and be no nearer than when he began. As he tries to
finish the whole at once, and as this is not possible, he always leaves
his work in an imperfect state, or as if he had begun on a new canvas
—like a man who is determined to leap to the top of a tower, instead
of scaling it step by step, and who is necessarily thrown on his back
every time he repeats the experiment. Again, the French student
does not, from a childish impatience, when he is near the end,
destroy the effect of the whole, by leaving some one part eminently
deficient, an eye-sore to the rest; nor does he fly from what he is
about, to any thing else that happens to catch his eye, neglecting the
one and spoiling the other. He is, in our old poet’s phrase,
‘constrained by mastery,’ by the mastery of common sense and
pleasurable feeling. He is in no hurry to get to the end; for he has a
satisfaction in the work, and touches and retouches perhaps a single
head, day after day and week after week, without repining,
uneasiness, or apparent progress. The very lightness and buoyancy of
his feeling renders him (where the necessity of this is pointed out)
patient and laborious. An Englishman, whatever he undertakes, is as
if he was carrying a heavy load that oppresses both his body and
mind, and that he is anxious to throw down as soon as possible. The
Frenchman’s hopes and fears are not excited to a pitch of intolerable
agony, so that he is compelled, in mere compassion to himself, to
bring the question to a speedy issue, even to the loss of his object. He
is calm, easy, collected, and takes his time and improves his
advantages as they occur, with vigilance and alacrity. Pleased with
himself, he is pleased with whatever occupies his attention nearly
alike. He is never taken at a disadvantage. Whether he paints an
angel or a joint-stool, it is much the same to him: whether it is
landscape or history, still it is he who paints it. Nothing puts him out
of his way, for nothing puts him out of conceit with himself. This self-
complacency forms an admirable ground-work for moderation and
docility in certain particulars, though not in others.
I remember an absurd instance enough of this deliberate mode of
setting to work in a young French artist, who was copying the Titian’s
Mistress in the Louvre, some twenty years ago. After getting in his
chalk-outline, one would think he might have been attracted to the
face—that heaven of beauty (as it appears to some), clear,
transparent, open, breathing freshness, that ‘makes a sunshine in the
shady place’; or to the lustre of the golden hair; or some part of the
poetry of the picture (for, with all its materiality, this picture has a
poetry about it); instead of which he began to finish a square he had
marked out in the right-hand corner of the picture, containing a
piece of board and a bottle of some kind of ointment. He set to work
like a cabinet-maker or an engraver, and appeared to have no
sympathy with the soul of the picture. On a Frenchman (generally
speaking), the distinction between the great and the little, the
exquisite and the indifferent, is in a great measure lost: his self-
satisfied egotism supplies whatever is wanting up to a certain point,
and neutralizes whatever goes beyond it. Another young man, at the
time I speak of, was for eleven weeks daily employed in making a
black-lead pencil drawing of a small Leonardo: he sat with his legs
balanced across a rail to do it, kept his hat on, every now and then
consulted with his friends about his progress, rose up, went to the
fire to warm himself, talked of the styles of the different masters—
praising Titian pour les coloris, Raphael pour l’expression, Poussin
pour la composition—all being alike to him, provided they had each
something to help him on in his harangue (for that was all he
thought about),—and then returned to perfectionate (as he called it)
his copy. This would drive an Englishman out of his senses,
supposing him to be ever so stupid. The perseverance and the
interruptions, the labour without impulse, the attention to the parts
in succession, and disregard of the whole together, are to him utterly
incomprehensible. He wants to do something striking, and bends all
his thoughts and energies to one mighty effort. A Frenchman has no
notion of this summary proceeding, exists mostly in his present
sensations, and, if he is left at liberty to enjoy or trifle with these,
cares about nothing farther, looking neither backwards nor forwards.
They forgot the reign of terror under Robespierre in a month; they
forgot that they had ever been called the great nation under
Buonaparte in a week. They sat in chairs on the Boulevards (just as
they do at other times), when the shots were firing into the next
street, and were only persuaded to quit them when their own soldiers
were seen pouring down all the avenues from the heights of
Montmartre, crying ‘Sauve qui peut!’ They then went home and
dressed themselves to see the Allies enter Paris, as a fine sight, just
as they would witness a procession at a theatre. This is carrying the
instinct of levity as far as it will go. With all their affectation and
want of sincerity, there is, on the principle here stated, a kind of
simplicity and nature about them after all. They lend themselves to
the impression of the moment with good humour and good will,
making it not much better nor worse than it is: the English
constantly over-do or under-do every thing, and are either mad with
enthusiasm or in despair. The extreme slowness and regularity of the
French school have then arisen, as a natural consequence, out of
their very fickleness and frivolity (their severally supposed national
