Englishness and the Victorians

The Victorian era witnessed an intensification and deepening of the debate surrounding an English national identity, a debate staged and refracted in the literature of the period. Whilst England was often visualised or conceived as an amalgam of other racial groupings, both the new vogue for topographical description and classification and the political and administrative reorganisation of the age lent weight and urgency to the sense of national identity. It was largely during the 1980s, a decade marked in Britain by polarisation and a renewed rhetoric of ‘patriotism’, that these Victorian preoccupations came under renewed scrutiny in a series of studies primarily motivated by the left‐liberal cultural studies instigated by Raymond Williams. Much work was done at this time, for instance, to identify the ‘discovery’ of a semi‐mythicised South Country embodied in the prose of George Borrow, Richard Jefferies or Thomas Hardy, whilst John Clare and Alfred Tennyson often served as paradigmatic poets in the reading of landscape as part of history and national formation. More recently, this focus has shifted to reflect a more theorised, post‐colonial sense of the Victorians and their sense of an ever‐shifting definition of literary England.