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by Henry Hitchings

  Jane Austen’s novels are full of public events: assemblies, dances, balls. Here, as so often, society comes together in order to observe itself in the act of doing so: one of the reasons you might go to an event of this kind was to watch others in attendance, savouring their little triumphs, discomforts and deficits. Austen is adept at showing ‘polite’ people at their most awful. There are characters for whom good manners are merely a form of self-advertisement. Then there are those who use manners simply as a means of appraising and grading others. Typically, the characters who create most trouble for others are the ones who practise an elevated politesse; their artfulness is a kind of villainy. Austen has a notion of a truly virtuous politeness, and its key elements are constancy and amiability. The latter is defined by Mr Knightley in Emma when he dismisses Frank Churchill as ‘amiable only in French, not in English’. Critical of imported affectations, Knightley unpacks the significance of a word that others use too liberally, explaining that Frank is merely ‘very agreeable’ and ‘can have no English delicacy towards the feelings of other people’.

  The occasions and locations of polite public gathering – such as the Pump Room at Bath – had for some time been identified by moralistic commentators as the sites of sin, places suited to the very agreeable Frank Churchill rather than the properly sensitive Knightley. Austen never has any of her characters visit one of London’s fashionable pleasure gardens (Vauxhall, Marylebone, Ranelagh), but they figure in the novels of Fanny Burney, and they are the setting for tests of female virtue. Burney presents episodes that suggest the importance of being able to suspend attention when we are in modish or crowded places. Sharing communal space requires a degree of inattentiveness; although we cannot switch off all our sensitivities, we learn to show an awareness of other people’s presence without making them feel that they are objects of curiosity to us. It is not easy to manage the balance between looking and not looking, between having our lights on full and having them on so low that we can’t see where we are going.

  In Burney’s most accessible novel, Evelina, the eponymous heroine goes to the gardens at Vauxhall, where she has the chance to ‘enjoy my first sight of various … deceptions’. Blundering down a dark alley, she feels threatened by a group of predatory young gentlemen, who form a circle round her and her friends, imprisoning her ‘for some minutes’. The scene ends without disaster, but Burney nicely evokes Evelina’s unarticulated suspicion that she may be subjected to a sexual assault. The very fact of Evelina being at Vauxhall in the first place is interpreted by the more rakish sort of men as a sexual invitation. That basic attitude survives among many men, who defend their priapic blitzkrieg with baloney along the lines of ‘She was asking for it.’ For Evelina, going out in public is both socially necessary and socially hazardous. In one of her letters she laments the lack of a guide to modern living: ‘really, I think there ought to be a book, of the laws and customs à-la-mode, presented to all young people upon their first introduction into public company.’

  Burney’s own experience of public company and customs à-la-mode meant that she was surprised when she encountered people whose manners felt wholly spontaneous and unaffected. In September 1787 she visited the eminent astronomer William Herschel, who lived at Slough. In her journal Burney writes of his sister Caroline, who worked alongside him and received for this £50 a year from King George III: ‘She is very little, very gentle, very modest, and very ingenuous: and her manners are those of a person unhackneyed and unawed by the world, yet desirous to meet and to return its smiles.’5

  At this time Burney was ‘second keeper of the robes’ to Queen Charlotte. It was a dismal role, even if an honour, and one in which she toiled for five years. Her position, into which she had been pushed by her father, gave her a distressingly close view of the king’s insanity. As far as her own behaviour was concerned, normality had to be suspended. In a letter to her sister Hetty she could come across as an amused guide to the etiquette at court: ‘In the first place, you must not cough. If you find a cough tickling in your throat, you must arrest it from making any sound … In the second place, you must not sneeze … In the third place, you must not, upon any account, stir either hand or foot. If, by chance, a black pin runs into your head, you must not take it out … If the blood should gush from your head by means of the black pin, you must let it gush.’6 But this was before she had taken on the job, and once she was immersed in it her tone darkened. While many of her contemporaries were discussing social improvements and the reform of manners, she was stuck in a life of incessant service. Writing letters kept her in contact with a world of ideas that would otherwise have been lost to her.

  15

  The Englishness of English manners

  Edmund Burke, an admirer of Fanny Burney’s books, was instrumental in getting her released from her confinement, and his own brushes with monarchy, less intimate than hers, informed some of the most quotable words ever written about manners.

