The "Backbone of England": History, Memory, Landscape, and the Fordian Reconstruction of Englishness

The idea that nationalism is something pathological, something at the same time deeply foreign, is part of the English understanding of it. Hence, the unwillingness to accept that there is or can be such a thing as English nationalism.

—Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity 19

This, Tietjens thought, is England! A man and a maid walk through Kentish grass fields: the grass ripe for the scythe. The man honourable, clean, upright; the maid virtuous, clean, vigorous [. . .].

"God's England!" Tietjens exclaimed to himself in high good humour. "Land of Hope and Glory" [. . .].

Backbone of England!

—Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End 105-07

A land of English men and English maids, of the best people and good birth, of church and heroes, "God's England," Sir Edward Elgar's "Land of Hope and Glory"—yet for Christopher Tietjens, the "central observer" of Ford Madox Ford's tetralogy Parade's End, the "backbone" of modern England—government and church, empire, heroes, and glory—is "rotten" (Ford, It Was the Nightingale 215; Ford, Parade's End 106).¹ "English History," as Ford himself writes in the late 1920s, may be "relatively easy to grasp because in it it is not difficult to see a pattern of what someone has called Freedom slowly broadening down from precedent to precedent" (English Novel 9). Yet, as Parade's End glances back from the 1920s over the years surrounding the First World War, this apparently obvious pattern of historical development culminates not in "Freedom" but in the deterioration of social institutions and England itself, leaving Christopher Tietjens and his young suffragist companion Valentine Wannop to support, in Ford's words, a "crumbling world" (It Was the Nightingale 215). As Austin Riede unproblematically concludes, "In Parade's End, Ford is chronicling . . . the rapid decline of Englishness" in the early twentieth century (213). Nevertheless, intransigently resisting this narrative of fragmentation and decay, Ford's abstract "man" and "maid" remain as they "should be," personifying something that is as solid and persistent as the stones beneath their feet (Ford, Parade's End 106). "Clean," "upright," and "virtuous," they recall a seemingly organic authenticity that manifests itself in their ability to name "the birds that piped and the grasses that bowed" (105). At the height of what Eric Hobsbawm has identified as the "apogee of nationalism," when, following the Great War, national self-determination emerges as a universal right and national identity hardens into an apparently incontestable human attribute, Christopher and Valentine implicitly summon an English national character whose roots Parade's End thrusts into the ancient past and the landscape itself (Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism 131). Despite their ostensible political incompatibility—he is, Tietjens himself reflects, "the Tory of Tories," she, "the suffragette of the militants"—Chrissie and Val suggest stability and continuity, even as the English world crumbles around them (Ford, Parade's End 106). Indeed, rather than hailing the collapse of Englishness, they seem to point to its rebirth, participating in a postwar reconstruction of English tradition that requires a return to the very landscape from which a modernity of war and empire has alienated it. Although Ford somewhat surprisingly concludes in 1907 that "England is not a nation" and, in 1929, expresses the suspicion that he is "not really English," the community that Christopher Tietjens and Valentine Wannop evoke, the English tradition that Ford himself conjures so often over the course of his career, emerges as, above all, national (It Was the Nightingale 74; The Spirit of the People 84). Recoiling from early-twentieth-century politics of national identity, Ford positions himself within a tradition of scholarship and popular opinion that figures "nationalism" as, in Krishan Kumar's words, a virulent "pathology" to which the English have been uniquely resistant. Nevertheless, even as he does so, his work manifests an incorrigible preoccupation with national identity and character. In the process, it labors on behalf of this disavowed nationalism, contributing to the discursive reconstruction of "England" as an ancient national unity and the rejuvenation of its apparently degenerate national tradition.

Modern Englishness, Ford proposes in...