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British National Identity and the English Landscape

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

David Lowenthal
David Lowenthal
Affiliation:
University College, London, UK.
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Extract

Heritage is a messy concept ill-defined, heterogeneous, changeable, chauvinist – and sometimes absurd. In a TV programmer's words, just as ‘lifestyle has replaced life, heritage is replacing history'. Rather than ‘history’, Philadelphia's tourist boss now ‘talk[s] about heritage – it sounds more lively’. It is also more equivocal; as Walter Benjamin put it, every cultural treasure that is a ‘document of civilization is at the same time a document of barbarism’. Yet for all its ambiguity, ‘the idea of “Heritage” [is] one of the most powerful imaginative complexes of our time’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , October 1991 , pp. 205 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

Notes

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39 Haller, William, Foxe's Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (New York, 1963)Google Scholar; Pocock, , ‘England’, pp. 106–9Google Scholar; Hill, Christopher, ‘The English Revolution and patriotism’, in Samuel, Patriotism, 1:159–68Google Scholar; Furtado, Peter, ‘National pride in seventeenth-century England’, in Samuel, Patriotism, 1:44–56.Google Scholar

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45 Raphael Samuel (‘Exciting to be English’, 1: li) overstates former Arts Minister Lord Gowrie's praise of Stubbs' and Constable's empiricism; see Gowrie, Grey, ‘The twentieth century’, in Piper, David (ed.), The Genius of British Painting (London, 1975), pp. 291–336, ref. p. 291.Google Scholar

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57 Gilpin, William, Observations on the River Wye, and several Parts of South Wales, & c … (1770), 3rd ed. (London, 1792), p. 150.Google Scholar The rambling English villages enjoyed by early nineteenth-century aesthetes were quite unlike the immaculate ones of today; damp thatched cottages, some deliberately dilapidated, equated poverty with rural felicity (Williamson, Tom and Bellamy, Liz, Property and Landscape: A Social History of Landownership and the English Countryside (London, 1987), p. 169).Google Scholar For efforts to rectify such squalor, see Gauldie, Enid, ‘Country homes’, in Mingay, Victorian Countryside, pp. 531–41.Google Scholar

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60 Tebbit, , ‘Being British’, pp. 76–8.Google Scholar ‘Britain is no longer an island’ screamed the Sunday Times' front-page headline on the Channel Tunnel breakthrough (2 December, 1990).

61 Buckle, Henry Thomas, History of Civilization in England (1857), rev. ed., 3 vols. (London, 1873), 1: 232–5.Google Scholar

62 Nadal, E. S., Impressions of London Social Life with Other Papers … (London, 1875), p. 172Google Scholar; Lord Denning, interview in Wilson, A.N., ‘England, his England’, Spectator, 18 08, 1990, pp. 8–10.Google Scholar Atavistic Anglo-Saxonism has since surfaced. ‘If someone is of foreign origin, he is unlikely to have the same feeling for our history and institutions as we have’, writes a London editor. ‘When it comes to their abandonment, it follows that Sir Leon's views - and that of others of foreign origin … should be appropriately discounted’ (Daily Mail editor Andrew Alexander, quoted in Chancellor, Alexander, ‘Diary’, Spectator, 1 09, 1990, p. 6).Google Scholar My own views were dismissed when I decried the impending auction of the Codrington Papers, an archival legacy of West Indian islanders whose own ancestors had been sold on the auction block (‘West Indies archive for sale’, The Times, 29 11, 1980);Google Scholar respondents saw plantation papers as a genealogical game preserve and me as the poacher. ‘I gather from your name’, wrote one titled lady, ‘that your family has not been in England very long. When you have been here as many generations as the Codringtons you might have the right to say something.’

