The Warm South: How the Mediterranean Shaped the British Imagination by Robert Holland (review)

Each summer millions of British vacationers disgorge from discount airlines at destinations across the Mediterranean. Some are drawn by the region's rich history and culture, many more by its beaches and nightlife. Few are likely aware that they follow in the footsteps of generations of forebears on a quintessentially British pilgrimage. In his highly erudite and captivating book The Warm South: How the Mediterranean Shaped the British Imagination, Robert Holland explores the deep roots of this British sentiment for the Mediterranean and the role that it has played in British culture.

While British connections to the sea date back to at least Roman times, Holland argues that it is only beginning in the mid-eighteenth century that the Mediterranean began to function as a "laboratory for ideological, political and cultural struggles within Britain" (4). Increased interaction and rivalry in this period gave rise to a cultural inferiority complex vis-à-vis France and, to a lesser extent, Germany. Though its political, industrial, and economic stars were in ascendance, the British gentry felt a nagging suspicion that they were "crude and untutored" and that a glaring cultural gap separated them from their continental kin (5). The Mediterranean provided a prepackaged, esteemed legacy that Britons might co-opt, transfer, and translate into a cultural hybrid that partly filled this void, while also serving as a touchstone for comprehending and living in the modern world. This multi-century instinct was "riveted" into the British national psyche and experience (259).

The book is organized in a half-dozen chapters with a straightforward chronological structure and a fluid narrative format. Each follows a set pattern: the primary focus is on Italy, followed by Greece, with Spain usually treated more cursorily. This is a high cultural history in the traditional sense: elite poets, artists, writers, and sculptors own the stage. Indeed, the cast of characters is a who's who of British society: Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Benjamin Disraeli, John Ruskin, William Gladstone, John Singer Sargent, and Robert Graves. Everyone who was anyone traveled at the very least to Italy, and many set down roots, usually in British hothouses that isolated them from the uncouth local heirs of these formerly great lands.

The book begins in the pivotal period 1740 to 1800: this is when the Grand Tour became an essential element in the finishing school for noble men and a growing number of women. Italy occupied pride of place on the itinerary; Greece, while highly prized, was more distant and thus less often visited; Spain was generally avoided for historical and religious reasons. The eruption of Napoleon onto the scene was profoundly disruptive both politically and psychologically for Britons seeking to parse their standing in the world. The early Victorian period, 1830 to 1860, while on the surface a time of growing power and confidence, was actually characterized by significant "fears of individual and collective decay" (111). During the high Victorian period, 1860 to 1890, the Mediterranean preserved its centrality within what was a fundamentally conservative British culture. Elevation and imitation of the past served as a familiar and reliable aesthetic counterweight to the revolutionary changes that were disrupting and energizing the continent. "Cultural despair" combined with "a sense of national fragility" (192) and the enduring sense of a British "aesthetic void" characterized the years preceding the Great War (193). Some turned to vibrant continental cultural centers for inspiration, but more often modernism was processed through the familiar Mediterranean cult of beauty. In the post-war era, classicism provided a familiar harbor for a healing civilization. During the Second World War the Mediterranean was the most important British front after the homeland, and following the war the region once again became an escape for Britons fleeing the home-front's "cultural deadness" (249) and the enduring "unresolved confusion" about Britain's cultural identity and relevance (262).

Beyond simply providing a cultural education, the Mediterranean was profoundly...