Abstract
After looking at Priestley’s fiction, I will analyse how the symbolic form of Englishness was expressed in non-fictional work. The interwar period saw an expanding market for travel literature. As Paul Fussell has noted, most of this writing consisted of accounts of travels abroad,l but there are also guides and maps for tourists as well as some influential travel accounts exploring the condition of England, which engage thus in a (re)negotiation of Englishness in the period. Victor Gollancz asked Priestley to undertake a journey through England, and his account was published in 1934 under the eighteenth-century-style title of English Journey. Being a Rambling but Truthful Account of What One Man Saw and Heard and Felt and Thought During a Journey Through England During the Autumn of the Year 1933. On the one hand, this evokes a tradition of travel writing that goes back to Defoe’s A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of GreatBritain (1724-7), to Arthur Young’s Tours in the late eighteenth century and to William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1830), and on the other hand, there is a connection with a genre of social expeditions into ‘unknown England’ which can be traced back roughly to the middle of the nineteenth century.2 As regards the contemporary scene, Priestley’s English Journey can usefully be compared with the extremely popular travel books written by H. V. Morton. In critical accounts of Priestley’s social explorations, or those of other leftwing writers such as George Orwell, whose work I will also discuss below, Morton usually figures as ‘the other’ — a conservative popular writer with an unreconstructed view of Englishness, a writer who can be dismissed in passing.
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Notes
Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
There was a noticeable interest in early travel accounts in the interwar period. Defoe’s A Tour Through England and Wales was republished by Everyman (London: Dent, 1928), Arthur Young’s Tours in England and Wales were published in 1932 as No. 5 in the Scarce Tracts in Economics Series by the London School of Economics from Selections From the Annals of Agriculture and Other Useful Arts, 1784–1798, and Cobbett’s Rural Rides were widely available. For the nineteenth-century discourse of social exploration see Peter Keating, Into Unknown England 1866–1913: Selections From the Social Explorers [1976] (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1978).
Baxendale and Pawling, Narrating the Thirties (1996), 15.
Michael Bartholomew, In Search of H. V. Morton (London: Methuen, 2004). My brief account of Morton’s background relies on Bartholomew’s pioneering work.
Jonathan Culler, ‘The Semiotics of Tourism’, in: Jonathan Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 153–67; 157.
For the distinction between tourist and traveller in the context of ‘the nineteenth century’s ambivalent confrontation with a democratizing and institutionalizing tourism’ (5) see James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1993).
‘The master-trope for my investigation is named in my title. If there is one dominant and recurrent image in the annals of the modern tour, it is surely that of the beaten track, which succinctly designates the space of the “touristic” as a region in which all experience is predictable and repetitive, all cultures and objects mere “touristy” self-parodies’ (4). See also the classic study by Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: a New Theory of the Leisure Class [1976] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
Matless, Landscape and Englishness (1998), 67.
Morton A., In Search of England [1927], (2002), xviii–xix. The editor, Simon Jenkins, sees Morton as a ‘determined nostalgic’ (vii) and concludes that the people ‘need the country as much as ever. To that extent, Morton was right’ (xiii).
Bartholomew also emphasizes the fact that Morton developed a persona for his travel writings and that, although ‘the success of the book depends entirely on the reader’s being convinced that the events narrated really happened’, the account has the shape of a novel and ‘the narrator is a literary persona, a version of himself or herself, invented by the author.’ Bartholomew, In Search of H. V. Morton (2004), xvii.
Morton, In Search of England (2002), 3–5.
Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Invention of Tradition: the Highland Tradition of Scotland’, in: Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition [1983] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 15–41.
Bartholomew, In Search of H. V. Morton (2004), 124–5.
Matless, Landscape and Englishness (1998), 63.
Ibid., 10. For influential contributions to the discourse of preservationism and the dangers of ribbon development see Clough Williams Ellis, England and the Octopus (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1928) and Britain and the Beast (London: Dent, 1938) by the same author. Ellis was one of the founders of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, which came into existence in 1926 and has been an active charity ever since, from 1969 under the name Council for the Protection of Rural England, and since 2003 under the name Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, always abbreviated as CPRE. The National Trust was founded in 1895.
Thomas Burke, The Beauty of England (London, Bombay & Sydney: George G. Harrap, 1933), 32.
Taylor A., A Dream of England (1994), 19.
In fact, this impulse to participate has been an ingredient of depictions of landscape from an early point. As Simon Grimble argues, landscape ‘speaks of a space that has no centre, yet which invites the observer to locate himself within it: a viewer looks at a seventeenth-century Dutch interior painting and realises there is no place for him inside, whilst a Constable does tender that invitation’. Grimble, Landscape, Writing and the ‘Condition of England’ (2004), 26.
See also Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: a Middle-brow Art (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996).
For a photographic expression of Englishness as a symbolic form, see Bill Brandt, The English at Home (London: Batsford, 1936). Brandt was born in Hamburg in 1904 as Hermann Wilhelm Brandt and came to London in 1931.