characteristics); for, owing to the last, their studious exactness costs
them nothing; and, again, they have no headstrong impulses or
ardent longings that urge them on to the violation of rules, or hurry
them away with a subject or with the interest belonging to it. All is
foreseen and settled beforehand, so as to assist the fluttering and
feeble hold they have of things. When they venture beyond the literal
and formal, and (mistaking pedantry and bombast for genius)
attempt the grand and the impressive style, as in David’s and
Girodet’s pictures, the Lord deliver us from sublimity engrafted on
insipidity and petit maître-ism! You see a solitary French artist in
the Louvre copying a Raphael or a Rubens, standing on one leg, not
quite sure of what he is about: you see them collected in groupes
about David’s, elbowing each other, thinking them even finer than
Raphael, more truly themselves, a more perfect combination of all
that can be taught by the Greek sculptor and the French posture-
master! Is this patriotism, or want of taste? If the former, it is
excusable, and why not, if the latter?
Even should a French artist fail, he is not disconcerted—there is
something else he excels in: ‘for one unkind and cruel fair, another
still consoles him.’ He studies in a more graceful posture, or pays
greater attention to his dress; or he has a friend, who has beaucoup
du talent, and conceit enough for them both. His self-love has always
a salvo, and comes upon its legs again, like a cat or a monkey. Not so
with Bruin the Bear. If an Englishman (God help the mark!) fails in
one thing, it is all over with him; he is enraged at the mention of any
thing else he can do, and at every consolation offered him on that
score; he banishes all other thoughts, but of his disappointment and
discomfiture, from his breast—neither eats nor sleeps (it is well if he
does not swallow down double ‘potations, pottle-deep,’ to drown
remembrance)—will not own, even to himself, any other thing in
which he takes an interest or feels a pride; and is in the horrors till he
recovers his good opinion of himself in the only point on which he
now sets a value, and for which his anxiety and disorder of mind
incapacitate him as effectually as if he were drunk with strong liquor
instead of spleen and passion. I have here drawn the character of an
Englishman, I am sure; for it is a portrait of myself, and, I am sorry
to add, an unexaggerated one. I intend these Essays as studies of
human nature; and as, in the prosecution of this design, I do not
spare others, I see no reason why I should spare myself. I lately tried
to make a copy of a portrait by Titian (after several years’ want of
practice), with a view to give a friend in England some notion of the
picture, which is equally remarkable and fine. I failed, and
floundered on for some days, as might be expected. I must say the
effect on me was painful and excessive. My sky was suddenly
overcast. Every thing seemed of the colour of the paints I used.
Nature in my eyes became dark and gloomy. I had no sense or feeling
left, but of the unforeseen want of power, and of the tormenting
struggle to do what I could not. I was ashamed ever to have written
or spoken on art: it seemed a piece of vanity and affectation in me to
do so—all whose reasonings and refinements on the subject ended in
an execrable daub. Why did I think of attempting such a thing
without weighing the consequences of exposing my presumption and
incapacity so unnecessarily? It was blotting from my mind, covering
with a thick veil all that I remembered of these pictures formerly—
my hopes when young, my regrets since, one of the few consolations
of my life and of my declining years. I was even afraid to walk out of
an evening by the barrier of Neuilly, or to recall the yearnings and
associations that once hung upon the beatings of my heart. All was
turned to bitterness and gall. To feel any thing but the consciousness
of my own helplessness and folly, appeared a want of sincerity, a
mockery, and an insult to my mortified pride! The only relief I had
was in the excess of pain I felt: this was at least some distinction. I
was not insensible on that side. No French artist, I thought, would
regret not copying a Titian so much as I did, nor so far shew the same
value for it, however he might have the advantage of me in drawing
or mechanical dexterity. Besides, I had copied this very picture very
well formerly. If ever I got out of my present scrape, I had at any rate
received a lesson not to run the same risk of vexation, or commit
myself gratuitously again upon any occasion whatever. Oh! happy
ought they to be, I said, who can do any thing, when I feel the misery,
the agony, the dull, gnawing pain of being unable to do what I wish
in this single instance! When I copied this picture before, I had no
other resource, no other language. My tongue then stuck to the roof
of my mouth: now it is unlocked, and I have done what I then
despaired of doing in another way. Ought I not to be grateful and
contented? Oh, yes!—and think how many there are who have
nothing to which they can turn themselves, and fail in every object
they undertake. Well, then, Let bygones be bygones (as the Scotch
proverb has it); give up the attempt, and think no more of Titian, or
of the portrait of a Man in black in the Louvre. This would be very
well for any one else; but for me, who had nearly exhausted the
subject on paper, that I should take it into my head to paint a libel of
what I had composed so many and such fine panegyrics upon—it was
a fatality, a judgment upon me for my vapouring and conceit. I must
be as shy of the subject for the future as a damned author is of the
