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Culture and writing
The evolution of culture, writing and literature
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Headlines are in brown.
Dates are in red.
Hyperlinks to other pages are in dark blue.
References and citations are in turquoise.
Context and local history are in purple.
Geographical context is in green.
731 CE
The Venerable Bede (672 or 673 to 26 May
735) (“Saint Bede”) was
an English monk and an author and scholar who wrote the Ecclesiastical History
of the English People which he completed in about 731 CE. He was one of the
greatest teachers and writers during the Early Middle Ages,
and is sometimes called "The Father of English History". He served at the monastery of St Peter and its companion
monastery of St Paul at Monkwearmouth and Jarrow in the Anglian Kingdom of
Northumbria.
The Life of
the Venerable Bede, on the state of Britain in the seventh century,
begins: In the seventh century of the Christian era, seven Saxon kingdoms
had for some time existed in Britain. Northumbria or Northumberland, the
largest of these, consisted of the two districts Deira and Bernicia, which had
recently been united by Oswald King of Bernicia ... The place of his birth is
said by Bede himself to have been in the territory afterwards belonging to the
twin monasteries of Saint Peter and Saint Paul at Weremouth
and Jarrow. The whole of this district, lying along the coast near the mouths
of the rivers Tyne and Weir, was granted to Abbot Benedict by King Egfrid two
years after the birth of the Bede.... Britain, which some writers have called
another world, because from its lying at a distance it has been overlooked by
most geographers, contained in its remotest parts a place on the borders of
Scotland, where Bede was born and educated. The whole country was formed
formerly studded with monasteries, and beautiful cities founded therein by the
Romans, but now, owing to the devastations of the Danes and Normans, has
nothing to allure the senses. Through it runs the Were, a river of no mean
width, and of tolerable rapidity. It flows into the sea and receives ships,
which are driven thither by the wind, into its tranquil bosom. A certain
Benedict built churches on its banks, and founded there two monasteries, named
after St Peter and St Paul, and united together by the same rule and bond of
brotherly love.
Bede gave intellectual and religious
significance to as burgeoning nation at Jarrow from where many centuries later John
William Farndale was the youngest member of the Jarrow marchers. Bede first
defined an English identity. Bede produced the greatest volume and quantity of
writing in the western world of his time. At his monastery at Jarrow he had access to a university library with more books
than were in the libraries of Oxford or Cambridge 700 years later. (Robert Tombs, The English and
their History, 2023, 24, 26).
750s
By the 750s, the York school led by the
golden age of Archbishop Ecgbert was renowned as a centre of learning in the
liberal arts, literature, and science, as well as in religious matters. From
here, Alcuin of York drew inspiration for
the school he would lead at the Frankish court.
1100
There was a significant revival of
writing and literature emerging by the early twelfth century, possibly deriving
from English traditions, but written in Latin and French.
The first significant historical
writings since Bede started to appear.
1109
There were even some works of a defiant
tone, suggesting resistance by the indigenous population. Hereward the Wake was
written in Latin some time after 1109 and told
stories of Fenland uprisings.
1126
William of Malmesbury’s
Gestia Regem Anglorum
narrated English history from the Saxons to Henry I. Henry I started to
tolerate a more even handed approach between the
indigenous Anglo-Saxon/Scandinavian population and the Normans.
1131
Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum comprised two medieval works on the history of
England.
These works gave England a history and
an element of pride and identity.
There is an In Our Time podcast on Roger Bacon, the medieval
English scholar, an early pioneer of science who became known as Doctor
Mirabilis.
There is an In
Our Time podcast on the
Twelfth Century Renaissance.
1136
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Histoira Regum
Britanniae was a mixture of historical account and epic legend, which
perhaps reinforced a sense of nationhood. It became more widely read than
Bede’s works across Europe.
1250
By about the mid thirteenth century, a
tangible English identify had emerged, albeit this was a land of multiple
identities. There were the gems of a national community, communitas regni,
emerging. Societies started to develop dense networks of communities and
associations.
