Bursting the bubble: Mythical Englishness, then and now

Abstract

This article assesses the creation of specifically English myths, especially that of the southern English landscape as the one marker of a quintessential Englishness, in the first three decades of the 20th century. Taking H.V. Morton’s In Search of England as a case study, the article shows that Morton consciously created a racially exclusive England steeped in the past. Writing over 70 years after Morton, Joe Bennett in Mustn’t Grumble: In Search of England and the English retraces Morton’s steps and offers a postcolonial deconstruction of the “myths” of England that Morton had so painstakingly created. In the process, Bennett shows that Morton’s image of England still pervades society to this day, and warns of the dangers of uncritically adopting national stereotypes put forward by literature as well as by the tourism and heritage industry.

Keywords:

• Englishness
• myth
• landscape
• H.V. Morton
• Joe Bennett

Notes

1. For a discussion of contemporary notions of different Englands, see also Berberich and Aughey (2011).

2. Incidentally, this is a vow Morton broke quite easily; he eventually relocated to South Africa, where he rather worryingly lived all too happily under the apartheid regime.

3. Postcard reproductions of this particular gravestone are readily available in the souvenir shops surrounding Winchester Cathedral.