title of his play or the name of his hero ever after. Yet the picture
would look the same as ever. I could hardly bear to think so: it would
be hid or defaced to me as ‘in a phantasma or a hideous dream.’ I
must turn my thoughts from it, or they would lead to madness! The
copy went on better afterwards, and the affair ended less tragically
than I apprehended. I did not cut a hole in the canvas, or commit any
other extravagance: it is now hanging up very quietly facing me; and
I have considerable satisfaction in occasionally looking at it, as I
write this paragraph.
Such are the agonies into which we throw ourselves about trifles—
our rage and disappointment at want of success in any favourite
pursuit, and, our neglect of the means to ensure it. A Frenchman,
under the penalty of half the chagrin at failure, would take just twice
the pains and consideration to avoid it: but our morbid eagerness
and blundering impetuosity, together with a certain concreteness of
imagination which prevents our dividing any operation into steps
and stages, defeat the very end we have in view. The worst of these
wilful mischiefs of our own making is, that they admit of no relief or
intermission. Natural calamities or great griefs, as we do not bring
them upon ourselves, so they find a seasonable respite in tears or
resignation, or in some alleviating contrast or reflection: but pride
scorns all alliance with natural frailty or indulgence; our wilful
purposes regard every relaxation or moment’s ease as a compromise
of their very essence, which consists in violence and effort: they turn
away from whatever might afford diversion or solace, and goad us on
to exertions as painful as they are unavailable, and with no other
companion than remorse,—the most intolerable of all inmates of the
breast; for it is constantly urging us to retrieve our peace of mind by
an impossibility—the undoing of what is past. One of the chief traits
of sublimity in Milton’s character of Satan is this dreadful display of
unrelenting pride and self-will—the sense of suffering joined with the
sense of power and ‘courage never to submit or yield’—and the
aggravation of the original purpose of lofty ambition and opposition
to the Almighty, with the total overthrow and signal punishment,—
which ought to be reasons for its relinquishment. ‘His thoughts burn
like a hell within him!’ but he gives them ‘neither truce nor rest,’ and
will not even sue for mercy. This kind of sublimity must be thrown
away upon the French critic, who would only think Satan a very
ridiculous old gentleman for adhering so obstinately to his original
pretensions, and not making the most of circumstances, and giving
in his resignation to the ruling party! When Buonaparte fell, an
English editor (of virulent memory) exhausted a great number of the
finest passages in Paradise Lost, in applying them to his ill-fated
ambition. This was an equal compliment to the poet and the
conqueror: to the last, for having realized a conception of himself in
the mind of his enemies on a par with the most stupendous creations
of imagination; to the first, for having embodied in fiction what bore
so strong a resemblance to, and was constantly brought to mind by,
the fearful and imposing reality! But to return to our subject.
It is the same with us in love and literature. An Englishman makes
love without thinking of the chances of success, his own
disadvantages, or the character of his mistress—that is, without the
adaptation of means to ends, consulting only his own humour or
fancy;[39] and he writes a book of history or travels, without
acquainting himself with geography, or appealing to documents or
dates; substituting his own will or opinion in the room of these
technical helps or hindrances, as he considers them. It is not right. In
business it is not by any means the same; which looks as if, where
interest was the moving principle, and acted as a counterpoise to
caprice and will, our headstrong propensity gave way, though it
sometimes leads us into extravagant and ruinous speculations. Nor is
it a disadvantage to us in war; for there the spirit of contradiction
does every thing, and an Englishman will go to the devil sooner than
yield to any odds. Courage is nothing but will, defying consequences;
and this the English have in perfection. Burns somewhere calls out
lustily, inspired by rhyme and usquebaugh,—
‘Set but a Scotsman on a hill;
Say such is royal George’s will,
And there’s the foe:-
His only thought is how to kill
Twa at a blow.’
I apprehend, with his own countrymen or ours, all the love and
loyalty would come to little, but for their hatred of the army opposed
to them. It is the resistance, ‘the two to kill at a blow,’ that is the
charm, and makes our fingers’-ends tingle. The Greek cause makes
no progress with us for this reason: it is one of pure sympathy, but
our sympathies must arise out of our antipathies; they were devoted
to the Queen to spite the King. We had a wonderful affection for the
Spaniards—the secret of which was that we detested the French. Our
love must begin with hate. It is so far well that the French are
opposed to us in almost every way; for the spirit of contradiction
alone to foreign fopperies and absurdities keeps us within some
bounds of decency and order. When an English lady of quality
introduces a favourite by saying, ‘This is his lordship’s physician, and
my atheist,’ the humour might become epidemic; but we can stop it
at once by saying, ‘That is so like a Frenchwoman!’—The English
excel in the practical and mechanic arts, where mere plodding and
industry are expected and required; but they do not combine