63 Walter, François, ‘Attitudes toward the environment in Switzerland, 1880–1914’, Journal of Historical Geography, 15 (1989), 279–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nash, Roderick, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, Conn., 1967)Google Scholar; Williams, Ralph Vaughan, ‘What have we learnt from Elgar?’ Music and Letters, 16 (1935), 13–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quotation on p. 16; Emerson, , ‘English traits’, p. 353.Google Scholar The English landscape – misty, green, moist, rich – is similarly said to pervade Vaughan Williams's music (Foss, Herbert, Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Study (London, 1950), p. 66)Google Scholar. See Crump, Jeremy, ‘The identity of English music: the reception of Elgar 1898–1935’, in Colls and Dodd, Englishness, p. 181.Google Scholar On national and other landscape tastes, see my ‘Finding valued landscapes’, Progress in Human Geography, 2 (1978), 375–418.Google Scholar

64 Quiller-Couch, Arthur, ‘Patriotism in literature I’, Studies in Literature (Cambridge, 1918), pp. 290–306Google Scholar, ref. pp. 301, 306; Read, Herbert, ‘Introduction’ in his The English Vision: An Anthology (London, 1933), p. xGoogle Scholar; see Potts, , ‘Constable country’, p. 175.Google Scholar But such Englishness was open only to a few elite Celts (Hechter, , Internal Colonialism, p. 343).Google Scholar

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66 Young, John, ‘Move to ban hunting on Trust land’, The Times, 18 08, 1990, p. 12Google Scholar; National Trust Annual General Meeting 1990 notice, pp. 13–14Google Scholar; McCarty, Michael, ‘Trust faces internal strife after vote to ban deer hunting’, The Times, 5 11, 1990, p. 3Google Scholar; idem, ‘National Trust sets aside hunt ban vote’, The Times, 14 12, 1990Google Scholar; letters, The Times, 6, 11, 12 November, 13, 24 December 1990. For the background, see Williamson, and Bellamy, , Property and Landscape, pp. 201–5, 219.Google Scholar

67 Ridley, Nicholas, in The Future of the Public Heritage, Cubiti Trust Panel conference 15 October, 1986 (London, 1987), p. 92.Google Scholar

68 Thompson, F.M.L., English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1963), ch. 7Google Scholar; and ‘Landowners and the rural community’, in Mingay, G.E. (ed.), The Unquiet Countryside (London, 1989), pp. 80–98Google Scholar; Moore, D.C., ‘The landed aristocracy’ and ‘The gentry’, in Mingay (ed.), Victorian Countryside, 2: 367–98Google Scholar; Newby, Howard, Country Life: A Social History of Rural England (London, 1987), pp. 56–8.Google Scholar

69 Seward, Anna to Johnson, J., 20 September, 1794, Letters of Anna Seward, written between the years 1784 and 1807, 6 vols, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh, 1811), 4: 10–11Google Scholar; Abraham, and Driver, William, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Hants, with Observations on the Means of its Improvement (London, 1794), p. 10.Google Scholar For other encomia of order, Barrell, John, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 94–5Google Scholar; Williamson, and Bellamy, , Property and Landscape, p. 154Google Scholar; Thomas, Keith, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (London, 1983), pp. 254–7.Google Scholar

70 William Beach Thomas (1938), quoted in Chase, Malcolm, ‘This is no claptrap: this is our heritage’, in Shaw, Christopher and Chase, Malcolm (eds.), The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia (Manchester, 1989), pp. 128–46Google Scholar, ref. p. 138; Lees-Milne, James, Caves of Ice (London, 1983)Google Scholar, diary entry 16 June, 1947, p. 172. ‘Whatever we feel as to the desirability of reducing the inequality of fortune between man and man, we must realise that we have to pay a heavy price in natural beauty for a more democratic ideal’ (Gardner, Arthur, Britain's Mountain Heritage and its Preservation as National Parks (London, 1942), pp. 1–2).Google Scholar

