The English: A Portrait of a People

What is it about the English? Not the British overall, not the Scots, not the Irish or Welsh, but the English. Why do they seem so unsure of who they are? As Jeremy Paxman remarks in his preface to The English, being English "used to be so easy". Now, with the Empire gone, with Wales and Scotland moving into more independent postures, with the troubling spectre of a united Europe(and despite the raucous hype of "Cool Britannia"), the English seem to have entered a collective crisis of national identity.

Jeremy Paxman has set himself the task of finding just what exactly is going on. Why, he wonders, "do the English seem to enjoy feeling so persecuted? What is behind the English obsession with games? How did they acquire their odd show more attitudes to sex and food? Where did they get their extraordinary capacity for hypocrisy?" He ranges widely in pursuit of answers, sifting through literature, cinema and history. It is an intriguing investigation, encompassing many aspects of national life and character (such as it is), including the obligatory visit to that baffling phenomenon, the funeral of Princess Diana. Yet Paxman finds something fresh and interesting to say about even that now rather threadbare topic. In the end, he seems to find further questions to ask instead of answers. But why not? To him it is a sign that the English are acquiring a new sense of self. And some indication of this might lie in the obvious response to his remark that the English, being top of the British Imperial tree, had nicknames for the fellow nationalities--Jock, Taffy, Paddy and Mick--but there was no corresponding name for an Englishman. Of course, there is now, and it comes from one of the bits of empire to which so many undesirables were exported: Whinging Pom. --Robin Davidson

Not so long ago, writes Jeremy Paxman, the English were "polite, unexcitable, reserved, and had hot-water bottles instead of a sex-life". Today the end of empire has killed off the Bulldog Breed - "fearless and philistine, safe in taxis and invaluable in shipwrecks" - and transformed the great public schools. Princess Diana was mourned with the effusive emotionalism of an Italian saint. Leader-writers in "The Times" even praise the sexual skills of English lovers ... So what are the defining features of "Englishness"? How can a country of football hooligans have such an astonishingly low murder rate? Does the nation's sense of itself extend to millions of black, Asian and other immigrant Britons? Is it grounded in arrogant, nostalgic fantasy or can it form the basis for building a realistic future within Europe? To answer these crucial questions, Paxman looks for clues in the English language, literature, luke-warm religion and "curiously passionless devotion" to cricket. He explores attitudes to Catholics, the countryside, intellectuals, food and the French. And he brings together insights from novelists, sociologists and gentleman farmers; the editor of "This England" magazine (launched in 1967 with the slogan "as refreshing as a cup of tea"); a banker enthusiastic about the "English vice" of flagellation; and a team at the OED looking for the first occurrence of phrases like "bad hair day" and "the dog's bollocks". show less

The English is a disappointing read, but it's hard to pinpoint why. Paxman writes clearly and (occasionally) perceptively. His anecdotes and examples are well-chosen, even if they are sometimes too selective, and the topic is a rich and interesting one that should be a joy to unpack.

Partly, I admit, my disappointment with the book was that it didn't chime with my own views. It's hard to shake a sense of defeatism and a wearying strain of negativity throughout. Now, of course there is a strong element of decline in any reading of modern British history. Paxman is right (and thoroughly absolved) when he points out that "the belief that something has rotted in England is widely held: a people cannot spend decades being told their show more civilization is in decline and not be affected by it" (pg. 17). But Paxman neither fully embraces this negativity nor gives sufficient airing to a more positive view of the English; rather, he treads a meandering course through the middle of it all. Often, you don't know where Paxman stands on a certain issue and you get lost amidst all the anecdotes (which consequently lack the force they would have got from bolstering a certain viewpoint).

When he does make a stand on a certain issue, it is in favour of views that are (still) quite popular only amongst the privileged political classes in Britain. He comes down strongly in favour of mass immigration and multiculturalism, experiments by the country's insulated elites that have, in the years since, been found wanting and widely deemed to have failed, even amongst former proselytizers like Trevor Phillips. There is a strong argument to be made that it was policies like this that helped dilute the sense of what it meant to be English. No wonder Paxman couldn't find it.

So the book shows its age here – not least in that it repeats the lazy party line on multiculturalism without seeking even to defend it, for in the late Nineties when it was written it was so commonly accepted as indisputable fact. But its creaking, outdated stance would be more palatable if Paxman wasn't also dismissive of 'bigots' and 'thugs' when referring to those ordinary people who expressed concern about the collapse of communities and the rise of political correctness and 'no-go' zones. Paxman's book in these moments looks woefully narrow-minded and out-of-date, especially now in a post-Brexit age which has crystalized such discontent into a political force we still don't fully understand.

But this is not entirely – and not even mostly – about disapproval of contrary views on my part. It would be fine having different views as long as you could still see some kind of academic merit or method in the approach: that, at least, would endure through all the years since publication. But Paxman's approach is selective, haphazard and lacking the clear force of argument. His logic and perspective is sometimes off: one particularly big clunker occurs when describing the slums and disorganization of English industrial towns. He contrasts them with the beauty and coherent city-planning of French towns, for France "had the great advantage of industrializing later than the British" (pg. 163). It is incredible tunnel vision: yes, being late to the Industrial Revolution perhaps meant France could plan its city infrastructure with more care, but it also meant it missed out on the prosperity, primacy and influence Britain reaped as the first industrial society. The largest empire ever seen, untold wealth, the development of English as the world's second language, the scientific development and technologies… But, yeah, French towns got wider streets, so win. What?

