What makes an Englishman

Noel Malcolm 12:01AM GMT 24 Dec 2006

Noel Malcolm reviews The English National Character: The History of an Idea from
Edmund Burke to Tony Blair by Peter Mandler
Of course we all know that there's no such thing as 'national character'. Of course we have all
been brought up to believe that stereotyping people is wrong almost as wrong, indeed, as
racism, the ultimate thought-crime, to which it is so obviously related.
So, having got that straight, just run through the following thought-experiments. Imagine an
Australian man who is shy, riven with self-doubt, and rather effete. Imagine a Japanese
woman who is impolite, boorish, and physically messy. Imagine an Irishman who is
inarticulate, emotionally frigid, and teetotal.
Of course it is not difficult to imagine any such people. But in doing so, we go against the
grain of our expectations where people of those nationalities are concerned. The expectations
may be based (more than we realise) on fictions films, novels, jokes and other cultural
products. But they still have some connection with actual experience, and even crude
generalisations drawn from experience must contain some element of truth.
There really shouldn't be anything puzzling or unacceptable about this. Different cultures have
different codes or patterns of behaviour; if that were not true, anthropologists worldwide
would go out of business. The problem arises only because what should be called 'national
behaviour' has been sloppily misdescribed as 'national character' as if it were some preprogrammed personality type which each little Australian, Japanese or Irish baby brought with
it into the world.
At least, that is the main problem. But there are others too. The better you know a culture, the
more you will be aware that it contains a variety of styles of behaviour, some of them
divergent and conflicting. That is why generalising about these national styles is most easily
done by outsiders, with rather limited experience; generalising about your own culture is a
much harder business. It's easy for an Englishman to say that Australians are forthright and
self-confident, Japanese people are quiet and polite, and so on but what is he to say about
the English?
Which stereotype will he choose: the stiff-upper-lipped gentleman; the hearty, plain-speaking
John Bull; the Cockney cheeky chappy? Or (to take a rather different threesome): Captain
Mainwaring; Sergeant Wilson; or Lance-Corporal Jones? Outsiders, who have the easier task,
have themselves produced a whole range of generalisations from milord to hooligan, glutton
to puritan, hypocrite to child-like innocent.
This is the stuff of parlour games. But it can also be the stuff of serious history, because these
notions of so-called national character have played a part in our political culture; they have
grown, mutated and declined in ways that can be charted in detail. Since 'national identity' has
been a hot topic among historians for many years, it is surprising that this particular version of
identity-theorising has not yet received a definitive treatment. Peter Mandler's learned and
incisive book not only fills that gap; it also comes up with some significant surprises.

One surprise concerns what might be called the ideological charge that was originally behind
the whole idea. If we hear appeals to 'the English character' today, we tend to associate them
with nostalgic conservatism; Left-wing ideologues may even associate them with racism, an
evil traditionally located on the extreme Right. Yet the notion of national character was in fact
promoted by radicals and reformers who, around the time of the Great Reform Act (1832),
wanted to emphasise that the common people shared the same basic nature as the upper
classes, and were thus naturally entitled to share the task of government with them.
A second wave of discussion about 'national character' took place at the time of the second
Reform Act (1867): here too, liberal reformers made the running.
Another surprise comes when Mandler looks at the growth of racial and biological theorising
in the mid-19th century that is, in precisely the period between those two waves of debate.
Modern historians, obsessed with Victorian attitudes towards colonial peoples, have seized on
the writings of self-styled racialists as if they were central to the intellectual life of the age.
Mandler shows that they were fairly marginal, and that many treatises which began by saying
that race was an important factor went on to say that it had much less influence on people's
behaviour than laws, institutions, religion, and so on an old-fashioned 'Enlightenment'
approach which lived on for an extremely long time.
Also surprising, perhaps, are some of Mandler's findings on the 20th century his discovery
that the inter-war period was the golden age of 'national character'-mongering, for example, or
his claim that the image of the English gentleman began to occupy centre-stage in such
discussions only as an afterthought, in the period after the Second World War. (Only then, he
suggests, could both Left and Right finally agree on it the Right because it felt nostalgia for
gentlemanly behaviour, the Left because the old-fashioned gentleman symbolised so many of
the things it hated.)
This is a fascinating book, but for those who are not academic historians it will also be quite a
demanding read not because it is written in technical jargon (it isn't), but because it engages
quite strenuously with existing historical debates and assumes some familiarity with 19thcentury political argument. Much of the time, Mandler is concerned not with what people
actually thought about the English character, but with their thinking on the theoretical issues
that surrounded any such notion: theories of national identity, arguments about the scope of
the 'social sciences', and so on.
In the end, this book is limited by its focus on the writings of intellectuals philosophers,
social commentators and politicians. To what extent the emerging notions of 'English
character' got through to the ordinary population, via novels, plays and popular journalism, is
a question that remains unanswered, and it is strange to find that such an influential popular
writer as William Cobbett is not even mentioned.