Jeremy Paxman’s The English is a tremendously enjoyable book, pithily and amusingly written, with all Paxman’s verve and energy but without descending into polemic or hectoring, as you might fear from the presenter of Newsnight. He tries to get at an understanding of what Englishness is, and who the English are. He looks at the subject with engaging lightness and directness, but with a great deal of sense and absolutely no sentimentality; he is not so focused on Britishness, except as it is distinct from being English.
His basic thoughts, though it is a difficult book to sum up, are that the English, until recently, were dominated by both their relative isolation, and their sense of superiority. While both of these have passed away, there are myths in plenty still – the stiff upper lip may have been buried with Diana, but there is still a warm beer-cricket-parish church rural idyll which stands for England, and which has stood for England for many centuries. The point about it, of course, is that it is complete rubbish: it was never an idyll for the majority of people working in the countryside – exactly the opposite – and the Miss Marple rural way of life has gone for ever, under the pressures of population, agricultural modernisation, and encroaching suburbia. And, a rural ideal seems odd for the first, and one of the most intensely, urbanised countries in the world. Paxman concludes that we are still extremely bad at living in cities, and that we try and re-create the village in our gardens and parks even when we are in the city, which we all wish to escape from as soon as possible. Our (I am one of the English, but I do realise that not all my readers are!) desire for privacy means that we socialise badly in cites, rarely invite people into our homes, and retreat to the back garden rather than advance to the public square or the main street. Of course, the weather may have something to do with it.
I won’t try and recapitulate all his discussions, but he covers all aspects you could desire – the home, married life and sex, travel, political and intellectual life, and the relationship with Scotland, Wales and Ireland especially. It’s well worth a read, and here are a few choice selections:
‘Home’ is what the English have instead of a Fatherland. The notion of a Vaterland or Patrie is to hedged around with a sense of the importance of the state and ideas of race and breeding. ‘Home’ is where the individual lives, but it is also something imagined, a spiritual resting place. But, curiously, it can also mean that the idea of ‘England’ that the English carry in their minds is different to the reality around them.
Not all Englishmen can live in a castle. But they all want moats and drawbridges.
In a marvellous section on women’s education, and the deplorable tardiness with which men admitted women to full membership of intellectual society, he complains that much women’s education still aims at a different world. After all, Diana was a “perfectly intelligent woman [who] emerged from school with scarcely more than a certificate for the best-kept hamster”.
One of Paxman’s principal conclusions is that we English are never happier when fearing that everything’s going to the dogs – but that actually, the old place has a lot going for it still, including tolerance, a pretty well functioning society at many levels, great energy and creativity, and – which is crucial for readers of this blog – an unparalleled obsession with and tradition in the written word. “And yet they remain convinced they’re finished. That is their charm.”
Is it because you are a cricket lover that you mention cricket instead of football?
In his novel "England, England" Julian Barnes too aims to find out and give a definition of what Englishness could be. The characters of his book want to build and run an England-themed entertainement resort on a small island.
I never noticed a desire of privacy in English people but this is probably the part of Englishness that will always be beyond my grasping!
Posted by: glo | Saturday, 25 October 2008 at 03:44 AM