How to Be English
Page 21
The relationship is broken, but traces remain, and so is the English romance with wool. There is a slow revival of the crafts industry that uses wool, and a handful of English producers who are bringing back the ancient English business of knitwear. There is a movement of amateur spinners and an even bigger movement of amateur knitters. The old tradition emerged most powerfully in recent years after Prince Charles intervened on behalf of the hill farmers and the wool industry – the fightback has begun.
I praise God and ever shall
It is the sheep hath paid for all.
Lines carved above a medieval wool merchant’s house
THE PHRASE ‘BAH! Humbug!’ has long since passed into the English language, as a symbol of the mercantile approach to Christmas. It did so six days before Christmas in 1843, when Dickens published A Christmas Carol, at his own expense, and single-handedly reinvented an English Christmas – with roast turkey, families, presents, bonhomie and a very English kind of overindulgence.
Earlier that year, he had visited the Cornish tin mines and been appalled at the ragged children working there and planned a pamphlet, castigating their lack of education. In the end, he put the pamphlet aside and wrote the story instead and, by doing so, he turbo-charged its influence. The novella has ghosts and a whole series of Dickensian vignettes, lashings of nostalgia and a human transformation. In fact, A Christmas Carol is said to be one of the few books ever written that could genuinely change people’s behaviour. Well into the twentieth century, the queen of Norway was still sending presents to poor children in London with a note saying ‘With love from Tiny Tim’.
In fact, 1843 was rather an important year in the invention of an English Christmas. It was the first year where it can be proved that Christmas cards were sent. It was also three years after the arrival of Prince Albert, and the tradition of the Christmas tree arrived in England. A German-style Christmas was put back into what had become a rather dry, disapproving and puritanical nation, especially when it came to feast days, with their overtones of Catholicism.
But then, the English do live with the ghosts of Christmas Past, the exhaustion of Christmas Present and the fear of Christmas Yet to Come. They are not the only nationality to do so, but there is something overwrought and deliberately nostalgic about an English Christmas. Even the most sophisticated English professional, living in their Bauhuas white walls for 364 days a year, can still send Christmas cards with scenes of Dickensian mail coaches dashing through the snow. It is as if, on one day a year – perhaps a little longer – the history of England breaks through, and we pay our respects to it again. It is a period in the English psyche where transformation is possible.
The title of Dickens’ book was deliberately chosen. It made the story sound mythic, ageless and reached back to the days when the English sang Christmas carols – and hastened the day when they would sing them again. But then, this may not have been Dickens’ main intention when he wrote the book, though he carried on writing annual Christmas stories until 1849, when he was too busy with writing the great slab of David Copperfield to have time. His main intention was to extract a little generosity of spirit from the English in their most mercantile of moods.
And if we ever doubt that change is possible, a quick reread of A Christmas Carol can reassure us. There never was a transformation quite so instant as Scrooge’s, but Dickens takes him through a process which makes it possible for us to have the same experience, part memory, part shame, part exorcism. As it is, he seems to have succeeded in resurrecting Merrie England from the bare, dry bones of utilitarianism and as such deserves the last place in this book – in the hope that someone might repeat the trick again some day soon.
But there is one final aside to be made about the Englishness of A Christmas Carol. In one sense, that is beyond dispute, it was so influential on the way the English live that it remade Englishness around it. Yet there is a peculiarity. The Cratchit family cooks a goose and enjoys it, but Scrooge wakes from his terrifying Christmas night and buys the prize turkey which has been hanging in the butchers, an exotic bird imported from America.
As a result, we have shunned the English goose and the English now almost universally eat American turkey. Bah! Humbug!
There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn’t believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration. Eked out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family; indeed, as Mrs Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small atom of a bone upon the dish), they hadn’t ate it all at last! Yet every one had had enough, and the youngest Cratchits in particular, were steeped in sage and onion to the eyebrows!
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The idea for this book came to me in Monsal Dale walking with my wife Sarah, and I can’t think of anyone better to talk about ideas while walking along a river with. If she hadn’t been there, I’m not sure it would ever have seen the light of day. I’m ever so grateful to her for this and for so much else.
I would also like to thank my agent, Julian Alexander, for all his tireless advice and support. This book also wouldn’t have happened without the imagination and hard work of the team at Square Peg, Caroline McArthur, Francesca Barrie, Rosemary Davidson, Mikaela Pedlow, David Milner, Matt Broughton, Simon Rhodes, Louise Court and Rachel Norridge.
I would also like to thank the following for permission to quote:
Bloomsbury International UK Ltd for permission to quote the series of apologies here.
The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of John Masefield, for permission to quote from his poem ‘Sea Fever’ here.
Helga Woodruff for permission to quote from William Woodruff’s book The Road to Nab End: An Extraordinary Northern Childhood, here. First published under the title Billy Boy by Ryburn Publishing Ltd in 1993. Republished by Eland Press in 2000, by Abacus in 2002, and by Eland Publishing Ltd in 2011. ISBN 9781906011260 Copyright © 1993 by Helga Woodruff, Copyright © 2008 by Asperula, LLC
The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Alison Uttley Literary Property Trust for permission to use her recipe for Bakewell tarts here.
Nigel Slater and Fourth Estate for permission to use his recipe for toad-in-the-hole here.
‘Middlesex’ from Collected Poems by John Betjeman © The Estate of John Betjeman 1955, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1968, 1970, 1979, 1981, 1982, 2001.
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