One of the earliest compositions of
early music emerged with Sumer is icumen in,
recorded in writing at Reading Abbey in about 1250.
An idea had crystalised into stories by
the mid thirteenth century, about the outlaw Robehod.
By the fifteenth century those compound stories, with a stock character
encountering various formulae of adventure, had evolved into more formal tales
of Robin Hood, a forest outlaw. The first surviving written stories date to
about 1450 by which time there were large numbers of rymes,
some of which have survived.
1303
Robert Mannyng
(c. 1275 – c. 1338) was an English chronicler and Gilbertine monk from Malton. Mannyng provides a surprising amount of information about
himself in his two known works, Handlyng
Synne (1303) and Mannyng's Chronicle (1338).
In these two works, Mannyng tells of his residencies
at the Gilbertine houses of Sempringham (near Bourne)
and Sixhills, and also at
the Gilbertine priory at Cambridge, St Edmund’s.
1350
After the Black Death, many craftsmen
had died, and there was a temporary drop in the quality of craftsmanship such
as stained glass.
Composers of music for the first time
became known as individuals.
Language
Post Conquest Britain was multilingual and the elite were trilingual, speaking Latin
(religion, scholarship and administration), French (culture and some legal use)
and English (for everyday use).
Old English was a simple language,
without grammatical sophistication. There was no common spelling and distinct
local usages.
In the 1320s, English language history
started to appear, particularly in the works of Robert of Gloucester and Robert
Manning.
By 1350, patriotic fervour was instilled
by the Hundred Years War with France and there was a swift and dramatic switch
to use English as the national language.
·
1362 – The
Law Courts started to use English
·
1363 –
Parliament was opened in English
·
1380s –
Parliamentary proceedings were recorded in English
·
1399 – Henry
IV accepted the crown with a speech in English
·
1415 – Henry
V rallied support for his war with the French in English
Between 1250 and 1450, 27,000 words
emerged. A quarter were derived from French (Old English ful
added to French words like beau) and many from Latin and the language
grew in its sophistication. There were nuances of meaning.
The Robin Hood
stories were written down.
(Robert
Tombs, The English and their History, 2023,
126-128).
1400
Geoffrey Chaucer brought the English
language into European culture. He was more influenced by Dante and Petrarch,
together with bawdy French tales, than English writing, yet became the father
of English poetry. His Canterbury tales (1387 to 1400) satirised a wide cross
section of contemporary life.
(Robert
Tombs, The English and their History, 2023, 130).
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of
twenty-four stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by
Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. The tales are mostly written in verse,
although some are in prose. They are presented as part of a story-telling
contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together from London to
Canterbury to visit the shrine of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The
prize for this contest is a free meal at the Tabard Inn at Southwark on their
return.
There is an In Our Time podcast on Margery Kempe (1373 to
1438) and English Mysticism, and English mystic who went to Jerusalem and
dictated her life story, said to be the first autobiography in English.
1516
Thomas More,
Henry VIII’s Chancellor, wrote the humanist parable, Utopia,
describing an imaginary pagan island governed by equality and justice.
1520s
Henry VIII promoted a fashion for portraiture
with his patronage of Hans Holbein. Individual and family portraits became fashionable
1549
Language
Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer
became the compulsory liturgy. It used single sentence prayers and fresh styles
of rhetoric. This would also become the focus of the growth of the English
language, and many phrases which came into common use derived from it.
The Reformation and the Counter
Reformation:
·
Led
to the destruction of significant artistic expression
·
England
began to see herself as an Empire, under rulers with proclaimed rights from God
·
However much power was increasingly influenced
by parliaments who adopted increasing functions dubbed omnicompetence
·
A
national consciousness emerged distinct from the rest of Europe which was
centred on Rome – religion became nationalised with its English bible and
prayer book
Protestantism focused on the
interpretation of words rather than the enactment of rituals. This was the
catalyst to the English becoming increasingly tolerant as a nation. England
switched from a shame culture to a guilt culture, from extroversion to introversion.
