America and the British Imaginary in Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Literature (review)

For many years now critics have studied the so-called cultural cringe that afflicted so many nineteenth-century former colonies of Britain. Possessing such a long and distinguished literary history, Britain inevitably cast a shadow across other English-speaking nations. Brook Miller, however, turns his critical lens in the opposite direction to consider the ways in which British authors used the United States, or more precisely their idea of it, either to criticize or bolster British traditions. Miller suggests that many British writers of the late nineteenth century used American culture to emblematize their worst fears about modernization; to them, Americans seemed obsessed with material success and the rights of individuals. These characteristics seemed to be overtaking Britain, in danger of losing ties to the past, to community, and to class harmony. By focusing on the period between 1870 and 1914, Miller explores in some depth the contradictory nature of so much British writing about America, which often reveals more about Britain and its prejudices than about America.

Miller notes in his introductory survey the long-lasting impact of Matthew Arnold’s pedagogic view of America: it was homogeneous and provincial, in serious need of British cultural education. Yet, turning to Britain, he and many others felt that their own country needed America’s energy and idealism. In effect, British texts managed a “subtle evocation of a sense of British cultural superiority even while criticizing the British or English public” (10). By the early twentieth century, at the peak of British imperial power, numerous cultural commentators of quite varied political views believed that Britain was in decline and needed to “restore and cultivate” its cultural traditions as a bulwark against American materialism and democracy (15). I wish that Miller had explored more fully the notion of a homogenous culture, whether British or American. Both countries saw an influx of immigrants and a revival of regional literature during the years 1880 to 1900, so why was it that elite critics such as Edmund Gosse or H. G. Wells so rarely noticed the vigorous growth of dialect literature, whether in the Jewish or Irish English of the urban immigrant or the Dorset or Lancashire English of the countryman?

Miller compares the pedagogic responses to America to the performative, arguing that British commentators, at home and abroad, performed the role of cultured Briton. By modeling values in danger of being lost, writers reminded their readers that culture was an agent for both national stability and personal refinement. I’m not sure whether performativity does the work that Miller wants it to, since only Oscar Wilde fits neatly into this category, though presumably one could include several English critics who never visited the United States. More effective is Miller’s discussion of the ways in which attacking American materialism served to consolidate an author’s rapport with his British readers; by suggesting a shared cultural understanding that was beyond not only the crude American but also most British citizens, an author could both critique Britain and uphold its cultural superiority.

The most interesting turn Miller takes is to show how cultivated condescension gave way to an effort to align Americans with British traditions. Rather than seeing Americans as needing culture, the two countries should come together under the banner of their shared English heritage. In a key chapter, Miller discusses what he calls Anglo-Saxon racialism, or the ways in which British commentators attempted to make common cause with white Americans against modernization, commercialism, and immigrants (and, implicitly or explicitly, African-Americans). Miller uses the millennium celebrations for King Alfred as the quintessential example of this effort to unite the Anglo-Saxon races in a shared tradition of law and order. The nostalgic revival of a chivalric past was especially important in popular fiction, which was so often framed in terms of imperial duty. The Anglo-Saxon races, with their incomparable legal tradition, had a...