I wasn't expecting anything forensic, just something with a bit more rigour and foresight as to what Paxman wanted to portray in writing about the English. In the concluding chapter, where Paxman should be re-emphasising his main points and perspectives before making a few final poignant thoughts to stick in the memory of the reader, he instead introduces a previously unmentioned observation about hooliganism and the general British love of getting drunk, writes pages and pages on this, before saying: "The vast majority of English people do not spend their time getting drunk, fighting and throwing up" (pg. 254). Then why devote the majority of your concluding chapter to it? For all its nice moments, the book as a whole is a bog.

It is also very unbalanced. As I mentioned earlier, there is a strong feeling of negativity throughout the book, even though Paxman himself doesn't really come down forcefully in promoting such a view. Rather, this effect is created by Paxman spending too much time outlining the various faults and character flaws of the English (or, more specifically, Englishmen), complete with damning anecdotes and examples. After such a construction, he will then say something along the lines of "of course, not all...", and then summarize the various successes or positive traits in a brief couple of sentences which are kept vague and devoid of detail or qualification. It is as if he enjoys rooting through the negative stuff, and includes positive achievements almost offhand – compensatory fillips at the end of each critique. But that, I suppose, is also quintessentially English: "to ignore the silver lining and to grasp at the cloud" (pg. 17). And I suppose that's also what I've done in this review. The clear prose and the anecdotal colour are the silver lining of Jeremy Paxman's The English. But the great mass, I'm afraid, is all cloud. show less

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It was very interesting as an intellectual exercise to separate out England and Englishness, to acknowledge the fact that I am an outsider to both, and to consider them as phenomena in themselves. Having said that, I found myself in silent agreement with an awful lot of what Paxman writes about the English attitudes to history, the countryside, religion, sex, food, property and history again - so much so that I'm not going to recapitulate it, just urge you to read the book. There were just two points that jumped out at me as especially thought-provoking.

First, a rather technical historical point, and one that is not original to Paxman. The dissolution of the monasteries and Henry VIII's breach with show more the Pope, it is argued, had deep effects on England's cultural psyche; a rich mainstream (Catholic) European artistic heritage was literally destroyed forever, and the new concentration on the Word of scripture, translated into English, created the intellectual space for Shakespeare, etc, while England was unable to match the continent in the more visual arts. I suspect one could find plenty of opposing evidence if one wanted, but I sense there may be something there, and I should read more about it.

The second, more general point I picked up from Paxman's book is this: that for many English people, national identity is not something that actually has to be considered at all. Going back again to my Cambridge days, I remember one friend from Essex assuring me, "I daon't really 'ave an accent!" Of course he did, but he had never thought of it in that way; he just though he talked normal, and that I talked funny. We who come from smaller, or indeed just other, countries and nations are constantly (made) aware of our origins when we are in England. Other nationalities (certainly everywhere else I have lived, including even the US) accept that they are themselves a distinct and particular group of people, and that other countries are the same; in England, we visitors sometimes feel that we are weirdly and perhaps quaintly deviating from the default state of humankind, which is only found locally.

("Yet, in spite of all temptations / to belong to other nations / he is an Englishman! / He remains an E-e-e-e-e-e-englishman!")

Paxman then goes on to suggest that because the English sense of Englishness (or Britishness) is poorly or even unpleasantly articulated, it becomes much more difficult to have a rational discussion of European integration. To expand his point, the Belgians, Germans, Latvians, and Portuguese all have a good idea of where they are starting from, so are less worried about and more interested in going down the European track. Going back to Paxman, the British (and that largely means English, with certain peculiar exceptions in the territory where I was born) sense of mission collapsed with economic austerity and the loss of Empire after 1945, without anything much to replace it. Yet paradoxically the civic liberal tradition which is one of England's most admirable contributions to the world makes it almost impossible to construct a replacement national ideology. And even if that were possible, it's difficult to see how the Scots and Welsh might buy into such a project; consider how silly Gordon Brown's recent pronouncements on Britishness sounded, especially coming from a Scot.

Anyway, that's what I thought. I hope none of you English people reading this are offended - I like most of you and I love some of you! show less

A fascinating book for an Irishman to read – it seems there is no such thing as a real Englishman, a country on the cultural crossroads of Europe made dynamic by new blood and reinvigorated periodically by the huddled poor and tired masses long before the USA thought to admit a few white folk to its shores. Truly this idea of an homogenised England under one Queen is one of the best fabrications ever to take root. The English aren't bad, like Jessica Rabbit, they were just made that way.

An amusing look at the upper echelons of the English. It was fairly easy to read, but it did lack a general framework - it was more of a meander through Paxman's mind than a detailed study. There were huge chunks of English society missing, after all the English aren't just upper class public school boys. Where were the portraits of the working class? This could have been so much better.

Paxman's portrait of a people fails to include a large bunch of them. In fact, he mainly talks about upper class country squires. His England is the England of Country Life, the England that defeated the Nazis and seeks to preserve the Book of Common Prayer. He fails to mention or discuss that most English of Englishness, class. An Englishman has to just open his mouth to be immediately pigeonholed which separates the English from most other nations. He also fails to discuss the regional identities and their relation to England. A comparison to similar cases on the continent (such as Franconia in Bavaria, in turn part of Germany) might have led to insights but would have required research and a broader perspective. Read Kate Fox' show more Watching the English instead. show less

Paxo obviously thinks of himself as English when he is in fact partly Scots, and in this book he tries to pin down the elusive quality that defines the English as a people. Written with all the sardonic wit, breadth of research, and astute perception that one would expect from the Inquisitor General of our times.