A 'traditional Christmas' is just one part of our national identity that's in danger, cry the purists, but what do they mean? As four books suggest, 'Britishness' is about as real as Santa Claus, says Rafael Behr
Britishness is a bit like Father Christmas. So many people talk about it as though it really exists that you could almost start to believe it does
Also like Santa, Britishness has a strained relationship with Christianity. The jolly red-faced man with the beard is a hybrid of pagan winter spirits and St Nicholas. Britain's head of the state is also head of the Church. But it is as inconceivable today that non- Christians should be denied the right to be called British as it is to think that Father Christmas should refuse to fill the stockings of good little children just because they aren't baptised.
In the interests of fairness, the meanings of modern Britishness and Christmas are kept vague. But the nation's drift away from its religious mooring is a source of consternation to the devout, especially at this time of year. It is traditional for churchmen to lament how the baby Jesus gets forgotten in the orgiastic eating, drinking and shopping.
'Young people know more about the plotlines of EastEnders than about the story of the nativity,' writes Ian Bradley in Believing in Britain, a new treatise on God and national identity. Bradley, a theologian, Church of Scotland minister, and biographer of Gilbert and Sullivan, fears that Britain is losing its sense of collective endeavour. He worries (it is quite the fashionable anxiety in politics these days) that we are being pulled apart by forces of difference: nationalism on the Celtic fringe, a new English nationalism rising in reaction, the cultural autonomy of immigrant communities.
That's the bad news. The good news, according to Bradley, is that, if we read history creatively, we can construct an idea of Britishness that embraces diversity and nourishes the spirit of the nation. Take a bit of Anglo-Saxon liberty from Magna Carta, some law and roads from the Romans, a pinch of Celtic romance from Wales and Ireland, stiffen with moral fibre from Scotland, season with carnivals from the Caribbean and bake under the glory of God: behold 21st-century Britain.
The thesis is founded on serious scholarship, but the cement holding it together is a jauntily optimistic faith. The same cannot be said of The English National Character, a study of Englishness by Cambridge historian Peter Mandler who mines much of the same raw material as Bradley, but without the missionary zeal. Mandler's history of the Englishman's sense of himself 'from Edmund Burke' is often dryly encyclopædic. It comes to life mainly in the Victorian era when the business of fabricating first Englishness, and then Britishness, turned industrial. With the spread of the franchise to plebian voters and the rise of empire there were a lot more people who, for political expediency, had to be included in the national identity. But the Victorians were a bit snooty about European nationalism (which reeked of peasants, pitchforks and revolutionaries in grubby breeches). They didn't want to be just a nation, so they promoted themselves to the status of 'civilisation'. The advantage of this was that anyone could join. Britishness became a bounty that could, and indeed really ought to be spread to benighted peoples around the world.
As a consequence of this canny national rebranding many of the characteristics people think of as primordially 'British' are actually Victorian: austere, eccentric, industrious, beloved of fair play, liking a good pageant, respectful of the monarch, obsessed with decency and propriety, redoubtable, stoical, in possession of a stiff upper lip. There are those who like to bemoan the changing complexion and ill behaviour of modern Britain, imagining themselves to be guardians of some immutable national identity. In fact, they are just nostalgic for the 19th century.
Students of this nobody's-got-any-respect-anymore school of hand-wringing should read City of Laughter, Vic Gatrell's study of humour in the 18th century. The primary subject of Gatrell's prodigious research is the trade in satirical prints that circulated in Georgian London. But City of Laughter is also an intimate portrait of what was then the biggest, noisiest, smelliest and most exuberant city in the world. The print industry fed a hearty public appetite for scandal, grotesque caricature, gossip and smut, from which we get a pretty good sense of what sort of place the capital was: not unlike the noisy, smelly, exuberant, smutty place it is today.
Gatrell doesn't draw explicit parallels, but they leap off the page anyway. The obsession with sex and celebrity, the love of drunkenness for its own sake, the libertinage, the traffic jams, the ribaldry and all the indiscretion that is the cultural stamp of 21st-century Britain - they aren't a deviation from some more discreet and serious-minded course of historic Britishness, they are themselves antique. They are vintage Regency fun. Modern Britain even has, in Harry Windsor, its own equivalent of the Prince Regent, the simple-minded toffee-nosed oaf with the taste for pleasure and the habit of getting his picture in scurrilous papers. If anything, today's tabloid paparazzi are kinder to our royals than the 18th-century satirical cartoonists were to theirs.
