British Scholar: February 2008 Book of the Month

Review by:
Antoine Capet
University of Rouen (France)

February 2008

Book of the Month

The English National Character : The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke
to Tony Blair
Peter Mandler, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 348 pages

It is impossible to do justice to such a rich monograph in a review of limited length. As
he explains in his Acknowledgements, Dr Mandler’s magnum opus is in fact the result
of a long process of addition and elimination, following many conference papers and
discussions with specialists of the subject. His self-assigned task was not an easy
one, as anybody who has ever had to teach a course on the United Kingdom – its
formation and possible current break-up – will know from experience. The main title,
The English National Character, immediately suggests a number of hopelessly
difficult questions: the difference between “English” and “British” and the distinction
between national “character” and national “identity” foremost among them. “Why not
British National Identity?”, the reader is evidently tempted to ask before opening the
book – and Mandler, fully aware of these difficulties himself as he repeatedly
explains, does his best to pre-empt the question by constantly justifying his choices.

The first choice which he has to defend is that of the starting point. Why start with
Burke? An unpromising decision if one is to take Mandler’s judgment of p. 25 literally:
“Burke had remarkably little to say about what distinguished the English from others.
[…] In addition to being historically shallow, Burke’s vision of Englishness was also
substantively narrow”. But then – and this is a constant sub-text of the book, not
unexpectedly considering the theme – what counts are perceptions, not reality: Burke
was “seen by Victorian successors as laying a blueprint (not followed up) for
depictions of Englishness”.

And with Mandler being of course a prominent specialist of the period, Burke’s
Victorian successors receive a magnificently extensive treatment. The chapters on
the “long” nineteenth century constitute a veritable textbook on the history of political
and constitutional ideas, 1801-1914. Some names will be familiar to most readers:
Bagehot, Dilke, Seeley, Samuel Smiles – to name but a few. But there were many
others – largely forgotten today outside historians who concentrate on Victorian
thought – who had plenty to say on “the English national character”, both in the
narrow sense and in the wider conception of Empire. Thus we are initiated into the
sometimes arcane, but always fascinating debates between (among others) H.T.
Buckle (History of Civilization in England, 1857-61) and J.F. Stephen ("National
Character", 1861) or John Mitchell Kemble (The Saxons in England, 2 vol., 1849) and
Macaulay at second remove. The chapter on the Anglo-Saxons, with its sub-chapter
on ‘Teutomania’ (i.e. the “[c]elebration of the German origins of the English” [p. 87])
is a little gem – introducing us to the “fervently Teutomaniac” (p. 89) writings of
Edward A. Freeman ("The Continuity of English History", 1871), J.R. Green (A Short
History of the English People, 1874) and William Stubbs (The Constitutional History
of England in its Origin and Development, 3 vol., 1874-78). The superb Table 5,
"English traits as a compound of the Celtic and Teutonic, as seen by Thomas
Nicholas in The Pedigree of the English People (1868)", which opens the sub-
chapter on "Teutonic virtues", sums it all up.

By 1914, evidently, all this talk had become slightly embarrassing and, we are
convincingly told, “On the eve of the First World War, attitudes to the English national
character remained deeply muddled” (p. 141). The war was of course fought by the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (shortly to become Northern Ireland), not
by England and this, we are given to understand, added to the muddle – which
continued in fact after the war: “The ‘England’/‘Britain’ semantic confusion was never
greater” than during the inter-war years, Mandler argues (p. 148). But then, “[t]he
years between the world wars were the heyday of the idea of the English national
character” (p. 143). Mandler makes much of Strube’s “Little Man”, the familiar
caricature in the Express newspapers from 1920 to 1947 – and why not? Parallels
with Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, who incidentally published a collection of
speeches entitled On England in 1926, are perfectly apposite.

The only weak point of the book seems to reside in its failure (at least in the eyes of
this reviewer) to convincingly explain the sudden transition in public support in May-
June 1940 from the Little Englanders to the flamboyantly adventurous Churchill with
his inflated vision of England’s world role (though he always made an effort to speak
of “Britain” in public). “Muddling through” is a phrase which rightly appears
repeatedly in the book, as one of the traits most often associated with the English
national character – but it is arguable that in 1940, during “their finest hour”,
Churchill did not call for “muddling through” but for a deliberate and seemingly
irrational “risking their all”. What made them “rise to the occasion” (another favourite
trait) and accept to fight under Churchill when they had enthusiastically supported
the appeasers and the national humiliation at Munich? However that may be, the
post-1918 “‘England’/‘Britain’ semantic confusion” was not dispelled by renewed
victory in 1945.

On the one hand, Mandler tells us, “[t]he outcome of the Second World War seemed
to vindicate the English national character – both the idea that nations did have a
character and that, in the English case, it was made of the right stuff” (p. 196). But on
the facing page we read that “[o]ver half a century after the end of the Second World
War, it is widely felt that 1945 marked the last point at which Britain enjoyed true
national unity”. What won the war? The English national character or the British
national character? An idle question after the debacle of Suez in 1956, and even
more so after the cultural changes of the 1960s, which “further undermine[d] the idea
of national character, perhaps even delivering the coup de grâce” (p. 221). Poor
Margaret Thatcher faced an uphill struggle trying to restore values which perhaps
never existed: there was new hope following the Falklands War, but it lamentably
foundered under John Major. “Thatcher tried three variants, Blair six [all thoroughly
discussed in the book, of course]; anyone for nine?”, Mandler mockingly concludes
(p. 237).

It appears impossible to write the "definitive" book on such a complex subject, and
Mandler gives more insights (a wealth of them, in fact) than answers to that
hopelessly elusive question, What is the English national character? What he does –
admirably – is give the reader a state-of-the-art panorama of what answers,
proposals or suggestions have been offered since (at least) Burke. Also, the 33-
page Bibliography will be found a most useful tool for further advanced research.

It is to be deplored that in a high-class academic work of this nature, with its excellent
copious notes, the poor reader should be submitted to a constant toing-and-froing
between the text and the end notes. Yale should align itself on the better University
Presses in this respect and provide the more user-friendly footnotes which scholars
now expect.