Functionalizing Cultural Memory: Foundational British Literary History and the Construction of National Identity

When God wants a hard thing done, He tells it, not to His Britons, but to His Englishmen.

—Stanley Baldwin, "On England and the West" (1924)

At the beginning of the writing of nineteenth-century English literary histories we find an American voice. It is an American who first proclaims that "our purpose is to treat the importance and means of a national literature. The topic seems to us a great one, and to have intimate connections with morals and religion, as well as with our public interests." Great emphasis is laid on what is meant by national literature:

We mean the expression of a nation's mind in writing. We mean the production among a people of important works in philosophy, and in the departments of imagination and taste. We mean the contribution of new truths to the stock of human knowledge.

We mean the thoughts of profound and original minds, elaborated by the toil of composition and fixed and made immortal in books. We mean the manifestation of a nation's intellect in the only forms by which it can multiply itself at home, and send itself abroad. ¹

An American pleads for the high cultural value of national literature, which should be presented to the world: "We mean that a nation shall take a place, by its authors, among the lights of the world." He pleads for the high value of culture in general, as well as for "the expression of superior mind in writing," and emphasizes the instrumental value of culture: "We regard its gifted men, whether devoted to the exact sciences, to mental and ethical philosophy, to history and legislation, or to fiction and poetry, as forming a noble intellectual brotherhood to join their labours for the public good" (Channing, 4). He sees the increasing influence of literature and the increasing of reading habits and comes—long before Foucault—to the conclusion that "writing is now the mightiest instrument on earth" (10). And all of these insights are subservient to an Enlightenment version of the American wish to lead the nations: "We love our country, but not blindly. In all nations we recognize one great family; and our chief wish for our native land, is, that it may take the first rank among the lights and benefactors of the human race" (8).

This was, of course, a strong voicing of American nationalism and an American version of an old English dream. ² Yet although William Ellery Channing's Importance and Means of a National Literature (1830) was repeatedly printed in London, it seems that Britain was not in need of such an example from abroad. At least we can trace no expression of gratitude to the American, no mention of his name. Obviously, nobody thanks anybody for carrying coals to Newcastle. After all, the British felt so far superior to the Americans culturally that Sidney Smith could write in 1818, "Why should the Americans write books, when a six weeks' passage brings them in our own tongue, our sense, science and genius, in bales and hogsheads?" ³ And Old Mother England was just about to show the whole world that she could do much more. She was just about to enlarge her empire. And at least she could answer the questions that the American directed critically at his own country—"Do we possess, indeed, what may be called a national literature? Have we produced eminent writers in the various departments of intellectual effort? Are our chief recourses of instruction and literary enjoyment furnished from ourselves?" (Channing, 13)—with a proud "Yes!"

England's literary historians were just setting out to show her possessions—and to show off. "It may truly be asserted that the literature of no other country can boast of the preservation of such a long and uninterrupted series of memorials as that of England," declares Thomas Wright...