This Georgian spirit, captivatingly documented by Gatrell, vanished some time in the early 19th century. Irreverence and aristocratic indolence fell out of fashion, the rising Victorian bourgeoisie preferred industry and respectability. Their values prevailed until the Sixties; when at last the empire expired, deference went into decline and decadence made a comeback. Beyond the Fringe and the Rolling Stones were the start of a neo-Georgian revival. Bitter conservatives chart the decline of the nation from the same point. The Sixties, they say, is when the corset of dignity that kept the nation upright was undone, and Britannia got a pox of disrespect. The blame for this tends to land quite fairly on liberal permissiveness. Most unfairly, some also lands on immigration, which by unlucky coincidence happened to be going through the roof at around the same time that the country was, according to the pessimists, going to the dogs.
Blaming foreigners for an imagined decline in Britishness is a terrible but commonplace calumny. In fact, as a handful of the more Enlightened traditionalists have noticed, immigrants are more likely to uphold Victorian values of family self-sufficiency, modesty, reserve, piety than native-born British libertines, who never pray, can't keep their trousers on and vomit on tradition. Ian Bradley unearths a telling quote from Libby Purves writing in the Times after the 7 July 2005 London bombings: 'What Muslims want and respect is not so very unlike what the despised "Middle Britain" wants.' It isn't immediately obvious who despises Middle Britain, but candidates are 'the media' which 'would rather torment the monarchy than enjoy it' and 'public institutions' which 'are too shy of our religious heritage to defend Christmas.'
This year the lamentation that Christmas has been lost, or forgotten, or stolen by unbelievers and infidels has reached a higher pitch than ever before. The Daily Mail, house journal of bourgeois neo-Victorians, is running a campaign against political correctness and in defence of 'real Christmas'. But which festival do these revivalists have in mind? The earnest Victorian one where families gather around the hearth harking herald angels singing, or the naughty Georgian one of scoffing, drunkenness and fumbled erotic encounters in cupboards and alleyways? Both are as traditional and as British as Father Christmas.
Where the seasonal purists have gone wrong is that they are looking at the wrong sacred text. Of course the birth of Christ is narrated in the gospel. But the spirit of British Christmas - past, present and future - belongs to Charles Dickens. Every facet of our national festival is contained in A Christmas Carol, handily reprinted this year in a handsome and well annotated volume. It's all in there: snow, mulled wine, parlour games, turkeys the size of small people, fleeting allusions to the Baby Jesus, dancing, pudding, brandy, presents and charity. Dickens is the perfect mix of Georgian grotesquery and Victorian sentimentality. And with more morality than you can pack into a whole year of EastEnders plot lines.
That is what Christmas is really about: repenting of meanness and making sure that Tiny Tim has enough turkey, so that he doesn't limp to an early grave, but instead grows strong and has much occasion to repeat 'God bless us, every one!'
Britishness is a bit like Father Christmas. So many people talk about it as though it really exists that you could almost start to believe it does
Also like Santa, Britishness has a strained relationship with Christianity. The jolly red-faced man with the beard is a hybrid of pagan winter spirits and St Nicholas. Britain's head of the state is also head of the Church. But it is as inconceivable today that non- Christians should be denied the right to be called British as it is to think that Father Christmas should refuse to fill the stockings of good little children just because they aren't baptised.
In the interests of fairness, the meanings of modern Britishness and Christmas are kept vague. But the nation's drift away from its religious mooring is a source of consternation to the devout, especially at this time of year. It is traditional for churchmen to lament how the baby Jesus gets forgotten in the orgiastic eating, drinking and shopping.
'Young people know more about the plotlines of EastEnders than about the story of the nativity,' writes Ian Bradley in Believing in Britain, a new treatise on God and national identity. Bradley, a theologian, Church of Scotland minister, and biographer of Gilbert and Sullivan, fears that Britain is losing its sense of collective endeavour. He worries (it is quite the fashionable anxiety in politics these days) that we are being pulled apart by forces of difference: nationalism on the Celtic fringe, a new English nationalism rising in reaction, the cultural autonomy of immigrant communities.
That's the bad news. The good news, according to Bradley, is that, if we read history creatively, we can construct an idea of Britishness that embraces diversity and nourishes the spirit of the nation. Take a bit of Anglo-Saxon liberty from Magna Carta, some law and roads from the Romans, a pinch of Celtic romance from Wales and Ireland, stiffen with moral fibre from Scotland, season with carnivals from the Caribbean and bake under the glory of God: behold 21st-century Britain.
The thesis is founded on serious scholarship, but the cement holding it together is a jauntily optimistic faith. The same cannot be said of The English National Character, a study of Englishness by Cambridge historian Peter Mandler who mines much of the same raw material as Bradley, but without the missionary zeal. Mandler's history of the Englishman's sense of himself 'from Edmund Burke' is often dryly encyclopædic. It comes to life mainly in the Victorian era when the business of fabricating first Englishness, and then Britishness, turned industrial. With the spread of the franchise to plebian voters and the rise of empire there were a lot more people who, for political expediency, had to be included in the national identity. But the Victorians were a bit snooty about European nationalism (which reeked of peasants, pitchforks and revolutionaries in grubby breeches). They didn't want to be just a nation, so they promoted themselves to the status of 'civilisation'. The advantage of this was that anyone could join. Britishness became a bounty that could, and indeed really ought to be spread to benighted peoples around the world.