71 Weldon, Fay, ‘Letter to Laura’, in Mabey, Richard (ed.), Second Nature (London, 1984), p. 68Google Scholar; James, Henry, ‘Old Suffolk’ (1897), in his English Hours (New York, 1960), p. 196.Google Scholar Attitudes about such links vary. ‘Old associations are sure to be frequent herbs in English nostrils’, wrote Hawthorne; Americans ‘pull them up as weeds’ (‘Leamington Spa’ (1862), Our Old Home, in The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Centennial, ed. (Ohio State University Press, 1962–1980), 5:51).Google Scholar

72 MacVeagh, Diana, Edward Elgar: His Life and Music (London, 1955), p. 166Google Scholar; on the campo santo, Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Our Hundred Days in Europe (London, 1887), p. 279Google Scholar; Emerson, , ‘English traits’, p. 356.Google Scholar

73 ‘Memory lane’, The Times, 4 10 1989, p. 3Google Scholar; Thomas, , Man and the Natural World, pp. 217–23.Google Scholar This is not to gainsay British fascination with the geological and palaeontological heritage. See Allen, David Elliston, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History (London, 1976)Google Scholar; Bowler, Peter J., The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past (Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar; Ousby, , Englishman's England, pp. 130–43Google Scholar; Thomas, , Man and the Natural World, pp. 269–71, 280–4.Google ScholarFoulke, Robert, ‘A conversation with John Fowles’, Salmagundi, nos. 68–9 (1986), 367–84, privileges natural over human history.Google Scholar

74 Chippindale, Christopher et al. , Who Owns Stonehenge? (London, 1990).Google Scholar

75 Blythe, Ronald, ‘The dangerous idyll’, in his From the Headlands (London, 1982), p. 161.Google Scholar Weekend commuters ‘change their clothes … when they get down to the country; join appeals and campaigns to keep one last bit of England green and unspoilt; and then go back, spiritually refreshed, to invest in the smoke and the spoil’ (Williams, Raymond, ‘Ideas of nature’ (1971), in his Problems in Materialism and Culture (London, 1980), p. 81).Google Scholar

76 Springett, V.P., letter, ‘Recollections of a golden past’, The Times, 11 03, 1989, p. 11Google Scholar; Hall, and Ashbrook, , ‘“Nether Burton” revisited‘, International Herald Tribune, 26 07, 1990.Google Scholar

77 Yoder, Edwin M. Jr, ‘In praise of Baron Omnium and his old English village’, International Herald Tribune, 20 07, 1990.Google Scholar Yoder's idyll has old American antecedents. English relics and place-names evoked ‘deep-rooted sympathies; … a suppositious pedigree, a silver mug, [were] potent enough to turn the brain of many an honest republican’ (Hawthorne, Nathaniel, ‘Consular experiences’ (1863), Works, 5: 19–20).Google Scholar Americans steeped in Shakespeare and Tennyson preempted English heritage as their ancestral own, and in England enjoyed aristocratic privilege anathema in America; delighted by ‘contented’ English domestics, a Yankee parson who never spoke of ‘servants’ at home saw ‘no harm in it where it is customary, especially as [it is] abundantly sanctioned in the Scriptures’ (Heman Humphrey (1838), quoted in Lockwood, Passionate Pilgrims, p. 137; see p. 448). The Great House crowned the English landscape, preserving not only the visual heritage and owners' wealth but ‘an ancient and honourable pattern of human relationships’ – notably those of master and servant – ‘lost to the modern, democratic, and American order of things’ (Mulvey, , Anglo-American Landscapes, p. 127Google Scholar). ‘The well-appointed, well-administered, well-filled country house [is] the most perfect, the most characteristic … of all the great things the English have invented and made part of the national character’, but Henry James set against these glories the grim workhouse and orphanage idiots he saw the same day (‘An English New Year’ (1879), English Hours, pp. 170–1Google Scholar).

