‘I Had seen a Lot of Englands’: J. B. Priestley, Englishness and the People

Abstract

Recent discussions of English identity have focused on rural, traditionalist images of ‘Deep England’ centred on the south-east. From the early 1930s, in novels and non-fiction works such as English Journey, Wonder Hero and Let the People Sing, J. B. Priestley developed an alternative view of England, urban, industrial and populist in spirit, which was to inform his celebrated wartime radio broadcasts. In Priestley's view, rooted in nineteenth-century radicalism, it is ‘the people’ who are the real nation, denied their birthright by a parasitic ruling class: and it is among the people, not in aristocrats and imperial heroes, that the true English character is to be found. Priestley's lost arcadia is his native Bradford before the Great War, which he constructs in memory and desire as a robust and democratic civic culture, class-divided but bluntly egalitarian in manners. Since 1914, this England has been in sad decline, exploited by the overweening City, and betrayed by the desertion of its own capitalist class to the gentlemanly values of an increasingly fake ‘old England’. Meanwhile, in the ‘new England’ of suburbia and Americanized mass culture, while the old sense of community may be lacking, a democratic and egalitarian spirit is at work – also owing something to America – which may yet offer hope of regeneration. Priestley's view of the nation is a plural one, in which the traditionally dominant ‘southern metaphor’ is set against a dissenting, radical version of Englishness, rooted in the Pennine landscape and the industrial north. His reassertion of a vital but long-suppressed current in national life reminds us that national identity is not monolithic, but plural and contested, both in his time and in ours.

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