Tuesday, April 10, 2007

From John Bull to tearful marines

Over at the National Review blog the Corner, John Derbyshire has been lamenting -- to put it mildly -- the behavior of the British marines captured by the Iranians, both during and after their ordeal. (The youngest marine evidently told the Daily Mirror he "cried like a baby.")

Now an American citizen, Derbyshire was born in England. He says his mother told him wistfully, on her deathbed, in 1998: "At least I knew England when she was England."

At the time, the NR contributor thought this was just the stuff old people say, but now he says he knows what she meant:

I even feel a bit the same way myself. I caught the tail-end of that old England -- that bumptious, arrogant, self-confident old England, the England of complicated games, snobbery, irony, repression, and stoicism, the England of suet puddings, drafty houses, coal smoke and bad teeth, the England of throat-catching poetry and gardens and tweeds, the England that civilized the whole world and gave an example of adult behavior -- the English Gentleman -- that was admired from Peking (I can testify) to Peru.

It's all gone now, "dead as mutton," as English people used to say. Now there is nothing there but a flock of whimpering Eloi, giggling over their gadgets, whining for their handouts, crying for their Mummies, playing at soldiering for reasons they can no longer understand, from lingering habit. Lower the corpse down slowly, shovel in the earth. England is dead.

Wow. Those two pregnant paragraphs sound like a tidy summary of the ideas the historian Peter Mandler explores in this new book, from Yale University Press:

Coincidentally I'd just ordered a copy, but now I'm all the more eager to read it. [The title, if you can't quite make it out, is: "The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair." Maybe "the Derb" can write an afterword for the paperback edition.]

Posted by Christopher Shea at 06:10 PM

Print | E-mail to a friend | Permalink | Subscribe via rss