It was the ‘latent preparedness of the American mind’ for the English scene that made James' devotion ‘total and sacred’ (‘A Passionate Pilgrim’ (1875), in The Reverberator and Other Stories (London, 1909), p. 335).Google Scholar Indeed, only an American could truly savour historic England; so oblivious to hoary antiquity seemed England's natives that Hawthorne suggested they all be removed ‘to some convenient wilderness in the Great West’ and replaced by Americans (‘Leamington Spa’ (1862), Works, 5: 64).Google Scholar But the ‘phlegmatic’ English response to their heritage concealed strong attachments; natives, after all, could not pass the whole of life in tourist euphoria (Mulvey, , Anglo-American Landscapes, p. 62Google Scholar).

78 Hall and Ashbrook, ‘“Nether Burton” revisited’. Hall heads the Ramblers' Association, Ashbrook the Open Spaces Society. Their past is also mythical: old-time Turville was anything but peaceful to runaway serfs hunted by Chiltern Hundred stewards and to stagecoach passengers held up by highwaymen.

79 Williams, , ‘Ideas of nature’, p. 80 and The Country and the City (London, 1973), pp. 74–9.Google Scholar The miseries of dispossession limned in Goldsmith's ‘The Deserted Village’ (1770) were quite real; the unsightly villagers of ‘Auburn’ were tidied away from Earl Harcourt's landscape at Nuneham Courtenay, Oxfordshire. See Coones, Paul and Patten, John, The Penguin Guide to the Landscape of England and Wales (Harmondsworth, 1986), pp. 247–8Google Scholar; Barrell, John, ‘The golden age of labour’, in Mabey, Second Nature, pp. 177–95Google Scholar; Newby, , Country Life, pp. 78–91Google Scholar; Williamson, and Bellamy, , Property and Landscape, pp. 137–8.Google Scholar

80 Morris, Jan, ‘Barchester lives on’, in Blythe, Ronald, Places: An Anthology of Britain (Oxford, 1981), p. 146Google Scholar; Gammon, Reg, ‘Our country, all earthly things above, as always’, The Field, 272 (05 1990), 82–3Google Scholar (also his One Man's Furrow: Ninety Years of Country Living (Exeter, 1990), p. 176).Google Scholar

81 Heseltine, Michael, ‘Is it at risk, this England?’ The Field, 272 (05 1990), 78–9.Google Scholar

82 Howard Newby, ‘Revitalizing the countryside: the opportunities and pitfalls of counter-urban trends’, and Puttnam, David, ‘Myths of the countryside: obstacles to progress or bastions of defence?’, Royal Society of Arts Journal, 138 (1990), 630–6 and 625–9.Google Scholar On the harm to rural society caused by blind faith in its enduring stability, see Newby, , Country Life, pp. 219–24Google Scholar; Chase, , ‘Claptrap and heritage’, p. 133.Google Scholar

83 Baldwin, Stanley, ‘The Classics’ (1926), in his On England, p. 101Google Scholar; see Smith, Dennis, ‘Englishness and the liberal inheritance after 1886’, in Colls and Dodd, Englishness, p. 264.Google Scholar

84 Greig, Geordie, ‘Which Cheddar Gorge do you like best?’ Sunday Times, 7 02, 1988.Google Scholar Nineteenth-century New World visitors praised Britain as ‘the only country in the world that is all finished, … the rubbish picked up, … no odds and ends lying around’, ‘the whole country look[ing] … swept and dusted that morning’ (Lockwood, Passionate Pilgrims, p. 444). America's premier landscape gardener was struck both by the ‘clean and careful cultivation and general tidiness of agriculture’ and the order even of English trees, ‘as if the face of each leaf was more nearly parallel with all the others near it, and as if all were more equally lighted than in our foliage’ (Olmsted, Frederick Law, Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England (1859) (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1967), pp. 228–9).Google Scholar

85 Praising the hedging and ditching, the parks and gardens still cared for as a matter of course, Williams deplored ‘the urban blindness to all this work that actually produces and preserves much of the “nature” that visitors come to see’; there would be ‘too much [wilderness] for most tastes if this kind of tending stopped’ (‘Between country and city’, in Mabey, Second Nature, p. 218).Google Scholar