English had been a scorned language, and
in some ways it continued so:
·
In
1605 the Bodleian Library in Oxford had only 58 of its 2,000 books in English
·
Latin
and Greek remained a bedrock with the elegant modernity of Italian and French
·
English
was seen as a base speche
·
Where
English was used, it tended to be used in a form to attempt a form of
sophistication through complexity and long words. This flamboyant use of the
language was parodied in Thomas Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetorique.
A new tradition of a more readable
vernacular English was embodied in the work of William
Tyndale, born in 1494, versed in Latin, Greek and Hebrew and trained in
Oxford, the Netherlands and Germany.
·
He
pioneered a more easily read form of the language, of writing to be understood,
and the use of everyday words of proverbs
·
He
drew on French and Latin to find new words in the English language, such as granddaughter
·
His
linguistic naturalness was a challenge to the Church, and the likes of Thomas
More saw the dangers in an English language (which was forbidden to be read by
labourers by Henry VIII in the Act for the Advancement of True Religion)
When James I came to the throne in 1603,
new versions of the English Bible were authorised, which became the King James
Bible.
Tyndale, Cranmer
and the Authorised version of the Bible gave rise to a simple Protestant style.
Plain speaking became an English virtue.
A more standardised form of English
became familiar across the country. This contrasted with France where worship
remained in Latin.
It also reinforced a sense of
nationhood, where in England, this already existed, but was strengthened into
an imagined community of nationhood.
Concurrently with these influences, came
a growth in theatre. Professional theatre grew out of religious plays which had
become repressed from the 1530s. In the 1550s, travelling players were
patronised by noblemen and courtiers.
From the 1570s, permanent theatres came
to be built on the south side of the River Thames, outside the ambit of the
City authorities, including the Rose
in 1587 and the Globe
in 1599.
New plays were written by the University
Wits including Christopher
Marlowe, Thomas
Nashe and Thomas Kyd.
This was the context for William
Shakespeare, 1564 to 1616. Rather than dogmatic, he was inspired by multiple
cultural and religious influences, he did not respect social and gender
hierarchy and women played an important role in his plays. He was an innovator
who went beyond Chaucer. He was also an inventor of words and phrases in the
development of the English language. He was able to adopt the new style of
monosyllabic simplicity in a novel way.
Tyndale’s work gave rise to such phrases
as the salt of the earth, the powers that be, signs of the times, the straight
and narrow.
Shakespeare provided such phrases as the
game is up, be all and end all, the world’s mine oyster, pomp
and circumstance.
The thoughts and speech allowed by the
English language was enlivened and enriched. Shakespeare recognised that
language gives life to thee.
(Robert
Tombs, The English and their History, 2023, 194 to 203).
1558
Architecture
Henry VII and VIII built palaces on an
unprecedented scale
Under Elizabeth I, the drive for
building came from the nobility who competed to attract a royal visit. Property
acquired as monastic land were repurposed as country seats. Medieval features
such as battlements, great halls, towers, were replaced by a modern vernacular
style providing comfort, elegance and light, with the
privacy of individual rooms.
(Robert Tombs, The English and
their History, 2023, 182-183).
1590
Shakespeare wrote his ten history plays
in the 1590s. Uniquely he wrote about recent history and whilst some have
dismissed his plays as propaganda, they were mostly not so.
His narration also gave some light to
the rural England of the general populace.
1603
With the Union of the Crowns in 1603,
Shakespeare started to write about Britain directly in Macbeth (1606), King
Lear (1606), and Cymbeline (1610) and even anticipating the change in his
Welsh, Scottish and Irish characters in Henry V (1600).
