Abstract
‘I Had seen a Lot of Englands’: J. B.
Priestley, Englishness and the People
John
Baxendale1
1 Sheffield
Hallam University, Sheffield
Recent discussions of
English identity have focused on rural, traditionalist images of
‘Deep England’ centred on the south-east. From the early 1930s, in
novels and non-fiction works such as English Journey, Wonder Hero
and Let the People Sing, J. B. Priestley developed an
alternative view of England, urban, industrial and populist in
spirit, which was to inform his celebrated wartime radio broadcasts.
In Priestley's view, rooted in nineteenth-century radicalism, it is
‘the people’ who are the real nation, denied their birthright by a
parasitic ruling class: and it is among the people, not in
aristocrats and imperial heroes, that the true English character is
to be found. Priestley's lost arcadia is his native Bradford before
the Great War, which he constructs in memory and desire as a robust
and democratic civic culture, class-divided but bluntly egalitarian
in manners. Since 1914, this England has been in sad decline,
exploited by the overweening City, and betrayed by the desertion of
its own capitalist class to the gentlemanly values of an
increasingly fake ‘old England’. Meanwhile, in the ‘new England’ of
suburbia and Americanized mass culture, while the old sense of
community may be lacking, a democratic and egalitarian spirit is at
work – also owing something to America – which may yet offer hope
of regeneration. Priestley's view of the nation is a plural one,
in which the traditionally dominant ‘southern metaphor’ is set
against a dissenting, radical version of Englishness, rooted in the
Pennine landscape and the industrial north. His reassertion of a
vital but long-suppressed current in national life reminds us that
national identity is not monolithic, but plural and contested, both
in his time and in ours.
Source: http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/2001/51/87
History
Workshop Journal 2001 2001(51):87-111; doi:10.1093/hwj/2001.51.87
© 2001 by Oxford
University Press