Who are the English?

• From the beginning of the 18 th century,

when the character of John Bull came to
personify the national character, to the
present the question of a national identity
has been a topical issue.
John Bull in World War I recruiting
poster
• Generalizations on the idea of “national
character” are relative and they depend to
a considerable degree on the position of
the observer.
Icons
 English Traits
George Orwell
• " solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky
towns and winding roads, green fields and red
pillar-boxes" not forgetting "a delicious cup of tea
"and the pub, which he described as" one of the
basic institutions of English life. " As for the
English, Orwell imagined that a foreign visitor
would quickly notice his "artistic insensitivity,
gentleness, respect for legality, suspicion of
foreigners, sentimentality about animals,
hypocrisy, exaggerated class distinctions, and
obsession with sport."
 English Traits
T. S. Eliot
• Derby Day (a horse race), Regatta Henley
(traditional rowing competition between
Cambridge and Oxford), Cowes (a yacht
race), a Football Championship final,
Wensleysdale cheese, vinegar beets, 19th
century Gothic churches and music by
Elgar (composer of a famous unofficial
national anthem).
 John Betjeman
• Anglican Church, the Women's Institutes
(non-partisan women's clubs devoted to
voluntary and teaching activities) the
village bed & breakfasts1, the rural train
stations and "the sound of the lawnmower
on Saturday afternoons".
 Nikolaus Pevsner
• "understatement, aversion to fussiness, distrust
of rhetoric [...], personal independence, freedom
of speech, wise reconciliations, [...] an eminently
civilized faith in honesty and fair play, ability to
stand in a line with the greatest patience, and
open and convinced conservatism, visible in the
use of wigs in courts and gowns in schools and
universities "(in the 1950s, secondary school
teachers still wore gowns in class).
 Raymond Williams
• considered the list made by T.S. Eliot very
narrow because it was limited to "sports,
food and little art". He then suggested that
other reasons be added for British
boasting: "steel production, car travel as
leisure, mixed farms (raising livestock and
producing wheat), Stock Exchange, coal
mining, and London transport."
• Most recently, in 2006, the government launched a
survey on what it called "icons of England". Among the
most popular items chosen by the public, in addition to
Big Ben, cricket, Sherlock Holmes, a top hat and, of
course, a "good cup of tea," were two significant
innovations: Empire Windrush, the first Jamaican
immigrants to Britain in 1948, and the Notting Hill
Carnival, a tradition these immigrants took from the
Caribbean to London. These are small signs that the
Caribbeans and their descendants are now considered
English, at least by the population.
 WHO'S THE OTHER?
• Defoe, Daniel (1997 [1701]) “The True-
Born Englishman”

       A true-born Englishman's a contradiction,

       In speech an irony, in fact a fiction;
       A banter made to be a test of fools,
       Which those that use it justly ridicules;
       A metaphor invented to express
       A man akin to all the universe.
Just as in the case of so many other nations, the English define their
identity - when they care to define it - against the "Other." Traditionally,
the "Other" has been France, the main enemy since the Hundred
Years' War (1337-1453) until the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815).
The Scots, for their part, have long regarded the French as their allies
against the English. Germany does not play the same role as "Other"
or
enemy, despite the two world wars, perhaps because it is more distant
from England than France.
Even alliances with France in the First and Second World War were not
enough to eliminate the traditional suspicion of the rival nation on the
other side of the English Channel, a rivalry that was particularly
obvious
when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister (1979- 1990).
• In the first decades of the twenty-first century, breaking
the tradition, debates about identity are becoming more
intense, and some commentators talk about the identity
crisis they reveal. Manifestations of nationalism are
made more openly than before with the use, for
example, of the white, red and blue national flag known
as the Union Jack, because it combines the traditional
flags of England, Scotland, and Ireland. One can see it
fluttering in front of houses and apartments, reproduced
in everyday objects, from umbrellas to blouses, boots
and sunglasses, wrapping spectators at football games
(or even painted on their faces) and so on. And it is not
so unusual to hear people muttering things like "speak
English in England" or even "England to the English."