Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650-1850 (review)

What sort of people were the English, those folk who rose to world power between 1650 and 1850? According to Paul Langford, contemporaries thought they were energetic, candid, decent, taciturn, reserved, and, often, eccentric. Langford devotes a chapter to each trait, wherein he dissects their sometimes curious permutations and connections. He hopes thereby to contribute to the literature on national identity.

Langford’s book is alternately rewarding and frustrating. On the one hand, his observations are grounded in compelling evidence: the observations of contemporaries, mainly foreign travellers, but also some natives. Langford believes travellers’ accounts offer a useful alternative to the prescriptive sources (advice books etc.) upon which many studies of manners and character are based. He rightly observes that the didactic literature has its pitfalls. But the observations of outsiders are not unlike the pronouncements of advice writers in that they too are selective perceptions and interpretations of actual behavior rather than a photographic rendering of the real thing. It is true that outsiders can offer a certain objectivity in their cultural observations. They can also offer bias, or at the least, misunderstanding. Thus while Langford’s approach is immediately accessible in the sense that we have all had the experience of travelling and forming opinions about the national character of other peoples, a second thought will remind us that such opinions are at best generalizations and at worst unfair stereotypes. Still, Langford amply proves that travellers’ accounts have a lot to offer when mined systematically. And therein lies the book’s greatest strength. He offers a convincing web of characterizations of the English, all supported by multiple voices. While perhaps not an exact rendering of reality (admittedly elusive to all historians), one is convinced that he is showing us how Englishness looked to most outsiders at the time.

The portrait is quirky and sometimes almost self-contradictory. Outsiders believed the English to be industrious but melancholic, open-mannered but homebodies, hospitable but xenophobic, brilliant orators but weak conversationalists. They were famed for both their adherence to etiquette and their informality, their sense of propriety and their eccentricity. One benefit of Langford’s systematic treatment of his body of evidence is that he is able to paint a nuanced picture. He makes careful distinctions among variant possibilities and shows connections between traits. He is also honest, and does not spare the reader the warts that were sometimes sketched.

His organization into topical sections is effective. It allows an accumulation of necessarily anecdotal evidence to be persuasive. But sometimes the rationale for his organization is not clear. He discusses English bravery under their lingering reputation for “barbarity,” but discusses a lack of “stoutness” under “loyalty.” Sometimes his distinctions are so subtle as to lose the reader. Were the English thought to be cruel or not? The point gets lost in the refinements. Of course Langford is dealing with an extremely complex array of data. It is remarkable that the book is as smoothly written as it is. It also reads well in the sense that it is absolutely studded with pithy and amusing observations—it is a veritable compendium of bon mots (and some not so bon) about the English. And Langford makes smooth transitions between his categories. The book’s organization and style make it an easy read.

What is lacking is a sense of momentum. In this sense, Langford’s chapters do not fulfill all of the promises made in his introduction. While he offers a schema of change over time in that section, change over time most often gets lost in the individual chapters, and thus one loses the sense of a historical dynamic at work. He sometimes neglects to consider how and why certain traits developed or what functions they served. On other occasions he offers a number of contemporary theories about the genesis of certain characteristics, but doesn’t weigh in on which he finds most convincing in hindsight. Some common themes about causality do emerge...