86 Ascherson, , ‘The land belongs to the people’, Observer, 25 01, 1987, p.9.Google Scholar

87 Brooke, Michael, ‘A day in the country’, New Scientist, 7 04, 1990, p. 68Google Scholar; Crowe, Sylvia, Tomorrow's Landscape (London, 1956), p. 137.Google Scholar

88 Mabey, Richard, ‘Strange vision of a promised land’, Observer, 1 02, 1987, p. 26.Google Scholar

89 Henry VII, in Heylyn, Peter, Cosmographie in Foure Bookes, Contayning the Geographie and Historie of the Whole World … (London, 1652), Bk I, p. 263Google Scholar; Newby, , ‘Revitalizing the countryside’, p. 631Google Scholar; 1983 European Community figures in Shoard, Marion, This Land Is Our Land (London, 1987), pp. 144–5Google Scholar; Fedden, Robin, The National Trust: Past and Present, rev. ed. (London, 1974), p. 98.Google Scholar Fedden's view is widely shared. Against his own bias, H.E. Bates acclaims the great landowners. ‘I doubt if the poor have ever beautified the English landscape. It is the rich and the prosperous who have left on it the hall-marks of beauty’ (‘The hedge chequer work’, in Massingham, H.J. (ed.), The English Countryside: A Survey of its Chief Features, 3d ed. (London, 1951), p. 50).Google Scholar A dissenting view contrasts the ‘peasants’ country' of South Germany, the Touraine, the Midi, with typical English ‘landlords’ country' – ‘the open woods, the large grass fields and wide hedges, the ample demesnes which signify a country given up less to industry than to opulence and dignified ease; … sparsely cultivated, but convenient for hunting and shooting’ (Masterman, C.F.G., The Condition of England (London, 1909), pp. 201–2).Google Scholar

90 Coleridge, Nicholas, ‘Why the Lords love the lady’, Spectator, 22 09, 1988, pp. 9–11Google Scholar; Lord St John of Fawsley, quoted in Alderson, Andrew, ‘Study of aristocratic decline makes the blue-bloods see red’, Sunday Times, 2 09, 1990, 1.7.Google ScholarCannadine, David, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (London, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, traces the elite's dwindling political power; Shoard, , This Land Is Our Land, pp. 127–43Google Scholar, and Paxman, Jeremy, Friends in High Places: Who Runs Britain? (London, 1990), pp. 39–46Google Scholar, document continuing elite control of land and social institutions.

91 ‘A guide through the district of the Lakes’ (5th ed., 1835)Google Scholar and ‘Kendal and Windermere Railway’ (1844), The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1974), 2: 225, 3: 346, 355.Google Scholar

92 Joad, C.E.M., The Untutored Townsman's Invasion of the Countryside (London, 1946), pp. 219, 80.Google Scholar Today's townsmen ‘play football on a hay field; pick our fruit; run their dogs off the lead and let them chase stock; they sunbathe, picnic and copulate in the fields; they scatter rubbish and … leave gates open’ (‘The rights and wrongs of way’, letter, Observer, 9 September, 1990, p. 44). On elitist assumptions, see Keith, W.J., The Rural Tradition: A Study of Non-Fiction Prose Writers of the English Countryside (Toronto, 1974), p. 11Google Scholar; Thomas, , Man and the Natural World, p. 267Google Scholar; Ousby, , Englishman's England, pp. 189–92.Google Scholar

93 Nicholas Ridley at Historic Houses Association, 22 November, 1988; Fletcher, Martin, ‘Sell stately homes to nouveaux riches, says Ridley’, The Times, 23 09, 1988, p. 1Google Scholar; Binney, Marcus, ‘Mr Ridley's bad house-keeping’, The Times, 24 09, 1988Google Scholar; Saye, Lord and Sele, , in Sally Brompton, ‘Family castle not for sale’, The Times, 17 12, 1988.Google Scholar The custodial sentiment is an old cliché: Charles Trevelyan ‘considered Wallington not so much owned by him as entrusted to him by inheritance for the benefit of the public’ (Drury, Martin, ‘The early houses of the country houses scheme’, National Trust Magazine, no. 52, Autumn 1987, p. 33).Google Scholar

