Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART ONE LIFE
- 1 St Louis
- 2 New England
- 3 Paris
- 4 London
- 5 Englishness
- 6 The idea of Europe
- PART TWO FORMS
- PART THREE LITERARY CROSS-CURRENTS
- PART FOUR POLITICS, SOCIETY AND CULTURE
- PART FIVE RECEPTION
- Further reading
- Index
5 - Englishness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART ONE LIFE
- 1 St Louis
- 2 New England
- 3 Paris
- 4 London
- 5 Englishness
- 6 The idea of Europe
- PART TWO FORMS
- PART THREE LITERARY CROSS-CURRENTS
- PART FOUR POLITICS, SOCIETY AND CULTURE
- PART FIVE RECEPTION
- Further reading
- Index
Summary
Still I feel that I don't understand the English very well.
(L1, 61)In September 1914, writing from Bloomsbury, just prior to going to study at Oxford, T. S. Eliot gave his cousin Eleanor Hinkley his impressions of the English. In particular, he contemplates their habits of reserve, a sense that their personalities remained in some sense out of sight, partly because they seem to be ‘conventional’. Eliot portrays himself as perplexed by this:
I don't know just what conventionality is; it doesn't involve snobbishness, because I am a thorough snob myself; but I should have thought of it as perhaps the one quality which all my friends lacked. And I'm sure that if I did know what it was, among men, I should have to find out all over again with regard to women.
(L1, 61)Eliot cheerfully admits here to his own ‘snobbishness’, a keen if anxious sense of social superiority, but he is mystified by this other category of ‘conventionality’, with its capacity to make the identity of others inscrutable and to make those who are not conventional (that is, Eliot and his friends, but implicitly Americans in general) unsure about where they stand in relation to these baffling people. Eliot's conclusion is that ‘Perhaps when I learn how to take Englishmen, this brick wall will cease to trouble me.’
Clearly, Eliot does not expect this ‘brick wall’ to disappear but merely to become something he might be able to take for granted.
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- Information
- T. S. Eliot in Context , pp. 43 - 51Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011