H. V. Morton, I Saw Two Englands, revisited and photographed 50 years on by Tommy Candler (London: Methuen, 1989), 42.
J. B. Priestley, English Journey. Being a Rambling but Truthful Account of What One Man Saw and Heard and Felt and Thought During a Journey Through England During the Autumn of the Year 1933 [1934] (London: Heinemann, 1968), 233.
Keating, Into Unknown England (1978).
Andrew Higson, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 181.
Marsha Bryant, ‘Auden and the Homoerotics of the 1930s Documentary’, in: Mosaic 30:2 (1997), 69–92; 71, 90.
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier [1937] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001), 156.
Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 [1981] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Matless, Landscape and Englishness (1998), 35.
See also Chris Stephens, ‘Ben Nicholson: Modernism, Craft and the English Vernacular’, in: Corbett, Holt and Russell (eds), The Geographies of Englishness (2002), 225–47. As Stephens notes, ‘one can argue that in the two decades between the wars the recovery of specifically English vernacular traditions gave craft and, by association, the handmade surface, a nationalistic dimension’ (245). This is part of a process characterized by ‘the feminisation of British culture and the positing of the private and domestic as key components of a modern consciousness’ (245).
For the persistence of these traditions in the interwar period, see Fiona Russell, ‘John Ruskin, Herbert Read and the Englishness of British Modernism’, in: Corbett, Holt and Russell (eds), The Geographies of Englishness (2002), 303–21.
Russell states that ‘[b]oth [Herbert] Read and [Paul] Nash were anxious to root the Modern Movement in Britain’s “solid traditions”. To this end, both created a series of purpose-built lingeages: for Nash, Regency furniture was the best example of modern British design; for Read, pottery was the quintessential modern English art form. But it is striking that these lineages were largely made up of objects and styles, rather than ideas. […] The presence of Ruskin in Read’s work, however, points to a potentially rich British resource of ideas, a resource which raised insistent and pertinent questions about the circumstances — political and social — under which art was and could be made’ (306). See also Grimble, Landscape, Writing and ‘The Condition of England’ (2004).
For a more bourgeois discourse of moral and social improvement, see Diana Maltz, British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870–1900: Beauty For the People (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
On the Frankfurt School, see Jean Seaton, ‘The Sociology of the Mass Media’, in: James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power Without Responsibility: the Press and Broadcasting in Britain [1981] (London: Routledge, 1991), 249–76; 249–56.
In his short discussion of Priestley’s English Journey, Philip Dodd hastily conflates the ‘real enduring England’, which he also mentions in passing, with Priestley’s Old England ‘of ministers and manors and inns, of Parson and Squire’. There is no warrant for this, and while Dodd’s judgement that ‘Priestley, the traveller, could observe only division and conflict in England in 1934 [sic], but that Priestley, the citizen, wished to see unity’ may be valid, his analysis remains very much on the surface. Philip Dodd, ‘The Views of Travellers: Travel Writing in the 1930s’, in: Prose Studies 5:1 (1982), 127–38; 129.
Brome, J. B. Priestley (1988), 326.
See Matless, Landscape and Englishness (1998), 279.
Collins, Time and the Priestleys (1994), 192; 204.
Brome, J. B. Priestley (1988), 412.
Susan Cooper, J. B. Priestley: Portrait of an Author (London: Heinemann, 1970), 157.
J.B. Priestley, Rain Upon Godshill (London: Heinemann, 1941), 214.
Priestley, English Journey (1968), 409.
For a different opinion on The Road to Wigan Pier see Taylor, A Dream of England (1994)
in chapter 5, ‘Documentary Raids and Rebuffs’, 166–71. Taylor sees Wigan Pier as a problematic text because Orwell did not produce the documentary-style work that the Left Book Club had wished for. Thus, Gollancz included an explanatory preface and photographs of distressed areas. ‘While Orwell talked of Lancashire and Yorkshire, the photographs reproduced views of Wales and London; while Orwell attacked the Left, it distanced itself from Orwell through the foreword and the photographs. The Left interrupted the authorial voice, and disturbed the credibility of its witness’ (168). For a more ‘appropriate’ left-wing documentation, Taylor points to Wal Hannington, The Problem of the Distressed Areas (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937). Nowadays, the offending passages contribute largely to the continued interest of Wigan Pier. For a recent discussion of Orwell’s politics see Philip Bounds, Orwell and Marxism: the Political and Cultural Thinking of George Orwell (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009).
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia [1938] (London: Secker & Warburg, 1959), 248.
Priestley, Rain Upon Godshill (1941), 211.
George Orwell, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius’ [1941], in: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, vol. II (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 56–109; 57.
George Orwell, ‘The English People’ [1943/47], in: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, 1–38; 6.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four [1949] (London: Secker & Warburg, 1959), 34.
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), 10.
For a political account of this preoccupation with the past, see Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country: the National Past in Contemporary Britain (London and New York: Verso, 1985).
Michael Bunce, The Countryside Ideal: Anglo-American Images of Landscape (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 8.
Bartholomew, H. V. Morton (2004), xi.
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© 2010 Ina Habermann
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Habermann, I. (2010). English Journeys. In: Myth, Memory and the Middlebrow. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277496_6
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