business and pleasure well together. Thus, in the Fine Arts, which
unite the mechanical with the sentimental, they will probably never
succeed; for the one spoils and diverts them from the other. An
Englishman can attend but to one thing at a time. He hates music at
dinner. He can go through any labour or pain with prodigious
fortitude; but he cannot make a pleasure of it, or persuade himself he
is doing a fine thing, when he is not. Again, they are great in original
discoveries, which come upon them by surprise, and which they
leave to others to perfect. It is a question whether, if they foresaw
they were about to make the discovery, at the very point of projection
as it were, they would not turn their backs upon it, and leave it to
shift for itself; or obstinately refuse to take the last step, or give up
the pursuit, in mere dread and nervous apprehension lest they
should not succeed. Poetry is also their undeniable element; for the
essence of poetry is will and passion, ‘and it alone is highly
fantastical.’ French poetry is verbiage or dry detail.
I have thus endeavoured to shew why it is the English fail as a
people in the Fine Arts, because the idea of the end absorbs that of
the means. Hogarth was an exception to this rule; but then every
stroke of his pencil was instinct with genius. As it has been well said,
that ‘we read his works,’ so it might be said he wrote them. Barry is
an instance more to my purpose. No one could argue better about
gusto in painting, and yet no one ever painted with less. His pictures
were dry, coarse, and wanted all that his descriptions of those of
others indicate. For example, he speaks of ‘the dull, dead, watery
look’ of the Medusa’s head of Leonardo, in a manner that conveys an
absolute idea of the character: had he copied it, you would never
have suspected any thing of the kind. His pen grows almost wanton
in praise of Titian’s nymph-like figures. What drabs he has made of
his own sea-nymphs, floating in the Thames, with Dr. Burney at their
head, with his wig on! He is like a person admiring the grace of an
accomplished rope-dancer; place him on the rope himself, and his
head turns;—or he is like Luther’s comparison of Reason to a
drunken man on horseback—‘set him up on one side, and he tumbles
over on the other.’ Why is this? His mind was essentially ardent and
discursive, not sensitive or observant; and though the immediate
object acted as a stimulus to his imagination, it was only as it does to
the poet’s—that is, as a link in the chain of association, as implying
other strong feelings and ideas, and not for its intrinsic beauty or
individual details. He had not the painter’s eye, though he had the
painter’s general knowledge. There is as great a difference in this
respect between our views of things as between the telescope and
microscope. People in general see objects only to distinguish them in
practice and by name—to know that a hat is black, that a chair is not
a table, that John is not James; and there are painters, particularly of
history in England, who look very little farther. They cannot finish
any thing, or go over a head twice: the first coup-d’œil is all they ever
arrive at, nor can they refine on their impressions, soften them down,
or reduce them to their component parts, without losing their spirit.
The inevitable result of this is grossness, and also want of force and
solidity; for, in reality, the parts cannot be separated without injury
from the whole. Such people have no pleasure in the art as such: it is
merely to astonish or to thrive that they follow it; or, if thrown out of
it by accident, they regret it only as a bankrupt tradesman does a
business which was a handsome subsistence to him. Barry did not
live, like Titian, on the taste of colours (there was here, perhaps—and
I will not disguise it—in English painters in general, a defect of
organic susceptibility); they were not a pabulum to his senses; he did
not hold green, blue, red, and yellow for ‘the darlings of his precious
eye.’ They did not, therefore, sink into his mind with all their hidden
harmonies, nor nourish and enrich it with material beauty, though
he knew enough of them to furnish hints for other ideas and to
suggest topics of discourse. If he had had the most enchanting object
in nature before him in his painting-room at the Adelphi, he would
have turned from it, after a moment’s burst of admiration, to talk of
the subject of his next composition, and to scrawl in some new and
vast design, illustrating a series of great events in history, or some
vague moral theory. The art itself was nothing to him, though he
made it the stalking-horse to his ambition and display of intellectual
power in general; and, therefore, he neglected its essential qualities
to daub in huge allegories, or carry on cabals with the Academy, in
which the violence of his will and the extent of his views found
proper food and scope. As a painter, he was tolerable merely as a
draftsman, or in that part of the art which may be best reduced to
rules and precepts, or to positive measurements. There is neither
colouring, nor expression, nor delicacy, nor striking effect in his
pictures at the Adelphi. The group of youths and horses, in the
representation of the Olympic Games, is the best part of them, and
has more of the grace and spirit of a Greek bas-relief than any thing
of the same kind in the French school of painting. Barry was, all his
life, a thorn in the side of Sir Joshua, who was irritated by the temper
and disconcerted by the powers of the man; and who, conscious of
his own superiority in the exercise of his profession, yet looked