  In 1790 Burke, established as a first-class orator and political thinker, published his Reflections on the Revolution in France. There he recalled seeing Marie Antoinette in her pomp at Versailles: ‘just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in’. At one time ‘ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult’. Now, though, ‘the age of chivalry is gone’, and ‘that of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone!’1

  For Burke, Marie Antoinette was the embodiment of civility. Her degradation was the mark of what he would six years later condemn as a ‘coarse, rude, savage’ new order. The French revolutionaries were desecrating the very principles of mannerliness: a regard for monarchy, religion and rank, and a deference to women. ‘Manners,’ wrote Burke, ‘are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or sooth, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us.’ They achieve this by a ‘constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and colour to our lives.’ At their best ‘they aid morals’; at their worst ‘they totally destroy them’.2

  Burke regarded a system of manners as a means of preserving political, social and commercial stability. When the traditional structures of society were overthrown, as by the French Revolution, manners also unravelled. Burke argues that what passes for egalitarianism is in fact a brutish stripping away of the architecture of civility. His thinking has played a large part in shaping conservative notions of Englishness. ‘In England,’ he writes, ‘we preserve the whole of our feelings still native and entire … We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look up with awe to kings; with affection to parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility. Why? Because when such ideas are brought before our minds, it is natural to be so affected; because all other feelings are false and spurious.’ He imagines the English as a huge family with deep roots, and English society as ‘a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’.3 His ideas and his language, though repellent to many, have never since gone out of fashion. Perhaps more than anyone before or since, he recognized that language does not just refer to politics, but actually constitutes it.

  There is a hearty emotiveness in Burke’s statement that ‘In England … we preserve the whole of our feelings still native and entire.’ Some will find it absurd; others will relish its confidence. It seems grouchy to
point out that Burke was not English but Irish; after all, by the time he wrote these words he had lived in England for nearly forty years, and he would not have thought Irishness and Englishness incompatible. We are likely in any case to be struck by Burke’s sense of what sometimes gets called English exceptionalism. In this view, England is different from everywhere else: it has had its own political, religious and colonial agendas, its own forms of government, a special eclecticism, unusual traditions in education, a history of success. Even if you dismiss this as a self-aggrandizing myth, there is no escaping the consequences of so many people’s belief in this exceptional status.

  When Burke spoke of the English preserving the whole of their feelings, he was contrasting them with the French whom he saw ‘filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags, and paltry, blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man’. The revolutionary French were the products of a kind of shoddy taxidermy, whereas the English were brilliantly alive. English people’s vitality came from their capacity ‘to love the little platoon we belong to in society’; more than that, it came from a sense of place and from historical continuity.

  The story of the last of these has been especially popular with proponents of English exceptionalism, and merits examination here because its facts feed into the tradition that Burke applauds: the awe of kings, the partnership between the living and the dead, the ‘constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation’ of manners. It begins with the arrival, in the fifth century AD, of Germanic settlers: Angles, Saxons, Jutes. This was a land grab, a voluntary economic migration in which the newcomers made straight for the fertile lowlands. The dialect these people used was Anglisc; they and the land they took over was known as Angelcynn. When Pope Gregory the Great saw some of these people in an Italian slave market in the 590s, he is said to have remarked that they were ‘not Angles but angels’. The Christian mission that Gregory sent in 597 was intended to establish a single English Church – at the heart of a single English kingdom. Slowly a sense of English identity developed. This was evident in the 720s when the monk Bede wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bede did not write in English and thought of himself as Northumbrian rather than English, but he presented a powerful image of these people’s shared past and shared destiny, and of their status as a single people. The awareness of a distinctly English identity was also shaped by the experience of Viking invasion, beginning with a raid on the island of Lindisfarne in 793.

  By the end of the ninth century King Alfred was able to think of himself as the ruler of all England. This view was not current beyond Wessex, but in the reigns of the two kings that followed, Edward the Elder and Athelstan, the idea of a united English people became political reality. That sense of unity was shaken by the Norman Conquest but survived it, and is captured in a memorably absurd line in 1066 and All That: ‘The Norman Conquest was a Good Thing, as from this time onwards England stopped being conquered and thus was able to become top nation.’4 Ever since 1066, feelings of ‘top nation’-hood notwithstanding, there have been attempts to recover a supposedly lost Englishness, something that might feel truly ‘native and entire’, a Saxon earthiness and authenticity that the Normans displaced.

  It may seem odd, then, that the English have accepted monarchs of obviously un-English origin, including at least one who did not even speak the language (George I). But it is not so odd when we understand the English tradition of regarding their monarchs as subjects of the law, rather than its creators, and the tradition of monarchs also regarding themselves in this way. The philosopher Roger Scruton writes that ‘Many of the peculiarities of the English can be traced to this conception of law. What is sometimes known as their “individualism” – that is, their disposition to affirm the right and responsibility of individual action in all spheres of social life – is surely to be attributed to their sense of being protected by the law from those who might otherwise coerce them.’ The English common law, which has custom and tradition at its heart, is a tissue of local judgements, and, although there exists a wealth of commentary, the law itself is not explicitly set down. The articulate system of English common law is the truest expression of partnership between generations; among its gifts to us is the idea of ownership as duty, and its doctrines ‘compose the face of England, which reveals in its every contour a long history of peaceful settlement’.5

  Yet today the English past is typically seen as an encumbrance, and Englishness is a dirty secret. It is more than fifty years since the novelist Doris Lessing wrote that ‘The sad truth is that the English are the most persecuted minority on earth … [and] like Bushmen in the Kalahari … they vanish into camouflage at the first sign of a stranger.’6 Born in 1919 in what was then known as Persia, brought up in what was known as Rhodesia, and resident in London since 1949, Lessing saw English behaviour with the eyes of an extra-terrestrial – but also from close up. The vanishing act she perceived was a guilty one, a means of forestalling hostilities. It was as if Englishness, like other romantic notions, had continually to be tucked out of sight.