1649
In 1649, Thomas Hobbes, a Royalist in
exile in Paris, wrote Leviathan,
which he presented to Charkes II. Its premise was that humans originally lived
in a barbarous state of nature, but emerged by
yielding individual rights to an all powerful
sovereign. In practice he upset both camps and copies of Leviathan were burned
in Oxford. It has subsequently been regarded as a masterpiece of political
philosophy, insofar as it is regarded as a statement on the sovereignty of the
state and the law rather than the person of a prince.
On the Parliamentary side of the
argument, John
Milton (including Paradise Lost), Sir Henry
Vane, the Younger and Algernon Sidney
wrote their treatises.
1667
John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Theatres closed during the Civil War
were restored.
1678
Dissenters went underground. John Bunyan,
imprisoned for illegal teaching, wrote the Pilgrim’s Progress, a work on
Puritan piety.
Henry
Purcell (10 September 1659 – 21 November 1695) was an English composer of
Baroque music. Purcell's musical style was uniquely English, although it
incorporated Italian and French elements. Generally considered among the
greatest English opera composers, Purcell is often linked with John Dunstaple and William Byrd as England's most important
early music composers. No later native-born English composer approached his
fame until Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, William Walton and Benjamin Britten in the 20th century.
1688
After the Glorious Revolution, two new
parties formed. The Tories were opposed to this exclusion. The derogatory term
Tory came from the toraigh, the Irish Catholic
rebels. The "Country Party", who were soon to be called the Whigs,
supported the exclusion. The derogatory term Whig came from the whiggamore, Scottish Presbyterian rebels. The Civil
War camps were the foundation of the evolution of British politics and a trend
towards what Robert Tombs called a
Whig History.
The Enlightenment from the late 1600s to the early 1800s
After the Glorious Revolution Europeans
started to contemplate the universe and themselves in new way in what came to
be referred as the Age of Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason.
New ideas generated economic innovation
and accelerated overseas contact, though also conflict.
Europe began a period of ascendancy as
Asian empires were in decline.
Ideas and institutions emerged which
have come to be seen as modern British ideas. Rationality, tolerance, optimism and politeness were new values emerging. There was greater freedom to debate. For the
first time the English language and English ideas started to spread overseas.
For the first time Europeans began to
think about the universe and there was greater secular awareness.
There was even a new parody of
traditional religious ideas, as in Laurence
Sterne’s The Life
and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759).
Francis
Bacon (1561 to 1626) was the father of modern scientific method.
Isaac Newton
(1642 to 1727) began with experiments by pushing pieces of metal into his own
eye. His Principia Mathematica
(1687) remains a significant influential work. He made fundamental insights
into the forces holding the universe together. His own story of the apple gave
popularity to his important work on gravity. He found an ordered world and
benevolent creation. He remained a pious Anglican Cambridge don. He was
President of the new Royal Society and Master of the Mint.
John Locke (1632 to 1704)
was influential in changes in philosophy and political thought. He was a
political adviser to Earl Shaftesbury during the Exclusion Crisis and went into
exile in 1682. In exile his views were radicalised, and he wrote his Essay
Concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises of Government. In
the latter, his contract theory, in line with Hobbes’ ideas in Leviathan,
saw government as arising from an agreement with the governed. He argued
against contemporary Tory ideas that a king derived authority from God. He
returned from exile after the Glorious Revolution. His Essay Concerning
Human Understanding was a seminal philosophical work. He argued that humans
were born with minds like a piece of black paper and felt there were no innate
ideas of principles. All were capable of reasoning. His Letters on Toleration
(1689 to 1692) prompted religious tolerance. People did not permanently
surrender their liberty and he recognised natural laws. His ideas have perhaps
retained their influence after Locke’s death most notably in the US, for
instance in ideas within the American Declaration of Independence including
that governments were made by the consent of the people.
The Royal Society
was founded in 1660 to promote sociable intellectual discussion.
The Third Earl of Shaftesbury in his Characteristics
of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711) promoted politeness and an innate
sense of right and wrong. This in turn found a place in ideas of good breeding.