94 ‘Can you call yourself “a common man” when you have a coat of arms and a crest “on a chapeau gules turned up ermine a dexter glove argent grasping a scroll fesswise proper”? Maybe in this extraordinary country you can’, though Lord Denning seemed to disqualify himself not only in accepting a peerage but in proposing to exclude ‘the common man’ from juries (Chancellor, Alexander, ‘Diary’, Spectator, 25 08, 1990, p. 6).Google Scholar

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96 Emerson, , ‘English traits’, p. 484Google Scholar; Saunders, Kate, ‘Modern manors’, Sunday Times, 26 08, 1990, 5.1.Google Scholar Unlike country-house hotels, ‘real English country houses have an essential shabbiness … They have draughts and mouseholes and untuned pianos and mangy old dogs’ (Arnold, Sue, ‘Country kitsch by the yard’, Observer, 27 01, 1990, p. 51).Google Scholar

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97 Sarah Lonsdale and Michael Prestage, ‘National Trust gems closed to the public’, and Darley, Gillian, ‘It's open season on the Trust’, Observer, 28 10, 1990, pp. 4 and 20Google Scholar; Rodney, Legg, quoted in Jenkins, Lin, ‘National Trust rejects an open and shut case’, The Times, 23 10, 1990, pp. 1, 22.Google Scholar

98 Dennis, Nigel, Cards of Identity (1955) (London, 1974), p. 119Google Scholar; Billig, Michael, ‘Collective memory, ideology and the British Royal family’, in Middleton, David and Edwards, Derek (eds.), Collective Remembering (London, 1990), pp. 60–80Google Scholar; Ousby, , Englishman's England, p. 60.Google Scholar Raphael Samuel notes that the newly populist and democratic heritage, despite radical and egalitarian roots, ‘feeds on a nostalgia for visible social differences. “The World We Have Lost” was one where people knew where they stood, where classes were classes, localities localities’ and the British an indigenous people, ‘Exciting to be English’, Patriotism, 1: xliv).

99 Levi, Peter, ‘Knowing a place’, in Mabey, Second Nature, p.41.Google Scholar

100 Nicolson, Adam, ‘Tidiness and the Trust’, National Trust Magazine, no. 58 (Autumn 1989), pp. 37–9Google Scholar; Piper, John, ‘Pleasing decay’, in his Buildings and Prospects (London, 1948), pp. 89–116.Google ScholarPrince, Hughand I treat love of order in ‘English landscape tastes’, Geographical Review, 55 (1965), 186–222.Google Scholar John Bayley sees order as British, not English; today ‘Englishness’ conjures up sturdy folk liberties and radical protest, while ‘Britishness has come to represent law and order and the orthodoxy of established power’ (‘Embarrassments of the national past’, p. 188).

101 ‘The Learned Boy’ (1812), Poetical Works of George Crabbe (London, 1908), p. 334Google Scholar; Gissing, , Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, pp. 214–17Google Scholar; ‘Heaven's order’ is in Pope's Essay on Man.

102 ‘The common image of the country is now an image of the past’ (Williams, , The Country and the City, p. 297).Google Scholar See Wiener, Martin J., English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge, 1981).Google Scholar On how the emptiness of the English countryside has affected the ruralist mystique, see Lucas, John, Modern English Poetry from Hardy to Hughes (London, 1986), pp. 50–69Google Scholar; idem, England and Englishness: Ideas of Nationhood in English Poetry 1688–1900 (London, 1990), p. 204.Google Scholar

103 Masterman, , Condition of England, pp. 208, 204.Google Scholar

104 Haseler, Stephen, ‘How a nation has slipped into its dotage’, Sunday Times, 25 02, 1990, p. C6Google Scholar; Hoggart, Simon, ‘Thinking of Englandland’, Observer Supplement, 12 08, 1990, p. 5.Google Scholar