Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (review)

The satisfaction in reading this book lies in Ackroyd's sometimes idiosyncratic treatments of English literature from the very beginning – the runes to the Romantics. When he talks about music or sculpture he is maddeningly brief. His arguments serve his notion of a continued distinction that marks English literature, not English imagination. His main avenues for this exploration are the English melancholic interpretation of nature, English reverence for the past, the English predilection for horror, the continuous reinvention of the English female voice, and the recurrent notion of the mongrel.

The theme of melancholy makes its first appearance in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (627 AD). Bede was addressing King Edwin of Northumbria "on the wisdom of accepting the Christian Faith" and focused memorably on the brevity of human life and its harsh environment in the image of "the swift flight of a single sparrow" through the baronial hall and out again to the dark where "winter rain or snow are raging."

The passage undeniably presages much that comes later. Ackroyd neatly ties it to other pieces of historically significant writing. He finds consonant experiences to compare – all "good" British horrors pace the misty moors ("mistige moras") as Grendel does; Sir Gawain felt the giants blowing after him ("etins aneleden him") in the same place that Wordsworth sensed "low breathings coming after him" – the Lake District. Ackroyd locates this theme in Donne, of course, who cheerfully reminded his flock that "Between that excremental jelly that thy body is made of at first, and that jelly which thy body dissolves to at last; there is not so noisome, so putrid a thing in nature." Ackroyd traces the passage of the gloom torch to writer and witchcraft expert Thomas Browne, who wrote of a melancholic subject: Hydriotaphia, or Urne Buriall. Samuel Johnson found much to admire in the writings of the learned doctor from Norwich. Browne's melancholy spoke to him in a special way, encouraging him to document his own melancholy.

In his Arthurian chapter, Ackroyd locates one of the sources of the British taste for horror: Sometime between 1185 and 1225, Layamon introduces "aelvene" or "ylfes" in his writing. They were known to be "prehistoric people of the moors" says Ackroyd, who inspired countless unsettling tales. Ackroyd traces the English predilection for the uncanny from Beowulf to the Gothic novels, and establishes that it "has not faded yet."

One of the most moving genealogies is that of the female literary voice, from early Anglo-Saxon nuns through to Austen, both Brontës, Eliot and Woolf. Ackroyd notes that the administration of the "mixed"religious houses – both men and women belonged was always feminine, "perhaps as an atavistic remembrance of the period when the Germanic tribes worshipped a principal goddess." In the early poetry of these administratively minded nuns, a sense of connection with the divine is strong, a sense of isolation is equally strong, and all is expressed in alliteration. Ackroyd says, "It could be argued that the Anglo-Saxon respect and reverence for women are somehow emmeshed in Old English itself, and that by instinct or intuition certain female writers have recourse to alliteration as a measure of their original pre-eminence." Ackroyd finds Emily Brontë alliterating: "woods and sounding water, and the whole world awake and wild with joy" and Woolf doing the same in an intense moment: "that spot the size of a shilling."

Finally, Ackroyd defends the notion that a strength lies in the very mongrel nature of English – that it begins with King Alfred, who encouraged the arrival of foreign scholars. Whether Shakespeare was borrowing from Ovid, lifting from Hackluyt, or indulging in taqqiyah, "the perverse pleasure derived from colluding with one's oppressors", Shakespeare is the perfect English writer, combining sources and delighting audiences. Philip Sidney called English drama "mungrell," which "be neither Right Tragedies, nor right Comedies, mingling Kings and Clownes" the legacy as Ackroyd would have it of hundreds of years of...