British National Character
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘British National Character’
In The Copybook
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘British National Character’
In The Copybook
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Richard Price argued that the true patriot does not scold other countries for being worse than his own; he inspires his own country to be better than it is.
In 1789, Non-conformist minister Richard Price preached a sermon urging fellow Englishmen to welcome the stirring events in Paris on July 14th that year. Only John Bull’s patriotic prejudice, he said, prevented him from admitting that what was happening was a mirror of our own Glorious Revolution of 1689, and he enlarged on what a more generous love of country, a Christian duty, should look like.
Ralph Waldo Emerson traced a common thread running throughout English literature.
In English Traits (1856), American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson set himself to examine what it was that made English literature so characteristically English. He came to the conclusion that it was a fondness for robust, grounded language, and for descriptions and ideas that were similarly plain and unaffected.
According to Kipling, the British Empire was the last resort of Englishmen who could not stand conditions at home.
In a speech to the Royal Society of St George in April 1920, Rudyard Kipling took issue with Sir John Seeley’s by then famous dictum that ‘we seem to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind’. After rehearsing a catalogue of meddlers and oppressors, foreign and domestic, from the Romans to Cromwell, Kipling declared that the men who made the Empire had a very clear purpose: to get away from England.
Our peculiar brand of democracy and liberty is a noble thing, but we should be wary of recommending it to other countries.
Historian Mandell Creighton believed unlike our Continental neighbours, when the English laid down our Constitution we were driven not by ideological purity or a passion for order but by a desire to protect our customs and little oddities. Though this worked well for us, foreign nations had some trouble getting it to work for them — and they were starting to notice it.
Robert Tomson was a typical Englishman and it nearly killed him, but it also made him a fortune and won him a bride.
In a prestigious lecture on the English national character in Oxford, historian Mandell Creighton developed the theme that unlike our European neighbours we don’t much care what others think of us. Sometimes this is good, sometimes bad and sometimes, as in the case of sixteenth-century emigrant Robert Tomson, both.
The great French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte protested that in calling England ‘a nation of shopkeepers’ he had paid us a compliment.
‘The English are a nation of shopkeepers’ intoned Napoleon Bonaparte, offending many English politicians including Viscount Castlereagh, Foreign Secretary from 1812 to 1822. But as the great General, by now exiled on the island of St Helena, told his personal physician Dr O’Meara, he had meant it as a compliment. The English, he said, should stop trying to be French.
After a visit to England in 1847, Aleksey Khomyakov published his impressions of our country and our people in a Moscow magazine.
Russian landowner Aleksey Khomyakov (1804-1860) paid a visit to England in 1847. He subsequently sent a letter to a Moscow journal in which he relayed his impressions of England and the English, at a time when relations between the two countries were strained over Afghanistan and Turkey. In 1895, John Birkbeck summarised Khomyakov’s commentary for those who knew no Russian.