askance at Barry’s loftier pretensions and more gigantic scale of art.
But he had no more occasion to be really jealous of him than of an
Irish porter or orator. It was like Imogen’s mistaking the dead body
of Cloten for her lord’s—‘the jovial thigh, the brawns of Hercules’: the
head, which would have detected the cheat, was missing!
I might have gone more into the subject of our apparent
indifference to the pleasure of mere imitation, if I had had to run a
parallel between English and Italian or even Flemish art; but really,
though I find a great deal of what is finical, I find nothing of the
pleasurable in the details of French more than of English art. The
English artist, it is an old and just complaint, can with difficulty be
prevailed upon to finish any part of a picture but the face, even if he
does that any tolerable justice: the French artist bestows equal and
elaborate pains on every part of his picture—the dress, the carpet,
&c.; and it has been objected to the latter method, that it has the
effect of making the face look unfinished; for as this is variable and
in motion, it can never admit of the same minuteness of imitation as
objects of still-life, and must suffer in the comparison, if these have
the utmost possible degree of attention bestowed on them, and do
not fall into their relative place in the composition from their natural
insignificance. But does not this distinction shew generally that the
English have no pleasure in art, unless there is an additional interest
beyond what is borrowed from the eye, and that the French have the
same pleasure in it, provided the mechanical operation is the same—
like the fly that settles equally on the face or dress, and runs over the
whole surface with the same lightness and indifference? The collar of
a coat is out of drawing: this may be and is wrong. But I cannot say
that it gives me the same disturbance as if the nose was awry. A
Frenchman thinks that both are equally out of drawing, and sets
about correcting them both with equal gravity and perseverance. A
part of the back-ground of a picture is left in an unfinished state: this
is a sad eye-sore to the French artist or connoisseur. We English care
little about it: if the head and character are well given, we pass it over
as of small consequence; and if they are failures, it is of even less. A
French painter, after having made you look like a baboon, would go
on finishing the cravat or the buttons of your coat with all the nicety
of a man milliner or button-maker, and the most perfect satisfaction
with himself and his art. This with us would be quite impossible.
‘They are careful after many things: with us, there is one thing
needful’—which is effect. We certainly throw our impressions more
into masses (they are not taken off by pattern, every part alike): there
may be a slowness and repugnance at first; but, afterwards, there is
an impulse, a momentum acquired—one interest absorbing and
being strengthened by several others; and if we gain our principal
object, we can overlook the rest, or at least cannot find time to attend
to them till we have secured this. We have nothing of the petit
maître, of the martinet style about us: we run into the opposite fault.
If we had time, if we had power, there could be no objection to giving
every part with the utmost perfection, as it is given in a looking-glass.
But if we have only a month to do a portrait in, is it not better to give
three weeks to the face and one to the dress, than one week to the
face and three to the dress. How often do we look at the face
compared to the dress? ‘On a good foundation,’ says Sancho Panza, ‘a
good house may be built’; so a good picture should have a good back-
ground, and be finished in every part. It is entitled to this mark of
respect, which is like providing a frame for it, and hanging it in a
good light. I can easily understand how Rubens or Vandyke finished
the back grounds and drapery of their pictures:—they were worth the
trouble; and, besides, it cost them nothing. It was to them no more
than blowing a bubble in the air. One would no doubt have every
thing right—a feather in a cap, or a plant in the foreground—if a
thought or a touch would do it. But to labour on for ever, and labour
to no purpose, is beyond mortal or English patience. Our clumsiness
is one cause of our negligence. Depend upon it, people do with
readiness what they can do well. I rather wonder, therefore, that
Raphael took such pains in finishing his draperies and back grounds,
which he did so indifferently. The expression is like an emanation of
the soul, or like a lamp shining within and illuminating the whole
face and body; and every part, charged with so sacred a trust as the
conveying of this expression (even to the hands and feet), would be
wrought up to the highest perfection. But his inanimate objects must
have cost him some trouble; and yet he laboured them too. In what
he could not do well, he was still determined to do his best; and that
nothing should be wanting in decorum and respect to an art that he
had consecrated to virtue, and to that genius that burnt like a flame
upon its altars! We have nothing that for myself I can compare with
this high and heroic pursuit of art for its own sake. The French fancy
their own pedantic abortions equal to it, thrust them into the Louvre,
‘and with their darkness dare affront that light!’—thus proving
themselves without the germ or the possibility of excellence—the
feeling of it in others. We at least claim some interest in art, by
looking up to its loftiest monuments—retire to a distance, and
reverence the sanctuary, if we cannot enter it.
‘They also serve who only stare and wait.’[40]

