A wrappage of traditions: nineteenth century narratives of British National Identity

Abstract

As Kellow Chesney has written, 'Much of the fascination of the Victorian age derives from its strange familiarity.' My contention is that the collective national identity of the British and, especially, the English, remains largely a construct of Romantic and Victorian mythologists. The intention of this paper is to explore the process by which the Victorians invented a tradition that suited the British Empire during a period of seismic social change. It was not, however, historians that spun the past to suit the present but the literary authors. Drawing upon a variety of sources, I intend to explore the foundations upon which the increasingly unstable edifice of Englishness is based. My starting point will be Scott, and his successor W.H. Ainsworth's dramatic histories of national monuments such as the Tower of London. I will also consider the legacy of Dickens, and the nationalism of Kipling, in particular his interpretation of the wreck of the HMS Birkenhead. I hope to demonstrate that my culture owes as much to the above as we do to the Battle of Britain or, rather, that such twentieth century tales of heroism in adversity are merely a continuation of what Carlyle called 'a wrappage of traditions.'