The Spectator (1711 to 1714) endorsed the idea daily.
In contrast to this developed a counter culture of flouting the rules of politeness
deliberately, through drinking, and bawdy jokes. There was an interest in
racing and boxing and fox hunting (which became increasingly important in rural
life) and masculine ideas.
A new form of
literary work emerged in the eighteenth century, the novel, focused on ordinary
people and the present. The probable father was Daniel Defoe and Robinson
Crusoe (1719), with direct prose and vigorous narrative, and vice, danger and crime in Moll Flanders (1722). Novels
worked through the imagination of both author and reader and inspired by
getting inside peoples’ heads.
In due course
the novel would evolve away from Tory or Whig ideals,
to a bridge across the political divide, where conflict is resolved, as in
courtship tales such as The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) by
Henry Fielding. In due course this would evolve to the rationalist and romantic
ideals as Jane Austen’s works.
There was a new
and moral response to and a new vision of nature. There was a new taste for
paintings with a picturesque ideal.
There was also
the invention of a new idea of the English garden, idealised nature, carefully
planned to seem unplanned, Garden designers came to fame including William
Kent, a Yorkshire apprentice from Bridlington, who came to fame in the
1730s and is now considered to be the father of modern gardening; Lancelot
‘Capability’ Brown (1716 to 1783) whose opulent parkland style can be found
at Kew, Warwick, Blenheim and Chatsworth, and Humphrey
Repton.
Exploration
went beyond the merely commercial. The President of the Royal Society
commissioned James Cook for his
voyages of exploration, and he brought back stories of Polynesian exoticism,
the Tahitian prince Omai and even the story of his
death in a clash with the Hawaiians in February 1779 (which highlighted that
exploration was not such a benign affair), as well as importantly his answering
remaining questions about the southern hemisphere.
Even the London
Stock Exchange was described by Voltaire in the 1720s as peaceful, albeit Baron
de Montesquieu felt that in England money was more important than honour.
Ordinary folk
were now reading for pleasure, prestige and
empowerment. 300,000 books were published between 1660 to 1800. Daniel Defoe’s True
Born Englishman sold 80,000 copies.The
Methodists were pioneers of innovation in reading and produced an abridged Pilgrim’s
Progress in a 4d booklet in 1743 and similar initiatives.
The end of the
Licensing Act in 1695 brought an end to press controls. These were the early
days of newspapers and magazines. The first London daily of note was the
Courant which began in 1702. By the mid eighteenth century 35 provincial
papers sold 200,000 copies per week. Magazines such as the Spectator, Tatler
and Gentleman’s Magazine were popular.
Samuel Johnson
(1709 to 1784) published his Dictionary
of the English Language in 1735. He was a Tory with Jacobite
sympathies. James
Boswell (1740 to 1795), his young friend, wrote his biography (1791).
Johnson was a literary pioneer and authored works from Latin poerty to travel writing. He produced a scholarly edition
of Shakespeare and his Life of the English Poets (1781). His Dictionary
evidenced that language was not a static system.
This was a new age
of the exchanging of information in the public sphere.
·
New
and fashionable coffee houses.
·
Freemasonry
spread rapidly
·
Libertine
groups such as the
Hellfire Club, founded by Philip
Wharton.
·
Literary,
philosophical, scientific and debating societies such
as the Newcastle Literary and
Philosophical Society (The Lit and Phil) and Samuel Johnson’s
Literary Club.
There emerged a
new momentum of public opinion and political discussion. Politics was opened to
public scrutiny. Montesquieu, the French Philosopher, recognised an English
sense of liberty in his De l’esprit des Lois
(1748). The public was restricted to those with money, education
and respectability, but even so there was greater permeability in social
boundaries.
The national
character emerged in songs and fictional characters. John Bull was the
invention of the Scot, John Arbuthnot in 1712. Fielding composed the light hearted patriotic song Roast Beef of Old England.
