Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the first edition
- Introduction to the new edition
- Part I The setting
- Part II A world view
- 3 A counterrevolution of values
- 4 The “English way of life”?
- 5 The wrong path?
- Part III Toward behavior
- Part IV Industrialism and English values
- Appendix: British retardation – the limits of economic explanation
- Notes
- Index
4 - The “English way of life”?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the first edition
- Introduction to the new edition
- Part I The setting
- Part II A world view
- 3 A counterrevolution of values
- 4 The “English way of life”?
- 5 The wrong path?
- Part III Toward behavior
- Part IV Industrialism and English values
- Appendix: British retardation – the limits of economic explanation
- Notes
- Index
Summary
I have a cursed hankering after certain musty old values.
—Lord Peter Wimsey in Dorothy Sayers's Gaudy Night (1936)The temperate April sunlight fell through the budding chestnuts and revealed between their trunks green glimpses of parkland and the distant radiance of a lake. “English spring,” thought Paul. “In the dreaming ancestral beauty of the English country.” Surely, he thought, these great chestnuts in the morning sun stood for something enduring and serene in a world that had lost its reason and would so stand when the chaos and confusion were forgotten? And surely it was the spirit of William Morris that whispered to him in Margot Beste-Chetwynde's motor car about seed time and harvest, the superb succession of the seasons, the harmonious interdependence of rich and poor, of dignity, innocence, and tradition?
—Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall (1928)There'll always be an England
While there's a country lane,
Wherever there's a cottage small
Beside a field of grain.
—Popular song of World War IINorth and South
The cultural conservatism of the re-formed elite was most evident in its conception of what constituted “Englishness.” Like the other aspects of its world view seen in Chapter 3, the new national self-image dressed itself in the trappings of an older tradition. One certain sign of the inherent self-limitations within English modernization was the degree to which the increasingly dominant image of the nation denied its chief characteristics – the rise of industry.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004