As a consequence of this canny national rebranding many of the characteristics people think of as primordially 'British' are actually Victorian: austere, eccentric, industrious, beloved of fair play, liking a good pageant, respectful of the monarch, obsessed with decency and propriety, redoubtable, stoical, in possession of a stiff upper lip. There are those who like to bemoan the changing complexion and ill behaviour of modern Britain, imagining themselves to be guardians of some immutable national identity. In fact, they are just nostalgic for the 19th century.
Students of this nobody's-got-any-respect-anymore school of hand-wringing should read City of Laughter, Vic Gatrell's study of humour in the 18th century. The primary subject of Gatrell's prodigious research is the trade in satirical prints that circulated in Georgian London. But City of Laughter is also an intimate portrait of what was then the biggest, noisiest, smelliest and most exuberant city in the world. The print industry fed a hearty public appetite for scandal, grotesque caricature, gossip and smut, from which we get a pretty good sense of what sort of place the capital was: not unlike the noisy, smelly, exuberant, smutty place it is today.
Gatrell doesn't draw explicit parallels, but they leap off the page anyway. The obsession with sex and celebrity, the love of drunkenness for its own sake, the libertinage, the traffic jams, the ribaldry and all the indiscretion that is the cultural stamp of 21st-century Britain - they aren't a deviation from some more discreet and serious-minded course of historic Britishness, they are themselves antique. They are vintage Regency fun. Modern Britain even has, in Harry Windsor, its own equivalent of the Prince Regent, the simple-minded toffee-nosed oaf with the taste for pleasure and the habit of getting his picture in scurrilous papers. If anything, today's tabloid paparazzi are kinder to our royals than the 18th-century satirical cartoonists were to theirs.
This Georgian spirit, captivatingly documented by Gatrell, vanished some time in the early 19th century. Irreverence and aristocratic indolence fell out of fashion, the rising Victorian bourgeoisie preferred industry and respectability. Their values prevailed until the Sixties; when at last the empire expired, deference went into decline and decadence made a comeback. Beyond the Fringe and the Rolling Stones were the start of a neo-Georgian revival. Bitter conservatives chart the decline of the nation from the same point. The Sixties, they say, is when the corset of dignity that kept the nation upright was undone, and Britannia got a pox of disrespect. The blame for this tends to land quite fairly on liberal permissiveness. Most unfairly, some also lands on immigration, which by unlucky coincidence happened to be going through the roof at around the same time that the country was, according to the pessimists, going to the dogs.
Blaming foreigners for an imagined decline in Britishness is a terrible but commonplace calumny. In fact, as a handful of the more Enlightened traditionalists have noticed, immigrants are more likely to uphold Victorian values of family self-sufficiency, modesty, reserve, piety than native-born British libertines, who never pray, can't keep their trousers on and vomit on tradition. Ian Bradley unearths a telling quote from Libby Purves writing in the Times after the 7 July 2005 London bombings: 'What Muslims want and respect is not so very unlike what the despised "Middle Britain" wants.' It isn't immediately obvious who despises Middle Britain, but candidates are 'the media' which 'would rather torment the monarchy than enjoy it' and 'public institutions' which 'are too shy of our religious heritage to defend Christmas.'
This year the lamentation that Christmas has been lost, or forgotten, or stolen by unbelievers and infidels has reached a higher pitch than ever before. The Daily Mail, house journal of bourgeois neo-Victorians, is running a campaign against political correctness and in defence of 'real Christmas'. But which festival do these revivalists have in mind? The earnest Victorian one where families gather around the hearth harking herald angels singing, or the naughty Georgian one of scoffing, drunkenness and fumbled erotic encounters in cupboards and alleyways? Both are as traditional and as British as Father Christmas.
Where the seasonal purists have gone wrong is that they are looking at the wrong sacred text. Of course the birth of Christ is narrated in the gospel. But the spirit of British Christmas - past, present and future - belongs to Charles Dickens. Every facet of our national festival is contained in A Christmas Carol, handily reprinted this year in a handsome and well annotated volume. It's all in there: snow, mulled wine, parlour games, turkeys the size of small people, fleeting allusions to the Baby Jesus, dancing, pudding, brandy, presents and charity. Dickens is the perfect mix of Georgian grotesquery and Victorian sentimentality. And with more morality than you can pack into a whole year of EastEnders plot lines.
That is what Christmas is really about: repenting of meanness and making sure that Tiny Tim has enough turkey, so that he doesn't limp to an early grave, but instead grows strong and has much occasion to repeat 'God bless us, every one!'
Labels: Britishness, EastEnders, Santa
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