But there was also a questioning of English identity, such as the sarcastic
poem of Daniel Defoe, The True Born Englishman (1701), who felt that
successive invasions and immigrations into the country meant “we have been
Europe’s sink.”
These new
characteristics have been interpreted as insular and xenophobic. There was a
focus on new freedoms and rights. However it came with
an admiration for Continental culture (especially Italian and French) and the
nation perhaps saw itself more as fighting for liberties in a European context.
In the late
eighteenth century Francois de La Rochefoucauld was amazed by the confidence of
ordinary farmers, who he saw as mere peasants, talking knowledgeably and
meeting in clubs.
Trends in dress
codes were sometimes pioneered by ordinary folk, such as the adoption of round
hats instead of wigs.
There was a new
interest in travel, or for those less adventurous, vicarious travel through
reading travel books. At the end of each war there was a rush to the continent.
Young gentlemen started the tradition of the Grand Tour. Influences arrived
from overseas such as classical statuary. These new collections at scale led to
the founding of the British
Museum (established 1753, largely based on the collections of the
Anglo-Irish physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane and opened in 1759) and the
National
Gallery (founded in 1824).
Musical tastes
became more cosmopolitan with fashions for Handel and Johann Christian Bach.
(Robert Tombs, The English and their History,
2023, 275 to 300).
Charles Dickens (1812 to 1870)
Charles
Dickens was a self made
gentleman, son of an Admiralty clerk.
Dickens was prominent in a literary and
intellectual post romantic group, which also included Thomas Carlyle,
Alfred, Lord
Tennyson, William
Makepeace Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell
and Harriet
Martineau.
His most popular novels were The Pickwick Papers
(1836 to 1837) and Oliver Twist
(1837 to 1838).
Dickens adopted an approach of populist non sectarian Christian radicalism. He disliked the elite,
including the church, but did not sympathise with the criminal poor. He
supported capital punishment. He accepted the inevitability of social and
economic inequality. He sent his eldest son to Eton. He wrote of a family ideal
around adorable children, but his indulgence in these dreams led to disastrous
consequences for his own family. He welcomed progress.
He was the first significant writer to
make working people and children his central characters. Poorer folk provided
models of human and moral values. He was able to portray larger than life
characters.
Dickensian England was becoming a new
kind of society, but without any blueprint. It was scientifically and
technologically modern, but there were concerns that it was heading for
disaster. It was a place of exhilarating but frightening change. Dickens and
Carlyse were both concerned with the condition of England and hoped to
influence social change. They consciously wrote about society that seemed
unstable and dysfunctional. Yet, the Poor Law that he attacked was at the time
the biggest form of wealth distribution in the world. He had a nostalgia for a
land of his childhood memories.
He wrote a
spoof Tory hymn, God bless the squire and his relations, And keep us in our proper stations.
In
Hard
Times
he drew a nightmarish picture in his Coketown, based
on Preston, with its joyless materialist culture. He did not disapprove of progress, but disliked the inhumanity.
He
was contemptuous of Parliament and did not aspire to politics.
Dickens
works were read by every class from Queen Victoria. Pickwick sold 40,000 copies
of each episode and copies were often read by several people.
(Robert Tombs, The English and
their History, 2023, 420 to 425).
1846
The Hungry
Forties was a period of economic slump across Europe which began in
1846. A speculative bubble of railway building burst. There was a dread of mass
hunger and a revolutionary feel across Europe. This was a period of self examination in Britain.
Several of Dickens’ most popular works:
The Old Curiosity
Shop 1840 to 1841
Barnaby Rudge 1841
A Christmas
Carol 1843
Dombey and
Son 1848
David
Copperfield 1849 to
1850
Thomas Carlyle’s Chartism 1840
and Past and Present 1843
Disraeli’s Coningsby
1844 and Sybil
1845
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre
1847
Thackaray’s Vanity Fair
1848
Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton
1848 (Chapter 27, In the Liverpool Docks)
Tennyson’s Locksley Hall
1835
Science and religion
Religious belief were challenged by new geological, archaeological and
astronomical discoveries.