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Nation, Class and Resentment: The

Politics of National Identity in England,

Biota Grow 2C gather 2C cook Loucas

Rethinking Stateless Nations and National Identity in

Branding the Nation The Global Business of National

The Emigrant Communities of Latvia National Identity

Celtic Tales: Fairy Tales And Stories Of Enchantment

The Debatable Land The Lost World Between Scotland and

The Politics of Losing: Trump, the Klan, and the

The Politics of Resentment Rural Consciousness in

Robin Mann and

More information about this series at

Nation, Class and

Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016953850

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover image © age fotostock / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

Council for Wales (HEFCW). We would like to thank colleagues across

would be incomplete if I did not also thank my co-author, Steve. After

Robin Mann and Steve Fenton

1 Introduction: Nation and Class in Twenty-First-Century

2 Resentment, Classes and National Sentiments 31

3 Class and Majority English Identities 71

4 The Politics of English Identity and Nationalism 99

5 The Nationalist Alternative: Nation and Class in Scotland 139

6 Wales, Nationalism and the Politics of Resentment 169

Table 5.1 Differences by social class on the question ‘should

© The Author(s) 2017 1

 he Changing Political Landscape of National

National Identities and Their Material Settings

their material lives. It is through people’s views on being English, British

Popular Sentiments and the Nation

 he Political Organisation of Popular National

 ontemporary Class Relations and the

Changing Contours of Class

global capital accumulation driven by a ‘financialisation’ model (Van der

(Parker 2013). Many of the material pressures generated by the financial-

movements undermine the autonomy of states, so the power of the state

tion to capital but in a way that is distinct from socio-economic groups

Class, Voting and Political Identities

Nationalism, Political Parties and Class

ter, and so neo-nationalism refers to a form of nationalism occurring

 eo-nationalism and Populist Politics

and whose mawkish insensibility or sullen scorn are equally

The Monthly Magazine.]

It is impossible to have things done without doing them. This

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1 Introduction: Nation and Class in Twenty-First-Century

2 Resentment, Classes and National Sentiments 31

3 Class and Majority English Identities 71

4 The Politics of English Identity and Nationalism 99

5 The Nationalist Alternative: Nation and Class in Scotland 139

6 Wales, Nationalism and the Politics of Resentment 169

he Changing Political Landscape of National

National Identities and Their Material Settings

Popular Sentiments and the Nation

he Political Organisation of Popular National

ontemporary Class Relations and the

Changing Contours of Class

Class, Voting and Political Identities

Nationalism, Political Parties and Class

eo-nationalism and Populist Politics