  Whereas Celtic myth is celebrated with gusto and forms a key part of the Scottish and Irish romantic appeal to foreign visitors, the English tend to appear shamefaced about their folk traditions and ancient lore. National pride is regarded as gauche and offensive. There is no English national dress, no English national anthem (‘God Save the Queen’ is shared with the rest of the United Kingdom), and little formal recognition of St George’s Day (which is often, it seems, inconveniently close to Easter). ‘English nationalism’ is an odd-sounding combination of words; instead of nationalism the English mostly practise jingoism and royalism. Rather than shaping a vision of democratic Englishness, intellectuals and political heavyweights see Englishness as something best left to the mob, and in the media the subject is presented negatively – at its most simple, through news reporting that constructs a painfully narrow idea of English culture.

  In many circles the mere mention of Englishness provokes hostile reflections on the iniquities of the British Empire, as if the two were actually the same. Overt celebration of Englishness is associated with atavism and racism, with hardcore football fans and the toxic politics of the far right. For the loudest celebrants it has become about race rather than place, on the grounds that English places are increasingly occupied by ‘un-English’ faces.

  Englishness is often a source of fascination for people newly settled here, and may even be what attracts them in the first place, but there is a common belief that these people deplete English identity. When the popular historian Arthur Bryant delivered a set of lectures about the English national character on the radio in the early 1930s, he spoke of the ‘various successions of immigrants … to whom this island had given a home and a country’, adding that ‘fortunately for England, this alien inflow has never been too rapid, and she has never suffered as other countries have from racial indigestion.’7 ‘Alien inflow’ and ‘racial indigestion’ are not phrases that succeeding generations of commentators have taken up, but there is a large and from time to time vocal constituency that would delight in their suggestiveness, would regard them as synonymous, and would argue that Bryant’s claim long ago ceased to hold true.

  As immigrants have come to make up an increasingly significant part of the population of Britain, and of England especially, they have espoused new identities as, say, Black British or British Pakistani. Accordingly, the decision to define oneself as English has come to seem redolent not only of pride in one’s indigenous status, but also of resistance or outright hostility towards incomers. That resistance is historically specious – the ethnic purists often turn out to be examples of what was once considered alien. Daniel Defoe scorned the English pretence to purity of pedigree in his poem ‘The True-Born Englishman’, which presents the English as mongrels inheriting a variety of conflicting characteristics from their many forebears. Defoe’s poem was published in 1700; twenty-first-century purists are mostly on thinner ice than the ones h
e was satirizing. Nevertheless, a preoccupation with ‘pure’ Englishness is a mainstay of right-wing evangelism. Tellingly, the flying of the cross of St George, which has become commonplace in my lifetime, is widely associated with the England football team and its more combative supporters. It is also an emblem of English distinctiveness at a time when, though Scotland and Wales have established their own devolved political assemblies, England is in a state of political limbo, with no parliament truly its own.

  It now seems possible that a crisis in Britishness, prompted by anxieties about the instability of that identity, may be turning people back on to the idea of being English. There is evidence of a resurgent interest in authentic Englishness, which is seen as a riposte to the homogenous banality of modern living. It is perceptible in the fresh enthusiasm today being shown for English food, folk music and nature writing, as well as for community projects and a host of other initiatives designed to preserve the soul of English experience and stave off the etiolating influence of globalization.

  Yet it is normal to feel that England is vanishing or in a state of abashed torpor, and those who do so cling to their culture’s relics. This is apparent in the tendency to describe as ‘peculiarly English’ things that are not: lunchtime boozing, cricket, tiredness, gardening, garden gnomes (which are German in origin), bad hotels, country estates, frigidity, melancholy, bell-ringing, a love of nonsense, DIY, a fascination with the sea, and being amused by foreigners. This descriptive tendency may be more peculiarly English than any of the above. It speaks of a desire for ownership – a possessiveness about traits and places and traditions, an urge to lay claim to things, especially if they are a little absurd. A desire to own, and also a desire to own up. For the English take a kinky delight in acknowledging their faults. By acknowledging them, they are able to control any discussion of them; the faults can be made to seem foibles and can be slipped inside curatorial inverted commas – ‘Oh yes, we do have a great “love of nonsense”.’ At the same time, to admit possession of some embarrassing object or tendency is a stealthy way of showing that Englishness is robust.