Charles Lyell’s Principles
of Geology (1830 to 1833).
Robert Chambers’
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844)
Charles
Darwin’s On the Origin of
Species by Natural Selection was largely written after the HMS Beagle
voyage in the 1830s, under Malthus’ influence but publication was delayed until
1859.
Samuel Smiles’ Self
Help promoted patience, perseverance and conscientious working, based on
sketches of successful self made
men, even foreign ones like Napoleon.
These all had
implications for theories of divine creation and led to a clash with the Church
at a meeting of the British Association of Oxford in 1860 between Thomas Henry Huxley,
defending Darwin and “Soapy Sam”
Wilberforce, son of the anti slavery campaigner,
William Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford. The Evangelical literal interpretation
of the Bible was particularly threatened.
See the Kirkdale cave discoveries.
Railways were constructed at enormous
speed in the 1840s and 1850s. Thackeray in 1860 recognised a new era of the
railroad replacing an age of stage coaches, pack
horses, highwaymen, druids and ancient Britons.
With these changes came a growth in
ideas of freedom. Science was the embodiment of progress. The universe was seen
as perpetually developing.
Social Darwinism was pioneered by Herbert Spencer, applying Darwin’s
theory of natural selection to human society, with race, nationality and class
being subjected to the survival of the fittest theories.
Inter war years
The lives of the gentry became a new
theme – Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, DH Lawrence, Lady
Chatterley’s Lover, P G Woodhouse, Right Ho!
Jeeves.
Modernism in art was tempered by a
revival of traditional cultural forms.
Literature followed a multiplicity of
different paths from T
S Eliot, Virginia
Woolf, to John
Betjeman to J B
Priestley (born in Bradford)’s English
Journey 1933 (see Chapter 7, the Potteries, Chapter 9, the Tyne,
Chapter 10 East Durham and the Tees).
There was cultural novelty in
entertainment in the mass phenomenon of the cinema, the gramophone and later
the wireless. The cinema also became a source of news and propaganda through
newsreels.
American trends led to the
Roaring Twenties – the Jazz Age, the Charleston (1925) and flappers
with bobbed hair and relatively short skirts.
British entertainers included the
working class Lancastrian Gracie
Fields and George
Formby.
The wireless was supervised by a
paternalistic elite including John
Reith, director general of the British
Broadcasting Company, which in time replaced the Church of England as the
provider of moral compass. George V made his first
royal broadcast in 1932 and Stanley Baldwin started to use the wireless as
a means to talk to the population in their own homes.
World War 2
The BBC grew significantly in its size
and impact in the Second World War, adding the Light Programme and newsreaders
like Alvar Lidell and Bruce Belfrage became
celebrities. A new type of satirical and rather mad comedy took hold, such as Its
That Man Again. War became a seedbed for post war British humour.
The Proms started to attract mass
audiences and Myra Hess organised daily lunchtime piano concerts in the now
empty National Gallery.
The Entertainments National Service
Association (“ENSA”) took travelling shows including Gracie Fields, Vera Lynn
and Goerge Formby.
Cinema became popular. The Ministry of
Information encouraged morale boosting films. The film industry though
sometimes took a critical view, such as the challenge of British values in The
Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943).
The Royal Navy often featured in films
as in Noel Coward’s In Which We Serve
(1942). Historic films depicting Britain’s unchanging character, such as
Laurence Olivier in Henry V (1944) were popular; “We few, we happy
few, we band of brothers.”
Evelyn War wrote of action in Norway and
Alistair Maclean wrote the Guns of Navarone. Films of the 1950s included
The Wooden Horse (1950), the Cruel Sea (1953) and The Cockleshell
Heroes (1955).